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Sure, today you're delighted your shoes fit perfectly, but a little later you'll be so excited you'll kiss the woman who inadvertently killed you, and then where will you be? It's a recipe for ending up mooning over a slip of a girl across multiple regenerations, though I should clarify that I mean ordinary moons when I say "mooning" and not giant eggs. Easy to mix those up.Lampsacus posted:I'm always interested in the DW episodes that branch away from the usual tropes of science fiction into more obscure ones. Perhaps that's a bad way to phrase it because all tropes are tropes but, hm, how do I say this - odder tropes? For example, Warriors' Gate when they are stuck in E-Space: For classic Who, try some of these on for size: The Keys of Marinus The War Games Inferno The Daemons The Time Monster Planet of the Spiders The Masque of Mandragora The Face of Evil The Androids of Tara The Keeper of Traken The Awakening Battlefield Ghost Light Survival
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Jan 14, 2021 19:37
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marktheando posted:Please don't even joke about a Disney Doctor Who "Geronimo!" "Allons y!" "Chim chim cher-ee!"
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Jan 20, 2021 19:56
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Gameko posted:I gave up on the modern Who after Deep Breath. I was really excited when I heard Jodie Whittaker was coming on board, because I really love her work and I thought (like most people) swapping her in as the Doctor could revitalize the series. Most of what I've read about her run has been negative. If I were going to cherry pick some Whitaker run episodes, which would you recommend? You want to just hit the minimum highlights while not really knowing what's going on? Watch Demons of the Punjab, It Takes You Away, Spyfall parts 1 & 2, Fugitive of the Judoon, and The Haunting of Villa Diodati. I'd suggest watching The Woman Who Fell to Earth, Rosa, The Tsuranga Conundrum, Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror, and Can You Hear Me as well. You probably won't like everything in all of those, but you will probably like some things in some of those. But really, you ought to watch Capaldi's last season starting from The Pilot. There's at least one "shout at the screen" bad episode in that run, but on the whole it may be one of the strongest seasons of the show. MrL_JaKiri posted:Time and the Rani is often considered a classic A classic what? (Actually, I rather like Time and the Rani. I don't think it's good, but it's bad in enjoyable ways.) The main reason not to pick Time and the Rani is that the script was originally written for 6/Mel and you can tell that from time to time. Really, any 7/Mel episode after that is going to be watchable. I'd choose Paradise Towers, but Delta and the Bannermen and Dragonfire are both watchable.
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Jan 21, 2021 22:13
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Two Owls posted:I always liked the bit in Ambassadors of Death where Liz is being held hostage by some goons who are clearly nervy about their plans unravelling, and she smirks and goes "don't worry, I won't hurt you." when one of them threatens her. Liz was the best; should have had several more seasons with her. Barbara is awesome, but at least she gets to pull off her awesomeness in sweaters; Liz gets to deliver this line in a mini-skirt and impractical boots.
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Feb 10, 2021 19:55
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OldMemes posted:After finding a broken Dalek in a lay-by, the Sixth Doctor is stuck watching a disarmed and disorientated Dalek until UNIT forces can get out of a local traffic jam and dispose of it. However, their debate is interrupted by a Dalek reclamation squad looking to strip the broken Dalek for parts. Let's get them all out of our systems now, shall we? Reconnaissance of the Daleks Recollection of the Daleks Representatives of the Daleks Reproduction of the Daleks Reluctance of the Daleks Resistance of the Daleks Recrimination of the Daleks Regurgitation of the Daleks Revenge of the Daleks Recalcitrance of the Daleks Responsibility of the Daleks Reality of the Daleks Realty of the Daleks Redlining of the Daleks Refulgence of the Daleks (look it up) Ruination of the Daleks Running out of title ideas of the Daleks And, of course, the Apartment trilogy (which follows Realty of the Daleks): Rent-free Apartment of the Daleks Renovated Apartment of the Daleks Relisted Apartment of the Daleks
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Mar 6, 2021 00:34
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Sydney Bottocks posted:I love BF but goddrat do they stripmine the hell out of the DW IP for characters to build new series around. Just think of them as the Doctor Who equivalent of a retirement plan.
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Mar 24, 2021 00:46
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The_Doctor posted:The next lot was more interesting, however. Four original scripts from The Keys of Marinus, with some photosfrom the estate of actor Peter Stenson, who played 3 different roles in the serial. I bid on them, but they ended up going way above my budget, especially with a 30% buyers premium (auctions usually run between 15-25%). Did they include a receipt for the cab the scripts took?
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Apr 13, 2021 15:23
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CommonShore posted:They should just recast Captain Jack and not even acknowledge with so much as a remark on the new face. Just like "Oh hey Captain Jack" and the new actor enters and just starts chewing the scenery. Patton Oswalt is already playing one giant head, right?
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Apr 30, 2021 22:49
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Open Source Idiom posted:Moffat hosed his way around the BBC studios "like a mechanical digger", his words. He cast Karen Gillen over another, apparently more qualified, actor, because she wasn't "wee" and "dumpy". You’re wrong about the second quote: “I thought, ‘Well, she’s really good. It’s just a shame she’s so wee and dumpy.’ … When she was about to come through to the auditions I nipped out for a minute and I saw Karen walking on the corridor towards me and I realised she was 5’11, slim and gorgeous, and I thought, ‘Oh, oh, that’ll probably work.’” He thought Gillen was wee and dumpy, he didn’t choose her over a better actor because the other actor was wee and dumpy. Moffat’s said enough stupid and sexist things to condemn him without distorting or twisting his words. How do we parse the show itself, or its management? I don’t think Hinchcliffe is on record as having said horribly misogynist things, but what about Dicks or Holmes? Do we forgive Troughton and Hines but not Barrowman because of the expectations of the era? Can we ignore the frequent and obvious racism of the program that runs from the early years straight into the present? And to what extent should the scrutiny be directed back at the fandom? It’s possible to condemn a creator while appreciating that their work supports what they themselves do not. And we have a bad tendency to credit the male exec producers and forget the women: everyone discusses the Davies years and not the Gardiner years, and nobody gives any credit that I’ve ever seen for Series Five to exec producer Beth Willis, although I’ll be delighted to be proven wrong on that.
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May 4, 2021 14:47
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Sydney Bottocks posted:That's because (as Jakiri pointed out), that's not how the running of the show works anymore. The showrunner model is basically the same principle as the auteur theory of filmmaking: that there is one singular creative vision behind the show/film and they have the final say. Julie Gardner may have had some input on certain things, but at the end of the day she was working for RTD and he was the one that made the final decisions regarding the show, both on and off screen. Gardner wrangled a bunch of things behind the scenes, for which she most certainly deserves a ton of credit, but she wasn't writing and rewriting scripts or coming up with overarching storylines or deciding the format the series should take. It's akin to saying the foreman of the construction crew should get equal credit for the design of the building that the architect came up with. The showeunner model is not entirely a myth, but is partly a myth. I haven’t obsessively followed the production of Who in the way I have a few other programs, but even an extremely auteur-centric show like Babylon 5 ends up having a bunch of collaborations. Being in charge of the budget comes with considerable influence over what can and can’t be done, and even a lowly producer can have a huge influence over a show. Women, historically, have had their roles in collaborative enterprises (and make no mistake, TV production is collaborative no matter how powerful the showrunner) minimized, and the auteur theory is one effective way to do it. That doesn’t require us all to be credulous enough to believe in it.
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May 7, 2021 01:03
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Sydney Bottocks posted:As was already pointed out, you're not making the same argument for Brian Minchin or Mark Strevins, so it honestly comes across like you're trying to gin up outrage over an issue that really isn't an issue. Sydney Bottocks posted:I know RTD's currently riding a wave of critical acclaim and good press because of "It's a Sin" and all, but people really need to be asking him "what did you know about this, and when did you know about it" in regards to this kind of poo poo happening while he was running the show. Firstly, we're outraged about the same thing, or so I thought. Evidently not. Secondly, I'm pleased to see the Guardian follow-up talked to both Gardiner and Davies, so evidently they understand that both were involved in running the show--in fact, it sounds like Gardiner was the one to reprimand Barrowman, although the story isn't entirely clear in that regard. Thirdly, my point was that fandom tends to treat the "solo showrunners" of the new era as if they're the only ones making the decisions, and that this tendency means that the women involved with the show tend to have their contributions minimized, because no woman has "run the show" since Verity Lambert. Your response is that the same thing has happened to Minchin and Strevins, so it's OK? Or it isn't, but there's some "gotcha" because I didn't mention them? But you didn't pick Marcus Wilson, or Phil Collinson. Neither of us has been comprehensive in that regard. I was pointing to two women to demonstrate how the auteur model marginalized them. That you somehow think that male producers also being marginalized in this way justifies the auteur model is baffling to me; it doesn't. The auteur model isn't deserving of our support and defense, and it isn't how things actually work except in a few very dysfunctional cases. I don't really understand why anyone would go out of their way to defend it, and I didn't think attacking the auteur model would somehow turn into a controversy. And I promise to stop posting on this topic in future, because it feels like it isn't a controversy except for me and Sydney. In other news, was I the only one who saw Barrowman's "tomfoolery" statement whose mind went immediately to Tom Baker making a "Who, me" face?
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May 9, 2021 04:04
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I'm starting to wonder whether there aren't deep differences between classic and new Who that render new Who inherently problematic. At the risk of boring everyone, let me see if I can articulate this fully, because new Who clearly has better production values, has some really good writing, and has fantastic performances, but I'd still rather rewatch Horns of Nimon over about 80%+ of new Who. 1. Story length. 90+ minute stories do lead to plenty of padding in classic Who, but they also mean stories are substantial enough that you can forget lots of details and be surprised upon rewatch. Even a well-watched story like Robots of Death offers a few scenes that you may have forgotten but which are delightful. New Who's shorter stories don't entirely preclude that phenomenon, but while there's less corridor-running, it feels like they're either ruthlessly plot-driven, meaning that if you recall the plot, you have no surprises ahead, or they still feel padded. I feel like Jodie's run as Thirteen has especially suffered from stories that are either drifting aimlessly or so ruthlessly plot-driven there's no room to breathe, and that's despite the fact that there's plenty of "Doctor talks with a companion" character-driven scenes. Perhaps it's because they so clearly exist to do that, instead of being embedded into the action like, say, the Doctor/Romana scenes in The Ribos Operation? 2. Production design, direction, and overall visual look. Of course classic Who is often closer to a filmed stage show, while new Who is visually more active and interesting. But conversely, a lot of classic Who has a radically different look from story to story, while new Who can be surprisingly samey. You can certainly tell the difference between new Who's original cheesy CGI and later series, but a greater uniformity in how the show appears on-screen might hurt rewatchability because it makes the episodes feel more interchangeable. For example, if you took a 3-minute scene from Pyramids of Mars and Talons of Weng-Chiang, I suspect most Who fans could tell the difference without even watching the whole clip. The visual setting, the places the stories happen, even the shot composition are so distinct between the two that you'd differentiate each without much bother. Some average-to-bad episodes could be hard to differentiate, but even the jungle scenes in Planet of Evil and Face of Evil can be differentiated pretty rapidly (despite both having invisible monsters!). Maybe I'm just not visually savvy enough, but I'd find it a lot harder to differentiate in the new series. The greater uniformity, the shift away from "this episode was kitbashed and assembled from spare parts" may have come at the cost of distinctiveness. 3. Series arcs and character development (or "development"). Davies started this, of course, though Moffat certainly doubled-down on it. But in terms of intelligibility (or maybe I mean legibility), classic Who is a thing of parts: you might group by producer, or by Doctor/companion, but while there may be major stylistic differences between, say, the Philip Hinchcliffe era and the Graham Williams era, conceptually you can detach individual stories and take them on their own without it being too jarring. Even the Key to Time series is really only disconcerting in its final episode or two of The Armageddon Factor, and aside from the first and last stories you could scramble the order without any real damage to any of them. In the new series, because of the shorter stories and because the whole thing was built around the expectation of rewatching, the serial design is significantly greater, and I'd argue that both Moffat and Chibnall design series arcs first and stories second, at a cost. Because there's plenty of other serialized TV right now, much of it more complex and interwoven than Doctor Who: you can dispense with a lot of the "arc" stories in new Who and follow the series arc, while trying that with a show like The Good Place or Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. would be trickier. Perhaps what's bothering me here in new Who is that it feels like the individual stories, as secondary to the series arc, feel like afterthoughts, but that the series arcs rely upon being unknown and unexpected to drive interest and, once completed, don't seem especially interesting or compelling. I'd say the single best arc was Eleven's first series, and even that amounts to a statement about stories that feels profound on first watching but is really rather cliche in retrospect. If I want me some Three and Liz Shaw, I can watch Spearhead from Space and Inferno and be quite happy; if I want new series five, I'm probably skipping half the episodes because I find Amy's Choice kinda problematic, don't have the energy for the Silurian two-parter right now, and am in a very different place with regard to both Gareth Roberts and James Corden, thanks. But does that bust up the arc too much? I wanted to see what Chibnall was going to do with the Timeless Child thing, but now that I know, why in the world would I want to rewatch a series built around telling that story? (And I liked it more than most people here did!) And the character development also hurts rewatchability, in my experience. Sure, Twelve undergoes a development arc. But it isn't handled consistently: after his first series where he figures out he is a good man, he still needs Clara as his emotional support companion in the following series, to "care" for him? That honestly feels like a total misunderstanding of the character who actually develops from Capaldi's performance, whose problem is that he cares too much and too unreservedly: the idea that he doesn't understand emotion or other people's emotional reactions and needs a young woman to be "nice" for him is cringeworthy in multiple ways, but the biggest is that despite the series being built with greater care to feel like it's of-a-piece and with Twelve developing, the development is so erratic from episode to episode that it might as well not be there at all. I can believe that the Heaven Sent Twelve and the The Doctor Falls Twelve are the same person, but who the hell was that in The Return of Doctor Mysterio, or The Lie of the Land? The new series' insistence on having development merely allows it to get things all mixed up in a way that doesn't happen with the classic series; Four's final series is tonally different because of the new costume/producer/script editor plus Tom's health, and the tone is pretty consistent despite having stories as radically different as State of Decay and Warrior's Gate. As a result, I'd rather invest my rewatch time in a 90-minute classic story and get a complete experience, over watching new series piecemeal. What bothers me is the extent to which this is just me, moderately depressed after a year-plus of COVID, and the extent to which it's the show. Because I'm starting to reach the point where I'm unsure how much I care about the next series beyond finding out what happens: after decades of recording and collecting and purchasing Doctor Who episodes for rewatch, I'm wondering whether I should even bother anymore because of intrinsic problems with how the new series is handled.
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May 11, 2021 16:47
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Sydney Bottocks posted:Yeeeeeeeeah I'm not buying that RTD didn't at least know about Barrowman's proclivity for yanking his todger out without warning. He was very careful not to say that. He doesn't say he didn't hear about it, he says he never saw it happen himself. It's unclear what role he had in Barrowman's eventual reprimand, but we do know that Gardiner is the one who actually reprimanded him. Presumably she and Davies had at least one conversation about Barrowman before that reprimand happened.
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May 12, 2021 23:40
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Let's just get Michelle Gomez in to play a Time Lord who calls herself The Doctor and travels around with a companion saving people, and leave it ambiguous whether she's actually the Doctor or whether Missy survived.
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May 31, 2021 01:23
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usenet celeb 1992 posted:This was such a great moment, and to me the most memorable. I loved how quick she was to turn around her thinking and realize that they were being sincere. It's not just that this incarnation is particularly more empathetic than any other (because she's a woman, rite), it's that she is much more fluid in her thinking and the Doctor's natural curiosity has a more adoptive element to it. It's a great take on some of the Doctor's core character elements and I wish we could see more of that. Maybe she’s more positive in her emotions, but Chibnall especially has gone out of his way to make her socially awkward in any kind of one-on-one situation involving relationships. As if the previous incarnation’s character arc led up to a big nothing. Having the Doctor either unable to human-emotion or unable to detect human emotion was always a bad idea; compare with Four, who was keenly observant and perfectly capable of detecting human emotion and just didn’t care much of the time, and whose alien-ness came out on having different emotional reactions to things and not in behaving like a bad stereotype of an autistic person. Thirteen has been problematic because they seemed to have made a decision to play against those bad new-series tendencies but then had the same (because she’s a woman, rite) thought and made it a mess trying to not do that. Nobody insisted that Five suddenly became emotionally available or hapless because he was blonde. It’s an understandable but infuriating thing to suggest that the Doctor became something because of being a woman now, but it’s also infuriating to insist the change had no effect. The Chibnall years so far have displayed a real lack of self-confidence that undermines much of what’s being done. Davies was full of bravado and Moffat actively trolled fans; I’m still not sure how to characterize Chibnall. Does he lack the courage of all his convictions, or are his convictions simply unintelligible? I love Jodie’s performance, but she’s been largely wasted, and our brief glimpse of Jo Martin’s Doctor shows us what could have been done with a female Doctor and a bit more confidence in the character. But it’s not good that I can characterize the showrunner who gave us the massive Time Lord retcon the thread mostly hates at the end of the last season as lacking in confidence. We should see Chibnall as a megatroll and instead he comes across as a ditherer.
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Jun 6, 2021 15:40
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Jerusalem posted:Which is frustrating since ever since 1969 there has been an emergency glass case set up in the BBC with a single piece of paper that reads,"When in doubt, ape Troughton" and he could be using that instead. Sadly, in 2011 someone misread the paper, and while they were able to successfully engineer an ape Troughton, the ape then charmed its keeper and escaped and has yet to be recaptured.
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Jun 7, 2021 00:06
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Maybe age 8 or 9, flipping through the channels, I may have caught bits of the very beginning of The Ark in Space, then navigated away. I picked up that channel again as Tom and Ian peek up from behind the table and Tom say "I think we've done it, Harry!" Watched the rest of the 90 minute combined episode, continued the following week with the Sontaran Experiment, and that was it. In my teens, I'd watch every Saturday evening on the TV in my bedroom while my parents went to sleep (10-11:30 PM, unless the story went longer), and recorded every episode on VHS so I could rewatch. It wasn't until adulthood and the advent of DVDs and an actual income that I started collecting DVDs. I think I'm about four episodes away from owning every episode released on DVD. (drat you, Mind of Evil!)
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Jun 11, 2021 22:59
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Vinylshadow posted:It's a bit absurd how much acting One and Two did with their faces alone, and you lose all of that in animation Well, that’s certainly the headline on the story, but it isn’t true? Whittaker says she was going to try to binge-watch Doctor Who (just the new series? Or the whole thing?) before her audition and Chibnall said “Please don’t do that,” in a very kind exec producer way that amounts to saying “I know the role and I think you’d do well with it without spending a solid month researching.” And also “don’t spend a month of your time researching a role you’re just auditioning for at this stage.” If the story were about how he warned her not to watch past episodes after being cast, that might be a story, but this is just kindness. It’s kind of a silly story anyway. Many of the classic series Doctors weren’t that familiar with the show and it was non-trivial for them to “research the role” like this. And I think most fans prefer Eleven to Twelve even though (or because of the fact that) Smith wasn’t a fan and did limited research while Capaldi was deeply versed in the whole series.
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Jun 16, 2021 14:49
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Vinylshadow posted:Ah, the Rian Johnson approach to storytelling; certainly something worth emulating in TYOL 2021 - and look how well that turned out by turning the future of a series into a dead end so hard they decided to jump far into the past *Sigh.* I have my doubts about trying to have a good faith back & forth with someone who shares a click-bait headline and then responds to my objection by bringing up both The Last Jedi and The Timeless Children and somehow tries to equate them despite the fact that the "jump far into the past" was all JJ and not Johnson. (Never mind that in TLJ it's the villain who talks about killing the past while the hero recovers the ancient Jedi texts.) But here goes. My imagined quote--“I know the role and I think you’d do well with it without spending a solid month researching.”--referred to the AUDITION. You do know what an audition is, right? Show me one piece of evidence suggesting that Chibnall said to Whittaker, after she was cast, that it would be a bad idea to spend a month researching the part. If Chibnall recommended to Whittaker that she not stress out about trying to somehow encompass the entire history of Doctor Who in her audition performance, it was not just good advice, but kind. He's committed plenty of outrages, and continues to provide plenty of evidence that he can't communicate messages coherently and neglects obvious and effective storytelling elements in his episodes. I responded to the last special by spending hours rewriting the story and then posting the results here to illustrate how much Chibnall bobbled things. There is so much low-hanging fruit here that you'd have to bend double to avoid hitting your head. I don't see any reason to create a new sense of outrage over something that was good and solid advice to a performer who did not yet have a part and who could easily have been overwhelmed in audition by trying to somehow capture the long and rich history of an iconic role via cramming, when that research is better done after being cast and accepting the part.
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Jun 16, 2021 19:02
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OldMemes posted:Colin Baker was offered the part without an audition, that's how cool he is. But he first did extensive research by watching The Two Doctors fifty or sixty times.
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Jun 16, 2021 23:23
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Heroic Yoshimitsu posted:So I finally got around to starting 13's run. I've watched the first four episodes and it's.... good? Well the fourth episode, with the spiders, was a bit average. But the other ones were much better than I was expecting, especially after everyone's opinions on 13's/Chibnall's seasons. The Rosa Parks episode was... not nearly as embarrassing as I was dreading? Chibnall's two seasons are, on watch, better-to-much-better than they are when they linger in the memory. I think some weaknesses in several of the earlier Who seasons get wallpapered over because of the stronger serial arcs: 10's single season, in particular, has not aged especially well, and ranges from spectacular to embarrassing, but because it ends pretty strongly the overall impression trends more positively than it otherwise might. The Martha season may suffer from the reverse effect, somewhat. Donna benefits from a strong season and a memorable ending... and so on. 13's two seasons really don't stick the landing. Her first has the advantage of Resolution, which if you take it as the real season finale works fine for that. I'd even go so far as to say that the show needs to break itself of the "showrunner writes the start and ending of every season" pattern, because Chibnall is perfectly capable of writing a stand-alone episode, and he's even shown some promise at the beginnings, but doesn't do so well on endings. I like that he's taking some chances with the other stories: I'm not sure any previous Who would have dared something like Rosa or Demons of the Punjab, for example. It Takes You Away falls into the "pushing the format" pattern of old Who episodes like the Mind Robber and executes beautifully. S12's run features another "wouldn't have tried this before" episode with The Haunting of Villa Diodati, and Fugitive of the Judoon shows boldness of a sort I'm not sure we've seen since the Tom Baker years; the problem is that most of the best episodes of that season get hooked into the season arc, which I didn't dislike nearly as much as most people ITT but which did not carry itself off well. (I'd probably rank it somewhere around Last of the Time Lords and Name of the Doctor in terms of finales.) Personally, I think Chibnall would benefit greatly from some sort of UNIT-equivalent, having an old school kind of disconnected travel episodes with a smaller season arc based around the Earth-focused stories. If I were showrunner, I'd advocate for having 13 working with some ex-UNIT people plus the Zygons to try to address ongoing planetary threats. Unlike 3, I think 13 actually wouldn't resent doing that kind of work some of the time. Also, give Whittaker a few off-planet two-handers with her as the driver of the story. I don't know why the Doctorish moments she's gotten in multiple episodes haven't gelled for the fans like Capaldi in Flatline did, but the focus on ensembles isn't doing her any favors and Chibnall's scripts seem to be more interested in the concept of "The Doctor" than in the actual character and actor he's working with now.
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Jul 5, 2021 18:13
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Maxwell Lord posted:The thing is only two episodes last season struck me as being especially sub-par... but one of those was the season finale so it left a bad taste in folks' mouths. I'm not even sure he lacks in ambition: the massive changes to series lore in the last season are nothing if not ambitious. I think it may have something to do with the way he sets priorities in stories, even the ones he doesn't write himself. Moffat had some well defined priorities, which are probably best in view at the beginning of S3 Sherlock: Moffat is profoundly disinterested with explaining the precise mechanism through which Sherlock faked his own death, and honestly he's less interested in the plot of the week than he is in the character beats for Sherlock and Watson. Subordinating details and explanations of the story to the characters, in other words, is a Moffat trait. He's also very good at writing minor characters who feel "real" and at developing a setting or environment that feels like it has more depth than we see on screen. Chibnall's interests are clearly not with character, although he doesn't completely ignore it. He can't sketch out a minor character in 2-3 lines and make them feel real, he needs more time to manage that. With more time, he's good with character. And he seems very interested in high concepts for stories, far more interested than he is in the intricate details of their operation. And unlike Davies, who actually greatly enjoyed playing into audience expectations, he's more enamored of twists and unexpectedness, but not as clever at setting up for them as Moffat tends to be. That means he's good at set-up episodes. The Woman Who Fell to Earth, for example, was pretty good because it was establishing characters, meaning that the focus isn't on the "wham" plot elements paying off but on a slower development process. Chibnall needs a slow development, so he finds that workable. And his high concepts are generally really solid. Just consider his older episodes: 42 is a gimmick episode with a timer and high stakes. Hungry Earth/Cold Blood is a Silurian reboot with an underlying environmental message (something he brings back as a theme in the last season). Dinosaurs on a Spaceship pretty much sells the concept in the title. The Power of Three is more interested in the Doctor being forced to wait and the idea of a slow invasion than it is in the actual resolution of the story, with the "exterminators from the dawn of time" angle both generic and disappointing. But the character bits before the plot starts paying off are solid. Go down the list of episodes of Chibnall Who, and you'll find every episode has a clearly defined high concept, and episodes not written by Chibnall which are weak on the characterization for the more sketched-in characters don't see any improvement in the edit stage. So Rosa never really makes us feel that the villain is a real person, but has a clear high concept and does well with the characterization of everyone on screen fitting the concept. Conversely, Patel and Hime are more solid at rapid character development, but they also aren't getting any script editor support when they're overreaching (I'm mostly thinking of Hime with Orphan 55, which has too many characters). S11 isn't really arc focused, but S12 is pretty coherent, being focused on technological development and the implication on planetary survival or destruction. That plays out on the environmental end of things (Orphan 55/Praxeus) but also along the "Gallifrey has been destroyed again" plotline. I suspect bringing back the Eternals may have some potential relation to the concluding episodes, but hard to tell if that will go anywhere. But that, perhaps, is key: the thematic underpinnings of the season do not clearly play out in the final episode. That, in turn, leaves one watching the whole series and feeling that it was thematically unfocused and the finale unjustified. A showrunner who started out by casting the first female Doctor and wrapped a season by completely upending the series mythology can't be described as unambitious in my book. But because Chibnall is designing unfocused seasons, it feels like he doesn't have anything really to say, like he's just being shocking to shock, and this compounds with his weak skills at designing episode finales so that a villain like Jack Robertson not only doesn't receive his comeuppance, he doesn't even seem to really get an ending at all. I'm wondering after writing all this just how many episodes over Chibnall's run so far people would describe as having "stuck the landing." Even the best ones that spring to my mind are better because of high concept-related elements, not the conclusion. Spyfall part 2 stuck the landing, maybe? Rosa? Even an episode like It Takes You Away was more about the situation than the resolution, to my mind.
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Jul 6, 2021 19:21
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Maxwell Lord posted:Yeah, but that's... lore. Having the first woman Doctor is ambitious in the sense that it risks idiots getting mad, and changing the lore causes all sorts of fandom shouting in both directions, but there's not really much in the episodes themselves that feels like a shakeup. Gallifrey being gone again doesn't really change how the show goes forward (where the Time War did, simply in the process of clearing the boards and the Doctor being lonely and haunted by what he'd done and so on.) Jo Doctor is lore? You’re parsing Chibnall’s ambitions unfairly, I think. The last time Gallifrey was destroyed, the Time Lords were unavailable (except for the Doctor and the Master). In the last season, we saw a CIA agent (or whatever the organization will be called) in pursuit of Jo Doctor, subsequent to learning the Master wiped out Gallifrey. So whatever Chibnall has in mind, this secret Time Lord organization still exists despite what the Master did (and that’s assuming they didn’t help him do it). Was the fate of humanity in Utopia lore, when we saw humans on-screen? Why is massively changing established Who lore not ambitious? Moffat added another Doctor in between 8 and 9 when he was showrunner: isn’t that lore? Maxwell Lord posted:I don't even have that strong an opinion on the Timeless Child revelation. On the one side it does make the Doctor more "special" and that's kinda dumb, on the other it does bring up the possibility of "past" Doctors we've never met and actions the Doctor has taken that she doesn't even remember and there's some potential there. It's easily ignored most of the time. The main problem with Timeless Children is it's a badly structured story where the Doctor doesn't get to do much and the big dramatic sacrifice is by... some guy. This is where Chibnall's falling down. So we agree that Chibnall is bad at endings? I haven’t watched much of Broadchurch. I am wondering if Chibnall stuck the landing there, and if so, whether it had something to do with the innate structures of mystery stories?
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Jul 7, 2021 15:04
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Khanstant posted:Doctor Who is great as a flawed godlike figures whose reputation and high charisma score are their greatest weapons. Just some semi-immortal alien person who got a time travelling spaceship and just go around the universe doing random acts of mostly good. First off, the word "just" is doing a lot of work there. If the Doctor didn't know about her origin, and if her power to regenerate is no more special than any Time Lord's except that she doesn't need any help to regenerate past the limit (which, as has been repeatedly suggested, appears to be an artificial one), then how does that change anything else about her? Also, calling the Doctor "exceptionally-empathetic" seems suspect given what we saw from Twelve, not to mention several previous Doctors. (I wouldn't call One or Three exceptionally empathetic, for example.) Seven's last two seasons established him as "more than just a Time Lord" and made him considerably more godlike than Thirteen has ever been allowed to be. Ten, and especially Eleven, seemed to have played out the "reputation" thread of the show enough to last for some time yet ("look me up" was brilliant in the moment, but it doesn't work for an every week thing), although Twelve still had some of that. I can understand the arguments about the Doctor's "born special" status, although "born an alien" or "born a Time Lord" has sometimes mattered and sometimes not. Fan favorite City of Death makes a big deal about how Time Lords are special, and as far as we knew at the time, that was a genetic thing, not a learned skill. The only thing we know about the Doctor as the Timeless Child at this point is what we saw in a single episode, coming from an unreliable source. For all we know, she was hurled back in time and space to be discovered by the people who would become Time Lords from the far future, where she was genetically altered or engineered. There is, as yet, zero evidence that she was a member of a species capable of doing the same things, and some evidence to suggest otherwise (because what happened to all these other beings who CANNOT DIE?). Harry Potter was cringeworthy, because besides his special magic powers being partly associated with his blood, it seems like his goodness was also inherited, given that his nasty aunt and uncle raised him and not his parents. He inherited heaps of money from his folks, and his fame is due to something his mother did, not him. Perhaps by the end of the series, he's "earned" his special status, but even then, he hasn't really worked all that seriously through most of the books. That's a mixture of "providence" and "character is nice because the author says so." The Doctor is still the Doctor even if her origins are different than we first thought. Everything she knows about the universe, about people, all the choices and decisions she's made, it's all either a matter of who she is as a person, independent of this past she was unaware of, or a consequence of the physiological characteristics common to all Time Lords, with the possible exception of Eleven's regeneration (which might have been impossible if not for this retcon'ed reason, though obviously it wasn't). Blind Azathoth posted:Maxine Alderton (The Haunting of Villa Diodati) and Ed Hime (It Takes You Away and Orphan 55) are both writing for series 13. From the sound of it, Alderton may be writing multiple episodes or helping write the overall story. I find that very encouraging. Orphan 55 didn't actually work in execution, but the concept was brilliant and I feel like the biggest problem was the pacing of the story, which was also an issue with It Takes You Away. And the only bit of Villa Diodati that I found in any way problematic would have been the insertion from the larger plot; in theme and atmosphere, it was a great haunted house story.
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Jul 27, 2021 03:44
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AttitudeAdjuster posted:I agree that part of what makes the Timeless Child plot so terrible is that it needlessly makes the Doctor special in virtue of who they were born as rather than their deeds and virtues. To my mind, the Timeless Child plot doesn't make the argument that the Doctor is special in virtue of how she was born. I'd have to rewatch, but I don't even think the Master is so pissed off at the Time Lords because the Doctor turns out to be the Timeless Child. He is pissed that he isn't special in the same way, certainly, but some of his anger did read to me as outrage at their treatment of the Doctor, who he has always had a special relationship with. Kind of like End of Time's "gently caress you, Rassilon" moment, only moreso. In other words, the reveal isn't about establishing that the Doctor is special because she was discovered by the Time Lords, turned out to be able to regenerate, and then got tested until the Time Lords figured out how to give themselves the same ability. It is about the Doctor being exploited by the Time Lords, ruthlessly and repeatedly, and then brainwashed into WORKING FOR THEM and defending them. It could possibly have been more steeped in postcolonialism, but it's hard to see how. And the Doctor's moment of escaping from the resulting Blue Screen of Death is Jo-projection-Doctor reminding her that she's defined, not by how she was born, but by who she is and what she does NOW. The real problem in my mind, both here and in both Chibnall seasons overall, is that we don't get to see enough of Thirteen showing how special she is via her deeds and virtues. There's a bit of that, but she gets oddly sidelined in some episodes and is made to seem excessively ineffective in others. Are there moments in the last two seasons that people would point to as the equivalent of Nine's "Everybody lives" moment? Of course, the underlying phenomenon of the reboot that you're pointing to is that big fans were writing for the show, and remembered both the Cartmel Masterplan and what the New Adventures had done for (and to) the character. Of course RTD decided to lift the "Gallifrey is destroyed" idea, and of course that ball got picked up and kicked around by his successors. On some level, these three showrunners exist in a context where they felt they had to defend their passion for this character and program, so naturally they are all, in their own ways, overanxious to prove both what the show is capable of doing and that the Doctor herself is like the best character ever, ya know? I think all three show signs of recognizing the problem, but respond differently to it. RTD threw in a few episodes undermining this narrative (and the Time Lord Victorious idea), and arguably the whole Donna season is about deflating Ten, brilliantly, but by the end it's clear RTD opts to own what he's done. Moffat arguably goes as far as he can with Twelve to make the Doctor unlikeable, almost to Six levels, but his heart clearly isn't in it and he keeps vacillating between the "I am not a good man" and "I want to be unknown" threads in the Doctor's story and the "Big drat hero" and "legendary" strands surrounding him. Hell, Moffat builds a story-line around the universe being destroyed because the TARDIS explodes, literally writing the Doctor into the heart of reality in an episode where he briefly gets written out. I think if assessed honestly, we need to acknowledge that Chibnall's seasons addressed the "Doctor is special because he's the Doctor" issue pretty well, although unfortunately by making Thirteen often seem ineffective, passive, or in error. The Tsurenga Conundrum sees her acting more or less like multiple past Doctors always did (with all the high-handedness of One, Three, Four, Six, Seven, Ten, and sometimes Eleven and Twelve) before correcting herself; with sharper writing, more sense of consequence for villains, and a very different kind of pacing and direction, it's fairly easy to imagine Thirteen as a Two-like manipulator, existing in the margins and prodding other people as often as she takes center stage. The larger problem, perhaps, is that the show's larger apparatus has been configured for so long with the objectives of the previous showrunners that even trying to pull a Two-style approach off would be a huge challenge, without factoring in that Chibnall has trouble zeroing in on how to write the character this way. If you think about it seriously, the Doctor changed from a rebel to the ultimate defender of the establishment, such as it is: Nine obviously didn't have that problem, but Ten was pretty heavy-handed with the "Lonely Time Lord" and "I am your judge" approaches to things even when he's fighting the Time Lords themselves, Eleven constantly takes things over, saves Gallifrey and then drops the whole "now I will find it" subplot, and ends up in one place for long periods of time where he's basically meddling outrageously. Twelve has a deep streak of arrogance so wide that he can tell Rassilon to get lost and he does. Even granting that the point of that episode is that Twelve is too arrogant, his final season keeps switching back and forth from a more humble Twelve like we see in The Doctor Falls (mostly) to the horrific arrogance he displays in The Lie of the Land. Thirteen is at least an attempt to do something different; failing, thus far, but a worthy thing to try. She's almost complete devoid of the typical Doctor's arrogance, though it's still present. She's isn't as casually privileged as most previous Doctors have been. The main problem is that she comes across, in terms of effectiveness as a revolutionary, about as well as the Occupy Wall Street movement.
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Jul 28, 2021 02:44
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Barry Foster posted:The BBC's highest execs are all tory chuds after Cameron parachuted a bunch of em in. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they had it in for a production where the Doctor is a woman Don't know about the top tier, but Piers Wenger is Director of Drama and was previously the director of BBC Wales and Exec Producer on both Doctor Who and Sarah Jane Adventures. I'd expect a combination of COVID and general fuckery with the BBC budgeting to be to blame, but I'm not exactly well-informed in this area. Given what Chibnall has been showing, I'd think that tory chuds would want him to stay, if only because of the non-zero risk that someone more effective replaces him. So the usual suspects would be Mark Gatiss and Toby Whithouse, I assume?
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Jul 29, 2021 18:01
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LionArcher posted:This is good but also needless attacks rise of skywalker and gets it wrong. The gently caress up was back when being a Time Lord got turned into something "regular." The start of the new series managed to fix that, at least for a while. One good thing about this departure: when fans talk about Thirteen, I expect the general consensus will be "Jodie got cheated of better-written episodes" and not "women cannot play the Doctor." So at least there's that.
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Jul 29, 2021 23:25
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OldMemes posted:I just listened to The Magic Mousetrap, and its great - funny and rather creepy and sinister. I also like the format of the interviews on this release, with the writer talking to the cast, rather than having the cast talk unprompted to the microphone, shame they don't do that more often. Orphan 55 is pretty clearly written as horror. (Insert your own joke here.) Praxeus is also skirting the horror line, and The Haunting of Villa Diodati is played as almost straight horror, though the mood is arguably spoiled by having a Cyberman appear. They’ve had their horror moments, but that really hasn’t been their prevailing mood since their first appearance and even World Enough and Time couldn’t sustain its horror forever. I’d say Whittaker has had one good horror episode and multiple OK episodes, they just keep veering off into something else.
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Jul 30, 2021 15:19
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The_Doctor posted:Rassilon. Yes, Ian McShane as Rassilon and Dame Judi Dench as Omega.
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Jul 30, 2021 22:16
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FilthyImp posted:Oh god they should go full crazy and cast an actual child God no, with the restrictions on how long child actors are allowed to work, we'd get three episodes a year. The_Doctor posted:Go on then, I’d watch it. Almost certainly never happen, which is probably too bad. I'd predict JMS would pull stuff like having two new companions, and then at the end of the first series, one of them is revealed to be the Master. (Even better, he'd play with the question of whether this is a post-Missy Master who actually wants to help the Doctor or not.) I could see a framing narrative where the Doctor showed up at place X, with a plan, and is taking trips to other places and times in the various episodes to change or rearrange history in such a way that she can handle the place X problem in minutes at the end of it all. I also suspect we'd see far fewer "monsters" and more alien species with individuals and conflicting morals and agendas. Of course, there's always the risk that he has the Doctor announce that she's not going to travel in the TARDIS because it'd be better if she walks everywhere. One good thing I can say about JMS as a producer/show-runner: he knows how to stretch a minimal budget. And he knows how to get things filmed on time by planning really far in advance.
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Jul 31, 2021 18:26
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J33uk posted:Forget looms. Forget the timeless child. Let's talk Time Lord Totems. The number of nuclear detonations also goes through the fuckin' roof. Hey, that was just John “Nuke ‘em” Sheridan. Sinclair never nuked anyone. I haven’t seen Sense8, but I think there’s a distinct lack of nukes there, too. Also in Changeling. And it isn’t like “insane control freak becomes showrunner for Doctor Who” would be a novel circumstance at this point. Either he’d triple down on the Time Lords, or he’d drop them entirely and introduce multiple potential replacements for them. We’d probably see more exploration of the TARDIS interior, possibly doubling as a bubble episode, and we’d see some kind of interwoven temporal story arc that relies on people being able to stream the show on demand. Non-zero risk of “the TARDIS becomes a woman again,” though. And there would be no shortage of long Doctor speeches.
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Aug 1, 2021 06:08
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Capaldi as Caecilius in the next multi-doctor story confirmed! Rhyno posted:That article even says it, Tennant said he wasn't keen on coming back either and then he did anyways. If Eccleston by some miracle wants to do it there's no way Capaldi would sit out. Yes, but Tennant says this time that he would come back if asked, which suggests that he hasn't been asked because if he had been he'd lie about it. "Ever hear of the double-bluff?" Shut up, Uvanov.
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Aug 3, 2021 17:23
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OldMemes posted:I'd like them to go full 6 and give her some audio original companions. A character as interesting as Evelyn, Liv or Charley would give 13 so much more depth than the underwritten TV companions. Can we please let 13/Yaz have some time together before insisting, like the TV show, that we need some other companion? Yaz has been sidelined since being introduced and she should be levels of awesome that Amy and Clara wish they could achieve.
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Aug 6, 2021 18:40
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Unkempt posted:It's basically a space rocket with Batman at the controls. And his companion is a cow wearing a space helmet.
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Aug 9, 2021 00:01
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LividLiquid posted:I was such a naïve little Whovian that I assumed we'd actually have The Doctor go hunting for Gallifrey after DotD. Well, it was Tom who suggested it.
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Aug 27, 2021 20:27
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"it’ll be a joint decision between BBC Studios and the top decision-makers at the BBC" Is my window open? I just felt a chill. Edit: Not the worst page snipe I've seen, but not great. See original post: Timby posted:From Radio Times:
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Aug 31, 2021 20:18
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Letts co-wrote episodes during his time as producer, so he was closer to the current showrunner model. And the current model is, or at least has been, more complex than presented. RTD was executive producer and showrunner on nuWho, but Julie Gardner was also executive producer and head of Drama for BBC Wales. So at “best,” the showrunner model gives authority to the head writer (along with an expectation the showrunner writes for the show, where someone like Robert Holmes had difficulties writing for Who while script editor), but the financial person is still there. And I have no idea the practical effects of having RTD as showrunner when Gardner was head of drama for BBC Wales. In show terms, exec prod Davies outranked Gardner, but he was working for BBC Wales drama and that made Gardner his boss. Most likely they were closer to partners and operated as a unit. Moffat had issues with his financial exec producers and went thru a number of them; Chibnall hasn’t. Whether any of this is driving the production issues or whether they’re occurring because of broader BBC problems I’m in no position to say, but Gardner definitely deserves some credit for early nuWho.
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Sep 1, 2021 15:13
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I love the typically Whovian suspicions here that RTD got appointed out of BBC desperation and that we’re in another JNT “nobody else wants this” situation. Maybe nobody else the BBC wanted was lobbying for the position, but we know of at least one other person who was. Far more likely is that they talked to RTD and liked his pitch the best, and it sounds like RTD’s pitch was “I was trying to run a Doctor Who franchise before such things were cool, so let’s try it again”. My bet is that he wants to be Who’s Feige. That might mean refreshing Who for a few years first, then becoming franchise supervisor while another showrunner comes in. What’s less clear is precisely what kinds of spin-offs he has in mind, mainly because most of the obvious choices right now would have to be headlined by people who probably wouldn’t say yes. I don’t think we’re getting a Clara and Me spin-off, for instance. So over a few years, RTD may deliberately design spin-off worthy characters and concepts and get their actors signed to a MCU-style contract where they commit to play the character in multiple series if that gets approved by the BBC. That could turn out either amazing or cringeworthy. In particular, watch for more writers who are potential showrunners themselves in the anniversary year: if you want Gatiss to run a spin-off show, having him write the episode that could generate it makes sense.
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Sep 25, 2021 14:36
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Rochallor posted:Speaking of which, didn't the Tories pass some crummy law recently forcing the BBC to shop jobs around to private companies before looking for somebody in-house? This is presumably why Bad Wolf Studies is co-producing the next series. I guess the no hiring foreigners things would cancel out that re: hiring someone like Stracynzski, though who knows if he made an actual pitch or just a tweet. JMS posted multiple tweets, asked who his agents needed to communicate with, and then passed along the response he got (which I believe was also posted here, prompting a mini-discussion about how if the British are polite to you you know you didn't get the job). Bad Wolf is Julie Gardner and Jane Trantor, who produced Who with Davies. Gardner did Torchwood and Sarah Jane, and she was working for BBC Worldwide before starting Bad Wolf with Trantor; their last series was a streaming show starring Billie Piper which streamed in the US on HBO Max. Trantor was Controller of BBC Drama and brought Who back, and she then took over at BBC Worldwide before leaving to found Bad Wolf with Gardner. These are two extremely "connected" women, both in terms of the BBC and of BBC Worldwide, and they're also hooked into the HBO organization (apart from Bad Wolf,Trantor is an exec producer on Succession). Couple that with RTD's "Who as streaming franchise" and this starts looking very much like a very savvy end-run around that law to create an independent production group affiliated with the BBC and run by BBC insiders to massively grow the franchise. I would expect to start hearing about partnerships between the BBC and HBO to produce spin-offs. Given that Billie Piper just worked with Bad Wolf, I would not be surprised to see them offer her a show centered around Rose at 40; that would also give her a chance to show off her acting chops, as I've always gotten the sense from her that she's a bit embarrassed by her early Who performances. Whether they can snag Tennant as the Hand Doctor is anybody's guess; maybe he'd appear infrequently? Camille Coduri and Shaun Dingwall as the Tyler parents are probably realistic gets, too. Given RTD's investment in the Tylers, and the advantages of running a spin-off in an alternate universe, that idea seems like it would have legs and it could benefit from the experience doing Torchwood and Sarah Jane while going in a slightly different direction. As there doesn't seem to be a Doctor in that universe, that would also neatly solve the "where's the Doctor" problem.
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Sep 25, 2021 18:10
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 17:14 |
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Sydney Bottocks posted:Oh, I know who Jon Blum is, I read a bunch of the PDA/8DA books back in the day. You’re an MST3K fan, so surely you understand that making a show “good” isn’t just a matter of having a cast and production team and writer who want to make good TV. Doctor Who fans really are both the best and the worst. Years of complaining about how little show we’ve been getting, and now that we’re faced with the prospect of getting loads more than we were, I look forward to years of complaints about that, too. There are some big advantages to having a franchise, and some real risks. I greatly enjoyed Sarah Jane and am grateful we got some extra time with the wonderful Lis Sladen before her untimely death. Torchwood was a mixed bag, but Children of Earth was fantastic and nobody is forcing me to watch Cyberwoman again. Who’s strength has always been its ability to give you lots of different kinds of stories, like an Every-Flavored Bean, and even in the worst seasons of the show there’s something worth watching. Let’s see what develops. In the meantime, after the ongoing phenomenon of the show doing less with less and the repeated suspicion that the BBC isn’t providing enough money for a full season of shows, the prospect of Bad Wolf co-producing and HBO bankrolling should be welcome. If you don’t enjoy what’s coming, stop watching. Another change will come along in a few more years, and in the meantime, there will be some good and terrible episodes to seek out or avoid.
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Sep 28, 2021 15:48
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