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What do you think of the new international distribution deal? This poll is closed. |
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| Hate it |
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12 | 16.90% |
| REALLY hate it |
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16 | 22.54% |
| Hello, my name is Bob Chapek |
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43 | 60.56% |
| Total: | 71 votes | ||
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I want to preface this post by saying I'm not scolding anyone or calling anybody out. When I say that I don't know what to do with what I'm about to write, I mean it. I can see the queerbaiting reading of Power of the Doctor becoming a "thing," and I have mixed feelings. Maybe Chibnall fully thought through what he was doing, and I wish I could believe that, but he's been inconsistent in writing Thirteen's emotional openness and awkwardness throughout the run. Being critical of him for his handling is entirely fair, and from a Doyleist perspective, "queerbaiting" may be an accurate term. Personally, I'm more inclined to suspect that this is Chibnall rebuking RTD for Ten/Rose in much the same way Moffat rebuked RTD for Donna's memory wipe, but that doesn't exactly make him look any better. From a Watsonian perspective, though, I think the matter is more complex. Thirteen is pretty open and straightforward when she talks with Yaz about things in the specials. And while she's certainly queer and she certainly has feelings for Yaz, at the same time, her expressed preferences (which match with some of her other incarnations) are much closer to asexual than anything else. So we have a 'ship where one partner identifies as somewhere in the bi/queer/gay part of the spectrum, and the other partner identifies as ace. Suggesting that the ace partner and the queer partner should have hugged or kissed or displayed some form of sexual attraction before parting at the end of Power of the Doctor sounds to me like it's disrespecting the very clear "no" that the Doctor expressed. The ending and the performances we got on screen definitely communicate the love between these two people, and I think Yaz's willingness to go without a token of physical affection can be read as part of that expression even if the writer may have been completely oblivious to the nuances of what he was writing. Going after Chibnall for queerbaiting therefore seems entirely fair to me, but I think Yaz's behavior was exemplary in this situation and that the Doctor's preferences are equally worthy of respect. At least within the fiction, I have no doubt from the performances about how Yaz and the Doctor feel about one another, and am delighted by Yaz's decision not to ask for physical affection from the Doctor. It would have been so easy to do otherwise, even an unscripted hug, and while the refusal leaves unresolved tension behind, the assumption that it must be sexual tension for both of them threatens to erase the ace aspects of the Doctor, aspects that have been around for a long time and which were far more respected in the old show than the new one (even if the showrunners didn't recognize or care about asexuality as a human preference at all). It's troubling, because I don't want to be policing people's language ITT or making anyone feel bad or trying to pit one aspect of queerness against another. But after seeing this, I can't unsee it, so I'm offering it to others here as food for thought.
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Oct 29, 2022 16:14
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Yannick_B posted:It's pretty good food for thought! But I gotta say I had not perceived this incarnation of the Doctor as asexual and I feel like if we were meant to think so, it might've been more underlined? (I'll admit that most of Chibnall's era hasn't been memorable to me, so I might just have forgotten all of it) but I did think that Yaz's emotions were foregrounded. A person coming to terms that they're not only queer but they're in love with a partially-distant alien felt like a pretty amazing emotional plot for the show and I thought it was barely resolved or adressed. It almost felt like the Yaz stuff in the previous episodes didn't happen (like the Timeless Children stuff!). I hadn't really seen any moments suggesting Thirteen wasn't asexual? One in The Aztecs definitely has something going on; Two is an open question for me; Three may present as "manly" but seems generally disinterested in other people in terms of attraction; Four and Romana were definitely an item; Five seems like he'd just be confused; Six seems too self-obsessed to find anyone else attractive; Seven just doesn't engage with that aspect at all; Eight probably isn't asexual, and not just on the strength of that kiss. In the new series, Nine hints at it but despite clearly falling for Rose I don't really see any hints that there's a physical element for me, even if he does dance; Ten is possibly the most sexual the Doctor has ever been; Eleven is a solid maybe; Twelve doesn't think of Clara in that way, but he absolutely does think of River that way; Thirteen, at least to my memory, is another "doesn't really engage with this aspect of life" character. As for Yaz, she was massively underserved across the whole series, and this definitely fits into that larger problem. Eve of the Daleks made an attempt but I just don't think Chibnall has the ability to pull something like this off successfully. OTOH, the show can definitely support these kinds of conversations and I feel like Chibnall foregrounded them in a way that wasn't weirdly heterosexist (what was RTD thinking in series 2? I suppose representation has progressed a lot over the past 15 years, but still). I just can't tell how much he'd be surprised at hearing that he did.
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Oct 30, 2022 00:18
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Tectuan and her Time Agents seemed undestroyed after the Master blew up Gallifrey again. And Flux may have destroyed most of the universe without undestroying it, because why would anyone care about that at all? It really is feeling like the novels during the wilderness years, where a Time War pretty much meant a whole bunch of planets kept existing and then not existing again and again. (The Flux candy skeletons felt like they’d be at home in either set of novels, Virgin or BBC.) I’d wager Gallifrey comes back again during this RTD run, assuming he doesn’t simply replace it. You’d really expect the Time Lords would just have a decoy planet by now while hiding out somewhere. I have to say that what really irritated me was after Eleven saved Gallifrey and Tom told him it was still out there, just lost… and then Moffat never did anything with that at all and it was just casually there again during Twelve’s run. “Here’s an interesting story I will set up and then never do anything with” bugs me more than “here’s a really bad idea I had but then let drop without further development.” My preference would be to get “different” Gallifrey. Completely reconceive, justify via the constant changes to its past, and have the “New Gallifrey” be a potential concern. The Time Lords have mostly vacillated between a powerful and often corrupt threat and a bunch of doddering old fools. Either use them to tell some interesting new stories or leave them dead.
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Nov 5, 2022 23:15
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LividLiquid posted:Unless I've misunderstood something, the entire season-long Hybrid story with the confession dial culminated in the excellent Heaven Sent and The Doctor finding Gallifrey at the end of that episode, but basically loving off again because they weren't going to let him save Clara, which felt to me like dealing with it without dealing with it. It felt like maybe that was a way to quell the nagging questions of "why isn't The Doctor looking for Gallifrey" while leaving the larger arc of it for an anniversary, big special, new showrunner, whatever. It was out there, but just like it started, The Doctor was a fugitive again and couldn't go back to deal with whatever larger implications of Gallifrey being around again. Only incidentally. If, in Act 1, your main character is set a task to find the Maltese Falcon, and he does nothing in subsequent acts to find it, but is knocked out in Act 5 and wakes up in a room with the Maltese Falcon, did he “find the Falcon”? Nor did it make much sense that the Confession Dial, an object that people can carry around, somehow ended up in the Gallifrey wilderness. If he’d broken through to the TARDIS and then used the dial to travel to Gallifrey, that would have been an improvement, but even then you have a character set a quest who has had the means to fulfill it the whole season and done nothing with it. Eiba posted:I don't think Cybermen Time Lords is an inherently bad idea. But it just sits there, confusingly inert, as other things happen around the concept. And that's it. It could be an opportunity: have them revert to being Time Lords but they declare they prefer these bodies. Have them start speaking in posh or RP English and going to “Amber Alert” and deploying the Glove of Tectuen and other ancient artifacts. Have their leader declare that the Time Lords are the ultimate survivors, that they have no interest in converting “lesser species” but that the Doctor has repeatedly demonstrated supreme survival skills and must therefore be converted. Have them offer technology to other species in exchange for help in catching and converting the Doctor. Force the Doctor to save the Master from Cyberconversion and make them work together to undo what he did to get rid of the Cyberlords.
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Nov 6, 2022 15:57
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Random Stranger posted:Just watched The Timeless Children and I was braced for the episode to be bad and the the twist to not make any sense, but it doesn't even make any sense in the context of Chibnall's plot. If they brainwiped pre-Hartnell Doctor after long service to the I'm unclear about your confusion. She's on the run after being an operative for the Division. They catch her at some point, mind-wipe and regenerate her. If you want to parse this closely, the place to get upset is that Chibnall is supposedly dealing with the Morbius Doctors, but it is demonstrably true that none of them were working with the Division if the Fugitive Doctor was the last to do so, meaning that the Doctor should remember them. But if he remembers them, he should expect his last regeneration much earlier than he does. If he doesn't remember them, why did the Division do a second mindwipe? Or did they work for the Division after the Fugitive Doctor did? Be honest, the most plausible thing about the whole ridiculous idea is that the Division, upon catching the Fugitive Doctor, regenerate her, have a retirement ceremony for the new Doctor praising them for their work in the Division, and then promptly mind-wipe them when it's complete. That definitely sounds like something a Time Lord operation would get up to. ^^^ Or there's the Season 6B theory.
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Nov 7, 2022 01:52
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mind probe in which case how was she aware of being part of the Division?
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Random Stranger posted:Except they didn't. We saw a different Doctor serve in the Division, retire from it, and then get mind wiped. So if this guy is post-Ruth, then how'd the Doctor get back in their good graces? And if he's pre-Ruth then why's she on the run from the Division? We were specifically told that the Matrix sequences themselves weren’t accurate, in the same way that “Irish cop falls off cliff and regenerates” wasn’t actually what happened. There is no evidence that the Doctor got back in the Division’s good graces. The only specific on-screen evidence relating to this is the Doctor being told in Flux that a specific pocketwatch contains her wiped memories. There isn’t a way for her to find out if that’s true without using it, apparently. Whether a future showrunner ever bothers to pull on that thread is an open question. The whole of Flux is unintelligible in this respect anyway. Did the Flux erase people from time, in which case, Tecteun never existed? Did it get undone completely when the candy skeletons were defeated? Did it get undone, but only partly? Chibnall doesn’t seem to have cared. I presume he set up The Timeless Children thread in a way that makes it easy for a future showrunner concerned with continuity to retcon, but it’s a time-travel show with alternate universes and you’d expect Time Lord history to either be sacrosanct or a complete mess, and the show’s gone hard into the latter.
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Nov 7, 2022 15:54
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Confusedslight posted:I still don't know if you're doing a bit. Post history shows inactivity since 2021 with a few short posts prior to that in threads titled AMA I’m a Time Traveler and Proof of Time Travel, mocking the OP of those threads, Tapes From the Future. Recent history is two cryptic posts (one looks like a hash) followed by what we’re getting, which is Tapes From the Future right down to the same website with that name attached. Tapes has been probated for “get help” reasons but not banned, so I don’t know why they’d be posting using another account. I don’t think there’s much we can do to assist.
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Nov 27, 2022 01:06
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Vinylshadow posted:Happy 7-year anniversary to Heaven Sent Seven years? Get back to us in a few hundred million and you've got something. Is there another point in the show where it dared to do something like that out of something besides desperation (thinking of Midnight as a recent example in that category)?
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Nov 28, 2022 19:22
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The_Doctor posted:Yeah, Flux has some excellent ideas and concepts but just refuses to engage or explore them in any way at all. Time even shows up and has a conversation with the Doctor (who I guess isn't "Time's Champion" in Chibnall's eyes), threatening her with a final death that seems completely forgotten by the time Power of the Doctor rolls around. It's amazing how much promise Chibnall squanders in Flux, but I give him credit for at least having a lot of bonkers ideas even if he couldn't seem to execute most of them with any degree of effectiveness. Boring Chibnall is much worse.
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Nov 29, 2022 05:36
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Jerusalem posted:Since the entity from Power of the Doctor (which I at first assumed would be one of those "creation" aliens from The Battle of Name I Can't Remember) instinctively took on the form of somebody/something that the viewer would feel inclined to protect, I'm sad we never saw it from The Master's POV simply so we could see that it was seemingly The Master chained up there. Given the Master has killed themself, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t qualify as wanting to protect themself. It would have been interesting if he saw Yaz, though. Every time the new series has head-faked in the direction of Susan, it’s gone nowhere. New series fans probably don’t care, but it annoys me something fierce. Carole Ann Ford is 82, showrunners. Waiting until she dies to recast is just needless and cruel.
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Nov 30, 2022 01:00
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TinTower posted:Rosa was co-written by Malorie Blackman (the show's first black writer) and directed by Mark Tonderai (the show's first black director), so it wasn't just Chibnall trying to be detached but still preachy. Although the script almost certainly got its messages toned down by Chibnall and the higher-ups. One thing Chibnall did do well is increasing the diversity among the writing and directorial staff (and elsewhere) on the production side. Who has not had a lot of diversity on the writing/directing/production side of things. The only problem is that Chibnall did too much of the writing himself.
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Dec 11, 2022 19:40
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Behold, the Bathrobe of Rassilon!
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Dec 31, 2022 23:32
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Sydney Bottocks posted:It's entirely possible, to be sure, but I would point out that Disney is not exactly known for embracing the "auteur" theory and letting the creative types have the final say in whatever projects Disney is funding. If Disney is providing money (and an international streaming platform outside of the UK) for the show, then they're going to have some say in what goes into the show. Depending on what things Disney requests them to do, it's then up to RTD and co. to decide if going against whatever changes Disney asks them to make is a hill worth dying on for them or not. My guess is that by and large, they'll go with the flow. As you say, though, we'll just have to wait and see for now. From the interview: “ Russell: And that’s a good example of Disney notes. They sent us a note on episode one [of Ncuti’s first series] that said, “That opening isn’t as much fun as the other episodes.” It was a great note. So I’ve written a new opening –” He said the note was “great,” and he said they changed the opening because it was a great note. I’d say I don’t know how anyone goes from RTD telling a story about how Disney has been improving things on the series with their notes and concludes that Disney has taken the show hostage and RTD is sweating bullets over it, but I’ve spent enough time here to know precisely how that happens. The BBC has always been in a position to ruin the show without any help from Disney, anyway. Nor does Disney own the show, unlike all those other properties it bought up. I’ll point out that Disney seems perfectly happy to let Feige run the MCU and their purchase actually cleared away some of the interference he was getting from Marvel. Given that it isn’t just RTD but that he has Julie Gardner to run interference with Disney and the BBC as needed, I’m reasonably confident Bad Wolf Productions can fend off any interference. It worked in 2005, 18 years ago…
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Jan 6, 2023 06:22
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I liked most of the Morbius Doctors, but I quit watching completely when they cast Jered Leto.
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Jan 12, 2023 19:33
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AndyElusive posted:Going to buy Kerblam off Amazon. Don't pop the bubble wrap.
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Jan 21, 2023 00:25
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"What stories I could tell..." "So then he stole your sandwich AGAIN?" Nice tribute to Bevan at the end of the trailer, and it was nice to see an actual functioning Sea Devil as opposed to their recent appearance in the show. I'm a little shaky on the "disable the guard and then watch the eggs hatch" bit, and I'm not sure the "Sea Devil" name is a great idea any more. Maybe they should be renamed "Seocenes"?
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Jan 26, 2023 17:13
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Jerusalem posted:I wonder how many walls the War Doctor practiced shooting words into until he got it just right? “The Doctor has left a message, sir!” “Not again! What is it this time?l Camera pans to a hologram showing a wall with the words “No mauve” shot into it. Cut to the War Doctor. “drat, I almost had it.”
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Jan 29, 2023 15:51
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Edward Mass posted:This isn’t Doctor Whose Line Is It Anyway, it’s a scripted show. And now, it’s the whole team with the end of show Whodown.
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Feb 27, 2023 16:02
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Sydney Bottocks posted:Christ, don't give RTD any more ideas, the one episode he did based off of contemporary UK gameshows was bad enough "Let's end this show, it's rotten and it's bollocks..." "Even so, it's still better than the Daleks!" Chorus: "Better than the Daleks!"
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Feb 28, 2023 20:15
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Jerusalem posted:Yep. About the only thing that might possibly maybe perhaps tangentially almost potentially be considered kind of a "resolution" to that whole thing is that the Doctor tells the Ood that they could use the engine to reverse the damage the Flux did. The Ood says he can't let her do that, she starts to talk about his fellow Ood and then the Sugar Skull Gang showed up, killed Not-Rassilon and zapped the Doctor away, leaving the Ood sitting between universes. I guess maybe he might have decided,"Ehh gently caress it?" and fixed things? “Didn’t everything get destroyed?” “Yeah, but it all got fixed by Act of Ood.”
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Mar 6, 2023 16:42
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The budget was £4 for that video because when they asked RTD how much to spend he just reflexively answered “Four to Doom’s Day.”
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Mar 20, 2023 15:31
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I was promised Doctor Oho! I've been tricked!
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Mar 26, 2023 18:57
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Random Stranger posted:That one made a bit more sense than some of the others (looking at you timeless child) because at least prisoner zero came through a crack and might have gained some knowledge from that. It all falls apart if you think about it. People fall through the cracks and are erased from time and memory, but Prisoner Zero can travel through one and escape, and it goes unnoticed not because of any property of the crack but due to a perception filter (that it abandons for some reason because two people got around it). All the birds at the pond got eaten by the crack for some reason and that means no additional birds show up in this location in future but plenty of birds still exist. The most baffling bit is the thought that it becomes common knowledge that the Doctor and the TARDIS are connected with the cracks, but evidently only the Doctor’s enemies know and they set a trap to stop him. None of his friends ever ring him up and say “the TARDIS seems to be unravelling the fabric of space-time, maybe have that checked?” Moffat gets away with it because you don’t have the context to see the problem until the finale, and it’s so satisfying that you are likely to say it justifies the elements that retroactively don’t make sense. Honestly, Prisoner Zero could have told the Doctor the cracks were his fault in a way we wouldn’t believe and the whole season still works, but Moffat loves his mysteries.
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Apr 24, 2023 14:59
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Vinylshadow posted:Excellent, more Doctor Who Charades because good luck hearing anyone over a roaring orchestra going absolute ham I think I'd prefer that to the deafening "audience is listening" noise made by the Chibnall-era Doctor Who bumper.
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Apr 24, 2023 23:42
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SecretOfSteel posted:While we're thinking things through, I've always been a bit worried about Capaldi's first episode Deep Breath where it implies he maybe mugs that old distressed guy... what was that about 😞 Compared to Six’s post-regeneration trauma, I’ll take the mugging of an old man off-screen. (Though I read that as coercion stopping short of physical violence.) We’re supposed to be unsure if Twelve is a “good man,” perhaps because Moffat forgot the whole “Good Man Goes to War” thing he wrote.
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Apr 25, 2023 15:01
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Jerusalem posted:Tag yourself, I'm Morgus' secretary. Your other choices are.... oh wait, no. Everybody else is dead. I'm the elevator shaft. Nobody is pushing me down myself! MrL_JaKiri posted:Face of Evil down, only Survival to go! One of my absolute favorites. "I hear you, Xoanon... I hear you."
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May 26, 2023 00:24
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As the ultimate troll, RTD will have Mel appear wearing a fabulous frock, but she will pull out a gun and start shooting later in the episode.
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Jun 8, 2023 19:25
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Jerusalem posted:Thanks for the checks on the gifs - bizarre about the Pertwee warning, I guess imgur took Ncuti Gatwa's description of Pertwee dressing like a slut to heart! The spider on Sarah’s back was 100% naked! Also, whatever tool they use may be registering the Cesar Romero Joker as a boob.
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Jul 13, 2023 02:44
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The amazing thing about Kerblam! is that almost any other permutation of the story would improve it, but McTighe and Chibnall went for this one because it’d be an unexpected twist while apparently disregarding any kind of message it would communicate. Even a story about how the System went mad because it is supposed to maximize automated efficiency as well as sales, and the absence of work for humans depresses sales, so the System has realized that the part of it that replaces human labor (and makes remaining human labor cheap) is working at cross-purposes to the part of it that wants to sell to customers, would accomplish aspects of the “twist ending” where the System is “good” while being more intelligible and interesting. More interesting would be to actually explore the implications of the System developing empathy for humanity as well as a conscience and thus desperately trying to escape the limitations of its own existence harming humanity in the name of corporate profit, where the plea for help translates into asking the Doctor to somehow reform the whole company, but I can see why nobody might think they could pull off a satisfying ending. Then again, this story doesn’t either and it has just enough gestures toward the possible “the System became sentient and considers itself a monster” thread to make what actually happens a terrible disappointment. Chibnall has this strange fixation on story being about things that happen without any particular attentiveness to the underlying meanings of those happening things. You can see it in Torchwood interwoven into individual “message” stories (what is the meaning of the overall character arcs? There really isn’t any) and it gets far worse during his run on Doctor Who. It’s sad that his tenure can largely be summed up as “first showrunner to cast a woman as the Doctor, but didn’t really have any ideas about what to do with her after that.” I mean, what writer, when confronted with the opportunities inherent in eventually casting not just one, but TWO female Doctors, decides “the thing to do with this opportunity is to explain the extra faces in The Brain of Morbius!”
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Jul 21, 2023 15:22
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Open Source Idiom posted:Nah, I disagree tbh. I think Gwen has a very clear arc over the course of Chibnall's seasons, as does Owen. I still think that's an intelligible arc that pertains to the character relationships in the show, but has nothing really to say outside of that. Compare to some of the strands running through Doctor Who, whether they be an innate suspicion of authority (whether that's the revolutionary aspects of Two or Seven or Eleven, or the subversiveness sometimes displayed by Three and Five), or to some of the new series Doctor arcs: 1. Eleven's arc going from "everyone knows who I am" to "nobody knows who I am" (not that it stuck) is intertwined with the idea Moffat explores further with Clara, where the Doctor inspires other people to be like the Doctor. That's why the obsessive focus on the Doctor himself was a problem, and why the series later interrogates whether anyone else can actually be like the Doctor safely. (I'm not sure the eventual message makes a lot of sense, but it's clearly present.) 2. Nine's "coward, every time" arc was underlining a message against the choice he thought he made in the Time War, though Moffat eventually patched that. But the larger message was to the audience, that the ends do not justify the means, and it was delivered during a moment in history where that very argument had led to the invasion of Iraq. 3. Classic series development isn't very coherent, for obvious reasons. But we do see the Doctor espouse and defend principles which apply outside the immediacy of the fiction. Don't get me wrong, I think it's possible to write good TV that doesn't do that sort of thing, especially in comedy, I'm just saying that Chibnall doesn't seem very interested in that kind of engagement. "I want the Doctor to be played by a woman" is a very different statement from "I want the Doctor who is played by a woman to be known for her mad engineering skillz so actual girls and women aspire to become engineers." armpit_enjoyer posted:"The Doctor always travelled in a police box, but Chibnall made her a cop" -- someone writing about series 11 and 12 a while back I'm not sure she's an establishment figure--certainly less so than Three often was--but she's not clearly an anti-establishment figure either. It's like her stories just don't engage with reality in the same ways as the rest of the new series, despite episodes like Rosa and Demons of the Punjab which seem very much to be doing so. There's a fundamental engagement with the broader concepts, even in classic Who (Genesis of the Daleks, Remembrance of the Daleks) depicting racism and fascism, which is just not operating the same way in Chibnall's run. Remembrance underlines racism and links it to fascism, with the Doctor and Ace clearly lining up in opposition; Rosa depicts racism but without much of a sense of how it connects to anything else (time-traveling racist is nearly a cipher) and despite landing several good conversations aided by the fact the show actually has non-white companions, has the bizarre ending on the bus where Graham, in particular, acts sickened as if he's doing something wrong by denying Rosa his seat instead of doing exactly what she would have wanted him to do. Demons of the Punjab has better characterization, but the Doctor gets weirdly sidelined IIRC and ends up dealing with that baffling side-plot with the aliens while the rest of the story proceeds without her. Even one of the best Chibnall stories, It Takes You Away, is focused on grief and mourning, which is intensely, even selfishly, personal instead of being hooked into larger issues of politics or society. There's a sort of disconnectedness or abstraction in Chibnall's work, and it leaves the Doctor unmoored in a way that can't even make her a cop. Even the police are attached to something. The best Chibnall can manage is suggesting she used to be a cop. But even then, what does that mean? Flux (which I thought was pretty good in a general sense) doesn't manage to provide any sense of why the Doctor was involved in whatever originally happened, on whose behalf: the Time Lords wanted her to take Space's side in a fight between Time and Space? Or just didn't like the candy-skulls? Or wanted Time kept in her place so they could remain Lords? We know why the Doctor needs to stop the Flux, but her motives the first time around remain muddled at best.
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Jul 21, 2023 19:16
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Khanstant posted:The arc was especially funny this time because I had a flash of that lady who was PM for like 2 weeks and was made to quit. Now I'm picturing this scene: Khanstant: "Oh, were you PM before or after the cabbage lady?" Liz Truss [teeth gritted]: "I was the cabbage lady." I am really interested to see what RTD does with the current level of SFX. It's easy to forget how much things improved since his first run in that regard.
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Jul 24, 2023 19:09
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Jerusalem posted:Just as an aside, the Doctor dismisses the idea of Satan existing, which is kind of hilarious since she's met Satan before! In an episode literally called The Satan Pit! "Who told you that was Satan?" "Well... he did." "Oh, you should know you can't believe a word Satan says."
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Aug 3, 2023 19:53
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Fil5000 posted:Daleks should constantly be falling apart due to infighting over degrees of ideological purity. We've had that happen, what, twice? The civil war in the late 80s that spanned a few serials and in the awful Daleks in Manhattan. Arguably there's a third if you count "your sewers are revolting" as another civil conflict and not as a plumbing disaster. Davros has been a real problem to developing the Daleks as characters. They should be at least as obsessed with schemes and backstabbing as the Time Lords are, and probably more so. More scenes of Dalek conspirators whispering at the top of their vocoders, please!
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Aug 10, 2023 17:02
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Khanstant posted:Yeah my problem with Moffats run is just how godlike the doctor became, and even that had its moments. But like a god, they're at their best when in the end you can't be sure they existed at all. I like Doctor best when they are a trickster imp inspiring folks to solve their problems and tripping up villains on their own bullshit. RTD is the one who made him Space Jesus.
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Aug 17, 2023 00:06
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Jerusalem posted:It also appears that the first time he actually meets "Trine" is the same time he decides not to leave, so he set all that stuff up BEFORE knowing his dead wife was apparently alive on the other side of a moth-filled cave accessible through the family mirror. I was being extremely charitable in the write-up trying to assume writer intent but yeah it's absolutely hosed up and as I noted I'm legit surprised Yaz of all people didn't make a point to contact child protective services. Erik loving sucks! I like the episode, and it reads differently to me now that my father is dead. My mother was married to him for 51 years, and I'd guess they spent perhaps 30 days apart across that entire span of time. And she's now both in mourning and clinically depressed (which isn't uncommon). One of the clear expressions of those things is a profound inwardness, a self-centeredness that can read as selfish. That doesn't justify what Erik does--if I had an emergency, my mother would respond to that if able--but I'm going to bet that, especially as the father of a special needs child, he wasn't doing 50% of the work raising his daughter. Probably not anywhere close to that. And it's hard to assess if the character is depressed, partly because given his circumstances it might be overcome by the conditions of that other universe. (Plus TV is usually pretty bad at depicting mental health issues in accurate ways.) If he can't help, or feels he can't, and he's grieving, and he's depressed, then neglect is an entirely believable response. But it happens because he needs help. A mother suffering from post-partum depression needs help, she isn't a bad mother who should have her children taken away because of a medical condition. As for the "monster" he concocts, that's more a weakness in the script--he has to be an rear end in a top hat in that way or the story doesn't work--and I don't think we get any information about him that would justify his character doing something like that in the first place. Doing something more Forbidden Planet and having the threat outside the house be a different materialization of his grief or depression would probably work better, but that's not the story we got. But I'm a drat sight more sympathetic for Erik's failures after seeing how grief can hit a parent IRL. "It Takes You Away" indeed. They're all fictional characters, sure, but maybe Graham isn't the only one who deserves some Grace in his life. If anything, it's the ending that's unrealistic: this man needs help and possibly medical intervention. But that's not how these stories work. Narsham fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Aug 25, 2023 |
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Aug 25, 2023 03:17
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Jerusalem posted:Bolded part mine. Yeah, it ties itself up in knots so much to make any kind of even superficial sense and even setting aside the distaste for "the Doctor is secretly a key element in creating a core aspect of the Time Lords as know them and also a super special mysterious alien from another universe because being a mysterious alien from this universe apparently isn't enough anymore?" my takeaway of the whole thing is,"What was even the point of any of this?" It apparently didn't change anything, didn't add anything, didn't go anywhere or have any reason for existing beyond Chibnall apparently wanting to give whatever weird idea he had about the Doctor's origins the "official" stamp. If you must do the Cyberlords, why in the world would you waste them by making them reanimating zombies versus the Cybermen-as-zombies? They should have all the cunning and intelligence (and bumbling about) that the Time Lords demonstrate. Have one of them jump the Doctor, get knocked down, and then say "Oy, it's me, your old pal Drax!" Sure, new viewers won't get the reference immediately, but you can have the Doctor explain after they finish hurling that Cyberlord into a nearby star. Seriously, after the late old-series Cybermen, this move by Chibnall offers the show the opportunity to make its Cybermen even more camp, and it's been wasted. I want Cyberlords sitting in a TARDIS debating whether or not to go to amber alert. I don't want them shooting at the Doctor, I want them complaining icily about his propensity for vulgar facetiousness. (I guess I actually want Bob Holmes back...)
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Sep 9, 2023 01:10
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Warthur posted:So re: the Timeless Child stuff, the way I would resolve this is as follows: I got the feeling during Flux that Chibnall was hinting toward something not dissimilar to this: all the fuss about crunching this galaxy while moving to another made me think that obviously the Timeless Child came from another galaxy, and coupled with the "weird evacuation rift that leads to Gallifrey" in the immediately prior season, that'd work with the idea that the Timeless Child was a survivor from the last Flux-like evacuation. Maybe they sent multiple people to multiple different galaxies, or maybe she was the only one. I'm not sure I can truthfully say I'd be interested in RTD trying to resolve this stuff. A throwaway line about how the destructiveness of the Flux got undone wouldn't hurt, and if the show decides to have a mini-arc where the Doctor goes back to that intergalactic station and ends up exploring another galaxy, that might be fun, but I never got the sense RTD believed the show to be limited to a single galaxy, where Chibnall did seem to think that, so I dunno. Maybe best to pretend the whole thing never happened.
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Sep 14, 2023 17:21
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Biggest hit against Chibnall is that, when titling The Battle of Can’t Be Bothered to Find the Name even a Few Posts Earlier, he has the title "Disintegrator of the Soul" sitting right there in his own script! He also repeatedly goes to the well of “waste two good ideas in a muddle of incoherent elements” to the extent I have to wonder if he has some sort of inferiority complex. Give more time for characters and give more time for Yaz in particular to do the things we know she can do on screen. If you have to reuse a new villain, either make him a credible threat or lampshade his ineffectiveness, but make up your drat mind instead of faffing about. Deciding to anchor interesting and mad ideas to this lead balloon of a villain just sinks the entire episode, which would work much better if there were no villain and dealing with the “disintegrator of the soul” were the main story-line. And maybe don’t follow the episode about grief which directly calls up Grace with a Graham and Ryan subplot about getting through grief via revenge.
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Sep 25, 2023 15:03
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The_Doctor posted:I really hope we get a moment like this. Get Bradley back and just.. let it happen. Nah, I want at least one story with Gatwa and a more recent Doctor. If only to see his huge smile. Jodie, Matt, Peter Capaldi? Jo Martin needs as much screentime as RTD will give her. I doubt his Doctor will be as emotionally expressive as his character on Sex Education, but I really want to see Ncuti’s Doctor give Peter Capaldi’s a big hug.
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Sep 29, 2023 15:12
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I don’t know why the obviously deliberately outrageous Kill the Moon and the kinda sad Sleep No More get all this guff but almost nobody is upset about Dark Water’s decision to tell kids that all their relatives who died and got cremated are experiencing eternal torment. I’m middle-aged and watched the episode before my father died and was cremated, and I found it disturbing. And unlike the claims of the other two episodes, it isn’t clear that this one can be conclusively disproven, at least not for anyone who believes in the possibility of life after death or the soul. In the Forest of the Night deserves every criticism it gets, though.
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Oct 1, 2023 14:42
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