|
Which season of Doctor Who should get a Blu-ray set next? This poll is closed. |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| One of the black-and-white seasons |
|
16 | 29.63% |
| Season 7 |
|
7 | 12.96% |
| Season 11 |
|
1 | 1.85% |
| Season 13 |
|
0 | 0% |
| Season 15 |
|
2 | 3.70% |
| The Key to Time |
|
21 | 38.89% |
| Season 21 |
|
0 | 0% |
| Season 25 |
|
7 | 12.96% |
| Total: | 54 votes | ||
|
I think the main difference between Davies and Moffat and their visions of the climax of the Time War is their respective levels of cynicism. Davies says that evil not only exists but lurks in the hearts of normal people, and can be released without much prompting- see Midnight. The Daleks are actively, consciously evil, like Mind Flayers in D&D or something. Of course the Time Lords turned evil. A whole species became unrepentantly, unfixably evil, and had to be extinguished for the good of the universe. Moffat refuses to believe in evil in the same way. His first two Doctor Who stories were about malfunctioning machinery. The whole Silence arc was ultimately about people with relatable motives loving up. Even the Daleks are portrayed as victims, their evil maintained by constant technological control over what they're allowed to see, even what they're allowed to express, reinforced from the top down. Through that lens, of course the entire Time Lord species didn't turn evil. Maybe the elites did, Rassilon and his inner circle and the Time Lord Congress or whoever that he made his "Gallifrey Rises" speech to. But not the salt of the earth common folk. Not the janitors, the shopkeepers, the Shabogans. Not the children. Clara says in Day Of The Doctor, "you said you wiped out your own people, I just never pictured you doing it". Moffat can't imagine the Doctor actually destroying Gallifrey, Davies could
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2023 05:23
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 23:37 |
|
|
Imagine the universe as a tall building, with each floor being a different period of history. The Time War is one floor of that building and all the doors are locked so none of the participants can go to a different floor. Rassilon's plan is to pick the lock on a door to a stairwell and get himself to another floor, doing so much damage to the building itself in the process that the whole thing comes tumbling down. David Tennant shoves him back in and locks the stairwell door, and then later Matt Smith moves everyone he likes on that floor into a different building entirely.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2023 07:51
|
|
|
Creature posted:It never even occurred to me that DotD and EoT were interlinked. And I’ve watched each of them a few times. They aren't, really. From the Time Lords' perspective, DotD just takes place shortly after EoT, linked by a line early in the episode; quote:ANDROGAR: The High Council is in emergency session. They have plans of their own. I've had fun watching a "chronological order" series of episodes, following the Doctor and then the Master: Waters Of Mars Day Of The Doctor End Of Time World Enough And Time/The Doctor Falls Dark Water/Death In Heaven E: lol Steven Moffat posted a screenshot of IMDB's top rated episodes on instagram, of which episodes written by him make up the entire top four. I think he's experiencing some low self-esteem this Christmas season 2house2fly fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Dec 31, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2023 15:00
|
|
|
Steptoe And Son was a British sitcom about junk merchants that was remade in America as Sanford and Son, which kept the premise but made the main characters black. The main characters in Journey To The Centre Of The Tardis are three black junk merchants who inherited the business from their father. Those seem to be the pieces, though I don't know how they fit together to lead to that outcome
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2024 23:02
|
|
|
Sweet vindication. Capaldi is "my" Doctor, the series 8 version specifically where he's weird and prickly. Also kind of funny because I remember the rumour being that Capaldi was forced out because audiences didn't like him
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2024 02:48
|
|
|
Last Christmas is one of my favourite episodes, but also one of the ones I'm hesitant to let my 7 year old watch because the idea that "nobody ever knows they're not dreaming" would absolutely cause an existential crisis, which would take more than Santa Claus to resolve. Also: "No, no, line in the sand. Santa Claus does not do the scientific explanation." "All right. As the Doctor might say, oooh it's all about dreamy weamy"
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2024 19:23
|
|
|
Watching some of the Jodie Whitaker eps, I forgot there are some actually good gags in them:Fugitive Of The Judoon posted:DOCTOR: Give me ten Earth minutes and we can have this resolved for you.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2024 03:53
|
|
|
Me and Rubes, we got just one hope- if I have understood that rope. 'Cause stuck up there when things got hot, I think I found the master knot.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2024 00:14
|
|
|
If you're watching the whole series through then getting to Amy and Rory's last episode will be a treat
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2024 04:24
|
|
|
Moffat's already run through more story ideas than most of us can conceive of, some tossed out in a cold open. Not sure what he could have left in the tank. I think he's written more Doctor Who than anyone at this point? Though a fresh lick of paint can always provide inspiration, and "the Doctor has to stand still" sounds like a fun high concept, especially for someone as active as Ncuti
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2024 14:21
|
|
|
Another thought: if you don't count co-writer credits (and uncredited co-writing/rewriting) Moffat has written 42 episodes. That's a number one might not want to alter
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2024 14:42
|
|
|
I can take or leave the first ten episodes of series 9, but the last two are some of the best the show's ever done. So on balance it's a good series.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2024 23:28
|
|
|
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
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2024 02:31
|
|
|
Series 8 is my fav one. First half of Deep Breath is a slog, but the minute Clara and the Doctor sit down in that restaurant it's like a switch has flipped and the Doctor is here. Such a tonal departure from Matt Smith, marking a clear delineation between eras without a change in lead writer, an underrated trick. Ditches complicated myth arcs for thematic and emotional ones; I'm a sucker for a series where the stories all rhyme with each other in some way- robots, soldiers, power relations. It has an episode where the villain is a mummy, an episode where the villain is the protagonist's fear of the dark, and an episode where one of the heroes is Santa Claus. The Doctor is really interesting, ruthlessly pragmatic and socially uninterested to the point of "deleting" people from his memory moments after meeting them. Nobody's inviting this guy to Christmas dinner after he helps them defeat a monster. Even he's unsure who he is and what he should be after so many regenerations, going so far as to compare himself to the Ship of Theseus. (one year later in Heaven Sent: "how long can I keep doing this? Burning the old me to make a new one?") Plus he's got that snazzy jacket with the red lining. It's a great time
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2024 04:35
|
|
|
Coupling was good fun, had some very creative concepts for episodes and great gags. Very sweet ending as well. I had a good double take at one bit when I rewatched a few years back, where a character says X is the case but later Y turns out to be the case, and when confronted with the fact that he said X before the character replies: "A clever lie."
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2024 21:23
|
|
|
How Moffat didn't originally intend to go out on a Christmas special? There's a brief summary here: https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/cult/a834617/doctor-who-christmas-special-almost-scrapped/quote:I was going to leave at the end of series 10 – I had my finale planned and what I wanted to do with it. I had a good notion of that. Then I learned at a drinks event somewhere that Chris didn't want to start with a Christmas, so at that point they were going to skip Christmas. There'd be no Christmas special and we would've lost that slot. Doctor Who would've lost that slot if we hadn't [done a special] because Christmas Day is now so rammed. So I said, probably four glasses of red wine in, 'I'll do Christmas!' and then had to persuade Peter that's how we were leaving.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2024 22:21
|
|
|
I vaguely remember Moffat saying around the time it broadcast that he'd written a version for if she left and one for if she stayed because he was pretty sure she was going to stay. I imagine she was keeping her options open, maybe some contracts got renegotiated behind the scenes or w/e
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2024 06:33
|
|
|
Warthur posted:Watched World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls and I mostly love it, but I think there were two big missed opportunities: I wished someone had slipped Moffat a copy of the Terry Pratchett novel Carpe Jugulum, because the whole thing with Bill's identity being at war with the Cyberman identity was just begging for a resolution where she asserts her identity so strongly that it gets beamed out through the Cybermen hivemind and instead of her turning into a Cyberman, all the Cybermen turn into her. I had visions of an army of Bills going back down to fight the more advanced Cybermen (probably only the more primitive Mondasian models would be able to be overridden that way)
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2024 14:00
|
|
|
I'm another one who didn't like him and expected to dislike his Doctor Who episodes, then actually did like them and liked him in them. Also liked Gareth Roberts bringing a sitcommy tone to the show with the Corden episodes and The Caretaker, thought they were some of the standouts of their respective series. Well, not that Closing Time has that much competition. As if my questionable judgment wasn't already beyond doubt, let me just say while I'm here that I quite liked Nightmare In Silver
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2024 03:09
|
|
|
Just occurred to me that the Power Of Three kind of foreshadows Time Of The Doctor, with the Doctor forced to stay in one place for an extended period of time. Dinosaurs On A Spaceship featured another Chibnall hallmark, introduce a bunch of characters and have them say exciting dialogue, and kind of hope a story happens among all that. Gotta rewatch those drat Flux episodes some time to try and remember what happened in them
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2024 03:34
|
|
|
Tom Baker rocks right from the start. New series fans may recognise an early line when a physician is trying to get him to relax: "You may be a Doctor, but I am the Doctor. The definite article, you might say."
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2024 18:36
|
|
|
Rewatched Nightmare In Silver after it came up in this thread, and it remains a perfectly fine episode of Doctor Who. The only thing I actively dislike is the children, who are played by bad actors who are given pretty tedious dialogue to deliver. Matt Smith overhams it a little as the baddie, but then maybe that's just my personal distaste for hammy acting
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2024 20:38
|
|
|
I'm gobsmacked to this day that Chibnall decided to give the character a whole new backstory, in such a way that it indelibly stains the whole show. And even more than that, the Doctor finding out about that backstory wasn't even the plot of the episode it was revealed in. The Master used it as a distraction while he got his Time Lord Cybermen up and running. This insane retcon of the entire show was functionally a set of keys being jangled for a few minutes. And it was sandwiched between the bizarrely insane plot twists of Gallifrey being destroyed again and half of the entire universe being erased from existence. Chris, mate, what are you thinking
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2024 05:19
|
|
|
Edward Mass posted:Something I missed on the first watch of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship: the Doctor claiming that he’s (probably) a Sagittarius. I laughed when I looked up the dates that a Sagittarius is born under. I wonder if Moffat slipped that in, it's the sort of thing he likes to do- Amy was born when Doctor Who went off air, met the Doctor for the first time in 1996 when the McGann movie came out and for a second time in 2008 when it was announced Moffat would be taking over; Clara was born on the 23rd of November and her mother died right before the new series started airing. Plus of course Moffat's big episodes took place on the airdate if he could manage it
|
|
#
¿
Jan 26, 2024 14:01
|
|
|
I don't like the reuse of it in the regeneration scene, it feels like it cheapens it a bit. Maybe that's exacerbated by the fact that I don't much like the regeneration scene itself, which is exacerbated by me not being fond of the episode which preceded it.Then again, it's tied into the Twelfth Doctor's anxiety about regeneration ("How long can I keep doing this? Burning the old me to make a new one?") so I guess it's valid
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2024 03:00
|
|
|
I forgive Twice Upon A Time a lot because of the circumstances under which it was made, so having belittled it I feel compelled to list some things I like about it. Accentuate the positive and all that.quote:MARK GATISS: Is one of you a doctor? The First Doctor getting a preview of his upcoming adventures, with the Twelfth protesting "they cut out all the jokes!" The Christmas Truce was used in an episode and the Doctor didn't loving cause it. This was a great antidote to the implication before and after that the Doctor is the sole reason evil doesn't prevail in the universe. "The universe generally fails to be a fairy tale... that's where we come in." One last self-referential callback with the phrase "the long way round" referring now to the longest way yet. One last tasteful callback to the classic series with the First Doctor saying "here we go" Oh and the silly monologue about how only children can hear the Doctor's true name is apparently something Peter Capaldi came up with, which is nice 2house2fly fucked around with this message at 03:18 on Jan 27, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2024 03:15
|
|
|
I was a fan of Maid Marian And Her Merry Men as a kid so I got a little thrill at the Worksop shoutout
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2024 03:34
|
|
|
Idle thought: John Simm Master didn't regenerate into Missy onscreen, and when Sacha Dhawan Master turned up all of the Missy character development was completely reset. I've seen people propose before that the order goes Simm>Dhawan>Missy, and I wonder if Power Of The Doctor wasn't trying to hint at that. In Dark Water, Missy accused the Doctor of abandoning her and leaving her for dead, which didn't exactly happen in The End Of Time or The Doctor Falls, but did happen in Power Of The Doctor. Anyway, in local news, a nerd spent his evening pondering Doctor Who lore instead of doing the dishes
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2024 06:44
|
|
|
Capaldi had the jelly babies added to Orient Express himself, and almost certainly ad-libbed the Fourth Doctor impersonation when he was talking to himself. That kind of thing is why he's the GOAT
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2024 03:41
|
|
|
Immortal use of a jelly baby from Face Of Evil:quote:(The Doctor holds a jelly baby under the nose of the red-haired warrior.)
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2024 03:51
|
|
|
I read Dirk Gently as a kid and many years later I stumbled on City Of Death without knowing anything about it and I was like whaaaat
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2024 05:06
|
|
|
I wonder what The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul started as. A comic book adaptation?!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2024 05:39
|
|
|
I find a new fav thing about it every time I rewatch, most recently the Doctor's voice cracking as he says "all you need for energy is something to burn". Also as a follow-up to Missy saying she put them together because "you'd go to Hell if she asked, and she would". In Heaven Sent, at (dream)Clara's urging, the Doctor almost literally breaks out of Hell A perennial fav thing about it is the way it's followed up in the next episode: recontextualised as a hosed up idiotic stunt when Clara finds out about it and bursts into tears and demands "why would you do that?!"
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2024 04:26
|
|
|
Earthshock and Caves of Androzani are the most well regarded, I'm not sure if The Five Doctors counts as part of his run but well worth a watch too
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2024 21:52
|
|
|
Steven Moffat was a big fan of Kill The Moon by all accounts
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2024 14:10
|
|
|
I remember one guy pointing out all the ways Kill The Moon's story wasn't compatible with an abortion narrative, and coming to the conclusion that that made it a bad abortion narrative, as opposed to not one. Whatever you think of it as an episode, it generates some primo discourse.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2024 19:01
|
|
|
They were too attached to the punchy elevator pitch. The genesis of the episode, the seed from which it grew (I'm sure there's a better metaphor but... nah, not getting it) was the five-syllable phrase "the moon is an egg". Hatching from an egg isn't anything like giving birth, but as they're both methods of reproduction someone was bound to conflate the two. It might have gone over better if the elevator pitch evolved with the writing of the episode, and the premise updated to reflect the execution. Imagine James Cameron writing "the moon is an egg" on a whiteboard, then crossing out "egg" and replacing it with another word, a word that wouldn't have significantly impacted the events of the episode, and in fact would have better aligned with the theme of "rites of passage" and kept any potential abortion subtext at a further remove while still evoking the image of an enclosed protective vessel from which a beautiful winged creature emerges: chrysalis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmXV5iOncT8&t=88s
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2024 08:16
|
|
|
Lottery of Babylon posted: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. For all anyone knows it's the only individual
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2024 20:20
|
|
|
In The End Of Time he jumps out of a moving spaceship from hundreds of feet up. Though in that case his fall was broken by a glass ceiling
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2024 19:48
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 23:37 |
|
|
A review of a Chibnall episode I read recently described it as "not so much less than the sum of its parts as it is just a bunch of parts" which is pretty much the magic phrase that describes that entire era
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2024 04:15
|
|