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This episode was very bold and clever. Its structure is weird but that's because it's a trick: it acts like it's going to be a Moffat-esque spooky sense-based monster episode, and then near the end reveals that all along it's been a personal piece about the Doctor's desperate desire to see for himself what it was that was under his bed that night, in a way that places him as vulnerable and questioning rather than tally-ho, seeing off the monster of the week with a surge of Murray Gold. It wasn't my favourite of the episodes so far this season, but I thought that willingness to play around with structure and subvert the cliche was really interesting and made it one to remember.
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Sep 13, 2014 23:56
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RunAndGun posted:Something wrote "Listen" on the TARDIS chalkboard. And all those accounts throughout history of the same dream? Clara points out that it looks like the Doctor's handwriting and makes clear that he quite possibly could have written it down and forgotten, because he's that kind of person. A dream where you wake up partially and hallucinate something else being in the room with you actually is a real phenomenon experienced cross-culturally, because it's one of the ways in which sleep paralysis manifests (also hypothesised as the partial source of incubus/succubus/demon myths). The Doctor just reads all that material through his own personal lens because he's always wondered what happened to him that night in the barn and is determined to turn it into a grand, heroic unified theory as a way of coping. There's a very strong case in the episode, and I think this is much of its strength, for there never having been any monster at all. Every single thing the unseen monster "does" is offered an explicit on-screen explanation for what could actually be happening, and then at the end we find out that the thing which caused the Doctor to pursue the monster in the first place was actually a totally explicable event. It's much more about the psychology of fear and how people cope with it than any kind of supernatural adventure.
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Sep 14, 2014 03:44
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I think it's brilliant that for once the Doctor is entirely wrong from foot to toe and his ludicrous, larger-than-life approach to the world is in this case just a way of coping with a basic, very human insecurity. It's not the kind of plot arc you'd want to see all the time in Doctor Who, but being able to shake up the formula and have the Doctor be operating under a complete and total misapprehension for once is really clever, the more so because it's exactly the sort of theory he would formulate and get really excited about despite its basic improbability.
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Sep 14, 2014 03:59
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Clara doesn't have a clear memory of all her alternate lives which lead up to saving the Doctor from the Great Intelligence - she mentions it in one of the episodes around that time.
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Sep 15, 2014 00:50
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SNAKES N CAKES posted:Is that really what this episode was doing? They didn't even bother to give a techobabble explanation about why that door would have unlocked on its own. The Doctor unlocked it with his screwdriver. That's not a plausible explanation, that's what actually happens on screen.
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Sep 15, 2014 05:30
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Jerusalem posted:I feel like an idiot for never even considering the one option somebody bought up earlier that maybe the kid trying to spook Rupert (and his two weird adult friends oh poo poo what have I walked into how do I get out of this oh wait the Scottish dude is giving me an out!) might have been wearing a fright mask in order to freak out Rupert if he had the guts to pull the sheet away. Yeah, I never thought of that but it's actually incredibly plausible. It's not like those things are rare or hard to get, kids wear them for Halloween all the time.
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Sep 15, 2014 05:55
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Yeah, it didn't look nearly wartorn enough in Day of the Doctor to be Gallifrey proper - it looked like some obscure place the Doctor had flitted off to after stealing the Moment. The Time Lords were/are very powerful, they probably had an empire spanning multiple planets, or at very least a boarding school retreat on some distant moon.
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Sep 15, 2014 07:09
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It doesn't seem like you're indifferent, BioMe, it seems like you were fairly angry that people were talking about it. It's perfectly possible to talk about it on a reasonable basis but posting "why won't you all shut up crying about this" is probably not the way to go about that.
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Sep 15, 2014 21:45
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I like River a lot until the later episodes where she goes from being a dynamic, interesting figure, the Doctor's equal who has her own cool space adventures and can match him wit for wit, to a tragic, weepy figure who is totally obsessed with the Doctor and tolerated by him on the basis that he pities her. Like, in Name of the Doctor, he straight up just sends her away like "it's time to go now River", as if he's her dad sending her to bed. I think there are two camps, roughly speaking, of people who dislike River Song. There are people who dislike her on the basis that she's kind of larger than life and action-y and flirts with the Doctor a lot, and there are people who dislike her on the basis that she becomes, increasingly, a sad, uncomfortable figure who feels distinctly subordinate to the Doctor. Obviously enough, I fall into the latter camp - I think the feminist aspects of River's character early on, to wit that she can match the Doctor in the field of adventure and sometimes outdo him, much outweigh the slightly pander-y parts of her. The part of her I think is un-feminist is that dynamic characterisation being undermined until she's just a lonely Doctor groupie desperate for his attention.
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Sep 16, 2014 01:00
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Irish Joe's whole MO is just to post contrary opinions in various TVIV threads in hopes of riling someone up. I'd take him with a grain of salt.
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Sep 16, 2014 02:15
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I don't really see it, moths. Twelve seems to me like he has no romantic interest in Clara whatsoever but rather considers her sensible, intelligent and reliable. Maybe the leaked scripts had notation suggesting jealousy on the Doctor's part, but I don't think it shows up even slightly on the screen. When he apologises to her in Deep Breath for acting like her boyfriend before, it's an apology for the flirty way he was leading her on as Eleven, which he now realises was unhealthy and inappropriate. I can agree that maybe there's an issue with all his oblivious insulting of her being looks-focused, but at the same time I think a lot of it is too weird to really play into that narrative, and some of it clearly isn't malicious - like, when Capaldi delivers "her face is so wide, she needs three mirrors", he sounds more impressed than anything. The bit where he assumes she's already taken her makeup off reads way more as his inability to tell whether Clara is wearing makeup or not, to me, combined with an impatience to get her to come with him, than a process of "you look ugly - you must not be wearing any makeup". It's not all like that, and if it continues apace maybe I'll change my mind, but I don't think it's particularly bad so far, and it's more than made up for by how important, confident, capable and pro-active Clara has been in these episodes. She's interesting, charismatic, good with the Doctor, good at solving problems, though not without her own flaws...I think the amount of spotlight she's getting in these episodes and the way it's framed is really feminist. At this point she's not the Doctor's sidekick but feels like she's genuinely sharing centre stage as one of two heroes.
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Sep 16, 2014 02:59
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Hurt is sidelined and just referred to as the War Doctor. It actually doesn't matter that much because the numbering is used almost exclusively for fan discussions and hardly ever pops up in the show, or yeah, I'd kind of feel like he should be retroactively the Ninth Doctor. As it is, though, no big!
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Sep 16, 2014 03:11
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MattD1zzl3 posted:I have a fun question: What if matt smith wasnt shown the door last year, what if he was wrapping up his fourth season on the show and rumors were floating around that, No, he wouldnt be leaving before his fifth. If he had stuck around longer than any newwho doctor and was gunning hard for Tom Bakers longevity record: Would you be annoyed? Would he be wearing thin at this point? Were the fevered cries in 2010 of "He can stay for a million years" actually going to have legs? Matt Smith owned and I would have been happy to have him in the role for as long as he wanted to do it. I don't think his chemistry with Coleman was all that good, though, and Capaldi is really great at being the Doctor too.
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Sep 16, 2014 03:18
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It really all comes down to the "He's my boyfriend~" line. There's almost no way you can resolve that that isn't kind of weird and cringeworthy. I mean, unless it's the Master. Then it becomes maybe retroactively fantastic.
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Sep 16, 2014 20:59
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Gaz-L posted:I'd agree with most of these. I do think it's funny that no-one can agree on one for Seven at all. We've had like 5 or 6 different suggestions. Seven just has so many good lines. I don't know if anyone has mentioned it, but another candidate might be his conversation with Davros in Remembrance of the Daleks. "Unimaginable power! Unlimited rice pudding! Etcetera, etcetera!"
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Sep 18, 2014 22:43
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I love the question marks. Seven's question mark jumper is hilarious.
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Sep 19, 2014 03:29
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I didn't like this one much. The concepts were all good but I don't think it came together in a satisfying way - Saibra and Si felt too much like stock characters who exposited a bit of backstory at one point rather than being properly characterised. I think it also loses the bank heist feel once they're in the maintenance tunnels, the episode's sense of urgency slowly evaporates from that point and it just feels a bit weird that apparently these tunnels are largely unsecured and go absolutely everywhere to the point where they can just walk up to the main vault. Still some good bits, loved Capaldi, liked Coleman.
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Sep 21, 2014 11:02
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I feel like, much as Moffat is against them, this is an episode that would have looked really good as a two-parter just to give all the plot beats a bit more space and make the characters feel more meaningful. It felt like a movie plot crammed into a TV show's time allotment, to me.
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Sep 21, 2014 12:23
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I don't know if Twelve is poking fun at high heels so much as he literally does not understand them, and is baffled as to why Clara has special shoes to make her taller. He's a very abstract man.
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Sep 24, 2014 13:46
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I like this thread. I think there is a lot of disagreement here, but it's mostly very good-spirited and polite and people make an effort to understand others' point of view. And many of the posters are very interesting and full of opinions!
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Sep 26, 2014 18:39
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This episode was fantastic. The fake Matt Smith bit was superbly set up and executed, really really funny. I really like how they're doing character-focused stuff this season and the episodes aren't necessarily as self-contained on that front as you'd expect. A lot of character beats feel like they're aiming to develop down the line.
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Sep 28, 2014 17:23
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I really loved this episode. I hope Courtney recurs again, it was a cool dynamic having multiple companions and the bit about her posting their adventure on Tumblr made me crack up. I'm just so excited about the characters this season - Clara and the Doctor both are getting loads of interesting character work that seems to progress meaningfully from episode to episode, and they're both a treat to watch on screen as well. e: also the science holds together as well as Doctor Who's science has ever needed to. A growing organism increases in mass, a dead organism decays. Nukes wouldn't explode the moon but would probably produce a shockwave large enough to stop an embyro's heart inside its egg, plus of course the radiation. An organism that lays a very large egg upon hatching seems materially less likely, but probably remains significantly more plausible than a bigger-on-the-inside spaceship that can travel through time. Android Blues fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Oct 7, 2014 |
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Oct 7, 2014 02:46
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marktheando posted:Yeah. Abortion is really not a controversial topic over here- aside from a few old conservative fossils and religious lunatics nobody thinks abortion should be banned. The last parliamentary vote on the topic had a vast majority of all political parties vote in favour of the status quo, in favour of abortion rights. Yeah, anyone reading this episode as being anything to do with abortion except on an extremely superficial level is baffling to me. The analogy doesn't hold up for even like two steps (if you don't get this abortion...billions might die!!) and, as mentioned, abortion is not a controversial issue in Britain at all, the pro-life movement is very much an American cultural artefact. As others have mentioned, the central analogy of the episode feels to be much more about reactive militarism, and the struggle between pre-emptively killing to protect yourself even if it's morally unjust, and risking your safety by respecting the life and autonomy of other people. This also fits with the season's overarching theme of soldiers, and how they may do terrible things in war with a notion of protecting themselves or others, and whether or not (the show leans 'not', but with the Doctor being an unreliable perspective it's still an open question!) it's possible to justify this. How the Doctor talks to Captain Lundvik when he realises she wants to kill the baby is very like how he's talked to the military throughout the season so far, and I think that's the moment where he thinks, 'oh, you're one of them, are you'. Android Blues fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Oct 7, 2014 |
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Oct 7, 2014 14:00
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On the topic of Turn Left, I saw a (non-Doctor Who!) fanfiction prompt the other day which wanted writers to submit a 'turn left' AU where the normal events of a story progressed much worse because of one small, fateful decision somewhere down the line. It tickles me that this has apparently become an accepted fanfiction term. 
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Oct 7, 2014 14:42
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Unkempt posted:How anyone can watch a debate about killing an unborn being in order to safeguard others and not think it's about abortion utterly baffles me. And there are plenty of anti-abortionists in Britain; I don't know what evidence you have that the writer isn't one of them, but I've got a whole episode of Doctor Who that suggests he might be. Because as a science fiction analogy it doesn't stretch even to the first step. I guess you have to read the Earth as the mother of the child? So if you allow the baby to be born it might destroy your body and all your...population? Except you don't have any say because you're non-sentient? So it's up to all the parasites that live on you to decide whether to get the abortion or not? The essential premise of the episode is "allowing this creature to live would endanger many other people, possibly absolutely everyone". It doesn't apply to arguments surrounding human babies at all unless you reductively boil down "absolutely everyone" to "like, a pregnant woman's psyche or something, right?".
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Oct 7, 2014 15:14
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Bicyclops posted:Let's Kill Hitler is so intentionally crass that it actually has them stuffing him in a closet, though. It literally doesn't pull its punches, it's sort of like To Be or Not to Be, except with a bizarre stupid plot about how the Doctor's sort-of niece is also his femme fatale wife and would-be assassin, making it a Very Bad Episode. I have very mixed feelings about Let's Kill Hitler. On one hand, I love the idea of a way more reckless time traveller than the Doctor just being like "oh, let's run and kill Hitler, then!". I also like Mels! But River transforming from "Amy and Rory's devil-may-care friend" to "evil assassin" to "adoring fangirl" in the course of one episode that mostly takes place in the same room just feels like way too much. Having the same character attempt to murder, and then sacrifice their eternal life for, the Doctor within the course of about twenty minutes of sitting around talking is a narrative stretch that really does not function in the episode.
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Oct 7, 2014 15:20
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I feel like "many of the principal characters are women, therefore it's about abortion" is super simplistic. There's zero mother symbolism in the story: neither Courtney nor Clara nor Lundvik have any particular connection to the creature other than as a foreign life. There's no suggestion that any of them have anything like a maternal or a genitive relationship to it. There's even an exchange where Lundvik suggests that a negative consequence of letting the creature hatch might be the death of a bunch of human babies, which really makes any attempt to contextualise her character as a strawman caricature of the pro-choice position extremely muddy. Incidentally, while rooting around for quotes from this episode, I noticed this little gem: quote:Doctor: Listen. There are moments in every civilization’s history in which the whole path of that civilization is decided; the whole future path. Whatever future humanity might have depends upon the choice that is made right here and right now. Now, you’ve got the tools to kill it; you made them. You brought them up here all on your own with your own ingenuity. You don’t need a Time Lord. Kill it or let it live, I can’t make this decision for you. I never realised the first time around that, of course, the President of America is there helping to make this decision, it's just that she happens to be fifteen at the moment. e: also, oh man, I never realised this, but Courtney was the girl in Clara's flashback in Deep Breath who tells her, "Go on. Do it." and who inspires her strategy for dealing with the Half-Face Man. That's really cool. It feels like this character has been quite subtly built up over several episodes! Android Blues fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Oct 7, 2014 |
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Oct 7, 2014 20:13
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Post-modern, as in post-modernism, an artistic style and school of literary analysis.
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Oct 7, 2014 21:29
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I agree with Jerusalem. The Doctor is very smart - he just doesn't do well in a controlled environment that doesn't account for his individuality. He's fiercely independent, somewhat narcissistic, hates being told what he can and can't do, and frequently goes on mad tears after ideas that have temporarily transfixed him. He can be a genius without being any good at, for instance, writing a thesis on hydroponics for his Time Lord degree when this week he's really much more interested in orthographical progression.
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Oct 10, 2014 03:18
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Yes, Twelve clearly has a fairly solid ethical core. He just doesn't bother with, care for, understand conversational niceties, and is usually thinking on some kind of abstract level that isn't much for friendly human social cues. In terms of his actions he's no more of a jerk than Eleven was - maybe less, there's nothing like The Girl Who Waited or even 'don't you EVER think you can play games with me!' in Twelve's lifetime yet - it's just that he doesn't dress himself up in whimsy and jokes to smooth the course of casual conversation. This is a Doctor, in effect, who's not a hugger and doesn't go out of his way to be casually kind to others, nor does he understand why that would sometimes be useful or why, really, people would want him to do it. He's blunt not out of spite but through his brain operating on a different wavelength from people who desire compliments, reassurance, casual friendliness. He still means to do the right thing and struggles to achieve justice in a pinch, though, and is often visibly perturbed when someone informs him that he's being inconsiderate.
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Oct 11, 2014 02:27
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I actually didn't like this one much. I'm a fan of Frank Skinner but I thought his character was very flat and under-acted. A few very nice scenes still, though!
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Oct 12, 2014 07:02
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A Time Lord can only regenerate based on the rules in play in the current story. That's totally how Doctor Who works.
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Oct 15, 2014 08:30
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That was stupendous. For my money Clara is quickly becoming the best revival companion, she just has so much confidence and agency and gets to do so much stuff and have cool, heroic moments. It's hard to believe she's the same character from Season Seven.
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Oct 19, 2014 19:24
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The first two episodes of Time and the Rani are pretty ridiculous fun, but the last two feel like unnecessary padding. I can't resist the exploding purple trap sphere or Mel doing a judo throw on McCoy. Also the Mel-Doctor reunion scene is actually pretty well done!
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Oct 31, 2014 15:36
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This was spectacular. This season is just firing on all cylinders, both big reveals landed really well and all the setting work (a.k.a. elaborate misdirection) was really atmospheric too. Capaldi and Coleman are total dynamite together in like, every scene they share.
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Nov 4, 2014 00:44
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There's no reason the Doctor couldn't grapple with his identity changing if that occurred. He does that with many of his other incarnations, after all, including this one. Or you could just have him (her) not be bothered or interested or even understand why other people are shocked that he's changed, which would be very in keeping with the abstract character displayed by several of his selves. ("I always say they should put it in swimming pools." "Why?" etc).
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Nov 4, 2014 04:05
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I thought it was pretty good, but a little messy. A lot of plot elements and characters introduced and then quickly dispensed with, and quite a slow pace. It felt very much in the style of an RTD episode, with its global focus, government agencies, and various meanderings, and I don't think that's generally to its credit. It was still pretty good though! I feel much the same as I did about Forest of the Night: various good bits, interesting ideas, nice scenes, but as a whole it hangs together rather loosely. I loved the Master but I'm kind of sad we probably won't get to see her again for a season or two, too brief this candle burnt, etc. Hopefully she's still Gomez for the next go-round.
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Nov 10, 2014 09:28
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Yes, I thought this series was wonderful and a serious competitor with series five for the best of the revival. I'm not sure which I'd pick in the end - I don't think Death in Heaven stuck the landing as well as The Big Bang - but it's a really near thing.
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Nov 10, 2014 22:13
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The Master carefully moving up and down time, creating an entire functional afterlife that persists for all human history, just so she can have grist to transform into soldiers for the Doctor on his birthday, is really absolutely perfect. It's immensely diabolical and totally ridiculous all in one.
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Nov 13, 2014 03:20
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That or Clara is already pregnant. Who knows!
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Nov 13, 2014 06:43
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