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I want to like Bashir because he's best friends with Garak, but so far there's too many episodes without Garak. e: wrong thread Boxturret fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Dec 5, 2023 |
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Dec 5, 2023 06:49
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Boxturret posted:I want to like Bashir because he's best friends with Garak, but so far there's too many episodes without Garak. You're objectively correct, but you might have the wrong thread.
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Dec 5, 2023 06:52
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Did they just do another Star Trek Doctor Who crosseover comic book?
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Dec 5, 2023 06:57
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Cleretic posted:You're objectively correct, but you might have the wrong thread. Oops how did that happen lol
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Dec 5, 2023 07:03
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LividLiquid posted:I liked both, but vastly improved the latter. He *really* came into his own in his second season. Riding a tank into an axe fight playing a bitchin' solo. Aging rock star fit twelve so well it's hard to imagine why they even tried anything else. Yep. That later version of 12 felt like how 11 saw himself. Except while 11 was too self conscious and focused on trying to get others to agree that his current interest/fashion item is cool, 12 just owned it and didn't give a toss if anyone thought it was cool or not.
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Dec 5, 2023 09:06
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Maxwell Lord posted:What makes Orphan 55 stand out is not even the messaging being a little clumsy, it’s just very sloppily put together. It has the air of one of those episodes TV shows sometimes have where they didn’t quite have the story cracked and a good sense of what they were doing but the deadlines are looming and they can’t all be bangers. Except that this season only had 10 episodes and so to still have a clunker like that is especially egregious. This is what I was trying to say earlier on when I cited it as one of the worst episodes, it doesn't feel like a finished script, the edit feels messy as gently caress (like the cut from the Doc's impassioned speech about climate change to a close up of a Dreg at the end feels very "first cut" and is something that would have been removed if someone had looked at it more than once before shoving it out the door). I've looked up what Ed Hime's done since and he wrote half of the episodes of Lockwood and Co, which I really enjoyed and am sad that they're not making a second series, so it wasn't just the writing, clearly.
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Dec 5, 2023 09:25
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Can I just say that I know it was because the show was effectively on hiatus and also the fatigue of the Chinball Era, but it's great to see this ole thread moving again  I think it's about ten years that I've been reading Jerusalem's reviews and slowly catching up on Big Finish lol
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Dec 5, 2023 10:08
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Is that dude who had the "new to Doctor Who I hate that I'm being made to watch this wait I'm three series in and this is the most batshit and best thing ever" watch threads still around?
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Dec 5, 2023 11:49
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Season 12 Episode 1 & 2: Spyfall Written by Chris Chibnall, Directed by Jamie Magnus Stone O posted:... got me! Given the way the Chibnall era of Doctor Who ended up (sadly predictably) going, you take the good when you can get it, and part 1 of Spyfall gives us one of the absolute best moments there was. After a series of adventures traveling around the globe, from the United Kingdom to Australia and America (and another dimension!) and (maybe?) South Africa, the climax of the first episode of this two-parter sees the Doctor and her companions race after a departing plane piloted by villain Daniel Barton, played by Lenny Henry. Among the regular companions is "O", a dismissed MI6 spy devoted to gathering information on the alien and unexplained, a soft-spoken and almost timidly excited man who struggles to keep up with the others - including Graham! - as they race after the plane. Pulled onboard last, he gasps and breathes heavily, apologizing that he was always bad at running. This momentarily catches the Doctor by surprise but she sets it aside to get everybody into the plane, taking a moment to breathe and consider their next moves before confronting Barton. Except... that comment keeps tugging at her brain, and so she pushes O on it, and when he continues to tell about how awful he always was as a runner, she points out that she has read his file and knows he was a champion sprinter at school. For a moment, O's eyes dart to the side, as he mentally runs the calculations and considers potential answers.... and then suddenly his entire demeanor changes. "Mmm... got me! Well done!" he chuckles, and O is gone as if he never existed, a persona built up for years cast aside in a moment of giddy exhilaration as he realizes he can finally stop pretending and just be himself out in the open once more. It is, of course, The Master.  There was Derek Jacobi opening his fob watch and suddenly changing from kindly Professor Yana to the coldly bemused Master. There was Michelle Gomez greedily drinking in Peter Capaldi's horrified realization as she told him the name Missy was because she couldn't call herself "The Master" anymore. There's John Simm ripping off his mask and giving a little smirk to Missy herself as the camera does a gloriously lovely little zoom-in and he tells her he's very worried about his future. And now there's Sacha Dhawan literally trembling with glee as he shows off in front of a horrified Doctor, reveling in the fact she not only walked directly into his trap, but that he tricked her into liking him first! In an episode fittingly dedicated to the co-creator of The Master and a major part of Doctor Who history - Terrance Dicks - we see the Master making his inevitable return despite seemingly being killed (by a prior incarnation, perfectly!) in her last appearance. But aside from Dhawan's delightfully unhinged performance - which makes his subdued role before the reveal work even better as you consider it in that new context - is Spyfall actually a good story? The answer, says the filthy centrist, is... maybe? Because there is some really, really good stuff in these two episodes, better in fact than a lot of the first Chibnall/Whittaker season. But there's also some bad stuff, some bizarre stuff, some frankly embarrassing stuff, and the whole thing kind of gets wrecked in the end by the unwelcome intrusion of Chibnall's pet "THE TIMELESS CHILD" nonsense and a genuinely baffling decision to reverse a tremendous amount of what previous showrunner Steven Moffat had achieved in the acclaimed 50th Anniversary special. I've noticed that in a lot of these write-ups for this era I say that an episode is itself a microcosm of the Chibnall era as a whole, and I'm saying it again here now. The reason for this is that the problems persist across every season and most episodes, and part of that is because Chibnall himself - whose own written episodes during the RTD and Moffat eras were generally among the weakest - was so clearly deeply involved in nearly every episode. In some ways this is something that might be considered a positive, the man had a clear vision of what he wanted from Doctor Who. Unfortunately, that clear vision was something that didn't really sit well with one vital - perhaps THE most important - consideration that all Doctor Who showunners should take into account: I didn't like it! Me! Jerusalem!    The story opens with the murders of a number of intelligence operatives (one's straight up just an assassin!) by a seemingly alien presence that can move through walls. We get a brief look at each of the companions as they prepare to embark on another set of adventures with the Doctor, getting a sense of how they're trying to coordinate their "real" lives and the fantastic journeys in the TARDIS. Graham, getting the all-clear that his cancer remains in remission, tells his regular doctor that he's traveling now. Ryan has been making up injuries to explain absences to his mates. Yaz, disturbingly, has made up a series of "secondments" to explain both to her family and the police why she's not around completing her actual probationary period as an officer. Each of them is collected by grim-faced men in black suits who then travel to collect the Doctor, in another of the few nods to her brief characterization as an engineer as she works in a mechanic's shop on the underside of her TARDIS emptying out the water from "the rainforest". Joining the others in the car, (adorably, the man in black is using Google Maps to find his way to base) without any explanation, at which point the driver is disintegrated by a laser from inside the car which then tries to drive itself off of a bridge. The Doctor destroys the sat-nav (sat-nav's kill a lot of people in Doctor Who!) and they learn from a complaining voice from inside the car that they supposed to be going to MI6 to meet with "C", the Controller of the Spy Agency. C, it turns out, is played by Stephen Fry, who initially mistakes Graham for the Doctor. It's wonderful to see Stephen Fry, but the writing does him no favors as he gets barely a few minutes of screen-time, introduces who the supposed villain of the piece is and the stakes - the spies have had their DNA entirely rewritten and their corpses are no longer actually human - and some honestly very silly spy toys, gets chided by the Doctor for firing "O", then is unceremoniously killed. His presence is presumably due to UNIT being written (temporarily) out of existence as a Brexit joke in the New Year's Special, leading to an awkward bit where C has to both insist that there are no such things as aliens as well as that organizations like UNIT are supposed to deal with the aliens, not MI6! All this was set-up for the major driver of the story, which is the Doctor and Graham locating O while Ryan and Yaz are sent undercover to get information on Daniel Barton. Complicating this is that they're also trying to avoid being killed by glowing white aliens that can move through walls, including a rather chilling moment where one almost manages to get through the TARDIS doors (this never once comes up again, as the episode seems to forget the Kasaavin can break into the most secure ship in the Universe and later on forgets that weapons-fire phases through them). Episode one spends a lot of time on setting things up that never really go anywhere, though to be fair that's mostly because a lot of what we were seeing was part of The Master's plotting and only needed to make sense long enough to get the Doctor where he wanted her. It's an episode that tries to do just a bit too much, much like Resolution before it. Having to make Barton seem like a feasible main human villain; having to make the Kasaavin feel dangerous and arrogant (the laughing mockery of the one "captured" in Australia suggests a personality that we don't really ever see again); having to put a companion in danger to up the stakes (and then immediately undercut them, though it does give Mandip Gill a rare chance to act!); all before tossing it mostly all aside for the reveal of The Master. It's a GREAT reveal, don't get me wrong, but it makes a lot of what built up to it feel kind of extraneous.   This is partly because episode 2... introduces even more! Episode 1 has a fantastic cliffhanger, with The Master having gloated in triumph over the Doctor before blowing the cockpit of the plane away and then zapping her into another dimension, leaving the companions to crash to a fiery death. The follow-up to that in the start of episode 2 is a fun bit of time travel shenanigans. Ryan discovers metal plates with guides that lead him to a laminated safety sheet in the plane seat with instructions to "land a plane without a cockpit", and they discover the Doctor has recorded instructions and pre-placed an app on Ryan's phone that will allow him to take control of the plane's computer and land it safely. This pays off in a very fun way at the end of the episode when Ryan and the others mention the Doctor doing this, she gasps that she forgot and races back to the TARDIS to go back in time and set this all up after the fact to have already saved them! Indeed, the Doctor is far more proactive as a character in episode 2 than she usually gets to be in the Chibnall era, and it's a welcome sight. She's the one who figures things out, who takes action, who has plans, who quickly catches up and runs rings around the Master after the initial handicap of getting caught by surprise by him. By the end of the episode when the Master staggers furiously into the hangar after slow-boating through almost 80 years of the 20th Century, only to find out the Doctor has outsmarted him again, it's a rather hilarious end to a very terrible century he had to sit through as the cost for that initial victory he got over her. But getting from that start to the finish involves throwing a whole lot more at the wall, all of which could have probably been an entire episode by itself. The Doctor meets Ada Lovelace! And Charles Babbage! And finds herself in an exhibition of 19th Century scientific marvels such as... the magneto! But she also travels to occupied France in World War 2? And meets Noor Inayat Khan! All while Graham, Ryan and Yaz find themselves fugitives being chased by every law enforcement agency in England (Yaz's family seem unbothered by this beyond her sister considering it a joke), leading to an embarrassingly badly written scene where they get the drop on a bunch of paid mercenaries while Ryan does a little dance and lasers fire wildly into the air. There's also so much happening that the episode ends up with a lot of contrivances to keep it all together that don't really hold up to scrutiny. One part in particular that stands out is when Ryan and Yaz are hiding inside Barton's headquarters. That they were able to just hide out or the notion that a giant tech company like this would "close for the night" is already ridiculous, but they then walk out directly in front of a surveillance camera, point it out, use a device that turns them invisible to cameras (but doesn't remove the footage of them pointing at the camera in the first place) and then.... walk in front of a bunch more surveillance cameras without using the device again? Which means they're on camera (we even see it from the camera POV!) the entire time they're in Barton's office hacking his computer. A minor thing perhaps? Except... later in the episode, Barton's aide shows him footage of Yaz and Ryan hacking the computer, complete with audio, meaning that people review this footage of Barton in his office without his supervision (they have to tell him about Yaz and Ryan)... which means they ALSO have surveillance footage of Barton meeting with the Kasaavin and audio of him openly discussing murders with them!?! I suspect that Chibnall either just didn't consider this as a possibility or decided to ignore it and hope the audience didn't notice because he wanted Barton to discover Ryan and Yaz were spying on him but not till they were at the party, or Barton was already aware due to working with the Master and it didn't bother him what they were doing, but that means his security staff were in on Barton's plot? That's relying on a lot of loyalty (or fear) given they have video/audio proof of Barton being involved in murder even if you don't take the aliens into account! Maybe I'm just overthinking that whole thing, but it's kind of bizarre that they have a device that literally prevents them from being seen on camera, they note the importance of doing this, but only do it once and then stop bothering! But speaking of Barton and the Master, they're apparently at odds, but also Barton IS in charge of the operation with the Kasaavins and it isn't entirely clear why the Master needs to be involved at all by either of them. Barton kills his own mother presumably to make it clear what a monster he is as if his eventually revealed plan to turn 95% of the population into DNA hard drives for use by the Kasaavins wasn't enough. We also learn next to nothing about the Kasaavins, their motivations, why they need the hard drives, whether the long cables/trees in their dimension are parts of a giant computer or a version of plant life etc. Plus, of course, there's all the stuff about Gallifrey that just comes out of nowhere, and a final message from the Master that brings the ridiculous Timeless Child back to the forefront again even though all of the UK must have heard my groan when it was first name-dropped back in The Ghost Monument.   A focus on one or even two of these things might have given the two-parter a stronger sense of cohesion. As it is, it relies heavily on the chemistry between Whittaker and Dhawan to carry it, though happily there is plenty of that as the two spark on screen together. There's a real sense that these two have known each other a long time and there is a lot of baggage there. A moment I loved comes when the two stand on top of the Eiffel Tower and the Master muses that it is even higher than Jodrell Bank and asks if he ever apologized for that. When the Doctor grumbles that he has not, he simply replies,"Good!" Unfortunately, there's also some really... well, there's no nice way to put it, some really hosed up stuff that happens in this episode including by the Doctor. The Master dressing up as a Nazi and menacing Noor - a spy who would go on to be executed in a Concentration Camp - is already pretty loving gross but the Doctor's triumphant moment coming when she turns off the Master's telepathic perception filter so the Nazis will see he has brown skin and want to kill him is really, really, really hosed up. Similarly, the Master's line about all the things he had to "escape" throughout the 20th Century seems like yet another nod to the color of his skin (maybe I'm reading too much into that?) which I think it supposed to make us glad that he suffered but instead just makes him sympathetic instead, which I assume Chibnall can't possibly have intended. It's a shame too, because the conversation between the Doctor and the Master on the Eiffel Tower is good stuff, and the episode includes one of my favorite Master tropes which is him either not realizing or getting irritated when reminded by the Doctor that the aliens he's helping to genocide people will probably want to kill him too at some point! The Doctor turning his own words against him to convince the Kasaavins to haul him back to their own dimension is some good traditional "the Master is defeated FOREVER until a couple of episodes from now!" stuff, though her explanation of how she is locking them out of our reality somewhat undercuts how much of an impossible threat they were initially shown to be. An attempt is made to explain how the Doctor's figured it all out, but the Kasaavins remain an enigma that ended up not really working for me in the way that the Boneless from Flatline did, for example. So much is going on that Barton's humiliation goes unremarked on by anybody. His company is presumably toast following his press conference appearing to be him losing his mind and declaring he was going to wipe out all humanity... but with the Master and the Kasaavin's gone, even if his company goes under or gets brought up by a competitor he's still going to be left impossibly rich and powerful, not to mention presumably that 7% Kasaavin DNA shift he underwent gives him some kind of extra-human advantage that others don't have. But we never see him again, in this episode or any other. Which is a shame if only for the fact that I really, really like Lenny Henry! And then there's this bullshit:  Less than a decade after Day of the Doctor saw the triumphant moment when all the Doctors (ALL the Doctors!  ) came together to save Gallifrey, clearing a massive weight from the Doctor's conscience... Chibnall just has it wiped out off-screen, with all the people on the planet apparently all brutally murdered. The Master is the one who told the Doctor it happened, and after she visits and discovers it is true, a pre-packaged message from him pops up to tell her that HE did it (really? He killed the ENTIRE planet? Really?  ) and he did so after learning the truth about all their pasts. The Doctor gets the flash of a little girl next to a giant monument and he comments that it's something buried deep in all their minds, something to do with the... ugh... Timeless Child. So that's that. Gallifrey got wiped out anyway. Oh well. Remember all those billions of children in particular that the Doctor lamented dying in the Time War only to discover they'd saved them all? Yeah, apparently they all died anyway. Horribly. With worse yet to come in reveals made at the end of this season. Ugh. Look, when these two episodes first aired I really, really liked them. I still do like them! They're trying to do too much, and they don't give much time to breathe (moments they do, like the Doctor getting the Master's attention with the code of a double heartbeat, work REALLY well) and a lot of it doesn't make sense... but especially when considered around much of the rest of this season and the Chibnall era as a whole this two-parter was a very strong one. More than that though, it marked a genuinely high point for the revival with the casting and performance of Sacha Dhawan as the Master and the immediate and clear chemistry between himself and Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor. But, as bad as the Timeless Child stuff is and would become, it's the casual slaughter of Gallifrey that really irritates me, something that should be huge and universe shaking that just kind of gets tossed out and has about as much impact as discovering they didn't upsize your fries at McDonalds. There is a nice moment in the epilogue where the Doctor finally tells her companions a rough overview of her past that works because you know she herself isn't really sure if it's all entirely true anymore after the Master told her everything she knew was a lie. But that's all it is, a moment, and for most of the rest of the season and indeed Chibnall's era the destruction of Gallifrey would seem bizarrely incidental to the Doctor.  You can see in moments like the above that Whittaker could absolutely deliver the performance if the writing was there. Unfortunately, even when it came to episodes as fun as these two, those moments were few and far between, and rarely followed on or built on prior ones to give her the chance to show just what she was capable of. Now, unless she ever returns for a Special under a different showrunner, it's unlikely she ever will get the chance. A drat shame. Index of Doctor Who Write-ups for Television Episodes/Big Finish Audio Stories. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 12:07 on Dec 6, 2023 |
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Dec 5, 2023 12:42
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God Chibnall really did make some incomprehensible decisions. 
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Dec 5, 2023 13:40
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Jerusalem posted:So that's that. Gallifrey got wiped out anyway. Oh well. Remember all this billions of children in particular that the Doctor lamented dying in the Time War only to discover they'd saved them all? Yeah, apparently they all died anyway. Horribly. With worse yet to come in reveals made at the end of this season. Ugh. I loving hate Chibnall's run and this is one of the main reasons. Can't have Sacha Dhawan's scene-eating Master without the off-screen slaughter of Gallifrey and the Cyber Master horseshit. Can't have Jo Martin's enigmatic Fugitive Doctor without accepting the Timeless Child retcon mess. There's playing with that built up canon, something the animated Spider-verse films does well, and then there's the wholesale disrespect of decades worth of build up in Chibnall's run. God I wish Whittaker had a season under a different showrunner
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Dec 5, 2023 13:46
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Senor Tron posted:Is that dude who had the "new to Doctor Who I hate that I'm being made to watch this wait I'm three series in and this is the most batshit and best thing ever" watch threads still around? I believe he either stopped watching or stopped posting, or both. I can't remember his user anymore because the two of them changed it so that they sounded almost exactly the same, lol. Toxxupation or something.
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Dec 5, 2023 13:58
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Infinitum posted:God I wish Whittaker had a season under a different showrunner
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Dec 5, 2023 14:02
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Jerusalem posted:So much is going on that Barton's humiliation goes unremarked on by anybody. His company is presumably toast following his press conference appearing to be him losing his mind and declaring he was going to wipe out all humanity... I think Elon Musk did that last week...
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Dec 5, 2023 14:23
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Spyfall 1 is where Chibnall lost me, and not for any one good reason. Just the slow buildup of disinterest finally crushing it. I very clearly remember watching the car/motorcycle chase scene and thinking "this looks great.... and I don't care"
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Dec 5, 2023 14:23
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Warthur posted:One mistake I think the new show has made is by being too anxious to tie Doctors to showrunners. The Tom Baker era was able to run as long as it did because changing showrunners midway through it was almost as good an opportunity to reinvent the show as regenerating the Doctor himself. I think that's less an official policy decision, and more just whoever's playing the Doctor deciding that they're more comfortable working with someone they know and have built up a relationship with over the years, and not wanting to have to start over from scratch with a new showrunner. Also the Tom Baker era really isn't a good comparison. Aside from television production being a vastly different creature than it was back in the 1970s, they didn't change producers/script editors during Tom's era because they wanted to reinvent the show; I suspect that if the Hinchcliffe/Holmes duo had continued to get good ratings and managed to avoid the controversy over "teatime brutality for tots", the BBC would have been happy to let them run the show however they wanted, for as long as they wanted. There were a variety of reasons why DW changed showrunners during Tom's era: because one or the other was moving on to a different show (back in those days, those roles were much more of a "journeyman" type of position), they got too many complaints about violence from people like Mary Whitehouse, or (nearer the end of Tom's run) the star of the show was becoming increasingly difficult to work with and they chose to move on rather than deal with the headache. JNT is notably the only producer who'd decided both to completely reinvent the show in Tom's last year (new opening titles, etc.), and who actually took Tom at his word when he did his usual "do it my way or I walk" round of threats. (E: after doing a bit of googling, it looks like there were only three actual producers during Tom's run: Philip Hinchcliffe, Graham Williams, and JNT. Barry Letts oversaw Tom's first episode and was brought in to advise during JNT's first season, but he wasn't a full-fledged producer of the show like the others were. As far as script editors go, I believe there were four: Robert Holmes, Anthony Read, Douglas Adams, and Christopher Bidmead. All the producers and script editors had their own influence on the show, of course, but by and large they didn't really reinvent the series so much as just execute variations on the template that was already laid down; and if we're being honest, really the one person who increasingly dictated what direction the show should move in was Tom himself. By the time he was almost halfway through his run, he was a big enough star that the production team often deferred to him, in order to keep him happy and keep him from quitting. Again, that only really changed when JNT took over.) Sydney Bottocks fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Dec 5, 2023 |
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Dec 5, 2023 14:50
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I didn’t love Chibnall’s first series, but I didn’t hate it either. I actually enjoyed a fair number of those episodes at the time and appreciated that it was a change from Moffat’s version of the show. But Spyfall was a definite turning point for me. It wasn’t the worst episode or anything, but I remember watching it and just feeling nothing. I kept watching after that out of some misplaced feeling of obligation. My interest never really came back until the new specials.
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Dec 5, 2023 15:03
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Chibnall's first series felt like a statement of intent - new Doc, new location on earth for the companions to keep coming back to, no old villains. Hey everyone, this is a good jumping on point, all you need to know is contained in the first episode and you're going to be learning everything at the same time as our characters. The second series onwards felt like Chibnall just jamming in all the stuff he'd deliberately avoided from the first series, and then piling on top of that with a Joseph Lidster level "Also this important character's backstory was completely different and they'd been mindwiped to forget it", only it's WORSE than Lidster because he did it with the bloody Doctor.
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Dec 5, 2023 15:13
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Sydney Bottocks posted:(E: after doing a bit of googling, it looks like there were only three actual producers during Tom's run: Philip Hinchcliffe, Graham Williams, and JNT. Barry Letts oversaw Tom's first episode and was brought in to advise during JNT's first season, but he wasn't a full-fledged producer of the show like the others were. As far as script editors go, I believe there were four: Robert Holmes, Anthony Read, Douglas Adams, and Christopher Bidmead. All the producers and script editors had their own influence on the show, of course, but by and large they didn't really reinvent the series so much as just execute variations on the template that was already laid down; and if we're being honest, really the one person who increasingly dictated what direction the show should move in was Tom himself. By the time he was almost halfway through his run, he was a big enough star that the production team often deferred to him, in order to keep him happy and keep him from quitting. Again, that only really changed when JNT took over.) Showrunners in general seem to have about three good seasons in them before they need to be given a rest; Capaldi might have had a stronger start if he was working with someone less exhausted than Moffat, Barry Letts' run on the show started to get shaky in season 10 and went to pieces in season 11 (in the latter case in part due to Delgado's death, but the signs of rot setting in were there in the previous season when Delgado was very much alive). A very talented Doctor can keep things up for more than three seasons plus some specials - Tom did - but they need to a) have a take on the character that can adapt to a lot of different styles to keep things variable without seeming to be entirely undefined, and b) have fresh material to work with. Ploughing one creative furrow for three seasons rarely works out and so you need to either change Doctor about that often or change showrunner about that often or both. The new series has tended towards doing both, and it probably is because the actors in question prefer to stick with the showrunners they are comfortable with, but it's kind of a missed opportunity that nobody has even tried to see if their take on the Doctor can survive a change of showrunner since Tom Baker.
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Dec 5, 2023 17:20
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I'd actually argue that RTD/Moffat both got second winds and their middle stuff was the weakest. Like both season one and season five (imo) contain a lot of their best moments, their best ideas, and a real solid spine. Like they're finally getting their dream after all these years to do Doctor Who. Then, the next season its like "ok do more" and they're like poo poo. But I think season four is RTD's next best, and I feel like a lot of the later Capaldi stuff is extremely good too. Its the weird middle for both of them that lost me.
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Dec 5, 2023 17:33
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elf help book posted:Spyfall 1 is where Chibnall lost me, and not for any one good reason. Just the slow buildup of disinterest finally crushing it. I very clearly remember watching the car/motorcycle chase scene and thinking "this looks great.... and I don't care" Haha, I was exactly the same. That was the last episode of Who I watched until Rusty came back. I never even felt tempted to come back to it, it just dropped out of my mind entirely
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Dec 5, 2023 17:47
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Clouseau posted:I'd actually argue that RTD/Moffat both got second winds and their middle stuff was the weakest. Like both season one and season five (imo) contain a lot of their best moments, their best ideas, and a real solid spine. Like they're finally getting their dream after all these years to do Doctor Who. Then, the next season its like "ok do more" and they're like poo poo. But I think season four is RTD's next best, and I feel like a lot of the later Capaldi stuff is extremely good too. Its the weird middle for both of them that lost me. TBH the weakness of my analysis is that it's hard to discern in the classic show how much influence producers and script editors had. Hinchcliffe never had a script editor other than Robert Holmes, and guess what - the early Williams era is both very good and an awful lot like the Hinchcliffe era. So was it Hinchcliffe or Holmes who was truly responsible for its tone? And look at JNT, who arguably had the exact same thing you are pointing at - strong start, weak middle, rallied at the end. And guess what, the weak bit of the JNT era aligns more or less perfectly with Eric Saward's stint as script editor. That said, I think I'm the sort of fan who puts a lot of stock in the quality of individual stories and can take or leave the big picture vision - so that might be affecting my analysis. A producer/showrunner with a weak vision is fine so long as the scripts are good; I don't like any of RTD's season closers other than Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways, but all his series have individual stories which are great. I think in the classic show the script editor had more sway in terms of acting as quality control on a story-by-story basis. Warthur fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Dec 5, 2023 |
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Dec 5, 2023 17:48
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elf help book posted:Spyfall 1 is where Chibnall lost me, and not for any one good reason. Just the slow buildup of disinterest finally crushing it. I very clearly remember watching the car/motorcycle chase scene and thinking "this looks great.... and I don't care" There had been such a long gap between seasons that when Spyfall was just an okay Chibnall episode it didn't feel worth investing in anymore. I finished that season, and saw the Timeless Child poo poo, and just checked out entirely. I've not seen anything between that and Power of the Doctor (also poo poo).
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Dec 5, 2023 18:13
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https://twitter.com/bigfinish/status/1732082536849784879 Everyone's favorite Dalek designs!
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Dec 5, 2023 18:16
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Vinylshadow posted:https://twitter.com/bigfinish/status/1732082536849784879 I like the NDP's. I wish we'd seen more of them once they had the repaint.
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Dec 5, 2023 18:18
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Vinylshadow posted:https://twitter.com/bigfinish/status/1732082536849784879 I don't know who Valerie is but she looks entirely over this poo poo. Oooh, special weapons dalek!
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Dec 5, 2023 18:33
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I wanna see the Daleks with the airbrush attachment
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Dec 5, 2023 18:57
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Senor Tron posted:Is that dude who had the "new to Doctor Who I hate that I'm being made to watch this wait I'm three series in and this is the most batshit and best thing ever" watch threads still around? Oxxidation/Occupation, right? I just wish I could find their actual original threads, the reviews were a fun read.
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Dec 5, 2023 19:24
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Didn't they originally do a toxx to review all of Tim Allen's lovely Fox sitcom and then did another one that led to doing Who?
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Dec 5, 2023 19:33
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idk what's so cool about the special weapons dalek but it just is always fun to see
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Dec 5, 2023 19:34
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Dabir posted:idk what's so cool about the special weapons dalek but it just is always fun to see it has a big gun that goes boom, op
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Dec 5, 2023 19:36
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Vinylshadow posted:https://twitter.com/bigfinish/status/1732082536849784879 tell me that the round buildings in the background are actually building-sized daleks with regular daleks riding inside.
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Dec 5, 2023 19:53
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elf help book posted:Spyfall 1 is where Chibnall lost me, and not for any one good reason. Just the slow buildup of disinterest finally crushing it. I very clearly remember watching the car/motorcycle chase scene and thinking "this looks great.... and I don't care" I remember having almost the same reaction to the chase scene. I was trying to give the show a chance since some people said they liked Spyfall and I'm watching that scene going, "This looks like it was very tricky and expensive to film and it's utterly meaningless." It's a perfect example of my thesis that Chibnall had big moments but couldn't string them together into a good story because he didn't care about the bits that linked them together.
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Dec 5, 2023 20:43
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SirSamVimes posted:Oxxidation/Occupation, right? I see Oxx around ADTRW pretty regularly. No idea about Occ. I really enjoyed those threads, but I can see how it'd get old.
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Dec 5, 2023 20:58
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Sydney Bottocks posted:I for one would applaud a showrunner with the courage to have the Doctor show up in a past companion's current life, have them sit down to tea, and then slowly over the course of the episode realize that, aside from their adventures, they absolutely cannot relate to each other. No monsters or aliens or mad scientists or universe-ending peril. Just two characters who figure out that there's no real reason for them to stay in touch any more. Like that one episode of Frasier where he and Woody meet up and then realize they just have zero things in common apart from spending time at Cheers. Guess Who's coming to dinner Open Source Idiom posted:I think that script's making a misdiagnosis argument. Poorly. I know too many people who need to be on medication who are convinced they would feel better if they get off their medication, and too many cases where someone did discontinue medication with consequences that will never completely go away as the result. Creating a justification for people who need medication to discontinue it does active harm, and arguably doesn't address misdiagnosis and its causes at all, because that's a problem with doctors and the medical establishment and the ways in which they relate to patients poorly. You'd need to show the person who made the diagnosis and establish that it was wrong in this case, and frankly I'm still not sure whether that justifies the consequences for those who were properly diagnosed but falsely believe otherwise. A better Ker-Blam! wouldn't have ended capitalism; Forest, as-is, has probably done real harm to a small number of people. Jerusalem posted:The thing that really gets to me is that the Doctor doesn't just excuse the System literally murdering a completely innocent person, she uses it as an example that proves why the System is.... good? I don't think she quite endorses it as a necessary action but given that was even a potential interpretation of something the Doctor does is madness to me. There's an incoherent point in there somewhere about the AI having better ethics and morality--despite being constrained to act as it does--than the people responsible for it (or hacking it). Except that the total lack of a capitalist villain to set against the anarchist, coupled with the System's apparent acceptance of all the bad things happening in this workplace related to labor, means that the AI's morality is so distorted it looks like an actual villain. Maybe if we were meant to see that the System (AI) has been hopelessly corrupted by the System (capitalism) there'd be some irony in all of this, but the Doctor's missing of it guarantees the point can't land and it's clear neither of the people involved in writing the episode thought they were doing that. Contrast to The Sunmakers, which turns into a much broader criticism than Holmes supposedly aimed at originally. I think you don't walk away from that episode thinking "government taxation is bad" and that's all, even if that's pretty clearly where Holmes started out. The government in question is so clearly coded as a corporation and not a government ("The Company") that the critique lands in a very different spot. Whereas Ker-Blam! seems set on disarming any aspect of criticism with some weird combination of "blame people, not the system" and "human beings should be happy to have any work at all" that's worse in the "Disney is going to spoil the show" sense even though it's before Disney had any involvement in Doctor Who at all.
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Dec 5, 2023 21:18
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Dabir posted:idk what's so cool about the special weapons dalek but it just is always fun to see Ben Aaronovitch’s Target novelisation of Remembrance has this great bit about it: quote:The Dalek was insane. Radiation had altered the structure of its mind and made it mad. The mark of its insanity was, that of all Daleks in the great race of Daleks, it had a name.
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Dec 5, 2023 21:46
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A question to fellow Americans - have you seen ANY promotion for Doctor Who this year, either online on on TV? Because I haven’t, which could explain the viewership internationally.
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Dec 5, 2023 22:27
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Meep had a higher appreciation index than wild blue yonder?
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Dec 5, 2023 22:32
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Edward Mass posted:A question to fellow Americans - have you seen ANY promotion for Doctor Who this year, either online on on TV? Because I haven’t, which could explain the viewership internationally. I haven’t really. Word is Disney plans to start up the hype machine with the Christmas special, but I don’t know where that came from originally. There is a certain logic to it though since that’s where Ncuti takes over, and Disney doesn’t have any of the back catalog.
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Dec 5, 2023 22:32
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| # ? Jun 1, 2024 17:37 |
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Edward Mass posted:A question to fellow Americans - have you seen ANY promotion for Doctor Who this year, either online on on TV? Because I haven’t, which could explain the viewership internationally. Youtube's algorith has served me official Doctor Who channel promotional material, but it already knew I liked Doctor Who. Beyond that, I'm blocking all advertising so I haven't seen a thing.
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Dec 5, 2023 22:40
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