For a while now people have been complaining about DW being childish and tonight we get a serious plot, an angry Doctor with no silliness or comedy scripts and the episode was really gripping but the fans are still not happy so how exactly can the writers win?

I agree tonight we got a serious plot and some classed it as boring?

I personally have loved both Series 5 and 6 and now 7 and agree that the accusations of childish, especially after tonight, are a bit silly and potentially unfounded. However, I personally felt the episode was lacking. I think that the humor that has been so good in Who over the last few years was slightly lacking and Amy and Rory were almost non-existent apart from Amy stopping the Doctor executing Jex. As for the story itself, I loved the concept but it was almost too morally ambiguous. The Doctor was not great, his anger was tempered almost too quickly and he went from one extreme to the other so quickly and it felt a bit all over the place and honestly boring in the back half of the episode. The best bit was the undertaker and it wasn't awful, but not my piece of cake.

Talking to Susan the horse wasn't silly or comedic?

I think sometimes when people say it's childish, they might be referring to the Doctor's mannerisms, not the plots (just guessing here). He lacks the gravitas of other Doctors, which is fine (that's this incarnation and they're all different) but maybe some people find *that* silly and childish.

I actually think that it's the humor that's making the fans accuse the show of becoming childish, to be honest sometimes it's like the scripts are being wrote to make the audience laugh.

The story really could have done without Amy and Rory (particularly Amy) but overall I think it was my favourite of this series so far. It made some logical sense and I think it waspretty cool to have the gunslinger becoming the protector of the town ever since.

One question does springs to mind. Kahler Jex and the Gunslinger were both aliens. How come they could both speak and understand English?

I think that even the best dramas are punctuating by humour. It doesn't have to detract from the episode. Look at last year's opener, one of Moffat's finest eps, it was packed full of humour and still a brilliant episode. Same with Asylum. You can keep me on the edge of my seat and still have me laughing. For me, humour is a massive part of Who and i feel it was missing tonight.

tonight was brilliant IMO.
god knows why everyone is moaning.

Maybe because people have different tastes, something a lot of people on here seem to like to forget on a Saturday night!

No ones ever happy.

I always check the previous posts of those people who come to this forum and call Doctor Who childish or rubbish or both.

Many are not Who fans at all.

They are almost invariably people who post to other forums devoted to soaps, reality shows or some downmarket ITV-2 trash.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

More like you can't please everyone all of the time. Some people moan for the sake of moaning, whereas others just find a particular episode wasn't to their tastes, or a whole season isn't to their tastes. Being a fan of a show doesn't necessarily constitute loving every episode and as such, being such a big fan means overall average episodes that leave you feeling let down will make you want to moan.

By way of a convenient plot device, it is said that the TARDIS translates languages so the they are universally understood.

Well i adored it....the second 10/10 perfect episode of series 7 for me alongside Asylum! It was perfect....i did adore Dinosaurs too of course but i really lvoed the does to Spaghetti Westerns, i loved the Terminator vibes a got from it too...loved the pacing, the characterisations, the twists too were sharp, it was a brilliant adventure...Whithouse has done his magic yet again!

Some people who have been Who fans since the late 60s / early 70s rarely post on these fora. Is posting only allowed for people who don't realise that all companians before and after Zoe are insignificant in comparison?

Maybe being morally ambiguous was the whole point?

That might work after the Doctor arrived - but they'd obviously been talking English with the locals long before that.

I'd say that a more logical explanation is that at least some aliens - the ones clever enough to build spaceships, time-machines, cyborgs etc - will either be smart enough to learn a foreign language or will have technology to do it for them.

I got that the morally ambiguous was the point, as I said, I loved the concept I just feel as though it wasn't executed brilliantly and for the middle/back end of the episode, I wasn't sure what was supposed to be going on. Granted the moral ambiguity could and for a lot of people did work well but i didn't feel it. It just felt like there was no way to end it and if Jex was going to blow himself up, he should've just handed himself over to the Gunslinger (obviously it was a spur of the moment decision but still...)

This is going to sound silly, but there was too much of the Doctor in this episode. Most of it was cheesy, especially the town turning on him. That time could have been used for something more interesting and something more relevant. Rory barely even got a line in.

I also thought that the whole thing was entirely predictable. I knew Isaac was going to die at some point and I also guessed that Jex was going to turn out to be the bad guy.

Also, I felt that the episode climaxed at the wrong time. The best part of it was when we saw the Doctor willing to throw Jex to the gunslinger and Amy trying to stop him. After that, it went downhill for me.

It was not a bad episode but I have seen much better.

That only explains how the Tardis crew can understand them. It doesn't explain how the people of Mercy understood Kahler Jex. Not that it matters, it's one of those things in pretty much all sci-fi.

Oh, for god's sake, it's all a matter of taste and the degree of ''seriousness' or 'childishness' in any given story is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

This story was a classic example of fictional morality, where, the writer being God, he can make the benign moral choice (the one the writer is espousing) turn out to be the correct one, because he controls the fictional reality.

Real drama, proper drama, does not do this; it holds a mirror to the real world, and shows us what it is like. Real drama does not provide a cop-out for the hero. And a cop-out in this case is anything other than two things happening: the Doctor giving whatever the guy's name was over to the cyborg or the cyborg destroying the town. This story was as much fairytale as anything you're likely to see. The Doctor magically finding another way - that is the stuff of childish fantasy. That is why I liked last week's episode: the Doctor had a decision to make and he made it. The writer didn't give him a get out of jail free card, nor did he feel the need to have characters talk in pompous (and out of character) speeches about the moral choices they were being presented with.

Anyone who thinks this latest episode made the slightest useful comment or observation about real world morality is childish, in my view. And see, that's the point: it's all relative to one's own mindset. So can we stop this kind of crap about whether episodes have a suitable gravitas or sobriety to them and judge them on the terms of what they were actually trying to be?

My judgement of this episode: it was just too banal for me.

Litterally the only thing wrong with this ep was Amy channeling Tennant's Doctor and his self rightous goodygoody attitude. There was really nothing else bad about this ep!

I loved this episode, and thought it the best since Vincent and the Doctor.

It had some real moral questions. Can it be acceptable to kill one or a few, or hand them over knowingly to be killed, to save the many? Jex thought so, and the Doctor did too, until Amy came in with the opposite view. The Doctor recognised that his mercy to such as the Daleks and the Master had consequences for others who later fell victim to them.

In the end, Jex took the decision that allowed the questions to be dodged, but they were still asked.

I also liked this episode because we lost that awful hectic pace that ruins so much Who now. It moved at a slower space, which meant that all the dialogue could be heard clearly and the plot could be followed. What's more, the background music was actually in the background! Bliss.

My main issue with this episode was the horrible western clichés : empty town with faces staring from windows, the gunfight at noon, the dr on horseback in profile, the angry townsfolk vs the good guy sheriff, dr wearing a cowboy hat just because, undertaker trying to take measurements etc ...

I found it very obvious and incredibly predictable. It was obvious that the alien dr was going to be a bad guy but would sacrifice himself in the end for redemption. And when the sheriff sacrificed himself I remarked it was obvious the gunslinger would take over.

I felt this episode was an exercise in checking off western tropes, while stepping through a boring morality tale seen many times before. I don't think the drs character progression has been entirely steady and the conflict with the ponds feels artificially escalated.

Looking forward to next weeks episode with relish !

Good luck to you if you enjoyed it, but we all have different tastes and opinions! I found it a bit too predictable for my liking!

I think that in lots of sci-fi things I watch. Seems that everyone in the whole Universe speaks English!