Doctor Who

[DRW50]

Glad to hear they may be getting another series as it seems like that is very up in the air. 

I also saw that he didn't play into Graham Norton's usual sneering about fans.

 

Edited October 12, 2024 by DRW50

[Vee]

I'm not up to date on finishing the past season at all, but I don't really think it is. The YT outrage merchants love to claim it's at death's door to fuel the woke wars, but in reality I think even if Disney didn't renew it (and I don't think that's likely, yet) the BBC would still continue it on a tighter budget.

[Vee]

Never sure how I feel about colorization of DW. I still need to see the Daleks edit.

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Cutting The War Games specifically down to 90 minutes seems egregious - I'm sure it has plenty of fat, but it's not the same as cutting down a classic Terry Nation runaround. I'd at least give it 120 minutes. And we'll see how the 'new regeneration' comes off.

Edited November 23, 2024 by Vee

[Vee]

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[Vee]

Finally diving deeper into the RTD2 era proper, as it's rumored this week's episode may or may not be

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If anyone is gagging for extremely belated thoughts on much of Disney's Season 1/Series 14-onward, you know where to find me.

Edited April 25 by Vee

[Vee]

A few very longwinded thoughts for no one in particular after catching up most of the last two seasons of DW on Disney+. @DRW50, apologies for copypasting much of our recent discussion but there's a bit more at the end that might suit you! (And a few more expansive thoughts on Dot and Bubble/73 Yards.)

Season 1/Series 14 (I'll always refer to these like that):

•  I cannot imagine what possessed them to open the first Disney season with Space Babies. After a promising prologue which sort of functions as a recap for new viewers on the new platform, it begins as something at first appealingly deranged if controversial right out of the Graham Williams era, then very quickly slides into one of the nadirs of 60 years of the franchise for me. Possibly worse than Jodie Whittaker's first episode, which I found to be little more than a dull bit of Canadian syndicated sci-fi from 20 years ago. Absolutely staggering this was chosen. Shades of RTD lowlights like Love & Monsters, the Slitheen 2-parter or Fear Her.
• OTOH: The Devil's Chord is a mix of either not great or fascinatingly weird, mystical stuff out of the Andrew Cartmel era in the late '80s. I found everything with the Beatles tedious or cheesy as well as how they defeated the villain, but Jinkx Monsoon was actually quite creepy as one of the gods of the pantheon (which made me think of the gods from the McCoy story The Greatest Show of the Galaxy). And the meta, random musical break at the end and all sorts of strange pacing and tonal bits felt very experimental - some of it appealing and unsettling, other parts just baffling. It makes you wonder what everyone BTS was dosing themselves with, at least for these two episodes.  The actors are fine, it's the material that is thunderingly insane. You can see why this first Disney season was very divisive already - it was wildly unwise to start with these two episodes - but there's still a lot more going on than the average Chibnall story. A truly, truly strange and unique time in the annals of Who.
• Season 1/Series 14 picks up quite a bit with Boom and 73 Yards. Boom is a fairly bog-standard Moffat episode with a bottle premise (Doctor on a land mine) but a subversive message re: corporate military. A lot of the usual twee, now quite shopworn Moffat elements are in there including a ridiculous little girl and fairly precious finish, but it's still a solid watch and a good sight better than the first two eps. (The fact that it reuses some of the plot device from The Empty Child can be somewhat forgiven as it is apparently the same imaginary weapons manufacturer Moffat made up in that episode, from the 1940s - this same corporate enemy, Villengard, reappears later in Joy to the World.)
• 73 Yards is excellent if often obscure, the first banger of this season but also (like Lux in S2/Series 15 a few weeks ago) one of its most metaphysical. Sort of a melange of folk horror a la the old BBC Christmas ghost stories as well as Tennant's Midnight, with elements of Turn Left and even a political thriller, and a great appearance by Sian Phillips. Its plot is deliberately very vague in places but it is easily the most compelling piece of Who I have seen since Peter Capaldi's era. Though like Turn Left it is a Doctor-lite episode. Really remarkable, at least as creepy as anything Hinchcliffe, Series 18 or the late Cartmel eps. With the same haze of doom as Inferno. Fans are still trying to puzzle it out to this day when parts of I think are designed to be opaque. Still, excellent and very, very different.
• The same goes for Dot and Bubble: Very, very strong S24/early McCoy vibes (in a more positive way than Space Babies) a la Paradise Towers, etc. due to its wacky social media/TikTok/VR interface premise, but with a very, very bitter aftertaste as the open secret of Finetime becomes clear. I understand this story was controversial for obvious reasons to anyone who's seen it, but I think it serves as a slap in the face and a bucket of cold water for an audience that sometimes needs it. Plot aside, Dot and Bubble is at its core a simple, remarkably nihilistic story - a Black Mirror story riff, really - about who we are and where we may well be going. The social media commentary and tools are just the lens for the message, they aren't the message itself. It sticks with you, and is easily the other standout of a very mixed season for me next to 73 Yards. (Rogue with Jonathan Groff is a fun romp but not much else, though he and Gatwa do have chemistry.)
• The Sutekh finale of S1 is not as bad as people claim - the first half is pretty good putting aside the typical RTD nonsense anagram/wordplay that doesn't quite hold together, while the second half is weaker and much more pat, but it's really just a pretty typical 2-parter conclusion with DW time travel magic, followed by the hilariously weird and stupid touch of having the Doctor foil Sutekh like Mitt Romney's dog. The reveal on Ruby's parentage is basically The Last Jedi which made people mad all over again, but it's just as well an ending for something that had a very limited window of time to play. (They probably should've dumped the subplot entirely if they wanted it to be stronger, but the payoff with Ruby's real mom does hit very hard and genuinely got me.) I've seen far worse DW finales, starting with Army of Ghosts/Doomsday or literally any Chibnall finale. Not great, but not terrible and wonderful work from Bonnie Langford (Mel should travel with Fifteen for an ep or two), as well as a very touching sendoff for Ruby and a mature approach from the Doctor who (like Whittaker's) calmly accepts what's best for her before she does and doesn't moan or weep over it. I would've loved to have more of Millie Gibson who was great, but Ruby does really feel in a way like RTD bedding the show back in with a standard-issue companion for a season before hopefully moving on to someone more complex. It feels appropriate for her to go.
• The latest Christmas special (Joy to the World) is quite good IMO, one of the stronger efforts of the current era. Unlike Boom, it is full of Moffatisms but they feel far less shopworn or treacly. The holiday special format makes the schmaltz more appropriate and touching. And watching Gatwa's Doctor navigate some long-form time travel/waiting around situations quite similar to ones Capaldi and Smith approached but in a very different way helps distinguish him more beyond just the actor's winning, very open performance. He remains a very emotional, evolved Doctor and that seems to be the throughline so far along with his explicit queerness. It's a good start, though I really hope he'll get the customary three series to fully blossom. Though I fear he won't.

Season 2/Series 15:

• After the considerable upswing of Joy to the World, The Robot Revolution was a pretty brutal comedown. I found it quite dire - a very blunt force message about incels and an astonishingly nonsensical story that barely held together, feeling very rushed through the shorter Disney under 60 mins running time. It felt like a very woolly first draft of this story. It barely keeps itself together because Varada Sethu is great as Belinda and quickly winning with Gatwa, but boy could I not get out of here fast enough. First stories are rarely great ones for a new Doctor or companion but this one was rough! I did love the opening bit with Mrs. Flood as Belinda's neighbor, and Belinda telling her to tell the other neighbors their atomized cat had gone to live on a farm. Sethu has great comic timing as well as her dramatic chops - more on those below.
• Fortunately, Series 2 seems off to a better start overall: The Well is well-received and Lucky Day (the upcoming Ruby solo episode) seems very positively reviewed as well this weekend. I will get to them, but as of now I am only up to episode 2: Lux, with Alan Cumming as the evil cartoon Mr. Ring-a-Ding. The ongoing subplot/arc of the Gods of the Pantheon, which has recurred off and on ever since the Toymaker in the specials, is an interesting throughline for RTD to keep playing with, and feels possibly like a response to a Disney note, but it works here. (And again, seems reminiscent of when the scheming master Seventh Doctor repeatedly would face seemingly god after god from various strata of cosmic deities in his final two seasons.) Lux lives up to the hype for me: It's both very unique in execution with the evil cartoon but very experimental - at least as much as 73 Yards or Dot and Bubble - with the heavy metatextual element of the Doctor and Belinda escaping television entirely and interacting with fandom, even if their teary goodbye to them is a bit much. The episode operates entirely on avant-garde logic that it makes work for it, and then has a great, melancholy, almost Warriors' Gate/Evangelion-esque ending with Lux Imperator ascending into the cosmos. Which brings me to my larger points.
• You just will never find another DW ep like Lux, 73 Yards or Dot and Bubble and that's why they work so well IMO. The Disney era is quite a mixed bag so far, at times full of some of RTD's most rushed or downright woefully bad writing, but it also has him taking some of his biggest, wildest chances as an artist, things you get the sense he never felt the freedom to do in the franchise anymore and now may never get a chance again. Some of them are dreadful, some feel like tired rehashes but some are really spectacularly different and daring. Even the constant fourth wall breaks with Anita Dobson (who's chilling as Mrs. Flood) mostly work for me.
• Similarly: Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor is a work in progress, and hopefully not one with very little time left. Yes, Gatwa's Doctor cries a bit too much but the fact that he cries at all, and that we accept it and that rage and tantrums do not accompany it a la other Doctors, is the biggest change. Fifteen, insofar as we have gotten to begin to know him a bit (not enough yet), is the evolved, vulnerable, emotional but not self-pitying or self-mythologizing Doctor. He remains (to me at least) as open and honest and forthright, and kind, as he appeared when he first revealed himself to Fourteen in The Giggle. He is not bland and a collection of other Doctors' tics like Whittaker's Doctor, but he does feel younger - reborn, more in touch with a kind of youthful emotionalism but also a kind of innate maturity to not be egocentric or tortured, for once. This kind of naked honesty has led to accusations that Gatwa is only 'playing a normal human' or is too opaque at present, and I can understand some of the latter commentary but I don't think he is just playing a cool dude. He's just a remarkably refreshed Doctor who (in addition to being very explicitly queer onscreen) feels the healthiest that he has in ages. But does that leave much for the character to do or explore unless he suffers setbacks? That's an open issue and it remains to be seen. It's certainly never a Doctor I've seen before though. He definitely has gotten the 'therapy' he told Fourteen he had. And I do enjoy watching him. I hope this isn't the end for him due to the state of streaming - I think we have much more to learn. The key moments for Fifteen include two in Lux: The way bigotry is dealt with here is not with gurning or screams or rage as Belinda discovers she and the Doctor wouldn't normally be allowed into the segregated spaces in Miami in the '50s, but with Fifteen gently telling her with a dazzling smile that he has toppled worlds but lets them do it themselves sometimes in their own time; 'until then, I live in it and I shine.' Followed by at the end, where he calmly says that according to the laws of the land 'sunlight doesn't suit us' and it's time to go. It's not giving a pass to the era but it's not doing the adolescent thing over being trapped in the '50s either. Again, this is material that leads to accusations of Fifteen being too perfect, or too static - I think we've just rarely seen such a settled Doctor in the modern era. Whether he's too static, I think it's too soon to know. Thirteen's certainly was, and much less interesting IMO.
• Belinda Chandra reminds me a lot of Liz Shaw: No nonsense, a medical professional and often all business in a situation before the Doctor (so far). She's a grown woman, not a young girl on the cusp and shows it without being as comic as Donna Noble. It's a different kind of companion and one maybe needed for this Doctor. I'd be curious to hear other people's thoughts on her and Varada Sethu.

Sorry to run so long, but if anyone else is watching do chime in sometime! I will get to The Well (a.k.a.

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and Lucky Day shortly.

Edited May 3 by Vee

[soapfan770]

Thanks @Vee for the commentary. 
 

I haven’t even watched this season yet after  I couldn’t get past the couple episodes last season…like it was too Disneyified for my taste, although I did think it was a least better than the Chibnall era (but so is a lot of things). I’ll probably go back and binge it now.

Hoping this season ends on a high note. I did read the ratings are terrible. As it stands I’m beginning to feel like what long time DW fans felt with S26 in 1989.

[Vee]

They're neither great nor terrible AFAIK, but it is more a question of the streaming numbers in this day and age vs. actual TV airings. The Chibnall era reminded me much more of the crisis years, but I do think it's a very real possibility now as well due to the streaming bubble collapse affecting the show and its prospects.

[Vee]

Lucky Day is an awfully good Doctor-lite episode focused on Millie Gibson and Jemma Redgrave - I am glad the show brought in Varada Sethu who continues to give major Caroline John/Liz Shaw vibes, but Millie was always very good in what felt designed to be a single arc companion and she's very good here too. She deserves a bit more somewhere in the franchise.

The depressingly relevant storyline aside, I was most impressed by the showcase for UNIT and Kate Stewart. Jemma is always good but she was amazing here, noting the Doctor would've stopped her from going all the way re: Think Tank if he were there. Yet it's the kind of brute force her father could and did resort to in extreme situations back in the day. I almost hoped she would allow Conrad to be killed right then and there, which is something I think the Brigadier also would've done when backed against a wall over operational control and the safety of the Earth. She came very close, and the steel Redgrave exhibited (as always) was amazing.

Whatever spinoffs can still materialize given the current streaming climate and DW's uncertain future (I do think it will continue somewhere, but I would not be shocked if it's back to a run of holiday specials for awhile a la Tennant's and Whittaker's), aside from the upcoming odd Sea Devils miniseries that's in the can, I still hope UNIT and Kate can get a proper one sometime.

[Vee]

For those who care (like @DRW50) and want to be spoiled:

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I guess I have to reluctantly rewatch

Edited Saturday at 02:22 PM by Vee

[Vee]

Some spoilery press photos:

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[Vee]

@DRW50

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I hope the IG post will show up - it's RTD paying tribute to Kate O'Mara. Click through as needed.