Doctor Who

[Guest]

Got my days mixed up. It was Friday and I thought it was Saturday so I thought I'd missed it.

Phew.

Except on Saturday I forgot it was on so I missed it. Thank god for iplayer.

[CarloOos]

I've seen four episodes of the show since the end of Matt Smith's second series and that includes this one because I went off the show so thoroughly. Don't worry, you'll have your thread of uninterrupted positivity back next week.

That's a bit off the mark, I don't think this thread has ever been full of "uninterrupted positivity". When the show's not actually on, whilst Sprite does his recaps, maybe.

[Sprite Machine]

Heh, my recaps are hardly uninterrupted positivity either!

Anyway, I thought that was decent. Capaldi's good, Clara has improved, VFX were excellent and the clockwork dude was kinda terrifying. It didn't have the makings of a classic, but I can't put my finger on what it's missing. The slapstick stuff was a bit... weird.

[NEG]

It was poorly written for the most part, translating the Dino/homeless/Matt scenes were best. Too long, terribly dull. Too much Silurian/Jenny. Worst nu-who doctor introduction episode.

Ending makes me tired of series-long arcs, as background filler as they could possibly make them.

Capaldi himself, he's alright, but I have to admit I need to turn the volume up to fully understand what he's saying at times due to the accent. Glad Clara has some personality now.

Not even the Sontarian scenes saved this. I basically dread every Moffat written episode these days.

[CarloOos]

Heh, my recaps are hardly uninterrupted positivity either!

Anyway, I thought that was decent. Capaldi's good, Clara has improved, VFX were excellent and the clockwork dude was kinda terrifying. It didn't have the makings of a classic, but I can't put my finger on what it's missing. The slapstick stuff was a bit... weird.

Ha, and nor should they be! I meant the mood of the thread rather than the recaps themselves.

The whole opening with the dinosaur and Capaldi 'doing a Matt Smith' just felt completely misjudged and out of place; as a premise it was the bad kind of nonsense, it wasn't very well executed from either a technical or dramatic perspective, and also bore almost no connection to the rest of the episode. The dinosaur itself was only in about three shots, seemingly for the sake of the trailers.

If they had ditched that whole setpiece and opened with Capaldi being as intense and mysterious as he was in the alley, I think we'd have been left with a much more solid, cohesive episode. As it is I have no desire to rewatch it but can't wait to see more of him, and echo that Clara seems much improved.

[LyonJacques]

And all those Moffat-scripted pleas for Clara to see the Doctor we all know and love beneath the lined face and grey hair was blatantly aimed squarely at the younger/female Who fan base. Lol.

Didn't she jump in and out of his timeline rescuing him and thus see every one of his other faces? Including some pretty old ones? Plus Matt Smith got to live until he was really old too... Why does it never make any fucking sense?

[footle]

Didn't she jump in and out of his timeline rescuing him and thus see every one of his other faces? Including some pretty old ones? Plus Matt Smith got to live until he was really old too... Why does it never make any fucking sense?

She did, but then she also didn't seem to do this during the aftermath of a regeneration (nutty doctor ahoy?); and I can't remember how she got out of that timeline... Perhaps she didn't?

[Flub]

I get the impression they've decided that Clara Prime has no awareness now of what all her Clara splinters did. Which is probably handy since at least one of them was a Gallifreyan.

(Until someone decides it would be handy if she remembers obviously) But yeah it didn't ring true really. Given what we know of Clara and the fact that she prefers brain to pretty boy I'd have thought she'd be the last person to be freaked by a new Doctor.

I do like Capaldi and I hope Coleman stays a lot longer now but I suspect we'll find the rumours about her leaving are true.

[dismembo]

I really enjoyed that episode. The oversized dinosaur was interesting. I liked how the doctor was translating what was happening to it: frightened, cold and alone in an unfamiliar environment. I liked the return of the victorian gang. The robot was creepy. I thought it was going to turn out to be a manifestation of the great intelligence, as the costume was so similar. That escape pod balloon was made from human skin!

I felt that somehow, there was a more adult tone to the story but I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it was the slower pace? It felt like there was time to absorb the atmosphere more.

[El Pibe]

It was pretty good and Capaldi showed signs that he'll be a good Doctor. Agree with the Moffat criticism - he still appears to be really lacking new ideas. I just hope we won't see anymore of River Song.

[strider]

My nine-year-old hated it until it got to the restaurant

and then she started getting scared, peeking through her fingers whenever the cyborgs were on (she loves getting scared by doctor who). Her favourite part was the kiss between the two women, when she said : ooh, lesbi-friends. She got incredibly excited when it was revealed that the daleks were back.

[Not Thread Owner]

Did you watch the behind the scenes thing? The half clockwork head in particularly looked unnervingly real and had some really intricate stuff inside.

That's clearly where all the money went. If only they'd a few pence spare to make it less obvious everyone was superimposed over a fake London.

[hmm]

There was a decent half hour in the middle, with the pleasingly creepy clockwork army, but the rest was largely terrible.

I usually drift in and out of new Who - mostly out - but I'll give this series the benefit of the doubt for a bit longer because of Capaldi. Think I'd prefer an 'uncut' sweary version though.

[Hello Goaty ♥]

On reflection, this was supposed to be a biggg arrival of a new series and a new doctor.

It was supposed like Bonfire Night .. but it rained. HARD

[macosx]

Really enjoyed that especially the end. Think the music in this really undermines the whole thing though.

[Hello Goaty ♥]

What about it did you enjoy?

Most of us only liked the Tramp in the Alleyway bit

[macosx]

have only dipped into one or two episodes per series but really liked Capaldi and his less manic portrayal and how he was finding it hard to adapt. Will maybe watch the next one Intrigued who Missy was at the end.

[LaParka]

After reading Reddit I can very well see why they have to explain Capaldi being a bit weird post regeneration (and going on about his age). It seens a big % of the viewers are watching it thinking Eccleston is the starting point.

They wouldn't have seen Colin Baker trying to strangle after his regeneration!

I realised after watching it that my kids are psychopaths. When they were up in the skin balloon they were both shouting that the Dr should push him out...

[Nick R]

Capaldi and Coleman great. The story Meh. The disparity in the direction annoys me. Wheatley can't do fight sequences.

This is pretty much exactly how I felt. It felt a little like a Russell t Davies directed episode, where it looked a lot more cartoony and less like the Matt smith ones which looked way better in terms of the set and lighting; I can't really describe it but if you watch even a minute of a Martha jones and tennant clip and then a Gillan and Smith clip the latter feels a lot more cinematic?

RTD didn't direct any Doctor Who episodes!

But on the subject of the direction...

That's clearly where all the money went. If only they'd a few pence spare to make it less obvious everyone was superimposed over a fake London.

There seemed to be a couple of scenes where they avoided cutting back to SFX shots (mostly of the dinosaur), more obviously than usual. But that also seemed to happen in a less SFX-heavy scene: when Clara first got trapped in the room with the robots, it seemed to spend a long time on shots of just her and the door, without cutting back to the robots to show how close to her they were, or how threateningly they were behaving.

After the Xmas special, I wrote this:

The emphasis on Matt Smith's whole "I will remember this, every single day of it" speech raised my suspicions that it was foreshadowing memory issues as a side-effect of the regeneration. So I hope that Capaldi's "Do you know how to fly this thing?" doesn't mean that the next episode will spend ages with the Doctor an an amnesiac.

Amnesia storylines in fiction are a dime a dozen, but ones that are done well are very, very rare!

So a large part of the episode was an amnesia storyline, and in a few parts that did become annoying. Like The Christmas Invasion, and unlike Rose and The Eleventh Hour, it's hard to judge this new Doctor based on this one episode, because we only get to see his new personality properly established towards the end of the episode.

However, I think the episode generally worked well for Clara, who I think came across better here than in Eleven's episodes. Not that I disliked her before, it's just that I never really thought the last series did enough to show how her feistiness was at all distinguishable from Amy's. Neat idea to have her teaching experience be the thing that saves her from the robots - although it didn't need to repeat the flashback to the schoolgirl!

As for the clockwork robots, and the link to The Girl in the Fireplace: I know a lot of the delay in the Doctor figuring out the connection can be put down to his amnesia, but I think the show took a bit too long getting to the revelation - I felt too far ahead of the characters for too long, and I think that's partly down to the longer episode length. But when it finally came, I loved his dismissal of the name Madame de Pompadour.

More entries for the Moffat Times Table: "How long can you hold your breath" = "How long can you avoid blinking?" And the spaceship disguised as a restaurant was very reminiscent of The Lodger.

So the sonic screwdriver can unlock horses' reins now...?

I liked the slapstick joke with the newspaper... but not the Doctor wackily falling through a tree and the gag with Vastra's car lock sound effect.

Is the alley scene, where the Doctor's asking where he's seen that face before... is this perhaps going to lead up to some in-universe acknowledgement of the link to Fires of Pompeii?

[Mogster]

Is the alley scene, where the Doctor's asking where he's seen that face before... is this perhaps going to lead up to some in-universe acknowledgement of the link to Fires of Pompeii?

I don't think it's going to be explored, but I think that was the implication. The Doctor apparently picks his faces from his memories, sometimes at least, and probably subconsciously.

[Dr Derek Doctors]

I really enjoyed it overall. The opening with the dinosaur was terrible, as was the putting to sleep scene, but as soon as they got to the bit about the Doctor showing his true face and Jenna Coleman got the opportunity to do some acting at last it was really solid. Plus the VFX for the half-face man were *really* excellent. Watched it at a cinema and they totally held up as convincing on the big screen. Plus the last scene with the phone-call was a lovely touch. Even if it did seem to exist primarily to placate the viewership, it still felt emotionally satisfying - which has been a rare thing in Dr Who in recent years.

[Rudi von Starnberg]

Right, so you're saying that the show doesn't challenge children or introduce new concepts despite the fact that you've hardly seen the programme recently. Suffice to say, literally every second that you've missed has been stuffed to the brim with all the children-challenging new elements you could imagine, which is pretty impressive for a meagre second of a TV show.

Ah, here we are. Beneath the sarcasm there's the other side of the 'you say you don't like it but you still watch it' coin; the face that says 'you haven't watched it enough to properly judge it (every episode)'. Handy get-outs, both of them.

I stopped watching it because the show's flaws were overwhelming any enjoyment I could get from it and the four episodes I've seen since had the exact same flaws on display. These were Hide, as I'd heard that was a notably good one in a season of crap (it wasn't), the two specials with the War Doctor etc, and now this one. None of these have been good although this newest one was at least no worse than mediocre. The same things I came to dislike about Moffat's tenure are still on show though, and indeed many of these flaws are ones he shares with RTD. Both of them suffer from getting their own way for far too long as the series went on and becoming increasingly detached from actual stakes and drama and reliant on meaningless technobabble and predictabilities to carry each story forward, with a dependency on the sonic screwdriver as a cure-all magic wand.

Moffat's writing is safe for a peculiar value of safe - it taps into several hideous zeitgeists that make it enduringly if bemusingly popular, much like Sherlock. And this stuff has been in his writing all the way back to 2005 - for instance the flag-waving Britain-uber-alles stuff was there in The Doctor Dances in the form of a paean to Blitz spirit and how plucky little Britain could accomplish so much, but it was acceptable in context - as a way to buck up the spirits of 1940s British characters. It's far harder to accept when that sort of thing becomes the context and is the very fabric of the show and the stories it tells, and you end up with Starship UK and deifications of Churchill and all that nonsense. It's like the televisual equivalent of a Keep Calm And Carry On poster, to the extent that I'm surprised the new title sequence doesn't have all the text in that fucking font. Couple that with the increasing predilection of the Doctor for genocide to the point where it's no longer something to be remarked on or even a source of moral conflict for him (like Remembrance of the Daleks or even RTD's 2005 finale, Parting of the Ways), but his default method of dealing with alien threats to (almost exclusively) Earth. I've read about how significant numbers of Who fans consider the Jon Pertwee era to be that of the 'establishment Doctor' or even a 'Tory Doctor', since he spends almost all his episodes essentially running errands for the government or the army and at one point even convinces a minor functionary in Parliament that he's much more of a Tory than him without even a hint of irony. The Doctor under Moffat is an establishment Doctor once again, but he's not a Tory one. He's a New Labour one, a kind of deniable Toryism where flag-waving Britishness is the norm now and not to be remarked on, and mass-murder is just The Way Things Are, and everything political about the show is pretended otherwise. It's not political to include a jolly fat Churchill, it's just a bit of fun! It's definitely not political to have Elizabeth I in and to portray her in a very specifically sexist way that goes against what we actually know of her, it's definitely just fun because she was hundreds of years ago! I'm just a killjoy trying to see the political where it's not and this is a show for children and analysis is bad and wasn't the lesbian not-kiss daring and hooray for the British Empire! IT'S NOT POLITICAL THOUGH. NOT. POLITICAL.

There certainly are things that aren't political. Doctor Who isn't one of them, by deliberate design of its current showrunner. There are non-political aspects of it to criticise and I do, but aspects of its politics are really awful and to pretend that they somehow don't matter because ??? is very odd. And oh yes: no matter his protests to the contrary, Moffat's writing is very sexist, and I wish I'd never defended him against those accusations in the past because fuck me, I was just making excuses.

[The Liberal Elite]

I thought it was alright.

[NecroMorrius]

"Wacky" Capaldi is just him mixing up his memories. He's not very wacky at all in ep2. It's not as good though, apart from the end bit.

I actually liked the workprint more, it didn't have the terrible music and weird sound effects. Felt more grounded and creepy!

[kensei]

I don't think it's going to be explored, but I think that was the implication. The Doctor apparently picks his faces from his memories, sometimes at least, and probably subconsciously.

That's a Chekhov's gun if ever I saw one. You simply don't mention it unless you intend to come back to it as a plot point later.

[Hello Goaty ♥]

Can i be reminded why Strax and the Lesbian Lizard are Living in London 1800's?

[Flub]

Can i be reminded why Strax and the Lesbian Lizard are Living in London 1800's?

We don't know. They've never told that story.

[Harsin]

I don't think it's going to be explored, but I think that was the implication. The Doctor apparently picks his faces from his memories, sometimes at least, and probably subconsciously.

So the 5th Doctor hated that one guard on Gallifrey so much he deliberately chose his face and then went out of his way to be an obnoxious arsehole in a fashion disaster so that the entire universe would forever associate those features with a thundering space twat? The ultimate revenge.

[Nick R]

Also, that museum curator in Day of the Doctor wasn't really a future Doctor taking on an old face, but just a person that one of the first three Doctors met at some point.

[NEG]

The hair plucking felt Sherlock-y, and I don't want my Doctor Who Sherlock-y. (not that I've even watched that show since Series 2 anyway)