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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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Open Source Idiom posted:To be fair, there were extenuating circumstances there. Just make The Doctor Falls a christmas special. CGI a bunch of christmas trees into the background, we even know those are a thing on Mondas.
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Jan 7, 2024 11:23
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 17:11 |
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Edward Mass posted:My first classic serial was Planet of Evil, and I turned out OK. Mine was The Five Doctors, followed by Nightmare of Eden.
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Jan 16, 2024 09:05
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Seeds of Doom is great. I think the major shift after episode 2 helps it avoid feeling overlong the way some 6-episode serials can end up, like it's halfway between a 6-part story and two shorter stories.
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Jan 18, 2024 09:05
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I can think of at least one weapon in the show that can explicitly kill Time Lords hard enough that they can't regenerate: The one Master Saxon uses on Missy in The Doctor Falls. ...of course, she survives it anyhow, because that's what the Master does. I think we also see that if a Time Lord is like, killed a second time while they're trying to regenerate from the first death, it interrupts the regeneration process and just leaves them dead? But I forget if we ever see that happen for real or if that was only ever done with Mecha Eleven.
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Jan 21, 2024 06:07
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My preferred explanation of Jo Martin: She's the Thirteenth Doctor. The climax of Fugitive of the Judoon has Jo Martin's character solving the situation in a typical Doctor fashion: making threats she's not actually planning to follow through on, and tricking the enemy into destroying itself with its own weapon. And while she's doing this, Jodie Whittaker's character just sort of stands there doing nothing but whinging at her about how she's not supposed to do that and the Doctor would never do that, even though these are standard Doctor things that literally every incarnation of the Doctor has done. The scene is clearly designed to show that Martin's character is the Doctor... but it also ends up showing that Whittaker's character isn't. It retroactively explains why Whittaker's Doctor seems so out-of-character for the Doctor in so many ways. Why is she suddenly terrified of social interactions? Why does she just walk away from a close friend who's trying to open up to her about his deepest fear? Why does she just let every villain walk away? Why does she sent a person of color to a holocaust concentration camp? Why does she love Amazon? They all have the same answer: she's not acting like the Doctor because she's not the Doctor. Capaldi's Doctor regenerated into Martin's Doctor, and Whittaker's Doctor is someone or something else entirely who just thinks she regenerated from Twelve. So what exactly is she, and why does she think she's the Doctor? Well, she's the Doctor's closest equivalent from the Cybus universe. Wait, no, she's a paradoxical alternate-timeline shard of the Doctor caused by the Time Lords interfering in her history to save themselves from the Master. Wait, no, she's the Master, regenerated from Missy and imprinted with the Doctor's memories Jackson Lake-style. Wait, no, she's actually E-Space itself, taking the form and memories of the last person to escape it before it collapsed into entropy, and the talking frog sentient universe was foreshadowing this. Wait, no, she was spat out by the Cracks in the Universe. Wait, no, she's a Florbozam, altered by Shawingian radiation from the Hirmnog Anomaly due to the schemes of Commissioner Sleer. It's Doctor Who, you can come up with whatever stupid sci-fi explanation you want. Sadly, the Timeless Children killed off the chance to go in this direction, and I don't think the show would ever have the guts to go "yeah the Doctor you've been following for the last two whole seasons wasn't really the Doctor". But it's what I genuinely thought Fugitive of the Judoon was setting up, and it's still what I wish we'd gotten.
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Jan 24, 2024 00:17
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I don't think I'd have liked the idea if I hadn't already been sour on Thirteen's run, and latching onto any fanficy way of saying "none of those stupid things happened" to wipe it away. Imagine getting entire seasons of Jo Martin's Doctor, though. I know Chibnall writing her would have given her all the same problems Chibnall's actual run had, but I can dream.
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Jan 24, 2024 00:51
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His scarf is always the same size. It just sometimes looks bigger on the outside.
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Jan 26, 2024 05:17
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That one guy in Thirteen's run namedrops the Guardians in a "I am like the thing you are nostalgic about, therefore you should like me too" way.
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Jan 28, 2024 21:47
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Hollismason posted:Just got to season 17 and Destiny of the Daleks. Kind of strange that Romana just decides to regenerate on a whim and choose Astra's form. I like that her outfit also includes a ridiculously large scarf just like the Doctors. People used to be aghast not just that she seemed to regenerate on a whim, but that she seemed to burn through several regenerations in a row just to try out different faces. (That interpretation seems to have disappeared since the new series with The Christmas Invasion, though.)
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Jan 29, 2024 01:40
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My favorite part of Praxeus is when that one tertiary character dies on the beach (I'm not sure what he thought he was going to do against the swarm of birds) and no one notices or reacts or mentions him again or even seems to remember he ever existed.
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Feb 7, 2024 09:30
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The other problem with Bradley is that every third line his character says is "Why has your wench not made me a sandwich yet?"
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Feb 8, 2024 19:53
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Jerusalem posted:One of the truly perplexing things about Kill the Moon is that the decision by the three women to NOT kill the unborn baby results in a big text display reading,"ABORTED" I assumed they were throwing some pro-choice trappings in their anti-abortion screed to make it seem like they weren't taking a side even though they obviously were. I've heard people try to excuse the episode by saying that abortion isn't a political issue in the UK, which... at the time the episode aired, abortion was illegal in Northern Ireland no matter how early along in the pregnancy, even in cases of rape and incest. That didn't change until 2020. This isn't a case of "abortion was already legal and uncontroversial so everything was hunky-dory".
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Feb 11, 2024 06:57
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Thirteen would, but only if it doesn't involve a gun, and she'd prefer if someone else would do it and die in her place.
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Feb 11, 2024 09:02
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Wait, who said anything about genociding the moon-creature's species? It's literally just one individual, the episode's not called Kill All The Moons.
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Feb 11, 2024 18:17
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Random Stranger posted:You can make a good story out of Kill the Moon. They already did, it's called The Beast Below. All of humanity overwhelmingly votes for "condemn the big space creature" over "condemn humanity", the Doctor doesn't just magically fix everything, the companion unilaterally overrides humanity's vote and presses the irreversible "condemn humanity" button, it turns out everything works out and humanity isn't destroyed because it was a nice giant space creature.
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Feb 12, 2024 18:35
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SirSamVimes posted:So is Jodie Whittaker just immune to fall damage or something 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.
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Feb 12, 2024 19:36
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Open Source Idiom posted:It's been so long I honestly can't remember what was going on with this plot, particularly the inexplicable the Irish dreamtime subplot. What's the deal here? The Last Cyberman is actually the Lone Cyberman, everyone's just misremembering the name. He's not the last Cyberman left alive in the future, but the Cybermen were losing their war to genocide all humans (which for some reason is their goal in the far future, no "we muzzt survive" here), and he's alone because for some reason his incomplete conversion makes him the only Cyberman that can be sent back in time to get the macguffin to make the Cybermen start winning again. Maybe cyber-time travel works on Terminator rules. He's only alone for the first half-episode where he appears, after that he's surrounded by other Cybermen doing war stuff. Also at one point he stabs a hibernating Cyberman to dead with a chainsaw or something for literally no reason? He was good for like half an episode and just a boring angry guy after that. The inexplicable Irish dreamtime subplot shared an episode with the Last Cyberman but was completely unrelated to him in every way, because it was part of the Timeless Child stuff. Dream Irishman was actually the story of the Timeless Child Doctor falling off a cliff, regenerating, joining the Time Lord black ops Division, and eventually having their memory wiped at retirement. Why was it presented to us in the form of Dream Irishman? Who loving knows. The Master indicates to Thirteen that she's been having dreams about Dream Irishman, but there's literally nothing about the Dream Irishman segments that indicates they're appearing as dreams, or are appearing diagetically to any of the characters, or that Thirteen has any awareness of the Dream Irishman at all. The segments are just randomly sprinkled around the Chibnall Does Earthshock episode, during which the Doctor is notably not asleep. The Master says the Timeless Child backstory is being presented as Dream Irishman to disguise it in the Matrix by the Division for some reason? I'd have thought the memories of a random human instead of a random Time Lord would be a very suspicious and bad way to hide something in the Matrix. It never made any sense and I genuinely think Chibnall just wanted to pretend he was writing Broadchurch again. Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Feb 13, 2024 |
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Feb 13, 2024 15:21
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I like how the Doctor using the Master's skin color against him to send him to a concentration camp happens like ten minutes after she yells at Ada Lovelace for using a steamgun to nonlethally distract the Master while he's executing a room full of people one by one. Thirteen's moral compass is bizarre.
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Feb 16, 2024 23:43
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Every time Chibnall writes a heavy-handed anti-gun PSA, he does it by writing a situation that seems artificially contrived to make the pro-gun position unambiguously correct.
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Feb 17, 2024 10:21
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The_Doctor posted:Was Jericho even relevant enough to make more stories of? No but I'd have said the same about most of the spinoffs and it's never stopped them before.
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Feb 19, 2024 02:18
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SirSamVimes posted:My Doctor Who catchup is about halfway through the Chibnall era and my god I hate the Doctor responding to to Graham talking frankly about his cancer with "I'M SOCIALLY AWKWARD SO I'LL WALK AWAY NOW" It makes sense when you realize she's already figured out he's a shapeshifting alien who has kidnapped and replaced the real Graham, as evidenced by him not knowing the word "pathogen" despite being a cancer patient married for years to a nurse.
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Feb 26, 2024 21:44
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For all Chibnall's love of shocking surprises, the most shocking surprise to me of Thirteen's run is at the start of the Witchfinders when the woman is being drowned, and Thirteen tries to intervene. Like, yeah, Thirteen fails and the woman dies, but from everything we'd seen of Thirteen I unconsciously assumed that this would be a scene of her standing there watching passively but making a judgmental face. Thirteen's best moment is "drawing the map" in It Takes You Away.
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Feb 27, 2024 17:39
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I still don't know what the Cyberium is or does. It's supposed to have all the accumulated knowledge of the cybermen or something, but it seems like the only wisdom that was needed was "hey maybe we should reactivate the massive perfectly functional ship full of perfectly functional cybermen that we left lying around deactivated for no reason." Ashad chainsaws a cyberman so that that one pointless human can say "We're on a ship with a cyberman that makes other cybermen scream." That's it. That's the reason. His motivation is that Chibnall needed him to do this completely random thing so that Chibnall could use that line that he thought sounded cool and scary. I think I saw people speculate that chainsawing another cyberman was somehow what created the Death Particle, but I don't think there's any indication of that, just people trying to assemble some sort of connection between all the unrelated stuff that's been thrown together.
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Feb 28, 2024 08:20
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2house2fly posted:I don't remember if there was any point to having the name of the planet and the name of the guy mixed up. That came up for a reason, surely? Nope, there's no reason for it other than to have a pointless "reveal" that it's a person's name.
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Feb 28, 2024 17:05
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Coward posted:There is a lot of Chibnall that occasionally feels like, if you'll pardon the expression, "cargo culting" Doctor Who. Like, if my script includes these twists or big concepts or references or character beats, then that will make it an episode of Doctor Who, regardless of whether those make sense or have any narrative impact. Some of them are so incompetent they almost feel like they're "cargo culting" not just Doctor Who but television episodes as a whole. Things like the main plot of Can You Hear Me being resolved more than ten minutes before the end of the episode by a character who hasn't spoken in half an hour "literally conquering her fears" completely offscreen. Or Ghost Monument. SirSamVimes posted:The thing that I hate about sacrifices for Thirteen is that she always just lets it happen. Other Doctors usually need to be physically restrained to allow it. Twelve wouldn't stop trying to find grenades to jump on. Thirteen is relieved Old Guy is offering to take her place because she knows the show would be over if she actually did it.
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Feb 28, 2024 23:57
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Narsham posted: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. Before Columbo, I think Poirot had a similar line about how the detective's advantage is that the detective is always a professional, but the murderer is always an amateur.
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Mar 13, 2024 19:14
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Bicyclops posted:I think more people have heard all the Big Finish audios and watched the Zygon softcore than have seen Class. Class apparently had five seasons of Big Finish audios, which I can only assume means that Big Finish audios are really just a money-laundering operation.
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Mar 15, 2024 17:31
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Fil5000 posted:A quick Google turned up this interview someone did with Miles for a fanzine in I think 2003? Over two decades ago, maybe he's changed his mind on some of the stuff he says but the overall tone is similar to his Twitter presence I'd say. 2003 posted:Eventually, there will be another TV series of Doctor Who. And it will fail horribly, because inevitably it'll be aimed at the kind of fan-targeted SF market that didn't even exist until Star Trek: The Next Generation came along and spoiled everything. Doctor Who only works as a family adventure series, but when it finally comes back you can bet any money you want it'll be like Babylon 5 or something. It'll only last one series, maybe two. So then the TV programme will be dead forever, the license will be in limbo, and nobody will ever want to pump more money into it as a TV concept. Imagine the Milesverse where NuWho only lasted one season and it was "Trial of a Peladon Lord".
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Mar 21, 2024 01:20
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Khanstant posted:The arrogance. We keep Doctor Who alive in our hearts and minds and occasionally thinking directly into satellites to rescue him. Since we're talking about Lawrence Miles, the Doctor we keep alive that way isn't the original Doctor but an extremely-online media-obsessed alien shaped into the way we remember the Doctor.
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Mar 21, 2024 03:42
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2house2fly posted: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. I think that was the resolution to the Eaters of Light. It really feels in the Timeless Children like the only reason the Doctor isn't pressing the button is that
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Apr 5, 2024 09:54
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The weirdest part of Woman Who Fell To Earth is when uh the guy Tim Shaw's trying to murder kicks Tim Shaw, and Thirteen snaps at him "You had no right to do that!". Like, Tim Shaw was already holding and about to use a teleporter, so kicking him off a crane doesn't actually hurt him since he's not going to land, and his DNA is already melting anyway. Why is harmlessly kicking the guy who just tried to murder you the thing that crosses a line here? In retrospect, it's an early sign of Thirteen's absolutely bonkers morality.
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Apr 5, 2024 19:45
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Warthur posted:13's is "1980s kids' educational TV show presenter", neither hit the mark. I dunno, I feel like that hits the mark perfectly for what Chibnall wanted from her.
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Apr 6, 2024 04:56
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Warthur posted:The costume works somewhat for "here, let's have Doctor Who teach you some stuff", but that's a handful of moments from series 11. From series 12 onwards that aspect of Chibnall's vision is dead. I think he's still trying to do it in series 12. It seems like he's going for that same thing when he tries to have her teach about Ada Lovelace, or global warming, or Tesla, or plastic pollution. He's just... somehow even worse at it than in series 11. The most notable example is Can You Hear Me, where she tries to be kindergarten tour guide about old Syrian mental health only to realize there's no one to be a kindergarten tour guide to and she doesn't know what to do when she's not being a kindergarten tour guide. (Even though she's supposed to simultaneously be going off on her own all the time to brood.) e: lmao she even needed to teach the man-who-was-both-a-cancer-patient-and-married-to-a-nurse-for-years what "pathogen" means
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Apr 7, 2024 05:19
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Infinitum posted:I think a much better writer could have been able to frame it so that the Doctor's TARDIS is unique due to centuries of use by a single pilot, rather than a team as it is meant to be used, and that is how it has gained sentience over the centuries. Go with this, and then a season later have the season villain be the Master's TARDIS, acting on its own after the Master's very real definitely final death (they'll turn up alive a series later) bringing various villains around time to cause mayhem.
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Apr 7, 2024 18:45
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People have already said a lot about how Rosa is weird because the Doctor and the episode itself both seem to buy into the idea that the villain is correct, Rosa Parks's protest was just a fluke and if the starts don't align just right it won't happen and the civil rights movement will never happen. But the other weird thing about it to me is that Rosa isn't really a central character in her own episode? Like, the episode is about her, and the plot revolves around her, but it's all very distant and detached. She's treated as a figure in a historical textbook and macguffin who everyone's fighting over, but not as a person the episode is really interested in spending time with or getting to know as a character. Which isn't an inherently bad thing, I suppose, especially when I try to imagine the alternatives Chibnall's writing could have given us (I'll take what we got over something terrible like "Rosa has a tearful breakdown and the Doctor tells her things will be alright and gives her the strength to go through with her protest"), but it felt odd to me when NuWho has a well-established pattern for celebrity historicals, and all the others focus on the guest celebrity as a central character. Even within Chibnall's run, we had the Tesla episode. I only remember this because I didn't get around to watching series 11 and 12 until last year, but the "conundrum" in the Tsuranga Conundrum is this: the ship has Hungry Invincible Stitch on it. The ship's homeworld's sensors detect that the ship has Stitch on it. The homeworld asks, "Hey, our sensors indicate that you have Stitch on your ship, is that correct?" If the ship answers "yes", the homeworld blows up the ship so Stitch can't reach the homeworld. If the ship answers "no", the homeworld goes "our sensors indicate that you're lying" and blows up the ship so Stitch can't reach the homeworld. Why does the homeworld even bother asking? gently caress if I know. Why doesn't the homeworld just go "Hey, you can't come here with Stitch onboard, stay in deep space until it's gone and if you try to approach homeworld then we'll blow you up?" gently caress if I know. Anyhow, the "conundrum" is "hey some assholes want to blow us up". The ending is weird where the space-general dies of her space-cancer or something, and then her sentient humanoid android assistant friend goes "I, as her personal android friend, shall now be put to death because that is the law of our society" and the Doctor's just totally fine with that? The episode also treats it as a huge revelation that Stitch is just a hungry animal and not a scheming mastermind with a diabolical plan to deconstruct the ship in exactly the right order, but I think even the kids in the audience realized that about 0.1 seconds after seeing Stitch so it just makes the characters look like idiots. (The actors pretty obviously don't have any idea what their characters are looking at, since it won't be CGI'd until later.) Ghost Monument is loving bizarre because it's a race where everyone moves very slowly and with no urgency and the competitors are just walking side by side and never trying to gain any lead? You can imagine Terry Nation writing a good Keys of Marinus-ish story with this premise in the 60s where the two groups don't meet up until the end, with one group journeying through a perilous swamp and and the other group journeying through perilous caves, but it's mind-boggling how lifeless this is. And it's all to set up the Stenza Empire as a threat... which never appears again.
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Apr 8, 2024 20:12
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Infinitum posted:If 'the Doctor commits a racist act' is part of your story? Get hosed. Remember when she sent multiple people of color, one of whom was a hero, to nazi concentration camps in a single episode?
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Apr 8, 2024 20:39
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I mean, I think I broadly agree that it's perfectly adequate as an edutainment after school special from the 90s for kindergarteners. I just would rather Chibnall aimed for a slightly higher standard. (I'd especially have liked it if Rosa's protest was explicitly something she planned; the show has her meeting with MLK but doesn't indicate that the bus protest specifically was part of a strategy.)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. And this is explicitly after she's already framed him as a British spy and summoned the Nazis to arrest him. She's already resolved the situation and neutralized the Master as a threat, then decides to add an extra racial element for no reason. And it's not played as morally ambiguous in any way. About fifteen minutes later in the same episode, she memory-wipes Noor Inayat Khan without her consent and dumps her back in 1943. The Doctor knows who Khan is and what her story is, which means she knows 1943 is a very bad year to be Noor Inayat Khan and that she's basically just feeding her straight into a concentration camp. They could have solved this problem easily with like two lines of dialogue: "Khan, are you sure you want to return to 1943? It could be dangerous." "Yes, but even with the risk, I have to go back. All of us are in danger from the Nazis and like so many others it is my duty" blah blah blah we all know how the "Are you sure you don't want to come ride in the TARDIS?" "No, my place is here" exchange goes. Instead, they have the Doctor brainwash her while she tries to resist but doesn't get to say anything? It's really bizarre.
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Apr 8, 2024 22:25
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 17:11 |
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There's an exchange in Let's Kill Hitler that really pissed me off that goes something like: Amy: "Why's River acting so crazy?" Doctor: "Well, she's a woman." Amy glares at him "Shut up, I'm dying." It's not something the Doctor would ever say or even think, it's blatantly just Moffat turning to the camera and going "AM I RIGHT FELLAS? BITCHES BE NUTSO"
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Apr 23, 2024 17:44
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