The Doctor Who Spoilers and Speculation Thread V3 - "Oh, brilliant." - Film, Television and Music

Why is Dalek so good? Because The Doctors backstory, acting and the writing really sold just how scary a singular Dalek really was. You can't really replicate that however, The Doctors long standing "I'm the last of the Timelords" was fucked by Moffat, her grudge has been downplayed by moffat, basically blame Moffat for neutering The Daleks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwW9eG4nyh4 Here's a pretty good video on this very subject actually.

You just summed up the problem with Resolution in your post, mate. The writing sold the Dalek in Dalek. It didn't sell it in Resolution.

Even if you believe the way Moffat handled the Daleks was a downgrade from RTD (turning them more into blockbuster villains and making them less menacing.. ironically what this episode was supposedly going for) at the very least the stories told with them were interesting. Oswin being a Dalek the entire time? The Doctor and Davros having weirdly touching talks? A Good Dalek? At least those were properly interesting stories. This episode wasn't, really.

The Dalek was, just that, a Dalek and I preferred how it was done here to anything Moffat came up with, like I said, you can't replicate "scary" dalek anymore, the ideas behind that, the WEIGHT behind that has been killed off and diluted, they just aren't anymore. Personally I think it sold itself as a threat perfectly fine, up till it's end, it was a Dalek with very little resources, yet it managed to rebuilt itself to a level in which it was dangerous enough to take on a small platoon of soldiers and a tank. Like it's dispatch did bother me slightly, but like, with how The Daleks "practically sniper like aim" disappears around The Doctor quite a bit in various episodes, it doesn't bother me THAT much.

Out of interest, to the people that enjoyed this episode, when it comes to the Dalek stuff - what to you was the episode actually saying? As in, thematically - what is it's message? Obviously I get the point of the family stuff, that's all pretty baseline, but when it comes to the Dalek plotline what did you get out of it and how does it tie back into the rest of the episode? What layers do you see in it from a storytelling perspective? I'm genuinely interested.

By doing what exactly? By making them a 'threat'? Which seems to just translate to 'Kill more people' or 'Kill a Companion' or 'Shoot the Doctor' all things the Daleks have already done in the show. You cannot redo Dalek, as much as this episode echoes it. You can only realistically look at it on its own merits and judge it accordingly and as I said previously I have issues with it, I think there was too much family drama stuff and too large of a cast. If you are going down the "Well, it was done better in the past" Well where do you go from there? Not do them any more until someone makes one that is every bit as good as Dalek? Because when it comes to this kind of stuff the proof of the pudding is in the eating and you won't know if it works or not till it is done and how people react to it. No one wakes up in the morning and says "Hey I am going to make a shit episode of Doctor Who". As for 'Thematically' and what it was 'Saying', did it need to say anything? There are plenty of stories of Doctor Who Classic and Modern that don't and this one can quite easily be one of them.

Eh, yeah, I mean, that sounds about right. Without the human parts it's basically just, Dalek pops up, does something relatively interesting in it's piloting of a human, manages to rebuilt itself to an extent, we get a Doctor/Dalek faceoff where it learns just how much of a threat she is, it almost causes an end of world scenario, Doctor stops it, The End. It doesn't really tie in to the whole family stuff, but in and of itself it's enjoyable enough, it's adequate.

also there were so many little things that annoyed me too the font choice on the location titles? atrocious the dalek doesn't even move right. its gun doesn't do that little aim adjust when it was shooting like it normally does which implies it's just shooting straight all the time. why isn't it moving its head and eye-stalk around more? it felt like a statue at times. I know these are nit-picks but it's so frustrating to see things we got right nearly 15 years ago now just thrown to the wind.

I mean it wasn't exactly in tip top shape was it.

That's just a lazy excuse for it being badly operated, come on. The CGI while it was flying was atrocious.

Wait, wait, wait, are you saying that the special effects in Doctor Who were bad?... This changes everything...

I mean CGI is usually shit and kind of cheap looking in Doctor Who.

Well now you're just being ridiculous. The show being Doctor Who does not excuse the CGI being bad.

I dunno about that, I usually give Doctor Who a little more leeway in regards to shit CGI, either way it's kind of subjective, I thought it worked fine.

Yeah and it was made by the BBC, you seen that Watership Down remake they did? Animation looks so stiff it looks like it fell out of 1997 and bumped its head on the way down. As far as five second shots of an angry flying pepper pot with a whisk for one hand and a plunger for the other goes it was fine enough.

"eh it's okay that it looked bad because that's the way it is"

Well, yes. It has been the case practically since the show started and aside the odd moment here and there the effects have always been crap. Look at it this way, did that bad special effect ruin your enjoyment of the episode? Because I know you loved this one, I am sure it is in your top five of all time but given the other problems this story had, is that really the killer one?

I'm sorry but to me Doctor Who has always been more thoughtful and said more than this. At least, nu-who has - and I know a good portion of Classic Who was too (I mean Genesis of the Daleks is literally all about genocide). Even the worst of the past fifteen years has tried to tell interesting stories. One of my least favourites, Sleep No More, is at least a weird episode that delves into our obsession with technology/entertainment and trying to speed things up. And for all its faults Love and Monsters is a love story about what happens to the people the Doctor leaves behind. Every episode said something. If you enjoy this more (by your own admission, kind of) vapid stuff that's fine, more power to you, but our last era of this family show ended with an epilogue essentially about the main character wanting to commit suicide. To go from that to this makes me sad. (not that it's all doom and gloom, some of S11 was amazing - It Takes You Away was a complete banger for example - just this episode in particular made me feel drained because it simply had nothing to say)

It's hardly vapid, it had some value in regards to it's ideas, the father/son family character stuff was perfectly fine, the episode itself was basically about the strength of what a family can achieve, though that entire plotline did screw the pacing significantly, it had something to say, even if it was a tad cliche, it was The Dalek itself that was completely superfluous to the actual message.

I'm still confused to as why season 6 looked so nice

Like I said, I enjoyed the family parts - but they were kind of generic (maybe "nothing" to say was too strong, but nothing interesting is more what I meant I suppose) The Dalek was most of the episode and you call it superfluous? How is that in any way ok?

That is perfectly fine, but, the fact of the matter is that having been a fan of the show for almost thirty years there are just some things that you have to make peace with when it comes to this show. For every story about Apartheid or Hyper-Aggressive Capitalism or Environmentalism you are going to sooner or later get a story where the Daleks fight Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula or the Doctor getting shrunk down to be part of a strange alien flea circus or them going to a holiday camp in Wales. And whilst some of those stories can have deeper thematic and emotional aspects to them there are times you will just get a story where the Doctor arrives on a planet, finds something amiss, finds the monster, deals with it and moves on. And this ultimately is pretty much just that. Yes there is the angle about Ryan and his dad and about father figures and dealing with grief which is fine in and of itself and if you want to put a pin into what it is you pretty much have it already. My issue, as said previously is that the family drama stuff, as well written as it can be and as interesting as it is to see the show do it just straight without metaphor or analogy my personal issue is that, well, we've had that every story. And whilst I don't want to go back to the days of the Doctor running and pointing at stuff delivering exposition as the dramatic music plays in the background and every dramatic moment having a welsh choir in the background is is a Sci-Fi adventure show and that is what I watch it for. If it wants to do something bigger and deeper that is fantastic, but the vehicle it has is an adventure show. And for all the will in the world I am getting sick of watching characters in this show sitting around a kitchen table and talking about their feelings. It was great when we first had it, but all too often it feels like a clutch to hold the rest of the story on. And whilst I can dig that in small amounts having it in every episode can reduce its effectiveness for me.

Honestly, like I said, it was bog standard Dalek stuff, I didn't mind that but it was like two episodes stitched together, where one was more of a character driven episode, mixed in with the bug eyed alien episodes of yesteryear, but the character driven stuff was put on the backburner in favour of the standard dalek stuff, which was ultimately superfluous to the episodes point, which I admit, wasn't very strong, but it had one. Like not every episode with a dalek, especially in the classic series had a point, it was usually just, The Dalek was trying to destroy the Earth, The Doctor has to stop them, it was the characters themselves that brought those episodes out, heck, even some episodes in the newer moffat series, it was similar to how they did it back then, The Daleks act as the plot driver, but it's ultimately character driven, they had certain cool ideas, but certainly not the gravitas of past Dalek encounters.

I guess the thing for me is that in the 10 series before this one it never was just that. I can't speak for the classics because I haven't watched all of them but for all of new-who there isn't a single episode before now that I'd say was as thematically vapid as this one. That's why it's so sad to me that this is where we are now because on a storytelling level it feels like a proper low point - the lowest I have personally ever seen, I think. Maybe you guys would disagree but it just feels so hollow compared to literally everything since 2005.

I dunno about that, perhaps it's just nostalgia talking on your part but there are plenty of episodes that are worse than this one, this is literally just a mediocre episode with some decent dalek action.

I agree with you 100%. It's hollow, shallow and boring. There's no real conflict, so there's no real drama.

Genuinely, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on why any single episode from 2005-2017 is less interesting (in terms of thematic storytelling) than this one.

Off the top of my head I can only really think of the REALLY bad ones, like say, Love & Monsters or Fear Her, mediocre episodes usually don't stick out in my mind. I'd have to do a full rewatch to really answer your question in great detail, hm, the Idiots Lantern I guess? That was more of a general purpose alien threat episode with not that much thematic story telling backing it up.

The Idiots Lantern has some pretty great and rich imagery. For me, it's an episode all about identity and how the world changing can affect that (and how some get lost in the sea of change). People's faces (and thus, a metaphor for their identities) getting sucked away by the TV (and thus the advent of technology) is a stronger concept metaphorically than anything in Resolution. And then it even all comes back and ties into the family drama - and the wrestling of identities within that dynamic. The crux of it being a father and son and the clash of personalities. For a episode that is normally considered weak, I believe it to ultimately have a stronger heart than anything we saw today.

I completely agree, it did have more of a heart than this episode, but generally speaking, this episode did still attempted some character driven stuff, even if it ultimately fell felt, like the scene in the diner with his father was pretty decent acting, some decent writing. Now the things I did hate, that random fucking character that just straight up states that he was gay for no reason, I mean I'm gay, so this isn't some gay hate or what have you, because, like, not even a straight person would have said that in the moment, it was some weird ass writing. The Dalek itself flying away when it had The Doctor pretty much dead to rights in the barnyard, one missile and BAM dead. (like sure it had it's mission, but like, you would think it would want to get rid of the what basically amounts to the biggest threat the Daleks ever face and as I've already mentioned, that's sort of what Doctor Who does, the bad guy usually has The Doctor dead to rights, but leaves an opening for her, or let's her slip away, or just straight up leaves because that's just how it goes) Yaz again does fuck all.