Doctor Who S34E1: "Deep Breath"

[DaveJB]

Peter Capaldi's official bow as the Doctor will be upon us in a little over 90 minutes.

[Lost Soal]

I really hope they give the Doctor a charactor soon instead of this gibbering idiot

[Sharp-kun]

Remind me, was that phonecall at the end in "The Time of the Doctor" in some way (I don't remember) or was there time for him to make it?

Otherwise ???!!! he didn't know that wasn't his last regeneration.

[Crazedwraith]

Well that was bizarre. And I don't think really needed to be extended. It could have fit 45 minutes no problem.

And Matt Smith's showing up was bollocks. I like Eleven but it takes the punch out of a regeneration story if you have the old one turn up again as the finale.

[madd0ct0r]

dinosaurs good. return of repair robots, also good. setting up big bad, good.
terrible fight scenes, excess emotional scenes padded out by strings. She should not have made that phonecall.

[Lost Soal]

Between destroying the daleks and Clara finding him again he had enough time to get changed and make fish fingers & custered. I think he had time to make a phone call off screen as well. Plus the phone was off the hook.

[DaveJB]

Otherwise ???!!! he didn't know that wasn't his last regeneration.

Yes he did. He said as much when he was blasting the hell out of the Daleks. And if memory serves Clara was stuck in the church for an indeterminate amount of time after Dalek-blasting, so there's time to fit it in. That said, the Smith scene should have been shorter and placed at the start, where it would have been a nice call-back to Power of the Daleks. It dragged on too long and cheapened his farewell.

As for the episode, mixed bag. It was actually pretty good from about the point where the Doctor and Clara showed up at the restaurant, but the Vastra-Jenny-Strax stuff in the first half really dragged; it really wasn't anything we hadn't seen before from that trio. If I didn't know better, I'd say the BBC suddenly demanded a double-length episode the day before filming started, and Moffat had to resort to copy-pasting chunks of the Christmas special from the year before last to make up the running time.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Well that was....ok I guess.

The phone call bit, I dunno, I think it worked for me. The point about it taking the punch out, maybe, but then again this is completely new territory for the Doctor, even more so than a normal regeneration. So him planning ahead enough to reassure Clara is actually quite nice.

As for the rest, entertaining enough, although it did drag in places. And I find it kind of annoying that they didn't show whether it was the droid that jumped or the Doctor that pushed him.

[The Romulan Republic]

That was fucking bizarre. And Moffat's style is old (and crappy to begin with, Blink and Day of the Doctor partially excepted).

I wonder who the woman at the end was.

[Eternal_Freedom]

As bizarre and...meh as it was, I'm sold on Capaldi as the new Doctor.

[The Romulan Republic]

At least I appreciate a short break from the Daleks. Apparently they're back in the next episode though, which seems a bit too soon. I like the Daleks, but they've been used a lot of late.

[Crossroads Inc.]

The thing that rubbed me the wrong way about the episode?
The needless "Drama for the sake of Drama" of the "fight" between Vastra, and the others, and the clockwork robots.

I mean come one... Strax has a Giant "Kill'O Zap" gun, and is all "mighty Sontaron Warrior" and he is over powered by ancient barely working robots, with knives? Really?
Did they really need everyone's lives hanging by a thread in that sequence? Could you not have had something else to have a sense of drama?

And the lady at the end "I hope my boy friend was not too rough on you" Um yeah, want to know more about that...

[Darkevilme]

I mean come one... Strax has a Giant "Kill'O Zap" gun, and is all "mighty Sontaron Warrior" and he is over powered by ancient barely working robots, with knives? Really?

To be fair. Strax is also supposed to be a medic, and he doesn't seem to be a very good medic what with demonstrating a doctor zoidberg level of competence at times. So it's possible I suppose he isn't a very good soldier either.

[Crazedwraith]

And the lady at the end "I hope my boy friend was not too rough on you" Um yeah, want to know more about that...

Who cares? It's River song MK-eleventy-one from Moffat.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Given that she was talking about heaven and how the two-faced guy got there it's probably the version of her that got saved in the Library planet.

[DaveJB]

I dunno. You could tell from her first appearance that River and the Doctor had/would have something resembling a genuine relationship, but if anything that woman seemed more like the psycho ex-girlfriend from Wayne's World than another River.

[Batman]

River's first appearance also had a lot more River and actual River/Doctor interaction. That scene lasted all of what, 2 minutes? I'll wait and see. And even assuming they couldn't get the actress for some reason, I don't think that's River.

Undecided on this episode. The first half had IMHO too much Smith-style zany for what's supposed to be a new Doctor, but I think Capaldi managed to establish his own character in the latter half of the episode.
As for Strax not being able to hold back the robots despite having a ray gun, this incarnation of him has always been portrayed as borderline useless in nuWho.

[Lost Soal]

I can't stand strax but I will give some defense, in that you hear him say "why won't you stay dead?" meaning all his gun is actually doind is knocking them down briefly. Hardly his fault.

[streetad]

Has there been a big budget cut? I will admit I haven't seen the last couple of series but this one definitely featured some very ropey cgi (seriously there were a couple of scenes that looked like something done on an Amiga in the 1990s).

It also appears to have become somewhat more slapstick than I remember...

[InsaneTD]

The Doctor is always a little manic/crazy after a regen. Or at least Moffat thinks so. He was definitely setting the tone for a much darker doctor though. He also kinda transitioned from Smith's zaniness to a more serious doctor. I did like Capaldi as the doctor so far.

The episode was too long. It felt too long. The pacing seemed to change a couple times.

[Darth Nostril]

Weirdest episode of 'The Thick Of It' I've seen.

[Tribble]

So what exactly was Clara all pissed off about? I mean, she has literally been in every single adventure the Doctor has ever had, and although it's not clear as to how much of those memories she retains, its firmly established that she is aware of how his regenerations work. You would think that she would completely understand what was going on, but apparently that wasn't the case. What was there to be confused about? Or is she just pissed off that the Doctor is no longer a flirty push over?

[Steve]

She's an audience surrogate. In this case, she's being used to explain to all the teenage fangirls who think Capaldi is old and creepy and totally not hot like Tennant and Smith that it's still the Doctor and please please don't tune out.

[InsaneTD]

She failed. I know a few people who were looking forward to seeing Capaldi, and are now not going to watch cause of her.

[Tribble]

Ugh. I guess that explains Matt Smith's phone call: "Just ringing in to remind my fans that yes, Capaldi IS the new Doctor and that you should watch him. For my sake. Also think of him like your grandfather, whom you love dearly, but need to accompany to the mall in order to make sure he doesn't swear at the staff and panic when someone shows him a computer."