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Doctor Spaceman posted:Superman - Secret Identity is one of my favourite takes on the character. It's about a guy called Clark Kent who becomes Superman in a world where Superman exists but only in comics. And it also feels like Moffat thinks superhero/comic fans are like Grant. At least this episode creates the opportunity to troll a particular brand of Whovian by asking whether Mr. Huffle counts as a Companion.
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Jul 9, 2017 06:01
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2house2fly posted:I think the idea of wiping the Vardies is that it severs them from their programming to serve the needs of the humans, leaving only their identity as a new species. So he's not wiping their minds, he's wiping the weird stuff that was coexisting with their minds. The big missteps imo are making the process of wiping them such a lighthearted ending (if the Vardy remember they killed humans then making amends could be what they get out of letting humans live in their city, for example, because else can you really offer them) and leaving it so long to establish that they even have minds, the resolution cones out of nowhere and morphs it at the last minute from "malfunctioning technology" to "diplomatic incident with natives". Still, grading on a Frank Cottrell-Boyce-shaped curve, this is an amazingly good episode. Likely true, but the ending is so rushed and perfunctory that it hardly reads as anything at all. There's additionally the problem that the prior climax involved the Doctor trying to blow everything up and then reversing himself to save the colonists; firstly, why not investigate before ignorantly killing everyone? Secondly, as he discovers, the Vardies are also alive, so why is he so unremorseful that he almost committed genocide? The Doctor, of all people, should feel guilty about that. The big ending betrayal is that the Doctor's set up as a teacher in The Pilot. Teaching pupils by wiping their minds doesn't seem very practical. The episode establishes that the protocols restricting the Vardies are the problem-if they didn't feel any need to keep humans happy they'd not have killed them-so removing those would be a step toward a solution and they could cram in a negotiation montage after that, ideally by cutting the "blow it up" subplot entirely by having the Doctor enter the ship to rig up a warning instead, or to set up some kind of EMP to disable the Vardy, or anything that doesn't necessitate a dramatic climax that overshadows the actual dramatic climax of saving (almost) everyone.
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Jul 23, 2017 14:56
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:So yeah, there's just no easy out, and I totally share Moffat's frustrations. I'll probably switch to they and their next season, but I won't like it and I already know it'll make my writing read worse. It's pretty loving annoying. Well, the easy way out is to say that using "he" and "him" to refer to the Doctor all this time may have been just as invalid as it would be post-regeneration. Personally, I would default to "she" and "her" to refer to all the Doctors starting with 13 and I'll be sorely tempted to keep that up even if 14 is played by a man. The other alternative is to use the appropriate gender for a specific Doctor but refer to the character generally according to the gender of the present occupant.
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Jul 25, 2017 04:03
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This one could have been so many things but because it never decides it never quite becomes anything. It rings up the horror tropes, and the premise of a horror movie messed up by the Doctor joining the young men and women trapped in the house could be sublime. But half of the Landlord's characterization seems built around totally surprising us with the twist ending, so much so that he's only just about half-characterized. The psychological drama doesn't strike me as chief interest for most of the story, which instead seems to hover somewhere between a parable about post-Imperial Britain and a potentionally stunning, if almost entirely unintentional, satire on a predatory man in real estate who sacrifices the lives of the young to feed his own need for parental approval. That relies entirely on an election which hadn't occurred before the episode was complete. And the obvious joke ("Knock, Knock." "Who's there? Wait, this is a lame 'Doctor Who' joke, isn't it?") gets strangely deflected. Bill gets more character development than the Doctor and the potential parallels between the Doctor and the Landlord aren't played up enough to register. On the plus side, this one's frustrating because of its wasted potential, not because it's terrible. I also wondered whether we'd get set-up here for Susan's potential reappearance or relevence later in the season, but no joy there. Playing up a contrast between the tenants and Victorian-era England could have led somewhere interesting, especially if instead of a wooden mother the Landlord is sustaining a wooden Queen Victoria. At the end of the episode, agents could have dismantled the house and used it for Torchwood.
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Aug 8, 2017 05:44
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:"Oxygen" is so great because it never, not once, ever pretends that the villain is anything but the concept of capitalism. It's not the zombies, it's not the suits who make them, it's not even the corporation that ordered those suits to kill the humans. It's capitalism. The corporation is nameless for a reason. Its name doesn't matter, because it's not specifically amoral. Capitalism is amoral, it contends that people only have value if they provide value, and that valueless members of society are definitionally extraneous. Nothing the nameless evil corporation is bad, capitalistically speaking, because capitalism is a system that has no moral center. Its only purpose is to create more money. If it existed in the real world, that company would be lauded for its measures. I was delighted and flabbergasted by this episode, because if anything this description undersells how well the critique functions. It starts, after all, with the idea that this corporation sends people into space to work and then charges them for the oxygen they breathe, which comes to dominate the workers' thinking so heavily that their concepts of distance and time adjust to their circumstances. But while the criticism is overt, there's a covert series of suggestions being made about circumstances back on Earth. Because none of these workers see anything unusual about being charged to breathe. Even more brilliantly, the "rescue ship" comes up full and leaves full: they first clean up the station, then drop off the new crew, who load up all the goods onto the ship which returns to Earth. All goods, no space needed for the old crew to take the return voyage. Margins and bottom lines, squeezing out every cent of profit available. And who is going to find out? Nobody's going to just randomly shop up at the station at precisely the wrong time in the cycle, right?
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Aug 17, 2017 04:23
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