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DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

MrL_JaKiri posted:

The Seeds of Death is excellent

I can never keep The Seeds of Death and The Seeds of Doom straight.

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DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

LividLiquid posted:

Individual threads are great for people with archives who want to see past reactions to things, and it doesn't cost us anything to do them, so I don't understand this argument.

That'd be more useful if not for the fact that to-be-archived threads and posts from the past few months have been prone to just kinda falling into oblivion.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
The best part of the episode:

When the Doctor is trying to change Rusty, he TOUCHES TWO STRANDS TOGETHER.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

ConanThe3rd posted:

Honestly it's the whole "scooping someone up when they were supposed to die" gag.

Which is interesting, because that's how the Doctor saved... Gun Girl (forgot the name already).

Missy/TARDIS theories gaining strength. Actually, the TARDIS was also really prominently in one of the shots immediately following Missy's appearance.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
Not as good as Jubilee but I think it might be better than Dalek.

Of course, Into the Dalek is at least as different (thematically, narratively, and philosophically) from Dalek as Dalek is from Jubilee, so it's a pretty pointless comparison really.

But people are persisting in comparing them anyway, so I might as well compare them PROPERLY before someone does it all wrong and probably hurts themselves.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Solaris Knight posted:

Jubilee's also considered an extremely high bar to surpass, so Into The Dalek coming even close enough to compare is a huge achievement.

Let me clarify:

Into the Dalek really doesn't come close to Jubilee in terms of overall superbitude. But really, almost nothing does. It's not even a huge qualitative improvement over Dalek, really.

Dalek has about 15 factors going into it that make it more-or-less irreplacable. It's the only story since The Daleks that could make any claim to being critical to understanding the Daleks. It's certianly the only possible story that could have reintroduced them to the revival.

But I think I'll enjoy rewatching Into the Dalek more.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Jsor posted:

The tube they crawled out of was really hot, I think the implication was that the long crawl through that tube dried them off. (Never mind that their clothes and hair wouldn't dry that neatly, but ~TV~)

Yeah, it was a cheat, but it was a cheat that worked. There was a point to it, you know - you want the scene with the goop but don't want the characters goopy for the rest. Good a resolution as any.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Plavski posted:

How did they get deminaturised from inside the Dalek?

Who gives a gently caress, it would've been boring to explain anyway.

I liked that too, actually! It's the best use of Moffat's habit of "cutting out the 'obvious' bits" there's been thus far, in that it only cuts out the boring and obvious bits that would have ruined the pacing even if they didn't have a fixed timeslot.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Shugojin posted:

Also I think the "you are a good Dalek" line has a different tone. It's similar, but in context it has a different meaning - instead of "you would do a really good job as a Dalek" it's more "you are what you get if a Dalek has a sense of good and evil".

Browsing Tumblr right after it aired, it distressed me terribly how many people totally missed the distinction.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Potooweet posted:

It's a distinction without difference.

They mean completely different senses of "good" - moral versus qualitative/competence - and that distinction "hidden" in a continuity reference is brilliant.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
I'm not even sure I buy into the "weaknesses" thing, really. A healthy 56-year-old-man in 2014 is a far cry from a 55-year-old former boxer with arteriosclerosis in 1963 in terms of physical capability.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Rochallor posted:

How long have these Dalek saucers been around? The one with the bumps all over them. I know the Daleks have had flying saucers since forever, but was this particular design a new series thing? The only time I can recall Dalek ships appearing in the old series is Dalek Invasion of Earth. I think there might have been one in Remembrance, too, but I can't recall.

The Dalek ship in Remembrance was a big setpiece but I'm 99% sure it didn't have Dalek Bumps on it.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

ThNextGreenLantern posted:

I liked the episode quite a bit. It is very reminiscent of "Dalek", but I really like "Dalek". Also, this darker Doctor is really working for me!

I mean, there are large swathes of Rob Shearman throughout the script, which is a big part of why it succeeds.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
Maybe they had anti-radiation gloves at the ready!

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
Now we might finally know if he was right!

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

AndyElusive posted:

Speaking of Big Finish, are there any rumors or word on Matt Smith doing any 11th audio stories?

Not until they get the license for modern Doctor Who.

The most recent chance for them was when AudioGo folded last year, but they gave the license to BBC Books or somesuch instead.

I'd suspect they did so because Big Finish's output is of far higher quality and complexity than AudioGo or other audiobook companies, and therefore raised issues of competition with the TV series.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Jerusalem posted:

And when Big Finish has very carefully blurred the lines by taking a character introduced in a revival-era book tie-in and brought them into the Big Finish range.

Not quite. The Dalek Time Controller showed up in the Six story Patient Zero, followed by some EDA BF Audios before his appearance in the BBC Books Eleventh Doctor novel The Dalek Generation (penned by Nick Briggs) - BUT that novel is the first time the Dalek Time Controller interacts with the Doctor from the Time Controller's perspective, setting up his Big Finish appearances!

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Solaris Knight posted:

Capladi seems very intentionally like Hartnell in a lot of ways, starting basically from scratch and all that, so him progressing throughout his run won't be a surprising arc, but a very solid one anyway.

Hartnell? HARTNELL!? /sixthdoctor

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Senor Tron posted:

With regards to Twelve doing lots of math in the last episode and having chalkboards around in this one, I like the idea that he's still working on the calcuations on exactly how to pull off the scheme to hide Gallifrey. At some point (almost certainly offscreen) he will realise that he needs to go help and pop back to make his appearance.

That or something related to it (how to extract Gallifrey from its pocket dimension).

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Pigbog posted:

He should already remember that he was there, so he knows that he'll have to do that, right? wasn't the implication that 11 remembered the events of Time of the Doctor? And if so, why didn't he realize he's going to regenerate in Day of the Doctor?

I've read theories that the presence of Twelve and/or The Curator in Day made Eleven a "past Doctor" for the sake of the multi-Doctor story rules to some degree or another, and his memories of Day were compromised as a result.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Jerusalem posted:

Haha, in fact don't they show an older and younger version of the 7th Doctor during that section? :haw:

Yes they did. In DW Magazine, Moffat answered where the Companions were during the past-Doctor clips, then was disappointed when no one asked "The McCoy question".

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

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Autonomous Monster posted:

I think it'd be a mistake to get too caught up in untangling the rules here; Doctor Who's always worked more at an emotional, intuitive level than an intellectual one. Day was framed as Eleven's story and was part of Eleven's run- until the show suggests otherwise, I'm going to take it as read that Eleven was the primary.

Oh, absolutely - I'm not huge on rules anyway. I just felt like throwing that out there.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Yvonmukluk posted:

So where were the companions, then?

They were all just off-camera, because the Doctor likes to do his big show-stopping numbers alone and shooed them out of frame.

Which is wonderfully metatextual.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Plavski posted:

Poor ratings killed Who before, it can do it again.

Michael Grade killed Who.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Plavski posted:

Moffat's successor will be Rob Shearman. There's a rumour I can get behind!

Rob Shearman doesn't do TV. Moffat's had trouble getting Doctor Who through production as it is and he made like 5 very successful shows beforehand - Rob's written maybe six episodes of TV in his life.

I say this as the biggest Shearman nerd on this forum - Rob does his best work on Who when he's dancing along the edges, twisting iconography and engaging in his brilliant weirdness. He can't be the one writing regeneration stories and straightforward midseason romps, his talents and creative genius simply don't lie in that direction.

His influence on Doctor Who persists and grows even though he hasn't done a Who story since 2007 - Into the Dalek played with themes from Jubilee that Dalek didn't, for instance.

It's enough to give me hope that we might be entering a real “post-Shearman” era of Doctor Who writing. It seems to be about that time, around 10 years after he “made his mark” on Doctor Who.

If a near-future episode engages with the themes of history or tradition in the way that Jubilee and The Holy Terror did, respectively, I think it could be said with confidence that Rob's Doctor Who work has reached sufficient saturation in the creative consciousness of Who writers to begin influencing future Who in the same way that David Whitaker or Robert Holmes has done.

Which would be pretty much the best thing ever,

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
I find the constant Who-fan preoccupation with imminent cancellation odd. I guess it's the scar left by 1989 in the collective consciousness - Doctor Who has died before! The sky could fall in at any moment! - but this isn't the late-JNT era in terms of production, it's not the 80s (in terms of how fandoms and television behave), and for all his faults Moffat isn't Eric Saward.

I think we're gonna be okay for a while.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

After The War posted:

The other thing that makes Shearman stand out, and the reason he'd never work as showrunner, is his need to gently caress with the Doctor Who format. Obviously I don't need to say anything about Scherzo, but even things like his choice of companion in Holy Terror or the fake opening of Jubilee leading into the story's total rearrangement of the Doctor Who story structure... it's easy to see why he's only done a few, it must be extremely draining.

That's what I was getting at about "dancing along the edges".

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
There's a Big Finish audio coming up where Ace is working for the Celestial Intervention Agency, but the Other can stay buried in the ephemera of the wilderness years for another fifty years.

gently caress the Other.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
I've opined at length in the past on the subject of the Other, but the gist is this:

If the Doctor is the reincarnation of the Other - if his heroism and his distinct attitude towards Time Lord society is somehow preordained - it does violence to the central ideological premise of Doctor Who, by which ordinary people become extraordinary through their actions.

The Doctor must never be "more than just a Time Lord" - he has to be a hero despite being a Time Lord.

DoctorWhat fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Sep 2, 2014

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Payndz posted:

I always liked the very clear implications from the Tom Baker era that the Doctor was actually a rather mediocre Time Lord by their standards, barely scraping through academically and not fitting in with their staid and stuffy society, but that was exactly why he ran away in the first place.

Oh yes! That's the brilliance of the Doctor! Hold on, let me see if I can dig up a conversation I had with Jack Graham (proprietor of ShaboganGraffiti, a remarkably great blog about leftism in Doctor Who) about this subject.

Me, on Tumblr last month posted:

Let me try this again.

I have a serious problem with the “Cartmel Masterplan”. It’s not really about Looms, if you’ll believe that. It’s about The Other.

I can’t loving stand the idea that the Doctor - or anyone - is “destined for greatness”. gently caress that noise. The magic of the Doctor - where his moral authority can be argued to come from - is that he rejects the privileged society from which he came as morally bankrupt and uses those resources to help the downtrodden.

When you make the Doctor into the reincarnation of a GOD, suddenly that doesn’t really hold true. The Doctor becomes a moral authority not because of his actions, but because of his privilege - an accident of birth. “You can’t be like the Doctor,” suggests Lungbarrow, “unless you happen to be the genetic reintegration of a powerful white dude from millions of years ago.”

gently caress that. That’s gross. I’m not hating on Marc Platt or on Andrew Cartmel. That obviously wasn’t the intention of the Masterplan plot - all they wanted to do was introduce more mystery to a world that was rapidly getting “overexplained”. And to Platt’s credit, he claims he now regrets introducing that mythology. But that doesn’t make the final message any less grotesque. It only serves to amplify the already iffy “white man’s burden” theme that constantly threatens to subsume Doctor Who already.

Jack Graham, in response posted:

I have a lot of agreement with this.

I love the Cartmel era, on the whole, and have a lot of affection for the Virgin New Adventures… but I don’t like the idea of the Doctor as the recycled ‘Other’.
I don’t like the idea of him being ‘exceptional’ for his society. Much as he is bound to be exception from a human standpoint, I think that should always be because of what he does rather than what he is. I like the idea of him as someone who failed in his home context - “…scraping through with 51% at the second attempt” - and being a bit rubbish, a bit of a dilettante, a bit of a second-rater, a bit of a fartaround. Probably because I feel like one of those myself. But that’s okay. I hate the winners vs losers view of life. I hate the idea that one’s worth is determined by one’s ‘success’ in the competition of life, in carving a niche for oneself in a hierarchy. I still more hate the idea of those kinds of judgements being made without taking into account the fact that some people start off at higher rungs and with greater advantages. The Doctor should be someone who started off at such a high rung but who proved unsuited for it because of his infinite distractability, his vagueness and his inability to ‘play the game’… and also because of the moral sense - and the imperative to be a social actor - that he acquires from his involvement, from his breaching of the walls of the enclosed and reactionary envelope of Gallifrey, from his adventures and researches and friendships ‘out there’ in the muck and strife and pain of the universe.

The transformation of him into the reincarnation of a godlike founder figure from mythological pre-history injects a 80s/90s ‘epic’ sensibility into a 60s/70s ‘rebel’ storyline. It is a post-defeat rationalisation overwriting an artefact that originated at a time of struggle. The Doctor-as-drop-out-from-the-ruling-class is an (admittedly imperfect) artefact of 1969. It gets renewed - even intensified - in 1976. And then it gets downplayed and downplayed until - interestingly enough - Holmes gets his hands on it again at the end of the Trial in 1986. But in the run up to the ‘long-90s’, Cartmel et al lay the groundwork for a potential vitiation of it. Even as that crew take the show to angrier and bolshier territory than its has visited for quite some time, they’re also utiling an affect from various cultural strands that bigs the Doctor up and fetishizes him, and his ‘power’. I criticise Moffat (and RTD) for this… but the truth is that Cartmel started it, or almost started it. Thankfully it only partially and intermittently materialises on TV. They took out the “more than just a Time Lord” line, and the “brief glimpse of his birth” lines makes its way into the novelisation of ‘Fenric’ but not the broadcast show. The NAs, being purely made of words, can allow these tendencies to come out to play in a way that the TV show itself seemed to reject.

Fair disclosure: I loved the Cartmel masterplan at the time (and all the stuff that goes with that term… i.e. the manipulative, amoral, chessmaster Doctor, and his grimdark adventures, and his mythological origins, and his power, and his way of saying things that Merlin said in ‘Excalibur’, etc, etc, etc)

Sorry for the Bigpost but hey!

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

CobiWann posted:

Forget it, Livid. It’s the Internet. It’s not about who’s closest to being correct, it’s who can shout the loudest.

That's what makes me so great - I can do both! /six

Diabolik900 posted:

Yep. I think people have trouble sometimes understanding that calling a story racist/sexist/*ist isn't the same thing as saying that the writer hates black people/women/*.

Or, in fact, that it's not the same as calling people who like it racist/sexist/bigoted.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
Man, I'd be waaay more hype for Robot of Sherwood if it was Shearman writing it you have no loving idea.

Rob Shearman - Jacqueline Rayner, really - writing a story about the Doctor and his companion meeting a pseudo-historical mythic figure where the Doctor's being critical of "history" and legends while the companion has their own preconceptions? That's like the cool "history" bits of Jubilee meets the premise of The Marian Conspiracy! It'd be incredible!

But instead Mark Gatiss wrote it. I haven't seen the workprint or read the script but there's no way that isn't a tremendous waste of story potential.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Prison Warden posted:

Sub Rosa? Operation Annihilate? Love and Monsters?

I think an Asian or Black or female or even ginger Doctor is fine, just as long as there is never an American Doctor. :colbert:

I'd accept an American accent as long as it wasn't Yet Another White Dude. America is such a wonderful melting pot that it would be abominable to not reflect that. The diversity of Doctor cosplayers (although, unfortunately, not the diversity of Doctors) at the World Tour stop was fantastic!

I'd take a thick Queens (NY) voice coming from a black or hispanic or asian or [culture/ethnicity I'm sure I'm forgetting] Doctor, but I'd burn my coat if the gave the role to a white dude with a Hollywood accent.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

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GonSmithe posted:

It's okay.

I expect "okay".

I want exemplary.

:negative:

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

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The_Doctor posted:

So, who wants some Target novels? I've got a box of them here in my storage unit gathering dust. I was thinking I'll throw some in envelopes for the first 10 people (US only) who email me?

Doctorwhosecretsanta [at] gmail.com

Gimme your Six books, I need something for Colin to sign at LI WHO.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

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Glenn_Beckett posted:

Wait what about journey to the center of the tardis was racist? I must've glossed right over it

They cast the working-class, uncooperative, carjacker characters all as black, which has a lot of connotations especially in America.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
Man, all those Elder Gods spend an awful lot of time sitting in big chairs, don't they? The White Guardian, the Gods of Ragnarok... it seems to be a theme.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

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Gaz-L posted:

Oh gently caress, Jack Kirby writing for the Fourth Doctor would've been so awesome.

It really would've, yeah. :smith:

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

ewe2 posted:

I actually don't mind a less bubbly Fourth for a change. And why is it that I just noticed the terrible question marks on his collar after all this time?

He only got those in the JNT Season.

And they're great :colbert:

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DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
And if anyone hasn't been reading it, Occupation & Oxxidation's Toxx thread is right on the cusp of the review for Love and Monsters.

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