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Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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I'm aggressively wrong about everything!
All I know is that, with the 13th Doctor being a woman, the 14th will be the massively multi-actor Doctor, where everybody watching will design their own actor to play the Doctor in scenes that are otherwise identical. And then the 15th Doctor will actually be the main character of what was supposed to be a spinoff during 13's run that hit development hell.

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Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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I'm aggressively wrong about everything!

Wheat Loaf posted:

This episode was the highest rated episode since 2013, apparently.

I've heard that it's higher rated than The Christmas Invasion, The Eleventh Hour, and Deep Breath; the only reason it doesn't beat Rose too is because the rating system being used back then can't be directly compared against.

And wow, does it deserve it. I admit, my critical thinking is a little bit shot after that one and basically just seeing everything I've wanted for almost a year now on screen, but that was probably the best episode and character introduction of all of them, and I'm enjoying it way more than I thought. I'm especially a fan of the idea that this Doctor's really big on tinkering, and I hope that stays true, because that's got some really fun potential.

I love how everybody thought before airing that the new sonic screwdriver was going to be sort of chitinous and bio-organic, more fitting of RTD's TARDIS than anything else, and then we actually see it, and... nope! It's spoons. It's made of spoons.

Also: not ashamed to admit I'm in love with the new theme tune. It sounds absolutely amazing.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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And I don't know how small or insular Sheffield is, but that reads pretty right to me as someone who grew up in Adelaide. You get a city with only so many new people coming to it, everybody either knows each other or thinks they do.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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DoctorWhat posted:

They may have said no two-parters but as the cliffhanger indicated, that's not the same as no continuity.

I assume it'll be like the Batgirl season of the Adam West Batman (or maybe seasons, I don't know, that show just exists independent of time). They stopped having cliffhangers and multi-parters with the same enemies but every episode's ending led into the next one.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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Jerusalem posted:

I really don't get why people seem confused by this either. It was pretty explicit that Tim Shaw - a demonstrated cheat - deliberately set up a thing that would technically "grant" him access to Earth by using an unwitting human touching a light he had no idea the function of. He straight up answered the Doctor's question about what gave him the right to come to Earth by saying he was "granted" access, and Ryan's reply is obviously in reference to the weird light he touched as he grasps the significance of what Tim Shaw just said.

Tangentially, I just wanna say that even if the Predator thing is played out, I really liked that instead of being some super badass hunter, he was the type of guy who plays online games with cheats activated, then rage quits when he still can't win anyway. :xd:

And something else I've been thinking is that he might've been cheating about that 'unarmed' thing, too. He claims that he's killing with a grip because he's just that goddamn cold, but we see his palm has sort of an Iron Man-style glow that isn't like any other part of him, inside his suit or out. And I know this part's nitpicking, but hen he's not wearing his helmet he doesn't seem to be showing discomfort you'd expect from someone so much colder than the planet he's on that that kills people.

He cheated at everything else, why wouldn't he cheat at that?

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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Buml0r posted:

And although it isn't as much of a child psychological horror thing, there's the thing of learning to ride a bike and the feeling of failure, wanting to throw the bike off a cliff. Again, something right out of a kid's inner psyche - but it was hidden so well, or I should say integrated so well, into this grownup-feeling programme, that it took me days to think of connecting it to its younger viewers.

Yeah, this one didn't feel like it was hidden so much as justified very well. It felt a bit hackneyed and painful at first, when you see the attempts without knowing why he can't ride a bike, but once you learn about the dyspraxia it suddenly works really well.

Hitting Twitter on the night of the premier led me to two nice little moments relating to that:
1. A mother tweeting about how happy her ten-year-old son with dyspraxia was in finally seeing someone like him on TV. That's a sort of representation you never think about, of seeing someone on TV with the specific disorder you have, but it's so good that it's happening.

2. Tosin Cole said no to a stunt double and did all the 'falling off a bike' takes himself. Which I respected when I realized there's a LOT of those takes, they would've had to be done really close together, and convincingly falling off a bike isn't the easiest thing in the world on your body.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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Tiggum posted:

No, it was still dumb. Why does a grown adult need his grandma there to watch him try to ride a bike? The reason he can't makes sense, but the grandparents were just there to make a stupid "he's an adult but he's doing a thing that kids do" joke.

I think he doesn't actually want to ride a bike, his grandmother's the one pushing for it. So he wouldn't do it by himself until the end of the episode, because he wouldn't be doing it at all if it was entirely up to him.

And as to why he's doing it in the first place, I think it's more of a symbolic victory thing; his dyspraxia makes riding a bike, a really common thing, very hard but not impossible. It's an elephant in the room for what his disability keeps him from doing, and something that's probably gonna make things awkward when you say you can't do it. If he can beat that, that is a symbol that he is not his disability, he can overcome it, and participate in part of society that was previously unattainable. I have similar things with my own disorders, and it always sucked to know that, for example, my fine motor skills made clean handwriting and drawing effectively out of my grasp, even if I can go through most of my life without that being an outright obstacle.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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So apparently, the Thirteenth Doctor has a unique, custom-made ear cuff that Whittaker herself had input in designing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msSdDdhA1qk

Holy poo poo, that's amazing and bafflingly minute detail for a TV show costume design at the same time.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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I'm aggressively wrong about everything!

Wheat Loaf posted:

One idea I like is at some point in the past, the actor playing the Doctor falls out with the BBC and quits, and it's so abrupt they can't regenerate him so they recast the same Doctor. So, for instance, somebody like Laurence Payne plays the Second Doctor, decides he's had enough and quits, and they rush to cast, let's say, Denholm Elliott as the second Second Doctor. It'd drive fans nuts whether that should be two separate Doctors later on when they started to care about such things.

So, like that time when there were three Popes?

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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uvar posted:

I can't think of the right word so let's say "realism-paraphrasing" (e.g. was Martin Luther King really there? I have no idea, but I wasn't expecting him so the twist worked for me, and that scene was entertaining anyway)

I'm also Australian so I don't know the whole story either, but I do know that this part and everything said in that ending scene was right! I'm not sure exactly on this part and I might have timelines a little messy, but I think there's a genuine case to be made that if it weren't for Rosa Parks' display and subsequent arrest, MLK wouldn't have had the opportunity to gain national prominence as a civil rights advocate. And that wouldn't have stopped civil rights dead in its tracks, that's true, but the villain was right: the butterfly effect of what Parks did was a pretty drat big one for civil rights.

Yeah, this episode was pretty blunt. But honestly, if you want to do a story about Rosa Parks it can't not be blunt as hell. I got an 'educational TV' vibe from it all, too, but I was actually primed for that from last week and its weird scene of the Doctor pressing Ryan for scientific facts about a particular gas. And I'm actually okay with it, because honestly they're already doing pretty well at it. I am totally okay with Doctor Who occasionally turning into a combined reboot of Magic School Bus and Carmen San Diego if they keep being good at that.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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Wylie posted:

Rosa Parks wasn't even the first lady in Montgomery to be arrested for doing what she did, she was just the one that started the fire, as it were. Claudette Colvin did the exact same thing she did a couple of years earlier, but she was less of a sympathetic story. There's an episode of Drunk History that talks about her story (narrated by Drunk Amber Ruffin from Seth Meyer's show), if you want to look that up.

The whole "Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat" event was planned, and Rosa herself was chosen to do it.

I knew parts of that story, but not the whole thing; thanks!

I can still buy it as a moment racists would want to ruin, and a moment worth preserving in history even if you do know that it wasn't total serendipity, so I think as a story it's still fine, and hits most of the right notes. Most importantly, it holds that Rosa Parks was an activist, a woman who absolutely knew what she was doing, but needed a specific setup to do it. I read the whole plan not as setting things up so that Parks had no choice but to be in the position to make the choice she did, but to set up the scenario to let her make that statement. Because there's no refusing to stand if there's still seats to sit in, or if there's no bus to catch.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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HD DAD posted:

The slap-happy guy at the beginning was terrible though.

I'm gonna be honest, that guy looked and sounded like Justin McElroy doing a bit.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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Slowpoke! posted:

There will be an arc. So far, in three episodes we have:

1. A villain, the Stenza, who have been mentioned twice in the first two episodes and who have an unresolved plot line (they were using the planet in episode 2 to test weapons)

2. A villain, Krasko, who half-told his backstory and then got zapped back into the past by Ryan. That dude is coming back.


I just assume it means no 2-parters, but there will be an arc with a season finale that resolves it.

You know, the Stenza empire being effectively seeded by a time-travelling human racist would explain why their rite of passage is specifically hunting humans before they've even left Earth. Kept the species target, eventually forgot he only hated certain types of human.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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navyjack posted:

Ryan needs to be nicer to Graham. I like how Graham was like “This is my Grandson, fuckers!”

Ryan going for the fistbump to scare off a racist and then responding with 'no, I don't do that' when Graham tries is so good. Largely because, at least the way I read him, he probably is telling the truth on that one and Graham's just extremely out of touch with both kids in general and his kid specifically.

Also, some clever credit to Graham's old-man-ness, his failed attempt to describe a smartphone sounds like something that would've existed briefly in the 50s or 60s.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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aroundtheback posted:

Does anyone think Ryan and Yas were supposed to be younger but got aged up for some reason?

To me there characterisation works much better if I imagine there 16, like Yas's weird family outburst or the horrible call of duty thing they had Ryan do in Ghost Monument.

Hell I think it would of made most of there moments in the latest episode land even stronger.

16 makes sense for Ryan (although I also think he reads just fine as a kinda dopey early 20-something), but Yas has a job that's actually at least threatening relevance to the story, if not quite getting there yet.

I'd really like to get a bit of insight into what Ryan does with his life, because I think that's what's missing. For all the focus he gets, we don't really get to see him as anything but reactive to what's going on around him and a victim of his disorder; we don't really know what he does, what he wants.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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By the way, the Doctor Who Twitter just uploaded a case file on Krasko. Confirming that with this stuff, Occam's Razor applies: It really is that simple, he's just a massive racist.

https://twitter.com/bbcdoctorwho/status/1055072636378714112

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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Fil5000 posted:

It's kind of swings and roundabouts - on the one hand, the show makes money and should get a decent budget as a result, but on the other hand budget restrictions make the production team get creative and you get things like Midnight, Blink, Turn Left (yeah, ok, and Love and Monsters). There's a balance to be had in there somewhere, but god knows where it lands.

And honestly, we just had a budget-light episode that was stronger for it; the only part of Rosa that looked all that expensive was Krasko's gun, which got very little play.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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Okay, that's all a pretty fair judgement on the period stuff. The cost of period clothing/set dressing sneaks up on you.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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I had a lot of fun watching this episode (even if I had to look away/try to listen to something else at a few moments, and I'm not even arachnophobic), but I think the thing I'm most excited about after it is that Yaz got a lot more to play with. There's still some noticeable gaps in her story, and things that don't sit quite right, but I feel like we've left the phase where the gaps are a disappointment and entered the phase where they're an opportunity.

You can do something with Yaz being a police officer that never actually calls on that fact; personally, I think it's that she's too new to it to be confident in doing so, but there could be more external reasons. And there's definitely something about her loneliness that's planned and just not in play yet, there's just potential for a lot of things with it. I'm in a weird spot on that one, where I don't think it's LGBTI-related, but I actually can't think of reasons that aren't LGBTI-related.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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I did just remember that, after this week's setup, we really do need to have Ed Sheeran in a cameo appearance as himself. And the Doctor recognizing him for just long enough to wish him luck on his Presidential run.

EDIT: Alternative, Ed Sheeran does cameo, but he's actually playing the President.

Cleretic fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Oct 29, 2018

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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Strom Cuzewon posted:

Dalek's acting and talking in non-Dalek ways is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. The occasional lapse into humour is great and terrifying (WOULD you CARE FOR some TEA!) but too many jokes makes them feel really silly and unthreatening.

I thought that scene was fine from a 'would Daleks act like this' perspective. They're self-assured, omnicidal and up against an army they can crush without trouble, and they're acting accordingly. If anything, it's the Cybermen that are acting out of character in that scene, there's a smugness about them that they usually don't have.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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I enjoyed that, but probably because it felt like just the right time in the season to have what I'm gonna call a 'junk food' episode. Not filler per se, just simple, straightforward with not much to think too hard about. It's great that everything until now has tried something new or posed some interesting questions, but you don't want that every time, sometimes you just want to watch a monster terrorize a spaceship. In fact, just before watching this I was thinking I wanted exactly that, although in my mind it was a Dalek episode so everyone's immediately on the same page about everything.

This is something I've realized I like far more in marathoning or binge-watching shows, you need a release valve every so often. I actually realized how good they are recently when watching through the Arrowverse shows in airdate order; in the middle of episodes all about these tense questions about Who People Really Are and how evil Ra's Al Ghul is, it's such a relief to have an episode that's just 'gently caress IT, CAPTAIN COLD' to have some simple fun.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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Eh, it feels a little too clean and stereotypically 'futurey'. That's going to be to the 2010s (and 00s) what the kinda industrial beat-up tech is to the late 70s-80s.

I prefer the new console room, because it's kind of unusual and hard to say 'belongs' to any particular era, including our own. Hell, if I were to make a comparison to anything, it feels like it'd be right at home in Jack Kirby art rather than anything from today.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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The entire season was written before anyone in the writers room (except Chibnall) knew the Doctor was going to be a woman. So the scripts end up a little... generic on who the Doctor is, which gives a lot of room for Whittaker to define it herself, but very little to define it in the actual story.

Tennant and Smith had similar first seasons on that; stories that could be done for any Doctor, with small hints of personality in the story. Ten for example, all we actually had for what made him different on paper that first season was 'vindictive, and a bit happier than Nine'. The rest was all Tennant.

Thirteen's had 'socially awkward'. It's been there the whole time, but it was really at the forefront in Arachnids in the UK; she's not great at talking to people or understanding social cues. Whittaker seems to have injected a lot of pure happiness into the role that isn't necessarily there in the script, and I expect that will be something that becomes more a part of the character later on.

I will say I've been loving her awkwardness, though, it feels very real as someone who's at times very much like that. It feels like she knows what to do 'on paper' in a general sense, but when it reaches the stage of 'interacting with people' she doesn't get it quite right on execution. She can do prescriptive rituals quite well, though, like the prayer at the end of last episode.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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There were a few moments in that one where I just had to step back and take in how good this was. God drat.

Gaz-L posted:

If not for the historical setting making it basically a corner they'd been written into, I'd actually say the Doctor was a little out of character for letting them off the hook so easily. This kind of passive observation is the same thing she hates her own people for.

I think the Doctor giving these guys a pass is actually perfectly in-character. She knows that these guys have time travel or future sight to some degree, and she knows--as do they--that they can't just mess with what they know will happen. Nor are they entirely passive observers either, we see them literally with the priest and the eldest brother; they keep the lonely dead company in their last moments. I can imagine some Doctors being singularly mad about instances of that (Ten in this episode would have been very shouty), but Thirteen isn't one of them, and I think all of them would be accepting of their overall mission.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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I've been thinking about it, and funnily enough I feel like this is one of the few times in Doctor Who I can think of where it might be a stable time loop. The Doctor's the only person willing to wed them, and their (misinterpreted) information about the aliens is what spurs them into doing the wedding that day. Even if they did decide to wed without a 'respectable' ceremony, I imagine it would've happened at a different time, and since what set them off on all this was a broken watch, subtle changes would've had noticeable effects. Since nothing did change, including anything about the watch, then we have a rare time when Who time travel works in a 'you were always supposed to go back in time' way.

Also, Yaz's nan doesn't even recognize her own mother's henna tattoos from her wedding day, that she specifically called out as being a bit crap both on the day and 71 years later. So, yeah, her memory of that day seems to have faded down to the one big thing that happened.

Cleretic fucked around with this message at 09:29 on Nov 13, 2018

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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I prefer that, there's a lot less chance of getting lost in the holiday and being schmaltzy crap with a new years special.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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LividLiquid posted:

Don't they have to show a Dalek once per season or they lose the rights to the Daleks or some such nonsense?

That was a myth, I believe, it wasn't actually proven.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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Actually, something that's struck me, the entire season so far has been very small-scale and 'realistic' in enemies, rather than big Fights Against Nasties. We've had:

-One rear end in a top hat cheater, and his pile of power cables.
-A few robots and some rear end in a top hat strips of cloth.
-A time-racist, and also a bunch of actual racism.
-Ostensibly a bunch of giant spiders, but realistically not-Donald Trump.
-A single knee-height alien.
-Two misunderstood aliens, but really post-war British post-colonialism.

Thirteen hasn't fought anything especially big at this point, and I think that's going to stay true for this season; at this point in their runs Nine had stopped one full-scale invasion of London and two localized but significant incursions, Ten had stopped one worldwide alien invasion and was on the doorstep of fighting the Cybermen, and Eleven had fought full complements of Daleks and Weeping Angels (Twelve was smaller-scale, but he'd still fought off an entire spaceship and a robot army). If they were going to go big, they would have done it at least once by now.

What if the finale is against one recurring monster? I'm not sure which, because we've relatively recently had a Cyberman and Master finale and aren't too far out from Into the Dalek, but the way things are going, I feel like we're heading to a much smaller-scale finale, and pulling out a recurring monster at the last possible moment would be a good time to do it.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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Wheat Loaf posted:

Sontarans, except they are ALL Strax.

Going with my earlier idea of a small-scale returning alien: Sontarans, except it's just Strax.

To be serious, I feel like there's potential in a story with a single Sontaran as a villain, but I don't know what the plot would be since we've already had an episode that was basically Predator.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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The_Doctor posted:

The rest of the article makes for more troubling reading.

The rest of the article is speculating about a single five year old quote and literally no other evidence.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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If anybody is at all interested, I'd suggest looking up the Leekley Bible; the story bible intended to be used for an American reboot of Who in the nineties (despite popular belief, actually not the one the McGann movie was intended to kick-start, it was a few years before). It's a fascinating look at what a total scorched-earth, not-a-continuation reboot would've been like, by somebody who has no real emotional connection to the show. It actually has some neat ideas--I really like the planned Cyberman design--but yeah, it's probably good that we didn't get it.

I don't think we'll ever see a reboot of Who like that now, or for a very long time. What allowed both 90s Hollywood attempts at Who to happen was because they were done by Americans, at a time when Americans knew Doctor Who as a weird old sci-fi show that aired on PBS, and the BBC saw it as something that had run its course. That's different now; it's something the BBC hold close, and there's a reverence for it among anybody who they'd get to do it (since they wouldn't be shipping it off to America). And even in the States it's a known thing in the public consciousness, people would notice if you went nuts throwing absolutely everything out in a remake.

And all of this is to say nothing of how heavily circulated that older stuff is now; in the 90s you'd probably have to really look to find a classic Cyberman episode, nobody would bat an eye if they turned up as space pirates in a revival. But these days most of the show's library is easily available by streaming, with clips circulating YouTube and interminably long Wikipedia pages if you're actually curious. The show's history is so readily available now that you couldn't throw big parts out if you tried.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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Rochallor posted:

That moon should have been on loving fire by the end of the episode.

It was. The entirety of Dispatch blew the gently caress up. Which incidentally was a better plan than 'blow up a bunch of people getting their deliveries', both by being more reliable and by striking them where it hurts.

I agree that this episode wasn't the best, and it could've used a few more rewrites to make things clearer (and definitely a bit more of that revolutionary streak from season 10), but reading it as pro-Amazon and against workers' rights is a bit disingenuous. Basically every part of the episode was illustrating that Kerblam is a terrible place to work, and an extremely lovely and manipulative influence on the society it's in. That last bit isn't even a 180, it's still very openly admitting of how terrible it all is, it's just that the faces of the company we meet are all generally good people.

I would only do two things differently about this episode, and they're not honestly major things:

1. Be clearer about what happens at the end. The Doctor turning the bombs in on Kerblam itself turns it into a display that only hurts Kerblam (and it does so massively), forcing them to restructure and listen to the concerns that were being placed in front of them; it's not gonna solve itself overnight, but it is a turning point. All of that is actually in the scene, but it's not really made all too clear. Basically, it could use the Oxygen ending.

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.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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Barry Foster posted:

Chief among them being 'the system is good, the problem is a few bad actors' (literally the opposite of reality) and 'people need lovely dehumanising jobs' (automation is a good thing, people should not have to work to live).

The issue with jobs wasn't that people needed them to be fulfilled, but more that people needed them to live despite technology advancing beyond them as a necessary part. It's the extreme of one of the ways automation can break depending on how we as a society adapt to it and legislate it; we keep demanding people work, but keep automating the jobs, suddenly we've got huge swathes of unemployed people we keep telling to go get work but no jobs for them to go do. Kerblam's human workers were clearly unhappy, even the Head of People knew that, they're not doing work because it makes them happy. It's clearly depicted as a horrible state of affairs.

And honestly, most of the episode does support that the people in the system are good people. Everyone we meet is a good person in a bad place, if given the right information they're doing the right thing, it's just that the system is broken far beyond what they can reach (and I mean the societal system, not The System as a character). It's a nice approach to depicting a dystopic society, that we only ever see good people stuck in it rather than anybody who actually wants it, but this episode kind of messes it up by including Charlie without either giving him either a counterbalance or a thumbs-up.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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I should also say, I don't think this episode is necessarily worth defending; it's probably the worst of the season in my book, although it's landing there with an 'ehhhhh' more than an 'auuuuugh'. Not actively bad, just not doing anything all that good. I just think that it's there because of lazy writing instead of malicious writing, that it underutilized the pieces it put on the board. Doesn't mean they weren't on the board in the first place.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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seizure later posted:

As fine an actor as Jodie is, I just don't see how we got 13 from 12. Yes, fine, their personality changes with each regeneration, but I was sort of hoping 13 would remain an alien, not just essentially a really smart human with all the hope of a thousand miracles in her eyes every loving minute.

Thirteen feels like one of the Doctors that is fundamentally 'human', but unlike many of those, isn't very good at it. She's clearly pretty socially awkward, and not the best at social cues unless there's tangible things like gestures for her to latch onto. I could see that being the sort of personality that Twelve would try to guide his regeneration towards, or at least would approve of; Twelve was definitely an alien, and had absolutely no grasp of how to deal with humans, but definitely had an immense respect for them that could channel into a much more genuine affection in regeneration. He doesn't quite have a whole picture of how to be a kind person, so the result is a bit shaky, but entirely well-meaning. Plus, the Doctor who didn't know if he was a good man, but certainly tried to be, would probably quite like his next life to be that of an unwavering optimist.

So yeah, I can see Thirteen being a reaction to Twelve (and perhaps even his own), rather than a continuation.

Also, as an aside: Readings of various incarnations of the Doctor as some degree of neurodivergent have always felt a little 'off' to me, but Thirteen reads very well as someone with Aspergers', which I really like. The way they depict a lot of her slight social slip-ups has this comforting familiarity to it, she feels like she's making the same mistakes I do sometimes.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


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DrVenkman posted:

Is there anything to this rumour that both Chibnall and Whitaker are not coming back? Something to do with BBC wanted another season next year and Chibnall saying he won't be able to do a full series until 2020.

Total nonsense based on nothing but an out of context Chibnall quote from years ago.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


Ignore my posts!
I'm aggressively wrong about everything!
Honestly, my critical thinking on old references was shot after the Doctor mebtioned a man named Roger Wilco, who given the surrounding scene (and honestly, parts of the episode aesthetic) might have been Space Quest's Roger Wilco?

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


Ignore my posts!
I'm aggressively wrong about everything!

Jerusalem posted:

You've certainly got plenty of precedent to be wary, sadly. Chibnall does seem to have his heart in absolutely the right place, and the report before production started was that he'd very deliberately not told the writers the Doctor was going to be a woman, so they'd simply write for the character rather than any particular gender.

And you can tell that part of the character was in there from the start, because of how often it comes up and fits into the story. Notice how all the references to the Doctor being a woman/previously being a man are rare off-handed comments that don't really influence the scene; meanwhile, the Doctor not quite keeping up with her brain is coming up a lot, and is often an actual factor in scenes.

One of those was squeezed into the margins during later edits, the other was clearly a part of the basic architecture of the character.

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Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


Ignore my posts!
I'm aggressively wrong about everything!

Maxwell Lord posted:

This was probably Jodie Whittaker's strongest episode yet- I'm not sure if it was produced as late in the season as it aired, and thus she's more comfortable with the role now, or if it's just a better showcase. She had some great moments (her reaction to "Apple bobbing!" was very Tennant) and this feels like the first time they confidently poke at the idea that, yeah, the Doctor wasn't always a woman and hasn't had to put up with sexism.

I hate that I keep bringing this up, but this time it's interesting: the scripts were all at least initially written with nobody but Chibnall knowing the Doctor was going to be a woman. I really want to see what the early drafts of this one were like, because I think Whittaker's presence and performance, as well as being a woman, absolutely makes this episode.

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