Showrunner Chris Chibnall revived an old nemesis, a former ally, and a classic monster
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Review: Jodie Whittaker’s Time Lord returns to classic Doctor Who form
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Which seasons are you thinking of? I'm guessing the one with Vampires of Venice for Smith, not sure which you have in mind for Tennant though.
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yes it was/is. Modern day - It was conceived for production, and still today billed, as a 'family show'. In other words, it was conceived as a wholesome show that kids can watch. Although many adults do watch it watch, its main demographic audience is school kids. It has a UK classification of 12, meaning that it's suitable for that age and above - kids show too.
Doctor Who circa 1963-1989 was initially planned as a children's show for ITV. The remake in 2005 was planned as a children's fantasy series.
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Albino_Boo
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
The Empty Child episodes was scary for younger children because it played on the fear of the child losing the mother. It was well constructed and taughtly written
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Albino_Boo
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
While I do agree with fact that Dr Who has always been a show for the family but it has always been a BBC production.
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First of, I'm a new Whovian and only saw every episodes since it came back in 2005.
On my side, I put Eccleston first, a proper dark doctor, with what is for me the daskest doctor moment at the end of the second episode ("The End of the World") when he just let Cassandra die while looking at her not allowing hher any help, even Tennant's episode "Family of Blood" didn't end that darkly.
That being said, I can't judge the pre 2005 doctors but I would put Tennant and Smith around the same at second even if Smith never went as dark as Tennant or Eccleston
Then Capaldi, even if I wasn't sure how to rate him until his speech in "The Zygon Inversion", one of the most meaningful/poingnant speech a doctor delivered I think.
For Whittaker, she's good at the moment, reminds me a big of Smith in some ways, but not enough for me to judge, I need to see her dark side and see how she'll develop.
I'm sure John Hurt would have made a great Doctor and before we knew who was going to replace Capaldi, I would have loved for Michael Sheen to be the next one.
Anywho, That being said, I can see Whittaker go high in the Doctors ranking but Chibnall needs to fully open her potential and with a finaly like this one, I have big hopes.
On my side, I put Eccleston first, a proper dark doctor, with what is for me the daskest doctor moment at the end of the second episode ("The End of the World") when he just let Cassandra die while looking at her not allowing hher any help, even Tennant's episode "Family of Blood" didn't end that darkly.
That being said, I can't judge the pre 2005 doctors but I would put Tennant and Smith around the same at second even if Smith never went as dark as Tennant or Eccleston
Then Capaldi, even if I wasn't sure how to rate him until his speech in "The Zygon Inversion", one of the most meaningful/poingnant speech a doctor delivered I think.
For Whittaker, she's good at the moment, reminds me a big of Smith in some ways, but not enough for me to judge, I need to see her dark side and see how she'll develop.
I'm sure John Hurt would have made a great Doctor and before we knew who was going to replace Capaldi, I would have loved for Michael Sheen to be the next one.
Anywho, That being said, I can see Whittaker go high in the Doctors ranking but Chibnall needs to fully open her potential and with a finaly like this one, I have big hopes.
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I really liked the Timeless Child take. Yes, it does involve a little bit of retconning, but Doctor Who has always been full of that, anyway. Like, what exactly is the origin of the Cybermen, were they created by that tech mogul on Earth or have they been around for millennia? Was that just a story arc in an alternate universe? If so, why? Just to have a new origin story in the new series? It's quite confusing.
The Time Lords gaining the ability to regenerate from the time vortex may have well just been part of the Division coverup anyway, maybe only part of the real cause, the rest being hidden to the utmost elite of the ruling class.
I guess I like it because of the same reason The Master said he hated it. All this time The Doctors have been running around acting like they're something special, and in turns out that's literally true. I think my opinion on it will depend on where they take it from here.
I'm mostly wondering if Gallifrey has really fallen or not. If so, it would seem to invalidate The Curator's (who is really a later incarnation of The Doctor) explanation of "Gallifrey Falls No More". It felt like it cheapened that whole story arc.
The Time Lords gaining the ability to regenerate from the time vortex may have well just been part of the Division coverup anyway, maybe only part of the real cause, the rest being hidden to the utmost elite of the ruling class.
I guess I like it because of the same reason The Master said he hated it. All this time The Doctors have been running around acting like they're something special, and in turns out that's literally true. I think my opinion on it will depend on where they take it from here.
I'm mostly wondering if Gallifrey has really fallen or not. If so, it would seem to invalidate The Curator's (who is really a later incarnation of The Doctor) explanation of "Gallifrey Falls No More". It felt like it cheapened that whole story arc.
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I've been wishing for the writers to find a way to bring Gallifrey back into the story. In the original series run, episodes involving Time Lord society were always among my favorites, in part because the Doctor was up against his equals; now, his only legitimate challenges involve facing down entire races. In the modern series, the arc involving the Master are also standouts for similar reasons. We also got a glimpse of the alien side of the Time Lords, something the Doctor rarely reveals.
I'd like to see the Rani brought back, too.
I'd like to see the Rani brought back, too.
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I am one of those crazy folks who thought the last season was actually pretty good. I liked having the show push out and build its own lore base as we get to know the ensemble cast. With that said, I watched the first ep of this new season and boy I was not prepared for the tonal shift.
While I loved seeing Lenny Henry (I wish we'd get a Chef! revival!!) and didnt mind the acting of the supporting cast, it just wasnt doctor who. It was like when you'd see those crossover comics where the visiting super hero had to deal with different "rules" of the incumbent hero's comic. It was like watching Doctor who guest starring in The Avengers (the British Show). After that I decided i'd skip this out on this season unless the reviews say its a must see.
And it seems like they stuck the landing according to reviewers, so i'll be giving it another whirl.
While I loved seeing Lenny Henry (I wish we'd get a Chef! revival!!) and didnt mind the acting of the supporting cast, it just wasnt doctor who. It was like when you'd see those crossover comics where the visiting super hero had to deal with different "rules" of the incumbent hero's comic. It was like watching Doctor who guest starring in The Avengers (the British Show). After that I decided i'd skip this out on this season unless the reviews say its a must see.
And it seems like they stuck the landing according to reviewers, so i'll be giving it another whirl.
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That's what we're up to in the viewing order tonight. It'll be my own fault if she's up all night asking for us.
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The episodes with the weeping angels can be quite scary, especially for kids or the “Night Terrors” episode in season 6
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I like Jodie's doctor. I just don't even almost care about her companions or almost any of the plots Chibnall has come up with.
For all the Mofatt has been criticized, his intricate schemes felt like they mattered. He took his time with season-long arcs that made us care about people (companions) before really endangering them. Chibnall seems to be in a hurry, putting the new trio in danger every damned episode, before I get to know them. Also, we've not seen anything like River Song's tragic arc, or the Pond family's. Or Clara's.
Say what you will, Mofatt made characters most of us liked. Chibnall's given us an awesome new doctor in Jodie but her fam... are a bunch of redshirt randos.
For all the Mofatt has been criticized, his intricate schemes felt like they mattered. He took his time with season-long arcs that made us care about people (companions) before really endangering them. Chibnall seems to be in a hurry, putting the new trio in danger every damned episode, before I get to know them. Also, we've not seen anything like River Song's tragic arc, or the Pond family's. Or Clara's.
Say what you will, Mofatt made characters most of us liked. Chibnall's given us an awesome new doctor in Jodie but her fam... are a bunch of redshirt randos.
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Whilst being heartily sick of the companions getter ever more special (concluding with Clara saving the Doctor throughout time), the current crop are just too mundane to be interesting.
They don't even seem particularly thrilled with being able to travel thru space and time. Compared to Rose, Amy & Rory and especially Donna, the characterisation of them has swung back too far in the opposite direction. They either have a bored determination or a bored disinterest in all of space and time. They're not people you'd willingly spend time with.
That said, I've really enjoyed most of this series and I really hope the next writers really take advantage of *unlimited Doctors*. Now we can have 3 incarnations of the Doctor in one series or even a single episode. We can have someone featuring in episode one who turns out to be a later incarnation only in episode 10.
Another plus point is the quality of guest actors this time around. There's been some pretty good ones.
I thought the finale was reasonably well set up, altho Cpt Jack's appearance and warning seem pretty irrelevant at this point and if you start applying logic to it, it starts to strange that he gave it at all. That would have been rectified had he featured in the finale, vanishing half way thru to go and warn the Doctor in the past. As it is, it's just a needless cameo.
Anyway, let's hope it steps up again, ditches the companions (I really would take Jack as a single companion) and we get an even better series next time out. This one was middling, but at least it wrapped up most of its mysteries by the end. Unlike some...
They don't even seem particularly thrilled with being able to travel thru space and time. Compared to Rose, Amy & Rory and especially Donna, the characterisation of them has swung back too far in the opposite direction. They either have a bored determination or a bored disinterest in all of space and time. They're not people you'd willingly spend time with.
That said, I've really enjoyed most of this series and I really hope the next writers really take advantage of *unlimited Doctors*. Now we can have 3 incarnations of the Doctor in one series or even a single episode. We can have someone featuring in episode one who turns out to be a later incarnation only in episode 10.
Another plus point is the quality of guest actors this time around. There's been some pretty good ones.
I thought the finale was reasonably well set up, altho Cpt Jack's appearance and warning seem pretty irrelevant at this point and if you start applying logic to it, it starts to strange that he gave it at all. That would have been rectified had he featured in the finale, vanishing half way thru to go and warn the Doctor in the past. As it is, it's just a needless cameo.
Anyway, let's hope it steps up again, ditches the companions (I really would take Jack as a single companion) and we get an even better series next time out. This one was middling, but at least it wrapped up most of its mysteries by the end. Unlike some...
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Tom Baker and Peter Davison have always been 'my' Doctors (as I was a nipper when they were on the TV), and I've only really dipped in-and-out of New Who, but I have to say that Matt Smith's first season was pretty special.
The 'Pandorica' two-parter was some of the most memorable story-telling I've seen in years, and as a sentimental old fool I couldn't help but be moved by the van Gogh episode.
The 'Pandorica' two-parter was some of the most memorable story-telling I've seen in years, and as a sentimental old fool I couldn't help but be moved by the van Gogh episode.
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Disagree.
Jodie Whittaker is a really good actor but her version of the Doctor is written poorly for her. It is almost like she is playing Matt Smith playing the Doctor. She should have been given the latitude to make the character her own.
And I really dislike the companions they wrote in for these seasons. The bumble around aimlessly far more than they contribute to the storylines. They should have made Mandip Gill the main companion and kept the other two as supporting cast.
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It's always been like that! It's such a thing that I remember back in the 80's heyday in the US, there was a fanzine called "behind the sofa", after where kids watched the show from. And that attitude caused a LOT of problems back in the first run. I don't think it's so much a factor now, it's most definitely not aimed at little kids and never has been in the new series run.
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Mileage varies, I have HUGELY enjoyed this doctor's episodes, if for no other reason that this doctor enjoys being in her own skin, and we had a long enough run of grumpy doctor that it's fun to get back to that, even though I also liked Capaldi quite a bit.
I'll say one thing, this batch of companions is HELLA plucky. Yaz has nearly no fear, Graham will roll with basically ANYTHING, and Ryan ... well, I don't really have a good read on Ryan, other than again, despite a minor disability that used to mess with his confidence a lot, it doesn't seem to bother him much. They're all just a bit too good at this stuff - compare how long it took Clara to get to the point where she was good at "playing doctor" and browbeating people into doing the right thing. Yaz seems to have jumped nearly to that level almost right away.
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Classic Doctor but the highlights you mention are all emotions. The Classic Doctor is well written and intelligent not an appeal to emotion as the only draw.
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Am I the only one who has a problem with...
...the Doctor as a child being killed (because that's how regeneration is triggered) multiple times as a lab experiment.
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I expect she has problems with it.
And, yes, it's disturbing, but completely in character for early Time Lords. Rassillon himself was a complete bastard. Just look at the ending of "The Five Doctors".
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I dunno, I was sold on her as the Doctor shortly into her premier episode, and for one thing she doesn't have the God complex 11 did.
But I agree with the companions. Ryan is largely dead weight, Yaz can be good, and Graham is easily the best of the bunch. I think either just Graham, or Graham and Yaz, would be an improvement. Unfortunately we seem to be stuck with Ryan largely because his connection to Graham is useful for providing characterization for the latter.
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So, one thing that makes absolutely no sense with the pre-Hartnell Doctor thing is that the TARDIS wasn't stuck as a police box until An Unearthly Child, when Hartnell Doctor was already pretty close to the end of his life.
Also, it's been very well-established since pretty much the beginning of the show that Hartnell Doctor had stolen the TARDIS Type 40; this was even reinforced in the modern series.
So, that's a pretty big plothole, or an incredibly sloppy retcon. Either way, it's a glaring "miss" on a new season that was more or less doing a good job of sticking to the classic series in terms of characterization and storytelling frameworks.
And on that note, I'm also not a fan of how New Who needs to make everything a gigantic pile of interconnected canon. The classic series worked really well when it was a framework for storytelling and thought experiments, and even when there were season-long arcs they were all in service of telling a single, self-contained story.
I liked series 11 way better than series 12, which felt like it was backsliding into the worst of the Moffat and Davies tendencies.
Not that the classic series was perfect by any means, but I felt like it did a better job of handling continuity, by making continuity not a big deal to begin with. (And what little continuity there was has now been very badly contradicted!)
Also, it's been very well-established since pretty much the beginning of the show that Hartnell Doctor had stolen the TARDIS Type 40; this was even reinforced in the modern series.
So, that's a pretty big plothole, or an incredibly sloppy retcon. Either way, it's a glaring "miss" on a new season that was more or less doing a good job of sticking to the classic series in terms of characterization and storytelling frameworks.
And on that note, I'm also not a fan of how New Who needs to make everything a gigantic pile of interconnected canon. The classic series worked really well when it was a framework for storytelling and thought experiments, and even when there were season-long arcs they were all in service of telling a single, self-contained story.
I liked series 11 way better than series 12, which felt like it was backsliding into the worst of the Moffat and Davies tendencies.
Not that the classic series was perfect by any means, but I felt like it did a better job of handling continuity, by making continuity not a big deal to begin with. (And what little continuity there was has now been very badly contradicted!)
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Albino_Boo
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
You will get your wish, the other two are leaving in the next Christmas special.
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Chibnall going off-canon and destroying the Timelord civilisation basis by this Timeless Child nonsense is really annoying. Their control of time was the key to being Timelords with regeneration a byproduct of it. He flipped that an thereby got rid of most of the Doctors motivations for both old and new seasons.
But what really ruined it for me was
Oh, and scary? Little could top the Weeping Angels or the Empty Child!
But what really ruined it for me was
the absolute bollocks of the timelord bodies with cyber parts as cybermen with regeneration abilities yet they were all killed and DIDN'T regenerate at the time.
Oh, and scary? Little could top the Weeping Angels or the Empty Child!
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Off the top of my head, potentially scary Tennant episodes:
Midnight
Blink
Impossible Planet / Satan Pit
Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead
I think Midnight is easily the most scary episode in all of Doctor Who. It is possible a young child wouldn't get why it is scary though.
As for recurring villains, the cybermen are the scariest to me personally. Thankfully they don't actually show the conversion process, generally giving you sounds with the camera going somewhere else, but a very scary idea.
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I'm afraid you completely disqualified yourself from commenting on this review when you claimed "Whittaker is a terrible doctor".
I'm sure you'd much rather they went back to the good old days of not caring about social issues...oh wait, they don't exist except in the fevered imaginations of grumpy, middle aged guys.
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Albino_Boo
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Caring about issues is no excuse for poor writing. Weak flabby story telling full of false jeopardy is why Chibnall started with 11 million viewers and 19 episodes later has 3.5 million. Caring about the script is what the attention should be on.
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The final episode revealed the Time Lords were never the Doctor's equals, but at the same time it suggested there's a whole new group who genuinely *are* the Doctor's equals, living wherever in time and space the Timeless Child came from. I imagine the Doctor is going to want to find them and to discover why they sent her away, which could be an interesting arc for future seasons.
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Waste of time in my eyes and Chibs has totalally ruined 57 years of cannon just to get his diversity count up. For lots more info see Az on HeelVsBabyFace on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMyr08sFdN8
He also got on with Nerdrotic Youtube live stream as well. Worth a watch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaPitSPT678
He also got on with Nerdrotic Youtube live stream as well. Worth a watch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaPitSPT678
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Canon, by definition, is what's presented in the show. It is fundamentally impossible to "ruin" canon with show content.
Whatever it is you're bitching about, it isn't canon. It's internet nerd rage ranting.
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Doctor Who circa 1963-1989 was initially envisioned as a series for ITV. But Sydney Newman moved to BBC and David Whittaker reworked the series to be suitable for a mix of audiences and the show ended up at BBC. They wanted to get the viewers of other shows so when it got to BBC it was reworked to expand its audience from strictly children's fantasy series for kids to a universal audience and a 'family show' label was slapped on it. The rework worked and the show became very popular.
In 1996 BBC threatened to drop the show over disputes about money. To force BBC to the mat for more money a production with ITV was arranged and ITV was willing to meet the money demand. To not lose the show BBC caved and the show went back to BBC.
So in an odd way/sense twist of fate type of thing, you can thank ITV for Doctor Who being on BBC. If ITV would not have been available and BBC did not cave, the fall back was to move the show to either Austraila or the US.
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I'm not sure from this review if you fully understand what the "flashbacks" of Brendan was actually about.
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Unsurprising, Chibnall's plots vary from incoherent to downright confusing. Fo example, the Master kills all the Time Lords, then demonstrates, literally on-screen, how their bodies cannot be killed. And to throw away The Lone Cyberman - the most intriguing character of either season - with a comedy shrink-ray is beyond ridiculous.
This season did it for me, I'll return when the next showrunner takes over.
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You'll be pleased to hear then that Ryan and Graham will be leaving after the Christmas special (seemingly with the door left open for them to return from time to time, a la Captain Jack), which presumably leaves Yaz as the main companion.
Though I suppose new "fam" might be introduced in the next series.....
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When on-screen canon contradicts itself, it is by definition ruined. Insulting the guy won't change that.
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