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Doctor Who Series 8

I'm able to suspend disbelief to a very great extent. I've no problem with the moon being an egg, and a winged creature emerging from it and, err, flying away through the vacuum of space, honestly. But the repeated mentions of the moon being 100 million years old, and an extra 1.6 billion tonnes being a significant amount really bugged me about this for some reason. Perhaps it was because using figures implies some sort of calculation and precision, but that just seems shite when they are so wildly wrong.

Otherwise, I think Clara should have decked the Doctor so hard he regenerated. Major dick in this episode.
 
TheHoodedClaw said:
But the repeated mentions of the moon being 100 million years old
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was going to mention that but considered the possibility this happens every hundred million years so technically the moon is only 100 million years old. but other than that agree completely - perfectly happy with a giant insect hatching from the moon-egg and flying away - just don't pluck numbers out the air when it takes about 20 seconds to google it!
 
wasn't bad. could have been loads better. still like capaldi, there were a few moments he reminded me of tom baker.
 
Obvs suspension of disbelief, but I thought that was excellent. I didn't like the last two episodes at all, but thought this was great. Courtney, the last doomed mission to the moon, the moon being a giant alien, the Doctor leaving it all to humans to decide except he was always going to jump in if they decide to take off and nuke it from orbit, Clara's rightful anger… All very very good. I love spacesuit episodes.

Clara really is leaving at the end of this season, isn't she?
 
I subscribe to Philip Sandifer's very good, thought-provoking critical analysis of Doctor Who: Tardis Eruditorom. You should read it if you want a lit-crit history/review of every Docor Who episode EVER.

His review (I think it's spot on) is here:
This was the single best episode of Doctor Who ever.
The joke is that the episode as a whole is a decisive move towards the classic themes of science fiction they espouse. Harness was apparently instructed to “Hinchcliffe the shit” out of the first fifteen minutes, and he did, but equally important is the way in which he Lamberted the shit out of it. On a very basic level, this starts like the show did back, well, in the immediate aftermath of two teachers from Coal Hill School confronting a secretive alien in their school. It starts with “here’s a weird place, let’s go explore it.” It does a self-consciously back to basics opening, complete with the Doctor not using the namechecked psychic paper and instead doing a classic, fast, and utterly believable bit of talking his way into command of a situation. There’s a self-conscious move, throughout the start of this episode, to frameDoctor Who in a very classic way.
That’s been a mission statement all season, but with the exception of Into the Dalek, which combined a visually splendid “here’s what Terry Nation wished you could see” with the same warmed over Dalek story we’ve been redoing since 2005, there hasn’t really been the decisive turn to doing the “here’s Doctor Who as you expect it, only not quite” approach that this season has been developing onto something that’s almost entirely composed out of the series’ golden age science fiction heritage.
The series has gotten very smart about how it handles the near future, fully embracing the fact that it’s going to be proven wrong by longevity and accepting that you can still do interesting television that’s a clear extension of the immediate-term. Or, to put it another way, and a relevant one given the Mexican mining facility, The Enemy of the World is not harmed in the least by the fact that it’s looking mediocre as a prediction of 2018. Which, you know, we might have figured out when 2000 AD and 2001: a Space Odyssey survived the odometer rollover, but we’re Doctor Who fans and so are inclined to be irrationally paranoid that nobody will like us. So why not do something that will probably… well, no, actually, let’s remember, the moon is an egg, so essentially certainly turn out not to happen in 2049. (Season Forty-Three, by the way, assuming no more gap years.)
What matters is instead the way in which this is a future built out of the present. The oceans are rising and killing people, people still watch TV, and people’s grans used to post things on Tumblr. We’ve forgotten about space. We didn’t manage nuclear disarmament, but we got down to a hundred, so that’s something I guess.
Into this is projected a classic science fiction dilemma. Trolley problem, straight up, with a genocide chaser. None of this is particularly interesting in and of itself, but the episode is savvy in the set pieces it uses while setting all of this up. Courtney gives them a set of new ways to do old scenes, and they use them systematically and deliberately. Ellis George rises to the occasion, as she does. Giant spiders haven’t been used for a while, so out they come for the requisite action scenes. The cold open is a solid use of flash forwards. A few little nods toThe Moonbase to light the way, and you have an episode that rolls along nicely for a while, getting its pieces in place.
Along the way there are little oddities. The Doctor gives a beautiful inverse of the “fixed points in time” speech, which is the first clue that something’s up. (Well, the first is arguably Clara at the very beginning, appearing as found footage, but we’ll get there.) He does the “disappear out of the narrative” trick, which isn’t unusual for the series, and which was made likely by the cold open anyway, but then pops right back in having figured out the plot.
All of this is just there to buy the space for the Doctor, and indeed Capaldi to do the ultimate trick and actually disappear from the narrative in a way that contributes to the storytelling. This too is a classic series trick, of course - the Doctor frequently vanished for whole episodes so that Hartnell and Troughton could take a week off. But here it’s used in spectacular fashion, with a fantastic Capaldi speech that comes out of a very classic science fiction heritage - one that’s ultimately about free will and the ability to choose your own destiny and about the existence of ethics and morality as a serious concern. It’s the “why doesn’t Superman solve poverty” speech, ultimately, but in a way such that the moral problems that speech has (namely that it’s in the end still an argument against ending poverty) don’t really apply, given the ridiculously fictional nature of the problem the Doctor refuses to solve.
So the perfect match for the moral dilemma, really, which is just as blatantly constructed, such that we get a self-consciously theatrical story about three people stuck in a room together with an unpleasant job to do and a disagreement over how to do it. Under the hood, we’ve moved from a 1960s/70s perspective on science fiction to a 1940s/50s one. We’re back in the days of Quatermass - science fiction as televisual theater, complete with the theme of space as a yawning and horrifying void full of cosmic horrors.
Except that this story has been set up as only Doctor Who can do it: as a decision about whether to murder the moon before it hatches, taken by an astronaut, a school teacher, and a black girl who’s been labeled a disruptive influence at school, with a countdown imposed by the army of giant spiders bearing down on them.
So with all of this done, it proceeds to do the other massively Doctor Who twist and become a magical incantation. Suddenly Clara makes her own Troughtonesque move, peering out of the television screen at the viewer. She takes the pixie part of her underlying trope with sudden seriousness, goes full Peter Pan, and demands that the viewer clap their hands, or at least turn off or on their lights to vote to save or cut the hatching moon.
It is worth noting, in a series that seemed to start by being acutely aware of the sun, as we head now into October and the autumn proper, does a story that could only work at night, well after moonrise, and with a mostly full moon. The viewer is, of course, ensnared here. The default choice is to leave the lights on. And indeed, no viewer is going to go “yeah, fuck the imaginary alien on Doctor Who, I’m turning my lights off to prove a point.” Clara demands we choose, we leave our lights on, and by doing so we make our choice. Which is exactly what the story expects us to do, and which it then responds to by giving the actual inevitable result of saying “hey humanity, do you want to risk extinction or murder the last star whale,” which is that the star whale has literally lost that vote every time it has ever come up in human history. (Although the decision to focus mostly on white European nations in depicting the vote is significant as well, again tying the decision to the actual cultural context of the episode. This is, I think, the most immediately concerned with the act of transmission Doctor Who has been since "The Feast of Steven.")
And so we get Clara and Courtney using their veto on the audience’s behalf, taking in their affect and finding themselves hurled into action by the audience’s demand, turning Doctor Who into reality television, and deciding that, no, they are not going to use the Moment/fire the nuclear bombs (and siding with the viewer in doing so), and in the process bring Tinkerbell back to life/bring back the Doctor. Democracy be damned. The people do not have a moral right to make a morally wrong decision. An immoral order does not magically become moral simply because of the number of people giving it. "I was only following orders" is not a defense simply because the orders were democratically dictated. Clara and Courtney could have said no. They did. Good for them. May we all be so brave.
And so the Doctor returns with another classic science fiction speech, this time used to give humanity its utopia back, rewarding the audience’s moral decision with a promise that this decision to value life and beauty over fear and violence can overcome humanity’s worst instincts, turn the lights back on, and save the future.
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I would have liked the episode a lot more if it wasn't the moon.

make it one of the largest asteroids in the asteroid belt like Ceres

play up the baby will want to eat aspect, maybe implying that the asteoid belt is the remains of the last planet snacked on by mumsy.

would feel a bit better for me.
 
I get what all you likers are saying about it but it didn't grab me this one.

Also, back on earth at the end, it all looked very serene :confused:
Surely the earth would be wobbling on it's axis, utter mayhem going on weather wise and all sorts more?
 
About to watch it on iPlayer.

I've just sent a letter of complaint to the BBC about the ridiculous scheduling. It's on far too late for young children. It starts at 8:30, which is when my little boy goes to bed!

Having a 'kids' show finish after the watershed is mental.
 
mwgdrwg said:
About to watch it on iPlayer.

I've just sent a letter of complaint to the BBC about the ridiculous scheduling. It's on far too late for young children. It starts at 8:30, which is when my little boy goes to bed!

Having a 'kids' show finish after the watershed is mental.
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Can you not record or use iplayer?
 
starting at 8:30 is a bit on the late side.

I'm guessing nowadays it's more of teen+ audience.. or at least that's where the money is. so putting it on at that time don't effect their "core audience"

i'm guessing it almost more of an export show than anything else
 
Shippou-Sensei said:
starting at 8:30 is a bit on the late side.

I'm guessing nowadays it's more of teen+ audience.. or at least that's where the money is. so putting it on at that time don't effect their "core audience"

i'm guessing it almost more of an export show than anything else
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mwgdrwg said:
About to watch it on iPlayer.

I've just sent a letter of complaint to the BBC about the ridiculous scheduling. It's on far too late for young children. It starts at 8:30, which is when my little boy goes to bed!

Having a 'kids' show finish after the watershed is mental.
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It did seem odd scheduling and I do think it was on too late but I wonder if it's less to do with it now being a teenage or older show but more that "Strictly" is the BBC's stick they want to beat the X factor with plus their flagship Light Entertainment kiddies to grannies programme so they went for that as their core Saturday night programme.

I would have had it the opposite way with Dr. Who starting at 6.30pm with Strictly on after. And I speak as a Strictly fan!
 
Anyway, I've been fobbed off with a quick pre-written reply. Hey, if it's good enough for fucking 'Atlantis', it's good enough for Doctor Who!

"Thanks for contacting us.

We’re sorry to hear that you’re disappointed with the scheduling of Doctor Who. This decision was carefully considered, and it has always been the plan for this series of Doctor Who to follow Strictly, once Strictly started, in the same way that Atlantis and previously Merlin did, as this series is on air in the Autumn.

We know from viewer feedback and audience research that viewing levels are still high at this time amongst young audiences and children, and Doctor Who has always generated very high levels of recorded playback and iPlayer viewing, so lots of children and families already choose a time that suits them over the days that follow.

Nonetheless, we do appreciate your feedback on this matter, and please rest assured that it has been noted and circulated both to the scheduling teams and more widely across the BBC.

Thanks again for contacting us.

Kind Regards

Brian Irvine

BBC Complaints"
 
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I'm pretty sure your letter there was pretty much identical to the press release the Mirror were working from a fortnight ago.
 
I was really put off by this episode. Loved Courtney, and definitely feel less like slapping Clara after every sentence these days. But the episode itself just seemed so preachy and trafficked in really tired pro-life cliches, for me.
 
The concept of the moon-egg thing had merit in terms of imagination but the science was poorly thought through and would annoy most people with even a passing knowledge of astronony/physics.

I think Capaldi is an excellent choice of the Doctor but he is not managing to cut it at the moment. Not his fault - give him a decent plot to work with FFS!
 
Spod said:
The concept of the moon-egg thing had merit in terms of imagination but the science was poorly thought through and would annoy most people with even a passing knowledge of astronony/physics.

I think Capaldi is an excellent choice of the Doctor but he is not managing to cut it at the moment. Not his fault - give him a decent plot to work with FFS!
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I t would of made more sense if a bit like the Racnoss the egg had been within the Moon from the beginning and had slowly devoured it in growing. The mass thing still wouldn't make sense though. The creatures growth could of changed the orbit of the moon causing all sorts of chaos. I'm guessing they went with the mass thing so that old man Capaldi didn't have to bounce everywhere.
 
CNT36 said:
So where did the extra mass come from? What was junior eating?
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Indeed. I didn't buy 'high tide everywhere on earth at once' either, as that would require a vast amount of extra water to appear out of nowhere.

Seemed like the 'extra mass' bit was thrown in so the actors didn't have to do comedy moon-walking. Also to allow for a scene where Courtney levitates for no real reason. The moon breaking apart is enough peril by itself surely? The characters could easily have been given 'gravity boots' or something, or the gravity thing could have just been ignored; like in the film 'moon' which just did a sly bit of lampshade-hanging by having the characters play ping-pong. A few bits of editing by anyone with a GCSE in physics would have made a big difference to this one IMO.

Especially considering the unsubtle 'pay attention at school, kids' message behind the whole thing.
 
Otherwise it was pretty good, visually very impressive, an interesting twist on well worn Whovian tropes. But it's a sci-fi show and this isn't the 1960's, a quick glance at wikipedia isn't too much to ask.
 
Also, why did the spider-shaped giant bacteria (we'll leave aside the issue of inherent size limitations of monocellular organisms) spin webs? What are they gonna catch in those webs, besides half a dozen astronauts every few decades? Why would a species with a single, immobile and effectively infinite food source even bother to evolve legs?
 
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