WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

at least he's consistent

oh COME ON

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CVkay_8DNaX/

Even Moffat’s tossed-off Instagram dad jokes are more creative and funny than the series proper. That said obviously like a sucker I am looking forward to the new one on Saturday.

That was largely a trailer for the whole series, wasn't it? Except a trailer is supposed to make you want to watch it.

do i bother?

First time in human history I have not been even a little bit excited about the new series, and forgot it was on today. Will watch, because I’ve seen every other existing episode of this damn thing and the fallacy of sunk costs, etc, but really am just waiting for Chibnall to fuck off.

found a stream of bbc america, it's playing the one with the irish cop from last season, and wow those bits are bad once you know what they're supposed to mean

Man, this is his usual first-draft, it'll do stuff still, isn't it? Like, 30 seconds of work would make stuff make sense (ie the dog aliens could be the future evolved descendants of dogs (the same way Who already has the same with cats), which is why they feel an ancestral debt to rescue the species that uplifted them or whatever ), but no, it's just chuck half-arsed stuff into the plot until you've filled 50 minutes.

ok gonna go with Not Bothering

It's 5 (6?) Episode 1s smushed into one TV show. All the infodumps are about the 'important' ep 1, the rest are more or less trailers for the stories in the rest of the season. No indication at all they're linked by anything other than the way Chinballs has presented them.

DOCTOR: there's something weird in the space-time continuum, why are we here?
LADY: Hello, Doctor and Yaz. I come from your future, where we have fought together against the giant threat that is coming. I would like to warn you of it.
DOCTOR: uh right m8,

https://media1.giphy.com/media/XB43a39jYFT6JxjVtR/giphy.gif

at least he's consistent

oh COME ON

welcome to Commander Inston-Vee Vinder of Kasto-Winfer-Foxfell

It was essentially shit but there were still things I liked about it, enough for me to not regret having watched it.

Course you could argue that'd be a valid review of like 80% of all the Doctor Who I've ever watched.

more first draft garbage

our new companion. our first details: thinks liverpool has the best history in the world; no job but has "a trade"; single in his 50s and embarrassed to ask crush on a date; works at food bank; believes in luck; doesn't have food but has a van and a house; doesn't like adult trick or treater; alien species racist

no mention that the doctor caused the extinction of humanity last season. guess that doesn't matter -- she's nice!

You forgot "chompers to rival Rob Beckett"

A cultural question. Do Brits give out Halloween candy in bags rolled up like a tootsie pop? At first I thought he was giving those people drugs.

At first I thought he was giving those people drugs.

wow racist

https://i.makeagif.com/media/5-18-2018/3xjI6q.gif

You forgot "chompers to rival Rob Beckett"

I was completely obsessed with the Rylanesque whiteness of his teeth. They need a whole backstory of how he afforded them then fell down on his luck to the point where he can afford replica football shirts but no food.

I forgot to mention that while he is poor and believes in luck, HE DOES NOT PLAY THE LOTTERY

I'm old and my hearing's shite but I couldn't hear almost any of Jodie Whitaker's dialogue - too low in the mix, rushed and garbled.

Everyone above is OTM but I found it marginally more bearable than usual - a few interesting story threads, and the knowledge that Chibnall only has six more episodes left, probably helped.

Otherwise the usual poverty of imagination and wit but maybe not as bad as last time. The repetition of catchphrases ("bigger on the inside", "don't blink") felt particularly desperate and [PUT BETTER DIALOGUE HERE LATER]. The actor who plays Yaz seems sharper and more interesting than she has in the past, I'm sure Chibnall will find a way to waste that.

Just a guess but Swarm is the Master, surely? Chibnall loves his Baker-era continuity porn and the makeup seems like an obvs reference to the Peter Pratt version

The repetition of catchphrases ("bigger on the inside", "don't blink") felt particularly desperate

Guessing Chibnall's stage direction includes saying those phrases with ICONIC reverence.

Just a guess but Swarm is the Master, surely? Chibnall loves his Baker-era continuity porn and the makeup seems like an obvs reference to the Peter Pratt version

Poundland Eldrad I thought.

the knowledge that Chibnall only has six more episodes left

eight episodes across 13 months

Ha, I guess I'll amend that to "he is definitely leaving unless he pulls a Jay Leno" is enough reassurance

the brand is never letting him near doctor who again

Chinballs has revealed his inspiration for the Karvanista. He got the idea when...

he owned a dog.

I actually wish that was made up.

https://i.imgur.com/8N7Food.png

What a genius.

I... liked this? A lot?

what happened, I'm confused

It was very much "six-year-old creates story using every toy in the toybox" but I was into it

Yeah, I thought it was fun too, for similar reasons. Plus the eunuch from Game of Thrones turns out to be quite charismatic when he's allowed to speak in his own accent. 13 is still dulllll though.

Did hope we might have her getting a chance to shine with better material. Shame hope this doesn't haunt the rest of her career. Or totally get rid of the idea of a female doctor just cos it was done so badly by one programme runner.

I thought she was a lot more coherent in this one; in a previous story I wouldn't have been surprised to see her say "no you see the Flux is actually good, this is all part of the process of the universe renewing itself *chucks Yaz into the vaporizing maelstrom*"

she did try to stop the Flux by blasting it with a special kind of energy that turns you into a god tbf

(without bothering to find out what the Flux even is)

six-year-old creates story

https://i.imgur.com/hVfzJoK.jpg

(cf. We’ve already seen that Chibnall, despite living on one, has no idea how large planets are, but here he’s blowing out his misapprehension of them pretty impressively. and Again, the writers this series seem not to know what words for big things -- billions, galaxies, etc -- actually mean.)

Yeah. Seven billion spaceships turning up at once! Trying to think about the practicalities of that and how their civilisation could actually function has made my head hurt a bit.

for comparison: the observable universe, based on the speed of light, is about 93 billion light years in diameter. this Sontaran ship is 645x further away than the edge of the known universe.

travelling at the speed of light, it would take (licks pencil, squints) ...thirty trillion years to arrive at the scene of the action next episode. which is 2,307x longer than the universe is currently estimated to have existed.

It's true that up until now, the one thing that the time travel show starring an alien with two hearts always got right was the math

just sit quietly and watch your space stories, poindexters

you can't change distances! not one line!

Fantasy novels with inconsistent travel durations must drive you guys bonkers too.

Though this shit annoys me too, the original Who didn’t seem to know what constellations were.

This seems to be confusing the kind-of Star Wars fan level of insistence on every nut and bolt in every bit of machinery being consistent with "caring that things in a TV show make some kind of basic sense".

It's just mildly irritating when Chibnall just throws in random HUGE NUMBERS like the above because he thinks it sounds impressive, but has clearly put no thought into it beyond that. It's the same sloppiness that characterises his whole tenure on the show. Why accept such low standards?

At the same time, whoever designed the dog’s head should be very pleased with themselves

Whoever edited the weeping angel “chase’ sequence should be… less pleased

Honestly Chibnall’s like the idiot in your creative writing class who somehow gets the first book deal

This'd be the Star Wars where the first film had a distance unit where a time unit should be?

The Star Wars that is infamous for having a fan community that obsessively details every single aspect of every facet of the franchise on and off screen. I'm saying that having issues with bad writing on an episode of a TV show is not equivalent to that.

A different Star Wars, then.

Anyway, this is actually growing on me - the main Sontarans in the Crimea wasn't great, but I liked pretty much everything else - it helps that Sam Spruell as Swarm isn't really giving it pantomime villain.

Yeah, he seems to be legitimately menacing, which is good otherwise nothing in the story would work

Not seen the latest yet but just want to register my disgust at that font choice for the location captions

I know!! I think it's Impact, or something like it, because we used to use it for headlines on my student newspaper. In 1998.

The second episode, like the first, was objectively terrible but not unenjoyable.

A season of six episodes seems like a much better fit for Chibnall's ADHD/toybox/make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach to plotting: setting up curious little mysteries across a broad canvas of characters, and leaving the boring bits (like "plot resolution" and "thematic unity" and "making sense") offscreen for as long as possible.

I guess that means we'll get five episodes of (YMMV) enjoyable nonsense followed by an absolutely appalling final conclusion that makes everyone embarrassed to have bothered watching in the first place. But, at the moment, we're still in the "stupid but fun" phase, and "fun" is an improvement on whatever happened in the last two seasons.

These two episodes have worked much, much better than anything else Chibnall has done

I'm getting very strong Broadchurch S1 vibes from how much I'm enjoying this, which effectively means Chuck is probably OTM and the last episode is going to be Swarm going "actually it's me, Graham" and the entire thing suffocating in a wank implosion

That house is Lungbarrow, right? Which would be consistent with his Timeless Child 'Timelords are all just genetic experiments in the lab' nonsense.