WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

Having a black actor play the brains behind a new form of police brutality felt like a v bad choice

As well as the part where doctor who quoted current very popular person jk rowling

the Doctor Who who recently changed gender

I wondered why that character was black at all if they were going to do that with him. Seemed bad enough when he was operating under his own autonomy.

Roles for black actors in British drama that scarce that it seemed like a good choice? Do people turn roles down in that circumstance or dismiss it as a bit of fluff. Oh well at least it isn't an out and out stereotype or something. Not great representation though.

The Doctor is worried about a swarm of fascists committing a genocide on Earth, so she calls in a bigger swarm of fascists to commit a genocide on the first swarm, resulting in no net change to the number of swarms of genociders on Earth. So she sorts it by committing a genocide on the second swarm herself.

W... what?

Oh yeah, and murders a TARDIS, which she knows to be living and sentient, by boobytrapping it to do a genocide.


I remember being shocked when Colin Baker shot a lock or a computer or something, just because he used a gun at all. Now you can miss the Doctor killing one of the universe's rarest lifeforms, which we just learnt last episode are wholly descended from her, because she's busy killing an entire population of another one. "Bloody love a murder, me!" - Jodie Whitaker's compassion coming across onscreen.

That’s a genocide per episode in the last two episodes, then

I was glad, for once, that Ryan wasn’t treated as the Comic Relief, until the very last shot was, of course, Ryan falling over.

Likewise, the scene where Mr. Big picks the scientist up by the ear was certainly something

I did like the scene where Jack and the doctor do a runner inside the weird orb ball from the Sylvester McCoy intro sequence. It’s exactly the right sort of naff the show needs more of

Why was that dude breeding a dalek anyway, I understand he didn't know what it was but don't get what in his personality and/or job description would lead him to do that. Could've worked if he was portrayed as deranged rather than sympathetic. And all for what amounts to a Invasion Of The Body Snatchers rip.

Theresa May blackmails Trump surrogate by saying "if you don't give us daleks free I'll reveal you're not paying taxes". In real life companies don't pay any taxes in the UK and this is well known and legal.

"God isn't the doctor great, let's talk about that for a couple of minutes" moments were always one of the worst parts of NuWho but in a Chib episode they're even more insufferable.

also Trump surrogate acts like a corporate baddie in a 90's family film, no trace of the actual real evil that he represents

Yeah the portrayal was so chummy, I thought the episode might be a covert lead-in to having Noth as the new companion

I thought the denouement of that character was utterly naff and probably epitomises this political thing. Would think elsewhen a character like that would suffer some form of comeuppance

O good, yet another companion from contemporary Britain, exciting and original.

That’s a genocide per episode in the last two episodes, then

Also two episodes in a row where the Doctor spends 80% of the runtime standing still while men explain the plot to her, much of that time inside a jail with neon bars.

I did like the scene where Jack and the doctor do a runner inside the weird orb ball from the Sylvester McCoy intro sequence.

Weirdly, when the prison was resolved with no ongoing plot points minutes into the show, having been clearly created for no other reason than to generate tension at the end of the last serial my immediate thought was of the literal cliffhanger in Dragonfire where the Doctor climbs over a cliff and down his umbrella to create peril just so Glitz can lift him back up in the opening sequence of the next episode.

What's this thing with John Bishop? Was that the trailer for the next season or was that something else.
God get rid of one aging comedian/family recognised figure and replace him with another.?
Or was that not what they said to hang on for at the end of the show?

is there a spin off series being set up with the 2 guys from Sheffield traveling the world fighting alien crime on a nonexistent budget. Seemed to be what the psychic paper was setting things up for, but not sure how 2 blokes from Sheffield were supposed to be getting around the world. Don't think either had much in the way of mney did they and the potential of traveling in a tardis or something is a bit scuppered by the doctor scuppering it, like.

ohhh, okay: the bit that was missing from the iPlayer and the totally legitmate version that I watched

Welcome to the TARDIS… ✨ pic.twitter.com/WgpnYiweqR

— Doctor Who (@bbcdoctorwho) January 1, 2021

Yeah, that was what I was highlighting.

so the lady Doctor is so distressed by, m/l, learning she was adopted that she just sits in prison for t w e n t y y e a r s being bummed and reciting Terf Wizard books to herself

until! a fifty-something white man turns up to rescue her and be amazing

(then her "fam" give her shit about not seeing her for ten months and she blubs about it, even though she only knew them for about 1 year of the 21 years this version of her has lived)

then after this ten months of constant pining and trying to crack the secrets of the universe to be reunited with her, the one nonentity bloke and his amazing dad decide to stop hanging around her forever, after one hour of being in her company again.

then we see the amazing fifty-something white man dad concoct a plan to be The Doctor, but on Earth, because all it takes it being a cheery chappy (played by an English TV host unknown around the world)

then instead of deciding to have the first woman Doctor, 57 years into the run of the show, have just one female companion, and perhaps allow this young black woman (who was given hopes and dreams and aspirations in her first episode, but for over 3 years of screen time since, has done nothing but say "the Space Red Cross? Is that like the Red Cross, but in space?") room to have agency and plots and character development, and actual emotional interaction with the Doctor....

... fifty-something white man king of representation Chris Chibnall decides that we have to have a specially-announced trailer that itself specially announces "DON'T WORRY EVERYBODY!!!! we will have a new fifty-something white man companion joining next season (played by an English TV host unknown around the world)

the one nonentity bloke ... decide(s) to stop hanging around her forever

because his mate has got a PS5.

and actual emotional interaction with the Doctor

With a shitload of CLANG hints it's actually sexual interaction she wants, to keep the shippers happy.

also

The one running plotline through last season was that Official Space Cops were acting as mercenaries hired to capture the Doctor.

Then they turned up again but were working as official cops, not mercenaries, and arrested the Doctor and sentenced her to life imprisonment, without a trial or actual charges being laid (?? idrc)

A year later, we pick up on the Doctor in prison having not challenged this sentence, tried to escape, or learnt the charges in order to counter them. We don't even see a glimpse of the Official Space Cops who have behaved in such contradictory, wildly overreaching ways, and instead yoink the Doc out of her twentieth year in priz to drop her into a completely different and wholly unconnected story about... wildly overreaching cops? From space?

With a shitload of CLANG hints it's actually sexual interaction she want

honestly I'm deliberately ignoring this every time, just because I can't believe he's ever going to pay it off in any way :-/

Now you can miss the Doctor killing one of the universe's rarest lifeforms, which we just learnt last episode are wholly descended from her,

lol I totally forgot that every other lifeform from her homeworld also got genocided last episode

maybe because her beloved fam, the amazing iconic trio, didn't give two tenths of a shit when she told them about it today

then after this ten months of constant pining and trying to crack the secrets of the universe to be reunited with her, the one nonentity bloke and his amazing dad decide to stop hanging around her forever, after one hour of being in her company again.

then we see the amazing fifty-something white man dad concoct a plan to be The Doctor, but on Earth, because all it takes it being a cheery chappy (played by an English TV host unknown around the world)

It seems like in your haste to dunk on this wholly middling episode, you forgot to watch it

Ryan was the one urging Yaz to let go of the Doctor at the beginning of the episode and was decidedly unenthusiastic about her return compared to the other two. It was signposted from the beginning that he had rebuilt his life on Earth and that he was the driving force behind the investigation and, when he turned down the trip in the TARDIS, part of his reasoning was because he was the one who wanted to protect Earth. Graham decided to stay because even though he loved traveling with the Doctor, he finally had a relationship with Ryan and he didn’t want to miss out on his life. Transferring all of these decisions to Graham when the show itself explicitly gives them to Ryan is about as fucking stupid as Chibnall’s overall tenure has been.

The prison was loosely thematically connected to the rest of the episode. High tech prison, high tech police. Shame that the prison fell into the "laser walls that are inferior to wall walls" trope.

(Oh god I don't care, but) do we know that the Doctor has been in prison for 19 years, or that Captain Jack has been planning his rescue for 19 years?

It's good that Chibnall has realised that the real purpose for Captain jack is quasi-homophobic gags.

I don’t know what units of time the Doctor was counting off on her cell walls but there were certainly a lot of them

they were in groups of seven, so i figured days / weeks.

(that said she was writing ||||||| and then putting a cross through them rather than using the seventh to strike out six marks like everybody else would)

my general ranking of holiday specials

Time of the Doctor
A Christmas Carol
The Runaway Bride
(all of the middling ones here)
Dr Mysterio
the wardrobe one
Revolution
Resolution
Voyage of the Damned

the Capaldi face-hugger one was top 3 for me, maybe even my favourite

yeah that was tremendous.

my ranking:

Christmas Carol
Last Christmas (facehugger)
Husbands Of River Song
Time Of The Doctor
Twice Upon A Time
The Runaway Bride
The Snowmen
The Return Of Dr Mysterio
The Next Doctor
The Christmas Invasion
The End Of Time
Voyage Of The Damned
Resolution Of The Daleks
Revolution Of The Daleks
The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

Transferring all of these decisions to Graham when the show itself explicitly gives them to Ryan

tbf, by saying that Ryan decided I meant to give the impression that Ryan had decided

will freely admit that I was not paying full attention by the end* but I thought it was Graham who says "hey there's some rock aliums in a quarry in Korea, if you want to do good we could go and investigate aliums like what we've been doing" and Ryan says "well in that case it happens that the Doctor gave me psychic paper for my birthday, I was just going to keep in the wrapping buuuuut"

*middle

I think I was mixing together Last Christmas and Sleep No More, resulting is an average that was middling.

I've found most Chibnall stories just average rather than irredeemably awful over the years but this just felt so uninspired I could not enjoy it at all.

Ellard & Sandifer writeups good as usual.

will freely admit that I was not paying full attention by the end* but I thought it was Graham who says "hey there's some rock aliums in a quarry in Korea, if you want to do good we could go and investigate aliums like what we've been doing" and Ryan says "well in that case it happens that the Doctor gave me psychic paper for my birthday, I was just going to keep in the wrapping buuuuut"

Ryan’s big speech literally is “you can’t defend Earth forever, you’ve inspired me to be here when you can’t be” so Graham is giving him info about stuff he explicitly said he wanted to look into in the previous scene

But yeah, the White guy said it so it’s all his idea

I wonder if this is anyone’s favourite Doctor Who, I genuinely hope it is

The teaser was almost comedically banal. Here is a scene that tells you nothing about the character, that is uninteresting in itself, and has as a big reveal something that is meaningless to most people.

I for one am very excited to see how his ability to unload a van is going to save the universe

You can't say Chibnall's press release doesn't build on that palpable excitement:

“It’s time for the next chapter of Doctor Who, and it starts with a man called Dan. Oh, we’ve had to keep this one secret for a long, long time. Our conversations started with John even before the pandemic hit. The character of Dan was built for him, and it’s a joy to have him aboard the TARDIS.”

Dan

top crossover potential

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwW3ytid4DA

Okay this is feeling like Doctor Who is attacking me

I should rewatch Time of the Doctor perhaps, my memory is that by the end Matt Smith and Moffat had worn out their (considerable) welcomes.

Time Of is brutally cramped, trying to fit an uncomfortably horny Christmas romp, a regeneration and the entire intended plot arc of Smith's fourth season into 60 minutes. But it just about pulls them off, and making Eleven into a sun god who grows old and withers and dies, and then saves his tiny world of worshippers by being reborn as new light, is a much better solstice story than any of the other holiday specials even think about trying.

Plus Handles is cool.

Watching what we have now, I really miss that sort of ambition, even if it didn't always stick.

I would really like to see Jodie with decent material.
Would have also loved a lot more Capaldi without the very wrong companion. Why did he get saddled with carla too thunk it was bad enough that Matt Smith got stuck with her. Really don't like the character beyond being a consciousness trapped in a dalek.

But god the way that things fall in the wrong direction. would have hoped for a lot more from the first female doctor and not getting it.

Unverified potential spoiler link

Argh

The source said she will follow co-stars Bradley Walsh and Tosin Cole out of the door later this year, but ­showrunner Chris Chibnall is to remain.