What is Doctor Who supposed to be?
A fun show?
I found every episode of Series 5 fun save "The Hungry Earth"/"Cold Blood." So far this season I've found every episode save "The Curse of the Black Spot" fun. (I didn't enjoy the first half of "The Rebel Flesh," but once I watched the whole thing, I liked the rest.) I thought "A Christmas Carol" was the best, and most fun, Christmas special we've ever had.
I'm having fun.
One where characters behave true to their characterizations?
I can recall no scenes where this did not happen.
One where characters like us ground the story with a sense of reality?
Honestly, my biggest problem with Series Six so far is that I think it's a little
too grounded in reality. It's very dark -- literally and metaphorically. I think it needs to lighten up a bit and have a goofy, cartoonish episode just to release some of the tension.
One that is imaginative and doesn't give us a Cyberman/Dalek/Sontaran/Auton/Silurian alliance to shove the Doctor inside a box instead of SHOOTING him dead?
I found the idea of an inescapable prison constructed just for the Doctor, because they're all terrified of him, to be far more imaginative than just shooting him.
One where people die and there are real consequences and a sense of danger?
I thought there was a surprisingly large body count in "The Rebel Flesh"/"The Almost People." And I've certainly been finding a real sense of danger to the season.
I cared more for The Hostess from Midnight and Lynda with a "Y" then I have for any spear carrier in the Moffat era.
Well, I'm sorry to hear that. But between Elizabeth X in "The Beast Below," Winston Churchill and Professor Bracewell in "Victory of the Daleks," the Bishop in "The Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone," Craig in "The Lodger," Karzan and Abigail in "A Christmas Carol," Canton Delaware in "The Impossible Astronaut"/"Day of the Moon," the TARDIS in "The Doctor's Wife," and Jimmy and Jennifer in "The Rebel Flesh"/"The Almost People," I haven't wanted for supporting characters about whom I cared in the Moffat era.
In ten years people will remember Donna Noble and Rose Tyler. They won't remember Amy.
We'll see. I daresay they'll remember all three -- although my suspicion is that Rose will be remembered more than any of the others, primarily because A) she was the first, B) she was played by a former pop star, and C) she's a pretty blonde.
Of course he wonders about it. It's clearly been troubling him for a while. But it's also apparently not something he's found any leads on yet.
The Doctor has never wondered about it.
He was still trying to figure it out at the end of "A Christmas Carol." He then spent parts of "The Impossible Astronaut"/"Day of the Moon" trying to figure out who invited him to Utah, and then he's spent the rest of the season trying to figure out Amy. I think it's pretty clear that the Doctor is starting to tie all of those things together. Not everything has to be explicitly spelled out.
Moffat's choice to extend his arcs further than one season at a time is certainly new to the show. It either works for you or it doesn't; I don't know that there's any sort of objective standard for how long an arc is supposed to be.
Brevity is the soul of wit, so an arc is supposed to be as long as it takes to hit all of its notes. The arc is being dragged out.
I don't agree. I think it's an interesting experiment that's working just fine.
The story falls apart under the weight of its own logical inconsistencies. Why didn't the Cybermen, Daleks and Sontarans just kill the Doctor?
How many times has the Doctor managed to come back from the dead? I wouldn't be surprised if they honestly felt the Pandorica was the only thing that could ever hold him.
If the Pandorica could survive the destruction of the universe, why couldn't they just create a huge Pandorica-space ship to survive the death of the universe?
You're misremembering the episode. It's not that the Pandorica could survive the destruction of the Universe, it's that the Pandorica preserved a bit of the Universe as it existed prior to its destruction. Mind you, what happened was that the TARDIS exploded on 26 June 2010 CE while attempting to time travel to 92 CE, creating a little pocket of space-time at Earth's location between those years, in which the Earth continued to exist in some form even while the rest of the Universe had ceased to exist. Think of Earth from the period 92-2010 as the little piece of fabric from a shirt that had been burnt.
However, even that pocket of space-time was doomed. Had it reached 26 June 2010, the whole thing would have collapsed and the universe ceased to exist. As it stood, it was already rapidly progressing its own destruction in 1996 -- possibly as a result of Old!Amy and Young!Amy touching each other.
All the Pandorica did was preserve enough of the old universe's space-time for the TARDIS to combine with it to un-do its own explosion and "reboot" the Universe. The Pandorica would not have survived the destruction of the Universe.
Remember The Stolen Earth?
Well, no, no one does, the Cracks wiped their memories, remember?
(I kid, I kid.)
The entire Dalek plan was to . . . destroy all universes? Remember that?
With technology they controlled and which would still allow them to exist. Hardly comparable to an explosion they don't control and which would not allow their survival.
The core philosophy that you don't commit genocide.
You mean like when the Doctor destroyed Gallifrey and killed all the Time Lords and Daleks?
Or when the Doctor drowned the last remaining Racnosses in the Universe?
As it stands, the Doctor didn't commit genocide. He tricked Humans into fighting back against the Silence, who were an occupying army. That doesn't mean that every Human who tried to kill a Silent succeeded -- in fact, the very fact that Humanity did not become widely aware of the existence of the Silence in 1968 strongly implies that the Silence got the hell out of Dodge before they could lose too many people and wiped themselves from Humans' memories as they left.
And, frankly, I'm not sure how else you could overthrow the Silence's hold on Earth.
And a lot of us aren't. About three million viewers aren't as compared to the RTD era.
About how many of those would you say were David Tennant fans moreso than
Doctor Who fans?
But you're exhibiting that bizarre tribal fealty that defenders pull out for Attack of the Clones or Enterprise.
That, or he actually enjoys it. Just a thought.
I'm enduring this poorly written dragged out arc counting the episodes until Moffat leaves and someone better (Gaiman, cough cough) becomes the showrunner.
Neil Gaiman has never run a television program and I doubt he ever will. The overwhelming majority of his career has been as a comics and prose writer, with the occasional film screenplay, not a television writer. He's clearly a talented screenwriter, but it's highly improbable he'd be appointed as the showrunner of one of the BBC's biggest and most important and most
expensive shows when he has no showrunning experience whatsoever, and has only ever occasionally written for television.
Now, Richard Curtis, on the other hand...
