Amph Doctor Who Discussion (Russell T. Davies returns)

Spoiler

When the Doctor tried to call UNIT about the Dalek she was told that UNIT operations had been suspended due to a review of funding.

I wonder if this will become a point of plot in future episodes.

 

The best bit was

Spoiler

when the dalek revealed he had rocket launchers in his bumps , it's such an obviously brilliant idea , why had no-one thought of it before ?

here's a question which only just occured to me :
does the Tardis have a 'back door'? I mean if their exit is blocked to the front door is there any other way out?

 

New feature on the Dalek? We also didn't know they could deal with stairs at one point.

 

The UNIT thing was stupid. A cheap and pathetic attempt to get a laugh. As was the ridiculous "We'll have to have a....conversation" nonsense.

However, there were 2 good bits. Dalek vs Marines. Lovely stuff. Reminded me of the only good bit about Rogue One. The other one was the only thing that made me literally LOL. "Yorkshire, England"

 

And don't get me started on the Dyspraxia mention. Worked well in Episode 1. Briefly hinted at in Episode 2 (The ladder). Not mentioned or seen since.

 

Not sure how it needs to be seen.
I have it and it barely affects my day-to-day life at all. Never stopped me doing jobs, playing sports or driving a car (though playing instruments I don't do well, I can't move my fingers fast enough. Same with typing on keyboards).
Obviously it affects different people in different ways, but apart from issues with coordination I'm not sure how else Who is supposed to deal with a character having Dispraxia (apart from what they did in the first episode when something like climbing or jumping is involved).


I agree with those that say that much of the writing is problematic.
I think it has been since Capaldi's run started.
Perhaps a break for a year is what the show needs, if it is to avoid becoming stale & being cancelled again.
Chibnall has time to go away & reflect on where he's gone wrong.

 

The bit about UNIT was a bit clunky sure but I wouldn't go so far as to say it was stupid? The purpose was to increase the stakes and have the 'Fam' have to deal with the Dalek on their own. The circumstances achieved that. Did you have a better idea of how to avoid getting UNIT involved?

The "Conversation" scene got the biggest genuine laugh from me in the episode. Again slightly clunky perhaps; trying to see if Netflix works when they just stated that the Wifi is down was rather superfluous, but I thought it was an amusing bit of social commentary regarding media use in a family home.

What was there to like about the Dalek vs Marines? In the context of the episode this probably isn't saying much but that scene required quite a large suspension of disbelief IMO.
How in a farmer's shed can the Dalek be able to cobble together levitation?
Where did the Dalek's missiles come from?
The marines initially didn't see it for anything more than a drone?

Really curious to know which part of Rogue One you are referring to...

It did come up in Kerblam! as well but yes there was no need to mention it in this episode.

 

So Twitch are doing another marathon of the classic series starting later this month!

Sent from my SM-T713 using Tapatalk

 

I have a feeling I didn't miss too much by not having a landline since the 30th...

 

New vinyl release of Mission to the Unknown and The Dalek's Master Plan's full audio announced:
http://www.doctorwhonews.net/2019/01/the-daleks-master-plan-on-vinyl.html

Not into vinyl myself, but the story is a great one, and the cover is gorgeous:

 

Jodie Whittaker has been nominated for the Best Drama Performance in the UKs National Television Award for her performance as the Doctor

(I have of course voted for her! Not that I watch much (any) other TV for comparison)

 

Happy Birthday to...

 

Say what you will about Chibnall as a showrunner (I have a long, rambling piece to write defending him) or series 11 as a whole, but I won't hear an ill word spoken against Jodie.

She is a fantastic doctor, who faced down the most intense scrutiny a doctor ever faced since Patrick Troughton, if not even moreso. She deserves recognition.

 

I look forward to reading that.

 

I'm not @Chewgumma ( ), but still, here's my own little ramble about S11 now that it's had time to sink in (Resolution excluded - I couldn't catch it when it aired and didn't have the time to look for legal access to it). Under spoiler tag because, well, text wall.

Spoiler: Opinion worth what it's worth

Getting into the series
My approach was an optimistic one, and to digress a little, ran completely against my entourage's, the people who introduced me to Doctor Who, all of whom refused to watch out of certainty there would be SJWism. Amusingly enough, the same people keep challenging me because, as a Gaullist, I vote for not-Left candidates - the horror! - and I'm an avowed political conservative. Huh

Well, I decided it was their loss. After all, the Doctor is an alien well over 2,000 years-old that can drastically change form within humanoid parameters, and at that point it really wasn't outside the realm of possibility that the titular Time Lord might make the gender switch. It's an idea that had been floated around for quite a few decades, after all, so - off we go! I was a bit concerned about Chibnall taking the show over - his writing for Doctor Who could be on the unspectacular side, but on the other hand, he was working within longer frames defined by the directors at the time. I didn't particularly know Whittaker's work, so I actively decided not to form an opinion on how she might perform.


Episode by episode
These will be kept short, but do reflect how I generally received them, sometimes with commentary of other responses:

The Woman Who Fell to Earth - loved that one from start to finish and in how it was played/filmed/written, the only mark "against" being Segun Akinola's soundtrack work, which I found unimpressive. Other than that, again, I loved it, and didn't think there was much to be concerned about like those friends I mentioned thought.

The Ghost Monument - I found that one was a serviceable Doctor Who story (in line with Chibnall's work when he wasn't particularly inspired), and that's OK - after ~500 stories watched, it's quite normal a solid proportion of them aren't going to be exceptional. Saw its resolution coming five miles away, and I was badly tired...

Rosa - Utterly loved that episode, there's a reason I promptly went to other threads and told people "go watch". Yet it's apparently an episode that made quite a few people who said they were "on the fence" quit because they were being lectured. Don't mind a lecture when it's well integrated into a good story, and here, IMO, it's absolutely the case. One moment that will stick with me for a while: Graham facing the dilemma about having to act the scene he viscerally refuses to be a part of because he knows it's wrong, but the Doctor convinces him to do it anyway because history has to happen.

Arachnids in the UK - First episode where I had a "Huh, really, Doctor" moment these series: shooting spiders with a gun is bad, but trapping them to die of hunger in a room where cannibalism is their only possibility until the last one dies of hunger is OK? (Or maybe even of thirst?) Again, saw the rest of the plot coming five miles away, and for the first time, I told myself there was way too much repetition in the soundtrack and its unobtrusiveness may well have been taken a bit too far.

The Tsuranga Conundrum - This one had me rather unimpressed and bored. Nothing really happens, no message is delivered, and there's no hide nor hair of a conundrum to be seen. Skippable.

Demons of the Punjab - Finally, an episode I really enjoyed again. Didn't realize however that praising Chibnall's writing as being at its best when it found solid footing in history was damning praise: in this one, the Doctor and the aliens are entirely irrelevant in such quality. Only the human drama counts.

Kerblam! - Lots of people pointed out this one "finally felt like Doctor Who". I mostly agreed until the end part, which delivers a "trust the system" message in an Amazon-inspired episode (you know, that firm that is largely robotized already and treats its workers like Ford in the 1930s in the real world with modern surveillance on top)... in which "the system" is exposed as having utterly failed and leaving most humans with literally no job opportunities. Trust that system? Not in a million years, Doctor, and usually, you'd have been the one making a point of toppling it.

The Witchfinders - Alan Cumming delivers a stellar performance, and it saved that episode for me, because unlike preceding history-based episodes in this series, this one I found bland and uninspired.

It Takes You Away - This one I found mostly bland, save for two details: the temptation the Solitract uses against Graham and the resultant character growth (although his continuing to see Grace when she isn't there made me think 'neuro-impact tumor?' for some episodes), and how that in turn leads to Ryan's acceptance of Graham as family. I didn't find the Solitract itself particularly revolutionary, and found myself comparing the episode unfavorably to Hartnell's story The Edge of Destruction.

The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos - As a season finale, this one felt unspectacular. Tzim-Sha's return as "arch-enemy" for the season felt non-threatening by simple virtue of his literally be defeated with a sleight-of-hand trick in the first episode, and it's quite something to manage the notion of Earth being shrunk and sterilized feel entirely non-threatening. Plus, when a companion around them announces they want to kill someone else who wronged them and the Doctor knows them, their reaction has never been to threaten to kick them out before talking to them in my experience.


Overall opinion on episodes
In the end, there's only three episodes I'll rewatch from this season - The Woman Who Fell to Earth, Rosa and Demons of the Punjab. The regeneration episode I did say flowed great for me, the other two are very well written and do a great job at introducing major historical events (yes, with oversimplifications, but what would you expect from a 45-minute sci-fi format?) - and one of them doesn't need aliens at all, Doctor included.

Still, 3 hits, 7 misses for me - explains quite well why I decided to favor sleep over a second watch on Thursday nights by mid-season (Demons of the Punjab being the obvious exception on that end of the show). I wasn't particularly enjoying myself for most of the season, just found most episodes serviceable or bland. The reasons I won't feel the need to rewatch most of them, however, lay a bit too deep for episode-by-episode look.


Companions who?
The thing that actually annoys me with this series: three companions with excellent hooks to develop, all from episode 1. Most of them hardly matter; by the end of the season, the only real development is Graham and Ryan's relationship becoming more familial (and yes, I know, Ryan's dad shows up in Resolution, kind-of muddying that dynamic). Outside of that? Not much.

Ryan starts as a young man without too much direction and a point is made about his dyspraxia. Said dyspraxia stays on the TARDIS for 7 episodes, and Ryan stays a young man without much of a direction. Graham starts, for his part, in remission from cancer who lost the wife he married after meeting her during his treatments. His mourning essentially results in character moments but doesn't really seem to be worked through, his being a survivor of cancer doesn't matter.

But the one which actually pisses me off? What was done with Yaz. Or rather, what was not done, because nothing was done. The only Yaz-centric episode isn't about her at all, but her grandmother and a retelling of a dark moment of British colonial history. She's a cop from a minority background who is rather disenchanted with what her job is like starting from the bottom, but there's oodles to do in a series format that's always made a point of regular trips through contemporary time, and absolutely nothing is done with any of it. She's also the only character really supposed to show up for work as far as we know, but that's absent too. Yaz, in the end, is a body who provides an incidental story hook and additional background information for Ryan.

What a waste.


The Doctor
This season's Doctor is actually quite inconsistent, not just with preceding Doctors but also with her own. She takes literally opposite stances on moral issues on a couple of occasions, even; and then there's that moment when slow and painful death for dangerous animals is somehow portrayed as preferable to a quick exit... And, unlike the four preceding Doctors, Whittaker's isn't provided with a solid definition of who she is (or of who they are this season) or of what makes her tick, and isn't developing. And no, the latter is not a Classic Who trait - in his very first season, William Hartnell's Doctor undergoes considerable character development.

A season has passed, and I don't know who the 13th Doctor is, which is my second actual gripe with Chibnall's first full series. I know, however, that Chibnall and Whittaker made a big deal of the Doctor being female itself - but I'm sorry, while gender identity might provide a solid definition for a human being, it didn't seem to inform anything in the show beyond the odd quip, where there was something absolutely fascinating to be told here from a 21+ centuries-old alien being's point-of-view and entirely alien, highly gender-fluid culture.

Maybe next time...

On a different note, the reason the Doctor has companions to begin with is because the character is an alien, with an alien mentality, and despite the large variations in personality and very long character development, had always retained that otherwordliness.

And then there's this character who finds it rather hard to understand human social norms and responses - let alone really conform to them, loves discovering and learning new things, loves to provide exposition with historical and/or scientific background everytime they can, is at times quite enjoying being the cleverest person in the room and at other times loathing what it makes impossible to ignore, can just as well look at the simplest situations from forty different angles and/or integrated into multisecular global and local history and/or differing pluricultural approaches, seeks enjoyment in simple pleasures, makes a point of ignoring social norms, can be fascinated by absolutely dangerous situations - and, in the end, is a very lonely being who knows there's a chasm between them and the people in their environment, but mostly treats those people as equals anyway, enjoys watching them grow and change, and just does their best where they can, even if their methods can be completely outlandish.

That's the character I identify with.

Yeah, I know...

Unfortunately, that's also the character that wasn't there this season. It has nothing to do with Jodie Whittaker's performance, which I find quite solid, especially in the light she went out of her way not to inform her performance from watching the show. The problem there is the Doctor often does not have much agency this season, to the point of once being reduced to a background element for an entire episode (Demons of the Punjab - yes, I know I loved it!). And the Doctor's unique very long-term perspectives, hyperintellect and highly efficient problem solving are basically gone or irrelevant as well.


To conclude...
In the end, I find I'm actually disappointed with Series 11. Most of it (and its soundtrack) being bland isn't quite the problem, nor is the absence of an overarching plot; if you've watched the First and Second Doctors, there were a number of misses and the pacing clearly shows its age, but the fascination is still there in-between the bland episodes and the characters are alive, and they grow. There was no lack of new and bizarre alien creatures either, obviously - although the Daleks very quickly became a recurring fixture.

The character part is what Series 11 really struggles with. In the end, who the characters are seems to matter very little, let alone who they become. They're just part of the sci-fi decor. Unfortunately, as a person who is very big on character depth and development, it means Series 11 takes a very unfavorable comparison with every single Series or Season I've watched which preceded...

It's not an accident either. As it turns out, Chris Chibnall has given a succinct definition of the show: contemporary societal and political issues, with time travel and monsters. The first part the show manages, if a bit heavy-handedly now and then (might as well have made Robertson orange, we know he's Trump!) It treats the latter as secondaries used to serve the first, and it also shows. And it is quite telling that in Chibnall's own words, the Doctor, or any other character, fails to be even hinted at.

It shows.

 

Lest we forget...

 

Relevant to our interests:



They start talking Doctor Who at around 18:30.

 

Belated Happy Birthday to...

 

Got my Dad last season's episodes of Doctor Who on DVD for his birthday.

 

Who would live in a house like this?

 

Another clue