new-nu-Who: RTD2 (Doctor Who on telly 2023-?)

ha nope not required, you are well-advised to stay away from the chibnall era! new ep really only refers back to the end of the Donna run - and there are plenty of (slightly awkward) refreshers - i guess the basic setup is basic enough and simply explained - donna can’t remember the doctor - but all the extra detail and lingo was quite confusing for the very casual viewers in my house

i, as usual, lost interest about 30 minutes in. and having watched a dozen or so of the old 25 minute episodes i think a large part of what's missing, for me, is the cliffhangers (along with the more digestible length)

nice to see DT back though. thought new tardis was too big if anything, not that it matters given the nature of the thing.

murray can fuck off tho

Honestly think this guy has ruined Who far more than Chibnall. The new theme is terrible and within minutes was sick of the usual overblown score.

Although it was trailer-spoiled I did like the ET bit. Don't suppose there was a bit like that in the comic story so it turns out Spielberg ripped it off?

And I am looking forward to the NPH/Celestial Toymaker one honest.

So RTD technobabble is back in a big way huh?

This was mostly decent, Tate and Tennant are such a fun team.

i may have to watch that ending again but i don’t know how I feel about the implication that the metacrisis made Rose trans, and that was also maybe why she chose her name. (Also I don’t buy that she wouldn’t get into the Tardis with Donna and the Doctor at the end.)

I harp about this a lot, but in his New Adventures novel, RTD had a character from the future bone a bone a gay character in the middle of a stakeout at the height of the AIDS epidemic so that the 80s character could develop HIV-immunity from an injection of 30th-century sperm so that whole denouement read to me like someone was reining RTD’s worse storytelling impulses in a bit

I guess it was a blowjob rather than full-on anal but still wildly out of character

holy shit

I must have some kind of Stockholm Syndrome with Murray Gold, because although he's still very annoying, it feels much more like "real Who is back" when he's clodding over everything.

The new theme tune is multiple squares of OTT, but sort of exciting too? The original Ecclestone theme is still his best one.

My personal cringezone with New Adventures is Ace storming off at the end of "Love and War", a very terrible bit of writing (by Paul Cornell)

This was merely boring instead of an immediate hate watch which is a clear improvement over the last couple seasons. 50-something minutes felt long, and some of the scenes (rescue from Chez Noble) could have been edited way down.

I really enjoyed this

I loved the pacing, like backstory/new alium invasion/old characters/new characters; it’s all moving along on rails simultaneously in an adept way

Donna/Doctor moments were all gold, such good emotional moments throughout from all of them honestly

A timely reminder that once upon a time even generic Doctor Who episodes were very entertaining!

murray can fuck off tho

His action cues are no worse than standard Hollywood scores really, but when he goes for emotional or god forbid comical it's unbearable.

Yeah was watching unicorn and the wasp last week. Very generic but lots of fun. It has a certain ease with just existing on simple terms, which Moffat’s period struggled with

when he goes for emotional or god forbid comical it's unbearable

I counted at least three scenes where I essentially thought "There's some really good acting here with stakes. Sure wish I could pay attention to it because of all the fucking sonic glop over it."

(Fun episode, I'll add.)

Also, a massive bravo for choosing his first episode back to send an unequivocal message to young trans fans.

And enjoyed how Rose's identity was actually used in the plot resolution rather than just being a thing her character was (Admittedly in a slightly hokey way, but hey it's Dr Who)

a LOT of oof in the resolution, but the Doctor's "oh, I do that!" re pronouns earlier was such a beast line that it outweighs anything else.

agree w those last three posts

I had a disparaging comment about RTD’s usual mode of subtlety that read as mean to unintended targets when I started typing it but suffice to say it could have been about a billion times more awful, so I’m relieved that I only ended up rolling my eyes a bit

xxpost yeah i liked that line !

Tennant is extremely comfortable in this role, it’s a joy to watch him just dominate the screen even when taking the sonic screwdriver to new levels of wtf

on dr who confidential there's a great bit where the writers of the original comic are visiting and DT basically interrupts to tell them how much of a fan he is

(Dave Gibbons was the artist - equally important as an author, just noting ftr.)

(and wagner wasn't there. yeah, was using shorthand)

I am seeing some absolutely DERANGED ranting about this harmless, charming episode, mostly centered around the “men can’t let things go” line which honestly I didn’t even register when I watched it, possibly because I was also wrangling my kids

I liked this: https://open.substack.com/pub/philipchristman/p/a-show-for-dorks

Now Russell T. Davies, who revived the show in 2005, is in effect reviving it again. A prickly, opinionated Gen X gay man of a distinct sort, Davies has been responsible for some of the best episodes the show has ever done. Who knows if he’ll pull it off again, but I at least feel safe in assuming that if he fails, he’ll do it in an interesting way.

and wagner wasn't there

(as noted in the opening post, Wagner did not contribute to the comic strip — where Mills was credited first on DWM, he was the sole writer)

Men unable to let go of the idea that men can't let things go

Dave Gibbons meets the Meep:

Me and the Meep! pic.twitter.com/LCO0WUnKTe

— Dave Gibbons (@davegibbons90) November 27, 2023

Pat Mills meets the Meep:

https://iconoblast.substack.com/p/all-hail-the-meep

So far 03: apparently RTD wrote some snippets of bridging Dalek VO for the 23/11/23-TXed colourised 75-minute edit of the 7-part first Dalek serial, recorded by surviving 1963-65 Dalek voice actor David Graham.

Nice little BTS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWnPxke0row

my issue with the “let things go” line was not the implication that men can’t let things go, but more the classic RTD lack of constraint resolving deadly problems in favour of feels.

i don’t think that matters in general, especially if people enjoy it - it’s a show! but personally prefer a sense of the magical and wonderful and slightly terrifying being taken seriously (i think this can create problems in another direction - i’m just talking personal taste here) rather than HOOT!!!

Rewatching The Runaway Bride and seeing Donna turn down the offer to travel with the Doctor because he’s absolutely terrifying is a fantastic choice, one I wish would be played up a bit more (this is also why I really liked Dan’s departure; he got to a point where he was just tired of always being in mortal peril and fucked off back home, which is super relatable)

I read this and thought “my vague recollection is that Dan was kidnapped once, met the Doctor for about 15 minutes, then spent several months bouncing around space and time trying to save her, then went back to his life as soon as she could drop him home” before realising there were several episodes after Flux

Flux

or as iirc Chibnall thrillingly hyped it, “the story of a man… a man named Dan.”

I read the original Star Beast comic today, amazed that RTD chose to cut the section where the Wrarth knock the Doctor unconscious, strip him naked, and then perform surgery on him to hide a bomb in his belly!

recorded by surviving 1963-65 Dalek voice actor David Graham

https://i.ibb.co/VY6nYr0/grahamdalek.jpg

link to a reply with one of his lines embedded

seeing Donna turn down the offer to travel with the Doctor because he’s absolutely terrifying is a fantastic choice, one I wish would be played up a bit more

Isn't that why Tegan eventually decides to bail from the TARDIS life?

ratingswatch for Tracer: 5.08 milli VOSDAL, the highest overnight for a BBC drama launch in 2023**; nearly 2 million on iPlayer Sunday (1.62 recorded by BARB*) and another million Mon/Tues, per Jane Tranter (Grade also asked his scintillating opinion); highest Audience Appreciation Index since the first half of Capaldi's two-part finale in June 2017.

*which puts the 2-day figure above the 7-day final of, eg. Blink

** twenty-four episodes of six dramas have consolidated over 7m in 2023 on seven-day; Happy Valley S3 is the top six of those 24, with 7.9 for ep 1, and 11.08 for ep 6. (Call The Midwife S12e03 is 24th, with 7.01; its highest-ranked episode is the finale at 11 with 7.45)

Always helps to have National Treasure David Tennant back in the Tardis of course but yes they have to be pleased with this

Isn't that why Tegan eventually decides to bail from the TARDIS life?

Yes! Another fantastic departure, absolutely heartbreaking.

(A Christmas special with Ncuti Gatwa in the lead is likely to air one month from today, but not confirmed yet.)


Russel Tinsel Davies confirms: “From Day One in this job, I wanted Doctor Who back on Christmas Day! And with Ncuti, Millie, Davina and the Goblin King, I hope it’s a feast for all the family!”

OK, got around to watching the new episode today. I don't watch TV by myself, and the person I usually watch TV with was going through some stuff.

I had some trepidation about watching it, honestly. Stuff like TV shows are a really social thing for me. Half the fun of watching something is being able to talk about it. That's just been really hard for me lately. I don't have a lot of trust for communities, particularly fan communities. I've never really known how to talk to other people about Doctor Who, the way I see it, what it means to me.

Anyway. Full spoilers ahead.

I knew nothing about it going in except that RTD was showrunner again and that David Tennant would be involved and the new companion was going to be a trans woman named Rose Tyler (apparently that's not actually her character's name tho) and at some point David Tennant regenerates into Ncuti Gatwa. And that Donna was going to come back and they were going to resolve her arc.

So actually I knew a hell of a lot about it going in, considering I actively avoided reading anything about the episode.

The name of the episode rang a bell and as soon as I saw Pat Mills' credit I was like oh shit, this was based on a comic story. Have I read this? Do I know this one? And then the Meep showed up and I was all "OH SHIT IT'S THE MOTHERFUCKIN' MEEP"

And maybe this is why I have such a hard time talking to other Doctor Who fans

The Meep is such a _perfect_ RTD character, honestly better than any of the other characters RTD previously created in that mold. Kind of an Ewok-ET-Mogwai kind of thing except that it predates all of those characters, hahaha...

I went back to the story after watching it to see what the episode took from it. Surprisingly little, and not the stuff I thought. Aside from the Meep... meepself? (seriously, cute pronoun joke but this is why we say things like "she/her/hers" - in real life pronoun usage is distressingly similar to Douglas Adams' digression on tense conjugation in time travel) and the, uh, Wrarth warriors (big props to the actors for actually finding a way to pronounce "Wrarth"), the biggest influence I see is actually the influence of Sharon and her family on Rose and her family. I was pretty surprised to learn that "Fudge" is a character from the comics. I think I know a non-binary person named "Fudge". (Also a great non-binary name: "Keebler". If I had a child I'd argue with my co-parent that we should name them "Keebler" and my co-parent would very sensibly say "no".)

It's... the show I remember watching when RTD was running things the first time. Not the show I see when I watch it now. I remember the special effects, in 2005, looking genuinely impressive and not janky, the plots being exciting and fresh, the missteps easy to overlook. I remember it being a big action-packed family show with corny jokes and messaging that wasn't always perfect (looking at you "Unquiet Dead") but was...

I mean, Chibnall, right? I hate to mention his name. I don't know what happened, how David Tennant showed up again, any of that. I dropped that show like a hot rock after "Arachnids in the UK". Nothing particularly bad about that episode, I just figured, you know, this show isn't going to get any better from here.

Anyway, the trans thing. I thought it was... it was clearly an example of "cis-writing-trans". RTD gets it better than a lot of cis people. Sometimes, you know, sometimes a person knows just enough to be dangerous.

The idea that Donna and Rose could just "let go" of the, I don't know, magical time lord power (that goes back to Shada, right? What Chronotis does to Claire? God, I don't think I ever thought of that before)... that was good and authentic. Them saying that a "male-presenting" time lord couldn't ever _understand_ that is gender-essentialist bullshit, IMO. Cis guys... they sometimes put themselves down. Judge themselves in ways that I wouldn't dream of judging them.

It's something that I was taught. To hold onto things that I thought were important, but aren't. You don't have to transition to learn to let go of those things.

My girlfriend liked the corny "non-binary" joke/reveal. I liked it too, I mean, RTD is corny in a way I like. I eye-roll but it's all in good fun, for me. My girlfriend genuinely felt seen. And this is an example of... when I say RTD gets more than most people, Rose being both non-binary _and_ trans... that's me, that's my girlfriend, that's a lot of the people I know. I appreciate that a show run by a cis person sees that.

The thing about these stories is that... the stuff that gives me the trans feels isn't always the trans stuff. Rose is a great character, it was great to see her, and I just felt Donna's arc so deeply in my heart.

It's kind of echoes of... I wrote this whole story about how for me, "Human Nature" (the TV story, I never read the book) gave me particular trans feels. Donna's arc gives me that feeling but moreso. And it's not a trans story. This was an arc that was set up when, 2008? A lot of the stuff I've felt, I've experienced, isn't exclusive to trans people.

Donna lost 15 years of her life. The Doctor thought he was helping her. Thought he was _saving_ her from certain death. Thought... he could seal off that part of her and she'd be fine. She'd live a happy, normal life. Plus, she had a lot of money. It was OK that she couldn't think about those things she did, couldn't acknowledge those things she did, or the pain would fucking kill her. It was OK that everybody around her had to lie to her in increasingly obvious ways, stop talking about things that were incredibly important to them. Nothing is wrong. There are no aliens. You don't know this man at our front door. They're acting stupider than those asshole kids who deadname Rose.

Which is, again, a clear sign of cis people writing trans characters. Cis people talk about trans characters and the first thing that happens is you hear our deadnames. I don't want to know anybody's deadname. I don't want to hear it. It doesn't matter. It's a lot easier to just not fucking say it in the first place than it is to unhear it. Now I'm always going to know this character's deadname, whenever I think about her, and I would fucking prefer not to. A lot of cis people just don't seem to get that.

Anyway, Donna. "The Star Beast" shows, very well, the cost of that. Doesn't pass any judgements because there's no point. It doesn't matter whether the Doctor was right or wrong in doing what he did. It hurt. She spent fifteen years missing some important part of herself, not understanding, not knowing why or what was wrong with her, and whenever she asked about it people lied to her, tried to keep her from knowing the truth. _He_ tried to keep her from knowing the truth. He didn't want to be responsible for killing her. No. He couldn't accept that he was _already_ responsible for killing her. No blame. No guilt. The life he lives... people around him die, sometimes. People he cares about. Sometimes you can change that. Sometimes you can't.

I guess he learned that in "The Waters of Mars", in "The End of Time". By that time he'd already done what he did to Donna. I don't know. Maybe he thought sacrificing himself for Wilf atoned for that. It didn't. Nobody _asked_ him to atone.

Wilf's still alive, the show tells us. It's not... we'll never see him again. Bernard Cribbins died last year. I don't care if Wilf is living on a nice farm upstate with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart.

So he comes back, 15 years later, after spending a long, long lonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng time going to ludicrous lengths trying to keep anyone, ever, from dying, and then... we don't like to talk about what happened after that. Atonement? No, he just couldn't keep going on like that, the way she'd been going.

-

It was... nice. It was really nice to see Donna after she demanded, DEMANDED, that the Doctor stop trying to protect her from herself. Donna wasn't... she wasn't _dead_ before, exactly, but she was so much more _alive_ after the Doctor said those words. It was so easy to see and hear, just like it's easy to see the difference in me before and after. And she didn't regret it. Anything. Fifteen years that... for all the joy, still felt empty somehow, and then one minute of being alive in a way she didn't know she could be. Of doing amazing things. the lesson of the moth by archy. I have a friend who talked about... wanting to be that moth. And then doing it, diving straight into the flame and...

RTD always does this thing, right? Moffat pulled all kinds of shenanigans to keep anyone from dying except from old age, and maybe not even then, while RTD would destroy that world and then have Superman fly around the world backwards and everybody's fine now. It was my least favorite thing about Moffat endings. It seemed cheap. Using a time machine to re-edit a serial cliffhanger. Here, though? No, again, he's right. I dived into the flame expecting it to burn me up and I still don't know what the hell happened but I'm still here and everything I wanted from that flame I feel now in every moment of my life. It's such a queer thing.

-

Here's what I love most about this episode. Early in the episode, after Rose gets deadnamed, Donna says something like "I would burn down the world to protect you." And my girlfriend and I looked at the screen and said "Yes! Do it. Do it for us." She doesn't... well, she doesn't need to. But she also doesn't know that. I don't actually want to see the world burned down. Someone like Donna, though... that's what I want in an ally. Someone who would burn the world down to protect us.

I don't know. I'll say it. I'll share it. I've said enough stupid shit on this thread that... well, if I had anywhere else to say this stuff, I'd say it there instead. I guess.

thanks for that kate, that was beautifully said & deeply otm in ways that hadn’t occurred to me til you said it

and i agree re moffat, was the thing i liked least about his run

<3

That is lovely - though I haven't heard anywhere that Rose was the companion (for these three specials - I know Gatwa has his own companion) rather than Donna?

I definitely did see Rose described as a new companion in some of the earlier news stories around the 60th specials, but I think it was just people jumping to conclusions rather than quoting directly from what RTD was announcing, eg here, where they also decide she's a "new version of Rose Tyler".

Not that I think companion needs to be a very specifically defined term anyway, none of the "not a companion unless they travel in the tardis" or "not a companion unless they're in at least X episodes" etc nonsense is helpful. Rose meets the Doctor and helps him with something, that's probably enough to meet the companionhood threshold I reckon, it's arguably as much as Liz Shaw ever did.

haha yep that's the thing i'm just... out of touch in some weird ways, so much of what i "know" about the show is muddled fanlore that's since been corrected, except that i never picked up on the correction.

re: companionhood... see that's the thing, not only is the gender-essentialist take donna and rose give at the end wrong, there's a lovely bit in the episode that directly contradicts their claim

tennant is talking to someone... the current scientific advisor, maybe?... about donna... i can't recall what he says but it's really emotionally vulnerable and caring, and at the end he says "i guess i talk like that now?", and, if i'm wrong on this i'm wrong, shirley anne bingham says "that sounds like a good thing."

on a nerd sense it's very much in who tradition, new doctors who've just regenerated taking on some of the characteristics of their last incarnation (as far back as troughton in "power of the daleks")

it's more than that, though... the whole thing where chibnall declared that the doctor was no longer going to have "companions" but "friends" seemed like a genuinely good idea to me, although i'm sure chibnall managed to fuck it up and get it all backwards somehow. the doctor having been a woman for a few years is more than just the wrong gender on a taxicab license (and christ i feel the doctor's pain on that one... i hope updating the gender on his psychic paper is easier for him than updating my paperwork was for me. it probably isn't. given what i've seen of the doctor's approach to technology, the psychic paper settings UI is probably a fucking nightmare.)

the doctor is _changed_ by his experiences. it's why donna and rose refer to the doctor as "male-presenting". last episode the doctor was female-presenting, so... last episode she could have done it but this episode he can't? like, he can reach items on high shelves and pee standing up but he can no longer process trauma in an emotionally healthy manner?

it makes sense that the doctor doesn't know how to let go, not because he's "male-presenting" but because he's the DOCTOR, he's an alien who... this was the big revolution RTD brought into the show, the thing that made the show so much _better_ than it'd ever been before. companions weren't just people whose job was to scream and have the plot explained to them. she or he (yes, mickey was a companion, nobody gives a fuck about adam) was someone the doctor needed to _listen_ to, someone who undersood things he didn't. i grew up watching the original show, and my role model was mostly the doctor. (i mean, when she was in the show it was lalla ward, but i think that was mostly a me thing.)

the protagonist of the revived show, for me, that was rose, and not in a "i wish i was a girl" sense. it was her _character_. she was the strong one. she was the one i looked up to. the doctor's alien nature didn't make him some kind of unstoppable superhero. (mostly it made him act kind of autistic a lot of the time, down to literally carrying stim toys around with him in his pockets. can't imagine why i found the doctor so relatable as a kid.) when he tried to act like a superhero he hurt other people and he got hurt himself. his first companions, way back in the beginning, were teachers, and maybe that was less of a coincidence than it seemed.

-

some more serious spoilers for the ep in this next para, about shirley anne bingham:

i loved shirley anne bingham from the first second, that "oh she'd better show up again" love. (i looked up her name - i avoid researching writing stuff about doctor who for the same reasons i avoid capitalizing my posts, but i want to get characters' names right at least - and of course she fucking will... you don't create a character that good as a one-off.) this character... i don't have the lived experience of using a wheelchair, and someone who does will probably see things in the portrayal that i don't. i loved the character. i loved the actor, i loved the way the hectic pacing of the show made it a genuine surprise to me when she showed up again at the end. i loved the way the show recognized that hey, it's not just daleks who can't climb stairs. i loved her saying "don't make me the problem". i loved the way it gave a plausible plot reason for her to not be affected by the meep's bisexual lighting. i loved the way her disability affected what she could do in ways that were meaningful in the story but didn't make her a liability or a weaker character. and yes, i loved that she had a pimped out james bond wheelchair that could shoot RPGs.

she had _agency_, in a way that moffat's female characters didn't (i do think that verity ritchie convincingly makes the case that moffat's female characters are nearly all cis-male-fantasy versions of bisexual dominatrices). loved loved loved this character.

Judging from the online reaction, it's quite striking how many people don't know what "putting the show out to tender" means - it's not the same as putting it out to pasture! There'll be a new series in a few years' time!

― bamboohouses, Wednesday, June 10, 2026 6:27 AM (three hours ago)

well it's more that the bbc know better than to just outright say "we're cancelling doctor who", the fans get a whiff of that and there'll be a fucking i-- l----- charity single in camden market next tuesday

i give the bbc very little credit but i will at least credit them for sparing us _that_ horror

my feelings are basically relief. i do not believe that the bbc as of this moment is capable of producing a quality "doctor who" show. i lived through the first wilderness years, and i'm ready for round 2. god, maybe big finish will start putting on some better-quality scripts. maybe they're doing good scripts now, but it is a very large haystack. i'd love it if jodie whittaker and ncuti gatwa could do stories better than the ones they got on tv, the way colin baker and paul mcgann did. (i don't know if either of them would do big finish work mind you!)

to my mind doctor who requires change, revitalization, and i'll be blunt, there hasn't been someone who isn't a cis white man at the helm since verity lambert (we can quibble about what "at the helm" actually means, but i'm not aware of anyone else who qualifies). having said that, much love to white cis gay men as a group, the show wouldn't be where it is without you, your experience and perspectives will always be a fundamental part of what doctor who is. just please. someone who's not a white cis man.

and i don't mean fucking jk rowling. i mean there's a new generation of fans who grew up loving the show, the 2005 iteration of the show, and, given time and opportunity, some of them will have a lot to say. that may or may not be on a bbc tv show. we'll see how things evolve. i'm here to see what the woke-ass fans can do.

I fully agree on your diagnosis and your prescription Kate! Beyond time that kind of change is made at the top.

Doctor Who has not been cancelled though - the special has. The tender process means that a variety of independent producers will submit proposals as to how they would take the show forward, and the contract will be awarded to one of them. It means - for the first time since 2005 - there will be proper consideration given to a range of different approaches, rather than it being handed to whichever New Adventures-era male writer has exec'ed a splashy production in the last 18 months. I actually think this is the correct outcome!

A sort of good thing about the longer break is it justifies Gatwa's imo awful, abrupt exit (Piper appearance aside) more...in my head at least. Come back in 2 years with a TV movie.

please god give it to someone who doesn’t know or give a fuck what artron energy is

i don't know what that is. but i don't want the job

Doctor Who has not been cancelled though - the special has. The tender process means that a variety of independent producers will submit proposals as to how they would take the show forward, and the contract will be awarded to one of them. It means - for the first time since 2005 - there will be proper consideration given to a range of different approaches, rather than it being handed to whichever New Adventures-era male writer has exec'ed a splashy production in the last 18 months. I actually think this is the correct outcome!

― bamboohouses, Wednesday, June 10, 2026 11:05 AM (three hours ago)

my only stake in this is that i would like doctor who, at some point, to once again be a show i look forward to watching

this actually has very little to do with doctor who itself and a lot to do with my years-prolonged state of anhedonic depression

make doctor who good again - free ketamine and communism for everyone

or at least for british people, y'all deserve better

I fear not

yeah this show needs to take a nap and wake up refreshed

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm), Thursday, June 11, 2026 12:15 AM (thirteen hours ago)

counterpoint: it would be better to make and broadcast it, so it can be refreshed by new people working on it.

reminder that it took a longer-than-a-year nap between every season of Chibnall, and only woke up more sluggish than before each time. (plus when it turned out Chibnall's first nap was going to be THIRTY-FOUR MONTHS long, Moffat unresigned* so hard that a new companion was written, cast, filmed and on air in a special minisode shown at half-time in the FA cup semi-final four months after his final episode. the ensuing series was one of his best ever, and brought back two new writers from the previous season, who showed themselves to have enough ideas to carry on for years.)

*and unresigned a second time to make sure it wouldn't even have a 50-week nap after that.


Doctor Who ran for 26 years changing its tone, cast, production model and creative personnel willy and/or nilly, and every time it got a bit shit or the public got a bit bored of it, the creative personnel changed and it got good and/or the public got interested in it again.

The only time it ever got cancelled (because the creative personnel hadn't changed for years and an executive who wasn't creative had been convinced to put loads and loads of references to old stories and characters in it all the time), it got uncancelled days later, had an 18-month nap, and came back even worse with the same creative personnel.

Three weeks after being refused the chance to work on another show, the executive then hired the only existing writer(s) he liked to rush out four scripts based on a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book they'd already written, based on scripts that they'd had rejected by the production office two years earlier. Three weeks after that, he hired a new showrunner with no experience but who'd said in his job interview that his ideal for Doctor Who would be to overthrow the Thatcher government, so seemed fun. The first four scripts resulted in some of the worst Who ever made; the twenty-something's subsequent commissions resulted in a new approach to Dr Who so exciting that it inspired basically everyone who kept it alive and interesting in novels and audio for over a decade, and then brought it back to TV.

I'm fine with a break. Last few seasons were dismally bad.

― fluffy tufts university (f. hazel), Thursday, June 11, 2026 12:03 AM (thirteen hours ago)

considering that most of those were by Chris Chibnall: well, yeah. Each half of RTD2's basically-one production series had more good episodes written by him than his original five years put together, though - he just should never have been allowed to write season finales ever again.

(I liked the one-second Billie cliffhanger tho.)

One of the strengths of the Cartmel era was how in touch it was with 2000 AD (Greatest Show In The Galaxy being the most obvious), Love & Rockets (Ace as Maggie/Hopey) etc. Whereas I never got the sense that Moffat* and RTD were paying attention to any contemporary comics or SFF beyond blockbuster movies. Some of the writers of recent episodes did engage with more contemporary stuff, but it was overshadowed by RTD's horrible attempts to replicate the MCU, UNIT as Shield etc.

*Reworking gothic and Victorian fiction is a fine Who tradition of course, and Moffat did it pretty well, but read some other books lads!

^ again another thing that Mathieson absolutely had going for him! all of his own episodes were a clear and distinct Who-y take on a theme, and if Moffat gave him some old shit from the 20th century to rework, he made it feel vibrant enough

Jamieson's episodes were good, always seemed odd that Chibnall and RTD didn't ask him back. Likewise, Sarah Dollard, although she's been busy with other things.

RTD brought in some promising younger writers during his second run, but with the exception of Rogue, their episodes didn't quite come off. I liked the Saga nods in Juno Dawson's episode (the human-fawn antagonists), but it felt too rushed, without much space for character or world-building. Probably not her fault so much as that of the format and RTD's desire for spectacle. And The Story & The Engine was intriguing in theory, but whether through writing or direction, didn't quite work.

(Ace as Maggie/Hopey)

this literally never occurred to me until just this minute. Ace is easily one of my favorite companions of the entire run and now that makes sense.

Doctor Who ran for 26 years changing its tone, cast, production model and creative personnel willy and/or nilly, and every time it got a bit shit or the public got a bit bored of it, the creative personnel changed and it got good and/or the public got interested in it again.

The only time it ever got cancelled (because the creative personnel hadn't changed for years and an executive who wasn't creative had been convinced to put loads and loads of references to old stories and characters in it all the time), it got uncancelled days later, had an 18-month nap, and came back even worse with the same creative personnel.

Three weeks after being refused the chance to work on another show, the executive then hired the only existing writer(s) he liked to rush out four scripts based on a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book they'd already written, based on scripts that they'd had rejected by the production office two years earlier. Three weeks after that, he hired a new showrunner with no experience but who'd said in his job interview that his ideal for Doctor Who would be to overthrow the Thatcher government, so seemed fun. The first four scripts resulted in some of the worst Who ever made; the twenty-something's subsequent commissions resulted in a new approach to Dr Who so exciting that it inspired basically everyone who kept it alive and interesting in novels and audio for over a decade, and then brought it back to TV.

absolutely there's something to be said for desperation. season six of the original show, for instance, was utterly dire, and the two workmanlike scripts by some new guy named robert holmes didn't exactly stand out. for doctor who to be good it does have to go through those years when nobody knows what the fuck they're doing, when you put in people who didn't have a lot of experience in tv and didn't have any budget and made some shows that were, on a technical level, appalling.

i mean, if you can convince the bbc to let some young people who don't know what they're doing make two seasons of cheap and tatty doctor who on tv because that's how doctor who gets good, i salute you. honestly i think it would be easier for you lot to actually overthrow your horrific shambling thatcherite corpse of a government (most _certainly_ including the BBC) _without_ first making a BBC version of doctor who with that as its goal. and i'm saying that from a place where we have, well, some _very serious problems_ ourselves.

it's kind of like how i stan the animated missing episodes, cuz they tend to be shit. they animated the "celestial toymaker" and made it look like an off-brand version of "the amazing digital circus". i have _tremendous_ amounts of respect for that. if '00s who exists in the shadow of buffy, any new-nu-who... i'd like to see it exist in the shadow of something like "the amazing digital circus", specifically because i don't watch it and most people my age haven't even heard of it.

ok that's it, that's my pitch

baker and martin should go to glitch productions and ask them to make a new k-9 series, no input from them, no strings attached, just here's k-9, do whatever the fuck you want with that

_that_ is how you get good doctor who

or i don't know whoever owns k-9. i don't actually know who's still alive at this point. i just know there was an australian k-9 series and it sucked and it would be _very possible_ for there to be an australian k-9 series that _doesn't_ suck.

Dave Martin’s only Doctor Who since 1979’s The Armageddon Factor was another book in that line of Choose Yr Own Adventures, in 1986, and he died the year before Bob Baker’s last Oscar nomination.

The company that’s making 26 episodes of animated Dr Who for 2027 and another 26 for 2028 won two Emmys in 2021 and an Annie in 2020.

mark my words, within a few years they are going to officially embrace using AI for those missing episodes. people are already doing it on youtube to surprisingly good effect, I am reluctant to admit.

Yeah some Star Wars ones out there are pretty insane. Grave new world.

The company that’s making 26 episodes of animated Dr Who for 2027 and another 26 for 2028 won two Emmys in 2021 and an Annie in 2020.

― uploading this content requires perseveration (sic), Saturday, June 13, 2026 12:55 PM (one hour ago)

oh that's good to hear! i don't necessarily keep up on on this stuff, occasionally the BBC licenses the brand to people who know what to do with it :) if it's anywhere in the same league as "lower decks" i'll be quite happy!

---

mark my words, within a few years they are going to officially embrace using AI for those missing episodes. people are already doing it on youtube to surprisingly good effect, I am reluctant to admit.

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm), Saturday, June 13, 2026 1:18 PM (one hour ago)

oh, i can absolutely believe it. i gave up on buying the blu-ray sets when they started doing AI bullshit on them. i'm not, though, actually opposed to the idea of "AI recons", though i could be convinced they're a terrible idea.

i'm not opposed to ai in principle. my objection is that it's being used in basically stupid and fraudulent ways. you'd get better _results_, for instance, if it didn't just blindly hoover up anything it sees. of course maybe it's _not_ anymore, and that's kind of scarier? because there's no transparency when it comes to what the data set is. mainly my concern is that of perpetuating various forms of bigotry, but, like, there's nothing actually _unique_ about that (glances in the direction of "the celestial toymaker"). and of course i am _very_ unhappy about the absolutely wholesale destruction of, like, incalculable future lives in the blind, vain pursuit of this stuff.

that said it's possible that i might enjoy watching an AI recon more than most of the animations or other attempts at recons that have been made thus far. "doctor who recon" is actually pretty near the top of my list of "things could actually functionally work".

counterpoint (spoiled for TMI): that said, for all its advancements, i can't get off to AI gish nearly as well as I can get off to work created by humans. this isn't a strictly relevant concern when it comes to missing doctor who episodes, mind you, though i'm not at all condemning anybody who has a fondness for rubber cyberman suits. doctor who has just never really interested me in that way.

nah it's more that... no matter how technically competent something produced by an AI might be, there's something missing, something i can't quite put my finger on. maybe i'm imagining it. i don't think i am. it's not about it being made by AI itself, don't get me wrong. i've seen plenty of human art that feels soulless and empty and mediocre in the same way!

the thing i keep coming back to, though, is that the missing episodes, on the whole, just _aren't that good_. i obsess about them far more than i can rationally justify. it's infuriating. i heard years ago that "the year of the sex olympics" contains chromadot information but has it been restored to colour? i don't know, maybe it has. i don't keep up with these things.

the missing episodes, on the whole, just _aren't that good_

we literally don’t know, because what elevates nearly all Dr Who from “there” to “fun” are the decisions made by the human actors, directors and designers. Marco Polo is probably compelling bcz it’s directed by Waris Hussein and has the early cast finding their chemistry, in great costumes. Plagiarism robots are never going to “reconstruct” that. When the only existing episode of Enemy Of The World was filmed almost entirely in a corridor bcz they couldn’t afford a jail set, there was no way of knowing how sicko mode Barry Letts went on every other episode (that shot where Jamie walks out of a back-projection filmed two months earlier!), or how distinct Troughton’s performance was in the dual role outside of the accent.

For the most part, if a story is missing and the original writer did the novelisation, that’s going to be way better than any type of recon. (click post, look up whether this is true)

Marco Polo - Lucarotti did the novel but I got bored as a child
Reign Of Terror - novel is not by Spooner but is by Ian Marter so prob not bad
Doctor Who And The Crusaders - Whitaker did the novel so is almost certainly great. Dr Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks >>> The Tribe Of Gum and Serial B
Galaxy 4 - I watched the one recovered episode at its first public screening, that's enough
Mission To The Unknown - the complete remake by some uni students about ten years ago was fun
Myth Makers - Cotton did the novel, total megabanger
The Massacre - definite bummer not to have Hartnell's dual performance but Lucarotti did the novel and it's OK
The Savages - Black did the novel but idk iirc this is boring? same for Macra Terror
Faceless Ones - the two existing eps are pretty good but I bet it suffers in being expanded from 4 to 6 eps. blanket no thanks on any 80s novelisations by Dicks or John Peel ftr.
Evil Of The Daleks - absolute tragedy that it's missing (and that Whitaker didn't do the novelisation) but if we could only get one more episode back I'd rather have Trout and Jamie running around London going antiquing now that they can finally have a first date, than any Dalek stuff
and bummer that Wheel In Space is missing but it wasn't Whitaker's own plot so nbd that he didn't do a base-under-siege novel.

you're right that the rest of the missing S5 stories and Space Pirates (all six-part bases under siege! jfc) are prob not "good" BUT any footage of the Doctor and Jamie being #gaymarriedinspace is sure to be delightful.

For the most part, if a story is missing and the original writer did the novelisation, that’s going to be way better than any type of recon. (click post, look up whether this is true)

― uploading this content requires perseveration (sic)

i mean i'd almost say apples and oranges. "the massacre", for instance... i've read James Cooray Smith's Black Archive on the story... for whatever reason i'm kinda particularly fixated on this story. lucarotti's "novelisation" is fantastic - i love it dearly. it's also really valuable because it's, cooray smith argues persuasively, a novelization of his initial version of the script, before tosh and/or wiles (neither of whom, uh, i have a very strong opinion of) made some weird arbitrary changes to it. like you say, the show depends a _great deal_ on "the decisions made by the human actors, directors and designers". one of the reasons "the massacre" interests me is because it was directed by paddy russell. a 1966 story helmed by the director who went on to direct "invasion of the dinosaurs", "pyramids of mars", and "horror of fang rock"? my god, yes, i would absolutely love to see it.

and, like, at some point i accepted that this is not an episode i am ever going to see in its original form. of course anything could happen. someone could turn up some cache in barbados or whatever. it's probably not gonna happen at this point. and given the almost complete absence of any visual reference material from the story... no, it's not remotely possible to "reconstruct" russell's work on "the massacre". that's one of the things i like about "the celestial toymaker" animation - it _doesn't_ attempt to faithfully present the story as shown on TV. it's not just the character models - watching "the final test" animation side by side with the actual episode makes the differences pretty clear. there are human artistic choices being made, ones that are consciously distinct from the choices made by bill sellars in "the final test". of course a lot of sellars' choices were constrained by the conditions the show was made under.

neither humans nor ai can truly reproduce the decisions made by the actors and directors. i agree with you that no possible animation or reconstruction could be as delightful as episode 2 of "the underwater menace" or pretty much all of "enemy of the world". and i'd still kill for a whitaker novelization of "enemy", or, most of all, "the ambassadors of death", because it would be _markedly_ different from what we saw on air!

if an episode is "missing", well, none of them are "missing" in the way that episodes of (bog-standard example here) "united!" is. it doesn't matter how much i know what happens in "the nightmare begins", that i've seen the blue peter clip from "devil's planet", that i've heard the audio of it, that i've seen "day of armageddon". nothing is quite the same as actually _watching_ "the nightmare begins" and "devil's planet". until i saw those episodes, i couldn't properly say "well, 'devil's planet' isn't a very good episode". because something in the acting or the directing could have made it a delight to watch in the same way that "the underwater menace" episode 2 was (for me, at least).

a "missing episode" is something like a "lost album" - the mystique and joy of it is that its _incompleteness_ allows people who weren't involved in its original production to engage with it creatively. borrowing a model of the wooden horse to shoot some new poor-quality footage with it is a creative act! photo-collaging, compositing, creative acts!

whether an "AI recon" succeeds or fails, i'd argue, isn't a matter of "AI" itself but of the creative decisions being made by the people using it. even terrible AI porn _does_ involve human creativity, i'd argue. this star wars stuff... i haven't seen it, but if it's any good at all it's because of the time and effort and, like, _vision_ of the people involved in making it.

there are _so many_ attempted "fan edits" of star wars movies, particularly the prequels. so many ways people have attempted to make those movies _good_. well i don't think it's possible. the movies just fundamentally aren't good. you might as well make an entirely different movie. but god, i love seeing people try. the dialogue of star wars is terrible? let's dub the whole thing in japanese, then translate the japanese lines we wrote _back_ into much _better_ english dialogue in subtitles! i'm staggered by the inventiveness of it, staggered by the effort they put in the service of a movie which is, at the end of the day, simply not very good.

of course i'd love to see all the episodes of "the massacre", or "the power of the daleks", or "the highlanders" or "fury from the deep" (god, i would love to see what hugh david's work as a Who director looked like!). and i also gravitate, still, to these stories because they do offer possibility, because they don't exist in a "definitive" form. because people aren't as likely to do an animated "reconstruction" of, i don't know, "planet of evil". do i think the duff CGI added in for the DVD releases improves on any of the stories it's used in? not really. that doesn't mean i don't think people shouldn't continue to (TRIPLE NEGATIVE!!!!) fuck with the source texts in interesting ways, using whatever tools they have available.

Myth Makers - Cotton did the novel, total megabanger

that's the thing, i mean, "the gunfighters" is hilarious but quite honestly the best thing about it is cotton's novel, his novelizations are just so peak and the broadcast episodes just did _not_ do his writing justice

but of course none of us gets to choose what gets recovered and what doesn't!

if it's anywhere in the same league as "lower decks" i'll be quite happy!

Just to temper some expectations here - it’s being made for CBeebies, so the target audience is under-5s. It might still be great, most stuff on CBeebies is (which is why I’m still so defensive of the license fee, if that money goes away there’ll never be pre-school tv as good ever again) but it’s unlikely to be comparable to Lower Decks.

oh gotcha

well i did say i'd like to see a younger generation of creators, so

in other news:

https://bsky.app/profile/shivs.kindgirls.online/post/3mob4uz4fs22e

Doctor Who fans free to go back to clubbing and shagging

WITH no new Doctor Who on the horizon, its most loyal fans are free to resume their notoriously hedonistic lifestyles.

The BBC's decision to put the show on hold means its fanbase can return to the all-night raves and sex parties they enjoyed before they got sidetracked by the 2005 revival.

not sure where they got the impression i ever gave up on all-night sex parties

i mean they didn't make _that_ many episodes a year