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DoctorWhat posted:Amy Pond, in that first series especially is mentally ill in a way that pushes against the bounds of sympathy. If you don't take it seriously you can skim over it, which is sort of the original intent. If you know someone like her in real life (*raises hand*), you can either appreciate it or be turned off hard. I can absolutely see that in the writing for Amy, and it's something I wish had been explored more with her. I think it, and Clara, fall apart a bit when you realize it's kind of the only way Moffat knows how to write women, and ironically is probably an ailment he's suffering from himself when writing those women. It kind of loops back around from interesting but flawed into being a bit off putting. Infinitum posted:Good ol washing machine hatch Oh my God it really is just a washing machine door! PriorMarcus fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Dec 18, 2023 |
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Dec 18, 2023 14:22
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PriorMarcus posted:I can absolutely see that in the writing for Amy, and it's something I wish had been explored more with her. I think it, and Clara, fall apart a bit when you realize it's kind of the only way Moffat knows how to write women, and ironically is probably an ailment he's suffering from himself when writing those women. I'd say that Bill breaks out of this format pretty cleanly. You get the feeling that the year break gave the Moff a real opportunity to relax and refresh, especially after the tumultuous personal and professional stuff going on for his first five-ish years.
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Dec 18, 2023 14:28
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PriorMarcus posted:I can absolutely see that in the writing for Amy, and it's something I wish had been explored more with her. I think it, and Clara, fall apart a bit when you realize it's kind of the only way Moffat knows how to write women, and ironically is probably an ailment he's suffering from himself when writing those women. 1) Amy is meant to be really messed up like that for Reasons, but other women aren't, but because new-Who is very fast-paced and doesn't really have time to dig into that sort of thing it's not explained brilliantly. 2) Amy is meant to be really messed up like that, and so are all women, because Moffat consciously or unconsciously believes that all women are messed up. 3) Amy is not really meant to be messed up beyond having a big crush on the Doctor and Moffat just badly misjudged the scene. I mean, I think the intent is 1), but that's the kindest interpretation and it is still not great. Not least because "I didn't mean to make this person I knew since they were 7 fall in love with me, it just went out of my control" feels like the sort of lie abusers tell themselves. EDIT: and if it is a mental illness symptom on Amy's past, then that makes playing it for laughs worse worse WORSE, not better.
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Dec 18, 2023 14:30
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Cleretic posted:I also looked into this, and I get a bit of a kick about why he thinks Flatline turned out that way the first time: he was scared of Doctor Who as a kid, so he avoided it. The original Flatline was basically an adult writing the Doctor Who that exists in a terrified child's mind. It's a sort of darkly appropriate way to whiff on Doctor Who, but it does make me a lot more interested in his other work. Live action kids shows used to be a pipeline for actors and writers to learn their craft, as well as the mechanics of getting a show actually made. The fact that ITV are basically making no live action kids shows any more (and the Beeb are making less than they used to), sucks.
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Dec 18, 2023 14:31
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DoctorWhat posted:I'd say that Bill breaks out of this format pretty cleanly. You get the feeling that the year break gave the Moff a real opportunity to relax and refresh, especially after the tumultuous personal and professional stuff going on for his first five-ish years. Bill is easily the best companion of Moffat's run. He also had Missy to fill that role that season, so all of that nonsense got put onto her instead, it's just it works with Missy because of her being the Master and because Gomez is so loving great.
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Dec 18, 2023 14:31
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PriorMarcus posted:Bill is easily the best companion of Moffat's run. He also had Missy to fill that role that season, so all of that nonsense got put onto her instead, it's just it works with Missy because of her being the Master and because Gomez is so loving great. Bill is great but I'm a late-period Clara stan because it feels like Moffat finally dialing in how to depict that kind of dysfunctional, maladaptive behavior explicitly and precisely. The trouble is that doing so pretty firmly pushed the driving subject matter of Doctor Who out of the target zone of "kids and family television" and into "serious adult drama with Daleks in it", which was never gonna work for everyone and had a very real risk of working for nearly no one.
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Dec 18, 2023 14:41
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DoctorWhat posted:Amy Pond, in that first series especially is mentally ill in a way that pushes against the bounds of sympathy. If you don't take it seriously you can skim over it, which is sort of the original intent. If you know someone like her in real life (*raises hand*), you can either appreciate it or be turned off hard. I don't buy that Amy is mentally ill tbh, because I don't think her behaviour significantly changes between her first season and her later two after time is fixed. But also the way the temporal erasure works isn't mentally debilitating. It's not like Jenga, where if you take enough pieces away the tower wobbles and eventually collapses. The tower just stays together no matter how impossible it is, because that's just now how it works. That said uhhh I'm not sure that conflating kink (which is normal and mentally healthy, and probably isn't caused by someone watching a cartoon "at the wrong point in their lives", a fairly loaded idea in and of itself) with mental illness is a good way to make that point.
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Dec 18, 2023 14:42
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DoctorWhat posted:Bill is great but I'm a late-period Clara stan because it feels like Moffat finally dialing in how to depict that kind of dysfunctional, maladaptive behavior explicitly and precisely. I think my problem with late-period Clara is that all of the character work for her is great, and the drama of it is great, but it was hurt by Jenna Coleman wanting to leave every season, and anything to do with the Hybrid, which was just a wet fart of a season long mystery for me. Also, Me/Ashlidr likewise fell flat and Clara's arc is really tied to her sadly. I just don't think Maisie Williams is that good an actress, especially next to Capaldi and Coleman.
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Dec 18, 2023 14:45
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I wanna make it clear that I have no animus or ill regard for forever delitization or rouge the bat vore or anything like that. The trouble with Amy comes from her adolescent psychosexual paraphilia showing up in real life and sweeping her away. Also, like, sure Amy's parents came back. But that doesn't mean she has any real experiences of growing up with them. And all the way through Series 5, she's clearly dealing with severe abandonment issues that she can't even rationalize because the cause of the abandonment is science fantasy nightmare poo poo.
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Dec 18, 2023 14:46
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Bill was such a great companion, I'm both sad we only got one season and also glad that it meant what we got never had to be watered down. Also tangential, I love the delivery on Toymaker's,"Then he met Bill. Not Stooky Bill, no, LADY Bill!"
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Dec 18, 2023 14:47
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DoctorWhat posted:I wanna make it clear that I have no animus or ill regard for forever delitization or rouge the bat vore or anything like that. The trouble with Amy comes from her adolescent psychosexual paraphilia showing up in real life and sweeping her away. Amy's arc probably would of come together better if there'd been any consistency with it. Her parents came back, never to be seen again. She raised Melody as the "responsible" kid, though she certainly didn't seem have her poo poo together in Season Five. Her and Rory are destined to be together and are a forever love, but she wants to bone the Doctor constantly. She looses her child, and is held captive to give birth to them so they can become a future assassin, but it's the Weeping Angels that end up being one step too far for her to keep travelling.
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Dec 18, 2023 14:49
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PriorMarcus posted:She looses her child, and is held captive to give birth to them so they can become a future assassin, but it's the Weeping Angels that end up being one step too far for her to keep travelling.
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Dec 18, 2023 14:52
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Warthur posted:The Weeping Angels come back early on in Amy's stint as a companion. They break people's necks and eat critical bits of their faculties to speak with their voices and whatnot, because shunting people back in time stops being threatening when the Doctor has the TARDIS available to just go collect them. (Yeah, yeah, yadda yadda, fixed points in time, can't go back on your own timestream - whatever, even if you find an obituary for someone you can just rescue them anyway then plant the fake obituary.) Then Weeping Angels show up who are shunting people back in time again and Amy and Rory get themselves shunted and don't simply put a classified ad in the paper wherever they end up so the Doctor can come collect them. Weird. Plus one of them is the Statue of Liberty!
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Dec 18, 2023 14:55
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The River arc threw me way off series 6. They lose their child, eventually find out via seeing the future that they'll never get their child back, and... then just go on having adventures. Amy doesn't even leave and go back home of her own decision, the Doctor has to... buy her a house?? I was so gratified later in series 8 when Clara a) got furious and wanted to stop travelling with the Doctor when he hosed up, and b) reacted to the loss of a loved one by proposing that they use their time machine to stop it happening. They both felt like Moffat realising what he should have had Amy do and having someone else do it as soon as the opportunity came along
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Dec 18, 2023 14:57
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I think the arc of Amy's recovery is her choosing Rory over the Doctor, which in terms of the metaphor means that she chose to live in the real world rather than chase the fantasy that got her through her childhood. The problem with interrogating that too much is that the Doctor doesn't end up looking very good, which is sort of explored more intentionally with Clara.
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Dec 18, 2023 14:58
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2house2fly posted:The River arc threw me way off series 6. They lose their child, eventually find out via seeing the future that they'll never get their child back, and... then just go on having adventures. Amy doesn't even leave and go back home of her own decision, the Doctor has to... buy her a house?? I was so gratified later in series 8 when Clara a) got furious and wanted to stop travelling with the Doctor when he hosed up, and b) reacted to the loss of a loved one by proposing that they use their time machine to stop it happening. They both felt like Moffat realising what he should have had Amy do and having someone else do it as soon as the opportunity came along It just came across as so artificially that not a single character reacted to that realistically. I don't think Rory even got a moment to react to it, when he's previously been shown to be furious with the Doctor when stuff like that happens. Just awful. Moffat had so many great ideas, for every level of the show, but I feel like in retrospect none of them actually came together well in the end. At the time I just remember getting burnt out on his recurring story beats, and being kind of disappointed with his run, but with distance I can appreciate all he tried to do, whilst recognizing that I don't think any of it was that successful. Bicyclops posted:I think the arc of Amy's recovery is her choosing Rory over the Doctor, which in terms of the metaphor means that she chose to live in the real world rather than chase the fantasy that got her through her childhood. The problem with interrogating that too much is that the Doctor doesn't end up looking very good, which is sort of explored more intentionally with Clara. Amy's ending would've been much better if she hadn't been stuck in the past, cut off from all her family that Season Five had brought back, or Rory's dad the season had just introduced.
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Dec 18, 2023 15:03
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DoctorWhat posted:Also, like, sure Amy's parents came back. But that doesn't mean she has any real experiences of growing up with them. And all the way through Series 5, she's clearly dealing with severe abandonment issues that she can't even rationalize because the cause of the abandonment is science fantasy nightmare poo poo. She had them and she didn't have them. They disappeared when she was a kid, but the timeline where they didn't disappear still, basically, exists in so much as everything still operates as if they were still there. Like I said, the Jenga tower stays up no matter how many pieces get removed, including all the pieces that haven't been put in the tower yet.
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Dec 18, 2023 15:04
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On the topic of kink, I do definitely think Moffat has a thing for exhibitionism, or, “guy being naked in front of clothed others”. Like, it turns up in Blink, Eleventh Hour, Time Of The Doctor. It also crops up in Coupling and Sherlock, and I feel there was another time I can’t remember (maybe Dracula?). Whatever, it’s as valid a kink as any, provided everyone involved is fully consenting (which, in this case is maybe hard to establish). But it is weird just how many times it’s cropped up in his writing.
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Dec 18, 2023 15:05
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Matinee posted:On the topic of kink, I do definitely think Moffat has a thing for exhibitionism, or, “guy being naked in front of clothed others”. Like, it turns up in Blink, Eleventh Hour, Time Of The Doctor. It also crops up in Coupling and Sherlock, and I feel there was another time I can’t remember (maybe Dracula?). Yeah, in Dracula the titular character is naked for a major scene in the first episode.
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Dec 18, 2023 15:06
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Matinee posted:On the topic of kink, I do definitely think Moffat has a thing for exhibitionism He definitely has a fetish for strong, maybe crazy women and he seems to like power games. It's there with Jane and Sally in Coupling and threaded all the way through Jeckyll. Plus all the various Kovarian / Tasha Lem / River / Irene Adler types that turn up in his work.
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Dec 18, 2023 15:12
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Open Source Idiom posted:He definitely has a fetish for strong, maybe crazy women and he seems to like power games. It's there with Jane and Sally in Coupling and threaded all the way through Jeckyll. Plus all the various Kovarian / Tasha Lem / River / Irene Adler types that turn up in his work. I'd love to know if there was more to Tasha Lem than was put on screen. She certainly seems like a victim of condensing the plot down into one last special.
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Dec 18, 2023 15:13
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PriorMarcus posted:I'd love to know if there was more to Tasha Lem than was put on screen. It certainly reads like it was written to be River or maybe even Madam Kovarian originally and then the actor wasn't available. There are definitely a couple lines that feel like they weren't rewritten from a draft where it was River.
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Dec 18, 2023 15:20
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Warthur posted:Got to the end of Flesh and Stone and holy poo poo the "let's have Amy sexually assault the Doctor but play it for laughs" scene is terrible. Just absolute dogshit. A lot of the shaky early stories of Moffat's run as showrunner feel to me like they've got all the parts of a really good story, but the bits haven't been put together correctly, and without that Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone would be one of those, but the assault sequence is horrid. Don't forget the time in one of those "minisodes" between stories where Rory messes up the TARDIS because it has glass floors and he get distracted looking up Amy's skirt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E-wzgx1Vzc jisforjosh fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Dec 18, 2023 |
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Dec 18, 2023 15:21
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Am I right in thinking she was meant to be the payoff of the line from A Good Man Goes To War of “by decree of the Papal Mainframe herself”? (which I always found to be a really neat sci-fi worldbuilding allusion)
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Dec 18, 2023 15:22
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Matinee posted:Am I right in thinking she was meant to be the payoff of the line from A Good Man Goes To War of “by decree of the Papal Mainframe herself”? (which I always found to be a really neat sci-fi worldbuilding allusion) Yep. Unfortunately she gets only a minute or so of screentime before it's revealed she's been infected with a Dalek virus or something.
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Dec 18, 2023 15:23
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I assume we would have gotten more Tasha Lem if Moffat’s “extended arc on Trenzalore” plan didn’t get derailed due to Smith wanting to leave.
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Dec 18, 2023 15:29
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Rochallor posted:It certainly reads like it was written to be River or maybe even Madam Kovarian originally and then the actor wasn't available. There are definitely a couple lines that feel like they weren't rewritten from a draft where it was River. Equally possible that it's just Moff's limited repertoire of characters rearing its head again - like how Amy and Rory are kind of recycled versions of Sally and Larry from Blink once you set aside Amy's Doctor fixation.
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Dec 18, 2023 15:37
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Warthur posted:Equally possible that it's just Moff's limited repertoire of characters rearing its head again - like how Amy and Rory are kind of recycled versions of Sally and Larry from Blink once you set aside Amy's Doctor fixation. Oh yeah, it's 100% this as much as it is that she was meant to be a returning character. But even if she was a returning character it would still be this too.
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Dec 18, 2023 15:38
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I should really re-watch Time Of The Doctor again. I don’t think I’ve seen it since around the time it aired (because I found it such a letdown after the all time high of Day Of The Doctor). But it’ll be interesting to see it with the mindset of “this is four/five episodes-worth of season arc plot crunched down into an hour”
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Dec 18, 2023 15:52
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Matinee posted:I should really re-watch Time Of The Doctor again. I don’t think I’ve seen it since around the time it aired (because I found it such a letdown after the all time high of Day Of The Doctor). But it’ll be interesting to see it with the mindset of “this is four/five episodes-worth of season arc plot crunched down into an hour” I can't remember where I read this but I think at one point the plan was for an entire season to take place on Trenzalore. Not so much like the Flux, but just having stand alone stories taking place on one planet that the Doctor has sworn to protect, him unable to leave whilst all the side characters grow up and change around him.
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Dec 18, 2023 15:54
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I always found Amy saying "you definitely may kiss the bride" to the Doctor at her wedding TO RORY was the weirdest goddamn thing. At the time of originally watching it, I chuckled about it because I like how the Doctor responds to that, but the actual act of it is mega hosed up. I liked Amy and Rory a lot, but that first season was a touch rough when it came to their character development.
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Dec 18, 2023 15:56
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TheBigBudgetSequel posted:I always found Amy saying "you definitely may kiss the bride" to the Doctor at her wedding TO RORY was the weirdest goddamn thing. At the time of originally watching it, I chuckled about it because I like how the Doctor responds to that, but the actual act of it is mega hosed up. Yeah, the dude had just got back two thousand years worth of memories of being an undead plastic soldier, and the first thing Amy does is kiss another man.
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Dec 18, 2023 15:57
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PriorMarcus posted:I can't remember where I read this but I think at one point the plan was for an entire season to take place on Trenzalore. Not so much like the Flux, but just having stand alone stories taking place on one planet that the Doctor has sworn to protect, him unable to leave whilst all the side characters grow up and change around him. That's actually not a bad idea, as far as seasons of Doctor Who go. It's unique enough not to be a retread of Three being trapped on Earth and it's not really a "bottle" season because there's a whole alien planet to work with, so they can still pull out all the rubber masks and green screen backdrops, lol. You can maintain the sense of wonder and discovery while still having the Doctor "stay behind for once."
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Dec 18, 2023 15:59
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PriorMarcus posted:Yeah, the dude had just got back two thousand years worth of memories of being an undead plastic soldier, and the first thing Amy does is kiss another man. Amy sexually abusing the Doctor was bad but Amy emotionally abusing Rory is not something I am looking forward to on this rewatch, my main memory is that she treats him without a shred of respect at all. Which is probably playing into Moffat's fetish for Smug Women Who Are Better Than You And Will Bully You About It, but still.
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Dec 18, 2023 16:04
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Warthur posted:Amy sexually abusing the Doctor was bad but Amy emotionally abusing Rory is not something I am looking forward to on this rewatch, my main memory is that she treats him without a shred of respect at all. Which is probably playing into Moffat's fetish for Smug Women Who Are Better Than You And Will Bully You About It, but still. This is my memory of it too unfortunately.
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Dec 18, 2023 16:06
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E: re Trenzalore - I wonder if the plan was still to have the Doctor/Eleven visibly age throughout the season. In a kind of “if the Doctor stands still on a planet, he only deals with Daleks or Weeping Angels every six hundred years or so” kind of way. Obviously London in the twentieth century is the exception to this rule.
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Dec 18, 2023 16:08
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Matinee posted:I wonder if the plan was still to have the Doctor/Eleven visibly age throughout the season. In a kind of “if the Doctor stands still on a planet, he only deals with Daleks or Weeping Angels every six hundred years or so” kind of way. That's my understanding of the original plan. Yeah. You'd introduce a child in one episode, and have them be a grown up in the next. Or have the main setting evolve around the Doctor, with the clock tower being a constant but otherwise moving from pre-industrial styles into modern day buildings etc.
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Dec 18, 2023 16:10
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Moffat desperately needing some kind of a domme or whatever and it constantly coming out through his writing is like everything else about his writing where like, at first you can be like "Well, it's low-key enough, that guy forgot to put his pants on, they sure did dwell on it for a weirdly long time, but overall this is a good episode," and by the time it's happened on multiple shows, you're like "Jesus Christ, Steven, save it for the apps." Like you could do the John Irving chart that has stuff like "contains bears" or "features wrestling" but for seasons of television written by Steven Moffat. The man is more compulsive about his calling cards than Marv from the Wet Bandits.
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Dec 18, 2023 16:12
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Bicyclops posted:The man is more compulsive about his calling cards than Marv from the Wet Bandits. This is an incredible simile and I will absolutely appropriate it in the future.
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Dec 18, 2023 16:18
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HD DAD posted:I assume we would have gotten more Tasha Lem if Moffat’s “extended arc on Trenzalore” plan didn’t get derailed due to Smith wanting to leave. Wonder what the Year of Matt Smith Specials would've been like had he stayed around Well, probably we'd get the stories about all the little tidbits glimpsed at in Time of the Doctor
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