Kelloggs wrote:I think I like the glasses idea - as a novelty, but he's gone through sonic screwdrivers before and replaced them, so I would hope it's just a passing fad - and it almost made sense for getting a POV video feed, but... they explicitly confirmed a WiFi link, then he ended up in a closed Faraday cage.
While still transmitting.
!?!
It is non-electromagnetic Space WiFi, silly!
Moffat has said that the screwdriver will probably come back, but the glasses are a sort of comment on the ever expanding functions of the screwdriver-that-makes-a-noise. Personally, I like them. But I do feel they lack the elegance of a six-inch rod with a glowy tip that can be pulled out at any moment.
Emoticon and contraction free since... quite a while ago.
It's time we stopped calling them cliff-hangers. Really it's just stopping telling us things halfway through one narrative event. Cliffhanger suggests some sense of water cooler discussions about it until next Saturday. Which won't happen. Perhaps the style guide has "Bitches love cliffhangers" in it somewhere?
I much prefer the Game of Thrones way, where each episode feels like a chapter competently completed.
XBox Gamertag: GovernmentYard
Everything else: governmentyard
Let's be frank, the cliff hanger was always the narratively lazy way to emotionally blackmail your audience to return next time, as a means of securing your ratings in the face of being deeply insecure that your story and characters are actually any good to do so on their own merits, whoever used it and wherever it was used.
It's not as if Doctor Who came up with that.
Rather, as the nature of the programme has a touch of that old "Saturday Morning Adventure serial" to it - it was born of that era and still retains that spirit - then it's got a tendency towards doing it the "old school" way with the overt cliff hangers. Like, main characters literally hanging off the edges of cliffs by episode's end.
I mean, that's somewhat the whole point, in a sense. The "cliff hanger" was so named because ye olde adventure serials employing the trick really did do daft stuff like have the main character fall over a cliff, clinging by one hand to the ledge and then - oh no! - "tune in next week to find out if they die!". Same Bat time, same Bat channel.
And, really, it's just more obvious with modern Doctor Who, because whilst other dramas and serials have become more sophisticated in such devices (but let's not pretend that they aren't all pulling this same cheap "emotional blackmail" trick underneath it all), it remains beautifully unreconstructed in the case of Doctor Who.
Because it retains a thread of that "adventure serial" origin within it. Quite deliberately so. Partly a nod to the past, but also a recognition in that, well, because everything's moved on elsewhere, it's pretty much the only show still doing things this way nowadays. It becomes a unique, refreshing and special experience for it, as you can't quite get it like this anywhere else anymore.
(As an aside, I actually quite liked Murray Gold's previous Matt-Smith-era rendition of the theme tune - before they decided to go all "exotic Arabesque alien" with it now instead - because it was a deliberate musical nod towards that "Saturday adventure serial" vibe. A touch of the Flash Gordons about it around the edges, you could say.
And I can't help thinking that, as the style of the show matched alongside it at the time, it was Moffat who suggested that. That he actually wanted to take it back to a nostalgic "Saturday Adventure serial" vibe and the best way to set the audience up for that is to ring them in with a new version of the theme that clearly stamps that feeling onto it from the off.)
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
KlaxonCow wrote:And I can't help thinking that, as the style of the show matched alongside it at the time, it was Moffat who suggested that. That he actually wanted to take it back to a nostalgic "Saturday Adventure serial" vibe and the best way to set the audience up for that is to ring them in with a new version of the theme that clearly stamps that feeling onto it from the off.)
And yet, oddly, after his first one and half seasons I do not think there were any cliffhangers at all over Moffat's run until Dark Water last year (unless we count the John Hurt reveal at the end of The Name of the Doctor, which was actually the end of a season finale).
Emoticon and contraction free since... quite a while ago.
Just been rewatching the first few of Capaldi's. Interesting how different it is in hindsight - his actor's got some pretty clearly planned "accents" of the cold dry sarcasm he's associated with (i.e. Tucker) but he's far from bad like I think we were meant to wonder. What he is though, in these early ones, is desperately lacking social awareness.
That got me thinking. Hand on heart, I don't mean this like some kid off 4chan who uses it as an insult: is it possible that upon regeneration he developed autism (albeit a textbook version of it)? He's alien yes but his previous incarnations were not this out-of-touch with human social interaction / reading the emotions of others and acting accordingly, which is what it's usually known for. It's never that simple and doesn't always manifest itself that way (it's called a spectrum for a reason) but that's sort of the textbook definition I was taught in my brief foray into the mental health sector. Considering the various correlations - Doctor Who fans often nerds, autistic people often nerds etc (my cousin is both) it doesn't seem much of a stretch to think that maybe Moffat or some other with influence decided to try and appeal to that part of the fanbase. It can be something good - to give kids like my cousin someone to understand and identify with. Not just any someone either - a very intelligent and actually very kind hearted hero.
Really hoping not to cause offence, just thinking. This season he's more "in tune" but in his early episodes he was so socially inept that considering his previous incarnations were pretty good at this, one can only question whether something like that happened. It's known that his (or one day her) personality can vary somewhat in regeneration, but he seems the same guy underneath with the same memories who's certainly had time to learn social competence among humans, leading me to believe that it's more of a brain (re)wiring kind of thing than a skill one.
