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

Ah yes, also I had some info from my friend who styled her the other week for a Perou shoot - she runs with a fashiony crowd, boyf is art director type.

I'm looking forward to Rory showing his newfound maturity by kicking Amy to the curb

Ha, given this is a Moffatt show, that is not totally implausible.

I'm still not convinced that having ambiguous feelins about your partner (i.e. Rory) is character inconsistency -- surely it's just normal (especially if you're 20)?

I suspect I may have overprimed myself by thinking that Stephen Moffat running Doctor Who was going to result in the best TV ever made.

It's not so much that the show has become significantly better, I think, but the lows aren't nearly so low anymore.

I take it the Graveyard thing is the bit where that shadow quickly runs across the screen as in The Eleventh Hour. Guessing this is FutureDoc coming back on himself to piss about with time, no?

(Sorry if that was a spoiler, I was merely speculating based on what's already been said here)

It's still worth remembering the Amy (and Rory) we see waving in the distance are wearing their clothes from Amy's Choice.

Bloody hell aldo, how big is your telly?

particularly when Rory says to Silurian lady "you're not going to die, not TODAY!"

That was him echoing the doctor's earlier "nobody dies, not today" thing though, wasn't it? I thought it was a cute way of demonstrating Rory's faith in the doc, despite all his criticisms etc.

In the Angels episode when the soldiers guarding Amy all went off one by one into the light/Crack, why didn't Amy 'forget' about them in the same way she did with Rory?

Doctor said she's different cos she's travelled thru time, handily, iirc.

Soldiers not wrapped up in her timeline in the way that Rory is, plausible enough.

She's annoying as fuck and doesn't do anything except zing and sass about, even in mortal danger.

This is one of those things that becomes received wisdom 'truth' just because enough people have said it on message boards enough time but is actually not true at all. The space whale episode for example where Amy being compassionate saved the day when the Doctor was ready to let it all go to shit. The "Amy doesn't 100% trust the Doctor" thing hinted at in the Weeping Angels episode is going to get some play later. And the Amy's Choice episode was great.

I think the problem is that some of the writers haven't really worked out how to write properly for her yet, when Moffat's been at the helm she's been much better and more interesting.

Getting Rory out of the way at this stage is probably quite sensible. I want the Moff to do another episode soon though.

Next week's ep looks like the very definition of a 6/10 bit of standard nu-Who historical fluff though.

I liked the monster in the window tho. Touch of the MR James about it.

Hmm, I think Moffat got a lot better than I expected from Simon fucking Nye so it may be fine.

It also doesn't help Amy's character that she's been in a script written for Donna, who was zingy as all get out (& who I also liked a lot).

Maybe the problem is that Karen Gillen isn't a good enough actor to carry Amy off sympathetically. She has this annoying stary-eye thing that's difficult to take seriously. Same way Donna would have been much better had she not been played by Catherine Tate.

can't stop seeing the MySpace pout since Tracer pointed it out

I am really going to have to stop reading this thread. :(

Amy's life's theme is abandonment, so it's understandable that she would overcompensate by never allowing Rory to think that he has any emotional hold over her that might leave her vulnerable. My guess is that as the show goes on, she'll learn to be, well, kinder, and Rory will become more assertive - and that will help to cement the relationship.

(Mickey and Rose by contrast had the same dynamic - doofus boyfriend and lovestruck-with-the-doctor - but their growing up led to them growing apart, I see the opposite happening with Amy and Rory.)

It's still worth remembering the Amy (and Rory) we see waving in the distance are wearing their clothes from Amy's Choice. Other things to remember: Amy's stairwell in front of the door she can't see in The Eleventh Hour. The Doctor's jacket when he comes out of the forest in the Weeping Angels one. The graveyard just before Elliot disappears. Amy's memories of the Daleks.
There are no ducks in the duck pond.

Man, I am so confused now. If it was just a La Jetee thing and there was only one timeline I could deal, but things are changing all the time, aren't they?

The space whale episode for example where Amy being compassionate saved the day when the Doctor was ready to let it all go to shit.

Space Whale thing was weird because she was all "HE'S JUST LIKE YOU DO YOU SEE" when she'd known the Doctor for, like, two days. It was as unexpected as her working out to pause the video loop of the angel when the angel wasn't in screen.

I agree that it's because she's badly written for (and aye, getting a Donna episode didn't help), but regardless, I have no real idea of who she is or why the hell I should care about her. Her lack of backstory and continuous twattishness towards Rory (except when he's dead) doesn't help.

I thought the shadow in the graveyard was a Silurian. Silly me.

It was a Silurian.

Right? Like, doesn't Elliot disappear right before we first see the Silurian warrior, what's her name that dies?

Oh is that not what the SSH SPOILAZ were about? Was there SOMETHING ELSE in the graveyard?

xpost

Shadow isn't a Silurian.

Any chance of having less spoilers on this page, please, and getting back to more wrongheaded supposition instead?

most of these "spoilers" sound like utter tosh tbh. crappest episode of the series for me - not quite saved by exciting arc stuff at the end which all felt a bit forced in by hand of Mof who knew this was otherwise weak sauce.

last two episode titles have been confirmed btw

Chris Chibnall should be placed on Doctor Who's no fly list along with Gatiss and Helen Raynor.

Why no Paul Cornell this season? He could've pissed out a better Silurian story.

Gatiss' Dickens/ghosties one wasn't too bad at all.

yeah but he's done two crap ones since. keep him away from the 20th century.

Creepy Victoriana is pretty much the only thing Gatiss can do.

He wrote an awesome 7th Doctor book about people's memories coming to life and eating them.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/ebooks/nightshade/index.shtml

Why no Paul Cornell this season? He could've pissed out a better Silurian story.

Too busy writing his own BBC series and three or four comics series, I dare say.

Gatiss' Dickens/ghosties one wasn't too bad at all.

It was quite bad.

aw, it introduced the phrase "what PHANTASMAGORIA is this??" into my family's everyday vernacular so i will love it always.

anyways i'll take goofy and melodramatic over plodding snoozers like the Silurian two-parter any day.

Will totally rep for Gatiss-Dickens. It was a fun flight of fancy! A romp!

I actually don't mind that one. But The Idiot's Lantern is soooooooooo awful. I wish it was a person so I could punch it in the face.

Rly rly sick of historicals that turn out to be about aliens instead of historicals, especially when they have real people in them who might have been quite interesting to make up a story about, and RLY sick of the Nu-Who mode, which Gatiss set in this story, of "OMG IT IS GHOSTIES oh no they are aliums in DISGUISE" "OH NO IT IS WITCHES oh wait they are aliums in DISGUISE" "AARGH NO IT IS VAMPIRES oh bugger more bloody aliums in stupid fucking DISGIUSE"

don't forget werewolves

i've seen very little old-who, did they used to have historicals where they just knocked about in the past and encountered non-alien dramatic situations?

yeah, though mainly in the B&W years, last one was a cricket garden party murder mystery thing broadcast in 1981 or so

"OMG IT IS AN WEREWOLF no no it is an alium what MUTATED" ffs.

^ didn't hate that ep though iirc. though obv I did not r it at all for the last three years.

Risk collective scorn here and say I liked the Idiot Lantern - people having their faces sucked off by the tv resulting in faceless/identity-less people. It wasn't amazing but a perfectly reasonable and well executed idea. Also liked the Dickens one.

Also, some of this strikes me as criticising Dr Who for what it is - a children's science fiction programme generally about aliens. The reason I'm generally in favour of it is that it completely opens the doors of perception, on prime time tv for children, to messing about with time, inventiveness, interstellar travel, unbounded imaginative speculation about the conceptual aspects of the world around you and brrrr - frightening. Something Moffat, as everyone's pointed out, is great at.

My least favourite episodes tend to be the histrionic, thousands of daleks, end of the universe + cybermen and everything ever. Don't mind the little half hour ones. Certainly the things I remember as a child are the Jagaroth (apparently terrified me absolutely rigid, difficult to see now, in what is basically a Douglas Adams ROMP!) and the snake going up the arm in that Davison ep. Details, not star wars epic stuff.

Really don't see what the problem is with supernatural beings and mythical beasties turning out to be aliens. Surely it's long been established in the Who-niverse that the supernatural and magic doesn't strictly exist. Maybe there was less of the 'oh look, these werewolves/witches/etc are really aliens' in older historicals, but they still had fun by suggesting alien intervention in real events. Take The Visitation, which has the evil alien dress robots up as the Grim Reaper so as to scare the shit out of villagers - really creepy that, and brilliantly simple. And at the end of that serial, the aliens' defeat triggers a famous historical event. Or The Daemons, Pyramid of Mars: your gods and demons are really super powerful aliens! Perhaps their reliance on popular monsters in Nu-Who has been a little lazy, with some slightly tortuous mutation/hi tech disguise devices, but when it's done well it can be great fun, even if it's a bit daft. such as in Vampires of Venice.

Doing it once: hey, fun idea, nice bit of but what IF?! for the kids. Doing it every year: shitting on the very concept of youthful wonder and imagination iirc.

Daemons works super-well because it plays with a whole lot of related issues and actually has a set-up. You've got the institution of the church being supposedly well-meaning but actually kinda intimidating, you've got the dear lady Satanists who might be witchy devil-worshippers or they might be a herb-growing club, what ARE those ladies who get together for "knitting circle" in your local village up to rly?, you've got the proto-Blink awesome scares of ONE OF those gargoyles is actually an alien fighting monster thingy, eek what if ONE of the ones on the local church is too and WHICH one!, you've probably got a bunch of other cool shit I can't remember cos I've only seen one ep once in the last twenty years.

replace 'childen's science fiction' with 'universal fantasy' imo

Hmmm, not sure whether I agree or not there. Wd agree with the universal part to a degree but thing DW still works best when directed at children (even if the consequence is also appealing to adults) and the science fiction definition is handy because it deals with time and interplanetary travel and is speculative + sciencey.

But yes wd agree it's closer to fantasy than hard sci-fi, which I've never really been a fan of.

Hard sci-fi is for these guys:

http://static.tvguide.com/MediaBin/Galleries/Shows/M_R/Pa_Ph/Party_Down/Season2/party-down16.jpg

I still think "The Aztecs" is one of the best Doctor Who stories ever told.

Old Who was SERIOUSLY full of alien shit mistaken for supernatural shit by puny Earthlings.

am playing that free download game, and can't get past rewiring a fusebox:
http://lifetheuniverseandcombom.blogspot.com/2010/06/doctor-who-adventure-games-update.html

damn that mac delay

http://twitter.com/caitlinmoran/status/15273686131

hmm.