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The Vashta Nerada were mostly parasites without much intelligence. There's also Doctor Lazarus. Sure, he was smart and a victim of his intelligence, but in his monstrous form he certainly wasn't behaving very intelligently.
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Apr 10, 2017 05:50
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What is the 'reveal', anyway? Spare Parts doesn't really waste time before laying out that it's set on Mondas shortly before the Cybermen start being a thing. And the regular cover uses a Cyberman head too.
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Apr 10, 2017 23:09
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Wheat Loaf posted:Based on a few "How to Make Doctor Who Great Again?" articles I've read, I get the feeling there's a wee bit of a consensus among critics and commentators that Capaldi's age has counted against the show. I don't know if that's borne out by facts (because the only other people I know who like the show are all adults) but it would be a real shame if it was true. I feel like Capaldi's age didn't count against him per se, but his run hasn't had a whole lot to get excited about otherwise, so what would otherwise be a decent take on the character and a strong performance causes a bit of a sore point because there isn't an 'at least he's hot and fun' charismatic lead to hang on. Not to say Capaldi ISN'T charismatic, but he's harder to get excited about if you aren't a nerd. I'm personally currently in a place where I'd quite like a different casting choice for the Doctor that's not what we've had. I've loved every Doctor, but I feel like I've had enough 'young white dude' takes on it that I'd like to get something different for a bit. Capaldi certainly was 'something different' in that he was a fair bit older, but that didn't really get leveraged. A female or POC Doctor would get me excited right away, but I understand that's probably not gonna happen.
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Apr 12, 2017 23:33
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Okay, I am in love with EVERYTHING about this episode, throw in some Escherian mad geometry and/or the Cybermen and it would be entirely designed for me. That is the type of strong start that I can't even fathom being disappointed by the followups for. I love that they basically built the entire episode around making it VERY clear that Bill is gay, while somehow not feeling like they're beating you over the head with it.
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Apr 16, 2017 04:32
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Trin Tragula posted:What was that actually about? Does anyone know? There was some running around and some people being very enigmatic and it was all nicely photographed and performed well enough...but if you had to describe that episode to another fan who didn't see it, what would you say about it? Lesbian water wanderlust.
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Apr 17, 2017 00:30
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AndyElusive posted:Oh for some reason I thought it started on the same night as Series 10. Wasn't the War Doctor's screwdriver the one Nardole used for his diversion? I don't remember War's very well but I remembered it being red and having the same-ish shape.
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Apr 18, 2017 03:11
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CobiWann posted:Only real complaint? Random Dalek appearance. Daleks should be the centerpiece of an episode and not used as a Dalek Ex Machina. I kinda liked their use here, the Doctor treating them as less an actual enemy and more just a force of nature. This water-thing is persistent and they probably need to kill it, and there's some people who are VERY good at that and will do so without question. Then, of course, it actually survived. I get the feeling that he was treating it like an experiment to judge just what they're dealing with; if it could survive the Daleks, it can survive anything they can throw at it.
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Apr 19, 2017 03:14
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echoplex posted:I've noticed a lot of people (Americans) complaining about not being able to understand Bill, which is a bit surprising? There was a line or two that I had to rewind to catch, but that's less because of her accent and more because of the line catching me off-guard.
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Apr 21, 2017 12:34
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My quick one-sentence review of that episode, because I"m gonna be home for maybe another three minutes: Basically a version of In the Forest of the Night that's not the worst thing ever.
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Apr 23, 2017 06:58
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You can tell, even if it lacks pretty much all of the actual flaws of Forest of the Night, that this is the same writer. And this is part of why, because it's the same thing: the Doctor siding with an 'innocent' phenomenally dangerous and generally singular force, that might have caused the story's problems but meant no ill will by it. This is still better than that, because the Doctor's abundantly aware that these robots are loving dangerous, but he's more siding with them out of necessity to prevent further death. The only way this colony can thrive, for better or worse, is for the humans to respect and understand those robots, because they have all the power in this relationship. I absolutely got the feeling that this peace won't last at all, though. I'm not sure whether or not that's intended, but the Doctor did an awful job of convincing that colony to respect and understand that the robots will gently caress them the gently caress up if they think it's prudent to do so. On a separate note, something neat that occurred to me when I was watching: the Doctor says that he's met these colony ships before, implying that neither the reason they left nor the fact that this went awry is terribly surprising to him. The former is a general fact that's really not surprising the Doctor knows, but the latter actually makes sense too, as these robots are very similar thematically to the Clockwork Men from Girl in the Fireplace and Deep Breath. It's probably not the same project judging by the major aesthetic differences, but it's likely the same inciting event leading to them both. Apparently, that period's AI wasn't exactly prepared for managing the extended time they were going to need to run for!
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Apr 23, 2017 12:49
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The_Doctor posted:That's one of the other stories! What I'm getting is that pioneer colony ships leaving Earth to populate another planet don't often turn out very well.
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Apr 23, 2017 14:40
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Ark in Space and Beast Below are both 29th Century
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Open Source Idiom posted:I know the answer to this question is "Or there wouldn't be a story" buuuut I got the idea that it's something that didn't come up in the testing phase where they could fix it. There's similarities to the Clockwork Men from Girl in the Fireplace/Deep Breath as I said earlier: both types of robot essentially came to the conclusion, after an unclear amount of isolation, that individual human lives mattered less than the project's continuation. That's the sort of bug that doesn't come up in testing because there just isn't time for it to arise.
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Apr 23, 2017 23:22
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Plavski posted:She also got firsts on every paper the Doctor set her so she's certainly got smarts. She was also getting ~97% on her essays, which is no easy feat considering once you're past 80%, you're just getting rewarded for sheer excellence. And I can't imagine the Doctor is an easy grader. Going by that alone, she's maybe the smartest companion since... Nyssa? I feel like the Doctor would probably give the majority of his marks for understanding concepts rather than factual knowledge, so while she's probably very smart in that regard she's hard to compare. Consider that the most qualified and presumably academically intelligent companion of the revival has been Martha, by virtue of being a qualified doctor, and yet I think we'd all agree that Bill's smarter in a very different way.
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Apr 24, 2017 12:14
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Bicyclops posted:Sometimes I sort of miss the days of the First Doctor where he literally had no clue what he was doing and just ended up in a completely random point in space and time every time he activated it. Which is ironic, because Hartnell knew what every goddamn thing on that console was 'supposed' to do.
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Apr 29, 2017 06:21
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Less than two minutes before the episode acknowledges slavery as a Thing in the 19th century that can't be ignored, and then tying that whole thing into a story that didn't necessarily need it but absolutely gained from it. gently caress, I hope this hot streak doesn't end and we just get a whole season of this kind of stuff, it's great. Even the Forest of the Dead guy's turned in a strong episode!
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Apr 30, 2017 06:11
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Nathan Barley's point about coal mines was a good one which was skimmed over because he's the baddy That's kind of a matter of 'stopped clock is right twice a day'. His horribly exploitative and barbaric fuel manufactory happened to produce a fuel better than coal, especially for what we know about coal now, but that wasn't why he was doing it.
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May 1, 2017 20:49
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PriorMarcus posted:I didn't like this quote. How would the Doctor possibly count how many children where on Gallifrey that day? '2.47 billion' isn't exactly a concrete number. I feel like he didn't 'count how many children were on Gallifrey' as 'remembered the population statistics from around that time', which isn't unreasonable, it's like you remembering the rough population count of the country you live in.
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May 1, 2017 23:47
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Cerv posted:And now I'm worried about that elephant from the opening scene It was his plan to get a bunch of people out on the ice, he mentioned it. Since his plan didn't actually get to play out and he died right after, the elephant survived at least until the end of the episode!
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May 4, 2017 08:24
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Looke posted:Missy is in the vault, calling it now I dunno, that's too obvious at this point. Either it's not going to be a whole-series mystery and they'll reveal it halfway through, or it's a fakeout and we're dealing with something else (I'd buy our old friend Simm Master, it'd mesh well with him asking about the Prime Minister; he's hanging out with one). I was disappointed by this episode, but not because it was bad. I just got immediately excited that I might be getting an episode about my favorite thing: bizarro, terrifyingly wrong physical space. Instead I got a really good episode that would've totally wrecked the me of two or three years ago by speaking to problems I had then but don't any longer. So yeah, not a bad episode, but not what I was hoping for.
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May 7, 2017 10:05
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Aardark posted:Did their budget get cut? It's all dimly lit rooms. I'm not sure if you're serious (it's an old and lovely house at night, of course it's all dimly lit), I wouldn't be surprised if this was something of a bottle episode. Not for all departments--it had a fairly large 'active cast' compared to everything else so far--but I wouldn't be surprised if it was sort of a break for the set designers so they could focus their energies on some of the more elaborate settings for this season. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 11:25 on May 7, 2017 |
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May 7, 2017 11:23
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echoplex posted:I've been doing twitter roundups of episode graphics after every ep, I really struggled finding anything to post on this one. There was stuff like researching and recreating period contracts, doing up the estate agents as you said, phone apps (none of which get seen but we do make interactive apps for every scripted phone sequence), and then minor stuff like the door numbers on the rooms etc. The painting of the mother was mixed duty - we re-arranged the Doctor's Office set for the backdrop - I shot and lit it (which is weird how that always comes down to the graphics guy) and then the concept artist painted over in photoshop. I do want to say it wasn't until you started posting stuff like this that I really appreciated the effort that went into things like set design for Doctor Who. Future and alien stuff I could tell was some real work, but I never thought about how much effort goes into recreating a time period based largely on contemporary art, or mocking up believable modern-day background details. And as someone who works within app development, I love that you make apps specifically for scenes where they might be needed.
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May 8, 2017 12:45
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Vinylshadow posted:I don't care what color or gender the Doctor is, so long as I can recognize them as the Doctor. I'm at the stage in all this where I actively want a woman or PoC Doctor just for a very deliberately different take on the character, 'cause so far the Doctor's been twelve different white men's interpretations of the same very vague character. I mean when they inevitably cast the next Doctor as some fairly handsome late twenties-early 30s white male who's good at running and shouting I'll get back on board and be interested in what he's doing, but I don't want him right now.
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May 13, 2017 00:04
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This is what, the third episode this season where the real enemy is society's exploitation off innocent people (two of them being pretty explicitly anti-capitalism, with Smile aiming at colonialism)? It feels like the entire writing staff is really pissed off at society this season, and I love it. I'd echo all the complaints about this episode feeling kinda poorly-paced, but I honestly don't think it suffered all too terribly for it. I didn't feel like it was dragging or rushed while it was going on, just in retrospect. And I'm actually pretty cautiously interested in the Doctor being blind; it could easily be an annoying extra wrinkle to stories, but I don't think it'll remain a secret to Bill for long, and what it will do is slow the Doctor down quite considerably. Which is good, Capaldi's at his best being slow and deliberate.
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May 14, 2017 09:18
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Davros1 posted:Anybody else think Nardole is getting more and more sinister with each passing ep? I don't think he's getting more sinister so much as losing more and more patience. The Doctor keeps shirking his oath, and lying to and belittling Nardole and the job he's probably being kept around to do, at this point he's probably kinda pissed.
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May 14, 2017 13:29
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I think the Doctor actually saying he's still blind is a bit of a clumsy cliffhanger, especially with how kinda hammy they were about it, but I do think they had to be explicit about it. If they didn't say it, we probably would've just assumed that he 'couldn't look at Nardole' because he knows what he's saying is totally right and that he has to take his responsibility a little more seriously. And 'show, don't tell' is a very obvious answer, but the way that scene is set up (until he confides it to Nardole, only the Doctor himself knows he's blind) there's no way to do that that isn't straight out of a comedy. They had to have him say it just to make it both very clear and maintain the dramatic impact it's supposed to. Blindness is a really hard disability to show in a way that's both clear what it is and not inherently comedic. Especially since, as the rest of the episode showed, the Doctor's not used to it and needs a lot of help.
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May 16, 2017 14:15
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I've forgotten what shirt this apparently was. Was that the rainbow top?
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May 18, 2017 09:53
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Damnit, are they finally cracking down on people accessing iPlayer by VPN? Nothing's playing when I try. EDIT: Naturally, the moment I post this, it works. Nevermind!
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May 21, 2017 06:37
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Well that was pretty good! At this point I'm just dreading the house of cards of consistently good episodes to fall over, which I'm especially worried about since we're getting into the half of the season with things I'm directly interested in.
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May 21, 2017 07:48
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I can't figure out if the Doctor basically told Bill to go out with Penny because he wants her to have a nice time, or if he did it because he decided he has to improbably crash her real date, too. I mean either one's great, but for very different reasons.
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May 21, 2017 11:59
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Actually, this is the sister trope to 'it was all a dream', the 'it was all a lie'. The main effective difference is a variable quality level; the dream trope almost always means the whole story was useless but provides an interesting stage for things, while the lie trope could, depending on execution, either be a worthwhile and interesting addition or actively a waste of your time. Compare Last Christmas (dream, but interesting) to Time Heist (lie, kinda bullshit) and Heaven Sent (lie, really good). We'll see which one this was later, but it seems like it might actually be impactful on the story.
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May 22, 2017 03:17
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Facebook Aunt posted: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. Actually, this one is considerably possible. There's multiple levels of technology here, which would make it harder, but not impossible. Simplifying this down to a human-technology level, we're talking about a part of an application sending a message to something external. There's plenty of ways to do that depending on what you want to do, all you need is some sort of protocol that's common to both the sender and the destination. We're talking about a simulation of the Doctor sending a message to the actual Doctor through the use of a device both have, so that's no worry. Then, of course, there's the issue of it actually making the network connection, which is an issue they don't address; I don't care how powerful a computer is, it can't tweet without an internet connection. We don't know much about the system running the simulation, but it's a fair assumption that it isn't completely isolated. There's a few possibilities here, and only one of them actually makes it impossible to make that connection: -The simulation is running on a central network for the invaders. As there's no way in hell said network doesn't have access to external communications SOMEHOW, that's what sim-Doctor can use. -The simulation is running on a machine tangentially connected to the invaders' network, but has no other networking or communication capabilities. In that case sim-Doctor can't do it directly, but formulating a way to push that message through that single communication tunnel is very possible. -The simulation is completely disconnected from all other computers, and can only be interfaced with in person. That does make it impossible, but you'd need to be exceptionally cautious to actually think to do this, and these are clearly not aliens being cautious enough to do that. The real roadblock for this sort of thing in this case is getting incompatible technology to interact; we're talking about a computer made by currently unknown and unnamed aliens sending a message to what is presumably a homebrew system made by the Doctor. There's still a few ways to do this, but they'd require significant work. In this case it was an emulator--an application running within the simulation to imitate a standalone device. That's not so easy of course, but the aliens put that in the simulator themselves, so they solved the problem for him. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 08:53 on May 22, 2017 |
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May 22, 2017 08:48
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So something has occurred to me.We're 6/13 episodes in, with the next episode following on directly from this one, with the same enemies. Is this the longest a season has gone without an episode on ANY recurring staple enemy? We've had small appearances by the Daleks and Missy, but they were both ancillary to the actual focus of the story. With the very debatable exception of Smile ('rogue colony ship AI' even if not the same ones) and Thin Ice (if you want to count 'man' as a race), every antagonist has been a new thing.
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May 23, 2017 10:56
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Neddy Seagoon posted:From a few pages back, but this isn't quite right. They're a religion that has dedicated itself to finding a way to kill anything. They're less executioners and more people with too much time on their hands sitting down to think "okay, how could we actually kill a Time Lord?..." Their religion is the meme that Batman has a plan to kill everyone in the DC universe. Like Batman, they can never be too careful.
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May 24, 2017 12:08
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Hemingway To Go! posted:That episode makes no sense whatsoever if you think about it at all - like the number thing is too easy a tell, you'd have to simulate a universe WITH the doctor's time travel since it took the end of Oxygen into account when they just want to conquer Earth... there's a lot of logical things wrong. Actually, I think I might have a good explanation for some of this, that I believe I got from an SMBC comic (so he probably got it from elsewhere). Basically: we have no proof the simulation's been going for any longer than we were watching it. If our world didn't exist until five seconds ago, but we were made with believable and largely consistent memories of the world existing beforehand, how could we reasonably tell? Similarly, if the simulation in Extremis is complex enough to have simulated humans that can form memories, and is consistent enough with the real world that Bill's relationships with people are all correct, it's obviously both superficially accurate and capable of complexities, as well as easily having inhabitants smart enough to be fooled by implanted memories. Consider that the portals Bill and Nardole went through included the Vatican, the Pentagon and CERN. Those are all pretty distinct groups of smart people now, but it would've been a bit pointless to have a portal to an empty plain in North America in the era where the Library of Alexandria existed. Similarly, if you're running the numbers to judge how to attack an enemy very soon, it would be a waste to run those numbers in the past given that these aliens don't have time travel (as far as we know). What use would they have in knowing that there's a massive weakness in our defenses a century before they can attack? So we can reasonably assume they haven't been running this simulation for long. That, and the fact that this is an episode all set on Earth in the present day (Or not, but you get my point), suggests that they didn't have to design the simulation beyond a specific point. What I'd say they did was simulate from a snapshot taken some soon point after Oxygen, which explains away a lot of weird discrepancies. The reason nobody in the modern world found the RNG secret until reading the Veritas wasn't because it was hard, it was because they weren't existing for long enough to put it together. The reason it could 'simulate the Doctor's time travel' is because it DIDN'T, it just simulated the results and knowledge of it. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 12:04 on May 25, 2017 |
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May 25, 2017 11:57
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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 that was the intention? We know from their admission that they've run the simulation and dealt with the Doctor many times, yet this is the only time word got out to the real Doctor. That suggests that the only reason this one's special is because of that realization, brought on by the Veritas. I don't know why they'd do that exactly, but I guess if you're experimenting you have to entertain some outside possibilities.
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May 25, 2017 12:33
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Facebook Aunt posted:This great season makes me retroactively more annoyed that they stretched out "who am I? am I a good man?" for a whole season. Speaking of this season being so good it's almost annoying, how about we start a betting pool: what major issue will Peter Harness' story ham-fistedly reference and mishandle THIS time!? My money's on nuclear armaments, given the context of the story we have so far.
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May 27, 2017 02:42
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ThaGhettoJew posted:For about half of its runtime I legit thought this was going to be the twist to the episode. Like just conning their victims into being suicidal/complacent enough to give up seems like it would be less resource-intensive than simulating an entire planet's history and processing all their various sentiences and THEN going on to invade and/or murderize. It'd be kind of a RTD-era gag for cheap villains with access to handwavium technology, but still. Kinda funny, because you described that and I thought of something like the aliens from The Girl Who Died. Enemies who conquer not by actual conquest, but by being really good at convincing their enemies to surrender. ...and now I'm remembering that that wasn't the ACTUAL thing with those aliens, it was just an interpretation, and now I want an alien race that explicitly is that.
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May 27, 2017 11:17
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Elite posted:Okay, who had "GM research" ? Come collect your prize. I probably would've picked GM research in isolation, because that's absolutely in the wheelhouse of Peter Harness' episode focuses (that being 'conservative old British man scared of progress') while the initial guess of nuclear armaments kinda wasn't. I just happened to fall victim to the intentional misdirection. That episode was otherwise... alright, I guess. Not great, in large part because of those lab scenes being bad and spread out through the story; someone pointed out recently that Forest of the Night's anti-meds message was very specifically bad but mostly confined to a single scene that doesn't impact the rest of the episode, which debatably puts it above Kill the Moon because while that one is more nebulously bad, it's spread out so far across the second half of the story that you can't ignore it. The lab scenes in this one are constantly stepping in the way of an otherwise-fine episode, so it drags the whole thing down. Unfortunately, the stuff with the Monks can't really stand on its own. There's a bunch of good ideas in isolation, but they don't quite meet up and mesh together, which is really disappointing. Still, if that's the worst we get this season, I'm happy. At least there's stuff to like about it.
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May 28, 2017 05:16
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Facebook Aunt posted: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. I remember a bunch of infoposts in PYF from a while back where someone talked about crap British trains from the middle chunk of the 20th century,and this sort of thing you described is absolutely what happened in the automotive industry around that time so I could believe it. A working environment built entirely by somebody with no concept of what working there would require, then making a bunch of demands of how it's built to both counter imaginary problems and justify investment in other fields ("hey, listen, we need to keep our airlock manufacturers employed, so..."). ...This hypothetical story about the lab is way more fun than the actual stuff that happened in it. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 10:04 on May 28, 2017 |
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May 28, 2017 10:01
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Also, why the gently caress do they keep letting Peter Harness write episodes when he keeps writing crap? At least he's not writing the next one, so it might actually turn out okay. Even if this is looking like another pointless episode to set up the next one. Again. The only lynchpin linking them all together is "The Doctor is blind" and you could pull that out by having Nardole actually fix his eyes at the end of Oxygen. In fairness, this next episode obviously does need that setup; judging by the preview the Monks kinda timefucked the Earth's history, you can't just jump right into that. Especially since they're new enemies, even if it were the Daleks or something that are known quantities we'd still be annoyed if we didn't get that leadup. quote:For that matter, seriously, they're telling us the Doctor's just going to accept being blind for the rest of his incarnation instead of going anywhere in space and time to go fix his eyesight? Nanites. Nigh-magical technology. 50th-Century Lasik surgery in the Andromeda Galaxy. Take your pick. Honestly, why you're saying that at all is a bit weird, given the Doctor clearly DID bang together a solution through the shades. Sure, they aren't perfect, but the Doctor's never been one for perfect solutions. Veritas showed pretty definitively (even if it wasn't the real Doctor) that he's making the best of what he's got, you can't just assume there's a better solution out there that he 'should' be taking. I actually really liked the Doctor being blind, it was an interesting wrinkle to things (even if actually giving him an insurmountable obstacle through that was... somehow beyond them), but it seems like we won't be facing it for long. He wasn't wearing the shades at any point in the preview, and I don't think the shades featured in any promo shots for upcoming episodes. On an unrelated note, now I'm thinking about it this story feels really weirdly placed. This is the sort of thing that made up a season finale two-parter in the Matt Smith days, yet this is basically the halfway point and we've got some pretty big hooks coming in the stories after it. I'm not saying it's bad, it's just a really weirdly structured ride. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 13:00 on May 28, 2017 |
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May 28, 2017 12:56
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