Oooh, and this is at least the second reference to Christmas lists this season too. Umm, guess they’re foreshadowing that we’ll have a Christmas episode? 
Ah, thank you. I did actually like the first two, maybe watching the third with a hangover wasn’t a good idea..
I did wonder about her still-possible Dalekification when she pulled a gun on the Doctor (but again, I’d missed so much of the episode by then, I’ve no idea of context).
I loved that line. Also: “Don’t swear.”
It was a good solid episode. It was nice to see Ben Browder in the Who-verse.
I also liked that the opening and closing narration talking about an angel that fell from the sky turned out to be the Gunslinger instead of the Doctor.
So far I’m not that impressed. I liked the first episode, although I felt that it needed a bit more time to make the story work better. I thought the second episode was pretty poor, with little interesting about it. I suppose I’m not a big fan of the action-packed “adventure” episodes. The third was an improvement, but I didn’t love it. As happens all too often, it seemed like they had a good premise but fleshing it out into an actual episode didn’t produce amazing results. It’s as if the writers come up with cool ideas (“An alien cyborg in the Wild West!”) but can’t be bothered to make a good story out of it that doesn’t have a thousand contradictions. And I know a few people mentioned they liked the horse jokes, but I couldn’t help but roll my eyes.
I know I’m being very negative, but I do actually generally like Doctor Who. That and the food are my favourite things about Christmas.
I saw Christmas references in all three episodes so far - something is up…
I think the ring of rocks and sticks around the town was a mistake, dramatically speaking. Once I realized that the cyborg had placed it there as his “line in the sand,” all I could picture was him awkwardly trying to construct it, at night, with one arm. Probably shuffling around on his knees as he tries to get them placed just right so they don’t fall over. Good thing no one happened to go outside during the (what must have been ) several hours it took him to build that thing. He’d probably have had to flee the planet in embarrassment.
That was really good. You caught the Doctor’s voice almost perfectly.
OK, now I’m confused again. In the Cubes episode, Amy and Rory each have friends remind them that they DO often disappear for months at a time - these months presumably being filled by their adventures with the Dr. This implies that a seven-week adventure would see them return after seven weeks of conventional Earth time had passed, and that they’re therefore ageing at the same rate as you and I.
Then, later in the same episode, the Dr takes them off on an adventure involving the newly-built Savoy Hotel and Henry VIII, which he says took them seven weeks of personal time to complete, but still returns them to the wedding party soon enough for no-one to even notice they’d been gone. Which implies the faster ageing mentioned in my earlier post.
If the Dr can return them to the party that quickly, why doesn’t he do it all the time? And if he does do it all the time, then why would anyone notice Amy and Rory had been “disappearing” at all?
I know this doesn’t remotely matter, and that it’s probably just something where the writers assume time works however they need it to work for any given one-liner. The show’s science-fantasy rather than hard science fiction, after all, and probably the only sensible answer is “a wizard did it” - in this case, a somewhat unpredictable wizard called the Tardis.
All the same, if anyone can offer an internally-consistent model of how Amy and Rory’s ageing process works relative to their next-door neighbours’, I’d love to hear it. Has any series of the show ever set out any consistent approach on this question?
I think the problem you’re having is that you’re missing the one element of inconsistency in what is otherwise a perfectly straightforward and consistent scenario, viz. the Doctor.
Yes, he can return them to more-or-less where and when he took them from – if he remembers, or he can be bothered, or he doesn’t get distracted by something else happening…
The time travel is consistent - the Doctor isn’t. It’s the one thing that’s consistent about him.
Fair enough. On one level, as I said, that is the only sensible answer. You call your wizard the Doctor and I called mine the Tardis, but essentially we’re saying the same thing.
Mmm… not really, if I understand you.
You seem to be saying that the problems with Amy and Rory’s personal timeline are an arbitrary plot convenience that needs to be hand-waved away by some assumed quirk of the operations of the Tardis.
My point is that they’re a consistent and predictable result of the Doctor’s established behaviour and personality (or indeed, personalities – if there’s one thing that all his incarnations have in common it’s a hit-and-miss approach to putting his companions back where they belong).
In other words: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
For example, one time he brought Rose back after a short adventure, one year later than he intended to, leading to missing persons reports, etc. Rose, in that case, aged only a few days, while her friends and mother aged one year.
The answer is:
[QUOTE=Eleventh Hour]
Doctor: Why did you say six months?
Amy: Why did you say five minutes?
[/QUOTE]
Is it just me, or has this Series felt a lot more old school (or at least old school Nu Who). We got episodes taking place primarily on or around Earth, featuring companions’ family members, and the Doctor dealing various government entities. All of which Moffat has mostly avoided so far. Plus, other than a little bit during this episode, there has been very little timey-wimey going on.
I love that this conversation basically happened.
I really enjoyed this episode, but the ending seemed quite rushed.
I was underwhelmed by tonight’s episode. There were too many loose ends.
The doctor can’t detect seven huge spaceships hovering around earth for a year?
No one noticed a little girl sitting in an emergency room for six months?
If the cubes are doing all the intelligence gathering, why is the little girl there anyway?
By the same token, why are the orderlies kidnapping patients?
And why didn’t the Doctor make an effort to save the kidnapped patients before the ship exploded?
If the aliens exist in all space and time and are trying to stop the humans from expanding into the universe in the future it seems like they should already know so much about humans they shouldn’t need the cubes.
Brain death occurs pretty fast after heart failure. You can’t defibrillate people half an hour later.
The whole thing felt sloppy.
I liked the Brig’s daughter though. I hope she’s a reoccurring character.
I need to just set up a macro about how much Rory rocks. So where’d they go? Ah, here’s the portal into gods-know-what-dimension, exeunt. Wasn’t even wearing the centurion uni or anything!
The orderlies with the “big mouths”… where have I seen that before?
Those ‘Prisoner Zero’ zombies from 11’s first episode, the name of which oddly escapes me?
Possibly - I was thinking I saw it from a movie or another TV show. It’ll probably come to me sometime in 2014…
IIRC, it had to do with people being changed.
Damn, this is going to bug me.