WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

have at it, folx

So are we looking forward to this? I'm liking the new-broom approach to the casting/costume, and much as I enjoyed the last series (a lot), the fact that it ended with two incarnations of the Master in a Cybermen origins story that culminated in a surprise appearance from the Hartnell Doctor indicates a freshen up might be in order.

But jesus, Chibnall's previous Doctor Who sits on a spectrum of bland to poor - some of the most unmemorable episodes in recent memory. Or am I being pessimistic?

(cheeky plug: we review Chibnall's Silurian two-parter on the most recent edition of my Doctor Who podcast - http://www.illexplainlater.com/post/166422653503/episode-27-land-of-make-believe - where we discussed some of this stuff...)

v much looking forward to seeing how jodie whittaker plays it, v much apprehensive about everything else

The whole show has been feeling very tired and in need of a new injection of ideas for quite some time now. On the other hand I've never seen Broadchurch and most of the episodes Chibnall had written have felt like mid-series filler so I dunno if he's the guy to provide them.

The incredibly shoddy photoshopped TARDIS behind Whitaker's Mork cosplay in the promo photo sets the tone for exactly the level of quality I expect from ol' Chinballs.

Boring writer doesn't neccessariy mean boring showrunner, I'm hoping.

I am excited the same way I am excited for any new actor who takes on the role of the Doctor. I'm also looking forward to the Doctor-companion interaction and which parts will change and which parts will stay the same. I also enjoyed most of Chibnall's Who stories and think his worst work appeared in the first season of Torchwood.

I did read somewhere that he was planning to have more season-long storylines, which is the opposite direction things should be going in imo. A series of only very loosely connected, straighforward one and two parters each written by a different good writer would do the job fine.

I get that on the one hand, but on the other hand the current Golden Age of Television is really strong on bingeable serialized stories that last the whole season, plus his biggest critical praise came from doing that with Broadchurch.

I think the problem with recent Doctor Who arcs is that they're neither fish nor fowl - an awkward mix of 'arc episodes' and deliberately less important standalones that fails to really build to any sort of dramatic crescendo or are rushed at the final stages. I'd be fine with either 10 completely discrete episodes or a single 10-part story (an updated spin on The Daleks' Masterplan would suit me very nicely).

I think RTD's first season was the only to really pull off its "arc" - unless you count the Riversong episodes as a single story (and why not - at least "Wedding..." finally gave it a satisfying ending).

S1 barely had an arc, just some flash frames of graffiti shot later on and inserted into episodes months after they'd been written

S5 had a fantastic, coherent, satisfyingly complicated plot arc (only undermined by Rory's prop badge), and the first two Capaldi years together pulled off successful parallel character arcs

TBH I'd be happy to settle for the show being fun again and it hasn't felt like that for ages.

^ x1000000
i may try again now

Maybe I read too many Virgin/BBC novels but I can't point at a single season of the reboot that I would say is anti-fun, including Tennant's first season (which is the only one I haven't seen every episode of despite owning multiple copies of it)

lost me with matt smith, tried again with capaldi and still found it a slog

Can we count the 2008-2010 specials?

xp ulysses you crazy, Matt Smith's first season was the best yet.

i agree, first matt smith season is one of the most classic

I demand much less from Who then all of you. I'm happy if it's marginally entertaining which it consistently is. I don't care for her suspenders, but I like her coat, and I think she'll be an interesting doctor. I'm more concerned with three full time companions; that pushes this too far into an ensemble which makes me wonder if they will let her carry the show or not.

the ONE thing I did grow tired of under Moffatt was the manic pace of every episode though. LIke, 1000 things would happen in some of those smith episodes and they just got impossible to follow. Broadchurch, like it or hate it, has a much more staid pace that I hope he brings to the show.

I look at it as back to basics with the caveat that the show has often struggled to juggle story arcs for the Doctor and three full-time companions (the most notorious example I can remember being "Kinda", where Nyssa spends the entire story napping in the TARDIS and pops up at the end asking "hey, did I miss anything?")

If they do it with Bradley Walsh every week I'm all in.

Hot take: Bradley Walsh will be good in this.

Whooch.

I 100% know Bradley from The Chase (not the Doctor Who story) - what is he like when not being really annoyingly anti-intellectual all the time?

in cases like this (like with james corden, when he appeared on Who) I'm glad I'm not english and don't have the full context of how annoying this person is supposed to be (I liked corden's turn on who a lot. now that he's inflicted on the US with his own show, I see why people are tired of him though)

CHURCHWOOD

"an updated spin on The Daleks' Masterplan"

The Master's Dalek Plan

^irl giggle

CHURCHWOOD

it was early in the day and i have... no idea what i meant by this

re chibnall: i'm excited that it's essentially a minor ~reboot~ (god knows this show needs it) but chibnall's writing has never done anything for me. cyberwoman was one of the worst things that has ever happened, although to be fair it was a really long time ago.

Bradley Walsh is a decent actor. He'll be fine.

I worry that being Bradley Walsh gameshow host who's never off the telly might overshadow his acting ability.

re chibnall: i'm excited that it's essentially a minor ~reboot~ (god knows this show needs it) but chibnall's writing has never done anything for me. cyberwoman was one of the worst things that has ever happened, although to be fair it was a really long time ago.

"Cyberwoman" was terrible but "Exit Wounds", "Countrycide" and, to a lesser degree, "Fragments" were great. I also think his weakest Who story is "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" which I still enjoyed a lot because of how silly it was.

He was chirpy never-off-the-telly gameshow host while he was doing Law & Order UK and it didn't seem to have much of an impact on him then.

xpost

dan otm, chibnall's writing didn't stay at "cyberwoman" level thank god. also yeah, it feels wrong bagging "dinosaurs" because it was only ever meant to be the thing that it was. moffat/the bbc clearly wanted silly escapist quasi-blockbusters and that's what the writers delivered.

How much Gatiss are we expecting this time round?

i have seen a lot of lols about the new Doctor’s outfit on FB & elsewhere & it is making me annoyed

her look is on point & awesome
the short trousers with tall boots is such a great look esp with her height & propotions etc, and stripes are great & suspenders are cool wtf is wrong with ppl arg

don’t you get it veg she’s feeeeeeemale

grrr

suspenders are a 'little' costumey and it felt a bit like we were past costumey with capaldi, but I like her coat alot and I'm not sure what people have against culottes, I think they are cute on women.

suspenders are great on those who are shaped to accomodate them and horrific for everyone else, any suspender backlash is just indicative of the 90% of the population who can't wear them or who tried and failed
if you can pull them off (and Jodi Whittaker definitely can) I say put the pedal to the metal and go for it

otfm

(to whittaker pulling off the look)

Otfm

(to me wearing suspenders)

The coast is very Took Baker but with some Davison styling, especially around the lapels. The striped shirt also goes with the retro give.

*coat

*Tom Baker

*retro vibe

lol

“Took Baker Coast”, the new contribution from Mark Gatiss

Since you missed THE ACTUAL FUCKING TITLE of the Gizmodo story, it's pointless interfering with your crusade.

You win, drink your weak lemon drink NOW!

Bye.

“Doctor Who Season 13 Will Be Just 8 Episodes Long” is the headline on the page as it loads for me, but again, I’m on a phone and can’t check the browser header if that’s different.

Browser header (on Chrome) is also:

Doctor Who Season 13 Will Be Just 8 Episodes Long

the less the better tbh

hope dan's ok

y'all makinf me feel nostalgic for the days when I studiously avoided rec.arts.drwho

also, I would watch a season where the Time Lords punish the Doctor by forcing him to look after the real-life Kevin Sorbo for a year

Nothing really matched the day I went back through the legendary RADW flame wars and realized that even though he was a massive cock about it 95% of the time, Azaxyr was more right than wrong

Woof:

Doctor Who: Russell T Davies returns as programme showrunner

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-58682472

Whoah. Glad to see him leave; now surprisingly happy to have him back.

Fire up the Olly Alexander rumours again, I guess!

Yeah, was bored by the end of his first run, but after the turgid Chinballs era, this seems like really good news.

xp That would almost certainly mean a musical episode, not sure how I feel about that.

shows he's run since DW have been mostly fantastic so this is as good as news can get, IMO

So wait this is pretty much a guarantee that if Yaz and/or Dan stays on, one of them is gonna fuck the Doctor after regeneration, isn't it

maybe they will both fuck the doctor

she will regenerate during orgasm

RUSTY ALL IS FORGIVEN, and all it took was a couple seasons of the worst possible showrunner.

I mean by any sane metric a cowardly backwards move, but as you all say, the awfulness of Chinballs has pissed all over the metrics.

When Chibnall signed on, he was so unready to deliver that his predecessor had to be called back to fill in for two years with a full series and a special. Six years later, Chibnall’s eked out two reduced-length series, with the equivalent of one more due by the end of his eighth year. And the BBC are having to bring back the predecessor’s predecessor, as well as that guy’s co-producer/showrunner from 2005-09, and the commissioning executive from 2005, to do another fill-in two years of a special plus a series.

Six years of nobody in charge apparently bothering to look for or develop a head writer with new vision and real energy. Even if RTD doesn’t re-up, by the time he goes it will have been ten years since Moffat quit, an exhausted 54-year-old, but also the last new person to sign on with ideas about making the show fizz with energy and keep trying different things.

my takeaway is that McG should have been the new showrunner

Even with covid shutdown, we could have had three seasons of Mathieson and two of Dollard by now. After giving it to a 40-year-old, a 47-year-old, and a 45-year-old, they’ve shrugged and given it to the first bloke again, who will be SIXTY by the time his first ep airs. Letting tumblr teens plot a season and McG (48 in 2015) direct would have been entertaining for sure.

(obv if it’s the writer of It’s A Sin, Years & Years, Cucumber, parts of Banana, and A Very English Scandal that shows up to work, I will insist on OVER 55’s ONLY from now on)

RTD pitching the new series of Dr Who

https://i.gifer.com/Bjpt.gif

is mcg mcgann or the charlie's angels director?

mcgann is quite a bit older than 48

I wouldn't be surprised to see eccleston back now for an episode

mcg is patrick mcgoohan obv

this is… good? like, yeah safe and cowardly, agreed - but a strong intervention and course correction with a bit of succession planning sounds pretty cool - i had given up on the show and felt cancellation was probably the kindest move, but this is pretty interesting.

wouldn't be surprised to see eccleston back now for an episode

surely this would make eccleston far less likely than before

Erm yeah.

“I left because my relationship with Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner and Phil Collinson completely broke down during the shooting of the first series. I think it’s fair to say… that the first series nobody knows what they’re doing and the politics are raging. The shooting of the first series was a nightmare. I agreed with Russell that I would go, quietly and respectfully, and I would look after the show publicity-wise, in terms of publicising it. And then, without saying anything to me, they announced that I was leaving. They didn’t tell me they were going to do that. I was walking down the street and suddenly I got quite a lot of aggression. And more importantly… they created a quote, and they attributed it to me, which said I was tired. Now the thing is about that, ‘Oh I found it too tiring’, I didn’t find it too tiring. I found it too tiring working with Russell, and Phil and Julia. I didn’t find it physically too tiring. When they said that, any other producer reading that would go ‘Oh, we’re not going to employ Christopher Eccleston because he gets tired’. So it was a lie, and it was in quotation marks, and I’m from Salford, you don’t do that to me. So they issued a kind of apology, but it’s not enough, so no."

Have to admit though that the fact it slams the door on an Eccleston return (which was super unlikely anyway no matter who took over) is the only thing I don't like about this news. RTD's writing has only got better since his first run.

(That quote's from Dragon Con at the start of this month btw so it's a pretty fresh "I still hate these fuckers").

I've been thinking about Rusty's writing obsessions and I think they're focusing on the wrong collaborator for the role. His big thing is weak relationships with mothers, it's in everything he does, and he might well look at Chinballs' work and think he'd be better at writing a female Doctor.

So not Olly Alexander, but Lydia West. And the 60th Anniversary to feature the return of Susan, and to look at how dysfunctional a grandmother the Doctor was to her.

writes down "do not lie about people from Salford" in his immigrant's guide to Britain notebook

Looks like the production staff have been lumping money on Olly Alexander, betting suspended yesterday. Ladbrokes only one back open with him odds on.

Everyone focusing on the potentials for same-sex romance with Olly, but have we also considered the possibility of a "once more with feeling" style musical episode?

I'm sure Rusty mentions that in The Writer's Tale as something he would have loved to have done.

Maybe I'm conflating it with the Torchwood/ABBA musical.

Apparently all the money went on Lydia West, which is why you can't place a bet on her any more. The words "leaked email" have been thrown around.

Entirely coincidentally, and I'm sure not a harbinger of anything, all the official Who social media went offline about two hours ago.

there is now a phone number to call, ending in 3110 (ie Halloween TX), with a recorded message of Jodie saying "if you're hearing this, enemies from across the universe have blah blah etc."

fake-deleting all the social media channels means that the latest blu-ray trailer was only on youtube for a few hours. great work, Chris.

Five of the six episodes in the soon-come Doctor Who: Flux miniseries are by Chibnall solo, ep 4 is an Alderton co-write.

Fuck

Chibnall, the lame duck era. Deep breath and let's get over with it

I saw someone saying the BBC announcing Chibs leaving was a fuck you to everyone who worked on this season. I see it as the BBC knowing it'll be shit and giving fans some positive news to tide them by.

Don't hold your breath too long, there's still eleven months (three episodes) of Chibs after this season ends!

At least he's taken on feedback, after Timeless Child, that having the characters stand still and recite wikipedia lists is not dramatically compelling:

The Flux is Coming... pic.twitter.com/UmvY5rXJbW

— Doctor Who: Flux (@bbcdoctorwho) October 9, 2021

she’s not looking at the camera

lol flux: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flux

she’s not looking at the camera

at least he's consistent

lol flux

at least he's consistent

i've run out of flux to give

at least he's consistent

oh COME ON