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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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2house2fly posted:In The End Of Time he jumps out of a moving spaceship from hundreds of feet up. Though in that case his fall was broken by a glass ceiling Oh, that was lucky. So presumably in that case the death by falling and death by being sliced to pieces canceled each other out, like a double negative. The Time Lords thought of everything.
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Feb 12, 2024 19:52
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Her character was supposed to be the dead one in Broadchurch, but she kept surviving being thrown off the cliff, so they rewrote the story to be about a dead kid instead. This sentence is forcing me to rethink the whole "Irish cop who falls off a cliff" bit of (has to look up Chibnall episode title because Chibnall episode title) "Ascension of the Cybermen" as somehow making the Timeless Child plotline intersect metatextually with Broadchurch, and I really, really don't like it.
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Feb 12, 2024 20:07
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DoctorWhat posted:Yes but his death was time-locked by Ood prophecy to the radiation chamber/Wilf knocking. He literally couldn't die until then. Nah i don't buy that. Foreknowledge can be reinterpreted. "He will knock (his skull on the floor of a marble ballroom) four times!"
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Feb 12, 2024 20:11
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Open Source Idiom posted:Nah i don't buy that. Foreknowledge can be reinterpreted. Ordinary prophecies can be ambiguous, but Ood Sigma's foreknowledge was granted by the time-destroying foreshadow of Rassilon's plans to collapse reality and ascend beyond the material plane.
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Feb 12, 2024 20:24
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He used the ground pound just before he landed.
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Feb 12, 2024 20:32
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He waited until the very last second before he hit the ground and then he jumped.
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Feb 12, 2024 20:35
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SirSamVimes posted:So is Jodie Whittaker just immune to fall damage or something So was Ten.
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Feb 12, 2024 20:42
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We know for a fact that the 10th Doctor can survive 30 feet.
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Feb 12, 2024 21:01
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Wasn't there a serial where Five specifically can survive the vacuum of space because he's a Time Lord, or am I misremembering? I think he didn't need to breathe or couldn't be harmed by extreme cold. It's funny that sometimes a writer will just give the Doctor superpowers/D&D feats that the rest of the writers ignore.
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Feb 12, 2024 21:47
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Bicyclops posted:Wasn't there a serial where Five specifically can survive the vacuum of space because he's a Time Lord, or am I misremembering? I think he didn't need to breathe or couldn't be harmed by extreme cold. It's not that Time Lords didn't need to breathe in space, it was that he could survive it a lot longer than a human. This has been mentioned in passing a few times since that Fifth story, but I don't remember any other televised stories using it.
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Feb 12, 2024 21:51
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Bicyclops posted:Wasn't there a serial where Five specifically can survive the vacuum of space because he's a Time Lord, or am I misremembering? I think he didn't need to breathe or couldn't be harmed by extreme cold. Respiratory bypass has come up a few times, but yeah it's funny when the Doctor just has a new ability or gadget to get him out of a jam. Edit: he used it most recently in Oxygen
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Feb 12, 2024 21:52
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The cliffhanger at the end of Aliens of London was just resolved with "Time Lords can't get electrocuted lol"
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Feb 12, 2024 22:04
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And let us not forget that Time Lords can take massive doses of radiation and then shake it out their foot. We learned this in a Tenth story and fortunately he was never in a situation where that ability would be useful ever again.
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Feb 12, 2024 22:20
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2house2fly posted:In The End Of Time he jumps out of a moving spaceship from hundreds of feet up. Though in that case his fall was broken by a glass ceiling Ah, so Jodie survived because she was also breaking a glass ceiling
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Feb 12, 2024 23:15
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Dabir posted:Ah, so Jodie survived because she was also breaking a glass ceiling 
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Feb 12, 2024 23:41
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"You may find yourself revisiting some of your old falls, at least the favorites, eh?" Dabir posted:Ah, so Jodie survived because she was also breaking a glass ceiling Nice. 
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Feb 13, 2024 01:42
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Clouseau posted:One thing about Doctor Who's format is that at least many (not all) of the worst episodes are endlessly discussable. There's a lot of unremarkable bad, but Kill the Moon, Timelash, etc are just fascinating. And then you have the Chibnall era, where you get "bad, but worthy of endless discussion" on a good day and an awful lot of "bad, and so incoherent as to not be worth much discussion. (At least until someone behind the scene snaps and starts blabbing about what actually went down there. I'm convinced there's a fascinating behind the scenes story ripe to come out just as soon as someone gets resentful enough to disregard an NDA and start leaking.)
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Feb 13, 2024 04:06
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A review of a Chibnall episode I read recently described it as "not so much less than the sum of its parts as it is just a bunch of parts" which is pretty much the magic phrase that describes that entire era
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Feb 13, 2024 04:15
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Warthur posted:And then you have the Chibnall era, Yeah I almost singled this out as not being particularly fun to talk about but I noped out of it early, so maybe there was something intriguingly bad in there (probably not.)
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Feb 13, 2024 06:45
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Clouseau posted:Yeah I almost singled this out as not being particularly fun to talk about but I noped out of it early, so maybe there was something intriguingly bad in there (probably not.) Kerblam!, the Timeless Child stuff and Flux are all capable of generating huge amounts of discussion.
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Feb 13, 2024 07:52
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Kerblam!, the Timeless Child stuff and Flux are all capable of generating huge amounts of discussion. I couldn't remember the last two five minutes after I saw them.
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Feb 13, 2024 08:01
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Kerblam!, the Timeless Child stuff and Flux are all capable of generating huge amounts of discussion. My girlfriend and I currently watching through Chibnall stuff for the first time (me as someone who uses to watch, her as a first tike watcher as a whole) and we had plenty to complain about as of finishing Demons of the Punjabi.
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Feb 13, 2024 09:04
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I’ve already completely forgotten huge chunks of Chibnall’s tenure aside from that first season and Whittaker’s finale. Flux was the first time I ever just completely gave up watching the show because I just couldn’t find anything at all to hold my interest. It’s frustrating because every now and then you’d see flashes of genuine greatness. The Dhawan Master, the Fugitive Doctor, the concept of a “Last Cyberman”, really out there unique sci-fi stuff like It Takes You Away, etc. but it’s all buried beneath this intensely thick layer of malaise, often even within the same episodes as the aforementioned elements. Not to mention Whittaker’s Doctor herself. It’s cliché by now to say “oh I’d really love to see what [current showrunner] could do with [former Doctor]”, but imo it’s never been truer than with 13. She never really got her Heaven Sent or “Everybody lives!”, that one defining moment almost every previous Doctor seems to have that ends up defining that incarnation. And it’s entirely a failing of the writing because Jodie always gave a far better performance than any of those scripts deserved.
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Feb 13, 2024 09:34
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Whittaker's Doctor is absolutely one of those characters that will, hopefully, get pulled apart and put back together maybe ten to fifteen years down the line from her first appearance, similarly to how Craig Hinton/Steve Lyons worked to rehabilitate Mel, or what was done with Peri under Gary Russel, the Sixth Doctor generally... I think it's the most interesting part of the shared universe that Who exists within, this idea that someone can take an idea that wasn't working at all and a group of writers can collaborate to find a take that works. But I think the entire Chibnall era really struggles with shallow, bland characters -- you'd probably need to work from the ground upwards to do anything with anyone. I think Dahwan's Master is the only one that escapes, and that's because the part's so openly derivative of what Ainley and Simm were being given. Big Mean Jerk posted:the concept of a “Last Cyberman”, It's been so long I honestly can't remember what was going on with this plot, particularly the inexplicable the Irish dreamtime subplot. What's the deal here? Do you mean, like, a Cyberman chilling at the end of eternity or a Cyberman stuck by itself or...?
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Feb 13, 2024 10:15
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The best thing about the Last Cyberman, whose design I really didn't like, was what I thought was a fun bit of subversion where all its planning and threats just got completely undermined by the Master using the Tissue Compression Eliminator on it and being disappointed it's nuclear option didn't actually work and wipe them all out, but by the end of the Chibnall era I have a vague recollection that it comes back in the final special for some reason? Anyway if I recall correctly the concept is that it's literally the Last Cyberman, a half-converted Cyberman who comes up with a plan to get some mcguffin from the Doctor to restore the Cyberman race. I'm still slowly making my way through 13's run and getting close to those episodes now so it'll be interesting to see how much of it lines up with my memory and if I have a higher or lower opinion based on knowing where it all ends up.
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Feb 13, 2024 10:47
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Honestly my impression so far isn't that Whittaker is a good Doctor given bad scripts, it's that she may be a good actor but she's not a good Doctor. She just doesn't have the presence necessary to pull off the role.
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Feb 13, 2024 11:02
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I've seen a LOT of bad takes on the internet, but woof.
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Feb 13, 2024 11:12
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One of the biggest indictments of the Chibnall era for me was that Jodie Whittaker, at home with nothing but her costume and a phone camera during the lockdown, put together an incredibly sweet and pretty drat important video message for children (and, let's face it, quite a few adults) about how things were going to be okay. That really showcased to me that she "got" the Doctor, and it's maddening we rarely got to see that in the actual televised show itself. If somebody tells me now that actually Chibnall had a hand in writing that, it would just make things worse because it would indicate he COULD write 13 effectively and just... didn't? Moffat actually wrote a thing during that period as well if I recall correctly that was a rather lovely meta piece about a child in real life "talking" to the Doctor to help them through a tough time, where they both acknowledge that the Doctor is a television character but it doesn't matter because the message she brings is an entirely valid one for the real world. Why Chibnall couldn't manage the same for a character he was the primary writer for, who he cast, and who he'd written and cast in an excellent series before Doctor Who continues to bewilder me: I really do think Chibnall let his inner spotty 16-year-old turbo-nerd fan self get filtered far too much into his writing for Who and it's a drat shame.
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Feb 13, 2024 11:18
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FWIW I think a lot of choices that go into the 13th Doctor are strange ones, both in the sense that they're orthogonal to recent trends in characterisation of the Doctor, and because they're so inconsistently delivered. Like, it's pretty clear to me that Whittaker's Doctor expresses her discomfort with human beings and social interaction in ways different to other Doctors -- there's some level of social anxiety to her. So you'll have moments like the end to that earfingers story where she clams up and refuses to talk to people, but you'll also have the occasional "I'm the Doctor and I say go gently caress yourself" speech where she seems quite self-certain. I think this is part and parcel of Chibnall's interest in having a non-hierarchical structure to the TARDIS crew -- e.g. "fam" and not "Doctor and companions" -- because he's got some half formed ideas about power imbalances that he's trying to address in his depiction. Whittaker's dealing with a fairly inconsistent take, which isn't a new or unique problem for the series, but I don't think she overcomes what's going on.
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Feb 13, 2024 11:39
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hey if we're wishing for more past doctors with good stories give me more 7 and Ace, thanks in advance.
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Feb 13, 2024 11:46
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Yeah I would say that Jodie struggled to really impress herself on the role but I'm pretty sure that's down to the inconsistent writing - it must have been very frustrating as an actor to work with. I think the socially awkward stuff works well and I think she's faced more criticism for it than a male doctor would have because, well, with my feminism hat on, it is expected that women are more socially agreeable. It's just a shame that I think Chibnall doesn't land it on the whole.
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Feb 13, 2024 12:15
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There was this running character beat throughout the whole thing where she's constantly keeping secrets and not being honest with her companions and they keep calling her out and getting frustrated, and it happens in the last special too, and then that episode just ends without addressing that or anything. Like it wasn't an arc, just a thing that happened
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Feb 13, 2024 13:37
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Jerusalem posted:Moffat actually wrote a thing during that period as well if I recall correctly that was a rather lovely meta piece about a child in real life "talking" to the Doctor to help them through a tough time, where they both acknowledge that the Doctor is a television character but it doesn't matter because the message she brings is an entirely valid one for the real world. Why Chibnall couldn't manage the same for a character he was the primary writer for, who he cast, and who he'd written and cast in an excellent series before Doctor Who continues to bewilder me: I really do think Chibnall let his inner spotty 16-year-old turbo-nerd fan self get filtered far too much into his writing for Who and it's a drat shame. If what you're talking about is "From the Doctor to my son Thomas," then it's all Capaldi.
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Feb 13, 2024 13:45
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SirSamVimes posted:Honestly my impression so far isn't that Whittaker is a good Doctor given bad scripts, it's that she may be a good actor but she's not a good Doctor. She just doesn't have the presence necessary to pull off the role. I'll confess I thought the same thing about Davison at first, but I was eight, and also I had already seen him with his arm up a cow's rear end. But he, like Jodie, did the best with the scripts he was given and made the role his own. The Doctor has a lot of personalities, I have no problem accepting all of them for what they are. I do wonder if at least some of the problems with 13 (after the writing, of course) were bad/inconsistent director's notes. I always thought I saw a bit of Tennant in her depictions from time to time, mainly every time she had to twist her face up to say "ohhhh naaauuuuuu". Like the director was there doing take after take, going "okay love, can we do it a again, but with more gurning, yeah? ... no, even more gurning than that... look, let me just queue up a supercut of David doing it, do it like that". Like the directors were at a loss for directing Woman Doctor (or were afraid of fan backlash), so they just encouraged her to do more tics from the most popular recent Doctor.
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Feb 13, 2024 14:09
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I wish we got more of the prickly no filter 13 that we got for like thirty seconds in Resolution when Ryan's dad showed up. That would have been an interesting angle.
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Feb 13, 2024 15:06
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Open Source Idiom posted:It's been so long I honestly can't remember what was going on with this plot, particularly the inexplicable the Irish dreamtime subplot. What's the deal here? The Last Cyberman is actually the Lone Cyberman, everyone's just misremembering the name. He's not the last Cyberman left alive in the future, but the Cybermen were losing their war to genocide all humans (which for some reason is their goal in the far future, no "we muzzt survive" here), and he's alone because for some reason his incomplete conversion makes him the only Cyberman that can be sent back in time to get the macguffin to make the Cybermen start winning again. Maybe cyber-time travel works on Terminator rules. He's only alone for the first half-episode where he appears, after that he's surrounded by other Cybermen doing war stuff. Also at one point he stabs a hibernating Cyberman to dead with a chainsaw or something for literally no reason? He was good for like half an episode and just a boring angry guy after that. The inexplicable Irish dreamtime subplot shared an episode with the Last Cyberman but was completely unrelated to him in every way, because it was part of the Timeless Child stuff. Dream Irishman was actually the story of the Timeless Child Doctor falling off a cliff, regenerating, joining the Time Lord black ops Division, and eventually having their memory wiped at retirement. Why was it presented to us in the form of Dream Irishman? Who loving knows. The Master indicates to Thirteen that she's been having dreams about Dream Irishman, but there's literally nothing about the Dream Irishman segments that indicates they're appearing as dreams, or are appearing diagetically to any of the characters, or that Thirteen has any awareness of the Dream Irishman at all. The segments are just randomly sprinkled around the Chibnall Does Earthshock episode, during which the Doctor is notably not asleep. The Master says the Timeless Child backstory is being presented as Dream Irishman to disguise it in the Matrix by the Division for some reason? I'd have thought the memories of a random human instead of a random Time Lord would be a very suspicious and bad way to hide something in the Matrix. It never made any sense and I genuinely think Chibnall just wanted to pretend he was writing Broadchurch again. Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Feb 13, 2024 |
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Feb 13, 2024 15:21
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Chibnall wrote, far, far too much of the era himself. And telling Whittaker to do as little research as possible was a terrible creative decision. Tennant and Calpaldi were already fans when they took the role. Smith apparently spent time before filming watching as many serials as possible, and writing his own fan fiction (and I'm guessing his working relationship with Wendy Padbury helped too). Gatwa had a huge binge watch. Whittaker was told not to. You could see her passion for the role, but she wasn't given all the tools she needed to shine. Anyway, Theatre of War! One of the novel adaptations - the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Benny land a planet being explored by a race of theatre obessed colonists, who are looking for a legendary lost play said to be stored in a recording machine. But not everything is what is seems... I really liked this one! For some reason, Big Finish haven't done many stories featuring 7, Ace and Benny together, but it's a trio that works really well, even in bland stuff like The Dark Flame. They have a strange relationship with the VNA era - some concepts are treated as canon, but some aren't (they even say in the behind the scenes stuff for Love and War that Ace's departure doesn't really fit), but here we've got a story streamlined to fit into the standard characterisation, and it's a really cracking story. There's a great sense of mystery that slowly bulids, a clever twist-y scheme, and this is the first audio I've listened to with Irving Braxiatel, and what a character he is! Charming, yet oily, serving as an interesting mirror image to the Doctor's eccentric nature. Hopefully with the novel adaptations returning, we can get some more in this style.
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Feb 13, 2024 15:22
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I feel bad because I think Chibnall really, really tried and his casting was progressive, and some of his ideas were good, but2house2fly posted:"not so much less than the sum of its parts as it is just a bunch of parts" definitely sums up a lot of his run, unfortunately. Jodie Whitaker definitely had the presence to pull off the Doctor, though. If she ever comes back, I hope they give Thirteen a chance to be properly angry about something. That feels like the part of her range that she didn't get to use much during her run.
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Feb 13, 2024 15:43
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Progressive casting doesn't mean anything if you don't give the actors any character. Did Ryan even DO anything, aside from sometimes mention dyspraxia? (And apparently the writers would have to be reminded of that by Tosin Cole!). Given that Majorie Blackman co-wrote it, I'm still shocked by how clunky and awakard Rosa was. Bill was a much better character - her being black and a lesbian was part of her character, but it wasn't her only character traits.
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Feb 13, 2024 15:47
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armpit_enjoyer posted:If what you're talking about is "From the Doctor to my son Thomas," then it's all Capaldi. Moffat wrote a short story called The Umpty-Ums or something, where a villain is repelled from attacking a kid by the power of the Umpty-Ums, which turn out to be the Doctor Who theme tune and the whole thing is taking place in the kid's imagination E: looked it up, it's worth reading even if that description was a turn-off. Moffat worked a bit of magic with it, and it's probably 13th Doctor's most heroic adventure https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/doctorwho/entries/a094ba61-81b2-465b-9b87-2f509fe2a117 2house2fly fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Feb 13, 2024 |
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Feb 13, 2024 15:59
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