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This series really isn't doing it for me so far. Jodie is pretty good, Graham and Ryan are good and I'm sure Yaz would be if they gave her something to do. The music is great, and... that's about it. The concept of enslaved scientists being forced to build superweapons isn't a bad one, but it isn't developed at all. And one of their superweapons are... robots with lasers? It's a good thing they poured R&D into that concept. And Thirteen losing hope when Art Malik teleported the racers away made no sense. He said near the beginning that the TARDIS was phasing in and out of existence, and that it only appeared at certain times. I don't know why Thirteen was supposed to be surprised when that happened. The show looks more expensive, but I don't know if I'd say it looks better. The direction and cinematography seems lacking when compared to the Moffat stuff (which to be fair is one of the unsung heroes of that era). It's shooting for Netflix/cable prestige drama but not sticking the landing. There's an early sequence with Thirteen and Yaz in the ship where it seems like they're going for a long extended take... but then it cuts. So the shot you have is both too long and not blocked properly enough so that it's distracting, and also too short to be impressive. There's some kind of mysterious spark of cleverness that the show had under both RTD and Moffat that's no longer here. Which is weird, because it's a spark that was in everybody's episodes, including Chibnall's. The Doctor is still saying Doctorish stuff, there's still humor and cheer, but something's off about it. It's difficult to put into words, but I at least am really feeling its absence.
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Oct 15, 2018 10:03
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DoctorWhat posted:I really wanted to like this, and I still mostly do, but it lied about the history it focused on. Parks' protest wasn't spur-of-the-moment - it was a carefully-planned, scouted, and organized act of civil disobedience. This was my biggest problem with the episode, too--which is a welcome surprise given how nervous I was about it. The whole premise is based on bad history, but it doesn't hold back on its portrayal of the time and the episode's heart is definitely in the right place. With no evidence I'm going to blame the Ryan and Yaz explain the theme behind a bin scene on Chibnall and say that Blackman did a great job. It's easily my favorite episode so far. There are still a lot of dumb things going on, though. Jacket Man has the temporal displacement gun that he can apparently shoot people with, considering he tries to shoot the TARDIS crew multiple times. Why doesn't he just blast Rosa Parks to the 79th century? Whybird posted:The thing that bugged me most about the episode was this idea that this moment was a unique and precious thing and the whole of civil rights wouldn't have happened without it. It feels like it does a disservice to the strength and determination of Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement to suggest that they could be defeated by a late bus. This is true and it's related to the problem that DoctorWhat raises above, but I guess as long as we're pretending Rosa Parks sitting was just a spur of the moment thing, I guess it makes sense that while sure there would have been another inciting incident, but it would be different in enough ways that the future would be worse? Thirteen smashing the vortex manipulator knowing that Jacket Man would fail to strangle her was a wonderful Doctor moment, and one I'm having trouble played by any other Doctor. Mayyybe Series 10 death wish Capaldi, but even then Capaldi's just so tall it would be difficult.
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Oct 22, 2018 09:48
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marktheando posted:Yank viewers- how were the accents? Generally pretty good, though MLK and especially the racist dude at the beginning who punched Ryan were pretty bad. I wasn't even sure if that guy was bothering to do an accent at first.
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Oct 22, 2018 13:56
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 In a good year, Big Finish might put out two stories worth listening to, which is a bit worrying since they release round about seventy-five. I listened through most of the main run at work several years ago, and the gaps in between good stories just got longer and longer and longer until I ran into like fifteen poo poo stories in a row and gave it all up. It's the same eight guys grabbing monsters out of a hat. Doing a quick estimate by glancing at the Big Finish Wikipedia page, Nicholas Briggs may have written over one hundred Doctor Who stories. How many of them are good? Ten? Five? RTD wrote about thirty and Moffat forty-five-ish, for comparisons' sake. Rochallor fucked around with this message at 13:47 on Oct 27, 2018 |
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Oct 27, 2018 13:43
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Rhyno posted:Damned British math. Oh yeesh, that could be like three different numbers.
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Oct 27, 2018 13:47
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misadventurous posted:There is some good Big Finish but there’s so much that you really need to curate it. Sturgeon’s law at work. I also haven’t kept up with their more recent work, it all sounds kinda uninspired Looking again at the Wikipedia page, the last main line release I remembered enjoying was Heroes of Sontar, which was released in 2011. I got through the releases of 2014 or so before giving up. Barry Foster posted:They were great in the wilderness years, when they really tried weird new stuff. Didn't always land, but they were trying in a way they haven't in years. They also had much better writers back then. Oh definitely, there was still some bog-standard Doctor Who stuff, but there was also a lack of bog-standard Doctor Who stuff at the time. But when there are televised stories about ghosts on a spaceship and 19th century British soldiers meeting Ice Warriors, it makes you wonder what the point of it is. I would say it's too much to ask for Big Finish, as low-tier licensed fiction, to be more experimental, but there was a period where they were actually experimenting! And they've got the perfect operation set up to do it! They should be actively curating new writers who want to do stuff that doesn't involve (A. Daleks B. Cybermen C. Uh, Rutans D. Draconians) on (A. an abandoned space station B. 22nd century Earth C. Ancient Rome D. a submarine, thanks Barry Foster) trying to (A. Defeat a rival civilization B. Alter the course of human history C. Exploit a resource D. Run some experiment). We've already established that their audience isn't super picky, so let some young hungry writers run wild.
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Oct 27, 2018 14:11
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Open Source Idiom posted:While I stand by what I said about Briggs, I also suspect that their core audience is super picky, and what they want is the derivative run around stuff. The last few years have completely dropped character arcs (and even undone significant character development, in the case of Ace) because it was considered unpopular. Huh. Yikes.
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Oct 27, 2018 14:38
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It was a pretty okay episode until they forgot to write an ending. Like, I know that this is a constant Chibnall problem, but good god. The Trump satire was lazy. It hasn't been okay to have your Trump stand-in just be a rich dope with delusions of grandeur since, like February 2017. RTD going after Tony Blair felt like it had some bite to it, at least. This was like mayonnaise. I'm still enjoying the characters, and I'm looking forward to getting out of the Chibnall-scripted bits really soon.
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Oct 29, 2018 10:16
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I was really down on the show after last week because, even though I basically liked the Tsuranga Conundrum, I had a real sinking feeling that that was basically the highest quality of episode that Chibnall could produce. Totally forgot that other writers exist. This was a really rather good episode, probably the best of the series so far. While I did like the partitioning being basically a background thing used to fuel a story, it could have done with a little more blame on the part of the British. It largely comes across as a "isn't sectarian violence bad" story while totally ignoring the root causes of that sectarian violence.
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Nov 12, 2018 09:28
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In a show with time travel, alternate realities, and sentient body fat the most unrealistic thing it's ever shown is a megacorporation giving all its employees a two-week paid vacation. The system, even when functioning properly, has employees working so hard for so little that they see their own children twice a year. And the Doctor and her companions are totally fine with it. This episode was morally repugnant. That moon should have been on loving fire by the end of the episode. I hope Pete McTighe gets hit by an Amazon delivery truck.
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Nov 19, 2018 09:50
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I can't stop thinking about this lovely episode. As bad as the politics in this episode were, they resonate really worryingly with a lot of other stuff this season so far. The most outrageous of those being the Doctor's outrage that not-Trump shoots the spiders instead of letting them grow to death. Apparently it's wrong to give them a quick death if a quick death involves a firearm. And then this follows with the Doctor just letting him walk off. There's what's I assume is meant to be a comforting line in Rosa, when Yaz and Ryan are talking to each other about how lovely and racist 1950s Alabama is. There's even an acknowledgement that the time they're from isn't perfect (Yay!). But it's better, it's not as racist. There was a black President (and I assume that Yaz and all them are from 2015, or boy have I got some bad news for them). Progress has happened. Hooray. But that's the problem: it's all passive. Nobody does things to make progress happen. Things just get better. So you don't have to do anything. Just sit by and society will eventually marginally improve. We can leave this megacorporation as is because now they're going to treat their wage slaves more like wage indentured servants, and even hire more of them! What a triumph! Social progress is born from the bloodied bodies of protestors, strikers, and revolutionaries. Unless you're the Doctor. I hope desperately that the rumor that Chibnall is unhappy with being showrunner is true, because I want him gone as soon as loving possible.
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Nov 19, 2018 12:58
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Pretty good episode, though maybe it would have been better if it turned out that actually witch hunts were a good thing, but they managed to cut the false positive rate to a mere 40% and given anybody falsely accused a paid 2 week vacation. The alien plot should either have been brought up earlier or just left completely plotless, like having the muck be something non-sentient looking for corpses. As it is, there's a big exposition dump like 8 minutes before the end of the episode. The way the zombies' skin was expanding and contracting was incredibly effective, and Alan Cumming was an utter delight. There's another inexplicable moment of the Doctor trying to have the moral high ground when she yells at King James for setting the last mud zombie on fire. The witch hunter lady is already dead, isn't she? Burning a corpse is kind of gauche I suppose but not entirely irrational under the circumstances.
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Nov 25, 2018 23:35
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There have been 2 episodes so far this season that I might ever bother to watch again, so even if the last 2 episodes are 55 year high points (and that's a big if) it's easily coming in last, and a ways behind series 2 at that.
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Nov 29, 2018 04:32
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As good as Demons was and as mildly competent as Witchfinders was, this has really been the only time this season Doctor Who actually felt weird. This was some proper Logopolis/Castrovalva bizarre rear end-poo poo. And it actually remembered to do something interesting with the companions! Well, one of them actually, which is still one more than pretty much any other episode this season. Ed Hime for showrunner I guess, whoever he is. EDIT: Also, good to see that monster of the week from Season 2 of Buffy is still getting work, I like that guy. Rochallor fucked around with this message at 09:40 on Dec 3, 2018 |
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Dec 3, 2018 09:12
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There are plenty of sighted actors on Doctor Who who can't act worth a drat, so I see nothing wrong with some slightly ropey acting. That reminds me, the bit with the Doctor writing that her dad was probably dead on the wall was a cool, Doctor-y moment... but not for this Doctor. I could see it coming from... 9, maybe 11? It definitely doesn't seem like a 13 moment, even as loosely as her character has been defined so far.
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Dec 3, 2018 12:46
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Barry Foster posted:Yeah. It is. I feel like 12 would just come out and say it, except that in Series 10 he'd be nicer about it.
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Dec 3, 2018 13:08
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Regarding the exposition this season, it's especially jarring because the show has turned into a procedural of sorts, with lots of emphasis on searching for and picking up information. You'd think, based on Broadchurch, that that might be something Chibnall and his writers would pay attention to. But nope. Everybody splits up and looks for clues and then the threat reads its Wikipedia entry to the crew at around the 42 minute mark.
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Dec 4, 2018 00:16
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HelleSpud posted:2) Yaz's total contribution to the episode was Neural Blocker carrying case. She was a pocket. Like, one of those little Fob pockets inside your other pocket that are only there because of tradition, because people don't carry fob watches anymore. Which, incidentally, might be the only way to retroactively characterize her. It's even worse than that, because the Doctor and Yaz don't seem to suffer any ill effects from taking the blockers off. Like, the Doctor gets a headache and then them put them back on. It was built up like there would be some sort of stakes or consequences to removing them, but... And there was a whole scene to introduce the neck communicators. The neck communicators that are used once. In a scene where the Doctor is using a control panel that probably has some sort of space PA system. Another classic episode, right up there with the one from Series 3 with the Olympics and the one where Amy turns into a doll. At least we got Graham shutting down the Doctor's "if you try to kill him you'll be just as bad as him, a weird tooth monster and committer of multiple genocides who's killed like hundreds of people" nonsense. As someone who basically hated this season, I would like to propose something called the "Colony Sarff Test." For those of you who don't remember, Colony Sarff was a very minor bad guy in the Series 9 premiere, coming some distance after Davros, the Master, and the Daleks. He basically had two things going for him: a fairly cool effect where he turns into a bunch of snakes, and an off-hand bit of dialogue that mentions that said bunch of snakes function as a democracy, which has fascinating implications. My argument is that most things in a series of Doctor Who should be more interesting that the quarternary villian in a middling Moffat script. So here, by my reckoning, are the things in Series 11 that are better than Colony Sarff: -the music -all of Demons of the Punjab -all of It Takes You Away -perhaps half of Rose before it turns into detective work about bus routes -mayyybe bits of The Tsuranga Conundrum if I'm squinting and in a good move -Graham, in general, as a character -Grace, minus her dying -Alan Cumming -the scene between Whitaker and Cumming in the Witchfinders Which puts at least 6 full episodes, Ryan, Yaz, and frankly the Doctor this season behind a snakes-man from like the sixth-best episode from two seasons ago. I've no doubt that they're all fine actors, and they have shone a bit from time to time, but they're given nothing to work with. Absolutely nothing. Literally the only thing Doctor Who can do well is stick the Doctor and a bad guy in a room and have them argue with each other. That happened, what, twice? It's good and it's cheap, and they do it twice. I mean, this series was loving terrible so I honestly don't care if it's a year til the next one, but Chibnall, if you want to save money, find an old building, put a guy in a rubber suit and have him argue with the Doctor. How do you gently caress that up? Christ, I almost wish Gatiss was in charge of this show.
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Dec 10, 2018 04:26
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Chalks posted:I would like to think you could develop your characters while telling a compelling story rather than instead of. I know it's pretty clear that Chibnall's priority is developing characters while waving some moral lessons around in the most obvious way possible, but there really is more to the job than that and it's such a shame that he's approaching it like this. I've heard the character argument a couple of times, and while that's fine in theory, what are any of these characters? What are their traits? What are their personalities? How do they change throughout the season? Could you replace one of them with one of those tennis balls they use to mark where CGI characters stand and nothing would change? It Takes You Away actually bothers to have a story involving the characters in some way, but no other episode is interested in doing this. The only character who comes across as anything more than wallpaper is Graham, and I suspect that that's mostly because Bradley Walsh is an experienced enough actor that he's able to rise above the wet fart of a script he's been given. And even then, the fact that this suddenly milquetoast, politically-neutered, hand-wringing series is most interested in the only white male character makes me resent him. None of the showrunner's scripts rise above the competence of an episode called *checks notes* Dinosaurs on a Spaceship from six years ago. There's maybe two episodes this season that know what they're about and what they mean. And even those are grading on a curve. I don't know why anybody would pick watching any of the other episodes this season over an episode of loving Supernatural or whatever.
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Dec 12, 2018 23:13
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docbeard posted:Oh I know you didn't just imply that Dinosaurs on a Spaceship was anything but the platonic ideal of Doctor Who. I actually quite like Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. It's not saying much, but it's my favorite Chibnall script by a country mile. I was initially kind of bearish on Chibnall thinking if he could pull off scripts on that level of quality I'd basically be happy.
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Dec 12, 2018 23:42
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It sounds like Inspector Spacetime. This whole season has.
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Dec 13, 2018 07:29
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Edward Mass posted:I wish we had some fun quirk of Chibnall's writing we could poke fun at. Every notable Doctor Who writer has at least one that makes you say "Oh (X), you card!" and Chibnall should be no different. More pop culture references, I don't give a poo poo! I mean, we could all just end our sentences with no conclusion about 90% of the w
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Dec 23, 2018 03:31
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Part of the script from the upcoming episode has leaked!quote:The DOCTOR steps in front of a beleaguered squadron of resistance fighters, hands held up.
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Dec 26, 2018 00:55
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Oh, there's plenty of great scenes in Doctor Who that start with the Doctor having everybody put down their guns, and one thing all of them have in common is that none of them appeared in Series 11 and none of them were written by Chris Chibnall. After this series was over, I went back and watched Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, because I wanted to see if I was remembering it wrong when I called it quite good. I wasn't. It does a pretty good job of handling a large guest cast; there's the three regulars, Rory's dad, Cleopatra, and the hunter dude, and they all get at least a scene devoted to their development. They make sure to have a couple shots that aren't just generic spaceship interior, and the dinosaur effects are basically fine. The Mitchell and Webb robots... don't actively detract from the episode. And I really kind of like that the Doctor just up and kills David Bradley's character. It wouldn't work if it happened every episode, or even occasionally, but this is a guy that has basically attempted to commit genocide and is probably influential enough to escape any punishment, so the Doctor just... blows him up. That scene could do with a rewrite, sure, but it was really refreshing to see the Doctor actually... do something.
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Dec 26, 2018 01:38
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I would have preferred it be written somewhat like the Doctor locks homing missiles onto some expensive item that Bradley had been talking up earlier, basically forcing him to jettison his collection or get blown up, but as it is, I don't mind it. It definitely wouldn't work if that was happening every single episode, but Bradley is such a despicable character, and that's the only time Eleven really does something like that, so instead of feeling dissonant and out of left field it gives the ending of the episode some bite.
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Dec 26, 2018 03:37
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2house2fly posted:Whithouse pissed away the great story hook of "aliens have brainwashed the Doctor" Whithouse would have had a solid claim for showrunner before he wrote the two worst episodes of the Capaldi era.
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Dec 27, 2018 03:46
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Vampires of Venice is quite good, if a little slight. Whithouse had a real nice run for a while; The God Complex has a quite good script that Nick Hurran just knocks out of the ballpark with his direction. And... then we get to A Town Called Mercy, which isn't bad, but just feels empty. Then comes the Capaldi era and he just drops straight off a cliff. The underwater two-parter is just awful and unambitious, and then The Lie of the Land is pretty handily the worst Capaldi episode, and maybe the worst of the whole revival. I guess in fairness to Whithouse, the only appropriate end to the wet fart of the Monks storyline is making GBS threads your pants.Open Source Idiom posted:Whithouse didn't write the Zygon two-parter. I am going to win exactly zero friends when I say that the Zygon two-parter is really good, except for the speech at the end, which has some problems.
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Dec 27, 2018 05:37
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LionArcher posted:The speech at the end is the only good thing about that two parter though? On the whole it's good, though I really dislike the bits where Twelve dismisses Bonnie's complaints about being persecuted as "so what?" and lambasts her for not having a whole society set up and ready to go after her revolution. It comes around in the end, but it's really dicey for a bit there. 2house2fly posted:There are some problems overall with the politics of the episode, which I think is a sadly necessary consequence of trying to tell that kind of story in this setting (how else are you going to resolve "zygons want to live as themselves among humans on earth" but with "zygons keep on living in human bodies and are basically fine with it") more than anything the writer really thinks. I would guess they worked backwards from the message "the work of peace is never done" (I just realised the comment about how they've done this same thing a bunch of times foreshadows Heaven Sent) and either didn't think too hard or didn't have time to do more with the end result. Anyway, I think the plot in the episodes is generally pretty good, and it's got two Jenna Colemans in The overall politics of the episode are all over the place, to such a degree that I actually like it. Harness is using the symbols of specific politics completely divorced from any actual symbolism. The Zygons are blatantly inspired by ISIS imagery, but unless Harness' preferred method of fighting ISIS is "incorporate them into the British government," it absolutely resists being read into real-world events. On the micro level, though, there are some absolutely biting moments. Like the stuff with the drone operator who is totally ready to start blowing up Zygons until they shift into her family members, or the soldiers going into the church with the Zygons masquerading as their family. Everybody's ready to shoot people living in a fictional Middle Eastern country, but then all of a sudden they look like people you know and nobody can pull the trigger. There's TV that actually bothers to say something.
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Dec 27, 2018 07:58
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Organza Quiz posted:Counterpoint: the soldier walking into the building with the obvious Zygons is the stupidest loving scene in the entire show to date. Counter-counterpoint: it's a scene balancing precariously on the border between utterly wicked and incredibly stupid, and while I can absolutely see why some people will go with the latter, there's a couple of points that tilt it just enough the other way for me. 1) the music, which is probably the most brilliant thing Murray Gold has ever done. It starts so utterly cloying, to such an over-the-top degree, and goes a long, long way towards making the Zygons' story plausible, and builds towards this awful crescendo. And 2), the line, "Oh my god, you're actually going to kill me..." is just wonderfully wrong. I refuse to believe that this whole sequence wasn't guest-directed by RTD. I wish I could describe it better. We, as the audience, know right away that there's no way that these are really the solders' family, and yet, everything is trying to make us believe they are, from the wonderful performance of the mother to even the metatextual elements like the music. I can understand why it doesn't work for some people, but it's one of my very favorite scenes in the show.
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Dec 27, 2018 12:28
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Narsham posted:The Monk premise was bonkers and amazing. Given the season it was in, I was fully expecting some thematic comparisons with the Cybermen, especially with their own version of the Cyberplanner and their odd insistence on converting people (mentally, not physically), but none of that landed. Pyramid hinges upon a "safety" feature so inexplicable that I can only assume that Harness and Moffat have never met anyone who works in a lab, instead of relying on a safety feature failing. I could almost forgive it for the set-piece of people desperately trying to surrender to the Monks, who keep killing them because their desire wasn't sincere. There's a gradual but real decline in Harness' stories throughout the Capaldi era, but yeah, every single one of them is just full of crazy-rear end ideas and concepts. I remember reading an interview with him where he said that in his original draft, the supporting characters in Pyramid weren't the trio of generals, but Jeremy Corbyn, Donald Trump, and Kim Jong-un. Which means that presumably they all get incinerated by the Monks through the course of that episode. I don't know if it would work, I don't know if that would be good, but I do know it would at least be interesting TV worth watching. I would kill to see Harness' one series as Doctor Who showrunner, which would presumably be as many series as he would make it before being fired. He's such a fascinating writer.
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Dec 28, 2018 01:13
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I was enjoying this episode up until the Doctor's plan of "find a Dalek-sized black hole." That's what the plan was, right? I still have no loving clue how that was supposed to work. I am glad they resisted the temptation to have a steampunk Dalek and instead went with ironworks Dalek. The human-steering Dalek was a simply fantastic idea. This was pretty clearly Chibnall's best work of the series, though that's damning with the faintest of praise. The semi-procedural style really doesn't work for this show at all, at least the way it's going so far. Ideally it would be about characters breaking into groups and accomplishing different tasks or learning different things... but everybody largely stays together and there's been next to no development of the characters. The only episode that did a good job of this was Ker-blam! and that was awful for entirely separate reasons.
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Jan 2, 2019 07:28
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Bicyclops posted:Don't introduce a token gay character and have him killed literally the next sentence. This series has been so dire that I almost forgot that this exact thing happened almost every. loving. Episode. How many times this series was a character like, "Yeah, my gay partner's loving dead, deal with it." Five? Six?
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Jan 3, 2019 12:00
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