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jivjov posted:It kinda works if you give Moffat the conceit that the Doctor was off doing exactly that for 6 months (or at least trying to find her), but when you watch the series in one go, there's no weight to it at all. Believe me, Series 6 was still poo poo even if you weren't watching the series in one go.
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Sep 17, 2014 00:46
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egon_beeblebrox posted:My cat stares at the TV anytime the theme song plays. Then looks at me like "What the Hell was that?" Every time. My bird used to like Big Finish (I hook my computer up to the TV and play it through the TV speakers), but somewhere over the course of the run, they started to use very subtle bird noises for background stuff whenever the characters are outside, and he cries whenever he hears birds on the TV for some reason. He loves the theme song though and will happily whistle whenever it comes on.
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Sep 17, 2014 01:10
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Evil Sagan posted:Believe me, Series 6 was still poo poo even if you weren't watching the series in one go. I have a huge soft spot for season 6, I think the best parts are really loving good (and I even like A Good Man Goes to War and The Wedding of River Song, but I absolutely cannot stand River being Melody, that twist has always bugged me. The only slight redemption is Amy's realization that she's the Doctor's mother-in-law at the end of The Wedding of River Song, and the way she defends River at the end of the following Christmas episode.
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Sep 17, 2014 01:17
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Something just occurred to me, was 11 still seeing River sometimes offscreen around Day of the Doctor? Because he gave her the screwdriver when she went to the library which means after she left it wouldn't have been the same screwdriver War and 10 used to scan the door and compute the harmonic resonance. Or is it some sort of TARDIS cloud computing thing with the screwdriver's software? Edit: Unless 10 kept the screwdriver in the TARDIS until after he gave the current one to River? But I thought he left 11's screwdriver in the library computer. vvvv Fair enough Linear Zoetrope fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Sep 17, 2014 |
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Sep 17, 2014 01:34
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Jsor posted:Something just occurred to me, was 11 still seeing River sometimes offscreen around Day of the Doctor? Because he gave her the screwdriver when she went to the library which means after she left it wouldn't have been the same screwdriver War and 10 used to scan the door and compute the harmonic resonance. I think it's implied that a lot of things have happened off-screen based on the things she asked in the "have we done ____ yet?" because their lives were all out of order. Hell, that they still are happening off-screen, since she knew about future regenerations. Moffatt just said that the character is done for the purpose of the show.
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Sep 17, 2014 01:36
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Shugojin posted:Moffatt just said that the character is done for the purpose of the show.  This had better not be true.
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Sep 17, 2014 01:38
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In Eleven's first episode his screwdriver gets destroyed and he gets a replacement fabricated by the TARDIS. I think it's easier to assume that the internal memory and software back up via 'cloud' technology while the external fabrication can be destroyed/disposed/changed easily.
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Sep 17, 2014 01:44
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LividLiquid posted:
I don't see how you do a better ending than the Doctor catching her hand and that kiss from the end of last season.
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Sep 17, 2014 01:45
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True, that was a good send-off. But right there next to it was the mystery of why she was still there when Clara was gone. "Spoilers"
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Sep 17, 2014 01:52
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PriorMarcus posted:Really he should've introduced her in Eleventh Hour if he had the hindsight to do so. Oh, I'd say he introduced her at the eleventh hour all right...  DoctorWhat posted:In Sandifer's case, what happened is that "The Big Bang" had such a huge impact on Phil that it inspired him to do this huge, sprawling analysis of all of Who. Trouble is, he went into the writing process with the premise that current-day Who must be the teleological triumph of television; as a result, he's been increasingly dishonest and defensive ever since he stepped into the Wilderness Years. You're spot on there. I found his thoughts on the classic series amazingly well written and when he got to the Wilderness Years, which was for me in a lot of ways MY Doctor Who I was like "what the hell?" It was painfully obvious what his agenda was after awhile. And it was disappointing because I'd hoped to hear his wonderful analysis on some of the audios and whatnot. Astroman fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Sep 17, 2014 |
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Sep 17, 2014 02:04
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Jsor posted:Something just occurred to me, was 11 still seeing River sometimes offscreen around Day of the Doctor? Because he gave her the screwdriver when she went to the library which means after she left it wouldn't have been the same screwdriver War and 10 used to scan the door and compute the harmonic resonance. They specifically say the screwdrivers are the same 'on a software level', so yeah, syncs with the TARDIS and gets replaced.
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Sep 17, 2014 02:07
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LividLiquid posted:Only guesses I've seen are a Tardis, The Master, newly-regenerated River Song, the Time Lady, and some villain from the classic days. An evil Clara iteration is another guess. And another guess is that she's another stable time loop.
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Sep 17, 2014 02:09
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Still not sure what to think about Listen, but I loved the bit where the sonic didn't work on some thing that the Doctor was futzing around with and he has to use an actual screwdriver. He just has the most disdainful look on his face at it like can you even BELIEVE this poo poo I have to work with.
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Sep 17, 2014 02:14
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So, I finally saw the damned episode. Here's my take on it: Taken as an individual episode (minus the aforementioned complaints regarding Clara's appearance), it is actually quite good. It has some good bookends, it has a nice, Doctor Who message about how being afraid doesn't have to make you lash out or feel like you're powerless, all of the characters feel pretty full, and it's kind of quiet and intimate. It's also nice not to have a monster for once and that they didn't have to break out the rubber masks and addressed a fear lots of people have does make it a bit spooky. Taken within the context of the show, that it's the Doctor in the bed doesn't make a lick of sense and does smack of Moffat wanting to make his companion the most important thing in the Doctor's timeline, and that's particularly aggravating. I do, however, think that Clara is portrayed well. I think Danny is written very well as someone with some pretty heavy PTSD, that he plays it with humanity and that it serves well to mirror whatever the hell identity crisis the Doctor is going through. I am getting more and more of a sense of what Capaldi is going for in terms of his potrayal and he is doing very well with it. Basically, I wish Moffat were writing for another showrunner. His episodes are often pretty tight, but he exhausts when he does two or three a season and pulls out a few wacky ones, and his overarching plots are often disappointing. His obsessive fandom forces him to tinker with the Doctor's history, which is sometimes okay and sometimes kind of aggravating. Ultimately, that Clara showed up and said she was just a dream and repeated his fear story to him doesn't have to be an origin story, even if he wanted it to be, and I suppose there are ways to handwave it so that Clara can somehow get back there; I've just run out of goodwill for Moffat pulling this kind of stunt. tl;dr: It's actually a well written episode overall if you take it as a single episode, but taken within the larger context of the show, it grates once Clara finds herself under the Doctor Baby's bed.
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Sep 17, 2014 02:14
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With regards to Missy... Is it not obvious that she's the Master, and she's still somehow trapped on Gallifrey, and that she's somehow manipulating robots throughout time to find "the promised land" (obviously Gallifrey) and thus free the Time Lords (or specifically, the Master herself)? 'Cause that seems obvious enough that I want to get it on record so I can go "called it" later on when folks are surprised. Seriously, the "he loves me" bit can only refer to River (who's not coming back), a new character who's exactly like River (which would be really lame), or the Master.
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Sep 17, 2014 06:23
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Eiba posted:(which would be really lame) This makes me think that it's gonna be this. 
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Sep 17, 2014 06:30
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In keeping with the theme of 'Moffat retreading the beats of his earlier seasons' Missy will turn out to be the heart of the TARDIS which has gone crazy in the future, and the Doctor will blow it up, reconstructing the universe in the process.
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Sep 17, 2014 06:43
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It's telling that Jenna Coleman referred to closed causal loops as "Moffat loops". He loving loves them. I do too, so that's nice, but drat.
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Sep 17, 2014 07:01
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I haven't posted much the last couple of days because I've been building a rudimentary time machine so I can go back in time a couple of days and stop myself from listening to Minuet in Hell. Did it work? Oh wait no, I just time-traveled the old-fashioned way - straight forward in realtime. 
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Sep 17, 2014 07:53
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Jerusalem posted:I haven't posted much the last couple of days because I've been building a rudimentary time machine so I can go back in time a couple of days and stop myself from listening to Minuet in Hell. Did it work? So loving awful. Took me a week to get through the whole thing, where most audios take me like 2 days if I'm not busy. So I've been watching a whole bunch of classic serials because I had no idea they were on Hulu. Genesis of the Daleks was so loving good (that loving clam though  ).I'm watching Planet of Evil right now, though, and holy poo poo how many  were they on for this serial? Jesus.
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Sep 17, 2014 08:03
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I literally spent the first episode of Minuet in Hell thinking it was set in (a particularly terribly stereotypical) 1890 or something till I reminded myself the Brigadier wasn't around back then. Once I realized that was supposed to be 21st Century America... 
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Sep 17, 2014 08:28
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Jerusalem posted:I haven't posted much the last couple of days because I've been building a rudimentary time machine so I can go back in time a couple of days and stop myself from listening to Minuet in Hell. Did it work? Just keep reminding yourself that everything in Minuet from Hell is erased and retconned during the Time War. It's the only way to survive what should have been called Not-Buffy and the Pretty Satin-Bottoms versus Yosemite Sam and his Passive-Aggressive Demon.
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Sep 17, 2014 09:03
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What the gently caress is even happening in The Ribos Operation? 
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Sep 17, 2014 09:23
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Sobatchja Morda posted:It's the only way to survive what should have been called Not-Buffy and the Pretty Satin-Bottoms versus Yosemite Sam and his Passive-Aggressive Demon. I'm sorry, but this sounds amazing which probably wasn't your intention. I want to listen to this now. (Spoiler: I won't, I don't do audio dramas) Linear Zoetrope fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Sep 17, 2014 |
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Sep 17, 2014 09:29
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Jsor posted:I'm sorry, but this sound amazing which probably wasn't your intention. I want to listen to this now. Well, it is amazing in a way. Minuet in Hell is absolutely terrible, but it also sits comfortably in the so-bad-it's-good zone. If it were a film, they'd have featured it on MST3K. To Jerusalem: just wait until you reach Creed of the Kromon. Now there's a story that I actually hate with a passion, and the worst part is that you can't skip it completely because it introduces a rather important character.
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Sep 17, 2014 09:46
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GonSmithe posted:What the gently caress is even happening in The Ribos Operation? I think I remember reading that Mary Tamm didn't think it made any sense at all. It's one of my favourite Tom Baker stories though.
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Sep 17, 2014 10:09
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Sobatchja Morda posted:Well, it is amazing in a way. Minuet in Hell is absolutely terrible, but it also sits comfortably in the so-bad-it's-good zone. If it were a film, they'd have featured it on MST3K. I actually already heard that and wrote about it. After I finished the Divergent Arc I went back to catch up on some stories I had bought in the meantime. Yeah, it's much worse than Minuet in Hell, which is more bizarrely awful than outright offensive and creepy like Creed is.
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Sep 17, 2014 10:10
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Jerusalem posted:I haven't posted much the last couple of days because I've been building a rudimentary time machine so I can go back in time a couple of days and stop myself from listening to Minuet in Hell. Did it work? I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.
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Sep 17, 2014 10:15
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Jerusalem posted:I haven't posted much the last couple of days because I've been building a rudimentary time machine so I can go back in time a couple of days and stop myself from listening to Minuet in Hell. Did it work? The slow path is the cruelest of all.
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Sep 17, 2014 10:22
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Sobatchja Morda posted:It's the only way to survive what should have been called Not-Buffy and the Pretty Satin-Bottoms versus Yosemite Sam and his Passive-Aggressive Demon. "With their small butts!" Although "Minuet" is pretty bad, I thought Machrosias was entertaining as hell (heh) in it.
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Sep 17, 2014 11:01
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Neddy Seagoon posted:The slow path is the cruelest of all. Honestly, this was just an elaborate plot to get Jerusalem to understand how 11 felt during the Slow Invasion.
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Sep 17, 2014 11:03
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CobiWann posted:
This is... poo poo. I'm always wary of other people's opinions coloring my own of a story - it's very easy to be told a story is bad so often before you hear it that when you DO hear it you inevitably concentrate on what is awful. Conversely, sometimes you're expecting something so awful that just getting bland or ininspired makes you think the story is better than it is, because you were bracing yourself for much worse. But this is poo poo. I doubt anybody can listen to this story and say it's good. Maybe they could say it had potential, or that they didn't mind it too much.... but nobody could say this was good. Even if it was self-aware comedy it would still be terrible, and it's most definitely NOT comedy, and certainly not self-aware comedy either. It's poo poo. Not only has nobody involved in the production of this story ever been to America, but they've also never heard of America either. They've never seen an American on television or on stage or even from a great distance. The sum total of their knowledge of America seems to be based entirely on terrible English impersonations of broad parodies of third-hand accounts of a Canadian telling a joke they heard from an Australian about the time their friend from Fiji saw a South African production of a play inspired by a guy's half-remembered account of a Mark Twain book their teacher once read them in school. The geography is wrong, the accents are wrong, the stereotypes are misplaced, the politics are nonsensical and I'm pretty sure the story is taking place in the wrong year as well. In fact I was actually waiting throughout the entire audio for the Doctor to discover that this was a false/alternate/illusory reality that would explain all the many inconsistencies and discordant details. But no, this seemed to actually be what the people who made this story thought was an accurate representation of America in the 21st Century - I honestly spent the first episode thinking it was late 19th or early 20th Century America until I remembered the Brigadier was present. That's poo poo. According to CobiWann's review the story was written at a rush by an overworked writer, then the back half was heavily rewritten, and nobody was happy with the end result. That's good, because if anybody sat back after this story was over and said,"That was a job well done" then they'd either be liars or.... well, nope, they'd just be liars. The whole thing is just a mess, temporally and spatially even! Buildings appear to move about to fit the plot - sometimes the clinic is directly opposite the Hellfire Club, sometimes they're only separated by a wall, sometimes they're in different locations entirely. Same deal with the Brig's hotel or the television station or Wally's home. People can appear within moments in a location at one point in the story, and have to be driven there later on.... only to be joined within seconds by people who had to walk! Despite the super-secret nature of the Hellfire Club or the experiments occurring at the mental hospital, people seem to be able to come and go as they please, and everybody takes a bizarrely lax attitude towards the situations they find themselves in. The new "recruits" to the clinic don't seem to bat an eyelid at being smoothly informed that they're going to be turned into prostitutes for a high class clientelle, even though there is seemingly no security. When the chance comes to escape they take it and... what happens to them? They disappear into the city and then... nothing? Why did they not go to the police? Or the media? This isn't even a knock against easily forgotten background characters, because Charley has the same oddly detached attitude to everything happening to her which her brief stint of amnesia does nothing to excuse. She even heads straight back to the clinic where she was first informed she would be a prostitute, not to sneak about but to just walk in the front door loudly calling out hellos. How lovely. There seems to be this oddly sanitized attempt to shock with sex and violence in this story, as if Big Finish wanted to be "mature" but were so wary of going beyond the pale that they ended up stuck between being candid and chaste. The oft-mocked "pretty little satin bottoms!" line is the best example of this, they wanted the despicable Hellfire Club to be sadistic degenerates who treated woman as sex slaves and objects but knew that it would just be too weird in something like Doctor Who. So they tried to compromise, and what comes across feels like a half-hearted attempt to be edgy. Similarly, Charley spending most of the final episode in some kind of BDSM gear goes unremarked upon by nearly everybody and seemingly unnoticed even by herself - they put her into it and then acted like they were too embarrassed by their own story to reference it any further. Similarly on the violence side, references are made to Gideon Crane's horrific actions when he was found on the streets, explaining his presence in the mental hospital. But no further reference is made to these actions and by the end Gideon appears to be an entirely harmless individual... so was the whole thing just made up as an excuse by Dashwood and Pargeter to get another inmate to experiment on? And if so, why did they give him free run of the place after he convinced them he was sane? Was this just another example of the back-half rewrite? Whatever the reason, too much time is spent on suggesting Gideon is in some way villainous. What poo poo. Paul McGann is present throughout the entire story, but in a very limited and reduced way as most of the time he is suffering from amnesia. He (and Nicholas Courtney) are the highlights of this otherwise lovely story, they do the very best with the material they've been given, but you can only polish a turd so much. When the Doctor recovers his memories it isn't a simple matter of just being back to himself, he has to deal with an entirely too reasonable counter-argument to his own sense of identity. What I did like was that even when the Doctor is acknowledging the logic of what he is being told, or being presented with insurmountable evidence, he never once actually honestly believes any of it. There are points where he claims to have been convinced, and they're intended to make the viewer question whether he truly believes it (or if maybe it IS true and our perception of what we think we're hearing is wrong - similar to The Natural History of Fear) but even when his mind is hazy and his perceptions dulled he remains a mental step ahead of his "competition". That's the least poo poo. The Doctor's ability to outsmart everybody even when hobbled causes its own problems though, because once the Doctor is finally made whole again he proceeds to easily dismantle the main villain's entire operation in the space of a few minutes. It's appropriate in that Dashwood is a hilariously inept villain, but it means that for 80% of the story the Doctor has to be sidelined and deal almost exclusively with a red herring because otherwise this story would have been 20 minutes long (that would be a good thing!). There are no competent villains here though, everybody is an idiot or hopelessly gullible or inept. Dashwood is a moron. Pargeter is a moron. Wally is a moron. I hate the awful "Buffy" character and I'm not even going to talk about her beyond this. Marchosias is so incredibly unsubtle in his pathetically transparent manipulations that only morons could fall for any of his "clever" lies, and the Doctor casually dismissing it all is refreshing if only to hear somebody actually go,"Oh come the gently caress on why does anybody listen to anything this rear end in a top hat says?". There's also a great bit where the Doctor goes on a bit of a rant about Dashwood's stupidity in believing all the hype about the Hellfire Club and revealing the mundane truth of it all. In the end, Dashwood and Marchosias' fate fells less poetic and more the inevitable end result of two idiots loving about with poo poo when they should have known better. In the pantheon of Who villains, they rate slightly below the Vardans from The Invasion of Time, who at least were a good concept despite the terrible special effects and eventual reveal that they were space nerds. Dashwood and Marchosias weren't even a good concept. They were poo poo. Nicholas Courtney deserved better than this and thankfully he'd have other chances for good performances in other stories. The very brief time that McGann gets to spend with him is very promising, and he very much gets across the sense that they are close friends (the very best of friends, insists the Doctor  ) as well as getting to play a pivotal role in Dashwood's exposure. He is pretty much the only reason I'd suggest listening to this story, because it's always good to hear more of the Brig, and he and McGann have very good chemistry. Other than that though? Well I guess it very briefly wraps up the Ramsay the Vortisaur subplot, and gently prods the ongoing subplot about Charley's status in the universe. Otherwise though? No avoid this story, it's as bad if not worse than all the horrible stories you've heard about it.It's poo poo. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 11:39 on Sep 17, 2014 |
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Sep 17, 2014 11:37
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This review was the poo poo. And gave the story a much more critical eye than it deserves. Really, if they had expanded the Doctor vs. “the Doctor” in the Institute into an hour-long episode for the Eighth Doctor Adventures line, then you could have had a decent story. Instead, what we got was…well, I’m glad McGann came back for the second audio season so we could get The Chimes of Midnight, Seasons of Fear, and Neverland, which more than make up for this major misstep.
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Sep 17, 2014 12:28
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I think after hearing the even more terrible audios, Minuet in Hell takes on a certain kind of charm. It's interesting that in the other thread, they're reviewing that New York Dalek two parter, because I think both have some similar stock characters (although Minuet adds Yosemite Sam) and both really fail to understand anything about America. The amnesia plot is basically "Let's reach into the Eight lottery ball plot machine and pick one of the most common points." My favorite thing about the whole fiasco is still the obvious padding as the Brigadier hunt-and-pecks at his keyboard and reads his reports out loud while sipping his tea. They should have had Nicholas Courtney do this at the beginning and end of every audio story. "Dear computer man over at UNIT, I learned something today..." *sips loudly*
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Sep 17, 2014 13:56
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GonSmithe posted:What the gently caress is even happening in The Ribos Operation? Awesomeness
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Sep 17, 2014 14:07
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The entire conversation between those medieval dudes in The Ribos Operation feels like it's the opening to a Monty Python sketch and they just never get to the sketch part. Key to Time is really great.
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Sep 17, 2014 14:12
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Bicyclops posted:The entire conversation between those medieval dudes in The Ribos Operation feels like it's the opening to a Monty Python sketch and they just never get to the sketch part. Key to Time is really great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq3IZ7xS2ps
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Sep 17, 2014 15:07
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Does anyone have that quote of the write up of the Fifth Doctor anywhere? The one about him leading up to him having a battered heart? I really wanted to read it again because it was really interesting to me.
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Sep 17, 2014 15:25
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Thunderfinger posted:Does anyone have that quote of the write up of the Fifth Doctor anywhere? The one about him leading up to him having a battered heart? I really wanted to read it again because it was really interesting to me. It was McGann talking about the Eighth Doctor - interview's here http://sciencefiction.com/2013/12/05/paul-mcgann-on-night-of-the-doctor/ Although you could make the same argument for the Fifth Doctor, who also got shat upon by the universe more than pretty much any other
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Sep 17, 2014 15:41
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Barry Foster posted:It was McGann talking about the Eighth Doctor - interview's here That's not the one. Someone here in one of the last threads talks at length about it. I wanted to find that post.
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Sep 17, 2014 16:09
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