Amph Doctor Who Discussion (Russell T. Davies returns)

Pretty much this.

I was also really not a fan of retroactively making the Doctor's choice of TARDIS to steal actually being Clara's decision, along with inserting her and the Great Intelligence everywhere into the Doctor's timeline with Clara getting a 100% perfect record at stopping it.

I wasn't a big fan of 12/Clara early on, but across the course of both seasons, as their dynamics changed, they grew on me.

I'll admit to being biased towards Capaldi's work as 12, however - I had just finished watching Pertwee's first season when I watched Deep Breath and Into the Dalek; the similarities between early 3 and early 12 made me a fan instantly. Plus, at that point, Clara was no longer a plot device but became a proper, passionate and flawed human. After Series 7 when she'd ended up being an infallible Deus ex machina, it was refreshing to watch her struggle with this new, coldly pragmatic Doctor.

 

A fair and balanced opinion. I don't necessarily agree, but I appreciate your sentiments

 

When I was watching Blink again today, I noticed something in the DVD shop when Sally goes to talk to Larry. One of the DVD "movies" was titled Angel Smile.

Just an odd coincidence given that the monsters of the episode were the Weeping Angels and we saw one of them smile later on in "The Angels Take Manhattan."

Also, while we saw them explicitly move in "Flesh and Stone," we may have also seen them move in "Blink." When Sally is upstairs with the other three angels, Kathy's grandson leaves, slamming the door behind him. As Sally turns her back on one of the angels, there's a moving shadow, strongly indicating that it was one of the angels moving to attack her.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-...xterminate-why-its-time-for-doctor-who-to-die

Agree. I loved the show as a kid in the Tom Baker/Peter Davidson era, and enjoyed it again when Eccelston and Tennant took on the role, but it feels like a real slog whenever I watch it these days.

 

After enjoying the first three episodes of Series 11, I didn't expect that I'd spend the second half of that series feeling like watching was more and more like a chore...

I did a bit of thinking earlier today on why - and missed the comments deadline on the article above. Came up with a wall of text about a different topic - showrunner and writer egos, and their consequences on season and overall continuity...

Spoiler: I iz building a wall of text.

I'd argue the show suffered from having quite a few writers with significant egos.

RTD did introduce story arcs, but he also made sure said arcs were relevant in some way in most of the other writers' episodes. For an example, Chibnall's "42" episode included a development about the Master working to turn Martha's mother against the Doctor, and the following Human Nature / The Family of Blood story by Paul Cornell uses the same plot device RTD himself uses in the final season arc to revive the Master.

The writers under RTD, however, did tend to ignore one another's work. The structure put in by RTD just made it impossible for them to ignore the main arc. And RTD returned the favor when needed, like the integration of Helen Raynor's The Sontaran Stratagem and The Poison Sky into the chain of events revisited in Turn Left.

The trend of writers ignoring one another continued under Moffat as the showrunner, except Moffat was part of the earlier problem. A lot of the backwards referencing he did was about his own material under RTD, and one of the first things Moffat did was writing the erasure from the universe of events from the preceding four series into an arc that ends up with a reboot of the universe. It's outright stated in the third episode of Moffat's tenure:

DOCTOR: Amy, tell him.
AMY: Tell him what?
DOCTOR: About the Daleks.
AMY: What would I know about the Daleks?
DOCTOR: Everything. They invaded your world, remember? Planets in the sky. You don't forget that. Amy, tell me you remember the Daleks.
AMY: No, sorry.

Obviously, at the start of the reboot, RTD had done a much larger waving off of prior events - making the Doctor the last of the Time Lords - but there was a good case for that: a reboot wants new viewers, a lot of them, who by definition don't know about and can't possibly care about past lore. By doing away with Gallifrey, RTD did away with most of that headache, but did not deny former continuity. He also put a mark on the Doctor's character that allowed for further, long-term development. That mark was still present in the middle of Series 9 (it's in 12's speech in the Zygon Inversion), despite Gallifrey having been "brought back" since... in a way that allowed to still keep it mostly uninvolved.

In that, I largely preferred RTD's method of putting things aside to Moffat's. The former didn't change what had happened before, he changed what happened since. He picked dup the story, and when his time came, he let it go. Moffat, on the other hand, openly made most of what had happened in the RTD era un-happen for everybody but the Doctor. River, obviously, was the big exception that survived the reboot, but she was already Moffat's to begin with.

Moffat didn't just undo some of RTD's work. He preceded Chibnall in the act of retconning one's own work into the series at the end of Season 7, when Clara ended up woven throughout the entire story of the Doctor and saving him everywhen during it - which doesn't really change anything in the rest of Doctor Who, but technically leaves Moffat's mark across all past and future Doctor Who. It came along another retcon that didn't really have consequences but did change a fundamental point of the show in the 1960s: Clara also ended up pointing the First Doctor towards the "right" TARDIS ("Sorry, but you're about to make a very big mistake. Don't steal that one, steal this one. The navigation system's knackered, but you'll have much more fun") - which makes Clara the reason why the First Doctor's traveling was so chaotic, and also contradicts the very first serial:

DOCTOR: You see, this isn't operating properly. Or rather, the code is still a secret. When you put the right data, precise information to a second of the beginning of a journey, then we can fix a destination, but I had no data at my disposal.
BARBARA: Are you saying that you don't know how to work this thing?
DOCTOR: Well of course I can't. I'm not a miracle worker.

Unmaking the destruction of Gallifrey, however, didn't so much retcon Doctor Who as it overwrote RTD's decision to make the Doctor the last of the Time Lords and made them again a Time Lord among many. And as pointed out above, it didn't change the show's direction.

In the end, however, Moffat's ego as the showrunner was less of an issue as Chibnall's ego as the showrunner.

Moffat kept some writers from the RTD era - including Chibnall himself. Chibnall didn't keep a single experienced Doctor Who writer from either the RTD or the Moffat eras on board, and started by writing a season where the mark and the creatures of former showrunners were systematically erased (he ended up having to backtrack on that approach...)

There's also been a lot said about political messaging (to put it euphemistically), but frankly, Chibnall didn't introduce political messaging to Doctor Who or calling out archaisms in society - that's been there since 1963, when in the very first episode of the show the UK are predicted to abandon their passé monetary subdivisions for a decimal system (IRL, the decision was voted in 1969 and implemented in 1971).

What Chibnall was, however, was a lot more heavy-handed. With Chibnall, messaging isn't just part of the story, it becomes whole stories. Chibnall's show at times feels like lectures, and the showrunner himself did not hide that it was intentional, and that he was morally right to do so.

When the Doctor ends up siding with the exploitative Space Amazon against a lone and desperate wolf in Kerblam! and literally says the systems aren't the problem, moments before only putting up a token effort before she kills said lone wolf, I feel confident enough to say there's no grounds to stand on to be a moralizing lecturer.

And then Chibnall's Timeless Child turned the "let's retroactively introduce myself all over Doctor Who continuity" idea up to 11, when he redefined the Doctor as someone who never was a Time Lord after all, but a unique and timeless being that no longer began as Hartnell's Doctor and was the source of the genetic material used to make the Time Lords, rather than being a Time Lord. Where Moffat's retconning didn't really change anything about the fundamentals of the show, Chibnall's retconning does. The Doctor isn't the last survivor of many Time Lords or one among many Time Lords; now, they are the seed from which Time Lords were made. Until then, no matter how inhuman, the Doctor still had peers. They no longer do; no one is on the Timeless Child's level. They're unique in the current continuity, and the precursor of a lesser species known as the Time Lords, who are now presented as inferior both physically and morally to the Doctor. Time Lords are no longer a mysterious and frightening species; they are ersatzs.

Chibnall also overwrites another fundamental - it's no longer the First Doctor who acquires the TARDIS that he later gets stuck as the emblematic Police Box. An unspecified number of Doctors got there before the First Doctor. This emblematic blue Police Box is no longer Sydney Newman's character's - Chibnall's incarnations of the character are the ones that got there first, not the one incarnated by Hartnell.

But those are rather smaller, and mostly symbolic changes compared with how Chibnall's Timeless Child's story uproots all of his predecessors' and redefines the entire timeline of the Doctor as being permanently a small part of what his own work says the Doctor's complete story is. The entire setting of every season and series before is retroactively made into sequels to the Doctor's origin story, after an indeterminate period of time and following an impossibly elaborate lie in which an untold number of the Doctor's lives just got suppressed and went forgotten by the Time Lords. It's demoted every single one of Chibnall's predecessors to being the writers of an unreliable narrative that was "finally" exposed as woefully incomplete.

I much, much preferred it back in the day when RTD just made Gallifrey a closed chapter for his run, which was ultimately reversible (and ended up being reversed), in the interest of the narrative he wanted to build on the long term. For all his faults, RTD let the past alone and built forward. Moffat only did that after a reboot (inside and outside of the narrative) that deliberately did away with his immediate predecessor's legacy. Then Chibnall came in and said none of that, and none of what came before, is truly about the Doctor.

Moffat and Chibnall didn't need to edit or tear down the past in a show like Doctor Who for any other reason than to feed their own ego by putting their mark all over it. They all had all of time and space - in an infinity of parallel universes, and with a potentially infinitely regenerating lead role - to work with. That's more creative freedom than one will ever need. But because they had to leave their mark everywhere, past, present and future, they altered and undid the work of those who made it possible for them to be there in the first place.

RTD didn't, and that is why, in my view, he was a superior showrunner for Doctor Who by far compared with Moffat and Chibnall, and also why RTD left a mark that mattered more than Moffat did and Chibnall will have.

 

TV shows generally struggle if they go on too long, it happened with Who the first time.

The article raises some valid points

It isn’t just the budgets and production values of programmes such as The Mandalorian or Loki that are upstaging Doctor Who, it’s the storytelling. Something like WandaVision seems in a different league. And, even taking into account Covid, with only eight episodes expected in the delayed new season, the BBC’s production pace is glacial compared with its streaming rivals. Just as 70s Doctor Who looked cheap and wobbly beside blockbusters such as Star Wars, the show now suffers by comparison with Marvel TV shows

The BBC can't compete with the likes of Disney+ or HBO.
Doctor Who's low budget look used to be charming, but in an age where audiences used to shows that cost $10-15million per episode it doesn't really stand up so well anymore.
Add to that the writing problems and it's easy to support the idea that the show probably needs to go away for a few years again until someone with vision can bring it back the way RTD did

 

@Lordban - Thank you, you summed up perfectly what's wrong with Chibnall's run.

The best thing Who could do now is to go on a hiatus again for a few years.

 

I think this might be precisely the opposite of my order, with the caveat that I spend the entirety of the Ten and Martha season hoping Ten gets launched into the nearest sun, and so it’s only so high because of Martha’s excellence. She deserved so much better than that abusive git.

 

Speaking of Martha Jones...

https://www.bigfinish.com/news/v/martha-jones-returns

 

Most probably. It's going to be a very, very narrow path for Chibnall's and Whittaker's successors, since it's already decided we'll have a 14 and a new showrunner.

 

isn't the first time Clara is introduced she's actually a Dalek? I drop into random episodes every once in awhile. Since I watched Gunpowder Milkshake today I should probably find a good Karen Gillan episode.

 

An instance of her that has been converted into a Dalek, yes.

 

"Amy's Choice" is a good one. Also "The Girl who Waited."

 

This episode could be of interest:

S2E53 -Chapter Fifty-Three: The Traveller From Beyond Time! – Never Sleeps Network

 

The following meme isn't technically completely accurate.
If you've seen the entire Series 6, you'll know what I mean.

Spoiler

 

Still a funny idea

 

About to watch The Doctor's Daughter and it's only appropriate that the Doctor's daughter is played by the (Fifth) Doctor's daughter.

 

A question from a Whovian friend of mine

What links "Dalek's Master Plan", "Terminus", "The Doctor's Daughter", and the 2019 film Yesterday?

(I have no idea)

 

Ah, We have found the answer, but I'll leave it open for guesses

 

Boggled by the suggestion that Who has a canon, and that the Eighth Doctor stories are in a lower level from the 2005+ series.

The only things which have been officially deemed canon by the BBC are the Adventure Games and the Big Finish audios. Notably, not the TV series in any form.
(This arguably means that Vienna is more canon than nearly anything else on TARDISwiki. Which is quite pleasing to me).

The Target novels, the TV Comic strips, the DWM comics, Titan’s run, the Virgin novels, the EDAs and PDAs, Candy Jar Books, SJA, K-9, K9 and Company, Now I Am 500, Faction Paradox, Brenda and Effie, Bernice Summerfield and Iris Wildthyme and Señor 105, Kaldor City and the City of the Saved, all 300 versions of Shada, and yes, even the various television series from 1963 to the present day aired as ”Doctor Who” are all on the same playing field of “real.” Namely not.
Which, wonderfully, is so absurd it circles back round to the much simpler answer, it all counts if you want, just relax.
Yarvelling or Davros as creator of the Daleks? Yes.
Three (or more) Ninth Doctors? Sure thing.
Orson Pink driving the car that kills Danny as part of an initiation into a time-traveling voodoo cult? I don’t see why not.

 

Alien Bodies is a fantastic book by the way, I might even say it's my favourite Who story in any medium, though not without some strong contenders from both tv and audio (it's definitely the best Who novel). It's very similar to Moffat's take on Who, to give something of an idea of what it's like.

 

"The only things which have been officially deemed canon by the BBC are the Adventure Games and the Big Finish audios. Notably, not the TV series in any form."

You lost me here. It goes without saying that the TV show is canon. It's a TV show.

 

But the point is that the BBC has only weighed in on canon twice, for the 2010/11 Adventure Games and the Big Finish audios. They never said the show itself was canon

 

I got that, but this is a SW message board, and "canon" has always been a thing. If it's on-screen from the creators then it's canon - that's always true. That works for all TV/Film media produced. Saying "Notably, not the TV series" has been "deemed canon" is non-sensical.

I get that that may have been the point of the post, but it was so laden with lists and commas, that any point was lost in the haze of grammar.