T/Oxx's Reviews- This isn't fair. You've turned me onto Who.

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > T/Oxx's Reviews- This isn't fair. You've turned me onto Who.

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

I'm a big fan of Doctor Who, but over the years it veered wildly between very good and pretty bad. William Hartnell, Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy were mostly great, Peter Davison and Colin Baker were OK, and Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee were bad. But NuWho is awful. Just terrible in every way. And the first episode is a pretty good indicator of what the entire rest of the series will be like.

A few specific things that I noticed when watching this episode originally.

Autons. They were dumb the first time, they brought them back a second time and they were still dumb, then they decided to use them as the first antagonist for the new series. Why?
Originally it was a special plastic the Nestene consciousness had made, not just ordinary human-made plastic dummies. Still dumb, but at least an attempt was made to make sense.
The plot can be summed up in about three sentences, and yet it feels rushed. How do you even manage that?
The best Doctor Who companions were the ones who brought something to the table, who actually contributed. Leela, Ian, the brigadier, Romana. Rose, on the other hand, has no discernible skills or talents and is practically braindead.
The time war. I know not much has been said about it yet, but god, it is the worst.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2014 06:13

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 13:23

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Bicyclops posted:

Hey man, just a suggestion: if you ever need to get the sour taste of the show out of your mouth, try watching one the old serials from the Colin Baker years with the most acclaim: The Twin Dilemma. I gather that you're something of a feminist, so you'll particularly like the way that the Doctor interacts with his young woman companion in the first episode.

If you want to watch one of the old serials that's actually good, Genesis of the Daleks is my recommendation, if you can get past how ridiculous the Daleks look and you have the patience for it, because the show was a lot slower back then.

Oxxidation posted:

I made it clear to Occ at the start that the screwdriver is basically a magic space wand. If he tried to keep a running count of Problems Screwdriver'd he'd run out of conventional numbers before series 3.

What I really hate about the sonic screwdriver in NuWho, is that it should never have been brought back. It was actually written out of the show in one of the Peter Davison episodes because it was too convenient and did too much. Also, why does it have a blue light on it now?

# ¿ Jul 30, 2014 05:18

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Two things:

Why are all the Time Lords dead? What does that achieve? The Doctor was already an outcast who could never go home, making them dead doesn't seem to gain you anything. In fact, it just adds an arbitrary restriction that you can never do stories involving other Time Lords without coming up with some bullshit explanation for how they managed to survive.
The new TARDIS interior is just incredibly dumb.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 05:39

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

DoctorWhat posted:

the kind of universe-threatening stakes needed for season finales

Needed?

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 05:56

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

DoctorWhat posted:

From a dramatic standpoint, yeah, usually.

I disagree. Big dramatic high-stakes season finales are almost universally awful.

DoctorWhat posted:

Basically, active Time Lords limit the stakes. They limit the program.

Even if you want high stakes, it doesn't have to be the universe. The Earth is generally considered pretty high stakes, and Time Lords never bothered saving individual planets. The Earth was conquered by Daleks one time and they didn't step in then. There were also several stories in the original run where the universe was at stake despite the existence of Time Lords. One of their major characteristics is that they generally don't take direct action but prefer plausible deniability and influencing things through outside agents, which is why the Doctor ends up consistently arriving in places where his help is needed despite having virtually no control over where he goes.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 08:52

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Bicyclops posted:

The Time Lord stories in old Who are actually mostly pretty bad and involve people in silly hats so getting rid of them was actually a great idea.

Oh, I don't actually want stories about the Time Lords in the show, I agree that the stories set on Gallifrey are generally bad. But I still think having them be dead is a bad idea. With them around, the Doctor is an exile, sort of by his own choice, but also because he can't accept the the conditions that would be imposed on him if he were to go back, which is much more interesting than simply having them be dead. If he's an exile, he's a more interesting character because of the internal conflict of having chosen this life, but still kind of wishing he didn't have to. If they're dead, he's just an orphan. There's no conflict, he's just sad. He's Batman.

Also, if all the Time Lords died, you can't have individual Time Lords like the Master or Romana (or any of the others that have been in the show previously, or any new ones) show up without jumping through hoops to justify it. Even though the Master may generally be on the opposite side to the Doctor, he has shown previously that he doesn't want to see his own people and their civilisation destroyed. Especially if the threat were Daleks, because everyone is against the Daleks. It's pretty much impossible not to be.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 15:24

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Bicyclops posted:

He's never really interesting as an "exile" rather than as a traveler/tourist except during the Hartnell years when he claims to be trying to get home

It's interesting as a character background that explains what motivates him.

Bicyclops posted:

And we don't need individual Time Lords to show up. None of them, besides the Master, have ever been particularly interesting. RTD makes some very bad decisions, but the Time War was actually one of the best ones.

Romana.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 17:01

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Regy Rusty posted:

The only thing I've watched of original DW is the very first few episodes including the original introduction of the Daleks. They were boring and awful then too but maybe there's something in the intervening years that makes them less dull.

Genesis of the Daleks. If you want to see Daleks at their best, watch that.

VagueRant posted:

It was an old joke in Britain that you could easily escape a daleks just by going up stairs. This episode concocted the silly floating thing to mess with everyone's expectations. (But then raised the question - why don't they always do that?!)

In the first story they appeared in, Daleks were confined to their own city which had metal floors that they drew power from. The very next time they appear they're able to go anywhere and get up and down stairs without any difficulty, you just don't see it happen on-screen because they had no way of showing that without making them look even more ridiculous than they already did.

30.5 Days posted:

With respect to the Dalek, they do a good job of establishing the following without any real confusion:
- Daleks are very dangerous and very evil and very smart and lie a lot.
- They also have weird techno-magic.
- They're largely indestructible and implacable so anytime the Daleks are present in an episode going forward, the Doctor will have to defeat them with more cunning than he usually displays. Also there will always be people shooting at them and getting murdered for it.

What I really hate about this episode is that these things weren't true until just now. Daleks weren't very smart and were very bad liars. They didn't have any kind of inexplicable technology beyond standard-issue ray-guns (and a limited form of time travel at one point). And they were really easy to kill in small numbers. A handful of unarmed humans could kill a single Dalek without too much difficulty, because Daleks are dumb and awkward. The reason they're a threat is because they come in huge numbers and don't care about the lives of individuals. They can always make more Daleks, so they basically solve every problem by throwing more Daleks at it. And their one and only goal was to kill everything that isn't a Dalek, no matter how long that takes or what it costs.

Well, that and "time traveller DNA". That's just dumb.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2014 09:19

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Since people are talking about the non-TV Doctor Who stuff, what's the general consensus on Scream of the Shalka? 'Cause when I watched that I really wanted them to make more of the same. I particularly liked what they did with the Master.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2014 17:37

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Go RV! posted:

What is it about Doctor Who that makes you guys continually go off on tangents about poo poo that hasn't happened yet, that no one asked about in a thread involving a blind watch? Seriously now.

The only stuff I've talked about that wasn't related to the specific episode that E PLURIBUS ANUS just watched was stuff that came before that, which I assume is fair game. ANUS, if you'd rather that stuff not be talked about here I'll happily leave off, but I'm going on the assumption that you're approaching it as though you're starting watching in 2005, so anything we know about from before that time is OK because we could legitimately have known about it at the time. It's like an opportunity to talk about it like it's just happening again,

# ¿ Aug 8, 2014 18:43

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

VagueRant posted:

I've heard people say Moffat is a good writer and a bad showrunner, but I wonder if he just used to be good at TV but degraded.

I think he's just wildly inconsistent. Coupling was really good except for the last season, Jekyll was really good, some of his Doctor Who episodes are good, but then there's a bunch of stuff he's done that's just poo poo, eg. Sherlock, the last season of Coupling, some of his other Doctor Who episodes.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2014 14:26

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Toxxupation posted:

The climax of this episode is the Nancy reveal and confession, because it reveals that at its heart, the entire two-parter was about the power of the love between a mother and her son: Powerful enough to revive the dead, powerful enough to kill, but also powerful enough to cure. Powerful enough to bring hope and joy to a cynical, bitter nine-hundred-year old man, if only for one day. Powerful enough for everything to turn out okay.

This is why I hate this episode. The first part was good, it really had a lot of potential, but then the story ends with this episode where everything that had been built up just gets shat on by pointless running and shouting topped off with this utter wank at the end. And it wouldn't be so bad if the previous episode hadn't made it seem like it was going to actually be good.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 06:10

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

MrL_JaKiri posted:

One of the most effective cliffhangers came at the end of a series 2 serial. The first episode was called World's End. The episode opens with a man tearing a metal object off his head then committing suicide in the Thames. TARDIS lands in what looks like modern day London - a first for the programme - and then follows a really bleak episode, where they wander around a ruined London which features stuff like signs instructing you not to dump corpses in the river. For what was still sort-of supposed to be an educational show for children this was pretty loving dark. The end of the episode sees Doctor and Ian (one of the 3 companions) cornered by the river by more of the men with the metal objects on their head, and they look around for some way to escape...

Only to see a loving Dalek rising from the Thames!!!!!!

That drove people wild. Pity the story is now called The Dalek Invasion of Earth so that you know they're going to appear going in, but c'est la vie. We're living in a world where the explosion of the Enterprise (final dramatic moment of Star Trek III) was put into the trailer.

This is one of the things that really annoys me about NuWho. Some of the episodes have some great shock reveals in them, but every loving time you'd know about it before you saw it because they'd showed it on the preview at the end of the previous episode and/or just gave it away in the title. Dalek is great example, because they clearly wanted the Dalek to be a surprise, but you knew it was coming because you watched the previous episode and read the title of this one.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 12:30

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Hakkesshu posted:

It's probably because there is 60 years of established history, tone, feel and tropes that you have to contend with when writing Who. You can't just make up any story on the spot, even though the fiction theoretically allows it. I personally feel this is the biggest issue with the show - in internet dicussions you often see people grunting about how "this writer really GETS The Doctor" or "this is how The Doctor SHOULD act", which I think is a bunch of horseshit.

I haven't seen any evidence at all that the NuWho writers cared about the established history, tone or tropes. Superficially it's the same stuff, but below that surface level they just wrote it however they wanted.

Hakkesshu posted:

It seems to me that half the point of Doctor Who is that it has a built-in reset button

This is one of the things I find most disappointing about NuWho, how narrow the scope is. So much of it happens on Earth in the present day. You have a central plot device for taking your characters anywhere in space and time, and cast rotation is built in as well. There is absolutely no reason to keep going back to the same stuff over and over again.

Of all the old Doctors, Jon Pertwee is the one I consider the worst, because A) his stories tend to lean more toward action rather than science fiction and B) so much of his run was set on Earth in the present day. And NuWho seems to have taken that as its basic template and just magnified it and condensed it down into shorter, faster-paced stories.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2014 17:45

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Paradoxish posted:

I mean, the show had how many regular episodes before the revival? 150?

More like 700.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2014 09:48

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Basebf555 posted:

I suppose you could argue they began as niche shows, but 24, Xfiles, and Lost were all massive hits by the middle of their runs and by the end were drawing the highest ratings of anything on television at the time. Maybe they weren't all that well known outside America, but here they were as mainstream as it gets. During the final season of Lost every high school kid was talking about it, all the "water-cooler" talk was about it, and the media was all over it. You couldn't get away from that show for a while, it took over the country.

Those three in particular were all really popular outside of America as well.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2014 16:01

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Toxxupation posted:

I NEED TO STRESS THE FACT THAT THE loving DOCTOR SWORDFIGHTS ON TOP OF AN ALIEN SPACESHIP THE SIZE OF LONDON

I NEED TO STRESS THIS

HOW IS THIS NOT AN A IN ALL OF YOUR HEARTS

Because it's incredibly dumb.

Oxxidation posted:

That desperate bit of head-canon is also something I cling to for the end of this episode, which soured the entire special for me. Harriet Jones carries on her role the same as in World War III, despite now being Prime Minister - querulous and faintly silly on the outside, but solid steel on the inside. She's up against an enemy who didn't respect rules of engagement, who tried to fake-out half her race into slavery and then threaten to outright raze the planet when their gambit failed. There was no reason to expect them to play fair just because the Doctor killed their champion with a piece of fruit. So she does her duty in defending Earth, but since her idea of "defense" differs from the Doctor's, the Doctor showily destroys her career and the rosy future of Britain in response. Happy ending! Christmas dinner! God, it's like a male version of Rose.

That really, really annoyed me. She was right. And I never understood how the Doctor had supposedly ruined her career. He says "Don't you think she looks tired?" to... someone? And that makes everyone think she's not fit to be PM any more? What? :confused:

# ¿ Aug 19, 2014 06:27

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

mind the walrus posted:

Which itself is also very funny because there's an apocryphal quote in the ether about how in OldWho the Doctor was there for the kids and the companions were "something to keep Dad from changing the channel." I don't know how risque they companions actually were, especially because they seem very tame through a modern lens, so if anyone out there knows I'd love to hear about it.

I think the people who repeat that line are cherry-picking a few specific examples, because if you look over the list there are a hell of lot who don't fit that description.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2014 07:26

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Jsor posted:

This seems to be par for shows of this type. In Buffy (and probably Supernatural?) everything, even the odd thing from outer space, is Demons.

Supernatural gets more like this as it goes on. Originally there were just all sorts of monsters and they weren't related, but in the later seasons everything's tied into Christian mythology, with pretty much all the monsters being children of Lilith (if I'm remembering right).

# ¿ Aug 23, 2014 10:39

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

VagueRant posted:

Okay, I definitely gave up on the show before this episode. But I did end up checking it out when urged by fans some years later, and I didn't care for it. It just didn't do anything for me.

Yeah, I've never understood why people love this episode. I mean, it wasn't terrible, I don't dislike much about it, but I don't like much about it either.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2014 09:33

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Grey Area posted:

Yes, but most Americans are only aware of two English accents: RP and "cockney". I expect a lot of fans would say that Eccleston had a cockney accent.

Here is a helpful chart for Americans.

Pretty sure that's right?

# ¿ Aug 26, 2014 06:39

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Sleep of Bronze posted:

I think it's 99% about the quality of the imitation, wherever you are. Do it well and no one cares that it isn't your real accent (like, lots of Americans apparently didn't know Hugh Laurie was natively British?); gently caress it up about people will write angry internet posts about how the job should never have been given to a non native/the actor should never have been made to speak in a way they weren't comfortable with.

The best is when people complain about a terrible attempt at an accent that turns out to just be the actor's normal speaking voice.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2014 19:14

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Toxxupation posted:

And finally, we get to the cherry on top of this crap sundae, which are the Cybermen.

The Cybermen are apparently a long-running enemy of Doctor Who, so maybe they were more differentiated in the past but to me, holy crap are the Cybermen just low-rent Daleks. From their weird way of walking, to their modulated voice, to their lack of emotion, to their clipped speech, to their repetition of a single word- in this case "DELETE" over "EXTERMINATE" -the main antagonists of this episode, the army of metal men we are supposed to implicitly fear come off as a knockoff of an already utterly absurd looking enemy. Cybermen are so loving stupid, you guys.

Despite what anyone says, there are no good Cybermen. They have always been terrible. The concept is good, as Gaz-L said it's essentially the same as the Borg, but (like the Borg) it almost immediately starts getting a whole bunch of unnecessary poo poo added to it. Believe it or not, they could actually have been worse. The old Cybermen's greatest weakness was that gold dust would clog up their respirators and kill them. Gold dust. The good guys used weapons called "glitter guns" against them.

Although one thing that's definitely worse about these Cybermen is the stupid catch phrase. It doesn't even make sense! They're cyborgs, not robots, and even if they were robots there's no reason that they would call killing "deleting" because that's incredibly dumb. Daleks yelling "exterminate" constantly makes some sense, because they're constantly enraged beings designed to hate, and you couldn't really have them not do it at this point since it's so iconic. The Cybermen never had a catch phrase though and they didn't need one. That wasn't the magical ingredient they'd always been missing.

I do like the idea of having alternate universe Cybermen though, that's a good way to bring them back without all the ridiculous bullshit from the old series (glitter guns), so it's pretty unfortunate that the new version turned out to not be an improvement.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2014 04:31

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Soothing Vapors posted:

wtf is Torchwood

edit: Google says it is a show with more Captain Jack. I think I actually saw an episode of that once. I guess I'll be watching that now thanks for ruining my life Occ/Oxx

Don't. Torchwood feels exactly like the sort of show you'd get if you asked a bunch of fourteen-year-olds to write a mature, realistic sci-fi, and they weren't allowed to criticise each other's ideas.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2014 16:34

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Rarity posted:

So yeah. Doomsday. I can't stand this episode. The problem is that it starts off so good. The Dalek/Cybermen burn session is amazing, there's great scenes for Rose's supporting cast and then a bunch more Daleks turn up and things really kick off. And then just as everything's building up to an epic climax... it ends. And the solution to the biggest conflict we've seen in Rusty's era is really as simple as 'press a button'.

And then...

I hate the Ten/Rose dynamic. They have an unhealthy, co-dependent, relationship that encourages them to be horrible self-centred people (see Tooth and Claw, their treatment of Mickey, their appearance in Love and Monsters). The last thing I needed was a really great 2-parter being derailed to devote the final 10 minutes of the season to telling me how they had 'Tru Luv 4Eva'. The same scene is essentially repeated again over and over, playing the exact same emotional beats each time. Remember what I said after Fear Her about Rusty's unearned emotional climaxes? This is the main one I'm talking about. This was a bad relationship that made both characters worse and I was happy to see it end. So the 10 minutes of Rusty climbing out of my TV screen to yell at me to start crying was awful.

I really liked Army of Ghosts, I thought we were going to get an actually good story for the first time since Dr Who came back, and then Doomsday hosed it up completely. Rose was awful and the episode spent so much effort trying to get me to care about her and that just wasn't going to happen. Then there's the Daleks.

MikeJF posted:

The thing that I disliked about this episode was the whole AND NOW WE UNLEASH A BILLION GADZILLION DALEKS followed by AND NOW WE VACUUM UP A BILLION GADZILLION DALEKS. Throwing numbers at us somehow made the threat seemed less, because now we knew we needed a Deus Ex Machina to get out of it and we were going to magic it up.

I hate the new super-powerful Daleks, I think making them into indestructible tanks was a really bad move. But at the end of Army of Ghosts I thought they might have found a way to actually use the new Daleks well. They weren't what I wanted them to be, but they might have been good. Until they decided to introduce a billion of them. You can either have villains who are incredibly powerful individually or you can have weak villains in large numbers. Large numbers of incredibly powerful villains require the hero to be even more ludicrously powerful, so we got a lovely deus-ex-machina ending.

And this episode is even worse in hindsight since we see that Torchwood could actually have been good but absolutely wasn't.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2014 11:20

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Toxxupation posted:

Without a cheerleader, without any sort of buddy at all, who, well, who is The Doctor? This episode states that he's ultimately a sociopathic mass murderer when the chips are down, and maybe it's not his Companions that are the lucky ones- it's him, because without them he's lost. He's a dark, vindictive, mean man who'll kill an entire race, and do so happily, and he needs a foil or at the very least, a sounding board just to function.

gently caress this. That is not what the Doctor is supposed to be. :argh:

Also, Catherine Tate is just the worst. I can't understand why anyone likes her at all. I hated her in Big Train, I hated her in her own show, I hated her in Doctor Who, she's just terrible.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2014 04:12

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Jerusalem posted:

It is actually exactly what the Doctor is supposed to be. When the show first started way back when he was immoral, uncaring and more than willing to commit murder when it suited him. Traveling with human companions both mellowed him and gave him a different moral perspective (even if it was down to the first actors leaving, which meant the moral compass character became the Doctor by default), which is a theme the show would return to again and again over the decades and through into this revival.

I'd say that right back in the beginning he was more willing to do whatever it took to ensure his own safety, but his main goal in those early stories was usually to observe without interfering any more than absolutely necessary. As he started to favour intervention over observation he also moved towards non-violent solutions. My favourite example is in Genesis of the Daleks where even though he knows the Daleks will eventually kill everyone if left unchecked he still can't actually bring himself to kill them.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2014 05:17

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Oxxidation posted:

A NEW COMPANION APPROACHES: MARTHA JONES

The lovely Ms. Jones, played with a sort of perky exasperation by Freema Agyeman (her first and possibly only major role - her career before this point consisted of bit parts and soap operas)

She later had a major role in Law & Order: UK and was so unbelievably awful that I'd actually forgotten she was ever good in Doctor Who. Since then she's gone on to do some TV shows I've never heard of.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2014 05:49

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Republican Vampire posted:

No sorry it was a decently funny joke when it happened but it's aged ludicrously poorly and it, along with all the lol shakspare gay stuff leaves this looking like dumb fandom bait.

Even at the time it was terrible. In fact, everything about Shakespeare in this episode seemed like the writer going "I wish I could meet Shakespeare, I bet we'd have lots in common and get on really well and have a great time and be best friends forever!"

Mo0 posted:

It's not so much pandering as the world's most heavy-handed attempts at normalizing gay behavior. It doesn't really count as normalizing it when half the time it sticks out really obnoxiously, where you can practically hear RTD screaming LOOK EVERYONE DOCTOR WHO IS SHOWING A FUTURE WHERE BEING GAY ISN'T WEIRD, LOOK AT HOW PROGRESSIVE THIS IS!!!!

I can't really remember if it sticks out like this in the first two seasons, but definitely by the end of his run this was exactly how I felt. It's like, I agree with you Russell, but shut up.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2014 17:01

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

mind the walrus posted:

There's a sizable contingent of Who fans who are seriously and steadfastly against the idea of the Doctor being romantically/sexually involved with anyone ever, some even going so far as to say the entire Time Lord species is like this. Looms are not far behind.

The Doctor and Romana being romantically involved is fine, but a 900-year-old alien being involved with a 20-something human is pretty creepy. There's just no way they could be on anything like an equal footing, especially when the Doctor is in total control of where they go and when/if the companion goes home.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2014 17:54

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Toxxupation posted:

I wish the thread didn't kick up that gay agenda dust storm because it really colored my perception of the scene between Brannigan and the lesbian couple, and made me overtly aware of whenever there's a gay character onscreen in a way that's distracting.

Not saying you definitely would have noticed it, but the idea didn't come out of nowhere. For me, I noticed whenever there was a gay character on-screen in a way that was distracting because of how shoe-horned in it felt. It's not always too bad, but there are definitely times when it feels like the episode stops for a PSA about how gay people are just like everyone else. I can't remember if this is one of those times, but my perception wasn't coloured by other people saying this. I wasn't hearing it as a complaint at the time I watched the first few seasons, it was just something I was noticing myself.

Oxxidation posted:

The thought of people driving on Interstate 8 for 20 goddamn years without questioning the lack of support services beggars belief at first, but in truth - and especially for me - it's not too far removed from the patient resignation we get in traffic today. On some level, everyone in the Motorway knows that no help is coming, but they need to pretend, so that all of their time doesn't feel wasted. Likewise, when Martha finally corners the Doctor on how he's stonewalled her regarding his own past, he cracks and confesses that he wanted to pretend that his planet was still standing. The thread joins, and we get an actual plot out of the episode instead of a mere handful of interesting ideas; it also makes the Doctor's nth reiteration of the Time War effective in spite of itself, as he visibly chokes back tears at his description of Gallifrey's sky. He's not just remembering Gallifrey, he's saying goodbye to it, once but probably never for all. The end is never the end.

I found the actual plot of this episode just so irredeemably stupid that the attempts to appeal to emotion felt like a shameless attempt to distract the audience so that we wouldn't realise how dumb it all was. Also, I am so loving sick of hearing about the time war. I hated it right from the beginning, and it just gets brought up again and again.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2014 05:15

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Oxxidation posted:

I'm rarely interested in TV, especially when it's so cheap-looking, slow-paced, and dull in spite of its inherent ridiculousness.

Question for basically all the people who think old Doctor Who is too slow-paced: What do you think of modern dramas like True Detective or Quirke? I can't watch them because they're just so unbearably slow, but I can watch old Doctor Who no problem, even those episodes that are universally acknowledged to only exist to drag the story out to the required length.

Toxxupation posted:

Doctor Who
"Daleks in Manhattan"

Like, if Doctor Who was an American program, "Daleks in Manhattan" would essentially be like the (American) Doctor heading to colonized India and encountering a bunch of stuffy royals, monocles in both eyes, that would order their servants (all of whom are named Jeeves) to order all of their servants (all of whom are named Butler P. Butlerington III, Esq.) to fetch them their elephant guns to fend off the "mongrel hordes" as the American Doctor met a young Gandhi who would say in a thick Cockney accent, "Right-o guvnuh! I shore do wish them Brits would stop with dere imperialism, I shore do wish I did! Bangers and mash? Chim-chimeney chim-chimeney, chim chim, cheree/A sweep is as lucky/ As lucky can be..." which would lead into a whole song and dance number and wait where was I going with this

Oh, and the accents. Dear God, the loving accents. Has anyone on this show actually heard a New York accent, let alone a New York period accent in their entire loving life? Because holy poo poo, the only character with an even somewhat decent accent is Solomon, and even he takes a while until he finally locks it down. Beyond that, everyone else- especially Tallulah, but also everyone else -has an absolutely atrocious American accent- Andrew Garfield, Spider-Man himself, plays a bit character, a good ol' Tennessee boy who has really bad and forced "chemistry" with Martha and her accent is so Deep South I expected it to come deep-fried with a side of white pointed caps (oh also, hilarious that you write a 1930s young male who grew up in the Deep South during the height of Jim Crow who's not only Not Racist but Wants to gently caress a Colored Person Openly (As Opposed to Doing So Secretly).)

I wish this happened more often, just so every American would know what it's like for we foreigners when we're portrayed in your TV shows. :haw:

# ¿ Sep 17, 2014 06:20

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Toxxupation posted:

But, ultimately, the episode is a lot of nonsense and running around and terrible CGI

Grade: A

terrordactle posted:

One aspect of the whole immortality thing that few stories confront is the idea of full immortality for the universe. Mostly they just have one immortal amongst an entropic existence, but what if life simply continued? What if it kept going and going and no one ever died and new people kept being born even as their great, great, great, great grandfather was still kicking? It actually shows that even if everyone were immortal and you would never be separated from your loved ones by death, that it would still be a really bad thing.

But what if people stop being born as well? Obviously if population keeps increasing then eventually all the resources will be used and no one will have enough. But what if you have enough resources for as many people as there are now, and you just stay at that number?

# ¿ Sep 20, 2014 09:59

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Jerusalem posted:

I always figured that if immortality ever became an attainable thing, the "rules" around it would be that you'd need to have a particular level of guaranteed income to make sure you could look after yourself, and that the process would make you infertile as well since otherwise... well, one immortal person could have an endless number of children (and would they too be immortal?).

So you'd have the 1%ers in society like we currently do, except we'd pretty much have the SAME 1% for the rest of time while everybody else lived, worked, had kids and died as normal.

That's assuming that basically everything else about society remains the same while that one thing changes. There are likely to be a lot of other changes in between today's society and this hypothetical society that manages to create immortals that would make any assumption we could make about it now invalid.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2014 10:23

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Sighence posted:

Wait is there seriously shitflipping over his grade? It made him feel something, guys. That's the reason for the A. He's already said he's a sucker for that sort of thing.

Oh, I realise that. It just comes across (to me) as "Well, it was bad for these many reasons ... but aside from that I liked it so I'm basing my grade on the story it was clearly trying to be." I can't look at a story and go "Well, most of it was bad but I liked one thing a lot so it was good." To me, the overall impression is more the median rather than the mean.

MikeJF posted:

That's a convenient hope that's a million times less realistic than immortality in the first place.

Given the unknown (but certainly large) number of unknowns in this scenario, I don't think it's at all meaningful to make a statement like that. Maybe for some reason the population starts shrinking and immortality rays are invented to counter that. Maybe the beings who invent immortality serum are so far removed from the humans of today that their motives are totally alien to us. There are countless ways immortality could be terrible, but I don't think you can reasonably say that those outcomes are more or less likely than any others.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2014 10:58

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

mind the walrus posted:

Bad Wolf as we've all noted was notoriously poor--just two completely random words that sporadically appear throughout the season before a literal deus ex machina escalation/explanation in the finale. Torchwood in was much better--as Oxx noted--as it followed Buffy's (usual) pattern of evolving the plotline at least a little bit with each appearance until the finale where it all crested, although I'd say it still fell very short of the standard Buffy progression. That's ok though, even Buffy's surprisingly good spin-off Angel was poo poo at doing "Big Bad"s as well as Buffy.

Buffy was pretty bad at it as well. For half a season this villain would be built up as unstoppable and terrifying and then in the last episode Buffy fights them and wins and that's it. They never lived up to the hype. The Master was probably the best because there was the prophecy that he would kill her and he totally did. But even then, she gets revived and just throws him off a roof. It's anticlimactic.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2014 04:38

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Annakie posted:

She's been scrubbing floors and dealing with racist little assholes for two and a half months

Realistically, she's been dealing with racist little arseholes for her entire life.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2014 12:00

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Bicyclops posted:

Lots of people hate the ending to the Family of Blood, but I think it's one of the defining moments in Ten developing his ego problem.

I think maybe it could have worked fine as a completely different show, but it's terrible for Doctor Who. The Doctor is the good guy, he saves the day. Even when his actions cause bad things to happen, he does his best to fix them. And he doesn't do bad things intentionally. Except in this episode he does.

And there's no point to it. He could have just killed the family and been done with it, but instead he has this ridiculous convoluted plan that puts a bunch of random people in danger, just so he can pretend that letting someone die is somehow more moral than killing them. And then he reveals at the end that he didn't give a poo poo about that anyway by handing down a fate worse than death.

If it weren't the Doctor, if it were just some godlike alien whose motives and morals were totally unknown to the audience, it might work. I don't know if it would, but it certainly wouldn't have been as bad. And it's a shame that they stuck that ending on there, because otherwise it's a pretty good story. At the end of part one I was really enjoying it. That first part is one of the NuWho episodes I think is genuinely good. But I couldn't recommend it because it's only half the story and the whole thing together is bad.

Spatula City posted:

What he does in The Family of Blood follows logically from what he did to Harriet Jones in The Christmas Invasion

Well, that was terrible too.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2014 10:30

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Toxxupation posted:

Unfortunately the episode is too short to examine that dark, more depressing concept in any greater detail, so that single scene is all we get- it's a nice, emotive scene that works, but it's not enough. I don't blame Moffat- "Blink" is an episode absolutely loving packed with plot to the point where it's kind of a wonder he even was able to fit the more solemn, slow deathbed scene in the first place. But "Blink" is an episode so packed with theme, idea, plot, and generally interesting side characters- not to mention The Doctor and Martha's adventures in 1969, which get completely glossed over- that for once I'd argue that "Blink" could and should have been a two-parter; it's an episode who has all these brilliant ideas that by necessity have to be reduced to a quick line or five-second "scene".

I think the time constraints are why it works so well. It's really efficient, everything is there for a reason and nothing is wasted. Doubling the run-time would gently caress that up completely. If it was originally intended to be a two-parter then my guess would be that the process of cutting it down to a single episode was what made it end up so good. I'd like to see an experiment where the Doctor Who writers are made to write every episode as a two-parter and then forced to convert it into a single episode. Trim the fat and cut it down to essentials.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2014 16:52

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 13:23

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

thexerox123 posted:

This is a good explanation... basically, I think the Moriarty to the Doctor's Sherlock is not quite apt.

It never is. The Holmes/Moriarty comparison gets made all the time about hero/villain pairs and basically makes no sense, because Moriarty is such a minor, insignificant character. He's in one story and exists basically as a plot device to kill Holmes off because Doyle didn't want to to write about him any more (although he later changed his mind and brought him back anyway).

Although if you mean one of the Sherlock Holmes adaptations it may make more sense, because for some reason the people who make those seem to like to shoehorn Moriarty into everything for no goddamn reason.

mind the walrus posted:

That doesn't really jive with what I'm hearing, sorry.

Depends which Joker and which Batman. It's not like either of them is consistent in how they're portrayed. Adam West and Cesar Romero may have been playing characters with the same names as those played by Christian Bale and Heath Ledger, but they're not the same characters. :shrug:

# ¿ Sep 29, 2014 12:05

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > T/Oxx's Reviews- This isn't fair. You've turned me onto Who.

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