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

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.

At some point in the Baker era you see Leela swimming in the tardis pool

Yeah, wait until you get to the Invasion of Time. Also, alternate control room begins being used in... what, the Masque of Mandragora?

Slightly random thought re: Clara & Mr Pink:

I can't remember if it was this episode or the last, but Clara got Real Serious at one point with the Dr and said of Mr. Pink, "but I LOVE him!" like it was the most natural thing in the world and the Dr was being some thicko alien who does't get human emotions but I was like, you wot, Clara? Haven't you been out on a total of like four dates with him?

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"

the one where he fumbles into Spaceship Britain and accidentally finds out its powered by an enslaved space whale; the one where he fumbles into a castle full of vampires in Venice and finds out they're aliums; the one where he fumbles into a near-future drilling operation that is waking up an Eocene population from suspension; the one where he fumbles into an ordinary dude's flat, life, job and soccer team and finds there's aliums upstairs; the one where he fumbles into a grumpy grinch's plutocracy and accidentally cures him with a sky shark and an opera singer; the one where he fumbles onto a pirate ship haunted by a siren and accidentally figures out there's an alium hospital; the one where he fumbles into a pocket universe after getting a txt from one of those psychic boxes from 1969's the long one about war and accidentally finds out that he wants to bang his TARDIS when she's in a person body; the one where he bumbles into a refinery in a castle where ppl use skinsuit avatars to handle dangerous material and he accidentally gets turned into a plastic double who saves the day before they start a campaign for non-human rights; the one where he bumbles into a tower flat where a kid is scared of the monsters in his cupboard and he accidentally figures out the kid is an alium cuckoo; the one where he fumbles into a quantum nursing home and accidentally gets into the wrong time track and duplicates one of his companions; the one where he accidentally ends up in a haunted hotel in space and accidentally realises it's got a fear Nimon in it and has to Fenric his companions; the one where he fumbles his way into a job in a department store and accidentally saves the world from Cybermat invasion by being friends with a baby; the one where he gets tricked into visiting the Dalek parliament on Skaro that he accidentally enabled and fumbles his way through a Dalek asylum planet and accidentally figures out that the person helping him doesn't rly exist; the one where he fumbles his way onto a crashing spaceship full of dinosaurs and helps the Indian space agency save the planet; the one where he fumbles his way into a wild west town again and accidentally becomes sheriff and has to stop an alium robot bounty hunter; the one where he fumbles his way into an aliem vampire-worshipping society and accidentally finds out the vampire is just a cover for a sun emoji that wants to eat everyone; the one where he fumbles his way into a 1970s haunted house because he wanted to ask some advice and accidentally finds out that there's a time traveller stuck in a fragment of Apple Timestretch trying to find her way back to a 1997 jungle track and then accidentally figures out that the alium monster trying to eat her is trying to find his ladyfriend; the one where he fumbles his way onto a cold war submarine with a frozen Martian general on it and accidentally loses the TARDIS and has to get a boat to the south pole; the one where he fumbles his way into a rebel skirmish during the Dalek Empire and accidentally cures a Dalek of being good; the one where he fumbles his way through a space bank robbery and accidentally figures out that he set himself up; the one where he fumbles his way onto a knackered space shuttle with a handful of nukes on it and accidentally figures out that the moon is an egg and they shouldn't nuke it, come on, this was literally FOUR DAYS ago

btw

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.

used to be when - during RTD or when you grew up on it? the beast has never had the same feel for more than four years at any time in the last 50 imo

(except maybe the DWM strip from 1997-2005 which I've not read but seems to have had fairly consistent creative stewardship)

I don't know what RTD is - I meant since the reboot

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

I love the concentric rings of cryptic, sketched-out diagrams on the ceiling of the Tardis! (And how they're echoed in the opening credits.)

like: even the 1965-66 season feels different from the first two years. Holmes lasted less than a year after Hinchcliffe was moved on, and you can feel the difference in approach, style and budget from Williams' second story. Letts/Dicks stayed five years, but the first Pertwee season has a different feel from the next three (due to being commissioned by Sherwin/Bryant, budget cuts, cast, and the budgetary need to have three reeeeaallly long stories), and the last one loses the vibe as everyone gives notice and marks time. Even Saward's unfortunate reign of mediocrity had the 18-month mini-cancellation in the middle, and there's at least an intention to change tone when C. Baker comes in halfway through, and starts strangling companions instead of having a soapsworth of them roaming the TARDIS bedrooms.

xpost: RTD is Russell T Davies, showrunner from 2005-2009. so is it this year you think doesn't feel like the last eight, or the last five that don't feel like the previous four?

(nb not trying to sound belligerent here: for real curious)

xp i appreciate you taking the time to do that sic but i can't place any of those (didn't watch the most recent episode) so you may be banging your head against a wall here.

to your immediate question, i'd say the last four or five don't feel like the previous four.

my affinity for nu-who is in the first three or so years and then i felt like the show completely cocked up.

so is it this year you think doesn't feel like the last eight, or the last five that don't feel like the previous four?

I grew up watching the Pertwee/Baker/Davison era and idk the pacing and tone just felt different. I (half-jokingly) remarked to my wife that if you weren't bored during at least part of the episode than it wasn't really Dr. Who. You are unsurprisingly much more versed in the minutiae of this show than I am but yeah the reboot does feel like it has a more frantic and more nudge-nudge-wink-wink attitude running through it. Of the new seasons/Doctors I've probably enjoyed Tenant the most.

you guys are both just saying "a TV show written and run by Steven Moffatt doesn't feel quite the same as a TV show written and run by Russell T Davies," then*. Shakes I promise if you went back and watched representative episodes from the three different producer/script editor eras of Tom Baker, you could tell the difference between them.

frantic - TV just moves faster now. amusingly franticness annoyed me during Tennant and I see it as a storytelling style in the Moffatt/Smith era [they have notable slowed down hugely this year]

*though it's still lol/sad to me that forks got fed up with RTD's style after four years and quit because it was obviously going to stay the same when he left!

I wish I get this much attention and hand-holding when I vociferously complained about tv shows I didn't like.

i don't think i'm being vociferous; at this point i'm just answering when spoken to!

you guys are both just saying "a TV show written and run by Steven Moffatt doesn't feel quite the same as a TV show written and run by Russell T Davies," then

*though it's still lol/sad to me that forks got fed up with RTD's style after four years and quit because it was obviously going to stay the same when he left!

again, if you're getting some enjoyment out of the current series, more power to you and i don't mean to spoil your enjoyment!

I skipped the Matt Smith seasons because I had a visceral dislike of him as an actor. The Capaldi ones are allright but yeah they don't hypnotize me the way Baker-era did when I was a kid (which I'm sure has lots to do with being a nerdy kid alone at home on Sunday afternoons with nothing better to do than watch 1 1/2 of PBS)