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Doctor Who - Series 11 (Part 2)

Started by Mister Six, November 02, 2018, 01:50:06 PM

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Alberon

She does. It should have been a Yaz-centric episode last week, but wasn't. I can't see how it can not be one next week, but Chibnall can probably find a way.

With four regulars you can't give all of them (bar the Doctor) something significant each week, but Yaz should have had her turn long before now.

Mango Chimes

An odd thing: both this and Episode 2 began with the doc and gang getting twatted and waking up in a medical bay in a spaceship, complete with the same blurry POV shots and their previously awaken chums loitering in the background.

They also both featured alien humanoids who are so humanoid they're visually indistinguishable from humans. Has the BBC sold off its body paint stock? OR is it subtly setting up a future reveal that the Time Nazi has gone around wiping out alien races and seeding the universe with white people, like in that unnecessarily explanatory Star Trek episode?

Ja'moke

Quote from: Mango Chimes on November 04, 2018, 11:33:40 PM
An odd thing: both this and Episode 2 began with the doc and gang getting twatted and waking up in a medical bay in a spaceship, complete with the same blurry POV shots and their previously awaken chums loitering in the background.

They also both featured alien humanoids who are so humanoid they're visually indistinguishable from humans. Has the BBC sold off its body paint stock? OR is it subtly setting up a future reveal that the Time Nazi has gone around wiping out alien races and seeding the universe with white people, like in that unnecessarily explanatory Star Trek episode?

Half the hospital crew weren't white. But it's certainly possible Nazi Fonz didn't do a very good job.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Quote from: Ja'moke on November 04, 2018, 11:16:20 PM
The scene where Yaz was just asking Ryan questions was so bad. "When's the last time you seen ya dad?" "When did your mum die?" "Who found her?" "How old was you?"

She deserves better.

She does, because at the moment she's just an exposition generator. "Who found her?" was a particularly awful line, no one would ever say that in real life. Chibnall just couldn't think of another way of introducing the information that Ryan found her dead on the kitchen floor.

I'm actually quite staggered by his "this'll do" approach to dialogue.

Mango Chimes

Quote from: Ja'moke on November 04, 2018, 11:39:17 PM
Half the hospital crew weren't white.

Ha, even in my facetiousness I didn't consider they might be supposed to be not-human too. I was just thinking of the pregnant man.

Johnny Yesno

'You gave her great service.'
'So did you.'



Yicket! Yicket!

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: holyzombiejesus on November 04, 2018, 09:40:32 PM
if it was just after power, why did it trick that bloke in to entering the escape pod?

The Doctor answered this when she realised it was after the power. It wasn't a trick, it was an accident caused by the Spitoon consuming all the power units in the pod.

Mango Chimes

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on November 04, 2018, 11:44:22 PM
She does, because at the moment she's just an exposition generator. "Who found her?" was a particularly awful line, no one would ever say that in real life. Chibnall just couldn't think of another way of introducing the information that Ryan found her dead on the kitchen floor.

I'm actually quite staggered by his "this'll do" approach to dialogue.

It really does feel like a draft that lays out, in functionally adequate fashion, what information needs to be conveyed in the scene. "I'm a medical professional. So is she. We're on a space ship. It doesn't have a pilot." "I'm pregnant. I'm an alien. In my species, men give birth to men. The gestation period is one week. I don't think I'll be a good father."

But then it's been mistakenly printed out and distributed to cast and crew, rather than the later draft where that dialogue was completely rewritten to convey the same information but through character and natural speech.

The Yaz and Ryan scene went beyond dialogue to scene direction, or rather a complete absence of it. You can see this sketch draft script saying, "Yaz and Ryan are doing something and they discuss Ryan's mum and dad". But then again we've accidentally filmed that draft, rather than the one where they were found something to do. I was inwardly screaming watching that scene. HAVE THEM SAY THIS STUFF WHILST RUSHING SOMEWHERE, OR LOOKING FOR SOMETHING, OR DOING ANYTHING AT ALL OTHER THAN STANDING LISTLESSLY IN A CORRIDOR.

Kelvin

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on November 04, 2018, 11:44:22 PM
She does, because at the moment she's just an exposition generator. "Who found her?" was a particularly awful line, no one would ever say that in real life. Chibnall just couldn't think of another way of introducing the information that Ryan found her dead on the kitchen floor.

I'm actually quite staggered by his "this'll do" approach to dialogue.

Exactly! At the very least, Ryan could have offered the info himself. Chibnall didn't need Yaz asking, " So, who found your dead mum's cold corpse, then, Ryan?

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: Mango Chimes on November 04, 2018, 11:58:49 PM
HAVE THEM SAY THIS STUFF WHILST RUSHING SOMEWHERE, OR LOOKING FOR SOMETHING, OR DOING ANYTHING AT ALL OTHER THAN STANDING LISTLESSLY IN A CORRIDOR.

Waiting for two of six minutes to pass so they wouldn't get to the briefing too early.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

#130
"My gran and mum are dead. My bad dad left me. I am sad. I will eventually bond with my granddad due to this series of life-altering adventures. I will finally allow him an affectionate fist-bump. Then he will die. I will then feel quite sad again while having learned a valuable life lesson."

I hate being a smart arse about this, but that's probably how it's going to play out. I mean, there's nothing actually wrong with that as a basic character arc. It's sort of corny, yes, but a good writer could make it work.

Bradley Walsh will perform it well, he'll sell whatever he's given to work with, and yer Ryan lad will probably do okay. Whittaker will deliver a nicely played speech about death, mourning and memories. Yaz will remain silent while suggesting they all go for tea at hers.

Say what you like about RTD and Moffat, but you never knew where the fuck their seasons were going. If I'm wrong about Chibnall's arc, if I'm being a prick, I'll gladly hold my hands up and apologise.

Bourgyste

Thought that was a very good episode and very 70's Who in its vibe. But enough with the Ryan melancholy and we need more Yaz.
Oh, The Doctor was spectacular in this episode...I'm sold.

Black Ship

Anyone else get nervous when they started showing close ups of her hands? Just me then.

Also Pting is Adipose x Raxacoricofallapatorian. Probably turns out it was fabricated by The Stenza.

Or Something.

Mister Six

Hum, it's weird because that was about as much of a mess as The Ghost Monument, but I actually did like reasonably large chunks of it. Pretty much everything with Fat Mark Gatiss and his baby was decent - the banter with Graham and his matter-of-fact responses was funny, and having human-looking aliens whose males can get pregnant is so simple but actually worked for me as a quick bit of world-building, and as an effective way to present alienness. There's somehow something more "alien" about that than some bloke with blue skin who is otherwise exactly the same as a regular homo sapiens.

I also liked the general aesthetic - even if "iPod plastic white hospital world" was already done better in The Girl Who Waited - the alien (some properly great animation throughout for him), a surprisingly large number of the gags, Yaz's bits of banter about the alien, plenty of Whittaker's work - especially "It was more of a volume, actually", and The Doctor actually being a bit more Doctory.

It might have helped that Mrs Six, who's making an effort to get back into it having ducked out when the Ponds left, clocked this was written by the same bloke as last week's and thought I was primed for a piss-taking session, so talked all over the tediously long bits of exposition at the start. NO, WOMAN, I WANT TO TRY TO LIKE THIS EVEN IF IT'S IMPOSSIBLE PLEASE LET'S FOCUS ON THE RISIBLE TELEVISION SHOW.

Sadly, everything that I haven't mentioned above was a bit guff. Why not just toss the alien out of an airlock at the start (I assume it's because he'd just come back if he wasn't fed, but why not actually say that!)? Why does Chibnall keep crowbarring shit about Ryan's dad - a character we haven't met and don't give a shit about - into scenes where the characters should be on edge and talking about more than his shit EastEnders backstory? Come to think of it, why was The Doctor the only one who was panicking at the thought of being trapped on a disintegrating spaceship? Shouldn't Yaz, Ryan and Graham all have been bricking themselves when they saw The Doctor worried? And yet they were shrugging it off. 

What was the point of pilot woman and her brother? They weren't fleshed out enough to be remotely interesting (despite the bloke playing the brother gamely doing his best with such a non-role), and there was never any sense that the ship was actually in danger of crashing or whatever. The pilot dying offscreen and the brother taking over was especially poor - surely her keeling over mid-flight could have added a bit of tension? Would've helped if we'd seen the asteroids they were flying through, although I imagine the budget couldn't handle it.

Something that I think I said last week has been proven in this week's episode: Chibnall has absolutely no idea how to escalate a story. Within minutes of the first sign that something was wrong with the ship, we saw the monster and knew it was chomping through stuff. Minutes later, we were told that there was a bomb that could go off, and some asteroids to fly through. And that was it - the threat remained exactly the same right up until the end. The crew weren't forced down to one end of the ship, say, forcing them to come up with an ingenious way to get to the controls at the other. There wasn't a bit where a companion is trapped in a soon-to-jettison escape pod, necessitating a difficult decision on The Doctor's part. There wasn't even any risk to Fat Mark Gatiss - surely to god this is the point at which they get locked in a cupboard and have to help him give birth without loads of medical equipment?

No. Instead the threat is quite clearly laid out within 15 or 20 minutes, and then the characters walk backwards and forwards between a handful of rooms until The Doctor does a thing, and then the episode just stops. Not ends - stops. At the start of the episode The Doctor was shitting herself about leaving the TARDIS alone - to the point that she's willing to endanger a hospital ship. So I guess between the end of this episode and the start of the next one, she just picked it back up - eight days later, was it? - with no problems, and so her concerns were just an overreaction?

Also, as with the spiders episode last week, the characters were free to wander about aimlessly through corridors talking about Ryan's boring fucking backstory - "What about my dad?" WHO CARES YOU'RE IN SPACE AND PROBABLY GOING TO DIE YOU DAFT CUNT - without any sense of imminent danger. Ryan and Yaz just left Fat Mark Gatiss in the birth clinic! What if the monster came through the wall and poisoned him, or ripped his arms off or something?

This week's wasn't nearly as awful as that one, but by golly it wasn't good.

EDIT: Also the sonic screwdriver rebooting right at the very second The Doctor happened to need it again was exceptionally lazy writing.

Mister Six

Quote from: Mango Chimes on November 04, 2018, 11:33:40 PM
An odd thing: both this and Episode 2 began with the doc and gang getting twatted and waking up in a medical bay in a spaceship, complete with the same blurry POV shots and their previously awaken chums loitering in the background.

That and The Doctor losing her TARDIS annoyed Mrs Six, who got the impression that either these were inexplicable recurring themes for this season, or indications that this female Doctor is a bit shit compared to her predecessors. I had to persuade her that this kind of thing happened a fair bit to Tennant (she's mostly just familiar with Matt Smith, who generally kept tabs on his TARDIS - ironically the only episode I can think of where he lost it was in Chibnall's own Silurians two-parter, which we skipped).

Which is a bit of a problem with...

Quote from: Kelvin on November 04, 2018, 08:35:12 PMHaving her so out of her depth every week if both an interesting change of direction for the character, but also quite jarring after years of The Doctor always being so ahead of the game.

^ that kind of thing.

I agree with Kelvin - having The Doctor be on the back foot is a much more dynamic and interesting way to treat the character than having them know everything all the time. However, now she's a woman it runs the risk of implying that women are basically a bit shit. Still, better than a perfect female non-character like Rey from Star Wars, I suppose.

Replies From View

Also all the business with the corridors being unsignposted went nowhere, didn't it?  Once again they set up the possibility of jeopardy - getting lost later on when they really needed to find their way to somewhere specific - and then they seemingly just couldn't be arsed to follow up on it.

Replies From View

Has titbo really flounced from Doctor Who because the Doctor is now a woman?  I assumed that was a joke before.

Spoon of Ploff

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on November 04, 2018, 08:21:39 PM
What was the point of the Doctor clutching her side throughout this episode? Another botched attempt at creating tension?

I think I can answer this one. Having the Red Shirt medic rightly chastise the Doctor early on for her selfishness, and her realize she's acting that way because she's still feeling poorly. They couldn't just have her act normal after that hence continued side clutching.

I... kinda liked this episode, but I am very easily pleased. I did find the makeshift pilot interface a bit crap distracting... I was wondering where they got that SpecSavers prescription lens from? As least have some tiny lights dotted on it.

Yeah... Android fellow... what was point? Thought he might become bait for the cute Ptipex creature, but no... and with his boss being dead at the end it looked like he was going to get decommissioned anyway.

More I think about it, the more I'll pick holes in it, so I'll stop now.





Norton Canes

Quote from: Mister Six on November 05, 2018, 05:32:20 AM
Hum, it's weird because that was about as much of a mess as The Ghost Monument, but I actually did like reasonably large chunks of it. Pretty much everything with Fat Mark Gatiss and his baby was decent... I also liked the general aesthetic - even if "iPod plastic white hospital world" was already done better in The Girl Who Waited - the alien (some properly great animation throughout for him), a surprisingly large number of the gags, Yaz's bits of banter about the alien, plenty of Whittaker's work - especially "It was more of a volume, actually", and The Doctor actually being a bit more Doctory

Yeah, these were the kind of reasons I liked it, too. I said the other day that I was disappointed Chibnall hadn't even managed to come up with anything as breezily entertaining as The Power Of Three or Dinosaurs On A Spaceship in this series... well, at last he has. Pipe o' Pringles!

Norton Canes

So next week's episode in set in the Punjab in 1947, "as the country is being torn apart". I wonder if there will be an appearance by the British Armed Forces? And if so will we be treated to as obsequious a message as we got at the end of The Family Of Blood or Death In Heaven?

jobotic

I'm laughing now:

We're in a spaceship that is going to be eaten by a monster that we can't stop*.

Yeah I know but can we stop here and talk about the issues I've had with my dad.

Yeah, sorry, of course we can. What's troubling you?





*unless we wrap it in a blanket and hoof it.

Deyv

Quote from: Norton Canes on November 05, 2018, 09:38:32 AM
So next week's episode in set in the Punjab in 1947, "as the country is being torn apart". I wonder if there will be an appearance by the British Armed Forces? And if so will we be treated to as obsequious a message as we got at the end of The Family Of Blood or Death In Heaven?

That Churchill one was the worst for obsequiousness, but at least it had a Dalek offering to make a cup of tea. Family of Blood had a gripping story, Death in Heaven had Missy killing Osgood and dancing in her ashes. If there is a message at the end of next week's, I hope it's at least propped up by an engaging story or a moment where the villain makes me think "ooh, you bad sod." I enjoyed bits of this week's, but pacing, dialogue and the characterisation of the guest cast is an issue for me.

Kelvin

Quote from: Replies From View on November 05, 2018, 07:51:04 AM
Has titbo really flounced from Doctor Who because the Doctor is now a woman?  I assumed that was a joke before.

I would like to believe it's because he didn't want to watch a Chibnall ran show. He always said it would be crap.

Replies From View

Quote from: Norton Canes on November 05, 2018, 09:33:30 AM
Yeah, these were the kind of reasons I liked it, too. I said the other day that I was disappointed Chibnall hadn't even managed to come up with anything as breezily entertaining as The Power Of Three or Dinosaurs On A Spaceship in this series... well, at last he has. Pipe o' Pringles!

I think I might be in an alternate dimension.

daf

Quote from: Norton Canes on November 05, 2018, 09:38:32 AM
So next week's episode in set in the Punjab in 1947, "as the country is being torn apart".

That's got to be a proper historical, right? - with No Aliens, Monsters or Racist Time Fonzies involved?

Replies From View

You never hear of any Racist Time Fozzies, do you.

They must be out there somewhere.

Malcy

Quote from: daf on November 05, 2018, 11:13:54 AM
That's got to be a proper historical, right? - with No Aliens, Monsters or Racist Time Fonzies involved?

Doesn't look like it.

BritishHobo

Absolute spunk of a review in the latest Private Eye, literally just parroting the same 'diverse PC companions, and a token white guy!!!' thing that every other fucker has done. It also further tries to prove its point about the show being a new, more 'right-on' regeneration with the line 'Whittaker's incarnation is a pacificist'. Like Tennant and Capaldi were running around wanking on guns.

Mate.

daf

#148
Quote from: AsparagusTrevor on November 04, 2018, 09:30:42 PM
Did anyone else think the Robbie Rotten android bloke was gonna turn out to be a wrong-un, a la Alien?

Absolutely - when they were scanning for the bomb I thought it was definitely going to be him.

But no, the bomb is a little techno doughnut in a handy pullout drawer, and Robot Rotten™ is left hanging around like a spare prick in the background with NOTHING TO DO.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a Robot hanging about on a space ship, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must be revealed to pose some sort of threat to the heroes. If not, it shouldn't be there *

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
* (. . . unless it's written as a fusspot comedy butler)

Mister Six

What was the conundrum, by the way?