Dr Who..? Season 10 thoughts so far.

To be honest after the last season of Dr Who i did not have much hope. While i did enjoy the Capaldi doctor from time to time i did not feel much investment in Colemans Oswald. Not really Colemans  fault, she did what she could with what she had. It was just a bad character. So i did have some reservations towards the new season. But to my surprise the new companion as Bill Potts played by Pearl Mackie is both funny and a bit of a internet snark... Calling out some of the sci-fi tropes that usually we the audience have to call out. Now i am not sure how the entire season will play out but so far it is looking good. Now there is a second auxiliary character in the form of Nardole played by Matt Lucas. A reoccurring character from the Christmas specials of late.  His role is that of chaperon and conscience to the Doctor. Making sure that the later does not go over the edge. The series does also pay some homage to the complaints over the lack of of a sonic screwdriver. 

I will get back to the subject once we are deeper in to the series. But as mentioned. So far so good.  

Until next time

Stay safe, be kind and play fair. 

Bye.

Capaldi done with Dr Who. My take.

So i missed posting last week. Sorry about that.

But that is in the past and unless you have pocketed a TARDIS, we can not change that... Speaking of that. The TARDIS that is.

My sort of favourite doctor (no that is not doctor Cox.. even if he is a close second.) Peter Capaldi is going to regenerate his posterior out of Dr Who. While i can understand him, he will be missed. Now i was not that big of a fan to begin with. He felt a bit forced and overly abrasive. But over time i grew to like his manners in the role and how he portrayed a post silence and the end doctor. A person who have seen some shit and perhaps just have grown a tiny bit tired of the role as the maid to the entire time and space. In fact it feels like his doctor was the one to break the most rules and mess up the most. 

I come in peace... To rock out.

After all tho can forget gems like this or him crashing a sort of viking warlords party. In a tank if i do not recall incorrectly. Now i have my ideas and wishes for what to come next and i would like to see a femDoc... But since Moffat have proven to be a very unreliable creator when it comes to female characters i am not sure i actually like to see that happen right now. Not until Moffat is firmly removed from anything that has to do with story, tone or direction. Great at writing scary stories... not so good with lead females. 

Anyway back to the rockstar with the phoneboot. I am sure he will be remembered fondly by many and that as per usual the person stepping in to the shoes will have a mighty pair to fill. At least we get another season with the man who dared to wear a pair of sonic sunglasses... (don´t do that again.. EVER) so enjoy and keep hope for the future. 

Who you said…? S08E10 In the forest of the night.

Here we are again, ready for a spin through time and space. Turns out we are neither going through time or space this time… Eh well a little space but it is hardly nothing. But that is not to say that this is not an interesting episode. In fact it is a very nicely paced and tense episode that strike a good balance between light-hearted banter and some good old fashion mystery. We also see Danny Pink in action and that is always fun in my mind. Now the story goes as follow.

A small girl dressed in a red overcoat (oh you not so subtle red riding hood reference) knocks on the Doctors door and tell him that she has been sent to find him as it turns out that the entirety of London, and the world have been overgrown by trees. Next we find the dynamic duo of Oswald/Pink as they are having a museum sleepover… Is this I thing… It seems I went to the wrong school when I was young. Any way as the class exit the exhibition they had been straying in they see a big slice of a tree with a strange year ring. Turns out the door is blocked by enough foliage to all but shut them in. It would seem that leaving is not as easy as it seems. As the Doctor and Maven, the girl with the red hood get ahold of Clara and set up a meeting between the two groups with the Doctor and Maven staying at Trafalgar Square and O/P + kids moving from what I assume is the museum of natural history(seeing as they are on Cromwell road) to meet up with them. With the mystery squarely afoot the Doctor take son his oldest nemesis… Wood. 

In the meantime we get to follow the by now rather horrid train wreck of lies and deceit that is Clara’s relationship with Danny as Danny slowly puts together that Clara have been lying right to his face the entire time about her relationship with the Doctor. Things take a turn for the weird when it turns out that Danny is a tiger tamer and that Maven is a conduit for the sentient forest that acts as the guardian of earth. It also turns out that earth is about to be dipped in to the fryer by a solar flare. Hence the mighty morphing power Ents… We get a very nice moment as Clara tell the Doctor that she does not want to be saved because she does not want to be the last of her kind and that this time it is the earth that saves the Doctor. But it turns out that the trees are going to save the earth with oxygen and well everything works out in a way so perfect that even Hallmark would have a hard time writing it.

As I mentioned earlier I really liked the pacing of this episode and while not a massive tension builder it keep a fairly constant level, enough to keep you invested in what was happening. With that said it is a bit sad in my mind when the companion get upstaged twice by a child. First the girl who puked in the TARDIS and now Maven would both make for much more interesting companions then Clara in my mind. But that is just my humble opinion. Beyond that this was a nice little filler episode in which exactly nothing of any real value happened and by the end of it everything was back to normal.

What does Nelson rest his eyes upon..?

But as the teaser for the next episode showed  us.. It is in every way the calm before the storm as we move up on the season finally. I was hoping to see some sort of de-asshattering of the Doctor but he remains the crazy alien. It is like they have to compensate for Tennant and Smiths understanding and well attuned Doctors. Hopefully we will see some change over the final episodes and in to the next season.

The sets in this episode were gorgeous, the organic and lush world mixing with the familiar everyday backdrop made for some very nice sets, even if I am not sure that I have ever seen London that small or empty. Also I have never seen Londoners that passive. But it was a really nice change and whatever you can say about this season it has at least had a very good variation in the sets used.

So if I should say there was a emotional theme in this episode it would be… .. . Caring and open-mindedness. But this was really just a filler.

So let´s get in to a holding pattern on the express elevator to hell as we get ready for next weeks episode.

T.

Who you said…? S08E07 ”Kill the moon”

Who you said…? S08E07 ”Kill the moon”

Oh my, this was a very interesting episode. The title of course do give away the plot on very many levels. It did not contain any space spiders… So sad.  

In short the story is as follows. The Doctor and Clara takes the young girl that the Doctor insulted and who threw up in the TARDIS at the end of the last episode in to space, the moon to be more precise. Now as I mentioned earlier it has been established that the Doctor does not have full… Or any control over the TARDIS, depending on how you look at it as the ghost in the machine so to speak simply puts the Doctor more or less at the time and place he needs to be at. This is important to understand how the Doctor can mess up such a simple thing as going from earth to the moon. Any way the trio ends up in a crashing shuttle on course to blow up the moon as it has caused a massive amount of natural disasters by the way of increased gravitational pull. Some people get eaten by poodle sized bacteria it turns out the moon is in act an egg for a space whale butterfly thing… So now the Doctor and Clara try to argue for saving the unborn creature rather than nuking it out of existence. The team sent to nuke the moon are afraid that either the creature itself or the remains of the egg-moon pose a threat for Earth. This goes back and forth until Clara calls the Doctor on what could potentially be a plot hole. They have seen the future, and the moon was still there so why do they not just leave. The Doctor brushes this aside by the way of him not being able to see all of time. That is has fuzzy spots that has yet to be decided. In the end he pretty much puts the fate of the creature in the hands of Clara in a very Capaldi-Doctor-ish kind of way. In the end the creature hatches and the Earth is safe but Clara kind of breaks up with the Doctor over the rather dick-ish move he pulled. Then again… By now one would think she would be used to this. Also Mr Pink is being set up again as a much more likeable character.

So with the stage set for an intense and conflict ridden tale of life versus death and who has the right to take life and under what circumstances. What stands out to me the most is that the Doctor is really becoming a down right arse, especially if one take the previous episode in to account. Well maybe that is a bit of a strong wording… Perhaps human is a better. Yes his complete lack of understanding for humanity as a race, played for humor as it is does not equal him not being human. He simply make a lot more mistakes based on emotions and illogical responses. I am curious to see where they go with that. Clara continues to be annoying, perhaps due to poor writing or a lack of direction but she is either very competent or an idiot-savant that does everything backwards but still comes out ahead. My personal hope right now lies in either Mr Pink or the young girl taking up the mantle once Clara becomes a Dalek or a deity... depending on what once has as a fancy. I´d really like Mr Pink because it would be an interesting dynamic. Then again I would like to see the Doctor having a female regeneration just to watch Moffat turning himself in to a knot trying to figure out how to write good female characters.   

But I digress.

All in all this was a good episode, apart from a few rather pointless jump scares it struck a good balance between a lighter tone and a much direr and darker one. It does of course also touch on a subject that is a lot more sensitive. The right to life and if such a right is inviolable… Is that the right word… If such a right can or should be infringed upon for any reason. And since I have way too few BA´s in philosophy to get even close to an answer I am simply going to walk away slowly from that subject before I manages to really insult of offend anyone. But I think this episode does touch a bit on the subject and could work as a good entry point in to a discussion about such questions. As for a theme of an episode it does lend a good amount of suspense and presents a very easy to understand conflict that most can understand.

There was also a distinct lack of… to borrow a term form dear Mr. Homes... That woman… I cannot say I miss the Missy sub-plot at all at this point in time. I might feel different once it has played out but right now it just rubs me the wrong way for some reason. It just feel cheap and lazy.

Next time we are going off the rails with the crazy train…

Dr Who you said S8E4 Listen (Spoild spoilers)

Stay for a while, and listen. 

Listen is a much improved episode from the last one. It has a very nice tension and to my delight refrain from any obvious jump scares. It keeps on building tension pretty much right up to the end. Unfortunately the end goes a bit… I would say off the deep end but this is in my mind more along the lines of rocket-assisted swan dive. 

Any way the episode begins with the doctor in rant mode as he is trying to work out if there is in fact something under our bed, that everyone at one time or another has the same dream and that there very well could be a kind of being that live it´s life hiding. After all if someone is a master of hiding, how would you ever know? I like this premise as it has that same kind of slow creed as the Angels have. It sits up a very nice scene.

We then cut to Clara and after some back and forth finds out that she is on a date with Danny Pink, Dan is very weird and the way he delivers his line and they cut the scenes with him still lead me to believe that there is something up with him. Could also be that he is the red herring. Any way the Doctor and Clara sets out to visit young Clara at the point she has the dream of someone under her bed for the first time in order to see if there is actually someone there.

It is safe to say that things to awry and they end up in Dan´s past instead but it is ok as the plot works any way by the way of deus ex TARDIS (it is established that the TARDIS always take the doctor to where he is needed.. no matter if he knows it or not… Because free will is overrated. ) So Clara pretty much set her future FRI up with a serious of ticks, but as it will turn out later this was the least of her sins. The Doctor and Clara leave after anti-confronting the thing that was supposedly hiding under Dannys´s bed. It is not too big of a stretch that this will somehow have a payoff later but for now we leave it there. Clara try to go back and patch things up with Dan after having stormed out on him earlier but ends up making things even worse. The Doctor on the other hand have picked up Dan´s grand-grandson or some such after the TARDIS pointed out that he might be important. More mystery ensues and Clara is forced to fly the TARDIS… And here is where the plot lost me completely…

You see she lands more or less under the bed of the boy that will become the Doctor… She is literally the cause for this entire episode as her being there is what sets of the Doctor and what he was thinking about in the past-future and apparently the source of some strong ideological conviction of the Doctor. Wibbely-wobbely in deed.

But all in all this is a very solid episode. Pacing is good and the banter between the Doctor and Clara is very good. Danny is interesting character on his own and while Clara more than once fall in to the mother cliché she if a fairly well rounded character in this episode. I also like that it was a creepier episode that did not rely on jump scares and gimmicks but rather worked with the suspense and ambiance to build tension. It is also really fun to see a slightly less dominant Doctor. Also extra bonus point for the very small scene when the doctor puts down the sonic screwdriver and picks up a regular one… That brought a real honest smile. 

So the theme for this episode is absolute about facing your fear and turning it to a strength… It is literally spelled out for us at least twice. But it is a good message and a decent thing to build a plot around. Next episode seems to be a light hearted thing but more about that next time.