WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

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?

The time thing wasn't that they were pulling people into different time zones but that they had presences in these time zones, so when the Doctor used them to hop through dimensions she kept falling through the wrong door (she explicitly says Ada threw her off when she ends up in 1943).

Their original plan involved inserting themselves into points of history where critical developments of computer science theory occurred, aggregating the information they received, and feeding it into a future not-really-specified plan to stealthily invade the universe. They changed course to "reformat almost every person on Earth" at the Master's encouragement/desire for immediate mayhem, which included killing a bunch of spies because he figured that would get the Doctor's attention and put her in a position where he could kill her.

t/s:
paying attention to doctor who so you can follow the story because you like the show
vs.
paying attention to doctor who so you can perform a knowledgeable fisking because you loathe chibnall and/or the cast

In spite of myself, I actually enjoyed part 2!

next half dozen episodes are non-Chibnall-written!

Orphan 55: easily better than any recent chibnall episode, but still, it's another base under siege episode aimed squarely at children. the companions remain a blank this season.

Remember the haemovores? Remember The Mysterious Planet? Let's rip them both off, but do it much worse. We'll even use the exact same clue to the planet's identity.

Remember how time travel works in this show? Because nobody currently making it seems to. (Under previous showrunners I would expect this to be significant, but under the current one it's almost certainly just laziness)

Yet this is far from the worst Chibnall-era episode.

Also the way we had 3 separate cases of someone obviously going to sacrifice themselves, and in each case everyone else just stands back like, no, go ahead. Die, we don't mind.

Also

BENNI! BENNI! BENNI!

in each case everyone else just stands back like, no, go ahead.

Yes an awful lot of harrowing suicide in this kids' show :(

This was pretty classic basic-bitch ChibWho imo. The monsters are coming! Run to the transport! Wait we crashed the transport, get out and walk! Gah, here come the monsters, run back to the transport! Wait they're coming in, get out of the transport and stroll over to the hatch in the ground that appears to have been quite easy to get to in the first place, so that we can..... get back to the base where we started?!

And just in case we didn't understand the lesson of this story let's have the Doctor hammer it home for a good couple of minutes in the Tardis like we're idiot numpties

definitely feeling ok about my decision to preference reading this thread over watching the actual show

^^^
Same. If people start raving about a given episode i'll wacth it. Doesn't sound that likely.

We're about to run out of vitally important arbitrary thing A. Fortunately, arbitrary thing B can be turned into it with the handy addition of ludicrous plot device C.

Hey at least she didn’t have to Google it.

I haven’t watched anything past the 20-minute line of Spyfall pt 1. At the very least these episodes sound bad in a more interesting way than the last season

It's all so rushed-first-draft in nature. Interesting ideas left unexplored or half-arsed, bits of plot bolted together uneasily.

I watched some of the two Chibnall eps from Karen Gillan’s last season. They’re a mess but also full of swagger and fun flourishes and one-liners. Based on Chibnall’s current every-joke-a-groaner form (I *still* can’t believe he got away with that internet joke in Resolution) it might be fair to assume there’s a lot of Moffat in those episodes.

Also Gillan/Darvill/Smith seemed invested in each other and the material. Lately when thinking about 11, I wonder if Smith had a thing for... Keith Floyd?

I'm just hoping we don't get Jodie gone before she's found herself fully in the role. & that she doesn't just get stuck with something that I don't want to watch along the lines of Capaldi being stuck way too long with Clara.
I think I could enjoy Jodie as the Doctor if she wasn't being held back by naffness elsewhere.

Wow, this episode was baaad, easily worse than the Chibnall season opener. I'm sure the writer had good intentions, but everything was so over-the-top and half-arsed, with numerous gaping plot holes. For example:

* When the crew goes out to save Benni, why did *everyone* have to come with them, including the granny and the kid? What's the point of endangering them instead of letting them stay inside the spa walls?

* Okay, Bella hates her mom for abandoning her, but how does that justify her sabotaging the whole facility, with numerous innocent people inside?

* When the Doctor goes inside the mind of the leader monster, why does it have memories of pre-collapse Earth? Wouldn't it take generations and generations for humans to evolve into those things.

* At the end, why does the Doctor claim they were an alternate future, and Earth isn't necessarily doomed? We already know the TARDIS can't travel to alternate universes... The one time they did accidentally end up in one, Ten and Rose were almost stranded forever, because the TARDIS didn't function there. And we know the Earth *will* be destroyed, and British people will be saved by a giant space whale. Was the Doctor lying to her companions so they wouldn't be so depressed?

The answer to your last point is "lol, continuity"

Also, at the end of the episode, they're back inside the TARDIS... So why don't they just use it to go back to save Bella and Kane? Okay, they were both kinda dubious morally, but do they just deserve to die?

I guess they spent the entire special effects budget on the Dregs, because that one hotel staffer, who I guess was supposed to be some kind of... dog(?) human, looked less convincing than Barf in Spaceballs.

All in all this was just an incredibly amateurish episode, I can't believe it was written by the same guy who wrote the best episode of last season.

I just had a peek at the ratings and the picture looks fairly disastrous which I'm not at all surprised by. There's absolutely nothing 'talkable' about these stories so far.

I really do wish the first female Doctor wasn't being hobbled by such crappy stories.

I just had a peek at the ratings and the picture looks fairly disastrous which I'm not at all surprised by.

The first episode came in eighth for the entire week, and the second came in 16th. Having two episodes in the same top 20 alongside the soaps, the New Years fireworks, the new thing by the Sherlock team, and the return of Call The Midwife is the kind of disaster that we should all be cursed to endure in our own lives.

rmde

at the ratings being bad, the ratings being good, the Hime episode, the reactions to the episode itt?

at you never letting the slightest broad statement go by without factchecking it within an inch of its life

it’s part of your charm granted but it does get exhausting

<3

I mean, there's a moderate difference between "disastrous" ratings and "one of the absolute most popular ongoing programmes on television" tbf

these threads have a tendency to read one inaccurate post somewhere about how the ratings are plummeting and the show's going to be cancelled, or that everyone hates x worker on the show and they're about to be fired, and whip up some discourse about it, then be bemused when it doesn't happen. there's plenty of other discourse to be had imo

dogs and cats, living together etc

Was good to see Laura Fraser pop up. She stood out in A Knight's Tale, nice to see her.

i think general bbc view these days is that “Doctor Who isn’t what it was”, which they mean in terms of sheer brand (sorry) power and media focus. tho i imagine they saw that kicking in really post matt smith and tennant in particular, possibly russell davies.

like james i feel it’s such a shame that whittaker isn’t being served by better stories - in theory a reduced pressure can result in more latitude for story experimentation but my experience of the last season was that the stories were painfully moribund.