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Irony Be My Shield posted:This doesn't work, the creature is supposed to be unique in the entire universe. I thought this was just The Doctor's speculation, not a definite fact about the creature. Obviously, it's kind of silly to assume another one showed up and laid an egg and left again in the moments the camera wasn't pointed at the sky, so I'm not saying that's what happened. I just don't think we can say with complete certainty that there are no others out there somewhere.
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Oct 6, 2014 16:13
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Irony Be My Shield posted:I think The Doctor didn't realize that humanity voted to kill it. No, I think the Doctor probably assumed that they would.
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Oct 6, 2014 16:15
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Diabolik900 posted:I thought this was just The Doctor's speculation, not a definite fact about the creature. Obviously, it's kind of silly to assume another one showed up and laid an egg and left again in the moments the camera wasn't pointed at the sky, so I'm not saying that's what happened. I just don't think we can say with complete certainty that there are no others out there somewhere. Something has to come along and fertilize the new moon. When are we getting that episode?
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Oct 6, 2014 16:30
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Diabolik900 posted:I thought this was just The Doctor's speculation, not a definite fact about the creature. Obviously, it's kind of silly to assume another one showed up and laid an egg and left again in the moments the camera wasn't pointed at the sky, so I'm not saying that's what happened. I just don't think we can say with complete certainty that there are no others out there somewhere.
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Oct 6, 2014 16:40
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Big Mean Jerk posted:The difference being that the Jurassic Park quote is a throwaway line. Everything vaguely important to the plot in this episode is broken beyond belief. Middle school students should know enough science to pick apart the resolution to this episode. This is actually true of Jurassic Park as well, although it's more an introductory course in cellular biology at the college level. My fiance literally will assign this movie when she teaches the course just to give the students a laugh and point out how much is wrong with it.
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Oct 6, 2014 16:42
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Bicyclops posted:Until science literacy gets a hell of a lot better, expect your popular fiction to contain magic with science buzzwords thrown in, that's just the way of things. Magic still has internal rules, though; the reason people have a problem with Kill the Moon is that it doesn't. It's fine for popular fiction to contain magic, but it has to work as magic. That's the line between a workable narrative and incoherency, as far as I can tell. Jurassic Park works by rules that are not the rules of science, but it doesn't need to violate its own rules in order for it to have a workable plot, because its magic is consistent at the surface level. vegetables fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Oct 6, 2014 |
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Oct 6, 2014 17:03
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The thing that the people going, "So what?" about the plotting are missing is that the problem was set up as "The moon is gaining mass." At that point it could have been a gravity bomb (as the Doctor states in the episode) or a wormhole or a Cyberman planet duplicator or even space wizards. It's Doctor Who, weird made up stuff happens. And the central problem that we're given is one of mass, even that terrible scene where the student floats off was based on that since apparently the giant space And then the show goes, "The reason the moon is getting so much mass is because it's an egg!" And that's when people go, "Hang on! That's not how eggs work!" and the suspension of disbelief isn't just snapped, it's run over by semi.
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Oct 6, 2014 17:11
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I don't think Doctor Who has ever been particularly consistent about maintaining its own consistency with regard to the rules, even in individual stories, or even at trying not to be so over-the-top ridiculous that it breaks suspension of disbelief. he cures mega-plagues by taking all discovered medicines and mixing them together in a vat. You have to really work to believe either of those things, but I think the major difference is that the character work in the Cassandra episode kind of sucks and it relies on the plague zombies a little more. In this one, the space spiders (sorry, "bacteria" or "giant single cellular organisms" or whatever they were trying to convince us they were that wasn't space spiders) and the moon egg are fairly tangential to the actual story, which is about a small group of people being faced with a moral dilemma and how they interpret the Doctor's choice to make them characters in the examples page from an intro to ethics textbook. e: To be clear, the science in the episode sucks and is flawed when they could have, for example, left the space spiders and just space spider parasites and omitted some of the early conjecture, I think we just disagree over whether they're terrible flaws or minor quibbles. Bicyclops fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Oct 6, 2014 |
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Oct 6, 2014 17:16
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LividLiquid posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlTCflVs_DE That's the thing I kept hearing in Kill the Moon! It reminds me a lot of this bit from Jurassic Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOmjiZVAjN8&t=212s
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Oct 6, 2014 17:26
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On another note, there were a lot of callbacks to the old show this episode. "Now when I say run, run!" The yo-yo, which apparently Capaldi requested look similar to the one that Four uses. And the brief mention of the Blinovich Effect at the end in the TARDIS there.
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Oct 6, 2014 17:32
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I think I remember that The Doctor said detonating the nukes would cause the Moon to get pulled back together. Did I mishear/imagine that bit?
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Oct 6, 2014 17:55
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Striking Yak posted:I think I remember that The Doctor said detonating the nukes would cause the Moon to get pulled back together. Did I mishear/imagine that bit?
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Oct 6, 2014 18:03
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LividLiquid posted:He did. It made no sense, but he said it. That makes actual sense. If you merely kill the thing that's pushing its way out, gravity will crush the rocks back together. The nukes were not going to disintegrate or explode the moon, only kill the living part.
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Oct 6, 2014 18:29
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Super.Jesus posted:That makes actual sense. If you merely kill the thing that's pushing its way out, gravity will crush the rocks back together. The nukes were not going to disintegrate or explode the moon, only kill the living part. Are they like magical precision nukes that only target space fish or something, though? I don't think it made much sense, but these are the things I prefer not to ask myself and just take the ridiculous stuff they claim at face value.
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Oct 6, 2014 18:33
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Bicyclops posted:Are they like magical precision nukes that only target space fish or something, though? I don't think it made much sense, but these are the things I prefer not to ask myself and just take the ridiculous stuff they claim at face value. Nuclear bombs don't destroy matter. I mean they do, technically, but it's a tiny amount and the matter that goes away is inside the bomb to start with. Either way, the same amount of mass (minus a few pounds) will be there. Very little matter will be pushed beyond the moon's escape velocity, especially since it's now roughly equivalent of earth's. Also, they're only damaging about 1/10,000,000th of the moon's surface. And it's not like there can be a real shock wave from these blasts.
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Oct 6, 2014 18:40
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Bicyclops posted:Are they like magical precision nukes that only target space fish or something, though? I don't think it made much sense, but these are the things I prefer not to ask myself and just take the ridiculous stuff they claim at face value. You're not going to be able to blow up the moon with a hundred nukes, come on. At best, you'd blow a chunk off near the blast site.
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Oct 6, 2014 18:44
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Bicyclops posted:Are they like magical precision nukes that only target space fish or something, though? I don't think it made much sense, but these are the things I prefer not to ask myself and just take the ridiculous stuff they claim at face value. The radiation from a hundred nukes might very well kill a space whale baby without physically breaking the moon.
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Oct 6, 2014 18:49
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Okay, I stand corrected.
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Oct 6, 2014 18:50
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Hard-boil the egg. 
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Oct 6, 2014 19:01
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That said it would do nothing to reduce the mass of the thing. A thing and its corpse are basically the same mass. Also, the thing's mass has to come from somewhere, unless it converts solar rays to matter. But hey, it's a children's tv show.
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Oct 6, 2014 19:02
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Super.Jesus posted:That said it would do nothing to reduce the mass of the thing. A thing and its corpse are basically the same mass. To be fair, though, it was swarming with space bacteria, so it probably would have decomposed, eventually.
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Oct 6, 2014 19:11
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Unless it decomposes into gases light enough to escape its gravity, that will do nothing. Decomposing things only get lighter because they turn into H20, CO2 and CH4. Those gases escape into the atmosphere. But the combined mass of the Earth and its atmosphere remains the same.
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Oct 6, 2014 19:13
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I still think this is Doctor Who's "Threshold" from a science perspective.
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Oct 6, 2014 19:15
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Super.Jesus posted:Unless it decomposes into gases light enough to escape its gravity, that will do nothing. Decomposing things only get lighter because they turn into H20, CO2 and CH4. Those gases escape into the atmosphere. But the combined mass of the Earth and its atmosphere remains the same. Decomposing things get lighter because they're being eaten by microorganisms, it's not a process of evaporation...  I mean, gases do escape as well, but if it's being eaten by bacteria, that's where most of the mass will be going. thexerox123 fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Oct 6, 2014 |
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Oct 6, 2014 19:15
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Big Mean Jerk posted:I still think this is Doctor Who's "Threshold" from a science perspective. Threshold is so many levels below in terms of bad that you'd have to go like seven worse Doctor Who episodes down before you could even see it.
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Oct 6, 2014 19:18
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thexerox123 posted:Decomposing things get lighter because they're being eaten by microorganisms, it's not a process of evaporation... The microorganisms either incorporate the eaten matter into their own mass or excrete it as gas and liquid produts. The end product of aerobic and anaerobic decomposition is mostly sludge + a gaseous mixture of H20, CO2 and CH4 with various trace compounds. Any way you cut it, if you let bacteria decompose something in a closed system, the mass of the system will stay exactly the same. If you do it in a open pot, though, mass will decrease because matter escapes as gaseous compounds.
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Oct 6, 2014 19:22
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Bicyclops posted:I grew up watching and enjoying Jurassic Park, where halfway through the film Grant shouts "But how do you interrupt the cellular mitosis?!" which is among the least egregious of its biology flaws, but still enjoyed it, and that film had more responsibility than the show which coined "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow!" The "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" thing is sort of a bad example because in the early Pertwees they spent a fair amount of time and effort trying to have plausible sounding science, but then they found that Pertwee couldn't remember any of it so they gave him something simpler (and stupider) to say.
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Oct 6, 2014 19:39
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Anyways who cares, space dragons are inherently dimensionally transcendental and pull their matter from E-Space or some poo poo. That was a good episode and Capaldi is an incredibly interesting doctor.
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Oct 6, 2014 20:40
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MrL_JaKiri posted:The "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" thing is sort of a bad example because in the early Pertwees they spent a fair amount of time and effort trying to have plausible sounding science, but then they found that Pertwee couldn't remember any of it so they gave him something simpler (and stupider) to say. Yes, but he (and the writers) embraced it pretty heavily in the 70s and I think the nonsense continued to be a staple of the show throughout the JNT and RTD years. There's a facet as to how important the science is to the plot that makes it matter to me, I guess. The Lazarus Experiment is not a very good episode, but I don't think it's because of its atrocious science. How he becomes immortal is irrelevant and I don't care if they want to throw DNA Treknobabble around to explain it. The story is about dealing with the implications of trying to escape death. By comparison, New Earth's plot explicitly relies on the diseases involved being incurable, which is why the hackneyed solution bothers me a bit more.
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Oct 6, 2014 20:49
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I disagree again to some extent - RTD initially totally rejected the technobabble stuff (see: Anti-plastic), it quickly made a resurgence after his first series because it's a useful crutch. 99% of all science in TV shows - from what happens when people are shot to how spaceships work - is wrong. Should it bother you? No, unless it's 1) super egregious 2) a core aspect to the story in which case be bothered all you like!
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Oct 6, 2014 20:59
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MrL_JaKiri posted:I disagree again to some extent - RTD initially totally rejected the technobabble stuff (see: Anti-plastic), it quickly made a resurgence after his first series because it's a useful crutch. It's really just that first episode, though. By the time they get to the World War II parter, they're already full immersed in your average sci fi technobabble. It is an irritating crutch and I wish they would lean on science at least a little bit more sometimes, but I agree. I think people just can't come to a consensus on the definition of what "super egregious" is.
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Oct 6, 2014 21:01
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Why is this one thing that people just can't seem to be happy to disagree on? "I didn't like the monster design/story/acting" is fine, but introduce something that makes people think they might be smarter than someone else and god it's like the Somme in here, bits of biscuit everywhere
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Oct 6, 2014 21:03
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Why is this one thing that people just can't seem to be happy to disagree on? "I didn't like the monster design/story/acting" is fine, but introduce something that makes people think they might be smarter than someone else and god it's like the Somme in here, bits of biscuit everywhere
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Oct 6, 2014 21:05
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vegetables posted:Magic still has internal rules, though; the reason people have a problem with Kill the Moon is that it doesn't. It's fine for popular fiction to contain magic, but it has to work as magic. That's the line between a workable narrative and incoherency, as far as I can tell. Jurassic Park works by rules that are not the rules of science, but it doesn't need to violate its own rules in order for it to have a workable plot, because its magic is consistent at the surface level. Tons of magic doesn't have internal rules. The ones that do can be fun (Brandon Sanderson et all) but the most memorable fantasy doesn't rely on internal consistency if it makes a better story to ignore it.
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Oct 6, 2014 21:07
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Why is this one thing that people just can't seem to be happy to disagree on? "I didn't like the monster design/story/acting" is fine, but introduce something that makes people think they might be smarter than someone else and god it's like the Somme in here, bits of biscuit everywhere I dunno, most people are being congenial about it, I thought. 
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Oct 6, 2014 21:11
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Science is important to Doctor Who, except when it isn't. I'm watching Androids of Tara right now which is literally Prisoner of Zenda with androids (in some cases word-for-word). The androids are bolted-on in such a way that you cannot credit the Tarans inability to tell android from human apart, it's ridiculous. My favourite new word is bafflegab, Tom Baker's word for this flummery. It's just bafflegab, deal with it.
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Oct 6, 2014 21:20
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Doctor Who long ago went the way of modern TV, it presaged it in a way. It is a show that once had aspirations of being an educational program, and then threw those aspirations away for the sake of easier writing and more bombastic stories that appealed to a wider audience.
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Oct 6, 2014 21:30
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ewe2 posted:It's just bafflegab, deal with it. Oh, spack off. (  )
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Oct 6, 2014 21:43
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Bicyclops posted:"Now when I say run, run!" Lundvik: Who put you in charge? Doctor: Okay fine YOU can say run then, happy? 
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Oct 6, 2014 21:47
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Thank god they didn't mention that the moon was originally a giant floating space rock that when it came into our orbit it knocked Earth's twin planet Mondas out its orbit and took its place.
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