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This episode was actually surprisingly good for what it was. I was expecting the usual 'Stephen Moffat Horror' fare, with typical childhood fears blown up into an actual threat and all that. And while there's certainly elements of it, they did go in a refreshingly different direction; there's a lot less dealing with the actual threat, and more dealing with the response to it. Which is a great way to approach Moffat's type of horror monsters, since they are very grounded things based in irrational human fears. It's far less about the monster, and far more about how we feel about them. We probably all expected to see the monster sometime around when it left Rupert's room, probably in some kind of jump scare, and I think it was a really strong move to shy away so much from that reveal that there's not even clear proof there was a monster. Personally, I expected it to be the Silence, but I'm happy that it (probably) wasn't. I think we could've done without the end. It's not too terrible an idea, and they probably did it the best they could, but it ultimately just didn't need to happen. It's minor enough that it doesn't really hurt anything, but, well, the Doctor didn't really need an emotional connection to the barn he used the Moment in, and we didn't need to see the origin of a single line he said in Day of the Doctor. It probably just would've made for a better overall package if we got a less time-travel scene that paints the picture that, sometimes, the Doctor jumps at harmless shadows.
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Sep 14, 2014 13:09
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On the subject of the Doctor's constant insults to Clara, there's something to remember: He's not just doing it to her. She's getting the brunt of it because she's always there, but remember 'if you were real you'd only have six months to live' from Robot of Sherwood, and even him being very brutally callous to Rupert, a scared child. Hell, the only time he even pretended to be nice was Into the Dalek, when he got the one soldier to swallow something before he died. I think this Doctor has a bit of a 'runaway freight train' thought process going on. He can be nice, but he's usually too lost in his own thoughts (or too dismissive of the target) to realize he should be. Everything in the universe takes a back seat, because the Doctor's got ideas. We saw a different facet of that with Into the Dalek, where he's too busy with his own conclusions about the broken Dalek to realize the implications of the whole thing. I hate to use the comparison because of just how Internet it is, but it's a trait that a lot of people with Asperger's and other high-functioning autistics have. They're not being intentionally mean, they're perfectly capable of being nice. It just doesn't occur to them that they should be.
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Sep 15, 2014 02:45
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Darth Freddy posted:I liked that episode. At least I think I did, kind of confused to be honest. I think I will have to watch it again. Makes me feel a little stupid having to watch certain episodes more then once to get a good idea of whats going on, maybe my brain is getting old. I'm in the same boat, but it's not out of confusion over the episode. It just did some things that might have a different kneejerk response than a reasoned analysis. Reflexively, I feel like that big part at the end wasn't a good move, or at least could've been done better, but it might be worth coming back to after ome thought and digestion.
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Sep 15, 2014 06:40
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Can anybody point out to me any times other than in Listen that Twelve made jabs about Clara's appearance? I'm not doubting they exist, I just don't remember them.Jsor posted:It got kind of boring and samey when 11 kept using the same two jokes on Rory too. (Yes, we get it, Amy is your BFF and you'll only ever view Rory as an accessory to Amy's company. It was only funny the first 20 times) And in fairness, Amy definitely wore the pants in that relationship. I always read those sorts of comments from Eleven as not caring about how marriages technically work so much as this one actually worked, and even at his best Rory was whipped as hell.
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Sep 15, 2014 10:31
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Irony Be My Shield posted:Is it known whether The Doctor himself is legitimately a Time Lord, or could it just be a self-proclaimed thing? I very much doubt that the Doctor, especially recent incarnations, would have taken a false Time Lord title. Even the ones that would have probably would've used a bit of a rip-off title, that's clearly meant to invoke them but isn't their actual term.
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Sep 15, 2014 16:42
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Roach Warehouse posted:I really enjoyed the shots at the start of Listen where the Doctor was chilling in/near in the void of space or the bottom of the ocean just to indulge his eccentricities. If I were the Doctor, I'd do this just to show off. 'Oh, I had breakfast while overlooking a binary star system, no biggie.' EDIT: Rory's dad eating lunch while sitting at the TARDIS doors, looking down at the Earth, was pretty much the best thing. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Sep 16, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 06:26
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anastazius posted:Yes, exactly, somehow Missy is manipulating robots and self-sacrificing people and getting people to the 'Promised Land', and the Doctor will follow these breadcrumbs and find himself home. But it'll be Wrong because of Missy messing everything up cause she's a soul of a crazy Tardis who is obsessed with the Doctor. The way I'm seeing it, there's two possible ways to take this part of the overplot. Although, looking at them together, they don't vary the result much. A: The Promised Land is an actual, tangible location, where Missy is. It may be somewhere entirely new, it may be an unfamiliar name for a known location at some different point in time/space, but it's a location that exists enough that Missy isn't lying. Or B: The Promised Land is bullshit fed to gullible machines and people with nowhere else to go. Missy's working towards her own crazy gameplan, that for some reason needs these people, as opposed to A where they're just sort of... turning up, I guess? It's definitely too early to say much at all for sure about any of this, but from what the Doctor Who Tumblr jumped out of nowhere to spoil me about during the leadup to the season, there should be an episode, probably somewhat soon, that sheds light on it. At some point in this season is a Cyberman episode that Missy was shown on set for, so chances are pretty good that when the Cybermen turn up, we'll get some usable information.
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Sep 16, 2014 16:55
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Mr Beens posted:The Doctor always talks with an accent, everyone talks with an accent. It is no more strange that previous incarnations have used a "posh" english accent or a "northern" english accent. I always thought of regeneration as 'shuffle the deck and draw a new hand', and Twelve has just drawn an accent card that, while in the deck for a good long while, just hasn't come out before now. He's just speaking in an accent picked up off of different people than previous incarnations. And just as an aside, I always liked Nine's explanation of his accent for the unspoken element of it. 'Lots of planets have a north' implies that at least some of them don't.
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Sep 16, 2014 17:10
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Bicyclops posted:In addition, David Tennant must return to the show and re-film all prior seasons with his native accent. Tooth and Claw will become incredibly confusing.
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Sep 18, 2014 14:50
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I'd say that, overall, the Year of Specials were bad episodes punctuated with awesome moments. For as good as the Time Lord Victorious bit of Water of Mars was, the rest of the episode wasn't very good. Similarly, while the End of Time was mostly pretty bad, Dalton as Rassilon wasn't, John Simm had some fun hammy moments, and Wilf proved himself to be the best companion ever. The exceptions are the Next Doctor, which is a good episode, and Planet of the Dead, which didn't have any good moments.
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Sep 19, 2014 14:58
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I immediately pictured that exact same gesture paired with a 'well...', and didn'trealize until clicking this link how much that specific mental image applied to Tennant.
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Sep 20, 2014 15:42
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Android Blues posted: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. Yeah, on thinking about it, I would agree. It's actually a strong idea, with a story and script that could've held a two-parter quite easily, and I'm sure the characters would've been able to shine through from it, too. It's one of the few bits of TV in recent memory that's gotten my heart pounding, and at the very least the cyborg would've probably done very well with the extra time. A lot of the aethetics of the episode reminded me of the sort of future settings that RTD did a lot, that hasn't turned up much in Moffat's run. The setting, the Teller's design, the future humans' outfits, it all reminded me of episodes like Gridlock and the Planet of the Ood. I really liked those settings, and this episode did them all really strongly, so I was pretty happy about that. The one thing I'd level against it is that I really didn't feel like Capaldi's voice was there for this one. With all the other episodes so far, it's given a good feeling of what Twelve is like as a character, and how he approaches things differently compared to a lot of his predecessors, but with this one I could easily see Smith, Tennant, or (especially) Eccleston doing pretty much the same thing. Maybe that's just because I'm really paying attention to that now, thanks to you lot making me notice it, but this one more than anything so far just didn't feel like a 'Twelfth Doctor story'.
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Sep 21, 2014 12:51
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SirSamVimes posted:I don't think I could have imagined any of those previous Doctors offering a suicide device as an option. That's really the only part that didn't quite square; everything else was pretty doable by the last three. Even then, I could've seen Eccleston offering it, especially early in his season. But, I suppose not every story has to be definitively a 'this Doctor is different from the last ones' story. By this point in their first seasons, Nine had just come off of the Slitheen story, Ten was smack-bang in the middle of the Cyberman's reintroduction, and Eleven had just finished the Angels two-parter. All of them, well within the 'we know this Doctor well enough by now' range.
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Sep 21, 2014 13:28
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HD DAD posted:I'd just like a lot of smaller stories in general. A lot of the pomp and "this is the most x in the y" can be generally done away with. Listen was a step in the right direction. Fortunately, it looks like next week's story is pretty small.
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Sep 21, 2014 15:49
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Basically the Doctor can pilot the TARDIS as well as he loving wants to. Twelve just cares more consistently about landing properly.
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Sep 22, 2014 09:04
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imperialparadox posted:I'd kind of like to see a pair of companions again, where both characters are equally strong. It doesn't necessarily have to be a pairing of mixed genders however, but it would be interesting if it was two people with strong but differing personalities and outlooks. I say this because the current Doctor seems to question what sort of person he is a fair bit, so how would he respond to conflicting advice? We're definitely at least going to get some stories of Danny Pink in a 'Season 2 Mickey Smith' role, and if nothing else I think he's gonna be good at that.
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Sep 22, 2014 14:49
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greententacle posted:How about if we saw a companion actually spend their whole life travelling with the Doctor, and we see them get old and die? We'd either have to deal with age make-up (which is very hit-and-miss), or have the same character and actor for longer than we've had a few Doctors. Either way, probably best not to.
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Sep 23, 2014 04:50
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Bicyclops posted:1) Ms Delphox is a stock Moffat character that has worn out its welcome. He needs to expand his understanding of how women in authority look, sound and act. Was she Missy? Older Moffat Women are so interchangeable that I can only tell them apart by hair, and the hair looked similar.
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Sep 24, 2014 03:40
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PoshAlligator posted:I agree that a lot of those female characters have a lot of similarities but the idea of actually getting them mixed up is just bizarre to me. I'd even say it borders on being offensive to the actors. I legitimately have some problems with faces (I started watching Doctor Who because I saw the regeneration into the Tenth Doctor and thought it was Callum Blue), so this actually is a problem for me, although not to the extent that I can't distinguish between ANY of them. Really the only one I'm actually having difficulty with is Missy and this week's bank lady, because of similarities in the ways I do try to identify people. Kavorkian might've been lumped in with them too if it weren't for her eyepatch.
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Sep 25, 2014 03:21
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Jsor posted:FWIW, I somewhat agree with Mr. Flunchy. I mean, I've seen some of the poo poo Moffat says about women. Even in official BBC aired interviews. That's not okay. But as far as the show goes, I'm often pleasantly surprised by the female companions, at least. Sure on a meta-level Moffat sees Clara as some controlling bossy woman who needs to learn to not be so controlling, but so far in this season she's basically turning out like I imagine a female Doctor would. I think both Clara and Amy are a fair bit better than both Martha and Rose, and his RTD episodes treat female characters pretty well in almost all cases I can think of. I've warmed up to Moffat a bit over this season, because overall it feels like someone who's aware of his problems and trying really hard to overcome them. It isn't perfect, and you can still see some of his problems glistening through the cracks, but it feels like he's aware of them and consciously trying to either avoid them or improve on them. Yeah, you can still see his issues with writing women coming through. But Clara has improved exceptionally, and gratuitous lesbians aside all the other female supporting cast has been pretty strong too. His overplots have had problems, but the current Missy/Promised Land one has been very good about being off to the side and consistent, so perhaps the worst thing you can say about it is that it exists. Hell, the one that looked like the most Moffat episode of the season, Listen, turned out to be a very well-executed subversion of our expectations. I might just be pulling all this out of my rear end, but before the season aired there was a quote from Moffat about not letting yourself get repetitive, and the entire season so far feels like an earnest effort to not fall into his own traps.
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Sep 25, 2014 15:10
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Jerusalem posted:I for one am sick and tired of the fawning adoration every single episode this season has gotten, I wish at least one person would post something they found lacking or poorly handled but no, the goddamn hivemind consensus dictates that we all love everything about every episode all the time. I guess I understand why Trin wrote the following now: I'm not a great critic, but I've honestly tried to be even-handed in my analysis. There have been problems with this season, I've said what they've been when they've come up, but the episode overall tends to overcome the issues. The only ones that I'd say didn't were Deep Breath (which I didn't hate, but it really could've done with some more work and less time) and Listen (which is great until the end drags the whole thing down into 'good, I guess' territory).
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Sep 26, 2014 02:45
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HD DAD posted:I absolutely adore the poster for tomorrow's episode. Even in silhouette, that robot still looks like Garrus.
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Sep 26, 2014 16:39
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Bicyclops posted:Still, hopefully they don't have a monster that only preys on the sick so that the Doctor has to tell everyone not to cough. "Oh god, the drowsiness monster! Okay everyone, keep alert, and whatever you do: Don't. Yawn."
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Sep 27, 2014 02:35
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Jerusalem posted:Eccleston kept insisting that Mickey's name was really Ricky, so maybe there's an alternate reality out there where, while fighting a new breed of Sea Devils bred by a dying genius in a wheelchair, they discover Donnie Pink the PE Teacher. It's definitely something similar to the Mickey situation; it's not that the Doctor actually thinks Danny's a P.E. teacher, it's that he doesn't respect him enough to agree with what Danny claims versus what the Doctor has decided he'll go with. (Plus, let's be honest, he is very 'P.E. teacher') I can't entirely articulate why, but this episode didn't really come together for me. There was nothing openly bad about it, and I really liked the interaction between Danny and the Doctor that was ultimately the core of the thing, but the episode as a whole didn't really work for me. The only outright weakness I can point to is that their first proper meetup, right after timeporting away the deathbot, was really just kind of weak overall, with Danny not actually responding much. He steps up to the plate later, especially when he actually confronts the Doctor in the TARDIS, but I feel like that first scene should've been a lot 'bigger' emotionally, and it just wasn't.
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Sep 28, 2014 14:09
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Crazy Man posted:Glad to see I'm not the only one confused by 11's theme in the preview... It was in the last one, too. It's like someone on staff just sort of forgot that was Eleven's theme, and not the Doctor's. Maybe it's because Twelve doesn't really have a theme yet?
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Sep 28, 2014 16:08
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Rocksicles posted:The doctor saw him a soldier hence the P.E teacher. Soldiers are all about team stuff, PT, yelling. You all know he hates soldiers. Danny saw him as an officer getting people hurt or killed without a second thought. I want to know how PE teachers feel about the Doctor's discrimination against them.
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Sep 29, 2014 06:02
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Yvonmukluk posted:Oh my god, they even used the renovated original console room! Either they have way more self-control than I would, or there's an actual reason that they aren't just finding excuses to use that constantly. Peter Davison's pieces about finding the ultimate Doctor/the ultimate companion showed that somewhere around the BBC is a recreation of the chrome console room from the 80s, too. Is that also at the Experience?
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Oct 2, 2014 16:41
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Jerusalem posted:The Doctor's attitude towards Danny didn't particular strike me as standing out from how he treats most other people, but enough people have brought up their distaste with it that it seems clear there was some kind of problem in communicating whatever message was intended by the writers. I'm still surprised by just how intense the reaction has been, because this Doctor being ascerbic and stubborn-minded about his initial take on any subject until the weight of evidence comes down against him seems to me to have been well communicated across the entire season so far. I feel like it might just be that, for once, we know that the Doctor is wrong while he's being wrong. We didn't know that Robin Hood was actually real until after the Doctor went on his whole spiel about that, we didn't know what was going on with Rusty until the Doctor himself found out, we still don't know if he was actually scared of anything in Listen. But we've already met Pink. We already know him as a character, we already understand where he is mentally and what he's been through. For once, the Doctor's dismissal, callousness and incorrectness is getting directed at a character that we already know well enough to be able to recognize how wrong he's being, and that makes it all look very different.
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Oct 3, 2014 03:59
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So my dad found out that some esoteric channel somewhere in our cable package is airing the second Peter Cushing Who movie tomorrow night. Does anyone here know if it's worth watching, in either a good or bad way?
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Oct 4, 2014 14:34
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I think the start of the episode was a bit shaky, but by the time they got to the point where everyone knew what was going on and it was time to talk about it, it picked up immensely. The silly stuff with the yo-yo and cleaning agent left, they managed to find good ways to handle the fact they have a teenager on board, and the bacteria-spiders left the main focus alone. Before that point it was a kind of lackluster space-action-horror episode, but after that it clearly knew what it wanted to be, and became something worth having strong feelings about, be they positive or negative. The only thing that really got me about it was the whole 'turn your lights on/off' way of making the decision. It's a clever way to solve things, but it just wouldn't work out the way the characters are claiming it would. The lights you see from space aren't people's porch lights or living room windows; they're street lamps, public buildings, landmarks and cities. 'The population of Earth' isn't in control of that vote, the power companies are, and judging by the fact huge swaths of the Earth shut their lights off simultaneously, that fact was abundantly clear to someone on staff. I suppose it would've been worse if they listened to that vote instead of ultimately disregarding it, but I found it kind of hard to buy that solution being treated like it was. As an aside, this is the third episode of this season that focused a lot more on the interpersonal elements of the plot while the monster got massively sidelined, standing with Listen and The Caretaker before it. I wonder if that's going to be a theme this season.
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Oct 5, 2014 11:24
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PriorMarcus posted:I thought the moon looked good though this episode. It was one of the few this season where it wasn't evident that were one more budget cut away from designing alien backdrops with fuzzy felt. I didn't get this feeling from any of the previous episodes (Robot of Sherwood had it a bit, I guess), but it's a bit funny that you thought the moon was the best-looking setting of the season. The moon is notoriously easy to pull off, since it's just grey rocks. The BBC Quarry never fails, I suppose.
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Oct 5, 2014 12:32
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PriorMarcus posted:Also, I don't think it helps that I'm able to recognize a lot of the stock effects they use from working in the industry. For example the time vortex portal they used last episode to trap the robot. Yeah, this is probably what's doing it for you. I don't have industry experience, but I think they use the same sound library that City of Heroes did, and I do sometimes get jerked to attention by the fact one of the sounds they use for the TARDIS was one used for a few powers in CoH.
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Oct 5, 2014 12:53
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Lumberjack Bonanza posted:Well I'm not going to pretend that I'm a showrunner in any form, but I think I would leverage his talent for confrontation and black humor. He's certainly gotten to flex those muscles in this season, but he's able to do far more. Surely everyone's familiar with The Thick of It, so there's no reason to say more there. It's no coincidence that the best moments of this season have been those tense, discussion-heavy confrontations. Coleman's good at them too, so I'd really love to see more episodes like these last two where it's built so heavily around those confrontational scenes.
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Oct 5, 2014 16:29
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CobiWann posted:The fact that it took ten years for humanity to go back to the moon after a Mexican private company pulled it off, meaning all concept of space flight went out the window, I could hand wave. I might've missed it, but I thought the idea as just that humanity stopped caring. Which is true today; space isn't something that's really a focus for most people, and the big ticket scientifically these days seems to be subatomic particles. When Doctor Who started the space race was in full swing, but at this point it's a very 'been there, done that' thing for humanity at large, so we just don't have much reason to bother. That's how I thought it was meant to be taken; Humanity could go to space, at least to the point of a moon landing, we just didn't want to. The sense of adventure was gone, and we only went up there for practical reasons, like 'mining the moon' or 'figuring out why it's making everything go nuts'. And that's the point of the beach scene, we see space pull off something so insane that we want to go exploring it again. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Oct 6, 2014 |
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Oct 6, 2014 04:46
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Proposition Joe posted:Although none of the episodes this season would have benefited from the extra time, I hope that they bring back two-part episodes I think we all generally agreed that Time Heist would've benefited from being a two-parter. And while I don't think it necessarily would have improved the story, Kill the Moon could've made for a really good two-parter. Have the first part be learning that the moon is freaking out, seethe effects on Earth and exactly how humans intend to solve it, and then cut it right at 'the moon is hatching'. Then, devote an entire episode to the debate on how they decide what to do about all this. Kill the Moon is definitely a story in two parts, so it probably would've done well with actually making it a two-parter.
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Oct 6, 2014 09:41
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Rat Flavoured Rats posted:Though is anyone else a bit wary about the next episode like I am? I've not got anything to go on but a hunch, but I got some slightly RTD-era vibes from the trailer both in its concept and its designs looking slightly cheesy. Add in an Australian pop star and it's basically Voyage of the Damned.
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Oct 7, 2014 13:08
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The_Doctor posted:English pop star, Foxes, is in it? ...poo poo.
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Oct 7, 2014 14:28
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I haven't actually looked at the mythology surrounding the Other, but I'm sure it doesn't explore the part of it that's occurred to me as actually a reasonably smart way to handle it. Sure, it's stupid that the Doctor could be the reincarnation of a mythological Time Lord figure. But an idea that struck me about that was, if you ignore the actual reincarnation element, it makes some sense; Time Lord society reached great heights under a genius leader named Rassilon, but it took someone like the Doctor to get it rolling in the first place. It's not literally him, but it's someone just as off-beat and clever, that could come up with some fantastic ways to make entirely unthought-of things work, that's become a minor footnote in the public consciousness because the current ruling class prefers to just pretend they were destined to rule. That's how I think it would be best to exist. The Doctor isn't the reincarnation of the Other, he's just an average person that thought differently to the rest of his society. But, so was the Other, and his one wild imagination set all of Time Lord society into motion.
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Oct 10, 2014 05:21
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Yeah, okay, I can picture like half the Doctors saying this.
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Oct 10, 2014 15:55
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:46 |
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Rat Flavoured Rats posted:Whose voice is it that says "Start the clock" at the beginning of the episode? Was that Gus? I'm pretty sure that was Capaldi. This episode had all the makings of absolute garbage. I said earlier this week that it looked pretty much exactly like Voyage of the Damned, and it had the makings of an episode like that at first, until... I dunno, at some point it rose above the sum of its parts and became good. I can't in all good conscience estimate when, because I was taken by personal bias when I realized that Foxes opened the episode with my favorite Queen song. I also have to say that while I did like the Forewarned's concept, I didn't like that everything about it was so back-loaded. I think a 'mystery monster' like this is great if it's a puzzle that the audience is invited along to solve themselves, but we just didn't have enough information about him to do that at all until the end.
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Oct 12, 2014 11:16
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