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Jerusalem posted:I loved Robot of Sherwood but it was a very silly episode (which is part of why I loved it). Robot of Sherwood is a great episode to have, but it's never one I'd put forward to someone just getting into the show. I realized it when I was watching the Yogscast and one of them mentioned seeing it more or less in isolation, but it fits too perfectly into what people think Doctor Who is like to be a good early-introduction episode. There's nothing wrong with what it is, one of the great strengths of Doctor Who is that it can do stuff like that, and then immediately follow it up with something like Listen. But if you're trying to introduce the show to someone, it's not a good episde until they're properly sold on it. It would be easy to dismiss the show as a whole based on Robot of Sherwood, because it fits squarely into what people picture Doctor Who to be like.
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Nov 22, 2014 13:14
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I've found that I really like Who monsters being 'correct', in direction, internal story, message, and tone. It's why I liked Dark Water/Death in Heaven not as a Master story (which it's good at), but as a Cyberman story. It felt like Moffat seemed to get what made the Cybermen work; the right feelings to evoke, the right imagery, the right concepts to introduce to the picture without bringing the house of cards crashing down. That's why I actually prefer Angels Take Manhattan over Flesh and Stone/Time of Angels. Beyond anything else, Flesh/Time just wasn't a Weeping Angels story. The enemies were statues, and they didn't move if you looked at them, but that's it. And even then, they gently caress up one of the two facts they stick with; the way they act in Flesh/Time implies that they can move if you're looking at them, they just don't. This sounds like nitpicking, but it adds up. Flesh/Time isn't an Angels story, because it doesn't respect any of the elements behind them. It's not just that they don't play by the same rules; they don't prey on the same fears, grow from the same concepts, they introduce new ideas and have them act in ways that completely goes against their previous appearance. The fact they seemed to throw consistency to the wind rubs me the wrong way, and I just can't really judge the story on its own merits because of it. It will always be 'that story with the lovely fake Angels'. For all its flaws, and even though it may not be a good story (I haven't watched it since it aired), Angels Take Manhattan does at least feel like the same monsters that appeared in Blink. They're more organized, but that works--contrasting a structured plan like that with their more chaotic, directionless predation in Blink is a nice way to build on them. They're fighting in the same way, are weak to the same tactics, and call up the same emotions. It's the proper sort of follow-up to Blink: same enemies, same rules, just bigger and smarter. Maybe Flesh/Time would have worked better if it were after more Angels appearances. If you set a pattern, that gives you greater ability to break it, because you've at least shown that you understand and can probably use that pattern to structure the breakage itself. But with their second appearance acting nothing like their first, it just doesn't work for me, it makes it feel lazy. Like they had a story they wanted to tell, but couldn't be assed designing a new monster, so they crammed the most tangentially-relevant pre-existing one they had in. Or, other way around, that they wanted to write a new Angels story but didn't want to go through the effort of making a plot that suited them.
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Nov 23, 2014 05:05
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2house2fly posted:I see a load of wrong people in here who don't think the Angels two-parter was great. Like I said, I can't judge the quality of it because I always just dismiss it as 'the episode that got the Angels really wrong'. Docbeard is right that it really didn't call for the Angels, which only made the fact they were forced in there worse. The story is good in spite of the Angels' presence, not because of them. It reminds me of Asylum of the Daleks; an episode let down by a miscast monster. Someone in these threads mentioned it would have been better as a Cyberman episode, and they're right. Similarly, Flesh/Time would have been better with a monster more suited to it. I feel like they wanted to have the monsters be sentient art, which would be in-keeping with the 'image of an Angel becomes an Angel' idea, and does well at demonstrating the Cracks erasing something from existence. Why not make that the core of it? Why recycle the Angels, which look like sentient art but aren't, instead of just making a new monster that does work like that? Cleretic fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Nov 23, 2014 |
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Nov 23, 2014 08:02
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TinTower posted:Apparently, Catherine Tregenna–who wrote the Torchwood episode "Out of Time" (which personally, I loved) among others–will be writing an episode for series 9, becoming the first female writer for the show since Helen Raynor's Sontaran two-parter in 2008. Where was this announced? Do we have a listing of writers for next season, or did she just comeout and say that herself? If it's the former, is the Mummy/Flatline guy back on?
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Nov 25, 2014 08:27
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Bicyclops posted:I don't think including a suicide hotline in an episode very clearly about suicide is in bad taste. People who are in that dark a place often consider it when the topic is brought up, so providing what little help a TV show can provide afterward isn't exactly sensationalism. Seeing that sort of message at the end of an episode of something that tackles the issue of suicide always makes me smile a little. I know that to an extent it's mandatory (I know it's required for news stories about suicide here), but it's still a nice gesture every time I see it, especially when the show's handling suicidevery tastefully. Vincent and the Doctor remains one of my favorite episodes, and I honestly think a suicide hotline message afterwards actually helps the story. The whole episode is about how depression is actually a really tough thing to handle; it's not just a matter of being nice to someone, even giving Vincent the best gift you could possibly give him ultimately did nothing. Van Gogh couldn't get the help he needed because society in his time didn't even understand what was wrong, but someone facing the same issues today has more support than that.
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Dec 2, 2014 09:40
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PriorMarcus posted:The new series Cybermen couldn't survive a strong wind, so, no. I find it hard to decide how strong a Cyberman 'should' be, honestly. I'm not sure why that is, but while most other enemies of the Doctor are pretty self-evident and consistent, it just feels a tiny bit weird for the Cybermen to be at ANY level of direct power. Maybe the most fitting would be for the Cybermen to be fairly easy to stop, but tenacious. Yes, you can shoot one and he'll keel over, but he won't be down for long. Hell, maybe even being down doesn't stop him, he'll just pull himself along the ground on the exact same goddamn warpath.
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Dec 5, 2014 13:17
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PriorMarcus posted:I hated that scene. It's exactly what the Cybermen shouldn't be. A zombie inside a robot. The shell shouldn't have any autonomy without the body inside still being alive and ticking, because otherwise it's just a robot powered by blood. the problem is that it's hard to figure out what they should be. They're a perfectly solid concept, but no way for them to act really 'works' for them. They're destined to be inconsistent, because nobody's yet figured out a way for them to act as villains that isn't either 'Robot Zombies' or 'Silver Borg', neither of which is a great direction for them anyway.
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Dec 6, 2014 01:01
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McGann posted:When will we get a writer who realizes their every motivation should involve their own survival, and not just lovely Dalek/Borg hybrids? A cyberman should be able to be logically convinced to do something in the protagonist's interest, if they can show how it will also benefit the cybermen the most of the available options. well, Closing Time tried to do that. And I remain convinced that Dark Water/Death in Heaven had pretty good Cybermen, and that if it weren't a perfectly good Master story it would've been a great Cyberman revamp. But I don't really mean what they think, I more mean how they perform. How they approach, how they fight, how they die. An ideal way for the Cybermen to behave in regards to the plot exists, although whether or not it's adhered to is another question. What we don't have is, when it comes to the Cybermen powering up their weapons and heading into battle (which, like it or not, is inevitable), there's no real direction or style that works for them.
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Dec 6, 2014 01:19
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PriorMarcus posted:I'd also kind of like to be done with the idea of Cyber conversion as their end goal; instead they should be a culture and race who are trying to survive forever, but they have lost everything that makes them unique - no art, no history, no society or identity. They don't show up on other worlds looking to convert the population, because adding more numbers isn't the point, they show up looking for resources instead, even if that means body parts or oil or metal. I dunno, I think the Cyber-Conversion is a big part of them, it's basically the only thing that they've got that none of the other big villains do (the Daleks have it sometimes, but not often enough to call that one of their Things). I'd agree that perhaps it shouldn't be their end goal, but it can be incorporated into their 'MUST SURVIVE' thing fairly well. They're a race without any defining features, a culture without any culture. Since they've filed off everything that makes them unique, they'd be all over converting others--being a Cyberman is the only prerequisite to being part of Cyberman 'society', so conversion sits just fine with them in that sense. I suppose the problem is that it's consumed the rest of their character; it should be a prominent secondary ability, but not their main feature.
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Dec 6, 2014 03:19
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Davros1 posted:I would have loved In the Dalek more if the Doctor had spent the entire episode carrying that tray of coffee with him. I feel like if I'd written this season, the final scene of Death in Heaven would have been the Doctor drinking that coffee.
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Dec 10, 2014 12:49
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adhuin posted:Also Surprising number of people really liked the 2nd episode: "The End of the World". I thought that was panned as pretty awful by our collective hivemind. Well, it was the second episode, so we still weren't sure what to expect. It's bad given ten years of experience with the revival, but by itself it's still got some pretty nice designs and ideas.
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Dec 17, 2014 03:39
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Jsor posted:I like pretty much everything the first time I see it unless it's one of the very few things unlucky enough to trigger a gut hatred. I really only can do "this episode was bad" in retrospect. If I was posting in Who threads at the time, I probably would have been like "Wow, Love and Monsters was pretty okay, huh guys? I really liked the focus on how peoples friendships can grow beyond the reasons they originally got together. I'm pretty similar on both sides of the scale. Unless something sparks up as Pretty drat lovely really quickly (like Forest of the Night), or as really good really fast (like Flatline), I'll usually enjoy it well enough, but time will tell if it's actually good or terrible. It's not just Who that does that, either. I thought Metroid: Other M was pretty great until like, a week after finishing it.
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Dec 17, 2014 14:27
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Barry Foster posted:Here's someone doing a half decent impression of the Ninth Doctor doing a decent impression of the Eleventh Doctor. THis is genuinely pretty good, although the delivery could be better. This is something that would've gotten Nine very shouty, I don't really buy 'cheerfully calm' in this instance.
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Dec 19, 2014 06:06
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MikeJF posted:I know, right? She is amazing and single-handedly made the entire finale. I liked it as a Cyberman episode, and think it would've been great as just a Cyberman story, and even I agree with this. She's fantastic, and I want her back all the time.
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Dec 20, 2014 14:04
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I used to be pretty sure that you could estimate the quality of a Christmas episode from its initial pitch. Voyage of the Damned sounded like a terrible idea, and it was. Doctor Who doing a Christmas Carol on the other hand was a pretty neat idea, and actually rode it out fairly well. For whatever reason, Christmas specials never seem to rise above the initial idea. I'm going to retire this line of logic, because despite the utter stupidity of an episode about Santa, this one was actually really really good. It had a bunch of really good ideas, it actually included the Christmas parts of things fairly well, and I'm having one of those moments where I'm realizing that it was actually being more clever than I thought. Thinking about it, there's actually a lot of logic behind Dave actually being a dream construct of Shop Girl Whose Name I Forgot. The only mentioned interaction between the four on the 'base' before the Doctor and Clara turn up is between those two. He's the only one being impolite to the Doctor as they explain what's going on, because she thinks he's kind of an rear end in a top hat. He brings up Alien because she's been watching it. And he dies first not just because she's not keen on the guy, but because she's big on horror movies and that was exactly the time where someone had to die. I'd talk more abut this, but I've got this little ice cream headache on the side of my head, so I'm gonna go dig out some painkillers.
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Dec 26, 2014 11:56
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If she comes back Donna-style, I don't think anyone would complain. Certainly not me, she was great fun.
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Dec 26, 2014 15:20
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Star Platinum posted:Re: Capaldi's Doctor, there were certainly a couple of missteps taken with his character, but I think mostly they've been able to let his "humanity" (uh, timelord-ity?) shine through in the end. Especially at the end of this episode they were really able to sell him as a "kid in an old man's body" with his childlike wonder at steering Santa's sleigh. Maybe it's just because I have it, but Twelve's clicking the most for me when he reads like he's got Asperger's. He cares, and he's got genuine feelings, he's just bad at expressing them when he needs to. He doesn't step over the line intentionally, he just doesn't realize it's there. That's probably not their intended direction for him, but it's the way that I think works the best.
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Dec 27, 2014 01:34
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he was actually thinking "Look at me, I'm Doctor Who!" 
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Bicyclops posted:The bad CG had an actual in-episode reason for it, which is an incredibly good idea for Doctor Who. There's a reason for it to look fake, as there is with Coleman's bad aging makeup (I was a sucker for that scene, but I love the "ever so much more than 20" bit of Peter and Wendy). It was cheesy in all the right ways even if it was a bit dark for Christmas. I actually thought Coleman's aging makeup was pretty good, as far as aging makeup goes. It actually took a few shots for me to click that it was actually her, and not just clever trickery with an all-new actor that happens to look a fair bit like her. I think the big part of that is that they didn't let us get a good look at her. The lighting and the angles did a lot of work to hide the pitfalls of the work.
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Dec 28, 2014 02:09
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The Big Finish Humble Bundle just added three new adventures! And they're ones I never hear you lot talking about : adaptations of the Doctor Who stage plays. I didn't even know that sort of thing existed. One of them is a musical starring Colin Baker.
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Jan 1, 2015 05:59
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Davros1 posted:Yeah, the Daleks for the revival were initially designed to share the same eye line as Rose, for the purpose of their one on one dialogue scenes together. Moffat felt they didn't have to keep that anymore since Matt and Karen towered over them, and wanted them to be more imposing. He also mentioned the that new Paradigm were meant to look "sharp", i.e. the bronze ones were riveted together, while the new ones were supposed to look like one solid piece, any look like they would cut you if you even touched them. There's also the fact that Jenna Coleman is really short,so Daleks proportionately sized for the really tall Karen Gillan just dwarfed her. I'm not sure how much this directly contributed, but Jenna's first appearance was the first time we got the Old Daleks back.
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Jan 7, 2015 00:19
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Jsor posted:Also, do I need to have The Wedding of River Song running on loop in the background while watching it this way? Whatever part of the whole process you've reached at the time, immediately switch to The Wedding of River Song at 5:02 PM on Friday.
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Jan 8, 2015 05:29
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Jerusalem posted:In un-chronological related matters, is there ANYBODY who actually liked Kill the Moon? Outside of all the stuff that happens between Clara and the Doctor after the main storyline is resolved? I didn't mind it. You're right in that it's easily the best part of the episode, and that the rest of the story's pretty easy to hate for pretty good reasons, but I enjoyed it. It wasn't a good episode, and its faults would never be overcome by its strong points, but I liked what it was trying to do. The same cannot be said about Forest of the Night.
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Jan 8, 2015 06:32
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howe_sam posted:Is that the first time we learn who Amy's marrying or do they say it at the end of Flesh and Stone? Around when we first found out her last name. So, I think Flesh and Stone?
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Jan 14, 2015 22:23
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RunAndGun posted:Even if he doesn't live forever (he will!), he'll be in the 75th. I just hope that, when we get to the hundredth episode spectacular, we get some bits from Eleven about seeing all 57 Doctors in 12D.
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Jan 16, 2015 07:52
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Jerusalem posted:"Can you drive a motorcycle?" I initially thought Rory was just some sort of schlubby, awkward guy that was more intended for us to laugh at than care about. Like early Mickey Smith. The best part about Rory about that, though, was that he stayed like that. Mickey slowly became a more serious, genuine character, but Rory was always just sort of weird and awkward, despite constantly being given ridiculous, badass contexts like that.
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Jan 16, 2015 23:01
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While I can agree that I don't want the Boneless to become oversaturated, I love them enough that I want to see more of them. They're a great tool for making things that are just plain wrong; some of their work in Flatline is fantastic in making things terrifying in an unorthodox way. It's hard to describe how a flattened picture of a train on a wall is scary, but it still is, in its own way. The idea of a monster that can alter physical dimensions is ripe for loads of great sights that would be awesome to see crop up every so often over the years, although I'd struggle to think of a story/setting that would really suit them. An under-siege story set in an art gallery? Maybe their attempts to understand 3D reality result in MC Escher-style landscapes, because they haven't quite got it right. EDIT: vv I think a partially animated episode would work for it, but not a full-on thing. It'd be a great way to convey the nature of being 'flattened' and how that kills, but doing any more than that would demean their terror. Plus, it'd come close to giving them voice, and they're better off just being extradimensional bullies. Incomprehensible to our own perceptions, except for 'they're dicks'. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 03:47
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Humans aren't known for thinking straight, especially in events as stressful as I imagine finding out you're dead and can feel what happens to your body would be. Yes, rotting probably is more painful overall, but it's gonna take a fair while for that to start kicking in. Cremation on the other hand is going to hurt a lot, really soon. Then again, we're trying to think through a message that's almost definitely falsified by the Master. Probably specifically to aid her plan, too; can't necro-convert a pile of ash and bone, can you?
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Jan 20, 2015 13:41
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CobiWann posted:Warning - I’m a little wary writing this review as I know very little about Aboriginal culture and the Dreaming. In writing about an actual belief system still being followed today, I want to make sure I get as much right as I can. I apologize in advance if I get anything wrong! I'm not Aboriginal, but I am Australian, and there's a lot of Aboriginal history in our schooling. So I can say you've got everything right here, both on the subject of mythology and actual cultural implications of all of it. Aboriginal Australians are extraordinarily poorly-treated culturally, both in the past and today (this is a hard thing to say, and not an argument for now, but I think Aboriginals might actually be the worst-treated minority culture in the world). I always honestly liked the Dreaming stories, because they're actually, in a way, fairly relatable. There's an element of simplicity to it, since a lot of it is just the Aboriginals trying to explain parts of the world they don't understand with things they've observed. Done right, I'd actually think it would be great pickings for a science-fiction story; these aren't gods, they're just greater versions of animals, with the occasional extremely powerful human. It's even relatively scientifically forward for a belief system, since it's all about unrelated events, with no actual thought to them, gradually shaping the world we know.
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Jan 22, 2015 01:06
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CobiWann posted:Would you happen to recommend any books/stories about the Dreaming? If I can pull one thing from this audio, it's a curiosity to learn more about it... Unfortunately I can't, because a lot of this was when I was in school. I'm sure there are some great collections of Dreaming stories or somesuch, but I'm not aware of them personally. If anywhere on SA would know, it'd most likely be Auspol. Keep in mind that it's Auspol, but they're always keen to educate, and I know they occasionally talk about books on stuff like the stolen generation. I expect someone there would have a good resource for Aboriginal mythology.
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Jan 22, 2015 04:22
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The thing I hated most about Forest wasn't the potentially dangerous message or anything like that, it's that most of the episode is so frustratingly pointless. Nothing happens for most of the episode, and I don't even mean 'slow plot' nothing. I mean NOTHING loving HAPPENS. It's aggressively eventless, too; it's clearly not that they can't think of anything to do with their runtime, it comes up with ideas and then drops them in favor of more Walking With Kids. EDIT: I said it when the episode came out, but it bears repeating: Set it in the zoo. The idea that the trees broke the animal enclosures is a great idea to elevate the short-term threat, but they don't do anything with it aside from that single scene with the tiger. Which is then immediately forgotten, replaced instead by Walking With Kids. The episode would probably still be awful if it were set in the zoo, but at least there'd be something in it. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Jan 25, 2015 |
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Jan 25, 2015 03:46
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docbeard posted:This is pretty much how I feel. His story was at the heart of the "well that nearly worked" feeling I got from so much of this season. I really liked where they wanted to go with it, but I feel like they never quite gave him the experience to give his assertions meaning. He's not wrong, but it doesn't really feel like his claims are earned since his entire basis is 'I've seen people like this before', which we just have to take his word for since we've never seen such. If he'd taken even one trip with them, if he'd been along for Kill the Moon, or Mummy on the Orient Express, or even been present for Flatline, his words would have had so much more weight because there's no way we could really refute it.
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Jan 26, 2015 01:04
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Doctor Spaceman posted:I'd have cared a lot less about the bad science in Kill the Moon if they hadn't spent a bunch of time at the start of the episode talking about how the moon was unusually heavy and that the increased gravity was causing tides that caused massive destruction and so on. They made me think about the science at the start and then spent a lot of time ignoring it. rargphlam posted:The biggest problem with the egg, science aside, is that its artificiality is rendered bare. It's wholly and entirely designed as a mechanical plot element, and it strains credulity because of this. It doesn't feel real, it feels like something a writer cooked up to create a certain scenario and have certain effects, and then could be easily tossed away. These two, together, paint the issue for me. The science of the whole thing, ultimately, doesn't matter; the point is that we get to 'the moon is an egg', the actual science of it is completely secondary. And that should be completely fine... Except, of course, for the fact that they put so much spotlight on it before we get to that point. The immense focus on the scientific angle only serves to make us notice the fact that none of the science makes sense. I think what they wanted to do was lure people in with a hard science-based story, and then throw us off with the most insanely fantastical swerve they could possibly manage, and that's a daring move I can't help but like in theory. Unfortunately, since they got the science completely wrong, that maneuver falls flat. The worst part is that it doesn't have to be wrong. I'm sure that there is enough actual science to the hatching of an egg that you could apply it to that early part of the story, not actually change all that much of the plot, and at the very least have a stronger story, if not an actually good one. The sheer wrongness of the science as it is only serves to let the episode down, and while it's okay to have some absurd Non-Science in Doctor Who in general, here it's acting as a poor substitute for Actual Science in a story where there's no reason Actual Science can't be there instead. I should say that I actually didn't mind Kill the Moon all that much, and the science was not my biggest problem with it (the 'lights on/lights off' solution, and the clear questions it raises when we see it, are). But it is a problem I understand, and it's really not one that would have been hard to fix. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 12:16 on Jan 26, 2015 |
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Jan 26, 2015 12:13
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I actually don't mind his logic.The dynamic that New Who goes for is 'troubled (male) Doctor, grounding-force (female) companion', and it's a dynamic that works very well. If you reverse the genders, then without a major change in the way the Doctor is written, it's just going to come off weird and sexist. I think the only New Who season that might have, if it had a female Doctor, managed to avoid that is maybe season five, and even that would still have some weird subtext regarding certain Doctor/Amy elements. I think you'd need a proper, old-school Doctor to make it work right. New Who, as it is now, couldn't really handle it. EDIT: Plus, you guys can't seriously tell me you'd trust Moffat to write a female Doctor. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Jan 29, 2015 |
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Jan 29, 2015 03:54
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Rochallor posted:That's not necessarily a dynamic that has to continue, however. And it's pretty general as far as things go. I mean, it generally describes both Series 1 and 8, but the nature of those relationships is totally different. I think what I'm saying is that it has to be a really conscious, proper, planned shift. The 'base' New Who Doctor, that vague outline of a character that everyone writes the Doctor as before they really know how a particular Doctor feels, wouldn't work out. That dynamic can change, but it's so default that, for that establishing first season, you'd have to police the entire process to make sure it worked right. You can't just have the new Doctor be a lady, you need to really focus on making that happen. Thinking about it more, season 1 could have sustained a female Doctor well. Nine was troubled and unstable, he needed Rose to balance him out, but he wasn't weak. I feel like that would be the character skeleton we'd need for a 'current' female Doctor. EDIT: To better illustrate what I'm getting at regarding 'just gender-flipping New Who wouldn't work', mentally swap the sexes of the Tennant years. I dunno about you guys, but to me it suddenly looks A LOT worse. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Jan 29, 2015 |
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Jan 29, 2015 06:32
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Emerson Cod posted:As I tell my writing team, if you swap the gender of your character and they suddenly make no sense, you've written a lovely character. It's not that it doesn't make sense, it's that it takes on a whole new, and not terribly positive, meaning. Tennant's run especially gets really shifty if you gender-flip it. I should reiterate, I do think it's very possible to write a female Doctor, and I think it should happen. But it's not something they can do overnight, and I think having a bad one would be worse than not having one at all. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 14:50 on Jan 29, 2015 |
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Jan 29, 2015 14:47
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Jerusalem posted:It uses the Cybermen as a distraction/side attraction to the main storyline, which I guess could be considered squandering them, As the apparent resident Cyberman fan (Cyberfan), I'm still conflicted about this. Dark Water brings us, put simply, the perfect Cyberman revamp. As I understand it, the Cybermen have always been a commentary on humanity's relationship with technology, and to a lesser extent death. They're perhaps the earliest cyborgs to still be commonly known and used in fiction, and while it's certainly laudable that they've lasted so long, we've advanced so far in the decades since their inception that they can't quite resonate like they used to. They're a commentary on humanity and technology that's never managed to advance beyond the 1960s, and I think a huge part of why their stories fail so consistently is because, at their core, they're hideously outdated. Our views on technology have advanced as far as the technology itself, and it's a vastly different conversation than the one that birthed the Cybermen all those years ago, especially when relating to death. What Dark Water successfully did was update them. Technological advancements are something we welcome now, it's commercialized, commodified, and we surround ourselves with it without even questioning it. It even lasts beyond death, too, our Facebook and Twitter pages remaining alive after we're gone. Beyond, even; Joan Rivers endorsed the new iPhone from beyond the grave, and while that's certainly an outlier, there's no denying that technology has become irrevocably intertwined with our own mortality, in ways we never could have dreamed until it happened. And we just let it happen, too, we accepted these terms willingly, without even questioning. 3W is a stellar commentary on that, they have literally commodified the afterlife, and in their hands it's no longer just our Twitter conversations that last beyond the grave. Those who bought in have no word otherwise, either, 3W can do whatever it drat well pleases with the deceased, use them for their own ends, and it's already too late to start telling them otherwise. It's not even 'we must survive'. It's 'we will survive', there's no question to it. ...But then Missy turns up, and suddenly this is all out the loving window because she's got an even bigger, more ridiculous plan. And I would be REALLY MAD about that if Michelle Gomez wasn't utterly amazing every single second she's on screen. I can't even say I wish she wasn't part of it, because she was so good, so I just have to accept the squandering of such a great thing as a price to pay. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 08:40 on Jan 31, 2015 |
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Jan 31, 2015 08:37
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Annakie posted:But if anyone even hints over there about Rory's future even in a cutesy wink wink nudge nudge way, I'm gonna be mean and give you a week. I think we might be safe, it's way more fun to pretend he's gone forever and never existed.
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Feb 1, 2015 04:42
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Barry Foster posted:Awesome. The Big Finish Sixth Doctor is practically a different character to the one on telly, and he deserves the opportunity to not go out like a chump. The 6>7 regeneration was so blunt and anticlimactic that it's perfectly reasonable to assume that the cause of Six's death wasn't conking himself out on the console. That probably didn't help, and it might've been final nail in the coffin, but it's very possible that he took more significant injuries that actually did him in.
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Feb 4, 2015 15:21
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The hardest part of Lego Doctor Who would be knowing when to stop. Sure, it could be a massive thing, but do you start with a New-Who game, then take a bit of a gamble in hoping you can transition into Classic Who for the sequel? Do you go the other way, risking the core audience not even being interested in playing as decades-old Doctors they aren't familiar with? The sequence was obvious with stuff like Star Wars and Harry Potter, but Doctor Who is long and storied, it'd be really hard to pitch in a way that makes sense for a game. Reflexively, I'd suggest a sort of 'highlights reel', with one story from every Doctor. Opening with The Daleks for One, through to a good Master story for Three (maybe a mashup of several of them), Five does Earthshock, and we cap off with Ten and Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, Eleven going through The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone, and finally Twelve with Into the Dalek. Have an altered Day of the Doctor as the finale level, then throw in some companion-focused stories like Turn Left or Flatline as bonus chapters.
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Feb 5, 2015 05:22
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Do a Five Doctors thing, where the companion / Doctor pairings aren't necessarily the ones that actually happened? Hell, you could easily pair Doctors together with that. My experience with Lego games is limited, but as I recall being able to do that yourself is a key part of the gameplay. In replays of levels you can play as any characters you have unlocked, and doing so is actually part of how they handle unlockables. So in this hypothetical Lego Doctor Who, you can easily have Ten and Six team up to go at a First Doctor story for a replay. And there's probably benefits to doing so, because you're bringing a sonic screwdriver to a stage that didn't have one on the first runthrough.
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Feb 5, 2015 06:47
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