Be Excellent To Each Other

Not to forget all the Time Lords.

Shopping trolley?

I push a shopping trolley now. Shopping trollies are cool.

I thought it was a little like Firefly, except not shite.

*fireflyisnevercomingbacksadface*

Also... How old is he now? Did he say 1200?

I watched the pilot episode of Firefly last night. Not "The Train Job", the other pilot.

I've had the entire series on DVD for ages, and never bothered to watch it. Colleague and extreme BeEx Lurker Zeppo forced me to watch the pilot with him.

Why the shit didn't I watch it before? I think it was because I saw Serenity and wasn't particularly impressed, but I think that might be because I should have watched Firefly first.

I also liked the Weyland-Yutani logo at the very start in the viewfinder of the anti-aircraft gun that Mal hijacks.

Which is why I said he's been travelling on his own for 300 years - keep up.

I'm going to go with "because you're a massive bellend".

We've even got a thread ordering all forumites to watch Firefly.

Another one for massive bellend here. Even Ange has seen Firefly (and loved it).

I enjoyed this week. Thought it was done well.

Watch those spoilers, man!

To me it felt a bit like someone found a Chibnall script from the RTD days down the back of the sofa. So much for the series staying 'small'.

A nicely self-contained story with an enjoyable mystery and a fun explanation. Loved it.

Why stay small?

Really enjoyed that. Very satisfying.

Because you can only fit so much into 45 minutes and it be coherent or well paced. In this case we had 44 minutes of "what's going on?" and one minute of fixing it all with a sonic screwdriver.

A but less Alan Sugar and we might have had an explanation for stuff like the kidnappings, exposition around the enemy, value for the money we all paid Berkoff, etc.

Fewer Alanis Sugarers.

I look forward to visiting the temple built in my honour.

I don't feel the need to explain everything. It might be explained later.

Does this mean that Hitler got more screentime than Alan Sugar?

I thought he sounded familiar! Every time he spoke I thought immediately of Victor Maitland from Beverly Hills Cop, but figured it wouldn't be Berkoff so paid it no fucks.

It was interesting and good for the most part but I didn't really like how things were wrapped up. Now the Angels are back again when they should have been a one time deal. Sigh.

Moffat's lost it I say. (Despite me having not seen the next episode yet obviously)

I'm beginning to wonder if Moffat has had a brain swap operation with RTD. It's the only logical explanation for the sheer and utter naffness that Doctor Who has become.

Are you watching the same ones as the rest of us. Or do you live in opposite world?

It did seem like a big build up that lead to yet another screwdriver anti climax.

I don't think even the 10 year old me would have been impressed.

I've been a massive fan of Moffat/Smith Who so far, but apart from the first episode this season I've been left relatively cold so far. I get the feeling Moffat's grander ideas have been neutered by suits who think Doctor Who needs to have less complicated plot lines. I hope I'm wrong and he's going to pull something awesome out of the bag soon.

THAT EPISODE WAS A LOAD OF BOLLOCKS!

Gah! It could have been good, it really could.

I'm happy with less complicated plot lines. Doctor Who is brain candy, and I don't particularly want to be challenged by it. I've never really been a big fan of huge great overarching stories when it comes to television, as I spend too much time trying to work out what is going on and which bits I can ignore and which bits are very important. This episode, on relection, did seem to be a bit too much of "Doctor Who is quite a wacky person, look, he's playing a Wii!" and shoehorning pop cultural references in to appear up to do date. I still enjoyed it, though, so I'll forgive it for that.

Rubbish. I knew when I saw 'invasion' in the description on iPlayer. it started well At least, but they never, ever end well.

Matt Smith's first story was to foil an invasion, and he did it brilliantly. Downhill from there though, your point is almost perfect.

Maybe Moffatt will put some stuff in something somewhere later to explain why there were kidnappings and face people and little girls who weren't doing anything the boxes weren't, maybe it'll be a payoff in more than a year's time like one of the lines in last years opener being expanded on next week. In which case I say he's being a smartarse and there nothing clever about dragged out suspense.

There's not explaining everything, then there's bad storytelling. Bad Wolf was a great thing, memey and linked inexorably to the denouement. There's been stuff like it ever since, and it's unnecessary. There doesn't always have to be a mystery when there's a plot arc.

First we had the cracks, and a season later we were told they were there because the silence... and a year after the silence were downgraded to drones and explained as be bec..... oh, when's The Thick Of It on?

That's how to do a series arc.

I'm not bothered about having a big plot arc. Just individual stories is fine. But yes the wave the magic wand and everything's fine is a bit rubbish. Good start, Chibnall finish.

As GovernmentYard said, there's no time to explore epics. Big, epic tales are always so unsatisfactory. Also, people generally can't comprehend scale well, and so "a third of the people have died" is utterly impersonal versus "single character you've invested in just got stabbed to death by a mental Cyberman". Thirdly, I got tired of the invasion of the week thing RTD did, and the people instantly forgetting about them. Yes, ho-ho—it's all SATIRE, see? Well, no. It's just lazy plotting. Who generally works better with smaller, self-contained scares—it's the dark cupboard or the shadow in the corner of the building. Even with major enemies, I think it tended to work better when they were infiltrating rather than sticking a Dalek on every doorstep.

The other thing is that the knifed budget cannot keep up with such stories, and so going smaller and tighter provides more scope for something that doesn't look crap. As for the angels next week—I get why Moff wants them to be recurring villains, but they're a little diluted each time they're used.

The Angels were great in "Blink", and the episode next week (from the trailer at least) looks like it might be similarly frightening.

The way they were used in the last series though (or whenever it was, the two parter on the Byzantium?) was terrible though, it reduced them to not frightening at all.

Does the, ahem, Whoniverse, operate on San Dimas time? I was getting confused.

Also, I think I've worked out what happens to Rory and Amy:

Could be...

[spoiler]i did like idea of a slow invasion.[/spoiler

The screwdriver has always got the doctor out of trouble.]

I'd actually quite like it if they were in peril, very nearly die, and then the Doctor realises he can't push it any more (in terms of risking them), and so he just leaves them to their normal lives and never returns. But, you know, it's tele, and the forewarned 'heartbreaking' ending will presumably be Amy being turned into an Angel with big hair and Rory reverting to a plastic Roman and then being melted down to make toy dinosaurs, one of which the Doctor will keep in the TARDIS in a subtle nod to Firefly. Or something.

I have rewatched all of RTD Who over the las few months and most of it stands up well, with the exception of one or two episodes/specials. However, I've just watched The End of Time part 1, and I'm happy to admit it was utter, utter dogshit (even for a Christmas episode).

See now, you refer to the end of time, and I have no idea if you are taking about the Davros season ender or the Timelords season ender, which rather illustrates the problem.

Too many über threats. He always used to solve whatever localised problems he came across. I long for Paradise Towers.

There's a problem with Who at the moment, certainly, I just can't tell how big a problem it is. The trouble is that Moffat was great at the self contained stuff, and he's right in the notion that Who works on a semi-fairy-tale level and that it should be fun. Where I get cross with him is how he thinks he can do strong emotional stuff involving torment for main characters and then drop it like it never happened. Only to pick it up again after a couple of romps. Sometimes he even does this mid episode. It's disconcerting and means that nothing seems to flow well.

Also, I really, really hate so called plot-arcs that entirely rely on the odd hastily delivered line for explanation. The finale to that last series was pretty terrible in my opinion. I was just so concussed with the bouncing back and forth that I sort of went into shut down. Fortunate then that we had some corkers for standalone episodes last season.

It's odd, but I think the main problem is the lack of quality monsters and imaginative peril-plots. Whenever we do get a monster it's usually something tediously invadey. I almost embraced the Town Called Mercy one as it actually was trying to do something a little different with the stroy, even if the aliens were stolen from well worn cliches. The more straightforward the threat and boring the monster, the more heavy lifting the Doctor and Amy have to do, and that doesn't seem to end well, as it means yet more agonised looks and 'lonely-tortured-how-many-have-you-sacrificed-wibble'. And the problem with that wibble is that the more its done the more inhuman and monstrous the Doctor looks.

Which kind of ruins him.

So, fixes:

Get smaller, more intimate with the threats. Threats to themselves, ala Amy's Choice. Threats to a small party, ala Praise him, threats to a small complex/town/ship somewhere.

Give the aliens proper goals outside of domination/destruction. Buffy was great at giving monsters personalities and different ambitions. They all seemed to be up to something slightly different, even if did usually end in 'Open Hellmouth'.

Make the odd alien as smart and fast and clever as the Doctor, so he's not forever running rings around them and has to react to their changing of the rules.

Stop trying to be epic, all the time.

More people we want to have protected. Lynda-with-a-Y for example, or the young nurse in Praise Him. I was gutted when they died. Blub.

Have the Doctor achieve absolution for his sins in some astonishingly great finale where he dies. Actually dies. As in, never to come back. Then reveal there's a few before Hartnell. Yoks! This would be great as not only do we get rid of the huge burden of reference, but it forces every geek out there to wearily edit every 'ninth Doctor' type reference they've ever made online.

Time Lords. Davros wasn't a Christmas episode!

Part 2 was better - I was sad again watching the 10th Doctor regenerate.

Just watched the Chibnill cube related one.

Positives:

Funny bits.

New Stewart woman.

First half hour an entertaining mystery.

I like cubes.

Rory's dad.

Stephen Berkoff pouring on the ham-gravy.

Negatives:

A third of the population! WHAT?

Bzzzt. Phew, that was close.

I really wish Doctor Who would stop having millions of people die. I know that this time they were brought back, but it makes us look stupid, it makes the grinning runaround look monstrous and it utterly cheapens death. Gagh.

Quite. And the thing is, imagine this episode skewed slightly. Remove the cubes from everywhere and just have them in the hospital or a single town. This becomes fenced off from the outside world (perhaps by UNIT), and the premise is far creepier at that point, along with being more emotionally powerful, because it's all about people we've followed and people they care about. When the episode's done, it's also easier to wave away: a gas leak, or something similar. You just can't do that with bullshit like "a third of the world's population" (who, apparently, can survive quite a few minutes of being dead without any brain damage).

But then why that hospital? Surely a decent writer could come up with some reasoning. Maybe a trap specifically for The Doctor, or a means to try and capture Amy/Rory, who are the people stopping The Doctor coming off the rails. (Maybe not the best ideas, but then I did just make them up while typing that sentence, and yet they still make more sense than what was on Saturday.)

Also, +1 for everything NervousPete said.

I was really hoping that the revelation would be a hugely complex intergalactic edition of Beadles About, where an alien in a fake beard comes on at the end and begins demanding the Doctor tells him, "At what exact point did you realise?" after many yoks at the Doctor being baffled by what turned out to be perfectly harmless, pointless cubes.

Toss. Absolute toss.

River had a vortex manipulator. It is immune to the time bubbles around them, it cam transpotmmany people through space and time.... In fact from one end to the other. They could all have got out, at any point.

I know we're not supposed to over analyse it, so I'm not. If there was a big red button in every shot, marked "push to save the day" it would not have been any more obvious.

Wibbly wobbly timey wimey.

I well cried.

I'll have to offer up a proper verdict tomorrow, as I'm unsure and a second viewing might alter things. But here's what my gut's saying before I go out for drinks:

Clever. Slick. Epic. Dramatic. Great acting.

Also incredibly heartless and/or emotionally incompetent.

I think they've fucked up.