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variousqueerthings · 5 months

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No blowing up the planet!

it's.... Nightmare In Silver!!! the second of the neil gaiman penned episodes, and I've gotta be honest, the only thing I'm really vibing with this time around is Warwick Davis, unfortunately, because I'd want to watch it again for Warwick Davis, youknow?

sexism rank objectification (female character is ogled/harassed/turned into a sex joke by the doctor and/or a lead we’re supposed to root for and/or the camera): 4/10

sexism rank plot-point (lead female character is only there to serve plot, not to have her emotional interiority explored, or given agency to her emotional interiority): 3/10

interesting complex or pointlessly complex (does the complexity serve the narrative or does it just serve to be confusing as a stand-in for smart, this includes visually): 4/10

furthers character and/or lore and/or plot development (broader question that ties into the previous ones, at least two of these, ideally three should be fulfilled): 4/10

companion matters (the companion doesn’t always have to be there, but if the companion is there, can they function without the doctor– and overall per season how often is the companion the focus or POV of the story): 6/10

the doctor is more than just “godlike” (examines the doctor’s flaws and limitations, doesn’t solve a plot by having it revolve entirely around the doctor’s existence): 4/10

doesn’t look down on previous doctor who (by erasing or mocking its importance, by redoing and “bettering” previous beloved plotpoints or characters, etc.): 8/10

isn’t trying to insert hamfisted sexiness (m*ffat famously talked a lot about how dw should be sexier multiple times, he sucks at writing it): 8/10

internal world has consistency (characters have backgrounds, feel rooted in a place with other people, generally feel like they have Lives): 4/10

Politics (how conservative is the story): 5/10

FULL RATING: 50/100 (if I can count….)

it's not so much that it's the worst episode of ever, it's more that it's spreading itself way too thin. And then of course. we get the second most infamous fucking terrible line in Eleven's run:

OBJECTIFICATION: "A mystery rapped inside of an enigma squeezed into a skirt that’s just a bit too… tight."

I am just hoping that Neilman didn't write this line, because it scans as pure M*ffat at his worst, but who knows. this is the Doctor about Clara, and look, not that it should even matter, because it's a heinous line that shouldn't exist, but it also doesn't make sense, because Clara's skirts may be relatively short, but they're cut in a sort of almost 50s flare (I don't know skirt cutting terminology)

and I hate that that's even a point I have to make in this, why do I have to think about the tightness of Clara's skirts fuck you fuck you fuck you!

this is genuinely the only thing, but it comes outta fucking nowhere slaps you in the face and then leaves you with "ah, thank you for summing up the only things that matte about your lead character in one, hypersexist sentence." which... speaking of the first half of that sentence

PLOT-POINT: I've been praising Clara's competency in most of her episodes. she's proactive, she does things even though she's scared, she knows number one rule is Not Dying.... in this episode she's got none of the depth that comes with the things she does

suddenly, she is just In Charge Of Soldiers, and she's practically a different character. gone are emotional tie-ins to what she's doing, in fact she mostly seems to be having fun and/or being very happy to be put in charge of this particular military, with the exception of a second when they're almost killed by Cybermen

I did write initially that I liked her taking charge in this one too, but as the episode went on, she felt more like she was just there to run the B-plot, than to be important. I also wrote down this line "The only reason I’m still alive is because I do what the Doctor says"

honestly I'd have to go back and see if rtd-era companions have these sorts of lines, but also my girl-guy, he's asking you to run first line of defense against Cybermen, it's not that you're not being put in danger. this is the sort of line I'd have expected from Amy, but I think Clara's been remarkably free of them up until now (I could be wrong, but from my notes!) Especially because throughout this season we've had episodes where the Doctor had no idea what to do and you saw that Clara!

this is me picking up on dialogue, because this episode... did not have good dialogue by and large, but we'll get back to that, because we're not done with "The Impossible Girl" (sigh) -- because if you didn't think she was kind of absent proper emotions before, (such as the episode breezing mostly past her reaction to seeing the kids she's taking care of being controlled by Cybermen, which, again I can sort of believe in that she hasn't met Cybermen before and so doesn't think the children are dead like previous companions might, but they're still kids she deeply cares for and apart from an initial comical anger scene, she's just moving onwards with the plot), then remember here at the end that she's not really important, she's just the mystery of the season for the Doctor to solve!

COMPLEXITY: this episode has so many setpieces. there was a war 1000 years ago vs Cybermen that people won, and now they're on this abandoned amusement park that has a bunch of old Cybermen casings, and there's a lost emperor, except he's this guy who's been calling himself Porridge, who's the secret behind an automaton chess player (a real thing that existed in the 18th-19th century and used this exact technique), but is actually the long-missing emperor that's been searched for for awhile, I cannot remember why he was undercover as an amusement park gimmick called fucking Porridge

uh and then the Cybermen start waking up, because the Doctor brought children here and they needed children and I cannot remember why, and they cannot blow up the planet, until they've saved the children, and the Doctor is infected, but plays a chessgame against his evil Cyberself (called Mr Clever, because everything in this era has to be weirdly Silly all the time), while the others fight the Cybermen in an abandoned "comical castle" because it's still a theme park and most of them die, the Doctor convinces the evil!self to release the children and then promptly fries him out of his brain, because why wouldn't he do that???

and all the survivors beam up to the emperor's big ship and blow up the planet. I have a lot of questions. why a themepark (did they explain that, I somehow must have missed it), why is the emperor missing (did they explain that, I somehow must have missed it) why is he pretending to be this guy called Porridge? (did they explain that, I somehow must have missed it) why tf is he missing if he's so easily recognisable that a child would get it?? (did they explain that, I somehow must have missed it) why did the cybermen need children? (did they explain that, I somehow must have missed it) why was the amusement park abandoned and then stationed with troops? (did they explain that, I somehow must have missed it)

so like. there maybe are explanations for all of these points, but my point is that this episode is so unwieldy that if you look away for a second you miss the potentially single piece of dialogue explaining a thing and then it's very unclear for the rest of the story. and I am Watching these episodes, taking notes, going back to read subtitles. I genuinely don't know how I missed all of that

and I like watching things that are complicated, I do. but only if it's also engaging, and this episode is not engaging enough for me to go back now and look through it (or even to possibly watch it again). it's got so much dialogue that is so out of place, tonally and structurally, there's no way I'm going in to try and focus more on it than I already did. my point isn't necessarily that the above wasn't explained, it's that it wasn't explained well, and there was a barrage of weird shit that was coming at you from all sides

CHARACTERS/LORE/PLOT: you'd think, considering evil!Doctor is inside the Doctor's mind and they're battling it out and evil!Doctor is seeing Forbidden Knowledge and also being kinda weird about the Doctor's and Clara's relationship (framing it as explicitly romantic), that there would be more forward-motion, but not really

Clara's not massively changed from the kids having been kidnapped and taken over by Cybermen, and neither are the kids for that matter. which, I don't know where to put this, but remember how back in Rings of Akhaten I was saying that there's a looooot of kids in this era, which would be great if they could act (like the kid in Akhaten), these kids are... not good actors in this episode. and they're also given (especially the girl) thankless fucking dialogue. she's meant to be giving that tween/early teen surliness, and in order to manage this 90% of her dialogue is calling things stupid. She'll enter a scene like this:

Kid: Hello I’m bored Soldier asks her where her sister (Clara) is Kid: She’s not my sister, she’s stupid

this.... is not how tweens/early teens talk, and you can feel the director going "just act huffy in Every Single Moment you're onscreen." she calls the Tardis stupid, she calls an alien planet stupid, she calls people stupid, I swear the nr one word this character says is "stupid"

point being, the kids aren't important to any forward trajectory on the whole, Clara isn't questioning the picture of herself in the last episode that she doesn't recognise so that's a bust, and the Doctor's little duel of the mind doesn't go much of anywhere

the only bit of something that may come up again is the Cyberman bit drifting around space to set up future Cybermen (shocking)

COMPANIONS MATTER: she does. yeah, she does take control of the soldiers. I wish it had been more awkward. why is this Clara, who was having a near panic-attack in Cold War, who was admitting to being terrified in Hide, why is she just so effortlessly good at this? but yeah, she does do Plot Things so to speak

I'm also not 100% convinced the Doctor would leave his companion -- especially this companion, whom he is trying not to get killed for the third time - at the front lines battling Cybermen, that's truly a last resort kind of situation that seems very chill here

“GODLIKE” DOCTOR: aaaand so we get to the A-Plot, which is an admittedly cool little setting in the Doctor's mind where the Gallifreyan cogs whirl around (I wonder if there's easter eggs in there)

and of course, really it's a way to "trick" the evil!Doctor into letting the kids go, so he can say fuck it to the chessgame and just electric him out of his mind, and that's exactly what happens

it's fine-ish, I've marked it down because it totally overshadows the plot where Clara is in charge of scared soldiers, which matters far less, and shouldn't! and also because... I'm circling around saying there's a lot of this dialogue that doesn't work for me either, and that I don't think Matt Smith is the best actor for it

I've enjoyed Matt Smith in this era, more than I thought I would. there are some things he does very well (cry-face is solid, rapid speech patterns without it getting jumbled, annoyance, lotta bodily flailing although I think directors overuse that to the point of my not taking him seriously at all quite often), where I think he often loses me is the Dramatic Time Lord Stuff. the quiet competency and rage, the shouting grand speeches, all of that... never worked for me, didn't work this time either, and the whole episode hinges on it a bit

it didn't help that evil!Doctor called himself "Mr Clever," it's one of those things that happens a lot in this era where the balance of lighthearted-for-"kids" (in the sense that you can see the screen screaming for children to think this is funny/whimsical/etc) and take-this-seriously-in-the-timetravel-show-please is see-sawing like mad. often just a lot little things, like that. it's like someone grabbing you by the face and yelling WHIMSY!!!!!! at you, rather than whimsy coming from the construction of the story

but yeah evil!Doctor is kind of sneering I guess. I think there's just more that could have been done with this concept, but like everything else it's stretched Thin

PREVIOUS DOCTOR WHO: so apparently these Cybermen reference a bunch of Classic cybermen, along with the ones developed during RTD's era. that's cool. also a few references to other Doctor's, especially Ten, with Allonsy and

"You've had some cowboys in here, ten complete rejigs"

“SEXINESS”: we are pretty solid on this on the whole. thank goodness. I do wonder about the emperor asking Clara to marry him, but I'll save the emperor as concept for last

INTERNAL WORLD: yeah, back to complexity, nonsense from top to bottom. I guess it's built like a theme park, in that there is a theme park map. I'm just realising this is set at a theme park and we see four locations -- the bit where they land on the "fake moon," and do some fake moon jumping. the soldiers barracks. the little room kept by the con-man carnival type. and the "comical" castle. why set this at a theme park if you're not showing any... theme park?

POLITICS: this episode is devoid of politics, except we've got this platoon and we've got this emperor of several worlds, and none of it has any bearing on the episode, because we're not meant to think about these sorts of things. the platoon is kind of the dredges, and so several of them are immediately killed by Cybermen, which would be gruesome if one cared about them, but the episode has so much going on that there's not enough time to focus in properly

but also were they drafted? did they volunteer? can they quit? who's their families, their planets? what made them join up if they did join up? why do they care about the emperor, what is that loyalty made up of? propaganda? why does the emperor matter? what is the suggestion that the word "emperor" makes spring to mind?

it's sort of framed like a budget LOTR with a return of the king, except his spaceship was orbiting the planet the whole time. I still don't know what he was doing there, or why they didn't just evacuate and blow it up earlier, and I'm saying this, but also is there more at stake when "blowing up a planet" who lived there? what culture is lost? how does it tie into the idea that an emperor can just blow up a planet?

he's presented as a benevolent, brave person, who's fine with Clara turning down his hand in marriage, but truthfully we know nothing about him at all, and actually a story about that would have been more interesting to me. what are the connotations of it all???

FULL RATING: 50/100 (if I can count….)

a thin thin episode with too much happening, too many characters, highly suspect dialogue, much of which was out of character, and a setting that's cool on the surface and then totally unexplored, because it too, is just there to be Cool rather than to have any deeper bearing on things

it's got some nice callbacks to classic!who and Warwick Davis, that's... most of what it's got going for it, unfortunately

and then that fucking line!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

#im watching nu!who #im watching eleven who #a nightmare in silver #the measurement

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solitarelee · 9 months

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Hi! I'm the anon from Shirecorn's ask- I feel like my specific situation is very different. I'm not saying teachers Need to help (sorry if it sounded like that- bad with words. I wish you were allowed to, though) but in my district, for some reason, they refuse to at least stand by and let us work on student safety if that makes any sense? EX. we blocked some sites (like Kongregate and Newgrounds type sites, plus Instagram, Pinterest etc, exclusively non-school appropriate games and social media) and a bunch of teachers at multiple locations got extremely mad at us for some reason. We have a librarian who gets really. REALLY weird about us blocking anything explicit too. She's worse than the parents for some reason.

I know all districts are different, but also thank you for putting up the good fight at yours. 🙏godspeed soldier. May administration be conveniently looking the other direction

LOL they got mad because it also blocks it for teachers, which meant they couldn't go on instagram at work. They SHOULDN'T be going on instagram at work, mind you, but I'd be willing to bet that's why they got pissy (at work we also connect to the school wi-fi. yes it's a nightmare. yes it's slow. I worked at a school that had separate wi-fi for the teachers once, and that was heaven lmao). It's also possible you blocked some sites teachers were using as rewards. In order to motivate students, I've seen a lot of teachers basically say "if you finish early, you can play games on your laptop" in order to allow slower workers a chance to finish within the plan while not boring the faster students to absolute tears every class period. I've also personally run into the problem where students would go to increasingly sketchy, virus-ridden gaming sites because all the safe, popular ones were blocked by the school. Not saying they're right to get pissy at you (you're just doing your job, they should get pissy at the school board if they're gonna lol), just a few reasons, good and bad, they might be getting irritated.

A lot of teachers also get... I would say morally opposed to censorship. You have to remember that the association with censorship that teachers will have is very bad, books that aren't allowed in the library and an idea of "children's safety" that involves keeping them from learning anything about history, their own bodies, the memory of hired mobs screaming and calling them pedophiles at school board meetings (I work in English so I have a significant number of colleagues this exact thing has happened to. One of my closest work friends got called a faggot at one of those.)

A lot of teachers (honestly myself included sometimes) have a kneejerk reaction to a censorship-based concept of children's safety, because their primary experience with it is one that's built not around children's safety but around control of children. Most educators (and librarians) are inherently morally opposed to this kind of thing and will react negatively to any hint of it. When kids are coming from homes with "child protection" monitoring systems to schools with anything problematic blocked, it becomes an issue of control. This is potentially where some of the teachers and the librarians are coming from and why they're reacting that way.

The problem is at the same time, admin is often blocking us from teaching internet safety in a helpful way that isn't just revolved around blocking Instagram and Pornhub. In almost every school I've worked or was placed in for observation, lesson plans had to be approved by admin the week before, and they had to have a core curriculum connection, and internet safety ain't in there. That's supposed to be the job of comp classes that don't exist at any school anymore (comp class was where we learned internet safety when I was in school in the 90s/00s). Best I could ever do was internet literacy, because I'm an English teacher and there's a core curriculum about research that I could connect it to.

Needless to say, I wish we could help too, since just blocking sites (while necessary imo just for like... keeping students on task? a lot of ppl don't seem to realize children in schools from middle up have literal constant access to a laptop and are on it all day every day in all classes) doesn't really do anything to teach kids internet safety. Parents aren't doing it (parents are often the source of the problem too) and if teachers aren't allowed to... it just doesn't get done, full stop, as those are the only two kinds of adults we tolerate around kids.

#solitaretalk #long ramble about internet safety and education #thank u for clarifying btw! it makes sense from an education IT perspective #a lot of ppl just like blaming everything kids lack on teachers which is fair abt 50% of the time and not fair abt 50% of the time XD #we're crippled with oversight which isn't inherently a bad thing. the IDEA of core curriculum is good #but as with most things the way its actually implemented on the ground is ~*~functionally useless~*~

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