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

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.

so she gets to go to sex clubs in Berlin with Gaga AND watch Doctor Who in advance?! good thing i wub her...

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

Absolutely. Great plot, and I love the Olivier as Richard III type villain. 1st Doctor has a love interest as well!

Cold Blood was awful, the worst so far this series. I mean, Victory of the Daleks was ropey, but at least it was having fun, this was leaden. Meera Syal was a disaster, "But. Doc. Tor. What. Are. All. These. Plants?"

thought Syal was fine, a lot of other stuff was bad.

Meera Syal is terrible in almost everything though.

Dr Who sometimes almost reminds me of Iain M Banks for kids.

in what way?

okay I know there were a few skeptics after last week's previews, but I really, really enjoyed the van gogh episode.

amy was really good in this one, i thought!

there was this sense of 'the doctor explains grown-up emotions to amy' that felt kind of right, her immaturity/tendency to shy away from emotion was a definite thing.

scottish agenda...

So no need to buy a bale of hay for the naysayers?

End was ridiculously mawkish, with 'For Amy' written on Sunflowers (which isn't - and I don't think has ever been - in the Musee D'Orsay), also that Amy (who, it appears, quite respects his work) thinks turning up about 5 weeks before he shoots himself will make such a difference that he'll live happily ever after. Also managed to get the actual history horrendously wrong - he only lived at Auver-sur-Oise for, at most, 10 weeks and had painted pretty much all his notable works by then, and in fact had started being exhibited with some success and fame. He had also cut off (most of) his famously missing ear by then.

Neither The Doctor nor Amy recognise that what they've done is what drives him to kill himself; the unattainability of Amy, who we are encouraged to believe is his one true love, or the knowledge he will never again know the enormity of travelling in time and space, or the certainty he will only be world famous AN ETERNITY after his death (unless we consciously acknowledge how late in his life this occurs, therefore he has had a number of attempts on his own life by then, but exposes the sloppy writing).

The monster was utterly pointless and added the sqare root of fuck all to the plot apart from OMG MONSTAH YOU ARE ALONE JUST LIKE ME CAN YOU SEE EMOWUB (Slight Return). Plus, how do you get a giant invisible alium corpse out of a church through a small door and what do you do with it? (Also "I didn't mean to kill it, I just attacked it in the chest with a spikey thing" - what the fuck were you intending to do exactly then, EH?)

Could have been fine, felt like a massive return to the worst excesses of the Rusty era instead. Amy was better this week, admittedly.

yeah or maybe Van Gogh just realised he had to top himself in order to be famous

These one-off episodes where they go back in time and visit a historical figure are never, ever good.

The guy playing Van Gogh's acting was almost like he wasn't in the same TV programme as the Doctor and Amy.

Probably my least favourite episode ever and all I have to look forward to is James fucking Corden?

liked this, would have liked it better without random monstery-monster.

Missed a trick, monster ought to have been a chimera. Otherwise, loved it.

Monster was pretty bollocks...looked like a chicken imo.

But I loved the ending, 'For Amy' was daft but Amys life lesson was quite moving, and Vincent crying to see his legacy more than made up for a lot of the hokeyness. And was quite moved by Nighys hundred words on the greatness of VG, how he used his pain to show ecstasy of beauty. Nicely heartfelt.

"Ministry of Art....and...Artiness"

I thought the best thing about the monster was how it looked like a chicken.

It was the late lamented chickenbear.

:o

I really liked this! To me, best by far of the the historical figure episodes, and I was pretty moved by the end.

Also liked how the alien was a really small focus in the episode - mostly it was about Van Gogh and Amy. Really liked the way the aftermath of Rory's death was handled as well - if Tennant was still in the role, it would be silent moping, vs. the most active efforts to make up for it with Smith, trying to counter Amy's forgotten, inherent grief.

Amy, who we are encouraged to believe is his one true love

we are not! we are encouraged to believe he is super lonely and depressive and latches on to a pretty girl who turns up and is nice to him without apparent reason (and appears to also be Dutch) - it is hard to read this as one true love stuff! randomly proposing and i-love-you-ing a girl you've just met isn't hearts-in-eyes-love-at-first-sight, it's just badly done flirtation.

I enjoyed this one, much more than the last two-parter.

we are not!

I say we are, both of them fantasise about the kids they'll have together and (actual timelines be damned) she inspires him to paint sunflowers which is series of 9 or 10 paintings and, to the casual observer, is what he's most famous for.

Plus it's Richard fucking Curtis we're talking about here. To pick Notting Hill as a typical example, bookseller bumps into Hollywood star who it turns out is his one true love because a year later for not much of an apparent reason she gives it all up to live with him and get pregnant.

I gotta side with C# there, the whole "let's marry and have a dozen kids!" really seemed more light and flirty than serious

also, she isn't the only one who inspires him to paint sunflowers - they're also on the coffin of the peasant girl killed by the blind raging chickenbear (which fit q well with his 'they're alive and dead at the same time' problem with the flower).

Thought the dozen kids line was the PG rated version of 'would shag your brains out'.

> Plus, how do you get a giant invisible alium corpse out of a church through a small door

the same way it got in?

What, you encourage the corpse to walk back out again? That's some trick.

Thought the dozen kids line was the PG rated version of 'would shag your brains out'.

That might be OK were this not a show that only a couple of years ago had people being given blow jobs by paving slabs, and currently being run by the guy who invented an "I'll fuck anything with a pulse" guy from the future who once hid a giant gun up his arse (or urethra was a possibility, I suppose). Rusty (and Moffatt) have made this show overtly sexual, so no reason to be coy about it now.

Also, why wasn't Bill Nighy in the end credits, yet some very minor extras were? Odd.

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i totally forgot about the ending to that episode! srsly though, the van gogh thing was just being cute

"Who's Rory?" ;_;

Didn't know Van Gogh was Scottish.

the gun up Jack's arse was tiny.

no Nighy in the credits IS odd.