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Which non-Power of the Daleks story would you like to see an episode found from? This poll is closed. |
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| Marco Polo |
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36 | 20.69% |
| The Myth Makers |
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10 | 5.75% |
| The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve |
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45 | 25.86% |
| The Savages |
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2 | 1.15% |
| The Smugglers |
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2 | 1.15% |
| The Highlanders |
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45 | 25.86% |
| The Macra Terror |
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21 | 12.07% |
| Fury from the Deep |
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13 | 7.47% |
| Total: | 174 votes | ||
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I've resolved to use the SPINK video in my teaching somehow. Now I just need to decide for what.
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Apr 1, 2016 13:43
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| # ? Apr 23, 2024 13:05 |
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Road safety, perhaps?
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Apr 1, 2016 20:52
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qntm posted:Road safety, perhaps?
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Apr 1, 2016 20:56
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 Sometimes an episode of Doctor comes along and it's really drat good, cracking along at a great pace/dripping with atmosphere/full of great concepts and excellent performances.... and then the writer botches the conclusion and the whole thing leaves the viewer with a sour taste in their mouth. Sometimes an episode comes along and it's kinda boring or otherwise not very good, but then the ending hits and it's so incredible that the viewer ends up with an elevated sense of the quality of the overall episode. And then every so often, an episode comes along that is firing from all cylinders from the get-go and then sticks the landing so perfectly that you're left gaping at the screen at what you've just seen. Happily, after an incoherent and uneven series 9, the penultimate episode Heaven Sent is just one such episode, nearly perfect from start to finish. http://i.imgur.com/xoy9UQS.gifv This episode IS the Peter Capaldi show, it's a solo performance for 95% of the runtime, with his only "companions" a shuffling clockwork abomination wrenched from the deepest recesses of his childhood memory and his imaginary (and almost entirely one-sided) conversations with the now deceased Clara Oswald (who only shows her face just ahead of the magnificent montage that kicks off the climax). Capaldi doesn't just carry the episode, he IS the episode, everything relies on him and his performance and the seemingly effortless way he shoulders the weight of those expectations only goes to show just how hard he worked to do it. He's helped by excellent writing, a great score, the wonderful set design, and masterful editing that tell a story about a man trapped in hell and buried beneath the crushing weight of his situation only to continually get back up and keep pushing on and on to the point of (brilliant) absurdity. But more importantly than that, underlying the entire running theme of series 9 that wouldn't be explicitly spelled out till the final episode, it's about his relationship with Clara Oswald, and more particularly his grief over her death. When the truth of his situation is finally revealed, when he figures out what is happening and what he has to go through, when he questions whether to go on or just to give up, it isn't the knowledge of the eons ahead or behind of him that crush him down, it's the knowledge that even in the event of his unlikely victory one fundamental fact won't change.... his best friend will still be dead. http://i.imgur.com/oGClwxa.gifv The story is excellent, but it is also effectively just a greatest hits of Steven Moffat's favorite things - a puzzlebox story where everything comes cleverly together in the end and reveals some unexpected (but logical) truth, with the Doctor conquering through the power not only of his intellect and his will, but his love of and for other people. But to be perfectly honest... I don't care. If he's going to retread well-shod ground and THIS is the result, then I'm all for it. Because it feels like Moffat has refined the process to the point of near-perfection, and it even fits on a meta level with the actual meat of the story itself - the Doctor just keeps on repeating the same thing over and over again until he gets it right. In a broad sense, we're essentially seeing what would happen if the Doctor ended up in the Dark Souls universe - the architecture, the creepy monster shuffling about, the constant resetting and the use of death as a mechanic for progress. The difference in this poorly constructed analogy being, of course, that whereas ultimately victory in Dark Souls is empty (you either let darkness consume the world or you fit yourself into the machinery and reset everything for another temporary few hundred/thousand years of tortured existence before the next person comes along to kill you and repeat the process themselves) the victory in Doctor Who is one of willpower and determination conquering despair, of refusing to accept the lovely options laid out and forging some new impossible path and making it work. The throughline during the incredible montage at the end of the story as the Doctor repeats the process an untold number of times is his retelling the old story of the shepherd boy who explained the concept of infinity. That story is meant to evoke the unfathomable sense of eternity, and in turn showcase why the Doctor MUST surrender, must give his captors what they want, to surrender to their torture and interrogation and capitulate. But for the Doctor, of course, the message he takes from this story he tells isn't to despair at the length of eternity, but to marvel at the bird who managed to chip down a mountain of diamond with only its beak. When he finally breaks through the wall between him and "home", when the Veil falls apart as the system that sustained it breaks and the Doctor turns and for the first time in billions of years manages to finish his story I get chills down my spine. "That's one hell of a bird" will go down as one of the greatest moments in the show's history. http://i.imgur.com/qGTs325.gifv This episode is directed by Rachel Talalay, who directed the two-part finale in season 8. She did very well there, but she utterly exceeds herself here. It helps that the story is so intimate, but it would have been easy to screw up an episode like this and make it look low-budget or laughable. The Veil could have been a joke, the close quarters could have been claustrophobic in a bad way. Instead she makes wonderful use of the setting and enhances the themes, while making sure to capture every facet of Capaldi's performance. She frames the Veil to make it horrifying, playing up the terror of its inexorable progress. And Moffat has made an excellent "monster" in the Veil too, since it is by its nature immune to the Doctor's greatest weapon - his voice. The Doctor talks, his enemies argue or listen or allow themselves to be distracted which gives the Doctor the opening he needs. But here we have a monster with no mind, just another part of the machinery of the castle, the Doctor can't argue with it or convince it of something or even distract it.... unless he says very specific things that its creators WANT him to say. So the Doctor finds his own weapon turned against him, since he doesn't want to give his captors what they want to know but the only way to stop the Veil from getting its lethal hands on him is to go down that path. Even the Cybermen can be, if not reasoned with, at least distracted by talking, but the Veil just keeps on shuffling forward one step at a time: a literal representation of death, not needing to rush or chase or cajole or threaten because you can run and hide and shout and scream all you want but death is always coming and it will ALWAYS catch you sooner or later. The Doctor is no exception... the thing is, he won't stay dead, and eventually he proves the death of the Veil itself because he (or rather the Clara part of him) refuses to let him accept the futility of his situation. Clara looms large by her absence of course, this being a story all about grief. As the Doctor notes, the funeral of a loved one is not the worst day of your life because at least you have something to that day. It's every day going forward after that, when the absence of that person FOREVER sinks in for those left behind. This puzzle box is in a sense the funeral for Clara, because the Doctor has an enemy to face, a conundrum to solve. But as noted earlier, whether he succeeds and escapes or fails and capitulates, he's going to be left to face a lifetime(s) without her, she's gone. So he talks to her, he uses her memory as a distraction for himself as well as a thinking aid. This also helps break up the story with neat little interludes inside the Doctor's mental image of the TARDIS, demonstrations of his thinking process as in the blink of an eye we see him examine a problem, break it down into parts and come up with potential solutions. One function of the companion in Doctor Who was to ask him questions about the plot so he could explain without length exposition direct to camera or by talking to himself - the same is the case here, the memory of Clara serves that function but also the narrative themes of the Doctor's grief for her as well as reminding us that she is gone. By choosing to only show her standing with her back to the Doctor, by having her questions be asked by writing on a blackboard instead of by speaking, it hammers home again and again that Clara isn't really there, that she's dead and gone. So the moment when she does face the Doctor and speaks to him is powerful for us and the Doctor, and proves the inspiration he needs to face up to the unfathomably huge task of breaking his way through the barrier between him and "home".   Speaking of "home", that is another wonderful little touch to this story. Because at some unspecified point during this story the Doctor has figured it all out, he KNOWS that the Time Lords are the ones behind his capture, the backing of the Trap Street, the creation of the Veil, because they are the only ones who would know him well enough (and have the technology) to create a prison so perfectly designed to break him. But they also DON'T know him at all, he's moved so far beyond their experience/understanding that they never expect him to react the way he does once he figures out how trapped he is. That "home" written on the wall is the perfect encapsulation of that, something that again never gets explicitly brought up during this episode (or the next) at all. Because when the Doctor sees "Home" he doesn't think Gallifrey or the Time Lords, he immediately thinks TARDIS. When he punches his way through the wall, he expresses no surprise at finding himself on Gallifrey, that is for the viewer. For him, it is if anything disappointment (and of course fury) because despite saving Gallifrey and longing for its return, it has been a long time since it was his "home", and if anything the return (and even his victory) just reminds him of what he has lost, what really matters to him, and that has very important implications for the following episode. Because after a season of clumsily shoehorned in references to A HYBRID and an episode that attempted to mislead the audience into thinking this was the endgame for the finale.... the Doctor escapes his trap and then plays into the Time Lords' narrative expectations by pretending to be invested in that concept as well. It's both a strength and weakness of the season as a whole and this episode (and the one to follow) - the explicit verbalization of one theme while exploring something completely different. In a show that typically assumes (sometimes with justification) that the audience won't remember something from five minutes earlier without a visual flashback and a wooshing audio cue, there is a lot of subtle stuff going on under the surface that never gets explicitly laid out for anyone. We took the Master at her word that the Doctor sent his Confession Dial to her, and maybe she even thinks he did, but the Doctor admits in Face the Raven he has no idea how this thing works, implying that he has no idea where it came from originally. We get the answer to that unasked question in this episode when the Doctor escapes his trap and discovers it was inside of the Confession Dial all along, and he continues the theme of duplicity by warning that the Hybrid destined to stand in the destroyed remains of Gallifrey is "me". Does he mean himself? Does he mean Ashildr? It doesn't really matter because he's just playing into the Time Lords' expectations in order to try and cirumvent fate and save Clara after all. But while that is clever, it does mean that after a full season of clumsily talking about the Hybrid, and an excellent episode where information about the Hybrid was played up as the most important thing, we'll quickly discover it was all meaningless and unimportant, which can't help but put those prior episodes into a negative context as well since now we know none of that annoying stuff was ever intended to have any actual impact. http://i.imgur.com/kTL17Sk.gifv But for this episode itself? It's pretty much near-perfect, and any complaints I've made about it are more in the context of their greater bearing on the season as a whole. Nothing is perfect of course, but about the only bad thing I really have to say about this episode is that the bit where the Doctor leaps out of the window includes a silly sound effect.... that's, that's really about it. Everything else about it works so well, and even if the "rules" of the setting aren't entirely 100% consistent they still absolutely work in service to the story. Everything works in the moment and is given fresh context with every new bit of information (the Doctor's threat or his claim,"You won't see this coming" take on a completely new bent once you know how things are working) and even if the episode had "only" been good it would have been considered a classic on the strength of the "And the shepherd boy says...." montage alone. Thankfully, everything preceding that was already excellent, and it leads in to a fantastic cliffhanger of an ending. I can't really express how much I love this episode on so many levels, so suffice to say that this is a fantastic episode of Doctor Who, and a fantastic episode of television in general. And the music, my God the music.... and the acting, and the writing, and the direction, and the editing, and the props (that skull was backwards designed from Capaldi's head!) and and and and.... goddamn, what an episode. I think I'm gonna go watch it again. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 01:17 on May 30, 2016 |
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Apr 2, 2016 05:04
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Davros1 posted:Just listened to BF's The Peterloo Massacre, and goddam BF needs to stop hiring Nigel Fairs to do the music. He just recycles the same poo poo he uses in all his other stories. I enjoyed the actual story, but the production in this one wasn't great either. The old woman sounded like she was talking inside a closet the whole time. I still liked it, but it was definitely a step down from Aquitane, which was 
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Apr 2, 2016 08:51
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I haven't been able to get over Heaven Sent in the months since it was first on. I've watched it like a dozen times and I still tear up a bit at "and you'll still be gone" and "all you need for energy... is something to burn"
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Apr 2, 2016 20:04
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I haven't seen anything since the end of Matt Smith's reign. Is Capaldi's Doctor a good watch so far?
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Apr 2, 2016 21:42
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Thoggins posted:I haven't seen anything since the end of Matt Smith's reign. Is Capaldi's Doctor a good watch so far? He is, the series is not.
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Apr 2, 2016 21:44
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I'm trying to work out which Capaldi episodes were good and the list is not big
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Apr 2, 2016 22:00
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Capaldi is fantastic but he can be hamstrung by awful writing and plotlines. if you watch just one episode, it's absolutely Heaven Sent. A solid 45 minutes of 12 left completely alone to chew the scenery.
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Apr 2, 2016 22:00
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Little_wh0re posted:I'm trying to work out which Capaldi episodes were good and the list is not big Mummy, Flatline
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Apr 2, 2016 22:13
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Mummy, Flatline Last Christmas and The Husbands of River Song Well, I liked them
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Apr 2, 2016 22:25
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Series 8 was pretty solid overall, you can basically skip series 9 up to Face The Raven
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Apr 2, 2016 22:33
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Enourmo posted:
weird way to spell Listen
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Apr 2, 2016 22:46
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Toxxupation posted:weird way to spell Listen Weird way to spell Doctor Who: The Mummy on the Orient Express by Jamie Matheson starring Peter Capaldi and Jenna Colman
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Apr 2, 2016 22:47
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no jakiri, that's not how you spell listen, that's how you spell Doctor Who: The Mummy on the Orient Express by Jamie Matheson starring Peter Capaldi and Jenna Colman i understand the confusion, but listen is a six-letter word, while Doctor Who: The Mummy on the Orient Express by Jamie Matheson starring Peter Capaldi and Jenna Colman is a seventeen-word phrase in fact i would say that listen and Doctor Who: The Mummy on the Orient Express by Jamie Matheson starring Peter Capaldi and Jenna Colman are p vastly differently spelled things!
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Apr 2, 2016 22:50
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Thoggins posted:I haven't seen anything since the end of Matt Smith's reign. Is Capaldi's Doctor a good watch so far? Series 8 is very good (I'd rank it just a little behind series 4 which itself is only surpassed by series 5), series 9 unfortunately is a far more mixed bag though it ends very strongly.
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Apr 2, 2016 23:10
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Mummy, Flatline Also Into the Dalek, Dark Water & Death in Heaven, The Magician's Apprentice & The Witch's Familiar, Before the Flood, Face the Raven and Hell Bent.
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Apr 2, 2016 23:15
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How you gonna leave out Last Christmas
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Apr 2, 2016 23:17
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Toxxupation posted:no jakiri, that's not how you spell listen, that's how you spell Doctor Who: The Mummy on the Orient Express by Jamie Matheson starring Peter Capaldi and Jenna Colman How do you spell "trap sprung?"
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Apr 2, 2016 23:21
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cargohills posted:Also Into the Dalek, Dark Water & Death in Heaven, The Magician's Apprentice & The Witch's Familiar, Before the Flood, Face the Raven and Hell Bent. Disagree, disagree, disagree, violently disagree, violently disagree, it's ok but never lives up to the highlights, meh, disagree but less violently than TMA/TWF Toxxupation posted:no jakiri, that's not how you spell listen, that's how you spell Doctor Who: The Mummy on the Orient Express by Jamie Matheson starring Peter Capaldi and Jenna Colman Go on
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Apr 2, 2016 23:22
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I agree with jakiri list + last christmas i think. I thought s8 was overall kinda weak
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Apr 2, 2016 23:27
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Disagree, disagree, disagree, violently disagree, violently disagree, it's ok but never lives up to the highlights, meh, disagree but less violently than TMA/TWF I never thought I'd see the day when posters in the Doctor Who thread disagreed about whether a story was good or not. Has it really come to this!?! 
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Apr 2, 2016 23:41
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Eighth Doctor best Doctor.
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Apr 2, 2016 23:53
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So whatever curse that hit Matt Smith that left him with A Good Series and then two awful ones has only gotten worse for Capaldi right? Like, that man is a treasure. Shame about almost every episode he's in.
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Apr 2, 2016 23:58
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CobiWann posted:Eighth Doctor best Doctor. Agreed.
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Apr 3, 2016 00:01
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Burkion posted:So whatever curse that hit Matt Smith that left him with A Good Series and then two awful ones has only gotten worse for Capaldi right? Like, that man is a treasure. Shame about almost every episode he's in. That curse is called being on Doctor Who. Fairly sure you could replace those two names with just about any Doctor.
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Apr 3, 2016 00:14
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And More posted:That curse is called being on Doctor Who. Fairly sure you could replace those two names with just about any Doctor. First three are pretty untouchable actually, with only a few slips and slides here and there. Tom had his ups and downs but he had a lot of time for ups and downs. Peter the first was kind of shatter shot but mostly quality and went on on top Oh Colin Sly, you know, got better as time went on Shame about Paul Chris was great and so was his season David started strong, hit a lull and then had Donna which is fantastic So no, this is pretty exclusive to Matt and ESPECIALLY Peter the second. Even worse for current Peter honestly.
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Apr 3, 2016 00:20
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Burkion posted:Peter [...] mostly quality hahahahaah no
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Apr 3, 2016 00:51
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CobiWann posted:Eighth Doctor best Doctor. This guy knows what's up
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Apr 3, 2016 00:52
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cargohills posted:hahahahaah Hey once they started dwindling down his insane companion cast it got better
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Apr 3, 2016 00:53
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Burkion posted:Hey once they started dwindling down his insane companion cast it got better I was a big fan of the adventures of the 5th Doctor and Tegan (plus some others I guess) 
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Apr 3, 2016 01:03
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I feel like we should compile a list of people who hold unpopular opinions here, just so we can refer to it easily to know who to ask for a defense of Love and Monsters or whatever. 'Cause I'll defend season 9 as a good season.
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Apr 3, 2016 01:18
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I will admit that I like Tegan and Turlough
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Apr 3, 2016 01:18
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Burkion posted:Chris was great YEAH!  Burkion posted:and so was his season HELL NO!
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Apr 3, 2016 01:24
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Burkion posted:Chris was great and so was his season Ehhh, I'd say about 4 good to great episodes out of 13.
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Apr 3, 2016 02:21
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Burkion posted:So whatever curse that hit Matt Smith that left him with A Good Series and then two awful ones has only gotten worse for Capaldi right? Like, that man is a treasure. Shame about almost every episode he's in. This curse is called Stephen Moffat.
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Apr 3, 2016 03:55
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PriorMarcus posted:This curse is called Stephen Moffat. Lol
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Apr 3, 2016 04:56
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"This guy who wrote one of if not the best single season of the show in its fifty year plus history is bad" -opinions held seriously, in this thread
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Apr 3, 2016 05:00
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| # ? Apr 23, 2024 13:05 |
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But enough about RTD.
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Apr 3, 2016 05:50
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