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[Thad]

From the trailers I figured this'd be the most horseshit of the lot. Figures it'd end up being my favorite out of the last couple seasons.

Right?  Way to defy expectations.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's my favorite of the last couple seasons (that's still The Doctor's Wife), but definitely the meatiest of the new season.

Not so much riddled with cliches as reveling in them, and the pacing actually worked when they weren't trying to cram in a dinosaur chase or whatever every five minutes. Made time for actual, you know, character development and shit. And I love the almost cartoonish portrayal of Americans. Good times.

And it's nice that we got such a quick payoff on the "You know, the Doctor's really been kind of a huge prick these last couple episodes" observation instead of dragging it out.

I mean, obviously we haven't seen the last of it, but it's been acknowledged and will continue to shape things going forward.

And that he managed to keep the monologuing about everything he's seen and done to a minimum (which, in addition to the point that we've heard it all so many times, doesn't really fit his newfound attempts to keep a low profile).  He did the "every time I don't kill the Joker he just escapes and kills more people" bit with Rory and Amy, but he lets Kahler Jex's "you're just like me but imprisoned by your morality" speech go by without mentioning he's got at least three genocides under his belt.

And of course there's no simple solution to the question of the Doctor's morality, because the Doctor's morality is whatever the showrunner says it is.  But if we wanted to take a somewhat cynical but nonetheless interesting in-universe explanation, well, if you're 1200 years old you're bound to redefine your moral parameters a few times.  Sometimes you're in an optimistic mood and sometimes you're not; the guy who agonizes over whether or not he can bring himself to kill Davros might just straight-up trick him into blowing up his own planet a couple regenerations later because seriously, fuck that guy.

And it's not just the Doctor who's committed genocide.  Some of his best friends have committed genocide.  Even going back to #3, he was pretty pissed when the Brigadier wiped out the Silurians, but they were still friends the next week.

Oh, and of course it's Toby Whitehouse. I'd only just started on Being Human last night. Had to skip back and check the opening credits when I was about halfway through. Hell if the guy doesn't have a noticeable style with the dialogue.

Haven't checked it out yet.  Worth it?



ALSO: This is the second time in as many weeks the Doctor has mentioned his Christmas list.  I like to think the Doctor's Christmas List will play a major role in this year's Christmas episode.

[Sharkey]

Yeah, and he also mentioned Christmas in the Dalek ep, so that's the buzzword for the half-season.

And I just finished the first season of Being Human and I like it alright. It goes pretty heavy on the cliches and doesn't subvert them nearly enough, but entertaining nonetheless. Like a particularly thoughtful World of Darkness GM got ahold of a TV series. Definitely appreciate the writing more than the direction and editing, which implements so many contemporary pop songs and montages that I'm put in mind of a shitty 90s MTV series. Of course, that's almost nostalgic, so whatevs. I hear it goes to shit in the last season, but we'll see. Also, as usual, the American take on it is complete and utter dogshit.

[Thad]

Yeah, and he also mentioned Christmas in the Dalek ep, so that's the buzzword for the half-season.

Guys over on the Bleeding Cool comments section have noted that eggs keep showing up, too -- "Where are the eggs?", dinosaur eggs, and an egg-shaped spacecraft.

And flickering lightbulbs.  An image probably best remembered from Blink.

They've also suggested that we may not be seeing episodes in chronological order (at least, not from the Doctor's perspective), which is a tempting possibility and could certainly go a long way to explaining his overall dickishness and his increasing distance from the Ponds.  Could be that whatever Something Bad is forthcoming, he's already seen it.

And I just finished the first season of Being Human and I like it alright. It goes pretty heavy on the cliches and doesn't subvert them nearly enough, but entertaining nonetheless. Like a particularly thoughtful World of Darkness GM got ahold of a TV series. Definitely appreciate the writing more than the direction and editing, which implements so many contemporary pop songs and montages that I'm put in mind of a shitty 90s MTV series. Of course, that's almost nostalgic, so whatevs. I hear it goes to shit in the last season, but we'll see. Also, as usual, the American take on it is complete and utter dogshit.

Cool, maybe I'll put it on my list.  Still have Life on Mars to watch on my "British dramas people have recommended to me" list first though, I think.  (Actually thought the American adaptation of that was solid, if largely because nobody really seemed to give a fuck whether it actually made any logical sense.  But that's without seeing the original.)

Hm -- British shows that have had good American adaptations?  Till Death Us Do Part, Steptoe and Son, and The Office, off the top of my head.  I'm sure there are more but damned if I can think of any.

[Classic]

Of course, the Britons hate American adaptations as a matter of national pride?

[Thad]

io9 adds another recurring point over the past couple episodes: people not only not knowing who the Doctor is, but the scripts using that to actively subvert the audience's expectations.  Not only do we naturally assume that the alien doctor the Gunslinger is looking for is the Doctor, but in Dinosaurs, we assume Solomon recognizes the Doctor's name but actually he's just reacting to the presence of a doctor onboard.

[Lottel]

In your egg mention list,  there was also Rory yelling about Dalek eggs.
But you caught the important one. New girl needed eggs.  She comes back at Christmas.  Lots of eggs and Christmas mentions. Probably all just misdirects but whatever.

[Thad]

In your egg mention list,  there was also Rory yelling about Dalek eggs.

Well right, but it's the same thing.  Where did she get the eggs?  Eggs-terminate.

[Bal]

I wonder what would happen if they killed River in the "not everyone is getting out this time I mean it for real" scenario. Her original death isn't a fixed point, it wouldn't necessarily stop her from appearing, as they're both time travelers, and perhaps hint that The Doctor's timeline has been seriously altered. It would also be a good time/reason for Amy and Rory to step out of the TARDIS for good.

I don't think that's what's going to happen, but it would be interesting.

[Sharkey]

Amazing how an ending can turn an actually interesting premise into complete rubbish in the course of seven minutes. Reminded of I am Legend right up until after the dog died. Really neat mystery there right up until nope, it was just some guy in creepy makeup we've never heard of, who fucked off with his creepy buddies for no reason so the Doc could fuck up his entire plan by waving his screwdriver at a thing. What were the guys with the things in their mouth even doing? Why was there creepy robot stuff in their mouths? What was up with the patients? Did they wheel them all onto the Tardis before shit blowed up and everybody got magically better? Who gives a fuck. Everybody lives and the Doctor is great because he figured out exactly fuckall until the badguy explained it to him and then for some reason let him screwdriver the thing that makes everybody come back to life and the bad guys blow up. The end.

Seriously, it's like the writers are part of some alien plot to slowly transform me into Plinkett with this horseshit.

[Thad]

I liked it well enough but that's because right from the opening I realized the cubes and the invasion were completely inconsequential and this episode was about Amy and Rory trying to grow up.

(Me, I hoped the reason there was nothing in the cubes was that they were just a giant distraction, like that Philip K Dick story where everybody at customs is watching this really elaborate children's toy from Russia to figure out what kind of insidious plot it could represent, and it keeps doing increasingly bizarre things, until finally they realize it was all just to distract them while something else slipped right under their noses.  That's another story with a really promising setup and a completely fucking lame ending.)

Anyhow, I thought the character bits were largely pretty good; I'm quite liking Rory's Dad, and Brig's Daughter is a promising character too.  (A little young to be Brig's daughter given that he was like 90 when he died, but let's leave that alone for a minute.)

We're still very much on the Peter Pan thing and I think the resolution, rather than Amy dying as they keep hinting, is that she's going to tell the Doctor to fuck right off and stop coming 'round here.

But you're right: really, really dumb ending.

[Thad]

...you know, this is inconsequential canon nitpicking, but something else: he referred to his companions and said "Some die."

Some, as in plural.

Who's died besides Adric?

Peri's death was a fakeout; Romana and Rose wound up in alternate dimensions but survived; River's body died but the script was very clear that preserving her consciousness counted as Everybody Lives.

The Brigadier died of old age decades after the last time he saw the Doctor; I don't think that counts.  Sarah Jane's death hasn't been handled on the show but Lis Sladen died of cancer.  I GUESS there's Jack's death as the Face of Boe, but that's really stretching things.

Have any other companions actually died on the TV show?  I know some have in the comics and whatever other extraneous media, but that stuff's typically not considered canon.  Could the script just be alluding to adventures we haven't seen?  There are supposed to be over a thousand years' worth of those, after all.

[Kayma]

I GUESS there's Jack's death as the Face of Boe, but that's really stretching things.

hehehehe

Could the script just be alluding to adventures we haven't seen?  There are supposed to be over a thousand years' worth of those, after all.

This is kind of how I took it. Also, it might include people he liked, but that got offed before / instead of becoming companions, like the woman from that faith eating minotaur hotel.

[Lottel]

The shortest lived companion of all,  the waitress from the Titanic.  Died 15 minutes after agreeing to be a companion. And he took her death pretty hard.

[Sharkey]

...you know, this is inconsequential canon nitpicking, but something else: he referred to his companions and said "Some die."

Some, as in plural.

Who's died besides Adric?

Katarina blew her self out an airlock way back when, though she didn't travel with him for long. Still, she was there for more than a single serial and that's enough for deathplural if you're only counting stuff that happened on TV. Actually, in retrospect, that was pretty fucking brutal. Especially given that they were mostly just trying to get her out quickly because writing for a primitive who doesn't understand that light bulbs aren't magic was apparently hard. Then that turned out to be most of Leela's character arc ten years later.

[Thad]

Ah-har -- yeah, I can see how I missed that one, what with there only being 3 surviving episodes out of 12.  Worth checking out the Lost in Time sets?  I've been meaning to give them a look but they're not exactly high-priority on my Old Who To-Watch list.

Wikipedia's got a whole Death of a Companion section.  Which has the ones we've mentioned plus Kamelion.

[Royal☭]

Throughout the new series there have been several episodes of "I want this person to travel with me oh they died." Adelaide Brooke in "Waters of Mars" killed herself after the Doctor's actions, Astrid Peth in "Voyage of the Damned" turned into stardust, and for all intents and purposes the Donna Noble who traveled with the Doctor is dead, replaced by the shallow one that had never met him.

Those are all a bit of stretch, but the Doctor has left a string of dead people behind him implicitly trusted him like Amy and Rory do. If you want to be really charitable, you could also include the Madame Du Pompadour, who the Doctor was clearing out room for on the TARDIS when the time dilation of the episode ended up making him come back too late to bring her. While she didn't die under the Doctor's watch, she did die thinking the Doctor had abandoned her.

 And the list Thad links to specifically points out that both of them have died under his watch.

[Thad]

...man, Lucie Miller/To the Death sounds grim.

Those Wiki articles don't mention what happens to Susan and Alex so I assume they survive.  Which I guess makes sense in case they want to bring them back, but it would have been a convenient way to tie up that particular loose end and straight-up confirm that Susan died in the Time War.

Then again, I DO think that actually trying to explain what happened in the Time War is probably an inherently bad idea.

[Sharkey]

Ah-har -- yeah, I can see how I missed that one, what with there only being 3 surviving episodes out of 12.  Worth checking out the Lost in Time sets?  I've been meaning to give them a look but they're not exactly high-priority on my Old Who To-Watch list.

Meh. Maybe if you have a long drive/train ride/whatever, but even then I only watched/listened to a few where something interesting was supposed to have happened but mostly didn't. But hey, I apparently hate everything so YMMV.

[Lottel]

something interesting was supposed to have happened but mostly didn't.

So typical Doctor Who?

[Thad]

Neil Cameron: Daleks trying to figure out what happened all those times they tried to take over the universe and it didn't work out.