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So this episode’s villain was a siren that chased after the injured and sick members of a pirate crew.  Rory gets a cut and also becomes a target for the siren, and gets a black spot on the palm of his hand like the other victims.  For much of the episode it is assumed the siren can travel through water, until the Doctor realizes she can travel through reflections on mirrors and shiny objects to reach the injured.

The siren, when enraged, turns red and gets a scowl.  It almost reminded me of the robots from The Beast Below in a way.

The episode had its funny moments: “If something’s gonna kill ya, it’s nice that it drops a note to remind ya!”  When the Doctor describes the situation they’re in being like two universes colliding, and asks if they understand, “Good, cause it’s not like that anyway.”  The pirate captain partially understanding the TARDIS controls was entertaining.  And who could forget, “…Alien boogies.”

I did notice a potential goof in this episode as one of the crew members gets cutlassed by the boy, but we never see him meet his maker at the hands of the siren.  He just kind of vanishes like the other crew members have – it’s possible this was some scene that didn’t make it into the episode.

We get to see eyepatch woman again below-deck.

In the end everyone lets the siren get them because she teleports them to a hospital room where she puts them all on life support.  She is a doctor tending to the sick, not a shark-like creature coming to gobble people up at the scent of blood.

Rory is still drowning, and when taken off of life support needs to be resuscitated.  Amy manages to do this.  Meanwhile the pirate captain becomes the captain of the medical spaceship where the siren was from, and keeps his sick boy hooked up to the life support.

It ends with a question as to whether Amy is fine or not, since the TARDIS computers are giving the Doctor strange readings about her.

As with a lot of the old-timey episodes it took me some work to muster up the energy to watch it, but once I was into it I saw it through.  I reckon there have been much better filler episodes, but it was kind of cool seeing a pirate crew wind up as a spaceship crew.

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@dentarthurdent

I sure missed a lot of stuff in my run-down, but I think it shows there was a lot going on in this episode.

Well I appreciate your doing these rewatches with me.  I have no idea when I’ll get on to the next ones.

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@dentarthurdent

In either this episode or the next River actually implies that they are meeting in literal opposite order, so I think the show itself began all of our confusion.

I thought the scenery was stunning, especially at the beach where the astronaut was.  On Nixon, I try to remember he did some good things too, like improving relations with China.

I completely must have missed the Easter Island and Americans with guns moments lol.  I’m also not a car person so I appreciate you pointing out the unusual choice of the car the Doctor is resting on.  Maybe it suits the Doc’s eclectic tastes.

 

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The continuation from The Impossible Astronaut.  This one keeps the American themes going a bit, with Amy being chased and shot at by Agent Canton in Utah, and then Rory in Arizona.  River leaps out of a window to avoid being shot.  Canton builds a room around the Doctor to imprison him, and brings Amy and Rory’s body bags inside as well.  The prison finished, Canton frees everybody, and becomes a passenger on the TARDIS while the Doctor arrives just in time to catch River in the TARDIS’s pool.

One of the biggest plot points in the episode is the Doctor shoots recording devices under the skin in everybody’s hand, so if they see the Silence they can describe them and record it for later listening.  This plot is a little bit loose, and Amy’s telephone ends up coming more in handy for this purpose than the actual implants.  Instead it’s shown that the recording devices can also act as a one-way radio for whoever it had been implanted into…while it is no longer near them.  Huh?

Canton and Amy go to a childcare facility to learn more about the little girl in the astronaut suit.  The lone door man there seems to be pretty confused, and it sounds like the facility has been shut down for a while.  Amy discovers a room full of sleeping Silence, who sleep hanging from the ceiling like bats.  Amy also sees enigmatic eyepatch woman for the first time, and speaks to the little girl in the astronaut suit, who soon frees herself from the suit.  The Silence eventually take Amy away and leave behind her recording device.

Canton gives the Doctor the footage he recorded of the Silence and the Doctor uploads it to the broadcast of Apollo 11, causing everyone to subconsciously kill the Silence when they’re seen.

There’s a pretty good scene where River and the Doctor fight the Silence together, with River doing most of the actual shooting and the Doctor waving around his sonic screwdriver.  Amy is rescued, and reveals she has had reservations talking about being pregnant because she is worried the baby might have been effected by being on the TARDIS.

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I remember as season 6 was debuting, the show continued to get more promotion in the United States.  The setting and plot of the first couple episodes involved the USA, too, and it all kicked off with a school bus, the Doctor in a Stetson, and a 50’s diner.  So much about the episode does have a different, much less British feel.

The monster in this episode is the Silence.  (And, maybe the astronaut.)  Back when they were first shown it reminded me a lot of the Slender Man that was a popular horror thing around the time.  I guess they also kind of look like a poor man’s Ood, except in a suit instead of a jumpsuit.  I think there is some connection there between the secret service and the Silence, sort of an Area 51 vibe.  I had forgotten the Silence could even talk, and that the one in the bathroom totally electro-vaporized the woman there.

The Silence being able to be forgotten the minute you look away from them is kind of like the same power of the Weeping Angels.  The looking away is bad.

There is a scene where River seems to suggest that the Doctor and herself are meeting in literal reverse from one another.  This wouldn’t make much sense.  I still choose to believe they’re meeting more in a sort of randomized order.

Of course the mystery of the season, or at least part of it, is what is going on with the astronaut killing the Doctor.  We eventually revisit a lot of this, but as of the conclusion of the episode all we know is the astronaut is actually a little girl in a space suit.

I thought Nixon was cast okay.  Once again it was so American we have a scene with tons of handguns being pointed at the Doctor.  River, too, uses a revolver in the astronaut scene.  I liked the Doctor attempting to make the TARDIS silent and invisible and failing, only to have River correct it.  I’m still not sure why the little girl kept calling Nixon, or if this is explored further.

This was also apparently the first episode played after Elizabeth Sladen passed away.

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I lost my original post but I’ll just try to summarize.  Essentially this episode is about the Doctor traveling between different points in an old man’s life in an attempt to make him a better person.  In the process he inadvertantly makes the man into a Scrooge type, which likely always happened.  The old man is also in control of the skies via a machine his abusive father made, and is responsible for the lives of over 4000 people on a ship that is crashing because its pilots can’t see through the heavy fog.

The episode features no monster, but does have fish and a shark that can swim in the fog.

The Moffat years have a lot of pay-attention-or-you’ll-miss-it moments for jokes.  There is a whole scene where the Doctor says he is a mature and responsible adult and shows the young boy his psychic paper, to which he replies it’s all wavy lines.  “Finally, a lie too big!”, responds the Doctor.  There is a mention about creatures called Face Spiders with the face of a baby and the legs of a spider, which hang out in closets and in mattresses.  And then there’s my personal favorite scene:

Amy: So do you have a plan?

Doctor: Yes.

Amy: Are you lying?

Doctor: Yes.

Amy: Don’t treat me like I’m an idiot!

Rory: Is he lying?

Amy: *sweetly* No.

It is also pretty much confirmed that the Doctor was responsible for paying off the old roommate in The Lodger, as all of the old man’s servants win the lottery at the same time, in a similar turn of good fortune.

In the end it is the singing of a frozen woman named Abigail that saves the day, as she is able to soothe the fog shark and somehow act as a connection between the land and the air to save the crashing ship.  It was fun seeing the Doctor decide to spend several Christmases with young boy/young man and Abigail, and there was even a Shark-led carriage ride.

The episode was more fun than anything.

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@devilishrobby

My mistake!  Still, it’s cool that they can get so many former Doctors involved.

So 3 specials and then the fourth will be the new Doc.

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Supposedly there will be 8 episodes of DW featuring David Tenant next year, beginning in May 2023.

They will also feature Doctors 4-9 in some capacity.

Great news if it’s true!  The Tenant special will likely make for a series-encompassing lead-in to the next Doctor’s run.

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@oochillyo I have mentioned my thoughts on Disney + airing new episodes of Doctor Who, (and eventually getting access to the entire AG series) and I’m still feeling a little defeated.  Currently the series is on HBO Max, and I guess I feel like it fits there because it does seem a bit more “mature”.  At the same time, I guess the new episodes lag behind a lot being added to HBO Max.

The whole factor of Disney wanting to promote the show and be involved with it probably does say good things for the future of the series, however.  So I have to concede there.  I’m disappointed that I may have to subscribe to Disney + in the future to continue my rewatch, depending on how soon things move over to the service.  Yet, I am sure some good will come out of it.  I am liking the new series logo, and I think the show will benefit from many improvements.  And who knows?  Maybe Disney will help keep the show on track and stop it from getting too Torchwood-y.

It is cool that people who are caught up will get like 3 specials in 2023 featuring the return of the Tenth Doctor.  That alone is a nice streaming mini-series.  And of course that will lead into the arrival of Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor.

Ncuti Gatwa’s Guide to Doctor Who | Q&A | Doctor Who – YouTube

I liked Ncuti’s answers about where he would have the Doctor travel to (Africa.  Somewhere other than the usual Britain!) and which villain he would like to battle.  (The Beast.)  His favorite monster being the Weeping Angels is fair, even if they might be a little overused at this point and benefit from a break.  I think each Doctor should get the chance to confront their favorite monster at some point in their run.  I liked him saying that the TARDIS can go anywhere and will go anywhere – making me hopeful for an adventurous new series.  That might suggest a big-budget season like you were hoping for!

I suppose someone else will have to respond to the second half of your post about Shakespeare.

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@dentarthurdent My memory of these episodes was honestly pretty far off from what actually happened.  It’s amazing how much your brain can forget and fill in the holes over time.

I might slow down on my rewatch now.

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Now let’s talk about the S5 finale, The Big Bang.

I didn’t quite like how in the first part of the episode, they made it sound like something was in the Pandorica already when it was vacant.

This episode marks the introduction of the fez for the Eleventh Doctor.

The universe “collapses” and all of the Doctor’s enemies have been reduced to stone and rubble.  The Doctor from some future moment teleports in with River’s wrist device and gives Rory his sonic screwdriver, to open the Pandorica and free him with.  They put Amy inside of the Pandorica to be freed by (and heal from) her younger self in present time.  Rory guards the Pandorica for over 2000 years.

Rory becomes a guard at the museum and still watches the Pandorica.

The show has this obsession with making it seem like the Doctor is going to die during the season 5 and 6 years lol.

History continues to collapse and little Amy vanishes.  (I’m not sure why just her younger self.  And while we’re at it the thing about interacting with past selves has changed a lot since the Eccleston years.)  The Doctor looks for the collapsing TARDIS, but doesn’t have to look far because it’s taking up a segment of the sky.  He teleports to get River out of the TARDIS.  I like that Amy and River teamed up to put an end to the fez trend before it sticks!

The Pandorica contains atoms from the universe inside of it, and the Doctor hopes to revive the collapsing universe with the help of it.  River Song works out that piloting the Pandorica into the raging explosion of the TARDIS might cause a big bang and do the trick.  Of course there is this angle where doing so will trap the Doctor in another dimension.

The Doctor arrives in the TARDIS and sees bygone events.  It transports him back to the Time of Angels where he speaks to Amy when his past self walks away.  (I did not check to see if he had his tweed jacket on when he talked to her back during that episode.  But great planning if true.)  Then it transports him back to little Amy the night she waited outside for his return with luggage in tow.

The Doctor’s sentiments about hating repeats is pretty emotional.

Amy’s life becomes repaired and she suddenly has parents.  She finally goes through with her wedding and marries Rory, who also exists for sure again.  Amy is given the spoiler book that belongs to River Song, and it is blank.  (It gets its writing back in a bit.)

Amy saves the Doctor by remembering him, apparently bringing him back into existence in her dimension.  I liked the something borrowed, something blue scene leading up to it.  The Doctor dances with the little kids.  And Amy and Rory continue their travels with the Doctor.

I should point out that I had always remembered disliking this episode because I remembered it seeming like a cop-out and an easy fix to several problems.  Upon my rewatch nothing happened at all like I was remembering.  And there were a lot of things done to resolve the issues.  I enjoyed the The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang much more than I thought I did.

 

[Rewvian @replies]

So this episode has two parts, I will make a second post for the other one.

The main plot in the episode is The Doctor is summoned to Stonehenge in Roman times, by a painting of the TARDIS blowing up that Van Gogh made.  Seeing connections to the other episodes from the season was great.  Ultimately River Song is the one who retrieves the painting and reunites with the Doctor.  Stonehenge hides the Pandorica, an ancient prison that bears some similarities to Pandora’s Box.

While fending off invasions from many of his enemy monsters, the Doctor gets a little help from Rory, who returns as a Roman soldier.  Seeing the Cyberman head behave like an octopus and try to grab onto Amy was creepy, and we learn it had a drowsy dart inside of it.  Drowsy Amy is saved from its body by Rory, but doesn’t remember him.

The Doctor and River learn that whatever is inside of the Pandorica is opening it up.  River for whatever reason returns to the TARDIS and flies it, and it brings her to Amy’s house.  There she finds books about the Roman Empire and Pandora’s Box, and figures out that everything in this scenario was pulled straight from Amy’s life.  It turns out that the combined efforts of the Daleks, Cybermen, Judoon, Sontarans, Silurians, Atraxi and Nestene Consciousness among others have teamed up to trap and imprison the Doctor in the Pandorica.  The reason being they blame the Doctor for the cracks in the universe that the TARDIS caused.

Amy has a breakthrough and remembers Rory, but despite his best efforts Rory is still a robotic killing machine and only partly in control of himself, and shoots Amy in the abdomen.  The Doctor is locked away in the Pandorica, and River Song is trapped on the TARDIS as it apparently explodes.

I’d say this is the most villains we’ve seen on-screen at once, and the biggest alliance between them.  It is a little rough to buy that the Judoon and Atraxi would ever work with most of these enemies, and the Daleks would probably think all other races below them.  We also never directly see the Atraxi and the Nestene Consciousness among other things, but it’s kind of understandable why.  Anyway there were so many villains in the room I almost expected the Doctor to shout, “You’re all under arrest!”, like Dick Tracey.

I want to finish up the season so I’ll go ahead and watch the next part, so I can do another post on The Big Bang.

[Rewvian @replies]

So this episode had James Corden, I recognize him now though back when this episode came out I didn’t know who he was.  I still don’t really watch his show or anything, I just know of him.  It was sort of an Amy-lite episode.

The Doctor’s TARDIS stops being able to land, so Amy is being transported around while the Doctor looks for the source of the thing keeping the TARDIS from landing.  The thing just so happens to be in a building shared with two downstairs tenants.  Random people off the streets keep getting tricked into coming upstairs to help someone that lives there, and vanish.

Craig is looking for a roommate and the Doctor shows up to take the room, winning him over with his weirdness and good omelet cooking.  Throughout the episode the Doctor makes a habit of greeting acquaintances by kissing the air above each of their shoulders, which becomes pretty funny the more it happens.  Craig eventually invites the Doctor to a soccer game and the Doctor wins the match, then there’s a funny exchange about being against any sort of violence and being “the Oncoming Storm” after one of the players says they’re going to annihilate the other team next time.

Craig also has a problem saying how he feels about his lady friend Sophie.  The Doctor begins gradually getting in the way of Craig’s plans and even convinces Sophie to travel abroad and become an orangutan doctor, in an annoying sort of What About Bob? way.  The Doctor keeps stealing Craig’s thunder by playing soccer and doing his job better than him, leading Craig to want to return the rent money and kick the Doctor out.

Eventually the Doctor head-bumps Craig to telepathically bring him up to speed.  Everyone goes upstairs, learning that the building doesn’t have an upstairs, and find that someone is trying to build something like a TARDIS.  (Which is why the TARDIS is having trouble landing.)  The monster responsible is never actually shown, but the many incarnations of the upstairs neighbor are shown to be a hologram that seeks out people to attempt to use the machine.

In an ending I don’t quite understand, Craig and Sophie are able to stop the machine because they are content living in the flat, and have no desire to go anywhere else.  By trying to activate it despite being rejected as pilots for the device, they ultimately destroy it and cause the ship to implode.  This act also gives Craig the courage to say he loves Sophie, starting their relationship.

At the end of the episode Craig gives the Doctor a set of his keys to keep.

All in all not a bad episode.  I guess it was based off of a comic by the same name, featuring the Tenth Doctor and Mickey in the same situation as the Eleventh Doctor and Craig.  If you ask me this episode sounds like the better story, since the Doctor was essentially a stranger to Craig and came off as being more weird.  It was also a fun one-off episode leading into the 2-part season finale.

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@missy You’re right, because the sun was like an entity on the ship trying to punish them for stealing from the sun.  I kind of remember now.

@dentarthurdent A little off-topic, but I wonder if a day will come where we make ships that can come into contact with a sun.

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@dentarthurdent I’m surprised these episodes made you lose interest in the series back during original run.  I remember when I watched the Pandorica episodes at the end of the season I felt like it had a cop out ending sort of, but Idk how I would feel about it now.  I kept on watching through season 6 I know, but then kind of stopped for a while and had to play catch up with season 7 and the Day of the Doctor.

I watched season 8 with the 12th Doctor and most of that season disappointed me enough that I stopped watching the show since then.  Though, I wanted to get back into it a couple of times, the mood to rekindle my Who obsession hasn’t materialized until now.  And here I am catching back up to where I left off, gradually.  But the rewatch has changed my views on some of the series.

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@oochillyo It has been too many episodes and too much time now for me to remember the specifics of this episode, but it sounds like they had to release the fuel storage on the ship.  I don’t know if that was to like push them away from the sun or to make the ship less heavy or what.  If the engine was broken then I don’t know how it would have done anything, and if the ship could barely go on without the fuel I guess they took some serious liberties with plot holes.

It has been too long since I watched it now though.

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This episode sees the Doctor and Amy meeting Van Gogh, who on top of his mental health is being tormented by a large bird/horse monster that is invisible.

Amy and the Doctor end up staying with Vincent and are confronted by the monster, and afterwards the Doctor retrieves a device from the TARDIS that he was given (by a two-headed being), which enables him to determine what kind of creature it is by having it look into a mirror.

While Vincent is working on a painting and waiting for the monster to show up during another instance, the Doctor gets comically bored of experiencing the slowness of time, in the correct order.  Eventually the monster appears in the building Vincent is painting and the Doctor runs off to try to communicate with it.  Amy once again promises not to follow the Doctor, but does the opposite.

The Doctor tries to talk to the monster but is unable to successfully.  He has an aha moment and realizes that the monster is not only invisible, but is blind and unable to see.  While defending the Doctor and Amy from the monster with his easel, Vincent ends up fatally stabbing it.

A scene towards the end of the episode sees Vincent looking at the stars with our heroes, and noting how colorful the sky and the stars look if you stare at them long enough.  It gradually begins to look like a Van Gogh painting.  In a scene that I had no recollection of, the Doctor actually brings Vincent to modern times and shows him his paintings at the museum, and has the curator there explain in his own words how great a painter he was.

After leaving Van Gogh, Amy and the Doctor return once more to the museum to see if he has been inspired to make more paintings.  Nothing has changed.  But then, suddenly, Amy notices a painting of sunflowers in a vase, with a note for Amy.  (I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a new painting, or if the message was new, or what.)

I thought it was a pretty good episode and that Vincent was well-cast.  It was kind of progressive to have this episode where it speaks about mental health to some degree.  I feel like I should have more to say about the episode, but that was essentially it.  I thought the monster was kind of lame-looking, but it was interesting to make it impossible to see as well as unable to see anything.  I’m not sure if there was any explanation about or meaning for why it was blind.

And I guess technically Vincent Van Gogh was a companion to the Doctor.

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So I should start by saying that the makeup for the Silurians is pretty good.  The costuming and whatnot as well.  The guns they carry might be where they cut some corners (how do they fire them, exactly?) but all in all they did pretty dang good.

This episode sees the family failing to “be the best examples of humanity”, as the grandfather asks for help getting an antidote for his wound in exchange for helping the captive Silurian escape, and the mother shoots and kills the captured Silurian with a stun gun of some kind.  Amy and the father face surgery from a Silurian doctor, but Amy escapes by pickpocketing the chair lock device.  The Doctor gets captured immediately.  Everyone barely survives a confrontation with the Silurian warrior and her soldiers when a high-ranking Silurian shows up with the Silurian doctor.  The dyslexic boy is returned to the parents.

A chance is given for Amy and the driller woman to represent humanity and talk with the high-ranking Silurian to share the planet.  It is cut short when Rory and the people from above reach the room, and reveal the captive Silurian is dead.  When the warrior Silurian shows up all bets are pretty much off, and she awakens a whole army of Silurians to execute errybody.  She kills the doctor Silurian.  I said Silurians a lot.  Silurians.

The ensuing moments see a convoluted plot where the mother and grandfather set the drill to fire back up in 15 more minutes, so if everyone is to survive then they need to be allowed to leave.  The high-ranker executes a program that unleashes some toxic substance (or sleeping substance?), causing all of the Silurian soldiers to return to where they were and go back to sleep.  Warrior disobeys and, despite being floored, takes Rory out with a laser shot.

The Doctor reaches into the crack he finds outside of the TARDIS, but then comments that anything that touches the light emitted from it will cease to exist.  Mhm.  The cool twist is that he finds a piece of the TARDIS, burnt at the edges.  Rory vanishes and the Doctor tries to get Amy to remember him so he can somehow be saved.

I thought the episodes were alright, definitely made more interesting by the Silurians.  I wonder why they didn’t see Rory on the hill the second time, but did the first time.  There’s so much I forget.

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So I’m going to talk about The Hungry Earth, which is part one of this episode.  Go figure this second part has 2 threads…

So the Doctor & Co were going to a beach but wound up at a graveyard.  The people in the Graves have been going missing, as does the crew member for a drilling team.

The Doctor and Amy examine the drill team’s building and several sections of the floor open up.  Amy is taken in the process, dragged into the Earth.  The Doctor deduces that there is a new sound underground, underground people rising up to the surface.

The sky becomes red and a dome traps the group at the drill site and graveyard.  The kid with dyslexia gets kidnapped as well by the underground people.  The Doctor puts on thermal glasses and figures out which species it is because it is cold-blooded, then captures it.

The Silurians are reptile people.  The Doctor makes a valid statement by correcting that they aren’t aliens because they were the previous dominant species on Earth.  The guy leading the drilling mission gets poisoned by the Silurian’s poison tongue.

@dentarthurdent The Doctor takes this position of power like you mentioned in Vampires of Venice again, unfolding a chair and sitting in front of his Silurian captive to speak to it.  The Silurian threatens war against the humans.

The episode ends with the TARDIS being forcefully dragged underground, and the Doctor and the drilling lady finding a large civilization of Silurians underground and not a small tribe.

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@oochillyo So the Weeping Angels might be able to fly, if I’m going by the one scene in those episodes where the more humanoid ones transform and look more like angels again.  One of them had their wings spread, and I believe it was airborne.

This of course makes the angels even more threatening because they could probably fly faster than they run.  And it creates kind of a plot hole for all of their appearances so far.  Maybe they enjoy frightening and toying with people so much that they usually use their legs.

The Weeping Angels aren’t stone.  They only become stone when something is looking at or observing them.  So if you put it in this lift or the ocean, it would stay in stasis as stone, until the moment nobody is looking at it.  Then it would escape.

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@dentarthurdent You made an interesting observation about this being one of the first times the Doctor seems powerful, sitting in the throne andvtalking to the fish person.  I’m not sure if I agree or disagree, but now I wish I could have noticed.

I totally missed mentioning the Rory eunuch joke.  See, this episode was straight up funny!

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I watched Amy’s Choice and I’m pretty sure it has no thread so I’ll talk about it here.

Basically the Doctor, Amy and Rory are in two different worlds, and keep falling asleep and traveling between them.  In one the TARDIS is hurtling towards a frozen star and freezing; in the other Rory has a ponytail snd Amy is pregnant, and their quiet town is being overrun by aliens disguised as the elderly.

The group has to find out which one is the dream, and are tasked with this by the Dream Lord.

It turns out that both realities are dreams and they end them by crashing a car and exploding the TARDIS.  Successful, they wind up back in the normal TARDIS.

The source of the dreams is shown to be tiny gems that got into the TARDIS, but the presence of the Dream Lord remains uncertain.

I liked the Dream Lord as an entity for the Doctor and his companions to face.  He is sort of like Q from Star Trek in a way, challenging them to solve problems thrust upon them.  I was disappointed he never showed up again. (As far as I know.)

Much of this episode was interrupted for me by small children.  But that is about all I can think to say for now.

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@dentarthurdent I recall at one point they mentioned that these weeping angels seemed to have devolved a bit, and lost some of their angelic appearance, which is why they weren’t so easy to recognize as weeping angels early in the two-parter.  Something about they had no energy to feed on, and then at one point they found an energy source and someone pointed out that a few of them looked more like angels.

But I have no idea if the taking pictures thing applied just as well to the angels in Blink, maybe that did.  And the neck-breaking thing just makes these weeping angels look like stone-cold savages lol.

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@dentarthurdent Thank you, you made some sense of that whole plot!  I guess I missed the part where the angel had crashed the ship, and kept getting confused about whether the beginning scene was related to this Stormcage Jail.  I still wonder why she was allowed to act alone for such a big part of the mission.

@oochillyo The living room television here gets weird connection issues sometimes and won’t play streaming things.  It happened today, actually.  It can be a bummer whenever you’re in the mood for some Who and want to sit in a nice chair to watch it.

So I’m gonna jump right into my rewatch of The Vampires of Venice.

The episode was most definitely better than I remembered, which I remembered very little.  In the last episode the Doctor wanted to take Rory and Amy someplace romantic to help out their relationship, so he settles on old-time Venice.  But it doesn’t take long for him to deduce something is wrong when he hears people talking of the Plague, which should have been over by then.

The Doctor jumping out of the stripper cake was not entirely unexpected, and yet it was still worth it.  The early moments where the Doctor and Amy are running around and seeing “vampires” all over the place and getting giddy about it was a lot of fun, along with Rory’s feeling he’s the third wheel through it all.  When the boat-builder mentions his huge stockpile of gun powder and Rory moves away from the corner of the room I chuckled.  But when the boat-builder and Rory exchanged clothes I outright laughed, especially when I saw the boat-builder rowing the Doctor and Rory through the waters.

There were more good moments with the Doctor putting his hands over everyone’s mouths so he could think, including having Rory extend his hand to cover the boat-builder’s mouth.  Also the boat-builder thinking that the Doctor and Amy were an item.  Then there was Rory and Amy going along with the plan to act as brother and sister.  There were plenty of laughs littered throughout the episode.

The villain was the Saturnyns, barracuda or pirahna-like fish people.  They wear perception filters that hide their true appearance, and don’t show up in mirrors because the filter doesn’t know what to show there.  The Saturnyns regularly make their sharp teeth appear through the filter, thus seeming vampire-like.  I gotta ask though, why they make two teeth marks when they have several sharp teeth?

Ultimately the plot of the episode is the Saturnyns want to convert human women into female fish people, and have them mate with the males who mostly all reside in the waters in Venice.  They plan on causing an earthquake and tidal waves which will leave Venice sunken, and provide a place for the Saturnyns to start a new city in.

I kept wondering when the gun powder would come into play, and it wasn’t a disappointment.  Boat-builder stayed behind while the rest of the group left, to blow it up and take all of the converted female Saturnyns with him.  And of course no season of DW would be complete without the Doctor doing something related to heights and climbing a tower in the rain to stop some transmitter the villains left there.

I’d say the Doctor shouldn’t feel too bad about letting the fish-people race die out since after all, they did forget Isabella’s name.  🙂  I don’t see why Amy didn’t just go around using her compact mirror as a weapon to slaughter the Saturnyns since that was pretty effective.  Amy was really brave and bold throughout this entire episode, right from the moment she chased after the vampiric dude without any concern for her own safety.

Rory attempting to be brave seems to have been enough for Amy to have taken an interest in him again.  I find it funny how several seasons ago the motto was, “I don’t travel with families/domestics”, but now the Doctor has had this change of heart and seems to want to bring along his companion’s partner.

I feel that this episode was meant to be a smaller one, but it had so many funny moments and played into the plot of saving Amy’s relationship so much that I think it turned out to be much more than that.

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@oochillyo We don’t mind your longer posts at all.  I have been known at times to really write pages of stuff, myself.  I say if you enjoy getting your thoughts out on here then go for it!  This place could use a bit of discussion and debate anyways.  We’ve got a small community, but apparently a pretty good one – and it’s not too busy to stay in the loop with things!

I think you raised some good questions about The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone.  How and why did River’s escape go down like that?  It raises a bunch of questions.  Idk if the guard she kissed was connected to her jailor or not, but either way why was she away from her jailor and why did she just teleport them in?  Idk just so many random things in this episode that either weren’t explained very well, or else were explained quickly and I missed it.

I have been enjoying writing on here too, though I noticed sometimes I am watching an episode with the idea in the back of my head to be paying attention for things to write about after seeing the episode.  I kinda wish I could just watch the episode without extra pressure.  But I will try to keep it up because sometimes it feels therapeutic to discuss each episode and anything that stuck out to me from it.

In other news I did renew my HBO Max, so I will continue to watch through the season 5 episodes as I am able.

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@dentarthurdent I had completely forgotten about River being able to fly the TARDIS better than the Doctor at the beginning of the episode, but I thought that was a great scene.  Apparently the TARDIS makes its familiar noise because he leaves the breaks on.  The scene with the “homing box” and the writing in Gallifreyan suggests early on that River has some knowledge of the Time Lords.

The episode pretty much confirmed that the Doctor and River meet in no particular order, which makes more sense to me.  The other week when we were talking I mentioned how I was confused that they were supposed to have met in opposite order, but it isn’t like that.

I thought it was odd that the angels were snapping the necks of their victims instead of sending them back in time like they usually do.  I’m not sure if I missed something there explaining why that was.

The Doctor’s comments about “life” over the communicator with Bob were great, lol.

I think Amy and Rory’s relationship had to be a little on the rocks at this point, so that must improve over the coming seasons.

I loved your summary, I think you were way more detailed than I am.  I like that other people are doing the rewatch thing too now.

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So these episodes had a lot going on.  Mostly, it serves to explain that time can be re-written, and it even references why people don’t remember the Cyber King from The Next Doctor.  Ian Glenn is featured as the leader of a militant priest group, so it’s like Ser Jorah is there.  It is also the second appearance of River Song, who was apparently in prison and tries to keep this secret from the Doctor.

The plot confused me a little because they were chasing after the ship River Song was on, but wind up on this planet.  The logistics of what was going on was confusing.  River Song’s reasons for going along on the mission were also unclear, though perhaps she was brought on this mission because she got the Doctor’s help.

Most of the episode felt a bit like an older before AG episode of DW.  At least I thought so.  The gravity light orb thrown out early in the episode was pretty cool, and was eventually used as a plot device midway through to get everyone to float to the ceiling.  (And, I guess, the ship?)  The discovery that all of the statues in the cavern were malnourished Weeping Angels was unsettling, as was the realization because the statues only had one head and not two like the planet’s native race.

Weeping Angels being able to become real through photos and videos taken of them is also pretty frightening.  The affliction Amy suffers from looking into the eyes of a weeping angel seemed also to make the monsters even more troublesome.  Luckily nobody in “Blink” looked the angels straight in the eye.

Ultimately the Crack in the ship turned out to be what saved the day.  The idea that the weeping angel in Amy’s mind was gone just like the soldiers that went to check out the crack for themselves was a resolution that worked.  Amy walking with her eyes closed through the forest was scary enough, but she would have been caught if River hadn’t teleported her when she did.

Amy coming onto the Doctor at the end was quite something, and made me wish I was the Doctor, ha.

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So I am posting my rewatch thoughts on Victory of the Daleks here, since it doesn’t have its own thread.

I liked the impassioned wrench-banging and yelling the Doctor did early in the episode.  “I am the Doctor, and YOU are the Daleks!”  It helps to flesh out the range of this Doctor, and to show he’s not about to trust one of his greatest enemies.  The revelation that the Daleks created the scientist to make him think he created the “ironsides” was a nice twist.

The episode did a good job, as well, of sticking with continuity.  The Doctor realizing Amy should have known of the Daleks from prior events in the AG series was a big one.  The real big bad of the episode was the brand new Dalek race being unveiled.  Though, I admit I was confused by why the old Daleks were posing as British soldiers in the first place, and unsure of what needed to be done in order for them to unlock the new Daleks.  Apparently it amounted to the Doctor reminding the Daleks that he’s the Doctor, and that was enough to solve their problem.  Oops.  It was also frightening how the new Daleks exterminated their “inferior” counterparts.

Churchill didn’t really bother me too much.  Yeah I’m not big on real famous people being portrayed in DW, but as I surmised before I guess it bothers me less when it’s a long-gone historical figure rather than some person who is still active.  I thought it was funny when he tried to steal the TARDIS key, and he filled a certain personality-type that meshed well as an antithesis to the sort of hero that the Doctor is.  He was simply looking to use any means necessary to win the war.

Amy continues to come more into her own in this episode, simply by having moments where she can display her personality.  Such as, walking up to the Dalek to ask it directly if it’s an evil alien.  I was a bit shocked there was a moment where Amy seemed to confirm having feelings for the Doctor over the years, or at least I interpreted it that way.

Admittedly the scene with the fighter planes going into space was too goofy for me.  The tech wouldn’t have been there (and still isn’t), and I took it as something the writers wanted to do just to have their Star Wars-y scene with the Dalek satellite dish that was forcing lights to stay on in the city.

The Daleks’ trap of having the scientist built with a bomb inside of him was a great plot device.  The Doctor either goes and deals with it or stops the new Daleks.  We knew he would ultimately choose the Earth.  And as Amy is able to convince the Doctor, the results weren’t too shabby.  Let’s face it, we knew the Daleks would come back again somehow, and with a brand new iteration of them we are sure to see them again.

I must once again say that Matt Smith’s performance as the Doctor is quite good, and I think his ability to deliver those lines and mannerisms with believability helped keep the series afloat long after Tennant stepped down from the role.

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@oochillyo I will have to continue my rewatch and see if I pick up on any of those themes strongly.  It might take me a while to get around to watching the next episode, but one of these days I’ll write something about it.

“The fairy tale series” isn’t a bad way to describe season 5.  I remember one of my personal gripes with it was how the Doctor basically “reset” things and it felt kind of cheap, but from a storytelling standpoint it was everything turning out alright in the end.  Again, I will have to see what I think of the rest of this season as I resume my rewatch.  I think I am already looking at these episodes with different eyes than I once watched them with.

And I like that you and dentarthurdent are contributing to the rewatch as I’m working my way through the episodes.  It is likely you both will get a bit ahead of me, but I’ll try to keep up with the thoughts both of you post while I add my own.

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@dentarthurdent I think you analyzed and summarized that whole aspect of the episode much better than I was able to.  I think the part about choices not being clear-cut was probably right on the money.  Amy could have very well destroyed the humans to save the Star Whale, but fortunately it just so happened that wasn’t what the Abdicate button did.

@oochillyo It’s good to have a couple of you trying to analyze these episodes alongside me now, since it gives me some added perspective and thoughts I otherwise might have overlooked.  I think you raise good points about the ship on the star whale taking centuries to reach its destination, and perhaps not even having a clear destination at all.

Perhaps the people aboard the ship had grown comfortable with living that way.  Or it may just be that it simply would take even longer than a couple hundred years for the ship to reach another habitable planet, though in DW that seems kind of farfetched anyway.

I do wonder what the lifespan of the star whale would be, and whether it could live the entire trip.  It was being tortured for hundreds of years as well, which seems extreme.

I will have to watch through the season and try to determine if this love theme tracks or not.

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So I liked this a little better one my rewatch than I did back when I originally saw it ages ago.  But I still don’t think it was prime DW.

The early scene with Amy flying outside of the TARDIS was pretty iconic.  And I liked how it went from Amy talking to the Doctor to suddenly the Doctor being on the screen talking to the little kid.  Amy did this whole episode in a nightgown and pulled it off.

The “Smilers” made a creepy villain but really didn’t seem that important in the episode.  The real villain was probably the Queen and all of the voters, choosing to forget their knowledge of the happenings on the ship.

I liked the angry conversation between the Doctor and Amy at the end, and how he was planning on taking her back after resolving the issue with the tortured Star Whale.  Amy came through with her usual brashness and fixed things without making the Star Whale brain dead.  There were other things said between Amy and the Doctor that I would comment on now, but I sort of forget those moments already.

I guess the whole theme of the Doctor being relatable to this other being that’s the last of its kind, and the idea of voting or choosing to forget were good.  It would have been good to see more of the Star Whale itself.

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@dentarthurdent You made some good observations about how polarized Rory and Amy are.  I guess I wasn’t looking for that as much but they really had opposite personalities.

Also the Artraxi were like the Judoon.  I wonder if the Atraxi ever show up again.  Probably they wanted some alien race in the skies for the Doctor’s rooftop confrontation, and decided on this new one to fill the role.  I guess there’s got to be more than one set of galactic police anyway huh.

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I’ve made it to the Smith/Moffat years in my rewatch, and this rewatch is still going back quite far to over a decade ago.  Right off the bat I have to say they did a good job of packing this episode with content.  We’re thrust into the moments just after the Doctor’s regeneration, to witness the chaos that ensues in his regeneration-damaged TARDIS as it spirals madly out of control.  And then we explore three different points in time following his crash-landing.

The vast majority of the episode the Eleventh Doctor continues wearing the Tenth Doctor’s clothes, which I had forgotten about.  In fact young Amelia Pond meets her “Raggedy Doctor” while he is in these clothes, and again when he returns to her 12 years later.

The best part of the Doctor meeting young Amy was his attempts to find food that his new form liked.  The Doctor goes through about ten different things before settling on the fish fingers and custard, spitting out and throwing plates of normal foods he’d tried.  Nourished, the Doctor tends to the crack in Amy’s wall, but has to leave and take the TARDIS 5 minutes into the future.  It was cute seeing little Amy packing her things and eagerly awaiting the Doctor’s return, but unfortunately due to the Doctor’s poor sense of timing we know what’s going to happen next…

Grown woman Amy is a bit harsh to her childhood friend, but given the 12-year-gap of time it’s understandable she would be cautious.  Karen Gillan in a fake officer’s uniform was the stuff of dreams.  Her interactions with the older lady down the street about being a nurse and a nun was lol-worthy after finding out she is a kiss o’gram.

The lie about Amelia being gone from the house for 6 months turns into the perfect comeback when Amy points out she waited a lot longer than the 5 minutes the Doctor promised.  Probably the best scene here is when the Doctor says they have back-up, Amy corrects him and says there is no back-up and the Doctor rolls with it, and then the Atraxi appear and start broadcasting leading the Doctor to say once again that they do have back-up.

Prisoner Zero is the main antagonist in the episode, a ‘multi-form’ that normally looks like an anaconda thing with several sharp teeth, but it can copy the form of patients in comas at the hospital.  The funny thing is that whenever it copies people it usually goofs up and has the dog or child doing something instead of the adult.  Zero gives several cryptic warnings to the Doctor, including a far-off one about the Silence which I don’t think even comes into play during this season.

The whole plot to capture Prisoner Zero by using the photos Rory took of its other forms, along with the warnings of ‘0’s’ on every sign everywhere in the world, was pretty good.  Even better was when Zero tried to copy Amy, and brought up her dream version of her younger self and the Doctor, and the Doctor outed Zero by having Amy remember when she looked at it to make Zero appear as itself.  The Doctor calling the Atraxi back to Earth was unexpected, but makes sense when these things threatened to blow the planet up throughout the episode.

The whole of the scene showing the Doctor finding his new outfit while marching off to confront the Atraxi was well-done.  Even more amusing is how he was still mid-dress and trying to figure out the final details of his outfit while beginning conversation with them.  Finally his outfit is complete right as he reminds the Atraxi that the planet is protected thanks to him, and the scene with him stepping through the hologram of his past selves was a nice touch.

It’s funny that the episode ends with the Doctor going away another 2 years before finally coming back for Amy.  I had forgotten that she leaves the day before her wedding.  The reveal of the new TARDIS just made me think of pentagons and hexagons.  I feel like it took me seeing it a few times before back in the day to get an idea how much it had changed since the first 4 seasons.  Some of the controls got weirder, with a whole typewriter integrated into the console.

I would have to agree with @bluesqueakpip that Matt Smith “became” the Doctor pretty much a few moments into the episode.  He was able to pull off an old man in a young man’s body, with just the right touch of madness.  I don’t think Christopher Eccleston or David Tennant achieved that as quickly, but Matt Smith seems to have.  I will once again reiterate, however, that they all really grew into the role better with time.

Also the series got a brand-new intro with this episode, following the changes made to the theme back in season 3 or so.  I like the stormy clouds at the beginning, with the TARDIS bouncing around all over them through time.  I do miss the old theme with its epic violin pieces, but the new one is light and refreshing.

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@dentarthurdent

I always figured these powers came from the Master’s botched revival.  His need to consume people as well as the superhuman jumping and electrical surges seem to all stem from this energy dependency his body has since he is kind of undead.  I wonder if any of the Master Race had this problem, but apparently not.  Who could they even consume?

I recall the Winston Churchill appearance, but it has been a while since I saw it last.  I can’t remember how I felt about it.  I guess with historical figures who are no longer involved with current events maybe it isn’t as immersion-breaking as it is with current leaders.  It’s still always weird though.

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So DW is officially moving to Disney + outside of the UK.  The older seasons are remaining on HBO Max for the time being.  (But will likely move one day.)

I’m displeased with this news.  I don’t really want to get Disney + just to watch DW.  I think HBO seemed like the better place for it.

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@dentarthurdent

I don’t recall if the term Moment was used or not, but the Time Lords did mention how the Doctor would take out the Time Lords and the Daleks to end the war.

I also thought it was farfetched having the Doc jump from the spaceship through that glass ceiling and land on the hard floor.

The old people did manage to track down the Doctor pretty fast.  But they just missed bumping into the Master.  Wilf just wanted to save the guy who was already in the cubicle, but yeah he did become a liability.

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The End of Time found a way to beautifully wrap up the story of the Tenth Doctor, and the journey that began in 2005.  What begins as an attempt to cheat his fate becomes another mission to save humanity.

The Master is back, in a somewhat undead state.  Needing to feed on other people, and controlling electricity, he is a bit much in these episodes at times.  This is especially true when he is able to jump 100 ft into the air.

He succeeds in this elaborate plot to program a machine to transform every human on Earth into the Master – his Master Race.  Only spared are Donna Noble (part Time Lord) and her grandfather Wilf, who’s protected from the machine’s effects while in a square cubicle.

The Time Lords are the real antagonist this time around, having been changed by the Time War and seeking to command Time as beings of pure energy.  They sent out a signal in the Master’s brain eons ago, and use that link to escape the Time War and return.

The episode features some interesting revelations; there may be some connection between the Time Lords and the Weeping Angels of Old, Alonzo from Voyage of the Damned is into Captain Jack, The Doctor may have defiled the Good Queen Bess, and the Doctor’s mother may be alive and well.

I think they probably had a lot of fun making the whole alien bar scene with Jack, bringing back a mixture of alien costumes for at least one last moment.  The Ood were also featured prominently in the finale, singing a song for the Doctor.

Ultimately, the Doctor survives his entire ordeal with the Master and Rassilon (who is wonderfully played by Timothy Dalton), only to be forced to sacrifice his life to free Wilf from the cubicle – where intense nuclear radiation is about to be released.

The Doctor still has plenty of time to say last goodbyes to his companions, visiting them all across space.  He even goes back in time to see Rose once more.

Our regeneration episode is so powerful this time around, as the absorbed nuclear energy strikes the TARDIS and topples parts of it.  And the Doctor’s final words before his intense transformation are likely to have an emotional impact.

Perhaps the only bone I have to pick with this episode is how it names President Obama directly.  All of the Prime Ministers in the series were fictional, so it seemed a bit biased to mention the real-world president.  But the moment doesn’t detract too much from the Tenth Doctors’ final moments,  or the second half much at all.

I said the season 4 finale was the goodbye for the companions, and this special was the goodbye for the Tenth Doctor.  That was an accurate description.  As Russel T Davies signed off, he closed all major plot holes and left the house tidy for its new residents.  It truly was a movie-length extravaganza.

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@dentarthurdent

@janetteb

I will try to remember to check out Night of the Doctor and The Last Day when I get to Day of the Doctor.  I may need some reminding closer to that time, heh.  o_o

And Dentarthurdent don’t be so sure, I am not sure I’ll be able to keep up the pace I’ve been going at with the first 4 seasons and the specials.  I have The End of Time to watch through, and then I may even take a little break in-between before starting the Smith/Moffat years.  I am actually not sure how quickly things will go from series 5 onward, but I’ll be especially focused on comparing my memories of those episodes to how I view them at present.

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The Doctor gets to reuse his space suit from earlier space adventures, and winds up on Mars during the first Earth colony’s time.  It doesn’t take long for him to realize when he is, and to recall the fates of every crew member aboard.  The mission ends with all colonists dying, and a self-destruct measure to boot.

The villain in this episode was a being living in or under ancient sheets of ice.  It snuck through unfiltered water and began possessing crewmates who consumed it, or even touched one drop of it.  The infected take on a zombie-like appearance, with cracked lips and dilated pupils, and they also become eternally drenched in water.  The possessed crew mates also create water, enabling them to shoot water like a hose or apply great amounts of pressure.

For most of the episode the Doctor is trying to leave, aware that something bad goes down in history on that night, but he is kept at arm’s length with the commander, Captain Brooke.  Brooke gradually grows suspicious of the Doctor’s knowledge and wants answers from him.  Eventually she lets him go, but not before finding out what is supposed to happen to the Mars colony.

The Doctor leaves while the infected continue picking off crew mates, heading back to the TARDIS and remembering all the times he’d said he is the last of the Time Lords, and the Time Lords went away.  This results in an aha moment for the Doctor, since he realizes that without the Time Lords in control, the power to change events falls squarely on his own shoulders.  I have to wonder why the Doctor didn’t get in his TARDIS and try to move it close to the survivors at this point, but he probably didn’t want the evil space water to get on it.

This revelation sees the Doctor sealing up the damaged base that is losing air, and taking control of the Gadget robot to send to the TARDIS and teleport back over to the crew.  The Doctor succeeds and brings the Captain and two of her crew members home to Earth safely.  He declares himself “Time Lord Victorious”, and believes he can change those static points in time after all.  Captain Brooke isn’t so happy about it, however, and thinks the Doctor has too much power to decide who lives and dies.  Brooke steps inside of her home and commits suicide immediately upon entering.

The Doctor realizes that he didn’t really change events, except for the Captain was now found dead on Earth, and the other two crew mates may have survived but never exactly thanked him for it.  Ood Sigma appears before the Doctor, and he wonders if he has gone too far and is now going to be facing his next death.  He flies off in the TARDIS, intent on staying alive.

I thought this was a pretty good episode.  The monsters were frightening, and so was how easily people could become them.  The best part was probably how the Doctor questioned if he can actually change those fixed moments in time, being the last of the Time Lords and being the highest authority those decisions could come through.

I don’t know if I would go so far as to say this is the best of the 2008-2010 specials, especially because there is the fantastic The End of Time yet to come, but it is certainly somewhere towards the top of the heap.

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I’m not sure why this was called Planet of the Dead.  Planet of the Swarm probably would have been a better title.  The monster in this episode looked like a cross between a manta ray and a shark, and there were “billions” of them.  Despite the CGI, something like that would be quite frightening in reality.

The episode features guest appearances by Michelle Ryan and Lee Evans, as Lady Christina de Souza and Malcolm, respectively.

The Doctor and Christina wind up on a double-decker bus, being pursued by police cars as Christina has just stolen a museum artifact.  While going through a tunnel, the bus vanishes through a worm hole.  On the other side the people on the bus arrive on a desert planet, with the bus smashed at the top and the engine unable to start.

Nobody can go back through the worm hole without being protected in the bus, or else they turn into a pile of bones.

I liked the part where the Doctor referenced Midnight and people on buses after the passenger accused him of causing the crash by using his device with the spinning dish.

The passengers see that a storm is coming from off in the distance.  The Doctor decides to investigate the land and Christina comes along.  They bump into a crashed space ship and two fly people.  The fly people were also kind of a monster in this episode, but by this point the standard alien head and hands with a jumpsuit does seem a little overdone.  It was interesting how they used a device to understand other people, but kind of ironic (and probably saved a bunch of time) how it didn’t work the other way around.  The fly people send a drone to investigate the storm and learn it’s actually the swarm of manta ray sharks.

Meanwhile good old UNIT is screwing things up, ordering soldiers to fire on sight if anyone comes through the worm hole.  The Doctor works towards a solution, and the commanding officer still orders the scientist Malcom to close the worm hole before the Doctor is even back through it.  The Doctor has to communicate with a lot of people over the phone in this one.

Half of the episode felt like it was an adrenaline junkie’s dream, with Christina showing off her skills as a thief, sliding down cords and retrieving the spoils.  (She also talks about liking things extreme.)  This happens first when she steals the golden chalice, and again when she gets the gravity device from the fly person ship.  Ironically she would use the chalice with the gravity clamps to make the double-decker bus fly.

The concept of putting the gravity clamps on the tires and steering wheel looks fun, but there is no way a flying vehicle could be controlled that way, to account for ascending and descending.  But like so many similar instances in DW, this was one where the image of a flying double-decker bus just screams “Eff yeah, Great Britain!”, and simply had to happen for that reason alone.

I liked how the Doctor kind of bonded with Christina over his decision to steal the TARDIS when he was younger.  Though the Doctor doesn’t consider himself to be a thief in that same way, he can still relate based off of that one major decision from his life.  It was sad finding out that his reason for turning down Christina as a companion was because he simply didn’t want to lose any more people.  I’m happy he freed her from the handcuffs, and I’d like to think he had been planning her escape the whole time.

Now wait a minute though.  Did that double-decker bus just go into space?  Because Lady Christina de Souza most likely wouldn’t be surviving that.

It was an alright episode, and in a way sort of the antithesis to the previous one with the snow and olden times.  Filming for the episode took place in Dubai.  They call the double-decker bus the “200 Bus”, and this was (by some counts) the 200th episode of DW.  The bus in the episode was accidentally damaged by a crane during production, but they decided to just keep it and run with it.

When I was younger I remember I didn’t like this one as much, but it was fine.  I think I appreciate it more now.

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Tomorrow is the Power of the Doctor special!

It will probably be a long time until I get to watch it, but hopefully for all of you caught-up people it turns out to be entertaining.

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@dentarthurdent I didn’t see Night of the Doctor, but if there was anything shown in the Day of the Doctor then I probably forgot it over the years.  I have seen brief clips of McGann from that scene, in other things.  I would say at least the 8th Doctor got more exposure than the War Doctor.

@janetteb Since the Doctor made the whole Cyber King vanish, there probably wasn’t much proof left behind of it other than whatever carnage it got to cause for a few minutes.  Those info pods, if any still work, probably would have brought a lot of new knowledge to the people though.

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@dentarthurdent I’ve seen brief clips of McGann’s scene where he becomes the War Doctor, but not this entire short apparently.  If any of it was shown in the Day of the Doctor then I really don’t remember.  It will be a while until I get to rewatch that one.  I guess the 8th Doctor still got more exploration than the War Doctor.

@janetteb My guess would be the Cyber King vanished entirely a few minutes after rising to the skies and initiating its attack, so all that was left was whatever carnage it left behind.  There might have been stories, but after a little while most people probably chalked it up to some sort of mass hysteria.  It wasn’t there very long so it was hard for anyone to prove.  The info pod things the Cybermen left behind, if any still work, could reveal a lot of things to the people if they were found.

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@dentarthurdent I caught Time Crash and, since you reminded me, I just watched the Music of the Spheres.

I guess no matter what some shorts and related content is going to slip by me.  At least I will catch all of the episodes.

I thought Jackson and Rosita made a good team, and you could buy into the idea early on that they were the Doctor and companion.  Rosita’s best moment was using the axe to cut the rope so they didn’t come flying out the window.

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I recall the first time I watched this one, I didn’t know if Ten had run into a new iteration of the Doctor or not.  But I thought David Morrisey could have made a great Doctor.  I read once, the writers intended for Jackson Lake to be a version of the Doctor that could never exist.  Within the first few minutes of the episode he’s trying to lasso villains and open doors with an actual screwdriver.

The Cyber Shades are meant to be the new “monster” in this episode, I guess a cheaper cyber thing that can be ordered around.  I honestly don’t know what the hell they are supposed to be lol.  But they fit with the aesthetics of the episode and the era.

Jackson Lake’s improper use of the info pod things to fry Cybermens’ brains was cool, and saves everyone on a few occasions.  I am guessing they were property of the Cybermen, and apparently not very safe devices for them to be owning.

Someone up above pointed to the funeral scene as one of the best in this episode, and I might have to agree.  (Despite liking the rest of the episode, too.)  It was creepy and well done, with simple cyber marching and frantic guys trying to escape only to be cyber-zapped.

The Cyber King was some awful CGI but was entertaining at least.  Essentially a Cyberman mecha ship, it made the threat of the Cybermen more crazy than it already was in this episode.  It was equally funny watching the Doctor do battle with the Cyber King from a hot air balloon.  I thought the Cyber King was gonna fall and crush a whole lot of people, but it was a nice touch having the Doctor warp it all away with that device from Lake’s cellar.

One of the underrated scenes in this episode was Jackson Lake getting everyone to cheer and thank the Doctor for saving the day.  I think the Doctor is getting lonely at this point with his companions all gone, and that gave him the boost of appreciation he needed to continue on with a smile.

The Tenth Doctor really does say sorry a lot.  But I thought his exchange with Lake was good, and it was nice to see the Doctor give in and decide to enjoy a Christmas dinner with someone for a change.

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@dentarthurdent I guess my initial comprehension was that the Doctor always meets her in the opposite order that she meets him.  So like the second time he meets River is her penultimate time where she meets him.

But I think it isn’t that literal and they meet in any old wibbly-wobbly order.  Since they always use the book as a checklist of things that have and have not happened for the two of them, I guess that makes more sense.

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So in my last post on this thread I think I said it pretty well.  These episodes were the conclusion for his companions, and wrapped up the RTD storyline up to that point.  This episode literally had everything you could ask for from a finale.  I know in some of the other threads I’ve said “there is a lot to unpack here”, but that goes tenfold for these episodes.  I’m not going to cover everything, and I won’t even try to.  But I can comment on some things.

The finale showed us there are rules of regeneration that could come into play if the situation is just right, like if the time lord lost their hand and found themselves in need of a regeneration, they can heal up and absorb extra energy from the said hand if it is kept.  The hand-regeneration-energy was really generous in these episodes, and even came into play again to regenerate a part human Doctor and give time lord status to Donna Noble.

Honestly out of all the goodbyes said in the conclusion, seeing Donna lose all memory of the Doctor was probably most heartbreaking.  But she wasn’t meant to have her mind crammed full of the Doctor’s knowledge.  Rose ending up with the human Doctor was probably the best possible outcome for her, and I liked that this was also sort of a repercussion because the human Doctor got a bit unethical to “fulfill the prophecy” and kill a bunch of Daleks.  Mickey, ironically, decides to leave the alternate world and come back to the other one.  And no more time-hopping for Jack.  It was fun seeing everyone flying the TARDIS together.

The whole plot with Martha being ordered to use the key and detonate something that would blow up the world was craziness.  Unit really is different nowadays lol.  I also thought Sarah Jane coming along brought things full-circle in more ways than one, since these episodes featured the return of Davos.

I thought Davos was really well-done, and I especially liked his banter about the Doctor’s companions being like murderers who do the killing for him.  I thought it was a brilliant twist making Dalek Caan (Khan?) the one who ultimately turned on the Daleks.  The reality bomb was some real stuff, I seriously almost thought Jackie was gonna get it during that test run.  I’m still not sure I fully understand what grabbing all of those planets from different points in time and mashing them together did in relation to the reality bomb, but it was at least a fun way to reveal stuff was going on up in the sky.

I liked that there was almost this little multiverse of characters with the Sarah Jane stuff and the Torchwood stuff, and that you didn’t really need to know a lot about those shows to watch and enjoy this.  Harriet Jones came through as a real MVP for the group early on, getting them all connected together.  I do recall hearing her mention that her network thing was funded by Mr. Copper – which to me suggests it was the same Mr. Copper from the Voyage of the Damned, using his discovered wealth to do something for the Doctor.

Really I could sit and dwell on any number of things, but that was basically the episode.  The full might of the Daleks this time, but thwarted yet again.  The TARDIS nearly being destroyed but pulling through yet again with Donna in tow.  (Okay, she’s probably the realest MVP.)  Earth is driven back home safely, and all of the companions are back where they belong.  And all that remains for the Tenth Doctor is a series of solo adventures.

This really was a milestone on my rewatch, but I’ve got a few more stories to go until Ten’s exit and Eleven’s debut.  Maybe I’ll slow down a little bit.  But yeah, this really was the closest thing to a DW movie.

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Oh.  And it was funny seeing that America was suffering many deaths due to everyone turning into Adipose lol.

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I think this may very well be the weakest series 4 episode.  It was basically like It’s a Wonderful Life, except Donna had never met the Doctor and the world was impacted by several different alien events.

What bothered me most about the episode was all of the yelling.  Catherine Tate playing off of David Tennant is one thing, but Catherine Tate playing a Doctorless Donna for almost a full episode leads to a lot of audio irritation.

The trickster beetle thing was stupid.  There’s no real getting around how stupid that was.  I think they could have done this whole episode without an invisible bug crawling onto Donna’s back.  I get that they wanted to make it so this bug was draining time energy from her or something, and locking her into a decision she didn’t want to make.  I think there were better methods of accomplishing this.

Seeing Donna bump into Rose several times throughout the episode worked because she was in a sort of dream world.  In this weird in-between place while she was sitting at the fortune teller’s hut, it made sense that Rose could somehow reach her there.  It also enabled us to find out how certain things could be reverse-engineered from the TARDIS like the time machine, and gave us an idea of how some of those other brushes with the aliens went down alternatively.

Just a glimpse at life after the Titanic hit Buckingham Palace was interesting, with Donna’s family moving into a shared household.  Seeing whole constellations disappear sort of set the tone for the series finale, as did the conversation about why the Doctor kept bumping into Donna.  I had a feeling Bad Wolf were the words Rose said to Donna, but it seemed overdone a bit by this point.

This season goes by pretty fast to be honest.  At least I’ve still got the finale and the specials.

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So apparently the Doctor will regenerate in a different way and a different place than usual during the Power of the Doctor.

Doctor Who showrunner promises “very different” regeneration scene | Radio Times

I never really gave it much thought, but the Doctor has regenerated in the TARDIS with every AG Doctor.  (Well, I haven’t seen the 12th Doctor regenerate into the 13th, but apparently that must be the same.)  So I guess it will happen elsewhere.

I’m lightyears behind the rest of you all in my rewatch, but I hope it turns out to be a great finale for the Thirteenth Doctor.

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