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From beginning of the episode just based on the visuals and because I'm a big nerd I was thinking about how much I'm loving this Doctor Who/Dark Souls crossover. Was cool to see the analogy kinda sorta holding up with the ending. I really wish Time Lords didn't have dumb prophecies, but nothing's perfect
joe football fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Nov 29, 2015 |
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Nov 29, 2015 04:01
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Meiteron posted:You know what's a hell of a thing? Considering how he almost certainly blames Me for what happened he still opts for a few billion years of wall-punching instead of giving her up. drat. Considering what the Time Lords do to people who have something they want, being turned into a conscious scarecrow or trapped in all of the mirrors seems positively humane by comparison. joe football posted:From the beginning of the episode just based on the visuals, I was thinking about how much I'm loving this Doctor Who/Dark Souls crossover. Was cool to see the analogy kinda sorta holding up with the ending. I really wish Time Lords didn't have dumb prophecies, but nothing's perfect I hope the Doctor recovered the souls from his skull before he died again 
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Nov 29, 2015 04:01
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In general, the episode was good. I didn't like the ending (the whole hybrid stuff has not worked at all for me), and the "billions of years" thing was a scale too far in my opinion. But the episode looked great, sounded great, Capaldi acted the hell out of it and I love that kind of little sci fi concept thing. Certainly my favourite Moffat episode since The Beast Below. Bicyclops posted:Is that a part of her grievances? I'd thought it was only them being forced to look like people and adopt the cultures of Earth (which is a problem on its own). It kicked off when an immature Zygon couldn't hold human form and was killed by humans. Gaz-L posted:The Gallifrey motif is triumphant, though, and it's supposed to be ominous this time. Inverting motifs is pretty traditional in music, there's whole books about what Wagner did with it in the Ring cycle
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Nov 29, 2015 04:02
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The episode got off to a bad start with "SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT" and "I know you, you're a massive wanker" in the first few minutes.
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Nov 29, 2015 04:09
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MrL_JaKiri posted:and the "billions of years" thing was a scale too far in my opinion. I'll just write it off as the Doctor losing track of time through all that.
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Nov 29, 2015 04:17
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Rochallor posted:Speaking of which, this episode reminded me a lot of Part 3 of The Deadly Assassin where he's stuck in the Matrix. Just the Doctor and a monster, trapped in a room. If you give birth to a child, couldn't you be considered responsible for the fact that that child will someday die? Especially if you're immortal and your children aren't? Perhaps we're getting the origin story we never expected.
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Nov 29, 2015 05:03
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echoplex posted:Re: people saying the current TARDIS isn't a very good dramatic space or that it isn't used properly: I had the thought while watching the episode that this was a beautiful shot. I also really dug the whole moving parts castle, it reminded me of Myst. Very good episode, nice twists in the story that I didn't see coming. I'm interested to see where they go with the Time Lords. Kind of hoping the Master shows up again, she had the confession dial in the opener after all.
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Nov 29, 2015 05:10
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joe football posted:From beginning of the episode just based on the visuals and because I'm a big nerd I was thinking about how much I'm loving this Doctor Who/Dark Souls crossover. yooooo same In fact, it's not just visual similarity. Death and rebirth and cycles... How many times has the Doctor kindled the First Flame?
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Nov 29, 2015 05:17
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Maybe it was the fact that I watched a video of someone playing that part earlier today, but at one point in the episode I was totally thinking of Sen's Fortress. Wowie, what an episode. A fellow on Twitter I was talking to summed it up best by calling it "Scherzo meets I Wanna Be The Guy in Myst." Which amuses me intensely.
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Nov 29, 2015 05:19
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FreezingInferno posted:Maybe it was the fact that I watched a video of someone playing that part earlier today, but at one point in the episode I was totally thinking of Sen's Fortress. It's more Anor Londo, visually speaking, especially with the geared rotation - Sen's Fortress is just full of traps, while Anor Londo changes shape (though to less extreme degrees). GOD I'M GONNA MAKE A HUGE loving EFFORTPOST HERE AND ON TUMBLR ABOUT THIS
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Nov 29, 2015 05:25
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DoctorWhat posted:It's more Anor Londo, visually speaking, especially with the geared rotation - Sen's Fortress is just full of traps, while Anor Londo changes shape (though to less extreme degrees). Either way, Moffat made an episode that unintentionally brings back memories of really difficult games to people. The man must have been spying on my Twitter, all I do is complain about difficult games on there lately because I'm a grumpy old person. I'm saving my effortposts for tomorrow afternoon, when I do a rewatch.
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Nov 29, 2015 05:28
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Whatever happened to Sam Swift?
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Nov 29, 2015 05:33
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OKAY HERE GOES ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Doctor Who in Anor Londo So. Heaven Sent. Big deal type of episode for Doctor Who. Experimental. Riveting. A tour de force, as far as I’m concerned, purely on its own merits. But that’s not all it is. Heaven Sent is a crossover between Doctor Who and an unexpected partner.  Yes. Dark Souls, the infamously, punishingly difficult action RPG released in 2011 by From Software and Namco Bandai games. But while most of the popular knowledge of Dark Souls has to do with its challenging gameplay, that’s not all there is to it. This is the plot summary offered by Wikipedia, with some alterations on my part for coherence and relevance. quote:[Dark Souls] begins in primeval times, where the world was unformed and the immortal Everlasting Dragons held sole dominion over all. The First Flame was ignited from an unknown source, which brought disparity in the form of light and dark. Within the flame, four beings discovered the Lord Souls and became godlike entities, most importantly, Lord Gwyn. Already, one can see connections to Heaven Sent - energy loops, Sisyphean tasks, and in particular the Doctor’s repeated decision to burn himself up to further the cycle in the hopes of escape, all evoke themes and plot points in Dark Souls. However, Dark Souls was hardly the first time such stories have been explored, so why am I so confident in drawing this connection? Because the connections aren’t only thematic, but aesthetic. Heaven Sent LOOKS like Dark Souls - in particular, the abandoned seat of decaying power, Gwyn’s shining city on a hill, Anor Londo.   Anor Londo even features gear-powered rotating and reconfiguring architecture - in fact, it’s one of the most notable features of the area.  Oh, and of course  The Fog Gates that separate areas in Dark Souls should seem immidiately familiar to anyone who’s seen Heaven Sent, I should think. The Doctor traverses the White Light. How many times did he rekindle the First Flame?
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Nov 29, 2015 06:05
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I called the prison being the will a little under halfway through, when the walls were moving after he dug in the dirt. Called him being the hybrid too, pretty much immediately. Did not catch the loop aspect though. Didn't much like the random child wandering by, that was a little to bullshit to be believable. Pop up in the desert but who cares, there's a person ten feet away from you. Still a very good episode regardless of me getting the twist, although as a rule I hate any story that relies on the Doctor doing something for a very long time. Not at all a fan of Ashildr being in the next episode preview. I don't want her to have lived for billions of years, a thousand or so I can believe but surely she'd have hosed up and fallen into an oven or meat grinder eventually.
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Nov 29, 2015 06:17
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:I wonder if his skulls affected the local gravity due to 2 billion years worth of extra skull mass coming into existence? Assuming a human head weighs about 5kg and bone makes up 30-40% of a human body mass, a skull could be estimated at 1.5 to 2 kg. After 2 billion years, and assuming a skull per week, a mass of about 208 billion kg would be added or about 104 million metric tons. It's a lot, but on an astronomical scale compared to the gravity of the planet, probably less than a decimal point in how much gravity is affected. As for volume, given that estimate of mass, we can divide it by the density to get the volume. Bone density varies throughout the body and between individuals. Quick googling pulls up a range of 1600 to 1900 kg/m^3. With the greatest mass and the lowest density, the maximum volume from this data is about 1250 cubic centimeters or 1.25 liters per skull. The total amount of water displaced, thus would be 130 billion liters of bone or 0.13 cubic kilometers.
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Nov 29, 2015 06:29
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holy poo poo it has been a very, very long time since an episode of Who actually took my breath away but here we are.
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Nov 29, 2015 06:47
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This has probably been brought up a billion (or two) times already. But the ending line... quote:The Hybrid destined to conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins... is me. I'm thinking that it's actually supposed to be: quote:The Hybrid destined to conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins... is Me. with proper capitalization.
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Nov 29, 2015 06:47
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I doubt that if only because the Doctor always calls her by her actual name, and there'd be no reason to deliver that line as an imminent threat if he was talking about someone different.
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Nov 29, 2015 07:07
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Xelkelvos posted:Assuming a human head weighs about 5kg and bone makes up 30-40% of a human body mass, a skull could be estimated at 1.5 to 2 kg. After 2 billion years, and assuming a skull per week, a mass of about 208 billion kg would be added or about 104 million metric tons. It's a lot, but on an astronomical scale compared to the gravity of the planet, probably less than a decimal point in how much gravity is affected. I've seen people bring up various facts about the science in this episode. The problem is though, I'm not sure we're supposed to take it as being a real place anyway. 12 says it himself, it's his personal hell. It's a fake reality set up to punish him into making his full confession, but he never does it out of spite. The rules of the confession dial act like a closed loop to some extent, resetting in certain ways, but it was never meant to be a real place he was transported to. So things changing or not changing from loop to loop are just an expression of the system, not actually reflective of a real planet somewhere. It was the medium from London to Gallifrey, there was no real stop in between. How this ties into him having his confession dial and how 12 helped save Gallifrey in the 50th remains to be seen.
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Nov 29, 2015 07:11
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I wonder if airing 2 episodes in a row where The Doctor loses before this one was deliberate. I actually believed he was stuck in the loop and would need rescuing.
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Nov 29, 2015 07:31
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My first thought was to take him literally. It's a Dalek / Time Lord hybrid in him calling back to Dalek and Into The Dalek - all that "you are a good Dalek" stuff. He's got the anger of a Dalek. It ties into the whole revelation about why he ran from Gallifrey. It makes a bit more sense than worrying an immortal Viking girl is going to conquer Gallifrey. Ashildr is more likely though.
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Nov 29, 2015 07:36
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I'm used to Doctor Who being a bit silly and not having tight plots, but I'm getting a bit sick of gaping plot holes. Why does every room in this castle reset to it's original state after awhile *except* the one where having the room stay the same is convenient to creating a *cool* story ending? (the room with the tardis behind 20 feet of stone) I think the doctor said he thought the tardis was behind there. I can't remember 100% for sure, and I can't check right now. When does the doctor carve the thing about being in room 12 into that buried stone? Why does it stay when the room resets? If this torture chamber thing is the inside of the confession dial and a confession dial is something every/most time lords have, how could the doctor have no idea how it worked or that he was inside it? Why would time lords set something up to torture themselves for potentially billions of years/forever? Why would your everyday time lord feel like they need to torture themself in order to leave a will/last confession? It's doubtful that most time lords would have horrible secrets like the doctor does. What even is the point of the confession dial in time lord culture? Why didn't the doctor use the sonic sunglasses to open that locked door at the beginning? That is a very small inconsistency, but it's weird for the doctor to suddenly be flummoxed by a plain old locked door. Some of these things might get explained in the next episode, but that stupid tougher-than-diamond stone wall is such bs. It's a major plot point that all the rooms reset AND that the doctor slowly chips away at this stone wall that doesn't reset for billions of years to get through it. Was this explained in the ep and I missed it?
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Nov 29, 2015 07:40
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Because it's not literal.
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Nov 29, 2015 07:50
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I figured since it's supposed to be a PERSONAL confession dial, the only way to use it is to confess something incredibly personal and secret. The wraith is just the defense mechanism in case you aren't who you say you are (Or, like the Doctor, you feel like spending the next 2 billion years punching a wall) So normally it's not this big of a run around. The Doctor was just doing poo poo the hard way, as per usual. Also the locked door was wood.
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Nov 29, 2015 07:57
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See I was getting more an "Amnesia: Dark Descent" vibe from this episode (and by extension all those horror games which are "you are being pursued by something horrific, solve these puzzles before it kills you".) But whatever.
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Nov 29, 2015 08:35
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I powered through the season to catch up to the latest episode and man this has been one hell of a season. I love Capaldi as the Doctor. He has a lot more range than I thought he would and there have been some pretty heavy subject matters dealt with. Would watch again.
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Nov 29, 2015 08:55
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I don't understand construction/physical properties of matter super well and I realize this is entirely  , but if the Diamond Wall Thing was as strong as the Doctor said, wouldn't hitting it a billion billion times just end up with a billion billion broken fists? like, if I had the biggest pile of talc in history, would I be able to scratch a plate of diamond eventually? Cuz I figure I'd just end up with a clean plate of diamond and a whole lot of talc powder.
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Nov 29, 2015 09:01
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I mean, TVIV.txt and all, but GOOD GOD, a lot of you intake media the wrong way. I mean, maybe it's working in (lovely) film off and on since 2001, but so many people focus on exactly the wrong things. Real life science has absolutely nothing to do with narrative science. When a show tell you something, then pays off another thing based on what it told you, there is ZERO REASON to apply actual physics to, say, the gravity shift of two million years of dead skulls. I understand. I really do. I, too, used to try to be more clever than the things I watched. I wanted so badly to be smarter than the writers who told me stories. But eventually, I realized that I was just the guy at the magic show folding his arms smugly and turning to everybody around me going, "You all know magic isn't real, right?" Pro wrestling has this subset of fans, too. Yeah, dude. We all know it's fake. You're the only one acting like we don't all already know it isn't real. Television and movies operate on their own set of rules, and they change almost every episode. If we're told something is important in the first act, and it's contradicted by actual science, or something said over 45 years ago on the same show, try to forget that. The thing said in the first act is all that matters.
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Nov 29, 2015 09:17
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MisterBibs posted:I don't understand construction/physical properties of matter super well and I realize this is entirely Have you ever been to an old (old) church or similar and noticed that the floor is slightly concave? Worn out even. And that's just from people walking over it  Everything wears out eventually (although yeah just punching is probably not the best way which is why it took a Billion years) I really liked this episode with all the caveats other people pointed out. I will say that if the hybrid turns out to be Ashildr I will be a bit disappointed. That would mean that Moffat created a character and decided to call her "Me" just so he could get an ambiguous line in today's episode.... that's just... gimmicky not effective storytelling. Regarding the genera quality of the season. 1 & 2 I enjoyed because of Missy 3 & 4 were "ok" 5 & 6 were just kind of eye rolling 7 & 8 started pretty weak but improved a lot 9 was an interesting experiment 10 & 11 so far were top notch
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Nov 29, 2015 09:19
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This episode I swear is a homage to the Myst games because for drat sure if this was a game it'd be that difficult.
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Nov 29, 2015 09:21
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violetdragon, don't take this as me ripping on you or anything - I do think the answers to your questions are mostly pretty straightforward and I hope the following go some way to providing you with some kind of answers to the questions, which I don't think are really much of a stretch as far as an interpretation of the episode goes.violetdragon posted:Why does every room in this castle reset to it's original state after awhile *except* the one where having the room stay the same is convenient to creating a *cool* story ending? (the room with the tardis behind 20 feet of stone) The room was the link between the world of the dial and the real world, and so presumably outside the otherwise closed system. Note that despite the rest of the building rearranging/moving about, that room always stays in the same place (the Doctor finds it and is able to return to it later without getting lost) - the room it was attached to, the teleport room, also allowed certain things to remain while everything else got cleaned out: the writing of bird, the skull of the Doctor. This again suggests this room is somewhat outside of the closed system. Another, more scary thought is that these rooms were both deliberately set up not to completely reset, simply to hammer home to the Doctor the utter enormity of what was happening to him and would continue to happen if he refused to give up his secrets. They never considered that he'd be stubborn enough to continue on through the eons and do things the hard way. violetdragon posted:I think the doctor said he thought the tardis was behind there. I can't remember 100% for sure, and I can't check right now. I recall him saying that too. When he first enters the room, "home" has been left on the diamond-wall - presumably the idea of his captors was for him to realize it was Gallifrey, but his immediate thought upon seeing "home" was to believe the TARDIS was behind there. violetdragon posted:When does the doctor carve the thing about being in room 12 into that buried stone? Why does it stay when the room resets? That was left there by the architects of the castle, they wanted him to find room 12, they wanted him to know the exit was there.... and that there was no way out. The prison was designed to break his will, and the best way to do that is to offer up hope and then dash it. By giving the Doctor a mystery to solve, they let him think there is a solution and so he works hard to find it. When he discovers there is no solution he's supposed to fall into despair. Instead he just keeps doggedly on. violetdragon posted:If this torture chamber thing is the inside of the confession dial and a confession dial is something every/most time lords have, how could the doctor have no idea how it worked or that he was inside it? From what we learned this season, a confession dial contains whatever the person who made it wants it to hold. Whether that be secrets, final instructions, a message to the family etc - just like our own last will & testaments do, each one is unique to the person who made it. The Doctor obviously didn't make this one himself, the fact he has it now puts the events of the first two episodes into a new light and suggests that we aren't seeing everything in the correct order. violetdragon posted:Why would time lords set something up to torture themselves for potentially billions of years/forever? Again, the Doctor didn't make this for himself (unless he did!  ) and not every (or any!) confession dial is going to hold a rotating puzzlebox deathtrap in it. Whoever set up this one (I'm presuming it was the Time Lords, but that begs the question why) did it to get information from the Doctor, and nobody involved would have ever believed the Doctor would just refuse to give up and keep doing it over and over for billions of years.violetdragon posted:Why would your everyday time lord feel like they need to torture themself in order to leave a will/last confession? It's doubtful that most time lords would have horrible secrets like the doctor does. Same as above, the contents of this dial should in no way be seen as indicative of every single confession dial. violetdragon posted:What even is the point of the confession dial in time lord culture? Again, based on what we've been told so far, it serves the same purpose as our own last will and testaments do - only in this case instead of a lawyer holding onto it and reading it to the bereaved, it's something that can only be opened by a specific person when a very specific set of criteria (i.e the death of the person it belongs to) are met. violetdragon posted:Why didn't the doctor use the sonic sunglasses to open that locked door at the beginning? That is a very small inconsistency, but it's weird for the doctor to suddenly be flummoxed by a plain old locked door. The Sonic Screwdriver has a long history of having trouble with wood. The whole "maybe I can kinda be telepathic with the door maybe?" bit was weird as hell though. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Nov 29, 2015 |
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Nov 29, 2015 09:21
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Maxwell Lord posted:See I was getting more an "Amnesia: Dark Descent" vibe from this episode (and by extension all those horror games which are "you are being pursued by something horrific, solve these puzzles before it kills you".) But whatever. I saw this one in it too, more than Dark Souls. Though the thing it reminded me of the most is an old Sierra adventure game called Lighthouse.
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Nov 29, 2015 09:30
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MisterBibs posted:I don't understand construction/physical properties of matter super well and I realize this is entirely It's related to this fairy tale that was posted before: http://fanzone50.com/Tales/Eternity.html Anything breaks given enough time. And given enough patience, in the case of the Doctor. just_a_guy posted:I will say that if the hybrid turns out to be Ashildr I will be a bit disappointed. That would mean that Moffat created a character and decided to call her "Me" just so he could get an ambiguous line in today's episode.... that's just... gimmicky not effective storytelling. He did the same with Melody Pond -> River Song. It's not a bug, it's a feature. saucerman fucked around with this message at 09:34 on Nov 29, 2015 |
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Nov 29, 2015 09:30
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MisterBibs posted:I don't understand construction/physical properties of matter super well and I realize this is entirely You'd happily wear it away as much as you'd wanted, given sufficient time. Diamonds aren't invincible.
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Nov 29, 2015 09:36
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saucerman posted:It's related to this fairy tale that was posted before: It didn't even require patience. Each doctor copy only experienced one cycle.
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Nov 29, 2015 09:40
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Apparently the diamond wall punch erosion is possible, but they probably underestimated the time scale a bit..
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Nov 29, 2015 09:42
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That reveal of Gallifrey was so awesome; I guess next episode will reveal why they aren't still lost in time somewhere?
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Nov 29, 2015 09:48
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Fil5000 posted:It didn't even require patience. Each doctor copy only experienced one cycle. That's true but I am thinking he may have had some idea of what's going on while he punched his way further and further. After all, someone must have broken the wall.
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Nov 29, 2015 09:53
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We don't know what the population of Gallifrey was at the end of the Time War do we? Just that there were 2.47 billion children. If the Doctor was in that loop for two billion years, a week at a time, it seems like the numbers are getting close to the point where there could have been one death of the Doctor for every person killed on Gallifrey in the original pre-50th end to the Time War.
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Nov 29, 2015 10:04
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saucerman posted:That's true but I am thinking he may have had some idea of what's going on while he punched his way further and further. After all, someone must have broken the wall. Oh yeah, sure, but that's not patience really. Being willing to sacrifice billions of clones of yourself is something else entirely.
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Nov 29, 2015 10:09
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