Doctor Who Episodes

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.

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?

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Bumping past snowball spam.

>>8
...because you love how much better Doctor Who has gotten?

>>11-14
As you're avoiding the question, it looks like you didn't think this all the way through.

Bumping past fag spam.

Bumping past spam.