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

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).

xp times a zillion to sic and whoever else but i think the bottom line is just that i don't like this show and that's a huge bummer for me

are you new to it? or you don't like this season?

i grew up watching the show
i got back on with eccleston
i quit at the end of the tennant run when the last episodes were so abundantly dumb that I knew it was sign off time
and when it was clear to me that what moffat was doing was totally not for me
i tried again this season with the entry of capaldi but man there's something about the way the show IS that turns me off something fierce
no slams if you can get enjoyment out of it, i truly wish i could

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

Clara at least took a dig at this. I feel like te here was less background music in this episode overall but maybe it wa just the moment where she said 'does dramatic music play in your head when you do this?'

did she say that? Missed it!

forks there is an earnest, goofy, guy-and-gal-next-doorness to almost every british drama that would never fly in america and dr who definitely has it; is it that, do you think?

for me it's the mawkish sentimentality, the kindergarten level repartee between the sexes, the consistently dopey meta dialogue and the whole GUYS THIS IS SUPER IMPORTANT AND MEANINGFUL AND CLEVER overlay that never lets up
it's like somewhere along the way doctor who became self aware and it feels the need to constantly remind me that i'm watching doctor who and isn't it great that this is a new episode of doctor who

lol those charges are hard to argue with it must be said

it's like somewhere along the way doctor who became self aware and it feels the need to constantly remind me that i'm watching doctor who and isn't it great that this is a new episode of doctor who

haha yeah I feel you on this, and my viewing history mirrors yours. I find it sort of mildly enjoyable but I wouldn't miss it if it stopped, it does feel like an entirely different beast from how it used to be.

particularly in the MEANINGFUL AND CLEVER department

love meaningful-and-clever Who, like Time Meddler and Mind Robber and Deadly Assassin and Time Warrior and Sun Makers and Curse Of Fenric and Ghost Light

i liked the old quantum leap style eps where he shows up for some reason and spends most of the episode figuring out just why he's there. fumbling his way into trouble, clevering his way out and saving the day almost accidentally but probably not really.
episodes with the pomposity of the "you'll never be alone in the universe because you take along companions and why do you take along companions because you were scared you'd be alone in the universe" self fulfilling prophecy time-is-a-flat-circlejerk nonsense really run counter to Bond-style who and i get where that's maybe your cuppa java. it ain't mine.

lonely-in-the-universe and mawkishly sentimental are 102x more RTD traits than Moffatt for me, but if you hated Moffatt's eps most out of RTD's era, sure, bail out

but

i liked the old quantum leap style eps where he shows up for some reason and spends most of the episode figuring out just why he's there. fumbling his way into trouble, clevering his way out and saving the day almost accidentally but probably not really.

like The Beast Below and Vampires Of Venice and The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood and The Lodger and A Christmas Carol and The Curse Of The Black Spot and The Doctor's Wife and The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People and Night Terrors and The Girl Who Waited (about Amy, but it's an accidental bumble) and The God Complex and Closing Time and Asylum Of The Daleks and Dinosaurs On A Spaceship and A Town Called Mercy and The Rings Of Akhaten and Hide and Cold War and Into The Dalek and Time Heist and Kill The Moon?

(nb I am not saying all these episodes are good)

i am not that kinda fan; you're gonna have to be like "the one where they go to hell and the devil is there" or "the one where there's some frog beast that took over parliament"
anyways the signal to noise has dropped off where i think i'm gonna watch like fifteen minutes per ep going forward and if it's not clicking, skip it

did she say that? Missed it!

― akm, Tuesday, 7 October 2014 07:46 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I found the exact quote on another site

Doctor: Essentially, what I knew was that you would always make the best choice. I have faith that you would always make the right choice.
Clara: Honestly, do you have music playing in your head when you say rubbish like that?

Gold has been toned down in many recent eps, eg this one and Listen. but he was as horribly overpowering as usual last week.

#BringBackKeff

yeah I haven't noticed the music nearly as much this season.

idk maybe something about Saturday's Pro-Moon music struck a particularly jarring chord in my head because it got to a point where I couldn't pay attention to what was going on because it was so intrusive

Does Murray Gold score every single episode? Sounds like a big job (though I guess he reuses cues a lot).

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.

Yeah I agree with this, "anti-abortion propaganda" is overstating it. I mean leaving aside the fact that this sort of moral quandry is one that Dr Who deals with on a semi-regular basis, killing a baby that is right on the verge of being born isn't legally recognised as abortion, and the whole "what if everyone on earth dies?" is not is exactly the sort of counter-argument that can be easily applied to the debate. But it was clumsy, I admit, even if I enjoyed the episode in general.

Clara flaming the Doctor right at the end was probably my favourite bit, I'm not sure we've seen a companion get that... genuinely angry with him before.

Gold has done every single episode of the revived series AFAIK. It was a glorious relief to watch the leaked workprints of the early episodes this year and not be browbeaten with his obvious emote-o-tron orchestras.

Trying to work out when the Tardis gained a multiple of rooms after watching the Jon Pertwee era through

From memory, in story #3 way back in the Hartnell era, The Edge of Destruction, you see other rooms (the entire story is set on the TARDIS)

am still loving the sets this season, for some reason noticing them way more this time

I feel like they are using more sets, rather than location shooting. Lots more spaceships and corridors, much less CGI mattes making it much more closed in and claustrophobic to go with the darker feel overall.

the "moon" last week was the foreign location shoot for this year

I just moved onto watching the Baker era after completing the Pertwee one. & interesting to see that Baker is doing the proof that there is gravity by use of a yoyo thing at the start of story 2 the Ark In Space after him doing it at the start of last week's episode too.
There also seem to be some humourous cantankerous one-liners cropping up which remind me of Capaldi (or vice versa since Baker was much earlier of course) I think he sadisomething about humans knowing their place or something to that effect.
I watched the first story Robot yesterday which contains the explorationof character through wardrobe thing I thought lasted longer. I think it's actually 5 changes including Viking and Pierrot before he emerges with the first version of the new Who look and it's done at the TARDIS door so it indicates there is a wardrobe inside but doesn't show any expanded interior. THe previous episode shows a couple of the Doctor's Inverness capes hung on a coatstand at UNIT while Sarah Jane bewails the Doctor being dead since he's disappeared for weeks. MIght not mean anything more than they wanted something to evoke the Doctor's spiritual presence but might also suggest that there is no better place thought of to hang them like on the racks of his extensive onboard TARDIS wardrobe.
Seems like the absence of the extended interior may just be corners cut during the Pertwee era. Might just be they forgot about it since the era starts with the Doctor unable to use the TARDIS during his exile to Earth. So it had to be reintroduced later. I haven't seen far enough into the Baker era to see how it is broached. I do remember corridors being walked down at some point during the era though. I think Romana at least had her own room onboard too.

T Baker is certainly the other Doctor that Capaldi reminds me of most, perhaps with a touch of Pertwee dashingness.