WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

Introducing Juliana Marguiles as The Rani

LOOOL

Only a few hours until all the goodwill generated by the last episode gets dissipated by some new ham-fisted nonsense!

I caught up to last episode which was AWESOME

Only a few hours until all the goodwill generated by the last episode gets dissipated by some new ham-fisted nonsense!

well, this turned out to be very OTM.

I dozed off a bit. Lots more on-screen death, one attempted suicide - I was really pleased by the ending though. And uh, Yasmin? What.... are you doing? My son said 'she's trying to be the Doctor'.

But uh - guys? What about last week's cliffhanger?? wtf happened? It occurred to me that they might have cynically brought this week's episode up to capitalise on coronavirus paranoia??

Is Doctor narration in an episode (there was some at the start and the end) a first?

There were a couple with Capaldi addressing the viewer through the fourth wall to establish a premise or theme, and the odd episode with a portentous v/o intro by other characters iirc?, but this is probably the first with a straight VO top & tail by the Doctor

possibly McTighe was as confused as everyone else by his last episode airing with a Workers Dying In Amazon Fulfillment Centres (And The Survivors Having Their Pay Halved) Is Good Actually twist ending, and so wrote a very simple childish moral at the beginning & end of this one so that Chibnall would see it at the table read, and it made it all the way through by mistake

istr someone saying (perhaps wrt the bladerunner vo) that the presence of voiceovers tends to be an indication that the narrative hasn't been very well constructed or isn't gettable from the screenplay.

could have used a little less gettability in this one tbh

ah right. to reinforce a point upthread, dr who is canonically about the chill up the spine and dread that sends you running behind the sofa. by the pricking of my thumbs etc. and chinballs seems uniquely bad at generating that.

The Captain Planet message of the week was offputting but i thought this episode was OK. It wanted to be a big, planet-wide episode and it pulled that off. And Yaz actually did something! (and i didn't recognize yaz when she wasn't handing the doctor a wrench!)

My youngest was terrified, Fizzles! less by the virus and more by the near constant creeping round shadowy corridors with flashlights, etc

I think Chibnall has a good sense of the visually scary (at least in terms of general monster design) but...dassit.

i take it all back and will in penance actually watch this episode before commenting again.

Can we roll back to the previous episode for a second because I haven't seen yesterday's yet:

The AV Club reviewer was bemoaning the lack of camaraderie between 13 and Doctor Ruth and raising a bunch of "white woman distrusts black woman" issues as compared to allegedly buddy-buddy multi-Doctor stories of the past and... that's not really how I remember other multi-Doctor stories? Most of them involve the current Doctor being incredibly annoyed with his earlier incarnations while the earlier incarnations are borderline horrified by what they are going to turn into; over the course of the story, they settle into a somewhat uneasy truce but it's rare that they actually get along (I'm thinking specifically of the 2/3 relationship). The 13/Ruth relationship is extra-complicated by Ruth being in the Doctor's past but not being anywhere in her memory; neither one of them can place the other in their timeline so they can't get over the unease hump and really ACCEPT that they are the same person, which makes their relationship brittle. (At least, that's how I read it.)

Curious about the thoughts of others here.

That's how I read it too.

Definitely agree, they’re never buddy-buddy. Possible the reviewer has only watched post-2005 in which case the multi-doctor story pool is more limited, but even then the fiftieth anniversary ep was at best “A and B bond over their annoyance at C, then rotate ABC”, and the recent 12+1 pairup was pretty cantankerous.

so they can't get over the unease hump and really ACCEPT that they are the same person, which makes their relationship brittle

imagine if either of them had asked a single question about the other's timeline, that could have clarified whether they are the same person, though

well they say the same sentence together at the same time, so they have the same brain, so it's been 'proven' but it's still hard to accept because it doesn't make sense (yet)

They didn't really have to because 13 scanned herself and de-arched Ruth and they registered as the same person. 13 could have quizzed Ruth about where she actually fit into her backstory but Ruth didn't want to divulge anything, plus 13 wasn't convinced Ruth actually was from her past until she and Gat started discussing Gallifrey, which Ruth (as noted) didn't want to talk about.

They know they're the same person but that blank space, which Ruth appears invested in keeping in place due to whatever is she has been doing for the Time Lords, doesn't get filled in and they aren't together long enough to turn their annoyance on a large-enough foe (I think we can all agree that the Judoon are not the same level of threat as Omega/Rassilon/okay so the Androgum blow up this part of my argument, I accept that)

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YrJAzn9PnBc/T18_uAM1FoI/AAAAAAAAEV0/-4G00zd0YP8/s1600/07%2BDoctor%2BAndrogum.jpg

At least the ludicrous YOU HAVE ONE HOUR AND LET'S PRETEND I DON'T HAVE A TIME MACHINE bit didn't pay off stupidly with Yaz needing rescuing.

was heartened that at least the Rosa Parks episode had been written by a woman of melanin, until it came out midweek that Chibnall has a shared writing credit. Let's brace ourselves for tomorrow.

― My Gig: The Thin Beast (sic), Sunday, October 21, 2018 10:53 AM (two years ago)

next half dozen episodes are non-Chibnall-written!

― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Sunday, January 12, 2020 11:55 AM (one week ago)

Chibnall now taking writing credits on the other episodes by returning 2018 writers

― don't care didn't ask still clappin (sic), Saturday, January 25, 2020 5:50 PM (one week ago)

Chibnall now also taking writing credit on next week's episode, by a first-time Who writer

I'm sure there are perfectly innocuous production- or deadline-related reasons for this, but mild collar-pulling.jpg at commissioning the first four stories by (three different) POC writers in the show's history, and then putting your own name on one script by each of them

Didn’t RTD basically rewrite a fair chunk of almost every ep in his era without feeling he then had to put his name on it(*)? Maybe Moffat too?

(*) Half remembering this from RTDs own book which tbf might not be a reliable source.

Yep, some RTD-era shooting scripts were close to page-one rewrites (Moffat was the only person he didn’t rewrite at all), and both he and Moffat would commonly do multiple full drafts of freelancers’ episodes as part of the back-and-forth of developing them.

(RTD eventually took co-credit on the two freelance episodes during his & Tennant’s final year of specials, because that made it easier to sell not-a-regular-series to foreign broadcasters. Moffat took co-credit on a few in the first Capaldi season, apparently after one particular writer whom he had effectively apprenticed went to Hollywood & got some deals off the back of scripts that Moffat had mostly written himself, uncredited.)

[The next year he took a co- with Harness on a great ep that they’d back & forthed on a lot & ended up with loads of Moffat monologue in it. The final year he took a co- with Harness on a disastrous ep that neither of them had been able to fix, possibly so that Harness wouldn’t have to take the blame.]

Which writer went to Hollywood?

I feel like I gave enough identifying info for something that is unsubstantiable hearsay! (Nothing ended up produced from these Hollywood excursions.)

One of the most frustrating things about the Chibnall Doctor's repeated bleatings of "no guns! never guns!," but repeated and repeated endorsements of bombs and hand grenades and death rays and expanding fireballs and shoes that fire deadly laser beams in all directions with no control and time displacement gun-shaped hand devices, and *checks notes* enormous self-loading laser rifles, is that there's not even any attempt to sketch a moral position behind the opposition. It's just an empty phrase that Chibnall has seen other hero protaogonists say in TV shows, and is sticking into this one.

Proceeding from this, there's no consistent belief in the value of life being espoused, which has otherwise been a core principle in the history of Doctor Who the TV series, Doctor Who the character, and the span of comics, novels and audio plays that massively outnumber the telly episodes.

This week first manages to forget completely that any plants or animals live on Earth and might be worth not wiping out, and then weirdly makes a big deal out of saving one cop's life* while being completely blank about every other individual. The bloke on the porch in Madagascar gets left to be torn apart by birds without a second thought. The surviving vlogger is concerned about her life and business partner going missing, but after finding her body and SEEING IT EXPLODE IN FRONT OF HER, exhibits no trauma, and receives no consolation from the Doctor or any of the Fam (I guess Ryan says "fings'll work out, yeah?" and pats her shoulder or something once, at the end?). Science lady Suki explodes into fragments approx 14" from the Doctor's face, but since they didn't bother to CGI any fragments into the same shot as the Doctor, she's not perturbed by this. Honestly it's a wonder they bother to try and find a cure for the alium pandemic at all.


* in a split-second last minute way that not only invalidates every other noble death in Who, but doesn't line up with the Doctor being unable to pop back to Hong Kong to pick up Yaz with an hour's leeway earlier?

In fairness, the 6th Doctor did murder people and the 7th Doctor manipulated a lot of people into offing themselves

we've all done that

To continue being fair, the 7th didn’t run around repeatedly saying “never set up a situation where a crazed eugenicist dictator is handed the means of mass murder after you have sneakily rewired it such that it will kill his own mutant people if he tries to use it on other folks! Never ever!,” and he did tell the crazed eugenicist etc that not committing mass murder was a better idea

Plus he made a thoughtful sad face after the dude blew up his own planet

If Chibnall put the same loving passion and thought into Doctor Who that he puts into exploding, shooting, murdering and mutilating random bystanders, he might have a pretty good show.

Some behind-the-scenes saltiness: https://www.instagram.com/p/B8GkTaBDCC0/

The concept is an infection or virus that comes from plastic or inhabits plastic or something or other about plastic. Anyway job was to come up with concept that implied and conveyed the idea of a plastic infection and this is what I did.


So sixteen years ago the first episode of Doctor Who I worked on was the Autons - an alien intelligence that inhabits plastic and brings it to life to kill people. This is my last episode and its one about a space virus that infects people through plastic and kills them……………. Anyway, moving on.

Contrary to what the credits say the creature design was solely the responsibility of @Millennium_fx_ltd on this episode.

Apparently those credits have been changed on iPlayer now.

Plastic ep does not stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny, so par for the Chinballs era.

The thing that chafed me the most is that sacrificing your life heroically is absolutely "dodging life." (The runner-up was the guy who stood outside watching a menacing flock of birds so that he could warn the others that they are in fact dangerous. I mean, mission accomplished, but there were better ways of doing this, guy!)

The thing that chafed me the most is that sacrificing your life heroically is absolutely "dodging life."

Absolutely. The episode seems pretty invested in that guy's arc but really trying to arrest a kid for shoplifting and going on a suicide mission seems like consistent have-to-prove-myself behaviour to me.

Meanwhile the vlogger girl has no arc whatsoever, which gets comically highlighted when she decides to be the third wheel for the other dude's honeymoon trip because they couldn't think of anything else for her to do.

Also a Brazilian woman would be acutely aware that the rest of South America speaks Spanish and so would say "gracias" and not "obrigado". Actress actually Portuguese judging by her accent (checked imdb - yup), but hey, lusofonia para sempre, parabéns para ela.

Still a somewhat above-average episode for the season tbh.

But uh - guys? What about last week's cliffhanger??

It seemed to follow fine from that for me - assumed the three emergencies referenced in the previous episode were this. But schedule says next episode ALSO has three emergencies so maybe you're right.

The vlogger's accent was variable enough to be actually painful, fortunately she seemed to only be there so that Yaz had someone to info-dump to.

Last night's seemed like a mess with a very promising setup but another rushed resolution and some good ideas desperately shoehorned in and kinda wasted. Would the Toymaker really approve?

i agree. another one that resolves with the doctor and the villain saying what they are doing like it's an audioplay.

everyone's lost interest, then?

It's looking like the worst season of nu who. Two passable episodes and a bunch of shit.

i wonder how they're going to waste the presence of mary shelley next episode

It's looking like the worst season of nu who. Two passable episodes and a bunch of shit.

Mrs aldo has been burning through them on Netflix while she's been laid up with the cold and she's confident (as of last night, because that's as far as she's got) that S6 (astronauts, Silence, river song, Moffat disappears up his own arse) is the nadir. If you include the Katherine Jenkins Christmas ep then it's only worse.

lolol, a match made in heaven :)

I have fond memories of most of that (the creepiness of the marks 'suddenly' appearing in the Silence episodes, the Gaiman episode, Madame Kovarian, The Rebel Flash both as a two-parter and as a hairpin turn into the half-season final, "The Doctor will return in - Let's Kill Hitler", the old and bitter Amy Pond episode, and the Christmas Carol) - I won't argue that the 'arc' wasn't bobbins though.

First two Matt Smith seasons are the overall best ones of the nu-Who era fite me and lose

The arc was done no favours by shuffling the episode order, such that one week Amy & Rory forgot that they had had a child, let alone that it had been kidnapped. Great season overall, and the best Christmas special ever.

xp Agreed, they are also like 10% really fucking stupid though, and some people seem to obsess over that 10% for some reason.