Quite liked the emojibots, if you look at social meeja pretty much everything has been dumbed-down to emojis and memes, so the overall plot worked fine for me. I mean, it's the exact kind of thing I could see us doing in the future - remarkably complex technology used to convey basic communication. It's what we do now. Our mobile phones are powerful computers that would have been the realm of - not mere sci-fi, but far, far future sci-fi - three decades back, and we use them to respond to someone's life-changing events with a thumbs-up icon or a sad face. It was a bit flat as an episode, the pacing felt wrong. It was okay, but a bit of a forgettable and disposable ep.
Yeah. the "robots taking over and killing humans" schtick has only been done about 376 times before in Doctor Who.
And previously we've been able to empathise with the characters the robots are rising up against, these days you get the basic "killing people bay-ud, m'kay" rather than having an emotional investment in the characters themselves. I don't think they've cottoned on that shortened episode duration of nuWho necessitates a different tack in the scripts then the days of where every storyline required plenty of padding to justify 6 episodes or more. There was an eminently forgettable early TNG ep with machines becoming lifeforms that will stick in my mind longer than 'Smile' will. The emojibot idea deserved a Black Mirror level story, not a skiffy-series-that'll-be-cancelled-after-s2 story.
I weep for humanity that I can walk through the store and see the smiling pile of shit as everything from throw pillows to slippers. WHO THE FUCK BUYS THIS (LITERAL) SHIT?
Another middling episode with a few glimmers of brilliance. Absolutely loved the exchange between the Doctor and Bill when she questioned him about how many people he'd seen die and how many people he's killed. Bill: "How many before you lost count?" Doctor: "I care, Bill, but I move on." Bill: "Yeah, how quickly?" Doctor: "You know what happens if I don't move on? More people die." Doctor: "Let me tell you something: I'm 2,000 years old and I have never had the time for the luxury of outrage." Capaldi is definitely the best actor to play the Doctor since the 2005 reboot. He brings a gravitas to the role that Matt Smith certainly couldn't, and even the great David Tennant couldn't manage (although underneath his flippant exterior you could sense a darkness). The expressions on Capaldi's face when delivering those lines was prize-worthy.
I was into Garbage Pail Kids, and Madballs as a kid, so I would have dug a poo pillow. Course, "concerned parents", probably would have gotten them banned back then.
Wasn't a bad ep this week, very much Monster of the Week, but focussed on the characters rather than the beastie, plus the beastie wasn't bad. Dr Who is at it's best when it's placing human faults front and centre, either directly or via an alien proxy acting as a mirror. I'm liking Bill, and sad this is Capaldi's last season. If Kris Marshall is the new Dr I'm thoroughly dubious as to what the next few series' will be like - I know the BBC are desperate to regain the merchandise sales of the Tennant era, especially with Top Gear having an awkward time, but really.
] He's only had two major roles and one of those was playing a teenage son in a sitcom. Look for images from Death In Paradise, that's his latest big part. Edit: recent pic.
Lets not forget his Oscar-worthy acting in the BT adverts. He plays pretty much the same basic character, and just plays on the most relevant aspect as a persona. A weedy Dennis Waterman, just need to him to start writing the toon, singing the toon... And that is what concerns me. He may turn out to be a brilliant actor and perfectly suited to the role, I just wouldn't bet a more than a pint on it.
If subroutines can't send emails, what the hell are viruses doing to take control of accounts and send a bunch of spam?
Who cares? The scene where the pope shows up during Bill's date is just about the fucking funniest moment in Doctor Who history.
if I wanted to really stop and think it through (usually a horrible choice with a Moffett script) my first question would be this:
It's a simulation close enough to the real world that it knows things like a girl Bill is interested in but hasn't actually asked on a date yet, obviously the simulation is recently created/cloned from the real world. I'm willing to accept the random number thing as some quirk of their particular system. The suicides seem to me like the simulation trying to protect itself. Once a subject is aware it is being observed it ceases to provide reliable observations, so anything that becomes aware of its simulated status is programmed to remove itself from the simulation.
The episode was, much like the simulation, good on the surface but was lacking once you got past that. I mean, if you're not technically literate (go on result = ((x,y)=>{return x+y}), send an email for me) just go the indistinguishable from magic route, otherwise you're just a VOY episode with the Pope. The tone of the plot really didn't know if wanted to be Red Dwarf or The Matrix, and suffered from it. Pity really, this was the only episode that had a bit of a whiff of shit about it, but had the most intriguing concept so far. Last week's was very good - although the "capitalism bad m'key" triggered an eye-roll or two, remind me BBC, how many millions does Worldwide make from licensing Dr Who to tat merchants around the globe? Doth the lady protest too much? - with the space zombies and an actual consequence to the Doctor. The speech about true faces was good too. Very much going to miss Capaldi.
Could even be a cache of the real world - the aliens monitor everything and every x number of hours bin the current simulation, refresh the data store, recompile, rebuild and re-run it and test responses to things likes Veritas. That might have made nice scene actually, coming out of the simulation hardware and there's something that is obviously a computer and it's got 'Veritas' on it, next to it, another with 'Dalek invasion' on it, and zooming out to display racks and racks to indicate these aliens aren't fucking about. They've done their homework on why Earth seems particularly resilient to invasions rather than just rocking up and getting their arses kicked.
Also, thinking about it, Packard's issue with CERN going all suicidal isn't an issue - it just wasn't displayed very well. The simulation is designed to provide information in order to invade Earth, so the sensible solution would be to deny them that information hence the "we're saving the world" by killing themselves and making the simulation invalid.
There are ways to fix this, but the explanation presented or implied didn't do a good job. CERN's suicide cultists didn't know what the simulation was for, only that they lived in one; and blowing themselves up wouldn't hurt the main experiment anyway, even if they had known.
Yes, both of these would have made much more sense. But both are explicitly contradicted on-screen. The Doctor says all simulations have to have this random number problem; and he describes the suicides as free reactions against the system rather than its fail-safe. Its not that the episode couldn't have been great, it was just shoddy work.
