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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

DOCTOR WHO! SEASON...um.....thirtyone (No Spoilers)

  
  

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■
21:45 / 05.05.10
That's one hell of a callback.
 
 
Billuccho!
03:05 / 07.05.10
There's never been any ducks in the duck pond because there were ducks, and the crack ate them. This is what I'm figuring, anyway. The crack has been eating things in Leadworth for a long time. Amy's parents, perhaps? Little Amelia said she "didn't have a mum or dad." Not that they died, necessarily, but that she didn't have them. Hmm.
 
 
iamus
16:50 / 08.05.10
That was braw, and next week looks even brawer!
 
 
Poke it with a stick
17:33 / 08.05.10
I saw someone moaning on io9 that the monster of the week was a bit, um unscary but, to be honest, I'd rather we didn't get horribly malevolent universe-shattering nasties all the time.

OK, so destroying Venice is a bit OTT, but at least the not-vampires had a bit more depth to them than some. And the exchanges between Smith and the Sister of Water felt more grown-up than "Grrr! I'll stop you! No you won't! Ha!"

The episode itself felt like a Hammer horror film (albeit without Ingrid Pitt's chest) and possibly benefited from the obvious budget constraints imposed on the crew. I'd much rather have (relatively) subtle acting and the minimum of CGI than some of RTD's effects-fests.
 
 
Dead Megatron
11:22 / 09.05.10
I actually liked the design of the monster, it had a Forgotten Realms look and motivation that I thought fit the settingvery well. But, in 30+ years of Doctor Who, is it really the first time they went with the "I thought they were vampires, but not quite" scifi cliché?

I find that this Doctor has a strange, and dangerous, adrenaline-junk, puzzle-loving, thrill-seeking streak that is much more intense than the one before (and even more than the one before that), which probably makes being his companion particularly risky. Amy's fiancé has a big bullseye painted on his back, me thinks.

Also, I like how they are not trying to portray him as some sort of needy bufon, but as some one who can actually take a pro-active stance and analyse the situation with reasonable insight. Though I still can't remember his name now.

Strange thing, so far in this series the most exciting moment in every episode has been the preview for the next one. Well, as long as they keep delivering it in the following week, it's fine by me...
 
 
Evil Scientist
16:10 / 09.05.10
But, in 30+ years of Doctor Who, is it really the first time they went with the "I thought they were vampires, but not quite" scifi cliché?

The Fourth Doctor encountered actual vampires (the last survivors of a race wiped out by the Timelords).

The Seventh Doctor encountered Haemovores which were effectively vampires (fangs, blood-drinking, repelled by "faith", etc).
 
 
Dead Megatron
13:21 / 10.05.10
So, the Doctor all excited for running into something he hadn't before was just my misunderstanding of his reaction or the writers not knowing/caring for the original series, or the character simply having amnesia?

Wow, even I now think I'm being a bit nittypicky
 
 
Poke it with a stick
16:21 / 10.05.10
...the writers not knowing/caring for the original series, or the character simply having amnesia?

Well, I'd rather have the Doctor getting excited on meeting a variety of vampire he hasn't (as far as the televised portion of his life/lives) met before than him getting all shocked and awed by meeting the Daleks for the sixth time in the new run of episodes.

And hell, it was a fun episode.

Now, I was wondering last night: We know River Song's a bit dodgy; possibly a con artist; possibly not telling the whole truth about her and the Doctor's relationship and her knowledge of his past/future is patchy at best.

I'm just wondering, is she the sort of woman who'd decorate her diary with the Gallifreyan equivalent of hearts and unicorns?

Only, doesn't it seem more likely that someone who has form for making dolls of the Doctor and the TARDIS, who has a certain childlike innocence to her character might be more likely to pimp her diary to look like said TARDIS?

Now why and how River Song might get her hands on the diary I don't know, but doesn't it seem more plausible that River might be using the diary as a crib sheet to ingratiate herself into the Doctor's confidence?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:46 / 10.05.10
Honestly? Seems much too convoluted to me. It might seem like a clever idea in theory, but it'd be hellishly messy and unsatisfying in practice. And we're forgetting that River Song had *no* sneaky-sneaky about her in Silence in the Library, beyond the whole "I can't tell you about that, it'd fuck up the timelines if you knew" thing, but instead a lot of genuine affection and love for the Doctor.

I've not watched this episode a second time yet, because it was a fun romp and that was about it, but what was the comment in the conversation between the Doctor and Alien Fish Vampire Woman, where she said something about dreams?

Yeah, I'm still refusing to let my "realms of the imagination" theory go.
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
01:03 / 11.05.10
Hmmm, I enjoyed it the first time around, but enjoyed it significantly less the second time. Maybe because I had already heard all the good lines and beyond the simple fun of running around and making quips about buxom fish from space there wasn't much to the episode.

It bothered me at the end when everyone disappears and there's nothing but a foreboding silence mentioned earlier by the villian, and the Doctor basically ignores it and goes on his way. Really? You, ah, you don't want to investigate? Not even a teeny little bit? Everyone disappears and there's suddenly no sound at all and you don't want to look into it? Really?
 
 
iamus
17:41 / 11.05.10
Yeah, the endings have all seem a bit telegraphing so far. From the pulsing crack on the tardis monitor to the shadow of a Dalek to "You're the most important person ever numbersnumbersnumbers!" to Can you hear that silence?!? But it comes off to me as being intentionally unsubtle for all the really wee yins watching and to get excited about.

I'm getting into your imagination idea Spatula. It would read a lot like Moffat's MO, as he likes to occasionally put stuff in there that links the reality of a watching kid's life to the fantasy of the show. Would remind me a bit of Silence in The Library, where there's a little girl who has a whole library in her imagination only for it to turn out the library is real and that The Doctor is trapped there. Or Girl in the Fireplace, where her childhood imaginary friend turns up to help her whenever monsters attack.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:47 / 12.05.10
The line I was thinking of came at the end, just before Rosanna topped herself*. "Remember us, Doctor. Dream of us."

I know she was basically saying, "fuck you, matey - you just condemned my entire race to extinction", but even so, it sounded slightly more pointed than that.

*Incidentally, did this make no sense whatsoever to anybody else here? If her perception filter doohickey went on the frizz, how could it possibly lock her into human form? It's only a perception filter, not a body-morphing-wotsit. If it breaks down, then surely it reverts her image to her true form. And if it doesn't, then isn't the answer simply "take the fucking thing off"?

Which I think she did anyway. Feh.
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
02:32 / 13.05.10
Right? The episode seemed kinda lazy. I'm wondering how much more "perception filter" crap we're going to see.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
09:25 / 13.05.10
I'm still trying to figure out exactly how averse to sunlight they actually WERE. It seemed to change from scene to scene.
 
 
Lucid Frenzy
10:23 / 15.05.10
I'm still trying to figure out how adverse to lazy scripting I actually am.

Maybe not a whole lot, cause I'm planning to tune in tonight hoping for something a bit better.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
17:23 / 15.05.10
I liked that a lot. A bit of PKD, a bit of Twilight Zone, a bit of The Avengers.

The whole "we have to grow up eventually" thing suits the Peter Pan viewing. It was also worth it just for the line "if we're gonna die, we can at least die looking like a Peruvian folk band".

It was very much the "everyone does drugs" episode common to all good sitcoms and soap operas, and all the better for it. I'd have actually liked that to be a two-parter, because it was a bit rushed, and the whole suicide scene could have reeeeally been stretched out for maximum impact (as it were), but, well, thumbs up for that one.

I also had to wear a big hat for the entire episode, as I have no curtains and the sun was shining on my computer monitor.
 
 
Poke it with a stick
10:03 / 16.05.10
It was very much the "everyone does drugs" episode common to all good sitcoms and soap operas, and all the better for it.

That's what bothered me about the episode, to be honest - Doctor Who normally manages to do something different from the usual sci-fi tropes but this story felt like it had been done before.

Having said that, it was by turns funny and scary and the frozen TARDIS was genuinely creepy.

And I liked that there's no ambiguity in Amy, Rory and the Doctor's relationship now - Amy knows who she loves and both her "boys" know it too. No cuckolding of the tin dog this time around. Even when it comes to romantic interludes, Moffat's Who is a hell of a lot less mawkish than RTD and all the better for it.

The timey-wimey stuff is a lot less blatant now, as well - no real desire to shoehorn in references to over-reaching story arcs just for the sake of being clever. Not to say there aren't elements in there, but I was fed-up with people playing spot the crack in time every week.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:28 / 16.05.10
That's what bothered me about the episode, to be honest - Doctor Who normally manages to do something different from the usual sci-fi tropes but this story felt like it had been done before.

I agree. 'Particularly sinister dude appears as roly-poly, teeny-tiny gentleman' is a 'what if' story convention that I could do without ever seeing again.

I didn't like this one. I got a bit worried when I saw the preview at the end of last week and it managed to live down to my expectations. Budget cuts have never been more obvious - not only have we got the aliens taking human form, a definite sign of limited funds if ever there was one, we've got an episode set in a tiny English village. On a miserable, rainy day. Doctor Who is done no favours when it's domesticated like this, because doing so essentially neglects the endless possibilities that its set-up should allow for, in favour of presenting something we've all seen any number of times before.

Random observations:

The sudden appearance of the postman, simply to show how lethal the alien threat was meant to be, was hilariously bad. Badly written, badly directed. I actually laughed, and that clearly wasn't the response that they were aiming for.

Rory deciding to grow a ponytail was idiotic and didn't fit with what we've seen of his character up until now at all. The kind of piss-poor excuse for humour that I'd expect from Simon Nye, though. At least it was the only Men Behaving Badly moment.

Fighting old people in a nursing home is a singularly unthreatening predicament, especially when they're knitting you jumpers.

Karen Gillan doesn't have the acting chops to carry big emotion off, it seems. I haven't bought her tears once so far, and setting an entire episode around Amy's relationship with Rory - something which has, to date, been almost entirely unemotional and felt like nothing more than a convenience/an accident/an unfortunate mistake as far as her character's concerned - does her no favours.

Matt Smith is still aces. Loved both the 'don't let the humans know you're excited' moments - "this is going to be a tricky one" and "let's go and poke it with a stick" slyly transforming his face from 'oh shit' to 'heh'.

More emo Doctor? Do not want. Eleven's excitement, anger and joy have been such a refreshing change from Ten's self-cented miserablism, if we end up returning to that theme it's going to be a huge shame. That said, self-loathing is a different emotion for the character, so it depends on how they play it. Let's not have the Evil Doctor be a seperate entity again, though - that'd be about the laziest thing possible. If you're going to do it, internalise it.

The epsiode was built on a sound enough premise, but none of the essential ingredients were right. It's the first one this series that I've got no desire to watch a second time.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:33 / 16.05.10
One other thing: did anybody *actually* believe that the Earth reality was the real reality? Really? That was quite possibly the biggest mistake in the entire thing - for the story to have any real emotional heft, the audience has to be placed right in the action with the characters on screen. It was all so fucking obvious, though, I found it impossible to care about almost anything that was happening.
 
 
■
19:38 / 16.05.10
Fully agreed, but unfortunately was on hols this week and had to watch it while a pizza arrived at my friends' house. Which means I have to watch it right now again, for the first time. Grr. No, was hugely unimpressed by what could have been a great idea from what I saw. I was hoping for a big Celestial Toymaker reveal.
 
 
■
19:41 / 16.05.10
I mean, really "I know who it is" meaning "I know it's me". Really? It just didn't work from what I saw.
 
 
■
19:49 / 16.05.10
Oh, and as my friend (who had just put her toddler to bed) pointed out: "Pregnant woman in peril is just such a bloody cliche."
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:55 / 16.05.10
I mean, really "I know who it is" meaning "I know it's me". Really? It just didn't work from what I saw.

No, it didn't. I can buy a plot that has the three characters accidentally ingesting some psychotropic substance and getting sucked into a shared halucination, but this was something different than that - this was a directed, focused halucination based on the neuroses of a single member of the team.

Maybe, if Amy and Rory had already been made aware of the Doctor's self-hatred. In that case, maybe I could have gone with it. But they weren't, and so it makes no sense whatsoever, even within the broader realms of this fiction.

At the end of the day, I dislike it when the Doctor goes all psychic on us, but that's the only way that this episode can be explained.

More: do we honestly think that the Doctor, even hepped up on intergalactic goofballs, would ever create an alter-ego that refers to himself as "The Dream Master"? Do we see Eleven as the sort of being who would really get into Neil Gaiman? 'Cause that didn't ring true for me, either.
 
 
■
21:53 / 16.05.10
I have much I could wibble on about on that ep on second (first full) viewing, but the main one is that Simon Nye has clearly never watched ST:TNG, or he might have had a different spin on Q.
I tried the first time round to convince my friends that Q was borrowed (Mandarin robes and all) from Who, but if even the hired writers don't know the mythos, what hope do we have?
Still (/Dot Cotton hat on), bet it scared the crap out of the kids. Yay!
 
 
■
07:13 / 17.05.10
Haus, what were you doing in the back of that camper van?
 
 
iamus
14:52 / 17.05.10
I actually really enjoyed that one. Not the best of the lot so far, but I thought it was miles better than Gatiss' Dalek one, which I watched again sober and still really didn't rate.

Mainly liked this because there was a lot of character stuff going on that was mostly well played, and that seems to be the thing I'm enjoying most about this series so far. Last episode had a lot of inconsistencies in plotting; The perception filter stuff, the weaknesses to sunlight... but I just enjoyed being around these three characters and that was kind of enough for me.

This episode was like that again, but had enough elsewhere to be creepy and interesting. Amongst all the other things, I think that human-like aliens and middle-england are things that Doctor Who does and has always done really well. Subverting the normal into something evil is always the easier and more effective way to scare. Especially since in this episode the real threat was close to home, it works for me.

Fucking loved the "poke it with a stick" line. Favourite from the series so far and impeccably delivered. Made me laugh with glee that one.


Having said that, it was by turns funny and scary and the frozen TARDIS was genuinely creepy.

Totally. One of the bits from Tennant's run that really sticks in my mind is from an episode I'm not that fond of. The cyberman one where they go to the alternate dimension. When the Tardis explodes and effectively dies it's a real gut-punch moment. Stuff like that I find really effective. Only because it happens so rarely though.


One other thing: did anybody *actually* believe that the Earth reality was the real reality? Really? That was quite possibly the biggest mistake in the entire thing

No. I certainly didn't anyway. But to me, the episode dodged that bullet with the ending, having neither of those realities to be true, and subverting the villain into something a lot closer to home. So it's kind of been done in places, but it does highlight an intersting thing about the character. That there's a subconscious part of him that's willing to dominate his companions and put them through the wringer just to get to the root of things.

this was a directed, focused halucination based on the neuroses of a single member of the team... ...and so it makes no sense whatsoever, even within the broader realms of this fiction.

The Doctor has an incredibly powerful personality though. Everything that gets done revolves around him and at the end of the day, everything works in some way or other, in line with what he's doing. I think it works pretty well as a foreshadowing of this side of The Doctor to his companions. Amy already knows he's old and kind, and has seen what a merciless bastard he can be too, to those who deserve it. This seems like a hint that there's something deeper and more complex beneath all that. There's more than a whiff of the Doctor 7/Ace dynamic to this episode, I think.

I mean, really "I know who it is" meaning "I know it's me". Really? It just didn't work from what I saw.

I could see that as a way of dodging subject matter he doesn't want to get into explaining, but yeah, even then the episode would still kind of fall apart. If he knows who the Dream Lord is, then how come he's not just figured out the whole "both realities are fake" thing?
 
 
Lucid Frenzy
16:59 / 17.05.10
"If he knows who the Dream Lord is, then how come he's not just figured out the whole "both realities are fake" thing?"

It's somewhat ambiguous when he does figure that out, there's no moment when you see it happen. Perhaps you could even argue he knows it as Amy crashes the camper van.
 
 
iamus
17:38 / 17.05.10
That's a possibility definitely. Maybe he just wants to run it through to see what it resolves?
 
 
■
18:03 / 17.05.10
My rewatch last night did make me a bit more forgiving, but the thing that really, really was getting on my tits was the music. You're trapped in a bedroom with zombie alien grannies about to turn you to dust. Is it necessary to have dramatic music playing so loud throught the whole damn thing? I can't think of any other programme that does this, a fact that was brought home when I watched Ashes to Ashes next (which is getting quite interesting, by the way) and noted that it was so much more muted.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:10 / 17.05.10
That's been the case since the first series of the reboot - let's call it The Curse of Murray Gold. It's not been as bad this series, but it is becoming an issue again as the weeks go by. The thing that really annoys is that it's the same fucking piece, every single time, like he couldn't be arsed writing anything else after he'd got that one down.

It worked fine when the Doctor was getting puked out of a Space Wale's stomach, it worked fine when he was surrounded by Weeping Angels and about to do something really stupid. It doesn't work at all when the scene is 'hiding in a bedroom, having a chat'.
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
01:06 / 18.05.10
Amy already knows he's old and kind, and has seen what a merciless bastard he can be too, to those who deserve it.

Um, has she, though? I really don't think she has.

But to me, the episode dodged that bullet with the ending, having neither of those realities to be true, and subverting the villain into something a lot closer to home.

It doesn't dodge the bullet of the one "reality" being absolutely stupid and unbelievable. As Spatula Clarke mentions, that sort of plot only works when the audience believes or wants to believe that either of the realities is real, not the characters. Especially a character like Rory that no one really gives a shit about. Nobody believed that the quaint english village was real and nobody cared that Rory wanted it to be real. Without that there is no suspense. At no time do you care what happens in that world; Rory's death and Amy's reaction was mild and uninteresting, knowing as we did that it wasn't the "real" reality.

There's more than a whiff of the Doctor 7/Ace dynamic to this episode, I think.

I think this is reaching a bit.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
22:13 / 18.05.10
What I would say is that despite the considerable challenges experienced by the wardrobe department, the set dressers, the scriptwriters - generally, lots of people really trying to do their best at a difficult and uncertain time for the franchise - Sylvester McCoy did amazing work as the seventh Doctor. Possibly he was my doctor, the way Five was David Tennant's Doctor, but nonetheless.

The Dream Lord was, sadly, too easy, and indeed too Q-ish, in a kind of "I'm going to give you a challenge with two possible answers, the real answer to which is neither of them!" way. That said, I think it did a decent job of suggesting precisely that Rory's reality was the fake one and that the viewer and the Doctor were on the same side - wanting the reality where Amy is still slender and kind of fancies the perspective character - before having the Doctor, admittedly in a rushed and unsatisfactory way, reveal that that reality was also unsatisfactory, and that actually you had to acknowledge a reality in which Amy is slender but not that into you, or at least not into you enough.

The alien reveal was a bit underwhelming, but I have to say that before that I thought the village was actually nicely sinister - the bit where they come back and the children have been turned to ash was really nicely done, although the CGI on the pensioners' eyeballs was a letdown...
 
 
iamus
23:24 / 19.05.10
Yes. I thought the ash stuff was great and nicely set up the fact that one world keeps ticking in the background while we're in the other, making both dangers real and immediate.

Um, has she, though? I really don't think she has.

Actually, I don't think she really has. Wasn't to sure about that when I was writing it. We have, in the previous RTD series, which is admittedly not quite the same thing.


I think this is reaching a bit.

I wasn't really meaning it in a literal, narrative sense. More that there's parallels to it, though it's debatable if much will come of it this season. The darker side of The Doctor was never really gotten into with Tennant. It was kind of hinted at and sometimes you'd get brief glints of it, but it wasn't really developed.

I remember watching something about Troughton's Doctor and how somebody (perhaps Troughton himself, I can't remember) was saying he played the cosmic buffoon, but there was definitely somebody cold and calculating under there and that he liked the idea that maybe there was a split-personality side to him that went about being a massive evil dick inbetween televised adventures.

Don't think that will nor really want that to happen here, but something that really gives a voice to all the mucky and murky, bloody-handedness hiding there is interesting. There's a line in 11th hour where wee Amy says he's funny and he replies something like... Am I? Good. Funny's good.

In my mind, that kind of goes along with the Dream Lord tearing into him about his outlandish and buffoonish eccentricities really just being there to cover something else up.
 
 
Poke it with a stick
06:50 / 23.05.10
No new posts yet?

Well, quick response to this week's episode:

It felt (unsurprisingly if you watched the DW Confidential) very much like an old-school Doctor Who episode, but trimmed of much of the fat that would have seen this two-parter stretched out to fill three hours.

Having said that, even though it didn't feel quite as frantic as the last few episodes, that more relaxed pace didn't seem to improve the characterisation of the guest actors much or sew up any plot-holes "I just need to get my headphones" What? One minute before whatever launches out of the ground? Really?

The Silurians are a bit too generic for me so far, although they look great and the reveal of the city was beautiful.
 
 
Dead Megatron
18:15 / 23.05.10
Mofat certainly loves two-parters, doesn't he?
 
  

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