Gavin WintersMoffat LOVES the trick of carefully-phrased dialogue so someone *appears* to say one thing but cryptically means something else. Now, he’s very very good at it and finds endless ways to do it, but it does get exhausting having to analyse every line for hidden meanings. #DoctorWho
And it reaches a peak here, with constant dialogue misdirections to throw us off the scent - Amy’s speech (to her baby!) about the Dad ‘looking young, but he’s lived for hundreds of years’ and so on, to make us think she means the Doctor. Not exactly naturalistic. #DoctorWho
But anyway I commend Moffat for managing to slip in the filthiest gag in #DoctorWho so far, following Vastra’s line to Jenny: “I don’t know why you put up with me…”
*demonstrates incredibly long lizard-tongue*
*knowing look between the two*
Shame the River reveal was widely spoiled beforehand, would’ve been great to see that without knowing, but it still works well.
And the one-two punch of that, followed seconds later by the title of the next episode being LET’S KILL HITLER was a laugh-out-loud moment. #DoctorWho
Let’s Kill Hitler: mad, bonkers, wild, funny. It seems to rub some people up the wrong way but personally I always loved it when Moffat turned his Moffat-iness up to 11 and just wrote the craziest episode possible. #DoctorWho
Having Mels grow up with Amy and Rory so they therefore ‘raised’ her after all is a slightly awkward fudge to gloss over the fact they lost their baby.
Plus the timeline is left a bit unclear - was she a toddler for years until somehow making her way to Leadworth? #DoctorWho
Excellent transition. 🙂 #DoctorWho
The robot antibodies on the ship being prepared to straight up murder someone if they don’t have the right clearance seems a ridiculously over-the-top security system to have! #DoctorWho
And the plans/reasoning of the Tesselecta crew are a bit vague. Why do they only realise as they’re about to torture Hitler that they’re in the wrong year and 1938 is too early? Surely they knew what year they’d arrived in? #DoctorWho
Night Terrors: I always think this is a very underrated episode, certainly amongst Gatiss’ output. For me it’s one of his best contributions to the show. And without being in one of his usual favourite settings like the Victorian era or the mid-20th century. #DoctorWho
Daniel Mays is always bloody brilliant in anything he’s in, and the young kid playing George is very good too. #DoctorWho
Interesting to see this era show a council estate for the first time, and the very different view it gets. RTD’s Powell Estate was assumed to represent the common, everyman, home environment of most of the viewers. Here it’s looked at with a slight sense of detachment. #DoctorWho
The Peg Dolls are a brilliantly creepy invention, with their whole look and movement and their weird gurgling laughter. Must have been the cause of a few nightmares for the kids watching. #DoctorWho
The Girl Who Waited: another highlight of season 6, and a great character piece for Karen Gillan as Amy, who makes the older, bitter version of the character very distinct from the regular version. #DoctorWho
This episode seems a bit tight on budget, with lots of austere empty spaces, but it actually works quite well. For once, blank white corridors effectively convey the idea of a very alien environment without looking cheap. #DoctorWho
This is essentially a Doctor-lite episode, with most of Matt’s scenes being in the TARDIS, but he pops up frequently enough that the Doctor’s absence is not as noticeable as previous episodes of that type. #DoctorWho
The blink-and-you-miss-it reference to there being a Disneyland on the planet Clom(!!) is one of the most boggling concepts ever brought up in #DoctorWho. Please let us see it one day…
The ending is brutal with the Doctor betraying older Amy and locking her out of the TARDIS. But there were no easy answers to the problem of her existence. #DoctorWho
The God Complex: another strong episode in a solid run across the latter half of this season, and one that starts to see the beginning of the end for the Doctor and the Ponds… #DoctorWho
And the Doctor’s right - Rita would make a good replacement companion, the best candidate we’ve seen in the Matt Smith years. 🤙🏻 #DoctorWho
The Minotaur is a very impressive monster costume. We’ve come a long way since the one in the Time Monster. (And how funny that both were played by future Darth Vaders). #DoctorWho
The Doctor having to destroy Amy’s faith in him is very reminiscent of The Curse Of Fenric. #DoctorWho
Modern #DoctorWho’s always struggled slightly with how to convincingly show someone abandoning their whole life to go travelling with the Doctor.
RTD’s solution was to have the families involved and know what was going on, but Moffat seemed to have little interest in doing that.
(I’m sure that’s why Amy’s family were swallowed by the crack, so he didn’t have to deal with them!)
Here he finally hits upon his own solution: have the companions only travel part-time, an idea which lasts from now all the way into Chibnall’s era. #DoctorWho
Closing Time: this is not quite as good as The Lodger but still very funny, with the Cybermen as a mere token background irritation while we get to watch more of the Doctor and Craig’s comic misadventures. (Lynda Baron thinking they’re a couple is hilarious) #DoctorWho
The sonic screwdriver seems to have become a bit of a laser gun this season, with the odd zap of green energy. I mean, I suppose it always emitted something, but visualising it in that way makes it seem more of a weapon than a tool. #DoctorWho
This main flaw here is how the ending just basically repeats The Lodger: ‘Craig’s love for Sophie solves the plot’ becomes ‘Craig’s love for his baby solves the plot’.
The moment he starts to turn into a Cyberman the entire resolution of the episode becomes obvious. #DoctorWho
Moffat really, really loves to do the story of ‘the hero having one final adventure before facing his death’. He’ll return to variations on that idea in future #DoctorWho episodes, as well as doing it in Sherlock.
The Wedding Of River Song: for his second finale Moffat rehashes parts of his first - basically having history jumbled up and all time happening at once, which does at least give us some wacky visuals of Romans, Pterodactyls and hot air balloons all existing together. #DoctorWho
Just as well that in this jumbled up timeline each country gets back its most famous leader (Churchill… Kennedy… Cleopatra). I’m trying to imagine a version of this in which the Doctor has to battle the Silence with help from Liz Truss… 🫤 #DoctorWho
Simon Callow’s little cameo as Dickens was truly unexpected. I don’t think anyone saw that coming. #DoctorWho
How much you enjoy this (and season 6 in general) depends very much on how in sync you are with Moffat’s vision of #DoctorWho. He’s perhaps slightly less in tune with what the general public likes than RTD was, but for those who click with his style, it works like gangbusters.
The Doctor, The Widow And The Wardrobe: this always seems to have a bit of a reputation as one of the worst Christmas specials, but I think that’s very unfair. It’s a perfectly acceptable festive episode, just with a lot more influence from the fantasy genre than usual #DoctorWho
I know we’ve occasionally seen the Doctor survive unprotected in space for a brief period, but the opening scene with the spacesuit is really pushing it, especially when you consider what happens later to Capaldi in Oxygen… #DoctorWho
Judging by the goofiness of the ones we see here, the quality of soldiers from Androzani Major has really declined since General Chellak’s day! #DoctorWho
Say what you like about this episode, but for me the ending with Madge lighting the way home for Reg and reuniting the family is one of my top moments in all the Christmas specials. #DoctorWho
But what happened to the other airmen on Reg’s plane? I presume they’re still on board at the end, otherwise it’d be a very dark twist that he was pulled through the time vortex while they were left to die! #DoctorWho
Asylum Of The Daleks: some stylish ‘horror movie with Daleks’ type moments but otherwise this is only a moderately successful opener to a moderately successful season, easily the weakest of the Matt Smith years. Not keen on those murky new titles either. #DoctorWho
Oh look, it’s the New Paradigm Daleks. Quick let’s just hide them amongst gazillions of RTD’s bronze ones and hope no one notices! #DoctorWho
The possessed crewman who introduces the Doctor and Amy to his skeletal, long-dead colleagues is reminiscent of the original Kryten in Red Dwarf: “I was only away two minutes!” #DoctorWho
Ah. Clara (okay, Oswin).😐
Moffat gets a lot of stick for writing characters (especially women) as nothing but quippy, wisecracking and sex-obsessed… but Christ I don’t think any were ever written like that as much as Clara’s debut here. #DoctorWho
The nanogene infected people turning into Dalek slaves with eyestalks in their foreheads is an effective update to the old Robomen, and the zombie versions are great, but it gets a bit overused subsequent to this. #DoctorWho
Moffat clearly wanted to reset the entire continuity of the show with first the Doctor erasing himself from history and pretending to be dead, and now the Daleks knowledge of him being wiped, but both inevitably went nowhere and had to be undone pretty quickly. #DoctorWho
Dinosaurs On A Spaceship: a fun little episode, with the most ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’ title ever (I’d love to hear Samuel L. Jackson saying the sweary version).
Chibnall getting in some practice for writing a packed TARDIS crew, with lots of characters. #DoctorWho
The problem with retconning the Silurians so they were a space-faring race capable of building a giant space ark… is if they were that far advanced couldn’t they tell that the moon wasn’t really going to hit the earth and there was no need for their hibernation? #DoctorWho
A big game hunter from the early 1900s who delights in killing animals is an odd choice of friend for the Doctor to have, let alone want to bring along on an adventure. #DoctorWho
While Solomon is undoubtedly an evil bastard (poor Tricey!), him being deliberately left to get blown up is an unusually callous choice for the Doctor. #DoctorWho
A Town Called Mercy: a fairly straightforward tale with a moral dilemma for the Doctor, basically similar to what happened with Margaret Slitheen back in Boom Town. And especially interesting following his own actions in killing Solomon in the previous episode. #DoctorWho
The cinematography on location shoots like this continues to come on in leaps and bounds. They could have only dreamed of making a Western of this quality back in the days of The Gunfighters. #DoctorWho
Lol at Rory’s reaction to “Sheriff… Ma’am… fella…?”#DoctorWho
The main big American guest star is killed off half way through, presumably as a money-saving exercise! #DoctorWho
The Power Of Three: Kate Stewart arrives! Funny how a character from an unofficial spinoff ended up being adapted into the main show in such a major way. And strange to think she’s now been appearing as the head of UNIT for longer than the Brig’s original 1968-75 run. #DoctorWho
Chris Chibnall has started his little trick of having characters sit down for a mid-episode heart-to-heart chat, something that’ll become very familiar in his own era. Except here it’s *massively* helped by Murray Gold’s music. #DoctorWho
Okay, nerd hat on (when do I take it off?)… there’s a new UNIT dating issue here, as Amy & Rory’s encounters with the Doctor are now established as having months, or even years between them, so this is about 2015 (even before the year that passes during the episode…) So for Kate does this take place after she meets the Twelfth Doctor? Or are those episodes set in the near-future too? 😵💫 #DoctorWho
Anyway, lol at this shot. #DoctorWho
This is all well and good until the rushed, rewritten ending on the Shakri ship, apparently due to Steven Berkoff being an absolute arse on set and leaving them with barely any usable footage. #DoctorWho
The Angels Take Manhattan: one of the best post-Blink reappearances for the Weeping Angels, and a great companion exit for Amy and Rory (the mutual leap off the building is still a stunning moment). #DoctorWho
The ‘Weeping Cherubs’ are an hilariously creepy addition to the Angels lore, and I’d guess were at least partly-inspired by the Peg Dolls the previous season, with the same kind of scuttling and childlike laughter. #DoctorWho
Unlike some, I don’t have a problem with the concept of the Statue of Liberty being a Weeping Angel, but I do wonder how it would ever manage to move, as surely there’d always be someone looking at it? #DoctorWho
I don’t like how Moffat deliberately fudges the rules in order for Rory to be zapped back in time. The Angel gets him because he blinks *while not looking at it*. Amy does the same thing moments later, despite it being in full sight of the Doctor and River! 🤔 #DoctorWho
Metebelis Two Podcast@gavinwinters What other choice did the narrative leave the Doctor with, though? Leaving the villain to die by his own plan, or some variation of it as in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, seems to be pretty much 20th century’s Who’s solution to what to do with the story’s antagonist.
@gavinwinters I’m struggling to think of a story where Chibnall did the crowded TARDIS better than with Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. Here the characters had something to do, instead of when showrunning, leaving Yaz or Ryan idle a lot of times. He got better after Graham and Ryan left, but for those first two series, I think that members of the packed TARDIS crew were left wanting mostly for things to do.
Ken Wilson@gavinwinters I liked that version of the character it was when she came back as Clara I disliked the writing and character of Clara.. dunno what that says about me 👀