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

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

couldn't work out why you'd design a logo like that.

nethersphere

Also looks a bit like Gallifrey and its sun.

Oh I dunno, I really enjoyed that, one of the very few I've liked this year, but but but...telling your audience of children that cremation hurts the person being cremated is just the most absolutely NOT OK thing I've ever seen a kids' show do. Any recently or soon-to-be bereaved child watching that has just had one of the worst things they've ever had to deal with made a lot worse and yeah, I can't get past that.

That's really freaky but a) it's Halloween weekend and b) it's most likely some kind of manipulative bullshit they'll expose in Part Two.

it was already shown as not being true in this episode

Was it? I missed it, hard to believe most kids wouldn't also have missed it.

And I don't think kids' minds work that way anyway, it's not enough to say "HORRIBLE THING IS TRUE" then later in the episode or in the next episode say "oh it's ok, they lied", the thing that will stick is the original horrible idea. Hell, even if I'm wrong about that and the idea only stood unchallenged for 10 or 15 minutes, that's still not an ok thing to do to someone whose gran may well have died last month.

It was just a ruse to get people to press 'delete' and be turned into Cybermen.

Loving Missy.

Good god, what an episode.

It was just a ruse to get people to press 'delete' and be turned into Cybermen.

Can you explain the mechanics of the Cyberplot then? People die, their consciousnesses get uploaded into the Nethersphere, they get song-and-dance and are presented with an app that will delete their human essence... but how does that get their bodies Cyberfied?

Good question - I guess we're supposed to find that out next week.

And for the Americans, what was the building that 3W was in?

xp ah, was afraid I'd missed something (again).

Also, funny that the Nethersphere appears to have exclusive iOS licensing when that ~other~ mobile OS would've been much more apt.

Was it St Paul's cathedral? I noticed a scene from the Invasion being not very well recreated.
Think that was one of the more iconic cybermen images from the 60s.

It was St Paul's Cathedral.

& to clarify that was cybermen walking down a set of stairs I think is very close to St Paul's

Yeah, think it's heading towards the Millennium Bridge, St Paul's in the background.

Cyberman on the Millennium bridge, and possibly the London Eye, needs to happen next week.

Like the opening credits of the Apprentice, with Cybermen.

And I don't think kids' minds work that way anyway, it's not enough to say "HORRIBLE THING IS TRUE" then later in the episode or in the next episode say "oh it's ok, they lied", the thing that will stick is the original horrible idea.

This is what got Hinchcliffe fired, when Mary Whitehouse said that kids would assume the Doctor had been held underwater for a week due to a cliffhanger

So that's who Missy is

That's a really flimsy parallel sic. You really don't think "loved ones I know who have died might have then gone through horrific pain" might be a more upsetting premise for children than "hero of a TV show who almost dies at the end of every episode might die, again" was? I think you're being disingenuous in claiming these are comparable situations. Apart from the different nature of the underlying message, you're comparing a clear and complete statement (later refuted, much less clearly) with an incomplete depiction of an event. And the fact is, people, children especially, really do find it cognitively more difficult to overturn an established premise than to continue to accept it (eg http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/misinformation-psychological-science-shows-why-it-sticks-and-how-to-fix-it.html). The same presumably isn't true if that premise just isn't fully stated in the first place.

aghhhhhhhhh

this was great!

so the doctor made out with the master *waggles eyebrows*

also i enjoyed what i took as a little malcolm/in the thick of it nod with the "why all the swearing?" invisible paper government bit

this season also said the moon is an egg with space dragons inside, and that wasn't promptly shown to be a lie told by a computer program inside a floating hard drive from another planet

kids tend to learn what fiction is as they grow up, and that villains often tell lies in it

idk

The cremation bit was fucked up but all the more effective because of that. This was an exceptional episode, as were the last two, really; whole season has been, likely, the best run of the revived series. figured Missy was the Master the second time she appeared; and I'm surprised that I'm ranking any episode that features Cybermen and the Master, but this was expertly done.

still can't believe they waited til this season to make clara awesome

it's like night & day

how dare a character grow and change due to her experiences >:(

for real though if you go back and watch the seven eps of last season that she was in, without paying attention to the Doctor being a fuckwit about her, you'll notice the same person

meant to include "I bet" in there

as far as I'm concerned she was a walking flirting catchphrase machine

and now she's an actual person

it had nothing to do with the doctor being a fuckwit about her. she never seemed to have anything to do!

in Bells she cracked the GI's haunted wifi on the balcony and located Miss Kizlet

in Cold War she swallowed her terror and braved up for the adventure, never screaming like a "Dr Who girl," and talked dude out of launching nukes and Ice Warrior out of having his rescue UFO zap the planet

in Akhaten, her compassion and care for children were what led then to figuring out what was going on, and then her own sacrifice and letting go of memories was the sacrifice that killed or appeased or w/e the angry sunface planet god thing

in Hide her continuing to ask questions is what prompts the Doctor to figure out what the Crooked Man lovelorn alien's deal really is, instead of abandoning the pair to time-split torture

she smashed up Diana Rigg's Heath Robinson death machine with a chair in Crimson Horror

and across the "Of The" trilogy, she: personally entered the Doctor's timeline, had her identity shattered into infinite fragments, and saved the Doctor from attack, diversion or death across the entire span of history*; convinced the Three Doctors to keep thinking through the implications of their actions and save a planet full of children (and some arseholes) and relieve himself of several centuries of emo angst; and talked the now-/still-trapped Time Lords into posting the Doctor an entire new regeneration cycle so that he could stop a dread prophecy of evil from dominating the entire universe, even though it was going to leave them sealed up behind the crack

* let's underline here, she MADE THE DRAGONFIRE EP 1 CLIFFHANGER MAKE SENSE. if that's not "anything to do..."

I don't remember what her catchphrases were. (RYCBAR wasn't catchy.)

Uh sic, your tendency to get pissily defensive at even the slightest perceived criticism of this show makes it kinda not fun to discuss this stuff with you. But let's just say that I know for a fact that my stepson (whose grandfather is currently really ill) would find this episode upsetting, so I'm not going to show it to him. I'm not about to petition the bbc to have the tapes wiped though, dont worry.

My kids would find every episode of this season upsetting, therefore no watchie

Tracer, your kids are still a bit too young, but at least with Doctor Who, there's no blood.

When I was about seven or eight I was obsessed with various life-after-death options, but in a very detached, analytical way, yet the thing that absolutely scared the bejesus out of me was an episode of the Flinstones where Fred and Barney fall into a bottomless volcano. Go figure...

This was a tremendously good and exciting episode, by far the best this season. I agree that Clara's character growth has been much more prominent during this season than the previous one; yeah, she did all the stuff Sic lists in S7, but as we've discussed before, that seemed more like a stereotypical "plucky sidekick girl" stuff when compared to this season, where she's allowed to have more idiosyncratic tics and human weaknesses.

I have to say, though, that even though the whole Nethersphere thing was a really cool concept, why was such a pointlessly complicated fake afterlife system needed to turn humans into Cybermen, when in the past it's been shown it can be done much more easily? I guess the point was that if the folks inside the Nethersphere voluntarily cut their ties into their former personality and their human body (I assume the cremation scare thing was set up so that people would be more willing to give up their biological bodies), they'd be more accepting of their lives as Cybermen, and therefore less likely to rebel?

But their new Cybermen lives are still based on a big lie, so if they find out about that, won't they still rebel? (I assume that's what's going to happen in the next episode.) So it feels like Missy/Master has come up with this needlessly complex way of creating Cybermen, when the good ol' "kidnap people and turn them into cyborgs" method would've sufficed...

because skeletons sitting in water tanks looks great. this was an excellent episode (but then i think all this series has been incredibly good).

capaldi and jlc have both been as responsible for that as the quality of the stories and the writing. missy was hardly a surprise. tho i only noticed when the plaque for the founder was revealed was shown that his name was Dr Skarosa, and surely they would't give him a name like that unless... well.

Catching up on a lazy Sunday - Flatline ATM:

Episode was good-not-great (female Doctor trial run) till the climax, then seeing the restored TARDIS and the Doctor going all HAM was awesome, the first time for me where Capaldi brings something that Matt wouldn't have.

Oddly that's the bit that reminded me of Smith's "this planet is under my protection" at end of The Eleventh Hour - since they'd just undermined one cliche ("I really like this hairband, and every time I wear it, I'll think of the hero that saved it"), I half expected them to put the boot into that one.

Time travelling future Danny is definitely part of an overarching plot

Is that not his descendant?

This is the best nu-Who season fwiw.

Too early to tell, episode by episode (er, but I'm two episodes behind): it's up there with 7, but that was the last (only?) nu-Who season which actually did well by its big plot, and where the finale (both parts) are the best part of the season. If the end of 8 is as incoherent as the Name of the Doctor then I can see it taking a tumble.

are you sure you mean 7?

I'm reminded that the concept of the dead being conscious after their death and feeling everything that happens to their bodies is from an Aleister Crowley novella (The Testament Of Magdalen Blair) and that one of the 'big' Who baddies using a cemetery/mausoleum (where the dead aren't 'really' dead and can be contacted by relatives and loved ones) as a cover for harvesting their bodies to create new soldiers for their armies by encasing them in a metallic suit is in fact (part of) the plot of Revelation of the Daleks.

Danny Rose clearly didn't SPLINK.

Jim pls picture me grinning and poking genial fun, not sulking or being petulant. (and certainly not ...being defensive on behalf of? RTD or Saward or Chibnall or...)

apols btw, I misrecalled slightly:

wasn't promptly shown to be a lie told by a computer program inside a floating hard drive from another planet

it was the human Doctor CHANG!!! who actually said the cremation line, Seb just set it up in the cross-cuts with Danny.

But! I timed it on rewatching, and it's a whopping four and a half minutes between "don't cremate me" and the revelation that Chang doesn't actually know what's going on, and just about everything he has been told about the W3 situation appears to be bullshit. Is that really enough time for the concept to become permanently hardwired in the viewers' heads?

From your link:

And when we do take the time to thoughtfully evaluate incoming information, there are only a few features that we are likely to pay attention to: Does the information fit with other things I believe in? Does it make a coherent story with what I already know? Does it come from a credible source? Do others believe it?

Literally none of these fit the case of watching this episode of Doctor Who, and the paper doesn't seem to take into account the idea of accepting horror movies or fantasy series as sincere information about the way consciousness functions, anyway.

OF COURSE NOBODY SHOULD SHOW THEIR KIDS SCARY TELLY THAT MIGHT PROFOUNDLY DISTURB THEM. But you not showing your boy the ep sounds like good parenting, not that there's been a profound moral failure on the part of Moffatt and the other producers and the actors and Talalay.

Murray Gold was actually really good and restrained this ep! Until the opening of the tombs scene, where a bunch of Missy's lines got drowned out.

Dr Skarosa seems a really weird red herring to abandon. But I certainly hope it doesn't get picked up.

So it feels like Missy/Master has come up with this needlessly complex way of creating Cybermen, when the good ol' "kidnap people and turn them into cyborgs" method would've sufficed...

The Master's schemes are historically completely stupid and overcomplicated and based mainly on hubris about his own cunning, so this fits! (mark s once wrote a great thing or series about the rubbishness of his plans, somewhere.) Gomez currently on track to be the best Master in 40 years, imo and btw

Yeah, I think so far this is one of the Master's - or the Mistress, as we should call her now - more sensible, coherent schemes.

Speaking of red herrings, it seems that people who've died because of the Doctor ending up in the Nethersphere was one too, right? Because it seems the Master's plan was just to create new Cybermen, not snatch people close to the Doctor... OTOH, it's a bit weird that she would've bothered to go both to the past ("Deep Breath") and future ("Into the Dalek") to get the dead people she needs, when there's plenty available in the present, so I guess there could still be some revelation why she chose these particular folks?

"the present" is not the present for Missy. she can go anywhen.

It's also interesting to see where the Misstress's plot goes next... an invasion clearly, but it's not as if the Cybermen came out of St Paul's guns blazing. People seemed unfazed by the whole thing - it was just the Doctor freaking out. So presumably she's going to sell this as the resurrection of loved ones, allowing the Cybermen to safely infiltrate society before turning on the 'kill' switch.

Oops yeah, season 6 is what I meant, and anyway I'm cautiously optimistic about this season now (caught up completely).

Sic, I like you and all, but if that's not you being defensive, I'd hate to see what your defensive looks like :)

I'm also not quite sure that they do prove the cremation thing wrong - how are they getting the consciousness from the bodies otherwise?

It's possible that Danny's a special case of course, captured just before death to draw in the Doctor - but then there's always the question of whether the Master's plans are there for their stated purpose or just rickety enough to draw in the Doctor so the Master can have some (literal, in this case) face time with him.

I'm not sure if they're gonna go there, they already did the "dead people returning to live with their loved ones as a part of the bad guy's plan" a while ago, didn't they? I can't remember which episode it was, but I think it was during Smith's early run?

And yeah, Missy can go anywhere in time, but it feels oddly specific that the people we've seen her pick from the past and future just happen to have been folks who've died near the Doctor, instead of the billions of billions of other people she could've picked from... If this turns out to be just a red herring, I'd say they were cheating the viewers.

(x-post)

Also Jim, I'm not sure if you saw a different episode, but the one I saw had quite a lot of "Just so you know, this is incredibly fucking disturbing" leading up to the cremation line.