Part Two Of The First Story Of The Season

[poliphilo]

Bluff, counterbluff, counter-counterbluff.

"Got you that time."  "O, no you didn't. I knew what you were doing all along and kept my fingers crossed". It took me right back to the playground. As it happens I've been reading Shaw. He's a lot like Moffat; both think the world can be changed by a quibble.

I liked it when the Doctor and Davros shared a laugh. But then Davros went back to being totally evil and was immediately much less interesting. There were moments when Missy too seemed like she was treating the companion Wassaname as a woman and a sister and then she'd spoil the illusion by doing something gratuitously mean. Why do the Who villains have to be such out and out rotters? We accept a degree of moral ambiguity in the Doctor, why can't his opponents be a little nuanced too?

I love the Doctor. That's why I'm so hard on him.

Comments

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Well, we don't know yet that Davros was destroyed, or all of his Daleks, for that matter. For my part, I read a lot of bluff/counterbluff as a metaphor for the moral ambiguity that Davros, Missy, and the Doctor all share. There probably is a bit of Davros that regrets the slaughter of all of his people and wishes the Doctor well in the preservation of his race.

Did you by any chance watch the rebroadcast of the two episodes together as a seamless whole that I understand was on BBCone yesterday?

(When the character of The Master was conceived in 1971 by Terrance Dicks et al., he was modeled on Moriarty, by the way, so this isn't a Moffatt thing. And he's been escaping certain death by various timey-wimey hand-wavey devices since then, too.)

I also thought that Missy was marginally more nuanced in her performance in these two episodes, and to the degree that she is, I enjoyed her character more.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I saw it in two parts, but with only a couple of days in between.

Conan Doyle's Moriarty is rather different from Moffat's. Doyle's is an elderly professor, the unlikely head of an international crime syndicate - and we see very little of him. Moffat's is a games-playing young psycho.

I'm quite looking forward to next week's episode- billed as an underwater ghost story. I'm always happier when the daleks and/or the cybermen are absent.