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2house2fly posted:Whithouse pissed away the great story hook of "aliens have brainwashed the Doctor". He pissed it down the drain and I wish the character he played in Twice Upon A Time had died The fact he's not brainwashed makes his actions in that story completely bizarre.
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Dec 27, 2018 03:29
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Cleretic posted:I mean mostly you don't want to shoot Daleks because that's never actually solved a Dalek problem in the history of ever, but you know, keep on strawmanning. What about if you fired concentrated beams of rock and roll? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPOBd3pxI-s
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Dec 27, 2018 03:31
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The_Doctor posted:The fact he's not brainwashed makes his actions in that story completely bizarre. It comes across as loving your hero too much too.
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Dec 27, 2018 03:34
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2house2fly posted:Whithouse pissed away the great story hook of "aliens have brainwashed the Doctor" Whithouse would have had a solid claim for showrunner before he wrote the two worst episodes of the Capaldi era.
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Dec 27, 2018 03:46
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Rochallor posted:Whithouse would have had a solid claim for showrunner before he wrote the two worst episodes of the Capaldi era. Whithouse didn't write the Zygon two-parter. 
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Dec 27, 2018 04:18
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Whithouse also wrote Vampires of Venice, which I've always thought was unfairly maligned. It's a bog-standard monster of the week episode, yes, but it's so well executed. It's got decent effects, takes great advantage of the Croatian vacatian the production team took, and Helen McCrory hams it up well. Plus it has the Doctor bursting out of a cake.
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Dec 27, 2018 05:03
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Since when did people not like Vampires of Venice? 
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Dec 27, 2018 05:25
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Mameluke posted:Whithouse also wrote Vampires of Venice, which I've always thought was unfairly maligned. It's a bog-standard monster of the week episode, yes, but it's so well executed. It's got decent effects, takes great advantage of the Croatian vacatian the production team took, and Helen McCrory hams it up well. Plus it has the Doctor bursting out of a cake. The ability to write a solid 'standard, not special, standalone' episode of a show is on the whole underappreciated these days. Serialized is all well and good, but as someone who's been stuck watching cable TV at my family's place this past week I've started to really appreciate just being able to sit down and tune into a random episode that doesn't have any required foreknowledge or even any real idea when it was shot. There's a lot less focus on making that these days. It's something I think this latest season will do well in. They all stand almost totally alone, so you can just sit down and watch one.
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Dec 27, 2018 05:28
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Vampires of Venice is quite good, if a little slight. Whithouse had a real nice run for a while; The God Complex has a quite good script that Nick Hurran just knocks out of the ballpark with his direction. And... then we get to A Town Called Mercy, which isn't bad, but just feels empty. Then comes the Capaldi era and he just drops straight off a cliff. The underwater two-parter is just awful and unambitious, and then The Lie of the Land is pretty handily the worst Capaldi episode, and maybe the worst of the whole revival. I guess in fairness to Whithouse, the only appropriate end to the wet fart of the Monks storyline is making GBS threads your pants.Open Source Idiom posted:Whithouse didn't write the Zygon two-parter. I am going to win exactly zero friends when I say that the Zygon two-parter is really good, except for the speech at the end, which has some problems.
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Dec 27, 2018 05:37
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Astroman posted:Since when did people not like Vampires of Venice? Yeah, it’s a good episode 
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Dec 27, 2018 05:59
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Vampires of Venice is merely ok. I didn't know that the underwater two parter was bad though. I'm willing to be a bit forgiving of "Lie of the Land." Moffat writes the (excellent) part 1, Harness and Moffat write the awful mess which is part 2, and then they dump the whole thing on Toby Whithouse for part 3? That's just cruel. "The Pyramid at the End of the World" is a goddamn loving mess, and even with the hindsight of having seen the whole season, I have no idea how I would have resolved that story if I had been put in that position. The only correct answer is "leave it as a 1 parter with In Extremis and no continuation."
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Dec 27, 2018 06:09
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Rochallor posted:A Town Called Mercy, which isn't bad, but just feels empty. A Town Called Mercy wastes Ben Browder, there I said it.
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Dec 27, 2018 06:09
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Rochallor posted:Vampires of Venice is quite good, if a little slight. Whithouse had a real nice run for a while; The God Complex has a quite good script that Nick Hurran just knocks out of the ballpark with his direction. And... then we get to A Town Called Mercy, which isn't bad, but just feels empty. Then comes the Capaldi era and he just drops straight off a cliff. The underwater two-parter is just awful and unambitious, and then The Lie of the Land is pretty handily the worst Capaldi episode, and maybe the worst of the whole revival. I guess in fairness to Whithouse, the only appropriate end to the wet fart of the Monks storyline is making GBS threads your pants. The speech at the end is the only good thing about that two parter though?
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Dec 27, 2018 06:15
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Rochallor posted:Vampires of Venice is quite good, if a little slight. Whithouse had a real nice run for a while; The God Complex has a quite good script that Nick Hurran just knocks out of the ballpark with his direction. And... then we get to A Town Called Mercy, which isn't bad, but just feels empty. Then comes the Capaldi era and he just drops straight off a cliff. The underwater two-parter is just awful and unambitious, and then The Lie of the Land is pretty handily the worst Capaldi episode, and maybe the worst of the whole revival. I guess in fairness to Whithouse, the only appropriate end to the wet fart of the Monks storyline is making GBS threads your pants. There are some problems overall with the politics of the episode, which I think is a sadly necessary consequence of trying to tell that kind of story in this setting (how else are you going to resolve "zygons want to live as themselves among humans on earth" but with "zygons keep on living in human bodies and are basically fine with it") more than anything the writer really thinks. I would guess they worked backwards from the message "the work of peace is never done" (I just realised the comment about how they've done this same thing a bunch of times foreshadows Heaven Sent) and either didn't think too hard or didn't have time to do more with the end result. Anyway, I think the plot in the episodes is generally pretty good, and it's got two Jenna Colemans in
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Dec 27, 2018 06:17
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LionArcher posted:The speech at the end is the only good thing about that two parter though? On the whole it's good, though I really dislike the bits where Twelve dismisses Bonnie's complaints about being persecuted as "so what?" and lambasts her for not having a whole society set up and ready to go after her revolution. It comes around in the end, but it's really dicey for a bit there. 2house2fly posted:There are some problems overall with the politics of the episode, which I think is a sadly necessary consequence of trying to tell that kind of story in this setting (how else are you going to resolve "zygons want to live as themselves among humans on earth" but with "zygons keep on living in human bodies and are basically fine with it") more than anything the writer really thinks. I would guess they worked backwards from the message "the work of peace is never done" (I just realised the comment about how they've done this same thing a bunch of times foreshadows Heaven Sent) and either didn't think too hard or didn't have time to do more with the end result. Anyway, I think the plot in the episodes is generally pretty good, and it's got two Jenna Colemans in The overall politics of the episode are all over the place, to such a degree that I actually like it. Harness is using the symbols of specific politics completely divorced from any actual symbolism. The Zygons are blatantly inspired by ISIS imagery, but unless Harness' preferred method of fighting ISIS is "incorporate them into the British government," it absolutely resists being read into real-world events. On the micro level, though, there are some absolutely biting moments. Like the stuff with the drone operator who is totally ready to start blowing up Zygons until they shift into her family members, or the soldiers going into the church with the Zygons masquerading as their family. Everybody's ready to shoot people living in a fictional Middle Eastern country, but then all of a sudden they look like people you know and nobody can pull the trigger. There's TV that actually bothers to say something.
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Dec 27, 2018 07:58
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Counterpoint: the soldier walking into the building with the obvious Zygons is the stupidest loving scene in the entire show to date.
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Dec 27, 2018 08:35
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Organza Quiz posted:Counterpoint: the soldier walking into the building with the obvious Zygons is the stupidest loving scene in the entire show to date. Counter-counterpoint: it's a scene balancing precariously on the border between utterly wicked and incredibly stupid, and while I can absolutely see why some people will go with the latter, there's a couple of points that tilt it just enough the other way for me. 1) the music, which is probably the most brilliant thing Murray Gold has ever done. It starts so utterly cloying, to such an over-the-top degree, and goes a long, long way towards making the Zygons' story plausible, and builds towards this awful crescendo. And 2), the line, "Oh my god, you're actually going to kill me..." is just wonderfully wrong. I refuse to believe that this whole sequence wasn't guest-directed by RTD. I wish I could describe it better. We, as the audience, know right away that there's no way that these are really the solders' family, and yet, everything is trying to make us believe they are, from the wonderful performance of the mother to even the metatextual elements like the music. I can understand why it doesn't work for some people, but it's one of my very favorite scenes in the show.
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Dec 27, 2018 12:28
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Haha, I hate that scene so much. I'm usually one of those who gets irritated by people who complain about emotional people not making perfectly reasoned and logical decisions in high stress situations but it's just so.... terrible! The absolutely blatant nature of the trap, the supposed high level of competence of soldiers, the full awareness of the abilities of the people they're confronting, the walking into an open trap... everything about it is just so poorly handled and executed. I had such high hopes for those Zygon episodes. At least the second part was better than the first part.
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Dec 27, 2018 14:03
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I remember I initially really disliked how Kate escaped from the zygon that ambushed her by... just loving shooting it, but I love it now, if for nothing else than that it's such an obvious and common-sense answer, but the Doctor and the audience aren't primed for that kind of resolution to the point that it becomes a plot twist
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Dec 27, 2018 15:35
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Jerusalem posted:Haha, I hate that scene so much. I'm usually one of those who gets irritated by people who complain about emotional people not making perfectly reasoned and logical decisions in high stress situations but it's just so.... terrible! The absolutely blatant nature of the trap, the supposed high level of competence of soldiers, the full awareness of the abilities of the people they're confronting, the walking into an open trap... everything about it is just so poorly handled and executed. Yeah this. They *know* that Zygons can turn into other people, why the gently caress would they believe their family suddenly being there to the point that they walk into an unknown building with them just because they say so? I understand not wanting to gun down a being that is 99% probably the enemy but looks and sounds just like your mother and there's a slight chance that it could actually be, but there's a pretty massive line between shooting them and actually trusting them.
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Dec 27, 2018 15:47
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Rochallor posted:Vampires of Venice is quite good, if a little slight. Whithouse had a real nice run for a while; The God Complex has a quite good script that Nick Hurran just knocks out of the ballpark with his direction. And... then we get to A Town Called Mercy, which isn't bad, but just feels empty. Then comes the Capaldi era and he just drops straight off a cliff. The underwater two-parter is just awful and unambitious, and then The Lie of the Land is pretty handily the worst Capaldi episode, and maybe the worst of the whole revival. I guess in fairness to Whithouse, the only appropriate end to the wet fart of the Monks storyline is making GBS threads your pants. Lie of the Land isn't good, but it's no Kill The Moon or In The Forest Of The Unfortunate Medical Advice.
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Dec 27, 2018 15:55
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I like that two-parter (and Kill the Moon, actually), and it’s nice to see some positive things said about it. All of Harness’s episodes are reeeeal curate’s eggs at best though. Some interesting ideas butting up against some seriously misguided ones.
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Dec 27, 2018 16:00
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Organza Quiz posted:Yeah this. They *know* that Zygons can turn into other people, why the gently caress would they believe their family suddenly being there to the point that they walk into an unknown building with them just because they say so? I understand not wanting to gun down a being that is 99% probably the enemy but looks and sounds just like your mother and there's a slight chance that it could actually be, but there's a pretty massive line between shooting them and actually trusting them. Soldiers being useless inept idiots is a DW tradition, but yeah, that was particularly egregious
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Dec 27, 2018 16:12
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I actually do rate Kill The Moon a bit higher than most, though it desperately wanted a few more drafts of the script.
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Dec 27, 2018 16:26
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docbeard posted:I actually do rate Kill The Moon a bit higher than most, though it desperately wanted a few more drafts of the script. It's saved by Clara and the Doctor's final argument. That's a really good scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwsJKegTVik
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Dec 27, 2018 17:03
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misadventurous posted:I like that two-parter (and Kill the Moon, actually), and it’s nice to see some positive things said about it. All of Harness’s episodes are reeeeal curate’s eggs at best though. Some interesting ideas butting up against some seriously misguided ones. Agreed. I'd rather see messy and provocative than incoherent and a waste of a good premise (which I'd say applies to both Pyramid at the End of the World and Lie of the Land). Bits of the Zygon two-parter are cringeworthy--I especially despised the soldiers marching up and being greeted by their moms, as if they didn't know Zygons could do that and somebody couldn't have called their actual mothers (since the claim was that the Zygons were pulling the shapes from their mind and didn't actually have their mothers locked up for body-prints)--but the broader message about asylum-seekers seems prescient now. The broader point being made about the military was as obvious as people keep claiming Chibnall is being, but so rarely made that I'm willing to tolerate how it was done. The problems with the long last speech (ideologically) can be resolved if you assume that the Doctor isn't actually making an argument against bloody revolution (given that he's been responsible for several) but rather is concerned almost entirely with saving Bonnie (and Kate). He's telling her what he thinks will be effective to shake her out of her own convictions and convince her to see the situation like he does--in effect, to get her to think like him. That does illustrate a deeper failure in the two stories to get across a point about how the Zygon ability to transform into other people ought to have some relationship with empathy/seeing things from the "Other's" perspective, with humanity more monstrous in the sense that they can't do the reverse. But the story's hearts are in the right places. The Monk premise was bonkers and amazing. Given the season it was in, I was fully expecting some thematic comparisons with the Cybermen, especially with their own version of the Cyberplanner and their odd insistence on converting people (mentally, not physically), but none of that landed. Pyramid hinges upon a "safety" feature so inexplicable that I can only assume that Harness and Moffat have never met anyone who works in a lab, instead of relying on a safety feature failing. I could almost forgive it for the set-piece of people desperately trying to surrender to the Monks, who keep killing them because their desire wasn't sincere. Lie of the Land ought to be a great episode about the power and danger of political propaganda and rewriting history. Instead, it's an incoherent mess that can't decide how anything works, betrays the few interesting things about the Monks (who appear to have abandoned their predictive simulations entirely in favor of mind control and shooting force lightning), has a mini-cliffhanger that makes no internal sense whatsoever, and hinges its solution on countering a system of deliberate brainwashing with the love of a child for an imaginary mother, as if all of us didn't imagine our parents to be something other than who they actually are when we were young. Even the concluding scene, which I loved, was a terrible idea.
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Dec 27, 2018 18:35
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BioEnchanted posted:It's saved by Clara and the Doctor's final argument. That's a really good scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwsJKegTVik Because Clara is right. I think the first 12 and Clara season is bogged down in we don't know how the gently caress to write these two characters because Matt Smith walked away and this scene kinda the nadir of that.
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Dec 27, 2018 19:35
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They went all in on writing 12 as Malcolm Tucker in the first series and it didn't work at all. He was a huge dick too much of the time Vvvvvvv ehhh. I'm all for grumpy doctors but I just don't think it's in character to rip the piss out of someone who is standing in their friend's liquid remains. Barry Foster fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Dec 27, 2018 |
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Dec 27, 2018 19:42
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He was so good in his first series. Series 9 and 10 he was just playing Older Matt Smith
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Dec 27, 2018 19:44
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2house2fly posted:There are some problems overall with the politics of the episode, which I think is a sadly necessary consequence of trying to tell that kind of story in this setting (how else are you going to resolve "zygons want to live as themselves among humans on earth" but with "zygons keep on living in human bodies and are basically fine with it") more than anything the writer really thinks. I would guess they worked backwards from the message "the work of peace is never done" (I just realised the comment about how they've done this same thing a bunch of times foreshadows Heaven Sent) and either didn't think too hard or didn't have time to do more with the end result. Anyway, I think the plot in the episodes is generally pretty good, and it's got two Jenna Colemans in One aspect of Kill The Moon / Zygone two-parter that goes "unappreciated" is that how little trust they put in a general public. In the former their choice is explicitly overridden, while the latter does not offer one at all. Basically, they were co-written by Francis Fukuyama and Sam Harris.
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Dec 27, 2018 19:52
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rvm posted:One aspect of Kill The Moon / Zygone two-parter that goes "unappreciated" is that how little trust they put in a general public. In the former their choice is explicitly overridden, while the latter does not offer one at all. Basically, they were co-written by Francis Fukuyama and Sam Harris. Brexit and Trump.
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Dec 27, 2018 23:21
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Narsham posted:The Monk premise was bonkers and amazing. Given the season it was in, I was fully expecting some thematic comparisons with the Cybermen, especially with their own version of the Cyberplanner and their odd insistence on converting people (mentally, not physically), but none of that landed. Pyramid hinges upon a "safety" feature so inexplicable that I can only assume that Harness and Moffat have never met anyone who works in a lab, instead of relying on a safety feature failing. I could almost forgive it for the set-piece of people desperately trying to surrender to the Monks, who keep killing them because their desire wasn't sincere. There's a gradual but real decline in Harness' stories throughout the Capaldi era, but yeah, every single one of them is just full of crazy-rear end ideas and concepts. I remember reading an interview with him where he said that in his original draft, the supporting characters in Pyramid weren't the trio of generals, but Jeremy Corbyn, Donald Trump, and Kim Jong-un. Which means that presumably they all get incinerated by the Monks through the course of that episode. I don't know if it would work, I don't know if that would be good, but I do know it would at least be interesting TV worth watching. I would kill to see Harness' one series as Doctor Who showrunner, which would presumably be as many series as he would make it before being fired. He's such a fascinating writer.
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Dec 28, 2018 01:13
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https://www.vulture.com/2018/12/doctor-who-companions-ranked.html How must it be to live life being so very wrong? Martha over Graham? Ryan over Bill? And Rose at #2? I guess if I was limited to said list I'd go: 10. Martha. Maybe I'm giving her short shrift, but it's as if she existed to be the Anti-Rose. 9. Yaz. She hasn't been given as much as Ryan, but she's mainly low for the reasons I give for Ryan below. 8. Ryan. He's over Yaz because he's had a bit more characterization. But the problem with both of them is they're just too new to be rated so high. The biggest thing they lack compared to the other 8 is an end to their arcs, and that hampers them. When they finish out, we'll know their real place. Right now, they are kind of cyphers. 7. Rose. The only reason I rate her even this high is as much as I hate her, I can't deny the influence she had on the show. People like her, I guess. 6. Nardole. Comic Relief, sure. But he could give it to the Doctor even more than Donna. It's a crime he's not back, quite frankly. The Doctor should have gone back for him. Though I admit he wouldn't fit the current tone. 5. Clara. OK, I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand Impossible Girl was dumb. On the other, she did have her moments, and certainly helped humanize 12. I'd say she shone more as a companion of 12 than 11, and that redeems her. 4. Bill Potts. With us fairly briefly, but it was like only Bill could have taken us through the second arc of 12 and his final episodes. Her turn as a Cyberman was just amazing. 3. Graham. This might be the newness, or maybe just how much I liked him on L&O:UK but he is just killing it as the everyman companion and showing old folks can still bring it. 2. Donna. If you forget how great she is, just rewatch her. She just does her thing and gives it to the Doctor when she has to. 1. Amy and Rory-can't disagree there. Though perhaps they are the sum of their parts, and on their own might rank lower. 0. Handles. Better than K9? Maybe. Better than Kamelion. For sure.
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Dec 28, 2018 03:34
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Poor Moffat thinks in terms of fairy tales, and the happy ending in a fairy tale is a wedding, so after Amy and Rory's wedding he kind of didn't know what to do with them and they eventually just sputtered out. That's another way Clara is basically Amy turned inside out, after the resolution of "her story" she got stronger as a character, which is why she's better than them. I keep getting articles like that one recommended to me, and it drives me batty because I can't stop clicking on them and they're terrible. Like one about how Chibnall is refreshing after Moffat increasingly focused on epic sagas and crazy plot twists over character-centric stories (Moffat's time in charge of the show was characterised by literally the exact opposite thing happening)
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Dec 28, 2018 03:49
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uh, obviously stories can't be character-centric if i don't pay attention to them and call them puzzle boxes instead of actually caring.
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Dec 28, 2018 04:01
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Regardless of the wider story beats I now appreciate that RTD and Moffat were both mostly pretty entertaining to watch throughout their runs. The new series felt painfully clunky and heavy-handed.
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Dec 28, 2018 04:19
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2house2fly posted:Poor Moffat thinks in terms of fairy tales, and the happy ending in a fairy tale is a wedding, so after Amy and Rory's wedding he kind of didn't know what to do with them and they eventually just sputtered out. That's another way Clara is basically Amy turned inside out, after the resolution of "her story" she got stronger as a character, which is why she's better than them. Clara is different from Amy and Rory. With Clara Moffat focuses on one of the most interesting themes of sci-fi: what has to change about humanity, so that it not only survives, but reaches out for the stars. Just like Star Trek, for example, it presents various versions of future humanity, usually grotesque. But with Clara and Danny Doctor Who also explores inevitable tragic divide between new and old humanity through the relationship drama culminating in (*deep sigh*) In The Forest Of The Night, where we, along with Danny Pink, with whom we unquestionably identify at this point, are absolutely baffled by Clara's words and actions (and by the script that operates on some insane dream logic). "Clara... Who?" It's similar to Strugatsky's Beetle In The Anthill and The Time Wanderers, but Moffat's Season 8 focuses more on human drama than sci-fi concepts.
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Dec 28, 2018 12:07
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Rochallor posted:I would kill to see Harness' one series as Doctor Who showrunner, which would presumably be as many series as he would make it before being fired. He's such a fascinating writer. I'm often curious where Who writers come from - what their roots were before they became involved with the show, like how Davies and Moffat both started in children's telly - and it turns out Harness's big break in writing was... Wallander with Kenneth Branagh?
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Dec 28, 2018 12:21
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Nothing against Jenna Coleman but Clara the character made the show pretty unwatchable towards the end of her run. She might be my least favorite companion of the revival unless I can throw River Song in too.
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Dec 28, 2018 18:55
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Just imagine a Twelve + Graham season...
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Dec 28, 2018 20:09
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