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Davros1 posted:Saw someone on Twitter try to say that the problem with this series was that every ep revolved around the Doctor being a woman. He never answered when I told him to cite examples. If there's a problem with the latest series, it's that they didn't do enough with the Doctor being a woman. One or two quick mentions plus some scenes in "The Witchfinders" and that was pretty much it. No doubt the fact that scripts had been written for "generic Doctor" before Jodie Whittaker was cast is the main reason, and I hope Chibnall shows some signs of recognizing the potential issues with having the first woman to play the Doctor be the one who is socially and emotionally aware and non-violent to the point of seeming powerlessness going into the next season. marktheando posted:I’ve started re-watching this silly show from the start again, rather than looking for something new to watch. Please send help. An old man with white hair will be along soon to hit you in the back of the head with a rock. Jerusalem posted:It was made pretty clear (at least to me) in the episode that the Confession Dial was a closed system with the same energy being recycled over and over and over again throughout it. The Doctor doesn't die, he just burns his physical body and the energy within is reconstituted in the form it was in back at the start of the cycle when he first teleported in (hence him losing the memories). The expression on Capaldi's face when that wall shatters would retroactively justify the entire episode even if it hadn't been good before then.
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Jan 7, 2019 21:00
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Cojawfee posted:The new episode was ok, but it's a shame that British police don't have radios, and the military only has one tank. The scene where the police person doesn't bother to even radio in that a weird thing is happening took me out so much that I didn't really even pay attention when Ryan was talking to his dad in the cafe. How many tanks do you imagine are stationed in Sheffield? Most modern tanks can't go more than 40-50 mph and would take hours to redeploy even assuming you cleared traffic. Of course, Micromachine tanks can be instantly deployed by just taking them out of your pocket, but they haven't proven very effective in past episodes. It was a huge waste to have the Doctor find the Dalek via tech instead of having Yaz call in to the station, though.
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Jan 8, 2019 20:35
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Organza Quiz posted:https://twitter.com/jonnymorris1973/status/1087283906896900096 interesting! I haven't read it yet. Ugh, it's even more objectionable to see how needlessly stupid it was in addition to having the humorous bits sliced out. The Doctor's testing Bill, to the point of guards with guns and faking a regeneration. Why? Well, in the context, it makes sense that with Bill as the conduit through which the Monks are changing people's memories and perceptions, she herself might be ground-zero and loyal to the Monks and the "joining up with the Doctor" thing is all a trick. Only the script not only doesn't establish that, it goes out of its way to show that the Doctor doesn't know how Bill contributes to the situation until he talks with Missy. And while it's somewhat clever for the Monks to do nothing about Bill because they want the Doctor to protect her, they have to know he's dangerous to them. For that matter, given that the "let me see your papers" bit turns out to be part of the big put-on, having the Monk "rescue" Bill from that is worse than pointless. It's needless running-about-corridors but without the running part. Then they get to the Monk on the throne beaming lies into people's minds. Does anybody shoot the Monk in the head and shove him off the throne so the Doctor can hack the system? No. In fact, if the system requires the active participation of a Monk to function, surely just unplugging him will do the trick. But no, it turns into Bill hooking in so the Monk will erase her mind. You know, the mind which the Monks are already linked to and which, if erased, will spoil their entire plan. Does Bill live because the Monk doesn't dare tamper with her mind lest the whole invasion collapse, allowing her to fight it successfully? No, she wins because a part of her mind has embraced a fiction as if it were reality. You know, like almost everyone does in one way or another but without any of the others being in any way protected like Bill is for some reason the episode has no idea how to explain. That's not to mention the minor pointless stupid bits. They shoot their way into the pyramid with the headphones protecting them from the influence, and the guy whose Walkman is destroyed is neutralized in seconds, making the whole thing pointless. (Why not have no guard at all and skip the whole thing? Why not have humans form a wall of bodies to block the Doctor, creating an actual problem he has to solve instead of just getting some shooting effects while ruining the whole "scary Monks who we don't know what they can do" element?) Or the worst: the kid turning his mom over to the Memory Cops. The basic concept is clever, sure. But if the Monks are hacking people's memory and perceptions to insert themselves into humanity's past, and not breaking into everybody's homes and replacing all their books with new versions, then anyone affected by the Monks can pick up a book and see sections where the Monks appear while anyone resisting won't see those sections. So the kid finds a bunch of things mom is hanging onto and they don't have Monks in them. So what? If the kid is affected, he should see the Monks there whether or not they are there, because that is how it works! And every other drat book or postcard or whatever is missing Monks, too, so why are these keepsakes any different? The kid should be turning in his mom because she was reading Paddington to him and left out the parts with the Monks and when he complained she told him there weren't any Monks in the story at all. No, I'm not at all mad about this, after all this time. Why do you ask?
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Jan 21, 2019 20:42
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jivjov posted:Which was done in the middle of the night in a remote location; again, the point being made is not "nah, things were hunkey dorey", it's "the public face of things was kept civil, while all the nasty poo poo happened in dark alleys and after dark". This might have been accurate when it came to lynchings in the late 20th century or now, but not earlier. Some lynchings were announced in the local paper, made a spectacle, photographed, and then turned into postcards. The idea that "the public face of things was kept civil" is not even accurate NOW, in 2019 Alabama. Racism is certainly more covert at times than it used to be, and many people who are racist need some indication beyond "I see you are white" to start saying racist things. But racist behavior registers immediately and publicly to its victims, and if pervasive, colors all their interactions with white people even in circumstances where racism is not directly at work. Institutional racism is part of why Presidents Bush and Trump could get angry or shout-y without a problem but President Obama had to be extremely careful not to show anger outside a very specific set of controlled behaviors. It is true that there's some "bless your heart" style "polite" racism on display here. But there's multiple news stories every year about somebody leaning out the window of a frat house and yelling racial insults at a black student walking past. In broad daylight. On a college campus. In 21st century Alabama. Racism loses its effectiveness if the people it is meant to "keep in line" are unaware of it. A facade of politeness might be put on for the benefit of the powerful, who might not themselves all be racist and thus could cause problems, but it will rarely be put on for the benefit of the powerless. Burkion posted:Let me clarify exactly what my issue was, because I think that's been lost. Besides our main characters, I related to every single black person on screen. While I understand your point, you might want to think about why you phrase the situation as "literally every single person" when what you mean is "every single white person who isn't Graham or the Doctor," because I don't think you don't see the black people as people. Why, then, does the episode not "work" unless there's a white person in the period who is relatable? And would you expect a black child in 2019 Alabama to need a white person to relate to as an ally (besides the Doctor and Graham, who to my mind are plenty enough) or the episode doesn't work for that child? To your broader point, if I were a parent with a child watching this episode, I would want the conversation afterward to be "were things really that bad in the 50's" followed by me explaining that while not every white person was racist, racism was so institutionalized and pervasive that every single white person participated in it. There are plenty of people who were adults in the 50's and 60's you can talk to about that time. When my father worked in Baltimore in the 60s, he was in restaurants and at lunch counters when black protesters came in and sat down (illegally). Was he supporting a racist policy by eating at these institutions? Once these people (men, overwhelmingly) sat at the counter, what action could my father take that would support them? Is just sitting there quietly and doing nothing a tacit support for the racist law they were challenging? No 50 minute TV episode is going to get at these complex issues as well as a conversation can; the point is to trigger the conversations, not to render them unnecessary, because they ARE necessary even if Rosa had been a perfect episode of Doctor Who. And Rosa wasn't written or aimed at people who are thoughtlessly racist. It isn't pitched at the modern racist who will see himself on the screen and rethink the way he lives his life. And that is fine. Because I genuinely do not believe that such a person would change his behavior if confronted with it in a single Doctor Who episode. Just consider what I think is your likely reaction to the blowback to your initial comment (which, I am guessing, must include a certain level of offense at being perceived as a racist when you want to be an ally, and an inevitable amount of defensiveness, too). From your perspective, you want to have the conversation and you get attacked as a racist for trying to start it. But from another perspective, you could sound like the white moderate Archyduchess was just quoting MLK writing about. And for someone who might themselves have had the dogs set on them, phrasing like "literally every single person" sounds exactly like what they've had to live with every day of their lives. The episode is clearly pitched at younger people who don't know the history at all, and who will be provoked into doing their own research and starting their own conversations. You can't even make the facile point that "things are better now, though," if you're ignorant about how bad they were VERY RECENTLY. Given that there are now teenagers for whom anything that happened in the 20th century is "ancient history," what the episode was doing seems worthwhile and even praiseworthy, though we can certainly argue about whether it would have been wiser or more effective to target an older audience. Racism is complex, interwoven into everyone's lives, and covert mainly for the privileged. As privileged people engaging in a conversation about racism (or perhaps, direct action regarding it), we cannot afford to exempt ourselves from scrutiny. There's no switch inside your skull that gets flipped to "racist" as if it were an "on/off" variable. An initial step for people who are not the targets of racism needs to be a particular kind of awareness, and Rosa is a huge step forward for a show that has had fairly recent problems itself, ranging from Micky and Martha to the cringeworthy decision to have Twelve address Danny Pink as "P.E." I don't think we can have a conversation about the choices made in depicting racism in this one episode of the show without engaging more broadly with the program's own mixed record: I wasn't dismayed in watching that we didn't see a local white person who wasn't implicitly racist because I was too busy being relieved that the episode itself wasn't being unintentionally racist while trying to condemn racism. To address your point in another way: the episode was about Rosa and the effect of racism on her life, not about a waitress in a Southern town who wasn't herself racist but who had to keep her feelings bottled up because if she served a black man she would lose her job. There are interesting and worthwhile stories to tell about the effect of racism on white people. But it seems reasonable to let the show first tell a story (one innovative for this program) about the effect of racism on black people. Narsham fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Jan 22, 2019 |
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Jan 22, 2019 20:07
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Astroman posted:IO9 has a nice write up on Big Finish for newbies in The Year of No TV Who: Post history = this post only. (The io9 comment, not Astroman, obviously.)
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Jan 24, 2019 16:28
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corn in the bible posted:every time they tried to say CAPALDI DOCTOR IS AMBIGUOUS NOW it felt so loving hollow cause he was already way nicer than eccleston I think you meant to say Tennant. The "no second chances" Doctor. The one who did sacrifice his life, but only after complaining and making you genuinely unsure whether he would. Compare to Capaldi's "Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference" or his declaration in his last (but one) episode about why he fights. Stabbatical posted:I never liked the expansions of the Dalek mythos that Moffat made with regard to the casing. It stretched my ability to believe in the threat of the characters, the idea that they are just generally pitiable, nasty pieces of work who sincerely believed in their mission and place at the head of the natural order. It seems to be part of the trend in the new series of the expansion of the Daleks' machines' powers, the move from just being solid individual tanks in the old series into ultra-super-invincible individual world-armies. This can work well sometimes (like in Dalek) but in Into the Dalek and The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar, when it's basically stated that the tanks seem to drive the owners as much as the owners drive them. Granting first that Terry Nation seemed a bit confused about the whole robot thing, I think the new series Daleks have only intensified their central problem, which is that because they are monsters it is OK to kill them all. But they aren't all monsters. Evil of the Daleks establishes that, but in a way which suggests that you need "the human factor" to change them (so Daleks are evil only because of the Dalek factor). Then comes the new series and all its redeemable Daleks: "Dalek," "Daleks Take Manhattan," "Journey's End," "Into the Dalek," arguably "Asylum of the Daleks." After all that, what's true? That Daleks are not innately or genetically evil, and have some degree of volition, in which case Daleks should be allowed the chance to make better choices? Daleks are constrained by external factors, which makes them not responsible for their evil? Why would it be better to say that they are genetically altered to be monsters, and that therefore they should all be killed, instead of trying to undo the genetic modification (which, arguably, is what Two did)?
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Jan 27, 2019 20:58
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). Why make the tank suppress emotional expressions or ideas that shouldn't be able to even occur to a regular Dalek?
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Harlock posted:Personally I'd be happy if the Daleks and Cybermen go away for a while. Unless there's a truly great story, I feel like we have been circling the drain lately of the same motifs and themes. Sooner or later some daring writer will do "Redemption of the Daleks" and it will lead into the "Rebellion of the Daleks" and they'll be semiretired until some jerk writes "Recidivism of the Daleks." The Cybermen suffer from the twin problems of being built upon both Cold War anxiety and concern about artificial limb replacements. Given how the pseudo-Amazon story went, it might not be desirable for us to get a proto-Google or proto-Facebook story reconstructing the dangers of the Cybermen as a purely software/connectivity/data problem. We need a new method of prolonging life or "survival" that involves giving up one's humanity for the show to explore.
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Jan 30, 2019 02:21
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CommonShore posted:I just rewatched I AM THE MASTER and that is still so loving good. That specific scene, from the watch to the end, is probably the best thing from the RTD era, and they set it up so well throughout the season. Rani from the Sarah Jane adventures puts in an appearance... and finds a pocketwatch. Honestly, they are overdue to bring Omega back and he'd be a really interesting figure to bounce off of Thirteen. The only other shock reveal I could imagine working would be to recast the Black Guardian. Far better to bring back a past companion. Leela or Ace or Romana seem like the obvious choices. Or a surprise multidoctor episode. The show has yet to dare casting the next Doctor secretly and having her meet the current one.
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Jan 31, 2019 06:07
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If any of the Doctors is a Tory, it's clearly Ten. Kicks the Prime Minister out because he personally disliked what she did, lusts after a girl hundreds of years younger than him, has to use an elaborate piece of technology to be temporarily human... I only saw the new Ghostbusters movie once, so I hesitate to do much analysis of it. My impression was that the ad libbed dialogue was less memorable, the physical comedy was better, the plotting was more solid. The two big problems, in my mind, was making the "human" villain too much of a male power fantasy (where Dana/Zuul was very clearly another male fantasy in the original film), and not understanding how central character development was in the original movie. The original Ghostbusters really works on the strength of Venkman's character arc, from cynical exploiter of crap science to "too cool for this crap that is actually happening" to "HE SLIMED ME." Venkman goes from being part of the paranormal studies group because he wants to sleep with women, to being a ghostbuster because he wants to sleep with women, to actually wanting to save the world (and maybe getting to sleep with women afterward, but not, like, as his main objective). It's the story of an rear end in a top hat who becomes an rear end in a top hat hero. The 2016 Ghostbusters spreads out the development more, but it's pretty limited and focused much more on relationships within the team without a broader redemptive character arc. Making the Stanz-like Yates carry the weight while not really having a clear Venkman substitute doesn't help. Jones' character is at least more central to the story than poor Ernie Hudson's Winston was (though the Real Ghostbusters cartoon's making Winston a central character partly repaired that problem... if not for Hudson, who lost out on his own role). The things that happen between the four main characters somehow seem disconnected from the action of the film even though on paper they shouldn't be (especially Gilbert's arc from buttoned-up college professor to portal-diving badass). On the spectrum of bad, it doesn't even come near Who at its worst. In terms of wasted potential, it might be up there with Torchwood (as a whole): much better than you might recall, not nearly as good as it should have been.
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Feb 9, 2019 17:15
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CommonShore posted:Frazer Hines's wikipedia entry says he is in 117, which seems like a plausible typo/transposition for 177, whichever is actually correct. I'm seeing him in IMDB with 117 episodes.
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Feb 16, 2019 19:24
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Bicyclops posted:Like... does she have to eat or drink? Does she age? Is she going to live in that cement block for eternity? Did the Doctor save her out of rage because she was related to the Family of Blood? Clearly the only way to settle these matters is to finally have an in-setting Doctor Who-MST3K crossover.
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Feb 28, 2019 16:54
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Astroman posted:Of course there's also the problem with online, that even if someone says they aren't coming at it from a view of hating women and black people having agency, people still won't believe them and will try to assume "they're lying, I know in their heart they are a shitlord" and disregard everything they say. If you want to see sexism, racism, etc everywhere, you're going to see it. I really didn't like The Phantom Menace, but I don't feel compelled to post in the comment thread of anything online that mentions that movie, ever. Last Jedi is the absolute worst for this, though. I've had some reasoned discussions with non-shitlords about the movie: for example, one of the main reasons for disagreement in one conversation was that the other person hated the movie because it radically redefined (retconned) Star Wars. I liked it for that reason, and argued that most of the Star Wars movies did that and the best ones did it the most. Once you arrive at "this is a thing the movie does that I consider good and you consider bad," I don't see the point in continuing the discussion. Understand each other and move on. Most of the people still up in arms have a very different agenda in claiming, online, that the movie was objectively bad and a flop and the franchise better correct itself and Disney better be listening or they and all their buddies are going to boycott. Whether or not they claim that sexism and racism has nothing to do with their reaction, their motives in bringing this stuff up at every opportunity are pretty suspect and it's quite reasonable to assume that the reason they just won't stop posting goes deeper than a disagreement about a film's artistic merit.
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Apr 7, 2019 03:35
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marktheando posted:The casino sequence was worth it just for the bit where they say the place is home to the worst scum in the galaxy, then cuts to some rich people. It was as close as Star Wars is ever likely to get to Oxygen. Though in my ideal world, there's a scene in Episode IX where Kylo Ren has just gotten himself comfy on a throne and Mark Gatiss walks into the room to collect on the massive debt that the First Order ran up building all those massive starships. (Bonus points if he represents the Ferrous Bank.) Ren starts to choke him and he points out that he's an expendible employee, and the bank isn't even headquartered on a single planet so there's nothing Ren can do to destroy it. After it becomes clear Ren knows nothing whatsoever about the economic part of running an Empire, Gatiss' character is named Minister of Finance. The crippling taxes he institutes on all but the wealthiest Imperials end up giving the struggling Resistance a massive recruitment boost. Obviously a fantasy scenario, though past movies have hinged upon parliamentary procedure, so not impossible.
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Apr 7, 2019 15:01
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2house2fly posted:So that's what the round things are... "Gallifreyan rondels are PEOPLE!" Also, clearly Radagast would scold Arya for never looking for her dire wolf.
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May 23, 2019 15:37
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docbeard posted:Lie of the Land is also an episode of Doctor Who. Not content to merely insult my intelligence, Lie of the Land also tried to beat up my mother.
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Jul 11, 2019 15:18
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:I mostly was making fun of Ian Levine not bothering to actually Google the correct spelling. That tweet reminds me of how I felt when the story got out that Karl Rove loved Babylon 5. There is a cute moment in a video posted in response to Levine of Sylvester McCoy talking about 13: he is of course delighted by Jodie, and is especially happy that her sonic was built upon a spoon.
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Aug 11, 2019 19:21
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Babylon 5, as much as I love it, still has a hardon for the Great Man theory of history and military intervention solving problems. It's got a much easier far right read than, say, TNG - although that still happens. True, although sustaining that reading requires ignoring or skipping almost all of Season 5. Then again, I understand a lot of people do that. Doctor Who is sometimes susceptible to the same thing, although some of the time the Great Man is the Doctor. Which brings us right back around to Levine's problem with the current Doctor. Astroman posted:The US equivalent of this is when ex-Presidents pal around after they're out of office. Only with slightly more war crimes involved. Also, my personal headcanon is that Jim Henson's The Storyteller was the War Doctor in disguise all along.
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Aug 13, 2019 18:29
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MrL_JaKiri posted:The Telepath arc has the easy interpretation of "never help refugees they will just become terrorists" Only for someone willing to ignore actual text, not just subtext. And forget that the Narn refugees were crucial to the survival of the station. It's possible to see Bester as a hero but there's definitely something wrong with you if you do; he just isn't a one-dimensional villain. Doctor Who has multiple episodes that support that same "refugees bad" interpretation, sadly. Levine probably thinks Gatiss was gaslighting when he claimed that the anti-refugee message of The Unquiet Dead was unintended. (Yes, I did do that intentionally.) The new series episodes involving Time War refugees or Crack refugees pretty routinely make the refugees monsters or invaders.
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Aug 14, 2019 17:11
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Jerusalem posted:loving amazing, they have a psychic battle and a rock falls on the evil genius and the Doctor knocks back a mug full of barbiturates Romana could have saved herself if only she could have reached her time wand.
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Aug 17, 2019 14:57
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Capaldi returning as a Silent confirmed.
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Aug 18, 2019 18:36
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Trin Tragula posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPlI1WpAwpU Dalek Masterplan turns out to include five episodes of One chortling for 20 minutes.
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Aug 28, 2019 03:09
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The_Doctor posted:Terrance Dicks has passed away. Somewhere, he and Barry Letts are meeting again under a beautiful sky with colorful birds flying across it surrounded by wavy outlines. Letts: "I apologize for the bad CSO." Dicks: "It's Heaven, Barry. Heaven."
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Sep 2, 2019 18:40
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I've never quite understood why Fenric is so popular in relation to Image of the Fendahl. Is it all the WW II trappings that otherwise didn't appear so spot on in classic Who? Fenric's finale always seemed melodramatic and contrived to me where Fendahl's has an ironic justice to it. And I'll take faux Quatermass over faux post-apocolyptic vampires any day. I don't think Fenric is bad, just overrated.
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Sep 17, 2019 14:44
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Payndz posted:This is what soured me on Moffat's run as it went on. The show's premise is "quirky alien has a spaceship/time machine that can go to anywhere in the universe at any time; adventures ensue". On the face of it it's ludicrous, but it works because the TARDIS is just a sci-fi Thing that brings the hero into each story. Emphasis on sci-fi. Unacceptable things (because Moffat): TARDIS that can orbit (or tow) a planet hovering in midair; trees rapidly growing over the Earth; Moon being an egg. Apparently acceptable things (because Davies?): Sentient walking trees showing up to watch the end of the planet Earth along with a woman who's been turned into a flat piece of skin; alien who turns back into an egg after looking into the TARDIS console; Doctor flying through the air and acquiring magic powers because people believe in him. If you find yourself having the kind of conversation that might lead to you defending the idea that the Force has to be explained by the existence of microscopic midi-chlorians, my advice is to stop having that conversation. The Doctor travels to stories, which is why it's only slightly peculiar when he ends up in the Realm of Fiction, and stories operate in many different ways.
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Oct 14, 2019 01:23
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Voting Floater posted:The biggest misstep in Idiot's Lantern was having Maureen Lipman go full ham and bellowing "HUNGRY! FEED ME!" constantly. The idea of an evil sentient TV broadcast is kind of neat and I liked the parts where she was making threats in 50s BBC English. I agree. Did she think she was some kind of Great Architect or something?
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Oct 23, 2019 05:40
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