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rjalker · 3 years

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I'm, upset right now. I really like Doctor Who. But, I think I'll be giving it a pass until Chibnail leaves and we get someone actually competent back.

Was Moffat at all controversial like Chibnail?

(Made with speech to text forgive typos)

Oh god Moffat is even worse >:[ blatantly racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, oh my god. And there are so many rape and pedophilia jokes that it's not even fucking funny. He turns the Doctor into a fucking pedophile. He goes out of his way so that the doctor meets his companions when they are little girls so that they fall in love with him. Literally. I can't think of a single female character that Moffat introduced that did not meet the doctor when she was like 10 or something and fall madly in love with him. He started doing this shit in the girl in the fireplace when the 10th doctor was still around, and then he did it like 5 more fucking times. It's just fucking disgusting. He's constantly also making dick jokes despite this supposed to be a family-friendly show, and has the doctor sexual assault people and has a companions sexually assault the Doctor and it's all treated like it's funny and a joke.

Steven Moffat is like... Think of literally all of the horrible things that a person can say and do and that is what Steven Moffat does. He is a fucking blatant misogynist and homophobic and racist and transphobic. Everything you can think of that someone can do wrong he has done wrong.

As a single example of the homophobia, there are two gay characters. They don't have names. Because, and I quote from memory, "he's the fat one I'm the short one, we're gay, why do we need names?"

He literally had the gay characters themselves say that they don't need names because they're gay and one of them is fat and the other is short and they're the summation of their personalities. And they only exist for a single fucking episode for this oh so funny scene.

And even more than the bigotry, Steven Moffay is an absolutely horrible writer who can't tie a plot together to save his life. He actively builds up and makes you think that that's something important is going to happen and then just fucking drops it and makes fun of you for expecting a payoff. Key is you've heard of the unreliable narrator, now get ready for the untrustworthy writer. He doesn't know anything that he is doing. He thinks that a plot twist is lying to your audience and pulling something in that makes no sense and had zero foreshadowing and is literally coming out of nowhere. He thinks that having stories that make no sense is the same thing as being clever and that if you don't understand the story, because the story makes no fucking sense, that means you're stupid and just not smart enough to appreciate his talent.

He actively mocks and belittles his audience for actually giving a crap about the writing. He is the one that wrote Sherlock the BBC Sherlock, and during the Hiatus between I don't remember what it was season 2 and 3? Everyone was coming up with theories for how Sherlock survived falling off of a fucking building. We were all expecting season 3 to explain it to us because you know, it was kind of a big fucking deal and kind of a requirement for the story. He decided not to tell anybody and not to explain it.

He was literally too fucking lazy to come up with an actual solution to the problem that he fucking created, and not only that, he literally spent half the episode literally mocking The Audience by portraying fans in the universe see rising and talking about it and making fun of them. He literally hired people to play the role of the audience so that he can make fun of them and say look how stupid they are they think there's an actual solution to this problem look how much they care about this they're so stupid. I am not even joking. He literally spent half the episode making fun of his audience for daring to give a shit about the story he is telling.

I'm not even joking. I wish it were a joke. How the fuck do you see people being excited and invested in your story and being passionate about it and make fun of them for it????

Steven Moffat is literally the reason I stopped watching Doctor Who.

When chibnall took over I thought I would be able to start watching it again, and was unfortunately proven very fucking wrong.

Chibnall is also not a good writer, but from what I've seen before I gave up he's not even remotely as bad of a writer sad Moffat. Chibnall at least sort of kind of seems to be able to carry a plot even if it's going in a stupid Direction, Moffat's stories are so filled with plot holes and inconsistencies it's ridiculous.

Steven Moffat is a raging bigot, and I do not recommend anyone ever subject themselves to his writing. He is a misogynist, he is racist, he is homophobic and transphobic, and he likes to portray pedophilia as romantic and constantly has the Doctor running around making dick jokes and leering at people and sexualizing the companions.

If you trust my opinion on media, I always stop watching Doctor Who the moment 10 dies. It's all downhill from there.

There is classic Who to consider, if you can find it, and there are also Doctor Who audio books and audio dramas, and I can personally recommend the 8th doctor's Adventures With Charley Pollard, which I freaking adore, aaand @walks-the-ages is the one who got them so she can explain how to get the audios.

But yeah. If you hate Chibnall, you will loathe Moffatt.

Moffat stans do not interact 🔪🔪🔪🔪

[Plain text: Large red text that reads, "Moffat stans do not interact" followed by four knife emojis. End Plain text.]

#anti Moffat #don't you think he looks tired #in 2021 #fuck steve moffat #fuck chris chibnall #anti 13who #steven Moffat

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laughhardrunfastbekind · 5 years

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I asked my mom who the hottest Chris was and she said Chris Chibnall.

#chris chibnall #doctor who #series 11 #hottest chris #marvel #avengers #chris evans #chris hemsworth #chris pratt #text post #funny #captain america #steve rogers #thor #star lord #peter quill #shitpost

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thedoctorwhocompanion · 3 years

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Who Are the Guest Stars in Doctor Who Series 13?

Who Are the Guest Stars in #DoctorWho Series 13?

Snippets of what’s to come in Doctor Who Series 13 are coming thick and fast now; today we bring news of which actors are set for guest appearances when Flux begins at the end of the month. It has to be said that most of the names probably fall into the “Oh it’s him/her off that thing…” category rather than the household names classification and there’s no official word on who all of them will…

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#Annabel Scholey #Blake Harrison #Chris Chibnall #Craig Parkinson #Craige Els #Doctor Who Series 13 #Flux #James Buckley #Jonathan Watson #Kevin McNally #Nadia Albina #Paul Broughton #Penelope Ann McGhie #Robert Bathurst #Rochenda Sandall #Sam Spruell #Sarah Powell #Steve Oram #Sue Jenkins

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circular-time · 2 years

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#so she might at least have tried to moderate that and answer questions about her past while hiding her present

i hadnt put it together like this but yeah oh thats exactly what shes doing! trying to offer yaz some insight in past concerns while still hiding new concerns (not like shes been doing such a great job talking about past concerns but the intention was there :P) which is obviously not what yaz wants like, yeah she wants to know about what was up but she also just wants the doctor to trust her with all things i think

and your tags about men writing relationships between women are on point too but im also like. why would they be good at that you know? like i think it's fine if men cant write relationships between women super well, just let women write! asdhkfjh just get a woman to write! (im still of the opinion that not having a female showrunner for the first female doctor was a big missed opportunity. like im very happy with what chibnall has done but that choice just doesnt make sense to me at all)

On the one hand YES YES YES RACHEL TALALAY SHOULDA BEEN SHOWRUNNER ARGH or at least more female writers to write/edit this.

But on the other hand I don't wanna let Chibs off the hook for using Jack and Dan (and even Ryan) to tell Thirteen and Yaz how they feel and act as catalysts for their relationship arc.

I started writing this about 6am and it somehow turned into one of my LONG POST IS LONG essays with lots of thinky thoughts, so... SPOILERS to Eve of the Daleks, and...

See, female writers write male characters broships and relationships all the time, and we don't think twice about it. Aside from fanfic, if you look at any genre, from mystery to SF, there's some pretty notable guy-guy friendships and teams written by female authors from Bunter and Peter Wimsey in Dorothy Sayers to Kirk, Spock and McCoy in ten jillion official Star Trek novels including (especially!) those penned by @dduane .

It's like how little girls grow up learning to identify with and empathize with male protagonists from Christopher Robin and Frodo to Luke Skywalker and Captain America, but there's still a lot of people — even folks we like such as Peter Davison — who don't realize the limitation they place on boys or the ramifications it has for society down the road by saying they need male role models because (obviously) they can't identify with a female protagonist such as the Thirteenth Doctor.

I dunno. I didn't watch the Marvel movies (gasp), but was there a female character stepping in all the time to moderate the relationship and facilitate communications between Steve and Bucky? Seems like that wouldn't be necessary to play out that kind of drama.

I'm happy that Yaz's crush on the Doctor isn't subtext and is being written as Just A Thing That Happens, never mind they're both women, she's had a crush for a long time, obviously, and the Doctor's very fond of her but It's Complicated (tm), and that's good drama. I really did cry when Yaz cried and said "what am I gonna do, Dan?" because bloody hell, we've been there, and okay it's even more of a mess because the Doctor is an alien who is hiding even her NAME, but that particular cry of distress parallels the experience of a queer person (a) realizing they're queer and (b) not wanting to destroy a great friendship when you don't know whether your friend would be freaked out by finding out their same-sex BFF has a crush on them. Because there's no going back when you say it, and that is always a danger.

THAT is real, and I commend Chibs for writing that bit of gay angst 500% spot on.

And I love the character of Dan. I can see why everyone was excited about John Bishop. I wish it had been a different season he came aboard, not during the only season we'll probably EVER get that had the the opportunity to explore a friendship/BFFship/somethingship between two women (why is that so, so, SO RARE in media, rarer than a transit of Venus in SF?) but given that Chibs is a limited writer who wants to be more inclusive but seems most comfortable writing female protagonists who are as repressed and uncommunicative and antisocial as a lot of male nerds 😉 Dan may have been the best way to get over the writer's block he seemed to be having in getting Yaz and the Doc to (gasp) actually COMMUNICATE. Except they still haven't. But there's at least some overtures on the Doctor's part, so maybe she'll say a few things five seconds before regenerating.

I'm okay with an f/f ship in canon that's doomed and doesn't play out. That happens with the m/f ships with the Doctor as well: it's a side effect of the Doctor hanging out with a species with such a short lifespan and different life experiences who can only see a few facets of them. As long as it plays out in a way that's true to character, and so far, it has. I hope the Doctor and Yaz will finally, FINALLY talk. And I hope Chibs can find a way to let Yaz get out of this ALIVE having become the person she wants to be, instead of having her whole life ruined by or changed in tragic ways by the Doctor, which seems to be the default companion exit of new who. That's one thing I liked about classic Who, that companions found themselves by traveling with the Doctor and made a better life with what they'd learned through their adventures, rather than becoming sucked into the Doctor's orbit like a planet getting too close to its star and getting burned/damaged/torn apart/violently flung away. Chibs gave Ryan and Graham a classic Who ending, and signs point to him intending to do the same for Yaz, so I have hope.

Which just leaves us with a big juicy question mark of bittersweet angst over how much more Thasmin we'll get before the end of all this. Because it's not the ONLY thing we want out of Jodie's last two eps, despite the fact we've been waiting for it so long. We want Thirteen (and Yaz!) to be heroic and wonderful characters and have a few more good times and great adventures before the end. This is just an added layer that's gonna make Jodie's departure hit us even harder than it would've already, despite her Doctor really being A Bit of an Asshole sometimes behind all the fun and and curiosity and mad delight and courage and feral daft Doctor-ishness.

... All of which is just my own biased opinion, obviously.

#thinky thoughts #thasmin #meta meta meta #eve of the daleks #thirteenth doctor

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theroseandcrown · 3 years

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timeagainreviews · 4 years

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Vengence on Gallifrey

Welcome back, friends. We’re meeting up sooner than we usually do! I could get used to the idea of a new episode every Wednesday and Sunday. Wouldn’t that be swanky? In the time since part one of "Spyfall," there has been a lot of speculation and theories about what would be in store for part two. How many of your fan predictions came true? I know a couple of mine did. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Before part two aired, I revisited part one. I was curious to review O’s storyline in light of the big reveal. Would I notice any nods or giveaways to his being the Master a second time around? The answer is basically, no. Other than the Master’s reaction of "ridiculous," to the inside of the TARDIS, there’s not much telegraphing to be had. I did, however, notice some things that seem head-slappingly stupid upon a second viewing.

My pal Steve compared the episode to "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker," in that it moves so fast that you don’t have enough time to realise how stupid it actually is. One of those things I noticed the second time around was the big glass box in the middle of O’s home. My mind had kind of glazed over by that point that I never questioned how stupid it was that he would have a spring-loaded glass box in his ceiling. Now, I’m only human, but the Doctor isn’t. Why didn’t that seem weird to her that he would have a trap hanging from the ceiling? It made me think of Troll 2 when the dad walks over and grabs a fire extinguisher conveniently propped against the house. Why was it there? Because the plot demanded it.

Despite this, there is one thing I feel deserves saying. As much as I liked "Kerblam!" "The Witchfinders," or "It Takes You Away," I haven’t watched any of them since they first aired. I haven’t watched any of season 11 since my initial viewing. Regardless of any plotholes I found, I wanted to rewatch Spyfall. And I think that goes to show that despite various failings on Chris Chibnall’s behalf, he’s got me watching the show again! What then is different?

My first response would be that the stakes are higher this time around. A lot of that has to do with the fact that the Master is back. Regardless of how overused he may or may not be in the new series, their relationship has gravity. As an agent of chaos, the Master ups the tension as we have a history with him. Like with the Dalek in "Resolution," he lends a familiar element that this new era deeply needed. In these past few days, I was truly worried about how our friends were going to get out of this mess. I haven’t felt that way about Doctor Who in a long time.

When we last saw our heroes, the Doctor had been transported to the brain realm and the companions were about to crash on a plane. Through a bit of time travel, the Doctor saves the day via phone app, thus continuing the trend of the Doctor messing with Ryan’s phone. At least the dude got to keep his data this time. I found the whole sequence with the Doctor making plaques and laminating belaboured the point a bit, but it was cute.

We learn that the Doctor is walking around in some sort of synaptic realm. She meets Ada Lovelace who seems to think it's her own mind, but that was her best guess. I would complain that it was a weird design if it was a mind, but then I remember "The Invisible Enemy," and realise how much worse it could have looked! According to Ada, she’s been visiting this place since she was a wee bairn. She seems rather cool about the whole thing but is perplexed to see the Doctor.

The two flash into Ada’s timeline of 1834, where the Doctor has found herself at a steampunk convention. I found some of the steam-powered devices like the grenade to be a bit moronic. It was so unbelievable that my initial reaction was that she was in some sort of alternate history. But no, it’s just goofy. The Master discovers the Doctor survived and goes to finish the job. Before the episode, I was thinking "I hope they show the inside of his TARDIS." Turns out they already had. I guess it’s the same size on the inside. I had kind of expected it to be like Clara and Me’s TARDIS in that the diner was just part of the facade with the real bit hidden away. But no, his console is right there in the main room. Weird. Also, remember when chameleon circuits used to make TARDISes look inconspicuous? The biggest thing we ever saw it do was when the Master’s TARDIS became a truck. The coolest camouflage still goes to my man Professor Chronotis’ TARDIS in Shada. It was just a door along a wall. How cool is that? Not complaining, merely lamenting the loss of simplicity.

From within the Master’s TARDIS we see Barton confront the Master. The conversation between these two really only serves to show Barton as alive, and establish the power structure which is that the Master is in charge, which we already knew. It also establishes the existence of a sculpture that looks like something a third-year art student might have half-assed while hungover. Barton goes to intercept the companions, while the Master takes care of the Doctor. He makes a grand entrance with his tissue compression device doling out murder without reason. Did anyone else wonder why the device seemed not only to shrink people but also to turn them stiff like plastic or wood? I suppose compacting material like that could increase rigidity, but it was an odd choice.

To get the Master to stop killing people, the Doctor placates his ego by getting on her knees and calling him Master. It was, for lack of a better word- hot. Ada shoots the Master with a steam-powered gun and they get away. This was more of Chibnall’s weird relationship with guns. The Doctor says to Ada that she doesn’t approve, but the second Ada uses a grenade the Doctor is like "Hell yeah, this is my bad bitch Ada! Represent!" It’s like in "The Ghost Monument," when she hated the use of guns against a group of emotionless robots and then used a bomb to take out the same group of emotionless robots. It’s almost as though it’s not the killing the Doctor hates, it’s the inefficiency of the whole thing. "Mate, use bombs, way more effective!" Okay, Chris.

In the last five minutes of part one, I wasn’t sure if Sacha Dhawan was going to be a good Master or not. I was worried he was going to be too flamboyant, but the second he hits the screen in part two, it’s as though he had always been in the role. I really love him and Jodie Whittaker’s chemistry. It’s great to see her Doctor faced with someone truly evil, and I feel as though it’s given her a lot to work with. Watching the two of them verbally spar is nothing short of delightful.

Barton comes up empty-handed in his search for the companions, which is no sweat off his back as he is Mr Tech Empire. After a little bit of finagling with the internet, their faces are soon posted everywhere as wanted criminals. Exactly like in "The Sound of Drums," they’re going to have to go off the grid. They even take refuge in a construction site! Doing so gives them a bit of downtime to talk and regroup. In a moment of clarity, it dons on them that they don’t really know the Doctor all that well. They decide that after all is said and done, they’re going to have a talk with the Doctor. Like many people, I was hoping that they would visit this concept, as series eleven made them seem a little too keen. It was a welcome bit of character development.

Another thing I love about this scene is that Graham isn’t annoying in it. "But Natalie," you say, "I thought you loved Graham!" And you would be right, I do love Graham. But I feel like it’s worth pointing out that they didn’t ruin him. Usually with a lot of shows and movies, if something is good or popular with fans, the tendency is to overdo it. This is the same lovable dude from the previous series and I feel that should be acknowledged. One of the things I really admire about Chris Chibnall is that he really seems to know his own character’s voices. One of my biggest issues with Clara Oswald is that her personality was all over the board. We don’t get that here.

Having travelled with the Doctor for a while now, the companions decide to carry on like she would have them do. They still have their spy gear and like exploding cufflinks and Graham’s laser shoes, and their timing couldn’t have been more perfect as the baddies from part one show up. Sadly, they’re not the Voord as me and many others had hoped. They’re a species known as the Kasaavin. It’s a name that’s about as inspired as Ranskoor Av Kolos, and that is not a compliment. It’s simply a very forgettable name. I dunno what it is, but I really hate the way Chris Chibnall names stuff. He’s willing to do groan-inducing puns like "Arachnids in the UK," or "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship," but then decides to reign it in with "Resolution," despite the naming convention established in previous Dalek stories like "Revelation of the Daleks," or "Remembrance of the Daleks." Though I suppose in his defence, "Resolution," is about a singular Dalek. Either way, Graham’s laser shoes save the day. It’s ridiculous, but unlike the Master, it is a compliment when I say it.

The Doctor has now regrouped with Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. After a bit of fangirling on her part, she goes into Doctor brain mode. She pieces together that the multiple maps of the earth are, like I had guessed, different points in time. The aliens are spying on important people throughout time, for some reason that still makes zero sense to me. Why would they care about the Earth’s technology? Wouldn’t their computers completely best our technology? What threat could humans pose to them? I thought their sights were set on taking over the universe, but now it appears their sites are set on one planet’s technology. I guess you’ve got to start somewhere.

The Doctor surmises that the Kasaavin must have difficulty keeping their form in our universe, thus a need for a machine that keeps them stable. This, of course, is the bad art student sculpture we saw in the Master’s TARDIS which has now found its way into Charles Babbage’s study. This must have been too close to the truth as at this moment a Kasaavin shows up. The Doctor uses this as an opportunity to hitch a ride off of the Kasaavin’s energy surge in hopes to end up back in the present day. As she does, Ada grabs her hand and is transported as well. Instead of 2020, they end up in the year 1943 during a Nazi blitz on Paris. Literally, the first person they encounter is another historical figure- Noor Inayat Khan. That’s gotta be some kind of record for the show- three historical figures in one episode.

After establishing that they aren’t Nazis, the Doctor and Ada hide in the safety of Noor’s home. However, it is then that the Master shows up in full Nazi regalia and orders a team of Nazi soldiers to fire into the floor and leaves. I, like many of you, was immediately confused. The Nazis weren’t known to ally themselves with people of the Master’s current complexion. However, we learn that by using a series of perception filters, the Master has disguised himself as white, which makes sense in relation to the show. We discover the Doctor and Ada narrowly averted death as they were, in fact, hiding in the floor.

On the other end of things, Graham, Ryan, and Yaz use being under surveillance to draw Barton’s people into a trap. Using Graham’s laser shoes, they steal a vehicle and head to stop Barton. Speaking of Barton, we’re treated to a deliciously dark scene between him and his mother. It was pretty obvious that the woman strapped to a chair in his bad guy lair had to be his mother, but that didn’t make it any less funny. This guy is such a piece of work that not even his mother likes him. He tells her that she is to be the first person to be subjected to his grand scheme. After being taken over by blue electricity, she appears to die. What a dick.

Back in Paris, the Doctor realises Noor is a British spy. Using her telegraph, the Doctor baits the Master by tapping out four beats- the heartbeat of a Time Lord. Unable to resist, the Master taps four beats in response to the Doctor. What happened next was one of the coolest things I’ve seen on Doctor Who in a while. The Doctor and the Master make contact telepathically, something of which hasn’t been seen in the show for years. I quite literally threw my hands up into the air with joy. Kudos to Chris Chibnall for giving me the nerd feels.

The Doctor and the Master meet up atop the Eifel Tower where they have a rather intimate conversation. We find out it was the Master who killed C in the previous episode. So yes, they did waste Stephen Fry, which officially makes me a disappoint. The Doctor deduces that the Master isn’t actually in control of the Kasaavin. Instead, the Master has merely allied himself with them, claiming to have given them a broader scope of vision. I’m not exactly sure how going from wanting to take over the universe to taking over a small planet is a broadening in scope, but stop asking questions and watch the show.

Now, remember how I just gave kudos to Chris Chibnall? Well, I am going to have to take those back. In an attempt to delay the Master, the Doctor gives him away to the Nazis. She makes them think he is a British spy and directs them to their location. However, not only does she do this, but she also disables his perception filters. So effectively, the Doctor, a white woman, gives up a brown man to the Nazis. It wasn’t enough to make them think he’s a spy, they had to also see that he had brown skin. I was honestly a bit disgusted by this. How would they even recognise him as the same guy they were told was a spy? They’re going to arrive and find a person of colour in a Nazi uniform and not know who he was. Jesus Christ, Chibnall.

The Doctor uses the Master’s TARDIS to get back to the present time, just in time to find Barton unrolling his big plan. He goes on a long speech about how we give all of our information to corporations and how we should watch who we allow to pry into our privacy. It’s the social media equivalent of "Don’t blink." It’s a very effective bit of writing on par with one of Steven Moffat’s better speeches. It’s a shame it was preceded by the Doctor selling the Master out to Nazis.

So what’s the big plan? Well, remember the spy woman in part one whose DNA had been rewritten? And remember how Barton was only 93% human? It turns out that the Kasaavin plan to rewrite the DNA of the human race and turn us into hard drives by storing information within our DNA. They do so by using our smartphones and tablets against us. In the same arc of blue electricity as Mother Barton, people all over the world begin to be assimilated. During this entire press conference scene, I’m not sure if any of the actors in the audience were given proper direction as they have the most benign faces throughout most of this. Barton, whose speech went from zero to megalomaniacal in the first few seconds, should have sent up red flags across the room, but instead, they were as serene as cows. It was bizarre.

That was it, that was the big plan. Turn people into hard drives. I think? I had to ask a few of my friends what they thought it was supposed to be because I was worried I had missed something. Were they trying to take over the bodies of humans so they could have corporeal form? If so, then why say they wanted to store data in our DNA? Why do they need so much data storage anyway? Have they got a huge stash of hentai in their universe? Were they torrenting all of Doctor Who? Seriously, I do not understand their motivation or their methods. But honestly, I hardly care, because the real star of the show is the Master.

Having waited 77 years, the Master shows up just in time to be kind of late to the show. Like, he didn’t even buy a gun in that time. I do however look forward to the Big Finish audios pertaining to that era of his life. However, in the meantime, the Doctor took it upon herself to put a bug in the Kasaavin’s system which negates their mission and reverses the conversion. She informs the Kasaavin that the Master had planned to double-cross them. As they depart from our universe, they take the Master with them, but not before he mentions to the Doctor that Gallifrey was destroyed.

After getting Ada and Noor to their respective timelines, the Doctor goes to see Gallifrey for herself. Sure enough, the once-great Time Lord society has been raised to the ground. It’s a powerful bit of acting on Jodie Whittaker’s behalf. Devastated, the Doctor returns to the TARDIS only to be greeted by a hologram of the Master telling her it was him that did it, as a sort of act of punishment or vengeance. This is a much needed source of motivation for the Master’s current rage, considering how much of a departure it is from Missy’s redemption arc. Remember the timeless child storyline I’ve been dreading? Well, I’m genuinely surprised to be sitting here today to tell you that it has piqued my interest. Having something to do with the founders of Time Lord society, Rassilon and Omega, the implication is that their legend is based upon a lie, thus the Master’s final warning to the Doctor at the end of part one.

So who is the timeless child? Well, I am relieved to say I don’t think it’s the Doctor. My wildest guess is that she was some sort of person that didn’t experience time like the rest of us and was killed to harness that power. Think Rusty Venture powering his dream machine with the heart of an orphan. Like I said, my wildest guess. The biggest takeaway from all of this is that I’m sitting here speculating about Doctor Who. With Moffat’s plotlines oftentimes leading nowhere interesting, I had grown wary of speculation. Why wonder what was next when it was most likely something disappointing? It’s nice to feel intrigued by Doctor Who again.

Upon returning to her fam, the Doctor is distant and quiet. The companions can tell something is up, but as they decided earlier, they needed to have a talk with the Doctor. The Doctor concedes and tells them the basics- she’s a Time Lord, she’s from Gallifrey, she can regenerate her body, the Master was her friend. This bit of truth on her behalf seems to please the trio as they don’t press the issue further. The Doctor throws the TARDIS into gear and we’re left lingering on her face for a moment before the episode ends.

Afterwards, my wife and boyfriend and I sat in silence. As the biggest Whovian in the house, I think they were waiting for my reaction. And in some ways, I think I was too. I really enjoyed the episode, I did. But I had my issues, which I’ve listed extensively above. My main qualms at that time were of structure. Much like the first episode, this one was clunky. The pacing was definitely better than last time, but still had issues. But otherwise, I needed to think about what I had just seen. I liked the anti-fascism angle, save for the Doctor selling out the Master to the Nazis. And there were a lot of great callbacks to classic Who. My wife had checked out at the DNA storage bit because she’s a giant nerd and was feeling nitpicky about the science in a science fiction show. But it was Duncan whose comments I think were the most on point. He told me that he, as a casual viewer, was lost throughout much of the episode. For him, a little bit of explanation peppered throughout the episode would have gone a long way.

One of the most persistent flaws in classic Doctor Who is that oftentimes they would explain what was happening within the final episode of a story, leaving you in the dark for the first few episodes. In the same way, Spyfall had left him feeling lost. I even said it recently that I am not the kind of fan Doctor Who needs to please. I will watch the show regardless of its quality. If someone as fanatical as myself was feeling confused, imagine how my boyfriend felt. It is, as he said, why people start tuning out. The show is on course to what may possibly be one of it’s best seasons in years. I’m hoping that the next few episodes give us a bit of breathing room before throwing us back into the deep end.

#doctor who #Jodie Whittaker #Thirteenth Doctor #Sacha Dhawan #The Master #Graham O'Brien #Ryan Sinclair #yasmine khan #yaz #spyfall #gallifrey #ada lovelace #noor inyat khan #charles babbage #kasaavin #Time and Time Again

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trueloveandotherscificoncepts · 4 years

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Ranking My Favourite New Who Seasons (& Episodes) Because Why The Fuck Not

This is based on personal preference only. If you disagree, I really couldn’t give a fuck. Don’t @ me.

1. Season Four - starring David Tennant as the 10th Doctor & Catherine Tate as Donna Noble

Best Episodes:

Turn Left (4.11) - Russell T Davis

Midnight (4.10) - Russell T Davis

The Unicorn and the Wasp (4.07) - Gareth Roberts

The Sontaran Stratagem (4.04)/The Poison Sky (4.05) - Helen Raynor

The Stolen Earth (4.11)/Journey’s End (4.12) - Russell T Davis

2. Season One - starring Christopher Eccleston as the 9th Doctor & Billie Piper as Rose

Best Episodes:

Dalek (1.06) - Robert Shearman

The Empty Child (1.09)/The Doctor Dances (1.10) - Steven Moffat

The Unquiet Dead (1.03) - Mark Gatiss

The End of the World (1.02) - Russell T Davis

3. Season Three - starring David Tennant as the 10th Doctor & Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones

Best Episodes:

Utopia (3.10) - Russell T Davis

The Shakespeare Code (3.02) - Gareth Roberts

The Sound of Drums (3.11)/The Last of the Time Lords (3.12) - Russell T Davis

4. Season Eleven - starring Jodie Whittaker as the 13th Doctor & Mandip Gill as Yasmin Khan, Tosin Cole as Ryan Sinclair, Bradley Walsh as Graham O’Brien

Best Episodes:

Demons of Punjab (11.06) - Vinay Patel

Rosa (11.03) - Malorie Blackman & Chris Chibnall

The Witchfinders (11.08) - Joy Wilkinson

Bonus:

Arachnids in the UK (11.04) - Chris Chibnall (because those poor spiders were adorable and they deserved better)

5. Season Ten - starring Peter Capaldi as the 12th Doctor & Pearl Mackie as Bill Potts

Best Episodes:

Thin Ice (10.03) - Sarah Dollard

Knock Knock (10.04) - Mike Bartlett

The Eaters of Light (10.10) - Rona Munro

6. Season Two - starring David Tennant as the 10th Doctor & Billie Piper as Rose Tyler

Best Episodes:

Love & Monsters (2.10) - Russell T Davis

School Reunion (2.02) - Toby Whithouse

The Impossible Planet (2.08)/The Satan Pit (2.09) - Matt Jones

7. Season Nine - starring Peter Capaldi as the 12th Doctor & Jenna Louise Coleman as Clara Oswald

The Zygon Invasion (9.07)/The Zygon Inversion (9.08) - Peter Harness & Steven Moffat

Heaven Sent (9.11) - Steven Moffat

8. Season Five - starring Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor & Karen Gillan as Amy Pond, Arthur Darvill as Rory Williams

Best Episodes:

Vincent and the Doctor (5.10) - Richard Curtis

The Lodger (5.11) - Gareth Roberts

9. Season Eight - starring Peter Capaldi as the 12th Doctor & Jenna Louise Coleman as Clara Oswald

Best Episodes:

The Caretaker (8.06) - Gareth Roberts & Steve Moffat

In the Forest of the Night (8.10) - Frank Cottrell-Boyce

10. Season Six - starring Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor & Karen Gillan as Amy Pond, Arthur Darvill as Rory Williams

Best Episodes:

The Doctor’s Wife (6.04) - Neil Gaiman

That’s it. That’s the only good episode. (But it is at least a very good episode.)

11. Season Seven - starring Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor & Karen Gillan as Amy Pond, Arthur Darvill as Rory Williams, Jenna Louise Coleman as Clara Oswald

Best Epsiodes:

None. It’s awful. Terrible. Just a complete clusterfuck.

#endless list of favourite shows #doctor who #new who

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willidleaway · 4 years

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Doctor Who, series 12, episodes 1 and 2

In short: I love two-parters and I’m glad Spyfall was a two-parter. The conclusion wasn’t entirely satisfying, parts of this felt like a retread of old favourite story elements (including from The Curse of Fatal Death—seriously!), and I think there was a bit of disjointness between the two parts, but this is still a very good start to series 12, and I’m 90% sure I’m not saying that just because he’s back.

In slightly less short, still without spoilers:

—Positives: good tension throughout part 1, including the cliffhanger (hangar?); loved seeing historical characters tag along and interact in part 2, in one of the better attempts of Chibnall!Who at being educational; strong performances all around from heroes and villains.

—Negatives: part 2 has me fearing for a regression from some of the positive aspects of series 11; the villains weren't really fleshed out enough, especially in their motivation.

Verdict: Go watch Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death. It’s quite funny.

Oh, you mean about this two-parter? It’s good. Could have been great, though—almost should have been with its set pieces—and it didn’t strike me as great.

In less short, with spoilers:

OK, so I don’t even have much to say about part 1 because it really is all setup. We’ve got weird higher-dimensional ghosty things, they’re attacking spies all around the world and swapping their DNA out with something else, except they either won’t or can’t attack Yas and send her instead to some weird alternate dimension. Yas and Ryan go off to find out that Google are involved [0] in some sinister fashion because their CEO is totally in league with the aliens and is himself 7% alien, but it turns out the real mastermind is ... the Master! Dun dun dun. Very much the Dark Water reveal, right down to the gender swap.

So at the end of part 1, the situation is that the Doctor is in the same realm that Yas had ended up in, and her companions are in a crashing plane. So how is this all resolved?

Well, the second one is easy. It’s a time travel show. Do the Blink gambit! [1] Just go back in time after everything’s done, plant some signs and a recording on the plane, and they can land completely unscathed! In Essex! (I’d say ‘unscathed/Essex: pick one’, but obviously Graham feels differently.)

This is fine, but ultimately the companions don’t ... do much from there? It’s the series 3 finale thing again where they’ve got to go off-grid, except in series 3 where Martha is planting the seeds for, well, that conclusion. But she’s at least got some kind of agency in the story. Here, Graham and Yas and Ryan are ... chased? I mean, it did give us Graham laser-tap-dancing his way out of those situations, and I will be forever happy that that was a thing that happened, but overall they had so little to do other than have villainous speeches and antics spouted at them. Frankly, from a purely logistical point of view, it would have made very little difference if the Doctor had just picked them up on the plane before it crashed, because of course the Doctor had sorted everything out about the Silver Lady and the Kasaavins and all.

So I found that fairly unfortunate, especially given Yas and Ryan’s crucial actions (and their rather excellent performances) in part 1.

Resolving the Doctor’s cliffhanger seems a little trickier, and it leads to some of the disjointness I was talking about at the start between parts 1 and 2. In part 1 we’re led to believe that these pointy-hat white ghosts [2] are alien spies spying on Earth’s spies today. Here it turns out that, no, actually, they’re also spying on the Who’s Who of Earth computing and telecommunications.

This includes Ada Lovelace [3]—why she was also known as Ada Gordon is baffling to me given she was Lord Byron’s legitimate daughter and it’s not like Gordon was Byron’s surname (not blaming the show, just baffled at the apparent historical fact)—and later Noor Inayat Khan, the pacifist SOE hero with expertise in wireless telegraphy. It was really good to learn about them and their contributions, however briefly (although I have mixed feelings about the episode avoiding discussing Noor’s ultimate fate).

Thankfully they also get more to do than the companions—Ada hijacks a gun and fights off the Master while he’s distracted, while Noor hides Ada and the Doctor from Nazis and later feeds information to the Nazis to trap the Master. They then both go out and track down the Master’s TARDIS (although given his hubris it turns out to be not so difficult). That’s way more than laser-tap-dancing and being rather ineffectual otherwise!

My main gripe is how the Doctor wipes both their memories at the end—it’s not like the Doctor’s wiped the memories of Dickens or Shakespeare or even Queen Elizabeth! Anti-STEM discrimination, this is.

But overall I very much liked the Doctor in this power trio of women, although I think Ada got the short end of the stick out of the three of them. I suppose it may have been difficult because her abilities are relatively abstract—computer science is a bit more difficult to get across on screen compared to telegraphy and disinformation, so she has to make do with a gun instead.

So: strong companions in part 1 (although not so much in part 2), strong Doctor and historical figures in part 2. All fine and dandy. But let’s talk about the villains, because of course that’s the meat of the story.

OK, first off: that’s Lenny Henry?! God he’s unrecognisable. Goatee suits him, though. He looks sharp.

Daniel Barton, though, seems not so sharp, and not terribly interesting either. First off, he has all the information in the world yet can’t seem to be bothered to run a face recognition routine on Yas and Ryan when they’re undercover in his office as journalists. (Maybe he’s wilfully ignoring it. Maybe he just wants attention.) Then it turns out he’s 7% non-human, which is intriguing at the start but gets rather casually dismissed towards the end of part 2 as just him test-driving the DNA replacement idea.

But the real trouble was that I never found it terribly clear why Barton would have been interested in joining forces with the aliens to wipe out humanity. Did he just find the idea of using seven billion humans as data centres really appealing? Maybe, but what’s the use of all that data? Barton is most powerful as the head of basically Google, and all his data becomes utterly useless without the civilisation that actually needs it, surely.

Oh, then there are the Kasaavins themselves.

At first, their basic plan seems like it’s to wipe out Earth’s intelligence network, which makes sense as a step in an invasion. But then it turns out the ultimate point of their invasion is all about ... computers? And disk space, basically???

Why did they attach themselves to people like Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing and Steve Jobs? Was it to influence the evolution of computing in ways that made today’s computer architectures more vulnerable to ... whatever it is the Kasaavins later do through the Silver Lady and all of our modern devices? Sure, Ada Lovelace’s notes on computing engines were prescient and unquestionably influenced her spiritual successors like Turing, but I would personally have said more in the abstract. You'd definitely want to go after people like Woz, doing design on microcomputers much closer to our modern laptops and phones. I guess they figured it couldn’t hurt, anyway.

What exactly were they going to do with all that disk space? Why don’t they have their own massive storage devices? Why do they need to overwrite human DNA? Can’t they just build more DNA?

I dunno, maybe I’m overthinking it. I thought they were building towards a Matrix-style thing where all of human civilisation was going to just be someone’s cloud computing instance—but no, it’s hard drive space. It seemed a bit weak.

I think the Kasaavins suffered mostly for being in the same story as the newest incarnation of the Master.

The good thing about the Master, at least, is that he needs little motivation. He’s just mad. If he wants to wipe out all of humanity and the Kasaavins needing storage space happens to mean there may be a common interest there, the Master can just do that. That’s how the Master works.

He cuts an imposing figure at the start, I suppose—maniacal slick sort of fellow, shades of Simm’s incarnation in series 3 but still his own thing. But the way he works in this episode is just ... goofy. I mean, really? He just keeps tracking the Doctor through time? Can’t be bothered to keep tabs on whether someone’s trying to sabotage his master plan?

And then there’s the way the whole situation with the Nazis gets resolved.

I really thought he was going to go ‘seventy-seven years ... in a sodding twentieth century ...’, à la Jonathan Pryce’s excellent Master from Steven Moffat’s Comic Relief special. You know, the one from all the way back in 1999 where for the first half-ish, the Doctor and Master basically try to outwit each other through increasingly ridiculous time-travel hijinks, ending up with the Master having to crawl out a sewer for over nine hundred years.

Totally unlike this story, where the second half-ish involves the Doctor and Master trying to outwit each other through time-travel hijinks, and the Master ends up having to crawl out of his predicament for almost eight decades.

I’m not sure that’s a complaint, myself, frankly. For one thing, of course, when a show has gone on for over half a century, it’s difficult to avoid new stories running into old ones. But for another thing, saying something feels right out of a Comic Relief special isn’t necessarily a, erm, fatal flaw for Doctor Who. I prefer it when Doctor Who isn’t taking itself too seriously, just seriously enough.

Still, when you look at the big picture and look at all the retreads, I can’t help but think we’re heading back into the worst excesses of past new!Who.

For all its faults, I really enjoyed series 11 for how the narrative focus returned to the companions after much of the Moffat era’s obsession with ridiculously overpowered characters—Clara as the impossible girl, the Doctor as the Hybrid, the Doctor as literally where we get the word ‘doctor’, and so forth.

Well, now we’ve got the Master back and he’s gone and destroyed Gallifrey (negating the big winning moment of the 50th anniversary special, to boot) and it’s all because of some mysterious lie and it involves the Timeless Child that was mentioned for a hot five seconds last series??? It smacks of past new!Who arcs, especially under Moffat—and at least in my eyes those arcs have never gone terribly well. Those arcs have come at the expense of good companion characterisation as well, so overall it has me a bit concerned about series 12.

Sure, all these aspects of pre-series 11 Who returning to the show—the Daleks last year, and now the Master—maybe makes the show feel more like itself, much like how having a functional rebel force that’s not just confined to a single light freighter makes a Star Wars film feel more like Star Wars. I just worry that it’s a instinctive reaction against some of the mixed reactions to series 11, and that ultimately it’ll be an overreaction.

Good start, though, this two-parter. I just hope it doesn’t turn out to be the best story that series 12 gets.

Footnotes:

[0: Sure, they’re called Vor in the episodes, but first off they’re clearly meant to be Google, and second off it’s very awkward talking about ‘Vor’ being everywhere on the Internet and on everyone’s devices ... so for the purposes of this write-up I’m going to call them Google.]

[1: I know that in Blink, the Doctor and Martha are trapped in the past and have to plant the message in DVDs to get someone to get them out of trouble. But you know what I mean. Timey-wimey out-of-order rescue plan.

Maybe I ought to call it the Arrival gambit, after the excellent film from a few years back.]

[2: Makes them sound like alien Klansmen, doesn’t it?]

[3: What’s the opposite of née for the purposes of distinguishing maiden and married names in time travel stories? I guess mariée is as good as any ...]

#(Doctor Who series 12 spoilers!)

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