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29 October 2018 at 20:02 #65152
the Donald Trump character with the terrible American accent (on purpose) was ridiculously jolly.
There’s a long-standing joke in acting circles that it’s always the actors who are genuinely from the area who are told how terrible their accents are. Given that Chris Noth is originally from Wisconsin, I suspect the accent was very much on purpose.
I have noticed that this rule is being followed to the full by those BTL at T’Other Place, though more with the Northern accents than the North American ones. 🙂
29 October 2018 at 17:12 #65141Am I the only one who is noticing that in every episode so far, the “baddy” is white and male
Yup, because as @miapatrick points out, that simply isn’t true. The baddy has been, respectively, alien, non-white (possibly alien), from the dominant race in a racist society, and not orange, honest, because the Orange One will probably sue if we don’t make it clear the character is not Donald Trump.
The main baddies have been male, but Chibbers has done previous episodes where the main baddie has been female – so it’s more likely that he’s deliberately riffing off the fact that he’s switched the Doctor’s apparent sex, and so is establishing her authority against male villains before he gets to the female villains.
29 October 2018 at 17:01 #65140@msrbahar
I can’t wait until you hit the episode about Partition…
Seriously, are you the sort of person who, when told that someone is from Texas, insists that you already said they were from Louisiana?
28 October 2018 at 21:55 #65085Yes, after much angst she eventually ended up with the Doctor-Donna clone with the human lifespan.
But on the whole, I don’t think ‘You’ll end up trapped in an entirely different dimension’ counts as ‘being kept safe’, even if Rose did end up with a wealthy Dad, a boyfriend and possibly a TARDIS.
Yes, that’s how I felt about the Capaldi Doctor. Hopefully the Whittaker Doctor isn’t going to be like that for you.
@pedant
Yes, those shadow puppets! I’d love to know if that was in the script, or was something the actor came up with.28 October 2018 at 21:45 #65084YOU HAVE LEFT YOUR CAPS LOCK BUTTON ON. IT’S ON THE LEFT OF THE KEYBOARD.
28 October 2018 at 21:21 #65080@rob
Yes, I noticed that. In fact, I remember saying for The Woman Who Fell To Earth that the Whittaker Doctor seemed to be considerably more honest than previous incarnations.But I don’t think it’s necessarily a ‘female’ thing. If you think about it, things have ended badly for every single AG Who Companion. It may simply be that this more honest incarnation has decided that not only can’t she keep her Companions safe, but letting them think she can at least contributed to Clara’s death. Better to admit it – and at least their run started with a death, so they know the stakes.
28 October 2018 at 20:46 #65075But a sense of peril somewhat missing this week.
Comedy horror, I think. I was laughing my socks off, anyway – though that may be because ‘fear of spiders’ appears to be absent from the Bluesqueakpip genome. But there were definitely a few places where even I was going ‘Yikes, that’s a BIG spider’.
They were lovely spiders. Really good CGI, very alive, much better than the ones in Kill The Moon.
I am now completely sold on the Whittaker Doctor. Things were starting to come together for me last week, but this week’s story cemented it. She’s the Doctor. 😀
27 October 2018 at 23:44 #65044So – anyone see this?
27 October 2018 at 17:17 #65041@msrbahar
Anyway, getting back to the music – @thane16 will probably know more about this than I do, but the hiring of musicians became much less ‘white male’ when many of the top symphony orchestras introduced auditions from behind a screen.
That is, the panel couldn’t see who was playing – they could only hear how they were playing.
27 October 2018 at 17:00 #65039@msrbahar
Welcome to the English language. English is a global language, and words from one area of the globe may have different meaning in other parts of the world.
For example, ‘African-American’, to a British person, would mean ‘a black person from the United States of America’. ‘African’ would mean ‘born in, or a citizen of an African country’, and the British history of colonial involvement in Africa means that they might be white, black, or possibly ethnically Asian.
Ryan’s from Sheffield. To date, it looks like his Dad is also from Sheffield and his Nan was from Sheffield. Unless it turns out that his Mum was from Guyana or somewhere, he’s not an African in the British sense. He’s English, or Black British if you need to specify ethnicity.
‘Indian’, to a British person, would mean ‘born in, or a citizen of India’. Yaz has specifically mentioned being called a rude word for people who have Pakistani ancestry – so she’s not ‘Indian’. I’m not even sure if she could claim Pakistani citizenship by now, as it looks like she’s about third-generation Sheffield.
Brits use ‘Asian’ because we commonly distinguish between ‘Indian’, ‘Pakistani’ and ‘Bangladeshi’. So Yaz is English, or ‘British Asian’ if you need to specify ethnicity.
I’m not sure why you think this is political correctness. If you described an actor as ‘American’ and someone replied ‘No, they’re Canadian, or I suppose you could say North American’, how is that politically correct?
26 October 2018 at 00:10 #64990In a sense, the revelation that Krasko was a racist from the future wasn’t a big deal for me; I’ve read other SF where there’s still racism in the future.
But I think the big danger with racism is seeing it as an ‘alt-right’ thing, rather than an ‘othering’ and ‘stereotyping’ which can become toxic in pretty well any human grouping. That was one of the things the episode handled really well – racism as an institution which sucks everyone in. Graham did not want to be the unknown ‘white male’ who Rosa Parks was supposed to give up her seat to – but he had no choice.
Just as, earlier in the episode, the Doctor sits next to Rosa on the bus – and is told that if she continues to sit there, Rosa will have to move. Neither the Doctor nor Graham want to be racist; the system both forces them to act as if they are racist and (the policeman who checks the motel room) punishes them if they don’t perform those actions.
The episode had only fifty minutes, so understandably concentrated on Rosa’s fight against what you might call ‘othering’ – keeping a certain section of the population as legal second-class citizens. That tends to be the ethno-nationalist variety. But the stereotyping type of racism is found on both sides of the political spectrum. And that smugness you mentioned, that’s particularly prevalent in the UK because we’ve never had racist laws, can crop up on both sides of the political spectrum as well.
What you can end up with is a toxic brew where people will simultaneously apply racist stereotypes, or use racist terms, while smugly thinking that they’re anti-racist. Because often, when we talk about the fight against racism in the UK, we talk about fighting that alt-right, nazi stuff.
Using a couple of recent examples that I’ve seen – someone presuming a black MP must be a Labour MP, because black people can’t possibly be Tory, someone else responding to a British Jew’s worries about rising UK antisemitism by demanding to know their opinion on the Israel/Palestine conflict. I can think of quite a few other examples, and the people they came from were, to my definite knowledge, left-of-centre to left-wing.
Racist violence of the type that we saw in Rosa? No. But using social pressure to force ethnic minority people to fit into a particular box, definitely.
25 October 2018 at 22:33 #64984I found my sleep improved hugely when I used the parental access controls to set a timer on my OWN tablet and computer. Now, if only I could set a timer on my bladder…
@lisa
There’s nothing wrong with having an opinion about Brexit (however you voted or would have voted if you’d been living here) – but the entire UK has an opinion about Brexit. Really. We had an intensive debate about Brexit. We voted on Brexit. We continued having an intensive debate about Brexit. We had an election which was mainly about Brexit. Then we continued having an intensive debate … and now some people want yet another vote … and maybe another election … followed by more intensive debates, and …So be aware that if you want to talk about Brexit, it’s very quickly going to get angsty. 😈
I’m kind of hoping that Chibbers avoids mentioning the B-word during this series, because – whatever opinion you express about Brexit – someone will disagree with it. Which is what tends to happen when there’s a 52/48 split over a major constitutional question.
25 October 2018 at 18:58 #64965@msrbahar
Those who use IMHO are generally shouting ‘I am not remotely humble!’
In my not-remotely-humble-opinion, of course.
Other points to note are that you somehow managed to remember the last names of every single man you mentioned, including Segun Akinola, James Horner, John Williams, Davies, Moffat – but apparently being on your phone renders you completely unable to remember who the heck the leading actor is – or, for that matter, even spell the tiny bit of her name that you can remember. So I’m forced to conclude that your phone is pretty sexist, and you should probably switch brands.
My taste has been pretty consistently backed up by history
This generally translates as ‘I like popular stuff, but I’m a bit ahead of most trends.’ Fair enough. But telling a PhD in Musicology than you know more than they do does connect fairly solidly with your use of IMHO. Personally, I’m not terribly fond of Wagner – if I end up in Hell, they’ll probably stuff me in a chamber with Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg on a never-ending loop – but that doesn’t mean I think he’s a terrible composer, just that I don’t like him. In my definitely-not-humble opinion, of course.
And yes that is exactly what I meant:
Uh, huh. You really need to switch your phone brand – it’s making what you type sound pretty racist as well as sexist. Maybe make the plunge back to a dumb phone – it might suit you.
In my humble-yeah-right opinion, of course.
23 October 2018 at 22:27 #64880And no wonder Toisin Cole played the moment where he got to stay for the meeting with such a huge grin. Ryan actually got to hear Rosa Parks and Dr Martin Luther King Jr. plan the beginnings of the Montgomery Bus Boycott! How historic is that?
23 October 2018 at 22:19 #64878Dramatic license, I think. They wanted to skate over the ‘planned’ aspect of Rosa Parks’ protest. Mainly because if they had explained that the strategy meeting was to discuss such a protest, poor Jodie Whittaker would have been landed with an incredibly long speech explaining why they still had to stick with the exact history.
Because if the audience had known (or been reminded) that Rosa Parks and her allies were determined to make such a protest at the first opportunity, then the plot starts to fall into a deep, dark, hole. Unless Krasko’s going to buy Rosa Parks a car or something, there’s realistically no way he can continually stop her refusing to give up her seat.
So the plot went with the emotional truth, showed that there was a strategy meeting that night, and had Ryan there to hear the planning. Those who know the history in detail are left to presume that the Whittaker Doctor did her incredibly long speech explaining why every little detail had to be right off camera. 😀
23 October 2018 at 20:55 #64865The South would not have been at all tolerant – they would have ordered her to the back of the bus, too
Yes, I was a bit ‘suspension of disbelief’ about that too – so I checked. It seems that Malorie Blackman and Chris Chibnall got it pretty much correct in their research, because while Yaz would have experienced social prejudice in Alabama, the ‘Jim Crow’ laws largely didn’t apply to her. There weren’t enough Hispanics in the Alabama of that period for discrimination to be enshrined in the legal system the way it was for black people.
She could legally have sat in the White section of the bus, because legally, she wasn’t classed as ‘colored’. So it was within reason that the bus driver wouldn’t bother – especially since she had a British accent, was talking to British accented white people and was probably going to be gone in a couple of days. But as we saw, anywhere privately owned could tell her ‘We don’t serve Mexicans’.
23 October 2018 at 20:07 #64856@craig and @jimthefish
I’m sure we used to have a better quality of trolls in the old days.
Anyway, to quote one of my posts over at T’Other Place:
“The other point that occurs to me is that it would have been the wrong power balance. Instead of this being a historically based story about a moment where a black woman protested systematic injustice, it becomes yet another story where Mighty Whitey swoops in to save the poor oppressed souls. That was certainly the impression I got from Whittaker’s performance – that the Doctor very quickly realised that her skin colour meant any help had to be ‘in the background’, rather than her normal front and centre style.”
23 October 2018 at 14:51 #64840Yes, Lady Cranleigh thanks them for staying for the funeral. There’s also a scene in Remembrance of the Daleks where the Doctor and Ace accompany the cortege to the door of the church, but then quietly slip away rather than go in. (Remembrance of the Daleks also had a lot to say about racism, btw).
But I can’t think of one post Time War, and I can’t think of a previous scene where the audience sees the Doctor actually at the funeral itself, listening to someone’s eulogy. So I think it’s meant to say something – what?
That she’s no longer getting into her little Blue Box and flying away, leaving others to inform the family and explain the circumstances?
23 October 2018 at 14:09 #64838There are approximately 56 stories set in the historical past, many of which include real figures from history. There are also another 12 serials where there was no extra-terrestrial threat – what you might call the ‘true historicals’.
So, out of those sixty eight historically based stories – many of which had ‘I can’t change the past’ as a major plot point – what in particular angered you so much about this one?
23 October 2018 at 11:19 #64836@arch
Two possibilities:
1. The question is being saved for later and there’s another episode with Sharon D. Clarke.
2. This episode was the answer, and they’ll never need to ask the question.This is the first time the gang have really experienced the power of time travel, and the first lesson they learnt was not to change the past.
If it’s so important to make sure Rosa gets on the right bus, on the right date, with the right driver, and with enough white people – when there were other people making such protests – then it’s important to accept that Grace is dead, and that can’t be changed. Which, in fact, they were accepting – the little joke about ‘I wish she was here’/’I’m glad she isn’t, she’d start a riot’.
One thing I did notice was that the set-up for Grace’s death very carefully made sure that the gang had no reason whatsoever to blame the Doctor. Grace was told to do her task and then get somewhere safe – but chose to go into danger anyway. She died trying to help Ryan and the Doctor, yes, but it was very much her own choice.
And the Doctor was at the funeral. I can’t emphasise enough how unusual that is for the Doctor; I’m not sure that there is another episode where we see the Doctor go all the way through with the funeral service, going inside the church and listening to the eulogy – even if she does prefer to stand at the back.
23 October 2018 at 09:23 #64833What do you mean by ‘one-dimensional’?
The villain was ‘one dimensional’ because he essentially refused to reveal anything about himself. Rosa Parks certainly wasn’t one-dimensional – we found out quite a bit about why this woman would decide she’d had enough. Even James Blake was revealed as a fairly ordinary guy who liked shooting pool and fishing. Which is kind of the point, really; that level of racism was ordinary. Shoot pool, go fishing, drive bus, scream at black people and leave them to walk home in the rain.
That’s about what you’re going to get, characterisation wise, when the TARDIS gang and Doctor are only on their third episode and so are going to get most of the character development space.
I’ve now watched the episode twice and the only bit I think didn’t work too well was the coda on the end – which I think was there as a history lesson for the kids. Otherwise, a lot of work was done on developing Ryan and Yaz, Ryan’s dead grandmother, and Graham.
22 October 2018 at 00:24 #64778To state the completely obvious – we haven’t any idea what kind of chromosomes an alien from the planet Gallifrey would have, but sequential hermaphrodites are fairly well known in biology. 🙂
21 October 2018 at 20:37 #64745Okay, anyone noticing a theme with the episode villains?
Tim Shaw – pushed off a crane and zapped back to who-knows-where.
Ilin – a hologram, zapped himself back to who-knows-where.
Krasko – gets zapped by Ryan – back to who-knows-where.Are we going to end up with a grand villain meet-up for the finale, or is this just so we don’t know who’s going to be returning?
Also, last week we had reports of ‘cleansing’ by the Stenza, and this week we had an alt-right white supremacist from the future. Coincidence, or is there a racism theme developing?
21 October 2018 at 20:29 #64744@oldgitdotcom
Trolling report: Very poor attempt, little imagination. About 1 out of 10.
Bloody hell, I remember the old days, we had proper trolls back then …
18 October 2018 at 23:07 #64659There is literally nothing in canon that supports the idea that the Doctor would remain contained,
Um. There’s The Wedding of River Song, where he’s regarded as a crazy Soothsayer and it’s Amy who rescues him.
I think the better argument would be that the Doctor is rather frequently contained, but that if it’s for longer than a day or so, there’s probably a plan in view. There were several stories in the Moffat era where the Doctor was imprisoned for months – but it always turned out that he had a reason for not escaping.
18 October 2018 at 22:46 #64658I think we might find out next week if there’s any problems with the Sonic/TARDIS interfacing – but I’ve always presumed that the Doctor is the original designer of the Sonic Screwdriver, but the TARDIS manufactures them. I think that fits best with our seeing the TARDIS produce new Sonics, while the Doctor consistently claims to have invented and improved the device.
Logically, therefore, if the Doctor designed the original, then the Whittaker Doctor’s Sonic should have also been designed to interface with the TARDIS. It might be ‘designed’ in the sense of ‘will need a software update’, but I somehow don’t think she’d have called the device a Sonic Screwdriver unless it had full functionality. It’s not as if he/she hasn’t designed other weird and wonderful devices to detect whatever the script needs him/her to detect. 🙂
18 October 2018 at 20:52 #64646@shinymcshine
What @pedant is gently trying to hint is that this particular discussion site includes posters who are also professional writers and actors. We migrated over here from the Guardian, which is the paper-of-choice for UK arts professionals.
It’s not that your treatment isn’t good, it’s just that episode forums are the places to discuss and analyse the episode script and episode performances. If you post in the form of a script or treatment I know I’ll automatically start analysing your script/treatment, critiquing it and making suggestions for improvement. Because that’s what I’m trained to do. And I really want to be talking about the aired episode. 😀
The Fan Creativity forums are the place to post your creative alternatives.
18 October 2018 at 15:50 #64632@ichabod and @shinymcshine
But it is a video game. It’s made clear it’s a video game. It’s just that this particular video game has real live people taking part.
But the mention of bonuses and race and prize makes it clear that this is a *game* for Art Malik’s character. That’s why he warns them not to touch the water – no fun in it if the contestants get slaughtered. It has to be a game they can win.
Personally, I’m going for ‘the Whittaker Doctor’. I realise that we’re all likely to go for Jodie because there’s a convention of calling women by their first names – but that’s because of the historic subordination of women in our society. Women are called by their first names – just as children are. 😈
She’s the Doctor. And she gets accorded exactly the same status as any other Doctor. Which means, since I tend to call the other Doctor’s by their surnames, she’s ‘the Whittaker Doctor’. 😀
17 October 2018 at 11:16 #64594Not sure that there’s nothing more to know about the Whittaker Doctor than we’ve seen. I liked her better in this episode than I did in the first one, so it may simply be that she’s a ‘slow grower’ for a lot of us.
But that sudden collapse into ‘I’ve failed’ was definitely a bit odd – and if the ‘Timeless Child’ is her (and that could easily refer to the Doctor), is that something to do with it?
But anyway, while I understand why she and Chibbers both felt it was better for her not to watch the previous Doctors, that means she’s in the position of feeling her way into a notoriously nebulous role. So definitely give it an entire series.
Mind you, I hope she’s not a method actor. Yeah, you’re a several thousand years old shape changing alien who’s just flipped gender. Take that, Stanislavski! 😀
16 October 2018 at 12:17 #64564Or the guns are self-aiming. And the sniper robots were designed to be an obstacle to the race, rather than slaughtering all the remaining contestants.
Because they definitely had attended the Stormtrooper School of Sniper Training, and their weapons were rather low powered. 🙂
16 October 2018 at 11:18 #6456116 October 2018 at 10:46 #64557A few thoughts about Graham and Grace:
Graham is supposed to be in remission from cancer, yet he recovers from the exposure to vacuum more quickly than either Ryan or Yaz. It should be the other way round: the younger, fitter companions should be the one out of the medipod first.
Graham makes a joke about ‘will people stop sticking stuff inside me’.
Graham didn’t expect to recover from the cancer – he appears to be retired from driving a bus.
Grace is Ryan’s Nan, and Ryan clearly adored her. Yet her son wouldn’t come to her funeral.
Grace clearly wants Ryan to accept Graham as his ‘grandfather’.
Grace reacts with (over) confidence to the aliens, and is eager to destroy the surveillance device. So eager that she both risks her life and gets killed – and while doing so says something along the lines of ‘try to kill me, will you?’
Grace was Graham’s chemo nurse, and in a perfect position to insert more advanced healing technology. Previous episodes written by Chris Chibnall make it clear that Rory (another nurse) was deliberately collecting such advanced technology and using it on his human patients – but did it in a way that wasn’t spotted.
We know from Episode 2 that people were being ‘cleansed’ by the Stenza, and that some of them were running as far and as fast as they could.
Possibilities? One is that Grace was one of the people running from the Stenza, and had hidden on Earth. This could explain Graham’s unexpected recovery from both cancer and exposure to vacuum (she loved him, and so saved his life with advanced healing tech that’s still inside him), Ryan’s Dad’s not turning up (he either knows to stay clear, or is Grace’s stepson) and the aliens turning up in Sheffield (they know there’s an escapee, but can’t spot the right one).
Thoughts?
14 October 2018 at 21:59 #64477I’ll have to check on a rewatch, but I’m fairly sure that there was a mention of a medipod for Yaz, at least, and Ryan also looked like he was waking up in something that could have been a medical unit.
Certainly that was my default assumption, since the humans definitely would have needed medical attention. Gallifreyans like the Doctor, probably not.
14 October 2018 at 20:48 #64468Setting aside the question of the Doctor and the other three surviving unprotected in space for even the second or two before they were scooped up,
They had at least ninety seconds before permanent damage, and maybe as long as four minutes – for obvious reasons, NASA has done a fair amount of experimentation on it. For equally obvious reasons the episode glossed over the projectile vomiting, major toileting failure, seizures, paralysis – but while test animals (and accidental people) lost consciousness very quickly, they also recovered completely after pressure was restored. It seems that as long as the heart keeps beating, recovery is possible. Once it stops, the damage is too great.
I think Arthur C. Clarke’s Earthlight uses this to evacuate a spacecraft when there aren’t enough spacesuits – essentially, they haul everyone across within the time limits (though he has people staying conscious for longer than they realistically would).
13 October 2018 at 22:26 #64441Ha!
I admit my first thought when people commented on the incredibly long train journey was that there’s really nothing unusual about it … 🙂12 October 2018 at 09:09 #64399… though it would be funny if Ryan were the Doctor’s son, because that would mean he was complaining about his Dad not turning up when his Dad couldn’t – and his now-Mum was standing right beside him. 😈
12 October 2018 at 09:05 #64398I agree that there’s something significant beyond not wanting to book an actor. 🙂 What did strike me, upon reflection, is how very like the Doctor Ryan’s Dad sounds.
I don’t mean in a ‘Ryan’s the Doctor’s son’ sort of way; just the unreliable/bottles funerals/possibly travels around a lot part – yet in this new regeneration, the Doctor is here for Ryan, is at the funeral, is back in the parental role that he was fulfilling in 1963.
And that connects with her taking Ryan, Yaz and Graham with her by accident. His companions since Donna have either died or had their lives irrevocably changed. But she had no intention of doing that to this bunch, not when Grace had already died.
11 October 2018 at 20:00 #64396@troygorsline and @toinfinityandbepond
Both the ER and UNIT, I’d guess. Maybe, in her confused state, the TARDIS as well.
The Seventh Doctor regenerated into the Eighth when an ER doctor called Grace presumed his double heart beat was fibrillation.
I also took it as a ‘we’re not going near UNIT this series’ quip. Whether she’s also ‘not going anywhere with only letters’ because she’s going to be chasing after the TARDIS all series is something that remains to be seen.
11 October 2018 at 11:57 #64393The train was located quite precisely – it was between Hathersage and Grindleford, en route to Sheffield, when the Gathering Coil attacked.
I missed the train stations! I think I’m so used to ‘fake place names’ that I missed the point that they were real names.
Sorry to hear about your kid brother – it can be tough when fiction touches that closely on reality. I still struggle to watch Father’s Day because my Dad, like Rose’s, died in a stupid accident.
@puro
I don’t think Moffat is the only one capable of twists and metaphors.
Exactly. I think we’re going to have to get used to looking for new clues about the themes and for different types of metaphors under Chibnall, but judging by this first episode, they’re going to be there.
Far from being ‘just for kids,’ there were some very adult themes of loss and death going through the script, with many of the dead being firmly connected to their family. I have a suspicion that this iteration of Who is going to be more character orientated (possibly ‘Doctor’s character’) and more concerned with after-effects in the sense of rebuilding, contrasting with Moffat’s more philosophical ‘What is a good man?’ and ‘time paradox’ approaches. The early signal, to me, was the Doctor attending Grace’s funeral – which was something he very rarely does, so notoriously so that Bishop Octavian actually called him out on his ‘just walk away’ habit of leaving others to do the emotional clean-up.
But she does. She didn’t just walk away. She stays for the funeral, then tells her new friends that she has to go and find her TARDIS. Interesting.
10 October 2018 at 22:52 #64389No, they’re not holes.
1. The bike is in a tree. Ryan knows perfectly well where it is, but can’t retrieve it. Chibnall may be basing this bit on a rather well known incident on the A6, where it was a car that came off the road where the edge is a bit on the vertical side – and went straight into the top of a tree.Stayed there for months; no one could figure out how to get the car out of the tree.
Dunno which train it’s supposed to be, but they could easily have got delayed by signals, or something.
2. Guessing you’ve never been to Sheffield and the Peak District? There’s a lot of flat ground – which is mostly on top of hills. 🙂 The bit Ryan was practising on was perfectly flat – and more importantly, a long way away from anyone who knew him. Yes, trainer wheels would probably help him ride the bike, but they wouldn’t help him learn to ride a bike without trainer wheels – he’s dyspraxic. A dyspraxic who’s really embarrassed to admit that he can’t do a simple thing like ride an adult sized bike without trainer wheels.
3. I believe the general conclusion is that she only survived the fall because she was regenerating at the time. Her cells were full steam ahead on damage repair anyway, and the damage from the fall was just a bit more extra work. Remember, the Tennant Doctor was able to regrow a hand because it got chopped off while he was still regenerating. [This didn’t arise with the Smith Doctor because he managed to keep a grip on the TARDIS.]
9 October 2018 at 23:50 #64376Okay, what did I think of the episode as a whole?
The good points: Sheffield came across as a real place, rather than a backdrop. Likewise, Chibnall wrote to his strengths, with a lot of vivid characterisation. Salad Guy was especially brilliant, but Graham getting location data on the alien from his old mates on the buses was a very nice touch.
The death of Grace means that the Doctor’s new friends start their run realising that they, personally, really could get killed. That removes the ‘offering a kid a sweet shop’ aspect of AG Who Companionship, and also means that there’s a plausible reason for the characters to walk away (if they’re still alive) at the end of the actors’ contracts. 🙂 It may also be another aspect of Chibbers writing to his strength – he’s really, really good at looking at the impact of unexpected death on the people left behind, and it’ll be interesting to see if Grace’s death doesn’t get tucked away in backstory, but reverberates throughout this series.
I liked that this Doctor’s response to ‘no sonic’ was ‘I can build a new one’. There’s an air of ‘The Time War is over’ and that this Doctor has finally come through the entire ‘genocide and war trauma’ and out the other side. Whatever and whoever is lost is remembered, honoured – and she will go on and rebuild her life, not just survive. She also seems a lot more honest than previous incarnations – I have a plan. Really? Well, I will have by the time I get to the top.
The cinematography was amazing. I’ve only just noticed that, in the scene where all the main cast are staring at the hole in the fence, the soon-to-die Grace is in semi-darkness while every other member of the cast is brightly lit. I suspect that there are other little bits like that.
The less good points: traditional regeneration monster – Samuel Oatley did a nice job, but Tim Shaw was very much the type of monster who’s only really a problem because the Doctor’s regenerating. Normally, she’d have handled him with one hand while fighting off an attack of Cybermen with the other. 🙂 To be fair, this second-rateness was signposted by the script. He’s no big warrior leader; he has to cheat to even have a chance of passing his people’s test. He’s not even a great warrior who fights other warriors – more a serial killer of worried brothers, random drunks and kindly grandfathers. A murderous, cheating bully.
I think a lot of people are very happy with Jodie Whittaker; I can see signs that I will be, but at the moment her performance doesn’t seem to have quite gelled for me. That may well be because she was playing up the ‘confused’ part of the regeneration.
Tosin Cole seemed to be struggling a bit with the accent – however, I did notice that they’d included some ‘London’ type things in his bedroom, so possibly the reason Ryan only knew Yaz from primary school was that he’d gone to secondary school in London before moving back to live with Nan in Sheffield. That said, I see why they cast him, accent or no accent. He’s going to be very good as the dyspraxic Ryan, I think.
9 October 2018 at 22:33 #64374@Tempusfugit and @kharis
I liked Segun Akinola’s music, so there you are. And, much as I loved Murray Gold’s music (I own the CDs), by the end of Peter Capaldi’s run I really was feeling as if he’d said what he had to say for Doctor Who.
I’m with @thane16 and @pedant – it’s going to take more than one episode for the new composer to find his Who sound. Gold’s music for Series 1 AG is noticeably different in style to the later series – for that matter, his initial theme for Capaldi was dropped once he saw more of Capaldi’s Doctor. At the moment, Segun Akinola’s choices seem interesting, and there were definitely motifs that I liked, so I’m happy to be on board while we see what he does.
42 is much better on a rewatch, funnily enough. I remember watching it the first time and thinking ‘not very good’, then I watched it a second time and it really did seem much better. It might be that the pacing was a bit too frenetic, so when you know the plot you can relax and realise there’s a lot of good character work. Especially David Tennant, with a rare chance to show the Doctor scared spitless.
Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is always tagged in my mind as ‘definitely for the kids’, but it was fun. The robots didn’t work, but I think that was a ‘production’ rather than ‘script’ failure.
8 October 2018 at 20:15 #64286@rob
Well, Chibbers also said that the stories were all standalone and single episode – and we’ve just gone into Episode Two with everyone stranded in vacuum and a still-missing TARDIS. So he’s clearly absorbed Rule Zero: The Showrunner Always Lies. 🙂What he may mean is that you don’t need to know why the Gang are hanging about in space if you do choose to start at Episode Two – just that they got stuck there. Likewise, the lost TARDIS only needs a line.
The high death count is, I think, warning us that no one is safe – though frankly, I was giving it 50/50 odds that Nan wouldn’t make it to the end of the episode, as she hadn’t appeared much in the pre-publicity, and guest stars in Who have a truly horrific fatality rate. She also seemed far, far too confident about confronting weird aliens – but that could simply be the pointer that she was indeed too confident and was going to get herself killed – kind of a nod back to Clara.
Though Graham’s unexpected survival also makes me wonder about Nan; chemotherapy nurse whose patient unexpectedly survives; a son who doesn’t turn up for his mother’s funeral, a grandson who gets targeted by alien tech. Is that the Doctor later going back into Graham’s past? Is it simply that they don’t want to make Ryan’s dad an on-screen character?
Or something else?@pedant
It depends on whether she wanted to butter the bread, or fry the egg in the butter and then slap the buttered egg on unbuttered bread. In my part of the Peak District, the former would be an egg buttie, the latter a fried egg sandwich.Could simply be translation issues, of course. 🙂
I still owe Art Malik for my share of a taxi ride…
29 September 2018 at 19:28 #64147As you say, she’s still finding her feet – both as an actor playing the Doctor, and as the Doctor in a new body. She could easily be making an acting choice to deliberately riff off previous incarnations until the regeneration has settled. In favour of that, this particular scene comes from a point in the story when post-regeneration confusion is in full swing.
Or it could simply be that Jodie Whittaker, actor, has worked extensively with David Tennant – and is subconsciously mirroring his Doctor until she finds her own. Sort of a ‘What would David do?’
Or it could be a combination of both. 😀
29 September 2018 at 08:28 #64142Well, that’s got me with a big grin on my face.
24 September 2018 at 17:57 #64120Well, it’s clearly meant to make us think it’s one of the regular characters. But given the death rate of non-regular characters, it’s probably an episode guest star.
What was it Rory once said? “Whenever the Doctor starts getting friendly with someone, I always feel like notifying their next-of-kin.” 😈
22 September 2018 at 16:08 #64114You beat me to it. 😀
19 September 2018 at 15:27 #64095Given Disney’s proactive attitude to copyright infringement, I doubt that the thought ‘Infinity Stones’ has even crossed Chris Chibnall’s mind. 😈
What’s crossing my mind, however, is ‘Key to Time’.
19 September 2018 at 10:57 #64093@jimthefish and @janetteb
The word that springs to my mind is ‘crystals’.
There’s also a TARDIS hexagon in the upper left (facing) and more TARDIS style hexagons behind the Doctor. The picture seems slightly unbalanced with the left side very ‘busy’, as you say, and the right side clearer and less cluttered. As if the whole picture is spiralling round.
The series tagline is ‘it’s about time’ and the teasers so far have involved time freezing or reversing.
Hmmm. The TARDIS is in the background, as if parked on a cloud, but that cloud could also be a trail of smoke. Reference to the explosion at the end of the last series? Or are they going to make that explosion into something that doesn’t get sorted out by the end of The Woman Who Fell To Earth?
I know we’ve been promised self-contained stories, but I can’t help thinking that Chibnall might have thoroughly absorbed Rule Zero – The Head Writer always lies. 🙂 That is, each episode story might indeed by wrapped up by the episode end, but there’s an undercurrent that leads to the finale, maybe in ‘Bad Wolf’ style.
13 September 2018 at 15:40 #64087The Series Premiere has been announced – and there are tickets available! Well, for the red carpet arrivals. Sorry. Not for the premiere itself. But if you’re free to go to Sheffield on Monday afternoon, 24th September, you can see the cast arriving, and maybe get an autograph/selfie if you’re super lucky.
The random draw is for tickets for the red-carpet before the premiere of the new series. Applications for the random draw will be accepted up to 4pm Monday 17th September. Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Mandip Gill and Tosin Cole are all booked to be there.
If it’s you and a friend, and the friend lives in or near Sheffield, get them to apply. 🙂 The allocation is going to be 50% of tickets to Sheffield or surrounding area postcodes, and 50% for rest of UK.
I have a faint feeling that a lot of kids in Sheffield may have ‘an appointment with the Doctor’ on that Monday afternoon. 😀
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