|
CobiWann posted:So, if Caves to Twin is the biggest drop in quality from one episode to the next, which pair is the biggest jump in quality? Kill the Moon to Mummy on the Orient Express? Destiny of the Daleks to City of Death?
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2023 23:14
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 17, 2024 15:54 |
|
|
Sontaran Experiment to Genesis of the Daleks?
|
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 00:17
|
|
|
The Web Planet to The Crusade?
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 00:23
|
|
|
Arc of Infinity to Snakedance?
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 01:04
|
|
|
I asked a friend... Drop in quality - Twice Upon A Time to The Woman Who Fell to Earth. Nothing against Jodie, everything against Chibnall. Rise in quality - Inferno to Terror of the Autons. Inferno could have been told in half the time and the monster was weak.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 01:07
|
|
|
CobiWann posted:Rise in quality - Inferno to Terror of the Autons. Inferno could have been told in half the time and the monster was weak. Couldn't disagree with this more if I tried
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 01:11
|
|
|
CobiWann posted:I asked a friend... Inferno does run long, but it's still a strong story despite it's length. It's not like The War Games where you could chop half the episodes out and have an amazing story instead of just a good one that ends perfectly.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 01:15
|
|
|
Sydney Bottocks posted:Couldn't disagree with this more if I tried I agree. The story was too long, but drat it, that shot of the Brig turning around with the eyepatch almost makes up for it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 01:16
|
|
|
CobiWann posted:I asked a friend... I hate Chibnall but The Woman Who Fell to Earth isn't a terrible start. There's never a moment when Thirteen falls off a cliff, it's just a consistent steep decline. I'll line up to kick Inferno, it's not a terrible story but it's way too long and easily the weakest story of the season.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 02:04
|
|
|
Rochallor posted:the weakest story of the season. I'm sorry, but that's going to be The Ambassadors... (*twanng*) OF DEATH
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 02:11
|
|
|
Rochallor posted:I hate Chibnall but The Woman Who Fell to Earth isn't a terrible start. There's never a moment when Thirteen falls off a cliff, it's just a consistent steep decline. The thing is I don't think Thirteen is a consistent decline episode-to-episode, in that there are individual episodes which are better than the last one! But the baseline is just constantly dropping so that you get yourself in the indignity I was in of trying to convince myself that any part of Flux was good. It was like being a boiling frog. It's going to be weird when RTD's Who is like, mid, but mid-RTD is just so much better than Chibnall on a good day that it'll seem like the best poo poo ever.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 02:16
|
|
|
Sydney Bottocks posted:I'm sorry, but that's going to be The Ambassadors... I said the weakest episode of the season, not the strongest! lines posted:The thing is I don't think Thirteen is a consistent decline episode-to-episode, in that there are individual episodes which are better than the last one! But the baseline is just constantly dropping so that you get yourself in the indignity I was in of trying to convince myself that any part of Flux was good. It was like being a boiling frog. This is true, I should have said the trend line is a sharp decline while the individual episodes are more noisy. There was just a baseline level of competence the show had under RTD and Moffat where you might have one disaster of an episode of a season, but bad episodes were still generally competent pieces of television. Glancing over Series 2 for a moment, which I'd consider the weakest series of the revival, I'd watch about 6 or 7 episodes out of 14 in a rewatch. There's maybe 2 or 3 episodes total of Chibnall era stuff that I'd considering watching again, and at that point I'd just not bother and pretend that Capaldi regenerated into the Fugitive Doctor and had a bunch of neat adventures offscreen before turning into David Tennant again.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 03:38
|
|
|
Rochallor posted:I hate Chibnall but The Woman Who Fell to Earth isn't a terrible start. There's never a moment when Thirteen falls off a cliff, it's just a consistent steep decline.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 03:44
|
|
|
PriorMarcus posted:So... do we think the anniversary episodes will have Donna be a millionaire? I think they'll side step it and just show that she's living a comfortable life without getting into details.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 03:52
|
|
|
Rochallor posted:I said the weakest episode of the season, not the strongest! As much as I love TAoD, it doesn't compare to Inferno. The Third Doctor struggling against the fascist parallel universe version of his friends as the world ends in firey destruction, or a story where it feels like Liz Shaw keeps escaping and getting recaptured every other episode? Hmmm  (I do like that story, it's just that Inferno is way better)
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 04:08
|
|
|
Liz Shaw was just a weird choice for a companion. If your companion knows as much as the Doctor does, they can’t ask the questions the audience wants to ask!
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 04:18
|
|
|
Random Stranger posted:It's not like The War Games where you could chop half the episodes out and have an amazing story instead of just a good one that ends perfectly. But every single second of The War Games is perfection  Why... I'm starting to think maybe us Doctor Who fans might not have a hive mind about what makes a good or a bad episode after all! 
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 05:20
|
|
|
I'm ride-or-die for Time-Flight so yeah, maybe!
|
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 05:33
|
|
|
Step down: Heaven Sent to Hell Bent.Rochallor posted:I'd just not bother and pretend that Capaldi regenerated into the Fugitive Doctor and had a bunch of neat adventures offscreen before turning into David Tennant again. When I finally got around to watching series 12, I honestly thought after watching Fugitive of the Judoon that this was what they were building up to: Ruth was the real Thirteenth Doctor, and Thirteen was actually some fractured alternative split off by temporal paradoxes or alternate timelines or whatever made the Valeyard or the thing from The Next Doctor or something. The ending of that episode, where Ruth resolves everything in an extremely Doctor-typical way while Thirteen just stands there and whines that she can't do that, would have been perfect to set up that kind of eventual reveal. I prefer to pretend that's what they went with.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 07:03
|
|
|
Lottery of Babylon posted:Step down: Heaven Sent to Hell Bent. The Caves of Androzani Part 1 would be a step down from Heaven Sent. This is my belief.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 07:05
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:But every single second of The War Games is perfection The Space Pirates to The War Games might actually be my pick for biggest uptick in quality. That or Time and the Rani to Paradise Towers, but that's just because I like Paradise Towers a lot.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 07:13
|
|
|
Step up: The Vanquishers (what even is that title referring to?) to Eve of the Daleks, purely on how bad Flux as a whole was. You could put any mid special in Eve’s place and you’d get the same Superman-like leap in quality. And, much like Superman leaping over a tall building, you then get Legend of the Sea Devils and the greatest bit of CGI the show ever delivered on your way down to street level 
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 09:07
|
|
|
There's some 15 year old somewhere for whom Thirteen is their favourite era of the show and it's going to be quite strange when they are grown up and looking back on that era nostalgically.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 09:19
|
|
|
Edward Mass posted:Liz Shaw was just a weird choice for a companion. If your companion knows as much as the Doctor does, they can’t ask the questions the audience wants to ask! Pertwee's whole first season was just one big exercise in trial and error, really. They had an idea of what they wanted to do, but they were still working out the bugs, and they hadn't quite settled on the idea of the "UNIT Family" just yet. That's why the Brig isn't necessarily scientifically smart but is otherwise very intelligent (and a bit ruthless, when he feels he has no other choice) during Season 7, only to get dumbed down a fair bit throughout the next three seasons until he's pretty much just comic relief in episodes like The Three Doctors. Liz was the same way; they wanted a companion who was also an intelligent scientist and could hold their own in a conversation with the Doctor...but they also wanted someone who could ask the questions that naturally led to the exposition that the audience needed in order to know what's going on. And, if we're being honest, they wanted a companion that was pretty enough to keep the dads interested, which is why Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, Noted Scientist, was often running around in miniskirts and go-go boots. Since Caroline John decided to leave the show after the first season (due to a combo of being unhappy with how her character was written, and discovering she was pregnant just before filming on Inferno started), they didn't need to dumb Liz down like they eventually would the Brigadier, so they just came up with daffy but lovable Jo Grant instead (who was not any kind of a scientist, so running around in miniskirts and go-go boots was perfectly fitting for her character).
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 09:19
|
|
|
Sydney Bottocks posted:Pertwee's whole first season was just one big exercise in trial and error, really. They had an idea of what they wanted to do, but they were still working out the bugs, and they hadn't quite settled on the idea of the "UNIT Family" just yet. That's why the Brig isn't necessarily scientifically smart but is otherwise very intelligent (and a bit ruthless, when he feels he has no other choice) during Season 7, only to get dumbed down a fair bit throughout the next three seasons until he's pretty much just comic relief in episodes like The Three Doctors. I liked how Shaw's farewell note pretty much lampshaded the problem she presented too.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 09:26
|
|
|
Doctor Spaceman posted:Also Twice Upon a Time is kinda bad and I'm not even sure it's a step down to go from there to The Woman Who Fell to Earth. Yeah the step down is from The Doctor Falls to Twice Upon a Time
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 09:26
|
|
|
I would love twice upon a time only if they didn't make the 1st doctor so awful. Like maybe (and probably) willaim hartnell was like that to some degree but the 1st doctor was not that bad...
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 09:32
|
|
|
Tbf I know plenty of scientists who dress in the 2020's equivalent of a miniskirt and gogo bootsRandom Stranger posted:Inferno does run long, but it's still a strong story despite it's length. It's not like The War Games where you could chop half the episodes out and have an amazing story instead of just a good one that ends perfectly. Good lord
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 09:33
|
|
|
Confusedslight posted:I would love twice upon a time only if they didn't make the 1st doctor so awful. Like maybe (and probably) willaim hartnell was like that to some degree but the 1st doctor was not that bad... Yeah, Moffat's big mistake was thinking that the First Doctor was a character from the 1960's, rather than him being a character created in the 1960's. It was such a bizarre misunderstanding of who the character is.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 10:28
|
|
|
Edward Mass posted:Liz Shaw was just a weird choice for a companion. If your companion knows as much as the Doctor does, they can’t ask the questions the audience wants to ask! Then again, the Brigadier can be in that role just fine. The Doctor is his scientific advisor, that's all the reason you need for the Brigadier to say "so, Doctor, please summarise and explain the plot for us." The real problem with Shaw as a companion is that her skillset is redundant next to the Doctor's. She's a scientific advisor to UNIT who isn't entirely unboard with the military worldview. He's a scientific advisor to UNIT who isn't entirely onboard with the military worldview, plus he knows alien super-science and has major insight into offworld threats and knows Venusian aikido. What, exactly, is she going to do that he can't? Part of the reason she spends TAoD imprisoned and they spend Inferno in different timelines is that when they are together the Doctor can't help but overshadow Liz. Jo Grant is at least a trained intelligence agent, crack lockpicker, and most crucially can win people over with charm when the Doctor is being prickly; in practice most writers forgot the first two of those but the third was consistently true. Sarah Jane Smith has the edge that Sladen didn't work directly with Roger Delgado and so was the one major player onset in season 11 not dealing with bereavement. (Seriously, post-The Time Warrior - which is the one season 11 story produced before Delgado dies - it's very obvious that not only was Pertwee's heart not in it, but Letts and Dicks were going through the motions too as were most of the csst regulars.) Liz Shaw just didn't bring enough to the table that wasn't something the Doctor could do better. Warthur fucked around with this message at 11:23 on Nov 10, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 11:17
|
|
|
PriorMarcus posted:Yeah, Moffat's big mistake was thinking that the First Doctor was a character from the 1960's, rather than him being a character created in the 1960's. It was such a bizarre misunderstanding of who the character is. They have a similar (but several notches tamer) version of the same thing in The Five Doctors, mind.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 11:22
|
|
|
Warthur posted:They have a similar (but several notches tamer) version of the same thing in The Five Doctors, mind. Which is what I assumed - Moffat grew up watching this version, and so the version we got was a character with their motivations /behavior dictated by game of temporal telephone.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 13:58
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/MetroUK/status/1722894361153909192 I love this man.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 14:03
|
|
|
You loving tell 'em, Rusty 
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 14:53
|
|
|
I remain baffled at people who like Doctor Who (and indeed Star Trek) who get angry at progressive politics. What on earth are they finding in the show to enjoy?
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 15:00
|
|
|
Fil5000 posted:I remain baffled at people who like Doctor Who (and indeed Star Trek) who get angry at progressive politics. What on earth are they finding in the show to enjoy? Cognitive dissonance
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 15:49
|
|
|
Maxwell Lord posted:On the flipside there's the massive uptick in quality from The Dominators to The Mind Robber. Massive uptick in NuWho: Aliens of London/World War Three into Dalek
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 16:23
|
|
|
Fil5000 posted:I remain baffled at people who like Doctor Who (and indeed Star Trek) who get angry at progressive politics. What on earth are they finding in the show to enjoy? Kerblam edit: also Kill the Moon and the Zygon Invasion edit: for star trek, the last episode of the original series, which is explicitly a morality play about how women are too emotional and should know their place Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Nov 10, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 16:34
|
|
|
Less flippantly, these are people who have a very unusual definition of "political". For them, the political part of Aliens of London / World War Three isn't the 9/11 allegory where a group of politicians use false claims of weapons of mass destruction in the wake of a flying vehicle hitting a tower to drum up enough fear to start a war on false pretenses for their own profit, it's the part where Mickey is black.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 17:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 17, 2024 15:54 |
|
|
As someone said in one of the many star trek threads recently: There are two races, white and political There are two genders, male and political There are two sexualities, straight and political And so on
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2023 17:47
|
|
