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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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Jerusalem posted:New thread! True, but it is wheelchair-accessible.
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Dec 30, 2023 06:53
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 03:28 |
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Sydney Bottocks posted:In all seriousness, while the Doctor (at least, the Third Doctor) decried what he saw as the military mindset, he did so without having to dehumanize or reduce his friends in UNIT to being just mindless drones in his eyes. He even chewed Jo out over it, when she was poo poo-talking the Brig one time, telling her he was doing his best under very difficult circumstances. The Doctor knew that just as there are idiots and incompetents and blood-thirsty maniacs in the military, so too are there essentially decent people who are just trying to do the right thing, which is what he saw in the Brig, Benton, etc. In other words, just like the real-life actual military. Three also has a sizable number of stories where his allies are military and the villains are also military. I can see how someone might not like that because the show is definitely showing militarism in a positive light (government bureaucrats come off worse than UNIT pretty consistently), but it's also frequently nuanced and concerns itself with people. Contrasting some of One's and especially Two's stories where all X are bad (Ice Warriors, say), Three's run of stories sometimes insists that we as an audience treat "monsters" as people, with differing motivations and distinct personalities. It doesn't always hold to that. We get the Silurians and the "Ambassadors" and the Ice Warriors (in Curse of Peladon) on the one hand, but we get the Primoids and the Ogrons, too. And the Sontarans, where the initial joke is "they are actually all exactly the same, but we only ever see one." Three's a bit inconsistent himself, as he can be very acerbic but has a streak of arrogance that seems to include pride at knowing members of the upper class (not to mention Chairman Mao). His attitude toward the Master is also a bit uncomfortable as it implies he's fine with the deaths of lots of Daleks and Autons but a little chummy with a man who casually kills humans and invites those "still unified monsters" to the planet all the time.
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Jan 1, 2024 20:13
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While I don't want to continue this line of conversation, I cannot resist pointing out that companion Harry Sullivan is a naval officer attached to UNIT who travels with the Fourth Doctor. While not quite as wasted as Yaz (it's remarkable how useful his medical expertise should be in all of his episodes), he does suffer a goodly amount of ribbing over the course of his brief tenure, which probably proves some kind of point but I have no idea which. The important take-away is that "Harry Sullivan is an imbecile!" But do we like him anyway?
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Jan 2, 2024 01:24
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2house2fly posted:I'll say this for Chibs, the last Jodie Whitaker episode is a fun blowout continuityfest in a completely different way to what you'd get from RTD or Moffat. I don't know if I like it (it falls into the same Silence-esque place as the rest of Chibnall's era where I can't remember a drat thing about it when I'm not actively watching it) but I like that it made some of the choices it made The former companion support group (and getting William Russell on-screen) is so brilliant you wonder why it hadn’t already happened.
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Jan 6, 2024 16:32
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Fil5000 posted:Unfortunately it also has the other seventeen hours of The Invasion Of Time. If you ignore the two sets of villains and pretend it's The Doctor vs the Time Lords, it's a good story. Milton Johns' performance alone is more entertaining than a substantial fraction of the Chibnall years. "Go to... Amber Alert." [Outraged] "It's an ancillary power station!" Plus K9 gets to blow things up and otherwise be smugly superior even to the Time Lords. Though I do admit that the Doctor needs to stabilize his pedestrian infrastructure. I'm also irrationally fond of Image of the Fendahl. The story isn't great but the performances almost save it.
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Jan 12, 2024 03:40
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Edward Mass posted:Ah, the Sensorites. Few people doing the Hartnell watch-through make it past there! I like the opening episodes of the Sensorites, and I like that it's "aliens but they aren't really monsters." That wasn't inevitable after the Daleks. But it just doesn't quite manage past that point, especially when we find out that sensorites all look alike TO SENSORITES. It's a mix of some brilliant atmosphere mystery and "aliens are different but not enemies" with some baffling stupidity.
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Jan 15, 2024 20:30
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Hollismason posted:Yeah I like her as a companion. I'm on the Brain of Morbius and its great that one of the villians is a literal brain in a jar. Its great! Not many people know this, but Morbius took an extra degree at Prydonian Academy in vegetable envying.
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Jan 17, 2024 16:37
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DavidCameronsPig posted:A lot of it is that a big percentage of the British Black and Asian community was just a lot newer than, say, Afro-Americans are to the US. A lot of immigration to the UK, particularly the big cities, happened in the immediate post war period with families like the Windrush generation coming over. In the 1960s, this was still all fairly new and a lot of empire-era stereotypes were still kicking around in common culture, but by the 1980s you had a second generation of Black and Brown Brits who'd grown up in the UK, and who were a lot less willing to put up with that poo poo than their parents were. And also, white kids who had grown up with them and could see those supposed traits didn't remotely match reality in any way. When Doctor Who gets itself into trouble in this way, it’s often a pairing between casual racist depictions and imperialism. Talons suffers from this, both in Litefoot’s backstory and in the decision to make Greel a fascist imperialist (and the “deformed because he’s evil” thing, while a Who trope, is just icing on that cake). Then the only character who in any way challenges the racist stereotypes is played by a man in yellowface. Compare with Pyramids of Mars, which gets that imperialist flavor from its archeological “looting” context and some solid 1st episode anti-Egyptian “suspicious foreigner” stuff before it clears that away in favor of something else. There’s even a strong undertone of Chariots of the Gods where citizens of a foreign nation can’t possibly have done what they did without help from aliens. The Mummy films vary wildly in how they feel about theft of artifacts and imperialism more generally, but the episode doesn’t take a position so much as forget all about all of it by episode 2 in favor of something else. I love a good Robert Holmes story like (almost) everyone else, but he has a mixed record in this specific area. There’s some really ugly subtext that never quite goes away: The Two Doctors handles “the uplifted savage” in a pretty imperialist manner, even concluding that the savage cannot be civilized or overcome genetics. In a story where a major plot-point is identifying something genetic to Time Lords that facilitates time travel, that’s especially cringeworthy.
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Jan 22, 2024 16:57
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Open Source Idiom posted:I agree with a lot of this, but I'm not sure how making Magnus a fascist or imperialist is problematic. He's a white dude. White fascist imperialist crash lands in "ancient" China, is worshiped as a god by the locals and eventually has an entire secret society devoted to him? That seems a bit problematic to me. Fu Manchu may have been a stereotypical villain and poster-boy for the "Yellow Peril" line of thinking, but at least he was a leader and a genius inventor. Greel is a white guy impersonating a Chinese deity, successfully. That's uncomfortably close to "we arrived and the primitive locals worshiped us as gods" trope that we constantly have to put up with (including in Return of the Jedi!). Hollismason posted:LMAO at Leela just slapping the poo poo out of this woman that screams. For no drat reason. Just pow! Really liking Leela as a companion. I was watching a recent interview Louise Jameson did after the latest Blueray set was announced (or maybe it was a clip from interviews which will appear on the set, which will be the season starting with Horror of Fang Rock), and she said the actress she slapped asked her to actually hit her. So she did. I'll spoil this next bit in case you haven't finished Fang Rock yet: It's one of the few Doctor Who stories where no characters survive aside from the Doctor and companion.
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Jan 23, 2024 02:24
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PriorMarcus posted:I'd only bother explaining it more if they brought the Fugitive Doctor back too, because otherwise there's no value in further dwelling on it. There's multiple "messing with the Doctor's history" things in the show, including the Great Intelligence/Clara thing Moffat did and RTD's "an evil from outside Time and Space messed with you." Given the Doctor's centrality in the defeats of multiple powerful foes who had access to time travel themselves, you'd expect half of the Time War to be people trying to mess around with the Doctor's past. On Jo Martin, let's just recognize the colossal feat she accomplished: firstly, she has to play a chameleon-arched Doctor in a way that, when you find out she's a John Smith-type, you immediately say "Oh, I see that." Then, on a dime, she has to become the Doctor "again" (despite having never played the role before) and convey immediately a sense of someone who is established as the Doctor, not freshly regenerated and a little fluid in presentation. And she has to pull that off in less than a full episode, too. And she nails it so convincingly that, as several people have mentioned in different ways, she feels more like the Doctor than Whittaker does, on her own show. If scheduling permits, I can't imagine RTD wouldn't want her back. He just needs the right story. And frankly, he seems really intrigued with the possibilities opened up by The Timeless Child. "Let's rethink who the Doctor was" is interesting; equally interesting is the idea, which was well-established by Twelve's run but incompatible with One and Two, that the Doctor is not only a big revolutionary but that he pulled off big revolutionary stuff on Gallifrey and then took off in a stolen TARDIS. The Deadly Assassin isn't about how this infamous Time Lord fled and has now returned and murdered the President; at least Goth and Borusa know who the Doctor is, so there's enough hinting that you can pull off Seven's "more than just a Time Lord," though perhaps not to Timeless Child extremes. It's a show about time travel that includes parallel realities and changeable continuities. Why not have the Jo Martin Doctor remain a mystery, but suggest that she's possibly an incarnation of the Doctor who shouldn't exist at all? I do find myself wondering if RTD didn't give us a new form of regeneration as a first step toward an explanation of the Martin Doctor. Maybe Gatwa isn't the first Doctor to emerge from a regeneration while there's another Doctor in the room? We could get Season 6b not because Jo Martin was Three, but because Two was force regenerated into Three but before that they employed him as an agent... and before wiping his memory and dumping him on Earth, they created an alternate Doctor as the perfect agent. But if RTD wants to make Martin the Sixteenth Doctor, I will have no complaints at all.
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Jan 24, 2024 04:35
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Jerusalem posted:Even more reason for the two of them to telepathically fill each other in to solve the mystery! The past one will forget until they eventually reach where the current one is, who will be able to move on now with the full picture! That’s the big reason I can think of not to do it: if neither is genuinely certain which one is past or future Doctor, establishing contact might be dangerous. Although in retrospect it’d be really obvious Fugitive is well in the past and had her memory wiped; the ambiguity is probably preferable to the implied storyline we get in Flux. “Doctor messes around with Time itself and ends up unmoored and disconnected from her own timeline” would be preferable.
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Jan 30, 2024 16:09
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Rochallor posted:Yeah, there's a palpable lack of ambition in Pip and Jane scripts, but they're also very obviously people who write a lot and are consequently very good at structuring stories on a technical level (also they probably turned in all their scripts on time). Should a TV show aspire to more than a C average? Sure, but that's the show's problem, not theirs. I think they’re above average for the era of the show they contributed to, and (Ultimate Foe aside) are let down by direction, acting, and production. Vervoids may be somewhat inambitious, but both Rani episodes are full of stuff someone should have warned them the production crew wasn’t able to handle, like the infamous tree, or the rapid-growth T-Rex scene, or “giant brain” or “deadly insects.” And some of the effects get pulled off: the Rani’s TARDIS set is amazing, and the mines in Time and the Rani are an amazing effect. Nor do I much mind the “look this word up, kids” part of their writing—having Six or the Master show off their vocabularies in a pompous manner is 100% appropriate—though they do vacillate between great dialogue and wooden dialogue. I’m not sure they ever make Peri sound like a human being, though they do a better job with Mel (unsurprisingly, as they write her first episode). I’ll take a lot of unconvincing dialogue carried out by disinterested performers getting no help from a director to get the Rani’s description of the Master as “he’d get dizzy if he tried to walk in a straight line.” I think they get lousy direction, fair to middling acting, and a range between brilliant and awful effects work on their episodes. Their dialogue tends towards “the stage” and needs a director to help guide actors through it, but they actually have a lot of ambition, just no script editor partner to keep it in bounds. I mean, Mark of the Rani introduces an amoral Time Lord renegade who gets caught in the Master-Doctor rivalry, with the premise that she’s trying to keep a low profile and that gets spoiled. Time… has “create a giant brain and use strange matter to turn it into a massive time controlling device” as its premise, which is nearing “the Moon is an egg” levels of ambition. In execution, they do tend towards episodic story design without a lot of follow-through or good motivation: why does the Rani have mines scattered about in both her episodes, and why do they appear as a set-piece and then never come up outside of that? And because of that, they aren’t developing much in the way of character arcs especially for episode-only characters (though Time is better about that, a little). But unlike Saward, they seem interested in the Doctor as a character and give him things to do. Their bad rep rests on things like dodgy implementations (the Tetraps are the most glaring example of that, badly executed in all respects) and bad circumstances (The Ultimate Foe, losing Six for Time and the Rani). Even the worse bits of Vervoids can be laid squarely at the feet of other people in the production team. “This trial for the Doctor’s life is now a trail for the Doctor’s life!” They get full blame for “a megabyte modem,” though at least they remember Mel is supposed to have a computing background.
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Feb 5, 2024 17:14
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Praxeus is a great example of a Chibnall-era episode that should be a good episode because it does all of the things that era often forgets to do, but somehow fails so badly in the execution that it ends up averaging out to "forgettable." There's a story, characters do things, the premise is interesting, but somehow assembling all the parts together under various restrictions ends up with an episode that never works as well as it should. "First draft hastily edited as we filmed" is actually a believable description for it. But it also falls prey to the era's chief weakness of having a lot of ideas which never really get developed properly jostling for space. It's like the series gets clogged itself by "event" microplastics and loses its shape entirely. Hmm... reading Praxeus as an unintentional metaphor for the problems the show was having might make it interesting, but I bet it wouldn't end up hanging together any better than the episode does without that framework.
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Feb 7, 2024 20:44
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PriorMarcus posted:Bizarrely if you ask the writer this is entirely by mistake and he's pro-choice in real life. Which I'm not sure I buy. The writer of Tardis Eruditorum also thinks its the best episode the show has ever done, but she also rates Forest of the Night in her top five so... On initial viewing in 2014, yes. During the more extended analysis in 2018, no. So that’s not entirely fair to El, who quite frankly one could have predicted would initially love Kill the Moon because everyone else hated it. Personally, I far prefer the kind of mad error that was those two episodes over the Chibnall years of “I should find this interesting, surely” mixed with “how can I be both mad and bored at the same time?”
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Feb 11, 2024 04:43
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Jerusalem posted:I think his race were supposed to have been capable of great technological feats? Which does beg the question why he didn't just build another dodecahedron instead of having to go steal the old one? Unless of course maybe he was just the dumb jock of the race who wiped out the smart ones and then basically ran with whatever old tech was still left lying around? Zulfa-Thura's resources were exhausted, so obviously they were entirely out of twelves. Meglos at least has late-era Tom Baker interested in what's going on. It may be poorly made and sometimes cheap looking, but it isn't boring when Tom or Lalla are on camera.
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Feb 12, 2024 01:37
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Warthur posted:The referendum in Kill The Moon is particularly goofy. It isn’t a well-considered plan, just a desperate attempt to avoid having to make the decision herself unilaterally. There’s probably an interesting point there about how she’d accept the Doctor making such a decision for all of humanity, and how she doesn’t accept the results of the “vote,” but their actual argument afterward doesn’t fully address such a point and the Doctor’s reticence seems somewhat uncharacteristic.
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Feb 12, 2024 16:26
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Her character was supposed to be the dead one in Broadchurch, but she kept surviving being thrown off the cliff, so they rewrote the story to be about a dead kid instead. This sentence is forcing me to rethink the whole "Irish cop who falls off a cliff" bit of (has to look up Chibnall episode title because Chibnall episode title) "Ascension of the Cybermen" as somehow making the Timeless Child plotline intersect metatextually with Broadchurch, and I really, really don't like it.
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Feb 12, 2024 20:07
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Reading that review of Can You Hear Me? (Jerusalem, you have “can your hear me?”) makes me realize how drat easy a fix would have been. Cut a bit to create the time to do this: The Doctor’s in her nightmare, when she gets rescued by herself. Maybe bring Jo Martin back, maybe use Jodie. She wakes up. We see her realize something and move to help the others. Cue a scene inside every other nightmare where we see a second version of the victim appear. In every case, the second person reassures the first from the perspective of the future: Yaz tells herself what will happen, Graham reassures himself that he can still love and lose, but the love is worth the loss, etc. And in the big confrontation, Thirteen reminds the two Eternals that unlike them, their victims can change and grow over time. They can learn, they can heal, they can become new people. Their experiences since these moments of nightmare turned them into people who could help themselves as they were then. But the two villains can’t change or grow; they’re trapped as they are forever. Cue the two getting trapped together. Then end the episode with the Doctor giving everyone another week “off,” and joining them this time. Thematically powerful, fixes the “how’d they escape” question, and has the Doctor win by realizing something about herself.
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Feb 13, 2024 16:41
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Matinee posted:I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being indifferent to it, that’s the typical response to any Chibnall script. I think that’s the offensive bit for me: the episode doesn’t register (or care about) that moment as a character moment. The Doctor has absolutely done worse in his time: ask the Family, or anyone on Skaro after the Hand destroys it. And Thirteen’s apparent callous disregard of the destruction caused by the Flux is far worse than this moment. I don’t even think it’s the most misjudged moment in Spyfall: Chibnall earlier gives us Thirteen being humiliated by the Master, in public, in a way that reads as creepy and sexual. Missie pushing Twelve’s boundries is less cringeworthy because Capaldi is an older white man and his Doctor’s fairly aristocratic; opting to punch down against Thirteen is bad enough without having a non-white Master doing it, given the history of “non-white men’s sexual attentions directed at white women.” I think this moment could play well registering both the Doctor’s anger about that past scene and especially about the Master killing ALL the TIME LORDS (how many children would that have been, Doctor?), and making this be Thirteen lost in righteous fury and perhaps regretting it a little later would at least be character development. But Chibnall doesn’t seem to care. Why should we? If the Master showed up in Demons of the Punjab pretending to be Indian and the Doctor exposed that he wasn’t, I think that’d be fine. And it’d obviously be terrible if the Doctor left the filter in place and used the psychic paper to establish for the Nazis that he was actually a British spy named Emmanuel Goldstein. As is, I feel like the really offensive part here is Chibnall not recognizing the thing: I feel like he’d say “Twelve left Missy to the Daleks, who are worse than Nazis, so what’s the problem here.”
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Feb 16, 2024 17:43
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Wolfechu posted:The destruction of Gallifrey gets even sillier if you consider the novels canon, given they had eight backup copies of the planet ready to go. Which were also destroyed. “That isn’t a moon, it’s a gigantic moon-sized pocket-watch!”
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Feb 18, 2024 16:15
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I think the problem is that Chibnall’s scripts don’t support a Thirteen who really needs to be more like Troughton and less like Davison. And I’d argue that Whittaker is actually perfectly good at the Doctor’s “enthusiastic wonder at something that in this era is a green screen where effects will be added later.” Given that multiple episodes don’t give her much more to work with, that’s important, but that glee should be attached to something more active or engaged, probably the “SCIENCE!” angle we get in her sonic screwdriver crafting scene and in one or two other spots like the science explainers in The Tsuranga Conundrum. Without that, her best acting trick is happening early in the episode and then gets buried by everything that follows it. I’d even argue that it’s the opportunity to have these moments later that makes her best in her best episodes, like her glee at meeting a universe in It Takes You Away. Sandifer is good with the literary analysis end of things, but I don’t get the sense she understands acting very much. “A good actor elevates the material” is a truism in Doctor Who but it’s also mostly nonsense. Very few actors can do everything: Tom Baker has some very severe weaknesses as an actor, but he played Four essentially as himself and he coupled that with a possessiveness concerning his performance. Part of how he can make a poor script better (if he cares to) is because of the same things that often made him awful to work with; Elisabeth Sladen also sometimes rewrote her lines, but she wasn’t abusive to her workmates. Pertwee has multiple strengths and weaknesses, and whenever he has to power through a sequence that doesn’t work you can expect him to tap one of them, whether it’s pomposity or his comedy chops, and for every time that works out we also get a Pertwee’s comedy gurning scene or a hi-keeba moment. I think Capaldi is generally acknowledged as the best actor in terms of craft to play the role, and he has weaknesses, too. Besides the craft, you can sometimes tell that he’s imagined himself playing this part for most of his own career (and maybe earlier than that), so he comes across as natural in the shouty-confrontation scenes. OTOH, I’m unsure he always manages to salvage the “I need an emotional interpreter” aspects of the character, especially as it’s handled so inconsistently. Whittaker’s strengths as a performer actually fit really well with what Chibnall is trying to do. The problem is that means she’s reinforcing and supporting his poo poo ideas instead of subverting them. She strikes me as a profoundly humble and generous actor (a similarity with Davison), but that means she’s dutifully trying to support Chibnall’s writing instead of taking the Tom-like “this script is poo poo so I’ll be taking the piss now” approach. Witness the beginning and ending sections of Kerblam!. She really sells the Doctor’s excitment over this corporation and its mascot (contrast with Sylv’s response to the Psychic Circus advertisement, where he can’t sell excitement but that reinforces the obvious “I want to manipulate Ace into going” subtext), and she keeps that excitement in tne conclusion where she’s defending the “system” as being better than people. It’s a poo poo message, it rubs fans the wrong way, and it does that because this feels like a betrayal of who the Doctor has always been: no wonder Chibnall told Whittaker not to watch past episodes! I just don’t get the sense that Whittaker is overly interested in finding ways that a story is poo poo and then “salvaging” them through performance: she’s pretty much enthusiastic and on-board and doesn’t see anything wrong, because her context is pretty much limited to Chibnall’s vision for her character. We get a few glimpses that suggest to me that she could have emphasized aspects of Two, Seven, and Eight in her performance. If she’d been allowed to be more emotionally open and savvy, she could have played an effective understander and manipulator of other characters. Chibnall probably avoided that because he didn’t want the first female Doctor to be the “emotionally intelligent” one, but the contrast with Twelve was sorely needed. I also think the fundamental flaws with the Chibnall era aren’t ones an actor can salvage. He cast the first woman in the role; he doesn’t actually seem interested in exploring issues related to gender in the show itself. And only 7 out of her 31 stories don’t have Chibnall’s name on them as writer or co-writer: Demons of the Punjab, Kerblam!, The Witchfinders, It Takes You Away, Orphan 55, Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terrors, and The Haunting of Villa Diodati. I doubt even Capaldi could salvage Orphan 55; the others feature most of her best performances. I conclude that she was overly deferential to Chibnall’s vision for the character, and given her short run, she never really got the chance to put her own stamp on the role. When she did try, the scripts undercut her: you can see signs of Thirteen as a “carer,” but then Chibnall repeatedly writes scenes where the character shuts down emotionally. I even daresay that there’s a bit of a double-standard here. A woman performing a part can rarely get away with acting like Tom Baker, and will be tagged with labels a lot worse than “eccentric” if she does. So Whittaker is trained to help the showrunner (who she’s worked with already) to fulfill his vision,, plus I think she genuinely wants to do so, even if she’s unsure quite what that vision is. Blaming her failure to elevate material when that elevation would subvert Chibnall’s vision for the character on her acting ability seems unfair to me.
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Feb 27, 2024 17:09
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SirSamVimes posted:I'm halfway through Flux The villains aren’t very boring. Well, SOME of the villains aren’t very boring. Plus Jo Martin appears; that was nice. Doctor Spaceman posted:I remember a lot of them but still stumble with ones like Can You Hear Me? It’s pretty sad that an episode featuring an Eternal who feeds off the nightmares that he gives people by tearing off his fingers and sending yhem flying through the air to burrow into people’s ears can be forgettable! The answer, of course, is “No, I can’t hear you because I have a finger in my ear.”
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Feb 28, 2024 06:15
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Thirteen, knowing precisely where she’s going and deliberately gathering anti-Cyberman equipment, proves completely ineffective. Every other Doctor can successfully fight the Cybermen without knowing in advance they’re present. Also, in the final war where the Cybermen were finally defeated, there’s a huge Cybership full of intact Cybermen that nobody on either side noticed. (Also, I guess only humans were fighting on the other side? Where’s everybody else?) One thing I’ll say about Chibnall, the Irish policeman story is made interesting by the fact that it gets us away from the rest of the plot for a while. But maybe don’t write an episode where the story that should be exciting is so boring that the viewers would rather watch a different show.
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Feb 28, 2024 16:12
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SirSamVimes posted:The reason was so they could do the Ra Ra Rasputin bit. Even that is a Chibnall joint: as scripted, the Master did not dance. Dhawan misread something and ended up dancing and they just kept it. That’s the best part! Even when Chibnall does something right, it’s mostly despite himself. That moment where the Master is dancing and the Dalek and Cyberman look at each other is brilliant, and Chibnall didn’t do it.
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Feb 29, 2024 07:02
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2house2fly posted:I'm happy to be charitable and say the power of the Doctor is bringing people together and giving them the strength to stand up for what's right, while the Master misinterpret it and thinks if he takes the Doctor's body he becomes the Doctor with all that implies. It's charitable because sometimes Chibs titles his episodes with things that don't happen in them, eg Revolution Of The Daleks depicts no actual revolution Hey, I'll have you know that those Daleks were on Earth and Earth was revolving around the Sun so the Daleks were also revolving around the Sun. If it'd been titled Complete Revolution of the Daleks, that'd be a different story. (Oh, no, I bet Chibnall thought "The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos" was a clever title because the real battle was happening inside Graham the whole time.)
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Feb 29, 2024 19:27
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radmonger posted:For all the poo poo the ending to KerBlam! rightfully gets, a surprisingly large number of people do seem to want to apply it in real life. I don’t think “fire all the part-time freelance contractors we paid to write marketing copy, but keep our management because we have to personally vet every piece of AI content” is quite the same as what you’re describing. I’m frankly shocked someone hasn’t set up an honest competition as a gimmick: half our materials will be AI produced and half human produced, and we’ll see which is most successful. Cutting humans out completely implies AI can’t compete yet so you can’t allow it a level playing field.
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Mar 8, 2024 16:28
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Open Source Idiom posted:And to its credit the series wrings some decent comedy out of their downfall. Particularly Marshall's "it's not fair! the police get so many attempts to practice catching killers and killers only get one chance to get it right" sob speech, which is definitely the best thing Moffat's written in ages. Sadly, that's not Moffat's line. It's from a Columbo episode where Columbo is explaining why he has an advantage at catching killers. And given that Moffat was part of the Columbophile website's "greatest Columbo moments" list and made an attempt to reboot the series, he definitely is pulling the idea from Columbo. Not that that takes anything away from the way the idea gets deployed or the decision to shift that line from detective to killer.
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Mar 13, 2024 19:12
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Jerusalem posted:This is a fantastic trailer. I like that season already, and that trailer makes me want to rewatch it all. Even Underworld, which is an accomplishment.
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Mar 15, 2024 01:43
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Reading the latest reviews on Sandifer's site and this realization hit me:Narsham on https://www.eruditorumpress.com posted:After a very long think, I believe I’ve found a potential approach to the Chibnall years. To expand a bit: Chibnall's first season consumes the stories of the Doctor's companions. Season 2 consumes the Time Lords, the Master, and of course, the Doctor herself, by adding to the Doctors we know about a potentially infinite number of past Doctors, none of whose stories appear to be worth a drat. (We still don't even know if the Fugitive Doctor is really a past Doctor or not, and Chibnall theoretically brought her back!) And the Flux is a story about the entire universe being consumed, that somehow manages to "finish" telling its story without making clear if any of the universe that got consumed is subsequently unconsumed or not. It literally tells a story where the big thing that is happening doesn't matter. It's like if Davies never had the scenes of towing Earth back into place at the end of The Stolen Earth. But then, consider what the first three Davies stories do: 1. The Star Beast restores Donna Noble's memories and brings back the Doctor-Donna. 2. Wild Blue Yonder sees the Doctor and Donna confront malevolent simulacra of themselves which could almost be mistaken for the real thing. They manage to banish them, but Doctor Who the show will be changed as a result. (It's fair to read the simulacra as versions of the Chibnall years show.) 3. The Giggle retells the history of the show within a radically different context, integrating past and present and future. It also overwrites the "black hole of story" that is The Timeless Child (millions of potential lives, no stories to tell) with bigeneration (lots of room for new stories for every Doctor), rewrites the cringeworthy Celestial Toymaker, and creates a chance to start again. And of course, The Church on Ruby Road is all about preventing a group of piratical grotesque creatures who may or may not represent BBC executives and members of the government from stealing away the show's future and consuming it.
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Mar 26, 2024 01:04
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A.o.D. posted:Just one thing, Wild Blue Yonder pretty emphatically underlines the destruction of half the universe. After all, the setting of the story is inside the vast void created by that event. My thesis is that Chibnall’s the showrunner whose tenure sees the show consume itself. Davies brings it back from the brink. Warthur posted:Oh, we can go further than that. Nah, the Toymaker is too entertaining to be Chibnall. I admit it will be interesting to see if he writes an episode for Davies at some point.
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Mar 27, 2024 16:53
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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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Jerusalem posted:tl;dr - The Timeless Children is a bad episode of Doctor Who and Chris Chibnall was a bad showrunner. Neither of those are easy to dispute. (I wonder if they're even possible to dispute.) The Timeless Child idea is just bonkers, but potentially GREAT bonkers. The Doctor's past is all made up, and we know we don't really know the half of it, and the Timeless Child idea addresses not just the Morbius faces but also Seven's "more than just a Time Lord" and if Chibnall had pulled this off, it'd be like Holmes and The Deadly Assassin: enraging fans of the show at the time, but being pivotal in a few decades and reconsidered. He didn't pull it off. In fact, the episode is a complete mess. Worse, it's a complete mess with more potentially good ideas than most of Chibnall's whole run. Seriously, The Battle of Kan't Be Bothered is such a total failure and it arguably has between one and two ideas which it totally wastes. As a season ender, this one has so many more totally wasted ideas! Even if we just think along thematic lines: humans hiding inside Cybersuits while an insane Cyberman tries to roboticize the Cybermen, until he's comedy-killed by the Master for being boring; a retcon of the Time Lords that takes the show's past hints that their "non-interference" policy came after a lengthy period of being massive British-like colonial imperialists across Space and Time, with the Doctor herself as someone exploited and gaslit who finally turned against them and rejected them repeatedly after that point; the "Cyber-Lords" as a way of thematically reconceptualizing these new "regeneration-stealers" as an organic version of the Cybermen who "muzzzt survive," and who should have their personalities back and immediately turn on the Master for being so colossally stupid as to bring them BACK; the Doctor discovering a hidden secret about her past that briefly incapacitates her until her other selves remind her of the difference between what the Time Lords tried to make of her, and what she made and still makes of herself... there's probably one or two more ideas in there as well. If you set about trying to write a story that squanders the potential contained in these ideas, well, you'd have to be really skilled to do that as well as Chibnall does here. I have a sneaking suspicion that RTD has a plan to redeem this whole mess, and it seems likely it has to do with myth becoming real earlier than we think it did, but we'll see. It's clear that he loves this episode for knocking down the sandcastle and leaving him with the challenge of rebuilding it afresh; what's less clear is how much he loves the central concept behind it. I will say this: I like this explanation of how the Doctor has more than 12 regenerations more than Moffat's decision to deliberately put Eleven at the end of the cycle and then "save" him via the Time Lords. That wasn't just bullshit, it was obvious and uninteresting bullshit, stacked on top of the "I saved Gallifrey and should look for it but never actually will" subplot that he introduced for no good reason whatsoever. At least Chibnall took a big swing here. If every one of these episodes had this level of ambition, he might have gotten lucky and had a fantastic episode or two in amidst the wreckage.
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Mar 31, 2024 01:04
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The_Doctor posted:S2 is Flux done much, much better. True, though the ending would be a bit trickier to pull off in Flux. I still have the document from 2021 I wrote up immediately after seeing Revolution of the Daleks explaining how to fix the story with 19 changes, ranging from concealing what's going on with Robertson's "Daleks" in the early part of the episode to having the Doctor deliberately processing the Timeless Child thing to having her prompted to escape by both Yaz and Jack showing up. Robertson is more clearly sleazy and cheap, there's only the one Dalek who takes control of the whole neural network to remotely pilot the shells, and the Doctor beats it herself by exploiting the fact that while the Dalek is perfectly capable of controlling all those shells using the network, it can't do anything about the fact that Robertson's network equipment is all "lowest bidder" quality. A 30-minute rewrite would have been enough to take this from a poorly-thought-out idea that mostly rehashes old material (two Dalek factions? There's a fresh idea!) and makes poor use of almost every character in the story into something decent or better. Another huge waste.
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Apr 7, 2024 19:07
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The_Doctor posted:Oh wow, yes! Eve is one of the Nearly Good ones, too! I thought it came earlier in the run for some reason. I knew every story title by heart until the Chibnall era. I do go a little vague on episode order at some point with the new series, but I gave up completely only part-way into Chibnall's first run. OK, I'm going to continue my little object permanence experiment ITT with some more recollected episodes: The Ghost Monument: Thirteen and the Fam get rescued by two passing spaceships involved in a race. There's some sort of arbitrary danger that they have to cooperate to solve that really feels like it should have mattered to the episode, but nothing matters in this episode. They land or crash on the planet, who cares, and we find out that this is a giant reality TV show with a prize for whoever gets to the Ghost Monument (which is obviously the TARDIS, why is there even a moment this gets played as a mystery). Can't be bothered with what the prize is, there's a dearth of contestants at this point, the whole planet is supposedly deadly but compared to a place like Skaro it's a vacation paradise, and there's a brief moment where the Doctor might get angry at capitalist imperialist pig who hosts the show and isn't actually there, but that doesn't really play because we don't get nice things any more. There's a few character-building scenes in here that make it look like Chibnall cares at all about characterization, but they don't matter to this story and the bits we get about companions won't much matter in future stories, so who cares? We also get some very "I played Quake and Portal so here's concrete buildings and ladders and killer robot/turrets," Ryan humiliates himself by going all FPS-homicidal despite this being real-life and him supposedly having dyspraxia (Chibnall, you're already making an obvious theft from popular culture, why do you keep lampshading it as if that makes it clever). There's something about the night being dangerous but apparently that means animate sentient pieces of cloth that taunt the Doctor about the Timeless Child, because Chibnall wants to ruin as many interesting premises in his stories as he can without allowing them to be actually interesting. They get to the TARDIS, the Doctor gets to do the "you redecorated? I love it!" twist line that would work better if the TARDIS were better lit or better designed or something, or if she got to have that character trait consistently. The "amazing race" storyline concludes in a way I don't remember or care about. Does the jerk male contestant end up splitting the prize with the female contestant with the tragic backstory that also hints at a planet-destroying threat for the end of the season? Do neither of them win because the contest runners are capitalist imperialist pigs? There's no message and the game's made up and the points don't matter. Chibnall literally wrote a story about something happening while the Doctor and companions try to find the TARDIS, and made it so engaging that finding the TARDIS is the only part of the ending I recall. Rosa: I was hopeful for this episode, as Chibnall shares credit and it had a chance to be a pure historical. But no, a time-traveling racist from the future who somehow manages to know everything about the bus protest while being a complete boob is here to try to ensure there's enough seating on the bus or that the racist driver is off-duty because if Rosa hadn't refused to change seats on this specific day and time, I guess the civil rights movement would have collapsed? His actual objectives are vague enough for long enough that you can almost overlook that the story makes no sense. There's some nice moments here: Rosa Parks is well written and performed, the story gives Ryan a few good moments while establishing that Rosa wasn't a fluke or a lone wolf but part of a concerted plan (which makes the "lone white supremacist from the future threatens the timeline because a whole group of local civil rights leaders can't manage a protest" threat amazingly offensive). There's a few nice moments where the Fam confront racism that are unfortunately not as powerful as they might be because the episode dances along the edge of "weren't things so terrible in the 60s in Alabama, thank God there's no racism in the UK in the 21st century" but it doesn't quite tip over the edge. Graham having just lost the Black woman he loved and being a bus driver is weirdly centralized given that he's the only white male main character. The Doctor gets to be almost angry with the white future racist; as far as confrontations go, this is about as good as she's going to get, sadly. There's some things about forcing events that culminates in our cast having to occupy seats in order to ensure history goes smoothly. That's either really offensive as a "solution," if you read their being seated on the bus as participation in segregation (and it's hard for me to do that), or it's perfectly fine because they are SUPPORTING Rosa Parks, but the episode seems to think it's putting the Fam through the wringer. White supremacist gets "accidently" sent back to the stone age, caveman mentality, we see Rosa Parks' asteroid, the episode is much more self-satisfied than it should be, and we're left to wonder whether Blackman wrote a great script that Chibnall ruined or if it was always meant to be this way. Arachnids in the UK: Giant spiders and an American businessman who is Trump-like. There's some Yaz family development in this story, set back in our Fam-present, but it all seems to weirdly focus attention away from Yaz. The initial giant spider stuff is pretty effectively creepy, but Donald J. Big is played for laughs and there's only a few moments in the episode where that decision works, mainly when it's clear he values the lives of his employees less than he does his convenience. Yada yada industrial waste, maybe, and the episode waits a long time before the Doctor plays the "it's hard being big and that spider will die soon" in a context where it makes no sense. A potentially interesting building-under-siege where we want one of the characters dead turns into a mess and an argument about humanely killing the spiders who used to be the horror-film enemies, and maybe there's a message about how the businessman is the real Arachnid in the UK, but he shoots the spider and the Doctor resolutely refuses to chide him, much less telling an assistant that he looks tired. The lesson learned here is that the current series has competent direction, effects, and performances and the writer is the one letting it down. The Tsuranga Conundrum: TARDIS appears on a planet-wide junkyard or something, the Doctor and Fam get separated from it almost instantly and end up on an emergency medical ship or something. I recall liking this one because all the characters got to do something and the "enemy" was Nibbler from Futurama and keeping it from eating the ship without killing it was an interesting conundrum (Oh, Chibnall, I see what you did there). There's a sideline about a pregnant man and something about an old general and a clone or something that pays off with piloting the ship, I believe. There's a bit of "educational science" although I think it's inaccurate educational science, but nice try. The Doctor actually gets to act like the Doctor, including being amazingly rude and condescending to someone and then apologizing, although IIRC she's rude to a doctor and not a nurse, so only partial credit there. I can't recall what extra crisis happens as they approach their destination, they get rid of the Tsuranga or whatever they called Nibbler, all the developing plotlines of the single-episode characters get resolved, mostly off-screen and in mere seconds, end of story. This felt like a good enough episode of Doctor Who to be an average episode of Doctor Who, instead of whatever Chibnall thinks he's been writing. And I'll stop there as we get into a few episodes that were actually pretty good.
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Apr 8, 2024 17:29
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Fil5000 posted:She literally defeats the Master by loving up his perception filter so the Nazis recognise he's not white and, as far as she knows, will send him to a camp and gas him to death. This is presented as the Doctor being clever and finding a smart way to deal with the Master. It was a bad writing choice. In universe, I'm not sure claiming the Master is "a person of color" is especially accurate, and I think it's hard to take seriously "the Master will end up gassed to death in a concentration camp" as a potential outcome of that scene, but Chibnall really should have been thinking about the world he was living in at the time, too. Moffat had Twelve abandon Missy to the Daleks, who are absolutely a genocide machine. And he had Eleven use the moon landing footage to turn humanity into unconscious genocide machines. RTD had the Doctor genocide the Daleks and kill all the other Time Lords, until that got rewritten, though at least Nine "learned a lesson" from that. And let's not even talk about Six.
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Apr 9, 2024 23:20
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