WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

No full season in 2019; there’s definitely one episode on NYD, and the PR language leaves room for other specials.

This means that in the first five (5) years of his contract, Chibnall will have produced two (2) series of the show.

(Without any further specials, he’ll have done 22 episodes during his 5-year tenure, and Moffatt will have done 14.)

14?

1x Mysterio, 12x S10, and 1x Twice Upon A Time.

i am going to need a therapeutic rewatch of a prev season I enjoyed

I wasn't wide awake when I watched this episode (Rancorous AV Club), so I'll rewatch it before I judge it. I still noticed that half of the lines were clichés, like Chibnall was taking the 250 most common movie lines and trying to make a story out of them, Seuss style.

All Chibnall's best moves(female Dr, the companions and their relationships) seem to have come very early on in the set-up, and he was then out of good ideas before writing script 1.

And I still feel the joyless drudgery of much of Matt Smith's last half series, final 3 eps aside, is a lower point than S2. Most of the anniversary year was wasted, just as the first female incarnation of the Doctor has been so far.

just once I’d love her to get somewhere & yknow, just let her fkn ~play along~ to figure stuff out

i love you Jodi but UGH these stories are so dumb

Although 'Hide' was pretty good in that series too.

Xp

Also, the constant thing where the Doctor has ALWAYS heard of the villain/problem/whatever it is before, rather than encountering it for the first time, and so tediously explains it to the audience rather than letting us all discover it together in an interesting way, is really beginning to grate.

Second viewing. Turns out I didn't miss much the first time. I think this is another Chibnall stinker.

- Regarding cliched lines. Just watch the scene where Graham tells the Doc he wants to kill the monster. Yeesh.

- Radio play writing, where everything on screen needs to be described in the dialog, but not everything described gets shown on screen. Like how there are "dozens of people in there", but only a few get shown.

- Another episode with no background characters that doesn't feel like a real location. The one minor character they encounter, Dilf, has amnesia for no good reason, and only exists to deliver packets of exposition as he recovers. A few robots from Ghost Monument get shown for a second then get blown up off screen.

- The compressed planet idea was stolen from the classic Who serial The Pirate Planet, the only classic serial with a script credited to Douglas Adams alone. (Oh and "planetary genocide"? Were they trying to wipe out the race of planets? Use gooder words please.)

- The Doctor is against killing but is fine with torture a la Tantalus. This is consistent with Human Nature/Family of Blood, at least.

- I didn't get why the Ooks thought Edgelord Predator Batman was a god. Or why E.P.B. was expecting the Doctor to show up before finishing his plan (or was that conincidence?)

- The Ooks get set-up as having Yoda's rock piling powers, which gets paid off by having the rock pile being a weapon and a portal creator. Were they creating the weapon before Tim Shaw even showed up?

- Neural imbalancers get a ton of set-up and are always on screen. They get paid off by solving a filler problem as soon as the filler gets introduced. When they get taken off..... nothing happens.

They're taking another year off apparently.

xp Well, the alternative is that actoring happened - having recently seen Silver Nightmare I was quite concerned about that.

The Ux were just a source of massive 'power' as I understand it - the Stenza brought most of the plans.

There might have been some kind of point being made about how religions generally create doubt, so if you can get into the inside of one (by appearing to a particularly messianic one at a crucial point) you can use doubt to keep you on the inside.

I did briefly think that the 9 planetary alerts might mean that all of the villains might come back - Tzim-SHa, Ilin and his holographic tent, Krasko the time Nazi, Not-Trump, a Pting, um Manish, um Charlie, the Morax, um wait this theory really fell apart.

my son was like "when graham didn't shoot, tim shaw starting blasting him but graham was fine! and then graham shot him in the foot. tim shaw was so dead!" NB "so dead" means lame in uk kid-speak

The cast seem to be bigging up the NYD special as the "real finale"

Hmm

Still curious about how this show's done so well, reviews and ratings-wise

huge viewing boost from sjws, obv

I'm keeping track of episodes here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qcFl2gWV_xiS8Ugd6-1FCJV6MT7IIeM543f3_gVTZjY/edit?usp=sharing . I've watched most of Classic Who now too, all of it in the past 3 years.

I think this was the worst season of Nu Who yet, but I don't really want to watch the RTD era again to compare.

My biggest complaint about this past season is that they had all of this fanfare about a female Doctor and nonwhite companions, then gave the most emotionally rewarding/interesting story line to the old white guy. (Note: I enjoyed and appreciated the story line but it was very difficult to not to feel like the entire season had a rolling "don't worry shitlords, the white dude is the real hero" vibe permeating it. If they'd done even 5 minutes more with Yaz's family or really Yaz in general, I wouldn't have felt this way.)

I do think the season improved as it went on and every episode had something in it I really, really enjoyed, so my complaint is not at the "the show is ruined forever" level.

(I also think the Doctor being a gigantic know-it-all works well and really should be expected given how old she is and how much she's seen.)

I'd go with "the show is currently ruined" rather than "forever".

Beyond the companions and graham, It's weird and cowardly that the first season with a female doctor was the most heteronormative since nu-Who began. There were intimations about Yaz in the Arachnids episode, never followed up, but even if they are followed up, there's really no need to be so discreet.

Intrigued how parent ilxors' kids found the show though.

They loved it because it had a lot of action and fighting. The episodes that didn't have much action and fighting were not as good

And yes, i am speaking for all ilxors' parents children

I spent much of the last episode thinking 'wow this looks really good' which came up two or three times most weeks but peaked with this one.

counterpoint: it looked terrible

Also, the constant thing where the Doctor has ALWAYS heard of the villain/problem/whatever it is before, rather than encountering it for the first time, and so tediously explains it to the audience rather than letting us all discover it together in an interesting way

be fair, she often also googles the baddies twenty minutes into the episode and then reads the results out to the audience, rather than deducing anything or having it revealed by action

GHOST COUNTERPOINT

Show obviously not ruined unless it gets cancelled--it has been a lot of different things and this is just the latest iteration. Be a shame if we have to wait years for the next (and I hope better) one. And I really wish Whittaker was being better served, as she has the potential to be a great Doctor with better scripts behind her.

otm

Yeah, the show is the opposite of ruined by having a very popular year with the most consistent ratings it's ever managed. It's gone multiple years of being nearly entirely shitty before, which means that someone with new ideas gets to come in and remake it in a new form. If Chibnall writes less next time, and brings in more new writers (or lets Jamie Mathieson, Sarah Dollard and Peter Harness back in), great! But if he doesn't and loads of kids and grandparents keep watching, that's probably pretty good for the show, too.

(This finale was such a megadud that it might put off viewers, but it's going to be off the air so long that they'll have time to forget it.)

or: the Cartmel era was so good that the BBC had to take the show off the air for 16 years to recover. The Virgin novels era was so bold and varied that the BBC had to take the books inhouse and borify them by 71%. The Moffatt era did so many things, tried so much and dared to overshoot its ability, that we have to have an era that doesn't try or dare anything, just to let the excitement settle down for a while again.

otm

I'm curious about the fact that Whittaker has never really watched the show before; if she takes the interregnum as an opportunity to delve into past versions of the show / character, now that she doesn't have to be afraid of being unduly influences, what will she make of other stories or performances?

Has any previous era been so profoundly uninterested in exploring the possibilities of the show? This makes Stargate Atlantis look pretty fkn ambitious.

This alternate ending of An Adventure in Space and Time is so emotional 😢 #DoctorWho pic.twitter.com/2TGzJ8lXOa

— Doctor Who Poop (@DWPoop) November 25, 2018

Has any previous era been so profoundly uninterested in exploring the possibilities of the show?

The Lloyd/Bryant eras are generally six weeks of hiding round a corner from a man in a rubber suit -> six weeks of hiding round a corner from a short man in a cardboard suit -> four weeks of something absolutely fucking mental where the companion turns into a jigsaw puzzle and the Doctor has an evil twin who keeps a secret slave army living in a volcano -> six weeks of hiding round a corner from two men in a woolly suit

But they had to crack out 42 episodes a year in them days, you have to spread the good ideas pretty thin just to keep the cameras rolling

Most of the Saward era was on a strict ration of 1.5 ideas a year, in about 25 episodes; his final year dropped to 14 episodes and no ideas or, indeed, plot. (But he plainly wanted the show to be better.)

His idea to get rid of the sonic screwdriver was a good one.

Yeh I guess the Troughton era might've been artifically elevated in my estimation by cool radiophonic musick, Mirrolon and general spillover from a fairly ambitious time in TV storytelling.

And yes the Saward era was pretty hopeless I s'pose although as it started when I was about 7 which is of course key to my residual fondness for it.

When the current series started I began watching it with my kids who liked it well enough, and I was conscious that the cliches weren't cliches for them. But I stopped making the effort because it was so dull, and they haven't complained.

artifically elevated in my estimation

if loads of those stories weren't missing, I'm sure they'd be extremely watchable just by having Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines in front of a camera together, regardless of how non-boundary-pushing they were


His idea to get rid of the sonic screwdriver was a good one.

the concept of making writers be more creative by removing a get-out-of-jail-free card is alright in theory, but in practice it just meant slightly longer scenes where the guards turn their backs and the Doctor sneaks out behind them

(for all her EXTREMELY DRAMATIC POINTING of the screwdriver this year, I'm not sure that the Doctor ever actually used it for anything practical? *bzzt bzzt* tch, the wi-fi's out, I'll have to google this on a computer instead of my screwdriver)

She opened a lock once!

I'm not unhappy with it as a tricorder.

oh, the big locked door that she loved which we never saw onscreen - lol

actually, fair play, the Sawardian no-sonic effect was probably better felt by the time Colin Baker came along: his arrogant cock of a Doctor was suited to thinking his brain was big enough to get him out of any locked room. (and the Seventh probably would have been written without reliance on a gadget anyway: he always learnt about what was going on by carefully listening and observing, or was secretly 28 steps ahead and may have set the whole thing up millennia ago; but McCoy could have done wonders of physical business & parlor tricks if scripts called on him to pull out his magic lockpick.)

Many Xps Knowing everything and reeling it off, and a) the backstory thus reeled off is some bollocks b) this process is joyless

It's so lazy and an insult to the intelligence of kids and cardamon

The dr isn't clever and perceptive, just knows everything. That the 'science' is all gobbledygook doesn't do much to answer a need for a cool scientific and technical role model for girls imo.

It's so smug, like lol big words are just big words

It definitely feels the least like it is “made by fans” of the series than it has been before

Rusty for all his faults, Tennant, Moffat Capaldi etc were all huge boffins

On the one hand it is cool to clear away all the fanwank & old villains... but on the other hand when there’s hardly any mythos at all, and no “there” there, it’s not really that enjoyable. Or maybe it would be with better writing etc

I'm totally up for a clean slate, non-fanwanky Who - but yeah it would have to be heaps better written than this. There were hints of what that might feel like in the Norway ep I guess.

Having said that, if it is truly experiencing a renewal in terms of audience/non-fan public enthusiasm then I'm pretty happy to sit out until it gets proper weird again.

yeah if other ppl are super into then yay

It definitely feels the least like it is “made by fans” of the series than it has been before

Rusty for all his faults, Tennant, Moffat Capaldi etc were all huge boffins

omg Veg :D get ready --

Chibnall is such a massive spod that as a schoolboy he went on TV, representing his Dr Who fan club, to tell two writers of Dr Who that they were terrible and had made the show really uncreative and boring that year

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irIqTPQqgvQ

(to be fair, they were indeed terrible, but this is the "there's always a tweet" of criticising Dr Who writers)

LOL

welp