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I've read a bunch of these reviews before but never posted. After having a read-through of your 2016 one, I'll take a go at the guessing game.
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Jul 3, 2017 19:15
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:10 |
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It was okay for me. I'd had some drinks, Christmas dinner, some family around. It did The Business.
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Jul 8, 2017 03:19
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I also generally viewed the episode as being more about Grant leaving a state of arrested personal development with regards to his ability to relate, communicate, and understand other people. All the superhero stuff (the costume, the cocksure manner, the Christian Bale voice) is him trying to be a big manly superhero but not really getting any of the stuff about motivation that Toxx mentioned with regards to Superman & Spider-Man and overcompensating for it. He also does fancy Lucy really hard but would never consider making a move - he's not trying to 'trick' her into a relationship. It's the opposite. He's trying to avoid moving in either direction, either moving on with his life and from her or actually acknowledging and expressing his feelings thereby running the risk of rejection. He's a classic nervous teenage boy. He is a kind of Nice Guy and a general wet blanket but he's also too nice (or read enough Superman comics, on which his worldview seems to be based) to be tricking her. He's just become some kind of servant for Lucy. If, prior to the climax, Lucy said to him "I like you, let's try things and see what happens" then he would have just run away and not confronted it. The irony is that despite all his power, he has no agency in his own life. He's in a rut. His arc is that he just grows up a bit and gains the power to express his wants and needs more clearly. Maybe that theme would've worked better if the episode focused on Grant as a teen or a younger man. He and Lucy must be in their early to mid 30s or so when the story airs? He seems a bit old to only be learning that kind of life lesson then. Maybe the idea was that being The Ghost took up enough time that he never had a chance to develop himself but then was his life of actual superheroics that easy for him that he was never forced to grow up? Had nothing else happened in his life? Did he never just read a book or something? (At least, this is how I remembered it all - I've not rewatched this because it's not really worth it.)
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Jul 9, 2017 10:58
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Jerusalem posted:Interesting stuff idonotlikepeas! Just a couple of thoughts I got coming out of that: It's probably covered by the phrase "poorly conveyed" but I did not get that part out of it at all. It came across to me as if the humans that made the Vardy just accidentally solved the hard problem of consciousness without realising it, programmed themselves up some robots that were Actually Conscious & Worthy of Moral/Political Rights, and (at least in The Doctor's eyes) re-invented slavery. I never got anything about the Vardy needing, wanting, or being able to grow at all. I still don't get how exactly they are going to live with the humans. The end gag makes it seem like the Vardy were an oppressed slave class which now happily gets to be rentiers of the planet. What could they possibly do? Sit around being a city all the time and driving the human-interface robots? What could they possibly want? Maintenance that they can't provide for themselves? What stops them from thinking 'let's just strip these humans and their ship down to elements just in case we need the parts'?
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Jul 24, 2017 15:12
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Jerusalem posted:I think the idea (and again, this is all my interpretation, based on that very brief bit of info we get so incredibly late in the episode) is that they built these things and then basically left them to run while the ship traveled through space with the crew in suspended animation. Once they landed on the planet and pulled a few support crew out, the Vardy had been running so long that they'd started to develop at least the basic germ of consciousness - complicated learning machines running in concert together in isolation/being exposed to stimuli for long enough that something started happening. But then the support crew are there and the Vardy don't quite grasp how to reconcile their core programming/how to understand how humans work differently to themselves. Which, again, is why I think it would make more sense for the Vardy to have grasped the concept of grief and realized for themselves the mistake they'd made, as opposed to the Doctor seeing them demonstrating emotions outside of their limited reflection of the humans around them and then wiping their memories to reset the field. Yeah, that sounds like a much stronger idea. They could have either done that, or idonotlikepeas's suggestion about a simple error in their ethics logic, or perhaps an incredibly skilled writer could have mixed the two into a satisfying and clever ending. As it is, we suddenly have The Doctor just saying a bunch of stuff and swanning off because it's been about 45 minutes already.
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Jul 25, 2017 10:38
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Aardark posted:Alternatively, maybe it's because the show is dull as poo poo now. That's why I stopped watching it. The past few seasons have had one (1) good episode (the one with the diamond wall or whatever). Flatline was also really good and Grumpier 12 was good too but merely Grumpy 12 is easier to watch. Clara as a character worked better with him than 11 but Clara was just unevenly written the whole time she was around.
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Aug 3, 2017 21:41
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:10 |
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drat it, I thought this'd be a case of Toxx going "the idea is great but the execution is flawed" for some reason known only to them. Guess I'm basically out of the game.  Still, it is a really good episode and I hope Mathieson gets an episode or two next series. I wonder if Moffat had decided to make The Doctor blind only after reading this script or if he'd planned on doing it at some point anyway and Mathieson's script happend to be serendipitous. Stabbatical fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Aug 17, 2017 |
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Aug 17, 2017 18:52
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