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

sounds like someone was pining for the original format and started a successful rumor

the Beeb have made "blockbuster movie" style poster images for each of the five new eps, if by "blockbuster movie poster" you mean 'knocked up cheaply in Photoshop in five minutes by a work-experience kid'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/galleries/p00xzhxb

And from the rumors I've been reading online, the 50th anniversary keeps sounding more and more dismal...

I don't want to 'spoil' anything for anyone so I won't go into detail. Well that and the fact that online rumors often turn out to be completely false.

I just wish we were getting a full series in 2013, but from all I can see it seems we're only getting the other 8 eps of this one.

The next 8* will be early in the year; at the moment it looks like a cluster of 2009-style specials around the anniversary (not counting Gatiss' Sydney & Verity docudrama), and Moffatt and Smith are signed for a full series in 2014. All this could change, of course.

*apart from the Christmas special

Oh, good, that's more like it then!

Someone else has spotted this:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9v1aa2Fuk1qjp42oo1_500.jpg

Unfortunate re-use of a prop, or...?

well wait, one has gold arms and the other has black arms

totally different things

Does not not happen all the time though?

(Is that the last known shot of the Doctor's Daughter?)

It's not inconceivable that spaceships might have similarly designed chairs. Just a thought.

Commodity item in teh future.

Bottom one doesn't have gold arms, it's just the lighting.

Aye YMOF, that's the Doctor's Daughter leaving in her spaceship at the end of her episode.

Yes, does happen all the time and is more than likely just a coincidence - and of course Moffatt has no control over the production department even when they make horrific fuckups (cf Rory's hospital badge).

possibly it's more accurate to say they lit the bottom one specifically so it would have gold arms in a vain attempt to throw off canny Internet propspotters

well maybe "accurate" isn't the word I'm looking for

The premiere is kind of a throwback to the ye aulde Who, no? With all the walking back and forth through subterranean tunnels?

and all the old daleks

those tunnels were the BEST, I was so happy to see them

It's weird because when watching it I did wonder if the Doctors daughter would ever come back in it. But that just looks like a re-use of props.

was hoping for a second that the Doctor would take Dalek Souffle along with him, just for the lols of having a Dalek companion.

SPOILARS

this was a lovely episode. properly had me in stitches for the whole first half, and smith's performance was absolutely top notch. also loved the strong women, especially that moment where the doctor tried to stop nefertiti and she completely disregarded him.

Hard to believe this was a Chris Chibnall episode!

I loved this one. Adventures in space, nice characterisation, self-contained story. I realise I've failed at nu-Who fandom, but it's nice to enjoy a story in itself without giving a fuck for arc shit.

I await the avalanche of posts telling me about the clues I missed...

Mitchell and Webb were fucking dreadful, Hale and Pace all over again. But everything else was fun.

Yeah, good fun. The Doctor could've saved Solomon easily right? Vindictive!

That was DELIGHTFUL

Walder Frey had to die. xp

this was by a long shot the least awful Chibnall episode ever, I will actually watch it again sometime. but still too much of him playing Moffatt notes clunkily, like in the first Pond Life. Murray Gold needs to STFU, still.

And the thing looks as if teal & orange ate a big meal of teal & orange and then vomited teal & orange all over teal & orange. in the spaceship scenes there was barely another colour on screen at all, and the other scenes were desperately heavy with it. if you're setting your story in a variety of locations and timezones and whatnot, it might help to differentiate them somewhat, just a little?

other production design pissweakery: not knowing how to spell "progress"; thinking Minority Report screen-waving is so cool that a TEAM OF SPACE-MISSILE EXPERTS would not keep a COUNTDOWN OF THEIR SPACE-MISSILES PROGRESS in a prominent visible place on their monitors, instead needing ONE SPECIFIC TEAM MEMBER who knows where that window is hidden to have to bring it up to check any time they want to know; having a thousands-and-thousands-of-years-in-the-past spaceship use the same floaty-touch-screens as a thousands-of-years-in-the-future, instead of distinguishing them to look like a) a different species' tech, b) a different time's tech, c) tech designed to be sturdy and survive for milennia in transit.

and the ark design made no fucking sense either - there's no way that ship design could have taken off, so did they ferry each dinosaur up there one at a time? was theur transmat technology so powerful it could get hundreds and hundreds of dinosaurs OFF THE PLANET? if they were able to build an entire ark off-world, how were they not able to find a new planet to settle in SEVERAL MILENNIA? we've seen that the entire universe is chock-full of planets with Earth-like atmospheres.

not that the design was built for long-term travel anyway - any meteor shower would probably have hewed one of the pods off, let alone how many they ought to have encountered in these thousands of years

anyway nice to have the prob;ems not be mainly from the Chibster


that said, how many times have we seen the Doctor basically str8 murder dudes before? Tennant at end of Human Nature 2 debatable, Pertwee caps ppl in Day Of, did Baker ever actually kill anyone or did he just want to all the time?

liked Mark Williams, but why didn't he go to his son's wedding? - it's not like he would have been anywhere else, since he'd never travelled

basically str8 murder dudes before

oh there's programming the human race to kill Silents on sight

actually Tennant blew up or watched die heaps of baddies now I think abt it

Colin Baker shot a dude who fell into a vat of acid in "Vengeance On Varos" IIRC

yah I meant Baker comma C full stop obv, ta

annoyingly i can no longer turn off the part of my brain that is angry about the sexual politics of nu-who; and as such the ending stuff with Nefertiti and Ruper Graves pissed me off disproportionally, given his character was canonically a dick but heaven forfend we not pair off the spares (and because it just cemented her characterisation as 'fierce and proud but gagging for it', which: retch.)

also the mitchell and webb robots were super boring, and the fact that everything involved in the story had to be from earth was jarring. but the rest was pretty fun, and i liked the little bit of arc stuff where the doctor and tardis no longer exist on databases.

I really enjoyed this ep!

and i liked the little bit of arc stuff where the doctor and tardis no longer exist on databases.

this doesn't make sense though, Oswin only wiped Dalek databases. dalekbases.

(though I'm hugely in favour of ppl just HAPPENING to not know who he is, which I hope is the case here)

that was kinda silly and fun, plus it seemed to be filled with harry potter character actors.

this doesn't make sense though, Oswin only wiped Dalek databases. dalekbases.

it's almost as though this might become a plot point

yes maybe! but it would also be fine if they just have the Dr run into ppl who haven't heard of him from now on, instead of doing cross-episode connections

When Solomon googled the Doctor, the Doctor looked quite scared, genuinely unsure what would come up. There was palpable relief when it was blank. So I'm thinking this is a plot point. Is it possible that 'silence' has fallen with the question - Doctor who? - being asked by the Daleks? That silence being the Doctor's anonymity. Mind you, wasn't that question supposed to be asked at some the battle of Tramadol or whatever it's called?
Regardless of the big question, is it possible that the underlying arc is going to be the Doctor's anonymity and that having terrible consequences for him and/or the universe?
Kinda like the rationale for saving the Daleks at the end of Genesis; they helped make the universe what it was, bringing planets together etc. Without the Doctor being a thing, bad shit goes down.
It's like they're flipping the messianic Doctor idea of the past few seasons on its head in more ways than one. It means we can have more stand alone adventures, while setting up something big.
Who knows, this could be completely wrong, but it'll be fun to find out.

As for this ep, good fun, but messy. Excellent, really nasty old-school baddy, shame he couldn't have had more screen time. Good to see strong female characters, but as pointed out above, Nefertiti as sex-pot let things down. Mark Williams a good addition. Peep Show robots shit - obviously going for a Douglas Adams thing, but lacking the wit or bite. Adams would never have gone in for the cutesy shit either. The Doctor leaving Solomon to die was pretty harsh, but not unprecedented. I suppose it could be argued he made a utilitarian decision: if he couldn't take Solomon with him to be handed over to the authorities then there was no choice but to leave him to his fate. And he did commit genocide. On the other hand, the Doctor didn't really offer him mercy either. Again, maybe this will tie into the anonymous Doctor = bad consequences theme. If he can't be arrested, as it were, then he starts to make rash decisions which will ultimately come back to haunt him. After all, this Doctor has made rash and brutal decisions before, like blowing up a Cyberfleet to make a point. His darker side still lurks...

Yeah, the robots were terribly written and acted, and entirely unconvincing as the threat the whole plot hinged on. They looked quite cool though.

Easily the worst episode of Moffat's tenure. "We're riding a dinosaur! On a spaceship!". Having your characters shout about how wacky and bonkers and LOL RANDOM the episode is really doesn't do it any favours. Very poor.

there sure was an uneasy mix of genocide, camp and slapstick - but i enjoyed it immensely more than eg the hollow pastiche that gatiss wrote last season

Anyone know if any classic villains are being resurrected this year? (Were any last year come to think of it?)

there weren't.

cybermats!

the threat the whole plot hinged on = a) missiles and b) dinosaurs surely? I never got the impression that the robots were anything other than comic relief / the dopey will of Solomon.

Expected to hate this but it was quite an enjoyable romp. Agree with the absolute HATRED for the Peep Show robots, but also... why? Why were they like that? Solomon hardly seems like the sort of guy who would build that shit for comic relief.

Surprised that anyone is even discussing whether the Doctor's anonymity is going to be a major plot point... well, duh, of course it is.

Solomon said he got the robots cut price, hence their goofy patter. The idea of giving threatening evil robots camp C3PO-R2D2 banter isn't necessarily a bad one; the problem was in the execution. Thinking back to how Douglas Adams wrote robot henchmen in Doctor Who, he turned comic ideas into threatening monsters. The robot parrot in Pirate Planet was initially hilarious, but he was quick to establish how deadly it was. Its showdown with K9 is gold.

I never got the impression that the robots were anything other than comic relief / the dopey will of Solomon.

They were the only reason anyone did anything Solomon said!

Haven't watched it yet - was out in the country last night and will iPlayer it tomorrow - but this is the inverse of Earthshock, right?

Earthshock: spaceship crashes into Earth, dinosaurs are wiped out, annoying companion dies.
This one: spaceship doesn't crash into Earth, dinosaurs survive, annoying companion lives.

Also, doesn't it imply that the Silurians detected Adric's spaceship, filled their own spaceship with dinosaurs, launched it and put themselves in suspended animation in deep caves in Derbyshire in less time than The Doctor could tear his eyes off the TARDIS scanner and save his bestest E-Space mate.

well in fairness it was Adric, I'm sure if Nyssa had stayed behind they would have saved her

That was great. Stuffed without feeling overstuffed. Propelled forward by the sheer momentum of nonsense. Yes, the robots were rubbish, though.