Dr. Who

[Return of the Freaker]

I don't even remember weeping angels being so much as mentioned in end of time. That was the one about the master's drumming being revealed to be the timelords trying to break out of the timewar timeloop hell shit using him as a sort of beacon.
It was also kinda shit but had funny moments like this.

Also had a kinda redemption/death thing with the master that ended up being undone with the "missy" thing.
You know, despite the fact that it's implied he became a crazy glow in the dark cannibal.

God I miss John Simm Master. A worthy successor to Anthony Ainley. Sacha Dawan too if not for the garbage stories.

 

[Mr. 0]

I don't even remember weeping angels being so much as mentioned in end of time. That was the one about the master's drumming being revealed to be the timelords trying to break out of the timewar timeloop hell shit using him as a sort of beacon.

It was towards the end of the special when Timothy Dalton showed up and punished two dissenters by making them cover their hands over their faces while everyone else escapes existence. He was making a comparison to "the Weeping Angels of old".

 

[The Lawgiver]

It was towards the end of the special when Timothy Dalton showed up and punished two dissenters by making them cover their hands over their faces while everyone else escapes existence. He was making a comparison to "the Weeping Angels of old".

That's nowhere near the same thing as whatever the fuck is going on in the new dr. who.

 

[The Valeyard]

The above clip omits the line where the Doctor asks Tecteun if what the Master said was true, but you can see it at the start of Gary's video about this episode.

 

[Jaimas]

I know nobody cares about the robot's opinion but until your dying day I will insist that the female "doctor" should have been Susan "inheriting" the TARDIS and having adventures on a quest to find her grandfather.

That honestly would have been cool. Which is precisely why it wouldn't happen.

 

[Flexo]

That honestly would have been cool. Which is precisely why it wouldn't happen.

It would have also been a great callback to the episode that started it all 50 years ago.

Plus if you did things right and made her WELL WRITTEN you could then have a spin off ready to go once she found her grandfather. Give Susan her own unique looking TARDIS and you can print out the money

God I miss John Simm Master. A worthy successor to Anthony Ainley. Sacha Dawan too if not for the garbage stories.

He hasn't clicked with me yet, and I love Ainley's haminess. I do like the clips I've seen of Sacha Dawan. Though some of them would be more fitting for some of the Doctor's other time lord foes. (Like the war master.)

 

[Standardized Profile]

It's never stopped bothering me how the OG concept of the weeping angels has been so fucked to hell and back at this point. The original premise was that they were humanoid aliens that weren't statues but had freaky time dilation shit going on with them where as long as something is looking at them they're frozen at the point they were at.

It was "quantum locking," a play on the idea that a particle can be in an superposition of two different states and it doesn't assume concrete form until someone observes it. It's a real enough physical phenomenon, scaled up to the level of an organism. But in their second appearance the writers changed it so as long as you pretend you can see, the angels can't move. Which implies it's no longer a physical phenomenon, but a choice, or at least an autonomic nervous response by the angels. And they can somehow sense that people are behaving like they can see, like they evolved a special sense that can detect sighted people but not really well.

And there's also the weirdness about an image of an angel in someone's eye sticking around and making hallucinations and talking through them and the person becomes an angel and they can also reanimate brains and make them talk and

 

[The Lawgiver]

And there's also the weirdness about an image of an angel in someone's eye sticking around and making hallucinations and talking through them and the person becomes an angel and they can also reanimate brains and make them talk and

That one was less "person becomes angel" and more "showcasing an image of one for too long may result in a new one manifesting in the image and jumping out into the physical plane or a reflection in your eyen literally climbing out of your eye killing you" or "they can kill you and then use your stolen organs to speak for them like some sort of quasi-sentient meat puppet" which admittedly is a freaky ass concept in both cases but yeah it's where shit started getting kinda kooky especially with the "pretending to see" thing . each appearance has just gotten progressively shittier for something that was a really cool concept for an alien.

 

[Standardized Profile]

So if an angel climbs out of someone's eye, is it a really tiny angel, like the size of a chess piece? What's to stop someone from just stepping on it and killing it? It's like a baby sea turtle with no sea in which to seek refuge.

 

[Gar For Archer]

It was "quantum locking," a play on the idea that a particle can be in an superposition of two different states and it doesn't assume concrete form until someone observes it. It's a real enough physical phenomenon, scaled up to the level of an organism. But in their second appearance the writers changed it so as long as you pretend you can see, the angels can't move. Which implies it's no longer a physical phenomenon, but a choice, or at least an autonomic nervous response by the angels. And they can somehow sense that people are behaving like they can see, like they evolved a special sense that can detect sighted people but not really well.

And there's also the weirdness about an image of an angel in someone's eye sticking around and making hallucinations and talking through them and the person becomes an angel and they can also reanimate brains and make them talk and

I still remember that episode, that’s about the time I started to consciously recognize that Doctor Who was kinda shit.

 

[The Lawgiver]

So if an angel climbs out of someone's eye, is it a really tiny angel, like the size of a chess piece? What's to stop someone from just stepping on it and killing it? It's like a baby sea turtle with no sea in which to seek refuge.

I think the idea is it like rapidly grows to normal angel size as it exits the eyeball reflection kinda like how the one in the video footage went from being a security cam footage replay to a weird ghost-ass hologram angel but that'd be fucking funny as shit.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

That one was less "person becomes angel" and more "showcasing an image of one for too long may result in a new one manifesting in the image and jumping out into the physical plane or a reflection in your eyen literally climbing out of your eye killing you" or "they can kill you and then use your stolen organs to speak for them like some sort of quasi-sentient meat puppet" which admittedly is a freaky ass concept in both cases but yeah it's where shit started getting kinda kooky especially with the "pretending to see" thing . each appearance has just gotten progressively shittier for something that was a really cool concept for an alien.

Yeah, the Angels started out incredibly cool and then got retarded in subsequent appearances because Moffatt, as per usual, couldn't resist fucking around with them. The core concept presented in "Blink" is extremely simple but hard to do, in a Freddy Krueger kind of way. The implication was that you never got to see the Angels' true form, and the statue was just a placeholder that the universe slotted in when the waveform collapsed. Blink supports this by messing with the fourth wall by never letting the Angels move even when it's only the audience that can see them. Even when they move on video, all you see is blurs, so their true form could be almost anything- but you'd never get to see it. Good horror stuff.

Then it just kept getting dumber, culminating in "the statue of liberty is an Angel omg!" As if there is ever a time in the last century that literally no one was looking at it, especially in the city that famously never sleeps.

 

[The Lawgiver]

Yeah, the Angels started out incredibly cool and then got retarded in subsequent appearances because Moffatt, as per usual, couldn't resist fucking around with them. The core concept presented in "Blink" is extremely simple but hard to do, in a Freddy Krueger kind of way. The implication was that you never got to see the Angels' true form, and the statue was just a placeholder that the universe slotted in when the waveform collapsed. Blink supports this by messing with the fourth wall by never letting the Angels move even when it's only the audience that can see them. Even when they move on video, all you see is blurs, so their true form could be almost anything- but you'd never get to see it. Good horror stuff.

Then it just kept getting dumber, culminating in "the statue of liberty is an Angel omg!" As if there is ever a time in the last century that literally no one was looking at it, especially in the city that famously never sleeps.

The statue of liberty being an angel episode was a shitty sendoff for the companions. "oh no I can't go back to that time period in new york and yank them out once you read the book it's a fixed timepoint!" despite there being like several cases of that not being a thing with timeline tampering shit in any other episode and there being several other existing episodes that take place in that time period. There's also the whole plothole of "why not just land outside new york and walk/drive/ride in on some other shit if time's too fucked to land there with the tardis manually?

That episode also had it less of an RNG thing and more "yeah the angels can put you in like a fucking backwards timeloop in a shitty hotel permanently till you die of old age. Why? Fuck you that's why.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

The statue of liberty being an angel episode was a shitty sendoff for the companions. "oh no I can't go back to that time period in new york and yank them out once you read the book it's a fixed timepoint!" despite there being like several cases of that not being a thing with timeline tampering shit in any other episode and there being several other existing episodes that take place in that time period. There's also the whole plothole of "why not just land outside new york and walk/drive/ride in on some other shit if time's too fucked to land there with the tardis manually?

That episode also had it less of an RNG thing and more "yeah the angels can put you in like a fucking backwards timeloop in a shitty hotel permanently till you die of old age. Why? Fuck you that's why.

Yeah, it's pretty obvious that they wanted to use the Angels to get rid of Amy and Rory, and needed to keep coming up with bullshit as to why the time traveler couldn't just go pick them up.

But the worst part honestly is how the fucked up a really solid concept by refusing to leave well enough alone. Imagine if "Midnight" had a bunch of sequels that completely ruined the critter's mystique while adding a bunch of contradictory bullshit to it.

 

[Standardized Profile]

The statue of liberty being an angel episode was a shitty sendoff for the companions. "oh no I can't go back to that time period in new york and yank them out once you read the book it's a fixed timepoint!" despite there being like several cases of that not being a thing with timeline tampering shit in any other episode

The entire sixth season was about cheating a fixed timepoint because only the history was fixed, the presumed events underlying the history could be incorrect and were subject to change or reinterpretation. History said the Doctor died at Lake Silencio, so the Doctor faked his death and preserved history. Seeing that same character give up immediately because he read a mass market paperback was baffling. Granted, they said the timestream was screwed up in that era of New York, but ... I don't know, show up five years early and wait, or go to New Jersey and take a train, then buy a plot in the cemetery and put a headstone over the empty grave? And River, who had independent time travel technology, didn't try anything either. If she had zapped away and come right back with horrible injuries because of timestream damage, I'd understand Amy telling them not to come back for her ... but River just gave up immediately and encouraged her mother to exile herself in the past. This is the woman who broke time because she didn't like fixed points. For her parents, I think she'd at least think about it for a few minutes. You know, "last time was a disaster, but this time I'll do it differently," that sort of thing.

I liked Moffat's first two seasons because he was trying to tell long stories that utilized Doctor Who's unique qualities, and he was mostly successful. This one was lazy and, as much as it was superficially related to his other work, was really disconnected from it.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

The entire sixth season was about cheating a fixed timepoint because only the history was fixed, the presumed events underlying the history could be incorrect and were subject to change or reinterpretation. History said the Doctor died at Lake Silencio, so the Doctor faked his death and preserved history. Seeing that same character give up immediately because he read a mass market paperback was baffling. Granted, they said the timestream was screwed up in that era of New York, but ... I don't know, show up five years early and wait, or go to New Jersey and take a train, then buy a plot in the cemetery and put a headstone over the empty grave? And River, who had independent time travel technology, didn't try anything either. If she had zapped away and come right back with horrible injuries because of timestream damage, I'd understand Amy telling them not to come back for her ... but River just gave up immediately and encouraged her mother to exile herself in the past. This is the woman who broke time because she didn't like fixed points. For her parents, I think she'd at least think about it for a few minutes. You know, "last time was a disaster, but this time I'll do it differently," that sort of thing.

It's one of those cases where the contrived writing yanks you out of the story because you, the viewer, can trivially solve the problem but know that the problem is behind the camera. The only way to get rid of a companion for good is to kill them (well, until the Capaldi era) and Moffatt loves his speshul girls way too much to do that, so you get a perfunctory excuse and that's it. It's the same low-effort storytelling that gave us the damp fart called "the hybrid."

 

[Commander X]

 

[Kerr Avon]

God I miss John Simm Master. A worthy successor to Anthony Ainley. Sacha Dawan too if not for the garbage stories.

If only Simm was less of a schizosperg and more the defiance near the end of LotT , I could agree. At least he had better innings with Life on Mars.

 

[Standardized Profile]

Morality's a great flaw. Put someone in a position where doing the moral thing is self-defeating, what do they do? Give up your morals, you're a hypocrite. Stick to them, you're stubborn and inflexible and maybe even worse off than if you had just bent a little. Morality doesn't guarantee a happy ending. It doesn't mean you win. It doesn't even make other people like you.

But you can't distill that down to two lines of dialogue and conclude "no morality gud."

 

[PLB]

The entire sixth season was about cheating a fixed timepoint because only the history was fixed, the presumed events underlying the history could be incorrect and were subject to change or reinterpretation. History said the Doctor died at Lake Silencio, so the Doctor faked his death and preserved history. Seeing that same character give up immediately because he read a mass market paperback was baffling. Granted, they said the timestream was screwed up in that era of New York, but ... I don't know, show up five years early and wait, or go to New Jersey and take a train, then buy a plot in the cemetery and put a headstone over the empty grave? And River, who had independent time travel technology, didn't try anything either. If she had zapped away and come right back with horrible injuries because of timestream damage, I'd understand Amy telling them not to come back for her ... but River just gave up immediately and encouraged her mother to exile herself in the past. This is the woman who broke time because she didn't like fixed points. For her parents, I think she'd at least think about it for a few minutes. You know, "last time was a disaster, but this time I'll do it differently," that sort of thing.

I liked Moffat's first two seasons because he was trying to tell long stories that utilized Doctor Who's unique qualities, and he was mostly successful. This one was lazy and, as much as it was superficially related to his other work, was really disconnected from it.

I'm pretty certain that river talks about visiting them in the past and asks why he hasnt and he gives a non commital answer, this might be giving the writers too much credit but the doctor could just be lying and seeing that they live a long happy life without him lets them live it. It was a long term story element that the doctor would just come into their lives and fuck it up and that it wasnt really fair on them.