Guys!
March 30th! That's when the series begins again! Sooo basically it
has just gone back around to starting at Easter like before, but, hey, at least the Easter weekend is really early this year. =D
...well, pfft, The Eleventh beat me to it. xP But yes. Excitement!
As for your responses to things I have previously written, let me say how AWESOME it is to be able to even have this conversation! I've never really spent much time discussing Doctor Who with people since many of my friends are only casual fans of the show if they watch it at all, so this forum is a welcome treat to me.
That's exactly what I aim for this club to be: a place where people itching to have lengthy in-depth discussions of Doctor Who, perhaps because they don't have anywhere else they can find opportunities for them, can come and do just that! Hearing that you see the club this way makes me happy.
Amy never has a family in the traditional sense. When we first meet Amelia she is alone though being raised by an aunt. Well we never see said aunt until the end of season 5 when Amelia is going to the museum and even then she's more of a stand in like the adults in the Peanuts cartoon. I don't even know if we're told her name since we only see her in one episode. ... (though it always kind of bugged me that she had no visible parental units).
Well, at least for series 5, Amy's lack of parents - as well as the fact that her lack of parents was never really brought up because Amy didn't even consciously know she'd lost them - was a large part of the point for her storyline. I will give you, though, that it did of course give Amy a different feel as a companion compared to the previous ones who'd had families. And in series 6, given that Amy and Rory were married and had been living in their own home until the Doctor invited them to America to kick off the series, it didn't really feel like there was that
need for their parents to have a noticeable presence, since the two of them had become independent and started their own life together. But yeah, it makes things different. I do think that seeing more of Amy's parents after the wedding, though, could have led to some interesting stuff, what with them being perfectly normal lovely parents who once upon a time had never existed. It's a shame that never managed to fit anywhere in the story (or, well, perhaps it was just because the actors who played Amy's parents in The Big Bang weren't available to come back, but).
But to me, and this is just my opinion, it made the adventures less real, less grounded, because they weren't for anyone specific. Let me explain. When the Doctor has the reboot the universe or save the planet from the Atraxi it is for the planet as a whole or the universe as a whole. There is no specific reason other that it will save everyone. When the Doctor and Micky and Rose go to stop the Cybermen it is for the purpose of saving Jackie (even though that Jackie wasn't technically Rose's mom). Or when the Doctor and Martha have to stop Lazarus (I know, not a threat to the whole Earth) they fought to save Martha's family from being killed. What I'm trying to sai s that the conflicts seemed a bit more grounded to home to me.
I completely see your point here and agree that it is nice to have the more personal stakes sometimes when a companion's family - an ordinary family who never asked to be dragged into the Doctor's dangerous world - is in peril. However, this does only happen in the three or so episodes a series which are actually set on Earth with the family present. Every other episode still just has the same basic save-the-world stakes (or sometimes save-the-companion or even save-the-Doctor, which I would argue is equal or even higher stakes than the companion's family), whichever Doctor's run they're part of.
One thing that has bothered me about the 11th Doctor's time is the lack of tie-ins to the previous Doctors (except for the 4th Doctor). Everyone on Earth seemed to have forgotten all the Doctor's previous shenanigans and they never really explained why. Yeah there were cracks in the skin of the universe and people forgot stuff but once the Doctor rebooted the universe and Amy willed him back into existence shouldn't that have been fixed? There are potentially people living on Earth that should remember the Doctor's exploits. Martha and her family, Micky, and Donna's family to name a few. And what about Captain Adelaide Brooke? It was the Daleks who killed her parents and the theft of the Earth by the Daleks that inspired her to go into space which in turn led to a fixed point in time with the destruction of Bowie Base One. It always irked me that all of that was just written off as forgotten by everyone when it was integral to so many people.
Eh - I think this is less to do with the Eleventh Doctor and more just to do with Steven Moffat being the showrunner. He wanted to start afresh and tell his own stories without having to feel obligated to constantly refer back to the things Russell did, I suppose. Maybe things would technically make more sense if past storylines were still taken into account, but after a point it'll just start to become a tangled mass of continuity. I mean, if it has to stay completely consistent with the earlier parts of the reboot series, then by that logic it should also try and stay completely consistent with all of the Classic series, and that would start to get impossible and leave no breathing space for telling the stories Moffat wants to tell. I find it best to not think too hard about the Moffat era's relative lack of harking back to the RTD era and just consider them on a separate basis.
I will admit that I had not thought about a lot of the things you said especially about the beginning of season 7. I'll have to rewatch those episodes with new eyes which wont be hard since those are some of my favorite Matt Smith episodes.
Hee, it makes me happy to hear that I've inspired you to rewatch the half-series and maybe spot some things and come to some conclusions you might not have noticed before! I hope you have fun doing so. :3
One more thing that you might be able to answer. Where the heck did Strax come from and how did he come back? I know he was in the episode where we find out that River is Amy and Rory's daughter, but he's never seen before that and he died in that episode. It's as if he was just made into an important character lately simply to have one. If anyone could clear that up for me, I would be grateful.
Apparently there's going to be a little DVD extra scene showing what happened to Strax and how he survived. It just wasn't brought up in The Snowmen because it wasn't really important. Some other friend of the Doctor's saved him, like he said; that's all we really needed to know for now. The extra scene will just be for the curious.
As for where Strax
originally came from - that's never been explicitly stated, however I for one thought there was something of an implication in A Good Man Goes to War that it was the Doctor who'd given him his work as a nurse as penance for... some kind of war crime-ish thing that he'd probably done simply due to being a Sontaran. Because that's absolutely the sort of "punishment" that the Doctor would have dealt out, at the time.
Or at least a bigger deal than "I'm sulking at the loss of my friends/in-laws and don't want anything around me to remind me of them."
I'm with VampirateMace in that this
is a big deal and a perfectly valid reason for a TARDIS-interior-change. The Doctor is the main character; if something significant happens to change him as a character - even if it's not a regeneration - then it's significant to the show as a whole.
I know the TARDIS usually remodels herself, but surely it wouldn't be impossible for the Doctor to have been the one to do it this time? Or maybe it was something like a collaborative effort between the two of them. (Or maybe the TARDIS did it all herself and just let the Doctor
think he was doing the work. I can just imagine her doing that.)
66 days to go! yaaay precise countdown~
-elyvorg/Amelia