WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

Didn’t RTD basically rewrite a fair chunk of almost every ep in his era without feeling he then had to put his name on it(*)? Maybe Moffat too?

(*) Half remembering this from RTDs own book which tbf might not be a reliable source.

Yep, some RTD-era shooting scripts were close to page-one rewrites (Moffat was the only person he didn’t rewrite at all), and both he and Moffat would commonly do multiple full drafts of freelancers’ episodes as part of the back-and-forth of developing them.

(RTD eventually took co-credit on the two freelance episodes during his & Tennant’s final year of specials, because that made it easier to sell not-a-regular-series to foreign broadcasters. Moffat took co-credit on a few in the first Capaldi season, apparently after one particular writer whom he had effectively apprenticed went to Hollywood & got some deals off the back of scripts that Moffat had mostly written himself, uncredited.)

[The next year he took a co- with Harness on a great ep that they’d back & forthed on a lot & ended up with loads of Moffat monologue in it. The final year he took a co- with Harness on a disastrous ep that neither of them had been able to fix, possibly so that Harness wouldn’t have to take the blame.]

Which writer went to Hollywood?

I feel like I gave enough identifying info for something that is unsubstantiable hearsay! (Nothing ended up produced from these Hollywood excursions.)

One of the most frustrating things about the Chibnall Doctor's repeated bleatings of "no guns! never guns!," but repeated and repeated endorsements of bombs and hand grenades and death rays and expanding fireballs and shoes that fire deadly laser beams in all directions with no control and time displacement gun-shaped hand devices, and *checks notes* enormous self-loading laser rifles, is that there's not even any attempt to sketch a moral position behind the opposition. It's just an empty phrase that Chibnall has seen other hero protaogonists say in TV shows, and is sticking into this one.

Proceeding from this, there's no consistent belief in the value of life being espoused, which has otherwise been a core principle in the history of Doctor Who the TV series, Doctor Who the character, and the span of comics, novels and audio plays that massively outnumber the telly episodes.

This week first manages to forget completely that any plants or animals live on Earth and might be worth not wiping out, and then weirdly makes a big deal out of saving one cop's life* while being completely blank about every other individual. The bloke on the porch in Madagascar gets left to be torn apart by birds without a second thought. The surviving vlogger is concerned about her life and business partner going missing, but after finding her body and SEEING IT EXPLODE IN FRONT OF HER, exhibits no trauma, and receives no consolation from the Doctor or any of the Fam (I guess Ryan says "fings'll work out, yeah?" and pats her shoulder or something once, at the end?). Science lady Suki explodes into fragments approx 14" from the Doctor's face, but since they didn't bother to CGI any fragments into the same shot as the Doctor, she's not perturbed by this. Honestly it's a wonder they bother to try and find a cure for the alium pandemic at all.


* in a split-second last minute way that not only invalidates every other noble death in Who, but doesn't line up with the Doctor being unable to pop back to Hong Kong to pick up Yaz with an hour's leeway earlier?

In fairness, the 6th Doctor did murder people and the 7th Doctor manipulated a lot of people into offing themselves

we've all done that

To continue being fair, the 7th didn’t run around repeatedly saying “never set up a situation where a crazed eugenicist dictator is handed the means of mass murder after you have sneakily rewired it such that it will kill his own mutant people if he tries to use it on other folks! Never ever!,” and he did tell the crazed eugenicist etc that not committing mass murder was a better idea

Plus he made a thoughtful sad face after the dude blew up his own planet

If Chibnall put the same loving passion and thought into Doctor Who that he puts into exploding, shooting, murdering and mutilating random bystanders, he might have a pretty good show.

Some behind-the-scenes saltiness: https://www.instagram.com/p/B8GkTaBDCC0/

The concept is an infection or virus that comes from plastic or inhabits plastic or something or other about plastic. Anyway job was to come up with concept that implied and conveyed the idea of a plastic infection and this is what I did.


So sixteen years ago the first episode of Doctor Who I worked on was the Autons - an alien intelligence that inhabits plastic and brings it to life to kill people. This is my last episode and its one about a space virus that infects people through plastic and kills them……………. Anyway, moving on.

Contrary to what the credits say the creature design was solely the responsibility of @Millennium_fx_ltd on this episode.

Apparently those credits have been changed on iPlayer now.

Plastic ep does not stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny, so par for the Chinballs era.

The thing that chafed me the most is that sacrificing your life heroically is absolutely "dodging life." (The runner-up was the guy who stood outside watching a menacing flock of birds so that he could warn the others that they are in fact dangerous. I mean, mission accomplished, but there were better ways of doing this, guy!)

The thing that chafed me the most is that sacrificing your life heroically is absolutely "dodging life."

Absolutely. The episode seems pretty invested in that guy's arc but really trying to arrest a kid for shoplifting and going on a suicide mission seems like consistent have-to-prove-myself behaviour to me.

Meanwhile the vlogger girl has no arc whatsoever, which gets comically highlighted when she decides to be the third wheel for the other dude's honeymoon trip because they couldn't think of anything else for her to do.

Also a Brazilian woman would be acutely aware that the rest of South America speaks Spanish and so would say "gracias" and not "obrigado". Actress actually Portuguese judging by her accent (checked imdb - yup), but hey, lusofonia para sempre, parabéns para ela.

Still a somewhat above-average episode for the season tbh.

But uh - guys? What about last week's cliffhanger??

It seemed to follow fine from that for me - assumed the three emergencies referenced in the previous episode were this. But schedule says next episode ALSO has three emergencies so maybe you're right.

The vlogger's accent was variable enough to be actually painful, fortunately she seemed to only be there so that Yaz had someone to info-dump to.

Last night's seemed like a mess with a very promising setup but another rushed resolution and some good ideas desperately shoehorned in and kinda wasted. Would the Toymaker really approve?

i agree. another one that resolves with the doctor and the villain saying what they are doing like it's an audioplay.

everyone's lost interest, then?

It's looking like the worst season of nu who. Two passable episodes and a bunch of shit.

i wonder how they're going to waste the presence of mary shelley next episode

It's looking like the worst season of nu who. Two passable episodes and a bunch of shit.

Mrs aldo has been burning through them on Netflix while she's been laid up with the cold and she's confident (as of last night, because that's as far as she's got) that S6 (astronauts, Silence, river song, Moffat disappears up his own arse) is the nadir. If you include the Katherine Jenkins Christmas ep then it's only worse.

lolol, a match made in heaven :)

I have fond memories of most of that (the creepiness of the marks 'suddenly' appearing in the Silence episodes, the Gaiman episode, Madame Kovarian, The Rebel Flash both as a two-parter and as a hairpin turn into the half-season final, "The Doctor will return in - Let's Kill Hitler", the old and bitter Amy Pond episode, and the Christmas Carol) - I won't argue that the 'arc' wasn't bobbins though.

First two Matt Smith seasons are the overall best ones of the nu-Who era fite me and lose

The arc was done no favours by shuffling the episode order, such that one week Amy & Rory forgot that they had had a child, let alone that it had been kidnapped. Great season overall, and the best Christmas special ever.

xp Agreed, they are also like 10% really fucking stupid though, and some people seem to obsess over that 10% for some reason.

Pandorica Opens through A Good Man Goes to War is my fave section of Moffat’s DW outside of the RTD stuff and Capaldi’s last two-parter. The Hitler episode is where the show goes wobbly for a while, until the anniversary specials

The Hitler episode was mostly hilarious

It’s very Coupling I guess?

Was thinking of the unusually bad acting by Smith in the last section, which sorta prefigures his equally horrible split personality thing in Nightmares in Silver.

Tosin points out that the script often seems to forget that Ryan has (dyspraxia); Tosin will add hesitations and eg small trips on the stairs

Tosin Cole: when I was auditioning they asked me if I’d seen the show and I said, “...No...”

“But I know some stuff! I know there’s a wand—“

“It’s a sonic screwdriver”

it's a wand tbf

or I guess for the Chibnaker doctor it's a QR code reader

was it ever used as a screwdriver after its first appearance?

I wish they'd ditch it again, as they did with Peter Davison.

currently it's being used to let the doctor know enough to spout out exposition without knowing enough to end the episode in a minute.

was it ever used as a screwdriver after its first appearance?

It's used as a screwdriver in The War Games (1969). I'm sure Pertwee uses it as both a screwdriver and a magic wand (1970-74) but don't have specific stories to mind

currently it's being used to let the doctor know enough to spout out exposition without knowing enough to end the episode in a minute.

my impression is she scans the episode's QR code when she arrives, can't get a decent signal, and has to google the plot summary on a desktop when she finds one

Preview blurb for the finale two-parter:

...in the face of such a relentless enemy, has she put her best friends at risk? What terrors lie hiding in the depths of space, and what is Ko Sharmus?

- across 17 Chib-era stories with new aliens in, we've had

Tzim-Sha, of the warlike Stenza
space racist Krasko
pilot's brother Durkas *
alien tree monsters the Morax
amnesiac pilot Paltraki vs the religious Ux in The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos
interdimensional Kasaavins
spider monsters the Skithra
plastic virus Praxeus
nightmare werewolf monsters the Chagaska, created by fear-eating gods Zellin and Rakaya
and what is Ko Sharmus?

imagine Chibnall's terror everytime he meets a Keith or a Cassie or a Max, running and hiding under his desk because K and S sounds in names invariably mean "alien baddies" to him

* (not a baddie but caught hacking into medical records)

last night's was OK...could've done with more skele-Thing

^ two weeks in a row - two stories out of eight this year - where disembodied fingers were the monster

That was reasonably OK. Would probably have enjoyed it more if, 1, the general level of the whole season wasn't so souring, and 2, if there was much chance the finale it spent so much time setting up would be any good. Cyberman was effectively unpleasant. Not much danger of anybody trusting him at any point, though, surely.

Did I mishear it or did they call the Cyberman "this modern Prometheus"? The confusion between the Dr. F and the monster is common, but thinking the alternate title referred to the monster would be a new one for me.

Yeah, that was dumb and meaningless.

Yes, that raised an eyebrow with me too.

Still no desire to actually watch this season based on feedback here.

I liked this one, the best material that Jodie's had to sink her teeth into properly.

I thought her decision was lousy and her speech defending it was fashy.

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

Proceeding from (another episode), there's no consistent belief in the value of life being espoused,

last week billions of human lives were the only reason to save the Earth, animal and invertebrate and bird and fish and insect and plant lives don't count for anything

this week, billions of human lives (or the life of one specific human valet) don't count for as much as the life of A Famous Poet

who also ranks above his far more influential writer wife, because she just wrote down something based on a Doctor Who episode, not Poetry

also, she doesn't need her mind wiped despite going on to massively influence the future by writing down something from the future


also this is at least the fourth different version of "rules" for time travel / butterfly effects in the last six episodes. does nobody at all on the production read more than one script

I'm still one behind so a couple of thoughts on the stories I've caught up on:

Praxeus: While it was totally lol that everyone forgot about the dude who was eaten by birds, wasn't he another alien trying to use the Earth as a petri dish? I think once the Doctor figured out what they'd been up to, she wrote dude off and everyone else is just callous AF (Ryan's attempt to be comforting was pretty hilarious)

Can You Hear Me?: I really enjoyed this, again lol at how callous the Sheffield crew is; it's really like watching the spiritual successors to Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester on television, which is probably why it's not bothering me. Although, why did finger dude take Ryan's friend and ignore Yaz's sister?

I can’t believe sic forgot the pting

not a K or S sound (the Zs are extra space-laziness), and notably created by a non-Chibnall writer for a Chibnall-written episode

That’s not how you introduced your list

I introduced my list by saying "these are not every new alien"

including every other alien that wasn't in my list would have made it a list of every new alien