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E PLURIBUS ANUS posted:This episode is a really, really bizarre one for me to review, because there's a confluence of everything I like (thus far) about Doctor Who, everything I hate, and a whole shitload of nostalgia that flies way over my head. For once, I feel completely out of my element reviewing an episode of this show, because "Dalek" doesn't really feel like an episode written for me (a brand new DW watcher and ostensibly new fan); it feels like a love letter to the Doctor Who fandom, which I can really respect. I didn't know anything about Doctor Who when I started watching this season either, and this episode was useful in that it uses a single Dalek to sort of try and amp up the stakes of dealing with them and also introduce them (and also try and make them vaguely scary by acknowledging at the beginning that they look ridiculous and having everyone be surprised when it starts murdering people). The one thing is that I don't think they ever did a really great job of even making the Time War make sense or whatever, I thought for several years that the whole "time war" thing had always been in Doctor Who's backstory instead of something that had ostensibly happened recently, and so the more references there are to the time war in an episode, the less sense it really made to me. With respect to the Dalek, they do a good job of establishing the following without any real confusion: - Daleks are very dangerous and very evil and very smart and lie a lot. - They also have weird techno-magic. - The Doctor has dealt with them a lot before and they've killed a lot of people he cares about. - In fact, they're tied up in his ~SUPER MYSTERIOUS~ backstory. - They're largely indestructible and implacable so anytime the Daleks are present in an episode going forward, the Doctor will have to defeat them with more cunning than he usually displays. Also there will always be people shooting at them and getting murdered for it. - Daleks look really dumb.
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Aug 8, 2014 06:30
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 10:02 |
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DoctorWhat posted:Oh my god, just drop it. Don't post here at least until the next review-pair goes up, and it'll all blow over. It's not down, your URL was wrong. http://wifeinspace.com/
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Aug 12, 2014 15:09
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Hold onto your butts, it's all downhill from here.
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Aug 17, 2014 02:58
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Real talk, an episode's quality is inversely proportionate to how much Rose/discussion of Rose it contains. This is true across all of RTD's run.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:36
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One Swell Foop posted:Eccleston's official reason for leaving was that he "didn't want to be typecast". He'd already done an amazing mini-series with Russell T Davies (The Second Coming) and supposedly had a good working relationship with him from that. That said, along with Paul McGann, he's an actor who much prefers Theatre work over doing TV and movies, and so I think has said that he's quite happy to take terrible roles in bad movies for lots of money if it means he can do interesting stage work for the rest of the year. That was actually the reason the BBC offered for him and he explicitly had to come out and say that it was actually because of poo poo that happened that pissed him off and he never said anything about typecasting to anyone, but wouldn't really elaborate further. It reminds me of when I was moving out of an old apartment and they asked me why I was leaving. I gave them my top 3 things I hated about the place (mainly centered around a bad office staff), and they wrote down "didn't like the neighborhood".
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Aug 19, 2014 01:24
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I agree, pointing out that literally hundreds of movies come out each year in which multiple named male characters speak about any number of topics, whereas nearly zero movies come out each year in which the same can be said of woman characters is a totally meaningless observation if Gravity can be a Good Movie without passing the test. Or maybe you could pull your head out of your rear end.
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Aug 25, 2014 16:55
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DoctorWhat posted:The Impossible Planet and its second part are the epitome of what 90s Doctor Who fandom would call "trad". That basically determines how you feel about it, in my experience. I have no idea what this term stands for or what it means. Maybe after they do episode one you can explain it and poo poo?
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Aug 31, 2014 00:28
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I have to say, I've been looking forward to the reviews of the final episode all season. I got the hugest grin on my face you guys, Christmas has finally come.
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Sep 6, 2014 08:28
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Big Mean Jerk posted:Hating an episode from 2006 because of how the 2012 Olympics were handled is pretty dumb. (It's not just the 2012 Olympics)
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Sep 6, 2014 08:42
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Yessss! Christmas came! gently caress cybermen forever.
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Sep 7, 2014 11:35
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My big problem with rose is I think that love stories with the doctor are universally terrible and boring, and rose's was the most terrible and most boring, but they're all really bad. It's hard to give examples without spoilers, but suffice it to say that if you've seen the series you can think of eras where the companions were not interested in having sex with the doctor and they were better, and eras where they were and they were worse.
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Sep 8, 2014 22:20
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There's so much about this season that is terrible. The weird Rose-pining is only the beginning. I will say that there's parts I like about the RTD stuff from here on out, but I'd say that in many ways it gets worse as it goes on. Like a comic book, RTD allowed the story to gather increasing amounts of canon that, just based on the inconsistent quality, were frequently not great. Stuff like Harriet Jones and torchwood and whatever the hell. And by the end of RTD's run, the show is heavy with it and every time the doctor returns to earth it's just this awful slog and you just want him to get in the TARDIS and take off to zambalon V or some poo poo.
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Sep 11, 2014 11:42
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I was legit worried this thread would give it away after The Runaway Bride. Good job, everyone!
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Oct 5, 2014 22:52
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Hi, so now that Donna's in, I wanted to talk about something I wanted to mention after The Runaway Bride, which is that Tennant's & Tate's chemistry probably has a lot to do with the fact that they're good friends off-screen too. I think that the Catherine Tate Show video hinted at this, but here's an awesome BBC radio thing of Tate interviewing Tennant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBXB49zublM I don't have any clue if that contains spoilers, so please occ don't watch it until the end of the season or something if you're interested? Or I guess someone else could watch it & say whether it has any.
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Oct 6, 2014 02:52
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thexerox123 posted:I got the impression that "releasing" Ood Sigma wasn't actually a kind act at all... as he was letting him go to join his brethren in dying en masse while he made an escape. I think he didn't trust Ood Sigma to stand by his side as he killed the brain and thus all Ood. It's actually not even this complicated. The ood in this episode are a kind of hamhanded reference to American slavery. Both the master releasing his favorite slave on his deathbed trope and the common belief at the time that black people could not survive outside slavery/did not want to be free. I have a feeling that this was mostly a response to the really loving uncomfortable and unironic use of that belief in the satan two-parter, but only because I doubt that rusty could have set a reveal up this far in advance.
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Oct 11, 2014 08:07
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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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good review x obnoxious contrarian post = this thread
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Nov 3, 2014 19:44
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So when's the correct review for this episode coming out?
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Nov 4, 2014 19:56
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Rating Last of the Time Lords better than Midnight man, I don't know about all this. I don't wanna be all MY SACRED COW! But goddammit, my sacred cow.
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Nov 6, 2014 03:15
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I thought turn left kind of sucks because they reveal the problem and solution in the first 30 seconds of the episode and you're just waiting around for the execution. Every time that stupid-rear end bug makes a noise you're like "hey cool take it off your back. or don't, that's cool, we'll look at this totally meaningless alternate universe for a little bit longer I guess, because at the end of the episode you're gonna take it off your back." Like normally when you're in a situation like this, like, imagine a character that's stuck in a dream. You have a little while of them not knowing it's a dream so they can introduce the world and how it's different from the real world. Then they start to suspect something's wrong. And that suspicion sort of develops into them seeking a solution and then finding it and then executing it. In this episode the solution is take a thing off your back, it's right loving there. So they never progress beyond stage 1 because there's nothing to do past that, so it's just 40 minutes of poo poo happening to donna that doesn't matter ok now you can take the thing off your back. It's interesting for character reasons and wilf and poo poo but the total lack of stakes or any agency whatsoever on the part of the protagonist makes the episode really tedious.
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Nov 9, 2014 07:02
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Also BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF
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Nov 9, 2014 07:04
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If Turn Left had committed to its loving plot it wouldn't have been as offensively bad. It was an episode about Donna being trapped in an essentially artificial world (which was, incidentally, done REALLY loving WELL two episodes previously, remember that?), but they couldn't bring themselves to do anything except force her to sit down and watch a 25 minute educational video about how bad the world would be without the doctor.
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Nov 9, 2014 23:59
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Like the irony is that if you think about it, the episode actually DID have real stakes- if Donna tripped and broke her neck on a coffee table, all that awful stuff really did happen. If they had explained that fact toward the beginning instead of the end and put Donna in danger the episode could have been pretty cool. But RFD was too busy masturbating all over how awesome the doctor is and then he looked up and there was only 10 minutes of screentime left.
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Nov 10, 2014 00:01
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Bobulus posted:Would it have, though? The Doctor says that the alternate path was an actual alternate timeline, not a changing of the actual timeline. Meaning that all Donna accomplished was killing off the alt timeline and carrying back a message that the Doctor gets anyway, thirty seconds later. Well then what's the not-weeping-angel feeding on then, exactly?
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Nov 10, 2014 00:06
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On the other hand if you have a pet beetle that feeds on timeline changes why would you WANT to have it feed on someone extremely important, it seems like that'd put you yourself personally in danger.
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Nov 10, 2014 00:07
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I think what if episodes are cool but agree with occ that they're emblematic of genre fiction: if the author is too busy jerking themselves off over the cleverness of the setting/conceit/gimmick it sucks every single time and that is exactly what this episode does and is. Like seriously what % of the episode is the protagonist being a powerless observer to TOTALLY CLEVER setting exposition dumps? We're up at like 75% in this show where that number should ideally be as low as possible.
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Nov 10, 2014 04:12
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DoctorWhat posted:can "buying Occ a Sixcoat" be a stretch goal? That is not appropriate burial attire.
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Nov 13, 2014 06:13
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Pwnstar posted:Now thats Ten's time is up, lets look back fondly on his adventures in the form of a musical retrospective. This is such a glorious capper to the first half of this thread and allows me to digest and internalize the end of the RTD era in ways that were never previously possible.
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Nov 30, 2014 08:35
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Diabolik900 posted:Who are these people that say Blink is a good introductory episode? I've read several posts in the various Doctor Who threads, expressing bafflement about these people, but I don't think I've ever actually seen anyone say it is a good introduction. It used to be a common opinion but we're so deep into the backlash that now the backlash to the backlash is about to begin.
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Dec 4, 2014 15:48
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Bicyclops posted:I mean, linking to the worst serials of a show that ran for over 20 years is going to make it look bad, and there are obviously going to be a lot of them, but at least the Sonataran almost falling into the pool is funny. Man the two-parters in the revival are so much padding I can't even imagine having MORE parts.
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Dec 5, 2014 10:04
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MikeJF posted:We've had three-parters, and End of Time was basically the runtime of a four-parter. But it depends on the episode; good two-parters like Library or Dances didn't feel padded at all to me. 2 out of 13 is 16%.
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Dec 5, 2014 10:58
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I hate people saying "well doctor who doesn't tell serialized stories". It does, sometimes. It usually fails at it. Multi-parters that'd benefit signifcantly from being one episode shorter: - Aliens/WW3 - Rise/Age of Steel - Daleks/Evolution - Stolen Earth/Journey's End - Sontaran/Poison - The End of Time 1/2 Multi-parters that'd benefit signifcantly from being a single one-hour special - Bad Wolf/Parting - Army/Doomsday - Human Nature/Family - Utopia/Sound of Drums/Last should be a regular episode and an hour-long Hour-long specials that'd benefit significantly from being ordinary-length - Voyage of the Damned - The Runaway Bride - The Next Doctor - The Planet of the Dead Multi-parters and specials that are actually correctly lengthed - The Christmas Invasion - Moffat 1 - Moffat 2 - Satan - The Waters of Mars And I honestly feel like I'm being generous with some of these specials: I think you could make The Christmas Invasion shorter without any real problems, I just don't think it suffers from its padding so fine, whatever, put it on the list. The simple fact is this: if the BBC can't actually properly length anything above 40 minutes without having problems the idea of doing serials consistently is completely insane. Especially when the best-remembered old serials are the same length as a modern one-hour special or two-parter in terms of screen time. How many old 5+ part serials are even considered to be "classics" compared to 3 or 4 parters? The season 2 finale is the equivalent of an old 6-parter and is bloated as gently caress.
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Dec 6, 2014 00:44
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Burkion posted:(Referring only to Korra season 1 do not start some massive bullshit argument about the merits of Korra I have only seen season 1 do not do this this was mostly meant as a joke) Season 2 is even worse in a lot of ways! 3 and 4 though are good though, so I don't know man I'm not sure it's worth watching season 2 to get there.
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Jan 3, 2015 15:47
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Toxxupation posted:[*] So I came up with the grade for this episode differently than usual; I was so split on what grade to end up giving this one- I could literally see myself giving every possible grade to it -that I wrote the review first, then went to random.org and rolled a number from 1 to 5, with 1 being an "A" and 5 being an "F". At no time writing this review- not even writing the words you're reading now -did I have any idea what the grade would end up being, since I wanted this to be as pure an expression of my thoughts about the episode as possible. If I could, I simply would not have given this episode a grade- but that would throw off the contest, so here we are. I think you'll find that B is actually the objectively fairest grade. Also spitfires doing star wars xwing runs at the dalek secret WWII moon base while shouting THE SHIELD WILL BE DOWN WE GOTTA GIVE THE DOCTOR MORE TIME is basically the greatest thing ever.
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Jan 11, 2015 14:15
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fatherboxx posted:I don't give a poo poo about fictional rules, this two-parter is just dull as hell. Well, this episode is kind of boring. Walking around in caves for like 15 minutes before they realize OH GOD WE'RE IN AN EPISODE OF TELEVISION AND SOMETHING INTERESTING HAS TO HAPPEN. The only thing keeping the episode running during that time are the killings and Amy's weird condition, and the former is SUUUPER predictable. Every other problem with this episode is sort of one of those what I wanted/what was actually happening conundrums that Occ likes to write about. Moffat wanted to follow up one of his most popular episodes of television ever, and I guess he decided to go a particular route. This is the Aliens to "Blink"s Alien: some new superpowers for the baddies, severely increased numbers, a squad of disposable soldiers who actually die now instead of being sent back in time(??). I just really hated the angels talking. One of the things that makes the angels creepy is their unknowability. Unlike, say, the Shakespeare episode, Blink pulled the neat trick of having magic enemies and fitting them seamlessly into a sci fi story, and they did it by making it "life, but not as we know it". Something that could not be reasoned with because it was so completely alien to our experience. If they're gonna get on the drat walkie talkie and gloat at you like snidely whiplash, what's the point?
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Jan 13, 2015 09:47
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Would you believe in all those pages, not a single doctor who review? So I guess occ is giving a lower grade to the second part than the first, which is the opposite of how I feel about it. The first episode is boring and introduces a ton of dumb angel poo poo. The second one all that dumb poo poo is already in play and it moves like a motherfucker.
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Jan 17, 2015 21:34
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MikeJF posted:Like I said last time, the first scenes ever filmed for this cast were on the beach. The one at the start of last episode was pretty generic, but I have to say that Smith and Gillan end of this episode were pretty impressive chemistry for the first go. As was the stuff they did on their second shoot, the forest location shoot. I read on the wikipedia that they had Smith and Gillan go on an adventure boat ride before filming to build up their chemistry.
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Jan 18, 2015 12:57
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There was a throwaway line about how the ones on earth were scavengers, barely surviving, but it sucked.
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Jan 18, 2015 14:42
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