Good Lord, what rubbish! Sub-Harry Potter nonsense, even down to the sonic wand doing all sorts. This really was RTD-level storytelling. The sun god thingy looked cool though.
Hm, I really, really don't know. I gave it an average. Visually, spectacular. The Clara's parents teaser, the Doctor watching, etc was nice, and made sense considering how puzzled the Doctor is over "what" Clara is. Of course we get a few clues: Clara's Mum telling her that she'll always be there, and then promptly dies. I'm wondering if Clara's Mum has something to do with what's going on. I looked at the dates on Clara's Mums tombstone. she died on 5th March 2005. Which is about three weeks before the new series started, but only about three days before the leak of the episode "Rose". I doubt it's relevant, but I find it interesting. Them mention of Susan was interesting, I thought we might get more about that. Jump to the final speech given by the Doctor. I need to go back and watch that again, because I think we get some good stuff there that we haven't had before. I didn't think the leaf would come into it again so soon. Bit of a shame but obviously we're going to get more. Also, as much as I love the sonic, can he leave it behind next week? It's getting very, very annoying.
Nope. I don't know when I'll have time to rewatch it but my first impressions are pretty negative. The ridiculous scooter thing aside it looked spectacular but effects, snazzy or otherwise, are among the last reasons I watch anything. I prefer substance and this episode didn't have much. The complaints (for lack of a better word) about the music are interesting. I can't say I noticed, but then again I've generally enjoyed Gold's contributions. This was one of the very few pluses for me. Nice touch on someone's part. Or with me. She's not the worst companion ever but I don't get the fuss over her at all. I hope she becomes even slightly interesting very soon. Hardly. I detested Martha from day one.
I really, really like Clara but her status as a favourite depends almost entirely on how this mystery turns out. Martha was actually very good and way better than Rose in her first episode. Then she became increasingly infatuated with The Doctor and it became tedious.
The biggest success and mistake with this story was Clara's backstory. It was wonderfully written and wonderfully thought out. The problem was it took up half the story, if not more, leaving the rest to be rushed. This is basically Clara's 'End of the World', but with the plot being pushed aside for Clara exposition. It's wonderfully acted, the music is beautiful, the visuals are fantastic, concepts were good and dialogue both funny and evocative. The dialogue was a triumph in my opinion. It's just not much actually happened. Oh and any scene with that scooter was just silly and not in a good way.
No kidding. I didn't like Amy yet after two episodes either, but she and Rory grew to become my favorite companions. So who knows how Clara will turn out? I think she has potential. As for the episode, I enjoyed it, though it was certainly flawed. I'm a huge sap for sentimentality, though, so even though I wasn't really sure what was going on, I was still crying when Clara had to give up her leaf!
I was being a bit tongue in cheek, but to put it another way I liked all the other companions (even Donna and Martha) right from the start, whereas Clara... meh.
She's not as obnoxiously unfunny as Tate and she's less forgettable than Agyeman so I prefer her already.
I just don't feel like we know enough about her to form any kind of opinion. At this point she's basically a plot device to get the Doctor active again. We haven't done much to actually explore who Clara is and what makes her tick.
the problems is, they killed off the smart, interesting victorian clara and replaced her with a boring amy-clone
Fair enough. Certain companions will simply click faster than others. I know you're not a huge fan, but absolutely loved Donna right out of the gate. "The Runway Bride" Christmas Special is one of my all-time favorite episodes of the entire show, mostly because of Catherine Tate.
I liked Lance in Runaway Bride. An anti-reality television and celebrity gossip man that gleefully plots to murder Catherine Tate for her obnoxious behaviour. I found him utterly relatable in a way no other RTD characters are.
Actually they killed off the smart, interesting future Clara, replaced her with the smart, interesting victorian Clara, which they also killed off, and replaced her with the smart, interesting modern-day Clara. It's basically the exact same character.
I would have much prefered that Victorian Clara be the companion but I still like the current one. I just dislike modern day London so it's irritating we always keep going back there. It's patronising to the audience.
It seems like they don't think the audience can relate to, or find interesting, anything historical or alien so we just get characters from modern day London over and over. It's the same reason I hate JJ Abrams narrowing Star Trek's focus to being Earth. It's dumbing the premise down severely.
They're right. You need a point-of-view character. It's the oldest trick in the book: the double act. If you want your funny guy to be funny, you need to pair him with a straight guy. You can't have two funny guys. For the same reason, pairing the weird eccentric alien Doctor with another alien or a girl from the 13th Century wouldn't work. Me, I like people, I know people, I relate to people. Show me a police procedural where one cop is a ghost and the other cop is a martian and I'm out.
^You know Being Human? It has a ghost, a vampire and a werewolf as the main characters. It's in the name. It seemed to function as a secondary sun though. It got a bit darker than before, maybe it was night, but it sends a messed up message. Maybe it was supposed to mean they can embrace negativity now but they forgot to allude to it properly. The rest of the episode has such a meaningful story in the paradoxical society where good meanings count more than what would be valuable for any contrived bureaucratic mechanisms, and then they spend so much on making an unnecessary god happy, so they can escape doing something of actual worth. The singing conveys meanings so well and the sonic wand battle sequence was a great battle of wills, but there were parts left obviously distractingly vague, but that's just a delay, not an obstacle, if there's such an expression in english.