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It's kind of funny that if you excise the modern pronouns and trans talk, the ending was basically the kind of 90s-esque "battle of the sexes" stuff that Steven Moffat still writes to this day. Like in The Doctor The Widow And The Wardrobe where men are "weak" and women are "strong". Davies just replaced "man" with "male-presenting person". Of course, excising the pronouns and trans aspects is easier said than done given how core they are to the whole thing. It's so front and centre it's straight-up confrontational. That's right bitch, we said "male-presenting" on Doctor Who, you can love it or leave it. And yet it doesn't feel like it's the show talking to the viewer and crowbarring in "woke pandering" or perhaps it's more the case that the whole show is so openly talking to the viewer (literally, at the beginning) that the woke bits(which given the political milieu the viewer is likely to be primed to interpret them as pandering that breaks the fourth wall, like that guy who ranted about a video game asking him to choose his pronouns) don't feel out of place. Commendable that Davies didn't just go there, he went there with gusto. I liked the Doctor making the stakes clear for Donna and her accepting that she had to die without hesitation, and the resolution made about as much sense as you could expect for a 15 years later pseudoretcon and is easily handwaved in any case because aww Davies is getting to do an Everybody Lives ending. The plot was extremely thin though, and hopefully now that the fanservice is out of its system the next episodes can have some fun with new things Vinylshadow posted:I wonder if Tentwo's the result of Twelve borrowing from his future in Extremis
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Nov 26, 2023 08:59
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 17:28 |
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jisforjosh posted:Yes, Youtube algorithm, just because I watched a Disney+ video of Doctor Who means I hate "woke" content from Disney Specials have been fun but I'm just not into the fanservice enough to justify all the time they're spending on it. Looking forward to the actual new Doctor Who adventures
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Dec 12, 2023 03:35
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It was a weird decision to have the actual Doctor take the duplicate Tardis. Why not have him take the original? Why duplicate the Tardis in the first place? The idea is that Tennant is settling down and living a normal life and getting over all the Daleks and Time Wars and things. Have him just live in a house then! Not sure I agree with the complaint about the underwear tho. Thirst posting about a man in his underwear is different from thirst posting about a woman in her underwear, come on. Plus it establishes him as having just "woken up", reflecting that this isn't episode 1 for him it's episode 0, and lets him either have a scene where he picks out his outfit or just has it for the first time in an episode where he isn't essentially a guest star. I can imagine that while everyone's fine watching Matt Smith run around in another man's raggedy old clothes, that also might not be a good look for the first Black Doctor E: I won't deny that to at least some extent the effect of having the first Black Doctor running around in his underwear is that there's an attractive man running around in his underwear. This may have been relevant to both the writer and the actor, both being LGBT, and it's also a little bit transgressive for a kids show- RTD's "gay agenda" stuff has always seemed less about flattering the viewers who are already on-side than about poking at the ones who aren't 2house2fly fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Dec 13, 2023 |
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Dec 13, 2023 01:37
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Big Mean Jerk posted:Huh, I just realized this will be the first time the current Doctor will be younger than I am. Not sure how to feel about this information. Same! Smith and Whitaker were close but now with Gatwa he's straight up just a wee boy
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Dec 13, 2023 16:33
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Davies wrote a short story that was set right before Rose, and it described the Time War in a bunch of crazed psychedelic imagery (iirc Earth was mentioned somewhere with its history being used as ammo for a giant gun or something) and at one point said the Doctor had been reborn and unborn so many times now due to the war that not only didn't he know what regen he was on, he didn't even know how old he was. He wrote it in 2013 right before the show itself wrote out the regeneration limit so it never got published, but the Time War was a good implied way to resolve the whole thing.
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Dec 14, 2023 20:10
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The_Doctor posted:I wasn’t sure why Hell Bent even needed Rassilon. It could have been anyone as President. Last time we saw the guy in charge of Gallifrey he was being attacked by the Master, so the choices were a) get Dalton back (I've heard they tried but he wasn't available), b) get someone else and suggest that he regenerated from the Master owning him, or just regenerated in general, that's the good thing about Time Lords is that you can just do that, c) have someone else be the Time Lord Boss, and then the audience of insane nerds start howling "where is Rassilon? Why is this guy president and not Rassilon? Isn't he the most powerful Time Lord ever? Did he just die and not regenerate? Did someone usurp him? The legendary Rassilon? What?!" and I'm sure Moffat was tempted to do option C for precisely that reason, but in the end his desire to stick with continuity won out
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Dec 15, 2023 16:02
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It will always baffle me that the "Timeless Child" reveal which profoundly alters the whole backstory of the entire series rendering multiple previous stories retroactively devoid of stakes (remember when the Doctor was about to die for real on Trenzalore? Remember the flashforward to after that time where the characters saw his grave??) not only hasn't come up much since, it wasn't even particularly important to the plot of the episode it was revealed in. The whole reveal was just to keep the Doctor busy while the Master got on with Cybermen bullshit!
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Dec 17, 2023 15:33
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I think RTD's style could wring some good stuff out of the Boneless for sure
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Dec 18, 2023 04:30
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They never did follow up on Gus from the other series 8 Jamie Mathieson episode did they? Though granted there's not much potential there that I can see. What was he trying to do? The reveal: make a big bomb or something. I can barely remember anything from the Chibnall years other than the cybermen wearing Time Lord head dresses, but there were probably some good villains in there somewhere
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Dec 18, 2023 06:47
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The River arc threw me way off series 6. They lose their child, eventually find out via seeing the future that they'll never get their child back, and... then just go on having adventures. Amy doesn't even leave and go back home of her own decision, the Doctor has to... buy her a house?? I was so gratified later in series 8 when Clara a) got furious and wanted to stop travelling with the Doctor when he hosed up, and b) reacted to the loss of a loved one by proposing that they use their time machine to stop it happening. They both felt like Moffat realising what he should have had Amy do and having someone else do it as soon as the opportunity came along
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Dec 18, 2023 14:57
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Season 6 had a perfect ending for Amy and Rory, finding out the Doctor survived and the punchline of Amy realising she's his mother in law. In fairness when it did come time for Karen Gillan to properly exit the show I recall hearing that she specifically asked for her exit to be really sad
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Dec 18, 2023 17:26
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A funny way to resolve the Donna thing would have been the Doctor saying "wait, if I'm not actually a Time Lord then that wasn't a human/Time Lord metacrisis, let's give her her memories back and just roll the dice here"
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Dec 18, 2023 18:55
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A fun thing about the Capaldi era is, despite Moffat moving away from convoluted myth arcs, that era features the (accidentally) biggest and craziest self-causation timeloop in the whole show. By the end of it there are three timelines: 1) the First Doctor refused to regenerate and died at the South Pole 2) the Doctor lived 13 lives and died at Trenzalore 3) the Doctor survived Trenzalore Except it was the Twelfth Doctor from Timeline 3 who went back and ended up convincing the First Doctor to go on, so Timeline 3 created Timeline 2 and then went on to create itself, pulling two entire timelines up by their bootstraps. Even when he's trying to keep things simple, Moffat fills the margin with doodled headache-inducing time travel shenanigans, is the moral of the story
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Dec 18, 2023 20:45
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I forgot Chibnall wrote those Silurian episodes. I also forgot everything about the episodes, which I always seem to with Chibnall. I don't know why he slides off my brain so much. That whole Flux arc, I barely remember anything about it at all. Sugar skull? Was that one of the baddies? I have no idea at all!
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Dec 19, 2023 22:45
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When I watched Independence Day as a kid I once put on a stopwatch at the end when they have to escape an explosion in 30 seconds, to see exactly how much longer than 30 seconds it actually was
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Dec 20, 2023 14:34
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keep punching joe posted:I was kinda sad that this weird painting just turned out to be a weird painting, and not a thread in a larger mystery. Nick Cave And The Bad Wolf
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Dec 20, 2023 20:31
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Warthur posted:Having rewatched The Lodger fairly recently, I think the problem for me is that it's a blend of Doctor Who and a romantic comedy, which runs into several issues: I disliked James Corden at the time but he won me over in his Doctor Who episodes. Now that he's had an extended career as an American talk show host, I'm back to hating him
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Dec 20, 2023 22:14
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Moffat has worked some magic in his time, but making "it was all a dream" an actually happy ending is a trick for the ages. It's also got one of my favourite Doctor moments, where he tells Clara she's dreaming and she'll die if she doesn't wake up, and the scene ends with this exchange: CLARA: If this is a dream, how can you be here? How can we be having the same dream? DOCTOR: There was only one way to get to you. CLARA: And what was that? DOCTOR: I'm dying too.
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Dec 21, 2023 07:14
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Dr Mysterio is lightweight but a fun lil romp. Not a bad fit for Christmas. I enjoy the joke that Nardole was a few seconds late rescuing the Doctor because he went the wrong way and accidentally became ruler of ancient Mesopotamia
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Dec 21, 2023 15:46
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Khanstant posted:I tried watching a show recently and after I gave it up, I went to look up all the Who actors I recognized and lol it was a Moffat show. I wasn't hooked so I looked up the synopsis and it read like a rejected Doctor Who script reworked into a mystery/cop show. Capaldi himself ended up being some kind of wobbly wobbly timey wimey timelooped immortal who was trying to correct the world based on knowledge from his repeating lives. Reckon all the murders is why it couldn't work on Who. Moffat produced that but didn't write on it, though there are a couple of lines that could have come from him. At one point they ask Capaldi "so how come you couldn't stop 9/11" and he says "I can't stop everything, I did stop 8/16 though" they say "what's that?" and he says "see?" Matinee posted:The Silence (species) had some interesting stuff going on, albeit with the feel of Moffat *really* trying to make the Weeping Angels lightning strike twice. (I liked the idea that they were some kind of archetype for Greys or Men In Black… very X-Files, love that kind of thing). The Silence: Please Doctor, have pity on us! Doctor: I have pity for you. E: describing DW monsters to my 7 year old, he thought the Weeping Angels sounded cool (kind of the "can only move when not observed" thing but also the way they reproduce via images) but wasn't impressed at the Silence being memory proof at all. I bet if he watched the drat episodes he'll be spooked tho I like to think of their appearance in Time Of The Doctor as their epilogue rather than their prologue. They were actually colonizing Earth and manipulating humanity, got kicked off the planet by the Doctor, and eventually the Papal Mainframe removed the "kill us all on sight" directive in exchange for the Silence doing penance as confessional priests. You can even get a good time loop out of it, with Kovarian using the confessional priests to fight against the Doctor, resulting in them committing the sin they were doing penance for in the first place. The destiny trap 2house2fly fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Dec 21, 2023 |
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Dec 21, 2023 18:32
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Series 6 was in an uncomfortable place where it felt like it was trying to balance a serialised story arc with fun standalone episodes, and both suffered as a result. Every episode had some nod to the questions raised in the opening 2-parter, but they just re-acknowledged the question rather than progressing the arc in any way. Eventually the arc progresses itself, and as fun as Let's Kill Hitler is I hate how it resolves the kidnapped child arc. I was gratified when Amy brought up in the finale that she's never going to get her daughter back and did something emotionally understandable to the person responsible. It also nags at me that the Silence wanted to assassinate the Doctor at Lake Silencio specifically, but did nothing to lure him there. He just decided to go there of his own accord because he knew he was supposed to. That even gets referenced in the finale too when Kovarian says "why can't you just die" and the Doctor says "did my best, I showed up". I probably like series 7 better (though I'm not a big fan of either series tbh) for largely ditching the metaplot stuff, and the standalone episodes seem to have a higher hit rate, though that's subjective. Also subjective is that I love Jenna Coleman
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Dec 21, 2023 21:28
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Zohar posted:Found out that my vague memory of S6 had rewritten The Wedding of River Song to be a two parter, and now I'm baffled that they didn't make it one given what a natural cliffhanger the Doctor not getting shot is. I feel like the stuck, time-crashed alternate universe is a very cool concept that's wasted in the tiny space it's given -- both in terms of runtime and being mashed together with a grab bag of other half-developed ideas. RTD was on the money about the importance of staying focused in his commentary on Wild Blue Yonder. Moffat is a better writer than a showrunner. As a way of proving this, he decided that two-parters cost more and did away with them to save budget. A severely misplaced instance of Scottish thrift
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Dec 22, 2023 02:04
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I love his disgusted/enraged "WELL THAT'S ALL RIGHT THEN" when the Doctor keeps trying to say "it wasn't as bad as all that"
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Dec 22, 2023 03:04
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Kinda wish Kovarian had been in Time Of The Doctor instead of Tasha Lem. Have the Doctor grimace and say "hello Madame Kovarian" and her be shocked that he knows her name. I wonder if the actress wasn't available or if Moffat just wanted a more cheeky and flirty character for Matt Smith to play off. Will we ever know...
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Dec 22, 2023 03:22
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Cleretic posted:It kinda makes me think of the Deep Space Nine episode For The Uniform, where Sisko performs a straight-up war crime to stop an asymmetrical guerilla war. Both of them basically just use their opponent's tactic against them, it's not escalation so much as just meeting them where they set their bar. Still bad, but it's being forced to fight on their level rather than find some theoretical high road. Haven't watched Deep Space 9 but the Maquis seem to be a terrorist/militant group like Al Qaeda. The Silence are an alien occupation force, maybe more comparable to something like the British Raj except none of the oppressed know they exist. Like if after centuries of occupation the occupied people just kind of got on with their lives and determinedly never acknowledged the pale men in suits who rule them. Someone who knows more about history could probably come up with a better example, the Raj was just on my mind because I watched RRR the other day and started imagining the Doctor expelling the Silence with kickflips and dance battles
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Dec 22, 2023 14:42
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DavidCameronsPig posted:Huh. She didn't have a weapon, probably ran into Tasha's room to get one
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Dec 22, 2023 17:33
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Felt fresh and fun. Identifiably Russell T Davies but also noticeably different from his old Doctor Who stuff, even the recent specials. Now those episodes feel a lot like he was playing with some old toys one last time before putting them away. I don't know if I liked this episode that much, but I like a lot of stuff about it
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Dec 26, 2023 01:49
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They've lived on that flat since before Ruby was born, I just assumed property was relatively affordable when they moved in there
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Dec 26, 2023 04:17
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Ah hell, I've been caught not paying attention again. I just extrapolated from the mother and grandmother still being in the same flat when Ruby was erased
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Dec 26, 2023 04:26
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Yeah my D+ subtitles glitched out and I was made painfully aware of how rough the audio mixing is
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Dec 26, 2023 05:38
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I don't particularly dislike the snowman head bit, and his interaction with the cop was cute, but I do like the suspense when the Doctor doesn't turn up for a while. My fav is probably A Good Man Goes To War, where it's something like 20 minutes before you see more than a silhouette
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Dec 26, 2023 22:04
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The Doctor knows the word should be Gravity (he corrected himself about it when talking to Donna in the second special) he's just rolling with it. Then again, back in series 5 there was a joke where Amy pointed out her village's duck pond and the Doctor said "how can it be a duck pond without any ducks" and I thought that was a cute joke about terms that are commonly understood but not necessarily descriptive, but it turned out to be a plot point and a crucial Sherlock-esque moment of revelation was punctuated with "but the duck pond didn't have any ducks!" so I'm not the guy to ask what's relevant and what isn't
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Dec 27, 2023 05:50
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Ooh another good one was Asylum Of The Daleks, where early on Oswin says she keeps herself busy making soufflés and the Doctor idly says "where do you get the milk" before being yelled at to concentrate on more important things. Then at the end it's revealed Oswin has trapped herself in a delusion to avoid the nightmare of being converted into a Dalek, and the Doctor mournfully reveals he suspected all along because "where did you get the milk for your soufflés?"
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Dec 27, 2023 06:05
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What's "Mrs Flood" an anagram of? Come on, we've watched RTD Doctor Who before, we know how he thinks! Old Forms? DSM Floor? Kind of a joke about the DSM4, the old version of the psychiatric diagnostic manual... or what's the longer version of Mrs? Missus Flood? Sodium Floss? No, we'll need to get her first name if we're going to crack this.
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Dec 28, 2023 05:37
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Cleretic posted:If I remember correctly, 'Mister Saxon' was said to be an anagram of 'Master No. Six'. RTD claimed it was a pure coincidence. But he would, wouldn't he. Professor YANA wasn't a coincidence!
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Dec 28, 2023 06:00
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Watched Deep Breath for the first time in years (always put on a bunch of Doctor Who around Christmas) and the Doctor's little speech at the end hit me like a truck, I'd never noticed before how Moffat used it to bookend the Capaldi/Coleman eraDeep Breath posted:You can't see me, can you? You look at me, and you can't see me. Have you got any idea what that's like? I'm not on the phone, I'm right here! Standing in front of you! Hell Bent posted:There's one thing I know about her. Just one thing. If I met her again, I would absolutely know.
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Dec 29, 2023 15:48
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