Doctor Who Season 8 Finale (Spoilers)

[mme_hardy]

My God, that was bad. A potpourri of bad, with each element stinking up the place, independently, so as you move around the room you are constantly catching new pockets of distinct stink. We're talking Last of the Time Lords bad.

Oh God, Missy. Leaving aside all the dreadful uses of all the stereotypes about mental illness, a villain who does self-sabotaging things "because I'm crazy!" is a very. dull. villain. For a villain to be scary, you have to believe s/he is capable of executing a plan even if that plan itself is born of madness. See Heath Ledger's Joker for an example: he was frightening because he might do something terrifying at any moment, but he wasn't incompetent.

Why was Missy's accent wandering all over the place? Because she's maaaad hahahaha?

UNIT once again wins prizes for incompetence. Yes, you totally need to knock the Doctor unconscious before anointing him President of the Earth. Why? dramatic necessity, because there's an act break somewhere around there. And yes, you totally need to put the demonstrated Mad(TM) villain on the plane instead of in a nice convenient Earthbound cell, because otherwise no big confrontation. And yes, two soldiers watching said Mad(TM) villain should do nothing while a victim puts herself in strangling range, because otherwise no demonstration that the villain is both Mad(TM) and villainous.

Cyberman!Brig had me absolutely livid with rage. Yes, show, you could have filmed Nicholas Courtney while he was still alive. He wanted to do it, and said so in interviews. I am bitter about this. Doing a plot with a guy in a tin-foil suit pretending to be Nicholas Courtney makes your dumb decision worse, not better. Why was Cyberman!Brig a nice Cyberman, while all the others were mean Cybermen? Because gushy sentimentality about old!Who, that's why.

If you're going to have a soldier explaining that he does his job so that you can sleep soundly, an Iraq War veteran is perhaps not your ideal choice. Saddam Hussein wasn't troubling my sleep, although al-Qaeda certainly was.

I'm sure all the Iraq War veterans out there are thrilled to have the first (I think) Iraq War veteran in Doctor Who be a guy who murdered a kid, and who redeems himself by un-murdering said kid.

Do I care about Clara's grief? No, I do not, because both Clara and Danny are cardboard characters.

Now that Danny is a dead Cyberman, the opportunities for him to have passed on his plastic soldier to the next generation seem limited. And wasn't that soldier supposed to come from one of future!Pink's ancestors, not just one of his relatives?

That was a zombie plot. There is NO REASON to put Cybermen into a zombie plot. Cybermen are about body horror, the rising dead are about rotting corpses with a motivating force. Pick one. If you'd picked just plain rising dead, you might not have had to shoot around three usable Cybermen suits. While you're at it, we have seen the dead bursting from their graves so often that it's a joke. The single hand rising from the grave has long passed fear and occupied the territory of running joke. Furtherurthermore, if you're going to say "the dead outnumber the living", every inch of Earth (and every molecule of London) is a graveyard. You don't have to stick to formally anointed graveyards -- there are plague pits all over the place.

Why do neoCyberdead have to consent to having their emotions erased? It was never necessary before.

The Gift of the Magi scene there at the end would probably have been pretty good if I weren't already bleeding from the ears with rage. I could dimly see that I would probably have admired Peter Capaldi losing his cool all over the TARDIS console, under other circumstances.

Moffat has become his own version of RTD. He needs to go, for the sake of my blood pressure.

In summary: What a great season, but I don't understand why it contained only two episodes ("Mummy on the Orient Express" and "Flatline", if you're curious.)

Comments

[ankaret]

I was hanging in there in the hope that Danny would turn out to be Handles the Cyberman head. Sadly not.

If they really wanted body horror, they could always have gone for the 'we all contain a few atoms that used to be part of Napoleon, Julius Caesar, an apatosaur, etc' angle (supposing that's not an urban legend) and had the dead bursting forth from the living, which would be a lot more likely than there still being anything whatever left of someone who was buried in a London churchyard in 1748.

Also, I don't know whether 'largest conurbation in Cornwall' ranks as big enough to get a Cyberman of its own, but I'm pretty certain that if a Cyberman showed up anywhere between Camborne and Redruth someone would just mutter 'Bloody incomers from Up Country!' and smack it round the back of the head with a random piece of heavy equipment from the nearest mining museum.

I did like the acknowledgment that Jenny Who existed. It gives me hope we'll see her again.

[mme_hardy]

I was pleased to have Jenny Who namechecked, and to have four marriages acknowledged. I wasn't interested enough to try to determine who the other one was in canon. (Susan's mom grandmom, Elizabeth I, River.)

> had the dead bursting forth from the living,
God, that one has me shivering even thinking of it.

[recessional]

Moffat has become his own version of RTD.

See, this is why I like you. Your aggravation with Moffat does not result in you magically retconning RTD into a flawless showrunner.

[mme_hardy]

My hatechamber is vast, and can contain multitudes. (Seriously, when you're comparing feminism-incompatible moments, paving slab!blowjobs and Harriet Jones are hard to beat.)

[recessional]

And yet I swear to god my dash and network end up full of people griping about Moffat while making pining-type statements for the OLD days of Rose and Martha and Donna and how perf they were.

It may or may not explain anything, but the director of the finale had literally a week's notice that she was directing. (She's a UBC prof so it got a mention on CBC I saw when I was looking for stuff about the huge windstorm in Victoria yesterday.)

[mme_hardy]

I know! I know! The idea of RTD as some sort of triumph of women-on-television makes me reel. Were you actually watching, people? (Donna was perfect, however. It is known.)

If the director had only a week's notice, that would explain why both the Cybermen and the graves were so badly used. The Cybermen didn't even move right. I remember when they were brought back in Season 1 (or was it 2?), Doctor Who Extra had footage of the Cybermen being trained in mime so that they moved right, and in unison. That obviously didn't happen this time around. And when you're down to only three operational Cybermen suits, it's time to retire that villain.

[kore]

After the mind-rape/wipe of Donna (MY HEART), and the awful shit that Martha got put through, AND the endless Rose looooooooove story, it just boggles me that people think RTD was better on that stuff than Moffat. And I would probably be placed in the Moff camp because Nine was My Doctor.

[muccamukk]

I quit two episodes ago. I regret nothing.

[mme_hardy]

Nor should you.

Did I mention that Santa Claus showed up at the end of this episode and announced that neither Clara nor the Doctor was happy? I anticipate the Christmas episode with a leaden heart.

Save yourself; it's too late for me.

[muccamukk]

Mom told me about the Santa thing. She was highly entertained. I said something like, "Oh, yeah?"

I think I'll go on a Big Finish kick for a while.

Have a fluffy otter.

[mme_hardy]

Awwwwwww.

I am midway through hearing "Storm Warning" for the first time. Envy me.

[batwrangler]

I think the show has just become a tottering framework on which to hang fanfic. (I had a fleeting moment of hope that maybe it would be Death as the Hogfather instead.)

[clanwilliam]

I haven't watched - apart from the 50th anniversary where I was screaming at the TV - for well over a year. I realised I couldn't bring myself to watch Capaldi in it because I love him so much.

[kore]

.........whut

The horror has just gotten more horrible

[mme_hardy]

Somebody on The Mary Sue has pointed out that in the Post-It collage Clara made to remind herself of things to say to Danny -- he was fridged in the middle of the conversation -- was one reading "three months". Which means she could be having a tragic-redemptive posthumous pregnancy.

Gag me with a contraceptive.

Re: The horror has just gotten more horrible

[muccamukk]

I'm currently memorising a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

To quote: I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

[kore]

I quit after I think the third one (it was the one before Robin Hood) after both partner and I realized we were dreading watching the next one. Maybe I'll bingewatch the whole season once it's over....or something.

[cupcake_goth]

I have not seen anything of this season yet, and I'm not sure I want to.

However, I have been warned that people are going to start asking me if I'm cosplaying Missy. Not sure how I feel about that, either.

[mme_hardy]

Nah. Tell them that both Mary Poppins and you are insulted by the comparison.

[ironed_orchid]

Hey, that's not fair! The forest episode was also an episode!

I was also confused about Danny being really dead because what about Future!Pink. Unfortunately, Moffatt does not have a good track record about characters staying dead.

Missy reminded me of the Moffatt Sherlock Moriarty, with the accent all over the place and the "Ooh, look at me, I'm so crazy and camp!" approach. Once I figured that out, it became easier to understand and harder to forgive.

He is clearly out of ideas and needs to step back.

[mme_hardy]

It has been pointed out on multiple fansites that one of Clara's stickers to discuss with Danny said "three months", so it's possible we will have a heartwarming posthumous pregnancy on the Christmas show.

Yeah, he's been repeating himself all season and is used up.

I hated the tree episode

[clanwilliam]

In fairness to Andrew Scott, his accent is perfectly stable. It's just that it's a very specific accent - I had it narrowed down to one of two schools and picked the wrong one.

For me it was actually a joy to hear a very specific accent from an actor who didn't cover it up (it's Scott's own accent - he went to Gonzaga, aka "the Zag" - drawl through your adenoids on the "a").

[genarti]

Oh blerg. I gave up on Doctor Who ages ago, and I wish I hadn't had to, but nearly every reaction post I see confirms the decision. This all sounds godawful.

(For the record, I'm terrible at keeping up with ongoing canons and I'm terrible at watching live-action shows, so I probably wouldn't be watching it anyway. But I wish I wanted to watch it, instead of feeling like I dodged a bullet.)

[mme_hardy]

Heh. I hear you. I'm in it for the long haul, but I'm certainly not enjoying it at the moment.

[kore]

I truly hated Missy from the moment I saw her (or rather, the writers who inflicted her on viewers) and nothing I ever heard about that character, including the Big Reveal (guessable from space), ever made me feel any differently. I'm really hoping Clara is ushered out on the Xmas special (I like the actress but she got the most horrible writing since maybe Martha) but if Missy will be coming BACK, that drops my interest in future Capaldi!Who to near-zero.