Reg hacks see the woods or the trees In the Forest of the Night El Reg's resident Doctor Who fans – Brid-Aine Parnell, Gavin Clarke and Jennifer Baker – have come together to discuss the plot of tonight's episode, In the Forest of the Night. Please note: THIS IS A POST-UK-BROADCAST REVIEW – THERE WILL BE SPOILERS! Brid-Aine says: After the tentative forward momentum achieved in Mummy on …
@Robert E Harvey: I suspect that's what the writer was thinking, but if so, he needed to work harder at it. As it was, it was an awful ending - no real explanation, just "magic" and a touch of "happily ever after" that, once again, would have been more in place on CBBC. Oh, and on a planet of 7 billion people, the pivotal individual just "happens" to be a pupil at Clara's school? Well - there was a vague hint of another Missy connection; but if it was meant to be significant, it needed laying on with a much, much bigger trowel.
I don't make a point of going around discussing Doctor Who, but it's come up in conversation a couple of times, and I haven't yet spoken to anyone who claims to be liking the current series. And the plaint isn't Capaldi - it's the abysmal plots. I'd really love to know what the viewing figures look like - because I have a nasty suspicion they're nosediving.
OK, so you three don't like the new Doctor Who. Boo hoo. You don't need to keep telling us about it every week.
It's not just those three. There are plenty of us who think this series is by and large tedious, over-sentimental, and selling short the classic series we knew and loved. Despite the best efforts of Mr Capaldi. Why the hell shouldn't we say so?
There are plenty of us who think this series is by and large tedious, over-sentimental, and selling short the classic series we knew and loved.
You mean like it has been ever since the reboot? It's simply following the same trajectory established by Russell T Davies - a classic British sci fi show transformed into mumbo-jumbo space opera and lacking any logical consistency. That isn't news.
Reality check guys. The classic series was at least as tediously hammy and fantstical in places as this one. It actuayll hasn't changed all that much.
Masque of mandragora was repeated recently. It was a akk of the above. Didn't stop it being as entertaining as last nights was. Switch off your brains - kick back and relax, Relive your childhood - stop analysisng it.
Clara Oswald never existed? Yeah, right.
Ah - that explains everything !!
Missy is a female version of the Master - but not the Timelord "Master". She is the female replacement for the Master from the second Doctor's "The Mind Robber".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/mindrobber/detail.shtml
All the series since Clara was introduced (and possibly earlier) have been fiction written by Missy. Unfortunately the aliens were only able to find a second-rate hack to replace the Master which is why the episodes have been so bad :)
'twas total crap.
The science doesn't even work. We all know what caused Tunguska, and it wasn't a coronal mass ejection
As for the kids.......aaaargh please shoot them
Given the school setting for this series, maybe they should consider bringing back Ian Chesterton and Barbara White. THEY knew how to keep children under control
We all know what caused Tunguska, and it wasn't a coronal mass ejection
That's not at all how I interpreted it, I understood that as meaning that the trees were there to minimize the damage to the planet from the air-burst (which they did by absorbing the energy of the explosion).
The examples given were all extinction level events which were averted by the trees, not all CMEs.
The actual premise of the episode was quite interesting, I thought, although the execution was awful and the ending was abysmal.
It's not that we (by "we" I mean the collective "we" here) don't like the new Doctor Who, I think it's a more the case that we are desperately disappointed with it and wishing it was half decent in some way. We just want it to be better than it is, because we know it can be.
This series is just so... lacklustre. It's not very well written (at all) with stories and characters that are just so bland it's hard to invest any emotion, sympathy or empathy in them. This whole series just feels so forgettable
Peter Capaldi is a good actor as is Jenna Coleman, as indeed are all the adults in it (all the kids just have that over the top stage-school feel to them). Steven Moffat is an excellent writer and producer (of other things just, sadly not for Doctor Who)
This episode, had nothing at all of interest, no characters to give a crap about, no tension, no drama, no fun, no laughs no emotion, in fact no "energy" at all.You can level many things at Doctor Who since it started but lacking emotion or energy generally hasn't been one of them.
Steven Moffat peaked at series 3 of Coupling, everything since then has been on a downward trajectory. And I'm not alright with that, because Joking Apart and Coupling were genius and Capaldi and Coleman are decent actors, hell Coleman must be because she has to play a different character every episode, but the Who since Xmas have been bobbins.
Or was anyone else hoping the earth (or at least humanity) would be destroyed? At least that way, we might get an episode where an alien, who can travel to almost any time or place in the universe, might do something that doesn't involve humans. But no; it seems that the rebooted Dr Who universe is so small and empty, that anything of any cosmic consequence has to happen to the earth, or it's dominant species.
I wasn't convinced that Peter Capaldi was the right choice to play the Doctor, but he's grown on me. However this incarnation of the Doctor seems stunted and diminished - despite his 1300 years of experience and timelord intellect, it's his female, human companion who solves everything now. It feels like a clumsy attempt to overcompensate for the passive, intellectually limited companions of the past. If they wanted a strong and smart female character, why not be bold and cast a woman to play the Doctor? I'd find him losing his testicles more believable than losing his character. There's nothing to suggest a regeneration couldn't result in a swaping of gender, it's even been hinted as a possibility, it just hasn't happened yet in the same way that tossing a coin can give you a run of the same result.
I like much of Moffat's work, including some of the Dr Who episodes he's penned, but it seems he's at his best in small doses - Sherlock and Jekyll being my favourite examples of where he delivers small, self-contained masterpieces. But under his long-term stewardship, Dr Who seems to have run out of ideas. Even the opportunities offered by later scheduling are being squandered; every ending is a happy one; every problem can be solved by love, rather than (or in preference to) science; and nothing has to be explained, be it extinct-bar-one creatures that can lay eggs bigger than themselves without losing their virginity, or missing siblings that turn up out of the blue in a magic shrubbery.
I know this is supposed to be a kids show, but there are plenty of shows that explore the human relationships. This show should be opening young minds to questions about the universe and our place in it.
Since the Dr Who Universe continues to move further and further from our own place in the multiverse, yes I'm all for the destruction option. Perhaps that way the Doctor can be encouraged to find his way back to our universe where he lived for the first 8 incarnations.
The notion of a sex-changed Doctor regeneration is such a bad idea. The concept that a strong female character needs to be based on a 2000 year old male is both ludicrous and insulting to women and why, apart from perversity and 'because you have the power to', would you want to introduce such an idea into a series aimed at children and adults?
Incidentally I would very much like to see a female timelord take over as the lead character in the series. Not with the baggage of the history and character of the Doctor himself but an interesting woman in her own right with a different attitude to the role of traveller in space and time. The Doctor needn't die but a long vacation would be a smart move.
"I like much of Moffat's work, including some of the Dr Who episodes he's penned, but it seems he's at his best in small doses - Sherlock and Jekyll being my favourite examples of where he delivers small, self-contained masterpieces."
Yes, I think that sums up the entire problem with the whole of the reboot series, most obviously this current series. Stories are too short and end up with a hurried solution in the last few minutes and no clear back story to link the episodes into a coherent series. And no, a "surprise" in the very last episode "explaining" the back story isn't good enough if there are no clues to allow the viewer to work it out for themselves over the span of the series.
Back in Ye Olden Days, the episodes were half the current length but the story ran across several episode or even the whole series with a cliffhanger at the end of each episode. This gave time to develop the characters and work though a proper plot with a decent lead up to a solution.
Thus far any Moffat-related story that features elements of an arc has ended in disappointment. There was a nice build-up with the Silence, the oldest secret in the universe (Doc-tor Who!) etc., but what did we get?
I'd like to be disappointed about my disappointment but the odds aren't good.
[Yes, I woke up grumpy.]
Looks to me as if the "Doctor's" soul-searching has been his attempt at electing similar from Clara, before she abandon's her humanity (At least, I think that's Pink's point in so far - to show what Clara should be but isn't). But the point made above that the "arcs" of new-who have been poorly handled, though many of the episodes have been fine in their own right. Not this one though: Bloomin' awful it was.
Like most folks, I feel that Capaldi was a good choice to replace Matt Smith, but they've lumbered him with some seriously bad scripts. Jenna Coleman has gone from "Little Miss Smug Deus Ex Machina" (how many times did she have to save Smith ?) to "Little Miss What The HELL Am I This Week ?" - and in the middle of this we've got Mr Pink as the lamest "Tin Dog" yet.
The whole thing seems to revolve round a compulsive liar, a 2,000-year-old cradle-snatcher and a passive-aggressive whiner. Sounds like a great mix for a US-style sitcom. Maybe that's the market Moffat's aiming for now, I don't know.
The bit at the end annoyed me too. I think they *might* have got away with bringing Maebh's big sister home as a thank-you for helping the trees do their job - because lets face it, the Pudding Brains In Charge would have killed everybody by breaking out the Agent Orange.
Maybe they need someone to come up with better scripts, someone like (say) Dan Freeman. Check out "The Minister of Chance" - imagine a Time Lord with no TARDIS, no sonic screwdriver and a bad-tempered companion who frequently refers to him as "Tosser!" and you get the idea. The title character doesn't have any convenient plot holes to get him out of trouble, he has to THINK his way out of peril - more like the Classic Doctors.
They're trying to raise money for a movie version, but it looks like their KickStarter is going to fall badly short of its target. Shame really, because the "podcast" version was rather good.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/934034666/the-minister-of-chance-movie-episode-1
Going by Gallifreybase, this one proviokes a similar reaction to Rings of Akhetan. The voting curve isn't a single peak but has more in common with Cisco's logo.
Thematically, there's a tie-in with the Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe with its sparkly vegetation-based lifeforce.
Personally, not one of the stand-outs of the series but may have more meaning once the end of the series is reached. The seasons's themes have been 'choices', 'sacrifice', and 'lies' so this story may have partly been to round off/fill-in some elements as an intro to the finale.
Birnam wood, great dramatic device in Macbeth, Tolkiens forest of huorns at dawn in the battle of Helms deep. The story concept of an emergent forest on a global scale could make for a great story, not a dreadful idea if well written with some thought to plausibility.
What we were given was poorly crafted story telling with apparently no attempt to help the viewer suspend disbelief beyond a few sentences of pseudo-scientific babble. Some recent survey claimed more Americans believe in Bigfoot than accept the idea of the Big Bang and this kind of unnecessary random magic in place of science just encourages a wide sub-culture that accepts ignorance and irrationality.
Not quite as badly written as "Kill the Moon" imo (having watched Dr Who live missing few episodes since Unearthy Child I'm pretty tolerant but KtM got my worst ever episode to date vote).
That makes two examples of desperately bad writing this series. My wife regarded this episode as the worst of series even more so than KtM and in the brief discussion afterwards including my 16yo currently studying for GCSE we got onto the topics of dysfunctional teens, poor writing and the likelihood of the offending writers having passed a GCSE in any science subject.
Wondering it its about very untalented writers chosen to write for the series or the heavy hand of editing, either way the editorial team needs to wake up. The reviewer is quite correct this is bottom of the barrel material.
Old series; Tom Baker was "my Doctor". Although I think McCoy could have been the best if he'd been given the chance. He re-introduced some of the mystery around the Doctor.
New series... I immediately liked Ecclestone. He was great. It made a good reboot and made me a fan of the new series. Disliked Tennant when he started, but got used to him within a few episodes. Smith was too young but he grew into the role (seriously, look at him standing up to the Atraxi in his first episode and thinking "cute, kid"; compare to almost any of Series 7; Journey To The Center Of The TARDIS; in just 2 years he'd grown up).
Capaldi I'm actively disliking. His character is an arsehole. Not Colin Baker levels of dislike ('worst Doctor ever!'), but definitely the worst of the new series.
It's time to dump the script writers and get in some proper sci-fi script writers.
Doctor Who needs to be more darker for the adult audience. It is after all being shown 8:30 pm-ish
Also the TARDIS needs to leave Earth and actually go to other worlds otherwise might as well be called TARDOE (Time And Relevant Dimensions On Earth).
Not sure it needs to be darker. Just go back to basics. The stand out episode of this season for me has been Listen - good old monsters-under-the-bed creepiness.
Not dark or adult, just a common fear of the dark.
That said, I do wonder why they are showing what is ostensibly a family show (and really quite light a breezy with no especially gruesome or dark bits) at 8.30pm. What happened to Who being 7pm Prime Time viewing?
... still wouldn't be satisfied if every episode was written by isaac asimov, produced by arthur c clarke, directed by stanley kubrick with laurence olivier as the doctor and marilyn monroe as his sidekick
don't know who any of those people are? aww bless - but fear not, the bbc are remaking a hardcore sci-fi classic next year especially for you! it'll blow your little socially-networked minds with its gritty realism and rollercoaster story about the hazards of lunar terraforming whilst under alien attack from intergalactic reptiles and mechanized avian cyborgs ... it's called 'the clangers'
in other news... 'professor' brian cox has just proved the existence of trans-dimensional wormholes by sticking his head so far up his own ... transmission interrupted
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
