...Even if he outright LIED to them, that whole "danger every episode" thing kind of makes it moot. They can still perceive danger through the mystic cloud of booze Doctor. Anyone who goes with him in the first place has a screw loose- alien! Those that stay are suicide junkies/dragged along by the junkie. And none of the junkies seem to blame him, either.
But then, related to this, the writing for them in danger can be god awful weak too. They all should be dead, including the Doctor, too many times if not for sudden onset Lets Not Just Shoot Them Dead syndrome the bad guys get. So maybe it be more "realistic" if one of them did blame him. People blame the drugs, after all.
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Mego Thor"I say thee...NAY!"Registered Userregular
Not digging the new season; and not because of the new Doctor, who I want to like. The end of the last season made it look like the Doctor would start looking for Gallifrey, but so far they've made no mention of it. Clara seems like a completely different character, and I'm already bored to death of the new Mickey.
Not digging the new season; and not because of the new Doctor, who I want to like. The end of the last season made it look like the Doctor would start looking for Gallifrey, but so far they've made no mention of it. Clara seems like a completely different character, and I'm already bored to death of the new Mickey.
The funny part is Clara is back to OG Clara. Last season Clara was some kind of god damn time anomaly.
Not digging the new season; and not because of the new Doctor, who I want to like. The end of the last season made it look like the Doctor would start looking for Gallifrey, but so far they've made no mention of it. Clara seems like a completely different character, and I'm already bored to death of the new Mickey.
The funny part is Clara is back to OG Clara. Last season Clara was some kind of god damn time anomaly.
It's wonderful. She actually has a personality again.
Not digging the new season; and not because of the new Doctor, who I want to like. The end of the last season made it look like the Doctor would start looking for Gallifrey, but so far they've made no mention of it. Clara seems like a completely different character, and I'm already bored to death of the new Mickey.
The funny part is Clara is back to OG Clara. Last season Clara was some kind of god damn time anomaly.
It's wonderful. She actually has a personality again.
I think Neil Gaiman inadvertently told us all what was wrong with Clara last season. He said that he wrote his episode with the understanding that it was Elizabethan Clara, not modern Clara, that was adventuring with the Doctor. I think that they only decided very late in the process that the companion Clara would be from the modern day. I wonder if Moffat really wanted to have the companion not be from modern times but was shot down or something.
I thought it was Gaiman who convinced Moffatt to make Clara modern.
No, it was apparently Moffat. There's a bit in the Cybermen issue of the Essential Doctor Who series where Gaiman talks about it:
Originally, the companion in that script was called Beryl. She was a Victorian governess in charge of two kids. Beryl was a Mary Poppins figure, so the idea was to have a kind of Mary Poppins adventure. When Steven changed that plan and Beryl became Clara, I said, 'Hang on, I've started writing the Victorian one.' He was like, 'It's fine, she looks after two kids anyway.'
No, recognizing a deadly situation and having the desire to get away from it really really is a common-sense thing. It's basically a universal trait for all living things on the planet. Even when people override it, their body goes haywire because everyone is biologically wired to avoid things that you know can kill you.
The tendency is as intrinsically common as it gets, and if you're overriding it to go on totally excellent adventures, that's you overriding common sense which is your own call.
It's not pop psych crap when it really is a commonly sensible thing, and there absolutely are such things.
Pop psych is taking several superficially related behaviours from different individuals (in this case different species entirely) and tying them together with a single all encompassing causal factor that appeals because it appears to tell a good story and is simple to understand.
Real causal explanations are rarely simple.
Animals do not "avoid death". Animals do not know what death is. Animals have much simpler reactions (such as fear of sudden movement, loud noises or pain) that cause them to behave in ways that lower their chances of dying. Over the course of countless generations the animals that did not react this way died before passing on their genes and the ones who did react passed them on. Death avoidance is an unneccessary simplification of this: each animal is actually an extremely complex creature that has a large variety of simple instinctive tendencies that cause them to produce behaviours that appear to be consistent with the story of avoiding death, but this does not mean death avoidance is the cause. Death avoidance is the result of other causes. Or more correctly, continuing to pass on their genes is the result. Many species die very quickly after passing on their genes. These causes do not always promote life either: fear of pain can drive an animal to its own death, for example. They can go haywire pretty easily. But as long as the flaws aren't big enough to wipe out a large subset of the population evolution isn't going to "fix" that. It isn't how evolution works.
A great example is rats and cats. Rats have evolved an incredibly extreme fear reaction to the smell of a cat. It is so strong that the mere smell is enough to cause them to hide even when there is no cat. They're not hiding to avoid death by the cat: structures in their brain have evolved to cause them to respond in this fashion. The rats were shown clothes that a cat has slept on they spent 87% of their time hiding. In comparison, a control group was shown an unworn cat collar and spent only 20% of their time hiding.
They don't even need to have seen a cat, ever, in their life.
All this has been shaped by the environment they evolved in. To a certain extent, animals also learn more complicated behaviour during their own life span (for example, learning that not all sudden movements are deadly) and they can learn from watching other animals as well (many predator young need to be taught by their mothers how to hunt, for example. Otherwise they fail to learn properly and rarely live long).
Take a wild animal, domesticate it for human life, set it loose in the wild, its survival rate is very low. It doesn't know how to hunt properly, it doesn't know how to deal with predators, how to deal with its environment, it has none of what you call "common sense".
The fact that you applied common sense, a human concept, to animals (anthromorphising them in the process) shows that it is a pop psych concept. It does not apply, it isn't necessary, it isn't explanatory and it is a gross simplification spun into a "believable" tale that makes sense to you.
Now lets move onto humans, for whom we actually could potentially apply common sense to.
Humans also react to their environment. We are much, much better at learning things, especially from other people, but even then for the most part we only learn for our own environment.
Put us in a totally unfamiliar environment without preparation with only a couple of viewed examples and pretty much everyone is going to fuck things right the hell up in a way that any professional would shake their head at and declare they "lack common sense". Even dangerous environments, dangerous places. We don't just magically osmose common sense out of the ether. We have to learn it. The cliche of the "idiot rookie more dangerous to himself and everyone around him" is as common as muck. You'll find examples in every dangerous service in the world. People don't have automatic and common correct responses in dangerous situations. They have to learn them, and to learn them they have to be taught. It has to be hammered repeatedly into their heads, because in reality when dangerous situations happen untrained people either freeze completely or panic. They go to pieces.
As a result, because every person has a different environment and experience to each other, there tends to be a hell of a lot of variability in each individual persons ability to assess risks.
So much so that the sheer breadth of different perceptions across even the same culture is sufficient to completely dispel the simplistic notion that all humans have a "common" understanding of what constitutes risky behaviour.
Without common sense, what is left? Well they have free will right? And they can learn from observation.
So, what is the first thing an adult human on the planet earth from an advanced, stable, fairly safe society learns when they come with the doctor?
1). There are dangerous things out there.
2). The Doctor can beat them.
3). This is cool, but not really dangerous, because the Doctor can beat them.
Where Doctor is "Magic alien wizard god". Which is basically all he lets them know when they first meet him.
Does the Doctor do a hell of a lot to dispel this notion? Does he, as a good parent does to a child, or a good instructor does to a rookie, continually reinforce to his companions that no things really are dangerous and no you really can die? Does he give them training and drilling in emergency procedures or show them pictures of likely enemies so they know on sight what is and isn't benevolent?
Not really. He's pretty vague.
Could he do a hell of a lot more? Yes. Should he? Double yes. Does he, in fact, tend to take along with him fairly young and impressionable people who love to go gosh wow and not spend a hell of a lot of time disabusing them of the gosh wowness but instead basically going along with it and taking them frequently and thoughtlessly into extremely dangerous situations while giving them barely any information regarding the risks of said situation? All the time.
Is he thus the most despicably evil person in the universe? Nah not really. He needs people. He'd be a lot worse without them. They don't always die. He does his best to keep them safe in his own rather clumsy way.
He doesn't share all the responsibility. But he does share a lot more than an equal share. He's the one with all the experience, all the knowledge, all the information, and he barely does anything to prep them.
On the other hand, without these very people, the universe would be a hell of a lot worse. There are dozens of examples of companions bringing unique capabilities that saved the day. And without them he goes Waters of Mars.
And there's also the fact that even when the companions do have enough experience to begin to make informed choices on their own, by that point they've got dozens of examples of the doctor always winning coloring their judgement, but also dozens of examples of reasons why the doctor is a force of good in the universe, and that staying to help him regardless of the risk is a worthy cause. So there's the altruistic nature of their continued choice to stay popping up to muddy things.
But again, here they are the ones who have to come to terms with it, realise it all, and be more mature than the doctor in terms of figuring out their informed choices, because it is so very, very rare for the doctor to do the right thing for his companions on his own volition.
Not because he's a bastard. But because he's both weak and arrogant. He believes he can handle anything himself, but at the same time, he knows he does need people. They're understandable character flaws and he has plenty of other character pluses to make up for them.
This constant to and fro of rights and wrongs produces the tension that has resulted in a lot of the best dramatic moments in the new Doctor Who.
It's also the reason I love rory so much, cos he only needed to see the doctor a couple of times to realise this and call him out for it. That man was so damn bright.
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(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
edited October 2014
Ok. Can someone help me out with this Danny Pink character? I don't understand how he is being portrayed. When he showed up in the beginning of Into The Dalek, maybe I missed something but I really felt like everyone around him was being extraordinarly rude to him. The brief period he was featured in that episode made me wonder if he might be a telepath who can't control his talent or something.
Then I got to the fourth episode, Listen. Frankly I have to say the entire thing was crap. Crappity crap crap, wrapped in a drift vise of spongecrap. But...there's Danny Pink again, and, Oh wow, look Clara is being really out of line with this guy and saying he can shoot kids because he was a soldier! And he calls her out on it, and she...gets offended at him? And...leaves in a huff? And then...he feels bad about this?
1) Am...I supposed to think Clara is really fucking bad at social interaction and making jokes?
2) Is this some kind of subtext about the callous misconceptions that exist about what kind of people veterans of the armed forces might be?
3) Is this some kind of writerly thing where they're trying to show a date where the guy isn't the one who says the dumb thing and capsizes the entire evening?
How is any of this okay? Someone, anyone? Could a person give me a tell?
Ok. Can someone help me out with this Danny Pink character? I don't understand how he is being portrayed. When he showed up in the beginning of Into The Dalek, maybe I missed something but I really felt like everyone around him was being extraordinarly rude to him. The brief period he was featured in that episode made me wonder if he might be a telepath who can't control his talent or something.
Then I got to the fourth episode, Listen. Frankly I have to say the entire thing was crap. Crappity crap crap, wrapped in a drift vise of spongecrap. But...there's Danny Pink again, and, Oh wow, look Clara is being really out of line with this guy and saying he can shoot kids because he was a soldier! And he calls her out on it, and she...gets offended at him? And...leaves in a huff? And then...he feels bad about this?
1) Am...I supposed to think Clara is really fucking bad at social interaction and making jokes?
2) Is this some kind of subtext about the callous misconceptions that exist about what kind of people veterans of the armed forces might be?
3) Is this some kind of writerly thing where they're trying to show a date where the guy isn't the one who says the dumb thing and capsizes the entire evening?
How is any of this okay? Someone, anyone? Could a person give me a tell?
My take was that Clara fancied him, and kept blurting out things trying to be funny, but kept getting it wrong.
To be fair, he was the same. Like when he said "People like you often misunderstand..." and she replies "People like me ?" and takes offence.
It was just a first date gone horribly wrong, basically.
Clara and Danny are both terrible at dating. Danny because oh his ptsd
Clara because shes just discovering who she is as a person is vastly different from who she thought she was
I have a podcast now. It's about video games and anime!Find it here.
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Mego Thor"I say thee...NAY!"Registered Userregular
It's basically awful, awful writing. The writers desperately want the audience to like Danny (and, by extention, Clara) so they dredged up the tired, old "soldiers are bad" trope; which is best saved for coming home from Vietnam stories.
It's basically awful, awful writing. The writers desperately want the audience to like Danny (and, by extention, Clara) so they dredged up the tired, old "soldiers are bad" trope; which is best saved for coming home from Vietnam stories.
What? Except no one but the Doctor thinks he's bad? Like, the kids in his first appearance give him a hard time, asking if he's killed people, but they were coming from the angle that that would be cool, not that he was bad.
Origin for Dragon Age: Inquisition Shenanigans: Inksplat776
Clara insinuates it. Danny is portrayed as feeling it. The Doctor is a dick. It's there. It's not supposed to the focus, but the awful writing jumps out.
Clara insinuates it. Danny is portrayed as feeling it. The Doctor is a dick. It's there. It's not supposed to the focus, but the awful writing jumps out.
Where does Clara suggest he's bad? She makes dumb, insensitive jokes, but that doesn't mean she thinks he's bad.
Origin for Dragon Age: Inquisition Shenanigans: Inksplat776
When the character is written as making light of X it follows that they, either intentionally or not, have a less than stellar opinion of it. That could change. And does. But if you had to guess Clara's opinion on the military for a zillion dollars what would you pick?
People make light of things because they make light of basically everything, not because they think its worthless or bad. It certainly does not necessarily follow that they think ill of what they make light of, though in the scene that's probably what Danny thinks.
People make light of things because they make light of basically everything, not because they think its worthless or bad. It certainly does not necessarily follow that they think ill of what they make light of, though in the scene that's probably what Danny thinks.
Well, whether or not I was a soldier, and whether or not I worked at a school, I would not be down with someone who doesn't even know me thinking it's okay to make glib statements about me killing kids based on things they think I've done with my life, joke or no joke.
Ok. Can someone help me out with this Danny Pink character? I don't understand how he is being portrayed. When he showed up in the beginning of Into The Dalek, maybe I missed something but I really felt like everyone around him was being extraordinarly rude to him. The brief period he was featured in that episode made me wonder if he might be a telepath who can't control his talent or something.
Then I got to the fourth episode, Listen. Frankly I have to say the entire thing was crap. Crappity crap crap, wrapped in a drift vise of spongecrap. But...there's Danny Pink again, and, Oh wow, look Clara is being really out of line with this guy and saying he can shoot kids because he was a soldier! And he calls her out on it, and she...gets offended at him? And...leaves in a huff? And then...he feels bad about this?
1) Am...I supposed to think Clara is really fucking bad at social interaction and making jokes?
2) Is this some kind of subtext about the callous misconceptions that exist about what kind of people veterans of the armed forces might be?
3) Is this some kind of writerly thing where they're trying to show a date where the guy isn't the one who says the dumb thing and capsizes the entire evening?
How is any of this okay? Someone, anyone? Could a person give me a tell?
1) Yes.
2) Yes.
3) Yes.
I'm one hundred percent certain the whole point of Danny Pink is to challenge the Doctor's long-held dislike for soldiers. In order to emphasize that, they made sure to make a point of showing that the Doctor dislikes soldiers in Into the Dalek, even explicitly drawing a parallel between Journey Blue and Danny Pink. After that, he's made a point to highlight how Clara and the Doctor treat him differently because he's a soldier. We're definitely supposed to sympathize with Danny when Clara is accidentally mean to him and when the Doctor is purposefully mean to him. I believe Moffat is almost certainly building towards Danny becoming a Companion and the Doctor accepting Danny in spite of him being a soldier.
Mego Thor"I say thee...NAY!"Registered Userregular
So far, the only good episode has been the first one, which was set in Victorian England; where Clara works best. If they have to keep setting stories on Earth, come up with some timey-wimey excuse for why the TARDIS can't materialize in the modern day and keep having adventures with Vastra, Jenny, and Strax. Anything to stop wasting time with Clara's job, Clara's dating, etc...
I think the first episode was the weakest and every one since has been ok to very good. I have seen enough of the Victorian crew for a lifetime and have been enjoying the modern day stuff with Clara a lot more than anything the show has done with her previously.
Can we just stop taking kids on the Tardis? Or at least not stupid kids?
"Don't. Touch. Anything."
[touches switches for no reason]
"I'm bored."
Nobody remembers the singer. The song remains.
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Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
I wasn't on board for the first 10 minutes or so, but it got real good real quick.
I think the whole spider bacteria thing was unnecessary, and they made a bunch of weird assumptions about how everything was working - like how'd he know they have dinosaur vision and can only see movement? And then when the gravity switched off for the kid's room, but not the one they were in, it seemed like a tech failure but I guess it was the critter shifting?
But once they established what was actually going on the episode started getting REAL INTENSE AAAA
I was half expecting the hatched creature to be the Star Whale from The Beast Below. It'd even fit thematically; same problem in that episode.
Also, and I know this gets thrown around every single goddamn time we meet a new character, but...
...what if Danny is the Master? The "one bad day" line seemed a little ominous.
Next week looks like no Clara, and I've heard there's no Doctor episode after that, just like Midnight and Turn Left eh?
Next episode looks like an amazing genre mashup. Murder mystery space train horror adventure.
Just keep shoving everything in the blender. I love it.
Edit: This has probably been my favorite Capaldi episode so far. A lot of weird thematic business I'd like to parse through though. Some weird surface level implications that are... Confusing, at the least.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
It's basically awful, awful writing. The writers desperately want the audience to like Danny (and, by extention, Clara) so they dredged up the tired, old "soldiers are bad" trope; which is best saved for coming home from Vietnam stories.
one time I saw a movie where this Hitler guy said some mean things about the Jews and I was incensed because I realized that this meant that the writer, Lefty Berkowitz-Rosenthal, must be some kind of anti-Semite
Is it ever explained how a creature growing in the moon causes the moon to be heavier?
And if the Moon became so heavy it got Earth-like gravity, wouldn't the tides have submerged entire nations? Japan would be gone, pretty much.
[edit]
I mean, yes, this was addressed in the beginning, but how are they going to get the gravity to go down again after the creature is dead? And how does the creature shifting cause the kid to float in the air? And those spider sound effects, did that guy who got eaten on the surface of the moon actually hear them? Because there's no sound in space. And was it just me or was the dialogue... stilted.
There were a lot of silence between scenes. Like transition scenes, only much longer. It's like the directer wanted to imitate space/moon movies but couldn't pull it off. Like in the movie Moon, there was a lot of silence, a lot of atmosphere. This episode had atmosphere... somewhat, but it also had spider creatures and the Doctor shouting, so I'm not sure the atmosphere is really appropriate.
Also, I don't get how those spider things are supposed to be bacteria. Bacteria is microscopic. I get that they are really tiny in comparison to the moon, but that doesn't make them bacteria. So the logic behind that anti-bacteria spray thing doesn't really work.
God, some of the things Clara says...
Clara tries to imagine a world without the moon.
"Okay, there would be no tides, but we would survive that, right? There's, uh, they've knocked out the satellites There's no internet, no mobiles. I'd be fine with that."
Dude, I'm pretty sure they can just put the satellites back, with the creature gone. Satellites don't need the moon to exist. Also, I'm pretty sure internet doesn't depend on satellites. This is common knowledge. Clara should know this is an educated woman.
[edit] The scene transitions need work
Clara says, "Can we broadcast on this?"
Guys says, "Well, yes."
Half a second later, Clara addresses Earth.
There needs to be something in between these scenes. I was confused. I'm pretty sure the ground control guy can't just flip a switch and broadcast to the entire Earth. And wouldn't he ask questions? Like, why do you need to address humanity? And wouldn't people want an explanation on what's going on, instead of just "DECIDE! DECIDE NOW!"
I'm not saying we should see the entire explanation, but we need have a transition between the ground control guy mumbling yes and Clara talking to everyone on Earth.
And how did they get the video to, like, 90% of households with electric lights?
[edit]
God! How does the creature propulse himself forward using his wings and tail WHILE BEING IN SPACE?!
Yes, I know the answer is space magic. The creature has space magic, which probably also gave him the ability to manipulate gravity, but surely that needs to be addressed somewhere in the episode. You can handwave it away, but you need to actually take a second to actually do it instead of assuming the audience will do it for you.
[edit] WTF?!
The moon is back again? It laid a new egg? Just like that? While the Doctor was talking about humanity in a creepy voice?
How does it lay an egg the same size as the egg it just crawled out of? WHERE DOES IT GET THE MASS?!
This entire episode is like a fever dream. I had a glass of wine and I'm a little tipsy right now. Did I imagine this? Am I dreaming right now?
Are there scenes missing? Did they cut out the scene where Clara explains the situation to Danny? And the scene where the Doctor introduces himself to the astronauts and convinces them to let him help? And the scene where the astronaut notices something wrong about a hole in the ground (because he certainly didn't hear skittering, because there's no sound on the moon).
Speaking of the spiders, if they react to movement, why were they swinging their torches around when one was hunting them? Wouldn't that set the spider off? Shining a light in its face and moving it around is really noticeable.
This episode had plot holes up the ying-yang. That is a given. The list is quite possibly endless. But there were several redeeming moments that I enjoyed, DW and sci-fi in general excell at investigating ethical quandaries and impossible decisions. And those last couple scenes, ho boy. I did not see that coming. But Clara is totally right, the Doctor needs to stop treating humans like his laboratory mice experiments. It seems like this season, he has significantly less respect for them. Where did that come from?
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But then, related to this, the writing for them in danger can be god awful weak too. They all should be dead, including the Doctor, too many times if not for sudden onset Lets Not Just Shoot Them Dead syndrome the bad guys get. So maybe it be more "realistic" if one of them did blame him. People blame the drugs, after all.
The funny part is Clara is back to OG Clara. Last season Clara was some kind of god damn time anomaly.
It's wonderful. She actually has a personality again.
I think Neil Gaiman inadvertently told us all what was wrong with Clara last season. He said that he wrote his episode with the understanding that it was Elizabethan Clara, not modern Clara, that was adventuring with the Doctor. I think that they only decided very late in the process that the companion Clara would be from the modern day. I wonder if Moffat really wanted to have the companion not be from modern times but was shot down or something.
I have never read anything saying anything like that.
BBC might. They might worry that there wouldn't be an audience insert if the main characters are an alien and a woman from a couple hundred years ago.
No, it was apparently Moffat. There's a bit in the Cybermen issue of the Essential Doctor Who series where Gaiman talks about it:
Pop psych is taking several superficially related behaviours from different individuals (in this case different species entirely) and tying them together with a single all encompassing causal factor that appeals because it appears to tell a good story and is simple to understand.
Real causal explanations are rarely simple.
Animals do not "avoid death". Animals do not know what death is. Animals have much simpler reactions (such as fear of sudden movement, loud noises or pain) that cause them to behave in ways that lower their chances of dying. Over the course of countless generations the animals that did not react this way died before passing on their genes and the ones who did react passed them on. Death avoidance is an unneccessary simplification of this: each animal is actually an extremely complex creature that has a large variety of simple instinctive tendencies that cause them to produce behaviours that appear to be consistent with the story of avoiding death, but this does not mean death avoidance is the cause. Death avoidance is the result of other causes. Or more correctly, continuing to pass on their genes is the result. Many species die very quickly after passing on their genes. These causes do not always promote life either: fear of pain can drive an animal to its own death, for example. They can go haywire pretty easily. But as long as the flaws aren't big enough to wipe out a large subset of the population evolution isn't going to "fix" that. It isn't how evolution works.
A great example is rats and cats. Rats have evolved an incredibly extreme fear reaction to the smell of a cat. It is so strong that the mere smell is enough to cause them to hide even when there is no cat. They're not hiding to avoid death by the cat: structures in their brain have evolved to cause them to respond in this fashion. The rats were shown clothes that a cat has slept on they spent 87% of their time hiding. In comparison, a control group was shown an unworn cat collar and spent only 20% of their time hiding.
They don't even need to have seen a cat, ever, in their life.
All this has been shaped by the environment they evolved in. To a certain extent, animals also learn more complicated behaviour during their own life span (for example, learning that not all sudden movements are deadly) and they can learn from watching other animals as well (many predator young need to be taught by their mothers how to hunt, for example. Otherwise they fail to learn properly and rarely live long).
Take a wild animal, domesticate it for human life, set it loose in the wild, its survival rate is very low. It doesn't know how to hunt properly, it doesn't know how to deal with predators, how to deal with its environment, it has none of what you call "common sense".
The fact that you applied common sense, a human concept, to animals (anthromorphising them in the process) shows that it is a pop psych concept. It does not apply, it isn't necessary, it isn't explanatory and it is a gross simplification spun into a "believable" tale that makes sense to you.
Now lets move onto humans, for whom we actually could potentially apply common sense to.
Humans also react to their environment. We are much, much better at learning things, especially from other people, but even then for the most part we only learn for our own environment.
Put us in a totally unfamiliar environment without preparation with only a couple of viewed examples and pretty much everyone is going to fuck things right the hell up in a way that any professional would shake their head at and declare they "lack common sense". Even dangerous environments, dangerous places. We don't just magically osmose common sense out of the ether. We have to learn it. The cliche of the "idiot rookie more dangerous to himself and everyone around him" is as common as muck. You'll find examples in every dangerous service in the world. People don't have automatic and common correct responses in dangerous situations. They have to learn them, and to learn them they have to be taught. It has to be hammered repeatedly into their heads, because in reality when dangerous situations happen untrained people either freeze completely or panic. They go to pieces.
As a result, because every person has a different environment and experience to each other, there tends to be a hell of a lot of variability in each individual persons ability to assess risks.
So much so that the sheer breadth of different perceptions across even the same culture is sufficient to completely dispel the simplistic notion that all humans have a "common" understanding of what constitutes risky behaviour.
Without common sense, what is left? Well they have free will right? And they can learn from observation.
So, what is the first thing an adult human on the planet earth from an advanced, stable, fairly safe society learns when they come with the doctor?
1). There are dangerous things out there.
2). The Doctor can beat them.
3). This is cool, but not really dangerous, because the Doctor can beat them.
Where Doctor is "Magic alien wizard god". Which is basically all he lets them know when they first meet him.
Does the Doctor do a hell of a lot to dispel this notion? Does he, as a good parent does to a child, or a good instructor does to a rookie, continually reinforce to his companions that no things really are dangerous and no you really can die? Does he give them training and drilling in emergency procedures or show them pictures of likely enemies so they know on sight what is and isn't benevolent?
Not really. He's pretty vague.
Could he do a hell of a lot more? Yes. Should he? Double yes. Does he, in fact, tend to take along with him fairly young and impressionable people who love to go gosh wow and not spend a hell of a lot of time disabusing them of the gosh wowness but instead basically going along with it and taking them frequently and thoughtlessly into extremely dangerous situations while giving them barely any information regarding the risks of said situation?
All the time.
Is he thus the most despicably evil person in the universe? Nah not really. He needs people. He'd be a lot worse without them. They don't always die. He does his best to keep them safe in his own rather clumsy way.
He doesn't share all the responsibility. But he does share a lot more than an equal share. He's the one with all the experience, all the knowledge, all the information, and he barely does anything to prep them.
On the other hand, without these very people, the universe would be a hell of a lot worse. There are dozens of examples of companions bringing unique capabilities that saved the day. And without them he goes Waters of Mars.
And there's also the fact that even when the companions do have enough experience to begin to make informed choices on their own, by that point they've got dozens of examples of the doctor always winning coloring their judgement, but also dozens of examples of reasons why the doctor is a force of good in the universe, and that staying to help him regardless of the risk is a worthy cause. So there's the altruistic nature of their continued choice to stay popping up to muddy things.
But again, here they are the ones who have to come to terms with it, realise it all, and be more mature than the doctor in terms of figuring out their informed choices, because it is so very, very rare for the doctor to do the right thing for his companions on his own volition.
Not because he's a bastard. But because he's both weak and arrogant. He believes he can handle anything himself, but at the same time, he knows he does need people. They're understandable character flaws and he has plenty of other character pluses to make up for them.
This constant to and fro of rights and wrongs produces the tension that has resulted in a lot of the best dramatic moments in the new Doctor Who.
It's also the reason I love rory so much, cos he only needed to see the doctor a couple of times to realise this and call him out for it. That man was so damn bright.
Then I got to the fourth episode, Listen. Frankly I have to say the entire thing was crap. Crappity crap crap, wrapped in a drift vise of spongecrap. But...there's Danny Pink again, and, Oh wow, look Clara is being really out of line with this guy and saying he can shoot kids because he was a soldier! And he calls her out on it, and she...gets offended at him? And...leaves in a huff? And then...he feels bad about this?
1) Am...I supposed to think Clara is really fucking bad at social interaction and making jokes?
2) Is this some kind of subtext about the callous misconceptions that exist about what kind of people veterans of the armed forces might be?
3) Is this some kind of writerly thing where they're trying to show a date where the guy isn't the one who says the dumb thing and capsizes the entire evening?
How is any of this okay? Someone, anyone? Could a person give me a tell?
My take was that Clara fancied him, and kept blurting out things trying to be funny, but kept getting it wrong.
To be fair, he was the same. Like when he said "People like you often misunderstand..." and she replies "People like me ?" and takes offence.
It was just a first date gone horribly wrong, basically.
Clara because shes just discovering who she is as a person is vastly different from who she thought she was
What? Except no one but the Doctor thinks he's bad? Like, the kids in his first appearance give him a hard time, asking if he's killed people, but they were coming from the angle that that would be cool, not that he was bad.
Where does Clara suggest he's bad? She makes dumb, insensitive jokes, but that doesn't mean she thinks he's bad.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Well, whether or not I was a soldier, and whether or not I worked at a school, I would not be down with someone who doesn't even know me thinking it's okay to make glib statements about me killing kids based on things they think I've done with my life, joke or no joke.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
1) Yes.
2) Yes.
3) Yes.
I'm one hundred percent certain the whole point of Danny Pink is to challenge the Doctor's long-held dislike for soldiers. In order to emphasize that, they made sure to make a point of showing that the Doctor dislikes soldiers in Into the Dalek, even explicitly drawing a parallel between Journey Blue and Danny Pink. After that, he's made a point to highlight how Clara and the Doctor treat him differently because he's a soldier. We're definitely supposed to sympathize with Danny when Clara is accidentally mean to him and when the Doctor is purposefully mean to him. I believe Moffat is almost certainly building towards Danny becoming a Companion and the Doctor accepting Danny in spite of him being a soldier.
HORSES FOR COURSES SWINGS AND ROUNDABOUTS
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
"Don't. Touch. Anything."
[touches switches for no reason]
"I'm bored."
But once they established what was actually going on the episode started getting REAL INTENSE AAAA
I was half expecting the hatched creature to be the Star Whale from The Beast Below. It'd even fit thematically; same problem in that episode.
Also, and I know this gets thrown around every single goddamn time we meet a new character, but...
...what if Danny is the Master? The "one bad day" line seemed a little ominous.
Next week looks like no Clara, and I've heard there's no Doctor episode after that, just like Midnight and Turn Left eh?
Just keep shoving everything in the blender. I love it.
Edit: This has probably been my favorite Capaldi episode so far. A lot of weird thematic business I'd like to parse through though. Some weird surface level implications that are... Confusing, at the least.
one time I saw a movie where this Hitler guy said some mean things about the Jews and I was incensed because I realized that this meant that the writer, Lefty Berkowitz-Rosenthal, must be some kind of anti-Semite
And if the Moon became so heavy it got Earth-like gravity, wouldn't the tides have submerged entire nations? Japan would be gone, pretty much.
[edit]
There were a lot of silence between scenes. Like transition scenes, only much longer. It's like the directer wanted to imitate space/moon movies but couldn't pull it off. Like in the movie Moon, there was a lot of silence, a lot of atmosphere. This episode had atmosphere... somewhat, but it also had spider creatures and the Doctor shouting, so I'm not sure the atmosphere is really appropriate.
Also, I don't get how those spider things are supposed to be bacteria. Bacteria is microscopic. I get that they are really tiny in comparison to the moon, but that doesn't make them bacteria. So the logic behind that anti-bacteria spray thing doesn't really work.
God, some of the things Clara says...
"Okay, there would be no tides, but we would survive that, right? There's, uh, they've knocked out the satellites There's no internet, no mobiles. I'd be fine with that."
Dude, I'm pretty sure they can just put the satellites back, with the creature gone. Satellites don't need the moon to exist. Also, I'm pretty sure internet doesn't depend on satellites. This is common knowledge. Clara should know this is an educated woman.
[edit] The scene transitions need work
Guys says, "Well, yes."
Half a second later, Clara addresses Earth.
There needs to be something in between these scenes. I was confused. I'm pretty sure the ground control guy can't just flip a switch and broadcast to the entire Earth. And wouldn't he ask questions? Like, why do you need to address humanity? And wouldn't people want an explanation on what's going on, instead of just "DECIDE! DECIDE NOW!"
I'm not saying we should see the entire explanation, but we need have a transition between the ground control guy mumbling yes and Clara talking to everyone on Earth.
And how did they get the video to, like, 90% of households with electric lights?
[edit]
Yes, I know the answer is space magic. The creature has space magic, which probably also gave him the ability to manipulate gravity, but surely that needs to be addressed somewhere in the episode. You can handwave it away, but you need to actually take a second to actually do it instead of assuming the audience will do it for you.
[edit] WTF?!
How does it lay an egg the same size as the egg it just crawled out of? WHERE DOES IT GET THE MASS?!
This entire episode is like a fever dream. I had a glass of wine and I'm a little tipsy right now. Did I imagine this? Am I dreaming right now?
Speaking of the spiders, if they react to movement, why were they swinging their torches around when one was hunting them? Wouldn't that set the spider off? Shining a light in its face and moving it around is really noticeable.
Am I nitpicking here?
They missed an opportunity to make something really weird with the evolved bacteria, like skittering trilobites or something.
Seriously, am I going to have to become a screenwriter and straighten these chuckleheads out?
I was not a fan of 90% of the episode, but the end did redeem it a lot.
I miss the good writing. I am wondering if they are saving the budget for the last few episodes.
This was filmed in Canary Islands, Spain, so we can safely assume it didn't save any money.
It Still looked like a Welsh Quarry.
They started pulling that crap when they added the alternate Prime Minster and US President.
But then the TARDIS exploding and subsequent universe reboot put us in a new NEW alternate reality.