“You hear a child talking to herself and you give her medication!?”
Yes, fuck you, Doctor Who. Given the clout the anti-medication faction has I know some kid out there is going to think they don’t need their meds, because the Doctor said they’re just special, not sick.
Do we overmedicate? Yes. But literally hearing voices for a year after an extremely traumatic life event is one area where I think medicating is an appropriate response.
And yes, I got that this was a special situation. It doesn’t change the fact that the Doctor treated “medicating someone hearing voices” as something universally stupid, and was right about it. And that he refused to let anyone give her medication despite all the other kids in the class clearly being distressed, begging him to give Maebh her meds.
It was a zoo tiger. Probably lived its entire life in captivity, no clue how to actually hunt for itself. It wasn’t following them because it was hunting them, it was probably just confused as to why everything suddenly smelled and looked different and was looking for something familiar. When they shined the flashlight in its eyes, it decided to go look somewhere else. Poor thing.
A google search shows some anecdotes about flashing lights being an effective deterrent. It’s apparently not unheard of, at least.
Reading through the comments, I have a hard time explaining why I (mostly) enjoyed this episode. Lots of good points, and many that I would echo if we were talking about Kill the Moon.
Hey, not saying there wasn’t a lot of dumb stuff in this episode, Sage Rat. I mean, even I noticed some of it, and it’s gotta be really dumb for that to happen.
But I enjoyed it anyway, and I correctly predicted that the people who were disappointed that Doctor Who was no longer hard SF with Kill the Moon would have their second hissy cow with this episode.
Hopefully we get back to the hard SF roots of Doctor Who with the lady who runs the Promised Land and occasionally shows up at the end of an episode to make a cryptic comment.
(Seriously: I’m not thrilled with the arc plot this season. While I don’t like it becoming this incredibly baroque structure upon which we sorta hang our episodes as an afterthought, nor am I a fan of just having Missy show up to deliver a line apropos of nothing. Go check out Burn Notice for a fine example of a show that had both a weekly A-plot and a season-long B-plot, guys.)
While I think this season has been a big improvement over the silly over emotional end of 11’s run, they are overdoing the asshole Doctor thing.
The Doctor is supposed to be eccentric, weird, alien, inhuman. But this Doctor is very human, an old grumpy asshole that hates people. The Doctor doesn’t hate people! He just relates to them oddly.
This Doctor is too human, he reminds me of the community service supervisor in the last episode.
And can we finish with Clara’s relationship drama, please? I like the actor playing Mr. Pink, but at this point, he’s basically just a more articulate Mickey.
Yeah I’m not even paying close enough attention to understand what they are going on about anymore. “Hi, how are you?” “You’re lying!” “I’m not lying! I’m uh…” “You’re lying!”
He seems like a great actor and character but they are just ruining it with his story line with Clara.
A comment that appears in these threads a lot is “It’s just a kids’ show.” Except I don’t think it is. The original one was for kids, sure, running in the afternoons and being quite silly at times. But I’d be willing to bet that most of the viewers of the reboot are adults.
There’s been a lot of loopy science in Doctor Who over the years, but it always made narrative sense. In fact, that’s what saves classic Who. The science and the props may be rubbish, but the characters and writing are usually solid. When dinosaurs were wandering around London in 1974, the people in London acted like you’d expect them to act. What was so maddening about the most recent episode was that the responses of the characters to the events around them made no sense.
I disagree. I think he likes people just fine–just not all of them, and maybe not as a “buddy.” I see him more in the vein of Three–he’s smarter than everybody in the room, knows it, is proud of it, and expects everybody to recognize it. He’s got his soft spots, but for the most part he’s got a job to do (keep humanity safe, mostly because he does have a soft spot for them!) and he just wants everybody to get out of his way and let him do it.
The community service guy was a small, vindictive, horrible person without a shred of goodness or compassion in him. The Doctor is neither small nor vindictive. He might not be the most compassionate guy around in this incarnation, but he’s like Dr. House: if you’re in trouble, would you rather have compassion, or the guy who’s smart enough and dedicated enough to pull your bacon out of the fire?
Yeah, I found this very worrying, too. I couldn’t help but think that maybe the writer has had some personal brush with this issue, either having been or having a child in need of medication he’s now decided stifles creativity and inhibits natural expression, or whatever rubbish it is people go on about these days.
The original didn’t run in the afternoons in its country of origin. It’s pretty much always been aimed at a family audience though - well, some of the very earliest stories were supposed to be educational for kids - and that is how it is perceived and directed in the UK. Some episodes are aimed a bit younger, is all. The US audience may well be different.
Yeah, the “It’s a kid’s show” thing is definitely not new, but kid’s show or not…that episode was terrible! Now, I was one of the big defenders of “Kill the Moon,” because I agree that getting angry about illogical science in Doctor Who is like getting angry that the ocean gets you wet when you swim in it, but nothing excuses bad storytelling.
At no point did that episode jell into a cohesive whole. Halfway through the potentially interesting tree mystery, the “we’re in a Hansel and Gretel fairy tale” thing was brought up, then promptly dropped, then shoehorned in again at the end. The cutaways to explain the backstories of child characters we’ll never see again was unnecessary. The sudden light bug aliens (“We are Groot!”) weren’t very well realized or explained. The action involving the zoo animals went nowhere. And the medication comment had me raising an eyebrow as well.
Worst of all, this episode suffered from that which just about killed the Eleventh Doctor for me: A nauseating bucket of whimsical glurge. “But sir! If the trees are good, why do we cut them down?” …GET IT!? And when the sister appeared in the bush at the end, I think I actually went into diabetic shock. Why was she there? What did the lightning bug aliens take her for? When she went missing, why didn’t her parents bother to check the front garden?AHHHRRGGGG!
But it had its moments. The Doctor and the kids were cute together. I thought the line, “I presume your teachers had already told you about the deadly solar flare,” was pretty funny. Capaldi did his best, and I still love this Doctor to bits, but everyone’s entitled to some garbage episodes.
Also, Danny and Clara: sort your shit out, and leave it off camera next time. Please.
But we don’t complain about the science in all of the episodes, we complain abut the science in *some *of the episodes. What, I ask, is the difference between the episodes in which we complain about the science and the episodes in which we do not complain about the science? My hypothesis: the episodes in which we complain about the science are stupid. The ones where we don’t, aren’t.