Random Stranger posted:

I listened to We Are the Daleks and that is one seriously overstuffed story. It felt like every episode was a completely different plot.

Also, there's something dark about a story about encroaching fascism where one character says, "Make Great Britain Great again," being released almost simultaneously with Trump going down that escalator...

The_Doctor posted:

The fascists were already using it long before. It’s a dogwhistle for returning to a supposed golden age when everything was fine that never actually existed. ie, before all these uppity minorities started being loud and demanding rights.

Random Stranger posted:

I'm well aware. And there's even a "good" character in the story who spouts some pro-Brexit style rhetoric about being ruled from Brussels.

Open Source Idiom posted:

The recent Torchwood finale is the most loving wild post-truth thing I've seen in ages. It seems like it's going in that dumb direction where the heroes broadcast the truth about the current crisis, spurning the country into taking action and fixing itself. Instead, it takes an aggressive right turn and the heroes end up weaponising reactionary conspiracy theorists and 5G paranoia to destroy British telecommunications and, ultimately, the Internet.

The entire season's been amazing, at times a fairly brutal satire of Britain's descent into fascism -- with running jokes like an app that allows uses to "Heil a taxi" or this gameshow where finance bros get to vote asylum seekers "off the island". But it's genuinely really funny and smart, quite modern and subversive and lefitst, and I loving *love* that John Barrowman's big episode (the Ukraine conflict one) was handed over to a genderfluid lead instead. The episode about what the abandoned Torchwood building gets up to when no one else is around is also really chilling and weird. Highly recommended.

Open Source Idiom posted:

I've seen one or two around the Internet and I don't love them. Here's my low down, at least:

You've got a handful of ranges, but there's really only two kinds of releases:

1. The "Story Continues" sets, which are basically follow up seasons for the TV show. Though the stories themselves are self-contained, each season is heavily serialised, with the stories focused around a core group of mostly new regular characters. They're great, I love them, they're all interesting figures that the series manages to do a lot of work with. The stories themselves focus on contemporary issues and do a decent enough job of handling them, but the series also manages to have a decent amount of fun.

Not that there's a slightly controversial element to these, in that people were expecting slightly more significant appearances by the regulars (as were the writers, Eve Myles stepped away from recording the first season of these at the last minute, leading to significant restructuring of her arc when it turned out that she could only record for less than a day).

2. The monthly range. These stories are standalones that jump all over the timeline and usually feature only one regular. Many feature no regulars, and focus instead of aspects of the organisation as it existed in the past, or in the form that it eventually evolves into in the future. There are loose -- very loose -- arcs that occasionally crop up in these stories, but every story is completely inessential to understanding any other story and they can each be enjoyed as their own thing.

The tone of these vary wildly. There are action stories, spy thrillers, ironic camp, chamber pieces, horror stories, romances...

There are also occasional boxsets that crop up here and there, which give slightly more focus to one or two of the teams, or tell stories about Captain Jack. These are also mostly self-contained.

Basically just pick and choose what you feel like. They're mostly all pretty good, and if anyone tells you that the one where Gwen gets drunk and goes on a bender is a bad story then they're wrong. It's Speed but with alcohol, and then it's Speed with speed. It's amazing.

There's only ONE story from this range that's weirdly essential: Ghost Mission. It introduces a number of characters and elements that crop up in the main range, and it's the basis of the Torchwood Soho run of stories. It's great though, and Norton's a really fun character played by the guy who played Dirk Gently off that US Dirk Gently show.

Did that, uh, answer your question? Or did I misunderstand what you were looking for?

quote:

A forgotten social network is out for revenge. Someone's killing influencers. Torchwood get into crypto.

Rochallor posted:

Looking through the various releases there's a special release called Torchwood: The Sins of Captain John. Any opinions on this one? I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to give John Barrowman residuals but I do like James Marsters.

Rochallor posted:

Looking through the various releases there's a special release called Torchwood: The Sins of Captain John. Any opinions on this one? I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to give John Barrowman residuals but I do like James Marsters.

Open Source Idiom posted:

My favourite Nimon factoid is that they're all played by ballerinas.

OldMemes posted:

Paper Cuts - Six and "Charley" deal with Draconia politics. There's some fun ideas that just don't work well in the audio format, and there's nothing special here, it just....happens. They don't really do much with Mila stealing Charley's identity, aside from India Fisher playing the character as a bit more giddy and impulsive.

Pops Mgee posted:

Finally getting around to the Whittaker run and just finished Flux. Is the rest of the universe just gone now or what?

Pops Mgee posted:

Finally getting around to the Whittaker run and just finished Flux. Is the rest of the universe just gone now or what?

howe_sam posted:

Open Source Idiom posted:

It's not bad! I remember that it takes Marsters maybe an episode to knock the dust off his performance, but he's having fun and is very enthusiastic (lmao there's this reveal right at the very end of the extras) and while I remember the middle two stories being better than the other two, none of them are bad. The third episode in particular, which sticks the characters in a Pleasantville pastiche, was kind of inspired.

I guess I'd describe the whole thing as sort of their version of Deadpool, if a bit more serious.

Davros1 posted:

It's a quite fun set! More light hearted than the usual TORCHWOOD stuffa

Davros1 posted:

Also surprisingly fun: JENNY THE DOCTOR'S DAUGHTER

Khanstant posted:

I don't think either our or Who's universe is infinite though?

MrL_JaKiri posted:

What we observe about the universe isn't incompatible with it being infinite (proving that it is is, obviously, a bit more challenging)

Fil5000 posted:

It being infinite doesn't mean there's infinite STUFF in it though.

MrL_JaKiri posted:

What we observe about the universe isn't incompatible with it being infinite (proving that it is is, obviously, a bit more challenging)

Jerusalem posted:

Just go to infinity+1 and turn around and look back to check, duh!

God, even 6-year-old me knew that much, and I'm not even good at math!

Edward Mass posted:

This kind of thinking leads one to believe that the amount of intelligent life in the universe is zero, because the size of the universe relative to the amount of life makes intelligent life a rounding error.

Fil5000 posted:

It being infinite doesn't mean there's infinite STUFF in it though.

MrL_JaKiri posted:

Justifying where there's something here while there's nothing essentially anywhere is very challenging - finite/finite vs infinite/infinite is much easier

quote:

Baginski: The audience changes, it’s not like… It all changes. I see the [quickening] of the processes Jacek Dukaj wrote about in his book After the Script. We resign from cause-and-effect chains, from linear narration. This book-like narration. When it comes to shows, the younger the public is, the logic of the plot is less significant.

Interviewer: What is significant, then?

Baginski: Just emotions. Just pure emotions. A bare emotional mix. Those people grew up on TikTok and YouTube, they jump from video to video.

Edward Mass posted:

This kind of thinking leads one to believe that the amount of intelligent life in the universe is zero, because the size of the universe relative to the amount of life makes intelligent life a rounding error.

armpit_enjoyer posted:

You're devoting way more thought to this question than Chris Chibnall ever did. Just accept vibes based storytelling like the people working on the Witcher keep saying.

Open Source Idiom posted:

It's very funny that so so many BF plays sort of take this idea of being "seen" very literally, when it's really the idea of them being "observed". So you'll have characters holding onto Angels, observing them with security devices, etc. but that doesn't really count because only the naked eye counts. Even Flesh and Stone gets this (maybe?) kind of wrong, with Jorah Mormont being trapped in a headlock. That seems like a stalemate.

Senor Tron posted:

How the angels were later depicted doesn't really fit with their first appearance, which is weird since Mofat invented them.

The lonely assassins, they used to be called. No one quite knows where they came from, but they’re as old as the universe, or very nearly, and they have survived this long because they have the most perfect defence system ever evolved. They are quantum-locked. They don’t exist when they’re being observed. The moment they are seen by any other living creature, they freeze into rock. No choice. It’s a fact of their biology. In the sight of any living thing, they literally turn to stone. And you can’t kill a stone. Of course, a stone can’t kill you either. But then you turn your head away, then you blink, and oh yes it can… That’s why they cover their eyes. They’re not weeping. They can’t risk looking at each other. Their greatest asset is their greatest curse. They can never be seen. The loneliest creatures in the universe.

MrL_JaKiri posted:

What we observe about the universe isn't incompatible with it being infinite (proving that it is is, obviously, a bit more challenging)

Khanstant posted:

make the Doctor look small and young

alexandriao posted:

Disagree, because as the quote above/below clearly shows

The original idea was analogous to quantum mechanics, and in QM whenever you read "observed" what they mean is "shot with a laser"