WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

Another point of having a large entourage is splitting them up, and the tension of bringing them back together - which hasn't really happened yet, although Ryan doing his own thing yesterday was nice.

I'm split on the ending last night - I thought they'd really aced it until they brought that fucking song in. I mean, they also kind of made it about the White Man's Pain (i.e. Grahame having to make Rosa stand) but I think they just got away with it?

The uplifting song at the end vs the dialogue snippets from next week about spiders was kinda lol mostly awful

There's a good documentary on one of the Davison era dvds where it looks into how three companions is too many and the tactics they used to get rid of one of them for the purpose of telling the story (Nyssa spends Four To Doomsday 'investigating' in the TARDIS, Africa spends Castrovalva trapped in The Master's 'web', Nyssa becomes Anne in Black Orchid etc).

Chibnall has dealt with it so far by splitting the team into two each time:

TWWFTE - an 'action' team of The Doctor, Yasmin and Ryan and an 'information' team of Graham and Grace

Ghost Monument - boys vs girls (including the guest stars)

Rosa - whites and non-whites

IIRC in the first few minutes of Kinda, Nyssa says "I fancy a wee lie-down, you go on ahead," and stays in the TARDIS having a kip for the next four weeks while the other three repeatedly get almost shot and et

Just noticed Adric autocorrecting to Africa.

Nyssa in Kinda is set up in the last episode of Four To Doomsday iirc when she finally re-appears in it.

I think she spends half of The Visitation in the TARDIS making something too.

That resolved better than I expected. I love as amused by the villain being a future alt-right douchebro even if they didn’t use him very well. I half expected him to be captain jack when he had a vortex manipulator.

Next week spiders in Park Hill.

This was decent enough that I have some renewed faith in this season.

I rewatched Ghost Monument. I expect them to return to the issue of dead planets again, since there's so much repeated setup there without any payoff. But if Texas Ranger Boy and Dead Lesbian Syndrome Woman and Hunger Games Toymaker never get mentioned again, it's the worst episode since... Victory of the Daleks? Daleks in Manhattan? Something around there. Just so little that makes any sense, and so many details that never add up to anything.

I said the special effects were good in the first episode. I suspect there were some scenes in the script for Ghost Monument that they decided would look like crap and just cut them out. Like how you don't see the team get picked up in space, or the first ship landing, or flesh eating microbes, or even that fucking door.

I felt this episode was decent enough in illuminating who Rosa Parks was and how awful Jim Crow era racism was, and the reactions of the two POC characters to all of it were thoughtfully done, and provided some good moments... But on the level of the overall plot, yet again, it was pretty weak.

What they seemed to be saying was that Parks' moment of protest was a random incident, a personal reaction to a bus driver who'd been mean to her. Except that the episode also shows, rightfully, that she was part of the civil rights movement, so her act of civil disobedience wasn't really so random. So in the light of that, the bad guy's plan makes little sense: even if Parks didn't ride the bus that night, or the bus wasn't full enough, most likely she would've refused to give her seat the next time the same situation happened.

So really, all Krasko would've managed to do was to postpone the Montgomery bus boycott a bit. And it's not like Parks was the only black person willing to go for such a protest (in fact, a black teenage girl had already done the same a few months before Parks), so even if Krasko somehow made sure Parks would never ride a full bus again, it still wouldn't have changed history. So it's nice for the writers to give Rosa Parks her due, and the actress playing her did a good job in portraying her dignity, but to reduce the birth of the entire African-American civil rights movement to a single (no matter how important) act without which it wouldn't have happened feels kinda disrespectful to the countless other who were involved in it.

All of this could've been explained away by simply stating that the villain was stupid, that what he thought he was doing could never be achieved, since others would've taken Rosa Parks' place in history. In fact, the Doctor saying something to that effect to Krasko, telling him he was doomed to fail, would've been a nice way to emphasize the collective nature of the struggle and the inevitable victory over segregation. But the Doctor seems to agree with Krasko that his plan would work, so she has to make it so that everything happens exactly as it did in the history books, including having the exact same douchebag bus driver there - because apparently Parks wouldn't have protested if another racist white driver had told her to give her seat? It's all just so stupid.

the episode struck a good balance between acknowledging that what rosa parks did was important and recognizing that she didn't, in fact, end racism forever (the yaz & ryan scene was indeed a good one).

Keep thinking about this and how fucking Ryanair only last week asked a black woman to move because an abusive racist fuck wouldn't sit next to her on a plane.

"the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice, except when one tiny thing is out of place and then it's like, the butterfly effect! jurassic park! chaos theory wtf!! WE'RE ALL JUST ELECTRONS, MAN"

It's true that there's no-one who can say whether that specific bus driver was important. Other than Rosa Parks, who had sworn never to take his bus again after the incident in 1944. And Emmett Till had been on her mind, but might in time fade.

Which is not proof - there is no proof. The episode does definitely comes down on the side of "small things can be crucial", whereas you're presumably a fan of "social change will happen independent of the small details" - I don't think it's weak plotting though to pick one over the other, though.

It is weak, self-contradicting plotting, because the episode (rightfully) shows her as a part of network of activists, and yet we're expected to think that if circumstances had stopped her from protesting that specific night, neither she or none of the others would've done it on any other night? Yes, Emmett Till was freshly on her mind, but I would imagine he was on the minds of every civil rights activist in the country, since his murder had sparked a nation-wide outrage. Would the memory of Till have faded from her and everyone else's mind after that one night? Would no one else been inspired to protest due to his lynching?

I've nothing wrong with Doctor Who with doing "one deed by one person can change history" type of plots, but when it's done with a real-life collective movement that cannot be reduced to one person or one deed, it does feel disrespectful and weak, despite the writers' obvious good intent.

The one deed in this case is hugely symbolic. Despite all and any other work done by Rosa Parks that one deed stands out across the globe.

I think the story both highlighting her activism and focusing on the symbolic deed is fair.

I think they rightfully say if she hadn't done what she did when she did, things might have panned out differently. Given the range of awfulness that "differently" entails, it's worth trying to make sure things go as they did.

One thing that the episode did really well was the sense of threat: Ryan felt in real, unpleasant danger in a way any number of aliens menacing previous companions failed to achieve.

It is weak, self-contradicting plotting, because the episode (rightfully) shows her as a part of network of activists, and yet we're expected to think that if circumstances had stopped her from protesting that specific night, neither she or none of the others would've done it on any other night?

Whatever its flaws, I thought this was probably the strongest episode aired in years. The scene between Yaz and Ryan behind the dumpster was something really great to see in Doctor Who, and they managed to be less frantic and more focused on letting the characters react to the story instead of be dragged around by it. Anyway, it's a pretty standard time travel trope that there are certain pivotal events in time that, if changed, change history. Yes, this detracts from the historical reality that Parks' action was very much a group effort, but I'll choose to see it as dusting off a stock Doctor Who plot line, warts and all, and doing a pretty decent job of wielding it with POC characters and history.

Also I dug the concept of a villain who can't kill people.

Whatever its flaws, I thought this was probably the strongest episode aired in years.

Oxygen was less than 18 months ago, and Thin Ice and World Enough And Time were also really, really solidly built

Last two really good stories (IMHO) were the Day of the Doctor from 2013 and a Christmas Carol from 2010. I didn't even bother to watch Capaldi's last season. Blink, Unicorn and the Wasp, Midnight, and Boom Town are other ones I thought were interesting/solid to give my definition of "solid" some context. Human Nature/Family of Blood, The Lodger, Gridlock, School Reunion, and most of Eccleston's season.

Yes, this detracts from the historical reality that Parks' action was very much a group effort

I get that this wasn't what you meant, but one of the things that I liked about it was that it wasn't "Tardis team give encouraging thumbs-up while historical figure does something difficult".

Though I did also like that it isn't "Operative Parks, you'll enter the bus at 17:51..." - it deftly* makes clear that while she is an activist with MLK, he is literally just the local preacher at this point. Something like this was likely to happen, but it was her choice that it was her and on this day.

One enormous trap that I'm glad that they avoided was having her being another historical figure saying "Yes, Doctor, I think we should do as you say"

(I'm choosing to believe that a terrible staging error means that her nod and smile at the end appears to be directed at the Doctor rather than Ryan)

*I enjoyed Ryan as Terrible Time Traveller, and I not-enjoyed-but-appreciated how this put him in mortal danger for some of this episode, but I think another polish would have smoothed the transition from "The first lady to drive a bus" to "I AM SHITTING MYSELF WITH EXCITEMENT THAT I'M SERVING COFFEE TO ROSA PARKS"

I think they rightfully say if she hadn't done what she did when she did, things might have panned out differently. Given the range of awfulness that "differently" entails, it's worth trying to make sure things go as they did.

One thing that the episode did really well was the sense of threat: Ryan felt in real, unpleasant danger in a way any number of aliens menacing previous companions failed to achieve.

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Monday, 22 October 2018 22:58 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. justified paranoia and threat in everyday surroundings. best thing about this episode. krasko fairly unnecessary, other than to have a focus for the villainy, as it could have shown the daily contingent uncertainty about events, with Doctor Who and team attempting to ensure it stays on the tight rope – how history is every day in the balance. an essay in historical materialism!

having slated chinballs for his linear, flat stories, I must admit a part of me quite likes the very old school approach to an adventure, feels quite retro. but episode 2 was awful.

The one half-decent idea that I ever had for a Doctor Who story was similar, but about Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

Also who has the key for the DJP-signal?

I so nearly agree with yr list f. hazel that you not rating Heaven Sent is even more startling!

It is weak, self-contradicting plotting, because the episode (rightfully) shows her as a part of network of activists, and yet we're expected to think that if circumstances had stopped her from protesting that specific night, neither she or none of the others would've done it on any other night?

I've nothing wrong with Doctor Who with doing "one deed by one person can change history" type of plots, but when it's done with a real-life collective movement that cannot be reduced to one person or one deed, it does feel disrespectful and weak, despite the writers' obvious good intent.

― Tuomas

you realize you're asking the impossible here, right? a large part of the appeal of history stories is that we all wonder what made things happen the way they did. the challenge is that we don't know - worse, we don't agree. there's a whole spectrum of beliefs, from "god plays dice with the universe" on one end to complete predestination on the other. doctor who has been unsatisfactorily ping-ponging around that spectrum since 1964. both of the extremes are narratively useless, so in practice writers wind up with some muddled and confused equivocation in the middle.

as far as i can tell the writers' intent in this episode was to say that what rosa parks did was good and important. considering there are plenty of people who are questioning right now whether what she did even mattered, i think it's both a good intent and was accomplished well.

Also I dug the concept of a villain who can't kill people.

― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel)

i think a lot of the best chibnall has to offer is asking questions and going with the most obvious answer. writers' room question: racists are well known for their love of using violence to accomplish their goals, so given that he could totally get away with it, why doesn't he just kill rosa parks and be done with it? because he literally can't. done and done. i could write pages on how this simple decision makes the story immensely more effective and powerful, but i don't know that they necessarily considered all that before making the decision.

otm. justified paranoia and threat in everyday surroundings. best thing about this episode. krasko fairly unnecessary, other than to have a focus for the villainy, as it could have shown the daily contingent uncertainty about events, with Doctor Who and team attempting to ensure it stays on the tight rope – how history is every day in the balance. an essay in historical materialism!

― Fizzle

i'd argue krasko isn't a focus for the villainy, though! to my mind his presence gives doctor who and team reason to be in an environment where they otherwise wouldn't belong.

In the moment I was most pleased with it because it avoids the exhaustion involved in a Who villain presenting an ever-escalating threat like wiping out England, then Earth, then destroying the universe (but I still love you, Logopolis) which gives license for a lot of easy drama and stagy speechifying by the Doctor that only pays off about 10% of the time. But I think you're right... intentional or not, making the bad guy's objective erasure instead of Dalek-style mass murder worked way better.

This was comfortably the best of the three so far but it would probably have worked as a straight historical with no aliens (other than the Doctor) turning up at all. The stakes felt high enough for there to be some real tension and it's the first one where I felt the cast and characters actually gel with one another.

Next week's looks suitably boilerplate, you can't really go wrong with spiders.

Unless you're the third Doctor.

otm. justified paranoia and threat in everyday surroundings. best thing about this episode. krasko fairly unnecessary, other than to have a focus for the villainy, as it could have shown the daily contingent uncertainty about events, with Doctor Who and team attempting to ensure it stays on the tight rope – how history is every day in the balance. an essay in historical materialism!

― Fizzle

i'd argue krasko isn't a focus for the villainy, though! to my mind his presence gives doctor who and team reason to be in an environment where they otherwise wouldn't belong.

I so nearly agree with yr list f. hazel that you not rating Heaven Sent is even more startling!

...in that case I'll sit myself down in the near future and check out Heaven Sent, Oxygen, and Thin Ice!

It seems there's a lot of faint praise or excuse making being used to describe the poor writing thus far, because as far as I'm concerned, the plotting and the dialogue have only been barely competent. I don't think time will see these episodes in much regard, if I can prognosticate.

I do really wish the series would get fun again. Doctor Who should be fun.

as someone who i guess is turning into the chief chibnall defender in this thread, i don't necessarily want to excuse chibnall's hacky writing. i acknowledge and accept most of the criticisms made of his writing. mostly i'm trying to say that there is more to doctor who than clever writing, that chibnall's obvious flaws and limitations do not render the show terrible. that i do enjoy watching the show, and i did think the first two episodes were fun. (last week's obviously wasn't, and also i don't want to tone police here but ugh this is not a good week to complain about how the show should be more "fun".)

i don't know how the show will hold up twenty years from now. i'm not watching it 20 years from now. i like the show because it's doing things the show has never done before. chibnall is changing the show and he's changing it in a good and necessary direction. i get the challenge it poses to fans. of all the ways i've thought of doctor who in the past, i've never really thought of it as "stupid", and the first two episodes of this season were, on reflection, pretty unquestionably dumb. i don't like this particularly, but it's a trade-off i'm willing to accept, because i fully believe that the show will be smart again, because the show is still fun to watch for me and still popular, and because i hope, though i don't know for sure, that he's bringing the show to new audiences without compromising the heart of the show - which isn't, for me, that it's "smart".

i like the show because it's doing things the show has never done before.

prominent role for bradley walsh iirc

however stupid the plots have been, at least i can follow them which is like, good i think?

I'm taking Leee to mean that they shouldn't do an episode about Rosa Parks (or that they shouldn't do a season of them, which seems unlikely) rather than that episode should be fun.

What sort of things do you mean?
― Tuomas

to be frank, doing a historical story that isn't total ass

the production values this season are also excellent. i know it's easier for fans to forgive shit production values than to forgive shit writing, but i want to at least acknowledge that the show has never looked this good. i've seen enough shitty-looking and incoherent big-budget films to know that this isn't simply a matter of budget.

I'm taking Leee to mean that they shouldn't do an episode about Rosa Parks (or that they shouldn't do a season of them, which seems unlikely) rather than that episode should be fun.

― Andrew Farrell

i was being generous and kind of assumed leee wasn't talking about the rosa parks episode at all, because "how dare doctor who do an episode addressing racism" is a bad opinion

to be frank, doing a historical story that isn't total ass

― dub pilates (rushomancy)

ok, that was a little harsh, "human nature" was really good, though this is the first american-set story that isn't an acute embarrassment. look, we're all justly proud of verity, but we are still dealing with a show that has, since 1963, been pretty much been narratively centered on the experiences of white men. chibnall is actively changing that, he's on the vanguard in doing so, and his making that change is both to the show's immediate and long-term benefit.

Did you miss the entire previous season, where the co-star was lesbian woman of colour? And which also had a good historical episode that pointed out the racism of its era through her experiences? (Granted, it wasn't about racism as explicitly as this one... But so far this episode is the first one of the season that actually centered their experience as POC, so I'm not sure the white man's perspective has been completely discarded now.)

i want to at least acknowledge that the show has never looked this good

Adam Smith? Toby Haynes?

(half of Wheatley and Talalay's episodes are visually splendid, but half are stodge)

just changing lenses and aspect ratio doesn't mean that the shots or editing are automatically any better, and the lighting so far has been hack as heck

My "fun" comment isn't specific to "Rosa" (which on its own fails IMO but not because it's not fun), but describes the first two episodes which I've found sour and unengaging.

And for the record I definitely think it's important for the show to broaden its experiences and representations, but I want its stories to be good stories too!

Did you miss the entire previous season, where the co-star was lesbian woman of colour? And which also had a good historical episode that pointed out the racism of its era through her experiences? (Granted, it wasn't about racism as explicitly as this one... But so far this episode is the first one of the season that actually centered their experience as POC, so I'm not sure the white man's perspective has been completely discarded now.)

― Tuomas

i missed most of it because i got fucking sick and tired of moffat, i plan on getting back to it later. i think i saw the one you're talking about though- that's the one where the doctor punched the racist in the face, right? yeah that was a good episode. i think it's definitely worth thinking about the differences between last week's episode and the episode where doctor who punched a racist in the face.

you know what i love most about doctor who, more than anything else? it's run by fans, people who grew up watching the show, loved it, and grew up and got their own successful tv shows. russell davies, steven moffat, chris chibnall. and then other fans and writers for the show got their own tv shows too - mark gatiss, toby whithouse. i think it's great that so many doctor who fans have gotten the chance to make their mark on british television.

at the same time, i am wondering where the contemporary bbc tv series made by women and non-white fans are. i'm glad that doctor who has a lot more women fans since davies started running the show. i think that's a great thing. i don't know how much of that is down to davies, how much of that is down to julie gardner, but it's wonderful. i hope to see these fans get inspired and get the opportunity to run their own tv shows, because it's abundantly clear to me that they have the ideas and the potential. i think that chibnall, not just by making a woman doctor who, but by giving people other than white men the chance to tell their stories, is setting a precedent, giving them a space. i consider this not just a good thing in the present but essential for the survival of the show in the future.

i want to at least acknowledge that the show has never looked this good

Adam Smith? Toby Haynes?

― Eighty Big Ham Tents (sic)

here's where i sheepishly admit i don't actually do a thorough comparison of this week's episode to every past episode and do tend to get caught up in the moment. i duly apologize for any hyperbolic praise i might dish out.

And for the record I definitely think it's important for the show to broaden its experiences and representations, but I want its stories to be good stories too!

― Is Guardians of the Galaxy worse than it used to be? (Leee)

of course, we all do. i also, honestly - i want to like this show. i mean, really, i'm probably not a great critic of the show, i liked the fucking tv movie when it came on. you know, i've been a fan for more than 30 years now, and i've seen a lot of bullshit on the show. i've forgiven a lot of bullshit, though by no means all of it. i've forgiven farting aliens, i've forgiven jokes about getting blowjobs from paving stones, i've forgiven davies destroying the universe and then undoing it at the end of every goddamn season, i've forgiven that episode that suggests chronic mental illness is some sort of superpower, i've forgiven the allegation that the moon is an egg, i've forgiven moffat killing off clara approximately once every episode and then bringing her back the next episode - and that's just in the new series! i don't see find it any more difficult to forgive chibnall for being an incurable hack.

that’s fair.

i liked the moon is an egg one.

I loved the moon being an egg, hated single-celled giant spiders leaping and hissing in no atmosphere earlier in the episode ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

look at his li'l face

https://78.media.tumblr.com/e7e0bdb7e3c8f58b5c0d09152d5250db/tumblr_nd13m1GYx91sk2rnjo4_250.gif