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The_Doctor posted:“What’s the point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes?” "Our destiny is in the stars, so let's go and search for it..." "People spend all their time making nice things, and then other people come along and break them." "While there's life, there's hope." "They always want you to go alone when you're walking into a trap, have you noticed that?" "An apple away keeps the... ah, never mind." "What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?" "Exotic alien swords are easy to come by... Aces are rare." "These shoes fit perfectly!"
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Dec 30, 2019 00:54
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 00:10 |
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Crusader posted:hoping part two resolves some of the outstanding mysteries elegantly, but for now I'm glad the messy archrival who lives for drama is back Yes, either the interesting but unexplored stuff introduced early in the episode will get paid off, or this is another case of Chibnall assembling a bunch of evocative and interesting ideas and then not doing anything with them. I did like Agent Yaz continuing her “think like the Doctor” bit gestured in the past, and I suspect if we’d gotten more background on our new characters people would be complaining about Chibnall telling instead of showing. Daniel Barton gets sketched in but seems better established than the Naismiths were in The End of Time; the possibly new aliens seem evocative and I found myself thinking the Vardans could have done with this kind of treatment. If part two sticks the landing this could be a good sign. Those who like Who when it is invading the tropes of various genres should be liking this. The nonsense car chase is, in my opinion, no more objectionable than the lift from Oscar Wilde over the painting in a carboot in the Seeds of Doom. Jodie seems even better than last year. I’m looking forward to seeing how she behaves toward the Master in the next episode. happyhippy posted:Loved how they are all out of the porch drinking iced tea while two bodies rot in the sun nearby. Pretty sure there were no bodies left behind.
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Jan 2, 2020 06:48
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DroneRiff posted:Yeah "The Timeless Child" thing will 100% turn out to be a wet fart. Not eveything needs to be the grand mutli-reality chess plan and saving the whole universe At the moment it sounds like it’s heading in a “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” direction, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And it’s interesting to think that both the Doctor and the Master would be furious at grounding an entire society upon the suffering of one being. If we can get away from saving the universe and make it more about trying to right an eon’s-old wrong even if that means sacrifice, that could be interesting. Or, you know, a disaster. But Doctor Who is better when it’s trying and failing than when it’s playing everything safe.
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Jan 6, 2020 03:42
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Rochallor posted:Yeah. It's real bad. It "feels" more like Doctor Who, in that it's less trying to be HD Davies stories, but this doesn't feel like a show that's learned much from the Moffat era; it feels like the show was canceled in 2009 and this is the revival of the revival. Broadly things hang together better than last week, but man are there a ton of bad things on the outskirts. There are foundational moral problems in a show of this kind where the main character can actually steer the TARDIS. Why not rescue every single person from the concentration camps and drop them on another planet? Why not save everyone from every disaster? The “drastic alteration to the timeline” excuse seems both to hold true and to get entirely ignored. Barton slinking away is fine because he was nowhere near where the Doctor was. Does spending the money showing him getting arrested improve the story? Showing him getting away could be setup for a return later. Is the Doctor really supposed to be concerned about what the Nazis will do to the Master? I thought the real danger there would be that he’d bargain some of his technological knowledge for release; evidently the Master is also in “don’t risk altering the timeline” mode save for his original scheme. Similar situation with the “exile” at the end. Does anyone seriously believe that the Master won’t escape? How is walking into that climactic scene with a gun and shooting him dead dramatically interesting? The character operates by the rules of narrative logic and has been “killed” again and again. Severing his new alliance and getting a bit of dramatic irony is more satisfying. And it’s interesting to see an objection on the level of “why not shoot him” and not on the level of “why not try to redeem him since we know that’s got a better chance than keeping him dead?” Shooting somebody in real life is almost never the end to a problem, even if television keeps insisting otherwise; we could use more examples of alternatives, even if they too aren’t morally simplistic but get presented as if they are.
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Jan 6, 2020 16:14
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The_Doctor posted:He flew down. Romana was telling the truth. I am now picturing this Master sitting in a cafe in Paris brooding when Four and Romana come running past. Then a timeslip occurs and he spills his coffee. Basically, I’m hoping this becomes the disgruntled Master. Delgado was suave, egg-face single-minded, Ainley was erratic, Roberts was arch and camp, Jacobi a vicious nerd, Simm a hyperactive nerd, Gomez evil Mary Poppins, and now Dhawan can be the insanely frustrated Master. Found out a Time Lord secret? Urrrgh! Doctor stranded him for 77 years? Arrrgh! Doctor wanders in and defeats his plot while getting his allies to turn on him? Errrrrm. I want to see this Master snap. I want to see the point where he just throws up his hands and says, “fine, now I’m going to do something nice and dare you to stop me.” I want to see him working with the Doctor out of spite. I want him to help her recover the Time Lords so that he can see her give them a scolding and strip them of their power. And then he shoots one of them for no reason. I want Dhawan to play this Master like Sideshow Bob in a yard full of rakes. He’s just settled down for a nice calm plan execution, and then *thwock!*
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Jan 7, 2020 05:51
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Organza Quiz posted:As a jewish person watching this the only thing that struck me as off was the way she delivered "they'll see you as you REALLY are" when she removed the perception filter. That's what you say to the villain when you make their allies see them as the conniving evil person they are, not when you make racists see them as a person who appears to not be white - I mean the Master isn't even actually an Indian man, he's a Time Lord. It's at least potentially possible that the script was foreshadowing what she does to the Master at the end of the episode. We're not in a position yet to tell whether that was better or worse than what she did to him in WW II.
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Jan 8, 2020 01:36
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Rhyno posted:I'm pretty sure Delgado and Three had this conversation 7 or 8 times. And Ainley with whoever would listen. "I'm indestructible; the whole universe knows that!"
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Jan 9, 2020 05:25
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For all its faults, Kerblam! at least knew what message it wanted to deliver and laid groundwork for it even as it also seemed to be laying groundwork for a criticism that got entirely undercut. The off-screen “Earth goes to poo poo and only the wealthy escape” might have landed if there had been any connection between what we saw on screen with the characters and the larger message of arguing while your house is on fire. We have a mechanic and his son, an unemployed woman who could afford viruses and bombs but who certainly does not come across as a member of the 1% (or the 10%), and an owner-operator who doesn’t come across as rich but rather as a Classic Who base commander under siege. We have a single character who displays any signs of conspicuous wealth and she is largely played for sympathy and without the slightest sense of conspicuous consumption. Despite her offer of jewelry, nobody actually seems to care about the valuable necklace beyond it being an excuse to extend Act 2 a little. How exactly is this place going to produce enough money to terraform the planet? The fam get a free two-week stay there, and it appears the place takes 20 guests at a time or so. How many are paying? Is this place a tragic failure, because that doesn’t land or relate to the larger theme. You want a really quick improvement to the story? The Doctor realizes the dregs breathe carbon dioxide and that the oxygen inside Tranquility is poisonous to them. So why are they attacking? Food can’t be that scarce given how many dregs there seem to be. So have her find out that the resort was producing oxygen via tech and then dumping the waste-products outside. They showed up for trash and CO2 and thought there’d be more inside, then got violent when the place turned out poisonous and full of people who shot at them. Make the attacks somebody’s fault for being heedless in the way humanity is heedless of global warming. Mother-daughter angst isn’t thematically meaningful!
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Jan 13, 2020 15:52
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Comrade Fakename posted:I forgot about the important moral that we should always believe that a literal child is a better engineer than his father, the professional engineer, on basically no evidence. In fairness to the episode, it was pretty obvious that dad has taken a lot of performance-decreasing drugs in his time. marktheando posted:I think so. I want to say that happens in Caves of Androzani. The main one I remember is 4 using it to survive being strangled by a mummy. It's Four to Doomsday. And "useful in a tight squeeze." Der Shovel posted:Oh I must've missed that part. Urg, I hate defending this episode, but we were told that was a dreg nest. We know the dregs produce oxygen. So a dreg nest is one of the few places where fires are likely. That still doesn't explain why they have burning things in their nests or why the burning was ongoing, unless there's some natural gas or some other constantly renewing fuel source. Maybe baby dr-eggs need the heat?
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Jan 16, 2020 05:25
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Jerusalem posted:Hey as least nothing is quite as bad as The Unicorn and the Wasp, where the Doctor declares,"Only Agathie Christie can solve this mystery!" and then practically shoves her out of the way to solve the mystery himself instead. I love how folks complain when the show is ham-fistedly delivering a message and then complain when it’s more subtle that it doesn’t have one. Edison was clearly an evil bastard but not murderous. But the episode kept drawing huge pointy lines of comparison. The not-too-bright laser-scorpions appear like workers for Edison; they steal other people’s inventions (and inventors) instead of coming up with their own; they justify their cruelty and exploitative natures by claiming not to be as bad as they are, as when the queen stressed that they’d intended to just grab Tesla and go instead of ransacking the whole planet but would do that now because the Doctor tried to mess with them. See, they’re not terrible unless provoked. And the whole species, despite supposedly being hive creatures, aren’t self-sacrificing worker bees but rather vicious and selfish. Lab scorpion interrupts the queen? He dies. Scorpions supposed to pursue Yaz and Edison run into each other at a corner? Fight each other. They were each clearly trying to get those two themselves and screw the others out of that success in the process. Short of having the queen’s name strung in electric lights inside their ship, I’m not sure how much more on the nose the episode could have been, though I do agree it wasn’t quite as consistent as it might have been in driving home the difference between an inventor driven to create the future and someone trying to scavenge whatever he can of the future to make money.
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Jan 21, 2020 04:55
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TheKirbs posted:I think evil is a stretch, selfish arsehole always looking for a way to make money certainly but not evil. When he sees the dead in his workshop his first thought is about the worker he recently had dinner with and how he was going to have to explain to his children that their father was dead. Not mass murderer evil, but human yet pretty awful. Both the Doctor and Tesla love invention for its own sake and are fixated on the future. Edison loved the money (well, and the authority and prestige) and wanted to improve his own future and screw everyone else. There were glimpses of the inventor he either once was, or could have been if he weren’t a miserable rear end in a top hat. But the episode did a great job, I think, inviting us to draw connections between the attitudes of the two inventors and the future we saw in the last episode. Tesla is the sort of scientist who would be warning people and trying to invent something to save Earth until he dies. Edison would have been with the other rich people evacuating. He’s not a monster. He sort of cares about people. He sort of loves invention. He just loves himself more.
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Jan 22, 2020 02:25
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Well, the risk-taking plots are back! One alternative option nobody has mentioned yet: the Doctor lies. Why couldn't Doctor Ruth be a potential future Doctor (a la Orphan 55's alternative time) who remembers being Thirteen, and remembers everything going wrong, and wants to try to prevent her own future from occurring? That would explain some strange coincidences (like hiding in the precise time period and area where Thirteen operates), and make the "what's that" with the sonic screwdriver a deliberate deception. Even the buried TARDIS is shades of the Hand of Omega. And given how unusual the "two of the same Time Lord in the same place" is according to Gat, it seems interesting that Doctor Ruth knows precisely what the risks are. Her moves seem very new show era, too. I do wonder if whatever is coming for the Doctor will turn out to be new or old. Omega would be an interesting possibility--maybe the alt-future Gallifrey is one where Omega escaped, went back in time, and restarted society without Rassilon--and the Black Guardian has the juice to do this level of chaos upon space-time. Gat's uniform looks like streamlined Time Lord ceremonial robes, so that's interesting. And the Kasavin may end up factoring in to all of this. Jack is definitely going to be back.
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Jan 28, 2020 03:25
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Personally, I’ve decided that instead of continuing to call her Doctor Ruth, I’m just going to refer to her as R Doctor. Both of the other Time Lords had three-letter names. I wonder if that’s significant?
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Jan 29, 2020 06:15
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Lone Cyberman theories: Maximum Chib: The Brigadier Maximum Moff: Bill Maximum Fanwank: Davros Maximum WTF: Omega Maximum huh: Susan Maximum crossover: voiced by Sir Patrick Stewart Maximum New Adventures: Ace
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Jan 29, 2020 16:14
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Blasmeister posted:The doctor accidentally unleashing some all powerful gods on the universe felt like something they could have done a season arc with or at least a two parter. Setting them up and then beating them in 5 minutes of screen time felt like a real waste of a good villain. I thought that at the time, but thinking again afterward I realized that this is a trend. The Eternals, even the Guardians, are amazingly powerful and amazingly clueless. That’s been true of every single instance appearing in the show. This will work better if it’s setting up a real threat further down the line, but as a stand-alone I’m ok with the immortal beings who never learn being easy to defeat so long as you avoid going up against their strengths.
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Feb 12, 2020 00:30
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Jerusalem posted:My pick is that Jo Martin's Doctor is from between 2-3, that this "Division" sent her on missions (AFTER remaining 2 for awhile and doing The Two Doctors The point seems to be that the Doctor is the source of all the stories, which she is, so the Time Lords only exist because of her. Arguably, this episode just made every piece of Doctor Who fiction potentially canon. Oddly, I'm happier with that than with the episode proper. We have the Doctor virtually silenced and utterly sidelined for two-thirds of the episode, and then the big run up to the big save the day speech is the Doctor replicating "I'm gonna push this button?" And then instead of coming up with a better brilliant plan, she simply gets bailed out by someone else? Is Jodie's Doctor ever going to be allowed to actually win by defeating a bad guy? For instance: two episodes ago we see the Cyberium avoiding Mr. Last of the, and the Doctor has to virtually force it into him. We're told in both instances that it can't leave its host unless the host dies. Let's see the Doctor disprove that, by showing up, refusing to press the button, and then convincing the Cyberium that its alliance with the Master means not the dominance of the Cyber race, but its absolute destruction. That the imperative of the Cybermen, their prime directive, is to survive, and yet the Master wants to die. It could feel that at the moment when she was about to press the button. Turn the Cyberium against the Master, as we see it rush out of him, and then we see the Cyber Lords turn on each other or on the Master as the Doctor flees. Have the Doctor dump the Death particle somewhere. Maybe it turns into the Fendahl or something, why not, but dump in off-screen in a line and proceed. And the idea that the Ireland thing was being projected into the Doctor's mind out of the Matrix, but the show gives us no on-screen evidence that the Doctor's aware of one second of it during the time it's being beamed into her head? Idiocy. Have her react on a few occasions and maybe even speculate someone is beaming this stuff into her head! If people are upset now, what are they going to think when Yaz ends up "dying" by passing through into an alternate universe and we see her emerge from a gateway as the Timeless Child? (I probably hope this doesn't happen, but I'm not 100% sure.) I'll say this: the show's gotten unpredictable. I'm hoping that the Doctor gets rescued from prison by revolutionary Daleks who want her help. After all, she's got a great win/loss ratio in fights with the Daleks.
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Mar 2, 2020 04:01
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) but she didn't like that they were military oriented and used the chameleon arch to turn human and hide from them, and that eventually after meeting 13 she gets caught up with them again and they wipe her memory, regenerate her into 3 and dump her on earth for Spearhead from Space. The Timeless Child or whatever story is true but it's the Master and he's furious that he was used as an experiment and is trying to get revenge on all the Time Lords.
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The_Doctor posted:I’m going to become showrunner to throw this all out. We can’t know yet if this will be The Deadly Assassin of its era, or Trial of a Time Lord. The bit that bothers me is all the people focusing on the new canon and not the characterization or story choices. Who cares how old the Doctor is and whether she’s a Time Lord, escaped from The Land of Fiction or a redeemed Evil from the Dawn of Time? I’m more upset that the fam didn’t show up for the Doctor to praise them and humanity (“You only live one short life and look at ya: you teach me how to be brave.”), that in an episode this long the Doctor was not only isolated from her companions who saved themselves, she has no real engagement either with that or with them generally beyond “plant these bombs ya brought.” Why “Children”? Why wasn’t this titled The Timeless Child? Seems like every time the Doctor is a child, she’s ultimately the same child. So who are the other timeless children?
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Mar 2, 2020 15:21
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 00:10 |
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Jerusalem posted:It absolutely wasn't the planned thing, but it happened due to production reasons and performance and writing choices as you noted above, and it ended up creating a narrative that while unintended worked extremely nicely in terms of character development for the Doctor, and has been largely the basis for the character from that point forward, and creating some bullshit "actually the Doctor was just always this way for multiple unseen lives before Hartnell" is just... well, it's completely pointless and adds nothing to the series whatsoever. Even that silly Brain of Morbius scene originally had the intention of letting Robert Holmes tell a "the last Doctor" story (which he went ahead and implied in Caves of Androzani anyway) but it was rightfully ignored and discarded by everybody except a few people who obsessed over "explaining" it. Sadly it looks like Chibnall was one of those few people. The Doctor-Doctor conversation, and honestly most of the “this will blow your mind” stuff seems directed at the audience more than Jodie’s Doctor. This doesn’t change any of what we already saw, it just opens up the Doctor’s past as well as her future. I personally didn’t feel a need to have past Doctor-as-rebelling-former-Division-agent stories, but it’s no more ridiculous than the Valeyard and the conceptual framework was better. Still have yet to see anyone explain why the episode title is The Timeless Children, because the Doctor is (maybe) the Timeless Child, and I don’t think the Cyber Lords or the Master are the others. The Time Lords generally? Humans? There’s some signification that hasn’t been registered yet.
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Mar 4, 2020 21:52
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