My favourite
food scoffing nonsense to watch on TV while eating.
Enuff said
still waiting for the OMG moment though..... 7/10
Readers please note: THIS IS A POST-UK BROADCAST REVIEW – THERE WILL BE SPOILERS! Kelly says: Ah yes, we've reached that part of the series where the Doctor goes to battle with some ancient warmongers – and this time, it's Vikings. He may not be in the mood for them, but I sure am. And finally, we have someone who is …
Yes. It was annoying that Dr Who stuck with the historically inaccurate cultural stereotype of the viking horned helmets but they're hardly the first show to do so and the viking's headgear was pretty much irrelevant as far as the plot was concerned. However the electric eels were a crucial part of the plot without them there was no electricity to win the Doctor's battle with the Mire.
More to the point, why were the eels in barrels and not hovercraft?
Seriously, if you're going to nitpick, at least go for something historically verifiable!
And voltage, current, ability to make so much wire in a short space of time, shorting, earthing, not to mention the complete disregard for proper Part P certification for the setup which didn't even have a fusebox! It's a disgrace and as soon as the regulations are made in a couple of thousand years time I will be the first to raise the complaint.
ability to make so much wire in a short space of time
The wire was stripped from the spacesuit. I expect it fed power to the heating elements, so there would be a lot of it in a mesh throughout the suit's cloth.
But, yeah, eels. And electromagnetic anvils capable of dehelmeting armour. Hmm.
> VIÐ:KLÆÐAST:HORN:EKKI
Having trouble with my translation here, this appears to be something along the lines of "again, me so not horny"?
Or possibly "Something something oranges something" which is normally a fairly good backstop when stuck though in this context I'd probably question the 'oranges' bit. Noting also that so far at least two people are pretending to be less ignorant than wot I is.
for clarification, for the less norse/icelandic inclined as i:
SAY-THOU:AGAIN
WE:WEAREST:HORNS:NOT
tho i was simplifying from full icelandic grammar to make it more "runey" [not that one]
[boring factoid addendum: i started learning icelandic years ago after a discussion with my then girlfriend about "text speak" - i said how i didn't mind "tho" - and when you look at the etymology, with good cause, old english used "þo" ... i began to learn old english - as i get obsessed by trains of thought like that, but then decided icelandic (who use "þó" for though) was a more useful direction since were i live we have a lot of viking links, like our parliament "thing" ]
>... who cheered when the Sonic Sunglasses were snapped in half?
> And then booed when it turns out they still bloody worked?!
> Still, apart from that (and the stupid horned helmets) it wasn't a bad episode :-/
Hah - they missed an opportunity with the sunglasses: after the Doctor had wittered on about them being 6m years more advanced (or whatever it was) the viking should have tied to snap them and found it impossible. Then tried to hack them in half with his sword only to have the sword break!
This one was a kid's entertainment episode - particularly with the electric eels and magnetically levitating anvils[1] - so unbreakable sunglasses would fit right in.
[1] Hands-up who thought they were going to drop on the now helmet-less aliens? Yep me too.
Vikings did not wear winged helmets.
The original premise of Dr Who was to teach children about history in an entertaining way.
I think, as usual, that the BBC has failed to fulfil its remit.
I think - as someone else has pointed out - that they did it because it would be expected. Anyway, kids these days (and I have four of them) learn a heck of a lot of history from the Horrible Histories books and (particularly) the TV shows. My two eldest, who watched Doctor Who last night, were more concerned about the slightly dodgy CGI than the horned or winged helmets which they knew were probably anachronistic but really didn't care about.
Mind you, one of them has transcribed the words to the HH Kings and Queens song and stuck them on the wall of the outside loo so we can all learn something useful while "otherwise engaged".
M.
> The original premise of Dr Who was to teach children about history in an entertaining way.
>
> I think, as usual, that the BBC has failed to fulfil its remit.
You're about 52 years late for that particular whinge, the whole educational bit went out of the window when someone terrorised Carole Ann Ford with a sink plunger and the Daleks turned up.
After the last 2 x 2 part'ers, this was a slap in the face for the more serious Who fans amongst us. I am used to the comedic moments/ramblings but they took it to new heights in this episode. Doctor Who is not a fucking comedy (although many will say it is actually but it's not intentional)!
Throwing in the Benny Hill theme whilst threatening to use interstellar social media to bully the aliens with was the last straw.
This has turned into Reddit/Twitter appeasing nonsense where every moment of the show is about rhubarb rubbing showing how 'clever' they can be with plot arcs.
Don't get me wrong. I still watch and enjoy the show when it is written coherently and as a quirky science fiction 'fun' family show. But it really pushes some aspects too far sometimes. Lexx did dark sci-fi comedy better and Red Dwarf just did outright comedy a LOT better. The writers keep switching from sad to humorous with gay abandon barely giving any time to actually allow it to sink in or associate any emotional context to the characters (and with that infernal soundtrack intruding LOUDLY every minute DROWNING out the fast paced dialogue it needed subtitles enabled to understand what the hell was being said).
The show is full of some great idea's ruined by idiotic script writers. I shall still be here for next weeks episode though as I have nothing better to do on a Saturday night.
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I stopped watching Dr Who when the infantile idiot took over from David Tennant. I tried this episode on the offchance things had improved, but found it much the same. It seems to have become very American in format - an interesting idea ruined by a puerile, facetious implementation. I will not bother again.
After suffering through the durge that has been this season so far... sonic sunglasses ffs, breaking the 4th wall (are they trying to give of a deadpool vibe)... some would say homages to other movies and shows... I say poor writing and a lack of decent ideas.... Desperately trying to make Clara something other than the poorly developed 2 dimensional character she's been since the beginning... Finally, we have an episode worth watching instead of watching and cringing.
Don't get me wrong... it wasn't perfect by any means... nothing screams pandering more than those stupid sonic sunglasses... undoubtedly the worst idea of sonic something ever conceived (and something that will date the show and make it laughable in future) in a way that hasn't been done in 50yrs.
But it was fun, it was clever, it was poignant and it hinted at something dark and foreboding to come. The twist of remembering where the face came from and why he chose it was a nice touch of continuity (let's pretend Torchwood never existed and gloss over that character please).
It's by far the best episode of this season so far, a season which has been awful in my opinion... But they are finally starting to understand this doctor and capaldi is starting to step up his performances. He remains the one constant in this show... If only the plots and writing could be stepped up to match his acting abilities.
At least I have one thing to look forward to in future episodes... the (hopefully) death of Clara and good riddance to her character. It's been a noose around the show for 2 long years.
I'm actually all for Maise Williams taking on the role of companion myself... an immortal alongside a timelord. The possibilities there are endless.
I'm actually looking forward to next weekends episode now... instead of dreading it like I was after the first episode and the following 3 eps.
Is it only me who thinks that Dr. Who becoming over-hyped crap these days?
And is it only me who finds the melodramatic music distracting and intensely annoying?
If you just threw in a few four-letter words, it would metamorphose into Torchwood, that dire "adult" (read "juvenile with swearing") spin-off.
The fundamental silliness of high-tech armoured warrior aliens shown to have an intergalactic spaceship, teleport technology, and keep-you-alive-forever style automatic medical tech:
1) Losing a fight against electrically equipped Vikings
2) Running away from a scary looking animal (illusory or otherwise)
3) Failing to annihilate the Viking village and everything around it from orbit with their hugely high tech weaponry when challenged in the first place, or for that matter when worried about the embarrassing video getting out.
I mean, the Mire have teleporters. Zap yourself out, zap a bomb back in: video, what video?
I could just about have coped with the technically inaccurate electrical fighting, but too much of this episode was too daft for my liking.
The episode had some good features, but the level of suspension of disbelief required was just too much for me. Alas, this seems to be a feature of Moffat era stories. It's pretty good a lot of the time, but then things just get too silly. Someone should teach Moffat and the rest of 'em how to write good SF - I'm sure they could, if they had some lessons.
(Anyone else find themselves thinking of the Judoon? - at least until the helmets came off?)
Whilst I would dearly love a more reality-based and darker Dr Who (or something that was inspired by Dr Who perhaps?) this is still, and always has been, a kids show.
When I was a kid and I made out the cardboard box I was sitting in was a Battlestar Galactica fighter no-one bothered to tell me that
a) cardboard boxes were not sealed and did not have life-support
b) they had no heat shielding and would therefore burn up on entering the atmosphere
c) the 'peeow peeow' lasers had no chance of obliterating the cat that just walked into the living to see what the weird child was up to.
It didn't stop me enjoying myself however, and as I grew up I swore to myself that I would never forget what it was like to look at the world like a child, for alas, many people do seem to forget.
Cardboard has magical properties and acting ability, how do you think Clara has remained in the show for so long?
Personally I've enjoyed this re-boot of Dr Who up until Matt Smith, the whole I am the Doctor fear me until I get emo and now these two parters with cliffhanger endings are just plain rubbish with little distraction and poorly written plots with no sub-plots to speak of. This however is just my opinion and like moffats everyone has one.
I know Doctor Who's meant to be family entertainment with the children most in mind.
And I don't want Doctor Who to be more "reality based" or "darker" or anything (Doctor Who got dark enough for me back in the Tom Baker years). I want mind-expanding tales of the fantastic - just written properly.
I started reading decent SF when I was quite young and I appreciated all the different approaches I came across (lots of Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and "Doc" Smith - then I met the SF shelves at the local library and devoured them). The objections I raised in my previous post were issues which would have been glaringly obvious to me by the time I was 10 years old and they'd've irritated me then probably more than they do these days.
I've never forgotten what it was like to be a child and back then, when I was young, I expected the story tellers to follow the rules: childrens' stories like Rupert the Bear and Beatrix Potter worked a certain way, fairy stories and fables had rules like that, fantasy had rules like this, and SF had rules like the other. It was all clear how it was supposed to be done: all the different ways of telling stories required a certain amount of suspension of disbelief (different types permitting different things), but in return you got a certain degree of consistency.
When the rules were not followed, I was annoyed at the story teller Not Doing It Properly. Mostly, though, the stuff I read was done properly and I loved it. True realism was not required, but fictional credibility was.
Now, Doctor Who's supposed to be SF and it always has been. SF is supposed to be credible-for-a-given-value-of-credible: the writers aren't supposed to make it daft, unless comedy is the aim. Posit intergalactic armoured warrior aliens with teleporters if you like, but once you've come up with them you've got to keep things consistent to avoid it being absurd and they failed in this latest episode as far as I'm concerned.
(Douglas Adams wrote comedy SF and he kept it less daftly inconsistent than this latest Doctor Who! Mr Adams understood the nature of the genre and kept to the rules.)
There's too much daftness in big budget on-screen SF if you ask me, such as in the Matrix film series where human beings were being used as power supplies for the machines.
Yes of course use your imagination, certainly you should fight battles in the living room in your fantastic fantasised cardboard spaceship. That's not daft. That's learning to create.
I'd prefer a decently constructed SF story acted out with crude props like obviously cardboard spaceships than daftness with megabudget SFX: the special effects don't matter half as much as the story and what the special effects are supposed to represent.
Writing a story which depends on intergalactic space warriors with teleporters not thinking to use high tech long range weaponry to wipe out a serious threat like that embarrassing video is very daft, unless you somehow justify the lapse.
Which is a shame, because there was so much about this latest episode that I liked.
You make some good points and put that way I agree with you.
In fact my wife and I were discussing this last night and trying to work out what the main difference was in the writing styles and it basically came down to layers.
Some writers can write a story for both adults and children at the same time - each group taking something different from it. Children who were ahead in comprehension (typically SF readers) would get some of the ideas put across for adults, and adults would appreciate the tongue-in-cheek humour that could be both innocent and naughty at the same time.
There aren't a lot of writers like that these days (or there aren't enough writers getting scripts through written like that perhaps). Which is a shame.
I guess hybridisation is just part of the on going BBC "multi-culti" message. The other day there was a program predicting olive skinned farmers on nuclear powered tractors in Scotland in 300 years. Is it just my biases or BBC's that I am noticing all the time. On another note, isnt it funny how an organisation supposedly wedded to diversity believes that its dominance in media is a Good Thing.
"Or did the props team get lazy? Unlikely."
Right....they didn't "borrow" that entire set & wardrobe (Other than the foam-clad aliens) from The Last Kingdom/Vikings then?
The only good thing in that entire episode was Maisie's last "Time Passing" fugue. That was quality, the rest was bollocks of the first order. Don't even get me started on the lack of any historical accuracy at all.....
" [...] they didn't "borrow" that entire set & wardrobe (Other than the foam-clad aliens) from The Last Kingdom/Vikings then?"
Following in the tradition of the 1930s "Flash Gordon" series - loved by kids who paid their 6d for the 1950s Saturday morning cinema. They just used any film set that was available on the studio lot. It took the faithful parody in "Flesh Gordon" to put the flesh on the suggestive bones.
No doubt someone will do the same for "Dr Who" one day with "Dr Oooh" - if they haven't already. The mention of the Benny Hill tune means they are getting there.
Yes, the silly horned helmets, the "we are Vikings" thing, the electric eels, but who oh why was it necessary to have a printed and bound BOOK on the table, and to draw attention to it by the Doctor casually lifting it up and chucking it down again. I was surprised not to see the title as "Harry Potter and the Eels of Vikinglandia". Could this BE any more childish?
No, this is not the first time we have seen the orange spacesuit(s) in Who. They are obviously part and parcel of the magic wardrobe. I'd have been more annoyed if they'd forgotten about the spacesuits already part of the Tardis inventory and used a different design or colour.