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Which season should the next animated reconstruction be from? This poll is closed. |
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| Season 1 (Marco Polo) |
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13 | 18.57% |
| Season 2 (The Crusade) |
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1 | 1.43% |
| Season 3 (Galaxy 4/The Myth Makers/The Daleks' Master Plan/The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve/The Celestial Toymaker/The Savages) |
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25 | 35.71% |
| Season 4 (The Smugglers/The Highlanders/The Underwater Menace/The Evil of the Daleks) |
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16 | 22.86% |
| Season 5 (The Abominable Snowmen/The Web of Fear/The Wheel in Space) |
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11 | 15.71% |
| Season 6 (The Space Pirates) |
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4 | 5.71% |
| Total: | 70 votes | ||
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A part of me is gleeful about the ratings drop because I despise this incarnation of the show and I want it taken out of Chibnall's hands as soon as possible. The problem is is that Chibnall hasn't really cultivated any potential successors; the most any of the other writers have amassed is 1.5 to 2 episodes. There's a whole mess of great writers from the Capaldi seasons who remain woefully commissioned: I'd love to see the show taken over by Sarah Dollard, Jamie Mathieson, or Peter Harness (yes I know I'm alone on that front). After the past two series, I'd even take Mark Gatiss if it weren't for his gross transphobic poo poo.
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Mar 10, 2020 05:28
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Jerusalem posted:I think somebody mentioned Toby Whithouse might have been a possibility at one point? I haven't seen any of the shows he created but apparently Being Human was quite good? Based solely on his DW work, I was dreading a potential Whithouse era. It's not that he hasn't made stories which I don't enjoy, but the vast majority of them are about hard men making hard choices, which is to say, every single other show on TV. And the two stories he wrote with Capaldi are both strong contenders for the worst of the revival (until Chibnall). There are heavy, heavy extenuating circumstances for The Lie of the Land, but Under the Lake/Before the Flood is terrible completely on its own merits.
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Mar 10, 2020 05:39
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Cleretic posted:That two-parter had some really neat ideas, but none of them really managed to make the episode GOOD. I'll add the mystery about the Doctor's 'ghost' to that pile, as well as that fake prop town setting, which I remember thinking was a really neat concept when it came up, but then didn't really... do anything. The fake town was particularly galling because it's the second time Whithouse ripped off Curse of Fenric, and the second time he couldn't do it as well as Curse of Fenric. In a medium that ages as quickly as television, it's really damning when you can't pull off a trick better than one done thirty years ago. I'm one of three people in the world who thinks that Series 9 is the pinnacle of all Doctor Who, so that two-parter stands out all the more for me.
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Mar 10, 2020 06:01
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Sydney Bottocks posted:The difference between the 7th Doctor being Merlin and whatever nonsense Chibnall came up with is that the Merlin thing A)took place in another dimension and B)was posited as a potential future version of the Doctor (along the same lines as The Watcher, The Valeyard, and The Curator). "Future version of the Doctor" is fine because that's easily ignored if people who work on the show later decide they don't want to go down that road. Yeah, it's not bad because it's a retcon, it's bad because it's a retcon that makes things less interesting. The timeless child retcon changes things so that the Doctor has ALWAYS been a super important person by circumstance of their birth, which is at best utterly boring and at worst morally repugnant. I'm definitely not against delving into the Doctor's backstory and history on Gallifrey, as long as it doesn't fundamentally change what the character is (and ideally it should be done sparingly). Stuff like the Doctor admitting that he left Gallifrey because he was scared in Heaven Sent is a big retcon, but it hints at interesting ideas and also fits in with stuff like One apparently having been scheming about things in Remembrance of the Daleks.
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Mar 12, 2020 07:04
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Sydney Bottocks posted:As I say, that may just be me being overly cynical. Also I want to reiterate that I am 100% in favor of the casting choices, I just have these nagging doubts that he might have had other reasons beyond just wanting to shake things up. Even if casting of women and PoC is done for deeply cynical reasons, it still gives acting opportunities to them and serves as a valuable form of representation. Much as I loathe Chibnall, he would need to gently caress up hard to turn casting Whitaker, Cole, and Gill into a net negative, and the show has come nowhere close to that. That being said, I get where you're coming from. I've been kind of iffy about Whitaker from the start and have felt really uncomfortable about saying that simply because the other people saying that are all alt-right shitheads. The scripts give her absolutely to do, admittedly, but even on the occasion when somebody gives her good dialogue, she delivers it... fine. I'd put her around the same level as Tennant (whom I also don't really care for), maybe a little lower. It hurts even more when Jo Martin shows up and immediately owns the role of the Doctor. We could have had so much more.
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Mar 13, 2020 06:11
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WSAENOTSOCK posted:Because under Moffat, The Doctor was special because of things they chose to be and do, and now they're special by divine right of birth. This is what it all comes down to. It's a stupid retcon, but there have been stupid retcons before. But this one actively damages the character of the Doctor. By making her more special, she becomes less special. Past that, it's just another bad episode. Also, let's talk about The Deadly Assassin. What does it have in common with whatever this recent episode was called? It takes place on Gallifrey and there's a retcon (though I'd argue that since Assassin doesn't really change anything it's just... continuity.) How does The Deadly Assassin differ? It's a good use of your time. It's well-written. It's funny. It's a timely riff on 70s conspiracy fiction. It has a chalk outline of a Time Lord with his big silly hat. It understands that the Time Lords having an organization called the CIA is a joke, and not something that should be taken seriously and brought back for future stories.
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Mar 14, 2020 10:07
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Voting Floater posted:Neat, but kind of sad that I'd rank Jodie stood in her wardrobe pretty highly in her list of best Doctor speeches. I was gonna say, it bodes poorly when a public health PSA filmed on an iPhone is like the second or third best episode of the year.
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Mar 25, 2020 23:25
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Edward Mass posted:RTD and Moffat didn’t rewrite the Doctor’s backstory any further than “why did the Doctor leave Gallifrey in the first place?”. Chibnall, however, did a Looms. Did RTD do anything to the Doctor's backstory aside from saying the Master got that way from looking into a black hole? (Way to make fun of fan theories by having the Doctor dismiss the idea that they're secret brothers then come up with something just as dumb.) The only concrete thing Moffat did with the Doctor I think was establish that they were scared as a child and either were orphaned or sent to boarding school, which is fine. Anything regarding the hybrid is basically inadmissible due to the Doctor saying it to gently caress with the Time Lords (and purposefully poisoned by having Me bring up the half human thing), and stuff about the Doctor being a little girl/stealing a moon/stealing a wife is kept purposefully vague and unreliable.
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Apr 10, 2020 03:04
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Jerusalem posted:That farewell to Sarah Jane was just beautiful, and reading through RTD's tweets reminds just how wonderfully enthusiastic he could be and how it carried through to the show and often helped paper over the cracks. Turlough is about as gay as you could be on mid-80s BBC, so I doubt he's too broken up.
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Apr 20, 2020 08:16
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Jerusalem posted:On one of the commentary tracks, Mark Strickson said that he always played scenes with other companions like they were in a secret relationship. I remember Janet Fielding not being too impressed, haha. Huh. I've never gotten that specific interpretation, but he does play all his scenes like he's got a secret for sure, which if you're from an all-boys school definitely reads as closeted to me.
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Apr 24, 2020 02:09
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I thought the finale and series were awful, but about the same level of awful as the previous series, so I'm kind of surprised honestly on how quickly people turned on the show. I remembered the consensus last year being broad, cautious optimism. Sure, the ratings are down, hence the thread title, but that's all television.
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Apr 28, 2020 12:08
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:Canon in Doctor Who is sort of pointless to argue about too much, so I feel it's more important to look at what narrative goals are accomplished and what's communicated to the viewers and IMO this finale doesn't communicate very much of import. This, exactly. The retcon itself is messy, but there have been messy retcons before and probably will be again. However, the retcon is in service to a nasty, pernicious message that the Doctor isn't special because of who she chooses to be, she's special on account of her birth. Of her blood. That's a far more fatal blow to Doctor Who than canonizing the Morbius doctors or whatever. The Doctor lived a whole regeneration cycle prior to Hartnell? Sure, if you want. The Doctor is special only because she's the granddaughter of Palpatine? gently caress right off with that.
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Apr 28, 2020 22:47
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Both of the Capaldi Cybermen stories made really good use of them, I thought. Giving them rocket boots is dumb (it should be their numbers, single-mindedness, and inevitability that's terrifying, not their weaponry), but Death in Heaven wrung a lot of horror out of the conversion process, and World Enough and Time did the same with Bill. And the idea of Cybermen as the inherent endpoint of human evolution is a particularly chilling one. It's so weird that Chibnall went back to the Cybermen/Master well a third time, especially with how bad his story looks in comparison.
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May 5, 2020 08:48
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Astroman posted:Problem is this theory holds no water when you see that post 2005 Big Finish continues to get better, advances the shared universe, is creatively on fire As someone who used to listen to a lot of BF, this statement is pretty darn wild in my opinion. About 95% of the good stuff Big Finish has done was in the very early part of their catalogue, well before the revival started. Their entire goal since then has been to produce safe, unchallenging Doctor Who stories and I doubt Nicolas Briggs would dispute that characterization much. The production's gotten better, and they have more actors and access to revival-era content, but it's still mostly the same 4 writers writing the same 6 stories over and over and over and over again.
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May 18, 2020 03:08
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And given that Big Finish, in the business of selling expensive niche content, is apparently a rather successful company financially, I suspect (and there's no nice way to phrase this) that their customer base doesn't have particularly high standards. Demand seems inelastic. Anything starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant is probably gonna sell pretty well. So why not throw some stuff at the wall and see what sticks? Also (I haven't listened to a new main line release since maybe 2016 so maybe they've done away with this but I highly doubt it), it's 2020. The classic series was canceled thirty years ago. Stop breaking up stories into four parts with cliffhangers! There have been like ten good cliffhangers in the entirely of the series, and all of Big Finish's are, "Oh no, it's the monster that's on the cover of the CD!"
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May 18, 2020 07:43
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By virtue of being the most widely consumed medium, televised Doctor Who is always going to be supreme. But pre-revival, both the books and, to a lesser extent, Big Finish, had solid claims to being "the" Doctor Who. They did this by learning from what had been on TV and trying to build on and evolve past that (of course this varied greatly from story to story). Simply by virtue of being expanded universe material, current books, audios, comics, whatever are limited to some degree to filling in gaps in previous televised stories, but with a property like Doctor Who those gaps are uniquely wide and I wish they'd take more advantage of them, and more advantage of their respective mediums. I mean, audio drama is a medium with a ton of potential for DW. It plays to all of the show's strengths--talented British actors talking at each other--and eliminates its weaknesses--design budgets, set wobbliness. Stuff like Scherzo or The Natural History of Fear or Legend of the Cyberman (to a lesser degree) are uniquely suited to the medium.
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May 18, 2020 12:18
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The show has tried to engage with that from time to time, like in Planet of the Ood when Ten snaps at Donna and asks, ''Who do you think made your clothes?'' But it's immediately undercut by Donna (rightfully) calling that unfair. The correct way to deal with it would for the Doctor to point out that hate, subjugation, and genocide happen everytime and everyplace so they're used to it, but that's a supremely cynical statement for what is a fundamentally optimistic show.
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May 20, 2020 02:40
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Who is Milo Parker? It looks like his only BF credit is this story and he's 18 years old. Is he another BF-only Master? I would guess he's far too young to be a sound-alike for Delgado.
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May 23, 2020 02:02
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Open Source Idiom posted:No one knows, though the thought is that he's playing the kid who looked into the Schism, back from The Last Of The Timelords. That... sounds like Big Finish all right.
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May 23, 2020 14:29
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It's especially bizarre because the show never acts like the Doctor is in the right (or wrong) for being a dick to Mickey. He's a well fleshed-out character with his own ideas and beliefs and the Doctor is just an rear end in a top hat to him. It is, in fact, kind of difficult to not read it as the Doctor being racist, or at best jealous and also racist. There's shades of this with Danny in the Capaldi era too, but fortunately we can assign most of the blame to Very Bad Human Being Gareth Roberts.
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Jun 2, 2020 11:14
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I don't know why I bother when every ancillary media of any kind has fallen into this trap already, but there's very little of a thing you can show of a thing like the Time War before it gets less and less interesting. For as good as Day of the Doctor is, it makes that stage of the Time War look rather a lot like conventional combat, let alone thirty-two hours worth of stories.
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Jun 3, 2020 04:41
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If the Doctor's regenerations work the same way as regular Time Lords, presumably she's not immortal, she just has infinite regenerations, barring accidents. Which is fine, I don't think there's a particularly interesting story to be told of the Doctor at the end of their life. Regeneration is already a big enough price to pay for any big sacrifice. There's a reason TotD only spent like 15-20 minutes on it and then Moffat later tried to demurely suggest that the Doctor has infinite regenerations anyway later. That's nowhere near the biggest problem with that episode.
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Jun 12, 2020 12:16
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It also helps that RTD rarely went ultra-cynical and bleak with his work. There's individual scenes and moments that strive for that, but Midnight really works because of how out of step it is with everything around it. It and Turn Left are sandwiched between the mega-event that is the Series 4 finale and what, the time Agatha Cristie got menaced by a bee?
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Jun 13, 2020 11:55
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Davros1 posted:Wonder if it could be James Bond. Ian Fleming's nieces control the rights to his books, and one of them, Lucy Fleming, has acted in the BF Survivors and Counter-Measures ranges. That's not a bad guess. I'm not too familiar with post-Fleming novels but the comics they've been putting out recently have all been of a pretty high quality. Though I suppose the state of the movies is a big mark against being protective of the property, but I guess that could all be MGM's fault.
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Aug 6, 2020 04:48
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Voting Floater posted:I think there's also something fundamentally awkward about the process of having to work backwards by animating to the existing soundtrack. Things like small facial expressions and dramatic pauses just don't work as well in animation as they do in live action (at least on the budget they have), but the animators are stuck with the soundtrack they've got to work with. You could create a compelling piece of animation around the existing soundtrack, but not on the cheapo budget most of these things are made for. Nobody's going to put down cash to animate a 50 year old television show, though. I wonder if a motion comic style might not be better. Like a prettier version of telesnaps. You don't really lose anything by not having characters awkwardly move their mouths and toddle from one side of the frame to the other. Just show an actually well-drawn panel of the Doctor and the bad guy talking at each other, maybe with a couple cutaways in there. You'd probably lose less of Troughton's body language than with this style.
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Aug 9, 2020 00:22
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Vinylshadow posted:I like Jack and Rose as much as the next one, but I'd rather they stretch those thirty seconds forever, even if they need to keep giving Nine amnesia Does anybody really care (yes, I realize the answer is yes, people care a lot about continuity for some reason) if you can't slot stories neatly between episodes? If you've got an idea for a cool story where Nine and Rose go to Space New Orleans, just do it. At that point, you might as well demand an explanation for why Billie Piper sounds like she's aged fifteen years. For whatever else I have to say about them, it sounds like Big Finish is a healthy work environment and everybody enjoys doing it, so I hope Eccleston has a good time there.
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Aug 9, 2020 22:29
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One thing I miss about Old Who is scenes not involving any of the lead actors. There's still plenty of parts now where the companion or the Doctor will discuss current events/the state of the world with its inhabitants, but there's hardly any moment where they're just talking amongst themselves about what's going on. You've got great stuff like the carnie in Carnival of Monsters, or the stuff with the priest in Curse of Fenric. It's been an issue for most of the revival, but having three companions, I think, has just exacerbated it drastically. And where the hell are the scenes where the Doctor and the bad guy talk at each other? Where are they, Chibnall?! I bet they're really cheap to shoot! I skipped several episodes of this most recent series, but the only example I can think of where Whitaker gets the chance to harangue a bad guy is in the episode with King James.
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Aug 20, 2020 05:24
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Buffy was clearly influential on the revival, but I don't think what RTD took from it was the quippiness. It's more the domestic setting being invaded by the supernatural; like half of Series 1 takes place on contemporary earth. Characterization, too, though that sort of thing you can trace back to Ace. And the sort of rapid-fire patter you get once Moffat takes over is clearly coming from his background in sitcoms more than Joss Whedon. Moffat comedy is pretty distinct from the sort of quips that dominate the Marvel movies, which have basically fully embraced the Whedon model.
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Aug 20, 2020 05:37
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Big Mean Jerk posted:You can say the same for just about every Doctor other than maybe One, Two, Three, and Eight (and only on technicality since he’s only had 1.25 tv episodes!) though. Most Doctors, in addition to bad stories, also get good stories though
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Aug 23, 2020 12:54
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My sources tell me that there's actually a successfully typed hashtag tucked away in the basement of an old government ministry building in Hong Kong.
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Aug 24, 2020 22:36
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Moon is an egg is great and I can only assume that the people who hate it must be watching a very different show
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Aug 26, 2020 09:44
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Open Source Idiom posted:Yeah, but it's not literal. It's an allegory for, you know, ALWAYS CHOOSING LIFE. I understand how you can read Kill the Moon as an anti-abortion story, but I don't think it comes naturally and I think that the episode actively cuts against interpreting it in that fashion. For all the discussion it generated, it's not actually a political story. That's what I find interesting about Harness's stories: he uses politics as trappings but doesn't dip into polemic or even really advocacy. He seems practically apolitical, maybe generically liberal. Though I honestly don't remember a thing about Pyramid At The End Of The World or any of those monk episodes.
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Aug 26, 2020 13:24
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Android Blues posted:I think the abortion metaphor reading is totally accidental and not that intuitive. It's mostly just that it's a decision about whether to let something be born or not and there's a big button that says ABORT, and from there no matter how shaky or circumstantial the rest of the reading is, you have to at least acknowledge the subtext. I suspect that during production, somebody pointed out that it could be read as an anti-abortion parable and there was some hasty rewriting to muddle that interpretation as much as possible (like the big ABORT button). Choosing not to kill the mysterious space creature in the egg doesn't make it a pro-life story. That's just a Doctor Who story.
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Aug 27, 2020 04:47
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OldMemes posted:What is Time Lord Victorious actually about? The promos just seem to go on about it being a multimedia event and not what it is or how you follow the story. So do you have to read the comics, then the books and audio plays in order to follow it? Is it a story with a middle, beginning and end? Is the play the end, and how will people experience the ending if they don't attend?  If the roadmap is any indication, they've totally embraced comic book crossover-style storytelling, so the first several comics/audios are designated ROAD TO TIME LORD VICTORIOUS, which means that they have absolutely nothing to do with the story except at the end the same character show up and says a few things. Let's have him be... I dunno, the carnival operator from Carnival of Monsters? Then in TIME LORD VICTORIOUS #1, the carnival operator is shockingly killed off and then all of the Doctors have to fight each other. Romana takes off all her clothes for some reason in TIME LORD VICTORIOUS #3. In TIME LORD VICTORIOUS #11, the whole crossover is retconned out of existence and the Fifth Doctor has lightning powers. But stay tuned for TIME LORD VICTORIOUS: AFTERMATH!
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Sep 5, 2020 23:54
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I suspect part of the push is an admission that there's not going to be any televised episodes on the horizon. They need to do something to keep the brand in mind. As to why it hasn't happened before, that's probably down to the licensing status. The Titan Doctor Who comics, which are mainly new series focused, have only been around for a couple years, as has Big Finish's ability to play around with new series ideas.
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Sep 6, 2020 00:28
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Okay, who wants to play? I'll be the Ninth Doctor. I rolled a 2 and landed on All Flesh is Gross. "Contemplate the horror of your existence. Lose 1 turn."
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Sep 6, 2020 01:39
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Jerusalem posted:They cast Matt Smith in the role of "good, well-written character" and had to drop him when they decided to go in a different direction. As if anything in TRoS was ever going to be good or well-written. They should have tried to get the guy who got the snap-activated brain port thingy in The Long Game.
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Sep 10, 2020 05:54
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I would prefer that the War Doctor be used as little as possible, really. Given that he regenerates immediately after the end of DotD, there's not a lot of times for him to pop up and on those occasions he's probably in an even worse state than he is in DotD. The novels and four-part audio stories are fine continuity speaking, I guess, even if I'm conceptually opposed to them, but him getting invited to a bunch of multi-Doctor stories is rather silly.
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Oct 7, 2020 09:54
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Burkion posted:She's just really nice and sweet and I'd like to see her get very vindictive at some point. Its kind of tied to that lack of agency thing, I think. She doesn't get to do stuff really. The Doctor's not like an angry character, usually, but even the Fifth Doctor got to be pissed off. She mostly comes across, at her worst, as mildly crossed. I've harped on this before but the biggest reason for this is that the Doctor doesn't spend any time talking with the villains anymore. The majority of the dialogue under Chibnall is the Doctor and the companions discussing the plot, designating roles for each of the companions to do, then getting back together and discussing the results. It's like Law & Order: TARDIS or something. So the only time she can get angry is when one of the companions does something she doesn't like, like when Graham expresses enthusiasm for killing a mass murderer or whatever. I didn't watch like half of the last season so maybe there are some counter-examples, but the only instance of the Doctor getting into the thick of it with a bad guy I can think of is the episode with King James. It seems like such a more myopic show nowadays, and the fact that the inherently boring dialogue is being scripted by someone who's far worse at patter than RTD or Moffat makes it all the more weaker.
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Oct 11, 2020 04:15
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Pastamania posted:Dinosaurs on a Spaceship - the one good thing he's written on Who After being profoundly disappointed by Whitaker's first season, I rewatched Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and it was astounding how much more of a competent piece of television it was. It does a pretty good job of giving all of its large cast of characters a couple of beats, a feat which has thus far eluded Chibnall's other writing. It's kind of dopey, but that's a far more forgivable flaw than dull and pointless.
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Oct 11, 2020 23:19
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