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TV Production is a weird and strange place, and British TV arguably even moreso. They had that Hitler sitcom that somehow made it to air for like fifteen minutes after all. Sometimes the worst and most offensive jokes imaginable will just plop out of some deranged writer's head and onto the air, and sometimes the most innocuous phrasing will get nitpicked to death by committee and result in five people losing their jobs.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:16
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Like I think they wrote Jackie in because they were worried about not including the familiar characters for most of the episode? Maybe? Because there's just no reason to include her and doing so diluted her character and made you hate our erstwhile protagonist. I think if they went all the way and just had the Doctor Who fan club of mostly innocent nerdlingers influenced by the evil Levineblob, and the Doctor came in at the end and said "Hey, yeah, I'm real, but move on," it would have been okay. I also really hate that it turns out Elton's entire life has been influenced by the Doctor. It's a wasted opportunity. He could have thought his whole life was influenced by the Doctor and it turns out the Doctor was just there at a traumatic moment and that's why Elton places such importance on the search. I don't know. gently caress the blowjob. gently caress the end of this episode in general.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:17
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Captain Fargle posted:Okay, no one else has brought this up yet and I feel it's worth restraining myself long enough to point it out: The Absorbaloff was literally designed by a ten year old who won a contest. And they even hosed that up; the kid said afterwards that the Absorbaloff was meant to be a giant and people would get glooped into its skin.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:22
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Toxxupation posted:So it's interesting that the antagonist of the episode is essentially the "rear end in a top hat" part of the fandom, and even the way in which he kills the other members of the group- by absorbing them -is, to me, a clumsy metaphor for how the dicks like to shout down everyone else and impress upon the group as a whole how they should be operating. I think it's even more clever when you think about how Kennedy is the clear minority- he's outnumbered, five to one -and yet he still "wins", much like how one complete prick can ruin an otherwise interesting discussion/group. It's not Shakespeare or anything, but I do think the metaphor is fully formed and layered. Anyways, I'd like opinions from other people in this thread if I got the general "groups" of Doctor Who fans labelled well, or what your collective opinions are on this theory of mine. The groupings seem broadly right to me, though they could be applied to pretty much any show - there's always some subsection of fans who want to force their views onto everybody else and just suck all the fun out of the room and close off all discussion. This isn't even the first time the show has done a bit of naval-gazing re: the fans, either. In the 80s a story called The Greatest Show in the Galaxy was a pretty obvious metaphor for not just various fans, but noted critics of the show, as well as the BBC itself and even some digs at "competing" shows like Star Trek. It's a bit hamfisted but nowhere near as bad as the Abzorbaloff, and that story ends with the Doctor walking casually away from an explosion as opposed to cursing some poor woman to an eternity as a paving slab.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:22
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I haven't seen the episode for a while, but I was under the impression anything out of vlog was part of Elton's Narrative Flashback. By that I mean, Concretia doesn't show up in the blog format, and so if it makes you feel better there's a segment of people out there who believe Elton went insane and has dreamt up BrickBJs.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:25
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It's actually genius that they took a ten-year-old's design and made it into a disgusting blob-man to represent the absolute worst facets of Doctor Who fandom, it's just a shame that they also decided to use him for butt & BJ jokes and bad CG faces. Creepy voices from inside him would have worked better and having his victims actually separate from him fully and go back to their lives would have better served the metaphor, the story, and the general, feel-good optimistic nature of the show.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:25
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Craptacular! posted:I haven't seen the episode for a while, but I was under the impression anything out of vlog was part of Elton's Narrative Flashback. I'm pretty sure she talks, on-camera, at one point or another. Or otherwise appears on camera.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:32
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I had some point that I wanted to make, but I came up with the name BJ Slabcowicz and I can't stop laughing long enough to remember what it was.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:36
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Jerusalem posted:This isn't even the first time the show has done a bit of naval-gazing re: the fans, either. In the 80s a story called The Greatest Show in the Galaxy was a pretty obvious metaphor for not just various fans, but noted critics of the show, as well as the BBC itself and even some digs at "competing" shows like Star Trek. It's a bit hamfisted but nowhere near as bad as the Abzorbaloff, and that story ends with the Doctor walking casually away from an explosion as opposed to cursing some poor woman to an eternity as a paving slab. Isn't that the one where poor Sylvester McCoy basically gets his back burnt off as he walks by an explosion set off much too early, and he keeps on strutting like a boss because he knew they only had the one take?
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Sep 4, 2014 04:38
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Also, something about the fact that giggling concrete block monstrosity is mostly known to this era as Moaning Myrtle makes the whole thing creepier somehow.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:38
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Doctor Who "Love and Monsters" Series 2, Episode 10 Doctor Who is a show of ups and downs, as anyone could tell you, snapping back and forth between near-brilliance, soul-eroding inanity, heartfelt pathos, and astounding tone-deafness several times in a series and often within the same episode. And while every fan of this show has their own vehement, often incoherent opinion about the quality of any singular minute of the series, this episode and the next are still widely regarded as nu-Who's nadir, its lowest low, the Marianas loving Trench of its many valleys. For that reason, I happily skated right over the both of them when I first saw the series, eager to get this season over and done with after that awful Cybermen two-parter. These two episodes were the only way this toxx could ever hurt me. "Love and Monsters" failed to rattle me to my core, but there is an unusual heat above one of my temples that I think is what dying synapses feel like. Like I said in that monster chatlog, I have serious trouble believing this show was written by a human - certainly a single human, as it whipsaws between formats and conceits with a verve that even Davies' attention-deficit style often doesn't match. You have the terrible rubber-mask monster in the start, the Scooby Doo chase, the vlog segments, the Who fan club getting together, and then it all turns into another generic monster story with one very obvious twist and one that is horribly, horribly unexpected. If Davies had been able to stick to a single loving concept for a change and if someone had just given him another good thwack on the head before he could wrap up the script, this episode could have been fine, or at least safely dull. As it turned out, though - well, see above. I was actually having fun with the start of it, despite myself. The vlog stuff was ridiculous but harmlessly silly, and the whole allegory about a bunch of people initially getting together due to their obsession with Who and then growing closer as they actually learn about each other as people was kind of sweet. Then the Ur-Nerd shows up and it all goes to poo poo. Mind you, I can appreciate the further metaphor of Victor Kennedy as exactly the wrong kind of Who fan, a socially inept, touch-allergic fatass who's so humorless about his Doctor obsession that he gives his new "club-mates" homework. As DoctorWhat helpfully pointed out, Victor has a direct equivalent in Ian Levine, a hateful, joyless lump of protoplasm who, among other things, was Patient Zero for that asinine "Unquiet Dead is xenophobic" meme; Levine has a cult following among Who followers despite being (like many other obsessive no-fun followers of media everywhere) an unproductive waste of DNA, possibly because he is a wicked djinn who reflects the worst of Who fans back at themselves. [ed note: I have since been informed that Levine is in fact an entirely separate turbo-nerd and possibly even worse due to his involvement in boy bands and related boy-band media.] I'd be lying if I said that I hadn't seen several Levine-alikes in these very forums (though they tend to hiss and chitter to one another in the fungal depths of the spoiler megathread), or that I hadn't gone along with this thread just so I could piss on them from time to time. Victor's analogue for such people is good for a giggle, yes, but it goes on for way too loving long, all while he picks off characters I actually like in the most obvious way possible. That part also gets to me - how when the Abzorbaloff, and oh God I actually gagged a bit at having to type that, takes nearly every other named character in the episode with it when it finally cacks out, all of whom were established as pretty likable and fun and at least one of them even as a caring parent. It's such a jarring tonal shift in an episode so deeply, deeply stupid, and poo poo like this is by far my biggest problem with Davies - there's something disturbingly oblivious and sometimes downright spiteful in the way he treats any character who isn't the Doctor and his precious girlfriend Rose, putting them through abrupt deaths and sometimes prolonged torture right in the middle of some goofy, sketchy episode like a grade-schooler who hasn't quite grasped why Grandma was lying so quiet and still in that big long box. Other writers, Moffat included, are certainly guilty of tonal whiplashes, but never with the frequency or intensity of Rusty himself, and that little mutual-suicide meltdown was just one more sour note in a whole symphony of them. I could go on about the plot issues. Why did this alien need a crew of nerds in a basement to find the Doctor? Why did that stupid "Jackie thinks ahead of Elton" gag need to happen four consecutive times? Why Jackie, in general? Why did Elton step out into the night without his coat in the first place, he'll catch his death of cold, and for that matter, how much does that dork lift, because I know that Davies gave us that lingering torso shot for a reason? How did Rose triangulate Elton's location merely by learning that she'd pissed off Jackie, if she had a data point for every booty call that woman's made the whole of London would be lit up like a Christmas tree. And why in the blue hell did we get that big sappy "in remembrance of Mother" segment right after a chase sequence with a wobbly green fat man with a cane? Why was it related to the Slitheen? WHY WOULD YOU REMIND ME ABOUT THE SLITHEEN? But no, no, you all want to hear about only one thing, which is Paver Fellatio. I know the way you all think. I knew about that...let's call it a "joke," because the English language is at times perilously unreliable...well in advance, so it didn't crack me between the eyes quite as hard as it did Occ. But still, the whole concept of existing as an inert, immortal, aware object is loving horrifying, to the point where it has effectively been used as horror in several pieces of honest-to-god non-Scooby-Doo horror media, and I want to pick Rusty's brain, possibly literally, until I find out what the hell he was thinking with that whole ending sequence. Moffat's sexism may be more traditional, more insidious (according to some people, I personally never bought it), but there is no doubt that, at the preview screening of this episode, even he glanced up from his doodle of Rose Tyler wearing gingham and frying him bacon long enough to mutter "well, that's a bit shite, isn't it." "Love and Monsters" is, on some level, an indictment of certain elements of the Who fandom, but ultimately it's an indictment of Davies himself. All of his grating, stupid, small-minded, ugly little habits are on full display here: a complete lack of focus in plot or execution; obsession with "domestic" moments to the exclusion of anything interesting; childish cruelty to any character who doesn't have a contract past a single episode; a moment of stupidity so potent it can caused permanent brain damage in lesser men. So long, "Love and Monsters." We might have some good episodes left in this man's run, but you reminded me why I was so relieved to get the gently caress away from Rusty and never look back. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Sep 4, 2014 |
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Sep 4, 2014 04:39
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mind the walrus posted:Isn't that the one where poor Sylvester McCoy basically gets his back burnt off as he walks by an explosion set off much too early, and he keeps on strutting like a boss because he knew they only had the one take? It sure is! 
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Sep 4, 2014 04:40
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Oxxidation posted:Victor has a direct equivalent in Ian Levine, a hateful, joyless lump of protoplasm who, among other things, was Patient Zero for that asinine "Unquiet Dead is xenophobic" meme; Levine has a cult following among Who followers despite being (like many other obsessive no-fun followers of media everywhere) an unproductive waste of DNA, possibly because he is a wicked djinn who reflects the worst of Who fans back at themselves. I'd be lying if I said that I hadn't seen several Levine-alikes in these very forums (though they tend to hiss and chitter to one another in the fungal depths of the spoiler megathread), or that I hadn't gone along with this thread just so I could piss on them from time to time. You've gotten Ian Levine mixed up with Lawrence Miles. Ian Levine is a famous record producer who spearheaded the British Boy Band era of the late 80s and 90s. During the 80s, he was brought on as "continutiy advisor" for Doctor Who, and used his position in fandom to "sell" the show to the fans in exchange for access to the production of the programme. He also recovered (or aided in the recovery of) several of the show's missing episodes. He also owns a complete collection of pre-Crisis DC Comics. Nowadays he spends his time on Twitter complaining about how little Doctor Who is being made, and spending his ridiculous fortune on hiring Sylvester McCoy to star in his fan-films, which he never distributes.. Larry Miles is a different fellow altogether. He wrote for the Eighth Doctor novels that BBC Books published in the late 90s-early 2000s and was the source of the "xenophobic reading" of The Unquiet Dead. He's got very strong opinions about what Doctor Who should be and he's very loud about them. He also collaborated with various other Who fans and critics on the first several volumes of About Time, as well as creating Faction Paradox, which is what he would like Doctor Who to be. The Absorbaloff is based heavily on Levine, not so much on Miles. Levine exploited the fanbase and manipulated them to serve his own obsession with fame and prominence; Miles seems to mostly resent Doctor Who fandom for not preferring Faction Paradox. DoctorWhat fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Sep 4, 2014 |
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Sep 4, 2014 04:46
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Oxxidation posted:But still, the whole concept of existing as an inert, immortal, aware object is loving horrifying, to the point where it has effectively been used as horror in several pieces of honest-to-god non-Scooby-Doo bits of horror media It's actually the cruel and "ironic" fate of one of the villains in an earlier Doctor Who episode too!
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Sep 4, 2014 04:50
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I love how Elton being into rock is considered both the best and worst aspects of this episode.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:54
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Jerusalem posted:It's actually the cruel and "ironic" fate of one of the villains in an earlier Doctor Who episode too! Well he didn't have any penis to suck, so of course it was a punishment! As we all know, if you can give a dick a good blow, you are never low. 
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Sep 4, 2014 04:55
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Stairs posted:I love how Elton being into rock is considered both the best and worst aspects of this episode. ...get out.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:56
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Stairs posted:I love how Elton being into rock is considered both the best and worst aspects of this episode. jesus gently caress
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Sep 4, 2014 05:01
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Stairs posted:I love how Elton being into rock is considered both the best and worst aspects of this episode. 
NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Sep 4, 2014 |
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Sep 4, 2014 05:06
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Stairs posted:I love how Elton being into rock is considered both the best and worst aspects of this episode. 
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Sep 4, 2014 05:12
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Stairs posted:I love how Elton being into rock is considered both the best and worst aspects of this episode. oh noooooooo
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Sep 4, 2014 05:13
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Stairs posted:I love how Elton being into rock is considered both the best and worst aspects of this episode. 
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Sep 4, 2014 05:15
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Stairs posted:I love how Elton being into rock is considered both the best and worst aspects of this episode. The true purpose of this thread has been revealed
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Sep 4, 2014 05:16
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Sep 4, 2014 05:19
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Stairs posted:I love how Elton being into rock is considered both the best and worst aspects of this episode. 5'd, again.
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Sep 4, 2014 05:29
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Stairs posted:I love how Elton being into rock is considered both the best and worst aspects of this episode. Best thread.
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Sep 4, 2014 05:38
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Stairs posted:I love how Elton being into rock is considered both the best and worst aspects of this episode. You are history's greatest monster.
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Sep 4, 2014 05:44
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What bothers me about Love & Monsters, beyond the mere existence of the last five minutes, is that there was apparently no one working on the show willing or able to look at those minutes and say "Hey Rusty? We shouldn't do that. People are going to hate it." You get that a lot with successful creators in any media, not just TV. If you make enough cash, people start becoming afraid to try and edit you. That was the core argument in Red Letter Media's dissection of the Star Wars prequel movies, that no one was willing to tell George that his ideas were stupid anymore. It happens all the time in publishing. Once you're Stephen King, James Patterson, or George RR Martin, no one can tell you to tighten up your plot or dump that superfluous character, and it shows. What shocks me is how quickly it happened to RTD. At the point of Love & Monsters he's only in his second season as showrunner. And already he's gotten to the point that either no one told him the end of the episode was poo poo or they did and he blew right past their objections anyway. Neither is good news for the show.
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Sep 4, 2014 05:49
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS0bCSLx8JI
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Sep 4, 2014 05:49
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There's one thing no one mentions, but I think it needs to be acknowledged: The actress who played Ursula previously played MOANING MYRTLE. So she previously played a girl who was trapped in a toilet and had a creepy lust towards the male protagonist, and here she played a woman who was trapped in a stone slab and had a creepy sexual relationship with the male protagonist (of this episode).
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Sep 4, 2014 06:13
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I liked the Jackie/Elton scenes because she gave him SO MUCH poo poo for trying to use her like that. Like... so much poo poo. She was angry and betrayed. Her hitting on Elton made sense because, well, she's a lonely woman and here's this solid 7 that's totally getting all up in her business for seemingly no reason. It is, to my mind, a more interesting and considered arc than anything that happens with Rose. That said, I only watched it the once because of how bad it is. The show's last great laughable turdbasket of a story about what the show "means" and its "fans" was The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. And that had a cringeworthy rap. And it's still more watchable. jng2058 posted:What shocks me is how quickly it happened to RTD. At the point of Love & Monsters he's only in his second season as showrunner. And already he's gotten to the point that either no one told him the end of the episode was poo poo or they did and he blew right past their objections anyway. The showrunner is a relative novelty in UK TV. Previously head writers would get P or EP vanity credits, but the actual work and authority would be with other people. Davies (and Moffat, who came after) became television writers in a world where showrunners were few and far between. Even on the shows that made their names (Queer as Folk for Davies, Coupling for Moffat) there were other people running the business end of things. With that in mind, it's really not surprising that it went to Rusty's head so fast. It was relatively unique and, in fact, the success of Rusty's Who is credited with popularizing the showrunner model in the UK. Republican Vampire fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Sep 4, 2014 |
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Sep 4, 2014 06:40
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Potooweet posted:You are history's greatest monster. But he's a monster we love Get it? I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'll be leaving now. terrordactle fucked around with this message at 07:36 on Sep 4, 2014 |
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Sep 4, 2014 07:34
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Stairs posted:I love how Elton being into rock is considered both the best and worst aspects of this episode. 
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Sep 4, 2014 08:37
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Toxxupation posted:[*] Oh also, making Elton the star of the episode- The Doctor and Rose literally don't show up until the last ten minutes -was also a giant misstep because Marc Warren is an incredibly bad actor who couldn't sell any of the (bad) lines he was given. Just to let you know, this happened because the idea of doing a Christmas special was only thought up after the show came back and was a massive hit, and the deal was that they could have a Christmas special if they didn't mind compressing the shooting schedule of S2 to have an extra episode in the same amount of time as last year. The solution eventually arrived at was to shoot two episodes at once, which naturally limits the amount of time Rose and the Doctor can be in it because for most of it, they're off making something else (it was double-banked with The Impossible Planet). So yeah, have fun anticipating the next Doctor-lite story! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtKADQnjQmc Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 11:03 on Sep 4, 2014 |
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Sep 4, 2014 10:59
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This thread is the best. I love how an A or B grade episode becomes the worst one ever because of just one joke. I mean it's a shockingly stupid joke but even so
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Sep 4, 2014 11:12
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This reminded me of the best Dalek .gif
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Sep 4, 2014 12:01
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Stairs posted:I love how Elton being into rock is considered both the best and worst aspects of this episode.
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Sep 4, 2014 12:15
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Jurgan posted:There's one thing no one mentions, but I think it needs to be acknowledged: I mentioned it on this page! 
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Sep 4, 2014 13:56
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Jurgan posted:There's one thing no one mentions, but I think it needs to be acknowledged: Ah, so that's where I saw her.
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Sep 4, 2014 14:02
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Re: The Impossible Planet/Satan Pit and author Matt Jones:PriorMarcus posted:Writing isn't his full time job, most likely because the stars never aligned, so he works as a Producer instead which is a very time consuming job. It's possible that he wants to come back, and would be welcomed, but just has never been able to. Rusty must of liked his scripts because he invited him to write for Torchwood. These scripts were apparently so heavily rewritten by RTD that he felt dishonest in not putting his name on them. The original scripts featured a possessed Rose, and not Toby, at the end of the first episode, and the second episode had a significant portion of run time dealing with Rose negotiating a dream-like version of the Powell estate, as allegorical representations of her family and friends turned up to manipulate and terrorise her, in a metaphorical representation of her fighting her inner demons (and possession). So they went through a lot of revision when RTD came on board.
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Sep 4, 2014 15:05
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