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2 January 2023 at 19:19 #73919
Thanks for the new sofa and jolly spiffy it is too. With regards, to the conversation on the previous sofa, yes, I must admit to a moment of squee when I saw Meep and the Wrath Warriors — a really interesting one to bring to the screen, I think as they strike me as some of the most comic book-ey characters you could name but it looks to me that they’ve done a really good job with them. But which I guess is really quite canny of RTD because there’s a nostalgia factor there but it’s not too overt or overly familiar. And it does make me hopeful that RTD hasn’t lost his touch with Who with him hitting the anticipation buttons right out of the gate.
And interesting point you make about the show now having access to the Marvel back catalogue with the move to Disney. And as RTD has expressed an interest in a DW continuity universe, who know what else we might see. (I’d like to put in a pre-emptive bid for Kroton.)
And, good heavens, is it really 10 years? That’s a scary statistic in and of itself.
28 December 2022 at 22:11 #73899@blenksinsopthebrave —
That trailer is certainly eliciting a sense of anticipation that had been missing in the Chibs era — and I say that as someone who wasn’t the biggest fan of the 10/Donna pairing. It will be nice to have them back tho. What’s really got me stoked tho is the prospect of seeing live-action versions of what to me look very characters that readers of the 70s Dr Who Weekly comic strip would recognise. (I miss @phaseshift and @wolfweed. They would totally get what I’m driving at.)
On Gatwa’s costume, I think I like but don’t love it. It looks rather close to riffing on Tennant’s old outfit and makes me worry that he’s going to be under instruction to be a Tennant-clone to bring back the viewership rather than get to be his own Doctor. And again, it looks like something that originated in a TV wardrobe department rather than a ‘found’ costume that fans can emulate…
31 October 2022 at 15:43 #73654Me again. Just to echo @juniperfish‘s thoughts on WhitDoc. It is indeed a shame that the Doctor’s flirtatious arrogance was excised from this interpretation. I look forward, now that the fact of a female Doctor has been established, to seeing more courage in this direction in the future. And, yeah, I was also surprised at how lacklustre an end there was to Thasmin after the vague nods in the previous episodes and it is irritating that it did amount to little more than queerbaiting. Perhaps in 40-odd years time, we’ll have a hologram reconciliation with Yas and 13 where they can finally declare their feelings. For an era that at least initially wore its progressive credentials on its sleeve I think we could have at least seen a kiss. As it is, it felt like 13 was more cut up about Dan leaving than she was about Yaz.
31 October 2022 at 15:05 #73653@blenkinsopthebrave and @bluesqueakpip —
I’m with Pip on this one. While there are crash-bang-wallop shows on Disney+, the general trend, as far as I can see, has been for character and plot driven series. WandaVision, Obi-Wan Kenobi and especially Loki (which is so timey-wimey that you’d swear that Moffat had had a hand in it) have all looked great but have all been driven by the writing. Assuming that doesn’t change anytime soon, (and I can’t see why it would while RTD is at the helm) then I can’t see Disney’s involvement being a cause for concern, rather one for quiet optimism because, as Pip says, it more than likely means a steadier stream of new episodes.
31 October 2022 at 15:01 #73652As the whole process of regeneration is a natural thing, what possible explanation can there be for these dark roots?! Don’t forget than the explanation must fit in with the story.
Not sure it does really though. I think the regenerated body has to be starting point that can then be altered as any biological body would. Otherwise, you’d have to account for Eleven’s beard in Day of the Moon, the varying length of the First Doctor’s wig, the Seventh Doctor’s hair (not to mention the Sixth Doctor’s perm). Or do you mean the fact that she regenerated in the first place with grown-out dyed hair? There could be any amount of explanations — for instance, the idea explored in Twelve’s era that there seem to be subconscious influences at work in the regeneration process. It could just be that the Doc had been subconsciously impressed by someone who had needed their roots done at one point.
31 October 2022 at 14:52 #73651I suppose it’s symptomatic of Chibs’ era that it’s taken me this long to muster up the enthusiasm to watch and put some thoughts together. And I have to admit that I watched The Power of the Doctor in a state of anxious frustration – constantly willing it to be better than it actually ended up being. Frustration, I think, will be the defining emotion of the Whittaker years for me on a number of levels. Because it’s not a bad era – it’s as chocful of great ideas and bold as either the RTD or the Moffat ones and it’s looked far greater on screen than either of those. Plus in Whittaker we had a potentially great Doctor who never really got a chance to shine. And while lockdown has to take some of the blame for this, it seems I’ll always have to remember her as the Standing About Not Actually Doing A Whole Lot Doctor.
Anyway, onto the episode itself, which like its predecessors, was kind of meh, while still having enough cool moments to perk up the interest whenever it flagged. Once again, it looked great – and the bullet train sequence at the beginning was surely one of the most impressive in the show’s history. But here’s a few observations, in no particular order:
The Master. I’ve been kind of ambivalent about Dhawan’s Master throughout. His performance has been great, if a little heavy on the scenery chewing (but if the Master can’t chew the scenery, who can?) He’s consistently got all the great lines and I’ve always been left feeling that Chibs has been more interested in the Master than the Doctor. I can’t help but wonder if this era would have had a bit more oomph if Dhawan had been cast as the Doctor in the first place as in everything from dress to demeanour a lot of the time, so the plot of him wanting to become the Doctor makes a lot of sense as an endgame to me. In fact, Dhawan’s character would have made a whole lot more sense as The Valeyard than as The Master (this plot being basically the same as the reveal in The Ultimate Foe). And I guess what’s kind of irritated me slightly about the Dhawan Master is that its rather one-notey-ness essentially erased all the character development from the Simm-Gomez iterations.
On a related note, the lifts from previous stories, which are another trademark of the Chibs era, were just a bit too blatant and clunky this time around. I’ve never really cared for the tweeness of Journey’s End so to see that reprised kind of made me roll my eyes. And, similarly, with the Rasputin sequence. John Simm just about managed to get away with the dancing around to pop music trope but this time I found it to be just cringe. Making even the watching Daleks and Cybermen look embarrassed is actually quite a feat.
But the main frustration of the episode was the Doctor-shaped hole at the middle of it. Once again, Whittaker was denied her big moment and was once again reduced to standing around expositioning, this time as a hologram for much of the time. Every Doctor should get their Big Moment, whether it’s Davison’s Androzani dash, or Baker’s hanging from the Pharos Project, or Smith’s wiping out the Dalek fleet or Capaldi’s blowing up a bunch of Cybermen. Admittedly, some are better than others. The concept of regeneration was in its infancy when Hartnell left (although I’d argue that one of the highpoints of Twice Upon A Time was that it gave an added resonance to the First Doctor’s regeneration.) Colin Baker was denied an onscreen regeneration but I think Big Finish did quite a good job of rectifying that and even McCoy got (I think) a decent send-off in the short time he was in the TV Movie. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that Thirteen felt oddly absent from her own swansong. Even her regeneration speech was rather flat.
Which I guess brings us onto the other Doctors who made an appearance. The idea of there being a Doctor-specific ‘afterlife’ of sorts is a good one (and has a kind of precedent in The Five Doctor, I think) and it was a nice conceit in order to explain away the dramatic change in appearance of the actors (as was the concept that the perceptions of the companions changed the appearance of the Doctor AI). Not sure I agree with whoever said above that they should have had the ex-Docs in costume and wigs. This way gave them a bit more dignity and the only time I really cringed was when seeing Davison back in his cricket gear when talking to Tegan.
On which note, I didn’t have any real problem with seeing the Tegan and Ace as they are ‘now’. It wasn’t an issue when Sarah Jane came back so I don’t see why it should be for them. And, indeed, it was part of the point of one of the strands of the story, at least – what happens to the companions after the Doctor leaves them. Although by this point, it’s kind of been done to death and Power added nothing to the concept that hadn’t been done already. I probably had more of an issue with them being here at all. Admittedly, I’ve always found Tegan and Ace to be deeply bloody annoying characters and so I guess it was on-point that they hadn’t changed an iota in that respect. But, if nothing else, it certainly helped put Yas and Graham in perspective (although were we given any explanation why Graham suddenly showed up at the Earth’s crust? Any at all?) I’m not against fan service as a rule, but this all seemed rather arbitrary and I couldn’t help but feel that Tegan had a (characteristic) brassneck in having a go at the Doctor for not coming back when it was her that stropped off in a huff all those years ago. For Sarah in School Reunion and Jo in Death of the Doctor to feel abandoned is fair enough but it doesn’t feel earned for Tegan. (Nor for Ace, for that matter, because unless you were a diehard reader of the New Adventures, we just haven’t seen her falling out with the Doctor.) And so, I’m afraid, both those companion/Doctor ‘touching reconciliations’ left me pretty cold because once again it felt like Chibs was trying to hard to appropriate some ‘greatest hits’ of the past without putting the work in for the emotional payoff.
The Traitor Dalek. A great idea but a largely recycled one. And I can’t see any reason why it can’t have just been Rusty, who would have fit the bill nicely, and would have offered a nice bit of continuity. (But it was nice to see that the Daleks haven’t abandoned their penchant for hair-brained, tectonic-related major engineering projects.)
Finally, the regeneration itself. Like @blenkinsopthebrave, I hope that there’s an explanation given for Tennant regenerating, complete with clothes (although not without precedent again – didn’t Troughton do the same?) I’d hate to think it was cowardice on the part of the Beeb. And kudos to those who remained unspoiled by the reveal and it’ll certainly be interesting to see where RTD is going to take us next. I must admit to being a little nervous at the brief run-through of Ten’s tics that we got post-regeneration though. I find it hard to look at Ten’s run now and not come away with the impression that he was actually a bit of a dick and so I hope RTD and Tennant intend to give us a distinctly recognisable ‘Fourteenth Doctor’ and not a re-run of Ten’s schtick. If all we get is WhatWhatWHAT??, Allonsy and Well…Well…Well, I’ll be kinda dismayed.
Still, it’s nice to be able to contextualise the Whittaker era as a whole and I hope @phaseshift still plans to give us his blog on the subject. If I had to offer a definition, I’d say it’s been one of wasted potential, not helped by being dragged into the Culture Wars on too many occasions, but by no means the worst era of Who and Chibs is far from being the worst showrunner.
Anyway, sorry for the epic and thanks for reading if you made it this far.
7 June 2022 at 10:58 #73226Sadly, Harold Saxon would be a model of competence, probity and intelligence compared to what we’ve been saddled with….
20 May 2022 at 13:45 #73154Ooh, I never thought of that. That might be quite nice actually and might even make there being a point to having them in the first place.
And I second your Zarbi idea plus Chumblies (ideally in the same episode). But seriously, along with the Wirrn, they are creatures who could be done far more justice with modern CGI….
19 May 2022 at 22:14 #73150Good heavens, RTD has been barely back on the block and he’s already left us more room for bonkerising than Chibs did in his whole run. Just to collate the current scuttlebutt in one place (and based upon the grabs from the recent filming, here are some of the more pressing questions.
Who is Tennant playing? The slightly altered costume seems to suggest that we’re not talking about a previously unseen Tenth Doctor adventure here but something new. He could be the meta-crisis Doctor from Journey’s End or it could be that JW is going to regenerate into Tennant (fulfilling the Curator’s prophecy of revisiting some of the old favourite faces). Not sure how I feel about this concept (or the rumours that Tennant is going to stick around for a series of specials before regenerating into Gatwa — although it strikes me as distinctly possible. The return of Tennant is going to rather overshadow JW’s regeneration as it is. To have a new Doc having to compete with him too might be a bit of a tall order too.)
Who is Rose? RTD does like teasing fans with similar names to much-loved characters but it doesn’t look like Yasmin Finney’s character is the Rose. Current speculation seems to have her as Donna’s daughter, which is interesting. But I’m not sure this means the original Rose won’t be coming back. We’ve got a year to go and I suspect there’s going to be a few announcements of familiar faces in that time.
19 May 2022 at 21:57 #73149What @bluesqueakpip said. I believe the prevalent theory at the moment is that this new Rose is new character and not some new version of the original Rose (there is a more specific theory but I think I’ll save that for the Spoilers section). As to Yasmin Finney’s credentials, they look pretty solid. I’ve only checked out a couple of episodes of Heartstopper and she strikes me as pretty good in it. And let’s not forget just what the general reaction to Piper’s casting was back in the day and just how comprehensively she proved the naysayers wrong.
18 May 2022 at 17:53 #73146I suspect you’re right — although it’s hardly RTD’s fault and is largely down to the public filming. But I think it’s almost certainly true that a lot of people will be watching Jodie’s last episode just waiting for Tennant to show up.
Having said that, even at this early stage, RTD has already provided some juicy material for bonkerising, so I think a visit to Spoilers might be in order….
17 May 2022 at 20:57 #73144As it looks as if now that RTD is back in the pilot’s seat that news, hints and teases will probably the order of the day, I’ve started a new news page (since this one has creaked its way well past the 1000-post mark).
You can find it here!
17 May 2022 at 11:02 #73138And the news just keeps coming…
https://www.doctorwho.tv/news-and-features/yasmin-finney-joins-doctor-who-cast
10 May 2022 at 10:51 #73113I really liked Smith’s first one. For me, it had just the right level of quirk and space. Never really liked Tennant’s one. Capaldi’s really grew on me though and I think it is definitely the best one of the new iteration. Though if TUAT\FotJ showed anything, it was that the classic Brahacki still stands up today if done properly…
As to costume, I could never get on board with JW’s. It looked too much like it was designed rather than found. Tho it did strike me that it was going to be interesting to see how a new Doc would carry it post-regen and I think Ncuti would be able to with great aplomb.
9 May 2022 at 12:17 #73102Rather late to this party but Ncuti looks like a great choice. I seem to be envisaging a more playful Doc from him — maybe in the vein of Matt Smith or Tom Baker. @blenkinsopthebrave — I’ve only seen clips of Ncuti and a few interviews but I think he’s definitely got a lovely sense irrepressibility and I think I can see him having the gravitas too. It’s an aspect of the Doc that RTD is very aware of so I’ve no doubt it’s been taken into account in the casting. I feel the design will be a big element. Jodie was hampered with a terrible costume and console room. If they get those things right this time then that’s half the battle to getting the Doctorly vibe going.
22 April 2022 at 21:20 #73048OK, so I’ve finally got around to watching it and, um, let’s just say I didn’t love it. Flux might have had its problems but I ultimately found it a pretty enjoyable step up from the rest of Chibs’s run but we were here right back to the bad old days of s11. It felt like all of Chib’s worst foibles were on display. The supporting characters were beyond two-dimensional and the fact that they were real, historical figures was somehow supposed to make up for that. The narrative pacing was halting and illogical and as with the worst of Chibs’s oeuvre felt more like a sequence of Big, Cool Things Happening with the bare minimum of connective tissue to join them together. And Jodie was back to bordering on non-Doctorly behaviour in a) rather nonchalantly leaving Dan to his own devices and b) being rather sanguine about letting Ying Wai sacrifice himself at the end. And Dan was criminally wasted, reduced to such blundering ineffectuality that for a moment I thought that Graham was back.
But there were compensations. As ever, it looked gorgeous and the Sea Devils looked great. (With these, the Sontarans and the Cybermen his era has done really well in modern reimagining of BG monsters, tho the less said about the Daleks the better). And the Thasmin stuff was nicely handled. (Side note, I don’t see how this is any more ‘lecturing’ or ‘political’ than the Rose, Amy or River relationships with the Doctor. And I like the relaxed and enlightened attitude to sexuality with which it portrays the Doc. My only problem is that once again we got a character telling us (rather than showing us) how great and exceptional Yaz is. I haven’t really seen much evidence of Yaz’s specialness at all. To me, she’s always been the ‘at least she’s not quite as boring as Graham or Ryan’ one. Bill had more ‘hero’ moments in one series than Yaz has had in three.
As for the Next Time trailer, it looks kinda promising. I hope it ties up the whole Timeless Child thing in a neat bow though. The faces that Chibs seems to be bringing back are interesting and if we’re seeing these in the trailer, I wonder if he’s got others up his sleeve. But personally, neither has been a particular favourite of mine and there are a great many other BG figures I’d rather see before them.
19 April 2022 at 13:07 #73029Apologies, fellow veteran. Just haven’t got around to watching it yet (like much of the rest of the population if the viewing figures are to be believed). Such is the ennui of the Chibs era. Plan to watch later today/early tomoz and will post my thoughts soonest.
Have seen the Next Time trailer though and have to say that the big ‘reveal’ has left me feeling rather ‘meh’. Neither were particular favourites of mine (and this was very much my era) but this is probably a convo to be continued in Spoilers…
4 January 2022 at 01:58 #727594 January 2022 at 01:56 #72758Well, I quite enjoyed that. It’s usually best to go into the festive episodes with low expectations but I thought that was a pretty solid, if not exactly mind-blowing, bit of Who. It was basically Who does Russian Doll, wasn’t it? The concept was cool, the guest stars engaging and created characters that I was actually concerned about for once and the regulars moved effortlessly through their paces. Jodie seems very comfortable in the role now (frustrating now that she’s so close to the end) and with Yaz and Dan have formed a rapport that was almost entirely lacking in the original ‘Fam’.
And if you can say one thing for Chibs it’s that he can write the Daleks well. I can’t think of a single other story where the Daleks have had all the best lines like this. Nice to see the old bronze Daleks used too — though, come on, bring back the New Paradigms already.
But the best thing about the ep, for my money, is that Thasmin has been acknowledged and is now apparently very much a canonical thing. It’ll all depend on how Chibs follows through, of course, and he only has two stories to do so. I like that this seems to confirm the Doc’s bi (pan?) inclinations but unlike the 11/12 and River and 10 and Rose, I feel it’s a shame that we’ve not seen Yaz and 13 share that many happy times or even that much in the way of flirtation. Mostly what we’ve seen is them bicker and snap at each other. I’d like to have seen some of the fun times too.
The only two disappointments with the episode were the cringey rallying speech — 13 really isn’t a speechifying sort of Doc imo and the wasted opportunity of the TARDIS reset failing to get rid of that godawful console room. I’m really looking forward to seeing that one blown up for good.
31 December 2021 at 17:18 #72722That’s pretty much it — I just think a reset to a mad, bad Master after all the character work put into Missy is kind of a waste…
31 December 2021 at 01:31 #72717@blenkinsopthebrave and @devilishrobby
It’ll be a shame if they’re just trying to replicate The Doctor Falls but I’d be delighted if it’s for a regeneration crossover, thus retaining Missy’s canonical status as the Last Master.
13 December 2021 at 17:19 #72669Just to say to @blenkinsopthebrave that the blog is an excellent idea. Flux has given much to chew over (albeit in a gristly rawhide kind of way). I’ll look forward to reading it.
8 December 2021 at 00:45 #72650Well, it’s been a couple of days and I still don’t quite know how I feel about that. But first of all, massive props to the extreme Hartnell-ness of the actual title. Chibs deserves kudos for that, at least.
I’d said before that the overall success of Flux would depend on Chibs being able to stick the landing and needless to say he didn’t manage it. But that’s not so much the problem as him juggling about three or four different landings and just about managing to paste them over the hole. As @juniperfish says, there was something very ‘kitchen sink’ about this and it made for a still strangely enjoyable but ultimately unsatisfying finale.
As @blenkinsopthebrave points out, the story going round is that this was a full series that was cut down because of Covid and that would explain the extreme packedness of these episodes. It suggests that if Chibs had to make cuts then he made some wrong ones because there’s stuff here that just should never have been included. Ultimately the Bel and Vinder stuff didn’t really go anywhere and could easily have been cut (while at the same time we never really got enough of them for me to remotely care about their plight anyway). Similarly, the Grand Serpent infiltrating UNIT, while interesting, could easily have been removed to give Tecteun and the Timeless Child narrative more room to breathe (and let’s face it, it’s a narrative that so ground breaking that it needs attention given to it).
In fact, there’s so much here that it feels even 10 episodes would not have been enough to do it all justice and part of me wonders whether whether Chibs was told/decided he was moving on and tried to cram the rest of his whole ‘five year plan’ into these episodes.
That said, given the manic velocity bordering on incoherence of the finale, I still kind of enjoyed The Vanquishers. It’s certainly miles better than Chibs two previous finales, having at least some sense of rising stakes and urgency (entirely lacking from Av Kolos) and also avoiding the tedious passivity of the Timeless Children. The whole series benefits from a nice Guardians of the Galaxy vibe and benefited from a roster of likeable/interesting characters. With Jericho, Claire, Karavanista, Dan, even Tecteun, Flux has introduced more memorable characters than the rest of Chibs’s run put together. I certainly hope that by some jiggery pokery we get to see Jericho again. I was convinced that he was going to return to 1901 to look after Peggy, maybe burdened with the heavy knowledge that he already knew what the next decades held in store. His death seemed rather perfunctory too. Given that they’d spend three years with him and embarked on a number of globetrotting adventures together, I would have expected at least Dan and Yaz to be be a bit more cut up about his death. Karavanista would be welcome to return too. He feels very like Chibs’s version of Strax in many ways. Certainly it feels like he and the Doctor have some unresolved business.
There were weak points though. As I said, Bel and Vinder never really came alive for me. The return of Kate Stewart felt kind of pointless too. As was Di, whose throughout the series was to do nothing but to be there to dump Dan at the end. She seemed just a bit too tech savvy for a museum tour guide while inside Passenger and her coming up with the solution in the TARDIS at the end seemed like a bit of a leap. It felt very like she’d been given some lines that would have been a more natural fit for Yaz. (On which note, the Doctor’s apparently heartsfelt joy at being reunited with Yaz seemed to suggest a leaning into the whole Thasmin thing which it might be nice to see a bit more of.)
But as others have pointed out, there’s a hell of a lot of loose ends here. The universe has been left in a severely depleted/destroyed state and I agree that the Doctor seemed remarkably OK with leaving it that way, and with the casual genocide of the Daleks and Cybermen (it’s as if the 50th anniversary never happened). And we didn’t really even get the canon reset that looked as if it might have been about to happen. It’ll be interesting to see where the following specials go, whether Chibs has plans for the fob watch or whether the Timeless Child arc has been kicked down the road for RTD fix later.
But I have a feeling that there’s at least something being set up for the end of Whittaker’s run/the 60th anniversary and that’s Omega. Surely, having three Doctors (another quibble might be that I’m not sure JW quite sold the three Docs thing either) in this episode and the fact that the plot hinged on matter being turned to anti-matter and vice versa suggest that he’s going to be the Big Bad for 13’s swan song. The prophecy of ‘their Master’ returning seems a little obvious and on-the-nose and must surely be a misdirect. Mind you, this is Chibs we’re talking about.
2 December 2021 at 22:22 #72613@miapatrick and @scaryb
Yes, I think we’re looking at a reset canon going forward and the Doc as cosmic adoptee too and I’m fairly happy with both ideas. RE. RuthDoc, yep, I think we’re definitely going to see her again. It occurs to me that the holy grail of unexpected reveals for Chibs will be a surprise regeneration and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what he’s planning to pull. Maybe 13 will be gone sooner than we think. Perhaps this week’s cliffhanger will be the opening of the pocket watch, opening up the possibility for next year’s specials being the adventures of past, previously unseen, Doctors, Ruth included.
Yes, I was rewatching Heaven Sent recently and its resonances with The Timeless Children struck me too. Maybe Chibs was bothered by the vagueness of the Hybrid prophecy and wanted to do something more literal with it. As you say, it certainly seems to have come to pass now and a case could definitely be made for the Doc being the Hybrid (or maybe the Doc and the Master being it?)
2 December 2021 at 21:47 #72611I must make my posts more focussed…
Oh, I was referring to the news article. Your posts are always irreproachably erudite and concise.
They certainly allowed RTD, Moffat and Chibnall to do things in their own radically different ways
True but I always got the impression that they were there for the creative vision but that the other executive producers were there to act as conduits to BBC management and to make sure that their wishes (not to mention budgets) were being adhered to. Certainly, I remember Moffat in his interview with Christel Dee saying how he would be given notes the same as any other writer and they are, I imagine, the only ones these could have come from. I suspect Mal Young, Julie Gardner, Matt Strevens etc. have a lot of production power.
Whether that’s the same going forward, who knows. Maybe there will be some kind of liaison between the Beeb and Bad Wolf but from the little we’ve seen so far it looks like the Beeb are going to be little more than ‘buyers’ of the new show, with not that much creative input into its making.
under the BBC the show has retained an identifiably British stamp to it. Will Sony respect that
I doubt this will be a problem under RTD who has a very finely tuned appreciation of the show but I’d say it might definitely be a concern with whoever succeeds him. Certainly I think it’s fair to say that the show will be aiming for a very internationalist appeal but then that’s been the case since the Moffat era anyway but I wouldn’t be surprised if we ultimately started seeing American Doctors and the like. The other worry is that the show will be far more at the mercy of commercial forces than it is now.
I believe company’s such as Sony have fallen afoul of these sort of issues in the past
Don’t know about the Star Trek thing but certainly Sony seem to be in a constant battle of wits with Disney over the Spider-Man movies. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing might happen with Who. With regards to licensing, wasn’t one of the reasons it took so long to get show back on air in 2005 because of the behind the scenes effort in sorting out the tangled mess of rights and permissions that the show had gotten itself into? I seem to remember hearing something of the like. And I think writers stopped being able to keep copyright of their creations at all after Lincoln and Haisman made such a nuisance of themselves over the Yeti. But I bet you’re right that even if they do have to cede direct creative control to Bad Wolf/Sony, it will be within specific parameters. No one, for example, will be allowed to permanently change the TARDIS from being a police box, for instance.
But I guess no one really knows how it’s going to change the show. I’m willing to bet it will have some effect though.
30 November 2021 at 23:25 #72589An interesting, if vague, read. Presumably ‘commercial revenue’ means that the BBC is holding onto licensing and/or merchandising rights but I wonder just how much of that filtered back into production budgets anyway. And as Bad Wolf has just hitched its wagon to Sony anyway, I’m not sure they’re going to want for money too much.
What’s more interesting to me is that it essentially means for the first time the show will being made with next to no creative input from the BBC and with RTD being able to call the shots to a degree he couldn’t before. I’ll be curious as to how that translates to what we see on screen.
30 November 2021 at 22:51 #72587I’m not saying it’s probable, but it’s possible so far.
Oh, I think it’s both and as a theory I like it a lot. And if it brings a sense of closure to the Doc’s past going forward, as you suggest, then I think that can only be a good thing. And I do love the idea of bringing Eight’s backstory into the general mythos a lot. If there’s one thing you can say for Chibs is that he hasn’t wanted for ambition with this whole storyline and part of me suspects it might be the shot in the narrative arm that the show needs.
On another note, does this mean that UNIT had Thirteen’s functioning TARDIS all the time Three was exiled to Earth? The Brig must have been killing himself laughing every time the Doc’s back was turned.
29 November 2021 at 18:57 #72578So are witnessing the death and rebirth of the universe and the death and birth (rebirth) of the Doctor simultaneosly?
Ooh, I do like this idea quite a lot. I do wonder if the Doc and Vinder wouldn’t have felt some kind of bond when they met though — although I guess not, given we’re talking many, many regenerations and mind wipes later…
29 November 2021 at 18:53 #72577First of all, it’s so nice to see so many familiar names back. It’s almost like old times. A special wave to @scaryb — good to see you with us again, my furry friend…
One the episode itself, I’m a bit more meh about this one. Still a vast improvement on the last couple of years but this defaulted once again to an entire episode of the Doctor being talked at and doing pretty much nothing at all. It was the Timeless Children or Once, Upon Time all over again.
What saves it is two things. First, Dan, Jericho and Yaz off on a series of Indiana Jones-esque adventures. They had great chemistry and the little snatches of their adventures were really tantalising and positively screamed spin-off (although where did they get the money for all that globe-trotting?). I wouldn’t be surprised if Big Finish were printing off the contracts even as we speak. Yaz, in particular, came into her own here and I really don’t want to see Jericho go. He’s got the potential to be a really good recurring character or maybe even a companion of the future. (@blenkinsopthebrave, RE. Peggy, I suspect that the regretful and childless Jericho will be ultimately deposited back in his own time to bring up Peggy as his own child.)
The other saving grace was, of course, the wonderful Barbara Flynn. I’ve waited years to see her in Who and I’m so glad it finally happened and she plays her scenes with Whittaker brilliantly. Like many others on here, I’m a bit disappointed to see her go so quickly though and I’m hoping that we’ll get to see her again through some time-wimey shenanigans or other. The hints of the ambivalent mother-daughter relationship between the Doctor and Tecteun were handled really well and if we are to have the Doctor’s family making an appearance in the show then the least we can do I think is explore those relationships in detail. Flynn played her brilliantly too (more Rose-Marie from A Very Peculiar Practice than Mrs Swinburne though). There was something of the Rani done properly to her performance — the morally blind but brilliant scientist but thankfully with all the 80s camp excised. She certainly could have been an interesting and worthy adversary going forward — more interesting than, say, the Master, who I think ran out of steam as a character a while back and should really have been laid to rest with the fitting send-off given to Missy.
And it looks as if any hope of the Doctor not being the Timeless Child and the whole thing being a fabrication of the Master has been shot out of the water. Which is fine, I guess. I think I’ve become a slow and grudging convert to the idea. As I’ve said before, I prefer the Doctor to be an unexceptional maverick but it’s also important that the narrative moves forward if the show has to survive. Both RTD and Moffat understood this too, I think, and it’s only natural for any writer to want to deepen the characters and explore the characters under their charge. Sure, it makes the Doctor a little different than what she was even a decade ago but you could have made that same argument about Pertwee and Hartnell. Change is and should be the only constant in Who.
I suppose the in-universe problems I have are the problem of the Doctor’s Time Lord physiology. It could be, as others have suggested, a mutation that Tecteun introduced into the Gallifreyan genome and it’s not an insurmountable objection. What I wonder about more is if the Doctor had been deeply involved with Division all this time then why did the Time Lords exile her to Earth for interference at the end of the War Games? Surely there would have been someone in the High Council who would have been in the know, or that Division would have pulled some strings? It strikes me as a risky thing to allow to go ahead in any case.
Kudos to @miapatrick for identifying the double meaning in ‘Division’. It feels like the end of Flux is going to be another universe reboot, with the Doctor being placed in a simplified new universe, perhaps with another memory wipe in place. I’m not sure that will be satisfying however and I’m not convinced that we can wholly return to the ‘mad(wo)man in a box’ concept. Even if the Doc has no memory of who she was, we as the audience will now and our relationship with the character has been changed forever. And as @miapatrick says, she’s going to be burdened with a PTSD even greater than her Time War survivor guilt. But it took Moffat most of his run to unpick that angst from the Doctor and return her to the (more or less) untroubled figure that we had pre-Time War (and I’m pretty sure that even RTD said that he eventually found the Time War to be a counter-productive concept and certainly by the end of his run it was something that he was trying to downplay too.) I suspect that when he takes over again, he’s going to spend a lot of time unpicking and rewriting the Timeless Child narrative (although maybe not, as he is apparently a fan of it and is perhaps looking to build upon it.) But on the other hand, I can definitely see the argument that the Doctor is being enriched by this turn of events and that it opens up a whole set of narrative possibilities for the future.
So, another just slightly weaker episode but Chibs deserves kudos for even managing to provide a credible explanation for UNIT’s dating controversies and that was a nice nod to the Brigadier in the episode. The whole thing (the episode but also Flux in general) has had something of an Infinity War vibe to me. So, I’m looking forward to the Endgame now and very much hope that Chibs manages to stick the landing.
24 November 2021 at 23:41 #72521Chibnall even references it with brief shot of what appears to be Lungbarrow
Yes, that struck me too. Chibs will have serious stones on him if he brings Lungbarrow into TV canon. But then he’s already shown himself capable of that with the whole Timeless Child thing anyway.
Well, bonkers is what we do here, so why not. @devilishrobby‘s theory kind of reminds me of Alan Moore’s strips about the Time Lords (which were clearly the influence for RTD’s Time War) and so I wouldn’t be surprised if Chibs is mining that surprisingly rich seam for inspiration. Certainly, the Division does make me think of some cross between Moore’s Special Executive and the Order of the Black Sun. And seeing Swarm as a reimagining of Fenris the Hellbringer isn’t that much of a stretch either.
If anyone’s interested, there’s a nice summation of Moore’s Time Lord lore here….
Actually, the other thing that this series is reminding me of is pretty much a BBC Books EDA. Am I the only one who isn’t seeing echoes of the Faction Paradox in Division? And someone on Twitter put forward the theory that the Passenger could turn out to be a TARDIS in humanoid form, which is a great idea and, if true, is very reminiscent of Compassion.
23 November 2021 at 23:52 #72514What happened to ‘just a madman in a box’?
I must admit that I have to agree and this Doc as Chosen One narrative runs a bit counter to the spirit of the show for me. I like to think of the Doc as an irritating, unremarkable yet vital dilettante within the context of Time Lord society but I look on this Captain Marvelfication of her as somewhat similar to the James Bondification of Pertwee (the show latching onto the cultural zeitgeist which is something I think it needs to do every so often).
But my hope is that this Doctor/Division storyline will be wrapped up by the end of the Chibs era and can become something self-contained and that the show can move on from in much the same way as the Pertwee/UNIT years were.
23 November 2021 at 20:29 #72509Well, I thought this was an absolute cracker. I don’t know what they’ve been putting in Chibs’s Weetabix but I heartily approve.
As someone said above, it had definite Daemons vibes but I was also reminded of Hide in the first part of the episode. Certainly it has that distinctive English folk horror vibe that Who can tap into so well. And the 60s setting really worked for the Angels somehow, better than the futuristic wreck of the Byzantium or even of 40s New York. There’s something really quite singularly British about the Angels, I think.
And because of this Chibs and Alderton have, for my money, produced the best Angels story since Blink. It’s something that happens only occasionally on Who, that another writer can enhance the returning villain of another creator. Both David Whittaker and Louis Marks did it with the Daleks, for example, and I think Alderton/Chibs have managed it with the Angels here. They’ve managed to exploit the unique horror of the Angels and explore the implications of their time travel ability. (He’s thankfully ditched the neck-snapping of the Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone version and even the direct communication in this episode is a lot more chilling than ‘Angel Bob’ of that story.)
They also lend themselves to some fantastic imagery here. The Burning Angel and the Paper Angel being particular stand-outs. Both are vivid and terrifying images that wouldn’t have been out of place in Classic Who. And then, of course, there is THAT cliffhanger.
The performances were uniformly good too. Kevin McNally redeems himself for the execrable Twin Dilemma and both Jericho and Claire filled the gap of proxy companions really well. Dan and Yaz work well together too and it seems to be becoming a trend this series to keep the Doctor and her regular companions apart for quite a lot of the time — to the benefit of all their characters. Jodie, once again, is really getting a chance to shine as the Doc now. If only they could get rid of that terrible costume. Even the reversed version seen last week is preferable.
In terms of quibbles, there were maybe some pacing issues but these were made up for by the pretty effective jump scares. And again, Bel and Vinder did very little for me. They are really going to have to be integral to the finale or they’re going to be the absolute weakpoint of s13.
Oh, and thanks to @mudlark for that useful and well researched guide. I personally have a feeling that The Division might indeed turn out to be the Big Bad — although I’d lay money on Sacha’s Master making an appearance in Episode Six. We’ve had just about every other familiar face returning so I’d be surprised if he doesn’t show up.
23 November 2021 at 19:58 #72508It depends where you are, of course, but BritBox has all the Sarah Jane Adventures (plus pretty much all of Classic Who and a number of other cultish goodies too…)
19 November 2021 at 01:29 #72460I’ll just add my voice to the eloquent appeals above. I felt much the same way as you a year ago. I thought, I’ve finally gone past this (it only took 40-odd years) and that I was done. I was struggling to get through more than 10 minutes of a Chibs episode without my attention wandering. But this year, while it’s still far from perfect I’m starting to see glimmers again. But it’s not the first time this has happened. I completely stopped watching from Mid Colin Baker through to late McCoy and every time I caught a glimpse it was reinforced to me that I’d made the right decision. But then McCoy’s final year, while again far from perfect, started to show definite glimmers. It’s a cyclical process and it will in all likelihood happen again. And after the glimmers, often we get magic again.
And yet. And yet. 60 years is a ridiculously long time for a single narrative to unfold. And if you just take the AG series, then 16 years is an incredibly good run for a (not inexpensive) TV show in the current climate. I hope the show continues (and it looks like it is, for the short term) but I suspect a break is inevitable at some point and it might, in fact, be the best thing for the property as a whole.
But to the site itself, this has been just as much of an achievement. As @blenkinsopthebrave pointed out recently, we’ve all been here a long time now. And true, there’s not as many of us as there once was, and some names come and go, but as others have pointed out, it’s not just been about Who. This is a little community of sorts. We’ve seen @htpbdet come and sadly go. We had Shazz briefly rallying us together. We joined Puro through her first Buffy watch. And you were all very kind when I had a little indyref breakdown. And @scaryb and @wolfweed (where the hell are they?) have become occasional welcome faces at the odd geek event north of the Border. All those things have been deeply worthwhile experiences.
But all good things must come to an end and more than once over the past couple of years I’ve thought about hanging up my Sash of Rassilon too. If it’s stopped being fun — and we all owe you a real debt for creating this rather special place in the first place — then I can totally understand you wanting to step back from what must be a sink of time and energy (not to mention money). The site itself has had a remarkably good run and has seen some drama but lots of good times too but nothing lasts forever and as @juniperfish says, the priority must be your own happiness, wellbeing and peace of mind.
As the Doc says, ‘Everything ends and that’s always sad. But everything begins again too and that’s always happy. Be happy.’
(Oh, and am I the only one who totally wants to see @juniperfish‘s vision of the show realised? It sounds awesome. Or maybe it’s just a fish thing….)
16 November 2021 at 23:32 #72428Those are some excellent points which I fear you’ll never get the answer to. There is, however, an excellent novelisation by Steven Moffat himself which is well worth checking out. It does fill in a lot of the background around the story, although I fear that rather than answering your questions, it will present you with a load of new ones.
16 November 2021 at 19:46 #72422Well, looking at t’Other Place and the hellsite that is Twitter, it looks like the reception to this episode has been surprisingly muted. Even this thread is a bit quieter than those for the previous eps. And to be honest, I’ve been holding off on posting because I’m not sure how I feel about it myself.
It’s certainly the weakest of the three episodes, although I’m putting that down to Covid restrictions during filming to an extent. And was it just me or was the CGI a bit ropey and unfinished-looking in this one. The shots of the Doc and the Morai in the Time Storm could even have come from a BG episode.
And when you get down to it, this was largely a colossal expository infodump (as predicted by @phaseshift, only a little earlier than expected). In many ways, this was essentially The Timeless Children redux — lots of standing around (or floating around) in a cold, empty chamber while plot and technobabble is flung around with manic abandon. Though it surprises me that the Timeless Children was (relatively) well received while this ep seems to be taking something of a public beating.
Because I still found quite a bit too like in this episode. Much of this is down to JW who continues to be rocking her Doctor Mojo imo. And I think I just find this a more personable TARDIS line-up then we had previously. Lots of niggles though. Like that was an unusually forthcoming Cyberman. Jo Martin was once again wasted as the Fugitive Doc, showing up to give a few gnomic comments and not much else. Beyond Fugitive of the Judoon, they’ve really squandered the character’s potential, I think. I can’t say I felt any particular interest in the literally star-crossed lovers of Vinder and Bel either. I’m getting the feeling that if last series was Chibs attempting to channel the RTD era, this is shaping up to be his attempt at a Moffat pastiche. Although, the rather ham-fisted info-dumps are giving me a new appreciation of the deftness of how Moff handled his timey-wimey plotting.
It was cool to see Barbara Flynn finally in Who though. She’s always been pretty near the top of my list of ‘actors who really should have played the Doctor’ and hopefully we’ll see her again presently.
In terms of predictions/theories, I suspect that a) the whole Timeless Child/The Division plot thread is going to be resolved and contained by the end of this series and that the Passenger(s) are a gigantic plot McGuffin being put in place now in time for the finale. I wouldn’t be surprised if whole alternate universes come pouring out of them in due course.
Still, Village of the Angels looks quite promising. The trailer suggest chills and the setting has that nice folk horror vibe that really is Who’s home turf. I do hope that Chibs manages to pull it off.
9 November 2021 at 01:25 #72326I have a horrible suspicion that this series is going to end with a steaming dollop of Chixposition
Yes, I thought that myself. Especially as that Temple of Atropos set did rather remind me of the Gallifrey one where that hideous infodump took place last series. I’m hoping that Chibs has learned by his mistakes though and we get a finale that’s a little more dynamic. Right now I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt, and trying to put any misgivings to the back of my mind. Something I’ll possibly regret.
Then it’s announced Sony is in a deal to buy Bad Wolf.
Yeah, that would certainly change the implications for Who going forward. I thought it was just a proposal at the moment though. Has it definitely gone through? If it does, then RTD is almost certainly going to have a lot more money to play with than he otherwise would and my guess would be that this would constitute the shift of Who away from the Beeb and more into an international, streaming arena that I’ve been feeling has been inevitable for some time.
The main point was that the BBC may have suddenly been keen on this radical change to lore to facilitate this move
I’m not sure that such a change would have been strictly necessary though. Who lore is quite a loose and baggy monster anyway and there’s already lots of spin-off potential if what Sony has in mind is some sort of DWEU. But maybe that has been the plan all along. Personally, I didn’t mind The Timeless Children concept too much (although its execution was godawful) and think it was more Chibs trying to make his mark on the lore and was his riposte to Hell Bent as much as anything else. It was a Captain Marvelfication of the Doctor, to be sure, but I’m not sure in the long run it’s going to be any more damaging or had any more corporate agenda behind it than the James Bondification of the Third Doctor back in the day.
8 November 2021 at 14:46 #72321Or ‘Stramash of the Tumshie-Heids’, as my old pa would have said.
Well, I have to say that I really enjoyed that quite a bit. I’d say that was easily Chibs’s best episode of Who ever and, what’s more, I’d say he’s produced the best Sontaran story since The Time Warrior. I’m gradually getting used to the new Sontaran design and it was nice to see Dan Starkey back, even if it wasn’t as Strax. The Sontarans here certainly occupy that fine line between comedic and threatening that Robert Holmes laid out for them all those years ago and props to Chibs for managing that (certainly better than RTD did).
And once again, the whole thing looked absolutely beautiful. Both the Crimean sequences and the battle at the Liverpool docks were positively cinematic and really the most epic the show’s ever managed to be. If the shorter season duration is the price we pay for this level of polish, then it’s a price worth paying.
But the real revelation (sort of) this ep was Whittaker. For my money, we finally saw the excellent Doctor that seemed to be trying and failing to come out for the last two years. She was great in this episode, channelling aspects of Davison, Tennant and perhaps even a little Tom Baker at points but still being utterly her own Doctor. The passivity was gone as she took control of the situation, whether bouncing off Mary Seacole or facing down General Logan. It, in fact, showed what had been the fundamental problem with her era these past two years — the bloody Fam. Like Davison, she was lumbered with a TARDIS full of absolute lemons and this series is positively benefiting from the absence of the oaken presence of Graham and Ryan. It was even a relief to see the getting-slightly-proprietorial Yaz shunted off into a side-plot as it really gave Whittaker a chance to shine. I’m now starting to feel that I’m going to miss her Doctor, which surprised me no end.
Bishop as Dan was also killing it this episode. He’s another engaging, active presence and I far prefer him to the maudlin passivity of Graham. Where he shone most was in his interactions with his parents, of course. And this is where Chibs does shine as a writer. His SF plots are always full of more holes than a gorgonzola but there’s no one better at doing the bickering, loving interactions between ordinary folk. I think in the long run, his most memorable contribution to Who is going to be in the utterly vivid, utterly human side characters like Dan and his parents, Rory and Brian, Nasreen and Tony. In this respect, he’s easily as good as RTD and somewhat better than Moff. I’m kind of hoping @juniperfish and co are wrong about Dan being the Master. I’d be sad to see him go.
Not that there aren’t problems with the story. The Sontarans were rather easily defeated and the Doc’s plan seemed to hinge on Dan managing to pull off some unspecified coup at his end — which wouldn’t have happened if Karvanista hadn’t shown up. Similarly, the concept of the Sontarans all going for their recharge at exactly the same time seems like rather a tactical faux pas. But this one I can let slide a bit more because it fits with the previously established Sontaran sense of arrogance and outright stupidity.
The stuff on the planet Time, I’m not sure about yet. Vinder is interesting but a bit bland so far. Swarm and Azure look and act like a nicely old school pair of Who villains and that cliffhanger too was nicely BG in feel. As mentioned on t’Other Place, it feels like they’re setting up a Weeping Angels origin story here. Is that going to be Yaz’s fate? Turned into a Weeping Angel in the way Bill was turned into a Cyberman?
Overall, so far this is feeling very like s26 to me. A change in direction and quality that’s hard to credit with what came before and a Doctor who’s finding her mojo after a shaky start. Still plenty of time for it to all go pear-shaped, of course, but at the moment I’m feeling oddly elated and hopeful.
3 November 2021 at 23:53 #72288Welcome.
how can he be about to kill a human?
I never thought of that and now that you’ve brought it up, it’s going to bug me endlessly. I think I’ll probably have to put it down to Chibs’s trademark writing in something that looks really cool but collapses the minute you start to think about it.
When she says, as in this episode, that Earth ‘ … is protected … by me’, it didn’t come across with the force and authority conveyed by previous incarnations; it felt more as if she were trying to convince herself as much as her opponent.
True but I could equally imagine Davison giving the line an equally ambivalent reading. They’re both similar sorts of Doctors, I think, and my take is that this is just the sort of Doctor 13 is. I think it was certainly a deliberate choice on Whittaker’s part. (Let’s not forget it’s a kind of gauche AG sort of thing to say. As Twice Upon A Time pointed out, the First Doctor probably wouldn’t even dream of saying something so grandiose in the first place.)
I think you’re right that the fundamental problem with this Doc is in the writing. Even now, I just don’t know what her values are, what she’s likely to do in any given situation. Granted, that’s exactly how One started out but it was an aspect of the character that was quickly jettisoned and is essentially gone by the time we get to The Sensorites. Even the most ambivalent Doctors — your Six or your Twelve — by this stage in their lives you know exactly what they stand for, how they’ll react at moments of crisis. I don’t have that with 13 and probably never will.
To put it in a nutshell, I think there’s a gestural shorthand to any Doctor, whether its One clutching his lapels imperiously, or Three’s Venusian Aikido or Two/Twelve playing the recorder/guitar. Thirteen hasn’t got that for me. Prior to this episode, my visual shorthand would this era would have been Adventures in Standing About. Whether that’s been sitting watching Rosa make history, or looking at a frog in a chair or listening while the Master tries to bore her to death with exposition, it’s all been so passive until now.
But these days I’m of the mind to celebrate the many great things the Whittaker era has brought to the show while we still can rather than cavil at the coulda-beens.
3 November 2021 at 18:51 #72286Well, that was quite the chaotic mess. And yet, it was a chaotic mess that I think I, on the whole, rather enjoyed. As @craig says, if you look at it as you would a regular AG Who episode then structurally it’s a mess but I think the key is to look at it like a first episode of BG gap story. I rewatched Image of the Fendahl as my Halloween treat (still for my money one of the most atmospheric and most overlooked classics of the BG show) and if you looked at that episode on its own you’d be left in an equal state of WTFness. So, I’m happy to let all those questions rest for the time being in the hope that they will be answered by the end of the story. (Whether Chibs will be able to stick that landing is another question but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for now — and it’s not as if RTD and the Moff don’t have spotty track records in that regard either.)
If nothing else, Chibs deserves plaudits for at last giving us scope for some proper bonkerising, something I don’t think his previous series really did, even with the massive Canon Bomb of the Timeless Child. I think it’s the reason that this site, and the general reception to his era has been so muted and divisive. He just hasn’t given people enough to talk about, to take temporary ownership of the narrative while it unfolds. That was the appeal of the RTD and (especially) the Moff eras and it was, I think, the appeal of the original show too. Four and six parters inevitably resulted in frenzied playground speculation and you could make a case of saying that Who was one of the first shows to allow that sort of fan entry and is even one of the reasons for its longevity.
But despite the breakneck pace, lots to enjoy in this ep. First of all, it looks gorgeous. One of the things you can say about the Chibs era is that the show has never looked better. From the space shots to Swarm’s disintegrating ability. (My own bonkers theory is that the Flux is the accumulation of Swarm’s victims over the millennia, perhaps taking a new and vengeful form).
Dan is also a pleasant surprise. Not a huge John Bishop fan and news of his casting was met with a ‘Gawd Help Us’ from the direction of the Dam but he made Dan really personable and likable and, for my money, gave him more character in 10 minutes than Graham had in two series. And I have to say, I do like the idea of him being the Master and I think @bluesqueakpip might be spot on with those clues. I think it’s a dead cert that he’s going to show up at some point though. Though I am wondering if Dan being a former Division agent precludes this from being a possibility? Was the Master a member of the Division too? I guess he might be if that ambiguity around the Timeless Child means that the Master ends up being the Child rather than the Doctor.
The Weeping Angels sequence was nice and scary too, although was it my imagination but they seemed to move a lot slower than we’ve seen them do before? I’m still not crazy about the Sontaran redesign though. It’s just a bit Shakedown for me and I think I far preferred the slickness of the RTD/Moff-era design.
JW seems very settled into the role now, which is nice to see. Acting-wise, there seem to be two approaches to playing the Doc. One is to nail it straight off the bat and have a few stellar early seasons before boredom starts setting in. The other seems to be to circle around the role gingerly before truly nailing it after a couple of series — and annoyingly just as you’re about to move on. JW is never going to make my list of favourite Docs but she was pretty good here and I liked the bickering couple vibe between her and Yaz. (Though it took a while to get used to. The opening above the acid lakes felt a little forced, a little bit like written banter rather than an actual exchange between friends.) But by the end of the ep, I was very much on board with the concept of them as two old friends who drive each other nuts while still caring deeply for each other.
So, despite its bitty nature, I’d rate the Halloween Apocalypse pretty highly. I certainly enjoyed watching it more than I did Spyfall. And if nothing else, Chibs has made me want to tune in next week — the first time he’s managed that since the Hungry Earth/Cold Blood two-parter.
16 October 2021 at 15:53 #72217That’s a good point but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt for now. Not crazy about those Sontarans though. Am I the only one who thinks they look like they’ve escaped from a Bill Baggs video production?
16 October 2021 at 00:02 #72214New trailer has dropped. I have to say it looks the most promising of all of Jodie’s run…
15 October 2021 at 23:58 #72213So sorry to hear your news. I think I’d also go with the ‘good things’ quote from Vincent and the Doctor. Again, my deepest condolences and thinking of you and your loss.
24 September 2021 at 23:55 #72097I’d say the odds of Olly Alexander as the next Doctor just shortened dramatically.
I’m not so sure. I doubt RTD will want to return to YoungWhiteBloke territory plus Olly has a lot of irons in his fire to be taking on the life-consuming task of the Being The Doctor. I am hopeful though that it gives T’Nia Miller (currently top of my wishlist) dramatically shortened odds of getting the part. (Given that RTD had a future Doc who sounded really very like her indeed in his novelisation of Rose.)
He brings the best out in other writers (as well as being a bloody good writer himself)
Absolutely. As a manager of writers, I suspect he was better than Moffat and he’ll almost certainly be a massive improvement. I have only a couple of reservations, one of which I very much had even when he was showrunning before — and that was that Who is never really his best work and while he’s tied up running the show, we’re going to be denied the high-quality personal work of the likes of Years and Years and It’s a Sin. RTD to me is one of those figures (Chris Ecclestone and Jodie Whittaker being another two actually) who while not exactly being ‘too good’ for Who can’t fully play to their individual strengths within the confines of the show. It’s almost like they’re slightly forced to pull their creative punches.
Yep, I think that’s all spot on. I definitely think that RTD and Moff got to tell stories that they’d been rehearsing in their heads for years and the Chibs didn’t really know what he wanted to do, didn’t even, in fact, have that firm a grasp on the character of the Doctor — to the point that he felt the need to rewrite her backstory. And as you say, Moff and RTD definitely still seem to have absolute love for the show. I’m not sure they’ll ever lose it.
I think RTD phase 2 may throw more than a few people who are expecting more of the same a curveball
I think so too. My other reservation about RTD was that he seemed to be running on fumes by the time he was going. He’d fallen back on Rose returning just one time too often and the year of the specials was a very mixed big indeed imo. But as you say, he’s had 12 years to ruminate on new ideas and it’s not as if the wider world hasn’t been given him plenty of food for thought. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw an iteration of Who that isn’t even more socially engaged than it was last time he was in charge, given that seems to have been the direction of travel of much of his other work since.
It’s very exciting though. If I were foolish enough to make predictions, I’d say we’re looking at a Tennant-focused 60th Special, with guest Docs (I’d like to that we’d get Ecclestone back but I’m sure he’s sworn never to work with RTD again). But it will, I’d guess, bring in a new Doc and then a new series that will initially be as pared back to basics as Ecclestone’s first one was till it finds its feet again.
It would certainly be fascinating to know what’s been going on behind the scenes. The whole thing has that vibe of the family computer being taken back to the manufacturers to be returned to factory settings cos one of the teens tried to install some dodgy software and now all they can get is the BSOD.
24 September 2021 at 16:14 #72088Well, here’s a belter of a bit of news….
30 July 2021 at 17:54 #71921I believe the Beeb’s centenary year is 2022, which is the year the specials and Jodie’s regen story are planned for with the 60th the year after. That would mean a new showrunner having to introduce a new Doctor (and presumably new companions) as well as marshalling through 60th celebration duties and that strikes me as something of a seriously big ask for anyone. If it’s indeed the case, then I wouldn’t be surprised if an old hand (a Moff or an RTD, say) were on hand in the background to help out.
Personally, I think @blenkinsopthebrave is probably correct and that if there is no new production partnership in the offing that they might well be willing to let the show die for a while, no matter how short-sighted that might be. As you say, the corporation has got a lot on its plate at the moment and Who is (or has become) a complex and expensive proposition and maybe one that they feel they can do without for a while.
That said, in an age that’s hungry for IP with already built-in fanbases, I think there’s no way we’ll be looking at another 14 years without Who on-screen. It’ll pop up somewhere or other in some form or other. My money, as I said, is on some streaming behemoth snapping it up.
Yeah, Mercy is a quite underrated ep indeed. I’ve never been the biggest Whithouse fan and consider the Under the Lake two-parter to be his best Who work but he certainly wouldn’t have been a terrible showrunner. In terms of their stories, I would maybe have preferred Jamie Mathieson or Sarah Dollard but there’s more than writing to running a show — as Chibs has demonstrated. But in Chibs defence, the mess that is The Power of Three (and it does have some great little domestic moments with the Doc and the Ponds) are less Chibs’s fault and the way that Steven Berkoff threw a veritable hand-grenade into the filming of the episode.
As to a future showrunner, I suspect that Neil Gaiman might be a more credible proposition than he was a few years back, now that he’s got a few seasons of American Gods and Good Omens under his belt. Whether he’s available and willing is quite another matter though, of course.
30 July 2021 at 14:18 #71914And almost as if he’s showing Chibs how to maintain and breadcrumb anticipation for a new series, Moff drops a bit of a s13 spoiler (sort of)
30 July 2021 at 13:45 #71913@phaseshift et al
Is this the time to release a really bitter long form post entitled “F*** Chris Chibnall, and all his works”?
Sorry about Whittaker – what might have been,eh?
My sentiments exactly and I to was wondering if it’s time for an examination of the Chibs era. Possibly best to wait to until s13 in case there’s a dramatic rise in quality. I have my doubts and like @blenkinsopthebrave I’m less than enthusiastic about this whole ‘linked story’ thing. It feels like Chibs is planning to end his rein with his very own Trial of a Time Lord.
For my money, the Chibs era (so far) has neither been as awful as the NMDs have tried to make out nor as brilliantly groundbreaking as the JodiStans would have us believe. I tend to put it on a par with late Colin Baker/early McCoy. I’m glad it’s out there and that there are people who are into it but I’ve found it largely charmless — I haven’t even managed to summon the willpower to watch Revolution of the Daleks yet. Like the above-mentioned eras, there are great ideas and isolated moments of greatness but it’s mostly been dragged down by an over-arching sense of half-arsed mediocrity. And what’s struck me most about the Chibs era is the combination of really long production gaps/reduction in episode count and a disinclination to fill those gaps with other, sanctioned but fan-led, material. Even during the Wilderness Years, the show had a more vibrant public profile than it does at the moment. The fact that it’s been the most politically conservative era of the show, despite trying to appear otherwise, hasn’t helped either, of course.
Sad for Jodie though. When she was announced, I was hoping for a vibrant, quirky out-there Doc, largely based on her performance on Adult Life Skills but she so far hasn’t been given the chance to shine — saddled, as she has been, by a terrible costume and an over-abundance of pretty dull and under-developed companions. I would definitely have liked to see what another showrunner would have done with her Doctor — Moffat, for example, seemed to make the character shine far more in his short story than Chibs managed throughout his run. Perhaps she’ll undergo a Colin Baker-esque revival on Big Finish. She’s actually a pretty good Doctor and the best thing about the current iteration of the show but just not being allowed to fulfil her character’s potential.
But what strikes me most about this announcement is the lack of an immediate replacement for Chibs. Wasn’t RTD’s last mission to get his replacement in situ and I’m pretty sure they held off on announcing Moff’s moving on until Chibs was in place. This seems to be the first time that there isn’t any sense of urgency or continuity about the show moving forward. We’re still talking about quite an extended time-frame, of course, and there’s plenty time yet for a new head honcho to be announced and get started but it just seems odd that they leave this gap at the top, however temporarily. It could mean outright hiatus/cancellation, of course, but I find it hard to believe that the Beeb would do that just in time for the show’s 60th.
So, here’s some wild speculation:
- A new showrunner who’s just not been announced/finalised yet. If that’s the case then I find it odd that they wouldn’t have held off until they can make an announcement. (Unless Jodie or Chibs are about to announce a new project that would have given the game away.)
- A game-changing alteration in format or distribution. Is Who about to make the jump to streaming and get into bed with Amazon, Disney or Netflix? This strikes me as inevitable and the 60th might be considered a good jumping-off point. BritBox has been going big on Who and they’re starting to dip their toes into production. I imagine having exclusive New Who on their service would be a big pull to new subs. (It would also perhaps explain why there’s no announcement as to a new production team — it’s just not the Beeb’s place to make that kind of announcement anymore.)
- A big-screen movie for the 60th with a film Doctor. Not beyond the realms but strikes me as less likely at this time.
- A one-off past-Doctors 60th special. Or perhaps a mini-series culminating in the unveiling of a Doc 14/new showrunner for s15 onwards?
But who knows really? And it seems I’ve gone off on an epic diatribe, so apologies for that (I shall look forward to Phase’s bitter rant also). But interesting times — which in itself makes a nice change.
27 July 2020 at 02:22 #70855@toinfinityandbepond and @phaseshift
Yeah, saw that. Very sad news. Dan was genuinely enthusiastic and as the article says deeply passionate in his writing. And this forum definitely owes him a debt.
16 April 2020 at 15:37 #70472Late to this one too, although I did more or less watch it ‘live’.
Heaven Sent is actually a really difficult story to talk about as it’s so unique, such a one-off. Others in the watchalongs, like Vincent and the Doctor and The Doctor’s Wife, also have very unique and special aspects but they still seem to exist within the general narrative of the programme. Heaven Sent, like Listen and Midnight, are more experimental and seem to demand to be discussed on their own terms.
The obvious reference point, aside from the highly effective writing is Capaldi’s performance. This could have become very stagey and static but there’s always a kinetic energy to the episode. This is largely thanks to Rachel Talalay’s brilliant direction but also, of course, to Capaldi’s deft performance. It’s also a nicely defining episode for 12. By the end of this episode, you get a very clear sense of who this Doctor is. It is, in fact, an episode that perhaps could only have been made with 12. It’s hard to imagine too many other Doctors being able to pull it off.
But as others have said, the score deserves some kudos too. Murray Gold has produced some incredible work over the years but this really has to be his defining moment. I can’t think of another episode of Who (or of too many other programmes, in fact) where the score has been such a significant component of the narrative. If you removed it, or changed it in any way, then the entire episode would be different.
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