I’m torn. I enjoyed it, but wanted to love it. (maybe because I saw RealityChuck’s “best since Blink” review before watching. Not your fault, Chuck, I should have known not to read the thread at all before watching.) It certainly wasn’t that, for me. (Not sure what takes that honor. The Doctor’s Wife? A Good Man Goes to War? Amy’s Choice? Silence in the Library? Name of the Doctor? Day of the Doctor? this one doesn’t touch any of those… IMHO)
I realize I may be forgetting what show I’m watching, but I really wish the plot would just make some bit of sense. I love the individual scenes, I love the visuals, the ideas, the acting. It just doesn’t form a cohesive whole. I feel like a story editor is sorely needed. Missy collected dead people’s brains and bodies to make cybermen. OK, that works. But then, was it a) people who died to save the Doctor, b) all dead people everywhere since the afterlife concept was formed, or c) people with too much money and not enough sense (or something like that. What the Doctor said on the plane) who want their bodies on display? Any of these concepts would have worked, but it seemed like the script called for all 3 at different times. Then the bracelet that controls the Cybermen suddenly has the power to bring someone long dead back to life in human form? Where did that come from? Then the bit about Gallifrey… if he wanted to find it so badly, why do we never see him looking for it? And then he gets the coordinates, but nothing is there… so he smashes the TARDIS? ??? and lies to Clara about it? why? Oh, and Danny’s makeup was pretty abyssmal. And the guards placed on Missy were literally the worst guards who ever guarded anything. Poor Osgood.
But then the moments, such great moments: “Never trust a hug. It’s just a way to hide your face.”, “bowties are cool.” the Brigadier, all of the Doctor’s speeches, all of Missy’s speeches, Danny/Clara, all the callbacks, Clara as the Doctor… so much good. Just wish it held together better.
Yeah, I didn’t phrase that well. Clara has been, at least for this season, very active and a co-protagonist. But she still is young, and … perky. Like Rose, and Martha, and Amy…
However much you might hate River Song, you can see that an older, confident, mature companion brought a different dynamic to the Doctor/companion relationship. Osgood would be fun, but she’s still in awe of the Doctor. Kate…well, she’s a Lethbridge-Stewart, isn’t she?
So she could live a regular life with Danny, guilt-free. She knows how the Doctor gets without a companion and “carer” around, so she wouldn’t leave him alone, unless she thought he was heading home to be with his own people. So, he lied to her.
At the same time, Clara was lying to him about Danny, so that the Doctor would feel free to return to his long-lost home.
I thought that final episode was godawful. Plan Nine from Outer Space, with Cybermen instead of zombies. And making one of the Cybermen a resurrected Brigadier who catches his daughter before she hits the ground … what a disgraceful use of a classic character. Ugh, don’t get me started.
Man, you guys are a tough audience. All the reviews I’ve seen have loved the finale, but so many people here seem to think it was terrible.
Me, I loved it. I love Capaldi, I love Doctor Who. Being nitpicky just takes the fun away for me (though even I had a hard time with “In the Forest of the Night”).
I did enjoy this episode a lot. And my wife afterward said that it was the best of the season and really tied things together for her! So, I did enjoy it and try and turn off my brain and not think as much.
Dunno, with Kate being slightly crazy, overconfident, hyperactive, and smart, it seems like you’re just ending up with two of the same character. I’d vote that if you’re going to have a companion, it should be someone with a personality that complements the Doctor in some way. With Kate, the both of them would be too lost in their own deal that they’d scarcely interact. (Obviously, they could change the way that they write Kate. But as currently displayed, that’s what we would expect to happen.)
I was too, though after I thought about it for a while after the episode, I was glad she wasn’t going to become the next companion (when I first heard the Doctor bring it up, I thought it was a great idea). Never been a big fan of the “fangirl” type, so having Osgood constantly taking hits on her inhaler and hero-worshipping the Doctor would have gotten really old after a very short time, even with her obvious intelligence.
You mentioned several points with which I agree, but this one stood out. It’s true: there was the Big Reveal (at the changeover between Eleven and Twelve) that Gallifrey still exists. Yet this played no role whatsoever in Twelve’s first season…it wasn’t even mentioned, was it? Then we’re supposed to believe that out of the blue, Twelve is so emotional that he would actually damage his beloved Tardis in pique at not finding Gallifrey at the coordinates Master/Missy gave him. (Would the Doctor really have believed that Master/Missy would have given him a straightforward-and-true set of coordinates? Really???)
Then there’s the matter of asking us to believe that the Master/Missy spent untold centuries plotting and planning, in order to achieve the ultimate goal of getting the Doctor to be his/her BFF. Again: really???
Also: the idea that human belief in an afterlife would never have arisen but for the Master’s intervention is painfully off-base. Moffat showed great insight into human nature with his invention of The Silence–a villain that embodies (with great poetic force) our tendency to obliterate from consciousness anything we find intolerable to know.
But he then turns around and demonstrates that he knows nothing about the human mind, with this idea that ‘belief in an afterlife was suggested to us by an alien and we wouldn’t otherwise have had it.’ Of course the truth is that none of us can truly conceive of an end to our own consciousness; confronted with the evidence that others of our species do cease to exist, we reconciled the dissonance by coming up with the idea that our consciousness will go on after our body dies.
Yes, I know that Doctor Who is “just a show.” But that show is capable of delighting and enthralling us when it offers stories that incorporate metaphors and embodiments of the facts of our lives–and falls into the Mediocrity Bin with a thud when it does the opposite.
yeah, I guess the lie makes some sense in retrospect, but only if Clara doesn’t know anything about Gallifrey, because they are assholes. I wouldn’t trust them to “care” for the Doctor if he had a papercut. (And given all she knows about the Doctor, as she rattled off to the Cybermen, that seems unlikely).
Still no reason to take it out on Sexy like that. How is it her fault?
Add to that the fact that they went to Gallifrey this season to have Clara present the Doctor with the idea that ‘fear is a superpower’ and thus, or so it’s implied, start him on the way to becoming the Doctor in the first place… Sure, that was Gallifrey as it was, before the Time War and the associated events, but still, there’s a right and ready path to Gallifrey in the past; it seems like there should at least be some resources, some Time Lord thingamajig to restore it in the present there, or hell, failing that, there should be some interest on the Doctor’s part to revisit it—but the whole thing never was mentioned again, not even to paper it over á la ‘fixed point in time’ or whatever handwave works.
Nevertheless, I found the finale to be enjoyable—there were many strong character moments, and ultimately, I think that’s where the show really shines, or at least, where it has the most potential to do so. Plus, the ending was just heartbreaking, if perhaps a bit overdone—which is why I welcomed to comic relief of Santa’s ‘you know it can’t end that way’; I’m sure he basically voiced what everyone in the audience was thinking. I think this sort of subversion, to immediately undercut the tragic, serene, and melodramatic with something irreverently goofy, while hard to pull of, is part of what keeps me coming back.
Is that how she reads to you? I see her as sane, competent, self-confident but aware of her, and her species’, limits, and secure in her own agency. Rather like Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister. … (space for obligatory catchphrase quote)… And like Harriet, not afraid to make tough decisions.
Besides, your list of adjectives could be applied to Donna and River, and both of them were fantastic foils for the Doctor.
What was that exchange between Osgood and the Doctor right before he leaves? he mumbled something, she goes “what?” and he says something else i couldn’t understand.
I knew Kate Stewart wasn’t going to die in that fall, but didn’t foresee who her rescuer would be. Makes sense that he’d be what TV Tropes calls a Papa Wolf, though.
I wouldn’t trust them to “care” for the Doctor if he had a papercut. (And given all she knows about the Doctor, as she rattled off to the Cybermen, that seems unlikely).