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LividLiquid posted:But I wants me some lore stuff and gimmicks. I'd be surprised if the Toymaker isn't a means for slipping in some good lore stuff, given how deep the character itself is dipping into the lore (and his reality-warping powers), and the fact that it's the climax of Tennant2's specials, but we'll see.
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Dec 4, 2023 01:37
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LividLiquid posted:The last episode resolved the gross Donna issue — again, really, and properly this time. Twelve mind-wiping himself instead of Clara last time felt like a sort of resolution of that problem — and that was very nice, but it felt a little tacked onto a completely normal, though really great, episode of the show. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your comparison, but I don't think the Tenth Doctor mindwiping himself would have helped prevent Donna's death at all.
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Dec 4, 2023 01:43
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lol 
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Dec 4, 2023 01:54
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Open Source Idiom posted:Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your comparison, but I don't think the Tenth Doctor mindwiping himself would have helped prevent Donna's death at all. What I meant was that it seemed like he regretted having to mindwipe Donna, so the next the gross "I have to violate you to save you" trope came up in the writing, The Doctor handled it differently. He included himself in the 50/50 shot. It would've meant more if twelve just wiped himself without the coin flip, but it still felt like something of a resolution of said violation because he clearly still regretted having to do it to Donna. So it's nice they went back and undid it. It's been a pebble in my shoe since I first saw it.
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Dec 4, 2023 01:54
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Excellent analysis Narsham. I don't want to read too much into the authorial intent of RTD but, when I think over it, this episode really does feel like a jab at Chibnall. Thirteen has long been criticised as a copy of Ten, so the fake Doctor literally copies Tennant's face and physique. The fakes trick the Doctor and Donna into exposition dumps and clunky backstory, including forcing them into the kind of info-dump resolution the Jodie era was so fond of. The episode uses sloppy editing and production errors to demonstrate these 'fakes'. I also don't think it's a coincidence that the fake Donna brings up the Flux and Timeless Child stuff (in a nonsensical retcon of Donna's mind wipe) while the real Donna is completely unaware of it. And then what happens? She melts into sludge. She's not defeated by the Doctor, she's defeated by thinking about Season 13 for more than fifteen seconds. On top of all this, the fakes are simply undeveloped, and deliberately so. They have no personalities of their own, so they have to copy the Doctor and Donna. They have no clear motivation for most of the episode and lack basic concepts of object permanence. The Doctor and Donna have to give them their motivation, backstory and even their reasons for being scary and compelling - they are a villain justified in retrospect by the protagonists. This is RTD grappling with having to justify Chibnall's past creative decisions to maintain the show's continuity. The ship's design, as a convoluted mystery-box which does random things for basically no reason, propels the plot via massive contrivance. Why do the doors close for no reason? Why all the random corridors? On a ship this large, how do these four keep running into each other, and why does the Doctor never run into the fake Doctor? And, when the characters aren't in a convoluted maze, they're in the straightest, most boring corridor there ever was, where there are no sudden turns or even any branching paths. It's a physical manifestation of Chibnall's storylines. It's also stranded in a void. Nobody is around, and nobody's watching. The nearest audience is a trillion miles away. The ship feels like a counterpoint to the TARDIS in this way. If the protagonists are akin to the duplicates, sloppily repeating the show's Greatest Hits ad infinitum and stenciling over previous Doctors forever, the show becomes akin to the ship: constantly running down the same corridor, lost in a void with nobody watching, slowly plodding along to a sad implosion. RTD understands that the show must be akin to the TARDIS: spontaneous, unpredictable, and always elastic. The TARDIS can always go somewhere new, WILL always go somewhere new, so it will always survive. This big long ship can go nowhere and is destined to die. Note that the show was nearly cancelled before RTD stepped in. While this might have struck some as sudden, many Who fans could have seen this coming from the first few Jodie episodes. The show's eventual end would have felt like a very slow countdown to cancellation. As proven by the show's cancellation in 1989, it's not enough for the show to simply make good episodes after bad - it has to redeem itself and rid itself of its prior failures, like the reboot did. This is why the Doctor and Donna cannot simply escape the fakes, they have to destroy the fakes and make sure nobody thinks about them again. The Doctor literally flushes the Flux-aware Donna out of the TARDIS and into a fireball. I think it's safe to say that the Chinball lore stuff is never getting brought up again. Also the suicidal space lizard is the BBC. Updog Scully fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Dec 4, 2023 |
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Dec 4, 2023 02:02
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LividLiquid posted:What I meant was that it seemed like he regretted having to mindwipe Donna, so the next the gross "I have to violate you to save you" trope came up in the writing, The Doctor handled it differently. He included himself in the 50/50 shot. I think this comparison only works in terms of the writing for the two scenarios being vaguely similar, I don't think the choices are all that parallel. In the first scenario, the Doctor has two choices -- let Donna die, or save Donna's life through radical medical intervention of a mindwipe. In the second scenario there are far more -- no mindwipe, mindwipe Clara, mindwipe the Doctor, mindwipe both, etc. etc. tbh I don't find the Donna mindwipe to be that gross. Her brain was cooking so hard she couldn't finish a sentence, and had maybe a minute to live. You can't consent to die in that kind of situation. What the Doctor did was an emergency triage. If anything The Star Beast confirms this read, since given a little bit of time and a more stable mindset she's able to quickly and simply come up with a solution. That she couldn't before suggests she wasn't in the mental headspace to adequately judge what was going on.
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Dec 4, 2023 02:20
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Updog Scully posted:she's defeated by thinking about Season 13 for more than fifteen seconds. This gave me a good laugh, thank you 
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Dec 4, 2023 02:31
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Open Source Idiom posted:tbh I don't find the Donna mindwipe to be that gross. Her brain was cooking so hard she couldn't finish a sentence, and had maybe a minute to live. You can't consent to die in that kind of situation. What the Doctor did was an emergency triage. I respect that it didn't bother you, but I found it to be yet another example of a troublesome and oft-repeated writing device of a man having to violate a woman to save her. Even all the way back to the trop of slapping a "hysterical" woman to calm her down "for her own good," it has permeated fiction for ages, and I'm quite glad we have grown enough as a culture that many fiction writers and producers who have engaged in that sort of thing have realized why it's not something they should be doing. It's a very good thing that they got the opportunity to undo it.
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Dec 4, 2023 02:51
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That was really good Dr Who. Beyond the metacommentary about modern Who, it set up a really neat mystery with your standard empty spaceship plot combined with some goofy but at the same time creepy body horror stuff. Okay, I must have created a mind block but I completely forgot what the gently caress happened during Flux and Timeless Child. The Doctor is actually not a Gallifreyian? Also blew up half the universe? All I remember is constantly talking about a Planet Called Time! Which was just super dumb. Whittaker deserved a better series.
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Dec 4, 2023 05:05
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twistedmentat posted:Okay, I must have created a mind block but I completely forgot what the gently caress happened during Flux and Timeless Child.
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Dec 4, 2023 05:11
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twistedmentat posted:The Doctor is actually not a Gallifreyian? Also blew up half the universe? If you take the word of noted liar The Master as the truth, due to him using the infallible Matrix (proven fallible in its own first appearance, due to sabotage by.... The Master!) to prove it, then the Doctor was some kid found on a deserted planet next to a portal to another universe by a contemporary of Rassilon and Omega who adopted her, then discovered she could regenerate when she died and proceeded to vivisect her for years until she figured out how to pass on the ability to regenerate to the Time Lords at the top of Gallifreyan society. Then the Time Lord version of the even worse CIA than the Celestial Intervention Agency from Pertwee's era put the Doctor to work for some reason doing various war crimes or wetwork for them, including capturing the Sugar Skull Gang and something something something Time is a living entity apparently this bit I gotta admit I haven't got a clue about until eventually one incarnation disguised herself as a human in 21st Century Earth until she met Jodie Whittaker and was restored to full awareness again and went back on the run. At some point she got caught and mind-wiped again and became Hartnell (you know, the actual FIRST Doctor. The one who was actually called the Doctor for the first time by Ian and Barbara, the one who got the TARDIS stuck as a police box in the first place, the one that every other instance of the show looking back over past lives showed to be the FIRST Doctor?) who then took off into hiding and this time the Time Lords just.... didn't do anything about it until Troughton summoned them in The War Games? Anyway the vivisectionist was in charge of the Super CIA and hiding outside of the Universe all through the Time War etc, built the Flux and used it to wipe out half the universe to power her space station to go into the other universe the Doctor originally came from, but then it turned out the Sugar Skull Gang could just.... teleport outside of the Universe as well and killed her unceremoniously making her entire thing a complete waste of time, then kidnapped the Doctor leaving the universe still half destroyed. Then Time was a real thing that.... killed the Sugar Skull Gang? And they were happy about it? And told the Doctor it hated her and then... just hosed off? And the Doctor never mentioned the Flux again after making the next Flux wave go inside the Passenger Robot, literally dumped the locket with her memories of past lives into a trash can, then had three last random stories, got bodyswapped briefly with The Master then regenerated back into Tennant. Look, in other words: twistedmentat posted:just super dumb.
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Dec 4, 2023 05:20
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I thought when I didn't enjoy doctor who as much I was just maturing out of it, but it's still possible to have fun. I can still enjoy this.
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Dec 4, 2023 05:59
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So, something I've been chewing on about the last episode. I don't think it's a mystery, or a big mistake, but more just something I noticed that was never nentioned. Does the ship captain being a skeleton sound weird to anyone else? I'm not an expert on Space Science, but I feel like a body wouldn't have decomposed in the vaccuum of space, right?
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Dec 4, 2023 07:39
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a body wouldn't decompose in space but who's to say what would happen to a body in nothingness full of no-things
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Dec 4, 2023 08:18
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I think in normal circumstances yeah, should be frozen or mummified depending on temperature. The captain's non-skeletal body parts might've been made of jello or foam or something not a body like earthling one, aside from having some skeletal structure that looks like a horse skull, and boiled away out there? Or maybe the not-things ate the bodies but not the skellingtons. Or the captain was from a species of living skeletal horses. If the body was sealed and somehow had a decomposition-length's amount of air supply, I think the body could rot, then maybe bump something or suit mechanism breaks and opens the helmet. Just spitballin, don't think they intended any of those. The physics could also follow different rules since it's not normal vacuum of space, it's near the or in the gradient edge of not-universe. Come to think of it, there was stuff winking in and out of existence, including that captain I think, so who knows what goes on when you do a mix of existing and not back and forth. I might rewatch to look because the notion of spatially navigating in and out of nowhere is an interesting idea, a preserved coordinate system of sorts between universe and former universe, or perhaps something that you can make the shape or place of by the hole of itself?
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Dec 4, 2023 08:25
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There's life that exists in space in Doctor Who so there are probably vacuum-resistant microbes.
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Dec 4, 2023 08:29
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1) it’s ostensibly still a kid/family show, so showing a desiccated corpse was probably a no-go 2) space skeletons are cool 
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Dec 4, 2023 08:41
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Jerusalem posted:If you take the word of noted liar The Master as the truth, due to him using the infallible Matrix (proven fallible in its own first appearance, due to sabotage by.... The Master!) to prove it, then the Doctor was some kid found on a deserted planet next to a portal to another universe by a contemporary of Rassilon and Omega who adopted her, then discovered she could regenerate when she died and proceeded to vivisect her for years until she figured out how to pass on the ability to regenerate to the Time Lords at the top of Gallifreyan society. Then the Time Lord version of the even worse CIA than the Celestial Intervention Agency from Pertwee's era put the Doctor to work for some reason doing various war crimes or wetwork for them, including capturing the Sugar Skull Gang and something something something Time is a living entity apparently this bit I gotta admit I haven't got a clue about until eventually one incarnation disguised herself as a human in 21st Century Earth until she met Jodie Whittaker and was restored to full awareness again and went back on the run. At some point she got caught and mind-wiped again and became Hartnell (you know, the actual FIRST Doctor. The one who was actually called the Doctor for the first time by Ian and Barbara, the one who got the TARDIS stuck as a police box in the first place, the one that every other instance of the show looking back over past lives showed to be the FIRST Doctor?) who then took off into hiding and this time the Time Lords just.... didn't do anything about it until Troughton summoned them in The War Games? I think calling that dumb is an understatement. No wonder I completely forgot about the whole thing. That's worse than Clara being secretly behind all the Doctors wins through his entire history.
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Dec 4, 2023 08:51
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SiKboy posted:- I'm like 80% sure that Tennant was fiddling with a casio keyboard in that scene, with the hose from a shower shoved in the back of it. Amstrad CPC 464, with an incredibly well insulated cable (RF antenna?) stuck in its monitor port. When I saw it I was like "oh time to spend the next three hours deep diving British microcomputers from the 80s to see which model they used" and then was immediately disappointed when my second guess proved correct.
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Dec 4, 2023 10:05
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Big Mean Jerk posted:space skeletons are cool Maybe she was a space skeleton???? you know, when she was alive. she always looked like that.
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Dec 4, 2023 10:35
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I just assumed the captain looked like Beta Ray Bill.
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Dec 4, 2023 10:37
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Open Source Idiom posted:Maybe she was a space skeleton???? Space Mari Lwyd.
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Dec 4, 2023 11:27
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ikanreed posted:I thought when I didn't enjoy doctor who as much I was just maturing out of it, but it's still possible to have fun. I can still enjoy this. Yeah, someone else mentioned it as well, and I have the same sentiment. I think I fell off before the last season of Capaldi? The whole Clara thing just got too tiresome/deus ex machina-esque (it didn't help that it followed a bunch of other 'These companions are the crux of the universe' type stories). I tried Whittaker's run, but fell off after a few episodes. I think someone mentioned Jay Exci's video? The Fall of Doctor Who actually breaks down the issues I had with it pretty well. Figured I'd give these specials a go, mostly for nostalgia reasons, but they're so good, I'm actually hyped again for the next Doctor 
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Dec 4, 2023 12:20
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I really hope we get some solid "life isn't ruined by the doctor" happy endings for the companions going forward because most of the Modern ones tend to have awful poo poo happen to them at the end. Martha escaped mostly unscathed (Well she got stuck with Mickey, so maybe not) and they've fixed Donna's ending, but the first RTD and Moffat eras was just MEAN to companions whenever possible. I am not as familiar with the 13 era, and it seems like they all ended up mostly okay.
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Dec 4, 2023 12:39
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Modern writers feel the need to say to get the chance to travel with the doctor you will pay a heavy price and I agree it is getting a bit old.
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Dec 4, 2023 12:49
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The doctor being mostly in control of the TARDIS and the material realities of television production where actors want to move on create a circumstance where companions only leave in times of crisis or under tragic circumstances because otherwise the doctor could just take them home but also why would they want to go home? I think one strategy to address this might be to have a companion who has an agenda and motivation beyond adventure - someone who has their own mystery to solve, so that they are an enthusiastic participant but still have a life plan beyond the adventure.
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Dec 4, 2023 13:02
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TheBigBudgetSequel posted:I am not as familiar with the 13 era, and it seems like they all ended up mostly okay. Everyone in Thirteen's TARDIS got through okay, if a little bit off-kilter by the end; Chibnall actually did make a point that even if you are 'fine' after that sort of trip, it's something that changes you or faces you with poo poo that's gonna leave you with some personal questions to answer. If I recall correctly, Jacob Anderson's character (if you count him as a companion) actually got off better. And of course, Clara basically got an ending so wish-fulfillment that it feels kinda weird it's never come up since. EDIT: Honestly, every time I come back to mentioning non-Timeless Child stuff about Chibnall's run, it's the epitome of 'sounds good on paper'. Pretty much nothing he tried ended up working, but none of them sound like just inherently bad ideas. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Dec 4, 2023 |
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Dec 4, 2023 13:04
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DoctorWhat posted:The doctor being mostly in control of the TARDIS and the material realities of television production where actors want to move on create a circumstance where companions only leave in times of crisis or under tragic circumstances because otherwise the doctor could just take them home but also why would they want to go home? God, how has this NOT happened yet? There's SO MANY companions across all of the Who expanded universe and I can't think of a single one that's "I'm coming with you to figure this thing out and then I'm off".
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Dec 4, 2023 13:21
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Fil5000 posted:God, how has this NOT happened yet? There's SO MANY companions across all of the Who expanded universe and I can't think of a single one that's "I'm coming with you to figure this thing out and then I'm off". There's Compassion and Anji from the books, and Sally and Aristedes at BF. The latter two suffer from being terminally boring, unfortunately. Oh and Amy/Abby, who does her initial three stories then fucks off, job done. Anji's interesting, in that she spends a lot of her time initial time in the TARDIS working through her own issues, and once that's over she starts secretly recording future history so she can play the stock market with future knowledge when she gets back. Which gets delayed a bunch of times for plot reasons, but she's very much got a clear goal in mind and a life she wants to return to.
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Dec 4, 2023 13:33
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Open Source Idiom posted:There's Compassion and Anji from the books, and Sally and Aristedes at BF. The latter two suffer from being terminally boring, unfortunately. Oh and Amy/Abby, who does her initial three stories then fucks off, job done. Sally and Aristedes get brought into one of 7's schemes though rather than joining up to solve their own thing though if I remember rightly. And yeah, after House of Blue Fire Sally's not given a lot of opportunities to be a character.
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Dec 4, 2023 13:36
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Fil5000 posted:Sally and Aristedes get brought into one of 7's schemes though rather than joining up to solve their own thing though if I remember rightly. And yeah, after House of Blue Fire Sally's not given a lot of opportunities to be a character. I was thinking more about them in the sense that they were recruited for a job, did the job and then left. But fair enough hey.
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Dec 4, 2023 13:38
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Fil5000 posted:God, how has this NOT happened yet? There's SO MANY companions across all of the Who expanded universe and I can't think of a single one that's "I'm coming with you to figure this thing out and then I'm off". It would be very easy for that to be interpreted as them exploiting the Doctor for their own ends. I think people generally want the companions to be in it for the spirit of adventure, not knowing what's coming week to week just like us.
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Dec 4, 2023 14:23
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Open Source Idiom posted:There's Compassion and Anji from the books, and Sally and Aristedes at BF. The latter two suffer from being terminally boring, unfortunately. Oh and Amy/Abby, who does her initial three stories then fucks off, job done. Amy was a lot of fun, I should give the Key2time series a relisten. Five was such a perfect pairing for that one, I think that's part of why it worked so well. Wasn't Raine also trying to do something on her own? Tbh I'm only remembering her from Dominion (which she was used without the authors permission irrc?) but I feel like might be be something tacked on later - something about her dad. LividLiquid posted:
Wow. Thank you for pointing this out, I have never made the connection before but it makes perfect sense now that you've made the point. I really do appreciate your input in this thread, fwiw Edit just to be clear, I do see the other reading, but the fact that this is a potential takeaway, makes me view it in new light as well. McGann fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Dec 4, 2023 |
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Dec 4, 2023 14:26
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McGann posted:Wasn't Raine also trying to do something on her own? Tbh I'm only remembering her from Dominion (which she was used without the authors permission irrc?) but I feel like might be be something tacked on later - something about her dad. I can't really remember. tbh most of those Andrew Cartmel stories were really bad IMO. Mags had a whole goal about trying to get her lycanthropy under control, but BF dropped that character after her first three stories.
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Dec 4, 2023 14:34
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This has reminded me that I think I've heard Graceless more often than I've heard Key2Time so I should probably correct that.
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Dec 4, 2023 15:00
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Open Source Idiom posted:Anji's interesting, in that she spends a lot of her time initial time in the TARDIS working through her own issues, and once that's over she starts secretly recording future history so she can play the stock market with future knowledge when she gets back. Which gets delayed a bunch of times for plot reasons, but she's very much got a clear goal in mind and a life she wants to return to. I guess you could technically count Adam from Series 1 as a companion who attempts this if you have a loose definition of companion. Joins Rose and 9 at the end of Dalek then travels with them the following episode to the distant future in The Long Game on Satellite 5 where he gets that surgery to link and download all of human history and attempts to transmit it back to his time for profit.
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Dec 4, 2023 15:47
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Dabir posted:It would be very easy for that to be interpreted as them exploiting the Doctor for their own ends. I think people generally want the companions to be in it for the spirit of adventure, not knowing what's coming week to week just like us. I mean, it could, but if they're upfront about it and the doctor's like "ok cool but we're taking a detour to fight zygons in 3rd century mesopotamia" and they're like "ok if we gotta" then I reckon it'd work.
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Dec 4, 2023 16:18
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The main thing I remember about Anji from the 8DA novels was that her character remit was basically "think Milly from This Life", which was followed some time later by a blog post from Mad Larry (after he'd started moving away from the DW novels), detailing how he asked the people at BBC Books something to the effect of "why the gently caress do we want a companion that's based on someone from an awful nighttime soap, that revolves around a bunch of yuppies in the mid-late 1990s".
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Dec 4, 2023 16:34
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Confusedslight posted:Modern writers feel the need to say to get the chance to travel with the doctor you will pay a heavy price and I agree it is getting a bit old. Rose gets stuck on Earth 2 with her replacement doctor and family. - ok, not great. Martha ends up with Mickey running Torchwood? - 2nd worst fate. Donna becomes a living god that will kill her (reversed) - 3rd worst fate. Amy and Rory got to live a full life together though yah separated by time from their family. sucks but at least they are together and lives. Clara - roams time and space until she decides it time to stop with Me. Bill Potts - Cyberized - worst fate. 13ths Companions - All fine, I don't really remember. So you know, yah, its not great. Also, Whittaker's first year was fine to good but Chinball got way up his own rear end. Gave us a complicated puzzle that he didn't know how to complete.
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Dec 4, 2023 16:36
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Mooseontheloose posted:Rose gets stuck on Earth 2 with her replacement doctor and family. - ok, not great. Don't forget that Bill got to travel the universe after she "died" with the girl/spaceship from The PIlot. It was still lovely the got cybernised.
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Dec 4, 2023 16:38
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