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Doctor Who

FishyFish

By FishyFish
in Film, TV & Radio

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scottcr

scottcr

Posted
Posted

Matt Smith is just perfect as the Doctor. Weird, childlike, ancient, complicated. Just absolutely brilliant. I accidentally keep referring to Series 5 as Series 1 now... I thought the whole finale was brilliant, one of my favourite scenes was the 'look into my eye' bit. The joy on The Doctor's face and his wee dance as he waved.

Brilliant telly.

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Garwoofoo

Garwoofoo

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Matt Smith is just perfect as the Doctor. Weird, childlike, ancient, complicated. Just absolutely brilliant.

In general I agree but this series I've found him a little lacking in warmth. They seem to have dialled up his oddity and self-doubt a little too much for my liking - I prefer the Doctor when he's genuinely childlike in his enthusiasm, whether that's the 9th Doctor declaring "Everybody lives!" or the 10th Doctor giddy at having met Madame Du Pompadour. 11 for me has never quite been as likeable as he was in The Eleventh Hour, and at times during this series (especially The Girl Who Waited) he's been bordering on unpleasant.

None of this in any way is a criticism of Matt Smith, who is pretty much faultless - more an observation on the way they've taken the character of late.

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Space Gibbon

Space Gibbon

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In general I agree but this series I've found him a little lacking in warmth. They seem to have dialled up his oddity and self-doubt a little too much for my liking - I prefer the Doctor when he's genuinely childlike in his enthusiasm, whether that's the 9th Doctor declaring "Everybody lives!" or the 10th Doctor giddy at having met Madame Du Pompadour. 11 for me has never quite been as likeable as he was in The Eleventh Hour, and at times during this series (especially The Girl Who Waited) he's been bordering on unpleasant.

None of this in any way is a criticism of Matt Smith, who is pretty much faultless - more an observation on the way they've taken the character of late.

What about when he was the Doctor, who works in a shop now?

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scottcr

scottcr

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the bit when the Doctor was jumping through time in The Big Bang was probably one of the most joyful Doctor sequences ever.

I think in this one, we've started to see a Doctor who's bearing the weight of being this God like character... but now he's buggered off with a Cowboy hat and into a brave new future where everyone thinks he's dead and he can enjoy the anonymity...

I don't want Matt Smith's tenure to end. :(

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Mogster

Mogster

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found another good question on the finale ontop of the fake regenerating: if they have to touch to restart time, then how is river touching a robot doctor suit the same thing?

Because the break in time was centred around River failing to shoot and "kill" the robot Doctor suit, not the Doctor himself.

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Alex W.

Alex W.

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If you've read anything I've posted in this thread in the past few years you'll know that I'm not hankering for the return of the RTD era. Fuck me, Torchwood: Miracle Day serves as a pretty clear warning in that regard. I also think the show has improved immensely since Moffat took over, to the extent that I'll generally tell new people to start watching with The Eleventh Hour and maybe go back to the Eccleston series and watch from there if they enjoy Matt Smith's run. They definitely are making the (reduced) budget stretch farther than before; that's been obvious since Matt Smith's first episode. Cinematography, set design, the acting, the writing, everything's improved, pretty much. Moffat was responsible for a good chunk of the best episodes of the revival pre-2010, and oversaw (and penned) some great ones since. However, none of this has any bearing on my complaints about this episode, or this series as a whole.

I also don't give a shit about viewing figures and anything like that. My own view is that the entire arc of this series has been a mis-step (with the seeds of this downfall sown in the largely excellent 2010 series). Far too many ideas and plot points chucked in willy-nilly with no regard for consistency or coherence, with good ideas being necessarily squandered because too much is being shoved in (the whole 'three months later' thing in Day of the Moon, for instance - a great concept which accomplished nothing and made no sense due to the implementation). Far too many of the 'arc' episodes are just stuff happening one scene after the next with no rhyme or reason; Let's Kill Hitler was particularly bad for that, but it's notable in this finale as well. Things happen because they have to happen, and the pat resolution of it all rankles for me. Not to mention that there's a tendency towards the obnoxious at the moment. Not only the overwhelming BEST MAN I EVER KNEW OH THE DOCTOR HE IS SO WONDERFUL THE MOST IMPORTANT MAN IN THE UNIVERSE stuff, but... for instance, Closing Time's self-congratulatory bullshit about the Doctor actually speaking 'Baby' and him telling random shopgirls about the alien invasion going on. It just doesn't fit. This is much like the majority of Tennant's run, and on top of that we have heavy re-use of ideas - the ideas are just escalated and made more offensively stupid. All of time collapsing in The Big Bang is handled pretty subtly, but in The Wedding of River Song it becomes Emperor Churchill in Buckingham senate with steam trains going into Canary Wharf and pterodactyls in Hyde Park! Christ on the cross. On top of that, the stakes have become so high as to be meaningless. We're all united in disparaging RTD for going from EARTH IS THREATENED to THE GALAXY IS THREATENED to THE UNIVERSE IS THREATENED to ALL OF TIME IS THREATENED, but for some reason it's taboo to point out that Moffat's finales (and a fair few of the standalone episodes, even!) have similarly ridiculous stakes that just can't be conceptualised or have any weight or threat when they're so frequent. Similarly, the sheer amount of Doctor/companion fakeout death. This only works with Rory, since they've made a joke out of it; however, the Silence may as well have taunted the Doctor and Amy as well about how often they die. Even James fucking Corden gets reprieves from death, courtesy of yet another power of love resolution (this particular series' favourite method of defeating a threat).

Now. Moffat's said that he's going to scale back the over-arcing storyline for next series, and focus on less connected stories. Hopefully the fact that everyone thinks the Doctor is dead now will help as well, since Doctor Who is at its best, I think, when the Doctor is just an idiot pootling about on the sidelines and hanging around while stuff goes wrong. Moffat should also put more faith in the quality of his ideas and give them room to breathe. None of this will be essential to keeping the programme popular and successful, as Doctor Who is essentially a runaway train of success at the moment. But I'm pretty sure the programme could retain its popularity as well as improving the quality of its storytelling - it can definitely reach that level of quality, since even in this series it was up there at times (The Doctor's Wife and The Girl Who Waited, for example, not to mention The Impossible Astronaut even though it was all setup for the terrible arc, much like Utopia was still good despite The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords being shit).

I know a fair few people here don't have any problem with how the series has gone, and the majority of people I know in real life also thought that Stormageddon was the height of humour and that the finale was just epic and amazing. But hey. That was a lot of words about a kids' TV show eh.

I see you writing long things about the show I love, and I'm like, "plus oooooooooooonnnnneeeeeee~~~~~~" (doo doo doo doo)

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