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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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Ohhh, I forgot there was a remake, right. Carry on. E: I am glad the middle eight is back.
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Jan 1, 2024 23:29
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I hate the words "the first of the Doctor Who spinoffs"
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Jan 1, 2024 23:32
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I'm probably a bad person but when I saw the bit where Danny talks about how he dug a bunch of wells and people don't talk about that in connection with military service half of my brain thought "Well, Oxfam and that lot dig plenty of wells without the armed forces component so it kind of makes sense that people concentrate on the stuff unique to militaries which make them militaries" and half of my brain thought that this was a really weird use of the "...but you gently caress one sheep..." joke. Though if we are going to morally condemn Danny, we may as well do it for him and Clara deciding it was perfectly fine to let all the kids fry in a solar flare in In the Forest of the Night because it was better to get them home to their parents, to die screaming and burning in their arms, than let them go off with the Doctor in the TARDIS to maybe survive somewhere. Sure, the kids all survived and the flare didn't kill anyone because checks notes... a magic instant forest stopped it? No, clearly my notes are wrong. Anyway, something happened in that episode which clearly wasn't the forest thing, because that would be stupid, and the kids lived. But based on the knowledge Clara and Danny had, they were condemning the kids to die without even getting their opinions (the flare was news to the kids, a later scene emphasises this). What the gently caress? For that matter, Danny loses a ton of points with me when he talks up how he doesn't want to go on a TARDIS trip even to watch a solar flare from an unbeatable vantage point because he's just too normie to enjoy or like anything weird or special, and then mere breaths later repeats Maebh's point about trusting more and fearing less. I get that he's meant to be a more grounded character who's suspicious of the TARDIS and doesn't want to get caught up in weird poo poo but there's a point where you seem to lack imagination, curiosity, and soul, and the point when he's passing up a chance to witness cosmic wonder and would rather condemn kids to die as solar radiation flash-barbecues them a la the Terminator 2 nuclear war scene is way, way beyond that point. Warthur fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 23:36
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SirSamVimes posted:I hate the words "the first of the Doctor Who spinoffs" When they say "fan-favorite the Sea Devils," to which fan in particular are they referring?
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Jan 1, 2024 23:51
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Rochallor posted:When they say "fan-favorite the Sea Devils," to which fan in particular are they referring?
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Jan 2, 2024 00:01
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Warthur posted:None of the soldiers in UNIT ever became travelling companions of the Doctor. At most some of them took brief trips but that's not enough to meet the criteria of Companion in my book, which is that you travel with the Doctor in the TARDIS across consecutive stories. (Liz Shaw gets an exception solely because the TARDIS was broken during her one season, and had it been functional then clearly she'd have been travelling in it regularly - by contrast it was super rare for the Brigadier or Benton or Yates to take trips in it, even in the two seasons when it was working fine.) Jo Grant did, and she was a civilian member of UNIT, which is a UN-sponsored governmental paramilitary secret police kind of organization, so my original point still stands.
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Jan 2, 2024 00:16
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Warthur posted:I'm probably a bad person but when I saw the bit where Danny talks about how he dug a bunch of wells and people don't talk about that in connection with military service half of my brain thought "Well, Oxfam and that lot dig plenty of wells without the armed forces component so it kind of makes sense that people concentrate on the stuff unique to militaries which make them militaries" and half of my brain thought that this was a really weird use of the "...but you gently caress one sheep..." joke. Pretty much this. You're not a bad person, Danny was extremely poorly written, and as others have mentioned the whole concept behind his character was flawed to begin with in any case.
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Jan 2, 2024 00:22
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Sydney Bottocks posted:Jo Grant did, and she was a civilian member of UNIT, which is a UN-sponsored governmental paramilitary secret police kind of organization, so my original point still stands. Remind me what the word civilian mean?
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Jan 2, 2024 00:29
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SiKboy posted:Remind me what the word civilian mean? A) She's still a member of UNIT B)This entire line of conversation has been hashed out pretty thoroughly, and I'm fairly sure the thread as a whole is very sick of it, so let's just leave it lying here on the ground where it belongs
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Jan 2, 2024 00:36
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The unread post count had me wondering which surviving classic Doctor had died 
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Jan 2, 2024 00:40
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While it looks like we moved on a bit, I'll say this: all cops are awful regardless of the nation they serve and one should never aspire to be one or ever treat a single blue fascist with respect and soldiers are even worse and deserve less respect for how they are a part of an imperialist, colonist machine that terrorizes the global south. You can recognize much of what occurs is the result of the system while also recognizing anyone who joins that services have agreed to do horrific acts of inhuman violence on their fellow man as an inherent element of their position. The Doctor, often portrayed in a heroic (though, sometimes morally dubious) light should treat both groups with scorn outright. My views on this broadened and solidified after meeting quite a few people from the global south. Those experiences led me to have to question myself as many pretty much told me that they like me but would be thrilled if all of western civilization collapsed since its entire existence is the direct source of almost all of their societal problems, as we steal their resources, kill their leaders, install dictator puppets, enslave them literally like with the MARS corporation, and other horrible acts.
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Jan 2, 2024 00:53
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Sydney Bottocks posted:A) She's still a member of UNIT DoctorWhat posted:The doctor doesn't want to travel with soldiers because the doctor wants companions who are creative, self-directed, and will challenge him. Sydney Bottocks posted:2. I see someone never watched the Pertwee years. Warthur posted:None of the soldiers in UNIT ever became travelling companions of the Doctor. Sydney Bottocks posted:Jo Grant did, and she was a civilian member of UNIT, which is a UN-sponsored governmental paramilitary secret police kind of organization, so my original point still stands. SiKboy posted:Remind me what the word civilian mean? If you had a brainfart and lost the track of the conversation that's fine but the polite thing to do is to acknowledge and concede that you did, and I'm happy to risk an infraction to tell you that. 
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Jan 2, 2024 00:55
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Warthur posted:Agreed, let me write the headstone on this sidetrack: Whatever, if it makes you happy, go on with your bad self. Sydney Bottocks fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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Jan 2, 2024 00:58
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While I don't want to continue this line of conversation, I cannot resist pointing out that companion Harry Sullivan is a naval officer attached to UNIT who travels with the Fourth Doctor. While not quite as wasted as Yaz (it's remarkable how useful his medical expertise should be in all of his episodes), he does suffer a goodly amount of ribbing over the course of his brief tenure, which probably proves some kind of point but I have no idea which. The important take-away is that "Harry Sullivan is an imbecile!" But do we like him anyway?
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Jan 2, 2024 01:24
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Big Mean Jerk posted:The unread post count had me wondering which surviving classic Doctor had died Don't worry, it was just the Morbius Doctors (Not the actors that played them)
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Jan 2, 2024 01:26
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Narsham posted:While I don't want to continue this line of conversation, I cannot resist pointing out that companion Harry Sullivan is a naval officer attached to UNIT who travels with the Fourth Doctor. While not quite as wasted as Yaz (it's remarkable how useful his medical expertise should be in all of his episodes), he does suffer a goodly amount of ribbing over the course of his brief tenure, which probably proves some kind of point but I have no idea which. He's an imbecile, but he's our imbecile. 
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Jan 2, 2024 01:27
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https://cohost.org/covok/post/4045435-doctor-who-out-of https://cohost.org/covok/post/4039559-if-you-like-the-11th https://cohost.org/covok/post/4039332-doctor-who-out-of I've been posting my reviews of Doctor Who stuff on my cohost. I only did three so far but I plan to do more. I am 3/4 through volume 1 of Stranded and will probably do an impression afterwards. Maybe I should also do some of my thoughts on classic who. Also, I might have said it, but I was thinking of doing a Doctor Who RPG 2nd edition solo game using Mythic GM Emulator. That could be fun.
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Jan 2, 2024 01:30
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I don't want to prejudge, but based on that last special and... well... every single Silurian story other than the very first one I am amazed that they would choose these to base a mini-series around. Although, to be fair, that very first Silurian story IS an absolute banger!
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Jan 2, 2024 02:33
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Weird little thing: There's a 'who's your fave Doctor' poll on that Mirror article: Top 3? Tennant, Baker comma T and... Capaldi. Davison is dead last.
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Jan 2, 2024 02:40
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Looks like there's a new Peter that people are asking if it is okay to kiss 
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Jan 2, 2024 02:43
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Sweet vindication. Capaldi is "my" Doctor, the series 8 version specifically where he's weird and prickly. Also kind of funny because I remember the rumour being that Capaldi was forced out because audiences didn't like him
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Jan 2, 2024 02:48
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People just got too scared about the feelings awakened in them by his Pertwee hair.
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Jan 2, 2024 02:58
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Jerusalem posted:People just got too scared about the feelings awakened in them by his Pertwee hair. At the risk of sounding creepy, all the Doctors are kind of hot. Like, Colin Baker is hot, Tom Baker is hot, Peter Davidson is hot, John Pertwee is mega hot, David Tenant is hot, Christopher Eccelston is hot, Matt Smith is hot, etc. etc. Like, all of them are pretty dang hot. Yes, even Sylvester McCoy, since my friend thought I was weird for saying all of them.
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Jan 2, 2024 03:05
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It very rarely comes up in the history books but Dalekmania was actually a cover for a blushing nation that had secretly put pin-ups of William Hartnell in their bedrooms.
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Jan 2, 2024 03:34
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Jerusalem posted:It very rarely comes up in the history books but Dalekmania was actually a cover for a blushing nation that had secretly put pin-ups of William Hartnell in their bedrooms. Can you blame them? The man had style. 
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Jan 2, 2024 03:56
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No wonder Susan said the French Revolution was his favorite period of human history 
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Jan 2, 2024 04:02
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Jerusalem posted:It very rarely comes up in the history books but Dalekmania was actually a cover for a blushing nation that had secretly put pin-ups of William Hartnell in their bedrooms.
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Jan 2, 2024 05:15
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Jerusalem posted:People just got too scared about the feelings awakened in them by his Pertwee hair. he also had to go before he was consumed by his own
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Jan 2, 2024 05:25
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Warthur posted:"This old body of mine is wearing a bit thicc." Man, the ending to Atlanta Season 4 really hits strong
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Jan 2, 2024 06:30
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Season 12 Episode 4: Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror Written by Nina Metivier, Directed by Nida Manzoor Nikola Tesla posted:The future is mine. Here it is: a perfectly fine, absolutely adequate, kind-of-forgettable-but-not-necessarily-in-a-bad way episode of Doctor Who! Under previous show-runners, stories like this tend to be forgotten or overlooked against the absolute bangers (and stinkers), but the relative blandness of much of the Chibnall era means I hold a much warmer opinion of this episode than I might have in anything pre-season 11. It is far from perfect, and has plenty of issues, but on the whole it's a perfectly enjoyable, mostly fine-to-good episode of the show that I wouldn't mind watching again if it were to pop up. Part of that is helped by what a fascinating character the real life character of Nikola Tesla was, as well as how fascinating the kind of idealized version of him that history now remembers also is. Another part is that he's well-cast, with Croatian-American actor Goran Višnjić (best known as Dr. Luka Kovač in ER) playing the Serbian-American Tesla. While the story has to get over some really quite awful make-up effects and over-acting for the Skithra Queen (both of which call to mind the Racnoss Queen from The Runaway Bride), and aspects of the writing/editing still leaving me scratching my head at times, the overall quality of the episode is on the positive side of average. This may seem like damning with faint praise, but after the utter poo poo-show that was Orphan 55, this was something of a relief. On the negative side, while the story does admirably sit on the "gently caress you, Edison" side of history, it doesn't do it nearly enough. Seriously. gently caress Edison  Opening at Niagra Falls in 1903, Tesla is attempting and failing to convince investors to put money into his efforts to build a wireless power transmission system. After the Foreman informs him that one of the workers was killed by one of Tesla's devices, his insistence that such a thing is impossible doesn't give the best impression of him as a person, which is somewhat the point. Tesla faced numerous hurdles in his efforts to convince people to either invest or to maintain investments in his theories, not helped by Thomas Edison's "War of the Currents" with George Westinghouse, whom had paid Tesla a large amount for the patent to an induction motor that helped him develop a rival power transmission system to Edison Electric. Seeing Tesla insist his devices were perfectly safe when a man had died would not help but bring to mind some of the (horrific) "experiments" done to showcase the danger of Alternating Current, and Tesla's insistence on the quality of his own work could easily be seen as arrogance and pigheadedness, not helped by his earlier refusal to back down from a claim he had made that he'd intercepted a communication signal from aliens on Mars. With his secretary Dorothy Skerritt doing her best to placate the investors and quickly move them away from talking about Martians, Tesla sets about testing his devices, working into the night and of course discovering that while the device did kill the worker, it was due to tampering: somebody has taken parts out and left things exposed. It's then that Tesla sees something remarkable, a technology doing things even he has never dreamed of, before he and Skerritt find themselves menaced by a hooded figure with a laser gun only to rescued (well... helped to run away!) by the Doctor.   Like Orphan 55, there are some odd gaps in the edit particularly here in this early part of the episode (and again towards the end) that indicate a rushed job, a lack of coverage, unusable material or a mix of all three. The Doctor tells Tesla and Skerritt to follow her as they race through the hydroelectric power planet.... and suddenly they're on a train? A clumsy voice-over from the Doctor has her telling them that she told them this would help them escape, and they enter the cabin to find Ryan, Yaz and Graham waiting for them, all in period costumes. Why were they on the train? Why did the Doctor go explore the power plant by herself? If she hadn't arrived to the train in time, were the companions just going to gently caress off to New York without her? How far did the Doctor, Tesla, and Skerritt have to run with the menacing figure in pursuit? Knowing what we know about what that figure ends up being, why didn't it change shape and easily outpace them in its natural form? There were three train stations at the time near the falls, what if the companions got mixed up and went to the wrong one? In any case, once on the train and having detached the carriage with the menacing figure onboard, the Doctor reviews what she knows: the creature was not Silurian but had one of their guns, how does it have an alien gun (Silurians aren't aliens!)? More importantly, why is Tesla - who she always wanted to meet - a big fat liar!?! That's her amusing reaction to Tesla's obvious lie about not seeing anything unusual until the attack, but it isn't till he reaches his lab in New York that he reveals it to her (why wait?), and the Doctor figures out he has encountered an Orb of Thassor: a device made by an ancient race that wanted to spread their knowledge throughout the universe. Unfortunately, this particular orb has been tampered with, much like Tesla's machines at the power plant were tampered with, but she isn't sure why. The Orb of Thassor as a throwaway line is another example of one of Chibnall's laudable goals that never quite got pulled off in execution: he wants a sense of the Universe being a big place, history being a LOOOONG thing, and wildly amazing, near-magical powers/beings populating the universe. All great ideas, except more often that not the way they are placed here in the story (to be fair, this is NOT a Chibnall-written episode) feels more like a crutch to shortcut connections between otherwise disconnected story elements. Protestors outside the lab spot Tesla as he enters, riled up by Edison's campaign to discredit his rival (in this story, Westinghouse is discarded in favor of a direct rivalry between Tesla and Edison). This, coupled with a man is spotted taking a photograph through Tesla's workshop window being identified by Tesla as one of Edison's spies, makes the Doctor make the rather far-fetched leap of logic that Edison is somehow behind the menacing figure, the alien (Silurian's aren't aliens!) weapon and the tampered with Orb of Thassor, and sets off to confront him. As an aside, given Tesla's increased pop culture profile over the last couple of decades, there's an amusing section where Graham gently chides Ryan for not knowing what Tesla invented before having to admit to an amused Yaz that he has no idea either beyond the fact that the car company was named after him. It's also somewhat amusing/maddening that the person who owns that company is far more of an Edison than a Tesla. Much like in life, Tesla gets overshadowed for a time in this episode by Thomas Edison. For decades touted as one of the great all-time genius inventors, Edison held a dizzying number of patents for a variety of astonishing creations which would indicate he must surely have been an unparalleled genius. Even now, close to a century since his death, he's still often touted as one of the great examples of American "greatness": home schooled, a self-learner, a man who worked his way up from selling newspapers to operating telegraphs to founding one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world with General Electric. There is, of course, more to the story than that. Despite obvious intellect, curiosity for experimentation, and some genuine inventions of his own, Edison was first and foremost a Capitalist. He turned "invention" into a factory, owning the patents to anything the workers he employed created, engaging in every dirty trick he could think of to defeat his competition. Edison as seen in this episode is the show doing a fair amount to demonstrate that his perspective and values stood in direct contrast to Tesla's own, with the Doctor and the companions having no issue with seeing Tesla as the more laudable of the two. However, the episode doesn't make Edison a snarling caricature: while it doesn't shy away from him flatly laying out that his primary drive is capitalism and that he has no issue with buying his way into technological superiority, or that he used people to build his own success, when he discovers his workers dead he is mortified and angrily points out to the companions that he dined at the house of one of the victims only days earlier. This is the early 20th Century, the start of the so-called "Gilded Age", and though Edison was a jerk in many ways, he knew his workers, and yes he may even sometimes have socialized with them. Hell, one of the few known real world interactions between Edison and Tesla was Edison bumping into him early in the morning and joking with him that he must have been out partying all night, before praising him when learning he'd spent the whole night working on improving one of Edison's machines (a variation of this story in this episode replaces a falling out between Tesla and a manager with Edison himself).   At this point in the story, everything is moving along fairly well. We've established Tesla and the threat, there is some mystery as to why that threat is after Tesla and what the Orb of Thassor has to do with things, and there is even a rather chilling moment where the Doctor sets off a fire to block off the menacing figure attacking them and you see its face shift and change to reveal some thing hidden away beneath the face. Edison has been included as somewhat of a complicating factor, there both as an example of the "mundane" problems facing Tesla as well as the parallels between Edison and the Skithra that would soon be come apparent. It's just that, once Tesla and Yaz are transported onto the alien ship and find themselves surrounded by the skittering, very alien Skithra, and things are building up well.... this happens:   The Skithra as a race are essentially an exaggerated version of Edison: creatures who use others to achieve their goals, who simply take from others, who see technology and innovation not as ways to improve the world but to improve their own status. They are more parasites than they are a space power, incapable of insight, existing only to consume and dominate for its own sake (so they're Capitalism as well as Edison!). They are also constantly infighting, incapable of working together unless dominated by a more powerful force, only given a voice and direction and some measure of control due to the force of the Skithra Queen. She herself is hardly some vast strategic genius, she's just smart enough to know that a human being capable of detecting the communications from their spaceship (which he mistook for Mars) with early 20th Century technology is going to be smart enough to fix their spaceship and be used to help them maintain their stolen weaponry as they continue to make their way across the galaxy like space-locusts. But we get that represented by wild overacting in cheesy make-up that doesn't actually match up with the looks of the rest of the Skithra. Seemingly taking inspiration from the Racnoss Queen from The Runaway Bride, the look and even the performances are so close that I was bewildered the show itself never appears to comment on it. Perhaps due to the restrictions of the make-up, the actor hams it up ridiculously, and quick cuts and rushed edits appear to be in place to try and cover up just how bad it looks and sounds. It's a drat shame, because you can see what the episode is going for and with just a little more work, some more footage, perhaps a rewrite or two and a stronger edit you could really play up the parallels between Tesla's worldview and that of Edison and the exaggerated version of that which is the Skithra's. But on the plus side, the Doctor shows up to save Tesla and Yaz and it's a rare example of getting to see her written as a proactive force. She's come up with a plan, explained the limitations, and she eats up time masterfully in the best Doctor tradition as she keeps the Skithra Queen busy while she waits for the teleportation device she used to recharge so she can get the others out. This plan involves plenty of improv, as she had no idea what she was walking (teleporting) into, and her use of an old flash camera both demonstrates her ability to think on her feet as well as showcasing that she and Yaz have actually formed enough of a bond to make her plan clear to her. Once they escape, they bring Tesla inside of the TARDIS which is handled wonderfully, best of all because Edison - who you would think the Doctor wouldn't let within 100 miles of it! - aims for some measure of connection with Tesla by noting he can't understand it either, only for Tesla to remark with fascination that while he can't explain how, he does understand that it's a matter of the internal dimensions not matching the external: in other words, Tesla has a more flexible mindset than Edison does. None of this explains how the TARDIS got there though. The Doctor slightly earlier had noted with satisfaction that it had been delivered as she wanted... but by who? Tesla doesn't have any staff beyond Dorothy Skerritt (who is woefully underdeveloped as a character in this episode), did she get Edison's men to do it? Especially considering many of his employees are now, well... dead! Why would he agree to do so if asked, and could it be done this quickly if so? Anyway, never-mind, it's here!   Seeking to avoid innocent bystanders from being hurt by the Skithra, the Doctor and the others hole up at Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower where she attempts to turn his only half-formed idea around power generation into a way of blasting the Skithra ship. Things are a little unclear here, as the Doctor lays out the plan she appears to be basically running with a strategy of straight up destroying the ship and killing all the Skithra, but once we see the plan executing at the end of the episode it looks more like the ship is.... warped away? Like she overloaded the ship engines and causes it to zip far, far away from Earth with no way of being able to get back? The latter would certainly be more in keeping with modern Who's ideas around avoiding senseless murder, but there appears to be a disconnect between the writing and what we see on screen. But like when they were on the ship, this is another good example of the Doctor coming up with a plan, making use of the resources at her disposal, being aware of the limitations, laying out what needs to be done to everybody involved, and using the power of talking ("talking's brilliant!") to give her the edge she needs to overcome brute force and military might. Each of the companions gets a little something to do, and it's fitting that Yaz's attempts to use her police training to clear the streets of bystanders is overshadowed by Edison - who understands his "audience" very well - simplifying things by just outright lying and claiming Tesla is doing one of his "dangerous" experiments and everybody needs to get off the street. Thus, they achieve their goals while also giving him the bonus of furthering his strategy to undermine Tesla as a rival to his dominance of the market. gently caress Edison. We get more reminders that without the Queen's continually domineering force over them, her workers are effectively useless and prone to infighting and losing track of their goals. This enables Yaz and Edison to escape being captured, and when the Skithra Queen escapes to the ship as it is blasted by Tesla's power generator they simply join her onboard, unsure what to do otherwise, their dominance by her meaning that the Doctor's plan effectively removes all of them from the board, even if it still isn't entirely clear if they were killed or just warped away.   It's far from a perfect episode, there are all kinds of little issues with it that add up. But for the most part, it does enough well and gives the Doctor a far more proactive than (sadly) normal role in the episode that it makes for an enjoyable enough romp. Yaz rather naively thinks Tesla helping save the world will change future and he'll get the success she thinks he deserved, but the Doctor points out that as far as the rest of the world knows, all that happened is that some of Tesla's experiments caused some problems. Nothing changes, he still dies "penniless" (technically true, but while his businesses all failed he was hardly homeless or forgotten by history, his constant hotel accommodation was covered and he continued to be socially active and a semi-celebrity till his death, and he even got to pen the only actively negative obituary in the wake of Edison's death) but that doesn't change that he saved the world. Tesla himself, unaware of what the future will bring, ends the episode on a positive note. He knows he is mocked and misunderstood in the present, but his final line speaks to what we've seen in the 21st Century. Edison "won", but today more and more people are aware of the reality of his "genius". Tesla, whether the quality or feasibility of his ideas were valid or not, is romanticized heavily as the inventor who truly represented the spirit of innovation and promise of the future. Nikola Tesla posted:Well, let them talk. The present is theirs. I work for the future. And the future is mine. It's a nice way to wrap things up, and overall that's how I feel about the episode: it was nice! Not perfect by any means, plenty of flaws. But more episodes like this from Chibnall's run would have been just fine by me. Nothing game-changing, nothing that will stand out as one of the great episodes, but competently made and overall telling an enjoyable story. While, again, this wasn't written specifically by Chris Chibnall, we've seen that his attempts to really shake things up in Doctor Who has mixed results, and perhaps too often he was trying to make everything a big deal. An episode like this stands out in contrast... and based on the "Next time..." preview surely the next episode featuring a nice but confused lady in modern UK unexpectedly meeting the Judoon will be another fine but largely inconsequential episode to the greater overall history and character of the Doctor! Index of Doctor Who Write-ups for Television Episodes/Big Finish Audio Stories. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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Jan 2, 2024 11:49
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Gaz-L posted:Weird little thing: There's a 'who's your fave Doctor' poll on that Mirror article: Top 3? Tennant, Baker comma T and... Capaldi. Davison is dead last. Some people even say Davison was a better veterinarian than a doctor!
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Jan 2, 2024 12:37
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CobiWann posted:Some people even say Davison was a better veterinarian than a doctor!
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Jan 2, 2024 13:12
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Warthur posted:I'm sad about Davison polling last but not surprised because he's my own second favourite after McCoy - he feels like the sort of Doctor where even if you rank him highly he's not going to be the first one you think of. The nice thing about Who fandom is that give it 12 months and that list will come out in an entirely different order. It helps a lot that (IMHO) there's never been a bad actor in the role.
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Jan 2, 2024 13:49
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Gaz-L posted:Weird little thing: There's a 'who's your fave Doctor' poll on that Mirror article: Top 3? Tennant, Baker comma T and... Capaldi. Davison is dead last. I wouldn't go with Tennant first, but Davison last is objectively correct.  The thing that annoyed me the most in this one was all of the Tesla worship since for a long time you couldn't alternate your current online without someone going, "TESLA! SCIENCE!  " and it felt like the show was part of all of that bullshit, though a few years late.
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Jan 2, 2024 14:01
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Got to Dark Water/Death In Heaven in my watchthrough. The scene where Clara gives a speech to CyberDanny about how she and the Doctor are best friends and she'd never, ever lie to him kind of lands awkwardly when Clara began the two-parter by deceiving and betraying the Doctor in an attempt to force him to do something she knows he will never, ever consent to otherwise. This just makes her Clara look like a massive hypocrite, which pretty clearly wasn't the intention. Also, aside from the mid-credits scene setting up the Christmas special, the end of the episode really comes across like Moffat wrote it as a potential end to the series, like he was worried the BBC were about to cancel it. EDIT: Apparently Coleman had decided to leave at this point but then unexpectedly changed her mind, so that explains why the end feels like a final goodbye to Clara, but it still feels framed like it's also a potential farewell to the Doctor, what with all his talk about simply going home to Gallifrey and retiring. Warthur fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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Jan 2, 2024 14:03
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Random Stranger posted:The thing that annoyed me the most in this one was all of the Tesla worship since for a long time you couldn't alternate your current online without someone going, "TESLA! SCIENCE! I kinda feel like that episode was a bit of an... I guess 'post-I loving Love Science' Tesla story, if that makes sense? That energy of the re-evaluation has definitely petered out, but said re-evaluation is definitely still there, and Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror is just what stories about Edison and Tesla are like after it. It's definitely still very enthusiastic about Tesla, but not really in a way that's abnormal from Doctor Who in general. Doctor Who loves a 'this is why this historical figure was rad' episode, and this was just one of those.
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Jan 2, 2024 15:16
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Very late but I've just rewatched The Church on Ruby Road and god what a mess of a story. Doctor Who always runs on nonsense logic but they usually try to at least walk you through the nonsense with some funny words and a whizzing gadget and some sort of sequence of cause and effect, and people at least sort of sounds like they're making reasonable decisions, but so much happens here with no warning and no follow up and is just totally accepted. Even small stuff (why is there a ventilation shaft in a poorly constructed tall ship in the sky??) just feels like Davies just threw it together without much thought. It seems like they treated the superstition thing as carte blanche to just give up on making sense, I really hope it's not representative of the rest of the series. Not to say it was all bad - I thought the moment to moment dialogue writing was good, Gatwa is obviously charming, Ruby seems like she's fun enough even if she was kind of wasted for most of it, and I'm assuming Mrs Flood is going to turn out to be someone interesting.
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Jan 2, 2024 15:21
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I reckon Chibnall's just a slow moving dag, so it makes sense he's just late to the party.
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Jan 2, 2024 15:21
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Deformed Church posted:Very late but I've just rewatched The Church on Ruby Road and god what a mess of a story. Doctor Who always runs on nonsense logic but they usually try to at least walk you through the nonsense with some funny words and a whizzing gadget and some sort of sequence of cause and effect, and people at least sort of sounds like they're making reasonable decisions, but so much happens here with no warning and no follow up and is just totally accepted. Even small stuff (why is there a ventilation shaft in a poorly constructed tall ship in the sky??) just feels like Davies just threw it together without much thought. I agree, yeah. Hoping for some more coherent stories in the rest of the season. Vibes is fine and all, and it was obviously knockabout Christmas fun, but Who is at its best when it has internal coherence within the story (the meta-myth, "canon" stuff is generally less important)
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Jan 2, 2024 15:44
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Barry Foster posted:I agree, yeah. In principle I agree, if you're contradicting something said in a previous episode/serial that's a fine and honourable tradition, if you're contradicting stuff you said a few minutes ago it's time we sat you down and did a concussion check. In the case of Church On Ruby Road I'm willing to believe at the moment that RTD's seeded stuff (like the Mrs Flood mystery and the identity of Ruby's mum) which will change how we see the episode once we get the answers.
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Jan 2, 2024 15:54
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