Doctor Who SE04 EP09: Forest of the Dead (spoilers)

horacethegrey · Jun 8, 2008

Fleeing from the all consuming Vashtun Nerada, the Doctor along with Professor River Song and her team race through the Library to stay alive. Meanwhile, Donna awakes in a world where she meets the man of her dreams and lives her life with him and their children. But somehow, she doubts all this, and it will take the words of one who was dead to make her see the truth. But who is the little girl watching all this, and what part will she play?

Can't tell you. Spoilers...

WOW. An amazing conclusion that neatly wraps up all the dangling plot threads from the previous episode. Yet somehow it leaves you with more questions than answers. The main one being who is Professor River Song? What is she to the Doctor? And would the Doctor [sblock]tell her his real name?[/sblock] Guess we'll just to wait and see in the future. After all, spoilers.

Performance wise this was great all around. Tennant was good as always, but Catherine Tate probably gives her best performance in the series here. Alex Kingston of course was fabulous as River Song.

Really, what more can I say than that Steven Moffat has done it again? Here's looking forward to his tenure as showrunner in 2010.

delericho · Jun 8, 2008

Actually, I was faintly disappointed in this episode. It wasn't a bad episode, but I just didn't feel it lived up to the brilliance of the first part. In fact, it was probably the weakest Moffat episode to date, IMO.

Two things in particular got to me:

1) If the computer can save people to hard disk, and then use the teleporter to beam them out, restoring them to life, why were River Song and the others left there? Surely the thing to do was to restore them to life proper, rather than leave them in the Matrix?

(Plus, there's no reason the Matrix-world had to be left with only eight inhabitants at the end - the beauty of digital copies is that they can be duplicated. Okay, maybe not leaving all 4,000 people inside, but maybe some?)

2) What is it with this series and 'living deaths' for NPCs? Jack was brought back as an immortal, the girl in "Love and Monsters" was trapped in stone, Astrid was forced to live on as a phantom, and now River Song is trapped in the Matrix. If it was me trapped like that, I'd be mad as heck.

Pseudonym · Jun 8, 2008

delericho said:
Two things in particular got to me:

1) If the computer can save people to hard disk, and then use the teleporter to beam them out, restoring them to life, why were River Song and the others left there? Surely the thing to do was to restore them to life proper, rather than leave them in the Matrix?

Well, I think that

unlike the people who were teleported and saved to the hard disk, all those who remained in the Matrix world in the end had died in the library, and the comm link ghost was what was incorporated. Maybe they couldn't be restored like the others were because there wasn't enough information?

Padril · Jun 8, 2008

Pseudonym said:
Well, I think that

unlike the people who were teleported and saved to the hard disk, all those who remained in the Matrix world in the end had died in the library, and the comm link ghost was what was incorporated. Maybe they couldn't be restored like the others were because there wasn't enough information?

Thats how I interpreted it as well.

The computer had enough information from the link to give them some sort of consiousness in software but not enough to make a living copy

. I think that this was the first episode that I saw Donna as Donna rather than Catherine Tate.

Plane Sailing · Jun 8, 2008

Steve Moffat is like unto a god of Dr Who stories IMO.

Fantastic end to this two party - not least because it

changes direction from horror flick (part 1) to emotional drama (part 2), but because it considers experiencing loss for both the doctor and donna. It is almost like it started like "lonely child" and ends like "woman in the fireplace"

Good stuff

The Grumpy Celt · Jun 9, 2008

I’ve heard something interesting about the season finale…

…that in addition to Jack Harkness, Rose Tyler, Dr. Martha Jones it also features Davros.

horacethegrey · Jun 9, 2008

The Grumpy Celt said:
I’ve heard something interesting about the season finale…

…that in addition to Jack Harkness, Rose Tyler, Dr. Martha Jones it also features Davros.

Ugh. I hope not. [sblock]Davros is one of the lamest, if not the lamest villain in the entire Whoniverse. The Daleks themselves are very effective adversaries for the Doctor. No need to include their sorry excuse of a creator into the mix. [/sblock]

While we're on the subject, I've also heard that [sblock]Sarah Jane will make an appearance in the season finale.[/sblock]

Cthulhudrew · Jun 9, 2008

delericho said:
Two things in particular got to me:

1) If the computer can save people to hard disk, and then use the teleporter to beam them out, restoring them to life, why were River Song and the others left there? Surely the thing to do was to restore them to life proper, rather than leave them in the Matrix?

My take on it:

It's not so much that it just saved the people's memories. It teleported all the people- still alive- and kept their patterns in the teleport buffer, while allowing their consciousnesses to interact in its hard drive. The others- River and the crew- had physically died. Their memories were saved to the hard disk, but their bodies were already dead and the computer would have had nothing to download their consciousnesses into, except corpses.

At least that's my understanding, based on the concept of teleport buffering as illustrated on Star Trek many times in the past.

I really, really enjoyed this episode and the previous part. Two of my favorite Who episodes ever. I was getting really miffed at the end when- yet again, the Doctor is made into this tragic figure. Fortunately, they somewhat mollified the situation.

Don't get me wrong- I enjoy the depth of pathos that the Doctors Eccleston and Tennant have been able to and allowed to portray over the course of the past four series. It's something that didn't get done nearly enough (IMO) during the previous Who series (at least by my recollection). So I like that a lot. They just seem to weigh the Doctor down with tragedy more than not, and that gets a bit burdensome. I enjoy seeing him happy, too.

delericho · Jun 9, 2008

horacethegrey said:
Davros is one of the lamest, if not the lamest villain in the entire Whoniverse. The Daleks themselves are very effective adversaries for the Doctor. No need to include their sorry excuse of a creator into the mix.

The problem at the moment is that there is only one Dalek in existence anywhere. They really need to find a way to fix that. I suppose Davros is the easy way to do so. (Perhaps a more effective one would be to point out that when Rose breaks through from one dimension to another, she opens the door for all those Daleks that got sealed off at the end of season 2.)

The other thing they need to do, quite badly, is give the Daleks a victory. So far, we've had the Daleks show up four times in three seasons, and be beaten back four times in three seasons, 'wiped out' three times, and all-but destroyed the third, and all at relatively little cost - the only characters we've actually had a connection to were Jack, who came back, and Rose, who didn't actually die.

Basically, they need their teeth back.

So, if it were me writing the season finale, assuming that that is where the Daleks show up, I would have them reappearing in numbers, have them kill Donna, do something to make Rose's re-appearance a limited thing (unless BP is coming back full time, but that seems very unlikely), and have the Daleks retreat at the end, but not be emphatically beaten, and definately not be wiped out (almost) completely.

Pinotage · Jun 9, 2008

I thought this was a great episode. Probably the best of the series so far. You really got a feel for who the Doctor was as a person and the dialogue and action were great.

Pinotage

Doctor Who SE04 EP09: Forest of the Dead (spoilers)

horacethegrey

First Post

delericho

Legend

Pseudonym

Ivan Alias

Padril

First Post

Plane Sailing

Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!

The Grumpy Celt

Banned

horacethegrey

First Post

Cthulhudrew

First Post

delericho

Legend

Pinotage

Explorer

Similar Threads