WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

No problem with it being a show for kids, just want it to be better than disposable trash for kids.

Just watched the first part of Mackenzie Crook's Worzel Gummidge adap, and somehow managed to find a show for kids to be delightful, charming, spooky, mildly witty, and to follow through on the premises and gags that it sets up.

I should give that a go, Wiesel Gummidge terrifies me a a child and I could exorcise that demon.

Kids LOVE long speeches about state work being outsourced to tech giants!

This was fine? Not great, not terrible.

Not sure I'll bother with this season unless I start reading amazing reports on this thread.

I did think it was a nice touch for the Doctor’s favorite spy to be a desk-bound analyst (lol I almost typoed “analist”)

My expectations for last year was "the cast are charming and work well together", and Sacha Dhawan fits in well there. Also "the story might be good if Chris Chibnall isn't writing it"

I honestly spent some time wondering if Lenny Henry had a son - he looks well!

The two Worzel episodes were really, unexpectedly impressive.

I'm kind of with Dan on this, the episode compared to some of Chibs's worst offerings from the prior season is at least competent (though if we start burrowing into the ideological themes (but why) we'd find plenty to object to). In the end, though, the episode is really just a modern techno-thriller in Doctor Who cosplay. No anarchic spirit, no fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants mummery, no cleverness, no ideas. I'd take Moffat at his most indulgent over the dead fish running the show now.

A modern technothriller for kids, where all of the shots fired in the terrible chase hit a part of a bike but not an important part or the cast.

that really was a bad chase

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/X4jF3xTxKWM/hqdefault.jpg

I am working slowly towards the present series with my kids (we've done s1-6 in last 18 months) so won't get to this one for ages, but today's episode seems to be going down very well on twitter

Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful.

Steals directly Rusty's "Master returns and puts companions on the run/undercover by taking over the internet and telling everyone they're bad" device
Bringing Gallifrey back to destroy Gallifrey to bring Gallifrey back to destroy Gallifrey to bring Gallifrey back to destroy Gallifrey as nauseum
Something something arctron something something that's the plot

Anyone who's ever interrupted a simultaneous overwrite like that knows it ends up in a bricked device.

Saying right now that turning off the Master's perception filter so he no longer looks like a white Aryan but a brown skinned traitor is a) a touch racist and b) a bit brutal (but c) why would they even think it was him?)

Ugh.

Also I have seen Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure already.

Actually it's Bogus Journey, isn't it.

Evening jacket look reminded me heavily of Max Wall which presumably wasn't the desired effect.

Everything paid off in part 2 imho

“What’s it doing?”
“TOTAL… transference.”

"TOTAL... shutdown."

seems pretty clear that the choice is between hatereading this thread or hatewatching the show

^ But at least this was Chibnall recycling his own self-contradicting nonsense. Both these episodes piecemeal ideas and jackdaw lines from Davies and Moffat, without re-examining or newly contextualising or taking inspiration from them, just plonking them (and half-remembered ideas of What's In Bond or People Who Computer) down in this witless sequence of events without the ability to connect with anything.

Gomez, Moffat and Missy (and Simm!) took a version of the Master that expanded, drew and rounded off a character arc for this 47-year patchwork character, while leaving endless room for Big Finish future TV writers to slot in more villainous, earlier versions of the character. Chibnall can't even wait the length of a Moffat-standard series to undo it all, dropping a maniacally cackling Ainley-style Master in, without even the motivation of Sawardian revenge or Davies' jealousy. He brings back a mode of killing last seen in... 1981? as though that will mean anything to the 2020 audience -- not even making it scary on its own terms,let alone in a new way. Waving tiny matchstick men just inspires a shrug, whereas 1971 blue-screening an actor into a lunchbox still looks unsettling.

"When's this all going to stop for you, all this killing and madness?"
- how about 12 episodes ago, at the conclusion of a year-long arc?

Gallifrey (or, if you prefer, Galli-free) is destroyed,! Thousands of years of guilt add up to find a way to save it, and free oneself emotionally. Then one hears that its disappeared, and find oneself tricked into journeying through several million years of (unrelated) guilt and (related, building) anger to discover it at the end of the universe, and conclude - as one's 55-year character arc suited - that this hidebound institution is better off locked away in its own insularity. But Chibnall has a great idea: it's destroyed again! And even though he insists on both Gallifrey and Time Lords living in exact synchronised linearity, it's destroyed in a) the year 2020 and b) the Doctor's current timeline. Just like Moffat, let's shut the TARDIS door after looking at it and brood for a while.
(At least this one was nearly two series ago that Moffat did it. Should feel nice and fresh to ppl binge-viewing on iPlayer in March.)

Women have been grand and creative and underappreciated through history! Let's redress that balance by... denying them agency and brain-raping them against their explicit requests. So that they can die in Dachau in a few months, believing their struggle and brilliance and ingenuity was useless, tbf.

"Love a pacifist" and "don't approve" of guns -- but just like last year, still 100% approve of blowing up people that look different to you with bombs within minutes of seeing them, in a way that's likely to kill multiple bystanders. (speaking of, pulling off the Master's space-mask so that the Nazis can see he's brown is played... like... a joke? Like Chibnall's idea of a Roger Moore Bond quip on murdering somebody? This was really queasy in a way I don't think was intended.)

The Master having to live through decades to get out of a trap the Doctor set isn't just taken from Moffat without variation, it's taken from The Curse Of Fatal Death, Moffat's parody of some of the dumber unexamined things in old-style Dr Who. They can't even be bothered to have him change his hairstyle in seventy years!

Also wah wahh lol Lenny Henry tried to kill the entire world bcz his mummy thought he was a shit. At least that one's ripped off of Tim Burton Zach Snyder Trump.

Like last season, half the dialogue is describing whats happening on screen that that moment, and a quarter is written in later and dubbed over the back of people's heads. There was almost an unbroken minute of Ada staring at the back of the Doctor's chattering barnet while she tried to hotwire the aliens tonight!

and nah, it's Excellent Adventure where they make mental notes to go back later and do all the things that saved them along the way.

xpost

the Verity! podcast loved ep 1 if you want some positivity affirmation Tom

First half of part 2 was passable, then Chibnall kept piling on the Chibnall bullshit.

At least this week's episode wasn't paced like a Michael Bay movie.

Thinking about it some more, the Master was a late addition to this story, wasn't he? He might say he helped the cybermen oops i meant casavans, but he doesn't actually add anything to the story. It's all about Bezos and computers being evil.

Ah yes, I meant to drop in Curse of Fatal Death to my post too but forgot.

I'm not going to rewatch any Chibnall episodes this year to make sure it wasn't me that couldn't follow, but I thrice rewound the scene of the Nazster marching goons into Noor's study, machine-gunning the fuck out of the floor, and marching out with no bullet holes in the floor, to see if I'd missed something. Does this make visual sense to anyone else? Or that Ada recognises his voice when he doesn't speak during the scene?

I know every single other shot in these 130 minutes went wide except for the crack assassination laser pulse zap bullet through Stephen Fry's head (before dozens from a dozen different sources go in various directions, even though The Master fired them all. Were there 12 of Dhawan outside, all standing on different grassy knolls?), but we saw woodchips flying up during the active fire.

Amongst the things that just don't follow through on themselves: last week the Doc was unable to tell O was The Master despite ten years of friendship and previous face-to-face meetings, but this week she's so aware of his existence elsewhere on the planet that she can skype directly to his brain?

(Also despite ten years of friendship, the one tip-off that he's a fake comes from her having just read "his file" for some reason: Chibnall's Doctor cannot deduce or detect anything at all without googling it.)

When the plane with no front looked like it was going to pull up at all, I got excited for Chibnall outdoing his unawareness of the laws of physics from last year, but it completing a transatlantic flight was extremely special.

"Doctor, we trust you implicitly, and always will, but we also can't trust you because we don't know anything about you - not really, not profoundly. You need to reveal something more than that you're a space alien who can control the flow of time."
"You're right. I'm from the planet Gallifree in the constellation of Kasterberous, and I'm a Time Lord."
"Wow, these stunning revelations have changed our understanding completely."


Still, the least underwhelming of last series' writers is on next week.

Noticed last night that I’m now essentially watching the show the same way I watched the original run - I know it’ll be mostly tosh, with big chunks that don’t make much sense or are plain tedious, but with a couple of interesting ideas/monsters every year (or at worst every couple of years). And that’s fine, it’s enjoyable enough, I don’t need to feel like it’s actually good.

(The other thing on tv this weekend which reminded me of old Doctor Who was The Masked Singer and the way those costumes were terrifying not in spite of the fact they were shit, but because of it)

Simultaneously managed to waste the 2 major historical cameos while also underlining how dull it is having multiple present day everymen as companions is.

Again I thought this was mostly fine but read the thread latest before seeing the ep for the first time ever.

The MASSter's 'they lied to us' thing makes me think it's a TLJ-style 'Actually anyone can be a Timelord' revelation to come.

Amongst the things that just don't follow through on themselves: last week the Doc was unable to tell O was The Master despite ten years of friendship and previous face-to-face meetings, but this week she's so aware of his existence elsewhere on the planet that she can skype directly to his brain?

(Also despite ten years of friendship, the one tip-off that he's a fake comes from her having just read "his file" for some reason: Chibnall's Doctor cannot deduce or detect anything at all without googling it.)

Not that I disagree with your other criticisms of Chibnall's nonsense, but didn't the Doctor mention in the previous episode that she'd actually met Oh just once, and was kinda exaggerating when she said he was a friend?

Also, the Doctor's ability to recognise the Master was already inconsistent before this: in "The Last of Time Lords", Ten can sense the Master's return from a distance, and he explicitly mentions that he always knows when the Master is around, so apparently it was only because the chameleon circuit that he didn't recognise him in "Utopia"... But then in "Dark Water" Twelve has no idea Missy is the Master, even after he finds out she's a Time Lord.

(I never remember anything about the RTD Master episodes, but that's an outlier: Pertwee needs a Time Lord bureaucrat to turn up on Earth and tell him the Master's about (and tell the audience the Master exists); Tom doesn't realise the Melkur is a TARDIS, let alone that the Master is wearing it & walking around; Davison's always fooled by the Master wearing a rubber mask or colourful hat iirc; Colin can't detect the presence of either the Master OR the Rani in Mark Of The Rani. And none of them suddenly develop the ability to cosmically facetime the Master once they know he's on a planet: even in Deadly Assassin, when the burnt-up corpsey Master has sent fake psychic visions through space to the Dr using the Matrix, Tom has to risk his life by going to Gallifrey and physically hooking his brain up to the Matrix to interact w/ him.)

anyway here's another amusing Pip Madeley video:

That new #DoctorWho film looks HOT 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/2ePh8LXsjw

— Pip (@pipmadeley) January 5, 2020

physically hooking his brain up to the Matrix

this sequence is streaming on Pluto right this second btw

I really liked part 2 and every plot hole sic mentioned was something I thought was really funny and not at all a detriment to my enjoyment of the story (although I don't think O's identity is a plothole for the same "the Doctor greatly exaggerated how well she knew him" reason Tuomas laid out).

I also thought that Sacha Dhawan makes a really good Master, balancing Gomez's redemption arc with Simm's derangement

I thought Dhawan was good too, but if this was supposed to be a post-Missy version, then I didn't really see much of the redemption in him, as he was acting in a similar amusedly sociopathic way as Simm's master was. I get it that no one should've expected the Master to stay permanently dead, but IMO it would've been nice to at least acknowledge Moffat's long character development for Missy by not reverting the character back to the previous version.

There were moments of tenderness that Simm didn't really put out there (largely because his Master turned into a deranged ghoul) that felt like an acknowledgment of Missy's arc.

One of the most deranged proclamations of Chinball's genius I read was after ep1:

O sent The Doctor a picture of a fish
That well known language trick says fish would be a potential pronunciation of 'ghoti'
A phonetic pronunciation of 'ghoti' would be goatee
So it was obviously The Master from the start and he was sending clues the whole time

Anyway, I am not back again, I just commented on the new year shows because they were clearly supposed to be event television and I was still on holiday from work.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Are the Master and the Doctor running in roughly parallel regenerations? Or bouncing around time, could this new Master be several iterations different? I assumed this Master followed Missy, but don't remember if that was stated.

The baseline narrative conceit is that the Doctor and Master's personal timelines are running roughly parallel.

Second episode much better. I liked Graham's warm words to Ryan and Yasmin.

I was also unclear about how Doc and Ava survived the machine gun fire. I guess they were just in a different part of the floor. In any case after the machine-gunning we were only shown the bit of the floor they were under, and surely it would have been odd for that bit to be riddled with bullet holes because then they'd have been.. dead?

I still don't think I know exactly what the "Silver Lady" does. Or why the cassava (? -Ed) were pulling people through time to key moments of world history?? I readily admit these are probably not the show's failings but my own.

The sound was fantastic! I had it plumbed through my home stereo and all the dialogue was very clear, the music was great, sounds effects great.

One of my kids asked if the Master could change into any shape he wanted, since he said he stole O's identity, and I was like.... I guess??

you guys will enjoy this. The Master beckons The Doctor over for a little ritual humiliation with her friends as ransom, smiles cruelly, and says: "Kneel!"

My son: "Who's Neal?"

The Master has taken over identities before, most notably Tremas (Nyssa's dad) whose name was entirely coincidentally an anagram of Master.

are we going to go through all the things that don't make sense in the keeper of traken? I have a list somewhere

he took over Tremas' physical body, rather than changing into his shape, tho

Or bouncing around time, could this new Master be several iterations different? I assumed this Master followed Missy, but don't remember if that was stated.

as I said, this is one of the most frustrating things about Chibnall's choices: there is endless opportunity to make this an earlier Master who hasn't struggled to reform & chosen to die, but he put out an extra youtube video explicitly explaining that Dhawan is a regenerated Missy

Yeah, it wasn't explicitly stated that this is a post-Missy incarnation, but the fact that he knew Gallifrey was hidden in a pocket dimension and knew how to find it would suggest that's the case.

I still don't think I know exactly what the "Silver Lady" does. Or why the cassava (? -Ed) were pulling people through time to key moments of world history?? I readily admit these are probably not the show's failings but my own.

chibnall didn't put any thought into that stuff, so why should i?