Discussion Recap / DoctorWhoS32E7AGoodManGoesToWar

Okay, so I've seen The Paternoster Gang character page and it also says something like that, so I assume it was edited out in Ukrainian translation.

And who's to say that they didn't find some sort of cure out there amongst the stars? (WAFF, WMG)

It's been my assumption ever since that episode aired that if they're now flying in a universe where these medical programs are common, they can easily find someone who can teach them how to communicate with theirs and program her to heal humans.

Which then leads to Fridge Logic when you try to work out how exactly they managed to even get back into this universe.

I think the TARDIS was probably able to disentangle the universes. It's done stuff like that before.

"I wish I could tell you that you'll be loved. That you'll be safe and cared for and protected. But this isn't the time for lies. What you are going to be, Melody, is very, very brave. But not as brave as they'll have to be. Because there's someone coming. I don't know where he is, or what he's doing. Trust me, he's on his way. There's the man who's never going to let us down. And not even an army can get in the way. He's the last of his kind. He looks young, but he's lived for hundreds and hundreds of years. And wherever they take you, Melody, however scared you are, I promise you, you will never be alone. Because this man is your father. He has a name, but the people of our world know him better as the Last Centurion."

Needs a bit more showmanship (such as the cuts between the Doctor and Rory) to be presentable but there's the quote.

Sorry, I've pressed the wrong button.

Accidental Nightmare Fuel or High Octane Nightmare Fuel? And you could always just add it and see if Wiki Magic is merciful.

High Octane, definitely Nightmare Fuel Unleaded.

Um, this is only one of maybe three times Doctor Who has scared me. This needs to be added.

It would also count as ... something due to the episode right before this one having the doctor say he can always tell Flesh, but in this one he even communicates with the baby in English (which would basically have to involve some telepathy) and can't tell.

Gonna have to elaborate. Nothing about the episode annoyed me whatsoever. I enjoyed it greatly and the only thing that annoys me is we gotta wait til Autumn for the next one...

I second Carnivac.

I agree, that was one Wham Episode ! and "massive Fridge Logic" is Fridge Horror if I got my tropes right - so how Moffat is going to address that should be interesting !

And good gracious ! Having to wait until next fall... Dang !

Okay, I'll elaborate;

The people the Doctor chose to help made no sense, and rather than choosing the most powerful of his allies he apparently chose the people most able to give Call Backs to earlier in the season and last season.

The thing about the word Doctor meaning healer in all languages makes even less sense, seeing as even on Earth it's a word that exists only in the English Language.

River Song being half Time Lord.

I'd disagree with you there; the good Doctor clearly choose his allies because their particularly skills would best fit his plan for the battle.

The word Doctor meaning healer is clearly meant to be valid in most/all of the (fictional) universe, not just earth. And, in a sense, you're wrong: the word doctor (spelt and pronounced in a similar way) does mean physician/healer in at the following languages: Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French...

Finally, River being a part Time Lord is an essential and clever part of the part, both from why she is (the effects of the Tardis) and why it matters (since you'd pretty much need one to take on the Doctor); I'd see it as good storytelling more than anything else.

Okay then, three or four human languages. That is most definitely not "every language in the universe". If the doctor was choosing his allies for their skills, then he did a piss-poor job. Why the hell force a pirate to bring his dying son to a battle when he knows literally billions of alien warriors who could do better? What about Jack Harkness? Why the actual fuck did he decide to use the shitty spitfires instead of the countless fully-armed non-shitty battleships he could have procured?

The answer is that Moffat wanted to masturbate out some more cameos. That's the only reason, and it comes at the expense of all in-story logic. As for River she's been forced into every single gorramn plot-important story under Moffat's reign, and this latest twist just reinforces how spehul a snowflake he views her as. Notice how her first response to everything is to just kill it? Notice how the doctor not only fails to call her out on this, but goes all OOC and joins in? She's a Mary Sue. Accept it.

The final problem with this shitpile is a much greater one; rather than the Doctor being the medium of this episode, he's the subject. And it's self-congratulatory as fuck. The first half was essentially "Isn't the Doctor brilliant, despite being a massive hypocrite", and the second half equates to "Nah, we lied, it's River Song who's secretly brilliant". The Doctor's main attribute has stopped being that he's smart or resourceful or has a time ship and instead become that he's famous. He's stopped being a normal person and become a celebrity, and in doing so has destroyed pretty much the entire fucking point of the series.

Also, you would by no means "pretty much need a Time Lord to take on the doctor". Making River Song into an evolved Tardis in the style of Lolita would work infinitely better and not involve raping the canon reason for the Time Lords being how they are; Rassilon and his forays into genetics, not some trademark Moffat bullshit fanwank about a time rift.

Yikes, such vitriol. I don't mean to be rude, but it seems to me that you're basically saying that you don't like River and because the focus was on her, you disliked the episode. And fair enough, that's a valid position, but one that I disagree with, so I'm done arguing this one.

No. What I'm saying is that I don't like it because it makes no sense, runs on the time-honoured Moffat tactic of self-references instead of any actual plot, and completes River Song's full conversion to Black Hole Sue.

Methinks you haven't thought this through, Malignancy. Why get the pirate and his dying son? Erm, because he's a pirate, and therefore an expert at tackling and boarding other ships Even without his Universal Driving License). You know, the exact task they needed him for. Why get Spitfires? Because they're small, light and unlikely to pop up on futuristic sensors more used to picking up big and bulky cruisers. It was supposed to be a quick surprise attack. As for Jack, I heard he was supposed to appear, but the filming of Miracle Day prevented John Barrowman showing up, so blame real life for that. You also have to bear in mind that the Doctor needs people who could be relied on to turn up, and who had a reason to turn up. I mean, he could have gone to the Cybermen given that he helped them against the Daleks in Doomsday but its unlikely they'd be convinced by something like that.

The only time I can think of River using 'kill it' as a first option is in Day of the Moon where she takes out that Silence nest (the rest of the time she either uses trickery like the hallucinogenic lipstick or legitimate channels like Silence on the Library). And on that occasion the Doctor quite clearly says he's mad, which is why he "should mind, but doesn't" or whatever his words were. Don't take your short-sightedness out on the writers

You're an idiot. Please think about what you say next time and bear in mind that the Doctor has all of time and space to choose from. Pirate is an expert at boarding eighteenth century ships, not bases on fucking asteroids. He also has a dying son he brought along for literally no fucking reason. The spitfires were cooked up in about five minutes out of desperation and are shit compared to the custom-made space fighters he could have got if he wasnt too busy making inane references to past episodes.

Also, bullshit. River carries a gun. River kills nazis and daleks for fun. This has been shown. The Doctor should by rights absolutely mother-fucking abhor her, and any Doctor previous to this one would have.

Don't take yours and the writer's stupidity out on me, and don't try to pretend you know what you're talking about.

Hey, don't insult them. S/he didn't do anything to you.

I'm merely returning their insult.

Chill-axe, guys.

River's a Mary Sue, yes, but that doesn't mean that the rest of the show can't be enjoyed.

I think the whole purpose of this was the Rule Of Cool of having a bunch of characters from past episodes show up to have a big ol' fight. Kind of stupid, yeah, but that's kind of the point. It's not supposed to be a well-thought-out masterpiece.

"You're an idiot. Please think about what you say next time and bear in mind that the Doctor has all of time and space to choose from"

When the TARDIS ultimately determines where he'll end up?

"River carries a gun"

So do most of the characters in this episode including Amy & Rory.

"The thing about the word Doctor meaning healer in all languages makes even less sense, seeing as even on Earth it's a word that exists only in the English Language. "

Don't be so literal minded, it means in those languages their word for Doctor has changed its meaning over time.

the cybermen thing is a callback to The Pandorica Opens, where Rory shows up again by killing a cyberman with a sword.

The review section is over there. The discussion page is for wiki building purposes.

You didn't already know the Doctor would get the baby back?

Probably. If you have a direct quote, add it!

Possibly a Ship Tease?

I think it's Ship Tease as well

Doesn't matter if River looks like Amy and Rory or not... it was mentioned that the baby, despite being human, does have some Time Lord DNA. River might also be the girl in the astronaut suit, in which case, she's regenerated! The Nth Doctor!

I know it doesn't matter, I just found it funny and think the casting department deserves some cred. Although nobody knew who she was going to play, so it can all, once again, be accredited to Moff standing around in the shadows rubbing his hands.

Yeah, regeneration and Time Lord DNA and all that - but that if anything should be the last thing affecting her appearance. I mean...The Nth Doctor and his Nth Face.

Talking of resemblances, anybody else think Madame Kovarian *seriously* looks like an older River?

^^^ Yes! I almost thought that that was going to be The Reveal.

So did I.

Could still happen. There's a trailer for the 2nd half of the season that show Alex Kingston wearing an eyepatch. Even though she's not supposed to live to get that old—re: Silence in the Library. But it could be, somehow.

Same here.

For most of the episode, I thought that Madame Kovarian was River, and I didn't make the distinction between the two until the end.

Incredibly Lame Pun?

I'm guessing that they'll both be the same time, but BBC America and BBC... erm, Britain, have different ideas of when summer ends and autumn begins.

Because you didn't put it there.

They're brand new, but the actors portraying Vastra and Strax have played other Silurians and Sontarans before.

The exact phrasing is 'not a drop of blood being spilled'. A bit of an Ass Pull with energy weapons and that.

Maybe he figured the soldiers brought that on themselves. After all, he didn't force them to attack the Monks or the Monks to attack back. It's hard to argue that he didn't both predict and cause it, though.

No, we already know River as a character, which is the big difference in the two tropes. If it were a brand new character to us and them saying "hi, mom!" then it would be the latter

It's a combination of a lot of things : A) River survived to become at least a reasonably decent (if rather violent) adult, so he isn't as much of a failure as he thought B) River has Time Lord DNA - maybe he's not alone anymore *again* C) This is all horribly embarrassing and ridiculous.

I'm not entirely sure where you are getting the 'creepy' from. I'd say he looks positively giddy, not turned on.

I can certainly see all these things. He gave me the "Now that I know who she is, I'm totally okay with her coming on to me" vibe. And given *who* she is, that thought is positively creepy.

could just be part of his normal celebate hero behaviour.

Huh, hadn't thought of tha- OH GOD THE FLIRTING.

The screaming!

And quite possibly the squeeing from the audience.

They've both made a joke about them being around 2 doctors. Maybe their meeting was so powerful that it affected this universe and made John Barrowman unable to appear.

It strikes me as a mix of Don't You Like It? and The Only One Allowed to Defeat You.

The (probably) humans he's speaking to most likely know enough of Sontarans to accept that that is something fundamentally different about their cultures, and that he meant it with the utmost respect.

Or at least they seem to know the nurse and get that he just says stuff like that sometimes.

I'd say it's in-universe Values Dissonance.