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“So these are my replacements… a dandy, a clown, a lunatic, a milksop, an eyesore, a creep, a romantic, a hooligan, a geek, a goof, an aging punk, and… no, I’m all right, my dear, just out of breath. Eh? Really? Take a walk with me while the others fight over the desktop theme. Nice to see my future isn’t a complete loss.”
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Jan 5, 2022 01:32
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Rhyno posted:Donna. Best companion deserves to come back. Fourteen runs into Donna, who turns out to be adventuring with Clara (who dropped Me off somewhere). "I have no idea who you are" hijinks ensue.
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Jan 13, 2022 20:21
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Every time I see another promotion for the Eve Online Doctor Who thing, I get more and more irrationally angry that they didn't go for "Eve Online of the Daleks" instead.
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Jan 16, 2022 17:51
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Based on that trailer, Sly has gone full gnome.
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Jan 21, 2022 03:36
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With the big launch being the 60th anniversary, throwing out the show’s history is simply not going to happen, even if selling Who abroad weren’t a going concern. With the possibility of COVID protocols being in place for a while, I wonder if RTD might not steal another books/Big Finish concept and have a multi-Doctor episode where the Doctors spend most (or all) of the story apart, but each Doctor’s actions change the circumstances for the others. That allows you to keep teasing the audience with the idea the Doctors might meet while delaying the point where it happens.
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Jan 24, 2022 19:06
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MrL_JaKiri posted:The entire story hung on Troughton playing it entirely straight, it really not have worked in almost any other era. Maybe Eccles. It's weird, but I think my first pick of new Doctor to replace Troughton in Mind Robber and pull it off would actually be Thirteen. I think Whittaker can pull of the serious bemusement and puzzlement that Troughton does so well better than any of the other new era Doctors.
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Jan 30, 2022 01:21
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Sydney Bottocks posted:I'm old enough to remember it too, and frankly there are times I wonder if maybe we didn't realize how good we had it with just the books and Big Finish audios, much like how Star Wars was better off before the prequels and sequels. "New" most definitely doesn't always mean "good". Your memory is being very selective. The absolute worst of the books and audios were far, far worse than anything the series ever game us, and I would put the average for them as lower than almost any season of the show. The books were always highly variable. There's a strong argument to be made that the average quality of the Big Finish audios has gone up several times, but aside from the very early days, that doesn't happen without the new show and its casting (Hurt as the War Doctor; Jacobi as the War Master). The influences of the books and audios are also very visible in the new series, for good and bad.
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Feb 2, 2022 00:55
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Sydney Bottocks posted:RTD's run is probably going to be as bad as his previous run was, but I'd say fans of modern DW should be more concerned about his stated desire to franchise the poo poo out of the show, given that his previous attempt at doing so gave us one okay kids' show and Torchwood. I dunno, the Torchwood RTD was most initially involved with was Children of Earth, which was fantastic. (There was a season after that? I don't know what you're talking about!) The Sarah Jane Adventures were amazing and I'll not hear any claims that it was merely OK. Liz Sladen almost made watching K9 and Company endurable, and the writing was much much better on the Sarah Jane Adventures. As for the "kids' show" comment, Doctor Who also had that label. I'd love to see what some new people (not all men, please) can do if set loose on some of the other aspects of the franchise, especially if they can lure some of the performers back. We need some new names and some fans of the new series to take the reins.
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Feb 5, 2022 01:01
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Sydney Bottocks posted:(The Doctor winces as a loud, annoying Cockney accent calls out in greeting) This is not the “Drax the Destroyer” we were looking for.
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Feb 27, 2022 16:54
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The_Doctor posted:The idea that Six was a personal favourite incarnation of the Doctor is very odd. Of course Six is the Doctor’s favorite incarnation; just ask Six!
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Mar 1, 2022 16:42
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Mode 7 posted:Hugh Grant confirmed as the next incarnation of The Master. The role of “Anthony” will be played by Huge Rant.
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Mar 22, 2022 15:40
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CommonShore posted:Rather than bring back Eleven I'd rather see Smith (or actually any other doc) come back and do a new interpretation, just to make things interesting. Somebody hasn't seen Dimensions in Time.* *Note: do not see Dimensions in Time.
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Mar 30, 2022 00:27
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Updog Scully posted:I'd love to see Colin Baker come back, but not as the Curator... as Maxil, who is now a grumpy old man who has a grudge against the Doctor for stealing his likeness. “And look at this HAT they gave me! I couldn’t wear it because it didn’t fit through any of the doors!”
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Mar 30, 2022 04:20
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Jerusalem posted:Also what a waste of Madam Ching, she's barely had any impact on the story at all. Forced to recover a treasure for a male pirate to recover her crew, upstaged by that male pirate who gets more to do as well as more heroic moments despite the fact he should be dead: somehow this story managed to make Madam Ching not even be the most legendary pirate in it! Also, Chibnall really wants to have the Doctor relearn what she clearly knew at the end of The Husbands of River Song? That’s the big arc he’s going for to wrap up his years as showrunner? Chibnall’s biggest sin isn’t being a poor writer or a bad showrunner: it’s how he took such a great cast and such great potential and wasted so much time.
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Apr 17, 2022 20:25
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Mr Beens posted:Not that strange. Regen episode is probably going to be nearer the end of the year. Oh, BBC News. Please do better: "Jodie Whittaker became the first female to play the Doctor in 2018." I would have accepted "became the first female Doctor" or "became the first woman" or even the now-antiquated "became the first actress" (though ignoring The Curse of Fatal Death is a little suspect), but "first female"? Have they hired a Dalek to edit? "ANY EMPLOYEE WHO DOES NOT USE THE OXFORD COMMA WILL BE EXTERMINATED!"
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Apr 21, 2022 18:43
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Payndz posted:I always liked the sheer creepy weirdness of the fried-egg-eyes Master, and was disappointed when he returned with normal eyes. They just missed an opportunity with Davros' eyes. "You liked looking into my eyes, Doctor? And no wonder. Because I TOOK THEM FROM YOUR GRANDDAUGHTER!"
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Apr 28, 2022 19:01
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JohnnyQPublic posted:I would hope we don't get James Corden, it really depends on what RTD has planned to right the ship after the Chinabll run...which was so uneven it would have an episode that was cool, and then an episode that absolutely sucked, plus the companions weren't the greatest. Maybe they're planning to give him a side series starring as the henchman to Stormageddon. That would also be pretty objectionable, but it could also get canceled after three episodes. They could never pull off the surprise, but I'd have loved it if the Doctor takes the fatal wound, drops off Yaz and says goodbye, goes back in the TARDIS saying something like "you'll get over her" to herself again and again, and then regenerates... into Yasmin Khan. First words of the new regeneration, looking at herself in the mirror: "Or... maybe not."
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May 6, 2022 00:01
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The_Doctor posted:I write way better under pressure, so maybe he does too and never figured that out? RTD seems to have had the same thing, at least some of the time.* Wasn't Midnight a rush job? (*I gather RTD almost always wrote under pressure.)
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May 9, 2022 18:52
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Open Source Idiom posted:Most Doctor Who forums are motherfucked. Gallifreybase is a cess pit of atrocious moderation. Out of morbid curiosity I checked in there the day this was announced and almost everyone was making positive posts about it. The negative posts were mainly "I was hoping for another woman" and then another poster attacking the first one for that, so still Gallifrey Base, but I was surprised at the positivity. It's possible all the chuds needed time to process/don't post before 5 PM, though. I'm not gonna go back to check. OldMemes posted:And yeah, I don't think there's ever been a bad actor cast yet, just bad scripts. Whittaker is bursting with energy in the role, even when the scripts are aggressively fighting to make her so. Whittaker is energetic, delighted, and delightful. Much less grim than the other new Doctors (even Tennant, who could go from manic to brooding on a dime). She's been cheated out of being really wrathful, though. I'm guessing Gatwa is going to keep some of that "delighted to be here" energy in his performance, though on the basis of his grin he could manage Tom Baker levels of energy if he wanted to go that way.
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May 10, 2022 23:39
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At this stage, I think we need new Cybermen who aren’t based around body part replacement but rather brain and behavior modification. Something closer to the “turn humans into data storage” story. Make them about ideological survival first and foremost, a projection of the wrong application of “survival of the fittest” and linked to the idea that a competative “marketplace of ideas” guarantees that only the best ideas survive. Extract emotion from people and program them for ideological purity, versus what little is left of the Dalek’s focus on genetic purity. Make the body part replacement, if it happens, a consequence of the ideology and its associated sociopathic behavior.
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May 16, 2022 04:39
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So, the Valeyard, then? That might salvage the whole Timeless Child thing: the Valeyard has been tampering with Time using the Matrix to change the Doctor's past. "And soon, Doctor, I will see things YOUR way! Uh, I mean, I will see things MY way! Or, uh, you will see things YOUR way!"
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Jun 13, 2022 23:57
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McGann posted:I'd second this - it's a fun little story. For that matter, I'm curious what a "conservative" Doctor Who TV story looks like. Assuming we disregard the incoherent crap like Kill the Moon being an anti-abortion story (and to clarify, the incoherent crap being referred to is the episode, which I'm pretty sure isn't trying to comment at all on abortion). The Dominators?
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Jul 11, 2022 19:38
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Rochallor posted:It's possible to read the Zygon story as anti-immigrant, but it's a stretch, much in the same way as Kill the Moon. The Zygon story is clearly a political one in a way that Kill the Moon isn't, but trying to read it as anti-immigration is hampered by the conclusion that we must... incorporate ISIS as a vital partner? Elements in the speech are intelligible, and the idealistic thought that convincing “enemies” to become allies in keeping peace is better than killing them is fair enough, though the story itself completely undercuts every part of that message by establishing that this has happened repeatedly. But it 100% falls into the pattern of “liberal thinker who has never actually been personally affected by injustice wants to tell the suffering that he knows how they should respond.” It’s just an order of magnitude greater than the suggestion that when your people are being murdered or imprisoned or profoundly oppressed, you not only can’t respond with violence, you aren’t even allowed to be rude! Taking a knee during the national anthem or protesting outside a restaurant are somehow the real problem. And while the story isn’t ultimately anti-immigrant, it is profoundly pro-assimilation. “Fit in, try to look like everyone else, defend the establishment that wants to transform you into a duplicate of itself…” Still massively less objectionably than In the Forest of the Night, and while the speech’s messages don’t all land, Capaldi acts the hell out of that scene. I still haven’t gotten over his line reading of “you could just step away”. Lefty episodes like The Happiness Patrol and Oxygen stick the landing in ways that conservative-messaged episodes of the show just can’t manage, I’d argue, if indeed there are more than a handful of those. Maybe if you go back to Hartnell and Troughton you can find a counter-example or two, if you press hard. Rochallor posted:The worst part of Kerblam! is that even given its atrocious politics it's probably still top 3 or 4 for in Series 11. The rest of the series was just that dire. It at least has the grace to be evil and competent as opposed to milquetoast and shoddy. Chibnall’s era has been variable in quality, but while the messaging has been pretty uneven, it’s been pretty forthrightly to the left of center. For every Kerblam! or The Witchfinders you have Demons of the Punjab or Praxeus. If you’d seen none of the Chibnall era and just read episode summaries, you’d think it astoundingly ambitious. I don’t know how he managed to convert such an ambitious remit into such average results.
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Jul 12, 2022 16:48
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EricFate posted:Does anyone remember that short lived spin off show, "Class"? I was reminded of it today, but can no longer recall much of anything about the show beyond the setting. I'm shocked to see that Big Finish continued to do audio dramas for it. I figured it was dead, buried, and entirely forgotten. I remember it as a great deal of potential that was somewhat squandered. Suffered a bit from the Buffy syndrome (ie. After three episodes you wonder how anyone can still send their kids to this school) and from the main season arc being only somewhat intelligible, but there’s operational concepts that stuck with me over time (the idea of a school being run by a secret cabal, the “blossoms are actually aliens reproducing to kill everyone” concept, a few others). A bad show to watch if, like me, you get frustrated by an urgent crisis plot grinding to a halt while the characters hash out interpersonal drama and the crisis kindly waits until they’re through. My personal take-away: this post made me see how much I could recall of the show (seen once on release), and while it turned out I can recall a lot and most of the things I’m remembering I liked, my immediate response after the memories started coming back was still “drat you for making me remember the show.” Granted, these days I feel pretty much the same about Buffy.
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Jul 23, 2022 14:51
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The_Doctor posted:So in a Covid-fuelled dream last night, I dreamt that one of the new villains David Tennant would face off against was himself. Bad David Tennant was wearing a weird plastic parody mask of himself, like the William Shatner mask that Michael Myers wears in Halloween. It had very cartoonish proportions, all angular pointed chin and cheekbones, with a big plastic pompadour/quiff/spiked hair, and black eye holes, through which you could just see Tennant’s real eyes against his burnt, blackened skin in a very creepy effect. He had a fake Rose with him too, in a similar style, and just yeesh It's the Doctor and Rose from an Auton-ate universe! (sorry not sorry)
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Aug 1, 2022 19:30
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Class3KillStorm posted:Oh, they're not bringing back those Cybermen/Time Lord hybrid things from the really crappy second season finale for Jodie's final episode, are they? *Mouth opens.* Cyber voice: "This is the game of Rassilon" *Mouth closes.* I'll accept the Cyber Lords returning if we get us some surprise Omega action.
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Aug 5, 2022 01:05
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Rochallor posted:Susan is the Timeless Child is actually a story that might work if she'd been named any more recently than the 80s. She wasn't named but she was referenced on-screen, including Twelve having a picture of her on his desk when he was a professor. May as well declare that Susan IS the Doctor, having been thrown back in time as the Timeless Child, and that the Doctor has infinite regenerations because she's part of a massive bootstrap paradox. And Time's promise that she won't regenerate (in Flux) will turn out to mean that she's going to degenerate/relapse instead next time out.
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Aug 17, 2022 18:59
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Open Source Idiom posted:It's from Peri and the Piscon Paradox, (written by Bryant's boyfriend Nev Fountain). It basically offers a solution to every contradictory explanation of what happened to the character (novelisation, TV version original draft -- I think -- Bad Therapy, etc.). Always the most plausible explanation for just about everything. Great, yet another context where I can wince at someone using the phrase “I’d tap Rose Tyler.”
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Aug 18, 2022 23:19
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I’d characterize the Chibnall years as ambitious and mediocre. Maybe half of the episodes have taken a real swing at whatever they were trying to do. The results have only rarely been classics, but this isn’t one of those eras of the program that’s playing it safe and getting the occasional hit or miss while the rest are watchable. The biggest flaw I’d identify is that when the show’s at its most ambitious, it becomes very clear that the showrunner doesn’t actually have anything to say. The number of frankly bonkers-interesting ideas that Chibnall’s squandered is kind of breathtaking. And the number of derivative ideas he’s repurposed to interesting effect and then failed to stick the landing is amazing. I don’t think any other era of the show has managed to make so many provocative story ideas boring. Let’s take the two big accomplishments I’d praise him for: casting two women as the Doctor. Brilliant, great casting choices, and it opens up space for a whole bunch of new stories. Whatcha gonna do now that you’ve cast a woman as the Doctor? It’s like Chibnall did that and that was the big idea: he didn’t really have any ideas, any stories to tell that would emerge from that. I don’t think anyone expects the “Yaz loves the a Doctor” story that’s cropped up here at the end after years of Yaz getting alnost as badly neglected as Peri was is going to have a satisfying conclusion, because it’s shown minimal development and Chibnall seems to think that representation and story only need to be loosely connected. Here’s a list of episodes that conceptually strike me as interesting and ambitious, good ideas whether or not they were executed well: Rosa, The Tsuranga Conundrum, Demons of the Punjab, Kerblam!, The Witchfinders, It Takes You Away, Spyfall, Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror, Fugitive of the Jadoon, Can You Hear Me?, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, Revolution of the Daleks, the whole Flux concept, Eve of the Daleks, and Legend of the Sea Devils. That’s out of a total of 30 episodes. 50% of the ideas have been bangers. Of those, I’d say maybe 6 episodes mostly landed, and 10 felt like they’d pretty much squandered their fantastic concept in multiple ways. This show has had periods where you’d struggle to find more than 2-3 stories in a season that had any real ideas to them at all! So I’d identify these two central problems of the Chibnall era: firstly, a huge amount of ambition with about a 2 failure per success rate of hit & miss, and secondly, that even when the show is working well episodes just cannot conclude in ways that feel like Doctor Who. The net result is that his era feels deeply unsatisfying. Sure, in the (insert your most hated season here) era, the show reads now like it could go straight to bad B-movie festivals or Mystery Science Theater 3000, but in that period it isn’t trying for much more, and the combination of camp, overacting, bad ideas and bad production values keeps it entertaining in that B-movie kind of way. The Chibnall era, OTOH, feels to me more like the Star Trek movie reboot (or maybe the Star Wars sequel movies): production values are way up, leaving yourself wondering why a bunch of professionals thought that this story was worth their time. Jodie has gotten maybe two moments to compare with Peter Capaldi’s Flatline speech while feeling ineffective a lot because Chibnall is bad at endings. And it’s been disappointing to watch a show squander this much potential. When the classic era went wrong, you could tell yourself that it was silly to expect more and at least aspects of the show were fun. Now, it just feels like a waste.
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Sep 16, 2022 16:00
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OldMemes posted:Chibnall seems far more interested in Yaz as a character than the Doctor, and Yaz has paper thin characterization! I think Chibnall started really admiring the way RTD and Moffat could establish character rapidly with a few lines of dialogue and decided he needed to figure out how to do that. He forgot that they did that with one-shot characters in a story for ten minutes or less and started doing it with everyone. He has considerably improved in that specific skill, but it hasn’t helped him with longer-term characterization. He seems to have largely regressed and it”s mostly the actors left to fill in the gaps. If I had to provide short summaries of the new series Doctors, they’d probably be: Nine: guilt-ridden Ten: manic Eleven: goofy but ancient Twelve: deeply compassionate and gruff Thirteen: ???? Initially it looked like she was going to be much more socially aware (in contrast to Twelve), and a gadget-maker. But over time she has come to feel more like an enthusiastic tourist who gets caught up in events. If Chibnall was doing a sort of restart making Thirteen closer to early One or Two, he’s run out of time to get any development.
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Sep 18, 2022 01:13
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What else is there for a writer after he’s won an award for most gratuitous use of the word “Belgium” in a Doctor Who minisode? Can’t wait for his next show where you won’t believe what he’s done with the phrase “An album cover.” Just because you’re capable of being really clever doesn’t mean you always are.
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Sep 30, 2022 15:23
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Open Source Idiom posted:In The Forest of the Night. Agreed. Not only an absolutely horrible message, but an episode solution to a problem that essentially says "nobody in the story actually needed to worry because this is just going to get taken care of" while communicating nothing of value to any conversation about conservation, environmental change, or anything else. Plus encouraging everyone to take a position on medication for psychological problems slightly worse than Scientology's. And in the process, the episode also stole away the "Doctor Who high-concept story drawing on Blake's poetry" concept, and retroactively damaged one of the better bits in Planet of the Spiders by making me think of this poo poo story when Tommy encounters Blake's poem. You know what? On further thought, this episode is even worse than I remembered. Overnight, deforestation is reversed and the trees save the planet. The "message" to be sent out is "leave the trees alone," but in no other episode will any of this forest be present anywhere, so humans chopped down all these trees and then instantly forgot about them growing in the first place. So the real message is that no matter how much damage we deal to the ecosystem, the trees will just magically regrow and save us from catastrophe, and we can then defoliate without any consequence and forget right afterward. I guess the one thing this episode does is make Orphan 55 look less terrible.
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Oct 11, 2022 14:18
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The_Doctor posted:And then the space dragon instantly lays another egg the size of the one it just emerged from. Be honest, would the episode really be improved by a character explaining that the egg and dragon seem to be drawing mass from another dimension? Can’t wait for the next showrunner after RTD to write an episode revealing that Five never got out of the Matrix in Arc of Infinity and the entire show since that point has been inside the Matrix while Omega ran around using his body. My favorite 13 episode is just barely Demons of the Punjab. One of the few eps that doesn’t waste Yaz. I’d rate The Tsuranga Conundrum, It Takes You Away, Resolution, Spyfall (Part 1), Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror, Fugitive of the Judoon, Can You Hear Me?, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, War of the Sontarans, Village of the Angels, and Eve of the Daleks as good episodes. It continues to baffle me that Chibnall repeatedly takes risks and goes with lots of bonkers premises, but most of his failures somehow come down to lack of ambition. How do you take big conceptual risks and still come across this way? It can’t just be his inability to end stories properly!
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Oct 12, 2022 15:29
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Kerblam was supposed to be anti-corporate but then they came up with a great "twist" that turned the thing into a massively pro-corporate thing. I was one of the viewers that was initially OK with the computer being an unwilling baddie, because that meant even the infrastructure of the corporation had been corrupted by the influence of capitalism and it was all poo poo. Only that didn't turn out to be where they were going in the end. Reading that last word from Chibnall makes me think that all his happiest memories involved casting and the people involved with the show's production. Lots of "loved seeing the expression on Jodie's face when" items. Almost nothing about the actual writing beyond the initial excitement with a writers room (not that I ever got a sense of a writers room process with what he produced). The show reads very differently if you imagine Chibnall trying to write scenes that his cast will enjoy playing instead of writing scenes about fictional characters or focusing on the audience. Looking forward to having the very audience-savvy RTD back, though I hope his sensibilities have kept up over the years and he doesn't end up taking us back 15 years. (I have hopes if Donna is back that he won't, but the jury is out.)
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Oct 15, 2022 04:24
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Open Source Idiom posted:Do we know this, or is this just a theory? We know the “twist ending” part based on what Chibnall and McTighe have said about writing the episode. I recall following a link to an interview from whatever Who thread was active here at the time. The rest is my interpretation coupled with the ways in which the episode’s “twist” sits so uncomfortably with all the other work it is clearly doing, including relating workers to robots and presenting even the AI as a victim, while refusing to give us a human figure like in Arachnids in the UK to hate. There’s still a muddled message given the decision to equate the AI with the “system,” but it’d work OK if it turned out the AI was following twisted programming while desperately trying to get someone to stop it. Obviously, neither writer was very committed to that message given the willingness to abandon it completely in order to make their twist ending work. But you don’t start with a story about how capitalism is good if you just treat workers better and end up with this big of a muddle; if you change the ending, why would you then add in criticism that conflicts with the ending?
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Oct 16, 2022 00:13
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I mean, I enjoyed it, and I literally did this during the episode:Open Source Idiom posted:Actually crying, gently caress you Chibnall But his best episode? It was bonkers and did a lot of fun pandering things that I appreciated, but like most Chibnall it managed to have a lot of plot elements but almost no plot. The seismologists went missing; not a mystery, just the Master. The pictures weren't stolen to conceal that the Master was now appearing in them, were they, because UNIT had pictures just like LOTS OF PEOPLE ON THE loving PLANET would, so what was the point, where are the paintings, who cares, why are you still talking about that when Ian is back? And the Master had the Cyberconversion planet in 1916 to provide the needed power for the forced regeneration, so why pull the Russian Doll trick in 2022 to get Cybermen onto the planet for a conversion? Isn't the point to convert people in 1916? And why in the world would the CyberMasters support a plan where they are to start converting humanity at the same time that the Daleks are tectonically destroying it? Why bother with the Russian Doll plan when UNIT drag the Master into their apparently-impossible to enter building without even changing his clothing? He could have just carried the device in himself. And it seems like he somehow stuck his teleporter/time-travel iPad/control for everything on the conversion planet in a hidden spot in UNIT's basement? So the entire thing is just playing mindgames with Tegan? It isn't the dumbest thing the Master's done, but that doesn't make it good writing. The traitor Dalek was apparently a real traitor, and it had the information encoded in its casing and the Doctor was downloading it to a device. The other Daleks then force open the Dalek's casing and shoot the Dalek inside, but not only do they leave the casing intact, they stick the Doctor into it. So what happened to the device, or the data encoded in the casing itself? And should we just ignore that Thirteen seems to be gung-ho on Dalek genocide after Four famously rejected the idea? I'm not thrilled that Chibnall has written a story that's both "clearly the Doctor should just kill all Daleks" and "clearly Yaz was right not to shoot the Master in the back of the head the second she got that gun" though the worse part was that in the context of the story I was desperate for her to do that. "Just loving shoot him, it's better for everyone, the Doctor will eventually forgive you." I'm a little dubious about "operative goes alone through wormhole to free imprisoned being, finds being entirely unguarded, has no ability to free being even though it turns out you can just tell the being to free itself and it will" even if we ignore that the Cybermen guards that shot at the Doctor and Yaz initially are nowhere to be seen later on. I guess despite having a whole Cyberplanet, they were all down in Russia at that point in the story, and then dead. You'd think the Master would bother to trap his TARDIS, or at least, to lock it, but never mind. The Master's always been brilliant and massively stupid at the same time and Missy appears to have been his only incarnation capable of learning anything. Plenty of little brilliant stuff (using the MasterCybermen regeneration energy to reverse the forced regeneration, for instance) mixed with stunningly lazy stuff (hey, that panel that destroys the UNIT building actually just kills all the Cybermen and frees Kate, which leaves me wondering why they also brought down the building with it). I was 100% there for the pandering and bravo to Chibnall for figuring out a way to both bring back old Who actors and arrange for a Tegan/5 and Ace/7 conversation. But I don't know how you can work this hard on something with so much promise and just bobble so much of it. It's like Chibnall has hundreds of good ideas but no confidence in any of them, so he deploys dozens and just keeps moving on to the next without bothering to make most of them do very much. Fugitive Doctor is rapidly climbing in the ranks of "best Doctor" for me, and she's still being wasted. A real sign of just how formidable Jo Martin is that she can walk into a scene and scare the Dhawan Master senseless in about two sentences. But the thing to notice here is that he did not recognize her. This is the Master who viewed the Matrix files, found out about the Timeless Child, killed all the Time Lords out of rage, trapped the Doctor in the Matrix using the recording that he watched... and he never saw the Fugitive Doctor before? I can't tell if that's intentional or if Chibnall is just really bad at this sort of thing, though I suppose it could be both. Whittaker has been loving misserved. Bad enough she spent most of the Timeless Children episode locked up and unable or unwilling to do anything, in this one there's a period where she gets written out of the show! She's saved by her friends, sure, but also by the holoprojected versions of herself; this isn't even the first time Chibnall has managed to have Thirteen get saved by not-really-Thirteen Thirteens! Five got to be a more active Doctor, and that's not a flattering comparison point. I was hoping Thirteen was going to be a part of saving herself directly from the Edge, but she just waited there until something happened. It doesn't even appear to have required effort on her part. Still and all, I remain a Who fan, and after all these complaints I'd still say 7 out of 10. Narsham fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Oct 24, 2022 |
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Oct 24, 2022 03:54
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Dabir posted:While all of the plot contrivances and plot holes you mentioned are there and more, it's still Chibnall's best. That's how mediocre the man has been. I’d probably say his best was The Power of Three, which works great until the ending which was ruined by things outside Chibnall’s control. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship had better pacing and plotting, though less ambition or character work. Eve of the Daleks had a remarkably good plot and some good (if deeply frustrating) character work. I think Power of Three best displays his tendencies to want to explore characters outside the traditional structures of the program, which would explain his desire to write a “Doctor who upholds the establishment” retroactively into the lore (though doing it as an Irish policeman is an odd choice). Again, I did like the episode, but not for plot related reasons. If RTD recasts the Master, Dhawan has had a great showcase, and I only wish Chibnall had been as good writing for Whittaker.
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Oct 24, 2022 15:05
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Cleretic posted:One thing that the early part of this story made me realize I'll miss is a TARDIS crew that's genuinely friendly and earnest. That super brief segment where the Doctor and Yaz genuinely congratulate Dan on his landing made me so happy, and I realized that's because Thirteen's the only recent Doctor that really fosters that sort of attitude, while previous revival Doctors have always been too serious or too detached. I wouldn't make assumptions yet about the Ncuti Doctor. Lord Ludikrous posted:It’s a testament to the quality of the actors who’ve played The Master that it’s consistently very hard to rank them from least favourite to favourite. Aside from the crispy Masters being the least favourite and Roger Delgado being at the very top. Delgado is so good it's amazing they found anyone to follow him much less so many good performers. I do actually think Pratt's fried egg Master works, and Beevers' main problem isn't the story or dialogue, it's the makeup. They've all had to sell some frankly hard-to-stomach characterizations; even Delgado struggled a bit when story after story required the Master to successfully summon an ally and then be convinced by the Doctor that the ally was untrustworthy and had to be defeated. Weirdly, the Roberts Master has really aged well, in part because the hyper-camp performance has really gotten affirmed and reaffirmed in the new series. Even RTD isn't this crazy, but given what just happened with the forced regeneration, there's a realistic opportunity to cast a former Doctor as the next Master. I actually think Whittaker would be a really interesting choice, and obviously Capaldi could play the part without much effort.
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Oct 24, 2022 20:58
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Astroman posted:Also today I learned: Get him for one episode. New title sequence, The Adventures of the Meddling Monk, situate him as the main character of the story, make it the Doctor-lite episode. He's off to do some petty mischief, stumbles across a Doctor and current companion adventure, nabs the companion for a while, runs off Zoidberg-like when the Doctor catches up. Maybe Berry has a blast and agrees to come back later; if not, you can always regenerate the Monk. werdnam posted:Is anyone else bothered by the fact that if the Cybermen or Daleks, as described, really tried then the Doctor wouldn't be able to stop them? There were multiple times in this story where all they needed to succeed was have one of dozens of baddies actually connect with a laser blast. No. That isn't how stories like this go: if you want that kind of thing, watch the TV Movie, or, arguably, The Stolen Earth. Given how many lesser characters routinely get shot or killed in episodes of Doctor Who, I'm not sure it's the best example of the Star Wars imperial stormtroopers "precision" shooting phenomenon. Companion or Doctor deaths are special and unlikely to just be a random shot, although RTD was more willing to pull that narrative trigger (and then reverse it).
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Oct 25, 2022 03:58
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Vinylshadow posted:Let the RTD vs RTD2 wars begin Disney Plus? RTD2? Sounds like a Doctor Who/Star Wars cross-over is only a matter of time! (I think that’s a joke?)
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Oct 25, 2022 15:14
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