"Yeah, people criticize YoH for having a reset button, and then go on yo say 'They should have had it after a whole season!) Which simultaneously validates and elevates the idea of a reset button.."

@avclub-94d8526a5fae933806f65b8a0f49301a:disqus To be fair, is the show itself really doing that anymore? I'm not sure they even mentioned the Vastra/Jenny relationship last night.

@avclub-b9a25e422ba96f7572089a00b838c3f8:disqus Yeah, pretty much this. If Classic Doctor Who didn't do this stuff (And it did, but to the extent that it did not), it was a lesser show for it. And if the current series isn't "in the tradition" of the Classic Series*, well, okay, but I can only let a series from the…

"The last few seasons have been a time travel show."

Right. And the thing is, any idea/plot/character can be as complicated or as simple as the person explaining it wants it to be. The Doctor can be a Time Lord from the planet Galifrey with two hearts and the ability to regenerate whenever he has a mortal wound, effectively becoming a different person, just with the…

@avclub-55ab1e0836b46cc575ee502254e68ea9:disqus Actually, I think kids- at least the kids who would watch DW- have a lot easier time understanding stuff like that than we give them credit for. Even when I was 9 or 10, I loved time travel stories like "Yesterday's Enterprise", and I seem to have understood them (At…

The thing is, at some point, we can't keep saying "Well, that was the exception that proves the rule". Yeah, Classic DW wasn't all City of Death/Three Doctors, or all Ghost Light/Mind Robber. But it clearly was those things, too, and not to an insignificant extent. That's what's cool about a series with a magic box…

And yet, there it is, in plain text. :)

PRO TIP: The guy "winning" the argument doesn't have to declare himself doing so.

This is awesome- guy issues a challenge, says everyone failed to meet it before anyone even tried, then when someone does it, says it doesn't count because 20 minutes of this one episode were really complicated. We get it, @avclub-b327ac90601ec5904ca8e539cba62638:disqus , you don't like The Big Bang. :)

I actually think a huge flaw of the last few seasons has been that they're TOO much about The Doctor. I mean, lordy, the climax of the last episode was the Doctor speechifying about himself. The central story arcs revolve around his marriage and his real name. There's not a lot of room left for thought-provoking…

@avclub-ad45e11f2e88b8963920c79cd1d8755e:disqus I guess that's fair, but I have trouble considering the limits of the BBC's resources as a "core concept". It might be one of those "necessity is the mother of invention" things that makes the showrunners more creative/resourceful, but when I think of core concepts, I…

"I can't find anything in the original series even half as crazy and overcomplicated as the season five finale. Nothing that you have mentioned comes close."

No, I mean at the end of the episode, where she tells the Doc "Maybe later." And again, the deferred dreams of travel, that's….well, that's an explicit explanation of why she'd want to go with the Doctor. It's actually quite a bit more of one than we got with Rose in her first episode.

Well, the fact is, Clara's displayed ambivalence about jumping in the box.

I dunno, I think I have a pretty strong idea of who Clara is by now. Granted, the previous two episodes helped, but the bottom line is, I have a pretty good sense of what she'd do in a given situation, how she'll respond to the Doctor, etc. I guess I don't know where she grew up or what her mom was like or what she…

I think if we're looking for Who to be a feminist work (and that's not the only viable work for it to be, and there are some foundational factors in the show that will almost always prevent it from being one), then some of the details of Amy toward the end fell down on the job (the only job she could hold on to was…

And it's a weird thing, too, because you want villains to have well thought out motivations, rational thought processes, etc…but as someone said about this episode, sometimes you just want a bad guy to be evil, too. Giving them too much motivation and backstory turns them into RTD's Master.

This is a bit of tortured argument, but Sisko has his moments of exile from Starfleet. He's certainly contemplating self-exile in the pilot, and there's kind of a mini-theme of being the Emissary making him kind of a man apart, from both the fleet and from Bajor.

"I suppose this is the right time to point out that Will and Alicia are now theoretically equal colleagues. Alicia isn’t a name partner, but that seems like a far less important distinction. "