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thexerox123 posted:Vastra and Jenny? Vastra isn't an alien. 
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Apr 12, 2017 21:46
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Rochallor posted:Nardole is perfectly fine but I'm not sure having him around actually helps anything. You could remove him from the rest of the season and not really anything would change. Nardole is thick. He's from the future and familiar with the technology, but he's not smart. That give the Doctor someone to be smart at, without Bill having to be dumb.
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Apr 17, 2017 00:02
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Chokes McGee posted:it was just trying to say hello Could be this, actually. Puddle TARDIS was more 'alien' than most scifi aliens. Something with an inhuman conception of time, space, matter, and social organization. It just barely understands that humans communicate by vibrating our meat at each other. It started off trying to mimic/reflect what Bill said, which is a pretty good strategy for setting up communication, but Bill kept running away. It doesn't understand why Bill is running away, or even that she is trying to escape it, as far as it knows she's just rudely walking off in the middle of a conversation for no apparent reason. Once they made physical contact higher bandwidth communication became possible, and the offer and rejection were able to be imperfectly communicated.
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Apr 18, 2017 19:56
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Doctor Spaceman posted:They may not have been ultimately responsible, but they certainly were in a direct sense. By the end it starts to feel a bit iffy, because the Doctor is insisting that they be treated as the rightful inhabitants of the city and offering to negotiate on their behalf. The Vardi aren't the rightful inhabitants of the city; they are the city. Without the Vardi the colonists are left with a spaceship and a wheat field. Oh, and just one wheat harvest, because without the Vardi there is no way to pollinate the wheat on this bee-less planet. The Vardi don't need to kill them, they can just fly away and most of the colonists will be dead within a couple years. At best they might be able to scratch out a primitive existance as substance algae farmers, a single mishap from disaster and starvation. The Vardi killed some folks, but if the rest of the humans want to live they are just going to have to get over it. 
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Apr 24, 2017 18:10
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all-Rush mixtape posted:I'm hoping we get a Doctor that's also a DJ by 2040. 1 was a DJ. It just never came up in the show.  All he needs is headphones.
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Apr 26, 2017 04:43
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Astroman posted:They should do some black and white versions of the episodes to kick it Classic Who style. like the special B&W airing of The Walking Dead first ep. You want oldschool just find an old b&w TV. HD ruins the authenticity.
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May 1, 2017 05:46
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Astroman posted:Not only that, to be fair the people who were working in the mines chose to work there and could in theory not do so (yes their opportunities weren't great but still...). Not so much the people who were at a fair on the ice expecting to have a good time and not randomly die. Though if the baddie gave a fig about human lives he would have fed the poopwhale cows. Or sheep. Or pigs. Or geriatric horses destined for the glue factory. That's assuming the poopwhale will only eat living things (some wild animals are like that) if it isn't so fussy he could fed it bundles of off-cuts and offal from the slaughter houses. Presumably it didn't evolve to eat just humans (or the Doctor has made a terrible mistake) so the only reason it isn't eating animals is because there are migrating deer or seals or whatever on the ice in the middle of London, and it's captors decided promoting the frost fair was cheaper than feeding it livestock.
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May 3, 2017 17:47
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navyjack posted:Pretend this was happening in the real world. What does your heart tell you to be true? Not sure. If he was feeding the creature from an orphanage, work house, or charity hospital that would be one thing, but there were some pretty posh looking people out on the ice. People that matter. The wrong one of those dies on the ice and there could be a proper investigation, and even if they don't find the creature if someone is found to be responsible for promoting the fair and getting more people out on the unsafe ice, there could be lawsuits or even criminal charges. There could be a campaign to ban future frost fairs entirely because they are too dangerous (this assumes the guy is right about the creature causing the Thames to freeze over, so if it hadn't been freed this wouldn't have been the last time the river had a hard freeze). The frost fair scheme seems like an unnecessarily risky way to get meat. Though I suppose in Regency London meat would have been quite expensive. 
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May 4, 2017 08:15
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Irony Be My Shield posted:I thought that was a good episode. There were some genuinely creepy moments and the writing felt fairly real. I liked the use of 3D audio during that one scene with all the knocking coming from the ceiling. I don't think it was meant to be a shocking twist, his story not quite making sense was just an opportunity for Bill to show some 'common sense' human cleverness. That way she's not just a pretty face, or a damsel in distress who needs to be rescued, she's helping to work the problem.
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May 9, 2017 05:16
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The_Doctor posted:I guess his head is still organic? The battery was nearly dead so it wasn't enough to kill her, just to stun her for a few minutes. She got a shock only a little worse than a taser. Bad enough it left a scorch mark on her face, but not quite enough to kill a healthy young woman. Presumably he's looked at her TARDIS health scan previously, so he knows she doesn't have any pre-existing heart conditions. It was still a bit of a gamble, but he's never been afraid to lie to make someone feel better. There's something weird with Nardole though. He's a robot, but he needs oxygen. His head is organic, yet he hasn't seen his 'true face' in years?  Oh, and his head spent decades attached to the robot king/waiter without aging. Okay, that robot body probably had a really good life support system so King Hydroflax wouldn't be laid low by free radicals or telomeres, so maybe that bit isn't so weird.
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May 14, 2017 08:10
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jivjov posted:Jack says he's "omnisexual", which tends to amount to the same thing, but they explicitly didn't say "bi". IMO bi people should consider adopting the term Omnisexual. "Bi" merely reinforces the idea that there is a duality, rather than a continuum. Maaan.
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May 18, 2017 05:28
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Well Manicured Man posted:That's a shame. She and Capaldi had amazing chemistry, but who knows how well she'd play off the next Doctor? Maybe Nardole will stay on. 
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May 20, 2017 00:07
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Andrew_1985 posted:I was really loving the episode when they got to the scientists, but christ, that ending. And then they woke up!/And then the computer game ended :< Absolute amateur hour bullshit. Like, that's how you end a lovely story as a kid. The simulation Doctor didn't wake up. He sent the email, but then he was horribly murdered or whatever.
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May 20, 2017 23:19
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I wonder if their simulation included the Silence? Would they know if it did?
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May 21, 2017 01:32
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Burkion posted:What strikes me about the episode is that, for a very short time there, it was almost like the Doctor Who version of John Carpenter's The Prince of Darkness. No, they killed themselves "to save the world". The real world. It mucks up the data set, and teaches the invaders that humans are prone to mass suicide at the drop of a hat (which, okay, we do that sometimes but not as often as their simulation predicts.) All the NPCs we saw just committed suicide, but it's possible there are some who take more chaotic actions. Nothing matters and none of the people around you are real, so why not murder that annoying guy on the bus or rob a bank? If you're the POTUS why not launch a bunch nukes before you kill yourself and really mess with the simulation? If the invaders have complex simulations but not time travel, then rerunning the simulation costs them time. Time where the real humans are moving into the future and developing more complex technology and weapons of our own. It's not a huge advantage for us, but it is all the NPCs can do.
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May 21, 2017 21:55
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Bicyclops posted:The real question is how come computer Third Doctor didn't figure all this out during the UNIT years (the simulation is imprecise enough that it could have been the 70s or 80s). Probably did. Lots of times. The zombie alien did say they'd killed the Doctor before.
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May 21, 2017 22:30
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Pocky In My Pocket posted:The show is happy to have 'the doctor is very clever' as an overt assumption Yes, he is good with computers. He once programmed a virus that affected every clock in the world using only a cell phone in a few minutes. That is impossible, and so is this. He is the Doctor he does impossible things.
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May 22, 2017 08:19
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Fil5000 posted:I dunno, Nardole has been pretty competent so far. Yeah, we'd be Micky. e: maybe a few Adrics
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May 23, 2017 10:22
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Diabolik900 posted:Wouldn't this mean that the bad guys created the Veritas themselves when setting up the simulation? That would be a pretty big blunder. Maybe save points? You want the simulation to be accurate for the present and near future. How do you test that? An easy way would be to set up historical simulations and see how well they predict what actually happened. Like Crusader Kings II seems pretty detailed and has a bunch of accurate historical figures, but if you set up in some isolated corner and just let the rest of the world run on AI, in a couple hundred years the game world will be very different from the historical reality. Any simulation is going to have some drift, but if you start the simulation running in 1200 AD and by 1500 AD the world mostly looks the way it did in the real 1500 AD, then you know your simulation is really good. At some point a tiny heretical cult discovered the truth, they wrote it down, and then they all committed suicide. In the real world none of that happened. Instead the tiny heretical cult accomplished nothing of note and died out because they were all celibate, or because they were murdered, enslaved, or converted to another sect and disappeared. Whatever, the only difference is that they disappeared 20 years later in the real world, and in both cases they had no noticeable effect on the development of the world. The aliens have this amazing simulation but (as seen in their random number generator) they have a lazy programmer on staff. That guy uses "close enough" save points to continue the simulation rather than loading every possible parameter fresh each time. So the Veritas, a tiny flaw in the simulation, ends up getting saved and propagated in other versions of the Vatican collections. In most runs of the simulation that tiny flaw doesn't matter and so isn't detected, because it is only ever seen by celibate librarians, and anyone who reads it dies without changing much. Facebook Aunt fucked around with this message at 04:42 on May 26, 2017 |
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May 26, 2017 04:35
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CommonShore posted:OR the Veritas exists IRL too, and it says exactly what it says, but in the real world it's more or less a combination of esoteric religiosity and speculative fiction - our world has texts that hypothesize that our world is a simulation, after all. The difference is that in the simulation, the Veritas speculation is, by coincidence, correct Woah.
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May 26, 2017 06:13
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This great season makes me retroactively more annoyed that they stretched out "who am I? am I a good man?" for a whole season.
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May 27, 2017 01:43
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Hemingway To Go! posted:I'd like to remark that I wish that the extremis aliens were more RTD and did have to be serious boring mummies. Maybe they used to horrible alien gamerbros and creepy nerds. They've been playing video games for 400 years. 
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May 27, 2017 06:41
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Carbon dioxide posted:Yeah, I agree that was really stupid. Nah. No known disease could kill every living thing on earth. Releasing the airborne combination of anthrax, smallpox, and tuberculosis wouldn't kill everything. Hardly anything directly kills both complex animals and plants. Kill all the plants and the animals would die eventually too, but not that quickly. There wasn't even mold left. It wasn't just dead, it was sterile. And there was no sign left of what had done it. Nothing can do that. No disease. No weapon. Maybe something like extreme solar activity, but this was supposed to be something we did to ourselves. Shooting off all the nukes wouldn't do it: nuclear winter might kill almost everything but it wouldn't be gone without a trace within a year and not even mold taking over. Maybe some chemicals. Chlorine gas or converting every drop of water to hydrogen peroxide might do it -- but that wouldn't be instant, to kill every living thing on the planet whatever was generating the toxic chemical would have to keep chugging along for months while humans did nothing to stop it. It has to be something completely new, and something that can keep on trucking without our help once it gets going. Even in science fiction that leaves either self-replicating machines turning everything to grey goo, or micro-organisms: nature's self-replicating machines. Given what he knows of our current technology, the Doctor decided accidental unstoppable bacteria was more likely than accidental unstoppable self-replicating machines. It's still pretty unlikely though. The bacteria composts everything it comes in contact with nearly instantly. How does the bacteria get across the open ocean to Australia and the Americas though? Anyone infected is dead in minutes, so we're not carrying it on transoceanic flights. America will drat well shoot down any plane or ship in the ocean to protect itself. Ocean currents would require the bacteria be able to survive in salt water, and there's no reason it would have that ability. Maybe the bacteria composting Europe, Asia, and Africa generates enough methane to choke the planet? The world ends smelling of farts.
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May 28, 2017 07:54
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Maxwell Lord posted:The one issue I have with the blindness thing is- surely disability law would require that a lab not have a combination lock that ONLY works visually. ATMs all have to have Braille, after all. Just accept that the lab made no drat sense. No element of the lab made sense. The layout of the lab had to be a comedy of errors. The airlock wasn't an airlock, because the lab didn't need an airlock, because they were working on improving crop yields not diseases. Then someone was all "Oi, this should have an airlocks, what if the killer tomatoes attack?" So they installed a half-assed non-functional airlock, an absurd lockdown procedure that protected nothing, and a filtration system that vented everything to the atmosphere every 30 minutes just so they could claim to have those safety features installed. Everyone who works there knows it is a joke. That's why they don't bother sealing their suits, and taking off your hood and drinking coffee inside the lab is no big deal. It's all just security theatre to look good to investors or NIMBYs touring the lab. Nothing dangerous was supposed to happen there.
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May 28, 2017 09:43
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Looking like desiccated corpses is an odd choice if you want to be loved. They would have had people lining up to consent a lot faster if they'd looked like beautiful, angelic glowing women. A magic mom telling you she wants to love you and protect you forever. 
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May 28, 2017 22:42
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Dabir posted:I feel like it's a bit dishonest that they were setting up the prediction thing to be like a military invasion. Like, we've studied your every move, we know everything you could do, we're teleporting onto your planes and taking them over, and then it was... what we got. It was a show of power. Have to prove that you have power to convince anyone you have the power to save the world. Though given that they need adoration it probably would have been better to do that through miracles. They were able to heal the Doctor instantly without touching him, so this was totally within their ability. Heal a bunch of quadriplegics or something. Heal everyone in a single hospital. People will be breaking down the doors to worship you.
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May 28, 2017 22:49
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As a children's show, "evil is ugly" is kind of a poo poo lesson. Like "stranger danger" inadvertently teaching kids that bad men wear trenchcoats and lurk in alleys.
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May 28, 2017 22:56
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Eiba posted:Honestly, it's not really a three parter. Just three stories with the same villains. The first one was quite good I think. Very interesting ideas, passable execution. The second one also had neat ideas, but the story didn't quite come together, but honestly those vaguely neat ideas are all that matter going into the third one. Specifically how the invaders must be loved and invited to rule the Earth. Yeah, there is no reason why there couldn't have been other episodes between the first and second parts. The intervening weeks could have had moments where the doctor considers the message and tries to figure out what it means. After part one I assumed the reason why they would choose to attack NOW rather than any other moment was because sim-Doctor had gotten a message out to real Doctor -- in effect making it the Doctor's fault they attack this week rather than 50 years from now. The Doctor's attempt to save the world becomes thing thing that endangers it. Nope. Apparently it was pure coincidence that humans almost destroy ourselves within days of Sim-Doctor sending the message. So what did Sim-Doctor accomplish? Did anything at all about their plan change because he sent that message? Did anything the Doctor did change? As soon as they enter the pyramid the aliens immediately tell them about the simulation, so no advantage there. I guess if he hadn't known about their plan the Doctor might have been more curious than suspicious, and encouraged the humans to talk instead of attack the pyramid. But since the attempts to attack the pyramid didn't work, that seems moot.
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Jun 1, 2017 04:18
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DoctorWhat posted:It's almost certainly a lie predicated on racism. But she's not blue.
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Jun 1, 2017 19:19
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2house2fly posted:Why does Bill's mental construct of her mother beat them? Is it like a bookend to Extremis, the monks getting defeated by the real-world presence of a fictional character? How does the fake version of Bill's mother beat the monks' fake version of history? Wouldn't a lie be beaten by the truth? Broadcasting anything over the link would start to overwrite the false history. Missy even suggested rendering her brain dead so the link would just broadcast static, because that would be faster than killing her and having the link simply stop working. In effect, that's what Bill did: broadcast static. There was no message, to reinforcing real history like the Doctor wanted, just static. Various images of a pleasant young woman, devoid of context or meaning. Very simple images. The 'static' started overwriting the fake history program in people's memories. Because there was no message on the signal, it allowed people to think and remember for themselves. Too bad about all the people who died though. Oh well, Bill is safe so everyone is happy.
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Jun 4, 2017 03:48
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n4 posted:I don't really understand why Missy is becoming good/having regrets about being evil/etc. I'd assume it's an act but the Doctor seems to take it seriously. Did I miss something that led to her change of heart? It kinda just seems like she said she would be to bargain with the Doctor and for some reason she's sincerely having a change of heart but that doesn't make any sense. It is almost certainly an act. The Doctor knows this. The Doctor hopes that change is possible, and he has 1000 years to try.
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Jun 4, 2017 07:26
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fractalairduct posted:Wait, how did Bill survive direct exposure to the transmitter? The monks weren't willing to kill her, because that would break the link. Game over.
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Jun 4, 2017 12:03
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Does he have to do his own laundry, or is that one of the things the TARDIS just magically takes care of for him?
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Jun 5, 2017 01:43
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MysticalMachineGun posted:Yeah but it was in the Thames, she corrected herself and the Doctor said something about that being a code to see if he was tricking her, but... She assumed that the Doctor was putting on an act because he was being watched. By referring to an event no one but the two of them knew about, it gave him a way to show her that he was lying to fool the monks and guards. In effect a secret code only the two of them would know. When he immediately told everyone it was a coded message, that told her that he wasn't lying, he really was on Team Monk.
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Jun 5, 2017 02:03
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Keisse J posted:Also, as was touched on, the faked regeneration makes zero sense - if Bill knew he could regenerate, it's unlikely she'd have been nearly as willing to make that deal last episode; but if she doesn't, why do it? For us and characters in the know it would confirm that she really had fatally shot him... but she's literally the only one in the room NOT in on "this is all a test". I think that was just a thrill for the kiddies at home. "Wait, are they changing actors mid-season???" That wouldn't work on terminally jaded goons or spoilered superfans, but it probably made some casual viewers sit up and take notice for a moment.
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Jun 5, 2017 03:34
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Gordon Shumway posted:They weirdly did this in the Zygon two-parter last season, where he goes in with a locked-and-loaded UNIT squad and just tells them to kill as few Zygons as possible. Also, I'm surprised that the army guys in part two didn't try the five rounds rapid solution, considering the monks were extremely susceptible to bullets in this episode. Come to think of it, the monks can stop missiles and teleport onto bombers to stop them, but a hail of gunfire is too much to handle? My guess is the submarine grabbing tech isn't something any random monk can carry around with him. It only works from the mothership/pyramid. During the second episode they had all hands on deck. All the monks were inside the pyramid making sure everything went according to plan. A bunch monitoring various info feeds to see how people were reacting, a bunch manning the simulation threads, updating the simulations with the current situation, a bunch running the weapons control room we never saw. Somebody running the completely bullshit "instant anti-blindness medical treatment" machine. 3 months later the monks are dispersed. There are a handful maintaining essential functions in the ship, while the rest are off doing monk things and shooting lightning at folks for history crimes. Nobody was running the submarine teleporter. Probably they can't run the teleporter and the psychic field generator at the same time because  .
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Jun 5, 2017 23:04
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Yes, but the important thing is that Bill didn't die. Happy ending!
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Jun 8, 2017 02:21
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Cleretic posted:The Monks aren't capable of time travel on any level. They're just good at making it look like they are. Lying, predicting, and remote eye surgery.
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Jun 8, 2017 06:22
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I liked the episode, but someone is salty about their colonial past, lol. Colonialism is bad, and also every single member of the victorian armed forces was greedy, cowardly, foolish, and generally a lousy person. With the accidental discharge and casual mutiny, they weren't even good at being soldiers. They were cartoonish. It was so unnecessary. The soldiers could have been competent people like the soldiers in Time of the Angels, and still run into the same problem of cultural misunderstanding. There is no reason the queen had to be awoken by a guy planning to steal anything he could carry and then abandon his mates taking the only means of transportation.
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Jun 11, 2017 05:55
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It might have been a little less obvious if they'd had their PoC soldier have ancestors in India rather than Africa. The empire must have imported a fair number of non-whites over the years. Any busy port will eventually have sailors from all over the world visiting the local prostitutes. Nations have diplomats, managers and merchants stationed overseas, mixing with the locals, their servants mixing with the local servant caste. poo poo happens. It makes perfect sense that a big port city like London would have much higher diversity than Britain in general. And historical Doctor Who episodes are more likely to be set in London than in Leeds or Whitby. I don't remember if Robots of Sherwood had any non-white people? That's a setting where a bunch of PoC would be harder to explain.
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Jun 11, 2017 09:12
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