I bring you a most important message

[Tyranicus]

Also, while Amy and Rory were arguing about jumping, they take their eyes off the statue, and it does absolutely nothing.

[keira]

Thank you for using the spoiler tag. I have not seen that episode yet so the usage of the spoiler tag is very effective in ensuring I don't get spoiled.

[Balladeer]

 

 

They didn't see anybody die. All they saw was a tombstone with their names on them.

 

A. Why would being buried in New York at a certain point in time mean they could never see the doctor again? Couldn't they just eventually settle in New York after many more years of travel with the Doctor?

 

B. Who's to say they don't just have the gravestone made with their names on it and leave it there without actually being buried there? Nobody dug up the graves to find their bodies.

 

Neither one would create another paradox. I mean, the doctor 'dressed for the occasion' to withstand his own death. Surely he could think to put up a fake gravestone...

 

There are just too many loopholes for the ending they chose. And yeah, I noticed quite a few times when the angles should have or shouldn't have moved. The statue of liberty <span style="font-style: italic">never</span> moved. Same expression in every shot with Garner and the Williams. There was little care taken to making sure they weren't looking at each other as established in blink. There was a lot of turning off the lights but at least once (chasing Garner) they moved while looking at each other when the lights were on.

 

I just expect more care to be taken with Steven.

 

[nikki.]

 

 

It's not that they can never see the Doctor again, it's the Doctor who can never see them, because he's already said his final farewell to Amy. If he went back to see them, he'd be rewriting his own past. At least that's how I understood it.

 

I dunno, it wasn't perfect, and it annoyed the heck out of me at first, but I think we just have to go along with the timey wimey stuff to some extent.

 

[Actaeon]

Will the new system have a way to label an entire thread as spoilers?

[The Loquacious Lord Grimm]

Can we get a mod and/or the participants to collect the spoilers from the old system before it vanishes? The UBB "show me" function doesn't work here.

Grazi.

 

The Silent Assassin thanks you for reading his spoiler, and would like you to know that, as a reward, you will be spared when his Immense Space Army of Doom finally escapes E-Space.

[Tyranicus]

The spoilers actually still exist in the post if you edit in raw text mode. I think I've fixed all the spoilers in this thread.

[The Loquacious Lord Grimm]

Yay! Thank you, Tyran!

 

This is probably the best thing I've read on the issue that Jewels brought up:

 

 

 

 

That shared:

 

Moslty, I have been disappointed with the writing since we came back from A Good Man Goes to War last year. Without a well-defined Myth Item/Phrase/Arc, the show has meandered quite a bit. There's nothing wrong with meandering (I mean, that was kinda half the point of the original series), and I appreciated the thought behind The God Complex; and the episode with Craig and son was fun, if cheesy.

The Wedding of River Song managed to strike an okay balance between concept, spectacle, and wrapping up plot points (also, after that performance, I would really like to see Dorium Maldovar again), and the complete mind screw with Clara's physical reveal had given me high hopes for this season. Even Brian Williams' introduction in the spectacle-heavy dinosaur episode was acceptable as character development (surprised that nobody mentioned the wedding)... and then... the momentum hit a brick wall. While A Town Called Mercy served to darken the Doctor's personality a bit, by the time we finally reached the very rushed ending of The Power of Three, if felt like the staff was having trouble coming up with something to do before finally offing the companions in such a way as to please the fans and give the Christmas episode a nice ratings boost.

 

And then we have Angels. As has been discussed to death, for a show that likes to think and goof off with ideas, the episode was shockingly poorly-thought-through.

 

 

---

The Silent Assassin believes that The Silence are the disciples of an alternate-universe Susan Foreman, who, after being trapped in a stable time loop and snatched from her grandmother, River, realized that the man who held her in custody was the most dangerous entity in the universe. He also believes in magic.

[Balladeer]

Validation!

 

I said Jersey, didn't I say Jersey?

 

Okay, I'm good now. Guess I'll roll with the timey-wimey and just do an unofficial re-write in my head.

[Student of Trinity]

The weeping angels seem like a plot idea that sounds great but is really catastrophic. They send their victims into the past, I gather from Wikipedia. Yikes: sending people into the past is the nightmare problem of all time travel plots. It's hard to avoid gaping plot holes when you send just one person into the past, so most stories make that one sending-into-the-past be the whole crux of the plot, and the plot is entirely dedicated to sewing up all the holes. So now Doctor Who has a whole race of villains who have to send people into the past every time they commit a villainy. I'd be recommending a scroll of genocide turn up soon.

[Trenton.]

Oh my Jeff freaking Vogel!

 

What have I been missing?

 

 

I have to thank both the academy, and Tyran, and the rest of the Calamity Refuge chat for introducing me to Doctor Who

[Prince of Kitties]

The weeping angels seem like a plot idea that sounds great but is really catastrophic. They send their victims into the past, I gather from Wikipedia. Yikes: sending people into the past is the nightmare problem of all time travel plots. It's hard to avoid gaping plot holes when you send just one person into the past, so most stories make that one sending-into-the-past be the whole crux of the plot, and the plot is entirely dedicated to sewing up all the holes. So now Doctor Who has a whole race of villains who have to send people into the past every time they commit a villainy. I'd be recommending a scroll of genocide turn up soon.

 

These days they're thankfully called "Scrolls of Banishment."

[Aran]

The frustrating part is that before now the Angels' time-bending was justified as a threat despite being theoretically trivial to fix: In Blink the premise was that the Doctor had lost the TARDIS and couldn't save Kathy or Billy since their messages were what brought it back to him. In the Byzantium story, they replaced it with more mundane neck-snapping powers. In the latest episode, the past-sending is back and the only thing stopping the Doctor from fixing it is that "New York is too unstable". Amy could have simply written "Pick us up at X on the date Y." on that last page and then waited there. No paradox as long as they're picked up after she wrote the message. [/rant].

[The Loquacious Lord Grimm]

[/topic_hibernation]

 

 

An impossible woman, a sulky millenarian, a new desktop theme, a set of recurring characters, and the voice of Ian McKellen bring us the only bit of savory Whovian goodness that we'll have to hold us over until April.

And of course, the big question: did this intro remind you of some things you may have seen before?

 

 

So our dear Clara Oswin Oswald is... a recurring person? I had originally thought that we were going into a fun little causality game, but it looks like the new myth arc is going to revolve around trying to understand this new "companion". I'm looking forward to it, but I cannot help but wonder if this arc comes at the immediate expense of the three major points that have remained unaddressed since the season closers past: why the Tardis was abducted in Series 5 in the first place, The Silence and their activity post-Utah, and... The Question. Okay, we presume The Silence, and nothing, respectively, but the whole Silence Will Fall arc is ongoing, and it wouldn't hurt for the writers to remind us that they remember.

But as we now have Clara/Oswin/? and this Great Intelligence to consider, will time be taken to remind us that the Fall of the Eleventh is coming, or like the past half-season, will it be pushed away (possibly until the 50th anniversary) in favor of the new shiny toy?

 

 

 

 

My greatest hope is that further developments will justify the time spent with Amy and Rory this fall as foreshadowing elements instead of mere fanservice. Time, of course, will tell.

 

EDIT: ooh. thought.

 

Rory "died" on screen three times, and off-screen once, in the 20+ episodes in which he has appeared (not to mention some self-referential humor in series 6). Clara has been effectively killed twice in the two episodes in which she appeared (succumbing to her Dalek conversion, and taking a very nasty fall indeed). The previews indicate that we're looking at a series of incarnations of a character instead of a steady companion, and so this begs the question, what good reason would these incarnations have to not eventually come with the Doctor, other than death? Also... is the fandom going to put up as much of a stink about it as they did the poorly-timed introductory "death" and death of Rory Williams?

 

 

---

The Silent Assassin suspects that Strax is actually the Master in disguise. Also, he really wants a memory worm. Edited December 26, 2012 by Lenar Labs

[keira]

*bumps*

 

I just watched the latest episode. *fangirl squees*.

 

So, thoughts? Is it just me or is the anniversary thing looking to be most epic?

[Lauren CW]

I really want him to tell me a story right now.

[Trenton.]

I really want cable TV or for Netflix to update their Doctor Who Selection already.

[Aran]

 

My reaction to nearly every arc-related episode. Except Wedding of River Song and Big Bang; those provided a bit of rare closure at least.

[Khoth]

The latest episode was even actually good. That's been a bit too rare lately.

[Actaeon]

I admit to having bit rather underwhelmed with the last season. Looking forward to the 50th anniversary, though.

[nikki.]

Everything since 'Dalek' has got progressively worse.

 

Okay, blatant lies aside, I thought there were a few good ones this series. I liked seeing a darker side to the Doctor in episodes like the Wild West one (which was average until the Doctor straight out murdered somebody). and that was obviously the direction Moffat wanted this series to go, in order to get to where we are now. I mean, the series wasn't great, but at the end of every episode I'd think "okay, that could've been better, but I AM enjoying Smith's Doctor more and more so I'll not be too harsh". I think a part of me is just glad to leave the Ponds behind, which is a bit sad, because I really liked Amy when she first joined.

[A less presumptuous name.]

A lot of how I feel about the last several episodes has already been mentioned. What I'd like to add is something that I've heard as a critique of Moffat. It certainly seems to me like he has more trouble with stretching plot across multiple episodes. In seasons past, elements have slowly built up until the finale. That wasn't so much the case this last season. Sure, there are things going on, such as "Doctor Who?", but the season finale seemed much more stand-alone. Because of this, a lot of the finale seemed to be dedicated to build-up necessary for the final climax.

[Khoth]

Moffat seems to be far better when he's writing individual episodes than when he's plotting a whole series.

 

Still, for all the build-up they had in the finale, at least it wasn't Journey's End.

[Actaeon]

I think that's a concise rendering of Moffat's issue. He does his best with an hour or longer- both of the episodes he wrote personally for "Sherlock" are brilliant, and his two parters in Who are unparalleled.