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Which season of Doctor Who should get a Blu-ray set next? This poll is closed. |
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| One of the black-and-white seasons |
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16 | 29.63% |
| Season 7 |
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7 | 12.96% |
| Season 11 |
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1 | 1.85% |
| Season 13 |
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0 | 0% |
| Season 15 |
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2 | 3.70% |
| The Key to Time |
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21 | 38.89% |
| Season 21 |
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0 | 0% |
| Season 25 |
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7 | 12.96% |
| Total: | 54 votes | ||
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https://twitter.com/bbcdoctorwho/status/1783591392947712242 ...Honestly, I did a double-take at "Season One" and my first thought was "they're showing An Unearthly Child on the big screen? At its resolution? Are we sure that's wise?"
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Apr 26, 2024 00:02
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Dabir posted:I always took the guns thing as maybe Jack had fought Daleks before, but they were pre Time War Daleks that didn't have forcefields. Tooth And Claw Pretty forgettable, this one. Notable for letting Tennant talk with his real accent for a bit, and the reveal of a counter-conspiracy to stop the werewolf was sweet in a weird way. One of the ones I kind of dreaded rewatching because of how little I took away from it the last time. That's most of series 2, really. I'm not its biggest fan School Reunion The music is absolutely baller in this one. I don't think that action music was ever used again in the whole series, which is a shame. It could have been an equivalent to All The Strange Creatures. The episode fails to satisfyingly answer why the Doctor is such a serial monogamist with companions and never really talks about them once they're gone. or rather, it fails to answer it in a way that makes the Doctor look good, which I guess is what we as fans would prefer in an explanation. Still, if he was perfect we wouldn't love him. The Girl In The Fireplace A preview of the Moffat era, both in the writing tics he'll repeatedly display ("the slow path" will eventually mutate into "the long way round", a doomed out-of-sync time travel romance, the villain is a well-meaning system which is malfunctioning) and the flubs he's capable of. Mickey's line about finding the portal "right under our nose" has stuck with me since I first watched it. The narrative can't think of a way to organically have us realise "oh wow the portal has been under their nose this whole time" but finding the portal has to be an Event, a plot element clicking satisfyingly into place(the big ending being what was right under our nose the whole time is probably Moffat's best tic when it works- "I am your mummy" or making Prisoner Zero impersonate itself, or the final shot of this very episode). So they just have a character announce it. Effectively, a plot twist took place offscreen. I read the novelization of Day Of The Doctor recently and there was a joke about some kind of electrical component being used as castanets, which I didn't get at all. Mystery solved, it was a reference to this episode! Rise Of The Cybermen / Age Of Steel It's very rare that Doctor Who will make me feel embarrassing skin-crawling unpleasantness, but the scene where Rose tries to play matchmaker and Mirror Universe Jackie goes "who do you think you are" does it and then some. I don't know how much Davies wrote on this (isn't the rule that if you write/rewrite over a certain amount you have to be credited?) but that definitely feels like something of his. The unsettling feeling that this Jackie isn't that far away from real Jackie, that all that's separating a good person from a bad person is their circumstances, and good circumstances don't create good people. Also if Davies didn't write the subplot where they try to save Jackie interspersed with clips of Jackie zombie marching to the conversion to create tension, only for them to get there and find out Jackie was already converted offscreen, then he certainly liked it because he used the same trick years later in It's A Sin, which not to go on a tangent but that's the only time I've yelled out loud at the TV in easily a decade. The Jackie reveal isn't that powerful, but it's still a damned good trick. Tell you what, if you don't like Rose then the ending of this episode is nothing but schadenfreude, what with Pete's entirely negative reaction to finding out she's his daughter and Mickey ditching her, all in the span of five minutes.
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Apr 26, 2024 00:17
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Vinylshadow posted:https://twitter.com/bbcdoctorwho/status/1783591392947712242 Yeah someone decided this was a good time to restart the count again.
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Apr 26, 2024 06:40
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is brian may a new doctor? is he going to rip sick guitar solos?
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Apr 26, 2024 06:51
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https://twitter.com/bbcdoctorwho/status/1783452927056650588
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Apr 26, 2024 09:18
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Regular Wario posted:is brian may a new doctor? is he going to rip sick guitar solos? Huh apparently Anita Dobson is married to Brian May. That’s awesome.
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Apr 26, 2024 15:38
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2house2fly posted:
Yeah, why does the music go so hard in that one while they're doing the "typing and looking at a Matrix screen" thing? It's so intense, lol. I think that and Anthony Head are what make that episode (also the whole "You are in a car!" thing from K-9). I don't really like the Doctor's explanation to Sarah Jane, especially since Thirteen kind of doubles down on it later with Yaz. We don't want him to be perfect, but when his flaws involve the people he's carting off into danger, it's just not a great look. I think he probably should have told Sarah Jane that some of his adventures with her made him legitimately afraid that she would die, and that him visiting his home planet seemed like a good time to drop her off, and he didn't have the heart to tell her it was a permanent goodbye. That gives him flaws that aren't "You'll eventually get old and need care and die and I don't want to watch that." Captain Jack is a good "I needed to leave you behind" from that era. I do like the rest of the episode, bad CG and Vaseline camera and all. The Cyberman two-parter is such a good representation of Davies's flaws and strengths, lol. That interaction you note with Rose and her Mom really does hit, for the exact reasons you say it does. It's something Doctor Who rarely does with its time travel, investigate the difference between nature/nurture and how those things can shape a person's life. I think the other side of it - Pete's struggle to do the right thing and feeling like he can't involve Jackie in it - is also cool to watch, as is Mickey looking at his other life. The actual threat, the Cybermen, are handled badly, like in a laughable way (Loomis is bargain basement Davros, "DELETE!" is a terrible catchphrase, etc.), but the human part of it still makes it enjoyable to watch.
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Apr 26, 2024 15:38
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Bicyclops posted:I don't really like the Doctor's explanation to Sarah Jane, especially since Thirteen kind of doubles down on it later with Yaz. We don't want him to be perfect, but when his flaws involve the people he's carting off into danger, it's just not a great look. I might be conflating this with later Toby Whithouse episodes, but Whithouse generally seems to be arguing that it's fundamentally immoral for the Doctor to offer human beings trips in space and time. So Vampires of Venice has some (light) comparisons between Amy and the vampire girls, suggesting that she's been damaged / corrupted / victimised by her experiences (which is true and happens repeatedly after) and then God Complex goes full mask off and has various characters explicitly talk about these concerns in the text. Amy has a darker and edgier time that pretty much any Doctor Who companion out there, barring maybe Compassion from the EDAs. The series just repeatedly ignores any interest in her feeling or managing her trauma, so the effects are elided.
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Apr 26, 2024 15:51
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Bicyclops posted:It's something Doctor Who rarely does with its time travel, investigate the difference between nature/nurture and how those things can shape a person's life. I think the other side of it - Pete's struggle to do the right thing and feeling like he can't involve Jackie in it - is also cool to watch, as is Mickey looking at his other life. The actual threat, the Cybermen, are handled badly, like in a laughable way (Loomis is bargain basement Davros, "DELETE!" is a terrible catchphrase, etc.), but the human part of it still makes it enjoyable to watch. The bit in the recent Christmas special where they kind of did that was one of the highlights of that ep for me, seeing a version of the world without Ruby in where her foster mother and grandmother are both miserable. When I rewatched the episode and remembered that bit was coming up I almost didn't want to watch it again because of how downbeat it was
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Apr 26, 2024 19:46
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https://twitter.com/bbcdoctorwho/status/1783858578148704519
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Apr 26, 2024 20:42
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I still can't quite get over Mel being back 40 years on. It's pretty great.
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Apr 26, 2024 21:40
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Open Source Idiom posted:I might be conflating this with later Toby Whithouse episodes, but Whithouse generally seems to be arguing that it's fundamentally immoral for the Doctor to offer human beings trips in space and time. So Vampires of Venice has some (light) comparisons between Amy and the vampire girls, suggesting that she's been damaged / corrupted / victimised by her experiences (which is true and happens repeatedly after) and then God Complex goes full mask off and has various characters explicitly talk about these concerns in the text. Similar to Tegan, who gets next to zero resolution to having the Mara gently caress her up, not once but twice
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Apr 26, 2024 22:59
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I thought RTD and Moffat still got on well, and yet in the photo of the them together RTD is standing 700 miles behind Moffat. Depressing.
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Apr 26, 2024 23:21
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Season 13 Episode 2: War of the Sontarans Written by Chris Chibnall, Directed by Jamie Magnus Stone Yaz posted:I don't want to freak you out, but there's something's very wrong with the universe right now. This episode is... fine! As a standalone episode I liked it fine, and it does a functional job of trying to tie in the overarching season-long story by showing one of the "lower stakes" repercussions of the Flux. That fact that "lower stakes" refers to the conquering of the planet Earth in the present and backwards through time just demonstrates how universally shaking the Flux as a concept is meant to be. Whether it was a good idea to do that is another matter, and it can't help but bring to mind the Time War which as a storyline had already been mined to death by RTD and Moffat culminating in the beautiful, beautiful Day of the Doctor where the Doctor successfully saved the lives of billions of children who were then personally murdered casually by the Master a couple years later and nobody gave a poo poo... but you run with what you've got, and what we've got is six episodes of Whittaker's final (half-)season so I take what I can get! The basic premise of the A-Plot is an idea I dig. The Sontarans took advantage of the Flux to sneak into Earth at the last possible second (more on that later) for the most petty of initial reasons: to get revenge on the little shits who humiliated Commander Linx back in 1973's The Time Warrior! Their plan is to conquer Earth, first in the 21st Century, then the 19th (skipping the 20th?, and then (I think?) onwards backwards throughout history. Cause and effect are upside down as a result, impacts of "later" wars that happen in the past are leaking through into the "present" so that Russia and China have been replaced by the nation of "Sontar" in the memories of the unconquered, putting Earth history into a state of Flux (get it!?!) that the Doctor has to set right before it becomes fixed in place as the new permanent history of Earth. https://i.imgur.com/o6FXfgy.mp4 Now this raises a lot of questions that the show doesn't really answer, or seem interested in answering. That's not necessarily a bad thing, getting bogged down in the minutaie and trying to explain things can often be a bad idea (see Chibnall "solving" the "problem" of The Brain of Morbius), though when considered in the context of the entire Chibnall era it speaks to an ongoing issue where ideas are expressed purely at face value without consideration for the whys or wherefors. Since when do the Sontarans have time travel technology? The Two Doctors was all about their failed efforts to achieve this! There is an explanation for how they knew about the Flux, which raises further questions about how the Daleks or even the Cybermen couldn't figure that out... but how did they know that Earth would survive it? The good doggies weren't coming to protect the planet but to teleport the humans away in their protected ships, it was the Doctor's last minute brilliant strategy of "form a sphere!" that achieved the planet's protection, so the Sontaran Strategy was based on nothing! Are they only based in the 19th and 21st Century initially? If there are more forces further back in history then the Doctor hasn't achieved anything. I assume there aren't, but then the Doctor's plan would have involved ANOTHER full powered fleet (Staak's) returning to the 21st Century and undoing everything Dan and the good Doggy did! So the rear end in a top hat British Lieutenant-General was right to do what he did!?! I bring up all these things to point out that beyond the surface level there are plenty of problems with this episode, but that overall I still found it an enjoyable, easy-to-watch and inoffensive episode of Doctor Who. In the Chibnall era, that's a triumph! https://i.imgur.com/3fODVC3.mp4 And for any other faults, sometimes the show would just pull out a lovely bit like the above and remind me just what could have been. The Doctor, Dan and Yaz find themselves mysteriously on the ground in 19th Century Sevastopol, with no memory of how they got out of the TARDIS beyond the Doctor's vision of a disturbing "impossible' house. The TARDIS has sealed itself up, removing all of its doors, leaving them stranded. Except Dan and Yaz, apparently in "flux" themselves, fade from view, with Dan returning to 21st Century Liverpool while Yaz ends up in the Temple of Atropos on the planet Time, a temple nobody has ever heard of on a planet that doesn't exist. https://i.imgur.com/cqlZMmZ.mp4 The Doctor, still in Sevastopol, meets Mary Seacole and the commander of the British forces, where despite running headfirst into the infuriating but unsurprising misogyny of the day she gets the Lieutenant-General to admit far more than he intended to reveal about his lack of (military) intelligence. She similarly tricks a Sontaran patient into leading her and Mary directly to the Sontaran base, which is both consistent with the portrayal of the Sontarans but also demonstrates the historic problems with trying to make them seem like a serious threat. The Time Warrior and The Sontaran Experiment both did good jobs of showcasing the Sontarans as dangerous, amoral and intimidating, but even before the revival leaned so hard into the comedy aspects the classic series had turned the Sontarans somewhat into jokes. Their arrival as the power behind the power behind the President in The Invasion of Time was a wet fart of a reveal, and while it wasn't intentionally scripted the Sontaran tripping over a lawn chair in that serial seemed to mark the moment where fans considered the Sontarans as more comical than threatening. They're naive and easily manipulated in The Two Doctors, and from The Sontaran Stratagem on they have become progressively less scary and far more comical. So in this episode, we're supposed to see them as a deadly occupying force and a deadly opponent, but they're also repeatedly played up for comedy as they have been in the past. The update to their make-up to be a modernized version of the old classic look is a welcome change, but the characterization remains the same... except for when it doesn't, and we're supposed to find them scary or threatening again. That contradiction undermines both the comedy and the drama, working against what the episode is trying to do and the Sontarans' continued presence as a major force in the season. https://i.imgur.com/S7hDZtH.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/6wdKWgg.mp4 So which is it? Are they deadly monstrous soldiers who massacre armies or are they comedy dunces who get easily played and manipulated? A writer with a deft touch could walk that fine line. Chibnall is unfortunately not a writer with a deft touch. It doesn't help that the Doctor's strategy to defeat them is based on an unbelievably stupid piece of planning by the Sontarans who have apparently never heard of "shifts". Way back in The Sontaran Experiment it was established that Sontarans need to regularly refresh the nutrients and atmosphere contained in their suits while on Earth, and thanks to Mary Seacole's observations the Doctor figures out they are on a 27-hour-cycle. Except they're ALL on a 27-hour-cycle, synched up for the entire army, meaning there is a roughly 8 minute window when EVERY SINGLE SONTARAN is out of commission and vulnerable. The Doctor, aided by Mary, the Lieutenant-General and the surviving men of the massacre, sabotage each ship's supplies so the Sontarans will have no excuse but to retreat back to the 21st Century. As mentioned above, this strategy was entirely reliant on "my best person" (Dan, who she barely knows) taking care of the problem there, and since Dan and the good doggy had just taken out the 21st Century fleet then the Lieutenant-General blowing up all the ships actually saved Liverpool from being immediately invaded yet again by some now very angry Sontarans and no longer having any method of dealing with them. Dan's own little adventure involves sneaking into the Liverpool docks after being rescued by his parents (who are very charming and sweet, and I don't think ever show up again?) where the same contradictory problems as above are in full effect. We see Sontarans brutally execute humans who have snuck into the docks, but also Dan is able to seemingly easily sneak through the docks, into a ship, get through sealed doors using his very human hand on a Sontaran handprint and access computer systems, all while taking out Sontarans himself with a wok. He does end up cornered and about to be executed until the good doggy arrives to save the day, and I got a good laugh out of,"I've still got a human in this hunt!" as Karvanista notes that he and the Lupari accept responsibility for not spotting the Sontarans sneaking in. That does raise another of those niggling questions though: if they're all pair bonded to a human, and if you can in fact leave a ship without hurting the sphere around Earth, then why didn't a large contingent of Lupari come down to the surface and fight off the Sontarans? How did the Lupari whose bonded humans were killed by the firing squad react to this? Did Chibnall even think about that when he raised the "pair bonding" concept or does he not think about it beyond Karvanista and Dan? https://i.imgur.com/DotdxJz.mp4 To be fair, I do love the interactions between Dan and his good doggy. And really if it wasn't for the ongoing overall issues with Chibnall's run on Who, I could forgive a lot of these little hanging questions just like I'd often overlook those "Hang on, but doesn't that mean..." moments with RTD's writing. But, you know... the last two seasons of Chibnall's Who up to this point... Yaz meanwhile ends up in the Temple of Atropos, as confused as Commander Vinder who has also shown up there as little flying robots demand that they "repair" without explanation of what that means. Atropos obviously brings to mind the Three Fates of Greek Mythology, also known as Moirai, and the parallels continue when the little robots finally explain they're here to repair the "Mouri", voiceless guardians standing on podiums, two of them "burned out" like circuits, seen only as brief flashes of corporeal forms within standing robes. Yaz here demonstrates some more of what has been one of her few defining characteristics: using her police training to try and calm who she speaks with and get information from them. She briefly meets Joseph Williamson, wandering grumpily through the temple and showcasing a surprising openness to the notion that he may have found himself outside of 1820. Where her subplot best shines though are in her interactions with Swarm and Azure, who arrive unexpectedly and claim to be able to repair the Mouri, getting the initial trust of the robots until they grasp who they are truly are. Swarm and Azure are delightful, the "Sugar Skull Gang" as they came to be affectionately known in the Season 39 thread as Flux was airing, clearly having a great time and enjoying themselves immensely. When Vinder pulls a gun and tries to shoot them, Swarm doesn't just teleport around to dodge his attacks but takes the opportunity to troll him mercilessly by striking a variety of poses as he taunts him to keep shooting, with Azure then joining in so she can have part of the fun too. But their true glee is in mocking Yaz, taunting her "What Would The Doctor Do" message on the palm of her hand, laughing at her "linear" perspective on time - she's never met them, and they've never met her... but they also know that they will and how that will go, as the first pieces start to be put together of an overarching theme throughout the season that never quite properly gets laid out clearly: Swarm and Azure serve "Time", but not the controlled and navigable time we're familiar with, but rather the wild and chaotic unrestrained time that exists simultaneously forward, backwards, sideways and always in the moment. The Planet Time doesn't exist, insists the Doctor, but she also - once able to get back into the TARDIS - noted that something appeared to be corrupting the TARDIS, before it gets hijacked and brought back to "0" in Time and Space. The intention is clearly that something else happened before time as we understand it in Doctor Who came to be, something that that the Doctor doesn't know (or remember). These ideas never quite coalesce in the way they should have, leading to a final episode confrontation between the Doctor and Time that feels like it came out of nowhere even with all this setup, and doesn't appear to have actually gone anywhere. In that sense, it's a lot like the the Chibnall era itself: an interesting idea not executed well. https://i.imgur.com/oHUvzCS.mp4 Swarm and Azure destroy the burned out Mouri, and the Doctor and Dan are summoned to the Temple in the TARDIS. Swarm taunts her, telling her that time is beginning to "run wild" and that his repairs are short term, taking glee in revealing that a horrified Yaz and Vinder have been jammed into the place of the burned out Mouri. When she tries to rush to Yaz's aid, she's warned that Swarm will turn them to ash if she touches them, but the alternative isn't much better, once he activates them as part of the new "circuit, all of time will blast through their bodies and burn them out in seconds. Azure begins a countdown, both of them relishing the horror on the Doctor's face as they turn time against the Time Lord, and we end on a good old fashioned cliffhanger in the best Doctor Who tradition. That's War of the Sontarans, really. It's got all the same problems as much else of the Chibnall era, but it also does what a perfectly serviceable episode of Doctor Who does, and where it works it does work well. As a follow-up to the first episode, it shows us a somewhat more understandable, lower-stakes situation for the Doctor to deal with before she's drawn immediately back into the bigger plot, and ends the episode leaving the viewer (hopefully) wanting to see what happens next. https://i.imgur.com/r94Ixvj.mp4 Index of Doctor Who Write-ups for Television Episodes/Big Finish Audio Stories. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Apr 27, 2024 |
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Apr 27, 2024 03:03
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I really hate the "updated" design for Sontarans, that is all.
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Apr 27, 2024 03:37
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Saw a promo for the new season during the NFL Draft. This has been your commercial update.
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Apr 27, 2024 04:45
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I wasn't aware they weren't a new thing when they first showed up. Just looked em up and... you really can't go wrong with Sontarans. All of these are fantastic in different ways! Similar enough you know that's a Sontarans immediately. I now look forward to all future and past Sontaran designs.
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Apr 27, 2024 05:32
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You can go wrong with Sontaran designs, and they did.
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Apr 27, 2024 05:37
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Yeah they look dumb as hell with the helmets on looks like we agree
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Apr 27, 2024 05:39
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I think it is very important they be short, which is one of the few things that isn't good about The Two Doctors
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Apr 27, 2024 05:51
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Sontall-ha!
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Apr 27, 2024 06:57
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Vinylshadow posted:Sontall-ha! Strax meets Amy, turns to River and says,"Son tall, so what?"
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Apr 27, 2024 07:00
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Jerusalem posted:Season 13 Episode 2: War of the Sontarans just starting this ep. right now and for all the deserved grief ch. got on his run -- he does new things at least? like i've never seen doctor who revival in greyscale like this, and the house looks like straight out of 2005 deviant art and its awesome.
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Apr 27, 2024 11:44
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The house was a fantastic visual look, yeah. That's one of the many frustrating things about the Chibnall era: a lot of great ideas on paper, some genuinely awesome visuals, a thoroughly overdue and welcome look at expanding on the diversity of not just the actors on the show but those working on it, but then the key integral aspect of actually making really good Doctor Who too often fell flat. But there was gold in them thar hills, they just refused to dig more than a couple of feet, except for where a torn and dirty piece of paper that said,"Iunno, more Doctors before Hartnell?" had fallen out of Robert Holmes' notebook, that's where Chibnall hired a full excavator and told them to man it 24/7.
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Apr 27, 2024 11:54
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LOL at the new Paternost Gang box where they working undercover on an estate, and Vastra goes to see the Lady of the house's lawyer and they turn out to be The Fourth Doctor
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Apr 27, 2024 13:43
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Ahaha, that's fantastic 
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Apr 27, 2024 13:49
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Davros1 posted:LOL at the new Paternost Gang box where they working undercover on an estate, and Vastra goes to see the Lady of the house's lawyer and they turn out to be The Fourth Doctor This is what made me return up give the previous series a go, and it is very much a decent Jago and Litefoot replacement. Some of that might be ellie higson appearing as well though
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Apr 27, 2024 14:05
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So she's reaching up in the low angle shot, but when it cuts to the wide angle she's standing there with her arms by her side. A basic continuity error which is indicative of the shoddiness of Chibnall's production. Unless this is an edit made by the gif maker.
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Apr 27, 2024 18:02
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Updog Scully posted:So she's reaching up in the low angle shot, but when it cuts to the wide angle she's standing there with her arms by her side. A basic continuity error which is indicative of the shoddiness of Chibnall's production. Unless this is an edit made by the gif maker. Its a video so you can see that the actual order of the shots is the distant shot then the close up shot.
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Apr 27, 2024 18:22
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Lampsacus posted:just starting this ep. right now and for all the deserved grief ch. got on his run -- he does new things at least? like i've never seen doctor who revival in greyscale like this, and the house looks like straight out of 2005 deviant art and its awesome. Chibnall’s take on Who had a lot of new things, and very little that was familiar, so his take had the universe feeling more cold and lonely somehow?
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Apr 27, 2024 18:48
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Updog Scully posted:So she's reaching up in the low angle shot, but when it cuts to the wide angle she's standing there with her arms by her side. A basic continuity error which is indicative of the shoddiness of Chibnall's production. Unless this is an edit made by the gif maker. As mentioned, the wide shot is the establishing shot showing her looking at the house, then it turns around to a closeup and shows her raising and stretching her hand out towards it. I should have really included a few frames of black to more firmly show the start and finish of the video. The house shows up again in later episodes but she never goes inside or opens it up, she dumps the chameleon watch into the TARDIS dustbin at the end and the whole thing ends up being a giant loving waste of time, but it still made for a great visual!
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Apr 28, 2024 04:18
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The Idiot's Lantern Ah hell. I don't care at all about this one. It's so forgettable I went back and checked the writer to make sure it was definitely Mark Gatiss who wrote it and not Chris Chibnall. I guess I liked the bit where the villain became colour television. And the Doctor defeating the villain by taping over it. The ending with the kid and his dad feels a bit unearned, normally there'd be some suggestion that the dad is redeemable despite his horrible actions but here it's just "yeah your dad is a pathetic scumbag. Yeah he said out loud that he plans to beat the gay out of you. He hasn't even expressed any contrition for reporting your own grandma to the police, or indeed for anything. He looks chastened because he got kicked out and now has nothing. Good! He's got a well deserved comeuppance, nobody will miss him. But don't give up on him." Maybe that's the point. Call it early foreshadowing of the Doctor keeping Missy in the vault for 70 years to try and make her good. As Emil says in Nier Automata, "even if it's pointless, you still have to do it." Sometimes you have to fight evil personified as cute little robots or evil little orcs, sometimes you have to fight the evil in your father's heart. The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit Speaking of fighting evil! I'm in love with the aesthetics of this episode. The grimy "used future" look, everyone's in their undershirts suggesting an ambient level of hardship that precludes bothering to dress smartly, the lights in the spacesuit light your face up to look like a skull, AND SATAN IS THERE! hence the Doom door sound. I know it's just a generic sound effect but come on, there's a reason they used that generic sound effect in this story. The writing is no slouch either. I'm glad the show went back to the Ood later, they're a classic alien, but this story already makes clear enough that even a willing slave is still a slave, and what was done to the Ood was a sin which literally allows the devil to escape and pollute the universe. The captain updating the log to record the death of every Ood individually was a lovely sweet ending, and the conversations between Ida and the Doctor were great as quiet contemplative moments. And the image of him hanging alone in the abyss, taking a leap of faith and falling into darkness... no notes. Molto Bene. I did roll my eyes a bit at the big climax where the Doctor says if he believes in nothing else in the universe he believes in Rose Tyler. Talk about unearned! One episode ago he left her alone for five minutes and she got her face pulled off by the villain. But it works with the themes. When all your beliefs in the laws of the universe are being challenged, believe in people. It kind of works as a follow-up to the last episode's ending as well: when fighting evil you have to have faith that good will prevail. Love And Monsters Always been a fan of this one. The Abzorbaloff's dialogue with the Doctor at the end is just cracking- "Clom, yes." Elton making all these plans to worm his way into Jackie's home and then her introducing herself to him and inviting him over seconds after meeting him is an all-timer gag. I know it's an obvious metaphor to go for in general, but the villain absorbing people still feels a bit prescient as at that time watching TV wasn't referred to as "consuming". Weird little parallel at the end between the villain and the Doctor, the Abzorbaloff says it only takes one touch for him to kill you, and then Elton says anyone who touches the Doctor is doomed, foreshadowing the finale. Of course, if you extend the thought out a bit, the good thing he laments losing was a group of friends brought together by the Doctor. So while the Abzorbaloff takes everything away from you, contact with the Doctor gave something to Elton and his little gang. Fear Her Time's been kind to this one I think, if only because the pool of available episodes has expanded so the impact of what the fan base once considered the worst episode ever has been diluted. After all, there's so many more stinkers to pick from now! This would be one of the highlights of a Chibs series. Plus in retrospect a bad episode in series 2 is buoyed up by the knowledge that the next two series are going to have a much higher banger ratio. Rewatching it for possibly the first time... eh, it's a bit bland. Mostly notable for the truly batty last ten minutes, where after a stadium full of people vanishes the announcer keeps enthusing about the Olympic torch. Then the torchbearer starts to run out of steam and the announcer wonders if it was because he was struck by lightning a few minutes ago. Properly off its head. The writer has said he doesn't care if "the fans" don't like it, it's for kids. Which is fair enough, but I don't know if any kids are particularly fond of this one either.
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Apr 28, 2024 05:07
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The Impossible Planet is still one of my favourite Doctor Who stories.
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Apr 28, 2024 11:14
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My favourite bit of trivia for Impossible Planet + Satan Pit is that they aired within the week of 6/6/06; to really hammer home the devil 'connection'. Absolutely wonderful bit of timing on that.
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Apr 28, 2024 11:28
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Also, the change-in-shift music was Ravel's Bolero, which got perfect sixes at the 1984 Winter Olympics. And the kids they got to rate how scary the episodes were back then rated them all six out of five.
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Apr 28, 2024 12:12
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I love this whole exchange. Ood: The beast and his armies will rise from the pit to make war on God. Rose: ...What? Ood: shakes the translator a bit Apologies, I said would you like sauce with your meal? The Ood maintaining that polite tone of voice the entire time is perfection.
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Apr 28, 2024 12:18
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Rewatching The Church On Ruby Road. Still don't like it, but I don't hate it. Very solidly mid. It's like a version of Rose except Ruby is way more passive and basically exits the plot as an active player in the climax of her own introductory episode. There's nothing like Rose and Mickey investigating or Rose swinging into action at the end. I'm also less interested in the supporting cast than in Rose, mostly because everyone's a bit too nice for my tastes. Goblins are fun and look great, Davina McCall is inexplicable and can't act (in ways that add to the episode), and the singing is fun. The bit where Flood's doing direct address to the audience jumps out because the fourth wall breaking is otherwise a Doctor thing in this incarnation. Edit: In a strange IMDb error I've never seen before Anita Dobson's got a credit for on the episode's page, but is weirdly uncredited for the role on her own page. Edit Edit: Oh I see what's happened. All the guest cast are being credited under their 'self' tag and not 'actor' tag, for some reason. Open Source Idiom fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Apr 28, 2024 |
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Apr 28, 2024 21:02
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2house2fly posted:The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit You can read this as a callback to The Curse of Fenric. The haemovores can’t touch the Doctor because he has faith, but not in God, in his companions. He walks through the crowd of monsters quietly reciting their names.
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Apr 28, 2024 22:33
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Season 13 Episode 3: Once, Upon Time Written by Chris Chibnall, Directed by Azhur Saleem The Fugitive Doctor posted:You've got a lot to figure out. I'll give this to Chibnall, he gave it the ol' College Try. He really went for it in this episode, and he took on a pretty large task and did his best to pull it off. He didn't, but the effort was clearly there. He had to juggle the Doctor's story, Vinder's story, Dan's story, Yaz's story, the Fugitive Doctor's story, Swarm and Azure's story, resolve the cliffhanger from the previous episode and setup things for the next episode, AND incorporate the wider season finale and how it plays into revelations from the end of last season, AND also throw in Bel's story and how it links to Vinder's as well. The fact that all these things he had to deal with are the direct result of his own writing leaving him in this position halfway through his final complete (and only half as big) season of Doctor Who is on him, of course. But he came at it with gusto and tried to give everything the time and attention it needed, and by the time the episode ended we did know more about Vinder at least as well as a hook for his return later in the season, we had a reason for why Dan needed to continue to travel with the Doctor, and while we didn't get much in the way of revelations about Yaz's own history even now 3 seasons in, she was intrinsically linked to the setup for the next episode. We also got to see the actors get a chance to stretch their legs a little, playing multiple roles in a variety of different settings, and if nothing else it lead to the delightful scene where Jodie Whittaker gets to play a police officer telling a boring story about a pointless argument with a retail worker https://i.imgur.com/wb167tY.mp4 But before anything else: a complaint! Maybe I'll be proven to be laughably wrong and I just forgot the context/explanation provided in a later episode... but the scene with Tectuen in this episode completely undermines the entire relevance of the Weeping Angel and the events of the following episode, surely!?! As this episode progresses, the Doctor's plan to use the "Time Storm" to set in motion a plan to defeat Swarm and Azure in the nano-second between the end of the last episode and the start of this one sees her diving through Dan, Yaz and Vinder's timestreams, as well as her own. She gets close to learning information that has supposedly been wiped from her memory, and in the middle of all this she suddenly finds herself somewhere completely different. A seemingly indifferent woman tells her that her screwing around hasn't gone unnoticed and that she isn't allowed to know this information. The Doctor demands to know who she is, and the woman sends her away with an irritated flick of the wrist. This, we will learn later, is Tectuen (known as Awsok for some reason in this episode). The adopted mother of the Timeless Child who vivisected her child to learn the secrets of regeneration, and the head of "Division". She admits that she created the Flux to destroy this universe because it's time is over, and she doesn't like what the Doctor has been doing. The intent is to make her out as the big bad final villain for the season, which feels a bit silly given the season is halfway over and we've only just had the Doctor have her first real face-to-face contact with the Sugar Skull Gang. It feels even sillier given Tectuen will be unceremoniously murdered without a second thought and the true true for real for reals final no kidding final villain will turn out to be Time, which has been discussed up to this point as a conceptual thing but will turn out to be an actual entity? But nevermind all that, because there's a Weeping Angel in this episode, chasing the Doctor, using Yaz to get eventual access to the TARDIS and take them all back in time for the next episode. That will culminate with them capturing the Doctor, and it will turn out their mission was to... deliver the Doctor to Tectuen. But... she establishes in this episode that she can just... make the Doctor appear and disappear before her at will already? So why did she need the Weeping Angels and this whole complicated plot in the first place? Maybe there are explanations I'm just forgetting, but watching this episode with the benefit of fractured, dim hindsight, that immediately jumped out to me as making no sense. https://i.imgur.com/n0HXgqH.mp4 I felt the episode had a particularly strong start. We get one of the rare glimpses into the Doctor's internal mindset, as we see the events of last episode's cliffhanger from her perspective. She is, of course, talking non-stop to herself ("talking's brilliant!") and her mind is racing a million-miles-an-hour taking onboard everything that is happening, considering all the potential problems and solutions, choosing and discarding possible courses of action. Swarm is so smug and self-satisfied, he and Azure both thrilling to the Doctor being apparently paralyzed with fear and confusion, when they're just barely a fraction of her attention: the root cause of a problem that she needs to find a solution to. Said solution is to haul her and Dan up onto the other burned out Mouri pedestals just as Swarm snaps his fingers, taking on the brunt of the flow of Time now flooding her body (the "Time Storm") in order to protect them, but also give her "time" to talk with them and find a solution. The trouble is, they're immediately hauled backwards into their own time streams, as is the Doctor herself. This isn't random chance, "Time" is running wild and also seemingly toying with them, the first of frustratingly few signs this season that Time as an Entity will show up in the final episode. There's a Weeping Angel in the mix as well, leaping into Yaz's time stream and corrupting it, so that while Dan, Vinder and the Doctor are experiencing events from their past, Yaz is experiencing events that didn't happen to her, or not quite as they appear to do here. Throughout the episode, the Doctor is hauled back into the Time Storm at different points by the Mouri, a tug and pull between them and Time which relates back to the Doctor's plot in this episode discovering herself in a period she doesn't remember: the Fugitive Doctor pre-fugitive status, working with a team to defeat "The Ravagers" (the pre-rejuvenated forms of Swarm and Azure) after they took over the Temple of Atropos. It's here that the Mouri, snuck in via "Passenger", shackle and control Time, quantum locking it away from Swarm and Azure who are imprisoned by an eternity by Division until their escape and return to Atropos. Confused? So is the Doctor! She has no memory of these events, no knowledge of Time as an actual Entity, nor the Temple of Atropos. The "planet" Time was supposed constructed to contain Time through the Temple, then that in turn was not enough and the Mouri became the jailers. With the Flux damaging them, Time is running wild again and the Sugar Skull Gang return to finish things off and set it entirely free so they can "rule in hell". Of course we have no idea who it was who made the Planet or the Temple, if they work for the Mouri or the Mouri work for them. The presumption would be that it is the Time Lords, that Division working for Gallifrey helped set up a controlled, navigable version of time? Was this before or after Omega and Rassilon created time travel? Or was it some other race? Some other Godlike being or Entity responsible for all this? We don't know, we don't get the answers in this episode, in any other episode this season, or any of the final three Doctor Who specials under Chibnall. It's up to RTD whether he elaborates on these questions/ideas or not, he already did more for the Flux with a single line than Chibnall did with the entire season, but can anything explain this mess? https://i.imgur.com/MIjITy1.mp4 But despite these problems, I did enjoy most parts of the episode. Vinder's story is designed to work in parallel to Bel's till we reach the point where we understand - if we didn't already guess - that each is the life partner the other is trying to find. Bel's story shows us the impact of the Flux on the universe, and how the Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans are dominating what little is left of the universe. Vinder shows how he ended up where we first found him, an accomplished and decorated pilot relegated to exile on an observation platform for letting his conscience get the better of him over an assassination ordered by his boss "The Great Serpent" (who, disappointingly, is NOT a great big serpent or the Mara or something, he's just some dude). Dan's story is largely a repeat of what we already knew: he loves Liverpool and has a crush on Diane, but we do get to learn a little of his past history/love life, plus he is the next person to run unexpectedly into Joseph Williamson, who has this time managed to get his hand on a laser gun. As mentioned, Yaz gets the short end of the stick - again! - in terms of actual personal development/revelations, but her story does serve to involve the Weeping Angels. We also see her growing frustration/confusion over the Doctor refusing to share things with her or tell her things, something that never really actually gets resolved to the best of my knowledge, as their parting at the end of the next episode leaves Yaz just devoted entirely to reuniting with her, followed by three episodes of the Doctor awkwardly trying to explain why they can't date. Another complaint: they loving BLOW the chance for a perfect Cyberman moment during Bel's story where she asks it why the Cybermen want to take territory in what is left of the Universe. The Cyberman responds that they must rule and impose order, which is nonsense. The Sontarans want to fight and gain territory as part of war. The Daleks want to take control of sectors so they can exterminate everything not-Dalek until there is only Daleks left. The Cybermen shouldn't want to impose rule and order, they should want to survive. They should be taking territory and converting the prisoners not to be in charge, but because even at the end of a ruined universe the Cybermen's core directive should be a completely hollow and meaningless imperative that they muzzt survive. They muzzt survive. THEY MUZZZZT! https://i.imgur.com/LVadecO.mp4 The Doctor, after a brief chat with her reflection as the Fugitive Doctor, experiences enough of her timestream to learn that she was involved in some pretty questionable military actions with a team. This includes Karvanista, which she discovers when "Dan" is referred to as a "dog" which offends him for obvious reasons. This raises more questions about where exactly in the timestream all this happened, because apparently it's buried enough that nobody has ever heard of Atropos or the Planet Time or the Sugar Skull Gang, and the Division is barely known beyond that Karvanista used to be part of it... but how old is Karvanista? Centuries? Millennia? Eons? Are all the good doggies similarly aged? Who pair-bonded them with humans (my guess is the Doctor)? How did the Daleks and the Cybermen never find out about this? What about Dorium Maldovar who knew everything about everybody given enough time? Were the events here closed off in their own little time bubble by the Time Lords after all was said and done so nobody could access them or know about them? Vinder, it turns out, knows what a TARDIS is and even seems to suggest he might be able to pilot one, so what Empire did he serve? Was the Grand Serpent a ruler or just a particular powerful baron/duke/crime lord/dictactor? https://i.imgur.com/Jhy75uu.mp4 We don't (and mostly never will) get any of those answers. But we get to see Jo Martin again, which is a treat, and the Doctor learns how the Fugitive Doctor defeated the Sugar Skull Gang in the past and uses that to repeat the same trick in her present, using the present Passenger as a backdoor into reasserting the Quantum Lock on Swarm and Azure and putting Time under control once more (this would also account for the TARDIS starting to lose the signs of corruption seen in the previous two episodes, though this goes uncommented on I believe). Of course, Swarm and Azure figured this would be the case, it's part of why they brought Passenger with them in the first place (I genuinely love how his first appearance in the previous episode was entirely without explanation and he was just some big dude who was around now). They've changed up their planning, the Flux wasn't their design but they see it as a good model to run with. Enough damage has been done by the brief period Time was "running wild" that they're ready to follow up the physical and "spatial" damage done by the Flux with a temporal version. They brought Diane inside a Passenger in order to taunt Dan as well as show the Doctor they have a hostage, one will do where the hundreds of thousands they had to hold over the Fugitive Doctor did not suffice. They depart to "rule over hell", while the Doctor - infuriated that the Mouri (and Tectuen) didn't let her spend more time in her own past getting answers - snaps at a confused Yaz for constantly asking questions (but talking's brilliant!). They drop Vinder off on his home planet, the inconsistency of the story somewhat on display as we've seen the Flux tear apart entire solar systems on the molecular level but here it just appears to have wrecked some buildings, and the Doctor gives him a way to communicate with her if needed. He heads off in search of Bel, convinced she will have survived, while somewhere else in what is left of the universe Bel rather clunkily declares to her recorded message of Vinder that they will find him... her and HIS UNBORN BABY! Exactly how long was he in service to the Grand Serpent and then in exile? Unless her species are pregnant for like 10 years? In the TARDIS, Dan is thinking about Diane and the Doctor is pondering what she does and doesn't know. Yaz, still a little upset about the Doctor snapping at her, opens her phone and is shocked to see the Weeping Angel that had infected her time stream has pulled a Passenger of its own and snuck onboard the TARDIS in her phone. Manifesting inside, the lights cutting on and off act to offset whatever synchronized blinking the Doctor might have been able to pull off with her, Yaz and Dan, as it reaches the controls and activates flight. In a callback to one of the most celebrated episodes of Who in the cliffhanger ending to one that will probably largely be forgotten, the Doctor declares,"The Angel has the TARDIS!" and a frustrating, sometimes good, often confusing episode ends on a real high note. https://i.imgur.com/UGMlfxw.mp4 Index of Doctor Who Write-ups for Television Episodes/Big Finish Audio Stories.
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Apr 29, 2024 07:35
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Jerusalem posted:I thought RTD and Moffat still got on well, and yet in the photo of the them together RTD is standing 700 miles behind Moffat. Depressing. lol. Remake of The Hobbit staring Davies as Gandalf, but they have to use camera tricks to make him look smaller so he'll fit in the shot.
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Apr 29, 2024 14:10
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