Doctor Who Season 8 Finale (Spoilers)
Nov. 9th, 2014 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mme_hardyMy 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.)
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?
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.)
no subject
Date: 2014-11-10 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-11-10 05:21 pm (UTC)Have you seen him as Uncle Rory in The Crow Road?
no subject
Date: 2014-11-10 05:25 pm (UTC)Not The Crow Road yet.
no subject
Date: 2014-11-23 09:53 pm (UTC)