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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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Hoover up that Flux for us.
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Apr 8, 2024 01:04
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| # ? May 20, 2024 23:40 |
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And it was literally done with ADR!!!! Like it was ten days from broadcast and he was STILL like "oh poo poo oh poo poo, how am I going to get them out of this one" and then his Roomba bumped his foot and a light bulb went on
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Apr 8, 2024 01:42
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Reminder that the Doctor's first plan to stop the Flux is to open the TARDIS and hoover up as much of it as she can. This plan fails, and thus is no longer a viable solution. The Doctor's final, successful plan to stop the Flux is to open up The Passenger and hoover up as much of it as it can. This succeeds because of <FILE NOT FOUND> thus solving the problem forever.
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Apr 8, 2024 02:44
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I thought the first plan was to blast the heart of the TARDIS at it, not absorb it all into the TARDIS. Either way it's dumb though.
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Apr 8, 2024 02:49
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Oh maybe I have remembered it wrong! I'll be rewatching it soon (...yaaay  ...) so it'll be interesting to see what else I have remembered wrong.
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Apr 8, 2024 02:55
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Boxturret posted:Hoover up that Flux for us. https://i.imgur.com/ZK4dfws.mp4  "Oh gently caress I need to come up with a solution on how to destroy a threat that's eaten half the universe! DEUX EX MACHINA BULLSHIT, GO!"
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Apr 8, 2024 04:28
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Its really good that that guy in the halloween mask teleported in and solved all our problems while we watched from off screen.
Boxturret fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Apr 8, 2024 |
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Apr 8, 2024 04:40
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It's also the literal last appearance of The Passenger They don't do anything with him It doesn't go anywhere I don't even think it's mentioned again. It's probably still just floating in space
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Apr 8, 2024 04:56
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Infinitum posted:It's also the literal last appearance of The Passenger To be fair, there were...three episodes after that before the return of RTD?
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Apr 8, 2024 05:33
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I remember being a fan of how comical The Passenger's first appearance is. It's just... there! We get intros to both members of the Sugar Skull Gang and then suddenly there's just this 9 foot tall brick shithouse in a mask hanging out with them with zero explanation for like 2-3 episodes. He's just... there! Who is he? The muscle? Where did he come from? Was he a prisoner too? Where did they find him etc? Then it turns out things like him are just a known quantity in the universe, though he's the last one (I think?) and he was actually just the equivalent of the Sugar Skull Gang rocking up with their suitcase.
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Apr 8, 2024 05:36
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Weren't there a bunch of people in the Passenger as well? Wasn't that what they'd been using it for, to go around snatching up a bunch of people for some evil scheme? I guess since the Passenger is infinite on the inside then anyone in there was still probably safe from the flux
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Apr 8, 2024 05:46
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I think other than the pilot dude and one other lady who managed to escape(?), all those people got... turned into dust by the Sugar Skull Gang? Something about being used as symbolic sacrifices representing Time and Space as corporeal entities that were their God and Devil respectively? Jesus Christ, what a mess the Chibnall era was.
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Apr 8, 2024 05:49
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The amazing thing to wonder is how much more baffled and disappointed we might have been if circumstances had allowed the Flux to be a full series, unaffected by COVID.
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Apr 8, 2024 05:52
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Coward posted:The amazing thing to wonder is how much more baffled and disappointed we might have been if circumstances had allowed the Flux to be a full series, unaffected by COVID.  the reason Flux got made was BECAUSE they could only do six episodes.
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Apr 8, 2024 06:06
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I still love how one of their ideas for marketing was to delete all the videos off the official channel.
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Apr 8, 2024 06:06
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i kinda fell off Who and didnt watch series 11, why is The Division just Section 31 from Star Trek?
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Apr 8, 2024 06:07
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Because the Timecops had an Ultra Timecops Violence Division, and the Doctor was the Most Violent Ultra Tomecop, and their first incarnation was actually a girl (Take that glass ceiling!), and they're holding all her memories hostage, and actually Ultra Timecop Boss is actually The Doctors Mum, and killing universes is A Thing They Do, and I am amazing Doctor Who writer Chris Chibnall
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Apr 8, 2024 06:24
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Edward Mass posted:
I am surprised the Flux wasn't the original intended story arc of Whittaker's third series. So much of it feels like the story Chibnall wanted to tell. But I suppose it could be equally true that a few scripts had already started development and Chibnall decided it was best to hamfistedly bolt on a story arc to them.
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Apr 8, 2024 06:26
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Chris Chibnall: The Doctor is a woman now! Watch out patriarchy, we're coming for the glass ceiling! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm2PXshWC_0 Doctor Who fans: OK that's a cool positive change and we like that, but is the writing good? We literally only care about cool stories. Chris Chibnall: The Doctor is a WOMAN! Girlboss! Fam! Vs Rusty: Behold the queerest black Doctor you'll ever see on screen! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2LKKnf4riw Doctor Who fans: Were those loving goblins Rusty?! Rusty: They were! Fun stories are back!
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Apr 8, 2024 06:37
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Edward Mass posted:To be fair, there were...three episodes after that before the return of RTD? There were?  I can only remember the sea devils one I didn’t watch, and then the dreadful finale.
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Apr 8, 2024 11:03
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The_Doctor posted:There were? Yeah, those two and the timeloop one about the dude with the serial killer locker.
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Apr 8, 2024 11:08
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I actually quite liked the timeloop one, though I don't know if it needed a Dalek. Aisling Bea rules.
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Apr 8, 2024 11:08
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Eve of the Daleks, which to be fair was a pretty solid ep - save for the fact it was the 3rd time the Daleks were the villain for the New Years Day special.
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Apr 8, 2024 11:11
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I really enjoyed Eve of the Daleks, and even them lampshading the joke about how creepy the dude was (the relieved "oh okay, phew!" from Yaz and the other lady finding out his ex-girlfriends were still alive I found funny) but then his really creepy behavior, including towards the owner of the storage unit, gets rewarded with a relationship which seemed... not right...
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Apr 8, 2024 11:17
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Oh wow, yes! Eve is one of the Nearly Good ones, too! I thought it came earlier in the run for some reason. God, the Chibnall era is just one big object permanence experiment
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Apr 8, 2024 11:57
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The next time I have to grieve, I think I'm just going to watch the Chibnall era so that I'll be able to just forget that part of my life.
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Apr 8, 2024 12:55
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Strangely I also kind of liked Eve of the Daleks but would’ve told you it aired before Flux if I was asked.
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Apr 8, 2024 13:02
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Diabolik900 posted:Strangely I also kind of liked Eve of the Daleks but would’ve told you it aired before Flux if I was asked. Yeah, that weirded me out, to remember that was Post-Flux. Chibnall's era loving sucked. I hope Whittaker comes back sometime and gets some good and cool things to do.
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Apr 8, 2024 14:26
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I've been watching Elsbeth, the Carrie Preston does Columbo show, and it's basically like watching a good version of the 13th Doctor and I kind of love it through that lens. She's clever and eccentric and not explicitly confrontational, but she's always clearly the cleverest person in the room and she's always getting her licks in, or finding ways to highlight and compliment the good qualities of the people around her. She's also socially awkward and slightly difficult for people to get a handle on, but completely harmless with it. It'd be a good model for the series to work off if they were to do more with Whittaker and her take on the character.
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Apr 8, 2024 16:33
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The_Doctor posted:Oh wow, yes! Eve is one of the Nearly Good ones, too! I thought it came earlier in the run for some reason. I knew every story title by heart until the Chibnall era. I do go a little vague on episode order at some point with the new series, but I gave up completely only part-way into Chibnall's first run. OK, I'm going to continue my little object permanence experiment ITT with some more recollected episodes: The Ghost Monument: Thirteen and the Fam get rescued by two passing spaceships involved in a race. There's some sort of arbitrary danger that they have to cooperate to solve that really feels like it should have mattered to the episode, but nothing matters in this episode. They land or crash on the planet, who cares, and we find out that this is a giant reality TV show with a prize for whoever gets to the Ghost Monument (which is obviously the TARDIS, why is there even a moment this gets played as a mystery). Can't be bothered with what the prize is, there's a dearth of contestants at this point, the whole planet is supposedly deadly but compared to a place like Skaro it's a vacation paradise, and there's a brief moment where the Doctor might get angry at capitalist imperialist pig who hosts the show and isn't actually there, but that doesn't really play because we don't get nice things any more. There's a few character-building scenes in here that make it look like Chibnall cares at all about characterization, but they don't matter to this story and the bits we get about companions won't much matter in future stories, so who cares? We also get some very "I played Quake and Portal so here's concrete buildings and ladders and killer robot/turrets," Ryan humiliates himself by going all FPS-homicidal despite this being real-life and him supposedly having dyspraxia (Chibnall, you're already making an obvious theft from popular culture, why do you keep lampshading it as if that makes it clever). There's something about the night being dangerous but apparently that means animate sentient pieces of cloth that taunt the Doctor about the Timeless Child, because Chibnall wants to ruin as many interesting premises in his stories as he can without allowing them to be actually interesting. They get to the TARDIS, the Doctor gets to do the "you redecorated? I love it!" twist line that would work better if the TARDIS were better lit or better designed or something, or if she got to have that character trait consistently. The "amazing race" storyline concludes in a way I don't remember or care about. Does the jerk male contestant end up splitting the prize with the female contestant with the tragic backstory that also hints at a planet-destroying threat for the end of the season? Do neither of them win because the contest runners are capitalist imperialist pigs? There's no message and the game's made up and the points don't matter. Chibnall literally wrote a story about something happening while the Doctor and companions try to find the TARDIS, and made it so engaging that finding the TARDIS is the only part of the ending I recall. Rosa: I was hopeful for this episode, as Chibnall shares credit and it had a chance to be a pure historical. But no, a time-traveling racist from the future who somehow manages to know everything about the bus protest while being a complete boob is here to try to ensure there's enough seating on the bus or that the racist driver is off-duty because if Rosa hadn't refused to change seats on this specific day and time, I guess the civil rights movement would have collapsed? His actual objectives are vague enough for long enough that you can almost overlook that the story makes no sense. There's some nice moments here: Rosa Parks is well written and performed, the story gives Ryan a few good moments while establishing that Rosa wasn't a fluke or a lone wolf but part of a concerted plan (which makes the "lone white supremacist from the future threatens the timeline because a whole group of local civil rights leaders can't manage a protest" threat amazingly offensive). There's a few nice moments where the Fam confront racism that are unfortunately not as powerful as they might be because the episode dances along the edge of "weren't things so terrible in the 60s in Alabama, thank God there's no racism in the UK in the 21st century" but it doesn't quite tip over the edge. Graham having just lost the Black woman he loved and being a bus driver is weirdly centralized given that he's the only white male main character. The Doctor gets to be almost angry with the white future racist; as far as confrontations go, this is about as good as she's going to get, sadly. There's some things about forcing events that culminates in our cast having to occupy seats in order to ensure history goes smoothly. That's either really offensive as a "solution," if you read their being seated on the bus as participation in segregation (and it's hard for me to do that), or it's perfectly fine because they are SUPPORTING Rosa Parks, but the episode seems to think it's putting the Fam through the wringer. White supremacist gets "accidently" sent back to the stone age, caveman mentality, we see Rosa Parks' asteroid, the episode is much more self-satisfied than it should be, and we're left to wonder whether Blackman wrote a great script that Chibnall ruined or if it was always meant to be this way. Arachnids in the UK: Giant spiders and an American businessman who is Trump-like. There's some Yaz family development in this story, set back in our Fam-present, but it all seems to weirdly focus attention away from Yaz. The initial giant spider stuff is pretty effectively creepy, but Donald J. Big is played for laughs and there's only a few moments in the episode where that decision works, mainly when it's clear he values the lives of his employees less than he does his convenience. Yada yada industrial waste, maybe, and the episode waits a long time before the Doctor plays the "it's hard being big and that spider will die soon" in a context where it makes no sense. A potentially interesting building-under-siege where we want one of the characters dead turns into a mess and an argument about humanely killing the spiders who used to be the horror-film enemies, and maybe there's a message about how the businessman is the real Arachnid in the UK, but he shoots the spider and the Doctor resolutely refuses to chide him, much less telling an assistant that he looks tired. The lesson learned here is that the current series has competent direction, effects, and performances and the writer is the one letting it down. The Tsuranga Conundrum: TARDIS appears on a planet-wide junkyard or something, the Doctor and Fam get separated from it almost instantly and end up on an emergency medical ship or something. I recall liking this one because all the characters got to do something and the "enemy" was Nibbler from Futurama and keeping it from eating the ship without killing it was an interesting conundrum (Oh, Chibnall, I see what you did there). There's a sideline about a pregnant man and something about an old general and a clone or something that pays off with piloting the ship, I believe. There's a bit of "educational science" although I think it's inaccurate educational science, but nice try. The Doctor actually gets to act like the Doctor, including being amazingly rude and condescending to someone and then apologizing, although IIRC she's rude to a doctor and not a nurse, so only partial credit there. I can't recall what extra crisis happens as they approach their destination, they get rid of the Tsuranga or whatever they called Nibbler, all the developing plotlines of the single-episode characters get resolved, mostly off-screen and in mere seconds, end of story. This felt like a good enough episode of Doctor Who to be an average episode of Doctor Who, instead of whatever Chibnall thinks he's been writing. And I'll stop there as we get into a few episodes that were actually pretty good.
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Apr 8, 2024 17:29
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With Rosa, I can imagine that the future racist learned that Rosa Parks was pivotal to the Civil Rights movement and so got it into his head that messing up the bus protest would mess up the whole thing. We can reasonably assume that if she hadn't done it someone else would, or she would have done it another time, but we don't know how things would have gone only how they went, so fair enough as a plan I guess. I remember liking the uncomfortable moment where the heroes have to actively take part in segregation to force the protest to take place; I like the idea of having to actively do something you oppose to save the day. It's kind of like the Pompeii dilemma if they'd had to actually look the people of Pompeii on the eye as it happened. I don't know what was up with the asteroid thing though. What a bizarre ending E: I will say, the Chibnall era has some great monster effects. The Pting is kind of whatever, but I loved the sheet monster things in Ghost Monument, and later on the light monsters in Spyfall 2house2fly fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Apr 8, 2024 |
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Apr 8, 2024 18:36
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Chibnall seemed to really want the Stenza to be a universal level threat on (or above!) the level of the Daleks or the Cybermen and it just never worked at all. The Doctor has apparently never heard of or encountered them before, the only representative of them we ever meet is a loving clown, they're never referred to again after season 11 etc. But in season 11 they bookend the season as the major threat (except even then their clownshoes representative is easily dispatched when he isn't using hacks), and in The Ghost Monument we are supposed to believe they've wiped out entire civilizations, that one of their (discarded!) experiments are so advanced in terms of mind probing that it is able to detect memories even the Daleks couldn't detect, memories that we later learn the Doctor explicitly doesn't have because they were supposedly extracted. I say supposedly because they weren't, the Master lied, so then what did the telepathic ribbons actually mind read? Ugh. Anyway, the Stenza sucked.
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Apr 8, 2024 19:40
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People have already said a lot about how Rosa is weird because the Doctor and the episode itself both seem to buy into the idea that the villain is correct, Rosa Parks's protest was just a fluke and if the starts don't align just right it won't happen and the civil rights movement will never happen. But the other weird thing about it to me is that Rosa isn't really a central character in her own episode? Like, the episode is about her, and the plot revolves around her, but it's all very distant and detached. She's treated as a figure in a historical textbook and macguffin who everyone's fighting over, but not as a person the episode is really interested in spending time with or getting to know as a character. Which isn't an inherently bad thing, I suppose, especially when I try to imagine the alternatives Chibnall's writing could have given us (I'll take what we got over something terrible like "Rosa has a tearful breakdown and the Doctor tells her things will be alright and gives her the strength to go through with her protest"), but it felt odd to me when NuWho has a well-established pattern for celebrity historicals, and all the others focus on the guest celebrity as a central character. Even within Chibnall's run, we had the Tesla episode. I only remember this because I didn't get around to watching series 11 and 12 until last year, but the "conundrum" in the Tsuranga Conundrum is this: the ship has Hungry Invincible Stitch on it. The ship's homeworld's sensors detect that the ship has Stitch on it. The homeworld asks, "Hey, our sensors indicate that you have Stitch on your ship, is that correct?" If the ship answers "yes", the homeworld blows up the ship so Stitch can't reach the homeworld. If the ship answers "no", the homeworld goes "our sensors indicate that you're lying" and blows up the ship so Stitch can't reach the homeworld. Why does the homeworld even bother asking? gently caress if I know. Why doesn't the homeworld just go "Hey, you can't come here with Stitch onboard, stay in deep space until it's gone and if you try to approach homeworld then we'll blow you up?" gently caress if I know. Anyhow, the "conundrum" is "hey some assholes want to blow us up". The ending is weird where the space-general dies of her space-cancer or something, and then her sentient humanoid android assistant friend goes "I, as her personal android friend, shall now be put to death because that is the law of our society" and the Doctor's just totally fine with that? The episode also treats it as a huge revelation that Stitch is just a hungry animal and not a scheming mastermind with a diabolical plan to deconstruct the ship in exactly the right order, but I think even the kids in the audience realized that about 0.1 seconds after seeing Stitch so it just makes the characters look like idiots. (The actors pretty obviously don't have any idea what their characters are looking at, since it won't be CGI'd until later.) Ghost Monument is loving bizarre because it's a race where everyone moves very slowly and with no urgency and the competitors are just walking side by side and never trying to gain any lead? You can imagine Terry Nation writing a good Keys of Marinus-ish story with this premise in the 60s where the two groups don't meet up until the end, with one group journeying through a perilous swamp and and the other group journeying through perilous caves, but it's mind-boggling how lifeless this is. And it's all to set up the Stenza Empire as a threat... which never appears again.
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Apr 8, 2024 20:12
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The Rosa episode bowls over so many important elements even before they decided the plot would involve the fam discriminating against Rosa Parks even elementary school books covered the topic with more depth in a couple paragraphs. Frankly I question whether British writers should be the ones writing her story at all. If they want to get into that subject, they could explore their own nation's history with slavery. If they were dead set on Rosa Parks I reckon they should've found a black north American to write it.
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Apr 8, 2024 20:28
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I dislike Rosa because for all the historical education the episode does, it ends with the Doctor being complicit in an infamously racist event. I remember watching it and being  If 'the Doctor commits a racist act' is part of your story? Get hosed.
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Apr 8, 2024 20:28
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Infinitum posted:If 'the Doctor commits a racist act' is part of your story? Get hosed. Remember when she sent multiple people of color, one of whom was a hero, to nazi concentration camps in a single episode?
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Apr 8, 2024 20:39
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No and I am suddenly grateful for my very terrible memory.
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Apr 8, 2024 21:14
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Khanstant posted:The Rosa episode bowls over so many important elements even before they decided the plot would involve the fam discriminating against Rosa Parks even elementary school books covered the topic with more depth in a couple paragraphs. I think it's ok for writers from one place and culture to write stories about something that happened in another place and culture. The entire point of fiction is to try and put yourself in someone else's shoes, after all. Although when your dealing with something that is as charged as slavery, racism, the civil rights movement and the impacts that are continued to be felt today, at a minimum, you best be prepared to do your homework and treat the topic with the care it deserves. And particularly in this case, it's not like the American Civil Rights movement only affected Americans, it had significant ramifications for black people and the civil rights movement in Britain too. The writer, Mary Blackman, is a black Londoner who grew up in the shadow of those events. I'm quite uneasy about the idea that a black writer is in the wrong to celebrate a civil rights icon just because they grew up in London instead of Alabama. I think I'm a bit more charitable to her writing than most of this thread. Mary Blackman is mainly known as a kids and YA writer. I suspect she very much had a younger audience in mind when she was writing it. If you try to view it through the lens of her trying to tell kids why Rosa Parks is her hero, a lot of it makes more sense. The barely one dimensional villain, the massive oversimplification of the events, having the white characters basically look direct into camera and go 'This is a bad thing happening. We should feel bad' to make it real clear to white kids about how they should feel about racism. It's all to keep the focus on where the writer wants it to be, which is who Rosa Parks is, and why she is considered a hero. Historically accurate? Not remotely. Most writing about history aimed at kids tends to gloss over a lot of it. But that's not remotely the point of what the writer was trying to achieve. And does it make the Doctor look good? If the question you come out of that show is 'Yeah but how does the blond white lady come out looking' then, uh, I worry you may have somewhat missed the point.
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Apr 8, 2024 21:26
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Khanstant posted:The Rosa episode bowls over so many important elements even before they decided the plot would involve the fam discriminating against Rosa Parks even elementary school books covered the topic with more depth in a couple paragraphs. Now it's been an eternity since I was in elementary school, but my recollection of what we learned about Rosa Parks was that she was simply a tired woman who one day said gently caress this poo poo, and not an active member of the NAACP spoiling for a fight over segregation. So in my case, the episode did teach me things!
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Apr 8, 2024 21:35
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DavidCameronsPig posted:The writer, Mary Blackman, is a black Londoner Malorie Blackman OBE
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Apr 8, 2024 21:39
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