WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

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.

sorry i should make clear i don’t really care about ratings - tho i was pleased that jodie’s first series did well. i looked them up just to see if my sense that there wasn’t much to talk about in the new episodes was reflected in the figures, and it is.

I take it these ratings include delayed/post-tx viewing? Moving the timeslot and day of tx around so much over the years this show has been the ultimate stress test for 'live' ratings.

it's seven-day ratings & positions I'm talking about, yes.

As long as it rates well enough to not get cancelled and somebody new eventually takes over, i'll survive.

I really CBA with this any more, skipping the whole thing until Chibnall goes.

the regular release of entire classic seasons on blu-ray makes taking a break from the new seasons pretty easy

Been watching The Brain of Morbius for the first time on Britbox. It's fucked up!

This week's ep got the second-lowest audience Appreciation Index figure of all nu-Who (77, above 76 for Love & Monsters in 2006).

also the only imdb rating below 5.0 (currently 4.7)

This week's ep got the second-lowest audience Appreciation Index figure of all nu-Who (77, above 76 for Love & Monsters in 2006).

Am I the only one who actually likes Love & Monsters? I thought it was a fairly fun and sweet parable on fandom and what makes it good. Do people hate it because it has kind of a downer ending? Certainly it was better than the one where Ten carried the olympic torch, or the one where he fought the TV announcer in the 1950s.

I think the part where the girlfriend got turned into a paving stone sex toy at the end kind of overshadowed everything else about the episode. I do remember liking it up until at least the halfway mark.

xps Brain of Morbius is possibly my favourite story in all of classic Who, definitely top three.

I really like Love and Monsters too.

I mostly didn’t hate this week’s, I thought the tone and pace and story (if not the dialogue) were very similar to early RTD filler episodes and I’m fine with that. But yeah that final monologue was terrible, not least because it was delivered with such urgency that if the companions don’t now spend the rest of the series back on contemporary earth working to stop climate change instead of gallivanting around the galaxy, they’ll come across as uncaring twats.

Love and Monsters was OK. A bit too dark for a jokey episode. Basing the villain on Ian Levine was a nasty trick, even if he deserves the scorn.

I liked Love and Monsters because of Shirley Henderson, fandom and the ELO content (give RTD’s Desert Island Discs a listen if you can, it’s his fave).

Isn’t the second story broadcast in every season of Nu Who always The Shite One?

where do (my counter-trollfarm and) I go to upboost Love and Monsters?

I unreservedly love Love & Monsters, a fantastic love song to fandom, which does well with the mandated monster - I even love the sex joke at the end, a sex life is a sex life even if it's not Rutting for the Continuation of the Species.

Still really think they should go all in on a single story/arc season. At this point it might be the only thing left to try and lift Chibnall out of mediocrity. This feeling is never stronger than after the usually arc-exempt monster of the weak difficult second/third episode tho.

be careful what you say or those tranquility human-things are gonna.... stand around a lot next to you

where do (my counter-trollfarm and) I go to upboost Love and Monsters?

you need to have been part of the BBC's regular audience survey panel fourteen years ago (run by GFK)

I adore Love & Monsters (one of only two RTD episodes that I actively like), but the last-minute cheapjack redesign of the Absorbaloff, and Kay's performance after the change undermine a lot of what is well done beforehand. For a story that manages so many tones of slapstick, senstivity, satire, social sort-of-realism and character comedy beforehand, the broadness of the monstery section is really jarring. (I'm agnostic on the paving slab ending. They both seem happy.)

Still really think they should go all in on a single story/arc season. At this point it might be the only thing left to try and lift Chibnall out of mediocrity.

He can't make the ideas in a single episode connect up from scene to scene, or often sentence to sentence. Imagine this inability over an intricate 14-episode serial that relies on everything connecting up, with no episodes originating from other minds.

Ooh, what was the redesign from? I'd thought it was a "winner of a design-a-monster" competition - was it something else before that?

Yeah, it was a kid's competition design. Apparently the kid was really disappointed, because his idea was a big scary monster that kept growing as it absorbed people - the size of a double-decker bus was in his pitch - and it turned out to be Peter Kay in a silly rubber suit making fart jokes with CGI faces in his bum.

(no doubt a double-bus-sized monster was going to be too expensive, and didn't necessarily fit with the "gradually arsesorbing the group" plot that RTD came up with, but at least it's still scary up until Kay's dancing around in the suit in broad daylight, jabbing his tongue out like his sole memory of Dr Who monsters is Sil out of Colin Baker's seasons.)

Love and Monsters is a story I liked on initial viewing but every time I've subsequently thought about it, I've increasingly hated it.

Curious what sic’s other (single!) favourite RTD episode is

Betting Midnight or Turn Left.

Rose

(aesthetically it’s nigh-hideous but that script is incredible. all the spookiness and mystery and set-up of An Unearthly Child, plus pulse-pounding action and laughs and character moments that tell us whole backstories in lines*, and huge implied history for the world and the title character without slowing down for exposition, and fully integrating the premises of Dr Who into modern technology and the style of current young people / family television. situating the audience identification character / protagonist so firmly that Doctor Who’s invitation to come along on adventures feels like the audience being treated to the invitation. What a fucking genius, who just happened to make loads of Who that isn’t on the whole much to my taste.)