Doctor Who Series Five: UK pace thread [edited title]

Cafe Society
121

Some fanwanking/answers:

[ul]
[li]They didn’t keep it a secret. They told everyone every five years and everyone chose to forget. Nobody wanted to live with knowing what had been done, and what they consented to, in order to survive.[/li][li]The smilers/winders seemed to be filling certain functions (opening scene they seemed to be grading the school children).[/li][li]Got to get rid of useless people somehow.[/li][li]Gets them into the room you have to press the forget button to exit and I assumed the feeding mechanism was designed with the ship itself. Maybe they didn’t know the beastie wouldn’t eat kids then but do now and can’t change it. Maybe it turned out to be an effective teaching method.[/li][li]The doctor mentioned that they were looking for a new habitable planet.[/li][li]What about powering everything? Life support, and so on, should still need power and therefore still need engines.[/li][li]Who knows.[/li][li]Intimidation seemed to be key to it; keeping tabs on everyone and getting them into the voting booth once they stumbled on the truth. Not to mention they live much longer, can self-repair, and aren’t going to grow a conscience. Machines and half-machines were the only ones who could deal with knowing the truth.[/li][li]No idea.[/li][li]You protest, you get eaten. It claimed that if 1% protested the whale would be released and everyone would, they thought, die. No clue whether this was true or if the video meant 1% of people who were not Whale Chow.[/li][li]No idea.[/li][li]No idea.[/li][li]Only the Queen.[/li][li]No idea.[/li][/ul]

122

Absolutely blown away. The first one was good, but this episode was fabulous.

The teaser part seemed very classic-Who. Right out of Sylvester McCoy’s era, in fact.

It is absolutely frightening how well Matt Smith has settled into the role right away. It actually bothers me a little bit. I expect an adjustment period with a new Doctor. I expect little things that make me go, “That’s not the Doctor I know.” But there’s none of that. After Eleventh Hour I thought he was just following Tennant too closely, being manic and cocky and rude just like Ten was after his regeneration, but in this episode we really get to see Matt come into his own as the Doctor with some really great acting. He’s not just doing Tennant, not at all. But he is doing Tennant and McCoy and Troughton and a little bit of Eccleston and maybe Davison, all mashed up together so that nothing seems the slightest bit new or jarring but nothing seems like an impersonation of what came before, either. It’s too perfect. It’s actually uncanny, and I feel a little bit cheated out of the roller-coaster of “Wait, who is this guy, what have they done, oh I see where they’re going, maybe this guy really could be the Doctor, OMG this is the best Doctor ever.”

There were a lot of plot holes in this episode, mostly pointed out excellently by vdgg81, but I think they are mostly deliberate. It’s part of what makes the Whoniverse seem big and strange,and it definitely hearkens back to the McCoy era. We don’t need to be told why the UK couldn’t get its shit together when every other country on the planet could, and even Scotland just up and seceded on their own spaceship. We aren’t even told explicitly that that is what happened; it’s just kind of mentioned that everyone else had left. A single line could explain it all, but not without coming off as expository. There was no reason to explain it; the local characters already know (and probably the Doctor too) and Amy couldn’t go around asking about everything in the future that doesn’t make sense (and frankly I hate it when that’s what companions do). The future is another country and you don’t expect to understand everything. A big part of Doctor Who is looking at how people deal with the strange mix of weird and familiar that gets thrown at them. It’s like a travelogue of a world even more bizarre and strange than our own and some things just don’t get explained.

Not that it doesn’t bother me, too, but I don’t think its an oversight. For better or worse, it’s an artistic decision, and its part of what makes Who Who.

And for all the over-the-top emotional manipulation going on, it worked. I did cry. Yes, I’m a big old geeky crybaby. Don’t mock me or I’ll take my action figures and go home, so there!

ETA: OK, the one plot hole that was pretty clearly an oversight and that really bothered me is that they don’t need engines to keep moving in space. I don’t mind magic or “a-Wizard-did-it” but I really don’t like bad science.

123

I had science-wanked (can we do that?) it out of the way by assuming the good Doctor referred to the engines and all their associated machinery, which wouldn’t be turned on and off on a whim.

Still, he might have had a regular ripple from a heart, if the whale had such a thing.

124

I had a lot of the same issues that vdgg81 did, and I think his analysis of the episode is spot-on. But when the big reveal was that they were being pulled through space by a freaking star whale, as though that makes any sense at all, I shrugged my other concerns away. You just kind of have to roll with the story when it comes to Doctor Who because most of the time it doesn’t make any sense any way.

This perfectly sums up my feelings, too. One thing I really liked in The Eleventh Doctor was the way he captured the spirit of Ten without mimicking Tennant. There were moments when I thought, “Yes, exactly. This is what the Doctor would do” but never “Um, why do we have this new guy if he’s just going to be Ten with a new face?” I had the same sense in the second episode, too. There’s an appropriate amount of continuity so when we get flashes of his new personality, it’s not jarring.

125

You’re not seeing stuff in the order it was filmed.

They filmed for 9 months solid, and some of the first epidode’s scenes were filmed at the end of that period. They don’t film one episoed at a time in order as they go along like in US series. They film a whole series then show the whole series.

126

Yup, the filming was split into 7 production blocks. The Eleventh Hour was the third filmed block, The Beast Below and the next one made up block 2. The first block was episodes four and five.

127

It occurred to me that we rarely ever see the Doctor or Companion eating.

The Eleventh Hour was an exception. That may be the only time we see this Doctor eat all season.

A lot of tv show often feature characters around a table, eating, and talking. That doesn’t happen much in the Doctor Who world.

128

Re each actor “growing into” the role … I wonder how much it is our growing into accepting the actor’s new interpretation as valid. This one going over well not so much because we are watching eps filmed after he had a chance to play the part for a while, but because he did a good job of incorporating enough of the various old doctors mannerisms and style into his new version that it comes off as new but not jarring?

129

Interesting. I didn’t know that.

I think that’s it.

You’ll have to jog my memory. I’m sure they swallowed a lot of whale vomit, but what did they actually eat?

130

The Eleventh Hour was the opening ep and it was him eating and spitting out all the foods until he found fish and custard. No eating in The Beast Below. Except for the Star Whale of course.

131

Oh right, of course. I thought you were talking about The Beast Below. I wonder if he still likes fish custard.

The TARDIS must have a kitchen somewhere (possibly where the swimming pool used to be). I wonder why the writers have previously been so reluctant to show more of the TARDIS. Where do they sleep, where do they eat, do they ever have a lie in or lounge around the pool reading, or is it just one adventure after another without time to sit down? You’d think one of the first questions a companion would ask is “Where do I sleep?” followed by “Where’s the loo?” It would be easy and natural to show them doing something normal when disaster strikes, so it’s not like they just haven’t fit into a story. It’s clearly been a deliberate choice by the writers.

132

Probably because they didn’t want the expense of building the sets for it.They’ll only do it if a story really needs a scene set in the TARDIS.

133

I remember food synthesizers from the show’s first season (Hartnell’s first season, not Ecclestone’s). In the past the writers weren’t so averse to exploring the TARDIS. I remember seeing a garden inside it in one of the Fourth Doctor’s stories (I think it was Logopolis) and there were lots of scenes inside during Peter Davison’s tenure. I remember we saw the Zero Room and Nissa’s quarters, plus lots of identical corridors. In fact, so much time was spent in the TARDIS not doing anything interesting that the fans became seriously annoyed with it. People felt that the show’s producer’s were putting too much emphasis in pointless continuity and in the main cast soap-opera and not enough in the adventures (an opinion with which I agree). My guess is that the current show runners are wary of repeating the mistakes of previous creative teams.

We did see the wardrobe room in The Christmas Invasion.

I see your point but remain unconvinced. Sure, the McCoy era had lots of weird unexplained stuff (the Psychic Circus and the planet where it was illegal to be sad being two favorites of mine), but those stories worked for me and this one didn’t. Maybe it’s because in those McCoy episodes there was a clearer demarcation of the territory we were exploring: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy had a magical realism vibe established from the start and The Happiness Patrol was clearly barbed social satire from the first minute on the screen; maybe it’s just that in those stories all the weird elements worked for the story and were essential to it’s telling. In The Beast Bellow we have a horror/sci-fi/action hybrid that shouldn’t need so much unexplained weirdness featured so prominently; to me the end result wasn’t evocative or playful but muddled and annoying. I think that the show needed to either do a much better job of world-building so that what was left unexplained wasn’t so inconsistent and illogical or, alternatively, that Moffat needed to rework his episode so that all the weirdness was both thematically necessary to the story and fit better to its mood.

Maybe the things that bothered me were artistic decisions, but I’ll argue that they were bad ones. On the good side, none of my complaints were the result of what I feared was a basic disagreement over what DW’s about between me and the new producer. Every season of DW I’ve ever watched had it’s share of stinkers and I have high hopes for the rest of this one.

It didn’t work for me. I’d rather it had, as I’d have enjoyed the episode a lot more. As it happened I was even a bit angry at the end.

134

As anyone mentioned the tribute to Terry Pratchett yet? (i.e whale/turtle).

135

Good points on the TARDIS issue, vdgg81. I do remember seeing the inside more during Davison’s tenure, but I don’t think I saw anyone’s quarters. There’re still a lot of his episodes I haven’t seen, though, at least within recent memory, and I was much too young to have known what fans were complaining about when I first saw whichever of them got broadcast in the US in the mid 80s. I do recall that we almost never saw even the control room of the TARDIS during Six and Seven’s runs.

Oddly, while I love McCoy’s Doctor, I feel about a lot of the storylines he was in (especially the psychic circus thing, and to a lesser extent The Happiness Patrol) the way you felt about this week’s:

Different strokes, I suppose.

BTW, I’ve seen most of Hartnell’s run (thanks to the wonders of the Internet) and they definitely showed the food replicator AND the sleeping quarters in the first season. I even thought about mentioning it when I brought up the kitchen. :slight_smile:

136

I assume the star whale will go back to eating whatever star whales eat when they’re not fed a diet of adult humans.

What I found confusing is why the whale felt all compassionate for the kiddies but gulped the adults up no problem.

137

Why the mechanism to ship academically poor kids who ride the elevator to beneath? Given that the space whale won’t eat kids, is this just to get workers for beneath or something? Why set this up at all, you can sort of understand why the secrecy over the whale etc, but why the get rid of kids set up?

138

It seemed awfully bitty to me and I spent half the programme thinking of sf books, etc.
that had used similar ideas before… Indeed, John Scalzi uses a ‘torturing the pilot’ method of space travel in his current Hugo-contender ‘The God Engines’

And having specifically mentioned that the Scots had gone their own way, why was it still considered the UK? England and Scotland uniting is the reason it’s called the UK! :slight_smile:
(Just a nitpick, honest; I don’t want to open a whole debate about the matter!)

139

It seemed to me that he jammed too many decent SF ideas into one story, each of which could have been adapted into full length stories of their own.

[ul]
[li]The Smilers as creepy lawkeepers that kidnap children (though that’s more like a Sarah Jane Adventure).[/li][li]“Forgetting after voting” and the mystery of Liz Ten.[/li][li]Feeding the Star Whale with people.[/li][/ul]

Too many set-ups; not enough resolution.

140

Sure, but a good chunk of why they hammered on it was because Amy got it and the Doctor didn’t. so, that was kind of cute and made it a little easier to swallow.

The whale, now that it’s under its own control, will likely stop off to eat occasionally - it can do that now that it doesn’t have a cattle prod jammed in its brain. Or, if you prefer the more macabre explanation, the dead folks are being dropped in. Plus, they had feeding tubes jammed into the whale - The Doctor comments on it when they’re in the mouth.

Ever see “The IT Crowd”? Presumably the original UK ship was made in the UK. And therefore promptly burst into flames - like their fire extinguishers.

One, what I’m going to call a plot hole, here, and maybe someone can explain it. Opening scene, Little Boy gets in trouble in school (he got a zero?) and then takes the lift instead of the stairs. Which makes him a bad boy. And…the sentence is death? For bad grades?

But…it’s not. The is absolutely standard science fiction. Is it inaccurate physics? Certainly. Now tell me how many scifi/space opera movies or TV shows you can think of that show a ship cruising through space without the engines being lit?

If it makes you feel better, think of it this way. It’s unlikely they’d just shut the engines down completely. At least keep them idling in case they need them.

My wife did, and the only exposure she’s ever had to Discworld is the “Hogfather” miniseries.

-Joe