Doctor Who S34E2: The Rings of Akhaten

[Captain Seafort]

Starts in five minutes.

[DaveJB]

While there's definitely been worse NuWho episodes, that really wasn't very impressive at all. It kind of felt like they tore pages out of the scripts for "The Beast Below" and that Torchwood episode where Captain Jack killed a life-devouring monster by overfeeding it with his immortality, stuck them together and filmed the result.

Judging by the fact that there were only a couple of sets and everything else seemed to have been filmed on a greenscreen, I get the feeling that this week's episode got the shaft budget-wise to fund the London filming for last week's episode, and the visual effects for next week's episode.

[Captain Seafort]

It's also one of the more obvious demonstrations that the modern format simply isn't suited to the sort of stories they're trying to tell. There's so much dashing about that there's no time to build the sense of suspense and mystery that the first half of it was trying to build. It felt like a four or six-part serial had been crammed into 45 minutes.

[DaveJB]

Since the episode's writer, Neil Cross has never written for the show before, I get the feeling that he didn't really understand how to properly execute the story he was going for, and/or Moffat rewrote the script and totally butchered the storyline. We may even have had a similar situation to Fear Her, where a combination of an inexperienced Who writer, late rewrites and the budget being slashed combined to produce a total trainwreck. Either way, it's quite a disappointment really, considering that many of the better Moffat-era stories have been written by Doctor Who newcomers.

[Captain Seafort]

It felt like a decent old style story that had half or two thirds of it cut out to fit into the time slot, the result being that it was far too rushed.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Well it was disappointing but not massively so. It's certainly far from the worst Who I've seen so I give it a 3. I just never felt that interested in finding out what happens. Although I was half expecting "the old god" to be a statue of the Doctor or something, since he's apparently the Lonely God, maybe it got lost in translation. My second hope was that it was Cthullu or one of his mates but oh well.

[Bedlam]

Personally I really liked it, probably my favourite so far this season (maybe that's daming with faint praise).

I think I preferred the first half, the market full of various alien species got my imagination going, the second was a bit overwraught I prefer the Doctor betting an enemy more practically like last year rather than by force

[Vaporous]

The first half was okay, and was the same "The new companion gets to see Space Stuff" episode we've seen before. Everything from the moment they rent the space-motorbike is nonsense. is the doctor riding motorcycles going to be a thing now for some reason? Why? Why bother with it when they have the TARDIS? Is it just to make the completely contrived heavy door-opening situation possible? Did the writers give up and finally just decide the screwdriver is a literal magic wand so that the Doctor could have a Dragon Ball Z style beam duel with Those Guys in Those Cool Coats That Are Never Developed as Frightening Villains? So the sun thing is alive and it eats souls. or stories, or memories. And it eats the Doctors, except that it doesn't because he remembers everything. I guess Neil Cross saw some episodes where the Doctor goes on one of his "I am the Great and Terrible Time Lord this week, be totally menaced by me." speeches and just stuck it in. This fails with no consequences so that Clara can be inspired to give away the leaf the way we all knew she would when they introduced the idea of sacrificing things with personal value earlier.

Maybe next weeks "The Adventures of Brutus and Davos Under the Sea" will be more fun to watch.

[Soontir C'boath]

Next time I visit Forbidden Planet NYC or an online Who shop, I'll bet everything we saw in this episode will be available. From the aliens, to the 'bike', and even the blue cupcake they were eating, I'm sure will be up for sale.

Maybe I should've waited until I finished the last ten minutes before voting, but it was all right. The main thing is having the sonic screwdriver be a mentally powered wand. I really hope they get rid of it sometime soon.

[Parallax]

That was ... 'naff.

Some immediate questions spring to mind:
Why didn't the TARDIS translate all those alien languages?
Why did the Doctor just abandon Clara in the market place?
Why use the space bike to chase the taken girl instead of the TARDIS?
When did the sonic screwdriver get upgraded from annoying but passable plot device to an extension of the Doctor's will? How did it hold the door up? How did it block an energy attack?

Everything in in the episode looked cheap as well, somehow. Maybe it was the direction, maybe it was cutting back on studio sets but things like Clara landing back in the stadium and her walking into that room where the Doctor was exhausted ... it looked more like a high school play than a BBC production.
The whole singing thing at the end was just silly as well. It seemed to serve no purpose other than give a character we don't care about and will never see again some more screen time.

This season really isn't off to a good start.
That being said, the trailer for the next ep looks interesting. Liam Cunningham is a great actor (as seen in Dog Soldiers, Game of Thrones and a bunch of other things) so there's that to look forward to, at least.

[Crazedwraith]

Umm... technically isn't this not a new season? It's the second half of last season? So this is S33E08 not S34E2.

Though the comments are mostly making me glad I've stopped watching now.

[Broomstick]

Judging by the fact that there were only a couple of sets and everything else seemed to have been filmed on a greenscreen, I get the feeling that this week's episode got the shaft budget-wise to fund the London filming for last week's episode, and the visual effects for next week's episode.

Either that, or this week's budget when to latex and make-up.

[Captain Seafort]

Why did the Doctor just abandon Clara in the market place?

By being as scatterbrained as ever, dashing off to look at the next cool thing to catch his eye without checking that she was keeping up.

Why use the space bike to chase the taken girl instead of the TARDIS?

Because they were chasing rather than simply moving from point a) to point b) which, idiotic car chase in Catherine Tate's Christmas episode aside, it isn't cut out for.

When did the sonic screwdriver get upgraded from annoying but passable plot device to an extension of the Doctor's will? How did it hold the door up? How did it block an energy attack?

Since they started cramming four and six part serials into 45 minutes and need to resort to the magic sonic to make things happen quicker.

The whole singing thing at the end was just silly as well. It seemed to serve no purpose other than give a character we don't care about and will never see again some more screen time.

That's one of the main things that made it feel like a old style serial cut down into a single episode. It treated the girl as though she'd been running around with them for the last few weeks, as she would have been had this been a serial.

[Starglider]

Hideously utterly awful. Definitely in the top ten worst Nu Who episodes.

Specifically;
1) Some of the worst do-everything ass-pull sonic screwdriver abuse ever, having it function as an actual weapon (and looking really stupid doing so) as well as the usual 'unlock impossibly secure things' and just gratuitous screentime (tease it being destroyed, tease it being given away). Of course there were plenty of other contrivances that stuck out like a sore thumb, TARDIS not opening, Doctor appearing and disappearing at exactly appropriate times etc
2) Utterly unthreatening villains, from the pathetic 'vampire' helplessly banging on glass, the worthless fail-at-creepy minions who only existed to cower in front of the doctor, to the ridiculous childish planet thing. Direction of the whole final stuck-in-a-room scene was bad.
3) Opponent is built up into a 'god', situation is supposed to look hopeless, but is defeated by writer fiat 'the doctor is just too awesome' in its purest form, without even a fig leaf of rationale. Followed by a chaser of utter nonsense with whatever the 'most important leaf in history' thing was supposed to be (writer utterly fails philosophy, villain looks pathetic for falling for that 'trap').
4) Opening scene was pointless and irrelevant to story, also makes Doctor look creepy for no reason.
5) Offensively indifferent to plausibility of any kind; no attempt to rationalise the setting, unrealistic character behavior (for a new companion particularly), wooden acting and ridiculous (not in a good way) dialog.

It struck me as the kind of effluent that would emerge from taking the 'plausibility doesn't matter, plot doesn't matter, sci-fi is just set dressing, real writing is purely about emotions and characterisation' conceit (that is currently very trendy on this board) to its ultimate conclusion. Lots of grandiose emotion, a couple of semi-interesting concepts that might have worked in a different story, half-baked dysfunctional plot, zero plausibility, no immersion, horrible episode.

It's nice that the costume designers got to show off, but that just means this episode sucked up budget & manpower that could have gone on a good story. The only good thing we can say about it is that nothing seen here is likely to come up in a future episode, so hopefully it can be forgotten.

[NecronLord]

I was cheering for the door.

Especially when it was about to crush the screwdriver.

Utter. Tripe.

[Soontir C'boath]

Well, there's a good amount of 3's and 4's, so what's carrying the decision that it was at least a decent episode? Is it that things like the aforementioned screwdriver is now being considered equivalent to Pertwee's "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" and character interaction/growth is what's being held in regard? If so, was "being along for the ride" more than enough to ignore the contrivances in the story that Starglider has mentioned?

I did enjoy Oswald's character and her interaction with the Doctor as she seemed to have mellowed out and isn't annoying as previous companions can be either. I can see someone enjoying their relationship especially in the first half of the episode when watching it.

[Korto]

I said it for the last episode, and I'll say it for this one.
I fucking hate that fucking sonic fucking screwdriver. KILL IT! KILL IT WITH FIRE!

Also hate the Doctor winning by being awesome at you, compounded in this by the saccharine of a group sing-song. The story was without suspense or plot.

But I didn't mind the episode before that point (before the girl got pulled to the pyramid). The Doctor checking out Clara's (?) past made sense. She's a mystery, so he's checking to make sure what he's told happened, did. Looking for clues and shit. Just more detective work.
So a 2

[Starglider]

I fucking hate that fucking sonic fucking screwdriver. KILL IT! KILL IT WITH FIRE!

The sonic screwdriver is good when it stands in for a conventional tool. If the Doctor needs to do something technical, it saves screentime of searching around for a logic probe or a spanner or a power cell or a PDA etc, and it's a visual/audible link between the different incarnations of the character. In this case it doesn't allow the Doctor to do anything that he couldn't do without the screwdriver (assuming no time pressure), but it is more stylish than say coventional lockpicks and keeps the narrative flowing. For example Star Trek tricoders were highly multifunctional and helped moved plots along, without being wonder devices that destroyed the drama.

It is bad when, as Vaporous said, it becomes a literal magic wand. The Doctor is not supposed to be a wizard, the series is deus ex machina prone enough as it is. When it excuses the characters (and the writers) of thinking of real solutions to problems, and when it means the viewers can't take any challenge or threat seriously, then it is harming the series. In fact an actual magic wand imported from Harry Potter would be less bad, because at least those have reasonably clear and consistent capabilities and limitations.

[Admiral Valdemar]

So, uh, that system's sun just vanished. That may be a problem.

[Starglider]

So, uh, that system's sun just vanished. That may be a problem.

It was a gas giant, hence 'The Rings of Akhaten', not 'The Asteroid Belt of Akhaten'. A silly looking gratuitous CGI gas giant, granted.

[Admiral Valdemar]

So it was. Forgot about that whole aspect. Still, a jovian vanishing = fun times.

As for the rest of it, I echo Starglider's sentiments.

[PREDATOR490]

0 - Have to say I find this episode incredible for its ability to actually leave me stupified into a brain dead coma.

Some of the highlights:
- Doctor being an awkward creepy stalker
- Pointless overshadowing of the big mystery
- Doctor is so awesome because he has suffered so much sobstory
- Sonic Screwdriver cranked up to new levels of wank

All this episode has established is the Doctor is a selfish moron that values his screwdriver more than someones life. We know the TARDIS can replace it and originally it was nothing more than a tool which was repeatedly scoffed at by sufficiently advanced races. I find it a bit pathetic for him to require his companion to give up a treasured momento from her mother because he dosent carry ANYTHING except a screwdriver which can be easily replaced but he dosent want to.
Then again, he had no reason to sacrifice it in the first place if he had just used the goddamn TARDIS to get the girl - Yes, the TARDIS isnt able to chase targets very well but the previous episode already established he can literally jump from a street to the inside of a plane in seconds. Based on that observed capability, the Doctor could have lapped the universe and been happily waiting for the girl to arrive at the temple.

The useless bullshit posturing about the Doctor being so valiant and not walking away - Thanks for establishing that, I was kinda forgetting about this since the last time it was hammered into the audience.

Complete waste of space and effort.

[The Guid]

Well I enjoyed it. Why?

It was a change of pace - we got to see the Doctor just on tour, enjoying the Universe, until things go wrong. We also had quite the ramp up to his emotional confrontation with the Godplanetthing, which, of course, was a score draw until Clara came along with a fresh perspective.

I also didn't mind the sonic, I never do, because sometimes I don't want the writers to have to come up with a million different ways to open a door, and its long been established that it does well with sound based things - and it was in its element in this episode.

It also made sense for him to not therefore give up the sonic screwdriver when pushed for time BECAUSE HE CLEARLY DID NEED IT.

And who reckons that he can jump the TARDIS to exactly the ring point to save her? It isn't always that reliable a shot, and its not always the best idea to take it to every alien's HQ.

It wasn't as good as last week, that had some gold in it, but it when I saw "average" I mean it as a compliment.

I don't know why so many of you watch every week, you hate this show.

[Vaporous]

We also had quite the ramp up to his emotional confrontation with the Godplanetthing, which, of course, was a score draw until Clara came along with a fresh perspective.

Except that this had no emotional impact. It didn't fit the tone of the episode, or the recent development of the Doctor. They introduced the evil sentient planetoid in the last ten minutes with its completely vague powers and expected it to work as an antagonist. It was just a big floaty lightshow to give the Doctor something to preach and cry at. Nothing fit together in this episode. It felt like someone built an hour out of a modular Dr. Who kit. Weird Sounding Aliens With Scrunchy Faces Chase Blonde Kid. Sappy Melodrama. Rargh Last of the time Lords angst. Tie crude facsimile of plot together with Magic Screwdriver Does Everything.

People still like the idea of the show, and we've seen good and great episodes before. This doesn't mean we have to ignore the drop off in quality and the increasingly lazy writing.

[Soontir C'boath]

The show's been around for 50 years now. There's been loads of poorly scripted serials in the past, but there were plenty of good stories as well. I'll praise as well as criticise as I see it.