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

Oh wait, it was nothing.

Rassilon declared that the two Time Lords who opposed him (who covered their eyes in the same way as the Weeping Angels) were 'monuments to their shame, and will stand witness as the Weeping Angels of old'.

xp

According to the Doctor, "[The Weeping Angels] are as old as the universe (or very nearly), but no one really knows where they come from."

from wikipedia - can't find anything Timelordy there.

I dunno, that line about the Tardis brakes -- quite a good joke, surely? And I also got the sense that Riversong was lying about it anyway, to show the Doctor up in front of Amy.

Best episode of the season so far -- thought (whoever said the opposite upthread) that it certainly matched up to Silence in the Library. Still not convinced by either Matt Smith or Amy yet, but that "rabbits" line did feel like a definitively Smith-ian, rather than Tenant-style delivery. A bit less snarky, a bit more sing-songy. I'm not sure that adds up to a whole personality, yet, but we're only four episodes in.

Also, glad this episode wasn't quite as BREAKNECK RUSH as the last few. I like that Smith speed-talks his Exposition Moments, but I wish he'd enunciate a little better sometimes.

Agree about the slower pacing being good. Though I found all of the episodes fun, everything could be such a whiz-blur that I often felt inclined to stop caring about the plot mechanics altogether. I think someone may have already made the comparison earlier in the thread, but they'd feel like those old Who four or six-part serials crammed into an hour.

that's modern tv though - all shows eat up loads more plot than they did 10 or 20 years ago

Y'all know that was Mike Skinner off the Streets as the tripped out security guard at the beginning?

> that's modern tv though - all shows eat up loads more plot than they did 10 or 20 years ago

i find the opposite. things like flash forward have one plot point an hour and 35 minutes of filler (and 15 minutes of adverts)

that said, i've just watched the entire Sapphire and Steel and if that was any slower it'd stop.

wtf was that beginning bit all about tho? It had a pleasingly Avengersy feel to it, but nothing really seemed to come of it. One minute they were in a piece of parkland, the next they were in a spaceship. Parkland in the spaceship? Who were the dinner suited people? Who were the dinner-suited people? Maybe I should stop asking so many questions and just see if it turns into something I guess.

the park was a hallucination caused by the lipstick. thought this was great. the tux guy was the 'owner' of the dormant Angel i guess. why River was on the ship in the first place (other than to try and destroy the Angel before being detected maybe) idk.

Ah, thanks. For some reason I just assumed the noisy birds were the hallucination and the park was real, which is a bit we tar did.

that said, i've just watched the entire Sapphire and Steel and if that was any slower it'd stop.

See, that's what I love about it.

Rewatched Blink last night (so great, even better than I remembered it), then this, in preparation for tonight. Even on second viewing there were some bits that went too fast for me to work out. Where did River Song get that book about the angels from? She says something about getting it from some old guy, then the doctor says something really fsat, which I listened to four times to try and decipher, but which always sounded like "and then you raped his girlfriend!".

tux guy owner of Angel.

meets femme fatale on shore.... they fly away in space ship.

they dance. femme fatale tells tux guy to hold on to something when dancing.

femme fatale sneaks off to burn words into black box.

that's where we come in and why tux guy and river are in evening dress.

I am guessing its a Poseidon Adventure-style ships banquet.

Yep, seems reasonable. Hyperwealthy art collector intergalactic travellers probably hold quite sophisticated balls n banquets. I'd hazily surmised something similar myself. Slightly confused by the 'Hallucinogenic lipstick? SHE must be here!' = 'Oh, I danced with you earlier' thing, but none of it matters, it just seemed so elaborate I expected a bit more to happen around it than them all blowing up their ship out of shot. I guess some of the story will be filled in as we find out more about River Song.

blowing up crashing.

Loved that.

Presumably the people who thought the points I brought up last week THAT ENDED UP BEING THE PLOT were ridiculously pedantic absolutely despised it as badly written. ;-)

Watch for time being unwound explaining away Rusty's time issues in a future ep. It can be 2010 after all.

A rift in time that eats you and means you NEVER EXISTED is a bit Neverending Story but also very scary and the basis for what's looking like a fantastic arc to the season. So River kills the future Doctor at some point and maybe that's what causes the crack?

Love how it's all fitting together as one long story - next week's looks terrific as well.

Also loved Amy trying to shag the Doctor. If you're going to go down that route then making it funny is way better than making it drippy.

I liked the giant Victorian Cyberman ref as well. Writing the Rusty era out of the Earth timeline seems sensible.

Amy not being able to open her eyes then tripping over in the forest = way scary.

Still a bit perplexed by the duck pond thing though.

Still think your view has it backwards. Up to now there was no fourth wall- we (well the rest of us) accepted the reasonable dramatic device that we didn't see them move cos that's how our heroes perceived them. Breaking out 'the viewers get to see it' was the powder he'd kept dry in your eyes (ahem) but just the creepiest thing ever to everyone else because at THAT point he's seemingly broken an implicit compact w the audience. Spooky and knowing and well timed.

Plus yes it does raise, in retrospect, issues of consistency. So when is it they can move again?

But I'm not of a mind to mull over that.

Finally enjoyed the ep! Slightly spooked by doctors sudden fiery outbursts now. Also by amy's sudden attack of lust. But enjoyable for it

No ducks duck pond will be like the bees in tate's season. Or the dog in the night that didn't bark

head hurts...so much to process

Again, so good. Time vortex memory wipe with energy sapping stone angels - what's not to like?

The whole relationship between the Doctor and Amy is perfect - completely agree with Matt DC. Obviously she'd fall for the Doctor, (he's flash) but at an immature stage of their relationship, and it becomes something to grow out of. Love his avuncular role.

The blind man's buff with the angels could have gone on a bit longer, or at least not ended with her getting teleported out I thought. Trailers for the next episode reveal a bit too much for my taste - you want to tantalise but not reveal, surely.

Anyone think the vampires look a bit like flesh versions of the angels?

Good spot on the angels/vampires thing.

Amy completely consistent with her character btw, casting notes referred to her at one point as "the village bike".

I am thinking hard about River's diary and am now prepared to lay money it's this:

http://img.search.com/thumb/b/bf/500_year_diary.jpg/150px-500_year_diary.jpg

and she's just happened about it at some point, having never travelled with the Doctor at all.

In best Blue Peter tradition, she has just covered it with sticky backed plastic so he won't recognise it. The reason she knows "Hello sweetie" is a trigger that means he rescues her when she jumps out of the spaceship is because he wrote that it did, and the reason she knows his name is because the silly old fool wrote it in the "This book belongs to..." space.

^^^^See, without all this fancy knowledge, I pulled 'not River Song's diary' out of my brain earlier in the week.

Yeah, pretty fabtastic that.

Ducks, like clerics, went into the crack I guess. The pond didn't, so everyone still knows it as the duck pond, but they don't remember it ever having any ducks in it because they've been wiped from ever having existed.

What was the bit about Amy needing to remember something the doctor said to her when she was seven? Felt like that was going to be the key to curing her of her brain-angel, but then it never got referred to again (unless I missed it?).

it might not have happened yet...wibbly wobbly timey wimey!

Also, what if it's actually Amy's diary? What if she's the doc's real future wife, instead of song?

What was the bit about Amy needing to remember something the doctor said to her when she was seven? Felt like that was going to be the key to curing her of her brain-angel, but then it never got referred to again (unless I missed it?).

He leaves Amy in the forest with his jacket off, then when he comes back to say "Remember what I told you as a child" his jacket is on again.

Wibbly fucking wobbly, that. Bet it's intentional, too.

Pretty much normally bow to Aldo's fancy Doctor Who knowledge, TBH.

There are a fair few things that people are going "plot hole!" about that turns out to be v. meant. Like that a lot. xp

Was surprised there wasn't a more explicit answer to Aldo's thing about the army -- though at first glance I didn't actually see any of them looking at one another. Perhaps he's refined it to just be face-to-face or something?

i was disappointed in this one, actually. the menace of the Weeping Angels, to me, was the idea that you had to strictly control yourself in order to stop them encroaching, and if you let them advance too far it was probably too late, etc. but here our protagonists were busy chatting and looking at other things while relying on the soldiers to look at them, so a lot of that tension was lost.

and then there were all these new rules why the angels wouldn't kill them being thrown at us in single lines of dialogue -- oh they've got the doctor, but they're distracted by the scary time energy so he gets away. idk the idea that the angels can get distracted by a larger threat diminishes some of that horrible, personal, eyes-open menace they had originally. and while i thought finally seeing the angels move was the best thing in the episode, the set-up of "so they think you can see them and you'll need to move so I've sent you some sonar, GO GO GO" was just crazy rushed.

I just chalked up anything weird they could suddenly do to the radiation they were feeding off, and if they were behaving like the soldiers we would have had angels forgetting angels existed, etc.

still not really getting how/why the angels moved and so slowly - distracted/panicked by the crack tho they were.

and how did the doctor get his jacket back?

i just handwaved that the angels never looked at each other face on. agree that the tension and their scariness became quite lost tho, with all the get-out-of-jail cards the doctor and co played against them...and why were they directly killing people again?

the whole gravity concept here was pretty neat tho, loved moffat's "TREES! and TECHNOLOGY!" thing coming thru so unabashed, Amy was pretty great throughout too esp. at the end ("THAT's what i've been trying to tell you!") and I was all WAUUU at both the Cyber King and duck pond references (but wouldn't the ducks have to have gone into the light of the crack to become non-existent?).

Loved it loved it loved it.

and how did the doctor get his jacket back?

Did he nip off, get into the Tardis, go off and do things elsewhere, getting a new jacket in the process, including revisiting a 7yo Amy (hence that bit in ep 1 where she remembers sitting in the garden as a child and hearing the Tardis noise), then comes back to the moment he left, says to Amy to remember what he said, and then goes on with River Song to the main flight deck?

Slightly spooked by doctors sudden fiery outbursts now. Also by amy's sudden attack of lust. But enjoyable for it

<q>i was disappointed in this one, actually. the menace of the Weeping Angels, to me, was the idea that you had to strictly control yourself in order to stop them encroaching, and if you let them advance too far it was probably too late, etc. but here our protagonists were busy chatting and looking at other things while relying on the soldiers to look at them, so a lot of that tension was lost.</q>

Ditto -- the Angels approached the heroes far too often and allowed them to escape far too often, too, and even when they killed their victims, it was in such a mundane way (any reason they didn't just send their vics back in time?), that their menace and other-worldliness kind of vanished (see: Borg). Anyway, my suggestion: next time you have anything to do with Weeping Angels, wear a suit of mirrors.

Surely there's a connection between Amy and the ducks, i.e. Amy POND and Duck POND. And her being the most important person in the history of existence is a lot like Donna, innit?

I don't know why, but I really loved Amy's sneakers -- err, I guess you Britishes call them trainers?

lol @ ultimate retcon

looked like converses with the logo ripped off. it will be funny to see how far they take this super retcon

yeah this was like Aliens vs Alien in the level of too-much-exposure-to-the-baddy

> the whole gravity concept here was pretty neat

why didn't they bash their heads when they jumped?

ncluding revisiting a 7yo Amy (hence that bit in ep 1 where she remembers sitting in the garden as a child and hearing the Tardis noise)

Hold on to this thought...

couple of things i noticed on rewatching the last two. in TTOA when River is asking the Doctor to do stabilise the TARDIS he appears to playing pinball, possibly as a means of looking busy but not helping her cause. in FAS at one point it sounds like he says "Bash you, Bishop" instead of "thank you" to Octavian.

I went back and watched bits of 11th Hour and noticed the clock in the kitchen when she's doing him a midnight feast - it moves all over the place, and not in a proper, linear fashion. Also, if there's a crack in her wall, it's also a crack that cuts right across the town and two of the things that are probably not really supposed to be touching are Amy and her fiancé. Just my guess.

Daytime, waiting Kid Amy could well have seen him come back and still be kept waiting twelve years for the next appearance, for some as-yet-unexplained reason. Originally I'd thought that she was one of those stubborn kids who would wait all night and into the next day (which she probably is, anyway), and that she was doing the thing that people do when they dream something noisy because there's a car alarm going off 100 yards from their house.

just watched that eleventh hour scene again and the clock shows roughly 8.30, 9 and 9.30 in order when shown so seems like normal time progression and the Doctor just spend an hour getting from apples to fish custard.

Think James is otm about Doctor going away and then another time line version of him coming back to comfort Amy once more and do his 'you must remember' speech. Because he clearly disappears with River Song and the Bashing Bishop, and he's presumably deliberately not shown coming back. Perhaps there'll be an episode where all the little aspects (the jacket, the clock, the ducks).

Just wondering whether this Pandora's box thing is the place beyond the crack, where the daleks went, where the weeping angels went, where the ducks went (and also all memory of these things).

It's brilliant that Moffat and his writing team have managed to expand the conceptual time trickery of Blink over a whole series, and equally brilliant the attention to detail (which gives depth and interesting little hooks out). RTD's stuff, later on, felt very frothy, but perhaps without as much substance - this series so far has been very much the opposite. Really is some of the best tv I've seen in a while. Love that it's essentially a children's programme as well - such imagination and conceptual mind-bending!

The angels have always fed off time energy though, even in Blink, so it stands to reason they'd be feasting off the crack, all the years ppl might have has.

Love all the theories that are coming out now, this hasn't happened since Bad Wolf and certainly not to this extent.

Agree (especially since Bad Wolf felt a bit cack-handed and simplistic).

Aaand if you don't mind I'll just finish that sentence that I absent-mindedly finished mid flow -

Perhaps there'll be an episode where all the little aspects (the jacket, the clock, the ducks) are tied together, almost as a seperate adventure, following interventionist doctor in his travels through the episodes.

I've not read it... But there is a Steven Moffat Doctor Who short story called "Continuity Errors" that might have some bearing on all of this. All I know about it is the title (and the fact that it's allegedly brilliant) but from title alone it would seem fairly relevant. And he has semi-adapted one of his own short stories for tv before (see "Blink" for instance)