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I just watched TMNT for the first time myself Saturday night. Totally agree with Squiggly, except that I thought the turtles were handled a little better than he did, personality-wise. And I think the 90's movie is also terrible. I just watched it a couple of months ago for the first time since I was about five, and it has almost no redeemable qualities. Judith Hoag is a mega-babe and Elias Koteas gets a couple of funny moments, that's it.

This new one was worse, though. I hated Megatron. Splinter was really ugly design-wise, badly rendered, and Tony Shalhoub was horribly miscast. And I've never been as actively annoyed by the style of photography in a film as I was here. Almost every shot is bad.

I'm crotchety guy who's not really super excited for more Star Wars in the first place, though I was hoping to be won over by the trailer. It was decent, but honestly my biggest disappointment with it is J.J. Abrams. The Star Wars episodes all have a very restrained, composed camera aesthetic that I was hoping Abrams would remain true to. Instead he's just doing his frenetic thing and as a result it doesn't really LOOK like Star Wars to me.

Ew. Series 8 is ridiculously schizophrenic. That episode was almost as bad as Kill the Moon. Almost.

One of my roommates is feeling the same way. I was starting to, but I thought the past two episodes were pretty great. If the rest of series 8 can maintain that level of quality it will be salvaged for me.

Doctor Who's universe is ostensibly our own in so much as it shares the fundamental laws of our own. People saying scientific gaffs like this happen all the time in Doctor Who... DO they? I can think of plenty of fantastical devices and locations and creatures, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any majorly blatant violations of what our reality is that you can't wave away with technobabble. Except for the TARDIS which gets them to the adventure, in this episode there is NO technology that doesn't exist right now, in this exact moment. So you lose the ability to technobabble your way out of things instantly.

We know gravity exists in Doctor Who and functions the same way ours does. So allowing that the moon has gotten heavier because a creature is now inside it... why does Courtney randomly float, and why is she the only human in the room to do it? The Doctor's explanation is that the moon is unstable. That's a fine explanation for the tremors going on and the collapsing terrain, but that would have NO bearing on gravity's pull.

We know things in Doctor Who are made of cells that work the same way cells do in our universe. The Doctor explicitly calls the spider a "germ," a "prokaryotic unicellular lifeform." We KNOW those can't be the size of a badger. We know if they were they wouldn't look anything like spiders. And they wouldn't leave anything like cobwebs.

The law of conservation of mass exists in our universe, it must exist in the Doctor Who universe. An egg is a closed system and CANNOT increase in mass, no matter what sort of biological changes go on within. All they needed was ONE hand-wavy line about craters in the moons surface really being pores that absorb space nutrients or some bullshit and I can maybe let this slide. But they don't, so I can't. I'm not bringing ANY of my own concrete when the rest of the episode is blatantly moronic.

If you're not willing to agree with me that Doctor Who should at least strive to adhere to the fundamental laws of our reality, then we're never going to agree on anything. I don't just expect this of Doctor Who, I expect this of most of my dramatic fiction. There's a very narrow niche of content that can get away with violating these rules and still expect me to invest.

And even if the science were up to snuff, this would still be a mediocre episode at best, for all of the character and plotting issues brought up previously in the thread.

Who cares if the characters behave consistently and have believable motivations, they're not real people.

I'm with you on Doctor Who at least insofar as it has NEVER striven to be "hard" sci-fi. But there's a difference between being space fantasy and being scientifically retarded. They get a pass on lizards buried beneath the Earth, because in theory it COULD happen, even if I know it hasn't. The evil mannequins are robots. The TARDIS couldn't happen but has a plausible enough pseudoscience explanation and is a device invented by a hyper advanced alien race.

That's all fine. And honestly I'm fine with the idea of the moon as an egg. That's clever and it's VERY Doctor Who. But you can do that concept without breaking my brain. I'm not even a science nerd, not by any stretch, but when you consistently get every aspect of the science wrong, in an episode set in our OWN BACK YARD, it really pulls me out of it. You could have this story without giant spider-bacteria that spin webs. You could have it without the moon's mass changing. The havoc wreaked on Earth was only used as the impetus for the moon mission, which could easily have been done any number of other ways.

It's one thing to play fast and loose with the rules, it's another to consistently violate them at every turn, seemingly through lack of understanding. Almost everything to do with the setting and the technology in this episode was scientifically invalid, and in a show that's meant to foster a love of learning and exploration in children that's inexcusable.

As to your other points... I honestly fail to see what's wrong with what the Doctor did. He's right, it's our planet, it's our moon, it should be our decision to make. Clara volunteers to travel with him, she knows the kinds of situations she'll be faced with. This is the girl who plunged headfirst into the Doctor's time stream to save his life, after being told it would kill her. It's totally fair for the Doctor to leave this up to hear and the astronaut lady.

You could argue that he didn't need to abandon the scene to do that, but I think he did. If he had stuck around Clara would have known he was there to pick up the pieces at the last minute and she wouldn't have acted. Her blow-up came completely out of left field for me because I legitimately couldn't understand what the Doctor had done to slight her.

This was definitely a dismal episode.

That's probably not even close to everything wrong with the episode. I'm sure I forgot to mention how it looked cheap as hell. I still think series 5 is the absolute peak of nuWho so far, and I loved Moffat's episodes during RTD's run, but I'm so ready for him to be gone. Under the right leadership Capaldi could flourish and outlast Tom Baker, but series 8 is so far from the proper way to do that.

Haven't had a chance to listen to this one yet, but I just wanted to tell Teague that I appreciate the amount of effort he expends making these episode posters that we only ever see as tiny little thumbnails.

I just saw this thread title up at the top, forgot which subforum I was in, and my brain went, "THEY'RE ACTUALLY MAKING A THIRD ONE!?!?" Then I immediately realized my brain is a dumbass.