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

This was a fun episode; much better than the boring Dalek one. Oddly fascinated and looking forward to Clara's dates.

in retrospect the Dalek one was pretty lame, huh?

i enjoyed the shit out of this. the Teller was fucking proper scary imo.

I liked the look of the corridors near the vault in this one. I feel like they've improved corridors.

in retrospect the Dalek one was pretty lame, huh?

nah

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--ZOue9IUT--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_320/j5yekz5khttskl9ezjsi.gif

I enjoyed this one a lot. It felt very 70s, especially Clara's outfit, and the bank promo video at the beginning seemed like something Douglas Adams may have dreamt up. The plot didn't bear too much close examination, but they never do. I am ready for the series arc to start explaining itself, Delfox/Karabraxos/Missy needs to start revealing herself.

Caved-in head was genuinely disturbing

Btw there's no link btween karabraxos and Missy is there? (XP to Ed)

enjoyed the corridor with different colour light as four different corridors

cyberpunk usb brain was a good joke i think

although doesn't he also use it as a projector, which, hm

the corridor with different colour light as four different corridors

Don't forget the "most greatest, most secure bank in the universe" with a huge network of man-size, ground level air-ducts with grilles that just pop off.

"Btw there's no link btween karabraxos and Missy is there? (XP to Ed)"

I doubt it. I think people are mistakenly drawing correllations just because of the slightly theatrical personalities. See also Miss Foster (Partners in Crime) and that lady that stole Amy as a baby.

room of treasures - just a room of treasures, or was any of that stuff symbolically significant?

it was cheesy

room of treasures - just a room of treasures, or was any of that stuff symbolically significant?

Significant! http://juliaskott.tumblr.com/post/98047664968/whovianfeminism-ithelpstodream-director

when are they going to pass legislation that allows you to set anyone who uses the word "feels" as a noun on fire

Yeah but the rocket!

lol @ rocket

I'm pretty sure they've dealt with the phone thing before - the TARDIS phone can be rung from any time.

Yup. When Churchill rang the Doctor in the WWII Daleks episode, he called from the 1940s and reached him in the present day, and when Clara first (mistakenly) rang the Doctor, she was in present day and he was in the Medieval times hanging out with some monks.

Though it remains unclear how the Tardis chooses the exact point in time where it connects the call... I guess in this case the Tardis somehow knew the Doctor needed to be there shortly before the solar storm, and with Clara it knew she had to reach the Eleventh Doctor because of the whole Impossible Girl thing, but with Churchill it seems to have been totally arbitratry; there's no reason why his call couldn't have been answered by any incarnation of the Doctor.

the churchill story was itself completely arbitrary and silly anyway

the only thing bugging me about this weeks: I don't actually see how it's possible for this to have happened. The Doctor only gives her his number because he went through the bank and got to that point. So her calling for him relies on him having done that. And yet he's only able to have done it because ... he already went through and did it?

normally I just handwave these things off but this time it's bugging me.

also how is the show doing under Capaldi, ratings wise? I see it's getting moved in the UK to a later slot.

It's called predestination paradox or stable time loop, and it's a mainstay of time travel fiction. Also, this is hardly the first time it's been used in Dr. Who.

(To cite just one example from recent episodes, in "The Robot of Sherwood", Clara calls Robin's gang "Merry Men", because she thinks that's what they're called. It turns out they're unfamiliar with that name, but they like it so much they decide to adopt it. However, Clara only called "Merry Men" because she hard heard the name in Robin Hood stories... So who came up with the name in the first place?)

(xpost)

yeah I get it it was just more overt this time, I guess.

It was pretty overt in the whole Impossible Girl arc too: the Doctor takes Clara as his companion because he's interested in her, due to having met her twice in the past already... But the reason why Clara appeared in his past is because she jumped inside the Doctor's timeline in Trenzalore, and that wouldn't have happened if she hadn't become his companion.

Or the whole

Or the whole BAD WOLF thing in the first season: Rose writes those words because she had seen them as a graffiti, but it turns out the person who wrote the graffiti was Rose herself, travelling back in time. So where did the BAD WOLF code originally come from?

I was ok with it, but I think it jumped out a little more than usual. Provoked kitchen-table argument here:
Fiancee: no, that doesn't work at all. She called him because he wrote the note which he only wrote because etc
Step-daughter (16): it only doesn't work the first time, but time is a kind of loop and it works after that.
Step-son (12): NO IT'S ALL FINE WHAT'S THE PROBLEM
Me: everyone otm all at once.

(I then played Time Becomes by Orbital and no-one liked it)

akm, Douglas Adams also addresses it in Life, the Universe, and Everything (which was originally the script of a Doctor Who movie, so it's relevant):

http://www.realhhg.com/hhgpage.php?page=time

I liked that a lot, although I always enjoy the silly futuristic ones with a Grant/Wagner vibe (like the Simon Pegg one, and, er, the one with the traffic jam that no one else likes). I also like that "shut up" appears to be the new catchphrase.

As someone mentioned, a Capaldi/Barrowman team up really needs to happen.

WANT

Eh. I'd be happy with a full season without any explicit callbacks to previous ones.

This last one was fun. Got a real '70s scifi feel from those bank corridors.

I think "a thing" is starting to be the new catchphrase too.

yeah I like that one. it would have sounded annoying and affected coming from Tennant or Smith

no comments yet? thought this one was by far the best this season has given us.

yeah was excellent.

was he wearing a punk rock sweater under his coat y/n

Clara, btw, has been wonderful all season, and her chemistry with Capaldi is spot on. It'll be a shame when she leaves.

she has a real Jo Grant thing going on

Their pairing has a really strong Buffy feel to it.

also between this, the Lodger, and the Shada novelization, Roberts is now maybe my favorite Who writer.

loved this! clara becoming much more enjoyable for me now that she has more meat to her interactions with the Doctor, they make a good pair

Danny Pink is v handsome imo

Oh Courtney, I get that the vertiginous expanses of space made you nauseous, but couldn't you hurl outside of the TARDIS?

The argument between Danny and the Doctor was great, I thought, especially when the Doctor proves him right by becoming that thing's general.

Yeah, this was a nice episode, no high concepts, just some solid character development. Clara is much better this season, now that they've allowed her to show some negative traits too. I still feel they're overstating the Doctor's hatred of soldiers, since it seems to have come out of nowhere. Presumably they're gonna reveal the hatred is based on something in his personal history (as was already hinted in the previous ep), but that still doesn't explain why the previous Doctors didn't feel so strongly about the subject. Why were they okay with working with UNIT, for example?

And Courtney was cool, felt like she had the makings of the next companion... Are kid/teenage companions strictly verboten in nu-Who? I guess they don't want to show the Doctor putting kids in danger?

I doubt the would want to pair a middle-aged man with a young teenage girl.

This was okay for one of their fish-out-of-water sitcom episodes.

Some of the anti-soldiering feel I think is meant to come from his reaction to being confronted with John Hurt War Doctor, which he'd completely repressed.

I haven't seen any old-Who episodes, but wasn't a middle-aged man and a teenager the basic pairing in them? Though I guess times have changed, from what I've understood the Doctor had no romances back then? So I guess it was easier to pair him with characters much younger than him.

In the early years of the show, there was usually a teenager and one or two adults tagging along with the Doctor. The Third and Fourth Doctors tended to have one companion, a young but not teenaged woman. And, you know, a robot dog. The Fifth Doctor for a time traveled with *two* teens, until he got one of them killed, anyway. Romance with the Doctor was off the table entirely.

Was Turlough a teenager? I feel like he was, but Peri was in college or just finished with it?

Ace was probably supposed to be about 16 (although I don't think Sophie Aldred was). That was the last companion under the age of 20, I think. How old was Rose?