Heads up! Dr Who starts Saturday....

[hillbilly]

So who what are these:

ABDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVXYZ 

Sea Devils.

This evening's episode was a bit of fan service.

I squee'd at three bits. 

(click to show/hide)

4. True 9->10. '13'.

I hope they take the opportunity with the next regeneration to have storylines over more than 1 or 2 hours.  I could have imagined the story of G.F.N.M. (which is a big deal) was the type of story that could have been split over a few episodes.  Too much was squeezed into the hour and a bit (although it was enjoyable).

[David Martin]

Clara always works..  Interesting episode.

[BrianI]

A great episode.    

[Cunobelin]

"The ravens are looking a bit sluggish - tell Malcolm they need new batteries"

Brilliant!

[andyoxon]

Quick work on some reviews...  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/10469945/Doctor-Who-The-Day-of-the-Doctor-BBC-One-review.html

[TimO]

"The ravens are looking a bit sluggish - tell Malcolm they need new batteries"

Brilliant!

Oh yes, that was very good.

I wonder if that's the same Malcolm as we saw in Planet of the Dead?  I'd quite like to see him come back.

[Cunobelin]

Almost as good as :

They're Screwdrivers - what are you going to do?

Assemble a cabinet at them?

[Regulator]

I thought it was a bit meh!  I think it's probably time to retire the franchise...

[geraldc]

So did Hurt regenerate into Hartnell?

[red marley]

No. See the mini-episode for the sequence:

McGann -> Hurt -> Eccleston

Hurt's Doctor was galactic galavanting while bad Mr Grade was keeping him off air.

[Cunobelin]

Too easy?

They could have shown Eccleston at the end of Hurt's regeneration, but chose not to do so .... WHY?

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

Well, they did - look at the eyes. But according to the Radio Times, Eccleston left because he didn't like the way the production was managed, and although he had talks about coming back for this episode, he decided not to.

[drgannet]

I just wish they had come up with a story line that hung together with previous episodes/series. John Hurt was excellent though.

[peliroja]

It was absolutely bloody brilliant. I got a bit choked up at times! Fantastic. 

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

Well, they did - look at the eyes.

And also "I hope the ears are a bit less conspicuous this time." 

[TimO]

Peter Davison's "The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot" is worth watching, it's very funny.

The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot (on BBC iPlayer)

[geraldc]

That five-ish doctors thing is awesome. Like Extras but with Dr Who

[citoyen]

Sorry to be a dissenting voice but I thought it was terrible. Really, really bad.

Apart from John Hurt, who was excellent.

The story was disjointed, incoherent and rambling, and far too earnest with the heavy-handed moralising. It's a bit tiresome that they've spent several years building up this Time War myth only to overturn it on a whim. The producers need to learn the art of subtlety and self-restraint.

I did enjoy the use of the original opening title sequence though, and the "reverse the polarity" line.

Fortunately, I've managed to avoid most of the associated blarney but I do have An Adventure... saved to watch at some point.

[pcolbeck]

I quite liked it. Thought Queen Elizabeth 1st was far to Queeny from Blackadder though.

[Exit Stage Left]

The story was disjointed, incoherent and rambling, and far too earnest with the heavy-handed moralising.

There's sermon fodder in just about anything, as Giles Fraser demonstrated in the Saturday Guardian.

The Bible is extremely weird in places: monsters with horns on their horns, men wrestling with angels, devils entering pigs, floods covering the whole Earth, people rising from the dead. For some, this weirdness is its very weakness. Such stuff obviously couldn't have really happened. It's just fiction, they scoff angrily, dismissing the whole thing as rubbish. But I often find the weird bits the best. Why can't the imagination be used to tell the truth – maybe not empirical truth, but something else. A truth about the human condition perhaps.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2013/nov/22/doctor-who-modern-scepticism-christianity-doesnt

If the Mosaic faiths are religions of the book, then perhaps Doctor Who is the religion of the video game.

[citoyen]

There's always been an element of that to Doctor Who, but it's been done much better in the past. I found it laboured and tedious.

A super-weapon with a conscience is a really interesting idea, and about as close to proper sci-fi as Doctor Who has ever been in my recollection. It could have been the basis of a really good sci-fi story, but not this one.

Having two sides negotiating a peace treaty while not knowing which side they were on is also a potentially interesting theme, but again, I thought it was badly handled and spoiled by being too melodramatic.

[LEE]

The story was disjointed, incoherent and rambling

Agreed.
The fans seem happy though.

I never usually watch it but thought I'd join in with this one.
I never felt the sense of threat that would warrant the annihilation of London and the QE1 scenes were terribly am-dram and poorly thought out.

The whole thing felt like I fell asleep a few times and woke up having missed something important.

I definitely missed the part, during the last 40 years or so, when the Sonic Screwdriver changed from being a lock-pick (it wasn't that much better than a normal screwdriver) into a do-anything-you-can-possibly-imagine tool.

I may watch a Capaldi episode, just to see how they cast him but it's a Kids' TV show (admittedly with high production values) and I'm not a kid any more.  Pertwee and, briefly, Baker were my Doctors.

[red marley]

I'm with citoyen on this one. I really wanted to like this episode, but there were just too many wasted opportunities. The galaxy heater with a conscience was very Iain M. Banks, but it just lapsed into A Christmas Carol and never really went anywhere. And they could have done so much more with Rose Tyler. In the end it just felt like an excuse to shoehorn Billie Piper into the programme.

They tried really hard to make Tom Baker's appearance a poignant footnote, but again it just felt like a clumsy nostalgia insertion. And as for the cardboard cutouts of all the doctors at the end...

[Kim]

The story was disjointed, incoherent and rambling

Agreed.
The fans seem happy though.

+1

I definitely missed the part, during the last 40 years or so, when the Sonic Screwdriver changed from being a lock-pick (it wasn't that much better than a normal screwdriver) into a do-anything-you-can-possibly-imagine tool.

Except solve NP-complete problems in O(1) time, which seems like the sort of thing a timelord would know how to do, given two instances of the same Turing-complete screwdriver.   

it's a Kids' TV show (admittedly with high production values) and I'm not a kid any more.

Exactly.  Like many Kids' TV shows, it's being made by geeks my age, putting in wanky references and in-jokes for other geeks my age to appreciate.  But it's still fundamentally a kids' show.  Long may it continue.

[citoyen]

it's a Kids' TV show (admittedly with high production values) and I'm not a kid any more.

Exactly.  Like many Kids' TV shows, it's being made by geeks my age, putting in wanky references and in-jokes for other geeks my age to appreciate.  But it's still fundamentally a kids' show.  Long may it continue.

It seems to be caught between two camps these days. If it really is a kids' show, it should be on at teatime, not at just short of 8pm with an "after party" on BBC3.