Doctor Who Series 8 (SPOILERS)

I think it was his homing arrows he blew up, makes sense he'd want to destroy them otherwise archaeologists would be wondering what the hell people were using in Nottingham back then!

I very much enjoyed Caretaker - Clara's two worlds had to collide at some point, and they handled it well for me. It's also nice we get to glimpse some of the adventures, shows us time passing and that we have adventures not merely between episodes, but between scenes. Even the start was nice - most shows would have started with the desert scene and than taken us to how they got there before them escaping. This was throwaway. Gives you a bit of a feel of epic, previously when you had a London-centric episode it would feel like "ah, budget restraints", but this manages to give a taste of the scale without blowing the actual budget on it.

Danny handled the Doctor perfectly, and was probably the first person since Davros in the Stolen Earth 2-parter to call attention to his officer qualities - why do the fighting when you can get others to do it for you? @Packard - do you think the Doctor would tell a "PE teacher" much? We saw in the second episode this Doctor has little but contempt for the military, an ex-soldier wasn't going to get far with him.

Disruptive Tendencies on the other hand... The Doctor is a rebel at heart, and it makes sense to open the eyes of a kindred spirit. I hope we see her again, and not as part of the Promised Land, but someone who the Doctor saved, not by defeating a alien machine, but giving her a glimpse of what there is out there. Sometimes its the little things that come with the most unexpected rewards.

Yes, the threat wasn't much, but that wasn't the point of the episode - it was the window dressing to the Doctor/Clara/Danny dynamic.

This series is really shaping up well, after the initial grandiose episode, we're getting a lot of character interaction that I hope will pay off.

^Rethinking the episode in light of this. Good points all around!

True up to a point. But that is not sufficient reason for Danny to act so... well, bored about the whole 2,000-year-old alien with a Scottish accent spiriting his girlfriend away in a wooden box thing.

And for all the Doctor's faults and eccentricities, he is not a complete idiot about trust. If he begrudgingly accepts that Danny is good enough for Clara, he should be good enough for a few lines of information about the wonders of the universe. If, on the other hand, this iteration of the Doctor hates the military too much to allow for the latter -- which would be a storyline I could get behind --, then he certainly won't accept him as Clara's partner either.

But most importantly, Danny doesn't have to ask the Doctor; he could ask Clara. She's been around the universe several times, and partially remembers the Doctor's last 12 lives as well. A boyfriend should have a minimum of interest in what kind of movies his girlfriend enjoys; shouldn't he also ask her which planets she's seen? In fact, shouldn't any early 21st century human ask a spacefaring other human questions, regardless of any romance?

There are ways to design emotional stances for all three characters to get around this, but this episode never did.

I prefer cagey. We know he values honesty, and that he's suffering from something akin to PTSD after an incident which caused him to leave the military (probably killing a female civilian, it's been hinted at.) He's smart and damaged, and he's a trained soldier. He's not got the same emotional responses you may expect.

Maybe I'm reading too much into the character, but I hope not.

The Doctor is also incredibly childish and can be very selfish - in his original incarnation he was quite prepared to abandon his companions (in The Daleks for one) - and petty. He may very well "come round" to liking Danny, but on his terms and time, and not without being prepared to making an ass of himself.

Again, cagey. He's letting her make the moves, and we know he's smart enough to divine information and when to press for it. The last scene indicated he knows what the Doctor is like, and Clara's response to danger is inappropriate. He's not going to ask too many questions, he'll let her tell him when she's ready. And there is also the aspect that he may not want to know. How well can a relationship last when one partner can, whilst popping out for a curry and a bottle of wine, zip a million years into the future and a billion light years distant to battle the Lesser Spotted Ultraheifers of Boggbrooshes. Every time they leave your sight, you may never see them again, never know what happened, as they're rushed to an adventure that, this time, kills them.

Maybe he's learned when it's best to be ignorant to retain your sanity and your relationship? He's seen how she responds to danger. Maybe he's frightened to know?

She's invested a lot of time and energy and determination into making her double life work the way she wants it to work. Right or wrong, she's decided how she wants to play it, and her control freak tendencies mean she'll try to hold everything together even when it's falling apart in front of her face.

The play thing was definitely a very lame invention though.

It's very likely at this point -- has seemed likely for several episodes -- that Clara will leave by choosing Mr. Pink over Mr. Doctor. She's clearly unwilling to do anything to risk losing him; see the constant lying about the weirdness in her life and the too-quick promising she did at the end of the episode. I have a bad feeling that that promise will be tested and she will not acquit herself well. It's not the healthiest of relationships in that regard.

Danny being more concerned with his girlfriend's well-being than the mysteries of the universe . . . I'll back him up on that one.

As has been said, it was really just a MacGuffin to get the other elements of the story in place.

That might happen. She's clearly not a bad person, but she needs someone to give her direction beyond "everyone calls me disruptive, so I guess that's what I am." And you may recall, we've already seen her again, as she was the defiant girl during Clara's blackout in the series opener.

Yes, we've seen Disruptive in almost every episode so far.

I don't quite see why Danny is choosing in favour of Clara or her safety by not asking her about her adventures. It would help if she had asked him not to, but that doesn't seem to be the case at all. Of course, a serious PTSD could motivate almost any behaviour, especially since the audience mostly aren't psychiatric professionals, but if that's what this story is supposed to mean, shouldn't the people around him react more strongly to his behaviour?

Maybe Danny's just burned out on "adventures" for the moment, after following his boyhood dream of going on adventures as "Dan the soldier man" and seeing how well that turned out.

Apropos of nothing, "Maths" sound very odd to my American ear. We take "Math" class in school.

You didn't invent the language.

We just made it better.

While we're speaking apropos of nothing, I'd just like to mention that the vast, vast majority of native English speakers is Indian.

Neither did you.

It's mathematics, not mathematic.

Works for me.

Anyway, I think I'm going to have to force myself not to watch any more of these until the end of the season, then have a marathon. That's how I viewed the first seven seasons, and the momentum seems to work better for me. YMMV.

I'll do BOTH!

I don't remember any line stating that he explicitly did not ask her about her adventures. He could easily have done so once they were chilling out on whoever's couch at the end. That would be the logical time, within the established story, for it to have happened.

He draws some of them out of her, she tries to frame them so as to minimize the aspects that would upset him, she's afraid he'll be upset anyway. Then when he tacitly accepts her continuing her adventures by telling her to promise to come to him if the Doctor makes her do uncomfortable things, she's so relieved that she immediately says "Yes, whatever you say."

It fits right in, narratively and emotionally.

Yes, that would have made a great scene!

I'm getting tired of half the episodes of each season feeling like people haven't done their homework. There were some good scenes in this one, but pretty much the whole first half and lots of the rest was badly put together in terms of dialogue, plotting, and at least two of the four actors.

And if you're going to have a ludicrous B movie sci-fi plot, at least show that you know it's ludicrous, and have some fun with it. Don't present it as some kind of amazing revelation that should strike us with awe.

Broke my self-imposed rule about waiting till the end of the season to do a marathon, and watched this last night. Beginning was meant to be flashback-for-foreshadowing, but ended up feeling as if the viewer had been dropped into the middle of something.

Agreed, overall it felt like a vintage Outer Limits episode...unnecessarily cheesy. Hermoine Norris should start avoiding roles where all she has to do is purse her lips and play the disapproving bitch.

This was the most scientifically awful piece of garbage I have seen in a LONG, LONG time. What an absurd premise!

But. I really liked the character interactions.

I just wish someone who wrote for the show knew science.

I long since just completely dropped the expectation that the treat of the week would be anything but laughably cheesy, I just dismiss that aspect and watch for the character interaction. If I can't take Daleks and Cybermen seriously 9and I can't) then why bother to try to take "the moon is actually an egg" seriously?

It's like something I might have written at 7 years old.
Everyone would pet me on the head, and go "very nice, Mike, you're so talented".
Then they'd walk off, and my dog hearing would catch them mumbling "fuckin' dummy".

........

. . . Basically what Chaos said. Dramatically it was a good dilemma, but the science was . . . they didn't even try to justify any of the problems, nor did they revel in the absurdity. Plus it was spiders. Ugh. And I say that as someone who enjoyed "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" for what it was.

However, given that they entirely demolished my last, predictive post, I suppose I can't talk right now.


Someone put together "classic novel" covers for the first six episodes of this season. Most of them are really good:

Oh, and since the space shuttle was taken out of a museum, I choose to believe that the Doctor has now canonically been on the Enterprise.

Or Discovery. Or Atlantis. Or Endeavour.

Anyway, a super-cheesy episode with some great lines. Also, Clara appears to be going completely bonkers. Very out of character.

"Tell me what you knew, Doctor, or I'll smack you so hard you'll regenerate!"

"In the mid-21st century, humankind starts creeping off into the stars. Spreads its way through the galaxy to the very edges of the universe. And it endures till the end of time. And it does all that because, one day, in the year 2049, when it had stopped thinking about going to the stars, something occurred that make it look up, not down. It looked out there into the blackness and it saw something beautiful, something wonderful that for once it didn't want to destroy. And in that one moment, the whole course of history was changed."

[Emphasis mine. A not-so-subtle jab at the current state of humanity's space program?]

Pretty much this. I felt the dilemma presented was very Star Trek-ian and provided something worth thinking about rather then the usual fluff, even if the MacGuffin for doing so was absurd. I enjoyed it and I am continuing to get great value out of Capaldi's performance, which is refereshing evocative of past Doctors, in this one of the First, Sixth and Seventh Docs in particular. This is the most I have enjoyed Who in years.

Well, if you can explain the science behind the TARDIS and regeneration you might be onto something....

I do get your point, but to me, it makes a difference how the gimmick is presented. TARDIS and regeneration has always been "Look at this amazing Time Lords magic!" And that's fine. But in this episode, I get the impression that the show is saying to me, "Isn't this a clever SF idea? Who knows whether the Moon is really an egg? And here are some of the consequences that would have on Earth, come on, think about it!" Which makes me think about it. And then I turn away in disgust.

Very much this. Capaldi is easily the best Doctor in terms of being The Doctor we've had in nuWho. I personally enjoyed Tennant just as much, but in other ways; this does a better job of reminding me why I love the whole series.

it's fantasy.It bothers me not. If I wanted realism I wouldn't watch a show in which the omni-powerful Nazis of the universe thought a large pepperpot was an ingenious design for symbiotic technology.

Agreed 100%.

I can buy a lot of sci-fi mumbo-jumbo but the moon as a giant egg bullshit was just too much to swallow. This episode could have had much more of a dramatic impact if the writer(s) could have found a better explanation for why the moon was breaking up. Still, as I said in my earlier post, some great moments in this episode. Capaldi definitely excels at being the Doctor