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I will watch every episode twice to make up for the loss.
Same here. I don't care how thin the plot gets, watching Eleven and now Oswin, Vastra, and Strax cavort makes up for loads of deficiencies.
Originally posted by Stevehauk
Maybe it's time for me to stop watching this show. This episode just left me bored. Kinda like eating a big varied meal and still somehow being hungry after wards.
-hated the new opening/theme. Wasn't broken, why change it. It seems shorter, but way too much lens flare/sparkly lights. The passing ghostly image of Smith's face was lame. Music certainly wasn't improved.
-New Tardis interior, a bit smaller true, but I liked the kinda 'steampunk' look with lots of different mechanical bits seemingly haphazardly added of the last design.
really didn't like that they didn't explain the change at all.
-I realize the program is primarily aimed at younger audiences, and they want to tone down the fright factor, but that leaves the antagonist as weak and kinda anticlimactic. Hard to mix more adult ideas and kiddie fare in one show, I guess.
-Clara was likeable enuff, and the supporting staff in this episode were really well done and interesting, so much so that I enjoyed them so much more than the rest of the program. The lady playing the lizard character was truly beautiful, and that trio played off of each other perfectly.
- The Doc gives her the key to his apartment after just a kiss? What? Seemed forced emotion, played very lame to me.
- I get that the Doc is lonely and heartbroken that all his companions move on in one way or another, sometimes due to him, sometimes not. The only companion I ever felt real loss for was Adric, who died heroically and was never 'brought back' or re-visited in some sort of flashback. When a companion leaves now I always have a feeling they'll be back under some pretense in a future show.
- Matt Smith is so un-even in his acting. He's depressed and moping, he's suddenly lively and goofy, and his mood swings vary so much and so quickly it's effect to me is over the top.
Like I said, maybe it's time to move on to other series, cause this one is getting kinda stale to me.
Sometimes this show outgrows us, my friend. It's been around for fifty years, after all, and its constant evolving can sometimes lose fans. I'm very lucky in that I've enjoyed all of Nu-Who so far. I've seen people on various messageboards declare that they're going to stop watching the show because "it's not as good as the classic show", because "it's not been as good since Russell T Davies left", and because "Matt Smith is no David Tennant". I don't really agree with any of those points (both Smith and Moffat are doing great, and I view the classic show as a completely different beast despite the connections) but, yeah, maybe it's no longer your show.
Still, the great thing about the changing nature of the show is that, if you come back again in maybe two or three years, you might find a completely different show. And it might be one that you like.
Same here. I don't care how thin the plot gets, watching Eleven and now Oswin, Vastra, and Strax cavort makes up for loads of deficiencies.
Agreed. I really liked the ensemble of characters, their chemistry was excellent. I also really enjoy whenever the Doctor assembles his team of Avengers to save the day.
I just watched it again.
Clara is so cute I want to slap her.
I think I was just hypnotised by that GIF for some reason. I seemed to lose a good two minutes of time at least.
I love that bit of the episode. In fact, pretty much everything dealing with Clara and the Doctor is complete gold. (And how about that shot introducing the new TARDIS? "It's called the TARDIS. It can travel anywhere in time and space. And it's mine." YES.)
With Doctor Who, I'll sacrifice air-tight plotting for magnetic feel. The Great Intelligence's plan wasn't particularly inspiring, but who cares if I'm having so much fun on this adventure with these characters? The Big Bang is full of utterly silly plotting, and it's amazing.
Here is a question that I have. Has River Song died yet? That would give the Doctor another reason to be so withdrawn. That and it seemed odd for a married Doctor to be flirting and kissing Clara.
"I'm a lizard woman from the dawn of time and this is my wife."
Here is a question that I have. Has River Song died yet?
For the Doctor? No.
Thanks.
I just watched it again.
Clara is so cute I want to slap her.
She's a very sexy Mary Poppins.
Is it just me, or did anyone else get the feeling that River was more in love with Tennant's doctor, and while she cares for Smith's, he's not really her guy. At least he doesn't seem to feel for her the same way Tennant's doctor did. Maybe I imagined that, not sure.
If any current Dr. Who character could carry a spin off I think it's River. Not sure how they would handle the whole checking in and out of prison thing, but I'd be willing to go along with them dropping that part of her character to get more River Song adventures. I remember how excited I was to see the further adventures of Captain Jack before Torchwood came out, and then it just turned into a dower mess of doom and gloom, with almost none of the charisma of Dr. Who. I would really want the River show to be more similar in tone to Dr. Who.
River isn't in prison anymore. She was released because its hard to kill a person who never existed. This was covered in The Angels Take Manhattan.
Ok, thanks. It was just impressions, I'll take this as an excellent excuse to watch the last two seasons again. Win, win.
I was just watching this short behind-the-scenes video on Youtube:
and it made me aware that they'd never shot a sequence where the camera moved from the exterior to the interior of the TARDIS in one shot before this episode. I'm pretty sure everyone else in this thread was aware of this but, stupidly, it was completely lost on me.
Just finally got to see this.
Is it just me, or did anyone else get the feeling that River was more in love with Tennant's doctor, and while she cares for Smith's, he's not really her guy. At least he doesn't seem to feel for her the same way Tennant's doctor did. Maybe I imagined that, not sure.
That makes no sense. She's spent almost all of her time with Smith. She didn't meet Tennant until the day she died. (Well, OK, it's possible she'd met Tennant before--from her perspective--and he met her after--from his perspective--the events of "Silence in the Library", but we didn't see it. Actually I hope that meeting did happen off-screen, since otherwise her meeting Tennant for the first time with a big, friendly "Hello Sweetie" is kind of undercut. Even if she does have a portrait gallery of all his incarnations.)
Like a lot of Who, I enjoyed this tremendously on a superficial level--Drax, Madame Vastra and her wife are terrific additions, and I'm glad we'll be seeing more of them--but there were so many logistical issues and concerns that I couldn't settle into it as well as I'd have liked. Chiefly:
--The Doctor withdrawing from saving the world for a hundred years?!? (Or maybe it wasn't that long? I'm not clear on how old he was in "Angels Take Manhattan", but last I remember he said 900, and here he's a thousand.) If something really appalling had happened to him in "Manhattan", I could accept it for the purposes of the story--though this still seems pretty drastically out of character--but all that's happened is that he's lost touch with two people he cared about. They didn't even die! I mean, right away, they died after a long and happy life together. Hasn't the Doctor had companions die on him before? He lost the (ugh) love of his life to an alternate universe, too, plus Donna getting her whole knowledge of him erased. None of these things turned him into Ebenezer Scrooge, what happened to the Ponds was nothing compared to that. I call shenanigans. Doctor Who increasingly seems to be falling prey to the JJ Abrams-ification of pop culture, where heroes have to be whittled down into emo whiners who only care about their own personal problems. The idea of a "Dark Doctor" or exploring his moral ambiguity has been teased over and over again, but all we ever end up with is an increasingly self-absorbed prick. Smith being such an engaging presence covered up the fact that this has actually been getting *worse* since the Davies era, but this one brought it to the fore for me. Enough with the Joseph Campbell Refusal of the Call bullshit, that seems pretty antithetical to what this show's supposed to be about.
--So after being potentially from the future AND from the past, the Clara we seem to be ending up with is going to be...another modern girl. Goddammit.
--This show is getting into the same "making a mockery of death" mode that dogged, and still dogs, superhero comics. Now we've got Clara as a freakin' Kenny, apparently, and Drax has been brought back through means unknown (which I thought was a bad move--couldn't he have just been a different Sontaran?) I'm not saying there's no room for resurrections on a show with this much loopy shit happening, but they need to be a lot more careful; the stakes have become dangerously low, and the Doctor is starting to look like a sociopath for not using all these apparent mortality loopholes to save people who died on his watch. (Of course, that's always been my problem with this show, even pre-Davies. He has a freaking time machine, why does anyone ever have to die on his watch?)
--The mystery of what's up with Oswin Oswald got me intrigued, until I remembered that these ongoing mystery meta-plots always suck and make little to no sense when they're revealed. Seventh time's the charm, I guess?
--That clip is making me aware that this show could have featured Space Yetis, AND YET IT DIDN'T. Epic fail.
Don't mean to sound too harsh, this was still loads better than last year's wet fart of a Christmas special, which was probably the worst thing Moffat's ever written. And Jenna-Louise Coleman is indeed relentlessly, implacably cute, enough that I've already forgiven her for replacing Karen Gillen.
I actually really liked the new opening titles, except the music was pretty so-so. Say what you will about the Davies era, I thought the opening music was pretty dead on. (I reeeeally wish they'd lose that opening flourish under the morse code "dum dah dum, dum da dum, dum da dum" beat at the beginning, it makes it seem so much less intense.)
So I adored the episode, and I adored Oswin... I wanted to know who she was dating, who could possibly be worthy of such a beautiful, witty, sexy creature, who dares to...
It's The King In The North, Rob Stark... Oh...
I assumed Rory healed Drax after the Battle of Demon's Run.
The Doctor took around 100 years for a farewell tour between leaving The Ponds and his "death" in Utah.
The reason The Doctor can't go back in time to fix his troubles is because once he has entered a time line he has to follow it up. That would be a cheat if he could just go back in time and fix whatever went wrong.
A few posts back someone wrote that The Doctor switches too easily from melancholy to hyper and cheerful. The character has been like that since the reboot. I always saw his cheerfulness covering up a lot of loneliness. He is the last Time Lord, one of his great loves is in a parallel universe and his friends always leave him. As Buffy has shown, characters that are kinda miserable are a lot more interesting.
That would've been me.
In the Xmas show he was depressed to the point of isolation and when a pretty girl engages him in banter and kisses him, he gets all teenager-like giddy and gives her the key to the Tardis?!? I've been horny and desperate in my own time, but never acted like that. Just dumb writing and performing.
And when we first saw Matt Smith (and mostly every Doctor) the regeneration is the explanation for the mood swings. But we've had this incarnation for a while now and it's still happening.
The Doctor needs to see a Doctor. Hey, that'd be a good idea for a story..pick a famous shrink from time and drop in on him..
Steve, you HAVE seen what Clara looks like? Right? If that girl started making out with you randomly you'd lasso the moon for her too.
A few posts back someone wrote that The Doctor switches too easily from melancholy to hyper and cheerful. The character has been like that since the reboot. I always saw his cheerfulness covering up a lot of loneliness. He is the last Time Lord, one of his great loves is in a parallel universe and his friends always leave him. As Buffy has shown, characters that are kinda miserable are a lot more interesting.
That also seems to be Matt Smith's actual personality, and is probably a big reason why he was chosen for the part.
More than watching other Companions get killed? Or seeing Donna have him erased from her memory? Or losing his own #$%&*ing granddaughter? Or watching nice people he liked get killed all the time? None of those sent him into a depression spiral and caused him to renounce humanity, why the fuck would being cut off from Amy and Rory, something that was bound to happen eventually even if he'd kept them in the TARDIS their entire lives, do so? It's contrivance for the sake of drama, and it's out of character.
I'd be amazed if there isn't some expanded universe spinoff thing that gives a different, and better, explanation, for why exactly the Doctor hung up his spurs. Maybe they'll even reference it on the show, though probably not.
Look, personalities are one thing, but having characters with different cultural contexts or life stories is important to drama. And it's getting kind of reductive to have a series of companions who are essentially the same in this sense, even if they were different in the specifics.
It's the Justice League problem. The Justice League has always been tricky in the modern era because it's a bunch of semi-interchangeable American white guys and Wonder Woman. There's a reason the cartoon used the John Stewart Green Lantern and Hawkgirl. It's not that you can't ever have a group like that, it's that it tends to get pretty bland-vanilla. The only member of the group who sticks out, otherwise, is Batman. (The Avengers, in their current movie incarnation, aren't that much better, but at least you have people with rather diverse histories, like a guy from the WWII and a Norse God. One of many reasons that's a more inherently interesting group.)
There's nothing WRONG with having yet another sassy sexy modern girl as a Companion, it's just that it would be really nice to see them shake things up a little for once, especially since there have been different Companions in the old show. Someone with more of a historical or SFnal backstory would let them develop a potentially more interesting metaplot, for instance...
...That would be the series that ended in perhaps the most random, illogical, making-shit-up-as-we-go storyline of all? The revelation of the contents of the Pandorica was clever, but the rest was just phlogiston.
More than watching other Companions get killed? Or seeing Donna have him erased from her memory? Or losing his own #$%&*ing granddaughter? Or watching nice people he liked get killed all the time? None of those sent him into a depression spiral and caused him to renounce humanity, why the fuck would being cut off from Amy and Rory, something that was bound to happen eventually even if he'd kept them in the TARDIS their entire lives, do so? It's contrivance for the sake of drama, and it's out of character.
I'd be amazed if there isn't some expanded universe spinoff thing that gives a different, and better, explanation, for why exactly the Doctor hung up his spurs. Maybe they'll even reference it on the show, though probably not.
I'm guessing you probably didn't catch the tenth Doctor's episodes where he did something a lot similar, deciding to travel alone because he kept losing companions?
Also, there's this bit of dialogue from "The Power Of Three" which goes some way to explaining his behavior following their loss:
Amyy: Then why do you keep coming back for us?
The Doctor: Because you were the first. The first face this face saw. And you were seared onto my hearts, Amelia Pond. You always will be. I'm running to you, and Rory, before you fade from me.
I guess we'll have to disagree here. I didn't see a single thing that made me think Moffat was making it up as he went along. In fact, it was one of the best seasons of a science fiction show I've ever seen and the payoff for the season-long storyline was fantastic.
B...b...but what about Season 25? That was surely the best series of Doctor Who, right? It has The Happiness Patrol which featured The Kandy Man! *
Oh, you're talking about Nu-Who? Okay, I can get behind that.
* Okay, okay. I'm kidding. Nobody liked The Kandy Man.
See I have the opposite opinion. I grew up on Classic Who. Individual stories could be over-stretched, I grant you, and there was a set formula (Doctor lands on planet, discovers Alien Invasion, kills all the aliens, leaves), but for me it was a formula that worked. Thing is, the plots could be silly but they worked a lot better than the plots in Nu-Who.
Nu-Who has left me feeling bored because while I really love the actors, especially Matt Smith, there is no "there" there. Needlessly convoluted plots that "threaten to end the whole Universe" which is all magically reset at the end. And that reset isn't even some TechnoBabble, but is stuff like "OMG if only everyone in the WHOLE UNIVERSE sez 'I believz in Teh Doctor' then the Doctor will save the Universe". Does nothing for me.
I've been a fan of the good Doctor since the Sylvester McCoy era but I was weaned on the classic stuff via YTV (Canadian channel) in the late 80s/early 1990s and yes there was some crazy plots and villains but it was all so entertaining. I particularly enjoyed the Jon Pertwee era where he was basically trapped on Earth and was working with UNIT most of the time.
I'm glad that the resurgence (and modernization) of WHO has gone off as well as it has. Keeping it firmly in continuity instead of a reboot was also a big plus with me as well. Anyhow, loved this year's Christmas Special and can't wait to see how this whole Clara story plays out.
I too have been a fan of the show since McCoy as he was my first Doctor. I probably didn't understand a lot about the show back then (hell, I probably didn't even understand the regeneration aspect seeing as I started watching it after McCoy's first appearance), I only understood that the main character fought monsters and I loved monsters as a kid. I caught up on a lot of the classic show in the 90's but decided not to bother with Nu-Who because an early report on AICN (pfffft) said it was awful, so I didn't want to sit through the embarrassment (and figured it would be cancelled after one season anyway).
Of course, I eventually caught an episode from Eccleston's run (I think it was "The Doctor Dances") and realised I'd been a fool!
I always tended to look at the Doctor's emotional swings through the knowledge that he is an alien and so ascribing human sentiment/emotions/etc. to him is pointless. It's been shown repeatedly that the Doctor has a whole host of abilities that he does not display all that often because he does not feel the need to (or as the writers feel they need to, obviously).
I saw bits of the old Who on PBS as a kid, and I couldn't get into it. I think it was the cheapness of it. Recently I saw a youtube clip of the Fifth Doctor channeling the other Doctors just after he had regenerated. It did nothing for me.
I thought it was the Tenth Doctor's loss of companions that made him think he could change the history of a fixed point in time in The Waters of Mars.
Matt Smith had a moment where he channeled the other Doctors including Tennant that was pretty great.
"The Almost People". Episode 6, Season 6.
Shape and Saxon, I'm sorry, but you're tapdancing around the main point here: traveling through time and saving lives/the universe is pretty fundamentally what the Doctor does. It's the core of the character. The examples you're giving, i.e. Tennant "running away" during the Waters of mars era, still have the Doctor traveling and saving people and solving mysteries when he runs into them. The Doctor at the beginning of The Snowmen has apparently decided to completely stop being the Doctor. For him to do so over losing Amy and Rory, when he's experienced so much worse in his lifetime, smacks of sloppy, over-convenient writing, creating a problem just to solve it, and it sails way too close to the way modern genre protagonists all seem to need to be whiny self-absorbed assholes who need a major push to do anything heroic.
I *like* a morally ambiguous Doctor, but a Doctor who refuses to go on adventures? WTF is that?
You seem to be willfully ignoring my point here. Of course they were different characters (though I'd argue there's more sameyness even there than there had to be--a definite sense of swapping out one hot girl for another). But for the same reason I occasionally like to read stories set in other places and times, I'd like to not have every companion ever be a middle-class white girl from modern England. Again, we've had cavegirl companions, companions from the future and the past, alien companions, robot dog companions, child-genius companions...let's get some fucking variety for Pete's sake.
That said, if Vastra, Jenny and Strax (not Drax, apparently) are now going to be de facto companions, I will shut up about this. They're exactly the kind of thing I was asking for. And the fact that they're so awesome kind of proves my point.
I LIKED the Big Bang, but plot-wise it was utter nonsense. Other than a lot of easter eggs getting tied together with continuity, it wasn't anything like a satisfying resolution to the "mystery" we were presented with. I'll admit Moffatt is trying a lot harder than Davies did--dropping "Bad Wolf" into every episode is not a meta-plot, guy--but there's too much making-shit-up for it to be satisfying. The Doctor has to erase himself from history to save the Universe? And then that gets undone almost right away because everyone claps their hands and says Doctor? What exactly are the fucking stakes in this show? It's another manifestation of the frustrating superhero non-death element I've been raving about.
You know, Prankster, it's interesting that you ask
On one hand you want there to be repercussions for the events which take place and yet, on the other, you don't think that these repercussions should affect the main character? Besides, who is to say that it's not just this one event which pushed him here? Perhaps this is simply the final straw for him. He has, as you point out, suffered a great many losses throughout his own long life.
I can understand that this version of The Doctor might not be one you favor but it's the one Moffat chooses to present as the eleventh incarnation of the character, and you either choose to accept it or you don't; just as the audiences back in 1966 had to decide whether they could embrace a main character who was suddenly clownish and bumbling when he'd previously been bitter and befuddled. Moffat's version of the Doctor didn't go on the run for a few days - he went on the run for two hundred years to escape his own death. Moffat's version of The Doctor doesn't send straightforward messages, he pops up in history books and appears in classic movies. Yes, this is The Doctor we all know and love but, as with every incarnation, there are significant changes to those which came before.
I can accept a version of The Doctor who has experienced so much pain that he's numbed into inaction, just as I can accept a Batman who might want to retire, or a James Bond who fakes his own death and lives abroad drinking budweiser. I don't think any of these ideas are an injustice to the characters; they're just proof that long-running characters still evolve and have new facets that can be explored.
I can accept a version of The Doctor who has experienced so much pain that he's numbed into inaction, just as I can accept a Batman who might want to retire, or a James Bond who fakes his own death and lives abroad drinking budweiser.
That...that just strains credulity!
Oh wait! it was Heineken wasn't it? It's lucky the guys from the Best Of Bond thread don't make appearances here. Dr Harford would skin me alive for that mistake.
Mr Saxon I will let your Bond mistake go this time....and only this time.
You know, Prankster, it's interesting that you ask
On one hand you want there to be repercussions for the events which take place and yet, on the other, you don't think that these repercussions should affect the main character?
What? I want there to be coherent stakes and repercussions, like a character who's been killed and mourned not popping back to life, since that's one of the worst cases of having cake and eating it I can think of. Never mind repercussions, that's just basic storytelling. If characters are constantly being killed and coming back, it becomes impossible to care about a big death scene, or even the threat of death, because you know it doesn't matter. Ask any superhero comic fan.
But I also would like the Doctor to act in character. These two things are hardly incompatible, and I'm not even sure why you're linking them. For Pete's sake, they JUST DID AN EPISODE about how the Doctor finds it impossible to stay still and lay low for very long, yet suddenly he's doing exactly that? This isn't me drawing on some arcane plot point from a 1967 episode, this is the exact character that Moffatt and co. have been trying to sell us for the last few seasons, and they pitched him on the dung heap for this episode.
The idea of the Doctor basically giving up and withdrawing from the world is a powerful one, but it's SUCH a radical change to his personality that it has to be really, really well motivated, and I don't think it was. At all. They basically asked us to believe that because he'd been separated from his friends, he's going to become a huge asshole and stop doing the things we watch the show to see him do, and I ain't buying. Apart from everything else, it makes him pretty unlikeable. And the fact that Doctor Who is always reinventing itself, as a show, only goes so far. You're not going to tune in one week and discover that it's a soap opera set in a girls' college in 1954. It's still got to be a show about a madman with a box who flies through space and time saving people. If you're going to take away part of that basic premise, even temporarily, you have to come up with a really convincing and clever reason, and far from that, I thought they did a pretty slapdash job.
Let me put it this way: I'm now having trouble seeing why the Doctor won't turn into a mopey asshole who refuses to do anything when Oswin inevitably leaves him too. Or the next Companion. Or the next. I don't want the show to become an endless series of people trying to drag the Doctor off his ass and get him to act like a protagonist, yet this episode gave me no reason to think it won't happen.
Yes, you’re right. “The Power Of One” perfectly demonstrated that the Eleventh Doctor doesn’t like to sit still, that he yearns for new adventures and that he’s always running forward. He even states in that episode, to Amy: “I’m not running away from things”.... which is exactly what he does two episodes later. I’d say this is deliberately highlighted in that episode so that the audience can fully appreciate the effect which Amy and Rory’s tragedy has upon The Doctor; it’s a culmination of events which devastates him so much that he stops moving.
You “ain’t buying” this and I can’t force you to, but I don’t see this as some grand reversal of The Doctor’s character. Even if we ignore everything from the classic show, this is still the guy who destroyed his entire race (twice), lost one companion to a parallel world, had another forget him completely, and has now lost two more to a timeline he can’t visit. Your own mileage may vary but, for me, I’d rather see that these things eventually have an impact on the main character rather than him shrugging them off with an “Oh well!” and plunging straight into an adventure involving space caterpillars and robot butlers.
Will he become despondent again after Clara departs? Maybe. Maybe not. That probably depends on what awaits him and the influence both those events and Clara have on him (as well as the decisions made by Moffat or whoever is running the show, of course). I’m not saying your view of the character and how he should react is wrong. It simply differs to Moffat’s (and mine). I used to frequent Gallifrey One quite a bit and you’d be surprised how many people claimed that they hated the interpretation of the Tenth Doctor as a guy who frequently referenced that he was the last of the Time Lords, claiming that he was an “Emo Doctor” and that he wasn’t true to their view of the character. I suppose that's the thing about a character who changes so often. There's never a right way to look at him because, one regeneration and showrunner later, he'll be someone new anyway.
