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

starting to wish capaldi had been paired with bill right from the start - they are so good together

My only real complaint is the initial plot Maguffin. They actively make a set of six looking to rent together ("Bill, meet your new housemates") then complain it's impossible to find somewhere decent for six to rent together.

But this is the best TARDIS crew since the reboot, no question. The episodes haven't been perfect, but have been very entertaining.

Once again this felt rushed and badly executed, and it didn't make much sense. The interplay between the Doctor and Bill is what's keeping this series fresh.

it felt neither of those things. what an odd reaction!

That was good - unheimlich. Wood people. Old Hammer Horror landlord (in the right makeup and acting style to 'invoke' it spookily).

Attempts to depict 'students' on TV are always bullshit so I ignored that bit of it.

Might have preferred it if they'd gone straight for the 'Dryads' theme (this would have fit in better with Hammer Horror landlord man via The Great God Pan etc) rather than weird woodlice but you know what, I'm glad they didn't have to explain where the lice came from or what they were, name them, etc.

Another 'swarm' monster like the nanobots ... is this a theme?

Ah it was David Suchet! Of course it was.

My 'that was good' includes DavidM's 'rushed and badly executed' response, I should say. Like always the story moves too quickly with no build-up or savouring, none of the 'students' were real characters and all were too squeaky clean. The creaks and noises in the walls were a bit too obviously malevolent and hammy. Etc, etc. Thing is though they are in this series mostly resolving stories within one episode and that just seems to be the format, which is why it moves too quickly

Great atmospherics, but I agree the plot felt rushed and didn't make much sense. Like, if the magic lice could eat anyone at any time, why did the evil landlord always provide them with exactly 6 students and exactly 20 years apart? Wouldn't six students gone missing at the same time have caused a massive investigation, and wouldn't most of them given their parents etc. their new address, so the cops would quickly come knocking on the house door? Why didn't the landlord just kidnap some random people every now and then and bring them for the lice to eat, thus drawing much less suspicion on house?

Also, I haven't tried the binaural thing, but I do have surround speakers, and it seems they put more effort into the surround mix of this episode than they normally do. In the scene where the knocks were heard all around the house, they were also coming from every corner of my living room. Quite creepy and effective!

Like, if the magic lice could eat anyone at any time, why did the evil landlord always provide them with exactly 6 students and exactly 20 years apart?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C_LN4V4XcAEPF1K.jpg

(from former DWM writer Clayton Hickman on twitter)

sidebar: anyone watching Class, Whovian high school spinoff airing after on BBC America ? Quite enjoying it so far, the kids are all great. Not Misfits level great but at least v watchable & fun (& gross)

Watched the first two eps (shown back-to-back originally), my watching pals didn't bother going further. I made it about ten minutes into the third before noping out.

But the third one was the best of the season so far!

Felt a bit off that the 1977 and 1957 students didn't get to come back to life at the end (and surely if they had, the doc could've just dropped them home at the times they disappeared, solving the "why wasn't this house in the news already?" question) but yeah this was great fun and I think just the right level of creepy for kid viewers (which is something this show has got wrong too often over the last couple of years).

Wishing I'd avoided trailers for this season though, I'd have preferred to have no clues regarding the vault contents.

Presumably it takes 20 years to work through whatever the students are converted to so their constituent parts are used up.

I haven't seen any trailers or read online speculation, but after the latest episode's stinger, it's not very hard to guess, is it? We know it's a humanoid (since it can play the piano), and apparently it finds the death of six students hilarious (since it switches from "Für Elise" to a happy melody after hearing about that). The Doctor is in friendly terms with it, yet the it needs to be kept locked in a vault. It has to be some previously established character, because otherwise its identity wouldn't need to be kept a mystery. And in an earlier episode it knocked four times. So yeah, there's pretty much just one character who fits the bill.

(xmessage)

Yup: Adam

(on a more serious note, I enjoyed this episode a lot, plot holes and all)

I actually thought of Adam when I was trying to come up with other candidates than the obvious one. But surely he's such a loser he wouldn't need to be kept in a massive Gallifreyan vault?

I hope it's a sentient piano.

Of course it's quite possible Moffat is intentionally dropping these clues so we'll be surprised to learn it's someone else than the obvious suspect. But I have a hard time coming up with any other likely candidate?

(xmessage)

I haven't seen any of the pre-reboot episodes, was there a sentient piano among the Doctor's enemies there?

the tardis was a pipe organ once

Maybe in that Eastenders crossover.

they showed both Michelle Gomez (MIssy) and Simms as the Master in the trailers for the season so I don't even think it's mean to be a mystery? The only mystery is how she/they got there and what happened before this season started.

switches from "Für Elise" to a happy melody

pop goes the weasel #classicallytrained

Whatever it ends up being on the actual show it will, in my mind, now be a sentient piano.

Maybe it's the sentient cabbage Tom Baker wanted as a companion

Knock Knock was a snoozefest. Everything had been done before, none of the characters were interesting, mystery solution made no sense. In the bottom 10 for nu who episodes.

i agree, it's monster-of-the-week with a truckload of clearly disposable chums. the ending was fine and the premise was nice. not terrible, not bad, just eh.

Seems like this season they've decided to go down the well-trodden path, at least so far. If we look at what's happened in the individual episodes so far:

Episode 1: Introduces the new companion, who gets mixed up in some mystery in the present day. Solving it requires the Doctor's help, and the companion learns who the Doctor really is. This same formula has been used for the introductory episode of every companion in nu-Who, though I guess it's kinda hard to come up with other ways of doing it? Also, the villain is not evil per se, but simply following a preset code of behaviour, a theme Moffat clearly like, since he's used it many times ("The Doctor Dances", "The Girl in the Fireplace", "The Eleventh Hour", etc)

Episode 2 & 3: With every new companion so far, their second and third episode also follow a specific formula. One of them takes place in Europe's past, where a specific historical event or phenomenon is explained to have involved aliens. The other takes place in far future, where something bad or weird has happened to humanity. Again, they follow the same formula this season. The future episode also involves nanobot antagonists, which has also been done in the series a few times ("The Doctor Dances", "Asylum of the Daleks", maybe some other episodes too, IIRC?). While the past episode has a alien monster that's not really a monster, it's the human(s) who are using it who're the villains, which again has been done several times ("The Beast Below", "Planet of the Ood", etc). Though at least time they did put some effort into addressing the sort of blatant racism a black time traveller might face in past, unlike in "The Shakespeare Code".

Episode 4: Something from European mythology is revealed to really be aliens! Also done quite a few times, most recently in "In the Forest of the Night", which also involved tree spirits. Also, this one has the same "humans are the real monsters" moral as the previous episode, where the monster just wants to eat, and the real villain is the human who keeps feeding it.

So yeah, I guess it's refreshing that they seem to have cut down the continuity references and the intricate season-wide plotting in favour of stand-alone episodes, but it'd be nice if the individual plots were also a bit less formulaic.

So, in short, all the plots and all the monsters of the week have been repeats of things they've done before. I understand that it's hard not to repeat yourself when a series has gone on for so long, but at least Moffat's seasonal arcs in previous seasons provided us with some more unique and innovative scenarios. So I'm hoping something like that is still coming up with this season too.

Oh yeah, and of course the "villain is not evil but following a preset code of behaviour" theme is also repeated in the second episode.

That's hardly a theme, though, is it? You think every week the villain should be acting because 'welp, turns out this alien race is also pure evil because they are because they are evil evil aliens'?

I think it is possible that an alternative to "this thing happens a few times" is not necessarily "this other thing happens all the time".

That's hardly a theme, though, is it? You think every week the villain should be acting because 'welp, turns out this alien race is also pure evil because they are because they are evil evil aliens'?

Okay, maybe I worded this a bit vaguely, but what I meant is that the villains have a specific coded behaviour that's meant to be benign (or at least harmless), but through some malfunction or misinterpretation becomes dangerous. The nanobots in "The Doctor Dances" are meant to repair physical damage, but they don't know what a baseline human is like, so they repair it wrong. The automatons in "The Girl in the Fireplace" are meant to fix the spaceship, but they start using human body parts to do that. The sentient spaceship goo in "Pilot" is meant to follow orders on where it should go, and it misinterprets Bill telling Heather she shouldn't leave her as such an order. This is specifict theme that's been used a lot in Dr. Who, so when it happened again in the very next episode, combined with dangerous nanobots, which has also been a recurring theme, it just felt like they're covering too much familiar ground.

The show has always been unsure about whether evil things are evil or not, whether evil is real or not

Daleks are pure evil. But then there's lip-service to the idea that there's a suffering creature trapped inside them. Sometimes this matters, sometimes it's minimised away into nothing. Vast numbers of Daleks get blown up on the reg for laughs but simultaneously Dr Tom can't destroy them all when given the chance because that would be genocide. Which makes sense if talking about reformable human beings, but then there's no reason given anywhere in the series to think that Daleks are really reformable (maybe some gestures to this I seem to remember, but nothing that's going to change what Daleks are in the show).

There's a Clara episode that should throw most of what we know about Daleks out on their ear, but it can't so it won't.

That's the one. And another in Ecclestone with a Dalek in prison somewhere?

xps cardamon That's my point, it seems weird that 'trying to understand reasons for 'evil behaviour'' is seen as merely a theme that appears in a few episodes.
But it looks like Tuomas was specifically talking about errors in programming (or perhaps the programmer was evil).

We've also seen Silurians, Sonatarans and Zygons rehabilitated to an extent

Although this rehab of old monsters is one of the weakest points of the new series I think. They've never really managed to rehabilitate a monster in all its monstrousness; what's actually happened is, somewhere off-stage between the old and new series, these monsters have become more funny than threatening; so that the real work of conflict resolution (ffs am I really typing this into a dr who thread lol) doesn't actually happen in any of the narrative that the viewer is privy to

If I was a parent I'd feel better placed to say how much of the intended message gets through to the kids watching it. Obviously the point of it all, the reason why the show tries to personise monsters every so often, is to encourage kids to be more understanding to other kids they don't like, right?

The Silurians were never pure unmitigated evil; this was the main conflict in their initial appearance. The antagonism they show humanity in their subsequent appearances is a direct consequence of that initial encounter.

The Sontarans are a warrior race that solves everything through violent conflict. Their primary conflict is with the Rutans and all of their encounters with humanity are incidental to that central conflict; they aren't fighting humanity because they hate us and are evil, they are fighting us because we are in the way and that's how they know how to interact with things. (Strax is an oddity; he was sentenced by his people to be a nurse as a punishment, was picked up by the Doctor and removed from the other Sontarans and evolved into a very different type of Sontaran from what we normally see, although he did revert back to form in "The Name of the Doctor" after Jenny was erased from continuity.)

The rehabilitation of the Zygons happened on-screen; we know they were defeated in the conflict from "The Day of the Doctor" and that they were hiding on Earth as part of the resultant peace treaty. We also know that some of the radicalized members of this group hated this and wanted to reclaim glory for their species, which was the entire plot driver for "The Zygon Invasion"/"The Zygon Inversion".

I have as question that I think I already know the question to: Has there ever been an episode of Doctor Who where they go to a world where things seem really weird and messed up on the surface but in reality there's nothing secret or evil going on? I realize that there wouldn't be much pay off to an episode like that but it seems like a clever idea to use once or twice.

There's a Russell T Davies sanctioned Torchwood audio drama series (with most of the original cast) to be released by Big Finish in February, 2018.

Torchwood - Series 5: Aliens Among Us
http://www.cultbox.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/torch1.jpg

Has there ever been an episode of Doctor Who where they go to a world where things seem really weird and messed up on the surface but in reality there's nothing secret or evil going on?

(not quite but) SPOILERS for a forty-five-year-old piece of TV that many people may not have seen: the Pertwee story Curse Of Peladon gets some great mileage out of a diplomatic intrigue story with Ice Warriors in it by having the audience and characters assume the Ice Warriors are baddies and not just one of the alien races in the story (a sequel tries to pull the exact same trick again, to let's say, diminishing returns).

this story also struck a very early blow in favour of representation in Who by having one alien character be a giant talking penis who is a lady

Oh yeah Torchwood

Best of the season so far, doesn't hurt that it's anti-capitalist.

I missed the bit about how Bill doesn't die when the space zombies get her, though?

admittedly i've just got up and haven't seen it, but is this yet another base-under-siege we're-all-wearing-the-same-uniform episode?