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

Well, Susan and the Doctor were granddaughter-grandfather, and she was 15 going on 25. With the tabloids twitching to stir up more outrage, following the recent child-molestation stories about former BBC presenters, it's unlikely that the corperation would want Capaldi's Doctor to whisk someone as young as Courtney away with him.

I enjoyed the jaunty low-stakes first half of the episode, but some of the writing in the second half was dreadful - the conflict between Danny and the Doctor, and all that shouty officer/soldier stuff was pretty ham-fisted. And Capaldi's performance is starting to feel a bit House-y to me - I enjoy that his character's kind of a jerk but it can be too much of good thing at times.

nonsense!!

his "proud dad" stuff was absolutely delicious, i could just eat tubs of that

Just caught up on this and I'm really enjoying this season - last year I was on the verge of checking out completely but this is just so much fun. Capaldi is getting lots opportunities to shout and be a belligerent dick, but I'm especially enjoying how terrible this Doctor is with kids, he's the complete anti-Smith in that regard.

So you could you say the erasure of teen/kid companions goes hand in hand with the introduction of Doctor-companion romance?

Nah, that doesn't really work. Teenaged companions disappeared around the debut of the Third Doctor in 1970, because the tone of the show had changed. Then some returned in 1980 and were usually (but not always... don't make us talk about Mel) present until the show was cancelled in 1989. Probably the choice was down to the showrunner/script editor, but as a rule Old Who simply did not let the Doctor do romance. That is a product of the rebooted show.

You could argue that the real life relationship between Tom Baker and Lalla Ward bled through into the Doctor/Romana II portrayal but as a rule, the Doctor was never romantically interested in his companions until the Ten/Rose nonsense happened.

"you're looking good, have you had a wash?"

"You've made a boyfriend error!". Capaldi has much better comedic chops than Tennant and Smith.

http://31.media.tumblr.com/a55dbf8236b3bc8c89d6a9bd17e2a198/tumblr_ncn20s5Tok1txqz97o1_250.gif

The old show was a lot less sentimental than the new one in general. Companion departures tended to be self-contained in the last two or three minutes of the show, and were hardly foreshadowed at all. Watch the one for Sarah Jane Smith, for example. She traveled with him for four years and they don't even hug!

IIRC Jo's departure was weirdly sentimental while being just as detached as all of the other companion departures?

he just kind of dumps her off. at least the redressed that in School Reunion (xpost)

I remember as a kid being completely appalled by the ending of The Hand of Fear and boycotting The Deadly Assassin as a result. Oops.

I didn't like it either. I reacted worse to getting rid of her than changing the doctor. my first TV crush!

Fortunately the next story was The Face of Evil #TeamLeela

I had the Programme Guide paperback, so I usually knew what was going to happen before I saw the shows (the local public station being very far behind) but the companion departure episodes were always anti-climactic. I kept expecting it to be worked into the plot of the story somehow, to see it coming, but it never was and I never did! Maybe the current writers felt the same and that's why they are always overegging the modern companion exit scenes.

Just caught up with the last three, a totally solid run. All v good in pretty different ways. Liking that the season arc is something as non timey-wimey as a love story.

Question for hardcore Whovians: What makes the Time Lords so special? It seems like every alien race and its nan can time travel; the human Time Agents can do it with seeming great accuracy with a dinky wrist thing. So why are the Gallifreyans and their hulking, noisy TARDISes so revered?

'Cause they're, like, awesome and stuff?

also they were the first ones and are the best at it; everyone else stole time travel technology from them

The Doctor stole his TARDIS from, like, a TARDIS museum. It's old and busted. The newer ones are better. There are battle TARDISes and the latest model is evolved from a sentient being. None of this is canon anymore, as far as the TV show is concerned... I think they made his TARDIS a living entity in one new episode?

Sentient if not living -- though is there a difference?

The old show was a lot less sentimental than the new one in general. Companion departures tended to be self-contained in the last two or three minutes of the show, and were hardly foreshadowed at all. Watch the one for Sarah Jane Smith, for example. She traveled with him for four years and they don't even hug!

yeah I agree that this foregrounding of the companions and their private soap operas is the big difference - I can see why they did it and why it appeals to various demographics but it will always be incidental to me.

You did see a slight move towards foregrounding the companions' lives with Ace, right at the end of the old show's run. But the classic show was way more Doctor-focused.

If you're going to talk about terrible companion exits, I think it's a toss-up between Dodo being written out of the show halfway through "The War Machines" or Liz Shaw vanishing off-camera between "Inferno" and "Terror of the Autons".

The best is obv Adric riding a spaceship into the side of the Earth, killing the dinosaurs.

Liz Shaw definitely got a Poochy-level disappearing

Maybe she went to the alternate universe unbeknownst to the Doctor and got left behind?

On the opposite end of silly departures, they left Tegan at Heathrow at the end of Time-Flight and in the very next episode they run into her in Amsterdam!

What happened to Dodo again? She got tired and went to lie down, and just sort of never came back?

oh man, Tegan's departure in "Time-Flight" also made me boycott "Arc of Infinity"; it was only when I tuned into "Snakedance" out of idle curiosity that I realized that I'd missed Tegan coming back in the next story

xp: basically; WOTAN mind-controllers her and she gets sent to the country halfway through the episode to recover, and at the end they're like "oh btw Dodo said 'fuck off'"

hahaha, I take it back, Polly saying "oh, Dodo said she wants to stay in the 20th century, let's jet" is way more Poochy than what happened to Liz Shaw.

Jesus. An hour of anti-abortion propaganda! Worst episode ever.

I didn't think of it like that, but even then, it was a pretty terrible episode.

ahahah. but yes i really didn't dig the high-concept here and moral tone. i want more space adventures.

yeah that felt like a 9th grade short story

the clumsy abortion stuff was v weird & ill-advised, but even without that, at no point could you suspend disbelief bc the whole thing was like "Wait, WHAT?"

and i couldnt understand what they were saying half the time bc of the space hats

helmets even

The abortion parallels were so plainly accidental that it doesn't come anywhere near to tainting the episode for me

Sentient if not living -- though is there a difference?

The TARDIS was identified as living in the first episode, and sentient in the 12th/13th.

You did see a slight move towards foregrounding the companions' lives with Ace, right at the end of the old show's run. But the classic show was way more Doctor-focused.

The show was almost never Doctor-focused -- the new show has been about his own experience or emotions or learning or growing or changing approx 1,000,000 more times than the old show did in 26 years. He just turned up in other peoples' stories every month or so.

(And the show was focused primarily on the companions in the early years, certainly as long as Ian & Barbara were in the TARDIS. Troughton was an inseparable double act with Jamie. [K-( rools you all drool, etc])

The abortion parallels were most certainly not accidental.

the possibility of reading it as an hour of anti-abortion propaganda, then

I don't read it that way exactly, but it definitely felt like a debate/topic the show is too constrained to deal with in any sort of adult way, even metaphorically, and the attempt to do so was profoundly weird and a little off-putting.

otm

I can't believe they ripped off an episode of Super Friends from 1980 and made it into a Doctor Who episode.

http://i.imgur.com/9sBDvEg.jpg

The episode asks whether it's right to abort a foetus which is very likely to endanger many other lives. And then unequivocally comes down on the side that no, what's right is to let the baby be born (Clara: "I nearly got it WRONG", the general suggestion that the humans wanted to just kill it because humans are stupid and nasty and scared, the Doctor even prompting the captain to actually thank Clara at the end for ignoring her decision and the decision of everyone else on the planet). The final message is undeniably that abortion is barbaric and wrong no matter what the potential consequences might be.

I'll admit that "an hour" is an exaggeration, it's only 40 mins long and the first 20 were "spider webs on the moon? Let's ignore those. Turns out they're not even spiders anyway".

I missed the abortion element totally, because it was an alien so I thought that was different?

You know I'll concede that the writing and script editing are so sloppy these days that the production team may have missed it too, the whole thing might be unintentional. But it's still there in the text, and shouldn't be.

no way that wasn't intentional, not sure whether the glib shitness was intentional tho

Godamn teevee show teachin urr kids not to terminate theurr foetuses

not sure it's possible to avoid the abortion angle, which is either extremely distracting or central, depending on your pov, but this was an interesting episode, with some excellent set piece speeches - Doctor on arriving on the shuttle to get out of being killed, Doctor making a much better fist of the whole 'fixed point in time' stuff, which has never really held much water other than as a necessary handwave, with the grey points in his mind - as much as anything this is an aesthetically attractive and personalised way of looking at the Doctor's difficulties (something the series has done exceptionally well - better than any other), and the final 'you walk on our earth, you breathe our air' speech from Clara.

I liked the almost medieval aspect of the dragon thing unfurling from the moon (though hints at rosenberg/nazi ice age moon science?), and also liked the acoustics of the speech in the helmets - very up front and centre, but distorted and hollowed out. Pace and structure was excellent, with some wonderful images and tense moments.

the innocent life of alien (exists outside human morality - is basically an animal) versus the continuation of humankind is fairly standard.

and yet, and yet - Courtney's 'but it's a baby!' and getting three women to decide, plus countdown feels too close, the final outcome of the plot too suggestive of moral endorsement for it not to be... well either extremely distracting or feel like it's the whole point.

re the intentionalist of the abortion angle, let's not forget the frame in which ABORTED appears in all caps