Doctor Who Series 8; The time of the man that stops the monsters (v2)

[Castel]

I'm not really sure what didn't make sense here. I totally get not liking it, I was not at all engaged, but I thought the Master's plan and what followed was relatively straightforward and without obvious holes (putting aside the Brigadier cameo nonsense)

[Seli]

The Brigadier Cyberman had indeed lost his emotions - as did Danny, once Clara removed them for him. The point was that even after deleting his emotions, supposedly, Danny retained his love for Clara and acted appropriately. And so the Brigadier Cyborg also retained his love for his daughter and saved her.

I assume that Clara actually did not remove them, she did use the psychic interface with the sonic, and she presumably does still have (latent) computer hacking skills from back in the Matt Smith episode. It is kind of plausible she found another solution to keep Danny functioning without removing his emotions completely.

[polishgenius]

I'm not really sure what didn't make sense here. I totally get not liking it, I was not at all engaged, but I thought the Master's plan and what followed was relatively straightforward and without obvious holes (putting aside the Brigadier cameo nonsense)

(1) The whole 're-animating the dead' thing just made no sense. The ones immediately available and recently dead, sure, but if they can put a mind in a 300-year-old body and make it work then they can just stick it in a robot, because the 'human' parts aren't doing anything relevant.

(2) Any tiny little part of a cyberman can make a whole new cyberman... what?

(3) Did they really not install any kind of safeguard to make sure no-one who didn't delete their emotions became a cyberman? And why did they bother doing that in any case, since

(4) Apparently having the inhibitors turned on means no cyberman who's ever had a loved one will be a proper emotionless cyberman. Coz if Danny and the Brigadier can do it, why not everyone else?

(5) The Doctor being knocked out in order to get him to go with them being immediately followed by him being made President of the World just... didn't go together. The reasoning for doing the one is exactly why doing the second would be the worst idea ever. Not to mention, the idea of persuading a bunch of world leaders and militaries to surrender their power to some random alien none of them have ever even met is possibly the least plausible thing ever imagined on Doctor Who.

(7) Did they really not search Missy when they had her captive? Convenient!

(8) Come to think of it, back to the inhibitors, why are they in an easily-accessible Iron Man chest-piece? What possible reason is there for that design feature?

(9) Fuck the more I think about it the more I hate this episode.

It also pissed me off that the trailed 'Clara Oswald has never existed' was a joke/very terrible plan.

I did like Missy in general (the scene with her tormenting and killing Osgood was great), and Capaldi's performance was excellent too. Clara and the Doctor lying to each other at the end made for affecting viewing, too. Kind of hope that's it, though I'm pretty sure from Santa's words they're going to go another way in the Christmas special (I so hope Santa turns out to be a Time Lord. Either that or that this is the DC Universe Santa who, every Christmas, breaks into Apokalips to give Darkseid a lump of coal).

Basically, this week's episode of Constantine was a much better episode of Doctor Who than this week's Doctor Who.

[Raksha 2014]

I put the emotional resonance down to the poor transition from corpses to Cybermen; the newly risen dead would take awhile to become hardened Cybermen. And it could be that while Clara shut down Danny's emotions, she could not remove his memory of having had them.

I thought the whole dead people rising as Cybermen plot was a bit unbelievable even for Dr. Who. CyberZombies? And what about the expense and public reaction to millions, billions of dead bursting out of their graves - what happened to the bodies after the Cybermen self-destructed? No more bodies, broken graves all over the world?

They could have elaborated a bit more on the supposed Missy/Clara connection, namely, why? Missy/Mistress goes out of her way to point Clara toward the Doctor, for what reason? Missy certainly makes no attempt to use Clara or even find her in the second part of the finale.

Interesting last scenes. Sad that the Doctor and Clara lie to each other; but Clara has done a lot of lying, though the Doctor hasn't, and seemed to be trying to spare her feelings. I haven't felt that they have meshed well as Doctor/Companion; maybe because the writing has been inconsistent. Seems like they can't decide whether Clara was a nurturing mother-figure or a shrill brat. And the Doctor only seemed to have actually become fond of Clara in the last two episodes.

They should have done more with the idea of the Doctor as reluctant President of Earth.

[Seli]

....

It also pissed me off that the trailed 'Clara Oswald has never existed' was a joke/very terrible plan.

....

I actually love that :) the trailers have been great in the way they have been misleading expectations all season.

So, for complete convolution: Handles was actually the Brigadier?

[dog-days]

...

All of this.

Thank you.

[felice]

Well, excuse the 'it's not an emotion' bit as poetic license, then. ;) The idea is that love prevails: it's so deep a part of who Danny is (and the Brigadier, too) that it can't be overcome. That's what matters.

While that's a reasonable idea in certain contexts, eg resisting hypnosis or struggle-of-will type mind control, it's an incredibly silly idea when applied to the Cybermen, who are supposed to surgically alter brains. Though this case wasn't quite as bad as Closing Time where the entire conversion process was physically reversed by love, leaving Craig without a scratch.

But this is an objection that applies equally to every incarnation of both Cybermen and Daleks. We just have to assume that there's something about the mind that they need. Volition? Motive force? Something like that.

Traditional daleks and cybermen are both living beings, with cybernetic enhancements; here we're just talking about dead skeletons inside robots controlled by a digitised version of a human mind. What purpose the human mind serves is a separate issue; in any case, it must be running on computer hardware, since the organic brains of even the most recently deceased would have decayed beyond repair, and in many cases will have rotted away entirely.

Clearly their personalities weren't erased - only their emotions, which, though a major part of personality, isn't the entirety of it.

I suppose there is some potential value to the cybermen in diversity of thought patterns, yes.

Bad timing. Danny hadn't agreed to it, but he was about to. He just got interrupted. So far as we know, he was the only one.

It's implausible that he's the only one (apart from anything else, there'd be more recent arrivals), and in any case, the system shouldn't download him until he agrees, just like you have to accept terms & conditions before installing software.

He didn't. He just hoped he would. It was their only chance to discover the information.

It made no sense for him to have any such hope; it's like unlocking the cage of a hungry tiger in the hope that it will clean your shoes. And there were plenty of other already-emotionless cybermen around; why not ask one of them? And the information didn't help anyway; Missy wanted him to know, to force him to accept the army. And it was hardly difficult to guess; he already knew the rain makes cybermen, and it's pretty obvious that it could convert the living just as easily.

Having the army is one thing, having an army (partially) made up of his victims is another.

It would have more impact if the victims were in any way distinguishable from all the other cybermen.

[Castel]

snip

+1.

Hm, you have a (well, nine) points. I can't deny that all of that stuff was contrived, I guess I just wasn't as focused.

[Chaircat Meow]

All round bad. The cybermen really had no need for all the corpses.

I liked the new master/mistress though. Shame she was in such a bad episode.

[protar]

It was somewhat disappointing that the Cybermen where not actually related to the old Cybermen, but created entirely by Missy. I mean that's true of the Cybus Cybermen too, but at least they where villains in their own right.

[dog-days]

And I do wonder - if these Cybermen were created entirely by Missy, then why didn't she make them better? Had she been watching too many episodes of old school Who?

[Werthead]

A lacklustre end to what had been one of the stronger seasons. Most of it made no sense, the female Master idea was underused and the Cyberleader/Brigadier thing was kind of a nice idea but not handled at all well. It was also lame that they suddenly remembered that the Doctor was supposed to be looking for Gallifrey. It made zero sense that they built it up so much last year and it played zero role in the season up until now.

Also, I want to see the Cybermen back as villains in their own right. They keep showing up either in cohorts with other villains or as pawns of other people. It's making them a really disappointing enemy, compared to their far more disturbing appearances in the original series. It also doesn't help that this episode drew comparisons with the far better (from what we have suriving of it) The Invasion by directly referencing it.

[red snow]

(7) Did they really not search Missy when they had her captive? Convenient!

Probably not, considering there were two guards standing behind her the entire time who failed to notice her hands picking the locks. That and them failing to respond in any way to her quite clearly proclaiming she was about to kill the scientist.

[mormont]

(1) The whole 're-animating the dead' thing just made no sense. The ones immediately available and recently dead, sure, but if they can put a mind in a 300-year-old body and make it work then they can just stick it in a robot, because the 'human' parts aren't doing anything relevant.

Again, take it up with any writer who ever used Cybermen or Daleks. They're both basically robots who are created by 'converting' the living, and in both cases it can be pretty hard to see what the biological component contributes to the mechanical. You just have to kind of accept that there's some x-factor that they both need that comes from the people converted. How they're converted (from a living body or a dead mind) is just a detail.

(2) Any tiny little part of a cyberman can make a whole new cyberman... what?

Some sort of nanotech, I assume. Decent idea, makes them a bit more interesting.

(3) Did they really not install any kind of safeguard to make sure no-one who didn't delete their emotions became a cyberman? And why did they bother doing that in any case, since

(4) Apparently having the inhibitors turned on means no cyberman who's ever had a loved one will be a proper emotionless cyberman. Coz if Danny and the Brigadier can do it, why not everyone else?

For that matter, why didn't any other ancient Greek except Orpheus bother to try to get their loved ones back from the Underworld? Lazy, or did they just not love them enough?

Because the story isn't about those other people, is what I'm saying.

(5) The Doctor being knocked out in order to get him to go with them being immediately followed by him being made President of the World just... didn't go together. The reasoning for doing the one is exactly why doing the second would be the worst idea ever.

Yeah, OK. This bit made no sense.

It's implausible that he's the only one

Not unless you first make some assumptions about how the whole thing works that are not backed up by the information in the story, I would think.

And there were plenty of other already-emotionless cybermen around; why not ask one of them?

Presumably because the hope is that Danny will retain enough of his personality to fulfil the request before he goes full Cyberman. And these Cybermen don't seem to have zero individuality, though we don't see enough of them to really get that. (The biggest flaw of the episode is that it tries to get too much into the running time.)

[john]

+1.

Hm, you have a (well, nine) points. I can't deny that all of that stuff was contrived, I guess I just wasn't as focused.

Even putting aside Polish's all very valid points (and I can think of several more), the central premise of the plot doesn't make any sense. Creating a genuine afterlife to capture dead human minds throughout history to use to reanimate a cyber corpse army to give to an old friend so he'll want to be friends again?

I mean, it's not quite as bad as creating a flesh replicate of a TARDIS companion so you can steal her baby who you can brainwash and then put in a mechanised spacesuit so she can emerge from a lake and shoot the Doctor with a big gun. But it's close.

[DaveSumm]

I think Missy would just have used the army or continued to make Cybermen until everyone was dead?

But he had the bracelet at that point. He could have ordered all cybermen to do nothing, the only downside being that the dead keep getting resurrected....... into cybermen who are also under his control, and can also be ordered to do nothing. Why does he HAVE to take the army away? If he had no idea how to stop the cloud, the same problem would remain whatever he did?

It's basically several centuries worth of work on the Master's part, to lead up to a moment where he offers the Doctor an army, who says no. Kinda anti-climactic. I'm reminded of Return of the Jedi, where we're told throughout that the Emperor has a great plan to turn Luke to the dark side......Luke shows up, says no. Great plan.

[Castel]

But he had the bracelet at that point. He could have ordered all cybermen to do nothing, the only downside being that the dead keep getting resurrected....... into cybermen who are also under his control, and can also be ordered to do nothing. Why does he HAVE to take the army away? If he had no idea how to stop the cloud, the same problem would remain whatever he did?

It's basically several centuries worth of work on the Master's part, to lead up to a moment where he offers the Doctor an army, who says no. Kinda anti-climactic. I'm reminded of Return of the Jedi, where we're told throughout that the Emperor has a great plan to turn Luke to the dark side......Luke shows up, says no. Great plan.

It's a problem because the Doctor is not sure of himself. That's what all the callbacks to the previous episodes were about. It's not that he logically couldn't just tell them to standstill, it's that, for a brief moment, he's seriously considering whether she's right. Is that dumb? Well, he's always had his psychological issues.

But Missy was going to use the Clouds to poison everyone and then bring them back if the Doctor didn't do as she said so he can't really just do nothing with them. The problem is that, as I said, he's afraid that if he starts using them even a little bit to mollify Missy he'll end up siccing them on the Daleks or some other asshole of the week. But,as we can see, he gets over this.

I also don't know if the Emperor was a failure. He got Luke this close to killing his own father and betraying everything he stood for. And what would have happened then? Luke would have lost everything he fought for (the Alliance and his entire support structure was basically dead until magic Ewoks showed up), and he would have proven to himself that he has his father's weakness. Luke won, but just because it wasn't some flashy victory doesn't mean that there wasn't a weakness or struggle there. The same goes for the Doctor.

[DaveSumm]

It's a problem because the Doctor is not sure of himself. That's what all the callbacks to the previous episodes were about. It's not that he logically couldn't just tell them to standstill, it's that, for a brief moment, he's seriously considering whether she's right. Is that dumb? Well, he's always had his psychological issues.

But Missy was going to use the Clouds to poison everyone and then bring them back if the Doctor didn't do as she said so he can't really just do nothing with them. The problem is that, as I said, he's afraid that if he starts using them even a little bit to mollify Missy he'll end up siccing them on the Daleks or some other asshole of the week. But,as we can see, he gets over this.

I also don't know if the Emperor was a failure. He got Luke this close to killing his own father and betraying everything he stood for. And what would have happened then? Luke would have lost everything he fought for (the Alliance and his entire support structure was basically dead until magic Ewoks showed up), and he would have proven to himself that he has his father's weakness. Luke won, but just because it wasn't some flashy victory doesn't mean that there wasn't a weakness or struggle there. The same goes for the Doctor.

I should probably rewatch for the exact quote before getting into this, but my recollection was that they went through all the temptation part and *then* Missy said "besides, if you don't take them then Earth's doomed", or something. That was the part I didn't understand.

I could buy Luke killing his father, just not subsequently turning to the Emperor and being all 'Hey, you're right, this dark sides awesome, I'm on your side now.' More likely he'd use his new found power to kill the Emperor. OK, maybe then Luke ends up being a threat himself (although quite why dark side = political power I have no idea) but that's no good to the Emperor's 'kill the rebels' plan.

I don't mind so much DW not making sense, it's just a shame that it all had to be crammed into one quick interchange. It's become gospel that everything has to happen so fast paced with DW, when the slower paced episodes that breathe always seem to work better.

[Castel]

I should probably rewatch for the exact quote before getting into this, but my recollection was that they went through all the temptation part and *then* Missy said "besides, if you don't take them then Earth's doomed", or something. That was the part I didn't understand.

I could buy Luke killing his father, just not subsequently turning to the Emperor and being all 'Hey, you're right, this dark sides awesome, I'm on your side now.' More likely he'd use his new found power to kill the Emperor. OK, maybe then Luke ends up being a threat himself (although quite why dark side = political power I have no idea) but that's no good to the Emperor's 'kill the rebels' plan.

I don't mind so much DW not making sense, it's just a shame that it all had to be crammed into one quick interchange. It's become gospel that everything has to happen so fast paced with DW, when the slower paced episodes that breathe always seem to work better.

It was Danny that said it first. He said that it'd rain again and everyone would die and come back. Then Missy reminded the Doctor and offered him an out: he'd have to take the army to get it though.

The Emperor doesn't need Luke to like him immediately. He just needs to destroy any sort of moral superiority and support that Luke has. It's hard to feel superior if you killed your own father. Honestly, it's like killing Mace Windu, you might as well go evil because if you don't convince yourself you're right you've just failed everything you've ever held dear. But, after that moral block has been destroyed, the Emperor just drags him back to Coruscant and breaks him. Luke IS his prisoner, and he IS traumatized by his current situation. A few years of psychological manipulation from the master of all manipulation should do it.And, if it doesn't work the Emperor just kills him.

Granted, he should have shut the fuck up until AFTER Luke committed patricide but I suppose he hadn't had a chance to gloat in years, being the undisputed ruler of the universe and all.

[Starkess]

I liked it. Some weak spots, but overall an interesting and enjoyable finale. I'm not ready for Who to be over for another year! :( (Okay, yes, Christmas special, but still.)