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

no she did indeed recognise him as the raggedy doctor

the whole 'cracks' thing is surely just more of the 'rift' issues that enabled both Cybermen returning, Torchwood etc. it would be daft to try and make it a separate thing but this did seem to be hinted at (the Doctor not knowing why...at least he didn't say "oh yeah, that whole darkness thing").

When he said, by the duck pond, "this is too soon, I'm not ready, I'm not done yet", that was him quoting Tennant from the Christmas specials, no? Rewatched it last night (with a transfixed five year old this time), and it did seem like a lot of the tennantisms were more intentional than I'd maybe first assumed.

Liked the episode. Stupid question from probably not listening at the right moment: thought Amelia said she didn't have parents and lived with her aunt, but had a freshly carved apple from her mother?

(Got a bit tired of previous ongoing companion-family sagas, so quite like to think that the obligation to be back for "stuff" the next day means her own timeline will be avoided for the whole series, and then just whisk her back to get married in the last episode. While trying not to be 12 years late again, obv. Seems fairly unlikely, I realise...)

the whole 'cracks' thing is surely just more of the 'rift' issues that enabled both Cybermen returning, Torchwood etc. it would be daft to try and make it a separate thing but this did seem to be hinted at

I thought Moffatt wasn't going to include any of Rusty's stuff and focus on building his own universe, as it were?

xpost I think Amelia just said that was what her mother used to do because she didn't like apples either. Good line as well - 'I'll keep that for later', actually kept it for 12 years later, when he used it again.

On podcast with (ahem) Richard Bacon, Matt Smith alluded to a lot of setup in the first episode, so the overstuffage may well be part of that.

phwoaar

thought Amelia said she didn't have parents and lived with her aunt, but had a freshly carved apple from her mother?

think the implication was that she did have parents, we just don't know what happened to them yet. maybeeee they got zapped back into the past by weeping angels.

"Also, I loved loved love the use of the color red in the episode. There's a fire-engine red item in practically every shot."

That's interesting. Perhaps the director is a Powell & Pressburger fan? Scorcesee did the same thing in Mean Streets as a homage to P&P. In response Powell said, "I like it, but you've used too much red."

think the implication was that she did have parents, we just don't know what happened to them yet. maybeeee they got zapped back into the past by weeping angels.

This would be awesome, and she'd be able to bump into them at some point as well.

you know, it's possible that amy/amelia's first meeting with the doctor (via the blue box) was not actually the first -- it could explain why she was not at all scared of him.

er, then why didn't she recognise him?

in answer to steve, cos he just regenerated

however she wasn't afraid because santa sent her a policeman to save her from the crack.

Still, Amy having obsessed over the Doctor as some kind of magical figure since childhood is going to lead to a much more interesting dynamic that "ooh I fancy him".

Yeah, this is good. I had the sort of fear with Donna that the fact she admitted in "Partners in Crime" that she'd been carrying around her clothes in the back of her car and sort of stalking him by turning up where bad things happened meant that she had expectations beyond just hanging around doing stuff when she finally did catch up with him, but that never materialised. I hope they stay away from this with Amy as well.

oh, i don't. i hope she's batshit for him; plunges off the deep end halfway through the season. how often has that happened? a treacherous/unstable companion?

I thought there was a hint of a paternal Ecclestone-type attitude from the Doctor as well, can't remember when it was. Maybe when she mentioned she was a kissogram?

xpost Turlough mk2. never trust a ginger

oh huh btw someone mentioned this elsewhere i think but how on earth can she work as a kissogram when she
1. lives in a village where everyone knows her and
2, does not have a car?

does she take the bus?

You don't really care about things like that though, do you?

still loling at "kissogram". family friendly!

Bingo also:
Nobody dies

The (hospital) Doctor dies - offscreen tho. At least I assume she died. Maybe she was just wounded.

I loved this. I've missed a lot of episodes due to issues with Piper and then Tennant but thought these two were great - once I got used to the Dr. being about 16.

the old woman who says 'I've seen you somewhere before...' isn't a mystery, surely - the old woman thinks she's seen the doctor before because she's known Amy through her entire phase of raggedy doctor picture-drawing/doll-making/story-telling?

I initially assumed that she was part of Wilfred's Doctor-Seeking Geezer Expeditionary Brigade.

oh huh btw someone mentioned this elsewhere i think but how on earth can she work as a kissogram when she
1. lives in a village where everyone knows her and...

does she take the bus?

presumably she can walk.

what, she doesn't kiss where she eats, that's okay

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8607925.stm

Instant response would normally be a big groan, but Charles Cecil could make these great actually.

yeh cautiously optimistic. free too!

http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/45516174.html#cutid1

http://i44.tinypic.com/nl5vub.jpg

Liked this quite a lot. As we've seen from Moffatt's other Who work, it re-uses a lot of his own ideas (the opening bit with the young Amy praying is much closer to the original Sally Sparrow story that he rewrote as part of Blink, for example) and seems to want to be closer to Coupling at times, but not really to any penalty. Colour me optimistic for the rest of the series, Gatiss' dalek story in particular.

Hated the music though, and the new title sequence.

I do have to comment on something Matt said upthread on Hartnell, but I have to nip out just now so it will come later (possibly after episode 2).

I thought the second one was terrific. Although I got a bit lost with some of the timey-wimey stuff - were the Queen's last 10 years in some sort of loop? And I don't get when Amy was meant to have recorded that message for the Doctor.

One thing that's already sticking out about this series is the use of children and riffs on children's stories. With the exception of School Reunion and a couple of the Moffatt stories, the Rusty era didn't really use kids at all, it felt very young-teen oriented. The first couple of episodes seem to have a much more fantastical feel to them - I'm thinking CS Lewis/Phillip Pullman style 'children disappear and magical things happen to them'.

Also Amy's character is classic childhood wish fulfillment. The idea of being swept away by an imaginary/secret friend and having loads of adventures over the course of one night is classic children's fiction, very Snowman/BFG. Especially as Amy spent the whole episode in a nightgown. If it carries on in this vein it might turn out to be a stroke of genius on Moffatt's part.

Matt Smith's bumbling professor Doctor is really taking off, he's distancing himself from Tennant already. I liked the bit when he flipped at Amy as well, a bit of an Ecclestone throwback there. Next episode looks like it might even do something interesting with the Daleks as well.

think Cockney Queen who goes "undercover" with a porcelain mask is probably the daftest thing Moff has come up with so far...

I liked Cockney Queen, although I thought they laid the Last of the Timelords stuff on a bit thick right at the end.

(I was challoping a bit with the Hartnell stuff Aldo, just getting tired of the constant "ah it were better when I were a lad" stuff on these threads).

were the Queen's last 10 years in some sort of loop?

yeah every ten years she has to choose whether to abdicate or forget. it makes sense for the plebs to remember they vote every five years, but she must have to forget she even had the choice.

agree with you about the children's story stuff, seems to be generally true about moffat that he's better when writing for a young audience. press gang>>>>>>>coupling and whatever the fuck else he's done.

Again, totally great I thought. No problem at all with the porcelain mask - goes back to that old literary/historical thing of the monarch wanting to see how his/her subjects really live. Love the way he ties up Ballardian urban images with fairy stories - completely agree with what Matt DC said about aiming for the younger audience with the fantastical (reminds me of that Robert Conquest poem defending science fiction Far Out - about seeing the galaxies in the button eyes of your rag doll).

Also so much happens which isn't simply running about. Love it.

The "forget" and "protest" buttons were brilliant.

I'm no Star Wars geek but there were a couple of things that seemed like little homages - interstellar royalty saying "Save us Doctor - you're our only hope" for instance. And of course suddenly realizing that there's a reason the cave you're in is so damp...

I feel like this Doctor is a bit of a softie so far. That hug! I imagine Tennant, and especially Eccles, kind of flinching if Amy had gone in like that. I like Smith, he has a kind of floppy scarecrow thing going on which is pretty great. Something Tennant had down cold was this kind of appreciation-for-humans-yet-at-a-remove look - a real warm kind of sympathy his eyes were capable of which still managed to convey that he would never belong to Earth, really. Maybe I'm projecting. But being so young is a special challenge for Smith I think. The Doctor is what, hundreds of years old?

And I don't get when Amy was meant to have recorded that message for the Doctor.

No, me neither (and was it even good advice? She didn't get him off the ship in the end, and it all turned out ok). I liked that this was such a sci-fi story, I just wish it had come later in the series. It would've been nice to see a bit more interaction between the new doc and amy, but this one was so plot heavy (maybe overly so, some bits felt pretty rushed) that there wasn't much time for that kind of character-based stuff.

Also why are they dumping the naughty kids in the monster pit to be eaten, if they already know it refuses to eat them? In fact why is it eating anyone, if it's basically there to help them all?

Cause it needs food?

They're not dumping the kids down there to be eaten, they're dumping them down there to weed out troublemakers and serve as a warning to others. I don't know exactly what happens to the kids, they seemed sort of zombified..

I figured she recorded it during the 20 minutes she ended up forgetting. By hitting the big "Record" button. No it wasn't good advice, but hey. What she'd seen on the tape scared her, she was convinced there was nothing positive they could do, but she also knew the Doctor would try to save the day, so she recorded a message to her future self to get him out of there before he messed up the nice little authoritarian regime the UK had going.

I guess some might say it's too obvious but I liked the metaphor of the star whale - the people who keep the engine of your country going could probably do a better job if you stopped exploiting them. But we'd rather forget.

Cause it needs food?

Ok, this isn't really solved by the Doctor's intervention then. But yeah, you're probably right about the rest of it. :)

Murray Gold needs to be horsewhipped.

Otherwise, I liked this episode.

Loved it. That Doctor/Amy hug at the end was a wonderful moment...the joy of the Doctor realizing that he's understood, possibly not alone...and after all of those years obsessing and imagining him, the joy of Amy being able show him how much she really knows...felt very genuine.

The story got a little elaborate in places, but overall a really vivid and engaging episode. Though Mr Veg and I lol'd at the last shot of Spaceship UK with the whale underneath..."You know if the Tardis had come in at a lower angle to start with they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.."

Excited for ole Winny's Ironsides Daleks.

Wonder if the daleks will shoot any miners

Agree that this episode had a tone and payoff more suited to a later point in the season, because it felt oddly disengaged for me (could be my indigestion though) and the stakes seemed remote too.

^^ this for me too, when the doctor got mad it felt more mood-swingy than righteous fury. i could see how technically the plot called for fury, but i was like "oh w/e you're not going to really condemn Amy as being the worst person ever in episode 2."

but actually wasn't The Fires of Pompeii the second ep last season? there was a similar "doctor has to make a terrible choice, companion disagrees" situation and i thought it carried sufficient resonance at the time.

The bare bones of the plot were ok but I'm not really down with the style of 1940s retro-futuristic authoritarian broken britain in space, which I feel like has been done time and time again - e.g. Gridlock, which ok was NY not UK but still had the same air of ramshackle technology, everyone in power behaving like assholes. The Smilers, for example, were just a gimmick, "ooh let's have a scary face in there", there's no logic behind having everyone watched over by dummies in boxes.

Though Mr Veg and I lol'd at the last shot of Spaceship UK with the whale underneath...

I think I saw the crack along the side of the ship's saddle, or shell, or whatever it is, in this shot.

Xpost - yep, know what you mean about the Smilers - they had no structural point - but they were v sinister.

This felt like an old Peter Davison/Sylvester McCoy four-parter squashed into 40 mins tbh, but I don't really mind the overabundance of ideas. Can make some bits rather sketchy.

I didn't think the reveal and exposition bit really held together particularly well but maybe I need to watch it again. Moffatt has quite got the hang of pacing an episode at this point which is strange given he was pretty much the king of it during the Rusty era.

Umm, that was OK but not hugely better than that. As much like a 200AD story as Gridlock, but with the added spice of ripping off Pat Mills' 'Song of the Space Whale' (an unfinished 5th Doctor story, replaced with Mawdryn Undead) and was consistent with the Nerva Beacon trilogy. This series feels very much like the 5th Doctor in tone, which probably isn't a surprise given Moffatt's leanings that way. Still very hopeful, particularly for next week.

Matt, I can see why you'd want to challenge that, and I can see your point to a larger degree. There is barely a six-parter (or longer), for example, that isn't at least one episode too long - The War Games has one episode that achieves absolutely nothing, and ends with Jamie being captured just like the previous one did - and there are even plenty of four-parters that could do with judicious editing. And, of course, no Doctor is above criticism - I myself can't stand the McCoy era (Sylv's characterisation is perhaps the only thing that redeems any of it, although Remembrance is at least watchable in places) and don't really like the majority of Davison, while having rediscovered Colin Baker as only failing due to poor scripts - but picking on Hartnell dialogue stumbles when it was mainly deliberate acting (William Russell has confirmed this, and was used at least in part to cut down the amount of reshooting required as Hartnell's arteriosclerosis did affect his memory to a degree) is one of the tropes that always gets trotted out criticising the b&w era.

Anyway, I'm just starting maybe the worst Who box set yet released (The Time Monster, Underworld and Horns of Nimon, none of which are any good at all) so I may not return in any fit condition.

I think I saw the crack along the side of the ship's saddle, or shell, or whatever it is, in this shot.

yep. looks like people were right about the crack in the universe being a long running thing.

"You know if the Tardis had come in at a lower angle to start with they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.."

a bit like if only the TARDIS had landed in front of the Madame Pompadour painting perhaps

Are the cracks connected with Amy is the question. Crack at her house, crack on the monitor when she enters the Tardis, crack at the end of this episode (i.e. after she's been there).

Didn't like ep2 as much as ep1 but am really impressed with Matt Smith. Too many loose ends (ha! - as if it that was a new development) and I didn't think the Smilers were sinister enough, they needed some weaponry.