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Slightly More About WHO (spoilers)
11 years ago
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Ok, so I've had a good few days to let last week's episode bubble about in my head.
Since my immediate review didn't really touch on any actual points of the episode, I figured I should at least sit down and make some notes about my thinking.
Let's start off with the big picture. This episode is a mess. Logically inconsistent. Reliant entirely upon shock value. It's basically a series of "shock" moments that Moffatt probably thought were cool, but which don't really fit together in any meaningful sense.
Let's go through a few of these.
Danny is talking to Clara on her phone. but during the conversation he gets hit by a car and dies. And Clara finds this out when someone picks up the phone and tells her "Sorry, but he's dead."
So, what's the big error here? If you were talking on the phone to someone, and they got hit by a car and died, resulting in their phone, most likely, being dashed to the ground for a passer-by to pick up... don't you think you'd hear some of that?
So, the TARDIS lands in a huge mausoleum filled with fish tanks, inside of which sit rotting skeletons (which are actually cybermen, with their cyber bits rendered invisible by the magic water) - after much ado and a few monologues, The Cybermen are released, and begin to march out of the building. The Doctor follows them and surprise.. it's all inside St. Paul's Cathedral. Which is one of those famous and popular touristy places in the middle of London, which is usually full of tourists (and is in fact surrounded by tourists when the Doctor emerges), who might just have noticed during one of the tours, that someone had replaced the entire inside of this national landmark with something not at all St. Paul Cathedralish. (in fact, as the cybermen emerge, a touristy type looks at them, and then ignores them, walking past into the building)
Edit: Just checked wikipedia. St. Paul's Cathedral is a working church. Hourly prayer and daily services. Not the kind of place you can install a massive evil corporate headquarters, let alone laboratories and acres of fishtanks into without anybody really noticing.
And of course, The Master is now a woman. And while it's been established that this can actually happen, what makes this revelation particularly stupid, is that everything this character has done and said throughout the episode has been completely at odds with it. The complex science project being undertaken is more fitting to The Rani (who everyone was expecting her to be) and at one point, she comments "I'm the one you left behind..." Which fits Susan more than it fits The Master. (Because the last we saw of The Master was when he body-tackled Rassilon, throwing himself into the gallifreyan timelock. )
It's a story built out of moments. And while it might make for a really amazing trading card set, it makes a lousy tv episode. You get bounced from one to the next, without them ever really connecting with each other. It's about as disjointed as you can get without just pasting together random scenes from random episodes.
So now, the big question - is this a defect or a design? It's going to be many days before we find out one way or the other, but one fan theory that is making the rounds to explain it all is this:
Nothing in this episode is actually happening.
In this story we're introduced to a little device called a "Dream Patch" - a device that induces a dream state when applied to a person - Clara takes them out of a bookshelf in the console room, and uses one on The Doctor in an attempt to steal his TARDIS. He later reveals that it didn't work, and he was just letting her dream that her hijack attempt was successful.
The theory is, all of what happened in this episode is a dream, resulting in one of those patches being used on either Clara or The Doctor, or Danny, or maybe even all of them, before the episode starts. That all the logical errors and pieces that don't fit together are supposed to point to the fact that this isn't reality. None of it is real - from the very first moment of the episode, we're being lied to.
I'll be interested to see if this is actually the case, or of it's just wishful thinking - trying to retcon rubbish.
Moffatt, you have one week.
Let's see if your story outcome is any better than the fan theories.
Since my immediate review didn't really touch on any actual points of the episode, I figured I should at least sit down and make some notes about my thinking.
Let's start off with the big picture. This episode is a mess. Logically inconsistent. Reliant entirely upon shock value. It's basically a series of "shock" moments that Moffatt probably thought were cool, but which don't really fit together in any meaningful sense.
Let's go through a few of these.
Danny is talking to Clara on her phone. but during the conversation he gets hit by a car and dies. And Clara finds this out when someone picks up the phone and tells her "Sorry, but he's dead."
So, what's the big error here? If you were talking on the phone to someone, and they got hit by a car and died, resulting in their phone, most likely, being dashed to the ground for a passer-by to pick up... don't you think you'd hear some of that?
So, the TARDIS lands in a huge mausoleum filled with fish tanks, inside of which sit rotting skeletons (which are actually cybermen, with their cyber bits rendered invisible by the magic water) - after much ado and a few monologues, The Cybermen are released, and begin to march out of the building. The Doctor follows them and surprise.. it's all inside St. Paul's Cathedral. Which is one of those famous and popular touristy places in the middle of London, which is usually full of tourists (and is in fact surrounded by tourists when the Doctor emerges), who might just have noticed during one of the tours, that someone had replaced the entire inside of this national landmark with something not at all St. Paul Cathedralish. (in fact, as the cybermen emerge, a touristy type looks at them, and then ignores them, walking past into the building)
Edit: Just checked wikipedia. St. Paul's Cathedral is a working church. Hourly prayer and daily services. Not the kind of place you can install a massive evil corporate headquarters, let alone laboratories and acres of fishtanks into without anybody really noticing.
And of course, The Master is now a woman. And while it's been established that this can actually happen, what makes this revelation particularly stupid, is that everything this character has done and said throughout the episode has been completely at odds with it. The complex science project being undertaken is more fitting to The Rani (who everyone was expecting her to be) and at one point, she comments "I'm the one you left behind..." Which fits Susan more than it fits The Master. (Because the last we saw of The Master was when he body-tackled Rassilon, throwing himself into the gallifreyan timelock. )
It's a story built out of moments. And while it might make for a really amazing trading card set, it makes a lousy tv episode. You get bounced from one to the next, without them ever really connecting with each other. It's about as disjointed as you can get without just pasting together random scenes from random episodes.
So now, the big question - is this a defect or a design? It's going to be many days before we find out one way or the other, but one fan theory that is making the rounds to explain it all is this:
Nothing in this episode is actually happening.
In this story we're introduced to a little device called a "Dream Patch" - a device that induces a dream state when applied to a person - Clara takes them out of a bookshelf in the console room, and uses one on The Doctor in an attempt to steal his TARDIS. He later reveals that it didn't work, and he was just letting her dream that her hijack attempt was successful.
The theory is, all of what happened in this episode is a dream, resulting in one of those patches being used on either Clara or The Doctor, or Danny, or maybe even all of them, before the episode starts. That all the logical errors and pieces that don't fit together are supposed to point to the fact that this isn't reality. None of it is real - from the very first moment of the episode, we're being lied to.
I'll be interested to see if this is actually the case, or of it's just wishful thinking - trying to retcon rubbish.
Moffatt, you have one week.
Let's see if your story outcome is any better than the fan theories.
It would have been cool to have Susan come back though. Wouldn't it be nice though, if this whole season was a dream? And the doctor returned to being matt smith? lol
Maybe Danny's phone was on AT&T, and the noise of him getting hit by a car fell into one of their connectivity gaps!
One thing that bugged me more than it should was how they handled the logo for the corporation, the big circle with a little circle attached.. they showed it just enough to make me think "hey, that's important, what is that?" But then when they finally showed the doors closing with two of these mirrored logos looking just like a Cyberman's eyes, they stayed on that image for a long time with some DUN DUN DUNNNNN sting music. Just beating us over the head with a lack of subtlety. They really should've just given us a passing glance at that.
And yeah, Rani woulda been better. I remember once trying to draw porn of a tetrap (those bat creatures she had as her minions during the McCoy era)...
Something else someone pointed out to me. We never see Danny's face, after the accident. They show you a body on the ground, but they frame everything so that the face is always obscured.
So - no car crash noise on the phone, and we never actually see the face of the victim.
Could mean something. But then, it's been getting hard to tell if something is a clue, or just a continuity error.
So, if the entire plot is to steal bodies and minds of the recently deceased to create an army of cybermen to conquer the present:
Why was the cyborg's mind taken? And even so, if the operation is going on this far in the past why wait until the -present- when the Doctor discovers the operation to try and conquer?
Why was the ship in the Robin hood story trying to find the 'Promised Land' if said land is merely a lie told only to those who get uploaded to it?
Why take the future soldier whose body was -vaporized- (not to mention miniaturized) and, again, the time issue. (Also, the security guard in the school episode that got vaporized?) The point of the operation is to convince the minds to delete their emotions so they can be re-inserted into the upgraded cyber bodies, if there are no bodies there's no reason to keep the minds or even convince them its the afterlife.
Why does no one recognize cybermen?
If the matrix sliver is powerful enough to snag the minds of the dead moments before they die... uh. that's pretty powerful, why use it for such a menial task as tricking people into thinking its the afterlife? why is the choice even needed if they're just editing the minds? And they're collecting from past, present and future to... conquer the present? W3 and its magic water only exists in the present and is maybe only a few years old, what was being done with the bodies then, were they making (and still making cybermen) in the past and future?
This scheme just seems overly convoluted for such a simple task as 'making more cybermen'.
As for Missy.
Yeah. All the hints she gives teases at every time lady. He's left Rani, Susan, Romana, all of whom could reasonably accuse the doctor of being 'left to die'. The Master was not abandoned to die, he even encouraged the doctor to break the time link and re-close the timelock. It seems overly cliche that he comes back and just goes right back to trying to conquer earth because mWAHAHA Evil.
It's been established that Timelords are aware of each other. Missy pretending to be a greeting droid should've been seen through in a flat second.