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8 March 2020 at 16:27 #70077
Yes, it’s a good piece but as you say could have done with a bit of editing. Whenever I see a lot of repetition, I don’t necessarily get suspicious but think that they should definitely call for an editor. I do agree with both you and their central point that Moffat was all about subverting the expectations of what Who fans, in particular, sometimes wanted from a story. I also agree with him that Chibs has utterly failed to understand this.
His reading of A Good Man… as a deliberately subverted rape-revenge story is peculiar and difficult to swallow, and I don’t think Let’s Kill Hitler was mocking anything other than Hitler.
I don’t know. AGMGTW as ‘rape-revenge’ narrative is not something that had occurred to me before and I found myself largely convinced by his argument. Definitely the part about how it’s a narrative deliberately constructed to exclude the Doctor. You’re right, I think, that it’s one of the most slyly subversive episodes ever produced and is definitely a bit underrated. It’s almost deconstructing the whole concept of Who RTD-style finales in a way.
I also find myself agreeing with his summation of Let’s Kill Hitler. It is possibly over-stating the case slightly, but the sheer fact of the choice of Hitler, as opposed to another morally questionable (or even fictional) villain is significant. And I do think that it’s Moffat deliberately pointing out just how unsuited Who is to engaging with situations like this. That there are limits to where Who can go, what it can do.
It definitely feeds into my view that you can break down the Who showrunners like this:
- RTD – The Spielberg one. Celebrating the ‘ordinary’ person flung into ‘extraordinary’ situations, even if this means stumbling into oversentimentality and overblown spectacle on occasion.
- Moffat – the Christopher Nolan one. Largely small-scale stories of human connection contained within Russian Doll-narrative structures and often challenging those structures themselves.
- Chibs – The Zack Snyder one. All too often mistakes edgelord grimdarkism for maturity or depth. Is willing to shortcut logical character work in the rush for spectacle.
His whole run had an increasingly classic-era vibe, and failed (never tried) to allow the righteous warrior of the time war opportunity to judge, convict, and execute the bad guys.
Yes, I think I agree. Moffat returned to the messianic Doctor trope constantly and while it has to be said that he occasionally used it himself when he found it useful, his era was largely about dismantling the concept as well as, as you say, reconciling AG and BG Who into something coherent and cohesive. And it’s this that Chibs has probably been most narratively tone-deaf about.
7 March 2020 at 23:11 #70073As a final coda to my burbling ramblings above, this is a long but pretty good read, I think:
7 March 2020 at 21:00 #70072Just finished The Good Place. It was all kinds of perfect.
And now I’m feeling rather … emotional.
7 March 2020 at 18:20 #70071Agree about the lack of TV writers like Chabon in the UK, but Chabon is probably pretty unique as a TV show runner in the US, come to think of it
That’s very true. I’m glad that he’s finally got to get involved in genre film and TV as it’s clearly been a long-standing interest — his book of essays on among other things Howard Chaykin, His Dark Materials and Sherlock Holmes is really good imo. I was aware that he’d submitted a treatment for an X-Men film many years ago and that it had gone nowhere. I wonder if Picard has put him off the TV process in general and if he couldn’t be tempted to have a little spell on Doctor Who once Chibs goes. I wonder if he’s a fan….
Will definitely stick around to ruminate on what’s left of Picard. And perhaps for a blog discussion on Penny Dreadful, if people are still interested….
7 March 2020 at 14:12 #70067Yes, the Piper analogy is really cool (and didn’t occur to me at all till you mentioned it). I guess it’s meant to contrast with the coldness of the Borg cube and the Romulan tech. Nice to see Riker and Deanna again too. (And was sad to say goodbye to Hugh again so soon. Couldn’t they have kept him around for a while longer?)
I’m struggling to think of a Chabon-like saviour who could come into Who, largely because I don’t think the UK has produced an author remotely of his calibre for decades.
7 March 2020 at 14:01 #70066Yes, on Chibs these are largely not new arguments and we should probably agree to disagree.
If this reaches the stage of discussing semiotics, your local vicar should be able to suggest some suitable deliverance ministries.
Yes, they’re coming for me now. Taking their time about it though. And I must admit that I probably did some violence to the fabula/sjuzet terms by forcing them into Who. Basically, as I understand it, fabula is a theoretical concept of a story, the raw events as it were, which can only then be accessed by a particular interpretation of them (sjuzet). Thus every version of, say, Hound of the Baskervilles is a sjuzet of a theoretical masterprint, as it were, Conan Doyle’s ‘original’ included. And yes, the fabula would be a strictly chronological rendering, with fancy playing around with time, perspective etc. only something that can be done at the sjuzet level.
Other writers have changed the Doctor’s biology, his morality, the ordering of his lives, how many of those lives he’s had and how many of those lives he/she is restricted to. RTD changed Rassilon from ‘Father of his People’ to ‘Mad Genocidal Dictator’
Exactly, that’s the point. Those changes are not ones that change the fabula, which we could maybe define as ‘The Doctor is a Time Lord from Gallifrey who becomes a rebel explorer and goes out into the universe, righting injustices wherever she sees them’. Things like Time Wars, number of regenerations, the character of Rassilon, none of them change those essentials, however much they are informed by them.
Chibnall’s changed the planet the Doctor comes from, her sex and her skin colour.
No, he’s done a lot more than that. Those things would be fair enough really and more power to him. But he’s basically changed the character of the Doctor herself. @phaseshift has rather annoyingly presented some of the same arguments more eloquently than I am about to, so I hope he forgives me for that and I also hope you’ll forgive injecting a little bit of personal reminisce into it too.
The Doctor’s backstory is something that grew rather organically. Slowly at first. Throughout the 60s, it was contained basically in The Time Meddler and The War Games. In those, the Doc is portrayed as, let’s say, a talented amateur. A nosey parker with a developing sense of morality, aided by a variable wit, an insatiable curiosity and a level of natural ability. She’s only the smartest person in the room when that room is full of humans and sometimes not even then (something that both RTD and Moff have been at pains to emphasise again and again). When that room happens to include other Time Lords she’s emphatically not the brightest, the most powerful, or even the most attractive or nattily dressed. As Time Lords go, the Doctor is decidedly mediocre, save for the fact of her desire to do good, to do right, to make the effort that no one else on her planet was willing to do. Holmes and Dicks translated this relationship into that of the Doc as a precocious but not necessarily gifted undergraduate, suffering both the indulgence and occasional censure of this tutors (Time Lords like Borusa, Flavia etc). But at its heart, this is still the same conception that Lambert, Newman and Whittaker formulated back in 63, even if they hadn’t yet given it those details.
Now, as Phase says, there was something quite attractive in that core character. If you’re a socially awkward, averagely intelligent and not particularly athletic schoolchild, the Doc becomes something between the ideal teacher, the cocky elder sibling, the relatable father/mother figure. And in a cultural ecosystem of square-jawed action men/women that’s something to be valued. The Doc belongs to a literary tradition of the able dilettante. Passionate without necessarily being committed or obligated to the state or its apparatus and institutions and who can therefore put them into sharp relief. She belongs to the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple (not Poirot, who has Hastings to tie him to the establishment) and perhaps even at the more ridiculous end of things characters like Paddington Bear. What she emphatically is not is James Bond or Bulldog Drummond or Jane Tennyson, who are all instruments of the state.
And that’s what Chibs’s rewrite does. And not only is the Doctor an instrument (or even a former instrument) of the state with her connections to the Division, you could say she actually is the state, by being the cornerstone of regeneration and therefore of Time Lord power (because when you get down to it, it’s not time travel that makes them unique, it’s their ability to regenerate). And that’s not even the worse of it. As Phase says, there’s now an unpleasant tang of genetic superiority to the Doctor now. She’s not special because of her determination to do right, regardless of her own abilities and shortcomings, she’s special because of her genetics. What Chibs has done has basically made the same fuck-up that the Star Wars prequels did and still haven’t been able to recover from. Heroic Exceptionalism. The Doc’s special regenerative ability is Who’s equivalent of midichlorians. She’s not just a talented amateur anymore. She’s the Chosen One. She’s Superman. She’s Interdimensional Space Jesus with a touch of Jason Bourne layered on top. And that is a fundamental change in the very DNA of the show. That’s like someone taking Sherlock Holmes and basically turning him into James Bond.
Jim, I think you’re taking a fan theory (that the sequence of events in the Master’s reconstruction show abuse and exploitation rather than acceptable medical research or the Master being an unreliable narrator) and blaming the writer for what’s presently a fan idea rather than anything their script has said
I don’t think I am. And I don’t think it’s a fan theory, or at least not as far as I’m concerned. I’m largely going by what we saw on screen. Which was a dark and dingy laboratory that in terms of iconography had as much of the torture chamber or Frankenstein’s laboratory to it as anything else. I saw an aloof ‘mother’ who never once made any kind of gesture of warmth or affection or reassurance towards her ‘daughter’. I saw someone basically using a child as ‘resource’, which is what all abusers do, and whether it’s a resource for physical gratification or scientific advancement is actually kind of by the by.
You’re right, of course, and that we have to treat the Master as an unreliable narrator (and I’m still not convinced that this won’t all be some kind of Matrix-induced hoax or at the very least the Master is going to have been coming to some erroneous conclusions). But until we see that on screen, we have to go by what we have been given. And that, to me, means the above. And it’s not, by the way, opposed to this general plotline; it has potential I think. But lumbering the Doctor with this rewrite of her character is damaging in all sorts of ways, and ways, I think, that Chibs probably didn’t intend in the first place. His trademark is lobbing stuff into a story because it looks/seems cool without thinking through the consequences and I think this time he’s pushed it just a bit too far. Far better, I think, would have been to have made Susan the Timeless Child and have the Doctor the regular old normal Time Lord she always was but one who ‘kidnapped’ Susan in a fit of conscience and escapes into the universe in a Type 40 to keep her safe, maybe even get her home.
I suppose you could say that in Chibber’s first series we saw a Doctor trying to escape her past, and in the second she discovers that the past she was trying to escape – is only part of a much larger past.
But is it though? I’ve seen it said on this board and elsewhere that this restores the mystery to the Doctor’s character but I’d say that it doesn’t at all. It’s designed to give the impression of mystery but what enigma is there really? That the Doctor is from another mysterious Otherwhere than the one previously thought? So what? To borrow a line from someone on Twitter, that’s like finding out your childhood friend is from Cardiff rather than the East Dulwich you previously thought. And if anything, it’s reduced the mystery not added to it. Unless the Timeless Child wasn’t really a child when discovered, then there’s not that much to get excited about. The original mystery of the Doctor was that there was a whole adult life that we didn’t know anything about. Now we pretty much know the Doc’s entire past (the Matrix’s Division-era gaps notwithstanding. In that case, we know the general outline of the Doc’s life at that point, if not the details of specific events). It’s not a new mystery, it’s a bit of narrative sleight of hand.
I’ve also seen it argued that this only changes the Doctor’s character pre-Hartnell and to all intents and purposes we’ve got the same rebel explorer that we always had because … memory wipe. But that doesn’t wash either, I don’t think — for the simple reason, we’ve not been memory-wiped. If we go back and watch City of Death, The Daleks, Terror of the Autons now, we’re no longer watching a precocious ingenue in charge of their own agency. We’re watching someone trapped in a delusion. All those stories essentially become subplots in an overarching narrative of a cosmic patsy.
Now, you’re probably right that we’ve only seen part of an arc, that there’s more to come, perhaps even a full re-re-retcon of this mess. But I’m afraid I won’t be there to see it. It’s not that this new direction is uninteresting or won’t yield some dramatically interesting stuff. It’s just not the show I signed up for. A Doctor coming from this place and direction is not the Doctor who I grew up with, who contributed a not insignificant part of the cultural DNA of my personality, of my emotional outlook. And so, while it still stands, I’m done with Who. I shan’t be back for Revolution of the Daleks. I shan’t be back for Series 13. Simply put, there are a great many other IPs out there more worthy of my attention, who are not relying on what I guess has essentially become habit at this point. Especially as Who has once again reached the point of using itself as its own frame of reference – ‘hey, this is just like RTD/being different than Moff/at least not as bad as Season 23’ etc. Who was at its best when it was able to hold its head up with the stories contemporary with it, as being of the same or greater quality. At the moment, when you put it up against Picard, The Good Place, Altered Carbon or the many other shows out there, it just doesn’t measure up.
And so in the words of Tegan, ‘It’s just not fun anymore.’ For the time being at least and it’s actually looking like it might even be for good, I’m out I think.
6 March 2020 at 00:21 #70020Yes, I think it’ll be well into s13 before we see any of this stuff returned to. I fully expect we’ll be seeing RuthDoc back in some form or another.
Yeah, there is already what amounts to a DWEU, I suppose. But I wonder if we are about to get something that keeps that extant but has another branch that can be explored independently, as it were. Maybe we are going to see celebrity one-off Doctors. Maybe @phaseshift and @bluesqueakpip are right and plans are moving ahead for a separate movie series. Or maybe it’s just never going to be a thing at all….
5 March 2020 at 14:25 #70010Still building it…. You can’t rush these things, you know….
5 March 2020 at 14:13 #70007Welcome! Enjoy the sofa!!
5 March 2020 at 13:45 #70005I hope so too – but I think, when articulating criticisms, there is a responsibility to assess whether there’s a genuine fault in the work, or whether the critic just doesn’t like this writer’s style
Well, I would hope so too but I haven’t seen anyone not do that on this site. Not for years now. Writing, like all art, is subjective but there are lots of valid criticisms you can make of Chibs. There’s the inconsistent characterisation that I’ve talked about. Or you could talk about his dodgy grasp of structure — as @blenkinsopthebrave pointed out, The Timeless Children is basically two rather disparate stories, one is the actually fairly decent Cybermen invading Gallifrey one, the other is the Doctor standing around getting infodumped by the Master. In terms of screenwriting 101, that’s pretty poor craftmanship. Or there’s the Silurian scientist who goes from a green Dr Mengele to a nice guy in a matter of minutes because he’s served his purpose of giving Chibs a convenient cliffhanger. And then there’s the sheer number of stuff just left hanging, like Mr Trump Avatar, Daniel Barton etc. Now you might argue that Chibs is making some cynical point that the morally dubious often get away more or less Scot free. Which is actually fair enough once, I suppose, but to me points to an ongoing blindspot with not being able to end a story in a satisfying way. Now, I’m thinking of it, I’m struck by the amount of Chibs antagonists who get to walk away. Most of them. Which makes me think the story that Moff made Chibs change the ending of Dinosaurs so that Solomon is killed makes sense. (Another arguably un-Doctorly moment but one which at least gives the episode a sense of closure and dramatic logic.)
The point here is to suggest that it’s not wildly unreasonable to have issues with Chibs’ work without being a Moffat fanboi or an NMD. To dismiss genuine criticism as either of these is both flippant and unfair. There is no doubt an element of favouritism, I’m sure. Moffat left stuff hanging (or actually more often with an explanation so buried that you really have to look for it) and so did RTD but they are getting more leeway because their highpoints were so strong but as far as I recall we’ve always on this site never shied away from discussing any writer’s shortcomings. But something seems to be happening to fandom. At one end, you have the repellent bigotry of the NMDs but at the other the fans of 13 and Chibs have become somewhat fundamentalist, perhaps understandably fearing that acknowledging any issues will be giving ammunition to the NMDs. The loser seems to be anyone who wants to engage in any critical analysis of the show.
Chibnall and RTD are, I think, pretty much on a level as writers.
I couldn’t disagree more, for the reasons outlined above. And not even for only those. Going right back to Torchwood, right back to his Who stories for other showrunners. Moff and RTD have their faults but they understand dramatic structure inside out. They understand that payoffs have to be there and they have to be earned. Chibs doesn’t seem to. It mostly seems like he starts with a series of ‘cool moments’ that he wants to happen (and often cribbed from something else he happens to have seen) but can’t be bothered putting in the hard work to make those moments dramatically satisfying. Even his best Who script — 42 — suffers from this. It’s basically Sunshine mashed up with the Satan Pit but he more or less gets away with it, largely thanks to the direction and the cast.
Unfortunately, I hated CapDoc’s characterisation
Oh, I know and that’s completely fair enough. And as @phaseshift says, even when we didn’t agree with you, there was always space here for your views to be listened to and debated with. Certainly I don’t remember anyone NotMyDoctoring you.
So if we’re judging characterisation styles, what we end up with is that you like the Moffat/Capaldi character arc and I like the Chibnall/Whittaker arc. For that matter, I liked the Graham/Ryan arc last series, which was a very definite characterisation arc.
Yes, there’s definitely an element of all this being a divergence in taste. And I’m glad that you’re enjoying this era. Personally I found that the Ryan and Graham character arc didn’t work for me because again Chibs didn’t put enough work into it. It’s established in TWWFTE and then left hanging till ITYA. I think it needed at least one more scene, maybe with Ryan processing his gran’s death in some way. But to be honest, I found Cole’s performance so one-note and dull that this might have happened and passed me by anyway.
I’m really not understanding what you mean by ‘mythos’, because in the sense of ‘a set of beliefs or assumptions about something’ Chibnall’s just blown the show’s mythos into teeny tiny pieces
Well, I guess I’m thinking of mythos in the Aristotelian sense which normally gets defined as the structure of dramatic events. These days the term normally used is ‘plot’ for that but I don’t think that quite works in the case of Who. Nor do I think ‘canon’ which is usually used quite captures it either. So, I’m using mythos in the sense that there is an Arthurian mythos, assembled from a number of sources but which gives us a sense of the core story which can inform and support divergences by the likes of Tennyson and TH White but not be affected by them. And since I’ve already evoked Aristotle, I might as well go full pretentious arsewit and suggest that we could maybe equate them to the fabula (Who mythos) and sjuzet (the contributions of RTD, Moffat, etc.) What Chibs has done is that he’s tried to destroy/rewrite the fabula rather than contribute his own sjuzet (God, kill me now for even going down this route….)
For example, RTD brought in the Time War, the destruction of Gallifrey etc. as a means of moving the mythos on from where it was in 1989 to where it needed to be in 2005. TV had changed. Audiences had changed. So this was the smart thing to do. But it meant that the mythos was still there to be slowly reintegrated, starting slowly with Daleks etc. and then building up to the return of Gallifrey. The point was it was all still there and that RTD had taken that raw material, adapted it for where he needed the show to go without destroying, rewriting, or rebooting anything. Similarly, Moffat brought us among other things The Impossible Girl arc, which completed the harmonisation of Old and Nu Who and streamlined it for the future. But the manifest point is that they added to it, allowing it form at least part of the forward narrative momentum of their particular eras.
Chibs hasn’t done that. Instead he’s gone right back and as you say blown that mythos into tiny pieces. Where RTD and SM added and expanded the mythos, Chibs has just decided to rewrite it in his own image. And it’s not multiple regeneration cycles (and their commercial possibilities) that are the problem, it’s that the entire mythos, the entire sense of who the Doctor is, what their ethos is, has been changed. They’re a damaged victim of abuse and exploitation now rather than a hopeful rebel explorer. Even from the end of RTD’s first series, you could see that this was the same show that it was in 1963 but that it had been moved on, made to evolve. But has the mythos of the show moved on at all from end of The Doctor Falls? Not really, that I can see. And you mention a new Cyber Empire. Are the Cybermen really in a different place than they were in, say, Revenge of the Cybermen or Earthshock? Not really. The events of the The Timeless Child weren’t even that new and again Chibs had basically cribbed them from Supremacy of the Cybermen.
4 March 2020 at 20:39 #69993Well, first of all, I think it’s important to say that it’s totally cool if Pip enjoyed the story, just as it’s totally cool if others did not. Personally, I don’t think Phase said anything remotely on the level of bowelstreak, nerdrotic, Noel Tardis and all those idiots. There’s little in his argument that wouldn’t have been considered unremarkable on here just a few years back. Just saying that I really hope that we’re not being infected by the Twitter virus where if you articulate any criticisms of the current run that you’re automatically labelled an NMD and basically told just to shut the hell up. Because I do have reservations about the current run, definitely, and I want to talk about them.
Having said that…
Except that part of that statement isn’t true. Well, it wasn’t true in 1963.
Well, no. But most shows don’t put their whole mythos on display straight away. Especially not one like Who, in which it is definitely made up from era to era, producer to producer, expediency to expediency. (And it’s worth remembering that the show initially gave us a backstory that bears little relation to what we ultimately got. If we go with your re-retcon terminology (personally I think that’s just semantics) then what we’ve got now is a re-retcon of a re-retcon. Which is Chibs’s prerogative but as I said above is unnecessarily complicated a canon that has just been tidied after becoming too messy beforehand anyway. But to get back to your original point, no, that statement wasn’t true in ’63 but the show did start finding its base format constricting pretty quickly. By ’65, we were getting other TARDISes, other Time Lords (even if we didn’t know them as such) and then it was increasingly formalised from the War Games onwards a few years later. The reason for this was that they mystery of the Doctor was no longer intriguing, it was constricting. It was leading to templated stories — a base under siege here, a pseudo-historical there. It’s just a fact that the longer a story goes on, the more of a following it gets, the more you have to accept that enigma is less and less of an option.
In fact, one of the fundamental ways in which Chibs is showing himself to be a lesser showrunner is that while he seems to be overloading himself on canon now, after two years he hasn’t added a single thing to move it forward. His Who is utterly stagnant. Both RTD and SM played with canon — actually modernising and streamlining, balancing making it fit their own vision of the show with developing and respecting what came before. Chibs hasn’t done that at all. The show’s mythos is no further forward than when he took over. You could even argue that it’s regressed slightly now.
Yes. Agreed. The Whittaker Doctor has had a massive amount of character development compared to other Doctors. Other Doctors usually get to develop in a major way just before regeneration.
Afraid I don’t agree. I don’t think we’ve seen anything like consistent character development from WhitDoc. We’ve seen increasing inconsistency with what Uncle Terrance would have called the core character of the Doctor — ‘never cruel, never cowardly’ as of this week, we’ve seen this Doc be both — and I don’t think there’s that much evidence that it’s anything like a cohesive character arc (I’ll be delighted if I’m proved wrong by the end of s13) but it seems to me more that Whittaker is just being left at the mercy of Chibs’s usual writing style, which is a shopping list of cool moments that he largely strings together by improvisation of varying quality. Even if it is the case that there’s an arc and a plan here, it’s on nothing like the same level of the characterisation 12 underwent — who underwent a character arc right from Deep Breath through to The Doctor Falls.
No – I think the real reason is the future
Yes, I think that’s definitely the case. I think we’re certainly looking at an attempt to create a DWEU, lthough I’m not sure it’s for a series of movies or anything like that anymore. The culture has moved on since the Yates plan and I don’t think a film series on its own is the holy grail anymore. I’d be inclined to think that it’s more likely to be a Project Luminous sort of scenario, with multiple IP streams, from books to videogames. (As I think we discussed in your Who and Videogames blog, one of the main stumbling blocks for a Who game is the Doc’s aversion of guns and violence. This has now been solved with a Doctor who isn’t really the Doctor (more like the individual who will one day become the Doctor) and what’s more is conveniently attached to a secret extra-military organisation. Now you can have a Doc who kicks names and takes ass should it be required.
And I think its clear that this has been the plan all along. I remember saying at the time that WhitDoc’s costume seemed to be designed with a brand iconography in mind. Colourful, a recognisable silhouette, looks good on comics and book covers etc. And now it strikes me that RuthDoc’s outfit was designed to the same set of criteria. The sheer Doctorly but unflashiness of the Smith and CapDocs must have driven BBC branding nuts in this regard. Now they’ve got characters who have the design simplicity of superheroes.
3 March 2020 at 22:55 #69974Well, lots to unpack here. It’s almost like old times…
Really? Sherlock is currently over a hundred and thirty years old and Doctor Who has a much more flexible structure than good old Sherlock
Allow me to clarify slightly. I’m not saying that the cultural text of Doctor Who won’t be around in 2063. It most definitely will. I doubt it’ll still be a TV show then — or at least not what we’d recognise as a TV show. I doubt even streaming will still be a thing. All I meant was that I doubt it’ll exist in its current form and that having to get a workaround for the regen limit will just not be relevant anymore. And even if it was, I’m sure a more elegant solution would be found at the time than what we’ve not been given. At any rate, it’s not something that Chibs needed to worry about at all at the moment. We’ll probably be well into the VR revolution by then anyway. Maybe it won’t be an issue to recast the Doc because you yourself will be the Doctor or something like that.
But the Sherlock analogy is a useful one. Sherlock has endured so long because it’s, as you say, a flexible format with relatively little backstory to get your head around. All you need to know is that Sherlock is a highly intelligent sociopath and Watson is a good and loyal friend and that they solve crimes together. That’s it, that’s the format. Individual interpretations, such as Moffat’s and Gattiss’s can fill in those gaps but if they’d been written back to the core format then that format runs the risk of losing its longevity and dying permanently. Moffat, I think, understands this and this is why he took pains to simplify the canon. For your average ‘Not We’, all they know (and want to know) is that the Doctor is a renegade Time Lord from Gallifrey who travels in a Police Box and has adventures. They don’t want to know about Timeless Children and amnesiac pasts and mysterious other origins. If a basic understanding of the show requires all that then it won’t remain in the public consciousness. It’ll be like Babylon 5. I think I’m with @phaseshift here in that as retcons go it seems pointless. It’s only functions seem to be for Chibs to troll all the NMDs who kept banging on about 50 years of white male docs and also to stick two fingers up to Moffatt.
Probably on streaming; I think the time-shifted viewing for Who is up to 40% for some episodes
I’ll admit I haven’t been keeping up with the ratings as it’s now an exercise in futility but as far as I can gather apart from the overnights slipping back down to basically Capaldi levels, the time-shifted viewing isn’t exactly brilliant either anymore.
I’d agree that the Whittaker Doctor can be ‘undoctorly’, but I still haven’t forgotten when the Capaldi Doctor grabbed his Sonic rather than a drowning child. The Doctor can have undoctorly moments in any regeneration.
She seems to have had rather more than most though. Although, you’ve definitely been borne out by the foregrounding of mindwiping earlier in the series. Seems the Doc was given rather a hefty dose of her own medicine.
Yeah, the sonic incident was awkward (especially as he could have presumably gone back to the TARDIS to get another) but that was a clumsy way to demonstrate to Bill that the Doc is operating by a different moral code. Or thinks he is. At least the arc of the episode demonstrates that not only does he have a strong moral code but that he’s mistaken about how different it is. The only problem is how he expresses it. It’s a learning process for both Bill and 12. If 13, on the other hand, has anything you can call a moral code, it is a deeply flexible one — and more importantly seems to be operating under a showrunner who either can’t be bothered to address those inconsistencies or doesn’t think they need addressing.
It does look like Shada, doesn’t it? Which could be interesting. Although, I have to admit, I’m one of the few that finds Douglas Adams’s contribution to Who wildly overrated.
3 March 2020 at 00:06 #69950Yeah, I think this will be retconned at some point. You can almost hear the tapping keyboards in the bedrooms of future showrunners even as we speak.
re. the running away from Ko Sharma — yep, it was pretty un-Doctorly, but 13 has by now made a habit of fairly regular un-Doctorly behaviour, so I’m pretty much letting it go now. What’s puzzling me more is why Ko Sharma was willing to make that sacrifice so easily. ‘The universe needs you, Doctor.’ What does he base that on, having actually met her for what can’t amount to much more than a couple of hours. Unless as Pip says, he was a Division agent of some kind and had previous knowledge of her.
Have to agree about the Master. Dhawan’s performance is fine but basically Simm redux. And definitely not a patch on Gomez.
That Who has made it to 50 is remarkable but even I strongly doubt it will make it to a 100. The more I think of it, the more the Timeless Child plot was intended to solve a bunch of non-problems — who were the Morbius Doctors? (who apart from a bunch of terminal Whovian anoraks really cares?), proving that the Doc wasn’t just 13 white blokes and then a white woman to shut the NMDs up (a laudable sentiment but wouldn’t it just be easier to ignore these fruitloops?) and then there’s the aforementioned regeneration cycle issue (which renders the conclusion of Time and the Doctor pretty irrelevant.)
And the more I think about it, while I have no problem with shifting the canon back a couple of regeneration cycles, it seems to cause more issues than it solves. As well as Time and the Doctor, both the War Games and Trial of a Time Lord are mystifyingly pointless now. And then there’s Name of the Doctor. Moffatt took a lot of pains, it seems, to streamline the canon, to make it manageable for the next 50 years (optimistic, as I said, but hey, let’s be optimistic for a moment.) Chibs, on the other hand, has just pointlessly unstreamlined for those future generations of hypothetical showrunners.
And then there’s the Doctor’s origin story. The most we’ve seen before is a lonely but otherwise presumably relatively normal (by Gallifreyan standards) child but who is given a life-changing sliver of hope and optimism when they needed it most. Now we’ve got one that’s part interdimensional orphan with suppressed memories of sustained child abuse (not sure I saw Tetris’s relationship with the Timeless Child as charitable but rather as one of exploitation) crossed with a time-travelling Jason Bourne.
2 March 2020 at 11:45 #69930I’m almost done. About halfway through s4… I shall miss it….
2 March 2020 at 01:12 #69913Well, at least Chibnall produced a finale this time. Not a great one — for a Gallifrey-centric, lore-heavy finale I’ll still take Hell Bent any day over this. But all in all, I found it pretty enjoyable. First off, I don’t massively have a problem with the Timeless Child reveal. Maybe all the discussion online slightly removed its wow factor cos I was just like ‘yeah, fine, at least it’s official now.’ I certainly don’t see it as ruining canon or disrespecting Hartnell or anything like that. I like that it brings a little mystery back to the Doc’s origins and I thought Chibs actually handled it with a rare spurt of subtlety. I’m also willing to bet it’ll be one of the first things retconned out of existence by his successor.
It might be sociopathic but I really could have done with a companion death. That scene with Graham and Yaz did seem to be setting one up but I guess that would have totally broken an already over-stuffed finale. I can stand one more festive special with them but then they really have to go. They feel so done now. Can they just go and give Jodie the chance to have a new Doc-companion dynamic?
The Master. Sacha’s performance is good and he seems a good fit for Jodie’s Doc but I have to say I don’t get all the love for him as The Master. He’s OK. A more amped-up Simm version really (which is why I’m still head-canoning him as post-Simm/pre Gomez — the ‘having no better nature’ thing bears this out, if you ask me.) But he’s still not a patch on Delgado or Gomez imo. On villains, the Cybermen were kind of wasted and the Lone Cyberman was despatched way, way too easily. That was disappointing.
Not as disappointing as the Time Cybermen though (sorry @jomomentor). A wasted opportunity right there and the worst Who design since …. well, I can’t actually think of a worse one. (And don’t say New Paradigm Daleks, cos they’re awesome, especially compared to this.)
Another bum-puckering moment was the Matrix overload flashback. To me that was cheesily awful. These can be punch the air moments (Eleventh Hour) or pointlessly unnecessary (Mawdryn Undead/Doctor Falls) but this was the first time I found one eye-rollingly embarrassing. If Jodie had actually been regenerating, fine, but it was so overkill, especially with the hokey music.
But it has to be said Jodie knocked it out of the park tonight. As she pretty much has been all series. I hope she and Chibs sit down and realise that she’s not a quirky Doc as they keep trying to make her. She’s just not. Whittaker’s is really good at portraying intensity and suppressed anger. They should let her do that. She was mesmerising throughout this episode right until they went back into Tennant-clone mode with all those corny ‘whats’ at the end. (Though I did like seeing the Judoon again.) At least now she’s got lots to be angry about.
So, wish list for s13. Let her be intense. In many ways, she’s kind of like McCoy – tried to make her light and clownish whereas really she’s a different kind of Doc. Pair her with one companion. Give her a more subtle costume and a more old-school TARDIS — that’s twice we’ve seen her in a Brachacki TARDIS and she very much suits it. The fact that you see her return to her underwhelming own console room at the end just underlined it. Please, please give her a new console room. This one does her no favours.
(Oh, and is anyone keeping count on the number of stray unclaimed TARDISes knocking about the universe now?)
1 March 2020 at 13:43 #69907RE. Dracula. Yeah, I don’t think the third episode really lived up to the predecessors but I have to admit that I really liked the Demeter episode and might even consider it the strongest of the lot.
RE. Picard. Yes, I’m really enjoying it too. And can we just take a moment to appreciate that it’s being co-written by Michael Chabon. Michael. Chabon. Of course, it’s going to be great. As you say, I do like how they’ve taken the characters and, well, the hope of previous Trek serious and successfully incorporated them into this darker world.
However, at the moment I’m mostly in awe of and loving The Good Place. Late to that party, I know. (And Ted Danson or Jameela Jamil for future Doctors anyone?)
28 February 2020 at 22:34 #69893@blenkinsopthebrave and @bluesqueakpip
This is probably a sad admission but nothing would give me more squee than a Who arc based around Shelley’s work. I am wondering myself whether Gallifrey is as destroyed as the Master is making out. Apart from anything, it would be the first time Who history that he’s actually ever really achieved anything. I’m at the stage of wanting to know the how as much as the why.
On a side note, the Doc releases the Cyberiad (sorry, that’s what I’m calling it) at Diodati and then zips forward into the future to undo the consequences, that’s right yes? Why does she wait till after a devastating war that’s nearly wiped out all humans before she gets involved. Wouldn’t it make more sense to get in there before the war’s actually started?
27 February 2020 at 21:00 #69883yes, it did occur to me that the most straightforward explanation for a lot of this year’s big twists is that it’s an elaborate hoax set up by the Master. The Doctor actually trapped in a Matrix-like hallucination?
26 February 2020 at 22:01 #69865That’s really fascinating. (Though annoyingly you’ve now furnished me with a long list of books that I really want to read …) I’m also interested in the gap between 1880-odd and 1982. Was there really nothing SF-ey published in Ireland for a 100 years? Admittedly, it’s a 100 years in Ireland that are pretty packed with incident, but all the same.
But the whole argument is really interesting. (I wonder if we can pin some blame on Yeats for shackling the ideas around Celtic mythology and therefore fantasy together with the fight for Irish independence? Did it mean that anything with a fantastical bent automatically had overtones of the political struggle?)
26 February 2020 at 16:31 #69861That’s really interesting. Thanks for sharing. So, the 1950s then. So, it’s just a nostalgia trip then rather than something more politically charged (although t’interwebs tell me that the 1950s was a time of intense IRA activity with a sustained border attack campaign, so maybe it is going to play into it, after all. Otherwise, again I ask, why Ireland and not some other cliched rural idyll?
And the point the writer makes about Celtic worlds not being considered suitable for SF/fantasy and being framed as ‘golden pasts’ is an interesting one but not strictly accurate from a Scottish perspective. There was apparently a strong tradition of science fiction written in Gaelic here throughout the 20th century. I’m wondering if the same might not be true for Ireland, if a little digging was done….
26 February 2020 at 15:35 #69859Hi @thecityofjeff
Welcome. This is a small-ish forum but everyone is very friendly and enjoy speculating like crazy on the slightest thing…
Yeah, s18 is a really interesting jumping-on point, I think. TV-wise, I was maybe a season or two earlier. But really Who for me has always been primarily a literary thing and my childhood was spent obsessed with the Target novels. The TV show was, oddly, a separate and sometimes slightly inferior thing to me. But s18 is exciting because it was such a time of change — changing Doctor, changing look to the show, changing production philosophy even. Kind of like what we’re undergoing now.
(Can’t help imagine how it would have fared if Twitter had been around in those days….)
26 February 2020 at 15:29 #69858That’s really interesting. I am definitely intrigued now whether this is, as you say, some nostalgic twee Irish fantasy. (In which case, why not just imagine some quaint English bobby scenario?) Or is it going to tap into something more directly political? A pastoral idyll that’s actually riven by civil war — as an analogue for what we’re going to find with Gallifrey perhaps? There’s something actually quite daring and actually amusing too if Chibs is indeed going to run with that ‘Gallifrey? Isn’t that in Ireland?’ joke of all those years ago.
26 February 2020 at 14:26 #69854As others have pointed out, coppers in Ireland are indeed known as Garda. I’m still wondering if the decision to set this little section in Ireland is going to have more import as a setting than just to make a slight teasing pun. The time period has to be significant too. Did we get a specific time for this action. Is it, for example, around the time of the Easter Rising or a bit later? Brave of Chibs to touch on that stuff, if so.
Also been wondering idly if the Cyberium (I still prefer Cyberiad) is going to have been affected by having been hosted by first Shelley (a passionate idealist if ever there was one) and then the Doctor (same). Is it going to change the philosophy and outlook of the Cybermen in some way? Are they going to become good? Or at least, less evil?
24 February 2020 at 12:33 #69812And what, by the way, do we make of Graham saying ‘I’m the Do … I’m the most normal person you’d ever meet.’
That can’t have been accidental surely. (Unless Chibs is bringing back the Billy-fluff.) So, is it a red herring or has the Doc transferred part of her consciousness to Graham or something like that?
23 February 2020 at 21:46 #69802That transition into the opening titles was bloody lovely though, it has to be said….
23 February 2020 at 20:48 #69798Am I the only one to think that jumping on a forum to link to your own elsewhere is kinda rude? Just saying….
As the first part of a two-part Cyber finale the one this ep had to beat was WEAT and it certainly didn’t manage that. But there was lots to love there. Having seen them in action, I have to say that I do love the new Cyber-Design. It’s a perfect synthesis of Old and Nu Who.
But as a story this had Chibs’ trademark of being so breakneck that you struggle to attach to anything really emotionally. And there was nice character work here. Graham was great throughout, although Yaz’s endless wittering on about hope was grinding my gears by the end. Here’s to a speedy Cyber-conversion next week.
And Jodie was on top form. I’m enjoying her Doc a lot more now that she’s brought this hard, abrupt edge to the character. If she is indeed paired up with a solo companion next series then I’m expecting some great things. It’s taken a while but I think her Doc has bedded in finally. Certainly, I at last have more of a sense of who she is as a character now than I did last year.
I’m not sure I’m quite enjoying Cyber-Psycho as much this week but it’ll be interesting to see where that part of the plot goes. And I did really enjoy the Irish segments – I actually could have watched a whole hour of that stuff. So I want to see that pay off too. My theory at the moment is that this is the origin of the Lone Cyberman or it’s what is playing inside his head.
Am I the only one who saw that Gallifrey reveal coming the minute we started getting the lightshow on the beach? And I had a feeling the Master was going to be the cliffhanger after he was taking so long to show up. But the overall pace of this was kind of plodding and it didn’t help that it actually reminded me of Av Kolos on more than one occasion. Starting off on alien quarry before segueing into poorly lit industrial gloom. One thing’s for sure though, this finale has got some serious heavy lifting to do next week if they’re going to stick a landing on all of this. I really hope they don’t mess it up.
18 February 2020 at 01:01 #69720Hmm, that’s interesting about the ghosts. They certainly made a point of emphasising it at the end.
I’m also slightly troubled by how this story seems to contradict the events of the Eighth Doctor Big Finish stories with Mary Shelley in them, particularly the one set at Diodati. I thought BF was canon now. Personally, I’m seeing it as further proof to my theory that JodieDoc has been an alt-universe Doc all along.
18 February 2020 at 00:48 #69718I seem to be saying this every week but that was probably the best episode of the Whittaker era (which is a good sign that it is constantly improving). Certainly this episode finally gave Jodie her ‘Doctor’ moment and it’s been a damn long time coming. I’m liking this angry and impatient Doc a lot more — in fact, she excels at being more Hartnell-ish than Capaldi, who wore his Hartnelliness on his sleeve a lot but was actually in the end something a lot more unique. I hope JW and Chibs start to realise that Whittaker’s strengths lie far more in giving us an intense Doc rather than the quirky-quirky Tennant knock-off that we’ve been getting and which seems to be falling away a bit now.
The Cyberman was great also. In philosophy, the closest we’ve had to the original Tenth Planet Cybermen. Although having him with a deactivated emotion inhibitor, while meaning that they can get round the making him an actually interesting antagonist to engage with, makes me wonder whether you can really consider him a Cyberman and rather more of an armoured psychopath. But even so, he was a memorable villain. And it looks like we’ll be seeing him again.
However, as a huge Shelley nerd, I’d have to say that as a historical this story absolutely sucks — and that’s saying something considering some of the filmic violence that’s been inflicted on the Diodati story over the years. For one thing, Byron was clearly an absolute arse but the last thing you could call him is a coward, as is implied here, I think. The guy used to keep a bear in his rooms at Oxford ffs. He also died a general in the Greek wars of independence. Claire Clairmont was also hardly the winsome almost lovestruck schoolgirl we see in this story. She was a pretty fiery and forthright individual, certainly by the standards of the time and seemed to have pursued Byron as much as he pursued her. (Also no sign of Byron’s club foot, I notice.)
And then there’s Shelley. Shelley is always made out to be this thoughtful dreamboat character and they really amped this up here. But he was a deeply off-putting figure to most. He certainly wasn’t this elegant figure and was always remarked upon for the extreme dishevelment of his dress. Byron used to complain that he smelled overly of talcum powder. And he was a highly excitable figure with a shrieking high-pitched voice that grated on many.
It’s probably too much to expect a totally faithful rendition, of course, and in previous stories this series we’ve seen deeply selective interpretations of historical figures. And literary figures get an especially bad rap in Who — from HG Wells to Shakespeare but this was particularly bad, if you ask me. To the extent that I ask myself what the actual point was? Why not just have any old haunted house with some gifted people in it? I guess it has something to do with the dangerous precedent set by Mark Gattiss and Simon Callow who are both immersed in Dickens and could bring that love and knowledge to bear on a Who story. I imagine that was harder to reproduce than it looked and to my mind it’s probably only Richard Curtis who has come close.
And once again there’s a question with the ever-expanding-can-of-worms that is mindwiping. In fact, what we see here is the absolute opposite — with the Doc forcing in ‘memories’ that a character really shouldn’t have. Which to my mind strikes me just as bad the other way around — especially as Shelley even in this rubbish interpretation doesn’t strike me as emotionally strong enough to be carrying around the knowledge of his own death for a couple of years.
14 February 2020 at 11:52 #69673Think I read the Corman many moons ago but never the Russell. (Corman to me always came across as a funny and affable bloke who never took himself too seriously. Russell, meanwhile, um, didn’t….)
13 February 2020 at 18:58 #69667@blenkinsopthebrave et al
It’s an interesting statement and I think I largely agree with the sentiment. Though part of me thinks that if you have to put out a statement explaining a scene then that scene has probably failed. Some thoughts:
For one thing, the ‘socially awkward’ line seems so gauche, and not something any Doc would come out and say, unless they were using it to dissemble. To my mind, it made 13 look shifty rather than honest. For another, the Doc isn’t ‘socially awkward’, not in the same way we are. Because our society is not theirs, no matter how long they’ve lived in it. To paraphrase Missy, we’re the puppies. You don’t feel socially awkward around the puppies. You just accept that your terms of reference are so very different.
But this isn’t a big deal to me, partially because it might play out in later episodes. The Doc might help Graham in some way or – my preference – the fam realise that the Doc is not someone they can be with or rely on long-term just because her frames of reference are so different. I’m also still slightly holding out for that this is maybe not the ‘true’ Doctor and the Ruth Doc is and that JW is some weird anomalous alt Doc created by abortive regenerations over a black hole. And that would maybe explain why her behaviour doesn’t chime with what we might expect.
Because that’s my only real problem with the scene (aside from its actual placement in the ep). It just clips into what I think are the core values of the Doc and which are constant regardless of incarnation — one of them being unquestioned compassion to those closest to him/her It’s consistent with 13’s personality but not the Doctor’s character and there is difference between those. However, as it’s clearly resonated with a lot of people in a RL capacity it probably doesn’t matter that much. Plus for my money, we’ve already seen her behave in a much more egregiously non-Doctorey way in Ker-Blam! (and possibly also with her random mind-wipey behaviour earlier in the series) . Life went on after that, so there’s no reason why it shouldn’t after this. And we’ve had behaviourally quixotic Docs before.
Placement is another matter tho. It kind of undermines the over-arching message of the episode imo and it just makes for a packed episode. It would have been nice to see all this companion back story unpacked over a number of episodes, in fact. I do wonder if the evil Immortals might have been a better Big Bad for a series arc, with these companion bad dreams being unpacked over a number of episodes and culminating in a big showdown, which was kind of rushed anyway.
My only other beef with the ep was it was kind of unoriginal again. Like Judoon, which was a mash-up of everything from Eleventh Hour to Utopia, this one seemed to be Amy’s Choice meets Listen. I’m starting to wonder if Chibs is the recycler showrunner rather than bringing anything actually new to the table.
Edge of Destruction is a great story. It’s always left me wondering two things though: Is it the first example of a ‘bottle episode’, and did Who actually do that before Trek, which gets credited with it. And is it the first example of a bona fide deus ex machina in Who?
13 February 2020 at 18:42 #69666There’s also Frankenstein Unbound which had Michael Hutchence as Shelley, if you can believe that. Plus the biopic of Mary Shelley from a couple of years back, which I believe is on Netflix….
10 February 2020 at 14:40 #69631Maybe the ennui is just setting in. Not that this was a bad ep. I’d maybe count it as among the better episodes of s12. I liked the Syria setting and kind of wish that they’d stayed there a bit longer. It was also good to see the ‘fam’ (shudder) having their backstories filled in a bit more. I rather wish we’d seen some hints of Yaz’s mental health history a lot earlier, so we could have seen it seeded through the episodes. A companion dealing with those sorts of issues while travelling in the TARDIS would have been very interesting. Having said that, I’m not sure that I found the portrayal of Yaz’s depression wholly convincing – certainly not compared to Tony Curran’s as Van Gogh (although that was obviously a far more extreme example of mental illness). As a whole, I think Vincent and the Doctor is the more compelling story about these themes but I’m always glad when they get highlighted in something like Who. (I’m also left wondering if Yaz would really have been put on frontline policing duties if she’d had pretty recent mental health issues.)
And then there’s that horrifically emotionally tone-deaf scene with Graham and the Doctor. Yes, I get that the Doc is alien and her responses are going to be unexpected but that seemed to fly in the face of the core compassion of just about any other Doctor. Again, with Vincent and the Doctor, we see 11 (very much a socially awkward Doctor) able to comfort Amy after Vincent’s suicide. We’ve also seen 12 evolve from emotional isolation to embracing kindness. Has the Doc forgotten all that. And if she undergoes an emotional reset every time she regenerates, that strikes me as kinda problematic. And I guess what particularly jars is that it’s only a couple of episodes since she was in an isolated, lonely place and the fam rallied round for her. What with this and the mindwiping, I’m really not that keen on this Doc. My complaint last year was that there was no depth to her. Now we’re seeing plenty of depth but it’s rather revealing her to be a bit of a dick.
But in lighter matters, the actual plot of this ep was pretty interesting and Ian Gelder and his co-God were genuinely creepy and brought some genuine old-school Who scares to proceedings. I liked the little animated sequence too — although it was perhaps a little bit too much of an obvious Gaiman-ey rip-off from Good Omens. Wasn’t crazy about the fanwanky cruff of the references to the Guardians and the Toymaker. It didn’t really add anything to the episode and was, if anything, rather self-consciously distracting.
2 February 2020 at 20:56 #69542Yep, that was terrible. Back to s11-style well-intentioned ‘kernel of a great idea’ but utterly screwed up in a breakneck, poorly thought-out slice of Who pudding. After Ker-Blam and now this, I’d really like it if they kept Pete McTighe away from Who. And I wouldn’t even say the environmental message was handled particularly well. The Green Death managed it far better and that’s 40 years ago, for heaven’s sake.
Nope, aside from looking as fantastic as ever, I found that utterly dismal.
28 January 2020 at 17:38 #69455Absolutely, anything is possible in this show. Let’s cross our fingers for more Gat.
While I wouldn’t want to be overly negative, I must admit I do still have quite a few reservations with s12. Here’s what I posted on Twitter after a rewatch of the ep:
Just rewatched Fugitive. Brilliant, kinetic fun but I don’t think my opinion has changed on what a mess it is narratively. It’s really just a series of WTF fangasm moments strung together in a plot that’s a mash-up of Smith and Jones, The Eleventh Hour, Name of the Doctor, Family of Blood, Utopia and probably more. Kind of confirms my belief that Chibs is not a creative developer in the manner of RTD or Moff but a recycler of other’s ideas, with an impatience to skip from one Big Moment to the next without considering the story logic of doing so.
It feels like a Greatest Hits package more than anything else and I suspect that after the adrenaline rush of this week has died off, it won’t be considered a classic ep in the long run. But he has raised some fascinating ideas and I’ll take my hat off to him if he pulls it off.
28 January 2020 at 17:33 #69454I think that’s almost a certainty with regards to Big Finish.
And it’s probably too early to say for sure but I wouldn’t be massively surprised if we have, in fact, just met the next Doctor…. at the very least, I think she’ll become WhitDoc’s equivalent of Captain Jack/River Song — a capable peer of the Doctor’s who can show up every so often, as required.
28 January 2020 at 15:16 #69450Done.
The Doc’s motivation for getting involved in Gloucester was that the Judoon were trigger-happy and dangerous, so I think those deaths were there to bear that out. And if what they were hunting was a renegade Time Lord then it would make sense that they would have guns that would have an anti-regeneration feature. My inclination is that they’re dead. Which is a shame cos I’d like to have seen some more of Gat.
That is one incredibly fanwanky theory (but that’s what we’re here for). But having said that, it’s still not as fanwanky as the episode itself was…
28 January 2020 at 15:10 #69449Is the fact that the TARDIS was over a black hole when CapDoc started but then refused to regenerate a factor? Is JoDoc the Doctor we would have got if he’d gone through with it then and that she’s the Doc of betwixt universes. WhitDoc being the one who emerges after time being frozen and all the events of TUAT. I guess that might still fall into the ‘parallel universe Doc’ getout that Chibs has nixed but I think there might we wiggle room.
And at the mo, I’m kind of liking it because it doesn’t render TUAT a pointless exercise that slightly devalued the potential impact of the end of The Doctor Falls.
I think the modus operandi of the aliens from Spyfall (can’t even remember their name. Chibs, you really need to work on your alien-naming skills. Your choices are rubbish and unmemorable) and the line about possible futures at the end of Orphan 55 strike me as possibly being hints in that direction.
It also struck me that Chibs might be being a bit tricksy here. What he’s actually said that JoDoc isn’t from an alternative universe. But what (ref. my half-assed theory above) is that WhitDoc has been the alt-universe Doctor all along and JoDoc is the ‘our’ regular one?
27 January 2020 at 00:45 #69395@juniperfish – yes, it would have been difficult to imagine 13 and Jack getting on, possibly even less so than 12 and Jack. (In fact, for someone so chirpy, I can’t help but feel that 13 is the Doc least likely to get on with a whole range of people. She seems to use that fam like a security blanket in a way. And as that is stripped away, as in this episode, she emerged as a much pricklier character – and I’m not sure she’s not all the better for it.)
remember last week that I said Doctor Who had no compunction about using stuff from the New Adventures? And this week, guess what? A reprise of Human Nature
Yep, and I, of course, agreed with you. But with the chameleon arch, Jack and the Judoon, it did feel kind of like an RTD greatest hits package which I’m not sure I’m totally in love with. If it’s a one-off, fine. But if this is a well that Chibs continues to dip from then I think it might get old pretty quickly.
Dr Fish, I think the reason Captain Jack felt slightly fanwankery is because what was needed in this episode was any major character from the Doctor’s past to turn up with a warning. Could’ve been Jack or River – anyone who could reasonably teleport/scoop the fam.
True, and I suppose for Chibs, Jack is the obvious choice. I’ve just never particularly understood his appeal. That Chibs had to dig so far back for someone to fulfil this role is partly a side effect of having such canonically pared down series last year. Moff would have been able to slot River or Vastra in without any trouble or query. And while as @juniperfish says, it makes sense to keep Jack and 13 separate, it also minimises the actual sense of having Jack there. They don’t know him from Adam and it really could have been anyone there. Even someone we’ve never seen before. He’s there for the benefit of a bit of fan service rather than being narratively necessary.
26 January 2020 at 22:09 #69391Well, that was interesting. It looked great and had a real kinetic forward momentum in the direction. And this was the first time that Jodie was really clicking for me as the Doc too. Plus I even liked the Judoon, who I thought were pretty rubbish in Smith and Jones.
Plus the other Doc’s TARDIS looks great. Why can’t we have that one instead of the crystal monstrosity? Jo Martin in general was a pretty fun Doc herself. But when you get past the fangasmy potential, it was kind of a mess.
Jack is still as an annoying git as ever (sorry @juniperfish but I was so over the erstwhile Time Agent by the end of s3) and if there is not payoff for his being there, other than giving the fam something to do while the Doctors bond then it will count as the biggest piece of fanwankery in the show ever.
So, I guess we’re moving towards some sort of multiverse finale, with alternate Doctors and maybe alternate Gallifreys (alternate Masters?) All of which I find quite intriguing. Just so long as it doesn’t get messed up in the telling.
But if Chibs is really going for a ‘the Doc having a whole set of pre-Hartnell regenerations’ thing, I don’t really have a problem with that. It doesn’t detract from the First Doctor in the slightest and could open up interesting possibilities.
23 January 2020 at 12:28 #69350Good point about the Looms. As you say, it doesn’t mean that won’t manifest in some form and it’s true that the show does have form in nicking stuff from other media. Having said that, Chibs seems to be going out of his way to retcon Moff’s vision of Gallifrey out of exsistence, so I wouldn’t put anything past him at the moment.
What is nice, however, that he’s finally provided some material for some proper bonkerising. And not before time.
23 January 2020 at 12:23 #69349I was never a fan of the Black/White Guardian malarkey myself. It just made the moral universe of Who too, um, black and white. I think the connections is being made by the all the birds that seem to flock around him and the Guardians seemed to be associated with birds. Plus a being who can materialise inside the TARDIS by the looks of it.
Personally, I’m not convinced and think it’s a variation on the ‘Omega’s definitely coming back’ rumours that have dogged every series since like forever….
22 January 2020 at 07:59 #69326Scuttlebutt among the twitterati is the old bloke in the TARDIS at the end might be the Black Guardian. Not sure I like that idea personally and let’s face it, it could be bloody anybody…
22 January 2020 at 00:07 #69318I think a change of companions is definitely on the cards (tho I’m still holding out for some kind of Dark Yaz scenario).
I’m hearing speculation that the shifty bloke in the TARDIS which might be something for the hardcore spoiler section but would be very interesting if true….
22 January 2020 at 00:03 #69317How much would Davros crow if it turned out the Doctor’s own people were guilty of similar genetic “enhancement”.
This will be very interesting if it goes into this kind of territory. But are we veering dangerously close to Looms and such things?
22 January 2020 at 00:01 #69316Worth it for the title alone. Many thanks indeed….
19 January 2020 at 23:16 #69248Yeah, I’m not sure I buy that personally. Especially as Tesla’s own tech got given a Doctor boost in a potentially highly destructive way. But to me it highlights the fundamental issue at stake — the Doctor shouldn’t get to choose, particularly not on a set of murky and possibly shifting criteria of her own devising….
(I’m starting to feel that this might be the hill I’ve chosen to die on….)
Okay, so that’s now two stories (Skyfall and this one) where eugenics – not just the murder of the ‘unfit’, but the breeding of the ‘fit’ – is in the backstory. Skyfall with the Nazi’s and their breeding programme, and Tesla proposing the ‘deliberate guidance of the mating instinct’.
Good point. I wonder if that also feeds into the dark secret of the TLs that you and @juniperfish are moving towards…..
19 January 2020 at 23:09 #69246@juniperfish, @blenkinsopthebrave @miapatrick
Many thanks for the congratulations. (And @miapatrick, yes this forum makes a nice little refuge which is necessary sometimes)
19 January 2020 at 23:01 #69243A huge improvement on last week and if I’m honest the episode from the Chibs period that I’ve most enjoyed so far. Certaintly, Nina Metivier has a stronger grasp of putting together a Who story than many of the writers of recent years and possibly even the showrunner himself.
That said, it kind of flags in the middle and feels a bit SJA at points to me. Certainly, Queen Skithra (?) seems to be scoring pretty high on the Zaroff Scale of Who villain hokiness. The Skithra were rather sketchily drawn and I found their similarity to the Racnoss distracting.
Goran Višnjić gave a great performance as Tesla and was a real highlight. Robert Glenister did good work as Edison too. But as with Noor in Spyfall, there seemed to be extreme selectivity at play in the presentation. That they wanted to gloss over Tesla’s support for eugenics and compulsory sterilisation of the criminal and insane is understandable in the context of the story they wanted to tell but does feel a little like the whole story is not being told. Personally part of me is kind of OK with the fact that he never became rich or powerful, considering the kind of abilities he had, coupled with the views he held. But this is mere cavilling and you’d have to level the same criticisms at the presentation of the likes of HG Wells and Churchill in the show too.
Instead I’ll moan about the Silurians being described as ‘aliens’ more than once throughout the story. This seems to be something of a schoolboy production error to make, particularly as the showrunner wrote a two-part story all about why they weren’t aliens. Surely Chibs has read this script multiple times and surely he would have picked this up? On a related note, where the hell was the Silurian gun during the final stand-off? I would have thought it more useful than a non-functioning death ray prototype.
And for that matter, was that the only ‘alien’ tech, the Scythra had? Because they didn’t seem to produce any more to use after that. The TARDIS forcefield extending like that also raises questions. I can think of several times when that would have made or broke an episode in the past.
And finally, the mindwipe issue (sorry to bang on about this). Noor and Ada get mindwiped but Edison and Tesla don’t? The argument at the time was that leaving Ada with the knowledge was dangerous. But she’s a couple of hundred years out of time, surely it’s a much more significant threat with these two with their abilities, resources and at the start of the 20th C, especially as it’s made clear that Edison in particular could be a menace if he got hold of future tech. It just reinforces just how much of a can of worms Chibs opened with that (frankly unnecessary) action.
All in all, a solid bit of Who, I’d say. For me, perhaps the best of the Chibs era so far but still nothing earth-shattering. Probably on a par with Shakespeare Code or Vampires in Venice. Entertaining but largely unremarkable.
@bluesqueakpip and @juniperfish
Good point about the scavenging motif. It’ll be very interesting if the dark secret of the Time Lords does tend in that direction. I’d be quite happy if it did.
16 January 2020 at 18:23 #6917416 January 2020 at 17:40 #69172@phaseshift and @blenkinsopthebrave
I too would love to see a blog on this subject. It does make me wonder what other analogies we can make. Would RTD be Verity Lambert, for being the midwife of Nu-Who? Does that make Moffat Barry Letts or Philip Hinchcliffe?
Was also wondering if this is the most comprehensive trouncing the forum has ever inflicted on an episode. I’m struggling to remember a worse one. Maybe there should be some kind of plaque….
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