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

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

Cor there was some bad acting and dialogue in this one.

when nothing he has done for it has been any good?

The Unquiet Dead was good. Granted that was 10 years ago.

Cor there was some bad acting and dialogue in this one.

g a t i s s

Enjoyed that. Rona munro is the first classic series writer to return, right? Glad it wasn't the Bakers.

after some pretty poor episodes, yes that was good.

And the finale looks as though it will be fun, though I suspect I know how it will pan out.

Liked the monster and the clothes and the landscape. Roman-Pictish friendship a bit forced but whatever. Someone had been watching Stranger Things.

Something I've noticed about the more recent historicals is that whenever we meet historical people, they're always the same: they want to kill each other or some thing, and need to have the Doctor explain to them that this would be a bad idea, which he does eventually. A few of the historical people get killed along the way, but they always end up listening to him.

They always end up learning the key lesson: that you must not kill the monster, because she's just guarding her eggs, or: humans must team up to kill the monster.

Also historical people are just like normal today people, only they need a bit of help to be nice like us. They rarely ever strongly exhibit any of the real-life behaviours and attitudes of historical people that we would find depraved or wrong. There's always just a bit of racism and sexism and child labour, or whatever - mention of Romans taking slaves and burning down farms, sure, but not seen on screen, no Picts collecting heads; but what I mean is the program doesn't try to deal with the fact that our time machine has cropped up in a context where these things are just normal as far as most people are concerned. The unacceptable is always fixable.

The more difficult task would be to show historical people being absolutely horrible but also to show the underlying causes for this behaviour. That I guess would be for the writers to take an educational approach to history as opposed to using history to flavour a formulaic plot to get variations in it.

And again the naughtiness of these historical people is always kind of naive - it's that they must fight, because it is their traditional way! But now the Doctor has come to show them that really all humans are lovely. So you don't get, e.g. a story about Conquistadores knowingly loading up a ship with worthless glass beads to go and fleece some Mayans, out of self interest, because it'll make them rich. Or a witch hunter going round 16th century Lancashire opportunistically looking for women to hang so he gets his money. The program doesn't try to deal with gnarly, real-life naughtiness of that kind.

This isn't meant to be a takedown as such - I have absolutely no idea how you'd present Victorian racism or any other kind of historical violence, to modern children, in a fantasy fictional setting, in a way that was age appropriate and not boring; just it's interesting to see the strategy they go with.

Hah, that's interesting, because I actually thought something adjacent to those points when I was watching the previous episode: a) the representation of the Imperial British Army as a force for plunder was about as subtle as the anti-capitalism a few weeks back (which, tick vg that is the appropriate amount of subtlety for displaying the IBA to kids) and b) one of the lead characters doesn't see the light and turn to the Doctor's side but quite the opposite, he embraces the soldier's way (as the Doctor is peevish about).

A plot hole I think about the regiment - is it just "Hooray lads, the commander's had a character arc, we're all Ice Warriors now?". The TARDIS could take them back, but that ruins the line about how no-one will ever know what happened here.

I don't think the show flinches from showing barbarity; just not necessarily in the historicals, and not necessarily in this season, which seems to be all about relative power in relationships (or, er, checking your interdimensional privilege - sorry).

Anyway, that last one was really excellent, Murray Gold and wobbly time vortex SFX notwithstanding. Basically it was the same as Gattiss's episode, except written by an adult. Two things I especially liked: a plot and resolution that made sense (or at least Doctor Who sense); and actual slow *distinguishable* dialogue instead of the usual Moffat babblestreams. Wish we could get ten more of those before Capaldi fucks off.

Also fucking hell the acting was a lot better than last week's.

I enjoyed this, but also didn't care even a little bit about anyone in it who wasn't in the TARDIS crew, which was a little odd for me.

There was a point where I actively caught myself rooting for the light-eater.

I enjoyed doing this, mind you, but I don't think that's the type of enjoyment the episode was going for.

Actually, I really liked the crows.

(I had a similar reaction to "Survival", actually; I mostly enjoyed watching it but I also really, really wanted all of Ace's friends to die)

this whole year feels like a tepid greatest hits, which is not how i expected moffat to go out

Yeah but he already went out two years ago with a deliberate build up and “The End” on screen, this year was never meant to be by him

When the Doctor came out of the cave after staring at the Season 11 title sequence for two days he should have fallen onto a handy mattress

this year was never meant to be by him

i hope someone writes an explosive book about this era

there's no secret - the BBC wanted Chibnall but he wasn't available for three years bcz Broadchurch, Moffatt was begged to come back and fill in once he'd had a break and could face it again.

makes sense

The more difficult task would be to show historical people being absolutely horrible but also to show the underlying causes for this behaviour. That I guess would be for the writers to take an educational approach to history as opposed to using history to flavour a formulaic plot to get variations in it.

This is a good point, and just offering an off-the-cuff response, maybe it's because the show tends to portray modern-day people as more pathologically terrible, and make the historicals more redeemable because of a nostalgic idea of the past being a more innocent time?

was a bit weird having two "army is difficult" + "desertion isn't cowardice" episodes in a row.

talk to the five episodes at the start of the season that were all about humanity's tools being used for evil

if this had run where it was meant to (4th or 5th ep), both those problems would have been solved

well there was a part where Bill asked "you were just trying to get them to stand in that gate the whole time, weren't you?" and he says "yes of course that's a half-dozen less murderous, raping slavers and mutilators running around" but it got cut

something i'm never very clear on, sic - why do they change the order of the episodes like that? My very rudimentary sense of how things work is that there are a set of stories they decide to go with (perhaps having been written with the sense of a few themes that might be in the series) and Moffat will shove in some story arc stuff, sometimes more or less crudely (bit at end of story), sometimes woven into the original story a bit more.

If that's the case I can see why some stories might be ordered one way in terms of arc, and in another according to series pacing. But maybe I'm probably just ignoring something about the logistics of series production here.

xp

Classic Master ploy there - disguising himself to people who wouldn't otherwise recognise him anyway...

Properly spooky episode there. The idea that the patients were constantly crying for help but their volume was turned down creeped me the fuck out. Bill continues to be totally amazing.

best episode of the year by a mile. i thought john simm was mark gatiss until halfway through. weird though how bill spent years apparently fine with having a machine where her heart used to be, and the doctor is relatively "eh" about the whole thing (enter sic to tell me why i'm wrong)