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Delta and the Bannermen is a mostly funny, mostly good serial.
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Sep 18, 2015 15:10
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Jerusalem posted:glorying to the fact that they're holding out on exterminating Clara till she runs. That's probably the biggest addition to actual Dalek character since like, Genesis of the Daleks maybe? It's a really great idea and goes a long way towards making them more frightening. It also backwards explains why the Doctor gets out of so many Dalek situations: he doesn't run, he talks. So it looks like we're going to get a complete time rewrite for the second half, but they still gave Missy and Clara a way out, it looks like. Dalek laser beams usually do a color invert and then have the bodies fall to the floor, but they both got disintegrated. Which could, I suppose, be another secret teleport, albeit with skeletons.
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Sep 20, 2015 02:10
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I mean, it wasn't the most content-full episode of Doctor Who ever, but it's a season premiere. They're flashy, showy affairs. It's clearly setting stuff up for the next episode, which I'd expect to be more focused on a single story. It probably plays better for people watching for the first time, even.
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Sep 20, 2015 03:23
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If any of them still exist, I'd love it if they threw some movie Daleks in there from time to time. Partly because they look great and partly because it would confuse continuity even further.
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Sep 20, 2015 12:58
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2house2fly posted:There isn't really any minutiae of canon in the episode, I don't once remember thinking "I wish I watched the old shows because I don't have any context for this". The closest anyone's going to come to that is Davros showing up with no introduction but Davros is one of those cultural osmosis things everyone knows about, like Darth Vader or Klingons or Vodka Martini Shaken Not Stirred. And there's a fairly lengthy scene where the Doctor explains to Clara exactly who Davros is. The clips from the classic series aren't confusing, either, unless you literally didn't know that there wasn't a classic series. They're seasoning. It is a bit weird that Davros seems to have the classic series on DVD, though. I think voice clips might have been sufficient there.
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Sep 20, 2015 14:38
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If we don't get a Missy/Davros scene next episode I am going to be really grumpy.
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Sep 20, 2015 18:55
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If River Song is going to be in the Eighth Doctor series BF apparently has the go-ahead to mix and match classic series characters with new ones, so anything's possible. There's a whole lot of possibilities in here.
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Sep 23, 2015 23:08
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DoctorWhat posted:...no. Exactly. And even when they were reliably putting out great material, Big Finish was never really good at serialized storytelling. They're more or less okay at telling one-off "safe" stories that slide right into established material. Every time somebody suggests Nicholas Briggs for showrunner I wince a little. It will never, ever happen, for a number of reasons, but it's really not a good idea.
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Sep 24, 2015 01:46
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Last week's episode was just on the verge of toppling over, but ultimately held together. This one fell apart, but there were SO MANY good elements to it. They don't fit together in the slightest, but already I'm liking this episode more because the great bits are all memorable and the clumsy structure is forgotten immediately. Just the scene where Clara learns how Daleks talk is worth the episode. Between that and the "they're waiting for you to run" scene from last episode the Daleks are seriously becoming a frightening foe. I also loved how Davros' confession to the Doctor that he's happy that he's saved the Time Lords is absolutely couched in racist ideology. "Every man should have a people." It may be a trick, but it's coming from a place of honesty, and it fits in perfectly with the very concepts of the Daleks.
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Sep 27, 2015 01:59
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I think it might have been overlooked in the new episode fervor (at least, I didn't see anything about it in the thread) but apparently the third episode of Web of Fear was found, but it was stolen before it could be returned.
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Sep 27, 2015 03:40
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Maxwell Lord posted:I do believe one of the reasons they weren't doing two-parters for a time was that there was inevitably a drop off in ratings. (Plus it may not be as dramatic in the UK but there's the whole "3.6 now is not the same as 3.6 then" phenomenon.) I thought at the time they said that it was assumed that 2-parters were cheaper but they actually weren't. At any rate, I wouldn't get worried about ratings. The show is super popular abroad, it makes tons of money in merchandising, and everybody watches things online now.
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Sep 27, 2015 16:36
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Forktoss posted:Big Finish is having a Davros sale, it seems. I guess I'll be finally picking up I, Davros, then, but are any of the newer releases worth getting? Can anybody recommend Daleks Among Us or The Curse of Davros? The Curse of Davros is pretty fun; the main attraction of it being that (spoilered just in case, but it's the main idea of the episode) the Doctor and Davros switch bodies. Colin Baker and Terry Molloy get a chance to stretch their acting muscles, and it does a good job of treating its ideas seriously. Daleks Among Us is the conclusion to a trilogy and also the weakest part of it. I couldn't really recommend it, unless maybe you're REALLY invested in the mystery they set up in the first two stories (both of which are really good).
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Sep 28, 2015 11:54
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Nah, Gallifrey was only hidden away and made to look like it blew up (okay so the first go-round probably counts as once). Skaro got clean destroyed at least twice. Once by Seven tricking the Daleks into turning their own sun into a supernova, and the other during the Time War. Hasn't Skaro already been back? I thought it was Skaro that was in the opening of Asylum.
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Sep 28, 2015 19:29
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Frontier in Space has plenty of problems but is basically the only working attempt at Grand Space Opera in Doctor Who. There's a lot of detail in the societies and how they actually work, despite generally only seeing the upper echelons. It's certainly the story that works hardest to make you forget it's literally six episodes of the Doctor getting captured over and over. I don't know what it is, but you barely even notice until the end. The Draconians look great, too.
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Sep 28, 2015 23:29
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The only thing I've read of Patrick Ness is his contribution to the 50th anniversary short story collection, "Tip of the Tongue," which was fantastic and by far the highlight of that little project, so if he wants to do a show I say go for it. He does an amazing job of writing believable young adolescents.
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Oct 1, 2015 23:34
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MisterBibs posted:It's brought up every New Who Doctor, but for me 11 was the best Old Man In A Young Man's Body the show has had. He's your grandpa suddenly given a young body and thinks he'll effortlessly be able to hang with The Kids. Thing is, he's still Grandpa. There are so many variables involved that it's basically impossible to say that viewers are tuning out because some crusty old guy is in the lead. Besides that there's still Jenna Coleman, and plenty of other young attractive guest stars. Besides (and admittedly this is not my area of expertise) wasn't Tennant considered to be more of a prettyboy than Smith? And Smith held onto the ratings pretty well.
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Oct 3, 2015 02:45
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Capaldi is definitely the best actor at delivering boring exposition since Tom Baker. I could listen to that man say anything. I really liked the episode overall; obviously it depends on how it sticks the landing. But it looks like we're only going to have the one token corridor run, hopefully. If the show is going to be doing a bunch of two-parters, making them distinct episodes is definitely the way to go. As funny as the cards were, I didn't like the way Clara was acting immediately afterwards. It seems as though she should have gotten a line, or at least a look, to express some kind of sadness over Danny when the Doctor was talking about death. But she's fine then and excited to get back into action later on in the TARDIS. It feels like a missed opportunity. I suppose that's mostly Whithouse's fault, though Moffat should have recognized that as a problem, too.
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Oct 4, 2015 01:58
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Come to think of it, has the cloister bell been explained at all (at least beyond, "this is bad") in New Who? Or for that measure, at all since Logopolis? I can't recall any examples.
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Oct 4, 2015 22:19
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qntm posted:Unrelatedly, have I missed something or is there no hyper-obvious recurring season-long arc thingy developing just yet? They spent too much time on that prophecy business about a half-Time Lord, half-Dalek for it to not pay off sometime down the road. But at any rate, they're not telegraphing the series arc like they did with Clara or Missy.
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Oct 5, 2015 00:00
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Cerv posted:I'm not so sure. Trying to fit around an established continuity is so limiting, and too easily slips into fanservice over anything new / imaginative. Yeah, as neat as this is for Big Finish, I think the War Doctor works better the less we know about him. (And maybe yknow instead of spending all that money on John Hurt they could have used it to hire some good writers maybe)
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Oct 5, 2015 11:50
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You should at least listen to the last series of the Eighth Doctor Adventures. There's a lot of good stuff in there and it sets up a lot of the status quo for Dark Eyes. You can always go back later and hit the good stories from the other two series.
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Oct 10, 2015 14:58
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squarerandom posted:Dude just calls the Doctor out for treating O'Donnell like a test subject, that he only cares about saving clara because she's close to him. His answer is that he's saving Clara, not himself. This bit especially fell flat because the Doctor makes an attempt to keep O'Donnell on the TARDIS. The subsequent "YOU, DOCTOR, ARE THE REAL MONSTER!" bit felt like the least earned one yet. This felt like it could have been a single episode. There was definitely not ninety minutes of material in here. The resolution with the ghosts was lame, the village was so boring that even the production crew realized it and said, "Dunno, put up some Russian signs or something," and the last minute, "Oh, they're in love!" falls flat. Definitely Whithouse's worst script. Come to think of it, the Russian bit feels like it was cribbed from The Curse of Fenric, which is also where Whithouse took the ending of The God Complex from.
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Oct 11, 2015 02:52
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Yeah, the conquered guy was definitely played out like halfway through The God Complex. I groaned when he showed up alive again.
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Oct 12, 2015 01:58
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This was probably my favorite episode of the season so far, though I bet The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar will work a lot better back to back. There was some goofiness involved, but the training montage was fun, and I absolutely loved the Doctor's way of circumventing the standard third act of the Seven Samurai model. Making a fool out of a dangerous enemy is the ultimate Doctor-y way of winning. Humiliation is so much better than destruction.
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Oct 18, 2015 01:24
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Wheat Loaf posted:I wonder if they originally thought to use the Sontarans and decided against it? Because that's the Sontarans' whole thing - having this reputation of being the ultimate warrior race despite being vulnerable to deckchairs, right? I would think that post-Strax Sontarans would be expected to have individual personalities, and this story, like most Seven Samurai riffs, calls for a faceless enemy. You can still do stories where the Sontarans are the enemy, but I don't think they would have worked here. Aren't there multiple ultimate warrior races now, too? Either the guys with the shark heads or the guys with the rhino heads were supposed to super soldiers, I think.
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Oct 19, 2015 02:32
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The structure of this episode felt weird to me. Not bad, just...weird. Like the opening two-parter, I expect that this will go down a lot better on a rewatch. I still quite enjoyed it this time, though. Fun fact: this series the new series will tie the classic series in number of female writers. There's a lot of wiggle room on that though; since Pip and Jane Baker worked as a team and who knows who actually wrote Attack of the Cybermen.
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Oct 25, 2015 00:30
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Rhyno posted:I've watched every episode of GoT, she's really bad. I don't understand the internet obsession with the girls of GoT. I'm not aware of any internet obsession except with whoever plays Margaery Tyrell, but Maisie Williams has always struck me as being one of the more talented cast members, especially for...I guess she's no longer a child actress, but she's definitely the standout of the younger-ish/more unknown cast. That owes a little to some of the limitations of her fellow actors, but mostly it's because she's good at it, I think. So I suppose we'll be seeing her one, maybe two more times. It looks like she's definitely got some role in the finale, but I imagine Game of Thrones is a grueling enough shoot that main cast members can't just pop off for extended periods of time.
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Oct 25, 2015 05:11
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There was definitely a lot of dialogue, especially towards the end, that sounded...George Lucas-y? Stuff that works on the page but sounds stilted out loud. I agree, the monster stuff, and indeed basically all of the standard Doctor Who stuff, felt obligatory. The first two acts of this episode are probably the least it's ever felt like Who. Which is totally fine; I'd rather they'd just continued that to its conclusion instead of throwing in random baddies. I really dig how they're testing themselves with the two-parter format this year, so I wish they'd been a little more similarly brave with the structure of this episode.
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Oct 25, 2015 15:46
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Crusader posted:Is there a good (as in the opinions seem generally sane) review site for BF audios? I haven't listened to any on a regular basis for some years now (like... since 2008 I guess), and I'm not sure what I should check out that's come out in relatively recent times. I've never found a good place, but for the past year or so I was writing my own mini reviews of stories I listened to, mostly so I could remember what they were about it they came up. I've gotten pretty burned out on Big Finish lately, so I stopped around May or so. The few reviewers that are out there tend to be pretty sycophantic, so I've got no idea what's good recently. I just put all the ones I've done up here if you want to take a look.
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Oct 25, 2015 22:34
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Didn't either the New Adventures or some of the later Big Finish stories try to tie up Fenric and some other guys with the Cthullu mythos? I have vague memories of somebody talking about how they did a piss poor job of it.
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Oct 26, 2015 02:40
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IceAgeComing posted:no such thing I'd say it's pretty likely given where we left the Zygons last time. You can't really go back to having them as unambiguous villains. It would be like turning the Ice Warriors into bad guys after the Curse of Peladon.
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Oct 26, 2015 20:49
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That was...well, I really liked Kill the Moon, so I'll give it til the next episode, but it doesn't seem like there's anything worth salvaging here. The Islamic overtones would be perfectly fine if basically all the Zygons we saw weren't evil; having them be evil mustache twirlers just makes it all REALLY uncomfortable. I have to believe that there's something more going on here, if only because I can't believe that the group of soldiers going into the church could possibly be written that stupidly. The next episode title suggests something really interesting, assuming it's not just in reference to the toxin.
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Nov 1, 2015 00:49
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I would like to believe that the guy who wrote the pro-choiceist pro-choice story of all time wouldn't be a latent Islamaphobe, but yeah, I don't currently see any other way to read this than "they're rapists, murderers, and thieves. Some of them, I guess are nice Zygons."
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Nov 1, 2015 01:18
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AttitudeAdjuster posted:We've only seen half the story, I doubt the denouement will be the Doctor ordering a nerve gas drone strike. The show's protagonist kept calling for dialogue despite having seen a bunch of soldiers murdered seconds before. No, obviously not, but the Zygons here aren't written as people you can have a dialogue with. The Zygons that we've seen so far are murderous conquerors which UNIT would be totally justified in blowing up with drones. That's the problem.
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Nov 1, 2015 01:32
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I'm in agreement that there's no way the ultimate message of this story is going to be "all Zygons are bad." We here a little bit about these good Zygons, and we even see a whole...two of them? Zygon ISIS is a great idea for a story, but then you really have to stress how it's just the ISIS Zygons who are evil, especially because, due to the limitations of special effects, they literally all look alike. Have the Doctor interviewing a bunch of Zygon families, trying to find out if they've heard anything. Or give Zygon ISIS some lines referring to their numbers. They could call themselves "the ninety-nine" or "the three hundred and thirty-three" or something like that. "There are hundreds of ussss!" I'm definitely going to hold off on some of my concerns until the second episode, though.
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Nov 1, 2015 15:08
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I do think it was absolutely an effective episode, even though I have some lingering doubts as to how well the follow-up is going to pivot on the racial issues. When was the last time we had a globe-hopping political thriller? Enemy of the World?
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Nov 3, 2015 02:32
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I really hope nothing comes of the hybrid stuff, because then it goes from being annoying to hilarious.
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Nov 4, 2015 14:36
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Rob Schrab mentioned on the Harmontown podcast that the BBC wants him to put one of their properties into the sequel to the Lego Movie, which narrows it down to either Doctor Who or Broadchurch, I suppose.
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Nov 5, 2015 15:54
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The_Doctor posted:ITT: non-Brits who think everything is made by the BBC. I did want to go with Misfits originally, but I knew for sure that one wasn't BBC.
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Nov 5, 2015 20:00
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CobiWann posted:And her main reason is that the Doctor has spent nearly this entire season as a passive observer whereas Clara has been the "Mary Sue" in getting everything done and being amazing. That is a...weird complaint, especially as how this season has been much less kind to Clara than the last. She's really had very little to do this season: she was basically subservient to Missy in the two-parter; she ran a couple corridors in the underwater episodes; she didn't really do much in The Girl Who Died and she wasn't even in the next episode. Now, Jenna Louise Coleman has had a pretty good season so far, but Clara? Not so much.
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Nov 6, 2015 15:15
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