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Season Six does have one of my favorite episodes of the entire revival. (The God Complex. And shut up no it is not either undermined by the eventual reveal of what the Doctor saw in his room.) Come to think of it, Season Six has quite a few very good episodes. I have some problems with the main story arc, but I refuse to countenance the idea that a season that contained the aforementioned The God Complex, as well as A Christmas Carol, The Doctor's Wife, the Flesh two-parter, The Girl Who Waited, Closing Time, and gently caress it, A Good Man Goes To War "sucked". It was about this point, though, that I realized the key to enjoying Moffat-era Who was to completely ignore the main story arcs as much as possible. (Well, no not really, but they're definitely the weak link.)
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Nov 23, 2014 02:40
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Jsor posted:Out of wonder, why do people hate Let's Kill Hitler so much? Admittedly I only saw it once, but I remember liking it in a "oh my god this is the most ridiculous thing ever" sort of way. I enjoy it the same way Occ likes The Christmas Invasion, basically. Show me that episode in a vacuum, and you could in no way convince me that Amy and Rory were six months out from their infant daughter having been kidnapped. Aside from that rather large albatross, I think it's fine, if completely silly. (And I loving love the Tesalecta or however it's meant to be spelled and I will hear nothing said against it.) But yeah, it's basically the poster child for why: DoctorWhat posted:Series Six failed as a serialized narrative Or everything Jerusalem just said.
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Nov 23, 2014 03:16
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Jerusalem posted:Oh yeah, and let's not forget the TERRIBLE epilogue with River. One thing I've really noticed about Moffat, and this is as good an example as any (though I think the notorious "...A WOMAN" line from The Wedding of River Song is the platonic ideal), is that, given the choice between dialogue that fits the character and scene and plot and a one-liner that sounds cool, he's going to go with the cool one-liner every drat time.
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Nov 23, 2014 05:53
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Cleretic posted: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'. I agree with this and would go one step further; you could swap in any number of other established aliens for the Angels without changing a good 90% of the story. You might lose the specific way in which the Angels are loving with Amy's mind, but (a) that's not something they've ever been able to do before or since, and (b) it's not like aliens influencing human minds is exactly unprecedented in Doctor Who. Otherwise, make them Daleks, make them Cybermen, make them any number of other critters and the story doesn't change. And I think that the Angels, in particular, really only work in stories where only the Angels would work. (It has just occurred to me that the plot, at least at a high level, is not far at all from that of Tomb of the Cybermen.)
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Nov 23, 2014 05:59
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DoctorWhat posted:The relative merits of Spare Parts and The Chimes of Midnight could be debated until the heat death of the universe, but I don't think it can be readily denied that Chimes is better as a Christmas story. My position is "DON'T MAKE ME CHOOOOOOOSE". Though yeah, Spare Parts is a story that takes place during (the Mondasian equivalent of) Christmas, whereas Chimes is a Christmas story. As for the specials, A Christmas Carol is best, and I would watch The Snowmen and The Runaway Bride again on purpose too. Actually, come to that, The Christmas Invasion was fine too, if not quite on the same level of quality. I really only dislike Voyage of the Damned and The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe.
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Nov 26, 2014 02:38
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Nothing lives up to hyperbole. Even hyperbole. I will say that Chimes is my favorite of the three (or four, he did The Maltese Penguin too, right?) of Rob Shearman's audios I've heard, by a considerable margin (Jubilee I admire the hell out of, but I connect with the human touches of Chimes a bit better, and, aside from Frobisher, I didn't really care for The Holy Terror), and that Spare Parts is easily my favorite Cybermen story. (Not that it had a lot of competition! Though I like Tomb a lot.) Don't ask me to choose between them. I'm one of those horrible people that, when you ask me for a favorite anything, you'll get ten answers. And if you ask me again a week later, you'll get ten different answers.
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Nov 28, 2014 21:23
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...Tom, have you been at the pub?
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Nov 30, 2014 06:47
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Having been reminded of its existence (and Michelle Gomez's presence in it) by this thread, I've been watching Green Wing again recently and it is surprisingly easy to believe that the Master would be hanging out in a hospital messing with the staff just for the hell of it.
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Dec 1, 2014 06:25
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I think the characterization in Kill the Moon makes up for a lot, but also that it has a lot to make up for. I go back and forth on Forest. I think it's ultimately crippled by a very clumsy script and a better one that hit similar themes could have made for an utterly fantastic episode. But basically: Oxxidation posted:Thank God for Jamie Mathieson
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Dec 19, 2014 12:10
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:Can't this be said of most bad Doctor Who episodes, though? I can think of very few that have an outright bad premise. I suppose it is a bit like I just said "If the episode had been better, it wouldn't have been as bad", but I think the script flaws were especially glaring here, like they just threw a first draft up on the screen and hoped for the best. My roommate really liked Forest but she's really into mythic stuff.
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Dec 19, 2014 12:34
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I've just finished watching Green Wing again and I think Michelle Gomez might actually be The Master.
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Dec 22, 2014 16:44
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Burkion posted:And even if he DIDN'T find out til late, why he could always just go back in time and take her at an earlier point to a hospital or something! Why doesn't the Doctor solve every problem in every episode ever by time-traveling back to the start of the episode and undoing every conflict before it even happens? What is this time travel bullshit anyway? RodShaft posted:When does the latest series tend to show up on any of the streaming services(in America)? My friend hasn't seen season 8 and it's killing me. I'd guess it will show up on Netflix, et. al., once season 9 starts airing, though you might get lucky and have it show up sooner. If you have a cable system, it might be on its on demand service already, though.
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Dec 24, 2014 21:01
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I thought it was pretty good, and very intelligently put together. It occurs to me that this would have been a really interesting way to do a multi Doctor story, but I have no complaints about Santa Claus. I like Clara and I'm glad she's staying but that would have been a fine sendoff, and I think it would have been stronger if, instead of that encounter being yet another dream, it had ended with Clara mentioning that she'd seen him plenty of times after the dream crab thing and this was just a meeting out of sequence. Don't know if I'd call it the best of Who's Christmas specials, but it's definitely a worthy addition to the mix.
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Dec 26, 2014 15:39
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Not every throwaway joke needs an expla- There's a twenty-thousand word article about the eleven distinct explanations for Father Christmas and how to reconcile them all on the Doctor Who Wiki, isn't there?
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Dec 27, 2014 15:41
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Bicyclops posted:That is really cool! I'm not familiar with any of her work (which does seem to include a lot of Torchwood, unfortunately), but hopefully it'll be a great one so that they can invite her back for more. She did at least write some of Torchwood's better episodes (which is to say, the ones that haven't since been banned by the Geneva Convention.)
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Dec 30, 2014 20:50
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CobiWann posted:It's truly the Plan 9 From Outer Space of Big Finish. It's bad, but laughably so, as opposed to the truly bad stuff like The Rapture. I will listen to Minuet twenty more times before I will ever listen to Nekromanteia again.
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Jan 3, 2015 03:10
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On a whim, I watched The Rings of Akhaten tonight (not for the first time), and I think it is officially my favorite Doctor Who story. (Yes, better than The Eleventh Hour, The Caves of Androzani, or any of the various Big Finish audios people are about to name.) I can't think of anything else that presents both the premise and the ethos of Doctor Who so effectively, and Smith's and Coleman's performances are phenomenal.
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Jan 6, 2015 05:46
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Even though it would have been completely impossible, I had a moment where I hoped that the other experts Gus had lured aboard the train would be the previous Doctors.
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Jan 12, 2015 16:50
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Organza Quiz posted:I really hated that, and especially the Face of Boe thing. I know, I know, continuity means nothing in this show, but as far as I recall the Doctor talks about how he doesn't like looking at or being around Jack because Jack is immortal and he's a fixture of the universe and that feels wrong to the Doctor's Time Lord senses because the universe is about change and an unchanging being shouldn't exist. Jack doesn't have to be physically unchanging for the universe to not let him die. And if Jack really does become the Face of Boe (and enough people hate this that I want it to be true), I reckon he woke up again five minutes after the end of Gridlock all "...well, poo poo."
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Jan 15, 2015 12:33
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The Flesh story is kind of drab and dull on the surface but has some really smart ideas and character beneath the surface. It's not my favorite of the season, but I consider season six to be an especially strong season with some of the best episodes of the Moffat era, even if it is let down by some staggeringly terrible choices. (Well one staggeringly terrible choice.)
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Jan 16, 2015 00:56
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I'm just glad no one pointed out (as far as I saw) my favorite subtle clue that Things Are Going On, from The Eleventh Hour: where Amy (as a child) talks about her mother cutting faces into apples. But the apple she gives the Doctor must just have been cut (because it's not turned brown yet), implying that her mother must have been erased just moments before the Doctor arrived.
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Jan 18, 2015 15:06
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DoctorWhat posted:woah It might, admittedly, be so subtle that they don't even realize they did it (since as far as I can tell it never gets signposted later), but there's a moment when the Doctor's looking at the apple that I'm pretty sure is him working out that something's really wrong.
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Jan 18, 2015 15:12
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I can't say I liked Scherzo very much but I admire the hell out it.
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Jan 21, 2015 23:18
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CobiWann posted:Woohoo! No Big Finish on the list! Minuet in Hell redeemed! All the Eighth Doctor ruination was omitted because of amnesia.
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Jan 24, 2015 02:45
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I actually played through the Aerie romance when I was much, much younger. It...was pretty much what you'd expect. But yeah, cleric/mage at high levels is ridiculous.
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Jan 24, 2015 18:08
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Haer'Dalis was an actor from another dimension, so it's theoretically possible that he was actually Colin Baker with some swords.
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Jan 24, 2015 22:28
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It really, really feels to me like they filmed a first draft. There aren't really any problems (and the episode undoubtedly had many, many problems) with this episode that couldn't have been fixed with some aggressive editing of the script.
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Jan 25, 2015 03:28
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2house2fly posted:I like Danny and I kind of wish he'd gotten a better story. 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.
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Jan 25, 2015 23:18
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As someone who gives zero fucks about scientific accuracy in my fantasy series about an immortal space wizard, I still thought the egg stuff in Kill The Moon was poorly executed. And that's the real problem. It doesn't matter that that's not how egg-laying critters actually work any more than it matters that time travel is impossible. It matters that the way it was presented serves to distract from, rather than enhance, the meat of the story.
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Jan 26, 2015 12:37
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"Space dragon, what are you talking about? I was just going to bed!"
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Jan 26, 2015 16:20
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In a sort of half-hearted defense of DoctorWhat's point, I think it's perfectly reasonable to look at something like Kill The Moon, acknowledge that it has some flaws (in this case, scientific nonsense in a story that's presenting the science as a key plot element) but that those flaws don't detract from the things you liked and valued about that story. An example that's been on my mind a bit is the Big Finish story Invaders From Mars. Looked at objectively, it's a mess. I choose not to look at it objectively, because I love the subject matter, I enjoy the cast, and I just had fun listening to most of it, and if I had to roll my eyes at a bit of plotting (or cringe at certain uses of language), the joy I got from Doctor Who Meets War Of The Worlds played tongue in cheek is what I actually took away from the thing. The catch is that no one would actually be wrong in saying that Invaders was a flawed story, or that Kill The Moon was a flawed story. To me, those flaws largely don't matter that much. To others, they do. Neither of us are wrong. Also, it's been unseasonably warm in Minnesota these past couple weeks. (In that molecular motion is technically possible.) If we were having our usual January, most likely my thoughts about Kill the Moon would take the form of "If the moon were really a space dragon egg, the giant wolf that ate the sun would have had it as an appetizer already".
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Jan 26, 2015 22:05
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Fucknag posted:I have to say, the use of false trailers is a brilliant meta element, expanding from a theme from Eleven's run of "the Doctor lies"; now, by presenting misleading marketing information, what they're telling us is "Doctor Who lies". I think my absolute favorite iteration of this is the subtle alteration of the opening credits in Death In Heaven.
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Jan 31, 2015 16:33
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Jerusalem posted:I'm still upset that they didn't end Rory and Amy's time with the Doctor with season 6 (or even the epilogue of the otherwise awful Christmas Special that followed), because that seemed like the perfect ending and only a slight variation on what they ended up doing anyway. Rory and Amy "outgrew" the Doctor, but they still loved and valued him, and he knew that they were safe and happy and living a good life, all the better for the adventures they had together. Seeing them and River dancing around in happiness at the knowledge the Doctor faked his death, or the two of them welcoming him in for Christmas dinner and letting him know there was always a place for him in their lives was just a lovely way to say goodbye to them. I recently watched The God Complex again (which is probably my favorite episode of the Matt Smith era that isn't The Rings of Ahkaten), and I couldn't agree more. That was such a perfect conclusion to Amy's story and relationship with the Doctor in particular. Amy putting aside her childlike faith in the Doctor, because he doesn't deserve that and they both know it, and instead embracing him as something like an equal is such a powerful idea that it's a shame that it got trampled over. As well, having variations of Clara show up in the first few episodes (rather than just in Asylum and The Snowmen), each a distinct person (and ideally not always dying at the end, because that's a downer, but having something to do that makes it clear that she's only intersecting with the Doctor's life for a short time each time, when she's needed most) was such an obvious way to milk the mystery of her that I'm astonished that Moffat didn't jump at the chance.
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Feb 1, 2015 05:22
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DetoxP posted:Still, I know someone in this thread loves it Hi there! There are two reasons why I think I rate it so highly. The first, and probably most important, is that it sums up the themes and ethos of Doctor Who more neatly than any other episode I can think of. It's the beginning of the Eleventh Doctor's transformation from the brash and terrifying Galactic Policeman and Slayer of Monsters to a man who would, without hesitation, without question, sacrifice everything for someone he's just met. And in a season where Clara's characterization was few and far between, this episode served to establish exactly who she was for me. And it does it with exactly the sort of fairy-tale atmosphere that In The Forest Of The Night got so tragically wrong. I know it's not going to appeal to everyone, but it genuinely is my favorite Doctor Who story. In any medium. Since 1963. (Yes, I've heard The Chimes of Midnight/Spare Parts/insert good audio story here.) Oh, the second reason. I liked the singing.
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Feb 2, 2015 02:09
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qntm posted:Does that make S6 the "difficult second album"? That's a really good analogy, yeah. A few hits, but the album doesn't quite work.
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Feb 2, 2015 02:36
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CobiWann posted:There's more than one? Son of a... No sir. All thirteen.
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Feb 5, 2015 00:58
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Season 6 is in an odd position of having almost no episodes that aren't, at the very least, reasonably good* (and having some of the best episodes of Moffat's time on the show) but having a larger storyline that just doesn't really work. Actually, come to think of it, I'd say that's true of Seasons 7 and 8 too, though 8 comes closest to having a well-realized season arc. ___ *Even Let's Kill Hitler, divorced from its larger context, is a bit of daft fun.
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Feb 15, 2015 06:09
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Doctor Spaceman posted:I dunno, Curse of the Black Spot and Night Terrors are stunningly forgettable. I actually keep forgetting that Night Terrors exists. Which is a shame because I thought it was decent enough at the time, it just doesn't stand out. I'm so glad Mark Gatiss appears to have embraced "I am going to write ridiculous pulpish historical episodes and to hell with all of you", though. The Crimson Horror and the Robin Hood one were lots of fun, and people who dislike these are objectively wrong, and I can prove it with graphs (that I made up). In the end, I'm really pleased by Eleven's overall storyline, how he goes from, essentially, Time Lord Victorious to the sort of person who will sacrifice himself without question or hesitation to defend a small insignificant town in a war he neither can nor should ever win (I really liked Time of the Doctor, you guys, in spite of its flaws). Pleased enough that I'm more-or-less willing to forgive most of the missteps along the way. (gently caress The Doctor, The Widow, and the Dubious Message though.)
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Feb 15, 2015 15:07
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I'm reasonably certain that Michelle Gomez herself is an incarnation of the Master. Certainly her character on Green Wing was.
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Feb 20, 2015 01:15
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dirksteadfast posted:I love manic Missy...but that video makes me also want a passive, rambling Missy. No threats, no action. Just sittin' in the Tardis, talking about apples. I suddenly really want there to be a story where it turns out that the Master is completely uninvolved in whatever's going on and is just hanging around to gently caress with the Doctor. Though come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised if there were such a story already.
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Feb 20, 2015 04:13
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