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

kind of wish the episode had ended with everyone thinking the dr was dead? possibly with something involving ppl ~taking on his mantle~ or going looking for him to bring him back or really anything that wasn't so annoyingly triumphalist and handwavey.

and really anything other than that question bullshit, which was total oh my god moffat way to ruin the entire fucking forty-odd year run of this damn television show.

all downhill since press gang imho

i kind of assume the "laying low bcz believed dead" doctor is being set up for a seasonful of stand-alone creepers

there was lots of misdirection and sleight-of-hand: i liked that (i'd guessed he'd be the tesselector) (bcz i am 901 years old) -- but this should have been a two-piece i think; the silence in particular got very short-changed, and a bit too much was introduced, explained, deployed and left behind in just this one ep

the "power of love" was a very cheeky misdirect: it had little role to play in what followed, and -- i am happy to believe -- was just a massive fib from river to get the doctor into the right mood at the right moment to agree to the right thing (this doctor likes that kind of stuff even if no one else does) (if river HAD set up that beacon the entire universe would have responded just like trishyb upthread; hence she didn't and was just lying and/or deluding herself)

i liked it mostly -- he's better at moments and visual oo-stuff than arc, for sure, and i'm more interested in moments and visual oo-stuff, to be honest (because the more coherent the arcs, the less timelines there can possibly be)

in fact quite a lot of this ep -- as a friend just pointed out in a different timeline -- seemed to be subtly disassembling a lot of now-quite-unhelpful RTD-era continuity-baggage

But we aren't going to get a season of stand-alone creepers because (and I didn't mention it for fear of spoiler police) Amy & Rory are back next year, it's already been announced. So the handwave only exists for the Christmas story, then The Doctor is back in plain view. (I retain the right to concede it's not true when Moffatt says hahaha that was a lie, I paid them to say that just to cover up what I was going to do.

But Amy and Rory know the Doctor lives already. They'll keep it a secret so that their reunion doesn't mean the Doctor will be back in plain view to the entire universe. Then surely they'll join him on his undercover adventures? Having the Doctor as soe mysterious stranger coming to a planet to solve some problems sounds like what the old-school fans would want.
Moff has said the next season will be a return to more self-contained episodes hasn't he? Albeit with an underlying arc.

that was quite a big favour the teselector did then - entirely sacrificing the ship and everyone in it for the doctor. or have i missed something.

also, who cares that rory,amy,river and romo lamkin see the doctor die - or are silents there to witness it too, so are they still keeping the secret from them.

oh i give up. the whole apocalyptic alternate time stream that stopped existing and was reset - feels like i've seen that before. Oh yes, it was this time last year

AND I STILL DON'T KNOW WHY THE UNIVERSE EXPLODED

big favour is right -- and not the sort of thing you'd ask for with a cheeky grin, surely?

Remember the Doctor was inside the Tesselector and said he wasn't singed when they burned the body, so presumably the crew are fine too. The Doctor may even have given them a lift home in the Tardis.

ok, sacrificing the ship maybe isn't so over the top. actually i'd have liked to see that rescue happening

(nb, i didn't really think we'd learn why the universe exploded)

The funeral pyre skeleton with the sonic at the end of the first half series would be the Tesselecta - remember it has bones, veins, anti-bodies, so when burned it'll look like a skeleton. So the sonic would be calling the Tardis in to pick them up.

character we need next series: face of bo tesselecta

OK, things not yet explained:

Why the TARDIS got blown up in the last series
Why did the Silence cause the Space Race
Why the Silence put the young Melody in the spacesuit in 1969 if they knew The Doctor didn't die until 2011
What the skeleton hand was at the end of A Good Man Goes To War
How they escaped the cliffhanger at the end of The Impossible Astronaut
What happens in the three months between the end of The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon
Why, if the spacesuit is controlling to the point you can't resist it, it can't be just anybody and has to be River
Linked to the above, why Amy is abducted
Where the regeneration energy came from after what we now know was the Tesselector robot 'died'
How can the question 'Doctor Who?' be the oldest question in existence unless The Doctor is older than time and/or language and/or curiosity
If the silence that falls is the death of the Doctor, why did ""silence fall" over Venice in Vampires of Venice
What is the TARDIS in The Lodger
Who is Madam Kovarian, since by the end of the episode The Silence was a race again
What happens between A Good Man Goes To War and Let's Kill Hitler
Where the Doctor goes to in Let's Kill Hitler after being poisoned that needs the 'wedding suit'

ok, sacrificing the ship maybe isn't so over the top.

I woouldn't even worry about this. He probably just nipped into another time stream where it hadn't been destroyed and got it for them. Because that's what people do nowadays, it seems.

How can the question 'Doctor Who?' be the oldest question in existence unless The Doctor is older than time

doesn't have to be older, just has to have taken a trip back to the start of it all, at some point. btw i assume everyone guessed what the question was upthread somewhere, not just me.

two misuses of "you and i" for "you and me" in the episode rankled almost as much as the whole 'handwaving to pretend to tie up a bunch of loose ends in a masshoosive story arc that doesn't make a jot of sense' that this episode was. can we just get some self-contained throwaway saturday night science fantasy for kids plz? (oh and dial down the sentimentalism by about 50% maybe.)

just havin a stab at some of these:

Why did the Silence cause the Space Race

"they have influenced humanity into the Space Race for purposes of building a spacesuit, which must somehow be crucial to their intentions. " yeah yeah that just begs another question

What the skeleton hand was at the end of A Good Man Goes To War

i don't remember much but i definitely don't remember this

Where the regeneration energy came from after what we now know was the Tesselector robot 'died'

just a ruse to trick whoever was watching altho as it is the whole of time and space depends upon the doctor dying, the whole of time and space seems to be quite easily tricked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G47Er3hbBaw

ah well that's just the old flash gordon trick ...

"with one bound he was free" <--- answer to the world's oldest question

I think most of those things that aren't explained don't really need to be spelled out. They just happen off screen and are left to the viewers imagination. What happens in those three months? Well, they're just on the run, so make up your own adventures. I don't think there's some kind of important missing chapter that changes everything here; the time span simply adds further drama.

If the Tesselecta can shapeshift then it can surely do regeneration energy too? Likewise the skeleton hand. Don't think there's any real mystery in that.
The 'Tardis' in the Lodger was a Silent ship. DW Adventures Magazine even confirmed this! The Silence obviously have the ability to time-travel if they can set all this stuff up.

Putting River in the spacesuit when it seems to control the user is a bit clumsy, but I think we can just assume that as River had been raised to kill the Doctor, the Silents wanted her to finish the job. Gives them a good excuse for having her imprisoned, out of harm's way.

Madam Kovarian is just an agent of the Silence, one of many. No mystery there.

Obviously the Tardis explosion needs tying up, but that's presumably to come. It's all part of the Moffat Masterplan, or Cartmel mk 2...

doesn't have to be older, just has to have taken a trip back to the start of it all, at some point. btw i assume everyone guessed what the question was upthread somewhere, not just me.

My friend guessed and I thought it was wank so I'm not enjoying him being right. Anyway if the Doctor goes back to thee beginning of time he's going to have to meet another time-traveller there or there won't be anyone who knows what a doctor is to ask the question. It's a pretty old profession but one which probably required some questions to be asked before it could be invented.

the whole of time and space seems to be quite easily tricked.

This was also a bit wank but on the other hand the fixed point couldn't be very fixed if the Silence knew what would happen and rewrote it, eh?

Bits of that were fun, bits of it were rubbish; not quite sure how I rate it overall, but it felt slightly less overdone compared to previous series finales, I suppose. (Because the whole of space/time collapsing again is, oh, no big deal...)

I loved last season so much, it was perfect to me. This, on the other hand, left me feeling very annoyed.

I feel like Inspector Spacetime would have handled this much better.

"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

http://www.sweary.com/dailyfun/wp-content/uploads/picard-o-rly.jpg

^ rule #1: the Moffat lies, duh

anyway he does rly get shot. if you throw quotes around the latter pronouns it holds true. but ^

Why the TARDIS got blown up in the last series

a Silence did it

Why did the Silence cause the Space Race

cos they thought spacesuits looked cool (hope these two do get addressed more in the future)

Why the Silence put the young Melody in the spacesuit in 1969 if they knew The Doctor didn't die until 2011

they were hiding in time

What the skeleton hand was at the end of A Good Man Goes To War

this totally wasn't in the version I saw. having seen it now I don't think it's meant to be literal

How they escaped the cliffhanger at the end of The Impossible Astronaut

they ran away

What happens in the three months between the end of The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon

they were on the run, and devised the arm-markings before they all got split up. why Rory & Amy didn't change their clothes in 3 months is the only real plot hole here

Why, if the spacesuit is controlling to the point you can't resist it, it can't be just anybody and has to be River

either: the Silence are just being super-cunty, or a weird time-heided babby is needed in order to hack the not-rly-fixed point in time

Linked to the above, why Amy is abducted

same as above

Where the regeneration energy came from after what we now know was the Tesselector robot 'died'

if the Tesselector can shapeshift into a dude AND a motorcycle, it can shapeshift some fake regeneration energy (wish they'd actually included a line confirming this though, it was the biggest griping point for me and ppl when we saw it)

How can the question 'Doctor Who?' be the oldest question in existence unless The Doctor is older than time and/or language and/or curiosity

Dr's travelled all over time and left too much of an impression on it - this is p much the whole point of blue dude's scenes. people have been asking "Dr Who?" since the beginning of time, because he's been everywhen btwn the beginning of time and now (lol tribe of gum.)

If the silence that falls is the death of the Doctor, why did ""silence fall" over Venice in Vampires of Venice

foreshadowing of Silence's attempt to kill Dr last year - not going to rewatch VoVenice to see if this doesn't work though!

What is the TARDIS in The Lodger

crashed Silence timeship. again, hope they come back to this sometime but it's probably done all it needs to story-wise by establishing pre-Impossible Astronaut that the baddies can time travel

Who is Madam Kovarian, since by the end of the episode The Silence was a race again

don't like the implication that the Silence are just a race (but if so they're totally Voord, look at their elongated heads and fondness for formal dress), but it's def established that Kovarian was a deluded Silence patsy

What happens between A Good Man Goes To War and Let's Kill Hitler

Dr drops R&A back home so they're not travelling with PTSD, searches unsuccessfully for Melody himself. even if this wasn't totally implicit in Hitler, the mini-prelude episode says so

Where the Doctor goes to in Let's Kill Hitler after being poisoned that needs the 'wedding suit'

again, hope this is a set-up for some Moffat time-rompery, but it doesn't need to be - he doesn't actually have that much time offscreen to get up to adventures, and it could just be that he fancied getting done up to act more impressive.

tribe of bum, amirite

shite

Didn't find this worse than previous finales but I didn't like that the Tesselected Doctor seemed to be able to act just like the Doctor whereas other Tesselected ppl were more solemn and robot-like (I'm assuming that as the Tesselected Doctor's body burned on the lake everyone inside just beamed out to the mothership or escaped via TARDIS).

Or why the Doctor tells River she probably won't remember shooting him and her acting like she did at the picnic etc. but then to go "of course not" after shooting at herself. If she remembers everything then her slapping him in that diner and saying "this is cold, even for you..." would be major hypocrisy!

Seems like Silences said to each other "We found this still point in time but it would just look way cooler if she actually hides in the lake itself so let's use a spacesuit..." So why did they need to put the child in it again?

Whatever hijacked the TARDIS in TBB, it didn't really sound like a Silence and it's still not clear why they were doing it or how.

"Doctor who?" being a thing at least justifies its utterance by both the Doctor and that woman in TIA's opening scene more but the idea that this is something that must never be answered (and won't be for another year or whatever) is lame and made me have to read about the bloody Cartmel Masterplan again.

The episode title's shittiness totally confirmed within. What is the relevance of the wedding?

Is there still a time loop fuck up re Amy & Rory in Colchester (after TIA) a day before Utah/TIA?

Apart from all that I dug it :)

TIME BABBY

Oh wait, that was just River as a kid or something, wasn't it?

Oh yeah and please stop having clock or watch hands stuck as if that were any indication at all that time itself as perceived by living things was fuxxored rather than, y'know, just the clock being broken and not actually controlled by some external timey-wimey (hopefully the only time i will write that) force. Surely much better ways to do this than go 'it's always the same time of day' but still actually have night and day (as Churchill acknowledged) or Christmas (as the usual rubbish BBC self-plugging TV footage mentioned) and so on.

Having Amy and Rory in Closing Time added some unnecessary complications, but I don't think it's actually much of a problem in terms of timeline: The Doctor has gone back to see Craig before the events of the season, so this is indeed Amy & Rory in their honeymoon period, living at home while the Doctor cavorts through time and space. He's haunted by seeing them before all this happened. Bringing the perfume in was probably just a gag, but it does complicate things a bit more, continuity wise. Agree it would have been simpler had they left them out of the episode.

It's pretty obvious to me that Moffatt deliberately painted himself into a corner at the start of the series and didn't have a clue how he was going to resolve it - exhibit A being that Canton was invited to the death (as opposed to, y'know, Captain Jack or Martha or any one of a number of previous companions) and then completely forgotten about and not mentioned by the finale.

I actually like the resolution more now I think about it - when River was giving her gushing speech I thought everything was set up for some kind of dreadful 'The Doctor triumphs through the power of the universe's love' resolution like the end of the Martha season (still the worst nu-Who finale) and steering away from that was a decent misdirect.

Mostly a bit annoyed because 'everything in time and space happening at once' was too good a concept to be thrown away as a mere backdrop.

Also I don't really buy the Doctor-River relationship by now. Killing the Doctor would be relatively early in River's timeline and I'm not sure whether this bottomless well of love that would make it worth sacrificing all of time and space was supposed to come from. It felt like Moffatt was writing with a later River in mind.

Also there just isn't really any on-screen chemistry between Smith and Kingston in a way there is between Smith and Karen Gillan/Arthur Darvill.

Or they just couldn't afford to pay Canton for a third appearance... Plotwise, however, I don't he really needed to return in this ep. He did his bit by providing petrol and leading them back to 1969. Presumably the Doctor paid him a visit at some point to ask him to take part in the staged event, but we don't need to be shown everything. Canton's part in the Doctor's 1969 escape has already established that he's willing to go along with the Doctor's bonkers plans.

Hated this but look forward to the inevitable KPunk post reading the 'everything in time and space happening at once' world as dramatic allegory of the atemporal anachronesis of zombie-capitalist cultural exhaustion.

why would 11th Doctor invite past companions to his death when none of them have met them (except Sarah Jane...in one of the other episodes where HE DIED, ugh)? amy, rory and river are the only people who have a big load of happy memories with this particular doctor.

would've been nice to see Canton in Area 52 or whatever but iirc he did say they wouldn't see him again or something.

'everything at once' is far too difficult to depict and i'd rather they just didn't bother trying really. it doesn't actually explain why steam trains are running thru the gherkin anyway (yes i know it's fun).

i know the martha finale (as Matt sed) is largely frowned on by a majority - but I still rep for it. I like the sheer preposterousness of flyingmagicspacejesus Doctor via psychic-world-network thing, and I'd have that time paradox resolution over this one.

(also Rogue Traders, in the penultimate ep)

Canton is invited to the death to tell the companion kru about the boat and wood and petrol or whatnot, idk why he needs more explanation

Didn't find this worse than previous finales but I didn't like that the Tesselected Doctor seemed to be able to act just like the Doctor whereas other Tesselected ppl were more solemn and robot-like (I'm assuming that as the Tesselected Doctor's body burned on the lake everyone inside just beamed out to the mothership or escaped via TARDIS).

I'm assuming they let the doctor drive so it seemed more natural?

^^^

I'm not sure where the timeline stuff finished up. The last couple of scenes with River and Amy in the garden and stuff, they felt like they followed directly on from the Doctor's death scene - but that would mean this whole season never happened so that's obviously not the case. So does it happen after Amy and Rory got dropped off after The God Complex? It has to really, but then how did amy find out the Doctor finally died (and why was she even that sad about it when she knew about it already really)(and what about her remembering herself killing eyepatch lady, *when* exactly did she remember herself doing that, cos it seems it "happened" (ie didn't happen) at the moment of his death but was the amy we see just sat at home at that point (after being dropped off), then was suddenly full of a memory of something that didn't even happen anyway)? Just doesn't quite sit (and sure, lots of the episode didn't quite sit but this is the only bit I can be arsed worrying about because it's kind of important to how the story picks up from here on).

Overall yeah it was pretty shit but I didn't honestly expect it not to be (yeah I watched lost to the end too so will probably never expect anything like this to be non-shit ever again) so I wasn't hugely disappointed, more just o_o

Brigadier bit was almost really sweet except it kind of got brushed over too quickly cos blue-head-in-a-box wouldn't shut it.

Man in a blue box vs Blue man in a box. With the entertainment chip embedded he's bigger on the inside, you know.

I'm not sure where the timeline stuff finished up. The last couple of scenes with River and Amy in the garden and stuff, they felt like they followed directly on from the Doctor's death scene - but that would mean this whole season never happened so that's obviously not the case

Thought that it was shortly after his death, but that would mean that Amy's plastic and pregnant again and no one know who River is. Am not going to try to analyse it until it makes sense though, I think the one and only explanation for any of this series is "they didn't think it through".

No this is the rory and amy that were dropped off with the penis car. The Rory and Amy at Lake silence go and have the adventures of this series. Not sure how long ago they were dropped offf but Long enough for Amy to launch her own line of cosmetics and be in Colchester the day before the Doctor's death, but presumably not before Amy was last whisked away from Ledworth so as not to cross timelines (Amy is clearly showing a previously unrecognised talent for being shit hot at marketing).

RIver Song presumably barrels up sometime, let's say september 2011 straight from the forest with the weeping angels and tells mum the Dcotor is still alive.

the only way the colchester/ledworth/whichPondsarethese? works is by pretending

a) that the scene in the department never took place at all
b) that the scene took place in 2012 at the very least or later
c) that Amy and Rory left Ledworth months and months before which they couldn't have because River was conceived in the Tardis and therefore Amy would have been showing by the time they got to Utah (unless the Silence kidnapped her long before that, but then... do you see where this going? And this is just ONE small discrepancy in the whole season. Blah.)

I'm going with the first option, because it's the least complicated.

din't hate that finale overall though - just very, very unsatisfied. the Silence (race or religious order) are awesome villains that could have been used better in a superior story.

bah need to sleep, so many goddamn typos

- whichpondsarethese? conundrum*
- department store*
- do you see where this is* going?

http://www.shropshirestar.com/entertainment/2011/10/03/doctor-who-the-wedding-of-river-song-review/

I didn't feel as negatively about this as the reviewer but there is a lot of OTM in this review. OTOH, the comment made me lol.