[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@winston

Thanks for the welcome.     Yes ‘Rose’ was the episode that got me hooked too, though my favourite episode of S1 was probably The Parting of the Ways, and the awesomeness of Bad Wolf Rose after she looked into the Time Vortex.

But I’ll happily adopt your suggestion and add a few comments to the discussion on specific episodes.   Probably means I should read the preceding comments so I’m not just repeating word-for-word.  That’ll give me something to keep me occupied.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

Hi Declan

Well Clara is one of my favourite companions, so we’ll just have to differ on that.   Your point about Clara and Me flitting about the universe in a stolen Tardis with too much power for their experience is – well, worth considering, but I think I have to disagree on the ‘experience’ side.   Clara went through some pretty harrowing experiences as a Companion, and while we only saw a few quick snapshots of Ashildr/Me’s life, she lived throughout the entire duration of the Universe, the hard way.   I think they earned their freedom.   As for their potential to create chaos, well, it’s no more than The Master / Missy, Davros, assorted Gallifreyan timelords, the Great Intelligence and others have been doing for decades or millennia, I’m sure the Doctor can handle it    🙂

As for Last Christmas, I’d suggest just watching it and not taking too much notice of reviews  (though if you don’t like Clara obviously that may diminish your appreciation).   What I’ve found (with all TV fiction, not just Who) is that Good-Bad is not a linear scale, it’s more like a ball of wibbly-wobbly – er, threads.   Different things may matter to different people, so a reviewer may praise or condemn an episode for some point that you never even notice.   Particularly in Last Christmas, Santa Claus and the sarcastic elves are great fun (OK, humour is subjective) but they all have a valid sci-fi-ish explanation in the end.    But then if I like the ‘feel’ of an episode I don’t worry too much about plot holes (though Kill The Moon was a step too far for me).   But the Zygon eps by the same author – which had nearly as much improbability, 20 million Zygons living in secrecy? – I find I can quite happily dial out the quibbles and go with the nice dialogue and the fan references.   And the awesomeness of Zygella’s realisation after ten minutes of the Doctor’s oration that the Osgood boxes were actually empty.   Wow!

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

Hi Declan,  what a lovely invitation!

I had to make a little list.   I ended up with six (but it could well have been longer).

A difficult choice, but I think it has to be  The Day of the Doctor.   John Hurt makes a fine Doctor and it was great to see Tennant back, plus Clara, Osgood is an excellent new character, and if you include the Night of the Doctor prequel, Paul McGann as Eight (he would have made an excellent TV-series Doctor).     Oh, and lovely to see Billie Piper as The Interface (that girl can steal a scene just leaning against a wall in the background, and I don’t mean that in a bad way).   Quite often, adding more characters can result in none of them being effective (e.g. Journeys End), but in DotD  Moffatt controlled this excellently, and did justice to all the cast.  And it was also visually appealing, and a nice balance between drama and humour  (“What’s our cover story for this?”  “Er, Derren Brown.”   “Again?”   “Oh, we’ve sent him flowers.”)

Blink was also on my list (what a surprise), the opposite of DotD (in terms of size and characters), and possibly the neatest time-loop story ever.   The Weeping Angels are uniquely scary and the scene with Old Billy is incredibly moving.

Last Christmas.    Love those sarcastic elves pointing out all the ‘inconsistencies’ in the plot!   That was an episode that really paid re-watching – on about the third watching the foreknowledge means that everything makes sense.   That’s not a defect – on the first watch-through events were as confused as a dream often is.   And it’s not a reset-cheat as ‘dream’ sequences often are, because it warns you in the first few minutes to beware of dreams.   BUT even before I had a clue, it was fun to watch.

Asylum of the Daleks – the first appearance of a Dalek ‘skin job’, I think.   And the sight of the entire Dalek parliament telling the Doctor “you will save us”.   And the same parliament later not knowing who the Doctor was, thanks to Souffle Girl hacking their database.   And – we can’t say Moff didn’t give us a massive heap of clues (‘where does she get the milk?’) – the final tragic reveal that Oswin was a Dalek.   That caught me completely by surprise, quite simply because Oswin was so vivacious and upbeat the possibility never occurred to me.   My brain just didn’t want to suspect she might have been ‘turned’.

Listen – Capaldi doing a genius solo act (and breaking the Fourth Wall, iirc).   And the spookiest bedsheet monster that might not have been one.

Flatline – gotta love the cute little Tardis.   And I do like Capable Clara.

I should also mention Magician’s Apprentice / Witch’s Familiar, Hell Bent (I think that’s maybe a little controversial?), The Doctor’s Wife (I’ve seen the Tardis in a different light ever since), and The Girl Who Waited  (Amy’s finest hour, but a heart-wrenching ending).

(I find  Gridlock a perfectly satisfying episode to watch, it just doesn’t make my highlights list.   Nothing wrong with it, and I like Martha, a very smart companion).

Cheers

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

Hi Declan,  thanks for your kind reply!

I believe (from what I’ve read) BBC iPlayer is area-limited (to UK only?)    Apparently there are ways to get around that e.g. using a VPN, but I’ve never tried.   I do have all of NuWho in boxsets up to Series 10,   I’ve also got Series 11 but haven’t watched it yet, I picked it up after I’d restarted watching from ‘Rose’.    So it can sit on the shelf unopened until I work my way through to it in a few weeks time (I’m currently on The Woman Who Lived).

Series 8 has some great eps in it. I like Twelve and I like Clara, but I also like their interaction even when they’re clashing head-on (if that doesn’t sound paradoxical).   I love good dialogue and a clever plot, so I’m definitely a fan of Moffat’s style.   Series 11 – I’ll wait and see, I’m not sure if anyone else can match Moffat’s ideas and plotting BUT I’ve thought that before about TV series and sometimes been proved wrong, sometimes not.    Like you I prefer to watch the episode before reading any reviews – I’m quite good at letting occasional accidental spoilers go right over my head.   Helped by the knowledge that different people see the same episode in, sometimes, quite bizarrely different ways, so any random spoiler ‘fact’ may be quite insignificant to me.

Female Doctor – fine.   It depends entirely on how well it’s written and how good Jodie Whittaker (who I don’t know) is in the role.

The advantage of viewing on DVD is that I can decide when to watch and I can watch it uninterrupted by adverts and I don’t have to worry about missing an episode.   The disadvantage is that everybody’s already discussed it and moved on – I’m a little bit uncertain about posting my comments at the end of a thread where the last comment was 4 years ago   🙂      But I might do that anyway on the assumption that everybody can ignore it if they want to.

Oh well that’s enough from me

Cheers and thanks

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

Hi (he says, jamming himself on to the end of the sofa), is this the place for newbies?

First, I’m no relation to any Dentarthurdents anywhere else, though obviously I’m a fan of an old Doctor Who script editor, one-time Pink Floyd collaborator and Mark Knopfler admirer.

I came here following a time trace from Dan Martin’s Guardian review of Before the Flood. Like him, I detest the ‘minority of trolls’ (his words) that infest the Comments section of any online reviews. When I watch an episode (particularly one I like) I just want to see an acknowledgement that others also appreciated some of the awesomeness of the better moments and I don’t want to have my enjoyment killed by persistent nitpicky moaning. Pathetic, eh?

I first saw Who on TV in the very first episodes (yes I’m older than Marvin the Paranoid Android), but lost track of it. No more scifi until decades later I caught Blakes 7 in re-runs, I’m a sucker for ironic black humour, especially when delivered with style by Paul Darrow (Avon), cardboard sets notwithstanding. (I suspect the budget for one ‘effects’ shot for NuWho probably exceeds an entire series of B7). Never got into Star Wars/Trek.

My first acquaintance with online Internet ‘fandom’ was when ‘Xena’ was being made a few miles from my home. (I’m in Auckland, New Zealand, btw.) Surprised to find so many obsessive ‘fans’ who hated any new eps, wanted all storylines to suit their preferences, thought their favourite character was being sabotaged by the writers, yadda yadda… every fandom has some, it seems.

Next time with Who was NuWho with Rose (the episode), I followed that on NZ TV until it got irregular at the end of S4. Caught a few more eps on DVD but then the excellent video store in Newmarket that stocked almost every ‘cult’/scifi TV series, tragically closed. I knew Capaldi was now the Doctor, about 6 months ago I caught a random episode on TV and decided to ‘catch up’ so acquired all the DVD sets, watched from ‘The Eleventh Hour’ through to ‘Twice Upon a Time’, then went back to ‘Rose’ and started again. So, I’m currently at the start of Series 9, I loved Magician’s Apprentice and Witch’s Familiar, the two ‘underwater’ eps not so much (which is odd because they seemed to have got excellent reviews). So that’s where I am right now.

Cheers

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