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

I really liked this. They paid off Danny/Clara so well & with genuine emotion, same with Danny & The Doctor...even if the rest of it felt a tad thin, it was v good.

And the odd forced cheeriness at the end was a nice question mark left to be resolved

missy is great btw

i want a gif of missy disintegrating squeeing seb/addison

Liked the updated credits where Jenna gets top billing and her eyes show up too.

The disintegration a we're all red coloured, and Missy's teleports were blue, and her final zapping was also blue, so I think it's safe to say this was one of the masters more straightforward escapes

Also, is the brig now flying around as a good cyberman? He was there after all the others were blown up.

danny deserved better :(

the disintegrations were red from her little handheld thing, i don't know if the cybermen were seen to kill anyone at any point. otoh she could have, for example, programmed in some cyberman failsafe wherein any attempt to shoot her did not kill her, whatever, easily done. i hope she comes back.

i feel like the beats here were a little forced, that it would have been a better climax if there'd been more than ten episodes of the status quo. i always felt a bit like we were being told what clara's, danny's, the doctor's relationships were, rather than them having breathing room to actually be the things they were. which made the last bit (though excellently choreographed) ring kind of false. probably murray gold's nadir, the music over the hugging.

felt v let down that there wasn't More Going On with the cold opens of this and last week

random middle eastern kid back from the dead would be problematic as hell if it weren't just really, really, stupid. still may be

i like stories where the narrative impetus is overwhelmed by the urge to just have a bunch of stuff happening but even so this was a bit silly, the whole president thing kind of limp and pointless. also i hadn't seen the episodes with stewart and osgood before and i thought this was how they were being introduced, which i thought was kind of ballsy. seemed a waste to kill osgood, maybe. felt largely unmoved by most of the nominally moving bits, felt the monologue about love was kind of awful

oh well

Praying the killed Osgood was the Zygon Osgood....

largely otm tho a bit harsh overall I think.

The Doctor seemed curiously flustered throughout this episode, and Capaldi neutered. His manner and awkward decisions (gormless acceptance of presidency, fluttering inability to decide about Danny) forcing him towards the moral crux the writers evidently felt they had written into him - power, the dreadful nature of believing yourself right - rather than his actual character, an energetic and acute mind capable of strongly articulated and decisive wrongness. This is not a man (at least in the rest of the series) who would have struggled about being president

in fact throughout the series they've been exceptional at putting him in positions where complicated decisions around that moral crux the power and rightness have been tackled brilliantly by the Doctor and Clara as a pair. It was cackhanded here, but did serve to show the great success of this series, and it was interesting to see a finale that attempted to resolve not lots of cryptic SF type clues unsatisfactorily, but emotional relationships.

That said the bits that have been dropped throughout the series were very partially dealt with - I'm not sure if I really got the meaning of having taken people who had died in the service of the doctor, or what having 'taken' them meant exactly, or what keeping Clara and the Doctor together really meant as a master/missy plan.

the episode had a number of set pieces awkwardly put together, but I found the set pieces charming in a funny sort of way, almost old-fashioned, like something out of Zorro. The Doctor being depended out of the skies, rushing through the clouds, only to skydive just about probably into the TARDIS brought a mixed reaction of 'oh come on really' and 'bloody hell!' so it probably got it about right. (Tho clearly Missy couldn't have allowed him to die - a sort of doubling-up on plot consequences that ALWAYS happens in James Bond and I find irritating whenever I stop to think about it).

Cybermen over the plane was alarming, and somehow also faintly comical. also reminded me distractingly of the opening set piece of The Dark Knight.

The black clouds and water seeping over Brompton Cemetery was great as an image. But it was really the out-of-town cemetery with its wintry twilight greys, and Clara wandering amidst the stones and emerging cybermen that saved this episode for me. Reminded me of The Village that Died for England, which I saw last week:

http://twitchfilm.com/assets_c/2012/09/Flipside_-_Requiem_for_a_Village-thumb-300xauto-23343.jpg

It's a shame it didn't quite use all the elements it had at its disposal - that handcam suggesting something hiding and watching Clara was creepy but didn't really mean anything. Trying to escape from a graveyard full of semi-dormant cybermen would have been awesome, but again, it was really just a picture, a set piece. Liked it though.

And yes, something went terribly terribly wrong with Murray Gold's music at the end.

Doctor and Clara in the cafe was fantastic. Danny was fantastic and disquieting in a way that the series has managed consistently. How Clara has been portrayed by JLC and the writers is as great as the performance and depiction of the Doctor. Well, almost. It's hard not to feel that of all the elements that have made this season great, it's Capaldi that swings it.

Overall this series has been like a great LP. Loads of idiosyncratic, strongly themed tracks, each with great individual ideas that also link together, high-spirits and considerable depth, not frightened of anything.

This was great up until the point at which the plane blew up and then it got a bit stupid, if only because Missy should really have seen the "fuck this, we're all going down the pub" Cybermen moment coming.

Danny Pink was rubbish, or at least the actor who played him was, just an endless one-note drip, and as a result I didn't really buy the emotional moment in the graveyard. Clara, on the other hand, has become my favourite nu-Who companion, and it's a shame she's leaving.

duh not the village that died for england obv (tho that is also good). keep doing that. xpost.

Also 'love isn't an emotion, it's a promise!' -_-

that use of sententious formulations to get out of a basically SF premise or set-up is so nu-Who.

I didn't mind that love saved the day because this time The Doctor had fuck-all to do with it.

My biggest regret from this season is that we will never get to see an Amy/Rory-Clara/Danny double date. It would be especially fun to watch Rory complain about the number of times he was killed and for Danny to be all "sure but I got turned into a Cyberman" and for them both to sigh and mutter "fucking Doctor" under their breath.

Watching Clara turn from a boring mystery into a fantastic character has been a delight. I will be following Jenna Coleman's career; assuming the post-Who bump holds true and the escalation trend continues, I expect her to win an Oscar by 2016.

http://38.media.tumblr.com/6b853077d9289e835a62742423cd6a3c/tumblr_neqokynyKA1qf5tr5o2_500.gif

I will be following Jenna Coleman's career; assuming the post-Who bump holds true and the escalation trend continues, I expect her to win an Oscar by 2016.

This is after Karen gets a Best Actress Oscar for her seminal work in Selfie, I presume?

that was good

xpost

Selfie: The Movie

(Besides, Sally Sparrow got an Oscar nomination so it's not like it's impossible)

Selfie cancelled after 5 eps btw. fwiw I really enjoyed it, except the first ep.

Fizzles has been perhaps MVP poster itt this season (tho I want to argue with one thing from that post up there (but I'm sipping wine on a balcony overlooking Bondi Beach so))

!

mark the calendar

;)

you know Pertwee would have been all about Point Break Doctor

hey veg

http://instagram.com/p/vNYfETH8oC/

Sic knows Hayley Campbell? Crazy stuff!

There's a ghostly face wearing sunglasses right next to sic! Wooooooo!

I was kinda disappointed by this episode, especially after the very strong setup in the previous one. It reminded me of Davies era season finales, in that plot coherence was sacrificed in favour of big sentimental "love saves the day" type of moments. There were so many questions and plot points left unanswered... Like, what was the point of the previous episode's opening scene, where Clara was looking at Post-It notes and figuring out something important? They never returned to that scene. Also, they revealed that Missy was the one that got Clara to meet the Doctor, but it was never explained what she hoped to accomplish with that? Seems her plan was simply to create an army of Cybermen, and then force the Doctor to take control of the army in order to save the Earth, but she could've carried out that plan without Clara being involved with the Doctor at all. And at the end of the episode, when Danny contacts Clara and they explain that only one person can be brought back from the Nethersphere, and Danny chooses the kid he had shot, it was never explained why only person can return. And how did the kid return in the first place? Danny shot him years ago, so presumably his body had been decomposed a long time ago... But if Missy's technology was somehow able to restore the kid's body, why couldn't the same have been done to Danny, and everyone else who wanted to return from the Nethersphere?

And those were just big unresolved questions the episode left me with, there were numerous smaller ones too. Presumably some of them migth be answered in the Christmas special, but I think most of them were simply there because Moffat seems to have preferred setting up big, "important" moments over good plotting.

Clara's post-its and phonecall - just her coming clean to Danny about her adventures with the Doctor. Pretty straightforward, no need to return to it.

Master's plan was pretty daft, but then this is the Master...

The resurrected kid bit was pretty hand-wavey, but it worked in terms of emotional payoff - Danny's final sacrifice.

Clara's post-its and phonecall - just her coming clean to Danny about her adventures with the Doctor. Pretty straightforward, no need to return to it.

Why did she need all the post-its if all she was gonna do was to call Danny and come clean? It looked more like she was trying to solve some mystery.

The resurrected kid bit was pretty hand-wavey, but it worked in terms of emotional payoff - Danny's final sacrifice.

I agree it worked on an emotional level, but if Moffat had put more effort into scripting, surely he could've come up with a solution where Danny's sacrifice/penance is an organic part of the plot, instead of introducing an inexplicable "only one person can be brought back" plot element, one that'd never been mentioned before, at the very end of the episode.

Why did she need all the post-its if all she was gonna do was to call Danny and come clean?

She's that kind of person. She makes lists and organizes everything.

x-post - Fair point, but I'm not sure trying to come up with some kind of scientific explanation would have added to the drama much.

Post-its also a nice way of telling the viewer why she's calling without having to put in some clunky scene where she rehearses what she's going to say to him.

the jump from the graveyard to clara at home when danny sends the kid back was the worst bit in the whole episode. "oh the doctor explained to you" blah blah...it just seemed like they were trying to cover a major hole, or something else had been cut for time.

this was otherwise good, if exceptionally silly. the end was touching though I was certain she wasn't departing yet because they still haven't explained how she and danny have a descendant in the future.

So now that this is done, is everyone here in agreement that Capaldi has been amazing in this role? Is that just because we're all old? My wife taught creative writing to a bunch of middle schoolers this week and at their break they were talking about Doctor Who and all said they had a hard time relating to him; they all liked Tennant the best.

Capaldi ruled and tbh I don't think you're supposed to relate to his Doctor so um mission successful?

I think there's more to it, or at least we were supposed to think so even if it went nowhere.

http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/doctor-who/32782/doctor-who-series-8-the-clues-in-claras-post-it-notes

This one makes me think she might be pregnant:

http://cdn-static.denofgeek.com/sites/denofgeek/files/styles/insert_main_wide_image/public/3/76//three_months.jpg

also as it says on the article, the Doctor describing her as “quite the mess of chemicals” after scanning her with the Sonic.

exactly.

whenever I pop in to comments in anything (youtube trailers, fb posts from the show) the amount of whining and bitching about this series is just exhausting. moffat is bad, clara is still bad, capaldi is bad, blah blah blah.

My kids like Capaldi being rude and blunt but I think both prefer Smith & Tennant.

I do think the age thing is an issue, sadly.

I do feel like most of the people complaining about the sexism of modern Who (#notallcomplainers) never saw the original series

or noticed how every maternal figure in RTD's era was a terrible harridan who made life worse for everyone around them

The age thing is definitely an issue, they could get round that in future by including a younger/cooler/hotter male companion in the Tardis entourage though.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-f9fWHdU_eiE/UYlI_st00EI/AAAAAAAAAdw/5Tf6BEcY7Ns/s1600/06+Adric.jpg

Will MattDC ever know if he was right?

I didn't notice the "three months" Post-It, but I guess Clara's pregancy is kinda likely now, since it seems Danny won't be coming back from the dead, and we already know an identical grandkid of his exists in the future, so Danny must've procreated somehow before his death. And I doubt they're gonna reveal he already had a kid with someone else...

hahahaha DJP

That would be a good plot idea Tuomas, had it not already been established (by the same writer) that foetuses travelling in TARDIS become Tiem Babbies and can regenerate and all kinds of shit. Plus because they're Tiem Babbies they're of special interest to time travelling alium species that nobody knows exists (and weren't defeated or anything, just had the "I don't need to show you what happened in the gap, go away and think" logic applied to them) who'll stop at nothing to kidnap and indoctrinate them because they're unique. Although of course they won't do that if The Doctor is in hiding and nobody in the entire universe knows he's alive.

Three months could well be pregnancy, but I took it more as her attempt to keep tabs on her own timeline... i.e. three months in Danny's time was when she went back to young Rupert's time. The Orson thing does suggest she's pregnant though.