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

not enough people generally. last week's villain was some water, this week's was some robots/nanobots. i mean i get that the doctor and bill are meant to bouncing off each other atm but they're reacting to concepts rather than people. even the people at the end of this one (antony royle &c.) were bashing out cardboard dialogue.

also this one didn't have 30 minutes of plot much less 45, and the ending was lazy.

I liked this again. Do enjoy the show when it's being light and simple and unambitious.

Bill remains excellent but I hope they don't lean too you much into the old codger vs. voice of yoof dynamic. There were some very 7/Ace style exchanges in this ep.

Though there was a bit with the skeleton cupboards when I was like, er, maybe I'm not ready for "dayglo aushwitz" as a sci-fi concept.

Got reminded of a load of things, Sam Slade Robo Hunter, The Happiness Patrol, among others.

Is the location a real thing or what is it? I don't know how much CGI costs for something like that.
Are they doing much filming outside the UK these days? Just looks like it would make more sense in a more tropical or temperate place.

Building is in Valencia, took me a while to recognise.
http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-04-22/visit-doctor-whos-spectacular-colony-world-in-valencia

"The Happiness Patrol" OTM. I liked this fine though bill and the doctor's riffing actually got a bit tiresome to me.

Just watched - liked the design and pacing and ideas and visuals. I'm not sure about the ending yet. Will read what people here said about it since last time I was on this thread

Yeah so the bit where everything is solved by the idea of paying rent to landlords ...

Alternatively, reparations.

There were some very 7/Ace style exchanges in this ep.

You say that like it's a bad thing!

Ha, didn't mean it that way! Not sure it's the best fit for Capaldi, but it's only episode 2.

Will say about this one, I think they got the atmosphere and environment 'right' in a way they often don't in nu-who. It still moves far too quickly (and I would have liked to be able to just watch for five minutes as bits of the building peel off into a nano-swarm and then reform somewhere else etc) but at least the setting has some substance built up?

Yeah, nice design and mood in this one, great interaction between Doc and Bill, let down by a distinctly average plot and very bland secondary characters.

nice ark in space reference in this episode, too, i think?

Yeah so the bit where everything is solved by the idea of paying rent to landlords ...

― Never changed username before (cardamon), Monday, April 24, 2017 3:59 AM (five hours ago)

Alternatively, reparations.

― Andrew Farrell, Monday, April 24, 2017 4:26 AM (four hours ago)

it's a Reverse Silurians

Capaldi seriously channeling Tom Baker, both in voice and face, at times

I thought this was going to have the same ending as The Happiness Patrol and was initially happy it didn't, then have gotten progressively annoyed about the ending they actually went with.

Like, okay the robots gained sentience and were de facto enslaved as a result, I get that; they weren't sentient when the whole thing started and they decided to start mulching sad people afaict, and even if they were having the resolution be "suck up to the monsters that ate the cute kid's mom" is deeply unsatisfying. I also don't get why Bill would be so on board with this, given that she had just found out that this enclave of humans was one of the last bunches in existence. I also don't buy the Doctor cavalierly wiping the robots' memories, given that he'd just discovered they were sentient and that he just went through all of that angst with Bill over wiping her mind and how that tied to the lingering angst from the mind wipe that pulled Clara out of his memory.

That said, the Doctor/Bill interaction continues to be fantastic and Bill feels much more like a real person than Clara did. The first 3/4 of the episode were super creepy in all of the right ways. It would have been kind of funny to see Amy and Rory in that place; I assume Rory would have been vaporized instantly.

Yeah I felt they probably had to cobble an ending together quickly, and tried to press a few different moral 'keys' but just made a noise, sort of thing

The irritating thing is that they could have gone with the solution they used but shifted the reactions to it and the story would have been stronger for it; The Doctor muted and regretful about wiping the Vardi's memory, Bill asking the Doctor if erasing memories is his solution to everything, more focus on the colonists' attempts to reconcile the danger they placed themselves in with the second chance to have better communication lines to avoid its repeat, etc. It wasn't a happy ending and seemed like the writing was really forcing it to be; they should have leaned a little more into the ambiguous melancholy and let the adults spin some more, which also would have helped make the kid's reconciliation with the robots sound a much more forceful hopeful note than the random aside it actually got.

someone remind me; did the doctor's memory of clara get wiped?

Yes. It's something else they should have woven into the resolution of this, given that they just made reference to it in the previous episode.

Is that related to the oath he swore? Who did he swear it to, River?

AFAIK we don't know anything about the oath yet.

yeah there seems to have been some time passed between the Xmas specials and now. we don't know what's down there (although I gather it's related to the OG Cybermen who are coming back) or what the hell is going on.

He did say he was 2000+ years old now, so we've obviously got a big gap (even though that ignores the billion years he lived through in "Heaven Sent").

He said he was over 2000 in Capaldi's first episode

(and the second and third Doctors were both thousands of years old)

(Moffatt has always said offscreen that the Doctor has no idea how old he is)

Doctor regularly wiped everybody's memories in the human/zygon struggles, not sure he has that big a problem with it

"Smile" began well, but thinking about it after a few days, that mad jumble of an ending is its most memorable part.

Lol @ trying to reconcile every last ad hoc flimsy plot device various hack writers have tossed off for a kids TV show over course of 50 years tbh

Doctor regularly wiped everybody's memories in the human/zygon struggles, not sure he has that big a problem with it

This was before he got his own mind wiped and got super emo about it, as shown in the end of Hell Bent and in the interaction with Bill at the end of The Pilot.

so he's a billion years old but doesn't know it?

Not exactly--that billion years was experienced by billions of different bodies, and his current self only experienced the very last (what was it--an hour?) cycle of Heaven Sent.

ah okay

each "cycle" of Heaven Sent takes a couple of days or so for the participants, depending on how long each new Doctor takes to figure things out (and even if they were rigid, the later ones obv each take a few seconds longer than their predecessors, as he makes it further through the bird speech)

this whole year feels so dated

also i wish they'd stop explaining the basics to us, like the reboot isn't already 12 years old

That was comfortably the best of the three so far. Simple but effective.

Missy being in the vault already seems too obvious though.

Bit bored of big monsters really being something nice that needs saving, didn't they do this with a tyrannosaurus rex at one point?

Liked the ice fair setting, urchins, cruel industrialist, thought all that was really good but honestly would have preferred a straight-forward historical. Might have been a better context to deal with the race issue rather than as a side to a big monster that took three minutes to design and still not quite sure what the little angler fish had to do with it.

Like how do you mess up the concept of a nasty underwater creature with a big mouth that lurks under the ice and swallows people? Why the need to bring in these extra fish that we're told 'aren't carnivores' and then, what, they melt the ice? They carry the victim off to be eaten by the big thing? Eh?

Another good one. Basically it was Kill The Moon without the annoying stuff. I'd always rather watch a lightweight but enjoyable episode of nu-Who than an ambitious but annoying one (e.g. most of last season). Capaldi is now so smooth it's easy to miss what a great job he's doing - I like that he seems to have split the difference between first-season-misanthrope and second-season disco dad.

also i wish they'd stop explaining the basics to us, like the reboot isn't already 12 years old

This is a show for children. The viewers they're explaining the basics to are watching it for the first time, and weren't alive 12 years ago.

immediately reminded of Louis CK's bit: "black people can't fuck with time machines!"

Liked it despite it being a plotwise retread of 'The Beast Below' and that Torchwood episode about 'The Meat'. But Bill is great and Capaldi very much hitting his prime, and the vibe between them is lovely to watch.

I accidentally didn't cancel my Amz Prime trial, so I'm now catching up on Capaldi-Who. Not bad at all.

I'm going to put my guess in the hat that Chiwetel Ejiofor is still the best man for the job of the 13th Dr. (he was offered the 11th). I'd still prefer Swinton, who could pull off the requisite asexual yet charming aloofness.

That late-ish 11th Doctor getting everyone to forget he existed subplot never really went anywhere, did it?

...yes?

I'd be pretty stoked with Swinton, but isn't she kinda of a big movie star? I don't think the actors who've played The Doctor before have ever been as internationally famous as her.

I remember with the 11th doctor, something happened so that he undid the memory wipe from the Dalek hive mind... I don't remember how/why everyone else began to remember him though.

the big name rumours seem to exist purely to generate click revenue for shitty new sites tbh. capaldi was known but he wasn't exactly hollywood-famous.

This is a show for children. The viewers they're explaining the basics to are watching it for the first time, and weren't alive 12 years ago.

― (±\ PLO;;;;;;; Style (sic), Monday, 1 May 2017 10:34 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but the old episodes are available, and catch-up videos/webpages are everywhere, and kids talk about stuff. it's not like they have to wait for repeats like we did.

immediately reminded of Louis CK's bit: "black people can't fuck with time machines!"

Is this the first time that a mainstream sci-fi thing has acknowledged this? Not that I want to hand Moffat any trophies for this, it's been a cliché in online discourse/stand-up for years.

Moffat didn't write this - Sarah Dollard did.