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

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.

Shut up djp

DJP reads the Shropshire Star o_O

DJP reads Google hits for lols

am i the only one that liked this?

there are several positive reviews out there, too

I didn't hate it, I just didn't think it was an unqualified success; partially this is because I do not buy the Doctor as a romantic individual unless the TARDIS is involved but mostly because if the TARDIS helped shape River than the Doctor is carrying on with both the TARDIS and its daughter

Amy's reaction to it all was great tho

also wondering if River is going to have a child that gets sent back in time to Gallifrey that will grow up to be Susan (ans: no, shut up DJP)

I guess I just expected more plot points to be resolved in a more satisfying way, for me it just seemed flat and anticlimactic.

I think the theme of the Doctor + love + family duty was pretty consistent in the 2nd half of this season, and I'm glad to see all of those themes come together, in a (to me) appropriate way. sure, the many-interrelated-stories thing was a little sloppy, but i don't think it's more so than a lot of the individual eposides?

http://www.aoltv.com/2011/10/02/doctor-whos-wild-ride-ends-with-a-wedding-is-it-time-to-slow/

The more I think about 'Doctor Who,' the more I wonder about the British model of showrunning. In that mode, you get one supreme writer who farms out scripts to individuals (whose scripts are often rewritten by the head writer). There's no writers' room in which ideas get batted around by a group; there's no group taking a hard look at whether the show is repeating itself or falling into ruts. In the American model, with the majority of writers meeting regularly to debate where the season and the characters should go, in theory, there's a chance for a greater variety of ideas and for certain hobbyhorses to get ridden a little less frequently.

What you end up getting with the British model, in which one writer rules supreme, are shows that very much reflect the proclivities and interests of one person, and that can make for a more coherent vision, but it can also be dangerous, because that grand supremo's ideas don't get questioned nearly as much. If a writers' room is working right (and I don't claim that it always does), people will raise their hands and voice concerns about a particular set of moves or creative directions that tend to come up again and again. Having other writers around is a form of self-editing; it's probably tougher on the ego, but I think it's often better for the creative process.

I liked the Brigadier scene, but it doesn't make any sense, does it? He's a time-traveler - why can't he just hang up and call back "5 months ago" or whenever?

That pissed me off too. Timey wimey blah blah but can't jump back a bit to see his old mate.

But the only day to deal with that - when the actor is dead - is to have a clunky bit of exposition. Also, the Doctor can't go back on his own timestream, or something.

worth it to pay a sweet tribute to Courtney, stfu grumps imo

It's not that he couldn't jump back to see his mate, it's that he was suddenly faced with the mortality he'd been avoiding up to then.

yes matt otm too

The scene where the Doctor sees Amy and Rory in the department store and some kid comes up for their autograph.

Was it just me who thought it might have meant that the Doctor had crossed over to 'reality' and what he actually observed was Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill?

(of course, the kiddy getting the autograph might actually have been completely genuine)

It was just you, yeah. You can tell it wasn't reality because there was a cyber-rat running around.

Not Actual 'reality', no. A 'performance' of it. Kiddy 'interrupting' possibly also staged, possibly not.

so in your reality Gillan has devised a perfume line that is advertised with great billboards of her face?

This is a country in which every fucking no-mark who has ever been on Big Brother has done, so that's about the most plausible bit of this theory, tbh.

Was just going to say, yes.