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

Fun again. NPH excellent.

Felt the Toymaker was dealt with too quickly in the scramble to get to the super feels of the last 15.

I would've maybe had the gold tooth fall off the building and be picked up off the ground by someone we could see as that bit was so knowingly a nod to Last Of The Time Lords as to be groanworthy. Be cool if it was Missy rescuing herself tho.

Amazing, 10/10, peak RTD (that spice girls scene my god!) and I loved it.

https://www.doctorwho.tv/news-and-features/part-missing-adventure-the-celestial-toymaker-to-be-completed-with-new-animation

I don’t know whether this is really what’s happened but I love the idea that until now there’s been a sense of “well it’d be nice to do an animated version of this story but, you know, we can’t because it’s just too fkn racist” and that RTD has now come along and said “hold on, I can fix that! Let’s make the toymaker himself racist! And then that’ll explain all the racism in the original story and make it safe to release again!”. It doesn’t quite make sense but it makes enough sense, it’s just an endearingly audacious retcon, and clearly comes from such a place of love that it’d feel super churlish to start picking holes in it.

And in that context, again, the spice girls scene! Because yes OF COURSE this version of the toymaker would be drawn THAT specific spice girls song!

yeah that pretty much ruled

<3

all the bits about salt and superstition in this and the last episode was a nice reminder that RTD is a massive fan of Supernatural lol

ncuti is such a joy on screen

bigeneration for the bi generation

so the first black doctor gets relegated to being only half of the current drs

not half - same doctor, different time. It’s implied that when 14 finally goes, after all the healing he gets with Donna and family, he’ll still end up regenerating into 15 in 2023 (“doing rehab out of order”) . I thought it was a convenient way to get past all the emoness of the previous seasons so that the new era can start fresh.

but yeah, i can see how it’s nagl to be doing it here, and the thought they will always be keeping Tennant around somehow

I did side eye Donna’s “do you come in a range of colours?” though… like she has a black husband and daughter, wtf RTD

What a surprisingly fun set of episodes. Enjoyed Tennant a lot more as 14 than 10, and was pleased he’s been given an excuse to stick around.

It ain’t feel to me like the new one is a “half-doctor”, more like he’s a new number one.

Enjoyed the completely uncommented upon lack of trousers.

*it didn’t

by far the best of the three tho share the view that the celestial toymaker matter, which was beautifully set up, was squandered somewhat, and resolved weakly.

still, loved ncuti gatwa’s freshness, poise and intent - his fairly brusque dismissal of dr and d and wanting to get on with things was perfect.

The fake accents were a nice way of getting around the racism of the 60s character.

I think it's a good thing that doctor who has largely avoided this type of god-character -- but one special episode in 20 years is a nice change of pace.

At some point I said “are they going to let him put on some pants?” and my partner said “ I hope not”

i love that it went unaddressed the whole time

Well, he was wearing British pants!

i love that it went unaddressed the whole time

they each had half the clothes, nothing to address!

Pleasing that he kept his Scottish accent.

they each had half the clothes, nothing to address

Wait so Tennant was commando?

cmon we were all thinking it

Fifteenth got the raw deal there.

lmao

The weird thing is Neil Patrick Harris has already played the Emcee in Cabaret (because of course he has), so I didn't understand why we got an audition-roll for it.

Actually the weird thing is that at no point during this story setting up a spare Tennant Who free to live their life, does anyone mention that they already already have one? Particularly Donna! she was there, it'll be the last thing she remembers.

I agree Ncuti Gatwa started off strong, established himself well - from "I have bigenerated - there's no such thing" onwards I thought he's got the stuff - more direct than Tennent, who would have stuck in "uh, the thing is" in there.

Hard not to view the new-series companion and the old-series companion literally pulling Doctor Who apart as some kind of metaphor, but - for what?

The "He's present in every screen" reminded me of the position about Doctor Who being fantasy in sci-fi clothes - the sonic screwdriver never not a magic wand.

Noticed that rtd is following the first season in episode order: present day britain, then far future, then haunted house. Although this one also borrowed the s2 gatiss episode with the killer tvs.

Wonder where they're going with mavity and the cab replacement word.

Nitpicks: the "everyone thinks they're right nowadays!" virus and the Doctor's speech about how us humans are always doing a cancel culture, the eyes they rolled. Thankfully this subtext was quickly ignored for the rest of the ep.

At one point I did double-take on whether Logie-Baird was actually Gatiss again in his beloved prosthetics.

I loved the 'Spice Up Your Life' bit but curious that RTD went with such a golden oldie given previous forays into this kind of thing used something more contemporary (Rogue Traders, Scissor Sisters). Not that I could proffer a worthy equivalent from recent years myself.

bit on the nose but Dua Lipa’s Hallucinate obvs (bonus points if it’s the BBC remix)

can i be the voice of opposition about the musical number shoe-horned into the episode? thanks. the lip sync wasn't even good (plus he was singing all the parts himself...)

(he said in the after show thing that he wasn't familiar with it, being American and all)

I enjoyed the song! I enjoy all the classic "RTD annoys Ian Levine" moves.

Note: If you're going to build a really big gun, don't build it to TURN BACK ON YOUR OWN BUILDING

lol let's say The Toymaker just manipulated it so it could

was it an in joke for fans that Mel the computer programmer was there and they needed a computer program... and so Donna coded it up?

Donna was the hyper-typer so that made sense in the moment.

I also laughed every time Tennant said "the vlinx" with total sincerity, it was very cute

In general I like this pivot (finally!) away from Watchmen-style "how would this be if it really happened, it would probably be DARK" to "fuck it let's have fun with it"

Chibnall and Nathan-Turner were probably the worst offenders with this approach, although I guess Nathan-Turner did a lot of "fuck it let's have fun", just very badly

RTD1 and Moffat tend to be better measured episode-by-episode because they're so gleefully all over the map

One thing about The Toymaster in this is that he seemed wholly uninterested in playing games unless someone forced him to; I thought his whole thing was about putting people into games that could/would kill them nit, not goofily torturing people until they forced him into a game.

That said, the goofy torture was very fun to watch

lol that was a bit myxlplytkian, like he’s this all powerful reality shifter with one extremely well known method of just forcing him into a situation where he holds no advantage

presumably he's off the leash in this new universe, compared to his own realm (and he cites mind games as a particularly human thing)

(plus he was singing all the parts himself...)

note that they carefully excluded one particular line, even though this version of the Toymaker was extensively calibrated to contextualise the racist elements of the first serial

so the first black doctor gets relegated to being only half of the current drs

tbf the previous black doctor was also only half of the current doctors (and the very first white-passing one was so relegated that they brought in an extra fake white one to reduce him to only one quarter of them in the anniversary special). also in both the first and second regeneration stories ever, future incarnations of regenerating timelords ran around interacting with their current selves. and this is the third time that there has been a bonus David Tennant doctor sharing the timeline with a current doctor.

ratingswatch: dropped less than 250k from WBY on overnights, tied for highest AI in the last decade*, this run of specials has the highest average AI since Series 7B.

*with Mummy, Flatline, Dark Water and WEAT.

7-day for Wild Blue Yonder projected to be 7.1M on TVs, again around 200k on devices.

Yeah but he isn’t playing mind games, he’s just killing people like a superpowered version of The Joker

in order to FUCK PPL UP MAN (including you, pwned by the NPHmaker)

Star Beast ratingswatch: two days RTD said it was up to 8.7 million, and today on instagram said 9.0. That puts it, on 19 days, higher than the +28 for anything since Rosa (Chibnall's third episode, October 2018).

(Chibnall's debut, on 11.46, was the highest consolidated since +28 started being recorded with Last Christmas.)

7-day for Wild Blue Yonder projected to be 7.1M on TVs, again around 200k on devices.

7.142M - beaten by I'm A Celebrity stripped and Saturday Strictly; beat the Sunday Strictly and the Bake Off final. 9th most watched episode, 3rd most watched programme for the week. TV-only details: 2.752M live, 2.118 catchup same night, 1.992 same week and a 41% share.

Star Beast is the 9th (behind all of Happy Valley, and two of Death In Paradise), and WBY the 22nd, most watched episode of drama on +7 for 2023, and Star Beast's 28 only expires at the Christmas weekend, so we might see timeshift on the other two leap up after Xmas special tx.

Is +28 the ratings in the first 4 weeks?

maybe i should have paid more attention since i didn't understand half of this episode. i guess it's using the crack in time to do its version of it's a wonderful life? but the character never regretted their life so it just seems odd.

Yeah the goblin storyline seemed very poorly thought through - RTD spent all his narrative logic on the specials.

Ncuti is top though.

I liked all three of the Tennant episodes, but found something off about this one, the goblin song was really bad, just sounded very generic and unimaginative. Ncuti was great throughout, yes.

Christmas specials have always been so-so? The first ever Tennant one is the only I can remember liking that much.

Most of Moffat’s were great, a few were big flops. (Chibnall of course didn’t do any.) Rusty’s were usually an excuse to make even less joined-up sense than usual.

I had seen so much Goblin Song in previews that it made a fab opportunity to grab a cup of tea and check the status of items cooking.

Other than that, with a fair amount of Xmas Zubrowka in me, really enjoyed that and love Ncuti Gatwa. He’s already nailed it.

As a Doctor Intro this lacked something imo, certainly compared to The Eleventh Hour which also had to introduce companion(s) and may be unparalleled in that but not sure what exactly - some more meta-commentary from the Doc maybe just to flesh him out more (we didn't see him picking out trousers)...glad he mentioned being adopted at least. Liked everything else more or less. Completely failed to recognise Anita Dobson.

She's got to be The Rani, right?

Probably although feels a bit off to cast someone in that role who also could've played them in the late 80s! But you could say the same of Jacobi...

i think rtd is following up on the mystery woman subplot in "the end of time". although the name mrs. flood suggests she could be related to the pond/river clan.

hate the Rani but a new version might be better I suppose

Rani...rain...flood...RTD you dunnit agane.