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Narsham posted:For that matter, I'm curious what a "conservative" Doctor Who TV story looks like. Assuming we disregard the incoherent crap like Kill the Moon being an anti-abortion story (and to clarify, the incoherent crap being referred to is the episode, which I'm pretty sure isn't trying to comment at all on abortion). The Dominators? The Zygon Invasion/Inversion is all about how immigrants are out to get you. Much like Kill the Moon's abortion message, they probably didn't intend it that way, but it's hard to ignore the text of the episode.
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Jul 11, 2022 20:37
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Random Stranger posted:The Zygon Invasion/Inversion is all about how immigrants are out to get you. It's possible to read the Zygon story as anti-immigrant, but it's a stretch, much in the same way as Kill the Moon. The Zygon story is clearly a political one in a way that Kill the Moon isn't, but trying to read it as anti-immigration is hampered by the conclusion that we must... incorporate ISIS as a vital partner? The speech at the end, though, is a perfect example of terminal lib-brains. You have Bonnie going on about how her people have been mistreated and murdered while the Doctor goes "yeah, so what, what's your PLAN though" You're not allowed to complain unless you have a constitution and board of directors already prepared as a replacement for whatever system you want to see overthrown. It's much better to work to change the system from within.
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Jul 11, 2022 22:17
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The first James Webb image looks familiar… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxODkExkNB4
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Jul 12, 2022 00:16
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McGann posted:I'd second this - it's a fun little story. The covid story by John Dorney, Best Year Ever, is a good example. Everyone is fine, they follow the rules and stay indoors. No one complains, everyone is very jolly, and people just sort of get referenced as dying off screen, once or twice. No one struggles with money, no one struggles with anti-vaxxers or anti-maskers or government policy, and then once the year is over everyone just sort of leaves (implication: covid is over, even if it's not). Narsham posted:For that matter, I'm curious what a "conservative" Doctor Who TV story looks like. Assuming we disregard the incoherent crap like Kill the Moon being an anti-abortion story (and to clarify, the incoherent crap being referred to is the episode, which I'm pretty sure isn't trying to comment at all on abortion). The Dominators? Again, if we're talking BF, then former police chief Andrew Smith's historical about the Romanovs is, I understand, a very good example. (Certainly most everything else he's written trends that way, I've heard enough of his writing to be bored by it.) A lot of UNIT stories trend liberal / liberal conservative too, though the ones where they have to combat the space aliens who invented Japanese culture is just straight up racist, and there's a recent one whose entire plot is dependent on the Stockholm Syndrome myth (again, written by the former police chief). In general, the Tengobushi (the space samurai) turn up in stories that are incredibly loving racist, though the one that takes the cake is the Doctor's Daughter story, Neon Reign, where Jenny has to liberate the women of pseudo-Vietnam from their state-enforced (male-enforced) drug dependency. Other, recent, examples include the story where the Doctor helps some landed gentry disband a working class uprising by telling them to trust their betters and go home (this works!) and a story about an ahistorical feminist revolution whose leader shouts "Make Britain Great Again"(!?!?) and features Queen Elizabeth as a heroic, undercover vigilante who helps put down the revolution. (It unfortunately comes bundled with a great Brexit satire.) The_Doctor posted:Kablam! maybe? Poor the innocent big corporation. There's meant to be some satire to this, but the entire thing is contradictory (and kinda crap because of it IMO). A friend pointed out that the only consistent throughline to the script is that it believes capitalism to be inevitable -- e.g. the villainous worker isn't fighting to stop work entirely and let automation handle all the menial and demeaning jobs, improve wages or remove the deadly lasers that kill people who fall into the comically large Willy Wonka packing shute. He just wants more people to have lovely jobs just like him. power to the people yaay yaay Open Source Idiom fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Jul 12, 2022 |
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Jul 12, 2022 01:13
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I've always struggled with Kerblam because I don't think it's as bad as people say, but it's certainly not good enough to defend. And that goes for its morals, too. I don't feel like it's outright saying 'corporations are good and should have all the power' or anything, it was just written by someone who can't really picture a better world than 'everyone works kinda lovely jobs forever'. Not a hard shitlib story, and I never felt like there's malice behind it, but it's the level of modest shitlib you get from someone who hears about a strike and just genuinely doesn't understand the situation.
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Jul 12, 2022 02:50
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For me I think the thing that REALLY makes me detest Kerblam! (a story that I don't mind admitting I really enjoyed on first watch in the moment but that COMPLETELY fell apart on even a surface level inspection) is that the AI murders that poor girl and the Doctor makes out like this was somehow perfectly acceptable and perhaps even a sign of the computer having a better moral code than the terrorist (who achieves all his aims by the end of the episode). There were still plenty of problems with the episode, but I think I would have forgiven most of them if they'd revealed the AI faked her death and just teleported her somewhere else, because it wasn't willing to sacrifice any human life thus making the terrorist realize how far he'd fallen from his original intentions to help people. What we got instead was.... ugh.
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Jul 12, 2022 03:15
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Something I didn't notice about Kerblam! until a recent rewatch (I saw it about a week ago) is that the title has the exclamation mark at the end, but the in-universe advertising spells the word "Kerb!am". Not a problem, just funny. Also I really like the (undersold) gag where Ryan is bragging about being good at wrapping packages and Toisin Cole's just made a big stupid mess out of the packing supplies instead. Jerusalem posted:For me I think the thing that REALLY makes me detest Kerblam! (a story that I don't mind admitting I really enjoyed on first watch in the moment but that COMPLETELY fell apart on even a surface level inspection) is that the AI murders that poor girl and the Doctor makes out like this was somehow perfectly acceptable and perhaps even a sign of the computer having a better moral code than the terrorist (who achieves all his aims by the end of the episode). Even with that fix you've still got the problem with the death lasers. (Which, again, lol). There's an added layer of satire to the script, when its message is "we can fix the system" but all evidence in front of your face just makes that utterly laughable. But I don't think McTighe was playing four dimensional chess, and even if he were he'd still have to explain why the only person "fighting for human rights" is completely useless, violent and cruel. Or why the Doctor seems randomly chill with the giant distribution centre containing a secret interrogation room and executives covering up worker deaths? I guess she really likes her Kerb!am merch... I feel like the Tenth Doctor would take one look at the entire thing and chuck the factory into a sun. Also is the factory meant to be more Willy Wonka in design, but someone didn't get the message? The random secret panel that the Doctor finds in the corporate office, the janitors who have to mop up the grass, the Monsters Inc conveyor sequence? I get the feeling it was meant to be more of a candy coloured dystopia, rather than importing the lighting and concrete from some anti-soviet 80's film.
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Jul 12, 2022 03:53
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Oh yeah, like that was the BIGGEST problem for me but far from the only one. It's a bizarre episode, it really doesn't seem to have any idea what exactly it is trying to say or even how it is trying to say it.
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Jul 12, 2022 04:01
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Jerusalem posted:Oh yeah, like that was the BIGGEST problem for me but far from the only one. It's a bizarre Fixed for Chibnall.
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Jul 12, 2022 04:07
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The worst part of Kerblam! is that even given its atrocious politics it's probably still top 3 or 4 for in Series 11. The rest of the series was just that dire. It at least has the grace to be evil and competent as opposed to milquetoast and shoddy.
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Jul 12, 2022 05:04
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Rochallor posted:It's possible to read the Zygon story as anti-immigrant, but it's a stretch, much in the same way as Kill the Moon. The Zygon story is clearly a political one in a way that Kill the Moon isn't, but trying to read it as anti-immigration is hampered by the conclusion that we must... incorporate ISIS as a vital partner? Elements in the speech are intelligible, and the idealistic thought that convincing “enemies” to become allies in keeping peace is better than killing them is fair enough, though the story itself completely undercuts every part of that message by establishing that this has happened repeatedly. But it 100% falls into the pattern of “liberal thinker who has never actually been personally affected by injustice wants to tell the suffering that he knows how they should respond.” It’s just an order of magnitude greater than the suggestion that when your people are being murdered or imprisoned or profoundly oppressed, you not only can’t respond with violence, you aren’t even allowed to be rude! Taking a knee during the national anthem or protesting outside a restaurant are somehow the real problem. And while the story isn’t ultimately anti-immigrant, it is profoundly pro-assimilation. “Fit in, try to look like everyone else, defend the establishment that wants to transform you into a duplicate of itself…” Still massively less objectionably than In the Forest of the Night, and while the speech’s messages don’t all land, Capaldi acts the hell out of that scene. I still haven’t gotten over his line reading of “you could just step away”. Lefty episodes like The Happiness Patrol and Oxygen stick the landing in ways that conservative-messaged episodes of the show just can’t manage, I’d argue, if indeed there are more than a handful of those. Maybe if you go back to Hartnell and Troughton you can find a counter-example or two, if you press hard. Rochallor posted:The worst part of Kerblam! is that even given its atrocious politics it's probably still top 3 or 4 for in Series 11. The rest of the series was just that dire. It at least has the grace to be evil and competent as opposed to milquetoast and shoddy. Chibnall’s era has been variable in quality, but while the messaging has been pretty uneven, it’s been pretty forthrightly to the left of center. For every Kerblam! or The Witchfinders you have Demons of the Punjab or Praxeus. If you’d seen none of the Chibnall era and just read episode summaries, you’d think it astoundingly ambitious. I don’t know how he managed to convert such an ambitious remit into such average results.
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Jul 12, 2022 16:48
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Narsham posted:Elements in the speech are intelligible, and the idealistic thought that convincing “enemies” to become allies in keeping peace is better than killing them is fair enough, though the story itself completely undercuts every part of that message by establishing that this has happened repeatedly. Oh, Capaldi for sure gives it everything he's got, and it does get better once he's talking about how he doesn't want Zygon Clara to have to do the sort of things he's done. And for as middle-class as most of the speech is, the resolution is actually really clever: Kate Stewart chooses not to blow up the Zygons and gets her memory wiped, while Zygon Clara realizes the buttons never did anything in the first place and is rewarded. I will say, I rewatched the Capaldi stuff about a year ago and Oxygen left me a lot colder this time around. The ending in particular feels really inadequate; the end of capitalism comes because some employees go to the union with footage of bad stuff their company has been doing? I know that episode was written pre-2016 but even for that time that seems boundlessly optimistic. The RTD show Years and Years had a similar conclusion that didn't seem to jive at all with the overall tone of the show. Narsham posted:Chibnall’s era has been variable in quality, but while the messaging has been pretty uneven, it’s been pretty forthrightly to the left of center. For every Kerblam! or The Witchfinders you have Demons of the Punjab or Praxeus. It is nuts that it took over 50 years to get the first Desi companion on Doctor Who, and to get the first (?) story set in India. He's a poo poo writer, but I'll give Chibnall his commitment to casting non-white people.
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Jul 12, 2022 22:27
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widely-forgotten excellent left wing episode is Gridlock.
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Jul 13, 2022 00:11
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DoctorWhat posted:widely-forgotten excellent left wing episode is Gridlock. 
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Jul 13, 2022 01:01
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Narsham posted:For that matter, I'm curious what a "conservative" Doctor Who TV story looks like. Assuming we disregard the incoherent crap like Kill the Moon being an anti-abortion story (and to clarify, the incoherent crap being referred to is the episode, which I'm pretty sure isn't trying to comment at all on abortion). The Dominators?
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Jul 13, 2022 05:45
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The Sun Makers was written to be an anti-Inland Revenue piece before Graham Williams asked Robert Holmes to tone it down.
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Jul 13, 2022 06:24
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Rogue AI Goddess posted:Planet of the Dead. ("The aristocracy survives for a reason!") Oh gently caress that story in particular. The screenwriter outed himself as a big terf anyway, so right wing views like that aren’t a surprise.
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Jul 13, 2022 11:49
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https://twitter.com/mike_mccahill/status/1547339344003928065?s=21 Russell The Davies, my beloved.
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Jul 14, 2022 00:42
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God I've missed that Welsh Giant so much.
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Jul 14, 2022 00:51
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forgive me since my wheelhouse is American politics but while I wouldn't describe Turn Left as particularly political the scene where Wilf sees the immigrants sent to the camps in the alternative London is pretty effective. A man who is seen a lot of poo poo and then crying no no its happening again was pretty powerful and while not explicitly leftist was prescient.
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Jul 14, 2022 00:58
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Open Source Idiom posted:The covid story by John Dorney, Best Year Ever, is a good example. Everyone is fine, they follow the rules and stay indoors. No one complains, everyone is very jolly, and people just sort of get referenced as dying off screen, once or twice. No one struggles with money, no one struggles with anti-vaxxers or anti-maskers or government policy, and then once the year is over everyone just sort of leaves (implication: covid is over, even if it's not). But with yours and other examples, I absolutely get the argument. IMO Doctor Who SHOULD be progressive, and I think that's the basic idea behind the character but we're getting stories filtered through the lense of capitalism *after* personal biases are added in, so like anything else with multiple creators it gets muddy. Mooseontheloose posted:forgive me since my wheelhouse is American politics but while I wouldn't describe Turn Left as particularly political the scene where Wilf sees the immigrants sent to the camps in the alternative London is pretty effective. A man who is seen a lot of poo poo and then crying no no its happening again was pretty powerful and while not explicitly leftist was prescient. This is why Wilf is such a great and powerful character for me, he representes a viewpoint that has *seen* some poo poo and so everything is filtered through that lense (I'm geting good use out of this lense thing).
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Jul 14, 2022 13:48
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Chris Chibnall could never write the line "labour camps? that's what they called them last time". gently caress, he'd probably try to put in some boneheaded line about work setting you free.
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Jul 14, 2022 14:10
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TinTower posted:https://twitter.com/mike_mccahill/status/1547339344003928065?s=21 So good.
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Jul 14, 2022 15:28
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DoctorWhat posted:widely-forgotten excellent left wing episode is Gridlock.
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Jul 14, 2022 18:55
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LividLiquid posted:This made my eyes pop because gridlock has a way different meaning on trans Twitter. Explain! EX-PLAIN!! I’m on gay twitter and I’ve never heard this.
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Jul 14, 2022 19:05
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The_Doctor posted:Explain! EX-PLAIN!! I’m on gay twitter and I’ve never heard this. It's what phones autocorrect "girldick" to.
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Jul 14, 2022 19:14
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It is interesting that Rose as the first revival companion was a working class and her friends were all working class people. Chinball kinda? did the same thing for his season.
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Jul 14, 2022 21:59
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Mooseontheloose posted:It is interesting that Rose as the first revival companion was a working class and her friends were all working class people. Chinball kinda? did the same thing for his season. Cops aren't workers
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Jul 14, 2022 22:29
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Ryan and Graham aren’t cops
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Jul 14, 2022 22:50
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Does Ryan have an established job? Graham's like, old. I'm not gonna disagree that Moffat's companions are basically severed from class but other than Evil Dan working at a reverse-charity where he's good at this, and Yaz being a cop, I don't remember anything about the economic backgrounds of Chibnall characters
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Jul 14, 2022 23:55
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DoctorWhat posted:Does Ryan have an established job? Graham's like, old. I'm not gonna disagree that Moffat's companions are basically severed from class but other than Evil Dan working at a reverse-charity where he's good at this, and Yaz being a cop, I don't remember anything about the economic backgrounds of Chibnall characters I don't remember about Ryan but Graham was a retired bus driver as established in the pretty funny line of his wife making sure he wasn't the guy who forced Rosa Parks to sit at the back of the bus.
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Jul 15, 2022 00:13
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I think Ryan said he had a ton of warehouse experience in Kerblam.
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Jul 15, 2022 00:21
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https://twitter.com/jamie_season7/status/1547674917671317506
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Jul 15, 2022 00:35
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The_Doctor posted:Explain! EX-PLAIN!! I’m on gay twitter and I’ve never heard this. TinTower posted:It's what phones autocorrect "girldick" to.
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Jul 15, 2022 00:52
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The title sequence of Gridlock with the episode title appearing in the time vortex has appeared as an image on trans twitter more than once lol.
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Jul 15, 2022 07:07
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I just learned what the ratings were for Legend of the Sea Devils and 
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Jul 16, 2022 06:11
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Edward Mass posted:I just learned what the ratings were for Legend of the Sea Devils and quote:The episode was watched by 2.20 million viewers overnight, becoming the eleventh most-watched programme of the day.[6] The episode received an Audience Appreciation Index score of 76.[7] The final consolidated ratings for the episode was 3.47 million viewers, the lowest viewing figure in the programme's post-2005 history, and the second-lowest in its entire history, only ahead of the first episode of Battlefield (1989), which received 3.1 million viewers.[8] Holy poo poo  Just as a reminder, Whittaker's (and Chibnall's, obviously) first episode: quote:"The Woman Who Fell to Earth" received a total of 10.96 million viewers, making it the highest series premiere for a Doctor in the history of the programme, and the highest consolidated ratings since "The Time of the Doctor" (2013).
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Jul 16, 2022 06:26
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I can't believe that the episode written at a 4th grade level featuring creatures spun off from the ultra-popular Siluarians, but with a racist name, didn't enchant the public! Joking aside I assume that at least part of the ratings decline is just the state of watching TV on TV as a whole. The AI is actually the more surprising bit, it seems like it's always hovering around the mid-80s no matter the quality.
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Jul 16, 2022 07:18
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It also just wasn't really a smart time to do a one-off special. Christmas works great because everyone's home with family and at that point probably watching TV after dinner anyway. New years has a similar appeal, in the US you could swing a Thanksgiving. Some shows could shoot their shot on a thematically-appropriate event that they can be sure their audience would bite on, like when The Thick Of It did an election special. Does Easter have any of that? Even theoretically? I don't know about the UK, but here in Australia Easter is just a long weekend with chocolate involved. Not only is there no cultural assurance that people will be watching TV then, there's arguably negative correlation since Easter's a good time for a short holiday. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Jul 16, 2022 |
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Jul 16, 2022 07:56
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Rochallor posted:I can't believe that the episode written at a 4th grade level featuring creatures spun off from the ultra-popular Siluarians, but with a racist name, didn't enchant the public! That's impossible, given that Eve of the Daleks got 4.3 million viewers. That's nearly one million viewers' difference in the span of a few months!
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Jul 16, 2022 08:17
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