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Placeholder for my own reviews. Possibly I’ll make an organized list post like Jerusalem eventually. For now, links to my posts in the previous threads (largely reviews): https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4064084&userid=185993#post542466173 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4077597&userid=185993 Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Mar 26, 2025 |
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Mar 26, 2025 03:49
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The Tsuranga Conundrum: While there’s no particular scene here that’s egregiously awful, this episode is quite dull to watch. It’s not even about people running through corridors so much as people standing in corridors; scenes of people standing in corridors while spouting technobabble alternate with scenes of people standing in corridors while talking about family drama. And it’s set on a hospital spaceship, so the corridors in question are monotonously white. Yes, the Ark in Space had a somewhat similar setting, but there the white corridors felt ominous. There are a couple of apparent Signals from Fred. “Why am I even talking about this?” asks Ryan at one point. “I get it,” Yaz snaps after some particularly longwinded exposition about particle accelerators from the Doctor. (Yaz also looks disgusted by the sonic screwdriver’s “self-rebooting”, reinforcing my perception from It Takes You Away that she hates plot developments that aren’t properly foreshadowed.) The episode improves somewhat towards the end; it even develops an actual sense of tension. Is that enough to make it a 2 out of 5? I don’t think it’s as good as any of my 2s so far. Rating: 1/5. Next: A story from 1987 and a story set in 1987. Both involve dragons.
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Mar 28, 2025 01:29
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2house2fly posted:I recall my takeaway from The Tsuranga Conundrum being pleasant surprise that it was a recogniseable episode of Doctor Who, structurally. There's like a sci-fi mystery, the heroes find out about the monster using some kind of clever plan, they defeat it with another plan, side characters have arcs, nobody that I remember espouses an inhumanly insane ideology. It had all the ingredients. Faint praise, admittedly I guess I can see the argument for it being better than Arachnids in the UK (which I gave a 2), but Arachnids at least looks prettier, and feels like things are actually happening in it. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Mar 28, 2025 |
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Mar 28, 2025 03:23
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Doctor Who reviews, dragons of 1987 edition Dragonfire: I think the Seventh Doctor era’s mix of 3-part and 4-part stories was a good idea; it keeps plots from dragging the way 6-parters sometimes do, but also gives settings and side characters room to breathe in a way the new series often fails to do. There’s some fun scenes here, from the Doctor distracting a guard with a philosophical discussion to the milkshake cantina. I have two issues with this story, though, both involving characterization. The Doctor and friends get along too well with Glitz considering he’s just sold a bunch of people into slavery. And Ace feels too cartoonish. Rating: 3/5. Father’s Day: This is a very effective tear-jerker. It helps that it has a sense of restraint. The standard criticism of the story is that the Reapers feel tacked-on. I don’t think the story would really work without them, though. You could substitute a more abstract time-paradox consequence, but I think that would weaken the story’s atmosphere; the intensity of the scenes in the church relies on them. I’d like to see them again, actually; because they’re a consequence of historical interference, rather than the cause of it, they could enable new types of historical stories. If I have any reservations about this story, I guess it’s that it moves Jackie back towards comedic-grotesque mode a little. But Father’s Day has some sense of restraint even in this regard; the flashback scenes, at least, take her seriously. Rating: 5/5.
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Mar 29, 2025 01:43
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Why is the spin-off material so weird about the 60s and 80s companions? And some of the audio-only companions too, come to think of it.
Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Apr 2, 2025 |
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Apr 2, 2025 03:54
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Open Source Idiom posted:I think that's really unfair. I think people just liked telling stories with more visceral stakes, possibly because they had things they wanted to say or because they wanted the series to grow with its audience, and possibly overcompensation for the show not being on television anymore. And sure, there were pervs, but my god if we chucked every bad taste pervert out of Doctor Who then we wouldn't have RTD or Moffat or Hinchcliffe or Holmes. There wouldn't be a show. Wait, how were Hinchcliffe and Holmes perverts? OK, I guess Hinchcliffe must have approved Leela’s outfit, and Holmes wrote a couple of the mid-80s stories with Peri that FreezingInferno mentioned. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Apr 3, 2025 |
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Apr 3, 2025 15:37
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Doctor Who reviews, Gareth Roberts edition: The Shakespeare Code: This story has been criticized for being a Shakespeare celebrity historical with surprisingly little interest in Shakespeare. It does at least have a suitably Shakespearean “monster” (witches), although this has the unfortunate effect of uncritically importing some early modern gender politics. It also has a few good gags that arise from it being about Shakespeare. Unfortunately the gag at the core of the resolution, with the out-of-place magic words, is cringe and also doesn’t have much to do with Shakespeare. The handling of race here is rather clumsy. “Just walk about like you own the place; works for me” is not an adequate response to Martha’s concerns, and I’m not sure the story realizes how inadequate it is. Given Roberts’ later bigoted turn, it’s tempting to blame him for this, but I have an uncomfortable feeling that the handling of race here was broadly Davies’ idea. (I don’t want to be too harsh on Davies – he did better in this regard in the Fifteenth Doctor era – but I feel like the new series has often had more diverse casting than the classic series, but without the overwhelmingly-white people on the other side of the camera thinking through the implications of this for the writing, with unintentionally offensive results.) Also, the Doctor’s pining over Rose, especially when he outright compares Martha unfavorably to her, was a misstep. It undermines the regular characters for the sake of someone who isn't in the show anymore. Rating: 2/5. The Caretaker: Speaking of race, this is the start of the Doctor’s hostility to Danny, and the “PE” remarks unintentionally come across as nastier than they otherwise would because Danny is black. (To be fair, this is also the story where the Doctor seems to seriously consider Courtney Woods as a possible companion.) Having said that, we’re still clearly not meant to approve of the Doctor’s attitude here. Danny’s view of the Doctor isn’t completely wrong; the Doctor even defeats the skovok blitzer at the end by establishing himself as a superior authority and giving it orders. Though I suppose the Doctor’s view of Danny isn’t completely wrong either; being a former soldier seems to be Danny’s primary personality trait. Though as I noted when I reviewed it, Listen shows that it’s partly the Doctor’s fault that Danny is like that! There were some pretty good gags in this episode. I especially liked the montage at the beginning, Clara assuming that the Doctor had a celebrity-historical adventure with Jane Austen, and “Last year you said she was a very disruptive influence, so I suppose that counts as an improvement.” Rating: 3/5. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Apr 5, 2025 |
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Apr 5, 2025 01:42
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Doctor Who reviews, Second Doctor and Victoria edition: The Enemy of the World: This is the best Second Doctor story so far. Troughton’s performance here is very impressive; he really sells the idea that the Doctor and Salamander are completely different people. The side characters are very well done, too, especially Astrid, Benik, Fariah, and Griffin the grumpy chef. It’s action-packed but, as Elizabeth Sandifer points out, the cliffhangers show that the plot is really about what characters know, which helps give the story the substance to work as a 6-parter. There’s some great lines, although they don’t look quite as impressive as the page as they are when delivered. The Doctor, when Astrid asks what kind of Doctor he is: “Which law? Whose philosophies?” Griffin to Victoria: “Well sit down and write out the menus. First course interrupted by bomb explosion. Second course affected by earthquakes. Third course ruined by interference in the kitchen. I'm going out for a walk. It'll probably rain.” Fariah after being shot: “You can't threaten me now, Benik. I can only die once, and someone's beaten you to it.” You can poke holes in the plot, if you like. The subplot with the newspaper clipping is a bit overly convenient; why did a clipping get stuck to a food box now and not at any point over the past five years? And how did Salamander know where that Tardis was? But I’ve given 5s to stories that probably have worse plot issues if you care to poke at them; I even praised Terror of the Zygons for lampshading its implausibilities, interpreting it as a parody of the Pertwee era. And at least The Enemy of the World’s setting has fast transportation to avoid the “Why is everyone right next to each other?” issue that The Brain of Morbius and Genesis of the Daleks had. Rating: 5/5. The Web of Fear: The second Yeti/Great Intelligence story is genuinely tense in a way the first one wasn’t. The Great Intelligence is more proactive, the darkness of the London Underground makes for a more ominous atmosphere than a monastery, and the Yeti have been upgraded. Funny how Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart is placed in the usual situation of the Doctor in base-under-siege stories: a guy who turns up seemingly from nowhere and starts trying to take charge. Of course, that makes him the obvious suspect for the Great Intelligence’s spy! He’s recognizably the same character that he’ll be in the early Pertwee era, but he has the bad luck of being in a situation where the other characters (and the audience at the time) perceive him very differently. My only complaint about this story is the ethnic-stereotype side characters: Silverstein, a Jew who values his possessions more than his safety, and Evans, a Welshman who values his safety more than his dignity. To be fair, I’m not sure whether cowardice is a stereotype of the Welsh particularly, but he’s definitely presented as a comic-relief character (much as Welsh characters in the Pertwee era will tend to be). Rating: 4/5. Minor observations:
Next: Some statistics on seasons/companions/monsters I've seen all of. After that, probably a couple of Eleventh Doctor stories.
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Apr 7, 2025 03:26
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My Doctor Who rating averages for completed seasons, writers, companions, monsters, etc. so far: First, a few notes. I normally use the list at https://tardis.wiki/wiki/List_of_Doctor_Who_television_stories to define a season and a story. So Disney season 1 includes The Church of Ruby Road, and Empire of Death and The Legend of Ruby Sunday are counted as a single story, but the three Fourteenth Doctor specials are effectively their own three-story season. There will likely be a few exceptions in the future, though; I will probably treat Trial of a Time Lord as four stories rather than one, and The Five Doctors as part of season 20 rather than as its own one-story season. Not sure yet how I’ll handle Flux. The question of what counts as a substantial enough appearance of an ally or monster is trickier. Is The Five Doctors a Yeti story? And how can I evaluate that if I haven’t seen The Five Doctors yet? My solution for now is to default to how tardis.guide classifies stories. So The Five Doctors isn’t a Yeti story. Seasons: Season 7 (4 stories): 4 Season 8 (5 stories): 3.2 Disney season 1 (8 stories): 3.125 Monsters: Sutekh (2 stories): 2.5 Yeti (2 stories): 3 Companions and aliies: Liz Shaw (as a regular) (4 stories): 4 Adam Mitchell (2 stories): 3 Ruby Sunday (as a regular) (8 stories): 3.125 Writers: Don Houghton (2 stories): 3 Script editors: Victor Pemberton (1 story): 3 Antony Root (3 stories): 2.667 Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Apr 8, 2025 |
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Apr 8, 2025 01:29
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Fil5000 posted:I'm very glad to see Liz scoring high. I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up being the top-scoring companion in the end.
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Apr 8, 2025 12:35
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Doctor Who reviews, Amy and Rory edition: Amy’s Choice: This has more of the love triangle stuff I’m not a fan of, but the situation is genuinely tense. The concept of the Dream Lord allows for some good exploration of the Eleventh Doctor’s character, too. As in Last Christmas, the dream concept allows for some humor at the expense of Doctor Who’s standard tropes (scientifically-questionable astronomical concepts, thinly-motivated alien villains). I suppose I can’t object too much to that sort of thing after I praised Terror of the Zygons for it. Rating: 3/5. The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood: This is a season 7 throwback: The Silurians with a bit of Inferno. For the first three-quarters or so of the story it mostly works fine, but then Chibnall is stuck in the position of coming up with a happy-ish ending for The Silurians that doesn’t make present-day-ish Earth unrecognizable, with only 25 or so minutes to do it in. Less than that, actually, since he has to devote some of that time to the cracks in time storyline (which I assume Moffat mandated or even wrote himself) with Rory’s fake-out death. And so the story falls apart in a clunky discussion followed by a rush of contrivances. Maybe this story should have been set in Pete’s World or something like that to avoid the status-quo issue. Still, this is better than I was expecting. I prefer it to either of Chibnall’s stories I’ve seen from his own era. Rating: 2/5. Minor observations:
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Apr 10, 2025 03:29
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Yeah. Due to the way I got into Doctor Who by reading discussion of Doctor Who, this will be the first time I've seen a Doctor Who story genuinely unspoiled.
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Apr 10, 2025 03:54
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The Robot Revolution: It's OK. We've seen most of the ideas here (literal-minded robots, bootstrap paradoxes, the Doctor helping rebels but some of them die, etc.) before, but I like Belinda. It's been a long time since we've had a reluctant companion like Tegan. I think she's a lot more likable than Tegan in part because she's a nurse instead of a flight attendant, so wanting to go back to her job makes her seem dutiful instead of unimaginative. Rating: 3/5. Edit: I should add that despite having seen most of the ideas here before, there were several twists that came as surprises. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Apr 12, 2025 |
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Apr 12, 2025 18:08
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Open Source Idiom posted:I dunno, you can want to go back to your life for reasons other than doing your job. Definitely, but sometimes Tegan does come across as wanting to get back to her job specifically.
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Apr 12, 2025 18:44
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Eiba posted:I'm not a fan of people dying for comedic effect either, and honestly I'm thinking back to how many irreverent deaths there have been in this show and it's honestly been kind of lovely for a while. How long do you mean by “a while”? Because Doctor Who has been doing this sort of thing since the Dennis Spooner era.
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Apr 12, 2025 23:50
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Doctor Who reviews, Daleks made of people edition Revelation of the Daleks: Amazing how much of a gulf there can be between a Doctor Who writer’s best and worst stories. This sells the horror of being turned into a monster far better than Attack of the Cybermen did. (And Earthshock didn’t even try, weirdly enough.) It definitely sells the idea that the Sixth Doctor and Peri don’t completely hate each other far better than Attack of the Cybermen did. (To be fair to Saward-as-writer, that’s only to be expected, as Attack of the Cybermen is set right after The Twin Dilemma. But that’s partly Saward-as-script-editor’s fault to begin with.) I think Saward is better at dark comedy than at straight-faced dark action-adventure. I love when Doctor Who mashes together several existing stories that have nothing to do with each other like this. In this case it’s Soylent Green, Don Quixote, Return of the Jedi, and Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One (which Saward read while on vacation in Rhodes right before he wrote this). Perhaps it’s because I haven’t seen Destiny of the Daleks or Resurrection of the Daleks yet, but I’m not sure I completely understand Davros’ motivations at this point. It feels like he’s become a Master-style villain who’s more obsessed with the Doctor than with his nominal goals. He isn’t really being used to make a serious commentary on fascism anymore. He’s more fun this way, though. Rating: 4/5. Minor observations:
Asylum of the Daleks: I’m fed up with the Amy/Rory relationship drama; every time the show goes there, it makes Amy a bit more unsympathetic. Also, Oswin is a less interesting character than the real Clara will turn out to be; she has basically two character traits (flirty, likes souffles) that get reiterated over and over. Characterization aside, the basic plot here is fine, I guess, if a bit standard; the power of emotions and a side-character’s self-sacrifice save the day. The usual criticism of this story is that Oswin hacking the path-web was a deus ex machina because the path-web had never been mentioned before. I was about to say that the path-web was mentioned earlier in the episode… And then I checked the transcript. No it wasn’t! The path-web comes out of nowhere! Though to be fair, the episode had plenty of examples of Dalek technology messing with people’s memories, so maybe it’s not too much of a stretch to use Dalek technology to mess with Daleks’ memories… Who am I kidding? It’s a shameless deus ex machina. Rating: 2/5. Minor observations:
Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Apr 23, 2025 |
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Apr 15, 2025 12:29
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PriorMarcus posted:Asylum of the Dalek's always read more like a Cyberman story to me than a Dalek one. In fact, I've always thought that Moffat didnt really "get" Dalek's with the bits of lore he added in. It’s funny how, despite their seemingly opposite concepts (as a commenter on Elizabeth Sandifer’s site put it, the Daleks are all-rejecting and the Cybermen are all-embracing) they tend to be somewhat interchangeable in practice. In addition to all the stories where Daleks turn people into Daleks, Daleks are presented as “logical” robots, and Cybermen spitefully massacre people, the new series has the Master appear alongside the Cybermen so often (and even create new types of Cybermen) that he/she almost feels like their version of Davros. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Apr 15, 2025 |
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Apr 15, 2025 13:05
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McGann posted:BF's Main Range did an arc, 197-200 that follows this trope. I enjoyed it although I wish they'd done actual stories (and not had the big bad be the monk, that's not really his thing...but his pathos is good albeit confusing as hell for the Doctors since he is mad at 8 . Actually, they did something like that with Return to Shada.
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Apr 16, 2025 00:47
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The_Doctor posted:…you don’t know much about RTD, do you? Davies is gay, but he’s also a cis man whose handling of trans issues in the past hasn’t always been great.
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Apr 17, 2025 13:43
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I didn’t see Rogue as trying to own the right-wingers. I’m not a fan of the Doctor having romantic relationships with humans either, although Fifteen/Rogue at least feels less skeevy than Ten/Rose (or Two/Jamie).
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Apr 17, 2025 14:50
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Davies didn’t write Rogue, though.
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Apr 17, 2025 15:19
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Slyphic posted:I just want more companions that aren't 1) young 2) contemporary 3) British 4) women - doesn't have to be a full sweep, just please let's stop hitting all four points. I had such expectations for 'the fam'... Like can we get 15 and Percule Hoirot or something (he's still not Public Domain in the UK, ugh, rare point for America here) The weirdest thing is that companions that met all four criteria were actually fairly rare in the classic series. Technically it was just Dodo, Polly, and Ace. Though Liz, Jo, Sarah Jane, and Mel were from near enough in the future that it didn’t make much difference most of the time. Edit: Liz was still pretty different from modern companions, though, because she was an exceptional scientific genius instead of being presented as an “ordinary person”. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Apr 17, 2025 |
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Apr 17, 2025 22:14
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Demons of the Punjab: A Lucarotti-style historical! Despite being one of the primary story types of Doctor Who back in its very first season, they’ve been rare ever since. (On television, at least; they’re much more common in spinoff material.) Usually when the Doctor and his companions visit the past, it’s either a comedy story, a pastiche of existing historically-set fiction rather than an actual attempt to represent the past, and/or a standard Doctor Who story type (e.g., a base under siege) where the time period is of secondary importance. But here we get a story that’s actually about a historical event (albeit more recent than the periods visited in Hartnell-era historicals), that takes it seriously and indeed tragically, and that presents the past as both dangerous and immutable. And while there are aliens other than the Tardis crew, they’re primarily bystanders. At the same time, this is a story that obviously couldn’t have been told in the Hartnell era. Not just because the Partition of India had happened less than 20 years ago at that point, but also because, of course, there were no South Asian companions in that era. Chibnall’s commitment to diversity has been accused of being somewhat surface-level, and maybe sometimes it is, but credit where credit is due here: it really did open up new possibilities for stories. A big part of what makes the story work is its willingness to violate the “always a twist at the end” principle. As soon as the true nature of the aliens is revealed about halfway through the story, it’s fairly obvious how the story will end, and that contributes to the story’s emotional force. (Father’s Day, which has elements of a Lucarotti-style historical but isn’t quite one, does something similar.) The only thing that really brings the story down is the dull bit where the characters make speeches at the wedding, but that sort of thing comes with the territory of the Lucarotti-style historical to an extent. Rating: 4/5. Minor observations:
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Apr 19, 2025 02:32
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Lux: Although the general concept here is similar to The Giggle and The Devil's Chord, this episode has the best execution of the three. It has a more satisfying ending than The Giggle, at least (due to the risk of resolutions in Pantheon stories coming across as arbitrary, giving the ending away in advance was actually a clever move). It has a lot of fun with the trapped-in-a-film idea – it helps that Davies knows a lot more about television and film than he does about games or music. Rating: 4/5.
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Apr 19, 2025 20:26
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Terrible accents are traditionally Whovian, though.
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Apr 21, 2025 00:15
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Doctor Who reviews, key-collecting edition The Keys of Marinus: Not surprisingly given the episodic nature of this story, the episodes vary in quality. The Screaming Jungle is probably the weakest, because the basic idea of aggressive plants doesn’t have enough substance for a full episode. So we get mechanical traps (an oddly common form of padding in 60s Doctor Who) and the contrived dying words subplot (the nadir of which is Ian fiddling with the safe). It also features Susan at her most timid and childish, though to be fair, I think the implication was that her developing psychic powers flared up and she had the harrowing experience of direct mental exposure to the evil plants’ malice. The strongest episode is Sentence of Death; it has the most plot substance, and I like seeing the Doctor as a detective. The Snows of Terror is memorably disturbing. The mind-control plot of The Velvet Web isn’t especially original, but I like the brain-slug design. One neat effect of the episodic approach is that it helps sell Marinus as a planet, not a town or even a country; it has jungles and snowy mountains and cities, just like Earth does, and the travel dials are necessary because the distance between the locations of the keys would otherwise be too great. This is something Doctor Who is not always very good at; in some stories this is largely a matter of budgetary limitations requiring as much as possible to be kept offscreen, but sometimes the writers simply don’t seem to understand the scale involved, with Colony in Space being the worst offender. This story has been criticized for the protagonists seeming to be weirdly OK with mind control. To be fair, he does end up concluding, “I don’t believe that man was made to be controlled by machines.” And the Tardis crew were initially retrieving the keys under duress in the first place; it’s not like they volunteered to repair the Conscience of Marinus. If the Doctor’s position seems to shift, perhaps that’s attributable to his experience with the brain slugs moving him towards a more anti-mind-control position. Still, the ethical issues with the Conscience should probably have gotten more focus. As it is, you could change the story to be about a weather control machine instead of a mind control machine with fairly minimal rewrites. Rating: 3/5. The Armageddon Factor: This is better than I expected. There’s an oppressive atmosphere here; just watching it gives you cabin fever. Romana has recovered her competence after the mishandling of her character in The Androids of Tara and The Power of Kroll, and K9 is also used well (not surprisingly, as the writers of this story, Bob Baker and Dave Martin, created him). That said, I can see the problems. The initially interesting character of Princess Astra is sidelined, because it seems to be a rule of classic Doctor Who that only one female character can be competent per story. (OK, I’m being slightly unfair to the series here; The Visitation, for example, violates this “rule”.) The Shadow is an obnoxiously generic villain; he even has an evil laugh. There’s also few ill-judged bits of effects and/or acting, mostly in the second half of the story. The way Shapp collapses after being shot by a Mute, for example; I’m not sure if that was terrible acting or just an attempt at dark comedy that didn’t work. And despite what I said about the oppressive atmosphere, it’s not a particularly convincing portrayal of a nuclear war specifically. Though I suppose it’s probably more logistically plausible than the Thousand-Year War from Genesis of the Daleks. The ending works well on its own terms, but there’s a notorious problem with it in the context of The Ribos Operation. (Also a smaller continuity problem in the context of Stones of Blood, but that one doesn’t really matter.) “The White Guardian would never have had such a callous disregard for human life,” declares the Doctor, except…for all we know, the White Guardian would. He’s the embodiment of order rather than good as such. But in a sense, this doesn’t really matter; if it really was the White Guardian and he really was a callous rear end in a top hat, that would also be a good reason not to give him the Key. And the very end of the story shows that the Doctor doesn’t see order as inherently good or chaos as inherently bad; he likes things unpredictable. Overall, though, I think that a lot of what people find unsatisfying about the ending of the Key to Time storyline is really the fault of the stories in the middle. The portrayal of the Guardians in The Armageddon Factor doesn’t perfectly match their portrayal in The Ribos Operation, but the real issue is their absence, and even the absence of the Key as something more than a MacGuffin, from the stories in between. There’s a real wasted opportunity in The Androids of Tara, for instance, where Lamia is studying the fourth segment of the Key, and this doesn’t lead to anything. Rating: 3/5. Minor observations:
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Apr 23, 2025 02:09
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Open Source Idiom posted:Rewatching that Sue Tech two parter from last year. Forgot about Kate's child soldiers lmfao. For the sake of not ruining the Pertwee era as a whole, I tend to agree with the common fan view that the Brigadier only sealed the caves rather than killing all the hibernating Silurians, and the Doctor just misunderstood what was happening. Though a line in The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood (“The humans attacked them. They died.”) is hard to reconcile with this theory. As much as I love The Silurians, that ending really was a mistake in the broader context of the era. It should have been someone else (Major-General Scobie from Spearhead from Space?) giving the order to blow up the Silurians. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Apr 25, 2025 |
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Apr 25, 2025 01:21
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Rochallor posted:If Boom felt like Moffat doing a greatest hits, this feels like RTD doing Moffat's greatest hits. It's an Angel, it's sort of the Silence, it's sort of even the monster-that-might-have-just-been-a-kid from Listen, and it feels derivative of and lesser than those stories. I initially thought it was going to be a Weeping Angels story when they mentioned snapped necks and broken mirrors.
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Apr 27, 2025 14:46
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Day of the Daleks: There’s some interesting things going on here, from some complicated acting from Aubrey Woods as the Controller to the way the threat of war between the USSR and PRC is paralleled by the conflict between the Stalinist-coded Controller and the Maoist-coded guerrillas. Despite all that, and despite the timey-wimey elements that are fairly rare in the classic series, there’s an odd simplicity to this story. The actual plot consists largely of captures and escapes, and the explanation for the time paradox turns out to involve the guerrillas (especially Shura) being absurdly stupid. Though speaking of characters behaving stupidly, I like that when Jo helps the Controller, the circumstances make her actions a lot more understandable than Adric’s in Four to Doomsday. Her apparent reluctance to change her mind during the conversation with the Doctor and the Controller afterward does make her seem somewhat dense, though. A common criticism of this story is that the Daleks aren’t prominent enough in it. I don’t really agree. It’s true that the Daleks don’t get a ton of screentime, and that the original plan for this story didn’t involve Daleks. But the parallels to The Dalek Invasion of Earth make this very clearly a Dalek story. This story introduces the Ogrons, and I’m not a fan of them. The name implies that the concept they were going for was “fairy tale ogre,” but the end result ends up being uncomfortably evocative of racial stereotypes. Rating: 3/5 Minor observations:
Next: Probably Midnight and The Well
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Apr 27, 2025 15:03
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OldMemes posted:There is a fun bit where he needs to fight some of the rats in the TARDIS, and is trying to find a loophole about what "counts" as a weapon, but Turlough really doesn't get much to do. Which is a shame, as before remote recording, they only had Mark Strickson in to record every so often, so Turlough stories are a bit of a rarity. Ah, the Radio Times: spoiling returning monsters since The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
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Apr 27, 2025 19:49
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Doctor Who reviews, Moon edition The Moonbase: OK, let’s begin with the good points. I enjoyed seeing Ben and Polly being competent. (OK, maybe a little too competent in Ben’s case; isn’t he supposed to be a sailor, not a scientist?) And the plot makes more sense than the plots of Cybermen stories usually do. But this is a generic base under siege with underwhelming antagonists. Our heroes already know from the events of The Tenth Planet that Cybermen are vulnerable to radiation, but soon learn that they’re vulnerable to gravity and nail polish remover too. They are also obviously neither as intelligent nor as emotionless as they think they are, and it’s unclear how intentional this is. Also, most of the side characters are bland, and the beginning of the story is too slow-paced. Rating: 2/5. Kill the Moon: Three standard criticisms of this story are that 1) it’s scientifically nonsensical even by Doctor Who standards, 2) it comes across as some kind of incoherent allegory about abortion, and 3) the ending is a deus ex machina. The standard defenses are 1) it’s actually good when Doctor Who is scientifically nonsensical, 2) an incoherent allegory is no allegory at all, and 3) …actually, I’m not sure what the defense to this one is supposed to be. I think the real problem with this story, though, is that it takes the anti-utilitarian moral outlook Doctor Who occasionally espouses to stupid extremes. As Andrew Rilstone puts it, “Kill one thing in order to save billions of things doesn’t seem like a very difficult dilemma to me. I have a sense that Moffat think [sic] that it is significant that we are being asked to kill one really big thing in order to save millions of small things, but that ought not to make a difference.” I’m not sure why Rilstone is trying to figure out what Moffat thinks instead of what Peter Harness thinks; possibly he’s making an unconscious connection to Beast Below. As others have pointed out, Beast Below is the non-stupid version of this story. For one thing, it handles the moral issue far better by giving Amy a good reason to reject the apparent dilemma as a false one. Let’s return to the scientific meta-issue here. Why do I find the nonsensical science here annoying when I’m willing to tolerate or even enjoy it in, say, Evil of the Daleks? There’s two key differences between Evil of the Daleks and Kill the Moon that I think explain this. First, David Whittaker is drawing on real-world mystical and pseudoscientific ideas in ways that suit the aesthetic of the Victorian setting. The problem isn’t simply that “The moon is an egg” is obviously wrong; it’s that it’s obviously wrong in a way that feels childish. Second, previous Doctor Who stories, especially ones by Whittaker, build up to the weirdness of Evil of the Daleks. The Edge of Destruction prepares us for the idea of a time machine that works by manipulating images, and Power of the Daleks prepares us for static electricity doing bizarre Dalek-related things. I guess you can argue that Kill the Moon is building on the “fairy tale” elements of the Moffat era, but it’s just too big a leap. It's a pity because the ending, with Clara calling the Doctor out on his condescending attitude and manipulative behavior, is quite good. It deserved to be the ending to a better episode. Rating: 1/5 Next: Midnight and The Well, for real this time.
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May 1, 2025 03:45
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Doctor Who reviews, Midnight edition Midnight: I suspect Davies wrote this shortly after an unpleasant plane, train, or bus trip. Actually, if I was looking for a reason to hate this story, I’d cite the setting as an example of Davies’ inability to imagine the past or future as meaningfully different from the present. But I think it works here; the fundamental ordinariness of the tour bus setting and the people in it is necessary to make the story’s bleak view of human nature convincing. I expected the repetition gimmick to get annoying eventually, but it also worked very well; the gradual shift from repeating to speaking in unison to predicting to controlling built tension very effectively. Rating: 4/5 The Well: For some reason, base-under-siege stories with returning monsters in dimly lit environments seem to work well, at least for me; I liked The Web of Fear and The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone. Maybe the real problem with The Moonbase is that the moonbase is too brightly lit. So it’s no surprise that my initial impression of this story was positive. Speaking of lighting, despite the name, the Doctor previously encountered the Midnight entity in broad daylight, and it didn’t have the clock face gimmick. It’s as though the writers didn’t watch Midnight and were mostly guessing what it was about based on the title…except, of course, Davies wrote Midnight and co-wrote The Well, so clearly this is deliberate. It’s interesting that different people seem to interpret the in-universe significance of the entity’s changing “rules” differently; the Tardis wiki assumes that the entity’s powers somehow changed as it adapted to the environment of the well, or something like that, while posters here seem to latch onto the Doctor’s remark about the entity “playing games” and assume that it was telekinetic as well as telepathic all along, and limits its powers in particular situations for its own amusement. The later interpretation fits with the reading that the entity really did escape at the end, as opposed to one of the soldiers just worrying that it did. Several people have nitpicked the plot here, although none of the issues people have pointed out occurred to me while I was watching it. Well, maybe I was vaguely aware that a lot of the problem was caused by Aliss not actually explaining everything she knew initially, but that isn’t a plot hole; that’s just a character behaving somewhat irrationally in a very stressful situation, as people do. One thing I did dislike at the time, though: Belinda and the Doctor are getting along a little too well. It seems like the Belinda has already lost a big part of what made her interesting…although it’s still too early in the season to judge for sure. I guess the reason I’m writing so much about this one is that I’m having trouble deciding between a 4 and a 3. I’m probably overthinking it. It’s spooky and I liked it. Rating: 4/5 Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 12:26 on May 2, 2025 |
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May 2, 2025 00:51
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And here are my updated rating averages. Seasons (titles made up by me except for season 16): Season 7: Exiled to Earth (4 stories): 4 Season 8: UNIT vs. the Master (5 stories): 3.2 Disney season 1: The One Who Waits (8 stories): 3.125 Season 16: The Key to Time (6 stories): 3 Series 8: The Promised Land (11 stories): 2.818 Monsters: Midnight Entity (2 stories): 4 Yeti (2 stories): 3 Sutekh (2 stories): 2.5 Companions and allies: Liz Shaw (as a regular) (4 stories): 4 Ruby Sunday (as a regular) (8 stories): 3.125 Romana I (6 stories): 3 Adam Mitchell (2 stories): 3 Writers: Don Houghton (2 stories): 3 Script editors: Victor Pemberton (1 story): 3 Antony Root (3 stories): 2.667 Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 00:59 on May 2, 2025 |
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May 2, 2025 00:57
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Doctor Who reviews, McTighe edition: Praxeus: Introducing five or so significant one-off supporting characters, in an era that already has three companions, for a one-episode story is a bold choice. It works better than it should, but there are issues. The contrived bit where Graham has to act as Jake’s psychologist because there wasn’t time to explore Jake’s characterization more organically, for instance. And the way Suki’s assistant gets abruptly killed off when he picks a fight with some birds for some reason and then is never mentioned again. (What was his deal? Did he know Suki was an alien?) The opening narration suggests that what McTighe and Chibnall were aiming for with this story (hence all the characters) is a Doctor Who take on the “we’re-all-connected” stories common in the 2000s. Both the movie version of this sort of story (Crash, Babel) and the TV version (Lost, Heroes) are generally viewed pretty negatively nowadays when people think about them at all, so I’m not sure why they thought this was a good idea. Despite the issues mentioned above about having too many characters, it’s hard to point to anything seriously wrong with this story. It has pretty scenery, and it’s hard to object to the plastic-pollution-is-bad message. But it’s lacking something I can’t put my finger on. Andrew Rilstone suggests that the problems with it are 1) it’s a “non-arc” episode that comes right after Fugitive of the Judoon, so it feels insignificant, and 2) the reveal of Suki’s identity is arbitrary. I don’t think either of those are quite it, though (after all, I haven’t watched Fugitive of the Judoon yet). Actually, I think I may have realized what the problem is while writing the minor observations section… Rating: 2/5 Minor observations:
Lucky Day: I don’t really buy the characterization of Conrad here. It feels like McTighe was trying to reuse the twist from The Runaway Bride where Lance rants about how annoying it is to pretend to be in love with Donna, but it doesn’t work because Ruby is a lot more perceptive than Donna was back then. The plot simply requires Conrad to be too good an actor. (I don’t really object to his contradictory motivations, though; that part seems true to life.) I also agree that the story feels somewhat thematically muddled, politically (though to be fair, at lot of that is probably the result of the episode being made so long before it aired). I’d probably have more to say about that if I’d watched Kerblam for comparison instead of Praxeus. And I could have done without the Doctor’s speech at the end. Overall, I like this better than Praxeus, but it’s still the weakest story of the season so far. Rating: 2/5. Minor observations:
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May 4, 2025 02:24
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The TV Movie: The structural flaws of this are easy to point out. Opening with a big lump of exposition was a mistake. Having the Doctor spend so much of his screen time first in his seventh incarnation, then in a state of post-regeneration confusion was a mistake. Using the Master as the only real villain was a mistake. That said, it’s worth pointing out what this story does right, or at least, what it doesn’t do wrong. It’s recognizably a Doctor Who story in a way that the Leekley draft wouldn’t have been. It looks pretty, at least by the standards of 80s Doctor Who. McGann is good. The supporting cast are better than I expected. I can understand why people hated it at the time, when its mistakes meant that the Wilderness Years would continue, but it’s hard to muster up that kind of anger at it now. Rating: 2/5 Minor observations:
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May 4, 2025 15:05
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My Doctor Who rating averages for completed seasons, writers, companions, monsters, etc. so far: I admit to being somewhat unsure which stories should “count” for purposes of the averages. If I count Night of the Doctor, on what grounds can I exclude the zillions of Eleventh and Twelfth Doctor minisodes? Does Shada count? Dimensions in Time? Curse of Fatal Death? The various animated serials? Even if Night of the Doctor “counts,” isn’t it actually part of the Eleventh Doctor era? The spreadsheet that inspired the project, which covers the classic series only, includes Shada but not Dimensions in Time. (It doesn’t include the TV movie either, but the movie is arguably not part of the classic series, unlike Dimensions in Time which is very much the work of the same producer as 80s Doctor Who.) It also, incidentally, treats Trial of a Time Lord as four stories rather than one. In accordance with these precedents, I guess I should exclude all minisodes (and maybe treat Flux as six stories). Doctor’s eras Eighth Doctor (1 story): 2 Seasons (titles made up by me except for season 16): Season 7: Exiled to Earth (4 stories): 4 Season 8: UNIT vs. the Master (5 stories): 3.2 Disney season 1: The One Who Waits (8 stories): 3.125 Season 16: The Key to Time (6 stories): 3 Series 8: The Promised Land (11 stories): 2.818 The Wilderness Years (1 story): 2 Monsters: Midnight Entity (2 stories): 4 Yeti (2 stories): 3 Sutekh (2 stories): 2.5 Companions and aliies: Liz Shaw (as a regular) (4 stories): 4 Ruby Sunday (as a regular) (8 stories): 3.125 Romana I (6 stories): 3 Adam Mitchell (2 stories): 3 Writers: Don Houghton (2 stories): 3 Script editors: Victor Pemberton (1 story): 3 Antony Root (3 stories): 2.667 Producers: Philip Segal (1 story): 2 Next: The Eighth Doctor in review
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May 4, 2025 21:15
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Xelkelvos posted:Depends on if that spin-off actually materializes at this point given the performance of Disney Who. The spin-off is already ordered, IIRC. It's only the third season of the main series that's up in the air.
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May 5, 2025 00:18
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Era review: The Eighth Doctor After I finish a Doctor's era, I plan to rank their television stories, which will add more nuance to the 1-5 ratings and allow me to compare my views of stories to the DWM poll results. Here are my Eighth Doctor rankings: 1. The TV Movie (2/5) That was easy! If I were to include all of the Eighth Doctor stories I've watched or listened to so far, the results would be: 1. Night of the Doctor (5/5) 2. Chimes of Midnight (4/5) 3. The TV Movie (2/5) This is the point where I say something about the Eighth Doctor, I guess. The conventional wisdom is that every Doctor is a reaction against the previous one. The Seventh Doctor is old and calculating, so the Eighth Doctor is young and impulsive. The Eighth Doctor is optimistic and dresses like a 19th-century dandy, so the Ninth Doctor is grumpy (at least at first) and working-class. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that. It's also the conventional wisdom that the novels were inconsistent in their characterization of the Eighth Doctor, and that McGann himself took the character in a somewhat different direction from what one might expect from the movie in his Big Finish audios. And I can see that in Chimes of Midnight; he has a certain sense of wry detachment - or maybe he's just calmer because he isn't immediately post-regenerative. One thing the movie deserves some credit for that I don't think I discussed before is establishing the Eighth Doctor's instinctive sense of morality. The War Doctor retcon exists because Moffat thought it would be out of character for the Eighth Doctor to destroy Gallifrey (and Christopher Eccleston wasn't interested in returning as the Ninth Doctor). This is ironic because the Eighth Doctor did destroy Gallifrey in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels...and yet I can see where Moffat was coming from. The movie manages to fit in three iconic moments (discarding the gunbelt, taking himself hostage instead of the cop or Grace, and trying to save the Master) that make it hard to accept the Eighth Doctor doing such a thing. Whereas I could definitely buy the Second Doctor, for example, doing something like that in sufficiently extreme circumstances.
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May 5, 2025 03:33
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Jerusalem posted:Have to admit at the start in the department store I was half-thinking Autons were gonna show up. Those sort of fake-outs involving past antagonists seem to be a weird trend this season. Before the Midnight reveal, The Well hints at Cassandra (Britney Spears' Toxic) and Weeping Angels (snapped necks). In Lux we have the Toymaker's Giggle...which turns out to be a general Pantheon thing now and not just a Toymaker thing. Later in Lucky Day we have the Think Tank reveal...which seems to be a completely different Think Tank from the one in Robot.
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May 5, 2025 03:38
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Brigadier Sockface posted:Why is the wheelchair boy now a girl? Why is everyone dressed like David Tennant? Shirley is from the Fourteenth Doctor era. Has it really been that long ago already? Morris Gibbons is a separate character from The Legend of Ruby Sunday/Empire of Death.
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May 5, 2025 23:23
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