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Apparently there are a lot of commercials.
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Oct 7, 2018 19:14
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:26 |
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Well at least we colonials seem to be getting it on a delay because of the commercials rather than it being cut all to hell. (Last commercial complaint unless it isn't.) Loving the new composer.
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Oct 7, 2018 19:27
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My thoughts on the episode will probably congeal into something more nuanced than YAAAAAAAAAAY eventually but for now, I thought that was wonderful. As I mentioned earlier, I love the new sound. And I liked Murray Gold a lot, but I'm completely happy with the change. The show looked completely like something new in every way possible. The script was a bit shaky in spots but it got the job done, and a few awkward "OKAY THAT'S HOW WE GOT FROM POINT A TO POINT B" moments in service of not making the episode even longer are sometimes a necessary evil. (If I hadn't known, and you'd told me this was the same person who wrote Cyberwoman, I would have called you a flat-out liar.) I actually didn't mind Grace's death, as much of a shame that it was. It wasn't a gratuitious murder, she went out a hero (though that's one of the bits that could have used more exposition, because I sure didn't notice any "Hey we have a plan to electrocute the data collection monster thingie" talk before they were doing it). I'm looking forward to getting more in the heads of the new companions, so far Ryan's the most developed, but there's time for that. And Jodie Whittaker is, of course, phenomenal as the Doctor. A bit of Tennant in her portrayal (completely understandable when you figure how closely they've worked together in the past) and a bit of Smith too, but she feels like a distinct character. Very much looking forward to more. And goddamn that was a lot of commercials.
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Oct 7, 2018 20:56
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Lunatic Sledge posted:he said he was given permission, Ryan (I think it was Ryan?) just assumed the permission was via the Dr. Strange button Yeah, I picked up on that too. Though I think it works even if they don't come back to it, if this really is a leadership initiation rite, getting some human to agree to let you hunt on Earth is probably part of it. (And as Tim's a big ol' cheater, showing a 'primitive' some glowing lights til one of them is curious enough to touch them and calling it permission completely fits with his M.O.)
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Oct 7, 2018 23:32
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I dig this. I particularly like the way it starts out as basically the classic theme and gets progressively more alien and disjointed.
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Oct 8, 2018 00:00
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ShortLeroy posted:To be fair its a hunt not a fight. He had to find one specific human on earth. And wasn't he supposed to take his target alive?
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Oct 8, 2018 01:51
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I don't think the plotting is this episode's strong point, to be sure, but the plot does what it's meant to do and otherwise mostly stays out of the way, which I think is the way to go (especially after years of labyrinthine puzzle-box stories). (It's also essentially the same plot structure as The Eleventh Hour, and, for that matter, Rose.)
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Oct 8, 2018 20:05
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Wolfechu posted:You could argue they tacitly covered that, by having Graham not ask every five minutes when the bombs were going to go off, after she made her sonic. Also from the way you didn't see anyone's collarbones flashing later.
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Oct 8, 2018 20:28
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Tiggum posted:It really felt like there was a scene missing where the Doctor actually transferred the bombs. I think maybe they wanted to have the solution be a surprise to the audience, but it really shouldn't have been because it would have worked a lot better if it had been properly set up. I'm thinking they probably just had to cut some things for time since the episode was already a bit longer than usual. Anyway, the Doctor turning the enemy's weapons/advantages against them is a long-running staple of the series.
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Oct 8, 2018 20:38
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Spikeguy posted:Just saw the first episode. Looks amazing. I love the Doctor and the companions. She seems a lot kinder, several of the past doctors would have shouted at them when they didn't listen and Nan got killed. One part 'the crack in time did a number on history", one part various unsatisfying "people choose not to know about aliens because it's easier that way" explanations (and that's been a thing in the series since the classic days), and one part "it's just a show, you should really just relax".
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Oct 9, 2018 04:43
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Jerusalem posted:I really don't get why people seem confused by this either. It was pretty explicit that Tim Shaw - a demonstrated cheat - deliberately set up a thing that would technically "grant" him access to Earth by using an unwitting human touching a light he had no idea the function of. He straight up answered the Doctor's question about what gave him the right to come to Earth by saying he was "granted" access, and Ryan's reply is obviously in reference to the weird light he touched as he grasps the significance of what Tim Shaw just said. I can't quite get away from the idea that Ryan just assumed that touching the glowy lights was what Tim Shaw was talking about and it was never confirmed, but yeah, I certainly think it's credible that "get permission to hunt here" was all part of the challenge (and that Tim did it in the cheapest way possible).
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Oct 9, 2018 12:14
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The_Doctor posted:See, I never got the ‘randomly mentioning it’ thing. Every time it came up, to me it seemed a valid place. Yeah, exactly. Aside from her joking around with the Doctor at the end there (which I thought was sweet, considering the circumstances for both of them) , was there a single time she mentioned that she fancied women when she wasn't talking to (a) a woman she fancied or (b) a guy who was/who she thought might be flirting with her?
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Oct 9, 2018 12:18
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corn in the bible posted:I'm glad the doctor will risk the universe to save Clara and not his wife or in-laws, what a cool guy So what you're saying is that the thing that the episode explicitly presented as being hosed up is in fact hosed up?
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Oct 10, 2018 13:58
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Rhyno posted:There was an escape pod and Clara made sure the door was welded shut before the ship was ever launched. "Now I'll never know if I had the right ans-" "YOU DIDN'T, LOSER"
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Oct 10, 2018 18:28
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Bicyclops posted:I think if they'd left out the tooth thing and given Tim Shaw a very different design and a little more dialogue, it would have improved him a little, but, eh, it's the new companions and the new Doctor we're supposed to care about in a regeneration episode. As high regard as everyone (including me, obv) holds The Eleventh Hour, I don't think I've ever seen anyone demand the return of the Atraxi. So yeah.
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Oct 10, 2018 19:12
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A lot of ones I like (and a few I didn't care for) have been mentioned already. (The Fearmonger, Colditz, and Bang-Bang-A-Boom are particular favorites.) Some others I like: The Fires of Vulcan: A Pompeii story but it works completely distinctly from The Fires of Pompeii and it's a testament to the rehabilitative powers of Big Finish for the less notable companions, in this case, Mel. The Harvest: The introduction of new companion Hex, and does some interesting things with a familiar foe. Night Thoughts: Another one that feels like it could have been part of McCoy's TV era. It's reminiscent of Ghost Light (though not nearly as opaque).
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Oct 11, 2018 03:50
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In addition to it having been a fantastic look for Michelle Gomez, I'm glad they went with the Mary Poppins aesthetic for Missy because it must have been really tempting to do that for the first lady Doctor, and the direction they went is so much better. Yes, it looks a silly, and I love that. It makes her look like a childrens' book character has come to life in the real world, and that's exactly who the Doctor should be.
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Oct 14, 2018 15:34
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Just finished watching it and so far they're two for two as far as I'm concerned. Like, the plotting was nothing amazing but when the main plot is "get across mysterious dangerous landscape" it doesn't need to be. It did feel like it really wanted to be either about fifteen minutes longer or have about ten minutes cut out of it, and the Creepy Exposition Monsters didn't quite work but so far they've been doing a great job with keeping the flaws fully in the "I don't really care that that didn't work so well" category. I desperately want more insight into Yaz though. Ryan got a pretty solid introduction last week and this week focused on Graham a bit more (and I *love* Graham and Ryan's tentative relationship) and Yaz was also in both episodes. Plenty of time, though. This Doctor is a little flightly and absent-minded in the best way possible. (And she's definitely got the whole Doctorish 'nobody but me is allowed to do violent things' attitude down. One wonders what she'd make of Ace and her Nitro-Nine.) Also her general attitude toward...um...rear end in a top hat racer dude...wasn't at all surprising or out of character but I thought it worked well. I don't think the new TARDIS interior is amazing but I did really like "You've redecorated...I REALLY LIKE IT" as a line. Pairs really well with her "...OH BRILLIANT" reaction to seeing herself, and if her signature ends up being just completely random bursts of positivity, I for one welcome it.
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Oct 15, 2018 02:36
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Jerusalem posted:Though I think her losing all hope felt a little rushed, I figure the intent was to show that - like her previous incarnations - it is her companions that help give her the drive and energy to keep going. Ilin did say the Ghost Monument appeared once every 1000 cycles so I figured she thought they'd missed it and would have to wait another 1000 for it, she does mention they'd be dead before even 1 was over. That was overtly pessimistic for the Doctor, but her obvious wonder at hearing these people she accidentally roped into this situation was good, and I loved how relieved and happy she was to be reunited with the TARDIS. I kind of like her being a little on the fragile side, and keeping up a brave front that sometimes slips. She's still the Doctor who went through everything that, oh, pick a recent incarnation, went through, plus she's still arguably recovering from her latest regeneration. And yeah, her sheer joy at seeing the TARDIS safe and whole was just perfect.
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Oct 15, 2018 14:34
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Bicyclops posted:I thought we weren't doing season arcs or anything this time around, but it seems like "the Child Lost to Time" is going to be a thing. Question: ]: I sort of missed this (the baby was crying enough that I rewound over it enough times to give up on trying to figure it out) - was the hostile planet designed by the Tim Shaw race of aliens? Is that what Graham and the Doctor were talking about? I'm guessing the "10 standalone episodes" just means there are no literal two-parters, not that there's not going to be a recurring foe or a season arc or anything. And yeah, the big reveal was that the Tim Shaw Gang (who are actually called the Stexils or something?) were the ones who abducted scientists to develop superweapon after superweapon. Also I'm guessing they did not leave the best superweapons behind on a dead planet, the robots were probably what they were using to guard the scientists, and the Evil Cloth may well have been the Tim Shaw Gang equivalent of the F-35.
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Oct 16, 2018 02:46
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BSam posted:Nah gently caress em. It’s a great episode. Agreed. Like I said initially I think it could have done with being either 15 minutes longer or with having 10 minutes cut, but the stuff it did well it did really well and the stuff it didn't do that great is stuff I don't care that much about.
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Oct 16, 2018 02:47
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Bicyclops posted:Yeah, it's this. Like, horrible monster-water would normally have been demonstrated by some expendable character refusing to follow the Doctor's request not to go near the water, and getting monster-watered, and it felt less like a threat when it was just continuously explained and not demonstrated, but all things considered, that's a minor complaint. Yeah. Although I'm actually pleased that, particularly after the body count last week, the Doctor got them all through a lethal environment with no one dying. Still a bit too heavy on the telling rather than showing.
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Oct 16, 2018 02:57
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The_Doctor posted:The cover for Doctor Who Comics Day next month: I'm not often impressed by Doctor Who comics art but I really want this as a poster on my wall
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Oct 17, 2018 17:00
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The_Doctor posted:Moffat's idea. The War Doctor was Moffat's idea, the idea that the Doctor destroyed Gallifrey to avert/end the Time War was
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Oct 17, 2018 21:14
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Heavy Metal posted:What sticks out to me about the show in general, is it is often almost relentlessly hilariously dark. Major characters getting turned into cybermen or dying or other weird dark stuff happening to them, and then it not being undone etc. I think key characters becoming cybermen is one that ended up being overused. I don't know if spoilers are needed for older seasons, just in case. I think that specific thing happened, what, twice in basically ten years? Though yeah, I miss companions just wandering off from the TARDIS into the next thing in their life rather than having some TRAGIC and HORRIBLE separation from the Doctor.
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Oct 18, 2018 01:44
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No sir, all thirt-, fourte-, twenty-sev-, uh... Stop talking now, please.
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Oct 18, 2018 13:46
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Fil5000 posted:Didn't they call out the thing Missy had as being a Matrix fragment or something? I don't recall if it was that specific but it was definitely called out as Gallifreyan technology.
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Oct 18, 2018 15:33
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corn in the bible posted:Listening to Jubilee and goddamn it's so loving good I liked Jubilee a lot the first time I heard it but found it didn't really stand up well to re-listens. So what I'm saying is that if you loved it, listen to it exactly and only once. (I'm a bit cooler on Robert Shearman's work than most of this thread, though. Aside from Chimes of Midnight of course, I'm not a monster.)
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Oct 19, 2018 11:24
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Fil5000 posted:They could have done that at any time anyway though. I mean, we didn't know that dildodoctor counted until Moffat told us he did in Smith's last story, and we didn't know about War until the 50th. Basically the only point at which it would have been narratively a problem to have a single story Doctor was in the middle of Smiths' final story. They arguably did broadly that story with The Next Doctor even though something else was actually going on. (I unironically love The Next Doctor and I will fight you all.)
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Oct 19, 2018 13:51
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CobiWann posted:I don't remember this character. Which serial are they from? 
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Oct 19, 2018 16:42
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Subtle as a brick, but sometimes a brick's what you want. The villain was completely uncompelling but as a plot device he more-or-less worked. Yaz felt like less of an afterthought this week though she could still use more of a spotlight. Ryan being simultaneously completely frustrated and completely starstruck and just sort of blundering his way into meeting Martin Luther King Jr. was fun. Graham continues to be best. And I liked the Yaz and Ryan Explain The Plot stuff mostly because they were careful to establish that one victory, or a hundred victories, weren't going to magically make racism go away forever.
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Oct 22, 2018 02:55
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Thinking about it a little more, I'm struck by the ways in which this compares with probably my other favorite revival-era historical story, Vincent and the Doctor, particularly in that the Doctor and Company don't always have magical solutions to things. You can't make suicidal depression go away by showing someone a good time, and you can't make institutionalized racism vanish by making a speech or smashing a vortex manipulator. Of course the other way in which it compares is that the alien "threat" feels unnecessary and arguably weakens the story, though I guess there's a bit more justification here; you need the time traveler to justify the Doctor wanting to poke around, and you need that time traveler to be malicious* to set up the need to Put Right What Once Went Wrong. (Whoever compared this favorably to a Quantum Leap episode was dead on, in my opinion.) The more I think about it though, the more I dig Kresko just being a straight up Future White Supremacist, since it plays pretty well into the idea that things like racism won't ever magically disappear, that they must always be opposed. Like, there are other, more nuanced ways to tell this story, and other stories to tell, but I think this worked. I think it was good. ___ *Or at least meddlesome, perhaps some sort of monk-like figure?
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Oct 22, 2018 11:55
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bessantj posted:Did Chibnall say that they weren't doing a season arc this time or did I make that up? All he said was "ten standalone episodes". Which people seem to have interpreted as "no season arc" but which I suspect just meant "no literal two or three part episodes".
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Oct 22, 2018 21:26
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Now I come to think of it a bit, it is kind of interesting (as a white dude) that the far future as envisioned predominantly by white dudes is usually one where the only racism that exists is in coded forms; other species are racists among themselves, or against other species, or WE-ARE-THE-SU-PER-I-OR-BE-INGS, but racism amongst humans is completely unheard of, hell, we're not even Americans or Russians or Pakistani any more, we're humans. Whereas we get Doctor Who written by a black woman and hell yeah there are future white supremacists, or at least one. Who was a mass murderer held in Space Supermax and only let free on the condition that he be wired up so he literally couldn't hurt anyone, so you could probably draw certain conclusions about how widespread the Space Proud Boys actually are in the 72nd Century. Hell, you can still have your idealized future if you want by saying that what Kresko meant by this being "when everything started to go wrong" is that in his time there's little to nothing in the way of institutionalized racism and he's fed whatever his personal grudge against society is with ridiculous tales of the "good old days". If you felt the need for this to somehow be unwritten, I mean, which the more I think about it, the more I do not. Not because I'm not into optimistic visions of the future, but because, even in science fiction, if you want to write about racism, it's completely okay to just loving write about racism without hiding it behind a bunch of layers of metaphor and setting lore and whatnot. Not that those things are bad (and science fiction in particular is a medium through which that can done very powerfully indeed), but I certainly don't think they're necessary. Which isn't to say that Kresko was an especially compelling villain, but that's more because he was just there to be a plot device, not because he was a Racist from the Future and that's Impossible.
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Oct 23, 2018 01:00
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Davros1 posted:Why research matters: JOURNALIST: Oh, I know, I was just testing to make sure you didn't have amnesia again. or JOURNALIST: ...wait are you not Peter Capaldi?
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Oct 26, 2018 19:16
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Another daft plot made compelling because the characters we're watching and the actors portraying them are compelling. That's not a complaint, that's basically the ideal state of Doctor Who for me. It did feel like a "welp we're out of time let's just call it done" ending but I didn't really mind, I think the Thank Christ I don't particularly mind spiders, though.
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Oct 29, 2018 02:26
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Random Stranger posted:Don't forget letting one painfully suffocate for hours! She clearly wasn't "fine" with the big one suffocating, she just didn't get a chance to do anything about it before Mr. Bigly shot it. I do agree that the show could stand to make her "guns bad but killing in some other fashion okay" attitude a little more nuanced, especially since it really seems more like "it's okay for me to kill things but not for the rest of you to", and that's an attitude that could lead somewhere interesting, given the Doctor's history.
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Oct 29, 2018 02:32
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Necrothatcher posted:Never forget when the Doctor took on Thatcher: There's also the other time the Doctor took on Thatcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60shMyabeMo
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Oct 29, 2018 02:38
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Irony Be My Shield posted:I think it's mostly that a) people use guns without actually working out the best course of action first and b) guns are rarely good solutions to the problems she faces. Generally they just piss the monster off or attracts more alien soldiers to you. She'll only use violence after working out that it's actually required, and if she does it's generally on a larger scale that will actually solve the problem. Yeah, I agree, I like the attitude (and I thought it was presented well in The Ghost Monument when Ryan grabbed a gun and just made their situation worse). I just think it could be presented a little more effectively. Narsham posted:You know what? Given how often TV and movies show guns as unrealistically useful solutions to all sorts of things, as well as turning actual gun battles into one-shot miracles as if that's how things usually work, I am quite all right with a single character on a single show being unreasonably anti-gun. She did burn up the evil bedsheets (though again were they actually alive or just very clever machines) but yeah, I generally agree with all of this. It's clumsy presentation (at worst), not a bad or dumb character trait, particularly for the Doctor. And yeah, I did think it was reasonably clear that she was looking for a way to humanely euthanize the spiders (and certainly either she or the spider researcher did that offscreen).
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Oct 29, 2018 03:08
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:26 |
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Jerusalem posted:It struck me that they worry that she doesn't seem to have a social life/friends/anything outside of work, so they were excited to see her have friends and maybe a girlfriend/boyfriend too. Yeah, just the idea that she was bringing friends around at all seemed really noteworthy to them, particularly to her sister. Other observations: I was a little surprised that when Kevin the Bodyguard started threatening her and her mother with a gun she didn't so much as mention that she was a police officer. I can't believe no one's mentioned Ryan's shadow animals yet! (There had better be a gif of these I am just saying)
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Oct 29, 2018 03:11
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