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Which season of Doctor Who should get a Blu-ray set next? This poll is closed. |
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| One of the black-and-white seasons |
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16 | 29.63% |
| Season 7 |
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7 | 12.96% |
| Season 11 |
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1 | 1.85% |
| Season 13 |
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0 | 0% |
| Season 15 |
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2 | 3.70% |
| The Key to Time |
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21 | 38.89% |
| Season 21 |
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0 | 0% |
| Season 25 |
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7 | 12.96% |
| Total: | 54 votes | ||
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I went to the Experience a couple of times, but then I live in South Wales anyway and the first time was free because it was a beta test before the exhibition opened to the public (and I work across the Bay in Techniquest). Lot of signs with "lorum ipsum" on them that first time  .
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Mar 29, 2024 14:54
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Open Source Idiom posted:Was it though? I thought the first season was good. It's also a lot closer to Agatha Christie in terms of what it is than Doctor Who, but David Suchet was already the perfect Poirot, they're still making big budget Poirot movies, and, being honest, I don't want to watch Miss Marple, lol.
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Mar 29, 2024 15:14
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Open Source Idiom posted:Was it though? I think it's easy to understate what a disaster his Doctor Who era was even among people who absolutely hate it. It's completely non-functional television compared to Broadchurch, which for all its hacky plotting and westworld-esque willingness to abandon actual storytelling in favor of surprising people, still had basically functional scriptwriting direction and editing.
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Mar 29, 2024 16:43
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I tried watching Broadchurch but I didn't think it was very funny and didn't finish it.
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Mar 29, 2024 16:46
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DoctorWhat posted:I think it's easy to understate what a disaster his Doctor Who era was even among people who absolutely hate it. It's completely non-functional television compared to Broadchurch, which for all its hacky plotting and westworld-esque willingness to abandon actual storytelling in favor of surprising people, still had basically functional scriptwriting direction and editing. I reckon the direction and editing were basically fine on Chibnall's Who. I reckon both series are about equally poo poo, though Broadchurch had the better cast and soundtrack.
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Mar 29, 2024 16:50
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Open Source Idiom posted:I reckon the direction and editing were basically fine on Chibnall's Who. Have you seen Legend of the Sea Devils?
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Mar 29, 2024 16:58
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There's a reason that episode is the one that comes to mind when talking about directing and editing, it's an outlier. Pick a random Chibs era episode and a random Moffat episode and compare their direction and there'll be less daylight between them
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Mar 29, 2024 17:29
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Yeah, Legend of the Sea Devils is an extreme case caused by a very troubled production and pandemic filming. I'd be fascinated to find out what the original episode was actually like.
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Mar 29, 2024 17:36
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I want Jed Mercurio to write some Doctor Who. We need the insane energy of late-series Line of Duty or Vigil (I think he's a producer on the latter?)
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Mar 29, 2024 17:48
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Whenever I read the synopses of Chibnall-era episodes, even those which I know I definitely watched, I have absolutely no recollection of them. I quit at some point during his second series thinking I no longer liked Doctor Who, but as it turns out I just didn’t like his way of doing it. I’m currently rewatching the old series. I’m halfway through series 4 (next up is The Doctor’s Daughter lol) and it’s reminded me about how ridiculously fun it was. The giant plot holes absolutely infuriate my wife, but I keep telling her not to think about them.
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Mar 29, 2024 19:10
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https://twitter.com/bbcdoctorwho/status/1773772111124828305?s=20 Let's goooo
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Mar 29, 2024 19:16
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Creature posted:Whenever I read the synopses of Chibnall-era episodes, even those which I know I definitely watched, I have absolutely no recollection of them. I quit at some point during his second series thinking I no longer liked Doctor Who, but as it turns out I just didn’t like his way of doing it. With the RTD episodes it feels like he's writing them with such enthusiasm that I'm almost always prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. So much of it is silly but who cares if we're having a good time? Edit: and then he'll hit you with a Midnight and it's like what the gently caress, Russell, how dare you utterly blindside me with this equally brilliant thing that is not silly at all
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Mar 29, 2024 19:19
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I have a friend who isn't into the show, but my other friend/his wife and I do like it and he watched some number of episodes through her at some point. He summarized it something like "it would go from the stupidest corny bullshit plot to a cool sci-fi or philosophical story but then regress to some embarrassing almost unwatchable crap before swinging back hit you with something really poignant and emotional that made him cry." I reckon he pretty much just saw modern season 1 episodes because he only recognizes cornerstone as a doctor when I've brought up others in something we watched.
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Mar 29, 2024 19:42
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Hmm, maybe I’ll do a mini-feature here and see how much I recall of Chibnall era stories. I will, of course, have to look up the titles. The Woman Who Fell to Earth: Establishes Ryan and Graham in a bicycling scene. Yaz seems like an afterthought. There’s an interesting thingy on public transport and the Doctor does an “End of Time” I’m alive plummet. She techs up a sonic screwdriver and tracks the menacing ball of tech-string back to the deeply disappointing Tim Shaw, an evil teleporting toothy alien who hunts humans. Something something something, the most interesting new character falls off a crane to her death but Tim Shaw doesn’t get killed, the TARDIS is missing, everyone gets teleported into space, cut to credits.
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Mar 29, 2024 19:58
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Narsham posted:Hmm, maybe I’ll do a mini-feature here and see how much I recall of Chibnall era stories. I will, of course, have to look up the titles. Don't forget that Ryan on a bike establishes both his relationship with Graham and that he has dyspraxia. And then the dyspraxia is barely ever mentioned again.
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Mar 29, 2024 20:10
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according to chris chibnall, dyspraxia means you have trouble climbing ladders but does not interfere with your ability to effortlessly headshot robots with a laser rifle also don't forget that graham is weirdly ablist towards ryan in this one episode and it never comes up or is acknowledged ever again
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Mar 29, 2024 20:55
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My greatest regret in life is that I’ll never be able to pull off all these incredible outfits Gatwa is wearing
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Mar 29, 2024 20:59
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SirSamVimes posted:according to chris chibnall, dyspraxia means you have trouble climbing ladders but does not interfere with your ability to effortlessly headshot robots with a laser rifle "Suppose you'll blame this one on the dyspraxia too, eh? Can't ride a bike, started an alien invasion..." Writing it down like that, it feels like it was supposed to be a joke, but he sure did say it unironically cruelly.
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Mar 29, 2024 21:14
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He is effortlessly cool and gorgeous and it’s just not fair. 
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Mar 29, 2024 21:20
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The_Doctor posted:He is effortlessly cool and gorgeous and it’s just not fair. We can't all be Kenough.
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Mar 29, 2024 22:50
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Big Mean Jerk posted:My greatest regret in life is that I’ll never be able to pull off all these incredible outfits Gatwa is wearing You can't truly know until you try!
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Mar 29, 2024 22:56
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Big Mean Jerk posted:My greatest regret in life is that I’ll never be able to pull off all these incredible outfits Gatwa is wearing That's definitely something that looks great on him but would look terrible on anyone who didn't have an absolutely rock hard perfect body.
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Mar 29, 2024 23:52
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This is gonna be long, I'm sorry. Click here to skip it.
Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Mar 30, 2024 |
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Mar 30, 2024 07:37
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Season 12 Episode 10: The Timeless Children Written by Chris Chibnall, Directed by Jamie Magnus Stone The Master posted:This is going to hurt. It's 1966 and the BBC has a problem: Doctor Who is a smash hit. Not a bad problem to have, but the issue is that the show is tremendously popular but all the original cast, producer and director have left the show. All that is left of the original cast now is William Hartnell as the titular Doctor Who. He is THE Doctor, the original you might say! But he's also older, cranky, progressively more prone to flubbing his lines. How much so has long been a point of contention, as well as whether it was caused by declining mental health or the frankly insane production schedule he was expected to keep up. One new Producer has already left the show after trying and failing to replace Hartnell as the Doctor, but it appears that things cannot continue as they are. The solution when found left everybody but William Hartnell happy, though he is credited (but perhaps never actually stated) that if ANYBODY could replace him, it would be Patrick Troughton. Yes, the titular Doctor Who was going to be replaced by a new actor, something not unheard of in film and television but hard to really justify after Hartnell had appeared on screen almost every single week for the last three years. So how to explain it? Did it even need explaining? Perhaps Troughton could just show up one week and everybody could call him the Doctor and audiences would just move on? No, figuring that the sci-fi setting gave them the leeway, a story was written where the life energy of the Earth (and the Doctor) was being drained by twin planet Mondas, peopled by a race of cybernetic humanoids now called Cybermen. Defeating the Cybermen, the Doctor stumbled to his TARDIS to be "renewed", collapsing to the floor where he transitioned before companions Ben and Polly and a watching audience of over 7 million people into Patrick Troughton, a younger, revitalized and renewed Doctor Who. Thus, the show was saved forever! It's near impossible to judge The Timeless Children in a vacuum, because by its very nature it simply can't stand alone. It is not only the culmination of Season 12 of the revival of Doctor Who, it is the culmination of showrunner Chris Chibnall's overall strategy for the show and his clearly long held desire to "explain" and "solve" "problems" that didn't exist. Everything he has written for Doctor Who, particularly during these last two seasons, has been building to this. This is his Bad Wolf, his Pandorica Opens/Big Bang, his Day of the Doctor. This is the episode where he attempts to stamp his name and his ideas on Doctor Who irrevocably, to change the Doctor's story to fit in with what he has always wanted it to be. Like Moffat writing his own fan theories from his old Usenet posting days into the show during his time as showrunner, Chibnall attempts the same here to "fix" a long-standing point of (incredibly minor) contention from 1976. Whether he watched The Brain of Morbius at 6-years-old or saw it later and became intrigued I don't know, but everything seems to spring from a single brief scene from that single episode. Thus, this episode can't help but be considered in a wider context, with much of what happens in the episode overshadowed by the "revelations" that come and the implications they are meant to have in the future: a can which Chibnall proceeded to kick down the road, leaving returning showrunner RTD to try to salvage what he could from it. But in the interest of fairness, I'd like to try and consider the episode and how it stands alone as an episode of Doctor Who, or at the very least how it wraps up the season as a whole. It's REALLY bad.   I probably shouldn't be envisioning a super-imposed image of a sweaty Ian Levine during what is supposed to be a major revelatory episode of Doctor Who that "CHANGES THINGS FOREVERTM", but here I am. It's 1969 and the BBC has a problem: Patrick Troughton is leaving Doctor Who. The show has run for 6 years now, not a bad run, but it is showing its age, feels a little old fashioned, and with Troughton - who took the role agreeing with his wife to only remain for 3 years so as not to get typecast or miss out on opportunities like William Hartnell complained he had - going maybe it was time to put it out to pasture? No, the show still rated well if not at the heights it once had, and maybe this was the opportunity to refresh it? But how to replace Troughton? Another renewal? Instead, the concept of "renewal" was formalized into the concept of regeneration. To explain this, writers Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke had the Doctor summon his own people to deal with the giant task of returning captured warriors to their various original timelines, brought there by a rogue Time Lord called the War Chief working for an alien called the War Lord. Thus we were introduced to The Timelords, seemingly Godlike in their powers to step in and resolve issues beyond the Doctor's individual control. Ending the threat of the War Lord, the Time Lords punish the Doctor who admits to companions Jamie and Zoe that he ran away from his (never named) home planet because he was bored. Exiling him to Earth in the 20th Century, they also force a "change of appearance" on him. The next time we see the Doctor, six months later, he is Jon Pertwee and the show Doctor Who has been modernized from black and white to color, from gallivanting around the Galaxy to dealing with alien threats on Earth with the aid of the United Nations Task Force. The show was back up to old ratings highs, and Jon Pertwee had no plans to leave after 3 years. Thus, the show was saved forever! A major complaint around Jodie Whittaker's time as the Doctor was that her character was often written and performed in an oddly passive way. While we were frequently told that the Doctor was an active force for change and good in the universe, somebody who lead and inspired her "fam", we very rarely ever got to see that. This Doctor seemed to get carried along by the tide ALOT, her token resistance often little more than a frowny face, and those odd moments we got to see her talking ("Talking's brilliant!") her way out of situations or completely undermining the arrogance of her captors or opponents were delightful but far too rare. This episode is possibly the worst example of this passivity, as the Doctor spends most of the episode standing in place being talked at and eventually is little more than a bystander observing other people save the day.   The Master forces her to cross the boundary with her into Gallifrey, leaving behind her companions who have to figure out how to survive the arrival of the Cyber Warship, while on board Graham and Yaz have to figure out how to survive being on it at all. Most of the "action" of the episode revolves around them doing what they can to survive or prepare to fight the Cybermen. There's a speech about putting aside pacificism that feels like something out of 1963's The Daleks, more of the LAST EVER HUMAN BEINGS WHO EXIST EXCEPT THE OTHER ONES WHO ARE SOMEWHERE ELSE get killed while Graham and Yaz figure out a plan to hide within the shells of Cybermen in order to avoid detection. This idea makes little sense, though it does offer us the sniff of a somewhat interesting direction the show could have explored (even then, Chibnall would have probably made it boring) where the future humans explain that it isn't simply a matter of opening up the Cybermen and stepping inside: there are human organs and flesh inside, they will need to scoop out and detach human remains in order to execute their plans. The true horror of the Cybermen's nature is an area that the show has never been particularly good about addressing, usually just relegating the Cybermen to nothing more than robots. In fact, if I was more charitably inclined I'd say a later exchange between the Master and Ashad was meant to put a lampshade on that whole thing. But that raises another issue with the story, it feels like two entirely different intended season-long arcs from alternate versions of different season 12s have been ended up coming together in this episode. Was the season supposed to be about the mystery of the, ugh, Timeless Child and the Doctor learning she had another incarnation that neither of them could place in her timeline? Or was it supposed to be about the rebuilding of the Cyber Empire by the last of the Cybermen, and the war where only humans or Cybermen could eventually survive, but not both? The Lone Cybermen is introduced in a one-off comment by Jack Harkness in the same episode where the Doctor learns about the Fugitive Doctor. Ashad arrives in the next episode and the Doctor gives it the Cyberium, the one thing she was told not to do. The Doctor tries to save the last of humanity from the Cybermen she has now revitalized... and then suddenly the show isn't about that after all. Again, another charitable reading would be that everything we've seen has been orchestrated and manipulated by the Master, except it appears that while he has set up a bunch of different things, he's also kind of... playing it by ear too and didn't account for but quickly adapts to the presence of the Cybermen, Ashad, and the Cyberium. Who set up the portal to other worlds? Was it him pulling another version of Utopia while waiting for the Doctor to show up so he could redirect it to Gallifrey? If so, he must have figured the Doctor would arrive there as part of an effort to save humans from Cybermen eventually. But then he seems completely caught by (pleasant) surprise by the existence of the Cyberium, unaware but intrigued by Ashad and the Death Particle etc. So if he didn't set up the portal, then who or what did? How did the Master take control of it? The show isn't interested in those questions though, it's interested in a long, dull monologue from the Master recounting from a 16-year-old Chris Chibnall's "ideas for Doctor Who origin story, don't read mum and dad" notebook.   It's 1972, and the Third Doctor is strapped to a table by his most dangerous enemies, the Daleks. Analyzing his mind, the Daleks - whose mastery of technology would eventually grow to rival the Time Lords - discover memories of his previous two incarnations, familiar to them from his stymieing of their plans in those forms. No other faces are seen, because there aren't any to be seen. Screeching in rage (and a little fear), the Daleks screech that he is the Doctor and he must be exterminated. A great cliffhanger as the screech into the theme music plays, as well as a nice little nod to the show's continuity at a time when it wasn't all that easy to just watch old episodes whenever you felt like it. It's 1973 and to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the show, a special 3 Doctors story is made in which all three of the Doctors come together. Only three, because that's all there is. William Hartnell makes an appearance, though in a limited role as his memory had deteriorated significantly by this point and he needed to read lines off cue cards. Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee however make a phenomenal double act. They discover one of the missing founders of Time Lord Society, Omega, whose experiments to help build the technological breakthroughs that made the Time Lords the dominant race in the galaxy left him trapped in an anti-matter universe while fellow founder Rassilon - a bit of a poo poo - was content to just make his friend a martyr rather than actually look into whether he might have survived. It's 1974 and Jon Pertwee is leaving the show after 5 years. During his final story, Planet of the Spiders, the Doctor meets his old mentor, a Time Lord who now lives on Earth as a Buddhist Monk. It is revealed that his assistant is actually a future incarnation of himself, projected into physical form (the production team at the time was heavily into Buddhism) and for the first time the process is named as "regeneration". When the older monk "dies", he becomes the Assistant we have already seen. Pertwee has become synonymous with the Doctor and is being replaced by a relative unknown, but along with the formidable producer/script editors combo of Phillip Hinchliffe, Terrance Dicks and especially Robert Holmes, Tom Baker make an already successful show even more popular. Thus the show is saved forever! Between these long sections of monologue, the Master invites the Cybermen to Gallifrey promising to make them more powerful than they ever dreamed. He meets with Ashad and we get a sequence that is both maddening and also arguably one of the best parts of the episode. Ashad, who is completely mad, reveals his grand plan for the Cybermen that he now leads, the one that his Cyberium has helped him to formulate, the scheme that will make them unstoppable. He's gonna turn them into robots!  The Master's,"...oh" reaction is perfect, because it's such a stupid loving idea. He says as much to Ashad, complaining it's dull and unimaginative and there are already plenty of "robots" out there in space, anybody can be a robot! No, he has a better idea, and unceremoniously he kills Ashad with his Tissue Compression Eliminator (which apparently also shrinks metal), actually being somewhat disappointed when the Death Particle (alluded to in the last episode, only specifically mentioned for the first time in this episode) doesn't get set off and kill him as well. The Cyberium emerges and the Master offers to host it now, an offer it is glad to take up given it had initially chosen the Doctor over Ashad in the first place.   Ashad's death is kind of perfect even if it is frustrating. The whole Lone Cyberman thing was introduced, executed and finished off in essentially 2 and a half episodes and gets the finish that he deserves. He was just some hosed up weirdo failure of a Cyber Conversion that was lucky enough to end up being the only available hosting for a superweapon, and the moment a better villain comes along he's just discarded like the junk he is. It also makes the entire Lone Cyberman storyline somewhat of a shaggy dog story, largely a waste of time that could have been avoided or used to give more time for other story ideas to shine. Again though, given our experience with Chibnall's writing up to this point, I'd be making the opposite argument if he had, because he wouldn't have done that well either. Meanwhile, Ryan and the others manage to fight off a handful of attacking Cybermen before they find themselves surrounded. Luckily they're saved when the Cybermen seem to turn on each other, only for the reveal that the rescuing Cybermen are actually Yaz, Graham and the other future humans who managed to pull off the scheme to hide inside the hollowed out remains of the Cybermen bodies. As an aside, this is the answer to what Ashad was doing in the previous episode when he seemed to attack his own Cybermen, he was removing their organic components as he sought a entirely robotic race of Cybermen for his future army. All reunited, the companions decide to cross the boundary into Gallifrey to find and rescue the Doctor, Yaz not hesitating for a moment to take that step because she more than any of the others has become entirely dedicated to being with the Doctor. She's still largely a barely sketched out character who hasn't had the benefit of the storylines that Ryan and especially Graham have had to develop as characters, and we haven't really seen what it is about the Doctor that makes her so dedicated, but at least it is something.   It's 1976, Tom Baker's fourth incarnation of the Doctor is arguably the most popular to ever hold the role, which he did for a still unmatched 7 years. But writer and script editor Robert Holmes - one of the best writers to ever work on Doctor Who, and yes I'm counting Douglas Adams in that company - has been musing about the scattered bits of disconnected information we have about the Doctor as a character. He's a Time Lord, he comes from the planet Gallifrey (named by Holmes 3 years earlier in The Time Warrior), he travels in space and time and he can regenerate. Holmes is interested in an idea, what if there is a limit on the number of times a Time Lord can regenerate? The Second Doctor had already told Jamie and Zoe that "barring accidents" his people could live forever if they wanted, but what if he was to... just ignore that? It's not like anybody is gonna ever go back and rewatch old episodes anyway! The trouble is, the Doctor is only on his 4th incarnation, and the limit can't be too low... but too high and Holmes will never get to explore the story he wants to: the Doctor facing up to the possibility of actual death on his final incarnation. What's the solution? How about some bullshit!?! It's January of 1976, and Tom Baker's 4th Doctor is engaged in a battle of the minds with the brain of rogue Time Lord Morbius, now inhabiting an abomination of a body, each vying for mental control. Morbius' mind seems to be dominating, overpowering the Doctor as we see flashes of his past lives as we did in Day of the Daleks. But as Morbius keeps pushing, taunting the Doctor, asking how many lives he has lived, we suddenly see a flash of unknown faces before the casing holding Morbius' brain can't keep up with the strain. Holmes' intention (he rewrote Terrance Dicks original story under the pseudonym Robin Bland, to get around restrictions given he was also script editor) was that Doctor had actually already lived 8 times BEFORE we saw Hartnell. It was a dumb idea, and the faces included were largely treated as fun Easter Eggs by the rest of the production crew, who dressed up in costumes and had their photos taken for these prior lives. Particularly dedicated fans would spend many years (decades!) arguing over the validity of these faces, whether they were actually Morbius' past lives flashing up as his brain casing failed to hold up to the strain (we see his prior face early in the contest) or were indeed missing Doctor lives (they weren't, Hartnell was the first). Of course, the idea of previous lives made absolutely no sense to the character of the Doctor as seen from An Unearthly Child on and his slow progression from a slightly antagonistic eccentric to the moral center of the show, unless you assumed he lived 8 previous lives as a shallow, mean-spirited elitist, which wasn't a particularly enticing idea. But regardless, it didn't really matter to Holmes, he'd set what he thought would be the groundwork for a later story he'd want to tell, and given how often he wrote for the show, he'd get more chances to add to it whether it was made explicit one way or the other. And here is the major problem with this episode, and one that seems to stem all the way back to January of 1976. Because, as noted, the Doctor largely spends this last episode standing around doing nothing while the Master monologues at her. And what a dull, tedious monologue it is! Ignoring almost everything the show had established over the prior near 60 years, Chibnall told a story about the history of Gallifrey and the native Shobogans who lived on it. One was called Tecteun, who traveled across space and found a lone child next to a strange structure on an alien planet beneath the portal to another universe. Tecteun brought this child back to Gallifrey and doted on her like a mother, until one day the child fell from a cliff while playing with other little Shobogans... but then she regenerated! So of course Tecteun did what any good mother would do, she... spent multiple years vivisecting the child through multiple regenerations to find out how it worked! Then she used it on herself and gave herself regenerations. Then she gave it to a now elite cadre of Shobogans (presumably the two we see are meant to be Rassilon and Omega) who became known as Time Lords thanks to Rassilon and Omega figuring out time travel. This is of course all absolutely horrific and monstrous, and it is to Chibnall's credit at least that he writes the Doctor's reaction to all these revelations to be a very natural one: what about the child? Was the child okay?   But why are we taking the Master at his word on any of this? Why does the Doctor believe him? Well she has to, of course, because he's actually showing her memories from within The Matrix. This is the recorded storage of ALL Time Lord memories, going back to the creation of the Matrix itself, an infallible, unhackable, impossible to lie device that only ever tells the truth and nothing else. It's October of 1976 and Holmes has his chance. The Master, not seen since the untimely death of Roger Delgado three years earlier, returns to the show as a decaying, barely held together Time Lord suffering through the last days of his final Regeneration. The Regeneration limit has been set now by the show, 12 regenerations, 13 lives, and the Master has none left. Desperate for more life, he arranges for the assassination of the President of Gallifrey, framing the Doctor for the crime. To achieve this, he does what is supposed to be impossible, infiltrating and faking records and memories of the supposedly infallible living memory of ALL Time Lords: The Matrix. Thus, in its first ever appearance, the incorruptible Matrix is corrupted... by the Master! Yes, we're supposed to believe that the device that we've only ever seen in episodes where it was being abused by the Master is actually a completely legitimate and trustworthy source now... being used by the Master! But even if this addition of Tecteun to the formation of Time Lord society is new, the idea that Regeneration was stolen from an alien child actually seems somewhat in keeping with what dicks the Time Lords can be. Andrew Cartmel during his time as script editor in the 1980s had wanted to include an "other" alongside Rassilon and Omega, so isn't Tecteun fitting into that role at least somewhat understandable? I mean, at least it's not looms or doing something stupid like making the Doctor the super special secret founder of the Time Lords like Cartmel considered, right!?! No, it's much worse. It's 1981 and Tom Baker's time on the show is ending. In a callback to Jon Pertwee's last episode, the Doctor is able to project a rough approximation of his future self into the current day as The Watcher. Falling from the Jodrell Bank Observatory after reversing an uncontrollable build-up of entropy, the Doctor's lives flash before his eyes as he remembers past companions and enemies. Notably, nobody from before William Hartnell makes any appearances. It's 1983, and for the 25th Anniversary of Doctor Who, a special 5 Doctors story is made. It's called The Five Doctors because there are all the previous Doctor Whos are in it, and that's 5. All 5 of the Doctors are there. They're summoned by the Time Lords, specifically the President of the Time Lords Borusa who has access to all the deepest and darkest secrets of the infallible Matrix. He summons 5 Doctors. The First Doctor (played here by Richard Hurndall, as William Hartnell had died 8 years earlier) mentions that he is the original. They discover one of the deep, dark secrets that Borusa knew, because as President he knows all the deep dark secrets, is that founder of the Time Lords Rassilon was a bit of a poo poo. It's 1984 and Robert Holmes finally has his chance. Long since done as the Script Editor for the show, Holmes is still a regular contributor of often excellent stories, but any chance he had to formally make his idea for the Doctor being on his final regeneration are long gone. Still, he manages to get something in there, as Peter Davison is wrapping his 3 years on the show as the 5th Doctor. In one of Davison's best stories, he dies trying to rescue new companion Peri who he barely knows and who came into his company by complete accident (or, if you listen to Big Finish, was his close personal friend for years and years and years first!). As he lies dying, he mutters that "something feels different this time", the most Holmes can get across to suggest that Davison is actually the 13th Doctor. The result of this is that... he regenerates, becoming Colin Baker, the 6th Doctor. 6th because there are only six Doctors so far. You get the point, I could talk about the 7th Doctor and that Looms bullshit and The Other that Andrew Cartmel wanted to bring in and thankfully never did (he was also a very, very good script editor!). This kind of agonizing pawing over the minutiae of the "lore" of the show is navel-gazing at its worst, setting aside the quality of the story to bother and argue and complain or speculate about the details. But while Robert Holmes was responsible for a lot of this nonsense with that dumb inclusion of the 8 extra faces in The Brain of Morbius, he also produced banger after banger after banger of great stories. But some fans couldn't get past those 8 faces, they wanted to know more, they wanted an explanation, they created little stories in their own heads, backstories and companions and fanfiction and in some cases transparent scam cash-grabs. All of which is fine (apart from the scams!), if it's just fans doing dumb fan stuff. It doesn't affect the show, you can focus on the things you like, and the show itself is just fine continuing to tell good stories. If they happen to include little tidbits or gems of new information to pepper in with all the others, that's fine too, so long as the stories are good. The Morbius "Doctors" are irrelevant, they're not a problem, it's just a writer who had an idea that he couldn't put into the show properly, that has a bunch of different potential explanations, all of which really aren't relevant to the show in the intervening forty plus years of the show. It's 2020, and Chris Chibnall decides to "solve" the problem of the Morbius Doctors and thus, "save" Doctor Who forever.  What happened to the child, the Doctor asks, and the Master gives the answer. Surely she's figured it out by now. Why. It was you, Doctor, you were the child!   There they are. Chibnall, the loving troll, includes The Morbius faces in that montage and he must have been SOOOOO pleased with himself. he's finally done it, he'd "fixed" the "problem" at last and everything was going to be okay from now on! Yes, from the very first moment "The Timeless Child" was mentioned by those dumb telepathic ribbons we were supposed to think had better mind-reading technology than all the other things that ha probed the Doctor's mind in the past, I groaned. I was already tired of these season long mysteries that had been done so well by RTD with Bad Wolf, less so with Torchwood, better in Moffat's first run before each further iteration - THE HYBRID! - just got a little more stale. But I could never have imagined it would be as bad as this. The Doctor as The Timeless Child was utter garbage that makes a completely pointless retcon to the past of Doctor Who that not only was terrible in the moment, but has become even worse with intervening time as Chibnall proceeded to do NOTHING with it, chickening out and pulling back far too late so that the stink of it was all over Jodie Whittaker's final season and specials without actually achieving ANYTHING. And all that pointless navel-gazing I mentioned (and demonstrated with this long rear end write-up)? That's the result of Chibnall committing another cardinal sin, he slammed in all this pointless crap and forgot to actually tell any kind of actually interesting story to frame around it. This episode is one of the worst examples of the Doctor being reduced to an utterly passive character who simply stands around to be talked to, credulously accepts everything she is told at face value, has to be told how to solve her problems, and ends up unable to actually do anything until - and this is perhaps the worst sin of all - an older man pops along to take the decision out of her hands. Of course, maybe I'm just guilty of my own personal bias? So let's take a look at how the other posters in the Doctor Who thread reacted at the time? The_Doctor posted:Oh gently caress off. SiKboy posted:I'm withholding full scorn because the master lies, but they can gently caress off with that bullshit for a start. The_Doctor posted:It’s the stupidest retcon for no reason whatsoever. I’m genuinely annoyed at this. SiKboy posted:They were doing the "First regeneration wasnt a native gallifrean" stuff and I was thinking "This is kind of pointless, but harmless", then... That and I literally said out loud "Oh get hosed!". The_Doctor posted:Holy poo poo, this has descended into godawful fanwank. Burkion posted:And so Doctor Who eats itself like a hungry snake Tomtrek posted:Looking forward to this to go into the file of retcons that will get ignored once the next showrunner takes over, alongside "The Doctor is Half Human!" and "The Other". Chuff McNothing posted:That was not a clean landing. RoboJoe posted:Last weeks episode was my favourite of this series (I can't really explain why so I might be in a minority on that) but I was so disappointed in this episode as the follow up ConanThe3rd posted:Whittaker has been done rotten by Chibnal. Yvonmukluk posted:I mean, I did feel it was a bit fanwanky, but the actual reveal didn't seem much of a leap from the Cartmel Masterplan. Veeta posted:What's the point of pulling the rug out in such a grand fashion if your main character has completely reconciled herself with everything that's been revealed in the space of half an episode? OldMemes posted:The Doctor's origin being [Blank] raised in a stuffy society [blank] stole time machine, adventures is really all you need. So the Doctor is from another dimension or something? And not a time lord? And had pre-Hartnell lives? And running out of regenerations has never been a problem? It seems a bit pointless. I DroneRiff posted:Blah, just blah. egon_beeblebrox posted:I kind of admire them for deciding to Break Canon Voting Floater posted:But hey, it's fixed that one ambiguous scene from 40 years ago! And none of it matters anyway because the Doctor's already over it! cargohills posted:That was utter tripe. Looking forward to Chibnall eventually leaving even more than I was after Ranskoor Av Kolos. Rochallor posted:Ah, this sounds so loving dumb I'm going to have to start watching again. I'll take Goddamn Stupid Who over Boring Who any day. VivaLa Eeveelution posted:I don't think I hate the Timeless Child/eleventy billion pre-Hartnells reveal. It's just...there. That might be worse. marktheando posted:The terrible spoilers that sounded too stupid and lovely to be true, were completely correct. gently caress. Strom Cuzewon posted:I actually really enjoyed that. I tried to not just cherry pick reactions of people who hated it, you can see that there are a small few who enjoyed or didn't mind this "reveal" and that's perfectly fine! But overwhelmingly the reaction was negative. Of course, that's just a small group of dedicated TVIV posters on SomethingAwful. We can't take our own perspective as the dominant one, so let's look at the ratings... the second lowest rated episode of the show since it's revival in 2005 behind only The Eaters of Light. It's reviews top out at B+ at their best (and the Radio Times ranked it 2 out of 5, ouch). Because it's a terrible loving episode, doing terrible loving things, wasting a terrible amount of time and talent, all to achieve what? For the showrunner to let his inner fan take the reins and push past to FINALLY explain a problem that was only a problem to him. His inclusion of the Morbius Doctors in the montage I can only assume he thought would be his big triumphant moment stamping forever his legacy on Doctor Who by giving us a definitive origin and - like Andrew Cartmel's plans for "The Other" - restoring some "mystery" to the show and the character. Instead? Garbage. Oh yeah, plus the Cyber Lords!  I haven't even really touched all that much on the fact that the Master wiped out ALL of Gallifrey is barely addressed or seemingly cared about by anybody including the Doctor. Nor is the reveal that he's stacked the corpses up to preserve them and decides to pack the bodies into Cyber Converters and create a race of eternally regenerating Cybermen. This is mindbreaking horrific monstrous stuff that just kinda... happens. And nobody really seems to give a poo poo. The Doctor breaks herself out of the Matrix prison with the help of a pep talk from the Fugitive Doctor (who makes the point that this is just the Doctor's own mental projection and SHE is the one helping herself out) and agrees to a plan with Yaz and the others to destroy the Cyber Warship and wipe out the Cyber Lords with the Death Particle, which she can trigger from Ashad's shrunken body. It's the first somewhat proactive thing she does all episode, which ends up leading of course to another entirely passive sequence where she just kind of stands around while the Master monologues at her and says her using the Death Particle will mean HE wins. So she decides not to, which means he's about to run roughshod over the universe again... and then old man Ko Sharmus shows up and takes the choice out of her hands by offering to do it instead. What functional difference there is between the Doctor being the one to trigger the Death Particle or giving it to Ko Sharmus to do really isn't clear but that's kinda Doctor Who morality for you sometimes. But this exchange completely robs the Doctor of any agency, and for some reason the Master and the Cyber Lords just let them stand there and chat about it (maybe the Master thought he owed her the favor for doing the same for him). Ko Sharmus reveals out of nowhere that he was the one who sent the Cyberium back in time in the first place (What? How? Why? Why not use the tech to stop the Cybermen in the past!?! Where is the tech now? Can you time travel?) and then... the Cyber Lords shoot him anyway, and then apparently it doesn't matter because 50 of the 1 shot that killed one Cyberlord isn't enough to stop Ko Sharmus having enough strength to trigger the Death Particle. Which is also pointless because in a hackneyed bit of writing they actually have the Master shout from off screen,"THIS WAY!" as he's clearly leading the Cyber Lords to his TARDIS to escape. The Doctor, who already sent the others back in one of Gallifrey's TARDISes, escapes in another and returns to her own. She enters inside and takes a moment to breathe... at which point the Judoon show up (bypass TARDIS defenses?), declare she is the Fugitive Doctor and teleport her to a space prison! It was actually a quite effective cliffhanger ending that, like much of Doctor Who under Chibnall's run, would end up not only going absolutely nowhere, but again leave the Doctor an entirely passive figure relying on some middle-aged or older man to show up and get her out of a predicament. You might have picked up a minor, somewhat subtle theme that I'm not a fan of Chris Chibnall's writing.   For a run that started with such promise (I loved The Woman Who Fell to Earth and so did audiences, who watched it in record high numbers), by the end of season 12 I was really feeling that Doctor Who was struggling mightily despite good actors who clearly were trying their best, and a showrunner who for all his other faults seemed to have his heart in the right place about better representation, tackling some tough topics and being open to new ideas. But this was where he really lost me, this bullshit. A story that seemed to override all Chibnall's sense as an experienced television writer/showrunner in favor of wallowing in his most fannish desires to tell the story he made up in his own head as a teenager.  Seen here, Jodie Whittaker considering a role that was supposed to be a major milestone and achievement to take her career to new heights. Was this finally it? Was Doctor Who finally destroyed? Could it possibly be saved and come back from the utter banal depths it had fallen into under Chibnall's run. Multiple times throughout this write-up I've discussed how Doctor Who was saved "forever" only to hit another calamity. But the calamity that was Chibnall? Could even this show survive that? It's unlikely, the only possible saving grace would be if a mad Welsh Giant was to scoop the show up in his mighty hands and stride roaring with laughter towards Cardiff to revitalize a seemingly dead franchise and save it forever... and what were the chances of that happening TWICE!?! Index of Doctor Who Write-ups for Television Episodes/Big Finish Audio Stories. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Mar 30, 2024 |
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Mar 30, 2024 07:38
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Especially the timeless child stuff, that just felt a pointless change to the Doctor's history. I was actually quite liking the Masters explanation of how Time Lords were created (particularly as it was implied the scientist killed the child multiple times to force regenerations while experimenting which is definitely what Time Lords would do) until I realised it was going to be the Doctor and then had it confirmed a few minutes later. Dear BBC please stop messing with the past and just make fun stories again.
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tl;dr - The Timeless Children is a bad episode of Doctor Who and Chris Chibnall was a bad showrunner.
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Mar 30, 2024 07:39
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Aside from the Timeless Child bullshit, the thing I truly hate most about that episode is the fact that the Doctor is unable to detonate the particle but only gives the most token opposition when someone else is willing to do it for her. It makes the scene come off more that she objects to having to sacrifice herself, but if someone else is willing to sacrifice themselves for her? Oh, well that's fine then. It just made me think of Ten having to literally be knocked out and handcuffed to a wall because he would not allow someone to sacrifice himself for them and had to have the choice taken from him. Or in End of Time where he rages about how he has so much more he could do because he knows right from the start of that rant that he was always going to take Wilfred's spot. Thirteen lets other people sacrifice themselves for her time and time again, and only argues for a moment before allowing it. Chibnall tried to recreate the bit between Nine and the Daleks from The Parting of the Ways and just... failed completely at it.
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Mar 30, 2024 08:24
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SirSamVimes posted:Chibnall tried to recreate ... failed completely at it. Pretty much, yep I really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt despite finding his stories during the RTD and Moffat runs almost universally weak or unappealing but the end result of his run on the show sadly ended up being even worse than I had feared.
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Mar 30, 2024 08:32
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It's really amazing the show survived Chibnall. Would you believe I hadn't given up on him at this point? It took Flux to finish me off, against all rationality.
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Mar 30, 2024 08:39
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Jerusalem posted:
Maybe, and there is credit due there for casting the first female Doctor, but writing her as largely passive and constantly doubting herself, combined with the paper-thin characterisation of Yaz and the fact that the only two fairly well realised characters in the whole show are Graham and Dan, is....uh....it's not great! I hate to call it stunt casting, partly because that argument has been used at best disingenuously by the worst kind of shitheads and because it's Jodie loving Whittaker, who is absolutely an accomplished actor who has done some great stuff. But consciously or unconsciously, it does feel a little like she was cast, Chibnall patted himself on the back for it, and then did absolutely zero additional effort to think about and write around his own biases. So you end up with The Doctor being sidelined and the middle aged guys being the one's that get most of the character development. All it needed was for the Doctor to have a boyfriend that she constantly talked about and Chibnall would have completed the badly written woman trifecta. And it's a real shame. Occasionally other writers would sneak in the odd scene where she was the Doctor and we got a glimpse of what could have been.
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Mar 30, 2024 08:43
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I somehow tricked myself into thinking he was gonna end on three bangers after I really, really enjoyed Eve of the Daleks, because I was desperate to believe and thought maybe finally divorced of The Timeless Child nonsense he might have three good standalone stories in him. Then Legend of the Sea Devils turned out to be legitimately one of the worst episodes of Who I've seen. It reminded me of Planet of the Dead, which was similarly awful, though at least that was followed by Waters of Mars. Power of the Doctor was at least fun. Incredibly dumb fun, but it embraced having big dumb "let's get the old gang and some other old cast members back for a completely ridiculous story" energy and I liked the Doctor's final scene before she regenerated. DavidCameronsPig posted:I hate to call it stunt casting, partly because that argument has been used at best disingenuously by the worst kind of shitheads and because it's Jodie loving Whittaker, who is absolutely an accomplished actor who has done some great stuff. Even more surreal, some of the great stuff she'd done was... for a Chris Chibnall show! 
Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 11:05 on Mar 30, 2024 |
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Mar 30, 2024 08:44
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Power of the Doctor still has the problem of Thirteen still not actually doing anything.
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Mar 30, 2024 08:46
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Somebody mentioned once that it was a missed opportunity to have the Master's plot to "switch" with the Doctor not resulting in Jodie Whittaker playing the Master walking around in the Doctor's body. It would have added another layer of horror for Yaz during the scene where he's forcing her to be his "companion" and taunting her, that perhaps there was a concern that this would be TOO hosed up a thing for kids to see the hero of the show doing. It would have let Whittaker stretch her acting legs in her final performance though. The other downside to what they did do, of course, being that it leaves the Doctor once again reduced to just standing (or slumped) around until somebody else comes along and gets her out of the mess she's in.
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Mar 30, 2024 08:49
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The tragedy, I think, is not the ideas but that Chibnall is nowhere near a strong enough writer to pull any of them off. RTD or Moffat I feel would have understood how hard you would have had to work to sell that concept, and there is no way it would have just been an interminable expository monologue that meant nothing to the story. Comparing how Moffat tied a previously unseen incarnation into the narrative's themes against Chibnall having a reveal awkwardly thud into a bunch of things that happened is intriguing. I occasionally wonder how I would have felt about the 50th if it had been handled by Chibnall. And then I remember how much I cringed at Power of the Doctor.
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Mar 30, 2024 08:50
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Jerusalem posted:tl;dr - The Timeless Children is a bad episode of Doctor Who and Chris Chibnall was a bad showrunner. Chris Chibnall's legacy. loving up decades of canon with the Timeless Child, undoing John Hurt's legacy of saving Gallifrey by killing the population off-screen, and handwaving the death of half the universe in a lovely 6 part event. 13 was written as just reacting to whatever situation they were in, and having very little gravitas in the dire situations where it called for it. And it sucks, cause Renegade Doctor rules.. but I'd rather they just sweep it all under the rug and get on with 15 having a good time. Infinitum fucked around with this message at 09:46 on Mar 30, 2024 |
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Mar 30, 2024 09:17
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SirSamVimes posted:Aside from the Timeless Child bullshit, the thing I truly hate most about that episode is the fact that the Doctor is unable to detonate the particle but only gives the most token opposition when someone else is willing to do it for her. It makes the scene come off more that she objects to having to sacrifice herself, but if someone else is willing to sacrifice themselves for her? Oh, well that's fine then. This is a huge problem throughout a lot of Doctor Who, I won't lie, though it usually takes the form of a guest star of the week who decides to murder suicide the villain / stay behind and blow up a bomb that can't otherwise be blown up, etc. Usually because the story otherwise has no real catharsis. It's an absolute hack move, honestly. The idea that the Doctor gets into deadly adventures throughout universe -- now with more lives than ever -- but is essentially successful thanks to the pile of dead guest stars she leaves behind is something the series very rarely gets into, for obvious reasons. It's the basis of the very excellent The Chimes Of Midnight, whose climax is, essentially, the Doctor convincing a guest star of the week to not commit suicide in the name of him and his companion. Superficially very uplifting, though the implications are disturbing.
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Mar 30, 2024 09:25
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Every now and again they explore the idea of the Doctor making soldiers that will jump in front of a bullet that the Doc should rightly be taking... And then they'll not talk about it again because it's dodgy ground if you want them to remain even slightly relatable. Honestly that's a fun thing you could do with the timeless child stuff, strip out the regeneration limit entirely and have the Doctor start throwing themselves at stuff with no regard for their own life because there's no excuse any more. Yeah, each incarnation wants to live but they also don't want innocents to die, so with no upper limit on how many times they can throw themselves under the bus what would that even do to their approach to problem solving?
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Mar 30, 2024 14:52
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"There's no time! I need to get down there!"
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Mar 30, 2024 15:05
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One instance that comes to mind for me (I originally typed "recent instance" before realising it was over a decade ago and I've got some grey hairs now) was in Name Of The Doctor when Clara jumped into the Doctor's timestream to save him. The Doctor said "no it'll kill you don't do it" but was incapacitated so he couldn't stop her. Then the instant he was back on his feet he went in himself to save her. Which risked him dying and making her entire sacrifice pointless, but the Doctor looked back at a series of people killing themselves for him and declared "no more". I don't think it even happened again in Moffat's run on the show, characters died but not specifically so the main character wouldn't have to. One of the things about the Timeless Child which i don't know if I love or hate is that it doesn't matter. Like, forget about the arc of the character after this episode, it isn't even relevant to the plot of this episode. The Master uses the whole flashback to distract the Doctor while he puts the Cyber Time Lords together. Absolutely bonkers storytelling
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Mar 30, 2024 15:22
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lines posted:It's really amazing the show survived Chibnall. Would you believe I hadn't given up on him at this point? It took Flux to finish me off, against all rationality. The funny thing about the Chibnall era was that at the end of every single series I came out of it thinking it was total poo poo, but then I tried to keep an open mind for the start of the next series... just to eventually be beaten down into total hatred again by the end. I was so happy with last year's specials, because even though I think the episodes had the occasional weak moment, it was on the whole 4 episodes in a row that I actually liked. There genuinely isn't a streak of good episodes that long in the entire Chibnall era. Looking back I think the closest I can find to 4 good episodes in a row is Demons of the Punjab -> Kerblam -> Witchfinders -> It Takes You Away, but even that includes the absolute nonsense that is Kerblam's twist. EDIT: Oh also, something that blew my mind recently is that until the new season starts broadcasting in May, Flux (from 2021!!) is still the most recent series of Doctor Who. Mad. cargohills fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Mar 30, 2024 |
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Mar 30, 2024 16:28
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2house2fly posted:One instance that comes to mind for me (I originally typed "recent instance" before realising it was over a decade ago and I've got some grey hairs now) was in Name Of The Doctor when Clara jumped into the Doctor's timestream to save him. The Doctor said "no it'll kill you don't do it" but was incapacitated so he couldn't stop her. Then the instant he was back on his feet he went in himself to save her. Which risked him dying and making her entire sacrifice pointless, but the Doctor looked back at a series of people killing themselves for him and declared "no more". I don't think it even happened again in Moffat's run on the show, characters died but not specifically so the main character wouldn't have to. Is this bit from one of the RTD finales?
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Mar 30, 2024 16:48
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