Doctor Who?

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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Fri Nov 23, 2018 7:05 pm

Spoiler: show
The other thing is that the AI didn't just make one attempt to stop Charlie. It was the one that sent the Help Me message to the Doctor. When they joined the company in an attempt to infiltrate, it tried to give the Doctor the role Graham ended up getting. This would have given her full access to anywhere any time and send her directly to the same room as the ultimate villain. If the Doctor hadn't switched it the story might have been over in a quarter of the time.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby KleinerKiller » Mon Nov 26, 2018 11:29 am

I wanted to believe "Kerblam!" was a sign of better things to come. I wanted to believe "The Witchfinders" would keep a hot streak going. But let's get into it.

Spoiler: show
Was the audio mixing particularly bad for anyone else in this episode? The whole season's had its ups and downs in that area, but in this one, I kept having to rewind scenes to understand what was being said (I don't care for my TV's closed captioning display). The music was really loud compared to the dialogue, and the bass seemed to randomly blow up for no reason. Just me, or an actual thing? Who knows.

Anywho, we open with The Doctor and friends stumbling wildly into yet another dangerous historical time, though at least unlike "Rosa" and "Punjab", they have the excuse of trying to go somewhere else (Elizabeth I's coronation) and being redirected apparently without the chance to view their time period. Turns out they're in 17th century Lancashire, and just in time for a witch trial (I expected Salem, Massachusetts, given the subject matter, but I guess that's a little played out... and they couldn't justify the inclusion of a certain irritant if it were in America). Concerned, they rush off -- tailed by a mysterious masked man -- and arrive just in time for a woman to be drowned in a ducking stool. The Doctor admirably tries to save the drowning woman, but fails, and in a rage she takes authority of the situation away from the woman conducting the trial by psychic-papering herself into the "Witchfinder General" spot. I quite like this turn of events; this episode is probably Whitaker's most fully-realized outing yet, whatever the flaws with the episode itself, and she gets a lot of great work as her companions continue to flounder about.

The strange woman presiding over this township's witch trials -- which have already killed 36 -- is named Becca Savage, because I know writers who use subtlety and they're all cowards. She's your typical witch trial conductor, manically convinced Satan has infected the area and determined to root him out, though she transparently knows more than she lets on. I hate her. In contrast to a certain irritant, nothing is done to humanize her or even give insane justification to her actions throughout the episode; she's fueled purely by wild religious fervor and a selfish refusal to see her own evil even as things spiral wildly out of control, and that's one of my least favorite types of villain. Her actress is fine, but the performance is little to write home about. Guess Charlie was an odd-one-out for this season's villains.

On the way to her manor, though, she says the following to the Doctor: "It's very difficult in these times, especially for a woman." The charitable reading of this line is that she's just hypocritically pointing out how rough it is to be a woman during a witch trial, but I'm not feeling particularly charitable; the way it comes off unmistakably is an on-the-nose acknowledgement of period sexism, which is not only one of those hacky stock time travel lines, and not only wildly contradicts Savage's characterization, but sticks out like a sore thumb because there's not nearly as much focus on gender in this plot as one would expect. Outside of a certain irritant. Moving on. Right before the TARDIS crew reach her manor, we're told of what's initially a decent mystery: the township's name is completely unknown to the modern day, and somehow none of Savage's numerous murders are on record. What happens to the town? Will it be disappointing? All this and more on Doctor Who!

Once we get into the manor, things really go to shit, as we're introduced to... well, I've danced around him long enough. The ominous masked man strolls in, and pulls off his mask to reveal that he's KING JAMES! The Bible man himself. Played by Special Guest Star Alan Cumming, which I guess is a big deal. I find this alone massively implausible in addition to being a waste of a tease, but if the king really was known to make surprise visits to small towns virtually alone and sneak around in costume, feel free to enlighten me. But even leaving that aside, I cannot stand this guy. He's so campy and over-the-top that I almost thought he was the next regeneration of The Master, and while I can enjoy some good ham and cheese in a silly performance, Cumming blows it out more than the bass in the audio mixing. Sometimes less is more, and this king just does not have a fucking off switch. It didn't work for me, and he's in so much of the episode that he just became a weight on my neck; I could only stand him in one scene, and he barely speaks there.

But back to the plot. King James is a raging sexist, so when The Doctor shows him the psychic paper, he sees "Witchfinder's Assistant" instead and automatically assumes she's subservient to "Witchfinder General" Graham. Then he minces around some more before the scene just sort of ends, but not before Savage gleefully reveals that she's ready to defeat Satan even if it means killing everyone in the entire town. Nuance, thine name is more alien than The Doctor's. And we're not even at the bad part of the episode yet. The first two acts are over-the-top and not super compelling, but they can't hold a candle to what comes at the third act.

Meanwhile, Yaz is searching around for the elusive "thing for Yaz to do", and sort of finds it when she spots the drowned woman's grieving daughter praying in a field, oblivious that she's about to be attacked by... a weird little mud tentacle. Yeah. The monster for this episode turns out to be evil mud. Evil blankets, eat your threads out. Yaz hacks the thing apart with a shovel, and after some tomfoolery that gets the Doctor and the rest to the area, we learn that the grieving woman is named Willa -- and that she's Savage's cousin. Despite appearances pointing to witchcraft, the Doctor scans her thoroughly and finds that she's completely normal. Must be aliens.

After briefly cutting to King James revealing his tragic past to Ryan (whom he then not-so-subtly flirts with) in a scene that's not as bad as his introduction but not as good as the later scene, the Doctor scans a mud sample and is puzzled by it being completely normal. That is, until the sample starts vibrating around, and everyone turns around to see MUD ZOMBIES! Yes, everyone killed by the witch trials -- including Willa's mother / Savage's aunt -- has been dredged up as these surprisingly creepy bone-white mud zombies, which are apparently the result of the mud straight-up piloting their corpses. King James and the gang arrive on scene quickly, but James' assistant / barely-coded lover Alfonso tries to shoot the zombies and is killed by a really stupid-looking sonic blast that the main zombie emits when she claps her hands. So close to being a decent monster, too. Once everyone has run a sufficient distance away, the Doctor realizes Savage clearly knows a lot about the mud, but she fires back with a predictable witchcraft accusation -- and Willa backs her up, being too scared to resist. I do so love a plot that's only allowed to get as far as it does because people refuse to talk.

Anyways, the Doctor is dragged off for a trial, but first, she's tied up and left alone with King James, who interrogates her about her "magic wand" and general mysteriousness. This is the single scene in which Cumming's James is not awful, and not just slightly below tolerable, but outright pretty solid -- and he barely talks after the Doctor starts going, because this is also one of Jodie Whitaker's best scenes and she entirely carries it. In a cheesy but so very Doctor-ish monologue, she appeals to his sense of humanity and implores him to solve the mysteries of the heart before worrying about supposed magic -- and equally predictably, he seems to ignore it and sends her away for her trial. It is incredible how no matter the flaws in these past three episodes, the other writers have understood Chibnall's vision for the Doctor far more clearly than Chibnall himself.

After we cut back from the companions fucking around with the zombies (the whole group really is just background noise in this episode), the Doctor gets chained into the ducking stool. As she tries to bore into Savage's reasons for covering up what she knows, Savage gets even more annoyingly obstinate, even as she's zapped by the ducking stool's wood and cries a tear of mud in her rage. Right around this, you might expect that she's been so obstinate because she's a spy for the evil mud deliberately screwing things up as part of a plan; you'd only be half-right, but we'll get to that stupidity. Down into the depths goes the Doctor, but after a few seconds, King James -- clearly shaken by his earlier chat with her -- takes pity and commands the furious Savage to raise the stool early. However, the Doctor has already escaped the chains regardless, and (in one of the defining Thirteen scenes of the series) marches up to the shocked crowd, sopping wet and bizarrely upbeat, and carries on her investigation. However, she doesn't have much time before the zombies show back up.

And here, cornered by the zombies, we learn why this whole mess started. Savage is obviously to blame, but rather than for the sake of an alien plot, she's been doing it all for pure mind-boggling selfishness. Apparently everything started going to shit when she decided her aunt's favorite tree was blocking her view, so she personally took an axe to it and inadvertently released an unknown entity from inside the tree, which pierced her thigh with a tentacle and infected her with the mud. She'd gone to her aunt for help, but when her aunt wasn't emotionally strong enough to cut off her niece's leg, she went crazy and started killing people. Sounds like a reasonable unreasonable explanation, right? Mankind is the real monster, and all that.

Except then she turns into a stupid generic-looking alien, and the episode flies so violently off the rails it tanks everything that came before it. The alien mud creature, which has now completely overtaken Savage's personality, announces / loudly exposits that it's the queen of a warrior race called the Lorax (actually Morax, but it's a dumb name and there's a tree connection, so who cares); the Lorax have been imprisoned in a technological prison disguised as a tree, and Savage's cutting broke the seal just enough to let the queen out. The ducking stool is actually made of the same alien technology, and it's serving as the lock to the prison the queen has been trying to break open by continuously drowning women...?! I'm pretty sure that's the explanation, at least. It's nonsensical. It's really stupid. Then the queen and the rest of the zombies just explode mid-sentence while screaming about how they're going to dominate the world, which is shortly revealed to be them teleporting away with King James, but comes so late in the episode's run time and is so violently abrupt that I genuinely thought that was how the writers were etching the problem away.

Blech.

The Lorax Queen uses King James' blood to completely break open the seal on the prison, somehow, I guess. If blood was the key to opening the prison, I don't know why the ducking stool was implemented or why she didn't use a method of execution that produces blood, but who cares. The tree explodes open to reveal a fairly large and goofy-looking mud tentacle, but it doesn't get very far before the Doctor and friends technobabble the problem away by lighting up some torches made from the ducking stool and somehow using them to instantly reactivate the Lorax's prison. This leaves only the queen, now on her own, only for King James to rush forward and burn her to explodey death with one of the torches. The Doctor is very cross about this, but little is made of it afterward.

We then come to a hasty epilogue, where King James resolves the earlier mystery by just vowing that he'll cover up everything that happened there, and Willa -- who is barely a character and has had little in the way of an arc -- says that she's going to follow the Doctor's namesake and become a doctor of her own. James flirts with Ryan again, and Graham quotes Pulp Fiction at him before they all fly away. Roll credits.

This... was... shoddy. It's nowhere near as bad as "The Ghost Monument" (which seemed unfinished) or "The Tsuranga Conundrum" (which is stupid and I hate it), and actually got off to a fine start save the irritating villains and some narrative quibbles. But then it went and wasted its setup on a needless alien plot whose villain just roared about destroying Earth, and any themes or arcs that were set up before were muddled into nothingness. This was the narrative confusion everyone blasted "Kerblam!" for supposedly showing.


Two episodes left.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby ghijkmnop » Tue Nov 27, 2018 3:38 pm

Redacted
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby cmsellers » Thu Nov 29, 2018 4:43 pm

KleinerKiller wrote:
Spoiler: show
But back to the plot. King James is a raging sexist, so when The Doctor shows him the psychic paper, he sees "Witchfinder's Assistant" instead and automatically assumes she's subservient to "Witchfinder General" Graham.


This almost addressed something I'd wondered about for awhile
If psychic paper shows people the credentials which would most convince them, how does it avoid showing two people different things? AFAIK, this is the first time it happened, and they didn't do anything interesting about it, just soapbox about sexism a bit.

And on that note, I'm annoyed that the Doctor has dealt with cultures all over the universe, and has a particular fondness for Earth, yet somehow never realized that sexism is a thing. The Doctor knew racism was a thing, and that has been far less universal in human cultures than sexism.

You know how some conservative politicians basically say "I didn't realize how bad sexual harassment/assault were until I had daughters"? The Doctor seems to be acting like an even more cartoonish version of that: "I didn't realize that sexism was an issue until I became a woman." Which is shockingly unobservant for someone as experienced and cosmopolitan as the Doctor.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Krashlia » Sun Dec 02, 2018 7:01 am

cmsellers wrote:
KleinerKiller wrote:
Spoiler: show
But back to the plot. King James is a raging sexist, so when The Doctor shows him the psychic paper, he sees "Witchfinder's Assistant" instead and automatically assumes she's subservient to "Witchfinder General" Graham.


This almost addressed something I'd wondered about for awhile
If psychic paper shows people the credentials which would most convince them, how does it avoid showing two people different things? AFAIK, this is the first time it happened, and they didn't do anything interesting about it, just soapbox about sexism a bit.

And on that note, I'm annoyed that the Doctor has dealt with cultures all over the universe, and has a particular fondness for Earth, yet somehow never realized that sexism is a thing. The Doctor knew racism was a thing, and that has been far less universal in human cultures than sexism.

You know how some conservative politicians basically say "I didn't realize how bad sexual harassment/assault were until I had daughters"? The Doctor seems to be acting like an even more cartoonish version of that: "I didn't realize that sexism was an issue until I became a woman." Which is shockingly unobservant for someone as experienced and cosmopolitan as the Doctor.


Speaking of the Doctor being cosmopolitan and all
Why did she have so much difficulty watching what she was saying? She knew that they were religiously zealous and were absorbed with the idea of Satan, an evil spirit, possessing people. So why couldn't she keep that in mind, before saying things like "Something not of this Earth is filling people's bodies!" Which she should know would reinforce the idea that its Satan?
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Sun Dec 02, 2018 11:15 am

I had intended to do a full review, but Kleiner said most of what I wanted to say so I'll just add a few comments.
Episode 8 - The Witchfinder...I guess.

Spoiler: show
The most massive, glaring problem with the episode that kept popping into my mind the most was that the Doctor knows damn well that Satan is in fact real in the Who-verse. In The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit
David Tennat's Doctor met and fought a large red demon imprisoned in a rock orbiting a black hole who couldn't escape except to cast its consciousness out of its prison and influence people to do evil and unnatural things.

Sort of like something people would interpret as witches then eh?

Now while I don't think that it's worth rewriting the episode to be about that enemy, it would have been nice to see the Doctor privately admit there was a thing that called itself Satan which was some huge great old one and investigate if that wasn't at play in this story before loudly stating she didn't "believe in" Satan. This is the problem when you scienceify every myth over 50 years, it comes back to bite your ass when you try to highlight superstition.

I found the portrayal of King James pretty ridiculous. But I have to say I sort of enjoyed how stupid it was the second time around. This was because I didn't take it seriously the second time. As a serious character he doesn't work, and the best scene he has is the serious one. I wish they'd have made it more clear that his mother was Mary Queen of Scots (who was eventually executed by Elizabeth I, who ruled England before James did). I also wish they'd have pointed out that a lot of the witch hysteria was based around his troubles getting his future wife from Denmark. He did have unpopular male favourites and was rumoured to be more interested in them than was seemly for the 16th century, but he also seemed to have been attentive to his wife and had a lot of kids (Edward the second, for example, basically left his wife in another city and ignored her). Generally this was a cack-handed interpretation of a king.

Of interest is that while James wasn't noted to travel incognito around England having witch hunting adventures, Charles as Prince of Wales did in fact travel to Spain incognito to bring Infanta Maria of Spain back to England for marriage. The plan failed (she basically didn't like him and ignored him), but that was probably the inspiration for getting King James into the plot here, because it was just Charles and a favoured retainer.

I once again think this is a plot that would have been improved without the inclusion of aliens. By this point the explanation of "is all aliens guv" is becoming a handwave to get away with anything in the story then saying "this is a thing beyond your understanding puny humans" and isn't really even the third most interesting part of the story. A tree as a lock to an alien warrior race made from mud is stupid, and doesn't improve the episode at all. The berserk screeching from the alien Savage is silly and hard to take seriously.

They are still making the Doctor a bad driver. Also, the last time Elizabeth I saw the Doctor she was either in love with him or trying to have him executed, why would a sojourn there be a good idea, even with the new face?
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Tue Dec 04, 2018 2:14 am

Episode 9 - It Takes You Away

Spoiler: show
Our episode begins with the TARDIS landing in picturesque Norway. The crew more or less guess it's Norway without having to be told, and there's no indication why they're there. The Doctor is frightened by a sheep, because of the forthcoming "woolly rebellion". As tell not show gags go it's pretty funny. The Doctor eats some dirt and determines the TripAdvisor review score of an alpaca farm nearby, which tells us nothing about what's going on but I suppose this one is going to be goofy. Hoo boy is this one going to be goofy.

There's a cabin in the woods, and spooky music. There's even an interior shot of the outside where a hidden figure presses their hand to a window for no reason. The whole beginning is shot like a horror movie, and it's weird and unsettling. The cabin is weirdly boarded up, and there's something inside the cabin. So obviously the sonic does do wood now, and the metal bolts just open with no mechanical force to make them do so. Sure whatever. So now we're looking around the cabin, and honestly it's a pretty house with lots of very normal things like kids trainers and stuff. I'm not sure why we're so frightened by it. Ryan begins his career of faux-girlish silliness that will continue the whole time when we meet our inhabitant; Hanne. She's a blind Norwegian teenager that's convinced there's a monster that took her father. Graham lures her out with a cheese and pickle sandwich he...just happens to keep around. That feels like a very Doctor thing to do. If Bradley Walsh turns out to be the newest incarnation of the Master I will retract all my previous criticism of the show in favour of awestruck adulation.

Hanne asks them for help finding her dad (as a side note, do Norwegians say "mum" and "dad"? That seemed a curiously English expression) and they wander blindly into the front yard to look. Ryan pisses off Hanne by saying he thinks her dad probably left, which he clearly thinks because of his own experience but never gets the chance to explain that to Hanne. Yaz demonstrates her police skills by lying to the girl long enough to make her like Yaz so that she'll answer exactly the same question phrased a bit differently. They then hear Hanne's watch indicating it's monster time, so they run off in smaller groups to search for things. Yaz and Ryan continue Ryan's ridiculous goofball moments by having him screech at a hanging pheasant (which is not remotely a Norwegian thing, I've seen these myself in the UK) and then discovering a "shed load of these things in the ....shed". Well done, you made a funny.

The Doctor decides that five minutes of looking is enough for one day thanks, and tells everyone to get inside. Those roars are loud and stuff. Graham gets posted to the attic room to be lookout. The the word goes zing and the mirror is no longer reflecting things. Mirrors as portals is lore as old as time, so...it's a portal right? Yep it's a portal. The Doctor looks through it and we don't get to see what's going on, but she leaves Hanne and Ryan (who now openly dislike each other) behind and goes through with Graham and Yaz. Before she goes she writes to Ryan to assume Hanne's dad is dead, protect the house and find someone who can look after her. I'm unsure how this exploitation of a blind girl's disability is supposed to be seen, but in places this episode makes the Doctor seem a bit like Capaldi's stern "do what it takes" Doctor which I can't dislike too much.

Ryan confronts Hanne about why she doesn't like him and she says he said her dad would leave her. Like. Okay sure she's annoyed about that but wouldn't it be a simple thing to say "oh but that was because my dad ran out on me and left me behind, so I'm reacting how I've experienced life" and she would at least understand why he said it even if she still disagreed? He then drags her into another room and locks the door to the portal so she can't get in. Hanne also dislikes this and threatens to call the police, which Ryan also handles badly. Then the monster starts roaring again so they go to check things. At which point Ryan discovers that the monster is a fake, a speaker set up to keep making noises in the evening. As he runs back into the house to tell Hanne this, she knocks him clean out with a door and goes through the portal too. Smooth move ex lax.

Meanwhile through the portal, the Doctor, Yaz, and Graham can't see shit in this dark cave. The Doctor plays out a line of string to keep their path, and they head towards the only light they can see. Thus enters my second favourite character: Ribbons of the Seven Stomachs. Yes that is his name, and yes he's a discount Gollum/Orc. He carries giant six legged rats on his belt, and enjoys a good trade. He has a red balloon which lights up (lol) and offers to show the Doctor and crew where Erik is and give them the balloon if he can have the sonic, which he calls a "tubular". He frequently speaks in a way that's threatening or plain bizarre and is just enjoyably ridiculous to have around.

Several things about Ribbons makes no sense. How he speaks any sort of intelligible language when he lives in an antizone is unfathomable. He claims to have "always" been there, but that's also confusing nonsense. He then refuses to give any further information save that which is necessary for a plot because he's not paid. How a being that exists in caves with no commercial system and has never left knows about trade and commerce is strange too but Ribbons is too silly to care about that. He's just fun and silly. Graham also thinks he smells like piss.

He does tell them about the flesh moths, which unsurprisingly eat people. Eventually they do so to Ribbons, who can't quell his desire for the tubular. There's a squicky moment when a moth crawls out of his vacated eye socket that bothered me in the right way both times I watched this. The moths duly fed, the Doctor and crew run through a portal and find themselves in a cabin similar to, but not the same as, the one they left. Turns out when you run randomly through a portal you eventually find yourself in a different place.

Hanne now finds herself in the antizone and in imminent mortal danger. She follows the now-cut string (courtesy of Ribbons) to a corpse, and finds Ryan who managed to find her and navigate the maze completely safely. Peril, what peril?

The doc and crew find Erik making some food in a nice-looking place. They surprise each other, and all of the crew take it in turns threatening Erik for having abandoned Hanne. He claims she's fine and can look after herself, but this seems to ring hollow. I did especially love when they said "why all the bear traps" and his answer was "because there are bears". But the real reason he left is because a version of his dead wife is here, and he's trying to make a life with her in the mirror world. He's still an irresponsible jerk and Ryan was 100% right about him. But the new version of Trina offers for them to meet their "friend" who arrived when they got there.

Holy shit it's Grace. I really appreciate that this is someone one of the companions cares about, because it shows a degree of emotional heft that I don't think the episode would have otherwise. It's shameless fan manipulation, but still it worked on me. Grace is notably different though, far from the shameless and vivacious person she was in episode one (I actually happened to rewatch that right afterwards and the actress is noticeably playing a different character which is really cool). Graham initially thinks she's fake but comes around when she explains she likes frogs. I mean who doesn't?

Meanwhile the doc figures out that this is, via a bedtime story and absurd grannies, the Solitract a sentient universal energy which disrupts the fabric of our universe. The dead people are a honey trap, but its intentions aren't evil, just they want people to be with them. We then enter an extended scene where, joined by Hanne, the crew are encouraged to reject the solitract until only Graham, Erik and the Doctor are left. Graham eventually realises the grace copy is fake because she's perfectly willing to leave ryan to die (who never made it to the solitract). He turns from her with such a thunderous expression on his face that it really feels like he's more than just a bus driver.

Erik refuses to reject his fake wife, even after seeing her blast people through a portal and the fake Grace literally disappear when not needed. But the solitract universe is destabilising with so many people in it, and the doctor takes another leaf from Capaldi's book and does whatever it takes to get the job done, sacrificing herself to remain with the Solitract and expelling Erik. At which point things get...odd.

Image

Talking frog on a chair odd.

Yes really. The frog speaks with Grace's voice, because of course it does and it took that form because it "delights me". Which is a stupid reason for a universal consciousness to adopt the aspect of a fucking frog. They have a little talk about how this isn't going to work and the doctor is sent back. The frog animation is awful in the same way Tommy Wiseau's acting is awful and I could not for the life of me stop laughing the entire time. I loved it. It was shit.

Back in the real world Hanne and Erik are all fine again and going back to Oslo to live real lives. The portal is sealed and nobody can go through, and Ryan and Graham have a character moment where they talk about missing Grace and Ryan calls Graham grandad, which he's wanted since episode 1. Kudos on a quiet character moment where two people share a tragedy and build a bond.

Overall this was pants-on-head silly and I loved it. It had no consistent tone, and no real message. Things happened and were weird. There was emotional heft to some sections that did genuinely move me, but Bradley Walsh's checked out delivery hampered it in places. The Doctor was probably the first time I recognised her as the Doctor in the same vein as the previous incarnations, willing to give herself up to an entity to save someone she never met before and somewhat regretful she didn't get to learn more about it. The Solitract was just a very strange idea and it sort of worked, though the means it took were very generic.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby cmsellers » Sat Dec 08, 2018 9:31 pm

This episode reminds me of the original run. Better production values, but campy and ridiculous in the same sort of way.

And many if not languages have both a formal "mother" and "father" and an informal "mom" and "dad," and many have "mommy" and "daddy" instead or as well. According to Google Translate, in Norwegian "father" is "far" and "dad" is "pappa."
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Mon Dec 10, 2018 1:54 am

Episode 10 - The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

Spoiler: show
Here goes the finale, written once again by Cibnall. I've grown to mistrust his writing for Doctor Who, so I'm not sure if this is going to be a car crash. Not a great way to start but I'm realistic.

The first scene is pretty strong. We see a pair of aliens, who at least have the decency to dress funny and have facial markings that mean we scan that they're supposed to be aliens without having to be told. They're some kind of religious telekines who are there to create...something. They spend more time speaking about their faith, the younger one is full of doubts which have only increased as he learns more. The elder explains that this is the tenet of their faith: the more one learns the more one learns one does not know. This is a nice sentiment with a reasonable provenance in real philosophy (the idea that wisdom is knowing what you don't know is as old as Socrates) and dovetails neatly with how the Doctor acts generally. But right when they're doing something with floating rocks, an unknown figure teleports in.

The crew are in the TARDIS mulling over the attractive prospect of a planet with nine simultaneous distress calls coming from it. The name is...another thing that ends up meaning "serious bad thing" and reminds me of Ghost Monument. Now, I'm not saying that this couldn't occur in a large universe, but come on man. As a writer it's the laziest thing in the world to name two planets and have both of them translate as bad things for a cheap sense of foreboding. Nevertheless, they resolve to go figure it out because why the hell not? Only Graham protests, and even then not very much.

They materialise inside what looks to be an abandoned and ruined ship. Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor hands them each a little metal blob they can stick on their heads to prevent the planet making them...uh insane? I guess? This is mentioned about once and never really ends up being a thing. It really fails the Chekov's gun test, because why set up a planetary insanity field if you're not going to use it? This also creates a parallel between this and GM, because this is another planet where we're told it's inherently hostile, and it then goes on to pose literally no danger to the crew whatsoever.

They wander into the ship, only to find Robert Baratheon with a laser pistol and a vexed expression. He can't remember shit, not even his own name. This is the only time the field is a real plot point because it allows there to be a person from within that context without him immediately summarising the situation. I'm of half a mind to think that the insanity field was specifically added to allow this. Once they talk him down and convince him to put on a metal head blob too he calms down and starts being more a standard Who military man from whenever they are. Except he doesn't know what's going on or who's behind it.

Ryan starts mucking about with the communicator, and the alien lady from the start comes on asking Paltraki to give back what he stole. Then another voice comes on, and the Doctor and crew immediately know it's Tim Shaw from the first episode. This was so obvious as to be annoying in the buildup so I appreciated how they didn't shroud the identity in no mystery and then reveal it like anyone was in doubt. He blithely murders someone we just saw that second to cement the fact he's what my daughter calls a "buh-ah-duh guiy" then mic drops.They ask what Paltraki stole, and he shows them a weird crystal and some thrumming thing inside it. He claims to have recovered it, rather than stole it, but can't tell you what or why. The Doctor thinks it's "impossible" which is a bit trite for a series determined to refer to everything as impossible by the end of its run. Impossible frog anyone???

Having upped the game by reintroducing nobody's favourite antagonist, the gang set out through the battlefield. The place is littered with wrecked ships, none of which they go into or investigate. This is because there is a big old floating tower in the murk and fog, hanging there ominously. I will say that the production value for this episode is way higher than the last one. I appreciate it, but I wish it was the case in every one, so we're spared more amphibians which delight us.

During the way we get the best scene of the episode. Graham asks to have a private word with the Doctor, which doesn't usually happen in shows like this. He tells her that if he meets Tim Shaw he'll kill him for killing Grace. The Doctor seems shocked and tells him he's better than that and threatens to revoke his TARDIS privileges if he does. He brushes that off with no bother by telling her he's happy to accept that as a consequence. It's in scenes like this that Cibnall's strength is on show: he deals with personal drama very well and in organic and sensible ways. People don't, for example, give up a long held grudge because of a pep talk. Graham was already my favourite character in the new Who run, but this cements it. He's the only one of the four who gets any kind of arc or emotional heft. Would that they wrote the Doctor something so engaging.

They arrive at the base of the floating building, and the show goes off on a little tangent handing out jobs for people to do so they don't get bored and making the Doctor look like a huge hypocrite on violence again. Ryan actually calls her out on her use of grenades by referring to GM, which isn't helping the comparisons. It's nice to see character remember the events of previous episodes but it would be nice if they were not just the ones the same writer wrote, because right now it feels like they could have gone from ep 2 to ep 10 with one of those Spongebob "8 episodes laterrr" cards and we'd have missed very little. Ryan and Graham get hostage rescue, Yaz and Poltroony get...um something that ends up being weird crystal duty, and the Doctor decides to walk blindly into the lair of a known enemy in the hope he won't immediately kill her because she's a suicide bomber. Well done.

Once inside the ship we have two minor plots, where Yaz and Piraty find there are four more weird crystals and kind of just stand about while the bad guys do stuff, Ryan and Graham argue about why Graham shouldn't kill Tim Shaw and find there's too many hostages to rescue while the sniper bots (yes the ones from GM) try to kill them. The Doctor gets the main one though. She runs into the elder one of the aliens from the start, who claims to follow the creator but we know it's only Tim. Once they stop being wary, Tim asks to see the Doctor. I'll give the show credit, the reveal of Tim is suitably cinematic, and he looks awesome. Sadly he's still the same frothing lunatic he was in the first episode and is more of less just being a dick for the sake of it. The teleport sent him to the Ux aliens, who immediately started worshipping him as a God. As if hyper advanced aliens who can reshape reality based on thought alone don't know what a fucking teleporter is.

Tim reveals that the things in the crystals are planets which have been stolen for defying the Stenza. Despite being the only stenza in the place, he thinks he's advancing their cause by being just the worst offscreen dickhead. Strangely we're told that moving planets from their orbit would kill everyone on it, and he's accused of genocide. But this flies in the face of the events of Journey's End where the Daleks were able to move multiple planets into a new position without killing anyone. Probably he didn't think of that though. It's not like it's his job to or anything. It's not like he...had the Doctor reference that episode in this one in a way that honestly doesn't make any sense.

Nevertheless Tim tells the Ux to get started, and the younger one is revealed to be literally crucified on a machine that the elder one controls. They're using it to warp reality to steal planets because of reasons. I was really disappointed by how Cibnall thinks someone of faith is so stupid they'd accept anyone, even a genocidal maniac, as their God simply because they appeared at the right time. For stone age people maybe this might work but for hyper advanced precursor species? Nope. It just seems to betray a prejudice that people of faith are mind bogglingly credulous and it sits wrong with the tone of the episode for me.

Woah hold up, their target is Earth!?! Who'd have thought it??? Now this has tension and stakes. Not.

This then boils down to, Paltraki wanders off to save Ryan and Graham, besieged in the stasis chambers by sniper bots. The Doctor and Yaz take the decision to remove their neural stabilisers to interrupt the Ur stealing Earth. I do find it a weakness of Cibnall's Who writing that he seems to think that unless everyone's running about with laser guns that it's not SF. I've never seen so many people armed in Who as in this one, including episodes set in the Time War. Removing the neural stabilisers does nothing to the Doctor or Yaz apart from them looking pained a bit. Why this was there, I don't know. But with the Ur on their side, they hijack the TARDIS, the Stenza tech and the Ux abilities to replace the planets in their proper places and everyone lives. Yay.

Tim Shaw meanwhile arises from his slump and strides off awesomely with some badass cloak shit going on. Graham manages to lie to Ryan to get rid of him and is waiting for Tim. But of course he doesn't do it, and Ryan comes back to help and they incapacitate Tim and "sentence him to life" by locking him in a stasis pod forever. This...kind of fits and was what I expected, but still it would have been more interesting to see someone go too far and the consequences of that. It'd have given the episode an emotional hit that wasn't there. Then the gang fly off and the survivors, Paltraki and the Ux go on their way.

Aside from the fact of the personal drama, this didn't feel like a Who finale. I am sympathetic to the concept that they have been getting too grandiose, and a confrontation with someone who they have beef with is a nice way to drag it back to a greater emotional depth. But the problem is that they don't generate any weight to it by the end, everything is very predictable and by the numbers and for a finale it just isn't enough. It's a perfectly acceptable episode of Who, I knew what was going on and what was supposed to be happening all the time, and the concepts on show are interesting enough for all they're not properly explored. It just doesn't hang together well, and doesn't entertain beyond the surface, despite its pretensions to do just that. At some point I will do a series round up, but probably when I've had a few days to think about it more.

Also, calling it now, the New Year's episode monster is a dalek.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby cmsellers » Mon Dec 10, 2018 5:40 pm

Before I read Marc's take, I want to share my thoughts.
Spoiler: show
1. Crazy guy is way too willing to take neural implants from strangers. Can the planet not do paranoia?
2. Oh great, Tim Shaw is back.
3. Circular firing squad + Stormtrooper marksmanship. I can feel my suspension of disbelief shattering.
4. So the Doctor's "mercy" left a dangerous psycho free to atrocitize again. The doctor claimed her ethics were flexible, and yet she still adheres pretty strictly to pure deontology.
5. Wait, you are rescuing two crew members and didn't bring two spare neural implants?
6. The Ox are way too quick to accept that the foundations of their faith for over three millennia is a lie.
7. Locking a great evil in an impregnable stasis chamber. That always goes well. Expect to see much more of Tim Shaw in future seasons.
8. I thought Davies used the Daleks and Cybermen too much, but so far we've seen more of Tim Shaw than the Daleks, Cybermen, and Silurians combined in Chibnall's run. New villains would be nice if they're good, but if the best you can do is Tim Shaw, maybe bring back the old ones.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Mon Dec 10, 2018 7:26 pm

On the villain of episode 10.

Spoiler: show
I actually like Tim Shaw a lot in some ways. I love his aesthetic which is much more a serious SF character design than the campy silly stuff we usually get. The Ood (for example) are a good concept, but they are at heart a bit silly really. The same for a lot of previous Who enemies. Tim Shaw looks fucking incredible in Ep 10, especially in that opening reveal shot where he's slumped over amid bundles of wires and looks like absolute shit. Conceptually I like the Stenza, a race of aggressive warriors who commit war crimes like they're going out of fashion. An enemy like that is dangerous and resourceful.

The problem is that he never does anything. The narrative does its best to make him a cheating jerk whom the Doctor and crew ridicule at the first opportunity. He does cheat, but instead of making a wider point about how people with power abuse that power to get even more power, they go for playground jokes and don't take it to its logical and entirely thematically appropriate conclusion. The plan he has with the Ux is actually very interesting, and it's rare to see a genuine combination of two aliens with different backgrounds, skills or abilities in SF like they did. But again we get next to no information about the Ux, nor what Tim Shaw intended to do with the captured planets. The Daleks captured planets for a reason, Tim seems to be doing it for nothing more than shits and giggles.

At base, this is a problem of motivation. Tim Shaw indicates that he's acting on some impulse to lead from the outside by completing the mission of the Stenza on his own. But we never had a clear idea what the Stenza were intending on doing in the first place because we never meet any other ones. Sure they're omnicidal maniacs who fabricate exotic and terrible weapons with no regard to decency or sense, but what do they want? Unless you can answer that, the mission of the Stenza is basically moot to us as a viewer. That means Tim Shaw's claim to be achieving their mission is also moot, because we don't know what it is. If it's just to destroy worlds who "crossed them" then that's unbelievably petty.

In terms of aesthetic and feel, I like Tim Shaw. In terms of what he and his ridiculous sniperbots do, it's nothing. Which is a shame because there's a lot of concepts in episode 10 that seemed to be worth exploring and the story just didn't.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Anglerphobe » Mon Dec 10, 2018 8:31 pm

Spoiler: show
The inept minions were a confusing inclusion in this episode for me. They were used for what was essentially a spot gag with the literal circular firing squad Sellers mentioned, then apparently forgotten about. At no point after that scene do I remember any characters acting as if the villain had armed minions at his disposal. Did I miss some scene in which the rest were somehow disabled or was that all of them?
It seems like a terrible waste of tension established by having villains willing to use deadly force on sight to then have said villains fall for a ruse that would fail to trick a small child, and all annihilate themselves for the purposes of momentary comic relief.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby KleinerKiller » Mon Dec 17, 2018 12:30 pm

So I'll be completely honest: I still haven't watched either of the last two episodes, and I have very little impetus to.

My family cut cable at the start of this month, and since this season has been too mediocre to bother ordering on Amazon, the only legal means I have of watching the new eps is via BBC America's website, which requires creating an account to watch anything. I really don't want a BBC America account, so I've been putting it off.

And from what I've been hearing, these episodes aren't fantastic. One is surrealist madness that ends in some incompetence, and the other is another Chibnall. So, like... I don't know. I don't really care. This season has been completely at or below par, save "Kerblam!", and I doubt the last two episodes could salvage it enough for my opinion on the season as a whole to change.

If y'all really want me to watch 'em and give my thoughts, I'll do it. I'm refraining from spoilers until I get a response. But all I know is that I've had a really crap day today, and the thought of unwatched Doctor Who episodes waiting for me used to make those kinds of days bearable.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Mon Dec 17, 2018 4:51 pm

Personally I enjoy your reviews, but it's not important enough for you to put yourself out over. Do whatever you feel is right, I'm cool.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby AboveGL » Wed Jan 02, 2019 11:55 pm

General musings about the most recent seasons and the NY special after the recent release of Series 10 on 'Flix:

Spoiler: show
At risk of bringing up the tired Davies vs. Moffat discussion, I will mention that for all its flaws, I preferred the emotional journeys and the fleshed out nature of the Doctor's companions to Moffat's intricate and over-ambitious plots that only focused on the Doctor. When I finally accepted I'm not likely to experience that again on the end of the Eleventh's tenure, I lowered my expectations for the show and treated it as fun and easy watching. This is likely where my enjoyment for Series 8 and 11 came from (and why I enjoyed more of Series 9 than most here, which I'll get on to shortly), and why I could forgive the inconsistencies that came up in those series. Sadly, that missing element that made me love the RTD era made it easier to nitpick everything about Moffat's episodes, even when I could bring up similar issues with numerous examples with Davies' writing. And for all the convenient twists that occurred at the end of the first four series to give our heroes a boost, at least they are provided with some plausible in-universe explanation in self-contained single or multi-part episodes instead of blowing away any potential with a big fakeout.

Anyhow, I decided to stomach Series 9 after the disappointing two-parter that introduced Me. I can't say I was particularly intrigued by the Zygon two-parter or the massive plot hole at the end. The episode after that with the evolved sleep mucus was okay, but the twist at the end didn't really add anything. However, I did enjoy Face the Raven and Heaven Sent, and despite the wasted potential and ridiculous fakeout of Hell Bent, I enjoyed the second half of that episode just for the final scenes with Clara alone. In summary, I think Series 9 is okay by starting on a very high note, going massively downhill and then inching its way upwards slightly with a very mixed finale.

Series 10 though... hoo, boy. Almost every episode was forgettable, especially the two historic episodes before the two-part finale. As The Doctor Falls wasn't on Netflix, I had to read up on the plot summary and I don't feel it's worth watching the episode when it does become available. However, World Enough and Time is pretty sweet and it's probably for the best I ended watching the series on that one instead.

But the Monk trilogy is easily the highlight for me, because it's so entertainingly awful and that alone makes it more memorable than the only episode in the series I actually enjoyed. I can't resist the urge to burst out the fuck laughing at the mere thought of those villains, or that that shit was drawn out over three episodes. Also, Bill's a blithering idiot.

As much as I enjoyed Series 11 (with the exception of one dull episode), Chibnall seems to have the opposite issue to Moffat. I enjoy the companions, even if they're no Rose or Donna. Unfortunately, instead of intricate and overambitious plots that could only be resolved with a fakeout, we get generic ones that don't take enough risks. This especially shows in the NY special, which was enjoyable but not particularly remarkable. I know daleks are brought up again and again, but not completely without rhyme or reason and there's usually come passable explanation for how they manage to amass their armies, so where on Earth (or outside of Earth) did THAT fleet come from, and how did that dalek know there was even one to contact after all this time it was dormant?

Whatever. It all ticks the "enjoyable" and "easy watching" box for me and that's it.
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