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

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.

I wonder if that Vastra investigates was thought to be the introduction to the character that had been missed. It looks like the same actress plays her and the amenable member of her species that turned up in the Welsh episode. Which again might be why they didn't think she needed any further introductin though why not escapes me.
HOw mush red tape/depts do any story ideas have to go through before they get greenlighted, just wondering if anything is getting lost in taht way. If introductory elements are sheared off in streamlining in group scriptwriting meetings or something.

xp hence "not-so-gently"

I liked this episode, I thought it did a decent job of introducing the new Doctor's quirks and exploring how the regeneration might feel for a companion. IIRC, in the Nu-Who era Rose is the only companion who has gone through this before, so it didn't feel overplayed or anything. (Agree that the "lol he's old" jokes were a bit tired.) I loved that this episode finally gave Clara some room to develop, though admittedly the "control freak" and "egomaniac" descriptions of her felt wrong, seems they just put there for that one the gag.

The villain part of plot was kinda meh, but since the episode was more about the new Doctor, I didn't mind it having a bit of an excuse plot. I didn't think it had too much humour, though I did like the tearjerker moments more than the gags: the Vastra/Jenny kiss (IMO it wasn't there for titillation or anything, I simply felt it was about time, since they haven't actually shown these two kissing before, even though the doctor now seems to snog everyone he meets, so not having them kiss would've reeked of gay panic), and especially the "the Doctor will always have my back" scene, which was so simple and touching, a brilliant way of refining cliche into gold.

Here's a few geeky questions and speculations that came to my mind, maybe some of you can comment on them?

* What was up with the dinosaur's size? It seems they made it way bigger than it should've been just so that they would get that cool opening scene... But previously, when Dr. Who has twisted historical facts, they've at least tried to give it some justification, and here there was none.

* So the robots were the same kind as those aboard the spaceship in "The Girl in the Fireplace"? It's been ages since I saw that episode, so correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the robots in it go crazy and start replacing the spaceship parts with human parts only because they were stranded in space, and had nothing else to use? But the robots here would have had all the inorganic raw materials they need, yet harvesting organs now seems to be their default mode? Does not compute.

* What was the point of making it so ambiguous whether the robot guy committed suicide, or whether the Doctor killed him? He's not Superman or anything, previously we've seen that he is perfectly willing to kill loads of people in order to protect the innocents, so what's with the ambiguity now?

* The woman at the end... My first thought too was that it was the human incarnation of the TARDIS, but then I thought she felt too nefarious and crazy and possessive of the Doctor to be the TARDIS. I'm thinking it must be River Song, right? The last time they met (chronologically) he left her living inside that computer simulation, and maybe spending an eternity there has made her a bit crazy? Also, the robot guy dies and goes into "afterlife", and what could be a better afterlife for a robot than a computer-simulated paradise? That garden could easily be inside the simulation, maybe River even learned how to control the computer? (That would also explain how she's able to manipulate the Doctor's life while still remaining a virtual being.) The only thing that doesn't fit into this theory is the woman calling the Doctor her "boyfriend", not "husband", but maybe the writers thought using the latter word would've it too obvious who she is.

There are some things in episode 2 that might go against your last point, but I'll not say anything more. & will be looking forward to seeing that in better version.
Not seen any of the others yet

The thing about Clara as a control freak is that as far as I know, she is the first companion to tell the Doctor directly from the jump "I have a life, this is how you fit into it, see you next week", so it's not like it came completely from nowhere.

also, aside from the totally nothing plot I thought this ruled

Capaldi rules

I was curious about this episode's mention that some woman (apparently it was "Missy", the mystery woman at the end of the ep) deliberately gave Clara the Doctor's number when she phoned him in "The Bells of St. John", thinking it was the tech helpline. I thought this was just a bit of a retcon... But I rewatched the earlier episode, and when the Doctor asks where Clara got his number, she does say, "The woman in the shop wrote it down... She said it's the best helpline out there, in the universe". So apparently they really were setting up this plotline back then already, I'd just totally missed that bit, I thought Clara managed to ring the Doctor by accident, because the universe wanted them to meet or something.

But that made me think, maybe this Missy character isn't actually a villain, even though she has the aura of one? Because she caused Clara and the Doctor to meet, and if they hadn't, he would've died at Trenzalore, and Missy probably knew that. (This of course would support the theory that Missy is TARDIS.)

seems unlikely to me that she's the Tardis, they already did that with Idris in the Gaiman episode and what would the point be in recasting the character or changing it in such a way? If anything holds weight it's Miss/Mistress/Master, to me.

When she started filming in public, BBC put out a press release that Michelle Gomez was cast as Gatekeeper of the Nethersphere.

...Matrix?

If anything holds weight it's Miss/Mistress/Master, to me.

I'm not sure about that one... The two major things we know Missy was responsible for (setting the Doctor and Clara to meet up in "The Bells of Saint John", and bringing them to the cyborg guy's restaurant in this ep) have been helpful to the Doctor, so it seems she's not (at least not intentionally) antagonistic to the Doctor, which would rule out the Master. (Unless his experiences in "Last of the Time Lords" made him into a good guy or something.)

A nefarious supervillain could help their rival in the short-term only to set them up for some operatic revenge.

oh missy

http://media.tumblr.com/258ac50dc271a5782a747082ae1faa2a/tumblr_inline_n8ziibZZ8g1rnlhg5.gif

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

Most of those people had been shown before, in the previous six episodes, when they shot their appearances for Good Man (pirate captain and son, space spitfires, idrc what else) [actually pirate ep might not even have been shot yet?]. Vastra/Jenny and Strax NOT having been seen before was EXCELLENT AND FUN storytelling, not bad storytelling: the Doctor has had thousands of years of off-screen adventures in which he has met thousands of people that we haven’t seen. Note also in the same episode, the girl who life-changingly remembers him from her childhood but he doesn’t, possibly because he’s not even had that adventure yet.

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

http://37.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyp986r8fv1qcwhkeo1_400.gif

If introductory elements are sheared off in streamlining in group scriptwriting meetings or something

There are no group scriptwriting meetings.

* What was up with the dinosaur's size? It seems they made it way bigger than it should've been just so that they would get that cool opening scene... But previously, when Dr. Who has twisted historical facts, they've at least tried to give it some justification, and here there was none.

Yes there was, in dialogue between Jenny and Vastra.

so what's with the ambiguity now?

We’ve never seen this Doctor before, we don’t know if he would kill. We don’t know if he knows if he would.

when the Doctor asks where Clara got his number, she does say, "The woman in the shop wrote it down... She said it's the best helpline out there, in the universe". So apparently they really were setting up this plotline back then already

When that was written, the woman in the shop was a splinter of Clara; by the time they made Name Of The Doctor, there wasn’t room to include it.

So Missy is The Rani, rite?

FPd you for that