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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Oof, I’d forgotten how cringey the “Perfect Scenario” featurette for Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks is. It’s an attempt to look at the themes of the stories and their world-building, which is fair enough, but it’s all framed through a shallow 26th century writer getting a history lesson/lecture from a historian (in some kind of mind-meld thing) with talking heads from people who actually worked on the show and then various fake people from our future, such as a guy who writes for Doctor Who in 2032-2045 or something.
It all ends up just feeling like an earnest attempt at Time Trumpet and undermines anything it actually has to say.
The Behind the Sofas for season 10 have been pretty bad too. One group is Katy Manning, Richard Franklin and John Levene, who mostly just make bold declarative statements about the nature of Doctor Who that are pretty asinine (Manning explains at one point why it’s so perfect for TV rather than cinema, except doesn’t). The other group is Phil Collinson and Pete McTighe mansplaining every story to Joy Wilkinson seemingly because they don’t think she’s understanding any of it, which is frustrating to sit through really.
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There’s a new release of Web of Fear out today, with an animated recon of the missing (stolen, apparently) episode 3. For some reason, the BBC decided to try out a different animation style from all the recent recons and, erm, it’s not gone well.
Something dangerous is lurking behind the door… 🔐
Watch a clip from newly animated Second Doctor story – 'The Web of Fear', available now. pic.twitter.com/t7ysym5yPd
— Doctor Who (@bbcdoctorwho) August 16, 2021
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I finished the season 10 blu-ray set last night and it has another excellent feature from Matthew Sweet. Usually those are in-depth interviews with the actors who played the Doctor, which is a bit tricky for Pertwee. So it’s instead a shorter interview of that kind with Katy Manning (which manages to get beyond the usual responses and anecdotes) as part of a wider look at Pertwee’s era, using various archival talking heads (including the head of serials from the BBC at the time, who I don’t think I’ve seen interviewed before) and a conversation with Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, who make some good observations.
It’s a pretty solid piece, given there’s relatively little new to work with.
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Nothing passive aggressive about it. Just about being nostalgic I actually liked the old shows and others here might like them as well.
None of that is mentioned in your post informing us about photos you could but won’t post.
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As rumoured Galaxy 4 has been confirmed as the next animated release.
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That wording makes it sound like the next full series won’t be until 2024, which boo.
I’m happy he’s back though.
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Short term, a great choice. RTD getting to do the 60th anniversary should make for a spectacular celebration for the show. And for, erm, how shall we say, righting the ship after Chibnall leaves, also a good choice.
Long term though it is a bit worrying that the BBC’s best choice to take over was a guy who has done it before. Hopefully Davies will have a long term succession in mind. That Bad Wolf are repeatedly named as production partner alongside BBC Studios is interesting too. Are they quietly outsourcing the show?
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It’s interesting because of course Bad Wolf is Julie Gardner and Jane Trantor’s production company, so it’s fully the original Doctor Who revival team. Whether their involvement is temporary and part of a package with Davies (as they are all super close) I guess we will see.
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Yeah, I mean certainly if you are going to outsource the show, they’re the best choice. But there is a hint of “well we don’t fucking know how to make this work any more, you do it.”
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I can definitely see that reading although a part of me wonders if we should care really. Over 50% of BBC has to be made by independent production houses by law and while we pay detailed attention to this stuff with Doctor Who I wouldn’t know in most cases see which is which or any connection to the quality or popularity of the shows. It’s just a different set of the same kind of people in a different office.
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Yeah, I mean certainly if you are going to outsource the show, they’re the best choice. But there is a hint of “well we don’t fucking know how to make this work any more, you do it.”
In fairness, it’s only the last three words that are news there.
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Yeah, there is a sense of “shit, we killed the patient, who’s good at resurrections? Oh yeah, that guy. After we killed the patient before….”.
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Cue a lot of people conveniently forgetting how tired they were of Davies’ Who by the time he left the show before…
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It is funny that they’ve ballsed it up so much, that they need to hand it back to the guy that rebooted it the last time. I would see the odd interview with Davis when he was promoting Its A Sin, and when asked about Doctor Who he clearly still has a lot of love for it. So I’m excited to see what he’ll come up with. ..And I’m wondering if this pretty much confirms Olly Alexander as the next Doctor?
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I’ll laugh if he leans in to the Chibnall stuff and casts Jo Martin.
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Well that’s the unspoken truth about a lot of Who fandom, they are always fucking moaning. 😂
As long as I have been old enough to be aware of it that’s been pretty much a constant. It’s ironic that the famous clip of a young Chris Chibnall is him complaining the show is going downhill.
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Cue a lot of people conveniently forgetting how tired they were of Davies’ Who by the time he left the show before…
We’ve got years before we get back to that feeling though!
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I’ll laugh if he leans in to the Chibnall stuff and casts Jo Martin.
This is what I want
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Cue a lot of people conveniently forgetting how tired they were of Davies’ Who by the time he left the show before…
We’ve got years before we get back to that feeling though!
By that point they’ll be lining up Moffat for another go.
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Meanwhile Chibnell will give us Torchwood: Cyberboobs II.
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Regardless of writing style, I think it’s hard to argue against RTD being the most successful of the three showrunners so far.
I think that on balance I appreciate the RTD era more than I love RTD’s stories specifically – more for the way he was able to bring together so many decent other writers, offer a variety of flavours of story, and bring a light touch to the season-arc aspect (as well as successfully relaunch the entire show, obviously) – and I think it probably makes him a better showrunner than Moffat (who I think is the better writer, but who didn’t integrate all that wider stuff quite so elegantly as showrunner).
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Cue a lot of people conveniently forgetting how tired they were of Davies’ Who by the time he left the show before…
Yeah, but in hindsight, the Davies era was probably the strongest. Yes, he gave us those farting aliens and some truly awful episodes (like “Fear Her”), but then Moffat gave us six incoherent seasons that contained a lot of ambitious set-up with no pay-off (rebooting the universe?), and Chibnall’s tenure produced a string of dud episodes (like, “Hey, lets do an entire season of ‘Boomtowns’ and ‘Idiot Lanterns'”) and completely upended decades worth of mythology.
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Yeah, but in hindsight, the Davies era was probably the strongest
I strongly disagree with this.
and completely upended decades worth of mythology.
And with this, I become convinced we’ve been watching different TV shows. Doctor Who doesn’t give two shits about continuity, never has, never will.
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Doctor Who doesn’t give two shits about continuity, never has,
It quite definitely has. Ian Levine was a sort-of paid continuity advisor at one point, so it was definitely a consideration for a while. I mean, that gave us Attack of the Cybermen, so I’m not saying it’s a necessarily a good thing, but it has been a thing.
But part of why Chibnall’s retcon didn’t work (beyond it being just a shitty idea) was that it was itself rooted in some random old bit of continuity (the pre-Hartnell Doctors thing in Brain of Morbius). It existed seemingly to justify and explain that as much as because it was thought to be a good idea. Doctor Who doesn’t care about mythology in that it’s rarely let that stand in the way of a good story, but it’s let that mythology be the springboard to bad stories more than once.
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Doctor Who doesn’t give two shits about continuity, never has,
It quite definitely has. Ian Levine was a sort-of paid continuity advisor at one point, so it was definitely a consideration for a while. I mean, that gave us Attack of the Cybermen, so I’m not saying it’s a necessarily a good thing, but it has been a thing.
But part of why Chibnall’s retcon didn’t work (beyond it being just a shitty idea) was that it was itself rooted in some random old bit of continuity (the pre-Hartnell Doctors thing in Brain of Morbius). It existed seemingly to justify and explain that as much as because it was thought to be a good idea. Doctor Who doesn’t care about mythology in that it’s rarely let that stand in the way of a good story, but it’s let that mythology be the springboard to bad stories more than once.
That’s a fair point, what I meant more was that stuff like Levine’s fanwankery or the Cartmel Masterplan were just ignored rather than retconned away later
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Still the ‘retcon’ stuff I’m still open about because every word is told by an unreliable narrator in The Master. That has to have the viewer at least suspect not all of it may be true.
I do side very much with Lorcan though, despite whatever Levine was doing at some point, it’s a show that contradicts itself all the time, all the way through. I think what happens, as with a lot of long running franchises, is people pick their definitive version and decide it should be like that.
A perfect example was the uproar (without seeing the full story and context) of a series preview with Matt Smith shooting a gun (it was a flare gun if I remember) “The Doctor hates guns, would never shoot one”. Pertwee era has the Doctor in big shootouts with Ogrons, he doesn’t give a shit shooting at anything he sees like an episode of the A Team.
I’m maybe an oddity in that I like that approach and don’t really care as long as the stories are fun, I’m not fan of the anal Star Trek approach of sourcebooks and manuals.
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Yeah, all of that is relatively easy to hand-wave by just having someone familiar say “so the Master strapped you into a machine that beamed things into your head and told you your whole life was a lie and you believed him?!”
It’s not just easy to hand wave away, I’m not 100% sure it isn’t meant to be that as part of the plan.
I’m not a fan of Chibnall as Who writer primarily because I find most of it dull but I also don’t think he’s thick and if you want to place a revelation that shakes the origins to the core you know that giving that role to the ‘Loki’ of the Doctor Who universe is a particular choice. Now I could be wrong on his intentions to shift that around later or not but I’d give it a 50/50 chance of being either.
It’s like in comics, sometimes you kill a character for good but it gets retconned, sometimes you always knew how and when they were coming back as part of the plot.
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Yeah, it’s going to be interesting if Chibnall does pull a reversal on those revelations, because I imagine people will see it as evidence of the pushback forcing a change – when like you say it seems like it could well have been designed to be revealed as intentional misinformation from the Master in the first place.
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I’m hoping Chibnall wraps up his loose ends before he leaves. I know he probably had less episodes than he planned for, but I’d rather RTD be left with a clean slate going forward.
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For the ‘continuity’ fans of Doctor Who don’t get too excited at RTD back at the helm. In his Writer’s Tale book he makes it pretty clear that the way he writes is he thinks of a great visual scene or exchange of dialogue and builds plot around that. He’s not a guy with a spreadsheet or an array of post-it notes working out some great mystery.
He is 90% emotional resonance and 10% sci-fi plot.
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For the ‘continuity’ fans of Doctor Who don’t get too excited at RTD back at the helm. In his Writer’s Tale book he makes it pretty clear that the way he writes is he thinks of a great visual scene or exchange of dialogue and builds plot around that. He’s not a guy with a spreadsheet or an array of post-it notes working out some great mystery.
He is 90% emotional resonance and 10% sci-fi plot.
Actually, after the last few years that does sound rather nice.
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Because they tend to have the emotional resonance of a used tissue.
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Don’t worry, I’m sure guy who wrote… *checks notes* “girlfriend who got turned into a paving block can still go down on me” has your back this time.
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…nah, still better than the Timeless Child.
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I’m not going to sit here and defend The Timeless Child, just saying be careful what you wish for.
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A close call for sure but VI has Gunmen of the Apocalypse and the “it does mean changing the bulb” joke to put it over the edge.
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Has it been explained how it matters if the Time Lords are dead or alive? They travel in time! Even if they were all killed at a specific point in time, they should still be scattered all over time and space. If the Doctor can meet dead versions of himself/herself, why not dead versions of other Time Lords?
(I have not watched an episode of Dr Who since Moffat left, but it didn’t make sense before that either. So the Time Lords are dead, but so are Vincent van Gogh and Adolf Hitler, and the Doctor met them anyway.)
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I strongly disagree with this.
It’s down to RTD, Moffat, and Chibnall.
Moffat, after delivering what were, arguably, the best stories of the RTD era sort of fell down on face when he was handed the reigns. Lots of solid ideas and concepts that never quite gelled into any kind of decent story. It was just a hot mess with a lot of crazy ideas that didn’t go anywhere.
And with this, I become convinced we’ve been watching different TV shows. Doctor Who doesn’t give two shits about continuity, never has, never will.
I never mentioned continuity. I said mythology.
Maintaining any kind of strict continuity within a series like Doctor Who is going to be impossible with all of the time travel going on. Though I do get annoyed whenever someone is surprised to see an alien when, since 2005, it seems like there’s a been at least one high profile alien invasion every year. At least during the UNIT years they kept this stuff on the down low.
Crafting a story where it revealed that the Doctor isn’t just any Time Lord but some kind of magical creature that essentially created the Time Lords, and that there are now dozens or hundreds or thousands of pre-Hartnell Doctors out there gallivanting about the universe alters the very foundations of the series. It’s dreadful storytelling.
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Maintaining any kind of strict continuity within a series like Doctor Who is going to be impossible with all of the time travel going on. Though I do get annoyed whenever someone is surprised to see an alien when, since 2005, it seems like there’s a been at least one high profile alien invasion every year. At least during the UNIT years they kept this stuff on the down low.
I’m sure part of the effect of the cracks in time in Moffat’s first series was to wipe a lot of those experiences from people’s memories (and potentially from Earth history) so that aliens, the Daleks, Cybermen etc. were all new and unknown again. There’s a line somewhere where the Doctor even queries how people don’t remember events of previous episodes, like the giant steampunk Cyberman in London or the Christmas invasion in Tennant’s debut.
In other words, once Amy’s crack showed up people forgot about everything else.
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In other words, once Amy’s crack showed up people forgot about everything else.
Hold on, I’ve got a meme for this somewhere…
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In other words, once Amy’s crack showed up people forgot about everything else.
Hold on, I’ve got a meme for this somewhere…
It’s called “Jumanji”.
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I doubled up on Amy’s crack, sorry
edit: it’s here so I am going to use it
So who here enjoyed RTD’s Dr Who? obviously not Lorcan. I did, btw. Who here believes RTD’s Dr Who was a success? obviously the BBC
if it was enjoyed and successful, is there a chance it could be again? Didn’t Tennant’s Doctor say he did not want to go? no, scratch that, that won’t work.
I look forward to RTD’s return. it is too bad Jodie Whittaker is leaving. that pairing has possibilities. Is it possible that some discarded Tardis capable people could return? who knows. Do British people like to moan? will they get a chance to do so with his return? should that be considered a success?
It extends the Doctor’s existence. I would miss that if it had ended. yet another checkmark in the positive column.
also, as long as the Doctor continues to be on TV, there remains an infinitesmal chance that an American Doctor appears(cue Jim Carrey dumb and dumber quote)
(you guys got a British Star Fleet Captain, why can’t we get an American Time Lord)-
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Hold on, I’ve got a meme for this somewhere…
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So who here enjoyed RTD’s Dr Who? obviously not Lorcan. I did, btw. Who here believes RTD’s Dr Who was a success? obviously the BBC
I enjoyed a lot of it. I maintain that RTD’s run had most of the modern classic episodes, but while it had many of the highest highs, it also had the lowest lows and it doesn’t stand up that well to reawtching. I think Moffat had a better average quality to his run but not as many big woah moments. And Chhibnall’s… isn’t as bad as his detractors claim?
I just have no expectations that RTD returning to the show is automatically going to make things better.
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I enjoyed a lot of it. I maintain that RTD’s run had most of the modern classic episodes, but while it had many of the highest highs, it also had the lowest lows and it doesn’t stand up that well to reawtching. I think Moffat had a better average quality to his run but not as many big woah moments.
Weirdly I think I feel the opposite. I don’t think the RTD era ever had anything as spectacular and brilliant as Day of the Doctor or Heaven Sent or the Eleventh Hour or Christmas Carol, and when those perfect moments came in Moffat’s run they were wonderful and up there with the best the show has ever been.
But I felt like the overall quality level was a little more consistent in the RTD era, while not quite ever reaching those Moffat-era heights – so as well as the big season openers and closers you had lots of great stuff along the way like Dalek and Human Nature/Family of Blood and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead and Blink and Midnight and Turn Left and Waters of Mars. And even the next tier down wasn’t bad.
Whereas with Moffat a lot of the season arc stuff fell flat after the first Matt Smith season, and there weren’t as many standout memorable mid-season episodes (although there were some).
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Have there been any examples of showrunners who left a successful show, saw the show continue for several years and then returned to it and had success with it a second time around?
Dan Harmon on Community? I never watched it but I’ve heard this from fans
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Whereas with Moffat a lot of the season arc stuff fell flat after the first Matt Smith season, and there weren’t as many standout memorable mid-season episodes (although there were some).
In all honesty, Dr Who should just drop the whole story arc idea. Davies’ version of it was just having a word be mentioned a few times – which worked for Bad Wolf because of how the story ended but less so with Torchwood and Saxon – and with Moffat it never really gelled outside of Smith’s first series. Most of the big event finale stories would have worked as well with little to no buildup.
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Have there been any examples of showrunners who left a successful show, saw the show continue for several years and then returned to it and had success with it a second time around?
Dan Harmon on Community? I never watched it but I’ve heard this from fans
Harmon was only gone for one season. It was also never really a successful show.
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Whereas with Moffat a lot of the season arc stuff fell flat after the first Matt Smith season, and there weren’t as many standout memorable mid-season episodes (although there were some).
In all honesty, Dr Who should just drop the whole story arc idea. Davies’ version of it was just having a word be mentioned a few times – which worked for Bad Wolf because of how the story ended but less so with Torchwood and Saxon – and with Moffat it never really gelled outside of Smith’s first series. Most of the big event finale stories would have worked as well with little to no buildup.
Yeah, I agree. Outside of Moffat’s first series (which he obviously had a lot of time to plan and construct) it never really held together. That River Song/Doctor’s death/shape-changing robot story was the nadir in terms of it clearly being worked-out on the fly with a random solution that was pulled out of his arse at a late stage.
RTD’s method of teasing a word or phrase with only vague hints is fine and I don’t think it needs to go further than that.
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you guys got a British Star Fleet Captain, why can’t we get an American Time Lord
After watching a load of Only Murders In The Building, I think I’d probably accept Martin Short.
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He was already tipped for the role but RTD in there makes the chances of Olly Alexander being the next Doctor a lot higher. He he used Ecclestone after working with him on Second Coming, Tennant on Casanova. Alexander after It’s a Sin?
Still he looks too baby faced for me, Smith was young but had that old fashioned air about him that worked.
I’d love to see Michael Sheen and it may suit him, he’s moved back to live in Wales and he’s midway between the BBC’s Cardiff Bay studios and Bad Wolf’s in Swansea. 30 minute commute for a high profile role may work this time.
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If Sheen gets it then it should be on condition that he and Tennant do another series of Staged about it.
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If Sheen gets it then it should be on condition that he and Tennant do another series of Staged about it.
Michael Sheen? Who the fuck is Michael Sheen?
(Staged joke)
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Have there been any examples of showrunners who left a successful show, saw the show continue for several years and then returned to it and had success with it a second time around?
Paul Levitz on Legion of Super-Heroes
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