Which Who Stories Have you seen lately?

burrunjor wrote:

Bernard Marx wrote:Dark Water/ Death In Heaven- episode 2 review/rant. Oh, fuck- here we go.

We open with an incredibly smug scene where Clara asserts herself to be the Doctor in one of the most egregious pre-credits scenes to any New Who story. And a scene that could have been cut entirely due to it having practically no bearing on the plot, so it seems Moffat wrote this scene purely to satisfy his strange sycophancy over Clara’s character. Pure shite.

Oh- and the title sequence features Jenna Coleman’s name prior to Capaldi’s, and Clara’s face features as opposed to Capaldi’s. Moffat, stop. This is not clever or original- it’s plain patronising. People accuse Revelation of the Daleks of sidelining the lead actor- this story completely undermines his role and presence before he even shows up!

Missy continues to tonally disrupt the nature of the opening by laughing and gurning over the Cybermen being surrounded by what seems to be people taking selfies. Bollocks. And it turns out that UNIT were disguised as these people all along- so how did they manage to assert their positions there so quickly? Were they aware of where 3W was located immediately? How did they manage to disguise themselves in so short a time? Rubbish.

The Cybermen can now fly- someone needs to tell Moffat that a new idea isn’t necessarily a good one. He doesn’t seem to understand the Cybermen in the slightest, as he seems to interpret them as robotic variations of Iron Man rather than converted human corpses. Awful.

Clara continues to smugly recite the Doctor’s history to the Cybermen whilst further asserting his position. What a mundane Mary Sue.

Capaldi’s Doctor is now knighted President Of Earth- again, this has absolutely no bearing on the plot of the story and just seems implemented for Moffat to insert a jab at Americans (Capaldi refers to Americans being likely to merely pray if they turned up in response to the possible presence of the current president). Although I’ll admit to liking Capaldi’s snarky attitude in series 8- I’ve warmed to his Doctor since this shit was broadcast and really like him at the best of times. It’s a shame those times were so rare due to scripts like this.

Missy kills Osgood in a painfully badly directed scene. She whispers very loudly in her ear as to her intentions, in spite of the fact that guards are standing very close behind them and should be able to hear. This is made even more incompetent when it turns out that Missy removes her handcuffs, yet the guards stand there and do nothing in spite of her holding her hands out for about 10 seconds. Drivel. And Missy’s “Bananas” line only kills any semblance of tension during the scene- it is so difficult to understand the tone or stakes in this pathetic excuse for an episode.

Clara encounters Danny in a very dimly lit graveyard afer being transported to Earth- fine in concept, but why does Moffat have to go and fuck up cyber conversion again? Why does no one in his era stay converted? It would have spared the mawkishness that follows in the next few graveyard scenes.

After the Cybermen laughably fly across the plane and attempt to subdue it in a few more woefully directed action scenes, Capaldi finds Missy after killing Osgood, looks as if he’s prepared to give her a thrashing, and then just stares at the floor pitifully. What a dire emasculation of this once great character.

Capaldi dives outside of the plane with some awful green screen rendering and direction. How he manages to fall in the right place is frankly inconceivable. And an early section of Gold’s music during this scene sounds uncannily like a parody/riff on the 1960s Batman/Incredibles theme. Tone!

Some more moping with Clara and Danny, followed by Missy’s fucking awful ‘Mary Poppins’ arrival (again with crap green screen). Again, tone is completely alien to this pile of effluent.

The Doctor announces himself to be an idiot in order to adhere to Missy, as she was allegedly correct about it all, and he was never a ‘good man’. This is followed by the Cybermen emerging into space in an equally shit manner, and then by the presence of ‘Cyber Brig’. There are so many things wrong with this scene that it’s frankly unbearable. And Moffat completely misunderstands, root and stem, what the whole point and DNA of this series is. The Doctor’s intention was never to appease his enemies, or to denounce himself in order to win, or to cower in the face of a farcical pseudo-progressive imitation of a key nemesis in order to stay a ‘good man’. Doctor Who has always been a series of perspective- where the lead character was always prescribed to do whatever was right to prevent the ascent of the ‘evils in the universe that must he fought’, but fundamentally, to do the best he could (as Tanmann says), regardless of whatever veil of self-righteousness got in the way (as where stories like Warriors and many of Tennant’s stories fail). But now, he can’t do it because he was always an ‘idiot’. Missy was always right, in spite of her atrocities and psychopathic nature (not to mention how fucking annoying she is), and the Doctor was always an idiot- this is the philosophy that the episodes seems to adhere to, purely to allow for more mawkishness and to reduce the very essence of the Classic series to that of a mere farce, where the Doctor and Master “never played it as enemies”. And the Cyber-Brig seems to encapsulate this approach- not only is it inherently disrespectful to a key figure of the Pertwee era (which Missy also mocks), but signals that Moffat’s perception of the original series is also decidedly robotic, emotionless and lacking in substance.

Moffat wrote a piss-poor episode of TV here, but also gutted the very core of the original series purely to adhere to his own farcical tendencies. Not for the last time, mind. In that sense, it embodies the absolute worst elements of New Who and condenses them into two episodes.

Brilliant review. To the surprise of no one I agree with every single thing in this post LOL.

There's not really much more I can add to this. Death in Heaven was the turning point for the revival. There was no way back after what they did to the Master.

I still say Missy is far worse than Jodie in every conceivable way. Jodie is pandering, she's not a good fit as its a male character so any woman would always feel out of place, and her Doctor is very mamby pamby on top of everything else.

Still Missy is pandering just as much as Jodie (and without that abomination we never would have had Jodie, so she is just as if not more complicit in the demise of the show overall. Its because of Missy that its now become received wisdom even among critics of Series 11 like Computing Forever that its canon that Time Lords change gender. Gee remember when that cunt Mofftwat went on about the show having no canon to cover up his plot holes? When it suits him I guess.)

There are also the same anti men digs and SJW crap in Missy's dialogue that there was in Jodie's too, though I'd argue that they are more blatant.

"Time Lady, not all of us can afford the upgrade."

"Never believe a man about a vehicle."

So yes everything wrong with Jodie is there with Missy, but Missy is actually even less like the Master than Jodie is like the Doctor. Missy has NOTHING in common with the Master, literally nothing. Jodie is at least a traveller with a desire to explore, where as with Missy what even superficial similarity does she have with the Master? She doesn't even have the TCE or the characters hypnotic powers.

Missy also handles the gender bending far worse than Jodie.

My god Missy is like a fucking sexist parody of a female Master ironically "Ooooooooh if the Master became a woman we'd have to call him Missy, and he'd be all hormonal, and want to shag the Doctor instead of killing him, and she'd get all weepy at his big speechs as opposed to the male Master, because you know what women are like, always crying and getting all girly."



Also Missy episodes are a lot more unpleasant to watch in that as terrible as 13 is, Jodie's Doctor is at least an upbeat hero who saves the day. With Missy we have a thoroughly irredeemable monster who butchers innocent young men and women like Osgood, and not only is there no pay off, no consequences for those horrible things she does unlike say Mark Hamill's Joker, but we actually have the main hero attempt to justify those actions and compare the lives of her victims to a fucking bacon sandwhich!

I don't want to hear ANYONE who slags off Jodie yet justifies Missy. Missy is the single worst character in the history of DW. Its quite rare to find characters who are so terrible they manage to single handedly kill a show outright but ol Pissy Missy managed it.

I agree with everything you say here, and should have discussed Missy’s damaging impact in my review, though was too caught up in how much of a shit episode of TV it was on its own, and how badly conceived and written it all was.

I’m thinking of writing a review for The End Of Time next on this thread, given that I have a rather a lot to say about it. Although I could also discuss Love and Monsters, Last of the Time Lords, Journey’s End, Asylum of the Daleks, The Magician’s Apprentice, Hell Bent etc.

Tanmann wrote:Time-Flight.
Still a bit of a disaster but I did see moments of merit in there, and Davison and Ainley were very good in it.

I quite like Time-Flight. Nyssa and Tegan look extra yummy in it for some reason.

Bernard Marx wrote:I agree with everything you say here, and should have discussed Missy’s damaging impact in my review, though was too caught up in how much of a shit episode of TV it was on its own, and how badly conceived and written it all was.

I’m thinking of writing a review for The End Of Time next on this thread, given that I have a rather a lot to say about it. Although I could also discuss Love and Monsters, Last of the Time Lords, Journey’s End, Asylum of the Daleks, The Magician’s Apprentice, Hell Bent etc. Smile

I'd love to see a review of The Magicians Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar. IMO that one gets overlooked as among the worst stories ever made. I think its because it came after Death in Heaven which pretty much killed any long time fan's interest in the series, so by then most people didn't care. Still looking back at it now it really is appalling.

burrunjor wrote:

Bernard Marx wrote:I agree with everything you say here, and should have discussed Missy’s damaging impact in my review, though was too caught up in how much of a shit episode of TV it was on its own, and how badly conceived and written it all was.

I’m thinking of writing a review for The End Of Time next on this thread, given that I have a rather a lot to say about it. Although I could also discuss Love and Monsters, Last of the Time Lords, Journey’s End, Asylum of the Daleks, The Magician’s Apprentice, Hell Bent etc. Smile

I'd love to see a review of The Magicians Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar. IMO that one gets overlooked as among the worst stories ever made. I think its because it came after Death in Heaven which pretty much killed any long time fan's interest in the series, so by then most people didn't care. Still looking back at it now it really is appalling.

At the moment, I’m debating on whether to tear apart The End Of Time or The Magician’s Apprentice, so you’ll get a review of the same calibre as the previous one for either story in due time.

Update: I’ll be doing The End Of Time next as it’s more fresh in my mind, though The Magician’s Apprentice will soon follow.

Inferno.

First time I've ever managed it in one sitting. It still feels slightly overlong in one go, but fared better than I remember from the last time I viewed it. Definitely Liz Shaw/Caroline John's best story. Perhaps for obvious reasons.

The End Of Time: Part 1 of 2. Oh, bloody hell...

We open with a portentous monologue from Timothy Dalton on the human race having bad dreams ‘a long time ago’ featuring John Simm hammily laughing his arse off, and then they ‘forgot, because they must’. What? Why would they forget having a collectively shared dream experience? What incentivised such dreams in the first place? We discover in part 2 that Simm’s Master transmitts the drumbeat in his head across a particular point in time and space, and that the Master becomes everyone on Earth, but how does that culminate in said bad dreams? More than that, why are the Ood experiencing the same dreams when the Master doesn’t use their template to transfer himself to? Are they just naturally the most sentient and telepathic beings in the universe? Why would they specifically share the same dreamlike experience as the rest of humanity? And why does Wilf just happen to remember these dreams? Is it because the universe allegedly has plans for him or something? Fuck me, I’m 10 seconds in, and the narrative’s already fucked.

Wilf wonders into a Church for little reason beyond the plot needing him to (he literally comments on this afterwards, likely due to the universe having plans for him, because that’s how RTD’s writing works), and encounters a mysterious woman. She tells him that ‘events are taking shape’ and that ‘perhaps The Doctor is coming back’. Sounds fascinating. I wonder how she knows of him, knows how all this will happen, and what relevance she has to the narrative beyond being a piece of walking exposition... oh. This isn’t contrived at all.

The Doctor arrives on the Ood planet, and brags about his marrying Queen Elizabeth I and denouncing her title as The Virgin Queen. Because that’s what long time fans of this series wanted to see and hear- the intellectually accomplished and maverick figure of the original series reduced to a gurning lothario. After Ood Sigma tells the Doctor that he ‘should not have delayed’ rather ominously, the Doctor locks the Tardis door and remarks on him ‘locking it like a car’. This is another instance of tonal inconsistency, but more than that, why would he assume that Ood Sigma would know what a car is?

So the Ood have apparently progressed significantly over the last century for some unexplained reason (The Doctor acknowledges this, but not much comes of it). And how were they ever enslaved if they were always as powerful as this on a telepathic level? Anyway, we then cut to a prolonged expository scene where Lucy Saxon is shown to be jailed. Why she is jailed after audaciously killing a man who was show to have murdered the President elect is beyond me.

The Master is resurrected in the worst way possible- how the fuck does the implementation of Lucy’s lipstick bring him back to life? What did the books of Saxon actually entail as to ensure the creation of a cult? Surely his influence dissipated after the archangel network was likely disabled?

So the Master finds himself in a junkyard of some sort- why food is being sold there is beyond me. And his ‘I am SO hungry’ and ‘Dinner Time!’ lines are as hilarious as to tonally disrupt the scene again. How far we have come since Delgado.

The Doctor finds himself near the Master’s location when he starts hitting a barrel with a rhythm of four and starts chasing him, only to be found by Wilfred and other elderly people, one of whom starts being sexually suggestive towards him. Davies, you lack any understanding of tonal consistency.

The cafe scene commences, which basically deconstructs the very essence of regeneration into a piece of teenage drama. ‘Even when I change, it feels like dying’. Bollocks. Time Lords do not experience death as we do (hence Hartnell’s “It’s far from being all over” line, as well as Pertwee and Tom’s final lines), so why does Tennant’s Doctor get all emotive about this? It simply portrays him as cowardly and unwise- a far cry from the original character- and lessens the philosophical richness and otherness of regeneration completely. And following the scene where Whitfield feels Tennant’s arse, this is again incredibly tonally inconsistent.

The immortality gate is first glimpsed (another plot device for a later event) whilst Dalton continues to monologue about ‘the final day’. For Classic fans, it is obvious that a Time Lord is speaking due to the clothing he is briefly glimpsed in, so the final reveal therefore lacks any impact.

After a scene where the Master’s new fucking awful lighting powers are exhibited (akin to Emperor Palpatine- it seems Davies has no original plot elements here), he is taken to Naismith’s base of operations to commission the immortality gate (a truly awful name). He is then portrayed as a hilariously hammy raging carnivore in a scene that makes Ainley’s Master look decidedly reserved.

The Doctor and Wilf head off to Naismith’s base of operations and encounter the Master unleashing himself into the gate (alongside the pointless addition of President Obama with a stand in that looks nothing like him), and hysterically transforming himself into everyone. What a fucking farce. Seeing John Simm in a dress is hardly sinister or effective, Davies. And the ‘Master Race’ line also seems decidedly forced.

The Time Lords show up, and the panopticon is now the senate building from Star Wars Prequels. And how does Rassilon know that ‘this is the day the Time Lords Return’ if they haven’t died yet from his perspective? What shite.

This is bloody horrendous, and I’ll give a full summary after I finish part 2, whenever that may be. I might take a break for now.

Bernard, are you a masochist? ;-) lol

Yes, I am. And it’s also fun to tear these piles of shite to pieces.

Haha. Fair play.

Bernard Marx wrote:After Ood Sigma tells the Doctor that he ‘should not have delayed’ rather ominously, the Doctor locks the Tardis door and remarks on him ‘locking it like a car’.

For that bit alone, RTD should've been put in the stocks and pelted with rotten fruit by the public for no less than three months!

Lucy Saxon is shown to be jailed. Why she is jailed after audaciously killing a man who was show to have murdered the President elect is beyond me.

After already being battered by her husband, the scenes of her having to endure imprisonment too were just downright horrible. I think even Eric Saward might've considered that development too mean-spirited.

The End Of Time: Part 2 of 2. Given that this episode is relatively long, I don’t know if I can be arsed to cover every scene, but I’ll go through what I can. RTD, what have you done...

We open with the Time Lords discussing the possibility of the future, the Time War, and the Doctor/Master, featuring a fortune teller. What? Why the fuck would a species that exists outside of time and space and operate around it require a fortune teller? And why the fuck does everything have to be prophecised in this story and era? Does RTD not understand the concept of coherency or naturalistic storytelling? Does everything have to be stupidly contrived?

Rassilon proceeds to execute a member of the high council with a shit looking CG glove, and then announces his abject fear of death. What the fuck? So the very moral of immortality being a path to greed, corruption and insanity in The Five Doctors now means fuck all? Remember when Hurndall said about Rassilon ‘He knew very well that immortality was a curse, not a blessing’? It seems this character has undergone a 180 degree turn with no explanation. Come to that, how is Rassilon even alive in body?

In spite of remembering her travels with the Doctor, and in spite of being told that if she were to remember him ‘her mind will burn and she will die’, her head explodes with her arms held in a Christlike manner, she knocks out five John Simms at once, and just falls asleep. RTD seems to specialise in crap cop outs with no narrative explanation.

The Doctor is rescued and taken to the Vinvocci ship (preceded by a crap Simpsons reference), and switches off all the power in order to avoid detection by the Master via the sonic. The other characters appear pissed off by this, yet the Doctor proceeds to switch the power back on later via the same method, so why didn’t he just tell them that was possible before? It seems RTD was making it up as he went along.

Wilfred encounters the mysterious woman again, who remains cryptically pretentious and never says anything of value beyond ‘events are taking shape... the Doctor will die’. We never find out who she is, and Davies doesn’t bother inserting any meaning or explanation to this, so that’s all we get. Another walking nod to the audience and nothing more.

Wilfred demands that the Doctor take the gun and shoot the Master. This makes sense morally and logically, given what he’s already done, but the Doctor is portrayed as morally righteous instead with his pacifist approach. Utter nonsense. Though I’ll give credits to Cribbins- he was actually rather good here.

The Time Lords establish a means of traveling to Earth via...sending a star through a hologram and then harnessing a recording of the drumbeat in the Master’s head. I have no clue how this works, and I suspect that RTD didn’t either, especially given that The Master refers to the sound as ‘tangible’ (a sound is not physical, Davies).

The Doctor restores the power back, and we get another Star Wars riff in a scene that basically plagiarises the Tie Fighter Attack scene from the original film. How very original.

The Doctor decides to jump from the ship into Naismith’s Base of Operations, and somehow lands in the right place, shatters the entire shard of glass on the roof, and survive the fall with merely a handful of cuts all at the same time. Fucking bollocks. Tom Baker fell from a Radio Telescope from a less great height and couldn’t survive.

Dalton stands there and makes a few more portentous speeches about ‘ascending into beings of consciousness only’. How he plans on doing this is never shown, but the speech sounds intimidating, so RTD thought to include it. God, the Time Lords are so badly wasted here.

The Doctor flicks back and fourth between whether to shoot Rassilon or The Master, whilst both of them stand there and do fuck all about it. He also reloads the gun during every turn for some strange reason- very poor directing there, though the score sounds nice.

The mysterious woman turns out to be one of the Time Lords, though what her place in the story is isn’t ever revealed, yet we’re supposed to be emotionally invested in the scene as indicated by Murray Gold’s melancholic choral music.

The source is destroyed by the Doctor, and The Master kills Rassilon via his Palpatine inspired lightning. Oh- and he yells ‘you made me!’. So the Master was only evil due to the Time Lords now, undermining the legacy of the character and his agency in basically every prior story now.

The Doctor rants at Wilf about how insignificant he is and how much better he is, serving as one of the most sycophantic scenes in Who history, and one that never portrays the Doctor as inherently wrong. We’re supposed to sympathise with him here, indicated by Gold’s music, but what the character does is so unlike himself and a complete arsehole that it creates an emotional disconnect for those who analyse the scene. Wilf isn’t exactly young, and the Doctor will regenerate anyway, though the episode adheres to the philosophy that regeneration is basically death, in spite of this never being the case with any prior Doctor. Davies’ intent is clearly to sabotage the subsequent era (not that this didn’t happen anyway), as it eulogises Tennant as some sort of deity who is above and beyond any other Doctor.

The last 20 minutes entirely consist of a self-indulgent wankfest of the Doctor seeing old friends but never saying anything (as to highlight the portentous, adolescent and emo qualities of this Doctor and era). He says no words to Sarah Jane, but indulges in extended conversation with Rose. Utter shite.

He stumbles to the Tardis (despite looking very healthy), followed by an Ood appearing out of nowhere. Where the fuck did Ood Sigma come from? If he was capable of teleportation all this time, he could have been useful at some stage!

The Ood sing him a song (only exclusive to this Doctor, by the way- what rubbish), as he utters his final lines ‘I don’t want to go’. This is the worst final line uttered by any Doctor- it completely undermines the very concept of regeneration, the ability for the show to evolve past this point (evidenced by those who abandoned the show after Tennant), and endorses passive audience spectatorship in the worst possible way, commanding that the audience cry and worship Tennant’s Doctor, ultimately failing as a piece of thought-provoking art through telling the audience how to feel.

Not only does this story fail as a piece of TV, and barely functions as a script, but it betrays the intellectual mantra of the orginal series completely through forcing a passive form of teenage drama into the show that has since adhered the mainstream towards Tennant’s Doctor and restricted any sort of intellectual progress for the series following Davies and this story, indicated by those who stopped watching after Tennant left. What a disaster.

Thinking about it, I’ll write a review of the same calibre for The Magician’s Apprentice eventually, though I need to take a break from crap Doctor Who. It’s very wearying.

Bernard Marx wrote:The End Of Time: Part 2 of 2. Given that this episode is relatively long, I don’t know if I can be arsed to cover every scene, but I’ll go through what I can. RTD, what have you done...

We open with the Time Lords discussing the possibility of the future, the Time War, and the Doctor/Master, featuring a fortune teller. What? Why the fuck would a species that exists outside of time and space and operate around it require a fortune teller? And why the fuck does everything have to be prophecised in this story and era? Does RTD not understand the concept of coherency or naturalistic storytelling? Does everything have to be stupidly contrived?

Rassilon proceeds to execute a member of the high council with a shit looking CG glove, and then announces his abject fear of death. What the fuck? So the very moral of immortality being a path to greed, corruption and insanity in The Five Doctors now means fuck all? Remember when Hurndall said about Rassilon ‘He knew very well that immortality was a curse, not a blessing’? It seems this character has undergone a 180 degree turn with no explanation. Come to that, how is Rassilon even alive in body?

In spite of remembering her travels with the Doctor, and in spite of being told that if she were to remember him ‘her mind will burn and she will die’, her head explodes with her arms held in a Christlike manner, she knocks out five John Simms at once, and just falls asleep. RTD seems to specialise in crap cop outs with no narrative explanation.

The Doctor is rescued and taken to the Vinvocci ship (preceded by a crap Simpsons reference), and switches off all the power in order to avoid detection by the Master via the sonic. The other characters appear pissed off by this, yet the Doctor proceeds to switch the power back on later via the same method, so why didn’t he just tell them that was possible before? It seems RTD was making it up as he went along.

Wilfred encounters the mysterious woman again, who remains cryptically pretentious and never says anything of value beyond ‘events are taking shape... the Doctor will die’. We never find out who she is, and Davies doesn’t bother inserting any meaning or explanation to this, so that’s all we get. Another walking nod to the audience and nothing more.

Wilfred demands that the Doctor take the gun and shoot the Master. This makes sense morally and logically, given what he’s already done, but the Doctor is portrayed as morally righteous instead with his pacifist approach. Utter nonsense. Though I’ll give credits to Cribbins- he was actually rather good here.

The Time Lords establish a means of traveling to Earth via...sending a star through a hologram and then harnessing a recording of the drumbeat in the Master’s head. I have no clue how this works, and I suspect that RTD didn’t either, especially given that The Master refers to the sound as ‘tangible’ (a sound is not physical, Davies).

The Doctor restores the power back, and we get another Star Wars riff in a scene that basically plagiarises the Tie Fighter Attack scene from the original film. How very original.

The Doctor decides to jump from the ship into Naismith’s Base of Operations, and somehow lands in the right place, shatters the entire shard of glass on the roof, and survive the fall with merely a handful of cuts all at the same time. Fucking bollocks. Tom Baker fell from a Radio Telescope from a less great height and couldn’t survive.

Dalton stands there and makes a few more portentous speeches about ‘ascending into beings of consciousness only’. How he plans on doing this is never shown, but the speech sounds intimidating, so RTD thought to include it. God, the Time Lords are so badly wasted here.

The Doctor flicks back and fourth between whether to shoot Rassilon or The Master, whilst both of them stand there and do fuck all about it. He also reloads the gun during every turn for some strange reason- very poor directing there, though the score sounds nice.

The mysterious woman turns out to be one of the Time Lords, though what her place in the story is isn’t ever revealed, yet we’re supposed to be emotionally invested in the scene as indicated by Murray Gold’s melancholic choral music.

The source is destroyed by the Doctor, and The Master kills Rassilon via his Palpatine inspired lightning. Oh- and he yells ‘you made me!’. So the Master was only evil due to the Time Lords now, undermining the legacy of the character and his agency in basically every prior story now.

The Doctor rants at Wilf about how insignificant he is and how much better he is, serving as one of the most sycophantic scenes in Who history, and one that never portrays the Doctor as inherently wrong. We’re supposed to sympathise with him here, indicated by Gold’s music, but what the character does is so unlike himself and a complete arsehole that it creates an emotional disconnect for those who analyse the scene. Wilf isn’t exactly young, and the Doctor will regenerate anyway, though the episode adheres to the philosophy that regeneration is basically death, in spite of this never being the case with any prior Doctor. Davies’ intent is clearly to sabotage the subsequent era (not that this didn’t happen anyway), as it eulogises Tennant as some sort of deity who is above and beyond any other Doctor.

The last 20 minutes entirely consist of a self-indulgent wankfest of the Doctor seeing old friends but never saying anything (as to highlight the portentous, adolescent and emo qualities of this Doctor and era). He says no words to Sarah Jane, but indulges in extended conversation with Rose. Utter shite.

He stumbles to the Tardis (despite looking very healthy), followed by an Ood appearing out of nowhere. Where the fuck did Ood Sigma come from? If he was capable of teleportation all this time, he could have been useful at some stage!

The Ood sing him a song (only exclusive to this Doctor, by the way- what rubbish), as he utters his final lines ‘I don’t want to go’. This is the worst final line uttered by any Doctor- it completely undermines the very concept of regeneration, the ability for the show to evolve past this point (evidenced by those who abandoned the show after Tennant), and endorses passive audience spectatorship in the worst possible way, commanding that the audience cry and worship Tennant’s Doctor, ultimately failing as a piece of thought-provoking art through telling the audience how to feel.

Not only does this story fail as a piece of TV, and barely functions as a script, but it betrays the intellectual mantra of the orginal series completely through forcing a passive form of teenage drama into the show that has since adhered the mainstream towards Tennant’s Doctor and restricted any sort of intellectual progress for the series following Davies and this story, indicated by those who stopped watching after Tennant left. What a disaster.

100 percent spot on. The new who crowd don't seem to get that what made regeneration such a genius concept was that it was the same character.

Any show can just replace the lead. Death in Paradise has done it two times for instance. Regeneration however allowed it to still be the same character. It was the best of all worlds.

You didn't have to toss out the development of your predecessor, you could still keep the core characteristics of his predeccessor, but as the outer persona was different then the new actor could still make it his own in some way, and bring something new to it.

The New Who crowd instead just turned it into a legacy character, not even for creative reasons, just because they get get more emo crap out of Tennant whining "I DON'T WANT TO GO."

burrunjor wrote:

Bernard Marx wrote:The End Of Time: Part 2 of 2. Given that this episode is relatively long, I don’t know if I can be arsed to cover every scene, but I’ll go through what I can. RTD, what have you done...

We open with the Time Lords discussing the possibility of the future, the Time War, and the Doctor/Master, featuring a fortune teller. What? Why the fuck would a species that exists outside of time and space and operate around it require a fortune teller? And why the fuck does everything have to be prophecised in this story and era? Does RTD not understand the concept of coherency or naturalistic storytelling? Does everything have to be stupidly contrived?

Rassilon proceeds to execute a member of the high council with a shit looking CG glove, and then announces his abject fear of death. What the fuck? So the very moral of immortality being a path to greed, corruption and insanity in The Five Doctors now means fuck all? Remember when Hurndall said about Rassilon ‘He knew very well that immortality was a curse, not a blessing’? It seems this character has undergone a 180 degree turn with no explanation. Come to that, how is Rassilon even alive in body?

In spite of remembering her travels with the Doctor, and in spite of being told that if she were to remember him ‘her mind will burn and she will die’, her head explodes with her arms held in a Christlike manner, she knocks out five John Simms at once, and just falls asleep. RTD seems to specialise in crap cop outs with no narrative explanation.

The Doctor is rescued and taken to the Vinvocci ship (preceded by a crap Simpsons reference), and switches off all the power in order to avoid detection by the Master via the sonic. The other characters appear pissed off by this, yet the Doctor proceeds to switch the power back on later via the same method, so why didn’t he just tell them that was possible before? It seems RTD was making it up as he went along.

Wilfred encounters the mysterious woman again, who remains cryptically pretentious and never says anything of value beyond ‘events are taking shape... the Doctor will die’. We never find out who she is, and Davies doesn’t bother inserting any meaning or explanation to this, so that’s all we get. Another walking nod to the audience and nothing more.

Wilfred demands that the Doctor take the gun and shoot the Master. This makes sense morally and logically, given what he’s already done, but the Doctor is portrayed as morally righteous instead with his pacifist approach. Utter nonsense. Though I’ll give credits to Cribbins- he was actually rather good here.

The Time Lords establish a means of traveling to Earth via...sending a star through a hologram and then harnessing a recording of the drumbeat in the Master’s head. I have no clue how this works, and I suspect that RTD didn’t either, especially given that The Master refers to the sound as ‘tangible’ (a sound is not physical, Davies).

The Doctor restores the power back, and we get another Star Wars riff in a scene that basically plagiarises the Tie Fighter Attack scene from the original film. How very original.

The Doctor decides to jump from the ship into Naismith’s Base of Operations, and somehow lands in the right place, shatters the entire shard of glass on the roof, and survive the fall with merely a handful of cuts all at the same time. Fucking bollocks. Tom Baker fell from a Radio Telescope from a less great height and couldn’t survive.

Dalton stands there and makes a few more portentous speeches about ‘ascending into beings of consciousness only’. How he plans on doing this is never shown, but the speech sounds intimidating, so RTD thought to include it. God, the Time Lords are so badly wasted here.

The Doctor flicks back and fourth between whether to shoot Rassilon or The Master, whilst both of them stand there and do fuck all about it. He also reloads the gun during every turn for some strange reason- very poor directing there, though the score sounds nice.

The mysterious woman turns out to be one of the Time Lords, though what her place in the story is isn’t ever revealed, yet we’re supposed to be emotionally invested in the scene as indicated by Murray Gold’s melancholic choral music.

The source is destroyed by the Doctor, and The Master kills Rassilon via his Palpatine inspired lightning. Oh- and he yells ‘you made me!’. So the Master was only evil due to the Time Lords now, undermining the legacy of the character and his agency in basically every prior story now.

The Doctor rants at Wilf about how insignificant he is and how much better he is, serving as one of the most sycophantic scenes in Who history, and one that never portrays the Doctor as inherently wrong. We’re supposed to sympathise with him here, indicated by Gold’s music, but what the character does is so unlike himself and a complete arsehole that it creates an emotional disconnect for those who analyse the scene. Wilf isn’t exactly young, and the Doctor will regenerate anyway, though the episode adheres to the philosophy that regeneration is basically death, in spite of this never being the case with any prior Doctor. Davies’ intent is clearly to sabotage the subsequent era (not that this didn’t happen anyway), as it eulogises Tennant as some sort of deity who is above and beyond any other Doctor.

The last 20 minutes entirely consist of a self-indulgent wankfest of the Doctor seeing old friends but never saying anything (as to highlight the portentous, adolescent and emo qualities of this Doctor and era). He says no words to Sarah Jane, but indulges in extended conversation with Rose. Utter shite.

He stumbles to the Tardis (despite looking very healthy), followed by an Ood appearing out of nowhere. Where the fuck did Ood Sigma come from? If he was capable of teleportation all this time, he could have been useful at some stage!

The Ood sing him a song (only exclusive to this Doctor, by the way- what rubbish), as he utters his final lines ‘I don’t want to go’. This is the worst final line uttered by any Doctor- it completely undermines the very concept of regeneration, the ability for the show to evolve past this point (evidenced by those who abandoned the show after Tennant), and endorses passive audience spectatorship in the worst possible way, commanding that the audience cry and worship Tennant’s Doctor, ultimately failing as a piece of thought-provoking art through telling the audience how to feel.

Not only does this story fail as a piece of TV, and barely functions as a script, but it betrays the intellectual mantra of the orginal series completely through forcing a passive form of teenage drama into the show that has since adhered the mainstream towards Tennant’s Doctor and restricted any sort of intellectual progress for the series following Davies and this story, indicated by those who stopped watching after Tennant left. What a disaster.

100 percent spot on. The new who crowd don't seem to get that what made regeneration such a genius concept was that it was the same character.

Any show can just replace the lead. Death in Paradise has done it two times for instance. Regeneration however allowed it to still be the same character. It was the best of all worlds.

You didn't have to toss out the development of your predecessor, you could still keep the core characteristics of his predeccessor, but as the outer persona was different then the new actor could still make it his own in some way, and bring something new to it.

The New Who crowd instead just turned it into a legacy character, not even for creative reasons, just because they get get more emo crap out of Tennant whining "I DON'T WANT TO GO."

Agreed. It completely dismantles a key philosophy of regeneration, and what made the very concept unique and endearing purely for angst teenage drama, although I was also shocked on re-watch as to just how ineptly written the story really is. I’ve missed so much else in my review that the episode fails at- it’s so badly conceived.

I’ll do The Magician’s Apprentice next, though this might not be for a little bit.

The Space Museum. It really isn’t as bad as many say. The story’s full potential is essentially wasted by the end on a nondescript runaround after a really rather good first episode, but how this managed to get into DWMs bottom 10 stories is something of a mystery.

However, I’m starting to feel a little distant from Who at the moment, at least on recent viewings of stories. I doubt I’ll watch another story soon due to both the current state of the programme (which has become depressingly pertinent to me after re-watching Death In Heaven), and the fact that I’ve simply overwatched too much of Classic Who lately to the extent where its staying power wears off. Any of you guys had the same experience of late?

Bernard Marx wrote:The Space Museum. It really isn’t as bad as many say. The story’s full potential is essentially wasted by the end on a nondescript runaround after a really rather good first episode, but how this managed to get into DWMs bottom 10 stories is something of a mystery.

However, I’m starting to feel a little distant from Who at the moment, at least on recent viewings of stories. I doubt I’ll watch another story soon due to both the current state of the programme (which has become depressingly pertinent to me after re-watching Death In Heaven), and the fact that I’ve simply overwatched too much of Classic Who lately to the extent where its staying power wears off. Any of you guys had the same experience of late?

I'm really struggling to enjoy most things these days due to my depression. It really does drain the colour from everything. I still watch the show but I'm having a really hard time focusing on the stories themselves. I rarely watch them in one sitting anymore.

Commander Maxil wrote:

Bernard Marx wrote:The Space Museum. It really isn’t as bad as many say. The story’s full potential is essentially wasted by the end on a nondescript runaround after a really rather good first episode, but how this managed to get into DWMs bottom 10 stories is something of a mystery.

However, I’m starting to feel a little distant from Who at the moment, at least on recent viewings of stories. I doubt I’ll watch another story soon due to both the current state of the programme (which has become depressingly pertinent to me after re-watching Death In Heaven), and the fact that I’ve simply overwatched too much of Classic Who lately to the extent where its staying power wears off. Any of you guys had the same experience of late?

I'm really struggling to enjoy most things these days due to my depression. It really does drain the colour from everything. I still watch the show but I'm having a really hard time focusing on the stories themselves. I rarely watch them in one sitting anymore.

Sorry to hear that, Maxil. Depression is a fucking bastard from experience (not of my own, but other people I know), and I hope you pull through eventually. In my case, I’m just gradually losing my passion for the series as the new show has dampened it for me. Earlier this year, I assumed the awfulness of the new show would showcase how good the original series was, which is true to a point, but there’s a limit as to how it impacts your perception of it all. That, and it does become a little monotonous watching the same shit over and over again regardless of quality. Maybe I should just take a break from it, or go back and watch the stuff I’m less familiar with.

Bernard Marx wrote:arx"
[quote="Bernard Marx"]The Space Museum. It really isn’t as bad as many say. The story’s full potential is essentially wasted by the end on a nondescript runaround after a really rather good first episode, but how this managed to get into DWMs bottom 10 stories is something of a mystery.

However, I’m starting to feel a little distant from Who at the moment, at least on recent viewings of stories. I doubt I’ll watch another story soon due to both the current state of the programme (which has become depressingly pertinent to me after re-watching Death In Heaven), and the fact that I’ve simply overwatched too much of Classic Who lately to the extent where its staying power wears off. Any of you guys had the same experience of late?

Commander Maxil wrote:I'm really struggling to enjoy most things these days due to my depression. It really does drain the colour from everything. I still watch the show but I'm having a really hard time focusing on the stories themselves. I rarely watch them in one sitting anymore.

Yeah, because of personal problems and other matters, I've only seen one story in its entirety this month (Fang Rock) and whilst I enjoyed that, I tried to go back and rewatch Genesis Of The Daleks and gave up on part two.

Depression is a royal cunt, if you feel like getting anything off your chest, feel free to talk about it.