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

^ makes no sense to me either. maybe sic can shed some light.

I thought the point was not so much 'the power of lurrrrrve' as 'the power of imagination', which is a bit cleverer no?

still weird that one person's imaginary mum would send an established oppressive force packing. they all just left.

It's not weird if it was Bill's consent that allowed the monks in, so she used constructed memories to push them out. Foreshadowed in the earlier cup of tea at table scene.

yeah but… they all just left

pissweak as invading forces go

Enjoyed a lot of this episode, but it had serious problems. The Doctor putting Bill through emotional trauma in that unjustified way really stank. And once the episode gets past that, it ignores the Doctor making propaganda videos for six months.

I liked the flashes of the Monks to represent the brainwashing. Too bad the payoff of Bill's message sucked.

I assume the mention of "fake news" was ADR.

^ yes, it was delivered with all characters’ backs to the camera. That was one of the good bits though.

Up until now, I’ve been thinking of Whithouse as having every second episode being okay, alternating with utter duds – right down to his two-parter last year, which squandered a promising set-up and one of the best cliff-hangers in Who history with a limp fish, damp squib, and soggy ghost of a follow-up.

This ep threw that out, and I’ll probably remove any benefit-of-the-doubt I gave his previous eps on rewatch. “They made it untrackable, so I tracked it with this tracker!” The monks not only have no motivation revealed, they literally don’t have any lines. The Doctor tricking Bill with regeneration energy – ‘’too much?” is not only vicious and callous, but doesn’t make any sense as she has no idea what regeneration or ‘regen energy’ is. The Doctor DEFINITELY acted as a collaborator and facilitator of the fascist regime for six months, just in CASE Bill wasn’t secretly a rebel in her own secret thoughts. I’m not sure Missy actually had a chance to be told about what was going on in any way? Unless the line about the door is meant to imply she’s sneaking out? Why was gun bloke using a Walkman with a cassette? Had they all brought tape walkmens? If so, did Bill have to record her message onto each one’s built-in mic at 90 minutes a go? If so, why was it so studio-clear? What if one of them had a playback-only Walkman, like the majority of all sold? There are only 12 monks worldwide? Do they have more than one pyramid, or did the one just move to London? Bristol? after Bill invited them? If the pyramids fly, rather than materialising, why did nobody see it land the first time?

I thought the point was not so much 'the power of lurrrrrve' as 'the power of imagination', which is a bit cleverer no?

It was at least set up, but still played as yet another bloody power of love ending.

I thought it did a good job of portraying a dystopia effectively within the time and budget constraints of one episode, and a had a solidly good and controversial message (if we remember it's for kids) about bad people making you think it has to be this way.

Yeah this was good too.

Random question for Who nerds: whatever happened to Paul Cornell? How come the guy responsible for the two best Nu-Who episodes never got asked back?

Two best my steaming arse: don’t break time not because of paradoxes, but bcz space dragons will appear and bite you. And a) the book of Human Nature was 1000x better and b) RTD claims he wrote most of the screen version.

That said Cornell is obv one of the best and most important Who writers ever and I wish he had come back in the Moffatt era, but: at various times he has either been busy with his American superhero writing career taking off, and seizing all those opportunities; or had his own pilot under development; or mor recently returned to Who in comics instead with IDW’s The Girl Who Watched Dr Who (excellent), Titan’s Four Doctors miniseries (utterly terrible), and the Third Doctor mini just this year (delightful on most levels). He has quit writing anything he doesn’t own going forward though, so that’s yer lot. (I guess he can still write Benny if the mood strikes.)

The Doctor DEFINITELY acted as a collaborator and facilitator of the fascist regime for six months

I didn't mind this - it felt like one of those Moffat-y dangling threads that gets resolved in the finale. But we'll see. Thought the episode was FUN enough that I didn't mind the very sloppy plotting (and ending).

Interesting re: Cornell. I wasn't talking about the space dragons episode but Human Nature as a two-parter. If that was mostly RTD, where was that version of him hiding for four seasons?

...I'd probably read the comics but find the art too off-puttingly awful.

The Doctor tricking Bill with regeneration energy – ‘’too much?” is not only vicious and callous, but doesn’t make any sense as she has no idea what regeneration or ‘regen energy’ is.

Yeah this was my top nitpick in terms of visual and emotional storytelling. She didn't get a chance to say "WTF WAS THAT?"

Perfect opportunity for an "I'll explain later!"

"You'll find out soon enough!"

Perfect opportunity for an "I'll explain later!"

Doesn't work if she's meant to THINK HE'S DYING BECAUSE OF THE golden Jesusy glow at the time

Interesting...If that was mostly RTD, where was that version of him hiding for four seasons?

Well, he was working off Cornell's original novel and screenplay. Just adding dumb and bad shit to it.

...I'd probably read the comics but find the art too off-puttingly awful.

Art on the Girl Who Watched gets the job done (it's the bloke he did Knight & Squire with), art on Four Doctors is far worse than the script, art on the Third Doctor mini is occasionally obv copied from old promo photos, but really does work at capturing a Pertwee era with no budget restrictions.

I enjoyed the performances in this but the story was really "The Doctor and Bill are our heroes so let's let them off the hook for the cascading reprehensible shit they've done for the six-month interim between the cliffhanger episode and the resolution, did you all catch the cassette player? #GenX"

IMO the weakest of the season by a long shot. Still love Pearl Mackie, though.

It would have been a much stronger story had the Doctor actually been compromised by the Monks and Bill and Nardole needed to break him out of it to help them boot the Monks out, OR if they had actually done the regeneration midseason and the Bill/Doctor confrontation was Capaldi's exit, with the confusion around the regeneration effectively shielding the Doctor's mind from the Monks, leading to a situation where the more he stabilizes, the more susceptible he is to their control, so it's a countdown to getting an erratic, destabilized Doctor into a position where can get rid of the Monks before he shakes off the regeneration confusion and falls back under their thrall.

Hell, they could have gone all fanservicy and had Rose pop in from an alternate dimension to be a proxy Doctor and I would have been less irritated storywise.

I think I want to see DJP's version instead. Yeah the more I read on here the more the problems with the ep stand out.

The trouble with the Monks having no motivation is they're so painstaking and clever about their invasion plan - running a simulation for millions of years, they're hinted at being more extra-dimensional than extra-terrestrial, allusions to Gnosticism. So we're left thinking their desire to invade the earth must have some sort of significance if they're not just your average hungry octopodes. Unless Missy created them and they're part of a plan?

ALSO if they really wanted to hit a reset button, the Monks could have been warping reality as opposed to just influencing everyone via mind control and breaking their grip on Earth could have just rolled everything back to right after Bill consented to them; that would have allowed them to regenerate the Doctor, have the new, unstable one recognize what was going on and sacrifice himself to save the day, effectively undoing his creation and everything that happened to everyone in that 6 month period, giving a better explanation for why no one really remembered the invasion and leaving only the Doctor and Missy with the ability to work out what actually happened and Bill and Nardole feeling like something is off due to their proximity to the resolution but never actually having experienced the events after the invasion. (Perhaps the resolution creates feedback that zaps all of the Monks once everything is unwound, so they basically go from menacing Bill to falling over dead and no one at the time really knows why.

Capaldi gets some time off, we get a fun what-if story, the reset at the end makes more narrative sense, and we get a preview of what things may be like once Capaldi actually goes away; in fact, this would be an interesting and different way to introduce the new Doctor to everyone and build some more anticipation to his(her?) arrival.

god dammit I don't want to fall back into a fanfic hole and that seems to be where I'm headed

Again, would rather watch this version. I think maybe they should get in some writers who've done tight plotting before - maybe not in sci fi or genre, maybe people from thriller or comedy background

I'm reasonably certain that no era of Doctor Who will ever preview a Doctor's incarnation on television before his regeneration so as to not step on the toes of the actor currently in the part or the expectations of the audience. (It can also backfire horribly; if everyone decides the new guy is the worst, you have an automatic millstone around the series' neck for the next season before it even begins.)

Well except for the Capaldi eyebrows in the 50th anniversary ep.

I thought about that, but there was no real interaction with other characters so you didn't have any sense of what the character was like/all about aside from having legendary eyebrows. I'm talking about a full-on preview of what the next Doctor will be like before the current Doctor's tenure ends with the new Doctor taking the lead in the story (and afaik because I haven't really been paying much attention, no official announcement of the next Doctor has been made so it's not like the public has been primed to look for a specific actor/actress to take the part yet).

The closest the show is ever going to get to what I'm talking about will be stories like The Next Doctor, IMO.

I was enjoying it up till the fake out revelation (though I feel like they've done the 'alternate reality where the villains have won' episode three or four times already), everything after that was a stinky turdy anticlimax.

I think I might need a break from Doctor Who. Even the good episodes don't really excite me at the moment.

Hmmm

Do not like steampunk. I could not get past this for this episode sadly.

Some alright bits in it. Bill great as usual. Couldn't help but feel they'd misused the Ice Warriors really, and all that threatening, Lovecraftian dead rock/nameless city/reptile monsters underground etc

I am a big fan of Mark Gatiss' movie geekery, but it should be saved for BBC4 docs, not put into Bill's mouth for no reason.

Also got a vibe of "I have CAREFULLY studied Victorian-era vocab" from the writing though perhaps that's just me as a non-brit being less acquainted.

Enjoyed this - Alpha Centauri cyclops alien voice at the end was wtf hilarious.

They didn't explain why the TARDIS did a runner right? Presumably some kind of paradoxy Missy trick.

No, I don't recall that being mentioned at all. Also, what was all that 'are you all right?' at the end? I couldn't parse it and the scene just died there.

Ha had no idea :

Blast from the past: Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat and Peter Capaldi on the return of Alpha Centauri!#DoctorWho pic.twitter.com/0LrtrYVggC

— Doctor Who Official (@bbcdoctorwho) June 11, 2017

hah that's great

i quite enjoyed that ep! tbh I was distracted by how the Empress looked a bit like Predator tho

So, predictably this was yet another mediocre Mark Gatiss episode. It seemed they could've gotten something cool out of these themes, like the idea of the Victorian army being so chauvinistic they honestly believe Mars belongs to them too, but everything here was so perfunctory, so uninspired. Just soldiers and rubber aliens shooting each other in a boring cave set, with the Do ctor shouting at everyone. I really don't understand why they keep letting Gatiss write episodes for the series, when nothing he has done for it has been any good?

an uninspired but OK episode.

i liked how they had one guy being all "can't wait to get home!" and he lives.

Huh? If you're talking about the black soldier who showed the other guy the photo of his fiancé waiting back home, the Ice Warriors did kill him later. (As per the cliché of what happens to anyone who shows a picture of his family in a war story.)

oh really? missed that bit.

Was that death by Ice Warrior effect new? Looked like the soldier got reduced to something that folded inside clothing like you fold a shirt or something. Don't remember seeing that before. But not sure when I've seen more than one Ice Warrior at a time remotely recently. & the solo one on the Russian sub was Matt Smith wasn't it?

Were they just firing a bundle of clothing etc representing a dead soldier out of a tshirt cannon or something.
Just couldn't see what the Ice Warrior weapon was supposed to be doing to a human to have that effect. Didn't see anything resembling a body in it.

Also, while I know Dr. Who is hardly hard sci-fi, I wish they could've at least come up with some justification why Mars in this episode had Earth-like gravity, not the lower gravity it should. It looked like they just forgot about that.

And it was never even explained why the Ice Warriors had gone into hibernation? Based on what the Queen says, Mars still had an atmosphere when they went to sleep, so what was the point of it?

There was a war, the Ice Warriors went into hibernation to regroup, they overslept and the planet died underneath them. That seems to be what the episode was going for, anyway.

As soon as I heard the voice answering the distress beacon, I went "oh my god, it's Alpha Centauri"

colonialism overextending its grasp to mars is an interesting idea but this was just kinda... dull

Gatiss has been quoted as saying he was not keen to cast a black man as a Victorian British soldier due to the perceived 'unlikeliness', in this show of shows, and seems to have even protested it until it turned out there were records to indicate a precedent. This has come from the Telegraph though so not entirely reliable.

I was incredibly annoyed that the black soldier was sacrificed by the dickhead captain.

Yeah, if they decided to have a black man as a soldier because there was historical prececent, did they really have to make him the only sympathetic character who dies in the episode? Also, even though Victorian attitudes regarding women were addressed, none of the white soldiers seemed to display any racism towards that soldier or Bill, which seems incredibly unlikely. (And it's not like the show isn't afraid to show us racism of the olden times, as we saw in "Thin Ice".)

It seems like Gatiss coul

...it seems like easily could've easily looked into the theme of racism and othering, making the black soldier and Bill sympathise to with the Ice Warriors, because they're both alien to the Victorian white male. But this episode was really a prime example of a story that has many potentially interesting ideas but refuses to develop them in a satisfying way.

That is just as facile as what we got; it was much more interesting to have Godsacre as a deserter finding his courage against his oily, self-interested second-in-command while the black soldier was just a soldier. Also, said black soldier getting used as a literal human shield for Catchlove so I'm not sure how much more racism you were looking for.

But not sure when I've seen more than one Ice Warrior at a time remotely recently.

It was 43 years, 6 weeks and 2 days since the last episode with more than one Ice Warrior in it.

that's not how the song goes

<3

It's been 43 years, 6 weeks and 5 days since you took your giant green genderqueer penis wearing a cape away.

ah ah-ah ah ahhhhhhhhh