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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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It's a fool's laughter, 2house2fly. All sound and fury signifying nothing. I don't know if I came up with this, or if somebody here said it and I just adopted it, but his entire run is The Silence. You can't retain it. The moment you look away, it just VOIPs from your mind.
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Feb 27, 2024 01:13
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I don't think it's been brought up yet, but Elizabeth Sandifer of Eruditorum Press has started covering the Chibnall era. I'm only up to the Rosa entry so far, but... it is brutal, unsurprisingly.
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Feb 27, 2024 01:37
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LividLiquid posted:I don't know if I came up with this, or if somebody here said it and I just adopted it, but his entire run is The Silence. You can't retain it. The moment you look away, it just VOIPs from your mind. It’s so true. Until I decided to catch up on this thread, I had assumed I tapped out of season 11 after the one two punch of Rosa and Arachnids in the UK, watched Fugitive of the Judoon and The Timeless Children to see what the fuss was about, and then the specials to see how they finished out Jodie’s run. But when I read Jerusalem’s reviews of the S12 episodes, I realised I’ve watched the entirety of that season. The review of Praxeus was amazing, because I couldn’t remember it at all, and wasn’t until the bit with Yaz being in the trash pile was mentioned that I suddenly remembered that exact scene, and that one neuron firing unlocked memories of the rest of the episode, including the bits already discussed. My memories of S12 had eroded so badly that my brain was assuming I had seen the Master being handed over to Nazis scene on YouTube, because I just couldn’t remember the rest of the episode it was in. I’m actually questioning if I tapped out where I thought I did in S11, or if I’ve just forgotten the other episodes completely.
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Feb 27, 2024 04:59
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Rochallor posted:I don't think it's been brought up yet, but Elizabeth Sandifer of Eruditorum Press has started covering the Chibnall era. I'm only up to the Rosa entry so far, but... it is brutal, unsurprisingly. My days of thinking that she is an overly pretentious critic in love with her own cleverness are certainly reaching a middle.
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Feb 27, 2024 08:18
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lines posted:My days of thinking that she is an overly pretentious critic in love with her own cleverness are certainly reaching a middle. The review of Rosa is great, but yeah, she is too verbose for me most of the time, so I end up skim reading large amounts of the text. I agree (mostly) with everything she says, but she's far too positive about some episodes for my taste (Kill the Moon, Forest of the Night and Karblam!*) come to mind. *To clarify she thinks the episode is pretty good until the ending absolutely tanks it, whilst I think it's dogshit all the way down.
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Feb 27, 2024 10:06
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I have witnessed the Timeless Children and even though I have been spoiled on what the reveal is, I am still dumbfounded by how stupid it is.
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Feb 27, 2024 10:12
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PriorMarcus posted:The review of Rosa is great, but yeah, she is too verbose for me most of the time, so I end up skim reading large amounts of the text. I agree (mostly) with everything she says, but she's far too positive about some episodes for my taste (Kill the Moon, Forest of the Night and Karblam!*) come to mind. Kerblam! spends about five minutes or so tricking you into thinking it's come up with a dystopia to do some interesting poo poo with like Happiness Patrol or Oxygen but nope, absolutely fucks it into a bin. What a waste of a premise.
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Feb 27, 2024 10:21
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I will say that her Witchfinders review, which is the most recent one, articles a point I've always been really reluctant to discuss, and that's the maybe Whitaker, even with the poo poo material she was given, just isn't a very good Doctor? Like, I was all on board with the idea that she wasn't given the scripts and material (she wasn't) but then I think about how much of her era has just slid off my brain, and how little of her Doctor I have a grasp on, and I can fairly safely say that she really didn't do anything to elevate the material. I think, with every other Doctor, that when they had bad scripts they still managed to do something memorable with them, but Whitaker just... doesn't? I won't quite the review at length here, but I do recommend reading it. https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/qui-quae-quod-the-witchfinders
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Feb 27, 2024 10:32
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lines posted:My days of thinking that she is an overly pretentious critic in love with her own cleverness are certainly reaching a middle. PriorMarcus posted:The review of Rosa is great, but yeah, she is too verbose for me most of the time, so I end up skim reading large amounts of the text. I agree (mostly) with everything she says, but she's far too positive about some episodes for my taste (Kill the Moon, Forest of the Night and Karblam!*) come to mind. I tune out on a Sandifer article if it's apparent that it's either a) one of those ones where she's Doing A Gimmick, because the gimmick often involves deflecting discussion of the actual thing at hand in favour of working on her hobby horses (yes El we get it you like William Blake and occultism) or b) one of those ones where she's either being a contrarian taking the "redemptive readings" thing to an extreme to try and argue the merits of clearly dogshit episodes, or she genuinely does believe the episode is good in which case OK, El, great, we might as well be different species when it comes to our aesthetic preferences and outlook because there's no conversation we can productively have which starts from the axiom that Forest of the Night has redeeming features. But if she's not going down either of those lanes her stuff's very neat. And I appreciate that she's not doing the "redemptive readings" schtick with Chibnall because she concluded that it isn't meaningly possible to do it.
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Feb 27, 2024 10:34
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PriorMarcus posted:I will say that her Witchfinders review, which is the most recent one, articles a point I've always been really reluctant to discuss, and that's the maybe Whitaker, even with the poo poo material she was given, just isn't a very good Doctor? Like, I was all on board with the idea that she wasn't given the scripts and material (she wasn't) but then I think about how much of her era has just slid off my brain, and how little of her Doctor I have a grasp on, and I can fairly safely say that she really didn't do anything to elevate the material. I think, with every other Doctor, that when they had bad scripts they still managed to do something memorable with them, but Whitaker just... doesn't? I’m much less sure what anyone could use as the kernel of a Thirteenth Doctor Story Only Good This Time. The bit at the end of It Takes You Away where she manages a bit of conversational manoeuvring to get the humans to reject/be rejected by the Solitract, in order to propel them out of the mirror world to safety, perhaps, but that’s literally one moment in three seasons and a cluster of specials. I really don’t think she has any other truly great moments in her run which make you sit up and think “Yes, this is what the Doctor is supposed to be about”, particularly once you get to entire seasons based around her getting upstaged by Jo Martin or blithely watching the Master do a Powerpoint presentation in the Matrix and then assuming it’s true, after the Master has demonstrated that the Matrix can lie in literally every preceding story involving the Master interacting with the Matrix. Sure, it’s not Whittaker’s fault, but it still means that there’s precious little material to build on there. Honestly, the absolute best thing she did as the Doctor was that video message she improv’d at home at the start of the COVID lockdowns, but whilst that was nice and heartwarming and a lovely gesture, it’s not a foundation you can build a full-size story on, any more than you can infer World Enough and Time or Heaven Sent from that video message Capaldi did in-character to the autistic kid who was struggling with grieving a grandparent.
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Feb 27, 2024 10:37
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Warthur posted:I’m much less sure what anyone could use as the kernel of a Thirteenth Doctor Story Only Good This Time. The bit at the end of It Takes You Away where she manages a bit of conversational manoeuvring to get the humans to reject/be rejected by the Solitract, in order to propel them out of the mirror world to safety, perhaps, but that’s literally one moment in three seasons and a cluster of specials. I agree with everything you said. For me the version of Thirteen I'd like to see more of is the mad inventor we get a glimpse of at the end of her first episode, and briefly again when she's doing work on the Tardis. But, it's striking to me that with Thirteen this is something I've grasped onto and want to see more of, but with Eleven he was routinely tinkering in the control room and I just think of them as neat beats in his larger character. Her being a mad inventor isn't even text at this point and it's certainly not enough to build a better version of the character from, it's just one of the few aesthetic choices the show made for her that stands out as ever so slightly different to the other Doctors. Of course, Martin was also dealing with the same scripts by the same writers, and she does a great job of being the Doctor and feeling like there's a full character there to explore. I'm more excited for the Big Finish audios announced for Martin, with all the baggage her character brings with it, than I would be for Thirteen audios.
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Feb 27, 2024 10:44
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To be fair Eleven tinkering in the control room felt more like something going on between him and the TARDIS than it did him being a mad inventor.
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Feb 27, 2024 11:00
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In my mad thrashing about trying to find SOMETHING to latch onto character-wise for 13 (and I still don't blame Whittaker, I lay all the blame on Chibnall), the best I could do was to try and piece together what I wanted to be an intentional character development choice but which was probably just a result of inconsistent writing. Up to The Witchfinders, 13 approaches situations as she always has: she shows up and quickly takes control, people naturally follow her, she and the antagonist clash heads as enemies but ones who see the danger the other represents (albeit often belatedly on the antagonist's behalf). But she has progressively been finding this oddly more of a struggle. Part of this is down to the (laudable) decision by Chibnall not to tell his writers the Doctor was going to be a woman, so they would simply write for the Doctor and not a woman Doctor. But I like to think there was more behind the idea. In The Witchfinders, the Doctor has her position as Witchfinder General immediately ignored by the king despite the psychic paper because his mindset simply can't comprehend of a woman (who isn't the former Queen) in charge. She notes grumpily that she has started to notice people don't just listen to her like they used to, as she runs headfirst for the first time into the unfairness and stupidity of sexism from a woman's perspective. Which as I think I have mentioned before is a nice contrast to her telling Martha back when she was a white male that "you just act like you belong and know what you're doing and people will just accept it", which was a staggeringly privilege-blind thing to say. Anyway, I started noticing from that point at least a couple/three times that the Doctor started sidelining antagonists in her confrontations with them by letting them think they had her on the back foot, all while she was busy playing some other angle that they hadn't noticed at all. Perhaps the best example is in Resolution or Ascension of the Cybermen when she confronts the Dalek or Ashad and lets them taunt and goad her while she's actually dredging for information and insight into their plans or probing for their weaknesses without them realizing until till late that she had gotten one over on them. This theory doesn't really hold up much to scrutiny, not just because Daleks and Cybermen don't give a gently caress about gender but because Chibnall's run with the benefit of hindsight seemed to have no idea what it was actually trying to do or say beyond a bunch of (often welcome) attempts to be more representative of gender, race, social issues and overlooked points of history. But you (I) make what you can from the patchwork mess of disconnected or abandoned ideas that the Chibnall era gave. As for Jodie Whittaker? The only way to ever know if she could have done better is if she gets a chance to be in the role again under a different showrunner... and I would loving welcome the chance to see that. She deserves the opportunity.
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Feb 27, 2024 11:55
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I think the fact that she wasn't previously a fan is fine but the fact that I believe she wasn't encouraged to watch some of the deeper history of the show is bonkers to me. I don't really understand how she approached the role at all. I like her as an actor but over time I think I'm more willing to admit that she isn't an amazing Doctor, and that loving sucks because I don't think it's a gender thing but it lumps me in with a bunch of chuds who do think that.
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Feb 27, 2024 12:01
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PriorMarcus posted:For me the version of Thirteen I'd like to see more of is the mad inventor we get a glimpse of at the end of her first episode, and briefly again when she's doing work on the Tardis. But, it's striking to me that with Thirteen this is something I've grasped onto and want to see more of, but with Eleven he was routinely tinkering in the control room and I just think of them as neat beats in his larger character. Except for Resolution, where they have the home-forged Dalek casing sequence, which is a nice parallel and would be an even better parallel if 13 had done any mad inventor stuff after her first episode.
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Feb 27, 2024 12:02
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PriorMarcus posted:I will say that her Witchfinders review, which is the most recent one, articles a point I've always been really reluctant to discuss, and that's the maybe Whitaker, even with the poo poo material she was given, just isn't a very good Doctor? Like, I was all on board with the idea that she wasn't given the scripts and material (she wasn't) but then I think about how much of her era has just slid off my brain, and how little of her Doctor I have a grasp on, and I can fairly safely say that she really didn't do anything to elevate the material. I think, with every other Doctor, that when they had bad scripts they still managed to do something memorable with them, but Whitaker just... doesn't? As difficult as it is to test the hypothesis, the counter-example of Mandip Gill always trying to find something to do despite the scripts barely remembering she exists is a good one. A lot of the discourse around Whitaker was so toxic and sexist that it kind of inoculated criticism of her among people who aren't insane. Warthur posted:I'll say here what I said there: “Jodie got sandbagged by by bad scripts” is a testable hypothesis. Colin Baker had essentially no five-star scripts during his stint, but then audios happened and it was great. But that's because Colin is an exceptionally good actor for allowing a glimpse of a better version of his Doctor to emerge in brief flashes during television stories largely designed to undermine him, and it was those flashes people used as a basis for later stories. Many of his best audios (at least of those I have heard, and I admit I’ve only heard the early ones up to The Holy Terror or thereabouts) seem to be built on the idea of “OK, what if we let Colin do more of That Thing or This Bit, in a story which better supported it?”, and to his credit he grabbed those opportunities with both hands and wholly exonerated himself. Colin is obviously much better on audio, but I don't know if I'd agree that his work there expands much on his TV performance. Like, audio Colin and TV Colin have a little in common, but they're basically as different as any other pair of Doctors. Warthur posted:I really don’t think she has any other truly great moments in her run which make you sit up and think “Yes, this is what the Doctor is supposed to be about”, particularly once you get to entire seasons based around her getting upstaged by Jo Martin The way everybody was instantly agog about Jo Martin is maybe the most damning evidence against Thirteen (largely as written, maybe a bit as acted). The first thing you want to do when introducing that sort of inverted character is make them everything that your main character is not, which requires you to think exactly about what your character is. And Chibnall, in maybe his most insightful moment across three series, correctly deduced that the inversion of Thirteen is a character who does stuff and is proactive.
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Feb 27, 2024 12:09
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lines posted:I think the fact that she wasn't previously a fan is fine but the fact that I believe she wasn't encouraged to watch some of the deeper history of the show is bonkers to me. I don't really understand how she approached the role at all. If a dude Doctor did that, I'd punt him to the bottom of the ranking without a second thought. If Jodie had done a really, truly amazing job of rising above the material she was given, I could see an argument for not ranking her at bottom. But she just doesn't. 6 does awful poo poo in his first serial but he is at least on an upward curve after that but Jodie starts with an unusually weak season for the revived show and it just declines from there. So I can't differentiate myself from the chuds by saying "actually, she was a good Doctor", and pretending I believe that for the sake of pwning the chuds would be as risible as when they pretend to believe something just to pwn the libs. But I can come to different conclusions. She's not the worst Doctor because she's a woman or because of any deficiency in her performance, she's the worst Doctor because her era got comprehensively fumbled, and if the first woman to play the role has her era derailed by lovely management that's not a "checkmate, feminists" point, that's a "structural sexism did this" point.
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Feb 27, 2024 12:10
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Rochallor posted:Colin is obviously much better on audio, but I don't know if I'd agree that his work there expands much on his TV performance. Like, audio Colin and TV Colin have a little in common, but they're basically as different as any other pair of Doctors. Naur. Under Gary Russel there was an attempt to craft an arc for the guy (impressive given his stories were out of order) but that's long since fallen by the wayside. Partly because Baker just can't do a lot of the voice anymore tbh.
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Feb 27, 2024 12:11
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Rochallor posted:Colin is obviously much better on audio, but I don't know if I'd agree that his work there expands much on his TV performance. Like, audio Colin and TV Colin have a little in common, but they're basically as different as any other pair of Doctors. The thing with 13 is that if you do the same sandpapering job... there is nothing left.
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Feb 27, 2024 12:13
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I think, for Thirteen to ever have a successful second life, you'd basically have to create an entirely new character whilst keeping some of the (failed) ideas of the series under Chibnall as the foundations. Maybe have her travel with a Tardis Fam of a few people, but do a better job juggling it, have her meet River and still fancy her, politically interesting historical stories, etc. It says a lot that the most interesting things about Chibnall's run was always the intent behind ideas rather than the execution (cast a female Doctor, politically aware in historical episodes, bring mystery back to the Doctor). Making her a kind of mad inventor/trickster, because she can't rely on having the inherent authority of being a white male anymore could be fun.
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Feb 27, 2024 12:22
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What does it mean to be politically aware in a historical story, as opposed to Moffat's Thin Ice and such?
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Feb 27, 2024 12:26
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Open Source Idiom posted:What does it mean to be politically aware in a historical story, as opposed to Moffat's Thin Ice and such? Honestly it's very hard to articulate the differences, but I'd say that the Chibnall historical episodes (certainly in the first season when the show at least seemed to have some ideas of it's own) tried to set historical stories in a broader political landscape/social movement, rather than a snapshot in time. I don't think they were very successful, but I'd also say that more than any defining trait of Thirteen's character it's one of the things that defines her Doctor.
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Feb 27, 2024 12:38
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Open Source Idiom posted:What does it mean to be politically aware in a historical story, as opposed to Moffat's Thin Ice and such? Rosa and Demons of the Punjab suggest an interest in recent, important, and controversial parts of history in a way that Moffat (and Davies) didn't really display.
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Feb 27, 2024 12:52
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Of course part of the reason I am very down on the Chibnall era is that it comes immediately after Capaldi, who's my favourite Doctor of all time and whose last season is my favourite of the revived show. The drop-off of quality is stark, and beyond Gallifrey being a place which can be visited reasonably easily rather than being tucked in a pocket universe, there's zero sign that Chibnall even watched the Capaldi era. Like, you could have 11 regenerate directly into 13 and the 13 era would make as much sense.
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Feb 27, 2024 12:56
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Again, might just be grasping at straws, but the Doctor's suddenly aggressive demands that Graham, Ryan and Yaz not follow her to confront the Cyberman in The Haunting of Villa Diodati suggested to me that Bill Potts was right at the forefront of her mind and she was horrified at the thought of the same thing happening to any of them. Her furious ordering of them felt quite out of character for her, though whether that was a wrinkle Whittaker brought or it was the guest writer actually putting 2+2 together that the Doctor's last encounter with Cybermen ending in the horrific conversion of her friend/student/protege should actually have some impact I don't know.
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Feb 27, 2024 13:35
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lines posted:I think the fact that she wasn't previously a fan is fine but the fact that I believe she wasn't encouraged to watch some of the deeper history of the show is bonkers to me. I don't really understand how she approached the role at all. This is a bizarre one. I don't think you have to be a fan of something to act in it, but you'd research the part surely. As I recall, Matt Smith wasn't a fan of the show either but Steven Moffat got him to watch some old serials to inform his performance. And of course Peter Capaldi is a lifelong fan which allowed him to add things like offering people jelly babies out of a cigar case
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Feb 27, 2024 14:22
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2house2fly posted:This is a bizarre one. I don't think you have to be a fan of something to act in it, but you'd research the part surely. As I recall, Matt Smith wasn't a fan of the show either but Steven Moffat got him to watch some old serials to inform his performance. And of course Peter Capaldi is a lifelong fan which allowed him to add things like offering people jelly babies out of a cigar case I don't think I've ever really seen her talk much about the show and I would be quite interested in her take on it all.
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Feb 27, 2024 14:24
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lines posted:I don't think I've ever really seen her talk much about the show and I would be quite interested in her take on it all. Chibnall is on record as telling her not to watch any of the show as research.
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Feb 27, 2024 14:40
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For a show so reliant on callbacks to its own history that’s such a wild thing to tell the new lead.
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Feb 27, 2024 15:55
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Big Mean Jerk posted:For a show so reliant on callbacks to its own history that’s such a wild thing to tell the new lead. I dunno, maybe Chibnall thought he was doing an RTD and reinventing the show? Series 1 had minimal callbacks to the show's history apart from the basics that everyone knew and I guess the Autons but it explains them entirely.
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Feb 27, 2024 16:00
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13’s first season felt very lonely, like they’d slipped into a new, unfamiliar universe. There were no enemies or characters we’d seen before, no UNIT, nothing you could latch onto aside from the Doctor and the TARDIS. And both of those were different from what we knew, making it all feel a bit more uncertain.
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Feb 27, 2024 16:29
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I watched Pyramids of Mars and it was pretty good! Sutekh was a good villain despite being immobile thanks to a really strong vocal performance and the makeup on his human puppet was suitably creepy. Could have probably done without the big beefy robot mummies though, they were distractingly goofy in a story that otherwise sells the threat of Sutekh very well. I think the atmosphere could have been better maintained if they were replaced with other humans under Sutekh's control or a bunch of cultists or something. I really like the dynamic between the 4th Doctor and Sarah Jane. Baker and Sladen have very good chemistry and the way that they needle each other all the time is fun.
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Feb 27, 2024 16:33
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I think the problem is that Chibnall’s scripts don’t support a Thirteen who really needs to be more like Troughton and less like Davison. And I’d argue that Whittaker is actually perfectly good at the Doctor’s “enthusiastic wonder at something that in this era is a green screen where effects will be added later.” Given that multiple episodes don’t give her much more to work with, that’s important, but that glee should be attached to something more active or engaged, probably the “SCIENCE!” angle we get in her sonic screwdriver crafting scene and in one or two other spots like the science explainers in The Tsuranga Conundrum. Without that, her best acting trick is happening early in the episode and then gets buried by everything that follows it. I’d even argue that it’s the opportunity to have these moments later that makes her best in her best episodes, like her glee at meeting a universe in It Takes You Away. Sandifer is good with the literary analysis end of things, but I don’t get the sense she understands acting very much. “A good actor elevates the material” is a truism in Doctor Who but it’s also mostly nonsense. Very few actors can do everything: Tom Baker has some very severe weaknesses as an actor, but he played Four essentially as himself and he coupled that with a possessiveness concerning his performance. Part of how he can make a poor script better (if he cares to) is because of the same things that often made him awful to work with; Elisabeth Sladen also sometimes rewrote her lines, but she wasn’t abusive to her workmates. Pertwee has multiple strengths and weaknesses, and whenever he has to power through a sequence that doesn’t work you can expect him to tap one of them, whether it’s pomposity or his comedy chops, and for every time that works out we also get a Pertwee’s comedy gurning scene or a hi-keeba moment. I think Capaldi is generally acknowledged as the best actor in terms of craft to play the role, and he has weaknesses, too. Besides the craft, you can sometimes tell that he’s imagined himself playing this part for most of his own career (and maybe earlier than that), so he comes across as natural in the shouty-confrontation scenes. OTOH, I’m unsure he always manages to salvage the “I need an emotional interpreter” aspects of the character, especially as it’s handled so inconsistently. Whittaker’s strengths as a performer actually fit really well with what Chibnall is trying to do. The problem is that means she’s reinforcing and supporting his poo poo ideas instead of subverting them. She strikes me as a profoundly humble and generous actor (a similarity with Davison), but that means she’s dutifully trying to support Chibnall’s writing instead of taking the Tom-like “this script is poo poo so I’ll be taking the piss now” approach. Witness the beginning and ending sections of Kerblam!. She really sells the Doctor’s excitment over this corporation and its mascot (contrast with Sylv’s response to the Psychic Circus advertisement, where he can’t sell excitement but that reinforces the obvious “I want to manipulate Ace into going” subtext), and she keeps that excitement in tne conclusion where she’s defending the “system” as being better than people. It’s a poo poo message, it rubs fans the wrong way, and it does that because this feels like a betrayal of who the Doctor has always been: no wonder Chibnall told Whittaker not to watch past episodes! I just don’t get the sense that Whittaker is overly interested in finding ways that a story is poo poo and then “salvaging” them through performance: she’s pretty much enthusiastic and on-board and doesn’t see anything wrong, because her context is pretty much limited to Chibnall’s vision for her character. We get a few glimpses that suggest to me that she could have emphasized aspects of Two, Seven, and Eight in her performance. If she’d been allowed to be more emotionally open and savvy, she could have played an effective understander and manipulator of other characters. Chibnall probably avoided that because he didn’t want the first female Doctor to be the “emotionally intelligent” one, but the contrast with Twelve was sorely needed. I also think the fundamental flaws with the Chibnall era aren’t ones an actor can salvage. He cast the first woman in the role; he doesn’t actually seem interested in exploring issues related to gender in the show itself. And only 7 out of her 31 stories don’t have Chibnall’s name on them as writer or co-writer: Demons of the Punjab, Kerblam!, The Witchfinders, It Takes You Away, Orphan 55, Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terrors, and The Haunting of Villa Diodati. I doubt even Capaldi could salvage Orphan 55; the others feature most of her best performances. I conclude that she was overly deferential to Chibnall’s vision for the character, and given her short run, she never really got the chance to put her own stamp on the role. When she did try, the scripts undercut her: you can see signs of Thirteen as a “carer,” but then Chibnall repeatedly writes scenes where the character shuts down emotionally. I even daresay that there’s a bit of a double-standard here. A woman performing a part can rarely get away with acting like Tom Baker, and will be tagged with labels a lot worse than “eccentric” if she does. So Whittaker is trained to help the showrunner (who she’s worked with already) to fulfill his vision,, plus I think she genuinely wants to do so, even if she’s unsure quite what that vision is. Blaming her failure to elevate material when that elevation would subvert Chibnall’s vision for the character on her acting ability seems unfair to me.
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Feb 27, 2024 17:09
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Ha, I hadn’t realized her best episodes were all non-Chibnall but that makes perfect sense in retrospect.
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Feb 27, 2024 17:14
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I agree with what you say Narsham, but I am going to add a layer of nuance to it. Tom Baker got to the point where he was subverting entire episodes over time. In his first season he was still easing into the role and Elisabeth Sladen and Robert Holmes both had more tenure on the show than him - Sladen as the incumbent companion and Holmes as the regular writer turned script editor. Robot was written to accommodate a range of interpretations of the character because it was knocked out before the casting decision was actually finalised, but if Baker had wandered onto the set and then immediately started outright subverting important bits then he probably wouldn't have been Doctor for long. The major point of comparison, I would actually say, is Colin Baker, who was turbofucked from his very first story. Is it really plausible that Colin Baker could have walked on set and proclaimed "we aren't going to have me throttle Peri, thank you, let's try another way to get what that scene is going for without totally contaminating the companion relationship from day one"? No, I don't think it is. Actors generally need to pay some dues before they pull creative control stunts. Which kind of plays into the other reason why "What would a good version of 13's run look like?" is a tricky question. We don't hold The Dominators or The Power of Kroll against Troughton or Tom Baker because we know they're capable of better. Before Big Finish, it wouldn't be a totally unsupportable fan opinion to hold Colin Baker responsible in part for his TV run, because you'd have precious little evidence that he was actually capable of taking the lead in a genuinely good story. Whether or not Whittaker could be a truly compelling Doctor is an untested question. On Whittaker being told not to research the role: yeah, it's ridiculous. You could imagine the merits of someone coming to a role completely fresh without preconceptions if the show in question were culturally obscure, but Doctor Who isn't - so if she had to play the role without watching any of the old stuff she wouldn't be coming to it without preconceptions, she'd be coming to it with a set of preconceptions based on cultural osmosis and broad assumptions rather than any insight into what the show was actually like. I cannot see how that could possibly help.
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Feb 27, 2024 17:26
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Yeesh I just remembered that in Demons of the Punjab - the one which along with ITYA is probably running for "best of the era" - you have an entire plot point which only works if multiple people who examine a murdered man's body either fail to notice he was shot dead or inexplicably fail to mention that for no clearly enunciated reason. Gah. Ridiculous. Absolutely irredeemable era. I don't want to blame Vinay Patel because I don't know what happened between the thing being written and the end of post-production but whoever missed that should hang their head in shame.
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Feb 27, 2024 17:36
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For all Chibnall's love of shocking surprises, the most shocking surprise to me of Thirteen's run is at the start of the Witchfinders when the woman is being drowned, and Thirteen tries to intervene. Like, yeah, Thirteen fails and the woman dies, but from everything we'd seen of Thirteen I unconsciously assumed that this would be a scene of her standing there watching passively but making a judgmental face. Thirteen's best moment is "drawing the map" in It Takes You Away.
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Feb 27, 2024 17:39
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The 13th Doctor isn’t really a character, as much as a blank sheet of paper that things happen to.
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Feb 27, 2024 19:59
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Edward Mass posted:The 13th Doctor isn’t really a character, as much as a blank sheet of paper that things happen to. Happen around, since I remember very few instances where events had a lasting, tangible impact on Thirteen or her character or outlook. The fact that everyone was praising Fourteen having a 10-second mini rage outburst in "Wild Blue Yonder" or Fifteen getting a single line commenting on also being an orphan in "The Church on Ruby Road" shows how little use the show had for character development during the Chibnall era, since those are comparatively small moments for the Doctor in the scope of those four episodes, but at least they're something.
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Feb 27, 2024 22:13
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I'm halfway through Flux It's pretty bad innit
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Feb 28, 2024 00:45
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