Maybe I'm spoiled with Moffats great episodes, where the intrigue is clever and solid, but Steve Thompsons The Curse of the Black Spot made me question why I was watching Doctor Who at all (so naturally I come to 4chan to whine, because I know that you all care very much). It was clear that it was a filler episode even before Wikipedia confirmed it (as it was previous scheduled as the ninth episode, but later easily moved) but very sloppily(?) done.
There was nothing wrong with the basic premise, but the line is crossed when the Doctor "invents" that parallell universes can be linked through reflective surfaces. I'm not a nerd boy expecting everything to be canon, but this was handwaving a solution: "X can be a portal to alien spaceships sometimes."
The Doctor previously mentioned that the myth about sirens was persistent for a valid reason, so this implies that derelict spaceships ROUTINELY seeks out ships at sea with reflective surfaces to project their holographic medical AIs through. The alternative is that... ...the ships somehow crashed into eachother for some reason? ...and the boy infected them with typhoid fever? This is never explained, and yet this is most likely an obvious filler that will never be referred back to or explained further.
...but all these insane things doesn't compare to the finale, where they find Rory strapped to a medical table, because he's been kept alive so that he doesn't drown. His condition is easy to cure: His lungs are filled with water. I can understand that the ship doesn't know how to cure him, but the Doctor is known for his TREMENDOUS skills with alien computers, so this is where he should point his sonic screwdriver to the ships medical bank and explain to it that fluid doesn't belong in human lungs. Alternatively they could manually resusitate his heart and lungs while he's being kept alive.
Instead we have yet another cliché lifesaving scene where Rory magically gets better once Amy has stopped breaking his ribs, all because the series wants to explain to the viewers that she loves him and that he matters. It's so cliché and horribly contrived that what this scene does, is making Rory into an annoying burden.
Name:
Anonymous2011-05-15 5:18
The next episode was half-decent. It was another filler, but what storyline is there really in this series? (...besides one detached clue per episode and then some double episode towards the end weaving them all together. Actually, you can tell which ones are going to adhere to the main storyline by if it's written by Steven Moffat, in which case the next double episode will be another filler, but the NEXT two are going to contain something important and interesting, or at least clever.)
Maybe it's because I'm more eagerly awaiting each episode now, that I find myself demanding more then previously, but it feels like the series is approaching a "jump the shark" moment. I can swallow a more Peter Pan doctor, I can swallow that he's becoming less and less brilliant in his deductions and more and more "magical", but the show has got to make SOME kind of sense. You can't keep pulling things out of your ass, like "There's a whole dimension I've forgot to tell you all about BEYOND space and time, but it's too 'complicated' to explain to you, so I'll just talk about soap bubbles instead." whenever you invent a new place to go to, "It will destroy the whole universe with a BLACK HOLE (Oooh!) and a SUPERNOVA. (Aaah!)" to invent a threat, or "But what if we reverse the polarity - look at that, it solved everything." to invent a solution. There's no fine line between thoughtful brilliance and bullshit anyone can come up with in two minutes - there's an eight files wide motorway, especially to the audience that the show is (or at least was) intended for.
Maybe that's just it: With the new doctor, the show is appealing to young people who hasn't finished school yet, and soon the doctor will go to "the happy magical wonderland that exists in your imagination dimension SUPERNOVA".
Is there any place left for a nerd in this world?
Name:
Anonymous2011-05-25 17:05
The Rebel Flesh
This was another filler, like predicted: Yet another alien race (like the Ood) that people shun and mistreat, and then we have acid flowing about, and that's it. That's all that happens.
What's lacking is a mystery. In the old episodes we always had something that we were struggling to understand, a plot to unravel. There's no plot here. The aliens has the obvious motive to survive, so do the humans have, and there's a lot of paranoid gruff because otherwise we wouldn't have a plot going at all. The race is easy to grasp, especially since the entire process of creating an alien is laid out for us.
The link to the main storyline is distilled to a woman opening a sliding hatch in the wall in each episode, and we go "Yup, there's also a main storyline going on somewhere - thanks for the reminder.". It's not even different clues anymore - just the same thing, but even less of it.
The doctor has stuped to horrid intelligence levels in this one: He pretends to be an inspector, he flips his magical ID, but other than that he and his companions acts so unaware of what they're supposed to inspect, that the staff has to explain everything to them. After that, all he can add to the scenario is that he isn't paranoid like all the others. We've already seen this kind of episode before - there's no reason to make it a double one.
Name:
Anonymous2011-05-31 12:54
The Almost People
This actually had some good stuff in it other than "the astonishing revelation" that the aliens "are people too". Being intelligent, I could see both the set ups (the doctors' shoes and the double copy act) way ahead, but it's something to chew, and if the viewer is able to figure it out if it's clever, the better, so this was a good episode. The only complaint with it was perhaps that the fake doctors demise was very "convenient", and that the real doctor threw him the actual sonic screwdriver before he died, so unless he has a spare somewhere, this could complicate things.
The ending was most certainly written by Moffat, because as soon as the group entered the Tardis, the dialogue became twice as intelligent and meaningful, and I knew that the episode was about to set up the next double episode. The only thing that took me by surprise was that Amy was flesh. That blew my mind.
I'm going to make a guess here: The next two episodes is going to involve the Atraxi we encountered back in the very first episode involving Amy Pond, because the child is a product of the cracks in the universe. (I'm not going to spoil ALL I've figured out, but I believe that the only thing I don't know at this point is probably where they made the actual flesh switch with Amy, though - that could probably be anywhere.)
Name:
Anonymous2011-06-06 22:05
A Good Man Goes To War
Moffat's back!
It worries me when a head writer is away this much from a series, but at least he's back.
...but enough said about the man. There's a myriad of ways in which a man can be brilliant, but he usually makes the same few mistakes.
In Moffat's case, he tried to do another The Big Bang finale, squeezing too many races into one episode. It's almost as if someone or something is keeping him from writing episodes, so he has all these ideas that he wants to put on (script) paper, but he can't for some reason, so instead they all entangle into one big blorb and come out all at once: The Cybermen, the Atraxi (has its first mention since the first episode in last season), basically every featured race but the Ood and the Daleks. They all gather in the episode for some final thing, and they don't contribute that much other than being colorful, which is lovely to see, but when the viewer is bombarded with races to the left and right, he gets distracted from the actual plot.
In this case the plot is Amys baby and the doctor becoming a fearsome warrior. We could probably see River Songs reveal far ahead of time, so the ending scene seems a little slow, and this also means that her "final" role is cemented as well.
We really could have done this without making a mess with the races and throwbacks to earlier episodes. It looks epic, but that has nothing to do with a great episode, and further more the final save in the next episode will no doubt come from a cheap "Chekov's race" like the Atraxi suddenly being put into play.
Please make more episodes, Moffat.
Name:
Anonymous2011-06-06 23:25
As we're given time to reflect upon "what a fearsome warrior" the Doctor has become, my own thoughts is that the last two seasons he has only attacked the Silence, the Daleks, the Angels, the Cybermen (in this episode) and viped out a race of fish people, which isn't that aggressive for a common superhero, or even for the Doctor, so he's probably paying the price for a lot of previous incarnations.
However, as a character, the Doctor is extremely peaceful, being ever so careful NOT to intimidate and destroy aliens (unless there's an soulless invasion on Earth's doorstep). The humans have no reason to wage war on their protector, unless influenced by the Silence, the Daleks wage war on anything, and so does the Cybermen, and the fish people was ambiguous, but were actively invading.
The only thing that disturbed me was how the Doctor dealt with the Silence, without knowing what they actually wanted. It's as if Moffat wanted a darker, more fear-inspiring and enemy-making Doctor this season, but didn't get around to writing the other dark episodes, and unfortunately neither did the stand-in writers.
...so what awaits is basically an episode where everybody hates Jesus. Hopefully Moffat can make this work.
Time for a nap.
Name:
Anonymous2011-06-08 5:45
Bumping past snowball spam.
Name:
Anonymous2011-06-10 19:42
>>8
...because you love how much better Doctor Who has gotten?
Name:
Anonymous2011-06-11 7:37
>>11-14
As you're avoiding the question, it looks like you didn't think this all the way through.
Name:
Anonymous2011-06-11 14:11
Bumping past fag spam.
Name:
Anonymous2011-06-11 20:32
Bumping past spam.
Name:
Anonymous2011-08-29 14:28
Let's Kill Hitler
This episode was marvelous in pretty much every way except for one. When a Doctor Who episode enters drama territory, it stays there, slowing down things like death scenes into agonizing boring, sappy moments. First time viewers may percieve this drawn out sequence of dying as of appropriate length, but if you're a regular viewer, drawn out demises are getting to be fairly common and very repetitive, and that it's pointed out that the Doctor doesn't actually die there, doesn't really help (although I guess he actually does die).
How River Song goes from being a lost girl in the middle of New York, to being a schoolgirl in England, isn't explained, but I'm guessing she can travel at least in space.
The best part for me, was that they not only managed to save Hitlers life, but also put him in a cupboard and completely forgot about him, because he just wasn't significant in the scope of things.
I couldn't be happier. Well actually, I could be much happier if Moffat wrote more episodes for the show, because now I have to wait until the last episode of the season. Would he have fleshed out these twists and turns into twice the episodes, he could have made the series richer. Well, except for the drawn out death scene.
Name:
Anonymous2011-09-04 19:31
Night Terrors
I have come to expect flat episodes by now, but somehow this episode exceeded this expectation. The basic premise had potential, but is barely held together: If you have a house where everything scary is put, how come there was nothing but zombie dolls in it? The kid wasn't even afraid of zombie dolls, and they're never explained either. They're not even supernatural - they're invented for the sake of the episode. They're just there for the kid to somehow defeat with magical confidence.
Besides the deus ex machina dolls, another horrible thing was that the doctor decided that he didn't need any cover, and managed to convince the father (without reasonable explanation) that he is indeed a timelord, and that there are actual monsters in his sons cupboard, making the father scared as a child for what could be in there.
That the doctor wasn't even the least bit suspicious when a call from a seemingly normal, human 8 year old boy managed to reach him, would mean that he does those types of house calls all the time, which is taking the "magical fairy doctor" role too far.
Overall this episode would do better in a kids series, because this is a story not only ABOUT an 8 year old, but having enough logic to convince only an 8 year old, with a lesson that only an 8 year old needs to learn: That daddy loves you, and that you have to face the fears in the cupboard.
Name:
Anonymous2011-09-13 0:46
The Girl Who Waited
While the basic premise of this episode - that one character is trapped in a time-stream moving at another speed - was good, the rest consisted of the stereotypical running from the weekly monster (although this monster wasn't entirely thoughtless), completely unbelievable technobabble handwaving, and strungout emotional scenes (where Amy and Rory loves eachother so much that they can even break time). The latter two was completely put in charge of the episode, resulting in a complete mess of a plot.
This is the second time with this doctor that we see that growing old makes you spiteful and resentful (if not crazy and homocidal) towards the one you used to love, which is kind of weird, because before these two times Amy was introduced as (quote) "the girl who waited" for the doctor most of her life, and Rory even waited for THOUSANDS of years, fuel by his timeless love for Amy.
The worst was probably the blatant technobabble which explained nothing except for the "sleep touch" of the weekly monster, who was paradoxically humanoid in shape, yet still inhuman in function, with hands for eyes and eyes for hands for no apparent reason, as its main alien feature.
Other bizarre features was an alien planet never having encountered human viruses, but still having Disneyland amusement rides, a virus that could kill with 24 hours OUTSIDE of compressed time (If you want to slow down a virus, put the infected in a SLOWER timestream, to PRESERVE them.) and a disease that would survive without any infected (prior to Amys arrival there).
In the end the doctor makes the choice to KILL somebody (although exactly WHO he leaves to another), which is something that he in a previous incarnation said would not make him "The Doctor" anymore. The value of this persons life was the very core of the episode, but the doctor still couldn't figure out a solution other than murder, and this for somebody who managed to give River Song a decent future in a virtual world.
The episode might have been a mess, but it still had more depth and maturity than the previous episode, and the special effects were never lacking.
What is a little disturbing is that it is declared that a person who is devious and unpredictable enough can pretty easily change his own fate just through wishing it and some random technobabble, which gives the doctor a free ticket out of his own death scene at the future season finale.
I know that I've reserved this comment for Moffat episodes only, but I liked this episode. It even went as far as furthering the overarching plot toward the end, which is extraordinary for non-Moffat episodes.
The mechanics for the episode is simple: The monster of the week feeds on people, the protagonists misunderstand it, and when the Doctor finally understands it, he can prevent it.
There are so many things I liked about this episode: The Doctor meets a replacement, the Doctor gets really upset when she dies, there's an angel cameo, the friendly alien has some intriguing beliefs, and the drama is being kept sweet but still short and to the point.
There are some problems, though:
- Out of every environment in the whole universe, the aliens set it to an 80s HUMAN hotel lobby (no doubt to meet the budget cuts enforced by the previous expensive episodes scenery).
- Out of everyone there, only ONE person is an alien, despite it hovering over that aliens home planet.
- This is also the second time in a row where the Doctor kills (starves to death) an alien even though he claims to feel sorry for it. Surely there's some fish somewhere in the universe full of sustenance for the creature, but no, it turns into a euthenasia scene instead.
- I also think it's weird that Amy let the Doctor go that easily, as the reason they embarked with him in the first place was to save him from his own death.
- Also, I kind of don't buy that Amy would lose faith in the Doctor that easily and that quickly. It was necessary but contrived.
...but overall I enjoyed this episode none the less.
Name:
Anonymous2011-09-25 13:03
Closing Time
Sometimes this series remind me of the last seasons of MacGuyver, where this former special agent just goes around setting kids straight. In this episode the Doctor decides to help a "single" dad deal with handling a baby, and it is permeating the episode like it's intent on making me vomit. Sure, they encounter cybermen in this episode, but that encounter takes far less space.
The pair also get mistaken for a gay couple, and maybe I could have laughed if I've never seen this gimmick before, but now it just makes me nauseous.
In the beginning the Doctor makes the choice to sacrifice a once-in-a-lifetime visit to some extraordinary constellation of seven galaxies, to help out his friend Craig, because somewhere along his train of thought, he somehow forgot that he had a timemachine that would give him all the time he needed. In fact, between this episode and the previous one, he's been putting off his own death for 200 years, but now suddenly he's "run out of time".
After some messing about with a cybermat, which design I actually liked, the Doctor goes off to greet the cybermen, armed with nothing else but his screwdriver and a deathwish. His ace is the reprogrammed cybermat, but this is something he intends to use after getting captured, expecting a single cybermat to take out a whole group of cybermen singlehandedly.
This is of course all contrived to let Craig save the day, by "blowing them up with love". Yes, Craig literally blows the cybermen up with love, and although there's an explanation, this EMBODIMENT of a corny aesop, is what the whole episode was working toward. Perhaps the biggest hurdle in this rampage of a plot is at the end of it, where love alone is something that is shown can even break welded cybermen steel apart. Try breaking TINFOIL apart with love and get back to me on that.
Previous to this, only one other person has overpowered the control of becoming a cyberman (that are supposed to be cmpletely dead in order to make killing them off not a moral issue) and that woman was CRYING BLOOD, and she sure wasn't coming back to life after the process was complete - she just had some spirit left in her.
What I liked about this episode was the very basic premise of cybermen being stranded, but at this point I'm suspecting that Moffat is handing out these plots on cards, and then just going "Have fun!".
My problem with all these "love conquers all" plots, is that Doctor Who was about making the viewer feel small and humble before the universe, fueled by intelligent relativism. This season has been doing the opposite: It has been feeding the viewers stupidity and lies, making them feel all-powerful and absolute to the point that they can just blow anything up with the power of love. I'm not blaming Matt Smiths doctor, because this guy is brilliant as an actor ESPECIALLY when being allowed to be clever about things, but I'm beginning to think that maybe the Doctor SHOULD die, before this gets any worse.
Name:
Anonymous2011-09-25 15:58
I think I figured out the finale on this season, with the help of another forum:
River Song has created a paradox. As if her conception aboard the Tardis wasn't enough, she sought out her own mother and brought her and her father together, and from that moment the fabric of time and space has been slowly tearing apart. Cracks have been showing, between the possibility of Amy choosing Rory and making River Song, and Amy leaving Rory and River Song not existing, cracks in Amys very bedroom wall, but also elsewhere. This gives birth to the cult of the Silence, who somehow exists in this twillight, and maybe because of it.
When the Doctor finds out about his own death, this furthers the paradox, into a possibility where he doesn't know about it and gets shot, and where he does know about it and avoids it. This results in there actually being two Doctors aboard the Tardis: One that won't know about his death and will die, and one that does know and won't. The one who doesn't know and gets shot, wears a BLUE bow tie throughout the season, while the one who finds out about his own death and avoids it wears a RED bow tie. Once inside the Tardis after this episode, the "red Doctor" will simply toss the cowboy hat over to the "blue Doctor", and the Silence will be none the wiser.
Having witnessed the assassination, the Silence is aware that his past friends witnessed it as well. Some within this cult, who wants to SAVE the Doctor, figures that if the younger Doctor is warned, he might still prevent it, and tries to insist that Amy "tell the Doctor" that he's going to die in The Impossible Astronaut. (That was actually a good guy, or else why try to bring a message?)
River Song does shoot the Doctor with the prophecy "Silence will fall when the question is asked." still unsolved to the Silence, because the surviving Doctor is still alive. Letting the Silence assume that the Doctor is dead, as verified by this belief in all his friends, he can work covertly in bringing them down, up until the Silence finds out and asks "Who's Who? (Was the Who the one we killed, is Who just one version of two, and then was the one that we killed the version who knew of his death, or is Who still alive?)". "The living question" is thus asked, whereupon the Silence falls. Maybe it falls because the Doctor did something, maybe it falls because the paradoxes are somehow resolved, or maybe it falls because the paradoxes somehow turn in on the Silence itself somehow. (Impossible things has happened in finales before, and if we add "the power of the miracle of love" into the mix, then "anything can happen".)
Name:
Anonymous2011-09-27 19:24
>>404
Actually, no, that's false: I went back and looked at some episodes, and the Doctor switches from a blue bowtie to a red one somewhere before The Curse of the Black Spot, and then back to a blue bowtie in the beginning of this half of the season (before Let's Kill Hitler). (Then, of course, he probably starts switching between them in these latest episodes, as demonstrated by the apple and the rubiks cube.)
Another interesting thing is that this still doesn't rule out that there are now two Doctors. On the contrary, the Doctor mentions that his duplicate could very well survive his own demise at the end of The Almost People (after using a sonic screwdriver to melt himself and all flesh around him), and also that bringing flesh creations aboard the Tardis will stabilize it into real lifeforms. Note that the Doctor speaks about the clone surviving not only the melting, but the following explosion somehow, which can only be done through Tardis transportation.
It's no hazzle for the Doctor to travel back and create anything from the flesh back at the factory, but as there wouldn't be much time between the former Doctor leaving and the explosion, he'd probably just scoop up his former clone, and then bring the new Doctor aboard the Tardis to make him real (and thus be able to regenerate, and not melt when shot and burned).
It's also weird that in Partners in Crime, we learn that the (tenth) Doctor doesn't keep spares around of his sonic screwdriver, but the Doctor seem to have the sonic screwdriver he tossed to the clone, at the beginning of the very next episode, so I think that after he cut the signal and turned Amy to flesh, he more or less IMMEDIATELY went back and scooped up his clone, hiding it in his Tardis.
Name:
Anonymous2011-10-01 21:09
THE WEDDING OF RIVER SONG
(Spoilers, of course. Watch the entire episode first.)
I'm somewhat cranky about this episode, and half of it could be due to sleep depravation, so let me first state the things I liked about this episode:
- River Song rewriting the fixed point in time. That was unexpected and funny.
- While it's not impossible to figure out, the way that the Doctor and "Ceasar" first notice that they're fighting the Silence, is plain awesome. I'm not sure exactly how the Silence is fighting them simply by hanging from the ceiling, but let's not go into that.
- Second of all, the eye pieces are explained properly, and goes from the role of being a trademark for evil, to a handy gadget.
- Third of all, the Doctor trying to make Amy remember who she really is, is pretty funny.
That being said, here's the bad side:
First of all, I could barely buy the headless monks, but talking heads? Talking heads enjoying wi-fi movies, and sometimes getting headaches because their boxes are being put on their wrong sides? Heads whose skulls still move freely after death? ...without necks?
Oh, how low this show has fallen. To mirror the words said straight afterwards: "This is absurd."
The scene ends with the Doctor being told "the living question", a question that somehow translates into a reason that he has to die, but a question that is asked "at the fields of Trensilor at the fall of the eleventh". What this new verse does, is that it ruins the episode by postponing both the Doctors death AND the fall of the Silence, in the very beginning of the episode before anything of it has even had a chance to happen the first time around. With all suspense gone, we are left with nothing but a Houdini to look forward to.
The old riddling verse is also retranslated as "The Silence MUST fall." meaning that everyone who said "Silence will fall." during the first season with the eleventh Doctor, has translated it wrong in the same way.
I was also treated to a plot completely suspended on "timey wimey" techno-babble, and I was speechless to be served this from Moffat. I'm completely fine with River short circuiting history, but as soon as she does, nothing HAS to make sense anymore, and very little does. How come there's a centurion riding a horse carriage in the middle of the street, among lots of cars? Is he too stuck-up to buy a car? Why would River and the Doctor touching start time again, and even start Rivers space suit? ...and if time has stopped, what is keeping "Ceasar" from simply flipping the calendar every day? This is a simple, basic understanding of velocity being dependent on time: If time stops, EVERYTHING stops. Time can collapse (though in a more chaotic manner) but never stop, not for everybody.
The Doctor is rescued from the Silence and taken to a US(!) government pyramid where they store captured Silence aliens, along with Madame Kovarian, presumably because at the top of this, there's a distress beacon calling for help. ...that doesn't help. This whole episode has been moving towards nothing.
In response millions of voices is apparently seen dotting the sun in the form of solar flares and sun spots. They're just there for dramatic effect - they don't even serve a purpose. However they managed to project themselves in this manner - all the people from the past and the future - millions of people "showed up" for nothing.
By the way, as the Silence can't kill the Doctor without killing themselves as well, I am assuming that the Silence was aiming to ultimately capture both Doctor Who and River Song and force them to hug, but this isn't explained, despite this being a chance for the episode to cling to some kind of plot coherence.
...and while the Doctor insists that he has to die at Lake Silencio, it dawns on me that nobody explained why he showed up there in the first place, the first time around that he later learns about. Because "time was running out" and he couldn't have any more fun? If he still doesn't die, will time still be running out for him just as before?
There were three ways that Doctor Who was getting out of his own death: He could pull a complete Houdini like he did with the Pandorica, he could make a replica of flesh, and he could borrow a robot from the little people. The first and the third option would be completely ridiculous, the third option because the Doctor is seen regenerating, and massive energy waves emanating from his body when River shoots him. That would be some extreme pyrotechnics there, that he would get scorchmarks from if it was even remotely bound by the laws of physics, and the flesh duplicate would be much more plausible. This was even before the robots hand touching Rivers arm caused time to move again, when I presume direct contact was required. It's as if the episode was rewritten toward the end.
...and in the end River goes to jail for killing a robot, while Amy who killed a human being, becomes such an (in television) unique thing as an unpunished murderer. Well, I'm not convinced about this at all, as Amy was frying the woman only to leave the room to the Silence for an easy rescue. We'll be seeing her again.
In the end, the smurf guy is seen desperately shouting after the Doctor, and it's painfully obvious that he's shouting something equivalent of "Please don't go! Come back and watch the next season, won't you? There's so much more! We'll tell you more about the Doctor, promise! We'll do the whole death scene again, but "at the fields of Trensilor at the fall of the eleventh". See? There's even a new riddle verse! That's never been done before! Hello?!".
>>500
What an idiot. Great job flooding reviews saying that Doctor Who sucks, because you think Doctor Who sucks.
Name:
Anonymous2011-10-04 13:10
0/10 You're just butthurt
Name:
Anonymous2011-10-04 17:53
>>502
No, you really ARE an idiot. You read the title without even reading the posts. You've spent about 500 posts virtually spamming "I'm an idiot." over and over again. It is beautiful.
>>505
Oh, do tell me how I'M the idiot here. I'm not even going to comment on that "I'm A idiot", because now I'm intrigued.
Overall Doctor Who sucks. It USED to be a good series a few years ago with the previous writer, but the current one lacks the intelligence necessary to write good episodes. When Doctor Who was good, it was KNOWN for its brilliance.
>>507
I haven't watched much of the old 80s series, mostly because it resembled a childrens show more than anything, but that probably varies from Doctor to Doctor. In one incarnation he even had a Batman-styled Who-mobile, and in one incarnation he relied on slapstick. If you compare that to David Tennants Doctor, there's really no competition.
OP is a fag, at least that's constant, unlike the writing in Doctor Who.
Name:
Anonymous2011-10-06 18:24
>>509
You know what? As the current season is over, I might start watching all the OLD cybermen episodes (if I have the time and effort) and review them here. They might suck, but they might also not. One thing's for certain: Their 60s appearance will fit better in the older episodes.
Name:
Anonymous2011-10-07 14:07
THE TENTH PLANET
This episode is from the 60s, featuring the first Doctor for the last time, so you can't measure it by the same standard as the modern episodes. You have to completely disregard the special effects, that the fourth part of the episode is what remains after it was rescued from a fire, and look past some of the primitive plot. I will bring the hammer down of complete contradictions, though, because logic still existed back in those days, despite the audience believing in "duck and cover" back then. I also have to keep in mind that this is what modern times would call a full movie in terms of length: 1 hour and 40 minutes. This allows for, and does contain, a much more complex plot, much richer than most of todays movies.
As expected, this episode features the ugliest cybermen yet. Still, in some ways the appearance does its job much better in conveying something cyborg rather than robot: These cybermen have unaltered human hands, reminding us of their human origin. (By comparison the Daleks are actually cyborgs too, but alien, but that's so hard to tell that it's almost a secret.) They were human once, but began to weaken, and were saved by a cybernetic engineer that "removed" all their weaknesses, emotions being among these weaknesses.
The overarching plot is that the cyberman homeplanet Mondas (which is a separated twin-planet of Earth) has returned to Earth to refuel its "energy", because apparently that's just how the universe works. (Bah "science".) However, somehow the Earth contains too much energy for Mondas to absorb, so unless they blow up Earth before Mondas become oversaturated, the planet will "burn itself out" and "shrivel up to nothing". There are actual real forces at work here, called "gravitational pulls", that this episode could have used to illustrate a far more realistic and horrible disaster of two planets slowly colliding into each other in the biggest earthquake yet, so I'm disappointed that they went with "energy-sucking" instead.
The Doctor is taken out of the plot pretty early in the episode, by simply collapsing from exhaustion, leaving the episode up to his companions (Polly and what's-his-name). As this foreshadows his regeneration into the second Doctor, I like this. Usually the Doctors have time for being the star for one last episode, but this actor was instead laying low throughout most of the episode, allowing for a more natural regeneration process.
Besides featuring an "interplanetary war" (Well, at least the MENTION of it.), this episode brought up two things: The ethics of not having any emotions, and the launching of the first A-bomb twenty years ago.
When making his case for having emotions, the Doctor lists examples such as "love, pride, hate, fear" which doesn't really make a strong case, especially since the Daleks are said to be driven by "a hatred for all life" - an emotion. However, the cybermen are later revealed to not even care about other people at all, making them evil by nature.
I get the feeling that the plot (divided into for episodic parts) might have made the suspense up along the way, because all of a sudden the polar base that the "Doctor and Friends" randomly arrive at at the beginning, happens to feature the countrys only planet-busting doomsday weapon, despite of it running on a skeleton crew. I also don't understand why Earth would have built not one, but THREE planet-busting doomsday weapons, if no hostile planets have shown up before this. It also features a general breaking down into a strawman, that in the end just wants to force people into launching a Z-nuclear missile because he's an insane sweaty man. The discussions about the radiation contaminating Earth and the bomb possibly igniting the atmosphere to make the planet go supernova, was a strong point of this episode, because these were realistic dangers. (The supernova question was brought up before launching the real-world A-bomb.)
Name:
Anonymous2011-10-07 14:46
Yupibar Toolbar is ready!
2300+ World TV Channels, 4500+ Radio Stations, World News, 1400+ Games, Shopping, RSS News, Tools etc. ...
The most full Toolbar! It's Amazing!
Half of the four parts of this episode had to be reconstructed by fans.
The second Doctor and Friends arrive at the moon, almost a hundred years into the future, and after enjoying the lower gravity for a bit, they're taken aboard a human weather control station there, who is currently battling a strange disease. Right off the bat I'm struck by the realism of the old series: The control rooms may get repetitive, but they are operated by physicists and matematicians, not original personalities (except for one very colorful frenchman, complete with scarf, one colorful scottsman in a kilt - oh okay, I admit it's a circus), and in a brief while we learn about the moon surface being distinguished from the Mars surface, low atmospheres, low gravity, spacesuit tears (although those are pretty futuristic looking ones), things that shows like Star Trek would have completely ignored. Of course, a LITTLE emotional acting would help - the crew seems to shrug off deaths of their members like if they hadn't known them at all. I also again question how severly understaffed the station is, if it can vipe out large parts of countries just by being a few "units" or degrees off, or "flood half of Europe". It's another doomsday weapon guarded by a skeleton crew of only 19 potential evil overlords.
The cybermen's plan is complex: Cut their way into the store room, infect it, and then rob the sick bodies for convertion until the base is weak enough to take over by force. It's an intelligent plan, and we see it unfold at pace that allows for reflection as well. The way that todays networks are trying to compress stories into 40 minutes or less, just seems like murder by comparison.
In the end of part 1, after many mysterious shadows, we finally get to see one of the cybermen. They now have faceplates, looking less like skiers sporting skimasks, and more like robots. In part 3 we hear them speak, revealing a LESS successful improvement: They now all speak through 1967 electrolarynxes ("throat backs" - articifical voice boxes), and while this probably was the only synthetic voice effect available at the time, this makes them hard to understand as they order the crew of the base around and explain their plans.
This episode features something as unique as a chemistry scene, as the heroes come up with a "Polly cocktail" mixture of benzene, ether, alcohol, acetone and epoxy-propane, used to dissolve the plastic lungs of the cybermen. Whatever organic chemistry that would stir up, they pour this mixture into "fire extinguishers" that looks very much like regular window sprayers completely made of plastic themselves.
Despite this episode realistically featuring decompression cycles, there's a horrible continuity error with this episode: The cybermen punch a man-sized hole into the storeroom, causing only slight atmospheric decompression that's not enough to suck anything into space, and the hole is easily blocked up by sacks. Later in the episode they punch a small 1x1 decimeter hole in the dome, and all of a sudden everyone is gasping for air and there's this huge sucking noise.
Another inconsistency is that as the final move to get rid of the cybermen, they switch off the gravitron and realign it away from Earth completely. In the beginning of the episode, it was explained that switching off the gravitron was something that they must never do, because it will cause hurricanes and other disasters everywhere of Earth. The only comment we get now is that their superior "won't be happy about it". I bet he (and the rest of Earths population) won't.
Overall, while this episode wasn't perfect, this was good for a Doctor Who episode, mostly due to the slower pacing.
Not FIVE minutes into this movie, it completely abandons all hope when the Masters DEAD REMAINS crack open a solid metal chest and pour into the core of the Tardis. What the fuck?!
As he steps out of his Tardis, the Doctor is shot with one submachine gun spray, and somehow manages to take one bullet in his shoulder and two in his leg. The hospital then kill him in some weird opera operating scene. While the Master has turned into a bodypossessing jelly snake, the Doctor punches himself through a solid steel door and emerges as a shrouded Jesus. He has suffered temporary amnesia (allowing him some time to mess about with and befriend a woman), and somehow he still has a torn off hospital artery probe left inside one of his hearts. The Master takes chase, being some kind of creepy T-1000 clone (Terminator 2 was released five years earlier and was awesome and very popular), but when taking off his glasses, it is revealed that he is actually Satan. He is intended to track the Doctor down for having "stolen his body". When the Master opens some kind of power source "Eye of Harmony", the Doctor has a mystic premonition, and then he kisses the slutty woman he's with. The Master is literally referred to as "the devil" and "pure evil", and the whole plan relies on some mumbo-jumbo about the Eye of Harmony being able to suck up Earth. (There apparently WAS an Eye of Harmony back on Gallifrey, but it's not the same one.) Then romantic complications happen, and Doctor Who has to deal with a hysterical woman. He proves that the Earth is in danger by showing that all glass on Earth is now gooey and can now be walked through. Mass is apparently also losing density by one pound a minute, and the weather system is also collapsing. Apparently Earth is going to be sucked up into the Eye of Harmony by dissolving it in a pure concentration of Fuck, because my mind is full of fuck right now. I'm giving this movie ten more minutes none-the-less.
Boring fucking car chase, but I guess it's mandatory for the decade. "Great! I finally meet a nice guy, and he's from another planet." finally sums up the whole romantic plot of this movie, and a dozen other movies being typical for that decade as well. I bet these movies were some kind of desperate nerd-chick date movie attempts.
Overall this movie is making me hate american movies: Romance and "thrills" has eaten all reason and intelligence in Doctor Who. Did you know, that the Tardis is whirling around through time and space with a secret hollow out above the "P" in "Police Box", that contains a spare key? There's no lid on the hole at all, but this isn't necessary, because americans don't think further than spare keys being in holes on top of regular doors. My brain is now full of a special kind of fuck called "stupid AMERICAN fuck", and I'm done with this movie. There have been lots of american movies far more horrible than this one, but it's still not worth my time. There's just no plot to it: We have a magical macguffin that needs to go in a magical place, or magical things will happen. It's the plot of EVERY american movie, and nothing is scientificly explained at all.
Name:
Anonymous2011-10-20 23:54
>>521
You stopped watching at just the right time. What happens after that point on will suck your will to live. America, fuck no!
>>523
American bastardisations doesn't make a whole tv series suck, and you know it.
Name:
Anonymous2011-12-27 1:00
THE DOCTOR, THE WIDOW AND THE WARDROBE
Doctor Who christmas stories have always had some forgivable elements of corniness to them, so with the latest episodes being directed at children, I prepared for nothing short of a christmas calendar episode. I got that, and worse.
We begin the episode by introducing Doctor Who as basically James Bond, as we see him steal a space suit in freefall, and then crashing into the ground. He survives, of course, because the space suit is futuristic and self repairing. Apparently the suit is built from a flexible heat shield that makes teflon look like cardboard, and can regrow a timelord out of his bionic jelly, or the story is possibly just written by someone with the intellect of a ten year old. At this point I had this inner vision of Moffat giving me the finger, going: "Just so we're clear: Fuck you!"
From there Matt Smiths Doctor acts like a whimsy moron for childish giggles. Apparently he can't even open an ordinary door without unhinging it first, but can still "repair" the house chairs so that they make a "dance routine". The big "Doctor WHO?" reveal next season, will apparently be that Doctor Who is Peter Pan.
What makes this episode worse than all other episodes, is that everybody in it is acting like idiots. Military personel are disarming themselves over crying mothers, and mothers go "Oh, shiny!" when giant golems try to place glowing devices on their heads. It's a complete lobotomy, but the big reveal at the end is in a league of its own: The supposed children watching this are told that "the base code of nature" classifies men ask weak, and women as strong, because "how else does life ever travel" but from mother to mother? One word: Semen. There were officially four adult men and one adult woman at the helm of the production of this episode, and not one of them could figure out what gender is fertilizing what gender.
Then yet another finale follows where some banal emotion is tearjerked and worshipped. This time a widow is piloting a ship by overcoming her loss of her husband. It sounds like a really bad joke made under the influence, but no, this is what Doctor Who has become.
There was exactly one interesting thing in the entire episode: That Doctor Who was helpless inside a wooden building. That's it.
Well, I was coming here to possibly discuss the upcoming Christmas special and the new companion, but I do not believe that to be a good idea anymore...