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That one was annoying because the plot didn't even progress at all. Amy and Rory just mention the Doctor dying, maybe Amy sees Kovarian's face in a wall, on with the episode. Eventually a time-travelling robot full of tiny people had to warp in to actually move the drat plot along. Man I'm looking forward to the other thread getting to series 6.
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Feb 15, 2015 05:22
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adhuin posted:Agreed. All 10 episodes of the Season 8 were mostly great! All eleven episodes you jerk  Because I count Last Christmas as part of the regular season!
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Feb 15, 2015 06:04
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Season 6 is in an odd position of having almost no episodes that aren't, at the very least, reasonably good* (and having some of the best episodes of Moffat's time on the show) but having a larger storyline that just doesn't really work. Actually, come to think of it, I'd say that's true of Seasons 7 and 8 too, though 8 comes closest to having a well-realized season arc. ___ *Even Let's Kill Hitler, divorced from its larger context, is a bit of daft fun.
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Feb 15, 2015 06:09
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I dunno, Curse of the Black Spot and Night Terrors are stunningly forgettable.
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Feb 15, 2015 06:14
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Let's Kill Hitler is a pretty good example of season 6 as a whole, because it's got some tremendously good parts that tend to get overshadowed by some SPECTACULARLY stupid parts. It also completely mishandles its attempts to deal with the enormous emotional stress and pain of the Ponds, instead preferring to ignore them as much as possible or just sweep them under the rug and hope everybody just forgets about them.
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Feb 15, 2015 06:18
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Jerusalem posted:Let's Kill Hitler is a pretty good example of season 6 as a whole, because it's got some tremendously good parts Every single thing Rory says or does during it, for example. It's full of a lot of his most awesome moments. God Rory was a great companion.
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Feb 15, 2015 06:41
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docbeard posted:Season 6 is in an odd position of having almost no episodes that aren't, at the very least, reasonably good* (and having some of the best episodes of Moffat's time on the show) but having a larger storyline that just doesn't really work. Yeah, I enjoy the individual bits but the overarching plot is all tease with no payoff. Day and Time of the Doctor respectively did a lot to finally wrap up loose ends (even if the latter wasn't all it should have been), so Season 8 benefitted a lot from that.
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Feb 15, 2015 06:47
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I have to admit that season 6 at least took a lot of chances, which is a better sin than being boring. I do kind of hope 9 takes its chances on an episode to episode basis and doesn't introduce some sort of forced conflict to break up the chemistry between Coleman and Capaldi, though, because it could be really good if they let them just get along together and let the outside threat be the focus. With a promising season approaching, Big Finish possibly getting into revival stories, and the
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Feb 15, 2015 06:57
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Doctor Spaceman posted:I dunno, Curse of the Black Spot... stunningly forgettable.
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Feb 15, 2015 07:28
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Just got reminded it exists? That'd upset me too. Luckily there's an almost perfect pirate story, Doctor Who and the Pirates! Listen to that to cheer yourself up.
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Feb 15, 2015 07:37
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Tim Burns Effect posted:Well apparently the "Key to Time" box set is out of print in R1. I found this out by trying to order it in December when they had it marked down to $45 and them not sending it to me because they ran out. And now there's only used ones that are $90+ Got any Barnes and Nobles near you? Might want to look at them. And Amazon has all of the SE DVDs of the stories that make up the Key to Time available. Might want to go that route.
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Feb 15, 2015 14:15
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Doctor Spaceman posted:I dunno, Curse of the Black Spot and Night Terrors are stunningly forgettable. I actually keep forgetting that Night Terrors exists. Which is a shame because I thought it was decent enough at the time, it just doesn't stand out. I'm so glad Mark Gatiss appears to have embraced "I am going to write ridiculous pulpish historical episodes and to hell with all of you", though. The Crimson Horror and the Robin Hood one were lots of fun, and people who dislike these are objectively wrong, and I can prove it with graphs (that I made up). In the end, I'm really pleased by Eleven's overall storyline, how he goes from, essentially, Time Lord Victorious to the sort of person who will sacrifice himself without question or hesitation to defend a small insignificant town in a war he neither can nor should ever win (I really liked Time of the Doctor, you guys, in spite of its flaws). Pleased enough that I'm more-or-less willing to forgive most of the missteps along the way. (gently caress The Doctor, The Widow, and the Dubious Message though.)
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Feb 15, 2015 15:07
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I don't dislike either of those episodes, I just find them (especially Night Terrors) fairly run-of-the-mill in a season that has crazy ups and downs, often within in the same episode.
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Feb 15, 2015 15:11
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Tim Burns Effect posted:Well apparently the "Key to Time" box set is out of print in R1. I found this out by trying to order it in December when they had it marked down to $45 and them not sending it to me because they ran out. And now there's only used ones that are $90+ Time to break the region coding on your DVD player!
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Feb 15, 2015 15:22
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The_Doctor posted:Time to break the region coding on your DVD player! But Doctor, that's impossible!
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Feb 15, 2015 15:47
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Try the red setting.
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Feb 15, 2015 15:55
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docbeard posted:In the end, I'm really pleased by Eleven's overall storyline, how he goes from, essentially, Time Lord Victorious to the sort of person who will sacrifice himself without question or hesitation to defend a small insignificant town in a war he neither can nor should ever win (I really liked Time of the Doctor, you guys, in spite of its flaws). Pleased enough that I'm more-or-less willing to forgive most of the missteps along the way. (gently caress The Doctor, The Widow, and the Dubious Message though.)
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Feb 15, 2015 16:53
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Night Terrors and Curse of the Black Spot are pretty fine, I feel. I agree that the overarching plot in Season 6 doesn't really work and is weak (and I think it makes River a less interesting character to recontextualise her as a brainwashed minion of the Silence), but as has been said, most of the individual episodes are strong taken on their own.
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Feb 15, 2015 16:59
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Pwnstar posted:I bet if Jack Harkness did everything River did then people would be loving every minute of it. I'm dragging this over here because this is SUCH a loaded statement. River as she is in Season 5? Sure! She's pretty much 11's Jack anyways! River as of Season 6? No. I don't think anyone would love Jack being the quasi time lord baby of ....what Donna and that one guy with the stuttering problem? Rose and Mickey?
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Feb 15, 2015 17:15
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No one can deny that let's kill hitler would have been awesome, if mel had regenerated into Jack Harkness.
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Feb 15, 2015 17:32
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Wow. The karate scene from Warriors of the Deep is even worse IN context.
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Feb 16, 2015 14:47
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CobiWann posted:Wow. The karate scene from Warriors of the Deep is even worse IN context. It would be too broad for a Peter Sellers farce
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Feb 16, 2015 17:46
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 The Wormery is a really weird story, and not a particularly good one. That feels a little unfair, because it has an interesting premise, explores interesting themes, features a couple of strong lead performances, and everything is tied up nicely by the narrative framing... but this is a story whose strength is in its concept and NOT in the execution. It relies too heavily on adapting pre-existing material, to the point that the Doctor himself outright accuses the villain and their plan of being a second-hand knock-off of recent events in his own life, pretty much flat out calling it plagiarism. Also, while Katy Manning's portrayal of Iris Wildthyme (a pre-existing character from some of the wilderness years' extended universe stuff) is an interesting idea, the character feels like a variation/mixture on Bernice Summerfield and Romana (so a kind of proto-River Song), more a combination of traits from pre-existing characters than a fresh creation in her own right. While Manning's performance DOES do a very good job of distancing her from Jo Grant in the listener's mind, she's the kind of character who very easily grates on the nerves. It may be deliberately so, but that doesn't change the fact that she grates on the nerves! Set shortly after Trial of a Time Lord, the Sixth Doctor is traveling alone (presumably he dropped off Mel at home and is yet to meet her for the first time from her point of view) and in a bit of a funk. He pops into a bar called Bianca's in 1930s Berlin, a little out of the way place where the "dregs" of pre-War Berlin are able to hide away and socialize in relative comfort. So intellectuals, homosexuals, artists and the occasional bemused soldier rub shoulders and copiously drink the house special, all of them in awe of the woman who gives the bar it's name - Bianca, the performer who gives her all on the stage each night, then settles in to her table and allows guests the pleasure of her company for a few minutes, drinking in the atmosphere of the bar. The Doctor is basically in a funk, the events of his recent Trial have left him in despair of his own people and the nature of the universe - the universe lacks harmony, nobody appreciates him, and everything seems to be coming apart at the seams. He's not alone in this viewpoint, and somebody else intends to do something about it by forcing "harmony" onto the universe throughout all of time and space. He's not to know this though, for most of the first episode the Doctor is completely on the backfoot and unaware of greater events going on around him, even if he does keep picking up on odd things happening in and around the bar. He's distracted mostly by the appearance of Iris Wildthyme, an old drunk woman who claims to be a Time Lord who destroyed all record of her past, and now flies around time and space in a TARDIS shaped like a double decker bus. The Doctor finds Iris an annoying, clingy and pathetic figure, and after she is accused of stealing some of the House Special, helps her out of the bar and into a taxi, at which point they discover that Bianca's is no ordinary bar - it exists at a nexus point in reality, and is accessible from countless worlds throughout the cosmos simultaneously. The main storyline is a confusing affair, split between multiple antagonists with no clear sense of who is actually the threat, who is the victim, who is really running things behind the scenes etc. Bianca has created a stable establishment at the center of a decidedly unstable fracture in reality, with vaguely defined plans of spreading harmony throughout all time and space and effectively becoming not only immortal but worshiped and paid attention to at all times - she wants to, in effect, become God. But the bar's manager, despite being her employee, apparently has the power to replace her as the main act of the show, and openly defies and betrays her throughout the episode while she basically sits around and complains but does nothing about it. Then there are the so-called "worms" whispering in everybody's ears, and the "shadows" flitting into the bar from across multiple realities. Two ill-defined sides of an ill-defined race of "perfect" creatures that rejected evolution, they're attempting to use Bianca's plans for their own purposes, either to spread "harmony" or foment chaos, then at one point they seem to be working together, then at another.... well, it's all quite muddled, not helped by Iris staggering around slurring in the background and the Doctor either grumpily complaining or barely being able to resist the siren call of the "worms" himself. Probably the most memorable moment comes when Bianca reveals her true identity (which doesn't come as a surprise, having been telegraphed plainly) and the Doctor gets into a huff about this whole thing being a watered down version of recent events of his own life. That little critique is telling, because even if it is a self-aware homage, it still comes across as the story just rehashing stuff we've already seen. Iris Wilthyme is a character who has existed for awhile as a Wilderness Years creation, brought into Big Finish and given life by Katy Manning, who is best known as Jo Grant, a long-running 3rd Doctor companion. Manning quite clearly differentiates between Jo and Iris by wildly overplaying Iris as a rather pathetic figure, a drunk hopelessly obsessed with gaining the Doctor's favor. While it's kind of fun from a meta-standpoint to see what a different character she is to Jo, this is a character that works better in concept than execution, more of a one-off sight-gag joke than a character who can carry a story. The Doctor is often reduced to a background character in favor of Iris taking the spotlight, and she gets to be a little much at times, especially the singing section where distortion is applied to her voice to create the sense of the shadows overcoming the patrons with negative energy. Iris is supposed to come across as pathetic so that her "redemption" is all the stronger when she stands up for herself, proves she is more than just a drunk, and that she is an accomplished Time Lord in her own right and not just staggering about after the Doctor like a puppy. The whole thing feels contrived though, the Doctor does some pretty foolish and silly things simply to create situations where Iris can step up to the plate and do what he would normally do. She's an interesting idea for a character, and Manning certainly goes in whole hog, but I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to check out any solo stories she did. Like Big Finish frequently does, this story features a narrative framing device, this time with one of the young bar staff looking back at this time in her life many decades later as an old woman. The idea is that Bianca's had bugs everywhere to record everything said and done in the bar, but the initial efforts to play to this gimmick quickly gets thrown aside in favor of just having the story unfold without concerning itself about the fact recording devices couldn't possible have been around. Perhaps the most telling aspect of this is the fact that we're frequently able to hear things that even the characters present in the "past" were unable to hear at the time, because it was a telepathic noise and not something that could actually be picked up by recorders. As a result, the framing device feels more intrusive than anything else, only salvaged by the final line reveal of who the mysterious Mr. Ashcroft is. Given this is an audio, it would have been an interesting experiment and made this perhaps a more "worthy" story if they'd really dug deep into the gimmick of Ashcroft and Mickey listening to recordings of events from decades earlier. Have us only hear characters when they were in range of a bug, only get parts of a conversation, have characters refer to things they said/decided while they were outside of Bianca's etc. Instead, the gimmick is given lip-service only, there is nothing beyond a moment where one of the old reels breaks down where you have any reason to believe you're listening to a recording. The Wormery is a muddled, strange, and not particularly good story. It has a lot of neat ideas and concepts that aren't executed all that well, and it is far too self-aware of the fact it is essentially plagiarizing other stories/themes. The Doctor is too often sidelined, and the interesting idea of his morose state following his recent Trial never really gets the attention it deserves. Katy Manning throws her heart into her performance and I'm not going to blame her for the deficiencies in the character, since all she can do is work with the material she is given. This is a story that could have been a lot better, but sadly wasn't.
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Feb 16, 2015 23:29
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CobiWann posted:Wow. The karate scene from Warriors of the Deep is even worse IN context. You could fix Warriors of the Deep just by making it darker. In this specific case you'd just turn the lights off.
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Feb 16, 2015 23:39
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Doctor Spaceman posted:You could fix Warriors of the Deep just by making it darker. In this specific case you'd just turn the lights off. They actually WANTED to make it darker, but for some reason the studio insisted on keeping the lights bright. This was a story they should have scrapped and just put the money towards the season's other stories. Jerusalem posted:The Wormery is a muddled, strange, and not particularly good story. It has a lot of neat ideas and concepts that aren't executed all that well, and it is far too self-aware of the fact it is essentially plagiarizing other stories/themes. The Doctor is too often sidelined, and the interesting idea of his morose state following his recent Trial never really gets the attention it deserves. Katy Manning throws her heart into her performance and I'm not going to blame her for the deficiencies in the character, since all she can do is work with the material she is given. This is a story that could have been a lot better, but sadly wasn't. I liked Baker's performance in this one, if only because he came across as the Doctor without that inner fire or spark that drives him. I call this story "The Doctor Needs A Freaking Drink" because he's a Doctor without a companion and it's very rare we viewers/listeners get to see such a thing. I see where you're coming from with Iris, but I took her as the balance to Six being so down. I wouldn't seek out Iris' stuff either and Katy should have turned it down a notch, but it's nice to see a Time Lord just be...not high and mighty, but a wreck.
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Feb 17, 2015 00:12
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I really like this, the time vortex particularly looks amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNEjx6XUbfQ
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Feb 17, 2015 00:17
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PriorMarcus posted:I really like this, the time vortex particularly looks amazing:  That looks great, and it's also funny how desensitized we've become to the completely ludicrous idea of a telephone box flying through a weird portal. It doesn't even register for me.
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Feb 17, 2015 00:38
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CobiWann posted:I liked Baker's performance in this one, if only because he came across as the Doctor without that inner fire or spark that drives him. I call this story "The Doctor Needs A Freaking Drink" because he's a Doctor without a companion and it's very rare we viewers/listeners get to see such a thing. I agree, but that makes Iris' presence a real distraction - she's too strong a personality, and too "big" to really fit into place in a story about a despondent Doctor reevaluating everything he knows about himself, his people, and the universe. Had it been Mickey exploring everything and figuring out in her own way that something was up, and basically forcing the Doctor out of his funk and giving him the spark back to deal with the problem, I feel the story would have been a lot stronger. PriorMarcus posted:I really like this, the time vortex particularly looks amazing: This is really cool. I wouldn't like it as something that happens in every single story, but just every so often seeing dematerialization/rematerialization from a different perspective would be fun.
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Feb 17, 2015 04:23
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Well, the broken trains in Boston means I'll be walking through two miles of snow in the morning and evening until they are repaired literally every day, which is very bad news for my bum knee but good news for my Big Finish listening.
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Feb 17, 2015 04:26
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Bicyclops posted:Well, the broken trains in Boston means I'll be walking through two miles of snow in the morning and evening until they are repaired literally every day, which is very bad news for my bum knee but good news for my Big Finish listening. I wish you well! Might I recommend either The Land of the Dead or Winter for the Adept?. Both seem appropriate for how much Beantown is getting bukkaked by Mother Nature.
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Feb 17, 2015 05:57
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CobiWann posted:I wish you well! Might I recommend either The Land of the Dead or Winter for the Adept?. Both seem appropriate for how much Beantown is getting bukkaked by Mother Nature. I've heard them both, but those are both really good recommendations for the snowpocalypse, thanks you! And double thank you, because your post made me look at my checklist to see where I was, and I remembered that I need to clear some of the old ones off my phone to make room for more!
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Feb 17, 2015 06:15
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PriorMarcus posted:I really like this, the time vortex particularly looks amazing: But how do I know it's travelled through time if there aren't any clocks in the vortex? 
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Feb 17, 2015 07:23
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And today in the Doctor Who thread, the TARDIS falls down a patterned pair of leggings on bonfire night.
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Feb 17, 2015 09:17
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Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of the takes on the time vortex where it looks like a smooth (albiet flashy) tube.
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Feb 17, 2015 09:56
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Late on the Brooker/Screenwipe talk from a few pages back, but I really love their bit about Broadchurch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1MyfcQ2KmE "Sorta like Torchwood, but for adults!"
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Feb 17, 2015 14:40
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Bicyclops posted:Well, the broken trains in Boston means I'll be walking through two miles of snow in the morning and evening until they are repaired literally every day, which is very bad news for my bum knee but good news for my Big Finish listening. I'm in the same boat (a two-mile walk thanks to Boston snow); maybe I should finally consider listening to some of those things.
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Feb 17, 2015 15:35
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idonotlikepeas posted:I'm in the same boat (a two-mile walk thanks to Boston snow); maybe I should finally consider listening to some of those things. Feel free to ask where to start, as in all things Doctor Who, the Thread Hive Mind is in generally agreement about the BFAs.  Seriously, though, let us know how you like your Doctor Who and we will lovingly craft you a playlist. If you're considering listening like me and Bicyclops (everything*, in release date order), please hang up and and dial 911 or go to the nearest emergency room. * Within reason. I'm not touching Bernice Summerfield or Iris Wildthyme outside of the main range. After The War fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Feb 17, 2015 |
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Feb 17, 2015 15:48
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After The War posted:Feel free to ask where to start, as in all things Doctor Who, the Thread Hive Mind is in generally agreement about the BFAs. Iris' range is worth it simply for David Benson as Panda. I'd really like to hear a Panda and Frobisher story.
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Feb 17, 2015 15:51
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Davros1 posted:Iris' range is worth it simply for David Benson as Panda. I'd really like to hear a Panda and Frobisher story. That's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. EDIT - Despite how it looks, Peter Davison isn't necessarily the thread's favorite Doctor, he just makes for good avatars.
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Feb 17, 2015 15:54
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PriorMarcus posted:I really like this, the time vortex particularly looks amazing: Looks like he's redecorated the Dematerialisation sequence. Hum. Don't like it. He even got the audio wrong! (He used the Rematerialisation audio for the Dematerialisation audio, and a simple "Thump!" for the Rematerialisation audio!) (Yes, the actual series screws this up to occasionaly, doesn't make it right!) Couple things I did like: The "tunnel" effect, on its own, was nice. As in, that's some nice not-associated-with-the-time-vortex random piece of art. The circling effect (since it was supposed to be from the TARDIS's point of view) before take off.
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Feb 17, 2015 16:15
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