Doctor Who

Possibly, but then again, I'd say you could make a case for any number of Doctors having even the slightest amount of autistic coding to some extent. That said, as someone who actually has autism, Eleven doesn't really seem autistic to me; just very goofy and out of touch. Now Twelve on the other hand, he's someone you could make a helluva case for, at least in his first season or so. No social skills, self-centered, very impersonal, etc. Even now, he's still got some of that coding. It's just that he's done his best to get better and improve, which he has, and that's something that I can very much relate to.

edited 8th May '17 10:52:32 AM by kkhohoho

I don't think any doctors are deliberately coded (coding is when you make a character be a thing but don't explicitly say they're a thing, right?) to be autistic, but many of them do have autistic traits and reading them as autistic is not exactly far fetched.

I'd argue that a lot of writers end up writing autistic characters without even knowing. Our media has so many autistic coded characters in it without acknowledging autism.

This is so fucking true. I can't tell you how many characters I've seen that for all intents and purposes have autism without anyone actually saying that they have autism. The writers probably don't even know what they're doing half the time, which is in all likelihood a good thing, because if they did, then we'd probably get Rainmen up the whazoo.

If the writers aren't doing it intentionally, does it even count since any links are coincidence?

Honestly, seeing what happens when writers are trying to do it intentionally, I'll take what I can get.

edited 8th May '17 12:04:32 PM by kkhohoho

Well, they are writing autism characters, it's just what they know themselves to be writing is "quirky character trope", because they've not stopped and thought about it.

Honestly I think studios and writers should own their shit, if they write a character and accidently create a character, say, BPD people identify with, you should accept that, read up on it, and have it said in universe, "this character has BPD"

Even psychologists are like "Anakin Skywalker is the perfect rep of BPD". I have BPD and I love him.

With the Doctor at least (11 especially), I think the idea is that he's obviously on a different wavelength than everyone else (human). His priorities are different, he has different standards, he's really smart in some ways, but really dumb in others and so on. I don't think you could say he's autistic, if only because the character's literally an alien. Of course he's on a different wavelength.

I think that's one of the issues with 10. Tennant is a fine actor, but I don't think he can pull off the "truly, genuinely alien" thing, at least not with the scripts he got. He mostly just seemed like a smart, vaguely eccentric human to me. Matt Smith absolutely could pull that off. (And honestly, in terms of acting ability, I think Matt Smith blows David Tennant out of the water. Again, Tennant's a good actor, but I think, especially from the other stuff I've seen both in, Smith is a great actor.)

Probably. But his Purple Man was fantastic, no denying that. It was the role he was born to play.

Tennant managed to make the character more alien than the scripts intended, but mostly by licking the entire set and sticking all the props in his mouth.

Alright, just watched "Knock, Knock"...

Rather lackluster, I'm afraid to say. The supporting characters were pretty weak, and were mostly just cannon fodder without any meaning behind their "deaths", which makes their returns feel unearned. Occasionally there would be a flash of something interesting (like that one girl saying that she didn't want to be trapped), but none of that went anywhere.

I was also disappointed with the Landlord. In the beginning, he was appropriately spooky - polite, but shifty - and the bit about how everyone but him has to pay their dues had potential, but in the end he had kind of lost all sense of menace. Which might have been the point, but the stuff with his mother feels unearned. Speaking of which, why did he lie and tell her that she was his daughter? What does he get out of it? Is it some Freudian thing? I feel like this is a question that should have been asked.

And the ending was pretty rushed, and once they're out of the house, it just...ends. I'd say that they should have cut out some superfluous scenes earlier to focus on the big reveal, but quite frankly, I was more interested in the Doctor hanging out with Bill's friends than anything else - the idea of the Doctor hanging out with a bunch of young people intrigues me. Quite honestly, I would have built the episode around that, rather than whatever they were going for here.

So yeah, this season has just been okay for the moment. The Pilot and Thin Ice were good, if not the greatest episodes, Smile was doing well until the end, where it just kind of fell apart a bit, and this one was just kind of...eh. Nothing terrible, but nothing remarkable. Some potential here, but ultimately unrealized.

Hopefully, next week kicks things back up a notch. Mathieson is 3-for-3 for me so far, so I trust him to do something interesting, even if the "trapped on a space station" plot isn't necessarily one that I find inherently attractive. I will confess that the back half of the season has me more excited than the front, so hopefully that's where the best stuff is at.

11 is very much coded to be similar to Matt Smith, look at some of his interviews, there's a lot of him in that character and a lot of what comes across as Autistic traits are things that I believe are Matt Smith's personal traits.

Now if that's an argument for Matt Smith possibly having Autistic traits is something I belive it's rude to speculate on.

The mother to daughter thing seems to have been a way for him to maintain control over her, also he had to explain why he apearned to be older than her, it was all part of him lying not only to Bill and her friends but also to his mother.

Oh and a thing of note, the Doctor was referred to as grandfather in this episode.

I thought Eleven was coded to be the second coming of Patrick Troughton. I mean, just look at him; the way he acts, the way he speaks, even the freaking bowtie on his suit. It's as if Patrick Troughton's Doctor was transplanted onto a young twenty something's body half the time. Not to say that Matt Smith doesn't add plenty of his own unique touches to the character, because he does, but it's plain to see who Smith was inspired by in terms of past performances and who he sought to emulate, not that there's anything wrong with that.

edited 8th May '17 10:10:33 PM by kkhohoho

I suppose I figured it was something like that, but I feel like such an aspect of his character could have come across better. I do think it makes somewhat more sense now - it seems more likely that a daughter would be subservient to her father than a mother would be subservient to her son, and he needed her on her side if he wanted to keep her alive.

I still feel like it was a rather poorly executed twist, though. Not to mention, why tell the lie to Bill and her friends when they haven't even met her - wouldn't it have been simpler to just tell them that he didn't have any family?

There's a good story here, I think, but I feel it was poorly implemented. Maybe if they had introduced her as staying in the house with him, appearing normal only to reveal her wooden form later...maybe that could have worked.

Yes, I do think there's a version of this episode that's pretty good, or at least better than what we got (which, again, is not awful, merely subpar). But I think it's one that needs the mother in it from the beginning. Also, more creepy wood imagery.

And again, Bill's friends would need to have been characterized better. Maybe they should have dropped one of them, and had the mother - posing as his daughter - take their place in the narrative? Maybe she could have deliberately lured them there so that they could be absorbed, revealing herself as being in on the whole thing once she's lured Bill into a trap, or something like that, and then the story plays out as it did in the actual episode?

I mean, it would require some reworking of a few scenes, and maybe dropping one or two, but I think it could work. What do you guys think?

Also, I did notice the "grandfather" thing, yeah. And "The Pilot" drew attention to that picture of Susan, too. I wonder...

I think my problem with this episode is I was expecting a standard "haunted house" gothic horror episode but instead got something kind of weird and alien. Would a more classical horror episode have worked, or is that overused? I don't know.

My other problem was the ensemble cast was just disappointing. I was expecting an interesting ensemble like the cast of class but everyone just felt forgettable so the "deaths" had no weight in the first place.

I thought this episode was actually quite bad. The aliens made even less sense than they usually do in DW. (Lets mash together random things! wood! bugs! from space! that control wood! that eats people! and can keep people alive!) The roommates were forgettable placeholders, not characters. (While watching, I was constantly comparing it to The God Complex, where the the people "trapped in a haunted house" were actually memorable and had personalities.) The only one whose name I remember was Pavel, who liked to listen to music (and for most part did not feature in the episode).

Also, the Doctor being a "famous lecturer" that every recognizes ("is that the Doctor? so cool") was grating.

edited 9th May '17 4:28:30 AM by maus42

Considering that all the roommates apparently go to the same university where the Doctor gives random lectures where he tends to ignore the selected topics and has been around for ages, I don't think it's that weird.

Oh, it makes sense in story. (Sort of. Do people really go into "this is so cool" swooning mode when they meet their university's 'rockstar' professors? One would think that such behavior would be embarrassing to all parties concerned.)

But what I was really talking about... I did not like that the writers decided to go that route. Doctor's modus operandi (when he is running solo on Earth and not e.g. working for UNIT) is to come from nowhere, be a weird nobody, flash a bit of pscyh paper to fool the guards, and act like he knows what he is doing.

This is noticeably different than an alter ego / secret identity ploy sustained for many episodes.

Well, he is quite obviously doing something different this season, what with the Vault and all.

And I like this dynamic. It shakes things up a bit.

Is it? I don't really see how it is.

edited 9th May '17 1:11:17 PM by KarkatTheDalek

The Doctor seems especially drawn to people who have strong reactions to him, and to his way of life. I remember an episode during Matt Smith's tenure where the Doctor seemed very close to hostile towards someone who was unimpressed by the Tardis.

Spoiler-Free Oxygen Review (yet is full of potentially spoilery teases/...go figure)

The cliffhanger is likely The Doctor going blind, which sticks for the next three episodes until the regeneration is triggered at the end of the Monk saga and his eyesight coming back is the start of a long-haul transition just like 10

As long as we don't have Twelve spending the last three episodes waltzing around and visiting every single person he's ever met, as well as destroying the TARDIS while saying he doesn't want to go, I'm cool with that.

edited 10th May '17 1:01:47 PM by kkhohoho

The classic backdrop for masked costumed hero with a secret identity: it's of utmost importance to Clark Kent that nobody finds out he is Superman. Sometimes it even drives the plot and there might be even some convoluted and silly schemes. ("I'm her grandpa")

Doctor usually makes temporary conman trick and poses as whoever or whatever the psych paper happens show to the unwitting person. It does not matter that much to him, though, and by the end of the episode you have Daleks screaming DOCTOOO (or the equivalent). But the premise is that he is Doctor being Doctor, not Clark Kent being Superman.

Posing years incognito as a university professor, but still going about managing it the way Doctor manages his "secret identities"... it does not click. I hope they don't emphasize on that too much. It feels like a plot hole in making that I can't exactly pinpoint.

edited 10th May '17 3:48:53 PM by maus42

Well, I'm not going to fault the show for doing something different, especially when the point is that he's doing something different. I think it would be a mistake to pigeonhole the Doctor here - if he needs to do something long term, then he can do something long term.