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  • Locked thread
Soothing Vapors
Mar 26, 2006

Associate Justice Lena "Kegels" Dunham: An uncool thought to have: 'is that guy walking in the dark behind me a rapist? Never mind, he's Asian.

DoctorWhat posted:

Literally what does this mean?

Soothing Vapors posted:

u watsonian bitch

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DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

And More posted:

[W]hen 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.

No you don't! You've made these rules up entirely from whole cloth and you're doing exactly what I'm talking about that keeps setting me off.

Even apart from the question of "to what degree do Harness's scripts disregard certain conventions" (the answer being "not really all that severely, actually"), those conventions have no objective value.

In actuality, as time moves onward and the mass of media that the public can be trusted to be familiar with grows larger and more diverse in subject matter, it can become very prudent to acknowledge that familiarity when telling stories in frameworks where time and resources are scarce.

And don't get me started on "suspension of disbelief",

quote:

you watsonian bithc

DoctorWhat fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Feb 14, 2016

Burkion
May 10, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

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.

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.

Normally I allow all of this, because you know whatever, your opinion you go to it.

The only one where I disagree entirely with you is this particular episode because it is just dreadful and the ONLY way you can save it is by hog tying it to the next episode which we cannot talk about and limits discussion.

The thing is though is that this episode should stand or fall on its own merits. It was designed to be consumed separately and lead into another piece of media. So giving it a pass is just ludicrous to me.

Because this is a Bad episode of Who. This is a bad episode of anything.



I also don't want to dogpile on you because that's not something I like to do. So let's see what the host of this thread thinks of the episode before going further.

Your Boy Fancy
Feb 7, 2003

by Cyrano4747
I like Doctor Who. Sometimes the episodes are bad though. I like when the alien shouts whimsical things.

Soothing Vapors
Mar 26, 2006

Associate Justice Lena "Kegels" Dunham: An uncool thought to have: 'is that guy walking in the dark behind me a rapist? Never mind, he's Asian.
I like the shouty alien too. Sometimes he puts on his magic sunglasses and saves the pretty girl with the pointy chin!!!! That is good.

Soothing Vapors
Mar 26, 2006

Associate Justice Lena "Kegels" Dunham: An uncool thought to have: 'is that guy walking in the dark behind me a rapist? Never mind, he's Asian.
In all seriousness I like that when we disagree with each other we do it with civility, maturity, and respect, and without unnecessary namecalling or ableist slurs. Or at least it's been that way ever since we that howling retard Tiggum is gone (and hopefully dead)

NieR Occomata
Jan 18, 2009

Glory to Mankind.

just fyi i will be too busy petting my anime sister and getting a husbando to watch doctor who so next week's review is gonna be a lil' early

Regy Rusty
Apr 26, 2010

Toxxupation posted:

just fyi i will be too busy petting my anime sister and getting a husbando to watch doctor who so next week's review is gonna be a lil' early

same

Attitude Indicator
Apr 3, 2009

If you enjoy doctor who, no matter how, you have probably made some wrong decisions in your life

Your Boy Fancy
Feb 7, 2003

by Cyrano4747

Attitude Indicator posted:

If you enjoy doctor who, no matter how, you have probably made some wrong decisions in your life

To be fair, you could say that of any human being, and this one at least fosters a spirit of goodwill and togetherness as long as you don't devolve into overly long think pieces

MrL_JaKiri
Sep 23, 2003

A bracing glass of carrot juice!

DoctorWhat posted:

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.

Actually the opposite is true hope this helps

MrL_JaKiri
Sep 23, 2003

A bracing glass of carrot juice!
Also I'm not sure a television programme can have paratext particularly if you take the work as given as the text, unless you're defining "text" as "the script" and the paratext as everything we actually get which seems silly

Lottery of Babylon
Apr 25, 2012

STRAIGHT TROPIN'

What if, instead of examining the episode, we consider a platonic idealized version of the concept of "episode"? Viewed in this light, Invasion of the Zygons is good.

Lottery of Babylon
Apr 25, 2012

STRAIGHT TROPIN'

Since the dawn of time, mankind has struggled with war. History is defined primarily by wars. War is a very deep and complex topic, and there is a lot to be said about war. It is into these heavy waters that Harness chooses to plunge the Doctor, a premise which I think we can all agree has boundless potential. Therefore, Doctor Who and the Space Zygons is good.

Escobarbarian
Jun 18, 2004


Grimey Drawer
ooh I want to know how this episode is UKIPpy

Barry Foster
Dec 24, 2007

What is going wrong with that one (face is longer than it should be)

Escobarbarian posted:

ooh I want to know how this episode is UKIPpy

Barely-fictionalised alien ISIS live among us in secret. Refugees are not to be trusted.

Escobarbarian
Jun 18, 2004


Grimey Drawer
oh, just like Unquiet Dead, then!

(I am joking, let's not get started on that one again)

Party Boat
Nov 1, 2007

where did that other dog come from

who is he


MrL_JaKiri posted:

Also I'm not sure a television programme can have paratext particularly if you take the work as given as the text, unless you're defining "text" as "the script" and the paratext as everything we actually get which seems silly

Maybe the "Next Time" teasers? Episode trailers? Interviews in the Radio Times?

MrL_JaKiri
Sep 23, 2003

A bracing glass of carrot juice!
Maybe the next time trailers inside the episode, but the rest of that stuff doesn't really fall into paratext which is more about the additional material to a text that is never-the-less inherent in it. Examples include an introduction, illustrations, the name of the author, that kind of thing. DVD covers would count, I suppose, as would DVD menus.

Interviews in the Radio Times - and elsewhere, and twitter chat, and whanot - don't fall into that because they're not part of the experience of viewing the episode, any more than interviews with an author are paratext to the book.

In any case, you still run up against Death of the Author - another important concept in literary theory which Doctor What has studiously chosen to absolutely ignore. However if anything it is much more relevant to television than to books, as there's a slim chance that someone reading a book wouldn't know who the author was but an absolutely minuscule chance that a random viewer would know the writer, script editor, director and so authorial intent is absolutely irrelevant except in a "He didn't mean it like that so he's not a bastard, just exceptionally tone deaf" kind of way (eg. Forest of the Night)

And More
Jun 19, 2013

How far, Doctor?
How long have you lived?

DoctorWhat posted:

No you don't! You've made these rules up entirely from whole cloth and you're doing exactly what I'm talking about that keeps setting me off.

:rolleyes: It's really difficult to have any kind of conversation with you if you're so easily triggered, you know. Seems to me like you're just allergic to people disagreeing with you.

I also didn't make this up. You're just unfamiliar with the text I was referencing. If you want to look it up, I was thinking of a bit on literary disbelief in fiction in Tolkien's On Fairy -Stories.

Poor Miserable Gurgi
Dec 29, 2006

He's a wisecracker!
Episode bad.

NieR Occomata
Jan 18, 2009

Glory to Mankind.

Doctor Who
"The Zygon Invasion"

Series 9, Episode 7

That was a bit of a letdown, honestly.

Some context is needed, I guess. In the intervening months between the end of the previous thread and when I started the new one, Oxxidation watched the entirety of Series Nine, to keep our specific dynamic going into this review cycle. Since he's such a huge stickler for spoilers, mainly keeping me away from them (as anyone who read the old thread knows), you can imagine the level of vitriol it required on his part to break his own personal rule about keeping me in the dark. During his rewatch, he would throw vague allusions or context-less impressions my way - he characterized "Woman Who Lived" as, essentially, a juxtaposition of every strength and failure that Doctor Who has all at once, for instance. But the Harness Zygon two-parter was him at his most direct, because he was positively seething with anger coming out of these two episodes. "Remember that dumb fuckhead who wrote 'Kill the Moon'?" he'd ask (paraphrasing, here). "Because he wrote a two-parter this season, and it's about Zygons," spoken with an uncharacteristic level of disgust. He comparatively ranted and raved about this one, which...considering Harness' previous effort...and considering the hit-or-miss nature of two-parters on Who...and considering that Oxxidation is usually indifferent at best about television...put me on my guard going into "The Zygon Invasion".

I was expecting an unparalleled travesty of nightmarish proportions. What I got was a mediocre at best, inoffensively bad at worst hour whose chief emotion it inspired within me was boredom.

In a way, it's a bit refreshing. After an episode I hated - even if that hatred was totally passionless - "Zygon" was a story that on the first viewing I didn't, well, dislike. And at this point in the season that's the best I can realistically hope for, after a parade of boring and bad two-parters bookended by irritating one-offs. "Zygon" wasn't good, but it was good enough. You know the crackers you eat after a wine tasting to cleanse the palate? "The Zygon Invasion" was that cracker, after the Mad Dog 2020 that is "The Woman Who Lived". It was only on the second viewing when the problems really began to show.

Peter Harness is, at least when speaking about his Doctor Who output, a bad writer. But he's sort of covertly, almost maliciously bad. Unlike your, say, Chris Chibnalls, whose scripts turn the DW viewing experience into that infamous Clockwork Orange scene, Harness crafts stories that at first glance seem absolutely fine. If you are a viewer of DW who doesn't post on forums about them, who doesn't write multiple thousand word essays about each individual episode - aka a normal loving human being - you might even consider them "good". They portray just enough craft to make you, the viewer, feel stimulated while watching them and that's it.

I've always stressed the value of common perception in criticism; essentially, how all viewpoints are valid, not just the ones holding literary criticism or film lit degrees. The dichotomy and inherent pretentiousness of "high" art connoisseurs is something I've always railed against. Mark Gatiss is a writer that, I believe, is unfairly maligned by the Who fanbase as a result of this general sentiment to disregard "workhorse" episodes. Gatiss cares about Who, he always has, and that love and commitment to the material shines through. They might not be the most genius, or emotionally affecting, or daring, or layered of episodes, but Gatiss episodes are thought through from beginning to end and fully formed. Harness, on the other hand, is exactly what everyone (incorrectly) decries Gatiss for being - his scripts are paper tigers. They're the junk food of Who, televistic Cheetos. They reflect the inherent carelessness of Harness, a man who bangs out sixty pages of absolute pablum before tying it all up in a bow of "societal commentary" for, you know. Depth.

And the irony is, the trap worked on me. Coming out of the first "Zygon" viewing, I was more than content to give this hour a "B". To be fair, this was colored by how much I disliked the previous episode, so anything not-awful would be, comparatively speaking, absolutely great. I left "Kill the Moon" feeling the same way, to be honest - although in that specific case it was more due to the final act being as good as it was, which was more than likely written by Moffat. So uh.

But, either way, that's more the point. Harness' episodes are junk food, giving one the feeling of having been fulfilled while ingesting thousands of calories that were practically garbage. Returning to it exposed all of "Zygon"'s failures and then some.

Like, the Zygon splinter group that works as the antagonist for the episode. Firstly, they're totally ISIS - anyone who argues that they're not ISIS is just, flatly, wrong. Just look at the Zygon group's flag, alone - it's a white symbol on a black flag with "alien" script below it. You don't accidentally make something look so graphically similar to the ISIS flag. And that's not even counting the numerous manifesto videos read by scared white hostages, or videotaped executions. Or the fact that the splinter group is a terrorist organization that negatively reflects on a largely innocent group that is currently seeking refuge all around the globe.

Because, yeah, the Zygons in general are clearly supposed to represent the Syrian crisis, with the splinter group or "Truth or Consequences" or whatever the gently caress they're called clearly supposed to represent ISIS. And that's fine, I guess, because on a surface level "Zygon" represents the issue well, or at least well enough. Especially in comparison to the anti-abortion mess that was Harness' last work. The Doctor stresses up and down that they're a fringe element not representative of the whole numerous times during the episode, to the point where it becomes nearly obnoxious in its heavy-handedness. In one of the few moments of deftness within the hour, The Doctor even argues against bombing an extremist hideout since all it'd do is radicalize the base. From all surface appearances it feels like a fairly nuanced, or at least inoffensive, take on the ISIS/migrant situation.

The problem is, when one watches the episode again, one realizes that every single onscreen example of a Zygon is almost cartoonishly evil. It's all well and good to argue temperance and the extremes not being representative of the whole, but when in practice every visible instance of a Zygon is of them being murderous assholes it takes all the supposed balance out of the equation. The only exceptions are Osgood, who sucks in general and might not even be a Zygon in the first place, and the twin Zygon leaders, who were uncommunicative, obstructionist, and quickly dead.

But let's disregard the weird hypocrisy of how Zygons are talked about in "The Zygon Invasion" versus how they are actually portrayed in "The Zygon Invasion". Just on a functional level, nothing the Zygon splinter group makes any sense! They shout their dumb three word catchphrase over and over, kidnap people, and generally behave like murderous dicks. There's no real grand statement to their plan, no overarcing goals, no central focus or endpoint.

I honestly wonder how heavily this season has been graded down due to my matured reviewing style. If I wrote these up the way that I did back in late 2014, when I was busting out five a week or more - remember those halcyon days? - every writeup would've occurred right after the viewing, before the critical refraction point could've hit. This season, more than any other, would've benefited from that immediacy, because Series Nine has no permanence. It's all a bunch of episodes that only work in the moment, and often not even then. It betrays a fundamental failure of the season, where nothing has any persistence and therefore no weight, so the season thus far has been a sludgy, watery mess of mediocrity or worse.

That's my central takeaway from "The Zygon Invasion", if I'm being honest. I was bored with it. It wasn't bad - okay, it was objectively bad, but not offensively bad - but it certainly wasn't good. I'm left wondering why everyone hates this two-parter so god-damned much, since the strongest emotion it generates within me is utter indifference. I mean, I watched the episode again and couldn't find a single quote worthy of copying down to include within Random Thoughts. That has literally NEVER happened before.

That's how little I care for or about this episode.

Grade: D

Random Thoughts:

    Mortanis
    Dec 28, 2005

    It's your father's lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight.
    College Slice

    Toxxupation posted:

    okay, it was objectively bad

    You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

    Escobarbarian
    Jun 18, 2004


    Grimey Drawer
    Oh, he knows what it means.

    I think your assessment of Gatiss haters is a little unfair. It's alright to not get excited about a writer who's episodes straight-up don't inspire excitement.

    Oxxidation
    Jul 22, 2007
    Doctor Who
    "The Zygon Invasion"

    Series 9, Episode 7

    Occupation asked me to throw together a little something-something to bolster his writeup this time around, with special care to Harness and my aforementioned distaste for the man's work. So, here goes.

    I might have made the mistake of getting a literary education, but I managed to do so without getting too deeply invested in formal literary criticism - I don't know Watson from Doyle, I think Bloom's a joke, I can't read Lacan's name without my mind re-writing it as "lactate" and taking a brief detour down an uncomfortable path. In the end, I still basically have a layman's understanding of how stories "work," just with emphasis on functionality and more swearing. Most of my writeups for these threads, under all the long-winded pretension, boiled down to "this is good, this is bad, this is bad, pithy one-liner, end." Understandable, I think, since Who episodes tend to wear their quality on their sleeve. But Harness is the one writer on this show I've uniquely, passionately hated - more than Raynor, more than Chibnall, more than Davies at his absolute big-tent three-ring-circus campiest - because, ironically, I have to think about why his writing fails.

    On the surface, Harness' episodes are merely dull, inoffensive at best, which is why "The Zygon Invasion" was a cool drink of water to Occupation after he was forced to watch the adventures of Me and her little lion man. "Kill the Moon," also, was badly shot and stiffly acted, but not significantly worse so than other clunkers like the Silurian two-parter. Harness has spent his brief time on this show banking on social issues and social allegory, often with sledgehammer subtlety. That in itself is fine; lack of subtlety is practically Who's trademark, and like Churchill once said, a tremendous whack is sometimes needed when you want to get a point across. But Harness' ineptitude at nuts-and-bolts scriptwriting combined with his penchant for allegory and sounding "important" is a bad match, and the closer one peers at his scripts, the clearer the rot becomes.

    I talked Occ down two whole letter grades for this ep after pointing out the inconsistencies in how the villains are characterized in light of their real-world allegory. Because even if the snarling tentacular shape-shifters aren't meant to represent ISIS per se, they're a blindingly obvious immigration metaphor, with that one New Mexican cop's description of the initial conflict reading like several days' worth of Daily Mail front page headlines about scary brown people. Because Who is an optimistic show at heart, this episode attempts to put forward a message of tolerance and open-mindedness against knee-jerk counter-violence and further radicalization. Fair enough. But Harness fails to follow through on this by making the alien splinter faction so mindlessly, senselessly, gleefully violent that, if you were to take their allegory into account, they would single-handedly justify every sweaty hand-wringing NIMBY swinging dick on the continent, and it makes the Doctor, the main proponent of peace, look like a raving idiot at every opportunity. The aliens present a video about their demands - and it consists of a vague catchphrase and promises of murder. They tearfully attempt to parlay with the military unit sent to kill them, and actually defuse the tension - only to slaughter them all seconds later. One of them is non-lethally captured and interrogated - and cackles about world conquest moments before their own ally blows them out of the sky. They're like the Daleks without any joie de vivre.

    Occ was initially fine with this portrayal, because he took the ISIS allegory totally in its stride, and ISIS really does conduct themselves with an almost farcical degree of malice. But like the old saw goes, "if they wrote a book about this, no one would buy it." Fiction, ironically, often needs to follow certain rules and conventions in order to be palatable, and motiveless malignity only goes so far in a script - especially when the cackling strawberry-jelly monsters aren't nearly as fun to watch as Iago. What Harness has done here, once again, is awkwardly bolt a social message onto a subpar Doctor Who script in such a way that both the message and the script suffer for the contrast, and then stand back and consider the job done, as if the presence of social commentary alone is enough to elevate the work. And it's not. Fiction needs proper form and structure in order to effectively convey a message, and trying to ram through the latter without caring about the former isn't clever, it's cowardly. Much like "Kill the Moon," Harness doesn't just tell a bad story here, but a harmful one, as any analysis of the work only shows that it confirms the very same negative stereotypes he's attempting to disprove, and entirely because of his own neglect of basic characterization and structure. It's galling stuff.

    The flames of Occ's passion have already been extinguished by the catman's burning breath, so who knows how he'll react to what's coming. At least one of us is going to shout an awful lot, I know that much.

    Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 07:51 on Feb 15, 2016

    ThaGhettoJew
    Jul 4, 2003

    The world is a ghetto
    Occ's reaction is pretty drat close to how I imagined it, although it's hard to allow for goofy-time-theater letter grade drift with him. I am appeased.

    Oxxidation posted:

    The flames of Occ's passion have already been ironically extinguished by the catman's burning breath, so who knows how he'll react to what's coming. At least one of us is going to shout an awful lot, I know that much.

    I am excited to hear this. I'd like to hear about the arguments here later if you can remember them much (and don't escape again).

    Jerusalem
    May 20, 2004

    Would you be my new best friends?

    So much of this episode suggests, practically screams in fact, that something else MUST be going on beneath the surface. But it never shows that, there's nothing beyond commentary by the Doctor that "most Zygons are peaceful" which is never once demonstrated in the story - we're never given a counter-example to the destructive assholes on-screen that are our only representation of that race. Now what follows in part 2 has to be taken into account when looking back on the 2-parter as a whole, but even if part 2 is utterly superb (and I'm not saying one way or another whether it is or not) and deftly answers every single criticism there was for part 1..... that doesn't excuse the fact that part 1 by itself is really, really, really bad. An episode needs to be able to stand on its own two feet, even if it is primarily concerned with providing background/set-up for answers to come in part 2. It still needs to be engaging, interesting, compelling etc etc - The Empty Child pulls this off, for example, even if the answers only come in the second episode.

    Here we have a story so concerned with pulling off the obvious parallels with ISIS that it neglects to actually tell an interesting story in the process. We get the most basic information necessary to lead into part 2, yes, but it just feels like mostly disconnected scenes being used to fill up time as opposed to an actual engaging episode in and of itself. In other words:

    Oxxidation posted:

    What Harness has done here, once again, is awkwardly bolt a social message onto a subpar Doctor Who script in such a way that both the message and the script suffer for the contrast, and then stand back and consider the job done, as if the presence of social commentary alone is enough to elevate the work. And it's not.

    I absolutely agree.

    Doctor Spaceman
    Jul 6, 2010

    "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."
    Hey Toxx if you want to see a perfect example of an old-school Doctor Who cliffhanger, well, you just did.

    2house2fly
    Nov 14, 2012

    You did a super job wrapping things up! And I'm not just saying that because I have to!
    Come on Oxx there's only 6 more episodes after this and then Doctor Who is over for two years, which is essentially forever. Give It a good sendoff by joining in with the writeups.

    Lottery of Babylon
    Apr 25, 2012

    STRAIGHT TROPIN'

    Toxxupation posted:

    Peter Harness is, at least when speaking about his Doctor Who output, a bad writer. But he's sort of covertly, almost maliciously bad. Unlike your, say, Chris Chibnalls, whose scripts turn the DW viewing experience into that infamous Clockwork Orange scene, Harness crafts stories that at first glance seem absolutely fine. If you are a viewer of DW who doesn't post on forums about them, who doesn't write multiple thousand word essays about each individual episode - aka a normal loving human being - you might even consider them "good". They portray just enough craft to make you, the viewer, feel stimulated while watching them and that's it.

    Honestly, I'd say it's the other way around. Before reading your reviews I had no memory of the Silurian two-parter, having mentally filed it away as one of those not-terribly-good-but-not-remarkably-bad episodes of Who that made up the majority of the RTD era. 42 is the sort of aggressively average episode of Who like the Idiot's Lantern: uninspired, forgettable, but perfectly watchable genre fiction. The Power of Three seems to be pretty well-liked despite its incredibly weak ending, and even you liked Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.

    Harness, though, is clearly awful even on first viewing. There's an air of dullness that permeates every minute of Kill the Moon, a lifeless atmosphere that makes it feel as though even the actors don't care about what's going on, that I haven't seen the likes of since Fear Her. The choice is contrived enough, and the ending unearned enough, that it sticks out horribly even if you don't have the extremely obscure technical knowledge of what an egg is.

    Zygon Invasion dispenses with the conventional Who format entirely, consisting instead of a sequence of random unconnected events. We're used to seeing such sequences as the first ten minutes of a Moffat season opener or closer, but here it lasts forty-five minutes with no rising action, no falling action, just disconnected scenes of characters in random locations shouting meaningless catchphrases. Even at his wort, Chibnall could follow a familiar basic narrative structure, so his episodes were at least watchable and had average reception outside of messageboards. The Zygon Invasion is just a disjointed mess and doesn't even have "I just want to watch some C-list genre fiction" appeal.

    Harness's episodes seem much worse even from a casual perspective. Now, you might argue that this is because Harness takes more risks and tries to write more unique episodes, whereas Chibnall stays closer to a boilerplate Mad Libs script with "The Doctor and Martha run down the corridor of the spaceship pursued by a fire monster" written at the fifteen-minute mark. And while that might be true, Harness probably shouldn't be trying to do anything clever, and especially shouldn't be trying to include any attempt at topical socially-relevant political commentary, because holy loving poo poo is he loving awful at it

    NieR Occomata
    Jan 18, 2009

    Glory to Mankind.

    Lottery of Babylon posted:

    Honestly, I'd say it's the other way around. Before reading your reviews I had no memory of the Silurian two-parter, having mentally filed it away as one of those not-terribly-good-but-not-remarkably-bad episodes of Who that made up the majority of the RTD era.

    uh

    Silurian two-parter was series five

    Rory dies in it

    Amppelix
    Aug 6, 2010

    Toxxupation posted:

    Rory dies in it

    Who?

    Lottery of Babylon
    Apr 25, 2012

    STRAIGHT TROPIN'

    Toxxupation posted:

    uh

    Silurian two-parter was series five

    Rory dies in it

    Somehow I mentally swapped its position with the RTD alternate universe Cybermen two-parter. :psyduck:

    The point still stands!

    Blasmeister
    Jan 15, 2012




    2Time TRP Sack Race Champion

    Toxxupation posted:

    Rory dies in it

    this doesn't really narrow things down

    NieR Occomata
    Jan 18, 2009

    Glory to Mankind.

    Hey

    HEY

    HEY!

    RULE TWO FUCKERS!


    Toxxupation posted:

    [*] Don't insult Rory Williams you horrible fucks

    idonotlikepeas
    May 29, 2010

    This reasoning is possible for forums user idonotlikepeas!
    The Zygon Invasion

    I swear, before I saw this people were talking about it like it was another Love and Monsters, but it's barely half a blowjob.

    A

    BSam


    B

    cargohills
    Enourmo
    Mind the Walrus


    C

    Angela Christine
    DoctorWhat
    NeuroticLich
    Paul.Power
    Xenoborg


    D

    Ajax 99
    Alkarl
    And More
    jng2058
    Lottery of Babylon
    Regy Rusty


    F

    2house2fly
    AndwhatIseeisme
    blasmeister
    Howe_sam
    Jet Jaguar
    mycelia
    onetruepurple
    Organza Quiz
    Red Metal
    ThNextGreenLantern
    Weird Sandwich



    Overall Average Guess: 1.1
    Standard Deviation: 1.2

    Current rankings:

    Weird Sandwich: 4
    And More: 5
    Jet Jaguar: 5
    Red Metal: 5
    Sinestro: 5
    Ajax 99: 6
    blasmeister: 6
    mycelia: 6
    Regy Rusty: 6
    Xenoborg: 6
    Howe_sam: 7
    jng2058: 7
    Lottery of Babylon: 7
    onetruepurple: 7
    Alkarl: 8
    AndwhatIseeisme: 8
    Enourmo: 8
    Paul.Power: 8
    ThNextGreenLantern: 8
    2house2fly: 9
    cargohills: 9
    DoctorWhat: 9
    Mind the Walrus: 9
    Organza Quiz: 9
    NeuroticLich: 11
    Angela Christine: 12
    BSam: 15


    BSam, stop pretending you aren't doing this on purpose. Anyway, Weird Sandwich hangs onto the lead, but with half a season to go, most people who are playing still have a shot at the top spot.

    BSam
    Nov 24, 2012

    idonotlikepeas posted:


    BSam, stop pretending you aren't doing this on purpose.

    Hey, if the episode deserved an A I guessed an A.

    NieR Occomata
    Jan 18, 2009

    Glory to Mankind.

    ThaGhettoJew
    Jul 4, 2003

    The world is a ghetto

    :confused: Does that reference mean you've seen Inversion or just that you're really excited about obscure Pokemonhun stuff?

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    CobiWann
    Oct 21, 2009

    Have fun!

    Toxxupation posted:

    [*] Don't insult Rory Williams you horrible fucks[/list]

    He's the bomb in Legends of Tomorrow!

    (As well as Once if anyone here is of a Broadway/West End bent)

    • Locked thread