Doctor Who. Official!

[SkyLandOceAnna]

I think it'd be interesting to put Sherlock and Doctor Who in the same room together. I wonder if Sherlock could tell The Doctor was an alien quickly or if he'd be able to tell at all. haha lol

[HeavyMetalSunshineSister]

The Doctor has survived the Daleks by being clever, knowing what Daleks are, being a Time Lord (he's been shot by a Dalek at least once, something Sherlock would not have survived), having a sonic screwdriver, having companions who, thanks to him, also know what Daleks are, and a whole lot of luck.

 

Out of all the Sherlock characters, Mycroft and Moriarty would have the best chance against the Daleks, due to the big networks of people they have working for them.

[ChocolateFrogs]

I'd love to see a short Wholock minisode for Red Nose Day or Children in Need.

 

-CF

[Alyska]

Well, there's a strong possibility that they would never notice him, and that he'd end up just being randomly, pointlessly exterminated in one of their attacks on Earth. I don't think Daleks really do blogging, so Sherlock Holmes (or Watson, or Lestrade...) just ending up as, basically, a human speed bump seems quite likely to me in such a scenario.

 

There is, after all, not much clever can do against a Dalek when it's taking aim.

 

But...but... Dalek!Sherlock... the awesomeness...

 

"WHEN YOU HAVE EX-TER-MIN-A-TED THE IM-POSS-I-BLE, WHATEVER REMAINS, HOWEVER IM-PRO-BA-BLE...

MUST... BE... EX-TER-MIN-A-TEEEEEEEED!"

[HeavyMetalSunshineSister]

Nyeh, the whole idea of turning people into Daleks seems only slightly less counter-productive than the Statue of Liberty being a Weeping Angel. Quite apart from the fact that that sort of conversion is infringing on the intellectual property of the Cybermen, it seems like a grand shot at missing the point of the Daleks - whenever possible, they will exterminate all but themselves, and if any Daleks are deemed defective or impure, they are likely to be exterminated as well (and they're likely to be quite willing, because hey, Daleks are screwy). Turning people into Daleks creates a whole lot of impure Daleks that will, by Dalek doctrine, need to be exterminated ASAP.

 

If Daleks have been turning people into Daleks lately, it better have been done by Daleks that weren't exactly paragons of Dalek mental health.

[Alyska]

But there have been different races/cultures/generations of Daleks, and each of those seems to have a different set of values/ideals. So, some versions of the Daleks emphasise "purity", while others would simply want a large army, and others would be looking for intelligence and other qualities to assimilate into their population.

 

 

Anyway, has anyone seen the Sontaran Christmas Carols yet? They're brilliant. They need to make Straxx a full-time companion, seriously.

 

Also, I was flicking through the TV guide, and came across a synopsis of the Christmas episode:

 

"The Doctor's latest adventure through space and time sees him again crossing paths with the homo-reptilian Silurian Madame Vastra and her cohort Jenny."

 

Now, normally, I would say that the phrase "homo-reptilian Silurian" was redundant, but in Madame Vastra's case...

 

... there is no way that wasn't deliberate.

[Wotz]

Now, normally, I would say that the phrase "homo-reptilian Silurian" was redundant, but in Madame Vastra's case...

 

... there is no way that wasn't deliberate.

------------------------

what is love

 

bad jokes dont hurt me

 

dont hurt me

 

no more

[HeavyMetalSunshineSister]

I cringe every time I hear the species name for the Silurians given as Homo reptilia. If that particular episode (was it a two-parter? I don't care.) where the Doctor keeps bloody saying that wasn't otherwise rather good, I'd just skip it, because the genus name they came up with would imply that they're closely related to humans, but they're freaking reptiles, and Reptilia is a Class, so listing it as a species name is moronic anyway, and how was nobody involved in that episode smart enough to spot this?

 

Anyway, bah humbug.

[Blessed Blade]

It was a two parter; I only know that because I watched Series 5, and therefore The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood a couple weeks ago. =PCan't wait for the Christmas episode, though; I'm still wondering how they're handling the new companion, to be honest.

[ChocolateFrogs]

Can't wait for the Christmas episode, though; I'm still wondering how they're handling the new companion, to be honest.

-----

We're all wondering that. Especially since Doctor didn't know what Oswalt looked like. Plus we're all left to wonder just what puts her in space, with a different name.

Moffat has been churning the cogs for a while now, and we all shake our fist at him.

Can't wait for the rest of Series 7!

 

-CF

[Rahkshi Guurahk]

 

Can't wait for the Christmas episode, though; I'm still wondering how they're handling the new companion, to be honest.

-----

We're all wondering that. Especially since Doctor didn't know what Oswalt looked like. Plus we're all left to wonder just what puts her in space, with a different name.

Moffat has been churning the cogs for a while now, and we all shake our fist at him.

Can't wait for the rest of Series 7!

 

-CF

 

Aren't we all.

[Tilius]

.

Edited April 27, 2021 by Tilius

[Wotz]

Gosh, The Snowmen was the best Christmas Special ever AND the best episode in a LONG time. Completely loved it, and also LOVE LOVE LOVE the new TARDIS, beats both the previous designs, the new titles are amazing, and Clara looks to be a VERY interesting companion.

 

- Tilius

---------------

All of this with the addition that my mind is blown.

 

*shakes fist* MOFFAT!

[GSR]

Gosh, The Snowmen was the best Christmas Special ever AND the best episode in a LONG time. Completely loved it, and also LOVE LOVE LOVE the new TARDIS, beats both the previous designs, the new titles are amazing, and Clara looks to be a VERY interesting companion.

 

- Tilius

 

Concurred. Definitely one of the better episodes in a while, and I'm loving the myth arc setup for Clara.

[Tilius]

.

Edited April 27, 2021 by Tilius

[Blessed Blade]

Actually, she says it's smaller on the outside; not inside. =P And technically it was because everyone was crying, not because of Clara. The Doctor just said it was her because, well, she died to make the tears happen. =P

[Tilius]

.

Edited April 27, 2021 by Tilius

[Rahkshi Guurahk]

Commentary on the new episode:

I love the new title sequence.(making edits as I continue watching)

the stuff about ice and snow is creepy

Wat.

Strax!

fail.

Automated laser monkeys?

fail(again)

and again.

interesting choice of one word.

Strax, what is it with you and grenades?

What is that?

yes, bowties are cool.

strax is so funny.

That's the way to do what?

time:39:00

different than usual(smaller on the outside)

wait.,wait, wait, wait...

Great intelligence:

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Great_Intelligence

Edited December 27, 2012 by rahkshi guurahk

[Makuta DUSt]

While I prefer A Christmas Carol, I liked The Snowmen. I thought The new TARDIS design looked great, Clara was a likable companion and the villain had a threatening presence. However, while I thought the Snowmen were scary, they didn't do anything but rise from the ground and make scary faces.

The only threatening thing they did (in my opinion) was eating all the workers at the institution. One part that annoys me is when Clara falls from the cloud and lands on the snow surrounded by Snowmen, with the Ice Lady remains lying around her, but the Snowman beside her corpse doesn't do anything.

However, that's just my opinion, and I enjoyed the episode overall.

Edited December 27, 2012 by Toa of the Nova Corps

[Wyrd Bid Ful Araed]

Well given that they're made of snow, there's not too much they can do. They try to storm that house the protagonists all holed up in, for example, and I guarantee you they're going to break before the door does

Hence the need for the Ice Lady to give them a more sturdy form

[CHTrilogy]

The new intro is good; harks back to the older intros.

And I am flabbergasted by the new TARDIS design; just love it! Already I want a model of it!

[Alyska]

I cringe every time I hear the species name for the Silurians given as Homo reptilia. If that particular episode (was it a two-parter? I don't care.) where the Doctor keeps bloody saying that wasn't otherwise rather good, I'd just skip it, because the genus name they came up with would imply that they're closely related to humans, but they're freaking reptiles, and Reptilia is a Class, so listing it as a species name is moronic anyway, and how was nobody involved in that episode smart enough to spot this?

 

Anyway, bah humbug.

 

I noticed that too, and I probably would be annoyed by it were it not for the fact that it's not a biologist who's calling them that. It's the Doctor. He probably doesn't care about the scientific naming system invented by Earth scientists, he just likes to sound clever by throwing in some technobabble and Latin here and there. And there is a very good reason why he labelled them as "Homo"- it means "the same". The entire episode was drawing parallels between humans and Silurians, and he wanted to promote the idea that the Silurians are people and should be treated as such.

 

If a character that's supposed to be a scientist starts talking like that though, then it's a cause for concern.

Edited December 28, 2012 by Alyska

[Fastcar800]

Please. Shut. Those. Darlak. Up.

[HeavyMetalSunshineSister]

Well, it means 'man' in Latin and 'same' in Greek, so if he was using it for 'same' then he was mixing languages as well, which is generally frowned upon in science. He's probably lucky there weren't any scientists present for that.

[Alyska]

Well, "man" works too, if you think about it- it's still presenting the Silurians as people, and "humanising" them somewhat.

 

I think that generally speaking, anything that comes out of the Doctor's mouth is likely to give any nearby scientists headaches. That's just part of the fun, though, isn't it? I don't even really classify this show as science fiction in my head- it's more or less fantasy that just happens to involve time travel, aliens and robots.

[HeavyMetalSunshineSister]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the writers probably just don't know all that much about binomial nomenclature. And, really, the Doctor should not give scientists headaches by virtue of what he says being and sounding stupid to anyone who knows what they're talking about. He's supposed to be genuinely clever, not some charlatan who gets by because he has interesting tools that he doesn't fully understand, and is put off whenever he gets anyone who knows what they're talking about, because it means he won't be able to just babble at them and convince them that he's smart.

Edited December 29, 2012 by Ymper Trymon

[Tilius]

.

Edited April 27, 2021 by Tilius

[HeavyMetalSunshineSister]

Well I don't see how the Doctor would be doing it right and Linnaeus was doing it wrong, seeing as Linnaeus invented the system in the first place. Considering that the writers sometimes can't be bothered to know how they said time travel worked a couple of seasons - sorry, series - ago, and the fact that a not-insignificant number of people don't understand binomial nomenclature, I'm not going to bet that the writers understand it.

 

That being said, if any character brought up that problem, yes, the Doctor would absolutely say that he's doing it right, and everyone else is wrong.

 

As for theories... eh. Haven't seen any of this year's episodes, or, for reasons that suggest staggering incompetence on the part of someone over at Netflix, any of Matt Smith's Christmas specials.

[Alex Humva]

Ymper just brought up a point I was wondering about, maybe all you Whovians can help me. Is there any real explanation as to why the fundamental rules of time travel are constantly beaten to pulp in a fashion not all that different from a mob call? It's really odd when in the course of about one season you go from "DON'T LET YOURSELF INTERFERE IN YOUR OWN TIMELINE" to "Hahahahaha, we're going create SO MANY PARADOXES with this Melody Pond stuff!"

 

I mean I know it's Doctor Who and it's all a timey-wimey ball but seriously. Is there even an attempt at explaining it, or is time travel solely what Moffat feels like at that exact instance?

 

Also why is asking the question "Doctor Who" such a crime against nature, or was that just Moffat attempting like usual to be clever and unlike usual falling flat on his face?

 

_{Also wouldn't stating the question that can never be asked be the same as asking it...oh screw it.}

Edited December 29, 2012 by Cybernetic Alex Humva

[HeavyMetalSunshineSister]

Well, it's not that the question can never be asked, it's just that the Silence really feel, on the whole, that something awful (or good? I don't even know) would happen if it were asked under circumstances in which the Doctor would then be obliged to actually tell the asker what his real name is.

 

This is, of course, because his real name is Ralph, and that would just ruin everything. Especially if he made people call him The Ralph. Or The Ralphtor. Doc Ralph is the least bad option, unless his surname is Brown.

[Alex Humva]

And the whole mob call that is the laws of time travel?

[mistergryphon]

Who's everyone's doctor? What I mean is who was the doctor everyone saw first and likes the most? My doctor will always be the 9th, Christopher Eccleston.

[Alyska]

Only just watched the Christmas special last night- definitely my favourite Christmas story so far. Yay for all the Holmes references (Now, we just need to put Sherlock in a fourth Doctor hat and scarf and everything will be perfect). And Straxx. We need more Straxx.

 

"Smaller on the outside" was something I had made up my mind that I would say should I ever wind up inside a TARDIS (or similar dimension-bending building), and I am slightly miffed/impressed by Clara beating me to it.

 

 

 

 

Moffat really likes throwing his characters off tall structures to their not-quite-deaths, doesn't he?

 

My guess on Clara is that she's somehow a symptom of reality becoming unstable and repeating itself, or something like that. After all, neither version of Clara had met The Doctor before, and Moffat's a bit too clever to have her be a clone or something basic like that.

 

 

 

[Bominominomu Nemo]

Ymper just brought up a point I was wondering about, maybe all you Whovians can help me. Is there any real explanation as to why the fundamental rules of time travel are constantly beaten to pulp in a fashion not all that different from a mob call? It's really odd when in the course of about one season you go from "DON'T LET YOURSELF INTERFERE IN YOUR OWN TIMELINE" to "Hahahahaha, we're going create SO MANY PARADOXES with this Melody Pond stuff!"

 

I mean I know it's Doctor Who and it's all a timey-wimey ball but seriously. Is there even an attempt at explaining it, or is time travel solely what Moffat feels like at that exact instance?

 

Also why is asking the question "Doctor Who" such a crime against nature, or was that just Moffat attempting like usual to be clever and unlike usual falling flat on his face?

 

_{Also wouldn't stating the question that can never be asked be the same as asking it...oh screw it.}

 

For the "Doctor Who?" question, no one knows yet. All we know is that the Silence don't want the question to be asked.

 

As for the laws of time and the like, you need to remember that in the episode "Father's Day" it was established that there are fixed points in time- Points that, if changed too much, cause a breakdown in time. The eruption of Pompeii and the deaths of the majority of its population was another fixed point, and brought up the moral dilemma of causing the eruption while preventing the Pyrovile invasion, in "The Fires of Pompeii." Other points in time can be altered with a great degree of freedom, just so long as you don't do something like going back and killing yourself.

Edited December 29, 2012 by Vir Nemo

[Blessed Blade]

For the Melody Pond stuff, it wasn't necessarily a paradox. We'd already known that we were meeting River out of order, we just still didn't know who she was at the time. Then she specifically stayed out of the fight until after Melody was taken, to avoid crossing her own timestream. Why River went to the place with the Doctor is beyond me, but since she never truly acknowledged either version of herself, it was more like whenever the Doctor meets up with his past selves. Since, if you notice, she never actually does anything more than help Amy and the Doctor(And Rory whenever he's there before the Demon's Run incident). The most major thing that could cross the timeline, is the whole Impossible Astronaut two parter, where she comes close to meeting with her past self. But, for some reason, she doesn't seem to recall it; Silence side-effect? Regeneration? Either way, she never meets with her past self, since by the time she finds the suit, Melody escaped.

[Wyrd Bid Ful Araed]

I think the DW laws of time travel can be summed up as "don't screw around with it unless you're the Doctor who kind of maybe knows what he's doing". Basically paradox=bad unless said paradox is created by the Doctor in which case paraDoc=probably alright

[HeavyMetalSunshineSister]

Haha, that's good. ParaDocs are alright.

 

As for MisterGryphon's question... I saw Eccleston first, and he was pretty awesome. David Tennant had some of the worst episodes I've seen so far, but they weren't really his fault and he had some great moments. Matt Smith seems to be working with generally better writing than David Tennant was, which will naturally skew things in his favor, but yeah, based on the merits of the actor alone, I'm going to have to say Christopher Eccleston.

 

[Haven't seen any classic stuff. Should, want to, haven't yet.]

[Alyska]

For the Melody Pond stuff, it wasn't necessarily a paradox. We'd already known that we were meeting River out of order, we just still didn't know who she was at the time. Then she specifically stayed out of the fight until after Melody was taken, to avoid crossing her own timestream. Why River went to the place with the Doctor is beyond me, but since she never truly acknowledged either version of herself, it was more like whenever the Doctor meets up with his past selves. Since, if you notice, she never actually does anything more than help Amy and the Doctor(And Rory whenever he's there before the Demon's Run incident). The most major thing that could cross the timeline, is the whole Impossible Astronaut two parter, where she comes close to meeting with her past self. But, for some reason, she doesn't seem to recall it; Silence side-effect? Regeneration? Either way, she never meets with her past self, since by the time she finds the suit, Melody escaped.

 

She said she remembered being the little girl in the space suit, but had had to pretend she didn't for Amy, Rory, and the Doctor's sake. She turned up for this event because she remembered seeing her older self there, and in this case, not turning up would have created the paradox.

 

The River in the spacesuit killing the Doctor was the younger of the two Rivers at the scene, so she didn't know what was going to happen, and was not there by choice. The older River was there because this was a fixed point in time, and, once again, she had seen herself there and therefore knew she had to be there.

 

One thing that bugs me about that season is this: At what point in Amy and Rory's timeline do they gain the memories of the "all of time is happening at once" alternate timeline? It would make sense for them to have remembered it immediately after the Doctor's apparent death (on the date that time got stuck on), but you can clearly see that this isn't the case. It seems as if they were just chilling out in their deckchairs under the stars one evening, and suddenly-bam!

 

Unless time was rewritten so that they retroactively had those memories all alongaaaaaaaaaaaaa paradoxes.

Edited December 30, 2012 by Alyska

[Hordaki]

One thing that bugs me about that season is this: At what point in Amy and Rory's timeline do they gain the memories of the "all of time is happening at once" alternate timeline? It would make sense for them to have remembered it immediately after the Doctor's apparent death (on the date that time got stuck on), but you can clearly see that this isn't the case. It seems as if they were just chilling out in their deckchairs under the stars one evening, and suddenly-bam!

 

Unless time was rewritten so that they retroactively had those memories all alongaaaaaaaaaaaaa paradoxes.

 

 

Four words; Wibbly wobbly timey wimey.

Edited December 30, 2012 by Hordaki

[HeavyMetalSunshineSister]

Yeah, but that's a handwave, not an explanation. Handwaves do not a good/coherent plot make.