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

lol chap

the beatles were fans and were actually going to be on dr who until a scheduling conflict, so the totp video was used instead

so, not conflict, it was epstein who stopped them: "The Beatles were to have filmed an in-studio cameo for The Chase in which they played elderly versions of themselves, circa 1996, playing at the Festival of Ghana. Their manager, Brian Epstein, however, forbade this. Had this happened, it would have created an anachronism, given the early death of John Lennon. Ironically, given the loss of many Doctor Who episodes due to the BBC's policy of erasing old episodes, the clip of a live performance of the Beatles singing "Ticket to Ride" only survives because of its use in the first episode of The Chase. It originated in a 1965 Top of the Pops episodes which no longer exists in the BBC Archives. Because the production team for the story sourced the clips from this episode, this makes this the only known surviving footage of that performance known to exist." http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Beatles

"Had me wondering what other pop culture stuff had appeared on the show. But can't really think of anything else"

depends on what you mean by pop culture of course. But pop music, and pop stars there's been plenty of - not even counting Billie. McFly were in nu-who, the Simm's Master was very pop, dancing to Scissor Sisters and conjuring up earth's destruction by invoking Rogue Trader's (Elvis Costello sampling') Voodoo Child. (The most musical cast episode would have been old-who Delta and the Bannermen which featured Stubby Kaye, Ken Dodd and a member of The Flying Pickets - two UK number 1 acts right there - though they're not playing themselves)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOK1YdWalOw

and they reprised that with Simm watching the Teletubbies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV6efwQPdS4

Courtney Pine plays nearly a whole song in Silver Nemesis and the recording Ace buys from him (which he signs, because she's such a fan) gets used in her ghetto blaster to jam the Cyberfleet signals to Earth.

oh god I forgot about that. does anyone believe for one second that Ace was a huge Courtney Pine fan?

There was one instance of this like two episodes ago - it was Foxes singing 'Don't Stop Me Now' on the Orient Express.

So, In the Forest of the Night.

That was pretty silly, but also kind of fun... I guess silly science works better when there isn't a bunch of silly drama.

but HOW did Sleeping Beauty survive for 100 years asleep without hospital life support?!

well that was magic, you don't need to explain it.

In the original (at least the Italian one) version of Sleeping Beauty the prince can't resist her and rapes her while she sleeps. She carries a baby to term and (I think) delivers it at which point i think somebody else fosters it. Or so I read.

This was an errily accurate Who version of bedtime stories I tell my kids - start with an astonishing, inexplicable occurrence, throw in a chase or two, limp along, and fudge some kind of ending that wraps things up before I fall asleep.

Cottrell Boyce has seven kids.

i didn't understand the girl being returned at the end.

this was charming but odd in a few ways. like Kill the Moon it's more something you'd get in a book of children's fables (and lol Tracer otm). I realise that was partly the idea, but fable magic is different from science magic (I think?) and that results in some odd tonal stuff. For instance Dr Who as advocate of catastrophism theories of cosmic change creates some interesting consequences. aiui although catastrophism has some contemporary scientific credence in a limited form, it was also historically a biblical counter theory to evolution iirr. (no tree rings meaning trees all put there at once a bit like the dinosaur bones). Miraculous or interventionist events point to some sort of hylozoic view of the Earth or universe (where was the sister being stored again?).

i don't really care about 'hidden messages' in Dr Who, as i've never seen anything anywhere near strong enough to suggest some sort of conspiracy, or suggest covert propaganda being smuggled in, but these things do result in some unusual juxtapositions. I think that's a good thing, but it doesn't always feel quite right.

That bit did not make an enormous amount of sense to me, it might have been better had the sister just gone back of her own accord having heard the message, rather than being returned through firefly tree magic.

Rest of the episode was great fun, foresting London is just one of those irresistible setpieces as were the wolves and the tiger. I like how everyone concerned was all "woo-hoo the tiger has gone twenty feet in that direction let's all celebrate and make noise like we are perfectly safe!"

Also - "we do not think the pitch will be ready".

Moffatt-era episodes have generally been better when aiming for a kind of fairytale or ghost story vibe rather than a sci-fi vibe IMO.

yep, i agree with that. he overcomplicates his sciencey stuff (it's been the problem of previous series arcs imo)

there has been no science in previous series arcs, c'mon

"woo-hoo the tiger has gone twenty feet in that direction let's all celebrate and make noise like we are perfectly safe!"

this was consistently ill-attended to throughout, with Clara and Danny having frequent audible and innappropriate conversations in front of the kids, and it sometimes being "downstage" and sometimes being heard

realise that might look slightly contradictory - feel the best Moffat Who stuff is that which concentrates on quite childlike fears and frights, the under the bed, out of the corner of the eye, holding your breath, not blinking stuff. Kill the Moon and The Forest of the Night both feel fabulistic - like the Grimm brothers, or Andersen. hmm, wrote some stuff on laws of fable v laws of storytelling where worlds are accessible from this one, but it got confused.

anyway, i don't think i mind it, but it's a definite change in tone (and I'm thinking partly in terms of the thread on CREEP '70s shows). I wonder whether it's part of the approach that's allowed more and better emotional content in this series.

xpost

oh i mean the sort of SF science - messing with timelines, singularities, supernovae, rips in the fabric of space etc.

S5 all hangs together v well, S6 is a bit of a mess but due to being rushed (and the "Doctor lies" cheat), not complicated. The S7 arc is just about the Doctor being wrong abt Clara - the resolution of her past selves is so uncomplicated that it takes four minutes of screen time, and 3:30 of those are them arguing about whether she's gonna throw herself into his timestream or not

since it was apparently made up two weeks before shooting, it could have done with being more complicated, if anything

Just remembered that the bank job episode this season also featured the planet (nearly) destroyed by a solar flare.

Anyway, enjoyed this ep up to a point but couldn't really get onside for the explanation for the magic trees and didn't like the returned sister at all. This would have been much better served in SJA imo.

The explanation was that there are.. invisible light creatures who... have always been on Earth, and are intelligent, and who have amazing powers of natural/physical fabrication (a bit like fairies?) and who... created a fire-proof forest overnight in order to protect us against a solar flare. Right? Except they didn't know the solar flare was going to happen until a girl with... ESP... told them, with her mind? Is that about right?

I think the invisible light creatures were meant to be the spirit/voices of the trees.

The bank solar flare was explicitly mentioned in that ep. And wasn't the earth ultimately destroyed by solar flares in the second episode of nu-Who?

The bank solar flare was explicitly mentioned in that ep. And wasn't the earth ultimately destroyed by solar flares in the second episode of nu-Who?

Not so much a solar flare as our Sun going nova, IIRC, which is actual sciencey science.

I only grokked that the psychic girl had a sister who'd run away/gone missing when said sister appeared in a mist of fireflies at the end.

I was a little put off by the Schizophrenia Is OK, Kids! suggestion.

shame we manage to expel the fairies and cut down all trees/greenery by the time solar flares cause us to bail out into the Ark

also… no, YOU are a planet-sized air bag.

Another divisive episode, judging by twit-reaction, but not a bad go at what must have been the lowest budget one, right?

I was less distracted by the 'where have all the Londoners gone' in this than I was by the WTF insanity of the moon-egg some weeks back

also also… PEPPA PIG WAS IN IT!!!!!!!1!!!!one!eleven

The 'people are advised to stay in their homes' line was presumably their handwave for the lack of people. Problem is London is a 24 hour city... but what the hell, I'm happy to go with the fairytale premise. Flawed episode, but some nice touches, and the kids were pitched nicely, when they could have been insufferable. Nice direction too, particularly the kids-eye-view stuff with the Doctor and inside the Tardis.

I only grokked that the psychic girl had a sister who'd run away/gone missing when said sister appeared in a mist of fireflies at the end.

I grokked it when it was explicitly mentioned in dialogue by Ruby, and continued to grok it when Maebh asked the sister to come home while speaking to every phone on the planet.

I was a little put off by the Schizophrenia Is OK, Kids! suggestion.

Did you get what the title is a quote from, and the tiger was a reference to?

Seemed to be the most child centric one of the series so far. Even the caretaker episode seemed to have the location of a junior school as more incidental than central.
So I was wondering what it gets categorised as. Family sci fi? Or fantasy? Just remembering its traditional slot of around 5.30pm tea time. Which it was in again before they structured the night about dancing programs. Though the 70s had it before variety shows from what I remember.
Was also thinking about early Dr Who stories that have the Tardis crew dropping into straight history stories where the only sci fi element is the presence of the travellers. Not come upon the point where that switches over to it always having some sci fi element either alien or anachronistic presence.

That is whenever its a historical earth setting there would be a further sci fi element. But I think initially the historical thing was a selling point at least from the story dept to the main Bbc establishment.
Must be sometime in Troughton that it changes?

I grokked it when it was explicitly mentioned in dialogue by Ruby, and continued to grok it when Maebh asked the sister to come home while speaking to every phone on the planet.

These plot details are contingent on actually understanding the dialogue, a fifth of which I couldn't make out.

Did you get what the title is a quote from, and the tiger was a reference to?

I don't remember what the episode title is, but I presume you're pointing towards Blake?

Loved the set-up, production design and atmosphere in this one. The actual plot was really quite daft though - particularly the idea that everyone on earth would stop cutting down trees as a result of a cold call from a little posh English girl.

Yeah, I thought this looked terrific but the story was just awful. I think Frank Cottrell-Boyce is an overrated and shitty writer anyway.

This was an okay episode, but I think they should've just framed it as a pure fairy tale, having the Doctor explain it "scientifically" just made it all the more obvious how utterly unscientific it all was. Like, even if the "oxygen pillow" somehow stopped the solar flare from burning the Earth, that doesn't explain why the radiation that comes with solar flares didn't give everyone terminal cancer? And I didn't quite get how the trees' ability to produce more oxygen would've made the impact of the Tunguska meteorite less catastprohic, as was suggested here?

I also didn't appreciate how the little girl's sister was magically returned by the tree fairies in the end. Presumably she had simply ran away from home, and there was no supernatural explanation for her disappearance, so it would've been much more satisfying to have her return home because she heard her sister on the phone and began to miss home, not because of tree magic.

If the science is daft, aren't we still in fairy-tale mode?

I really liked Danny's take on why he's not tempted to travel in the TARDIS. Actually I just like Danny as a character and think he brings a lot of needed balance to Clara's tendency towards mania (which is also great now that it seems like an actual character trait rather than a authorial edict).

The story itself was total nonsense but then again I watched and enjoyed The Leisure Hive so I'm not going to be too negative.

Lot of chat here about Who's tonal inconsistency from episode to episode, season to season - but isn't that the point? Or, at least, an accidental positive.

First two-parter next week! I've not missed them this season, compared to the one before.

Actually I just like Danny as a character and think he brings a lot of needed balance to Clara's tendency towards mania

Me too. I don't know how companions usually work but I'd imagine that their function dramatically is to be an everyperson to the Doctor's weirdo. Clara, however, has gone native in a few ways (to what extent is currently in the crucible) so that role has shifted to Danny. Dude's got some secrets but they appear to have made him stronger and more grounded than anybody else in the show.

Lot of chat here about Who's tonal inconsistency from episode to episode, season to season - but isn't that the point? Or, at least, an accidental positive.

Exactly--the point is that it's a show that, theoretically, can do any kind of story, any setting, any time, any place. Hard to think of a show with more potential for tonal freedom. As long as there's some consistency in the central characters to hold it together, it's fine by me.

Of course, if the tone of aparticular episode is done BADLY, that sucks, but it's the execution at fault, not the nature of the show.

This season has perhaps had the most consitency of tone of any of the new series. Personally I don't think that's a bad thing - you can have an entirely different subject matter each week and still have a unifying tonal palatte. Several of the classic seasons pulled this off.

holy shit

HahahahahaahA

who spotted the logo

the windows?

"There's something I'm missing..."

DOORS CLOSE

(spotted the doors and windows WEEKS ago)

that's when I got it but my o/h noticed the logo/signs throughout (on everything). Mainly because he couldn't work out why you'd design a logo like that.

I called Missy = master but kind of hoping it wouldn't be