Main Menu
Menu

Show posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Show posts Menu

Messages - Taryn Tailz

#16
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
25 November, 2018, 07:49:57 PM
That's likely the first time Berwick has ever been mentioned in a televised episode of Doctor Who, so...score one for the home team.  :D (I live ten minutes from Berwick, so this was as exciting as seeing Sheffield was to some of you.)

The Doctor was being a little bit dense in key moments of that story. It was incredibly foolish of her to be openly wielding the sonic screwdriver during a witch hunt; what else were they going to think it was other than a wand? She was a bit slow on picking up on the tree being the lock for the prison, when it had already been made pretty clear.

On the whole, however, a pretty solid episode. Nothing earth-shattering (no pun intended considering, you know, killer mud) but a perfectly acceptable pseudo-historical. Next weeks looks pretty interesting though.
#17
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
18 November, 2018, 08:57:21 PM
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 18 November, 2018, 08:05:58 PM
Also: abrupt, weirdly edited ending. Man, do they need better script editors.

Yeah, that was very strange. It felt as though we were meant to be waiting for something to happen, only it didn't; almost as though a special effect hadn't worked so the cast were just left standing for a little too long.
#18
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
18 November, 2018, 07:29:01 PM
We've had a couple of Hartnell stories this series, but that was the first McCoy story we've been given. I could easily imagine 'Kerblam' appearing alongside the likes of 'Paradise Towers' and 'The Happiness Patrol', while the robots were very reminiscent of 'The Greatest Show in the Galaxy'.

Killer Bubble Wrap is pretty much the entire history of Doctor Who, so it's nice to see it actually getting acknowledged on screen.  :P

I really liked the fact that Yaz wanted to find the warehouse workers daughter in order to return her Father's necklace. That moment felt like a continuation of this series attempts at making life actually seem worth something (with a few exceptions, such as the security guard in the first episode). More often than not the warehouse workers death would just have been glossed over, so it's nice to see the characters acknowledging such occurrences. Doctor Who does have something of an unfortunate history in terms of disposable characters sacrificing their lives in order to save the main characters, even without any apparent motivation, so it matters that Yaz wanted to find his daughter and acknowledge his death.

All things considered though, that was another average episode. There really wasn't anything wrong with it - everything it did it did competently - but it's also very hard to imagine wanting to sit down and watch 'Kerblam' again for any reason other than a complete watch-through of the series.
#19
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
11 November, 2018, 09:06:39 PM
That was probably the best episode of the series thus far. For the first time this year we had an alien species that was actually interesting. It's such a lovely idea to have a species who travel the stars lamenting the unmourned dead, and such an ideal fit for today's events in the real world. Not sure if that was deliberately timed, but it worked beautifully regardless.

It was another Hartnell-esque historical for much of the run time. The Sci-Fi elements were fairly light, the plot favouring the drama of the situation more than the alien visitors. Once again, as in 'Rosa', I learned a fair amount about a historical period I previously knew very little about, so, yes, very Hartnell-esque again.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the best episode of the series so far also happens to be the first one not to be written by Chris Chibnall. That remains something of a worry.
#20
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
04 November, 2018, 08:46:22 PM
So, this weeks Doctor Who:

If we were looking at that one objectively then there was nothing really wrong with it, but that's about as faint a praise as one can offer a story. Doctor Who can be many things and be them successfully. It can be complicated, educational, silly, surreal, over-the-top, philosophical, base-under-siege, etc, but it should never be banal.

This weeks episode offered absolutely nothing worth responding to, in fact it felt exactly like one of those slot-filler episodes you would get in an American sci-fi series when they're having to make 22 episodes a year; 'Little gremlin runs around eating the spaceship'. Yawn.

When you're starting off from a banal idea, it's damn near disastrous to then be utterly predictable as well, but, alas, I had worked out both the manner of the resolution (flush the damn thing out an airlock) and the means through which it would be achieved. Not a good thing when it takes fifty minutes for the characters to reach that conclusion.

Yaz literally spent the first third of the story standing around saying nothing. Of the three companions she continues to be the most overlooked and it's a damn shame. Nyssa didn't deserve that treatment and neither does Yaz.

It's becoming increasingly obvious that while Chris Chibnall is a very good showrunner, he is a desperately disappointing head writer, his scripts never failing to be competent but never succeeding in rising any higher than that.

On a more positive note I think Jodie Whittaker is becoming the most adept of the Doctor's when it comes to displaying wonder at her environment. She just seems to be able to perfectly articulate this sense of absolute joy which is such a key part of the Doctor's character. It's just such a shame that she's having to drag these scripts up by the bootlaces in order to reach her level.
#21
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
28 October, 2018, 08:17:39 PM
Three thoughts on this weeks Doctor Who, the third of which ties the first two points together:

The visualisation of the time vortex was absolutely amazing, almost like the sort of thing you see used as illustrations of String Theory. It might well be the best visualisation of the vortex we've ever had in the show, so more of this please.

If you're doing a story about giant spiders, having them be the result of toxic waste is just about the most hackneyed explanation you could possibly go for. There was an enormous sense of 'that'll do' about that script, like Chibnall decided to do a story about giant spiders and never actually added anything further to the idea than 'there are giant spiders'.

These two points seem to be re-occurring ones week by week; that the aesthetic choices being made are spot-on in every instant, yet the scripts are lacking. For every single special effect or music score which hits the mark, there's this lingering sense that they're helping to prop up some very average scripts.
#22
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
24 October, 2018, 04:54:47 PM
Quote from: von Boom on 23 October, 2018, 03:48:05 PM
His motivation felt completely pointless and tacked on. How can civil rights make him a criminal several thousand years in the future?

While I thought he was a really poor villain, isn't that about the level of thought applied by such people. 'I committed a crime but it must all be someone else's fault, especially someone who doesn't look or act like me'.
#23
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
23 October, 2018, 02:06:57 PM
Yeah, he was definitely sent into the distant past, as evinced by Ryan's dialogue as he shot him, which amounted to something along the lines of 'If you like the past so much why don't you stay there?'.
#24
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
21 October, 2018, 11:07:05 PM
Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 21 October, 2018, 10:57:38 PM
That was a fucking great episode. Yes, absolutely, there's stuff you could nit-pick at but there were so many ways that could have gone horribly wrong and yet they ended up with something smart and affecting and (depressingly) still so desperately relevant. What a fine bit of TV. Well done, all.

So relevant that there's literally a story about a black woman being abused on an aeroplane in the news today.

There was one very specific moment where I feared they were going to stray into 'white folk helping a black woman find her place in history' territory, but they avoided it. When Rosa asks the Doctor if 'wining the raffle means she gets to sit anywhere on the bus', it would have been so easy to have had the Doctor say something along the lines of 'No, you'll need to do that on your own.', and I was so worried that was going to be what she would say. But she didn't. She just said 'no', and that made the moment all the more powerful than the potential 'white folk helping' trap they could so easily have fallen into.
#25
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
21 October, 2018, 07:51:16 PM
So, tonight's Doctor Who (No spoilers here):

That actually felt like a return to the original remit of the show back in '63, to present historical situations as a means of education. Granted, there was a sci-fi element, but that felt almost Hartnell-esque in it's presentation.

The racism was visceral enough to make the perpetrators seem every bit as - perhaps even more - loathsome than the Daleks, so that was successful. I'm willing to bet that those were the parts of the script not written by Chibnall.

Somehow, they managed to make 1950's America seem like the worst place the TARDIS has ever landed, something which would not have worked with a smaller TARDIS team. Everybody had their part to play in this one.

Please don't play a different piece of music over the end credits again though.
#26
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
18 October, 2018, 06:47:12 PM
The TARDIS interior and Paul McGann were pretty much the only good things about the TV Movie. I do still kind of consider the TV Movie interior to be my favourite of them all.
#27
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
17 October, 2018, 11:25:48 PM
I always liked that Mid-Tom Baker era console room (pictured above), though it was sorely lacking a time rotor (which might have looked glorious had they made one in stained glass to match the theme of the room).

Generally speaking in the classic series the original design was tweaked on a regular basis, though never so major has to make much of a difference. They tried to introduce a new console room in the Jon Pertwee era, rather unflatteringly referred to as the 'washing-up bowl interior', though it didn't stick. It was intended had the series continued into 1990 that a new console room would have been introduced. A design was drawn up for it but it wasn't until the recent Titan Comics run of 7th Doctor strips that the design was actually used.
#28
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
15 October, 2018, 10:01:44 PM
The Rosa Parks episode could either be a resounding success or an absolute catastrophe, depending on how they handle the subject matter. I hope to goodness it's the former.
#29
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
15 October, 2018, 04:01:45 PM
Quote from: Dandontdare on 15 October, 2018, 01:50:14 PM
Quote from: Taryn Tailz on 15 October, 2018, 01:16:48 PM
In 'The Woman Who Fell to Earth' the Doctor, while still in 12's outfit, repeatedly makes it clear that she has nothing in her pockets, after which she picks up her new outfit from a charity shop and heads immediately off to the planet in 'The Ghost Monument'. So...where exactly did Audrey Hepburn's sunglasses appear from?

They just didn't show the bit where she travels back in time a few decades and persuades Audrey Hepburn to donate a coat with sunglasses in the pocket to a Sheffield charity shop. Simple.


It's good to know they're already planning for the future of Big Finish.  :lol:

Thoughts on 'The Ghost Monument':

I love the new theme tune even more now I've seen the opening titles. A perfect modern evocation of the original titles from '63.

I thought the episode was much more engaging this week than last. It looked gorgeous throughout and it's been a while since we had a good old fashioned 'quest' story. It maybe could have done with a little bit more incident to shore up the middle, but I think that was my favourite Chibnall penned episode by far. (Though that may be somewhat faint praise.)

Jodie Whitaker continues to impress. The Doctor just seemed so enthusiastic about the adventure that she makes you want to go with her and join in on her travels. This is exactly what the Doctor should be.

New TARDIS interior - I think it's probably pretty good. I didn't really feel we got a properly clear shot of it, and I kind of wish it was lit a different colour to the near default new series colour scheme of 'burnt orange'; with the interior which immediately pre-dated this one being the obvious exception.
#30
Film & TV / Re: Doctor Who Series 11 Discussion
15 October, 2018, 01:16:48 PM
While they managed to pick up and fix the potential plot hole of the languages being translated without the TARDIS being present, I did notice one small goof which managed to make it's way through into the finished episode.

In 'The Woman Who Fell to Earth' the Doctor, while still in 12's outfit, repeatedly makes it clear that she has nothing in her pockets, after which she picks up her new outfit from a charity shop and heads immediately off to the planet in 'The Ghost Monument'. So...where exactly did Audrey Hepburn's sunglasses appear from?