I can't stand Rory. I think he's a very weak character, who's been badly written. Why do all the companion's boyfriend's have to be losers?! 
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Spoilers The Doctor Who Thread
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Basically, the dream lord is the doctor, the other side of him. The doctor knows the TARDIS can't just shut down like that, and so therefore knows both parallities are dreams. The only way to escape a dream is to end it, thus, he imploded the TARDIS.
Why do all the companion's boyfriend's have to be losers?!
Indeed.
I went off Rory this week - the two of them just don't seem like a couple no matter how much he bleats after her or she kisses him.
Indeed - it's the normally darker side of his personality given form and voice, apparently by the pollen. The niggling self-doubts, the digs at his companions... the Dream Lord was the nasty side of the Doctor delighting in causing mischief and havoc, an insight into the sort of person he might be if stripped of his morality and sense of right.
The Doctor said no one hates him more Dream Lord, that hate though was self-loathing it would seem. He's got a nasty side to him, we've seen it before - perhaps the best recent example would be Ten's 'Time Lord Victorious', dripping with arrogance and an inflated sense of his own power. It's this dark nature that - so we're led to believe - will ultimately give rise to the Valeyard later in the Doctor's life.
On another note I've started revisiting my Doctor Who audio books. I'm really enjoying the later 10th Doctor on his own adventures released earlier this year. Can't wait for the 11th Doctor ones. The first comes out June 3rd and will be read by Matt Smith and Karen Gillan. I'm American and love hearing audio books read by Brits and Scots.
This week, a two-parter:
Episode 6: The Vampires of Venice pleasantly surprised me. Even better, it surprised me that it surprised me. Toby Whitehouse, the cur, was responsible for School Reunion, which is the episode that reintroduced Sarah Jane Smith to the series and sacrificed her original relationship with Tom Baker's Doctor (which was as a curious journalist and later a friend) in order to heighten the melodrama of then-companion Rose's jealousy. It was a gigantic pity, and the episode featured a pretty stupid monster to boot. There's really very little of School Reunion in The Vampires of Venice, though. Okay, the monster's pretty stupid, in the sense that they can be obliterated by a sun bunny reflected by Amy's pocket mirror, but on the other hand, they are guided by a real philosophy - that it might be acceptable to sacrifice the city of Venice in order to preserve their own entire race. Never mind the line, "then we will take your world" in the pre-credits sequence, every single aspect in which is almost immediately contradicted after the episode starts properly. For example, the apparent importance of the steward in the court, or that Guido begins the episode begging the Venetian nobility to take his daughter, but after the credits is begging them to give her back again. Der.
However, Guido is moderately more interesting than the usual guest-star-in-distress. The theme of Venetian pride runs through the whole episode, starting with the Doctor describing the magnificent the city to Amy and Rory. It's artful that this sense of pride motivates Guido, giving him a motive for his sacrifice that, although still slight, is a whole lot better than nothing.
This is one of the reasons that The Vampires of Venice gets a passing grade. Another of these is the story's embracement of the fairy tale theme that has been running through this season. We get a sort of betrothal without love situation as Guido gives up his daughter to the Venetian court (who are, naturally, vampires/giant fish), but most interesting is that the Doctor and his team fail to rescue her and she gets devoured in an horrific way. (Not to mention the scene when we realise she can't escape she's too far gone.) Toby Whitehouse is bold in this and several other ways, for example when he cuts from Rosanna Calvierri just after she sinks her teeth into Amy's neck.
All this vampirism and gothisism benefits from the shadowy setting of Venice (and only more so as the aliens' terraforming device goes to work). There are some great, torchlit corridors, slimy sewers, domed candlelit rooms, and scenes creeping across the moonlit courtyards of Venice. Light is important in this episode, as it should be in a vampire story, and this shows in the production. (However, I would complain that it was not important enough. It was never explained exactly why these fish people are so averse to light, and the explanation that the Doctor gives about why they can't be seen in mirrors is fairly petty. After all, why would the Doctor's brain edit out monsters when he of all people would be the least surprised to find a grotesque alien lurking over his shoulder? Combined with the perception filter device that the aliens carry, it's one too many levels of illusion and only really services the already tenuous vampire analogy.)
The Venetian setting is in various ways reminiscent of The Androids of Tara, The Masque of Mandragora, and State of Decay from the original series. This isn't a bad thing, because the other "historical" episodes that Nu Who has attempted have not been particularly reminiscent of anything, not even history. This is certainly because unlike those episodes, the setting in The Vampires of Venice is important to the story. The aliens are amphibious, which is a perfect match in Venice, where streets run into rivers, and the history of Venice itself (which the Doctor remarks was once one of the greatest cities in the world) reflects the doomed nature of their race. In fact, Guido's sacrifice as he shouts something nationalistic would have been cringeworthy if it didn't reflect the aliens' desperate urge to preserve their own nation.
There are some other great moments. I don't know the extent to which Moffat edited the scripts of his collaborators, but the Doctor's lines are sterling and crisp, constantly delivering wit and remark with acuity. No amount of mythologizing about the Doctor does as much good to convince us of his mental powers as simply showing us how clever he is. Whitehouse gets to show us his "clever" too, playing against instead of into our expectations about the vampire enemy. In Victory of the Daleks we knew beforehand that a) there were going to be Daleks, based on the title, and b) that they were going to, of course, be evil in some fairly stereotypical ways. Gatiss did not disappoint. As a modern audience, we are pretty genre-educated, so we also know what to expect from vampires. It's pretty cheeky, then, when we get scenes like Rosanna "hydrating" from a chalice that we think must be blood, and it turns out to be water. (And only later do we realise how appropriate this is - retroactive realisation is the best kind.) Another one is when the Doctor climbs the tower at the climax of the film, and discovers a whirling, complex machine. After a moment of frightened observation, he turns it off with a single switch. Subverting cliches like this marshals our attention far more effectively than any quantity of melodrama (and there are examples of this too, like the Doctor's condemnation of the aliens because they "didn't remember her [Isabella's] name," as opposed to the many other more rational reasons why he might refuse to help them).
My favourite moment in the episode is when Rosanna's perception filter malfunctions on the stairs after Amy has conveniently kicked it, and briefly she transforms into her natural, crustaceanlike form. The court steward spooks in the most convincing way I think I've ever seen, jumping with real horror when she shifts and stabilises. For a character like the steward that never speaks but is always there (perhaps more so because of it), this lends diegetic credence to the terror that we are supposed to feel alongside him. It's also an example of another subverted cliche, as the steward never turns on his masters, or indeed does anything at all. This one scene reminded me a little of the brand of horror that the original series often touted, when for example Count Scarlioni reveals himself as an abomination in City of Death, or in Revelation of the Daleks when one of the characters finds the grotesque, pustulating abomination of his father after he has been genetically altered to fit inside a dalek machine. There are many other great examples.
All in all The Vampires of Venice was a great step for the new series. Moffat once said that he should never be put in charge of Doctor Who because he would make it like the Williams era of the show (the goofy, self-referential period during some of which Douglas Adams was script editor and Tom Baker was allegedly 'off the leash'). This is the first time the comparison can be called apt, and Moffat's statement finally proven to be ironic.
*
Episode 7: Amy's Choice was such a wasted opportunity. I was not expecting wonders from Simon Nye, but the opportunity to play with the concept of dreams and allegory was so crushingly wasted that I am hard pressed to articulate my disappointment. There were so many elements that were interesting in and of themselves, such as the idea of a Dreamlord, a cold sun, or the actually-interesting observation that "the old man prefers the company of the young." This episode squandered them all.
Besides the fact that the premise is based entirely on a coincidence where stardust of some kind gets into the Tardis mechanism, the situation that we're asked to buy into at the beginning of the episode is so unbelievably dumb that it's impossible to care about it all the way through to the end. Amy is asked by an omnipotent being to make an artificial "choice" between two scenarios, one of which will result in their deaths except Nye makes it pretty damn clear to the audience which one he prefers ("this village is so DULL"), and then goes on to mock the choice Amy makes by making it irrelevant (they were BOTH dreams, oh my god!). What's worse is that what efficacy Amy might have in making the choice is stolen when Rory dies and the choice is basically made for her. The metaphor is as clunky as Nye's dialogue, which tries too hard to be clever (bow ties, eh) and only occasionally succeeds with lines like "something here doesn't make sense let's go and poke it with a stick." Actually, once in a while bad lines and bad metaphors converge with verbal abominations like "we have to grow up eventually."
The greatest problem with the dialogue is that rapid delivery is mistaken for wit, and since so much of it is just delivering information (with maybe a quip on the end), it just reads like someone speed-reading a fairy tale, which is not, I expect, what Moffat intended.
The entire village plot is only made endurable by the tenuous pleasure of watching zombified octogenarians attack the main characters. The old people turn out to be a "proud and ancient race" of aliens (surprise) with the most uninspired motivation and ability the writing team could dream up (heh). In fact, the suggestion that these petrifying-gas-spitting eye creatures came from the imaginations of Amy, Rory, and the Doctor does a great disservice to my respect for these characters. And the writer.
It's one big, twisted ripoff of Star Trek: The Next Generation's finale, All Good Things where an omnipotent being forces Captain Jean-Luc Picard to shift from scenario to scenario in order to prove himself. Sound anything like this? And since we're on the subject:
Next week Frontios!
Episode 6: The Vampires of Venice pleasantly surprised me. Even better, it surprised me that it surprised me. Toby Whitehouse, the cur, was responsible for School Reunion, which is the episode that reintroduced Sarah Jane Smith to the series and sacrificed her original relationship with Tom Baker's Doctor (which was as a curious journalist and later a friend) in order to heighten the melodrama of then-companion Rose's jealousy. It was a gigantic pity, and the episode featured a pretty stupid monster to boot. There's really very little of School Reunion in The Vampires of Venice, though. Okay, the monster's pretty stupid, in the sense that they can be obliterated by a sun bunny reflected by Amy's pocket mirror, but on the other hand, they are guided by a real philosophy - that it might be acceptable to sacrifice the city of Venice in order to preserve their own entire race. Never mind the line, "then we will take your world" in the pre-credits sequence, every single aspect in which is almost immediately contradicted after the episode starts properly. For example, the apparent importance of the steward in the court, or that Guido begins the episode begging the Venetian nobility to take his daughter, but after the credits is begging them to give her back again. Der.
However, Guido is moderately more interesting than the usual guest-star-in-distress. The theme of Venetian pride runs through the whole episode, starting with the Doctor describing the magnificent the city to Amy and Rory. It's artful that this sense of pride motivates Guido, giving him a motive for his sacrifice that, although still slight, is a whole lot better than nothing.
This is one of the reasons that The Vampires of Venice gets a passing grade. Another of these is the story's embracement of the fairy tale theme that has been running through this season. We get a sort of betrothal without love situation as Guido gives up his daughter to the Venetian court (who are, naturally, vampires/giant fish), but most interesting is that the Doctor and his team fail to rescue her and she gets devoured in an horrific way. (Not to mention the scene when we realise she can't escape she's too far gone.) Toby Whitehouse is bold in this and several other ways, for example when he cuts from Rosanna Calvierri just after she sinks her teeth into Amy's neck.
All this vampirism and gothisism benefits from the shadowy setting of Venice (and only more so as the aliens' terraforming device goes to work). There are some great, torchlit corridors, slimy sewers, domed candlelit rooms, and scenes creeping across the moonlit courtyards of Venice. Light is important in this episode, as it should be in a vampire story, and this shows in the production. (However, I would complain that it was not important enough. It was never explained exactly why these fish people are so averse to light, and the explanation that the Doctor gives about why they can't be seen in mirrors is fairly petty. After all, why would the Doctor's brain edit out monsters when he of all people would be the least surprised to find a grotesque alien lurking over his shoulder? Combined with the perception filter device that the aliens carry, it's one too many levels of illusion and only really services the already tenuous vampire analogy.)
The Venetian setting is in various ways reminiscent of The Androids of Tara, The Masque of Mandragora, and State of Decay from the original series. This isn't a bad thing, because the other "historical" episodes that Nu Who has attempted have not been particularly reminiscent of anything, not even history. This is certainly because unlike those episodes, the setting in The Vampires of Venice is important to the story. The aliens are amphibious, which is a perfect match in Venice, where streets run into rivers, and the history of Venice itself (which the Doctor remarks was once one of the greatest cities in the world) reflects the doomed nature of their race. In fact, Guido's sacrifice as he shouts something nationalistic would have been cringeworthy if it didn't reflect the aliens' desperate urge to preserve their own nation.
There are some other great moments. I don't know the extent to which Moffat edited the scripts of his collaborators, but the Doctor's lines are sterling and crisp, constantly delivering wit and remark with acuity. No amount of mythologizing about the Doctor does as much good to convince us of his mental powers as simply showing us how clever he is. Whitehouse gets to show us his "clever" too, playing against instead of into our expectations about the vampire enemy. In Victory of the Daleks we knew beforehand that a) there were going to be Daleks, based on the title, and b) that they were going to, of course, be evil in some fairly stereotypical ways. Gatiss did not disappoint. As a modern audience, we are pretty genre-educated, so we also know what to expect from vampires. It's pretty cheeky, then, when we get scenes like Rosanna "hydrating" from a chalice that we think must be blood, and it turns out to be water. (And only later do we realise how appropriate this is - retroactive realisation is the best kind.) Another one is when the Doctor climbs the tower at the climax of the film, and discovers a whirling, complex machine. After a moment of frightened observation, he turns it off with a single switch. Subverting cliches like this marshals our attention far more effectively than any quantity of melodrama (and there are examples of this too, like the Doctor's condemnation of the aliens because they "didn't remember her [Isabella's] name," as opposed to the many other more rational reasons why he might refuse to help them).
My favourite moment in the episode is when Rosanna's perception filter malfunctions on the stairs after Amy has conveniently kicked it, and briefly she transforms into her natural, crustaceanlike form. The court steward spooks in the most convincing way I think I've ever seen, jumping with real horror when she shifts and stabilises. For a character like the steward that never speaks but is always there (perhaps more so because of it), this lends diegetic credence to the terror that we are supposed to feel alongside him. It's also an example of another subverted cliche, as the steward never turns on his masters, or indeed does anything at all. This one scene reminded me a little of the brand of horror that the original series often touted, when for example Count Scarlioni reveals himself as an abomination in City of Death, or in Revelation of the Daleks when one of the characters finds the grotesque, pustulating abomination of his father after he has been genetically altered to fit inside a dalek machine. There are many other great examples.
All in all The Vampires of Venice was a great step for the new series. Moffat once said that he should never be put in charge of Doctor Who because he would make it like the Williams era of the show (the goofy, self-referential period during some of which Douglas Adams was script editor and Tom Baker was allegedly 'off the leash'). This is the first time the comparison can be called apt, and Moffat's statement finally proven to be ironic.
*
Episode 7: Amy's Choice was such a wasted opportunity. I was not expecting wonders from Simon Nye, but the opportunity to play with the concept of dreams and allegory was so crushingly wasted that I am hard pressed to articulate my disappointment. There were so many elements that were interesting in and of themselves, such as the idea of a Dreamlord, a cold sun, or the actually-interesting observation that "the old man prefers the company of the young." This episode squandered them all.
Besides the fact that the premise is based entirely on a coincidence where stardust of some kind gets into the Tardis mechanism, the situation that we're asked to buy into at the beginning of the episode is so unbelievably dumb that it's impossible to care about it all the way through to the end. Amy is asked by an omnipotent being to make an artificial "choice" between two scenarios, one of which will result in their deaths except Nye makes it pretty damn clear to the audience which one he prefers ("this village is so DULL"), and then goes on to mock the choice Amy makes by making it irrelevant (they were BOTH dreams, oh my god!). What's worse is that what efficacy Amy might have in making the choice is stolen when Rory dies and the choice is basically made for her. The metaphor is as clunky as Nye's dialogue, which tries too hard to be clever (bow ties, eh) and only occasionally succeeds with lines like "something here doesn't make sense let's go and poke it with a stick." Actually, once in a while bad lines and bad metaphors converge with verbal abominations like "we have to grow up eventually."
The greatest problem with the dialogue is that rapid delivery is mistaken for wit, and since so much of it is just delivering information (with maybe a quip on the end), it just reads like someone speed-reading a fairy tale, which is not, I expect, what Moffat intended.
The entire village plot is only made endurable by the tenuous pleasure of watching zombified octogenarians attack the main characters. The old people turn out to be a "proud and ancient race" of aliens (surprise) with the most uninspired motivation and ability the writing team could dream up (heh). In fact, the suggestion that these petrifying-gas-spitting eye creatures came from the imaginations of Amy, Rory, and the Doctor does a great disservice to my respect for these characters. And the writer.
It's one big, twisted ripoff of Star Trek: The Next Generation's finale, All Good Things where an omnipotent being forces Captain Jean-Luc Picard to shift from scenario to scenario in order to prove himself. Sound anything like this? And since we're on the subject:
Next week Frontios!
Brought back many a memory of watching Tremors!
I really love the tech in this episode. One of my odd interests is the Kola borehole. Funny too that Doctor Who should be a massive influence on one of my games, and that years ago the Kola borehole also inspired an area in the same game. Nice to see them all join up. Ah I'm waffling!
Loved it. Although the indian woman, wasn't she in one of the previous series finales? I always forget her name.
Okay, so Episode 8 is Inferno, not Frontios, I guess. It's also *****. Truly, undebatably, drippingly *****.
Chris Chibnall's episode was never going to be good. It was never going to be clever. It was never going to be deep. Nor was it ever going to bring anything new to Doctor Who. But this episode lacks so much that watching it produces the inverse of cognition. Its stultifying absence of quality challenges the boundaries of even posthumous thought. Chris Chibnall's brain should be examined immediately and urgently for signs of actual existence. Even as a pathetic copy, this "story" fails to motivate even a single synapse; it makes no sense, a fact constantly reiterated by the guest characters, from whom every line already syphons deeply from the cerebellum. Every story development burns with ignorance, tedium, and vacuous, perfidious cynicism. Take the opening scene, for example: the most jaded and formulaic depiction of the "vulnerable family" I have ever seen during the course of my now-meager existence.
The plot exists in what we must only by convention describe as form: a series of machine-gun exposition that splatters idea-sized chunks of brain onto a wall already stained with the smears of masochistic enterprise. With this quantity of telling [not showing], I feel I can safely say this isn't a television episode; it's a litany.
The one interesting idea, which is the Silurians' challenge to humankind's nobility, could maybe have raised questions about whether we can ever "be our best," but it is so soaked in cliche, and formula, and sentimentality, and that rubbish, endlessly repetitive electricity sound effect, that it ceases to matter. And what the hell is with the Silurians' long, windy, venomous tongue? As if that made them unique and not like every other banal monster ejaculated into existence during the RTD tenure.
Hello, brave new series of Doctor Who. Hello, syringe full of battery acid.
Chris Chibnall's episode was never going to be good. It was never going to be clever. It was never going to be deep. Nor was it ever going to bring anything new to Doctor Who. But this episode lacks so much that watching it produces the inverse of cognition. Its stultifying absence of quality challenges the boundaries of even posthumous thought. Chris Chibnall's brain should be examined immediately and urgently for signs of actual existence. Even as a pathetic copy, this "story" fails to motivate even a single synapse; it makes no sense, a fact constantly reiterated by the guest characters, from whom every line already syphons deeply from the cerebellum. Every story development burns with ignorance, tedium, and vacuous, perfidious cynicism. Take the opening scene, for example: the most jaded and formulaic depiction of the "vulnerable family" I have ever seen during the course of my now-meager existence.
The plot exists in what we must only by convention describe as form: a series of machine-gun exposition that splatters idea-sized chunks of brain onto a wall already stained with the smears of masochistic enterprise. With this quantity of telling [not showing], I feel I can safely say this isn't a television episode; it's a litany.
The one interesting idea, which is the Silurians' challenge to humankind's nobility, could maybe have raised questions about whether we can ever "be our best," but it is so soaked in cliche, and formula, and sentimentality, and that rubbish, endlessly repetitive electricity sound effect, that it ceases to matter. And what the hell is with the Silurians' long, windy, venomous tongue? As if that made them unique and not like every other banal monster ejaculated into existence during the RTD tenure.
Hello, brave new series of Doctor Who. Hello, syringe full of battery acid.
You think so?
I didn't think much of this weeks episode until the bizarre twist at the end. It pleasantly surprised me, I was not expecting that at all. I don't think Rory is coming back, the plots seem more sensible this series, and I think this time, once your dead, your dead. (With the exception of the Doctor obviously.)
The crack in time is something the doctor hasn't taken seriously. He should have investigated it. Amy doesn't even know what the Daleks are
I am curious if anyone knows anyplace online I can find the Doctor Who comic? I remember vaguely from my teens reading one involving werewolves based in the old series but I haven't ran across any more since. I miss seeing it on PBS
Moreso, I think the engagement ring might have something to do with it. Our attention was focused on it at a couple of points in the past two episodes.
It's survived Rory's erasure, perhaps due to the fact that it's on board the Tardis but it shouldn't be there as Rory never gave it to Amy, therefore it was never brought into the Tardis in the first place. It should be still in a jewellery shop window, or on some other lass' finger, or something. One's thing for certain, if I had an item that was at the centre of a potentially dodgy time paradox I wouldn't want it sat on the console of my time machine. After all, if something went horribly wrong and a complicated space-time thingy happened, the resulting explosion could cause big cracks in the universe...
I'm thinking that the ring is either part of what destroys the Tardis (and thus causes the crack), or it's part of the solution to sealing the crack and saving the universe. Covering a few bases, there.
Moreso, I think the engagement ring might have something to do with it. Our attention was focused on it at a couple of points in the past two episodes.
It's survived Rory's erasure, perhaps due to the fact that it's on board the Tardis but it shouldn't be there as Rory never gave it to Amy, therefore it was never brought into the Tardis in the first place. It should be still in a jewellery shop window, or on some other lass' finger, or something. One's thing for certain, if I had an item that was at the centre of a potentially dodgy time paradox I wouldn't want it sat on the console of my time machine. After all, if something went horribly wrong and a complicated space-time thingy happened, the resulting explosion could cause big cracks in the universe...
I'm thinking that the ring is either part of what destroys the Tardis (and thus causes the crack), or it's part of the solution to sealing the crack and saving the universe. Covering a few bases, there.
Yeah, good catch. It was in the shot at the end, on the floor, but not signposted.
But doesn't seem a little early in this new Doctor's career to be facing a big-bad? Should they let him get his feet wet abit and have some mad-cap fun first?
It seems that they are in a hurry for him to face something big. They may not have faith in him being the Doctor and if he fails, at least he would have face a big-bad.
No comments on The Lodger? I've read some were annoyed by it; namely the main guy the Doctor was renting from. However, I found it a good episode with some funny parts as well as some good suspense and mystery.
They did specifically state somebody was trying to build a Tardis and not just a generic time machine, right?
They did specifically state somebody was trying to build a Tardis and not just a generic time machine, right?
I thought it was another brilliant episode. Although, I agree, James Corden should never have been in it.
I think I'm in love with her.