Jerusalem posted:

The Boneless are absolutely malicious, gently caress those guys. The Doctor banishing them rates highly among my favorite Capaldi moments, as of course does his 60 seconds solution to The Mummy.

God those two episodes were fantastic.

Cleretic posted:

While the Boneless are malicious, I think they stand apart from other 'malicious' villains by being distinctly sort of small-focused. It's hard to say that for certain give we only got one (very good) story and they don't talk, but I really got the feeling that their aims weren't especially high. They're like the interdimensional equivalent of a kid torturing insects in his backyard; it's more malice out of disregard for others than malice with any real intent.

Big Mean Jerk posted:

I love all the Tiny TARDIS bits in Flatline so much.

Voting Floater posted:

That's a valid read, but It's hard to say what exactly the Boneless's motives and ultimate aims were. They're almost completely non-communicative and all we really have is the Doctor's speculations about them, plus the fact they carried on being dickbags even after the Doctor managed to get a message across to them. They must be one of the most completely alien villains that've ever been in the show.

Jerusalem posted:

The_Doctor posted:

Yes, the CIA was a years old invention, but they’re not mentioned in Timeless Children, it’s another gallifreyan agency who seem to basically be the same.

jivjov posted:

Well, I finished Series 12. And honestly, I didn't hate the Timeless Child reveal as much as I thought I would. I don't like that apparently a bunch of the Pre-Hartnell incarnations were wetworks operatives for a hastily renamed Celestial Intervention Agency....but I feel like the episode still made it pretty clear that the Doctor as we know them still made the conscious decision to go out into the universe to be a meddler.

Vinylshadow posted:

Edward Mass posted:

Changing decades-long canon is like breaking up a tag team in pro wrestling - you can't just do it because you want to. You need to be thinking way down the line, with plans in place that explore what it means that the world you know is different. The Timeless Children ended without articulating the magnitude of the revelation, and then had the Doctor thrown in Shada as a cliffhanger. If you found out your life was a lie, wouldn't you be more contemplative?

Big Mean Jerk posted:

I mean it’s not like Doctor Who has ever been hesitant to make sweeping and sometimes contradictory changes to its own canon and continuity before.

Edward Mass posted:

Changing decades-long canon is like breaking up a tag team in pro wrestling - you can't just do it because you want to. You need to be thinking way down the line, with plans in place that explore what it means that the world you know is different. The Timeless Children ended without articulating the magnitude of the revelation, and then had the Doctor thrown in Shada as a cliffhanger. If you found out your life was a lie, wouldn't you be more contemplative?

Bicyclops posted:

I sort of wish we'd gotten to see Matt Smith ..... demonstrate how you can turn into a cartoon

Jerusalem posted:

Narsham posted:

And I do think that shifting the implied background of the Doctor from "got into the Time Lord caste out of an orphanage in the poor part of Gallifrey" to "the Ur-oppressed minority exploited by the Gallifreyan colonial power" shifts the character neatly out of a Victorian-era narrative that doesn't exactly challenge the British Empire (think rags-to-riches) into a more modern postcolonial narrative.

Or to be less Lit Crit about it, the Doctor-as-orphan narrative fits into all those stories about white boys who grow up to discover they are sons of royalty (the orphan girl narrative usually involves marrying royalty), so the idea that rewriting the Doctor's past somehow strips away the character's subversiveness seems strange to me. I do grant there's a lot of cringe possible along this path, though. As long as the show doesn't take things too far and get caught up in its own metaphor, there's a chance to comment far more boldly than Chibnall's first season suggested he is capable of.

CommonShore posted:

Yeah the fez rules and there needs to be more fez. Jodie could rock a fez.

Cleretic posted:

I'd never thought about it from this angle, and I actually like it, although it all banks on that actually being the direction they take, which... isn't necessarily true.

The thing that I think largely bothers people about this is that it takes the Doctor, who's what I generally call a 'Nobody Special' hero (essentially just a total rando doing the right thing), and turning them into a 'Somebody Special' hero (someone predestined to be taking on this role; your chosen ones, royal family either known or secret, pre-established ranks and roles but that can get a little muddy). You could argue that the Doctor is one of the greatest 'Nobody Special' heroes, with 50+ years of stories across all manner of settings that all essentially stem from the Doctor being the one to put their hand up and say 'hang on, can I jump in here'. Even things like technically being an in-crisis President or whatnot don't really change that, because it all stems from events that we've seen develop.

The Timeless Child reveal... technically doesn't change that by itself (as it stands they still look to be Nobody Special, just from a different place than we thought), but it could be used to change that, to recontextualize the entire show as 'this happened because the Doctor is Special'. I think the general hope is that it doesn't change anything, but for some that ship has already sailed.

The_Doctor posted: