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It certainly seems like very lazy plotting to have the new Doctor be all "I hate soldiers lol" and Clara be all "now I am dating a soldier what are the odds", like the world's most contrived drama being sort of magicked out of nowhere.
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Sep 28, 2014 18:27
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Cojawfee posted:How DARE the doctor be different in any way shape or form from the other 12 versions of him that were all different from each other. It's the contrivance of the difference that's the issue, like if he'd gone "now I hate lemons" and then in the same episode Clara had gone "I am going on a date with a sexy lemon wow". Obviously it's not quite that bad because there's at least some precedent to the Doctor hating soldiers, but it comes across as very non-organic indeed to me.
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Sep 28, 2014 18:55
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DoctorWhat posted:All contrivances aside, the argument that a potentially interesting plot-and-character line should be abandoned on the basis of character interactions from TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO (Battlefield) is absolutely bonkers. It's the worst kind of fannish canon-obsession. I don't disagree with this as an argument, but guess I do disagree that "soldiers aren't always bad!" is potentially interesting. The Doctor would have to have a more reasoned stance for that to be the case; as it stands there's very little to it as a plot.
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Sep 28, 2014 20:25
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Bicyclops posted:I think, overall, they're trying for what they did with Six, which is to make the Doctor vaguely off-putting at first and generally get you tor warm up to him. I'll admit that they did it better here than with Six... I actually don't think they have. Deep Breath is better than The Twin Dilemma as an introduction to an unlikable Doctor in the same way a delicious meal is better than repeated blows to the head with an axe, but Six as a character is better suited to this idea than Twelve is. With Six most of the awful stuff is very surface level, and Colin is generally very good at playing someone who seems like a good man lumbered with a bad coat of paint. There's still generally a sense of the Doctor bubbling below that isn't really there with what we've got now, and so in the audios there's a progression towards being likable that happens in a completely organic manner. I don't think there's any way for Twelve to progress in the same way; he's at once too thin and too broadly defined as a character.
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Sep 29, 2014 12:07
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thexerox123 posted:Question for the Big Finish fans... what are some of your favourite deeper cuts from the BF catalog? Not the generally accepted best or most interesting stories, but ones that really entertained you or made you smile or that you appreciated for trying something new. I thought Cobwebs was very good, but may be alone in thinking so. I am definitely alone in thinking The Reaping is very good, but I don't care; it is. The Eternal Summer is a very well done Moffat-style adventure that's better than quite a few of the ones that are by Moffat himself, and Legend of the Cybermen has such a fantastic concept that I'm willing to forgive its relatively mediocre execution. I generally think more or less everything by Jonathan Morris is good as long as it isn't Flip-Flop, while everything by Nev Fountain I've heard has had at least one thing to recommend in it. I also like most of Paul Magrs' stuff, although I've heard The Boy That Time Forgot is very bad indeed. In terms of non-main range stuff I liked Auld Mortality, Excelis Dawns and The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield. The Adolescence of Time and The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel are both...well, not good, but oddly fascinating if you've read the 8DAs. vegetables fucked around with this message at 13:54 on Oct 1, 2014 |
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Oct 1, 2014 13:44
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In non-audio recommendations, I read AL Kennedy's short Who story The Death Trap a few days ago and thought it was really very good indeed. It's a Douglas Adams pastiche that's good enough that the word "pastiche" feels a little unfair; it captures the bleakness as well as the humour of Hitchhiker's in a way that Adams's own work for Who never really did. I really like the portrayal of Tom Baker's Doctor as living in a universe which is both terrifying and incomprehensible to humans, as it makes complete sense and yet isn't a take on him that comes up especially often.
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Oct 1, 2014 18:02
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Stuff to avoid is a good shout. I found almost all Season 2 of the Eighth Doctor Adventures to be dreadful, especially Max Warp; Red Dawn, Sword of Orion, Exotron, Project: Destiny and Project: Twilight are all pretty dull; Flip-Flop is outright offensive; Zagreus is as bad as everyone says it is; and The Girl Who Never Was is not good like many people say it is.
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Oct 1, 2014 18:56
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Peri and the Piscon Paradox is on sale now at Big Finish. Some other stuff is as well, but you should definitely make a beeline to this one first.
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Oct 3, 2014 13:08
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Payndz posted:The moon doesn't weigh 1.6 billion (1,600,000,000) tons, or whatever the number was they kept bandying about. The moon weighs (approx) 73,459,000,000,000,000,000 tons (73 quintillion), if I'm reading Wolfram Alpha right. Sci-fi writers really don't get how massive planetary bodies are. :sperg: Ah, but you're using 2014 tons. 2049 tons are much larger!
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Oct 4, 2014 22:27
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Gaz-L posted:The Doctor should've let Clara stew in the Angry Dome for a bit. I would have no problem at all with Doctor Who going full-bore Futurama with its science at this point; it's already more or less there. I liked this episode a lot, even with its "make the stupid decision that turns out to be right" ending which people think is a good for children to hear for some mad reason. The last astronauts with the last nuclear bombs, landing on a Moon covered in cobwebs. That's a really beautiful way of illustrating the end of one era metaphorically, having the Cold War's iconography collapse to cause a whole new future to be born. And I really like the idea of the Doctor just loving off and making people make historically important decisions. It's just, well, it's a shame they can't carry through with said decisions; this would have been much stronger if they'd had the guts to Kill the Moon.
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Oct 4, 2014 22:39
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Unkempt posted:I'm pretty sure the point was, "Is it OK to destroy an unborn being if it could possibly This would only really work if it was the Moon itself making the decision, wouldn't it? I'd say the point was "the decision that seems less cruel on the surface is the right decision!", which if anything is even worse. I'm not a fan of stories where the moral is dictated by the plot; real life doesn't have a plot, and in real life doing what Clara did would be stupid and terrible. I'm sure lots of anti-abortion people will read that message into this episode, though, which I suppose matters more than whether I think it's particularly sound as a reading. So you're right, I guess, and I am flapping around.
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Oct 5, 2014 17:06
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Lumberjack Bonanza posted:I mean yeah, there's certainly a militaristic element to it, but I think the episode made it clear that it was a matter of survival. I don't think Moffat intended for the analogy to exist but that doesn't stop it from being right there in the open with a crosshair on its stupid face. But it's awful as a moral even if the analogy doesn't exist. The analogy just sort of takes it to a new level of horrible.
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Oct 5, 2014 17:13
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Lumberjack Bonanza posted:Without the analogy drawn, I think it works fairly well actually. How do you decide if you have so much agency that you can exterminate a unique lifeform? ...very, very easily? Perhaps I just differ from lots of people on this.
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Oct 5, 2014 17:30
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Lumberjack Bonanza posted:I mean, I'd make the same decision, but it's a worthy question. The only thing that would really make us choose humanity over it is instinct. For all we know that butterfly is Space Jesus. I would also say the decision was very, very easy if it was a human Moon-fetus over a butterfly civilization, for what it's worth.
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Oct 5, 2014 17:34
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Aliens of London begins with a scene that deals with the actual real world ramifications of a young woman running off to travel in space and time that was unprecedented in the show; it's possibly the worst episode to argue for not having a deeper point than Kill the Moon where human-Doctor relations are concerned.
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Oct 5, 2014 20:51
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I think the reason why "the butterfly laid an egg that is too big" feels like a problem and, say, "it's very convenient how the gravity on the Moon is now exactly the same as Earth's" does not is that the first violates folk logic as well as scientific logic. It's fine for Doctor Who to do things that can't actually happen, but they always have to feel like they can. If they don't then it feels wrong to the audience, and it seems perfectly legitimate to call that a flaw. Arguing otherwise is pretending folk logic isn't a thing: you can violate the laws of hard science fiction, but you should never violate the laws of fantasy.
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Oct 5, 2014 21:22
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Bicyclops posted:Until science literacy gets a hell of a lot better, expect your popular fiction to contain magic with science buzzwords thrown in, that's just the way of things. Magic still has internal rules, though; the reason people have a problem with Kill the Moon is that it doesn't. It's fine for popular fiction to contain magic, but it has to work as magic. That's the line between a workable narrative and incoherency, as far as I can tell. Jurassic Park works by rules that are not the rules of science, but it doesn't need to violate its own rules in order for it to have a workable plot, because its magic is consistent at the surface level. vegetables fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Oct 6, 2014 |
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Oct 6, 2014 17:03
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There are more episodes of Doctor Who by Steven Moffat than there are by all women ever. 
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Oct 8, 2014 21:08
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PriorMarcus posted:But the overall quality still tips in favor of the women, so it's not too bad. I like how this is so much more cutting when you know which episodes the ones written by women were. Well, except Survival, Survival's rad.
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Oct 8, 2014 21:32
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I forgot Enlightenment! Enlightenment is also rad.
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Oct 8, 2014 21:42
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Have all the writers for TV Who been white? I have a sinking feeling the answer is "yes", but don't actually know for sure.
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Oct 8, 2014 23:45
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Trin Tragula posted:^^^ Go watch The Caves of Androzani already, it's only the best story that Doctor Who's ever done vvv I think Caves is very, very good, but it's also basically the Doctor wandering into a much grittier show and getting killed as a result. I like that it was done well once, but don't think it should be held up as an example of what the show "should" be.
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Oct 14, 2014 12:42
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I just saw someone on Tumblr suggest that Clara died in the Doctor's timestream after Name of the Doctor and the character we've seen from Day onwards is one of her echoes, which is such a good idea that I'll be very sad when it turns out not to be true.
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Oct 16, 2014 19:28
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I was also really alarmed by the way mental illness was portrayed in this episode, to the point that it's probably the only episode of the New Series I would actively say should not have been broadcast as is. Saying that there was evidence Maeve was right is missing the point; many schizophrenics would say there was evidence their beliefs were right. Getting a clever Blake reference into your script is not a good enough reason for having a genuinely dangerous message in your show. I'm considering complaining to the BBC about it, unless the thread can persuade me this is an overreaction.
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Oct 26, 2014 13:34
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I don't think it's very RTD below surface level, to be honest; I don't think he'd have let a script this problematic through.
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Oct 26, 2014 16:23
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marktheando posted:Hahaha I can't tell if you are joking or not. Thing is that I'm sure there are really obvious things I've forgotten from RTD's time that were genuinely offensive, but I'm struggling to come up with them. Perhaps Donna and Rose's fate in Journey's End? I'm not sure those are unambiguously portrayed as good things, though.
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Oct 26, 2014 16:38
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I didn't find Slab!Ursula offensive, although it is very silly. IIRC most of the people I saw being offended by it took issue with the idea you could live like that and be happy, which isn't a view I agree with at all.
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Oct 26, 2014 16:50
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thexerox123 posted:Naming an episode The Voyage of the Damned. I stand corrected!
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Oct 26, 2014 16:53
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The shot of St Paul's opening up to reveal a big zappy laser was  enough that I don't mind too much if the episode itself is terrible. Seeing it makes me sad that Mortal Engines, the book for teens that it's possibly nicked from, has never been made into a big budget film.
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Oct 26, 2014 17:58
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howe_sam posted:At a very high level, I do think there's a sense that kids are over medicated these days. Give a troublemaker Adderall instead of solving why they're acting out. There is a flipside to this that people who need medication to function at all are discouraged from publicly disclosing this to be the case, and certainly as someone who's in that category I'm struck by how taboo it is to believe that, for me, there is no talking solution to what is certainly a medical condition. The Doctor's stance in this episode actually is the conventional one and not the challenge as far as society is concerned, and I think it's dangerous because in very many cases it is completely wrong. vegetables fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Oct 26, 2014 |
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Oct 26, 2014 18:14
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ewe2 posted:There you go, bringing reason into a hysterical hissy-fit, how dare you! The episode is so clearly about How Adults Can Be Wrong, but because it's not perfectly written, it's Not Allowed To Be. I too look for validation in all my fictional media and react with utter infantile rage when I feel slighted by its clumsy tropes but I pretend that's in sympathy for others. Now that I've had a yell at internet strangers I can have a nice lie down and maybe write an angry letter to the Guardian later. But Adults Can Be Wrong and The Voices Can Be Right are completely different messages, surely? The first -I think rightly- takes authority away from a controlling influence in a child's life, and the second -I think wrongly- gives more authority to another.
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Oct 26, 2014 18:17
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ewe2 posted:I did say the tropes were clumsy, but are you saying The Voices Are Always Wrong? That to me seems at base what the screaming is about; forget overmedicating parents or children with surprising insight, we can't have voices being right or where will we be? How dare a tv story suggest it? It's more that I worry they usually are. Perhaps I'm wrong, of course, and The Voices are right for all or some of the people who have them, but at least for the cases I'm aware of they mostly seemed to say things that weren't especially meaningful from the outside and ended up ruining lives. I imagine there are at least some people whose lives are improved by Voices, and I wouldn't want to assume they're always bad. My concern is that for the majority of affected people who see this episode they will be, and the amount of harm it causes is likely to be disproportionate as a result. But yes, I could be wrong; perhaps the dragon will lay a new moon. I wouldn't be comfortable being the final arbiter of anyone's sanity.
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Oct 26, 2014 18:49
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Irish Joe posted:Stare at it like the chimp who discovered fire? If you were the chimp who discovered fire you would be the most innovative chimp who ever lived, so this isn't an insult really.
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Oct 27, 2014 12:14
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Bicyclops posted:Man, some people are being real shitheads to a young man that had the gall to admit that he's lost some respect for somebody who opened his eyes to a lot of stuff during his formative years. It's not like Doctor What is expressing opinions that are actually moronic. I don't always agree with him, but he expresses himself well and often has some good ideas. I know wearing the coat is goofy, but it seems kind of absurd to hate him for it. I wish I was as eloquent as DoctorWhat is when I was 18, and wish I had the stones to own and wear *the coat* in public now. The writer of this episode was very nice about my negative blog on it on Twitter, and now I feel a bit of a heel.
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Oct 27, 2014 16:23
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Big Mean Jerk posted:DoctorWhat's a good kid with bad taste in Doctors. Lord, no. Six is the best old series Doctor; I don't care how many people disagree.
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Oct 27, 2014 16:57
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Davros1 posted:Lawrence Miles wrote "Interference" and "The Adventuress of Henrietta Street". He is in no position to criticize any one else's writings. "The Adventuress of Henrietta Street" is great! It's the one Doctor Who novel I wish wasn't a Doctor Who novel, because it'll never be reprinted and I think it really deserves to be. Not that I agree with him about Day of the Doctor; I have personal problems with it but think it's very solidly put together. vegetables fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 00:32
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M for Mushroom posted:Missy already feels more like the Master than John Simm ever did... I strongly agree with this. The Mistress feels like having the real Master back again to me, as Gomez is able to seem both confident and insane in a way I never felt Simm really nailed. Also! Apparently this episode got loads of complaints for some reason. The BBC's defense of it has a proper undercurrent of "these complaints are stupid" about it, which in this case I think is probably justified. vegetables fucked around with this message at 11:20 on Nov 5, 2014 |
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Nov 5, 2014 11:17
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The_Doctor posted:And I may be misremembering but didn't she look pissed off that the Earth hadn't been subjected to a huge solar flare? Surely that would have scuppered the plan altogether? Making insanely complex plans to destroy a species that's about to be destroyed anyway is entirely in keeping with the Master's way of doing things. Wasn't that in 2016, whereas this plan is presumably taking place in 2014? Maybe the flare is why she's doing this now rather than later; maybe she only wanted to rule Cyberearth for two years; maybe she was going to replace all the trees with "cybertrees" and is now frustrated that she can't. There are lots of explanations for this that make as much sense as anything else in this show.
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Nov 6, 2014 15:25
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Bicyclops posted:I'd go so far as to say that the strangling does render Six close to irredeemable and that you essentially have to pretend it didn't happen to like him. You basically just have to block it from your mind entirely. It's not just the Sixth Doctor, it's the Doctor full stop. Six is the Doctor, whether you like it or not; people aren't absolved of culpability for their pasts because they change, even if they atone for what they've done. Which the Doctor doesn't, ever. I think a "let's deal with the strangling" story is necessary from a character perspective because of this, even though it's something that would be very difficult to handle and I'd have no faith in almost anyone to successfully pull it off. Also, re 2016: oh! I am an idiot.
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Nov 7, 2014 11:26
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Bits of this really seemed to blur the line between "Cybermen aren't human so it's fine when the Doctor kills a bunch" and "Cybermen are still the people they were!", which made me quite uncomfortable as someone who thinks about this sort of thing more than you're supposed to. Like, if Cyber!Brig still has that level of autonomy, do any of the others? If they do, doesn't that make them human still, and Danny the biggest mass murderer who ever lived? Anyway, it sucks that Osgood died; I wanted her to recur wearing steadily more ridiculous things.
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Nov 8, 2014 23:48
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