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PERSONA MOTHER loving FIVE MOTHER FUCKERS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRJpmukSNTk
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Feb 10, 2016 03:19
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| # ? May 15, 2024 22:23 |
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Genuinely can't wait to (watch my wife) play Persona 5
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Feb 10, 2016 04:43
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Doctor Who "The Woman Who Lived" Series 9, Episode 6 I honestly don't know why I watch this any more. I can't remember a stretch of this show, outside of Series One, that was so lacking in quality for so long. This has been some dire, dreadfully unpleasant television. The grades, as usual, don't tell the whole story - C, B, B, B, D reflects a mediocre-at-worst average grade for the season so far. Which is more the point. Doctor Who is a show about Ideas, big grand swooping all-uppercase-and-bold IDEAS. It's a show meant to inspire, an uplifting if chintzy and broad piece of nonsense. In contrast, this feels lifeless, perfunctory. Derivative. The most damning criticism one can really level at Who, really. To be clear, I hate "The Woman Who Lived". It's a worthless, completely misaimed episode whose every remotely interesting or clever concept is immediately undercut by something else, usually awful shtick. On every level, "Woman" makes drastic, downright lethal mistakes that handicap what few decent scenes or themes are present within. It's a bad, bad, bad, bad hour. But the worst part is the lack of investment that I have in both this story and the season and general. My hatred is present, but perfunctory. Part of this is due to distancing myself from personal investment, but more importantly it's reflective of how little there is to invest in this season. In the writeup for "Under the Lake", I remarked that if every episode of DW was like it I wouldn't watch it. Turns out that was an accidental bit of foreshadowing on my part, as we're now up to the halfway point on Series Nine with nothing that calls to mind what attracted me to the show in the first place. It doesn't have that je ne sais quoi that's essential to Who. Series Nine has been a procession of bland and boring genre plots played straight. Maisie Williams returns from the previous story, reprising her role as the newly-immortal Ashildr - only now it's set in the mid-1600's, and the hundreds of years of living have made her change her name to "Me". I'm just going to say it - "Me" is one of the worst names a character on this show has ever had. It's downright immersion-breakingly stupid and would be worth docking a grade by itself, since hearing the side cast have to address her as "Lady Me" with no sense of irony is just ludicrous. It's a tiny issue that reflects the complete lack of care this hour has, where something as minor as a character's name suddenly becomes a major problem over a bit of prime DW naff or, at worst, easily ignorable. I mean, really, this is a microcosm of everything that's wrong with "Woman". Hearing people refer to another character as "Me" just sounds stupid onscreen. "Me" is a definite pronoun, not a name. And I get why the screenwriter, Catherine Tragenna, elected to name her that - on a themic level, Ashildr is supposed to have lost - or thought she lost, rather - all of her humanity, her empathy. She's supposed to be a soulless, downright sociopathic husk of a human. Someone who, therefore, only cares about herself. The problem is that naming the character "Me" is both subtle as a hammer and also a name that only works on the page, not when spoken aloud. And not even then, really - I'm reminded of Neil Gaiman's "magnum opus" American Gods. The main character is a half-black man who loses his wife, whom he defined his whole life around. Now with her dead, he's a barely-functioning, barely-present imitation of a human, consumed by grief and therefore completely lacking in personality. What should Gaiman name this man? Oh, "Shadow". Do...do you get it? Because, he's like. A shadow. Of his former self. You see. Tragenna falls into the easy screenwriting trap that such writers like Joss Whedon and Aaron Sorkin revel in where the writing is so satisfied with itself it thinks that it's cleverer than it actually is. It's a dangerous game to play and part of the reason why I think both latter examples don't really hold up under scrutiny, because you're not witnessing the inherently exaggerated reality of television so much as the smug pretensions of the author in question. In a crasser, more TVIV-esque and reductive way, you're watching people jerk themselves off onscreen. There's no investment in the characters in question; or, more accurately, there's just enough investment for the writer to play their word/symbolism games, which are always far less clever than the writer actually thinks they are. It's how scenes like the first Me/Sam Swift (Rufus Hound) confrontation must have been written. Me gets the upper hand, chases Sam Swift off, then petulantly remarks to The Doctor to cap the scene "You're not my dad." Clearly, what Tragenna was going for was some sort of darkly ironic commentary on how Me views The Doctor as the one father figure in her life but is in a state of denial about it, so the final line was meant to emphasize the point while also being cool in its own right. The problem is that the line is most firmly not cool when spoken aloud, it's cheesy and kind of petulant. Secondly, it's a statement undercut not thirty seconds prior when The Doctor says, while Me and Sam are scuffling, "Tell him I'm not your dad" and Me literally responds "Tell me, Dad". The joke only works if Me recognizes and is able to joke about the attachment she has to The Doctor, but if she does then her final line makes no thematic sense. "Woman" has zero idea of how to keep personalities consistent even within single scenes, and as a result the entire thing flounders. On the flip side, Tragenna revels in the worst and most artless camp and cheese this episode has ever seen. Further divorcing the audience from the too-smug "symbolism" and "theming", it's hard to actually take any greater points Tragenna sketches about the soul-deadening nature of immortality or whatever seriously when they're displayed at the same time as a fire-breathing catman. The worst example of this bizarre conflation of seriousness with camp is Sam Swift's hanging scene, which is, uh, supposed to...endear us to him or something? I guess? Or put a fine point on the value of life or juxtapose his desperate clawing for it against Me's realist fatalism? Either way, what it ends up being is five minutes of Sam Swift making the worst and most obvious death/hanging jokes, in a frankly interminable sequence. It's like Tragenna heard the phrase "gallows humor" for the first time and decided to take it to its absolute extreme in a scene that drags on forever, with none of the humor landing. I don't think the gallows scene was meant to make me cheer for Sam's death, if only to stop the godawful "humor" on display. "And then Sam Swift works on his tight five for next Saturday at the Chuckle Hut", Tragenna must've written into the script, because JESUS. The camp and cheese is absolutely everywhere, by the way - the aforementioned Leandro, most obviously, and the hanging sequence, but basically every single "serious" moment is placed within the context of something silly and stupid. "Woman" expects us, in one of the most downright insultingly manipulative moments of the episode, to find the scene where Ashildr mourns the death of her children to the Black Plague as monumentally heartbreaking. Unfortunately, this moment plays immediately after a series of light, bouncy, "fun" flashbacks, all shot at a deliberately low frame rate to give them a Buster Keaton feel as Me recounts her zany adventures throughout history. The tone change is downright jarring. But even by itself, removed from the context in which it airs, the Black Plague scene is bad and fundamentally misunderstands the interesting character notes of Me. Because, yeah, Me does have an interesting character, buried deeply under dumb cat burglar gimmicks, the Knightmare, and "totally awesome" kung-fu moves. She's ostensibly supposed to be a character who has lost her humanity due to simply living too long. There's no one inciting event - it's the totality of watching everyone she loved die as she continues on, lich-like, that's meant to change her personality. Her loss of self is only interesting if there's no reason for it besides deathlessness - a dark counterpoint to Jack Harkness' altruism, in other words. By including the Black Plague sequence, it's both a cold and obvious attempt to force a "moment" from the audience that the episode had not in any way earned, but it also flattens Me's character, by being a badly shot and casted sequence that leans on the melodrama entirely. I'm sorry, I just don't loving buy Maisie Williams as a mother, even considering the fact that people were having kids by the age of 14 in the Middle Ages. Maisie Williams looks utterly ludicrous as a mother and the character notes just don't play onscreen. She looks like a 12-year-old. On every level "Woman" fails. Special note must be made of the score, something Oxxidation specifically singled out for hatred when we were watching. If you know him, you know how big a deal that is, since he usually doesn't care about the music at all. He's right, though, it's an overbearing mess meant to accentuate the humor of the story and just comes across as intrusive and unnecessary. Yet another underline on an episode overstuffed with them. I just don't know who this episode was written for or to - you get scenes like Me and The Doctor debating the merits of immortality or why The Doctor and Me shouldn't and can't travel together (under her strenuous objections) in the midst of a Scooby Doo-esque housebreaking sequence complete with hiding in a chimney, as the score blares on. If it's for kids, why the philosophical, overindulgent pandering dialog? If it's for adults, why the shtick? The pacing accentuates all existing problems. "Woman" has no real plot to speak of, which is fine in an episode meant to be a character study as this episode...sorta is. But it's also not really one, I think. There's this ostensible narrative backbone that's supposed to drive the plot of finding and retrieving the amulet that neither The Doctor nor Me take at all seriously, so a full half of the episode is spent just...them sitting around talking in vague terms about it. It removes all stakes from "Woman" and creates a cascading issue where the story suddenly has to zoom through three acts worth of plot in ten minutes, so the climax of the episode is set up, implemented, and resolved within barely three minutes. It disappears almost as soon as it arrives, and resolves so quickly it's genuinely confusing. The worst part is that I could go on, for hours. There's so many other problems "Woman" has, great and small. Sam Swift is an awful and poorly introduced and deepened character considering how plot important he ends up being. Leandro (Ariyon Bakare) is even worse, a pair of glowing eyes in bushes that somehow arrives in the episode three-quarters of the way through it, that you're automatically supposed to care about for no reason. The guardsmen who The Doctor bribes change motivations and personalities three times within a minute. "PURPLE...THE COLOR OF DEATH" is up there with the silliest lines of dialog ever meant to be taken seriously, only exceeded by "You let me be...inside you" from Jessica Jones. The climax is shot, seemingly by a blind epileptic suffering a grand mal seizure. I know that this episode was more than likely written with budget considerations in mind, but if it wasn't then the episode makes no thematic sense with Clara absent from it. She would've been the necessary bridge between the two extreme viewpoints of Doctor and Me, and without her the episode has no anchor. That slo-mo shot. That slo-mo shot. But, here's the thing. I just don't loving care. I don't care about this episode. I hate it, and I can identify all the myriad reasons why I hate it. But this season and this episode in particular has been so inept and underwhelming that I have no passion for it. "Kill the Moon", "Daleks in Manhattan" "Hungry Earth/Cold Blood", "Love and Monsters", even Voyage of the mother loving Damned were hours I were passionate about, even though that passion was my hatred. They were episodes I had fun talking to Oxxidation about, analyzing how and why they went wrong and thinking of interesting ways to fix them. Oxx and I did a whole big riff on "Kill the Moon" and, I honestly think, came up with a perspective on it that could've made it potentially amazing. There was none of that here. I can honestly say that rewatching "The Woman Who Lived" for this writeup was one of my least pleasurable viewing experiences ever, since it was just this bucket of cold water to the face as I realized what little I actually liked the first time through was overwritten and mediocre. There's no nugget of a good story hidden within this episode; there's a sorta-interesting character backstory about an undying character and how that would affect their personality. Even that, though, the immortality angle has been done numerous times before and in far better ways. What's not terrible is just terribly derivative. Here's how bad "The Woman Who Lived" is. At one point while watching, Oxx and I traded a run of the absolute worst cat puns we could think of. This was, by far, the most enjoyable part of the episode. Grade: F(eline) Random Thoughts:
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Feb 13, 2016 04:02
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I still haven't been able to bring myself to watch the next episode to submit guesses This season sucks
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Feb 13, 2016 04:13
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I was mixed on this first half of the season because while the episodes were at best okay/average, I felt like they seemed to be building up a particular theme/idea and I felt like they might retroactively make the episodes stronger. Whether they did or didn't is irrelevant to the thread at this current point though, and whether they did or not don't really excuse a string of weak episodes. As for this episode, I liked it better than The Girl Who Died but that's damning with faint praise. It also suffered from a great sin of modern Who - the idea that there MUST be an alien/monster involved somewhere in the plot whether it fits or not.
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Feb 13, 2016 04:23
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Just pop out three F grades in one post and skip straight to episode 10!
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Feb 13, 2016 04:25
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Nail on the head. What a terrible episode.
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Feb 13, 2016 04:59
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zygon_Invasion In which HEY THE DOCTOR hosed A ZYGON DID YOU KNOW THAT DID YOU DID YOU?
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Feb 13, 2016 05:09
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I really, really, really, really, really did not like this episode 
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Feb 13, 2016 05:21
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Toxxupation posted:Grade: F 
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Feb 13, 2016 05:25
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that's NOT the grade i gave it SV, please do not slander me on the SA forums!!!!
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Feb 13, 2016 05:26
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Please stop letting Peter Harness write things he is quite bad at it. Thank you and have a nice day.
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Feb 13, 2016 05:32
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Toxxupation posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zygon_Invasion Whoah boy. This thing. Invasion is some pure RTD-era non-think pablum of an episode. Nonsensical on several levels, forced plot scenes, bizarrely drifting characterizations... Just straight up drivel. That said of course there's no way it is not loved by some fans. And at this point in Occ's torture season, I have no idea how he will take it. Particularly if he has to see it as a standalone. I'm so, so sorry (maybe).
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Feb 13, 2016 05:49
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Don't be a hero man, just quit now and preserve what's left of your sanity.
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Feb 13, 2016 05:51
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I've been looking forward to this one
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Feb 13, 2016 06:53
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The Zygon 2-parter is interesting as all hell. I like it, with conditions.
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Feb 13, 2016 09:49
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I loved this episode. After such a blandfest of a season dumping concentrated RTD nonsense on me was just what I needed.
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Feb 13, 2016 14:09
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What if she'd spelled it Mi? Would that have been better?
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Feb 13, 2016 14:11
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Oh, boy...you know that saying "abandon all hope ye who enter here?"
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Feb 13, 2016 14:46
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ThaGhettoJew posted:Whoah boy. This thing. Invasion is some pure RTD-era non-think pablum of an episode. Nonsensical on several levels, forced plot scenes, bizarrely drifting characterizations... Just straight up drivel. There are people who loved it and thought it was stunning political criticism! And they can dress themselves! They've written for the show!
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Feb 13, 2016 19:59
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The Woman Who Lived I've see worse, although like everyone else I was mystified by the presence of Vincent from Beauty and the Beast. A Alkarl BSam Mind the Walrus B 2house2fly And More Angela Christine cargohills Enourmo Lottery of Babylon NeuroticLich onetruepurple Organza Quiz Paul.Power Weird Sandwich C Ajax 99 AndwhatIseeisme blasmeister DoctorWhat Jet Jaguar jng2058 mycelia Regy Rusty ThNextGreenLantern Xenoborg D Howe_sam Red Metal F Nobody got this right! Overall Average Guess: 2.4 Standard Deviation: 1.0 Current rankings: Weird Sandwich: 3 Jet Jaguar: 4 Red Metal: 4 Sinestro: 4 And More: 5 blasmeister: 5 mycelia: 5 Xenoborg: 5 Ajax 99: 6 Enourmo: 6 Howe_sam: 6 onetruepurple: 6 Regy Rusty: 6 AndwhatIseeisme: 7 cargohills: 7 jng2058: 7 Lottery of Babylon: 7 Mind the Walrus: 7 Paul.Power: 7 ThNextGreenLantern: 7 2house2fly: 8 Alkarl: 8 DoctorWhat: 8 Organza Quiz: 8 NeuroticLich: 10 Angela Christine: 11 BSam: 12 The effects here were almost random... but no time for that! A new challenger approaches! IT'S ZYGONS! AHAHHAHAHAHAH
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Feb 13, 2016 20:01
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Toxxupation posted:that's NOT the grade i gave it SV, please do not slander me on the SA forums!!!! slander requires harm to your reputation. you are an internet dr. who reviewer. there is no possible way to damage yr reputation further . u just got lawyered u watsonian bitch
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Feb 13, 2016 20:07
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MrL_JaKiri posted:There are people who loved it and thought it was stunning political criticism! And they can dress themselves! They've written for the show! smdh. It certainly isn't the worst thing I've seen on Who since it's so gleefully upfront about everything it's trying to do, but without the second part this is a remarkably flimsy script. It's just so... politically deaf. And uh, character blind and causality mute.
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Feb 14, 2016 00:34
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DoctorWhat posted:The Zygon 2-parter is interesting as all hell. I like it, with conditions. You like half of it.
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Feb 14, 2016 01:13
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Burkion posted:You like half of it. I like it exactly as much as I like Kill the Moon: I appreciate and understand what it's trying to do enough that I can forgive its lack of elegance.
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Feb 14, 2016 03:09
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Yeah, Zygon Invasion is a poo poo show, no two way about it.
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Feb 14, 2016 03:52
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This season might be boring but this thread sure isn't.
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Feb 14, 2016 05:51
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DoctorWhat posted:I like it exactly as much as I like Kill the Moon Me too.
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Feb 14, 2016 05:54
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DoctorWhat posted:I like it exactly as much as I like Kill the Moon: I appreciate and understand what it's trying to do enough that I can forgive its lack of elegance. You'll never know how disappointing that is to me.
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Feb 14, 2016 06:49
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Burkion posted:You'll never know how disappointing that is to me. I honestly don't particularly care? Not meant as a personal thing but that's roughly how I feel. The fact is that neither story is really deserving of its most popular criticisms. There are absolutely valid criticisms to make about both (the Base Under Seige parts of KTM are pretty lifeless, for instance, and we'll talk about Zygons after both parts) but instead everyone races to the "anti-choice propaganda" or "bad science" or "UKIP politics" thoughtlines that betray an incomplete and/or insincere level of engagement with the actual text and paratext.
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Feb 14, 2016 07:08
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DoctorWhat posted:everyone races to the "anti-choice propaganda" or "bad science" or "UKIP politics" None of these are criticisms I have ever thought of leveling at this two-parter. The dialogue is cringeworthy, the plot makes no sense, Osgood is insufferable, and Invasion was so bad that I gave up on finishing the season for a full 3 months. I don't hate the subject matter, I hate the episode as a whole.
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Feb 14, 2016 07:38
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Big Mean Jerk posted:None of these are criticisms I have ever thought of leveling at this two-parter. The dialogue is cringeworthy, the plot makes no sense, Osgood is insufferable, and Invasion was so bad that I gave up on finishing the season for a full 3 months. I don't hate the subject matter, I hate the episode as a whole. He refuses to analyze the first part of the Zygon stuff on its own never mind the fact that it's its own episode, so all of that, I assume, was directed at KTM. He also cannot move past himself when it comes to talking about these episodes for whatever reason and seems to think that makes him better able to engage them than others. But that's a whole other thing.
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Feb 14, 2016 07:41
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Burkion posted:He also cannot move past himself when it comes to talking about these episodes for whatever reason and seems to think that makes him better able to engage them than others. Literally what does this mean?
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Feb 14, 2016 07:44
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That's a bit harsh. DW is entitled to his opinion, regardless of how dumb the episode is.
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Feb 14, 2016 07:45
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DoctorWhat posted:Literally what does this mean? You learned some advanced theory and college level courses on writing and fiction and apply it to your everyday thinking without really considering why or if you should. So you work that into your way of thinking without fail on near everything you consume and you work it out on those levels. Then you look at others who do not consider things in the same way or approach it from the same direction and you write the majority of them off because they are doing it differently without considering what you have considered. Never mind if they should. This is like, your thing. Big Mean Jerk posted:That's a bit harsh. DW is entitled to his opinion, regardless of how dumb the episode is. It likely is yeah. He just does this all the time especially with Who. Ends up falling into the same traps with it too. It's fine and it has its place, critical thinking and the like always does- just using that as an excuse to ignore or discount others is never a good idea in my opinion.
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Feb 14, 2016 07:47
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You know what, that's a mostly fair assessment. Except that I try not to steamroll other perspectives except when those perspectives are trying to establish themselves as definitive or absolute. Like "[X Episode] sucks because it has Bad Science, and furthermore the Bad Science is evidence that they Didn't Care when they were making this episode so the episode must be bad." There's like four worse-than-baseless & arbitrary assumptions and evaluations in that line of thinking but by GOD is that very argument loving omnipresent. And it's exhausting because there are interesting conversations to be had about how even bad episodes work, how they function, what they were going for and where they went wrong. So to me it's very irritating when folks dismiss [any given piece of media] completely out-of-hand, usually for Cinema Sins-level 'offenses'. Because the OTHER qualities, good and bad, are 100% of the time more interesting and can further conversation. Like, I'm not gonna go all Hbomberguy and declare the Star Wars Prequels as secret masterpieces. They fail to stick the landing on 99% of the stunts they try to pull and are totally busted as a result. But when you can see the underlying gameplan, the routine that was prepared but ended up fumbling and fumbling over itself, there's something to talk about.
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Feb 14, 2016 07:58
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idonotlikepeas posted:The Woman Who Lived gently caress yeah I'm finally in last place. Why are you opinions on Doctor Who not the same as mine Occ!
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Feb 14, 2016 09:28
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DoctorWhat posted:You know what, that's a mostly fair assessment. Except that I try not to steamroll other perspectives except when those perspectives are trying to establish themselves as definitive or absolute. DoctorWhat posted:I like it exactly as much as I like Kill the Moon: I appreciate and understand what it's trying to do enough that I can forgive its lack of elegance. See, you call it "lack of elegance" but I think it's closer to what Occ described as "lack of care". Harness doesn't give a poo poo about making the plot progression believable because it needs to lead him somewhere specific. The message is more important to him than the actual telling of a story. However, when you want to convey a message through a medium, you have to respect the rules of said medium. If you want to tell us how dangerous young Zygons are, you at least have to try to make the story believable in its portrayal of exactly that aspect. Nothing is more damaging to your argument than a viewer who can't suspend their disbelief. idonotlikepeas posted:The Woman Who Lived You know, I still wouldn't give this episode an F, but I have definitely started reconsidering how well it holds up in comparison to The Girl Who Died. It's not surprising that these episodes don't get any better when watched repeatedly, but I almost expected the stuff that seems jarring at first to smoothe over after a while.
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Feb 14, 2016 10:57
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i thought doctorwhat's 'thing' was that he was really into one of the old doctors and dressed like him irl or something
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Feb 14, 2016 16:09
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| # ? May 15, 2024 22:23 |
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He can have more than one thing!
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Feb 14, 2016 16:12
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