WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

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.

That's your wank explosion right there. Swarm will be the Loom Master or something.

I think I remember a video interview with Chibnall where he gets asked about Lungbarrow and professes to know about it (if not to have actually read it).

I saw people have been complaining about the sound levels on yesterday’s episode so I’m glad it wasn’t just me. The music was unbearable at times - Murray Gold’s problem was telegraphing the emotion of the story constantly, in case the viewer was too stupid to notice (“Music says: this is a funny bit!” “Music says: this is a sad bit!”). Conversely Segun Akinola’s problem is that he’s All Sturm and Drang, All The Time -- irrespective of what’s going on in the script. So John Bishop can’t even make a daft fucking dad joke about a wok without the soundtrack doing discount Hans Zimmer HHHRRRRRRRRRRRRR noises in the background.

The dog and the baddies are v good though

I'd double-check the audio settings in your current setup; I've noticed a lot of times that when I've had difficulty hearing dialogue; it's because my system is defaulting to a 5:1 surround sound setup I don't actually have and changing the settings back to stereo improves the quality dramatically.

Was listening on an iPad Pro – the speaker is not the best but most shows are fine

Ah well then, never mind me

sontarans are a good fit for chibnall. lots of fun to be had. who cares if they can be defeated with rugs now.

i don't care for mr. and mrs. edgelord. their outfits are fab though.

Watch out or she’ll kill another triangle

Evil Dan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74HvcECaE6k

that is fantastic

Speaking to Doctor Who Magazine, executive producer Matt Strevens teased Chapter Three: Once, Upon Time, revealing that the episode is an “ambitious” one for the long-running sci-fi drama.

“In terms of form, and structure, especially in Chapter Three – it really does take the show in a new direction,” he said. “It’s very ambitious, and it credits the audience with sophistication and intelligence.

“Which is something we always do, of course, but with this, it’s very much asking you to trust the show and go on a ride. Not everything is given to you in the moment. As with a lot of television now, it credits the audience with a degree of patience – that they’re not going to know quite what’s going on.”

He added that the third episode explores a form of storytelling that the show hasn’t done before, comparing it to Marvel films.

“For me, it was reminiscent of some of the shows that I love – of the way that Marvel Studios are telling stories; the way they’ll parcel out the information, and things can seem incredibly random and abstract, but they’re not in the end.

“They’re part of a very cohesive whole, but you don’t get served straight away.”

do i need to read a description of lungbarrow to understand this one?

Lungbarrow is utter crack, so wouldn’t surprise me to see Chibnall use it.

Cack, not crack

I'd be surprised if Chibnall read any New Adventures novels; I'd be startled if he read Lungbarrow.

do i need to read a description of lungbarrow to understand this one?

If it's true then there'll be a 5-10 minute exposition scene to explain it for you so I wouldn't bother.

Remember that time I asked Chris Chibnall if Lungbarrow and looming would ever become canon? #TheTimelessChild pic.twitter.com/1BPzCxDoIA

— Adam Lance Garcia (@AdamLanceGarcia) January 5, 2020

Have any of you actually *shudder effect* read Lungbarrow?

Oops here’s the actual video tweet, with Chibnall doing some excellent (and presumably well-practiced) fan-question-polite-face

A lot of people are asking whether #DoctorWho will (finally) dive into "The Cartmell Master Plan," Lungbarrow, and looming.

Here's how Chris Chibnall answered that EXACT QUESTION in 2018. pic.twitter.com/EhuEFOJVeo

— Adam Lance Garcia (@AdamLanceGarcia) January 28, 2020

I read it about seven years ago. It was a fun, baroque way to sow some wanky confusion at the end of an entire era of Who, the way Platt had been largely stopped from doing at the end of the previous one, about seven years earlier.

Capaldi's doing press for a new album this weekend:

It wasn’t until he was in his fifties and cast as the 12th Doctor that he achieved household-name fame. “My job was to go into work in the morning and battle Daleks. It was fabulous. You get to inhabit the skin of this charismatic, magical creature. Kids look at you and you can see their jaws drop. That’s an extraordinary position to be in.”

"(...)I wanted to be a more distant and alien Doctor. Because that’s how I remember William Hartnell, being a kid in Glasgow on dark winter nights when this strange figure with the white hair and slightly irate voice could open this portal to a magical world. The default now is a kind of cosmic imp. Which is great. But I wanted to touch the dark winter nights. I’m not sure whether the brand supports that any more, but that’s what I was interested in.”

Dunno why Lungbarrow has this reputation as being a franchise nadir. Compared to "The Timeless Child" it's a masterpiece.

Anyone thinking it could ever possibly be incorporated into the continuity of the current show is deluded though. It will never happen.

I read Lungbarrow and enjoyed it fine. IIRC for all its “origin story” splaining, it actually did a good job of asking more questions than it answered - leaving plenty of places for the curious mind to wonder and play. Which - although I have enjoyed it only in recap from - seems like the actual opposite of the shit reductionism of The Timeless Child.

Unrelatedly, I watched an old Sarah Jane two-parter, The Curse of Clyde Langer, a couple of nights ago. All the eps are on britbox now. Not a big fan of the show but it’s a solid, silly episode - a cheapo Cardiff take on the Hitchcock “innocent man on the run” story - fun if you’ve got a spare hour!

Is the Capaldi quote a subtweet of anyone in particular?

Sure feels like it!

Re Lungbarrow, there are definitely worse Who stories. I just hate it when they make the Doctor special because s/ he’s the Chosen One, ie for who they’re born as, rather than because of what they chose to do, ie nick a TARDIS, run away and start interfering. The second is interesting, the first is boring.

Yeah that's fair and OTM - and I definitely feel that the fan-industrial drive to unnecessarily fill in backstory is overall DUD. But yeah just Lungbarrow not the worst example I guess.

It's probably not a great sign that I enjoyed all of the bits of this week's episode where the Doctor isn't on screen.

"Sorry we haven't given you much to do this week, Mandip - would you like a go of one of the other roles?"

Because I'm not very observant, my better half had to point out that yes that is meant to be the same Lupari that is attached to Dan, because the reason Yas and the Doctor were talking to him in the first episode is that he's the last reachable member of Division.

Yeah I thought this was another decent episode - I guess this was Chibnall’s attempt to “do a Moffat”? Ok, none of the flashbacks worked as self-contained stories, and Yaz got forgotten again, and the pregnancy reveal was a real groaner, and the sci-fi elements were bollockry of the highest order - but, I dunno, it was still pretty fun? The light-switch planet was even - shockingly - an actual good story idea that deserved more time. And I believe at one point there was an alien character name without a ‘k’ in it.

Is the light-switch planet A Planet Called TIME? I have to admit I missed the good story idea because I was too busy wincing every time someone mentioned A Planet Called TIME.

Nice to see an weeping angel doing something other than going 'Boo!' though.

The character in the introduction – the daytime switches on and off while she’s on the Dalek planet. I thought it was a cool effect/idea, maybe Chibnall’s first ever! (“The idea came from having used a light switch.”)