WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

chibnall’s ability to annoying fanmen and racists is basically his only positive contribution to the show

I fear sic is right but I hope I'm right.

As in so much of life, really.

Regarding her being a black married woman. Was Chibnall hoping fans would think of the Torchwood episode "Sleeper" instead of the actual Who episodes that inspired this one? That's a deep cut.

With numbering I suspect they'll say the person was so unlike the Dr that they get a different title, like with the war doctor.

she referred to herself as The Doctor and was credited as such in the end titles (with an "and introducing as" in addition to her regular credit as Ruth)

there are plenty of unnumbered alt. Doctors already, like the second Tennant and the third Tennant and Hurt (omg anagram of Ruth! another clue), whatever The Watcher was, the pre-Hartnell Brain o' Morbius faces, the additional fact that four different people have played the ostensible First Doctor onscreen... the more confusion the better imo.

maybe she's who Peter Cushing's Doctor regenerated into..

footage of human Earth scientist inventing regeneration serum

Chibnall speaks:

“The important thing to say is – she is definitively the Doctor,” he explained. “There's not a sort of parallel universe going on, there's no tricks.

also Barrowman has been back in the papers launching another smear campaign against Moffat for his conspiracy to suppress the most beloved character in Who history, Captain Jack

Didnt moffat try to have jack in a goid man goes to war, but barrowman was unavailable?

Good man, even

That is correct

Moffat also created the personality, backstory and irrepressible hornitude of Captain Jack, when writing his first two appearances

and five years after Moffat invited him back, Barrowman started publicly claiming that Moffat was personally blocking Torchwood from returning, resulting in bemusement from and hate-mail for Moffat.

Presumably the 'lone cyberman' refers to Chinball's previous story about a solitary cyberperson from Torchwood S1. As long as someone summons a dinosaur with barbecue sauce and there's an invisible lift involved then we'll all be happy, although the sex slave stuff probably is best forgotten.

Jack sent a warning to the Doctor about a lone cyberman she has yet to meet... Why would the warning be about the Torchwood season 1 cyberman, which was related to a threat the Doctor and his associates dealt with three incarnations ago?

Sorry, Torchwood season 1 cyberwoman, not cyberman.

Anyway, I think Sic is right and this season will be about alternate timelines/the multiverse. So far we've had several hints towards that direction:

* The aliens in the season opener were operating outside time, and therefore can probably create alternate timelines.
* In "Orphan 55" the Doctor said Earth's future can be saved, even though it's been established in previous seasons that Earth will burn and humans will have to go live on other planets. Earth's destruction was implied to be a fixed point in time, but I guess it isn't anymore? And the same could be true of Gallifrey's destruction?
* While I don't think Jack's warning was related to the cyberwoman in Torchwood, it could be about the Cybus Cybermen, who were from an alternate universe.
* The easiest explanation for the existence of the other Doctor in "Fugitive of the Judoon", as well as why she and the other Time Lady were completely unaware of Gallifrey's destruction, is that they're from another timeline.

The only real problem is that "Rise of the Cybermen" in season 2 established that the TARDIS can't function in an alternate universe, while the other Doctor's TARDIS is clearly working. But Chibnall could come up with an explanation for that, or (more likely) simply ignore the whole thing.

Sorry I was being sarcastic and reminding people that Chinballs wrote a story where a man did bits of home cyberconversion to his girlfriend so he could keep her is a sex dungeon and continue to fuck her in her cyberthong, until he had to try and get a pterodactyl to eat her by covering her in barbecue sauce while he escaped in an invisible lift - only for her to get shot by his mates after she magically took over the brain of a pizza delivery girl. A classic of the genre, obviously.

He's said today no parallel universe or similar sleight of hand. So 6B(b) seems most credible, except the sonic was introduced in Fury From The Deep so The Doctor should know about it.

For her to be a past incarnation of the Doctor would mess up the entire plot of "The Time of the Doctor", where Matt Smith was revealed to be the thirteenth and final incarnation. So if she's previously unseen past incarnation, Tennant should've been the last one and he couldn't have regenerated into Smith.

If she's not from an alternate universe, then the most likely explanation is that she's a future incarnation who has somehow forgotten about Whittaker. If the Doctor manages to do some timey-wimey tricks so that Gallifrey was never destroyed to begin with, that would explain why neither the other Doctor nor Gat were aware of its destruction.

She's going to be a past incarnation. The other part of that Master speech where alternate universes came up was about "everything you've ever been told is a lie" which opens the door to Hartnell only thinking he's the first because of a mindwipe - which is where I think it'll go tbh.

Gallifrey has now been completely destroyed for ever and ever twice, so it'll be back with a simple maguffin. And as for Earth's future being fixed, The Doctor showed Sarah Jane what it would be like if they didn't stop Sutekh, so they did, and it wasn't.

Oh, I guess I must've missed the Master talking about alternate universes, what did he say about them?

I guess you're right that if they're gonna reveal the Time Lords lying about everything, they could've lied about the maximum number of incarnations too. Though if they've wiped the Doctor's mind and she actually had incarnations before Hartnell, then the mindwipe must've somehow affected the Doctor's objective timeline too, because Clara entered it in "The Name of the Doctor", and she didn't see any pre-Hartnell incarnations.

Trying to work out why the idea of pre-Hartnell incarnations bug me but 6B extra incarnations do not.

OCD? pre-Hartnell incarnations were established in 1975 tbf

new theory based on Doctor Rwhuth's flamboyant outfit: as we never saw Colin regenerate into Sylv, this is actually a Doctor from Season 23B. Recruited by the CIA after the events of the Trial to battle the Valeyard, and returned to the TARDIS in Six's coat just before the Rani attacks, with her mind wiped before and after her mission, so that she wouldn't remember fighting a different version of herself from further down her timeline.

finally, Chibnall's revenge on Pip & Jane.

You get one good episode and this is what you make of it.

A shame the other lead actress was kinda wooden too.

Huh, I really don't agree - I thought she was good as Ruth, which is a difficult character to play, but amazing as the Doctor.

I did like the exposition as misdirection - I assumed at the time that the recap of the Master-Gallifrey earlier was to set up that Lee/Ruth was the Master, rather than to remind us of Gallifrey.

I can't remember from the Family of Blood / Utopia if the restored timelord has any of their pre-restoration memories, but I did like that it's the one episode where the Doctor doesn't identify herself as such.

Yeah i thought Ruth was pretty good!

Yeah she was fine - maybe her accent/delivery is an issue for some...like the scorpion queen in last week's had a funny Lon-dUN accent or way of accentuating I couldn't decide whether or not it was good to be rolling with

Chibnall's ~Mysterious Warnings~ are really diminishing returns.

The murder ribbons on Planet Danger Sign hiss that The Timeless Child, an outcast abandoned and unknown, has terrifying resonance from the Doctor's hidden or forgotten past.

Master Dhawan screeches that "everything you think you know... IS A LIE!!!"

Captain Jack turns up to dance about a console and snog people, then asks them to, when they get a moment, pass on the message that The Doctor oughtn't to trust a Cyberman if she happens across one.

OCD? pre-Hartnell incarnations were established in 1975 tbf

Yes, but contradicted by everything before and after.

Not contradicted by anything major before, only by one sentence in one episode that got retconned already in 2013

I thought the Ruth actor was going for an ambiguous performance -- the reveal line was intentionally delivered differently than you'd expect. She didn't add much during the standoff scene but I think that was the fault of the story structure.

i think moffat's excursions into fanwank were pretty good mostly, and felt properly mythic

this feels a bit pip & jane baker, i find it hard to care about the details of this alternate doctor because she doesn't seem an inherently interesting character beyond her status as continuity riddle

this feels a bit pip & jane baker

Prime Chinballs trolling there

The most surprising thing about this episode to me, frankly, was Barrowman being asked back (and welcomed by fandom) after the LouisCK-type revelations last year.

Huh, I really don't agree - I thought she was good as Ruth, which is a difficult character to play, but amazing as the Doctor.

I agree. I know that's not the case, but for a second I imagined they'd already picked the next actor playing the Doctor, and this was an early-bird introduction to her, kinda like how Clara was first introduced while Amy and Rory were still around. Based on her performance here, I'd love Jo Martin to be the next Doctor.

I can't remember from the Family of Blood / Utopia if the restored timelord has any of their pre-restoration memories, but I did like that it's the one episode where the Doctor doesn't identify herself as such.

They do keep their memories from their time as a human: the Doctor is clearly still in love with Joan Redfern after his memory is restored, and he even visits her grand-daughter at the end of "The End of Time".

Captain Jack turns up to dance about a console and snog people, then asks them to, when they get a moment, pass on the message that The Doctor oughtn't to trust a Cyberman if she happens across one.

Well TBH, this is still much better than the warning he gave as the Face of Boe, which the Doctor didn't understand, and when he finally did, it was already too late. I really don't understand why, instead of "You are not alone!" he couldn't have said "The Master lives, disguised as Yana!", or something like that. Anyway, presumably the reason why Jack gave the warning is because the Cyberman he was talking about will appear otherwise trustworthy? The Doctor has had Cybermen companions before.

The Doctor has had Cybermen companions before.

Much as I'd like Kroton to be canon, he isn't (yet).

bring back Handles

Yeah, there's Handles, Bill, Danny Pink, the Brigadier... It's not like the Doctor automatically distrusts every Cyberman she meets, if she thinks they've overcome their programming in one way or another.

re Barrowman I remember reading this, which is good, or at least articulates some of the unresolved questions I have about him: https://everything2.com/user/Glowing+Fish/writeups/%2523metoo+and+the+John+Barrowman+problem

automatically distrusts every Cyberman she meets

sure but members of nearly every returning species over the whole 56 years end up being pally with the Doctor at some point. as an urgent warning it's like saying "eh oop, watch out for them Daleks zapping people like skellingtons" or "mind yrself around the Master, he can be a bit conniving that one."




{aldo annotation for Tuomas: Kroton was a "Cyberman with a soul" from some early 80s Steve Moore / Steve Dillon stories who later spent a few years as one of the Eighth Doctor's two companions in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, before the Eccleston TV series}

examining my indifference here i feel like alternate/lost doctors is a concept with steeply diminishing returns - just get on with having good adventures! that intention was pretty much the only good thing about last year's series.

(having said that i've always been kind of into the idea of one-off regenerations for christmas specials and the like - casting a big name actor for a one-hour special who you could never get to commit to a whole series)

(also this alternate doctor seems pretty cool and i would be interested to see more of his adventures)

https://imgur.com/bmDnt7m

https://i.imgur.com/bmDnt7m.png

with her mind wiped before and after her mission

this joke post aside: as expressed upthread, I found it fucking monstrous that two women were forced to have their brains wiped lest their fragile hormonal conditions slightly bend the future by allowing them agency, and was v unsurprised when the Chibnall Doctor allowed multiple men with the power, wit and ability to wildly divert the future to carry on unimpeded w/ all their exposure to skiffy developments, the following week. but it does seem likely that Chibbers was deliberately seeding the notion of Time Lords wiping women people's brains for their own good, ahead of his amnesia!Doctor coming down the pike.

Handles explicitly has all the Cyber parts removed, so is just a big standard robot head in a cyber casing.

The others are not cyberman' companions, they're companions who get converted but are able (sufficiently early in conversion - in Bill's case because it's primitive and incomplete) to resist bits of the cyber process and help The Doctor. This has been a NuWho trope since the outset - the Bride Cyberwoman in Age Of Steel, Yvonne Torchwood and of course oilcryingcyber.jpg - and fairly consistently applied so it's not any special feature of ex-companions.

I didn't say it was limited to companions, my point was merely that Jack's warning about not trusting a specific Cyberman might not be as pointless as it sounds, because the Doctor has trusted other Cyberpeople in the past.

Not ones they didn't already know (in your examples).

Sure. But until we find out who the warning refers to and how the Doctor reacts to said Cyberman, it's pretty pointless to say the warning was silly.

I didn't. Did anyone else?

What is 6c / 6b(b)?

I'm pretty sure it's a wireless WAN protocol

or a bra size