WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

Yeah, and most of the time when the companion was talking, they were talking about the Doctor - I don't honestly miss that.

She reminds me of Su Pollard and I'm not alone in this thought.

She feels weirdly crowded out and unestablished as the Doctor though - I'm pretty sure that Ecclestone, Tennant, Smith and Capaldi all got way more alone time on screen, or at the very least the fact there was usually just one companion gave their character space to breathe.

On the minus side, this was yet another story set on another galaxy where everyone looks like human... Except of the Pting, of course; I wonder if the whole special effects budget was used for it, so they couldn't even afford rubber foreheads for others. I really miss the robots and lizard people and blue men of the previous seasons, having everyone look the same as the protagonists makes it feel uninspired as science fiction.

― Tuomas

"star trek" does foreheads, "doctor who" does tattoos

really if your standard for "inspired science fiction" is forehead prosthetics i don't know what to say

i do disagree with the idea that whittaker's doctor is somehow undefined. i was actually just thinking today about the difference between her doctor and her predecessors. today i'm struck between that scene between the doctor and astos, and how well-handled it was. it's not flashy, it's not showy, it's just really incredibly solid character development

because here is the moment in the show where a woman is taking orders from a man. that's a goddamn tough one. chibnall manages it - first, by not foregrounding her gender, and second, by making her act in a manner _consistent with her character_. why is the doctor tearing up the ship demanding to be taken back to kembel or wherever? i mean, that's ridiculous, right, yet another example of chibnall's inconsistent characterization? no, it's not in this case. she acts this way because that's who she is. she's extremely stubborn and extremely vindictive. she once spent something like six billion years punching a wall out of spite. (and somehow the show under chibnall is too "violent"...)

but she listens. astos is in the right, she's in the wrong, he knows what he's doing, and she acknowledges this, acknowledges it by herself without having to have a companion in the room to talk her down. she's behaving in a way that i have a hard time imagining any of her predecessors behaving, and chibnall does it without doing some creepy william marston shit. he's actually really very good!

it does feel slightly unfair to Jodie Whittaker to stick her with three companions which is obviously going to dilute her screentime and presence. I could do without any two of them but not sure which two. Individually they're all interesting I just feel like they aren't getting enough time.

"star trek" does foreheads, "doctor who" does tattoos

really if your standard for "inspired science fiction" is forehead prosthetics i don't know what to say

"(Okay, the Time Lords are like that too, but I think the Grandfather Clause applies for them.)"

oooh, maybe Grandfather Clause is Doctor Who's real name! (It's not. It's "Doctor Who".)

"But all the people in Ghost Monument, and at least the pregnant guy here, maybe the medics too, are supposed to be a different species, so it's just lazy writing to make them look and act just like humans. Dude has baby sac that's said to have no nerves, yet he acts exactly like a human when he goes to labor?
― Tuomas"

Really, I don't know what to tell you here. The aliens aren't convincingly alien because, to the best of our knowledge, there are no aliens. It's an impossible and arbitrary standard and one Chibnall's not even trying to meet. Every character on the show, including the ones that look like salt shakers, is necessarily basically human, and I can't fault Chibnall for not putting in a lot of effort to hide this fact.

Arrival was a movie that did truly alien aliens very well, and made a good story out of it. Sometimes Doctor Who will go for this angle, but the focus here was an alien race which was pretty much humans except the men get pregnant, and gestate really fast. In this case, you WANT them to look otherwise human, because the whole point of it is to explore that particular counterfactual, which they did a pretty good job with here. Giving the alien big forehead ridges, antennae, and six eyes would change the focus from the significant difference to just a diffuse alien-ness.

In this case

yeah but Tuomas is citing this as just one example of Chibnall's dull approach to humans vs aliens. if a character is meant to be SCARY and EVIL then they are hideous-faced or a swirling ball of snakes or a gromlin, and should be murdered ASAP. if they are meant to be aliens from a distant, ancient culture for whom we have 1x skerrick of empathy, they look like humans in C21st clothes. even though nu-Who makes it a whole thing about all future human-looking space inhabitants being descended from humans.

(was Future Racist meant to be human or a Space Racist? idrc)

I don't think there's more humans than usual in this series of Who, they're just very... boring.

Really looking forward to a month of Chib-free episodes.

yeah but Tuomas is citing this as just one example of Chibnall's dull approach to humans vs aliens. if a character is meant to be SCARY and EVIL then they are hideous-faced or a swirling ball of snakes or a gromlin, and should be murdered ASAP. if they are meant to be aliens from a distant, ancient culture for whom we have 1x skerrick of empathy, they look like humans in C21st clothes. even though nu-Who makes it a whole thing about all future human-looking space inhabitants being descended from humans.

(was Future Racist meant to be human or a Space Racist? idrc)

― Sing The Mighty Beat (sic)

the uncanny valley is a thing and chibnall is happy to take advantage of our subconscious fear/repulsion when it suits him narratively

this can certainly be used to reinforce real-world prejudices but so far in this series chibnall has stuck to using the Othering-trick on blue people with teeth stuck all over their face and sentient scarves. even the giant spiders get the sympathetic treatment from chibnall. he hasn't created another rill or ood yet, but i don't know that he's required to?

He isn't required to, no, but the Ood are a good example of alien race that looks and behaves quite different from humans yet still gains our sympathy, and works as good story vehicle exactly because of that difference. Creating something like that is proper imaginative science fiction writing, and Chibnall hasn't really managed to do that yet.

sure, chibnall doesn't write proper imaginative science fiction, in much the same sense as bernstein's famous statement that beethoven never wrote a proper fugue.

What do you mean by that?

I don't think Chibnall is a bad writer per se, as I've mentioned, he's decent at writing human interaction and character moments, in this episode too. But if that's what interests him most, and he has no knack for coming up with good sci-fi ideas, then he should've continued with crime dramas and not taken the helm of one of the biggest science fiction franchises of all time.

he's decent at writing human interaction and character moments

he's decent at employing humans who can attempt to sell his stunted efforts at interaction and character moments

xp That is really not a good description of Doctor Who - it's been fantasy ever since he got his magic wand.

And it has had human-like aliens FOREVER.

Technically they are all Timelord-looking.

I felt sorry for Pting getting 51'd despite its destructive behaviour but no real harm done and I'm sure we'll see it again in a month or so.

I felt sorry for Pting getting 51'd

flag pting

suggest bomb

he's decent at employing humans who can attempt to sell his stunted efforts at interaction and character moments

― Sing The Mighty Beat (sic)

nah, i'm not buying "stunted". chibnall doesn't come across to me as having the emotional deficiency "stunted" implies. I'd take "hamfisted". I continue to argue that his most egregious narrative failures come from an instinctive understanding of human cognitive biases and his willingness to unreflectively represent those biases over logic and reason. For instance the ending of the spider episode - if this was supposed to be a serious examination of end-of-life issues it's a laughable failure, but it wasn't. It was a jeremiad against unreflective violence, as represented by not-Donald-Trump. The Doctor's solution to the spider problem was shitty, shitty in a particularly _human_ way with the concept of a "natural death" and all. If your conception of the character is an alien super-logician who can always think of the best and most moral answer to any given conundrum, this is a betrayal of the character. If your conception of the character is someone who is driven to always be kind and never be cruel, in the specific sense that a typical Western human being would understand those qualities, this is a very good portrayal of that character. It's absolutely a performative version of that morality, but I think it's a good thing for us to accept that much of our morality is basically performative, that we aren't terribly driven to understand the internal states experienced by icky giant spiders. Chibnall's vision of morality is in many important respects a fantasy, but we all live in fantasyland now.

my gf when they explained pting: "oh, so it's disney's stitch"

Been wondering why only the Doctor suffered any lasting effects of the sonic mine and if that is significant or was just a way to slow down all the running.

nah, i'm not buying "stunted". chibnall doesn't come across to me as having the emotional deficiency "stunted" implies.

I'm saying he's not a very good writer, I'm not saying he's never made eye contact with his children

when criticizing someone's writing, word choice is extremely germane imo :)

in other news i really enjoyed reading this article that showed up on my feed (in stark contrast to most of the shit about doctor who that shows up on my feed):

https://www.citymetric.com/transport/here-are-over-2500-words-role-london-s-tube-has-played-tv-s-doctor-who-4336

"Tsuranga" has the lowest imdb rating of any nu who episode. I guess a lot of people hate it, while no one loves it.

I haven't really liked any of these. I like the Doctor and the companions as individuals.

First episode - weak Predator ripoff. What was the swirly ball thing and why did it even matter? Episode might have been violent, technically, but no viewer of any age was actually scared of weak tooth face mister bean man, were they?

Desperate race for dubious riches on deathworld was played for laughs by all. Deathworld too normal looking. Robots arbitrary. Scarf monsters w disembodied hammer horror voices had a legitimate nightmare feeling but used poorly, the nightmare did not translate to tv plot.

Rosa gave Rosa Parks a fairly dignified treatment, but the Terminator ripoff space Nazi was weak. Better much better for the baddies to have been just normal 1950s white racists. Are we saying that real Rosa Parks story isn't material enough, and we require an alt right breitbart Terminator?

Surprise surprise I was not scared by the giant spiders ... and I'm arachnophobic. This was those spiders from giggly internet chat about scary spiders as the inverse of cute puppies. They hedged their bets with the lol Trump character. Wasted opportunity. Overlook hotel + evil Trump hotelier could have been much much better used. No one was actually killed in this or any episode so far, were they?

Real life Trump isn't a naughty grown-up man who kills animals out of fear, because he's lost his childhood innocence. That is a common trope in who, and they chose that as their reading of Trump. Trump is really much, much worse than this especially to children and honestly the messaging here, about Trump to young viewers, is way off. It's like people saying they don't like him just because it's socially expected.

Last episode ... okay spaceship hospital interiors. Bullshit cute monster that was a ripoff of Disney's stitch and that thing off futurama.

To sum up: monsters not scary enough, science fiction not serious enough, almost entirely ripoffs.

Which is of course a complete misunderstanding of Dr Who, with its long history of silly bubble wrap monsters and nonsense 'sf' premises. We're not watching it expecting Alien, The Thing, or 2000 AD or Blade Runner, are we?

Except it's not a complete misunderstanding, because the Doctor character needs some kind of grim Conradian high seriousness of cold space and eldritch horror to bounce off. We know it's not Alien, etc, but we need them to put the hours into *pretending* it is, sufficient so that the Doctor can then subvert it by offering it a jelly baby. What happens when the fun of kicking the classic series in the face runs out?

The tone here is *all* City of Death, u know, that stupid comedy episode written by that dickhead, that I don't class as a real Dr Who episode.

There is a politics to this children's tv show, and it's mostly the politics of lol liberals in a lol echo chamber, chuckling at parent-level injokes as if actively trying to undermine the serious bits when they come along, i.e. Yaz talking about being called a paki and the question of what makes a granddad a granddad.

I can entirely see the rationale for things being this way this series. What I've typed here would be irrelevant if this series happened to be good; it just happens not to be very good.

Still wish they would let Peter Davison write and direct an episode.

After "too bad boys don't have a Doctor to look up to?" Doubt that's happening any time soon.

the woman whose name i can't remember

I think her name is the Doctor.

Second episode in a row that I enjoyed, although I'm probably grading on a curve as I recognize that it is isn't otherwise memorable.

Interesting that the Doctor didn't know what Stitch was and had to have a database bestiary explain it.

IMO Jodie seems to be relaxing more into the role than ever.

City of Death, u know, that stupid comedy episode written by that dickhead

one hell of a challops

that were good, that

more than once the Doctor just immediately changes her mind as a result of perfunctory lobbying from a companion and.. it was kind of refreshing? like she appreciates they may actually know a bit more than she does about some things

I liked it. Again, human story could have carried it without ex assassin bat people. They were alright though compared to the previous monsters this series.

I also thought it was an example of: writing about deadly serious traumatic events, for children, necessarily corny dialogue, but doing a good job of that.

i am 100% behind using a kids’ show to teach children that colonialism fucking sucks

baller move to do it on remembrance sunday too imo

Establishing shots of actual poppies in actual field also *chef kiss*

Holy shit, a good episode!

I'm not sure I'd go that far, but this reframing is bringing me around.

I may or may not also need to have a word with myself that my main problem (apart from the usual "this me reading the bit I have to say here" scenes) was that I thought Jaz's nan in 1947 seemed too modern.

i am 100% behind using a kids’ show to teach children that colonialism fucking sucks

Although, I think they chickened out on this - barely any mentions of the occupiers and the villain seems like a lone angry asshole (who gets away with it, again)

Also, like the spiders a few episodes ago, the Doctor powerlessly resigning people to their deaths seems like a not-very-Doctorish tendency. At least it made (sort of) sense this week, even if the City on the Edge of Forever/Fathers Day parallels were a little strong. And Yaz, even in her own special episode, still seems undefined.

Good stuff, though

easily the best so far. and while i agreed with most of what cardamom said upthread , in this case i thought the aliens were great. both the way they initially manifested themselves in the mind, and the way their apparent threat was convertible to a noble purpose. did feel like a religious aspect to them, demonic guardians of death unwitnessed.

the direction and pacing was good as well. and yes she was too modern but watchya gonna do. that sort of thing is everywhere (some of the mannerisms in little drummer girl holy hell, and on of the lieutenants in the terror sheesh) and in the end not sure it matters here.

also felt it did history a bit better than the rosa parks episode - i remained uneasy about the ambiguities of doctor “rescuing” history, as if fate rather than the people driving it was the overriding force. i know it’s possible to argue round but it bagged at me.

here it was unflinching, clear eyed and the impact on the characters was central, but after all in the end this was as much about yaz and the doctor being witnesses as being able to
do anything.

Do we have a discussion about drummer girl anywhere?

Although, I think they chickened out on this - barely any mentions of the occupiers and the villain seems like a lone angry asshole (who gets away with it, again)

The aliens' gimmick is quite similar to the Testimony from Twice Upon a Time, which was only last Christmas

xpost - yep! but why were they about to die, who *is* this mountbatten, what did the english have to do with india, anyway?

basic questions but it felt like too much relied on viewers' previous knowledge. it's *great* that they wanted to tackle this subject, i just don't think they made the stakes clearer than "oh shit bad stuff's happening"

i'm not sure there's a way they could've done that without captain expositioning-it. but i still think they let the UK off too easily

I mean, I was going to joke that Graham's "Yeah sure, let's go to 1947 India, lovely jubbly" was intended as a damning indictment of the UK educational system... do you really think that people wouldn't know about the Raj?

the way they initially manifested themselves in the mind

I don't understand why they did this. How does it help them bear witness to hidden deaths?

Felt hard to believe that Umbreen hadn't realised that her granddaughter had grown up to look exactly like that one strange girl who turned up on her wedding day and then was never seen again. There seemed to be various hints in the early part that she DID realise; "maybe I'll tell you when you're older" (ie after you've travelled back and seen it all yourself), "my favourite granddaughter" (because you were at my wedding!), even the fact she'd been reluctant to discuss those events right up to the point where Yaz came back to the present (because she couldn't warn Yaz about her own future until after it had happened). All seemed to imply she'd figured it out already, and so it felt disappointing to me when she hadn't.

how well, though, do you remember a face seen once 70 years ago? Especially if your granddaughter slowly matures into that face over time.

I loved this episode. Even if I don't care about the "rules of time travel" nonsense. I got teary eyed at the end.