The Abominable Snowmen episode 3 discussion:
SG: Wow! “I was raised to be obedient” “Well, I was raised to be British, and I will go damn well where I please.”
P: I thought the ball movement sound was almost cute at times.
K: I loved right at the beginning with the pathetic sad ball outside like “squeeeeeeek.”
R: Actually my favorite ball moment…
<laughter>
R: Was they cut to one of the balls moving down the hall and it was “no, no. I’ll show myself out!”
H: So how did people feel about the CGI in the recon? It was done a number of years ago.
A: It was fine.
P: It held up.
E: I can’t comment on it, because I do that sort of thing in class.
A: I’m used to poor visuals in old Doctor Who, so crappy CGI was fine.
H: I didn’t think it was crappy.
A: Well, not crappy. But you know what I mean.
R: Like many BBC special effects, it did look like it was bodged up in a shed.
H: Actually, Doctor Who in the 70’s was absolute cutting edge of TV technology. While it looks really dated now, they were doing major advanced with blue screen / chroma-key.
Sp: Nobody does a fur burka like Loose Cannon.
R: It was like march of the giant fat hairy robot penguins.
K: I thought they could have done a better job with the arm movement. Lots of clipping.
H: <Morgan Freeman voice… well an attempt at one> “And it was now that the Yeti marched across the ice to retrieve and protect their eggs.”
Sp: <better Morgan Freeman impression> “The cycle that will continue over lo those many winters. Back and forth. Back and forth. The cycle of…”
K: What? Spoo’s got a deeper voice.
R: Speaking of movie references, I loved Krisong’s “I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.”
P: I know we all laughed when they were saying that the sphere was no where near the Buddha, but then it showed up in the image just a second later.
H: Yeah. They reused an earlier picture.
A: I’m surprised they didn’t edit the image.
R: Imagine trying to manage continuity on a story where they were having trouble managing continuity.
K: Imagine trying to manage continuity in Doctor Who at all. 😛
H: There is a difference between continuity in the series verses in an individual story. Doctor Who generally does a good job within the story, but they generally care less in the series as a whole.
R: And that joke has been taken outside and shot.
P: So I thought it was interesting that the Abbot bypassed the guard using a “hypnotism Jedi trick.”
SG: I think it’s interesting that the Abbot looks like he just stepped out of a session of Parliament.
Sp: I thought he just stepped out of the funk band, Parliament.
H: He did look a little like George Clinton, didn’t he?
SG & Sp: It was the hat.
R: I liked that Krisong kind of gets a bit of redemption in this. He’s like “We really have to protect ourselves!” and he comes across as the militaristic jerk. But then you realize that no, he really just wants to protect everyone. And he’s an honorable man.
H: Yeah, we were talking about that last time. His job is to protect the monastery and everyone in it. And he takes that very seriously.
Sp: Well, I’m glad somebody there knows something about guarding and protecting. Because Tomni certainly didn’t have the whole jail cell concept down.
R: She’s just a woman, what harm could she possibly do?
H: I’ve always gotten the impression from this story that he’s a little sweet on her. I don’t know if it’s just me, but that’s the impression I’ve gotten from their reactions.
Sp: That works.
K: I agree.
R: He’s Tibetan monk. He’d be sweet on Dame Edna if she showed up.
SG: I don’t think he was sweet on her. I think he was just naïve. The amount of times he stopped her from entering the most sacred place in the entire monastery, you would stop leaving her alone.
H: He’s also not used to people lying to him, clearly.
K: She didn’t lie.
H: No, she said “I would like food.” and then zip.
K: But she also said that she was going to get in there one way or another straight to his face. She could have been hungry too.
R: To be fair she could just have been following the example of Fumansushong, or whatever his name was, who said “Jamie and The Doctor are busy. I have told you nothing but the truth. Muhuhahaha.” Because they know she’ll go after them if they tell her the truth.
Sp: Was he the one with the almost falsetto?
H: No, that was Sapan, the Welsh monk. <Welsh accent> “Oh, I don’t like this throat singin’. We could be in a men’s choir, you know.”
Sp: He also looks unfortunately excessively squinty in a couple of the screen captures. Which makes it look like he is taking the character in an offensive direction. “They would never do ANYTHING…”
P: I was a little surprised to see the chess board being used the way it was, with Yeti chess pieces.
R: Yeah, the AI on those Yeti’s must have had FANTASTIC path finding to translate the flat chess board to MOVING ON A MOUNTAIN.
P: Well, aren’t you just a star (A*).
<editor’s note: A* is probably one of the most popular path finding algorithms in video game development. I should know.>
P: Alright, pyramid. New thing. Too new. It’s very sci-fi to whip out a new thing and put it into the plot.
H: Yeah, sure.
P: It’s like “magic wand! Solve problem!”
H: We don’t know for sure yet if it’s a magic wand. It’s something that is used to activate the Yeti, apparently. Speaking of which, what did folks think of the whole – the Yeti are inactive and the Doctor and Jamie can go by, but then they activate later. They have no way of know whether it’s going to stand there or if it’s going to attack them.
R: The Doctor has always been the sort to just kind of shrug and go for it.
A: It’s like those motion sensing frogs. You don’t know if it’s going to ribbit when you walk by until you go by.
H: Exactly.
P: With a sufficient enough snow fall you’re going to know who’s moving or now.
H: But we’ve already pointed out – there’s no snow on the damn mountain!
H: Final thoughts?
SG: I have nothing else to say.
E: I don’t really have much to say on this episode, other than my amusement of how Victoria just kind of slipped away the way she did. That’s about all I’ve got. I would be way too academically critical if I commented on the CG.
R: You could tell “Wow, you guys are really learning a lot just by doing this.”
E: At least use some lighting!
A: I don’t have anything.
P: I’m surprised at how little we saw of the Doctor in this episode.
R: Well, it was a recon.
P: But seriously, very few scenes featured him.
H: Yeah, it was more Victoria centric, wasn’t it.
K: Not enough Jamie either!
Sp: <Monty Python lady accent> “I like another Doctor Who without so much monk in it!”
P: Again, I always follow the soundtrack because no one else seems to talk about it. And once again, this one was a very sterile episode.
Sp: It was mainly wind and ball sounds.
R: There’s your balls joke!
H: That was actually a directorial choice. For one thing it was probably easier with all of the location shots in the editing.
P: Yeah, it was really hard to get the orchestra on the side of the mountain.
A: Even without the snow!
<laughter>
Sp: So I was a little unclear on what exactly the Yeti did to Krisong.
R: Wrassled him, from what I could tell.
Sp: They took the ball…
K: And then ran with it!
P: There’s your ball joke!
H: The Doctor said that they took their ball and went home. Which I thought was fantastic.
Sp: There’s your ball joke. Ball sounds. America! Apple pie! Boom!
R: Rocket Sound! Ball sound! Ball Rocket Sound!
<laughter>
Sp: <as Morgan Freeman again> Rocket sound… America… apple pie… Oh apple pie. <regular voice> No, serious. I lost track of what happened to him. There was a whole bunch of Yeti, and they got the ball. And suddenly Krisong has a change of heart.
H: It was really hard from the one still they had, but it look like essentially the Yeti beat him up and took the ball and left. And then the monks got him inside.
SG: I think the Yetis just gained a possession…
Sp: On the monastery’s own 40 yard line.
R: I got the impression that since the Yeti are robots, what they did was just grabbed him, removed him from the ball, which must have been kind of like being wrestled by a fork-lift, and then just put him down. Which was again, fork-lift.
H: The still had him smooshed between two Yeti.
R: But there wasn’t clubbing. It was just squeezing. Which is bad enough because they are friggen giant robots.
K: And you are the giant robot expert in this group, Hon.
Sp: Sir explorer dude had nothing to do in this episode.
P: He got to escape.
R: And say “But mooooonk! I wanna see a Yeti!”
P: And the Doctor was jealous.
SG: “Travers got to go outside. How come I don’t get to go outside!”
Sp: He did use pretty contorted reasoning to get out there. “The robots are in here. That means the Yetis are still out there.” “But the robots are still out there.” “But the Yetis are peaceful. They won’t hurt me.” “But the robots… oh, just go!”
H: He didn’t use reasoning at all to get outside. He flat out lied. He told the guard the Krisong had given him permission. Because Krisong didn’t buy his complicated argument.
Sp: Ah yes. Okay, here’s the other thing – the whole Gollum internal conversation disembodied voice thing is starting to get old.
K: Oh, you’re going to love the next 2-3 episodes then.
Sp: <mean voice> “You must pay the rent!” <nice voice> “I will pay the rent.”
H: I’m actually intrigued by the fact that we don’t know if by this point if “the master” is really a bad guy. Is this Great Intelligence thing a bad thing? We don’t know for sure, it’s ambiguous because there’s both a nasty and nice voice. It’s clearly the same guy.
K: There’s a nasty voice at all. There’s clearly something bad going on here.
Sp: Yeah, this week didn’t really do much for me. It was a lot of shuffling around. Yeti shuffling. Plot elements shuffling. Monks shuffling. Balls shuffling. Just… yeah.
R: “If you meet the Buddah on the road… run! Lest you are slain by his army of robot Yeti!”
Sp: That’s it?
R: This episode was kind of slow. There was a lot of sort of “go in the cave. Oh I escaped from the cave. Well I escaped from the cave again!”
H: There were no skulls!
R: No, there were just BALLS!
H: And there’s your balls joke for the week.
K: Try the fifth.
R: “For those of you playing the home game, that brings our tally of ball jokes to 7 for the week.” But, on the whole the episode was just sort of administrivia. It wasn’t awful, it was just sort of there. This is an episode between two other episodes.
SG: It’s a setup episode.
K: Yeah, but it’s the second setup episode of three total episodes so far!
H: But the way you tell a story is that you have forward motion. Then you get people to the forward motion…
K: Well, my final thoughts – I agree with Spoo and Ronelyn. It’s… very… slow. I actually like the chess board. Victoria’s scheming was cute. But it dragged on, with an awful lot of monk in between. Anyway, that’s my thought…
SG: That’s a lot of my criticism of classic Doctor Who as a whole. I like their stories overall as a whole, but various times they could shorten them without losing key points to the story of the plot to be a couple episodes shorter.
H: Well, I don’t know what to say because I like the way this story builds. I think adding new elements, which this episode did despite what you are all saying. But clearly I am in the minority here. There are several plot points that you didn’t touch on. There’s the Doctor and Jamie realizing that the Yeti could be standing on the mountain inactive. Important plot point. There’s the fact that the Yeti grabbed their ball and didn’t harm Krisong anymore and left. Which tells you something about how they operate. There’s Traver’s scheming to get out of the monastery, which could have a payoff down the road. There’s the Doctor and Jamie getting something out of the TARDIS, which could have a payoff.
P: There’s the ball moving on it’s own.
H: Yup. Let’s see… there’s continuing development of “the master who’s name I won’t make Ketina type” and the introduction of the chess board motif. There’s the introduction of the pyramid that’s clearly important. And there’s Victoria showing a hell of a lot of character. A lot happened in this episode. And I think a lot of it was potentially quite important to the story.
SG: I’m not saying that things didn’t happen. I’m saying that cinematically the way they showed those things was very drawn out. The pace of it was very plodding. That’s just my personal opinion and personal taste.
H: I like the slow build and the slow burn, but I know not everyone does. But I’m just responding to the idea that nothing happened in this episode.
