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

[mme_hardy]

Somebody once did a table of RTD middle-aged women, giving ticks for Evil, Bitchy, and/or Dead. I don't think there were any tickless ones.

[legionseagle]

Ah, I've done a few tabulations along those lines too.

Extract from that essay that never saw the light of day:

There is nothing inherently objectionable about any of the following plot-lines:
a) Alien disguises itself as human female;
b) Alien intelligence possesses human female;
c) One or more human female characters allies herself with hostile alien forces;
d) Alien antagonists are explicitly gendered female;
e) Female leader fails to handle a crisis effectively.

It is their repetition in New Who which may indicate an underlying bias. Based on the Davies era, one sound piece of advice to anyone travelling to the Whoiverse would be, “Never trust a man in a wheelchair – and think twice before trusting something which appears female.”

“Man in wheelchair” villains – Davros, Lumic and Max Capricorn – feature in five of the sixty full-length Davies-era episodes. Twenty-one of the remaining episodes use one or more of plot-lines a) to e), and a further eight feature human-impersonating aliens, possessed beings or quislings of both sexes.8[There is one example of a possessed male – Toby in The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit (first broadcast 3 June/10 June 2006) - and two of solo aliens in male form: Victor in Love and Monsters (first broadcast 17 June 2006) and Reverend Golightly in the Unicorn and the Wasp (first broadcast 17 May 2008). Cases in which an immediately recognisable alien form (e.g. the Master) is superimposed upon human characters have been disregarded for these purposes.].

This breakdown excludes Waters of Mars, discussed at length below. This initially seemed a type (e) story, but instead developed into a fascinating exploration of the inherent corruption of Time Lord power. Had the writers explored the ideas raised in Waters of Mars elsewhere, this paper would have been significantly different.

When examining trends in New Who it is fair to note the programme writers are not shy of reusing dramatic devices. For example, there are at least twenty-two examples of self-sacrificial deaths (SSDs), where a character makes a deliberate, informed choice to suffer near-certain death to allow others to escape or wider objectives to be achieved9[Given the fluid nature of death in the Whoiverse, a death has been counted as a SSD where 1) the character expected to die and for such death to be permanent; and 2) did in fact die (irrespective of what happened afterwards)]. Interestingly, the twenty-two SSDs identified break down 14:8 female to male, including no less than three companions; Astrid Peth (Voyage of the Damned10[first broadcast 25 December 2007]), River Song (Forest of the Dead11[first broadcast 7 June 2008]) and Donna Noble (Turn Left12[first broadcast 21 June 2008]).

(It's not that I didn't think yesterday's episode was a massive disappointment, it was, it's just that I've got about 50 years of finding Who disappointing, so by the standards of disappointing episodes of Who it didn't even make my top ten)

[mme_hardy]

I've only got twenty-some (started watching in the 1970s, dropped out for awhile), and you're quite right about the top ten. My worsts of the modern era would probably be "Kill the Moon" and "Love and Monsters", but I could be persuaded otherwise.

I was ranting last night about how nobody in the family would ever be willing to watch Who with me again after that finale, and Jim said "Last of the Time Lords."

I'm really sorry the idiots decided to castrate (in the Georgian sense, before Dr. Bowdler) that essay.

[legionseagle]

I'm not sure that you can call something a castration when the objection to it was that it didn't contain balls in the first place.

[mme_hardy]

Hee!

[legionseagle]

Well, mine goes:

1- Love & Monsters. 'Nuff said.

2 - ???? Anything with Hartnell which has survived. I literally cannot listen to Barbara and Susan's early 60s RP - the men are less strangulated, for reasons I suspect but have never have proved.

????-???? Anything with the Doctor and the male cast leering at Jo Grant in her skater skirt, with extra double-plus ungood if the script requires her to go first up a ladder or companionway stairs.

????-???? Bonnie Langford. Enough said (apart from Paradise Towers, which is awesomesauce)

After which:
New Earth. Seriously, ugh, ugh, ugh plus ugh (even Zoe Wanamaker could not retrieve that pile of sexist, ableist, ageist, transphobic shit, and the so-called science is as bad as Kill the Moon, which is going some, it's just epidemiology not physics that get trashed. And that gratuitous Belsen imagery was just the faecal icing on the shit cake)
The Christmas Invasion. The destruction of Harriet Jones. Ruined Christmas for me that year.
Tooth and Claw (was that what it was called?). Trashing Queen Victoria.
The Astrid Peth one. Managed to rip off the Poseidon Adventure. Badly.
The Next Doctor
Kill the Moon


I can't remember actually seeing enough of Talons of Weng Chiang to reach a view

[mme_hardy]

I adore Talons of Weng-Chiang, although I completely respect all the people who can't watch it for all the Orientalism and stereotypes. It's ripsnorting pulp at its finest.

Oh, God, Tooth and Claw, with the unbelievable vulgar rudeness *and* the leaving werewolves untrammeled because it's all so funny. I had managed to forget that.

[legionseagle]

Tooth and Claw is horrible (plus, it's also got bonus orientalism in it for no apparent reason apart from "looks pretty". I mean, there are Buddhist monasteries in random parts of the UK - try Googling Conishead Priory - but a) I don't suppose there were many in the 1880s; b) they don't concentrate on werewolf breeding and martial arts, last time I looked - they'd have mentioned it in Ulverston if Conishead had got up to that sort of thing).

[mme_hardy]

I had forgotten the surprise!ninjas, too.

I really thought, in the first few episodes of that season, that RTD was deliberately showing the Doctor and Rose falling deep into hubris, foreshadowing retribution to come. If only.