Ahhh, thanks for the warning. They are 11.5 and 13, so uh… probably depends on what the wife says. We let them watch most PG-13 movies (that are of interest to them), but they are of course rated that way for action/violence not nudity/adult themes.
NSFW + spoilers
very minimal/vague spoilers about part of ep 1
Link to the actress in question from the scene mentioned. No “technical” nudity is ever present, but she does spend a few minutes in this state.
Honestly, she’s naked, but other than flirting it’s not a sexual encounter, and you don’t see any naughty bits.
Compared to the deaths, corpses, etc., it’s not a thing.
It’s a very “neutral” scene, where she and him barely acknowledges the fact she is naked.
There’s some pretty horrifying things in the show, but most of them are implied instead of shown. The last episode of season 2 is pretty damn brutal though, for a kid.
What a brilliant series, definitely some of the best stuff I’ve seen on TV lately. I can’t believe I had never heard of it until some weeks ago! It’s a shame though that the 3rd season still looks to be quite a long time away…
I just went and did some research on Moffat because I was sure I had read something about him before. Turns out he was the writer in Coupling, another british series that I loved. Great pedigree there.
I just went and did some research on Moffat because I was sure I had read something about him before. Turns out he was the writer in Coupling, another british series that I loved.
Plus a little thing called Doctor Who.
Yes, I saw that as well and I’m aware of the importance of Doctor Who. It’s just that I never watched any episode of the series so it doesn’t really matter a lot to me.
So, yeah, you should watch Doctor Who if you have any taste for scifi at all. It’s more irreverent than Sherlock, but it’s got a good stock of seriousness and drama alongside the silliness and scholck.
It’s more irrelevant than Sherlock
I think you mean irrevererent.
Maybe.
It seems like the kind of series I would like. Is there a specific season that I could start watching without feeling totally lost since AFAIK the series has been running for 30+ years?
Starting w/ the Eccleston 2005 series is the usual recommendation.
If you’ve got Netflix Streaming, go watch “Blink” (Season 3, episode 11). It’s largely self-contained - ironically, the Doctor is barely in it - and if that episode doesn’t convince you to watch neo-Doctor Who, I don’t know what will. Then you can go back and start with Eccleston’s run.
The downside to watching “Blink” first is you’ll spend the rest of the series waiting for another high point like it and it never happens. But, man, what a high point.
Having that as my first episode ever (I always wrote the show off as low-budget SciFi pap, and then I accidentally saw “Blink” at an MIT All-Night Scifi Festival and got hooked HARD), I sort of agree and sort of don’t. Several other Moffat-penned eps hit as hard (“Girl in the Fireplace” immediately comes to mind), but more than that, the arcs sometimes have a moment of throat-lumping grandeur and emotional impact to them that just can’t be encapsulated in a single ep. Having been along for the ride, so to speak, for half a season or so, and getting that instant of payoff, is really powerful.
I’ll echo the previous rec: Start with Eccleston’s 2005 run and move forward from there (Series 1 - 6 are available on Netflix now; 7 starts next month). If you want to “cement” yourself, do watch “Blink” first, because Eccleston’s run hits a little high on the cheese at first and might strike you as a bit too silly to be worthwhile :)
Thanks for the recommendations! Nice to know that I don’t have to watch the older episodes (pre-2005, apparently?) to enjoy the series.
Alternatively, if you just want to skip to the Moffat ones, here’s the list of episodes that we watched, as recommended by a bunch of people in the netflix thread. (I found the pre-season 5 non-Moffat episodes a bit too hammy.)
There isn’t much you need to know about the backstory other than that the Doctor is a time-travelling alien who had to destroy his own race in order to save the universe, and when he suffers a fatal wound he regenerates into a slightly different version of himself.
I’m lazy, so I’ll just quote myself from earlier:
The flip side to that, though, is the RTD Era starts good then goes progressively downhill, to the point where by the end of Tennant’s run, most of us were more than ready for a changing of the guard. Fortunately, Moffat and Smith really reinvigorated the series again.
Think of it like “Star Trek” - there are plenty of callbacks and in-jokes for long-time fans, but you don’t need to watch TOS to enjoy DS9. Even though the Doctor is technically the same character throughout the entire franchise, he’s been played by ten different actors over almost a half-century(!), each of whom have their own take on his personality. And at this point, any attempt to make sense of the Doctor’s tangled continuity boils down to “timey-wimey” hand-waving.
MEGA SPOILERS AHOY IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THIS YET …
Was just reviewing this recently and got into the spirit of the cliffhanger again.
I think the mechanics of how he faked his death is probably going to be the least interesting part of what’s revealed - my money’s on the “bag lady” by the bench that you get a glimpse of when JM looks down and says “you’ve got an audience” being someone getting ready with a body from the morgue (via Molly) with a SH prosthetic(the same one Moriarty might have used to fool the kids). SH falls into the rubbish truck and gets driven away. But there are lots of slight variations in the mechanics for this, many of which are equally plausible.
The real trick is going to be that SH was (of course - he’s SH after all :) ) a step ahead of JM all along and knew the “key” thing was fake, and wasn’t at all surprised at JM killing himself (the shock and surprise is the thing that Moffat was talking about that was uncharacteristic of SH) - indeed that was the plan all along, to get JM to kill himself (there’s an interesting post on the web delving into the IOU puzzle and Grimm’s fairytales that sets this into context). SH is just a very good actor (this is established canon for SH) and needed to see the plan to the end to save his friends. From clues in the Grimm’s tales, notably Snow White, it will probably be revealed that JM was fully prepared to kill himself if it meant he could fuck up SH’s legacy and force SH to kill himself, and SH knew this and was prepared to coldly take advantage of it (this being the darker side of his personality that he chillingly reveals in that moment where he says “I may be on the side of the angels, but I’m no angel”).
Of course it’s also possible that it’s really a stalemate after all, and that JM faked his own death as well somehow - but that would be much harder to make true without some rather hokey device. OTOH, people do love the JM actor, and I’m sure they would like to bring him back (however, in Conan Doyle, JM very definitely dies at Reichenbach and doesn’t come back).
Anyway, we’ll have to wait till later in 2013 to find out (although apparently the “reveal” has already been filmed - must be the most closely guarded secret at the BBC :) ). Grrrr :)
God, yes, I love the actor for Moriarty. Someone floated him as a potential Master in the new Moffat-controlled Doctor Who and I nearly cried in joy at the mere thought of it. Plus them we could claim some bizarre crossover theory definitively proving that the two shows are happening in the same universe.