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Talk and Relevant Discussions in Snark: Doctor Who “Listen” SPOILER Thread


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My thoughts, as always, below the fold…

Okay. Here is why I love Capaldi.

In the era when I grew up in the Irish education system – which we should grant was similar to its English equivalent – the philosophy was very different from what we’re familiar with here in the U.S., today. It was like the intellectual version of boot camp – aged, cranky bastards would yell at you and tell you you were the worst person in the world constantly, until you shut up, took notes and memorized. If you were lucky, by the time you were finally ready to graduate, they’d soften a tiny bit and give you grudging signs of respect, but you had to know what to look for. These were, I think, socially maladjusted people who didn’t fully know how to relate to kids. William Hartnell embodied this.

If you were lucky, you’d get a teacher who was just fucking nuts, but in a good way. So absorbed in their own eccentricities were they that they might forget to give you homework…but they could equally well turn on a dime and suddenly feel dangerous. This was Tom Baker.

Better still, perhaps, was the young teacher not yet burned out and still naive. But we would eat them alive. Peter Davison.

Capaldi embodies both of the first two quite well. His attempts to be brutally honest with the kid, and his yelling at Clara to do as she was told reminded me 100% of my teachers. Clara is the modern, Davison-type teacher. That aside…

-The opening sequence with the meditation stuff was perfect. Loved that.

-Can Clara really be this fucking clueless about how to relate to a military guy? Have we not been in enough wars over the past decade to give people some kind of idea that you don’t bring up how many people they’ve killed? Shit, even the Doctor doesn’t talk about it much, and he’s probably killed more than any Earth soldier.

-Speaking of which, nice John Hurt appearance.

-The Doctor went to school in a space barn, though?

-Glad this wasn’t the cliched ghost-no-really-it’s-an-alien story I expected. But if the Doctor’s theory of hidden creatures is BS, then what wrote on his chalkboard, and what the hell was on that planet?

-Was this fully standalone? No Cybermen or afterlife hints whatsoever?

-I guess we already know now how Clara has to leave.

-Does the Doctor not know that Clara jumped into his timestream? Wouldn’t it solve a lot of problems just to tell him?

-Great use of not showing stuff when the first creature on the bed made its presence known. Whatever the latex mask would have looked like could not have equaled our imagination.

-When we’re talking about creatures who’ve perfected the art of hiding, and we’ve established in nu-Who that the TARDIS is alive, doesn’t a fully functional, non-chameleon circuit broken TARDIS fit the bill?

Those are my thoughts. Let’s hear yours.