You guys know what December 25th is, right?
Yeah, something about family and togetherness and religion and gift giving or whatever. But more importantly: a new Doctor who episode. Let’s see the Doctor square off with Santa this year!
Can’t wait!
Anyone in the UK watch it?
I did. I think this is my favourite Xmas special. The beginning reaches incredible levels of WTF, but it turns into a surprisingly lovely and moving story. There are plenty of scares too. To say more would be very spoilery, but play “spot the movie homage” as you watch.
I’ve just seen it, and it gets an easy 8 out of 10 from me. Great fun, and probably my favourite Christmas special since Christmas Carol back in 2010. Fair warning, though, it’s way scarier than the average Christmas special so if you’ve got very young children you might want to watch it first.
Give them caffeinated drinks and sugar snacks, and put them close to the TV.
I enjoyed it and liked the plot twists.
There were echoes of a previous episode, but after 50 years, that’s hard to avoid.
I agree it was scary, so keep an eye out for younger kids watching it.
Lots of great lines.
This is either my favorite or second favorite Christmas episode. I liked it more than Christmas Carol, but we’ll see how I feel in the long run. Overall the episode was great, bonus points for Every Sontaran being one of Santa’s elves.
I know before I expressed joy at Clara hanging on, but I’m beginning to get worried. She’s definitely my favorite companion, but I’m concerned about her overstaying and decaying as a companion. The second fakeout where the Doctor saved her while she was young felt like a last minute addition. Old Clara had a lot of subtle mirrors to Time of the Doctor and Old 11, and I’m almost certain it was originally a real sendoff before Jenna changed her mind.
I hope at least if, like the rumors say, she’s only on a half season, they introduce the new companion earlier and phase Clara out rather than what they did with Amy and Rory. (Okay, I guess technically they introduced the new companion early on with Clara, but that’s not what I mean)
Aye, nice to see Dan Starkey get a part where he doesn’t have to spend all day with full Sontaran prosthesis on. The older male polar expedition member was played by Michael Troughton, too.
There was something about the one elf’s delivery that was JUST barely familiar and I couldn’t put my finger on it. This is why.
It was pretty good - sentimental, but sometimes that’s OK. I quite liked the
idea of waking up from one dream, only to find another. The Doctor said something along the lines of “not one second of your life, not one moment, can you be sure you’re not just dreaming,” which sent a bit of a shiver down my spine.
However, I was a bit concerned with
the fact that the whole idea is still feeding off the Weeping Angels. The Angels were perhaps the first DW villain to revolve around the concept of repressing a natural human instinct: blinking. Then, last season, the clockwork guys worked off the same idea, only with breathing. Now they’ve progressed onto thinking. Although on their own, the monsters are all perfectly good, put together they show that the writers might be having trouble coming up with original stuff.
But anyway, all in all I’d call it a success. A highlight: the Doctor’s expression when he’s
piloting the sleigh.
Capaldi nailed it.
Excellent, best Christmas special since the Tennant years. A little over-long on the ending, but hit all its marks with a perfect blend of humour and scares, and it even managed to make Danny bearable, although he still has to be puppy-dog noble even in dreams. The creatures were a little familiar from Moffat’s bag of tricks, as were the movie influences on the episode - which it cheerfully acknowledged in Shona’s DVD watch list - but Moffat is so much better when he’s not doing story arcs. And the Doctor’s reluctance giving way to gleeful exuberance at flying you-know-what was absolutely grin-inducingly perfect. Some killer lines, too: I loved Santa telling the Doctor just how his sleigh fit so many presents.
eta:
and it just dawned on me that of course the setting of the polar base under alien attack was so familiar from movies like The Thing and Alien: everybody
http://www.giraffeboards.com/showthread.php?t=37021]shared the same movies as cultural reference points, just as much as they did Father Christmas. It was the shared psychic gestalt warning them they were being killed, in a metaphor which was familiar.
Meta and clever, and it means that the Doctor really had seen Alien.
The episode I referred to earlier is even closer to the same idea:
OK, now I’ve thought about it, I have big questions:
The Dream Crabs had taken over the Doctor, Clara and four random people. The Doctor says that after he was taken over, his thoughts of Clara led the Crabs to her.
But how many Dream Crabs are there? Are they attacking 6 billion people on Earth, or just four? How do the Crabs reach Earth? Why do the victims share a dream?
I hope I’m not missing something obvious!
Santa delivered the dream crabs so he could give The Doctor and Clara the present of adventure.
In other words, no, it wasn’t exactly explained.
Is this a good place to ask a question about the last episode of season 8, I think it was called Death in Heaven (I saw it for the first time in the runup to the Xmas episode)? I’ll spoiler it just in case.
Specifically, the ending: who was the Cyberman who killed Missy? I must have missed something earlier in the episode. Also, is Missy/Master really dead now? That looked pretty definitive, but that’s one of my problems with Doctor Who, nothing is ever final.
Roderick: To your first question, it was someone from old Who–if you only came in the reboot, it’s not going to be meaningful. He was also the blonde military chick in that episode’s father.
As to Missy, she seems to be dead, but there’s a lot of speculation that she’ll be back. Plus, the actress basically said as much before back pedaling a bit.
Well, he’s dead. We’re all dead. Because there’s no way that Happily Ever After ending wasn’t just another dream.
Next season starts with the Doctor regenerating and that killing the face hugger.