WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

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

It was shit because it wasn't called Cook The Egg.

Hatch The Goog.

i liked the moon being an egg too! i loved that episode. a lot of people didn't. a lot of people, and i'm sorry for even using that phrase but i'm too lazy to do the research, looked at that episode and said "that's fucking ridiculous, the moon obviously isn't an egg, and even if it _was_ an egg, how on earth does it get to immediately lay a new moon exactly the same fucking size as it immediately after hatching, that's physically impossible". this is a fair criticism, and it is all true, every word of it. and i didn't care. this probably says something about me and i will leave it up to the reader to decide what.

If you liked it, you'll love the episode of Super Friends from 1980 called "Man in the Moon"!

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

― It begat eight hymns (sic)

thinking about it this does actually make sense. spiders leaping and hissing in no atmosphere is bad sci-fi. "the moon is an egg", on the other hand, is just out-and-out fantasy, the sort of not-even-wrongness that epitomizes doctor who at its best and worst.

and i guess it also therefore makes sense that chibnall doesn't bother me, because i've come to the conclusion that doctor who is basically a fantasy show and i'm evaluating it by fantasy standards. in reality he's probably more plain old bad sci-fi, but i find the show much less fun and much less interesting to watch that way.

If you liked it, you'll love the episode of Super Friends from 1980 called "Man in the Moon"!

― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel)

thank you for your recommendation. i tried to watch this but youtube wanted me to pay two dollars to watch it, which i don't think is remotely a fair price. so i wound up watching a gentle giant tribute band play a song called "the moon is down" on one of those prog rock cruises. i didn't think this video was very good. i like gentle giant's "acquiring the taste" album and all, but too much of the music was programmed, and it was also a poor quality cell phone video. if it helps i don't hold any of this against you, it was a genuinely good suggestion i think.

thinking about it this does actually make sense. spiders leaping and hissing in no atmosphere is bad sci-fi. "the moon is an egg", on the other hand, is just out-and-out fantasy, the sort of not-even-wrongness that epitomizes doctor who at its best and worst.

yeah, that's the only level on which the egg bugged me - the moon as an egg was One Big Magic Thing to accept as a premise for this science-fairy-tale episode, but every bit of played-as-real science had been wildly nonsensical up until then so they'd eroded the benefit of the doubt.

(obviously I also got very cranky later about "the entire world" voting by turning off their lights when it was daytime in the southern hemisphere. FP'd Peter Harness good and proper.)

the overall difference is that Harness was telling a fable about human behaviour and self-interest and ambitions as a species, and he put things in the plot that shape and interrogate that story. Chibnall's stories don't even set themselves the aspiration of being about anything, so you expect the plot details to at least support the plot, but he can't be bothered to do that either.

(similarly, In The Forest Of The Night opens with a little girl getting lost in the woods and finding a wizard in a magic cabinet to come and help her, so ppl complaining that it seemed more like a fairy tale than a hard SF story about how to fight climate change hadn't been paying attention before the credits)

The reason people didn't like "Kill the Moon" was because it was an allegory for abortion.

different people liked or didn't like it for different reasons.

the allegorical elements of letting a woman make a moral choice on her own, despite the hectoring of government, got somewhat confused by the production design illustrating that by having her smack a giant button saying ABORT, which both didn't match up with the decision being made, and wasn't the allegory Harness had intended.

Yeah but Doctor Who has been an unabashedly too-life show since its inception; it seems a little churlish/nonsensical to get all mad about it now.

That said “pro” but my phone decided that wasn’t a word

It's more of a pro-life attitude in, say, a Catholic context, and not specifically about abortion, right?

Also hi dere.

to me, doctor who is at its best when it works on multiple levels. "kill the moon" was a fascinating and convoluted allegory, but it doesn't really work on a straightforward level. not everybody watches the show to parse out the allegorical meaning of it. (there was also a certain amount of unfortunate ambiguity in the allegory that apparently led some people to the conclusion it was about abortion?) and then of course the allegorical implications of "in the forest of the night" w/r/t mental illness were just bad. that's the issue with allegories - the more complicated they are, the more abstracted they are from the thing they're allegorizing, the easier they are to fuck up. i'm also reminded of the way moffat, having caused the show to go through a total narrative collapse in the season leading up to the 50th anniversary special, nevertheless managed to botch allegory of the "b" story in the special badly enough that he had to retcon it shortly thereafter.

i don't agree with your assertion that chibnall's stories "aren't about anything". he makes big, obvious statements. the details don't always support those statements, but they're generally mistakes of thinking of everything in human terms with human cognitive biases. human cognitive biases can be pretty fucking awful, but about the worst we've gotten from chibnall thus far is the doctor wantonly slaughtering a race of sentient scarves. maybe it would be more defensible if she spent a whole episode fruitlessly trying to communicate with them before making a big dramatic speech like she did with the stick figures, but i'll give chibnall a pass on this. i can't see too much harm coming about from him dehumanizing scarves.

The Ghost Monument isn't about anything, it's just some stuff happening for a while in between the Doctor not having her TARDIS, and having her TARDIS again. every other element of the story literally vanishes offscreen in time for her to get it back!

(there is nothing at all inherently wrong with episodes of a family adventure show not being about anything btw)

nevertheless managed to botch allegory of the "b" story in the special

the mindwipe version of M.A.D.?

still don't agree! "the daleks' masterplan" isn't about anything - they just run around for twelve episodes chasing after the mcguffin until everything blows up. "galaxy four", on the other hand, is about something, specifically that being beautiful doesn't make you good and being ugly doesn't make you evil. i would say that "the ghost monument" is about something (people should work together and not try to kill each other) in the same sense that "galaxy four" is.

and yes, being about something doesn't make it good - galaxy four is one of the worst stories the show ever made - and not being about something doesn't make a story bad.

i don't know what you mean by "the mindwipe version of m.a.d.", sorry!

Will I be the first to say that was utter shite?

• Plot rehashed from part of The Green Death
• Trump analogue DYS
• 'Murkins love guns DYS
• Return to mother and daughter politics
• Return to fathers being useless and socially inept
• Hints of Yaz's romantic feelings for The Doctor AGENDAR
• Handy expert scientist also investigating the same mystery
• Same scientist somehow not companion material because reasons
• Disco Dad in extremis

There was loads and loads wrong with it and I still bloody loved it. I think it's helping me identify the real reason I watch this show. I just want to see the doctor being funny and odd and doctory, and for all it's other faults, last night did that bit really well (I think this might also explain why I find it easy to forgive the hundreds of flaws in the 9th doctor's run).

"Loads wrong with it but i still bloody loved it" is a pretty fair reaction to most Doctor Who - it's often terrible! But still somehow loveable - most of the time.

With respect to Leee's comment about faint praise, that was pure bollocks but I enjoyed it, and it seemed to me that Whitaker's finally relaxing in the role.

Having said that - did I miss something, or did they basically just let all the spiders die at the end? Chibnall's inability to come up with a creative conclusion to his episodes makes the Doctor seem a bit cruel and useless.

I guess the question isn't "Can Chibnall make an episode as good as Blink or Bad Wolf or The Big Bang?" (of course he can't) but "Can he make an middling-but-fun episode like Gridlock or Turn Left?" (possibly).

Isn't it from GMoz's Animal Man, the whole bit about insects being too big for their respiratory system to work properly? (From memory he says it about a giant ant?)

I think this might also explain why I find it easy to forgive the hundreds of flaws in the 9th doctor's run

Still the best run since the reboot, if only because it all felt so fresh.

xpost - yep! it's in issue 2:

https://imgur.com/a/e5G9Zbo

Dug that one out of the grey cells.

I actually rate Turn Left pretty highly, I watched it back to back with Midnight and enjoyed both of them a lot (though I appreciated its bargain-basement Children of Men vibe, where I can see it would be annoying to some).

Anyway, this was a lot of fun. I was near Canary Wharf on Saturday and remembered fondly RTD's playfulness in claiming that the reason it was built with nobody to move in was that it was surrounding a space-time anomaly. That and the appearance of the 'ghosts' on Eastenders was good not bad, and while Mr Big impersonating Alec Baldwin impersonating Trump wasn't as good, I did like it. And he's another escaping villain!

I'm assuming there'll be no more Sheffield for a while, then?

'Murkins love guns DYS

But... Americans DO love guns.

(I liked this episode, which had a nice Third-Doctor-trapped-on-Earth vibe to it)

I agree with aldo, this was another turd.
- Why did they spend half of the episode explaining what was going on in multiple ways? It's like a Stephen King book with an Indian burial ground and a government conspiracy and also solar flares. Jesus it's a bunch of GIANT SPIDERS, this doesn't call for rocket science. Also, this breaks the streak of episodes that did special effects well.
- Why establish that the spiders are all over the place then have the Doctor think they are only in the hotel?
- There was ADR of people saying spiders don't attack humans, but apparently all their other behavior is the same.
- The act that shows a character being evil is the killing of a dying spider. The Doctor's calls for non-violence ring hollow when the monsters are house spiders.
- another female character whose only personality trait is that she's a lesbian. and then she gets killed off.
- Chibnall thinks all living things have an instinct to come back home -- followed by all of Doctor's companions wanting to leave home at the end of the episode.
- It's apparently an obvious idea to use a phone for its loud bass. Oh wait, they did show speakers -- but they didn't show a subwoofer, wtf.

I mean if you want something else to be annoyed about thers's also the fact that the doctor bought a blue t shirt with rainbow stripes from a charity shop, then somehow also magically owns a matching red t shirt with rainbow stripes which they haven't bothered to explain AT ALL.

But c'mon.

I gotta draw my line in the sand, viz Doctor Who trainspottery, somewhere before caring about "did we see a SUBWOOFER or not" :)

Did anyone notice a couple of [insert joke here] pauses in the script? After Yaz's mum says "you got a call from a doctor" there was a moment of Pinteresque silence, kind of like setup-punchline, but without the punchline

Thinking about Chibnall's villains, so far they've been: Dinosaurs, Spiders, The Predator, A Man in a Tent, and, er, Racism. So the last one worked, but it's not the *most* imaginative list ever (unless you are 7)

(Oh, and towels.)

Also The Man, in his Suit and Tie.

Thinking about Chibnall's villains, so far they've been: Dinosaurs, Spiders, The Predator, A Man in a Tent, and, er, Racism.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Planet of the Spiders, The Time Warrior (ok, I'm reaching), Mind of Evil, The Mutants.

The Man, in his Suit and Tie

Colony In Space

I actually liked this episode more than any of the previous ones... The plot was still full of holes, and kinda fizzled out in the end, but the interaction between the entire extended cast worked nicely. Obviously it was still far below the best episodes of the previous seasons, but I guess meandering plots with good character moments are the best we're gonna get from Chibnall, so best not set your hopes too high.

This was the third time in the first four episodes where the bad guy isn't defeated in any conclusive way but just disappears from the picture. (Four out four if you count the tent guy from episode 2, but he wasn't really the antagonist there.) So either Chibnall has real trouble working his "the Doctor doesn't kill" (except for sentient towels) approach into proper endings, which I guess is possible, or he's planning something bigger for all these villains. This time it felt even more obvious than with Tim Shaw or Krasko that Mr. Not-Trump was set to return..

(Voiceover: Chris Noth is not set to return to Doctor Who)

Oh, ok? Then the was a really weak ending.

Btw, it felt like this was the first episode in a looong time, where the story is set on present-day Earth, and Monster of the Week was neither aliens nor some kind of supernatural beings, rather than your good old-fashioned science monsters. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that's happened since the third season episode where Mark Gatiss turned into a mutant manticore?

this episode was the best since the restart. Tuomas on the money about Chibnall's problem with the problem of killing. there were all sorts of *issues* with the episode, but it was v enjoyable. the things that bothered me slightly was what the hell happens to all the other mutant spiders in Sheffield. It felt like a problem half solved. I was down with the mercy killing of the giant asthmatic spider *or would you just rather watch it suffer as it dies, Doctor*. But I think the thing that bothered me *most of all* was the goddam title, 'Arachnids in the UK'. Is it a not-even-a-pun on Anarchy in the UK? Why its incredible lack of any sort of attempt at poetry? it feels like the thing you write down when you're brainstorming ideas. Am I missing something? So when the title's the most annoying thing about an episode then it's probably ok.

Oh, but

Chibnall's inability to come up with a creative conclusion to his episodes makes the Doctor seem a bit cruel and useless. < this and yes what's with all the villains just sort of scampering off at the end? Are they all going to appear in the final episode and go SURPRISE!

Yeah, if the bad guy of this episode wasn't set up to return later, then at the very least the Doctor should've done something similar to what she did to Harriet Jones in "The Christmas Invasion", as it was pretty obvious he hasn't learned any kind of lesson and is going to continue abusing his power. If this really was the last we saw of him, then the ending was either incredibly inconclusive or pointlessly cynical for Doctor Who.

actually pretty excited by the idea that these second-division gomer villains might return en masse for a season anticlimax

doctor who and the cosmic bathos (aka "the pandora prolapses")

First enjoyable episode! As mentioned, nonsensical plot with a dumb conclusion, but the Doctor being weird and companions getting fleshed out made this the most Whovian episode of this regime.

The thing about the spider being too big to breathe is actual science fact.

Yeah, I remember learning that fact from Animal Man, maybe Chibnall did too?

I'd bet Animal Man's Grant Morrison learned it from this:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTD8No7yxIv1PTggX5lJPyJgwvhz1HhyBF0G_YSYwLfus3DLYJ4jA

this was only ok. as was the rosa parks episode which would have been better without the awful song. the historical innacuracies about Parks bugged me (it was an organized and planned event, etc...ok my kid went to a school named for Rosa Parks so I know this shit in and out, I guess I can forgive others for not following it slavishly) and yes, it did feel like quantum leap (which is a show I liked). Really hoping the stories improve soon; I like the cast, I like the pacing, I like Jodie Whitaker, but they all seem like B- stories so far.

Actually becoming part of events to ensure things happen as history recorded it, good idea for a show that.

which would have been better without the awful song

you mean Rise Up by Andra Day, the Black Lives Matter anthem? yeah terrible choice for a story about Rosa Parks. and on a show like Doctor Who, defined by an understated, restrained approach to pathos.

Point: f. hazel