Predator Vs. Aliens

HijiNKS ENSUE PODCAST Episode 87 “ZombieWhatever.com” is live!

COMMENTERS: Did you like the first two episodes of this season of Doctor Who? PLEASE NO SPOILERS IF YOU KNOW THE ACTUAL ANSWER TO THE NEXT QUESTION!!! How do you suppose they are going to work Oswin into being the new companion, seeing as how the same access plays them both? The companion’s name is Clara Oswin, so do you suppose she is a relative of Oswin’s? AGAIN NO ACTUAL SPOILERS, but how do would you like Rory and Amy to depart vs. how do you think they’re actually going to depart? I bet Amy gets turned into a Weeping Angel and Rory gets crushed between two stray planets.

Also, feel free to make up your own Dalek Parent and Dalek Child dialog. “YOU MUST EXTERMINATE YOUR VEGETABLES BEFORE YOU HAVE ANY SWEETS! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!”

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108 Comments

  1. I have a bit of an angry about the trouble between Pond and Pond. 🙂 It didn't make much sense. It was however a well-acted scene and was forgivable because of the general chemistry of the cast and quality of the direction.

    Many of my friends were angry that the Doctor is angry and violent, because the Doctor they fell in love with would never have done the things the Doctor did in Asylum/Spaceship. I told them that the Doctor they fell in love with is probably one that has never actually existed on the show, because most every iteration of the Doctor is frequently a violent bastard. Ten was often angrier and violenter than Eleven's sort of simmering short-temper, and Nine was the ragin'est bucket of rage that ever raged.

    I also entertained the possibility that the Doctor they fell in love with was Colin Baker, but I did not say it out loud, as I have more respect for them than that. 🙂 I'm not saying Colin Baker was the *bad* Baker, but there were only two Bakers, and Tom was the good one.

    • Kind of like when 10 beamed aboard the… potato head guys' ship during the ATMOS crisis in order to blow them up, but first he had to give them a choice… knowing GOOD AND BLOODY WELL they were going to choose getting blown up. He plays judge jury and executioner more often than not.

      • "He plays judge jury and executioner more often than not."

        This is _begging_ to be a Dr Who/Judge Dredd crossover comic. "I am the Law^H^H^HDoctor"

      • The end of Dinosaurs took me back for a moment before I remembered the 10th doctor killed someone with an orange not 10 minutes after being poiperly up and about. Solomon crossed several lines that showed he was pretty much irredeamable.

        I wonder if the Doctor is trying to wean himself off of the Ponds (like they're an addiction), and that he's worried he will be the death of them if he keeps coming back in to their lives. I suspect somehting near tragic or tragic would be needed to finally let him let go. Or he isn't the one that initiates the split.

      • OK this is canon if you follow the books as well as the TV shows. There are "The Guardians of …" the "gods" if you will in the Who-vers. Each one wears a color and is a reflection of what they represent. They are shown in the TV shows in the Key to Time series.

        In the books it is strongly hinted that when the Doctor finally dies after all regenerations that he is the One Who Wears Red. The Guardian of Justice. So the line about giving the villain one chance is sort of a throw back to this plot point.

    • The Doctor always gives villains a chance. Especially when he knows they won't take it. "No second chances. That's the kind of man I am." See also: "I used to be so full of mercy."

      • It's not his lack of mercy that bothers me. It's the fact that the Doctor gets all holier-than-thou whenever someone else dares to use force when it's deserved. I'm still pissy about how 10 treated Harriet Jones; she did the right thing blasting them out of the sky!

        • A local radio station plays old dramas on Sunday nights. Recently, they ran a Seventh Doctor radio play, the four-parter "A Thousand Tiny Wings".

          In it, one lady, who apparently used to live in an Earth with a Fourth Reich until the Doctor edited the timeline (and somehow moved her to the main timeline), called the Doctor out on his supposed no-violence, no-weapons policy after the Doctor uses an umbrella as a weapon to dispatch a rather troublesome alien life form. Sure, it was a case of it or them, but still, he'd been waxing poetic earlier in the show about how violence is *never* the answer, and there's always a "better way"… until that moment.

          To the Doctor's credit, he didn't try to mealy-mouth his way out of it, he just kind of ignored her and pressed on.

          • That's a play from Bigfinish.com – man, I have given them so much money over teh last few years (and happily so because they plays really are that good).. but I would love to have a local station play them for free!

          • Actually the seventh doctor is usually seen as the most callous and manipulting of all of them, Tennants doctor is very reminiscient of sylvester mcoys interpetation of same.

        • Yeah, do as I say and not as I do is generally his motto, though he hates people pointing it out. Unless he's in a good mood he doesn't really take well to people pointing out his faults, even his companions. He did do a number on Harriet Jones though 😉

        • I disagree. The Sycorax had given up on Earth- the threat of the blood control was useless, their leader was dead after trying to go back on the conditions of his duel, and they knew the Doctor was watching Earth and he'd kick their asses if they tried anything. They were running. It would have been better to let them run, and spread the story of the pretty blue planet that you DO NOT FUCK WITH, than to blow them up when they were in retreat.

          I mean, yes, the Doctor gets pissed at people for using force all the time, and he also uses force all the time, but this wasn't the best example of him being a hypocrite- he had a valid point about the value of letting the Sycorax run. Regardless of what was "deserved", letting them live would have been more productive for everyone involved, and Harriet fucked that up.

        • And don't get me started on his reaction to the Daleks in The Stolen Earth / Journey's End. His oldest enemy Davros makes his big return to destroy all universes, and the Doctor interferes with The Shadow Proclomation's efforts to stop the Daleks, takes his sweet time getting to the Medusa Cascade / Cruciform/whatever, and yells at his 1/2 human clone for doing what should have been done in the first place? That's not how the Ninth Doctor rolled!

    • He did of course wipe out an entire species or two including his own. Of course, only in that comic book way where the race you murdered to death in its entirety come back the next week to whine about it.

      • You know, considering one of the species he wiped out was his own, that has to make him feel even worse about it, seeing as how it was apparently all in vain.

    • Ha! Awww, also Colin Baker was my favorite of the originals. He was such a dickhead! Worthy of taking lessons from! Of course, I eventually would have taken a swing at him surely were I traveling with him.

      • I actually did enjoy Colin's run. But, I mean… I'm like many people. Tom defined the role for me. 🙂 Colin is almost always going to be "the Other Baker".

        But yes, I did enjoy how much of an asshat Colin could be.

      • I like Colin’s Who too (well not “liked”, like i wouldnt want to be friends with him) but I thought his acting was great & that it was a valid personality for a The Doctor to have. All the Doctor’s think theyre the smartest one in the room, its refreshing for one to own up to it. They’ve used him very well in the big finish audio-plays. The bit where he (as a delusion) chides 8 for giving up (temporarily) is awesome.

    • I started watching Dr. Who when I was a child. My father had a bunch of old episodes TAPED…. Yes TAPED…. on a VHS… Anyway… I started with the First Doctor, and he carried a gun. And was a crotchety old man. And manipulated people to achieve his ends. And did I mention he carried a gun? He was a mean old man. I liked him.

  2. No idea about Clara!

    But I've got a theory for Amy and Rory. I believe they're sent to the past by the Weeping Angels, and for whatever reason the Doctor instead of just going back to pick them up… arrives too late, when one of them has already died of old age. But this is not "The Girl Who Waited" all over again, because this time they've had a happy, long, life together… and who is the Doctor to change that?

    This is my theory, based on absolutely nothing! 🙂

    PS: I'm loving season 7 so far!

    • That's a good one. I bet you're closer than you think, but you're a bit too far on the "happy ending" side. If they are sent back, I bet the Doctor doesn't interfere because he never time travels within a single course of events, even if those events involve time travel. It's like once he's set in a direction he has a "no time travel" policy until those events have played out to his satisfaction. otherwise the show would just be a series of do overs until everything turned out perfectly.

      • Exactly. There are "fixed" point and "changeable" points in time, and he can only change the changeable ones. I bet the loss of the Ponds is a "fixed" point. Watch what happens in "Fathers Day" if you want to know what happens when you change a fixed point…

            • Yeah, if he'd brought any of the people who had gotten zapped back in Blink back to their own time, they wouldn't have been able to do what they were supposed to do to contribute to Sally figuring things out, so then she wouldn't have been able to send the TARDIS back, so they would have stayed back in the time they were zapped to, so she would have been able to figure it out and snd the TARDIS back, etc, etc…. It would have just gotten everyone stuck in a time loop. There's a sort of time loop involved anyway, but apparently bootstrap paradoxes are allowed and grandfather paradoxes aren't.

              • Exactly! Allowability of paradoxes in Who is basically down to whether or not the writer is aware that they are writing about a paradox, I think 🙂 Though they tend to do a good job of avoiding the kind of fluctuating causality loop that would be caused by the above.

      • It's also my opinion is that Amy (at least) is due to die of old age, but that's the problem with writing out the companions – the Doctor has the option to visit them at any point in their lives… although with Amy he's always gone forward… hmm… no, wait, he went back in Impossible Astronaut… dammit!

        Previous companions in New Who have been written out by making them impossible to reach (for one reason or another), so there's got to be more to it than, "it was just her time".

        This is making my head hurt.

      • Its been implied in some places (wikipedia) that this is what happened in the time war, with all the different sides repeatedly hitting the "Do Over" button until the Doctor stopped it.

      • I know it's just one of those convenience things, but it's not true that ne *never* time travels within a single course. He's done it with great zeal numerous times. The most recent example I recall is all that flitting-about he did with River's vortex manipulator after (or before, they didn't really clean that up) Rory got him out of the Pandorica so that he could give Rory his screwdriver to… get him out of the Pandorica.

        • Well, in The Big Bang there's at least the possible excuse that the vortex manipulator has different rules (Time Agents would have to be able to change events, wouldn't they?) and perhaps different dangers as well.

          A Christmas Carol pretty much killed it, though. He takes the TARDIS and walks all over Casran's history *while the man watches.*

          I don't think Moffat likes the time travel rules much.

          • I think even that has the (thin) excuse of being an extremely isolated world. It’s been implied that The Doctor (and other Time Lords) can remember alterations to time lines, so he knows what the universe was like before & after the time war isolation, and the big bang reset etc (making his mind much older, in terms of experiences, than his body) and that he (and again, other Time Lords) can sense the risks involved in any particular manipulation situation. I think he states the hard and fast rules for the benefit of non-Gallifreyans – similarly to how we’d talk to a child about using the oven or knives.

      • I believe Moffat wants to give a happy ending to the Ponds. Even though he said we would cry (and we would cry, in this case!) He loves the Ponds. It's like RTD with Rose, he would have never killed her.

        We've never really seen what the Doctor would do when someone is sent back in time by the Weeping Angels… we know he was, once (well, he and Martha) and what he did was have the TARDIS sent back to him. Of course in that case everything was already "written" so it wasn't really his choice, but I'm not sure he wouldn't do that anyway, provided it doesn't interfere with something important or something he's stumbled into (like older Ponds). We'll see!

  4. Setting aside the possibility that Rory is a half-brother to every other child of Arthur Weasley, I suspect, more seriously, that Amy Pond will be killed off, since Karen Gillan has stated explicitly that she doesn't want to do guest appearances as Amy once she leaves the program. This prospect disturbs me — I don't like the idea of Amy becoming another Adric, and Amy's life already has been too abused through time travel, the crack in the universe's wall, and all the waiting she's had to do. She deserves a happy ending, and it seems she's not going to get it.

    • Well, like she said, she'll just keep waiting for the Doctor to come back for the rest of her life…it's starting to seem like death is the only option. Just hope it's a good death. Or possibly another Donna-style memory wipe, but that would be so painful for the Doctor.

  5. Follow-up btw, at the end of the second episode, where Pond Sr is swinging his legs out the TARDIS and Amy & Rory are standing behind him, you'll note the Doctor (who is behind them) give them a knowing look and grimace. Amy and Rory do not have a happy ending.

    • It reminded me a lot of the scene with Molly in season 2 of Sherlock. "He was happy; he was grand. Except when he thought no one could see him, he looked sad. *You* look sad when you think he can't see you."

  6. Loved the first two episodes, especially the first had some amazing twists. I actually didn't know Jenna Louise-Coleman is also going to play the part of the new companion until later, I hope she will be the same or similar character as in AOTD.

    Seeing as the Ponds have been through a lot I hope that they will be honored with a peaceful departure from the show.

  10. I definitely think Amy’s going to die. There’s a bit of dialogue in DoaP where Amy says “or until the end of [my life]” and the Doctor instantly gets that foreboding look. Also Amy comments that the Doctor is trying to ween them off of him, I suspect it’s the other way ’round.

    As for working in Oswin, he does have a time machine. All he needs to do is pop in and pick her up before the crash, have a season or two of adventures, then pop her back in time to get marooned and Dalektified.

    • I think that if the Ponds last episode is against the Weeping Angels, Rory, the man who dies, will fall prey to them. Rory will be sent back to the 70s and live until the day he was originally sent back, if my memory of the WA's powers is right.

      Amy will make the Doctor send her back to 1971 so she can be with Rory, and I think Rory is time locked so Amy won't want to travel with the Doctor without Rory. This sets up the big, tear jerker farewell between Amy and the Doctor.

  11. I suspect that Oswin will either be an early itteration of herself that the Dr later encounters (remember she lost a lot of her memory, and then made the Daleks forget and time is wibbly wobbly) or cloned from the bio parts of the Dalek she has become.

  12. I have a feeling that this nanocloud thing is going to come back to bite Amy and Rory in the ass. I don't want to be spoiler-y, so I won't say more, but if you saw the ep you can probably guess what I mean by that.

    • Agreed. I have that feeling as well. Also what is this bullshit about the Doctor not being affected by the nanocloud? If these are the same little nano things we saw in The Empty Child then they totally work on the Doctor because they fixed his hand on Jack's ship. Don't know if the idea has any merit, but maybe there is a source for the Doctor's rage-y violent streak. Or perhaps that is why they didn't work on him; the daleks did say they found his hate beautiful. Anyway nit-picky detail pissed me off because I happened to watch The Empty Child the day before the first episode.

  13. I've always had some sort of complicated though tie-in that requires the Ponds to die just so he can save the earlier Oswin line. My brain just can't make out how it will happen beyond "Weeping fucking Angels!" that we all know about. Based on nothing but my good ole brain though.

  14. I've thought for a long time that Rory will end up being killed somehow by River. Because River killed "the best man she ever knew." That's the Doctor and she's already killed him, you say? But remember, the Doctor himself has said he's not a good man. And who was the good man in "A Good Man Goes to War"? Rory.

    • I agree that River at least knows something about what happens to Rory. He comes to her cell in A Good Man Goes to War (or it could've been a different ep?) and she has a brief but powerfully emotional response to seeing him.

  15. Having not kept up with all the talk (I like to let the show unfold at its own pace) I was astonished to hear that the charming lady in the last episode is destined to be the new companion. Do NOT see how that will happen!

  16. I think that no matter what happens to the Ponds, I am going to cry. The first two episodes have been spot on and sets the bar high for the rest of the season, both before and after the Ponds leave.

    As far Oswin, after the first episode I kind of expected the Doctor to weave in and out of the timelines of Oswin women, just missing them or barely meeting them. He doesn't know what the Asylum of the Daleks Oswin looks like, just sounds like. He does this until he comes across Clara, and decides to show her the stars. Since Dinosaurs on a Spaceship was a futurey episode, it could still happen, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

  17. Am I the only one who noticed the other bit of Doctor bias in Ep 1? In any other situation in which a bright young woman had been partially converted to an alien form, he would have either moved heaven and earth to reverse the process, or convinced her that she could still be human despite her physical form. Oswin ends up a Dalek? Oops, oh well, lost cause, nothing to do, so sorry, must go now.

    I also found it interesting that Moffat did the eggs/exterminate joke twice in the same episode.

    • I wonder if that's not so much Doctor Bias as Dalek-bias. Has the situation you described happened with Daleks before? Asylum was clearly trying (and, IMHO succeeding) to make the Daleks scary again. And considering how hopelessly they treated Amy's nano-cloud infection, I would say it seems reasonable that even the Doctor can't save you from becoming a Dalek once the Daleks start the process. Once you're a Dalek, you Dalek to the core. They wouldn't have it any other way…

    • Yeah, it's the Dalek thing. I mean, Nine and Ten have also both been… violently irrational about Daleks. Remember Rose trying to save the Dalek from him? The decided lack of effort to actually save the Human Dalek, even though it was showing *mercy* and *kindness*?

      Oswin was a Dalek… The Doctor doesn't really have a history of even trying to save them, regardless of what faces they might put on.

  19. i agree with what votedarkside said, i have never seen a single episode but enjoy it as well, that being said, where would be a good place to start watching the Dr. Who series? after all there are a frigging million seasons and going back to number 1 is not gonna happen. real life time constraints… unlike time lords.

    • Or skip Eccleston and go straight to Tennant, then watch Eccleston later. His episodes are a bit hard to swallow and might scare off a potential new fan. It's shockingly easy to run through them on Netflix Instant one after another.

      • I would definitely agree with this. I started by watching Blink and The Empty Child before going back to the beginning of Eccleston, and I'm very glad I did because otherwise I'm pretty sure I would have given up after Aliens of London (aka the one with the farting aliens.) Just starting with Tennant would be pretty simple and probably avoid all that. Or you could do what my husband did and start halfway through Eccleston's season (his first episode was Dalek), since there are some pretty good ones from that point on.

      • This comic made me giggle a lot. ^_^ Thank you!

        I started with Christopher Eccleston and loved it. Though I've never really been able to get into the idea of watching episodes from the middle of anything before the beginning.

        Also, though I totally agree that Blink is one of the highlights of all of New Who, I'm not sure I'd start anyone on that one. It's so off-track from what a normal episode is like. Empty Child/The Doctor Dances might be a good "just try it!" for new fans. (Though I do think Dalek is a very strong episode.)

    • If you just want a taster of what the show is about without committing from start to finish, Alex Albrecht recommend and I agree that you should watch 'Blink". It's possibly one of the best New Who episodes ever devised and will give you a perfect flavour. You don't need to know anything to watch it except that the show has time travelly elements!

  20. Oswin and Oswin are probably related the same way Gwyneth and Gwen Cooper are, or Martha and her identical cousin who worked at Torchwood One.

  22. From the first few minutes of the show we know that daleks can altar the memory of their "puppets" and I'm sure the daleks have cloning capabilities (I'm sure I remember seeing a classic episode as a kid where they wanted to clone the doctor, and they certainly play with genetics) I reckon Oswin managed to hack the dalek system and ensure a clone of herself is made with altered memories deleting the last year of her life and the doctor meets this clone and since he hasnt seen her before and she doesnt remember him it leads to a big reveal that the audience has already seen coming but with some added twist straight from the blue. Never know might be right, does seem like the sort of thing Moffat would do

  25. Yeah, the Time Lord triumphant. He realises, at the end, but by then it's too late. And as much as I hate a lot of Russell T. Davies' writing, the death of 10 still makes me well up!

  26. Total kudos for trying to branch out. Story lines and such. But satire of things (like this) is your forte. It's what you do best, it's what I look forward to. It's how I keep track of cultural developments. Embrace your strengths!

  27. I really like what they've done so far. It seems like they're going with the theme "With great power comes great responsibility". If you remember Stonehenge, just the power of his name and reputation was enough to make hundreds of his enemies tremble in fear.

    The Doctor thinks his anonymity gives him freedom, but what happens when he faces down a nigh-invincible enemy, says "I'm the Doctor. Look me up." and his enemies reply with a shrug and "Doctor who?"

    It's a dangerous question. It's the question that the Doctor's been running from his whole life, and as the prophesy states "On the fields of Trenzalore, at the fall of the eleventh, when no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer, a Question will be asked, a question that must never, ever be answered."

    Doctor who?

    As far as Oswin goes, the Doctor never saw her face and assuming she knew it would mess up the timeline, gave him a false name. It's a River Song situation again, meeting in the wrong order. He first meets Oswin long after she's already met him. I'm guessing after they depart, she joins the cruise ship as a means to keep traveling the stars.

  28. The woman in the asylum was Oswin Oswald. The upcoming companion doesn't seem to have been officially named; rumors are all over the place, from Clara Oswin to Clara Oswald to Foswin Jones. I don't think they're the same person, because Oswin Oswald dies at the end, says beforehand that getting on the Alaska was her first trip offworld, and doesn't recognize the Doctor. It'll probably be a Gwyneth/Gwen Cooper/Adeola/Martha Jones thing.

    • IMDB says that in her future episodes, her credited name is Clara Oswin. I found that very interesting. Don't know what it means, though!

      I would be curious to see the ramifications if it is the same woman, and the Doctor pulls her out before she winds up on the Asylum. Therefore she's not there to make the Daleks forget him; therefore there's no one down there to help them turn off the force field, or guide them through the Asylum. If he prevents the Alaska from crashing at all, then no hole in the force field at all! I don't know if they're going to explore any of this or have her turn out to be a sister/cousin/ancestor/clone after all, but it is something I would be interested to see them tackle.

      Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey…

  29. My instinct is it'll be another River Song-type situation. The beauty of a time traveling blue box is he can easily have met her well before. Also possible a twin sister type dealy, but that seems like a bit of a cop out.

  30. I've just spent about 5 minutes refreshing your page in an attempt to find the ad that auto-plays sound that came up when I first got here, because I thought you might not want that kind on your page. I can't remember – was it you or Danielle from GWS who asked people to report them? Anyway… I haven't found it. So there's that.

  31. I read all of these comments, and apparently Dr Who is a great deal different from the last time I watched it. That last time being "in the mid 80s, on the Australia Broadcast Network, with Tom Baker as the Doctor". Once this semester is over, I think I may just have to binge on all the new stuff.

  32. I need to buy this print, spend an obscene amount of money having it custom framed "(like I did with all our other Joel prints) and then hang it in my sons room. Hopefully this will scare the fanboys to sleep.

  33. The following is the Dalek version of the conversation I just had with my niece:

    SIBLING OF PARENTAL UNIT, REQUIRE INPUT, HAVE QUERY.

    QUERY REQUEST ACCEPTED. INQUIRY.

    WHERE IS THE CONSTRUCTION FACILITY FOR SMALL DALEKS?

    NEGATIVE! NEGATIVE! REQUEST FOR SUCH QUERY REQUIRES PARENTAL UNIT! REJECTION! REJECTION!

  34. I had a thought while watching DoaS. It seems pretty clear that the Doctor of Asylum/DoaS is post Pond era, but is there any evidence that this is happening in a neat row for the Ponds themselves? there's no reference to Asylum in DoaS (and in fact the AmyRory seems at the same level style of companioning as in previous series) but in DoaS it's much darker. So, Hypothetical timeline from the Pond's point of view: DoaS-> (Mercy, Angels in Manhattan) -> Asylum-> Closing Time

  35. I'm going to be quite sad if Rory ends up alone…but I mean, come on, The Moff has beaten up on him so much the last few series… As for those who didn't get the whole marital strife thing, did you watch the 5 part mini series the Beeb put on You tube called "Pond Life"? They put it together in an omnibus now, it makes that whole scene make so much more sense, so I highly suggest you go to youtube and watch it if you have not already.. It's a little over 5 minutes long when put together.

    As for Oswin…I really want to say first of all, it's great that from all indications from The Moff, we are due another intellectual equal for The Doctor, it has been WAY too long. He needs someone to challenge his mental superiority and put him in his place once in a while. I really hope they keep anything beyond friendship out of it this time, and allow her to be a fun companion that isn't dripping herself all over The Doctor. As for how they will put her in…any of the theories I've read thus far are valid and possible, I'm just wondering if The Moff is going to pull one over on us and mess with our heads. Oh, and Joel? LOVE THIS. The comic. The talk. <3

    • I was actually thinking the opposite. It was a nice break from the romance to have a companion and her husband along for all the adventures. I think I'm ready for the Doc to get a "steady girlfriend."
      Even the Rose thing was like "I dare not confess my feelings for you." Give me a break – just kiss her!

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