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Trin Tragula posted:Now, if only there was some cromulent Patrick Troughton quote that might be used to express an opinion on this alteration of circumstances... Oh my giddy Aunt, a season thread!  I've only seen the preview at the end of the episode last week, but this looks like it is the annual appease the mighty spirit of Robert Holmes/terrify every child in Britain episode, and I appreciate that.
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Sep 13, 2014 12:25
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Well that's off to a suitably creepy start.
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Sep 13, 2014 19:34
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In a clever twist, the horror of this episode is the horror of the awkward first date.
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Sep 13, 2014 19:36
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This is an entirely different type of dream for young Mr. Pink.
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Sep 13, 2014 19:47
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Once upon a time... the end 
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Sep 13, 2014 19:54
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ORSON Pink..... I thought it was Awesome Pink 
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Sep 13, 2014 20:01
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Autonomous Monster posted:As horror, this isn't working for me. But even so, I am liking it a lot more than last episode. Yeah, I wouldn't call it scary, but I love the odd atmosphere and sense that everything is just slightly off.
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Sep 13, 2014 20:10
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That was.... odd. I am not at all a fan of jumping back to the Doctor's childhood no matter how carefully they try to frame it, and while it was handled well I think it was still a mistake to include it. Also I guess we're supposed to take it as a given that it WAS just another kid fooling around with Rupert under that bedspread, except at one point it (out of focus) took the bedspread off and it looked like a monster so... ? I don't know, weird episode - I liked every individual part of it but it didn't make for a cohesive whole at all, and not just because of the jumps in time and space that it took.
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Sep 13, 2014 20:21
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Noxville posted:There was no way to not include it, literally the entire point of the episode was Moffat writing an origin story for The Doctor. That's why I think it was a mistake to include it. Nice idea, not a bad execution, but unnecessary and doomed from the get-go since they can't go into specifics at all. The Doctor's youth really doesn't need any exploration or definition, it's better left to the viewer's imagination, especially since we already know what makes him into the person that we know (his adventures with humans through time and space starting from An Unearthly Child). Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Sep 13, 2014 |
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Sep 13, 2014 20:24
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Autonomous Monster posted:So wait, if the barn was attached to an orphanage, where was the orphanage when the War Doctor turned up? Fell apart/destroyed/dismantled long ago by whatever turned the rest of that area of Gallifrey into desert, probably.
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Sep 13, 2014 20:28
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PoshAlligator posted:So who wrote "listen" on the chalkboard? I guess we have to assume stuff like that (and the thing under the bedspread) were deliberate misdirections, and that the Doctor really did write it subconsciously while absorbed in his own speculations, and that it was a kid under the bedspread. I don't know, while I enjoyed this episode and appreciate the idea that the "monster" turned out to just be the very "human" fear of darkness and being alone, it feels like it didn't quite work in the end. While I think it was unnecessary to pop back to the Doctor's own childhood, it was still a sweet moment, and there was no aspect of the episode I'd call bad at all.... it just that the whole thing ended up feeling ultimately unsatisfying to me.
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Sep 13, 2014 20:34
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Re: the "orphanage". Unless I missed a specific bit of dialogue, everything was left vague enough that it could have been anything really. Maybe those were his parents (or an Aunt and Uncle) and "the other boys" were siblings (or cousins). Maybe he was staying at some kind of camp. Maybe it was a Gallifreyan boarding school. Maybe it WAS an orphanage: the obvious parallels are there between him and young Rupert's situation. The trouble is, jumping back to any point in the Doctor's life BEFORE An Unearthly Child means you do one of two things: 1. You specifically define his past, which upsets viewers because it will inevitably not be what they imagined or like to think about the Doctor. 2. You go as hazy and undefined as possible to avoid 1, which raises the question of why bothering to do it at all. It's also unnecessary since, as already mentioned, what makes the Doctor "the Doctor" has already been seen from the events of An Unearthly Child on. So it really adds nothing to the character, and is distracting and draws away the viewer's attention/discussion of everything else that happened in the episode. Irony Be My Shield posted:Clara was asked to think about "the time she had that nightmare", but ended up going back to the time Pink had it instead because she was thinking about him. I guess at the end she did the same thing only with the Doctor. PoshAlligator posted:Also Clara was just telepathically communicating with the TARDIS. I have no issues believing the TARDIS would choose to go there based on the information Clara gave it. Yeah that's how I saw it too - she was telepathically hooked up to the TARDIS and it was getting conflicting messages of,"That time I had the dream" and "The Doctor!" - same thing was already established earlier in the episode when she thought of Danny and got jumped back to the first time he had the dream instead. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Sep 13, 2014 |
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Sep 13, 2014 20:42
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So if we accept that "Wally" under the bedsheet really was just a kid (who must have sat in his bedroom afterwards REALLY confused by the party going on at Rupert's) then is this the first episode of the revival to NOT feature an alien/monster/creature?
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Sep 13, 2014 20:55
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LISTEN to these gifs. Wait.... that makes no sense...       
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Sep 13, 2014 22:21
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Sep 13, 2014 22:21
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marktheando posted:That had a great creepy atmosphere, but I came away unsatisfied. A bunch of really strong scenes, but it was less than the sum of its parts. Sums up my feelings well. I think each individual element was handled very well, there was very good characterization, Clara continues to grow as an interesting person, I like her awkward relationship with Danny, Capaldi is doing fantastically as the Doctor but overall this particular episode felt like something was missing. Some extra little spark to tie everything together - it's a weird feeling to be left unsatisfied by an episode where I can't really point to any one thing and say,"This wasn't done well." Even the stuff with the Doctor as a child was handled well, and my criticism of it is that I don't want to see ANY writer try to define any aspect of the Doctor's life pre leaving Gallifrey. Edit: And just to further a point made by DoctorWhat - this was in no way an "origin" story, it told us nothing about the Doctor's childhood, family or pivotal events of his life beyond the fact that one night as a child he was scared in a barn and had a "dream" about being brave and protecting people. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Sep 13, 2014 |
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Sep 13, 2014 22:33
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DoctorWhat posted:Didn't the Doctor wake up saying something about Sontarans interfering in history? He leaps up and shouts,"Sontarans perverting the course of human history!" then glares at the silent Orson and tells him to shut up and stop confusing him.
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Sep 13, 2014 22:38
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thespaceinvader posted:Any yeah, why did no one remember the thing on the bed? After it has left, Clara asks the Doctor if they just successfully saved a kid from.... another kid hiding under a bedspread, and he agrees it is entirely possible. The out of focus image makes it look like a monster, but the end of the episode suggests that there was never any monster. So I think we're supposed to accept that it was just a kid (it does slam the door behind it as it goes, which seems odd for creatures perfectly designed to remain hidden) and that the image we see represented... I don't know, the characters' undefined fears of whatever it is that is the something under the bed? Maybe?
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Sep 13, 2014 22:53
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Shugojin posted:This is Doctor Who, it could have very well been an entirely different and very, very confused alien I would love that. "I am an alien who communicates via eye-blinks, I am looking forward to first-contact with these huma.... they... they won't look at me  "
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Sep 13, 2014 23:07
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Stealthweasel posted:The cloister bell also starts ringing at the end which is weird if there's nothing out there, although possibly the TARDIS just got scared too. It was the end of the universe, maybe the Toclafane were coming! Ludicro posted:Never seen any of Everdraed's work then? To be fair, after his "Loss" gif I think his "gifs" are more classified as modern art 
Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 00:17
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LividLiquid posted:Also, what's a cloister bell? It's a TARDIS warning alarm that basically acts as shorthand for,"poo poo's about to get serious."
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Sep 14, 2014 00:34
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Gaz-L posted:Speaking of, I did like the little "The TARDIS isn't supposed to come this far" nod, which immediately made me think of Dark Eyes, which opens with the Eighth Doctor trying to disable exactly those safeguards. This actually came up in the classic series as well, I think it's in Frontios where the TARDIS travels further forward in time than it is supposed to and gives a warning to the Doctor. The human race has retreated to a planet to escape an undefined threat which you could conceivably argue could have been an early example of the human retreat from inevitable extinction mentioned in Utopia.
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Sep 14, 2014 00:47
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7thBatallion posted:I thought the cloister bell went off because the Doctor was about to be vented into space... The Doctor was back inside the TARDIS (but unconscious) when the Cloister Bell began to go off. To be fair, it's entirely possible the universe was about to crunch down to a singularity.
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Sep 14, 2014 07:16
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PriorMarcus posted:It's because she's still romantically interested in the Doctor and he is in her. Actually it's because it is awkward talking about your love life with your goofy old Granddad.
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Sep 14, 2014 12:47
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MrL_JaKiri posted:His foot is flat, that's just perspective. The human and elf women have their toes bent up. Maybe there's a fence just out of our field of view and they're just trying to get a look over it (at an actual good sequel to Dragon Age: Origins on the other side  )
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Sep 15, 2014 00:33
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AndyElusive posted:So to ween us off this stupid talk about Claras self esteem, The Doctors misogynists insults and how you personally deal with it....does this Clara understand that her timeline and The Doctors are intertwined? If so then why was she so put off with 12's change of appearance in Deep Breath? Didn't she already understand the concept of regeneration and how it changes how he looks due to the fact that she's traveled across all thirteen of his lives? The 11th Doctor was meant to die at Trenzalore. The "scar" she jumped into was that of a Doctor who died for good at Trenzalore defending it from the assembled races terrified of the signal coming from the crack in time. He never regenerated (because his regeneration cycle had run out) so there was no look into his future, because he didn't have one. Thanks to Clara's plea to the Time Lords in The Time of the Doctor, the Time Lords decided to gift him a new set of regenerations and he started all over again with a new set of lives, changing his own future (and technically past, since he visited his own grave in The Name of the Doctor) so that Clara had no idea what was coming. Couple that with her own admission that her memory of what she saw inside that "scar" is fuzzy at best, and the fact that her prior experience with regenerations were prior to him becoming "her" Doctor - in other words, they were all on their way to becoming the man she knew - and it is no wonder that she reacts so strongly to this regeneration. "Her" Doctor has become a stranger, he's no longer building up to becoming the man she recognized as the Doctor, he's something more than that now, somebody who has moved on past that particular incarnation. Basically, everything is new uncharted territory for her at the moment, and to her credit (and the writers) she's reacted pretty admirably in that she now actually appears to have a strong character as opposed to just relying on the crutch of the undefined mystery of being "the impossible girl".
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Sep 15, 2014 00:53
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Spikeguy posted:So the whole thing about everyone throughout all time having the same dream at one point in their lives, was that a lie or was the Doctor mistaken? Because if it's true, it's another notch in there being something out there column. It's a common (but not universal) fear - the monster under the bed. A hell of a lot of people have had it in their childhoods, and the Doctor didn't set that in motion by having a Jenna Coleman under his bed one night. He was just one of billions of children across the universe who have been scared of the dark and the unknown one night. Only, because of who he, one day as an adult he got it into his head that maybe there WAS something to it and set about trying to prove that, when in the end all it turned out to be was that - like so many others - he was a scared child one night in his past, as "human" as anybody else.
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Sep 15, 2014 00:56
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Spatula City posted:I dunno, apparently thinking Listen is a great episode is watching Doctor Who badly, going by the general reactions of most people here. Nobody said anybody else was watching Doctor Who badly or the wrong way and if they did you can safely disregard what they have to say. 
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Sep 15, 2014 05:33
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Shugojin posted:It's pretty good that there is a plausible explanation for everything but the bed critter's face. I feel like an idiot for never even considering the one option somebody bought up earlier that maybe the kid trying to spook Rupert (and his two weird adult friends oh poo poo what have I walked into how do I get out of this oh wait the Scottish dude is giving me an out!) might have been wearing a fright mask in order to freak out Rupert if he had the guts to pull the sheet away.
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Sep 15, 2014 05:42
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computer parts posted:It could be a neighboring planet; if you're going to lock away an entire planet it's probably a good idea to not be standing on it. The War Doctor was originally planning to go down with everybody else, he never expected to survive whatever it was The Moment unleashed.
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Sep 15, 2014 05:45
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Spikeguy posted:Has it ever been established why The Doctor took such a liking to Earth and hangs out there more often than not? I know he protects anyone he can, but this place seems to have taken a special place in his heart. Because Ian and Barbara owned bones It was actually established early in the series that the French Revolution was the Doctor's favorite period of Earth history, and that in England he'd visited the court of King Henry at least before settling in 1963, so he was aware of the planet. Perhaps initially he thought it was a good backwater to settle down in where the Time Lords were unlikely to find him (or they knew but held back because he had the Hand of Omega, a weapon he stole before leaving) and his granddaughter could live a relatively normal life. But after meeting Ian and Barbara and having a series of adventures with them, he quickly grew fond of Earth and humans.
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Sep 15, 2014 22:40
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surc posted:Is there still a general doctor who and/or classic doctor who thread? I am about to take the plunge and go full chronological through classic who and would like to have a place to talk about it. I love the classic show and I will talk about it until my face caves in and I have to develop a rudimentary sign language to continue to talk about it, so please share your thoughts and questions and ponderings about it as you go 
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Sep 16, 2014 05:55
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thexerox123 posted:What are you basing this on? I think there are just 2. He specifically chose to vent the regeneration energy into his severed hand to avoid regenerating himself. Nah thexerox123 is right on this one - the 10th Doctor didn't regenerate, he just used up the regeneration energy and created the (terrible idea of the) meta-crisis half-human Doctor thing as part of the completely unnecessary and ill-thought out "happy ending" for Rose. It was a big ol' mess and I wish it had never happened, but it did. The 10th Doctor very explicitly didn't change, but Time of the Doctor clarifies that he still expended the regeneration energy that was apparently set aside to turn him into his next incarnation.
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Sep 16, 2014 06:10
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TBE: It's about a guy who looks down on humans, goes where he wants and does what he feels like, and everybody loves. Cat: Finally, somebody I can relate to!
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Sep 16, 2014 23:02
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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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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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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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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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Big Mean Jerk posted:I think I'm prepared for whatever b-movie hell Minuet brings.  
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Sep 17, 2014 22:39
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CobiWann posted:Stop with the Scottish referendum panic! Of course if we take Minuet in Hell as a chilling vision of the future, then Scottish Independence is guaranteed!
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Sep 18, 2014 00:44
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