I remember when 2020 seemed a long way away!
Hope we get some news soon on exactly when this is coming.
Doctor Who – What The Flux?
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Ok, fair enough. Happy to leave this as an ‘agree to disagree’.
Either way, I think the discussion here has been more interesting and thorough than that Guardian article!
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I think it’s interesting that these long-running fandoms like DW, Star Trek and Star Wars are falling into the same patterns of reaction.
Whereas I don’t agree they do.
Wait, are you disagreeing with yourself now?
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Dr Who avoids continuity snags
You could take the last word off the end of that sentence and it would be equally true.
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People also have their ‘favourite doctor’ which inherently means they will have a problem with su sequent iterations.
Id think it rare for a new doctor to become a long term fans ‘favourite’.
I’m rare?
I knew I was special.
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The Eighth Doctor is my favorite.
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Even then I could always hop in ever-decreasing circles.
This particular Doctor was ever so Doctor-y and wore an impeccable suit.
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I thought that one was ok, but after setting a lot up quite quickly it felt like they didn’t really do a huge amount with it this episode. I thought it was a mistake not to tie in the ‘mystery’ plot strand with the main story more strongly, and I thought the cliffhanger with the Master was far too vague to really propel things forward into the big finale.
I guess I was hoping for more. There are ingredients there for a decent story, but not enough really happened this week. This one will be easier to judge once we have both parts of it and can see how it works as a larger two-parter.
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That’s pretty much how I felt. It was ok but not spectacular.
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It was all build-up, yeah. Which is a bit annoying when last week’s contribution to the arc was all build-up too.
And when exactly were the parts in Ireland set? Obviously Brendan retired in the mid-20th century because of the style of car, but An Garda Siochána only formed in 1923, so depending on how long he was in service, he should have initially joined the RIC.
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Probably not, but I’ll never pass on a chance to nitpick up when a Brit fucks up the portrayal of Irish history or culture.
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This bloke called Andydrewz just does these for fun on Twitter, they also end up looking much better than most real book covers.
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Was there more to the whole Ireland strand than it being some sort of weird VR illusion to facilitate conversion?
I was waiting for it to be revealed as the secret origin of the boss cyberman, then I was expecting it to be the old guy on the planet who is randomly immortal, then I was sure it was tied into one of the Master’s regenerations.
I was quite disappointed when it turned out to be completely random
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Was there more to the whole Ireland strand than it being some sort of weird VR illusion to facilitate conversion?
I was waiting for it to be revealed as the secret origin of the boss cyberman, then I was expecting it to be the old guy on the planet who is randomly immortal, then I was sure it was tied into one of the Master’s regenerations.
I was quite disappointed when it turned out to be completely random
I think it was a mistake to not reveal the connection a bit more explicitly within this episode. There was so much build-up of this separate story strand, and you expected some kind of payoff, and then… nothing. There are some clues but they all could point to different things.
Having said that, I don’t feel like this will be a problem once we have both parts of the story. They did something similar with the Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead two-parter with the mysterious world with the little girl, if I remember rightly, and that worked out great.
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Some of the rumours out there about the finale are interesting, that’s all I’ll say.
For all that Doctor Who has a fairly bulletproof approach to lore and continuity (in that it largely ignores it whenever it wants to), it sounds like Chibnall might be aiming for something that’s pretty difficult for the show to ignore, and overturns the mythology underpinning the show quite considerably.
Then again, that was arguably true of the “half-human” revelation of the TV movie and that was ultimately ignored and (largely) forgotten too.
Let’s face it. We were all thinking of Superman during the Ireland stuff, right?
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I was mostly thinking of Father Ted. Then again, I usually am.
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I was wondering why there were so many different accents in one small village.
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I was wondering why there were so many different accents in one small village.
It’s multiculturalism gone mad!
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It’s multiculturalism gone mad!
I saw one review of the latest episode genuinely trying to criticise the show’s “woke agenda” because the group of the last humans alive included a teacher and a healthcare worker.
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The companions really got screwed over this season. They mostly just seemed to be tagging along, with almost no meaningful development for any of them, especially compared to the RTD/Moffat eras.
It’s funny, I was talking to my daughter earlier today about who she’d like to be most out of everyone on the show (fully expecting her to say The Doctor), and she said Yaz because she’s brave and smart and like a second-in-command to the Doctor – who she said it would be too stressful to be, with too much responsibility.
I think it’s tempting sometimes as an adult viewer to think the supporting characters need deep development or huge amounts to do. But I don’t think that’s always the case for kids – I think a decent, solid character anchored by a good performance can be enough.
(And my daughter was really happy with Yaz getting that little moment with Graham tonight, which meant quite a lot in terms of recognising what’s appealing to kids about Yaz as a ‘gateway’ character.)
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But, what happened to all the humans who went from that planet to Gallifrey through the gateway – did that not alert the gallifryans to the Master’s plan to lure the cybermen, or was that after he killed all of Gallifrey and the the Dr accidentally killed the last of the human race too ?
Last week they said the portal opened to a random location each time, and the gatekeeper said it had never looked like the Gallifrey portal before, so I don’t think the previous humans went to Gallifrey.
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Well, found some info on the next eps:
Doctor Who will return in Christmas 2020/New Year 2021 special Revolution Of The Daleks.
Even so, that’s still 10 months that feels a long way away to me and would feel even longer to a kid. Can’t help but think they are having the gaps between series be too big.
EDIT: Oh yeah, had just about forgotten Chibnell also gave us this one for the ages:
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That was awful. My “oh for fuck’s sake” counter hit about six.
First off (and this is partly from the previous episode too), Chibnall really doesn’t understand the point of the Cybermen or what makes them work. The implacable, undefeatable army concept is a complete misnomer. And hey, Neil Gaiman fell into that trap too. But Cybermen aren’t scary for threatening to kill everyone. Any cardboard villain can do that. Cybermen are scary for the threat of making them into you. They bring not death but broken, unendless life at the cost of what makes it worthwhile. Cybermen looking to “exterminate” their human enemies, let alone end all organic life, are Cybermen fundamentally not written properly. They should be believing they’re offering mercy, something valuable and even kind, in conversion (I’d even go so far to say they shouldn’t have lethal weapons, but tranqs so they can carry enemies away for conversion, or maybe even darts with nano-cyber-conversion stuff in). So a ranty Cybermen blathering about using some death particle to end all organic life is just stupid. However much they throw around the term “cyber-race” the Cybermen are nothing without organics to convert.
If you’re charitable, you could say Chibnall hung a lantern on this by having the Master laugh at the Cyber-guy’s plans to become robots, but when the Master’s in full on psycho-panto-villain mode, you shouldn’t have the audience going “yeah, man’s got a point, that is stupid” about the villain you’ve spent two and half episodes (if not half a season) building up. And if the most interesting story you can think to tell with the Cybermen is have them want to kill all humans and become robots then there’s something wrong with you.
Then the retcon stuff. And it’s not even that it’s an “everything you know is a lie!” story that bothers me. That can work well. The problem is that it’s an “everything you know is a lie!” story that immediately disavows the value of that revelation. Having the Doctor decide that her true past is, essentially, irrelevant, isn’t dramatically satisfying or particularly emotionally valid. But even if you accept it is, what benefit has any of this brought? What value has it added to the show*? It’s just another case of Chibnall trying to emulate the work of past writers without understanding how and why that worked, in this case the Cartmel Masterplan. That worked because it had a relative degree of subtly, adding some mystery into the character that had been weakened over the years of greatly detailing his backstory. Chibnall takes the rough ideas of The Other (which I doubt would have ever made it onto TV explicitly, however much it was used in the novels) and just throws it as a lump of backstory around the Doctor’s neck. The closest it gets to mystery is “where did she originally come from?” (which the show has already told us doesn’t matter) and “how/why were her memories wiped?” which is all but spelled out through the Ireland flashbacks.
Adding or retconning backstory is fine if you’ve got a purpose for it. Robert Holmes casually retconned the Time Lords for the Deadly Assassin, but he did it to drive the plot of that story. The Time Lords have finite lifespans! The Master is facing death and so is desperate! The Time Lords aren’t as perfect as they’ve seemed previously and some corrupt ones are dangerous! All of that feeds into the story and raises the stakes. Same with the Omega stuff in the Three Doctors. Here though, all the Timeless Child stuff is almost irrelevant to the plot. It’s this life-changing revelation for the Doctor – she’s the fount of her entire species and civilisation for god’s sake! – that changes nothing about her and instead is focused on as motivation for the Master to… hate the Doctor still/more/again? Because a lifetime of being frenemies and him being a psychopath wasn’t enough? This is just Chibnall masturbating over what was basically production in-joke from the Brain of Morbius (which featured in the flash of images when the Doctor had to overwhelm the Matrix for some reason). I can’t wait for him to create a season arc around justifying Susan’s claim that she came up with the TARDIS acronym.
For fuck’s sake.
Other stuff: “hey, let’s scoop out all the dead human bits from what are apparently just suits of armour and clank around in them to evade the villain who could earlier easily judge someone’s vital signs enough from a distance to gauge their emotional state!”. Chibnall’s cack-handed “guns are irredeemably awful but other weapons are fine” policy is disregarded for Ryan to go around shooting Cybermen and magically conquer dyspraxia to throw the bomb (it feels like the gunplay should have been the character moment tying into bits from earlier episodes, not the bomb, but that would require those bits to have had some significance beyond an arbitrary “Doctor doesn’t like guns”). The Time Lord Cybermen looked ridiculous (and not in a good way). Old guy whose name I can’t remember magically running out of nowhere to sacrifice himself in the Doctor’s stead was hackneyed shit. Jack was, as promised, nowhere to be seen, making his cameo earlier in the series doubly pointless (how did he know about the lone Cyberman stuff? How did he know about all that without the accompanying Gallifrey things? Why didn’t he just warn the Doctor about the Master?). The Master called the Cybermen the “Cybs” which I suspect is a reference to the aborted Amblin reboot of Dr Who. And Chibnall was clearly ripping off RTD with the “what? what? what?” at the end, which is like ripping off Simon Furman by copying only his habit of splitting sentences…
across different captions for no good reason, instead of any of the stuff that makes his work great.
Yeah, I think I’m done until Chibnall’s out.
*The only point I can see to any of that retcon stuff is the opportunity to repeat the Ruth thing** down the line but with stunt cast actors. “Hey, it’s guest star Dame Judy Dench and she’s another earlier unknown iteration of the Doctor! Wild!”
**nothing in the retcon reveal tonight explained why/how her TARDIS was a Police Box and I suspect it’s just going to be left up to some bullshit “cosmic synchronicity” handwavium or something.
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As entertaining as this rant is:
and magically conquer dyspraxia to throw the bomb
Which is also why dyspraxia is hard to feature in stories.
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Yeah, I thought the story itself was fine, in the usual wheelhouse for bigger modern Who stories where the emotions and ideas are big, but the plot is held together with spit and bailing wire.
I’m less enthused about the whole new portentous secret origin of The Doctor though. While it doesn’t invalidate the decisions made after the mindwipe and regeneration into Hartnell, I far prefer the idea of the Doctor as a weird hobo in space and time who doesn’t like injustice and has the ability to do something, but has always been kinda naff compared to their fellow Time Lords.
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I’m less enthused about the whole new portentous secret origin of The Doctor though. While it doesn’t invalidate the decisions made after the mindwipe and regeneration into Hartnell, I far prefer the idea of the Doctor as a weird hobo in space and time who doesn’t like injustice and has the ability to do something, but has always been kinda naff compared to their fellow Time Lords.
Yeah, there is something about making the Doctor suddenly Special that actually makes her less special, if that makes sense. But like the Ruth Doctor says, you can still see her as essentially the same character whose personality and outlook and decisions aren’t fundamentally by this, just her knowledge of where she came from and her relationship to the rest of the timelords.
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I do wonder whether the story might actually have been more interesting had the Doctor not been the Timeless Child – and instead had to grapple with the fact that Timelord society (and her own regenerative powers) were built on exploitation of this other being. Making it less of an “everything you knew about yourself is wrong!” story and instead focusing more on the aspects of class and privilege and abuse might have been a more interesting way to take it.
Of course, with the big gap in the timeline that they left and the ambiguity around the Doctor’s weird implanted memories of Ireland, they’ve still left themselves an easy get-out if they want to later reveal thay she’s not the Timeless Child after all.
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It really feels like Chibnall has only ever read a Wikipedia on Doctor Who rather than having any real knowledge.
sadly he’s been a huge fan since forever. This might be the problem.
Which I knew, but it still comes across as not really getting it.
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I do wonder whether the story might actually have been more interesting had the Doctor not been the Timeless Child – and instead had to grapple with the fact that Timelord society (and her own regenerative powers) were built on exploitation of this other being. Making it less of an “everything you knew about yourself is wrong!” story and instead focusing more on the aspects of class and privilege and abuse might have been a more interesting way to take it.
Of course, with the big gap in the timeline that they left and the ambiguity around the Doctor’s weird implanted memories of Ireland, they’ve still left themselves an easy get-out if they want to later reveal thay she’s not the Timeless Child after all.
Just making the Master the Timeless Child would have been a better choice. Razing Gallifrey to ground in revenge for him having been experimented on and exploited, giving him a justifiable reason for his anger and thus some moral complexity to his actions instead of him just having a paddy because the Doctor’s special.
Another thing that occurs to me: if this is the great secret shame of the Time Lords, the hidden history of their civilisation, why wasn’t it “redacted” from the Matrix like the stuff that happened to the Doctor/Brendan?
Also, the Doctor spent pretty much the entire episode with no agency. The only things she did were overload the Matrix and then try to commit genocide (however justifiable). That’s not a good look.
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That was fucking awful.
It was like fanfic written by a ten year-old. The Doctor is now the most important Time Lord ever, who is responsible for the creation of the Time Lords. The Master wants to turn the Time Lords into Cybermen because they’ll be able to regenerate after being killed.
I am, however, torn on whose take on the Cybermen is worse: Chibnall’s CyberLords, or Moffat’s grave-robbing Cybermen from Capaldi’s first series.
And, Martin, I do agree with your take on what makes the Cybermen work. However, I can understand why a character like the Lone Cyberman would want to use that Death Particle thingie. He has enough of his humanity left to be driven mad, and he’s caught between being a human and Cyberman, and his self-loathing sees this as a way to purge human bits from, not only himself, but the Cybermen as a species. It might have made an interesting story on its own, but it’s lost in all of the retcon mumbo jumbo and the Master’s shenanigans.
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Andrew Ellard’s ever-interesting Tweetnotes for this story are up today rather than the usual following Saturday and he makes some great points.
Okay, let’s do this. Here are the #tweetnotes on #DoctorWho The Timeless Children.
MUTE FOR SPOILERS
In short: Unless you’re the News, being told stuff for 45 minutes is a preposterous way to format an hour of television. pic.twitter.com/kSk97UT0ZR
— Andrew Ellard (@ellardent) March 2, 2020
DW-TTC: I can’t tell you how angry it makes me to see the first female Doctor cast, only to be made passive and ineffective in her adventures, and then given a backstory of abuse.
You waited for the Doctor to be a woman then remixed her to be a victim from day one?! #tweetnotes
— Andrew Ellard (@ellardent) March 2, 2020
DW-TTC: The critique of Chibnall’s Who has been the passivity of the Doctor. This season seemed to be making an effort to fix that problem.
But here it’s in full force. Removing her from the story until the end. Where, lacking the will, someone else Doctors for her. #tweetnotes
— Andrew Ellard (@ellardent) March 2, 2020
DW-TTC: (The accidental message here isn’t “The Doctor overcame her abuse and became something more” it’s “The Doctor doesn’t recall being abused, but once she found out it made her less effective until a man stepped up to do her job for her.) #tweetnotes
— Andrew Ellard (@ellardent) March 2, 2020
DW-TTC: And then our explorer/scientist. (Yup, one of those.) She’s the first ever astronaut from Gallifrey. Who skipped moons and orbits straight to…GALAXY HOPPING AND FIRST CONTACT?!
Imagine NASA starting their first manned flight that way. #tweetnotes
— Andrew Ellard (@ellardent) March 2, 2020
Worth reading the full thread.
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But it’s a show for children!
(That’s the standard excuse for bad writing on Doctor Who and Star Wars, isn’t it?)
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I am, however, torn on whose take on the Cybermen is worse: Chibnall’s CyberLords, or Moffat’s grave-robbing Cybermen from Capaldi’s first series.
Moffat, no question because the leader of the Cyber-corpses is…..
…. Danny fuckin’ Pink.
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I’ve been close to giving up on the current DW for a while, but I wont type out my geek rant right now. Maybe later. You can all make a note to skip it if/when it shows up.
Because the short version is simply that this isn’t what I want for, or from, the show.
So I’m out, at least until Chibnall moves on.
I don’t give a rat’s ass about his contribution to the canon. I hope someone will retcon the fuck out of it at some point, but even if they don’t I’m fine revisiting the previous approaches to DW that worked for me.
Nostalgia is definitely a factor, as my era (late 70’s through to the 80’s, then the first decade or so of the 2000’s return) is definitely not this one, but I do also think that Moffat got lost in his own ego and Chibnall simply isn’t a good enough writer or showrunner to do things well. Despite some bold moves and excellent casting choices, he’s both dropping the ball and also throwing it places I don’t want to follow.
So I’ll enjoy the other offerings that Peak TV is giving us, and also enjoy the DW that was, and maybe will be again… one day.
Well, what do know?! I typed up a geek rant after all! I guess, when you’re a geek about something, it’s inevitable?!
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Thank god I still have Big Finish.
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Which I think could be good for the show if it means that the remaining companion gets more attention and better development.
In fact, you could say that – with Graham and Ryan gone – for Yaz the only way is up.
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I mean it’s a tragedy that we haven’t already had a thirteenth Doctor/Autons episode called Yaz And The Plastic Population.
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Just caught up with the last two. Unlike everyone else I thoroughly enjoyed it. My issues with Chibnall have been his Doctor Who stuff has been mostly pretty bland (his bad stuff was in Torchwood) but this has series has been much better. The twists and turns were well done and quite in keeping with the show, it touches on old stuff like the Brain of Morbius but also leaves an enormous amount in doubt and up in the air.
I do think the 3 companions part has meant they’ve been undeveloped, this series Yas got a decent amount after she was ignored last time and vice versa for the other two. I think that meant when they tried with the Graham/Yas speech it lacked a bit of heft and it’s probably for the best if they are paring it back.
The ending bit was very Russell T Davies. Like the Titanic or Donna’s first appearance. I think a nice bit of homage at play.
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Just caught up with the last two. Unlike everyone else I thoroughly enjoyed it
Hey, I quite liked it!
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So did I!
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Thank god I still have Big Finish.
Who have this terrible habit of announcing cool stuff I feel the need to buy to support them, despite not getting around to clearing my backlog.
Currently on the Cicero series, Barnett has one of those voices that is great for audio.
I haven’t finished Dark Eyes yet.
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Doctor Who will return in Christmas 2020/New Year 2021 special Revolution Of The Daleks. Even so, that’s still 10 months that feels a long way away to me and would feel even longer to a kid. Can’t help but think they are having the gaps between series be too big.
I don’t know why they can’t deliver it annually when RTD did (even if he confesses it was hard work and had to devise tricks like the Doctor solo/ Doctor lite episodes so they could film 2 simultaneously).
Saying that 10 months is not that bad really, even if it’s just the special,there have been longer gaps previously under Moffat and my kids will be okay with that. Compared to Netflix’s Lost In Space which was a 20 month gap, they loved the first series but by the time the second one came along they (and me to be honest) had forgotten half of what was going on and they didn’t ask to see any more after the first episode.
I’m always one for quality above quantity but as with comics there is a limit where a gap is so long you just forget any enthusiasm for something. I think The OA from Netflix with a 2 year gap suffered the same and that has a single narrative which makes it worse as with a lot of Doctor Who you can just drop in randomly on a single episode and get it.
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I saw these on Facebook:
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I was just thinking that a big influence on the new direction was the Brain of Morbius with its secret 8 past doctors, before Hartnell.
Then I though that yeah that story is good, wasn’t it based on Frankenstein.
Then I thought about the previous stories in this season, and then I thought, Wait, what? What game is being played here?
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My theory is the next twist will be the Doctor regenerating into Yaz and it turns out she was the Doctor all along from the future!
Also, the Cyberman and Daleks will meld together to become the Cyberdaleks and it will turn out that Gallifrey was inside each of us all along.
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This is a really interesting piece about how Moffat’s era made creative choices that have been validated by the Chibnall era.
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Now that we’ve entered full-on retcon territory and memory-wipes, I predict that The Master is the Doctor.
What happened was they wiped the Doctor/Timeless Child’s memory, but when he gazed into the Untempered Schism he went bad, ran around the universe doing evil– a dark reflection of the Doctor — for any number of his incarnations before eventually being recaptured, mind-wiped, and force-regenerated again into the young Hartnell Doctor. And neither The Doctor or Master would know the truth, just that they had some kind of vague bond or connection.
God help me, I could see someone trying to do just that at some point.
It’s like Chibnall was reading late 80s/early 90s X-Men and Wolverine comics and thought “Hey, wouldn’t it be awesome if made a big mess of the Doctor’s past with mind-wipes, false memories, and secret agent nonsense like they did Wolverine back then?”
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My theory is the next twist will be the Doctor regenerating into Yaz and it turns out she was the Doctor all along from the future!
Also, the Cyberman and Daleks will meld together to become the Cyberdaleks and it will turn out that Gallifrey was inside each of us all along.
And Clara was actually the Master!
Dont you fucking dare
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http://www.doctorwhonews.net/2020/03/timeless-child-official-ratings.html
The conclusion to this year’s series of Doctor Who, The Timeless Children, had an official rating of 4.69 million viewers, according to figures released by the Broadcasting Research Audience Board, BARB.
The figure is the lowest consolidated figure for an epiosde of Doctor Who since the series returned in 2005, a record previously held by the 2017 story, The Eaters of Light. Out of 861 episodes of Doctor Who broadcast since 1963, only 33 have achieved a lower rating.
To put the figue in perspective, it was still the 30th most-watched programme on British TV for the week, much higher that the position achieved by the majority of episodes of Doctor Who shown over the years. The episode had a 21.5% share of the total TV audience.
In detail 4.55 million watched the episode on a conventional TV set. An additional 70,000 watched on their PC, 39,000 watched on a Tablet device and 34,000 watched on a smartphone.
Top for the week was Ant and Dec’s Saturday Takeaway on ITV with 7.41 million watching. The top BBC programme was the drama Death in Paradise with 6.78 million.
Doctor Who had an Appreciation Index score of 82
The average viweing figures for 2020 now stands at 5.40m as oposed to 7.96m for Series 11 in 2018. This is lower than Series 10 which averaged 5.64m. It is still higher than the lowest rated season, season 26 which averaged 4.31m .
So that doesn’t look good. I think there’s leeway to read what you want into the figures, given the AI and the 30th most watched show bit – is it the time of year pushing down ratings? – but still, not great in many regards.
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