"Doctor Who" season 9 is going to be the most epic yet

Well, the reviews said it was a comedic romp a la "Robot of Sherwood", and in many ways it was - lots of fun moments - but room for some darker stuff too. Whilst Maisie Williams had been built up as a character of "cosmic" significance, I wasn't expecting 1) an answer to a question from the very first CapalDoc episode or 2) a furthering of the major series 9 plot.

And I certainly wasn't expecting the rather silly "the Doctor can speak Baby" ability to be a dramatic and rather chilling point of the episode, nor for it to literally save the day.

Also a link to a mural on the wall of the base in the last two eps... Coinkydink? I think not...

Fluff, but with a lot of setup and some nice character work for the Doc and Clara. Top job.

The obvious question now is what message he was sending himself when he regenerated into Six, who had the same face as Commander Maxil of the Time Lord Chancellery Guard?

Probably that he'd only be around briefly and everyone would hate him. Poor Colin...

The village girl is also in Supreme Tweeter.

That was a great episode. Other than the first two-parter with Davros (which were abysmal failures a la Moffat) this series is looking really good.

Agree with everything matthunter said. This episode had some genuine laughs sprinkled with some very dark moments.

"I'm the Doctor. And I save people."

Probably Capaldi's best moment in the series so far.

Another good ep, I think this is the first one this season where things truly 'clicked' though, worked very well.

I really liked it, and I do like the Ashilda character.

Unfortunately, Moffat has now conditioned me to expect the resolution to her arc to be bullshit.

FYI, it's Ashildr. Which translates as God(dess) of War. Not a good sign...

Hey, didn't we get a namedrop of a "Minister of War" last week? Hmm...

Amazed at the praise. I thought it was pretty poor. Worst of the season by far. Next week's looks better though.

This was actually fun! I wonder, though: Did Maisie bring one of her costumes from GoT? This looked exactly like what she wore there

A thought about Ashildr:

only thing I didn't like was the Yo-yo bit, and the idea he would expect the sunglass to impress them (to say nothing of the idea something so important to him could be so easily broken)

I was underwhelmed.

I don't think so. Unless Einarr isn't her real father.

I see no indication that she is River, but it was strongly implied that she didn't hail from that town.

I'm not so sure about that.
But I do think Moffat wants us to think the Doctor, in one of his other incarnations, has met her before in the future.

The yo-yo has been used a bit, started off in the Tom Baker years iirc and made a reappearance a few seasons back.

As for the sunglasses, seems about right for the Doctor, his childishness reaches to not thinking that they'd be broken by someone, maybe by him sitting on them, but not someone else.

One thing that would've been nice, given that it started as a kids program with some historical aspects, would have been to correct a few Viking things.

The old Target novelizations were filled with tidbits of real science - not hard sci-fi, but just perfect for a curious 10 year old learning the basics - and it'd be nice to have a some educational stuff flung in under the radar.

no HAVING a yo-yo is FINE. Not using it properly isn't, nor is having him actually thinking it would pass as a sign of Odin.

Well, the follow up with Ashildr was horribly written. They had her character speaking lines that might have belonged in the mouth of one of the show's writers, but certainly not hers. It felt like the script was written by a precocious junior high student.

^OMG, that was tedious! Pullleeeze don't let this bland little brat be the next Companion...

I don't think it's her fault. What could she do with such a poorly written character? We're lucky they didn't have her saying "But you always leave people behind, like you did in season 6 episode 10 when Matt Smith left old Amy to die!"

For another Doctor Who/Game of Thrones connection, Jenna Coleman is going to be playing alongside Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) in Me Before You.

QFT.

An engaging first episode followed by utter dreck. Yay Moffat!

Capaldi was good. Maise Williams was bland as hell. The directing was awful, which in turn made the pacing awful, and the sub-plot with the Thundercat was pointless. That said. I like the less buffoonish Doctor this episode. It felt like Capaldi has been forced to play this series as Smith/Tennant-lite, which doesn't suit him. I also thought the basic concept of the immortality concept and interesting one, save that it had been done effectively years ago in School Reunion. It speaks volumes that School Reunion managed it in a five minute scene and this was dragged out for the entire episode. It shows you that the writer was so intent on advancing what she thought was a concept worthy of top drama that she didn't put a great deal of energy into the other plot elements.

And yet Moffat co-wrote last week's, but not this week's...

The problem is that Moffat is wildly inconsistent. He has written some brilliant stuff but unfortunately that appears to be the exception, not the rule.

He's also the show runner, which means he gets final say on everything anyway.

I don't put WHO to the highest standards, it being a kid's show and everything (with it going more and more over kid's heads with all the complex, confusing meta-stories). I enjoyed the two-parter for what it was. Three points:

- GoT actors seem to be one hit wonders, with Maisie at least getting sympathy points.
- I agree on the Vikings being pictured incorrectly. Would have been easy to slip in some entertaining education. Fer chrissakes get rid of the horns, they didn't do that!

I was irritated at how badly they blew the episode. You've got Ashildr going through centuries, watching people around her die, which they did at least cover. But that was undermined by having her lines written as if she's been living inside the Doctor's head all that time. She only knew him a few hours, many centuries earlier, and she was a little girl who understood next to nothing and couldn't even conceive of flush toilets, much less the physics of space-time and rejuvenation. Toward the end of the episode they revealed that she'd somehow been watching him, which is pretty absurd because he's not everywhere though out those centuries. His actual appearances are rarer and briefer than Elvis sightings, and nobody he visits would have any clue as to what he was. So there should be now way Ashildr even suspects he didn't die centuries ago just like everyone else she'd met.

But even if that major screw up hadn't been glaring, they had her waste her remaining immortality device. I imagine that Moffet thought it would be neat if she was forced to use it on her worst enemy, which would be in keeping with the way things tend to happen on Doctor Who, but they made her arch nemesis a portly Soupy Sales. So much for that.

And her story about being an archer at Agincourt is nonsense. Drawing an English longbow takes skill, but it also takes a huge frame and huge freakin' back muscles. They might as well have wrote in a bit about her being an offensive lineman in the NFL.

Even if Moffet didn't co-write the script, surely he at least read it!

Too bad the writers didn't know about this:


Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female