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30 October 2022 at 19:22 #73645
I think there’s a difference between ‘we can afford to blow stuff up’ and ‘we can afford more than six episodes’. At the moment, the BBC are struggling to finance six, or maybe three specials every eighteen months.
Yeah, Disney are quite happy with the type of show where two moons collide one week and then a few weeks later we have three people in a citadel at the end of time discussing whether a deterministic universe with no major wars is preferable to a free-will universe with a multiverse destroying war.
There was, obviously, a fight scene. As one of the actors said, that’s the genre. But then, Tom Baker had Daleks because that’s the genre. But they can definitely cope with ‘three people talk for most of the episode’, even if they do wave lots of budget at them.
29 October 2022 at 21:02 #73640Yes, but have you ever watched Disney Plus?
My experience with the Marvel shows is that while they have indeed given them a whacking great budget (for TV) their influence is mainly concerned with which characters to introduce from the comics, possible spin offs and which actors and directors to approach once they’ve decided on characters and series. Once they’ve greenlit, the artistic decisions are left to the director and show runner.
Given the Marvel experience I can see why Bad Wolf and the BBC think Disney is safe. If they’re told ‘Doctor Who needs to have a largely British cast’, they’re going to look at British actors, just like they agreed that Ms Marvel needed a largely South Asian heritage cast and show runner. They like PG 12 anyway, so ‘family friendly’ and ‘no guns’ won’t be a problem. Likewise, they’re very unlikely to ask to move production from the UK because they have productions in the UK right now.
I know we all have horror flashbacks to The Movie That Shall Not Be Mentioned, but I think it’s unlikely we’ll suddenly discover the Doctor is half human and seems to be visiting San Francisco a lot. 🙂
28 October 2022 at 22:44 #73633Yes, some people stay looking the same as they age. Others don’t. Elizabeth Sladen did, but I think you might have problems recognising Mark Strickson unless you knew who he was. A very famous and successful actor might have work done to make sure their face stays recognisable; the rest of us just update our photos every few years.
My point was that the part does not require the actor to be recognised as the same person. The overnights say four million watched this episode – are you arguing that four million people subscribe to Britbox? Because they don’t.
The fact that your friends are keen on the old episodes doesn’t mean you can extrapolate to the wider audience. I have a lot of friends who read the bible – that just means my friends tend to be from that subset of the population, not that the majority of the UK spends a fun evening discussing the Book of Job.
My information about the audience mainly comes from trade papers/websites and the broadsheets. I have sometimes been known to consult BARB, as well. Where do you get your information about the audience from?
28 October 2022 at 13:09 #73629You think they should have chosen a different actor because the ageing process has changed their appearance?
That doesn’t really make sense – in this episode Janet Fielding is playing a former companion of the Doctor. This former companion is thoroughly annoyed that the Doctor has apparently forgotten about her for nearly forty years. That means they need an actor, preferably one who did play a companion, obviously aged in their sixties or seventies. It doesn’t mean they need to look magically unchanged; it suits the script more if they’re visibly different and the Doctor still remembers them.
They also needed to match a companion who lives on present day Earth to living former Doctor, so they could both use the character’s resentment as a plot point and then have emotional closure for that sub-plot by the end of the episode.
For the current audience, it doesn’t matter that the actor now looks different, because only a minority will have watched the episodes from the eighties. For most of the audience, bringing back the original actor is simply a nice little extra.
I admit I didn’t recognise Janet Fielding’s face – but I recognised her voice as soon as she spoke.
25 October 2022 at 22:46 #73608Real life, alas, has been rather demanding of late (which is why I haven’t posted in ages). I think I need a second watch, especially since my first watch was broken up a bit.
I thought the way they removed Dan was good – it’s all fun and games until you see the hole in your helmet. I presumed that removing him that early in the episode and replacing him with Vinder was an actor availability problem of some kind.
Agree that was Sacha Dahwan’s best Master yet, @juniperfish.I think writing a distinctively female Doctor hasn’t been as easy as Chibnall thought it would be, which may partly explain the uneven feel of the Whittaker run. But I agree that, when we look back, we will see this as a great ‘opening up’ era. I also think the run suffered by coming straight after the Moffat era – the Moffat/Smith run really was a golden age, and the Moffat/Capaldi run had some astonishing writing and acting. After that, ‘yeah, the episode was okay’ felt like a letdown.
The Chibnall/Whittaker era tried something new, struggled to find its voice – but in the end, I think it succeeded. The only way to never fail is to never try anything new.
25 October 2022 at 22:08 #73605I got Disney Plus primarily for the Marvel content, but it has a lot more. It looks like at some point they decided they needed movies and series for parents to watch when the kids have gone to bed. So they’ve got a lot of movies, plus box sets like The Walking Dead, Grey’s Anatomy, Buffy, Angel, How I Met Your Mother. It might be worth checking out what they have, @nerys.
I can see exactly why Disney would want Doctor Who. It positions perfectly with their Marvel and Star Wars stables. Family oriented, PG to 12A rating, worldwide fan base, potential for spin offs, mini series, merchandising. I’m sure RTD can see the possibilities for a Marvel style expansion into Disney funded mini-series while the main series remains in BBC control.
The BBC, meanwhile, is probably in one of its periodic ‘This series costs a bloody fortune’ cycles, and was only too glad to outsource to Bad Wolf and get a House of Mouse distribution deal.
19 May 2022 at 20:53 #73148RTD has done this before – rumours abounded that the Rani was coming back, but it turned out to be a another character called Rani. Unless Rose acquired the ability to regenerate when she became Bad Wolf, I’d guess this is the same thing. Yasmin Finney is playing someone called Rose. Not the Billie Piper character.
Given that Rose Tyler is presumed dead, I suppose there might be some kind of ‘named after’ connection.
1 January 2022 at 22:03 #72737It was Karl from Whittaker’s very first episode – at least, the credits named the character as Karl and he was played by the same actor (Johnny Dixon).
The question is, was it a little joke, or is it significant?
1 January 2022 at 21:28 #72735That was a fun one – resetting to one minute later was a good use of the time loop concept. Also good use of the guest stars – Adjani Salmon figuring out how to save himself was a highlight.
@devilishrobby yeah, Whittaker seems to be joining Davison as someone who only relaxed into the role when she knew she was leaving it.
3 December 2021 at 17:58 #72616@blenkinsopthebrave
I thought it was the General trying to make a joke – Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart shouts like he was Corporal Lethbridge-Stewart. Somebody tell our ‘new corporal’ to turn the volume down.It’s completely impossible that a Corporal in 1967 could be a Colonel in 1968, so there’s definitely something ‘off’ about it. However, the General’s little joke about the ‘new corporal’ might be why The Grand Serpent doesn’t identify Lethbridge-Stewart as the guy who’s going to take over UNIT.
The only other alternatives I can think of are that Lethbridge-Stewart was working undercover as an NCO – which would fit with the fact he wasn’t in UNIT in 1967 – or time has gone very wibbly wobbly indeed.
2 December 2021 at 20:30 #72610I agree that I quite liked the Doctor as ‘John Smith from Gallifrey’. But one thing I did manage to mention before they shut the Graun thread; Chibbers is making the Doctor’s origin story that of an abused child. A very abused child.
Which is terrific, fairytale or not, because being an abused child is too often the villain’s backstory. It’s pretty much the backstory RTD gave to the Master, in fact.
The Timeless Children. One chooses to be a villain; one chooses to be a hero.
2 December 2021 at 20:14 #72609I genuinely don’t know. Given how easy it would have been to call that episode ‘The Timeless Child’, I’m pretty sure the plural has some significance. Right the way back in Chibnall’s second episode, The Ghost Monument, the Doctor herself is the Timeless Child, singular.
One of the things I did pick up this episode is that the Doctor’s adoptive mother increases the mirroring that’s become apparent between the Time Lords and the Daleks. @juniperfish calls her a Space Mengele, but she’s really the Time Lords’ Davros. Daleks and Timelords – both species are the result of genetic manipulation by a scientist who left their ethics at the door. Tecteun indeed – she rips her daughter’s hearts out to see how often she doesn’t die.
One possibility is that the ‘Children’ was a deliberate call-back to Moffat’s 50th Anniversary Special, in which the crime that haunts the Doctor is that he killed billions of Time Lord and Shogobhan children when he destroyed Gallifrey. Tecteun didn’t kill the children of Gallifrey; she gave them regeneration. But was that all she did to them? Did the Timeless Children become Time Lords – and is their megalomania and psychopathy inevitable? Did the Doctor, by saving the Gallifreyan children, inevitably bring back the Time Lords who are mirrors to the Daleks?
Basically, the question becomes – is the Master the other Timeless Child, because he discovered he was no accident? Is his psychopathy and megalomania built in – literally built in, deliberately designed in by Tecteun?
@scaryb – welcome back!
@miapatrick I get the impression the Graun thread is only being kept open by the efforts of Martin Belam and can’t get reopened the next day because he has to do his day job of Covid Liveblogging. Whether it’s a money thing, or whether it’s because they’ve noticed how many trolls the recaps were attracting, I don’t know. Less heavily trolled recaps seem to be left open for days.
I agree Bel’s baby is likely to be Very Important – too much is being made of the fact that she’s pregnant. It might be that Baby Bel is the Doctor, simply because of the pun – it does have a feel of a writer going ‘oh, this plotline is going to be cheesy, let’s just lampshade it’. The Doctor then becomes a Moffat loop; which might explain why Chibbers wanted the Weeping Angels and why Moffat was happy to release them to another writer. Moffat built on RTD and his Time War; Chibbers is building on Moffat and his Loop. Quite possibly, also building on Moffat’s idea that a human exposed to the Vortex is so close to the Time Lords that Madame Vastra was reduced to delicately asking if the Doctor, Amy and Rory were a threesome.
9 November 2021 at 13:42 #72331Definitely meant ‘knowingly’. This is Chapter 2 – if a Deus Ex Machina turns up in Chapter 2, I expect to find out why by the end of the story. 😀
Dan’s parents 1) turn up without being mentioned previously. 2) Have the precise skills needed to save Dan as well as the precise information he needs and finally (this is the reason it’s clearly a ‘knowing’ DEM) reference two important years in Doctor Who lore.
Dan’s other guardian angel is Karvanista. Dan has been provided with almost as much Plot Armour as the Doctor.
8 November 2021 at 15:18 #72322Okay, that was … dull. I’m not sure why I felt that way, because most other people seem to have found it a fun episode.
It probably didn’t help that I have to watch the current series on time-shift, which means that if I get bored I can pause rather than having to carry on watching. But it’s a bad sign when I really do wander off to make a cup of tea in the middle of the episode.
Okay, good points. We were introduced to Mary Seacole, who’s well worth a shout out. The budget clearly couldn’t afford the Charge of the Light Brigade, but the CGI of armies clashing was very nice. On a slightly sadistic note, I enjoyed the actors valiantly acting their socks off despite a Welsh downpour.
Unfortunately, I rated the Sontarian threat level as about zero for any character with lines. I don’t think they killed anyone at all with a speaking part – except for Dan Starkey. Who was playing a Sontaran. As credible episode villains, therefore, they were pants. Couldn’t they have at least vaguely threatened Dan’s Mum, or something? Couldn’t the budget stretch to having the Evil Lt. General having a nice adjutant who gets horribly slaughtered?
Onto Dan – he’s still weird. This week in the ‘Look at Dan, he is a real human’ series we saw his parents. Clearly Dan is human, because he has parents (humans have parents). Admittedly his parents first appear as a proper example of a Deus Ex Machina, following every single rule. One, they solve Dan’s ‘Going to get killed’ problem by Two, suddenly and abruptly appearing and Three displaying a previously unknown ability. It’s debatable whether they’re previously unknown characters, because admittedly, if Dan is a Real Human (TM) he has parents. But if you notice, despite their explanation that some bloke in Birkenhead discovered the Probic Vent weakness of Sontarans, they seem to be the only people in the whole of Greater Liverpool who know what the Bloke from Birkenhead found out.
Nobody else ever tries to hit the Sontarans on the back of the neck. This is Liverpool – if Liverpudlians had discovered you could take out the aliens by sneaking up on them and whacking them in the back of the neck with a handy kitchen utensil, dead or unconscious Sontarans would be decorating every street. So how come Dan’s parents turn up at precisely the right moment with the right abilities, but no one else ever does?
Two dates are mentioned by Dan’s Mum and Dad. One is the year of William Hartnell’s regeneration into the Troughton Doctor and the other (via their ‘classic’ car) is the year of the Key To Time. So – another connection with the Master’s Children of Time explanation – is Dan a ‘Brendan’? Is he an adopted child? There’s a great deal of utterly blatant mirroring in the Sontaran spacecraft, where he does exactly what the Doctor does. Yaz has a reminder written on her hand – Dan just does it, right down to the ‘randomly press buttons’ (very reminiscent of Family of Blood) and the conversation in which he says exactly what the Doctor says.
The point that Karvanista seems utterly unbothered by the deaths of any human but Dan is emphasised this week. If the Lupari are each bonded to one human, how come the Sontarans are casually killing Background Artists without any Lupari rescuing them? The Lupari are currently in orbit around Earth… but Dan is the only human whose ex-Division Lupari is utterly determined to keep him alive.
And Karvanista deeply dislikes Dan. Admittedly, this may be simple ‘rule of funny’, but there’s still that thing from last week where a temporal storm gets Dan rescued early so that he’ll be waiting in Karvanista’s spacecraft when the Doctor and Yaz turn up.
Swarm, Azure and Passenger – Azure and Passenger are names of butterflies. Don’t know if that’s relevant.
If you are a character in any SF, fantasy or horror story and find yourself in the Temple of Atropos, call a cab. Atropos is one of the Moirai and she’s the one who cuts the thread of life. This is the Temple of Death.
In addition, the Morai are the fates, which is probably another reason I was finding the whole episode a bit dull. The entire ‘time is death, time is the enemy, time is going out of control’ thing with forces who have to stabilise time was reminding me very much of the MCU series Loki and the TVA. Mind you, I very much enjoyed Loki (and it won’t be a deliberate plot echo, because these series were in production at the same time), but it did feel very familiar. Hopefully we’ll go in a different direction in later episodes.
2 November 2021 at 11:07 #72281BTW, if anyone is doing another watch – keep an eye out for oblique or direct references to previous companions. The ones that are coming into my brain after a night’s sleep 🙂 are: Station Rose, Nitro 9 being unstable, Claire having the same name meaning as Clara (thanks to T’Other Place for that spot), plus a direct reference to Graham and Ryan.
As well as companions, there’s big shout outs to previous stories: The Satan Pit, Fugitive of the Judoon and possibly Witches Familiar.
1 November 2021 at 21:31 #72273@juniperfish
Yes, there was a lot going on.A clear link made to Victorian industrial revolution Britain, and the poor being worked to the bone in the mines (digging for what, if not coal?).
Ah, that’s the interesting thing. Williamson was clearly harking back to previous villains like the Great Intelligence, but he and his tunnels are part of our history. The Williamson tunnels are apparently a bit of a tourist attraction in Liverpool, and nobody knows why they were built.
However, he fits with a bit of a theme in the episode. He’s played as a villain but, like the real Williamson, makes a point of employing the unemployed and the recently demobbed soldiers. So is he a villain? If he’s not, he becomes like Karvanista, who is initially portrayed as a classic Who villain – but turns out to be trying to save the people of Earth.
That also fits in with the young couple in the Artic Circle, who are a real callback to Fugitive of the Judoon – so much so, I was wondering if one was another Doctor. Instead, the woman turns out to be Azure. So seemingly nice people are villains and seeming villains are grumpy heroes.
Now, given that theme – that people aren’t who they seem – who is Dan? He is unemployed, because he’d rather be a tour guide at the Liverpool Museum (another call back to Fugitive of the Judoon, where the hidden Doctor was a tour guide)- it’s unclear why the Museum doesn’t offer their enthusiastic tour guide an official volunteer slot. He’s incredibly nice. Incredibly nice. He also volunteers at a food bank and gives small children sweeties. He won’t accept food even though he’s no food left at home.
How often have we warned kids never to accept sweets from strangers? But it’s okay here, because it’s Halloween. Err… it is okay, isn’t it?
By an amazing, total coincidence, Dan happens to be the former Division agent Karvanista’s designated human to rescue and by another amazingly total coincidence, Karvanista’s ship just happens to go through a temporal flux which allows them to pick him up early. Thus allowing Dan to be rescued by the Doctor in an apparently coincidental way.
Oh, and the booby trap Karvanista uses is a compressor, which is another call-back. To the Master’s signature weapon (and to the Master’s insane habit of setting multiple booby traps for the Doctor). Another oh, Dan has no food in his cupboard, but the table has a uncleared take-away on it, which would fit with someone who knew (at some level) they were going away for an extended period. They’ve used up the stuff in the cupboard and got a take-away last night. The photos on his fridge also reminded me of Mr Saxon’s set of ‘no, I have a history’ photos – this is Dan, he is a real human, look at him in his Liverpool shirt with Liverpool players.
None of this means Dan is the Master (it might be Karvanista), but I am really wondering if his ‘my mate’s got one of these but I think it was bigger’ is one of those lines we’re meant to think is a joke – but isn’t.
1 November 2021 at 18:07 #72271Well, when an episode is entitled Chapter 1, you know what you’re going to get. An episode in which we establish the characters, the setting and the problem.
My guess is (agree with you, @devilishrobby) that the problem is still the Doctor’s Memory Wiped Past and we are now in Act Three of that story. That’s why the Inciting Incident is ambiguous, @craig – the Inciting Incident for the chapter story is the Doctor’s quest to discover details of her lost past (which is why she’s chasing after Karvanista), which happened last series. The Inciting Incident for the longer story is the advent of The Flux, which seems suspiciously immune to Time Vortex energy.
Except the Doctor doesn’t know anything about the Flux, didn’t know that the Lupari considered themselves as having a sacred duty to rescue humans when called upon (that screams ‘time travel’ – previous humanised dogs appeared in the far future), and doesn’t know Swarm. Everything is disintegrating around her (literally, this is Doctor Who) and she doesn’t know why.
I think I agree with those reviewers who said this felt like a finale in reverse – the same quick scenes with characters who appeared in the series, the same ‘the Earth/Universe will be destroyed’ threat, appearance of Series Villain – except this is the intro episode. I dunno – I wonder if one of the reasons it did feel so bitty is that the episode was deliberately structured like a finale Part One. Chibnall called it Chapter One rather than Part One – is that a signal that the finale’s been bookended?
But it would explain why this felt so bitty – we don’t mind this sort of ‘oh, look, there’s Claire’ in a finale, because we know Claire. Now we’ve got ‘Oh, look, there’s Claire … but who is Claire?’
I’ll need to watch it again, but there seemed to me to be a lot of lines implying that almost all the characters were from the Doctor’s forgotten past. There’s the Lupari, who seem to know everything about the Flux and the Doctor (and don’t like the Doctor). There’s Claire, who seems to remember/know that Yaz and the current Doctor are going to see her in the past – which is her future. Even Dan makes a crack about ‘my mate’s TARDIS is bigger’ – and was it just me, or was he distinctly unsurprised by something being bigger inside than outside?
17 October 2021 at 16:31 #72221So sorry to hear of your loss.
I can’t think of any quotes, but the whole ethos of Who is that every second of time is eternal. Whatever memory you can think of, whatever event, the people we love will always be still living, there, in that moment.
We can’t meet them there again, because we don’t have a TARDIS, but that period between their birth and their death always has existed and always will exist.
24 September 2021 at 22:45 #72095I read that Russell T was returning and I was wondering if April 1st had come early. Then it got reported in the other papers.
Well – I wasn’t expecting that, but definitely great news. He brings the best out in other writers (as well as being a bloody good writer himself).
17 July 2021 at 18:53 #71872They could easily have fixed it by dating the telegram ‘1943’ instead of ‘1940’ though whether that would have fitted with them evacuating from London, I’m not sure.
My favourite reply to the ‘but you used an artefact from the wrong period’ was from the producer of the 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice. In response to eagle eyed viewers spotting that the billiards table Bingham and Darcy were using was ( horror!) Victorian, not Georgian, the producer replied that they knew that perfectly well. However, they explained, Victorian billiard tables were readily available, whereas there were about three Georgian billiard tables left in the country, they were all insured for a million plus – and no one was prepared to let a bunch of actors anywhere near them.
I suspect that’s the explanation for the Lancaster.
3 January 2021 at 21:12 #71316@nerys
Glad it was helpful.UK senior politicians are called ‘Secretary of State for xxx’ just as in the U.S. The terms date from the same period. However, the UK has a practice of calling any Secretary of State who is also in the Cabinet ‘Minister’.
So, unlike the US, ‘Secretary’ is often a signal that you aren’t in one of the really important government posts. (The exceptions are Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary which are Great Offices of State – but you’d always call them ‘Home Secretary/Foreign Secretary’ to make it clear they are Very Important Secretaries.)
3 January 2021 at 18:11 #71314We see the Dalek from Resolution being driven away, there is a stop at the side of the road, the truck is driven away, there is huddled discussion between Robertson and the scientist, there is a demonstration of the Dalek to the corrupt politician…
Yup. It was a long slow burn of a set up. That is, the plot proceeded methodically towards the explosive finale – slow burns are a normal film technique and as you say, Chibnall uses them in his other work.
So. We see the Dalek from Resolution being driven away, the brief dialogue between driver and supervisor having established that even the burnt out shell is still considered highly dangerous. It also establishes that the driver has a sick mum, a weakness for tea and permission to stop.
Why the tea? Well, it establishes that the driver was doing nothing wrong. Nice bloke with sick mother. It also establishes that CCHQ knows this is a potentially dangerous load but do not realise somebody wants to steal it. This is important.
There is a stop at the side of the road and the driver is poisoned. Again, why the tea? Well, because we were in MI6 a few episodes ago and nobody even mentioned to the Doctor that there was a missing Dalek casing. Which means the writer has to pick a hijacking method which doesn’t allow the driver to call for help, plus a bit of backstory which explains both why he’d stop and why CCHQ might think he’d possibly had a nervous breakdown and become a missing person rather than a crime victim. They’re not putting out an all points bulletin for a stolen Dalek while the Doctor is working with MI6, they’re thinking that the Dalek casing is on a junk pile somewhere or possibly still inside an abandoned container. Later they realise it got sold to Robertson.
The tea-poisoning also re-establishes Robertson as an utterly ruthless piece of work, quite willing to murder people to make a profit. Leo is also established as over-enthusiastic and willing to turn a blind eye to underhand methods of getting hold of tech. This fits in with his later willingness to incinerate something alive – very charming person, our Leo, but he really wasn’t very nice.
Finally, the Dalek casings get demonstrated, which establishes that Robertson and Leo (and the corrupt politician) are not planning on establishing a Robocop style reign of terror. The security drones they plan are armed with CS gas and water-cannon, not death rays. Again, this is why nobody bothered to mention the missing Dalek to the Doctor, or her known companions. Its theft has become an embarrassment rather than (they thought) a danger.
Chibnall actually showed us a lot without telling us. Yes, it was slower pacing than we’re used to. Is he as good as Moffat and RTD? No. Is he a perfectly good producer of Doctor Who? Yes. Is his Doctor Who currently aimed at a slightly younger age group than we’ve become used to? Yes.
By the way, I really doubt that Chibnall is completely unaware of Robocop; his MA is in Theatre and Film and he’s displayed a consistent interest in writing fantasy and SF for TV.
2 January 2021 at 22:05 #71304Martin Belam, who wrote this year’s recap over at T’Other Place, made a very good point. He was watching this with his kids, aged seven and ten. The bits he found clunky were also the bits where the seven-year-old was going ‘aha!’
The Verhoeven film was brilliant. It was also rated 18 in the UK. It was not aimed squarely at the family market and it could afford to be far subtler in its satire.
I agree Chibnall’s pacing is considerably slower than both RTD and Moffat, but on a second viewing it feels more like the story has room to breathe – and I remember thinking he was pacing it for the kids, not the adults.
2 January 2021 at 17:05 #71302From a production point of view, I think the neon was to give us an easy way of telling the two Dalek factions apart. From a story point of view, the jazzy light show was to demonstrate that these were human designed Daleks. Face it, we do tend to think everything robotic looks better with flashing lights.
2 January 2021 at 16:58 #71301Ooh, and did anyone notice that the Doctor thinks Jack’s never had a room in the TARDIS but Jack said he had a suite? Either Jack’s travelled with a now forgotten incarnation, or their timelines are slightly out of synch.
2 January 2021 at 16:54 #71300Yes, I thought that was pretty good. I think the Doctor being tossed in the clink for nineteen years may have been a slight leg pull for Steven Moffat and his ‘am I a good man’ arc, in that the Whittaker Doctor has now also had a long period of identity crisis … but offscreen.
The ten month mistake also proved to have dramatic point, as it was long enough for Ryan to settle back into life on Earth and to have time to realise he preferred it to travelling among the stars. I think Graham was always (barring Tim Shaw) more along to try and protect his grandson, so it made perfect sense that he’d go when Ryan went.
TARDISES are sentient – which also means that TARDIS may have consented to a suicide run if it would save a planet from being destroyed by Daleks. We don’t know; it wasn’t included in the script.
I am still somewhat annoyed at Gallifrey being destroyed yet again, but only somewhat. The Doctor briefly considered changing the timeline so she got back earlier – so I’m happy to wait until the end of this arc to see if there’s another timeline change coming for Gallifrey. If we’re constantly being reminded that Time Lords can change time, I’ll presume a major time change is coming up before the end of Act III.
And I loved the way Ryan and Graham ended their arc the way it began – with Grace still with them in spirit and Ryan still trying to ride that bike.
26 December 2020 at 14:33 #71253Hope everyone had a good and safe Christmas and that you all managed to eat and drink too much even in these most difficult times.
Merry Christmas
Pip
28 November 2020 at 17:09 #71187I’ll start by saying I don’t really know any more than anyone else on this one, but while Bradley and Tosin are ‘strongly rumoured’ to be leaving as regular characters (other work commitments, basically) – there are equally strong rumours that they’re not.
One solution to these conflicting rumours would be that they’re no longer in every episode, solving the ‘supposed to be filming in two places simultaneously’ problem. Yaz is the regular, Ryan and Graham are appearing ‘as and when’- bit like Freema Aygeman who left the TARDIS but was in several episodes afterwards.
25 November 2020 at 15:40 #71176@blenkinsopthebrave and @geoffers
The not-always-good Captain is front and centre in one of the BBC publicity photos, so it’s now as official as it gets.
23 November 2020 at 12:04 #71169@nerys
Glad to hear the news that your Dad’s oxygen levels are now up to scratch and they’re thinking in terms of a move to rehab. That is good news. As @dentarthurdent says, not wanting to read etc is part of resting – and from what I’ve been told, a more serious dose of Covid is really energy-sapping.My Mum lives back in North Wales and they’ve ended up having to put similar travel restrictions in place – to the extent of police checking people travelling over the border are doing so for essential purposes. I mean, seriously? The Welsh-English border hasn’t been a real border for centuries. We make jokes about it! There’s even border jokes in Doctor Who and Torchwood!
But now we have a real border again. Undoubtedly a temporary one, but who knows what the long term effects are going to be? The village shop was telling her they’ve never been busier – not because non-villagers are driving there to shop, but because the villagers want to go to the nearest large town as little as possible.
@winston
Toilet paper is definitely a self fulfilling prophecy. Having been unable to buy any, I’m now keeping a spare pack in my cupboard and bought a larger pack than usual. This is undoubtedly contributing to the shortage, but what else can you do if you can’t rely on any TP being available?19 November 2020 at 16:23 #71156@nerys
Glad to hear your Dad seems to be staying stable. Yeah, COVID is very weird and can present with all sorts of symptoms (or none at all). I think Strange Noises hit about 10% or so.18 November 2020 at 20:47 #71152I classed the archive as handwavium – the Master showed he can hack the Matrix more than once, so I’d expect him to be able to copy the interesting bits. But we’ll see.
I think the definite ‘unreliable narrator’ bit for me is where Brendan in the cover story is deliberately shot by a criminal, but the Master is oddly insistent that the Timeless Child’s first death was in fact two children playing, a childish shove that accidentally sent her over the cliff.
One of those is a lie. But which one? And why would the Master care about the reputation of some ancient child?
The other interesting thing is hiding in plain sight. The title.
If this is a story about ‘The Timeless Child’, why is it called ‘The Timeless Children‘?
Yeah, he’s an unreliable narrator. This affects him in more ways than some spliced-in genes. 🙂
18 November 2020 at 17:27 #71149He actually hasn’t ignored everything that’s gone before, any more than, say, RTD ignored everything we knew about the Master when he decided to make him a) driven insane by the Time Vortex and then b) driven insane by a homing signal sent through the Time Vortex by Rassillon. In a very similar way, Chibnall has given us information we didn’t previously know about the character’s life before his/her first appearance on our screens. The interesting twist is that the character didn’t know it either. As you say, the Master may be acting as Mr Unreliable Narrator, but the appearance of the Fugitive Doctor suggests there IS a gap in the Doctor’s memory.
This episode was the Act II climax, I’d suggest, which means things may seem very different by Act III. But rather than ignoring backstory, the idea explains a lot that’s puzzling about The Doctor. Why she’s so mistrusted, why she takes no responsibility for Gallifrey even when he’s the elected President, why the Time Lords seem ‘engineered’, even why there was such a mismatch between the number of children on Gallifrey and Time Lord life spans.
Is she a River Song? A mutation from over-exposure to the Time Vortex during conception? Was she abandoned because her own people could not cope with regeneration?
Incidentally, you can materialise inside the TARDIS – it implies the Judoon or the Shadow Proclamation now have TARDISlike technology, but it’s been done both pre and post gap. It’s best done when the shields are down.
18 November 2020 at 17:02 #71148Ah, yes, the mad queues at the supermarket. Currently I’m in Lockdown 2, the sequel and supermarkets here are a lot calmer. Apart from toilet paper. Why there was panic buying of toilet paper at the beginning of both English lockdowns is one of life’s little mysteries, especially since the UK not only manufactures toilet paper, it exports the stuff. But I think most people had at least stocked up on food this time – certainly I’m trying to keep enough tins in the cupboards that having to self isolate isn’t a massive problem.
My self isolation episodes are beginning to look like the Star Wars saga, but so far I’ve been lucky and got a (negative) test each time.
Definitely make your own face masks – you need a double or triple layer of cloth, but they’re pretty easy.
@blenkinsopthebrave We Are Living Nervously sounds like a great title for a history of this pandemic.
17 November 2020 at 22:55 #71139To be honest, the reason given for the original rumour (police box is to be changed because of the way the police are perceived by the public) sounds like something someone’s made up for its click bait value.
The whole reason the BBC still has the trademark was because the Metropolitan Police lost their case that the iconic blue box is a ‘police’ box. The ruling was that the general public will, if they see a police box, assume it’s the TARDIS. 🙂
I reckon it’s either a pile of rubbish, a rumour aimed at smoking out a leaker in the production team or something happening in one or two episodes being released because it’s guaranteed to get people talking about the new series.
17 November 2020 at 22:40 #71138The BBC owns the trademark for the TARDIS. Furthermore, the TARDIS has changed its outward appearance before – Baker2 and Capaldi – but only for a short period each time.
Basically, I can imagine the BBC signing off again on a temporary change to their highly valuable trademarked property, but not on anything permanent.
It’s possible that the storyline is heading in a direction where the Doctor is losing all her ‘props’ – Gallifrey, Time Lord and now the Police Box – in a way that symbolises the past she now knows she’s lost. But if that’s the direction I’d expect it to end with the Police Box back as she gets her sense of self and identity (what you’re describing as authority) back.
17 November 2020 at 13:35 #71136I suspect it MAY be connected with the Fugitive Doctor/Timeless Child storyline. The Judoon still have that millennia old arrest warrant and a very, very annoyed officer who had his horn removed. So it may be that the Doctor realises that the appearance of a Police Box results in a squad or more of Judoon appearing – and TEMPORARILY changes the Police Box appearance (until this storyline is resolved).
It’s certainly a great publicity item, because the Police Box is so iconic that they used it for the Ruth/Fugitive Doctor to immediately reveal her ‘Doctor’ status.
17 November 2020 at 10:32 #71134@nerys
That’s good news! Hoping and praying that your Dad continues along the needs-hospital-but-not-intensive-care pathway to recovery.@dentarthurdent Sorry, do you mean there isn’t a giant glowing eye in the middle of New Zealand?
12 November 2020 at 23:42 #71127So sorry to hear about your father and I hope the Remdesvir treatment goes well.
Even if you were living close by, the hospital very likely wouldn’t let you visit. That’s the worst of it – quite a few people I know have had COVID and you just have to hope and pray each time that they’re one of the lucky ones. I hope your Dad is too.
@thane16 Sorry to hear about your Mum. Lots of hugs.
Best wishes to you both.
27 July 2020 at 20:18 #70859Hi, everyone
Terrible news. Forty one is far too young. He was a real enthusiast who helped make his Guardian blog a lovely place to be – one of the few above-the-line commentators who’d join in below-the-line and (sometimes) argue it out with posters. You could tell he saw himself as a fellow fan, not simply a critic.
22 July 2020 at 22:53 #70845@blenkinsopthebrave and @janetteb
Only one TV appearance, yes. There was a name check in the Moffat era – Twice Upon A Time?
No,I wouldn’t bother with the Valeyard episodes, Janette. It was very much ‘what the heck is going on here?’ but not in a good way. Good actors and crew slogging their way through as scriptwriters died, script editors resigned, the BBC cut the 50 minute episodes back to 25 minutes so Doctor Who had to dump every commissioned script… amazing that they managed to get something half decent on screen.
As the joke goes, I don’t want it good, I want it Tuesday. They managed Tuesday.
Of course, the really interesting question is now whether the Valeyard is ‘future’ or ‘past’. Or was always a possibility, an ‘alternate Doctor’, that the Doctor has to avoid.
22 July 2020 at 19:10 #70842@craig
Quatermass and the Pit Part 1 also seems to have been visited by an inept hacker.22 July 2020 at 19:00 #70841@master124 and @devilishrobby
Yes, it actually explains a lot. Why the Time Lords have always seemed so … genetically engineered as survival machines (they are), why the Doctor is almost universally loathed on Gallifrey (no aliens on Gallifrey, but the Doctor is The Alien Who Must Not Be Mentioned).Why the Doctor is so different (he/she is different). Why Time Lords live for thousands of years but Gallifrey has 2.47 billion children (Shogobhans are the original Gallifreyans and don’t regenerate).
In terms of what kind of stories can be derived from it, we’ve got the question of whether the Master has really made Day of The Doctor kind of pointless, or whether the Doctor can save Gallifrey’s children again. We’ve got the mystery back – the Doctor joins the large number of mythological foundlings and nobody has a clue who or what she/he is. So various ‘quest’ possibilities.
Then there’s the ‘Master as unreliable narrator’ possibility. I keep looking at that ‘child who kills the Timeless Child’ and wondering. Just how long has the Master been killing the Doctor? Since before they were even ‘The Doctor’ and ‘The Master’?
Plus, more guest actors as ‘The Doctor’ because we’re no longer constrained to the current TV Doctor – or even to one-and-only-one series on air at a time. RTD did it by bringing back Liz Sladen to headline as Promoted Assistant, but the ability to have different Doctors the way Star Trek has different ships is a plus for me. A franchisable Doctor Who is far more likely to continue in today’s box-set on-demand multiple channel TV environment.
29 May 2020 at 22:32 #70721@shepherd
As @winston says, there isn’t a transgender agenda. Female actors have been taking male roles for centuries (and male actors have been taking female roles for millennia). Women have played Prospero, Hamlet and King Lear – and I promise you that I can find you examples of women playing some of those roles before the word ‘transgender’ was even coined. The Doctor isn’t transgender, just as the pregnant male in the Tsangra Conundrum wasn’t transgender. The non human characters in Doctor Who do stuff differently, that’s all, and Moffat and Chibnall between them found a way to make our Gallifreyan shape shifters able to change gender as well as bodies.In Star Trek they were able to get round it by placing the female Captains in different ships, but regeneration is now so firmly established that only Doctor Who can headline Doctor Who.
Personally, I think RTD making the Doctor a genocide was a much bigger change to canon than the discovery that she may have been adopted from a non-Gallifreyan species. Especially since the Timeless Child reveal was positioned as a between-series cliffhanger – and as @blenkinsopthebrave has pointed out frequently, the Master isn’t exactly Mr Reliable Narrator. 🙂
28 May 2020 at 23:06 #70715So who do we get to replace Chibnall for the next season? This is tough. truly tough.
Especially tough because he’s already confirmed for the next series. Or season. So is Jodie Whittaker. Sorry about that.
If your internal conception of the Doctor is an authority figure, then the Whittaker Doctor isn’t going to be your cup of tea – because her Doctor is experimenting with a less authoritarian, more truthful, more dare-I-say-it feminine style of leadership. And one of the funny things about the stereotypically female leadership style (participatory and team-building) is it tends to be seen as losing authority when it’s used in a male-dominated area. Such as playing a role where most actors and writers have gone with:
“I’m the Doctor and this is the situation and you need to do this to fix it.”
This particular thread is for TV Shows that aren’t Doctor Who, so I’ll bring in Picard – in the episodes I’ve seen to date, the production team are also playing with the idea of ‘authority’. Picard isn’t an ‘authority figure’ any more, and he clearly finds it both disconcerting and upsetting. It raises the question of whether his ‘authority’ was accepted not because people realised Picard was right, but simply because of his place in the Starfleet hierarcy.
The point is that looking at ‘authority’ – whether through how we perceive it or through leadership styles or whether it changes when someone’s gender changes – is a perfectly valid thing for a writer to do.
I’d go further and say that casting a woman in the role of the Doctor and then demanding that she play the part exactly like the men did is a complete waste of time; might as well not bother. Moffat, for example, didn’t demand that Michelle Gomez base her Missy on the previous Masters (I think Gomez has said she didn’t even look at the previous performances).
He pretty much stepped on Doctor Who with this rewriting of his entire canon origin from the beginning till now.
Since you could say that about just about every major change in Doctor Who since William Hartnell regenerated into Patrick Troughton, I’d say a willingness to rewrite canon when required is part of the Showrunner’s job description. I’d also say that the angst over the Timeless Child rewrite is a bit of a Twitterstorm – again, comparing it with other TV shows, Star Trek: Discovery rewrote canon to give Spock an entirely new foster-sister who not only has her very own show but then proceeded to rewrite half the previously accepted canon about Spock’s backstory. And the mushroom drive? Since when did Star Trek spaceships fly on mushrooms? That metaphor didn’t just extend, it achieved warp speed and visited entirely new dimensions.
I believe Discovery’s rewriting of canon also created something of a Twitterstorm, but I enjoyed the story. 🙂
26 May 2020 at 11:05 #70711Good to know.
I suspect the reason I’m liking Discovery better than Picard (apart from one being straight-up action adventure and the other aspiring to drama) is that Discovery stuck to the episodic style and Picard seems to be designed for a binge-watch. Since I don’t binge-watch, the current downward curve seems blinkin’ endless.
25 May 2020 at 18:19 #70709I suspect the videos have been carefully selected – at least, in my part of London people are generally being very careful and keeping apart. However I could, if I wanted to, find a large group to film, (teenage boys, usually) all suffering from ‘it can’t happen to me’ syndrome. The Thames Path last weekend was also extremely busy, and I think you could have got a camera angle that would make it look less-than-two-metre crowded, but the reality was that people were keeping their distance.
@nerys – yeah, I think population density (or lack thereof) has a lot to do with the rate of spread. Simple maths – even if only one in 400 people have Covid, but you live in an area with 4000 people per km squared, that’s ten people you can be infected by – without going out of your local area. But in a rural area with maybe 150 people per km squared, there’s quite possibly not anyone nearby to catch Covid from.
25 May 2020 at 17:17 #70708Hi, just popping my head up above the hibernation parapet.
So – I notice a lot of people on here liked Picard, but I’m currently on Episode 5 and feel as if the writers have mislaid their Prozac. Does it get any more cheerful? Any slight hint of optimism? At the moment I’m half expecting Picard to return home to discover the chateau has been torched, the Romulan bodyguards have died protecting it and the dog has been nailed to the gatepost a la Gladiator. All the characters seem to have a little sign above their heads saying ‘tragic angst delivered here’.
Currently I vastly prefer Discovery, especially Season 2.
1 May 2020 at 11:11 #70568I think this two-parter would have a much higher reputation if it hadn’t come immediately before Blink. Three really excellent episodes in a row.
I’d agree that most of the humour in this episode comes from the villains – because this is a classic tragedy for everyone. Latimer (and Hutchinson) at least have their tragedy diverted by Latimer’s foreknowledge, but everyone else (except The Doctor) ends up either dead or emotionally wrecked.
To be fair to David Tennant: firstly, I don’t think you’d ever really cast him as an ordinary schoolmaster in 1913, secondly ‘John Smith’ is not from 1913. As is made clear from the script, he’s been dumped down with a bunch of facts, not any real emotional memories. Tennant did try to play ‘John Smith’ (apparently he introduced himself in the read-through as playing John Smith), but he was trying to play a character who thought he was real, not a character like Pip Torrens’ Headmaster, who was.
If you notice, the Headmaster has real, emotional memories to play in that excellent script, whereas John Smith only has a geographical description of where his supposed home was located.
The Chameleon Arch for the Martin Doctor seemingly works much better – but that might represent a difference between the Tennant Doctor (who seems oblivious to the emotional impact he has on other people) and the Martin Doctor (who seems incredibly tough, but who’s programmed in emotional memories that explain why she doesn’t want to talk about or think about her past).
The Martin Doctor presumably remembers her real childhood, of course, so we can guess that those feelings of isolation represented by the remote lighthouse could be real childhood feelings.
Yes, the Tennant Doctor is simultaneously very self-absorbed and very self-pitying. But it might not be Tennant who picked that over-emotional performance. I remember in his final episode he gave the director about five readings of ‘I don’t want to go’, ranging from very muted to completely OTT. The director made the final choice, not the actor and it could easily be the same here.
23 April 2020 at 19:48 #70510I’m wondering whether racial integration was really so smooth in 1929.
Not one of my historical areas, so I wouldn’t know about Central Park Hooverville specifically – but Wikipedia says that the St Louis Hooverville was well known for being completely integrated. Given that, I’d say that whether or not it’s historically true, it’s allowable artistic licence for the Whoniverse Central Park Hooverville to have the integration that was in St Louis in our world.
Rather like Thin Ice, where every black person in London obviously decided to visit the Frost Fair on the same day. Artistic licence, again. There were Black people in London then and they might have all been at the Frost Fair on the day Bill and the Doctor turned up. 🙂
One of those with the iffiest accent is Andrew Garfield, of later Amazing Spider-man fame.
I think that’s probably because he was asked to do a Tennessee accent, and he’s from Los Angeles (though at that point, he’d mostly lived in Essex). Kerry Shale displayed a similarly dodgy accent in Day of the Moon – a Canadian actor asked to do a Floridian accent; didn’t go well.
The author, Helen Raynor, has done surprisingly little work outside the DWU.
Not actually true. She’s had a reasonably busy career outside the Whoniverse, but not if you compare it with top-level writers like Moffat and Davies. Post Who she’s done a series for BBC Wales (Baker Boys) and was lead writer for Mr Selfridge. Currently I think she’s got several treatments out and a pilot filmed, but I dunno if any of them have been greenlit. She’s also done an episode for Call The Midwife this year.
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