|
Vinylshadow posted:Maybe we'll be surprised He's gonna run out of later episodes in which to ruin things pretty fast. Maybe he cribbed a bunch of good ideas off of other authors, and we can nickname him Cribnall.
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2021 01:28
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 04:45 |
|
|
"I'm half-Timeless, on my mother's side." I wonder if the phrase "flux capacitor" will come up over the course of the new series.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2021 22:12
|
|
|
Myrddin_Emrys posted:They need someone to helm Who, who has the guts to make it a little more serious and completely take out the camp because it is massively derogatory to the show. Chibnall could have made Jodies run amazing, but it really did fall flat. The Timeless Child ret con was just an awful thing to do to Dr Who as a whole. I am still amazed this got the greeen light. Taking out the camp from Doctor Who is like taking the baking out of the Great British Baking show. Escobarbarian posted:I also saw the Flux ad at the cinema, and I just…..felt nothing. Except for when I laughed when she said “Sontarans”. I don’t think he’s given us anything as amazingly bad as Fear Her or In the Forest of the Night; his biggest flaw as showrunner is that, unlike the last two, none of his scripts have ever been best of season and he often struggles to land more than one or two above average. He also seems to have a higher percentage of episodes in his series which are competent to good but then get spoiled by the ending. On the other hand, he gave us both Jodie Whittaker and Jo Martin. I’m not going to praise him for mostly wasting Jodie’s Doctor, but it was still a big step and no other showrunner was willing to take it. Now that’s he’s done it, anyone could play the Doctor in the future, and that’s a big deal. The show’s had worse producers. I don’t have much patience for Innes Lloyd’s attitudes towards companions, for instance. It’s probably had a worse script editor, though Chibnall can be nominated in that category. As the combined showrunner, with only two others for comparison, Chibnall is worst, but by classic show standards his record looks somewhat better. Taking the long view, Who may never have looked so good on the screen, had as many good actors or sets. Scripting remains inconsistent, but I wonder if there’s any well-scripted episodes that have been let down by production design or bad performances, as in the old days of the show. Question for the thread.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2021 15:40
|
|
|
Sydney Bottocks posted:I'd disagree with this because his record pales in comparison to Hinchliffe/Holmes, whose run was arguably the gold standard for the classic era of the show. How you got from my "Chibnall isn't worst if you compare him with all the producer/script editor pairings across the classic series" to "he can compete with one of the top three pairings if not the very top" I can't imagine. JNT/Saward isn't always awful, but sometimes is, and the brutalism of the Sixth Doctor era in particular has not aged well at all, especially in comparison to Seven. twistedmentat posted:I can't wait to find out Gallifrey was destroyed, AGAIN! Honestly, i hated how they keep doing that in NuWho. I always loved there was a planet of bureaucrats and bean counters that would every once and a while interfear with the doctors adventures. I predict we're getting a kind of Schrödinger's Gallifrey: it both does and doesn't exist, and the Time Lords are both alive and dead. I really don't understand why Chibnall, who seemed fascinated by the idea of the Eternals and who has shown himself perfectly capable of the kind of fanwankery that links stories like The Mind Robber and Enlightenment, hasn't deployed them in earnest, especially as set against a potentially unguarded Domain of Time. Instead he toyed about with an Eternal with flying detachable fingers and another one trapped in a hamster ball.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2021 04:27
|
|
|
Looks like the Sontarans will be foes but end up as friends. The interesting bit is that it looks to me like that angel was working with (or for) the Doctor and deliberately transporting someone back in time to be somewhen the Doctor will need her. I wonder if Chibnall asked the question "If the angels are from the dawn of time and quantum-locked, what did they need to be quantum-locked to protect themselves from?" Whether Bone-face is supposed to be Fenric or not isn't clear, but so far he and his sister seem to be very much in the Fenric/Gods of Ragnarok mold, suggesting we may be getting Chibnall's version of the Cartmel Masterplan this series. Sadly, the odds of him being Sutekh are just about zero (although he did have a sister!). I'm pretty sure the Black Guardian doesn't have relatives.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2021 02:22
|
|
|
MrL_JaKiri posted:I'm sure there are stories that call back to previous ones as a hook that aren't terrible, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. I take it you’ve never seen Day of the Doctor? New series is full of call backs. If you restrict the equation to “new stories calling back to classic series in more than a general way,” you still have the call back to Spearhead from Space in Rose. If Sun Makers were a Six story, someone else would have been steamed to death before Leela’s turn came up in order to demonstrate the stakes. And we’ve have seen at least one of the underdwellers tortured to death. Also, the Gatherer would have been steamed to death instead of being thrown off a building.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2021 14:53
|
|
|
MrL_JaKiri posted:I'm talking about Classic exclusively, obviously there are loads in the new series. (Traken being destroyed comes up a fair amount, although there are some serials where it is just ignored (eg Black Orchid)) Great Architect identified ITT!
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2021 15:19
|
|
|
One big issue I had was the “shield Earth” plan. I don’t think Chibnall gets how big space is. With 7 billion ships and assuming a high Earth orbit, each ship has to be about 150 miles long to encompass the Earth. If we assume a low Earth orbit, that number drops to each ship being 792 feet long, which is plausible. OTOH, there may be enough orbital debris at that level to cause problems. The bigger issue is, of course, the idea that each of this aliens is pair bonded to a single human life. Over 100 people die per minute, while maybe 250 people are born every minute. That seems like a problem. And one wonders where this fleet was when other events menaced the Earth.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2021 15:25
|
|
|
Flight Bisque posted:Also the space station bring called Rose made me roll my eyes instinctively because come on man, all the words in all the languages and you pick that one? Obviously the station was set up by the Doctor to watch for the Flux. The only question is whether she hasn’t done it yet. The twist will be if it does turn out to be a coincidence.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2021 19:59
|
|
|
usenet celeb 1992 posted:Or very Ace, if this really is a Fenris sort of deal. Because that dog, according to the Doctor, is the only surviving person who knows anything about the Division.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2021 18:57
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:Taking the most charitable view, I'm going to assume it'll be something that stands distinct in some way that he wants to jam into the show's continuity, like time didn't used to exist and everything was just a chaotic flux of everything and nothing at once and then time got established thanks to the Mouri or whatever, the universe assembled into something resembling order with the Sugar Skull Gang imprisoned to prevent them unraveling it, and then Rassilon and Omega came along however long later and invented time travel and Rassilon elevated selected Gallifreyans into Time Lords etc. Unclear, but I’d assume a connection between the Timeless and the planet Time. The Division is presumably also involved, and our favorite dog (OK, second after K9) is connected with them and may be tied into what’s going on in a far more deliberate way than we thought. Seems like the characters are better drawn (except for the ones Chibnall doesn’t really care about, like the British general, who didn’t land as much of anything) but the actual logic of what is happening doesn’t hold up to a few seconds’ scrutiny. The “Sontarans don’t refuel in shifts” thing could actually have been explained in a sentence or two, but there wasn’t any attempt to do that. Yes, I do believe Sontaran temporal technology is so crap that a single uncontrolled time explosion would unravel their invasion. But there’s gonna have to be a hell of an explanation for why the triangle peacekeepers set as guards on the planet time don’t recognize Swarm or Azure, who are presumably the ones who damaged the temple of Atropos in the first place. This is starting to feel like it was influenced more heavily by the Key to Time season than first appeared. There’s a definite Order vs Chaos theme in operation and one wonders if the temple were fully operational whether it would lock everything into stasis. Unsure whether that house at the beginning is the TARDIS or Time itself. I do have a bad idea that the Weeping Angels aren’t going to turn out to be working with the Doctor after all, which will be a disappointment, but not as big of one as if Dan carrying his shrunken house around in his pocket doesn’t turn out to matter later in the story. If you see a shrunken house on the mantle in Act 1, you have to unshrink it on top of something before the end.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2021 05:10
|
|
|
Maxwell Lord posted:Anyway the one plot hole I thought I noticed had nothing to do with shifts, but is rather this- okay so the one Sontaran that Mary treated was captured, for long enough for her to observe his sleep cycle. But if that cycle is specifically because they have to recharge their suits, why was he showing no ill effects from being away from the ship for multiple cycles? He actually died during the first sleep cycle. And the general died on the battlefield. Something brought them both back to life. (I really hope that isn’t right, BTW.)
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2021 05:34
|
|
|
Forktoss posted:I for one salute our Sontaran friends for granting Finland the gift of independence a good 60-something years in advance “Leader, the climate in this part of our great empire appears to be defective!” “Excellent, we can use the threat of exile to this place to keep the populace in line.” “Can you technically exile someone to a place that is part of the empire?” “I… hurgh. Grant them their independence immediately!” (Yes, you can exile people to a part of your own country. Sontarans are not especially bright.)
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2021 15:39
|
|
|
fractalairduct posted:One of the skulls said that the Mouri had been quantum-locked as protection from them, so I'm wondering if they're going to turn out to have some connection to the Weeping Angels. I’ll repeat my old suggestion: the Weeping Angels are the way they are because of the skull gang. That probably includes their feeding off of temporal energy, too, although whether that’s related to the old Time before the Mouri harnessed time itself or to the period where time was under control but the skull gang were still active, it’s hard to say. If it turns out all the monsters end up fighting the Doctor instead of working with her, I will be profoundly upset. Fighting followed by the Doctor recruiting them is fine. But the skull gang are a threat to reality and beings like the Angels ought to know that. A quantum lock that suspends itself via proximity seems like a bad defense. Maybe the skull gang needed someone else to trip the proximity condition because they can’t for some reason?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2021 19:54
|
|
|
Forktoss posted:The Ultimate Foe part one is a legitimately great episode of Who, for me it's the closest Seasons 22-23 ever come to being genuinely good. I love Colin but despite all the good will I can muster I honestly can't say any of his stories clear a bar higher than "ok at parts but still kinda bad" (not even Vengeance on Varos really, despite what some say). The Ultimate Foe part two is such a disjointed mess that that story on the whole unfortunately doesn't either. The Mysterious Planet is pretty good and features what I think of as the best Six/Peri dynamic of the televised stories. You just have to not get upset over the ludicrous premise and the ways the trial messes with the ending.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2021 16:13
|
|
|
Payndz posted:"I am Drathro, not-polystyrene giant robot overlord of Drathro is crap, but the story makes it clear that he is supposed to be crap. The whole story is self-consciously a sci-fi parody, not unlike Creature from the Pit, only more clearly executed. The pathetic and stupid robot is supposed to be so. I can only imagine Saward explaining the “Time Lords moved the Earth” premise to Holmes and Holmes sitting there thinking “the only way to sell this idea is a parody of awful sci-fi, because the idea is awful sci-fi.”
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2021 16:05
|
|
|
A few observations: 1. Yaz saying the events she appeared in aren't a part of her timestream. Unclear how that is going to be important, but it will be. 2. Dan's house is near/at the site of the Williamson Tunnels. They're going to be important. I am still hopeful Dan's shrunken home will be, too. 3. Chibnall has been rewatching The Time Monster. 4. Space and Time are at odds, but the mission is Love. 5. Everyone is assuming that the Division is in the Doctor's past. The evidence seems to be hinting at that: Karvanista is a "survivor from the Division" and we now know he was at the Temple of Atropos when Jo Doctor seized it. The Division is in Gallifrey's past. The Division no longer exists. The Doctor suggested to the Mouri that they use the same plan as "before," but she's standing in the Timestream and she has no memory of the Jo Doctor's experiences. How do we know for certain that she's in the Doctor's past, and not her future? Our Doctor might not remember the first battle against Swarm across Space and Time because she's only now fighting it. (Then again, it's Chibnall, so this might be a twist he isn't capable of.) If Time isn't linear, then the second thing could precede the first. 6. What if Swarm escaped because of events which happened subsequent to his escape? In other words, the Flux enabled the escape, and not the escape the Flux. If that's so, then it's possible the Flux is indeed the Doctor's doing. 7. The woman the Doctor met who said the universe is coming to an end could be Chaos. We're in a stasis vs ending/Order vs Chaos model here which throws in Space and Time for good measure, and the Doctor has got to find an alternative to all these dyads. Atropos is the end, death, conclusion, so the Temple of Atropos needs something to balance it out. Williamson seems to be building something, and he put in a brief appearance on the planet Time. 8. If temporal events are scrambled, Jo Doctor could be working to save Jodie Doctor. We know she's out there. 9. If Yaz experienced events that never happened in her past, and the context makes clear that they're unlikely to have been in her future, what's the alternative? Either someone constructs new history and Yaz was seeing part of that, or Yaz had part of her timestream disrupted/eaten. For the latter possibility, we saw the Angel right there. 10. I'm going to be disappointed in the whole "Angels are on the Doctor's side this time" thing, aren't I?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2021 03:38
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:I also dug the scenes of actors playing different characters, particular Whittaker telling a boring work story about her war with a retail worker My favorite was actually her playing the Jo Doctor. The tone and attitude are completely different and Whittaker sold it so well that when the reveal happened you could kick yourself for not already figuring it out. Especially impressive given how much trouble Chibnall has with voice and characterization in some of his stories. Jerusalem posted:Based on Bel being pregnant but not noticeably so.... just how long did Vander's endless, utterly bored exile last before the Flux showed up? Like 2 months? We don’t know which people Bel and Vander are with. If they have time travel, Vander could have been away for thousands of years in his timestream while Bel perceives much less time passing. I’m not sure how I’ll feel if it turns out that the Great Serpent is actually Rassilon. (Unlikely, but not impossible.)
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2021 16:12
|
|
|
jisforjosh posted:"Don't you see Doctor? It was in front of you all along!" "Cows?!" "I said, it's pronounced like chaos." "Pretty sure that spells cows, though." Behind the scenes on the "fugitive Doctor" pretty much dashed any hopes of a "not past" Jo Doctor. OTOH, it did make me notice how Jo Martin adopts some mannerisms similar to Hartnell. Perhaps the Flux messes with the Doctor's personal timeline and mixes up her regenerations? I just want more Jo Doctor, please.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2021 01:48
|
|
|
Flight Bisque posted:I can't decide if Vinder knowing what a TARDIS is means something or not. It made me wonder whether the Vinder in the Jo Doctor segment was actually Vinder. His performance on that mission could have been what got him promoted to bodyguard. It seems unlikely, but not impossible.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2021 16:31
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:He would have recognized the TARDIS immediately if that was the case, given we saw that Ruth-Doctor's TARDIS was still stuck in the police box shape that it first got into in her earlier and first ever incarnation as the William Hartnell Doctor. If Swarm wasn't lying, the TARDIS couldn't have gotten to Time if he hadn't patched Yaz and Vinder in as a quick repair to the Mouri. In the other mission, time was sufficiently confused that the Jo-Doctor apparently needed medication to protect against its effects. I'd assume the TARDIS couldn't have gone near the Temple under those conditions. (The Time Scoop could have dropped forces off, though if this was really a fight between space and time, a space ship would have been a better idea.) If we'd seen Vinder do a "flicker" into someone else or if he'd done something distinctive, I might feel differently. But this looks like it could be a clever fake-out. Until Vinder meets Karvanista and they do or do not recognize each other, I consider the question open.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2021 01:21
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:Well that was a mess. It might have worked if they had just made it a story about the Doctor and companions in two time periods working together to try and solve the problem across time to stop the Angels, but instead it was peppered through with Vinder and Bel's storyline, the Division nonsense, and they directly contradicted or ignored their own "rules" about Angels constantly. I really wanted to like it and there were times it was very atmospheric or interesting, but that's definitely the absolute worst Angel story so far. Well, I thought that was brilliant, the Angels were genuinely scary, the dialogue was good, and the characters well-realized. The Angels observed a few new rules, but that’s happened every time we’ve met them, and this episode at least fixed the worst excesses of Moffat’s two-parter by explaining that the “image of an Angel is an Angel” thing requires a lot of effort/energy, so they won’t do it often and refugees like the three in Blink wouldn’t do it at all. I have also figure out The Division, although precisely what it entails I couldn’t say. The give-away was the hostage-taking Angel calling it, simply, “Division.” This whole sequence is concerned with a conflict or power struggle between Time and Space, yes? “Division” isn’t the name of the organization, it’s the goal of it. The Division wants to divide Time and Space. No idea what that means because the idea is rather mad. At the least, it suggests that Chibnall had all this planned at the start of his run: the Timeless Child, the Division, Space and Time. Odds are good that when it all gets explained, it won’t make much sense, but it is cleverer than “the CIA just got a different name”. The one blessing (?) with Chibnall is he’ll usually overexplain instead of doing the Moffat “you want to work out the details of what happened? Don’t be silly, mate, I’m already off on the next adventure and you’re just sad dwelling on the past.”
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2021 03:32
|
|
|
Maxwell Lord posted:Angel stories are tough because they do have these very hard/fast rules that other monsters don't. You can run away from a Dalek or duck laser shots from a Cyberman but an Angel *will* catch you if you look away so the writer has to work harder to contrive ways out of that situation. (Though yeah, nobody's tried blinking one eye at a time. I remember Colin Baker bringing that up at a panel.) The Angels are a combination of horror movie monsters and the Moffat fairy-tale season, so both call for a set of rules governing how they operate. But the rules don't make sense, never did, and keep changing in subsequent appearances, just like most horror movie monsters. Even the quantum lock mechanism coupled with the weeping posture makes no sense. The Angels are quantum locked when observed, meaning that they don't have to know they are being observed to get quantum locked. An Angel unexpectedly quantum locked wouldn't cover its eyes because it doesn't know that it needs to do so. More to the point, why would an Angel cover its eyes instead of closing them? Covering means your eyes are still open, someone could stick a mirror in your hands, etc; closing your eyes is also substantially faster than raising your hands (try it at home, kids!). The instant you're unlocked you can open your eyes again, navigate, and then shut them at the next available moment. But then they wouldn't be the "Weeping Angels" and the whole conceit falls apart. They prey on people by sending them back in time. That means that all Angel lore comes from the Angels' victims, recording warnings prior to being attacked by the Angels. Within the puzzle-box of Blink, maybe that's a stable or sustainable system. But if you get tossed 32 years into the past, why in the world wouldn't you write yourself a letter with explicit instructions on how to not get thrown into the past? And as we see, being hurled into the past doesn't mean you can't be alive "both times" at once: what happens if you meet yourself? And the biggest open question, at least until this last Angel episode: how can they possibly travel anywhere? Unless Angels are just found randomly on planets, they'd have to either dematerialize or cross interstellar space. (The "image of an angel is an angel" might work, but that's also pretty solid nonsense introduced in their second appearance.) In short, none of the rules really matter: they're a horror movie monster and they do or don't do things based on whatever the current rules happen to be. Compare to the supposedly non-rules-based series monsters and you'll find far more consistency among them, despite the fact that we get new Cyberman designs almost every time they appear and the Daleks keep gaining and losing characteristics because their creator gets confused about their not being robots (Terry Nation, not Davros). SiKboy posted:Yes, but there is no need for them to BOTH simultaneously stare wide eyed at the angel while dan tries to fix the torch without looking at it is my point. That was dumb as poo poo. My point is that as long as Yaz doesnt look away or blink dan can look down, fix the torch and then it wont be completely dark as they would then have a working torch. "Hey yaz, you dont blink for a minute while I try and fix this". As it happened, Yaz could have watched while Dan worked on the torch without any change in the results, because the cloud passing over the moon made things dark enough for the Angel to attack. Two people looking hedges against a sneeze or startle or other response that might lead one to blink. I think you're expecting rather a lot from Dan, anyway, given that his method of fixing seemed to be tapping on it rapidly. Might as well complain about how the camera moves kept us from watching the Angels and preventing their attacks. At least we avoided the cringeworthy moment in Flesh and Stone where we saw an Angel turn its head.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2021 20:36
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:Given the Division's whole thing about keeping secret and making people forget things, you'd think they'd include The Silence in them.... hell, maybe they do A retcon of The Big Bang I could get behind. “We were trying to stop the Doctor from bringing back the Time Lords and accidently blew up the TARDIS and destroyed all of space and time because we’re renegade confessor priests” makes a hell of a lot less sense than “We were trying to end the universe.” Although what the Division wants precisely is unclear, if we assume our unidentified woman who wants to end the universe is connected with the Division, we can probably safely assume that that’s at least a step in the plan. These do seem like the sort of people who would say “gently caress it, our original plan didn’t work, let’s terminate this universe and start from scratch” and that does seem like something the Doctor would oppose. Open Source Idiom posted:I think that your argument is trending towards No True Scotsman fallacy territory, but also: Alien, absolutely a horror film with a classic horror movie villain, and it doesn't fit the rules structure. It’s funny you mention Friday the 13th because that is my paradigm of the “horror movie with rules” where the rules can change radically from appearance to appearance. The first film, Jason isn’t even the killer! I completely agree with your larger point that the “set of rules” logic isn’t really a thing except within the framework of each specific appearance. I’ll repeat that the Angels, while inconsistent, haven’t even neared the levels of inconsistency for most of the old school Who monsters. Moffat broke their rules every time they reappeared, sometimes radically, and the nonsensical elements permitted in the name of horror were as bad or worse as in their latest appearance. “Statue of Liberty takes a walk at night through Manhattan without anybody looking out their window” is a heck of a lot worse than “Angels can apparently move through solid stone but wooden doors hold them off for a surprisingly long time”. I am a bit concerned that we’re going to get a Vardan-style reveal that the Division Angels are just people wearing Angel suits to protect them from the effects of the Flux and nonlinear Time.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 23, 2021 20:26
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:Yeah, it's why I'm in a mild panic about whatever Chibnall's ultimate resolution is. I detest the notion of the Looms/The Other as a concept and it's one of those narrow misses like the Doctor and the Master being sons of Ulysses the legendary Time Lord that I'm forever grateful got thrown out or never got a chance to happen. That's why I keep pushing for the Season 6B nonsense, because that's also bad but at least it doesn't turn the Doctor from a selfish old man who learned to be compassionate and adjust his moral compass via exposure to outside cultures/species and ways of thinking into a super special sexless reincarnation of some mythical Time Lord from the origin of their species who was just always naturally a "good" person trying to make the universe a better place. Given that the Timeless Child retcon is all about "Before she was the Doctor, she was a refugee/orphan who got experimented upon and then ended up working for the Time Lords and the Division before getting fed up and breaking with them," it's a bit strange to be upset over all the character arc for One that is going to get messed up. If One doesn't remember his past and doesn't start out a hero, then surely the arc development is still significant? You might as well suggest that because Eleven prevented the War Doctor from using the Moment to destroy Gallifrey, every moment of the Doctor's development from Nine to Eleven becomes totally meaningless. It is because Eleven thought War Doctor pushed the button that he's able to prevent it from happening. The good (?) news is there's no way that's either Lungbarrow or that Season 6B is happening. It'll be something new to piss a whole bunch of fans off while delighting others or, if we're unlucky, delighting nobody.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 25, 2021 04:23
|
|
|
Senor Tron posted:It's the classic storytelling rule that one unlikely thing is a great kickoff point, while a series just feels convenientally coincidental and unsatisfying. Or the "which caused/because/and so" style of writing rule. That’s an interesting story, which is itself a massive retcon. One was never a Time Lord and wasn’t originally experiencing a personal journey of discovery after stealing a TARDIS (Susan named it “the TARDIS” and there is no indication that another one exists, making it as likely that he owned the thing). The War Games is largely responsible for the retcon, with some additional details added in afterward, especially during Four and Five’s run. If you like that story better, fine, but it was not the original story, it was a Timeless Child level retcon that you either liked better at the time it happened, or grew up with and thus never perceived as a retcon at all. Depending on what Chibnall and his successors make of the Timeless Child retcon, in forty years someone may be defending it against whatever the latest retcon is. Very clearly, the change doesn’t make the Doctor a founder of Time Lord society, it makes her an exploited alien who was enslaved, experimented upon, and then brainwashed into thinking she was a Time Lord. That doesn’t undo the other character arc, it deepens it. I can see where someone could object on a number of grounds, but suggesting that this erases the context of the “original story” when it decidedly does not is a pretty weak claim. Objecting to the change on the grounds of identity politics—that the Doctor’s resistance to corruption and tyranny has to be coupled with her own oppressed status or it doesn’t count—would be a stronger objection, and I can think of about half a dozen other strong objections. This one has a strange mixture of fictional and metafictional claims and works better if the objection is limited to Chibnall not finding the current “Doctor was an orphan on Gallifrey who rose to importance, rebelled, stole a TARDIS and gradually came to be a hero” narrative rich enough instead of making claims about the series story claiming an intent which did not exist. RTD didn’t plan for Day of the Doctor and thought that the Doctor had pressed the button, but the fictional story works perfectly well as seen on screen despite that, because the Doctor is the only one in a position to know better and doesn’t.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 26, 2021 16:22
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:I think somebody even once said they like Delta and the Bannermen once! It’s easy to enjoy bad things as well as good ones, without necessarily believing that they’re good. The pleasure of Doctor Who, which has been increasingly curtailed in the new run of the show, is that however awful the episode you just watched was, there will be another one ‘round in a little while. They aren’t all Twin Dilemma and City of Death, either; often you’re getting The Android Invasion or The Visitation. I like bits of Delta and the Bannermen, but I wouldn’t claim it was a great episode. Sort of like Creature from the Pit, really: it doesn’t pull off what it wants to do, but as mad as the concept was, it was worth a shot. My brief review would be “largely inoffensive, wastes several of its guest stars, beekeeper might be Time Lord”. Actually, that could account for Season 6bee.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2021 02:38
|
|
|
Highly enjoyable. Chibnall is pretty clearly trying to generate as many different Big Finish series as he can possibly manage. At this stage I suspect he plans to retire and write the Doctor's memoirs under the name The Great Big Finish Curator. It's also pretty clear that trying to reassemble the whole story is going to be impossible. The planet called Time and the Temple of Atropos and all that doesn't situate in a way even slightly alongside the Division subplot. I do give big credit for the Doctor being such a disruptive force for Tecteun's little Enlightenment-style imperial control of Space and Time that the Division was essentially forced to cut their losses in one universe and head for another. But the odds that this will all make sense after one more episode are roughly 0%. Hell of a ride, though. OldMemes posted:There were moments of alrightness (Kate Stewart is a wonderful character), but the Timeless Child stuff is increasingly stupid. After all these lifetimes of adventures in time and space, talking about the thrill of adventure, the Doctor would rather have been left at some big portal? I'm trying to imagine any other incarnation having a reaction other than " That's what you got out of that conversation? From my perspective, it was Tecteun saying "I rescued you from that planet and raised you like my own child" and the Doctor saying "How do you know you rescued me? I was waiting next to a wormhole conduit! It's like kidnapping a child who's waiting for the bus and insisting that you saved her from being stranded alone and certain death!" I am unsure whether to praise Chibnall for delivering a clearly anti-imperialist message or condemn him for doing it in a way where the intelligibility depends on having seen The Timeless Child episode, but it's pretty clear what Tecteun represents and the Doctor's refutation of her claims to have essentially been saving that lonely child was on point, even if it's easy to imagine rewriting it in a way that actually lands more clearly and with more force. Great seeing Thirteen getting more chances to be angry, though Chibnall has this bad habit of making her helpless and reliant upon others to save her. One possibility out of all of this: undoing the Flux will presumably scramble the universe in terms of both Time and Space. Chibnall may be gifting RTD with an in-continuity way to essentially ignore continuity, not that RTD ever cared all that much in the first place.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2021 03:34
|
|
no"
|
Maxwell Lord posted:This felt kind of messy. I got the impression that Tecteun basically wanted to control everything. If we're very lucky, Chibnall will bother to reconnect with the Atropos temple and establish that the Division wanted to replace Time with Fate, giving them total control over events in the universe, and that the Doctor essentially assisted in that plan to beat the Sugar Skulls but then partly betrayed the Division's plan, ensuring free will as a possibility. She ran off with a companion to Earth to hide. That screwed up control, so after fighting the Doctor for a long time, the Division basically opted to write off this universe and move to another, using the Flux to power their trip and wipe out the old universe as a two-fer. The timeline doesn't actually make sense, and I freely admit that I hope Chibnall has some "alternative time" explanation for how Jo Doctor (who appears to remember the Division) became our Doctor because "she got caught and mindwiped and then became One" seems massively implausible. And the Doctor did do something in this one: the instant Tecteun left, she convinced the Ood to give her the information she needed to concoct a plan to save the universe. That is a thing. This Doctor, especially, doesn't do "I will murder you now" sorts of things, but she does do the talky things and she did well this time through. The Sugar Skulls showing up didn't deprive her of her agency so much as replace the threat she was working on beating with another one, and I think she'll have to do something herself to get out of the situation next week (though I do fear they won't kill her for "reasons"). Forktoss posted:A weird thing in the Chibnall era I've noticed is that he constantly introduces new story elements, themes, imagery, etc. that feel like they should obviously go together or connect to some other existing thing and they just... never do. A few examples: I don't disagree with the general point--there's dozens of unresolved threads here and I'm guessing 3-4 will be tied up next week--but a lot of these aren't fair. The Jo Doctor appears, in the absence of a twist, to be a past Doctor incarnation who worked for the Division but won her way clear as the price of taking on the Atropos mission. How you can double pocket-watch someone remains to be explained, if Chibnall bothers. The Master clearly didn't destroy the Time Lords given that the Division, commanded by one of the first Time Lords, seems very much intact. He does appear to have destroyed Gallifrey again, though these days who hasn't? Even the Sontarans came close to it. The Division and the CIA are clearly being distinguished IMO. The Division is Tecteun's baby (now--the hint that someone else ran it in the past is interesting) and likely had plenty of Time Lords involved with it, and they're weird temporal colonizers who want to dictate fate. The CIA doesn't operate on that scale and wants to interfere in events, but not to dominate. The surprise with the Grand Serpent will be if there isn't a relationship to the Master's time as a glowing snake-soul. That wasn't a call-back to the Mara and there's little indication of that here, either. Chibnall did have a fascination with the Eternals/Guardians, but he doesn't seem to have done much to pay that off (Can You Hear Me? the exception), so maybe there's something going on there. But "outside the Universe" in a space station/TARDIS isn't the same as being native to "outside Space and Time", so maybe it was just a fake-out? I'll say this: after lots of dull episodes that had very few ideas, Chibnall is going for broke now. It may be unintelligible, but you can't say it isn't ambitious, just that Chibnall is wasting a lot of potentially good ideas.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2021 01:40
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:I wonder if the end result (well one of them) will be the Sugar Skull gang left trapped in the now derelict Division HQ, floating eternally between two universes with no means of escape, getting to "rule" over nothing forever. That would seem an appropriate fate. Cut to a man in black wearing a dead bird on his head: “I expected no less of you! You whimpering wraiths!” Thinking of it, the Division’s headquarters actually does resemble the Shadow’s station in The Armagaddon Factor. I agree that it remains satisfying to see a manipulative Time Lord leader get her comeuppance. Rassilon gets his best in The End of Time (also featuring a guy with visible skull); arguably, Omega is the best of the three and comes across as tragic both times he appears. Between The Big Bang and the likely end to the Flux storyline, the universe has gotten rebooted twice by the Doctor. Makes me wonder whether the systems destroyed by entropy in Logopolis got put back. (I am aware pursuing that line of thinking is how we ended up with Chibnall!) TinTower posted:"Dan, are you from Liverpool? Why did you never tell us?" Loved that banter; Yaz is still underdeveloped and underused, but so much more central as a companion. I hope she receives more spotlight in the remaining movies. Chibnall has already arranged for her to be eligible for two different Big Finish series, one with Whittaker and one with the 1901 gang.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2021 16:22
|
|
as they realize it's inevitably going to happen
|
Khanstant posted:What's the lowest stakes Doctor Who adventure written yet? Like any time the doctor just wanted to make a simple sandwhich and ends up running around the galaxy doing who knows what, ultimately giving the big speech just to get the Fridge AI to open up so he could grab some turkey. An Unearthly Child arguably has no consequences beyond to the immediate TARDIS crew and possibly a few cavepeople. Or, arguably, it involves the discovery of time-traveling aliens. Edge of Destruction is low-stakes unless the TARDIS malfunction necessarily leads to a Big Bang-level disaster. Any early historical could apply if you accept as fact the "can't change one line" claim that One makes. The Mind Robber has pretty low stakes, as in Carnival of Monsters. Nightmare of Eden and Full Circle might be called medium stakes. Castrovalva could be low stakes as the threat is entirely Doctor-centric. Enlightenment? Most of those involved are immune to actual harm. New series, Amy's Choice? Or how about The Girl Who Waited, where the threat is essentially to one person?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2021 19:15
|
|
|
I thought that was great fun, too fast of course (we needed more Kate Stewart and the Doctor scenes!) and with the typical Chibnall carelessness about wrapping up the details. I do agree with other posters that the whole “did 99% of reality just get destroyed” question really needed answering, but the main issue is that Chibnall needed to define the Flux and its functioning earlier on instead of doing a “Deathly Hallows” last minute definition. And of course some of the basic premise and elements are handled inconsistently. That was true in Key to Time and in Trial of a Time Lord. This one didn’t quite stick the landint, but worked better than either of those conclusions. The three Doctors and Jodie getting to rescue herself was a brilliant step, the fakeout where it turns out Bel is just pregnant (and shame on everyone who has a problem with that, plenty of women are pregnant and we almost never see one on TV where the baby isn’t at the center of her storyline, this was great), the stupid Sontaran plan that was actually kind of clever. The Sugar Skulls failing and getting dissolved (to their delight) by Time, who seems to be threatening the Doctor but also genuinely fond of her, and the tiny little winks and nods to me and the four other people who love the trippy mythology of The Time Monster, all far more than I’d expect from Chibnall. And after constantly failing to show the villains getting their comeuppances, Chibnall finally delivered in this one. Jerusalem posted:Based on that poster maybe they DIDN'T forget that the TARDIS was supposedly falling apart/breaking down for mysterious reasons only to just magically be back to normal when the Doctor was reunited with it. That was entirely covered: first two of the Mouri were destroyed, and IIRC a third, which damaged the stability of chained Time enough to mess with the TARDIS. The Sugar Skulls patched two of them so that the Doctor could arrive at Time and the Temple. The Doctor then convinced the Mouri in the next episode to put three replacements in, fixing the Temple of Atropos and therefore restabilizing the containment of Time, meaning the reasons the TARDIS was breaking down went away. There’s obvious handwaving here about how space and time function: why does only this TARDIS suffer from the disruption, and why doesn’t the disruption apply to all points in space-time until it doesn’t? But the show has always been vague about destroying the past and the future; we do know that can be done. Khanstant posted:wow i have literally no idea what i just saw or what happened. The Flux events apparently involved injecting antimatter from outside the universe into the universe, where it would destroy matter and itself. But as observed it appears that the Flux fed upon itself, like a leak in reality. As more antimatter poured in, the fabric of space parted to allow even more in. Imagine it’s antimatter grey goo: it can replicate itself over time, as long as it doesn’t hit matter and destroy itself. With the inflow choked by the Ood, the final surge got stopped before it could replicate because it ran into much more matter than anticipated. What that means for the earlier Flux events remains unclear; possibly Time did something to restore all the destroyed space and matter. We know that’s trivially possible, because the Sugar Skull gang explicitly said (after demonstrating multiple times) that they can reverse the destruction before repeating it in an “endless loop.” No idea about the Grand Serpent. He’s a villain, plain and simple. If he appears in any of the specials we’ll find out more. Time itself appeared taking on first the licorice Sugar Skull’s form and then the Doctor’s. The Skull plan relied on the final Flux consuming the Temple of Atropos to release Time, but the Doctor stopped that, so Time “rewarded” them by destroying them. (It is unclear what Time actually wants, and just as well, too.) Bel and Vinder were two characters in love and having a baby. Unless Chibnall does more with them, that’s all. It’s like asking “what is the point of Craig and Stormaggadon in Closing Time: they are characters and they do important things in the story. The watch contains the Doctor’s missing selves and memories, supposedly. Look up Chameleon Arch for more information. The fate of Division is unknown. Assuming Tecteun is dead (there is no body and she may have been on her own TARDIS), someone else presumably will take charge. I would imagine whoever that is may change their agenda vis a vis the Doctor. If RTD has no interest, they will vanish into the void and never be heard from again. We didn’t get any sense of the average person on Earth in the later episodes. Presumably, Time has been rewritten by the end of the story as it’s otherwise hard to imagine that a few days after the second Sontaran invasion museum tours are back to normal, but Chibnall didn’t bother to spell any of that out. (Still better than the end of the Key to Time, where it’s unclear whether the Doctor’s work was successfully completed during the period he stopped everything, or the whole quest was a fake or something else. At least we have hints here.) Clearly, Diane needs a little time after what she went through to process. Her “no” implied “someday, maybe, but not soon.” The Angels were agents for Division pursuing a renegade Angel and the Doctor. After fetching them both, they made no further appearance in the story.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2021 06:15
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:Four: This is a pickle. What do you think we should do, Master from the Inferno Universe? River: Shouldn’t someone put him out? Six: It’s the Master. He’s always put out. Rani (to Two): I have a poison here that should kill all of them quickly. Two (to Rani): No, let’s see where this goes.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2021 06:57
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:My favorite thing about Tegan (and yes, I also had a crush on her as a kid Tegan is the original Donna. Probably not a coincidence that Five and Ten are the Doctors to end up with such companions. ikanreed posted:Part of the reason timeless child felt so insulting, is it clearly angles at "the doctor is Jesus" maybe without meaning to. It slots a little too easily into that mould. Last of the Time Lords would like to have a word with you. Maxwell Lord posted:I mean the basic idea that the Doctor has past selves she doesn't know about or what they did and might run into them at any time, I still like. It just hasn't led to much of anything, it doesn't actually add a lot of mystery since we know the outline of what her past on Gallifrey was (did a bunch of ethically questionable poo poo for The Division, eventually got sick of it, but also got mind wiped) and any details are going to be tricky because how unethical do you want the past Doctors to be? Oh, there's a lot of rich stuff to be done with the idea, so Chibnall almost certainly will find one of the least interesting possibilities if he bothers at all. In many respects I'd find it more interesting if some of the past incarnations weren't just working for Division but were in a leadership position. We know the Doctor's all for intervening and may have done some work for the CIA during the original series; what if she had been more deeply involved in Division than we think before the fugitive Doctor got fed up and opted to quit? If the Doctor's been lots of people over the eons, it makes sense that she wouldn't like all of them. Certainly Tecteun seems like the kind of person that would inspire someone to use the phrase "spurious morality." Maybe the Valeyard isn't the first instance where the worst elements of the Doctor's character came to the fore? Having an idealist who hurts people while trying to do the right thing doesn't damage the series, because the "hero" Doctor has done plenty of unethical things, and arguably moreso in the new series. "No second chances" indeed!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2021 21:04
|
|
) was that she just constantly gave the Doctor poo poo and was utterly unimpressed when he tried to pull some bullshit. The fact that she clearly did enjoy his company and their journeys made that entirely palatable, because she was a character who didn't just go along in awe of whatever he happened to be doing. Her explaining how the death and destruction he leaves in his wake made it impossible for her to look away any longer in her final story was a great moment, made even better by the fact that she did come back but too late: not discounting what she said but making it clear that she was so conflicted between her friendship with him/love of traveling and not being able to condone the horrors that seemed to come part and parcel with it.
|
“No, not the mind probe” mention compels me to observe that if you watch the alternate takes of that scene, every single one of them has a better delivery of that line. Pure speculation on my part, but if you’re an actor, be nice to the director.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2021 01:35
|
|
|
OldMemes posted:Flux is a handful of great ideas thrown into an incoherent mess. Have you ever ordered a salad which came with those cube-like dried bread things, usually flavored with garlic and other spices? Krotons are nothing like that. They appear to be a species that exist partly as mental/psychic energy and partly as grown crystal bodies. In theory, they could purpose-grow bodies for specific purposes. In practice, they're crap and not very good at doing much of anything, although I suppose when compared with silicon-based life-forms which are essentially rocks which barely move at all, they're pretty agile.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2021 02:17
|
|
|
The_Doctor posted:So Swarm was imprisoned on a planetoid for all time, but his sister who is just as bad was put into a human body because ???? Given that she was in a human body with a keeper, that she was free enough to smash the warning beacon, and that the Jo Doctor's circumstances were not entirely dissimilar, I have to suspect that Swarm refused to cooperate with Division and got trapped for all time, while Azure cut a deal and maybe even worked with Division briefly before being "exiled" to Earth. I have to assume Chibnall had something in mind, although it might merely have been "set up this mystery." It wasn't much of a mystery, nor did it last very long. I suppose we'll find out for sure when Chibnall gets put in charge of Big Finish's Division series in about seven years from now.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2021 01:46
|
|
|
I mean, there's only two stories you can tell here, right? 1. Doctor rejects the past and destroys the watch. 2. Doctor recovers the memories. 1 is absolutely obvious and where I figured the story was going. I'm afraid Chibnall is planning to use 2 prior to the regeneration so that Time's threat is carried out. Doctor recovers memories, says "I'm no longer the Doctor," then regenerates. The Doctor is dead, someone else is now alive, have fun with that story RTD. (But that's probably too clever.) Then there's the trollish 2 options. Option Remsta: Doctor opens up the watch, straightens up. Starts behaving entirely differently. Turns out that wasn't her old memories in there, but someone else who has now taken over her mind. Option Huh: Doctor opens up the watch, doubles over, gasps. Companion asks what's happening. Doctor says "I've just recovered all my old memories that were stolen from me by an evil organization trying to control all of space and time." Companion asks what she's discovered. "I don't want to talk about it." That feels like a Moffat troll, but I could see RTD use it. Either this stuff will come up later, or it won't. In the meantime, we don't have access to the Doctor's interior world, we just see things from the companions' perspectives.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2021 17:48
|
|
|
Quotey posted:RTD's first episode. The Doctor opens the watch, walks to the Lungbarrow House, opens the door and... SUPRISE! Every companion from every audio drama, comic, mini, TV episode/serial, movie, and book reality come in with everything for a HUGE party for the Doctor's 60th! Turns out the house is falling apart AFTER the party, because the party is so big it literally will bring the house down. Time is there as DJ and when the party finishes, rewinds back to the beginning again. Division had to seal the memory away or the Doctor would never have gotten any work done at all!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2021 01:09
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 04:45 |
|
|
Vinylshadow posted:https://twitter.com/bigfinish/status/1471790676652273668 Division made a really strange decision the first time they imprisoned Azure.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2021 16:02
|
|