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The bit with the Olympic Torch and the commentator just flat out telling the audience what they're supposed to be feeling at the end of that (otherwise generic and mostly forgettable) episode is one of the worst things I have ever seen in television.
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Jul 31, 2014 13:02
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MrL_JaKiri posted:you like some Doctor Who episodes but don't like some other ones Whenever the new main Doctor Who thread gets made this should be the title.
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Aug 3, 2014 02:41
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Bown's friend posted:RTD never bothers figuring out how a post-alien world would be This would be my number one problem with the RTD years if it wasn't for that awful poo poo at the end of season 4 with Rose on the beach. He wanted to create a post-alien world where the cat was out of the bag and everybody now knew and accepted that alien life forms existed and were aware of Earth and that some of them were pretty hostile with bad intentions.... but he also wanted the modern day London of the show to remain basically a mirror image of the real world.
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Aug 3, 2014 14:25
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MrL_JaKiri posted:It's notable that in Death to the Daleks, the story I mentioned above as an exception, the daleks are clever and the daleks are supremely dangerous in and of themselves, unkillable by the main characters. I remembered that story very fondly when I first saw it as a child, but on a rewatch it didn't hold up very well at all. That said, I did love that the Daleks land on a planet where it is impossible for them to use their weapons and their immediate reaction is,"Well we'll just see about that  " and proceed to figure out a way to kill people again.
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Aug 8, 2014 11:46
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VagueRant posted:What is this in reference to? A young Mickey is present during the events of this episode, and in his fear he looks to Rose as a mother-figure to protect him, and Rose even jokes that she fears she may have imprinted herself on his subconscious. It's played for laughs but it's still creepy considering he grows up to be her boyfriend.
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Aug 11, 2014 05:21
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I'm glad to see the recognition of how powerful that moment where Nancy acknowledges her motherhood is. It often gets overshadowed by the (excellent) following scene with the Doctor joyously declaring that just for once everybody lives, but it really is what the entire two parter had been building to.
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Aug 15, 2014 03:51
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Toxxupation posted:Just a quick reminder: this show is terrible and you're all pieces of human garbage for watching this trash, and I despise each and every one of you, especially oxxidation If you dislike it that much and there is so much more stuff you actually genuinely want to see that you're missing out on because of this, why not just stop watching?
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Aug 16, 2014 01:23
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Toxxupation posted:As this episode picks up, six months after the events of "World War III", the world has not changed. At all. In any real way. I cannot express in words how loving furious I was at the fact that RTD refused to address a single consequence of his two-parter. I...it makes me loving see red to even talk about it. It shows how lazy, how completely and utterly hack of a writer RTD is. Even if everything about this episode were on point, which it most assuredly is loving not, I would've graded this episode an F. This is the...this is how writing works! Actions have consequences! If you want to blow up the whole world, Davies, fine. I can respect that. But if you claim, at the very beginning of this episode, that this episode is a direct loving sequel to the events of a previous episode, that means as a writer you have to address the hanging plot threads. That's what serialized storytelling loving means. I've said it before but this really is the biggest problem with RTD's approach to the show - he can't create a post-alien earth AND still have it be exactly the same as a pre-aliens earth, but that is exactly what he did. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too - to make the Doctor visible, aliens an accepted fact, kill off major world leaders and stage coups etc..... while leaving society identical to the real world so it could still be relateable to the audience. If you want to bring the craziness of the show out into the open, people have to change as a result of that, actions DO need to have consequences.
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Aug 16, 2014 04:20
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mind the walrus posted:Well Toxx the important thing here is that you're happy. Agreed, I mentioned earlier that I didn't understand why you were doing this if you actively hated it as much as you did AND were foregoing things you actually WANTED to see in favor of watching it, but it sounds like you're getting a ton of enjoyment out of it now and regardless of why that is, that's cool 
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Aug 19, 2014 05:55
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Don't worry, a cure for what ails Toxx is easy, we'll just.... put all the other cures together into a big bowl and.... I.... 
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Aug 21, 2014 01:16
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Toxxupation posted:[*] The Doctor: "I'm the Doctor. And if you don't like it, if you want to take it to a higher authority, there isn't one. It stops with me." Harriet Jones: t
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Aug 21, 2014 03:34
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mind the walrus posted:(although for the record they've never ever explained how that lineage came about). Now I'm working off sketchy material and best-guess scenarios here, but my wild theory is that the Doctor had a kid who grew up and had a kid of their own
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Aug 23, 2014 01:55
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VagueRant posted:are they just THAT forgettable? For me at least I found Tooth and Claw to be a very forgettable episode, I didn't think it was a bad episode but there was very little memorable about it and it didn't stand out positively in any particular regard. The last time I rewatched it I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, pretty much because all I really remembered about it were the the bad parts, so the generally inoffensive and standard quality "good" bits came as a bit of a pleasant surprise.
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Aug 23, 2014 07:39
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I really like the parts of this episode where Rose is being not only proactive but figuring things out for herself, and was somewhat disappointed that at about the halfway point her reward for this is getting turned into the damsel in distress again.
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Aug 30, 2014 05:42
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PriorMarcus posted:I've been a massive Doctor Who fan for years, even before the revival and I've never heard that poo poo before. Me too, I never heard those terms before and I feel like my life is a little worse off for knowing them now.
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Aug 31, 2014 01:03
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The Ood as presented in this episode are interesting because they're so passive - even when they're on the attack it is under somebody else's direction. The all too brief chatter about their status as a slave race (and the humans from the future - who SHOULD be more enlightened - laughing off the notion of treating them as equals) is tantalizing. The trouble is that it's a really neat concept introduced as a sideline to a completely different (and very interesting) main plot that takes away all the attention. I'm of two minds whether I appreciate the "universe-building" present in the story by having these guys mostly in the background, or if I'm grumpy that they're thrown out there with the majority opinion/reaction to them from on-screen characters being such callous indifference to their status as a race who "want to serve" - there was a lot that could have been explored with that concept.
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Aug 31, 2014 05:15
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Toxxupation posted:As promised, my thoughts on the Ood: I think that a race that needs to be enslaved is not a slave race. Slavery is by definition an act that involves an unwilling participant and I think this two-parter, as a whole, made a mistake by labelling them as a "slave race". I think it was to make some sort of moral allegory- I don't exactly know what, exactly, because this plot thread was pretty much completely dropped by the end of "Impossible Planet" and is never really addressed outside of the very end of "The Satan Pit" -but by doing so it just made the Ood confusing. This is the downside of layering your statements behind genre metaphor- you sometimes make the entire point so utterly alien (no pun intended) from reality that there's no real way one can mine a sort of lesson out of it. Again, there's an initial revulsion I have a la Rose to the idea of a race that specifically exists to enslave itself to a "higher" life form, but this revulsion is specifically based on my association with the word "slavery". So to me it's really not possible to make any form of statement on the Ood since their arc was based around being the antagonist rather than understanding their cultural norms. This is why I was disappointed in how cavalierly it was handled - it's a subject ripe for interesting exploration even if it is a minefield in terms of the show potentially coming down on the side of saying,"Well maybe some races WANT to be slaves?" However, by seemingly going out of their way not to pursue the issue of the morality of using the Ood as "slaves" (a very loaded term to be sure") and by making the future humans so dismissive and mocking of the concept, I feel the show ends up making that judgment anyway. Given that in the Empty Child 2-parter and The Unquiet Dead, the Doctor chides Rose for applying her "old-fashioned" sense of morality to future/advanced societies, I felt like Rose was being shown as being on the "wrong" side of the argument here. But then you have that scene at the end where the Captain reads out each Ood as a member of the missing crew also suggests that he at least posthumously considers them as more than just servants. I don't think part 2 quite holds up to the promise of part 1 outside of a few excellent scenes: the Doctor lowering himself into the pit is great, though it does come at the expense of the actual expert in the field who passively sits by and watches him go when she should have been champing at the bit to do it herself. I would have preferred the "beast" to have been absent/the pit empty when the Doctor arrived, both because Toby was possessed and also because I far prefer the idea of the creature being an idea/concept somehow imprisoned over an actual physical body with the traditional big red demon look.
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Sep 1, 2014 04:43
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Toxxupation posted:i dont want to watch doctor who any more Haha, this was my immediate reaction to watching Love & Monsters and I've been watching the show since waaaaay back in the classic series, it really was that goddamn awful. When I watched it for only the second time as part of a complete revival rewatch it wasn't quite as bad because I was somewhat prepared for the madness, but it's still a goddamn car-wreck watching the interesting and even somewhat endearing premise completely fall apart. Usually you'd expect things to improve once the Doctor shows up but somehow they got even worse, and the paving slab "love life" joke has to be the biggest misstep in Doctor Who history.
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Sep 4, 2014 03:08
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Toxxupation posted:So it's interesting that the antagonist of the episode is essentially the "rear end in a top hat" part of the fandom, and even the way in which he kills the other members of the group- by absorbing them -is, to me, a clumsy metaphor for how the dicks like to shout down everyone else and impress upon the group as a whole how they should be operating. I think it's even more clever when you think about how Kennedy is the clear minority- he's outnumbered, five to one -and yet he still "wins", much like how one complete prick can ruin an otherwise interesting discussion/group. It's not Shakespeare or anything, but I do think the metaphor is fully formed and layered. Anyways, I'd like opinions from other people in this thread if I got the general "groups" of Doctor Who fans labelled well, or what your collective opinions are on this theory of mine. The groupings seem broadly right to me, though they could be applied to pretty much any show - there's always some subsection of fans who want to force their views onto everybody else and just suck all the fun out of the room and close off all discussion. This isn't even the first time the show has done a bit of naval-gazing re: the fans, either. In the 80s a story called The Greatest Show in the Galaxy was a pretty obvious metaphor for not just various fans, but noted critics of the show, as well as the BBC itself and even some digs at "competing" shows like Star Trek. It's a bit hamfisted but nowhere near as bad as the Abzorbaloff, and that story ends with the Doctor walking casually away from an explosion as opposed to cursing some poor woman to an eternity as a paving slab.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:22
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Oxxidation posted:But still, the whole concept of existing as an inert, immortal, aware object is loving horrifying, to the point where it has effectively been used as horror in several pieces of honest-to-god non-Scooby-Doo bits of horror media It's actually the cruel and "ironic" fate of one of the villains in an earlier Doctor Who episode too!
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Sep 4, 2014 04:50
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Toxxupation posted:...That's it? I've never quite been able to grasp the sheer hatred this episode frequently gets either. Yes I do absolutely hate the Torch sequence at the end, but the rest of the episode is just mostly bland with the odd moments of quality shining through here and there (I really like that Rose has to get proactive and try and figure things out for herself). I thought Love and Monsters was far worse even if I've mellowed on it somewhat over the years, and apart from airing the week after it, I still don't understand why people lump Fear Her in with that episode as being anywhere near equal on the shittiness scale. There are actually a couple of other episodes I now dislike more than either L&M or this one, but discussing them now would be utterly irrelevant since you haven't gotten to those yet. I do wish people would stop saying,"X coming up soon is great/terrible!" since - like it did with this story - it ends up creating an expectation in your head of what is to come, and I'd much rather just see your blind reactions to each individual episode, as opposed to having preconceived notions of whether you're supposed to like or dislike it in advance.
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Sep 6, 2014 04:35
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howe_sam posted:I think what bugged me most about Fear Her, beyond the Torch thing which is just Rusty being Rusty roll your eyes and move on, is the vanishing of the entire stadium of people. There was something about that sequence that really annoyed me when I watched the episode, it was just too big for the stakes of the episode. Yeah, the idea that an entire stadium of people would disappear live on television and that everybody would just go,"Huh, that's weird.... well let's just have the opening ceremony anyway!" was really silly. I think maybe the show might have been concerned with the stakes somehow not being high enough - even in something like Father's Day where the real core of the story is the intimate story about Rose never knowing her father and not wanting him to die they had to throw in some earth-threatening stakes. Same with this one, I think maintaining the focus on the scared little girl or even just the street in general would have worked better than trying to artificially up the stakes to include the entire world - it kind of suggests that the individual plights of the "little people" aren't actually worthy of our attention unless it's symptomatic of some greater threat to the world itself.
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Sep 6, 2014 05:08
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Bown posted:I had never heard the "people hate this episode because they hate the Olympics" thing before DoctorWhat posted it in this thread. I really don't think it's a factor for the vast majority of people. I think it's a pretty bad episode but that's largely because of the general feel of laziness and the horrendously cheesy bit with the torch. Yeah, I don't really have any issues with the Olympics as a concept, but it feels detached from the rest of the story (I had the same problem with the Coronation in The Idiot's Lantern) and I think the execution of the saccharine sweet "IT'S HOPE, IT'S COURAGE, IT'S LOVE!" is shockingly bad. I have no problem with the inspirational message they're TRYING to convey, but the execution is godawful and it is barely tangentially related with the theme of the main plot (love and togetherness to combat fear).
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Sep 6, 2014 08:26
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Not a Twat posted:This thread is actually making me really miss the RTD era of Doctor Who. The show has changed a lot since 2006. Having just recently finished rewatching all of the RTD era, I don't miss it at all. I enjoyed it when it was here, I appreciate it a lot for what it did, and there is a lot to be said for the rollercoaster experience that was the show during RTD's time in charge, but I wouldn't like the show to go back to that style. It very much worked at the time and made what we have now possible, but it was far too schizophrenic for my liking. Even just looking at the episodes covered by this thread so far you can see how wildly the quality see-saws between amazing and terrible (though everybody would disagree over what was amazing and what was terrible).
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Sep 6, 2014 08:55
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Matthew Graham co-created Life on Mars so he pretty much gets a life-pass from me.
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Sep 6, 2014 09:40
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Toxxupation posted:I AM OFFICIALLY A DOCTOR WHO FAN ClintEastwoodnodding.gif
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Sep 7, 2014 00:56
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Also what is twop?
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Sep 7, 2014 02:55
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Toxxupation posted:Plus, the cliffhanger was absolutely, completely loving fantastic. Very rarely does my face light up when watching Doctor Who, but I was nearly squealing when the Sphere opened up to reveal...Daleks. For an episode that played up the mystery and vague, unsettling weirdness of the Sphere, to have the payoff of the episode and the promise of the genuine series finale being the Doctor's greatest enemy (hopefully) kicking the living poo poo out of his worst...yeah. This show fuckin' rules. That cliffhanger is one of the best things I've ever seen the show do, whether revival or classic. To the point that I have to force myself to consider the rest of the episode, which is mostly very, very good. It's just that holy poo poo is that cliffhanger amazing, and a perfect encapsulation of what the Daleks are. They arrive, they notice life-forms OTHER than Daleks are present and IMMEDIATELY start screaming to exterminate them. Not because they're a threat or they want to keep a secret or anything, but because they simply are and that is unacceptable to the Daleks, how loving dare they exist and be not-Daleks? The Daleks are actually offended by this, and they will not let this aggression stand.
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Sep 7, 2014 03:26
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Yeah, that's from the start of the next episode.
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Sep 7, 2014 03:50
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Jurgan posted:Also, yeah, Mickey. Based on his first appearance, I never expected to care about him in the least, but he really grew over time. Mickey is so often dismissed based on his first appearances (which are admittedly awful) but he ends up getting a lot of really interesting character development over these first two seasons, and his regular appearances mean that it comes across as rather natural even though the Mickey that was in Rose is completely different to the Mickey at the end of season two. He was really badly served by the burping dustbin and,"Let's go out for pizza. Pizza. PITZZZZZZZ-ZAAAAAAAA! Baby baby honey sweetie baby BABY!"
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Sep 7, 2014 04:39
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Yeah, Season 2 is very uneven but I love the finale. I also think it's the great ending to a 2-season long character arc for Rose, and about the perfect way to write her out of the show. Her growing obsession with the Doctor and her detachment from the reality of her situation (Jackie warning her about losing her humanity, or the Doctor telling her she can spend the rest of HER life with him, but he can't do the same) meant that there could only be a clean break - she either had to die or be exiled to a time and place it was impossible to return from. I don't know how much if any of this was deliberate on RTD's part, but it's why I think the first two seasons work so well as a whole, because there IS a continuing background story going on there with Rose and it ended in a very emotionally satisfying way for me. The Cybermen have a long history of being appallingly misused, with their very promising concept often misused or completely forgotten by the writers of their stories. These Cybus versions in the revival are no different, and it was very satisfying to have the Daleks turn down their offer of an alliance and then proceed to just beat the poo poo out of them with contemptuous ease.
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Sep 7, 2014 06:42
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Republican Vampire posted:Seriously. Didn't they try to say that the Cybermen in Series two were loosely based on Spare Parts? How the poo poo does that work? Both were ostensibly origin stories. The similarities pretty much end there.
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Sep 7, 2014 07:02
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Senor Tron posted:I'm still firmly in the camp that says the Doctor had no romantic feelings for Rose, but adored her as a friend, and also grew incredibly attached because she was his first companion after the Time War and after all the things he'd seen and done in the war he needed someone who looked at him adoringly and told him he was a good person. Agree entirely, and given what we saw in season 1 and 2 I'd say that was the intent. Rose pretty clearly had an end to her story, and it was a good one. Even though they didn't go into the same season long story arc type of things, back in the classic series probably the best companion departures were the ones where they came to some kind or natural-feeling conclusion to their time with the Doctor. The worst were when the actor's contract was up and they suddenly fell in love with some random supporting character and decided to live with them forever.
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Sep 7, 2014 07:57
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Oxxidation posted:I've always felt that the best Companions are contradictory forces, ones whose personalities act against the Doctor, not for him I don't think they necessarily need to be contradictory, but I feel the best companions are the ones who ground him in reality and the everyday. Whether that comes through arguments (Tegan  ) or just offering the human "moral" perspective (Ian and Barbara as his first companions), they keep the Doctor from losing touch with the linear, short-lived and often petty lives of the average human being.With Rose in season 2, whether it was intentional or just a side-effect of the story RTD was trying to tell, she basically became the worst kind of companion - one who embraces the Doctor's lifestyle so firmly that the two of them lost touch with any sense of the actual consequences of their actions. We see it most clearly in Tooth and Claw when they're joking and laughing about a situation that has seen many people horribly murdered (and even at the end of that story after Queen Victoria rips them a new one they end up turning it into a joke), but it's also there in scenes like Jackie warning Rose about where her life is leading her, or even in Mickey's bitter little rants about her panting after the Doctor. Intentional or not, Rose is basically a case study in the dangers of traveling with the Doctor, and why ultimately while he might have had a blast traveling with her she was as bad for him as he was for her. It's interesting to see how future companions and their relationships with the Doctor can be compared to this one, though again that may not have been the intent RTD had at all (many would argue it was the exact opposite).
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Sep 7, 2014 23:31
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Craptacular! posted:I remember watching "Dalek" for the first time, and commenting to a friend who kind of hooked me into the show that it felt like the author had to resort to some Poochie-level bullshit when Rose essentially tames a Dalek, causes it to question it's own purpose for existing, and then it obliterates itself even after a small army and Van Staten's alien weapon collection was basically useless. All because it came into contact with her unique special snowflake and it's heart grew too many sizes as a result. The idea was that it was "infected" by humanity, which basically meant it got to feel and experience things that a Dalek normally wouldn't. That it was Rose was mostly irrelevant, the Dalek's worldview was expanded and it HATED that, because it ran counter to everything it understood/was allowed to understand about what it should be. I say mostly irrelevant since Rose's reactions to it and her attempts to "help" it added to its confusion whereas any of the other characters present in the story would have probably reacted hostilely to it, and the Dalek would have just killed them. The fact it was her IS important in regards to the Doctor though. His own hatred and fear of the Dalek mirrors the Dalek's own attitudes ("you would make a good Dalek" etc), because he understands the feelings and emotions awakened by encountering the Dalek, but needs her help to face up to them. Edit: There's nothing remarkable or "special" about Rose and I feel like that is kind of the point - Rose is "just" a generic 21st century Londoner, but that "simple" humanity and her moral worldview are important for grounding the Doctor and providing him with a moral perspective it would be far too easy to lose given the nonsensically high stakes he often deals with. Which is why Rose in season 2 is so interesting to me, because she stops being that grounding influence and actively encourages the Doctor that they're special and that their experiences and good time trump all else (as in Tooth and Claw, or her chiding Elton while he's being chased by a monster in Love & Monsters). Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Sep 9, 2014 |
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Sep 9, 2014 01:16
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Guy's there is a general discussion thread that would be more than happy to give audio recommendations or even talk about some of the companion-specific stuff that can't really be discussed in this thread yet.
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Sep 9, 2014 02:50
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Yes, so glad you correctly understood the objective truth that Donna is the best and rules. And I absolutely agree that the Doctor clearly needs a companion, without one he loses all sense of perspective and his disturbing sense of moral superiority comes into full focus unfiltered by human compassion. The Racnoss Queen is a distraction, and another example of RTD's seeming unwillingness to tell a story where the stakes AREN'T at least fate of the entire planet. Like you, I find the story is at its best when it's the Doctor and Donna interacting.
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Sep 9, 2014 04:09
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Tiggum posted: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. I enjoyed her so much in Doctor Who I checked out her show and I absolutely hated it. I guess that speaks to her ability as an actress with somebody else's writing. Tiggum posted:gently caress this. That is not what the Doctor is supposed to be. 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. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Sep 9, 2014 |
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Sep 9, 2014 04:14
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I just want to nth the recommendation to actually watch Broadchurch though, because it's the best thing that Chris Chibnall has ever done. Now that's not necessarily a high bar, admittedly, but it's very, very, very good. Gracepoint just seems so.... pointless.
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Sep 9, 2014 23:45
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Jurgan posted:I thought The Catherine Tate Show was hilarious for about five or six episodes, and then it just kept repeating the same jokes with the same characters over and over again. How many times can you watch the woman demand her co-worker guess something and then make fun of her for guessing wrong? I had the same problem with Little Britain, though in that case it was as little as 3 episodes before I realized that they were just doing the exact same jokes. For whatever reason I didn't have the same problem with The Fast Show even though they did the same thing, something about that show just clicked for me and I found every single,"Today I have mostly been eating <x>" goes back into the outhouse joke hilarious.
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Sep 10, 2014 03:29
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