WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

A shame the other lead actress was kinda wooden too.

Huh, I really don't agree - I thought she was good as Ruth, which is a difficult character to play, but amazing as the Doctor.

I did like the exposition as misdirection - I assumed at the time that the recap of the Master-Gallifrey earlier was to set up that Lee/Ruth was the Master, rather than to remind us of Gallifrey.

I can't remember from the Family of Blood / Utopia if the restored timelord has any of their pre-restoration memories, but I did like that it's the one episode where the Doctor doesn't identify herself as such.

Yeah i thought Ruth was pretty good!

Yeah she was fine - maybe her accent/delivery is an issue for some...like the scorpion queen in last week's had a funny Lon-dUN accent or way of accentuating I couldn't decide whether or not it was good to be rolling with

Chibnall's ~Mysterious Warnings~ are really diminishing returns.

The murder ribbons on Planet Danger Sign hiss that The Timeless Child, an outcast abandoned and unknown, has terrifying resonance from the Doctor's hidden or forgotten past.

Master Dhawan screeches that "everything you think you know... IS A LIE!!!"

Captain Jack turns up to dance about a console and snog people, then asks them to, when they get a moment, pass on the message that The Doctor oughtn't to trust a Cyberman if she happens across one.

OCD? pre-Hartnell incarnations were established in 1975 tbf

Yes, but contradicted by everything before and after.

Not contradicted by anything major before, only by one sentence in one episode that got retconned already in 2013

I thought the Ruth actor was going for an ambiguous performance -- the reveal line was intentionally delivered differently than you'd expect. She didn't add much during the standoff scene but I think that was the fault of the story structure.

i think moffat's excursions into fanwank were pretty good mostly, and felt properly mythic

this feels a bit pip & jane baker, i find it hard to care about the details of this alternate doctor because she doesn't seem an inherently interesting character beyond her status as continuity riddle

this feels a bit pip & jane baker

Prime Chinballs trolling there

The most surprising thing about this episode to me, frankly, was Barrowman being asked back (and welcomed by fandom) after the LouisCK-type revelations last year.

Huh, I really don't agree - I thought she was good as Ruth, which is a difficult character to play, but amazing as the Doctor.

I agree. I know that's not the case, but for a second I imagined they'd already picked the next actor playing the Doctor, and this was an early-bird introduction to her, kinda like how Clara was first introduced while Amy and Rory were still around. Based on her performance here, I'd love Jo Martin to be the next Doctor.

I can't remember from the Family of Blood / Utopia if the restored timelord has any of their pre-restoration memories, but I did like that it's the one episode where the Doctor doesn't identify herself as such.

They do keep their memories from their time as a human: the Doctor is clearly still in love with Joan Redfern after his memory is restored, and he even visits her grand-daughter at the end of "The End of Time".

Captain Jack turns up to dance about a console and snog people, then asks them to, when they get a moment, pass on the message that The Doctor oughtn't to trust a Cyberman if she happens across one.

Well TBH, this is still much better than the warning he gave as the Face of Boe, which the Doctor didn't understand, and when he finally did, it was already too late. I really don't understand why, instead of "You are not alone!" he couldn't have said "The Master lives, disguised as Yana!", or something like that. Anyway, presumably the reason why Jack gave the warning is because the Cyberman he was talking about will appear otherwise trustworthy? The Doctor has had Cybermen companions before.

The Doctor has had Cybermen companions before.

Much as I'd like Kroton to be canon, he isn't (yet).

bring back Handles

Yeah, there's Handles, Bill, Danny Pink, the Brigadier... It's not like the Doctor automatically distrusts every Cyberman she meets, if she thinks they've overcome their programming in one way or another.

re Barrowman I remember reading this, which is good, or at least articulates some of the unresolved questions I have about him: https://everything2.com/user/Glowing+Fish/writeups/%2523metoo+and+the+John+Barrowman+problem

automatically distrusts every Cyberman she meets

sure but members of nearly every returning species over the whole 56 years end up being pally with the Doctor at some point. as an urgent warning it's like saying "eh oop, watch out for them Daleks zapping people like skellingtons" or "mind yrself around the Master, he can be a bit conniving that one."




{aldo annotation for Tuomas: Kroton was a "Cyberman with a soul" from some early 80s Steve Moore / Steve Dillon stories who later spent a few years as one of the Eighth Doctor's two companions in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, before the Eccleston TV series}

examining my indifference here i feel like alternate/lost doctors is a concept with steeply diminishing returns - just get on with having good adventures! that intention was pretty much the only good thing about last year's series.

(having said that i've always been kind of into the idea of one-off regenerations for christmas specials and the like - casting a big name actor for a one-hour special who you could never get to commit to a whole series)

(also this alternate doctor seems pretty cool and i would be interested to see more of his adventures)

https://imgur.com/bmDnt7m

https://i.imgur.com/bmDnt7m.png

with her mind wiped before and after her mission

this joke post aside: as expressed upthread, I found it fucking monstrous that two women were forced to have their brains wiped lest their fragile hormonal conditions slightly bend the future by allowing them agency, and was v unsurprised when the Chibnall Doctor allowed multiple men with the power, wit and ability to wildly divert the future to carry on unimpeded w/ all their exposure to skiffy developments, the following week. but it does seem likely that Chibbers was deliberately seeding the notion of Time Lords wiping women people's brains for their own good, ahead of his amnesia!Doctor coming down the pike.

Handles explicitly has all the Cyber parts removed, so is just a big standard robot head in a cyber casing.

The others are not cyberman' companions, they're companions who get converted but are able (sufficiently early in conversion - in Bill's case because it's primitive and incomplete) to resist bits of the cyber process and help The Doctor. This has been a NuWho trope since the outset - the Bride Cyberwoman in Age Of Steel, Yvonne Torchwood and of course oilcryingcyber.jpg - and fairly consistently applied so it's not any special feature of ex-companions.

I didn't say it was limited to companions, my point was merely that Jack's warning about not trusting a specific Cyberman might not be as pointless as it sounds, because the Doctor has trusted other Cyberpeople in the past.

Not ones they didn't already know (in your examples).

Sure. But until we find out who the warning refers to and how the Doctor reacts to said Cyberman, it's pretty pointless to say the warning was silly.

I didn't. Did anyone else?

What is 6c / 6b(b)?

I'm pretty sure it's a wireless WAN protocol

or a bra size

Man, you know some thin women!

I think we're using 6c and 6b(b) interchangeably to refer to something that happens after 6b but before 7, and is clearly a new addition to 6b.

https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Season_6B

Yikes! That’s a sort of Geoff-Johns-level unnecessary continuity fix, if so

Incidentally, I wondered what the point of getting Barrowman back was and not putting him in a scene with Jodie
Whitaker?

Also, it’s not really been mentioned (I think?) but this is another episode where random members of the public with token backstories get murdered, and the doctor seems completely ok with that

It was mentioned... by you!

too much murdering;

I agree!

counterpoint: Earthshock rules

Wild that the extremely detailed Season 6B explanation there never mentions that the whole thing came from Robert Holmes (creator of Gallifrey, the Celestial Intervention Agency, the Time Lord internal infrastructure, the notion of Time Lord interference in worldly matters, and the Time Lord use of the Doctor as a plausibly deniable interference mission agent [also, while we're here, of onscreen pre-Hartnell Doctors]) just personally having an idea that they'd been secretly sending him on missions pre-Pertwee, and writing The Two Doctors according to this idiosyncratic headcanon

Im just catching up and wow are there some bad American accents in the Tesla episode

Also looking forward to Anthony Edwards, Eriq La Salle, Sherry Stringfeld, Laura Innes, Scott Grimes, and Gloria Reuben appearing in future episodes

Introducing Juliana Marguiles as The Rani

LOOOL

Only a few hours until all the goodwill generated by the last episode gets dissipated by some new ham-fisted nonsense!

I caught up to last episode which was AWESOME

Only a few hours until all the goodwill generated by the last episode gets dissipated by some new ham-fisted nonsense!

well, this turned out to be very OTM.

I dozed off a bit. Lots more on-screen death, one attempted suicide - I was really pleased by the ending though. And uh, Yasmin? What.... are you doing? My son said 'she's trying to be the Doctor'.

But uh - guys? What about last week's cliffhanger?? wtf happened? It occurred to me that they might have cynically brought this week's episode up to capitalise on coronavirus paranoia??

Is Doctor narration in an episode (there was some at the start and the end) a first?

There were a couple with Capaldi addressing the viewer through the fourth wall to establish a premise or theme, and the odd episode with a portentous v/o intro by other characters iirc?, but this is probably the first with a straight VO top & tail by the Doctor

possibly McTighe was as confused as everyone else by his last episode airing with a Workers Dying In Amazon Fulfillment Centres (And The Survivors Having Their Pay Halved) Is Good Actually twist ending, and so wrote a very simple childish moral at the beginning & end of this one so that Chibnall would see it at the table read, and it made it all the way through by mistake

istr someone saying (perhaps wrt the bladerunner vo) that the presence of voiceovers tends to be an indication that the narrative hasn't been very well constructed or isn't gettable from the screenplay.

could have used a little less gettability in this one tbh

ah right. to reinforce a point upthread, dr who is canonically about the chill up the spine and dread that sends you running behind the sofa. by the pricking of my thumbs etc. and chinballs seems uniquely bad at generating that.

The Captain Planet message of the week was offputting but i thought this episode was OK. It wanted to be a big, planet-wide episode and it pulled that off. And Yaz actually did something! (and i didn't recognize yaz when she wasn't handing the doctor a wrench!)

My youngest was terrified, Fizzles! less by the virus and more by the near constant creeping round shadowy corridors with flashlights, etc