Doctor Who

I was gonna say "like it was designed by H.R. Giger," but same thing.

It made me miss the Vervoids.

Yeah, see when I first heard the Vervoid design was obscene, I thought they meant they looked like vaginas, but everyone else says they look like erect penises.

It's both.

This week it was just a vagina.

edited 10th Oct '15 8:06:17 PM by unnoun

Vaginas in erect penises!

~Looks up Vervoid because he has no idea what's going on~

That...that sure is a thing. I don't think I've ever seen something that combines them like that.

Which were in vaginas.

The Vervoids were like a russian nesting doll. Only with genitalia.

I feel this comment.

You haven't even seen the penis in a cape yet.

edited 10th Oct '15 8:09:22 PM by unnoun

Shouldn't that be the other way.....

No wait. I should stop this line of thought while I can.

edited 10th Oct '15 8:08:59 PM by HandsomeRob

The Facehuggers in Alien look like vaginas on the side they hug to the victim's face, but the ovipositor that comes out to go down the victim's throat... does not.

I really wish people would stop using the term "beta male." Surely it's possible to criticize toxic masculinity without uncritically using terms that come from it directly

...Yeah, that'd be nice.

EDIT: While we're talking about Doctor Who and genitalia monsters, and in honor of the Fisher King:

edited 10th Oct '15 8:21:02 PM by unnoun

Yay people complaining about not being able to change time, when that's a plot point in like 300% of all episodes.

Two rules that seem pretty consistent in Doctor Who: if you saw or know of specific events, they have to at least appear to happen or Bad Things Happen; and if there isn't time for that, have the Doctor assert that he Just Knows that it's a Fixed Point In Time.

I guess what it is, might be that time can't be changed onscreen.

For the sake of the audience.

edited 10th Oct '15 8:43:55 PM by unnoun

Why does everyone hate yonic monsters? What did yonic monsters ever do to you?

In all seriousness, I actually liked the design.

Um...I didn't hate the episode? It certainly could have been better.

I mean, yes, the fridging of O'Donnell was unfortunate. Perhaps it would have been better if Bennett had died instead, but I think I would have preferred if none of them had died at all.

And yes, the ending was rather heteronormative in a way. I didn't actually have a problem with Cass and Land (?) hooking up, but I can see why others would.

And yes, quite a few elements were rather pointless, and the part where they cross their own timestream serves no other purpose than to give Bennett cheap manpain.

And yes, I would have appreciated it if the Doctor had actually found a way to save everyone (I'd wonder if he could have made it so that Clara's name actually came before O'Donnell's, but then we move into back into the whole bootstrap thing and my head starts to spin).

And yes, the whole bootstrap paradox thing might have been a bit overdone (though I had never heard the name of it before, so I don't mind them explaining what it is, and I think complaining that they were explaining it is being unfair to the audience members who hadn't heard of it and might not have watched nearly as much Doctor Who as others, and seems to come dangerously close to suggesting that Doctor Who should only be written for die-hard fans).

Still, I couldn't help but like it at least a little. I liked Cass throughout the whole story, and I liked her scene in the hallway with Moran. I compared her to Toph Bei Fong at the time, though of course their situations are rather different - and come on, surely it isn't that far-fetched for her to have felt the vibrations of the axe scraping across the floor (of course, I could be wrong).

I thought Clara had some good moments too, although again, she doesn't really do much as I thought she would. I missed the bit when she told him not to die until the next companion though.

So yeah, not my favorite episode, and definitely a mess, but I thought it was a vaguely attractive mess.

...I liked it better than "Robot of Sherwood", at least.

...I think.

edited 10th Oct '15 10:10:19 PM by KarkatTheDalek

...

Y'know, Doctor, you've been doing this for a long time by now.

I'm pretty sure giving yourself an idea from the future shouldn't be a big deal to you at this point.

I actually didn't think the fisher king was particularly vagina-ish when I watched the episode, though I can sort of see it now. But if your vagina looks like that you should definitely see a doctor (and not a time travelling one)

Dear lord.

I mean, I thought last week's episode was shit. This.

And we still have a Gatiss episode coming. Ugh.

If you try hard enough then anything that you can't make resemble a vagina in a penis in a vagina will resemble a penis in a vagina in a penis. Even your head.

Moving on from that, I loved the way that most of the crew were obviously not particularly bothering with grooming, to the point that Clara looks almost alien among them, which she almost is.

It makes sense, there would obviously be a fairly significant limit on supplies for an underwater base while Clara has a make-up bag that is bigger on the inside and all of time and space to shop in. Nice to see even so. I literally cannot imagine Sophie Stone wearing make-up.

I'd say I hated it, but it didn't inspire enough emotion to qualify.

The five minute explanation of bootstrap paradox paired with the end of episode explanation was just embarrassing. It's not that complicated. Moffat did in Blink with rain and tragedy, in The Big Bang with a fez and humour. Whithouse seems to think it's worth stating in its own right, because it's SO CONFUSING or whatever. No. No, it's not. It's a building block, it should never be the centrepiece.

The entire base crew between them hasn't a single character trait other than hyper-protectively-in-love, cautious/cowardly, and fan of the Doctor. The only time a character other than the Doctor furthered the plot was Cass's lipreading, and that wasn't even very relevant. O'Donnell's fridging was crass, cliche, and boring. I did not care about anything the Doctor and the Fisher King said to each other. It was so. Boring.

A couple of decent Clara moments which I half suspect were Moffat inserts/specifically ordered rewrites. Nothing else I cared about.

Clara got some fantastic scenes and I loved the Doctor speaking to the fourth wall at the beginning but, other than that, it was pretty bad. Pairing up all the survivors at the end was stupid.

Still, surprised that people are complaining that the Fisher King looked like a bloke in a costume. Most Doctor Who monsters look like a bloke in a costume. Hell, the moleman in this very episode just looked like Paul Kaye with bits of fur stuck to his face.

Come to think of it, the running gag of the mole people constantly being invaded isn't particularly funny. You'd think the Doctor would want to help them in some way.

A review. http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/doctor-who-gets-tied-bootstrap-paradox-226644

Great episode. Lots of bootstraps, a number of which weren't commented on, appearing as a number of Chekovs - Chekovs law of Time Travel? A gun that appears in the first act must be placed there by somebody in the second.

Unexpected pairings? Where. Can't be the Cass/Lunn one, because even I saw that from the beginning. Bennett for Mc Donnell was a lot more understated, y'know, it was almost like Bennett suppressed his emotions because he though his professional relationship shouldn't be harmed. Who would have thought acting meant something other than seeing how much pork product you can get into every line.

This may seem like blasphemy, but did you know there are people out there who watch Doctor Who and DON'T go on the internet to pick it apart afterwards? Who watch it in the same way as they watch Merlin or Downton Abbey, and don't expect it to be any more than entertaining? Weirdos, eh?

See those people don't explicitly think about the Bootstrap paradox, in the same way they don't worry about why turning a computer on is called Boot[strap]ing. If you ask them, they might go "err, hmm, yeah, it's strange", but they don't really care. The Opening was for them, and Whithouse saying "And after the show, I'd like to make your head implode."

I'd have liked to see the scene where the Doctor realises that he doesn't have to die. Doesn't have to be too big, just asking Clara where his body is, or checking with Bennet that she never mentioned it. At that point he knows all he has to do is make sure his Ghost is at the base - NOTHING ELSE IS FIXED.

"We know the Doctor [as lead character] can't die - why do they keep putting him in mortal danger?" Do you know who else can't die? James Bond, and yet... Is the giant asteroid going to hit the Earth and kill us all!!!!! Hmmmm, let's think? Are the quircky female and repressed man who snark at each other going to end up together? Let's face it - we've been doing that one for 400 years. And yet people go to see the film.

Anyone else note the profile silhouette of the Fisher King's hood-thingie looked like angel (biblical) wings? That scene where he towered over the Doctor - shades of Angel of Death/Judgement Day. (Side note - I sat there thinking 'How and why does that evolve. Thinking about it 'Peacock' answers that.)

The Doctor explaining the bootstrap paradox at the start felt like a concession to the "Moffat's Doctor Who is too complicated" crowd. Like, "Oh, okay. Just this once we'll spell it out to you."

It doesn't really need to be there, but I'm all for Capaldi doing monologues to the camera. The Doctor should do that more often.

Still, I didn't like the episode. It was a mediocre two-parter. New Who already has plenty of those.

Doctor Who has done bootstrap before. It didn't need pages of exposition and it didn't need the main characters going "Wow." A stable time loop is basic, not a fiendishly clever bit of plotting, mind-blowing even, because apparently avclub is... I don't even know, because they immediately go to admit it was done in Blink, Space and Time, Time Crash, Time Heist... The Big Bang, Smith and Jones, Time of the Doctor, New Earth, Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS... not to mention any other time travel story ever.

And I'm not interacting with any of those people, I'm interacting with the jerks that hang out on a website devoted to analyzing the structuralist aspects of fiction.

The change in the theme was good...the radio times explanation of the bootstrap paradox when you google its clever...