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

At the risk of seeming dense, I don't get it, sic? 1989 is when "Chime" came out, and 1996 was Middle of Nowhere...

The Doctor shouting at all the baddies last week just didn't feel right (not just the shouting, more that it didn't really make any sense).

It did make sense. What do you think didn't?

but couldn't they have been a bit more imaginative about what might happen if things had been wiped from existence - maybe something more than museum artifacts disappearing.

EVERYTHING was disappearing. Ducks from duckponds. We saw museum artifacts disappearing BECAUSE WE WERE IN A MUSEUM AT THE TIME. And the museum had already been imaginatively used to show how contracted and collapsed time already was at that point - penguins in the Nile, etc.

I was on board with the 'big bang' reboot kind of thing, but still not sure exactly what it was inside the Pandorica that was meant to have been magnified or w/ever to re-create all of everything. If it was Amy's memories, then what about all the people/places/things she wouldn't have a clue about?

Everything that had been erased from history across the universe had seeped into her mind and subconscious and memory while she slept, every single night of her life, through the crack in her bedroom wall.

Was it meant to be the air or something inside the Pandorica that contained 'memories' of everything?

The Nestene consciousness had taken a "print" of Amy's memory.

Why did the Doctor survive?

The same reason as the entire planet, universe, history and Amy's parents survived.

And why on earth does something built as a prison have the ability to fly around?

It doesn't, the Doctor wired the time bracelet into it. (They should have shown it dematerialising rather than flying but w'evs.)

This is all shown onscreen AND covered in dialogue btw, I'm not filling in any gaps!

At the risk of seeming dense, I don't get it, sic? 1989 is when "Chime" came out, and 1996 was Middle of Nowhere...

Try thinking about TX dates for a television program that may or may not have its title mentioned in this thread, not release dates for a band that played raves around the M25...

Might be a great doctor but he's a crap MC.

Was it meant to be the air or something inside the Pandorica that contained 'memories' of everything?

The Nestene consciousness had taken a "print" of Amy's memory.

wasn't the print thing about Rory? the Nestene consciousness had made a copy of Rory from a photograph but Amy's specialness meant that the copy also contained his personality and his human soul. by extension Amy is able to bring back other people directly connected to her - like her parents! and the doctor!

afaicr the 'memories' of everything are more the contents of the Pandorica - the doctor's logic was 'the Pandorica contains billions of particles from a highly populated pre-mass-supernova universe, and in combination with a highly concentrated tardisplosion and a big-crunch-universe its revivifying energy can extrapolate the ENTIRE HUGE UNIVERSE from them - just as one can extrapolate an entire body from the genetic information in a single cell'

nb i am not suggesting this actually makes any kind of sense. just that it was the explanation given.

xp Yep, I got confused about whether it was meant to be actual molecules or "memories" (not buying that Amy, consciously or otherwise, knew everything in the universe to be able to bring it back).

I liked the Nestene copy of Rory being wrong but not sure how it works that it had all Amy's memories/knowledge of him yet still had him being a Roman.

Why did the Doctor survive?

The same reason as the entire planet, universe, history and Amy's parents survived.

The museum thing still bugs me, why would artifacts disappear but leave an empty exhibit (think someone upthread also mentioned this).

someone on a different site described it quite nicely i thought as the crack erasing causes but not effects - i thought of it as being like stalin's image manipulators inking people out of pictures, where first they just erase the face without bothering to hide the fact that there was once a person there, and only after they've got rid of two or three people do they crop it/repaint it so it looks like there was never anyone but stalin in the picture in the first place.

like the crack makes things not have existed and then time shifts about to accommodate the new shape of things, but there's a bit of a lag. the crack doesn't change time directly (unlike the decisions in turn left e.g.).

the doctor had to be on the wrong side of the crack when it closed! no-one said anything about after it had closed.

I liked the Nestene copy of Rory being wrong but not sure how it works that it had all Amy's memories/knowledge of him yet still had him being a Roman.

the photo of him in Roman drag (with her in police stripper drag) let it make this mistake I guess

well yeah, but Amy's knowledge is that he's a guy from Wales who once dressed up as a Roman so why did this contradicting "information" win. I could probably do with watching the whole thing again tbh.

Nestene was in a hurry?

^ credited apologist I guess
I s'pose I am prepared to make excuses for the holes in Moffatt's handwaves bcz I want to hold onto the enjoyment I have while watching it, whereas with RTD the hole swould leap out at you, fart in your face, and make the BIG ROMP elements too hollow and unearned to even enjoy while they were going on

Kind of feel the opposite - that RTD's "this is all big fun nonsense, woohoo!" was fine for me, but SM's plots almost make sense, which just makes them more disappointing in the areas they don't.

ok but you know that probably every time travel story ever written does not make sense (and not in a 'time travel is impossible duh' way)...

http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=866

hmm. doesn't 12 Monkeys sidestep this problem?

yeah that's a 'you cannae change anything' kinda story, perhaps my 'every time travel story ever' was a slight exaggeration.

Worst year ever. cbf saying anything more, not worth it. Just awful.

I think Matt Smith blows David Tennant out of the water, and that alone is enough for me to call this season the best of the new series. The stories weren't as strong as, say, season three's, but I preferred this season's evenness and subtlety to the mawkishness and abysmal lows of the RTD seasons.

but you know that probably every time travel story ever written does not make sense

It wasn't those bits I had a problem with though, it was more then clunky "recreating the universe using molecules from a box plus, er, someone's ability to remember stuff" etc that felt disappointing. I mean, that's an RTD style explanation right there. And like I said, coming from RTD it's fine, but from SM that's disappointing.

I don't want to side with the h8rs though, I liked it!

I think it fitted the show's logic fine. Rusty would have introduced such ideas unheralded, but Moffat has been dropping hints and setting all this up for 13 weeks, avoiding the dreaded Deus Ex Machina.
Doctor Who is not hard SF and nor should it be. Some anal spod on the Guardian blog was citing Asimov's comment that SF was ruined when it mainstream, which is bollocks. Anyway, who cares about Asimov's dreadfully written, deeply boring and reactionary Utopian science fictions with their tedious adherence to rules and laws. Gimme the magic, fun, excitement and IMAGINATION of Doctor Who over such joyless tosh.
I guess I'm one of these people who is attracted to SF not so much for the science but for the imaginative and fantastical elements. I also love the gothic and uncanny, which is something this series has done superbly. I'm hoping the gothic elements will be carried through - Gaiman could do great things with it. Would love to see Moorcock and Mieville scripting some episodes too.

i really liked the pandorica-ex-machina business but that's mostly because i am fascinated by
* the big crunch theory (it is somehow more reassuring than the eventual heat death of the universe)
* stuff that exists OUTSIDE TIME (when i was little and was trying to imagine god/heaven, that's what i imagined, a thing that was simultaneously in all times at once but also outside time entirely)

So now I am watching that Orbital thing on the youtubes (thank you Leee) and thinking that if M. Smith knows Orbital exist then why hasn't he just shot Murray Gold already please

ok murray gold isn't fit to drink orbital's wee, but still i don't think either of them do great things with the theme. murray treats it as a regular tv theme, orbital treat it as a slice of standard techno. neither of them deal with the avant-garde aspect of it.

the final episode in the current series of Doctor Who had only moderate success.

Saturday's series finale was seen by an average of 5.1 million people - down on the 8 million who watched new Doctor Matt Smith's debut in April.

Yeah, I will admit that "Doctor?" was pretty disappointing on the first many listens, because Orbital + Doctor Who Theme sounded like it should be next-level amazing etc and really it was just a kind of tinny "well, there it is... oh, it ended", but still, when Murray Gold came along with his over-loud orchestral whatnot the Orbital version suddenly seemed like a good thing after all

(I do not mind it being a "slice of standard techno" at all, but techno at its best is propulsive, dark, cosmic, shimmering - all adjectives that go pretty well with the original theme, so why does combining the two seem to fall short on all of these? but STILL, ugh Murray Gold)

Saturday's series finale was seen by an average of 5.1 million people - down on the 8 million who watched new Doctor Matt Smith's debut in April.

Wasn't Saturday the hottest day of the year so far? I don't think even Matt Smith's charisma can compete with that.

There is - who would have guessed! - much back and forth on fan sites over the ratings. Ppl who didn't like this series say "it's doomed", people who did like it say "overnights don't matter any more". Neither are right IMO. Doctor Who *has* become an interesting test case for how TV watching is changing. Episodes have been getting an extra 1-2m from TV on demand (catch up, Tivo style devices, etc.), another 1.5m on iplayer (it's easily the most popular iplayer thing ever), and even without iplayer the final ratings hold up pretty well at 7m or so per episode.

But it's also true that they got a really big UK audience for "Eleventh Hour" and it dropped off pretty quickly - the in-series ratings decline is surely steeper than they'd like, hot weather or not. And they won't want the 'media narrative' around the show to become 'not as good as it used to be'. It might be that next year is a bit less ultra-connected than this year was.

IDK, it's all a bit academic - loved the show this year, more into it than I've been since the Eccleston series, but in the end the BBC will stick with it as long as they do and that's that. What's pretty definite is that they realise how important the brand is - so they won't let it degrade the way it did in the 80s, they'll axe it earlier and revive it earlier.

I loved this but 'end of the universe' = stakes are too high and that makes it difficult to actually care about because there's no way you can do it without pressing a reset switch and reset switches are lame. The first bit with the time travel knotted together was fantastic though. Loved the Doctor wearing a fez as well.

Can't work out where the Doctor was supposed to have gone between putting Amy in the Pandorica and turning up at the museum. How much time was supposed to have elapsed in his own personal timeline?

So is this a new universe and a new Rory/Amy/River with the old ones' memories? Or has everything just been put back as it was before things started cracking? Has all that RTD-era stuff happened or not? Does this universe have Timelords in it? Very confusing.

I absolutely wet myself when Matt Smith turned up with Orbital, it took a couple of minutes to twig what was happening and then it was like "fucking hell, that's so obvious and yet brilliant". One of those priceless festival moments.

Actually the bit with the Dalek begging for mercy and River showing none was great as well. We're going to get the River origin story next year, right?

Can't work out where the Doctor was supposed to have gone between putting Amy in the Pandorica and turning up at the museum. How much time was supposed to have elapsed in his own personal timeline?

Presumably none, the universe is mostly erased so it's not like he can go fannying off for a while and have adventures on Alpha Centauri with big-eyed chicks.

He was at Glastonbury. We have video.

wrong coat, did Flesh And Stone teach you nothing?

Timey-Wimey? (my new explanation for anything I can't explain)

Boo on River + Pond blowing up the fez.

I laughed so hard at this I watched it a couple times in a row.

Best Who finale in millennia. Best thing I can say is that I want to watch a new episode right now.

"It's a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezes are cool." *yank*

"i wear a fez now" was perfectly delivered, prob. my favorite moment.

Watched this earlier tonight whilst beginning the arduous process of boxing up 6 years of books to move across town. Thought it had many great moments. I liked that there were clever with some of the time-jumping(ref to the Moff-created Harkness debut?), but it never got *cute*.

I missed the line about him being the stag dancer, which is awesome. Did hear Rory's offhand muttering to her mother "I was plastic..."

Other bits: Rory standing guard thru 2,000 years only to pop up as a guard in a new uniform, the dalek stand-off, the Doctor waking up on the floor of the tardis("Oh! uh. okay."), the fact that we now have a married couple as companions.

One thing I am wondering about if they'll keep the character growth despite any possible reset/forgetting. Rory went from a RTD-standard sexless wishy-washy extra/S.O. to actually becoming a Roman officer, being able to blast at a Dalek, standing watch for that long, surviving the Blitz, etc. One of the things that pissed me off about the ending of the last full season(and we complained on it on here, iirc) is that Donna went from just a bleah mundane to having a much greater sense of power and ability, only to get that growth wiped out.

Hopping around with the Doctor and getting blasted at and eaten and usually disintegrated a couple times and always saving the universe over the course of a companionship would change and grow a person(even if they're just increasingly horrified and split, Tegan-style). Seems kinda bullshit to wipe that out, but we'll see how they do next year.

Yeah surely this is the same River if nothing else, because future River has already seen him after the Pandorica incident. In the same universe. I suppose the only way this can work is that nothing was reset, just put back where it should have been. But then how to explain Amy initial Doctor adventures, without her parents? Argh. Think Moffatt's been a bit too clever for his own good here.

loved the shrinking universe feel (very Final Crisis #7, for comics ppl)

OTM, I was thinking the same thing! Also, the Doctor saving earth by travelling into the heart of the sun -- isn't that All-Star Superman?

Thought that was a terrific conclusion, right up there with Blink/Fireplace etc. Almost metal. I thought what Tom politely calls the "sense-making elements" were all good and proper. And KG (finally!) totally stepped up the emotional moments in the last act.

I think the "That's a fairytale"/"Aren't we all" Doctor/River dialogue in Flesh and Stone is kind of meant to foreshadow the reset button but yes it makes very little sense. You end up having to assume the River in that story remembers a completely different version of the Pandorica storyline that happened in the cracking-but-not-yet-collapsed universe the Angels story (and all of episodes 1-12 at least) is set in. Which takes you into BRAINFAIL.

I think the assumption has to be that River/Amy/Rory remember everything that happened throughout the last series, and they remember the additional details (ducks, stars, new parents) as well. It doesn't work otherwise.

Rory protecting the Pandorica for 2000 years was a great moment by the way. Wish they'd kept him as a good Auton, it was cool.

That's certainly the case for Amy and Rory and there's no problem with that - it all happened. River is the problem because she's asynchronous to the rest of the cast, so it's not a case of her 'remembering' the Byzantium, it hasn't happened to her yet. Fine, you say, it never can happen to her, except she mentions the bloody thing in Silence In The Library.

Basically Moffat's two clever storylines have tangled up a bit. Which doesn't spoil my enjoyment of it all one tiny bit, and is fun to think about, but is a HERE BE DRAGONS for the continuity police...

Yeah I meant the later River rather than the one from the end of this series.

This shit must be fucking confusing for children. Wouldn't be surprised if Moffatt toned it down for the next series.

I think for a certain type of kid it'll be incredibly exciting. I remember going "WHOA MIND BLOWN" when I was 8 and watching some of the complicated stuff they had going on at the end of the Baker/start of the Davison eras, which is probably why this season really resonated with me in a way that the last few didn't. Where they have to get the balance kidwise is appealing to that kid, and the kid who wants to see the monsters, and the one who wants to be scared, and the one who wants Amy and Rory to be happy... but generally I think children like mysterious stuff going down, even if they're tuning out the details and focusing on the exploding TARDIS or the Stone Dalek.

I dunno, I wouldn't have thought this was too confusing, especially as the episode seemed to be bracketed up into a dozen little mini-stories, each with their own resolution. Also, isn't it the plot holes in the peripheries that are the fascinating bits? That's the stuff you actually remember.

If you get the imagery right you can get away with murder, sense-making wise. The most timey-wimey old Who story was Warrior's Gate, which I saw as a nipper, didn't understand the narrative of, but the robot axemen, time-shifting lion men, etc absolutely stayed with me and I remembered the story very fondly.

My friend's five year old (a Who nut) loved the finale, although he said 'it was quite confusing'. But yeah, I don't think kids mind being confused. And there was so much cool stuff for them to focus on. He went berzerk when the Alliance turned up. 'Cybermen? Daleks?! SONTARANS!!!' (he loves Sontarans). The odd nerd moaned that 'oh the Cybermen and Daleks would never team up', but if the Tories and Lib Dems can... Joking apart, why not? That sort of joyless nitpicking takes all the fun out of it. And setting up the Alliance only to have them play no part in the Big Bang was a nice touch, subverting the RTD finale mode. Making a single Cyberman and Dalek threatening was a great achievement.

We're going to get the River origin story next year, right?

I am so over origin stories. I'd like to see more stories I don't already know the conclusion to, thanks.

much better if River remains a little mysterious.