There are a couple of questions I have about this episode.
Why is Strax such an idiot? He seems to be getting dumber and dumber instead of more attuned to the humans he is in contact with on an almost daily basis. Sontarans are egostic, not moronic.
Why is Clara so freaked out about this change? She is the one and only companion who has seen every single Doctor. By this time, she shouldn’t be concerned with his physical appearance.
And why doesn’t the Doctor remember Madame De Pompadour? Especially once he read the name of the sister ship to the Marie Antoinette?
Overall, I really enjoyed this episode, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the time that Clara has on the show. I thought that I had read something online that the BBC released a statement that the Christmas episode would be her last, but now I can’t find anything about it online.
Overall I liked
Because she is playing the audience in this episode. She is supposed to be us and the writers think wer’re a bunch of whiny morons who can’t accept change and why is the Doctor not cute like he supposed to be because we want to be his girlfriend.
I liked the epsiode despite all of the annoying “Yeah, he’s a new Doctor, yeah he’s old, yeah he’s not sexy, ‘big whoop wanna fight about it’*. Get over yourself.” by the writers.
I liked Smith popping in at the end but again it felt like the writers all agreed that we the audience are a too clingy girlfriend and the only way we could move on to a new non-boyfriend was to have the old one tell us it’s ok to move on.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJimiVFCjJ0
Because of the rule of funny? :rolleyes: Yeah, I find it a little annoying too, but I think the dumb Sontaran shtick is a big hit with a lot of viewers.
He might not know that the ship in Girl in the Fireplace was called Madame de Pompadour - as far as I remember that fact was revealed only to the audience, at the very end of the episode.
Well, for one, it’s been established that Clara remembers, at best, very little fuzzy bits of being strewn across the Doctor’s timestream.
Even then, there’s the difference between knowing something emotionally and knowing it intellectually. With all the other doctors, she knew them as incarnations leading up to her Doctor. This new one is an unknown element, something beyond what she’s experienced before.
It’s like the difference between knowing your mom is at high risk for alzheimers and then seeing it happen.
Long answer: Strax comes from a unisex race that treats every situation like potential combat. His is a race of clones, so he has no sense of variety. There are no living creatures besides Sontarans on his home planet, so he thinks all Earth creatures are the same race, even horses and flies. He’s used to Sontarans being able to mutate whatever natural body process is needed, even if it’s to nurse babies. Because of this, he has an uncanny knowledge of the biology of bipedal organisms, even if he does confuse genders.
Think about it like this: imagine if a soldier is snatched from North Korea and forced to serve in the Peace Corps. All he knows is how to do military stuff. He is surrounded on all sides by the enemy, so he considers himself a hostage and complies with their demands until they decide to send him home. Maybe he grows a sense of attachment to his captors in a Stockholm Syndrome sort of way, but he’s not going to totally retract his training as a soldier.
Am I the only one to remember that the final scene of Last of the Time Lords featured a woman’s hand picking up The Master’s signet ring from the ashes of his funeral pyre? I’ve been waiting for that plot thread to get picked back up, and I have a feeling that it just did…
Yep, Mickey, Rose and the Doctor have a conversation at the end of episode about why Reinette/Madame de Pomadour was the target of the clockwork robots. Only the audience got the answer.
That’s true - when they’re leaving the derelict ship, they wonder aloud why it targeted Madame de Pompadour in the first place, and write it off as something they’ll never know. Meanwhile, the camera pulls back out of the ship and shows us the ship’s name for the first time.
The connection to “Girl in the Fireplace” kind of bugged me - seems long odds that both the Marie Antoinette and the Madame de Pompadour would suffer accidents that led to their repair drones going haywire and butchering humans for parts. Once is a tragic accident, but twice is just carelessness. Apparently, starships named after French noblewomen are the Pintos of the 51st century.
Anyway, liked the episode over all. I could watch an entire series about the adventures of Victorian era lesbian ninjas and their potato manservant.
Given that the Corsair is the only example we have of it - everyone else we’ve seen through multiple regenerations (The Doctor, the Master, Romana, Rassilon, River Song…probably others, but they’re the ones coming to mind) has kept the same sex through all of them - yeah, it’s clearly not a common thing.
Another thing about the Doctor not remembering the clockwork robots: he encountered them once, about eleven hundred years ago. And the Doctor has seen a whole lot of weird stuff before and since that. His regeneration addled brain might not be able to make that connection.
It was used by the woman Governor of the prison to resurrect The Master at the very start of The End Of Time: Part One. They needed that ring and some of Lucy Saxon’s DNA for the ritual.
That was the arc that ended Tennant run as The Doctor.
I’ve been itching to rant on this since I viewed it, and behold! A thread on the SDMB with an audience for my humble opinion far above your typical internet mope in sophistication and intelligence. Life is good.
Hated it. Moffatt seems to be pandering to fandom of late, particularly of the female fanfic-writing sort. A nod to the nerds once in a while is cute, but when it takes over the show it’s icky.
Vastra and Jenny are warmed-over Xena and Gabrielle with none of the charm and way too much of the warrior-babe ethos that has inundated fantasy and scifi media of late.
Weak plot and none of the cleverness that is a signature of Moffatt’s work. I’m generally rewinding to catch plot points that fly past…this one was more like the pre-reboot series, just a scifi soap opera with none of the flash and dazzle we’ve come to expect from the Doctor of the new millenium.
Liked Capaldi, but we haven’t actually seen him yet. He was performing the obligatory post-regeneration morph into his new personality. Once he’s fully present he should be wonderful, and although I love Smith, it’s time for less cutesy.
Good lord, if you hate every aspect of it that much, you should probably stop watching it and stop complaining about it on-line. Just let go and move on with your life.
As for me, I enjoyed it. And I’m still waiting for the Vastra/Jenny/Strax spin-off.
I agree with you PHibes about Vastra and Jenny - they seem to be there to be edgy and modern. The writing is too in your face with constant references to their relationship. There’s an old writing technique of show, don’t tell. The fact that it’s so often mentioned indicates that it’s hard to be believable.
I look forward to this season - the question of how much can you change a man and still have him be the same man is very interesting. Remember, all the good looking, charismatic, flirtatious doctors we’ve recently had are also William Hartnell.
[“There’s an old writing technique of show, don’t tell.”
PreCISEly, Frazzled. And Moffatt is the god of clever inference and subtlety of plot in this sad age of the reality show where the exact reverse of that is standard procedure: the technique, for instance, where after anything happens onscreen cut back to a faked “interview” so the actor can tell the audience what just occurred, in case they missed it when they witnessed it firsthand five seconds ago.
It’s heartbreaking to see him lower his standards. Doctor Who (and Sherlock) have been oases of intelligence in the vast wasteland.
