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Ah, now you see, Dr BSam, there is nothing you possess that Zaggitz cannot take away...
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Oct 14, 2014 13:47
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It's funny, apparently (at least in these early season four episodes), I should have guessed what I thought of them rather than what I thought Occ would think, since so far he's given them the same scores I would have.
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Oct 14, 2014 14:10
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mind the walrus posted:Yeah I mean I know the Sontarans are kind-of hard to take seriously but did you ever get the impression you were supposed to? I mean Occ and Oxx you guys are always going on about how this is a dumb show made for babies and now you've finally got a goofy race of alien villains that actually work and you're underwhelmed and complaining? I mean yeah you've got good points about your complaints, especially Oxx's about the Sontarans never showing the kind-of suicidal rationale consistent with their origin tagline, but again dumb show made for babies RIGHT? Don't get lippy with me, mister. They "work" in the sense that they're not at odds with the episode's tone in the way the Daleks are, but they're total failures as villains for the same reason. At least the Daleks might zap a fool or two even on their worst days; when you're up against the Sontarans you really just need to put your feet up and wait for them to fall down some stairs or something. They're a burlesque act, which makes them good for some situations and bad for others.
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Oct 14, 2014 14:28
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Doctor Spaceman posted:I wouldn't mind seeing the Rutans again, especially since their previous (and only) appearance was a classic. Having a Rutan companion for the entire third season wasn't enough for you?!
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Oct 14, 2014 14:34
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Oxxidation posted:Don't get lippy with me, mister. What's funny is that Classic Who understood that in part. The Fourth Doctor had quite an amusing run in with them in the TARDIS.
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Oct 14, 2014 15:21
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Everything about the Sontarans just clicked for me when I realized they're what would happen if a Klingon and Ferengi got caught in a teleporter accident while going to a peace conference. WHy did I realize this? 
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Oct 14, 2014 17:00
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Proposition Joe posted:The Sontarans are 100% serious. This is a pro-click, anyone who is wondering. The real reason this story had to be a two-parter is that the Doctor forgot about the Sontaran weakness to pool chairs. It's probably in my top 10 favorite clips from classic Doctor Who. Oxxidation posted:when you're up against the Sontarans you really just need to put your feet up and wait for them to fall down some stairs or something. They're a burlesque act, which makes them good for some situations and bad for others. Basically this. They're a hilarious joke when they're used properly, but it's often a one-note joke, so you've got to be careful.
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Oct 14, 2014 17:48
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BSam posted:ZAGGITZ 
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Oct 14, 2014 19:18
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For some reason I just assumed Occ would hate the Sontarans.
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Oct 14, 2014 20:01
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Y.A.N.A.
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Oct 14, 2014 20:53
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Wow, bottom of the list. Not too late to recover, but chances are looking dim. I guess I was being way too cynical with my guesses.
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Oct 14, 2014 21:00
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Zaggitz posted:What broke it for me, and this might actually be from next ep but its not a spoiler, but Rattigan at some point says "I'm clever!" which no American(or Canadian for that matter) would use as a descriptive for being a genius. I thought the same thing. He at one point shouts "I'm cleverer than you!" I'm pretty sure any American would say "I'm smarter than you."
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Oct 14, 2014 22:53
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Proposition Joe posted:The Sontarans are 100% serious. The best part is the way the actor shuffles over at the end to find his mark.
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Oct 14, 2014 23:42
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They spent all day filming that scene and that was the best take!
Lycus fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Oct 15, 2014 |
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Oct 15, 2014 00:38
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Lycus posted:They spent all day filming that scene and that was the best take! Everything in The Invasion of Time was so shoddy. The TARDIS interiors. The especially bad looking Sontarans. Not to mention: "Let me introduce you to your new masters."  Easily the worst aliens in the entire original series. And I'm counting the Zarbi.
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Oct 15, 2014 00:47
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That swimming pool is actually inside the TARDIS yeah?
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Oct 15, 2014 05:19
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Random Stranger posted:Everything in The Invasion of Time was so shoddy. The TARDIS interiors. The especially bad looking Sontarans. Not to mention: "Let me introduce you to your new masters." What's worse is that when they took those costumes off they somehow looked even lamer and more pathetic.
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Oct 15, 2014 05:38
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Those guys look like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qxWGr8VhzQ
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Oct 15, 2014 06:44
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Senor Tron posted:That swimming pool is actually inside the TARDIS yeah? Yes, it is. Leela swims in it at some point, unaware that its furniture is so powerful against Sontarans.
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Oct 15, 2014 13:55
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The Sontarans were actually pretty effective in their first couple of appearances: Linx in 'The Time Warrior' was disgusting and creepy when his face was finally revealed, as well as being gleefully ruthless (the Doctor gives him a grand speech, offering to take him back to his people/war if he'll leave the Earth in peace, and Linx's response is just to shoot him), while Styre from 'The Sontaran Experiment' was a lip-smacking sadist. After that, though, their weaknesses - being slow and lumbering, the probic vent - got played up and exaggerated until they became pantomime villains with no hope of recovery. The masks getting shoddier over time didn't help.
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Oct 17, 2014 13:42
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Yeah, that was one of the fascinating things. They looked worse in 1984 than they did in 1974, somehow.
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Oct 17, 2014 14:35
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I can't wait for the next review.
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Oct 17, 2014 16:18
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Gaz-L posted:Yeah, that was one of the fascinating things. They looked worse in 1984 than they did in 1974, somehow. Depending on when it was couldn't that have been because of that jackoff producer who was actively trying to kill the show getting it a reduced budget?
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Oct 17, 2014 20:20
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Doctor Who's budget was essentially fixed in the sixties, it was decreasing perfectly happily without anyone trying to kill the programme.
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Oct 17, 2014 20:25
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Doctor Who basically hit its peak as far as special effects go some time in the LATE 60s, to mid 70s. It was still not great, but the budget pretty much worked for what they needed it to at the time. As the years went on and stuff got more expensive, the budget didn't change to reflect that and...it showed.
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Oct 17, 2014 20:30
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Gaz-L posted:Yeah, that was one of the fascinating things. They looked worse in 1984 than they did in 1974, somehow. That does kind of sum up Doctor Who in the 1980's.
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Oct 17, 2014 20:53
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A reminder that we're doing the Galaxy Quest livewatch tonight at 9PM Eastern/6PM Pacific/2AM UK time. Easiest place to watch is on Netflix Instant Watch (US, can't speak for its availability in other countries). #SATVIV on IRC http://client00.chat.mibbit.com/?channel=%23satviv&server=irc.synirc.net (direct link) hcreight fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Oct 17, 2014 |
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Oct 17, 2014 22:43
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hcreight posted:A reminder that we're doing the Galaxy Quest livewatch tonight at 9PM Eastern/6PM Pacific/2AM UK time. Easiest place to watch is on Netflix Instant Watch (US, can't speak for its availability in other countries). #SATVIV on IRC yeah you should come, it'll be fun and I'll be in and out
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Oct 18, 2014 01:36
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Doctor Who "The Poison Sky" Series 4, Episode 5 Early on in "The Poison Sky", The Doctor deigns to give Donna her own key. Now, three Companions in, the audience has realized the central narrative and emotional importance of the moment when a Companion gets her key; although for Rose it was a brush-off scene hidden in "Aliens of London", for Martha it was this big swelling emotional beat in the otherwise completely-forgettable "42". Either way, Doctor Who has established, retroactively, that the moment of key-gifting is the signifier that The Doctor somehow implicitly trusts his Companion and wants to keep them around for the long haul. It also underscores the fact that no matter what, The Doctor won't abandon his Companion; he's so confident in their necessity to his overall raison d'etre that he's willing to let them go in and out the TARDIS unattended, as they please, so high is his faith and trust in them. So it's the appropriate level of gravitas lent to the Donna-key scene as The Doctor says, "Oh! I've never given you a key. Keep that. Go on, that's yours. Quite a big moment, really." Donna's, response, however, of "Yeah, maybe we'll get sentimental after the world's finished choking to death." is exactly why she is so great in comparison to Rose and Martha. In Rose's case, she was begging from a desperately, unhealthily co-dependence that The Doctor prove that he wouldn't abandon her, hence the key; and in Martha's, it was from over half a season of steadily more and more worrisome mistreatment of her character finally resulting in her confronting The Doctor about his pathetic pining for Rose. And yet, when Donna receives her key, it's immediately disregarded and backburned, because well, there's More Important poo poo to Do. That's just how Donna is, just how she rolls; she has a clarity of purpose and a tendency for practicality that makes her amazing, over her predecessors' predilections for an insistence on emotional validation at the worst possible times. Donna is very much a person whose issues are external; her lot in life, her overbearing mother, etc etc. After Rose and Martha, who were two people with internal issues (Rose's daddy issues, her love for The Doctor, her general idiocy; Martha's feeling of inadequacy, her crush on The Doctor), Donna stands out even more by being a person who by and large (outside of her generally unclear life goals, which endear her further to the audience instead of push her away from them) has her poo poo together, her head screwed on the right way. That little scene, with Donna accidentally taking the piss from what's supposed to be a huge emotional "moment" in a Companion's time on Who is both hilarious and perhaps the best Donna moment in a season full of them. "The Poison Sky", though...eesh. What a bad loving episode this was, what a waste of 45 minutes. Just a complete slog to sift through. There are many problems with this episode, but the largest one ultimately ends up being how predictable "Poison Sky" ends up being. Many of the plot points are really obviously, ineptly foreshadowed or have no stakes; for instance, it's clear at about ten minutes into the episode that The Doctor is aware that Martha is, in fact, a clone (or at least not who she says she is), just from The Doctor's long glares at Martha and stilted, rather noncommittal reactions when speaking to her. Martha was turned into an evil clone of herself all the way back in the first part of this two-parter, "The Sontaran Stratagem", about halfway through that episode. Ultimately, the narrative decision to make her into an evil clone of herself was a poor one for two distinct reasons: firstly, for about 80% of this episode, Martha isn't in it. Sure, there's someone who looks like her, but Evil Clone-Martha doesn't act like her and is clearly a separate character from Martha, so much like possessed Rose in "New Earth", almost the entire running length of "Poison Sky" has no Martha in it, despite Agyeman ostensibly one of the main cast members (It also gives Martha zero agency throughout this episode, as she is doing literally what she is programmed to do throughout "Poison Sky"'s run). Secondly and more importantly, it kneecaps the episode from the beginning, because of the reveal that Martha's an evil clone in part one: There's no narrative excitement in any of her scenes because we, the audience, are well aware of what her plans are. I wonder how much better the Clone Martha subplot would've worked if it wasn't revealed that she was an evil clone in "Sontaran Stratagem"; if Martha had suddenly started sabotaging The Doctor's plans, would it have created the ambiguity that the episode had been searching for? It would've made her scenes this episode at least slightly more narratively interesting, as this episode is spent mostly watching Martha repeatedly press a button. (Did we seriously need multiple scenes of UNIT about to launch a nuclear strike only to be sabotaged by Martha pressing the Stop Nuclear Strike app on her phone? Wouldn't once have been enough?) The whole Clone Martha thing is bad, but it's just one of a myriad number of obvious, uninteresting plot decisions on "Poison Sky"'s part. The plotting of Doctor Who has never been its strong suit, so harping on a simplistic, nearly brain-dead progression of an episode is almost unnecessary; the fact that it's so simplistic and so brain-dead is what makes this hour of television so bad. It's not even that the episode is patronizing or something; it's not offensively bad, I think it's just that the script thinks that it is far, far more clever than it actually is so comes off as irritatingly dull. So you get a final scene like where The Doctor is about to sacrifice himself to take out the Sontaran Fleet and it comes across as trite; the show's called Doctor Who, so of course he's not actually going to die. And because of the stakes demanding "someone" activate the "suicide bomb", and there's only three other people in the room with him before he goes off on his kamikaze mission, that gives three possible options: One, well, Donna's the season Companion so it's pretty much a zero percent chance that she replaces The Doctor. Two, I guess it could be Martha but that's a rather dark end to her character (but would create some interesting emotional implications), and Who doesn't really seem like that kind of show so it's not her. Which leaves Rattigan, the unlikeable antagonist who set out to betray his entire race but if he teleports himself and trades places with The Doctor that means he gets the easy redemptive arc to his character while simultaneously removing himself from the negative narrative implications of if he lived through the end of this two-parter (I mean, he tried to genocide the planet and committed war crimes and treason against the entire human race, that's sure to be a messy resolution to his arc if he lived through the end of "Poison Sky" any way you slice it). Oh, it's Rattigan? Rattigan's the one who makes the sacrifice? What a loving surprise, huh. Oh, and Rattigan. Maybe a trite, easy end to his character would've worked, at least emotionally, if he was well loving acted at all, but he's not; even beyond Ryan Sampson's atrociously, distractingly terrible accent, or the fact that Rattigan is fundamentally a loathsome, two-dimensional, desperately annoying character (as Oxx mentioned, he feels like a "Big Bang Theory" reject inexplicably placed into an episode of Doctor Who; even beyond that, Sampson plays Rattigan far too hammy to have his final sacrifice have any emotional impact. All of his scenes leading up to his final one are spine-cringing in their badness; his scene, in particular, where the Sontarans betray him and he teleports away, which ends with him sobbing over losing his one chance at importance or whatever...it's just embarrassing. It isn't heart-wrenching, or even pathetic in the way they want it to be pathetic; it's just awkward and lame. It doesn't lay the necessary groundwork for Rattigan's final scene to land, instead just another shot in a long line of shots of Rattigan shouting and being an angry, egotistical dick, but not in a fun or interesting way. There's no payoff to any Rattigan scenes, because Rattigan isn't a character so much as a collection of the single most dislikable traits a human being could ever have made flesh; the poorness of Sampson's acting merely compounds the omnipresent issues and elevates Rattigan from merely annoying to actively aggravating to watch onscreen. "Bad acting" is what makes this episode into an F; everyone overplays their character, Agyeman and Tennant included. The Doctor spits and snarls and RANDOMLY SHOUTS in the middle of his lines just like he always does, but the sheer ham in Tennant's performance this time around combined with the poorness of the script as a whole makes the whole experience of watching The Doctor sort of unsettlingly bad, as if The Doctor is some rageaholic with severe issues in maintaining his temper over an absurd shouty man. And then we get to Agyeman's portrayal; to be fair, she's stuck in a dead end character in Clone Martha but even then she mine as well stick an "I'M BAD, REAL BAD" sign on her back, so obvious does she make the fact that she's a double agent, all darting eyes and suspiciously vague responses to anyone's questions. Agyeman's performance is at her worst when Martha's clone dies as Martha herself is trying to get some information out of her; it's meant to be emotional and existential or something but the poorness of Agyeman's performance makes the whole scene farcical. One appreciates how important Maslany is to Orphan Black at elevating the show in any way, shape, or form; Agyeman's stuttered, melodramatic performances as both herself and her clone throws into a deeper light how impressive the work Tatiana is doing on it as a whole, since the entire program is built off this single episode's narrative conceit. Of course, it doesn't help that the sub-par cinematography breaks the immersion of the scene all the further, even beyond Agyeman's acting- it's so clear with the direct-face shots that Agyeman is playing both sides of the scene, with little to no wide shots and all the "behind the shoulder" shots using Agyeman's body double or stunt actor. Just a badly executed scene in all respects, even if the writing had been anything besides sub-par at best. Really, the only thing of value, narratively speaking, this whole wretched episode is Donna's little b-plot; unfortunately, it makes up so little of the episode as a whole it doesn't affect my (lack of) enjoyment of it in any significant way. If anything, it makes the episode worse; Raynor and/or RTD didn't learn from the mistakes in writing "Sontaran Stratagem" and had Donna, The Doctor, and Martha split up for almost the entire episode (remember, actual Martha's in that weird stasis chamber until about 35 minutes in or so); in any case, this means Donna's desperate sneaking around the Sontaran ship as the TARDIS has been kidnapped by them, trying to teleport it back to The Doctor is really the only genuinely interesting plot of the episode. "The Poison Sky" is ultimately an episode that places plot over characters, except the plot is really, really bad. All of the supposedly "emotional" sequences land with a thud, the climax is uninteresting, and the character moments- when people actually interact with each other and have fun- are too few and too far between to have any real meaning. Martha, The Doctor, and Donna only team up at the very end of "Poison Sky", and by then I had had enough of this episode. It is a nice final ten minutes, though- Tennant and Agyeman immediately improve acting-wise, almost as if the change in dynamic was visibly better, and there's some great one-liners and interactions between the three of them (Tate, as usual, brings her A-game throughout the episode, but she's again in a succession of minor subplots). Then Rattigan shows up and we get the climax and uuuuuuuuugh, so whatever. But hey, Martha is about to leave the TARDIS at the end of the episode before it forces her, Donna, and The Doctor to travel to somewhere else so maybe Agyeman's return to the show can still yield some dividends? Please? Please? I usually take into consideration the number of times I pause an episode to do something else when watching an episode of Who for reviewing, and the reason why I pause the episode if I do. Don't pause an episode? Probably pretty good. Pause it, but only because I'm bored? Probably a C grade episode. In "The Poison Sky"'s case, I paused multiple times, mostly because I was so actively irritated by the badly acted characters overemoting on my screen to further a story I had already figured out the ending to. There was no appeal for me to watch- the plot was predictable and dull, the "emotional" moments were too melodramatic even for me (Which is saying something, considering my love for those big swooping scenes usually), and it centered mostly on characters I didn't like, at least specifically how they were portrayed in-episode. So yeah, I really really hated this episode. It isn't offensively bad, but so unnecessary as simplistic and poorly executed on nearly every level that it really poisoned my already-ambivalent feelings on this two parter coming off of "Sontaran Stratagem". Just a real wet fart episode. Grade: F Random Thoughts:
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Oct 18, 2014 04:02
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Boy did I overestimate this episode with rose colored glasses. I guess the only real thing I remember liking was the UNIT commander's speech about aliens looking down on them and fighting back with their own technology. Well that are the "Are you my mummy" reference. Neither of which even got a mention in the review.
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Oct 18, 2014 04:11
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Toxxupation posted:[*] Wait, Pakistan and North Korea have a functioning nuclear weapon program in this version of present-day Earth? Do...do you think that's a good idea, rest of the world? Ummm, I hate to break it to you.... 
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Oct 18, 2014 04:18
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Personally I found the idea that Martha had a simple app to stop global nuclear war hilarious. But yeah it was a pretty bad episode. I was also sortof annoyed by the fact that the Sontarans were pretty much completely chumped in combat once their little gimmick had been negated. Aren't they supposed to be invincible in a direct engagement?
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Oct 18, 2014 04:18
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Yeah yeah all valid points etc etc I don't care I still love these episodes, almost primarily because I just goddamn love the Sontarans. I've written much more in the past breaking down what I like/dislike etc about these episodes (there are a LOT of bad points to it) and I don't think even at its worst it deserves an F (also because I really dislike any grading system for television at all) but really what it boils down to is that I just enjoy the Sontarans too much not to enjoy this 2-parter. Also man do I love the scene where UNIT finally gets some information out of the Doctor who has been looking down his nose at them the entire story and actually use it to negate the Sontarans advantage and turn the battle in their favor. Sure the Doctor wanted to avoid conflict at any costs, but it's telling that he could have probably saved a lot of lives if he'd told UNIT just WHY they would fail in battle as opposed to just repeatedly telling them,"You won't stand a chance so just sit back and let me solve all your problems for you." His naivety is also on display in that suicide threat, because the Sontarans A) Don't believe he'll really blow them up, and B) Don't CARE if he does blow them up, because it'll be an "honorable" death. In the end, it's the Doctor who is out of his league against the Sontarans and not UNIT, because the Doctor is attempting to play an entirely different game to the one the Sontarans are playing, and that UNIT prove themselves to be surprisingly competent at.
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Oct 18, 2014 04:34
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These episodes are really bad and I totally agree about Clone Martha. It's such an eye-rollingly poor sequence of events and it goes on for so long. You keep wanting Evil Martha to leave the plot and she just won't!
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Oct 18, 2014 04:36
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Yeah, after reading your review I have no idea why I thought you'd give this a C. Bad Episodes for Bad People.
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Oct 18, 2014 04:50
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Told you. That's Martha's lot in life. One step forward, two steps back. Always and forever.
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Oct 18, 2014 04:50
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This is the first episode since the season opener that I've guessed dead on. Never thought I'd be so happy that you so hated an episode.
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Oct 18, 2014 04:56
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RIP my lead.
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Oct 18, 2014 05:06
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Soothing Vapors posted:Yeah, after reading your review I have no idea why I thought you'd give this a C. Bad Episodes for Bad People. I guessed a C myself even though I think this episode is terrible. I figured on a bit more favorable view of the first part carrying this one up from what I expected as a D on its own. IIRC, they intended for another character from the classic series to return in this two parter. Nicholas Courtney played Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the head of UNIT, and appeared in more episodes than pretty much anyone other than Tom Baker. He was a really popular character and as of the early 90's had appeared as that character alongside every single Doctor except the first (yes, I'm counting Dimensions in Time for this purpose; it's the only positive thing anyone can ever say about Dimensions in Time). Unfortunately he was in poor health and couldn't appear which is why they threw in that "stranded in Peru" line.
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Oct 18, 2014 05:13
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Doctor Who "The Poison Sky" Series 4, Episode 5 Sometimes I wish I could get angrier at mediocrity. It would mean that holding opinions on media like "The Poison Sky" wouldn't be such a tribulation. This episode's a hunk of tapioca pudding and unsalted mashed potatoes on white bread, and while that's a significant step up from "Evolution of the Daleks," it's still nowhere near enough grist for even a kiddie-sized mill. Occ crucified this one for being so utterly rote, but I'm indifferent to it for the same reason - "The Poison Sky" is like if "42" and "The Lazarus Experiment" had a cranky potato baby, only without the semi-interesting sets of the former or the above-average performances of the latter. The characters remain separated and meander through their little subplots until the deus ex machina shows up, Tennant mugs the camera a lot, Donna is the best character, and then the Earth gets set on fire and everything's dandy. With material like this, I'm left scrabbling through the dross to find something worth talking about. Here's something: the Sontarans! Bit rubbish, weren't they? It's almost cute how the so-called greatest military force in the universe got immediately mowed down by a glorified security team the minute their magical anti-bullet field was switched off. Even the Doctor seemed cognizant of how much the Sontarans suck, since most of his desperate pleas for UNIT not to engage them turned out to be part of his elaborate con on Clone Martha. It's clear to all of us that the Sontarans are really enthused about dying in battle, but someone should have really sat them down and explained that dying in battle is a consequence, not a goal, because they fell over and drifted into that great potato-field in the sky whenever they even glimpsed a gun. The battle sequences in Doctor Who are always terrible thanks to a number of factors, some of the biggest being the lack of blood, the poor gun effects/feedback, and the limited number of extras to hold them. This has been the case ever since "The Parting of the Ways," where our big war scene consisted of a few terrified reality TV middle-managers awkwardly waving plastic guns at murderous garbage cans, and somehow that still ended up more convincing than what we got in "The Poison Sky." The total lack of impact effects from either bullet or laser on the enemy body ends up making the dead look like they just decided to take a nap whenever the enemy pointed a gun in their direction, and the entire battle consisted of clusters of Sontarans marching awkwardly down corridors until they were slaughtered. Occ and I briefly discussed the Rutans, the Sontarans' mortal enemies, after he finished watching this episode, and concluded that not only were they far cooler than the Sontarans (come on, they're basically Hanar with less politeness and more murder), but it's sort of a mystery how the Sontarans even lasted this long against them. Maybe it's all just some hilarious practical joke that occasionally ends with millions of dead. Equally ineffectual is alien collaborator and turbo-nerd Luke Rattigan. I was never as hard on Rattigan as Occ was, and in this episode I actually found his relentless incompetence and lack of respect sort of endearing. He's a five-foot waif with an accent that would make Dick van Dyke tweak his nose and wants to murder the world because he received one too many wedgies, and his plans completely fall apart because his nerd-apprentices aren't quite as far down the autism spectrum as him. His sacrifice leaves precious little impact on the viewer because he's such a joke of a character, but it still had one shining moment - watch how General Staal's face falls right before Rattigan pushes the detonation button. In that moment, the good General knows that his immediate future holds a death so inglorious that not even Chris Farley's ghost will hang out with him afterwards. Nearly all of the episode's threats are given the same treatment, really - weirdly ineffectual, disrespected even by the characters themselves. Clone Martha's ruse fools nobody and she dies trying to have an emotion. The Sontarans put up less resistance than the average paper towel and Donna bonks one of them with a hammer. Rattigan is Rattigan. The poison sky is fixed, somehow, with a terraforming doo-hickey that sets it alight in one of the most gratuitously spectacular special-effects sequences thus seen in the series, and oh boy, I sure do hope no one was occupying the upper floors of the Empire State Building when that fireball rolled over. I initially interpreted that scene as the Doctor retooling the terraformer to convert the clone-feed back into breathable air, but I don't see why all the fire had to get involved. One other thing worth noting - the Doctor's attempted self-sacrifice at the end is one of his dumbest (yes, offer parlay to the race whose driving ambition is to experience glorious explosive death, what a fine idea), but it's still not quite as dumb as the three or four times he tried to offer up his life in the "Dalek" two-parter. Seriously, what is it with Helen Raynor and making the Doctor suicidal? It's one of her few troublesome quirks that made the transition from her last two-parter to this one; that, and her tendency to write scripts that practically double as sleep aids. "The Poison Sky" does everything it can completely by-the-numbers, taking no risks, with no extraordinary performances, or even extraordinarily bad ones. I think Occ got so mad at it partly because it was the only way he could remember it long enough to do a writeup. It's insubstantial as a puff of smoke.
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Oct 18, 2014 06:11
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