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

Timey wimey stuff works because it makes it more exciting, more stuff happens and larger adventures are covered in a small amount of time. I know what you mean by addictive but in previous episodes it can all go on a bit too much. I like fast pace doctor!

I'm not keen on meeting versions of selves stuff either, think it is a bit cheesy. I hope the astronaut is a new character, or something dark and sinister, or even better, part of a series long story arc (I bloody love them I do!)

I like River when she's being all Carry On Up The Tardis

love this

yeah, I had major out loud giggles over that

Also the girl in the spacesuit played Alex Kingston's daughter in Marchlands. She's an incredibly talented actor and hopefully gets to ~do something~ in next week's episode.

Have I seen her in something else? She looks so familar..

I liked the agent dude that was in battlestar galactica, I don't know his name but he definitely raised the bar acting wise.

ROMO LAMPKIN <3

not his real name, but honestly it kind of is

Have I seen her in something else? She looks so familar..

― VegemiteGrrl, Monday, 25 April 2011 08:09 (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3041653/ <-- I haven't so

Ahhh Romo Lampkin, cheers for that!

So I need to get a Stetson now?

I don't remember the Silence at all, apparently because I looked away? (Also, Moff seems to have nicked the idea from Mark Waid's Legion of Super Heroes.) Did we actually see them/were they explicitly referenced in The Pandorica Opens?

Anyway, thought the tone was terribly uneven -- big shadow of melancholy cast over half the characters, and then the usual Doctor-y hijinks, which didn't quite reach the level of wistfulness that it was going for -- so it was hard for me to settle in and just watch/enjoy/get scared by it.

I also love crazy timey wimey but none of the Moffet-era stories have really affected me much compared to his RTD-era episodes.

Also:

“There’s no question that Time Lords can die, there’s never been a question about that The Doctor’s is running from real death, he’s not running from the possibility of a new body, so if you kill him fast enough then yes he won’t regenerate. You know he’s going to die one day, he’s definitely out there, one of the creepy things about the doctor, is that it must occur to him as he wonders through all of space and time that his body’s in a grave somewhere. He really does die in that first scene and that really is him. He starts to regenerate and then gets shot during that regeneration cycle, so he doesn’t live forever and he’s not indestructible.”
— Steven Moffat

woooow

;_;

He really does die in that first scene and that really is him. He starts to regenerate and then gets shot during that regeneration cycle

Good work of Matt Smith's Doctor to make it through 200 years without regenerating though.

Oh come on

There'll be a clause. Like the BBC would let Moffat walk in off the street and just take control of the end of the whole property.

Exactly!

or that is the doctor and he does die, but he is cloned/reborn/recruited from a parallel universe/ and a 'new' doctor begins even though he is basically the same, and can have regenerations anew / a new start

I reckon Moffat likes honestly telling 50% truth just to mess w people

Like he is witholding a key caveat

where is that moffat quote actually from? surely nobody really wants to see the doctor die like that so why do it (the fact that Amy, Rory, River and the Doctor have all died at least once already now feels a bit of a cheat, and moffat's been good before at keeping major characters away from repeated direct life-threatening scenarios because that does get tedious)?

moffat's gone from 'everybody lives' to 'everybody dies all the time' basically

drunk with Whedon-power

I loved the River/Rory conversation because the first time we meet River, the Doctor has no clue who she is and she dies at the end of the story, just like she was fearing here.

Yeah that was A+ and very moving

Moff quotation is from Tumblr, a very reputable source.

But come on, people, we're just going to get some more timey wimey by which the Doctor's death will be averted somehow.

Yeah that's what I'm thinking. Moff's got a timey-wimey rabbit in his hat

Good work of Matt Smith's Doctor to make it through 200 years without regenerating though.

most of them make it through a century or so!

why is everyone calling the aliums The Silence? did I miss something?

They're actually calling them Silents on the BBC's sites, so it is for reals.

I don't remember the Silence at all, apparently because I looked away? (Also, Moff seems to have nicked the idea from Mark Waid's Legion of Super Heroes.) Did we actually see them/were they explicitly referenced in The Pandorica Opens?

I believe this is first brought up by the Ood in a Tennant episode. So they've been laying track for this for a long time ...

Thanks for the tip w/r/t The Lodger TARDIS, I'd forgotten about that.

Er, Silent (singular), Silence (plural)

But yeah, we've not seen them in an ep before this point

Silence will Fall, etc

Oh also about that Moffett quote - Tennant actually mentions this exact circumstance in 'The End of Time Part 1', that he can be killed before regenerating

So basically Moffett gave RTD a big list of bits he wanted set up, is my impression - on Dr Who we no longer have season arcs, we have CREATIVE TEAM ARCS

Moffat quote was on Doctor Who Confidential, he definitely said it. Still think it's obviously a corner that there's a plan to get out of though.

The thing about Doctor Who is that the greatest story lines are the ones that seem like there is no way out, or the no this is it, games up.
It all depends on how the story is resolved, not so much what happens during it. I think back to Series 5? When it looks like the Darleks are about to win and the doctor just flicks a switch and zing! it's all fixed, very disappointing. I hope that if the Doctor is dead than this doesn't happen.

I always have this fear that Doctor Who is going to let me down and then BAM it kicks off and is awesome.

Absolutely loved it! And I have no idea where it's going AT ALL, which has not been the case with prior Moffat 2-parters.

feels a little pointless to me to claim that he's rooly trooly dead no takebacks when the whole point is going to be seeing how he gets out of it but w'evs, he was rooly trooly dead in the last regular episode too so

so calling the greys Silents is just off the BBC site or the RT or something? away with that!

I've managed to get sucked into a couple of spoiler sites (don't worry, I will neither speculate nor spoil - besides, a lot of people on them are barking up the wrong tree IMO) but I still thought this rocked and surprised me.

As to the Silents, the Scream/Gentlemen/Dementor/Slender Man (all comparisons I've seen) are all iterations of an archetype Moffat has said is designed to play on primal fear (human beings are hardwired to freak over anything that looks skully).

Shite Nixon, though.

We were too busy shouting "arrooo!" at the screen to hear anything Nixon said. He didn't seem very Nixon-y though. (Also after a weekend of Portal 2 the underground cavern bit was making us all "OK, you can put a portal in that wall but not that one, need to go through there and...")

I love all the "timey-wimey bullshit". As a kid I think my main disappointment with Who was that, ffs, you've got a time machine, let's have more of the timey-wimey bullshit.

Having said that, I didn't like this episode quite as much as I might've on paper. I like dicking abt with time, I like River when she's not being all "spoilers", like the concept/design of the Silents - but it didn't quite hang together for me. Plus, yes, lots of "haven't we had this before?" to disembodied anxious child voices, aliens you have to keep looking at, etc. But I'm interested to see where it goes.

I like the fact it is a bad Nixon, it's the so bad it's good argument.

The older Doctor surely knew he needed to die in order to set in motion whatever is going to happen over the course of the next episode, and probably the rest of the series. It's pretty obvious that Mofatt hasn't written the end of the whole story.

Also the bit where the Doctor suddenly was all "why should I trust you, what do you know?" was terrific, Tennant would never have been able to pull off that sort of abrupt register shift as well as Smith did.

i had a dream that the entire series 5 and 6 were taking place inside the TARDIS and the David Tennant was still the doctor and that the whole series was like a doll house created by Amy.

i thought the Nixon was great, what was he getting wrong?

- looking like Nixon
- sounding like Nixon
- having a black secret service agent calling the shots (??!)

but being constantly over-ruled and undermined! actually i was wondering about the relative racial diversity of the 1969 oval office security...

was this nixon really less accurate than the churchill of last series? i just like the way he says "hello" - apparently the (american) actor did struggle with the voice a bit due to having to use fake teeth