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

exactlyyyyyyyyyy

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llbnv0bfkN1qe7olko1_500.jpg

my thought was that the Great Intelligence was the same creature as in the Abominable Snowmen...

This was heavily underlined with the last Vastra/Jenny exchange, if you'd missed the lunchbox lampshade earlier.

Continuity problem though - he says the lunchbox is from 67, and the line the Web Of Fear is on doesn't open until 68. UNIT dating be dawned, Web of Fear is in 1975 (40 years after The Abominable Snowman from the dialogue).

I also thought (hoped?) that her dying every story despite best efforts at saving would be a neat plot point, and then I thought, well, Rory's already done that, and I don't really need any more excuses for emo Doctor every episode.

Quite liked the special but reserve the right to complain about everything in it later in the series when I'm sick of whichever bits turn out to be the new recurring tropey-wopey thing.

haha v true

Continuity problem though - he says the lunchbox is from 67, and the line the Web Of Fear is on doesn't open until 68.

dude it could just get the IDEA of using the underground from the map, and then look at a new one once it actually comes back and invades the tunnels, I'm sure there'd be one on the wall

this was pretty cool, although I am already tired of the mysteriously dying companion

well, not tired of her personality, just tired of her dying

it's not the same when it isn't Rory

Remember when Moffatt was the writer who didn't want to kill anyone at all in any of his episodes? And now he's killed all his companions off at least twice. Actually maybe Amy's only died once but there are enough deed Rorys to skew that anyway.

He's killed Amy twice at least; he had Rory shoot her and she was basically dead, plus there was old middle-aged Amy who went down in a blaze of glory after pushing the crew into the TARDIS and buying them time to escape. Oh, and also he zapped her back in time where she died of old age.

He also killed River in her very first story, lol.

actually I guess he didn't write "The Girl Who Waited" but I still think it counts since he's show runner

I didn't get the lunchbox ref, but my knowledge of classic Who is in bits and pieces. (xposts)

It's an Easter egg, not important to this episode in any way

(a great and fun Easter egg though!)

it was a callback to a couple of classic but lost 2nd Doctor stories

Speaking of deaths (with apologies if it's already been posted itt):
http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2012/359/c/5/the_gallifreycrumb_tinies_by_eattoast-d5p4bnf.jpg

(image linked bcz huge, I hope)

Loved Clara's pluck and sass, as well as the lulzy Strax/ Doctor exchanges, but the climax and the stuff immediately leading up to it were really tiring.

I liked the general re-invention, the Doctor as Scrooge and the stairs to the stairs to the TARDIS, made very effective by seeing it through Clara's eyes.

The TDKR bow-tie moment was great, as was "I only know who" - the line about souffles would have been a bit less awkwardly hit-them-over-the-head if it had been after the key handover though.

Well, I guess now all her incarnations are geniuses but that alone should have been enough really.

This Clara wasn't a genius, she just had the wandering spirit (which is basically the only requirement).

Though, right, I feel I kind of missed the reason why Clara handed in her dish washer job to go back to being a Governess (or rather the reverse) - I briefly thought there might be some catburglar 'casing the joint' thing going on, but no, nothing.

I assumed the landlord was family or an old mate and she was doing him a favour.

Ice-animated revenant, bloody "Winter is coming" thrice -- where are the direwolves?

Kill Jester.

"Ice-animated revenant, bloody "Winter is coming" thrice -- where are the direwolves?"

Ennit, spent half the episode waiting for someone to tell The Doctor that he was as useless as nipples on a breastplate.

Clara is dating Robb Stark irl.

!

that is a nice convergence

Hopefully the wedding will not be red.

i really hope Clara dies in every episode? which sounds kind of weird, as I actually liked the character, but the idea of a companion who the doctor comes to find in a bunch of different times, and who he can never save (but then maybe she... saves herself??) is kind of nifty.

Yes! I thought this as well. Enjoyed this episode - the ladder into nowhere & spiral staircase to a cloud had a (for me necessary) touch of the fairy tale, the Dickensian type of the man or woman who hardens their heart against emotion to avoid pain (in this case two men who do this), an impertinent assistant who has the smarts to keep up with the Doctor (scene on the rooftop with the umbrella), punch and judy (rather shoehorned in, but like I care).

Too many emotions! Definitely. But this has become something in nuwho that I've just learned to put up with by and large. New/old credit sequence theme amazing. Chill down the spine.

the ladder into nowhere & spiral staircase to a cloud had a (for me necessary) touch of the fairy tale

This is probably the single thing that Moffatt is best at. He's at his best when he is obviously pitching a scene straight at kids, whether fairy tale or screaming horror.

Yep, wd definitely agree with that. It's also a handicap for him - he loves establishing the uncanny or unheimlich, and is great at it, but the introduction of science, often introduced late as being part of the solution, is often so hurried and chaotic as to require a complete change of mood.

(Think this episode did reasonably well in that respect).

There were similar difficulties in yoking the two together in The Hound of the Baskervilles Sherlock episode.

Blink is a wonderful exception in this respect.

It's a similar problem to the deductive detective story - as with Blink the only deductive story I know that is a true solution of both the uncanny and the rational is Chesterton's The Honour of Israel Gow.

Baskervilles was indeed v poor at that but it's Gatiss

(whose Who track record on this was 100% atrocious until Night Terrors, wherein at least he handwaved with a slight flourish)

Nightshade was pretty good

'Yep, wd definitely agree with that. It's also a handicap for him - he loves establishing the uncanny or unheimlich, and is great at it, but the introduction of science, often introduced late as being part of the solution, is often so hurried and chaotic as to require a complete change of mood.'

Am finding this really predictable now too - 'ancient mystical magical thing is actually aliens/science'.

In my opinion it worked properly once and once only, in Quatermass and the Pit, (the original TV series by Nigel Kneale, which I've decided *is* Doctor Who more or less give or take) where tea-leaves, demons, ghosts, witches and all were simply manifestations of the evil Martian intelligence in the crashed prehistoric spaceship. It was a slow reveal and then the use of Blitz footage gives it reality.

The whole idea just has diminishing returns, Pyramids of Mars notwithstanding, and I remember thinking, as a kid (so this isn't just the thing where adults whinge about goings on in a kid's TV show) - 'So Dracula is actually a scientist, so mummies are actually robots, so dragons are dinosaurs?' and how this populates all of world mythology with a stupidly large number of secret aliens running around.

It's like ... there's not even any genuine urge to deconstruct superstition anymore, it's just a cliche. As if they're afraid to just have something dark, ancient and evil that can't be explained. And there's a whiff of Richard Dawkins about it too, and Dr Who ought to be far, far from him, I feel, anyway

* where tea-leaves, demons, ghosts, witches and all of human history and evolution

Nightshade was pretty good

yeah I meant TV, even the first The Time Travellers is miles better than any of his legit episodes

His Dickens episode was decent.

http://tybe.blogspot.com/2012/12/doctor-who-christmas-special-snowmen.html

Doh.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/897fa46855862dbea02b3f7c90278d0f/tumblr_mfq95e0WcD1qbypg1o1_500.jpg

the only deductive story I know that is a true solution of both the uncanny and the rational is Chesterton's The Honour of Israel Gow.

Read this on the tube today after mention here. Thanks! Quality. Couldn't help re-fashioning it in my head as campy Hammer movie. The potatoes, the potatoes

Campy horror movie fits - all that opening scene with the lowering sky and brooding Scottish castle. The apparent spectacular evil of that which is only venial, like a monstrous shadow cast by an insect on a light bulb, is part of the story's success I think. More commonly, for me anyway, the rational explanation of the supernatural has a touch of the let down about it, no matter how necessary in a detective story/Dr Who. Incidentally, another story, well novel, that plies a similar area is John Dickson Carr's MR James detective/ghost story The Burning Court. There's a touch of the Moffat about JDC at times, in that the surprising effects which you're hooked in by are frequently, if understandably, 'explained' with egregious fudge. (There's a great one at the beginning of TBC where the narrator comes across a picture of a woman in a history book, executed 200 years before at the Burning Courts of Paris. It is a picture of the woman he is about to marry.) The novel's worth reading in part because of the way JDC uses genre legerdemain to waltz with the reader. With Moffat I sometimes get the impression of a juvenile doing rapid kung-fu moves at a distance as a prelude to a fight. A great deal of exciting motion but not much that's convincing. He could do with some of the graceful romance and charm he gets to his fairy stories injecting some simplicity into the science - with the story arcs especially the solution is either to complicatie beyond comprehension ('well I suppose that might be how it worked, my brain hurts') or chuck in a singularity joker ('I just flew down to the corner shop why because a black hole at the end of the universe up my ass'). Paradoxically the necessity of putting all that caviling to one side means I will tolerate almost anything in nu-who apart from Murray Gold and RTD finales. Speaking of which, I do like Moffat's tendency to go quiet and small-scale (that S2? finale with the solitary dalek) rather than the 'daleks, on the hill, fahsands of 'em' you got with RTD.

Baskervilles was indeed v poor at that but it's Gatiss

ah, ok, thanks sic.

Yeah, I think that solitary dalek ep is one of Moffatt's best. But god

...(cont) those RTD finales just kept getting worse and worse.

(that S2? finale with the solitary dalek)

S5, The Big Bang

Thanks sic, think I did a Moffat-style post RTD reset there.

Finally watched this.

Clara/Oswin is smug & boring to me. I'd much rather the episode had revolved around Madame Vastra and Jenny.

― this will surprise many (Nicole), Wednesday, December 26, 2012 4:28 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I actually didn't mind Clara/Oswin, but yes, I would vastly prefer Vastra & Jenny.

Ultimately I liked this episode, some very funny bits, but man, STOP with the "human emotions are the only thing that can defeat the enemy" storylines already.

I kind of wanted them to resolve everything by letting Strax blow everything up

Yeah, it would've been great if with all that early talk about grenades, a grenade finally appeared.

run of episodes featuring sontaran(s) that bore the absolute shit out of me remains unbroken

The Sontarian was the best thing about it!

I agree

I can see not liking AGMGTW bcz it's too busy, but not bcz it's too boring