The theory that series six had no more convoluted or heavily laid on plot arc than this year or series 5, and that people only think that due to tabloid propaganda is total pish from beginning to end. Utter nonsense.
I will disagree with you on that, if I may (not about the tabloid furore, I agree that's rubbish).
Series 5? Cracks in each story. Silence Will fall mentioned. Tardis pieces floating in the cracks. Wait until finale two parter to find out. The two parter itself is actually almost a self contained story (the business with Rory aside).
There was a lot more to the story arc in Series 5 than the cracks, and when the cracks were the anchor point to the arc, they were often a fairly prominent part of the story (Vampires of Venice, Cold Blood).
The events of Eleventh Hour, Flesh and Stone, Vampires and Venice, (arguably Amy's Choice), Cold Blood and the final two-parter, were all inextricably linked. Each introduced elements and character progressions that were part of the overarching narrative.
Those episodes define a complete trajectory for the development of the characters, and put into place the pieces required for the final story. They weren't just changes made to the characters for the purposes of a single story, they were very deliberate parts of a bigger story - the arc. They were more than just a recurring theme or motif.
Series 5 did have a strong arc plot. But it was nowhere near the level of intricacy laid out in the opener of series six. It was a bit here, and a bit there and was layered fairly slowly as the series went on. Certainly stronger than series one to four, but not really the same level of mystery or multi stranded as series six. Series six started Bam! Loads of weird shit! WTF! Five laid the groundwork for the even more intricate arc of series six. But wasn't quite the same sort of thing.
edit: But i agree with you that I oversimplified series five in making my earlier point and overstated my case.
Series 5 did have a strong arc plot. But it was nowhere near the level of intricacy laid out in the opener of series six. It was a bit here, and a bit there and was layered fairly slowly as the series went on. Certainly stronger than series one to four, but not really the same level of mystery or multi stranded as series six. Series six started Bam! Loads of weird shit! WTF! Five laid the groundwork for the even more intricate arc of series six. But wasn't quite the same sort of thing.
edit: But i agree with you that I oversimplified series five in making my earlier point and overstated my case.
Yes, right enough, 'convoluted' didn't really apply to Series 5, only the finale. 5 foreshadowed things, or pushed things forward piece by piece, little questions building up to big answers. 6 definitely took the opposite tack of presenting all the questions at one, and feeding the answers out over the series.
Most of the things mentioned here are not story arcs but just common theme's. Surely an "arc" would get a bit of additional information in each episode. Having a common theme such as lights flickering is not really a story arc.
Well I absolutely loved series 6 and the whole arc so there
Apart from a couple of stand alone type episodes, every week there was new things to think about and wonder about for next week. Most things made sense within the context of their universe, and the ending was so deliberately wacky and cool. They even made it make sense that dinosaurs were flying around the park while roman chariots were rolling past under early 20th century style aircraft as steam trains puffed by on raised railways. It's totally crazy, but because there was a reason behind it- it made sense. One of my favourite ever Doctor who episodes was that 2 parter. And then POOF- the explanation to the whole series ( and partly to series 5 too) it was the Tesselecta that got "killed". Ah HAAA
So anyway, there still COULD be some kind of arc going on. It would be cool if there was and no one got it. When finally reveled it could be like the punchline to the best joke ever. I'm wondering if we might see the Doctor doing some kind of back to the future style spying on himself or something next year. Revealing then that there really was an arc going on and the main characters had no idea what they were in the midst of. MAYBE even some of the times he's been going to Amy and Rory, it's been future Doctor and that's why the Tardis lands him back there with months in between- to try and avoid crossing time streams. (with any luck we will see how the cubes were REALLY destroyed, and why there were no dead heart attack victims).
Maybe again, we might see him dropping in on past doctors too, back to the futrue style. It could be a little bit like the tribbles episode of deep space 9 in that case. Don't know if any of that will happen, but it would be cool
. Most things made sense within the context of their universe, and the ending was so deliberately wacky and cool. They even made it make sense that dinosaurs were flying around the park while roman chariots were rolling past under early 20th century style aircraft as steam trains puffed by on raised railways. It's totally crazy, but because there was a reason behind it- it made sense. One of my favourite ever Doctor who episodes was that 2 parter.
Well, it didn't really make sense, did it?
If there were no time, why were there clocks? How could there be a date? How could anyone tell what had happened in the past if there was no past?
It didn't make sense any more than it made sense in The Big Bang that Amelia lived in a world that was just the same as the world in The Eleventh Hour, even though there were no stars. So everything progressed and evolved the same, did it, in this starless world? I don't think so.
These are the things that really make no sense, not just a twiddle of the sonic that makes everyone recover from a heart attack.
I'm glad you liked the episode - so did I, though probably for different reasons, but certainly not because I'm under any illusion that it made sense!
It didn't make sense any more than it made sense in The Big Bang that Amelia lived in a world that was just the same as the world in The Eleventh Hour, even though there were no stars. So everything progressed and evolved the same, did it, in this starless world? I don't think so.
No. That's why there were the blink-and-you'll-miss-it Nile Penguins in the museum, the Dinosaurs in Ice, and probably one or two other bits I can't remember.
And besides really confusing the sailors who use them for navigation, I'm not sure how much difference a lack of stars would make...
Anyway, back on topic, the lack of a story arc this year (or perceived lack - as other people have said, there's an awful lot of recurring themes and situations) really doesn't bother me. It's a just a new approach, and it's nice that 7 series in DW is still finding new ways to show a series.
No. That's why there were the blink-and-you'll-miss-it Nile Penguins in the museum, the Dinosaurs in Ice, and probably one or two other bits I can't remember.
And besides really confusing the sailors who use them for navigation, I'm not sure how much difference a lack of stars would make...
Anyway, back on topic, the lack of a story arc this year (or perceived lack - as other people have said, there's an awful lot of recurring themes and situations) really doesn't bother me. It's a just a new approach, and it's nice that 7 series in DW is still finding new ways to show a series.
Why stars disappearing 2,000 years ago affected penguins and dinosaurs wasn't explained. But it was fun (if you freeze framed it or saw Confidential.) Maybe it's not just UNIT that benefits from a scientific advisor. We'll just have to assume that, even though humans thought the mystery was about stars disappearing 2,000 years ago, other weird stuff further back in time not mentioned in the script also happened (or ignore the museum exhibits).
Seasons of the show have usually been done as separate stories with no connection or at most light strands of continuity. e.g. get Ian and Barbara home, exiled on Earth, find bits of a key to time as almost a throwaway incidental to each story, we're in E-Space etc. The 21st century thing of having something repeated through stories without actually affecting the stories (bad wolf, bees, a new prime minister, possibly lightbulbs flickering or mentions of christmas) is fairly routine and not much different to old style Doctor Who.
I think it's only been Trial of a Time Lord, Series 5 and Series 6 that have had some or all stories in the season directly interwoven with the strands of the arc. My opinion - Trial and series 6 were problematic, series 5 approach was OK.
No. That's why there were the blink-and-you'll-miss-it Nile Penguins in the museum, the Dinosaurs in Ice, and probably one or two other bits I can't remember.
And besides really confusing the sailors who use them for navigation, I'm not sure how much difference a lack of stars would make...
Anyway, back on topic, the lack of a story arc this year (or perceived lack - as other people have said, there's an awful lot of recurring themes and situations) really doesn't bother me. It's a just a new approach, and it's nice that 7 series in DW is still finding new ways to show a series.
Nile penguins were fun, but irrelevant to my argument.
Would Europe, and specifically England, have developed in exactly the same way without the stars to navigate by, to the extent that a litle girl would live in a typically English house in a typically English village and be praying to a Christian saint?
Would the same social structures be in place? The same clothes worn?
I don't know if the stars just disappeared, or were never there, but either way, there would be huge changes in history which would certainly be reflected in Amelia's circumstances (even given that Amelia would exist at all!).
You may think that history would be the same with no stars, except that dinosaurs would still be alive (well, they wouldn't have been killed by an asteroid. So would humans have even evolved?). Though the question is academic, snce without stars there would be no Earth.
Maybe if the stars disappeared on that one night, the Romans would have made their way home, but such a cataclysmic event would have beeen seen as a huge message from the gods - how they interpreted that would have affected their subsequent behaviour. Whole mythologies would have been built round the event. The religious development of Europe would have been quite different. The various invasions of England would be unlikely to have happened. It probably wouldn't be "England".
I could go on picking it to pieces, but I won't. My real point was that it was daft. A lot dafter than a trick with the sonic, that people seem to be having trouble accepting.
Was Amelia praying to a Christian saint? Was Santa Claus just some other jolly old fat bloke?
They did have other mythologies. Dawkins was leader of the faith based Star Cult. Presumably deducing the nature and necessity of the legendary stars but lacking primary evidence. Stars being needed for humans to be made of stardust. They were possibly riffing on Fred Hoyle with that. Except Dawkins isn't a physicist.
Which doesn't explain the penguins and dinosaurs.
So, Big Bang all made perfect sense. Power of Three didn't. Except that Big Bang was full of tosh and Power of Three wasn't.
Was Amelia praying to a Christian saint? Was Santa Claus just some other jolly old fat bloke?
They did have other mythologies. Dawkins was leader of the faith based Star Cult. Presumably deducing the nature and necessity of the legendary stars but lacking primary evidence. Stars being needed for humans to be made of stardust. They were possibly riffing on Fred Hoyle with that. Except Dawkins isn't a physicist.
Which doesn't explain the penguins and dinosaurs.
So, Big Bang all made perfect sense. Power of Three didn't. Except that Big Bang was full of tosh and Power of Three wasn't.
Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children. Known as Santa Claus, Santa for short.
I still don't get how the star thing worked, but it's all water under the bridge anyway. To be honest, I'm trying to forget most of series 5 & 6.
Trouble is, if you say The Big Bang made no sense everyone thinks you mean the timey-wimey thing, which actually didn't bother me at all. Tthough that made no sense, either.;)
The problems with deleting the past without erasing the present can be explained fairly simply using "in universe" logic.
The cracks didn't "delete" events from history - the events were "moved" via the cracks. An analogy would be making a movie and editing some scenes out of the total filmed. That may cause "temporal continuity errors" but the later scenes still exist. It is already established within DW that time is not linear so cause and effect don't actually apply in the way we humans perceive them to and that "film strip" analogy for time is also used as one possible model in the real world.
Also, deleting "history" involves deleting fixed points. We saw in the show that when fixed-points are removed in some way, the effect is not an explosion or a blinking out of the universe but a bizarre messing with time itself. Events like the creation of the Earth and the first "spark of life" are fixed points - so when they were erased/removed, it didn't remove the later events that stemmed from them, just messed them up.
Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children. Known as Santa Claus, Santa for short.
I still don't get how the star thing worked, but it's all water under the bridge anyway. To be honest, I'm trying to forget most of series 5 & 6.
Trouble is, if you say The Big Bang made no sense everyone thinks you mean the timey-wimey thing, which actually didn't bother me at all. Tthough that made no sense, either.;)
I'm just joking. Except that in alternative history stories it is common for the same characters to end up playing a similar role as their real life counterparts but for different reasons. He might have been patron saint of a non-christian religion that also had saints.
A bit like having Thatcher as prime minister, but for some reason she's a communist.
The stars thing was played in such a way that anyone can interprete it as they wish. Moffat seemed to create a nonsense universe a little like a slightly less peculiar version of what he did full on in Wedding of River Song. Absurdity.
btw, Granny - I was rather agreeing with you. But in keeping with Moffat's style instead of saying so I left you to imply what I might be saying by not actually saying it. Please dont tweet whilst reading my posts. Pay attention. (In future I will play loud music over the top of the single sentence which explains all and mumble it so you still don't know.)
Comments
There was a lot more to the story arc in Series 5 than the cracks, and when the cracks were the anchor point to the arc, they were often a fairly prominent part of the story (Vampires of Venice, Cold Blood).
The events of Eleventh Hour, Flesh and Stone, Vampires and Venice, (arguably Amy's Choice), Cold Blood and the final two-parter, were all inextricably linked. Each introduced elements and character progressions that were part of the overarching narrative.
Those episodes define a complete trajectory for the development of the characters, and put into place the pieces required for the final story. They weren't just changes made to the characters for the purposes of a single story, they were very deliberate parts of a bigger story - the arc. They were more than just a recurring theme or motif.
edit: But i agree with you that I oversimplified series five in making my earlier point and overstated my case.
Yes, right enough, 'convoluted' didn't really apply to Series 5, only the finale. 5 foreshadowed things, or pushed things forward piece by piece, little questions building up to big answers. 6 definitely took the opposite tack of presenting all the questions at one, and feeding the answers out over the series.
Apart from a couple of stand alone type episodes, every week there was new things to think about and wonder about for next week. Most things made sense within the context of their universe, and the ending was so deliberately wacky and cool. They even made it make sense that dinosaurs were flying around the park while roman chariots were rolling past under early 20th century style aircraft as steam trains puffed by on raised railways. It's totally crazy, but because there was a reason behind it- it made sense. One of my favourite ever Doctor who episodes was that 2 parter. And then POOF- the explanation to the whole series ( and partly to series 5 too) it was the Tesselecta that got "killed". Ah HAAA
So anyway, there still COULD be some kind of arc going on. It would be cool if there was and no one got it. When finally reveled it could be like the punchline to the best joke ever. I'm wondering if we might see the Doctor doing some kind of back to the future style spying on himself or something next year. Revealing then that there really was an arc going on and the main characters had no idea what they were in the midst of. MAYBE even some of the times he's been going to Amy and Rory, it's been future Doctor and that's why the Tardis lands him back there with months in between- to try and avoid crossing time streams. (with any luck we will see how the cubes were REALLY destroyed, and why there were no dead heart attack victims).
Maybe again, we might see him dropping in on past doctors too, back to the futrue style. It could be a little bit like the tribbles episode of deep space 9 in that case. Don't know if any of that will happen, but it would be cool
Well, it didn't really make sense, did it?
If there were no time, why were there clocks? How could there be a date? How could anyone tell what had happened in the past if there was no past?
It didn't make sense any more than it made sense in The Big Bang that Amelia lived in a world that was just the same as the world in The Eleventh Hour, even though there were no stars. So everything progressed and evolved the same, did it, in this starless world? I don't think so.
These are the things that really make no sense, not just a twiddle of the sonic that makes everyone recover from a heart attack.
I'm glad you liked the episode - so did I, though probably for different reasons, but certainly not because I'm under any illusion that it made sense!
No. That's why there were the blink-and-you'll-miss-it Nile Penguins in the museum, the Dinosaurs in Ice, and probably one or two other bits I can't remember.
And besides really confusing the sailors who use them for navigation, I'm not sure how much difference a lack of stars would make...
Anyway, back on topic, the lack of a story arc this year (or perceived lack - as other people have said, there's an awful lot of recurring themes and situations) really doesn't bother me. It's a just a new approach, and it's nice that 7 series in DW is still finding new ways to show a series.
Why stars disappearing 2,000 years ago affected penguins and dinosaurs wasn't explained. But it was fun (if you freeze framed it or saw Confidential.) Maybe it's not just UNIT that benefits from a scientific advisor. We'll just have to assume that, even though humans thought the mystery was about stars disappearing 2,000 years ago, other weird stuff further back in time not mentioned in the script also happened (or ignore the museum exhibits).
Seasons of the show have usually been done as separate stories with no connection or at most light strands of continuity. e.g. get Ian and Barbara home, exiled on Earth, find bits of a key to time as almost a throwaway incidental to each story, we're in E-Space etc. The 21st century thing of having something repeated through stories without actually affecting the stories (bad wolf, bees, a new prime minister, possibly lightbulbs flickering or mentions of christmas) is fairly routine and not much different to old style Doctor Who.
I think it's only been Trial of a Time Lord, Series 5 and Series 6 that have had some or all stories in the season directly interwoven with the strands of the arc. My opinion - Trial and series 6 were problematic, series 5 approach was OK.
Nile penguins were fun, but irrelevant to my argument.
Would Europe, and specifically England, have developed in exactly the same way without the stars to navigate by, to the extent that a litle girl would live in a typically English house in a typically English village and be praying to a Christian saint?
Would the same social structures be in place? The same clothes worn?
I don't know if the stars just disappeared, or were never there, but either way, there would be huge changes in history which would certainly be reflected in Amelia's circumstances (even given that Amelia would exist at all!).
You may think that history would be the same with no stars, except that dinosaurs would still be alive (well, they wouldn't have been killed by an asteroid. So would humans have even evolved?). Though the question is academic, snce without stars there would be no Earth.
Maybe if the stars disappeared on that one night, the Romans would have made their way home, but such a cataclysmic event would have beeen seen as a huge message from the gods - how they interpreted that would have affected their subsequent behaviour. Whole mythologies would have been built round the event. The religious development of Europe would have been quite different. The various invasions of England would be unlikely to have happened. It probably wouldn't be "England".
I could go on picking it to pieces, but I won't. My real point was that it was daft. A lot dafter than a trick with the sonic, that people seem to be having trouble accepting.
They did have other mythologies. Dawkins was leader of the faith based Star Cult. Presumably deducing the nature and necessity of the legendary stars but lacking primary evidence. Stars being needed for humans to be made of stardust. They were possibly riffing on Fred Hoyle with that. Except Dawkins isn't a physicist.
Which doesn't explain the penguins and dinosaurs.
So, Big Bang all made perfect sense. Power of Three didn't. Except that Big Bang was full of tosh and Power of Three wasn't.
Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children. Known as Santa Claus, Santa for short.
I still don't get how the star thing worked, but it's all water under the bridge anyway. To be honest, I'm trying to forget most of series 5 & 6.
Trouble is, if you say The Big Bang made no sense everyone thinks you mean the timey-wimey thing, which actually didn't bother me at all. Tthough that made no sense, either.;)
The problems with deleting the past without erasing the present can be explained fairly simply using "in universe" logic.
The cracks didn't "delete" events from history - the events were "moved" via the cracks. An analogy would be making a movie and editing some scenes out of the total filmed. That may cause "temporal continuity errors" but the later scenes still exist. It is already established within DW that time is not linear so cause and effect don't actually apply in the way we humans perceive them to and that "film strip" analogy for time is also used as one possible model in the real world.
Also, deleting "history" involves deleting fixed points. We saw in the show that when fixed-points are removed in some way, the effect is not an explosion or a blinking out of the universe but a bizarre messing with time itself. Events like the creation of the Earth and the first "spark of life" are fixed points - so when they were erased/removed, it didn't remove the later events that stemmed from them, just messed them up.
I'm just joking. Except that in alternative history stories it is common for the same characters to end up playing a similar role as their real life counterparts but for different reasons. He might have been patron saint of a non-christian religion that also had saints.
A bit like having Thatcher as prime minister, but for some reason she's a communist.
The stars thing was played in such a way that anyone can interprete it as they wish. Moffat seemed to create a nonsense universe a little like a slightly less peculiar version of what he did full on in Wedding of River Song. Absurdity.