Doctor Who?

What have you been watching?

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby NathanLoiselle » Tue May 02, 2017 12:58 am

cmsellers wrote:
"it's 1814. ... Slavery is still totally a thing."
Not in England, it wasn't.

Do British schoolchildren not learn this? And how does The Doctor, at least, not know that A. slavery was illegal in England at the time and B. free black people co-existed alongside slaves everywhere race-based slavery was practiced?


So I told my wife, because we were rewatching the episode, about how slavery wasn't a thing in 1814 so she looked it up online. Turns out that while sale of slaves was abolished actual slavery wasn't. It would be 15 or more years before slavery itself was abolished.
  • 3

User avatar
NathanLoiselle
TCS Junkie
TCS Junkie
 
Posts: 4484
Joined: Wed Jul 09, 2014 3:49 am
Location: You'll Never Know!
Show rep

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby cmsellers » Tue May 02, 2017 2:22 am

NathanLoiselle wrote:So I told my wife, because we were rewatching the episode, about how slavery wasn't a thing in 1814 so she looked it up online. Turns out that while sale of slaves was abolished actual slavery wasn't. It would be 15 or more years before slavery itself was abolished.

I think you're thinking of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Those, respectively, banned the slave trade and slavery in the British Empire. Somerset's Case in 1772 held that English common law did not allow for slavery, and any slave who set foot on English soil would be automatically free.
  • 4

User avatar
cmsellers
Back-End Admin
Back-End Admin
 
Posts: 9316
Joined: Sun Apr 14, 2013 7:20 pm
Location: Not *that* Bay Area
Show rep
Title: Broken Record Player

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Sun May 07, 2017 2:01 am

Episode 10.4 - Knock Knock

Spoiler: show
When I saw the trailer for this episode, I had a good idea what I was getting into from the outset. The plot can really be summarised in a pair of tropes:

1. A living house that eats people
2. Someone doing bad things to protect someone he loves

That's the gist, the specifics are a little more complicated. Bill and five other people she doesn't know very well are suddenly and without preamble looking for a house. Being dumbass millennials, they have wildly high expectations, and after being shown around a couple of sheds with beds, they're randomly accosted by a weird dude who offers them a place for rent.

The benefit to this episode is that the villain is played by David Suchet, famous for his work as Hercule Poirot. He's a really good actor, and he carries this as though it were a backpack. It's sort of sad, watching him and Capaldi struggle to make the generally low-grade writing (Bill: No, stop. Don't do it) something entertaining and emotional for the audience.

The house turns out to be an old, but massive place with a ton of room. It's a bit creaky though. It was around this time I realised they'd dressed Bill in a top with a little motif of a packet of chips on it. Seriously? Do we need more reminders of "I'm Bill. I serve chips"? But while we're on characters, Bill really could have been replaced with a generic nobody and the episode would have lost nothing. I'm not sure if the writer simply had nothing for her to do,
or the story simply didn't demand it. Either way, Bill is less of a companion here and more a walking plot device.

Back to the story. One young chap named Pavel (Doctor? Pavel? Are we suddenly going to see a flaming bat on a bridge?) goes into his room and puts some music on. Then he dies. Nobody notices because apparently it's normal for people to sit in their rooms without ever leaving to piss, eat or anything for several days on end. I don't...remember being like that when I was a student, but whatever. We don't see him die, we only hear him die through a door.

We cut back to walking plot device moving to the house. Being as we need some reason to get the Doctor dragged into the story, she's recruited him to help her move by literally materialising the TARDIS on her stuff, and then just moving it to the new house. Still don't know why she needs to move, but whatever. During the small talk they have while the TARDIS is flying, the Doctor says a couple of weird things. She asks him if he sleeps there, and he replies "if I need to". That's a little odd, but then he gets all angsty when she asks him what regeneration is. I'm assuming this is supposed to be foreshadowing him regenerating at the end of the season and makes me wonder if they're going to do something other than him getting killed and coming back to life like before. I wonder if he might simply get too old to carry on and have to.

Either way, he walks Bill's stuff up to the house and meets Millennial archetypes #1-4. They have some hi-larious banter where he claims to be her father and she says grandfather. Then the Doctor starts trying to poke around a bit, and Bill keeps trying to get rid of him. He clearly knows something is wrong, and she keeps pretending that there can't be anything going on that's out of the ordinary. Now I keep going back to the Bill from episode 1,
who could recognise a mind wipe by sight, but now she can't notice a fucking haunted house that's eating people when the space alien who takes her to distant worlds thinks there's a problem?

After some messing around, they're grouped in the lounge and the landlord turns up. He's weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeird,
including twanging a tuning fork on the wall. He makes a comment about having a daughter who is "under his protection", and that comes off odd too. Clearly the villain, and clearly with malicious intent. By now I'm just waiting for them to figure it out, because I already know this guy is feeding people to the house in order to protect or keep his daughter alive. Well they soon start doing so when landlordy disappears and the house decides it won't have doors any more, thank you very much. We're down to the Doctor, Bill and two mooks when they pair off,
one mook to one main character and go exploring.

We then see the reason for the goings on in the house: magic woodlice. They are literally never explained more than this, and no attempt is even made to do so. They work for what they are, but aren't scary and make not a lick of sense. Bill finds Pavel who's not quite dead yet, and the landlord turns up out of nowhere to deliver a little speech about how the musical note is only delaying the inevitable and hope is cruel. The Doctor and his pet mook then find the belongings of several generations of previous residents, all twenty years apart,
dating back 70 years. Meanwhile Bill and her pet mook find a woman who's a tree. Considering there's literally no other characters left, we're to assume this is the Landlord's daughter.

But when the Doctor confronts him about his crimes, shit gets interesting. He says he had to, she was sick and they fixed her but he needs to keep feeding them, keeping them safe in order to keep her. He challenges the Doctor whether he would do the same for someone he loves, and he refuses to reply, to which he says that silence is confirmation. I suppose that's meant to be about his extreme behaviour to keep Clara around, but I felt like they squandered an opportunity for them to draw a better parallel between them by having the Doctor point out that for the longest time he thought he'd destroyed his entire species in an attempt to destroy his enemies. In the end going to extremes to protect his loved ones only led him to be their destroyer. But whatever, he can boo hoo over a character he doesn't even remember any more.

The Doctor offers to help the daughter if he can, to free her from this macabre cycle of killing that happens every couple of decades. Bill speaks to her in person and she feels just terrible about the situation, but feels like she doesn't have a choice and that her father knows best. But when the Doctor arrives and the gang's all here, they start poking holes in the story they're given. What father with a sick child would be in a position to stumble across magic woodlice in the garden? Why would someone bring a child bugs, Bill confirms that some people find them icky?
How would the landlord possibly be old enough to have participated in the earliest murders when, surely, he would have been a child at the time?

But then they figure it out. He's not her father, he's her son. He's lied to her, because her memory has faded (which is blamed on the restoration process) and she's been controlled by an assumed parental authority he had no right to.
He's adamant they need to kill their enemies, and keep her alive. Sadly he never goes so far as to say why beyond the "saving loved ones" trope. But the scene where they realise this, and their relationship comes crashing down,
led as it is by Capaldi and Suchet, works really well. As long as you don't think about it too much, but more on that later. The tree woman realises that she can't stop her son from carrying on, and has the woodlice eat them in order to end it. At the same time she releases all the studenti who were eaten before.

Wait...what? Were they eaten by bugs or not? I think this one thing sparked a whole load of fridge logic for me,
that collapsed nearly the entire plot. It's still a well delivered story which, while largely generic, does what it says on the tin. But my thoughts immediately afterwards were that the plot was like a colourful veneer over an inherent void at the center of the plot.

First of all, the woodlice make no fucking sense at all. They're not explained, even the Doctor wants to look into it further but never does. I'm all for the Doctor not being an all-knowing sage who's seen it all before, but when they're not going to even develop the bugs a tiny bit it might have actually been better to have them explained in that way.
Their abilities made no sense either, and followed no consistent rules. Even where the "rules" aren't explained to the audience, it's usually something the writer has figured out and has a clear idea of, but the woodlice heal one person, kill(?) others, respond to sound, but also to mind powers. They can also be commanded to "un-eat" some people? My biggest bugbear is that they have an emeny that responds to sound, the Doctor knows they respond to sound (because he used the music to agitate them) and never once uses the sonic screwdriver against them.
I guess it just wasn't in the plot, but it makes no sense to have those two elements in there and have them fail to interact.

Additionally, the revised ending plot also makes no sense. We're told that the mother is convinced she's a daughter because the regeneration process appears to make her memories fade. Sure thing chief, but we're shown an image of her with a wooden arm in bed, but no other noticeable changes. How, if she's still largely human, did she allow her son to kill several people with magic space bugs in order to keep her alive, and how did he manage this?
If she does have the authority the show implies she does, why did she not put a stop to something she doesn't appear to ever have wanted in the first place? The whole manipulation plotline is compelling, but it's also nonsense in terms of the timelines and the age of the villain at the time of the start of the thing, even though it works for the specific point in time the show presents.

Following the end of the plot we're given an extra scene with the Doctor and Nardole. The Doctor is extremely terse with Nardole, for some reason we're still not sure about. Nardole appears to be a bit more focused on his work,
and still calls the Doctor "sir". The Doctor appears to have brought enough food for ten people to eat takeout.
When the door begins playing a piano, he questions whether the Doctor put it there. He confirms that he did.
He then speaks, alone, to the door, and confirms that someone is imprisoned in there. Someone who's intelligent enough to play the piano, but also silly enough to play whimsical tunes when informed there's food. Bet's still on the Master. I was surprised that he opened the door and went in though. He appeared to sympathise with whatever's behind the door, calling them both a prisoner. This is also weird. The episode ends as the vault door opens up.

Overall this was a reasonable episode in terms of delivery (averaging good from Capaldi and Suchet, and poor from everyone else) and had a plot that allowed for the moments of good delivery but made no fucking sense. I can largely overlook nonsense in plots, but when the story itself calls for characters poking holes in it, it's hard to keep from examining them yourself.

The brief spot for the next episode was a bit of a sigh for me. How many times have they done "space suit what kills you and reanimates your corpse"? It feels like more than once, but the library one is the one that comes to mind most readily. I'm not really looking forward to it, but then maybe I'll be mistaken.
  • 3

User avatar
Marcuse
TCS Sithlord
TCS Sithlord
 
Posts: 6592
Joined: Tue Apr 16, 2013 8:00 pm
Show rep

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Sun May 14, 2017 12:04 am

Episode 10.5 - Oxygen

Spoiler: show
Reviews, the final frontier. See I can rip off famous lines from TV shows too! This one justifies itself by pretending to be part of a lecture the Doctor is giving that describes exactly what happens to someone if you die in space. We then cut nearly immediately to someone dying in space. There's a little sad trombone moment where the female astronaut says she's ready to have a baby with her husband(?) but he doesn't hear because the radios aren't working. Typical dystopian future societies, they can build and maintain vast intergalactic empires but can't make a radio work right. She's then killed by zambos. Her husband apparently follows, but it cuts back to the lecture before we see. The same guy seems alive in future episodes so I'm not sure what happened there. Maybe I'm mistaking them because none of the characters on the station really merit a name.

We return to the mildly gruesome lecture, which is clearly setup for the episode. Again, with these episodes, it bears no relation to what the character delivering the exposition is supposed to be talking about, but this time it's used as an indication that the Doctor is bored and hankering after going to space again. I still don't understand why this is a problem when he has a time machine and can literally leave and come back in the space of a second (they do, in this episode, modify this to mean "what if you get hurt" which makes more sense but wasn't included in any of the other episodes thus far).

The very next shot, he's asking Bill to pick somewhere to go to to see space. Weirdly, when she does pick entirely randomly, he chooses a much more dangerous one that happens to have a distress call coming from it. It's clear that they want to demonstrate that the Doctor is bored and doesn't want to be on Earth any more. He's interrupted by Nardole who saw through the Doctor's cunning ruse of "go to Birmingham for a packet of crisps". He's removed some doohicky from the TARDIS that means it can't go anywhere. But it can, and the whole thing is a waste. In a strange move, it actually makes a past episode kinda have a plot hole because that part being missing was used as an excuse as to why the TARDIS couldn't simply leave.

They arrive on this space station, and the TARDIS puffs a load of O2 into the system, which is noted by the computer as "unauthorised". It does nothing until they've explored a bit though, and come across the slightly macabre dead guy in a space suit. Bill finds it scary, but it's kind of overdone. I feel like her having a full on freakout over every not normal thing she encounters is getting old fast. Being unsettled I get, but her panicking every time she sees someone dead having seen a few of them is just...tiresome and gives nothing to the episode. But then the episode wants to try very hard to make us scared, and frankly it just doesn't work.

When the system realises it should probably be venting the O2 by now, it leads to another bland and uninteresting scene of them being not sucked into the void. They realise they need to wear the suits to be able to breathe because the system won't allow anything other than the O2 in the suits. Why? Because...Capitalism. Corporations are, in the words of Alec Ballllllllwin, corporationy. Therefore they do weird evil shit like kill people in order to make production costs less. Because in space, nobody can hear your human rights lawyer scream. The suits have received a command to get rid of their organic component. Apparently it's cheaper to send real people then kill them all than it is to send robots who wouldn't need oxygen in the first place. Or food. Or sleep. Come to think of it, why does Nardole even need a suit at all? Isn't he a robot? Didn't he literally fart out a spark plug in the first episode and talk about being "reassembled"? He talks about dating an AI in the episode itself. He don't need no oxygen.

They have them run around a bit and encounter four survivors of the original crew. They have laser guns that can literally blast these zambos into space, but they don't use them for no reason. Then we enter a weird version of null space inhabited by nothing but Bill's Opinions. Yes, it's that time again! When Bill notices one of the crew is a blue guy, who looks like a Blue Man Group extra she gasps like she's not travelled on a time machine with an alien and a robot into space for a jolly. He calls her a racist, and her counter is "I'm not racist, normally people are racist against me". Let's leave aside the fact that they're different species, so it would be speciesist, I don't know if they intended for Bill to say outright that she can't be racist because other people are racist to her, but it totally came off like that to me. At that point Bill's space suit begins malfunctioning, so they have to fix it.

They then have a little chat. There's nothing of value on the station, the suits are simple programs so they're not self-aware like the nanomachines (son). The only thing they're missing is oxygen, which is a recurring theme.
I suppose it's meant to create tension, but I found it simply didn't. I guess that setting an arbitrary number on breaths just isn't visceral enough for me. It isn't helped by the way they keep doing nonsense things for comedy like "keep calm or die" which is not particularly funny and it doesn't fit as logical advice. Then the suits manage to diagnose and fix an obvious problem with the door and come to get 'em.

We get some running from shuffling zambos, then they have to go outside. They're told that doing so is suicide,
but then helpfully point out that staying inside is also suicide so might as well do something eh? They all don helmets because the little air forcefields that're really cheap for the FX budget while allowing the actors to not have to act through helmets all the time don't work in a vacuum. Except for the vacuum inside the station. I suppose. This then becomes important because Bill's suit plays up again and takes her helmet off. They can't get hers back on,
so the Doctor warns her that she'll be exposed to the vacuum of space. Oh no! Who just got a lecture on how nasty that could be??? Not Bill, noooooooooo, who'd thunk it? We see the doors open (in a very unsafe system that cannot be cancelled) and she gets all cold and frosty and shit. Then nada.

The next we see, Bill is passed out stood up in her suit. Apparently she's fine, because she wakes up and looks about. There's like six zambos right there, but they're not advancing for some reason. Then suddenly Nardole.
He gets her walking around again, and fills us in: the Doctor gave Bill his helmet and suffered the consequences.
Why Nardole, a non-human robot couldn't have isn't explained or addressed. Turns out, he's blind, which is new.
Of course, he assures us he can just fix it in the TARDIS when all this is over. However, it's still pretty interesting,
especially as he never accepts help, until he does. The zambos won't go any further because the plans for that section of the station don't exist in the database, so they think it doesn't exist, even though they've been shown to have cameras that can scan things right in front of them. That's a weird idea, but fine.

But Nardole's single mention of "Section 12" makes the whole map magically appear. Zambo time again peeps,
now with even less oxygen in the tank. but lo and behold, that shitty suit they put Bill in fails again and Blind Doctor can't save her again. But he keeps telling her she'll be okay in the end. For a second I expected her to fucking regenerate or something. But the zambos get her, and she turns all blue and gross like the others. Bill is ded???
Seems a weird line for the series to take, but okay it's interesting. We get to see that image of her mother again when she dies. Don't know why.

The Doctor, Nardole and the couple of crew left run into a reactor room. There the Doctor does the worst fake out ever: he links their lives to the reactor system meaning if they die then the whole station will blow up. The crew and Nardole take it as an act of revenge, which the Doctor encourages. I guess intelligences as simple as the ones in the suits might manage to not figure out the real plan. Now I know I'm smarter than a space suit. Oh and Bill aten't ded because the suit was not powerful enough or some other bullshit nobody would have been able to tell that wasn't omniscient.

Of course the whole point is to make it cheaper to keep them alive than it is to kill them. We're treated to a heavy handed sermon about the evils of spreadsheets, and then the zambos respond like people and feed the crew oxygen so they can stay alive instead of dying and taking everything with it. As a plot device it works well enough, and it's reasonably clever to have the solution be modifying the cost/benefit analysis of the transaction. It's just delivered in a really sanctimonious way that's not very engaging.

The remaining pair of crew members ask the Doctor, now they're back in the TARDIS, to take them to "head office"
wherever that is. Apparently turning up at the head office of a company large enough and powerful enough to consider human life to have no value is a great plan and doesn't totally get you killed or anything. The Doctor then later reports, in similar manner to the results of his fraud regarding inheritance on magic poo fish episode, that this one single action brings an end to capitalism itself, and humanity moves on to "the next mistake". It just about saved it for me to point out that other systems are probably also going to be somewhat shitty, but man they over egg it by attributing to that one thing the downfall of an entire system.

But Nardole isn't happy at all. He warns the Doctor that the vault needs to be guarded, and what if he got injured or hurt and couldn't defend Earth. More oath shit, blah blah. He gets mad and asks the Doctor to look at him while he's talking, but despite having had a scene where we see the Doctor get his eyes fixed, he's apparently still blind.

So let's talk about the things that matter here. Bill got put through the ringer, but eventually came out of it the same as before. The Doctor however, has lost both his sight and his sonic screwdriver. In the next episode he's wearing the sunglasses again as some kind of "blind man" thing, because he's determined to hide from Bill that he's still blind for some reason. They're obviously on to some "depower the Doctor" kick, and I can't say I'm against that.
It might seem artificial, but depowering him and making him have to approach problems in a different way is probably the only way to eke any interest out of a character who has done nearly everything and always won.
I would be interested to see if there's any genuine fallout from this in the rest of the series, and if it changes how the episodes are delivered. Obviously, with Capaldi's Doctor regenerating at the end of the series, it means that we can be sure this will be fixed by then, but I do hope they keep this running until the end of the series, if only to give poor Peter Capaldi something to do.

The episode itself is reasonably bland and uninteresting. It was billed as horror-inspired, but for me didn't achieve a lick of that whatsoever. The "Nardole ain't human and doesn't really need to breathe" thing introduces a plot hole that scuppers the sense of the largest change the series has seen to a serving Doctor in my viewing of the series,
which is a shame.
  • 3

User avatar
Marcuse
TCS Sithlord
TCS Sithlord
 
Posts: 6592
Joined: Tue Apr 16, 2013 8:00 pm
Show rep

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby KleinerKiller » Sat May 20, 2017 10:42 pm

I was actually somewhat liking "Oxygen" at first despite glaring problems being visible from the start, and it took me a while to figure out why; it's because it has a few major structural and thematic similarities to "The Rebel Flesh" / "The Almost People", a two-parter I quite enjoy. Both episodes, noticeably, end with the scant few survivors of the incident being TARDIS'd to the door of their negligent / malicious corporate overlords for offscreen justice.

However, I'm now seeing some discussions about these similarities reevaluating "Rebel Flesh" from a decent pair of episodes to irredeemably shitty, simply because that two-parter was explicitly philosophical and dealt with questions about the worth of artificial life, while this episode is explicitly political and acts as one big takedown of capitalism (with another bit of out-of-nowhere racism commentary thrown in because why not), and we need political stories instead of philosophical ones now because Trump. The big questions about life just can't be relevant anymore.

In fact, much of the "best season ever" praise seems to be coming from a place of "OMG THEY'RE PRAISING MY POLITICS YAY~" rather than actual measurements of quality. It's the perfect collision between political thinkpiece culture and the general erosion of the hardcore Doctor Who fandom to a place where everything is considered nigh-perfect and no criticism is tolerated. And I fucking hate it.
  • 1

"Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it." - Eclipse Phase

NEW REVIEW! Judgment / Judge Eyes (2019)
User avatar
KleinerKiller
Time Waster
Time Waster
 
Posts: 1883
Joined: Sun Feb 08, 2015 6:34 pm
Location: Newfoungengzealaustrermany
Show rep
Title: Cute

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Sun May 21, 2017 4:08 pm

Episode 10.6 - Extremis

Spoiler: show
The Doctor gets an email telling him about an enemy.

...

What?

Seriously, this is the only substantive content in the entire episode. You know that one episode of Family Guy where Stewie actually kills Lois, then it turns out to have been a dream? Brian says at the end that making it an unreal dream is a "complete fuck you" to the fans, and this episode smacks of the same. Worse, it's unambitious for being so, refusing to do anything truly interesting with the characters given complete freedom to use and destroy the main characters.

But let's humour ourselves. Our episode begins with another one of those Moffat hallmarks: a planet of people devoted for millennia to whatever the plot specifically requires. This time it's a planet of creepy executioners,
who've made it their business to kill people. Presumably they do so on request from foreign judicial systems,
hope they're all on the level, otherwise these guys are about as bad as the Daleks. But leaving aside the plot hole of having a planet where everything in existence has been charted and methods to kill it devised (why not ask them every time something new pops up???) the Doctor is there. It's uncertain whether or not he's blind, and why he's there. The way they explain it to him, only one Time Lord can carry out the sentence on another one (for...some reason) and Missy is brought out.

At this point, I'm unsure what the episode is trying to do. We're obviously being led to believe that the Doctor,
blinded on Chasm Forge, is now attempting to commit permanent suicide. This is so far out of character for the Doctor that it rings wrong, and we're almost immediately contradicted in this by the situation being reversed and Missy being the prisoner, and the Doctor having been recruited to act as her executioner. Which is also...weird.
What did she do that got her banged up? Her taunting discussion indicates she's been in the position to learn intel from the Daleks, which apparently is just a thing she does because evil I guess. None of them care that she's also a Time Lord and probably also their enemy. Whatever, it sounds cool so throw it in and who cares about the logic,
right?

But we also get a time stamp on this, we're right after the events of the last Christmas Special, where the Doctor lived for a long time with River Song. Okay so flashback, then I guess this is where Missy gets shoved into the vault they're guarding. Lo and behold, said vault emerges from the water and Missy begs for her life, the Doctor's hand on the lever.

Boom we wake up to the Doctor sat in a darkened room. Because when you're blind you don't waste money on the lecce bill. He's wearing his sonic fucking sunglasses again, and they allow him to cheat basically all of the ill effects of blindness by allowing him to see. Now if that's possible why hasn't he gotten some more permanent solution?
Who knows. But there's people filing into his lecture theatre, and they're Catholic Cardinals. Then suddenly Pope!
He asks why the Pope himself is doing this, because casually disrespecting the Pope is totally okay, and also pointing out stupid plot devices in your own media is in vogue at the moment apparently. He replies... extremis.

Roll credits.

I do find it weird that the Pope speaks what seems to be (and pardon me if I'm incorrect) some version of Italian.
Last I checked, the current Pope is from Argentina, the one before that German, and the one before that Polish.
They also often speak many languages in order to preach in native languages to different people. Also the TARDIS automatically translates the speech of gargling aliens, but can't handle the Supreme Pontiff. I think it's to make the episode seem more cultured, but it just falls flat. They also claim that the Doctor was recommended by Pope Benedict the Ninth, in 1045, we then get our first SocJus yuk yuk when the Doctor claims that Benedict IX was a woman.

As an aside, basic research will tell you that this is not the case. It's so weird to me that Moffat would use the name of a Pope who was singularly poorly regarded and then fabricate details which are less interesting than the reality.

Either way, we discern that the Vatican is very concerned about a specific book in their library. Called Veritas (no,
not the short-lived political party of UKIP defector and BBC talk show host, Robert Kilroy-Silk) it kills everyone who reads it. But they don't die, they commit suicide. Everyone who has ever read the book has killed themselves.
Oh dear, and the Doctor is blind and can't read. Why he doesn't just tell them this directly is a mystery, but it seems tied to the nebulous concept of his enemies not finding out he's blind. As a reason it's broadly plausible,
but doesn't really compel as part of the episode.

Then we skip to recurring mook Bill's house. She's on a date, because this is important for us to know. Wouldn't you know it, she's brought a girl home. I would never have guessed. But apparently her adopted mother doesn't know that, because she turns up and acts mad Bill (a 20ish year old University student) brought someone home, she says she has "strict rules about men in the house". What the fuck is her beef with men and why does only Moffat write her like that? When she discovers (yes, discovers as though she didn't already know) Bill is gay,
she just fucks off to the pub. Why any of that was necessary is baffling to me. But then SUDDENLY POPE. Bill's date is scared off by the appearance of the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church and a group of senior Cardinals,
who, if you didn't know, take a dim view of what historian David Starkey refers to as "homousexuelles".

I just can't even. Move on.

Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor is fiddling blindly with a device he refers to as "deadly". On more suicide themes yay.
This show is definitely for kids. While he does so, Bill rants at him and Nardole tries to tell her he's still blind.
The Doctor turns to Nardole and shakes his head in the least subtle "don't do that" ever, and he instead tells her about the Veritas. I have no idea why the Doctor tries to hide his blindness from Bill, but it's probably to manufacture tension. He had no problem telling Bill that he was blind before, so why it's a problem now is confusing. As another aside, the blurb for the next episode has him openly admitting, presumably to Bill who is the only person beside Nardole and Doctor who knows what Chasm Forge is, that he's blind. So why the manufactured tension? I suppose it is it's own reward...

So to the Vatican Batman! Da nana da nananananaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

No wait, not the Vatican, to a flashback. At this point I just wish they'd fucking get to the Vatican already. But we're back to the strange Missy execution flashback. A priest turns up. After some wrangling, the Doctor, not Missy gets to consult about his mortal soul. Er, don't they usually offer pastoral care to the soon to be deceased, not the executioner? It speaks a lot to the attitude of the people writing this show that they seem to care more about the moral fortitude of the executioner than the needs of the person about to be killed. But in this case it's neither, because it's Nardole in disguise who's been told he has full permission to "kick the Doctor's arse". Ha. I will say that despite the crappy writing and ultimately pointless plot, Matt Lucas is turning Nardole into the most enjoyable part of this series. We need more irate companions telling the Doctor they're going to kick his arse and being totally weird in a kind of lovable way. I think if the series had more guts, they would simply write Bill out and have Nardole as the proper "companion". Reading from River Song's diary, he delivers the line "virtue is only virtue in extremis".

Roll credits.

But to the Vatican!!!!

Finally we're here. But when the silent and unresponsive mobile set dressing Cardinals leave, Nardole challenges the Doctor about hiding his blindness. The Doctor gives some shit excuse about not wanting to be worried about and Nardole doesn't buy it for a second and calls him an idiot. He says that that's definitely not a secret. The Pope then wanders off, because we can't actually do anything besides insult and disrespect the Pope. Actually harming him would be off limits. The Doctor and Cardinal Redrobes head off to the secret heretical library of the Vatican, protected as it is by a...sigh...image of Pope Benedict IX openly depicted as a woman. Sure, whatever. Bill exclaims "Harry Potter" to which the Doctor admonishes her with the word "language" as one might a child being rude. Redrobes tells us that the layout is designed to confuse the uninitiated, to which the Doctor then retorts "sort of like religion, eh?" Which...wait...what? I get that the Doctor is supposed to be this atheist hero who insults the religious as a matter of course, but why tell Bill off for comparing the library to a piece of fiction it does look like, then straight up insult their entire faith directly afterwards?

We then jump back to the execution. Nardole finishes whatever he was saying by telling the Doctor that "in darkness, we are revealed". He walks back to the block, where Missy is full on begging for her life. She promises to be good in future, and he challenges her with the same words from River Song's book, "without hope, without witness, without reward". It's clear that he's pointing out that yeah she'll be good when it suits her, but will she be good when there's nothing in it for her, when it costs her everything and she won't even be seen doing it. It's reasonable to suspect she won't.

We then jump back to the Vat. There's already someone in this library. Why do so many Moffat stories center on evil libraries? It's almost like he thinks the presence of so much writing is evil??? But this time it's a light pouring from a side passage, which we learn has a spoopy portal to another dimensjon in it. Redrobes goes to have a look, and dies.
Nobody notices. Requiescat In Pace, Cardinal Redrobes.

Ignoring this, they manage to come, unaided because it was always a straight walk to it, to the cage that the Veritas is in. Apparently someone else has been there, because there's stuff all over the desk. Oh wait no, some random Cardinal got in, shut the door behind him, and sent a copy of the Veritas to CERN (what? Why?). He then runs off with a pistol in hand to probably play with kittens or give alms to the poor or something. The Doctor makes an utterly contrived excuse to send Bill and Nardole away to follow the armed man who fled from them, into a library designed to get you lost. Clever guy. He commits offscreen suicide (kids show!) and the Doctor still sends them.

We then have one of the more enjoyable scenes between Bill and Nardole. She's petulantly objecting to Nardole placing himself in between her and potential threats, and he turns around and straight up threatens to kick her arse if she doesn't listen to him. She agrees and he shouts "goodo" and carries on. Matt Lucas is genuinely the funniest and most interesting part of this one. Bill then asks him if he's "secretly a badass" and has says (as did the Doctor) that there's nothing secret about it, then whimpers like a child at the sight of the gun held by the dead hand of the priest who died. Then they spot another portal and wander through it, because when you're not sure what's going on, walking unthinkingly into the light is the best plan.

We skip back to the Doctor using his magic device to "borrow" some eyesight from his future. Then a monk walks towards him. The Doctor can't see him properly because he's still half-blind. Yay.

We skip right back to the execution scene, where Missy tells him that without hope, without witness, she is his friend. So he pulls the lever and makes his oath to guard the body for a thousand years. That's dim, but the thousand years thing is supposed to be a preventative to stop a Time Lord coming back. So yeah. Great oath there Doctor.

We skip back to the Pentagon, because we've not had enough locations yet. Where Nardole and Bill have popped out of the portal. The Pentagon here being one single office, and an exterior footage shot. They're quickly accosted by someone who never calls security and just watches as two clearly unauthorised persons flee into the Pentagon. Back through the portal, they emerge into a room filled with projectors, and portals. Each portal apparently takes them into a different important place in the world. The next one they choose is the one that takes them to CERN. Convenient.

So we skip to CERN, where a drunken scientist tells them they're all going to die in the cafeteria. Remember that CERN got sent the details of the Veritas by email? Right?

Back to the Doctor! He's still half blinded, remember? He bullshits us for a while that this will have any one of many utterly irrelevant consequences, and the monks strap him into the chair (it has restraints because apparently the Vatican has been forcing people to read it, or continue to read it, against their will?) and he finally realises he's not with Bill or Nardole any more. They take away the Veritas, disappointing both me and the Doctor. The Doctor criticises them asking why they're playing a game, and they retort that it is a game. He uses the Sonic Screwdriver to...put out a fire...and escapes in the dark with the laptop that was used to send the message to CERN. The aliens demonstrate the ability to start a fire with their mind, and light it again. He's gone.

Back to CERN! Everyone's in the cafeteria drinking heavily and looking sad. Shit, this Veritas must be some heavy downer. Bill and Nardole look confused and the lead drunk tells them they have five minutes before they all die. Under the tables are...bright red ACME, fucking Wile E Coyote style TNT tubes??? Really? I've never seen something so cartoonish in a live action TV show. Notwithstanding that, how and why does a facility including a particle accelerator have vast amounts of TNT on site???

Back to Il Dottore. He's running through the library and opens the computer in order to read the Veritas, because when you're being chased by aliens, suicidal tendencies are a must. He reads literally just the first line; A Test of Shadows, before his eyes pack in again. Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuullshit fakeout. Then the baddies chase him again. Wooo.

Back to CERN. We're treated to an explanation of the Veritas without having to read it. Bill and Nardole are asked to pick numbers, and they pick the same ones. They all do, every person. This proves that they are not real people, and therefore they're committing suicide because they've realised that they're unreal. I don't know how the book adequately communicated the number 103 million (remember the book is supposed the predate the Catholic Church), but whatever.

Bill and Nardole escape the explosion by running back into the hub room they came from. At this point they start really freaking out, comparing their world to Grand Theft Auto. Yes Moffat, you are indeed positioned in a lower angled degree alongside the adolescent members of your species. Nardole points out that the center of it looks like projectors, and puts his hand into the middle. It, and he, promptly disintegrates leaving Bill on her own. She heads into the White House, where everyone's learned of the Veritas and killed themselves, including a not-very-Trumplike President. The Doctor is behind the desk in the Oval Office, and he convinces Bill that it is indeed correct: there's an alien trying to conquer the Earth, and this is a simulation designed to test things. Bill is convinced of her unreality to the point where she spontaneously dissolves and is notionally replaced by a monk.

The Doctor speaks with the monk again, remembering the words of River Song about virtue without hope or witness etc. He also does that thing about not being "The Doctor" unless he's being good or something too. So he threatens the aliens, and then uses his fake sonic sunglasses to record and transmit an email of the discussion he had with the aliens to the REAL Doctor, who's been sat on his ass the whole time.

His first act when he finds out about all of this? To call Bill and tell her she can totally score a date with that girl Penny from the beginning of the episode, whom Bill considers out of her league. We know it's possible because simulation Bill managed it. Yay. Just the dramatic and interesting response we needed. He then returns to the vault, and refers to "said you were my friend" and that the denizen of the vault is all he has left.

At this point we snap back, yet again, to the execution, where it turns out the Doctor can't kill Missy and won't. He will however, imprison her for a thousand years for the lulz and she'll go along with it for no reason other than plot. He intimidates the executions by having them bring up a record of how many people he's murdered.

We snap back, for a final time, to the vault. The Doctor then deliberately identifies the occupant as Missy and then tells her he's blind. What. He was scared of BILL knowing before, but now it's fine for his most dangerous frenemy to know? I seriously don't get how this makes any sense. He's relying on THE MASTER to defeat his enemies for him, and he can rely on nobody else all of a sudden. Did everyone forget that he's still kind of President of Earth, and also possibly still Lord President of Gallifrey? Why is the Master the only Time Lord left again? For this plot to make any sense at all, the events of Heaven Sent and Hell Bent have to not happen.

Look, overall, this plot is bloated, over complicated, and ends on a middle finger to anyone who got remotely invested in the events of the episode. Despite having absolute ability to injure, kill or destroy everyone, the episode fails to do anything interesting with that potential. It fails to explain anything about the enemy they're facing other than they're evil and do their research. We have no idea why they're powerful, who they are, what they want other than the obvious, and what their potential weaknesses might be. The Veritas is just a bullshit mcguffin that doesn't make any sense, why exactly would everyone kill themselves when they read it? It's not like the concept of being deceived by an evil demon isn't something real people haven't thought; it's simple Cartesian Doubt. The projectors are just a reinvention of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Nothing about it puts a new twist on it, and the story doesn't have time to use either of these interesting concepts in a way that compels. I spent the first half of the episode waiting for anything to make sense, and when it did I was disappointed. I was then annoyed by the final fuck you of making it all fake. This was not, strictly, a full stand-alone episode to me.
  • 5

User avatar
Marcuse
TCS Sithlord
TCS Sithlord
 
Posts: 6592
Joined: Tue Apr 16, 2013 8:00 pm
Show rep

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby KleinerKiller » Sun May 21, 2017 10:07 pm

OMG THEY PRAISED MY POLITICS YAY~

Seriously, though, I'm a staunch fucking atheist and even I got sick of all the church bashing in this episode. Combined with the takedown of capitalism in "Oxygen", the pointless and out-of-place posturing against racism in "Thin Ice", and the constant displays of people accidentally putting Bill off (remember when they said pre-season that her homosexuality wouldn't be something they'd make a big deal out of?) this series is really looking more like an edgy teenager's manifesto about everything wrong with the world than a grown man trying to make statements.

Not to mention everything you mentioned about the plot holes, unanswered questions, pointless narrative runarounds, empty twists, nonsensical villains, and such.

All that aside, however, this was probably my favorite episode of the season so far. It ended on an open bullshit note and had raging inconsistencies and stupid moments throughout, but I found it fairly interesting in the first half and then fleetingly clever once the mystery was solved, which is more than I can say for any episode thus far. Compared to Richard Spencer's fish poop harvest or the magical woodlouse manor, this was practically Shakespearean. It's not "THE GREATEST EPISODE EVER SO GENIUS SO BRILLIANT OH PRAISE MOFFAT" like so many other supposedly professional critics are falling all over themselves to screech, but it was... fine.

Spoiler: show
I cannot express how disappointed I am that it's just Missy in the vault, rather than even something like John Simm's Master (guess we have to wait on his appearance). Coming from the man who brought us the Hybrid mystery and then pointedly spit in our faces for being interested in it -- who has a habit of spitting in the faces of fans over his mysteries in general, whether on Doctor Who or Sherlock -- I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

As I mentioned before, I'm not seeing the blurbs for the next episode, so I don't know if this gets explicitly answered or not. Is this meant to be setting us up for an arc where the Doctor and Missy work together to defeat the Scary Vampire-Looking Alien Monks of Vagueness? Because I would really, really hate that if that's what they're planning. We've already seen the only things that make these enemies remotely unique (the fact that they made a simulation), their powers and motives are nebulous at best, and they don't even look all that interesting.

EDIT: Also, certain subsects of fans are apparently excited over the possibility that the finale might reveal that everything before this episode -- Classic Who, Big Finish Who, NuWho -- has been one long simulation conducted by these mysterious aliens, and that this would be the perfect mindfuck for Moffat to end on before he hands over the clean slate to Chibnall. That pretty much sums up DW fans these days for me.
  • 2

"Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it." - Eclipse Phase

NEW REVIEW! Judgment / Judge Eyes (2019)
User avatar
KleinerKiller
Time Waster
Time Waster
 
Posts: 1883
Joined: Sun Feb 08, 2015 6:34 pm
Location: Newfoungengzealaustrermany
Show rep
Title: Cute

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby cmsellers » Mon May 22, 2017 12:57 am

I'd just like to note that my reaction to learning I'm in a simulation designed to help aliens conquer the world would not be to kill myself. It would be: Oh yeah, I've heard that one before, and I don't see how that changes things. Keep calm and carry on and all that.
  • 4

User avatar
cmsellers
Back-End Admin
Back-End Admin
 
Posts: 9316
Joined: Sun Apr 14, 2013 7:20 pm
Location: Not *that* Bay Area
Show rep
Title: Broken Record Player

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby KleinerKiller » Mon May 22, 2017 2:10 am

cmsellers wrote:
Spoiler: show
I'd just like to note that my reaction to learning I'm in a simulation designed to help aliens conquer the world would not be to kill myself. It would be: Oh yeah, I've heard that one before, and I don't see how that changes things. Keep calm and carry on and all that.


Spoiler: show
According to various reviews and discussions, it was clarified somewhere in the episode that everyone wasn't killing themselves because they couldn't deal with the stress of the knowledge, but to keep themselves from giving any more information to the aliens that could be used to kill their friends and families. I don't know whether this was a detail we all overlooked or just fans covering for Moffat's sloppiness as they are wont to do.


Also, may want to put your post in spoiler tags since it's about the most recent episode, even if the plot does suck.
  • 2

"Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it." - Eclipse Phase

NEW REVIEW! Judgment / Judge Eyes (2019)
User avatar
KleinerKiller
Time Waster
Time Waster
 
Posts: 1883
Joined: Sun Feb 08, 2015 6:34 pm
Location: Newfoungengzealaustrermany
Show rep
Title: Cute

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Mon May 22, 2017 5:37 pm

The problem I have with these Moffat plots is that they're jam packed with often confusing stuff, and none of it means anything, to the point where it's often undone or unmade by the end of the episode meaning there's no reason to be compelled by any of it.

Spoiler: show
I'm certain that the plot for the series going forward is going to be monks vs Missy because why the fuck not? Also if you want the blurb from future episodes and also spoiler clips you can sub to the Who youtube channel, they post all that shit.
  • 2

User avatar
Marcuse
TCS Sithlord
TCS Sithlord
 
Posts: 6592
Joined: Tue Apr 16, 2013 8:00 pm
Show rep

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby ghijkmnop » Tue May 23, 2017 9:28 pm

Redacted
  • 2

Last edited by ghijkmnop on Thu Mar 14, 2019 2:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Delete my account
ghijkmnop
Time Waster
Time Waster
 
Posts: 1962
Joined: Thu May 28, 2015 8:22 am
Show rep
Title: Prisoner of TCS

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Fri May 26, 2017 4:32 pm

Slight next episode spoilers and speculation.

Spoiler: show
Remember when he stood in front of the vault and said that Missy was all he had? Yeah they forgot about that,
and remembered the whole "President of the World" thing I mentioned. In the next episode we have UN troops referring to the Doctor as "Mr President" again, so why exactly are we banking on a completely unreliable insane Time Lady instead of anything else the Earth might have to offer? I know UNIT basically just sit at desks and talk about how they're all fucked, but I imagine that the plot will run something thus:

The baddie monks will look like they're going to win, not because of anything specific they have or can do, but entirely because they've simulated it all and magically know all the Doctor's plans in advance. Missy will be unleashed, but, shock horror, will actually be the John Simm version for no reason (and will not be explained) and will gleefully fuck up the monk's plans by dint of not having been included in the simulation.
  • 2

User avatar
Marcuse
TCS Sithlord
TCS Sithlord
 
Posts: 6592
Joined: Tue Apr 16, 2013 8:00 pm
Show rep

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Sat May 27, 2017 10:49 pm

Episode 10.7 - The Restaurant Pyramid at the End of the Universe World

Seriously, fuck that unoriginal title.

Spoiler: show
But it's also inaccurate as well, being one of the hallmarks of Moffat influenced writing: big promises which are never kept.

So we begin with a strange interspersing of "previously on" material combined with new material of...Bill absolutely spilling the beans about the Doctor and the global threat to the peace of the world in order to impress that girl called Penny she's on a date with. They then recycle the deeply unfunny joke of the date being interrupted by the Pope, by having it interrupted in almost exactly the same way, but this time by discount Ban Ki Moon. They ask for the President, and we get a little jolly comment about him being orange (oh my god THEY PRAISED MY POLITICS), before they openly point out that it's actually the Doctor.

In the car to find the Doctor, we're introduced to our titular restaurant. Wait, pyramid. It's 5000 years old but wasn't there yesterday, wooooo spoopy. This time difference is never mentioned again and serves only for a confusing reveal scene. It's located in the Doctor Who version of the fake central Asian country Team America informed us was called "Durka Durkastan". It may as well be the same for all the relevance it has to the plot. It seems to be only a way to get the heads of three large world armies in the same place.

The Doctor is monologuing about death while playing his guitar in the TARDIS. I just want to take a moment to point out what a juvenile, self indulgent, and utterly pointless thing that is for him to do. None of his speech has any relevance to the plot, and the only purpose (other than making Capaldi once again appear like someone's old and uncool dad) is for Bill to puncture his introspection by being down to earf and real.

Discount Ban Ki Moon wants to speak to him! To do so, they loaded the TARDIS into a plane without the Doctor even noticing. Let's never mind that if the Doctor didn't want to speak to them, he could just fly it away. He's just sulking in there playing his geetarr like a moody child. When he pops out, they discuss the situation.

At some point we see a woman leaving her house and her glasses break. We get a close up of the broken glasses so I'm sure it's significant. Yes also the woman is a little person and it affects literally nothing about the plot so I'm not mentioning it again.

Flash snap to the ground, where they're standing next to a barrier in the middle of nowhere with no...walls or anything. Methinks the prop department didn't have a great plan there. We get baby's first deduction as Bill informs us cleverly that the pyramid that didn't exist yesterday is probably an alien spaceship. No shit fucking Sherlock.
The Doctor takes the fact it's landed in the middle of three powerful armies as evidence that it's telling the Earth to....sigh..."bring it". He then wanders up to the pyramid blindly, relying on Nardole to tell him what's happening.
Apparently hiding your blindness from enemies means openly asking someone what they can see through a comm while one of them is right in front of him.

The monk appears and tells the Doctor that they will rule the Earth, the Doctor makes empty threats, and the monk weirdly says that they will be invited to rule the Earth. The clocks all ape the "minutes to midnight" thing, and stick on 23:57. Spoopy. Thus far these guys have shown they can:

Start fires
Control clocks
Make pyramids really fast

Truly, they are the most puissant of the Doctor's enemies.

They go back to the hideout and think hard about things. The Doctor decides that the best plan is to nuke 'em.
Nice going Duke. You really took those lessons from the Zygon invasion to heart. The problem I have here is that the Doctor is never once consistent across series. Naturally it's easy to do in a series fifty years old, but they do have the expedient of regeneration to make it more sensible. I only really expect Capaldi's Doctor to be consistent with other things Capaldi's Doctor has said and done, and having him make such an impassioned speech against war, hate soldiers, and defend peace when Matt Smith's Doctor did occasionally use firearms and Tennant's fought with a terrible anger, makes me rankle when he blithely advocates war kind of just because.

Obviously the monks stop the attacks (didn't see a Chinese attack there, did they forget there were three powers at work there?) and they go back in. The monks tell them that the Earth is going to be destroyed, they have a lot of fairy lights that can predict the future (never mind the time machine the current President has) and will save them if they asked. The Doctor immediately rejects this, and as the President of the whole Earth, that would seem to be that. But the monks are apparently cool with accepting the word of the secretary-general of the UN anyway,
and interrogate Ban Ki-Moon's veracity. Strangely they say that his consent comes from fear, not love, so they...uh...kill him. What.

Let's break this down. You land your ship on a planet, threaten to utterly destroy it, then tell them they need to ask for help. But in order to do so and not die, they need to love your spooky ass? What is this? How is it helped by showing them images of their world in ruins and telling them that you're all dead to them already?

Around this point we realise our nobody leaving home is a scientist in a lab, inhabited by her and the single worst scientist in the world. He observes no adequate protocols for handling potentially infectious material, fails to use PPE correctly, and doesn't close air lock doors. We also get a close up of a glass smashing for him, when he describes his night out. Maybe smashing glass is a thing that's important?

The Doctor and the military types run back to the hideout. There, an extraordinary scene occurs. The heads of the field armies stationed at Durkadurkastan decide they won't do the fightin's any more. They do a shake hands thing like it's no thing at all. If it was so easy to do, why didn't they do that before? Why the Cold War if all it took to establish world fucking peace was to stand three generals in a room until they shook hands? The whole thing is totally unbelievable and serves only to highlight how weird it is that the Doctor was named President of the World,
but the Russian and Chinese generals appear to need convincing of this.

But we realise that the real threat is our "world's worst" scientists. They've created a GM super bacteria that turns everything into grey goo. Nanomachines son. The Doctor finally realises that there's something else going on,
and happily, Nardole manages to guess what the answer is the first time! Yay for him. He also gets the only mildly funny line when he reports that humans need various things and ends it with "beer". They despair of getting the right thing in time (forgetting that the President of Earth owns a time machine) and so the Doctor does something very strange. He...uh...publishes all classifed information on the planet onto the internet and tells them to google it...

Right, so, that ends the world several times over. No doubt about it. Nuclear codes are classified information,
and we know how the internet works; once it's there it's never coming off. So in order to save the world, he's just destroyed it. Second worst President ever (OMG MARC REFLECTED MY POLITICS YAY BEST REVIEW SERIES EVAR). When they can't find it, the generals head to the monks and ask for help, with Bill tagging along for some reason. But their consent is based on "strategy" so they die. Well shit. Does executing a high ranking officer in three separate armies count as an act of war? Probably, but who cares eh?

Meanwhile The Doctor and Nardole figure out a marginally clever way of figuring out the place where the real end of the world is being made. They switch off the security cameras to all the labs that're making biotech/bioweapons (because magic powers exist when the plot needs them to) and then spot the one the monks turn back on. They head there immediately. On exiting the TARDIS, they make some bitch-ass comment about Nardole being mostly human. What? Why has he gone about making sarcastic comments about humans and shitting nuts and bolts for the rest of the series then? I wish anything about Nardole made sense. The Doctor then meets our worst scientist ever,
and sends Nardole back into the TARDIS to fly it away because reasons. Nardole is infected with the death goop and dies. Oh. Well fuck you writers. The TARDIS doesn't have biohazard protocols then? Also that shit doesn't affect the Doctor but it's broad spectrum enough to affect both plants and humans? Fuck off.

We now reach the weird climax of the episode. The Doctor aims to blow up the lab in order to destroy the pathogen.
We get confirmation that this would actually help, because the "minutes of midnight" clock thing starts to...run backwards on its own in response to events nobody could have known at the time? Okay sure thing guise.

But he's trapped behind an airlock door, and it has a combination lock you can only make work manually. By sight.
Reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally? Are you serious that a biolab handling potentially dangerous products would use a manual combination lock for it's emergency closed doors? Whatever, this lab was designed by plot. But the Doctor is bliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiind and can't do it. In fact he doesn't even try except completely randomly. He doesn't do something like...use his ridiculous sonic sunglasses to take a still image and then ask Bill to tell him how many segments to move each one on or something. No he just stands there like a berk while the timer on the bomb runs out.

Then Bill does a dumbass thing. She offers the entire planet to be ruled by an unknown race of malevolent aliens in order to save the Doctor's life. Wait, that's wrong. Nobody would be that stupid. No, she offers the entire planet to be ruled by an unknown race of malevolent aliens in exchange for the Doctor's sight,
but still leaving him in immediate danger that could easily still kill him
.

The actual f....

You know what, I don't care. Not a single section of this has made the slightest sense, and so many elements have appeared only to further the plot that I just stopped caring. Mark this as the point at which Marc stopped caring about this series.

Overall this episode was dull. The first half was more boring fake military crap we don't care about. Look, if I want military fiction I'll read WH40k novels, I would like some half decent SF from Who and failing that some nice fantasy.
Stop putting crappy stock footage from B movies into Doctor Who please, it's dull. I'm also bored with discount Ban Ki Moon and various "too worried to offend so let's make them nice" foreign military leader stereotypes. Bill is,
once again, useless and harms the overall cause. Nardole is well acted but has nothing to do and dies which sucks.The Doctor is a moron when it suits the plot, and a genius when needed. The whole gaining sight thing is crap,
and having an entire world given in payment to restore one person's sight is a stupid, stupid bargain to make.

The next episode is some bullshit teaser with Missy out of the box, Bill murdering the Doctor and him supposedly regenerating (my money is on him turning into a monk, given he's saying he's joined them in the trailer), and an entire Earth ruled by the monks. My bet is on the "oh no but it was all an alternate reality dreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam" excuse again at the end. Missy says Bill would need to die in order to break the bargain, so maybe we'll get fucking lucky on that front, though I doubt it.
  • 5

User avatar
Marcuse
TCS Sithlord
TCS Sithlord
 
Posts: 6592
Joined: Tue Apr 16, 2013 8:00 pm
Show rep

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby cmsellers » Sun May 28, 2017 2:22 am

So I've just started watching this episode, and will read Marc's undoubtedly excellent review when I've finished it, but I need to vent now about something:

Spoiler: show
They mention a border dispute and have the US, Chinese, and Russian soldiers at a tripoint. The problem is that the only tripoints on the Chinese-Russian border are at North Korea, Mongolia (in two places) and Kazakhstan, while the US has land borders with only Canada and Mexico and no tripoints. Then they have the pyramid instead in some fictional Central Asian country called "Turmezistan." OK, this makes more sense because the US, Russia, and to a lesser extent China have been vying for influence in Central Asia. But why can't they use a real Central Asian country? It's not like the writers are loathe to comment on the politics of other countries, why the sudden "sensitivity" about Central Asia? Use Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan: either one would be perfectly plausible. And what was with the talk of a border dispute?
  • 1

User avatar
cmsellers
Back-End Admin
Back-End Admin
 
Posts: 9316
Joined: Sun Apr 14, 2013 7:20 pm
Location: Not *that* Bay Area
Show rep
Title: Broken Record Player

Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Australia » Sun May 28, 2017 7:25 am

Hold the fuck on.

Spoiler: show
So the Generals were accused of strategy when they only forfeited so everyone they loved would live and were subsequently killed but Blinkless Bill was not accused of strategy despite forfeiting so one person she gets along with can see and is seen as reliable, despite only seconds ago telling the Doctor that he has to get them out of the bargain she's making now? That checks out.

I thought the reason we had a made up country in this episode was either a) it gets destroyed in the end and they're saving literally every real country for an important plot in the years to come or, more creatively, b) a timey-wimey ending where the country no longer exists in our minds, given that the aliens have a history of creating realities and could be slowly taking over the world a country at a time without us realising it, which is where I thought it was going. Guess I expected too much from this show. Nope, it was just a made-up country for no reason. Should have set it on a different planet then, but what do I know?


My final gripe has nothing to do with this episode, but with every year that goes by since the special, this bugs me even more. Why did they bother bringing back Gallifrey if they're not going to bring back Gallifrey? There's so much potential for fresh plot there, even if it's just once or twice a season to spice things up a little. The Timelords can't be thrilled with the Doc for locking them in another dimension for millennia and it would be cool to see him butt heads with the more chaotic or strict or Meddling of his kind. I'm really hoping Missy's plot this season is to unlock Gallifrey so we can add a layer to the show next time around but I doubt her motives are anywhere near as interesting.
  • 4

YamI JamesT Eyebrows Edgar Logan Eric Michael Tess Sunny Notch Kate Jamish Lao Carp Moo FaceCitizen Aquila Nisi Qinglong Chaise Nullbert NotCIAagent JackRoad Delta MURDA Bert Czar Ambi JulyJack Adric Marcuse SilverMaple Nudge 52xMax Damiana Doma Pumpkin Toy Fry Andro Carrie Snarky Royal RLG Pikajew Windy skooma Kleiner Java Sellers Piter Gisarmbards Grimstone Recluse Esteban Syrup Krashlia Twistappel MacReady Funkotron mcfooty Pseudoman Creepy Kivutar nerd Ladki Jim Youghurt satan GL Angler
Scari
User avatar
Australia
Resident Dickhead
Resident Dickhead
 
Posts: 4227
Joined: Sun Apr 21, 2013 6:15 pm
Location: Take a wild guess
Show rep
Title: Kentucky Fried Colonel

PreviousNext

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 13 guests