Sea Devils And Die: GeroniMoffat's Doctor Who In The 2010s

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0By3KbtiGTysyNjA5YTMyODQtYjUxYS00M2ZlLTkxNjAtMmQ3OGMzMDQ4Yzgx&hl=en

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0By3KbtiGTysyNjA5YTMyODQtYjUxYS00M2ZlLTkxNjAtMmQ3OGMzMDQ4Yzgx&hl=en

Sorry, have no idea how to embed that from Google docs

ha ha

needs moar Pond pulling on his braces though

Irritated by the angels never having to cover their eyes. In first ep, was happy to believe it was because their eyes were decayed and they were under strength or something. By end of this one, though, when the angels were in front of the raised shields, eyes open and all looking over each other's shoulders, there was too much suspension required - not of disbelief, but of things carefully explained in previous episodes and now just ignored. Not a patch on Blink, and nowhere near as scary.

Yes. Aldo, what are the insider sites saying about that?

wait... avoiding the wolf whistles?

Yeah, sorry, just to clarify - I remember my dad saying when he was young and they went to the cinema on a Saturday afternoon, all the teenage boys would wolf whistle and stamp their feet at the back whenever there was a 'soppy' scene. Presumably this was partly out of juvenile embarrassment at the idea of Love, perhaps also seeing their hero unmanned, but also a critical reaction to the interruption of action with sentiment. I think the crucial aspect tho is the soppiness - Tennant + Rose (and Martha) = soppy, Amy + MS = not soppy - in fact Matt Smith reacted much as a young lad would (assuming a lack of sexual precocity) = no wolf whistles, just perhaps a certain amount of sympathy and a 'Thank God the doctor got out of THAT one, far worse than the Angels imo'.

Of course, this ignoring the whole 1,000 year-old literary history, of action + love = romance, but, in the words of Spector v Rector by The Fall 'The hero was a strange man, those flowers take them away - they're only funeral decorations'.

Online community too busy convincing themselves the beach sequence was all about the Doctor having a crying wank over Rose Tyler, and gnashing their teeth that the Rusty era has been written away so deftly.

The ones that actually care are pointing out the inconsistency while the rest hand-wave it away in the name of good television.

LOL. How is beach sequence ever about that?

They all reckon when he says "time can be rewritten" and has a wistful look on his face is all about him working out how he can bring her back. Obsessed, I tell you. Good job I'm reading it so you don't have to.

"Wibbly wobbly timey wimey" has become a mantra to explain any plot holes.

i read some amazing bit of the internet yesterday where there was wailing and gnashing of teeth because beach sequence apparently automatically means erasing of whole Donna Noble story. Which I had not considered!

So that whole "oh this one's really just for the kiddies" stuff disappeared quick, huh? <3 Moffat

impossible that donna is erased - i, for one, remember her

After rewatching my only gripe is how both the Doctor and Amy avoided the Angels clutches esp. the latter where you'd think they'd know better when someone's eyes are shut and why were the so slow (cool as it was to see them move)? Oh and how did he work out the date of the crack creation? Just by sonicking the crack?

Really don't want to see a whole bunch of RTD stuff written out of official history tbh - as daft as it got this would just devalue the Doctor's experiences further. And there is really no point doing this unless you're going to rule out further Earth invasions by Daleks etc. surely.

River's suspicious behaviour went into overdrive at the end, all that laughing plus Pandorica knowledge - presumably she'll re-appear in the finale.

Don't see what the problem is tbh - it hasn't been written out of history, it's been written out of a history.

ban this parallel filth

Ha ha. Anyway, if anything it's this series that is the outside of history one - the Doctor still remembers everything, so do we - it's only Amy's weird world where there are no ducks and no memory of history. It's also a handy way of escaping RTD's grabby grabby attitude to plotlines of course.

I really don't understand the people who think Rose is the Doctor's one twu wuv, and think he's referring to her in every episode.

I really don't understand the people who think Rose is the Doctor's one twu wuv

The other version of him choosing to live and die with her in alterverse suggest she is.

To me "hmmm history can be rewritten" is pretty much Moffat saying that to himself - in other words anything goes and he can bring back anything/anyone we think is gone or wipe out anything he can't be arsed writing around.

I am super mega excited for the remainder of this season based off of the bits I've skimmed so far re: rewriting history and the way the big threat is being established (neverending cracks in space/time, major catastrophic events not actually happening, etc).

"Victory of the Daleks" was kind of terrible though.

limp dictory of the daleks. also, look what i saw yesterday, for sale:

http://www.brattlefilm.org/brattlefilm/merch/images/tshirt-who-dalek-lg.jpg

Best part of Victory of the Daleks was the wordplay possibilities it provided for my username.

Worst part was the episode itself.

Which is why for a moment when I read HI DERE say "Victory of the Daleks" was kind of terrible though. I was like, "What is his beef with John?" :P

so I just watched both episodes, felt as if there was a lot happening and not a whole lot of explanation as to why - flexible gravity, various deus ex machina that saved them from the angels, the angels letting Amy count down and therefore control the time of her death - I felt as if I was hanging on to the plot but just barely. Some terrific moments though.

flexible gravity

this was explained

the angels letting Amy count down and therefore control the time of her death

this isn't what happened. they were counting down THROUGH her in order to put the frighteners up her. this is explicitly stated.

various deus ex machina that saved them from the angels

crack in time was set up in previous four eps. teleporter was set up explicitly in the previous scene. Amy walking with eyes shut was some buuuuuuuuullshit.

http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/4159/legodoctorwho.th.jpg

No-one seems to have clocked to the part where the Doctor claims Pandorum is a fairy tale and River says something like arent we all??

A fairy tale (time)rewritten by someone who used to write loads of stories about the raggedy doctor, who turns out to be the most important person when time (or stories of the Doctor) needs to be rewritten.

Sorry but I'm on some 4th wall, postmoderney-woderney reading of all this. I think the creating of a Raggedy Doctor fairytale by Pond will be the end of season make-it-all-better device.

rewriting Doctor Who timeline featuring a rewriting of the doctor who timeline = Mmmm thats good Moffat.

The Doctor Who timeline has already been rewritten at least once - given that according to Rusty the Daleks and Timelords were destroyed throughout all time and space.

i like where you're going with that

xpost

i really don't buy Amy Pond as a doll-obsessed closet fanfic writer though.

perhaps that is unfair, however, both to her and to doll-obsessed closet fanfic writers everywhere

at the end of the first ep we saw all her Doctor dolls near the dress, but when she brought him to her room they didn't seem to be around. Er, maybe the crack has non-existed them...

Terry Pratchett considers Doctor Who -- but what will Dan think?

Dan thinks Terry Pratchett is OTM; I've never considered Doctor Who to be hard core SF.

I sorta think - cue overloud challops music - most TV SF is not actually SF (including what I've seen of the Star Trek family, though I might give the original a pass on grounds of age if nothing else), but if you're going to watch an explosions-and-magical-fantasy-battles-in-space soap opera Doctor Who is one of the more interesting ones and has made me think about stuff even if stuff does not include science

(liked the article)

I think it's kind of funny/telling that he picks out a bunch of Rusty episodes to reinforce his point and then turns to Moffat/Cornell for the "but oftentimes the show is so great that it doesn't matter" rebuttal.

PS I am laughing at the comments to that article going "Doctor Who is not HARD SF, I mean a STAR WHALE?" when the last book I bought which said "hard SF" all over the back turned out to feature... star whales

(though there was some vague-murmuring-of-physics pretext for such a thing, complete with numbers which didn't seem to add up to my non-physicist brain, in the book. which was not very good anyway. "Raft" by Stephen Baxter, should you care)

http://i40.tinypic.com/2zqyek8.jpg

In other words, I agree.

Whenever anyone mentions hard sci fi all I can think of is Roman from Party Down.

that is fantasy!

how seriously can you take the dude who defends the fairy episode from torchwood, though

Last week's was more a series of connected setpieces than a proper story. Fucking great setpieces, though. And I loved the solution to the cliffhanger, and how it was turned round to be the solution of the whole episode.

Ha, just had to switch this off after the pre-credit sequence because the 5 yr old was too scared, although his specific complaint was "I don't like it when prisoner zero is in it!", which was maybe a good call - I've seen people mention the similarity between these vamp teeth and the angels' ones, but I'd forgotten the alien in the first episode had them too.

I'll have to iplayer the rest of it after his bed time, bah.

It was fairly perfunctory, the plot was too familiar. Next week looks good.

Some good lines but a bit too much "why are they doing this dumb thing? oh look, a magic button"

(reception crapped out partway through so I may have missed an explanation of some of the dumb things)

Just occurred to me that the fish aliens had an almost identical motivation and back story to the big red spider lady in that xmas special.

more lols in this episode than any others so far - not bad for a alien refugee filler ep tho not as good as the Doc's last visit to Italy.

really intrigued by next week's.

Well that was a bit shat. Don't really like snarky self-regarding doctor striding around moodily - eccentric and irritable and fallible teacher is more my sort of speed. And the lolz seemed rather brittle. I'm assuming the aliens co-opted local watchmakers to construct the generator rather than do it with their fish fingers.

Heavily CGI landscapes always make me feel slightly indifferent as well, but I'm feeling under the weather so all the criticism might just be lack of pep. Perfectly fun I guess. I just didn't like Matt Smith much in this.

Next one looks amazing.

Doctor had some good lines in this one, and I enjoyed Isabella's father wearing the stag party shirt with his breeches. LOL. Amelia's fiance wotsisname reminds me of Topher in Dollhouse though useless to the power of 10. A bit Ricky the Tin Dog. Hope they give him some more personality or something, he's a bit of a handbag right now.
Episode as a whole felt a bit skipped over...vampires were good and scary for a bit, fish alien was good and creepy looking, but it didn't seem to go anywhere. Really hated the toggle switch on the clockwork. Naff. But the nightmarey parts were good and scary, in true Moff form. That green light was supercreepy looking.

Very excited for next week.

Rory is from the Nicholas Lyndhurst factory, right?

Seems that way doesn't it? Dynamic between Amy and Dr seems a bit screwed with him - turned into two pints packet of crisps lols. Sure it will right itself tho.