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Which season of Doctor Who should get a Blu-ray set next? This poll is closed. |
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|---|---|---|---|
| One of the black-and-white seasons |
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16 | 29.63% |
| Season 7 |
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7 | 12.96% |
| Season 11 |
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1 | 1.85% |
| Season 13 |
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0 | 0% |
| Season 15 |
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2 | 3.70% |
| The Key to Time |
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21 | 38.89% |
| Season 21 |
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0 | 0% |
| Season 25 |
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7 | 12.96% |
| Total: | 54 votes | ||
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Narsham posted:White fascist imperialist crash lands in "ancient" China, is worshiped as a god by the locals and eventually has an entire secret society devoted to him? He's a baddie. He can do bad things.
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Jan 23, 2024 02:28
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Not really digging The Invisible Enemy, but it does have some charming model sets for Titan which I like. Not totally sold on this.
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Jan 23, 2024 02:31
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It’s like Forbidden Planet on a shoestring budget
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Jan 23, 2024 02:50
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Sydney Bottocks posted:Lest we forget, if DW hadn't been put on hiatus between Colin Baker's first season and Trial of a Time Lord, the next script Holmes was working in for the show was to be set in Singapore, with the working title of "Yellow Fever and How to Cure It". The "Lost Stories" line for Colin Baker at Big Finish is.... uh. It has my least favorite Doctor Who story ever with Mission to Magnus which would have been horribly misogynistic by the standards of the mid-seventies, would have been absolutely disgusting if it was produced for TV with Colin, and is truly godawful that Big Finish thought it was acceptable to release it without a ground up rewrite. Also, the story on the docket after that was the return of everyone's favorite The Celestial Toymaker! We're probably better off that the season got flushed. Harlock posted:I wonder if Rusty is going to touch upon the Fugitive Doctor again or if it's done and dusted. I could see him using the concept. It feels like the kind of thing that he'd be willing to go back to revisit even if he didn't "resolve" any of it. Hollismason posted:Not really digging The Invisible Enemy, but it does have some charming model sets for Titan which I like. Not totally sold on this. You have reached the Tom Baker lull, unfortunately. Don't worry, next season improves a bit even if it's messy! Unfortunately you have a lot of ground to cover to get there...
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Jan 23, 2024 02:55
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Random Stranger posted:The "Lost Stories" line for Colin Baker at Big Finish is.... uh. It has my least favorite Doctor Who story ever with Mission to Magnus which would have been horribly misogynistic by the standards of the mid-seventies, would have been absolutely disgusting if it was produced for TV with Colin, and is truly godawful that Big Finish thought it was acceptable to release it without a ground up rewrite. That story is hilarious. It's awful, dumb, misogynistic trash that ends with Nick Briggs forcing all the women to "marry" him and his mates and it plays it like a happy ending and it makes me laugh so loving hard because what in the goddamn gently caress were they thinking. Briggs also plays an Ice Warrior and hisses and slurs through the entire thing and it's just awful. They spent so much money on it too! Huge cast! Child actor! Dame Maggie Steed! The boy child tries to marry Peri! The Doctor gets PTSD flashbacks to being bullied in school and hides beneath the console! It's the kind of thing that tickles the same part of my brain as Silent Night Deadly Night or The Room. It's high camp. Edit: honestly half that Lost Stories season is total loving trash. The best ones are the ones where the BF adapter went rogue and just did their own loving thing (usually getting away with it too because of a sheer lack of oversight). Those plays will usually still have to include the murderous little person, or the murder gays, or the subplot where the companion has her radical feminism deprogrammed out of her thanks to a light spanking. Whatever the hell gonzo D2V idea was floating around at the time. But there's good stuff here and there, even in those scripts. You've just very much got to look at that release line as being cultural artifacts -- a lot of these stories were trashed with good reason. Open Source Idiom fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Jan 23, 2024 |
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Jan 23, 2024 03:04
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Philip Martin has written some absolute trash Who and even his better stuff (Varos) has his fixation with body horror inflicted upon women.
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Jan 23, 2024 12:10
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Season 12 Episode 5: Fugitive of the Judoon Written by Vinay Patel & Chris Chibnall, Directed by Nida Manzoor Ruth Clayton posted:I'm not that person. I don't want to be that person. This episode has everything going against it, by all rights I should hate it. Not just because of how it stood alone at the time it aired, but with the benefit of hindsight now that Chris Chibnall's time in charger of the show is over. The knowledge that none of it went anywhere, that where it DID go made no sense and that it hosed with things for seemingly no purpose. Coupled with some odd editing choices and the feel of attempting to cover gaps in coverage (an increasingly growing concern through season 12), this is an episode that seemed design to both confuse fans with only the barest background knowledge of the Doctor AND irritate those with perhaps too deep an investment in it (the type who might, I don't know, appear on the BBC during the 1980s bitching about the quality of the show under John Nathan Turner!). Add in the at-the-time welcomed but now extremely poorly-aged and very awkward cameo by John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness... well, this episode was a recipe for disaster. But then there's Jo Martin.  I hated The Timeless Child, as a concept yes but also if you're going to go for it then go whole hog! Not the half-assed way that Chibnall put it out there, immediately seemed to second-guess himself and then ended up largely trying to ignore the giant can of worms he'd opened and left it for the next showrunner to try and deal with... the type of herculean feat only some kind of mythical Welsh Giant could possibly pull off. I hated the notion that there were "Doctors" before William Hartnell's First Doctor (the original, you might say!), and I especially hated the idea that they were already fully formed characters of "The Doctor" as if it hadn't been 1's exposure to Ian and Barbara (and the softening presence of Susan) who had turned him from just another arrogant Time Lord into the beloved proactive force for good he became by the time they all left the show. I hated the idea that the TARDIS was already in the shape of a Police Box, that the Doctor worked for some intergalactic Time Lord wet-works mercenary force (seriously, what the gently caress?), that the Doctor indeed already had an established rapport and sense of kinship/familiarity with the TARDIS as opposed to the 1st Doctor's slow growing realization that "his" ship was more than he even he had been initially aware of. But then... there's Jo Martin.  There was a 1st Doctor, a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th. The show went on hiatus, and there was a one-off movie with an 8th Doctor who was immediately accepted by fans but took a bit longer before he was finally "officially" marked down as the real deal. There was a 9th, 10th and 11th. Then there was "War", only introduced during the 11th Doctor's time, but in a way that fans instantly embraced, and with a backstory that made enough sense and was wrapped up in enough awareness that people could accept it. Then there was a 12th Doctor, supposedly the start of an entire new run of regenerations because the 11th was the "last", a fact proven by a story from his last season showing his grave and the tear in space-time left by his passing. Then there was 13, and eventually 14 (a repeat of 10, who also stole one of those earlier regenerations with his But there was also, somehow, somewhere in there... Jo Martin. The Fugitive Doctor, as a concept, makes no sense. She doesn't fit in anywhere, and the episode offers no answers to the many questions her existence raised both for viewers as well as the characters - including the Doctor! - in the episode. There would NEVER be answers. Chibnall would never give any, his later attempt to "explain" the Morbius Doctors from a 5 second snippet of in-joke background footage from an episode that aired in 1976 appearing to leave him gun-shy to actually try and salvage anything from it and just leave well enough alone (too late). But despite everything about her character's creation irritating me, the Fugitive Doctor stands somehow apart from that irritation. Chibnall has ALWAYS been able to cast well, either because of his own talent/personal likeability or because he has a REALLY good casting agent (or both!) and Jo Martin fulfilled the criteria that every other cast Doctor has somehow managed to pull off: she IS the Doctor. I never want to hear about The Timeless Child again, I would be happy if they just ignored or undid all that dumb stuff with Gallifrey and the Cybermen (the first seeds of which are planted in this episode), I don't want "Time" to show up to elaborate further on whatever the hell was going on in "Flux". But the Fugitive Doctor? Jo Martin? Hell yes! Bring her back! Let her get a chance to stretch her legs with a different writer (bring Jodie Whittaker while you're at it!), because she just nailed it and left me wanting more. The interactions between her and 13 were delightful, the confidence with which she carried herself, the outfit rocked, and that "classic" looking TARDIS console was a huge relief to see after how badly the redesign of 13th's TARDIS interior let me down.  Pictured: Chris Chibnall deciding to hit "save" on The Timeless Children script That's a lot of words about the character, and that's because the story itself is largely carried by the charisma of Martin as both Ruth and later the Fugitive Doctor. Her interactions with Jodie Whittaker as well as Whittaker's own attempts to wrap her head around what is going on make for enjoyable viewing even if large chunks of the story fall apart under closer scrutiny. What makes it better is 13 of course refusing to shut up as always ("talking's brilliant!") and loving up Fugitive's carefully laid out plans as she (13) just madly improvises with no knowledge of what she's actually gotten herself into - it's the best tradition of mildly-bickering double-act Doctors in the finest tradition of Troughton and Pertwee. We're introduced to Jo Martin first as "Ruth Clayton", a very nice women living in Gloucester whose does historic tours of the city, though business doesn't appear to be booming. That doesn't seem to impact on her too much however, she has a nice life, a loving partner, a reasonable home and appears to be very cheerful even in spite of an apparent lack of interest from passers-by in her tours outside of tidbits about filming locations for Harry Potter. Probably her biggest problem is a painfully-badly written character of her local barista, who I think is supposed to have a "quirky" crush on her but comes across more like a deeply hosed up dude with obvious boundary issues who should be arrested for stalking. His use as a delivery mechanism for making the Judoon aware of her partner Lee's existence is painfully lazy, and frankly I felt a little like cheering when they execute him (albeit for a light shove as opposed to being a creepy stalker). It's neat to see the Judoon again, though sadly 13 never speaks Judoon to them, just finds herself rhyming Judoon a lot. Spotting the Judoon enforcement field surrounding the earth (VERY illegal, the Judoon appear to do that type of thing alot for all their talk of following the law!) she pilots the TARDIS through, insisting that she isn't just looking for an excuse to stop her companions pushing her to tell them more about Gallifrey and the Master (which she has been doing, albeit reluctantly) and immediately confronts them when she discovers them preparing to use yet another highly illegal and very dangerous weapon they insist is necessary because of the danger posed by their fugitive. Using the Psychic Paper to impersonate an "Imperial Regulator" and making up some bullshit about local earth laws (it might be an easy excuse, but the Judoon's mindset of what counts as legally binding and what doesn't feels appropriate for self-appointed "police" who work for pay), she convinces them to give her 5 minutes to convince the "Fugitive" to come quietly. 13 is a lot more proactive in this episode, and the exchange with the Judoon where she fails spectacularly at negotiating more time is a lot of fun.   The barista above is worse, obviously, but Lee as a character raises a number of red flags that don't bear thinking too much about. I'm still not entirely sure if he was Gallifreyan himself or even "just" a human or other humanoid-style alien - he doesn't appear to have had the same Chameleon Arch treatment as Ruth, he's appears to be in the "Martha" role of being there to make sure the Doctor can change back when needed... but that raises some disturbing questions about the fact they appear to be a married couple in this cover. Was that part of Ruth's plan? It's pretty hosed up if it is, and pretty hosed up if it wasn't, and it isn't helped by the brief comments about him indicating he was a well-respected and decorated part of "Division" whose (faked) death saw him given a memorial... so if he was that well-known, wouldn't his presence run counter to the Fugitive Doctor's desire to hide from Division? Presumably they thought the Time Lords/Division would never look for them on a backwater like Earth, and it was only Lee's inability to part with a medal from his service days that saw him discovered... but the Judoon scan of him doesn't trigger any alarms and it's only Gatt's presence that sees him exposed. Basically this part of the story raises questions that don't get answered and don't have enough time spent on them... which is sadly not unusual for this particular period of Who. Realizing his gently caress-up has put Ruth in danger, he convinces the Doctor to help her escape while Ryan and Yaz offer to provide a distraction before he delays the Judoon enough for Ruth and the Doctor to escape. Ryan and Yaz almost immediately find themselves scooped up to join Graham who they hadn't grasped had been scooped up earlier, which leads to a part of the episode that was awkwardly paced and stood out negatively in one respect on initial airing... and has only become more awkward since then. John Barrowman returns as Captain Jack Harkness, trying to grab up the Doctor while fleeing in a stolen space ship from unseen attackers. The Judoon forcefield screws with his scoop and he collects first Graham, then Ryan and Yaz, assuming each of them is the Doctor in turn before giving up and just passing them on the message he initially wanted to give: don't give The Lone Cyberman what he wants. The companions have no idea what a Cyberman is, of course, since Season 11 didn't use any old monsters until the New Year's Special! This whole section feels odd even before the context of present-day knowledge. As it is shot and edited, it isn't entirely clear if Harkness was even in the room with any of them beyond the section where he kisses Graham. There is a lot of shot-reverse shot footage with neither the companions or Harkness in the respective shots, and people just talking towards the camera like they were in a POV full-motion video game or something. Harkness' cryptic message is an unwelcome "here's the season's season arc!" line that comes in the middle of an episode introducing a character who appears to be part of a bigger series arc that Chibnall was already going for, making everything feel a bit too busy and incoherent. The other context, of course, is that revelations in 2021 (this episode aired in 2020) about Noel Clarke's sexual misconduct as part of the shows he was writing and producing. This lead to allegations of sexual harassment including during his time on Doctor Who, which caused renewed attention of an existing video of Clarke gleefully recounting to an audience while sitting next to Camille Coduri a story about Barrowmen enjoying slipping his cock out and walking about with it out, whipping it out on stage so other actors but not the audience could see it, putting it on people's shoulders on set as a "joke", including to Coduri, etc. More and more (entirely open, pre-existing!) accounts emerged of this being not even an open secret but simply something Barrowman constantly did as a given on-set. Barrowman would appear in one more episode during this run (before the Clarke revelations) and then never return again, and indeed it appears he hasn't worked much since then outside of an appearance to discuss the "incidents" as well as put out a statement apologizing, insisting there was no "harassment" but that it isn't something he would do nowadays. So suddenly it's a lot harder to watch Captain Jack's relentless omni-sexual flirting, or him just planting a big kiss on a completely stunned Graham even it was scripted. It's perhaps unfair to judge the episode on that, but I can't help but see it and cringe, particularly at my own posts celebrating his return at the time.   But while Jack, Graham, Ryan and Yaz awkwardly get edited around not necessarily being in the same place at the same time, the story is at its strongest with 13 and Ruth taking their road-trip to the lighthouse where Ruth grew up. The Doctor can immediately see all the seams in Ruth's memory of her childhood, and that it's unusual that Ruth apparently not only doesn't see them but can't even when they're pointed out. Arriving at the lighthouse, she is struck by how clearly everything is out of place, things don't make sense, and goes exploring, making a shocking discovery while Ruth - unknowingly following Lee's trigger phrase - shatters the glass and has her full memory restored. I wish we could have had a little more time exploring "Ruth" and her reactions to ceasing to exist, in the same fashion that John Smith had to reckon with the fact he was a fictional creation to hide the truth of who he really is. Her line about "I don't want to be that person" when the Doctor suggests she is the fugitive the Judoon are looking for gives us an indication of it, but once that glass is shattered Ruth effectively ceases to exist, and the Fugitive Doctor doesn't even really appear to take a moment to consider the loss of Lee. But while I think the idea of her being pre-Hartnell is ridiculous, and that the TARDIS being a police box before An Unearthly Child is also stupid, there is no doubting the power of the moment where the Doctor digs into Ruth's parents' supposed grave and discovers the POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX sign sitting buried beneath the ground. Her immediate assumption, of course, is that the Fugitive Doctor is from her future, and both sell their confusion so well as they grasp that neither of them have memory of the other which is impossible (one of them MUST have come before the other!). Of course this leads to other problems, the Doctor scans them both to confirm they are the same person but she could have used mental "Contact" to try and figure out what was going on and get the answer to a lot of questions... and you can't say they didn't remember that was a thing, before shortly after they use it with Gatt! More than that though they could talk to each other, asking "Okay who WAS your last regeneration?" and work things out from there. Except of course that would interfere with Chibnall's desire to "fix" the "problem" of Brain of Morbius starting with the upcoming season finale, which he appeared to be convinced was FINALLY going to solve things forever in a way that every fan would immediately love and accept. Instead, the Fugitive Doctor not recognizing what the sonic screwdriver is (except she does! She pretends not to know then smugly notes that SHE doesn't need one!) is supposed to indicate at the very least a pre-Troughton Doctor since that was the first time we ever saw the Sonic: back then all it did was... screw and unscrew screws! I'd like to think she just forgot about it briefly/didn't immediately recognize the adjustments made to it due to having her mind screwed with as part of Season 6b and she was actually a hidden incarnation between Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee! After all, Troughton is seen working for the Time Lords in The Two Doctors which must place it after The War Games and can't possibly have just been the writer forgetting Troughton didn't reveal the Time Lords existence until then! There's a good reason I'm not the showrunner of Who... imagine somebody forcing their own changes on the show based on a minor one-off continuity error regarding a production goof from decades earlier! Before they can escape in the Fugitive Doctor's TARDIS, however, Gatt - the Judoon's Client's representative - arrives. 13 ignores the instruction to just shut up and let things shake out, revealing to Gatt and the Fugitive Doctor both that Gallifrey is dead and destroyed in their future/her present, providing mental proof that leaves Gatt clearly shaken. Enough so that she apparently doesn't grasp that the Fugitive Doctor's insistence she NOT fire the gun that the Fugitive Doctor has had for decades now is a trap. Gatt wipes herself out, angering the Doctor who points out it is semantics to try and pretend this wasn't her intent and it's all on Gatt for pulling the trigger. To be fair, the Doctor has been guilty of the same herself during the revival (and I didn't like it then!) including the very last episode with the Skithra Queen! The Fugitive Doctor scares off the Judoon, who part with a warning that a Judoon Contract is ALWAYS fulfilled, and then in perhaps the most bizarrely inexcusable part of the episode she then drops off the Doctor "near" her TARDIS to avoid temporal feedback and then... fucks off! Why? Surely this would be the time to figure out what the gently caress is going on and why they can't recall each other!?! That's the thing about this episode, it is too concerned with the main points it wants to make to really care about how much the little things around it don't make sense. RTD could get away with that type of thing (and continues to do so in 2023 and presumably into 2024, God bless him!) but you have to have a REALLY strong story to pull it off. The Judoon's completely open presence in Gloucester, the murder of at least three people (two of them at least human), all kind of just gets lift sitting without any kind of further exploration of the impact. The Doctor is reunited with the companions, who fill her in on their encounter with Captain Jack and his warning re: the Lone Cyberman. She in turn, to her credit, has learned her lesson from the start of the episode and openly admits what happened with Ruth and her own confusion re: the Fugitive Doctor. She's clearly even more confused about what is going on in her life after the Master's troubling suggestions of a deep dark secret (oh yeah, maybe that whole genocide thing too?) and now this discovery of an incarnation she not only has no memory of, but has never seen any sign of in any of her surprisingly frequent trips back through her own entire life story. But while she's down, the companions are quick to insist that they're along for the ride regardless and they have no intention of leaving her behind because things might be getting dangerous or uncertain... they're friends, after all, and friends stick together! The TARDIS triggers a number of alerts from around the world that she quickly figures out is the TARDIS also trying to distract her from her malaise, and the episode ends with her setting aside the confusion raised by all these questions... for now. It's just that "for now" ended up being "forever", but we weren't to know that at the time.   Season 12 has a lot of problems, it's where for me at least the problems with the show under Chibnall started to overwhelm the good qualities (and there absolutely were good qualities to his time in charge). This episode marks a clear point where the the show was becoming a bit too interested in navel-gazing and the showrunner's status as a fan who grew up with the show was interfering with the quality of the show. It's a fine line to walk, and Chibnall was really drifting off course by this point. But I can't hold that or any of the myriad other issues identified above against this episode, because for all its faults as an episode and for all of Chibnall's faults as a showrunner for Who, he added something to the show here that it is absolutely the better for having included. Chibnall may be done, Whittaker may no longer be the current Doctor, but I hope we haven't seen the last of Jo Martin. Index of Doctor Who Write-ups for Television Episodes/Big Finish Audio Stories. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Jan 24, 2024 |
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Jan 23, 2024 12:42
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Fil5000 posted:Philip Martin has written some absolute trash Who and even his better stuff (Varos) has his fixation with body horror inflicted upon women. Looking back on his televised stuff after listening to his Big Finish stories and grasping the common factor that kept cropping up was very, very unsettling 
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Jan 23, 2024 12:43
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Oh yeah he's absolutely jacking off to it all.
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Jan 23, 2024 14:06
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Jerusalem posted:Hated the Timeless Child as a concept, really irritated by a lot of what Chibnall did and more importantly what he wasted potential wise... but one thing I'll always credit him for is casting Jo Martin as the Fugitive Doctor. The Fugitive Doctor doesn't make a goddamn lick of sense and it doesn't matter at all because her portrayal of the character is just great. Fugitive is the 6b Doctor who temporarily had her memory wiped/filled with fake memories to do covert Timelord poo poo before turning into Pertwee. The Division and Timeless Child stuff is just the wacky false identity they came up with and The Master discovered it with zero context, taking it as literal truth because he’s a big dummy. Boom, solved.
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Jan 23, 2024 16:14
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My preferred solution is that every Time Lord has suppressed memories of being the Timeless Child because the Child got disintegrated as part of the process of propagating the capacity to regenerate. Tecteun reactivated those memories in hand-picked agents - one of whom was the Fugitive Doctor - so she could then use the residual memories of the brainwashing and whatnot she did on the Timeless Child to control them. The Fugitive Doctor was the last of these agents, whose defection was sufficiently disruptive that Tecteun decided to drop that angle, and if the Master had pushed back even further he'd have discovered that. In other words, the Timeless Child is a body thetan attached to Time Lords, and that's why the Master lost all perspective when looking into it because it restimulated all his engrams.
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Jan 23, 2024 16:24
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HD DAD posted:Fugitive is the 6b Doctor who temporarily had her memory wiped/filled with fake memories to do covert Timelord poo poo before turning into Pertwee. I'd only bother explaining it more if they brought the Fugitive Doctor back too, because otherwise there's no value in further dwelling on it. "I made a jigsaw puzzle of your history." That's it. Done. Let's all move on from that poo poo.
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Jan 23, 2024 16:25
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Yeah, I mean, this is all very nice but literally the last episode hit the beat of going back to the Timeless Child stuff and reiterating that the Doctor was adopted. RTD has been pretty clear he doesn't want to retcon and it seems he isn't going to entirely leave it alone either.
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Jan 23, 2024 16:27
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lines posted:Yeah, I mean, this is all very nice but literally the last episode hit the beat of going back to the Timeless Child stuff and reiterating that the Doctor was adopted. RTD has been pretty clear he doesn't want to retcon and it seems he isn't going to entirely leave it alone either. I think using it as an emotional hook for the Doctor is fine, but further explanation of it would suck.
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Jan 23, 2024 16:28
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In the 4 eps so far RTD has been looking at all kinds of old plot hooks and mystery boxes and throwbacks and I think is getting ready to give a  continuity season starting from this problem of "ok, so I was handed this insane situation for both the universe and the character how do I move forward without throwing it in the garbage" and his solution is to drive through it instead of around - look for as many other things like that as possible from the history of the show and mash em all together so that "this makes no sense at all wtf is happening" is really the theme and question.Off the top of my head already we've had the return of three companions, a new self-contradictory doctor, a throwback to a Hartnell-era villain who works by anti-science rules, a new villain that seems to work by similar anti-science rules, and several places where the dialogue acknowledges that none of this makes any sense. The story this series is going to be about why nothing makes any sense.
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Jan 23, 2024 16:44
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I think the continuity heavy stuff was a fun treat for the 60th, and the Gatwa stuff is going to be a break from it. Maybe I'm totally wrong, but I think RTD will follow his instincts that he had when he relaunched the show the first time and be very selective and careful with continuity.
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Jan 23, 2024 16:57
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RTD already went through JNT's "stunt casting for guest stars" phase, and is apparently taking a bit of a detour into JNT's "Light Entertainment Division" phase, so it wouldn't be a shock to see him dive right into the "reference DW's past at every opportunity" phase that was a hallmark for much of JNT's run next. Pity he skipped out on the "serious science fiction" phase of Tom's last season/Davison's first season, though.
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Jan 23, 2024 17:07
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Clouseau posted:I think the continuity heavy stuff was a fun treat for the 60th, and the Gatwa stuff is going to be a break from it. Maybe I'm totally wrong, but I think RTD will follow his instincts that he had when he relaunched the show the first time and be very selective and careful with continuity. The difference though is the context of when he's taking control. Last time he had the clean break and blank slate. This time he has been handed a very present and active Gordian knot of continuity. It's like Hunter S Thompson and his advice on hitting wildlife: if you can't avoid the collision, hit the gas and not the brake.
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Jan 23, 2024 17:39
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CommonShore posted:The difference though is the context of when he's taking control. Last time he had the clean break and blank slate. This time he has been handed a very present and active Gordian knot of continuity. It's like Hunter S Thompson and his advice on hitting wildlife: if you can't avoid the collision, hit the gas and not the brake. He could just ignore it. Gatwa has already been The Doctor for a few hundred years by the time we meet him in Ruby Road, so just ignore all the continuity poo poo. Spreading salt at the end of the universe basically rebalanced the cosmic scales in favor of brand new weird poo poo. Just... move on. Reboot. The show won't survive no matter how good of a creative upswing it has if it's too busy trying to work out his Chibnall's poo poo can be spun into gold.
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Jan 23, 2024 17:42
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PriorMarcus posted:He could just ignore it. Yeah, unless RTD saw the Chibnall stuff and went "that gives me a bunch of ideas" I'm happy for him to abandon it. But I'm also happy for him to go full RTD and have the Master stopped with the power of belief so I think I'll just watch any Who at this stage and no one should ask me what I think
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Jan 23, 2024 17:45
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PriorMarcus posted:I think using it as an emotional hook for the Doctor is fine, but further explanation of it would suck. This is definitely how I feel - but in a sense trying to explain it away is also trying to explain it more! Just let your hearts heal!
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Jan 23, 2024 17:55
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I was kind of disappointed that The Church on Ruby Road didn't feel as much of a reboot as Rose did, but maybe that's because I'm older and more wise to RTD's tricks than I was when Rose aired. Maybe to new viewers on Disney+ it felt fresh and exciting and The Doctor felt mysterious and propulsive? I thought it was a great episode, I just question how great it was as an onboarding episode.
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Jan 23, 2024 17:58
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Depends on how far from the Who we're used to he's going to go, I guess.
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Jan 23, 2024 18:28
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I’m watching The Caretaker and got a good laugh. I have that exact same LED “invisibility“ watch.
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Jan 23, 2024 21:18
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Why on earth were the Smith/Capaldi/Whittaker blu-ray collections only released in Germany? They’re a much better solution than individual series sets. 
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Jan 23, 2024 21:57
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Creature posted:Why on earth were the Smith/Capaldi/Whittaker blu-ray collections only released in Germany? They’re a much better solution than individual series sets. I know Smith and Capaldi had all-encompassing Blu-ray collections - I own them! Whittaker, though...
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Jan 23, 2024 22:04
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Thanks to a random YouTube comment, I was made aware of Season 10 never getting a soundtrack release and these account https://twitter.com/S10albumwhen/status/1749170740937605258
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Jan 23, 2024 22:44
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The above discussion about the Fugitive Doctor and how best to incorporate her, whether to explore it further or just handwave it etc, just further hammers home to me that it goes to show just how good a job Jo Martin did that I still want to see more of her despite how loving stupid everything going on around her character's creation was. The video posted earlier of her getting her own toy was really sweet 
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Jan 23, 2024 23:03
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My preferred explanation of Jo Martin: She's the Thirteenth Doctor. The climax of Fugitive of the Judoon has Jo Martin's character solving the situation in a typical Doctor fashion: making threats she's not actually planning to follow through on, and tricking the enemy into destroying itself with its own weapon. And while she's doing this, Jodie Whittaker's character just sort of stands there doing nothing but whinging at her about how she's not supposed to do that and the Doctor would never do that, even though these are standard Doctor things that literally every incarnation of the Doctor has done. The scene is clearly designed to show that Martin's character is the Doctor... but it also ends up showing that Whittaker's character isn't. It retroactively explains why Whittaker's Doctor seems so out-of-character for the Doctor in so many ways. Why is she suddenly terrified of social interactions? Why does she just walk away from a close friend who's trying to open up to her about his deepest fear? Why does she just let every villain walk away? Why does she sent a person of color to a holocaust concentration camp? Why does she love Amazon? They all have the same answer: she's not acting like the Doctor because she's not the Doctor. Capaldi's Doctor regenerated into Martin's Doctor, and Whittaker's Doctor is someone or something else entirely who just thinks she regenerated from Twelve. So what exactly is she, and why does she think she's the Doctor? Well, she's the Doctor's closest equivalent from the Cybus universe. Wait, no, she's a paradoxical alternate-timeline shard of the Doctor caused by the Time Lords interfering in her history to save themselves from the Master. Wait, no, she's the Master, regenerated from Missy and imprinted with the Doctor's memories Jackson Lake-style. Wait, no, she's actually E-Space itself, taking the form and memories of the last person to escape it before it collapsed into entropy, and the talking frog sentient universe was foreshadowing this. Wait, no, she was spat out by the Cracks in the Universe. Wait, no, she's a Florbozam, altered by Shawingian radiation from the Hirmnog Anomaly due to the schemes of Commissioner Sleer. It's Doctor Who, you can come up with whatever stupid sci-fi explanation you want. Sadly, the Timeless Children killed off the chance to go in this direction, and I don't think the show would ever have the guts to go "yeah the Doctor you've been following for the last two whole seasons wasn't really the Doctor". But it's what I genuinely thought Fugitive of the Judoon was setting up, and it's still what I wish we'd gotten.
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Jan 24, 2024 00:17
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I think that would be a terrible idea, but that's okay, we're fans and we're allowed to have our own terrible fanfic ideas about stuff "explaining" the Doctor and their adventures (I have plenty and they're all awful), because none of it will ever actually affect the show. Chibnall, for all he might have accomplished in television as a professional over his career, clearly let that internal fan take control when he was doing The Timeless Child nonsense. But immediately regretting it and deciding to just try and hum loudly while looking in another direction from it as he wrapped up his time on the show just made it worse.
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Jan 24, 2024 00:34
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I don't think I'd have liked the idea if I hadn't already been sour on Thirteen's run, and latching onto any fanficy way of saying "none of those stupid things happened" to wipe it away. Imagine getting entire seasons of Jo Martin's Doctor, though. I know Chibnall writing her would have given her all the same problems Chibnall's actual run had, but I can dream.
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Jan 24, 2024 00:51
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Finishing The Invisible Enemy, other than K-9 this is kind of dull. I'll finish it tonight but I am unimpressed.
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Jan 24, 2024 01:53
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PriorMarcus posted:I'd only bother explaining it more if they brought the Fugitive Doctor back too, because otherwise there's no value in further dwelling on it. There's multiple "messing with the Doctor's history" things in the show, including the Great Intelligence/Clara thing Moffat did and RTD's "an evil from outside Time and Space messed with you." Given the Doctor's centrality in the defeats of multiple powerful foes who had access to time travel themselves, you'd expect half of the Time War to be people trying to mess around with the Doctor's past. On Jo Martin, let's just recognize the colossal feat she accomplished: firstly, she has to play a chameleon-arched Doctor in a way that, when you find out she's a John Smith-type, you immediately say "Oh, I see that." Then, on a dime, she has to become the Doctor "again" (despite having never played the role before) and convey immediately a sense of someone who is established as the Doctor, not freshly regenerated and a little fluid in presentation. And she has to pull that off in less than a full episode, too. And she nails it so convincingly that, as several people have mentioned in different ways, she feels more like the Doctor than Whittaker does, on her own show. If scheduling permits, I can't imagine RTD wouldn't want her back. He just needs the right story. And frankly, he seems really intrigued with the possibilities opened up by The Timeless Child. "Let's rethink who the Doctor was" is interesting; equally interesting is the idea, which was well-established by Twelve's run but incompatible with One and Two, that the Doctor is not only a big revolutionary but that he pulled off big revolutionary stuff on Gallifrey and then took off in a stolen TARDIS. The Deadly Assassin isn't about how this infamous Time Lord fled and has now returned and murdered the President; at least Goth and Borusa know who the Doctor is, so there's enough hinting that you can pull off Seven's "more than just a Time Lord," though perhaps not to Timeless Child extremes. It's a show about time travel that includes parallel realities and changeable continuities. Why not have the Jo Martin Doctor remain a mystery, but suggest that she's possibly an incarnation of the Doctor who shouldn't exist at all? I do find myself wondering if RTD didn't give us a new form of regeneration as a first step toward an explanation of the Martin Doctor. Maybe Gatwa isn't the first Doctor to emerge from a regeneration while there's another Doctor in the room? We could get Season 6b not because Jo Martin was Three, but because Two was force regenerated into Three but before that they employed him as an agent... and before wiping his memory and dumping him on Earth, they created an alternate Doctor as the perfect agent. But if RTD wants to make Martin the Sixteenth Doctor, I will have no complaints at all.
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Jan 24, 2024 04:35
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I'm gobsmacked to this day that Chibnall decided to give the character a whole new backstory, in such a way that it indelibly stains the whole show. And even more than that, the Doctor finding out about that backstory wasn't even the plot of the episode it was revealed in. The Master used it as a distraction while he got his Time Lord Cybermen up and running. This insane retcon of the entire show was functionally a set of keys being jangled for a few minutes. And it was sandwiched between the bizarrely insane plot twists of Gallifrey being destroyed again and half of the entire universe being erased from existence. Chris, mate, what are you thinking
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Jan 24, 2024 05:19
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2house2fly posted:I'm gobsmacked to this day that Chibnall decided to give the character a whole new backstory, in such a way that it indelibly stains the whole show. And even more than that, the Doctor finding out about that backstory wasn't even the plot of the episode it was revealed in. The Master used it as a distraction while he got his Time Lord Cybermen up and running. This insane retcon of the entire show was functionally a set of keys being jangled for a few minutes. And it was sandwiched between the bizarrely insane plot twists of Gallifrey being destroyed again and half of the entire universe being erased from existence. Chris, mate, what are you thinking I think this is why RTD is driving into it instead of pretending that it doesn't exist - resolve it in some way to get the stench off.
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Jan 24, 2024 05:25
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It really does reek of someone who was young during the wilderness years, brain full of Cartmel what could have been, and then not being able to resist that impulse when he actually got control of the show. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just that it was implemented in a very poor way.
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Jan 24, 2024 05:55
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HD DAD posted:It really does reek of someone who was young during the wilderness years, brain full of Cartmel what could have been, and then not being able to resist that impulse when he actually got control of the show. He was barely young in 1986, when he was both 16 and 45: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSuxFK6Hhvw But even Cartmel and Co during the Wilderness era knew not to make things too explicit (with the exception of Lungbarrow).
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Jan 24, 2024 06:58
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I’m really bummed that Jo Martin’s incarnation will probably be a Doctor that only ever comes back for specials/anniversaries/one-offs etc. instead of getting at least one full season like all the others aside from 8 and War (and I guess technically 14). It feels like a waste because she rules in the role and absolutely deserves to have her own era. I’m sure the Big Finish audios are inevitable, but… it’s not the same as having televised stories.
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Jan 24, 2024 10:22
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I finished The Daemons and I liked it! Like a lot of the Pertwee era that I've seen there is definitely a sense of padding the runtime in the middle but at five parts it's not too severe. The Master doing full on black masses in a church basement rules and I like the concept of what the demon is a lot (Jerusalem calling it Quatermass filtered through Dr Who was spot on). Azal was very goofy with his extremely over the top vocal performance but that was also very entertaining in its own way. I also got a laugh out of UNIT's practical approach to dealing with the gargoyle henchman. This was a really fun story and I'm glad I watched it.
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Jan 24, 2024 15:27
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HD DAD posted:It really does reek of someone who was young during the wilderness years, brain full of Cartmel what could have been, and then not being able to resist that impulse when he actually got control of the show. There's a real danger in long running media of fans taking it over and turning everything into canonizing in their awful fan theories and wallowing in past references. When RTD revived the show I was worried that something like that would happen, but instead he treated the show as something fresh and distinct, not even really acknowledging that the original series happened (instead of an abstract, "Oh, the Doctor's been out there doing stuff and fighting monsters" way) until the second season. Davies knew that the series had to be accessible and made a point of that.
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Jan 24, 2024 15:28
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