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

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

argh *intentionality

Trying to work out when the Tardis gained a multiple of rooms after watching the Jon Pertwee era through. I've just watched Planet of The Daleks in which they appear to have nothing beyond the console room, in which Jo drags out a camp/cupboard folding bed when the Doctor collapses and has to cover him with his own Inverness cape instead of taking him to his sleeping quarters. Oddly at the time she has just managed to change clothing without explaining where she got the new clothing. Do like that jacket she changes into.
So I'm wondering if the other rooms had appeared in any stories from the first couple of Doctors who I haven't watched through recently since they haven't been mentioned elsewhere in Pertwee, though there may be mention of a lab inside around the time of his first appearance.
So anybody know of any earlier references to rooms inside or were the contents always depicted as the console/control room anytime the inside of the TARDIS appeared?
Always wondered where the Doctor was supposed to sleep/live outside of his depicted adventures. Now he has a multiple of rooms on a multiple of floors.

This episode was fantastic from top to bottom. The pro-life propaganda complaint makes no sense to me unless the people making them have never seen an episode of the show before.

I thought it started well, but the egg concept was just too silly for me.

thanks Dan, I was afraid to even watch this after reading this but I trust you.

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

good point, the show is thus definitively saying that ABORTion is the right thing to do in all instances and will save the world

I didn't even notice the pro-life stuff, I just thought the episode was painfully bad.

the point repeatedly made that 'this is your decision, only you can choose' was what drove the issue home more than any other.

who is "you"

Clara, for some reason

also how would repeatedly stating your right to choose be an anti-choice message but

why Clara not Courtney?

I meant more that it screamed 'this is about abortion' rather than the particular outcome

the abortion reading of this story is… available. But IMHO underdetermined if you look at Who as a whole - stories where the Dr kills to prevent further destruction are not hard to find. I think a stronger claim to pro-life/anti-abortion reading could be cast towards Genesis ot Daleks. "Do I have the right?'

I kept expecting the third option of moving the bloody moon away a bit would have been brought up. Just lasso the Moon - you already done the bloody Earth like that for heaven's sake

Also notable that Dr left for 3 women to decide. Another point in favour of the viability of the abortion reading, as it suggests the writers were clearly aware that the reading is there for the taking.

anyway, this was the first episode this season where I was actually engaged - i know, it surprised me. the ludicrous moon egg thing was distracting at first, but the actual emotional adventure of Clara (and Courtney) felt like firsts for Who.

tbh I had already googled for a "have I the right?" gif

http://31.media.tumblr.com/86a854102bc330f2ab98552507b5f333/tumblr_mw0nsdpbDF1qke34uo1_250.gif

also, TUMBLR! Courtney's a SJW!

#DoctorWhoGate #NotYourDragonEgg

ok so now i have this stuck in my head

http://youtu.be/r9C3tZwDpx4

What if the ~choice~ was whether not to deliver the nuclear payload or to abort it?

or c) we leave the moon at a fire station

so having watched this after reading all of these comments I did think the abortion overtone was certainly there, though I don't really feel it had a position on it; it just posed the question, in much the same way Genesis of the Daleks did, on what is the right thing to do with this power. I don't think this was the strongest episode of the series, I'd put it just above Into the Dalek as the worst, but as usual I liked the Clara/Doctor interplay at the end and thought that went in an interesting direction. Half-way point of the season.

agreed. pretty silly (why so little reaction from the astronauts when they discover the doctor et al on their ship??) but clara calling the dr out was unexpected and powerful - it needed to be said!

I really liked it – I'm easily taken in, so I thought it'd be a pretty routine base-under-siege thing, and enjoyed the sideways swerve into the mess of stuff going on in the second half. Again, I thought I knew where I was with the Dr dropping a "Now… humanity must decide for itself. I can no longer decide for you" – enjoyable SF trope, & Capaldi sold it brilliantly. loved the further turns after – 'no stabilisers' = the Dr being a patronising fuck, Clara's rage, & the frightening sense that a huge moment of planetary-ethical choice might just be a pantomime to make Courtney feel special (Capaldi-Dr feels properly alien in a much less cute way than Smith – he just doesn't seem to get humanity, or how to be kind. He's been making mistakes regularly this series, in all sort of ways – this seems his deepest misjudgement yet. More generally, "Not telling people stuff" is p basic to drama, but there does seem a lot of it in this series).

But the abortion stuff… yeah, that's a problem. The writer/moffatt cannot have not noticed and gave what looked like deliberate pointers in that direction. To me, that's very risky – in fact not really ok – it's like flirting or playing with ideas (that in reality aren't just ideas) , doing a bit of nudging to give more moral weight to a narrative. With that reading pulled to the front, I think the climax is a bit of a mess or overladen, simultaneously pushing female agency/choice & preservation of life at all costs. & it does detract or distract from a resolution I would otherwise cheer the fuck out of – an encounter with the sublime pointing humanity to a better destiny.

Now a fan of Coleman! I did not think that would happen.

Now a fan of Coleman! I did not think that would happen.

― woof,

She's been a bit of revelation this season. Has probably always been a decent actress, and it's only now they're bothering to write her character properly now they're free of all the Impossible Girl baggage.

being able to move from the straightforward same-age romance/flirtation relationship seems v healthy as well – shakes up writers and audience, having to work things out on new grounds – there's a paternal/avuncular easy option which it's not taking.

The concept of the Doctor as a “patronising fuck” has always been there as subtext, but making it explicit, in a rather shouty adram fashion, didn’t really work for me. There’s a sort of Watchmen-y “this is how it would be if it really happened” vibe – but I’d rather have character fun than character depth, or at least the writers seem to think it’s a zero sum game between the two.

(Caveat: Next week’s episode looks silly as shit (yay), and I’ve really enjoyed the season so far.)

(adram = amdram)

Shitty overly dramatic music drowned the fuck out of everything again :(

Moon as an egg was silly but fun, felt like an old sci-fi short.

Enjoyed Clara calling out the Doctor on being a dick.

Didn't really see it all as anti-abortion but it's a valid reading I suppose (despite all the available women being given all the choice).

Once again we had three women (or two and a girl) sharing a scene without the Doctor - are they attempting to address those studies that said they repeatedly failed the Bechdel Test since Moffat took over?

lol "studies," more like Tumblr posts I'd reckon.

v much doubt it's anti-abortion, as such - it doesn't get that far. it's just clunkily present as a unavoidable but necessarily unarticulated interpretation.

anyway - yes to Clara (agree w chap about being free of the invisible girl baggage). and yes to capaldi as alien (and yes, continually making long-perspective mistakes about age, also washing and importance of humans, Clara's great comment about him "sitting there like a big grey stick insect" in Listen).