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There's also ...and the Pirates!
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Dec 7, 2023 23:28
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DoctorWhat posted:There's also ...and the Pirates! THAT'S the one I was thinking of. Thank you.
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Dec 7, 2023 23:32
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If we're talking BF, there's an excellent song about Beep The Meep in The Ratings War, and the songs from those Scorchies plays. I was really disappointed that Rayner was advertising a recent play she produced as being a "full blown" musical about american fascism, and for it to only turn out to have one song, played over and over again, that was part of an in-universe fascist musical. It's appropriately dumb and mocking, but it's, you know, not what I wanted and not something I'm gonna sing along to. Even if the drat thing got stuck in my head. "Behold America! The land of great and strong! Then there'll be a blight / or a plebiscite / and then it's gone gone gone"
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Dec 7, 2023 23:33
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Also in 13 Flux + specials, the Doctor and one companion are stated to be in love, while the other companion just turns around and walks off when it's too hard to write for them.
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Dec 7, 2023 23:43
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Open Source Idiom posted:If we're talking BF, there's an excellent song about Beep The Meep in The Ratings War, and the songs from those Scorchies plays. I was just looking into this Six arc two minutes ago. Apart from the musical fakeout, how is the Purity stuff? Worth my listening time?
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Dec 7, 2023 23:44
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SecretOfSteel posted:Also in 13 Flux + specials, the Doctor and one companion are stated to be in love, while the other companion just turns around and walks off when it's too hard to write for them. And it's the most underutilised and underwritten companion.
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Dec 7, 2023 23:52
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Open Source Idiom posted:I was really disappointed that Rayner was advertising a recent play she produced as being a "full blown" musical about american fascism, and for it to only turn out to have one song, played over and over again, that was part of an in-universe fascist musical. It's appropriately dumb and mocking, but it's, you know, not what I wanted and not something I'm gonna sing along to. Even if the drat thing got stuck in my head. Christ, don't tell me, Ben Elton wrote it, right?
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Dec 7, 2023 23:57
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Gaz-L posted:The Master even sings along! (Genuinely my favourite detail. I assume the experience on set was Simm just singing Scissor Sisters at the top of his lungs to utter silence as he hit his marks and choreo.) Just love that once the Master stole the TARDIS he went to earth, turned the TARDIS in to the paradox machine, set up a fake identity, became Prime Minister, and still found the time to compile a music playlist 
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Dec 8, 2023 00:01
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So we're getting the final episode for X-2 this weekend and a Christmas special with Gatwa on Christmas? Do they celebrate Christmas the same day in the UK?
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Dec 8, 2023 00:02
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Boxturret posted:Just love that once the Master stole the TARDIS he went to earth, turned the TARDIS in to the paradox machine, set up a fake identity, became Prime Minister, and still found the time to compile a music playlist Look, how is he gonna become Prime Minister if he doesn't have songs to talk about on Desert Island Discs?
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Dec 8, 2023 00:13
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usenet celeb 1992 posted:Christ, don't tell me, Ben Elton wrote it, right? It appears to be Matthew Sweet's work.
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Dec 8, 2023 00:27
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Detective No. 27 posted:So we're getting the final episode for X-2 this weekend and a Christmas special with Gatwa on Christmas? Do they celebrate Christmas the same day in the UK? Yes and yes.
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Dec 8, 2023 01:02
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DoctorWhat posted:I was just looking into this Six arc two minutes ago. Apart from the musical fakeout, how is the Purity stuff? Worth my listening time? It aight. I think the series is trying to do a delicate balancing act with making Hebe have unlikable qualities while also rooting them in understandable traumatic responses, which is good and I think it mostly succeeds at. However, it's also doing this annoying thing where the villain -- a space time eugenicist -- ends up having more screentime and a better character arc than the heroes, which I found conceptually problematic and emotionally unsatisfying despite (or, in fact, because) the writing and performance is so good. It also goes to absolute mush towards the end and has some weak/confusing politics, particularly where the Doctor runs around helping out fash because it's nice to be nice to people even when they're organizing and participating in supremacist demonstrations. But that's Chris "Scorched Earth" Chapman right there for you.
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Dec 8, 2023 02:16
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Rewatch note: Man, Moffat really was into having 11 show up, give a big braggadocious speech about how he's the best and they should all run away only for it to immediately bite him on the rear end. Both Pandorica Opens and A Good Man Go To War play out almost exactly the same. A Good Man Goes to War has a slightly more upbeat ending with it's big reveal, but still.
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Dec 8, 2023 03:19
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Moffat had like three or four ideas he was really proud of and ran them on a cycle. Like that one hbomberguy video pointed out, he went back to the well of "massive compute that saves the minds of dead people" what, three times?
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Dec 8, 2023 03:55
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TheBigBudgetSequel posted:Rewatch note: Man, Moffat really was into having 11 show up, give a big braggadocious speech about how he's the best and they should all run away only for it to immediately bite him on the rear end. Both Pandorica Opens and A Good Man Go To War play out almost exactly the same. A Good Man Goes to War has a slightly more upbeat ending with it's big reveal, but still.
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Dec 8, 2023 07:06
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TheBigBudgetSequel posted:Rewatch note: Man, Moffat really was into having 11 show up, give a big braggadocious speech about how he's the best and they should all run away only for it to immediately bite him on the rear end. Both Pandorica Opens and A Good Man Go To War play out almost exactly the same. A Good Man Goes to War has a slightly more upbeat ending with it's big reveal, but still. He even did it with 10 in the 50th special.
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Dec 8, 2023 08:05
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Dabir posted:Moffat had like three or four ideas he was really proud of and ran them on a cycle. Like that one hbomberguy video pointed out, he went back to the well of "massive compute that saves the minds of dead people" what, three times? I'll give him that they were good ideas, unlike, uh, everything I've heard about Inside Man.
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Dec 8, 2023 08:53
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TinTower posted:https://twitter.com/ianlevine/status/1732724542202589687?s=46 LOL. Remember when he announced he was giving up Doctor Who and was becoming a dedicated Babylon 5 fan?
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Dec 8, 2023 09:07
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Davros1 posted:LOL. Remember when he announced he was giving up Doctor Who and was becoming a dedicated Babylon 5 fan? Yeah but then Chibnall left. Man, Levine is still sore because Chibnall was on TV saying Who was bad at the one time Levine was involved in it.
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Dec 8, 2023 09:11
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:I'll give him that they were good ideas, unlike, uh, everything I've heard about Inside Man. and let's not even talk about Douglas Is Cancelled (which admittedly isn't out yet but just the premise is so goddamn dire)
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Dec 8, 2023 10:39
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MikeJF posted:and let's not even talk about Douglas Is Cancelled (which admittedly isn't out yet but just the premise is so goddamn dire) I read about it in this thread and then as a defense mechanism completely expunged it from my mind...
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Dec 8, 2023 10:45
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Sometimes, sci-fi can let you cloak really lovely views and ideas in enough metaphor and abstraction to seem profound or prescient. I feel like the emotional origin point of that recurring 'computers with dead people in them' might be some serious Old Man Yells At Cloud thing, but it plays really well sometimes; I genuinely love Dark Water's pitch on the Cybermen because of it.
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Dec 8, 2023 10:49
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:I read about it in this thread and then as a defense mechanism completely expunged it from my mind... It does occur to me that Hugh Bonneville is a less than ideal choice for this show given when HE ran into a scandal that could have ruined his career he just took out a superinjunction so no one was allowed to talk about it. Cleretic posted:Sometimes, sci-fi can let you cloak really lovely views and ideas in enough metaphor and abstraction to seem profound or prescient. I feel like the emotional origin point of that recurring 'computers with dead people in them' might be some serious Old Man Yells At Cloud thing, but it plays really well sometimes; I genuinely love Dark Water's pitch on the Cybermen because of it. "Computers with dead people in" is a perfectly fine notion, using it over and over again in the same show is a bit poo poo. And honestly I still don't quite get how the cyber conversion thing in that episode even worked given it required consent from the dead mind for half of it but then they were just raising entire graveyards in seconds.
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Dec 8, 2023 11:05
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Fil5000 posted:And honestly I still don't quite get how the cyber conversion thing in that episode even worked given it required consent from the dead mind for half of it but then they were just raising entire graveyards in seconds. The minds were already done beforehand, she'd been capturing every dead human's mind and getting them to consent in the nethersphere and processing them to be Cybermen for much of history. The nanite rain was just to assimilate the bodies in the cemeteries and create Cybermen for the minds to be downloaded back into. It's a pretty horrific implication. Tens of billions of dead humans were taken and twisted by her in the nethersphere. All our dead loved ones. The episode kinda skips over the scale. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 11:16 on Dec 8, 2023 |
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Dec 8, 2023 11:11
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MikeJF posted:The minds were already done beforehand, she'd been capturing every dead human's mind and getting them to consent in the nethersphere and processing them to be Cybermen for much of history. The nanite rain was just to assimilate the bodies in the cemeteries and create Cybermen for the minds to be downloaded back into. Oh, that makes sense, fair enough. I refuse to believe that literally the only people that couldn't break the conditioning were Danny and the Brig though.
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Dec 8, 2023 11:17
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Fil5000 posted:Oh, that makes sense, fair enough. I refuse to believe that literally the only people that couldn't break the conditioning were Danny and the Brig though. There were probably a few other outliers, but with Danny it was more that they just hadn't had time to finish gaslighting him into consenting. The initial pass failed when he was interrupted by the kid he killed, but I'm sure they would've just stepped it up a notch and gotten him anyway if events hadn't reached a climax first.
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Dec 8, 2023 11:19
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Season 12 Episode 3: Orphan 55 Written by Ed Hime, Directed by Lee Haven Jones The Doctor posted:Be smarter than what made you. I've gotta be completely honest, I had no memory of Orphan 55 until I just rewatched it. It gets brought up frequently as one of the worst episodes of the Chibnall era, and I know I watched it when it first aired, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you anything about it other than I think it involved a space hotel and was a quasi-base under siege episode? Anyway, I watched it again, figuring that if it didn't stand out in my memory like Kerblam! did then it can't be THAT bad, it must "just" be a really forgettable episode. Here's the thing though, now that I'm refamiliarized myself with what happens, I'm about to say the meanest, most devastating and perhaps cruelest thing I could ever say about a Doctor Who story. It reminds me of a Pip'n'Jane story. God, makes me sick just to write that. I'm so sorry. Ironically given Chibnall infamously was one of those fans who appeared on television in the 1980s making GBS threads on the then contemporary Doctor Who, this episode feels like a modern update on that era, and I don't mean that in a positive sense. It even repeats a twist from The Mysterious Planet, which kicked off the Trial of a Timelord series that returned Doctor Who from a lengthy hiatus (though at least that story was written by Robert Holmes), but has elements that feel right at home from Pip 'n' Jane's Terror of the Vervoids as well.  God, even the monster looks like something out of the 80s. Last season's best story was It Takes You Away, written by Ed Hime. It was a fantastic episode, though not without issues. Apparently the feedback got messed up somewhere along the way unfortunately, as they took everything bad from that episode and used it as the quality basis for this one? How else to explain how the same writer could write something so good and then something that was just a near-incoherent pile of garbage? I know why I don't remember this episode now, it's because my brain was trying to protect me. It doesn't even have the benefit of enough action overwhelming the initial realization that nothing makes sense until later, the inconsistencies and oddities are right there on the surface and continually left me asking questions like,"But how come...?" or "But then wouldn't...?" or "But why did...?" and the episode never really offers any satisfying answers... or indeed any answers at all. It starts fine enough: the Doctor and her companions are accidentally teleported on a guest vacation where the companions try to relax but the Doctor - still feeling off after her encounter with the Master - can't keep still, and then things go horribly wrong both in the story and WITH the story. The viewer is already being asked to do a lot of the heavy lifting though early on it's really more pedantic concerns that could be easily overlooked. Graham sets off the accidental teleport by collecting "vouchers" from a coffee machine on the TARDIS that wins them the vacation. Why the TARDIS has a coffee machine that is apparently hooked up to some kind of commercial operation is kinda bizarre, but can easily enough be overlooked or the viewer can come up with their own interpretation. Mine is that the TARDIS while rebuilding jury-rigged in a commercial model and turned off the "money" aspect, meaning Graham was at an unknown advantage earning the vouchers. Maybe later revelations mean that Kane was eating a loss on bringing in a bunch of "free" guests in order to build the rep of the hotel to make money in the long run? It doesn't matter though, it's a narrative device to get them to the planet without the TARDIS there, and whether the logic makes sense or not it's a pre-established thing from Kerblam! and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy that teleporters can pull people/objects in and out of the TARDIS at times. Ryan gets a minor shock from a vending machine that proves less than minor. The Doctor grasps that he has been infected with a "Hopper" virus, a rather neat concept of an engineering virus that can pass between organic beings and machines. She clears him of the virus and dumps the ejected physical object (it's very big for a virus!) into an empty crisps packet, leaving him to suck his thumb and warning him to "ignore the bats" until the hallucinations stop... and it's about here where the episode starts to REALLY fall apart in my mind.   The moment Ryan is left alone, he spots a pretty young woman also sucking her thumb sitting against the wall. He flirts with her (hilariously badly) and the two end up spending most of the episode together, and for the first half of the episode the framing and actions indicate that she is simply a hallucination brought on by the after-effects of the virus. Nobody else acknowledges her, the two characters always have enough distance between them to let other characters move between them, other characters never seem to actually look at her, or in some cases look past her as if confused by what Ryan is looking at or why he is talking. She doesn't talk to anybody else but Ryan, nobody calls her by name or appears to hear what she is saying, she's just very obviously a hallucination and we're just waiting for Ryan to discover it. Except... she's real! Because suddenly, out of nowhere, every character begins interacting with/talking to her. There was no reason for the initial lack of interaction between Bella and the others and no real reason for why it starts. The only reason I can think of is that the show wanted us to think she was a hallucination... but why? It has no bearing on the plot or characters, it accomplishes nothing. I can only assume that either it was just an oddity of framing and editing and thus unintended, or Ed Hime wanted to "trick" the viewers. But if the latter then... why? To what purpose? I mean, maybe you could take a very generous approach and say that the initial lack of communication is because Bella's ultimate intentions means she doesn't want to make friends or allow herself to understand these are living people she is putting at risk, beyond not being able to help being attracted to Ryan? But then, why would the other characters similarly not interact with, look at, or acknowledge her in an way? It's a two-way street of non-interaction and I don't get it! My assumption is that this is just a symptom of a very clear issue around the editing of this episode, whether to cover for a lack of coverage, shortfalls in the writing, reworks of the script or some combination of all of these. As mentioned above it's a quasi-Base under Siege episode, with the reveal that the resort location is mostly a high quality projection and they're actually inside a dome on a planet with an atmosphere hostile to life (as we know it). There's a neat little bit of universe-building around this particular period of history noted for dense, overpopulated cities. "Fakecations" are popular ways of having a lovely holiday without actually leaving the city, a short trip from your home is a dome that can recreate seemingly real exotic locations where you can relax and "get away" from it all. Tranquillity Spa then is unusual, set up on another planet to lower bureaucratic AND health and safety costs, using teleporters to bring people in and out so they have no idea that they're actually on a hostile planet. The spa is planned by Kane to help bring in enough money to cover costs of terraforming the planet - Orphan 55 - with the end result being she (and her staff, Kane is apparently both head of security AND head of the company, and there are only 4 employees - and a kid! - running the whole place) will "own" an entire now viable planet, setting her up for life. All of this is fine, it's the basis for a very interesting story in fact! Except... it's just one of multiple plotlines vying for attention, none of them properly developed, most of them taking wild jumps that ignore character, tone and basic continuity! What is this story actually about? It doesn't seem to know. Maybe it's about raising awareness of the dangers of Climate Change? Or a criticism of capitalism? A celebration of the adaptability and perseverance of humans? The importance of valuing family over money? The ability of the oppressed to fight past their (justified) trauma and rage? Conversation, thought and hope being able to overcome rage and a desire for revenge? Taking the time to communicate with your family? The value of sacrifice for the greater good? Hell, even bizarrely a gleeful celebration of the slaughter of the victims of abandonment and oppression as a family bonding exercise!?! It tries to be ALL of these things at once and the end result is an incoherent mess where none of those stories get a chance to shine.   Mysterious creatures living on the surface of the planet (otherwise known as the planet's inhabitants!) have broken through an "ionic membrane" security shield after one of the pylons powering it failed, and begin menacing guests. Multiple people are slaughtered in seconds until the Doctor builds a new "ionic membrane" to drive them out. How this works isn't explained, we see it blasting out of the "linen cupboard" control room and throughout the resort and hitting one the creatures - Dregs, they're called in a very unsubtle bit of writing - which makes it.... disappear? Presumably it is just forced back otherwise the Doctor disintegrated a living creature... but forced back where? To outside the dome? Through the walls? Why didn't the membrane affect the human guests? Ryan and Bella are left untouched, we don't see the creature actually being affected by the membrane, just a flash of white light and it is gone. The survivors reunite (one of the better moments of the episode is Graham's relieved hugging of Ryan, and Bella's awkward reaction which gets given further context later) where they discover that an old man called Benni is still alive, but has been hauled outside of the dome by the Dregs. Why? The Dregs killed all the others in seconds, why would they preserve the life of a single old man? Kane insists he is dead since there is no oxygen outside of the dome but his partner Vilma (who Benni was about to make a late life marriage proposal too till Yaz did what she does best and was a third wheel!) notes he has an oxygen tank, and that's enough for the Doctor to demand they stage a rescue operation. The padding for the episode feels particular egregious here. They all pile into a truck to head out of the resort - why? Surely at least some of them should remain, including the mechanic's kid at least!?! - which promptly gets damaged by a trap set by the Dregs, leading to them having to make a run for a tunnel to take them back to the resort, which once they return to they have to escape again! During this initial trip, the Doctor seems to forget that she was the one who insisted they all come out here, as she chides Kane for bringing them all into danger and insists they get back to base. Benni is never seen again, instead we get a voiceover of him cheerfully asking Vilma to marry him (she accepts) after which he equally cheerfully begs somebody to murder him. Much like with Bella, the episode seemed to be building towards something that ends up abandoned or was just accidentally suggested: seeing Benni alive suggested maybe the Dregs had some empathy for the sickly man but that doesn't explain their wholesale slaughter of the other guests. Maybe they were smart and using Benni's tracker to lure the others out (they did set a trap after all) but then why does Benni get to just have a chat with the guests? Does that mean the Dregs are using him as a way to taunt the others? But then why is Benni sounding so upbeat? Maybe the Dregs are actually emulating his voice and this is all some cruel "game" for them? That might explain why he's moving at such a fast speed (which the Dregs never exhibit again for the rest of the episode) and it kind of plays into what Kane tells Vilma a little later about how the Dregs were "having fun" with Benni, but he was definitely still alive so why did they wait so long to kill him (the lure presumably) but then waste time "having fun" with him in the middle of a firefight with Kane and her partner? And why did Benni sound relatively unbothered despite what was apparently torture bad enough to make him beg for death? The fight itself goes entirely unseen, part of the weird editing of the episode. Kane and her partner head outside to fight off the Dregs to give the others a chance to escape, the first nod to Kane accepting responsibility and thinking of somebody other than herself, but then the Doctor finds her lying on the ground at the bottom of a slope and she says she was "thrown" and tries to go back to help her partner, but the Doctor insists it is too late. Hyph3n has also died at this point, a horrible fate for a completely extraneous character who only existed as an excuse for the Doctor to discover the "linen closet" and to be a token alien, albeit one with an astonishingly cheap make-up job that looks closer to something out of Spaceballs than even the Cat Nurses from 2005's New Earth. A weird fixation perhaps, but the Doctor makes several references to Hyph3n's tail but I think we never actually see it? Which is... weird! Thus nothing has been gained and now the Doctor has to get the survivors back to the resort she insisted they leave. This could also serve as the primary driving force of the episode, except Kane now reveals that there is a nearby short-range teleport in this maintenance tunnel that can get them back. If they could teleport out to here in the first place why did they go out in the van!?! At which point things get complicated again when Bella grabs Kane's rifle and declares that she's here for revenge on Kane for abandoning her as a child! Yes the life and death situation wasn't enough, and Bella has chosen NOW to confront Kane about this rather than at any of the other opportune times. This includes her running with the others for the maintenance tunnels when it initially looked like Kane was going to sacrifice herself for everybody. It also includes her doing nothing when Vilma had to buy Kane's agreement to continue trying to rescue Benni. Ryan of course tries to stop Bella and the two of them are teleported back to the resort, and apparently it only had the juice for one trip, so the Doctor and the others have to continue to go on foot as their oxygen packs continue to deplete. This leads to another sacrifice moment where Vilma decides to let herself be torn to pieces in order to buy the others time, except they just stand and watch her get murdered, get upset about it, and THEN move. What time this actually brought is apparently inconsequential, especially as there are multiple Dregs and we've already seen that just killing one person won't stop them from very quickly killing multiple others too. But THAT'S not enough either! As they flee, the Doctor spots a sign and tries to hide it from the others, only for Ryan and Graham to grasp it is written in Russian (no TARDIS to translate I guess) and the Doctor to explain that Orphan 55 is actually Earth, abandoned by those responsible for destroying its atmosphere, leaving the "dregs" of humanity who couldn't find a way off planet behind to suffer. Which means the Dregs are the adapted descendants of those survivors, an evolutionary offshoot of humanity that can survive in the Carbon Dioxide rich atmosphere of the planet. This I guess explains the trees seen in shots of the "barren" wasteland, though not what it is is that these "apex predators" are actually hunting and eating to survive, especially given how high their numbers are.  The Doctor, running low on oxygen because she never stops talking (as she said in an earlier episode, talking's brilliant!) makes mental contact with a sleeping Dreg as they pass through a nest in the tunnel (so why did they never attack the base from below instead of through the ionic membrane?) and discovers alongside the fact this one apparently has firsthand knowledge of how the Earth ended (so... it is hundreds of years old? Thousands? Are all Dregs that long lived?) but also that they exhale oxygen and breath carbon dioxide. This restores her oxygen, and there is almost a point made following this revelation in a scene where the Doctor convinces the Alpha of the Dregs (we know it's the Alpha because of a clumsy post-production voiceover of the Doctor saying so!) to not kill them, but to work in harmony because they need to let each other live in order to get out of a closed space where each needs what the other exhales to survive. You would THINK this would be leading to an understanding that the Dregs are the actual rightful inhabitants of this planet, that they're capable of thought and understanding and reasoning, and that this will lead to the Doctor getting the others off the planet and leaving it those with an actual claim to the land and the environment. Except the Doctor then locks the Alpha Dreg inside the cage she used to convince it to not kill them, and then a bunch more Dregs get killed by one of Bella's bombs being used explicitly for that purpose by Ryan, and the "triumphant" moment of the episode comes when Bella and Kane put aside their differences as mother and daughter to kill the living, thinking beings whose planet Kane was trying to take from them! There are a TON of false dilemmas in this episode. Bella is infuriated when Ryan "chooses" to stick with his friends over somebody he met an hour earlier who has been trying to kill them, but then falls into line and works alongside all of them with the worst she gets for abandoning and trying to murder them to be lightly chastised by the Doctor. That brief moment where it seemed an understanding might be reached between the "humans" and the "Dregs" goes nowhere, as they're straight back to being cheesy killer monsters again. But in a particularly galling moment we find out that the mass teleporter can't get everybody off planet because they have the wrong kind of fuel... but it can be converted into the right type of fuel by a Hopper Virus! What a bit of luck that they don't have the made-up fuel they need but they can make it using the OTHER made-up fuel powered conveniently by a made-up virus! They finally make the conversion - following some more forced drama where the useless mechanic's kid runs away in a huff because his dad doesn't take this 10-year-old boy's insistence he is a better mechanic than him seriously - but then it turns out that there are too many to be teleported, meaning somebody has to stay behind to die while the others escape. Bella of course has had a trademark change of heart and decides to sacrifice herself, but luckily then Kane - who had sacrificed herself for like the third time earlier but then turned out to be okay why not - arrives so they can be reconciled (why? Kane has done NOTHING to earn reconciliation!) and murder living beings together! Except.... EXCEPT! loving EXCEPT! Once Bella has stepped off the teleporter platform and it activates... it can only teleport a few people at a time anyway! So, the mechanic and his kid go first, then the Doctor and the companions.... Kane and Bella could easily just walk onto the teleporter at this point and leave too! There was no danger, they could have still had their mother/daughter murder bonding together from the same place on the platform that the Doctor and the others were!   This really, really bothered me, perhaps more than it should. A big part of a story like this is about character growth and development, and there is none in this story between these two. Kane never changes her mindset, while she gets frequently chastised by others for her "practical" stance it is established that she has enough of a sense of responsibility/guilt even at the start of the episode that she is willing to put herself at risk to save others. This should actually make Bella hate her more, since she apparently - as far as Bella knows - never felt that same level of responsibility for her own daughter, and Kane's insistence that she was doing this FOR Bella (which Bella never hears) doesn't really hold water given that it's established that until told who Bella was she didn't even recognize her. For Kane to show up as the "savior" at the end of the story, and for that "salvation" to come about through killing beings capable of thought and reason who were driven into a murderous rage by HER utterly illegal actions is really hosed up. Bella's immediate acceptance and apparent happiness/satisfaction to be side-by-side with her mother again makes no sense at all, isn't earned, and feels particularly gross in how it is put on screen. Even odder, once returned to the TARDIS, Graham assures Ryan that Kane and Bella are definitely going to be okay and he asks how considering the lack of oxygen and help (maybe they'll step onto the functional teleporter 4 feet behind them?).... and then they all just move on to talk about climate change instead! They're in the TARDIS! It travels through time and space! It could go save them right now! Immediately! It could arrive a nanosecond after they left even! But all thought of either of them are cast aside, which given that Bella and Ryan were apparently feeling romantically attracted to each other feels as callous as, oh I don't know, a mother abandoning her daughter to go run an illegal holiday site on a toxic planet and wipe out all the indigenous life! Instead, the episode ends with an important and valid message that falls flat coming at the end of an astonishingly bad episode. She talks about how Orphan 55 is only one possible future for Earth (another is Ravolox!) and that people have the power NOW to do something about making sure that doesn't happen. There's a final shot of one of the Dregs roaring at nothing as a warning of what might happen if we don't stop climate change, and really that's probably the most compelling case you could ever make to the world: stop climate change or end up part of one of the worst episodes of the revival of Doctor Who! Index of Doctor Who Write-ups for Television Episodes/Big Finish Audio Stories.th Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 13:35 on Dec 9, 2023 |
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Dec 8, 2023 11:35
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Also lets not gloss over probably the single worst costume design of the series - Hyph3n Make up and costume departments apparently both on loving strike. "Yeah nah, we don't have face prosthetics. A bit of grey lipstick'll do the job! Quick someone kill an Ewok and shove it on her head!"  Very obvious tail-attached-to belt. Tail looks like it comes out of the middle of her back   100% get Doctor Who is usually on a shoe-string budget, but  that's just straight up someone's budget fursona costume.
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Dec 8, 2023 13:12
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Oh we did at least see the tail then! I couldn't remember and the fact the Doctor mentioned it a couple of times stood out to me. She's such a nothing character, in fact the whole staff setup at the spa makes no sense. Even running things on the cheap like they were the costs must have been exorbitant, which doesn't really make any sense if she hosed off out of her family's life to make something for her daughter to inherit. Whole thing needed to be completely reworked. Apparently the original script was very different and I'd like to see what the original intention was, given how strong It Takes You Away was I can't comprehend how Hime could write something this bad.
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Dec 8, 2023 13:19
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Jerusalem posted:Oh we did at least see the tail then! I couldn't remember and the fact the Doctor mentioned it a couple of times stood out to me. She's such a nothing character, in fact the whole staff setup at the spa makes no sense. Even running things on the cheap like they were the costs must have been exorbitant, which doesn't really make any sense if she hosed off out of her family's life to make something for her daughter to inherit. You managed to write that entire review without mentioning James Buckley's character or his kid at all. Reminds me a lot of Dan Olson summarising the entirety of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li without mentioning the two cops at all. "Guess we didn't need them!"
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Dec 8, 2023 13:21
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I did mention them very briefly, because they're pretty forgettable until the kid just decides now is the perfect time to throw a wobbly and race off. The editing is so bad that it leads to a hilarious point where the Doctor looks through a door and says,"I hope we can find him... oh there he is!" and he's like... directly in her line of sight, not remotely hiding at all. Their "costume" basically just being bad green wigs just adds to the feeling this was a Pip'n'Jane story that fell through a time portal and got made in 2020.
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Dec 8, 2023 13:27
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Jerusalem posted:I did mention them very briefly, because they're pretty forgettable until the kid just decides now is the perfect time to throw a wobbly and race off. The editing is so bad that it leads to a hilarious point where the Doctor looks through a door and says,"I hope we can find him... oh there he is!" and he's like... directly in her line of sight, not remotely hiding at all. Oops, yes you did - though correctly you didn't bother naming either of them because they just don't matter. And the Pip and Jane analogy is bang on.
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Dec 8, 2023 13:32
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I know I have seen it, but even with that review and the gifs from it, I don't remember it at allllll.
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Dec 8, 2023 14:06
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I remember thinking at the time that we knew Chibnall hired all new staff for Doctor Who when he took over, but had he hired anyone who actually worked in television before?
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Dec 8, 2023 14:13
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Jerusalem posted:Their "costume" basically just being bad green wigs just adds to the feeling this was a Pip'n'Jane story that fell through a time portal and got made in 2020. I recall going, "Are they trying to do a throwback episode with this terrible costuming?" It genuinely might have been but is an episode this bad it's impossible to tell what's intentional and what's just awful. Considering how badly Chibnall handled scheduling, I can only assume he tried to assemble Orphan 55 in the editing room after telling the director to shoot anything and they'd figure it out later. Of all the episodes in the Chibnall era, this is the one I'd like to get the full behind the scenes story on because I'm sure it was a disaster from start to finish.
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Dec 8, 2023 15:43
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https://twitter.com/bbcdoctorwho/status/1733118607700152526 They’re going to reveal 15’s sonic here on Sunday!
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Dec 8, 2023 16:00
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It wasn’t just scheduling, IIRC. I remember reading stuff about Chibs falling out with people due to poor script quality, directors vowing never to work on Who again, and Jodie stepping in to play diplomat between Sacha Dhawan and production. Not to mention the Sea Devils special being an especially notable clusterfuck (still haven’t seen it). I’ll need to dig back through and find context at some point again.
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Dec 8, 2023 16:02
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One thing I remember about Orphan 55 is that I feel as if they reused the main big white building's design in other episodes, in whole or in part. Wasn't it in The Timeless Child's flashbacks to the past
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Dec 8, 2023 16:23
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CommonShore posted:One thing I remember about Orphan 55 is that I feel as if they reused the main big white building's design in other episodes, in whole or in part. Wasn't it in The Timeless Child's flashbacks to the past It's a real place in the Canary Islands. Apparently they also filmed Foundation there.
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Dec 8, 2023 16:38
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