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GonSmithe posted:This reminds me, Occ, you should watch Luther. It has the Best Doctor in it!
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Jan 17, 2015 18:08
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adhuin posted:It has the Best Doctor in it! Idris Elba!
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Jan 17, 2015 18:29
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Would you believe in all those pages, not a single doctor who review? So I guess occ is giving a lower grade to the second part than the first, which is the opposite of how I feel about it. The first episode is boring and introduces a ton of dumb angel poo poo. The second one all that dumb poo poo is already in play and it moves like a motherfucker.
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Jan 17, 2015 21:34
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30.5 Days posted:Would you believe in all those pages, not a single doctor who review? Don't lose hope! Toxx might have tried to give the episode a made-up bullshit grade like S or AAA and the reason prevailed thanks to oxx. EDIT: BOO! Issaries fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 21:46
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Doctor Who "Flesh and Stone" Series 5, Episode 5 "Flesh and Stone" opens right where "Time of Angels" left off. The Doctor shoots out the lights, which was in fact him reactivating the ship's artificial gravity. This caused him and the rest of the now-depleted squad to fall up to the bottom of the ship, buying them crucial time to escape The Angels. Barricading themselves inside one of the main control rooms of the ship- Angels desperately trying to force their way inside -The Doctor, River, Amy, and all the rest try and figure out what, exactly, they should do to combat the Angel menace. The Doctor quickly figures out that the control room is connected to the ship's oxygen supply, which turns out to be a forest, in a rather practical narrative solution to a firmly futuristic problem. Unfortunately, Amy- rather ominously -has spent the past several minutes inadvertently counting down from ten. The Doctor realizes that this is certainly some sort of Angel trick, so demands Angel Bob explain to him what's going on- to which Bob reveals that the Angels are inside Amy -more specifically, her eye. Unfortunately, at that exact moment all hell breaks loose, as the Angels burst through the doors at the same time that The Doctor realizes that the source of power that the Angels had been feasting on was, in fact, the crack that had been following him and Amy the whole season up to this point. The Doctor orders River, Amy, and the clerics to evacuate, but stays behind to investigate what the source of the crack is. Out in the woods, Amy falls deathly ill, still counting down. The Doctor is able to escape the Angels' clutches, and encounters a dying Amy. He quickly puzzles out that Amy, in having looked into the Angel's eyes in "Time", had allowed it into her mind- via the mental image that she formed, and the Angel is now struggling to burst through and kill/control her. He then reasons that, much like Amy stopping the Angel in the first place via shutting off the monitor that was its image source, that if Amy were to turn off her own vision source- her eyes, via shutting them -the Angel would stop attacking, at least temporarily. He instructs Amy to do so, and the Angel is held at bay- but only for as long as she keeps her eyes closed. The Doctor is then forced to make a difficult choice- keeping Amy with the group, since she's quite literally blind at the moment, would kill everyone in it, especially considering that the Angels are hunting them down through the forest. Therefore, he instructs the clerics to stay and protect Amy, and to hold off the advancing Angels, whilst he, River, and Octavian try and find a way out. Out by themselves, Octavian reveals to The Doctor that River was, in fact, a released prisoner that was earning her pardon by assisting the clerics. The Doctor, seemingly unperturbed by this revelation, figures out that the crack is a fault within pure time- and a result of an explosion that damaged all of time itself. The explosion happened sometime during Amy's lifetime, which explains why it's been hunting The Doctor and Amy down- it's following her not him. Back with Amy, the Angels are encroaching on her and her guards' location, up until a brilliant light shines through the area- after which, suddenly, all the Angels disappear, as if they're running away. The temporary leader of the clerics, Marco, sends out two of his mates- Phillip and Crispin -to investigate the light. The Doctor, as Octavian tries to find a way in to the building they found, is trying to figure out what's happening to Amy. He suddenly realizes that her lack of knowledge of key events- the Daleks prior to "Victory", the Cybermen, even down to mundane minutia like how she referred to the duck pond as a "duck pond" when there weren't any ducks is indicative of Amy's personal timeline being rewritten. On Amy's side of things, she insists on opening her eyes to look at the light- and realizes that it is, in fact, the crack in her wall, still following her around. Marco sends the now one other guard who's still with them, despite Amy's objections to simply wait for Phillip and Crispin to come back. In fact, Marco has no knowledge of either of his two squadmates he had just sent out minutes before. The Doctor realizes that time is not only being rewritten, it's being unwritten; this is how everyone forgets all the crazy nonsense near world-ending events that happened during RTD's time on the show, the CyberKing and the multiple invasions from multiple alien races or the fifteen times the Daleks showed up over a span of hundreds of years. This how everyone on Earth reacts to every single crazy cosmic event like it's the first time, because for all intents and purposes it is. Unfortunately, The Doctor's too distracted by this revelation to realize that he's in imminent danger, and Octavian ends up gripped in a death-choke by an Angel. Octavian warns The Doctor not to trust River- for she was in prison for killing a "good man" -before insisting to leave him behind. With Amy, Marco- who has completely forgotten the existence of every other guard and insists to Amy that there's only ever been the two of them- decides to go investigate the light, over Amy's nervous objections, leaving her all alone and blind, with only a communicator for company. Marco soons disappears, just like the four guards before him. The Doctor- now inside the facility with River- calls Amy over the communicator, and explains that the crack is pure time, expanding at a dangerous rate. The expansion was spurred on by the Angels, who fed on the crack for power and destabilized the whole thing, and any living thing that the time vortex touches simply ceases to exist. Not just die- they become undid, they never were in the first place. Hence why the Angels are running from it, and why Amy needs to run. The Doctor hooks up her communicator from afar to act as essentially a sonar beacon, one that pings her way home while dodging obstacles- namely a whole swarm of Angels trying desperately to run away, and will catch her if they notice she has her eyes closed. The Doctor instructs her to "walk like you could see", which nearly works until she drops her communicator and The Angels quickly catch on and almost grab hold of her before she's whisked away- River was able to get the building's teleporters working in time to bring her back. The fleeing Angels show up at the same time Amy is teleported in- the crack will keep expanding until it's fed an "incredibly complicated space-time event", like the entire army of Angels or...The Doctor himself. The Angels need him to throw himself into the crack to save everyone, including his friends. The Doctor, of course, rejects their plea mockingly and instructs River and Amy to "hold on" as the expanding time vortex swallows all of the Angels (including the one in Amy's eyes) and is subsequently sated, solving both problems simultaneously. Day saved, everyone more-or-less gets out fine. Up until now we've seen Moffat ace every script he's delivered, at least in my eyes; keeping track since the RTD years, he's, up until "Flesh and Stone", gone nine for nine on episodes, an impressive record all-told. And yet here, in "Flesh and Stone", he ends the streak. Let's find out why. Moffat is a frustrating writer to review, because as Oxx has said in "The Eleventh Hour", his failures- when he fails, are dull, authorial failures, not the ludicrous insanity that characterizes an RTD failure. Looking it at from a critic's perspective, this makes Moffat an at-times incredibly difficult writer to review; his problems aren't blatantly obvious, they aren't stunning, unbelievable failures that overwhelm the senses like RTD almost often did. The reviews I wrote during the RTD years were very easy to write, from one perspective, because many of them consisted solely of me shrugging, pointing at God Rose or Blowjob Cinderblock or Martha's Not-Roseness or farty aliens or loving Cassandra and going, "Yep, that happened" over many thousands more words than necessary. In contrast, even now, only five episodes into the first Moffat season there's so much more in here to analyze. The reviews have gotten longer, and they've taken me much longer to write, because Moffat himself works on multiple layers- not just on plot, emotion, characters, or dialog, but on the themic, the allegorical. His episodes are much more serialized than before and require addressing events that happened in previous episodes much, much more than at any real point in the Davies seasons. The analysis on a per-episode basis is more convoluted because it requires addressing so many different elements of its script, and I can say from personal experience that the summaries are much, much longer this time around because so much stuff actually happens. A common, memetic statement that Oxx and I used during the Davies years was that an episode was a "typical run-shout episode of Who"; that so much of the episode consisted of Ten and the Companion running down hallways yelling about the antagonist. Here, in the Moffat years, there certainly is running and shouting, but it's all purposeful; the plot is still happening around Eleven and Amy and whoever else is coming along. The seconds in a Moffat statement don't feel wasted; they don't feel boring, Moffat desperately doesn't want to have the audience's time wasted just as much as they don't want to have their time wasted. Basically, a typical Moffat script is just full of attention and care to all aspects of the production in a way that Davies' never was. Moffat's episodes are difficult to review because there's so many elements, important elements, to focus on; it's hard to focus these reviews in a way that matters without feeling disingenuous from having left an element out. Moffat attacks an episode from all sides and focuses the script to service all aspects of whatever story he wants to tell. So this is where it becomes difficult for one to critically review Moffat's work. His episodes are so overstuffed with themes, ideas, allegories, and a focus and attention to detail- a typical Moffat script has more plot and development than any three RTD scripts combined -that the fact that some specific scenes or plot elements or plot progression don't work feels almost nitpicky. There's so much that works in a typical Moffat script, and so much else that works in a typical Moffat script, that in totality it's still far, far better than almost all of what came before it. It has more than enough good parts to blow all but the absolute best of Davies' work out of the water. But there's still major problems with "Flesh and Stone". Many of its plot elements just don't work or don't make much sense- I watched this episode with Oxxidation and he had to literally explain to me what, ultimately, occurred during the climax; I was under the mistaken impression that The Doctor had prevented the events of the two-parter from having ever happened, so Octavian and all the rest were magically resurrected and the ship never crashed, hence why River and Amy and The Doctor were outside on the beach during the denouement. I didn't get the "duck pond" analogy until he explained it to me; it was just a confusing non sequitur until he explained how it's reflective of the concept of "footprints" an object leaves in time despite disappearing entirely- just like how Amy's parents, despite ceasing to exist, still had Amy. The "walk like you could see" scene is almost entirely a failure; it took Oxxidation to point it out to me, because in the moment it still mostly worked. Even in the moment, though, I had major problems with how the scene was executed immersion-wise; Amy is instructed by The Doctor to "walk like you could see", which consists of her stutter-stepping, her gait unnaturally and extremely stilted and short. A common real-world tactic to not being recognized, to "blend in" to a crowd is to change your gait, because the motion of how a body moves is how the human brain initially recognizes a human it's searching for. The way one walks is so distinct from how anyone else does that even minor changes to the way one moves- slouched, upright, head up or down, legnth of stride, extension of legs, movement of the arms, etc etc- can make one stand out or blend in far better than a ridiculous costume or well-done disguise. So to have Amy move so distinctly slowly and unnaturally from how she normally could have made that scene generally confusing- I thought The Doctor's "walk like you could see" advice was meant to be metaphorical or something, since Amy was, in no way, "walking like she could see". It's a minor complaint- Amy not actually walking like she could see -that generally confused the whole scene, since it was so dissonant from its aims that the viewer assumes the advice is meant to be more allegorical than it was- some sort of koan or something. The second major issue with the "walk like you could see" scene is that it shows the Angels moving. This, admittedly, needed to be pointed out to me by Oxx himself before I even noticed it, but showing the Angels moving cheapened their characters, since it implies that they could just turn their heads and look around the entire time everyone's eyes were closed and just neglected to do so. For what reason? Idiocy? Laziness? Either way, The Angels come off looking dumb, especially when one rolls in the fact that Amy was so obviously walking around blind, since aforementioned her gait was so weird. I guess it literally took her making a ruckus scrabbling around in the dirt blindly for the Angels to realize that she couldn't see, over the fact that she was moving really oddly and very-nearly-but-not-quite bumping into everything on her way through the fleeing Angels. And then finally, we get to the post-denoument scene with Amy desperately trying to seduce The Doctor before he realizes that the date the crack occurs is literally the date of Amy's wedding, and thus she's central to the crack getting fixed. It's a scene that's completely tonally dissonant from what came before and so badly and poorly explained- just shoved right into the end -that none of it makes any real sense. I thought Amy's desperate seduction was reflective of the crack going near-critical or something (especially since it coincides with The Doctor's realization that the date the crack occurs is Amy's wedding) and making her genuinely go loopy or get possessed; in other words, it was Amy acting irrationally because she was forced to and that's why The Doctor is so keen on getting her fixed. It took Oxxidation, again, explaining what was happening and linking the post-credits secret video on YouTube to me to make the episode's final scene make even a modicum of sense in a way that didn't feel like it was overtly selling out Amy's character to make a weird joke, although I could objectively speaking admire Moffat's decision to address the sexual tension head-on, and have The Doctor reject Amy's advances, over RTD-patented will-they-won't-they for an entire season. The post-credits scene lays much of the blame at The Doctor's feet, as well, like it should, so the final scene gets retroactively turned into a bit where Amy gets a little desperate and weird over The Doctor's mixed signals and decides to take matters into her own hands instead of being a bizarre sexpot seductress. It's still a somewhat awkward and maybe a little bit troubling scene- although Moffat had the good sense of the episode treating it as bizarre and highly uncomfortable instead of super loving hot maaaaaaaaaaaaaan -but the YouTube scene fixes almost all the problems I had with it both in the sense of as a scene for both characters' arcs and as a scene that's potentially somewhat misogynist. The problem, of course, is that it's a bonus material scene in the first place- despite being, honestly, integral to the episode as a whole and how it ends, both as commentary and as a hour that works as progression to a larger, seasonal narrative. It should've never been cut in the first place- and I don't know why it was, since the episode is 41 minutes long and the extra scene is almost four minutes long, with most episodes of Who before now being 45 minutes long -and it's hard not to ding the episode for cutting out such an important scene that explains the confusing and tonally dissonant ending so satisfactorily. The Moffat years of Doctor Who are still episodes of Doctor Who, even though they barely resemble what was going on under Davies' reign. Giving "Flesh and Stone" a B, in isolation as a commentary on the failures of the episode- which were fairly severe -is, in and of itself, fine. The problem is when that decision is meant to reflect the larger views of Who as a whole; what most people don't realize when they look at episode grades is that the grades themselves are meant to be reflective of other episodes of the show in question; a B grade for an episode of Doctor Who is not the same thing as, say, a B grade for an episode of The Sopranos, because one is an oft-times terrible sci-fi kids tv show and the other is inarguably one of the greatest television shows the medium has produced. If I were to grade my favorite tv show, Breaking Bad, on Doctor Who's scale, which would be inherently disingenuous, nearly every episode of the show would get an A besides my two most-hated episodes of the show, "ABQ" (the season two finale) and "Fly", which the former would still probably get an A and the latter would get a B, simply because even at its absolute worst, its least well-executed or, in my opinion, its most self-indulgent and unnecessary (in the case of "Fly"), it's still better than 99% of all episodes of Who. And that's the problem, right. Moffat's Doctor Who is so different from RTD's Doctor Who that giving it low grades feels dishonest in a way, because even here, with all of the problems I listed, it's so difficult for me to say that this episode is qualitatively equivalent to, say, "Gridlock". And I love "Gridlock", but it's a messy as hell episode of television that doesn't even try to work on the levels that "Flesh and Stone" mostly does. There's so many more things that "Flesh and Stone" does right on every level that giving it the same grade as "Gridlock" feels...wrong, in a sense. The dialog remains incredible, and there's so many more things that Moffat does right. I hated Davies, and I still kinda hate Davies, for pulling the poo poo he did in "Boom Town" (and then doing so over and over and over and over again, until it became rote, almost a signature of the man) where he sells out and disrespects the audience and the stakes that he raised in order to reset everything back to normal. It became impossible to become invested with his plots, especially speaking in a meta-narrative sense because of how often he'd just push the reset button on everything and have the citizens of London be totally shocked that the Daleks were invading!!! Here, Moffat respects the audience. Sure the episode was confusing, very confusing, but it was bursting with ideas about time and The Doctor et al's relationship to it that feels so much more sophisticated than anything Davies tried. The fact that it has plot holes is mostly because it actually has a plot to speak of; you can't fail if you don't try, and here Moffat really, really tries. And there's the fact that he attempts to explain away all of Davies' dumb reset bullshit in a way that makes sense; the revelation that all humans forget the events that happen to them unless they're time travellers still contains some holes in it but it's so much of a better explanation- namely, it's an explanation at loving all -than ANYTHING the audience was given during RTD's reign, and reinforces the interpretation of time and how it works that Moffat presents that I can't help but feel wowed by it. It's a little thing, but it really isn't- so much of the parts I appreciated when RTD was showrunner felt like it was in opposition to his intentions, and here it's Moffat caring about and respecting the audience- respecting me, respecting my time, wanting to entertain. And it's that intention that translates into this episode, is what makes it as good as it is. Finally, and most importantly, though, is Smith's acting this episode, which is absolutely incredible from beginning to end. I knew he was a fabulous physical actor in the four episodes preceding "Flesh and Stone", but Matt's acting in "Flesh and Stone", whether it's The Doctor's scene with Amy in the woods, his generally harried attitude for the majority of the episode, his explosive anger when River points out how the sonar beacon almost surely won't work- "WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU GOT?! RIVER! TELL ME!" -it's all incredible. Most notably, however, is his little scene with Iain Glen during Octavian's death- Matt Smith keeps a tear in his eye for the entirety of it, and it's such a powerful and emotionally resonant sequence that it almost made me choke up, while being utterly stunned by how deft and powerful, but still subtle, Matt Smith's performance during it was. The scene with Octavian called back the very best moments of Eccleston's Doctor during Series One, which is something I thought I'd never say with any other actor that would follow Christopher. And one can't neglect the climax of the episode, where Matt gives another patented Eleven smug monologue at the enemies he's outsmarted, which remain as incredible as ever: "Thing is, Bob, the Angels are draining all the power from this ship, every last bit of it. And you know what? I think they've forgotten where they're standing. I think they've forgotten the gravity, of the situation. Or, to put it another way, Angels...Night-night." Way back in Series One, I had to spend the majority of the review for "Father's Day" convincing myself that an RTD episode of Who deserves an A. Here, I have to spend the majority of "Flesh and Stone" convincing myself that a Moffat-penned episode of Who deserves a B, which to me states something essential about the relative qualities of both writers. Grade: B Random Thoughts:
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Jan 17, 2015 21:57
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Having the Angels move on camera also ruins the incredible subtext that the viewer was an active participant in their horror. It's distancing and just an unbelievably poor creative decision. Edit: also, "Fly" is the best episode of Breaking Bad. *waves and literally flies away* Glenn_Beckett fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 22:06
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I forgot about the Angels moving on camera. That was pretty bad.
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Jan 17, 2015 22:12
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I forgot about Amy's subconscious countdown... so creepy.
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Jan 17, 2015 22:14
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The Angels moving is such a dreadful idea that I wouldn't have been surprised if you'd docked it an entire grade on the spot just for that. Christ, it looks and sounds so bad.
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Jan 17, 2015 22:15
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Glenn_Beckett posted:Edit: also, "Fly" is the best episode of Breaking Bad. *waves and literally flies away* Please don't get him started.
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Jan 17, 2015 22:17
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I agree with most of the review except I will say, even on first viewing and without any extra material, I really liked the ending sequence between Amy and the Doctor. The relationship with Amy felt like it was moving toward being another Rose/Ten situation (with poor Rorie playing Mickey), except extra-creepy given the Doctor's involvement in Amy's childhood and the fact that Amy has been hiding her pending wedding from him. I didn't think it was tonally dissonant -- Amy had just been through a near-death experience, which can make people want to go ahead and do things they've been putting off, and with the wedding happening, well, if she was going to make a move, this would be the chance. And she isn't characterized as the type to just follow someone around making puppy-dog eyes for too long. So, when the Doctor reacts with complete incomprehension at what she's trying to do, followed by horror, it was a relief for me. Partially fueled by how sick I was of Ten and Rose pining for each other by the end of RTD's run. Eleven making a sharp and explicit left turn away from that made me happy. And they managed to do it a way, as Oxx said, where's its played for awkwardness and a little bit of humor instead of anything else: this could have been oversexualized and it also could have been a cruel rejection of Amy, but instead it snaps right along, with the Doctor realizing something and hustling himself and Amy (along with the audience) right out of the scene.
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Jan 17, 2015 22:37
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DoctorWhat posted:I GOT MONHUN CODES FYI, the third code has also been snagged, not by me but I just tried it and it failed.
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Jan 17, 2015 22:40
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Dabir posted:The Angels moving is such a dreadful idea that I wouldn't have been surprised if you'd docked it an entire grade on the spot just for that. Christ, it looks and sounds so bad. In a way, though, it makes creative sense. The instinct is to keep escalating the horror of a monster. It's hard to bring a monster back and hit the exact same notes as before and expect it to be as scary. So what's the first thing that comes to mind to make the creature that never moves scary? See it move. And it starts off okay, with that initial shock of seeing them slowly move for the first time and realize they actually are living creatures. But then you realize how stupid it is they didn't know Amy couldn't see. They don't just voluntarily stop moving when someone's looking at them. The idea is they literally can't move when seen, that their entire biology changes when seen. So it makes no sense that they'd stop moving out of instinct.
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Jan 17, 2015 22:40
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Toxxupation posted:It sorta would've been something like one of those old-time sort of audioplays or something, which I think would've been a really interesting interpretation for Doctor Who and one I would've really liked to have seen explored, at least temporarily. You say you'd like to see Doctor Who audioplays explored, eh??? *locks the doors, calls DoctorWhat*
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Jan 17, 2015 22:51
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Toxxupation posted:-but the YouTube scene fixes almost all the problems I had with it both in the sense of as a scene for both characters' arcs and as a scene that's potentially somewhat misogynist. The problem, of course, is that it's a bonus material scene in the first place- despite being, honestly, integral to the episode as a whole and how it ends, both as commentary and as a hour that works as progression to a larger, seasonal narrative. It should've never been cut in the first place- and I don't know why it was, since the episode is 41 minutes long and the extra scene is almost four minutes long, with most episodes of Who before now being 45 minutes long -and it's hard not to ding the episode for cutting out such an important scene that explains the confusing and tonally dissonant ending so satisfactorily. I wouldn't consider that scene essential at all. It is nice to view for fanboys like us, but it contained mostly empty calories. Everything important discussed was already dealt within Amy's Bedroom-scene. the Final scene had a good tempo a with purposeful exit leading to a "next time"-segment.
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Jan 17, 2015 23:04
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Glenn_Beckett posted:If it's for the same reason I hate the episode, then I will forgive you for again murdering my points. You're an idiot.
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Jan 17, 2015 23:06
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Quantum lock can be psychosomatic, who says it can't. Upon rewatching the climax and ending is a bit sloppy- they skip to outside on the beach to avoid having to show how the characters got out of the control room where they were hanging from railings over a certain death drop and then got down from the top of the ship, the final conversation with River is a bit too heavy on foreshadowing and Alex Kingston's bad laughing, and it's not entirely clear what the situation is at the end either- based on the soldiers' reactions when the others got erased I assume whoever authorised River to go deal with the angel still remembers doing that but now sent her alone or something? It'd be hard to make it all clearer without adding a bunch of dialogue and screwing with the pacing though. That might be why that extra scene was cut as well. Edit: I still think the whole two-parter is completely magical however 2house2fly fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 23:08
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I agree so much with the love for Moffat really sitting down and trying to make the rickety world that came before make narrative sense. The way the ~ominous crack~ took a direct turn away from being the dull, RTD-style 'thing that shows up but means gently caress all until the season finale' and both played an important role in this episode and actually advanced the season story arc in a new and interesting way meant a lot to me. There are lots of other nice concepts in the episode- the idea of being unwritten from time itself is a scary one, and the solution of turning off the gravity was nicely set up at the start of the episode. The blind walking scene was bad, and I like the idea presented of solving all of its problems by having the scene done in sound only. What could have been... When I predicted grades for this two parter I think my distaste for the moving Angels bled over into my C grade for part 1, I ended up giving part 2 a B grade for the acting and clever ideas in the later scenes. after a rewatch, I think I'd give both parts a solid B+. Blasmeister fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 23:08
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Oxxidation posted:You're an idiot. Funnily, I remembered that I don't actually even hate this episode, just the Angels in motion on camera.
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Jan 17, 2015 23:15
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Toxxupation posted:Out in the woods, Amy falls deathly ill, still counting down. The Doctor is able to escape the Angels' clutches, and encounters a dying Amy. He quickly puzzles out that Amy, in having looked into the Angel's eyes in "Time", had allowed it into her mind- via the mental image that she formed, and the Angel is now struggling to burst through and kill/control her. I hinted at it during The Eleventh Hour and got some bad feedback for it, but I feel comfortable at this episode saying that you must now have noticed the Moffatt tries to end nearly every episode with this long, drawn-out Matt Smith monologue to an empty room, a green screen, or a bunch of props placed in front of him. Only The Beast Below lacked one, this two parter had TWO. They've been pretty impressive speeches to this point, but babbling a bunch of taunts to a room that's absolutely crowded with frozen statues was the point where it went from fist-pumping to "yeah, this is a thing now, I guess." Something I forgot to mention from the past episode, I think people getting mad at River Song already aren't really looking at these episodes in the bubble they should, and are letting other reasons get in the way. River is presented as unafraid and bloviating only because she has a history book telling her how everything went down. In "Time of Angels", when the ship she was chasing crashes into the planet, she remarked that it should have made a proper landing. And of course when every stone person turns out to be a starving weeping angel, she's as terrified as everyone else because now the script has completely departed from her journal of the past and any kind of poo poo is liable to go down. quote:It took Oxxidation, again, explaining what was happening and linking the post-credits secret video on YouTube to me
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Jan 17, 2015 23:38
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I really do shake my head whenever the Doctor is presented as overtly sexual because he always works best as vaguely asexual due to being a billion gently caress ton years older than everyone else. I say vaguely because obviously the Doctor IS sexual, or was once upon a time- he's had children and raised grandchildren after all. But one of my favorite lines from any Doctor is from the fourth, "You're a beautiful woman, probably." Such an understated way to get across that the Doctor doesn't really care much about romance or looks anymore. It's one reason why Donna was such a breath of fresh air and why this episode made me frown. I feared we were going to be getting some annoying bullshit with the Doctor and romance again. Thank yo ufor kicking that out Doctor
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Jan 17, 2015 23:41
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Craptacular! posted:I don't think I've ever seen this (I caught up via a Netflix binge.) Link? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xjAuTAq7P4 name of the video mentions the name of the next episode, so be warned.
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Jan 17, 2015 23:44
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I actually really dig the moment the Angels move because it looks creepy as hell, but yes I do think that this creepy visual pretty much trumped all other considerations in Moffat's mind, and it is something that really makes no sense, especially given how painfully obvious it is that Amy can't see and is stumbling about blind as a bat. I absolutely love the Doctor's reaction to her attempts to seduce him at the end, his grumpy and slightly accusatory,"You were a little girl!  " is just hilarious. It was sad to see yet ANOTHER companion going down the,"I wanna get it on with the Doctor" route but at least they addressed it early, made it clear the Doctor wasn't interested, and at the end of the episode it was seemingly leading somewhere narratively.The moment when the Doctor realizes the Crack is directly behind him is fantastic, and so much better than the clumsy little appearance it made in The Beast Below. I also love how the Angels effectively worship it, both visually and in terms of their belief it will give them power beyond anything they've ever known. That they then turn to the Doctor and, through Angel Bob, insist that he save them goes to show how little they understand him, or indeed the very deliberate religious imagery/concepts introduced throughout the episode. The Doctor as messiah is something RTD hammered home with his usual subtlety during his era, and here we see the Angels making the mistake of assuming messianic salvation through sacrifice is the function of the Doctor, that he is as powerless to prevent himself from saving others as they themselves are not to eat time - the Doctor mocks them, saves Amy and River, and they die because of their own hubris, like so many other villains before them they reached for unlimited power and had it blow up in their faces - they flew too close to the "sun" on wings of stone.
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Jan 17, 2015 23:52
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adhuin posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xjAuTAq7P4 Heh, the comments. quote:It is insulting to Rose that he said they were all just friends. quote:YOU LIE DOCTOR. THEY WERE NOT JUST PALS AND MATES. *Points to Rose Tyler*
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Jan 17, 2015 23:57
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I'd not seen the extra bit before, I don't know how I missed it. It's nice but its not necessary. I can see why I've made mistakes grading these episodes, I'm coming from better knowledge of Moffat and Oxx is still in honeymoon mode. When Moffat is good, it grabs you. When he isn't, it's meh.
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Jan 18, 2015 00:02
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So I take it that nobody's got a perfect score now, right~?
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Jan 18, 2015 00:04
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Lycus posted:Heh, the comments. A stark reminder that there are people out there who really did buy into RTD's Rose/Ten nonsense.
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Jan 18, 2015 00:05
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I think not being able to see them move does so much to sell the angels to the audience that dropping that conceit really hurts the concept. The angels are a fun twist on a more traditional stalking and killing kind of monster, but giving the viewer the same limitation as the characters being stalked is what really forces the viewer to engage with what makes it scary and different. That scene really bothered me.
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Jan 18, 2015 00:15
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Grouchio posted:So I take it that nobody's got a perfect score now, right~? I hope not, I guessed this one right so I know I'm still on one point.
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Jan 18, 2015 00:19
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Doctor Who "Flesh and Stone" Series 5, Episode 5 I had to think about this episode. That's new! Haven't had to think about one of these yet. Usually I just glop 1500 or so words around a handful of supremely witty observations and call it a day. Well, off we go. "Flesh and Stone" highlights one more difference between Davies and Moffat - whereas Davies' pacing often came off as meandering and disjointed, especially in his more extravagant episodes (see: End of Time Part 1, home of the Silver Brigade and the teleport-cut to the Generic Scrapyard of Regret), Moffat is an absolutely merciless editor of his scripts, paring away every unnecessary beat or development in order to cram his story into the allotted 45 minutes. Characters are almost always in action, dialogue is gatling-gun rapid, and plot points zoom by so fast that spacing out for a few minutes is enough to miss crucial points. It made mine and Occ's usual riffing session sort of a pain in the rear end, because by the time I'd finished a hilarious one-liner the script had already moved through three jokes, one monologue, and a Matt Smith soft-shoe routine. While Moffat's caffeinated pacing tends to hold viewer interest better than Davies', it has weaknesses of its own. Episodes sometimes feel unnatural in how hyperactive everyone's speech patterns can be, like they're all stuck in chipmunk-voiced fast-forward, and more importantly, the way scripts skate over certain plot developments means that you can buy them in the moment, but when you look back on them afterward, crack show. Sometimes small cracks. Sometimes cracks large enough to CONSUME TIME AND SPACE ITSELF wait no those cracks are an actual thing, never mind those cracks. Actually no, let's talk about those cracks. As a long-time Homestuck veteran, I have mastered the subtleties of bullshit fakey-fake time travel to a degree unfathomable by more well-adjusted people, but I had to sit back and puzzle for a few minutes over exactly how the time cracks running through Series 5 actually work. The Doctor puts it succinctly enough - through those cracks, "time is running out." The cracks are wounds in spacetime created by some cosmic explosion, and the warped "time energy" spilling out from them does some seriously bad juju to anything consumed by it; anything eaten by the cracks' light isn't just destroyed in space but also in time, as their unraveling extends to their entire personal timeline. This not only makes them extraordinarily dead, but also erases their existence from the memories of anyone who experiences time linearly, i.e., non-time travelers. The destruction isn't complete, though, leaving some impression that screws with the perspectives of people in certain circumstances, as told through the "duck pond" metaphor. The ducks were taken by the crack, so the pond should just be a pond. However, the impression of the ducks remains, so everyone still thinks of it as a duck pond, even though there were never any ducks. Kind of like how Amelia didn't have a mom and dad- uh ohhhhhh The way the cracks work was clearly planned out by Moffat and makes some degree of sense, but the jumpy way the end of this episode was cut contradicts his intent. We don't know how the Doctor got everyone off the suddenly-vertical ship, or how River's situation changed with the erasure of Octavian and his group; in fact, because we go straight from the Angels' erasure to chilling out on the beach, plus the Doctor telling Amy that the Angeli in her eye never existed as a result of the crack, the viewer's initial impression could very well be that the whole episode never happened, as Occ originally thought. Except that, if that's how the time cracks worked, then the original Angel's destruction would have meant the Byzantium never crashed and whole fracas with River never would have happened. Or better yet, it meant Amy never would have existed, since it's all but stated now that her parents investigated the cracks a little too closely and left her orphaned without ever knowing why. And if the ducks never existed, why would a duck pond remain? No need to ever dig a duck pond if there weren't any ducks! I hate time travel, I hate time travel, I hate time travel. Moffat's tendency to leave a certain amount of cognitive work up to the audience can help or hinder him, although, if the audience consists of a handful of angry Internet nerds who have fewer friends than kidneys and analyze/bicker over the episodes for weeks on end, the discussion tends to turn sour fast. The Angels caused a whole lot of trouble for themselves by ripping open the time crack wider to slurp up the delicious time-juice inside, and likewise, the constant eyeballing of Moffat's plot holes tends to open them wider, and wider, until they threaten to consume his entire oeuvre. It also doesn't help that the man occasionally enjoys scribbling out something just for the sake of it being kickin' rad at the time without giving much consideration to how it affects plot developments past or future, as with the "moving Angels" scene. It works in the moment - the Angels slowly grinding their heads and limbs towards the terrified Amy as she scrabbles for the now-useless communicator is tense as hell - but all of Occ's points against it were ones I supplied to him, and I think they're all valid. The moving Angels was a good little bit of horror, but it also makes the Angels look borderline mental-deficient, ruins the meta aspect of their power (that the Angels can never move if they're seen, including by the audience), and worst of all, was totally gratuitous. There were a dozen different ways that Amy's lethal game of Blind Man's Bluff could have been shot that wouldn't cause such a hubbub, but, well, this is what we got and now we've got to deal with it. Though I didn't mind Occ's last negative point, i.e., Amy's snog session with the Doctor. Amy is exhausted, she's relieved, she just had her rear end saved for the sixth or seventh time by her dashing not-imaginary friend, and she knows more than ever now that life is short, so her response is to grab the Doctor by the lapels and go, "KISS ME, YOU FOOL." After the endless doe-eyes sessions we endured with Rose and Martha, a Companion who's attracted to the Doctor and decides to just nail him to a wall and put her face on his face until those feelings get out of her system is a breath of fresh air, and the Doctor's initial cluelessness followed by abject horror keep the scene from being skeevy; he even makes several arguments that we should have heard four seasons ago ("I'm 907!"). Amy's offhand responses ("Ohh, you are sweet, Doctor, but I wasn't really suggesting anything quite so long-term") helps her character, as well, since she clearly doesn't have any fantasies about spending all her days with the magic yelling space-man as some of her predecessors did; this is a fling, she earned it, and the fact that she's getting married in twelve hours is a mere technicality thanks to time travel. The Doctor's immediate decision to just run off and fetch her husband might be the most grown-up thing he's done all series, and shows that he really doesn't want to go through the Rose poo poo again. Right there with you, spaceman. "Flesh and Stone" is dragged down by weaknesses, but Moffat's crazy-compressed editing means that even his weaker episodes contain a grab bag of enjoyable bits that smoothly carry you from title to credits. Amy's little countdown, fairly subtle at first then getting, well, less so at the end (Occ was right, those screeching violins were really obnoxious, though I liked how they were the same sting that played whenever an Angel got closer to someone) was an excellent, creepy little plot development, and the stone-jawed competence of Octavian's clerics elevated them about the usual cannon-fodder we saw in other episodes like, say, the last one. To their credit, the "vague walkie-talkie bait" trick can really only work twice. The forest in the spaceship is a cool, unorthodox bit of sci-fi that helped differentiate the episodes' environment from the usual gray corridors, though they're not tree-borgs, they're cy-trees, "borg" means organic and god drat it you are calling them tree-trees. Moffat's son pointed this out to him, originally. He sent him to his room. Then there's Smith again, who turns in his best performance yet despite it being technically just his second. "Flesh and Stone" shows the Angels finally succeeding in agitating the Doctor, and while it backfired on them horribly it does wonderfully illustrate what I said before about Eleven's emotional stability. Just look at that scene in the woods where Amy reaches the end of her countdown and River reads her biometrics - the Doctor's clearly stressed out, but never raises his voice and instead just goes off into high-speed stream-of-consciousness babbling ("Yes, you're right. If we lie to her, she'll get all better. Amy. Amy. Amy. What's the matter with Amelia? Something's in her eye, what does that mean?" Doctor." "Busy." "Scared!" 'course you're scared, you're dying. Shut up."). He's desperate enough to contact Angel Bob for information, and when Bob matter-of-factly says that they're just making her count down for shits and giggles, Eleven's expression freezes for a second before he just snarls and hurls the communicator into a tree. All while River, her original composure now totally gone, tries to comfort the flatlining Amy by saying that the Doctor's not being an rear end in a top hat, this is just his problem-solving process. It's a really great scene. Smith is also the one thing keeping Amy's little blind encounter with the Angels from becoming totally farcical, as his body language and tone clearly put across that the Doctor knows this is a horrible plan with no evidence of working - the way he finally loses his poo poo at River for vocalizing that fact is just the cherry on top. Then there's the Octavian scene that Occ mentioned, or his little hand gestures while working out the mechanics of the time crack. Smith is just so good, you guys. He's so good. Like I said in my first writeup of the season, Moffat's habit of playing out long-running and foreshadowing-laden plot arcs is an ambitious and impressive one, but every little plot misstep he makes becomes ten times worse as a consequence. Davies never would have prompted a subject like this, because Davies' scripts were a tire fire anyway and neither Occ nor I would have expected better. But we get one or two script boo-boo's in "Flesh and Stone," and they've been under the microscope to this day. I still think that, in a backhanded way, this is a credit to the relative strength of Moffat's scripts - as has been stated in this thread, you can't have plot holes without a plot - but it sometimes gives the impression that Moffat is barely holding on to control of his own story, trying to keep it from shaking apart from time-bullshit before it reaches its conclusion. Despite all that, though, the strength of his scripts shines through elsewhere, sometimes enough to distract from the more questionable bits. "Flesh and Stone" made me think way too loving hard about time travel and reduced the Weeping Angels to a gang of egomaniacal hungry statuary too stupid to remember how to turn their heads, but was still an enjoyable little romp despite that. Let's hope for better in the future. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 00:20
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adhuin posted:It has the Best Doctor in it! I agree, Ruth Wilson would be the Best Doctor.
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Jan 18, 2015 00:48
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I really liked Smith's upset acting in this. He yelled in the Star whale episode and he yelled at the Daleks, but he was pretty much just mad. Here he's scared and doesn't know what to do and it really works well with the atmosphere of tension and dread. It was unsettling to see him break when he's contemplating throwing himself in the crack ("feeding it a complicated space-time event will shut it up" "like what for instance?" "LIKE ME. FOR. INSTANCE.") or when he can't come up with a good speech to motivate Amy to walk blind through the forest (RTD's first series had Bad Wolf, Moffat's has Little Red Riding Hood) so he just keeps yelling at her that she has to do it.
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Jan 18, 2015 01:00
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Grouchio posted:So I take it that nobody's got a perfect score now, right~? I'm going to be trying to wait at least a day or so before posting my bits, I've noticed when i haven't been able to post straight away the tempo of discussion in the thread seems better.
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Jan 18, 2015 01:05
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Little_wh0re posted:posting my bits I think you can get banned for that  .
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Jan 18, 2015 01:29
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Toxxupation posted:[*] The music in this episode is really overbearing and honestly kind of awful, especially during the first fifteen minutes. I am not a sound person, so I may have reproduced the explanation wrong. I will say that since I got a sound bar -- no doubt most goons already had 5.1 sound -- I find it easier to pick out Who dialogue through the BOMBASTIC MURRAY GOLD SCORE.
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Jan 18, 2015 01:47
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Wasn't the walking blind bit and looking stupid explained in a line to the effect of, "the angels are scared and running away so they won't be paying attention to you." That was enough for me. I've forgiven this show worse.
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Jan 18, 2015 01:51
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ewe2 posted:I'd not seen the extra bit before, I don't know how I missed it. It's nice but its not necessary. I can see why I've made mistakes grading these episodes, I'm coming from better knowledge of Moffat and Oxx is still in honeymoon mode. When Moffat is good, it grabs you. When he isn't, it's meh. It does feature possibly my favourite single Doctor moment in the revival. (Maybe in the series, period.) The part where he just blurts out why he needs a companion. "Because I can't SEE it anymore!"
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Jan 18, 2015 01:51
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The moving angel scene is a bad narrative choice for two reasons: 1) As mentioned, we've never seen the Angels move before now, even when they potentially could have. This connects with an unspoken implication that the camera 'eye' is one of the many that the Angels become stone in front of. It includes the audience as a member of the horror story. So to have the Angel move on camera straightens this blurred line and makes them less scary. 2) It creates the impression that the 'quantum lock' or however Ten describes it that keeps the Angels frozen (as a defense mechanism) is not so much a perfect absolute physics thing and more a biological function. Which is bad, because now it relies on the biological organism somehow being able to 'know' all the time when it's being watched, and this gets messy. Plus: 2house2fly posted:Quantum lock can be psychosomatic, who says it can't. If the quantum lock is psychosomatic, if the Angels can 'override' it by force of will, then it totally ruins the ending of Blink, because if the Angels only lock up as a defense mechanism that they can override, not as an absolute thing, then they can just 'relax' after Sparrow and her boyfriend leave the basement. Oxxidation posted:how River's situation changed with the erasure of Octavian and his group Minor correction: Octavian died via neck snap (and the noise we heard was brutal), rather than erasure, as did a couple of his men, including Bob. So Octavian's commanding officer probably remembers that River went down to the planet with Octavian and his men (just, for no clear reason, a critically understaffed group).
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Jan 18, 2015 01:53
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I don't mind the least scene mainly because it's already been established that Amy is an incredibly impulsive character. She'll throw herself into doing something dramatic just to be doing something. Lock the man saving the world into a car door. Free the star whale on the spur of a moment. Combine that with the fact that the Doctor's been a looming, psychologically destructive presence her entire life, that she's suffering weeks worth of night-before-my-wedding jitters and guilt at running away, and she just had a major near-death situation, and kablam.
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Jan 18, 2015 01:54
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I am not a sound person, so I may have reproduced the explanation wrong. I will say that since I got a sound bar -- no doubt most goons already had 5.1 sound -- I find it easier to pick out Who dialogue through the BOMBASTIC MURRAY GOLD SCORE. This was the basics of it, yes, though it was done exceptionally badly on Jamaica Inn and a lot of people got in trouble for it. I've no idea if they fixed the mix for the DVD's (I don't know where mine is to check) but by then the damage was done and the entire drama was very negatively regarded.
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Jan 18, 2015 02:01
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