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

No, it's deliberately explained she had to survive as a toddler in NYC.

But Wait! Mel unintentionally saved Hitler's life before he invaded Poland, and if anything is a fixed point in the whonivere its World War Bloody Two (this is why the Doctor knew Time Was Broken when the Daleks showed up as Churchill's secret weapon... he didn't suspect wide ranging time-tampering when they showed up in 1920's NYC) The existence of that regeneration of River Song has to be conserved... now I'm going to have to rewatch Let's Kill Hitler to see if Moffat wrote in some kind of an escape clause for himself.

You know what I got the most>

EGGS EGGS I SAID EGGS EGGS LIKE A HEN LAYS I HATE HENS

eggs tern hen ate (ate like in eating an egg)

oeuf never bird oeuf tit

that bit was rubbish, or at least the bit where it was suddenly decided that the dalekification process was 100% halted forever with no need for further action

(maybe Amy's part-Dalek nature is going to come back in future episodes though, and I reserve the right to think that's rubbish too, because thinking things are rubbish is what I do)

We don't know how long she was uniknowingly wearing the anti-nano braclet thingy, which presumably stops and reverses dalekification. It was that which saved her, not the love stuff. That was just a trick by the Doctor to get them back together. Come on, people, pay attention!

Haha come on, past history shows that most people don't pay attention to what they watch

BTW I was trying to watch this with my parents and they kept having long, loud side conversations that forced me to restart the program multiple times until they got the hint and left me alone, lol. I'm such a good son.

She says later, I think in Let's Kill Hitler, that we wouldn't believe how she managed to survive it.

Don’t remember this.

Wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey. Possibly not a "fixed point".

Strongly doubt that Moffatt would rewind and rewrite his entire timeline from last year, especially in one of four episodes that are specifically branded as being stand-alone. (Also especially as the trick nature of the timeline was one of the biggest points of last year, but not as especially.)

No, she specifically says (in LKH, I'm sure) that she's a toddler. Plus, were she to regenerate into Mel she'd need to halt her aging for the next 20 years then start aging normally (as shown in LKH, where she goes to school at the same time as Amy and ages with her). Seems unlikely.

They cover this specifically in dialogue within two minutes of Mels regenerating into River – River says she might take her age down a little every year, “just to mess with people;” thus establishing that she’s able to manipulate her apparent age in exactly the way Mels would have had to after her first 20-some years in that body.

Also, you’re saying it’s “unlikely” that Time Lords can halt their apparent aging for twenty years, when we’ve seen onscreen, implicitly and explicitly, them hold to the same age for a century or two?

(The Leisure Hive either notwithstanding or withstanding, as I can’t remember why it happens or how it’s reversed)

Also on rewatching I'd forgotten all the eye-rolling dialogue. "On a scale of one to ten.. eleven" "Well this is a change"

“Well, this is new.” Loved that tbh, especially for Smith’s magnificent line-reading, rolling surprise up into delight; he loves things that are new, he loves mysteries, he loves challenges. HE IS THE DOCTOR

what happened to the movie-length episode thing?

what movie-length episode thing?

all the episodes were said to be movie-length, hence fewer episodes in 2012 and 2013

no, they weren't

thank the maker they're not doing that because I'm watching it on BBC America and they won't extend the running time, they'll just lop 15 minutes out of the 60 minutes episodes.

no, they weren't

looks like this might have got out of hand

sounds like someone was pining for the original format and started a successful rumor

the Beeb have made "blockbuster movie" style poster images for each of the five new eps, if by "blockbuster movie poster" you mean 'knocked up cheaply in Photoshop in five minutes by a work-experience kid'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/galleries/p00xzhxb

And from the rumors I've been reading online, the 50th anniversary keeps sounding more and more dismal...

I don't want to 'spoil' anything for anyone so I won't go into detail. Well that and the fact that online rumors often turn out to be completely false.

I just wish we were getting a full series in 2013, but from all I can see it seems we're only getting the other 8 eps of this one.

The next 8* will be early in the year; at the moment it looks like a cluster of 2009-style specials around the anniversary (not counting Gatiss' Sydney & Verity docudrama), and Moffatt and Smith are signed for a full series in 2014. All this could change, of course.

*apart from the Christmas special

Oh, good, that's more like it then!

Someone else has spotted this:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9v1aa2Fuk1qjp42oo1_500.jpg

Unfortunate re-use of a prop, or...?

well wait, one has gold arms and the other has black arms

totally different things

Does not not happen all the time though?

(Is that the last known shot of the Doctor's Daughter?)

It's not inconceivable that spaceships might have similarly designed chairs. Just a thought.

Commodity item in teh future.

Bottom one doesn't have gold arms, it's just the lighting.

Aye YMOF, that's the Doctor's Daughter leaving in her spaceship at the end of her episode.

Yes, does happen all the time and is more than likely just a coincidence - and of course Moffatt has no control over the production department even when they make horrific fuckups (cf Rory's hospital badge).

possibly it's more accurate to say they lit the bottom one specifically so it would have gold arms in a vain attempt to throw off canny Internet propspotters

well maybe "accurate" isn't the word I'm looking for

The premiere is kind of a throwback to the ye aulde Who, no? With all the walking back and forth through subterranean tunnels?

and all the old daleks

those tunnels were the BEST, I was so happy to see them

It's weird because when watching it I did wonder if the Doctors daughter would ever come back in it. But that just looks like a re-use of props.

was hoping for a second that the Doctor would take Dalek Souffle along with him, just for the lols of having a Dalek companion.

SPOILARS

this was a lovely episode. properly had me in stitches for the whole first half, and smith's performance was absolutely top notch. also loved the strong women, especially that moment where the doctor tried to stop nefertiti and she completely disregarded him.

Hard to believe this was a Chris Chibnall episode!

I loved this one. Adventures in space, nice characterisation, self-contained story. I realise I've failed at nu-Who fandom, but it's nice to enjoy a story in itself without giving a fuck for arc shit.

I await the avalanche of posts telling me about the clues I missed...

Mitchell and Webb were fucking dreadful, Hale and Pace all over again. But everything else was fun.

Yeah, good fun. The Doctor could've saved Solomon easily right? Vindictive!

That was DELIGHTFUL

Walder Frey had to die. xp

this was by a long shot the least awful Chibnall episode ever, I will actually watch it again sometime. but still too much of him playing Moffatt notes clunkily, like in the first Pond Life. Murray Gold needs to STFU, still.

And the thing looks as if teal & orange ate a big meal of teal & orange and then vomited teal & orange all over teal & orange. in the spaceship scenes there was barely another colour on screen at all, and the other scenes were desperately heavy with it. if you're setting your story in a variety of locations and timezones and whatnot, it might help to differentiate them somewhat, just a little?

other production design pissweakery: not knowing how to spell "progress"; thinking Minority Report screen-waving is so cool that a TEAM OF SPACE-MISSILE EXPERTS would not keep a COUNTDOWN OF THEIR SPACE-MISSILES PROGRESS in a prominent visible place on their monitors, instead needing ONE SPECIFIC TEAM MEMBER who knows where that window is hidden to have to bring it up to check any time they want to know; having a thousands-and-thousands-of-years-in-the-past spaceship use the same floaty-touch-screens as a thousands-of-years-in-the-future, instead of distinguishing them to look like a) a different species' tech, b) a different time's tech, c) tech designed to be sturdy and survive for milennia in transit.

and the ark design made no fucking sense either - there's no way that ship design could have taken off, so did they ferry each dinosaur up there one at a time? was theur transmat technology so powerful it could get hundreds and hundreds of dinosaurs OFF THE PLANET? if they were able to build an entire ark off-world, how were they not able to find a new planet to settle in SEVERAL MILENNIA? we've seen that the entire universe is chock-full of planets with Earth-like atmospheres.

not that the design was built for long-term travel anyway - any meteor shower would probably have hewed one of the pods off, let alone how many they ought to have encountered in these thousands of years

anyway nice to have the prob;ems not be mainly from the Chibster


that said, how many times have we seen the Doctor basically str8 murder dudes before? Tennant at end of Human Nature 2 debatable, Pertwee caps ppl in Day Of, did Baker ever actually kill anyone or did he just want to all the time?

liked Mark Williams, but why didn't he go to his son's wedding? - it's not like he would have been anywhere else, since he'd never travelled

basically str8 murder dudes before

oh there's programming the human race to kill Silents on sight

actually Tennant blew up or watched die heaps of baddies now I think abt it

Colin Baker shot a dude who fell into a vat of acid in "Vengeance On Varos" IIRC

yah I meant Baker comma C full stop obv, ta

annoyingly i can no longer turn off the part of my brain that is angry about the sexual politics of nu-who; and as such the ending stuff with Nefertiti and Ruper Graves pissed me off disproportionally, given his character was canonically a dick but heaven forfend we not pair off the spares (and because it just cemented her characterisation as 'fierce and proud but gagging for it', which: retch.)

also the mitchell and webb robots were super boring, and the fact that everything involved in the story had to be from earth was jarring. but the rest was pretty fun, and i liked the little bit of arc stuff where the doctor and tardis no longer exist on databases.

I really enjoyed this ep!

and i liked the little bit of arc stuff where the doctor and tardis no longer exist on databases.

this doesn't make sense though, Oswin only wiped Dalek databases. dalekbases.

(though I'm hugely in favour of ppl just HAPPENING to not know who he is, which I hope is the case here)

that was kinda silly and fun, plus it seemed to be filled with harry potter character actors.

this doesn't make sense though, Oswin only wiped Dalek databases. dalekbases.

it's almost as though this might become a plot point

yes maybe! but it would also be fine if they just have the Dr run into ppl who haven't heard of him from now on, instead of doing cross-episode connections