I finally got around to watch the last 4 episodes and read all the spoiler text in here.
Regarding
Sleep No More: meh. It's basically 45 minutes of Paranormal Activity and clickbait. I can't imagine a child that's properly scared of the sand men now –the plot was probably too contrived in the end. Perhaps I'm too critical since I've seen the same atmosphere in Sunshine, and there the tension was executed excellently. They could've made the sand men grow out of
thin air the floating dust. That would not only wisely spend the budget on CGI instead of silly plot, but also make children scared of dust so they clean their rooms more often.
Regarding
Face the Raven: can't say much else than "nice!". Or wait, I do: a death sentence for stealing necessary medical supplies? Me should know by now that harsh punishments (stealing isn't even a violent crime, that's robbery) don't make a society safer.
I really liked it when Me revealed that she made a deal with the raven, and then felt bad for Clara's plan to backfire horrendously. A glorious death for a glorious season (except for Sleep No More).
Regarding
Heaven Sent: I'm thinking they started the story with his confession dial (that's a proper Chekov' gun right? It was pointed out at the start of the season and again just before teleporting) being a proper time loop and then someone thought "hey, he can end up on gallifrey after leaving the dial, we just need some way to have a lot of space-time pass by –why not put an arbitrary reset mechanism in the dial instead of having a proper bootstrap-loop?".
...and then someone was so stupid to say "alright" instead of "Shut up, Wesley!".
There's also a bit of plot-residue left from when the dial was actually unlocking (with the castle being
a metaphor for the lock of course) every time he confessed something. Either that or it was specifically put there to get the doctor to confess a third time.
Nonetheless I enjoyed the episode. Especially that, for once, the main character learns that it is their nightmare/torture/interrogation and then using that information. "Death" turned into a nuisance rather than a scary monster after the doctor's escape out the window. It's a pity that in the end it wasn't as introspective as I hoped it to be; the whole confession monster was designed by others, instead of it being a dissociation in the doctor's mind.
Regarding
Hell Bent: whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
For the love of the universe, just keep the companion dead. Clara's death was sad and beautiful. Now the whole previous episode means nothing. Well, not nothing of course, but to me it really loses a lot of its charm.
rmsgrey wrote:Echo244 wrote:rmsgrey wrote:I'm less convinced about the whole irreplaceable best-friends-forever thing that Moffat's been continuing to embrace with the Companions - yes, Clara has been special to this Doctor, but he's had special people before, and lost them, and moved on and found someone new - sometimes even run into old companions again when he's managed to let them go at the time. It seems like the only way to stop traveling with the Doctor nowadays is to be forcibly prevented by some disaster...
Isn't that what Martha did? Hop on, hop off and then from time to time be part of the furniture?
Link wrote:Unrelatedly, it would be nice if the Doctor got a non-21st century human companion for a change (i.e. either non-human, or a human from a different era). There have been some major recurring characters who fit that bill, but apart from Handles, I think the last "real" companion who wasn't a human from the 21st century was Jack Harkness.
For humans, I'd say maybe go for someone from pre-industrial Asia. There's a rather glaring lack of Asian main characters. Non-humans may be trickier; heavy prosthetics aren't great for a regular companion, and I don't really think they'd go for a "looks exactly like a human but isn't" type of character, unless it's an alien disguised as a human (of which there have been a lot, lately, so maybe it's not that far-fetched).
I'm all in, but the guys producing the show probably think that an alien companion (either in form or culture) would alienate a lot of the audience. And it probably does.
Maybe it's also a good thing to have one character with contemporary Western values and one character with (contemporary Western) ideological values. Keeps the show's feet on the ground.