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Oxxidation posted:And Occ should have a bad feeling about what this means for his fingernails. I cannot wait to see which of you is the wrong-est person ever
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Nov 4, 2014 03:07
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Jerusalem posted:If you don't like this episode then you have a different opinion to me in regards to it. It's possibly my favourite RTD episode.
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Nov 4, 2014 03:08
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idonotlikepeas posted:This episode is amazing and I don't care if I lose one million points for my vote on it.  It's not my favorite but it's definitely in my top 10.
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Nov 4, 2014 03:08
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Doctor Spaceman posted:It's possibly my favourite RTD episode. I think it is almost definitely my favorite RTD episode.
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Nov 4, 2014 03:12
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Glenn_Beckett posted:I cannot wait to see which of you is the wrong-est person ever They do have a flair for the dramatic don't they?
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Nov 4, 2014 03:15
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Glenn_Beckett posted:I cannot wait to see which of you is the wrong-est person ever It sounds like Occ is the wrong one if you read between the lines, but we'll see
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Nov 4, 2014 03:16
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It's definitely one of my favourites, too. I look forward to the reviews!
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Nov 4, 2014 03:33
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I'll have to rewatch this one because I remember thinking it was kind of lame but I don't remember why.
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Nov 4, 2014 03:42
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Tempo 119 posted:I'll have to rewatch this one because I remember thinking it was kind of lame but I don't remember why. It functions on two levels-- a Twilight Zone episode of Doctor Who (most obviously "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street") and a giant inversion of RTD's usual plotting. If you can't get behind either you're going to hate it.
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Nov 4, 2014 04:04
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Oh, yeah, this one. This one is superb! It's not very RTD-y...but it's really really good for all that.
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Nov 4, 2014 04:08
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I've been looking forward to this review ever since I found this thread, since it's my favourite episode of Doctor Who ever made. Although I will admit some of that stems from it being the third episode I ever saw, after such classics as Aliens of London and 42 so that might explain why it's so memorable to me maybe. EDIT: vvv Ironically, Donna could probably have solved this episode's problem in five seconds just by yelling at everyone for a bit. JoltSpree fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Nov 4, 2014 |
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Nov 4, 2014 05:10
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How can it be good with so little Donna? Makes no sense.
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Nov 4, 2014 05:12
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Donna's so good that just having her around makes things better, even if she's not involved at all.
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Nov 4, 2014 05:21
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We must not look at Doctor Who We must not see its fans Who knows upon what soiled couch They park their fattened cans? I love this episode. There are people for whom it doesn't click and they really really hate it. If you've never read Goblin Market in its entirety, it is a fun read. It's just a bizarre little Freudian thing and it's guaranteed to make just about anybody uncomfortable: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174262
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Nov 4, 2014 05:41
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Toxxupation posted:now oxx is threatening me over the grade i want to give this ep Oxxidation posted:now oxx is threatening me over the grade i want to give this ep The toxx jumped between them! I saw it! The only way that any of us can be safe is to throw them out of the thread into GBS!
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Nov 4, 2014 06:32
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Jerusalem posted:I think it is almost definitely my favorite RTD episode. Probably because it is the least RTD RTD episode there is.
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Nov 4, 2014 06:36
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Random Stranger posted:The toxx jumped between them! I saw it! The only way that any of us can be safe is to throw them out of the thread into GBS! I remember when this episode first aired, there were people who took that line completely at face value and thought that Val legitimately did see something jump from Sky to the Doctor. Given how easily people just watching it on television found it to believe that, I thought it just further showed how easy it would be for a group in a genuinely terrifying situation like that to degenerate into a mob. I don't doubt that Val genuinely, 100% believed that she DID see something jump between them. I also think that before too much time has passed, she'll also genuinely, 100% believe she was telling the truth when she told the Doctor she knew it was Sky. Everybody wants to think they wouldn't fall apart in a stressful situation, nobody wants to believe they were one of the mob baying for blood out of primitive terror. It made for an interesting take on a usual episode of Doctor Who (and not one I'd like to see repeated often), where we do see humanity at its worse.
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Nov 4, 2014 06:42
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Doctor Who "Midnight" Series 4, Episode 10 In the eternal, and nausea-inducing, RTD versus Moffat civil war among Who fans, Oxx and I have covered nearly every aspect of the neverending argument. How RTD is an "emotional" writer, and how Moffat is a "logical" one; how Moffat's scripts are clockwork and RTD's incoherent; how Moffat favors the scary and RTD the romance; how Moffat and RTD both treat women in their scripts; even their perspectives on writing, and what sensibilities and worldview it should reflect of the writer. But we've left out one important point, and possibly the most important distinction between the two writers: Moffat is a tonal writer, and RTD is an event-focused writer. We've sort of nibbled around the edges of this central difference, but neither Oxx nor I have ever examined this chasm in writing methodologies in detail, except for now, when it's never been more appropriate. What I mean to say is that Moffat is very much about setting a specific scene and mood for his scripts and having them naturally play out. So what you end up getting in his scripts and episodes is an inability to really point at a specific scene from them and single it out for specific praise. His scripts are of a consistent quality the whole way through, but even beyond that he doesn't write from a perspective of having this sort of big flourish as a finale or something to build to, unless the script calls for it- and even then the big flourishes come across not as the focus of the episode but a natural result of what he had been specifically scripting beforehand. He's a "bottom-up" writer. This is in stark contrast to Russell T. Davies' writing style. In nearly every script he writes, he has a "moment" or scene he builds the script around, and he bangs and bangs and tortures the script to have that moment, gently caress the consequences. He's all about the events- he's a "top-down" writer. And to his credit, this has produced some of his best episodes- "Christmas Invasion" was all specifically building to having Ten swordfight on top of a spaceship, "Gridlock" to Ten having the reveal with the Face of Boe and his tearful confession about Gallifrey...the list goes on. This is RTD's raison d'etre; he wants to impress, and impress upon you, the Moral of the episode with a big, swooping, emotional or emotionally affecting scene. He wants the spectacle, and sometimes he knocks it out the park and you're left utterly stunned by the results. The problem with "top-down" screenwriting is something I've mentioned before; if the Big Moment of Rusty's scripts don't land with you, then the entire episode collapses. Those scenes, those moments, are make or break for the episode at large; it determines whether you love or hate the work, because if they don't work then the whole episode was for nothing. You can see the problem with "top-down" screenwriting on a macro scale in Series One; RTD is so in love with the idea of building a narrative to a specific scene or sequence that he ended up building the entirety of Series One to "The Parting of the Ways", wherein he revealed the entire point of the season as a whole- every episode -was to have a scene wherein Rose Tyler ends up a literal God who saves The Doctor via a bunch of convoluted time shenanigans and a two-word phrase that had literally nothing to do with the season whatsoever, on any level. This is why I consider Series One an abject failure; RTD stacked the deck script-wise so he built everything to that final scene of Rose staring into the TARDIS and becoming a literal Deus Ex Machina, despite absolutely none of it being earned and all of it being so terrible it almost defies belief. The end of "Parting of the Ways" was so bad, as I've aforementioned, that it was retroactively bad; RTD had set himself up for the entire first season to be an utter failure if the finale didn't land, and guess what? It didn't. And thusly, Series One implodes on itself and ends up a very, very bad season of television. This is all my long-winded way of saying that I didn't like "Midnight". RTD commits the exact same error he committed in this episode, in "Love and Monsters", in the entirety of Series One, wherein he builds the narrative to a single sequence that doesn't hold up its end of the bargain, and as a result of this choice the episode as a whole leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. This...this is a really disappointing episode, and it's all the more disappointing because of how disappointed I am that I'm disappointed. So much of it is good- the setup for the episode is incredible, with The Doctor sans Donna (she stays behind to work on her tan) deciding to go on a train ride to see an amazing waterfall on the titular planet of Midnight. Unfortunately, the train breaks down for Mysterious Reasons, and the episode quickly reveals itself to be a locked-room horror (the planet is "extonic", science pseudobabble essentially meaning it's lethal to venture outside) as one of the train's passengers, Sky Silvestry (Lesley Sharp), quickly gets controlled by some malignant...force as The Doctor and the rest of the passengers and the Hostess (Rakie Ayola) quickly try and figure out what to do and stay alive. So, this episode is a bottle episode- it stays firmly inside the cramped confines of the train compartment for the entirety of its run. Which is an odd choice, thematically, for RTD- as I've mentioned before, RTD loves building a script to a "big moment", which bottle episodes can't ever really have. Bottle episodes, by their very conception, are meant to be episodes that focus on character development and tonal, subtle work over broadly emotional/action setpieces, which seems utterly antithetical to the way that Rusty enjoys to construct his narratives. Plus, bottle episodes, because there are no other sets and all the actors are stuck in a confined space, are as a matter of course reliant purely on their dialog, which Davies has an...iffy at best track record with. RTD's strengths lie in the fact that he paints with a broad emotional brush, not the nitty-gritty of specific dialog choices which a bottle episode is completely reliant on. Furthermore, bottle episodes are totally dependent on the quality of the acting, which Doctor Who, again, is at best hit-or-miss about. Outside of The Doctor and his Companions (and sometimes not even then- eesh, Billie Piper's acting in Series One...wooden), every single other character cast, whether recurring or episode-specific, fluctuates all over the spectrum qualitatively. So the fact that "Midnight" doesn't have Catherine Tate for almost the entirety of its running time, combined with Tennant having to share the screen with not one, not two, but seven episode-specific (where the casting is at its most lacklustre) characters, in a script penned by Rusty, in a bottle episode, is almost a perfect storm for a terrible episode of television. Again- this is why "Midnight"'s initial quality is so surprising; it should have been rubbish, but somehow everything coalesces into a very interesting first impression. Each of the characters on board- the Canes, Val and Biff (Lindsey Coulson and Daniel Ryan, respectively), with their son Jethro (played by the spitting-image-of-Benedict Cumberbatch Colin Morgan), alongside the couple of Professor Hobbes (David Troughton) and Dee Dee Blasco (Ayesha Antoine), with of course Sky and the Hostess -are immediately distinct and impressive, and before the train breaks down they're quickly able to establish the bunch as variably likable and interesting. They might not be the deepest of characters, no, but the first half of the first act- before everything goes wrong -is able to get the audience at least acquainted with everyone they'll be spending the next hour with. And then, of course, everything does go wrong. An undefined creature starts pounding on the train, trying to get in- despite the Professor noting that it's impossible for anything to survive out on the surface of Midnight- and Sky is attacked, leaving her crouching in the corner, putting on her best Blair Witch impression. What's astounding about this episode is how little there ends up really happening within it- I've basically described the entirety of the plot of the episode -the rest of the episode's running time is spent with The Doctor et al getting slowly more and more panicked as they realize that Sky is somehow possessed by some sort of mimic creature -she starts copying everyone else's actions, and quickly learns English, before copying all of the other passengers' lines of dialog before progressing to the point where she's able to say what other people are thinking as they're saying it. But progression-wise, there's no big moments, really, up until the end. "Midnight" is solely based around the idea of establishing and ratcheting up the tension between the characters involved- aka creating a tonal piece -with minimal effects and sets, and it does so fantastically. Seriously, not enough praise can be said for how well Rusty's script takes advantage of the unique advantages writing a bottle episode gives him. The slowly building fear and distrust between the passengers until it all explodes in the climax of the episode is fantastic- the characters constantly flip-flop between cheerleading each other and arguing against each other, and there's a constant raising and lowering of status on an almost second-by-second basis. The Doctor, in particular, enters the episode his usual self- full of cheer and smug superiority -and throughout the episode is constantly tested and challenged- alternately relied upon by the rest of the group to guide them, then slowly loses more and more credibility as the rest of the group loses faith (and feels insulted by) his air of condescension. Even before he, himself, is possessed by the Sky-creature- who tries to trick the rest of the group into believing that the monster has jumped to him over the fact that it sunk him into a stupor -the scene right before that occurs, he seems mere minutes away from being ejected himself, as the rest of the crew has puzzled out that he, too, is an alien and are terrified into believing he's somehow in cahoots with Sky. And while we're on the subject, actress Lesley Sharp plays Sky so well it's almost uncanny, and her constant mumbled repetition of every line of dialog up until The Doctor gets possessed really establishes a freaky, unsettling tone to the episode as a whole. Her acting is absolutely stellar and utterly sells Sky's slow possession and transformation. There's also a decent metacommentary on the failures of Ten and RTD's writing in general that permeates the episode; Ten's constant idealistic statements and general attitude actually exacerbates the situation on the train. Instead of, as RTD usually does, have Ten endlessly proven right by the narrative no matter how much of an utter douchebag over even outright monster he comes across, instead The Doctor makes the situation on the train actively worse through his actions. His lack of empathy for how he comes across to others- his constant statements of being "cleverer" than everyone else, his insistence on being special -ostracizes him from the group and quickly gets him into hot water as the rest of the group Otherize him. Even The Doctor's views on humanity; to wit, that they're Always Super Special and Amazing and Must Be Protected; get proven wrong- every single one of the other passengers turn out to be selfish, bloodthirsty, spineless assholes, willing to kill an (as far as they know) innocent woman to save their own worthless hides. The Doctor's "compassion", even, gets brought down a peg- even besides the fact that it turns out the woman he was trying to protect attempted to have him killed by everyone else, one of the passengers even points out that he seems genuinely pleased by the utterly lethal situation the group finds themselves in -that he masks his glee over something new and interesting happening with a false concern for the "welfare" of it. Basically, "Midnight" comes across as an episode that is an indictment not only of the worst excesses of Ten as a character, but of RTD's worst excesses. It's, essentially, RTD owning up to how Ten and Ten's writing come across and revealing it for what it is- pulling back the curtain, as it were. And on some level, I have to respect the man for being so committed to self-correcting like this. So, why don't I like this episode? Because of its end. I think its climax, with the Hostess grabbing Sky and getting sucked out of the train- it's loving stupid. Firstly, it looks aesthetically, as in its physical effects work, utterly laughable- you can literally see the actresses for both Sky and the Hostess fuckin' hop to the right out of the door. Its an absurd-looking effect. Secondly- it's illogical to the extreme- why didn't the Hostess just push Sky out of the train? Why did she have to kill herself? She was able to pull Sky over to the door, surely she could've pushed the rest of the way? Literally no part of the climax makes any loving sense whatsoever- executionally, as a logical thing for a character to do, or as an end to a character arc with the Hostess sacrificing herself. The Hostess was the first one willing to kill Sky, and kicks the rest of the group over to being in permanent conflict with The Doctor- leading to the scene in the climax where the rest of the group is pulling the stupified Doctor to the airlock to eject him -so, what, her realizing it was Sky all along...what, her arc is meant to be redemptive? Was it supposed to be a recommitment of her stated goals, that she's so willing to kill the alien that she'd kill herself in the process, in a completely avoidable way? It's all so muddied and so unfocused and so, to me, meant to come off as this ~big emotional button~ for "Midnight" to end on that just doesn't work on any level. For Oxx, this is one of his favorite episodes ever, and as we've implied we almost came to blows over the fact that I really hated this ending and as a result really didn't like this episode, at all. For him, this is his hands-down favorite RTD episode. Which is fine, except for one thing- it's...not really an RTD episode. Think about it: It's a specifically tonal, slow-paced, and moody piece (Moffat trademark), centered around a female character (Moffat trademark) that deals with a mundane horror that's genuinely frightening, especially to children (Moffat trademark). There's no rubbery and/or CGI alien (RTD trademark) ; the monster is practical and preys on the audience's imagination (Moffat trademark) of what the encroaching horror of losing all sense of identity would be, in addition to the dual terrors of being stuck with an imminent threat in a confined space and being unable to trust your fellow man. The script is dialog and character-heavy (Moffat trademark) and there's no big action sequences (RTD trademark), and zero run-shouting (RTD trademark). Heck, The Doctor is a supporting player in the story, a Moffat trademark if ever there was one. I genuinely think it's kind of hilarious that Oxx loves this episode so much, because he's essentially saying that RTD is at his best when he tries to be Moffat. gently caress, RTD might even be subconsciously saying that considering how much of this episode is metacommentary on how RTD's scripts treated Ten, and that's...amazing if so. I mean, just think about if RTD had ever written an episode of Who where the alien is vague and unexplained, and mostly implied over a dude in a suit or bad CGI. Like, think about how RTD has handled the Sycorax, or the Slitheen, or literally any other RTD alien before now! This sudden shift in how "Midnight"'s antagonist is treated by the script isn't just a change from the norm -it's the polar opposite of how RTD characterizes villains. But the one thing that makes this episode distinctly RTD- this episode's climax -is what made this episode completely fall apart on me. The central difference, even outside of tone, between Moffat and RTD is that Moffat is about a script's average quality being high and RTD is all about his scripts building to high-quality moments. And try as he might, RTD is simply not Moffat, and the whole point of this episode is made on its climax landing. And to me, it just loving didn't. Because of that, in much the same way "The Parting of the Ways" ruined Series One for me, I don't like "Midnight". A real shame, because so much of it is so absolutely excellent. Grade: C Random Thoughts:
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Nov 4, 2014 06:47
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I don't really have a refutation for your problems with the ending, except that I guess it didn't bother me as much as it does you. It didn't take away from the tense, scary episode that the rest of it was. I had a similar strong disagreement and argument with the person who ultimately convinced me to watch this show. She hated this episode because she said the whole repeating speech gimmick was stupid, obnoxious, and not scary at all, whereas I thought it was incredibly creepy and unnerving. That and the escalating panic of the passengers makes for an extremely effective horror episode in my view, of a kind Doctor Who doesn't usually go for which is why it stands out and I like it so much.
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Nov 4, 2014 07:03
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Toxxupation posted:Doctor Who I never liked Midnight either. I never understood all the praise it got. I started watching the show late (mid series 4) and went back and watched a lot of the series 1-3 stuff and I never came to really appreciate RTD the way many did. That being said, I'm loving on the edge of my seat for the grades on the next few episodes.
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Nov 4, 2014 07:03
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Toxxupation posted:
This episode discovered him for TV and basically jumped him into lead role on BBC Family's Merlin for five years, so it paid off for him.
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Nov 4, 2014 07:05
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Yeah I guess if the ending doesn't click with you it's going to retroactively negate a lot of the good stuff that built up to it. The ending obviously DID hit with me, perhaps because I felt the message of the story was that humans are neither super special wonderful flowers nor snarling bestial monsters. We get to see ALL of the characters in the story at both their best and their worst, each of them has a moment where they shine and reveal some wonderful quality... but each of them has a moment where they reveal the very worst aspects of humanity, greedy and cruel and violent and frightened. The hostess' two moments both share the same common theme - killing Sky to ensure the safety of her passengers. She's a glorified tour stewardess but she takes her role seriously ("It's my job to see that this vessel is safe") and while it may have seeking justification for her own fear, she also mentioned the dangers of letting the creature get back to civilization. So why not just push Sky out the door? Because it was in a moment of struggle and panic and she had a six second window to make sure that Sky was in place and wasn't going to escape. So she sacrifices herself (and nobody knows her name) because in that moment she puts her own thoughts and fears asides and thinks about everybody else instead. It works for me, and as a result the entire episode works. Yes it is a very un-RTD story by RTD, but it's nice to see him stretch his legs and try a style of story completely different to anything else he normally produces. It's probably my favorite episode he ever did for Who. Though others had greater individual moments, this is probably the episode I feel is the most consistently excellent.
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Nov 4, 2014 07:12
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All of your criticisms of the ending are pretty much right. I think it still works as the climax of "The Doctor Is Wrong" arc of the episode as a whole. It takes all the things you described- the Doctor's arrogance pissing people off, his endless sanctimonious pronouncements about Indomitable Humanity turning around on him, his stupid alias "John Smith" not working- and caps them off by saying "Sorry, the real solution to the plot was to let this angry mob murder this woman twenty minutes ago like they wanted to". Now, that doesn't really stand up on its own either; by now we've seen The Doctor turn vengeance and genocide into art forms, so having pacifism be the thing that bites him on the rear end here sort of suggests that his problem is that he doesn't smite the heathen hard enough. That might be more of an issue of how the episode relates to the series more than about how it holds up internally.
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Nov 4, 2014 07:16
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Yeah, I can't argue with your conclusions, really, except that I think the opacity of the stewardess' sacrifice was the point - we barely know anything about her, including her name, the remaining group even realizing this in the very next scene. It felt, to me, like just another part of the episode's taking down of Ten, as he spends so much time holding himself up as the guy in charge ("BECAUSE I'M CLEVER!" is one of the most chilling moments in all of Who for me) that he doesn't really know these people or what they're capable of. The fact that the situation is eventually resolved by the stewardess' sacrifice - a combination of her feeling of responsibility toward her passengers and her intuiting the true nature of the creature - just shows him up further and demonstrates just how distanced he is from the 'little people' he often meets along his adventures. In the end, I think this episode sums up nicely why the Doctor needs a companion: they're usually the liaison between the imperious, inquisitive and thrill-seeking Doctor and the supporting players who need that sense of relatability to put their lives in his hands. Without Donna to even him out, Ten becomes an arrogant, suspicious monster, and it's only by the skin of his teeth (and the sacrifice of a stranger) that he even survives. Plus, I just love the simple theatricality of the episode itself; the fact that it's such a self-contained bottle episode allows it to be staged in such a way that you could, theoretically, stage a production of Midnight if you really wanted to. (It'd be hard to explain the serialized nature of the character and whatnot, but still - a man can dream.) Hewlett fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Nov 4, 2014 |
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Nov 4, 2014 07:49
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Hewlett posted:In the end, I think this episode sums up nicely why the Doctor needs a companion: they're usually the liaison between the imperious, inquisitive and thrill-seeking Doctor and the supporting players who need that sense of relatability to put their lives in his hands. Without Donna to even him out, Ten becomes an arrogant, suspicious monster, and it's only by the skin of his teeth (and the sacrifice of a stranger) that he even survives. Yeah, imagine the same episode with Donna, she'd blunt his rougher edges and form a bridge between him and the mob. By removing her from the story (due to the jam-packed filming schedule) you get a Doctor who can easily interact with regular people on a superficial level when everything is going well, and a guy who completely alienates or infuriates the group when poo poo gets bad.
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Nov 4, 2014 08:02
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It's a shame the ending was poorly executed on a mechanical level, but it made a lot of emotional sense to me. Ten was left helpless, and is only saved because someone else does the very thing he had been telling them not to do. This seemed like a good way to finish the rather brutal examination of the flaws in Ten's character, and the contrast after Forest (which treats him as an almost god-like figure) is incredibly stark. In terms of her character arc I guess we're just meant to take it that she took her role in looking after the passengers very seriously. It's not exactly deep but the lingering sense of guilt that the other characters have from mocking her inability to help earlier fits in quite well.
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Nov 4, 2014 08:28
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No mention of how horribly overwritten this episode is? How no one will shut up for five seconds and how there's a constant babble of people saying what they think instead of actually just thinking it? It's why I feel it fails as a concept. You don't have any space to be scared because there is no air for the fear to breathe. You have no time to wonder what had happened, to question who the alien is, or to project your own fears - the secret of good horror. Instead you're just bellowing "shutupshutupshutup!" I hate this episode. It also shows how limited rtd's imagination is. Space traveling, planet hopping humans in the far future are ignorant couples from Essex with Goth children. It's 1996 in space. It's the same thing that bugged me in Utopia: humans at the very end of time itself are just failed Mad Max extras. No imagination at all. It's also Donna-free, which should be a prosecutable crime. It's a nice idea for an episode, but needed a defter hand than RTD's, who approaches it with none of the subtlety or nuance to really make it effective. There's just So. Much. Talking. He's in love with his keyboard.
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Nov 4, 2014 08:41
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I think the constant chatter shows the rising panic and tension in the cramped environment. For most of the episode the scary part is the humans and the way they respond under extreme pressure rather than the creature.
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Nov 4, 2014 09:05
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Plus, given its stagey conceit it makes sense that the primary vehicle for the drama is going to be dialogue and performance. I certainly didn't get the impression that anyone was talking more than they should be.
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Nov 4, 2014 09:19
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This review series is really selling me on Moffat all over again. He used to be my favourite writer by a mile before he took over the show and it's great to be able to remember how good his episodes were. It's also reminding me that Donna owned at all times, but I never forgot about that. This was an episode with a lot of buildup, and I liked that a lot, but as with most of Doctor Who I can rarely find reasons to defend it from criticism. The ending was just kind of a "and now how do we make it end openly and without a closure in the most straightforward way". It's kind of nice to have an episode that unapologetically messes with you the entire way through, but it's very easy to turn that intrigue into frustration.
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Nov 4, 2014 09:45
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Hewlett posted:Plus, given its stagey conceit it makes sense that the primary vehicle for the drama is going to be dialogue and performance. I certainly didn't get the impression that anyone was talking more than they should be. None of the characters are interesting though; they are all two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. It's a self-contained play with no-one to care about and no reason to get emotionally involved. The only person you care about is the Doctor, and maybe Sky. Everyone else is just there to yell and have council-estate parochial values. This disparate group of people all just turn out to be monsters - there are no good guys, there is no-one who thinks out of step except the Goth kid whose only attempt at nuance is beaten down by Rusty's desire to hammer you over the head with the conceit. Man's inhumanity to man has never been so needlessly verbose and crushingly heavy-handed. John Carpenter's The Thing was effective because the first twenty minutes was pretty much a silent movie with character building and subtlety. When paranoia and conspiracy start to infect the camp, Carpenter knows that silence is far more of a powerful tool than noise. He also knows that characters need positive traits and more than two dimensions. Whenever I watch Midnight, I'm always reminded of how shallow Rusty's writing is, and coming off the back of Moffat's wonderful two-parter, his deep characterisation flaws are clearer than ever. I cared for the girl in the machine, I cared for Miss Evangelista, I cared for Doctor Moon and Donna's fake-family. I do not give a flying gently caress about anyone in Midnight and wish the back door had vacuumed them all out into space along with the pointless Rusty "sacrifice" trope.
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Nov 4, 2014 10:05
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Dammit dammit dammit. I can't stand this episode but I know everyone loves it so I figured Toxx would too 
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Nov 4, 2014 10:29
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Rarity posted:Dammit dammit dammit. I can't stand this episode but I know everyone loves it so I figured Toxx would too Just be glad that there wasn't a surprise Blowjob Cinderblock-moment tanking the score to F. (Love & Monsters was an A- or B-episode.  )
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Nov 4, 2014 11:08
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I think this ep is an attempt to show mob mentality from an outsider's perspective to the children watching the show.
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Nov 4, 2014 11:24
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Rarity posted:Dammit dammit dammit. I can't stand this episode but I know everyone loves it so I figured Toxx would too Right there with ya, sister. 
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Nov 4, 2014 11:35
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Toxxupation posted:Doctor Who 
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Nov 4, 2014 13:21
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Pyradox posted:This review series is really selling me on Moffat all over again. He used to be my favourite writer by a mile before he took over the show and it's great to be able to remember how good his episodes were. It's also reminding me that Donna owned at all times, but I never forgot about that. Yeah, same. For me Silence/Forest is probably the peak of Doctor Who as a whole. They aren't my favourite episodes necessarily, but they are the ones that are most successful in terms of tone and encompassing the very best of the Doctor Who experience. I don't hate the later seasons, but I don't think it ever got as good as that again.
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Nov 4, 2014 13:26
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Occ, I value and respect your opinion, but you are Wrong and I want to hit you with a brick
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Nov 4, 2014 13:47
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Toxxupation posted:Variously "emotional" setpiece x convoluted bullshit = every rtd script I quoted this earlier in the hopes of re quoting it again after you ate your words, but i guess you can't recognise good writing.
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Nov 4, 2014 14:03
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 09:50 |
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Soothing Vapors posted:Occ, I value and respect your opinion, but you are Wrong and I want to hit you with a brick New thread title right here.
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Nov 4, 2014 14:10
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