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MikeJF posted:Well New Dalek Paradigm don't have blue eyes. Aww, that spoils things. Burkion posted:Fun fact, according to a comic from the 60s, Daleks cannot see the color red. This makes up for it though.
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Jan 11, 2015 17:19
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Burkion posted:Fun fact, according to a comic from the 60s, Daleks cannot see the color red. I really want this to be a serious thing. Oh the beautiful Irony. I always figured the Daleks rarely ever rely on just their eye, they're tanks, they probably have all sorts of high tech scanners in there with them. To me their eye is equivalent to our sense of taste, good, but not essential.
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Jan 11, 2015 17:40
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 Check it
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Jan 11, 2015 18:03
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I thought the review was fine except you spent too much time recapping the plot which has been an issue with all of them so far so who cares?
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Jan 11, 2015 18:06
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M_Gargantua posted:I always figured the Daleks rarely ever rely on just their eye, they're tanks, they probably have all sorts of high tech scanners in there with them. To me their eye is equivalent to our sense of taste, good, but not essential. They do rely on the eyes, if you shoot the eye stalk off they just spin around like idiots and don't do anything
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Jan 11, 2015 18:15
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RodShaft posted:Since you asked for opinions on the review: It felt more like you were trying to pick a letter grade than review the episode. And as a review I think it suffered for it. It was obvious you were working though your thoughts, which is fine by the way, but it felt like you were aiming for figuring out what letter to give it so us goons could play our li'l game. How different would your review have been if we weren't playing, and you could have just written how you felt about the episode and given it no letter grade? Or an NA or Q or whatever? that's really interesting that you'd come to that conclusion, because- and i want to stress, you're not wrong -but like, my entire methodology going into this review was doing exactly what you said, which was to give an unabashed opinion about my thoughts see because in every other review I've written- all 62 of them, jesus christ, or 67 if you count time crash and season reviews -i knew what grade i was gonna give before writing it, so i wrote the review to justify my grade because that's like, the thing, right, every review before this one was at least inherently dishonest because I'd do stuff like if it was an A or B I'd overemphasise the good and marginalize the bad, or justify the bad parts, and vice versa with Ds or Fs. With Cs the narrative would route to be about how boring/repetitive/rote the episode was, or how the highs and lows cancelled each other out i mean that's why i like grades in the first place despite their drawbacks, it gives a narrative structure to the review, since it's essentially an argument right- "This episode is good/bad and here's why", and the grade gives the review a foundation to build the entire thing around. like, my favorite reactions to a review i wrote, and when i know i wrote it right, was when someone will go "I fuckin hated this episode but I can see after reading your review why you'd give it an A" or the other way around it's basically the reason why i was upfront about the grade being picked at random, since with 99% of my other reviews I'm trying to convince you, the reader, of why my grade is accurate, and in this one specific case it was just an honest- or as honest as I could be -recounting of what I assessed to be the flaws and strengths of "Victory of the Daleks", and I was wondering how the thread would react to a review written as inherently differently as this I wrote this review as honestly as I could, because I had so many conflicting thoughts about them my aim this review was to lay them all out with no sort of inherent judgement or bias, because I was so confused as to what this episode's quality was. so it's really interesting that you saw that as restraint- if you don't mind, could you be more specific in how you came to that conclusion?
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Jan 11, 2015 18:27
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Toxxupation posted:because that's like, the thing, right, every review before this one was at least inherently dishonest because I'd do stuff like if it was an A or B I'd overemphasise the good and marginalize the bad, or justify the bad parts, and vice versa with Ds or Fs. With Cs the narrative would route to be about how boring/repetitive/rote the episode was, or how the highs and lows cancelled each other out See, this is part of why I hate letter grade reviews. I'd much rather hear your thoughts on the thing in their entirety without them having to fit into one of five predetermined categories of quality, and I'd say that this is the best review you've done because of it. IMO if you're going to grade reviews at all, the grade should be something you do at the very end, and the review should be exactly what you think about an episode, free from the bias imposed by having pre-determined a letter grade.
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Jan 11, 2015 18:43
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Funnily enough, as I scrolled down through the review I noticed the letter grade before I got to the part where you revealed that it was random and I found myself thinking 'that makes sense'. Maybe others will disagree but as I read it I felt like you were heading towards a C/D, so random or not it felt like you broadly landed on the 'correct' grade. I think I'd be pretty shocked if you'd given it an A or a F or possibly even a B. The way I read your review it felt like the good and bad broadly outweighed each other resulting in an episode that was basically average, though not consistently so. Part of me wonders if you'd have stuck with it had random.org spat out an A, for instance.
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Jan 11, 2015 18:55
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Toxxupation posted:it's basically the reason why i was upfront about the grade being picked at random, since with 99% of my other reviews I'm trying to convince you, the reader, of why my grade is accurate, and in this one specific case it was just an honest- or as honest as I could be -recounting of what I assessed to be the flaws and strengths of "Victory of the Daleks", and I was wondering how the thread would react to a review written as inherently differently as this Grades are always just a guide to where you whatever you're reviewing fits in a larger sense. You can never fit anyone's experience or reaction into a letter, but I guess I might have been happier if you had said "I can't decide on one grade so I'm giving it two or three and here's the reasons", because leaving it up to chance doesn't reflect how you think and feel. And I echo Fungah!, you should be doing this at the end of the process, not the beginning.
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Jan 11, 2015 20:15
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Tiggum posted:And how does the phone on the TARDIS work? What made Churchill's call go through at that moment instead of literally any other time? When did the Doctor even give Churchill his phone number? Has he given it to anyone else? Why hasn't anyone else ever called him? I know the phone call was technically in the previous episode, but it's clearly part of this story. You can tell by how incredibly dumb it is. Random Stranger posted:So getting to bigger issues with the show's production, if RTD is one of those guys who likes Doctor Who, Moffat is one of those fanboys who has to decide between wearing his fourth Doctor scarf or his sixth Doctor coat before he goes out. The show has gotten a lot more self-referential already; The Beast Below picked up thirty-five year old plot points and this episode episode was a remake of a forty-five year old serial that doesn't even exist any more. I totally get liking one showrunner more than the other (me, they each irritate in different ways), but don't retro-justify it by creating facts. Along similar lines, RTD and Moffat both suck at female characters, they just have different modes of suckification. (The details of Moffat's being off-topic for this thread.) Ask me about what happened to Harriet Jones, Flydale North. Make yourself a cup of tea first. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Jan 11, 2015 |
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Jan 11, 2015 20:19
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You would almost think Occ was not a professional critic and was instead a guy on a forum.
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Jan 11, 2015 20:22
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Bown posted:You would almost think Occ was not a professional critic and was instead a guy on a forum.
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Jan 11, 2015 20:28
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Daleks only weigh two pounds on Earth? So a Dalek's greatest fear is a stiff wind? Send somebody you don't like running in front of them as a target while a Tipping Squad runs up behind them and tips them all over? ASSISTANCE! I REQUIRE ASSISTANCE! I HAVE FALLEN! I CANNOT GET UP! ASSISTANCE! And because they can't see red, red things are invisible to them? Wtf? From what I've read, dogs can't see red but they can sure as hell see a red rubber ball. Somebody didn't really think some of that stuff through.
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Jan 11, 2015 20:34
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I'm not usually one to worry about plot holes, but there was a pretty huge hole in the ending of this one. The whole episode builds to the sadistic choice of "let the fighters blow up the daleks or save the earth." It's basically a repeat of the climax of Eccleston's arc, where he had to decide whether to fry the earth and the daleks at the same time. However, this time it relies on a promise from the daleks not to blow up earth. The Doctor knows they're lying, as evidences by his immediately running to Bracewell to try to disarm the bomb. So why did he call off the fighters in the first place? He could have let them wipe out the daleks and still saved the earth- there was no reason to give in to their demands, as it was obvious they were lying. This episode is decent otherwise (I don't even mind the "power of love" stuff), but did the Doctor's brain just completely shut down at that moment?
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Jan 11, 2015 20:41
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Presumably on the off-chance that they weren't lying, he couldn't conscience taking the risk of turning down their ultimatum and then finding himself unable to disarm the bomb. He knows it's a long shot that the Daleks will deal fairly with him, but if there's a chance he can guarantee Earth's safety without having to deal with a bomb that he might not be able to disarm, he has to take it.
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Jan 11, 2015 21:04
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Burkion posted:
This is incredible. The Dalek that has no need to sleep, and therefore EXTERMINATES A BED. The Dalek that's in such a hurry to get to Birmingham, it rattles along at supersonic speed. The Dalek that's trying to post a letter but can't find the drat pillar box.
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Jan 11, 2015 21:15
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Jurgan posted:I'm not usually one to worry about plot holes, but there was a pretty huge hole in the ending of this one. The whole episode builds to the sadistic choice of "let the fighters blow up the daleks or save the earth." It's basically a repeat of the climax of Eccleston's arc, where he had to decide whether to fry the earth and the daleks at the same time. However, this time it relies on a promise from the daleks not to blow up earth. The Doctor knows they're lying, as evidences by his immediately running to Bracewell to try to disarm the bomb. So why did he call off the fighters in the first place? He could have let them wipe out the daleks and still saved the earth- there was no reason to give in to their demands, as it was obvious they were lying. This episode is decent otherwise (I don't even mind the "power of love" stuff), but did the Doctor's brain just completely shut down at that moment? Here's two rear end-pull explanations, pick whichever you find more satisfying: a) The Doctor needed to be present and countering the Dalek's systems for the Spitfires to even have a chance at blowing up the ship. Like he did with the shield. So if he stuck around and saw the Daleks destroyed, he wouldn't have enough time to diffuse the bomb. b) The show is primarily an optimistic one, and a Doctor who immediately knows the bad-guys will betray him and doesn't give them a chance is not in the spirit of the show. Even if they are Daleks, aka 'the worst thing in the universe'.
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Jan 11, 2015 21:34
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Bobulus posted:b) The show is primarily an optimistic one, and a Doctor who immediately knows the bad-guys will betray him and doesn't give them a chance is not in the spirit of the show. Even if they are Daleks, aka 'the worst thing in the universe'. But he did immediately know they would betray him, because he ran off to disarm the bomb before anyone told him it was going to detonate.
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Jan 11, 2015 21:37
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Fungah! posted:See, this is part of why I hate letter grade reviews. I'd much rather hear your thoughts on the thing in their entirety without them having to fit into one of five predetermined categories of quality, and I'd say that this is the best review you've done because of it. IMO if you're going to grade reviews at all, the grade should be something you do at the very end, and the review should be exactly what you think about an episode, free from the bias imposed by having pre-determined a letter grade. Yeah, the "grade" is the least interesting part of the review to me, and I've said before that I think they act more as a distraction than anything else - plus they pigeonhole an episode as being either "good" or "bad" when the truth is usually far more complicated. That said, people are having a lot of fun trying to guess the grade and that's part of what makes this thread a lot of fun to read, I just hope people are actually reading and digesting the content of the reviews rather than skipping to the end to see whether it was a "good" or "bad" episode.
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Jan 11, 2015 22:09
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Bobulus posted:Even if they are Daleks, aka 'the worst thing in the universe'.
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Jan 11, 2015 22:12
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Toxxupation posted:that's really interesting that you'd come to that conclusion, because- and i want to stress, you're not wrong -but like, my entire methodology going into this review was doing exactly what you said, which was to give an unabashed opinion about my thoughts I didn't mean to imply you were being disingenuous. I meant it lacked your usual embroidery. Which, from what you say, is from you trying to convince us of the grade you chose. I didn't mean that this one seemed like you were trying to convince yourself of a grade like Fathers Day did. Just that these two are different than the rest, in that you're more chatting with yourself than with us. That one to convince yourself that a Doctor Who episode deserved an A, and this one to try to work out a letter grade for it. It seems toned down. Even when you use exaggerated language(like "adored") it comes off as "Well, we should go ahead and talk about what I 'adored' I guess." As opposed to sounding like you were excited about those bits of the episode, it sounds like you are just laying the pros with "adored" in front of the list. In your other reviews when you said you adored something, I believed it. Maybe it was disingenuous, poo poo, I don't know, it's almost like I'm just done guy posting on the forums, not a professional writer.  I thought you were doing this, in part, for writing or reviewing practice. I'm not sure where I got that idea. I assumed you went with the ABCDF scale to better organize your thoughts and was sticking with it because it's a challenge to not tweak it after 60+ reviews. And being challenged makes you a better writer in general. But if you were sticking to it for the game that's lovely and go ahead and tweak it. But then again if you're sticking to it to eventually become a pro reviewer, literally(or digitally) rolling the dice for a score isn't the answer.
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Jan 11, 2015 22:42
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Jerusalem posted:Yeah, the "grade" is the least interesting part of the review to me, and I've said before that I think they act more as a distraction than anything else - plus they pigeonhole an episode as being either "good" or "bad" when the truth is usually far more complicated. That said, people are having a lot of fun trying to guess the grade and that's part of what makes this thread a lot of fun to read, I just hope people are actually reading and digesting the content of the reviews rather than skipping to the end to see whether it was a "good" or "bad" episode. I mean, I enjoy doing it too but in general I think tailoring the review to the grade isn't as good as just doing a review, then giving it a grade afterwards
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Jan 11, 2015 23:33
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This is an episode that I remember just hating, and I gave it a D, I think, because I assumed Toxx would like it more so I hedged my bets, but on rewatch, I appreciated the good parts of it a lot more. I care way less about the dumb as poo poo Dalek redesign because I know it'll never come up again and Spitfires in space is dumb, but it's acceptably dumb.
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Jan 12, 2015 01:02
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Just caught up to page 91 and watched this gem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu7OiJpnlUs Even Garth Marenghi's Darkplace couldn't out 80s that opening.
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Jan 12, 2015 03:05
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Sushi in Yiddish posted:Just caught up to page 91 and watched this gem I can't remember who pointed it out, but my favorite thing about that opening is that they run out of new footage 50 seconds into the 70 second opening credits, so the remaining 20 seconds is a greatest hits reel of the previous 50 seconds. EDIT: Not that there's a whole lot of hits in the first 50 seconds. Leaning on a car! Getting into a car! Sipping wine! Just standing there!
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Jan 12, 2015 03:10
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I just like how it looks like she's the last human on Earth.
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Jan 12, 2015 03:33
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Lycus posted:I just like how it looks like she's the last human on Earth. She may well be.
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Jan 12, 2015 03:40
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Well she's got the dead eyed stare of an apocalypse survivor down. I'm a fan of Sarah Jane Smith and Liz Slaydon, but man those credits make her look like she's been cyber-converted or something!
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Jan 12, 2015 03:45
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jng2058 posted:Well she's got the dead eyed stare of an apocalypse survivor down. I'm a fan of Sarah Jane Smith and Liz Slaydon, but man those credits make her look like she's been cyber-converted or something! I like to think she was just incredibly high, because you'd have to be to star in a K-9 sitcom.
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Jan 12, 2015 03:50
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Arsenic Lupin posted:You are more astonished by the phone on the TARDIS than by the TARDIS herself? Exactly like the TARDIS, the TARDIS phone is there when it's needed, for whom it's needed, with the functionalities required by the current script. I can't see the distinction in ridiculousness. Bobulus posted:a) The Doctor needed to be present and countering the Dalek's systems for the Spitfires to even have a chance at blowing up the ship. Like he did with the shield. So if he stuck around and saw the Daleks destroyed, he wouldn't have enough time to diffuse the bomb.
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Jan 12, 2015 04:58
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Tiggum posted:If you just ignore it, a bomb will diffuse itself. Source: Everybody with a student loan
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Jan 12, 2015 05:02
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I will say the phone is dumb. I forget, when did they introduce it? Was it here? I don't remember the TARDIS having an actual Phone Phone like this, just different ways to communicate. I seem to remember the Ninth Doctor explicitly saying that the TARDIS didn't have a phone (that worked)
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Jan 12, 2015 05:48
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Well, the last time someone tried to contact the Doctor directly, Martha gave him a cell phone. EDIT: The Eleventh Hour had similar nonsense with calling the Atraxi and the Doctor even apologized to Rory for the intergalactic phone bill. I kind of wish they had side stepped that one and just had the Atraxi try to burn the planet afterwards anyway, just to be scared away by goofy Time Science Man on the rooftop. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Jan 12, 2015 |
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Jan 12, 2015 05:56
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Burkion posted:I seem to remember the Ninth Doctor explicitly saying that the TARDIS didn't have a phone (that worked) That was just the outside phone he was talking about. Pretty sure they introduced the TARDIS having a phone with the Doctor keeping Martha's mobile phone in a slot on the console; then they built one in with 11. I think at some point with Ten The Doctor started carrying a phone on him sometimes too. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Jan 12, 2015 |
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Jan 12, 2015 06:01
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The Doctor did some magic poo poo with Rose's phone in the second episode ever of the revival and it's been brought up again multiple times since, why would you lose your mind at time travel phones now?
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Jan 12, 2015 06:20
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The Doctor has a a phone because for the last couple of hundred years he has generally carried companions from the early 21st century who are used to always being connected to communication networks, and there's no way he's going to not have a phone and have them feel disappointed in his technology.
Senor Tron fucked around with this message at 06:50 on Jan 12, 2015 |
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Jan 12, 2015 06:35
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I have trouble believing that the phone box that travels in time and space can communicate with people across time and space.
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Jan 12, 2015 06:36
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2house2fly posted:The Doctor did some magic poo poo with Rose's phone in the second episode ever of the revival and it's been brought up again multiple times since, why would you lose your mind at time travel phones now? Because the timing makes sense with those other ones. The phone synchronises the amount of time that's passed for the companion with the amount of time that's passed for people on Earth. If Rose's mother calls her three months after she leaves, Rose will receive the call after having travelled with the Doctor for three months. But what Earth time does the Doctor's phone synchronise to? Why did Churchill's call go through now?
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Jan 12, 2015 06:52
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Tiggum posted:But what Earth time does the Doctor's phone synchronise to? Why did Churchill's call go through now? Whenever you notice something like that,
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Jan 12, 2015 06:55
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Tiggum posted:Because the timing makes sense with those other ones. The phone synchronises the amount of time that's passed for the companion with the amount of time that's passed for people on Earth. If Rose's mother calls her three months after she leaves, Rose will receive the call after having travelled with the Doctor for three months. But what Earth time does the Doctor's phone synchronise to? Why did Churchill's call go through now? The phone doesn't synchronise with the amount of time that's passed for the companion, or when Rose got home and found out she'd been away a year she could have just called her mum on the phone a year ago. Plus didn't Martha's entire series take place over a few days?
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Jan 12, 2015 07:07
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