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

xp ahh! thanks

I am getting old and cranky. I thought the something old something new bit sounded clunky. Moff set this up mins earlier with dr musing on the tardis's blueness. And even that felt off

Feels odd to be the -ve voice I have to say

I think the sense-making elements didn't always come over on screen but it did seem to me there was a consistency about the way "erasing from time" worked: rather than rewriting history it was a very crude erasure of cause but not effect: Amy's parents are erased but Amy still exists; the ducks are erased but it's still called a duckpond; Rory is erased but the Silurians were still beaten; finally the Doctor is erased but Earth is still around (in contrast to Turn Left, where history DOES change very quickly for the worse once the Doc is removed from the timeline).

So this seems to suggest erasure works like a cosmic perception filter - the erased stuff is removed from time as long as nobody remembers it, and you need to be special (a time traveller, say) to remember it: the Doctor remembers erased stuff easily enough, River also seems to remember it (the Blue Book, and her remembering the Pandorica adventure at all), Amy obviously is very good at it as she's not only a time-traveller, she absorbed crack information in her sleep.

On an emotional and symbolic level it's all about imaginary friends, fairytales, etc. but I think the reason I found this much more emotionally satisfying than some previous finales is that there DID seem to be a set of rules around the cracks and their effects.

The restoration field/every atom was much more RTD-ish and seemed a little OTT, since it had already been established back in the angels story that the Doctor would need to sacrifice himself to a crack to close it. I thought for a moment the restoration field was going to work on the chunk of shrapnel TARDIS the Doctor had acquired earlier, but no!

It was superb, and I was v suspicious of the previous ep. Such good fun! The pandorica was only supposed to be difficult to get into, to attract the doctor. The whole story was made up to appeal to his sense of adventure via the unknown (that wonderful smile he does whenever he realises something is dangerous or impossible).

Thought the series was uneven but that last ep simply sped along, wasn't afraid of being complicated and zapping in and out of time and was far more enjoyable than any rtd finale. Wasn't afraid of sentiment but dealt with it in a delightfully un-mawkish way. Wonderful.

a massive rewrite and reset switch by any other name smells even worse when written by someone who has a reputation for tight plotting.

i'm def to blame a bit here tho -for just giving up trying to work out if there's any sense here. i may watch again - i have no idea why amy's parents were erased for eg.

The crack swallowed them up!

plz also explain the coalition of baddies pandorica trap plan again. it starts with getting VG to paint space-time coordinates on a pic of the tardis exploding...

Haha I am trying to work that out myself, in a big geeky post in a more specialist forum...

I think it's quite a bad plan tho.

In preparation for my project management course I'm going to write a project proposal, which starts with getting some user acceptance criteria together - getting those sontarans and daleks to agree on any quality assurance criteria is BEYOND crazy i tells ya.

So is the reason that Amy couldn't remember the Daleks and the Cyberking that those events were swallowed by the cracks? And if so have they been restored by Big Bang II?

HOLY FUCKING SHIT TURN ON GLASTONBURY RIGHT NOW

Matt Smith/Orbital Doctor Who theme reboot, easily most Googlable this week...

Matt Smith appears to be performing with Orbital at Glastonbury. Or at least pretending to. Now I still haven't seen yesterday's episode so LALALALALALALALA.

In a word, yes.

Matt Smith is on stage with Orbital at Glastonbury for the version of the Who theme tune. He shoulda been in costume rather than his civvies though.

Oops! We've stumbled upon a real space time event here.

Haha, ace. Wow that crowd looked like they were having fun.

Darn. Missed it. If more than 30 seconds of footage turns up anywhere, let me know!

Liked the last ep. Will concede some doubts about things making sense, but I thought it was a pretty good end to a pretty good series. Maybe not quite as brilliant as I'd told myself a Moffat series would be after RTD, but considering how unsure I was abt Smith and have really come to like him, it all balances out.

Wee red-haired nerdy girl who spends a lot of time talking to herself and inventing friends. Seems pretty special to me, thanks.

Man I haven't much liked Amy, not that I disliked her much either, but maybe I'd better start since this description IS my childhood (too bad I didn't grow up to look like Amy)

PS I did tune in at vaguely the right time but apparently it took 6 minutes to swear at the TV and write that post

Gasp! I need to see this! If anyone finds a clip, plz post? (slow, deep breaths... )

In the minute or so I saw he was basically just standing there.

I'm sure it'll never be made available on the internet!

There's an intro of some length, MS gets to wear the Orbital laser goggles and basically does a Pete Wiggs. It's ace, even if they missed a HUGE opportunity for monstah basslines.

(cries)

Moff set this up mins earlier with dr musing on the tardis's blueness

a) yes this is the point he is programming her to remember AT EXACTLY THE RIGHT MOMENT (ie just a few hours after the collapse/reboot event)*
b) no he set it up SEVEN WEEKS BEFORE, we have been waiting since Flesh And Stone to find out what he said when she was seven that was so important to remember!

*Tom OTM re Final Crisis here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF_R5UJGt-g

OMG THANK YOU!! I just broke out into a complete sweat.

Various ILXors at Glastonbury were sharing their Who at Orbital set-based heart attacks on Twitter, earlier.

I can die now

Has anyone noticed this here yet? Amy Pond -- the girl who doesn’t remember the Doctor, who grows up with her life defined by his absence.... was born in 1989 and first met him in 1996... for one night only, whereupon he vanished again for years.

many xposts:

i enjoyed it, but i didn't like that it made zero sense (TO ME). it felt like moffat thinking 'i can play RTD's game and be better with it', but for all the moffat tm tricksiness there was too much that seemed nebulous hand-wavy for the more solid tricksiness to have full impact. expectations subconsciously set too high perhaps

OTM - this really made me disappointed (my partner is in complete disbelief at all the love for the finale on this thread...). The Doctor shouting at all the baddies last week just didn't feel right (not just the shouting, more that it didn't really make any sense). There were bits I enjoyed - the Bill & Ted stuff, the gags, Rory as plastic guy - but couldn't they have been a bit more imaginative about what might happen if things had been wiped from existence - maybe something more than museum artifacts disappearing. I was on board with the 'big bang' reboot kind of thing, but still not sure exactly what it was inside the Pandorica that was meant to have been magnified or w/ever to re-create all of everything. If it was Amy's memories, then what about all the people/places/things she wouldn't have a clue about? Was it meant to be the air or something inside the Pandorica that contained 'memories' of everything? Why did the Doctor survive? And why on earth does something built as a prison have the ability to fly around?

As you can tell a lot of this went over my head (admittedly I was a bit distracted watching it and didn't hear every line, so please feel free to fill me in about what actually happened). I think the worst thing is that it could have been incredible if they'd kept it a bit simpler.

i'm def to blame a bit here tho -for just giving up trying to work out if there's any sense here

omg :) @ matt smith w/ orbital at glastonbury laser-light soundworld

xps sic - ha clever

At the risk of seeming dense, I don't get it, sic? 1989 is when "Chime" came out, and 1996 was Middle of Nowhere...

The Doctor shouting at all the baddies last week just didn't feel right (not just the shouting, more that it didn't really make any sense).

It did make sense. What do you think didn't?

but couldn't they have been a bit more imaginative about what might happen if things had been wiped from existence - maybe something more than museum artifacts disappearing.

EVERYTHING was disappearing. Ducks from duckponds. We saw museum artifacts disappearing BECAUSE WE WERE IN A MUSEUM AT THE TIME. And the museum had already been imaginatively used to show how contracted and collapsed time already was at that point - penguins in the Nile, etc.

I was on board with the 'big bang' reboot kind of thing, but still not sure exactly what it was inside the Pandorica that was meant to have been magnified or w/ever to re-create all of everything. If it was Amy's memories, then what about all the people/places/things she wouldn't have a clue about?

Everything that had been erased from history across the universe had seeped into her mind and subconscious and memory while she slept, every single night of her life, through the crack in her bedroom wall.

Was it meant to be the air or something inside the Pandorica that contained 'memories' of everything?

The Nestene consciousness had taken a "print" of Amy's memory.

Why did the Doctor survive?

The same reason as the entire planet, universe, history and Amy's parents survived.

And why on earth does something built as a prison have the ability to fly around?

It doesn't, the Doctor wired the time bracelet into it. (They should have shown it dematerialising rather than flying but w'evs.)

This is all shown onscreen AND covered in dialogue btw, I'm not filling in any gaps!

At the risk of seeming dense, I don't get it, sic? 1989 is when "Chime" came out, and 1996 was Middle of Nowhere...

Try thinking about TX dates for a television program that may or may not have its title mentioned in this thread, not release dates for a band that played raves around the M25...

Might be a great doctor but he's a crap MC.

Was it meant to be the air or something inside the Pandorica that contained 'memories' of everything?

The Nestene consciousness had taken a "print" of Amy's memory.

wasn't the print thing about Rory? the Nestene consciousness had made a copy of Rory from a photograph but Amy's specialness meant that the copy also contained his personality and his human soul. by extension Amy is able to bring back other people directly connected to her - like her parents! and the doctor!

afaicr the 'memories' of everything are more the contents of the Pandorica - the doctor's logic was 'the Pandorica contains billions of particles from a highly populated pre-mass-supernova universe, and in combination with a highly concentrated tardisplosion and a big-crunch-universe its revivifying energy can extrapolate the ENTIRE HUGE UNIVERSE from them - just as one can extrapolate an entire body from the genetic information in a single cell'

nb i am not suggesting this actually makes any kind of sense. just that it was the explanation given.

xp Yep, I got confused about whether it was meant to be actual molecules or "memories" (not buying that Amy, consciously or otherwise, knew everything in the universe to be able to bring it back).

I liked the Nestene copy of Rory being wrong but not sure how it works that it had all Amy's memories/knowledge of him yet still had him being a Roman.

Why did the Doctor survive?

The same reason as the entire planet, universe, history and Amy's parents survived.

The museum thing still bugs me, why would artifacts disappear but leave an empty exhibit (think someone upthread also mentioned this).

someone on a different site described it quite nicely i thought as the crack erasing causes but not effects - i thought of it as being like stalin's image manipulators inking people out of pictures, where first they just erase the face without bothering to hide the fact that there was once a person there, and only after they've got rid of two or three people do they crop it/repaint it so it looks like there was never anyone but stalin in the picture in the first place.

like the crack makes things not have existed and then time shifts about to accommodate the new shape of things, but there's a bit of a lag. the crack doesn't change time directly (unlike the decisions in turn left e.g.).

the doctor had to be on the wrong side of the crack when it closed! no-one said anything about after it had closed.

I liked the Nestene copy of Rory being wrong but not sure how it works that it had all Amy's memories/knowledge of him yet still had him being a Roman.

the photo of him in Roman drag (with her in police stripper drag) let it make this mistake I guess

well yeah, but Amy's knowledge is that he's a guy from Wales who once dressed up as a Roman so why did this contradicting "information" win. I could probably do with watching the whole thing again tbh.

Nestene was in a hurry?

^ credited apologist I guess
I s'pose I am prepared to make excuses for the holes in Moffatt's handwaves bcz I want to hold onto the enjoyment I have while watching it, whereas with RTD the hole swould leap out at you, fart in your face, and make the BIG ROMP elements too hollow and unearned to even enjoy while they were going on

Kind of feel the opposite - that RTD's "this is all big fun nonsense, woohoo!" was fine for me, but SM's plots almost make sense, which just makes them more disappointing in the areas they don't.

ok but you know that probably every time travel story ever written does not make sense (and not in a 'time travel is impossible duh' way)...

http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=866

hmm. doesn't 12 Monkeys sidestep this problem?

yeah that's a 'you cannae change anything' kinda story, perhaps my 'every time travel story ever' was a slight exaggeration.

Worst year ever. cbf saying anything more, not worth it. Just awful.

I think Matt Smith blows David Tennant out of the water, and that alone is enough for me to call this season the best of the new series. The stories weren't as strong as, say, season three's, but I preferred this season's evenness and subtlety to the mawkishness and abysmal lows of the RTD seasons.