Doctor Who

[Bal]

It's a character show guys. The softest, squishiest sci-fi there is. If that's your hangup, like, I don't know what to do for you.

[Mothra]

I mean, even from that perspective, they argue over whether or not to kill the moon, then poll the Earth, then decide, then the little girl aborts. They don't even talk about why she chose to do that.

Like, I guess the tension leading up to the decision was good? Kind of a cop-out when all that hard-choosin' meant nothing, and everything went back to normal immediately. The moon might as well have never hatched.

[Bal]

Clara aborted, not the little girl, unless you think Clara is a little girl. At any rate, it was an episode about choice, not an episode about the moon being an egg. That's window dressing.

[Thad]

I mean, even from that perspective, they argue over whether or not to kill the moon

Okay, you know people are being too sensitive about spoilers when they are spoilertagging THE TITLE OF THE EPISODE.




Just don't tell me what happens at the end of Kill Bill.

[Mothra]

Clara aborted, not the little girl, unless you think Clara is a little girl. At any rate, it was an episode about choice, not an episode about the moon being an egg. That's window dressing.

I actually typed out 'Clara', then thought, "there's no way it was Clara. The Doctor even made this huge deal about the girl being the one to save the moon!"

It's fine that she chose to save the egg, and it's fine that she did it against the Earth's wishes. What annoyed me was that, as a character-driven episode, there's this big, tortured choice to be made - one they started and ended the episode with - and she never says why she made the choice she did. The outcome made it irrelevant, but if they're going to focus so much on that choice, why leave it unknown? Why build up to it for an entire episode, then back out with the safest, least-committal resolution possible?

Felt like they had one-third of a story.

[Thad]

I don't know, I can't say as I would have wanted her to actually explain why she did what she did, in dialogue.

You can't just have your characters announce how they feel. That makes me feel angry!

[Bal]

Yeah, I'm with Thad here. She made the choice because she felt it was right, she doesn't have to announce it. Besides, the whole scenario is designed to play in to the Clara/Doctor/Pink thing that's going on. If you want to complain about the moon killing, complain that neither choice would save the Earth. No moon is as bad as too massive of a moon, if not worse, and the too massive moon would just stay if you killed the creature. So it's a choice between being fucking and being screwed. So why bother worrying about it when it's so obviously just wacky Doctor Who non-science window dressing to put Clara in a position she doesn't like, and to give the Doctor the chance to put her there, and explore a little bit the idea that some choices are not his to make.

[Thad]

Well, I understand there's such a thing as pushing suspension of disbelief too far, and the science in this episode fails on every level, far beyond even Doctor Who's pretty low standards.

It still worked for me because of the character stuff, but I can understand how all the moon stuff could be so distracting for some people as to overwhelm what the episode did right.

[Thad]

You know, within the first 66 seconds of the episode I said "You know, before this is over someone is going to say 'Are you my mummy?'"

Okay, let's see the checklist for themes of this season:
Soldiers
Impossible choices
Doctor being incredibly callous toward people who are about to die or just died
Didn't see anybody teleported to the Promised Land this time around but I wouldn't be surprised if one of the dead characters showed up there later.

Themes of every season:
Is he a good man?
Doctor as liar and manipulator
Companion becoming liar and manipulator too
Hartnell references: tie, cane

[Bal]

I quite enjoyed that. Clara continues to be interesting, and Capaldi continues to impress with his portrayal of The Doctor.

I was actually surprised and quite delighted by the twist in the middle of the episode revealing the purpose of the Train. It wasn't earth shattering or anything, but it was still very well done. I also really enjoyed the bit with the mythology expert, because of course The Doctor would be an expert in mythology himself, given how much of it he's actually encountered. I actually really liked the entire supporting cast this episode.

[Grath]

For those interested, the guy who wrote this week's episode (and next week's) did an AMA on Reddit.

[Thad]

Oh also forgot to mention we got something of an inverse of Journey to the Center of the Dalek here, in the Doctor asking someone to join up and the potential companion declining.

Also, I mentioned the two Hartnell refs I saw but forgot to mention the Baker one (jelly babies).

ETA: Oh, and also monsters that can't be seen, of course.

[Thad]

[Sharkey]

If anyone wants to hear why Kill the Moon is the most atrocious bit of television I've subjected myself to in years, leave your lights on.

Nah. I don't actually care what you think, even if you do live in a part of the Western hemisphere that just happens to be visible from the moon for a plot-irrelevant minute and a half. But congrats on having the only opinions that anyone noticed before they were completely ignored.

Spoiler: It's a fucking dogshit sandwich from beginning to end, and if you like it you're a terrible person who should die in a pit full of single-celled spiders. Which I'd waste a word or two on if it weren't the least of my concerns (I lied. Valonia ventricosa, squared-cube law, blah blah, etc.) Mostly I'm annoyed at the heavy-handed, hideously pretentious abortion metaphor. Yes, leave it to the women, it's their choice, so they should be able to press or not press the big red "ABORT the ABORTION" button. But we knew what the right choice was all along, didn't we?

Yeah, fuck right off.

Also, loving the poncho thrown over the chair next to the half-eaten tacos or whatever. Subtle.

Christ. I was actually enjoying this season.

[Sharkey]

I don't want to be entirely negative, though. I actually liked The Caretaker, though it had some character issues and the end was embarrassing. And Orient Express was a lot of fun. Personal score for the season so far:

Fun but stupid
Fuck off
Fun but stupid
FUCKING GREAT
Pretty Good!
Also pretty good. Ish.
Die in a hole
Yay!

[Mothra]

What was the deal with the one-celled spiders, too? Why make them one-celled?

[Smiler]

THEY'RE THE BABIES BACTERIA!!!!!1

That whole episode was a whole string of unrelated dumb shit happening. Remember the part where the little girl started floating in the middle of the big room for seemingly no reason while a spider was going to kill her?

[Bal]

The science in the episode was Voyager levels of stupid, to the point that the giant single celled organisms literally appeared in an episode of that show (Macrocosm if you hate yourself enough to look), but complaining about the Science in Doctor Who is just crazy to me. Not to say the rest of the episode wasn't dumb for other reasons. My favorite part was probably the very end with Clara on the TARDIS, because it was the only part that kind of made sense or mattered at all.

[Mothra]

It's not even that single-celled monsters are impossible, though. I'm wondering why they chose to establish that these generic moonspiders were germs at all.

Eggs in general aren't known for being unusually germy!

[Sharkey]

I'm also annoyed that the premise is pretty much the same as a short RPG I was working on almost twenty years ago. Kind of a pastiche of Chrono Trigger, FFVI and Nightfall, where the inner planets are mysteriously disappearing, mostly unnoticed, until the moon cracks open releasing a weird giant dragon monster while the protagonists watch from a cliff and realize all their other problems just became incredibly fucking trivial. Especially with all the earthquakes and whatnot that have been happening while they were running around fighting the evil empire or whatever. Turns out the evil empire wasn't responsible for those. They weren't just randomly relocating the protagonists' villages as part of some For the Evuls pogrom. All those crazy amoral scientists that tried to say "No, stop! You don't know what you're doing! This will ruin everything!" Yeah, maybe you should have listened to them. They were trying to suppress panic and minimize casualties while covertly preparing an evacuation. In retrospect, I bet I could have worked in something about the righteous resistance being orchestrated by an apocalyptic, millenarian death cult. Now the not-so-heroic-all-of-a-sudden kids have to regroup in a world bombarded by moon chunks. The world they're standing on is going to hatch in a couple years at most. Unless they can kill the thing inside. Or put it back to sleep. But would that be right? (No, John. You are the bacterias.)

Spoiler: It doesn't matter, because it can't be done anyway. A half dozen teenagers with goofy outfits and ridiculous weapons are not going to kill an unborn god. The save-the-world-abort-the-monster device being built by the scientists you assumed were being dicks for the sake of being dicks and now are all "I tried to tell you idiots!" That doesn't work, either. Possibly, but not definitively because of your earlier shenanigans. The last third was going to be trying to protect refugees while they boarded an exodus ship, but mostly from other desperate people, families with children, etc. Which would be a complete curb-stomp dark joke of a final battle. Some moral decisions at the end, but with no ultimate right answer. The only remotely noble thing they have left to do is stay behind to be ultimately overwhelmed and crucified by an angry mob while the ship takes off and the world egg hatches. Happy fucking Easter. It was incredibly fucking bleak, to stand in contrast with the first third, which was setting it up to be your typical saccharine Teenagers in Improbable Outfits Save the World sort of thing before the fake-out.

Cut me some slack, I wasn't even drinking age yet. Wish I still had my old hard drive, though. It was only going to be a few hours long, and the world graphics and soundtrack I'd already put together made for impressive mood whiplash.

But now I'm sad because even if I were ever going to give it another go (if I haven't done it yet it's never going to happen anyway,) it'd look too derivative of this turd (as opposed to all the other stuff it was derivative of. At least nobody turns into amniotic fluid.)

It still would have been a damn sight better than Xenogears.