Board 8 > Doctor Who Topic [15th Doctor] [Hype]

(+) Yeah! (+)

First two episodes of the new season out now! On Disney+ in most of the world and iplayer in the UK, will also be airing in the UK & Ireland on BBC One Saturday evening! If youve never watched they are literally branding this as season one so its a great place to jump on!

Watched both episodes. Space Babies was fine I guess? Ots very, very light on substance and some of the humour is definitely aimed at a younger audience but it goes at a good pace. The Devils Chord though was a great episode, great villain, got the tone just right and slightly felt like the real premiere almost.

LightningStrikes posted...

Watched both episodes. Space Babies was fine I guess? Ots very, very light on substance and some of the humour is definitely aimed at a younger audience but it goes at a good pace. The Devils Chord though was a great episode, great villain, got the tone just right and slightly felt like the real premiere almost.

These were my exact feelings. Space Babies feels very much in line with Russel T. Davies' other season premieres. It's meant to hook a younger audience in. Devil's Chord was fucking awesome though.

Yeah it was definitely the right move to put up two episodes at once. I do kind of feel that having an episode as light as Space Babies directly follow the also extremely light Church on Ruby Road was a little odd and could put off new viewers so if you are reading this post and have never seen the show before, keep going until the latest episode!

I didn't find Space Babies bad, although it was very much a classic easy-going intro episode as you've both said. I really didn't like the latter half of Devil's Chord, though. It all felt very loud with almost no emotional payoff or interesting concept in the resolution. It's a shame, because I thought the front half was solid.

Speculation/possible future spoiler content:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/5/5abb2866.jpg

She's clearly SOMEBODY important, but who? Is she Ruby's real mother? People pointed out her actress's name is "Susan Twist", and Susan was brought up in the last episode, but that's WAY too meta for me to take seriously.

On the other hand, "there's always a Twist at the end"...

New episode up! Really, really good so far.

Gutwa said this was his favorite episode of the season.

And he was right! So far anyway. Best episode since 2017. So tense, great performances especially from Gatwa. Moffats dialogue has been sorely missed. My only issue with it is that the child performance wasnt quite there but that was a very small part of it.

Solid episode. I was not a big fan of Moffat during the Smith era, but he's good at singular stories.

"There's always a twist at the end..." has been stuck in my head since I saw it.

Won't watch today's episode 'til Tuesday, though. My friend is still doing that, we got caught up to the new season just in time. (He was still doing one thing per Doctor, except for Jodie, where he did whatever he thought was relevant to what RTD was expected to do this year.)

Also bought the DVD box sets for Eccleston-Tennant, Smith, and Capaldi. Will have a lot to watch in the near future.

Hope you enjoy it! 2005-2017 is an incredible run of television. The era after still has good stuff too although it doesnt hit at the same rate

As for this series, an observation. The first episode was set on Christmas like the special, but then the second episode was set in June, and now this one the Doctor says its October, but also the first time Rubys been to another planet. Its very odd and makes me wonder if some time shenanigans are happening that tie in to Ruby and the snow falling/stopping thing. It also feels like they drew a lot of attention to the date in each episode. Whatever the case definitely fun to be theorising about thia again!

Gatwa is great. Good third episode, felt a lot more grounded than the first two. I'll be more than happy if the quality stays around there and we get a classic "eight people locked in a room, three of them will live" before the end.

God, I missed Moffat. Honestly, not near his best work, but still refreshingly good after the toothless Chibnall years. Love the unabashed criticisms of capitalism and the harsh rebuke of the phrase "thoughts and prayers".

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/2/27782629.jpg

(I'm STILL mad about that awful "space Amazon .com" episode)

Grand_Kirby posted...

God, I missed Moffat. Honestly, not near his best work, but still refreshingly good after the toothless Chibnall years. Love the unabashed criticisms of capitalism and the harsh rebuke of the phrase "thoughts and prayers".

My thoughts exactly. Easily the best episode of the season but we're still early! Child character kind of annoyed me in this one a bit but we got there in the end. Episode reminded me a bit of The Satan Pit in its themes of faith/religion though not as strongly.

Boom was great! Glad to see more Moffat. Devils Chord was quite good too. Enjoying the season overall so far.

How do people here feel about the Susan references? Do we think shes actually coming back?

GANON1025 posted...

Boom was great! Glad to see more Moffat. Devils Chord was quite good too. Enjoying the season overall so far.

How do people here feel about the Susan references? Do we think shes actually coming back?

I think so. Its the most references in 40 years.

Also new episode out! Reminding me of Return the slab.

That was a really good episode. Even better than Boom.

Yeah that was a wild episode and probably the best of the season although Boom is also really great. My only minor point is that I wish it was a full hour long.

I... don't get what happened at all. It was interesting, but left me with just questions. Reminds me of Midnight in a way, only Doctor lite instead of companion lite.

What was the deal with Martie? What was the deal with Gwilliam? Why did it take another 40 years for Ruby to return to the original timeline? Why was it exactly 73 yards? What did Ruby? say to everyone that made them run away like they did?

I think the general overview of whats happening in the episode is:

The Doctor breaks the fairy circle and gets erased. Ruby gets stuck without him amd ages until she dies, at which point she becomes the 73 Yards away lady and moves backwards through her timeline until she ends up back at the cliff to warn the Doctor not to break the circle. So the whole episode aside from the start and the end is basically a splinter timeline that loops back to stop itself from happening.

What Im curious about is does this last thing happen because of the fairy circle or because of Rubys unique situation? Or something else?

Dancedreamer posted...

I... don't get what happened at all. It was interesting, but left me with just questions. Reminds me of Midnight in a way, only Doctor lite instead of companion lite.

What was the deal with Martie? What was the deal with Gwilliam? Why did it take another 40 years for Ruby to return to the original timeline? Why was it exactly 73 yards? What did Ruby? say to everyone that made them run away like they did?

As far as I can figure out:

Marti was getting abused in some way by Gwilliam. I think Gwilliam was mostly there as a red herring but could come back later, after all Ruby wont stop him in the main timeline. Also he is social commentary both in populists but also specifically on a special kind of nutter in the UK that appears in the audience on Question Time before an election and demands that politicians should want to fire nukes, that will probably happen again in a few weeks lol. Ruby had to go to the end of her life to become the woman. I dont know. And lastly I dont know!

Fun one to figure out.

I feel like they specifically brought up Unit being trained against psychic and witchcraft stuff to hint there was something much more to it, but I wonder if they'll ever expand on it, or just leave this as a standalone episode that never explains itself.

I really liked that episode a lot but the lack of even the slightest clue of what was going on is disappointing. That's not to say there NEEDS to be clear-cut answers about supernatural situations, in fact, a lot of horror stories are ruined by explaining the elements too much. But there's a fine line between "we're keeping a lot of the explanations a secret to make it suspenseful, but we have our own internal logic about what happened" and "we're just writing mysterious, illogical stuff because we can get away with it, and we'll let the audience stew and come up with their own explanations because that's easier than actually writing any".

Like, WHY did The Doctor disappear? What was the force compelling people to run away and turn against Ruby, even her own mother? How and why did Ruby go back in time? If the old woman was actually Ruby, how did she gain teleportation powers and all that weird shit going on with her? Heck, how did she perfectly stay 73 yards away, and WHY was she doing that the entire time? Like, these question don't need to all be answered, or even make perfect sense, but I just get feeling they're all just random, bizarre aspects that were thrown into the story "just because", which is lazy. Now maybe this is setting stuff up for a future reveal and an upcoming episode will clarify things, and if so then I'll eat my words, but I honestly expect the ultimate answer to simply be "just because"...

I guess my best guess is it was a defensive spell attached to the faerie circle to protect it? Since magic seems to be real now. But that still doesn't explain any of the intricacies that happened throughout the episode. Not getting ANY answers and a lot of it seeming nonsensical is frustrating.

This episode was all vibes. Would I like an explanation for what happened? Yeah sure. Do I need one? Nah not really cause I was pretty enthralled throughout. Just right amount of creepy!

I did laugh though when they tried to make Ruby look 40+ by slapping a pair of "old lady glasses" on her and calling it a day.

My assumption, essentially the whole time, was that the woman in the distance was always Ruby. Like, literally from the first person we see talking to the figure in the distance. At first I thought perhaps the Ruby we were following was a doppelganger of some sort, and that they were running away because they knew the true danger. After seeing the final scenes I think that it was the old woman Ruby telling them her story, and how that if they ever spoke to her young self again that the world would end in nuclear warfare. Whatever version of the story she had to tell to convince whomever it was, she would tell that story, and tell it convincingly.

I haven't been as negative on the show in recent years as most people, but good lord is it good to see RTD showrunning and Moffat throwing down absolute bangers once again.