Please remember the Hoydens in different timezones and don’t post spoilers before the 27th.
Categories: arts & entertainment
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
#AWW2017 – non-fiction – six reviews 
Otterday! And Open Thread 
Wonder Woman movie marketing machine tied up in knots -
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Please remember the Hoydens in different timezones and don’t post spoilers before the 27th.
Categories: arts & entertainment
Hoyden About Town 
Well, cranky sassy girl who acts like a jerk but is apparently quite attractive because of this (Really?) says something clever about the thing the doctor is trying to figure out, but he ignores it, because, you know, girl, and then everything goes wrong, but the doctor maanges to avoid complete and total stuff-up-dom by restarting the universe, which also brings back Rory from the dead, because reasons.
Plus snow.
Cool! Easily the best of the Christmas Day specials since the one in 2005. (I have not been impressed by any of the 2006–2013 specials aside from Planet of the Dead, Waters of Mars, or Day of the Doctor – none of which aired in December!)
Also, how many different movies did Moffat ransack for that?
I don’t know what episode YetAnotherMatt was watching; I was watching Doctor Who Does Inception. (Not that I’ve ever seen Inception, but by osmosis I gather it uses that key gimmick a lot.)
I have seen Inception, and like that, this suffers from the problem that the outermost dream can never be identified and therefore could be totally boring. The dream mercenaries of Inception are the creation of a twelve year old boy sleeping in on Christmas morn, and so is all of Doctor Who canon.
That said, while I’m not a fan of the Inception nested-dream trope for that reason, I thought this was a reasonably well-paced version of it, with the exception that they realised the dreams were nested too quickly.
I haven’t seen Inception so it was the Alien analogies that struck most for me. I actually quite liked it. And although young people in ‘old-face’ always look a bit off to me, I thought old Clara would have been a good way for Clara to leave the series (if they had wanted her to). It sounded like she had a pretty good life, and I thought it was nice for the Doctor to see that happening for an ex – companion.
I enjoyed it, although didn’t totally love it. Well-paced and the Santa banter worked quite well, I just didn’t get lost in it. 4/5.
Susan, I’m pretty sure Matt (comment 1) was watching The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, from the end of Matt Smith’s first season in 2010 (and so not actually a Christmas special). However given the regular fridging of Rory followed by his apparent resurrection, he might have been referring to several other Eleventh Doctor stories!
I’m pretty sure Matt was making it uip as he went along, because he is a cheeky clever bugger like that, but actually quite accurate.
I enjoyed it, but I don’t have a lot to say that’s not been covered.
Okay, so back to the post I wrote on boxing day, which I know when I wrote it only by the time stamp.
Snow, check,
rebooted universe, no, he’s turning universes off and going back to a previously saved universe.
Dead Schrodinger’s soldier boyfriend who is hundreds of years younger, served in the British army instead of the Roman army, close enough.
Ignored the girl, because he’s the Doctor, ignored the humans, because he’s a Time Lord, ignored Santa and the elves, because Doctor, ignored the Doctor, because he’s senile and/or the minotaur is eating what’s left of his mind, I’m going to go with pretty much.
He talks about Dream Crabs going through layers of skin and bone and screaming, yet that didn’t happen, he asks everyone else a question for which the answer is “it’s a long story”, and doesn’t ask himself the same bloody thing, he doesn’t ask why HIS choice as to which order the four disposable humans choose words controls the answer, he states that noone ever knows when they have reached the final layer of the dream, yet happily stops at each layer, except for the lowest layer because he’s willingly entered the dream, and no dream crab is going to keep him happy and oblivious when he chooses to go in to save the girl. He goes on about gaps and missing bits in dreams and dream logic and plot holes.
He’s still not awake.
Are we all sitting comfortably with our foil hats on? Good, I’ll continue.
The rescue involves four women, the shop worker, the black woman, the woman who is approaching the end of her life span, and the impossible girl, the woman whose life happened, even though it can’t. The dream construct who is certainly not real and his sidekicks point out that the alien dressed as a magician isn’t even slightly plausible, that the person the six dreamers are realying on to rescue them is imaginary and a part of themselves. He enters dream states to let the dreamers know they are dreaming. The Master showed up, as a woman, to teach him that he’s an idiot in a box, and that there are some things he cannot fix like his bowtie. He ended up at the North Pole, because “It’s a long story”.
The T Rex was an ancient creature harvested for something in its brain, in an episode with a lesbian thespian victorian saurian stating that he looks like he does to be accepted, when every incarnation has seen the Doctor looking younger, and he has “attack eyebrows” two weapons growing from his head. What creature has weaponised keratin growing from it’s head?
He’s still dreaming, and he’s trying to tell himself that he needs to abandon his faith that he saved himself from the minotaur.
Moffat’s turn.
This episode is Moffat’s resignation letter, it’s his Last Christmas Episode that he’ll write, and he’s going to blame all the poor imagination that went into the last four years on the Doctor’s bad dreams, and the reason he has turned into a sad pathetic clown is because that’s exactly what the minotaur showed him, it was all a dream, and gosh, didn’t he just foreshadow the whole lot waaaay back then? We haven’t met any new characters in years because there haven’t been any new characters in years, the Doctor’s mind is just bringing the same ones back over and over. We’ve had to be patient, how many patients? There are four patients, and if the page numbers that have been mentioned come up with some significant clue, I will not be particularly surprised.