Talk and Relevant Discussions in Snark: Doctor Who Recap, Post-Pre-Flood Edition

I can’t not love a monster that looks like that, especially when Slipknot’s Corey Taylor does his roars, and Peter Serafinowicz, a.k.a. voice of Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace, does his spoken lines. This guy was a threat back in the past for the Doctor, while Clara remained trapped in the future on a haunted undersea base.

But did they HAVE to call the villain The Fisher King? The quickest way to make an evil thing less scary is to give him a name that recalls a yammering Robin Williams playing a homeless depressive.

Let’s back up a bit, though. Regular commenter Gallen_Dugall is prone to pointing out that Steven Moffat is prone to suggesting his Big Mystery’s solution in the first ten minutes or so. Moffat didn’t write this one, but it literally had the Doctor address the camera and explain what the big reveal would be about before the opening credits had even run. Was this an attempt to be ironic? Because in the end it had problems.

Said, solution, the “bootstrap paradox,” basically means you figure out what to do based on what future-you tells you, except how could future-you have known it in the first place other than learning it from present-you, who learned it from future-you, et cetera. Religion features this kind of paradox a lot – in Greek mythology, you have stories like Oedipus, and in Judeo-Christianity, Moses, wherein the act of trying to avoid the prophecy is what creates the truth of the prophecy, but the prophecy only happens because of what you do to avoid the prophecy. But in religion, you have an out – God, or gods, are powerful enough to exist outside of time and can do anything.

In sci-fi, and especially comedic sci-fi, the bootstraps paradox can work very well as a throwaway gag – Marty McFly playing a Chuck Berry song in front of Marvin Berry, for example, who then gets his brother Chuck to listen to it over the phone and thereby come up with the song that was his to begin with, in the future. But when it’s the focus of your story, I think it behooves you to offer an answer – and we did not get one that I found satisfactory.

Tangent: John Connor in the Terminator movies is also kind of a biggie – he knows what he knows because his mother teaches him stuff that he himself will teach Reese who will then tell her in the past. As much as we love Terminator 2, it’s a pretty big issue that he should no longer exist by the end of it once they’ve interrupted that paradox. Genisys was actually going to resolve all of that by introducing the notion of trans-dimensional travel (as embodied, of course, by Matt Smith), a plot point which stupidly got saved for a sequel that will never happen.

If there are later consequences to creating this week’s paradox for a Time Lord, I’ll take back my reservations. Maybe.

Kudos to reader Erik Paul for correctly figuring out it would be the Doctor inside the sarcophagus, though the notion that the Doctor had to wait 140 years inside that thing to resolve the story is kind of a minor detail that gets tossed away. The Doctor is too hyper to sit still that long naturally – does he hibernate? Does he not age like Matt Smith on Trenzalore?

Another issue – If the military intelligence lady is so familiar with the Doctor and such a big fan, why does she blatantly NOT do as he asks, only to promptly die as a result?

While I generally enjoyed the tension, suspense and atmosphere of this episode, I think any ending where you have to take 5-10 minutes to explain the whole thing afterwards is dramatically not a good one. We should, ideally, be figuring things out as the Doctor does, rather than have him suddenly fix everything, and then once the danger has passed explain how he did it, in detail. Also those goddamn sunglasses are becoming an even bigger handwave than the screwdriver ever was. Also Also – why, again, was the TARDIS afraid of ghosts who CAN ONLY HARM THINGS WITH EYEBALLS THAT HAVE READ THEIR LETTERS? Sign Language Guy was braver than a thinking time machine that has seen things you wouldn’t believe.

In the end, the Fisher King wasn’t all that threatening, either. But I will say it’s nice sometimes to have a big dangerous alien in this universe that looks evil turn out to be exactly what you think it is.

I have a bad feeling the Doctor is going to talk about his imminent death every episode this season. I hope my prophecy skills are less-than-biblical.

Next week we get Vikings versus big lumbering things.