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mind the walrus posted:Has there ever been as "quick" a turnaround on bit actors getting into major Who roles? I mean yeah we have Karen Gillian and Peter Capaldi and of course Colin Baker, but seriously Agyeman goes from one part to another literally from episode to episode. Sure there was a season break between but I still think that has to be a record.
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Sep 11, 2014 14:37
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Craptacular! posted:RTD Who with it's action-pulp comic aliens that facerush you while shouting and farting.
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Sep 30, 2014 14:47
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The Sontarans were actually pretty effective in their first couple of appearances: Linx in 'The Time Warrior' was disgusting and creepy when his face was finally revealed, as well as being gleefully ruthless (the Doctor gives him a grand speech, offering to take him back to his people/war if he'll leave the Earth in peace, and Linx's response is just to shoot him), while Styre from 'The Sontaran Experiment' was a lip-smacking sadist. After that, though, their weaknesses - being slow and lumbering, the probic vent - got played up and exaggerated until they became pantomime villains with no hope of recovery. The masks getting shoddier over time didn't help.
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Oct 17, 2014 13:42
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Plavski posted:I hate this episode. It also shows how limited rtd's imagination is. Space traveling, planet hopping humans in the far future are ignorant couples from Essex with Goth children. It's 1996 in space. It's the same thing that bugged me in Utopia: humans at the very end of time itself are just failed Mad Max extras. No imagination at all. Hell, even his human-looking aliens from 'Voyage of the Damned' were just contemporary humans with slightly silly names.
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Nov 4, 2014 22:07
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It's funny how the Daleks and the Cybermen are so similar in some ways - both are organic beings that encased themselves in metal and augmented themselves with technology - but the Daleks are iconic villains while the Cybermen are... well, a bit poo poo, as Oxx notes. It probably comes down to focus. The Cybermen have wavered between WE MUZZZT ZZZURVIIIVE desperation and "Delete! Delete! Upgrade!" cyber-zombie plodding, and always seemed somewhat pathetic at their core, to the point where even the Doctor takes the piss out of them for it. The Daleks, on the other hand, have stuck with one thing - pure, seething hatred of everything that isn't them - and been all the better for it.
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Nov 17, 2014 16:22
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The Christmas Day this aired, I was at the house of some relatives who consider Doctor Who pretty much the televisual equivalent of herpes, so obviously the TV wasn't on for it. When I got home and watched it, I was so glad of that, because the level of smug disdainful mockery would have been off the scale. I was embarrassed enough watching it on my own, never mind with other people. Even 'Time and the Rani' wasn't this loving cringe-inducing. Also: "Here's a shot of two dead people after the villain has gnawed the flesh from their bones. Merry Christmas!" Really, RTD?
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Nov 29, 2014 19:43
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MrL_JaKiri posted:The feeling I'm getting from it so far (I'm up to Queer as Folk) is that Davies fundamentally and unconditionally loves television in all of its forms
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Dec 18, 2014 23:09
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I was once in a Zizzi in Manchester having lunch with my family when my mum said in a whisper, "That's James Corden behind you!" I had no idea who James Corden was, only that he was being loud and determined to be the centre of attention. It wasn't until 'The Lodger' came around several months later that I realised. Anyway, that's my James Corden story. 
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Feb 9, 2015 00:17
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I literally could not remember a single detail about this episode, even after reading the write-ups. I know I watched it, and I recall there being pirates and a sailing ship and some sort of alien who disappeared people if they got hurt... but that was it. I even thought the guy who plays Sir Davos in Game of Thrones was the pirate captain, but nope. It was utterly forgettable. As a footnote, it didn't just swipe ideas from other, better episodes of modern Who; the concept of an alien spaceship being hidden in the same physical position as an earthly location but on a different dimensional plane came from The Stones of Blood. (Which also ended with Space Bureaucracy, in that case legal rather than medical.)
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Mar 25, 2015 12:11
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Stink Terios posted:I really didn't like Clara in this episode, I would rather have Dalek-Clara or Mary Poppins, because that would be so goddamn silly and perfect. Now this is just...
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May 28, 2015 18:23
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The Mind of Evil and Day of the Daleks both use "the Cold War is about to turn hot" as a backdrop. (UNIT kept being pulled away from its job of fighting alien invaders to act as security guards for diplomats in the Pertwee era.)
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Jun 4, 2015 07:50
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Mr Clever had the same issue as the Borg Queen in Star Trek. You have an enemy which by definition is a characterless, emotionless, monolithic mass, but that means your heroes can't engage with them on a personal level - they may as well be ants, or Starship Troopers' bugs. So you give them a "face", a leader who can trade barbs with your heroes... and by doing so, you lose the very faceless, remorseless unknowability that defined them in the first place. It didn't help that Mr Clever was an insufferable twat who exaggerated Matt Smith's weak point as an actor (when he's being so ZANY and LOLRANDOM!!!!) to the nth degree and dragged Eleven down with him.
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Jun 20, 2015 20:38
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Tom Baker isn't so much an actor who played the Doctor as the Doctor trying acting and happening to be cast as the Doctor.
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Jun 22, 2015 07:53
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mind the walrus posted:And this is where I personally stopped watching. I tried to watch the first few episodes of Twelve but despite being a cynical rear end in a top hat myself it just.... completely failed to grab me on any level, and I say that as someone who actually liked Clara a whole lot in Season Seven. It's ironic that Peter Capaldi was such a huge fan of Jon Pertwee that he had a costume (and publicity photo) specifically designed to echo him, then was given a character to play that couldn't be any further from the suave, controlled, aristocratic Three. Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 07:35 on Jun 25, 2015 |
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Jun 25, 2015 07:31
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Joining the club (is there a badge?) that thought Deep Breath was utter, excruciatingly embarrassing poo poo until the restaurant scene, as if the first half of the episode had been directed by the same guy who did Rose and went to town with the burping wheelie bin and r-r-r-robot Mickey. Not since The End Of Time Part 1 have I been so glad that I wasn't watching it with a non-fan in the room, because they would have been completely justified with any mocking "You like this crap?" comments.
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Jul 8, 2015 11:35
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And More posted:Sure, looking at an author's views and their other work can be useful. It's also very limiting because you end up creating an image of the author that colours the way you interpret their work.  (And yes, I know that TV is a collaborative process with the script filtered through actors, directors, cameramen, costumers, other writers and so on. But for solo works - novels, poetry, paintings, sculpture, etc - "what was the creator trying to say - and what are they saying without necessarily realising it?" should surely be a key question.) Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Jul 10, 2015 |
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Jul 10, 2015 12:09
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I feel kinda sorry for Capaldi, because everything I've read suggested that he desperately wanted to play the Doctor as the new Jon Pertwee, but instead he ended up having to do a less-sweary Malcolm Tucker. Actors normally get typecast as the Doctor, but he's already fixed in the public eye as his previous biggest role.
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Jul 11, 2015 18:09
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Zaggitz posted:We're already through 2 of the 3 absolute shite eps of S8. Feels good man. 
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Jul 14, 2015 12:01
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"Listen!" ... "As if a switch had been turned, as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called "Doctor" to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness! With the TARDIS, one cloud lifts, and another descends. Astronaut Orson Pink, rescued, alive, well, and of normal size, some eight thousand miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule! Then who, or what, has landed here? Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled? Case in point: The line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin! You have witnessed the line being shaved even thinner! But is the menace with us? Or is the monster gone?"
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Jul 18, 2015 22:59
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2house2fly posted:The whole time war thing is a bit nonsensical really. I mean there were clearly time lords in the 70s when the Doctor was working with both them and UNIT, but then in the new series we go back in time to the second world war, prior to the 70s, and there aren't any time lords around then? Did the Doctor retroactively kill all the time lords? Did he make it so that, say, The Three Doctors or The War Games never happened? But Russell T Davies surely wouldn't rewrite the show's history to that extent, there's people blowing up about this episode because Clara meets the Doctor for five seconds as a child!
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Jul 19, 2015 08:33
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Just throw yourself into the abyss of shoestring budget British sci-fi and review Blake's Seven It's also the show where the head of the BBC enjoyed what was intended as the final episode so much that he called the office and ordered the continuity announcer to say over the end credits that it would return for another year, which came as quite a surprise to everyone involved.
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Jul 20, 2015 22:33
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The original Lexx miniseries is oddly pretty good, in a weird and hosed-up way. (Well, the first and last episodes, but even the other two have their moments, and have Tim Curry and Rutger Hauer as bad guys.) It went balls-out to do something different from the usual Star Trek-inspired military adventures, and there's some genuinely imaginative worldbuilding to the Cluster. Plus the main characters are a snivelling perverted coward who accidentally controls the most powerful weapon in the universe, a part-lizard escaped sex slave, the lovestruck severed head of a killer robot, and a corpse. It's... unusual. (The actual series that followed was mostly garbage, though.) So, yeah. Do Lexx!
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Jul 23, 2015 20:25
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Ugh, 'The Caretaker', aka 'Doctor Who: The Sitcom'. That wacky Still not the worst episode of the season, either. Or even the second-worst. 
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Jul 25, 2015 23:48
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'Kill The Moon' is loving terrible. Not just for the stupid anti-science which made Space:1999 look like a documentary, although that became increasingly annoying as the episode went on (an extra billion tons of matter wouldn't make a flicker of difference to the moon's gravity; it is already really, really heavy), but because the Doctor decides first to recklessly endanger a child, then abandon her when he can't be arsed to deal with the current situation and fucks off in the TARDIS. Our hero! And yes, Clara does call him on it, which was the point of the episode, but by then he's been such a callous, arrogant, unpleasant shithead that he's perilously close to being irredeemable. By this stage, I disliked Twelve even more than I did Six after the same number of episodes. Not stories; episodes. Maybe the Doctor decided that everything would turn out fine because he'd already been to the moon at least twice in the future, so he could be as much of a cock as he wanted and it wouldn't matTHE MOON WAS A loving EGG! 
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Jul 30, 2015 08:31
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2house2fly posted:I'm also a bit confused by people hating this episode because the Doctor is such an rear end in a top hat in it, to the point that multiple people stopped watching altogether. Did you not see the end of the episode and think maybe they're going somewhere with this? Of course maybe you didn't watch all the way to the end. Actually, imagine how Capaldi's childhood hero the Third Doctor would have behaved compared to Twelve in the same scenario. Three would have belittled the military for being unthinkingly aggressive, rubbed his nose, been entranced by the moon-dragon-egg revelation, scratched his neck, been appalled by the prospect of blowing it up, then rolled up his frilly sleeves and negotiated some sort of solution. Twelve essentially calls everyone cunts, takes a steaming poo poo on the floor in front of them, and then leaves saying he's got better things to do with his time. Our hero! But you know, it is possible to have a redemption arc without making the character as unpleasant as Dick Cheney first.
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Jul 31, 2015 08:17
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2house2fly posted:Twelve basically did exactly that, except his solution was to peace out because this is a human thing. It's hardly as evil as Dick Cheney to tell people that they should make a world-altering decision instead of you. It could be argued that Three at first had a vested interest in saving the Earth because he was stuck there, but even after he got his freedom back he kept doing it. Based on this episode, Twelve would have gone "Humans and Draconians on the brink of war? Pfft, gently caress 'em, they've got diplomats, haven't they?" Or "Giant maggots? loving humans filthing up their own planet, let 'em stew."
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Jul 31, 2015 15:45
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Flatline was a great episode, made all the better for sounding really stupid as a premise ("Two-dimension aliens invade our universe, causing the TARDIS to shrink!") and then turning out to be genuinely creepy and unsettling. The only things wrong with it were that yep, "the Boneless" is a terrible name, and  the Class 117 diesel multiple unit seen in the episode was retired from mainline service in 2000 and was in British Railways green livery to boot.
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Aug 12, 2015 14:10
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Spatula City posted:I don't even want to talk about this episode. Toxx, you can just go ahead and write a review consisting of "gently caress THIS EPISODE". GRADE: F, and be done with it. When I rewatch this season, I will pretend this episode didn't happen. It has earned its place as one of the Worst Who Episodes of the Modern Era (I can't speak to pre-revival). It's actually quite a feat that two of the most irredeemably poo poo stories in the 50+ years since the show started are not only in the same season, but aired only three weeks apart.
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Aug 18, 2015 08:11
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I just realised that the two episodes I hated most this season both appeared to be science fiction on the surface, but beneath they were working on fairytale magic non-rules, where any old consequence-free bullshit can happen and it doesn't matter because where's your sense of child-like wonder, you miserable old bastard? "The moon is an egg of a space dragon that hatches and then lays a new moon-egg to replace it!" "Pixie-spirits protect the Earth by growing trees everywhere that ward off solar flares and then disappear!" 
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Aug 19, 2015 23:19
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thrawn527 posted:This would not be new for British Christmas specials. Downton Abbey, you assholes.  Chris Boucher sends you all a big Ho. Ho. Ho.
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Aug 25, 2015 15:24
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