|
Trin Tragula posted:Overnights are out. The panicky may wish to go sit on the throne before they read this. At the very least it's worth going "hmmmm" over. What were the ratings for the first episode? I saw the initial ones but not with the digital views factored in.
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 15:21
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 1, 2024 18:59 |
|
|
cargohills posted:I'd imagine most viewers of Doctor Who would care about Davros already, no? if you assume someone is allready invested in what you're writing you are probably going to end up writing poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 15:28
|
|
|
computer parts posted:What were the ratings for the first episode? I saw the initial ones but not with the digital views factored in. Like he said, the consolidated ratings aren't out yet. By the by, I'm amazed Casualty is still going. How many hours of television has that produced now? e: 964 episodes @ 50 minutes each  Not quite up to The Bill figures
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 15:29
|
|
|
Autonomous Monster posted:Like he said, the consolidated ratings aren't out yet. Currently 964 episodes. At a minimum estimation (going by the standard length 50 mins) at least 48,200 minutes of melodramatic accidents, and unlikely injuries. Or, if you'd prefer; 33-and-a-half days, watching it non-stop. In comparison, watching the entirety of the show from the Hartnell era to the latest episode is something like 20 days (it's something around the 380 hours mark). And while breaking down numbers, just the monthly range of BF Who - 389 hours (16 days!) [e]:  [e2]: Corrected now. Pesky Splinter fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Sep 27, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 15:33
|
|
|
Attitude Indicator posted:if you assume someone is allready invested in what you're writing you are probably going to end up writing poo poo. Assuming somebody knows who Davros is isn't asking much.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 15:35
|
|
|
Megaspel posted:Everything after the double-cross was terrible imo. It just turned from a unique story where the big bad isn't 100% evil, and actually humanized and made interesting, casting doubts on whether the Doctor is justified in vilifying and "other"ing an entire race because their goals conflict with his. Then they have to go and ruin it all with a gotcha and return to the status quo, even the tiniest glimmer of mercy was a gift from I'm glad Davros was scheming. His whole "Am I a good man?  " spiel was so sappy.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 16:03
|
|
|
Attitude Indicator posted:if you assume someone is allready invested in what you're writing you are probably going to end up writing poo poo. So, given a 2 episode story, how long do you think they should have spent giving background information for the master, davros and the daleks? Should the Doctor and Clara also get introductions in case the viewers don't know who they are either?
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 16:12
|
|
|
SiKboy posted:So, given a 2 episode story, how long do you think they should have spent giving background information for the master, davros and the daleks? 20 seconds. Clara: Who is Davros and why does he want the Doctor? Missy: He is the creator of the Daleks, skibbity boo, blerp blorp. *dances with a tree* Missy: He and the Doctor have a long history together *proceeds to make armpit farts* Missy: And its one of the Doctor's biggest *blows raspberries at a Dalek* regrets. *frenches a lightswitch*
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 16:25
|
|
|
I do believe one of the reasons they weren't doing two-parters for a time was that there was inevitably a drop off in ratings. (Plus it may not be as dramatic in the UK but there's the whole "3.6 now is not the same as 3.6 then" phenomenon.) Hope it doesn't slide much further though, I'd hate to see the BBC panic and try to retool everything.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 16:28
|
|
|
Maxwell Lord posted:I do believe one of the reasons they weren't doing two-parters for a time was that there was inevitably a drop off in ratings. (Plus it may not be as dramatic in the UK but there's the whole "3.6 now is not the same as 3.6 then" phenomenon.) I thought at the time they said that it was assumed that 2-parters were cheaper but they actually weren't. At any rate, I wouldn't get worried about ratings. The show is super popular abroad, it makes tons of money in merchandising, and everybody watches things online now.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 16:36
|
|
|
RIP Doctor Who. 1963 - 1989 1996 2005 - 2015 Death by Ratings
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 16:38
|
|
|
Maxwell Lord posted:Hope it doesn't slide much further though, I'd hate to see the BBC panic and try to retool everything. Oh no that would be terrible please don't change such a winning formula as what we have now oh no please why the humanity aaaah. I haven't seen the episode yet, but it's sounding like the same sort of nonsense that I don't care for in my Who, where the show drinks in its own importance and stops being charming or good and starts being annoying and self important to the point of idiocy.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 16:39
|
|
|
Plus, this was always going to be a rough week for Who in immediate local. It was up against England vs. Wales in the rugby (I think? I'm neither British nor watch sports), as I understand it that is one hell of a death slot to have.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 16:40
|
|
|
Burkion posted:Oh no that would be terrible please don't change such a winning formula as what we have now oh no please why the humanity aaaah. I mean, sure, it'd be fine for the showrunners not to think "we can do no wrong, the audience will follow us anywhere." But I'm thinking more of the kind of clumsy top-down interference that gave us Galactica 1980, Buck Rogers Season 2, and Community Season 4. And plus, really, despite all the craziness in Part 1, this ended up being downright traditional. The Doctor gets put in a trap by an old enemy, manages to clever his way out by the skin of his teeth, the Master- er, Missy gets caught in a collapsing city but probably will be around for the next time they need her, etc. On top of which, they actually managed to handle the self referential stuff in an interesting way- they touched on the idea that there's this icon of "The Doctor" that is wonderful and good and heroic, and there's the real old man in a box, and he wants to live up to that ideal but it takes work. He does have those values of mercy and compassion but he has to push himself sometimes. This is good writing. This is character development. For all that the concrete plot stuff gets handwaved, this season and the last have actually delved into The Doctor as person in a way the show rarely has in the past.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 16:56
|
|
|
MrL_JaKiri posted:And just like Whedon's Marvel stuff, even the things that were supposedly deeply connected to the continuity were pointless except in the moment. The poo poo about the Dalek/Time Lord Prophecy, for example. After spending all that effort on making the Doctor just a guy having adventures, the last few episodes have doubled down on the "Doctor is the most important and amazing person in the universe" thing again. The nanosecond laser beam teleporter nonsense? When has the Doctor ever done anything like that? I enjoyed this week but I have to agree with this. I'm not sure when to pinpoint when this started to take over the new series. I don't remember it happening much under RTD but I'm probably misremembering that. It seems pretty constant in Moffat's run though, even The Eleventh Hour had elements of the show doubling down on The Doctor's importance. I think it started to get bad with that the end of S6 and the start of S7.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:04
|
|
|
Yeah I fuckin' love this characterization of The Doctor because it so willfuly and proudly denounces all that "oncoming storm" destined-hero garbage and looks at the Doctor as an everyperson who is a hero because he decides to do heroic things.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:05
|
|
|
Pesky Splinter posted:Currently 964 episodes. At a minimum estimation (going by the standard length 50 mins) at least 48,200 minutes of melodramatic accidents, and unlikely injuries. I would love to see the tallied up costs on the props lists for this; the budget for butcher's leftovers alone must be astronomical.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:07
|
|
|
DoctorWhat posted:Yeah I fuckin' love this characterization of The Doctor because it so willfuly and proudly denounces all that "oncoming storm" destined-hero garbage and looks at the Doctor as an everyperson who is a hero because he decides to do heroic things. Too bad the man writing his adventures disagrees.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:08
|
|
|
Big Mean Jerk posted:Too bad the man writing his adventures disagrees. But he did in fact write the scene where the Doctor admits that he's just an old man in a box, and the entire story's about the Doctor pushing himself to be compassionate and merciful in a situation where it's hard to be so. This is literally the arc of the story.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:11
|
|
|
SiKboy posted:So, given a 2 episode story, how long do you think they should have spent giving background information for the master, davros and the daleks? Should the Doctor and Clara also get introductions in case the viewers don't know who they are either? I like the conflation of "background information" and "reason to care". They're not the same thing and you know it. Meanwhile, I gave an example of a story that did it well.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:11
|
|
|
Meanwhile, a story that does it badly: Frontier in Space, which has a sequence that makes absolutely no sense unless you already know who the Master is and what he looks like. Admittedly he was a semi-regular at that point.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:13
|
|
|
Big Mean Jerk posted:Too bad the man writing his adventures disagrees. Y'see this is what I don't get. That Moffat can literally write whole scenes, whole stories, expressing one attitude or point of view, and people will somehow be convinced that he believes the opposite.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:14
|
|
|
...I guess that I'm in the minority in liking this ep. Oh well. Though there's a lot of complaints I do not get. Like "too much quipping", this was less quippy than a usual episode. Or "shouldn't have explained Davros, everyone should know what a Davros is" I mean really? Davros has only appeared once in Newwho. Not everyone watching is a classic who supernerd who's watched the audiodramas and listened to the episodes and built there own sixth doctor coat.Some perspective might be lost here, I don't think a more casual fan would have that much familiarity with Davros's. And it was like, one line? Idg what's being argued here.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:18
|
|
|
Acne Rain posted:...I guess that I'm in the minority in liking this ep. No you're not. Those that do are just louder at the moment.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:20
|
|
|
Acne Rain posted:Or "shouldn't have explained Davros, everyone should know what a Davros is" I mean really? Davros has only appeared once in Newwho. Not everyone watching is a classic who supernerd who's watched the audiodramas and listened to the episodes and built there own sixth doctor coat.Some perspective might be lost here, I don't think a more casual fan would have that much familiarity with Davros's. And it was like, one line? Idg what's being argued here. Wait, who said that? Who would say that? Surely the story needs to introduce Davros and give some reasons to care for new viewers, like the children which are the main target demographic of this show.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:22
|
|
|
Posts likeSiKboy posted:So, given a 2 episode story, how long do you think they should have spent giving background information for the master, davros and the daleks? Should the Doctor and Clara also get introductions in case the viewers don't know who they are either? cargohills posted:I'd imagine most viewers of Doctor Who would care about Davros already, no? seem to be in response to MrL_JaKiri posted:None of that groundwork was done in the latest two parter, instead spending most of the running time doing little vignettes for giffing. The only nod to it was the little clip-based refresher course Moffat did of "Here's why you should care about Davros!" which is obviously a completely wank way of doing it. Make me care, don't just tell me that I should. So it's like one guy says they actually didn't do a good job explaining Davros in a show don't tell manner (fair) and the response is like "everyone knows about Davros, that doesn't matter" (what). I'm not really following most of the argument because people's post-episode character descriptions aren't really meshing with what I just watched so I'm probably just misreading something.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:28
|
|
|
I enjoyed this a lot more than the first episode, which I quite liked on first watch too but that really pales in comparison to this week. I'm of two minds whether the two-part structure worked here - on the one hand I like that the two parts are distinctly different, but on the other hand the first part ends up feeling really disposable as most of the actual meat of the story ends up in the second part. I don't know, maybe this should have been a 60-minute opener instead of a two-parter, but it feels a bit silly complaining about that after so many rushed episodes in the last two seasons. If at the end of this series one slightly overblown and mismatched opening two-parter is the price we've had to pay for a series of well-paced stories that have when necessary the space to breathe over two episodes, I'm pretty happy. Capaldi and Bleach both really shine in their scenes together, and having Davros be genuinely happy that the Doctor has found Gallifrey again is such a clever touch because it's simultaneously really surprising and actually totally believable. The stuff about dalek time lord super soldier hybrid mutant the doctors most darkest secret sounds dumb though, but I guess we'll see if it's going to be as John Peel as it sounds. Forktoss fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Sep 27, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:35
|
|
|
Acne Rain posted:...I guess that I'm in the minority in liking this ep. Maybe it's different outside the UK, but nearly everybody I know knows who Davros is, and the few that don't have never and will never watch Doctor Who. e: as a note, the reason I liked this episode isn't because I like Davros normally, it's (partly) because I think this episode did brilliantly with a character who normally totally sucks, e.g. in Resurrection of the Daleks cargohills fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Sep 27, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:41
|
|
|
Acne Rain posted:
well, you got it. Some think Davros wasn't characterized good enough in the episode, and some said he was characterized well enough 30 years ago so that's okay then. It's fine if a viewer, reader, listener, whatever thinks that, but if the actual author uses that logic that's terrible. A character should always be interesting and continously defined by his actions, words and emotions, not just legacy. Generally this is a problem I have with Moffat. He leans on previous material all the time and thinks that will make me care. E: I don't Davros was handled badly in this episode, but not very good either. As someone who doesn't know or give a poo poo about him from before I don't care if we see him again or not. Attitude Indicator fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Sep 27, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:44
|
|
|
DoctorWhat posted:Y'see this is what I don't get. That Moffat can literally write whole scenes, whole stories, expressing one attitude or point of view, and people will somehow be convinced that he believes the opposite. "He's a hero because he chooses to be a hero" doesn't mesh well with "Literally has super powers". It doesn't mesh well with "Part of a universe defining prophecy". It doesn't mesh well with a subset of said super powers being used by the villain to try and fulfil the said universe defining prophecy as the plot of a story. It's not stupid to say that certain elements exist in Moffat's work if they're present, it's not relevant if Moffat wants to put forward one attitude if the stories convey the complete opposite. Troughton in The Macra Terror is a hero because he chooses to be a hero. If he has a cup of tea it's because he found some tea-making facilities, not just because he's so gosh darned amazing and special
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:47
|
|
|
They say he's the creator of the Daleks, he appears in a Dalek-looking contraption and he refers to the Daleks as his children. He then spends the following half-hour chatting with the Doctor revealing all kinds of stuff about his character. Someone who's never seen an episode of Doctor Who before could watch that episode and then describe Davros in a way that passes the "don't describe their job or role within the story" Mr Plinkett Star Wars Review test.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:49
|
|
|
"It was great" "Great? GREAT?! It was terrible!" "GREAT" "TERRIBLE" "EXTERMINATE, EXTERMINATE THE RATINGS" I say this unironically: Thank gods it's Doctor Who season again. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:55
|
|
|
Can people not distinguish between "Knowing backstory of a character" and "Being emotionally engaged with a character"? Three separate people have now failed to make that distinction.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 17:58
|
|
|
I was emotionally engaged with Davros in the episode without previously liking him because of the quality of his portrayal in the episode.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 18:07
|
|
|
Davros was emotionally engaging, in the sense that his writing and performance made me experience multiple emotions.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 18:08
|
|
|
MrL_JaKiri posted:"He's a hero because he chooses to be a hero" doesn't mesh well with "Literally has super powers". Spider-Man, "with great power comes great responsibility". The Doctor's regenerative power definitely comes into play here, but the only reason he gets in that situation in the first place is because he abandoned a young Davros and is guilty about it. He knows that's not what The Doctor should be doing. That he's not living up to the ideal he has for himself. He has to push himself to show compassion to him. The powers are just a plot device. They don't obviate the choices he makes.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 18:26
|
|
|
I was very entertained by that and didn't feel like my intelligence was being insulted, which is all I really ask for, particularly as Deep Breath bored me to tears and back. Also the two parts actually synced up and made a coherent whole, which went out the window back with Day of the Moon. The only thing I didn't like was that a Time Lord/Dalek hybrid is a bit of a poo poo pointless thing to have, which is why it never came up before. A Time Lord in a tank doesn't really have much to gain over a mutant blob in a tank, you know? Cleretic posted:Plus, this was always going to be a rough week for Who in immediate local. It was up against England vs. Wales in the rugby (I think? I'm neither British nor watch sports), as I understand it that is one hell of a death slot to have. I was shocked they went up directly against the rugby tbh, that match was pushed in UK media as catastrophically massive and it seemed like sabotage to have the episode go out at 7.45 with the rugby kicking off at 8, particularly when the show has regularly gone out 30-45 minutes earlier in the past (it did contain the word 'bitch' tho). Psybro fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Sep 27, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 18:27
|
|
|
Psybro posted:The only thing I didn't like was that a Time Lord/Dalek hybrid is a bit of a poo poo pointless thing to have, which is why it never came up before. A Time Lord in a tank doesn't really have much to gain over a mutant blob in a tank, you know? I don't think (or at least I'm hoping) it's really meant to go anywhere past "oh poo poo, they're all restored! Davros hosed up, he hosed up bad. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 18:31
|
|
|
I guess the idea was the the Daleks wouldn't grow old and useless any more like the blobs down in the sewers? I'm not sure what they really hoped to gain from siphoning regeneration energy exactly, but wanting to be immortal is pretty universal I suppose.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 18:34
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 1, 2024 18:59 |
|
|
There's also actually a flub. Daleks have said "Mercy" before, to River Song in The Big Bang. But time travel, Doctor Who, etc, etc.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2015 18:38
|
|