Every time someone says this, or something like it, all I hear is "No flaems! if yuo dont like dont read!"

 

I liked the last episode a lot, right up until the end. "The power of three..." line pissed me off so much.

 

I'm getting a bit frustrated by the lack of any sign of an overall plot for this season... Surely something should have turned up by now? Or did I miss something?

 

I think that the overarching plot for the first few episodes of this season is the departure of Amy and Rory.

I expect we'll revisit 'Doctor Who' in the second half of this season.

Next episode does look good though, it's hard to go wrong with the weeping angels.

 

Well at least someone thinks the same way I do about Humans in the Who universe. I mean honestly the Humans are universal pests. They are everywhere, in every point of time,so the fact that someone noticed and decided to do something about it was kind of nice.

For the overaching, I thought it was the Ponds finally letting go of the Doctor.

Ok question. Is Rory still an Auton(the plastic guys)?

 

Oh, my lord. That was a rather fun episode. Loved it. First things first. If I were a ratings man (which to be honest I kind of am, more often than not), I'd give this episode a solid 4/5, with ticks marked off on account of some issues with believability and plotting, and one or two minor visual quibbles.

I'm just going to throw up the spoiler-filled parts of my post in spoiler tags because it's just hard to talk about what I want to talk about without spoiling a lot of the plot. To be perfectly honest, though, I rather think even Inq would enjoy The Rule of Three - it addresses a lot of big points that both he and I have agreed were a bit iffy in New Who (our opinions on the severity of the points at hand did differ), which far outweigh any of the smaller issues I saw within the actual episode.

Spoiler

Chris Chibnall wrote the episode, bringing the number of scripts he's written this Series so far up to 2, including Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. That episode was also rather enjoyable (notably the only other episode with Brian Williams in it in any capacity whatsoever), which is a marked improvement after his other episodes 42 and The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood.

On the topic of good writing comes to mind the excellent character driven writing present in this episode. Rory and Amy's dilemma - faced with the daunting prospect of having to choose between two equally important facets of their lives that are by their nature mutually exclusive. The Doctor, canny man that he is, observes this, and struggles with the idea that Amy and Rory may decide to leave him for good and pursue a more mundane life. Observing this from a relevant but removed perspective is Brian Williams, who's only recently become involved with the Doctor, there to provide the audience with an informed but less emotionally invested viewpoint.

Using this setup, Chibnall tells the story of an entire year where the Doctor is forced to return time and again to insert himself into the Ponds' lives, as opposed to the usual format of him dragging the married pair along on his adventures. In light of Amy and Rory's departure from the show, the entire episode is thus an entertainingly written inspection into the characters and the dynamics between them - a look at how people behave when they have significant investments in their lives that are intrinsically at odds with each other.

Dichotomous conflicts are fun. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde levels of fun (though I do concede that the only parallels between the Ponds' dilemma and that of Dr. Jekyll is that they both are concerned with the idea of duality). When contrasted with previous Series' episodes, I should hope that it is extremely obvious as to the significance of this variety of drama as opposed to child-oriented entertainment or romance-addled melodrama.

The dialogue in this episode was for me, extremely enjoyable, and the 'adult' perspectives of the episode in particular were very well-written. Kate Stewart was shown to be a quick-witted and legitimately intelligent woman in a position of authority just through her casual dialogue with the Doctor, without blatantly inserting a feminism-related label, thus removing political agenda from dramatic television writing. She is also already linked to the franchise's mythos by birth, which seems to be a good indication of future reappearances. Meanwhile, Brian Williams is portrayed as a down-to-earth father figure to the Ponds, giving a third perspective to their dilemma concerning the Doctor and factoring into their final decision at the end of the episode. Each scene afforded an insight into the named characters, the banter was originally written and avoided tired cliches, and the only issue I truly had was with the voiceovers that were used to start and end the episode. I suppose however, that given the requirements presented by the plot and the character-driven nature of the writing, they were perhaps a less-than-inelegant solution to delivering the story.

What impressed me most however, were the throwbacks to Classic Who - and the issues with continuity that'd been bugging me for a few months now, namely Artron Energy and UNIT. The Doctor's arrival at the Pond residence is signaled by a spike of Artron Energy that brings UNIT a'calling in the first few minutes of the episode - Kate Stewart is their new leader, hailing from a scientific background, at the head of the newly reformed organization "/.../UNIT's been adapting, well, I dragged them along kicking and screaming./.../".

Kate is the daughter of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, who declines to make use of "Lethbridge" in her name to make it on her own merit rather than be afforded consideration because of who her father is. Inspired to head up UNIT by her father (RIP, Nicholas Courtney), she makes for a rather delightfully written character, portrayed equally delightfully by Jemma Redgrave who's actually a very accomplished actress.

As a big point in favor of Chris Chibnall (and consequently, Steven Moffat's direction for the franchise as show-runner), UNIT is reorganized and put under new management. Kate Stewart is the leader of the scientific research department, which is now in charge of the military wing of UNIT. The fact that it's stated in the new episode that UNIT has been reorganized and put under a new leader portrayed both by a well known actor and as a very likable, competent, and Doctor-friendly character, allows writers of future episodes to move away from the RTD-era's childish facsimile of a UN-funded international military organization in a direction that better adheres to canonical concepts and thus lends itself better to the franchise from a world-building perspective. I'm very big on convincing world-building. Good worldbuilds combined with characters with emotionally significant conflicts, plus a convincing portrayal of both of these aspects (good acting and good cinematography) go a very long way, even if the overarching conflict might be less than perfect.

The final line with Amy's voiceover was a bit corny, but we need a bit of corniness and silliness in Who (not to mention, Doctor Who's always been a bit silly - a hundreds-year old man in a colorful suit who wears a stick of celery in his breast pocket comes to mind, and Six was one of the more aggressively outspoken and easily outraged Doctors to boot). All in all, the intro and outro to the episode are irrelevant when compared to the significant points of interests within the episode, which I've already gone about at length.

My final point isn't entirely about the episode, and is more a personal analysis about the show itself. Doctor Who is a children's television program, and Steven Moffat seems perfectly cognizant of that fact and willing to use it to his advantage. Because of its nature, the show's villains and their plots need only present a threat to the investments of the Doctor, whether the particular investment(s) involved is(are) his friends, the Earth, himself, or a moral obligation to help those in need. The villains only need to present a real danger - they don't need to be a credible, well-reasoned, or believable threat, or have the most thought out schemes. It's a kids' show. Just the fact that they threaten the Doctor or his friends is enough, and they still manage to pull it off more convincingly than a good deal of other popular science fiction shows. Anyway, this allows Moffat and his supporting writers to create emotionally significant and character-driven drama in each episode (admittedly with varying degrees of success) while still providing the target audience (and the rest of their viewers) with their Doctor Who jollies of scary monsters and zany scifi wrapped up in a cool bowtie and a fez on top. Whether the characters involved are the primary cast or are throwaway characters within the episode is irrelevant.

Moffat said in an interview when he took over from RTD, that the beauty of Doctor Who was that it could take place anywhere, at any time, with whomever he so chose. Admittedly, this has more to do with the subject matter of a man who travels through time and space in a box, but the children's entertainment medium itself allows writers to forgo strict adherence to cause and effect and matters of suspension of belief. Combine that with true freedom in setting and cast, and you have an environment that, provided that past events within the frame of reference of the protagonists (in the show, this would be the Doctor's personal timeline and those of major recurring characters) and their characterizations are both convincing and intriguing, can be engaging and entertaining for even an adult audience.

After taking over and transitioning from RTD's format of a 13 episode season in Series 5, Moffat then shifted to an episodic format that allowed him to focus more on the characters' interpersonal relationships, and the drama and dilemmas that those relationships brought. River Song is a good example of this, being the Doctor's spouse and sort-of murderer. Her parents, Amy and Rory, are also used to depict and explore how two characters in a committed relationship would interact when confronted with a man such as the Doctor. This current setup has run its course, leading to the end of the Ponds' tenure in the show coming next episode in The Angles Take Manhattan. Series 7 is to me, the culmination of the transition from RTD to Moffat. This Series is fully episodic, following a similar, but more polished version of that introduced in Series 6. It avoids the pitfalls of trying to tell an overarching story through episodic standalone plots as was the case in the RTD-era of the show, and the format forces each of the stories within the Series to be fully realized, emotionally and morally significant plots. Simultaneously, it so far accomplishes what Series 6 tried to do last year but kinda failed - start the Series off with a bang, have fun for a while, end the first half of the Series with another bang (last year, it was A Good Man Goes To War - this year, it's the Christmas Special), then end with another spectacular bang, all in 13 episodes. Personally, Moffat learned a hellovalot from making Sherlock, which follows a condensed version of the same format. Perhaps moving the show from an April start, Fall finish, spanning a summer break, to a Fall start, Spring finish, spanning a winter break (with the Christmas Special in between) allows the writers to focus on polishing their own episodes' stories, rather than being shoehorned into finishing their scripts to fit in to a schedule that doesn't span two fiscal years.

To me, Series 7 has hit the nail on all of these aspects, and The Rule of Three, despite shortcomings in selling the reasoning of the villains and their origins, as well as some corny lines, is simply the latest episode in a series of great fucking episodes. Pun most certainly intended. The shortcomings I mention aren't as important, in the greater scheme of things. The Silurians are a reptilian precursor civilization to mankind. The Sontarans are genetically engineered clone alien soldiers, the Daleks are hovering, laser-firing trash bins with plungers for hands, and Cybermen are people who are robots who were originally people. So the villains in this episode too, are what they are. The specifics concerning the villains matter less. The actual banter matters less. The quality and qualities of the drama within the episodes, and by extension the entire Series matter more.

What makes Series 7 so good so far, is that every episode that has already aired is driven by the main characters' ongoing dilemmas. The Silent Knight said that they were frustrated by a lack of indication for the overall plot of this Series. They're missing the main themes of Series 7 - the departure of the Ponds, and the entrance of Oswin as the new Companion. These are aspects of the Doctor's voyage through time, when it is viewed through the lens of his personal relationships, a very real side effect of the very nature of the Doctor's character. He's an effectively immortal being, and the last of his kind through his own devices. He goes on adventures throughout time and space - but what really sells both the character and the show, throughout all of his iterations, is that he is so convincingly human. Eventually, he'll outlive every single one of his friends. He's the only timeless being in the Universe, and just as he himself goes through cycles of death and rebirth, so too do his interactions with supporting characters.

This, to me, is the theme at the very core of the franchise, and what keeps me coming back to the show even when shit like The Curse of the Black Spot, or Let's Kill Hitler, or The Unicorn and the Wasp, or other ridiculous stories go on the air time and time again. It's the core conflict of Series 7, and I would most definitely say that this constitutes an overarching plot for the Series.

 

Wow, I haven't read the entirety of this thread but this is by far the best post I have read so far. You've basically put what has always been in my mind in a cohesive and eloquent post.

Question for you, what do you think of the ponds from start to now?

 

Thanks.

Moffat experimented too much and focused too much on them when he already had River Song to focus on, coming off of Series 4. Maybe Alex Kingston's schedule conflicted with extensive filming. I don't know.

Amy was great at the start, and Rory was decently fun as well (it helps that he played an important part in The Eleventh Hour), though the attention to duck ponds in the Series 5 opener sums up my thoughts on the matter quite well. Moffat admits to having put duck ponds in to show that the Cracks ate the ducks up at a later date, but never got around to it. There was Jeff, a dude that never made it on to the show again although playing an arguably crucial role in the episode, and then the namedropped introduction of the Silence. The focus on Amy and Rory's relationship (as well as how the Doctor often went great stretches of time in between visits) started here, and was, while well conceived, poorly executed.

Series 6 then was the story of River Song, which I say should've happened earlier even with the knowledge that it couldn't have, considering that Moffat knew the entire time that he was setting up Amy and Rory to be her parents, and their relationship needed grounding in the canon. A Good Man Goes To War was a fun ride, even though I still think that entirely too much happened off-screen and between episodes. Then, Moffat wasted a lot of River Song's potential in Let's Kill Hitler. One, she used up all her regenerations right after she met the Doctor, which meant that Alex Kingston then became the only actor eligible for the role. Two, it also meant that we are now unable to see River in the show in any capacity that is in anyway antagonistic to the Doctor, which kind of defeats the whole point of Madame Kovarian's kidnapping of Amy during the first half of Series 6 - to create a quasi-Time Lord assassin raised for the purpose of killing the Doctor. Imagine a recurring villain, a young woman, an old lady, or anything in between, who could also simultaneously be a Companion, a blonde archaeology professor with frizzy hair married to the Doctor, perhaps even in the same episode. It'd be great fun.

The point is, on a mechanical level, it seems to me that the primary purpose of Amy and Rory was to legitimize River Song's place in the annals of Doctor Who canon as a recurring character. I'll concede that Series 5 was a transitional season where Moffat had just inherited the franchise from RTD and thus a bit of a trainwreck from the getgo. I also concede the point that cementing Rory and Amy's marriage, preferably after several episodes exploring their relationship in relation to the Doctor, was a very necessary procedure if River Song was to have any traction as a character.

What I do have a problem with in the whole Amy-Rory-River situation, is that the marriage of River Song didn't have to happen this early, and indeed, if things were left unclear as to when exactly the Doctor and River got married (River has already died onscreen, and so if things were left open-ended, Alex Kingston simply would've been River's final incarnation), we could've had a huge amount of awesome content in between, and the marriage itself could've been left for later. As it is now, without Kingston, who has other acting jobs that limit her schedule, we can't have any episodes featuring the character, and we really can't explore at all the notion of a Time-Lord-esque assassin who hunts the Doctor throughout time and space, which is actually kind of fucking awesome.

So, in a nutshell. Amy and Rory. Yay. Love the Legs, don't really care either way about the Nose, and Mrs. Robinson's potential was stifled.

To be perfectly honest though, I'm extremely happy with the way Series 7 is going, so I'll just end this post on a note of tacit approval and gratefulness at more than a few great Who moments.

 

Did the Doctor just leave those other people on the ship to die? That's cold.

 

I saw that too. It was odd to see the three of them so happy after escaping the ship, not caring in the slightest about the prisoners that just died.

 

I hope this is just a mistake in preparing the scene. 2-3 minutes before Doctor orders to take all the people out of the ship, after all.

 

Okay, so I've been busy with things masturbating. Back to

DOCTOR WHO REVIEWS


Series 4¾ - The Tennant Special Olympics

I forget what I was going to call it, but whatever. First up is The Next Doctor, starring David Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker. Okay, it's Tennant. And Cybermonkeys. I don't know what those are all about. More Cybus Cybermen, and "Mercy" Hartigan has really cool contact lenses. Then she gets inside a gigantic mecha as if this were a really low budget anime (Japan can do it right, folks) and is about to destroy old Londontown Megazord-style when the Doctor intervenes and uploads an internet's worth of S&M porn into her head (she's a sexual abuse victim, Merry Christmas, kids). She explodes, for some reason.

At this point, I could remind you that Miss Hartigan's superior mind could hold it's own against futuristic technology, and point out that this is just more of RTD's humanity circlejerking, but I'm sure you've figured that out, so I won't. Also, Morrissey's exotic maid/love slave 'Rosita' was supposed to make you crank out a few tears because ohnoez Rose is gone again boo hoo.

-----

Four months later, we get Planet of the Dead, a.k.a. the one with all the black people. No, seriously. The soldier in charge? Black. The elderly couple on the bus? Black. The mechanic? Black. The flies? Black. (Okay, that one's not true.)

More than that, all the white people are fucking tools. The fat ass bus driver runs into the energy portal thing and gets vaporised. The young white dude who the Doctor says is good in a crisis (even though he didn't do anything)? Unemployed and a couch potato. Kind of like me, in that respect. The generic mum? Wastes all the gas in the bus. And even the scientist dude comes across as a numpty, but hey, Lee Evans is good playing numpties. See also, "The Medallion", starring Jackie Chan. And the flies who really are white, I looked: eaten by alien stingrays.

And once again, UNIT is staffed with morons. Captain Chumbawumba threatens to shoot Lee Evans, and three quarters of those soldiers can't aim worth shit, so I guess it's a good thing they're not being depended on to shoot at anything, isn't it. As I recall it took the Doctor steering the bus to nail two of them, and the other one got hit with the mobile SAM emplacement. Which they then parked on top of someone's apartment building just in time for the Olympics.

And speaking of Captain Jujumagumbo, wasn't she the one from Turn Left who's working with Rose Tyler? Really? And you're willing to just fuck over the Doctor like that? Give your head a shake.

And why the fuck does the Doctor gets all moral at the end of the episode by giving Lady Christina the Sousaphone a wag of the finger for stealing? And then he walks off to his stolen TARDIS. Hypocrite. Still, why would the Doctor want to travel through time and space with Paul Ryan's hot sister?

Overall, though, it wasn't a bad episode. A fun romp through the desert with a smoking babe on an alien world filled with the souls of the dead. If you guessed Dubai, you win 72 virgins and a flight on United Airlines.

-----

Then we come to Russell T. Davies' penultimate episode as head writer for Doctor Who, The Waters of Mars. Seven months later. I know I'm foreshadowing a little bit, but shit; a year between seasons, then four months, seven months, another four months, and later half the season stretched out by six months (and then a year, and pretty soon it'll be another six months)? Move over, girl-who-waited.

The Doctor lands on Mars to find that holy crap, the Ice Warriors and Sutekh weren't the only bad guys to exist on Mars. Who knew. The setting is Bowie Base One, because David Bowie is a known scientific giant. And the person who is the most companiony of the whole episode is that robot made from a segway.

Long story short, the captain of the Kids Sing Moonbase's granddaughter is inspired by her grandmother's suicide on Mars to go into space and fuck an alien, so after the Doctor rescues her and brings her to her front door, she goes inside and commits suicide, somehow inspiring her granddaughter to into space. Don't ask me how that works. Maybe she doesn't like looking at the stain on the wall that won't ever come out?

I wasn't impressed, and I'll leave it at that.

-----

Finally we come to The End of Time. The Power Rangers return to 2001 to help stop Ransik and save Wes' life - HAHA DISREGARD THAT I SUCK COCKS.

It is said, that in the final days of planet Earth, everyone had wet dreams. The Master comes back to life on Christmas Eve, and I was looking for a parallel to Jesus, but the most I could find was three days = three series. Oh, and weird old guys have visions of him. Anyway, some mysterious woman shows up and blah blah blah, to Oodsphere where the Doctor has just made the wittiest joke in the whole world, I just shat myself it was so fucking funny HE MADE THE TARDIS GIVE OFF A CAR NOISE WHY THE FUCK AREN'T YOU PEOPLE LAUGHING. Luckily, the Ood knows how retarded that joke was and doesn't say a thing. The Doctor and the Ood have a seance and the Doc got all scared and went back to see Donna and her gramps in Bel-Air.

I could go on to describe how silly and tedious this whole episode is for you, but I'll sum it up, old folks on a bus, cannibalism, the "Immortality Gate", cactus people, and seizures that make everybody turn into the Master.

The episode continues with James Bond with a metal gauntlet turning everybody back to normal (which is kind of a shame, when you think about it, for multiple reasons). The Doctor then complains that the Time Lords are back, because all the shit they thought up during the war was going to escape the Time Lock. He then lists off a bunch of really cool-sounding shit that will probably never be heard from again, and explains to the Master that the Time Lords went nuts. The Master responds with something akin to, 'so what, I'm fucking crazy too.' Bond puts on some shades and retorts that the Master is too crazy for the Time Lords.

Eventually, the Doctor shoots the machine that his mother tells him to, and everything goes back to the way it was in yet another deus ex machina, making that what, 10 so far? Also the Master redeems himself. Then he frees Bernard Cribbins from the pyrex box and absorbs a bunch of radiation. Again, the giant fall doesn't kill him, Tom Baker notes bitterly. Then before dying, he goes back and sees all the new!Who companions, in most cases saving their lives, but Barrowman is contractually obligated one hookup per appearance or something. Anyway, he goes back and gives Donna a lottery ticket, because he only gives each of his white companions something. What did Martha get? Also, Rose appearance for what I fucking hope will be the last time (no copouts this time, assholes).

He then wrecks the TARDIS for good measure and turns the key over to Matt Smith.

-----

The only powerful acting moment I can distinctly remember (other than angsty glares and sadpanda faces) was the Tennant monologue before he rescues Cribbins. I genuinely cannot remember much else. Most of the rest of Tennant's tenure was "Allons-y", "I'm so sorry" and other little catchphrases like that. Although, I imagine that was more of a failing of RTD's writing than anything else. If you'll recall that big-eared dude from 2005, in an interview, he stated basically that RTD was a Nazi, who wanted the part played a certain way, and if you didn't like it, you could piss up a rope. Which Eccleston later did.

On the whole, 2 out of 3 long-term companions were useless, Rose the chav wageslave and Donna the temp wageslave. Save for Martha (the medical student), we have yet to see an educated, best-and-brightest companion yet. Mostly it was just eye candy, although ew Catherine Tate.

I also want to say, for the record, that the character that was supposed to be the Doctor's mommy served no real purpose, unless she and Cribbins were going to hook up. I don't get why she even had to exist. Why didn't the Doctor fucking figure it out himself? He has a lot of trouble doing that, for some reason.

I don't know why the BBC went from full series to "specials", but there was an inordinate amount of time between each one, making kids (and us) wait for no reason. We'd better get used to it, though, because it'll be happening again after Series 5: Not Another Smith.
​

 

Okay, that was a tad disappointing. I'm not sure what I expected, but it was should've been epic, and, more importantly, a win.

 

Disappointing? I thought it was great. Very emotional and, for me at least, real edge of the seat stuff. Best episode of the series so far. Just a shame we have to wait till Christmas for more.

 

I cannot disagree more, I bawled at the graveyard, and have no shame in admitting it. It struck me how the doctor has learned his lessons from Waters of Mars as far as fixed points in time. Had they done an actual reference, I would have even been more impressed.

Both Rory and Amy showed their full characters today, and it was wonderful to see that.

 

Every single episode of series 7 has been a big bag of meh.

 

Only plus side of this episode? That we no longer have to deal with the Ponds. Thank fuck for that. Maybe, just maybe, things will get better with a new Companion. I can but hold out hope.

 

I have enjoyed the series so far, but I agree that it hasn't had any of the wow moments the previous ones had. Even Dinosaurs on a Spaceship was only amusing, and I honestly can't see myself going back to watch this episode as much as I have Flesh and Stone/The Time of Angels.

 

I think the episode was great till the graveyard scene. I loved the noir atmosphere, the Angels being scary and even music was more remarkable than in previous episodes. Though it's still rather disappointing for Murray Gold.

But two climaxes didn't really work for me. I couldn't even get emotional for the second one because it was obvious what will happen when Rory spotted his tombstone. Not sure how I'd end Ponds' time as the companions, but definitely not like this.

Well, I hope that the second half of the series will be better.

EDIT: One more thing. Why exactly the Doctor can't visit Amy and Rory? Or make them travel in time with him and then return to the past where they supposedly belong now? Or even take them back to the present and simply put fake tombstones for themselves from the past to see?