WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

Don't think I can be bothered to watch the finale. Does Ryan learn to ride a bike?

no, and it's easy to avoid the finale -- nothing happens.

He gets to run around shooting a space gun the size of his torso at incompetent robots again, except this time it’s cool and heroic for some reason. I couldn’t hear the dialogue to tell why.

no

Just a disregard for the most basic storytelling rules. I would've liked the entire last episode to be about getting him to stay on his bike.

Break the rules, don’t break the rules, just *be interesting*

Some decent write ups here - https://medium.com/@ellardentI

Can't remember what the floating rags in ep 2 told the Doctor, but that never paid off, did it?

I don't think anything has paid off in this season.

That’s where not watching the finale lets you down: in episode 1, Ryan doesn’t want to call Graham “grandad”. In ep 9, he still doesn’t want to call him grandad. In ep 10, this detailed emotional arc is brought to a triumphant close by having an adult man say “grandad” to another adult.

I haven't watched any of them since the spider episode and I don't feel like I've missed out on anything at all.

After you get past the ones written by Chibnall, which includes the first five, there are some good ones. Demons of the Punjab is great. It Takes You Away is fun.

IMDB's lowest rated episodes, from https://www.ratingraph.com/serie/doctor_who-3689/

The Tsuranga Conundrum
Arachnids in the UK
Sleep No More
Fear Her
In the Forest of the Night
Love & Monsters
The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos
The Witchfinders
The Ghost Monument
The Lazarus Experiment

Well ok, but also review bombing is one of the ways these mra pricks think they can throw their weight around, so need to be careful to avoid giving them oxygen.

Yeah, that is, to be clear, claiming that The Tsuranga Conundrum is the worst Nu-Who episode ever, which it isn’t, but it does have a male alien giving birth.

this detailed emotional arc is brought to a triumphant close by having an adult man say “grandad” to another adult.

Pretty sure this happened in the closing seconds of ep 9.

How is The Idiot's Lantern not in that bottom 10?

Sleep No More was the first episode ever where I couldn't remember a single thing about it afterwards.

I think the Idiot's Lantern is a teensy bit unfairly maligned - at least the setting is fairly distinctive unlike a million space base/modern day earth monster of the week fillers.

Yeah, couldn't tell you a thing about Sleep No More. Was it something to do with a doll house?

Sleep No More is the found horror one, I think? There's only two decent Gatiss episodes iirc - the Dickens one, and the charming silly Robin Hood one everyone hates for some reason

Sleep no More was the one with the sandmen and Reese Shearsmith. I didn't think it was that bad, but I can't remember much.

I thought that one was alright, I think.

Tsuganaaihiahuh Whatever is another one I wasn't arsed to catch up with.

yeah, Sleep No More was alright, elevated by the found footage schtick

Pretty sure this happened in the closing seconds of ep 9.

he says "I'm not ready to call you Grandad yet" and Graham goes "yet!" at the end of ep 9 iirc. you can't say Chinballs doesn't build his character development carefully

Watch The Tsuranga Conundrum on mute with like some of the recent Aphex Twin shit playing over the top maybe.

Found this mostly OTM
https://them0vieblog.com/2018/12/13/doctor-who-series-eleven-or-thirty-seven-review-retrospective/

A lot of that is OTM. I enjoyed this season more than the person who wrote that in that I don’t think it was the weakest season of nuWho yet but I agree with the criticisms, particularly the “conservative storytelling with a veneer of progressivism” observation.

(I also agree with the alignment of 13 and 5, only 5 is my favorite Doctor so I don’t see that as a minus.)

so happy they're finally cranking out classic season box sets on blu-ray, by the way. supposedly gonna do 3-4 a year going forward.

Dan's link mostly otm. This season was apologetically progressive, at best, politically, and artistically po faced.

happy they're finally cranking out classic season box sets on blu-ray,

crazy that they’re not keeping them in print, though

yeah it's like a nintendo-level obliviousness to demand, I wonder what the reasoning behind it is?

my boys and i just watched "the runaway bride" and the moment the big climax with the raknos was done my 7-y-o cast his eyes down and said "that was sad, daddy" :/

awwww

Pretty sure this happened in the closing seconds of ep 9.

yeah, idnrc. no idea which ep had Ryan saying he wasn't ready to say it yet, now, but the episode order has obviously been shuffled a lot before transmission* so I'm curious about how much this development was originally meant to take place through the season

*(eg the back and forthing on whether to call the team "fam," them having been told about not interfering with history before the Doctor actually says it)

Dear oh fucking dear.

What we have here, is some spare budget.

no spare ideas tho obv

Brexit joke will age worse than the Pertwee Politics era or Bob Holmes' fuck you to HMRC.

I didn't pick up on that, I thought it was just an Austerity joke.

The 'no wifi, conversation' joke is so bad I am still not certain I didn't imagine it.

Nice to see Ryan's dad continuing to be an odd sub plot shoe-horned in to show down an episode when time should be of the essence.

I suspect Chibnall thinks Dalek+Basket Case+Terminator counts as an original idea.

This episode kept buffering on iPlayer every 5 minutes and those were the highlights. Yrs, Statdorf.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jan/01/doctor-who-resolution-review-old-enemy-return-brexit-satire

Mark Lawson says it was brilliant specifically because of the Brexit and 'conversation' jokes.

The conversation scene was indeed very bad, but generally I... liked this? My partner and I both enjoyed it more than any other Whitaker episode so far, not that that's saying much.

Still, Chris, when you run a show that's universally beloved because of its theme tune, perhaps play the fucking theme tune?

tbf I think there might be one or two elements that people have enjoyed in the last 55 years, past the first 30 seconds of the first episode. (but the two eps that didn't use it in the main run had a point in not doing so, whereas tonight was just like they thought they couldn't spare another second out of the 60-minutes running time.)

I got excited in the opening that there was going to be actual daylight and colour and sun and things to look at within the widescreen lenses! but then it went back to the same digitally-graded green or blue as every other bloody episode this run

the Dalek reveal would have been very fun to suspect and figure out, if they hadn't shat the bed in panic and blasted out so much of an announcement that I kept running across it in twoots and headlinks and such for the last two weeks

Would have been great to do a Steven Seagal "Executive Decision" moment, and immediately solve the vanished squid puzzle in favor of some other alien dilemma, or even forward motion on the Dalek plot. FFS, The Doctor scans the first person met, then not the second, who's just been in the same room with the vanished alien? It gets tiring with long-running sci-fi shows, when previous possession or body swap plots are forgotten, to allow the plot to continue. Makes me feel like Ebert's Idiot Rule instead relies on the audience being stupid.

Has there been any in-story explanation as to why nobody remembers nothing of the various Dalek, Cyberman, Zygon, etc, invasions/transplantations of Earth over recent years? Did Amy Pond's amnesia afflict everyone, even those in her future? Or am i looking for Chibnall to make more of an effort than he can be bothered with.

The Dalek reveal was news to me - though I think I'd seen someone speculate based on the idea that every season has to have them (though 6 didn't) - and tbh the "most dangerous warrior in the universe" in the teaser + the enormous teepee in the first scene had me joke about it immediately.

Dude, they literally recut the trailer to include a dalek voice saying 'exterminate' at the end and broadcast it on BBC1 in a prime slot on Christmas Eve (and showed it on BBC1 at least daily through the holidays).

There was also a Radio Times promotional seed on FB and Twitter with a new UPDATE headline daily going "BIGGEST HINTS YET THE DALEKS RETURN".

Er, okay? I didn't see any of those.

Series 6 did have a dalek in a flashback during the finale iirc.

Anyway, the point being made is that the BBC used the primary tools at their disposal - except maybe Chibbers' appearing on The One Show - to pointlessly spoil an episode that had been kept successfully secret for 6 months a week before broadcast (seriously, this series has seen less leaks than any other NuWho to date) to an audience that were going to watch it anyway.