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NowonSA posted:I mean, I'm kind of on board with a whole season built around the Doctor clawing her way back to her Tardis through all sorts of obstacles. Access to a Time Machine and all the tech inside it is a huge asset, I can't even count how many times it was integral to solving the big problem of the episode. If you told me it was half the time I'd believe you. Hmm. My sense is that it's probably more important in the new series generally and in Moffat's bit of it specifically. I don't have time right now for a complete survey and perhaps nobody else is interested. But here's a quick count of times the TARDIS was integral in a Fourth Doctor story: Planet of Evil (marginally), Pyramids of Mars (equipment), Hand of Fear (offering transport partially resolves problem, or at least moves it elsewhere), The Invisible Enemy (again, as much part of the complication as the solution, but still integral), Underworld, The Pirate Planet, The Stones of Blood (saving K-9), The Armageddon Factor (arguable), City of Death, Shada, Warrior's Gate (arguably), Logopolis (again, arguably). In terms of solving a problem, I'd count Pyramids, Hand of Feat, Invisible Enemy, Underworld, Pirate Planet, Stones of Blood, and City of Death. That's not a lot. I suspect the TARDIS solves problems in the new series in closer to 20% or fewer of episodes. They just tend to be blockbuster episodes or end of season episodes. Then again, there's lots more of the "materialize around people to protect them" stuff that the old series restricted because the Doctor could rarely pilot that precisely.
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Oct 8, 2018 17:29
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Lunatic Sledge posted:I'm not totally convinced the button has anything to do with Tim Shaw, who may have gotten "permission" elsewhere and Companion #1 just assumed the two were connected Yes. Do we need a huge flashing sign over this plot point with an arrow pointing down and the words BAD WOLF scrawled all over it? What are the odds that Chibnall of all people will be the one to drop the season arc from the show? The only surprise will be if they don't end up traveling back in time to conduct an investigation.
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Oct 9, 2018 00:36
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Gaz-L posted:*Ryan presses glowy light, and immediately Tim Shaw's Hershey pod appears* In fairness, most of us are recovering from years of a showrunner where a small continuity error ends up being a major plot point. Tim Shaw ought not to be a reliable source of information. If Ryan's guilt over being (indirectly)responsible for several deaths including that of his gran is going to be part of his characterization this season, then the show is telling us pushing the glowy light square matters, even if there turns out to be no mystery to it.
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Oct 9, 2018 15:19
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Safeword posted:The robots ire had been drawn by moving in front of them, though. They were already aggressive and out to kill. It was the "on my own" guy who took a shot at one of the robots; they started shooting after that. Presumably, they were then in self-defense mode, and not engaging their primary programming or operating with any specific direction. I did find myself wondering if they'd been deliberately programmed to miss, either by the race organizer or as guards for the captive scientists. (If your sniper robots shoot to kill your prisoners, then they are dead.) Then again, accuracy in a firefight is rarely as high as people who just watch TV or movies thinks. The sheet-creatures were deliberately called out as "clean-up." Presumably they left a bunch of them to get rid of all the corpses. They look like sheets and activate at night, so I presume they are stealth weapons. Your sheets kill you at night while you're asleep. I'm fine with the show shifting back towards the old-school "if you step out of the room for a minute and come back, you probably haven't missed anything vital." Moffat, in particular, wrote for rewatch, but the frenetic and packed episodes, while more engaging, were more demanding as well. No surprise that fans serious enough to post their thoughts online are likely to prefer the frenetic to the casual. But this seems like a better pace for family viewing that mixes hardcore fans and occasional fans. What was being explored didn't end up being as interesting as I hoped, but I'm glad to see exploration over time being readded to the show's grammar. I'm also OK with them not flying one or two extra cast members on location just to demonstrate the flesh-eating water with an expensive and unnecessary effect. "Show, don't tell," sure, but not slavishly. Personally, I think adding a character just to fall in and demonstrate the flesh-eating water is lazy writing, too. Not framing the water as an ongoing threat (a room starts flooding, say) may have been a missed opportunity, but it is also a deliberate choice to have a lower intensity to the episode, and I'm unsure whether that's a problem or not. Chibnall does seem to have a different attitude towards Doctor Who as a children's/adult show which I'm not yet sure about. But I think we need at least a whole series to judge. Edit: Also, I hope that little TARDIS on the console is a seed.
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Oct 16, 2018 19:41
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After The War posted:"Ghost Monument" showed one of Chibnall's major weaknesses that we've seen in previous episodes - he's bad at bringing the disparate story elements into a cohesive whole in the final act. Remember the people last week saying that they completely blank on the ending of "Power of Three?" This wasn't as egregious, but it was similarly dissatisfying. With all the time spent on the Doctor trying to solve the mystery of the planet, it never tied back into the race plot in any way way. I expected Art Malik to be using the race as cover to acquire the weapons for himself or something like that, since he was played as ab obvious villain. But no, he's just a guy who likes races and is a little bit of a jerk? Allowing the tie didn't fit at all with how the character had been established, nor did acquiescing to a threat from someone with zero power to carry it out. And all the buildup with the scientists was just to establish that the assholes last week were different-scale assholes? That almost felt like Moffat's tendency to add arc poo poo to other people's scripts, except this was all Chibnall. It is just remotely possible that we shouldn't believe everything that Mr. "my mother didn't catch me" had to say. From the point when the Doctor talked him into letting her help keep his ship from crashing, he'd been showing fractures in his "loner" facade. It's also true that he was massively outnumbered, and I don't think he really understood the Doctor, so he could have calculated that the non-racers would stop him and throw the race to the other character unless he agreed to split the pot. They also played up the relationship between those two, not in the romantic sense, but in the sense that I thought they couldn't stand each other in a "but we've been through so much of the same poo poo" kind of way, not a genuinely loathing "I want you dead" kind of way. When he threatens to kill her later, he never seems genuinely threatening even before he's reminded that's against the rules.
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Oct 18, 2018 00:38
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cargohills posted:Reiterating what others have said, the Doctor’s anti-gun stuff seems pretty stupid. She’s fine with blowing up robots and starving mutant spiders, but for some reason shooting them is awful. You know what? Given how often TV and movies show guns as unrealistically useful solutions to all sorts of things, as well as turning actual gun battles into one-shot miracles as if that's how things usually work, I am quite all right with a single character on a single show being unreasonably anti-gun. I'm not even convinced it is unreasonable. Ten was unquestionably hypocritical in this regard, but we've seen Thirteen kill exactly zero things thus far. The EMP didn't blow up anything. That's not how EMP works. It shut the robots down, and most likely only temporarily, given that they turned themselves on in the first place. And she wasn't starving mutant spiders. They were already starving. What would you propose, bringing in a bunch of cattle for them to eat? Mutating some flies for them? Do you consider someone who squashes a regular-sized spider in their home to be a murderer? They're arachnids, not human beings. They deserved a humane death; allowing them to live and propagate would have been cruel, not kind. I know someone who owned a horse; it became ill and she was there when it was euthanized. They euthanized the horse humanely and with drugs to avoid causing the animal unnecessary pain. They did not step up to it and shoot it with a gun. Anyone who can't see the difference is really revealing something about the way they perceive humane behavior. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Bigly has no concept of humane behavior.
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Oct 29, 2018 02:56
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docbeard posted:I'm completely happy with the "they found a humane way to euthanize the trapped spiders offscreen" explanation given that they were literally talking about finding a humane way to euthanize the trapped spiders when they were gathering them in the first place. The more I think about the "missing ending" showing how they humanely kill the remaining spiders, the more I am glad they didn't provide it. Not only isn't it important precisely what they did, I can picture a certain kind of fan going around and "humanely killing" real spiders without reason.
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Oct 29, 2018 18:14
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Avalerion posted:All the doctors had some degree of “violence bad” as part of their message, but Thirteen may end up taking it so far it no longer ends up coming of as positive. Should we also have a beef with exterminators taking out cockroaches, or invent ethical bug zappers? Depends. If your exterminator seems to enjoy killing things, that might be a bad sign. There's brands of pest control that focus on removing pests and keeping them from returning over killing them. There is a big difference between swatting a fly and slowly pulling off its wings. So far, Thirteen seems less about "violence bad" and more about only returning violence when it is offered. The spiders were hungry, confused, frightened. They did kill people, but they weren't monsters, and were deserving of pity and compassion. It's funny that I haven't read more people being concerned, not about the Doctor's pacifism here, but about the extent to which she doesn't seem as bothered by the dead people they come across. "We don't see her 'humanely' kill those trapped spiders" and not "we don't see funerals for the dead people." Says something about underlying narrative assumptions in Who. Z. Autobahn posted:Isn't a single instant shot to the head a lot more of a humane way to go than slowly suffocating in your own body that's too large for you? Do giant mutant spiders have heads? If so, is a single bullet to that head going to instantly kill one? Even if so, does anybody seriously believe that CEO Bigly had the foggiest idea (or, for that matter, accurate aim)? For all we know, his shot led the spider to a slow and agonizing death.
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Oct 30, 2018 19:39
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dsub posted:The writing in this series is getting to me. The main cast are excellent and give it a real boost, but it feels like it's written for the radio, and not well. I could follow it perfectly without the pictures because everything happening is so painstakingly explained, and all I'd really be missing is a few visual gags. It wouldn't need so much exposition if what was actually happening made any kind of sense, but unfortunately the writer is real smart and wants to subvert our expectations all the time at the expense of making an entertaining, rewarding show. I'm not saying your take is completely wrong, but I am interested in how you can complain that the new series explains everything too much while at the same time not identifying that the monster wasn't suffocating on the wall, it was what fired a gun. And he is set up as such from the very beginning. The giant mutant spiders were restricted to Sheffield, meaning that they aren't the titular Arachnids in the UK. It's becoming increasingly clear why we won't have Daleks this series: They'd distract from the profile of real monstrosity being constructed.
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Oct 31, 2018 15:56
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and will die anyway, even though it was just as big before when it was literally running around murdering everyone. It's a colossal bait-and-switch and an utter disappointment.
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dsub posted:I understand that but I think it's quite a charitable reading if you don't mind me saying so. That guy was an rear end in a top hat and a scaredy-cat, but a monster? The spiders are literally murdering people. He doesn't get his comeuppance, either, which is disappointing, and as others have pointed out shooting the spider was probably the humane thing to do despite the show awkwardly trying to suggest it wasn't. It was also a mercy not enjoyed by the victims of the spiders, who were all suffocated in cocoons. So you bought the line of bullshit Robertson offered? His company, his decisions, entirely his responsibility that these mutant spiders came into being and then killed people. And his concern is covering it all up, not making certain that similar things aren't happening at his other properties, looking to provide survivor's benefits for the relatives of those the spiders killed, or doing anything much at all that involves ethical behavior or caring about other people. He's worse than the spiders. They killed because they were hungry and confused and scared. He just wants to cut corners to make as much money as possible and deliberately ignores corrupt practices or "outsources" his responsibilities to others. dsub posted:"The real monster is us" is a more tired trope than the Daleks, and not nearly as fun. You must have despised Oxygen, then. And the Cybermen. And the Kaleds. In fact, I'm not sure what you like about Doctor Who if you are bored with "we are the monster."
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Nov 2, 2018 00:59
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Bicyclops posted:Calling an episode about racism "preachy" is more or less code for "this was too political for me," though. It's a criticism leveled against every piece of media that addresses race, and it's tired and wrong. I'm tired of the program repeatedly preaching to me that the extermination of the Thals was wrong.
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Nov 3, 2018 00:45
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I thought it was a clever and fresh play upon the old school base-under-siege stories coupled with a very heavy mix of 70s Airplane disaster movies. The "going into labor during a disaster" was a big giveaway. And kudos to Chibnall for resisting having a cat-nun on board. I can't help but think that, while the show clearly isn't as sharp as it was, people are being critical in ways that kind of contradict. For example: 1. The exposition and characterization is really clunky and poorly handled. 2. We haven't had enough clumsy character exposition from Yaz yet (ignoring all the ways in which she's been deftly characterized through a combination of behavioral choices and performance). 3. The episodes spend too long with characterization when they should be more plot/puzzle-focused. Chibnall is providing a mix of development and subtext, he just isn't as good at subtext as Moffat was. He also doesn't write in a way that makes the subtext obvious and shouts "aren't I clever for having this" as loudly as possible. I feel like I know Yaz better as a character than I did Clara five episodes into her first season (counting only those episodes in which she appeared, obviously); she had to get past the "Impossible Girl" plotline before she really grew into a character. All that said, I agree that I'm looking forward to other voices and hope that Chibnall writes fewer stories in the future (or co-writes more) now that's he's put his mark on the show.
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Nov 5, 2018 05:55
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Davros1 posted:I really liked the last ep. You're not alone. I've heard and read opinions ranging from "Worse than The Twin Dilemma" to "best of the season thus far." I'd go so far as to call it Chibnall's best Who episode (as a solo writer, at least).
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Nov 10, 2018 19:39
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Retroblique posted:I really need to stop following the official Doctor Who page on Facebook, because within seconds of the episode finishing the usual band of muppets swarm all over the latest post, hitting the "angry" button, moaning about SJW agendas, how politics has no place in science-fiction, and how Doctor Who is now so terrible they didn't even watch the episode anyway. I miss the internet of the early/mid-90s, before the mentally ill got hold of it. It takes a special kind of person to watch that whole episode and come away believing the younger brother was right. It takes a lot of energy to maintain such a belief in the face of a story like this one. Also, the muppets would all support the other brother. Even Sam the Eagle. Even Uncle Deadly. These people aren't muppets, they're living wounds.
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Nov 12, 2018 03:21
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Jerusalem posted:I agree Graham is getting the most in terms of character/writing/chances to shine in his acting, but I still feel like Yaz is getting the short end of the stick compared to Ryan. Ryan and Graham's connection means there is a lot the writers can get out of their history and their shared love of Ryan's nan, but Yaz is still somewhat lacking in the character department sadly. This latest episode was definitely a step in the right direction, but given that at the moment she also seems to be the Doctor's "favorite" I feel like she's still undercooked. I'm no longer so sure about Yaz as undercooked, just that we're getting subtextual character traits instead of announced ones with her: We know she's chafing, both because of her job (which she's good at, especially investigating and averting/de-escalating a crisis, but where her bosses don't give her much to do because of her age/gender/race) and because of her home life (rivalry with her younger sister, who may still be in school as no profession has been attached to her, gran's favorite, dad is smart but quirky and a social crusader with more morals than sense, mom seems to be in an upper management track but her resignation upon being fired suggests she's also facing sexism/racism, doesn't share that with her family unless forced to, nags Yaz about relationships/children). She's observant, smart, a good investigator and a de-escalator as a companion, too, as well as the most action-oriented of the current cast (FPS gun incident aside). She's inquisitive, like many companions, but unlike pretty much all the others she'd stay put if the Doctor told her to. She keeps her sense of humor in a crisis. She's also socially alert, including picking up on the Doctor's disappointment when she thought they'd leave her, and she's emotionally supportive and loving, which looks to be the prime characteristics for this series. In addition to that, she's emotionally open with this group (more closed with her family, though not too much so) and seems to be following in that "wants to be the Doctor when she grows up" pattern while lacking all the negative characteristics of past companions (Rose and Clara, at least) who had that aspiration. Honestly, I don't care if we get a story about how she was scared of monsters under the bed when she was four, I just want her to have things to do in every episode.
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Nov 12, 2018 16:20
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Cojawfee posted:I think the spider thing was supposed to be spooky. Untrue in two ways. Firstly, without the Doctor, there's no holy person to preside over the wedding ceremony. Secondly, as the symbol of the broken watch made painfully clear, from the perspective of "now" the presence of the Doctor and her companions was a comfort to people in a time of need and trauma. And, like the aliens, they were present to witness and remember. They were, it turns out, always a part of events. (Note that stressing there was room for the holy man on the cart emphasizes that he would not have taken the proffered ride even in the absence of Team TARDIS, meaning he would still have been murdered.)
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Nov 13, 2018 18:33
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The_Doctor posted:I feel like there’s a bit of a Five embodiment. Almost generically nice, three companions... It's the opposite of One. Thirteen is a sweet young(ish) woman alert to and considerate of other people, and honest to a fault. Yaz is Ian, Ryan is Susan, and Graham is Barbara.
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Nov 17, 2018 20:25
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docbeard posted:The more I think about it, the more I'd really like to see the evolution of this episode, because there are a lot of half-developed themes that are a bit more subversive than we got, and I'm curious whether it's a case of a very subversive first draft that was toned down, or a bit of patchwork after the fact. You know, I'm actually OK with the show condemning BOTH of the choices you mentioned. The mass murderer (he did kill at least half a dozen people) wasn't right about everything, and the corporation was deeply flawed in multiple ways. Also, robots are OK, mostly, and automation in itself isn't evil, but its effects can do a lot of damage and it's not clear that rolling back on automation to provide jobs for human beings is the right solution. But it's not clear that there's another solution, either. All we have are small, incremental improvements to pit against things getting worse. I loved Oxygen, but while it offers an effective "take that" to a terrible corporation and suggests massive reforms coming out of that, we've seen reforms and regulations passed and then rolled back before. By the 51st century, clockwork robots are using human body parts as replacements for spaceship components. I'm guessing a decent union would have argued against that kind of programming. Oxygen ends with a specific problem being solved but the general problem remaining. (To the point that Davros is selling food made from human corpses in the later future.) And honestly, while it would have helped to make clear at the end that this wasn't an ideal solution (Ryan commenting on the two weeks pay for a month off, say), I'm not sure that the ending doesn't actually do that by again giving us reference to one of the dead characters, both commemorating him and reasserting that his connection with his daughter matters. In the end, yes to developmental problems. This would probably have worked well as a 90 minute episode, and one where the System got to communicate directly at some point. Although at some stage that threatens to look like Smile, and nobody especially wants that. Some things were pretty clear, though: these jobs aren't especially humane; the bosses are out of touch even if they are somewhat well meaning; employees are scared to even discuss the word "union," which I don't think is meant to play as a positive and which struck me as a clear (if brief) critique; even the "reformed" corporation still sucks, it just sucks less than before. It's ironic that Chibnall takes it on the chin (and appropriately) for on the nose, too obvious messaging, while this episode mostly goes with implicit and subtextual critique, before bobbling the brief obvious messaging at the end. I guess somebody is going to complain about anything. Cleretic posted:2. Add a Space Jeff Bezos. Something that lightens the image of Kerblam perhaps more than it should is that every face we see of it is a friendly one; the Head of People, the warehouse manager, the actual workers, even the system itself, all genuinely good people we're supposed to like even if they're cogs in a machine we're supposed to hate. Even Charlie wasn't actually a bad person, it's clear there's sympathy for his aims if not his goals from earlier in the episode, the problem is that because he's the only one that ever stands in opposition he gets off even worse. Add a Space Jeff Bezos at the top, who's just mad at all this loss of profit with no regard for anything or anybody else, to stand in opposition to all of this and it starts to go down easier. He only needs one scene to establish himself--hell, he might not even need that, just some mentions in a few scenes would probably be enough. I'm not sure they had the time, but if they had, adding the CEO as a returning character from the Ghost Monument (any of the three, though making it be Angstrom would be really interesting) could have made for an interesting twist. Rochallor posted:But that's the problem: it's all passive. Nobody does things to make progress happen. Things just get better. So you don't have to do anything. Just sit by and society will eventually marginally improve. We can leave this megacorporation as is because now they're going to treat their wage slaves more like wage indentured servants, and even hire more of them! What a triumph! How many episodes of the show pre-Chibnall show things that way? There's some Troughton-era stories, sure, although there's also the Dominators. Happiness Patrol claims that you can talk snipers out of shooting people and that the jackbooted thugs will all switch sides bloodlessly, and that's about as revolutionary as the show gets. Even Oxygen can only tell us that social progress occurs, it can't show us, and does it matter if things get bad again later on? You can punch Hitler but you can't stop the Holocaust. I thought the prevailing complaint about Rosa was that it presented a woman's single act of defiance as pivotal in effecting revolutionary social change, within the context of her wider engagement with a movement. The BBC can't afford to dramatize the March on Montgomery, and honestly I fear that we'd get another Daleks in Manhattan if it tried. This series seems to be arguing that it takes single acts of courage, whether it be Rosa's or Prem's (or Grace's?), to change things, but that those single acts need to be coupled with broader movements across society to make a systemic difference. There's a clear argument being made across the current series about social progress. You can hate the argument (and some ITT seem to), but it's sophisticated compared with evil being defeated by the world's faith in Doctor Jesus Who. Or the show not even addressing the issue.
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Nov 19, 2018 23:00
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CommonShore posted:The Sun Makers A few issues with The Sun Makers: 1. Bob Holmes wrote it as an anti-taxation screed. Making it aimed at a Company and not a government makes it OK, ish, but I support taxation, so I have mixed feelings about that. 2. It's unclear how many of the revolutionaries get gunned down. Surprisingly few based on what we see. Evidently the Company cut corners with the Inner Retinue. 3. So the Company has been defeated, and maybe the humans will return to a revitalized Earth (though evidence suggests they will mess it up again later, environment-wise). Who is going to lead them? Cordo? Mandrel, Mr. "do it or die" in the undercity? The ex-Company employee? We know Earth still has money and corporations in the future, so the revolution doesn't seem to have produced meaningful change. (Fake edit: plus what ewe2 said on the last page.)
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Nov 21, 2018 01:30
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Bicyclops posted:lol, yeah, the episode goes out of the way to create a labor rights villain who's all "Nothing is too extreme for my cause! I'm a revolutionary, violence be damned!" with a ludicrous, ultra-violent, murdering-innocents plan, but ultimately, the "big" societal changes of them maybe hiring more humans to work menial jobs and never see their families that we're meant to see as a happy ending are... actually a direct result of Charlie's terrorism and not the Doctor's intervention? Charlie wanted to create circumstances where robot workers would be outlawed, forcing every company to employ human beings. However big Kerblam! is, one company going to majority human labor is hardly the equivalent. And I don't know if you really want to use the resolution of the Ood story as your counterexample, given that Ood Sigma and Dr. Ryder might have been able to resolve the situation without the Doctor's presence and intervention. Be fair to the episode, which is clearly implying not that terrorist acts against consumers is the way to get what you want in terms of equitable labor laws, but that you should instead do massive damage to a corporation in order to force them to make changes. I am assuming that 10,000 delivery robots, plus whatever else may have been on that level, constitutes a lot of damage to the company, and I note that the Doctor could as easily have had the packages delivered to the local star instead. The more I think about this episode, the less it makes sense, but I do feel like that resolution was a deliberate act of violence against the company on the Doctor's part. (Also, given that she did it to change the minds of the company executives, it's a fridging of 10,000 robots, too.)
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Nov 21, 2018 19:23
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BioEnchanted posted:
TARDIS interior decorating by Erato.
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Nov 24, 2018 20:28
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Mr Beens posted:When the aliens revealed themselves every one just stood there whilst the aliens explained who they were and what their plans were. Then knocked everyone out. Just pretend they were giving their campaign speeches at a series of rallies. Stabbatical posted:I assumed that, had Alan Cummings's King James not burned her, she would have lived, or at least The Doctor thought so. The Morax would have left her body and it could've been written off as a possession or some such to be never spoken of again. It shows a complete lack of grasp of a (for The Doctor) fantastically old fashioned mindset. Even Becka, the person infected by the Morax Queen, thought she was possessed by Satan's powers. She's a somewhat tragic figure killed by something beyond her comprehension, aiming to fix her problem in an inhumane way allowed for by the politics of the time. Like last week, I think, the more I reflect on it, the worse it gets. The other corpses seemed to be as intact as they were before being filled with Morax, so that's quite possible. It's also possible that by burning that body, James killed the Morax Queen as well as Becka. I assume that this Doctor would be upset at both. Bicyclops posted:Nah, Crimson Horror doesn't count. The last pure historical was that Fifth Doctor two-parter I can't remember the name of, and before that, it was the Second Doctor. It's really only a part of the first six years of Doctor Who. Black Orchid. The historicals have a kind of mixed record. Black Orchid isn't great and has some cringeworthy elements. The Reign of Terror is the only Who story I found so boring that I couldn't finish watching it. And I'm not sure the tone of The Romans or The Gunfighters is what most people have in mind for historicals. Given the show's turn towards humanity as monstrous, it's in a good spot to go for a pure historical.
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Nov 26, 2018 03:32
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Jerusalem posted:Graham: Hey Doc, I just realized something. Next regeneration, they should have a series arc where the characters are all aspects of the Doctor's past and the Doctors passed, then have the big reveal that the whole season was a hallucination and the Doctor's having a regenerative crisis, triggered by all the regulars turning into past Doctors. Oh, God, Big Finish has probably already done something like this, haven't they?
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Dec 5, 2018 17:03
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Shorter Doctor Who fandom: most of these episodes desperately needed some extra thought and a few more drafts and rewrites. Also, we are outraged that the next series won't air until 2020.
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Dec 10, 2018 07:05
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Astroman posted:Also I think they missed the mark with The Doctor being responsible for Tim Shaw's wave of destruction. In the past we've seen the Doctor create problems unintentionally, such as Ashildr/Me. But here the Doctor did the "right" thing and let Tim go--and he ends up enslaving 1/3 of an entire race for 3000 years (even if they do live a long time and it's just 2 of them), destroying 5 planets and killing all life on them, causing the deaths of hundreds of people who tried to stop him--and the Doctor is like "yeah don't put this on me." No maybe DO put it on you. She clearly rejected the claim, it just doesn't happen overtly. I could have done with her throwing more shade his way before rushing off. "You've been a god for 3000 years and this was the best you could do? Badly-programmed robots, an industrial park inside a tower, and petty revenge? No wonder you had to cheat that test!" He could have changed his ways; he chose to define his life around revenge and cruelty. Graham didn't, and he didn't have all the advantages Tim Shaw did. The real problem is that we don't meet the people the Doctor "let go" who have redeemed themselves. Like those assassins-turned-witnesses weren't past villains the Doctor refused to kill who have since reformed. Maybe we can get some of that when she fixes Omega up on a date with the Solitract. Infinitum posted:Tim Shaw, you mean off brand Darth Vader? Try off-brand Dark Helmet. Burkion posted:Also I just want to point out that shooting a giant spider would do DICK ALL TO IT Setting aside the problem of navigating the TARDIS with loads of frightened giant spiders inside it, how is creating an ecological disaster on another planet going to be a better solution? If it wouldn't have led to a lot of collateral damage and casualties, I think stashing them in Mr. Big's house would have been a little more just, but not transporting them elsewhere makes perfect sense. 2house2fly posted:Is what they did to the villain definitely better than killing him? Depends. Is life in prison without parole better or worse than the death penalty? Making him live like one of the trophies he'd taken did have some poetic justice to it, even if it wasn't necessarily kind, and Graham isn't a killer now, so there's that. It's interesting that the Doctor just left punishing Shaw to her companions. At the very least, we're seeing Chibnall's answer to Davros' claim that the Doctor makes her companions into weapons.
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Dec 12, 2018 01:10
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That's a lot of collateral damage to be "The Woman Who Never Would." It's particularly jarring in a season where several times we see the Doctor vaguely solve some problem in a way that leaves loose ends like Space Racist. Tim Shaw just happens to be the loose end we see?
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Davros1 posted:... the gently caress? Shouldn't it be wearing a fedora? EDIT: Stabbatical posted:Also, an old friend of mine retweeted this thread on the issues in the finale. I thought it articulately put a few things into my mind I hadn't thought of before, so I thought I'd share. Don't know who the author is but his profile says he's a script-writer/editor, which is good although he does live in Basingstoke. Some good points, but he's making the mistake of thinking that Chibnall gives a drat about the plot or story. For him, they're just potential vehicles to get across character beats, so asking what difference it would make to the story if Graham killed Tim Shaw is asking a question that wouldn't make much sense. "Of course it doesn't change the plot. Why would it? The point is that it would change Graham." (Possibly followed by a further explanation of the Graham thing because maybe we missed the point.) His point about the Ux is spot on, though. I'm confused by his comment about how Tim Shaw was wearing a mask so there could be a surprise reveal. Did he forget that Tim Shaw wore a mask the first time out, too? Narsham fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Dec 12, 2018 |
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Dec 12, 2018 20:35
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The_Doctor posted:
The battle was inside us all along. (And by "us" I mean Graham.) I think I'm just going to refer to this episode as The Deadly Battle from now on.
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Dec 23, 2018 01:02
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misadventurous posted:I like that two-parter (and Kill the Moon, actually), and it’s nice to see some positive things said about it. All of Harness’s episodes are reeeeal curate’s eggs at best though. Some interesting ideas butting up against some seriously misguided ones. Agreed. I'd rather see messy and provocative than incoherent and a waste of a good premise (which I'd say applies to both Pyramid at the End of the World and Lie of the Land). Bits of the Zygon two-parter are cringeworthy--I especially despised the soldiers marching up and being greeted by their moms, as if they didn't know Zygons could do that and somebody couldn't have called their actual mothers (since the claim was that the Zygons were pulling the shapes from their mind and didn't actually have their mothers locked up for body-prints)--but the broader message about asylum-seekers seems prescient now. The broader point being made about the military was as obvious as people keep claiming Chibnall is being, but so rarely made that I'm willing to tolerate how it was done. The problems with the long last speech (ideologically) can be resolved if you assume that the Doctor isn't actually making an argument against bloody revolution (given that he's been responsible for several) but rather is concerned almost entirely with saving Bonnie (and Kate). He's telling her what he thinks will be effective to shake her out of her own convictions and convince her to see the situation like he does--in effect, to get her to think like him. That does illustrate a deeper failure in the two stories to get across a point about how the Zygon ability to transform into other people ought to have some relationship with empathy/seeing things from the "Other's" perspective, with humanity more monstrous in the sense that they can't do the reverse. But the story's hearts are in the right places. The Monk premise was bonkers and amazing. Given the season it was in, I was fully expecting some thematic comparisons with the Cybermen, especially with their own version of the Cyberplanner and their odd insistence on converting people (mentally, not physically), but none of that landed. Pyramid hinges upon a "safety" feature so inexplicable that I can only assume that Harness and Moffat have never met anyone who works in a lab, instead of relying on a safety feature failing. I could almost forgive it for the set-piece of people desperately trying to surrender to the Monks, who keep killing them because their desire wasn't sincere. Lie of the Land ought to be a great episode about the power and danger of political propaganda and rewriting history. Instead, it's an incoherent mess that can't decide how anything works, betrays the few interesting things about the Monks (who appear to have abandoned their predictive simulations entirely in favor of mind control and shooting force lightning), has a mini-cliffhanger that makes no internal sense whatsoever, and hinges its solution on countering a system of deliberate brainwashing with the love of a child for an imaginary mother, as if all of us didn't imagine our parents to be something other than who they actually are when we were young. Even the concluding scene, which I loved, was a terrible idea.
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Dec 27, 2018 18:35
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While we're imagining TARDIS crews, how about Thirteen, Rusty, and Handles? They could team up with the Paternoster gang for an adventure that will confuse Strax like never before. The season arc involves them eventually discovering that the villain they've been working against is a reprogrammed evil version of K-9.
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Dec 29, 2018 00:49
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Wheat Loaf posted:Who? RTD. You know, this guy: 
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Dec 30, 2018 19:53
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Burkion posted:I think you're having a stroke Some folks just need to improve their eyepatch game.
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Dec 31, 2018 02:19
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