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Doctor Who Series 9 - September 19th

Fuddlemiff said:
I really liked it. I didn't think Maisie Williams was great throughout (the bit where she snuck off to talk to the bad cat in the woods was really cheesy. But I guess it's difficult to act those bits where you're talking mysteriously to yourself), and the bad cat was lame, but I really liked all the exploration of what it means to live forever. And yeah, I've got to admit, Rufus Hound was very good. Which is annoying, because I've hated him since the Richard and Judy days.
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"You can't hang me right now...because Charlie bit me!"

(The parts where she had to act sinister and evil with the cat alien were a bit bad, yeah. Fucking cat alien.)
 
That was...pretty bad.

Remember ten years ago when RTD threw in a few terribly unsubtle "war on terror" references and we all rolled our eyes? This was a whole episode built around that. Clara's MIDDLE EASTERN LOOKING NEIGHBOURS turn out to be terrorists! The Zygons are based in SOME FAKE MIDDLE EASTERN COUNTRY. The words "Zygon training camp!" are actually uttered. The Doctor's all "look at them BOMBING ALREADY" even though that bombing saved him...

Oh yeah, we're supposed to agree with the Doctor's "the humans are JUST AS BAD" thing, right? Except it doesn't work because literally every Zygon we see is evil! (Except Osgood Zygon I guess but we only ever see her in human form acting evil.) So as Rebecca Front said it's not really being paranoid when really there is an alien invasion. If they'd actually shown some "good Zygons" he might have had a point.

The Doctor just stands there saying and doing nothing when that stupid soldier is fooled by "I can't tell you your date of birth right now, but come into this church, son!"?

Katie Stewart is once again an idiot who went to New Mexico by herself then just stood there watching the Zygon transform even though she'd already been established to have a gun.

The Clara twist was good and yes she looked hotter when she was evil.
 
It was all very by the numbers, and its like they had a check list of what has been news over the last year and tried to cram it all in to be edgy.

Put the Doctor up against 20 zygons and you might wonder how he will win, put him up against 20 million and you know there is just going to be some big red button that resets it all.

Also we all know its real Kate pretending to be fake Kate, and the Doctor will just sonic the missile away.

Also, fuck off with the guitar.

We get it, Capaldi can play one, it dosn't need to be every week.
 
How about you just give us your opinion instead of just attacking mine, because that's even more old and stale than most of this years plots.
 
I watched the highwayman one with Maisie Williams and the cat villain that had escaped a local Pantomime in Gateshead.

I would rather watch the worst episode of Merlin, played by the cast of Torchwood than watch that again. Dreadful.

My family are never watching Doctor Who again.
 
I agree that this one wasn't very good. The Clara twist was good and I didn't see it coming.
 
I think it could've been good despite the heavy handed analogies to real life, as there are plenty of examples of that kind of thing in scifi. It can be very on the nose, but still be interesting and dramatic in its own right, as I think BSG often was.

I just found this episode very rushed, with a lot of things happening but little discussion about why they were happening or why alternatives weren't being considered. I suppose the biggest issue, though, is the one Wacky pointed out. Although we're told the Zygons are overwhelmingly good, the examples we see are overwhelmingly bad.
 
And why are they even on Earth? I'm surprised they didn't mention wars on their homeworld creating "refugees."
 
I didn't understand why they were on Earth at all, but maybe I missed something. There must be thousands of deserted worlds they could live on.
 
The first part of this story was badly written, where the writer seemed to think he was writing a deep and meaningful piece about race-relations, but it just came across tone-deaf and a little bit racist.

The second part was... better. Maybe it's because Steven Moffat had a co-writing credit, and he's a much better writer than Peter Harness, but since we don't know the extent of his contributions it would be stupid give him all the credit. But thankfully they dropped all of the really strange "ZYGONS = MUSLIMS" analogy, and as such it was a better episode. Not fantastic, but not terrible like last week.

But what really elevated the script was Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman and Ingrid Oliver's acting, which was fantastic. Capaldi's speech was some of the best stuff he's done on the show (so far). That is what made the episode "pretty good". If both episodes had been this quality we might have had a pretty decent two-parter!

That flashback to Kate Stewart shooting a Zygon when she could have just "Five rounds rapid" and we'd still know what she meant was odd, though.
 
I liked the Five rounds rapid bit, and the speech, but the episode loses points by trying to leach of the day of the doctor, which I still watch now and again, including two nights ago when I woke at 3AM and couldn't get back to sleep.

So not sure why Osgood is saying she never met Clara when she clearly was with her in that episode, both of her.

Also not sure of the ethics of just letting one of the Osgoods now be a Zygon that was responsible for dozens, if not hundreds of human deaths, and several zygon deaths.

Also, absolutely no mention of the pilots of the plane, or anyone else that might have been on it who wasn't Basil and Osgood.

Still nice of them to show us the plane blowing up over and over when last year we got the beheading edited out ruining an entire episode.
 
Yeah I PRETTY MUCH agree with Tomtrek that it was a lot better because it was like Moffat came in to rewrite it and got rid of all the Isis stuff and wrote that speech for Capaldi (I assume anyway.) Capaldi and Coleman were great and Osgood was good as a companion. ON THE OTHER HAND the speech still would have worked a lot better if the set-up had been better, if the actual situation with the Zygons had been cleary explained and made more sense and if Bonnie's motivations were expanded upon. So it's kind of a shame that that speech went with this story.

I don't really like the "there's always two Osgoods and one's a Zygon!" thing because it just makes it look like Zygons have no personality and we can only like them if they act exactly like a human character we already like?

And it sure is lucky Kate was holding her gun and pointing it at the Zygon all along, even though that totally wasn't what was shown last week (I mean look at the editing this week where a gun just jumps into her hands.)
 
I didn't have any hopes for this week's after the dreadful first part, but it was actually pretty good. As everyone's said, that was mostly due to the absence of the lame and badly described Evil Zygons = Good Muslims analogy that undermined everything the hero of the show was saying.

Next week's looks interesting, even if it does mean there'll be four episodes this season taking place in a futuristic research outpost trope.
 
I liked the second one a lot.

Hasn't that been kinda the thing this season? The first part is not so great and then the second one saves it.
 
I am hoping for a return to standalone episodes next year, with two parters reserved for something special.

And that if they hire good actors they actually get some good acting out of them.
 
I'm pretty sure the next one is standalone as it's written by Mark Gatiss but then the episode after is written by someone else. Unless it's a linked story like the Ashlidir ones.
 
I think it was a weird episode of Inside No. 9.

Could someone explain the ending? I get that he manipulated everything to create a story that people would watch then be converted into Sadmen. But does that mean every human in the galaxy was converted into Sandmen after this? Isn't that something the Doctor would have heard about before? Or was it just a meta "you, dear viewer, are now a sand monster!" type thing. Because that doesn't really work as I'm not a sand monster.

And next week's looks like a really blatant Harry Potter steal...

And it's Clara's last episode?
 
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