New Who Review for "Forest of the Dead"

[puppetmaker]

Ariel still wants to sleep with the lights on after seeing it. In fact she refused to watch it with me last night.

It is interesting to see the Doctor when someone else knows more about what is going on than he does. He tends to pout a bit I think.

I love the title of the episode and how it works into the piece itself.

Overall I thought it was a really scary story played very well by the actors.

The villain of the piece was typical of Moffat's writing if you consider his other episodes.

As usual spoilers behind the cut and in the comments.



I did get a little tired of the use of the word spoilers.

I did like the Doctor telling the Vashta Nerada to look him up and they decided attacking the Doctor would not be a good idea.

I want a diary like River's. It looked like the TARDIS.

So River knows the Doctor's name. I like how his first time meeting her is her last time running into him. It has poignancy to it.

Poor Donna. Will she ever find happiness?

I am so glad that SciFi didn't screw with the ending. I saw that the clock was ticking down and we hadn't gotten to the screwdriver and I was worried we were going to leave it like that.

The idea that Doctor Moon is a computer set up on the moon to help the computer on the surface was a neat one. I had figured out that the girl was in the computer last episode but didn't suss out Moon until this one.

Overall the ending worked for me.


I am grateful that Moffat was tapped for Show Runner for 2010.

Comments

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I enjoyed it. Well written, of course--with Moffat that's almost a given now--and all about relationships, another given. I agree that he pouts a lot when upstaged--he's been like that in several incarnations, of course (Tom Baker comes to mind). I don't think that diary is available yet, but I'm sure they'll offer it before too long.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

I didn't quite follow why Donna couldn't find her guy. I mean, they're all being evacuated, so there's a choke point where they all have to walk through/be present either individually or in small groups. She just stands there and looks for him.

Also, I was never quite clear on how the Vashta Nerada either did or didn't attack people. As far as I could tell, all the attacked members of the expedition stayed in the light, etc., just like the members who didn't get attacked. And there certainly were enough of them to attack the whole group at once if there was no actual protection from being in the light.

Final nit was the bit with all the VR kids being identical. The problem is, they weren't, since each kid construct needed to have memories of its "parents", as well as what'd happened to it for at least the last few minutes in order to function. If you have distinct entities like that, it's not really a problem to have a few procedure based differences in physical appearance. It'd certainly take up less memory space than, say, Donna's complete set of memories and physical description.

Good ep(s), but not quite up to Moffat's previous ones in my opinion. I didn't find myself thinking "Oh yeah, another Hugo nomination coming up here".

[jenny_evergreen]

I think it's funny that I really didn't find it scary at all. Good, mind you, and it made me cry for the relationship/character stuff, but not even a little bit scary.
Oh, well! I'm weird! :)
I loved that ending. I really, really did. It was so HIM.