The moon landing was infected with a call to arms, because it is infinitely rerunable. Humans are going to rewatching this 30 second clip for the next 10 thousand years.
Spoilers Empire of Death grade and discussion thread
- Thread starter The Nth Doctor
- Start date
The moon landing was infected with a call to arms, because it is infinitely rerunable. Humans are going to rewatching this 30 second clip for the next 10 thousand years.
What the hell is this? (32 minutes.)
Not the best snapshot, but look at his thumb.
I mean, it's Earth. The Silence are always there, but if they feel threatened, they may have been active participants in this story, which is either a storyline that was dropped, or a big reveal next year when they tell us what really the hell happened.
Early promo shots of Ncuti's Doctor show that he has nail paintings of Gallifreyan symbols. The one you've screencapped just happens to look like a tally mark.
Just like the Kyptonian Glyph for "Hope" looks eerily similar to the English character for the letter "S"?
I did not like the way it a little song about babies being eaten, and think threatening children in so direct a manner is inappropriate for Doctor Who and lazy. It also bothers me on an emotional level. So I refused to watch.
(I caught the end of Devils Chord on transmission, and decided I wouldn’t be bothering until Boom because that was a Moffat episode.)
It’s cheap audience manipulation (particularly the way Rusty does it) so I won’t be touching it. Read a synopsis and that’s enough for me.
There’s classic serials I haven’t watched (on account of not being born when they were on or otherwise having to miss them ) but have read the target novelisation of, and a couple I only know the basics of. I’m not racing to watch Season 24s middle episodes, having found the books likely better, and I haven’t been fussed with most of Jodie’s first season either. I did go back and watch the Capaldi ones I skipped after that era started going off the rails mind you.
The problem with the Rubys mother reveal is that RTD kept telling you that there was steak for dinner, steak for dinner, steak for dinner — only it was chicken all along.
‘We’ didn’t make Rubys mother important, he did.
And it’s didn’t land because he had to lie in the writing, over and over, to get the result he wanted from the audience. He’s done it a lot this season.
It’s also possible it’s going to happen again, because Ruby will be back, and it makes so little sense. But all that does is make this ‘finale’ into another lie.
It’s also a bit bigger than everyone years ago scratching their head and going ‘ok, yeah, Bad Wolf… but… why those words?’ and everything else working, so he’s not getting away with the shoddiness of it this time. (Surprised he didn’t try to tie that into the Sutekh thing. Or maybe he was going to, and then remembered Sutekh was a jackal.)
Subverting expectations is a thing that when it does work, can’t be based on completely lying to your reader/viewer/player, and building false expectation.
He is literally crying Wolf, and pretty soon, people just won’t bother coming to the field.
Yeah, they've been visible several times.
The doctor got tired of K9 so he mounted him on the wall
TBF the head is the useful bit - the brain, laser and waggly ears. The body kept crapping out, especially on rough terrain (though I have just rewatched Stones of Blood and K-9 is the fucking GOAT there, and not a sacrificial one either).
That's not K-9, that's Sutekh-2
The doctor got tired of K9 so he mounted him on the wall
That’s a bit grim really. Like he’s got a little zen garden like you get in the gadget shop that’s Sara Kingdom, and an artsy fossil coffee table made from a lump of the ship Adric went down on in there.
Mind you. Handles isn’t something you want to think too hard about either.
Not sure where you are coming with all this. It was established back in "Ruby Road" that no one had come forth to identify themselves as Ruby's parent, and since her mother hadn't sent her DNA in anywhere, DNA connections were a dead end.
She really wanted to know her history.
Then she was erased from time by the goblins, only to have the Doctor bring her back. This paradox creates a fixed point of time and I'm guessing is what gave her the "snow tears."
The mystery is important because it's important to Ruby. Frankly I found it more satisfying that she found her normal, human mom rather than being a daughter of River Song or the Trickster or some other supernatural source.
Unsurprisingly (especially to those of us who already pointed out the obvious parallels), Davies says Ruby's ordinary parents was a direct reaction to The Rise of Skywalker and Rey's parentage:
“This is kind of my reaction to, bear with me now, the Star Wars films,” Davies said of the reveal about Ruby’s birth mother on an audio commentary track for “Empire of Death” released by the BBC. “I can’t remember their titles but in the last trilogy, [The Last Jedi] said that Daisy Ridley was nothing special. There was nothing special about her parentage. That she just got the Force, and was an ordinary person with the Force. And then in the next one they changed it all so that she was this child of the Emperor... and I really loved the version where she wasn’t special.”
“[Ruby’s] not the daughter of Sutekh. She’s not the daughter of the Time Lords, or Rassilon, or something like that,” Davies continued. “Her mum is Louise Miller, who was 15 years old and pregnant, from a dangerous home, an abusive home, and left her child on the doorstep. That’s my reaction to [The Rise of Skywalker], because I think that’s a better story.”
I find this reaction encouraging and I hope this completely dispells my fear of the other shoe dropping next season won't actually happen. Davies much preferred The Last Jedi's take on Rey's parents (as did I) over The Rise of Skywalker's walking back that take.The problem (for me at least) is that while the reveal that her birth mom is a normal person could be totally fine in certain contexts, it didn't work in this context. It had been built up throughout the season to be something super important. In fact, there was something so amazing about the mom that even Sutekh, who destroyed all life in the Universe, couldn't see her face (because reasons).
RTD created expectations that it would be something grandiose but it ended up being mundane. If the setup was different, sure, being a normal person is a great outcome. But that's not a natural outcome of a situation where they couldn't see her face using the Time Window and it was a mystery to Sutekh as well.
Subverting expectations can work but it didn't for me in this case. We got so many clues and it really seems to have been to get people chattering rather than for producing a great mystery story. That's why I no longer give a flip about Mrs. Flood.
I guess my take would be that if he wants to tell that type of story, don't set things up making it look like a different type of story. Don't make it seem like she has special parentage using various hints when it's not going to be that. There can be excellent stories about the mysteries of tracking down birth parents without any expectation that they're anything other than normal people.
Last edited:
That's a fair reaction. You saw my thoughts about both loving and hating such subversion, so I guess it comes down to execution. I like the idea overall and I could overlook (some of) the execution whereas I think the poor execution weighed it down too much for you.
Agreed! And we all react to things differently. I still enjoyed the story overall. Just less enthused about the mystery elements of it.
I don't know, I thought the Sutekh revelation was fine. So, it can work.
Of course she was special. The point was that her specialness wasn’t due to her lineage, but to herself.
Its not that her mother was normal, at least for me its the absolute stupidity of "She became cosmically important because we thought she was", and the overall bullshit of the mystery. That makes no sense, its just something he pulled out of his ass. There are also a lot of small but important questions that tear this mystery apart, like: "Why was a pregnant teenager wearing a hooded cloak like she was a homeless peasant from a fantasy novel?", "Why did she point at a sign like she was giving some world changing revelation?" "Where did the snow come from?", "Couldn't this kind of mystery apply to literally millions of people on Earth, much less the universe?", "Why did this only happen here, to this one woman, and no one else in the history of the universe based on how its literally the only thing that Sutek can't see?", etc. It makes no sense for any of this to happen, and its especially makes no sense for Sutek to not be able to see through it.
RTD made several bad mystery's, gave them either terrible payoffs or no payoffs, and now apparently expects anyone to give a crap about the mystery of Mrs. Flood. I personally won't be falling into the trap of caring about a RTD mystery again. He's absolutely terrible writing of mysteries, which to be fair probably has been the case since his first run but he was especially bad here.
He still managed to write a better season then Chibnall, but I'd say that this is both RTD's worst Dr. Who finale and overall its his weakest season of Doctor Who.
I think that is a critical part of the stories of the first season:
The Toymaker was defeated by the Doctor, but Maestro was defeated by a couple of musicians.
Sutakh didn't care about all the other thousands of orphans who never knew their parents because none of them were traveling with the Doctor. But Ruby being a time traveler, it just frustrated him to the point he needed that answered. But Ruby is 100% human (as had been said several times over the season) and - defeated Sutakh by just being herself. As powerful as the Pantheon is, these gods are not invincible and all it takes is the right person at the right time to stop them.
That's my take. Ruby is special because of who she became, not because of how she was born.