WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

have at it, folx

So are we looking forward to this? I'm liking the new-broom approach to the casting/costume, and much as I enjoyed the last series (a lot), the fact that it ended with two incarnations of the Master in a Cybermen origins story that culminated in a surprise appearance from the Hartnell Doctor indicates a freshen up might be in order.

But jesus, Chibnall's previous Doctor Who sits on a spectrum of bland to poor - some of the most unmemorable episodes in recent memory. Or am I being pessimistic?

(cheeky plug: we review Chibnall's Silurian two-parter on the most recent edition of my Doctor Who podcast - http://www.illexplainlater.com/post/166422653503/episode-27-land-of-make-believe - where we discussed some of this stuff...)

v much looking forward to seeing how jodie whittaker plays it, v much apprehensive about everything else

The whole show has been feeling very tired and in need of a new injection of ideas for quite some time now. On the other hand I've never seen Broadchurch and most of the episodes Chibnall had written have felt like mid-series filler so I dunno if he's the guy to provide them.

The incredibly shoddy photoshopped TARDIS behind Whitaker's Mork cosplay in the promo photo sets the tone for exactly the level of quality I expect from ol' Chinballs.

Boring writer doesn't neccessariy mean boring showrunner, I'm hoping.

I am excited the same way I am excited for any new actor who takes on the role of the Doctor. I'm also looking forward to the Doctor-companion interaction and which parts will change and which parts will stay the same. I also enjoyed most of Chibnall's Who stories and think his worst work appeared in the first season of Torchwood.

I did read somewhere that he was planning to have more season-long storylines, which is the opposite direction things should be going in imo. A series of only very loosely connected, straighforward one and two parters each written by a different good writer would do the job fine.

I get that on the one hand, but on the other hand the current Golden Age of Television is really strong on bingeable serialized stories that last the whole season, plus his biggest critical praise came from doing that with Broadchurch.

I think the problem with recent Doctor Who arcs is that they're neither fish nor fowl - an awkward mix of 'arc episodes' and deliberately less important standalones that fails to really build to any sort of dramatic crescendo or are rushed at the final stages. I'd be fine with either 10 completely discrete episodes or a single 10-part story (an updated spin on The Daleks' Masterplan would suit me very nicely).

I think RTD's first season was the only to really pull off its "arc" - unless you count the Riversong episodes as a single story (and why not - at least "Wedding..." finally gave it a satisfying ending).

S1 barely had an arc, just some flash frames of graffiti shot later on and inserted into episodes months after they'd been written

S5 had a fantastic, coherent, satisfyingly complicated plot arc (only undermined by Rory's prop badge), and the first two Capaldi years together pulled off successful parallel character arcs

TBH I'd be happy to settle for the show being fun again and it hasn't felt like that for ages.

^ x1000000
i may try again now

Maybe I read too many Virgin/BBC novels but I can't point at a single season of the reboot that I would say is anti-fun, including Tennant's first season (which is the only one I haven't seen every episode of despite owning multiple copies of it)

lost me with matt smith, tried again with capaldi and still found it a slog

Can we count the 2008-2010 specials?

xp ulysses you crazy, Matt Smith's first season was the best yet.

i agree, first matt smith season is one of the most classic

I demand much less from Who then all of you. I'm happy if it's marginally entertaining which it consistently is. I don't care for her suspenders, but I like her coat, and I think she'll be an interesting doctor. I'm more concerned with three full time companions; that pushes this too far into an ensemble which makes me wonder if they will let her carry the show or not.

the ONE thing I did grow tired of under Moffatt was the manic pace of every episode though. LIke, 1000 things would happen in some of those smith episodes and they just got impossible to follow. Broadchurch, like it or hate it, has a much more staid pace that I hope he brings to the show.

I look at it as back to basics with the caveat that the show has often struggled to juggle story arcs for the Doctor and three full-time companions (the most notorious example I can remember being "Kinda", where Nyssa spends the entire story napping in the TARDIS and pops up at the end asking "hey, did I miss anything?")

If they do it with Bradley Walsh every week I'm all in.

Hot take: Bradley Walsh will be good in this.

Whooch.

I 100% know Bradley from The Chase (not the Doctor Who story) - what is he like when not being really annoyingly anti-intellectual all the time?

in cases like this (like with james corden, when he appeared on Who) I'm glad I'm not english and don't have the full context of how annoying this person is supposed to be (I liked corden's turn on who a lot. now that he's inflicted on the US with his own show, I see why people are tired of him though)

CHURCHWOOD

"an updated spin on The Daleks' Masterplan"

The Master's Dalek Plan

^irl giggle

CHURCHWOOD

it was early in the day and i have... no idea what i meant by this

re chibnall: i'm excited that it's essentially a minor ~reboot~ (god knows this show needs it) but chibnall's writing has never done anything for me. cyberwoman was one of the worst things that has ever happened, although to be fair it was a really long time ago.

Bradley Walsh is a decent actor. He'll be fine.

I worry that being Bradley Walsh gameshow host who's never off the telly might overshadow his acting ability.

re chibnall: i'm excited that it's essentially a minor ~reboot~ (god knows this show needs it) but chibnall's writing has never done anything for me. cyberwoman was one of the worst things that has ever happened, although to be fair it was a really long time ago.

"Cyberwoman" was terrible but "Exit Wounds", "Countrycide" and, to a lesser degree, "Fragments" were great. I also think his weakest Who story is "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" which I still enjoyed a lot because of how silly it was.

He was chirpy never-off-the-telly gameshow host while he was doing Law & Order UK and it didn't seem to have much of an impact on him then.

xpost

dan otm, chibnall's writing didn't stay at "cyberwoman" level thank god. also yeah, it feels wrong bagging "dinosaurs" because it was only ever meant to be the thing that it was. moffat/the bbc clearly wanted silly escapist quasi-blockbusters and that's what the writers delivered.

How much Gatiss are we expecting this time round?

i have seen a lot of lols about the new Doctor’s outfit on FB & elsewhere & it is making me annoyed

her look is on point & awesome
the short trousers with tall boots is such a great look esp with her height & propotions etc, and stripes are great & suspenders are cool wtf is wrong with ppl arg

don’t you get it veg she’s feeeeeeemale

grrr

suspenders are a 'little' costumey and it felt a bit like we were past costumey with capaldi, but I like her coat alot and I'm not sure what people have against culottes, I think they are cute on women.

suspenders are great on those who are shaped to accomodate them and horrific for everyone else, any suspender backlash is just indicative of the 90% of the population who can't wear them or who tried and failed
if you can pull them off (and Jodi Whittaker definitely can) I say put the pedal to the metal and go for it

otfm

(to whittaker pulling off the look)

Otfm

(to me wearing suspenders)

The coast is very Took Baker but with some Davison styling, especially around the lapels. The striped shirt also goes with the retro give.

*coat

*Tom Baker

*retro vibe

lol

“Took Baker Coast”, the new contribution from Mark Gatiss

Also a cape is in fairness a costume.

How much Gatiss are we expecting this time round?

zero

suspenders??

lol yeah was going to say, made me double take, but i think that US use is fairly interchangeable with braces these days.

'these days' jesus.

Lol @ hypothetical british person when the first they read about female doctor who's outfit is a 'Murican saying she's in suspenders

O tempora, o mores

"The striped shirt also goes with the retro vibe" the colors are from Baker's scarf

"suspenders??" = braces

My reservations about the new iteration of Who are pretty much all due to Broadchurch, which I did not like. I don't know how you create a show starring Olivia Colman and David Tennant that I do not enjoy watching, but bravo, Chibnall.

Braces are a bit Matt Smith era but w/e. Her outfit should evolve or switch a few times as it did with all recent Docs. I guess shades are out for a while but I am hoping for more hats.

BTW I would be pleased as punch to have a season full of "Dinosaurs in Space."

Are they also planning to switch up the score a bit? the sound design has been stale for years imo

would love to hear the Ólafur Arnalds take on the theme & etc.

oh that would be super

i thought I saw that Murray Gold was leaving but dunno

i thought I saw that Murray Gold was leaving but dunno

― akm,

Great new if true. I'd love the score to be fully performed on vintage synths but what are the chances.

The new score will be the soundtrack to Final Fantasy VII

Gold leaving been a very strong rumour for 6 months now. I think he might announce after Christmas he won't be back, although you probably won't be able to hear his announcement over the background music.

if Gold leaves it's seven years too late

if only I4n L3vine wanted to bother commissioning Paul Hartnoll to rescore the entire Moffatt era

Pix from location shooting are in the wild. Considered spoilers in this thread? Erring caution-side

Apparently a new trailer is out, which I haven't watched and will not link for possible spoiler reasons.

It's not spoilery, just shows the three new companions individually getting inklings that something weird's happening.

i can’t remember what’s been mentioned itt

Surprised there's not been more jubilation over Murray Gold's departure.

I'm jubilant!

teaser is a bit pizza heavy for some reason i can't fathom

My fear is that Chibnall will fumble the ball but that Whittaker will take the brunt of the blame. I hope I'm wrong. I'd like to be wrong.

My fear is that Chibnall will fumble the ball but that Whittaker will take the brunt of the blame. I hope I'm wrong. I'd like to be wrong.

― Gregory Horsemelt (Old Lunch)

i'm definitely ready for fan war. apparently there are some people complaining about the new composer because they're worried he'll sound too "black". out. out of my fucking fandom, anybody who thinks that can find another fucking show to be a fan of.

I would've thought the liberal excesses of the Davies era would've chased away most of the Neanderthalic fanbase that would've objected to a female Doctor. But then I woke up and remembered what world I was living in.

at this point i'm ready for fandoms of all kinds to just be shot straight into the sun, myself included

it's for the best really

this is the only doctor who fan site I ever read so I don't care what a bunch of trolls do on reddit or whatever. I predict that whochurch will render the previous two doctors all but forgettable.

I also don't think "fans" who pretend to like things just so they can moan and complain about how there's not enough cishet white dudes doing stuff are actually "fans" of anything at all, and we would never know they even existed if it wasn't for the Internet letting them hang out together in discord chats and feel empowered to express their profoundly stupid and unacceptable opinions out loud.

i'm cautiously optimistic about chibnall. i have no real reason to be, but then again i have no real reason to be optimistic about anything, so i have to contrive excuses for it. here are some of mine:

1. if moffat was a better writer than he was a showrunner, it stands to reason that there's a possibility chibnall will be a better showrunner than he was a writer.

2. looking back on the history of the show, even the most loathed showrunner (take a bow, john nathan-turner) managed to put together four solid seasons of the show. as long as the show henceforth manages to keep showrunners from sticking around longer than four years, only a tosh/wiles debacle would be cause for concern.

3. the leaked clip is pretty swell. not much to go on, admittedly, but show me any random 42 seconds of "the twin dilemma" and i don't think i'd be able to say the same.

4. bob holmes' first two scripts for doctor who were absolute garbage. he got better.

5. at least he's not mark gatiss.

I also don't think "fans" who pretend to like things just so they can moan and complain about how there's not enough cishet white dudes doing stuff are actually "fans" of anything at all, and we would never know they even existed if it wasn't for the Internet letting them hang out together in discord chats and feel empowered to express their profoundly stupid and unacceptable opinions out loud.

― El Tomboto

oh they're fans of _something_ all right.

bob holmes' first two scripts for doctor who were absolute garbage. he got better.

his sax work on 'baker street' still the best thing he ever did tho

I think my primary feeling about this nu-Who era, sight unseen, is that Jodie Whittaker is very brave to take on a role that will likely be, to some extent, a thankless pain in the ass.

I think that's making some really rong assumptions. She has worked with Chibnall before, at length, so it's not as if she doesn't know what it is to have him as a showrunner / director / boss for multiple seasons. And being the first female Doctor is hardly going to be thankless. The worthless gremlins we've been discussing are not the only fans out there.

Oh, I know. But that's pretty much entirely who I was referring to. That they make up a tiny portion of the fanbase doesn't, unfortunately, put a damper on their volume or vehemence. Just thinking about the array of women who've had to deal with ridiculous amounts of 'fan' abuse in recent years because they had the temerity to challenge a bunch of thumbsuckers' deadlocked notions of nerd culture.

Hot take - the kids won't care at all and she'll be well-recieved, and whatever a load of miserable gits in their fifties and above think doesn't actually matter to the BBC.

Obviously it all depends on the scripts, by the last Capaldi season in particular it felt like the fun had just drained out of it and the whole show was treading water. If Chibnall can bring the magic and energy back then he'll be fine.

My one real disappointment about the end of Moffat's tenure is our all-too-brief acquaintance with Bill.

whatever a load of miserable gits in their fifties

I have a feeling that teen and 20-something alt-right idiots are going to be a persistent thorn (based on looking at reddit I guess).

I predict that whochurch will render the previous two doctors all but forgettable.

!! Tom what have you loved in Chibnall's scripts and series so much as to inspire this boldness?

1. if moffat was a better writer than he was a showrunner, it stands to reason that there's a possibility chibnall will be a better showrunner than he was a writer.

he's been showrunning for over a decade and the best he's managed was "well I liked the first year until the ending was dumb and bad"

2. looking back on the history of the show, even the most loathed showrunner (take a bow, john nathan-turner) managed to put together four solid seasons of the show.

hard disagree (not least because the "showrunner" position doesn't really show up in Dr Who until Cartmel: a guy who collaborates with writers, builds themes and character arcs, has a vision for the direction of the show etc - JNT actively seems to step back into using his budgetary/organising skills in service of Cartmel's work at that point [presumably in great relief after his experience with Saward and the Bakers]. Letts/Dicks and Hinchcliffe/Holmes totally count as double-headed teams doing a showrunner-type job tho.)

3. the leaked clip is pretty swell. not much to go on, admittedly, but show me any random 42 seconds of "the twin dilemma" and i don't think i'd be able to say the same.

I watched Twin Dilemma yesterday (on Twitch) for the first time since transmission, and it remarkably managed to be exactly as bad as I remembered. (I haven't watched the leaked clip.)

4. bob holmes' first two scripts for doctor who were absolute garbage. he got better.

Krotons was okay. It >>>>>>>>>> Cyberwoman.

5. at least he's not mark gatiss.

now THERE's someone whose TV Who has gotten better on a fairly straight line. and fair play to him for saying he didn't think he was suited for the role.



by the last Capaldi season in particular it felt like the fun had just drained out of it and the whole show was treading water.

this is crazytalk, Bill + Capaldi were fun squared. (The middle chunk of scripts went desperately off the rails tho)

Two Doctors is starting on Twitch in a few minutes if anyone wants to see The Youth react to Grey Trout and Jamie

yeah I really liked Bill and Capaldi. It's too bad she didn't stay on to form a bit of bridge continuity but obv that doesn't always happen. I do wonder how much of the pre-chibnall world we'll see once he takes over. Will he resist the temptation to revisit Rose? Will we ever see the cool Silurian and Jenny again?

1. if moffat was a better writer than he was a showrunner, it stands to reason that there's a possibility chibnall will be a better showrunner than he was a writer.

he's been showrunning for over a decade and the best he's managed was "well I liked the first year until the ending was dumb and bad"

― kelp, clam and carrion (sic)

i haven't seen any of his other shows. i've never seen "press gang" either.

i'm keeping the bill/capaldi season in reserve for the point where i get sick to death of chibnall

I haven't either obv, except for a handful of the Torchwoods. Law & Order UK didn't exactly set the world on fire though

(seen most of Moffat's work except Chalk and the final season of Coupling, seen nearly everything RTD's done since 2003 and like all of it better than all but two eps of his Dr Who)

If you guys have forgotten how to get excited about things without third-guessing yourselves into planning for how to deal with the “inevitable” dissatisfaction, maybe you don’t actually love the thing you’re trying to feel excited about.

Jesus.

!! Tom what have you loved in Chibnall's scripts and series so much as to inspire this boldness?

I liked Broadchurch and I really liked Whittaker in it. You?

no, I've found his Who episodes to often be the dullest, most-conscribed stories of their seasons, and stood up after Cyberwoman to ask my Who-watching group if we all wanted to watch literally anything else rather than another episode ever. and Matt Smith is the Best Doctor Ever for mine.


maybe you don’t actually love the thing you’re trying to feel excited about.

dude I watched BOTH The Twin Dilemma and Attack Of The Cybermen on Twitch yesterday (for the first time since...<checks broadwcast> June 1984 and December 1985 respectively)!

... and The Dying Days is my current when-I'm-waiting-somewhere Kindle re-read, and when I do my ironing I'm currently working through the donate-to-US-anti-gun-charity audio commentaries on The War Games that were done by Andrew Smith and Jamie Mathieson and Paul Cornell and Jenny Colgan and Peter Harness and Nick Abadzis and Philip Hinchcliffe and Steven Moffat &al...

apparently there are some people complaining about the new composer because they're worried he'll sound too "black"

The fuck is wrong with these absolute cunts.

The actor who played Bill was excellent, but I think she was undermined by the mostly mediocre scripts of season 10, and by a lack of character development. I mean, besides the (admittedly well done) Cyberman stuff in the finale, her one defining character moment was giving the Monks her consent to save the Doctor (even though he told Bill not to do it), which lead to the Earth being occupied and innocent people dying. And her guilt over this was never explored or even mentioned.

So yeah, it would've been nice if they could've kept Bill and allowed her to grow more as a character. Clara was a pretty bland character during the Smith era too, it was only during the Capaldi seasons she became more interesting than your standard Plucky Girl Sidekick.

apparently there are some people complaining about the new composer because they're worried he'll sound too "black"

The fuck is wrong with these absolute cunts.

― chap

they're racists

I haven't either obv, except for a handful of the Torchwoods. Law & Order UK didn't exactly set the world on fire though

― kelp, clam and carrion (sic)

oh wait i did see "law and order uk" and i thought it was really hacky, for some reason he failed to transmute the vision of dick wolf into compelling british television

If you guys have forgotten how to get excited about things without third-guessing yourselves into planning for how to deal with the “inevitable” dissatisfaction, maybe you don’t actually love the thing you’re trying to feel excited about.

― El Tomboto

this statement is silly and so wrong that it's not even worth trying to unpack why

TBF, it's true for me inasmuch as I neither love nor am excited about Who generally. It's fun but I'm not a superfan by any means.

But Broadchurch was real fucken bad so I'm less excited than usual.

I look forward to new Dr Who I’m sorry you all don’t I guess

Im going to watch a few episodes before I decide it’s terrible or good. I really want it to be good; Whittaker was my favorite part of Broadchurch and I’m extremely interested in her take on the Doctor.

This had been my favorite entertainment franchise since I was seven and the only time I ever came close to outright hating it was 10/Rose, so odds are I’ll think this is great and spend a lot of time rolling my eyes at perceived whining.

I like Who a lot more now that I have let go of being A Fan of Doctor Who. Looking very much forward to new season with Whittaker, I dug Broadchurch lots

i lied in my last post, the stupid thing is suggesting that the only way to be a True Fan is to be an uncritical fan. i've seen "the twin dilemma", i can't fucking do that and i don't understand anybody who can. also this board is the last place on earth i'd expect uncritical fandom of _anything_ to hold sway.

"But Broadchurch was real fucken bad so I'm less excited than usual."

the first and third series are great. I agree the second one was fucken bad.

All I saw was the first. It may have been fine for the most part but the incredibly stupid, completely out of left field 'let's say........Moe' reveal at the end blanketed everything that came before with a shower of bullshit.

well then I don't recommend watching series 2. or maybe I do! because it's garbage.

3 was pretty good though

the only way to be a True Fan is to be an uncritical fan

yeah that sounds exactly like something I would say

the mystery was irrelevant, it's all about the music and long shots of the seaside town and knitted brows

yeah I mean the mystery is terrible. it's all about that and also all about "how many more ways can Miller and Hardy screw this up?"

and the weather balloons

the only way to be a True Fan is to be an uncritical fan

Tombot notwithstanding, I doubt you'd find anyone here who would approach any show this way.

I just don’t understand bemoaning seasons of a show that haven’t even aired yet. I guess sic’s reasoning makes some sense in that he’s hated all of chibnall’s writing on the show to date.

i have a certain amount of trepidation about the guy who wrote the best episodes of the show i like being replaced by the guy who wrote the worst episodes of the show i like

i'm not prejudging, but i'm hedging my bets a little

Agreed. Or, I wouldn't say Chibnall's episodes aren't the worst of the series, if you compare them the to actively gringe-worthy stuff, like the alien TV announcer in the 1950s, or the Moon giving birth, or the magical tree fairies saving Earth from solar flares, they're just perfectly mediocre. Watchable, but there's no new ideas, nothing other DW writers hadn't episodes hadn't done better. So what I'm fearing his showrunner arcs will be like that too.

the guy who hired a woman to play the Doctor is definitely unlikely to bring any new ideas to the table, it's a fact

I guess sic’s reasoning makes some sense in that he’s hated all of chibnall’s writing on the show to date

iirc nobody else in this thread or any other Who thread has given any other reason for taking a cautious attitude? I'm going to watch and be delighted if it's good, which seems a better way to enjoy than to go in expecting it's going to be great

Anyway, it's definitely wild to have spent the last seven years being shouted at by 70% of Doctor Who thread posters for enjoying Doctor Who, or for plainly explaining things that happened onscreen that people weren't looking at (without indicating my own enjoyment or disappointment), and now be charged with being part of a nebulous pack of anti-fun Dr Who grouches

the guy who hired a woman to play the Doctor is definitely unlikely to bring any new ideas to the table, it's a fact

― El Tomboto

i was just reading some old doctor who news clippings and jnt was talking about casting a woman as the doctor in 1981

i don't think he was seriously considering it, but in that light it's hard to call casting a woman to play the doctor a "new idea"

Actually doing so rather than hinting it to goose ratings is anew idea.

xpost: the brand new idea that the producer of Doctor Who repeatedly teased in the press from 1981 to 1987, and that the original creator of Doctor Who formally advised the BBC to do in 1985 when the show was moribund, and that was done by four fully-produced shot-on-film American fan films from 1984 to 1988, and was done on BBC television by Steven Moffat in 1997, and has been repeatedly set up in dialogue from 2010 to 2014, then shown as possible onscreen in 2014 and 2015 (and had been implicitly established as possible and not unusual onscreen on 23/10/1976)

All credit to Chibnall for doing it and I expect her to be a delight! but it's really not an example of him bringing a new idea his first new idea to Doctor Who ever

i don't think he was seriously considering it

it was Tom who actually said to a press conference that he thought it could be time for a woman, JNT ran with it for years but obviously never considered it

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFJaHbYWAAAw1Rt.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFJaCXNXgAA2y9G.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFJZ-DwW0AI4z_Y.jpg

"I've spoken to various people, some them ladies"

I don't recall ever yelling at you for enjoying Dr Who but there's probably some episode I hated that you liked along the way somewhere.

I'm excited for new Who, you guys are all "well we'll see I guess grumble grumble" because of vague Chibnall beefs - I just don't see why the orthodoxy of grumble needs to reign supreme. Me, DJP and f. hazel OTM, the rest of y'all can carry on I suppose.

I don't think it's a radical or unreasonable position to take a cautious approach if you don't like the incoming showrunner's previous work! And that this position can be independent of the new Doctor herself.

That said, "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" and "The Power of Three" are fantastic! The rest of his Who eps are forgettable though.

most who eps are forgettable except that one with the completely horrifying creatures

damn, ratings absolutely tanked last season! chibnall hasn't written a who episode since 2012? that's more time than bob holmes took off between "kroll" and "androzani". strange.

I guess I just don't watch television for the ideas

wild to have spent the last seven years being

I mean

in this time period I have also

- read 36 NAs and 13 MAs and one QR
- bought nine volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum
- repeatedly paid up to $30 just in postage to get issues of Nothing At The End Of The Lane and Vworp Vworp sent to Australia
- bought issues and specials of DWM in three countries
- bought 11 volumes of the Panini strip collections, plus a bootleg of the first McGann one when it was out of print for a few years
- (also sold off my old copies of the Marvel colourised reprints)
- selected and programmed classic series repeats for the country's largest broadcaster
- paid to see Dr Who in the cinema on ten different occasions, in five cities, on two different continents and one island
- been the only telly person who got in free from BBCWW to the one-off cinema screening of the fancied-up Day Of The Daleks who stayed to watch the whole thing
- stood behind Waris Hussein and his boyfriend to watch an am-dram staging of An Unearthly Child in the basement of a Manchester pub
- repeatedly eaten lunch on other people's office floors to watch episodes before TX
- listened to over a hundred hours of Verity!, a podcast about women enjoying Dr Who whether it's good or not
- bought and read the autobiography of Barry Letts
- bought and read the biography of Robert Holmes
- bought and read and loved the biography of JNT
- bought and read both Cartmel's production memoir and his out-of-print, bad, history-of-Who book
- bought the first three print collections of Wife In Space, and read the blog entries for nearly every serial I've watched and several that I haven't
- talked to Paul Cornell, eating dirty chicken in the street outside a dance party he couldn't be bothered to queue for after the first screening of Day Of The Doctor, about Day Of The Doctor
- listened to hundreds of hours of Big Finish and Nest Cottage audios (most of them not good; some of the good ones 2 or three times)
- rented or borrowed DVDs for 55 of the 139 intact classic stories
-- watched nearly all of these in groups I've organised or with one friend
-- frequently rewatched by myself with commentaries and/or production notes on
-- generally watched whatever else of the documentaries and revisiteds and behind-the-sceneses I could get to before returning the discs
-- streamed half a dozen of the other 84 stories
-- watched a handful of orphan episodes
--- including the first ever, unannounced, public screening of Air Lock after it was recovered
-- watched three or four recons
-- read the Targets for 3 of the missing stories and two of the existing ones
- listened to the Lalla Ward / John Leeson audiobook of Gareth Roberts' novelisation of Shada
- watched an hour of I4n fucking L3vine's animation of Shada

this morning in bed I read the second issue of Ben Aaronovitch and Cartmel's Seventh Doctor Titan miniseries, and I have typed all my posts today in front of the Twitch stream of Trial Of A Time Lord*

last night my Seattle housemate got back from staying on the London floor of someone I met in Leeds five years ago by walking up to them and asking if they posted in the comments section of a Doctor Who blog



but sure, I'm bad at finding enjoyment in Dr Who ...because I think some of it is better than other bits?

I haven't done any of those things, but just wanted to say that so far Chibnall has done a brilliant job in upsetting Ian Levine, and that will do for me.

* within the first few minutes, The Doctor is shouting at ppl that he can't even be brought to trial for malfeasance or unbecoming behaviour, bcz he's the President. hope Tombot was watching too.

truly, the most difficult man alive to upset

oh but this time he's really upset

somebody on this thread seems pretty upset

<3 sic. But the real revelation here is

read the blog entries for nearly every serial I've watched and several that I haven't

Am still proud of the time I alerted sic to a Moffat Q&A series that he'd **never heard of**

Jim - missing episodes!

i once ate a sandwich that looked kind of like a varga plant, that's my fan cred sorted

* within the first few minutes, The Doctor is shouting at ppl that he can't even be brought to trial for malfeasance or unbecoming behaviour, bcz he's the President. hope Tombot was watching too.

― kelp, clam and carrion (sic)

sadly we're at a point where time lord government is better-run than american government, they were at least able to remove their president for gross dereliction of duty

I am to Marvel what sic is to Who except that sic seems to trump me on most Marvel knowledge despite not even liking Marvel much. Don't know how u do it, man.

Twitch is up to Trial episode ten, and if I'd ever know that space robots play holographic Galaga in this, I'd forgotten. I withdraw everything 0.07% of every bad thing I've said about Pip & Jane

wait I just noticed Colin's tie and waistcoat combo, reinstate that percentage even though it wasn't their fault

Have I missed "a megabyte modem!"?

I think that's in ep 14, when P&J come back to write the conclusion to a 14-part story without knowing what happened in the first eight or in parts of the four that they'd already written

I was 8 when Trial was on. Peri’s death is FUCKED UP. That and Paradise Towers are as scared as I can remember DW making me feel.

there's something slightly malevolent feeling about that entire era.

two different eras there

Paradise Towers starts on Twitch in 10 minutes!

Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEc-OQ_oqDk

I didn't look at Twitch at all until Colin started, and I've now rewatched 7 (or 4) of the eleven worst Dr Who stories ever, in a row, for the first time. It's so hilarious that JN-T only commissioned four scripts ever, and three of them were by the Bakers, all BACK TO BACK.

But in the same way shitty Who is great fun to watch with friends and beer, you can totally see how the chat element of the Twitch run papers over any ups and downs, the #youths watching just taking it all on in the spirit of fun, creating their own injokes and interests.

Case in point: Keff McCulloch's score for Time And The Rani, at 31 years' distance, is not (well, not only) being greeted with horror for its cheap terribleness, but being joyously celebrated as ｖ░ａ░ｐ░ｏ░ｕ░ｒ░ｗ░ａ░ｖ░ｅ

the kids are alright

looks fine, if typically uninformative.

xpost can a mod please zap that trailer ffs

There’s definitely something bleak and nasty about the horror episodes of that period, in a way that’s very different to the darkest stories of the Tom Baker era. The shoddiness just makes everything more horrible by default, like the show’s being mounted on the cheap in the middle of an apocalypse. Maybe Androzani through Happiness Patrol?

the bleakness of Saward is a different tone to the bleaker stories of Cartmel -- Saward's rings of aspiration toward cultural masculinity, but as he doesn't believe in it himself, the stories end up riddled with nihilism. Cartmel is out to actively interrogate cultural attitudes and assumptions, so the bleak stories there tend to be "structured society and authority are bad and tend toward fascism... let's overthrow the paradigm and build a new, inclusive world."

like: Revelation and Paradise Towers are both deeply influenced by 200AD, especially Wagner/Grant and Mills. But the conclusion of Revelation is "LOL EVERYTHING'S SHIT AND LOVE IS A LIE," whereas Towers' is "the oppressors should be overthrown and young women should be in charge of everything. also, spraypaint things pink."

xpost: the brand new idea that the producer of Doctor Who repeatedly teased in the press from 1981 to 1987, and that the original creator of Doctor Who formally advised the BBC to do in 1985 when the show was moribund

they should have strapped the doctor to a rotating wheel and thrown knives at him

they should have strapped the doctor to a rotating wheel and thrown knives at him

― karl wallogina (Autumn Almanac)

if by "the doctor" you mean "michael grade" i agree

Jodie is having too much fun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eosZSZKo1DM

Switching topics, it seems that the PR is making a concerted effort to use "friends" in place of "companions," like they're spreading out the agency so that it's not just Doctor and Her Assistants?

Note that I'm basing that last observation on a sample size of two.

PR and branding are relentless on calling her The Thirteenth Doctor, which is fucking insane imo

otm, she’s at least 15.5

I wasn't aware that Moffat wrote a Target novelisation of Day of the Doctor (!) earlier this year. I picked it up for a summer beach read - it's basically exactly what you'd expect a Moffat novel to be: too many jokes, too pleased with itself, but with a core of idiosyncratic genius. I expect it'll be living hell for certain type of DW fan, and I might want to throw it out of the window by page 120, but so far so good.

I wasn't aware that Moffat wrote a Target novelisation of Day of the Doctor (!) earlier this year. I picked it up for a summer beach read - it's basically exactly what you'd expect a Moffat novel to be: too many jokes, too pleased with itself, but with a core of idiosyncratic genius. I expect it'll be living hell for certain type of DW fan, and I might want to throw it out of the window by page 120, but so far so good.

― Chuck_Tatum

page 120? a true target novelization would be over by that point

It's a tolstoyan 229 pages

otm, she’s at least 15.5

ha

no it seems incredibly dumb to incessantly imply to new audiences that they need to know anything about the show beforehand, let alone do very specific research about 14.5 actors who have previously acted in the role, which leads to "oh what there's fifty-five years of this I'm supposed to know about already?!"

Jodie Whitaker is Doctor Who, that's all kids need to care about

there are also new Target novelisations of Rose by RTD, The Christmas Invasion by Jenny Colgan, and the final Capaldi special by Paul Cornell.

The Cornell looks like a fairly straight adaptation; the Moffat one is basically "my special plus everything they couldn't afford/wouldn't let me do" and you'll probably like it if you liked "continuity errors"

Also apparently it puts Peter Cushing into contuniuity somewhere

the final capaldi special is the one where nothing fucking happened, right? i can see why one would want to novelize that one.

like: Revelation and Paradise Towers are both deeply influenced by 200AD, especially Wagner/Grant and Mills. But the conclusion of Revelation is "LOL EVERYTHING'S SHIT AND LOVE IS A LIE," whereas Towers' is "the oppressors should be overthrown and young women should be in charge of everything. also, spraypaint things pink."

― kelp, clam and carrion (sic), Thursday, July 19, 2018 9:25 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not sure if Saward was ever really hip to 2000AD, that was more Cartmel's area of interest. Although he did commission a script from Pat Mills that came close to actually getting made a few times, so who knows.

no it seems incredibly dumb to incessantly imply to new audiences that they need to know anything about the show beforehand, let alone do very specific research about 14.5 actors who have previously acted in the role, which leads to "oh what there's /fifty-five years/ of this I'm supposed to know about already?!"

if this is new pr framing, perhaps they’re being ultra defensive because of the whole ~~~lady~~~ thing

Jodie Whitaker is Doctor Who, that's all kids need to care about

100% agree

Me too!

reviving so we can talk here about how close October 7th is

Meant to post this earlier, but Jodes was living it up in July:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eosZSZKo1DM

day of broadcast move would be a MASSIVE bummer & pain if I was still coordinating TV scheduling on the other side of the international date line

watch it now on iVoo

So when is this starting, then?

October 7. A SUNDAY!

Is sic asleep? OK let's go

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCt6f1Ttmy4

Liking everything apart from the Aaaaah, BODYFORM-ish power ballad all over the trailers and adverts.

All is forgiven M Gold...

yeah that song is fucking awful

i'm not going to go quite that far re: m. gold - two wrongs don't make a right - but i did find it super-distracting, to the point where, having just watched the trailer, i have no idea what was in it except for bad music.

Interesting lack of Classic Foes unless I missed 'em.

finally a Doctor Who workout video

Tardis spin class!

Interesting lack of Classic Foes unless I missed 'em.

― nashwan

apparently chibnall is making a clean break, at least based on the complaining article i read on the mary sue - no old foes.

I am 100% in favor of a couple seasons without Daleks or Cybermen

BREXIT MEANS BREXIT nashwan!

The Macron Terror

you know a dalek or cyberman will show up eventually; I give it until mid-second season.

i think they should bring skagra back instead (as long as they don't do it by remaking shada YET FUCKING AGAIN)

Had never seen this young Doctors image before. Davison basically unrecognisable.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DnmWPu7UwAAoSsX.jpg

Sean Pertwee!

in the full Davison pic he’s on a bus on the way to a ‘70s rock festival (and 18 iirc)

Davison basically unrecognisable.

And Ecclestone.

Oh no wait, that's John Hurt.

Worzel has a bit of the Shia Labeouf about him.

i love the aesthetics of some of these photos, the way they evoke certain eras as much as they do the actors being photographed. tom baker being photographed in the same way as the young bill hartnell, mugshot jon pertwee, grunge peter davison, and then especially the run of the first four new series doctors going from airwolf to mall photo to john mayer album cover to new wave band. also, the colin baker photo, with some of its more distinguishing features cropped out, is super evocative of his first scene in "androzani" (did graeme harper direct that scene, btw? it's probably the weakest part of the episode - colin baker staring at the camera just doesn't work very well imo)

yeah, Harper directed (Moffatt was on set to watch, though!)

'Doctor Who' is actually a codename

And they’d lost two days of shoot, and threw away loads of script pages* to get finished in time - if the final shot of the day/week/recording block looks perfunctory, that’s because it was: they got done just before the unions shut down for the day.

*including a big action scene featuring the magma beast chasing the Doctor and leaping chasms, so swings & roundabouts

Is that an early photo of Jodie Whittaker or a current one.

Very Don Draper-esque Troughton there, phwoar

mugshot jon pertwee

In the less cropped version of that he's wearing a sailor's uniform, at first I assumed that meant it was a promo shot from The Navy Lark but nope, looks more like it's an id photo from his days in the actual Navy.

google image "young colin baker" - he's one of those suzanne vega types who never seems to have the same face twice

i don't remember him ever looking this young in doctor who, despite it being a DW promo picture. the fro' adds decades

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/ERX9PF/colin-baker-new-doctor-who-the-6th-with-actress-nicola-bryant-who-ERX9PF.jpg

this is what two years of john nathan-turner will do to a person

https://i.imgur.com/93fkaJu.png
https://gillatt.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/183932.jpg

So, I was thinking how I wish the next season wouldn't have one of those stories where the Doctor and companions get stuck on a space ship/space base/another isolated sci-fi setting, and they have to find a way to ward off an impending doom which threatens to kill everyone inside, because so far they've done of those at least one of those every season, and they're almost never among the best episodes... But then I remembered two out of the four eps Chibnall has written so far have had that plot, and the Silurian two-parter he did has shades of that too, so I guess we might get one of these again?

I dunno, it's gotten tiring how they repeat the same elements, plus the excuses they have to come up for why they can't just save everyone with the TARDIS get tiring, and TARDIS shenanigans are usually the best part of the show anyway, so I rarely enjoy the eps where they write hee out of the story altogether.

I dunno, it's gotten tiring how they repeat the same elements, plus the excuses they have to come up for why they can't just save everyone with the TARDIS get tiring, and TARDIS shenanigans are usually the best part of the show anyway, so I rarely enjoy the eps where they write hee out of the story altogether.

― Tuomas

i have some bad news for you re: the ending of the most recent episode

Any info about the ending of the most recent episode would be news, can’t remember it at all.

Forget it tuomas, its doctorwhotown

Oh yeah, forgot about the ending of the Christmas special... Well, presumably she will find her again by the end of the next episode. I don't mind it so much the introductory episodes for the new Doctor and/or companions are light on TARDIS, since they need to spend most of their runtime establishing the characters anyway.

Finding the TARDIS should've been the season-long plotline. Don't @ me.

Can I agree with you though

Also forgive me but I don’t really watch Doctor Who for the plot.

Every week the Doctor hunts down a classic villain to ask for information regarding the question. The question that must never be followed by silence. The first and last question ever asked. "Where the bloody hell's my motor?!"

Lol.

"Where the bloody hell's my motor?" is the plot of the series never broadcast where The Doctor and Martha run around 1960s London until Billy Shipton arrives from the future in Blink giving the Doctor a chance to get his motor back.

Quite good I thought.
THink I'm going to like her as The Doctor.
Not so sure about that costume though, but if she gets the Tardis back she has a massive wardrobe in there, don't she?
So wonder how long she'll keep the charity shop one.

Lack of Murray Gold the obvious highlight.

Craking Sunday night telly, that! Very slick, good scary monsters. Straightforwardness very refreshing after the Moffat years.

Good cliffhanger too.

Jodie Whitaker was alright but I thought that was pretty grim - too violent, lame script, stagey direction

And a lot of weird choices, esp the long list of who-gives-a-shit guest stars at the end.

The guy throwing his salad at the robot was good though

it was good. the approach reminded me a little bit of "rose". looking forward to seeing where it goes from here!

I couldn't tell whether I thought it was obvious that Grace was going to die because of plot clunkiness, or because I know that she's not one of the companions.

But yeah, that was really good - I like that it's very northern, and also that they've decided to thoroughly annoy anyone who might be annoyed by a female doctor.

the long list of who-gives-a-shit guest stars at the end.

Yep, this was quite funny - I recognised maybe 4/5.

Straightforwardness very refreshing after the Moffat years

I dunno, I thought it was tonally all over the place and really fucking dour to boot. Of course Capaldi's opener was a stinker too, so who knows

Enjoyed this! Dark but v exciting & fun as well

Tim Shaw (lol) — god that teethface makeup was outstanding and SO GROSS D:

Lots of people who have been in other Chibnall things, some people I've never heard of, Art Malik, and Mr Big from Sex & The City.

Quite enjoyed it tonight. Scene setters are always a bit clunky, and it did seem a bit more violent than usual, but thought it was fun and scary in good measures (salad-throwing guy was great) and the dynamics of the new companions seems promising.

Mask wearing ugly alien hunter sent to hunt on Earth as rite of passage. Mutilates itself to mark every trophy, Cheats.

https://bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/predator.jpg

Of course Capaldi's opener was a stinker too

Not of course. It was better than this and this was just OK. Good ending though, absurdly long list of forthcoming guest stars aside.

One of my sons (4yo) insisted on watching this with me. He was enraptured. I call that a success.

(I also thought it was great.)

Ditto, this is the first time mine’s watched a whole episode and she really seemed to like it.

i don’t get near this until tomorrow night due to ~commitments~ but people who had lost interest seem to be coming back, so… success?

*won’t

I already like all the new companions which is an immense plus.

yeah i like the conceit btw the kid & his step-grandad

*conflict

The companions rule and how they end up with the Doctor is so perfect

Not a Who fan, but found it quite enjoyable. Though there were things about it which didn't ring true such as the policewoman not calling in after they find a dead body or that there'd be guys working on a crane in the middle of the night. Though given that an alien is wandering around Sheffield with teeth embedded in his face maybe those are minor quibbles.

Though given that an alien is wandering around Sheffield with teeth embedded in his face maybe those are minor quibbles.

i dunno if it's that uncommon a sight in sheffield tbf

The guy throwing his salad at the robot was good though

― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, 8 October 2018 7:46 AM (twelve hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The most Sheffield response to an alien invasion, ever.

That was pretty good all through. Music was a definite highlight, New end credits theme is pretty awesome.

Please count me amongst the Moffat-era hatas who has returned to the fold and thoroughly enjoyed this one. Dr Who always at its best when the violence feels a little bit too much for tea time.

We watched The Eleventh Hour on iPlayer straight after thiis, which didn’t do it any favours either. I hate being the lone grumblebum about this, and the leads were all fine, but the writing was just so, so bad, like bottom-end season 2 bad. Like Chris Carter’s last X-Files bad. I guess I’ll watch it again...

As someone who bailed halfway through Smith, this wasn't enough to bring me back (Whittaker's Horrocks-isms grated, amongst much that felt strained) - but nevertheless, a HUGE YAY for the dyspraxia meltdown; I get those too, but have never seen them represented in any drama before.

Well yeah the alien plot was kind of bollocksy and derivative (some nice ideas though), but I don't really care when everything else was so much fun. It's rip-roaring family entertainment, not hard SF. Honestly, it lifted me right out of the Sunday doldrums.

xpost

HUGE YAY for the dyspraxia meltdown; I get those too, but have never seen them represented in any drama before.

I related massively as I was 38 when I finally learnt to ride a bike!

I didn’t feel the family fun elements to the multiple deaths, the funeral, the cancer, the dour tone, the casual killing of the brother and sister (not sure why they needed to mention he had a broken jaw - that’s grim).

... less torture porn than perky sadism

I didn't find the tone dour at all is the thing. Who has never shied away from death n violence, it's supposed to be scary. Whether or not those things have a place in family entertainment is a whole other discussion, I think.

Yeah, the legacy of Pigbin Josh is a proud one!

Also some of the tell-not-show was stuff we needed telling - after watching that, I think I have a fair idea of how the three companions would react differently to stuff.

I don't mind violence in Who! I still have thrilling emotional scars from the kitchen waste disposal monster in Paradise Towers.

But last night just felt too morose and real. The brother avenging his sister and then being killed himself - and not just killed but mutilated - edged into misery porn for me. I was looking forward to a little light joie de vivre returning to the show - if anything, this felt grimmer than Moffat.

I'm sure the more dedicated than me Whovians on this board can provide examples of nastier stuff than that!

Speaking of sic, wondering what he thinks...

Probably avoiding in case we spoil the identity of a forthcoming episode key grip or something...

this is my kids' first Who

- on seeing the pod in the forest: "that looks like cardboard" ✅ VG

- 7-year-old LITERALLY hid behind the couch during the train zapping and then intermittently throughout ✅

- at about the 30-minute mark: "daddy this is good"

- when we see crane operator fella: "oh he's gonna die"

"Not a Who fan, but found it quite enjoyable. Though there were things about it which didn't ring true such as the policewoman not calling in after they find a dead body or that there'd be guys working on a crane in the middle of the night. Though given that an alien is wandering around Sheffield with teeth embedded in his face maybe those are minor quibbles.

― Dan Worsley"

honestly, watching as an american the thing that really didn't ring true to me was a black guy calling the police. maybe things are different in sheffield, i don't know.

"I related massively as I was 38 when I finally learnt to ride a bike!

― chap"

congrats! i've concluded it's just not something i'm going to ever do. i did eventually learn to tie my shoelaces though!

"I don't mind violence in Who! I still have thrilling emotional scars from the kitchen waste disposal monster in Paradise Towers.

But last night just felt too morose and real. The brother avenging his sister and then being killed himself - and not just killed but mutilated - edged into misery porn for me. I was looking forward to a little light joie de vivre returning to the show - if anything, this felt grimmer than Moffat.

― Chuck_Tatum"

after six years of moffat's "nobody dies" aesthetic "oliver twist" would feel overly violent. honestly at this point i'm mostly refreshed by the acknowledgment that sometimes bad things happen, sometimes people die and don't come back. i'm not a fan of the violence, but i didn't think it was gratuitous - we didn't see any of the predator's victims after he killed them, for instance, which _would_ have been gratuitous. "csi" this isn't.

that said i'll grant that there definitely is an american influence to chibnall's work which i don't find entirely welcome. that's how he's always been - his first "who" episode was a riff on "24" - but as long as he can keep it in check i can live with it.

- on seeing the pod in the forest: "that looks like cardboard" ✅ VG

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand)

https://dragon-quest.org/images/thumb/9/93/DQ_Slime.png/250px-DQ_Slime.png

The crane operator got a brief ticking off from the Doctor for pushing an already dying Tim Shaw off the crane but that seemed oddly perfunctory and without more consequences for him to the point where I hope he shows up again.

I liked it. Fine with the dour tone - isn't that what stuff set in Sheffield is supposed to be like? - though I did think one particular death was bordering on fridgeing.

Didn't particularly MIND the baddie being a Predator rip-off, but if the chat about them leaving the classic villains alone for a while is true they need to get a bit more original from now on.

the long list of who-gives-a-shit guest stars at the end.

Yep, this was quite funny - I recognised maybe 4/5.

Pretty sure the intent behind this was "look at the amount of non-white and non-male actors, suck it!" rather than "there's not a star in the sky tonight because they're all on Doctor Who".

If so, might have worked better if they hadn't given Chris Noth the top billing there

The crane operator got a brief ticking off from the Doctor for pushing an already dying Tim Shaw off the crane but that seemed oddly perfunctory and without more consequences for him to the point where I hope he shows up again.

Yes, this was an odd beat. Perfectly reasonable reaction to an alien super-hunter who's got it in for you.

The crane operator would have made a much better companion than Bradley Walsh fwiw. I like the idea of a Tardis entourage but I'm not sure there's ever been a successful older companion?

I was skeptical of Walsh, but he was very likable in this.

I'm not sure there's ever been a successful older companion?

Unless you count Romana?

Ian and Barbara.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/oct/08/doctor-who-jodie-whittakers-debut-is-most-watched-launch-for-10-years

Didn't particularly MIND the baddie being a Predator rip-off, but if the chat about them leaving the classic villains alone for a while is true they need to get a bit more original from now on.

― Daniel_Rf

i get what you're saying - i like originality too - but you know, i gotta be realistic here. the show's been on the air, off and on, since 1963, with innumerable (well technically numerable, but i can't do it) spinoff comics, audio plays, novels, sky ray lollys. even considering the exceptionally wide scope of the premise - the doctor can travel anywhere in space and time and even change her appearance periodically - there's a limited number of genuinely new ideas likely to come up at this point.

more to the point, doctor who is a show that _thrives_ on being unoriginal. many of the best doctor who episodes are pretty much flat ripoffs of better-known stories with space aliens hastily swapped in. since 1963, what are the best-known adversaries the show's come up with to face the doctor? well, there's space nazis, killer cyborgs, and an evil doppelganger of the doctor with a goatee (sometimes).

i don't need "doctor who" to be original. i need doctor who to be entertaining and to be true to the character and values of the show. yesterday's episode accomplished that. i'm happy.

I suspect the 'no classic villains' is a bit of a fake-out. Aren't they legally obliged to feature the Daleks in each season for some reason?

i mean, they already lied about no two-parters, so i'm assuming something will turn up?

also, yesterday felt pretty fan-servicey even with no new baddies

This isn't a two(+)-parter necessarily but a single season-long story of sorts, with or without a grand unifying mystery. Or at least I really hope so.

Liked Whittaker as the Doctor, and the new companions are solid, also the music was great! But yeah... the story in this was hot garbage. Like, the Doctor finds out the guy's sister is still alive in the Predator trophy room and is like "well, fuck it... no point in trying to save her, send Predator guy home and we'll call it a day". Maybe it's just the way shows are edited now, but they always seem to make an episode feel both frantic and tedious. No moments ever get to breathe... I remember really liking Boom Town back in Ninth Doctor times, because while it had some other issues, there was that great scene with the Doctor and the baddie in a cafe just having a conversation, not aiming for nonstop pithiness or serial memeability.

I'd assumed they're going to catch up with the Predator trophy room later on in the season. If not then that was a stupid thing to throw in, yeah.

I was also happy the episode was so Yorkshiriffic!

Speaking of sic, wondering what he thinks...

― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, October 8, 2018 11:17 PM (yesterday)

Probably avoiding in case we spoil the identity of a forthcoming episode key grip or something...

― chap, Monday, October 8, 2018 11:19 PM (yesterday)

Avoiding cos he doesn't want to spoil anyone's fun 😊

I suspect the 'no classic villains' is a bit of a fake-out. Aren't they legally obliged to feature the Daleks in each season for some reason?

― chap, Tuesday, October 9, 2018 1:16 AM (two hours ago)

no, this (like most generally-known facts about Dr Who) is a fan myth

Like, the Doctor finds out the guy's sister is still alive in the Predator trophy room and is like "well, fuck it... no point in trying to save her, send Predator guy home and we'll call it a day".

Not sure how she’s supposed to go save the trophy room victims without a TARDIS. It seemed obvious to me this’ll pop up again.

I hate being the lone grumblebum about this

You are not, sadly. Story was a dud, mostly, though I'll admit that the scene where Ryan was trying (and FAILING!) to ride the bike by himself was really affecting.

I think I prefer my Doctors to do a lot more scenery-chewing than what we got for episode 1.

Yeah the story itself was mostly boring. It should really have done a 'Rose' and just left the aliens as anonymous as possible in order to make space for character-building.

Whittaker was excellent though and it was a smart scriptwriting move not to make too much of a big deal out of the female Doctor thing, especially given that none of the other characters knew any different. Perhaps another good reason to avoid classic villains for a while.

Not sure how she’s supposed to go save the trophy room victims without a TARDIS.

Well, she had Predator's transporter thing because she handed it back to him at the end of the story and he used it to blip home instantly so... use that? Once he detonated the DNA bombs in his own body he was turning into a puddle of goop anyway, so he doesn't need it. Or even just be like "hey guys, we need to get my ship back so we can go save that poor kid's sister". That will make more sense to folks who have just met her than "I have a powerful emotional and possibly biological attachment to this police box, so you need to risk your life to help me get it back."

Honestly though, the vibe I got from the episode was a very good. Forging a new sonic screwdriver from spare auto parts in like thirty minutes also made zero sense but I thought the montage worked really well (especially the music, which again... was awesome).

a very good one, that is

i've always thought it was a bit sad when the classic series DVDs did CGI "improvements" to the wonky old effects shots

BUT i would gladly pay money to have every post-2005 episode rescored by Segun Akinola

I agree with people who said Whittaker was great and the new companions (for the little we saw of them) seemed interesting, but the plot was way too basic and derivative. I mean, besides the obvious Predator imitation, even the twist where the opening narration by the companion desribes an incredible person implied to be the Doctor, only for him/her to continue it later and reveal he was talking about a regular human, was lifted straight from "A Good Man Goes to War".

Maybe I'm alone here, but I did enjoy Moffat's overarching puzzle plots when he didn't overdo them, so I'm not that happy if they're completely missing from this season altogether. And it's true Twelve's introductory episode wasn't so great either, but if you compare this to Eleven's introduction (which seems most apt, since that was the last time they changed the head writer), in "Eleventh Hour" Moffat managed to:

1) Establish the new Doctor and how they're different from the previous ones.
2) Flesh out the new companions.
3) Give us a cool stand-alone plot with a creepy, original villain.
4) Hint at some intriguing mysteries which would lead into longer story arcs along the way.

Compared to that, I think this episode only succeeded with #1. Yeah, Whittaker was a joy to watch, but I don't think that was enough. The new companions did show some promise though, and IMO Chibnall seems to be better at writing interesting characters than cool sci-fi plots, so hopefully we'll at least get more out of that aspect. But mostly the quality of this season will depend on how good the other writers are, I fear.

Oh yeah, besides Whittaker, obviously the biggest joys of this episode was to finally be rid of Murray Gold's maudlin compositions and get some proper good sci-fi music for change. I especially liked the repetitive, creepy synth bit that was playing when the "egg" began to crack open, it set the mood perfectly.

I would love a moody, landscape-drenched Broadchurchification of Doctor Who where they hang out in one place for 3-4 episodes. Make the Doctor mysterious, make us wonder if she murdered somebody and have her not make much of an effort to dissuade her companions of that while she draws out some baddie, playing chess with them and sacrificing a bunch of townspeople a la the NA Seventh Doctor

Director of this episode has done 4/10 of the series, is the only white man directing this year.

"Maybe I'm alone here, but I did enjoy Moffat's overarching puzzle plots when he didn't overdo them, so I'm not that happy if they're completely missing from this season altogether. And it's true Twelve's introductory episode wasn't so great either, but if you compare this to Eleven's introduction (which seems most apt, since that was the last time they changed the head writer), in "Eleventh Hour" Moffat managed to:"

make one of the greatest doctor who episodes of all time, yes. maybe "the eleventh hour" is setting the bar a little high?

off the top of my head, new doctor debut episodes ranked:

the eleventh hour
spearhead from space
power of the daleks
the woman who fell to earth
rose
castrovalva
the christmas invasion
an unearthly child
deep breath
robot
the enemy within
time and the rani
the twin dilemma

i'd call that a successful first episode

So glad we're back to spooky Delia Derbyshire influence for the theme

xp that would make an awesome ambient album tracklisting

actually pretty excited for the debut of the new theme/intro sequence... is it next week?

ooh!

An Unearthly Child
The Eleventh Hour
Spearhead From Space (ep 1 or whole story)
Power Of The Daleks (ep 1
Rose
Deep Breath
Robot ep 1
The Woman Who Fell To Earth
The Christmas Invasion
Castrovalva ep 1
Grace: 1999
Time And The Rani
The Twin Dilemma

meant to close those brackets with ", probably whole story but I died of old age watching the animated version in the cinema)"

actually pretty excited for the debut of the new theme/intro sequence... is it next week?

When the theme rose and then died away after the Doctor's first appearance in this ep, I first thought the Australian broadcaster had butchered things and cut out the opening titles for time reasons.

Anyway, Whittaker felt just right as the Doctor. And Sheffieldian gloom seemed right to me, as someone who first saw it on TV in 'Threads'.

Also, re not immediately rushing off to rescue the sister: the girl has already been in stasis for 7 years, and once the Doctor gets the TARDIS back then time really is no object.

Sic, i came dangerously close to ordering some BF audios today. Talk me down.

stick to the ones I recommended in that other thread!

erm, five years or so ago

Or say what you’re looking to get out of them & I’ll give some tips.

Unrelatedly, in spin-off news, the Moffat book of Day of the Doctor is really good fun. If it sounds like your thing, definitely read it (and if it isn't, definitely don't).

Forgot to mention:

- I say to kids "You know, the new Doctor - she's great - she really seems like the same person as the previous doctors". 9-y-o rolls eyes - "Of course she does! Dad, she's a PROFESSIONAL ACTRESS"

- When it's over they go "Is this on every Sunday?!?!"

Oh and:

- "Dad can you pause it, I need to go pee!"

- "No I can't, this is live TV"

Look of confusion and horror

Well technically you could have...

I couldn't though! We were watching on Freeview

Just saw it ourselves here. Loved it.

Recent Big Finishes that looked potentially promising, but I will probably regret buying if I have a moment of weakness...

224 "Alien Heart"/"Dalek Soul"
229 "The Silurian Candidate"
230 "Time in Office"
240 "Hour of the Cybermen"
241 "Red Planets"

oh, RECENT -- Eddie Robson's usually not terrible, but generally I'd say for anything past #100, wait for it to turn up on Radio 4 and listen on iPlayer (radio is free worldwide), unless it's written by Nev Fountain. or there's a $5 weekend sale on the Big Finish site.

and you have already bought all the Rob Shearman and Nev Fountain stories.

Have the Shearmans, not the Nevs. Cheers!

The best Fountain is (nominally) a Companion Chronicle, “Peri And The Piscon Paradox.” Second-best is “The Kingmaker.”

yeah finally watched this last night. thought it was great. story could have been better maybe? sure, but teeth-face tim shaw bits kind of made up for otherwise weakly conceived villain. One thing that really stood out to me was how beautiful everything was; the outdoor shots on the hills, the lighting in some of the warehouse scenes... glowing, hazy, gorgeous looking.

also liked that she got her clothes at a charity shop and the first reaction was 'that's what you're going with?" though that cloak looks a bit expensive.

oh and as for Jodie Whittaker, she was great. I wasn't dreading her though; I did find her character a little annoying on Broadchurch (at least in the first two seasons) but that was the character more than her as an actress.

Bradley Walsh was great. I don't know him from anything else so I had no reason to think he'd be otherwise though. My son thought he was a jerk though and preferred Yas and Ryan.

If you can watch Attack the Block, she’s great in that.

Loved it, loved Sheffield’s guest-starring part, will re-watch again before next episode.

Yeah definitely a good advert for Sheffield.

The best Fountain is (nominally) a Companion Chronicle, “Peri And The Piscon Paradox.” Second-best is “The Kingmaker.”

― My Gig: The Thin Beast (sic)

cheers, i loved "piscon paradox", will have to check out kingmaker

i'm trying to delve into the most ridiculous doctor who trivia lately. like, i didn't know until yesterday the spinoff novel "turlough and the earthlink dilemma" had him facing off not against sky dayton, but against the evil Rehctaht, which is of course just "Thatcher" spelled backwards.

subtle!

I look forward to Thirteen's clash with Yam and Pmurt.

I still didn't love it, but it was much better on second watch

they always seem to make an episode feel both frantic and tedious. No moments ever get to breathe

yeah this was one of RTD's saving graces - his episodes always have strong, forward-moving narratives, but they're never too frantic or fast, even when they're nonsensical or oversimplistic. he's a good world-builder.

it's moffat (from silence in the library onwards) who introduces the gab-as-fast-as-possible thing where every episode goes at a breakneck pace - that was tiresome, and it's a shame chibnall still seems to be doing that

weirdly i think sylvester mccoy was probably the best too-fast-talking doctor

I didn't think the pace of this was fast at all compared to Moffatt. That was the one thing that got tiresome with MOffatt to me as well; some of his stories were so quick (more during Matt Smith's tenure) that they frankly didn't seem to make any sense at all. Would Moffatt have ever slowed down for a eulogy scene the way they did here?

Also: did production move permanently to Sheffield out of Wales?

Would Moffatt have ever slowed down for a eulogy scene the way they did here?

the bunker scene in Inversion was ten minutes including a five-minute monologue

Also: did production move permanently to Sheffield out of Wales?

did it move permanently to New York in 2012?

every single Dr Who story since 1985 has been filmed in Seville

I don't consider the eulogy scene particularly slow, though - my memory is that it's Very Shouty Capaldi.

They used special effects that they were capable of doing well in this episode. I especially liked how brief and blurry the shots of the spaghetti monster were.

Avoiding cos he doesn't want to spoil anyone's fun 😊

so assuming everyone's seen it and settled with their enjoyment level, respec knucks to Chuck and f. hazel and Leeee, this episode made me go Full Aldo:

(teal deers, step on the space bar if you dgaf)

TEH WOMANG WHO FELL TO EARTH

So, this episode featured a promising debut performance by Jodie Whitaker, and did an efficient job of introducing the supporting cast, and setting up the series premise for brand-new viewers. The score was a vast distance from the overstatedness of 2005-2017’s composer Murray Gold, though the issues with sound being mixed for 5.1 and dialogue therefore being frequently drowned out persist (and my vote is still for 2010-2017 to be rescored by Paul Hartnoll).

But beyond that, it aggressively lived down to my expectations for Chris Chibnall, a man who has never shown the signs of having a single idea that would motivate a Doctor Who episode, and a steadfast refusal to actually follow through any of the points he sets up in his stories. This might be a tribute to Russell T. Davies, who at least wilfully thought that you were boring and dumb if you expected any of his careful details to link up. Davies was obviously correct in this, as his “bugger the facts, feel the emotions” approach made the series a bigger and broader success than it had ever been. But it made it maddening to have a writer who would set up clues, or establish stats and figures, in a way that made it seem the viewer ought to be rewarded for tracking them, if you were the viewer who took him at his implication.
Chibnall, in having a stunningly basic alien-invades-middle-sized-UK-city, gets-turned-away plot for his opener, will plausibly build a new audience of children and grandmas again. But let’s not forget that Steven Moffatt’s “make it clever enough for ten year olds and hope the adults can keep up” approach also made the series bigger globally than it had ever been. As well as bringing new and weird and interesting ideas, and recruiting other writers for the same, Moffatt kept changing his approach to the series year on year, whereas The Woman Who Fell To Earth feels just like an episode of the 2006 Chibnall-run Torchwood with different accents.

From the opening scenes, Chibnall sets out his MAKE NO SENSE agenda: Ryan and his family are up a hill that gently slopes away. He takes nine steps away from the sort-of-path, and is suddenly on top of a cliff. By the time he gets down to the valley to hunt for his bike, we see the tall trees rising indicating the depth, but no cliff edges anywhere around – yet his bike is suspended right above the nadir of the valley. If his dyspraxia mainly manifests in gross motor skills, is it really that much easier for him to pick up, carry and throw a bicycle than to ride it? (Genuine question!) Even if so, I think it hugely unlikely that he could throw it a distance of what must be at least 30 metres. Or that any human could.

This locality aside, the geography is overall very confusing, though it might make perfect sense to anyone familiar with the area. Hathersage, Grindleford and Sheffield are the only pointers given. By the time Bradley Walsh and Sharon Dee Clarke off of them Nomads are on the train, it’s pitch-black night. They had to leave Ryan on the clifftop because it was 20 minutes until their train left. So presumably they’re further away than, and get on earlier than, Hathersage – backed up by Grace saying “we’re between Hathersage and Grindleford,” not “we’ve only just left the station.” But Yasmin, complaining about her assignments from a police station in Sheffield [right?] gets sent out to this rural location. Ryan presumably calls the Sheffield police because they’re his local… so does that mean that he doesn’t live where he’s learning? His grandparents CAME OUT ON THE TRAIN with him to (checks train map) Bamford so that he would be far enough away from anyone he knows to make fun of him, but ditch him to walk his bike up a cliff from a valley and then all the way back to the country town station to take a multi-train trip back to the city? This is a wild mix of extreme care and total cuntery. I guess maybe he’s thrown enough 19-year-old tantrums that Graham’s “are you going to blame THIS on the dyspraxia, too?” frustration is actually rooted in something, and this is genuine characterisation that Chibnall is laying groundwork for, and not just bad-soap-level dialogue. I’ll start holding my breath not just yet, though.

Even if Ryan has a reason to call Sheffield cops, and the supervisor is bored of Yasmin’s complaints enough to send her out of jurisdiction on a wild pod chase just to teach her a lesson – surely sending an inexperience, teenaged, trainee female officer to answer what you believe to be a completely made up call by a young man, to a fucking valley half an hour away, out of her own jurisdiction with no backup, is liable to have the supervisor lose his job when she gets murdered by the nutcase who called in?

--

The first scene with the Doctor is nearly great – her challenging Yasmin on what she’s going to say when she reports the event is great, like a classic Doctor inviting a companion to come away with him, except here just encouraging her to be a nosy adventurer on her own terms – except that it opens with the Doctor seeing an alium for the first time, immediately grabbing a sparking cable and electrocuting it. My group was all shocked at this. The Doctor’s first response to an unknown species should not be to attempt to MURDER IT IMMEDIATELY, without even finding out if it can talk. [hey, wait – how is everyone later able to talk to Tim Shaw, when there’s no TARDIS around to translate? I’m sure Chibnall reasoned that part of his race’s hunter’s honour code requires them to learn the local language for every place that they go hunting on any planet, and we’re not going to see them chatting freely with any other aliens next week.) She follows with “that should buy us a few seconds,” but come the fuck on.

Did Capaldi take everything out of all his pockets before regenerating in Twice Upon A Time? I don’t actually give a shit about continuity like that, but since they keep referring to it and to him, I did keep wondering.

--

When Ryan touches the space testicle in the valley, it’s so cold that he snatches his hand away in pain. Yasmin touches it half an hour or more later, and it’s still that cold. We later learn that it’s the travel pod for Tim Shaw, who is permanently so cold he can freeze a human to death, so presumably it stays that cold until it releases him.

[wait a sec here – if he needs a pod to travel to Earth by himself, how is he able to teleport away with just a badge, while also carrying a human: especially when he can’t touch that human to transport them? You’d think the pod would be more necessary for the return voyage, not superfluous.]

So how the shit are Rahul and his white mate (aside here just to note huge approval of the majority-melanin lead speaking roles this episode) able to PICK THE WHOLE THING UP WITH BARE HANDS, having to press their whole arms and probably torsos and maybe faces against it, walk very slowly sideways out of the valley and up a hill to (presumably) a carpark, wrestle it into the back of the van, and get it out again at the other end (and arranging it carefully in the middle of the surveillance zone BEFORE TURNING THE LIGHTS ON), without so much as a blanket lining the van for insulation? Also, Rahul spent seven years figuring out when Tim Shaw’s teleport thing might be happening SOMEWHERE around Sheffield, but how the flying cockfarts did he deduce that it had actually manifested in that exact location in a valley half an hour away in the country?

--

I still haaaaaaate glowy energy regeneration being the same every time, but also don’t get what the deal was with the bit that floated away out of the napping Doctor. Maybe this will pay off later, and they need to go back to in a future episode because she left an important piece of her brain somewhere, somewhere in a flat in south Yorkshire.

--

I said “uh, it’s a Predator” at the first shot of the out-of-pod alien, not knowing a) how accurate I was, and b) how exactly Predator 2 it was. People praised the alien design but… it’s a guy in a leather outfit? Who just walks like a guy? He doesn’t appear to be body-acting at all, just walking slowly and stiffly because his costume is too tight. Apart from looking more like a rando motorcyclist than the motorcyclists from Mandy (which, I took it on my first viewing, were meant to initially suggest might be demons manifest on earth), Tim Shaw is plainly not mechanical, but sometimes, only-when-it’s-spookiest-to-do-so, makes hydraulic mechanical noises when he moves his arms. (And Gaiman wasn’t allowed to have silent, sneaky Cybermen!)

And the toothface makeup is DUUUUUUMB, just glistening wetly and… are all the teeth human? Even though he’s only ever hunted a human once before in his entire Competitive Hunting career? Shaw’s OWN TEETH are blue and pointy, so were two different ppl working on designing and building his face without ever speaking to each other? Did Chibnall not bother to include anything about other aliums in his script?

His makeup is just “human, but with a few wet ridges.” It’s ‘90s Star Trek level. (Definitely feels super-racist for Bradley Walsh to call him “that creature.”) And is he absorbing the teeth? How are they staying in his face? Does all his race keep teeth in their face as souvenirs, or is this supposed to mean that he’s a GIANT PSYCHO who everyone else hates and keeps setting spurious nigh-impossible tasks of hunting to get him off the planet and away from the government? This might be an interesting approach if we end up going to their planet later! Let’s see!

--

The team arriving at Rahul’s warehouse and crouching over his battered corpse is so tell-don’t-show that it feels like Big Finish. How can Doctor Who see a tooth has been taken? From the face we see on Tim later, he’s only taking molars (and maybe an incisor or two)? So how can she see just from looking at a guy lying on the ground? Tim would have had to tear Rahul’s cheek open, leaving his entire jaw and mandible exposed, for her to see this – and if so, then “what sort of creature kills someone then stops to pull out a tooth?” shouldn’t be remarkable. If it’s literally tearing his face open, then it’s already slowing down more than a little.

Doctor Who spends at least an hour, probably a few, building her new crystal steeldriver – given the time to find components, figure out the construction, but specially to SMELT AND WORK STEEL and let it set – and the exact second she’s done, Ryan runs back in having watched the computer video file that he’d clicked “play” on before she began. We then see the video, which runs for about 20 seconds. Did Ryan and Yas go through his file folders, find a couple of films he’d torrented, and watch them before suddenly thinking that finding the “thing” that’s “come back” after seven years to hunt humans might be worth following up on?

“Only idiots carry knives.” Firstly, way to sevateem-shame, and secondly, what if you’re the sort of person who often gets their friends captured and tied up and needs to rescue them?

Doctor’s miscalculation that the two aliens are fighting, like Sontarans and Rutans, is good. Show her as fallible, and throw a slight curveball or two to viewers.

--

Salad-tossing: that is some of the worst drunk-acting ever. But beyond that: is this a side salad in a kebab or munchie box, or is he fishing the bits out of a burger to throw away? The tomato being in slices, not wedges, suggests the latter, but maybe sliced is the custom in Sheffield. If not, why is there no burger? And given the weight of the Styrofoam container suggests there’s nothing in it but salad, if he’s finished the other stuff, why not just shut the lid and toss the box?

But then all of a sudden when Tim Shaw steps on the dropped box, it’s piled high with food – the shot’s too short to see, but looks like kebab meat piled on a very soggy half a burger bun, on top of another burger bun?

“Halloween’s next month, mate.” – Chibs was obv originally expecting more than a week or two gap between the series and the Christmas / NY special!

--

It’s not until she’s electrocuted it a SECOND time and said “overloaded its circuits” that Doctor Who scans the tentacle thingy and realises it’s half machine! She’s tried to kill it twice before doing any kind of scan to determine that this wouldn’t kill it.

The sound design and music mix drowning out dialogue becomes more troublesome when its drowning out the already-impossible-to-understand Tim Shaw while he’s delivering long exposition dumps supposedly explaining the entire premise of the episode. (I tried to go to the Thursday cinema screenings to get around this, by Moviepassing in to something else, but by 7:30 all screenings of the two films on MP for the day had been removed from the app.)

Tim Shaw: Well done. Your tiny mind must be burning with such… effort.
DW: ………..did he just say I’ve got a small mind?

Is her brain still regenerating, so she can’t figure this out (in which case he might be accurate and she oughtn’t be offended), or is this the standard of banter we can expect from Chibnall for the next three years? (I know which one my money’s on!)

If he needs “access granted” to retrieve the “selected trophy,” then is it really Marquess of Queensbury rules to murder so many other ppl? They keep pointing out how he’s cheating the rules of the hunt itself, but that there are so many rules makes one wonder if it’s really kosher to murder everybody else you encounter on the way to capturing the one you’ve been assigned.

“What’s it doing?”
“TOTAL… transference.”
Why the emphasis? Just “transferring its data” would make more sense – he’s not absorbing the tentacle thing’s life or energy or w/e – this feels like Chibnall thinking he’s being SUPER DOUBLE EXTRA SMART in setup, laying very careful info to point up something that in the end doesn’t actually make any sense.

Lol at Tim Shaw setting off his “short-range teleport” by throwing a smoke bomb at the ground and vanishing, but not even showing special effects of smoke or a camera trick of him vanishing, just having Doctor Who say what happened. Again, like a Big Finish.

Ugh at the font on Carl Limmybloke’s app looking like it says YOU ARE VALULD. Terrible design. But I guess he doesn’t think he deserves a top quality self-affirming app yet. Or maybe it starts displaying better UX once he starts exhibiting greater self-esteem! In which case, A+ world-building from the production there.

--

It must be WELL after midnight by now, and Carl is just starting his shift at the … crane exercise yard? Construction site? He was on a train heading to work before sunset, which in Sheffield in late September would be… 18:00ish? (Never mind that it had fallen completely dark by the time the train LEFT the station.) And was worried about getting there on time? Even if we call it midnight: So the job site is six hours walk from the train station? With presumably six hours walk back, and an eight-hour shift, Carl must do all his eating and shitting at work, and - even if we assume he lives at Hathersage, right next to the train station - be operating heavy machinery every day on less than three hours sleep, and never showering. No bloody wonder he thinks his colleagues don’t like him. Also take a bloody thermos up your giant climb into a shaking, juddering machine, not an open mug of coffee, dipshit. How is it still so full that he can sip from near the top? Maybe he’s pissing in it and drinking that. Again, no wonder he’s unpopular.

Fukkn loollllll at the security guard talking to his granddaughter on the phone before going to investigate the alien arrival. Was it his last week before retirement, too? At least he acknowledges mildly that it’s too late for her to be up and phoning, but if he so regularly avoids his job of being alert and watching for things that he keeps a tablet on a stand on his desk for video calls, it’s a wonder he’s made it to retirement.

Fair play to Carl for paying more attention than Grandead, but surely he shouldn’t be looking out of the cabin and peering at the tower beneath him, rather than actually watching what’s happening with the heavy and valuable payload that he’s shifting. Whatever that is. He really doesn’t seem to have anything hanging from the end of the crane, but I was looking at the people so might have just missed it.

I guess we’re supposed to take it as fortunate that the guard got killed, so that Bradley and I Wanna Give You Devotion could sneak or break into the facilities and steal hi-viz vests that aren’t the same hi-viz vests that the workers wear, and clipboards.

Why the fuck was the guy with a coordination disorder carrying a switched-on torch in one hand while climbing a super-tall ladder that is already very strongly illuminated with giant kliegs? Just so we can gasp when he drops it. Great work, Chibs.

I really couldn’t track at all what’s going on with Doctor Who suddenly being at the top of the crane but Yas and Ryan having to climb it slowly after her and then the tentacle creature is alive again (so, not TOTAL transference) and trying to bring the crane down just by… glowing near it? When seconds ago it was only /guarding/ the other crane by glowing near it? Can anyone explain what does actually happen here?

Does Ryan look up crane-operating instructions on Reddit? Ugh.

Lol that they have to super-slow down Carl’s “jump” across a gap of approx. 15 inches, fictional distance, to make it seem scary. Even more so that IRL it’s filmed on a studio and he’s not even jumping that far.
But then DW runs and jumps by kicking off the “floor” of that gantry arm, with the safety-rail-prow thing COMPLETELY VANISHING so that it doesn’t trip her up and send her plummeting to the ground (where she could regenerate again, into Peter Davison).

“What do you do with them, your human trophies?”
“They're held in stasis in our trophy chambers, on the cusp between life and death.
“Left to rot? How completely obscene.”

Are you listening? He just said they’re kept in stasis. That’s obscene enough in itself: bad form for The Doctor to make up almost the opposite of what the baddies do and then condemn them for it.

Telling off Carl for booting Tim Shaw off the gantry is fucking idiotic – she tried to electrocute another alien on sight, and on second sight, and she’s just Seventh Doctor-ed him into blowing himself up, and Carl quite reasonably might think it’s safer for Tim Shaw to BLOW UP IN MID-AIR than to EXPLODE WHILE DIRECTLY STRADDLING CARL.

Why do Walsh and Devotion bother to take time to remove their hi-viz before embarking on the electrocute-alien-to-death-for-the-THIRD-time mission?

Eulogy runs 1 minute 20. Are there really no Moffat episodes which spend 1 minute 20 on a single scene or on emotion?

--

It’s after the funeral that they tell the Doctor to change her clothes, and she says she has to be getting on. So she’s been sleeping on someone’s sofa for at least a week, without anyone taking he to a charity shop?? And she then hits them up for cash, when they’ve been housing and feeding her for eight days already? And she didn’t bother to start building a space teleporter at all during that week, and when she does, expects someone who is GRIEVING HIS GRANDMOTHER to help out now? The bloke who’s grieving his wife is also drawn into it, but let’s imagine he chose to come along to keep distracted.
Also, what a dick to hurl half the contents of the shop over the floor. (And why is Yasmin standing there, metres away, holding another armful of clothes?) Fair enough if they bring this up and bawl her out next week though: “we spent a bloody week smelling your dirty derps and feeding you, and then you almost killed us all in an airless void!”

Anyway the music is an improvement, the cast seem promising, an expanded team could work well and Chibnall seems happier with an ensemble cast, given Torchwood, Law & Order and Broadchurch. The very very very simple plot with no actual subtext or concept is probably a tactic to onboard new and casual viewers easily and I give it full marks for that. But I wish it was a simple plot where things actually flow together, and Chibnall regularly showed evidence of thinking about how all the details in his stories actually connect. I knew the next few years were unlikely to be to my taste, though, and if the ratings stay good and do well with women aged 5-35 and old folks, then hoorah for now, and roll on Jamie Mathieson in 2021.

"If his dyspraxia mainly manifests in gross motor skills, is it really that much easier for him to pick up, carry and throw a bicycle than to ride it? (Genuine question!)"

yeah, it is

From the opening scenes, Chibnall sets out his MAKE NO SENSE agenda: Ryan and his family are up a hill that gently slopes away. He takes nine steps away from the sort-of-path, and is suddenly on top of a cliff. By the time he gets down to the valley to hunt for his bike, we see the tall trees rising indicating the depth, but no cliff edges anywhere around – yet his bike is suspended right above the nadir of the valley

That’s exactly what the gritstone edges around that part of Derbyshire are like rolling moors that drop away suddenly to a cliff, although lots of ways up and down and varying levels of difficulty. The view over Hathersage was clearly from Stannage edge but the only place you could chuck a bike and hit a tree is by the plantation and it would be a big chuck. ( went to an awesome rave there once)

If you really want woods at the bottom of your crag you need to be at froggat edge but you’d get on the train at gridleford. Of course you would end up in the dark and on the last train because you would have to stop off at the Chequers inn for a pint or two.

I think Chibnall is allowed some geographic license.

vashta
nerada

yeah, it is

thanks! (I figured it probably was, as it's a less... controlled? fiddly? action, hence the aside, but that he couldn't actually lob it farther than any real human.) looking fwd to more opportunities for you and chap & al to identify w/ and comment as the season goes on

Of course you would end up in the dark and on the last train because you would have to stop off at the Chequers inn for a pint or two.

I think Chibnall is allowed some geographic license.

:) thanks too for the v detailed local knowledge!

sic, your review has vastly improved my opinion of this one episode of Doctor Who

it's, i don't know, a balance thing. carrying a bicycle would be a little unwieldy for me but i don't think i'd fall right over trying to carry it like i do trying to balance on a bicycle.

lol tombot otm

it's the flipside of seven years of ppl going "wtf? this made no sense and why would she say that" and me going "that was explained onscreen in x y & z"

sic i absolutely loved reading that. where's your patreon??? :)

*cheers*
that 'left to rot?' bit had me fuming.
I'd not long ago watched a Black Mirror where being held between life and death was a plot point and it was explored so much better (ie at all)

as an aside I love how Ed has been everywhere on the planet, almost like ILX's very own Doctor

"Full Aldo"

:D

while i'm kind of awe-inspired by sic's indefatigable forensic unstitching, i probably don't care about ~99% of it. however, the central contention that yer chibs struggles with ideas or that ability to locate the smallness/ingenuity of the doctor/humanity into much larger (dangerous, alien) structures. with RTD that was largeness was achieved through grandiosity, with Moff it was complexity (both grand failings as well), but that first episode felt linear and flat, unimaginative.

also used the line 'that thing must have killed him/her' TWICE. (the first gets the good rejoinder 'must it?').

What saved it was that Whittaker was fantastic, and well written as well. what i think she does well, better than any other nu-who doctor is contain the mania, diverts the grinning antic behaviour early into pragmatism, purpose or seriousness. they do force the usual manic behaviour = eccentricity on her but she manages it superbly. And after a bit of musing, I think the relationships between the new companions and the doctor are well done as well. the 'team' approach works i think.

also sheffield and peaks fine by me even if it was a bit dark quite a lot of the time.

My name is aldo and I endorse this message.

Wait what's this about teal deers?

~

hey, who turned out the lights?

I'd not long ago watched a Black Mirror where being held between life and death was a plot point and it was explored so much better (ie at all)

― kinder

i don't think i'd want doctor who to be black mirror!

Wait what's this about teal deers?

tl; dr

I thought that was better than the last one but still only OK. The strangly fabric was both cool and scary but the premise was a bit on the drab side and the whole thing could use more in the way of humour.

Real overreliance on manic expository dialogue as well.

Also, I hate Bradley Walsh.

hey, who turned out the lights?

Second episode. Puts Chibnall's disadvantages into focus quite a bit - OK, so from now on all of the dialogue will be the characters literally describing what is happening on screen - but I'm still sold on his advantages. The show is beautiful. It's incredibly well-photographed and gorgeous to look at, and he's confident enough to do exactly what you would expect. Yeah, there was a lot to love in the convoluted narrative unpredictability of Moffat, but I loved watching this show, even though I could have written you a summary of the episode after watching five minutes of it. The music is also great, though I suppose there are still issues with the 5.1 mix?

The one part that bothered me was the bit where the Doctor apparently actually believed she had stranded everyone on an alien planet to die. The Doctor should, of course, have moments of vulnerability and doubt, but she is an alien genius. She should not be stupider than me. Falling into despair because the TARDIS shows up two minutes later than she expected is out of character for her and unconvincing to any viewer who is even remotely genre savvy.

Still, I've forgiven the show worse, and I'll gladly forgive this. Next week Doctor Who will tell us about racism in America. Speaking of having forgiven worse, can I just say how glad I am that Mark Gatiss will _not_ be writing the episode?

Difference between this and the Keys of Marinus: go!

though the plot of "the ghost monument" involves a deadly sea, chibnall has the narrative confidence to just make it look like a regular sea; "the sea of death" involves five minutes of screen time, some crappy fx shots and some foolishness with susan's shoes to laboriously establish what chibnall does with something like one line of dialogue.

finding the tardis at last got me a little choked up 🤙

though once she got inside of it the reveal of the interior was strangely subdued and drawn out, so much so that my 7 y o whispers to me "it's a trap!"

It’s definitely the most Chibnall TARDIS interior possible

I thought the teethface makeup in E1 was a bit silly but I’m kinda stoked for the Stenza being the season’s villains.

I found this only ok but still much better than the first one. Although if you make a big deal about the water microbes that dissolve people, you could at least... have a water microbe dissolve someone. And that’s two eps of “Doctor stuck in a sports game” so far.

hahaha, I also thought of the Keys of Marinus!

fun episode, I like the new theme tune and that the TARDIS chameleon circuit has chosen an action movie poster for its new form, but I don't think Pythagoras was the type of dude that would have hangovers.

Biscuits, my friends.

BTW, kinda curious question -- both Kate and I agreed that, at least over here, the sound mix of this episode in particular was...off? Like a lot of dialogue seemed buried in the mix, nnd not just for effect.

these 5.1 broadcasts always seem to have inaudible dialogue... center channel is always mixed too low when it's converted to stereo

I am sorta dreading next week's episode, Doctor Who sucks at America, and they have chosen an... advanced topic.

Ah, I see they've got Malorie Blackman to write it. That's reassuring, at least.

i don't know if it was the sound mix but we couldn't understand about 70% of the shouting in the spaceships at the beginning

lol what advanced topic is portended?

notes and comments on this episode

- Maybe I was dense but I didn't understand that there were on two ships until I rewatched the show. I think the shakycam was shaking my mind.
- It was surprisingly easy to split that ship apart.
- Enemy is a toymaker, a device that was lazy even in the 1960s. NAGL to use an asian actor dressed up as Fu Manchu, either.
- The Tardis appears once every "solar rotation". Nitpicks: 1. Solar refers specifically to Earth's sun. 2. The sun doesn't rotate, the planet does. 3. It is vague whether it is a rotation around the planet's axis (a day) or around its sun (a year). 4. It is convenient that the planet's day is around the same as Earth's.
- They call the game a "race" and then switch to talking about species -- not a great choice for clarity. Then they start calling it a rally for who knows why.
- They set up that Chekhov's lighter twice. But they say it lights with a "click of the finger", which doesn't make it clear that it's a snap that can be done from a distance. (and why does it.... but no)
- The cynical guy's sad story was a "Walker, Texas Ranger" clip used on Conan.
- Rather convenient that there's a robot deactivate button right where they get trapped.
- They are going all out with their generic predator species, huh. not an enemy i thought was notable enough to go back to.
- The Doctor was concerned about the dead planet because she "feels a duty to others who might be in trouble". But the planet looks long dead. Not the most pressing concern.
- They all stop to look at "scorch marks" on the wall which, uh, you already had the robots firing at you, why is that a surprise.
- Chibnall doesn't make every line matter, and I don't think that's a good fit for a show like Doctor Who. e.g. they are told that the water is poison, then there's a pointless scene where the doctor points the sonic at the water and says the water is poison. or when they are in a shooting range and it takes multiple sentences for the doctor to say it's a shooting range.
- The "do not travel by night" thing is returned to at the end, but a second later it doesn't matter. I don't know why they bothered.

Flesh eating water was such a cool idea that I presume it's going to be important later. Otherwise why bother?

Apart from anything else I loved the first shot of the Doc in this, seeing her from Yaz's pov effectively. Lots of nice touches, even just showing an alien planet's varying terrain for once. Pretty lacklustre storywise once again though.

Nu Doc confirmed as a Remoaner ("Better Together")

lol that was my immediate thought as well.

flesh eating water was a cool idea. which they then explored by showing a picture of normal looking water and sailing over it.

I was a bit disappointed she found her Tardis already, I was expecting this series to be a single episodic adventure which would've been cool. Enjoyed it generally, lots of little quibbles but it was atmospheric and fun.

Here is the only video I can find of the Walker clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsbNoUHwXWs

And here's the next lines.

(Nicholas jumps from the ladder and falls to the floor, seriously hurting himself)

Ranger Roberta 'Bobbie' Hunt: (shocked) Oh, my God! Are you nuts?

Salvatore Matacio: (grabs and restrains Bobbie, as Laura Justin; furious) You will not interfere with me teaching my son how to be a man. That is something you know nothing about! Huh?

Ranger Roberta 'Bobbie' Hunt: Yes.

(Nicholas is moaning, writhing, and crying in pain)

Salvatore Matacio: (slightly kicks him) Hey. Don't ever trust anyone, Nicholas. Nobody. The sooner you learn that, the better off you'll be. Stop crying.

Weirdly, this episode’s director was former R1 DJ Mark Tonderai.

lol what advanced topic is portended?

They're gonna meet Rosa Parks and fool around in 1950s Montgomery. At least it will be fun to hear the Doctor say "Montgomery".

The Doctor was concerned about the dead planet because she "feels a duty to others who might be in trouble"

This bothered me because, well... there are no humanoids on the planet, but the second you meet a sentient lifeform (one that can talk to you!) your reaction is to... murder all of them with fire? Oh but you hate guns, so it's cool.

At least it will be fun to hear the Doctor say "Montgomery".

omg

I don't know whether sic has poisoned my thinking on this but after completely loving E1 and not caring at all about any of those plot point nitpicks because the overall production and mood was so great, I had the exact opposite reaction to this, tons of minor stuff bugged me and the general feeling was just stodgy and aimless and weak.

Not even the thing I found most annoying but - the "only idiots carry knives" line last week was great I thought, and then this week a guy being suffocated by a bit of angry cloth has his life saved by...someone carrying a knife. Like ffs chibnall you wrote both these yourself, make your mind up.

sic i absolutely loved reading that. where's your patreon??? :)

pay $1 a week for me to keep doing these, $2 a week for me not to. number of voters wins over dollar amount.

sic i absolutely loved reading that

agree! he rudely added a few days too late. take my dollar!

i would v much miss sic’s posts itt.

- Enemy is a toymaker, a device that was lazy even in the 1960s. NAGL to use an asian actor dressed up as Fu Manchu, either.

Did I miss something, or where was it established he's a toymaker? He says something about winning the first of the races they're participating in, but I didn't hear any mention of toys. Also, I don't know the actor's background, but he didn't look ethnically East Asian to me, and I didn't get any Fu Manchu vibes from him.

- Rather convenient that there's a robot deactivate button right where they get trapped.

This was done very quickly, but the impression I got was that the machine wasn't designed to produce EMP, the Doctor just rigged it to do that. Certainly an EMP would've been a rather odd thing to use if the device was designed to be an off-switch.

abanana is drawing uncomfortable similiarities between this story/character and one of the three most racist Dr Who stories ever, The Celestial Toymaker from 1966

That's right. Note that celestial meant Chinese. I originally wrote gamester/toymaker then thought the Star Trek ref wasn't needed.

The new actor was Art Malik and he was born in Pakistan.

abanana is drawing uncomfortable similiarities between this story/character and one of the three most racist Dr Who stories ever, The Celestial Toymaker from 1966

Yeah, I understood the reference, but I didn't really pick Fu Manchu vibes from him. I guess his shirt and vest were kinda vaguely "Oriental", but other than that his appearance and behaviour didn't really fit the stereotype. Maybe if he was the only Asian actor we've seen so far, it would've stand out more, but this and the previous episode have already featured a couple of other characters of South Asian roots (including one of the companions), so it really felt more like "we cast whoever was best for the role" than some kind of racist stereotyping.

- The "do not travel by night" thing is returned to at the end, but a second later it doesn't matter. I don't know why they bothered.

I thought the rule against traveling by night was because those weird living bandages were dormant when the sun was shining? It was never explained why that was the case, but it certainly mattered.

I guess his shirt and vest were kinda vaguely "Oriental"

this is what dat banana dough meant, the obvious orientalism (vs, say, Dorium in a similar story-role). possibly you're thinking instead of the absolute most racist Doctor Who story ever, from 1977, in expecting very direct Fu Manchu references.

Anyway, in general I thought this was an okay episode. Certainly an improvement over the previous one, because the ideas was less derivative, and others than the Doctor got some nice character moments here. But overall the plot was still a mess, the conclusion where the two aliens claim the price together should've been a heartwarming moment, but it came too abruptly. There simply wasn't enough space to develop those two properly because Chibnall wanted to flesh out the companions as well. Which was nice, but it makes me feel three new companions + a new Doctor is simply too much if they want to have interesting one-off characters as well.

And yeah, so much for the idea that this season would be all stand-alone stories, since the shadow of the Stenza and the cryptic "timeless child" references were obviously set-up for a larger plot. I don't mind it, and at this point I think most Who fans expect the series to have seasonal arcs besides the Monster of the Week, I'm just not convinced Chibnall can pull it off as well as Moffat (or even Davis) did at his best.

Art Malik was wearing a Shalwar Kameez a fairly typical outfit for an Indian or Pakistani to wear anywhere. My Indian neighbor wears one on a regular basis. FFS it’s a Pakistani man wearing, admittedly fancy, everyday clothes, which presumably will still be quite comfortable on a hot day in the future.

thanks, i'm learning stuff.

so much for the idea that this season would be all stand-alone stories

Stand alone stories and the season having a larger arc are not incompatible.

I thought the incongruity being noted was bcz this either is so wildly far in the future that the very existence of humans and earth cultures has been forgotten, or (as the dialogue suggests) is in the present but it’s just a coincidence or budgetary limitation that everybody in it looks like humans

Took me a while to work out the woman racer's accent. Briefly considered 'Isle of Man'.

Norn Iron surely, which is her own accent

So far in the future we can have TK Maxx bargain bin tracksuit bottoms (as worn by the racers), but not Shalwar Kameez?

It’s a pretty strong trope in sci-fi in Genral and doctor who in particular that aspects of current human physiology and culture persist if only to keep the props, costume and makeup department budgets under control.

Did appreciate staff Sargent morrow as one of the racers keeping Yorkshire’s end up.

FFS it’s a Pakistani man wearing, admittedly fancy, everyday clothes, which presumably will still be quite comfortable on a hot day in the future.

Oops, sorry, I didn't notice Sic already said the same. But the Stenza tech the Doctor used to transport them there was supposed to be a teleporter, there's no mention of it being a time machine. So presumably they're in the present day, then.

Anyway, in general I thought this was an okay episode. Certainly an improvement over the previous one, because the ideas was less derivative

― Tuomas

see, i thought the ideas were absolutely as derivative as the previous episode, but i guess chibnall did a better job of reframing it this time, because nobody here at least seems to have commented "oh, he's doing the hunger games". (which in itself wasn't a completely new idea either... i mean in some sense this all goes back to "the most dangerous game", doesn't it?)

and that was what impressed me most about the episode. in terms of cast, this was so light as to be basically a bottle episode, but in terms of scope it was anything but. also, after the last episode and its dramatic break with moffat's "nobody dies" ethos, chibnall here does an episode where... nobody dies. also, as someone who grew up on the old show, i really like the more relaxed pacing under chibnall. i understand compared to moffat's overstuffed episodes it might seem slow, but in fact chibnall does move along at quite a faster clip than the old series usually did. as a writer chibnall is unquestionably not as clever as moffat, but i'm very impressed with his understanding of how to use the medium.

I dunno if it's Hunger Games or The Most Dangerous Game really, since the contestants were expressly forbidden from harming each other. It's more of a Wacky Races with treasure hunt thrown in.

anyway, while i'm clearly not a nitpicker, i do think the knife thing bothers me. i wouldn't necessarily have a problem with chibnall last week telling us last week knives are bad and this week showing them to be good, except, well, this week chibnall told us guns are bad. i'm down with didactic storytelling, at least so long as i agree with the lessons, but it needs to be consistent!

It was also pretty hypocritical for the Doctor to chastise Ryan for using a gun on the non-sentient robots, when he herself later burned those talking bandages (which were implied to be sentient, since they were communicating with her) to crisp. I mean, of course it was understandable since she was doing it to protect herself and the others, but so was Ryan.

Not only that, but him shooting the robots took them out of action for a few seconds, which she said was bad, then she immediately EMP’d them which did exactly the same thing but for longer.

Just felt clumsy.

i mean i'm not sure it hurts anything, nothing can top the bizarre and tortured illogic of gun advocates.

From my notes toward a big aldoing: dyspraxia crew, does it work that Ryan would be able to run out into a battlefield, dodging fire, carrying a huge rifle, and while moving shoot with perfect accuracy against multiple combatants a) at all b) using skills developed from video game fine hand-eye coordination?

As someone with minor dyspraxia I've never particularly got into video games as they require too much hand-eye coordination. Also I went clay pigeon shooting on a stag do once and was the worse one there by a long way. So I'd say Ryan's competency in these circumstances is a stretch.

chibnall confused about key character and plot consistency seems to be a decent call so far.

From my notes toward a big aldoing: dyspraxia crew, does it work that Ryan would be able to run out into a battlefield, dodging fire, carrying a huge rifle, and while moving shoot with perfect accuracy against multiple combatants a) at all b) using skills developed from video game fine hand-eye coordination?

― My Gig: The Thin Beast (sic)

well, i mean, i don't want to speak for all dyspraxic people everywhere, but no, the idea of me being able to do that is totally ridiculous. i spent some time on the shooting range as a scout and i was absolutely terrible at it - in particular my perception of depth, distance, size, all shot to hell.

it’s odd. because a character like ryan going out and doing a call of duty run - it was funny, sweet (especially his running away) and a decent, sympathetic reference for a number of viewers. other episodes have always had this “bit of fun” stuff that doesn’t quite fit but which everyone is happy to let go.

but everyone here’s right, chibnall managed to make it sit v awkwardly to the wider audience. it doesn’t work.

i’m not going to slag off chibnall. experienced tv writer (i hated broadchurch) tackling a major character and franchise. good luck to him. (i don’t like it)

i thought it worked fine! people here are just thinking about it too hard.

how many times did someone say 'what EXACTLY did you just do?' 'what EXACTLY are you going to do?'
'Come to Daddy/Mummy' line so predictable it annoyed me

I am reasonably resigned to the fact that a generic Chibnall episode will be a bunch of setpieces hammered together along with some terrible "let me read out my character sheet" speeches, and tbh I'm alright because he and the actors get the crew right.

He's done a fine job of setting expectations.

Chibnall's scripting reminds me of ILB nemesis John Lanchester - not just the overuse of quotidian detail ("I'll call my nurses group on WhatsApp") and naff phraseology ("sorting out fair play throughout the universe") - but the uncanny valley-ness of everything, the way the show's supposed to seem naturalistic, but the details are all ever-so-slightly, off-puttingly wrong.

RTD had a similar problem, but the campness added character. And also he was a decent gag writer, some of the time. Chibnall's getting by so far, thanks to (mostly) crack casting and audience goodwill - it'll be interesting to see if that goodwill lasts till Christmas - but hopefully it will.

Both episodes have struck me as tremendously atmospheric. And the tin-eared, uncanny hokeyness of the chatter strikes me as sort of ... charming? in the same manner as many soap operas. It's a stagey universe. And I find the plotting (if inconsistent) as pretty engaging. Torchwood, for its faults, felt the same way on a shoestring. Atmospheric, hokey, engaging and sort of goofball.

yeah. and i really like how much they're "on location" so far.

Finally got around to watching the second episode, and while I still wouldn't consider it good, it was much better paced and more watchable. I really wanted to buy into the TARDIS interior reveal but it just never happened.

i thought it worked fine! people here are just thinking about it too hard.

you rang?

Director Mark Tonderai is immediately a massive improvement on the staging from last week – that 1-minute DePalma-y tracking shot in cramped cockpit space! – but overdosed so insanely hard on Teal & Deep Yellow that I had to go outside and walk around looking at trees for two hours afterwards. Joke’s on me: it’s Autumn in the northern hemisphere. (Also, the visual artistry lessens drastically once we reach the planet, but it’s harder getting good setups in a desert.)

Beyond that, pretty much every hole Chibnall looked like he was digging last week gets fallen straight into. The simplicity of last week is at least replaced with a plot that’s intended to look like a massive series of clever points that all link up together. Except that none of them actually connect, most of them contradict, and things that try and pay off fall over and get left behind.

Even if the plot did connect together, there’s no actual story. Nothing advances any character’s development, nothing tells us more about the ongoing characters, and no goals are achieved by anyone.

Even if you want to argue that the Doctor started this adventure (at the end of last week) wanting to get her TARDIS back, and she does by the end, Chibnall doesn’t even manage to pull this off perfunctorily: he fails to set it up in the episode, resolves it 15 minutes later, and then forgets to have it actually happen.

CLIFFHANGER: name the most obvious way one could resolve “a bunch of people teleport into space with seconds to live.” If you said “a spaceship appears out of nowhere and takes them on board,” you’re ready to run the biggest (nominally) sci-fi show in the world. But would you leave an inexplicable gap where one ship grabs two out of four for no reason, using a long grabby scoop, that must take several minutes to extend and retract, then fly away out of detection by either visuals or space radar – rather than going into warp drive or lightspeed or w/e, bcz they’re so close to the planet that the Doctor’s TARDIS detector ray got ‘em there – and THEN another ship blorps into existence and scoops up the other two, who have mysteriously not died in the several hours this has taken?

I feared last week that blorping into adventure just minutes after harassing two grieving family members into ditching THEIR WIFE and GRANDMOTHER’s WAKE might not get paid off. That Chibnall’s admiration for a four-person TARDIS team might be echoing 1981-2’s Tegan and Nyssa, who respectively saw their closest living relative (an Aunt) tortured and murdered by Missy, and their beloved father murdered, hollowed out and worn as a skin suit for several years by Missy. And who never showed even the slightest aftershock from these events, not even when Missy kept turning up over and over to taunt them, while still wearing Nyssa’s dad’s body. Instead, the “fam” stick up for the Doctor – “we trust her implicitly” – despite her getting them almost killed a few hours ago, and getting things wrong over and over in their experience of her. There’s no moment of fear or distrust, or of “well, she got us into this, but we have no choice but to follow her,” and her competence and character winning them over.

There are attempts to build emotion and character into moments between setpieces, but they’re totally hollow – and only come for the guest characters and the blokes. Yas, who is so far only defined by wanting to have more fulfilling tasks as a cop, basically says and does nothing all episode, let alone even trying to impose order, convey authority over miscreants, or exhibit observational or problem-solving or nascent detective skills.

Angstrom telling Ryan they’re “Just off the final planet” is delivered as though they should know what she’s talking about – she mocks him for even acting as though he doesn’t know. But there are no spectators to the race, no cameras broadcasting it, no indication that anyone is aware of it taking place apart from the participants. There’s no reason she should expect either for these rescues to know about the planet, or even for the raceholder to have the honour to pay out when nobody in the universe would know whether they won or not. Especially given that sabotage has been allowed in the rules on every previous leg, and capturing slaves to sell to the raceholder has evidently been part of the race in every previous year, given that both participants are disappointed that he is not buying them in this instance.

Why is it happening? What is the point of there being prize money? Why did Malikgram take over running it after winning? If this is the biggest prize in the race’s history, has he been funding every prize, every year since he won, solely from his own winnings? Why did people keep taking part if the packet dropped so enormously the next year, and stayed low until his bond investments paid off enough to finally give away more than he won that one time?

“Strap yourself in.”
“We’re not doing anything. Unless you turn this ship around and go and look for our friends.”

This exchange exists so that Chibnall can have Graham make a character-defining statement, but it’s cardboard, it’s hack, it’s a photocopy of a photocopy and it only works if he doesn’t think about what it fails to say about the character of her out of Cracker. She’s grabbed these bodies as salvage to traffic, she wouldn’t slow down to reason with them. The second he says “we’re not,” she should be ignoring him and getting on with the urgent matter of flying the ship. But he doesn’t want us to know that she’s a slave trader yet, and he never wants us to think about the fact that she is, as he intends to use her through the majority of the episode as an all-in-together travelling pal of the people she tried and failed to sell into slavery.

Meanwhile, on the other ship, Epzo is furious at Doctor Who and Yasmin that he wasted fuel scooping them up (to sell into slavery), but he was stopping there because he thought the planet was there. Why would the extended funfair claw machine arm use fuel from the engines? It also makes no sense for him to only grab two out of four of the “little bonuses,” leaving two for another racer to get, even when he thinks it’s still a four-person race, not two.

Why has the planet moved? This could be a hint that there’s something more to what we’ve been told about it, that what we get told can’t be trusted. Or a hint that Art Malificent is rigging the game – he’s got mighty cosmic powers, has taken the planet from its orbit to create an extra challenge. We and the racers should be watching out because he will undermine them, set extra traps… but no. It’s in the wrong place just because.

And why has the TARDIS gone to this planet? She has never abandoned the Doctor like this before, disappearing across the universe. If it was to bring the Doctor to a place where she needed to resolve something, what is that thing? No injustice is righted, no injustice undone. And once the TARDIS found the planet in the wrong place, shouldn’t it have waited to save the Doctor on her arrival?

Once again, half the dialogue might as well be from a Big Finish audio, explaining things that don’t appear, and even that do. The Doctor points at a screen we don’t see, announcing that the planet’s there. On the planet, they lampshade “What’s that?” / “It’s a tent.” But yes, we can see that too. “Look Doctor, scorch marks.” To be fair, we can’t see those. “A big locked door. I love a big locked door.” However, the set designers don’t love building one, so we just have the Doctor pointing offscreen, a door-scraping noise on the soundtrack, and then her walking offscreen.

“Does the planet have a name?”
“Only a symbol. Or a warning. Closest word is… Desolation.”

Is desolation a symbol? Or a warning? How would BEWARE or STAY AWAY or DEATHTRAP not be closer? Or YELLOW TRIANGULAR SIGN WITH A SILHOUETTE OF A BLOKE BEING SHOCKED BY A WHOPPING GREAT LIGHTNING BOLT, if it’s a symbol? Also, presumably it wasn’t called WARNING SIREN FEATURING MATTY SAFER before the enslaved scientists turned it into a hellish deathtrap. Who put up the DANGER SYMBOL sign on it – the distressed scientists, before they died? The Stenza, who wanted to make sure nobody got hurt by the deathtrap they’d built, although they left it populated by death creatures?

Epzo was the first to get to the “planet,” and had flown so far away in the new direction of the planet before Angstrom blorped out of hyperjump that he couldn’t be seen. Yet she manages to overtake him on the way in a straight line from The Fam In Space to THE ONE EXACT SAME DITCH ON THE SURFACE OF AN ENTIRE PLANET.
A PLANET.
A WHOLE PLANET.
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO A PLANET? THEY'RE PRETTY BIG
…without ever spotting him and his spaceship. Neither she nor Graham nor Ryan have any greater skill at navigating in a ditch than they do in space, though, as when the front bit of Epzo’s ship comes hurtling towards them, they decide to OUTRUN A SPACESHIP BY TROTTING LIGHTLY ALONG THE DITCH instead of - just spitballing here, top of the head – running out of the ditch and out of the path of the plummeting chunk of metal. And how does Doctor Who manage to “pull up” or “brake” or whatever once she hits the ditch, when she THREW AWAY THE ENTIRE PART OF THE SHIP THAT HAS A PROPULSION SYSTEM, and it has no wingflaps to pull up? Yasmin isn’t even fiddling with the “stabilisers” at that point.

There are times where it seems Chibnall has set himself a rule where all of these have to be written in order, and he can’t go back and change anything from last week’s episode once he’s written it. I pointed up Tim Shaw’s perfect English last week, in the absence of a TARDIS to translate, and one supposes that must be the case, as ol’ Chinballs suddenly remembers that aliens who looks exactly like humans won’t speak English, even though aliens who only looked mostly human do. Instead of having an early hint of hope in the half-arsed quest narrative, by the Doctor concluding that the TARDIS must be nearby enough to be translating somehow, Chibs knocks it down to a quarter-arse by having them all be shot up with universal translators.

It’s lucky that the ppl on his own planet who hate Tim Shaw enough to send him away on dumb hunts keep sending him to the exact same city on the exact same tiny island on that planet. Have you been to this planet? It’s pretty big etc. If they really wanted to fuck with him, they’d make him try and get his hissy, spit-filled mouth around a new language every time.

Anyway! It becomes a big point a few minutes later that Epzo and Angstrom are completely different species. Different planets, different worlds, different technologies ---- but the differently-designed medical pods on both their ships both have the same policy of injecting universal translators into randos? If every interstellar exactly-like-human species has shared this technology, which they just in order for it to work on any species, then surely anyone who goes interstellar travelling would have it already, and not need to build it into the medical pods that they ALL have immediately behind the cockpits of their ships, at the expense of sleeping quarters or galleys or whatnot.

Our man actually picks up on one of these fuckups at one point: the Doctor offers Graham “her shades,” noting that she can’t remember who she borrowed them off, Audrey Hepburn or Pythagoras. Somewhere in the edit, either Chibs notices, or someone else manages to point out, that she has none of her own possessions, and is not wearing her own clothes with her own items in the pockets. A really clumsy ADR line is looped in over the back of Jodie’s head, adding “well I say ‘mine,’ they remind me of a pair…” I look forward to revised holo-DVDs from the roboticised brains of the Restoration Team in 2037, adding five-minute shots of the back of everybody’s heads, looping explanations for anything else that doesn’t link up.

(Also idgaf about this type of continuity, but it’s been consistent in nu-Who that humans from Earth eventually colonise space and build societies in the far future across the universe. Davies and Moffatt both used this to build messages of aspiration and progress, and support why the Doctor dedicates so much of her time to looking after humans and saving their home planet. By having the universe already full of exactly-human aliens, Chibnall undermines that totally.)

The Holomalik’s holo-tent manages to cast shadows, and people leaning close to his face cast shadows on him, and the foley artists include the sound of his hands slapping his thighs, and the real people walk on the flat floor of the non-existent tent, but if you wave your hand through a bit of the hologram, the whole thing makes a loud noise and flickers out of existence for a second.
He also gives them both a physical object, despite not being there and unable to hold or touch anything. The Doctor’s scan notes that he’s “projected in from a very long way away,” but projected by what? It can only be projected from within the atmosphere, or the light would be disrupted.
Even if we take it as the rules of these holograms, it makes no sense that the Doctor picked up loads of gossip from the time she was a hologram. Either people think you’re real – in which case you’d get exactly the same amount of gossip as actually being real – or they touched you and found out you were a remote spying device, in which case they would prooooooobably be a little less likely to confide in you than if they thought you were real. “Ooh, floating around as a fake person in order to secretly gain my confidence, is it? Well then, you’ll definitely want to know that Doris nicks people’s lunches from the work fridge, I’ve been having it off with my married boss, and Mister Saxon has the pee tape!”

I rewatched to make sure I’d gotten my details right before posting, and forgot that Holomalik also says he ALREADY TOLD THEM that bonuses are over! Making the entire opening, and general survival of our cast pointless! It would raise the stakes at this point to tell them the rules have been changed, that their survival is more on the line, that the homestretch is different. Instead he just tells us that despite being the only ones to survive, our protagonists are dipshits who can’t actually remember the rules and instructions of the race.
Doctor Who then apologises to Epzo that he’s not able to sell her, and the pal she’s just promised to keep alive, into slavery. “Sorry! Some of this is my fault.”

Having just failed an opportunity, Chibnall tries to raise the stakes by announcing it’s the final ever race, but there’s no reasoning behind it. What portentousness does “it’s the final race ever” add to this situation at all, beyond an empty attempt to add RTD-style Space Gravitas? And he then undercuts it with a nonsensical bit of comedy doubletalk predicated on the universal translators not being able to translate currency amounts. Which, okay, fair enough, but – does it not have trouble translating other measurements? Like distances and times and everything else that then apply to the quest they’re set?

Such as: the TARDIS appears every thousand “revolutions”. But how long does a solar year take when there are three suns? Even if it’s equivalent to an Earth year, that means that a civilization existed here for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, long enough for the TARDIS’ appearances to be noted and recorded and measured, not be a Brigadoon myth… was the planet unnamed for all that time? The civilization grew and persisted in that area for multiple millennia, keeping records all the time, and working out that they were a planet that revolved around their suns in a consistent timeframe… but they never came up with a name for their planet? Ours is a very dumb and bad name, but at least we invented one.

There’s no mechanism to project the holograms, to deliver the physical trackers (to the non-existent table that they nevertheless sit upon), or to teleport the winners away. The holograms must be getting projected from the sky somewhere, but Holomalik has no staff present and is not attending himself. But if he’s not on the planet, how has he set up a boat right at the point where he expects them to need to cross the water?

“Take your meds, don’t travel at night, and don’t drink the water. In fact, don’t even touch the water.”
It’s filled with flesh-eating microbes, but this never becomes an issue. They’re trekking through the desert, but not having any water also never becomes an issue. The Doctor also says that the atmosphere is toxic, but they breathe that just fine with no qualms whatsoever.

They must complete the trek within “one full solar rotation.” How are they supposed to be able to tell how fast the sun rotates, as opposed to how fast the planet rotates? And which of the three suns??!?!

The dialogue is generally completely empty, the sort of thing that you might put in as a placeholder when blocking the plot, and then come back to fill in with character beats or jokes or subtle foreshadowing or ironic counterpoints. Chibnall does give the occasional line with spark to Jodie, such as “Taking it as a chance to surprise myself,” or “It’s very all that!” suggesting he is aware of the need to make her stand out to the audience. But equally, it suggests he doesn’t see the need for anyone else to do so. Why have a rammed-full TARDIS team of four if three of them are just there to ask “What’s that, Doctor?!” Even more so if her answer every time is “I don’t know, let’s all figure it out at the same time on the next page of the script when someone tells us.”

“Are we eligible too?”
“No, you’re irrelevant.”
It’s like he’s written himself a note, but forgotten to do anything about it on a second draft.

“…the ghost monument is on the other side of the mist swamps.”
“mist what?”
He ignores her – do they ever cross a mist swamp?

“Four people who barely know each other, stranded on a planet called Desolation.”
But it was a whole point that it ISN’T called Desolation, or called anything.

The Doctor throws a giant tantrum about needing to know what the ghost monument looks like when it appears. But there’s nothing to suggest that it WILL appear, they only have to get to the site. And the Doctor and fam have been specifically excluded from the race, so it doesn’t matter whether they go along or not. She just throws the tantrum because Chibnall has made it secretly the TARDIS, and has to reveal that.

“So we’re sticking with Graham are we, and not Grandad?”
This is meant to provide conflict, but it’s played as if Graham isn’t being a massive cunt. You’re not his grandad anymore! If you’re staying in each others’ lives, it’s by choice, and you’d do well to respect him by expecting to address each other as adults. (This is not a plot nitpick in this instance, but I doubt the relationship is going to continue to be played on this level.)

Continuity easter eggs don’t make sense: she’s a “grandmaster pacifist” in Venusian Aikido, but Pertwee’s Venusian Aikido was wildly violent, an excuse for the actor to show off and also dominate the guest actors. What’s more, she says her neck-poke is “fundamentally harmless,” but literally stops Epzo from breathing. As his physiology is evidently identical to human, holding him another ten seconds might well have killed him, given the physical condition he appears to be in. “You’ve redecorated………… I really like it” is flipping the line just for the sake of it, not revealing anything in particular about the new Doctor, just tipping the wink of “look, I did the opposite of the usual line, eh? Eh?”

Chinballs tries to have a deep moment with Graham and Ryan talking about how they’re not talking about Grace being dead. But they spent an entire week or more preparing for her funeral, organizing it together, hearing each others’ speeches – then Ryan skipped the wake and went charity shopping, they both blorped into space, and have not been alone for a single second until this exact moment. And yet Graham boasts? scolds? that he’s developed the coping mechanism of asking himself “IF she was here, what would Grace say?” Bloody when has he been asking this? He’s barely shut up from yapping about how unfair it is that they’re stuck here, and not had any time for moments of quiet reflection. “You talk about this stuff way too much.” / “And you don’t talk about it enough.” THEY HAVE NEITHER TALKED ABOUT IT, NOR HAD A CHANCE TO TALK OR NOT TALK ABOUT IT.

Another heart-to-heart follows, with Angstrom almost revealing why people want to leave her world before shutting down. But despite knowing them only half an hour longer, she goes into all the detail she’d withheld before. Three minutes earlier Epzo had pointedly asked in front of everyone “how’s your family, then, Angstrom?”
And the revelation later comes that her wife died from the Stenza (played, I can’t help thinking, as though an alien of unknown gender having a wife is something we should be noting) – so she doesn’t count her wife as part of her family?

Having had two slow-down emotional-talking scenes, we then kick off across the deadly flesh-eating sea --- to no danger or drama whatsoever. Instead of raising the stakes, counterpointing the dumb hollow emotional drama with some physical action and peril, Chibnall has a THIRD character tell a dopey third-hand cardboard story of family trauma and aloneness… and then everyone lies down and goes to sleep. Epzo’s story involves breaking an arm and shattering an ankle; if he’s dropping from a height enough to shatter an ankle he would probably have been so high that his mother couldn’t catch him safely anyway.

Epzo’s cigar is permanently kept loose in his pocket, as shown when he takes it out to suck in in the holotent, when he shows it off while walking across the beach, and when Graham grabs it to hurl skyward. It’s triggered with a click of the fingers, a very generic snap sound – but can be set off from several metres away, with a whole variety of soundwaves flapping about in between. How is his pocket not catching on fire several times a day, whenever the cigar hears any noise, let alone a passerby clicking their fingers as they remember something? It would have only increased the preciousness, and been a chance to underline the alien oddity of it, to have him remove it from a sound-proofed space tube every time he wants to snort its already fifty-year-stale dry aroma.

Twice the Doctor says there’s nothing alive on the planet except them and the flesh-eating microbes – the second time “no organic life.” But they keep walking past various plants – shrubs, trees, grasses. Despite this:

“Why are there so few signs of life? What happened to everyone?”
You’ve already said that there’s nothing alive on the planet except for you and microbes (which, btw, establishes that her new sonic screwdriver can scan AN ENTIRE PLANET in seconds – let’s see if Chibnall ever has it unable to read something from behind a wooden door, or such, later on*) – why would there be signs of life?

*OH WAIT JUST SECONDS LATER she is unable to figure out the readings on the building right in front of them. Seconds. SECONDS.

Epzo is wily and cunning enough to have made it through a universe-crossing chase that killed 40 (iirc) other racers, but dumb enough not to notice a motion detector, even when he’s specifically casing the location with his weapon cocked, EVEN WHEN IT BUZZES LOUDLY FOR SEVERAL SECONDS AS HE SETS IT OFF.

“Well back in the tent, that bloke Illin, said not to travel by night.”
a) thanks for the recap, I assume BBC America put an ad break right before this
b) …..yeah but why shouldn’t you travel by night? Are there silent robot sentries on the planet that come out at night or something?

OH HOLY SHIT THERE ARE ROBOT SENTRIES THAT HAVE SUDDENLY APPEARED. IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. Without making a sound. We never find out why travelling at night is such a threat – the floating deathscarves don’t seem to be time-restricted. Although maybe they are, and the Desolation scientists also invented Mogwai. Can we have Joe Dante be the next American guest director?

“What we need to do is, totally unthreateningly, slowly back out of here.”
Everyone then walks forwards at a normal pace. (Is this on purpose? Is this the reason the robots also appear downstairs? Is it just the director not even bothering to pay attention to the words because they’re so dull?)
The Doctor’s line about not running straight is also ADRed – is it possible that by the time they were in edit, Chibs realized (or someone pointed out) that running in a straight line away from a crashing spaceship is super-dumb, so he tried to explain that away with the Doctor’s super-genius science brain being the only one able to figure out that running in a straight line doesn’t avoid anything coming directly after you, whether a massive metal building or a laser pulse zap ray?

The whole robot sequence just gets stupider and stupider and stupider. Turns out the robots are SNIPERS and yet are unable to land a single shot on a target from point blank, medium range OR long distance. Even collectively. (Finally, in their THIRD shoot-out, they get ONE shot, through the non-essential part of one person’s lung.) “Gasp! It’s a target range!” they say, after standing in the middle of a target range with targets literally popping up at them for several minutes. (While another example of writing for radio, this is probably very useful for kids and grannies who don’t read the visual cues immediately – but they could say “uh! Must be a target range” as soon as the targets pop up in their faces, not half a scene later.)

But what does the target range ADD, anyway? It doesn’t make it more likely that the robots will appear and shoot at them - in a goofy mistake! We were just in their gym by accident! – OR more threatening that the robots are crack shots due to all their practice, because we’ve already seen that they can’t hit the broad side of a holographic tent. They’re not even made to LOOK like robots – scarves over their faces could have been weird or spooky metal heads. And if they’re fucking SNIPER ROBOTS then why are they not designed as weapons, instead of being so human-shaped that their guns are MADE SEPARATELY and operated by HUMAN HANDS so simply that someone who has never been to this culture before, let alone learnt how to operate a gun, can grab one and fire perfectly instantaneously?

And the person who does it has a coordination disorder yet can play fast-response hand-eye coordination FPS games. Even if his level of dyspraxia does allow that, how would it translate to the real world? He can’t ride a bike but can carry a gun so heavy that it takes a robot to lift it, run fast and dodging, still carrying the gun, and aim fire multiple crackshots in motion, without a single miss, thus to a skill level greater than that of superhuman beings created only to be crack shots. And then run away again, still carrying the gun, now in one hand. And all the while, whether on the attack or in flight, screaming & shouting and drawing attention to himself.

As a counterpoint to the non-mechanical Tim Shaw making hydraulic robot noises when he moved his arms last week, the robots in this can move entirely silently, half a dozen of them appearing across an area completely unheard. Except if you shoot them down, then they start making hydraulic noises when they move their arms.

“Guns, never use ‘em. Out think them.”
“You can’t outthink bullets.”
She then demonstrates outthinking the guns by saying “you picked up the wrong thing from the floor,” instead picking up a BOMB and BLOWING UP THEIR OPPONENTS ('s brains). How is this an example to set to children. How is this out-thinking. THANKS OBAMA.

The hypocrisy gets doubled and then tripled down on – last week I said it was hypocritical to condemn knives when she’s forever getting her companions tied up, and Chibnall can’t go a week without having a new travelling companion saved from suffocation by someone carrying a knife. Having already condemned guns this week (and immediately undermined this), he doesn’t have Doctor Who condemn Angstrom for saving a life with a knife and say she should have out-thought the strangulation robots. And even though the deadly towels must, by inference, be robots due to there being no organic life on the planet (despite all the plants onscreen) – they think, they speak, they read minds AND they see into the past! These are totally sentient beings, an entire new species, even if it was created by scientists. And while it’s wrong to shoot robots with guns, it’s not wrong to blow up robots with guns, and it’s not wrong to MURDER SENTIENT BEINGS, alive in every way apart from being organic, by SETTING THEM ON FIRE.

At the end she endorses Epzo winning not by following the rules, not even by loopholing them creatively, but by threatening torture and murder to his target’s (holographic) face. This is the example being set to children. Don’t win on your merits! Always outthink your opponents, and by outthink I mean break the rules, and perform mass killings or one-on-one torture. The Doctor has been hypocritical about killing before, and Chibnall’s Doctor has murdered before, but this is a new Doctor, a chance to establish a role model, and he’s teaching these as lessons without any moral equivalence built into the text. Philip Hinchcliffe got fired as showrunner because ONE OLD WOMAN wrote in (a lot) and complained about a dream sequence where the Doctor got strangled. Chibnall’s being acclaimed for making the character endorse torture, as a solution to someone refusing to let you break established rules in order to get a huge amount of money. WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK. “That makes him smart.” – Chris Chibnall, probably.

Chibnall wasn’t concerned about Ryan’s running and marksmanning, but has him say “why is it always ladders?” before descending one. But he climbed up AND down the huge crane tower last week, he climbs down the tunnel this week, and suddenly needs a coaching from the Doctor to climb BACK up the short tunnel ladder at the other end?

While I like the sound of Akinola’s score more than most of Gold’s, there’s still more score than the story demands, and often running counter to the mood of the scene in a way not heard since Keff McCulloch. This very nearly becomes a plot point when Epzo is being strangled. The others suddenly hear from three rooms away and down a hall in a concrete bunker, and run to save him. But there’s nothing at all to hear, except for the score blaring ominous attack-y noises! Perhaps in a few weeks we’ll see that, like the pimps in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, the Doc is being followed around by a bloke with a whopping big synth, soundtracking her life and delivering her clues.

The scientists worked for years and years (if not millennia – long enough to develop new forms of life) building murderbots and death traps for the Stenza… but then suddenly decided to destroy it all when the Stenza came back to pick the traps and bots up? Where were the families being held? Who did the torture? If they were able to resist once they’d built a whole planet of deathtraps, why not resist and die earlier?
Also, would scientists have written their message in swirling cuneiforms on the floor, that one has to walk around in spirals to read? If they’re leaving a dire warning for future travelers (??!?!), they ought to have made it clearer. Furthermore, once the designers determined that the writing was going to be in big swirls on the floor, someone should have told Chibnall, so that he could change the bit where the Doctor says “there are two more words below that,” indicating she’s been reading something laid out top-to-bottom.

The idea of digging a ditch to hide from a gas explosion makes sense. Shame that drawing a shallow line in the sand and then lying on top of it would still actually burn your entire face and clothes off. Also that if you want to remind everyone of how flammable the gas is without saying so out loud, by going “remember that other thing I said about it,” it would be helpful if you actually had told them that it’s flammable. With any other writer I’d assumed an earlier line had been cut for time, but it really seems plausible that Chibnall tried to create a mystery by not giving the audience that info, and decided to not have the Doctor tell the travelers either. Until after she’s set it on fire. And nod-winkingly told them to dig ditches and jump into them. OH MY GOD WHY DOES NOTHING ACTUALLY MAKE CONNECTED-UP SENSE IN THIS WHEN IT SO EASILY COULD. IS HE DOING IT ON PURPOSE.

Doctor Who loses her absolute shit when the TARDIS isn’t there. “I don’t understand. It should be here!” But why should it? All you know is that it appears once every thousand years (maybe three thousand, if it takes three times as long to go around three suns!) when the planet is in its proper orbit. The planet is not in its proper orbit. Even if the finish line of the race was a time, not a place, you shaved half a day off your travel time by going through the tunnels. So you would be expecting to wait twelve hours before the TARDIS appears. But it’s just a place, and you know it’s a chance whether the TARDIS shows up at that place or not. You’ve been there for about 20 seconds. Using Earth figures, one minute of watching = a 1 in 525,600,000 chance of seeing it. But you don’t even know if that’s how long to wait, because THE WHOLE REASON YOU DON’T HAVE THE TARDIS ALREADY IS THAT THE PLANET IS NOT IN ITS PROPER ORBIT.

Honestly, Chibnall is so incredibly bad at thinking about how any single plot point he puts into his scripts connects to any other, or to the overall, that it’s a wonder he even uses the same character names from scene to scene.

“We can wait, can’t we?”
“No, we’ll be dead within one rotation.”
“Who sez so? We come this far, in’we?”
Look, make up your mind: can they survive a year on the planet by eating the plants, or is there no organic life on the planet?

The new TARDIS design is whatever, but having an entire Police Box grafted into it, that you walk into and then out of, so that you can see the back of it from inside, is dumb. It’s also weird that they’d fuck around with it so much, but have the sonic screwdriver make exactly the same sfx as the previous ones, despite being made out of murder-alien technology instead of by the TARDIS.

After watching this with a dedicated-but-more-casual-fan, who listens to DVD commentaries but doesn’t know who writes episodes, she was so disappointed that we watched The Eleventh Hour as a palate cleanser. Apart from tearing my hair out over how every line and scene in that is doing something artful and clever and steeped in a sense of wonder, I was reminded that Smith coughs some gold shortly after regeneration too, so I rescind my waiting to see if last week’s Jodie-cough is leading to anything.

I was heartened that at least the Rosa Parks episode had been written by a woman of melanin, until it came out midweek that Chibnall has a shared writing credit. Let's brace ourselves for tomorrow.

I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW WHOVANI (sic) OVERLORDS.

tho i’m fairly hand-wavey about this sort of thing normally, i thought the entirety of sic’s post landed. taken in the round it suggests a total indifference to anything that takes place or is said, or depicted having any meaning or consequence at all.

it reminded me v much of broadchurch where the investigators show themselves to be the most ineffectual police in history, with none of their investigations producing enlightenment or getting any closer to the killer. the only thing doing so is the endless progress of the episodes and events that force them to once again furrow their brows and make deductions of no weight or consequence at all.

things just happen on a timeline.

can we call these 'strewth bombs' y/n

The Doctor’s line about not running straight is also ADRed – is it possible that by the time they were in edit, Chibs realized (or someone pointed out) that running in a straight line away from a crashing spaceship is super-dumb, so he tried to explain that away with the Doctor’s super-genius science brain being the only one able to figure out that running in a straight line doesn’t avoid anything coming directly after you, whether a massive metal building or a laser pulse zap ray?

Aka Serpentine! Serpentine!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2_w-QCWpS0

The “I love a locked door” but “I’m not going to actually show you a door” thing was very wtf

ahhh, you know, you're not really wrong about most of it, but i can't help but be reminded of Jean-Marc Lofficier's review of the Deadly Assassin. What should I say, "You make a very convincing argument, I guess I didn't enjoy watching last week's episode"? All I can say is that the wild inconsistencies that I guess drive you up the wall don't bother me at all. I don't expect real-life human beings to be sensible or consistent. I'm not going to expect more out of characters on an entertainment program.

Chibnall's Doctor Who suits me where I'm at right now. For the last eight years the show has been a playground for clever white boys, and if Chibnall only fails that test by not being clever, fuck it, I'll take it. When it comes to Doctor Who, I set the bar real, real low.

I guess it's getting to the point where, like so many things, Doctor Who isn't really worth discussing anymore. That makes me sad. I used to like talking about Doctor Who. I ought to, really, just get myself off the Internet entirely, but it's difficult.

I get it. Moffat's stories were often full of handwavey nonsense and dropped threads, and it didn't bother me. I can't argue with you about the "clever white boys" comment without pulling a "some of my best friends are..." comment in return, so let's not do that.

Looking forward to tonight's with (half a) new writer, though. I'm more concerned about the accents that the subject matter. British actors + southern accents = mega cringe, usually.

i mean i have no particular objection to "clever white boys" other than every week seeing one or another of them coming up with all sorts of wonderful reasons everybody in their writing room is a white man or all the shows on their network are run by white men or everybody nominated for this award or that award is a white man. moffat certainly had lots of intricate explanations for doing that sort of thing.

chibnall has no convincing explanations for anything and i'm fine with that because he doesn't need them.

I don't think Chibnall stories tend to make less sense than RTD or Moffat ones, he just has yet to show he can get close to either of them for wit, conceptual creativity or genuine macabre thrills in the plots to compensate for any of that. I get the impression he has long recognised this himself based on his reported reluctance to take over, at least initially, and the evident focus on production panache (and general wrong-righting diversity-wise) so far.

I think that's OTM, the fun sort of drained out of a lot of the last Moffatt season for me and the Chibnall hasn't quite bought it back yet. It was probably a mistake to start it with the murder of a loved one when they could have gone with light-hearted Tardis tourism for a bit before bringing in the heavy stuff.

I don't think Chibnall stories tend to make less sense than RTD or Moffat ones, he just has yet to show he can get close to either of them for wit, conceptual creativity or genuine macabre thrills in the plots to compensate for any of that. I get the impression he has long recognised this himself based on his reported reluctance to take over, at least initially, and the evident focus on production panache (and general wrong-righting diversity-wise) so far.

― nashwan

i mean, i hate to be cynical, but if the only way to open up the doctor who universe was to put a hack in charge, i will applaud that hack as long and hard as i can. he's laying the groundwork for the kind of growth the show needs in a time when a lot of shows are conspicuously not doing the same.

spent half an hour with the kids on the Wikipedia page for the Montgomery bus boycott after the show so.. job done?

kinda dispiriting that the message of the plot seems to be that the history of freedom is an accident of happenstance rather than a forceful, planned struggle. they did speak to that a bit at the end when we see rosa p getting her congressional medal but the plot said otherwise

welp that was a solidly middle-tier episode of quantum leap

Loads of crap things tonight (those accents, that song, the feeble baddie, the dialogue) but on the whole I thought that was Chibnall's first decent episode: a couple (only a couple) of jokes that actualy worked, two actually affecting moments with the usually-wooden Bradley Walsh, and Tosin Cole is just fucking charming as shit, and the show drags whenever he's not onscreen.

Feels like the weak link might be... Jodie Whitaker? She's still a bit dull.

i liked the scene between yaz & ryan behind the extremely not-50s skip, a nice moment there. mandip gill is a delight imo

the feeble baddie

Dunno kinda feel hundreds of years of racism takes a bit of killing

space racist crim greaser was pants

speaking of accents??!

This reminded me of Who rip-off "Timeless" where our band of travellers keeps making sure significant moments in history happen properly despite the efforts of a saboteur.

welp that was a solidly middle-tier episode of quantum leap

― i’ll hufflepuff i’ll blow you away (bizarro gazzara)

i'd agree. definitely huge Very Special Episode vibes to this one. having said that, i did find it an unusually tense episode. partly this was because the setting was far more menacing than, frankly, i've ever seen on doctor who in the past. and partly because i watched the whole show with bated breath hoping they wouldn't fuck it up.

they didn't fuck it up, i don't think. did i enjoy watching it? not really. the actual plot of the episode was utterly contrived and implausible. i have to recognize, though, that i am not the target audience here. i don't need to be the target audience here. it's certainly possible to tell more dramatically compelling stories about racism, but doing so, i think, greatly increases the chances of fucking up.

i found the antagonist surprisingly plausible for a cliche stock figure. i don't find it implausible that there's still racism eight (or eighty, whatever it was) centuries in the future. given the way prison systems work today, i'm not terribly surprised that an ex-con would be tremendously racist. i think the episode struck a good balance between acknowledging that what rosa parks did was important and recognizing that she didn't, in fact, end racism forever (the yaz & ryan scene was indeed a good one).

and if the plot suggests that much history implicitly depends on happenstance, well, i can't say i disagree.

anyway, i kind of figured this episode would be the make-or-break point for me. i'm on board with chibnall.

This reminded me of Who rip-off "Timeless" where our band of travellers keeps making sure significant moments in history happen properly despite the efforts of a saboteur.

― Non, je ned raggette rien (onimo)

i loved watching "voyagers" when i was a kid.

I can't remember Voyagers. It possibly wasn't shown in the UK. Looks interesting.

it was very early-tartikoff. mostly remembered nowadays for starring jon-erik hexum, aka that guy who shot himself in the head accidentally.

i'll also say, i wondered how the show would incorporate sci-fi into montgomery 1955. i mean we're definitely running the risk of getting into "dr. doom crying at 9/11" territory here. a lot of times science fiction writers want to abstract racism, tell parables about how the blue skinned people hate the purple skinned people and how ridiculous it all is. this story took the most obvious and direct route and i have to say, in all fairness, i didn't think of it. oh, here is a white time traveller from the future who hates black people. well, can't say that doesn't make sense!

oh man I remember voyagers. and I remember jon-erik hexum. what a terrible thing that was.

ughhhh this episode was my kryptonite. next to bad fake wigs i hate bad fake accents

the ending was v good tho... got me teary

It was a clear break from the previous administrations, who presumably would have had the events "double deadlocked" or "a fixed point in time".

That's three episodes in a row where the baddie has been teleported away to an untold fate. In previous hands this would be an obvious indicator they would be back but I'm inclined to think it's just lazy writing. Are the characters not fully fleshed out or do they have 'unanswered questions'?

Also given the punning nature of next week's title, it's disappointing this week wasn't called "Parks and reparation".

lool

the ending was v good tho... got me teary

― Squeaky Fromage (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, 22 October 2018 03:38 (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is the first Doctor Who i've watched in an eternity and it was shit really but i did get something in my eyes round the ending

don't think i'll bother watching again, mind

The problem with having a TARDIS entourage is that it gives you very little space to flesh all the characters out properly while also making space for cool stuff. The original series would get round this by not bothering to flesh them out in the first place but I don't think you can get away with that in 2018.

Another point of having a large entourage is splitting them up, and the tension of bringing them back together - which hasn't really happened yet, although Ryan doing his own thing yesterday was nice.

I'm split on the ending last night - I thought they'd really aced it until they brought that fucking song in. I mean, they also kind of made it about the White Man's Pain (i.e. Grahame having to make Rosa stand) but I think they just got away with it?

The uplifting song at the end vs the dialogue snippets from next week about spiders was kinda lol mostly awful

There's a good documentary on one of the Davison era dvds where it looks into how three companions is too many and the tactics they used to get rid of one of them for the purpose of telling the story (Nyssa spends Four To Doomsday 'investigating' in the TARDIS, Africa spends Castrovalva trapped in The Master's 'web', Nyssa becomes Anne in Black Orchid etc).

Chibnall has dealt with it so far by splitting the team into two each time:

TWWFTE - an 'action' team of The Doctor, Yasmin and Ryan and an 'information' team of Graham and Grace

Ghost Monument - boys vs girls (including the guest stars)

Rosa - whites and non-whites

IIRC in the first few minutes of Kinda, Nyssa says "I fancy a wee lie-down, you go on ahead," and stays in the TARDIS having a kip for the next four weeks while the other three repeatedly get almost shot and et

Just noticed Adric autocorrecting to Africa.

Nyssa in Kinda is set up in the last episode of Four To Doomsday iirc when she finally re-appears in it.

I think she spends half of The Visitation in the TARDIS making something too.

That resolved better than I expected. I love as amused by the villain being a future alt-right douchebro even if they didn’t use him very well. I half expected him to be captain jack when he had a vortex manipulator.

Next week spiders in Park Hill.

This was decent enough that I have some renewed faith in this season.

I rewatched Ghost Monument. I expect them to return to the issue of dead planets again, since there's so much repeated setup there without any payoff. But if Texas Ranger Boy and Dead Lesbian Syndrome Woman and Hunger Games Toymaker never get mentioned again, it's the worst episode since... Victory of the Daleks? Daleks in Manhattan? Something around there. Just so little that makes any sense, and so many details that never add up to anything.

I said the special effects were good in the first episode. I suspect there were some scenes in the script for Ghost Monument that they decided would look like crap and just cut them out. Like how you don't see the team get picked up in space, or the first ship landing, or flesh eating microbes, or even that fucking door.

I felt this episode was decent enough in illuminating who Rosa Parks was and how awful Jim Crow era racism was, and the reactions of the two POC characters to all of it were thoughtfully done, and provided some good moments... But on the level of the overall plot, yet again, it was pretty weak.

What they seemed to be saying was that Parks' moment of protest was a random incident, a personal reaction to a bus driver who'd been mean to her. Except that the episode also shows, rightfully, that she was part of the civil rights movement, so her act of civil disobedience wasn't really so random. So in the light of that, the bad guy's plan makes little sense: even if Parks didn't ride the bus that night, or the bus wasn't full enough, most likely she would've refused to give her seat the next time the same situation happened.

So really, all Krasko would've managed to do was to postpone the Montgomery bus boycott a bit. And it's not like Parks was the only black person willing to go for such a protest (in fact, a black teenage girl had already done the same a few months before Parks), so even if Krasko somehow made sure Parks would never ride a full bus again, it still wouldn't have changed history. So it's nice for the writers to give Rosa Parks her due, and the actress playing her did a good job in portraying her dignity, but to reduce the birth of the entire African-American civil rights movement to a single (no matter how important) act without which it wouldn't have happened feels kinda disrespectful to the countless other who were involved in it.

All of this could've been explained away by simply stating that the villain was stupid, that what he thought he was doing could never be achieved, since others would've taken Rosa Parks' place in history. In fact, the Doctor saying something to that effect to Krasko, telling him he was doomed to fail, would've been a nice way to emphasize the collective nature of the struggle and the inevitable victory over segregation. But the Doctor seems to agree with Krasko that his plan would work, so she has to make it so that everything happens exactly as it did in the history books, including having the exact same douchebag bus driver there - because apparently Parks wouldn't have protested if another racist white driver had told her to give her seat? It's all just so stupid.

the episode struck a good balance between acknowledging that what rosa parks did was important and recognizing that she didn't, in fact, end racism forever (the yaz & ryan scene was indeed a good one).

Keep thinking about this and how fucking Ryanair only last week asked a black woman to move because an abusive racist fuck wouldn't sit next to her on a plane.

"the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice, except when one tiny thing is out of place and then it's like, the butterfly effect! jurassic park! chaos theory wtf!! WE'RE ALL JUST ELECTRONS, MAN"

It's true that there's no-one who can say whether that specific bus driver was important. Other than Rosa Parks, who had sworn never to take his bus again after the incident in 1944. And Emmett Till had been on her mind, but might in time fade.

Which is not proof - there is no proof. The episode does definitely comes down on the side of "small things can be crucial", whereas you're presumably a fan of "social change will happen independent of the small details" - I don't think it's weak plotting though to pick one over the other, though.

It is weak, self-contradicting plotting, because the episode (rightfully) shows her as a part of network of activists, and yet we're expected to think that if circumstances had stopped her from protesting that specific night, neither she or none of the others would've done it on any other night? Yes, Emmett Till was freshly on her mind, but I would imagine he was on the minds of every civil rights activist in the country, since his murder had sparked a nation-wide outrage. Would the memory of Till have faded from her and everyone else's mind after that one night? Would no one else been inspired to protest due to his lynching?

I've nothing wrong with Doctor Who with doing "one deed by one person can change history" type of plots, but when it's done with a real-life collective movement that cannot be reduced to one person or one deed, it does feel disrespectful and weak, despite the writers' obvious good intent.

The one deed in this case is hugely symbolic. Despite all and any other work done by Rosa Parks that one deed stands out across the globe.

I think the story both highlighting her activism and focusing on the symbolic deed is fair.

I think they rightfully say if she hadn't done what she did when she did, things might have panned out differently. Given the range of awfulness that "differently" entails, it's worth trying to make sure things go as they did.

One thing that the episode did really well was the sense of threat: Ryan felt in real, unpleasant danger in a way any number of aliens menacing previous companions failed to achieve.

It is weak, self-contradicting plotting, because the episode (rightfully) shows her as a part of network of activists, and yet we're expected to think that if circumstances had stopped her from protesting that specific night, neither she or none of the others would've done it on any other night?

Whatever its flaws, I thought this was probably the strongest episode aired in years. The scene between Yaz and Ryan behind the dumpster was something really great to see in Doctor Who, and they managed to be less frantic and more focused on letting the characters react to the story instead of be dragged around by it. Anyway, it's a pretty standard time travel trope that there are certain pivotal events in time that, if changed, change history. Yes, this detracts from the historical reality that Parks' action was very much a group effort, but I'll choose to see it as dusting off a stock Doctor Who plot line, warts and all, and doing a pretty decent job of wielding it with POC characters and history.

Also I dug the concept of a villain who can't kill people.

Whatever its flaws, I thought this was probably the strongest episode aired in years.

Oxygen was less than 18 months ago, and Thin Ice and World Enough And Time were also really, really solidly built

Last two really good stories (IMHO) were the Day of the Doctor from 2013 and a Christmas Carol from 2010. I didn't even bother to watch Capaldi's last season. Blink, Unicorn and the Wasp, Midnight, and Boom Town are other ones I thought were interesting/solid to give my definition of "solid" some context. Human Nature/Family of Blood, The Lodger, Gridlock, School Reunion, and most of Eccleston's season.

Yes, this detracts from the historical reality that Parks' action was very much a group effort

I get that this wasn't what you meant, but one of the things that I liked about it was that it wasn't "Tardis team give encouraging thumbs-up while historical figure does something difficult".

Though I did also like that it isn't "Operative Parks, you'll enter the bus at 17:51..." - it deftly* makes clear that while she is an activist with MLK, he is literally just the local preacher at this point. Something like this was likely to happen, but it was her choice that it was her and on this day.

One enormous trap that I'm glad that they avoided was having her being another historical figure saying "Yes, Doctor, I think we should do as you say"

(I'm choosing to believe that a terrible staging error means that her nod and smile at the end appears to be directed at the Doctor rather than Ryan)

*I enjoyed Ryan as Terrible Time Traveller, and I not-enjoyed-but-appreciated how this put him in mortal danger for some of this episode, but I think another polish would have smoothed the transition from "The first lady to drive a bus" to "I AM SHITTING MYSELF WITH EXCITEMENT THAT I'M SERVING COFFEE TO ROSA PARKS"

I think they rightfully say if she hadn't done what she did when she did, things might have panned out differently. Given the range of awfulness that "differently" entails, it's worth trying to make sure things go as they did.

One thing that the episode did really well was the sense of threat: Ryan felt in real, unpleasant danger in a way any number of aliens menacing previous companions failed to achieve.

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Monday, 22 October 2018 22:58 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. justified paranoia and threat in everyday surroundings. best thing about this episode. krasko fairly unnecessary, other than to have a focus for the villainy, as it could have shown the daily contingent uncertainty about events, with Doctor Who and team attempting to ensure it stays on the tight rope – how history is every day in the balance. an essay in historical materialism!

having slated chinballs for his linear, flat stories, I must admit a part of me quite likes the very old school approach to an adventure, feels quite retro. but episode 2 was awful.

The one half-decent idea that I ever had for a Doctor Who story was similar, but about Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

Also who has the key for the DJP-signal?

I so nearly agree with yr list f. hazel that you not rating Heaven Sent is even more startling!

It is weak, self-contradicting plotting, because the episode (rightfully) shows her as a part of network of activists, and yet we're expected to think that if circumstances had stopped her from protesting that specific night, neither she or none of the others would've done it on any other night?

I've nothing wrong with Doctor Who with doing "one deed by one person can change history" type of plots, but when it's done with a real-life collective movement that cannot be reduced to one person or one deed, it does feel disrespectful and weak, despite the writers' obvious good intent.

― Tuomas

you realize you're asking the impossible here, right? a large part of the appeal of history stories is that we all wonder what made things happen the way they did. the challenge is that we don't know - worse, we don't agree. there's a whole spectrum of beliefs, from "god plays dice with the universe" on one end to complete predestination on the other. doctor who has been unsatisfactorily ping-ponging around that spectrum since 1964. both of the extremes are narratively useless, so in practice writers wind up with some muddled and confused equivocation in the middle.

as far as i can tell the writers' intent in this episode was to say that what rosa parks did was good and important. considering there are plenty of people who are questioning right now whether what she did even mattered, i think it's both a good intent and was accomplished well.

Also I dug the concept of a villain who can't kill people.

― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel)

i think a lot of the best chibnall has to offer is asking questions and going with the most obvious answer. writers' room question: racists are well known for their love of using violence to accomplish their goals, so given that he could totally get away with it, why doesn't he just kill rosa parks and be done with it? because he literally can't. done and done. i could write pages on how this simple decision makes the story immensely more effective and powerful, but i don't know that they necessarily considered all that before making the decision.

otm. justified paranoia and threat in everyday surroundings. best thing about this episode. krasko fairly unnecessary, other than to have a focus for the villainy, as it could have shown the daily contingent uncertainty about events, with Doctor Who and team attempting to ensure it stays on the tight rope – how history is every day in the balance. an essay in historical materialism!

― Fizzle

i'd argue krasko isn't a focus for the villainy, though! to my mind his presence gives doctor who and team reason to be in an environment where they otherwise wouldn't belong.

In the moment I was most pleased with it because it avoids the exhaustion involved in a Who villain presenting an ever-escalating threat like wiping out England, then Earth, then destroying the universe (but I still love you, Logopolis) which gives license for a lot of easy drama and stagy speechifying by the Doctor that only pays off about 10% of the time. But I think you're right... intentional or not, making the bad guy's objective erasure instead of Dalek-style mass murder worked way better.

This was comfortably the best of the three so far but it would probably have worked as a straight historical with no aliens (other than the Doctor) turning up at all. The stakes felt high enough for there to be some real tension and it's the first one where I felt the cast and characters actually gel with one another.

Next week's looks suitably boilerplate, you can't really go wrong with spiders.

Unless you're the third Doctor.

otm. justified paranoia and threat in everyday surroundings. best thing about this episode. krasko fairly unnecessary, other than to have a focus for the villainy, as it could have shown the daily contingent uncertainty about events, with Doctor Who and team attempting to ensure it stays on the tight rope – how history is every day in the balance. an essay in historical materialism!

― Fizzle

i'd argue krasko isn't a focus for the villainy, though! to my mind his presence gives doctor who and team reason to be in an environment where they otherwise wouldn't belong.