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

At this stage I think casting decisions are if anything less important than broadening the writing team beyond just Whithouse, Mathieson, Harness and Gatizzzzzzzzz. The whole show feels like new ideas are urgently needed.

Could solve everything by making either Peal Mackie or Michelle Gomez into the next doctor innit?

gomez is an astonishingly good comic actor but i can't see her pulling off the serious gravitas moments. mackie totally could but she needs to move on to something better god damn it

otm, Gomez great but very much tied into pantomime evil character within this show, like it would take a lot of storytelling to get her into standard doctor mode

@Matt in DC yeah I've seen it claimed somewhere that everything that happened in this episode has happened before somewhere

I think mackie would be a great doctor.

Oh yay another fake out regeneration.

I thought this was a mess. I think I posted something a month or so ago that maybe Murray Gold was getting better. In light of the score in the second half of this episode I take that back violently.

Has is ever been properly explained who/what Nardole is?

missy lampshaded him as "the comic relief", and tbh i think that's all we'll ever need to know

I liked nardole, he thought he wound up being much better than I originally feared.

Nardole has stated that he doesn't know his true origins, as he was "found." (TV: The Doctor Falls) On one occasion, he claimed to have Scottish heritage, supposedly descending from the clan "MacNardole". (PROSE: Plague City)

Nardole had an ex called Velma, who worked as an actress. She left him for an AI at a call centre. (TV: Oxygen) He also once had an imaginary friend, until he left him for someone else. (TV: The Lie of the Land)

Nardole once swapped his face while "on the run". (TV: Oxygen) He was blue at one point, (TV: World Enough and Time) and had friends who were "bluish". (TV: Oxygen) At some point in time, Nardole also replaced his left hand with one he won in a game of some sort. (TV: The Lie of the Land)

Nardole studied the Tarovian martial arts for "a while" and reached the rank of Brown Tabard. He also learned the Tarovian neck pinch. However, he could only perform it with his original right hand and not with his replaced left hand. (TV: The Lie of the Land)

Prior to meeting the Doctor, Nardole had worked as a con artist. (TV: The Doctor Falls)

that's a lot of random backstory!

Nardole's ending is "go up a few floors and then look after these kids/country folk", his wrap-up dialogue is something like "the doctor has killed most of the cybermen so it'll take a while for the rest to figure out what to do next, we'll use that time to come up with a plan". But it's already been established that 10 years at the cyber end of the ship can pass in a couple of minutes at the opposite end, so...maybe five years of cyber time in a couple of minutes at Nardole's level? How much time are we meant to think they've bought by moving up a handful of floors? Can't be more than a couple of days at the most before those kids are all getting massacred (not upgraded, because we also know they cybermen have now classified them as a threat). And that's meant to be a satisfying ending?

I mean this is actually one of the smaller plot irritations in this episode but it just feels (as much else did) half thought out.

Had the opposite response - I thought they kind of nailed that as a pleasingly ambiguous ending. As a kid I would've remembered it's not-quite-happiness.

Moffat has talked a lot about plot loose ends not being loose ends but "stuff for kids to imagine" after the show is over. I like that. Obviously sometimes it's a convenient excuse to lampshade crap plotting. But I think it worked here. Also I'm sure we'll get five mins of Nardole, Bill & Clara followup in the Christmas ep.

I'll have to check, but I thought they explicitly raised "we can't run away because the cybermen will get more advanced the closer we get to the top"? Which is why the ending annoyed me.

In 'Nightmare In Silver' the Cybermen seemed to develop Sonic the Hedgehog boot speed but not a lot else. I guess that could get them up the ship a bit quicker. Hopefully they recognised using human parts was utterly stupid and they will never be seen ever again.

A nice thing to see in the new series would be some simpler, sturdier plots

Where things are resolved by someone figuring out a (no doubt mysterious and crazy) solution to a (no doubt terrifying and impossible) problem rather than handwaving it with the power of lurrrve or whatever

also turn down the goddamn music- half the time the dialogue is inaudible

Yeah I honestly believe no music at all would be more effective than that bilge.

it was distracting in the extreme

It's another Moffat story that has problems on a literal level but works on a metaphorical level.

The battle has problems taken literally -- the Doctor has a very poor plan, why not stay on the bottom level and reprogram the Cybermen there? But as a battle of niceness vs. almost inevitable forces of history, it works.

Likewise the idea of Nardole tricking Cybermen with some sort of VR explosions is a leap of logic, but if you think of it as a TV show writing its own rules it works.

Yeah I was wondering how he could manage to do that more than a couple of times. Thought what ever supply line he was tapping into and causing explosions in wouldn't be able to work once it exploded, so how it could reexplode was beyond me. Was it self healing or something?

I didn't even bother trying to parse that.

Also did it explain how the Doctor managed to take all that punishment (double death rayed by cyberman then exploded) without regenerating? Sheer force of will?

The happy ending doesn't make up for how angry I am about the sheer amount of hell this story put Bill through.

that was shit wasn't it? she deserved better. great acting from her though.

Also she should have been way way more pissed off at the Doctor.

I could almost accept the shit treatment of Bill as a token of how nasty the Master is, but even so, leaves a bitter taste

Isn't it the point that we're not supposed to like seeing what happens to her? If Mackie hadn't built up the goodwill by creating such an interesting character, the story wouldn't work. Also - she's the audience proxy, and it's most a dramatic violation to change the status of the audience proxy - which is why it's so horrifying and uncomfortable.

Knowing why it's happening from a plot mechanics perspective does not mean I have to accept it as necessary or decide that that was the story I wanted to see.

Here’s a thing about Moffatt’s returning to tropes, and beats, and elements of arcs: this episode lampshades a reading of this, with the wondrous continuity-meshing of “Cybermen keep happening everywhere!” (btw – Changes and especially The World Shapers were by far my favourite Who comics as a kid, and it was thrilling to come back to them as a teen in the ‘90s, when Morrison was now my favourite comic book not-cartoonist writer, and realise who’d written ‘em). The whole history of Dr Who is in returning to familiar concepts and teasing out new approaches, and of taking bigger genres and stories and finding a way to Doctor Who them. Two features of Moffatt’s writing – not only for Who, though he’s been at it since his first short story in 1997 – are to use time itself as an element, and to analyse people’s repeated behaviour being variously self-destructive or noble, depending on circumstances, and especially looking at them finding ways to learn and grow beyond said actions. That’s the arc of many Press Gang characters, but especially Linda Day and Spike; it’s the damage at the heart of the autobiographical lead in Joking Apart; and it’s the entire engine of all the characters in Coupling.

His first season as showrunner seemed to be interested in, if not largely built on, taking aspects of the RTD version of Who, and refining or interpreting them (at the time, I took this as being a wilful corrective, bcz I mostly hated the RTD approach as a viewer, and was more delighted by Series 5 than any other whole season I had a personal concept of. Ha ha). As his years have gone by, it seems he more uses the mythic scope of Who (like, the Norse myths repeat a lot of tropes an plots and character beats and resurrections, too), as well as his own inherent tendencies, to rework and refine and attempt to improve things he’s done already. Danny Pink’s resisting his Cyberising felt a little un-set-up and fell emotionally flat? Find a better way to try that. Clara running off for space lesbian adventures with a mayfly’s lifespan was kludged together by the Ashildir actress’s unavailability for shooting? Find a more elegant way to structure that sort of emotional resolution, but on the exact same beat.

As someone who loves nerdy old references but values Dr Who best for being a story format that can go anywhere, & keep doing unexpected things, I’d prefer to have had a Moffatt who always came up with great big new ideas – but you can’t always imagine a new Pandorica / Big Bang, and it’s fascinating for the man who came up with timey-wimey to play variations and repetitions on previous movements, seeing him reaching for improvements. Time doesn’t become a loop, but it does come around again.

Great post sic, you're absolutely right about moffat's "let's go back and fix that" tendency. The key problem is that when he does try having another shot at something, he might fix what was wrong first time, but it inevitably goes wrong in some new way instead. here's the thing - THE DOCTOR KNOWS THIS AND ALWAYS HAS, it's the reason he never goes back for a retry. Arguably one of the key messages of the whole history of Doctor Who has been "don't dwell on your failures, learn from them and move on". But in all his years of fandom Moffat's somehow failed to learn from that.

Great post± Although now I have the fear Moffat will try a redo on "The Final Solution" (by miles the worst thing he's ever done - I blame Gatiss).

just had a thought: wouldn't it be daring of them to sign up david bradley as the next doctor?

Daring yeah, totally going against the idea of a sexy doctor too. Though maybe that might be the point. He could play things differently than being the first doctor of course. Another case of why that face?
I'd really like to see Andy Serkis as the doctor probably since seeing him as Albert Einstein a few years ago. Incidentally opposite David tennant I think.

Saw something on Facebook about the current thought being it was going to be that ginger guy who everybody here hated when it was brought up the last time.
Wonder who else is in the running?

the leading rumor is phoebe waller bridge (fleabag), to the point where she is being extremely cagey about it and saying she's not allowed to say anything one way or the other.

she would be excellent, btw.

there were only about 3000 hints in the last episode that the next doctor would be a woman.

Can we keep rumours etc out of the thread, or something separate? Thanks!

A friend of mine asked on Twitter whether Michelle Gomez had ever said anything more than she was stopping playing Missy... (not someone in the know btw, merely idle speculation on their part as either interesting/unimaginative)

(by which I mean I don't think it's a credible rumour but might be fun to discuss)

there were only about 3000 hints in the last episode that the next doctor would be a woman.

and a few in eps 10/11 iirc. they're preparing us for a female doctor sooner or later.

(by which I mean I think it's allowable here post-Spoiler Wars but what do I know) xpost to me

Einstein & Eddington was good, more people should see it.

Anyway, something that has struck me:

The Doctor sees Clara in his Father Dougal past companion swirlaround. He had all his memories of her permanently wiped at the end of the previous series (hence why she could land in her Flying American Diner Funbus and him not recognise her) so how does that happen?

I'm also less sympathetic than sic is to Moffatt working out his foibles in multiple rewrites. It's fairly well established that this was a season too far for him, that he was supposed to go last time but Chibnall wasn't ready because of Broadchurch and so Moffatt agreed to stay but only if he could schedule round Sherlock S4 hence nothing in 2016. With that in mind, using the same plot to end S9 and S10 and reworking so many other plot elements smacks more of "that'll do" than "I can make this better". S10 was ultimately just a paycheck, and maybe a chance to screw up Chibnall - so who'll bet against the words "...and a Merry Christmas to all you viewers at home!" appearing in the Christmas ep?

If the next Doc is a woman there's nothing to be gained by not announcing that immediately. The longer the delay the more likely the disappointment there I fear.

He had all his memories of her permanently wiped at the end of the previous series (hence why she could land in her Flying American Diner Funbus and him not recognise her) so how does that happen?

Having just rewatched Hell Bent the epilogue involves the Doctor realising, after her departure, what Clara looks like by virtue of her face having been painted onto his recovered TARDIS by Rigsy. So he does remember and it doesn't seem to really matter after all.

Fucking hell, I missed that particularly impressive piece of "I couldn't care about the viewers" then.

With the exception of Donna, where it had some genuine emotional heft to it, has there been a single incident of memory-wiping not being a bullshit, lazy plot move?

If the next Doc is a woman there's nothing to be gained by not announcing that immediately. The longer the delay the more likely the disappointment there I fear.

if they can keep it a secret (not likely given all the leaks this season), revealing a woman doctor in the show would at least give them the jump on the usual MRAs before they enclose the planet in their fucking tears

The Doctor sees Clara in his Father Dougal past companion swirlaround. He had all his memories of her permanently wiped at the end of the previous series (hence why she could land in her Flying American Diner Funbus and him not recognise her) so how does that happen?

Clara has mutated into a virus that is eating the Doctor's memories bit by bit and will need to be destroyed by his previous incarnation as part of the Christmas special.

Dr Fleabag seems like it would be awesome, but she's in the Young Han Solo movie and Fleabag S2 starts filming in the fall.

Olivia Colman would be hilarious.