The Dr Who thread

[F-ZeroOne]

UNiT are getting quiet excited in there old age arent they

I can't actually tell if thats a misspelling or a series reference...

[Harlequin]

UNiT are getting quiet excited in there old age arent they

I can't actually tell if thats a misspelling or a series reference...

Aside from their scientific advisers, UNIT has always been a bit low on actual intelligence.

[merman]

I enjoyed that quite a bit.
Although I thought Unit got off very lightly - genocide isnt a appropriate response to a uprising from some members of a species.

Some fantastic moments, and one or two in particular that really stood out and made it an impressive episode.

For those who have seen it,

Geeky spots and hidden references in The Zygoon Inversion

Although they missed one...

The painting?

Yes, although they did mention it after spotting it in The Zygon Invasion...

[zip accident]

Series 1-4, boxed:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B002 ... ge_o00_s00

Is it worf owt?

Er, yeah, that was a bit of a rollercoaster.

Mr Eccleston was a bit of a curate's egg. David Tennant I'd seen in Christmas specials before, he wasn't quite such a surprise.

There is a delay of about three minutes at the start of every disc before you get to the menu, with 23 disks that's almost an hour and a half of your life just waiting for stupid to do something.

In old Who, the doctors were a bit more laid back about who they were. This lot though, are gods. What's more, the companions become demi-gods, and that's not right.

OTOH, this is many hours of Who, and it is Who, for £35.

I'm not buying series 1-8 with all this lot redundant in it (if they ever put that out, which Amazon don't know of yet), but at a price below £50 series 5-8 would be troubling.

[Little stoned kiwi]

I recently started watching series 1 on Netflix. Better than I remembered, once you learn to tune out Billy Piper and the inappropriate attachments the Doctor has with young women 1/100th his age.
Why doesn't he have equally intense and equally platonic relationships with young men?

[Governmentyard]

Well, that was an...... episode. Very..... um.

[Ollie]

At this stage I reckon Mark Gatiss has a hat full of slips of paper with things he's seen in B movies written on them, and when he's called on to write an episode he just pulls a few out at random.

[Governmentyard]

Children will certainly be all kinds of fucked up over this one, I don't think my cynical old mind was receptive enough. As I was expecting a two-parter, the end felt entirely sudden and daft. Plenty of Who tropes to enjoy, though - blokes lunging about in monster suits, five feet of corridor used for virtually the entire episode, something nicked from another sci-fi world, man's inhumanity to man, a crap mad scientist, unrealistic soldiers, sinister mod-cons. When I say do a callback, do a callback. DO A CALLBACK!

So as a box ticking exercise, it was a triumph. How was Capaldi? Impeccable as ever. How was Clara? Fine. In both senses. But was it a good episode? No. Not really. They indulge Gatiss on this show, and they shouldn't. I'm not saying don't use his talents, just figure out how to do so in a way which benefits the show.

[Dio]

Extraordinarily calculated nightmare fuel? Definitely. A pretty clever underlying plot and resolution? Fine. Continuing the pleasing nods to the past: more corridors and a Doctor catchphrase? Excellent.

But taking so many obvious, crowbarred-in cues from other sources, frequently in a clumsy manner, just made me gnaw my own hand off. They narrowly backed off "Nuke the station once we're out of orbit, it's the only way to be sure" but bugger me if they weren't so desparately battling to restrain themselves from doing it. And the plot would still have worked and been less cheesily derivative without all those elements. Once that stuff was out of the way, the last 15 minutes or so were really pretty good, but the rest was too often painful.

[Baggypants]

They've been a bit too clever here. The conceit as I see it is that It's chock full of tropes and corridors because it's edited by Evil Dr Doom to distract you from the fact he's seeding you with Morpheus. In order to get that they've filled it chock full of tropes and corridors in a show who's main tropes are tropes and corridors.

[Mayhem]

And the Doctor didn't "win". Gatiss is thinking about a sequel mind you, so you can only be left to presume the Doctor managed to "fix" Clara and Nagata after they left the station, but has no idea about the video...! Or it can be left as nightmare fuel, in the same way Blink should have been left as the only appearance of said statues...

[Ollie]

Apparently Moffat has asked Gatiss to write a sequel to that one. So there's that to look forward to, ffs.

[Cloudane]

Yeah that was... a thing.

*resumes watching Pertwee fending off a pterodactyl with a mop*

[Istar]

I just caught-up with Sleep No More, having been out last night and busy today.

It had a few mis-steps, but overall was jolly entertaining classic corridors and screaming DW. At more than one point I thought it was better DOOM than the DOOM movie (although that's not saying much - what I mean is that it was genuinely tense, claustrophobic, and full of half-seen horrors in the way the game was).

The twist at the end was nice. Unoriginal unless you're too young to have read much SF, but fun nonetheless. And the FX were solid behind-the-sofa material. There'll be a few nippers having nightmares for a while, I think.

I loved it. I'm genuinely surprised it's generated muted reactions here, because it was well up to this seasons' standard and far above anything we got last year.

9/10.

[Harlequin]

And the Doctor didn't "win". Gatiss is thinking about a sequel mind you, so you can only be left to presume the Doctor managed to "fix" Clara and Nagata after they left the station, but has no idea about the video...! Or it can be left as nightmare fuel, in the same way Blink should have been left as the only appearance of said statues...

Rassmussen could not have been unaware that the gravity shields had failed when he recorded the last part of the episode. He nonetheless seemed very confident that it would successfully be beamed out.

And, yes, he did record and edit the entire episode, and engineered most of the incidents, from start to finish. Which does give Gatiss a greater than usual excuse to indulge himself in all the nostalgic tropes he loves. It also makes the episode even more meta than usual. I love the Doctor turning to look straight at us as he says, "Like a story."