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I'd really recommend waiting for the Christmas special since that's going to be the real finale, but I'm interested to see what you have to say about this run so this is a pleasant surprise
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Jul 3, 2017 01:15
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| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 21:51 |
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I don't think they've done any shorts since the Matt Smith days. Probably budget cuts
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Jul 3, 2017 02:33
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Doctor Spaceman posted:They've done a handful (eg The Doctor's Meditation before season 9). There was one done for the first episode of this season that ended up being a reworked version of a scene in the released episode. drat it I also forgot about the series 9 prologue which has one of my favourite dialogues in it: OHILA: Will you go? DOCTOR: No. OHILA: Why do you always lie? DOCTOR: Why do you always assume I'm lying? OHILA: It saves time. The truth: will you go? DOCTOR: No. OHILA: When? DOCTOR: Soon. OHILA: Why? Did something happen? DOCTOR: No. OHILA: Was it recent?
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Jul 3, 2017 03:12
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I did roughly that, with some mild increases or decreases in grade based on feelings from past reviews of similar episodes. I also forgot what my guesses were the instant I sent them, so it'll be fun to see what I'd predicted
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Jul 4, 2017 22:08
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They dont pick a winner until the end of the season so imo if the grade changes it's the later grade that should count
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Jul 7, 2017 14:12
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Well, I do happen to be privy to *lowers voice to a whisper* the secret identity of Superman
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Jul 8, 2017 02:44
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A Christmas special is typically fairly light, so I got pretty much what I expected out of this. I didn't like the extended eulogy to River Song at the end but I did like the meta touch of the show's year off corresponding to the Doctor's 24 years of domestic bliss on Darillium. The ending where the "superhero" is defined not as the caped crusader fighting evil but as a humble family man was cute, and from what I understand that was a common enough theme in the old Superman comics this episode clearly draws from. Nardole was a good addition as well. His joke about accidentally becoming ruler of Constantinople on the way to pick up the Doctor justified him on its own imo. And really, whatever criticisms you might have of it, you can't deny it was the best episode of Doctor Who to air in 2016.
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Jul 8, 2017 04:07
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quote:Grant, from "Mysterio"'s beginning to its end, feels like a Nice Guy. He engineers the entirety of his life to be around Lucy (Charity Wakefield), from being her live-in nanny to saving her constantly when he's in-costume quote:LUCY: Oh, my God, he's real.
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Jul 8, 2017 22:40
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:It's clear that Moffat modelled this episode, and Grant specifically, after Superman. But he completely misunderstands why Superman works. Lick! The! Whisk! posted:Grant is somehow both boring and kind of creepy. He has no reason to be a superhero, no inciting event that caused him to throw a costume on, so he feels completely out of place in "Mysterio", an hour in which he stars. Where Superman does what he does because he's genuinely nice, Grant, from "Mysterio"'s beginning to its end, feels like a Nice Guy. He engineers the entirety of his life to be around Lucy (Charity Wakefield), from being her live-in nanny to saving her constantly when he's in-costume, so the entirety of the episode comes across as watching some super-powered stalker try to trick a girl into a relationship with him. He's supposed to be a nebbish nerd, I...guess? But he just comes across as a complete and utter loser creepily pining after his employer. quote:DOCTOR: The Ghost. What have you got? Lick! The! Whisk! posted:It seems like the episode wants to put across that Grant is the real superhero, but if that's the case then why give him both such a traditionally feminine job and then make him so overdefensive about it? And why does "Mysterio" constantly use his job as a punchline? If the show wants us to root for him, why does everyone make fun of his job so frequently? Especially when you contrast that with how DW introduced and wrote Rory Williams (another character who worked in a female-dominated profession), it puts into sharper relief how nonsensical and at cross purposes such jokes are.  As for the "constant" and "frequent" instances of people making fun of Grant for being a nanny, I'm afraid you'd have to point them out to me. Jerusalem posted:There is actually a kind of vibe of Grant trying to take advantage of the situation to get into a relationship with her, when he escapes Brock's trap there was absolutely nothing stopping him taking out the thugs and Brock and saving Lucy.... except she had just told him how she liked Grant so he makes a point of escaping, changing back into Grant and then running up onto the roof so "Grant" can save the day this time.
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Jul 9, 2017 04:48
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That rumour about Capaldi being forced out comes from a goon who works at another production near the Doctor Who studio and has accurately predicted some stuff about the current series finale, and that will clearly be in the upcoming Christmas episode, well in advance, so he's at least got some real second- or third-hand insider knowledge. Plus that guy absolutely hates Steven Moffat so if he says Capaldi leaving isn't Moffat's fault, he must really believe it. Anyway, as a producer Chibnall has delivered TV episodes consistently on schedule, as far as I can tell. And it's rumoured he'll be taking a US-style "writer's room" approach where the plots of episodes and seasons are hashed out collaboratively (or, if you're feeling unkind, by committee) and you barely ever see any episodes where the show runner has a writing credit, so his ineptitude as a writer may be a non-issue. In retrospect, Moffat clearly either intended to leave after series 9 or was expecting to. Bringing back Gallifrey and making the Doctor the villain is something you save for your big finale, and the ending was a perfect blank slate for a new writer. I like Moffat but he's had a good run on the show and I wouldn't have minded if he'd left, although I think I prefer a new show runner and new lead actor coming on together
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Jul 12, 2017 12:13
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Series 5 has 6 high-end Moffat episodes, Amy's Choice and The Lodger, which is just about a higher bar than any other series. I'd actually probably be more likely to watch series 8 through again though, where Forest is the only one I really couldn't stand watching again
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Jul 12, 2017 14:39
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I have seen people say they saw the moral of The Beast Below as "if you're nice to your slaves they'll be happy being slaves" which seems a bit of a stretch to me but it's out there. As for Victory of The Daleks, it features Winston Churchill ("I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia") as the Doctor's chubby chummy.
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Jul 12, 2017 14:58
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Mark Gatiss said he didn't want to tackle the darker side of Churchill because he didn't feel it was appropriate for a kids TV show. and he's correct but really what they should have done in that case was to not have Churchill in it
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Jul 12, 2017 15:05
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quote:The Beast Below: http://shabogangraffiti.blogspot.co...ngland.html?m=1
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Jul 12, 2017 18:36
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Always best to assume conflict between the rulers and the ruled. The rulers want to stay rulers, after all.
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Jul 13, 2017 01:25
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That sure is a lot more parallels than I'd realised. I think I have more or less the opposite problem with the episode, where it was designed to introduce Bill and make the audience like her, and it did that well but it didn't really do much of anything else. Moffat managed to introduce Amy and Clara with fun and exciting episodes but this one misses that mark imo. I especially didn't like the story Bill tells at the start which is just a way to shoehorn in Bill being a lesbian (and also do a bit of thematic setup but whatever) even though her being lesbian is established in the montage like a minute later. Even acknowledged in the scene to not be relevant! One difference from Rose though: in "Parting Of The Ways" Rose summed up her crappy council estate life as "eating chips". Bill serves chips. Probably Not meaningful, but I couldn't help but notice there are some comforts Rose has that Bill doesn't, like her relationship with her mother.
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Jul 15, 2017 18:42
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cargohills posted:I'm really not convinced that RTD is so much worse at working class representation than Moffat. Even just looking at the companions, Rose has a poo poo job and lives on a council estate with her mother, and Donna is a temp who lives with her mother well into adulthood. Martha is the most middle-class of the three outwardly due to the whole medical student thing but she also lives iirc with a single parent.
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Jul 15, 2017 23:15
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Fun thing about the framing of that opening scene: one door behind Bill is closed, the other ajar. Asymmetrical, like the star in Heather's eye, and like her final line, the only time she's not just repeating what Bill says. I think if they'd had a few extra minutes Heather's apparent aggression might have been explained away as teething problems, glitching as her personality was integrated into the water ship monster thing whatever it was. It feels like Moffat really started to tend more to explaining by implication as the years went on. Speaking of, I wonder exactly how Nardole "ran interference". It looked like all he was doing was running around pointing the sonic screwdriver at things and making them blow up...
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Jul 16, 2017 03:18
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Moffat wrote 15 episodes featuring Clara, and I'd say at a generous estimate she has a damsel-in-distress role, given a broad interpretation of that term, in ooh, 9-10 of them? That's a lot but includes stuff like her delusion of still being human in Asylum Of The Daleks, her sacrifice in Name Of The Doctor, and her technically being kidnapped by cybermen at the start of Death In Heaven. Basically any time she's in danger and gets saved by someone else(or not, in the case of Asylum and Snowmen)
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Jul 21, 2017 22:16
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Dabir posted:She does gently caress-all in Mummy and her role in Hell Bent literally starts with the Doctor saving her from death. That whole episode is questioning the definition of "saving" with the Doctor clearly established as being in the wrong
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Jul 21, 2017 22:42
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I think the idea of wiping the Vardies is that it severs them from their programming to serve the needs of the humans, leaving only their identity as a new species. So he's not wiping their minds, he's wiping the weird stuff that was coexisting with their minds. The big missteps imo are making the process of wiping them such a lighthearted ending (if the Vardy remember they killed humans then making amends could be what they get out of letting humans live in their city, for example, because else can you really offer them) and leaving it so long to establish that they even have minds, the resolution cones out of nowhere and morphs it at the last minute from "malfunctioning technology" to "diplomatic incident with natives". Still, grading on a Frank Cottrell-Boyce-shaped curve, this is an amazingly good episode.
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Jul 23, 2017 14:13
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He's made that joke a couple of times now, referring to the difficulty of talking about a character who's been male and female before. Not sure why it's appalling this time.
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Jul 24, 2017 17:53
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Oops there was a video here of Steven Moffat saying the words in the above tweet verbatim in reference to talking about the Master, but it also includes spoilers for a later episode so I've removed it. Have a civilised day.
2house2fly fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Jul 25, 2017 |
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Jul 24, 2017 19:13
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It's weird because the Doctor's realisation that they're sentient is caused by their reaction to one of them being destroyed. I wonder if there was an earlier draft where they tried to have that result in the Vardy realising what they'd done and had to cut it down for whatever reason
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Jul 25, 2017 00:29
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Escobarbarian posted:
With only one more Steven Moffat episode to go, I know I'm not  E: Bown just post the video or transcript or whatever so we can move on
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Jul 25, 2017 00:35
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you ok dude?
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Year Of Specials is a pretty good comparison to draw, since that's basically what series 10 is. RTD and Moffat both did big blowout finales with the expectation of leaving right after, then both had to hang around another year for whatever reason. With a regeneration story at the end. Still, like they say, accentuate the positive: an advantage of having episodes with similar plots is seeing how different characters react to similar stimuli. Capaldi turning to Bill and asking what to do vs Matt Smith taking it upon himself to solve everything, etc. It actually hadn't occurred to me to go back and compare this and Beast Below before but I might have a go Fun fact: Sarah Dollard specifically omitted naming the creature, which Moffat seemed thrilled about in an interview.
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Aug 1, 2017 04:09
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Relevant quote from the episode, and possibly the line that ties it most closely to Beast Below outside of the premise:quote:But if your future is built on the suffering of that creature, what's your future worth?
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Aug 1, 2017 12:50
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one good episode but a ton of great ones
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Aug 3, 2017 17:19
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I should probably rewatch this, it did nothing at all for me at the time. The previous episodes were either strong episodes or at least had strong bits, but with this one there's nothing I really remember enjoying. maybe the twist that he wasn't her father but her son, I guess that was fun
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Aug 7, 2017 15:12
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I liked that bit with the guy hitting on Bill as well, it was funny and friendly, all good. Also this episode started off being about the difficulties of finding affordable housing when you're young, which I don't think is something a companion has ever been shown to be concerned about before, so props to it for starting somewhere new at least.
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Aug 8, 2017 04:50
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We're fighting the suits 
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Aug 16, 2017 02:35
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Outside of the politics of the episode, I felt smart when I realised well in advance of the script expecting me to that the Doctor wiring everyone up to the reactor was a way to make their deaths unacceptably expensive. I mean everyone probably did because "What if this is business as usual" is a very On The Nose line, but still.
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Aug 16, 2017 05:46
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I can't look at anything...............EVER AGAIN
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Aug 16, 2017 21:09
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| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 21:51 |
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Mathieson originally had the Doctor recover his sight, but Moffat told him to keep him blind, so that last line might have been a last minute rewrite just shoved in. I kind of like that it's so overwrought, really, and having that reveal delivered as a lame pun is classic Mathieson ("we're fighting the suits!" / "you're relived, soldier" "he's not the only one")
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Aug 17, 2017 14:55
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