The Grand Who Chatter & Discussion Thread

[Lady Grey]

(No idea where this should go)

Is it just me or is The Master (as played by John Simm)
just Moriarty before Moriarty was 'cool'? (BBC's Sherlock)

Meaning the character's personality etc.?

[comrade_general]

John Simm's Master > Sherlock's Moriarty

No contest.

[Lady Grey]

Absolutely!

Also Original Irene Adler > BBC's Irene Adler (so, so many times over. Something does not sit right about the TV version. Well, a lot of things. )

[Othko97]

Thoughts on Kill The Moon? Personally I enjoyed it, although a lot of other people were bothered by the bad science.

[Jubal]

Science was awful, episode framing was really quite offensive for a lot of people (though unintentionally so, it was still sufficiently obvious someone should've picked it up).

The pacing, acting, etc were all good; they just needed to edit about 20 lines of dialogue to rephrase the dilemma. Not least because Clara morally made the WRONG CHOICE, given the way they phrased the problem. The life of a foetus is not worth more than the lives of millions of humans. Even if the foetus is a moon dragon.

To repost what I put on FB it would've been very possible, within the framework of the story, to fix most of these problems just by framing it differently.

- Crazy moon shenanigans observed on earth (Same)
- They send up astronauts, with bombs just in case (Same)
- The moon is an egg (same)
- Actually it hatching won't make bigger tides (once it's gone the tides will be smaller, so leaving the mass there and killing it would actually have kept the tides excessively big), and the shell, being so much lighter than the creature, should have gravitationally stuck to it anyway to begin with. So in a slightly more sensible version humanity isn't much at threat from this except possibly from longer term climatic destabilisations.
- The earth government decide to blow up the creature ANYWAY in case it's going to come down and eat humanity or some such. And the Doctor buggers off and various scientists argue either way and dilemma again.
- And voila, instead of "is it OK to kill a foetus to save humanity" (yes), we have "is it OK to assume a newborn baby is going to be evil when we don't even know its species" (no), and thus you have the same dilemma problem where Clara's decision makes a lot more sense.

But as it was, the episode just had severe problems. Still marginally better than The Caretaker, but second weakest of the series IMO.

[Othko97]

Yeah, that would have made more sense. I must admit I'm not a fan of the fact there are no negative repercussions to Clara's decision, but that seems to be something which has been a trend for the last few seasons.

[Jubal]

I've felt the last two episodes formed a real collective low point, in any case. Hopefully there will be improvements towards the end of the series...

[comrade_general]

It sucked. 'Nuff said.

[Jubal]

It's a pity because we should be getting so much more out of having an actor of Capaldi's calibre.

[Othko97]

To be fair, I don't think Capaldi is the problem.

[comrade_general]

I don't think Jub was bashing Capaldi.

[Jubal]

CG is correct - I think Capaldi at his best has been stunning, but the scriptwriting just hasn't done him justice. The production and acting have been excellent, some of the concepts have been good, but lately the scripting and plotwriting has let him down.

[comrade_general]

They've pretty much ignored everything in the last few episodes from Smith's era, and everything Capaldi said about fixing his past mistakes.

[Jubal]

I believe the Nightmare in Silver cybermen are returning. Admittedly I have zero idea what their plan is with the Gallifrey shenanigans.

[Lady Grey]

I must admit, we've not watched this series and a lot of the previous series, but this is because (and this could be the problem) we think Moffat has... lost it... with Doctor Who.
He's a fantastic writer for Sherlock (give or take a few things I'm not a big fan of) but I'm not sure about Doctor Who anymore.
I also think he doesn't write women particularly well.