OH MY GOD HE'S OOGLY: nu-Who season 8

Wow, I'm glad this didn't happen:

During the shooting of The Fires Of Pompeii, Russell T. Davies began preparing ideas for the 2008 Christmas Special, with the two foremost ideas being what would eventually become The Next Doctor, and an episode where the Time Beetle from Turn Left latches on to J.K. Rowling and converts her imagination to reality.

The main plot of the episode would have been the Doctor having to battle his way through a fantasy world of Victorian magic brought to life so that he could get to Rowling and remove the Beetle from her. This idea was later dropped because of concerns over whether or not Rowling could act and would agree to appear, and because of David Tennant’s concerns that it sounded more like a Doctor Who spoof than a real episode.

From here: http://whatculture.com/tv/25-facts-you-didnt-know-about-doctor-who.php/10

so did they actually hire / pay for a title sequence done by a fan artist for this series? that is awesome

I can't tell if that title sequence is a new take on the tune or not, if not it's a much better one than some of of the nuWho ones. A lot of which have dispensed with the proper baseline tape loop

http://www.youtube.com/watch?fv=XZ1kRxgKft4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ1kRxgKft4

there's probably a poll in that, but I quite like some of the late 80s one where they get some great sparkly FM synth noises in it.

read some more and yeah, moffat liked that guy's work when he saw it on youtube and hired him to work on the actual intro, which by all accounts is very close to the one posted above. cool!

Peter Capaldi was in a punk band with Craig Ferguson called 'Dreamboys'

Saw a Capaldi interview last night; he said the band was originally called 'Bastards from Hell'

Surprised that nobody saw the leaked episodes, or were they just avoiding spoilers?
Looking forward to seeing the completed episodes in full colour, overdubs & sfx complete anyway.
Still really hoping that Clara either improves or leaves. Or that Capaldi gets a new companion.

I think we've discussed this before, but I don't I don't think there's anything wrong with Clara as a character in theory, and the actress is pretty good too, the problem is that so far the writers haven't treated her as anything else but a MacGuffin. Previous companions were allowed to have subplots and a life of their own, but there's been nothing like that with Clara so far, she's been completely defined by her relationship to the Doctor, by the whole "Impossible Girl" plotline. So hopefully now that that plot is resolved, she'll be given more things to do as an individual character.

I think they have been making an effort to fill out Clara's character and life since DOTD. From the episode blurbs it sounds like she'll be given a lot more to do in terms of interacting with the Doctor and other people. I don't think they'll go down the RTD route with soapy Tyler subplots, but we'll see her on dates, at work etc. Of course, it all depends on how well written it is, but at least Moffat and co seem to recognise the problems with her to date.

The point of the Impossible Girl plotline is that the Doctor was being a self-involved dickbag to treat her like that. The actual stories showed us a character with a life, a personality, a propensity for problem-solving, a broad compassion, a tendency to put others ahead of herself, a bravado that covered self-doubt and fear, unfulfilled aspirations, reasons for holding herself back, strong enough self-regard to deny the Doctor his selfish desire to disrupt her life for his own ends. Treating her like a puzzle to be solved is actually pointed out to be an offensive and cunty thing to do. The Doctor's viewpoint is a narrative feint, denied by the actual text in episode after episode.

(eg: Clara finding the little girl in Akhaten, worrying about her, finding out what's wrong, and eventually resolving the threat through compassion - the reverse of the Doctor's behaviour; the psychic in Hide telling the Doctor outright to consider Clara as a person, not as a puzzle.)

a propensity for problem-solving, a broad compassion, a tendency to put others ahead of herself, a bravado that covered self-doubt and fear, unfulfilled aspirations, reasons for holding herself back

Most of these are kind of generic plucky (girl-)sidekick characteristics, though?

a) if true, still puts lie to claims of no character just mystery, b) not nec among Who sidekicks c) yr qualifying anyway. And eg the way Rory, professional nurse, caring abt others plays into stories is v different from how Clara, directionless-nanny-who-becomes-a-teacher, does.

I agree with Lee, nothing we've seen about Clara so far has made her different from the generic sidekick. And I wasn't saying that Clara doesn't have any character, just that her character is almost totally defined by her relationship to the Doctor. With Rose and Donna particularly, it felt like also existed as interesting characters outside their companion role, but I haven't felt that with Clara yet, she hasn't really done anything to step outside that template. I think Martha had the same problem, she never really felt unique in any way. I said previously that it isn't about the actor, but maybe it is? Billie Piper and Catherine Tate certainly were better at conveying their characters' idiosyncrasies than Freema Agyeman was, or Jenna Coleman has been so far.

Intriguing new take on the Doctor, pretty rote plot. Clara suddenly got really good!

Tonally all over the place, but the moments with just the Doctor and Clara were good, ie the restaurant scene.

It certainly was nowhere near the triumph of The 11th Hour, and I didn't take to 12 straight away. But maybe it's fine to have a more downbeat opener for a more downbeat Doctor?

Thought there was probably too much comedy in it, though I laughed at it all. Loved it when the Doctor left Clara behind and didn't open the door, and it was great to hear Vastra echoing the Brigadier. Knew Moffatt was heading for one of his own stories in referencing Girl In The Fireplace but he didn't half make it clear that it rips off the Cybermen something chronic.

Not sure having Michelle Gomez in this episode, so presumably in all of them, is going to work.

I seem to have had the opposite opinion to everyone else with the titles, liked the arrangement and hated the visuals.

I mostly enjoyed it. Much laughter at the eyebrows and the restaurant scenes but I agree it got too close to being a comedy show.
Hope they don't stick with the "lol u old" thing for long as it'll get old quickly.

the grey hair crap became tiresome quickly.

oh, and hang on, i know i had a few glasses of wine, but did i miss what happened to the dino stomping all over london ?

Was spontaneously combusted by robots for slightly unclear plot reasons.

Anyway, once the forced wackiness died down, Capaldi was very good, and the writing for Clara was a lot stronger. I appreciated the lack of manic pacing, but Ben Wheatley is crap at directing action.

Just when you thought there wasn't going to be any more sexing up - that 'lizbian' mouth-to-mouth.

The Easter egg at the end is lovely.

unclear? robot fella was harvesting 5 inches of the dinosaur's optic nerve to repair himself and presumably his unbreathing army, a fact both he the doctor repeated a few times just in case we didn't get it

i'm looking forward to next week's as the first one that won't need a lot of expository regeneration gab. by the way, i did not think the robots were scary. they looked as though you could knock them over with a light push. and somehow the fight with them was both laborious and too easy for our heroes. lotta fighting, no danger in it. clara's no donna but i like her. and capaldi was tremendous, the script lets him indulge a few malcolmisms and i'm glad he doesn't shy away from it. tremendous vision of birth and growth and aging, all in one episode. from a gibbering infant who doesn't know what bedrooms are, to the mirror stage (!) to someone who orders food in restaurants, and finally as someone who can repress desire.

I'm all for more Vastra and Jenny kissing. Also Jenny with her hair down. Also more Jenny in general.

I really liked this. Wasn't as great as the 11th Hour but it was awfully good.

as a first time in over three years watcher (i skipped the last doctor) this was thoroughly doofy and a little tired. i'll keep trying for capaldi.

I also liked that he openly acknowledged that his face came from somewhere else (Pompeii) with a hint that he chose it to learn something from it.

i enjoyed this by and large. capaldi is excellent, really excellent in it. I'm easily affected by such things, soppy you might say in fact, but I thought the initial portrayal of him as one who has lost his mind, his quick descent into vagrancy was quite touching. (Anyone who's had to deal with an elderly relative continually going wandering in the most new and inventive ways will appreciate his sudden moments of baffled clarity 'what am i doing/why am i here' and apparently purposeless aims.)

This made the scene in the restaurant particularly good i thought, sitting there, finally sober in his filthy clothes. His baleful face helps deliver trite comedy well 'There's a smell', 'I know, it's everywhere', and there's a quick contempt to his innocence which plays very well.

I quite liked the melancholy ancient clockwork robots. There was a touch of the Tales from Hoffman about them (The Sandman?), but yes, the fight was an embarrassment. In fact the whole deep breath thing didn't really work. Where Moffat has been good in the past, and what he did so well in Blink and the first Matt Smith episode (the corner of the eye one), and sort of well with the Silence, was take childhood fears, irrational challenges to yourself, and the general mentality that hasn't quite learned that the world simply doesn't behave like that, and translate them into a fantastically realised reality (to take it in Piaget terms it's a sort of concrete operations stage harking back to a pre-operations stage).

Here he took the idea of holding one's breath for a long time, and didn't really make it work - well, the bit where Clara initially fainted worked reasonably well i thought, but the bit in the fight where they all held their breath for a bit was CRAP.

I thought the whole 'lol u old' stuff was probably seen as necessary. Moffat feeling need to use Clara here as even more than usual a quite blatant proxy for us the viewer who've been conditioned to doctor-as-hectic-young-model. I don't know whether Moffat was right to fear this. I guess it might be considered quite alienating to have again a Doctor that looks like a f'ing teacher (albeit a great teacher). The whole episode obviously had a lot of articulate and various arguments faces, inner and outer, veils, clothes and beings reconstructing themselves, and I thought the doctor stuff was well handled, or at least not mawkish, apart from maybe getting old management back in to tell people to get behind the new guy.

great post.

the simplicity of the scene when capaldi gives his "you don't even see me" speech to clara was grebt and v moving i thought.

I found the holding breath thing pretty stupid. For one thing, I found it hard to believe that you can hold your breath up to the point you faint. But I don't know, maybe you can. Or maybe I should have suspended disbelief anyway. But it just felt wrong to me, and not even that tense.

Also, telling the viewer that Clara was supposed to have been an egomaniac control freak doesn't really make up for never having shown this previously. And lines like "who knows him best in the world" strike me as funny when it's like... Rose? River? One of the older companions? The Master? Probably not Clara, tbh.

Fanservice was fairly extreme but a lot of it worked - was not a fan of the big snog for the sake of gratifying the titillation-desiring male fans, but if it marks a move back towards the "gay agenda" years I will be satisfied.

I think I liked pretty much everything else? I'm a fan of the Vastra/Jenny/Strax characters, though, and I'm fairly sure some people on this thread hate them so wouldn't really have enjoyed a large swathe of this. Capaldi is definitely looking like he'll be a great doctor, Clara seemed more on form and alive than usual, the restaurant scene was good, the possible murder was good. Oh, the CGI dinosaur was a bit rubbish.

Also, my first thought about the end was that heaven looked like the place in 'the Girl Who Waited', but that totally isn't it, at all, right?

watched again due to the wine excess last night.
other than the holding breathe thing, i really enjoyed it.
looking forward to seeing more.

Probably not Clara, tbh.

She's the only companion to have visited and helped every one of his regenerations, so I'd be fine with her being the one who knows him best if only she appeared to actually remember any of that. But instead Moffat has her be confused by his face ageing, it's just shoddy character building.

Yeah, I think if you're going to have her respond like that, then you have to assume that she's somehow *not* a Clara who remembers being iterated throughout the Doctor's timeline, right? But then, I can't even remember how Jenny isn't dead, so maybe I'm the worst at this canon-analysis thing.

Where do vastra & jenny first appear. I remember seeing them when Amy's baby's been taken during the Matt Smith era but can't really remember them before that. Were they set up previously?

& when did the Scottish actress become the personification of the Tardis? That wasn't her in the earlier episode when they were knocked out of normal space/time and thereby had the TARDIS become a female was it? She looks more like the woman who kidnapped the Amy baby, though that wasn't her eitherr. Think i should know who that actress is since she was in Green Wing and a few other things.

Just looking for answers to that Vastra thing and found this
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2579624/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_6

which I haven't heard of before. Sounds like sometyhing I would n't mind seeing if it's played right. Presumably it's her playing a female Sherlock Holmes/Raffles/whatever

& if I looked further into it I might have seen that it was a 3 minute short. Just wondered why I hadn't seen it.
Wouldn't mind a longer sideshoot program like the one I assumed it was though.

It's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rirju6is4Sw

Right, explains a lot. Several things i would't have thought she'd want other people in her society to know though.
Still, would love a longer thing based on that idea of her as independent correspondent to Scotland Yard or whatever.

& when did Jenny die? Is that during the Name of the Doctor sequence? Was that rendered out of the time/space continuum by events that transpired?

So who was that woman in 'paradise' at the end?

I thought she was the personification of the Tardis which first appeared played by a different actress in The Doctor's Wife. She refers to him as her boyfriend at one point.

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2014-08-23/doctor-who-who-is-missy

Mostly speculation in there, but a couple of minor spoilers also, for those who are picky about such things.

Though I actually think Stevolende's theory makes more sense. But I'm not sure how the robot/robot consciousness goes from London to a Tardis-controlled simulation.

Vastra/jenny/Strax are great but they were not introduced well into the series; that episode (whatever it was...a good man goes to war?) where they get people formerly impacted by the doctor to come and help him out was problematic in that none of those people had ever been shown before and it didn't make any sense at all at the time. I still feel like the real introduction never happened.

it was during the era where they just crammed 1000 things into every episode and stuff was continually confusing to me

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bv0HN0FCIAEtjJ9.jpg

i thought the "lol u old" bit was in many ways a message to the nextgen who fan as personified by the "HE'S OOGLY!" girl who were all hung up on the optics and Moffat's not-so-gently pointing out we're here for the DOCTOR guys

Well yes. And it was delivered with the subtlety of a live Skrillex show when standing about six centimeters away from the speakers.