My answer to all three is "awesome". I think this new era of Doctor Who is going to be the best sci-fi show ever. The acting's great, but more importantly the scripts are just overflowing with ideas. There are some ideas which are so cool that if there was nothing to an episode but that one idea it would still be a really good episode. Moffat stuffs three or four such ideas into every episode he writes. And this first episode he's not writing has Winston Churchill trying to use the bloodthirsty Daleks as weapons to win the war. Sounds great, no?
As an aside, I was talking to someone who said she didn't enjoy the first episode of this season. (Whereupon her entire family informed her she was nuts.) She said it felt like it was "trying too hard" with all its many crazy plot points. I said that with the episode being twenty minutes longer than the usual, they could
afford to set up the characters and have cracks in the skin of the universe and save the world with a cell phone and have things which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye and have a shape-shifter who turns into the mental images of coma patients and still have time for food. She looked at me in disbelief: "It was a longer episode than usual? It was too short!" So I guess she didn't dislike it
that much.
==============================================
- Has there ever been a really great fantasy (as opposed to science-fiction) TV show?
- What TV show do you know of that went most spectacularly off the rails?
- Let's say you're given control of that show. (If it's been off the air for a long time, say it goes back on the air and any dead actors needed are resurrected.) What do you do to get it back to where it ought to be?
