|
Shutting up and acting like all working conditions are great is how all working conditions become poo poo
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 01:25
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 22:03 |
|
|
"I have not seen Jaws IV, which I hear is terrible," said Michael Caine. "But I have seen the house it paid for, which is splendid."
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 01:57
|
|
|
Dennis Hopper posted:I made a picture called Super Mario Bros., and my six-year-old son at the time - he's now 18 - he said, "Dad I think you're probably a pretty good actor, but why did you play that terrible guy King Koopa in Super Mario Bros.?" And I said, "Well Henry, I did that so you could have shoes," and he said, "Dad, I don't need shoes that badly."
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 02:03
|
|
|
Astroman posted:I'm less pissed about the Who stuff, than I am the GI Joe/Thor comments, and I didn't even see those movies. It just strikes me as very unprofessional and contemptuous of the audience. I haven't heard much about GI Joe, but for Thor 2 he did a lot of work that ended up on the cutting room floor to make the movie more "efficient." I can see how that would rankle an Actor's Actor like him.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 02:26
|
|
|
I just read a thing about Alec Guinness, whining about how Star Wars nearly killed his career, and how miserable he was playing Obi-Wan Kenobi. I really hate that I became a fan during his time in the Original Trilogy, and that he's "My Obi-Wan." He's so loving joyless.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 02:36
|
|
|
Don't forget Harrison Ford constantly pissing on it, too. Throwin shade in the doctor who thread.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 02:39
|
|
|
christopher eccleston has no responsibility to you or anyone else
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 03:58
|
|
|
corn in the bible posted:christopher eccleston has no responsibility to you or anyone else He was actually responsible for for his wife and children and if he hadn't died in the war, maybe they would have been spared their horrible fate in that haunted old house.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 04:26
|
|
|
Bicyclops posted:He was actually responsible for for his wife and children and if he hadn't died in the war, maybe they would have been spared their horrible fate in that haunted old house. What are you talking about? They were so happy to live there in THEIR house forever and ever, nobody could ever come into THEIR house because it was THEIRS 
Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Mar 13, 2018 |
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 04:28
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:What are you tlaking about? They were so happy to live there in THEIR house forever and ever, nobody could ever come into THEIR house because it was THEIRS It's creepy to be sure, but the alternate ending in which the soldier walks halfway into the forest, regenerates into David Tennant, and cheerfully breaks them out of the Time Loop they've been trapped in didn't test well with audiences.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 04:31
|
|
|
 : WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY DOCTOR?!?!? : But Rose, I AM your Doctor!
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 04:39
|
|
|
Been skipping to the Who repeats on ABC in the ads on Bargain Hunt and Curse of the Black Spot is on tonight and it's not the best episode but I managed to catch the bit where the Doctor gives his "two cars parked in the same space" metaphor that has Amy going like oh, yeah, I get that, only for the Doctor to sayquote:Good. ‘Cause it’s not like that at all, but if that helps… and I think that's one of my favourite examples of the thing where the Doctor simplifies a concept for us to be able to understand and then says well no, not really
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 09:09
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:Yeah, everything I've read suggests Ecclestone is about the nicest guy you could meet but he takes his integrity seriously and doesn't put up with poo poo or what he considers bullying. And this is the real reason he never came back for the 50th.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 09:47
|
|
|
The Lie of the Land - this episode has a clever title. Oh God I think I've run out of good things to say about this episode. What the hell happened? What went wrong? How did it come to this? These are the questions Bill is asking herself at the start of this episode AND the questions I was asking by the end. A repeat viewing didn't do anything to help, if anything it just brought the problems with the episode into sharper relief. In Extremis we learned that the Monks were a mysterious race of hyper-advanced aliens with the ability to accurately simulate down to the final atom a working replica of an entire planet. In The Pyramid at the End of the World we got a little more info about the actual aliens in the real world, including teleportation and telekinetic abilities as well as the ability to somehow turn living matter into ash. We also learned that they were as beholden to their own rules as any of their prey, their insistence on pure consent bordering on obsession. We ALSO learned that they weren't as smart or as powerful as they seemed if anything even remotely operated outside of the strict boundaries they had set - despite numerous simulations designed to understand the Doctor, he was still easily able to defeat them only for Bill to gently caress everything up for him in an incredibly contrived scene where they somehow cured his blindness (how? Exactly WHAT are their powers?) in exchange for dominion over the planet Earth. All this was set-up for the final episode of the trilogy, in which presumably everything we'd learned and seen would come to a head as the Doctor figured out how to defeat them. So it's a shame the normally reliable Toby Whithouse proceeded to write the third part of a trilogy we hadn't seen after apparently going on an all-nighter playing Half-Life 2. With villains that only bore a passing resemblance to the Monks of the previous two episodes, it felt like every writer of each of the three episodes had a completely different idea of what the monks were. It felt like there was only a skeleton of what they'd do across the three episodes, and largely didn't communicate with each other at all. That 1.5 of the episodes were written by Steven Moffat, then, makes it all the more baffling. How the hell did this largely unconnected and sketchily laid out series of episodes end up smack in the middle of what up to this point had been one of the most consistently high quality run of episodes since Moffat's inaugural season 5?  Rare footage of Peter Capaldi and Michelle Gomez after first reading this script The episode opens with the Doctor narrating a video detailing the history of the world to this date, a history which has ALWAYS included the Monks. They've been there since the first sea life emerged onto land, as it evolved through the ages into hominids and eventually homo-sapiens. Always there, always guiding, always encouraging, always helping. They were there through the Renaissance, there through the Industrial age, World War II, the 60s, the Moon Landing (did they also kill all the Silence on sight?) and into the present day. They are benevolent and altruistic, they are beloved... and it's all a lie, they've only been here for a few months but for some reason nearly the entire planet believes the lie... and the Doctor is helping spread it? Great concept, right? Well I think it is, and it is a drat shame it is wasted on this episode. Short of giving the show a chance to indulge in RTD's old standby favorite of a middle class family cowering in their living room, not much works here. The visual insertion of the Monks into history is pretty bad in most cases, and it doesn't feel like this was intentional or commentary, just a rush job to match what feels like a rushed script. Bill is among those who seems to remember the true history of the planet, but keeps quiet to avoid the literal Truth Police, who arrest anybody who contradicts the accepted history. There is another brief glimpse of the stymied potential of this episode, as Bill finally takes a moment to relax and the false history almost immediately tries to jam itself into her head. She finds respite in her memory of her mother, or rather her fake memory: the idealized fantasy version she created for herself to replace the mother she never knew. This is at least foreshadowing for what is to come.  The shots showing the obvious pleasure and relief of accepting the Monk's version of reality is well handled, and a sign of something that could have been really interesting in a better realized episode. Reunited with Nardole who took weeks in the TARDIS to recover from the killer bacteria from the previous episode, she explains she has been lying low and waiting for a chance to reunite with the Doctor who she is convinced is faking capitulation while working on a plan. Nardole has been able to figure out where he is, and together the two travel to a sailing prison vessel from which the Doctor has been broadcasting pro-Monk propaganda. A brief encounter with a Monk is the only real trouble they have getting into what is supposedly one of the most secure places on the planet (more on that soon), and Bill is able to finally reunite with the Doctor where she is horrified to hear him insist that the Monks are the lesser of two evils. He blames her for giving the planet over to them but admits that it is better for them to rule with benevolence given humanity's predilection to screw things up, and decries free will as a failed experiment. Disgusted but disbelieving, Bill reaches her final straw when he exposes a coded message she gives him, and with all faith lost she pulls a gun and shoots the Doctor in a rage.   This is where the episode goes completely off a cliff. Putting aside the fact the Doctor reveals it was a fakeout, that he so cruelly drove her to despair and the deep psychological damage of actually pulling the trigger, that the jaunty music belies what a hosed up thing this was to do, that everybody is just standing around laughing like it was nothing... why did the Doctor fake regenerating? Bill doesn't know he can do this, she doesn't understand the significance of the glowing light that emanates from a dying Time Lord. It's there purely for the audience as a fake-out, a reversal of the far superior reveal from season 5's The Beast Below in which we finally see the face behind a masked figured only to have no idea who it is. Because the mask was to hide a character known to the inhabitants of that episode's world. Here the fakeout feels forced, purely there as a GOTCHA for the audience. Because of course the Doctor wasn't going to die here in episode 8 of Capaldi's last season, and of course the Doctor wasn't working for the Monks. Both things would be interesting subversions of the usual for Doctor Who of course, and it rankles that such interesting ideas were wasted on this poor quality episode. With the Doctor convinced that Bill is absolutely NOT on the Monk's side, and having gone through all this effort to keep themselves hidden and work carefully to deprogram the soldiers and build a resistance... the Doctor promptly takes control of the prison hulk and loudly and publicly rides it into dock to announce his rebellion. Why? To what benefit? All it does is alert the Monks that their most dangerous subject isn't negated after all, making it harder for them to move about and get where they need to go. Plus... you know... we were explicitly shown that a Monk had boarded the ship unexpectedly at the same time as Bill and Nardole, so where the gently caress did it go? Luckily for the Doctor and Bill, the Monks are guarding his office at the University and not the Vault containing the Master (was that not in their simulation?), where she sulkily complains about being left to her own devices for the last few months. The Doctor wants her help in defeating the Monks and there is some interesting back and forth between the two about the validity of her efforts to become a better person under his guard. She reminds him that not only did she not escape while he was gone, but that she hasn't tried to escape before that either - and it's not like all of his careful safeguards on the vault could have stopped her in any case and he knows it. So does she know about the Monks? Yep, she encountered a planet controlled by them in the past and defeated them... by finding the person who gave pure consent and killing them. Narsham posted:Really, there's a deeper waste of potential here. The Monks are all about living for/in the future, even down to their "we see you as corpses" comment. So have them both genuinely alien in their thought processes and ridiculously patient. They land, say that they predict a rolling climate disaster over the next 50-60 years, set a deadline for the point that they'll actually help rectify it, and just settle in for the long game. They aren't really invaders. They aren't harming people. They're just saying they predict a disaster and refuse to help unless they are put in charge. Does the Doctor even have grounds for fighting them? I quoted the above because it struck a chord with me. Not necessarily the time-skipping, but the idea of Patient Invaders (which Chibnall ALMOST did in The Power of Three). Because Missy does talk about the patience of the Monks, noting that they think in terms of centuries and millennia. They are vulnerable at the start because a single person can unravel their plans... but if that does happen, they simply add it to the data they use for their invasions and then go somewhere else and try again with counter-measures in place. If the original consenter doesn't get found, then bloodline will eventually spread out across the race and so long as a single individual remains no matter how diluted their connection, the consent remains planet-wide. It's an interesting idea for a villain different to the ones we were given in the Monks, and that's largely what my complaints about this episode boil down to: interesting ideas wasted on a poor execution that we'll probably never get to see done right. The Doctor refuses to kill Bill, of course, in spite of her insistence that she caused this problem and therefore it is her responsibility to solve it. He does have an idea though, the statues of Monks spread around the world are a network to bolster the consent generated by Bill, but it needs a central point to feed through and he figures that must be in their "cathedral" at the center of London. ...wait, what Cathedral? And since when was it in the center of London? It turns out he means the Pyramid from the previous episode, which is now called a Cathedral for some reason and is no longer in Turmezistan, furthering my belief that Whithouse didn't read the script for the previous story, or that large changes were made he wasn't aware of. Breaking into the pyramid with the deprogrammed soldiers (all wearing headphones with a looped recording of Bill to overpower the boosted consent signal), they encounter several Monks and easily kill them in spite of their rather cool looking coral-shields.  Wait... since when did they have the ability to generate coral shields? Wait... so you can just shoot them? They can teleport into planes and pull submarines out of the ocean but then you can just... shoot them? Having killed two of the only 12 Monks on the planet (I'm not a big fan of killing as a solution, but maybe just, you know, kill the other 10?) they find "Fake News Central" (ugh) where a single Monk is hooked into the system feeding the image of the Monk into the world's memories. So we've gone from Bill's consent gives the Monks an opening to take over, to Bill's consent is spread worldwide, to Bill's consent is spread worldwide via statues, to Bill's consent is spread worldwide via statues hooked into a pyramid controlled by a single Monk's mind.  It's a cool visual at least.  The Doctor decides to pit his mind against the Monk's and remove them from the world's memory, but of course it's all too much even for him to try and he is blown away and temporarily knocked out. He wakes to find himself restrained as Bill decides to do something stupid since that worked last episode so well, and she's going to pit her mind against the Monk's. She knows it'll burn out her brain, but that will also kill her and remove the worldwide consent. The Doctor breaks free too late to stop her, and is powerless to break her free as the Monk - obviously no idiot - decides to just completely swamp her mind with images of the Monks and destroy her mind while keeping her brain intact. This is where the foreshadowing at the start of the episode comes in, as Bill looks to her mother in a time of stress and hits upon something the Monks can't touch. Many have argued that this is the oft-decried "Power of Love" ending, which I disagree with (even if I don't think "Power of Love" is necessarily a bad thing) even in spite of how much poo poo I've talked about this episode. Because all of this has been foreshadowed and doesn't exist purely in this episode, but was seeded through previous episodes. The Monks change memories to infiltrate the minds of a population, but Bill's mother isn't a memory, she's a fantasy. Bill only has an image in her mind of her mother because the Doctor gave her those photos (I could have used without him explicitly stating this), and the Monks - whether restrained by their own anal nature or some gap in their poorly defined powers - can't actually affect that part of her brain. Bill's mother goes viral (double ugh) and wipes the Monks out of the world's memory (to be replaced with people suddenly wanting to call their mothers and say they love them?  ), which causes the world's population to suddenly view them with disgust and distrust. Just as Missy promised, they don't stick around to fight or sulk or attempt to fight back, they just hoof it back to their "cathedral" and get the gently caress off the planet and that's that, and hopefully the last we see of them ever. Given they were Moffat creations, and not particularly well received ones, I think it'll probably be some time before we see them again. Good riddance to ill-defined rubbish. But while I don't have a problem with this so-called "Power of Love", I do hate what comes next. In yet another callback to the RTD era, Bill and the Doctor sit by the ruins of the statue at their University where she excitedly proclaims that now the world is aware of aliens... and he explains that nah the whole world just forgot any of that happened, proving it by querying a passing student who mutters that it was something to do with a movie or something? So the labor camps people were sent to? The Thought Police in their uniforms and black vans? The metal barricades lining the street? The dead UN Secretary General? The dead top ranking soldiers from China, Russia and the United States? Did those all disappear too? Did people just suddenly wake up and think they were LARPing? What a load of nonsense, and a reflection of the level of thought that seemingly went into these scripts. What a lovely cheat of an ending - look at all this world changing stuff to prove that poo poo has gotten real... only none of it happened and contemporary London is exactly the same as the real world again! With the last three episodes discarded with and the world a better place for their loss, the Doctor sits with Missy in her vault, spending time with her to help dull the boredom and isolation of her 1000-year accepted imprisonment. The mystery of the vault - which nobody really cared about anyway - was tossed away as an aside in the midst of this trilogy and for that we should be thankful at least, because getting to see Peter Capaldi and Michelle Gomez act together is as always a treat. The most interesting thing to come out of this episode is the Doctor's discovery (and suspicious disbelief mixed with wary hope) that the Master is becoming more... human? Stuck with nothing but her own thoughts, the memories of all those she has killed keep returning to her, along with the knowledge that she remembered all their names and faces in spite of herself. Is Missy turning good? What does a good Master look like/do in any case? Even when her heart is in the right place, is she necessarily going to do the right thing or just what she THINKS is the right thing? She would have killed Bill in a heartbeat after all and thought it the right thing to do. Those are interesting questions to me, and far more interesting than these badly defined Monks and their three inconsistent appearances blighting season 10's excellence. It's gonna be a looooong time before I put myself through watching at least the last two episodes again. I still wish Extremis had been a one-and-done. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 10:39 on Mar 13, 2018 |
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 10:27
|
|
|
Astroman posted:And we're not talking B-Movie schlock here, but multi-million dollar blockbusters
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 11:34
|
|
|
MrL_JaKiri posted:Shutting up and acting like all working conditions are great is how all working conditions become poo poo Yes, he's a saint because he quit Doctor Who before it aired in defense of the working downtrodden poor.  There seems to be a perspective with him. At first everybody slammed him for quitting. Then people jumped to defend him with "How DARE you! You FAN! You don't own these actors!" Then it came out that there was some incident or incidents where something vauge happened that was bad to some people on set and he started hinting he quit over that. Now he's some sort of canonized working class hero and you can't criticize him. Maybe he did, but him saying that he was a "whore" for doing GI Joe and Thor and was suicidal daily just going to work on those has nothing to do with with any of that. If I was a downtrodden working little guy on those movies who worked hard and was proud of my work, I probably wouldn't like those comments.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 13:41
|
|
|
"Actually, capital and the bourgeoisie are good" - Doctor Who fans mad that the actor man didn't dance for them a second time
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 14:09
|
|
|
I don't think anybody who worked on GI Joe or Thor 2 is under any illusion about the artistic integrity of those films.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 14:39
|
|
|
I hope Big Finish can get Eccleston sometime. I really want him and McGann to be in a multi-Doctor story together.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 15:39
|
|
|
Yeah I didn't like Land of the Lie very much. Like I said a few weeks ago when I watched it for the first time, it felt like they put "Last of the Timelords" and "Day of the Moon" in a blender and came out as this poo poo. The former even had the Maser in it as well! I wish if they actually bothered to deal with the "they have a simulation of all our moves" that Missy being in the vault was a wildcard who they didn't predict and she defeats them.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 16:25
|
|
|
Yeah it was a bad episode, I’d love to hear the behind the scenes on those three episodes because I bet it was total chaos.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 16:31
|
|
|
I still maintain that Lie Of The Land is the worst of the Capaldi era; at least other infamous episodes were trying something different; Lie just feels like it's either being derivative of other concepts done better in Doctor Who or outright pointing and laughing at you.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 17:12
|
|
|
From everything I've ever read, downtrodden little guys who work on Hollywood blockbuster films absolutely do not give a poo poo about the artistic integrity of those films. It's something they can add to their resume to get future jobs on Hollywood blockbuster films and that's it. The key grip on Thor or the best boy on G.I. Joe are not gnashing their teeth and rending their garments over the fact that some uppity Brit said he hated working on those films. Also I note that people keep slamming Eccleston over what he said about Thor and G.I Joe, but gloss over the fact that he also said in that same interview that he enjoyed working on Gone In Sixty Seconds (with particular praise for Nicolas Cage, who is often pointed to as the textbook example of "Hollywood actor whoring themselves out for money"). But, I guess these cherries ain't gonna pick themselves.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 17:14
|
|
|
Sydney Bottocks posted:From everything I've ever read, downtrodden little guys who work on Hollywood blockbuster films absolutely do not give a poo poo about the artistic integrity of those films. It's something they can add to their resume to get future jobs on Hollywood blockbuster films and that's it. The key grip on Thor or the best boy on G.I. Joe are not gnashing their teeth and rending their garments over the fact that some uppity Brit said he hated working on those films. I miss Eccleston and would love to see him play the Doctor again however I see exactly where he's coming from and hope he's happy with whatever he's doing now. I think in the case of GI Joe/Thor an actor/actress/crewmember is at the mercy of "production by checklist." Hit this point, hit this point, hit THIS point, and count on nostalgia/sequelitis to put butts in seats. Counting on "nostalgia" to put butts in seats is why I'm so revved up to hate Ready Player One. Something like Gone in Sixty Seconds is just as formulaic but there's a certain amount of freedom because you're not tied to nostalgia or some sense of "if you don't touch upon this part of the franchise the whole movie sucks" or remaking some beloved classic...yes, I know Gone in Sixty Seconds is a remake, but it's not a remake of a pop-culture "classic"...so there's less pressure and I would imagine just a sense of fun and being able to stretch your wings a lot more than you could in a Disney/Marvel flick. Eccleston basically chewed the HELL out of the scenery in Gone in Sixty Seconds and probably had a blast doing so. You could say the same thing in a much less subdued manner for 28 Days Later. Now that I think about it, this is one of the reasons I love Doctor Who. The show could coast so easily on nostalgia and dips into its own past quite a bit (any Dalek episode or something in the style of Under the Laker/Before the Flood), but you also get experimental, creative moments...some work (Blink, Midnight), some don't (Sleep No More) and sometimes you get a female Doctor. The show truly gives us the best of both worlds when it takes advantage of it. Edit - Huh. I could probably apply most of what I just wrote to CM Punk and the current state of WWE... CobiWann fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Mar 13, 2018 |
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 19:48
|
|
|
GORDON posted:I just read a thing about Ecclestone, whining about how Doctor Who nearly killed his career, and how miserable he was making GI Joe and Thor. i don't know if we read the same article, because he didn't really come off as whiny at all in what I read? he was pretty blunt that the only reason he holds ill will towards Doctor Who is because the BBC went out of their way to dick him over after he left (per his agent), and that the only reason he didn't enjoy working on blockbusters was himself rather than set shenanigans on those movies. e: like, his experience with those movies seemed way less "I had a horrible, traumatic experience making these movies" and more "making multi-million dollar actioners isn't really my bag."
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 20:08
|
|
|
I thought Big Finish already had the 9th Doctor in to record audio and that his name was Nicholas Briggs???
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 21:18
|
|
|
FreezingInferno posted:I still maintain that Lie Of The Land is the worst of the Capaldi era; at least other infamous episodes were trying something different; Lie just feels like it's either being derivative of other concepts done better in Doctor Who or outright pointing and laughing at you. CobiWann posted:Now that I think about it, this is one of the reasons I love Doctor Who. The show could coast so easily on nostalgia and dips into its own past quite a bit (any Dalek episode or something in the style of Under the Laker/Before the Flood), but you also get experimental, creative moments...some work (Blink, Midnight), some don't (Sleep No More) and sometimes you get a female Doctor. The show truly gives us the best of both worlds when it takes advantage of it. Yeah, Sleep No More and The Zygon Invasion/Inversion are pretty terrible but they're trying to do something, even if they don't do it very well. With Lie of the Land, it just feels like a first draft of a paint-by-numbers script that was written based on early discussions of a trilogy where the other two episodes ended up going in a largely different direction. I expected way better from Toby Whithouse, the fact he did the worst episode of the trilogy still boggles my mind.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 21:53
|
|
|
I mean, I was none too pleased with Before The Flood because Whithouse took an interesting "gee I wonder what's going on in this story" and all but put the resolution of it in big red flashing letters at the start of the episode, such that anyone with half a brain who thought critically about this show for a solitary second could see where it was going. Even with that, he hecked up a less interesting concept there than he did with the Monks trilogy.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 22:07
|
|
|
Astroman posted:Yes, he's a saint because he quit Doctor Who before it aired in defense of the working downtrodden poor. Oh please.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2018 23:58
|
|
|
It's not that he can't talk poo poo about what he's worked on, but he should do so while swearing as classily as possible. Tom Baker set a precedent. SYMPHONY!!
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2018 01:56
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:The Lie of the Land So I was lying in bed at 3AM last night and I came up with the final argument that this trilogy is complete poo poo. In Extremis, we saw a simulated world, with a simulated Doctor, and that Doctor is blind just like the real one. Except that the Doctor was blinded in an accident on a space station orbiting a mining colony a zillion light years away. So in order to know that the Doctor was blind, the simulation had to include that space station. So, instead of a computer which simulates the Earth and all humans down to the atom- which strains credibility a lot- we have a computer which models the entire universe, which is completely loving impossible.
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2018 02:31
|
|
|
Gynovore posted:So I was lying in bed at 3AM last night and I came up with the final argument that this trilogy is complete poo poo. In Extremis, we saw a simulated world, with a simulated Doctor, and that Doctor is blind just like the real one. Except that the Doctor was blinded in an accident on a space station orbiting a mining colony a zillion light years away. So in order to know that the Doctor was blind, the simulation had to include that space station. You don't know how the monks created the simulation. Maybe they scanned every atom of the planet and made a disk image on their giant quantum space hard drive they could mount on their holodeck, which would have copied the Doctor's blindness since it's a physical trait. Extremis is a cool episode if you can handwave that bit, shame about the next two.
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2018 02:44
|
|
|
Yeah, I think I mentioned in my Extremis write-up that Bill, Nardole and the Doctor being included in the simulation means that the Monks must have done some kind of scan/snapshot of the planet because otherwise they'd not only need to have simulated the entire galaxy or universe, but in the future as well for a simulation in the present which makes no sense at all unless they're time-travellers too which seems unlikely. Basically, you kind of have to take things at face value or not pull at the loose threads too much because the concept requires far too much explanation for a concise section of a single episode.
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2018 03:10
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:The Doctor decides to pit his mind against the Monk's and remove them from the world's memory, but of course it's all too much even for him to try and he is blown away and temporarily knocked out. He wakes to find himself restrained as Bill decides to do something stupid since that worked last episode so well, and she's going to pit her mind against the Monk's. She knows it'll burn out her brain, but that will also kill her and remove the worldwide consent. The Doctor breaks free too late to stop her, and is powerless to break her free as the Monk - obviously no idiot - decides to just completely swamp her mind with images of the Monks and destroy her mind while keeping her brain intact. This is where the foreshadowing at the start of the episode comes in, as Bill looks to her mother in a time of stress and hits upon something the Monks can't touch. What makes me really hate the resolution of Extremis in these two follow-up episodes isn't just that they're so poorly handled, it's that they waste so much potential that wherever you look or dig or scratch you come across even more potential gone to waste. Because here's another idea wasted: the Monks aren't capable of imagination. They have their elaborate computer simulations of the future because that's the only way they can understand it. They're so focused on "pure consent" and mind-control of this sort not merely because it's an effective planet-conquering device, but because no alternative occurs to them. And when they're beaten, they just calmly integrate that into their simulation because they aren't imaginative enough to think "maybe conquering planets isn't the only thing we can do." They're a kind of planet-wide jobsworth effect. The life you lead is the only possible life because who could imagine anything different? Of course a fantasy or an ideal simply isn't within their scope. But here's the thing: the human experience is filled with fantasy, with imagination, with the impossible being treated as real. That's what Doctor Who is, among other things. By making Bill and Bill's mom the linchpin of the whole episode, Lie of the Land misses a wonderful opportunity to reimagine the end of Last of the Time Lords in a way that works. Humanity shouldn't suddenly have their fixed ideation overwritten by a fantasy woman. Every one of them should be inspired to unlock their own fantasies, whether singing a song or staring at a photo of them cosplaying or picking up a copy of Twelfth Night or what have you. The entire power of the human imagination, our ability to fall deeply in love with what doesn't exist and will never exist, but maybe should, could have been set against the Monk's narrow-minded "teaching to the test" literalism. Then stick the stupid ending by instead having all of humanity defeat the invasion because they now think that they imagined the Monks from the beginning. Like the mythic War of the Worlds radio broadcast. The Doctor can say something pithy about the human power of delusion and how it makes people stupid, but also makes them powerful. And the Monks depart without having the foggiest idea what just happened. Don't shoot them, confuse them into defeat. That's what the Doctor's always been best at, after all. (And don't get me started on the utterly missed opportunity to do something with religion. They are Monks introduced in the context of the Vatican, and the best we get is renaming their pyramid a "cathedral?")
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2018 03:47
|
|
|
Here, just pop this in at the end of "Extremis," skip the next two episodes, and you're good!
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2018 04:32
|
|
|
Man, i'd forgotten that some of the DVDs have the old Annuals on them as pdfs. Including that kind of material is pretty neat Zoltan! Looking forward to Doctor Who and the Continuum Transfunctioner --- I've only just now heard about Stephen Hawking throwing a party for time travelers bback in 2009 and that sounds like a brilliant starting point for a Doctor Who story involving the man but it feels super tacky saying that given the circumstances Box of Bunnies fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Mar 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2018 04:46
|
|
|
Today I learned that, before Eric Roberts was cast, actors considered for the role of the Master in the TV movie included Tom Selleck, Sting and Phil Collins.
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2018 23:36
|
|
|
Oh, Sting would have been interesting.
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2018 23:46
|
|
|
That poor guy. I bet he'd been waiting for that moment for all his life. Oh lord.
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2018 23:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 22:03 |
|
|
It's too bad David Bowie never got to be in Doctor Who.
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2018 23:50
|
|