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 Cool. I was just interested if there was any "I guess the Doctor used to wear a cape and do kung-fu, that seems goofy" snippits or opinions, but even just knowing that both of your knowledge pretty much starts at Rose is interesting.
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Sep 17, 2014 01:23
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I've watched the very first few episodes of what's his face and Susan. Namely the story with the cavemen and the story that introduced the Daleks. They were unbelievably boring and I wanted to die. I'm never going to watch more from that era. In theory I might be willing to sample something of the runs of other Doctors to see if I like it better, but it seems like a lot of effort so I probably won't. E: oh I also watched the 8th Doctor movie and holy poo poo it was awful. Regy Rusty fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Sep 17, 2014 |
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Sep 17, 2014 01:25
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Regy Rusty posted:I've watched the very first few episodes of what's his face and Susan. Namely the story with the cavemen and the story that introduced the Daleks. They were unbelievably boring and I wanted to die. The pilot itself is pretty good, but unless you know what you're getting into, the rest of that story is pretty.... rough until the ending with the Doctor doing his first Doctor-y tricking the villain into incriminating himself speech. It might be worth checking out something like Spearhead From Space, the first story of the original season 8, or City of Death from late in Tom Baker's era, written by Douglas Adams. They have a bit more of a modern style and pace to them, although they're still obvious products of the 70s. Edit: God, I really want Occ and Oxx to watch the TV movie. It's an utterly fascinating experiment and I'd love to see how two people with little exposure to what came before would think of it.
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Sep 17, 2014 01:29
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Classic Who is something you can tolerate if you grew up watching that sort of low budget stuff or listening to old radio stories and otherwise it takes some getting used to and not everyone wants to get used to it, which is fine. If you like 70s James Bond movies and can tolerate the endless chase scenes, the Pertwee era has some appeal, for example, but if you want to shout "Why is George Lazenby's obvious stunt double still skiing! He's been skiing for 20 minutes now!" then probably the Pertwee era isn't for you. I obviously really enjoy them, but I can understand that not everyone does. But yes, the TV movie is among the worst of it, which is a shame. Paul McGann is great.
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Sep 17, 2014 02:26
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Gaz-L posted:The pilot itself is pretty good, but unless you know what you're getting into, the rest of that story is pretty.... rough until the ending with the Doctor doing his first Doctor-y tricking the villain into incriminating himself speech. I thought the whole thing was pretty good- I like that the Doctor was self-centered at first and Ian and Barbara had to force him to help. I also like that they did a story about cavemen who were smart and didn't use the broken English normally would. The Aztecs was a lot of fun, too, especially the hammy villain, who was basically the villain from Manos: The Hands of Fate. On the other hand, I started watching "The Daleks," and it's pretty slow. I'll finish it eventually, but I can't imagine there's enough story to be worth seven whole episodes.
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Sep 17, 2014 02:29
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Jurgan posted:I thought the whole thing was pretty good- I like that the Doctor was self-centered at first and Ian and Barbara had to force him to help. I also like that they did a story about cavemen who were smart and didn't use the broken English normally would. The Aztecs was a lot of fun, too, especially the hammy villain, who was basically the villain from Manos: The Hands of Fate. On the other hand, I started watching "The Daleks," and it's pretty slow. I'll finish it eventually, but I can't imagine there's enough story to be worth seven whole episodes. There isn't. There objectively isn't. One entire episode is devoted to crossing a 'chasm' of about 4 inches. The Daleks should've been 5 episodes at most, but they NEEDED 7 to fill out the schedule.
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Sep 17, 2014 02:46
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Jurgan posted:I thought the whole thing was pretty good- I like that the Doctor was self-centered at first and Ian and Barbara had to force him to help. I also like that they did a story about cavemen who were smart and didn't use the broken English normally would. The Aztecs was a lot of fun, too, especially the hammy villain, who was basically the villain from Manos: The Hands of Fate. On the other hand, I started watching "The Daleks," and it's pretty slow. I'll finish it eventually, but I can't imagine there's enough story to be worth seven whole episodes. Unless you're enjoying a story, give up and walk away. I mean, if you're a big fan you might want to come back to it later, but if you're just going, "I want to see what this old Doctor Who stuff was like," then don't subject yourself to the disagreeable stories. The Daleks in particular gets pretty clunky in the middle episodes. If you want to watch the old series and see a Dalek episode then the obvious recommendation is Genesis of the Daleks from the Tom Baker era. It's not without it's problems, but it's remembered as essentially the high point of the entire 26 year run for a reason.
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Sep 17, 2014 02:46
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I've been trying to get a friend of mine into DW for years pretty much in the same way Occ described, but was only ever successful with Classic Who. He tried out a few episodes ("I watched Blink because everyone seems to love that one but it just didn't click for me.") but a few weeks ago he was over at my place because he got locked out of his apartment and said "Show me the best Doctor Who you got" so I popped in City of Death and we had a whale of a time. His response was "Man, I'd have gotten into this a lot sooner if I'd started with this one." So I guess it just really depends on what kind of stuff you like and which one you start with.
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Sep 17, 2014 02:49
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City of Death does kind of have the bill of goods thing Occ was talking about regarding Empty Child, though. Even under Adams as head writer, the show was never quite that loose and comedic in a way that fires on all cylinders like that. And I say this as someone who enjoys basically every one liner he gave Lalla Ward in Destiny Of The Daleks.
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Sep 17, 2014 02:54
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Gaz-L posted:There isn't. There objectively isn't. One entire episode is devoted to crossing a 'chasm' of about 4 inches. The Daleks should've been 5 episodes at most, but they NEEDED 7 to fill out the schedule. Yeah you really really need to understand that 60s and even 70s Doctor Who was a very different broadcasting world-- one where the idea of saving episodes on tape to rerun later was a weird and strange notion, and they actually lacked enough programming to fill out the full day.
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Sep 17, 2014 03:04
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Gaz-L posted:City of Death does kind of have the bill of goods thing Occ was talking about regarding Empty Child, though. Even under Adams as head writer, the show was never quite that loose and comedic in a way that fires on all cylinders like that. And I say this as someone who enjoys basically every one liner he gave Lalla Ward in Destiny Of The Daleks. The script might have been exceptionally good, but I think the sets and costumes and general 70s TV studio atmosphere are still consistent enough with the rest of the series that it makes for a good jumping in point.
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Sep 17, 2014 03:17
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City of Death isn't fair. It has John Cleese, it has some of Tom Baker's greatest lines ("What a wonderful butler - he's so violent!"), Douglas Adams co-wrote it, it has Julian Glover as the cackling villain, Lalla Ward still enjoyed working on the show, they filmed on location in France instead of in their usual quarry. It's not like popping in something random from the Hartnell era, which, much though I love it, is not the sort of thing to necessarily get people hooked.
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Sep 17, 2014 03:18
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I wrote the greatest paragraph I'll ever write in this review
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Sep 17, 2014 03:33
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Toxxupation posted:I wrote the greatest paragraph I'll ever write in this review Whelp, we've peaked folks. Pack it in and lock the thread. We're done.
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Sep 17, 2014 03:37
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Toxxupation posted:I wrote the greatest paragraph I'll ever write in this review I'm giddy with antici
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Sep 17, 2014 03:38
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Random Stranger posted:Unless you're enjoying a story, give up and walk away. I mean, if you're a big fan you might want to come back to it later, but if you're just going, "I want to see what this old Doctor Who stuff was like," then don't subject yourself to the disagreeable stories. The Daleks in particular gets pretty clunky in the middle episodes. Genesis was the first Classic story I watched, and I liked it a lot (though the foam rubber clam was hilariously silly). But Davros is great, and the Doctor is very conflicted. I've only recently started really looking into Classic Who- I got Hulu Plus mainly for that reason (also Community), and have watched a few of Pertwee's stories. I love the Master, so that's fun.
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Sep 17, 2014 03:43
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Here's a question that I don't know if it's in the purview of this thread but I don't have anywhere else to ask it: what was with the Doctor that wore celery on his lapel? Was there a reason for that or was it just monkeycheese garbage?
Soothing Vapors fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Sep 17, 2014 |
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Sep 17, 2014 03:43
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Jurgan posted:Genesis was the first Classic story I watched, and I liked it a lot (though the foam rubber clam was hilariously silly). But Davros is great, and the Doctor is very conflicted. I've only recently started really looking into Classic Who- I got Hulu Plus mainly for that reason (also Community), and have watched a few of Pertwee's stories. I love the Master, so that's fun. Yeah, Roger Delgado is great as the Master, and Davros is really good in his first appearance.
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Sep 17, 2014 03:46
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Jurgan posted:Genesis was the first Classic story I watched, and I liked it a lot (though the foam rubber clam was hilariously silly). But Davros is great, and the Doctor is very conflicted. I've only recently started really looking into Classic Who- I got Hulu Plus mainly for that reason (also Community), and have watched a few of Pertwee's stories. I love the Master, so that's fun. Pertwee's first season is perfect. There is not a single bad story in the lot. The really fantastic thing is, it starts and ends with two of the best stories in Who history, new or old, and it has a story that introduces a now classic and beloved foe, even if they just keep repeating the same loving story-so you'd think the third, the odd one out, that it'd be rubbish right? It's not. It's a brilliantly well written and fantastic romp, a true diamond in the rough, and super unique to the franchise. Also it's about Ambassadors... OF DEATH! (Twang)
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Sep 17, 2014 03:47
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Soothing Vapors posted:Here's a question that I don't know if it's in the purview of this thread but I don't have anywhere else to ask it: what was with the Doctor that wore celery on his lapel? Was there a reason for that or was it just monkeycheese garbage? That was Peter Davison (now father-in-law to Tenth Doctor, David Tennant). There was an "official" reason if you really want to get into it, it was supposed to change colors when dangerous gasses showed up or something, but it was just a quirk. That era is filled with weird costume choices; it's when they put question marks on Baker's lapel and of course, there's the coat, which (sorry, Doctor What!) is just plain silly.
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Sep 17, 2014 03:52
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I heard they put it there because Peter Davison really did not like celery.
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Sep 17, 2014 03:55
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Holy poo poo, this thread is on topic (Doctor Who) and not spoilery (seeing as we're talking about the classic series). I've been watching through a few older ones, currently on Genesis of the Daleks, and before this I watched The War Games which while being ten episodes long, almost didn't seem too long.
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Sep 17, 2014 03:59
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Burkion posted:I heard they put it there because Peter Davison really did not like celery. I googled this and it turns out that he really did hate celery to the point where he had to spit it out in the episode he ate it. The second Google result is from the TARDIS wiki which describes what celery is in the past tense before listing its various appearances in Doctor Who 
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Sep 17, 2014 03:59
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Bicyclops posted:That was Peter Davison (now father-in-law to Tenth Doctor, David Tennant). There was an "official" reason if you really want to get into it, it was supposed to change colors when dangerous gasses showed up or something, but it was just a quirk. That era is filled with weird costume choices; it's when they put question marks on Baker's lapel and of course, there's the coat, which (sorry, Doctor What!) is just plain silly. It was supposed to turn purple in the presence of a specific gas that the Doctor was allergic too as I recall. The fun thing about it is that it wasn't even actual celery. It was just a bit of cloth made to look like celery. They couldn't even be bothered to get real celery for the costume.
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Sep 17, 2014 04:01
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Captain Fargle posted:It was supposed to turn purple in the presence of a specific gas that the Doctor was allergic too as I recall. The fun thing about it is that it wasn't even actual celery. It was just a bit of cloth made to look like celery. It was probably bits of rubber that had fallen off the recycled Davros mask they had to use even when they recast the role. And yeah, BSam, War Games is great.
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Sep 17, 2014 04:04
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Doctor Who "Daleks in Manhattan" Series 3, Episode 4 For once, an episode of Doctor Who is bad in a way that doesn't specifically incriminate Russell T. Davies. Helen Raynor is the credited writer for this episode, and she...well she really wrote one hot pile of garbage masquerading as a script. It's an interesting sort of mental exercise, though, because this episode doesn't really "feel", in most ways, like an RTD episode of Who, so the question remains: What does a non-RTD bad episode of Doctor Who look like? I guess...really loving boring and poorly written in a way that almost defies belief? That's...kind of disappointing, almost. The Doctor and Martha begin this episode landing in 1930s Manhattan. Daleks are in it! Then, well, nothing loving happens. That's the plot of the episode! Yep! Even for a the first episode of a two-parter, even in comparison to the terribly boring nonsense that was "Aliens of London", the old high-water mark in glacial pacing, this was an incredibly dull episode of television. Almost nothing loving happens- there's intimations of a plot, but the tone is so lax and the writing so poorly conceived and executed that any threads that begin to unroll soon get lost in the shuffle. It's an episode of television that's kind of impressive, in a way- it has Daleks, it has weirdo Pigmen in terrible-looking masks, and it ends with the reveal of a Dalek/human hybrid with an atrocious Jersey accent that looks utterly ridiculous, and yet my reaction to the episode, as a whole, is a sort of bored shrug. It's so bad, it's not even memorably bad; it's an episode that's just an utter waste of 45 minutes of your life (that feels like two hours). It's not even worth writing a review about, it's so bad. I am spending more time caring about "Daleks in Manhattan" in this review that anyone else has ever had, and that includes the people who made the goddamn thing. I have never, ever seen an episode as hagiographic as this. I think as a whole, that's my biggest issue with the episode- it's an episode that in no way, ever, feels set in a real place. 1930s Manhattan is a sterile, lifeless city in the hands of Helen Raynor (which is all the more an accomplishment, thinking more about how narratively exciting a time it was in Depression-era New York), one with apparently exactly three locations- the interior of the Empire State Building, the sewers underneath the aforementioned Empire State Building, and the Central Park Hooverville, each more boring than the other two. But compounding the problem is the fact that the scenes are very ineptly written. Each scene of the episode proceeds for five minutes too long- The Doctor and Martha meet Solomon (Hugh Quarshie), the "leader" of the Hooverville, who proceeds to explain to them and the Who audience as a whole what living in the Great Depression was like for like...ten minutes straight. It's not interesting dialog in the slightest -as a matter of fact, it's coma-inducing, and the plot relevance of the entire scene essentially boils down to Solomon going "People keep on disappearing in the night and that's, like, bad". But, that's all hidden behind lines and lines and lines and lines and lines and lines and LINES AND LINES of dialog wherein everyone speaks in vague platitudes that seem directly cribbed from every other period piece ever made - Solomon, at one point, literally says verbatim "How come we have that (points to the Empire State Building, under construction), and we have people starvin' in the Great Depression?" that's eye-rollingly trite. Which is why the hagiography of this episode absolutely kills it above everything else - I swear to God, it feels like Helen Raynor watched Gangs of New York like, fifteen loving times and was like "Oh, this is totally how people in New York talk!" Everyone has a puddle-deep metaphor for their current living situation, everyone uses the word "ain't" in every other line of dialog they speak - at a certain point, I expected a white-haired tubby man in a vest and overcoat holding a literal bag of money with a literal dollar sign on it to enter into a scene as he tried to buy orphans or something, every scene in this episode was so dogged in soullessly copying every single tired cliche of period works. It's the most obvious when you get scenes with Tallulah (Miranda Raison), the of course 1930s showgirl with perhaps the worst New York period accent I have ever heard in my entire life. She speaks in empty cliches about pursuing the big time, of how all the world's a stage and she's just looking for the right guy and trying to make it in the Big Apple and survive The Great Depression (it really does feel like every time a character mentions The Great Depression they're speaking in overly-melodramatic italics) and holy poo poo has this scene gone on for five minutes? Oh she handed Martha a rose (dumbass, obvious symbolism) when Martha whines ineffectually about The Doctor not noticing her. Great. Tallulah is a terrible character, terribly played by Miranda Raison, and she essentially encapsulates "Daleks in Manhattan" as a whole- a trite, obvious, completely surface-level examination that screams of lack of research or any sort of effort beyond What British People Think Americans (Especially Period Americans) Are Like. Like, if Doctor Who was an American program, "Daleks in Manhattan" would essentially be like the (American) Doctor heading to colonized India and encountering a bunch of stuffy royals, monocles in both eyes, that would order their servants (all of whom are named Jeeves) to order all of their servants (all of whom are named Butler P. Butlerington III, Esq.) to fetch them their elephant guns to fend off the "mongrel hordes" as the American Doctor met a young Gandhi who would say in a thick Cockney accent, "Right-o guvnuh! I shore do wish them Brits would stop with dere imperialism, I shore do wish I did! Bangers and mash? Chim-chimeney chim-chimeney, chim chim, cheree/A sweep is as lucky/ As lucky can be..." which would lead into a whole song and dance number and wait where was I going with this Anyways my point is, it's clear nobody did their research going into this episode. It's all the lazy sort of trite examinations and metaphors for Depression-era New York viewed from the perspective of Brits who can only speak in American stereotypes. Which isn't offensive at all, but it sure does make for a boring episode of television! That sense of complete laziness permeates every aspect of the episode, as we have an extended plotline involving the Daleks (more specifically, the Cult of Skaro from the end of Series 2, who now want to control humanity over destroying it, mostly via inexplicably turning them into pigmen and also integrating with humans I guess???) talking to the stereotypical Evil Capitalist, Mr. Diagoras (Eric Loren), the one bankrolling the construction of the Empire State Building (and the Daleks' plan), that goes fuckin' nowhere. There's even a kernel of a decent idea buried in there, somewhere - having the Cult of Skaro recognize (and lament) about the power of the human race is actually a decent dramatic point, and in better hands even having the Daleks try and become human is a decent enough progression of their character (solely because it happens to the Cult of Skaro and not the Daleks as a whole), even if it's The Borg redux. But that's the thing- in better hands. This is too poorly written to be anything besides extremely tedious and uninteresting as a narrative arc, leading to the aforementioned hilariously terrible Dalek/Human hybrid to cap the episode. Oh, and the accents. Dear God, the loving accents. Has anyone on this show actually heard a New York accent, let alone a New York period accent in their entire loving life? Because holy poo poo, the only character with an even somewhat decent accent is Solomon, and even he takes a while until he finally locks it down. Beyond that, everyone else- especially Tallulah, but also everyone else -has an absolutely atrocious American accent- Andrew Garfield, Spider-Man himself, plays a bit character, a good ol' Tennessee boy who has really bad and forced "chemistry" with Martha and her accent is so Deep South I expected it to come deep-fried with a side of white pointed caps (oh also, hilarious that you write a 1930s young male who grew up in the Deep South during the height of Jim Crow who's not only Not Racist but Wants to gently caress a Colored Person Openly (As Opposed to Doing So Secretly).) The Doctor and Martha are both forcibly pushed aside this episode in screentime- most of it is spent either on Mr. Diagoras' terrible accent, Tallulah's atrocious accent (and really boring romantic subplot that everyone can see from a million miles away with the stagehand, Laszlo (guess what he gets turned into a Pigman, guess what by the end of the second part I bet they'll end up loving)), or the various other side characters, so both The Doctor and especially Martha barely get any time during the episode at all, and almost none together. Agyeman basically gets turned into a lovestruck fool- her most important scene is whining about how The Doctor doesn't Like Her like she does -but Tennant gets a neat little monologue about The Daleks during the middle-end of the episode that is the by far best part of it, despite it being the like, fourth time the audience has seen a monologue about how much The Doctor hates Daleks, and the like third time Tennant himself has explicitly done it. But again, this episode just gets a shrug from me. It gets an F because its terrible, but not because I'm offended by it; it's too boring and inept and half-assed and lazy to be offensive. It doesn't at all feel like RTD's brand of terrible, where he goes whole-hog into crafting something, whether great, absolute poo poo, or somewhere in between; over everything else, "Daleks in Manhattan" screams of laziness. And somehow, some way, we still have 45 minutes of this tepid nonsense to go. Ah, well. Grade: F Random Thoughts:
NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Sep 18, 2014 |
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Sep 17, 2014 04:07
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Toxxupation posted:
I don't know, I think it goes pretty whole hog, RTD KAPOW! all out with its terribleness. Pulling the B-list characters from Kiss Me Kate and having didactic lessons about how Scrooge McDalek is screwing over Lord Mayor of the Poors is right up his alley, it's just not the exact setting he'd tend to pick. But yup, every aspect of it is pretty bad. The writing, the acting, the production. It feels like they just used the pig people because they had the makeup lying around and someone knew how to do it. It's not even wasted potential, it's just like the bad high school play version of Doctor Who, where you look at your watch, hide behind your playbill and hope you're almost done with the pig people.
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Sep 17, 2014 04:19
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I like this 2-parter. I like Tallulah. I like her terrible accent. I also accept that I am objectively wrong, and my reasons for liking these things are inexplicable even to me. (I have the same problem with Final Fantasy XIII) Linear Zoetrope fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Sep 17, 2014 |
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Sep 17, 2014 04:21
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BSam posted:I've been watching through a few older ones, currently on Genesis of the Daleks, and before this I watched The War Games which while being ten episodes long, almost didn't seem too long. The thing about The War Games is that when I was a kid and watching the show in the dead of night on PBS reruns, I started watching from very early in show's run. And as every fan of the classic show laments, there's a lot of missing episodes. Even more back then. So for a few months I had been watching Hartnell and had gotten used to the weird mad scientist alien who fought robots and monsters. Every other episode the companions would mysteriously change for reasons I didn't understand (I at least got to see Susan, Ian, and Barbara's departures), but I got used to that. Then one week, there was this different guy that they were calling "the Doctor" and I had no clue why they had changed the show. Soon enough (since there were only four surviving Troughton stories at that point), they got to The War Games and the last hour of it was mind blowing. All of the concepts in it are familiar to viewers of the show now, and I was probably the only kid since 1970 to get the full impact of the story. It was overwhelming to suddenly learn where the Doctor came from, why he traveled, and that he could change his face. And then next week the show completely changed. Going back to The War Games now, yeah, it's too long by a lot. But it was a hell of a ride to watch it as a kid.
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Sep 17, 2014 04:21
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Miranda Raison honestly does an okay job at playing what they wrote, which is a bizarre George M. Cohan showgirl amalgam... thing. It's just an obnoxious character and they should have at least had the decency to name her Trixie and include a gangster named Mugsy along with her.
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Sep 17, 2014 04:29
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Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks are episodes of Doctor Who I always just find myself skipping over when I rewatch the show. It's one of those that I just feel no desire to ever put into my eyeballs again. I can't really think of anything else to say about it really. It's bad and I don't think it's worth watching. It's like Fear Her and a few other episodes that are yet to come. They're episodes where if you were recommending Doctor Who to other people you just go, "Yeah. Skip those". Love and Monsters is rather amazing in how awful it is. Regardless of your exact feelings on it it's worth watching for how bad it is. Daleks in Manhattan isn't even that.
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Sep 17, 2014 04:29
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This is the kind of episode that I watched and then swiftly forgot all about as I moved on. I can vaguely remember watching it (I looked up a picture of the Dalek-Human and went "oh yeah") but mostly it just made no impression on me.
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Sep 17, 2014 04:32
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Doctor Who "Daleks in Manhattan" Series 3, Episode 4 So, since Occupation has decided to break my aura of venerable mystique and give you all a heartfelt recounting of our relationship re: interactions with various media, here's a few other tidbits about me: I'm a Leo, my favorite authors include Salman Rushdie and Cormac McCarthy, I'm sexually galvanized by the scent of horseradish, and I am, by my own admission, rather hideously classist. Like, oh boy do I rather detest the rich. I did surface-level readings of Marxist authors like any other college student (my favorite was Adorno, ha ha, he was so stodgy about jazz music), but most of it's not academic, just a seething obsession with money and the people who have it and the people who don't. It tends to inform my selection of certain media; I stopped in the middle of David Sedaris' When You Are Engulfed In Flames, for example, because it consisted mainly of an insufferably quirky white dude being pampered by the people of Tokyo while angsting about how hard it was to quit smoking. Gag me. And no, Sedaris, coating all your prose in a cloying layer of twee "humor" does not excuse the sentiment, what the gently caress kind of life does that man live anyway, he's probably stick his dick in a cobra's mouth just to get an essay out of it. I'm digressing. Right, classism. So, take class-fixated little old me, who, as Occ has mentioned, has a habit of dropping the guillotine on any piece of media that annoys me no matter what my prior investment on it, and then place me in front of a Doctor Who episode that takes place in the Great loving Depression. You may then marvel as my facial expression freezes into one similar to my avatar's. "Daleks In Manhattan" is a soul-eroding 45 minutes of TV even by Doctor Who's worst standards. Every single side character is a joke that wore out its welcome five seconds after its intro; the sets are cramped, dark, and not at all indicative of New York even during the Depression Era; the pig-men are a stupid, pointless side-villain and their presence is totally inexplicable given that they were made by the god drat Daleks ("BRAIN SCANS OF LO-CAL PO-PU-LA-TION IN-DI-CATE A PRE-FER-ENCE FOR "THE OTH-ER WHITE MEEEEAAAT." GA-THER ALL POR-CINE SPE-CI-MENS IN RAAAAAANGE!"); and speaking of the god drat Daleks, even the god drat Daleks are poisoned by the suffocating dullness that permeates every minute of this episode, doing little beyond waggling their eyestalks at each other and threatening comically voiced wiseguys. There is so much in this episode that isn't just terrible, but downright inscrutable - the pig men are maybe the most obvious, but why show that obviously fake shot of two crying men doing Ominous Things to the peak of the Empire State Building when you'd be better off keeping it offscreen? What was the point of Tallulah's dance number? Why did the Doctor need to sit around doing Science to that Dalek corpse for twenty minutes? Why the inordinate focus on Diagoras, whose voice is probably even more strained and artificial than the Daleks' themselves? All of these points confound and annoy, and yet none of them are quite awful enough to give you that ice-water shock that "Love & Monsters" pulled so often, leaving you in a dead stupor unless you're wise enough to skip this whole rotten two-parter and go on to do greater things. All this would merely make the episode very bad, but the Great Depression setting, and the treatment of that setting, gives the episode an ugly patina that leads me to wonder just how large Who's American audience was in these days, because I have to think at least some people would've gotten pissed off. Doctor Who, for all its faults, is generally respectful (if not always accurate) with history - the Dickens and Shakespeare episodes could be fun in spite of themselves because of the reverence they afforded to their historical figures, Queen Victoria was given her fair due, and "The Idiot's Lantern" was so proud to be British that it poo poo questionable pastries. Jump across the Atlantic, though, and what do you get? A poverty theme-park. The Great Depression is inherently anathema to the kind of tone Doctor Who presents; we have all sorts of iconic media showing what a miserable, dreary existence it was for those who fell between America's gradually widening cracks in those times, the tentative communities formed by the have-nots, the continuing apathy towards or exploitation of them by the haves (and speaking of which, when some of the Hooverville residents actually turned down work for a measly dollar a day - in a perfect world, Steinbeck would have risen from his grave in a pillar of fire and punched out Margaret Thatcher's ghost). The first thing we get in "Daleks In Manhattan" is a grade school-level lesson on the history of the Depression by the Doctor, followed by a "Hooverville" so full of generic poverty images that you might as well have pulled them out of a hat. And then you have Solomon. Solomon, the kindly mediator, who breaks a loaf of bread in half. High school Creative Writing classes would have flunked material like this, Jesus Christ. But the worst part, absolutely the worst part, of this choice of setting is that the episode does nothing with it. We get a city, a nation ravaged by poverty and fighting to remain optimistic in the face of economic collapse, and then spent 45 minutes chasing and being chased by pig-men in a sewer. It's like if the Doctor and Martha had had an adventure consisting of a barroom brawl and then a big runny-shouty scene from a race of irate sapient kookaburras or something, and then set it during the Irish Potato Famine. Not only is it a bafflingly stupid decision, it shows some serious ignorance, if not outright disrespect, with the material in question. I guess that in the end my complaints aren't too far off from DoctorWhat's anti-Olympics rant, but the social issues left hanging in "Daleks In Manhattan" also do serious damage to what was a pretty dire episode to begin with, and that's why I gave up on it, and the succeeding episode, about halfway through, picking up on the key details in forum posts later. Clearly, I didn't miss much. On top of all the crap I just mentioned, there's yet another "Martha's a rebound" scene (hey guys, did you notice Tallulah gave Martha a ROSE? Get it? ROSE? Get it? Get it? ROSE?), an unintentionally hilarious bit where a Dalek determines a black man possesses inferior intelligence ("DIS-CRI-MI-NAAAATE! DIS-CRI-MI-NAAAAAAAAATE"), and, of course, the Dalek-Human hybrid. A man in a pinstriped suit with a blue phallus for a head, speaking in a strained whisper, in a bad Brooklyn accent, in a bad Dalek accent. It's a Matryoshka doll of shame. I can't imagine the next episode being worse than this, because at the very least it'll be able to avoid the social issues as its relevant side-cast members get picked off (as tends to happen to most people who know the Doctor for longer than ten minutes). But somehow I doubt I'm going to turn around and gush about it. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm ready to escape from New York. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Sep 17, 2014 |
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Sep 17, 2014 04:42
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Ah, dildo face, how I haven't missed you.
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Sep 17, 2014 04:42
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I rewatched this episode recently, probably because I was way too tired and that makes me stupider than inebriation. With its heavy handed anti-capitalism messages and retarded pig monsters, I basically sat the whole time giggling "This is a MACHINE. A MACHINE, FOR PIGS!" the whole time. This is still better than the Amnesia sequel, though. And I feel a weird patriotic surge whenever a Doctor Who episode takes place in America, bad stereotypes and all.
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Sep 17, 2014 04:50
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Why the gently caress was this the first episode of Doctor Who that I saw!? WHYYYYY!?  (Also I'm very surpised that you did not mention Dalek Sec shoving a man up his rear end!) Grouchio fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Sep 17, 2014 |
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Sep 17, 2014 05:18
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My dad's a Londoner from way back, and, as geeky as the poo poo I tend to watch indisputably is, I always shied away from Doctor Who no matter how many times he's tried talking me into it over the course of a couple of decades. It just felt like a nerd threshold that I dare not cross, like the sort of thing D&D nerds beat people up for. It was a hypocritical and obnoxious point of view, obviously, but that's where I was coming from. Somewhere around late 2009, I was hospitalized with a horrific illness, and out of depression and a desperate need to distract myself from my physical and emotional pain, I watched the entirety of the Eccleston/Tennant run during my week long stay in the hospital, doped to the loving gills on morphine, Dr. Who on one half of my laptop, Minecraft on the other. The show was undeniably goofball, but it was everything I needed at that moment in time: super silly, eye-rollingly maudlin, and hopelessly optimistic. I was depressed and angry and scared for my life, but this stupid show helped keep me level, and it made me smile when that should've been almost impossible. Whatever, that's my sad loving story. I remember especially adoring the Daleks in Manhattan two-parter for some reason. I watched it again very recently, and my god does it suck. I tried to remember what I liked about it, and yeah it's real silly and all, what with the pig monsters and the awful goddamn accents, but it's also very, very bad. Thinking back on it, the third season of Who was, when I watched it, the peak level of my body trying to murder me, and I was extra, extra high during the whole thing. And I LOVED it. It's also when I designed the lava spewing obsidian skull edifice of my mighty fortress, which impressed the hell out of me two days later, after all the shaking and sweating and hallucinating was over. I've been a Doctor Who fan ever since, for better or worse, but if anyone's on the fence about whether or not to watch it, or if you're trying to talk a friend into it... Morphine helps. A lot. Oxx, that was you're best review to date. You guys are awesome.
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Sep 17, 2014 06:03
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Yeah, all I can really say about these episodes is that they're pretty bland. I remember the "HUMAN-DALEK" and one pretty funny gag from part two, and not much else. I seem to recall the idea of the Doctor helping the daleks evolve was good, as though he was hoping to find an alternative to his perpetual war with them, but it didn't really go anywhere. Out of curiosity, what was "the best paragraph [you]'ve ever written?"
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Sep 17, 2014 06:11
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Is it an unwritten rule that all the interminably dull two-parters need to feature human-pig hybrids in some capacity?
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Sep 17, 2014 06:15
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| # ? May 10, 2024 08:02 |
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Oxxidation posted:I'm rarely interested in TV, especially when it's so cheap-looking, slow-paced, and dull in spite of its inherent ridiculousness. Toxxupation posted:Doctor Who 
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Sep 17, 2014 06:20
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