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Where there's a Will, there's a way out of prophecy.
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Dec 20, 2023 22:12
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| # ? Jun 1, 2024 19:41 |
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Warthur posted:Having rewatched The Lodger fairly recently, I think the problem for me is that it's a blend of Doctor Who and a romantic comedy, which runs into several issues: I disliked James Corden at the time but he won me over in his Doctor Who episodes. Now that he's had an extended career as an American talk show host, I'm back to hating him
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Dec 20, 2023 22:14
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Khanstant posted:Where there's a Will, there's a way out of prophecy. Except when there's a Wilf
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Dec 20, 2023 22:36
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For some reason this brought back to mind the little jokes - started by Lawrence Miles I think? - about "Barry the Silence" who hosed up their centuries of planning because he couldn't stop blabbing to Crowley. 
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Dec 20, 2023 22:41
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Christmas Carol is perfect and I will not be taking any comments at this time. 
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Dec 21, 2023 06:20
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LividLiquid posted:Christmas Carol is perfect and I will not be taking any comments at this time. Easily my favorite of the Christmas specials, especially the Smith specials.
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Dec 21, 2023 06:49
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LividLiquid posted:Christmas Carol is perfect and I will not be taking any comments at this time. "I'm a responsible adult." "That's just a bunch of wavy lines on paper?" ".....finally a lie too big...."
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Dec 21, 2023 06:49
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I respect Christmas Carol, but my favorite christmas special will always be Last Christmas. I hope whoever cast Nick Frost as Santa is happy with their work forever, because god damnit, that's still perfect.
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Dec 21, 2023 06:57
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Yeah, I adore Last Christmas. The Doctor and Clara racing down to the TARDIS together like kids at Christmas is just a perfect ending 
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Dec 21, 2023 07:10
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Moffat has worked some magic in his time, but making "it was all a dream" an actually happy ending is a trick for the ages. It's also got one of my favourite Doctor moments, where he tells Clara she's dreaming and she'll die if she doesn't wake up, and the scene ends with this exchange: CLARA: If this is a dream, how can you be here? How can we be having the same dream? DOCTOR: There was only one way to get to you. CLARA: And what was that? DOCTOR: I'm dying too.
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Dec 21, 2023 07:14
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I think my favorite has to be A Christmas Carol, with Time of the Doctor and Last Christmas as honorable mentions. Before jumping into the Pertwee era I made a quick stop at The Android Invasion, one of the few T. Bakers I’d never seen before. It was fine, pretty standard early Tom story that’s maybe a bit run of the mill. I do like the twist that the village isn’t actually on Earth, but a training ground for the eventual invasion.
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Dec 21, 2023 07:20
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Jerusalem posted:"I'm a responsible adult." Man you're going to make me rewatch all the Doctor Who Xmas specials aren't you..
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Dec 21, 2023 07:22
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Nobody likes the tangerines.
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Dec 21, 2023 07:49
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Cleretic posted:I respect Christmas Carol, but my favorite christmas special will always be Last Christmas. I... agree with Cleretic.
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Dec 21, 2023 08:20
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Infinitum posted:Man you're going to make me rewatch all the Doctor Who Xmas specials aren't you.. I'm sorry, but after you told me how much you feared the briar patch, I had no choice but to throw you in!
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Dec 21, 2023 08:25
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Last Christmas also has the bit where the Doctor is aghast at us having made a movie entitled Alien "No wonder everyone keeps invading you." Probably one of Moffat's best jokes.
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Dec 21, 2023 11:43
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Warthur posted:By drawing your attention to them, Moffat is doing exactly what he shouldn't be doing as a storyteller. The whole point of the art is to use narrative sleight of hand to direct the audience's attention to the bits which can bear that attention, and away from the bits which will disintegrate if the audience stares hard enough. Sure, it resolves one particular continuity mystery, but in doing so it turns every other contradiction the show incorporates from that point forward into a big, confusing red herring. I mean, you can argue that Doctor Who opened that can of worms way back at the start of the classic series, when The Rescue had the twist that the fakey looking monster was, in fact, just a guy in a fakey looking costume. Which, yeah, it's a fun twist, but it does sort of draw attention to all the other fakey looking monsters who we're meant to pretend look realistic.
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Dec 21, 2023 11:59
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TheBigBudgetSequel posted:Last Christmas also has the bit where the Doctor is aghast at us having made a movie entitled Alien https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5jSRtwk6iM It felt for the briefest of moments that Capaldi was truly channeling Malcolm Tucker.
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Dec 21, 2023 12:03
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Jerusalem posted:"I'm a responsible adult." "We're boys, and what do boys say in the face of danger? ...Mummy."
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Dec 21, 2023 12:52
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Oh yah, I wouldn't mind Dr. Mysterio coming back.
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Dec 21, 2023 13:25
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Watching The Impossible Astronaut and whilst the episode-specific plot is grand I've got big issues with the season arc. A "future version of the Doctor apparently dies" gambit is a great idea in principle, but it happened literally two episodes earlier, and it really is the sort of thing which you need to let rest a bit longer before you pull it out again. Plus with the benefit of hindsight I know it's going to turn out that the Doctor was shot due to the machinations of a big conspiracy that exists to stop the Doctor doing a thing which, as a result of them trying to stop it, ends up happening, which is basically the same concept as the Series 5 season arc and I really, really wish the Eleventh Doctor had been allowed to have a different season arc for once.
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Dec 21, 2023 13:30
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Mooseontheloose posted:Oh yah, I wouldn't mind Dr. Mysterio coming back. ... Really? I can honestly say that this episode is tied with others for the worse of the revival for me, and it's far and away the worst of the Christmas specials. Absolute dreck.
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Dec 21, 2023 13:33
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I don't even remember what happened in that episode
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Dec 21, 2023 14:21
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Warthur posted:Watching The Impossible Astronaut and whilst the episode-specific plot is grand I've got big issues with the season arc. Series six was just a disaster. Moffat got his perfect series five out there and then when people said, "Okay. What's next?" he just shrugged. The Silence were conceptually cool but then their plot just fizzled out. PriorMarcus posted:... Really? I think Voyage of the Damned is worse, but it's close.
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Dec 21, 2023 15:04
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Random Stranger posted:Series six was just a disaster. Moffat got his perfect series five out there and then when people said, "Okay. What's next?" he just shrugged. The Silence were conceptually cool but then their plot just fizzled out. Them being confessional priest makes no sense at all. Random Stranger posted:I think Voyage of the Damned is worse, but it's close. Voyage at least has Wilf's first appearance in it, so it beats Mysterio for me.
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Dec 21, 2023 15:17
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Random Stranger posted:Series six was just a disaster. Moffat got his perfect series five out there and then when people said, "Okay. What's next?" he just shrugged. The Silence were conceptually cool but then their plot just fizzled out. Silence-the-species I have reservations about because the plot and outcome of Day of the Moon lands differently in 2023, and should have been rethought in 2011. "There's a hidden group who are separate and distinct from the mass of the human race and who secretly control us all, manipulating us through the culture, and they are a bunch of parasites who make nothing for themselves but freeload off the work of those they exploit, but we can free ourselves of them if we merely wake up to their danger and kill them all" is a bit Nazi-ish, and by a bit Nazi-ish I mean it is the literal exact thing the Nazis believed about the Jewish people. It's a risk of doing any narrative riffing on conspiracy theories, because antisemitism was basically the original conspiracy theory and so much conspiracist stuff loops back to antisemitism - and the wider and broader and bigger the conspiracy gets, the more likely it is to end up turning into antisemitism - but I can just about see how you could be that thoughtless in 2011 because that was before people were going mask-off fascist quite so frequently in public. It's still not a great look and something which should have been caught at the time.
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Dec 21, 2023 15:39
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Warthur posted:Silence-the-cult is interesting in theory but in practice is just an exercise in spinning out the series 5 plot all the way through to Trenzalore, yeah. The Silence hanging out on Earth and influencing events also makes no sense with their origin. How do they go from far-future confessional priest for the Papal Mainframe to being spread all over Earth's history? Why do they even want to manipulate Earth's history?
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Dec 21, 2023 15:43
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Dr Mysterio is lightweight but a fun lil romp. Not a bad fit for Christmas. I enjoy the joke that Nardole was a few seconds late rescuing the Doctor because he went the wrong way and accidentally became ruler of ancient Mesopotamia
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Dec 21, 2023 15:46
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Random Stranger posted:Series six was just a disaster. Moffat got his perfect series five out there and then when people said, "Okay. What's next?" he just shrugged. The Silence were conceptually cool but then their plot just fizzled out. Series six had a lot of good poo poo in it, but as a season, it really was a trainwreck. Only one of the episodes fully works for me ("The Doctor's Wife"). Pretty much nothing in series seven is good to me, unless you count "Day of The Doctor" as part of the season.
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Dec 21, 2023 15:46
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2house2fly posted:Dr Mysterio is lightweight but a fun lil romp. Not a bad fit for Christmas. I enjoy the joke that Nardole was a few seconds late rescuing the Doctor because he went the wrong way and accidentally became ruler of ancient Mesopotamia I just hate the moment where The Doctor is joking and snacking whilst people are killed, and the actual superhero pastiche is cringey as gently caress with no worthwhile payoff. Also, the actor for
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Dec 21, 2023 15:51
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egon_beeblebrox posted:Series six had a lot of good poo poo in it, but as a season, it really was a trainwreck. Only one of the episodes fully works for me ("The Doctor's Wife"). Pretty much nothing in series seven is good to me, unless you count "Day of The Doctor" as part of the season. It's amazing that Riversong as a character kinda recovered cause it was awful for that season.
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Dec 21, 2023 16:13
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egon_beeblebrox posted:Pretty much nothing in series seven is good to me, unless you count "Day of The Doctor" as part of the season. I liked series seven way more than series six, but it’s been a decade at this point since I’ve watched either, so maybe I’d feel different watching now. I honestly don’t remember much more than a basic synopsis of most of the episodes, and just a general sense of how they made me feel at the time.
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Dec 21, 2023 16:27
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Mooseontheloose posted:It's amazing that Riversong as a character kinda recovered cause it was awful for that season. There's a really sharp shift in between Silence In the Library/Forest of the Dead, in which she was a competent, daring space archaeologist, and Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone, where Moffat decides "actually, she's a sexy badass assassin domme" which is exactly the same thing he turned Irene Adler and Mary Watson into in Sherlock. Utterly tragic to watch Moffat dip into his own past repertoire of characters to turn them all into exactly the same goddamn thing yet again.
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Dec 21, 2023 16:30
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Warthur posted:There's a really sharp shift in between Silence In the Library/Forest of the Dead, in which she was a competent, daring space archaeologist, and Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone, where Moffat decides "actually, she's a sexy badass assassin domme" which is exactly the same thing he turned Irene Adler and Mary Watson into in Sherlock. Utterly tragic to watch Moffat dip into his own past repertoire of characters to turn them all into exactly the same goddamn thing yet again. Also, losing focus on the fact that Doctor is suppose to learn more about her and she knows less each time they meet, which he tossed the second people like Riversong. Credit to Alex Kingston though for keeping people invested.
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Dec 21, 2023 16:44
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Mooseontheloose posted:Also, losing focus on the fact that Doctor is suppose to learn more about her and she knows less each time they meet, which he tossed the second people like Riversong. I don't think this was ever a necessary part of their relationship. They are meeting out of order, sure, and the start and ends of their relationship is reversed, but for their relationship to really blossom into what it's implied to be in Silence In the Library you really have to have a period where they are on equal footing more or less.
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Dec 21, 2023 16:50
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Mooseontheloose posted:Also, losing focus on the fact that Doctor is suppose to learn more about her and she knows less each time they meet, which he tossed the second people like Riversong. Did that ever actually come up again? I guess she didn't know Capaldi's face in The Husbands of River Song, but that's supposed to be right before Silence in the Library so she barely knows any less apart from that.
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Dec 21, 2023 16:51
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The assertion that Moffat abandoned "they meet in exactly reverse order" has always been a weird... I almost want to say cope? There's never been any claim of this in the show. Her very second appearance wasn't an immediate prelude to the Library! This was never the pattern. It's just a case of people being generally dissatisfied with the show (which is fine) trying to construct Objective Reasons Why Moffat Is Incompetent because they don't have the critical faculties to discuss the show's failings maturely.
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Dec 21, 2023 18:03
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When Mel’s first regenerated into River I got all excited imagining this whole season with River as an antagonist, and then Moffat just blew through it and she was basically just the same character we’d been introduced to in the Library for every other appearance. Which, I liked River, but the idea of a character arc being out of order was really interesting, you could do so much stuff with a relationship where they are both married and Rivers past is also literally coming back to try and murder him and what does that do to a relationship and can he even really trust future River if he hasn’t himself saved her yet and doesn’t know for sure he ever does and….well, instead, we got a one dimensional Mrs Robinson that was saved largely by good dialogue, some decent individual stories and the acting chops of Alex Kingston. Eh. Maybe doing more is just too much to do with someone who wasn’t main cast when you’ve also got arcs for The Doctor and the Ponds to worry about.
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Dec 21, 2023 18:07
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I tried watching a show recently and after I gave it up, I went to look up all the Who actors I recognized and lol it was a Moffat show. I wasn't hooked so I looked up the synopsis and it read like a rejected Doctor Who script reworked into a mystery/cop show. Capaldi himself ended up being some kind of wobbly wobbly timey wimey timelooped immortal who was trying to correct the world based on knowledge from his repeating lives. Reckon all the murders is why it couldn't work on Who.
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Dec 21, 2023 18:08
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| # ? Jun 1, 2024 19:41 |
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The Silence (species) had some interesting stuff going on, albeit with the feel of Moffat *really* trying to make the Weeping Angels lightning strike twice. (I liked the idea that they were some kind of archetype for Greys or Men In Black… very X-Files, love that kind of thing). What I never liked was the Doctor’s plan to defeat them by splicing in the “you should kill us all on sight” clip. Like, well done, Doctor, you’ve just weaponised every human born after 1969 to become unthinking and unwitting murderers of a sentient species, willing to pull a gun without a second’s thought. “The Man Who Never Would”, huh?
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Dec 21, 2023 18:24
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