The only explanation for the extra mass must be some kind of energy source inside the "egg" that is used to generate additional matter.
But it's a common problem in Sci-Fi and Fantasy - all those regeneration aliens, zombies and what not - how dot hey keep regenerating if they don't get the materials from somewhere? They must have a separate source of materials, maybe a kind of replicator. Which is of course a very crazy concoction and is not likely to "evolve" naturally.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
The "egg shell" could of acted like chlorophil and the alien could of feed off the complex sugars to grow.
and before anyone says chlorophil is green.... yeah earth chlorophil is alien chlorophil might not be.
But where did the mass come from?
Photosynthesis is just rearranging matter, plants get minerals and water from the soil so that they can grow; the moon creature HAS NO MATTER INPUT. It CANNOT grow!
Also, the stated weight gain would NOT have had any measurable effect on Earth, the gravity on the Moon could NOT have been that high with the stated weight gain, and when the Doctor HIMSELF is visibly straining to keep a straight face due to the sheer stupidity of his lines, you've got a problem.
All I can say is that any episode which can provoke the level of debate I'm seeing here and elsewhere online must be something special, one way or another.
Personally, the dodgy science doesn't bother me, and I don't think it's much dodgier than the typical Doctor Who episode. It's a matter of taste, but I have a pretty high tolerance for zany high-concept plots than some.
For some time now, Doctor Who has been more about trying to find and land emotional plot beats, rather than logical ones, and that's okay by me. And the emotional plot beats that came from this episode were fantastic. I think the episode did an excellent job in laying out the Doctor's logic for doing what he did, but also not shying away from the fact that it was a complete betrayal of Clara. It was an interesting twist on past stories, like "Waters of Mars," "The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood," and "The Day of the Doctor."
...talking to players is like being a mall Santa. Everyone immediately wants to tell you all of the things they want, and you are absolutely powerless to deliver 99% of them.
Really enjoyed this episode. Thought Clara was (understandably) being inconsiderate at the end, but all-around good story. The pseudo-science kind of nagged at the back of my mind, but the rest of the episode made up for it.
All I can say is that any episode which can provoke the level of debate I'm seeing here and elsewhere online must be something special, one way or another.
Personally, the dodgy science doesn't bother me, and I don't think it's much dodgier than the typical Doctor Who episode. It's a matter of taste, but I have a pretty high tolerance for zany high-concept plots than some.
For some time now, Doctor Who has been more about trying to find and land emotional plot beats, rather than logical ones, and that's okay by me. And the emotional plot beats that came from this episode were fantastic. I think the episode did an excellent job in laying out the Doctor's logic for doing what he did, but also not shying away from the fact that it was a complete betrayal of Clara. It was an interesting twist on past stories, like "Waters of Mars," "The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood," and "The Day of the Doctor."
Overall, it worked for me.
Here's the thing:
1. I have nothing at all wrong with (for example) Daleks levitating and working computers and such with plungers, because they are made up whole-cloth and have technobabble counters to the laws of physics.
2. What this episode did WRONG was to attempt to use real science to justify its BS plot, and then to get that real science so painfully wrong that PETER F*CKING CAPALDI had trouble keeping a straight face.
3. Add to that the "TRIBBLE you, Africa!" solution to the problem, and the hysterical yelling by Clara (I was totally with the Doctor on the "does not compute" expression on that), plus the utter lack of emotion shown by Clara et all when the random explosion showed up, plus the bad pacing, plus the fact that Peter f*cking CAPALDI could barely keep a straight face, and it's one of the worst episodes I've ever seen.
2. What this episode did WRONG was to attempt to use real science to justify its BS plot, and then to get that real science so painfully wrong that PETER F*CKING CAPALDI had trouble keeping a straight face.
That's fair - I had a number of questions about the science as well, but they didn't distract me during the back half of the episode. I'm definitely not going to tell you you're wrong for having a problem with it, though.
I'm not sure what to think about your comments re: Capaldi; I didn't think there was anything in his performance suggested bad acting (and being unable to "keep a straight face" would be the definition of bad acting). I'd just be cautious about interpreting potential acting choices as the personal opinions of the actor. Again, though, I have no clue.
3. Add to that the "TRIBBLE you, Africa!" solution to the problem, and the hysterical yelling by Clara (I was totally with the Doctor on the "does not compute" expression on that), plus the utter lack of emotion shown by Clara et all when the random explosion showed up, plus the bad pacing, plus the fact that Peter f*cking CAPALDI could barely keep a straight face, and it's one of the worst episodes I've ever seen.
I feel like I'm missing a reference to something with the "TRIBBLE you, Africa" comment. And for the life of me, I can't recall a random explosion.
For me, Clara's reaction to the Doctor's choices in this episode boil down to a couple of points:
1) The Doctor didn't just leave her to help humanity make its own decision, he (as far as she knows) left her there to die if they decided to detonate the bombs. When the Doctor had the humans negotiate with the Silurians and the Vogons, he still remained with them, even if he was uninvolved.
2) Clara and Courtney were not of that time or place, and didn't belong there. In my opinion, if the Doctor truly wanted humanity to make its own decision, he would have left it completely up to Lundvik, and taken Clara and Courtney home. The fact that he threw them into the mix makes me question his motives, and agree with Clara - you're not respecting someone if they don't feel respected.
...talking to players is like being a mall Santa. Everyone immediately wants to tell you all of the things they want, and you are absolutely powerless to deliver 99% of them.
There is a big difference between "plot invokes novel laws of physics which are as yet unknown to us" and "plot violates laws of physics that we understand perfectly well, and doesn't bother offering any sort of explanation". You can't just magic up 1.3 billion tons of mass without explanation, and - as someone else noted - that's not even a tiny fraction of the mass that would be needed to give the Moon the same gravitational field as Earth. Without even an attempt at an explanation (saying "but it's an alien!" is not an explanation), these things grate.
And yes, it grated on me, too, that Africa, Asia, South America and Australia apparently don't matter.
The single-celled spiders weren't explained either... nor where the "new" moon came from, nor what happened to all the fragments of the old one... and I don't think the situation with Clara making the big decision was properly thought through either.
In fact, I don't think enough of this episode was properly thought through. Which, as I've said before, is one of the besetting sins of bad science fiction. The cast did, I think, their best with a duff script, but a duff script is what it is. Sorry.
...talking to players is like being a mall Santa. Everyone immediately wants to tell you all of the things they want, and you are absolutely powerless to deliver 99% of them.
That's fair - I had a number of questions about the science as well, but they didn't distract me during the back half of the episode. I'm definitely not going to tell you you're wrong for having a problem with it, though.
I'm not sure what to think about your comments re: Capaldi; I didn't think there was anything in his performance suggested bad acting (and being unable to "keep a straight face" would be the definition of bad acting). I'd just be cautious about interpreting potential acting choices as the personal opinions of the actor. Again, though, I have no clue.
Capaldi's an incredibly good actor; when a line he had to say had me and the sci-fi club howling with rage and laughing at the sheer stupidity of the lack of science, his only sign of pain was his cheeks tightening.
It was small, but it was there.
A lesser actor would've broken out laughing entirely.
I feel like I'm missing a reference to something with the "TRIBBLE you, Africa" comment. And for the life of me, I can't recall a random explosion.
1. "TRIBBLE you, Africa!": Africa is mostly without lights visible from the Moon. Africa didn't get much of a say in the decision; neither did countries on the other side of Earth, like China or Australia. Or most of Russia.
2. Random explosion: Eye-rolling trailer bait corridor run scene. There's a nonsensical explosion, nobody reacts to it except to have their hair billow dramatically.
1. "TRIBBLE you, Africa!": Africa is mostly without lights visible from the Moon. Africa didn't get much of a say in the decision; neither did countries on the other side of Earth, like China or Australia. Or most of Russia.
2. Random explosion: Eye-rolling trailer bait corridor run scene. There's a nonsensical explosion, nobody reacts to it except to have their hair billow dramatically.
1) Okay, I follow. I see your point, though I can't recall what Africa actually looked like in the episode. It being the not-too-distant future, there would have been no reason the production crew couldn't have added extra lights to the major population centres of the continent to reflect additional development from what we have today. I doubt any slight toward any parts of the world were intended by the writer, but I can understand the perception.
On a somewhat related note, the props department left a few awfully stereotypical pieces of set dressing in the Mexican moon base. I think there are some valid criticisms to be made there.
2) Ah yes, that scene. I didn't like it either - I almost never like gratuitous slow motion.
...talking to players is like being a mall Santa. Everyone immediately wants to tell you all of the things they want, and you are absolutely powerless to deliver 99% of them.
Those poor North Koreans, they all wanted to vote to save the creature, but couldn't turn on any lights :P.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
The mass-addition really could have been at least explained with made-up "science" but it wasn't even questioned.
The moonbase didn't exactly look equipped for low-grav...
As to the lights on-off deal with Africa, it's not like Clara had a whole lot of other options for polling the majority of humanity. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision on Clara's part, and pretty clever given the circumstances. There wasn't exactly time to conduct a vote for the entire population of Earth.
There were definitely concerns that could have been addressed fairly easily, but I enjoyed the episode anyways. Really hope they learn from their mistakes though.
This ep was one of the poorer eps in Nu Who, IMHO, for a lot of the reasons already named.
One thought not mentioned yet, however, regarded the choices. Everything in the script forced it all down to two choices: kill or not. And then the script calls for the Doctor to leave.
Please. How many times has the show over the last 50 years tried to show but two options, and then the Doctor pulls a third option out of his hat? "Either we push the big red button of doom or we don't and everyone good is doomed anyway." "Wait! I've changed my mind. We'll make Gallifreyan art instead!"
So where was the third option? More importantly, the Doctor's companions should know to look for a third option, and even more importantly, the Doctor should realize that though they make the choice, they may need help in the information category. "Doctor, there has to be a third choice. Tell me, do you know of any way we can suspend the hatching process temporarily or indefinitely while humanity figures this out?" Stuff like that. Abandoning his companion deprived her of a powerful tool in the decision process: his wealth of knowledge, and that was not being a friend.
Abandoning his companion deprived her of a powerful tool in the decision process: his wealth of knowledge, and that was not being a friend.
Which I think was precisely the point, and which I'm okay with. This latest incarnation of the Doctor seems to be more out of touch with humanity, and a poorer friend than the previous two, to be sure.
The decision to leave the solution up to humanity is one I could see any version of the Doctor making - certainly, Eleven made some similar choices when it came to the Silurians and the Vogons. What sets Twelve apart is that he not only made that decision, but he also completely abandoned the humans to do whatever they would do. Eleven remained in the room, and even offered advice. Twelve left the room, and offered nearly nothing aside from the initial revelation of the decision.
Debate over the plot mechanics aside, I think this is pretty compelling character work - the most compelling we've seen on Doctor Who in a long, long time.
...talking to players is like being a mall Santa. Everyone immediately wants to tell you all of the things they want, and you are absolutely powerless to deliver 99% of them.
So where was the third option? More importantly, the Doctor's companions should know to look for a third option, and even more importantly, the Doctor should realize that though they make the choice, they may need help in the information category. "Doctor, there has to be a third choice. Tell me, do you know of any way we can suspend the hatching process temporarily or indefinitely while humanity figures this out?" Stuff like that. Abandoning his companion deprived her of a powerful tool in the decision process: his wealth of knowledge, and that was not being a friend.
A point which the Doctor made abundantly clear, was that that event was a 'temporal blindspot' for him. He was probably aware of both outcomes, but may have been uncertain as to which was 'the correct one', essentially, a complete reverse of his predicament in the Fires of Pompeii, where he was all too aware of how the event had to play out, but if I recal, he still left the decision primarily in Donna's hands, rather than simply Making it Happen... It wasn't until the event played out, that he gained a clear awareness of the subsequent events. Capaldi himself, before the release of the series, described the 12th Doctor as 'less user-friendly', and I think that is a fair assessment, so his removing himself from the situation and leaving the others to make the decision, I would say was pretty much in character for him :cool:
Debate over the plot mechanics aside, I think this is pretty compelling character work - the most compelling we've seen on Doctor Who in a long, long time.
It also gave us a scenario that most Whovians are too afraid to deal with, and in an odd way, us Trekkers have already dealt with: Can humans survive without relying on some powerful being to bail them out?
Earth (and to an equal extent, Whovians) depend far too much on the Doctor to solve all the problems. You'd think that when Torchwood was created, they would have learned somee self reliance. No, instead, The Doctor is replaced by Jack Harkness and once again, humanity cowers behind one man. Torchwood gets cancelled and Earth starts depending on the Doctor. When humans attempt to solve their own problems using what they have on hand, Whovians call them monsters and beg the Doctor to find a better solution.
Now, I mentioned that Trek has dealt with this sort of scenario. In Star Trek, we have that problem of a powerful being who refuses to assist the human race with it's problems. That race? The Q Continuum.
The Q could, with a snap of their fingers, end the Borg threat. They could bring Kirk back to life and send him home. They could have saved Romulus. They could end the Undine threat and make the universe a happy little place with no war or anger and rainbow TRIBBLE unicorns and fairy dust baby gravy.
But they don't. Why?
Because it is NOT. THEIR. PROBLEM.
The Q don't solve all our problems because they know humans need to learn to do for themselves. Hell, the lesson was reinforced a second time in Voyager with the Caretakers/Ocompa. If you rely on someone to solve all your problems, you will never learn how to live without them.
The Doctor is always spouting off about "The Great Human Empire", how it spans entire galaxies and reaches for the stars. Answer me this: How can you expect to reach for the stars if your hands are firmly gripping Mommy-Doctor's apron strings?
The humans needed to make their own decisions and deal with their problems. They do not have TARDIS technology. They do not possess the ability to travel through time and build a second moon. They don't have Gallifryan scanners that could tell them "Hey, there's a giant space alien in the moon and it's friendly!" They saw the moon breaking apart, remembered the film Deep Impact and reacted accordingly with the tools they have. Big rocks threaten the world? Blast them into smaller rocks and pray the chucks burn up.
Human solution for a human problem. Do not forget The Doctor is not human. He is Gallifreyan. He only lives on Earth because he wants to watch the humans rise. But they won't do that if they expect him to fix their problems and neither should the fandom. Doctor Who WILL end eventually. You will need to learn how to live without it.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"
A point which the Doctor made abundantly clear, was that that event was a 'temporal blindspot' for him. He was probably aware of both outcomes, but may have been uncertain as to which was 'the correct one',
Right, but my quoted section was speaking to information he could provide, whether he knew an outcome or not, and regardless of what humans decided. Even if the Doctor had no knowledge of how things played out, the "temporal blindspot", he is still plugged into the vast knowledge of the Time Lords and might be able to provide technical information for a human seeking to craft a win-win situation, the "third option" I mentioned.
Capaldi himself, before the release of the series, described the 12th Doctor as 'less user-friendly', and I think that is a fair assessment, so his removing himself from the situation and leaving the others to make the decision, I would say was pretty much in character for him :cool:
Agreed, I never had a problem with the Doctor turning the decision over to the companion. That is "less user-friendly". It was the complete abandonment that was a mess.
Even if the Doctor had no knowledge of how things played out, the "temporal blindspot", he is still plugged into the vast knowledge of the Time Lords and might be able to provide technical information for a human seeking to craft a win-win situation, the "third option" I mentioned.
Indeed, at the end of the episode, he flat-out told Clara he had thought it extremely unlikely that the creature would destroy it's "nest" (Earth) after hatching, but he hadn't bothered to share that information with any of them.
...talking to players is like being a mall Santa. Everyone immediately wants to tell you all of the things they want, and you are absolutely powerless to deliver 99% of them.
While I generally roll my eyes at Moffat-bashing, he is the showrunner, and thus oversees every episode. Showrunners typically can and do make alterations to the scripts, and often don't take credit unless their contributions are significant.
All the same, I find Moffat-bashing to be a generally unproductive thing to do, and I think that the episode-specific criticisms elsewhere in the thread much more useful - even those I disagree with.
...talking to players is like being a mall Santa. Everyone immediately wants to tell you all of the things they want, and you are absolutely powerless to deliver 99% of them.
Moffat's the showrunner. Literally everything on the show has to go through him at some point.
Sure, he wasn't directly responsible for it, but he had the power to say "no, guys, that's idiotic, Capaldi can barely keep a straight face" and he didn't.
It's like...say for this hypothetical example cooked up at midnight with a toga party going on down the hall that "Scorpion" was written by Jar Jar Binks, directed by Wesley Crusher, and produced by Q in a tutu. Berman and Braga (in this half-baked example) had nothing to do with it directly, but they still would have to sign off on this abomination of an episode, which makes them partially culpable.
Sorry for that crazy and probably nonsensical example, it's midnight and I'm exhausted.
At least Harness and Wilmhurst are getting in to the fine art of Stephen Moffat's writing style (cook up some unbelievable BS to cover your railroading and plot holes, make the Doctor do dumb and nonsensical stuff, make the Doctor say eye-rollingly bad lines, make a trailer bait scene with perfectly made-up unblemished young women tossing their hair dramatically while something blows up, have all the important and interesting bits where they explain what's going on and puzzle through it go by really fast and with lots of background noise and flashy lights so nobody can tell what's going on, and make the BIG EPIC SCENE go on for half the episode with increasingly over-the-top swelling music and needless drama).
OK the moon is to heavy how are nukes going to help. Explosions can break up mass they can kill things but there is absolutely no way they could make the extra mass (wherever the hell it came form) go away.
A dead Giant space creature weighs the same as a living one.
The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest. G'Kar
OK the moon is to heavy how are nukes going to help. Explosions can break up mass they can kill things but there is absolutely no way they could make the extra mass (wherever the hell it came form) go away.
A dead Giant space creature weighs the same as a living one.
Go watch Deep Impact. Maybe then you'll get why they brought the nukes.
Moffat's the showrunner. Literally everything on the show has to go through him at some point.
Sure, he wasn't directly responsible for it, but he had the power to say "no, guys, that's idiotic, Capaldi can barely keep a straight face" and he didn't.
How do you know he didn't just sign off on the script and didn't attend the actual shoot? He may have been writing the Christmas special for all we know.
This isn't a simple case of "Moffat screwed up". Those three, Wilmshurst, Bennet and Harness are the confirmed to be behind the episode. Unless you were onset and saw Moffat there, we can't pin the blame on him.
If we're blaming showrunners for something we don't know they did, then Matt Groening is responsible for the Family Guy Crossover's extremely lengthy chicken-esque fight.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"
In deep impact there trying to slit the asteroid in 2 from far enough away that the pieces will have enough of a different vector to pass on either side of the earth. Once the asteroid passing an invisible line in space splitting would have done nothing as the separate peace's would still impact the earth that's why one of the pieces still hit the earth at the end.
THE MOON IS WAY TO CLOSE to for the pices to do anything but fall into the earths gravity well.
The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest. G'Kar
In deep impact there trying to slit the asteroid in 2 from far enough away that the pieces will have enough of a different vector to pass on either side of the earth. Once the asteroid passing an invisible line in space splitting would have done nothing as the separate peace's would still impact the earth that's why one of the pieces still hit the earth at the end.
THE MOON IS WAY TO CLOSE to for the pices to do anything but fall into the earths gravity well.
You kind of skipped the relevant part. They send the nukes up there to blast the larger moon bits into smaller moon bits that they hoped the atmosphere would burn up into even smaller chunks that do not pose a serious threat.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"
There is not always a third solution. Look at Pompei. Push the plunger, let everyone live, defeat the aliens some other way. Or push the plunger, ignite the volcano, stop the aliens there but also wipe out all those innocents.
Personally, I love the episodes where they do explorations of character like this. I viewed the Doctor's 'Blind Spot' as him intentionally witholding information from the humans in a way that woulddn't make them keep begging him for answers. He wanted to see Humanity stand on it's own two feet for once, to make a hard choice. And he did that.
"I thought you wanted humanity to decide."
"And it did."
That was not referring to humanity the species. That's not what he was doing. He wanted Humanity the spirit to decide. And it very nearly didn't. Forget the science that doesn't make sense to us humans, it's all alien creatures, it doesn't have to obey the laws of the universe as we understand them. Maybe it was drawing in kinetic energy from the movement of it's orbit and using that to feed up the creature. Where does that extra mass come from? Where does a baby's mass come from in the womb? The moon has no life on it. Maybe that's because all the life giving energy was absorbed years ago into the creature, allowing it to grow. Forget the random explosion scene that lasted all of five seconds. People are missing what the episode was about. It was about spirit. Choosing morality over safety. Like the Space Whale. But without that safety switch to push.
And yes, the Doctor did not go about this in a nice friendly way. But guess what. This Doctor is not a nice friendly man. Neither was 6. Neither was 7 when he got angry. That's who this Doctor is. And frankly, I like it.
*******************************************
A Romulan Strike Team, Missing Farmers and an ancient base on a Klingon Border world. But what connects them? Find out in my First Foundary mission: 'The Jeroan Farmer Escapade'
Right, but my quoted section was speaking to information he could provide, whether he knew an outcome or not, and regardless of what humans decided. Even if the Doctor had no knowledge of how things played out, the "temporal blindspot", he is still plugged into the vast knowledge of the Time Lords and might be able to provide technical information for a human seeking to craft a win-win situation, the "third option" I mentioned.
Agreed, I never had a problem with the Doctor turning the decision over to the companion. That is "less user-friendly". It was the complete abandonment that was a mess.
I think post #48 sums it up much better than I could have done :cool:
Comments
Star Trek:First Contact:
Riker: Look at that...
Cochrane: What? You don't have a moon in the 24th Century?
Riker: Sure we do, it just looks a lot different...
This episode explains why
As for the rest of your science/physics whining:
It was entertainment which was entertaining, that's all that matters...
I'm sure you know Shatner's response to such pedantry
But it's a common problem in Sci-Fi and Fantasy - all those regeneration aliens, zombies and what not - how dot hey keep regenerating if they don't get the materials from somewhere? They must have a separate source of materials, maybe a kind of replicator. Which is of course a very crazy concoction and is not likely to "evolve" naturally.
But where did the mass come from?
Photosynthesis is just rearranging matter, plants get minerals and water from the soil so that they can grow; the moon creature HAS NO MATTER INPUT. It CANNOT grow!
Also, the stated weight gain would NOT have had any measurable effect on Earth, the gravity on the Moon could NOT have been that high with the stated weight gain, and when the Doctor HIMSELF is visibly straining to keep a straight face due to the sheer stupidity of his lines, you've got a problem.
Personally, the dodgy science doesn't bother me, and I don't think it's much dodgier than the typical Doctor Who episode. It's a matter of taste, but I have a pretty high tolerance for zany high-concept plots than some.
For some time now, Doctor Who has been more about trying to find and land emotional plot beats, rather than logical ones, and that's okay by me. And the emotional plot beats that came from this episode were fantastic. I think the episode did an excellent job in laying out the Doctor's logic for doing what he did, but also not shying away from the fact that it was a complete betrayal of Clara. It was an interesting twist on past stories, like "Waters of Mars," "The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood," and "The Day of the Doctor."
Overall, it worked for me.
Here's the thing:
1. I have nothing at all wrong with (for example) Daleks levitating and working computers and such with plungers, because they are made up whole-cloth and have technobabble counters to the laws of physics.
2. What this episode did WRONG was to attempt to use real science to justify its BS plot, and then to get that real science so painfully wrong that PETER F*CKING CAPALDI had trouble keeping a straight face.
3. Add to that the "TRIBBLE you, Africa!" solution to the problem, and the hysterical yelling by Clara (I was totally with the Doctor on the "does not compute" expression on that), plus the utter lack of emotion shown by Clara et all when the random explosion showed up, plus the bad pacing, plus the fact that Peter f*cking CAPALDI could barely keep a straight face, and it's one of the worst episodes I've ever seen.
That's fair - I had a number of questions about the science as well, but they didn't distract me during the back half of the episode. I'm definitely not going to tell you you're wrong for having a problem with it, though.
I'm not sure what to think about your comments re: Capaldi; I didn't think there was anything in his performance suggested bad acting (and being unable to "keep a straight face" would be the definition of bad acting). I'd just be cautious about interpreting potential acting choices as the personal opinions of the actor. Again, though, I have no clue.
I feel like I'm missing a reference to something with the "TRIBBLE you, Africa" comment. And for the life of me, I can't recall a random explosion.
For me, Clara's reaction to the Doctor's choices in this episode boil down to a couple of points:
1) The Doctor didn't just leave her to help humanity make its own decision, he (as far as she knows) left her there to die if they decided to detonate the bombs. When the Doctor had the humans negotiate with the Silurians and the Vogons, he still remained with them, even if he was uninvolved.
2) Clara and Courtney were not of that time or place, and didn't belong there. In my opinion, if the Doctor truly wanted humanity to make its own decision, he would have left it completely up to Lundvik, and taken Clara and Courtney home. The fact that he threw them into the mix makes me question his motives, and agree with Clara - you're not respecting someone if they don't feel respected.
And yes, it grated on me, too, that Africa, Asia, South America and Australia apparently don't matter.
The single-celled spiders weren't explained either... nor where the "new" moon came from, nor what happened to all the fragments of the old one... and I don't think the situation with Clara making the big decision was properly thought through either.
In fact, I don't think enough of this episode was properly thought through. Which, as I've said before, is one of the besetting sins of bad science fiction. The cast did, I think, their best with a duff script, but a duff script is what it is. Sorry.
Who are you apologizing to? We didn't write the darned thing.
It was small, but it was there.
A lesser actor would've broken out laughing entirely.
1. "TRIBBLE you, Africa!": Africa is mostly without lights visible from the Moon. Africa didn't get much of a say in the decision; neither did countries on the other side of Earth, like China or Australia. Or most of Russia.
2. Random explosion: Eye-rolling trailer bait corridor run scene. There's a nonsensical explosion, nobody reacts to it except to have their hair billow dramatically.
1) Okay, I follow. I see your point, though I can't recall what Africa actually looked like in the episode. It being the not-too-distant future, there would have been no reason the production crew couldn't have added extra lights to the major population centres of the continent to reflect additional development from what we have today. I doubt any slight toward any parts of the world were intended by the writer, but I can understand the perception.
On a somewhat related note, the props department left a few awfully stereotypical pieces of set dressing in the Mexican moon base. I think there are some valid criticisms to be made there.
2) Ah yes, that scene. I didn't like it either - I almost never like gratuitous slow motion.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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The moonbase didn't exactly look equipped for low-grav...
As to the lights on-off deal with Africa, it's not like Clara had a whole lot of other options for polling the majority of humanity. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision on Clara's part, and pretty clever given the circumstances. There wasn't exactly time to conduct a vote for the entire population of Earth.
There were definitely concerns that could have been addressed fairly easily, but I enjoyed the episode anyways. Really hope they learn from their mistakes though.
One thought not mentioned yet, however, regarded the choices. Everything in the script forced it all down to two choices: kill or not. And then the script calls for the Doctor to leave.
Please. How many times has the show over the last 50 years tried to show but two options, and then the Doctor pulls a third option out of his hat? "Either we push the big red button of doom or we don't and everyone good is doomed anyway." "Wait! I've changed my mind. We'll make Gallifreyan art instead!"
So where was the third option? More importantly, the Doctor's companions should know to look for a third option, and even more importantly, the Doctor should realize that though they make the choice, they may need help in the information category. "Doctor, there has to be a third choice. Tell me, do you know of any way we can suspend the hatching process temporarily or indefinitely while humanity figures this out?" Stuff like that. Abandoning his companion deprived her of a powerful tool in the decision process: his wealth of knowledge, and that was not being a friend.
Which I think was precisely the point, and which I'm okay with. This latest incarnation of the Doctor seems to be more out of touch with humanity, and a poorer friend than the previous two, to be sure.
The decision to leave the solution up to humanity is one I could see any version of the Doctor making - certainly, Eleven made some similar choices when it came to the Silurians and the Vogons. What sets Twelve apart is that he not only made that decision, but he also completely abandoned the humans to do whatever they would do. Eleven remained in the room, and even offered advice. Twelve left the room, and offered nearly nothing aside from the initial revelation of the decision.
Debate over the plot mechanics aside, I think this is pretty compelling character work - the most compelling we've seen on Doctor Who in a long, long time.
It also gave us a scenario that most Whovians are too afraid to deal with, and in an odd way, us Trekkers have already dealt with: Can humans survive without relying on some powerful being to bail them out?
Earth (and to an equal extent, Whovians) depend far too much on the Doctor to solve all the problems. You'd think that when Torchwood was created, they would have learned somee self reliance. No, instead, The Doctor is replaced by Jack Harkness and once again, humanity cowers behind one man. Torchwood gets cancelled and Earth starts depending on the Doctor. When humans attempt to solve their own problems using what they have on hand, Whovians call them monsters and beg the Doctor to find a better solution.
Now, I mentioned that Trek has dealt with this sort of scenario. In Star Trek, we have that problem of a powerful being who refuses to assist the human race with it's problems. That race? The Q Continuum.
The Q could, with a snap of their fingers, end the Borg threat. They could bring Kirk back to life and send him home. They could have saved Romulus. They could end the Undine threat and make the universe a happy little place with no war or anger and rainbow TRIBBLE unicorns and fairy dust baby gravy.
But they don't. Why?
Because it is NOT. THEIR. PROBLEM.
The Q don't solve all our problems because they know humans need to learn to do for themselves. Hell, the lesson was reinforced a second time in Voyager with the Caretakers/Ocompa. If you rely on someone to solve all your problems, you will never learn how to live without them.
The Doctor is always spouting off about "The Great Human Empire", how it spans entire galaxies and reaches for the stars. Answer me this: How can you expect to reach for the stars if your hands are firmly gripping Mommy-Doctor's apron strings?
The humans needed to make their own decisions and deal with their problems. They do not have TARDIS technology. They do not possess the ability to travel through time and build a second moon. They don't have Gallifryan scanners that could tell them "Hey, there's a giant space alien in the moon and it's friendly!" They saw the moon breaking apart, remembered the film Deep Impact and reacted accordingly with the tools they have. Big rocks threaten the world? Blast them into smaller rocks and pray the chucks burn up.
Human solution for a human problem. Do not forget The Doctor is not human. He is Gallifreyan. He only lives on Earth because he wants to watch the humans rise. But they won't do that if they expect him to fix their problems and neither should the fandom. Doctor Who WILL end eventually. You will need to learn how to live without it.
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
Agreed, I never had a problem with the Doctor turning the decision over to the companion. That is "less user-friendly". It was the complete abandonment that was a mess.
Indeed, at the end of the episode, he flat-out told Clara he had thought it extremely unlikely that the creature would destroy it's "nest" (Earth) after hatching, but he hadn't bothered to share that information with any of them.
Reminds me unfortunately of the more recent seasons of OUAT, after the bad writing really started to show.
Moffat had nothing to do with the episode.
Writer: Peter Harness
Director: Paul Wilmshurst
Producer: Peter Bennet
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
While I generally roll my eyes at Moffat-bashing, he is the showrunner, and thus oversees every episode. Showrunners typically can and do make alterations to the scripts, and often don't take credit unless their contributions are significant.
All the same, I find Moffat-bashing to be a generally unproductive thing to do, and I think that the episode-specific criticisms elsewhere in the thread much more useful - even those I disagree with.
Moffat's the showrunner. Literally everything on the show has to go through him at some point.
Sure, he wasn't directly responsible for it, but he had the power to say "no, guys, that's idiotic, Capaldi can barely keep a straight face" and he didn't.
It's like...say for this hypothetical example cooked up at midnight with a toga party going on down the hall that "Scorpion" was written by Jar Jar Binks, directed by Wesley Crusher, and produced by Q in a tutu. Berman and Braga (in this half-baked example) had nothing to do with it directly, but they still would have to sign off on this abomination of an episode, which makes them partially culpable.
Sorry for that crazy and probably nonsensical example, it's midnight and I'm exhausted.
At least Harness and Wilmhurst are getting in to the fine art of Stephen Moffat's writing style (cook up some unbelievable BS to cover your railroading and plot holes, make the Doctor do dumb and nonsensical stuff, make the Doctor say eye-rollingly bad lines, make a trailer bait scene with perfectly made-up unblemished young women tossing their hair dramatically while something blows up, have all the important and interesting bits where they explain what's going on and puzzle through it go by really fast and with lots of background noise and flashy lights so nobody can tell what's going on, and make the BIG EPIC SCENE go on for half the episode with increasingly over-the-top swelling music and needless drama).
I never thought I'd say it, but I miss RTD.
A dead Giant space creature weighs the same as a living one.
Go watch Deep Impact. Maybe then you'll get why they brought the nukes.
How do you know he didn't just sign off on the script and didn't attend the actual shoot? He may have been writing the Christmas special for all we know.
This isn't a simple case of "Moffat screwed up". Those three, Wilmshurst, Bennet and Harness are the confirmed to be behind the episode. Unless you were onset and saw Moffat there, we can't pin the blame on him.
If we're blaming showrunners for something we don't know they did, then Matt Groening is responsible for the Family Guy Crossover's extremely lengthy chicken-esque fight.
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
THE MOON IS WAY TO CLOSE to for the pices to do anything but fall into the earths gravity well.
You kind of skipped the relevant part. They send the nukes up there to blast the larger moon bits into smaller moon bits that they hoped the atmosphere would burn up into even smaller chunks that do not pose a serious threat.
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
Personally, I love the episodes where they do explorations of character like this. I viewed the Doctor's 'Blind Spot' as him intentionally witholding information from the humans in a way that woulddn't make them keep begging him for answers. He wanted to see Humanity stand on it's own two feet for once, to make a hard choice. And he did that.
"I thought you wanted humanity to decide."
"And it did."
That was not referring to humanity the species. That's not what he was doing. He wanted Humanity the spirit to decide. And it very nearly didn't. Forget the science that doesn't make sense to us humans, it's all alien creatures, it doesn't have to obey the laws of the universe as we understand them. Maybe it was drawing in kinetic energy from the movement of it's orbit and using that to feed up the creature. Where does that extra mass come from? Where does a baby's mass come from in the womb? The moon has no life on it. Maybe that's because all the life giving energy was absorbed years ago into the creature, allowing it to grow. Forget the random explosion scene that lasted all of five seconds. People are missing what the episode was about. It was about spirit. Choosing morality over safety. Like the Space Whale. But without that safety switch to push.
And yes, the Doctor did not go about this in a nice friendly way. But guess what. This Doctor is not a nice friendly man. Neither was 6. Neither was 7 when he got angry. That's who this Doctor is. And frankly, I like it.
A Romulan Strike Team, Missing Farmers and an ancient base on a Klingon Border world. But what connects them? Find out in my First Foundary mission: 'The Jeroan Farmer Escapade'
I think post #48 sums it up much better than I could have done :cool:
Minor question just for clarification: Is a showrunner the same thing as an executive producer?
Tell that to these guys. :P