Doctor Who (38) 12:03 -Orphan 55

nixie

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Sorry it's a day late, didn't realise we didn't have a thread yet

After Graham wins a holiday and they're all transported to a luxury resort the team discovers all is not what it seems, toxic some might say.

Again I enjoyed this, it's got faults but its entertaining. Looks like we are going to see a green theme running through this series.
 
A truly awful episode. A lot of pointless running around and shouting and then preaching about climate change. If they want to know how to do a show about climate change right just watch the Worzel Gummidge Christmas specials. Crook hit the mark perfectly.

The only tiny bright spot was Bradley Walsh's impeccable humour.
 
It was very poor. Every idea has been done far better elsewhere. The bit where they negotiated with the monster to go in the cage was rubbish. When they found out it was *GASP* Earth was so underwhelming. I'm not going to say I saw it coming but I was not even slightly surprised
 
A Doctor Who fan at work said this episode was the worst TV he's ever seen and he was angrily shouting at the TV. It seems to have the lowest rating of any Doctor Who episode ever on IMDB. Blink has 9.8/10. :oops:

I haven't watched episode 3 yet and wonder whether to continue watching, as there's so much else to watch, and I feel like I'm still watching Doctor Who because I have done for the last ten years. The Timeless Child thing has me intrigued though...
 
It's a shame the story couldn't have just been a lovely holiday at a spa where the Doctor becomes increasingly frustrated at not finding a problem to solve. Much hilarity would have ensued.
A story where the Doctor creates a conspiracy out of nothing because they can't believe somewhere this nice, really is this nice...
Oh!!! Little drinks with umbrellas in them!
 
Yes, this wouldn't have needed much tweaking to be a comedic episode.
I expected the monsters to be only a few inches tall when they finally revealed more than their impressive grins. An opportunity missed.
Benny's marriage proposal followed by a request to be shot could have come from a stand-up comedian. Take my life, please!
Had the spa tourists not been wearing Breathe Right strips on their noses, they might have found themselves snoring as loudly as an oxygen-generating Dreg. Loading all the unarmed guests into the company personnel carrier to rescue Benny was a questionable decision, unless you saw a resemblance to a circus clown car.
Having the TARDIS gang teleported not elsewhere but elsewhen to experience the death of their own planet put an incongruous Planet of the Apes twist on what might have been a fun outing.
 
OK, I do have the words.

Well...one.

Dreadful.

The first two were not that great but better than much of the first series (though the point of comparison is pretty low). But this episode was just dreadful. The only thing making me continue to watch is the hope that the Timeless Child story is developed.
 
Part of the problem is the writers are trying to hard, we don't need equal rights or green themes, what we want is an entertaining time travel show that's funny, a little scary, silly but enjoyable doesn't matter if doesn't make sense at times as long as it is enjoyable.

Jodi is a good doctor, she's maniac, eccentric and has a sense of humour, Bradley is an excellent companion.
Ryan and Yaz are surplus to requirements. The writers are trying to make them central to the show, it doesn't work, like trying to fit square pegs into round holes.
 
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Part of the problem is the writers are trying to hard, we don't need equal rights or green themes, what we want is an entertaining time travel show that's funny, a little scary, silly but enjoyable doesn't matter if doesn't make sense at times as long as it is enjoyable.

Jodi is a good doctor, she's maniac, eccentric and has a sense of humour, Bradley is an excellent companion.
Ryan and Yaz are surplus to requirements. The writers are trying to make them central to the show, it doesn't work, like trying to fit square pegs into round holes.
Well said!
Doctor Who is always going to include a few clunkers. Devoted fans have learned to accept the bad with the good. We don't have to like them, but we keep watching.
Remember the "Sleep No More" eye-booger monster episode? :LOL:
 
Well, this was better than that dreck with the spiders last series, but that's the most positive thing I've got to say.

Everything else I wanted to say has been said except for one thing, and to be honest, this has been done by lots of films/shows/games, but it always bothers me. WHY do monsters take time roaring at their intended victim? Real apex predators don't stand conspicuously in front of their prey flexing and roaring! Real apex predators stalk and/or chase down their prey and murder the hell out of them with no warning! God, that trope annoys me every time I see it...

Also, what were the Dregs eating?
 
WHY do monsters take time roaring at their intended victim?

Because the monsters aren't the villains of the piece and they don't really kill anyone. In fact, in this episode, I don't think the Dregs actually kill anyone at all. In Chibnall's Who, the villains are always the humans. In Chibnall's first series, none of the aliens were actually villainous and they weren't a serious threat. It's the same pattern in the current series.

Although, to be fair, the aliens being the villains hasn't been a thing since Who was re-booted in 2005. Throughout the Davies era, people were implied to die although you didn't have to see them actually die. So when the Daleks carpet-bombed the Earth into oblivion and Chris Eccleston's incarnation of the character sobbingly declared that he couldn't take it any more (even though he'd created the situation), then you didn't actually have to see who died. Even though a few billion people did, in fact, die. And the Doctor did nothing about it.

And then in the Moffat era, the only people who actually died were the metaphorical fan-insert characters - who died because Moffat basically hated the fans and therefore he created a couple of characters to explicitly represent the fans so he could then kill those characters permanently. Nobody else actually died through Moffat's tenure, even though they appeared to. At the end of every episode the "Great Big Reset Button" got pressed and everyone who died magically survived. Indeed the entire point of "Testimony" in the Christmas episode at the end of Moffat's tenure is to basically say that nobody ever dies.

At present, it seems to me that Who is irredeemably stuck on its own political philosophy that an "alien" cannot be "the villain" or "evil" and that anything that is "evil" or "the villain" must automatically be "human" and "white" and "male". Just look at the Dregs. Whilst the costumes are great they're all sexually indeterminate and implicitly all male (ok, so they could all be female - honestly, I don't think that's a better scenario than if they're all male or if they're a mix), they're all white and all explained to be human living in a conformist society. I mean, the episode explicitly states that we're going to be them. All of us. Whilst this is commendably socialist, it's not great science fiction. I mean, it has a message but it's not like it has any interesting ideas going on.

To be fair, I did enjoy this episode up until it stopped and the Doctor gave us a Ferris Bueller-style lecture for the last three minutes. I think Jodie Whittaker is a good actor, and I think she could be great as the Doctor, but I do think that the writing leaves a lot to be desired.
 
Because the monsters aren't the villains of the piece and they don't really kill anyone. In fact, in this episode, I don't think the Dregs actually kill anyone at all. In Chibnall's Who, the villains are always the humans. In Chibnall's first series, none of the aliens were actually villainous and they weren't a serious threat. It's the same pattern in the current series.

Although, to be fair, the aliens being the villains hasn't been a thing since Who was re-booted in 2005. Throughout the Davies era, people were implied to die although you didn't have to see them actually die. So when the Daleks carpet-bombed the Earth into oblivion and Chris Eccleston's incarnation of the character sobbingly declared that he couldn't take it any more (even though he'd created the situation), then you didn't actually have to see who died. Even though a few billion people did, in fact, die. And the Doctor did nothing about it.

And then in the Moffat era, the only people who actually died were the metaphorical fan-insert characters - who died because Moffat basically hated the fans and therefore he created a couple of characters to explicitly represent the fans so he could then kill those characters permanently. Nobody else actually died through Moffat's tenure, even though they appeared to. At the end of every episode the "Great Big Reset Button" got pressed and everyone who died magically survived. Indeed the entire point of "Testimony" in the Christmas episode at the end of Moffat's tenure is to basically say that nobody ever dies.

At present, it seems to me that Who is irredeemably stuck on its own political philosophy that an "alien" cannot be "the villain" or "evil" and that anything that is "evil" or "the villain" must automatically be "human" and "white" and "male". Just look at the Dregs. Whilst the costumes are great they're all sexually indeterminate and implicitly all male (ok, so they could all be female - honestly, I don't think that's a better scenario than if they're all male or if they're a mix), they're all white and all explained to be human living in a conformist society. I mean, the episode explicitly states that we're going to be them. All of us. Whilst this is commendably socialist, it's not great science fiction. I mean, it has a message but it's not like it has any interesting ideas going on.

To be fair, I did enjoy this episode up until it stopped and the Doctor gave us a Ferris Bueller-style lecture for the last three minutes. I think Jodie Whittaker is a good actor, and I think she could be great as the Doctor, but I do think that the writing leaves a lot to be desired.

I think we've been watching very different shows since the reboot.

Implied death allows for people to have a much messier end. A horrific mauling on the classic show was a slow claw swipe, and the actor falling slowly to the floor. In New Who when a werewolf grabs a guy off screen, we can well imagine that what's left won't fit in a jar.
People died on-screen all the time in both the RTD and Moffat eras. Dalek had a pretty eye-watering body count, and we saw pretty much all of it. We saw a Slitheen tossing a guy around like a rag doll, and that was just in series 1. Moffat's tenure included the Weeping Angel two parter that killed everyone except Team Tardis, a random woman being disintegrated on-screen by a Silent, and those are just the ones I can remember without thinking too hard.

Aliens are still villains in the Chibnall era. We had Timshaw, the witches who turned out to be aliens, the Cassavin in the last episode, and as for the evil always being white and male, we had female villains in this episode, Lenny Henry in the last episode and an Asian Master.
 
A lot of people did not like the last season for the comments on society it delivered - I personally did not mind and for example loved the Rosa Parks episode - but this episode - ufff
I love a good environmentalist message but this was just way too blunt - beside the glaring plotholes about not being able to teleport into or out of Tardis. I would have liked it if the destroyed planet was not earth and instead of the russian novosibirsk sign htey find a sign from another planet and Yaz would be like "Hey weren't we there like two days ago?" Tha could have gotten the message across without hitting us over the heads with it.
Also the pure stupidity of going after Benni was creating tension for tensions sake - as @M. Robert Gibson said - way to many stupid subplots.
I loved the cross platform virus thing - that was fun.
 
I didn't think it could get any worse than the hyper actively mindless / ludicrous Spyfall, but this one definitely wins the award for worst Doctor Who episode I have ever seen - and that includes the low-budget original run's more glacial episodes. The ecological message at the end was delivered with all the subtlety of a nuclear bomb.

I continue to feel so sorry for Jodie. She is such a good actress and deserves so much better than this mostly execrable dialogue and breathless direction.
 

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