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Senor Tron posted:I'm curious Oxx. Based on the last couple of episodes, would you keep watching the show right now if you had the choice to just stop? Probably not; firstly everyone tells me it gets worse from here and secondly, except when it's firing on all cylinders, doctor who is IMO a real bad show Finally there's an issue of time, in addition to watching five episodes of who a week I stay current on the strain, the leftovers, masters of sex, manhattan, last week tonight and the soup, I try and watch gravity falls, I watch an episode of LOST a week (a show I've already seen; I'm rewatching it to keep current with a podcast I really enjoy that discusses each episode of the first season every week), and on top of that I like to read (I'm reading the book version of the leftovers and a book titled "Console Wars"), work out, and play video games- currently I'm balls deep in assassins creed iv All this is to say I'm not even watching shows I desperately want to catch up on, like the bridge, or finally taking the plunge on pantheon shows I've never seen, like the shield If I wasn't doing this thread y'all enjoy so much I would look at my time spent on this show I don't like at all, barring a few notable exceptions and spend the time on something else
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Aug 15, 2014 14:51
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Oh and I would probs watch all of season one of last man standing, because I make terrible life choices
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Aug 15, 2014 14:54
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That must be a really loving good podcast, because nothing could conceivably make me re-watch LOST short of a gun pointed at my head.
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Aug 15, 2014 15:55
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Toxxupation posted:Finally there's an issue of time, in addition to watching five episodes of who a week I stay current on the strain, the leftovers, masters of sex, manhattan, last week tonight and the soup, I try and watch gravity falls, I watch an episode of LOST a week (a show I've already seen; I'm rewatching it to keep current with a podcast I really enjoy that discusses each episode of the first season every week), and on top of that I like to read (I'm reading the book version of the leftovers and a book titled "Console Wars"), work out, and play video games- currently I'm balls deep in assassins creed iv 
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Aug 15, 2014 15:57
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Toxxupation posted:[*] gently caress you all Moffat loving owns. It's ok. We all thought this on our first watch through.
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Aug 15, 2014 19:27
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MikeJF posted:It's not like they'd be able to keep it that secret, since apparently BBC marketing and Radio Times has free will to spoil whatever the gently caress they want regardless of drama or what the showrunners want, going by the last few years. That problem isn't exclusive to the last few years. The BBC has always been terrible. 
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Aug 15, 2014 19:40
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That Dalek looks like he's compensating for something with that plunger.
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Aug 15, 2014 19:53
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I was going to make this comment earlier but I wanted to wait until this two-parter had passed. I generally find Season One to be embarrassingly bad, with the exception of this two-parter, and to a lesser extent Dalek. My views are pretty much the same as the OP's. I STILL much prefer Moffat as runner, the show is much more watchable under his reign. I will agree the episodes he's recently written tend to suffer from being way too ambitious, but the quality of episodes from other writers seems to go way up, and the visuals improve a lot too. (Also 98% less farting aliens.) If you end up not wanting to watch more after Season One, I'd be curious to have you at least sample a few episodes from Season Five just to see the change.
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Aug 15, 2014 21:15
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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
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Aug 16, 2014 01:16
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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 You're the one who started this whole project, best friend. Don't welsh on it.
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Aug 16, 2014 01:19
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Oxxidation posted:You're the one who started this whole project, best friend. Don't welsh on it. your av is my face irl, also gently caress you for that pun
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Aug 16, 2014 01:20
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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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Jerusalem posted: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? Integrity, surely.
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Aug 16, 2014 01:24
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Jerusalem posted: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? Never speak again.
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Aug 16, 2014 01:24
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mind the walrus posted:It's ok. We all thought this on our first watch through. Some of us still do. 
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Aug 16, 2014 01:25
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Jerusalem posted: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? Forums fame or some poo poo like that probably.
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Aug 16, 2014 01:39
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Jerusalem posted: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?  But seriously it should be evident by now that he does enjoy this whole review thing.
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Aug 16, 2014 01:48
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PriorMarcus posted:Forums fame or some poo poo like that probably. Infamy, surely.
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Aug 16, 2014 01:56
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Zaggitz posted:Infamy, surely. Nah, it was Brooklyn Bruiser that had it in for me. ...I'll find the door.
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Aug 16, 2014 01:57
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Ed: wait no
NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Aug 16, 2014 |
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Aug 16, 2014 02:04
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Okay I saw the preview for next episode at the end of this one and I've changed my mind, I'm back on board with Doctor Who forever, it is the greatest television show ever made and I was a fool for ever doubting it Also review coming soon
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Aug 16, 2014 02:25
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Ohhh dear, it broke him already. Time to bring out the wolverines.
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Aug 16, 2014 02:29
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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 I see someone just watched Boom Town! (I actually thought you were up to the end of the series and it was only after checking an episode guide that I remembered this episode even existed)
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Aug 16, 2014 02:42
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Toxxupation posted:Okay I saw the preview for next episode at the end of this one and I've changed my mind, I'm back on board with Doctor Who forever, it is the greatest television show ever made and I was a fool for ever doubting it Hahahaha As someone who liked Doctor Who as a child/teenager but isn't so sure anymore, I've really enjoyed your reviews. Hope you keep it up!
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Aug 16, 2014 02:54
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Senor Tron posted:I see someone just watched Boom Town! (I actually thought you were up to the end of the series and it was only after checking an episode guide that I remembered this episode even existed) Boom Town is, in fact, good.
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Aug 16, 2014 03:37
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Doctor Who "Boom Town" Series 1, Episode 11 Okay seriously, this episode is loving atrocious. I cannot stress how absolutely, completely and utterly worthless this episode was, on absolutely every level. Jesus loving christ, people are paid to write for this show?! Like actual loving money?! What the gently caress?! This episode brings back the Slitheen, the worst antagonists of the worst two episodes of this season. Which is bad enough, because they were and are terrible, but bringing them back brings back a host of attendant overarcing plot issues the show has to address. In order, they are: 1) At the end of "World War III", the audience clearly sees all (as the script goes to great pains to point out) of the Slitheen bunched in one room of Downing Street, which is the same room blown to bits and that kills them all, and 2) Harriet Jones, who again as the episode goes through great pains to note quickly rises through the political ranks and becomes the next great prime minister, is shown at the end of the episode walking to the cameras, shouting at the top of her lungs about the Slitheen's evil plot. This means that, as this episode is the followup to "World War III", that the world after the events of that episode must be fundamentally, noticeably different. Either the entire world has recognized and understood that the human race is not alone in the universe, and the world has to be thinking on a cosmic scale, or the opposite: that everyone used a more palatable, logical, less life-shattering explanation for the proceedings (which would sell out your own chronology, as The Doctor specifically notes that Harriet Jones gains political power, and any explanation the human race would arrive at for "what happened" would necessitate either marginalizing or even scapegoating Jones). Any mundane explanation would still have a hard time explaining what was up with Big Ben, or the alien ship that crashed into it and the Thames, or the sentient pig that multiple witnesses saw, or the prime minister's declaration that there was an alien superweapon in the sky, but okay, I guess I could see it done. That still would leave the giant hole of the fact that it would retroactively turn the events of "World War III" into a perceived tragedy, as in one moment the Royal Navy fired onto, and destroyed, Britain's sole seat of power. Either way, as this episode picks up six months later, the world would either be working rabidly towards an interstellar future or be suffering the shockwaves of one of the worst and most insidious terrorist attacks on one of the most important nations in the world. Either way, as this episode picks up after the time skip: the world has to have changed. Period. 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. God I can't even write about how much this pisses me off. This poo poo, this stupid, terribly written, disingenuous, worthless loving garbage right here is exactly why I hate genre television. I hate it because it allows for lazy, hack writers like Russel T. loving Davies to pull this poo poo. It...christ. I don't get mad about this loving show; I'm doing bits, I amp up the "anger" for comedy because I know people like it when I rage about something irrelevant like a television program. But this poo poo...this poo poo makes me loving angry. This is bad loving storytelling. This is dishonest storytelling. This is storytelling that sells out the audience, and to me that's the cardinal sin of working in any entertainment medium: to dangle a huge plot thread in front of the audience's face and then to yank it back, giggling about how it didn't actually matter all along. This episode makes the events of Aliens of London/World War III retroactively worse, if that was loving possible. Russell T. Davies wrote himself into a position where he had to upset the status quo, where he was forced to choose how to progress the narrative, either positively or negatively (really, though, he had already heavily implied it was a positive progression, but that is neither here nor there), and then did neither, either because he didn't know how (despite there being a bunch of easy ways, that I though of immediately, of progressing the meta-narrative in both directions) or didn't want to. And by doing so, RTD made the entire two-parter into one giant red herring, only existing to introduce a villain, and as a byproduct waving his dick at the audience and flipping them off for daring to get invested in his lovely, lovely plotting. All this and we're not even to the main plot of the episode. Essentially, the female Slitheen from "Aliens of London" has essentially gotten herself elected the mayor of Cardiff in the intervening six months, and has planned to build a nuclear power plant for obviously evil ends. There's some effort by RTD to justify why and how the female Slitheen has attained this power without anyone being aware of it- she rabidly denies anyone from taking any pictures, obviously so as to prevent Harriet Jones from being able to identify her, and she explains away how she survived the missile blast via personal teleportation, which, okay fine whatever. In any case she's photographed, and our Three Musketeers (with Mickey in tow) apprehend her and get ready to transport her back to her home planet, where she'll be summarily executed for her crimes. The problem with this development is that it's predicated on the female Slitheen being a complete loving idiot, quickly followed by the entire British government also being a complete loving idiot. The Slitheen's powers literally include being able to assume the form of anyone else, which was kind of the whole point of why they were a threat in the first two-parter. And yet, the female Slitheen keeps the body that she had when she was plotting to destroy the world, for no adequate reason. Further, it throws the stupidity of the British government into stark relief, for allowing someone who was either supposed to be dead or an alien (depending on if they trusted Harriet Jones or not) into a position of political power. I even asked at one point, if Harriet Jones was supposed to be alive, to Oxxidation, and apparently she is, so again this is just Davies refusing to allow consequences or commit to following through on his own logic, and it really gets my goat. It's at this point that the show enters its absolutely absurd climax, as the episode had been building to a series of scenes between The Doctor and the female Slitheen as RTD attempts to, completely ineptly, create a sort of parallelism between. It's obvious, utterly ridiculous, completely tonally dissonant, and just plain loving stupid as RTD completely overtly tries to make the argument that the Slitheen woman and The Doctor are somehow two sides of the same coin. See, because he's transporting her back to her death so that makes him just as bad, see. This is what I mean when I say Davies is a loving hack. He completely sells out his own plotting and tone to make a really lovely, terrible "point" that doesn't even land because it doesn't take into effect the context of the scene. I've argued before that The Doctor is more flawed than he first appears, and there's an interesting point to be made about how he's only willing to change stuff, but not deal with any of the consequences. That he holds himself up as holier-than-thou when, in fact, he's in many ways worse than the people he captures. That, inadvertently, despite his policy for pacifism, he actually causes many deaths. The problem is the female Slitheen is not the person to make this argument. She was part of two, completely separate, schemes to destroy the entirety of Earth for her own benefit. It sucks that she's to be executed for her actions, but The Doctor had no influence on either the actions she took or the actions her race took in punishing her- he's literally just transporting her. It is absurd that the episode attempts to make their actions even equivalent, considering she's directly murdered literally dozens of people of the course of these past six months to have her evil plan come to fruitition. This is...this is infuriatingly poor storytelling. This is what happens when a writer is so focused on having a scene where The Doctor is confronted about the morality of his actions, without taking into account any outside force like "having the plot make sense" or "having the person delivering the message have a moral leg to stand on that doesn't make them sound like a disingenuous hypocrite". It's forced, it's trite, it's awful, and it's completely and utterly embarrassing. This is sub-grade-school storytelling and it's infuriating. In any case, the episode finally, mercifully ends as just when the female Slitheen is about to surf off of the exploding planet (no, I'm not loving kidding, that's the absurd, awful climax that this episode builds to), she instead looks into a glowing light and her heart grows three sizes that day or some poo poo and she turns into a loving egg gently caress this piece of poo poo show, gently caress you Russell T. Davies, you're a lazy hack piece of poo poo screenwriter who completely violated the most basic, most integral tenet of a storyteller, don't lie to your audience. Christ. Grade: F Random Thoughts:
NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Aug 16, 2014 |
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Aug 16, 2014 04:10
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So you didn't like it then?
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Aug 16, 2014 04:16
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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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J-ru said it better than I was going to, but this is a core issue with the RTD era.
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Aug 16, 2014 04:21
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I kind of like "Boom Town" but I more or less completely agree with this statement:Toxxupation posted:gently caress this piece of poo poo show, gently caress you Russell T. Davies, you're a lazy hack piece of poo poo screenwriter who completely violated the most basic, most integral tenet of a storyteller, don't lie to your audience. Christ.
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Aug 16, 2014 04:27
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Yeah, that about sums up Boom Town.. and really I hope all you anti-Moffat folks are remembering just how had things were. It's not like it gets better any time soon either.
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Aug 16, 2014 04:28
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I really like Boom Town because I think all the actual dialogue, character interactions, direction, et cetera are really really great, but the lack of consequences from Aliens of London/World War III are pretty much inexcusable. ...Except maybe that Boom Town is set in Wales, not London - there's cultural humor in their mutual ignoring of one another, as Margret notes in the episode. But it's still misconceived terribly.
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Aug 16, 2014 04:30
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kant posted:Yeah, that about sums up Boom Town.. and really I hope all you anti-Moffat folks are remembering just how had things were. It's not like it gets better any time soon either. No. Moffat has all the same problems with half the strengths.
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Aug 16, 2014 04:32
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Doctor Who "Boom Town" Series 1, Episode 11 Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. I just played P.T. Hello. Hello. Hello. How are you this evening? Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. I'm a little keyed up myself. Hello. Hello. What the gently caress was that noise THE gently caress WAS THAT NOISE Right. Doctor Who. Hahaha, lighthearted adventure. Hahaha. Let's talk about it a little. Boy, this episode gives you a right bit of whiplash, doesn't it? Falling from Moffat's lovely two-parter into Davies'...Davies-ness really throws the less competent aspects on the latter into a sharper light. Occ already pointed out a valid central grievance with the episode - how the man completely ignores his own canon in favor of a hamfisted moral allegory - but I've got a more wide-ranging, partly rhetorical question. Who the gently caress does this man write for? What's his target demographic? Is he one of those people who just writes for himself and lets other people go along for the ride? If so, dandy, more power to him, but I have to question his taste, because the man has less of a grasp on tone, pacing and perspective than most other people and several varieties of trout. You have the utterly absurd weeping Fartbutt puppet in the opener, the ridiculous, Looney Tunes-esque trapping and chase of Margaret in the first act, and then a quiet rumination on the nature of morality interspersed with poison finger-darts and promises of being chemically flayed alive and turned into soup. Your average psychiatrist wouldn't approach a mind like this without a loving shotgun close at hand. Unlike the previous two-parter, which was effective precisely because the majority of its plot elements feed into each other and pull, as one, towards the conclusion, Davies' tendency to throw out whatever the gently caress popped into his head as he brushed his stupid Welsh teeth every morning torpedoes nearly every episode he gets his hands on unless they turn out to be so stupid that they become entertaining. "Boom Town" has a few such moments, but they're undercut by the persistent feeling that you, the viewer, are either being quietly mocked or forced to endure the video diaries of a man who still draws on the walls with crayons. The central conflict of this episode is full of holes that can only be considered matter on the molecular level; yes, yes, the Doctor's killed oodles of people, but his guilt and penitence for that is part of his (and especially Nine's) character, whereas Margaret has just come off her second attempt to kersplode the Earth and goes about her plan to guilt-trip/stall the Doctor with almost lethal quantities of smugness. At no point is it ever indicated that her pleas are even landing with the Doctor, which effectively makes this episode one big excuse to have Eccleston and Annette Badland pull faces at one another. Which they do with aplomb, mind you - Badland smirks, sneers, and quavers her way through every line with convincing emotion even when it's filtered through that horrible alien puppet, and Eccleston, as usual, puts way more effort into his lines than this script deserves. Ohhh, we're going to be in dire straits when he's gone, and we're left with only Davies, Billie Piper, and the other guy. I'm almost definitely projecting my creator-pet theory of Rose to pretty much all of her scenes throughout Davies' tenure, but her scenes with Mickey fall especially flat here, in part because Davies seems terrified of actually admitting the girl was in the wrong even as Mickey delivers some of the most spineless, whimpering accusations in the history of bad breakups. Again, the man was literally investigated for murder because of this lady, and he still pulls the "I will wait for you" routine, only getting angry when he suspects - rightly - that the Doctor's got him beat. And Rose continues to sulk, and pout, and look away, her only acknowledgement of guilt being a one-line aside at the very end of the episode, following such delights as a leering fat lady hissing "Surf's up!" into the camera and a tentacle-egg in a skin suit. Oh, and Jack is here too. He doesn't do much except look good. Davies is a child. He's a big pasty toddler with a camera who hit the lottery resurrecting Who, and oh boy does it occasionally get trying when you have to suffer through his imagination games. Sometimes, like any child's game, they can be fun if you disable your sense of shame, but other times they make you eye the clock and wish you were doing something productive. "Boom Town" falls in the latter category, despite some impressive performances; it's a jangling, self-contradictory mess that delivers the gravitas of a cartoon while attempting for a serious moral lecture that even kids could probably see as bullshit. And it preys on fears regarding nuclear power which just rustles my politics jammies something fierce. Boo. Ok, that's the review done. I'm off to gather every flashlight in the house and maybe drag something heavy in front of the bathroom door. Toodle-pip.
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Aug 16, 2014 04:33
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Not to defend Doctor Who but did you have the same post-alien-nothing-changed problems with the Marvel movies? (I did with Agents of SHIELD...)
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Aug 16, 2014 07:16
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I'm surprised that neither of you has mentioned the sonic screwdriver alleyway teleportation gag, which stood out to me as truly atrocious in an episode that was pretty loving bad to start with.
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Aug 16, 2014 10:20
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John Charity Spring posted:I'm surprised that neither of you has mentioned the sonic screwdriver alleyway teleportation gag, which stood out to me as truly atrocious in an episode that was pretty loving bad to start with. That bit was what I was thinking of when I kept calling the first act cartoonish. Mind you, it was kind of funny. Just totally at odds with the latter half of the episode.
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Aug 16, 2014 13:58
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kant posted:Yeah, that about sums up Boom Town.. and really I hope all you anti-Moffat folks are remembering just how had things were. It's not like it gets better any time soon either. I'm not anti-Moffat. I'm anti-shittywriting. Turns out Moffat has a lot of lovely writing! As does RTD. And every other writer. But that's not for this thread, nor does it have a place for the next few Moffat episodes.
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Aug 16, 2014 16:02
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VagueRant posted:Not to defend Doctor Who but did you have the same post-alien-nothing-changed problems with the Marvel movies? (I did with Agents of SHIELD...) A problem with the MCU is that you never get a citizen's perspective on stuff post-contact. I mean in Cap 2 they literally have a giant Harrier shooting up an office building in DC and there are no news articles about any sort of justification for it (whether it being terrorists or trying to stop terrorists).
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Aug 16, 2014 16:06
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computer parts posted:I mean in Cap 2 they literally have a giant Harrier shooting up an office building in DC and there are no news articles about any sort of justification for it (whether it being terrorists or trying to stop terrorists). Not to get too off-topic, but since all of HYDRA and SHIELD's data gets leaked at the end, the public at large would presumably have all of the information they need to piece together what actually happened.
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Aug 16, 2014 16:16
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