Support NeoGAF

[Quick]

 

[Magwik]

Good work on the OT.
Really gonna miss "We've fucking time traveled, yes?" though

 

[Masquerader]

I'm calling it: Capaldi will be remembered as the best Doctor by the time he's done.

 

[Magwik]

Going through some Torchwood clips on YouTube and I just remembered how similar the Pandorica Opens finale is to Torchwood's Season 2. Well similar ideas at least.

 

[Kaladin]

What does the Doctor want for Christmas?

Hmmmmmm?

 

[milquetoast]

Xmas not too far away!

 

[Jason Frost]

I hope the Christmas special will be better than last year one and better than the last series.

 

[Santiako]

Will Santa bring back Danny for Clara?

 

[milquetoast]

lol @ the airbrushing in the banner to make him look a decade younger.

 

[Magwik]

Will Santa bring back Danny for Clara?

If he's nice he'll bring a more interesting companion

 

[Kaladin]

Will Santa bring back Danny for Clara?

No, Doctor is done with Clara. They had closure, let them be till the Capaldi finale at least.

 

[milquetoast]

since nick frost is in it, I'm guessing it will be chock full of comic relief, so expect lizard lady + wife + strax to do some slapstick at some point.

I'm only looking forward to seeing how this Doctor acts when he's all alone for awhile.

 

[paradox121]

Will Santa bring back Danny for Clara?

Assuming Clara does leave at Christmas I think Danny's done. It's way too close together to bring him back, particularly since he had 'a chance' and sent the kid through instead.

Though it does make me wish we were getting some kind of dark take on Santa who just resurrects everyone's loved ones as zombies thinking he's getting them the best Christmas present possible.

 

[APZonerunner]

MOFFAT MUST GO

just getting it on the front page in advance

No, Doctor is done with Clara. They had closure, let them be till the Capaldi finale at least.

She's in it at Christmas, if the line "It can't end like that! She's not happy, and neither are you," from Santa wasn't clue enough.

 

[MrBadger]

No, Doctor is done with Clara. They had closure, let them be till the Capaldi finale at least.

There's no way Clara won't be back in the christmas special.

 

[Kaladin]

She's in it at Christmas, if the line "It can't end like that! She's not happy, and neither are you," from Santa wasn't clue enough.

Ah bunk. I'm ready to move on.

 

[TheCowboyPoet]

I liked most of the episodes of season 8 (besides the awful season finale and the Robin Hood episode), but I'm sorry, I really don't like Capaldi's Doctor. He's tolerable, that's about the nicest thing I can say.

 

[DrEvil]

I'm calling it: Capaldi will be remembered as the best Doctor by the time he's done.

He's unseated tenant for me already.

 

[Maddocks]

Christmas is going to be their closure no doubt.

 

[Dalek]

I'm calling it: Capaldi will be remembered as the best Doctor by the time he's done.

I feel the same. He's a tremendous actor.

 

[Bluth54]

If Jenna does leave at Christmas that means we'll get an announcement of who the new companion is soon since they are going to start filming soon.

 

[Kevin]

I'm very happy with Peter Capaldi. In fact he may end up becoming my new favorite doctor.

 

[hamchan]

Pretty hyped for Dark Eyes 3. Supposed to come out this month.

 

[KuwabaraTheMan]

I'm calling it: Capaldi will be remembered as the best Doctor by the time he's done.

Well, sure. Every Doctor is remember as the best Doctor by a decent portion of people. That's not going to change. Everyone's always going to have their favorites.

 

[Deadly Cyclone]

Just finished the finale finally. Didn't find it amazing, didn't hate it. Was impressed with the phone call callback but confused at the same time. Did they ever explain Clara as the impossible girl? Why she kept dying and showing back up?

Even if there were a few down episodes I feel like Capaldi nailed The Doctor. He's so good at it in a completely different way than Smith and Tennant, and shared a few similarities with Chris.

 

[M.Bluth]

I assume we don't need to spoil random speculation?

Will Santa bring back Danny for Clara?

I think Danny will stay dead just so that Moffat proves he's willing to kill some characters for good.

But I wonder now what Clara really wanted to tell the Doctor in the cafe. I feel like she was open to going back on the TARDIS permanently, considering that she seemed to feel like there isn't really much to keep her in present day London.

Personally, I'm open to both seeing her stay or go. Won't mind it if Christmas was to send her off properly, or whether to set her to go back with the Doctor. Either way, I've enjoyed her this season, so...

Did they ever explain Clara as the impossible girl? Why she kept dying and showing back up?

This was already explained in the Name of the Doctor. There's nothing more to explain, really.

 

[Dalek]

Just finished the finale finally. Didn't find it amazing, didn't hate it. Was impressed with the phone call callback but confused at the same time. Did they ever explain Clara as the impossible girl? Why she kept dying and showing back up?

Even if there were a few down episodes I feel like Capaldi nailed The Doctor. He's so good at it in a completely different way than Smith and Tennant, and shared a few similarities with Chris.

Sounds like you didn't finish Season 7.

 

[Deadly Cyclone]

Sounds like you didn't finish Season 7.

I did, but I must not remember.

 

[Dalek]

I did, but I must not remember.

 

[Slowdive]

Prints of Stuart Manning's (Radio Times) series 8 posters are going on sale here soon.

 

[APZonerunner]

I just got done reading an incredible write-up on The Day of the Doctor and how it intersects with RTD's era - which I found particularly interesting given that this topic pushed into the S8 thread recently. Quoting a bit of it:

So let’s recap for a moment, lest the problem here be too subtle. Tennant’s Doctor, in this story, has just come off of The Waters of Mars where his hubris and arrogance have seemingly damned him. Specifically, he’s just arrogantly decided that he has the right as the Time Lord Victorious to rewrite history at will and without serious thought, and this arrogance has caused him to have to confront an omen of the imminence of his own death. In particular, recall the reason given in The Fires of Pompeii for why you can’t alter a fixed point in time - because if you could, the Doctor could go and change the end of the Time War. So what does he do in the only story explicitly situated between The Waters of Mars and The End of Time? He pilots his TARDIS into the Time War and changes the ending. On the surface, at least, it is difficult to come up with a less plausible or sensible answer to that question.

This is, of course, the point. Thus far we’ve found no particular grounds for tension between the Moffat and Davies eras. There’s a retcon, sure, but no sharper than the ones Davies applied to his own era. But here we have an utterly irreconcilable issue. Davies wants the Doctor to be damned by arrogantly meddling with history at the exact same point in the narrative that Moffat wants to have the Doctor pull off the most brazen bit of meddling he’s ever done, casually rewriting the entire history of the show to be a long con building up to the thirteen-Doctor rescue of Gallifrey.

It is difficult, if not outright impossible, to read this as anything other than a rejection of some of the essential storytelling premises of the Russell T Davies era of Doctor Who. As the Davies era calmly goes out in a blur of epic darkness that suggests the underlying pessimism that Davies has always held about the world, the Moffat era asserts a viewpoint of the world that is fundamentally more moral. I do not mean, to be clear, more ethical; that is to say, this is not a statement about the comparative moral rightness of the two eras. Rather it is to say that Moffat writes Doctor Who with a world that believes unerringly in “the right thing to do,” whereas Davies writes Doctor Who with a world where there are no right answers and where if humanity survives into the future it will be through the fundamental dissolution of the singular concept of “human nature” and its replacement with the idea of “humanity” as a thing that just spreads out across the stars, dancing freely with other species. (Note that the hopeful future augured by The Waters of Mars explicitly includes the inter-special marriage of one of Adelaide’s descendants.)

But for Moffat, there are just things you don’t do. Moffat has said in interviews that the resolution of the Time War always stuck in his craw a bit for the simple fact that, in his view, the Doctor wouldn’t do that. In his view, Doctor Who’s ability to evade any narrative collapse by cheating the rules must include preventing the Doctor from making a decision as terrible as the decision to commit a double genocide. But this constitutes an explicit reversal of The Waters of Mars. For Davies, the Doctor sadly trudging away from Bowie Base One as everyone dies is the correct action, because for Davies the Doctor is never better than when he’s a tragic figure. He can cheat death, but only by losing something else. For Moffat, however, the idea that the Doctor going back and saving the last three people would be treated as a moral wrong is simply unthinkable. If, in Moffat’s view, the Doctor wouldn’t commit the double genocide, he wouldn’t walk away from Adelaide either. The entire moral structure of The Waters of Mars becomes untenable within Moffat’s worldview, and we see it unravel completely in his invocation of the Tennant era.


If we wanted to be uncharitable to Moffat we could suggest that this is because if there is one thing Moffat is utterly unconcerned with, it is the possibility of hubris. But this is not our only option. Another way of phrasing it is that for Moffat, the point of the exercise is to retell the story until you like it. Time can be rewritten, which means that the past is there to be revised into perfection. For Davies, our only hope of salvation comes through a sort of ego-destroying hedonism - the embrace of life in all its fragile glory, with the knowledge that embracing this involves a near-total rejection of the actual social order. For Moffat, however, salvation is an altogether stranger thing - something that is accessible at any given moment, but only through the rewriting and honing of one’s self to where one becomes a teleological narrative force. And so Moffat, at last, makes the Doctor into the Time Lord Victorious, and then has him walk away unscathed into the future.

More here: http://www.philipsandifer.com/2014/03/time-can-be-rewritten-final-day-of.html

So fascinating and correct, I feel. Really highlights the differences in the two.

 

[biggyfries]

Well, that was my first full season. Loved it, until the finale part 2, which was kinda rushed/lackluster/let down.

I even grew up with the Tom Baker episodes on public TV, but never watched them.

I think I have time to hit up Netflix before the next season starts.

 

[The Technomancer]

Oh man this big emotional moment! It sure would totally be undermined if they undid her sacrifice literally five minutes later wouldn't it?

 

[hamchan]

I assume we don't need to spoil random speculation?

I think Danny will stay dead just so that Moffat proves he's willing to kill some characters for good.

But I wonder now what Clara really wanted to tell the Doctor in the cafe. I feel like she was open to going back on the TARDIS permanently, considering that she seemed to feel like there isn't really much to keep her in present day London.

I feel the opposite. She was totally done with the TARDIS and you could tell. Probably because she's pregnant or that she has to look after the kid Danny brought back to life.

 

[Red Arremer]

I'm calling it: Capaldi will be remembered as the best Doctor by the time he's done.

I think he is a fantastic actor, but sincerely believe that the scripts might cripple him. As the season went on, the writing got better, but the first 2 or 3 episodes, and especially the season opener, were just painful to sit through.

 

[Ruff]

So was the Danny Pink lookalike at the end of time ever explained? I assumed it was just a later generation of their offspring but... yeah unless she's secretly preggers I can't see how anymore.

Maybe it was just a coincidence, or maybe it was a "time can be rewritten" thing.

 

[The Technomancer]

I just got done reading an incredible write-up on The Day of the Doctor and how it intersects with RTD's era - which I found particularly interesting given that this topic pushed into the S8 thread recently. Quoting a bit of it:



More here: http://www.philipsandifer.com/2014/03/time-can-be-rewritten-final-day-of.html

So fascinating and correct, I feel. Really highlights the differences in the two.

Wow, how have I missed this guy's stuff? I'm reading a guest piece on that site about the Moffat era in general and all I can say is:

(This, by the way, is a manifestation of Moffat’s unhealthy and point-missing insistence on the Doctor being what the show is about, rather than a way of unifying the polemics and allegories and metaphors and satires and pastiches inside one meta-text. That isn’t me calling for the Doctor to be characterless. Indeed, the trouble now is that he’s more characterless than ever before. The more Moffat concentrates on him, the more characterless he becomes, because he becomes more and more a narcissistic navel-gazer, rather than an actor in social events outside himself. Once again, the true neoliberal attitude: the atomised individual is what matters, not the social act.)

Fucking exactly

EDIT: The entire post is fascinating: http://www.philipsandifer.com/2014/03/guest-post-steven-moffat-case-for.html
In part because it dances and delves around the heart of my issues with Moffat's work without ever actually explicitly saying it: indulgence. The last four seasons (8 perhaps the least) have been defined more then ever before by an indulgent approach to storytelling that is more focused on cloyingly creating emotional highs than exploring interesting themes

 

[GSR]

I just got done reading an incredible write-up on The Day of the Doctor and how it intersects with RTD's era - which I found particularly interesting given that this topic pushed into the S8 thread recently. Quoting a bit of it:



More here: http://www.philipsandifer.com/2014/03/time-can-be-rewritten-final-day-of.html

So fascinating and correct, I feel. Really highlights the differences in the two.

I haven't read the full article, but that section you quoted feels particularly relevant given how series 8 ended. The scene between Twelve and Clara in the cafe and their farewell was (in my opinion) extremely well done both from a writing and acting perspective - and it's also extremely gloomy. Not a happy ending at all! But luckily a few minutes later Santa comes knocking to put things right, even interrupting the credits (and the associated sense of 'it really ended like that') to do so, a particularly wink-at-the-story piece of timing.

I don't know if RTD would have left Twelve and Clara in that same place forever - Rose and Donna got their happy endings eventually - but I don't know if he would have been quite so quick to start reversing things. Of course, who knows how Christmas will end, but I'd be very surprised if it was with Twelve and Clara still lying to each other at such a massive level.

 

[The Technomancer]

oh fine, I won't be all negative

whenever I get down I just have to remember that we got this:

 

[Dalek]

I haven't read the full article, but that section you quoted feels particularly relevant given how series 8 ended. The scene between Twelve and Clara in the cafe and their farewell was (in my opinion) extremely well done both from a writing and acting perspective - and it's also extremely gloomy. Not a happy ending at all! But luckily a few minutes later Santa comes knocking to put things right, even interrupting the credits (and the associated sense of 'it really ended like that') to do so, a particularly wink-at-the-story piece of timing.

I don't know if RTD would have left Twelve and Clara in that same place forever - Rose and Donna got their happy endings eventually - but I don't know if he would have been quite so quick to start reversing things. Of course, who knows how Christmas will end, but I'd be very surprised if it was with Twelve and Clara still lying to each other at such a massive level.

Imagine if the Titanic had come in instead!

oh fine, I won't be all negative

whenever I get down I just have to remember that we got this:

We'll always have Flatline.

 

[GSR]

Imagine if the Titanic had come in instead!

Granted, granted! (I think we all felt the Santa moment was a bit of a call-back to RTD.)

Anyawy, I didn't mean to say RTD was all doom and gloom. But bear in mind the two times he did pull that trick, it was both times totally unrelated to what had come before - whereas Santa pretty immediately puts the brakes on Twelve and Clara's fairly dark ending.

 

[Chezzymann]

I'm calling it: Capaldi will be remembered as the best Doctor by the time he's done.

He just needs a few episodes on the level of tennant's highs and it will be a lock in. He's already nailed the performance, the bad writing is just the only thing holding him back.

 

[Dalek]

Granted, granted! (I think we all felt the Santa moment was a bit of a call-back to RTD.)

Anyawy, I didn't mean to say RTD was all doom and gloom. But bear in mind the two times he did pull that trick, it was both times totally unrelated to what had come before - whereas Santa pretty immediately puts the brakes on Twelve and Clara's fairly dark ending.

For what it's worth, I hated the Santa moment. You're right it totally ruined the mood which was frankly hard to believe.

 

[The Technomancer]

For what it's worth, I hated the Santa moment. You're right it totally ruined the mood which was frankly hard to believe.

It did, but they also always do it. I really dislike it, but it is especially bad here because of the previous emotional moment. Tennant shouting "what!?" repeatedly works a tiny bit better, but its still jarring

 

[KuwabaraTheMan]

Wow, how have I missed this guy's stuff? I'm reading a guest piece on that site about the Moffat era in general and all I can say is:


Fucking exactly

EDIT: The entire post is fascinating: http://www.philipsandifer.com/2014/03/guest-post-steven-moffat-case-for.html
In part because it dances and delves around the heart of my issues with Moffat's work without ever actually explicitly saying it: indulgence. The last four seasons (8 perhaps the least) have been defined more then ever before by an indulgent approach to storytelling that is more focused on cloyingly creating emotional highs than exploring interesting themes

By the way, the guy who wrote that piece, Jack Graham, has his own blog Shabogan Grafitti which is really excellent. Definitely my favorite Doctor Who blog. A lot of great, politically charged analysis of both classic and new Who.

All the rest of what Phil does on TARDIS Eruditorum is great, too. I always love reading his pieces even when I wind up disagreeing with him utterly. It's some of the best Doctor Who criticism on the internet.

 

[GSR]

It did, but they also always do it. I really dislike it, but it is especially bad here because of the previous emotional moment. Tennant shouting "what!?" repeatedly works a tiny bit better, but its still jarring

For me it wasn't just the emotional shift - like you said, it's a kind of tradition, so you know what to expect - but that Santa explicitly calls out The Doctor and Clara as not being all right and that "it can't end like this". I'm a little biased in how I read the scene because I knew ahead of time that Coleman was booked for Christmas, but this felt like a double-whammy of knocking the air out of that farewell.

 

[Blader]

Imagine if the Titanic had come in instead!

Or a screaming Catherine Tate, doing her damndest to both make the worst first impression and ensure that huge emotional climax between Ten and Rose is completely deflated as quickly as possible.

 

[Bobby Roberts]

I've always thought the ability to survive an emotional whiplash is a key component to being (and staying) a Doctor Who fan.

 

[Red Arremer]

Wow, how have I missed this guy's stuff? I'm reading a guest piece on that site about the Moffat era in general and all I can say is:


Fucking exactly

EDIT: The entire post is fascinating: http://www.philipsandifer.com/2014/03/guest-post-steven-moffat-case-for.html
In part because it dances and delves around the heart of my issues with Moffat's work without ever actually explicitly saying it: indulgence. The last four seasons (8 perhaps the least) have been defined more then ever before by an indulgent approach to storytelling that is more focused on cloyingly creating emotional highs than exploring interesting themes

You know, I kinda was thinking about it, and yes. That is exactly what the issue is.
Before Moffat took over, you had the Doctor and companion either traveling through space and time, finding new exciting places to be in, or save the companion's home from an alien threat. The relationship between the Doctor and the companion, as well as the Doctor's origins all were touched upon, but they were parts of the plots, not the central piece. The only overarcing plot points were the characters getting to know each other better, but it was mostly just adventures contained within themselves. And the drama mostly came from the situation the characters were put in.

With Smith/Capaldi now, you have the story arcs focusing entirely on the Doctor and his companions. You see a LOT of the Doctor's history, how he became what and who he is, and the companions are also heavily involved in the stories, usually tied up into the overarcing plot of the season. There's so much emphasis on how important the Doctor is, and how much he influences the flow of the universe, but also an equal emphasis of the companions' private lives, and the relationship between them and the Doctor, which is where most if not all of the drama comes from now.

Basically, Who has turned from a sci-fi show about adventures in time and space into a character drama with sci-fi theme.

 

[The Technomancer]

Basically, Who has turned from a sci-fi show about adventures in time and space into a character drama with sci-fi theme.

I was planning on bringing this up as well, but on that note its frustrating to me how much the series has moved away from being, well, science fiction. As an example of this, when I first started watching the revival episode 2, The End of the World, instantly grabbed me with its bizarre look at the future of humanity. And while they weren't necessarily the best episodes, the RTD era is characterized for me by those frequent "look what humanity has become" episodes. Not just episodes ostensibly set in the future but episodes about the future, something which has almost completely evaporated. I mean, just breaking it down you have

The End of the World
The Long Game
Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways
New Earth
Impossible Planet/Satan Pit
Gridlock
42
Utopia
Planet of the Ood (arguable in focus)
Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead (arguable in focus)

under Moffat the times that theme has been hit have basically been
The Beast Below
The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People
The Rings of Akhetan (arguable in focus)
Kill the Moon

in the same span of time. Its something I really miss.