Even then, she should get a pass, because her brain was being slowly digested.
Moffat: The Whole Rotten Saga
- Thread starter TommyR01D
- Start date
Good old Perpugillaim Brown.
Doctor Who originally was an ensemble show, and truth be told, it never really drifts far from that. Those exact episodes you mention well...Peri is key to much of Caves, it’s her life the Doctor sacrifices himself for, and her scenes with Jek are at the absolute heart of things, Leela in Talons is very much a part of its popularity...’it’s a good knife’ at one end of why she works so well there, why she moves the story along, and at the other end, I think people liked seeing her in Victorian pants. Odd, when you consider that meant she was probably wearing more than usual. I’ll be honest, the only companion who ever annoyed me was Mel, but I am a bit unfair there because I have successfully only seen her first and last episodes. Clara annoys some..but....I think her writing is really clever. (I literally just finished the novelisation of Night Of The Doctor, and Moffat is the single best writer in the history of Who, and it’s a crying shame he never wrote for the novel series, which is the only place where the likes of Lloyd Rose, Lawrence Miles and Justin Richards - on a good day- would have stood shoulder to shoulder with him and burned brighter than a dying metaphor.)
It all makes me curious about these opinions that always polarise fans... Doctor at centre/companion and ensemble show...even the man/woman doctor debate. I wonder at what age people on the lines of these arguments came to the show. I have this suspicion that people who started watching as young children (particularly in the classic era, which is another dividing line) have a very different viewpoint to those who come to it as adults, possibly already as genre fans. I think this also applies to love/hate divide on Moffat too...because I think for the most part, he comes from the ‘started as a child’ side in his approach, even more than his contemporaries, who also started young as it were.
Man. You really don’t like the impossible girl do you?
I would point out that -aside from the reasons others have pointed out about her breakdown- the Doctor has a time machine, and she knows for a fact that time can be rewritten, because she did it herself to save the Doctors life at the destruction of her own. So you can see why she might be a bit pissed off that Danny wasn’t saved. That she then goes basically unstable, eventually becoming very very much like the Doctor, is a perfectly understandable reaction in her specific circumstances. Rivers general psychotic nature is probably more than a little bit down to the nature of the life (‘she didn’t get it all from you’ refers to more than Amy’s genetics I suspect.) of people living essentially outside of time and the usual laws of cause and effect. It’s probably why the Time Lords sequester themself. No one has jaunted up and down the vortex for very long, at least not without reason, without going a bit Bodmin.
Yep. We watched a different Doctor Who.
I think the Impossible Girl was TERRIBLE.
1. I don't understand how a Time Traveler is some how weirded out by meeting someone in an unusual way.
2. It reduced Clara to be a plot gimmick.
Clara was way more interesting with the 12th Doctor in his first season than she ever was as the gooey love interest for 11.
I love Rose in the first season. I can't stand her for most of season 2.
Well (1) the key is unusual...even for a time traveller. In all of time and space you keep bumping into person x, but the first time you met them...they died. In who prior, time travellers generally met each other in the ‘right’ order. (Call it a side effect of Gallifreyan Mean Time.) since the universe reboot, and even before, that doesn’t happen so much. And as they become more seasoned travellers, they also..in some cases...go a little bit more loopy. Call it a coping mechanism. It’s something I think is interesting in the modern show in general.
(2) I think Clara wasn’t a plot gimmick. At least...she was more than that. I think that was the point in some ways...even to the Doctor, she’s a paradox to be investigated, until she becomes his best friend. And she was engineered that way by....his oldest best friend. It’s more complicated, and I like complicated in narratives. People don’t like Clara for varieties of reasons. Some of them aren’t very good, and some of them are just a teeny bit sexist.
I'm not a fan of Clara but I couldn't actually tell you why. Colman is a good actress, she's pretty and always comes across as a great person, I'm not precious about the Doctor being the star of the show and the companion taking centre stage now and again, and it may just be that she had the misfortune to be the companion where the show took a dip (for me) but it is interesting that my least interest in the show (outside of S2 and the giggle twins) was 7B-9. Correlation isn't causation obviously but that is an interesting coincidence. In terms of Nu Who companions I prefer Donna, Amy and Bill, and probably S1 Rose, but prefer Clara to Martha and S2 Rose.
One of my big bugbears with RTD (and to be fair in some ways Moffat to) is their definition of happiness. Nobody on Who ever has to get over a loss or trauma, and everything can be made right with a somewhat hollow replacement.
Rose lost her father and the Doctor but it's ok because she ended up with knock off copies of both of them.
Donna grew as a person but had that all taken away, but though she's back to being shallow and selfish at least she's rich now.
Happy endings are fine, it's the weird way RTD in particular found of compensating characters that's always bugged me!
One of my big bugbears with RTD (and to be fair in some ways Moffat to) is their definition of happiness. Nobody on Who ever has to get over a loss or trauma, and everything can be made right with a somewhat hollow replacement.
Rose lost her father and the Doctor but it's ok because she ended up with knock off copies of both of them.
Donna grew as a person but had that all taken away, but though she's back to being shallow and selfish at least she's rich now.
Happy endings are fine, it's the weird way RTD in particular found of compensating characters that's always bugged me!
I think that quite a few of the companions do have to get over trauma...and the Doctor himself, but fundamentally as a family show, there always has to be some semblance of a happy ending. They probably also remember the nihilistic mid eighties run of the program, where that sort of antihero narrative was leading to many ‘down’ endings. The whole thing was presaged by Tegan leaving the Tardis for that very reason. Pretty much Clara’s entire arc is about her losing someone, learning to cope, finding someone new, then losing someone again...she’s hardened into a mortal version of the Doctor, and that’s what makes the hybrid dangerous.
One of the worst examples of this is the whole Amy, Rory and River/Mels thing. Apparently having their newborn child abducted is something Amy and Rory get over once they become aware their best friend growing up is their child. That doesn't make sense at all.
Yeah, that has always bugged me, too. If the show actually addressed the issue and then Amy and Rory said "Okay, we think we can live with this considering XYZ," I would've been fine with it. But Moffat didn't even try to handle the problem and just assumed the fans would move on. I love the Amy/Rory era but that's one of the biggest problems I've had with it (along with the Earthbound crap).
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The idea they always meet in the right order is ridiculous.
He never did with River. That didn’t suddenly make her the Impossible Girl.
In fact the first time the Doctor met River she died. That didn’t send him in some mission to solve the mystery. Why? Because the Doctor is a seasoned Time Traveler. He knows things can take place out of order.
The Impossible Girl story line would be a mystery to Mulder and Scully. But a Time Traveler? No.
I know what you're saying. Of the three characters Coleman played, Clara is my least favorite. For me, the two times Clara "worked" best as a character were in "The Day of the Doctor" and "Last Christmas." But I'd struggle to explain why those worked for me and other apperances didn't.
I suspect the writers of the back half of series 6 had no idea that there were serious emotional issues with Rory and Amy there to address. Of course, "The Girl Who Waited" and "The God Complex" had their own heavy issues, but some dialogue about how the Doctor let what happened with the infant Melody happen would not have been out of place. "Let's Kill Hitler" feels like Moffat making stuff up because he had no idea how to resolve the issues raised by "A Good Man Goes to War" (ie., the "baffle them with bullshit" strategy), and "The Wedding of River Song," though entertaining, is nonsense piled on top of alt-universe nonsense that ultimately doesn't matter. (As much as I despise the series' inability to deal with the emotional fallout of Amy and Rory losing their child, I despise Moffat's decision to have an alternate universe Amy take her revenge on an alternate universe Kovarian more.) Maybe, in ten years, when BBC Books launches a Missing New Series Adventures line we'll get novels that patch the holes of series 6. That won't fix series 6's narrative problems, but at least in one small corner of fandom it make it all make sense.
River was the first exception, it’s why it was a big deal when she was introduced. Prior to that, even non Time travellers were met in theright order to all intents. (Curiously, I think Queen Elizabeth is also in the wrong order.)
The Doctor always met the Master after their last engagement, never before, same for the Rani etc. He even met Glitz in the ‘right’ order despite technically meeting him sort of outside of time...of course the Ravolox affair must have occurred at an interesting point.
The problem wasn’t that he met Clara in the wrong order, it’s that she kept dying and was probably starting to seem more familiar cos of the Time stream at Trenzalore stuff. It actually all dovetails quite neatly when you look at it in relation to that.
What do you mean kept dying? When he first met her in the modern era, he had only seen her die once? And then later she alludes to a Dalek. That’s it. That’s all the dying. Rory died more than she did.
If River is such an exception why isn’t SHE the Impossible Girl? The Doctor shrugs it off as no big deal—other than she knows who he is.
I get how the puzzle works. I’m saying the puzzle shouldn’t be that much of a puzzle for a guy who travels through time and space and has a wife he continually meets out of order. Watch tr season: if she’s really that much of a puzzle how come he doesn’t spend that much time on it? Because there’s not that much story there.
It’s an example of Moffat thinking he’s cleverer than he is.
EDITED TO ADD: more bluntly: if the Doctor is smart, and we all believe they are, why doesn’t he ONCE consider the Impossible Girl is a product of time travel?
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She died twice. First time (the Doctor knows) was on the Dalek Asylum planet when she WAS the Dalek. It killed the Cruise Ship crew including Clara Oswin. The second time was with the Snowmen. She kinda fell off the Tardis' cloud and died. That's two.
I'd go with Time of the Doctor instead of Last Christmas. The main appeal for me in those two stories is that Jenna Coleman and Matt Smith really worked well together, and with the whole Impossible Girl thing done and out of the way, the two of them playing attracted to each other was a fresh dynamic to play up between Doctor and Companion which really could have had more done with it. I get why they dropped that angle between Clara and Capaldi's Doctor, but I missed it all the same.
She didn't know it was a dream, which is why I said she tried to kill the Doctor. as far as she was concerned, she had just murdered both him and herself, and she didn't care. It wasn't her subconscious or anything, it was what she had been plannng to do and would have done, if the stupid device had actually worked on The Doctor. Basically, The Doctor only didn't die because a certain piece of tech doesn't effect Timelords. That was how close he got to death, closer then almost any other time in his life.
All because Clara is a psychopath. She is the worst person to ever travel with the Doctor on the TARDIS (and I'm going to include Missy in that, since at least she doesn't try to pretend to not be a nutjob). Clara is an arrogant, selfish, psychotic asshole who Moffat was absolutely obsessed with making the most super important asshat in the universe for reasons I bet even he couldn't actually justify. She's the worst character in the franchise, and everything about her was shit. I mean, I guess the actress did the best she could but at this point I couldn't watch anything with Coleman in it because all I see is the character I hate.
I think you are on to something there.. (Moffat Not withstanding, I don't share your appreciation for him) I think there is definitely something to be said for those fans who grew up with the classic series VS those who have now grown up with the Nu-Who reboot. Age, and initiation do colour our own perceptions in the fandom about the universe, the show and it's direction. I think many are divided along similar lines when it comes to the new series and the issues that fans tend to bicker about back and forth. It could be age.. but I think it's more like you said.. a familiarity and general idea of how WHo should be presented is coloured by the past initiation into the series. This time frame coincides with their views on the show, it's lack of something from the old to the new, or the new to the old, and so on.. Change isn't easy to accept when you think you have a pretty comfortable understanding of something. However, let's be real and let's make it clear to the Polly anna's out there.. Change while necessary for Growth, isn't always a good idea, or could end up being a bad thing.. I disagree with the Bolshevik Communist Ideas espoused by Kylo Ren in TLJ where he stated Killing the past was something to be done to advance a future free of hinderence, however I am more in line with the thinking of George Santayana who said, "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it!"
