Sea Devils And Die: GeroniMoffat's Doctor Who In The 2010s

I think the pacing of a Who episode is really important and there are some that have felt so manic that they've been difficult to follow or care about, and that's certainly a directing issue. Some episodes just FEEL totally different from one another and it's not just an issue of which era or planet they're taking place in.

xp I just realised I can't remember a single thing about Damaged Goods (apart from somebody being called something Tyler)

depressed 80s tenement housing (can't remember the British term for this... council estate?) taken over by an alien made of trash; a pivotal subplot involves an HIV-positive gay man lusting after the Doctor's male companion, who before this book had been described as a relentlessly upbeat former cop from the 30th century who was relentlessly, deadly serious about his procedural work, but for some reason in this book decided to fuck the HIV-positive man in the middle of a stakeout, leading up to a horribly facile and offensive coda after The Big Fight where it's discovered that this tryst injected the HIV-positive man with future antibodies that cure HIV

all of the previous was totally unnecessary to the plot and counter to the characterization of the Doctor's companion; not so much the gay tryst, as much as it happening in the middle of him doing his job

(the fawning praise of that book at the time made me realize that fans and authors co-existing on the same newsgroup wasn't necessarily a good thing)

i am almost dreading the next ep wrt pace, altho the second preview clip has quite a laid back 'calm before the storm' feel. that scene probably occurs within the first five mins.

Damaged Goods contains a gay character, David, and homosexuality is a recurring theme explored in much of Davies's writing, as he himself noted in an article for The Guardian newspaper in 2003. "The first gay character I ever wrote was a Devil-worshipping Nazi lesbian in a Children's BBC thriller, Dark Season. She was too busy taking over the world to do anything particularly lesbian, though she did keep a Teutonic Valkyrie by her side at all times... Once I'd started, I never stopped... I even wrote a Doctor Who novel in which the six-foot blond, blue-eyed companion interrupts the hunt for an interdimensional Gallifreyan War Machine to get a blowjob in the back of a taxi. Like you do."[4]

no you fucking don't, not if you actually understand the characters you are writing rather than trying to get your personal wank material published

taken over by an alien made of trash

Sub-absorbaloff at best

actually the trash alien was an out-of-control Gallifreyan war machine; I have managed to block out almost everything about the book that I liked, lol

holy shit, are these books canonical + like approved by the estate? i can't even imagine...

Before the new series, they were semi-canonical; now they are kind of in a weird limbo space because the books bent over backwards to incorporate show canon (including the McGann movie) but the show has this on-again, off-again view of book canonicity (I think some of the monsters introduced in the books have been off-handed mentions in the series, but then again you have at least one instance of an entire book story being repurposed into a TV story).

sometimes really tempted to read The Dying Days and Lungbarrow

and THEN, when the BBC took the Doctor Who license back from Virgin, Virgin spun off into a new series using Benny, the Doctor's most popular Virgin book companion, which had its own set of weird canon synchronicities with the official BBC book line

Like, seriously, never mention Canon to Who fans. Wiggy McGann doesn't count for some people because 'The Movie' was technically that, a film, so doesn't count.

This idea of preserving a canon for a fictional character who has been handled by dozens of writers in multiple formats over many years is quite odd, really.

Holmes canonists are the real mentalists imo.

Oh, and UNIT DATING CONTROVERSY.

Like I've said before, if they can't even agree on the day of the earth's desctruction then consistency is basically out the window from the start.

xxp idk at least you can say "Conan Doyle and only Conan Doyle is canon", and then have fun arguments about e.g. Watson's wandering wound. Maybe he was never in the army at all!

Holmes canonists are the real mentalists imo.

lol this allows a gret tie-in to All-Consuming Fire, the Virgin NA that ties Holmes canon and Doctor Who canon together:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2d/All-Consuming_Fire.JPG

Xpost ... I picked up The Writer's Tale from a slush pile at work and was genuinely surprised by how much it made me despise RTD. Not just for his seat-of-the-pants approach to the show, but for the attention-seeking neediness that seeped out of every single sentence.

again, none of this would have been surprising if you'd read Damaged Goods back in 1996

I was so happy that "Rose" didn't feature Billie Piper bewilderedly watching an all-male frottage party that none of his other storytelling issues really bothered me. (little did I know he was saving that type of thing for Torchwood, lol)

Anyone here going to watch the new Torchwood series on Starz? The promo for it made it look like it could be good, but.

You know, it will still be Torchwood.

I am VERY tempted to order Starz for it (much like I ordered HBO for "Game of Thrones") because I liked "Children of Earth" so much. I hope it leans more on the apocalyptic creepy side and less on the "everyone in Torchwood has sex with each other" side

(I recognize that, without that latter side, it isn't really Torchwood)

bill pullman is in the new series. i hope he doesn't have sex with anybody.

it's RTD, Bill Pullman is likely to have sex with everybody

Rusty has already said Nu Torchwood will have more sex, gay sex, sex and explosions/ridic car chases than the BBC ever let him have. He also has a helicopter (presumably this will pan out the same way as JNT spunking away the budget of Battlefield).

I am bracing myself for a scene where Gwen stops chasing a monster so she can strap on a dildo and peg Rhys

Didn't you watch Series 2? That was hinted at in the wedding episode iirc.

holy shit, are these books canonical + like approved by the estate?

the... Who family estate?

Didn't you watch Series 2? That was hinted at in the wedding episode iirc.

I vaguely remember that...?

Alium posing as Cuntstubble Gappy's mum as I remember it. Long discussion in a Mexican standoff about them all shagging.

In TV the director's not the boss, the producers are. There's a number of reasons for that but the main one is that Dr Who needs to look and feel like Dr Who, just like ER needs to look and feel like ER. There's precious little room for putting any sort of individual stamp on the acting, the camera movement, the lighting, etc. So the only differences from week to week are going to be in the scripts.

Stanley Kubrick's DOCTOR WHO

Is he?

WOULD WATCH

a pivotal subplot involves an HIV-positive gay man lusting after the Doctor's male companion, who before this book had been described as a relentlessly upbeat former cop from the 30th century who was relentlessly, deadly serious about his procedural work, but for some reason in this book decided to fuck the HIV-positive man in the middle of a stakeout

oh god I think I had managed to cut that out of my memories somehow. Cheers for the summary. My god.

In fact I'm pretty sure that that scene was the moment when I went from being intrigued by Davies's take on DW (I read it in 2003 or something) to just thoroughly wtf

Doctor Who New Series 2005 (spoilers ahoy) <-- evidence of me liking this book and making allowances for RTD, sigh

I know! I was basically all "... o_O uh waht"

Even better was reading rec.arts.drwho at the time; Kate Orman (co-plotter of that book) and her soon-to-be-husband Jon Blum were regular posters and were very keen on slapping the homophobe tag on everyone who objected to Rusty's... interesting, and not backed up by any other author before or after him, take on Chris Cwej. I think I even got into it with them or their acolytes, under the reasonable-to-me argument that Chris having a gay encounter wasn't a problem, but him having a gay encounter in the middle of a stakeout was so painfully out-of-character that there was no way to read the scene other than to think Rusty really, really, really wanted to blow a fictional blonde future Adonis, and the "justifying" coda was in actuality horrifyingly tacky and awful.

Actually perusing back through the archives, I had an overall positive impression of the book at the time even though I objected to the irrational out-of-character sexcapades, which kind of reinforces my post upthread re: forgetting everything I actually liked about the book, lol.

Yeah, I distinctly remember enjoying the book (probably giving space to the new showrunner at the time tbh), but now that you've mentioned that stakeout it has come flooding back to me in sharp relief. I never read much Cwej so the out-of-character behaviour didn't jar for me nearly as much as the fact of the scene itself.

I mean you get used to seeing McCoy getting about in question marks and standing off against giant liquorice all-sorts, and then suddenly his mate's gobbing it in a cab.

Cwej as introduced and in pretty much every book up to that point was the quintessential "good cop"; almost always cheerful, tendency towards optimism, laid back and fun when off the clock and really, really focused on his job when on the clock with a staggering level of proficiency. He was supposed to be a perfect foil to his older, wearier partner Roz, who had just as strong of a justice streak but was MUCH more cynical and way more likely to presume guilt. It would have totally been within Roz's character to get fed up with a stakeout and do something else (likely not sexual, but more along the lines of say breaking into wherever they were staking out to look for clues) but Cwej was, until that scene, way more of the "these are my orders and I am politely carrying them out; sorry for the inconvenience" type.

xp: lolololol

(Benny, Chris and Roz are one of my favorite TARDIS crews of all-time)

A bit of me cheers every time new Who does something to fuck up incorporating the books into canon, ans all but one of my attempts to read them has been frustrated by the fan-wanking continuity crap, feeble prose, and the writers determiantion to make every event and every companion from the books SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than anything that ever happened on TV

The only good book I finished was the one, title now forgotten, written from the POVs of Alan Turing, Graham Greene and Joseph Heller

AS all but one, I mean

that was a BBC book by Paul Leonard, The Turing Test

IMO the best writers they had were Lawrence Miles, Jonathan Morris and Ben Aaronovitch

Loooooove The Tomorrow Windows.

The first half hour felt like the days of Rusty throwing ideas together while wanking hoping everyone agreed with how great he is. The last 20 were OK, but River Reveal was decidedly average. The only great bit imo was "fool you twice with the same trick".