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Doctor Who: now discussing Empire of Death (with spoilers!)
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I hated it
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Now that’s no way to treat a Single Malt.
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I hated it
It could have been worse. The primary instruments could have been banjos, kazoos, and recorders. 😜
I honestly thought it wasn’t that bad. Maybe a bit overwrought but perfectly serviceable.
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a bit overwrought
Also known as, “a bit Murray Gold”.
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So it turns out the cagily written press release was because An Unearthly Child (and the subsequent three cavemen episodes everyone politely ignores) won’t be on the iPlayer.
The son of the credited writer, Anthony Coburn, is some kind of deranged right wing racist and, as far as I can tell, hates that they’ve cast Gatwa. It turns out the rights he inherited from his father are actually enough to block the BBC re-releasing the story if he refuses to play ball on the periodic relicensing of the story (or the BBC refuses to meet his demands – supposedly over the monetary cap in Coburn Sr’s original contract). The beeb admitted to the Radio Times that it won’t be included as they don’t have all the rights.
On the other hand, it looks like all the animated reconstructions will be included. There are episode holding pages for them on the iPlayer already.
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I find it hard to believe the BBC would commission something and leave any rights with the writer. Surely it was all work for hire, especially back then?
Though there was that thing about Terry Nation owning the Daleks, wasn’t there?
Maybe it was common practice then
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I’m watching Girl In The Fireplace. Two thoughts:
Ignoring all the stuff that’s come out about Clarke, it’s a shame this is the only TARDIS adventure Mickey gets before getting shuffled off to Pete’s World. He and Rose have a good dynamic here.
It’s not struck me before how much Moffat recycles the Doctor’s relationship with Reinette here for Amy. A pivotal, fleeting meeting in childhood, dismissed as an imaginary friend, only to reappear in her adulthood, where she promptly tries to get off with him.
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Still sounds like a fun way to get the old Doctors involved.
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The great iPlayer deluge has occured. The only things that seem to be missing (beyond the actually missing episodes – obvs) are An Unearthly Child pt 1-4, the McGann flash animation recon of Shada, Scream of the Shalka, the various Children In Need and Comic Relief shorts, Five(ish) Doctors Reboot and
the new Underwater Menace animation(actually, that’s not even out yet). The original versions of episodes that have had animated recons (half the Faceless Ones for example) are in the extras section. Oh and there’s none of the DVD/blu-ray special features, but I didn’t expect there to be.I just watched the wrap-around for one of those Tales of the TARDIS and they’re quite twee. Pretty much in the same vein as the trailers they do for the blu-ray sets now, but longer and more self-indulgent. Not for me. I’ve worked out what they remind me of though: in 1988, Sunbow wanted Transformers on the air as “new” episodes still, despite not animating any more, so they made a giant foam puppet of Powermaster Optimus Prime and had him book-end a selection of episodes, talking with some rando child.
The first thing I’m properly going to watch is the animated recon of Web of Fear 3, which is reportedly horrendous and I’m not prepared to pay money for, but streaming for free? You bet I’m going to check it out.
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Oh yeah, it’s today, will have to check it out.
Edit – this is surreal:
Doctor Who 1963-1996
643 episodes available!
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There’s been rumours of a colourisation for a while. Doing a cut down edit of a story for it makes sense.1 user thanked author for this post.
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I watched An Unearthly Child for the first time, having somehow never seen it before. I loved how weird and experimental and unsettling it feels. If I was watching this as a kid in the early 60s I’d definitely want to see more.
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I’m watching season 3 at the moment. It’s astounding how bad Agyeman is as Martha. Consistently out-performed by every other actor she shares the screen with.
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I was going to put this in the trades thread, but I think it might be better off here actually.
On a different note, I think I’ve mentioned before, I have a bad tendency to lose momentum with series I’m reading in trade and end up leaving a run unfinished for years. I’ve been trying to clear that up the past couple of years but there’s a weird trend of the concluding volumes I’ve finally got around to picking up being rather disappointing. The biggest example of this would be Sturges’ House of Mystery for Vertigo, which had 8 volumes. I bought v1-3 when they came out and really liked it. v4 went out of print and rocketed in price weirdly quickly (I think it was around when Titan stopped distributing DC trades in the UK) and I didn’t buy it and the remaining volumes until a year or so back, upon which I discovered that they were nowhere as good as the first three.
And so now Doctor Who: The Flood, which is the final collected edition of 8th Doctor strips from Doctor Who Magazine. I’ve been putting off/forgetting to buy this for 16 years now. Which is kind of mad when you put a number on it. Annoyingly, I looked at buying it the other week, saw it was in stock only at Amazon, held off for a day or two for some reason and then when I went to buy it: out of stock, used price had rocketed up. Had to buy a fairly beaten up used copy off eBay. Weird timing for that.
It’s been so long since I’ve read the first three volumes that I remembered next to none of them when I reread them. My vague recollection was “good but not great” but actually I’d revise that up now. The first volume is a little creaky in places, but the second and third, which are written almost exclusively by Scott Gray rather than Alan Barnes, are fab. Some really good stories, nice characters – especially companion Izzy but also Kroton- good art, which mostly avoids the pitfalls of black and white UK comics art being borderline unreadable to me (I really struggle with a lot of old 2000AD) and then decent colour when that comes in. So I was quite optimistic going into the Flood.
And it’s a bit of a let-down. It feels very bitty and directionless for the most part. Izzy leaves at the end of the third collection and rather than give the Doctor a new companion straight away, they spend a while (over a year publication time) with him travelling alone. That would be fine, but they also drop any over-arching plot elements, which had been one of the strongest elements of the previous volumes (yet something editorial was always trying to move away from, weirdly). It doesn’t help that one of these stories is a truly execrable three part Roy of the Rovers homage by Gareth Roberts, but even Gray’s stories are a bit flat and I really don’t get the appeal of the very twee homage to the old TV Action strips with the Doctor’s grandchildren Gillian and John.
Things get back on track with Bad Blood, a longer story featuring Sitting Bull and General Custer, although the Doctor is presented as weirdly culturally insensitive when he meets the Native Americans (there’s a flat gag with him saying “how” when he meets Sitting Bull, who takes it as a question – that’s the kind of thing you could do with a companion but not really the Doctor). This introduces the new companion, Destrii, who was actually in the third volume as well, a borderline sociopathic bipedal fish alien who forcibly swapped bodies with Izzy. This comes to one of the problems the volume has. According to the commentary, Gray had to work hard to convince his editor, Clayton Hickman, to let Destrii come back as companion. One of the issues was apparently that her looking the same as Izzy had for a year or two (from the extended body swap) would fatigue or confuse readers or something. So it was decided to do a story in which Destrii gets hold of a holographic disguise thing that makes her look like a black human woman. Result: Destrii can be the new companion and there’s some black representation in the comic for the first time in a long while.
Which is a bit of a cop out really. I saw something on Twitter a few weeks back with a guy saying it was annoying that pop culture keeps having aliens disguising themselves as people of colour – think J’onn and all the other Martians in Arrowverse Supergirl – because it’s creating this shorthand of “black people = not human” and the more I think about that, the more I can kinda see his point on. I’m sure it’s usually intended as a metaphor for prejudice, an outsider disguising themselves as an oppressed minority (in the States) to draw parallels between racism and xenophobia (or whatever the equivalent is to actual aliens) etc but it’s also just Othering non-white characters and diminishing representation of actual people of colour. And Destrii really falls into that. She’s not black, she doesn’t have that lived experience, she’s a fish-alien from another planet who’s seen too many westerns. If they’d wanted a black companion, they could have just created a new companion who was, you know, actually a black woman. It’s not a great choice, imo.
It all becomes somewhat moot though as her next story is the last. The titular Flood, which was written as it was being announced that the TV show was coming back. This is where the collection excels because the back matter commentary is expansive and frank about the problems this caused. DWM knew they’d have to switch to using Eccleston. RTD even offered to let them do the regeneration in the comic, as it wasn’t going to be on screen. But they didn’t want to ditch Destrii so soon after setting her up as companion. They pitched doing a run of stories set before series 1, with Eccleston and Destrii, but RTD nixed it, saying that Rose was as important as the Doctor and had to be in the strip as well. So despite being offered the regeneration, they ended up in this odd position where they couldn’t show Eccleston before he appeared on TV, they couldn’t show him with Destrii and they couldn’t show him without Rose, which meant they couldn’t even really do the regeneration. RTD suggested they do some extended mid-regenerative point where he’s got a Dormammu style flaming head and they use that to ease Destrii out, which sounds dreadful.
So they ended up not doing the regeneration and giving the Flood the least favoured of the two endings they’d written, where it just leaves Eight and Destrii open to more adventures. The commentary is a bit bittersweet about that, but I think it’s the only feasible choice really. Even if they had done the regeneration, there’s no way it would have been treated as “canon” – the show inevitably would have come along and contradicted it somehow – let alone the fact it wouldn’t have gelled with all the Time War back story. They were better off ending on their own terms.
The Flood itself is a decent story, a modern day piece with very cool future Cybermen that take advantage of not being actors in suits to have a more lithe and eerie design. It’s odd how similar the end of it is to The Parting Of The Ways though with deus ex machina time-vortex powers being used to disintegrate all the baddies and then, in the regeneration version, kill the Doctor. I wonder if that influenced RTD? He had read the scripts to the Flood and it would be around the same time he’d have found out he needed to write out Eccleston.
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The Christmas Special will be called “The Church on Ruby Road.”
Not sure if D+ were supposed to announce that before the BBC.
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The Mirror’s run a story about there maybe being an 8th Doctor side series coming. It feels like that’s been rumoured (or asked for) for a while, so maybe there is some truth to it. Hopefully!
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Doctor Who is back!
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I think it was the same guy who played Davros back in s4. Really sounded like Nyder on the intercom too.
That was fun though bold of RTD to say on IG the other day that it wasn’t going to be a comedy skit.
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Some interesting comments from RTD on the new look for Davros.
Speaking on new BBC Three companion series Doctor Who Unleashed, Davies said: “We had long conversations about bringing Davros back, because he’s a fantastic character, [but] time and society and culture and taste has moved on. And there’s a problem with the Davros of old in that he’s a wheelchair user, who is evil. And I had problems with that. And a lot of us on the production team had problems with that, of associating disability with evil. And trust me, there’s a very long tradition of this.
“I’m not blaming people in the past at all, but the world changes and when the world changes, Doctor Who has to change as well.
“So we made the choice to bring back Davros without the facial scarring and without the wheelchair – or his support unit, which functions as a wheelchair.
“I say, this is how we see Davros now, this is what he looks like. This is 2023. This is our lens. This is our eye. Things used to be black and white, they’re not in black and white anymore, and Davros used to look like that and he looks like this now, and that we are absolutely standing by.”
Davies added that Children in Need night felt like the perfect opportunity to debut the reimagined Davros.
“It’s a night where issues of disability or otherness or being excluded from society come right to the front of the conversation. So of all the nights to make this change, I thought it was absolutely vital to do this. And I’m very, very, very proud of the fact that we have.”
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Huh. Ok. I never really took it as “he’s in a wheelchair because/therefore he’s evil” so much as the tech he developed for the Daleks was a natural progression of what he made for himself. That and his strange appearance make him the bridge between the normal looking Kaleds and the Daleks, because he’s the one ushering the former into the latter.
I assumed he was human looking last night because a) it’s earlier in his life and b) because it’s only a CiN thing and they didn’t have the time or money to do the make-up.
Between this and the “Tennant’s costume regenerated because we don’t want to disrespect drag” thing, there are some odd decisions (EDIT: or rather curious explanations for things that are fine) coming from RTD2.
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I think Davies has a point.
Where disability is concerned, historically it is either something to be fixed, mocked or a mark of villainy, see various Bond villains. This has been changing in recent years so I can see why Davies wouldn’t want to re-open that box.
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But I mean he’s not in anything recognisably a realistic wheelchair. He’s in half a Dalek!
Surely the better way to challenge these stereotypes (and I can’t say the disability = villainy one is something that feels like it really exists as much today, but I’ll freely admit I’m not as sensitive to it so could well be not noticing) is to make new characters that are disabled without those cliches (which Who could stand to do more of) rather than erase elements of existing characters, like they attempted with… I want to say his name was Ryan. Bradley Walsh’s character’s step-grandson.
It seems a bit patronising to say “disabled people can’t be villains”, as you’re limiting their range and depth as character as much as disability being shorthand for villainy was.
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Yeah, I agree that this is coming from a place of empathy but it’s a bit heavy-handed.
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Which new Who does have form for, see Ryan.
But even with imperfect execution, having a show with the profile of Who covering dyspraxia is still a big deal, as it has nowhere near the recognition dyslexia has.
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Yeah, I agree that this is coming from a place of empathy but it’s a bit heavy-handed.
This is my feeling too. I don’t think the show has ever made it feel as though Davros is grotesque and evil because he has a disability – he’s grotesque and evil because of who he is and what he does. And his machine elements, whether you think of them as a wheelchair or not, have always felt like they’re simply to signify that he’s half-Dalek himself.
I’m sure RTD means well here but I’m not sure the change is really necessary.
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I can’t say I made the link of Davros to disability, but can see how it could be made.
I think the line now would be if disabled people can be villains, how about some heroes are supplied first?
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I can’t say I made the link of Davros to disability, but can see how it could be made.
I think the line now would be if disabled people can be villains, how about some heroes are supplied first?
I guess RTD may have already been thinking along these lines in his novelisation of Rose, in the section with visions of future Doctors:
Rose saw a photo of a man with a fantastic jaw, dressed in a tweed jacket and bow tie. Then Clive kept the sequence going; an older, angry man in a brown caretaker’s coat, holding a mop; a blonde woman in braces running away from a giant frog in front of Buckingham Palace; a tall, bald black woman wielding a flaming sword; a young girl or boy in a hi-tech wheelchair with what looked like a robot dog at their side…
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Back to talking about actual Who stories and I’ve gone through the Keys of Marinarus and The Sensorites arcs.
There’s some rather clever lines in these stories to elude both the limits of budget and technology. Like the Doctor being asked why the scanner isn’t displaying in colour, with the answer being it’s not working right so they’re stuck with black and white!
Both were entirely new to me. Each was distinct too, with the one being a story of technology gone awry, the other a bad first contact between humans and aliens.
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I’ve been watching through RTD1, finishing off “the specials” this evening. They haven’t aged amazingly. They feel very listless for the most part. None of them really needed to be an hour (Planet of the Dead would have felt padded at 45m, I think) and The Next Doctor in particular feels quite tired, with a weirdly claustrophobic Victorian London.
Figured I’d watch the 50th Special too. I still think the War Doctor was a conceptual misstep but the thing that’s sticking out more is something Rachael Stott mentioned to me in conversation at a con a few years back (I forget how it came up); Tennant doesn’t feel right because his hair looks so sad. Could they not have gelled it up a bit?
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I think the 50th special is a fantastic episode, and one that seems to get better each time I watch it.
I wasn’t sure about the War Doctor when the concept was first announced, but Moffat makes the idea work brilliantly – finally addressing the Time War head-on makes the special feel like a proper event, and the story ends up feeling both backward- and forward-looking at the same time; the various parallels between the different story strands are very clever (and in some cases, even quite subtle); the interaction between the Doctors is great, with Hurt more than holding his own (and even fan-service moments like “all thirteen!” really land and aren’t overdone); and generally the whole thing feels like Doctor Who going Big in a way that it doesn’t often get the chance to do.
Now I want to rewatch it all over again.
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I think the 50th special is a fantastic episode, and one that seems to get better each time I watch it.
I wasn’t sure about the War Doctor when the concept was first announced, but Moffat makes the idea work brilliantly – finally addressing the Time War head-on makes the special feel like a proper event, and the story ends up feeling both backward- and forward-looking at the same time; the various parallels between the different story strands are very clever (and in some cases, even quite subtle); the interaction between the Doctors is great, with Hurt more than holding his own (and even fan-service moments like “all thirteen!” really land and aren’t overdone); and generally the whole thing feels like Doctor Who going Big in a way that it doesn’t often get the chance to do.
Now I want to rewatch it all over again.
It was quite jarring skipping to it after all the Tennant run. His Doctor ends up like all previous Doctors that do repeat appearances in that he becomes a bit of a caricature of himself. Which is absolutely fine and really the only way it’d work, but going to it straight after his whole run was odd.
I’m conflicted on the 50th special. There are bits of it I really like still – the 3D paintings look great, Clara was much less annoying than I remember her generally being (and it was nice seeing how much fun she and 11 have just being around each other when they meet up), the Zygon plot thread was pretty good and it’s laugh out loud funny in places (none of the Doctors thinking to check the cell door; the repeat of the cliche “you’ve redecorated. I don’t like it” with the retort “no, you never do”.)
But there are other bits that bug me or I don’t think work. As I said, I don’t like the War Doctor concept. I get that it’s a replacement for Eccleston declining, but it would have worked as well, if not better, with the 8th Doctor, who pretty much already was a “lost” Doctor, as far as the mainstream audience is concerned. The way the War Doctor is written is odd and in hindsight a lot like a dry run for the 1st Doctor in Twice Upon A Time. He’s essentially a meta-commentary on New Who by pseudo-Old Who and some of that is fine – criticising the catchphrases and using the sonic screwdriver as a weapon/magic wand – but other bits don’t make sense. Not recognising 10 and 11 because they’re too young, even though he’s already been Davison and McGann. Being surprised about the kissing, even though he’s already been McGann.
And then undermining the entire core of RTD’s characterisation/motivation for the Doctor by sort of undoing the destruction of Gallifrey as part of Moffat’s general aversion to having anyone die in Doctor Who, just feels like a bit of an F you to that era. Bringing Gallifrey back in some way, I can totally understand, but to go “ah but actually, the Doctor didn’t really destroy Gallifrey at all, he just thinks he did” is a cop out and I think I feel more strongly about that now than I did in 2013.
The weirdest bit is that it’s 10 years old already. The 50th really doesn’t feel that long ago! And just Matt Smith as the Doctor doesn’t feel that long ago to me either, despite having subsequently watched through all of Capaldi and, well, lived through the Whittaker era. It’s going to be weird seeing him again, back as a caricature of his Doctor at some point. But I think that’s just me feeling old.
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His Doctor ends up like all previous Doctors that do repeat appearances in that he becomes a bit of a caricature of himself.
Yeah, it’s going to be interesting to how he balances that with being the lead solo Doctor (mostly) in the upcoming specials.
He should hopefully be fine there because he is (allegedly – I’m not entirely convinced and still think at least Smith is going to show up in one) the only Doctor that will be in it. The caricature thing mainly comes about when you need to differentiate between past iterations, to give a bit a texture to them and their interactions, but also because the current Doctor has to be the main one and mostly carry the plot. You can see it with Smith in Day of the Doctor (though Tennant does get a decent amount to do) and Davison in Five Doctors. So hopefully RTD will have given Tennant enough to get his teeth into in the new one for it to not fall back into the tropes and catchphrases too much.
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I see that the BBC have aired an updated version of An Adventure In Space And Time, which now features a little cameo from Gatwa’s Doctor at the end, replacing the previous Smith cameo.
People have obviously reacted to this in the calm and measured way you’d expect.
Personally I think it’s quite a nice idea to update it with whoever the latest Doctor is (a shame they didn’t do it with Capaldi and Whittaker too) – although I hope it doesn’t mean the original Smith version is lost for good, as it was a nice little (brief) moment that he acted well. It would be nice to have both versions available.
But I suspect the real reason for the change is so that the new version can be made available on Disney+ internationally, and will make more sense with a final scene that brings things up to date with the current Doctor, rather than a past incarnation.
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I’m watching season 3 at the moment. It’s astounding how bad Agyeman is as Martha. Consistently out-performed by every other actor she shares the screen with.
Oh yes. That was my biggest gripe with that phase of Who. She was truly terrible.
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I see that the BBC have aired an updated version of An Adventure In Space And Time, which now features a little cameo from Gatwa’s Doctor at the end, replacing the previous Smith cameo.
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That’s a really neat trailer.
Never expected to see Doctor Who mention Pat Mills in the writing credits.
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That was a decent episode, but very RTD by the numbers. I can’t wait to see how all the dipshits who heralded his return as the end of “woke” Dr. Who (like the show hasn’t had a firm left-wing progressive political bent by the time Pertwee was in the TARDIS) are going to lose their shit at Rose’s arc though.
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Hail to Meep, fuckpigs!
That was Margoyles’ preferred version but it got silenced.
Very fun, very smart. Yeah, very RTD, but we haven’t had that for a long time. Some really deftly done representation across the episode too.
Now, I need to go shopping for weapon upgrades for my wife’s wheelchair.
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I feel like RTD has pulled it off here. That was a fun romp with great production values and feels like a proper reset for the show – in a lot of ways it almost feels like RTD is just picking up right where he left off (while still acknowledging the Moffat and Chibnall eras).
The kids really enjoyed this one too. All through the first half they were saying they really wanted their own Beep The Meep – and all through the second half, even more so.
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Now, I need to go shopping for weapon upgrades for my wife’s wheelchair.
That line got the biggest laugh of the night for me.
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I can’t wait to see how all the dipshits who heralded his return as the end of “woke” Dr. Who (like the show hasn’t had a firm left-wing progressive political bent by the time Pertwee was in the TARDIS) are going to lose their shit at Rose’s arc though.
I thought that aspect of the story was all handled brilliantly – it was both heartfelt and funny (the part about assuming the Meep’s gender got a lot of laughs in our house) and I didn’t see the twist at the end coming but it worked great. The part with the toys representing all the classic Who monsters was a lovely touch.
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Also, the new TARDIS interior looks amazing.
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I thought that was pretty decent. Some of the ::dickhead voice:: “progressive woke agenda” ::dickhead voice:: did feel a tad heavy handed and clunky* (the assuming pronouns bit, which, in my experience, is more something used mockingly by transphobes now) and I wasn’t sure if Rose saying she was non-binary at the end was her deciding she was non-binary after the meta-crisis (which… would she need a meta-crisis to realise that?) or just RTD misunderstanding non-binary…ness? The latter seems unlikely, but the former didn’t seem totally well explained. Also, I thought the actress playing Rose was pretty wooden (which made Donna’s joke about her not being a good actress hit a bit differently).
On the other hand, Tennant and Tate were great, as was Sylvia. The story was fun. I really liked Shirley. And the new sonic screwdriver effects; totally magic wand, but in an innovative and imaginative way. The show looks utterly gorgeous, properly filmic. And the new TARDIS interior is brilliant (and massive!). Oh and the opening titles are nice too.
I wonder about Beep The Meep’s boss. Presumably the Toymaker.
* I’m not against any of the sentiment but some of the execution feels like it could be smoother. But then I remember people making the same complaints about the “gay agenda” back in RTD1, so I don’t know.
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I think it was definitely a choice to make Rose such a prominent character and the trans aspects so relevant to the story, but in the new episode of
ConfidentialUnleashed, RTD sets out his thinking on this very clearly and convincingly, in terms of what a positive impact that clear visibility can make, especially for younger viewers.The gag about assuming gender was fairly tongue-in-cheek I think, especially the follow-up joke about the Doctor also preferring to simply be known by the definite article.
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I’m certainly not against the visibility of Rose as trans and her importance to the story but, as I say, I don’t think the actress was great and there are some moments that just felt a little too awkward.
Conversely, I thought the bit with Sylvia being awkward and stumbling over herself about complimenting Rose was nicely done. I think that’s the kind of advocacy stuff that works elegantly: a relatable character trying their best and being reassured for it. Because I think there is a swathe of the population who aren’t transphobic but feel hesitant and nervous of being berated for not navigating all the nuances correctly.
Whereas the pronoun assumption bit, even if intended as a joke, has an inescapable air of confrontation to it. And confrontation is fine at times – Donna raging about the transphobes for instance – but when it is, again, a relatable character being fairly benign, it kinda feels scoldy.
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Wait, women can let things go?
In fairness, a male-presenting Doctor could never deal with a situation in that wa…
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One subtle line I really liked was that he absolutely loved Donna. That’s not a line 10 would come out with, but it is one that 13 would.
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Yes, Tennant2 seems much more emotionally available than Tennant1 which is not only riding the zeitgeist but goes with the development of the Doctor’s character over the years. It’s nice they made that change rather than went back to solidly just Tennant again.
One other interesting bit I remembered this morning was when the Doctor mentioned his past iterations to Shirley and the disparity in that. “then I wore a bowtie” which 11 did pretty much made his personality, “then I was Scottish” which again, 12 pretty much made his personality “and then I was a woman”. That’s it, just a woman. Nothing about her personality or quirks then. Not “from Yorkshire” or… “gauche”? (I can’t really think of much else to pin on Whittaker’s Doctor really) just “oh, I was a woman”. It’s another thing where it sort just misses the thrust of the attitude being aimed for. If the Doctor being a woman is no big deal, something that can happen, something he’s fine with and not in and of itself remarkable, then surely he shouldn’t think of that past self as just a woman, he would be thinking of her by what made her different to his previous selves. It’s falling into that cliche of where you have a group of characters – the original GI Joe team say – where they all have individual characteristics to set them apart but there’s only one woman amongst a bunch of men and theirs is just “woman”.
On the other hand, what I liked about that scene is that Shirley clearly already knew this and it gave the hint, when she said “that’s your future, you shouldn’t know this”, of the Doctor’s greater criss-crossing of time and interactions with UNIT, that previous iterations have popped up in the future and future ones in the past. She could possibly know what his next three iterations are but is having to keep schtum about it. I liked that, it suggested a lot with a little.
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This comment from IO9 summed up the ep perfectly for me.
“I feel like RTD and Garth Marenghi’s attitudes about writers who use subtext align perfectly”But I had a lot of fun watching it, DT and Tate just have the best on screen chemistry.
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Yeah, don’t we all.
Talking of which, this recent quote from Chibnall made me laugh.
Doctor Who: ‘Specials are first time in 17 years I know nothing’
Highly debatable.
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That was an OK holding episode in the middle of this threw parter. Worked well as a horror piece.
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it seems like the show wants to forget about all that.
Yeah, don’t we all.
That aged poorly :D
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It was five episodes of build-up, varying from OK to very good, then concluded with Chibnell smashing the plane into the ground, going for maximum geographical distribution of the debris.
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I really liked that episode. A nice mix of sinister creepy spaceship stuff and ridiculous Vic and Bob style prosthetics. Plus Beta Ray Bill showed up!
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This comment from IO9 summed up the ep perfectly for me.
“I feel like RTD and Garth Marenghi’s attitudes about writers who use subtext align perfectly”But I had a lot of fun watching it, DT and Tate just have the best on screen chemistry.
Heh. Yeah, that comment is spot-on.
But yes, it was a lot of fun. The Meep was great. And those insect soldier guys reminded me of the space police in Rick & Morty (or presumably the other way round now, given that they were in the original comic).
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Beta Ray Bill showed up!
A Frozen easter egg last week. A Thor easter egg yesterday. Next week, there’s got to be a reference to Emperor Palpatine or something similar.
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Somehow, Davros returned.
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Best Past Doctors Team Up To Solve A Mystery anniversary special
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Yeah, that was a fun ep. A relief to see something that wasn’t laden with convoluted, mythology-busting continuity baggage and instead just let the charisma of the two leads loose in a tight, “what’s in the box” mystery.
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That was another decent episode. I wasn’t hugely surprised when the regeneration happened early enough, I figured it’d be the kind of trick RTD would pull at this point. The bigeneration thing feels a bit like him trying to have his cake and eat it to a degree, a clear setup for Tennant to return more readily than another Doctor and to do a Last Doctor story while keeping the series going in parallel. Gatwa was a lot of fun and I like his take on the Doctor as someone who’s more pragmatic but also empathic in a way that the other Dcotors haven’t.
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I thought it was tons of fun. Properly weird in places, funny in others, some nice nods to the past, a great baddie (NPH doing Spice Up Your Life was a hugely fun scene and brought to mind the Master under RTD), a nice final-but-not-really-final performance from Tennant, and Gatwa was great in his scenes – I think he’s going to be fantastic in the role. Couldn’t really ask for more.
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I liked it up till the ball game and then it went a bit to RTD for me.
I didn’t hate the spice Girls bit though, which was a surprise. 😅I do love that Rose is vegan, the Gammon are going to love that.
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The bigeneration thing feels a bit like him trying to have his cake and eat it to a degree
Definitely. The one thing that gives me pause is that it makes it feel like Tennant’s era as 14 hasn’t truly finished with Gatwa now in the role, when usually regeneration is a cleaner passing of the baton.
Maybe they’re leaving the door open for a Tennant spinoff/side adventure, or maybe he’ll come back in during Gatwa’s run and the bigeneration aspect will be resolved more cleanly. But either way it feels like a loose end, even if seeing a Doctor get to settle down and enjoy retirement is a nice idea.
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I do love that Rose is vegan, the Gammon are going to love that.
And she definitely won’t enjoy the gammon.
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At first it was a so-so episode – some neat culture riffs on the nature of the world, vicious villain being very nasty, so far, so standard. Then it got to that scene, yep, you know the one. And it was at that point it all flipped to go stratospherically good.
Repeat after me: There are no rules. Got that? Good.
At the same time, if you look at the collective experience of 11-13, that’ll wreck anyone. But none of it would have worked without Ncuti, who more than nailed his debut.
I’m looking forward to the Xmas Special.
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A fun episode with some nice visuals, the bit with the puppet babies was suitably creepy and the Spice Girls dance scene was surprisingly not as cringe as it could’ve been.
The regeneration feels like a bit of a cheat though…We all like Tenant in the role, but this just feels like it muddies Gatwas tenure as The Doctor, with the possibility that this fan favourite incarnation is still kicking around…But I did like what we saw of Gatwa here and the Christmas trailer looks quite impressive.
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Really enjoyed that. Fun episode. Was all ready to bawl my eyes out (again) and then it got weird. I assume this isn’t the last time we see #14. Seems ripe for a future season finale guest appearance.
Neil was fantastic. Ncuti was fun. RTD is clearly poking the bear with Bigeneration. Looking forward to the Christmas special.
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That was fun! Nice to see Mel (for some reason I thought she was going to be in Gatwa’s first season not these). The bigeneration was weird, felt kinda derivative of the meta-crisis Doctor (letting a version of the Doctor have a happy ending off with Rose while continuing on normally) but yeah, ok, sure. That set-up at the end, with the Doctor essentially retired in a country estate with a found family had a New Adventures vibe to me, for some reason.
It does muddy up the clear lineage of the character – I’m not sure undermining the legitimacy of the first black (and gay?) Doctor is an entirely smart move – but I don’t think that’s a massive problem. And it leaves 14 to hang around to become the Curator in the 50th Anniversary special (and every other character vaguely suggested to be the Doctor when he’s “retired” over the years) as well, I guess.
I liked NPH as the Toymaker. I thought maybe they were going to do more with that line of “I made a jigsaw of your past” – use him to retcon or clarify some stuff – but I guess not. The final game was a tad underwhelming though, but I’m not sure there’s really any game you could dramatise well in that situation.
I like what we’ve seen of Gatwa so far, but I did find his dialogue was really getting lost in the mix and I struggling to make out some of his lines at all. To the point that I couldn’t confidently tell you what accent he’s doing.
I’m a little disappointed – though not entirely surprised – that I was wrong about Smith being in it (I thought for sure there was a double in his costume in the location filming of the crowd scene) and that there really wasn’t a deeper explanation about Whittaker’s costume regenerating too. I guess RTD really did feel worried about mocking drag somehow, for some reason.
Oh and the remains of the Master being collected by a mysterious female hand. Again.
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I thought the Toymakers monologue about playing a game with the Master and making a jigsaw of the Doctors history was interesting…Maybe a possible retcon of the timeless child🤷♂️
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At first it was a so-so episode – some neat culture riffs on the nature of the world, vicious villain being very nasty, so far, so standard. Then it got to that scene, yep, you know the one. And it was at that point it all flipped to go stratospherically good.
Yeah, Donna beating up a puppet was great.
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I thought the Toymakers monologue about playing a game with the Master and making a jigsaw of the Doctors history was interesting…Maybe a possible retcon of the timeless child🤷♂️
I think it’s good to leave that line ambiguous so it can mean pretty much whatever you want it to mean.
Want the TV movie’s line about being half-human to be out of continuity? Done.
Want the Timeless Child stuff to be forgotten? Fine.
Want a version of history where Moffat hands over the shortener position to Mark Gatiss? Be my guest.
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