AudienceofOne

Look, I was bored as I often am when a show suddenly decides to be EPIC and especially when that EPICness is undermined by Twu Wuv. I actually found the whole thing tiresome. Part of my problem, I think, was that I found it hard to believe that Mara could remember 500 years of being somebody driven to help people and still be EVIL. And she was - tiresomely. I mean, for want of a less clichéd way of putting it, what is her motivation? Who is she and where did she come from? Why did she create the Troubles? Who cursed her? It's season 5 and I feel like this is something we should know.

My problem is not that the Doctor is gruff and uncaring. My problem is that I've now seen three different versions of him. This is the most mis-characterised I've seen the character. I had my problems with Tennant's emo-Doctor and Matt's slapstick-Doctor but I knew who thy were and how thy were going to react right from the first episode. Ignoring Capaldi's acting, which is what is currently keeping this together, the Doctor we saw in this episode was completely different from the Dalek one who was different from the first episode. Make him dark or sociopathic or alien or uncaring. Just decide and stick to it.

Because they've written themselves into a corner with the confused 'True Alpha' mythology. To say he couldn't become a True Alpha if he killed and then to extend that and say he can only STAY a True Alpha if he never kills, the writers have backed themselves into a narrative corner on the issue. There's no way to discuss the issue intelligently because Scott gets punished even if he's forced to kill to defend others, which is generally considered justifiable morally, ethically and legally. They should have either said that the 'no kill' rule only applied to him becoming an Alpha or they need to find a narrative way out. Considering they just pulled "Derek was actually evolving"!! I'm sure they came up with something.

Supernatural Anglicisation? Colonialism's a bitch, isn't it?

As an episode, this could have been acceptable if it was the culmination of the season - which is what a season finale is supposed to be. Instead, all the beats felt off because the season that built up to it was so poor. This was supposed, I think, to be the victory of Scott's True Alpha over his self-doubt but it just came off as trite and laughably melodramatic. Ignoring for a moment that none of this season makes any sense, the Derek situation is particularly dire. How did what Kate did to him lead to him becoming human and then dying and then evolving into a wolf? Was that Kate's plan? Did Peter have something to do with it? I thought the idea was that Kate and Peter had conspired to steal Derek's power and give it to Peter but... apparently not. Basically, I spent the episode alternating between yelling WTF!!?! and laughing my head off at how bad it was. Edited to add: The Berserkers. Where did they come from? Why were Northern European myths hanging around an Aztek temple? Why did they follow Kate and follow her orders?

See, that fell flat for me because it was so completely unrelated both to Robin Hood and to the story being told. It was like throwing in a reference to the Ides of March just because your story's set in Italy in the same century. You may as well as have a reference to letting the peasants eat cake because there were peasants and it's in the vicinity of Europe.

I usually really like Gatiss. And while this episode wasn't perfect, it was heads and shoulders above the first two. I floved the frequent callbacks to the Third Doctor. We could have used that last episode. And Clara is kind of growing on me. It's nice to have a companion simply excited by the journey. It's what I liked about Martha and Donna. Having said that, I felt Moffatt's hand in some of the clunky dialogue: "When did you stop believing in anything?" "When did you start believing in impossible heroes?" "Don't you know?" CLUNK. And in the recurring Promised Land theme, which is already tiresome. And in the ridiculous idea that an alien space ship of robots would be programmed with Earth legends. And in the dumb arrow thing at the end. I've seen some anti-scientific nonsense from this so-called science fiction show in my time but that took the cake. Basically, I really really enjoyed the first half but then it just degenerated into the standard Moffatt-era nonsense.

Still waiting for some explanation of why he's a worse fighter now than when he was a beta, though. I'd even accept a psychological explanation about him not drawing on his wolfy powers because he's scared of hurting somebody. This episode seemed a bit incoherent to me. But it was nice to get a mention of Alison.

The Doctor even says that "morality is a malfunction" and when he finds the radiation leak he calls it the source of the morality malfunction. And then he fixes it and everyone's surprised the morality malfunction is fixed too. It was bloody terrible writing.

I tender to you Wizards vs Aliens when other writers (RTD, I'm looking at you) weren't allowed to mess it up. That was some of the most unexpectedly powerful TV I've seen from a children's show. So I'm with you. Any strong characterisation or genuine emotion in this script came from Phil. The rest came from Moffat. In fact, I think Phil might make a good Doctor Who showrunner one day.

You mean like, "River is the Doctor's wife", "the Doctor's name is revealed at Trenzalore", and "the Timelords are coming back" etc etc etc. Moffatt spends whole seasons coming up with ways to clean up the mess he made in the finale of the previous one. It's almost as if his brain farts aren't thought through. (That last bit was sarcasm).

Part of Moffatt's ongoing "female violence is funny" theme. Wrapped up as it is in his rampaging misogynism it's annoying. This was may the least offensive example.

Word. Unlike a lot of Moffat's stuff, I found it to be quite good in conception. I've long been annoyed by the Doctor's hypocritical self-righteous attitude to morality, coming as it does from a man that Davies made genocidal and Moffatt an outright murderer. So I like the idea of actively acknowledging and exploring that. This could have been an extension of Dalek without being Exactly. Instead, the execution was unbelievably poor and, as normal for Moffatt, clunky and clumsy with poor dialogue and anvils dropping faster than a Dalek antibody. The Dalek we met at the beginning was already genocidal - "the Daleks must all die" - and they dub it a "good Dalek". The Doctor, Clara, the soliders all use those exact words, "A Good Dalek". Then, at the end, when it shares Twelve's memories and starts running around yelling "The Daleks Must All die" it's treated like is suddenly a bad thing. And it is. I thought so the first time around and couldn't understand why it kept getting called "good". Basically, its interaction with Capaldi caused no difference in its behaviour. Whether it was "good" or "bad", it was still genocidal. Thus, Ford and Moffatt have written an episode that tells us absolutely nothing about Capaldi's Doctor except that he's more prone to reflect on his actions and less likely to try to justify them. I do have other thoughts about Clara's inability to remember being a Dalek (I was waiting for that to be part of her anger at the Doctor's giving up halfway through, but it wasn't.) Even if she didn't remember, the Doctor should and I don't know why he didn't think of that when faced with the question of whether there'd ever been a "good Dalek" before. Not to mention the episode Dalek itself. If you're going to rip it off, at least hang a lantern on it. Finally, there was the annoying religious elements of the script. It was one thing for mad Daleks to create a religion in Nine's era. It's another thing to put those concepts in the Doctor's head. "Soul". "Divinity". "Divine perfection". The Doctor being God. This is where I stop being polite and tell Moffatt to fuck off. I thought we jettisoned these clumsy religious metaphors with Davies and I was glad they were gone.

I really enjoyed this episode. I admit it. It made approximately zero sense but I still enjoyed it. My only real gripe (because 'this season makes no damn sense' is somewhat redundant) is that it somehow feels as though there's both too many characters and yet too few. Too many new faces and they're too poorly drawn.

Are these writers really saying they think the culminating moment of this show is Bill's death? Because, to put it mildly, they're wrong. To put it not mildly, that was fucking terrible and - worse than terrible - boring. Boring as shit, actually. I can't even begin to start with what was wrong with this season and this episode. But Hoyt and Jessica's one-day wedding, the interminable Bill/Sookie shit and the disgusting torture porn with Sarah Newlin were the true low lights. I'd say on a par with Dexter as worst series finale.

The bit where the clockwork men talked about repairing themselves and their ship with people, I think I threw something at the screen. As a consequence, I have no clue what their motive was supposed to be. Maybe Madame de Pompadour was somewhere around the corner and she could have explained it. Without flirting. There's no flirting anymore. The fact they hung a lantern on the whole thing doesn't matter. The scene where Jenny was posing for a portrait and Vastra wasn't painting was not just not funny, it said volumes about their relationship and it was not good. Skeevy's the right word. And no, I don't remember her being skeevy before. But then, she's not actually a character. Just a Moffat note on a whiteboard that says: Gay Silurian in Victorian London? COOL. Clearly positioning this Doctor in the realm of the Seventh incarnation, I thought. Which makes sense if he wants to explore the Timelords more. But yes, I didn't like it and the theme seemed weak.

Can Moffatt fuck off and die now, please? He's not just a bad writer, he's an offensively bad writer. He writes the same derivative, pseudo-profound bullshit over and over and over again. His characters are one-dimensional cardboard cutouts. They're not characters, they're nothing but short concepts on a whiteboard and they change depending on what he wants to achieve with the episode. WTF, was that rubbish with "explaining" the Doctor to Clara? Is she the companion who's seen every aspect of his entire time line or not? It's one thing to say "no more flirting'. It's another thing to have characters deliver eons of laboured, poorly-written dialogue about it. Capaldi killed it of course, but the acting was never the problem with this show.

Every single teen character on the show has suddenly developed money troubles at the same time. It's clumsy. Besides, if the McCalls are so bad their power has been cut off, why hasn't Papa McCall intervened? He is still working as an FBI agent, right? The last few episodes have been so poor that I quite enjoyed this one but I'm trying not to think too hard about this dead pool concept. It's... kind of lame. I can handle confusing and possibly even nonsensical but if my printer suddenly started spitting out names with a number after them I would hardly leap to the idea that it related to murdering someone for money.

Since that scene didn't end with Eric casually killing every single one of them in vampire super speed and I had no idea how they got to that position in the first place, it was a bad ending to what was otherwise one of the better episodes this season. I say that with caveats - this season has been a train wreck so "one of the better episodes" is not saying much. If Hoyt and Jessica were going to get back together, I wish it had been less clumsy and involved him actually getting unglamoured. I thought the whole thing was clunky and do not care about Jason and whatshername either. I hope that Sookie uses her fairy ball to kill Bill and that she is not pregnant. They've dropped too many hints about her somehow magically getting knocked up for me. I hope I'm wrong about that.

And yet, I think what they're going for here is that Sookie has lost almost everyone and everything she's ever cared about - Tara's dead, Alcide's dead, Eric's dying, Bill's dying - and so she's rushing back to nostalgia as a coping mechanism. Dating vampires have probably created in her a false sense of security - it doesn't matter if they're together or not, Bill and Eric were here before she was born and will be there long after she's gone. This is especially true for Eric, who she no doubt views as timeless and above the realities of life. I can imagine his and Bill's illness on top of everything else would create a great existential crisis she's trying to use sex to deal with. Making her the same as about every other person on the planet. The problem is this season is so badly written that we're forced to fan wank this stuff. We needed just one scene of her saying that she can't fathom a world without someone like Eric in it for us to understand her motivation wihtout having to resort to this trite "true love/first love" nonsense about Bill they keep trying to force us to accept.

As long as it's not Bill and Sookie 4EVA with a magic baby made possible by fairy Hep V and their LOVE, then I won't kill myself. I may, however, just harm someone violently if she randomly ends up with Sam.

This episode benefited from coming after last week's train wreck so it was always going to be good in comparison. Still, the storytelling seems a little fragmented this season. Maybe it's too many new characters, maybe it's the setup being a bit ridiculous. Not sure. I've always liked that this show has teenagers with parents and this episode was no different. Great parent action. They seem to be sidelining Kira for the season. I guess this fits into the Scott as Killer theme for the season, which I'm finding a little heavy handed. Overall, not too bad, but like others I don't see why Scott had to be dead for the full 45 minutes.

I completely agree. It's more about the fact that Sookie, as a character, would never forgive* those things so this whole "Bill Redemption" Arc is downright painful. *probably a bad choice of words. She's a very forgiving person. She would forgive these things and him. But I don't believe she would ever trust him enough to be with him again.

Tricking her into drinking his blood and not explaining what vampire blood does to you so she would remain ignorant of it Manipulating her into falling in love with him to acquire her for the Queen Fang raping her, almost to death Trying to kill Eric - twice - for being romantically interested in her And aside from Sookie - blowing up the True Blood factories and conducting medical experiments on fairies without their permission. The fact that he tends to turn around later and try to "make up" for it, just proves that he's manipulative and abusive. That's what abusers do.

Blah blah YAWN Blah A fucking Bill flashback. Blah blah YAWN Blah. Season 1 Reference. Season 1 Reference. Season 1 Reference. OMFG. Yet. Another. Bill. Flashback. Arlene Yay! Andy and Holly Yay! WTF, why would I want seventeen hours about Adalyn losing her virginity Blah blah YAWN Blah Season 1 Reference. OMFG Sookie and a diseased Bill Somebody. Blind. Me. It's over. Thank God.