Doctor Who 9.04

[selenak]

Part two of the unexpected two parter.



Which was entertaining in itself, but once it was over, I thought that Toby Whithouse could have put all of this in a single episode without a problem. Mind you, extending it to two made it feel Old School - that's always the reason for chase scenes in floors.

As I had speculated last week, the Doctor, not the Fisher King, was the one in the suspended animation capsule, and the ghostly Doctor a projection by the living one, though it being nothing more than a holographic projection felt a bit of a let down until I considered that the Clara hologramm last week had set it up, fair and square.

The fake Russian village in Scotland made me immediately think "nuclear test site" and wonder when the bomb would go off, but that's me having been an impressionable teenager in the 80s with the very real fear of the bomb.

Clara getting asked whether life with the Doctor made her more callous with other people's lives and she said it taught her to do what needed to be done picked up a theme from last season again. It's noticable she did wonder last season, but this season not anymore, which in turn mirrors the Doctor not asking the "am I a good man?" question anymore, since last season's finale with Missy let him arrive at a self definition which was neither good or bad but "an idiot with a box", telling stories and trying to help.

He tells a story here at the start and ending, too, which basically sums up the two parters central McGuffin, and I suspect was Toby Whithouse's pitch to Stephen Moffat. And apparantly the season opener wasn't a fluke - Capaldi can really play guitar! Anyway, it's a cool scene, but I maintain my position: the story around it could have been told in a single episode.

RIP UNIT Specialist O'Donnell. Kass and Lunn getting together at the end was nice but I suspect was mainly there because the ghosts of the team outnumbered the living by then, and it was supposed to the the silver lining. Anyway, I was glad these two characters made it out alive. And I hope this wasn't the last time we've seen a deaf person on DW. In fact, here's my new speculation: maybe the two parter was a two parter because it was a sneaky introduction of something or someone, be it character or concept? (I hope the concept wasn't the surrender planet.)

In conclusion: bring on the Vikings next week!

Comments

[nenya_kanadka]

Surrender planet has appeared before! I think in that episode with Eleven where they're all trapped in the scary hotel and getting picked off one by one by the minotaur guy? I think. One of the people there was a Tivoli guy. So that's not a new thing and hopefully will not be this season's running gag. :P

This probably could have been one episode, but I liked the characters enough to enjoy having them for two eps. I was terrified that Lunn would get killed and leave Cass alone, and ahhh the scenes with him going out among the ghosts were truly suspenseful. And Cass being completely pissed off was great. I love her. I also wonder if it would be weird to have a romance between you and your sign-language interpretor...I don't actually know if people do that IRL or if it's a bit too caretaker-y. That said, I totally shipped it last episode. They were both my favourites.

I'd figured out about the hologram way back at the end of last episode, but wasn't sure if they'd go with that or not. Though everything having been programmed into the sonic was a nice touch.

The fake Russian village entertained me a lot. And the Fisher King had me thinking Faction Paradox, even though I'm pretty sure he's not. (They give a species name, for one thing.)

UNIT Specialist O'Donnell was a wonderful fangirl without being vicariously embarrassing. Wish she'd made it out.

Quite liking this season on the whole so far. IDK about Vikings next time but then the preview for this one didn't impress me and I ended up enjoying it, so willing to give it a chance.

[selenak]

I don't rely much on trailers. I remember the one for Midnight making it look like a completely blah episode, and it ended up as (imo) one of the best of RTD-era DW, so who knows?

re: Cass, I forgot to add that I loved she didn't have to speak at a crucial moment, because of the "overcoming her condition" cliché. Instead, she communicated her way throughout and nobody patronizingly commented on it. She wasn't the Deaf Character, she was Cass, team leader, who is deaf.

[nenya_kanadka]

I quite liked the scene where she and Clara are stuck together and can't really communicate in a regular way as Clara doesn't sign and Cass doesn't hear, and Cass does the equivalent of saying fuck it and just signing furiously at her. And it more or less works.

I'm hard of hearing rather than deaf, and don't even sign, but I tend to glom onto deaf characters, especially if they're like this and get to be actual people. I think letting her be pissed off and have strong opinions on things--and not just disability-related things; I don't think there was a Very Special Conversation all episode--went a long way towards making her one of my favourites.

Also, Lunn is a total hottie. :D If all the canon ships must be het, at least let the female hero get the hot boy. <3

[kalypso]

Yes, Gibbis (the David Walliams) character in The God Complex was from Tivoli, so the surrender planet is presumably a Toby Whithouse concept.

I was a bit puzzled by the fake Russian village - I'm guessing that the location they chose happened to be done up that way already, and they added a line to say it was a fake, because making it a genuinely Russian village rather than a Scottish one would have meant rewriting most of the characters as Russian to explain why they were working there in the 22nd century?

[kerravonsen]

I was a bit puzzled by the fake Russian village

I'd come across the concept before, in reverse -- a fake English village in Russia, where they trained their spies -- so it didn't seem strange to me. And it explained why there was nobody living there.

[kalypso]

It wasn't the concept of a fake Russian village that puzzled me - it was just that it didn't seem to add anything to the plot. So my guess was that it was a genuine fake which was a handy location for filming, and they wrote in a line to explain (truthfully) why it looked Russian, rather than that the script called for a fake Russian village so they redecorated a village which happened to be deserted. In some ways it would have been simpler to say that they were in a deserted Russian village, except that, as I say, they would have had to explain why the people working there weren't Russian, eg Pritchard's company had bought the mining rights from the government and sent in their own crew.