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.
>>500
What an idiot. Great job flooding reviews saying that Doctor Who sucks, because you think Doctor Who sucks.
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Anonymous2011-10-04 13:10
0/10 You're just butthurt
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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Anonymous2011-10-07 14:46
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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.