The Bells of St. John

I liked that. The spoonheads sounded silly but were actually pretty creepy, I thought, the Great Intelligence having basically stolen a little girl's whole life and then abandoned her as an old woman was very, very nasty, and the story title turned out to be a clever piece of misdirection. Oh, and I really like Clara!

How was the story title misdirection?

Lucy McGough wrote:How was the story title misdirection?

Well, it sounded significant, but it was just a throwaway line to do with the Doctor's phone ringing.

I suppose 'The Thing that Lived in the Wi-Fi and Ate Human Minds' would have been a bit long for a title.

Saw Bells last night and... what is there to say about it? It wasn't as screechingly awful as some but it wasn't what you'd call good either and we seem to have seen this episode before about six times at least. Jenna is hot but Clara has no discernible character other than making saucy quips ala every other Steven Moffat female, and the once promising Matt Smith is now firmly set on "infantile prat".

Once seen, forever forgotten.

Be interested to know what parts of it you thought we'd seen before. I guess there's an obvious thematic similarity with Silence in the Library, but that's as far as it went, I thought. And I liked this one better, though the lack of Tennant and Tate may have a lot to do with that.

codywillis1 wrote:we seem to have seen this episode before about six times at least

I can remember when it was called 'The Idiot's Lantern'. That even had a motorbike and a Doctor-climbing-a-famous-tall-structure-in-London sequence too. Plus a middle-aged female villain and hapless male dupes.

codywillis1 wrote:Clara has no discernible character other than making saucy quips ala every other Steven Moffat female

Yes, that is a pity.

To anyone who feels inclined to accuse Moffat of reusing ideas too often, I would like to point out in mitigation that he's still nowhere near as bad as Terry Nation (who always seems to get a free pass from fandom). Perhaps our dour showrunner would be cut some slack if the next companion was named Tarrant?

The Idiots Lantern meets Blink meets Partners in Crime meets Silence in the Library meets not a single original idea left in Moffat's head meets codywilis1 falling asleep in utter boredom at how inane and soulless this once great show has become.

Ah, well. I still like it. I suffered through five years of RTD Who that I hated and to me, these last three years have been a breath of fresh air. Each to his own.

Lest you should think I only come on here to moan, I must say that I found it a perfectly pleasant, amusing way to pass 45 minutes, and I did like the joke about the quadricycle.

Sorry tony, I'm afraid I can't even tell the blasted difference now. Bells pretty much WAS an RTD episode through and through, and not even one of the good ones. The Moffat era seems to have started with new ideas, ran itself into a brick wall with series 6 and has now run back to the RTD era well to lick its wounds this season, so little difference is there in style, tone or content.

I'm just not seeing this. It felt nothing like an RTD episode to me. Without wishing to offend anyone, I think a lot of older fans are always going to see similarities between the style and tone of these two eras (and whatever comes next) simply because they are made in the same style as pretty much all TV drama of this type these days, just as Who in the 70s was basically made in the same style as other shows of its type at the time: TV evolves, and if it's to continue appealing to a changing audience, Doctor Who has to go along with it and reflect what the current "modern" audience is used to. You say it lacks soul, Cody, but one (I think, unjustified) allegation I've heard many newer fans make about the classic series is that it lacked genuine human emotion. It's all down to perception, and I doubt that anyone who was used to TV in the 70s or 80s will ever see it in quite the same way as someone raised on TV in the 90s or 00's because they are two different animals. I've tried to get newbies interested in the classic series more than once, but many of them just see it as slow and dull. That doesn't mean it was, but their perception of it is shaped by the other TV they've been exposed to, which tends to be faster paced and more about the spectacle. And ultimately, the production team have to try to make a show which the younger audience will engage with as well as the older ones. I strongly suspect that if they were to put The Pyramids of Mars on today, it would get about 2.5 million viewers. Sad, but I think its true.

I don't see how you can't see it; there is nothing remotely dissimilar about Bells and, say, Smith and Jones or Partners in Crime (which, along with Idiots Lantern, Bells is practically a remake of); the tone, aesthetic, style and atmosphere is identical, as is the thin plot.

Personally I think the truth is that any newbies with that attitude are just thick. Simple as that. It's nothing to do with perception, more an unwillingness to want to bother in the first place if there isn't loud pounding music and glossy CGI over everything.

This stuff is thin, desperate, lazy codswallop; I don't remotely agree that this is what Who has to be nowadays - its a lazy argument when no ones tried anything different in eight years. If it is then maybe they should never have brought it back in the first place. It's a bit like the utter trashing of The Bill back in the early 00s, Paul Marquess transforming a police procedural that had always had a great deal of integrity into a ludicrous OTT soap. Sure, it was a betrayal of everything the program had been for 18 years but who cares? The ratings were better! (Because it attracted idiots and turned off the original audience altogether). Its sad to see Who joining the Cult of Moronicity. The sad thing is it doesn't have to be this way - Series 1 and 5 were fine work for the most part and they didn't seem to turn this oh so picky (yeah right) modern audience off; that just seems to me an excuse to justify the tedious format, lack of characterisation and endlessly recycled plotlines. THAT's what sad but true.
I've already stopped bothering to tape or buy the new series since the end of series 6. My patience has finally run out and for a fan of 27 years standing to say that is a damning indictment of how badly this stuff has abandoned its roots.

Needless to say, I disagree. And to start accusing anyone who happens to like something you don't or dislike something you do of being "thick" or "idiots" really doesn't help your argument; it's simply offensive and needlessly provocative. It doesn't appeal to you, I get that. But no, it is not "desperate, lazy codswallop", it's simply not your kind of thing. I've been a fan for more than 35 years, and I don't think the show has abandoned its roots, at all.

I liked it! My wife hated what they'd done to the opening title sequence thing, but other than that she liked it, too. Clara DOES need a little more character development, though; she was kind of like a warmed-over River Song, which is too bad because in her last two appearances she seemed a little more interesting. I kind of wish they'd just kept the Victorian version of her as the new companion, as not EVERY companion needs to be a twenty-something girl from modern day London now, do they?

(I voted "Good", incidentally.)

I think, sadly, they're rather afraid of giving us a companion who isn't from modern day Earth in case the audience can't identify with them. I don't agree with that at all, but it was Russell Davies' view and sadly Moffat seems not to be inclined to challenge it.

I think there's aslo a practical consideration in a 42 minute airtime show inasmuch it takes a lot of time to have to explain every bit of tech every episode or face people saying 'Oh how does a Victorian know about the atomic bomb.'

Scriptwriters can't win that one.

This is very true.
And I love your sig.

Tv and film are a series of compromises. The 'new' format of Who leaves less room for character exposition. I wanted to see a companion from the future who needed even less exposition - a sort of Romana/Zoe hybrid would have been my ideal.

BluesShark wrote:Tv and film are a series of compromises. The 'new' format of Who leaves less room for character exposition. I wanted to see a companion from the future who needed even less exposition - a sort of Romana/Zoe hybrid would have been my ideal.

Well, Romana could in theory be recast pretty much indefinitely, but I think with her you kind of lost the audience identification factor...

Absolutely. I suspect Mary Tamm's decison not to do a second series was god-send in some ways because good as she was, Lalla Ward was far more 'audience friendly'.

It's been odd recently seeing a lot of people criticising Moffat for refusing to cast 'outside' of the young female assistant role. It's as if some people don't grasp what the assistant role is for in Dr Who.

I don't mind them being young and female, as long as they have a brain and a personality of their own behind the pretty face. Otherwise they really are just window-dressing.

Lucy McGough wrote:I don't mind them being young and female, as long as they have a brain and a personality of their own behind the pretty face. Otherwise they really are just window-dressing.

I think most of them have been morethan just window dressing. Jo Grant was fairly useless and Nyssa was sidelined for most of her time on the show but most of them have contributed something. Even Rose (though sadly, what she contributed was mostly something we could have done without) and Donna (who basically contributed decibels).

Jo Grant may have been clumsy, but she definitely did have a well-defined personality and a heart the size of Wembley stadium. It's when the only word you can think of to define an assistant is 'feisty' (a modern word I loathe) that the show's in trouble. "Ooh, she's so feisty and she flirts with the Doctor and won't put up with any of his nonsense!" Yeah, right. You know that's a micron-thick veneer over a deep well of 'worships the Doctor and will do anything for this wonderful, impossible space-god because her only personality trait is cultish devotion'.

Nyssa got a raw deal, script-wise. The Master was walking around in her dead father's body and her entire race was obliterated, and did she react in any way? Nope. That really is shoddy characterisation.

Well, only if we assume that Trakenites react to loss in the way that humans do. Perhaps her people are just naturally less emotional than we are? Or maybe she just didn't like them very much...

The "Spoonheads" were great visually, and I liked the return of the Great Intelligence.

karatattoo wrote:The "Spoonheads" were great visually, and I liked the return of the Great Intelligence.

Whose name continues, sadly, to be a misnomer...