Dr Who

Was there a late edit put in to last night's show as a Robin Williams tribute? In the middle of the episode, the Doctor said to the mechanical man sitting in the basement, 'captain,my captain.' It seemed a bit out of place.

I thought overall, it had a better feel to it, was getting sick of the previous two's rubber-faced over-acting for kids tv style. Apart from the referendum references and the making sure that you were in no doubt that hello these two women are married to each other, the writing seemed ok, despite the story not being that thrilling.

And of course, the lovely Clara. Still there.

I have a feeling that they are setting up the ridiculous lizard human lesbo combo for a standalone series... with a side serving of Sontaran warrior turned butler for added comedy effect.
As for Dr Who last night... still too much pointless running around and too light hearted for my liking but to be fair the first episodes of any new Doctor are usually weak. Only exceptions being Pertwee and Bakers

(24-08-2014 22:15 )bytor Wrote:  I have a feeling that they are setting up the ridiculous lizard human lesbo combo for a standalone series... with a side serving of Sontaran warrior turned butler for added comedy effect.
As for Dr Who last night... still too much pointless running around and too light hearted for my liking but to be fair the first episodes of any new Doctor are usually weak. Only exceptions being Pertwee and Bakers

Which one, Tom or Colin?

(25-08-2014 02:45 )dundeered Wrote:  Which one, Tom or Colin?

Tom in the episode, Robot

Well, I never thought I'd say it, but I think I'm just about done with this. This new episode was just about the pits.
The whole contrived 'we are lesbians you know' thing, who fucking cares, it's bloody irrelevant. And a green lizard woman and a no-neck alien wander about without apparently attracting any attention, perhaps because everyone is momentarily distracted by the dinosaur before seeming to shrug it off and go about their business as if its perfectly normal!
And remind me, was this Dr Who or Sherlock Holmes (or Carry On Sherlock Holmes)?

This revival started so well, Ecclestone played his Dr, haunted by his actions, perfectly, and Piper produced the perfect foil in Rose, the sidekick who gives him back a purpose in life. David Tennant as an actor, has a limited range, but he used it well enough, playing his Dr with an energy and a sense of fun that suited his 'born again' status well. I liked Martha Jones, I would have liked to see her stick around longer, I don't think they really gave her a decent chance. Less said about Catherine Tate the better! Best thing to say about River Song is that she is probably not the worse thing about this Who revival. Matt Smith was Ok, he tried hard to make the character his own, and did a decent enough job in the end, but was always hampered by the story lines. Amy pond was another good sidekick, probably would have been better without the ridiculous Rory business, but she had a depth to her that made you care about her and made her real.

Maybe it's just me, but I just can't warm to Clara. The whole storyline of her and the Dr meeting over and over didn't really help, but I just don't get her character. Jenna Coleman is very pretty, but that's hardly enough. All I see in the Clara character is Jenna Coleman acting, I feel no real empathy for the character, she just doesn't bring her to life for me. In this new episode, I felt she just limped through like a spare part, the episode could easily have been made without her in it without losing anything. They even had to contrive a phone call from Matt Smith at the end to try to induce a bit of emotion into proceedings and create the bond between her and the new doc.

As for the new Dr, will he make the grade? Well, on the evidence of this start, the best I can say is that I really don't care. If this is the way it is heading, I very much doubt I'll be sticking around to see how he pans out. Limp storylines, over the top 'childrens tv' acting,characters void of any ... character, a sometimes all too obvious emphasis on the american market, might as well watch the original series of Star Trek!

I didn't quite understand why Clara suddenly became woolley and lost with the Doctor's new appearance. Surely the character should be more familiar with the concept of regeneration than any other companion - she's the only one to have seen every other incarnation, remember? She jumped in to the Doctor's time line and created the duplicates of herself throughout space and time, thus coming in to contact with or seeing all of his other selves. She must have noticed they don't all look the same - or has Moffat suddenly forgot all this and just scrubbed out the main plot of the entire last series when he came to write this new episode? Very frustrating.

As I said, 50-50. There were some good bits and a lot of frustrating bad bits - but yes, the comedy crap, the lovey dovey lesbian shit - Moffat needs to iron out these glitches or leave the show if he can't be bothered. Simple as that.

OK I missed it - but does anybody know why it isn't available in the Virgin Media Catch Up ? Just isn't in their version of the BBC iplayer list at all.

Are the reviews all that bad they're trying to limit who sees it ?

But it IS on the BBC iplayer on the web ?

So....cos I was a bit ambivalent about watching it "live" now I can't watch it on my TV and have to stream it ?

(25-08-2014 09:35 )munch1917 Wrote:  Well, I never thought I'd say it, but I think I'm just about done with this. This new episode was just about the pits.
The whole contrived 'we are lesbians you know' thing, who fucking cares, it's bloody irrelevant.

but can they be lesbians if one of them's a lizzard?

Sshh- spoliers


Ho Hum.
It wasn't fantastic and it wasn't completely unwatchable.
That said : I am not sure what a lot of it was - it didn't seem like Doctor Who to me.

Perhaps Moffat has had a pilot script for a "Torchwood" style spin off about the irritating alien/human comedy trio fail to be commissioned and thought - sod it I'll just stick the Doctor in it then ?

Or Guy Ritchie had approached him for a script for a third Downey-Jnr Sherlock and then thought better of it ?

Not quite sure if it really needed to be so long - apparently 79 minutes according to Imdb and at some points gotta be honest it felt like it.

To me this smells of the tail wagging the dog - BBC Worldwide need a season opener that can be shown in cinemas and plugged to the hilt internationally etc therefore we need to make it "feature length" and longer than a normal episode. Fair enough but even with introducing a new Doctor it just didn't seem to have the plot to sustain that, or certainly to sustain a sense of pace. Not saying every episode should be frenetic by any means, but this one verged too far in the direction of slow for me.

(And here's an idea - would it be novel to have a regeneration story where the Doctor ISN'T dazed/confused/incapacitated ? Off the top of my head I think we have to go back to Tom Baker in Robot for that one ?)

The "don't breathe" idea seemed a bit like a "OK we've done Don't Blink, what else can we do the same basic number on?" ; I don't think it really had the same impact though. The clockwork androids just didn't have the menace of the Weeping Angels imo. Or even the Clockwork androids in the Tennant story. And when tied to a recycling of the "Girl in the Fireplace" plot it seems a little bit assembled and "Paint By Numbers".

It must be a punishing schedule - is it any wonder the writing starts to wander - whether out of desperation or just a desire to keep themselves interested. There's presumably only so many times you can write "What is it Doctor?" and "I'm the Doctor - run" before you just go spare and want to write a comedy skit with aliens in it to pad out another under-running episode and not have to think up an actual plot ?

I'm pretty sure I've heard Moffat say (on one of these classic Dr Who DVD extras?) words to the effect that Dr Who script process basically demands a never-ending conveyer belt of feature film concept ideas; you have an idea(s) that would make a great sci-fi movie ? OK great, that's one episode : where are the other 10 or 12 please ?. I think it's fair to say there's only so many of those that any one writer could come up with before getting stale/repeating themselves : and give him his due he's come up with a fair few over the whole new Who run.

And again in fairness to Moffat - though I am not quite sure he deserves it - to my mind RTD dragged his fair share of "irrelevancies" and wanna-be spin offs into the show, including Torchwood etc as well as some pretty misjudged "comedy" ?

I remember groaning inwardly as far back as the second Eccleston episode when we had the "pancake face" monster playing Britney Spears and Soft Cell on a space-station.

But that said, I can't stand the Sontaran/Silurian/human "comedy" show either.

Perhaps this kind of diversion is inevitable when you go down the "head writer" route - as opposed to the 1970s/1980s BBC producer/script editor collaboration - and then also have that head-writer do so many episodes solo into the bargain?

Same thing presumably happens on US shows ? - I was a big fan of Aaron Sorkin West Wing / Studio 60 etc but they got pretty self indulgent at times - eg. he seemed to drag Gilbert and Sullivan into bloody everything way more times than it was called for.

With the head writer/show runner model there's presumably no other person in the production that can pull "creative rank" on them and say "hang on - we can't do that, it's just silly".

They might be able to say "we can't do that - we don't have the budget" but possibly not be able to over-rule something in a script purely on quality (as opposed to compliance issues) or to cut out the more indulgent script idiocies, in the way you imagine that Hinchcliffe or Letts might have done...and that arguably later producers like Williams possibly failed to do with Douglas Adams.

(It's great fun a lot of Adams's stuff, but it's arguably more Hitch-Hikers than Who a lot of the time. Williams got the raw end of the deal in terms of an increasingly prima donna Baker, a Whitehouse-led tabloid backlash against "horror", and the dual pincers of late 70s inflation and industrial action choking the life out of his ambitions for The Key to Time and Shada etc....the programme WAS Tom Baker by that time : what else was the producer left with but to up the comedy and the guest stars? My theory's always been a lot of the talent that worked on the Hinchcliffe shows got fed up when the "tone the horror down" directive came down and moved on either to movies or - worse! - the supposedly more "adult" (short for just grim?) Blakes 7, which probably competed with Who for talent and resources within the BBC, I suspect to Who's detriment a lot of the time in that period).

Probably a show that exhausting actually needs new blood much more regularly than it has been getting - Letts/Dicks running Dr Who for 5 years in the "glory" Pertwee years was actually an aberration - there's no way they wanted to do it for 5 years, they were desperately wanting out of there by 1973 - they had to be bribed with the "Moonbase" series to sweeten the deal to remain on Who ?Arguably some of the stuff in the last two Pertwee seasons is weaker than a lot of the rest : revisit to Peladon ; and - whisper it - the great regeneration story Planet of the Spiders is a bit dull when watched in one sitting as opposed to week-by-week : with a lot of not-very good chase scenes padding it out and then pretty boring spells on an unconvincing studio alien planet with stereotyped primitive human tribes. Even John Pertwee has a nap for most of an episode - something they hadn't done since his regeneration from Troughton and the days of Hartnell and Troughton going on holiday for a week and just hoping nobody in the audience notices. ( They do the likes of "Blink" and "Turn Left" now when the want to give the Doctor a rest ?)

Surely the decline in 80s Who was also not entirely unrelated to it having one producer slogging away at it for so many years - basically cos it was hard show to make, increasingly showing its age due to antiquated production methods in a world of ever increasing sophisticated cinema and US TV, and not least -no one else in the BBC wanted to touch it with a bargepole ?

I imagine now some years after the Noughties "rebirth" with the rosy glow of universal acclaim fading and the show becoming increasingly just part of the Saturday-night furniture to most casual punters in a "Oh is that back on again...I liked it when that Billie Piper was in it...let the kids watch it til Strictly comes on.....what the bloody hell was all that about I didn't follow a word of it" kind of way.

There's not necessarily a queue of people lined up eager to take Moffat's place, I suspect ?

I wonder how long Capaldi will last, and will they take the opportunity of the supposedly "last" incarnation - with John Hurt barging in Capaldi's the 13 now isn't he ? - to give the show a rest ?

Would they even be brave enough to just cast Capaldi for one season and then just end it ? Or Capaldi might just want to leave just like Eccleston presumably did ?

That would be the best idea imo : don't even cast a new Doctor, just make it open-ended enough and clear he isn't dead and that the show can still come back somehow; rest it for a few years until the new ideas and talent are there and the audience really really want it again - and then come back totally fresh bang! no regeneration scene, like Eccleston and Pertwee but with the absolute minimum of continuity hangovers from the previous season; and you can leave a lot of the worst of the twisty-turny self-referential stuff behind.

Just an idea

(Leave the Time Lords lost and undiscovered though please ? Probably a dead end that one ? )

Ah, the M-L-L dissertation has arrived.