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Acne Rain posted:Can someone spoil why Clara and Doctor are apparently in favor of murdering a bunch of children so I don't have to watch this inane sounding episode Because since it doesn't look like anything can be done and the Earth is hosed, it's better for them to be with their parents in the end than being the last seven-or-so humans in existence. The Doctor doesn't get the idea that the trees could be there to save the planet until Clara and Danny are taking the kids to be with their parents that they actively said they want to be with.
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Oct 26, 2014 05:06
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Acne Rain posted:Can someone spoil why Clara and Doctor are apparently in favor of murdering a bunch of children so I don't have to watch this inane sounding episode Clara says they should get back to the TARDIS. The Doctor presumably wouldn't have bothered, because Clara had to motivate him by saying, "at least let's save the kids we have here." The Doctor agrees that this is a good idea. When they get to the TARDIS Clara explains that she had tricked the Doctor. She believes (without asking anyone) that the kids would rather be with their parents than safe in the loving TARDIS. The Doctor basically goes, "Oh... okay. Well let's save you and Danny then. [Letting all the kids die is totally cool with me]." Clara explains that Danny wouldn't abandon the kids, (he's not a loving psychopath, I guess), and Clara doesn't want to be the last of her kind. The Doctor asks why the gently caress they even came to the TARDIS then. Clara explains that it was to save you Doctor. Let humanity save you this one time! The Doctor takes this in stride and begins to bugger off, as Clara leads Danny and the kids to what she believes is certain doom. This is an actual thing that happened on Doctor Who. Forget the fact that Earth ain't time-locked or anything. They can all go back to 1960 and live long fulfilled lives and poo poo. Nope. All gonna die right here right now. For the best, really. They might be sad otherwise. I guess if you're an orphan... gently caress you? You're better off dead? Jesus Christ this is a loathsome episode. I agree with what folks are saying about mental illness too. Eiba fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Oct 26, 2014 |
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Oct 26, 2014 05:18
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I think what we need to realize about the whole hearing voices and medication thing is context. Yes, in an ordinary situation where someone is hearing voices and having nervous tics, you should give them medication. When a alien scientist from a powerful race of psychics can scan someone's mind and determine that their disorder is helpful to saving the planet and was trauma based rather than a severe problem, that's another barrel of fish entirely.
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Oct 26, 2014 05:19
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Solaris Knight posted:I think what we need to realize about the whole hearing voices and medication thing is context. Yes, in an ordinary situation where someone is hearing voices and having nervous tics, you should give them medication. Of course, but hearing that on a children's television show reinforces the new age anti-medicine bullshit some parents want to believe. My daughter's not mentally ill, she's just an indigo child that can talk to the spirits, man! After this episode there's a nonzero chance that a child with mental problems will stop taking his pills thinking that the voices actually want him to save the world.
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Oct 26, 2014 05:24
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Solaris Knight posted:I think what we need to realize about the whole hearing voices and medication thing is context. Yes, in an ordinary situation where someone is hearing voices and having nervous tics, you should give them medication. If IF This was a show strictly for adults that was not in ANY FASHION aimed AT CHILDREN, I might begin to agree with you. This is NOT. Children watch this show, children love this show- AND CHILDREN CAN AND WILL TAKE THE WRONG MESSAGE FROM THIS.
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Oct 26, 2014 05:25
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Mr Beens posted:What do you mean "tying it in some way"? It was fairly obvious that Missy was directly involved in causing the solar flare and meant to destroy the Earth. I was really hoping we'd see a bunch of disaster buttons on her desk like Mr. Burns.  MisterBibs posted:"I don't want to be the last of my kind." loving ouch.
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Oct 26, 2014 05:25
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Solaris Knight posted:I think what we need to realize about the whole hearing voices and medication thing is context. Yes, in an ordinary situation where someone is hearing voices and having nervous tics, you should give them medication. The show doesn't exist in a vacuum. A significant percentage of the population of the real world really does argue against medicating people for mental illness. You can't remove the show from the context of the world in which it was produced and broadcast.
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Oct 26, 2014 05:27
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Solaris Knight posted:I think what we need to realize about the whole hearing voices and medication thing is context. Yes, in an ordinary situation where someone is hearing voices and having nervous tics, you should give them medication. The thing is, it's not real, and people with mental illnesses are. That scene was pretty loving heart-wrenching too. All her classmates knew what was going on, and it made them really loving distressed to watch. They were pleading with the Doctor to help her (that is, to give her real-world help), and he told them to gently caress off. Imagine if she was having an asthma attack and as she was on the ground writhing, and her classmates were crying in distress, the Doctor was saying, "no no, it's just a breath monster trying to communicate!" or something. That doesn't even have the baggage of mental illness, but can you imagine just how... gross that scene would be? "No no, foolish humans trying to fix what they don't understand, I know better!" Just because there's a fantasy explanation for it, doesn't change how it reads in the real world, i.e. the place where all us viewers live. It's like... in skeezy anime (my deepest apologies for using an anime analogy) you have characters who look like a little girl but are "actually" thousands of years old. That fantasy explanation doesn't make it any less incredibly creepy, gross, and wrong if you start... treating them like adults. We all understand the in-universe justification. It's just entirely irrelevant. (Sorry again for the poo poo analogy... I was wracking my brain for a better one, but I that was the best/least derail-y I could think of to demonstrate just how useless in-universe excuses are for bad poo poo.)
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Oct 26, 2014 05:38
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Eiba posted:
ShitSAsays.txt
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Oct 26, 2014 05:41
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Solaris Knight posted:I think what we need to realize about the whole hearing voices and medication thing is context. Yes, in an ordinary situation where someone is hearing voices and having nervous tics, you should give them medication. "Brain pills?! Will you people never learn?" "What do you mean? Medication can help people with serious mental problems, we can't just assume everyone who's hearing voices is actually a space wizard who's going to save the planet, that's ridiculous." "Well... Yeah, but in this case that's true, so don't give her the pills until I've done this magic wand poo poo." There wasn't anything like that, the Doctor just scoffs at the idea of mental health medication and nobody calls him on it except the horrible little girl who responded to a maths problem with something like "why is 7 being taken away from 9, did 9 do something wrong?"
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Oct 26, 2014 05:42
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Thinking back to RTD's era, I really wish more had been done with Time Lord Victorious. I feel like that had such great potential. Especially with the Master coming back, it could have created a lovely parallel with the Master back in the following episode. I don't know... I just felt like there should have been something more there.
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Oct 26, 2014 06:08
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I think what we've got, for the first time this season (yes, including Kill The Moon which was fine if you ignored the science, and the first half of Deep Breath which was actually well done and important and I will defend it to my grave and gently caress you all) is some astonishingly, almost criminally clumsy writing. I don't believe for a second that Doctor Who was advocating the idea that mental illness isn't real and shouldn't be treated any more than it was advocating the idea that trees are fireproof. Which isn't to say that they didn't gently caress up, only that it's worth looking at how and why they hosed up. The idea of (in this case) psychic phenomena being mistaken for mental illness is pretty common in science fiction. Hell, the kid arguably is still mentally ill; that her distress comes from telepathic sensitivity rather than a more mundane form of hosed-up brain chemistry doesn't make her suffering any less real. Making use of that suffering in aid of gaining more insight into what was happening is perfectly in keeping with the unpleasant form of pragmatism this iteration of the Doctor has demonstrated all season, and I'm sure that's what was intended. But they communicated it really goddamn poorly and now here we all are. They don't get a free pass, of course, for that rather unfortunate, if unintentional, subtext. As for what people will be casting as Clara cackling over the slaughter of the Earth's children any minute now, again, I think it's another mishandling of what was meant to be presented as an impossible dilemma, but which fell apart when exposed to reality. Clara's question of what sort of life these kids would have, alone on an unfamiliar world and deprived of their families, is a valid, poignant one, though it's a question that any of us can think of satisfying answers to. (As an example: "We'd be lost in another universe. Frozen in a single moment. We'd have nothing." "You would have hope!") (On the other hand, one might as well take the Doctor to task for not herding the entire population of every planet he visits into the infinitely-large TARDIS, where they could live lives free of disease, want, and strife.) I still liked the episode, but what a mess.
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Oct 26, 2014 06:21
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This was a really dumb episode, but nowhere near as bad as the moon-egg one. I'll take RTD science over insane conjecture any day. Plus, Danny and 12 had some good lines in this one.
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Oct 26, 2014 06:22
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quote:When they get to the TARDIS Clara explains that she had tricked the Doctor. She believes (without asking anyone) that the kids would rather be with their parents than safe in the loving TARDIS. The kids said they wanna be with their parents, if I remember the time line right.
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Oct 26, 2014 06:29
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MisterBibs posted:The kids said they wanna be with their parents, if I remember the time line right.
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Oct 26, 2014 06:34
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MisterBibs posted:The kids said they wanna be with their parents, if I remember the time line right. Also, the kids who want to be with their parents don't know that that means they'll die. Basically they're talking about something entirely different than Clara is.
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Oct 26, 2014 06:35
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PrBacterio posted:Fortunately, this season also had some absolutely fantastic episodes too, so it's really been kind of a roller coaster in that respect. E: Not sure specifically what was wrong but I found the dialog during the possessed-by-fairies scene really hard to make out. Doctor Spaceman fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Oct 26, 2014 |
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Oct 26, 2014 06:39
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The Silurian episodes aren't really bad, they're just boring.
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Oct 26, 2014 06:41
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Big Mean Jerk posted:The Silurian episodes aren't really bad, they're just boring. That's a pretty big sin in my eyes. I wasn't bored by Kill The Moon or A Barely Relevant Blake Allusion, and I'd be more inclined to rewatch either of them. The Silurian 2-parter also has the "let's have two unqualified people negotiate the future of the planet" thing that I really hate.
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Oct 26, 2014 06:43
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2house2fly posted:You'd need to have some lines of dialogue to make it clear this was a special circumstance. Well Gifted and Talented seemed to be a euphemism for special needs class with that particular group. I'd believe it if that girl had some severe learning disability so that wasn't particularly outlandish. But yeah the whole she wasn't crazy just psychic/leave the kids to die message was all terrible.
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Oct 26, 2014 06:43
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The Silurian episodes were a pretty good attempt to do a pre-revival style story. Better than the Sontaran two-parter. They just have messed up pacing because doing that kind of episode in a fast paced show like revived Who with its comparably fewer act breaks fucks it all up.
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Oct 26, 2014 06:45
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Doctor Spaceman posted:It's pretty much a feature of the revival. Even the seasons that tend to get regarded well (4 & 5, for the purposes of argument) have things like The Doctor's Daughter and the Silurian 2-parter.
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Oct 26, 2014 06:49
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Solvency posted:I just want to take a moment to think about how Smith's doctor would react to having a class full of school children aboard the Tardis. He would probably have loved it. I was wondering how Eleven would have reacted to the Greater London Forest. Then I started wondering how he would be about the kids. Then how about Ten, and Nine? Four and a TARDIS full of kids? In other words, I was so bored with this episode I was imaging episodes-that-will-never-be during the episode. Magical forest resurrecting dead people, psychic girl being inadequately explained leading to bad "don't take you medicine" message, oh and everybody acting like the tiger just teleported clear to the other side of the planet so you can forget your fear in two seconds flat. Also Clara the idiot deciding that the only people in the world the Doctor can possibly save is this small group of school children, but he can't save them 'cause then they'd be sad... Can you imagine the parents if the day hadn't been saved? "You had a chance to be rescued? And your teacher let you come home instead of going with the spaceship man who could have saved your life? I love you, son, but wait here. I'm just going to kill a schoolmarm." This episode sucked severely. Except for the tiger. I like tigers.
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Oct 26, 2014 06:54
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Filox posted:Magical forest resurrecting dead people
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Oct 26, 2014 06:56
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Well I haven't seen any anti-vaxxers latching onto Children of Earth when the government was going to use 'vaccines' as the cover for kids being kidnapped and handed over to junkie aliens, so I guess we can hope this one gets overlooked and not used as ammunition by the wrong people. Or maybe in the finale the Doctor will say he was wrong, because it turns out that Missy, like the Master, is a Time Lord with mental illness that has gone off her meds.
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Oct 26, 2014 07:05
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Doctor Spaceman posted:I just assumed she'd heard the broadcast and came home. That's probably what was intended, but as it was happening, having her appear before their eyes as a mass of fairy vines evaporated made me think, "Oh the trees ate her and now they're putting her back? Oh, gently caress that." If they'd gotten to their home and she was waiting on the doorstep, it would have been clearer and I wouldn't have got that silly impression in the first place. So I thought that scene was pretty lousy.
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Oct 26, 2014 07:10
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greententacle posted:Or maybe in the finale the Doctor will say he was wrong, because it turns out that Missy, like the Master, is a Time Lord with mental illness that has gone off her meds. Look guys, just so we're clear: hearing voices is normal, having a song stuck in your head means you're probably a violent psychopath.
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Oct 26, 2014 07:17
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Filox posted:That's probably what was intended, but as it was happening, having her appear before their eyes as a mass of fairy vines evaporated made me think, "Oh the trees ate her and now they're putting her back? Oh, gently caress that." The TreeSpirit did mention they put grass over the mass graves...
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Oct 26, 2014 07:50
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Hank Morgan posted:Did the solar flare kill the moon egg? God I hope so. This episode had a lot of moon egg level bullshit in it too, which is part of why I dislike as much as I do. There needs to be someone who goes through the scripts and throws things like that episode (and this one) out or at least forces the writers to take out everything that breaks suspension of disbelief. I legitimately feel bad for Capaldi and co having to go out there and act along to such awful scripts (setting the plot aside a lot of the writing has been bad this season too.)
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Oct 26, 2014 07:53
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Were these the same creatures as the fairies from that Torchwood episode? The girl that got brought back wasn't the one who was taken away there, but the the situation seemed similar.
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Oct 26, 2014 08:06
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I just gotta stress again that I absolutely do not think that the intention was that the girl was brought back by the "lifeforce", either physically or from the dead. I absolutely got the impression she'd just returned of her own volition after getting Maebh's global phonecall, but she was hiding because she was scared/nervous about coming back (then the leaves disappeared and she was exposed, and happily they were happy to see her). I'm not excusing the episode's writing or anything because I thought it was pretty poor in a lot of places (I did find the episode endearing despite that), but I think that scene was definitely left ambiguous enough that, if you dislike the idea of the girl being brought back to life, you can just look at it the other way instead. Nothing in the episode explicitly states it one way or the other. There are plenty of other very valid reasons to dislike the episode though!
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Oct 26, 2014 08:15
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Eiba posted:At first I thought it was somehow only the Coal Hill school group in a London otherwise empty of people, but full of trees. Honestly, when I was at that part of the episode that is what I thought too. When Danny had the kids burst through that door they accidentally walked into a pocket dimension or alien artwork or whatever (with the Doctor and the kid both already being there, obviously) and the whole point was getting out of that modelled-on-a-fairytale world without being eaten by wolves or killed by witches or whatever. Would have been a good premise and could have been a good episode but things took a turn for the stupid instead.
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Oct 26, 2014 08:15
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Cliff Racer posted:Honestly, when I was at that part of the episode that is what I thought too. When Danny had the kids burst through that door they accidentally walked into a pocket dimension or alien artwork or whatever (with the Doctor and the kid both already being there, obviously) and the whole point was getting out of that modelled-on-a-fairytale world without being eaten by wolves or killed by witches or whatever. Would have been a good premise and could have been a good episode but things took a turn for the stupid instead. Yeah, I thought this would be the case from the preview and I think that would have ended up making a better story.
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Oct 26, 2014 08:16
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Cliff Racer posted:Honestly, when I was at that part of the episode that is what I thought too. When Danny had the kids burst through that door they accidentally walked into a pocket dimension or alien artwork or whatever (with the Doctor and the kid both already being there, obviously) and the whole point was getting out of that modelled-on-a-fairytale world without being eaten by wolves or killed by witches or whatever. Would have been a good premise and could have been a good episode but things took a turn for the stupid instead.
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Oct 26, 2014 08:24
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Every time I think about this episode I get more angry about the medications thing. It's a goddamn shame because I really enjoyed watching it the first time, but that whole subplot was either deeply irresponsible, OR active propaganda for a dangerous and harmful cultural phenomenon. I don't give a poo poo about the science of the tree/solar flare interaction and frankly I think anyone who gets serious, insurmountable hangups about that has (ironically, I know) a broken brain. I enjoyed the character dynamics between the Doctor, Clara, and Danny. I liked the kids well enough. But you know what? gently caress this episode. Statistically speaking, at least ONE kid is going to go off-meds because of this episode - who knows for how long and how dramatic an impact that's going to have, because it could be a loving disaster for them - and that's not acceptable.
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Oct 26, 2014 09:36
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Jerusalem posted:... But what if that was the reason I disliked it?  Many stories can be made or broken on their resolution and to me this was one of those moments. There was a lot of wonky story-telling up until that point and then BAM, ambiguity ending. Did someone let RTD back in or something? It reminds me of when the kneeling woman revealed her face to Tennant for some reason or another. Using an onomonpeaic based rating system I'd give this episode: Blech
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Oct 26, 2014 09:36
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DoctorWhat posted:Every time I think about this episode I get more angry about the medications thing. It's a goddamn shame because I really enjoyed watching it the first time, but that whole subplot was either deeply irresponsible, OR active propaganda for a dangerous and harmful cultural phenomenon. Yeah...I'm in the same boat. I really enjoyed the episode as I was watching it, but after Burk's post and some of my own contemplation, there really are some troubling undertones. I made a big ol' effortpost on the official Doctor Who facebook page...I doubt anything will come of it, but it'd be nice if the BBC would acknowledge that there's a potential issue here.
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Oct 26, 2014 09:55
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This episode was loving terrible on pretty much every conceivable level. Bad/nonexistent plotting, bad child actors, bad effects, bad direction, bad script, bad everything. Sigh.
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Oct 26, 2014 10:10
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The direction this episode (or rather, the cinematography and camera-work) was fantastic, and has been for nearly every episode this series.
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Oct 26, 2014 10:12
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DoctorWhat posted:The direction this episode (or rather, the cinematography and camera-work) was fantastic, and has been for nearly every episode this series. I really loved that shot where the camera moved from the lion up Nelson's column to look over the city. I had to speed it up a lot in the gif but the actual shot itself was really smoothly done.
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Oct 26, 2014 10:36
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