Doctor Who?

[Snys93]

   Materializing with a whoosh and scrapping metallic sound comes the Tardis in the Picture House! Snes1993 here bringing you the Dr. Who discussion thread.

 

   Got a series theory, favorite villains you wish to see again or pining over "Ten", this is for you Who fans out there. Discuss your favorite episodes, your take on the series and where its headed. Remember, respect goes a long way and keep the discussion civil or the Master will return from Time War in the form of an angry Mod (no offense to the Mods, ya'll have a duty and we salute you).

 

   Anyway, onwards and upwards, allons-y and Geronimo!!!

 

[ballisticwaffles]

Im going to start out by alienating a majority of the people who read this, but Doctor Who is rather unenjoyable to me now a days.

 

At first i thought it was very good, but with the ascendancy of Matt Smith to the Role of the Doctor the series has alienated itself from me. River Song is a blatant Mary Sue that is shoe horned into her position as a 1/4 Time Lord or what ever and marrying the Doctor. The Doctor is a overly silly Hipster who adds nothing to the character other than the aforementioned Mary Sue catering that damages the character rather than go anywhere with it.

 

Plus the usage of new villains that are "Totally more dangerous than anything the doctor has faced before!" Makes the newer seasons more like fanfiction than Dr. Who canon.

 

TL:DR : Dr. Who was good up until Matt Smith.

[Fana McCloud]

Yeah, River is a freakin massive mary sue. I kinda wished they had left her involvement at the Silence in the Library episode and never brought her back. But alas, because Steven Moffat wrote that episode and later became the main writer she got resurrected. I loved his writing when he was doing single episodes but now the show is just a tangled mess. I also think the fact that they're showing it in two runs per season is a total arc momentum killer and doesn't help that any.

 

I think The Doctor seriously needs a continuous villain that's actually fairly threatening and always more or less present. The Master more or less got chucked out the window as that so I wish they'd replace him somehow. : /

[Sarita]

Doctor Who is my happy show, this weekend can't get here fast enough. I cried when the Ponds left, and I'm loving Clara. I hope Clara serves to fix some of the issues you guys seem to have with the Moffet era. She can match the Doctor line for line, and I really like her so far.

 

I can understand the need to split the past two seasons in in two separate arcs. The stories just aren't even closely related enough for them to fall in such a close time together. This past season especially, the Ponds were a well-loved set of companions, and I really appreciated the break to get used to them being gone before they introduced Clara. Also the stuff they do when the show is on hiatus is really fun. (the mini episodes, being what I'm referring to at the moment)

 

(There's a River rant here, if you aren't interested in changing your opinion about her, you can skip it. It's really just me chattering out some ideas.)

Also, I like River, calling her a Mary Sue seems a bit harsh. The only issue may be the idea of "changing the universe to make her fit in," and to that I say, Time Lords are Time Lords due to the influence of the Untempered Schism and the Time Vortex, both of which River was exposed to as someone conceived on a TARDIS. Besides, I don't feel like you can say you liked her in Silence in the Library then don't like her? She made it clear in SitL and FoD that she was the Doctor's wife, even if she didn't implicitly say it. Were you really not expecting her to come back at some point? That's not how any of the writers think. Davies wrote in similarly crazy plot devices (Bad Wolf still doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me).

[ballisticwaffles]

River Song is a Mary Sue purely for the conduct of which she holds herself in and the inescapable mess the writers continuously dig as they write her charecter. She is taken from the main characters from birth and raised without their knowledge, which is a common Mary Sue trait. Being raised off screen so the writers dont have to have their super awesome character have to go through anything resemballing a normal growth period, sheerly so that they can have a super cool awesome person. It is a common Mary sue tactic to be related somehow to the main characters so that the writer can have a pet charecter to wave around as a paragon of "super kewl awezomnezz!"

 

She is shoo horned and rather asspulled into both being a Time Lord and the Doctor's wife, which come out of the stands in the left field and hits the pitcher square in the nose. This all wouldn't be so bad, except River is the point of conflict. Nevermind the hundreds of millions of creatures that are three times more likely to actually do something to end the doctor, this random out of nowhere women is able to become the center of attention and do permanently fatal harm to the Doctor for the first time in the entire run of the series! And she is able to marry the doctor, which is another Common Mary sue trait, getting hitched to canon charecters.

 

This is comparable to the Son of Falco and Slippie's daughter getting married to Krystal, a travesty I urge you try not to think about to hard.

[Sarita]

My argument wasn't entirely fully formed anyways, my point was was that I like River, and not all things that look Sue are actually Sue. A lot of things that make a Sue a Sue are actually pretty cool character traits in moderation, and having multiples of them doesn't automatically make a Sue, either. The point of pointing out a Sue is that it's on a rediculous scale where she upstages the main character or plotlines just to focus on her. This is what I'm using to determine Sue-ness. There are some things I obviously don't know about River, so I actually gave her extra points just because I'm not Moffat so I honestly can't know, and a lot of the questions were complicated due to the nature of the show, so I went ahead and gave her those points. She scored a 35, which is in Sue territory, but doesn't make her a raging Sue.

 

So raging just because she shares Sue traits and then going on a tirade just because someone likes a character and wants to defend her... kinda not warranted here. I'm very familiar with Sue tropes, having written a few Sues in my time. (Because come on, we all had that bad fanfiction stage...) 

[Snys93]

What I always liked about Dr. Who were the Daleks and so far the Matt Smith series has done little without our favorite "squid tanks".

 

Steve Moffat, Y u no more Daleks?

 

and the Dalek we do get are different than the David Tennant Daleks. I have to say, it is a slight improvement, but how can you improve an already good thing?

[Hidi]

Yeah, my opinion on the show isn't far off to what some others have been saying;

 

I've followed the new series (The current one: 2005-present) since it started, and that was long before it was popular in North America. I really liked the series up until the last season or so (When episodes came in on an inconsistent basis). It seemed after that point, there became a recurring theme of the Doctor's death, and the entire story revolved around that to the point that it was getting a little annoying for me. Even though they've tried to go a little more in-depth with the characters and the series (The episode where the Tardis was put into the body of a woman), it also takes away from the simplicity of the show.

 

I have a feeling the show, however, isn't going to end any time soon. With popularity now gained among North America, there's no sense ending it when the fanbase is just beginning to really grow. I guess we'll find out if it's Matt Smith giving the show its down, or the writers.

[Guest]

Okay, now let's see.

The Doctor is a overly silly Hipster

I do admit, the eleventh is more of that than the recent ones, but please be honest: Which one isn't? XD, As far as I got it, this is part of his basic concept. It's due to the time travel thing. Clothing and mannerisms depend on where and when you are. So if you travel through space and time, however you dress, people in all places but one will always consider you ridiculous.

It's actually less that the 11th was different to the others, but more that 9 and 10 were more 'normal' for today's earth standards than the rest.

Also, the eleventh's spontaneous jump from one thought to the next is a way to adapt the characters more to the setting they're in. You're jumping around from one adventure to the other, meeting new people you have to introduce to everything every time. If you do it slowly and normally every time, forever, how boring is this going to be?

And about the more-dangerous-than-ever-before thing, that's nothing new. Just two quotes as examples from dalek-episodes:

"You hate your own existence. And this makes them more deadly than ever!" - Ninth Doctor, The Parting of the Ways

"...but right now, they're vulnerable, and that makes them more dangerous than ever!" - Tenth Doctor, Evolution of the Daleks

But this is one thing we need thrown in before anything gets said without taking it in consideration: Doctor Who + Something that isn't silly = not happening - ever. If you're not immune to silliness, DW is absolutely not what you're looking for. A murder happening when the Doctor visits Agatha Christie, ghosts just happening to show up when the Doctor visits Charles Dickens etc etc. And this is the DW thread, so please try and reduce the rant on this and that being too ridiculous. Otherwise we may as well start counting it all up, and if we do, even for only the new series, we'd be stuck to doing nothing else for years.

Okay, I'm not in a big position to talk an awful lot on the Mary-Sue-front, so I'll be brief: The only thing I find/found hard to believe is that you can skip milennia of evolution in the time vortex just by being conceived in the time vortex. Otherwise, there are more far-fetched things than her, such as the last episode featuring the Ponds. I'll explain: What does it depend on what happens if you change a fixed point in time, and if it really does lead to different things under different circumstances, how did Rory know precisely what was going to happen if he caused himself to die twice?

Well, let's proceed to something I consider more important: Speculation.

We've seen the first episode of the second part of the seventh series by now, and we have a brief summary of most of the stuff that is to come. I seriously didn't expect to see the Great Intelligence coming back so soon, let alone as the main villain. First I thought Oswyn would be the result of an accident. Like if she burnt up in the time vortex and got edited into it à la Bad Wolf. But by now...TGI mentioned that Unit was an old friend. I wonder what that's all about.

And this Clara girl, what do you think? (I honestly liked the Ponds a lot and thought it was too early for them to go, but I'm not going to deny Oswyn a chance to grow on me, like I first did with the eleventh - yes, I used to be a soft version of these tenth-fanboys) Is she some sort of device to lure the Doctor to the Fields of Trensalore? Okay, there are more unlikely things happening in the DW universe than three girls existing at three different points in time and space having the same face, voice, spare time activities, and partly professions. Like all sorts of completely different life forms throughout the universe looking just like humans (timelords, kaleds, skals, these other people on the titanic etc) But the way the series is going, it's obviously implying that there is more to Oswyn.

I'm mostly looking forward to the series finale and "Nightmare in Silver" I do hope the stuff about the Cyber-Doctor is true. I would prefer TGI for a main antagonist though. Was a good choice, I wouldn't have made, but in the aftermath, I think it's the right way to go as of now. Can't be sure of this position until I've actually seen "The Crimson Horror" and the series finale.

And part of the prophecy of the Silence was that the question was to be asked "on the fall of the eleventh", which might imply that the eleventh doctor was to die. And if I got this right (might as well not), timelords only have twelve regeneration cycles, and the tenth regenerated without changing his form in the finale of the fourth series, which leaves the eleventh doctor to be the last regeneration. So there would be a choice to be made. Either the doctor does somehow undo the timelock, stop Rassilon from performing the sanctification and find a way to reach one of Rassilon's biological modifiers to add some regeneration energy to himself or...the series would actually go through a reboot.

Now to explain my reboot theory/idea. If cooking yourself a Timelord is as easy as with River Song, you could create a new human Timelord any time. And since past events of both the new and the old series can only not be changed, because the Doctor must not alter his own timeline, they could be rewritten if there was a successor to travel around in the TARDIS instead. Everything could be completely rewritten. A complete reboot, without dropping the reality bomb. 

Other than that, let's make this a fun thread please. With discussion not being avoided yet without letting it get hostile.

What do you say?

[Fana McCloud]

And part of the prophecy of the Silence was that the question was to be asked "on the fall of the eleventh", which might imply that the eleventh doctor was to die. And if I got this right (might as well not), timelords only have twelve regeneration cycles, and the tenth regenerated without changing his form in the finale of the fourth series, which leaves the eleventh doctor to be the last regeneration. 

 

 

That was retconned in an episode of Sarah Jane Adventures:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9D-2HJMD9s

 

But technically speaking he can regenerate two more times according to old cannon if you don't count the quasi regeneration that Tennant pulled off, or one more time if you do - he can regenerate 12 times so that means there can be 13 doctors total.

 

 

 

 

 

But by now...TGI mentioned that Unit was an old friend. I wonder what that's all about.

 

What do you mean? Even in the old show the Doctor had dealings with Unit, and there have been plenty of instances in the newer cannon - like the episodes where the Sontari tried to turn Earth into a cloning world to reproduce themselves; that whole story was basically the Doctor working in tandem with Unit to stop them. They've more or less been allied for a long time. What part of that statement was confusing?

[Guest]

I've seen that episode of TSJA, but not a single other one yet, before you ask me to know other stuff from it. XD, But yes, you're right, I thought wrongly, with 12 regenerations it leaves space for 13 doctors. Many fans might not see the almost-regeneration of the tenth as one, but I don't share it. The regeneration energy is out. What was needed to recover was used, the rest was channeled into his severed hand to form this other human tenth doctor. 

[Sarita]

But, watching the preview of whats to come for this upcoming season, 11 was releasing hella regeneration energy. What do we make of that information?

[Snys93]

But, watching the preview of whats to come for this upcoming season, 11 was releasing hella regeneration energy. What do we make of that information?

 

Yeah, big WTF moment for me. The Doctor is regenerating and I don't think he will this soon in part 2 of this season.

 

-

 

Also theres something strange I found when I was watching the last episode, was the wifi password: Rucbnr123 or something like that (Run you clever boy and remember). Oswin has died twice already and is currently on life three. Numbers mean a lot in the Who universe, two hearts, 4 beats a second.

 

What if...

[Dr. Orange]

Remember you clever boy. 

 

*cue theme*

[Snys93]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enZ4P7Azxys

[Fana McCloud]

Ah yes, another stunning floppy drive symphony. XD

[Sarita]

I still have no idea how floppy drive music works. It makes me so happy.

[Snys93]

The pic below can only mean one thing.

 

vv

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vv

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NERDGASUM!!!

 

That right! Theres still a little paradox left in the Tardis after all!!!!

[Dr. Orange]

Tick tock goes the clock.

The preparations are set.

Tick tock goes the clock. 

9 more Doctor's to go yet.

[Snys93]

Tick tock, goes the clock,

 

time itself is abating.

 

Tick tock, goes the clock,

 

Trenzalore is waiting.

[Sarita]

But, watching the preview of whats to come for this upcoming season, 11 was releasing hella regeneration energy. What do we make of that information?

 

The new episode has set this moment in the preview in a new light. An emotional episode, either way. Darn it being the day after, I have to avoid spoilers.

[Snys93]

So far this part 2 of this series is pretty weak. I'm sorry, I'm a fan of the time traveling Doctor, his blue box and hot female companions. But these passed episodes...Oh my Gawd...its just terrible.

 

Am I alone on this? Can someone help me?

[Guest]

Well you're not with me there. I think it was great. At least the first 2 episodes. Ok Cold War was pretty weak, but I honestly didn't expect it to be strong back when I first saw the 2013 coming-soon trailer. But throughout the whoviverse, you're definitely not alone. Lots of whiners about the 2nd part of the 7th series everywhere.

 

Which I honestly don't get, because I don't see anyone posting anything involving a suggestion as to what to do differently and how. The first episode was brilliant and the second one didn't disappoint me at all. IMHO, I don't think the important question is what the "critics" want or wanted, but what they expected. 

 

Were they expecting the moast bombastic uberpowershow evar? And tension, action and everything rising with every minute in every episode? DW is in it's basic elements this: Far-fetched soft-sci-fi stories, costumes, silliness and sometimes very sudden uber-epicness, mostly both of them mixed (like in The Rings of Akhaten) and always along with an alternate way of solving the problems to just killing off the enemy with weapons. And the first two episodes had all this. One thing that's occurring increasingly often lately is the revival of old villains, such as the Great Intelligence and the Ice Warriors. Which isn't something new but it's getting more frequent again.

 

The stuff I read about the new episodes kind of reminds me of what a certain community of hardcore dw fans keep babbling. (I'm not exaggerating. If it were possible, I'd expect them to try and bring Hartnell back or so) Always ranting about new-who and how awful it is, which is why I sometimes even take the time and watch the more popular ones among the old-who stories. Just to try and understand the point. And from being used to new-who, I felt it was such a pain to watch. Very simple plot-lines, sometimes with huge plotholes created later on, and artificially drawn on and on to win some extra minutes without writing more. Awful doesn't describe it, I'll have to say painful. The new ones are just so much more fast-paced and hence often more complex even though single stories are only half as long. 

 

The point is, I'd suggest watching some of the older episodes. I don't mean the really old ones but older 11th-Doctor-episodes and the ones from the RTD  DW. In anything that goes through a development and/or increases it's quality, if you only stick to the now and constantly expect it to get better over and over, you're bound to be disappointed. I also like the 11th hour more than The Bells of Saint John, but the Pond-Saga is over (too early imo) and in the end of the day, they're just companions like any other ones. 

 

I liked the first half of TBOSJ most, honestly. It showed, how much you can do in twenty minutes. Ok the end was kind of predictable, but it was still funny and well done. 

 

And the second one. A friend of mine was really eager to see this episode and was disappointed by it, but I wasn't. They promised loads of aliens all around in certain scenes (redeemed), plot with a ritualistic touch (redeemed) silly uber-epic plot-twists along with an overpowered enemy (redeemed) and the mummy they showed in the trailers (redeemed). I didn't expect less and I didn't expect more. 

 

Cold War on the other hand...I didn't like it. Maybe it's a fanservice for these old-who fans so they get to see a reworked version of the Ice Warriors from which one? 2nd Doctor? I also didn't like it, because there was a lot of movement, but the setting was very constricting with everything reduced to this submarine and the TARDIS spontaneously gone. And very grim. It didn't have this spirit of laid-back adventure it usually has IMO. 

 

I'm looking forward more to the next episode and the next one I'll be eagerly awaiting will be Nightmare in Silver. From what we got to see, Hide will be about what was it? The Caliburn Ghast? Isn't Caliburn another name of Excalibur? So are we to expect a ghost story in England or something? (how original XD) And in the next-time-trailer, the Doctor asked where Clara is. So it might be about the typical kinda Ghost that makes people disappear.

[Sarita]

For the record, I'm on the same page as you. c: I'm loving 7 part 2 and Clara.

[Snys93]

Ok this last episode with the "ghost" was alright. I'm just waiting for the Cybermen to show up. They can be seen in the trailer for this series and I'm not sure in which episode to come that they show up in. Still, I'm not too impressed with most of these episodes so far.