Home Forums Ganymede & Titan Forum Doctor Who – Series 11

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  • #237932
    Dave
    Participant

    Worth a discussion thread?

    We’re just watching Capaldi’s regeneration into Whittaker as part of our build-up to tonight’s episode. Such a great scene.

Viewing 50 replies - 101 through 150 (of 374 total)
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  • #238720
    Pete Part Three
    Participant

    >If you saw the end of ‘Twice Upon A Time’ then you saw how far she fell from

    Well, not for about 11 months and not particularly keen to revisit it. I remember the regeneration and her saying “brilliant”. Did she fall out of the TARDIS while it was in orbit?

    #238721
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    If I recall correctly she does fall out. Because right after, my dad said “see, not even the TARDIS agrees [with a female Doctor]”.

    #238725
    Lily
    Participant

    It’s still on iplayer (in fact all nuwho is now).

    I re-watched the regeneration earlier, the Tardis turns on its side and literally shakes her out. That’s why I thought there would be more issue made about the ring and getting back in. But apparently not.

    #238728
    Ian Symes
    Keymaster

    I’m more confused about the whole ring falling off and Tardis throwing her out thing. I presumed the ring was required to operate the Tardis or something like that, but new Tardis apparently don’t care. There was such focus on the ring it’s got to mean something?

    Hartnell’s ring was discarded by Troughton at the start of his first episode. It’s a back-reference to this, given the context of the episode.

    #238729
    Dave
    Participant

    She fell out of the Tardis from a great height, yes. Above cloud level.

    #238732
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    She should have looked in a mirror and seen a dodgy photograph of Capaldi pasted on it as her reflection as well

    #238734
    Warbodog
    Participant

    The scene where they’re reunited and the TARDIS apologetically opens its door to welcome her back in is my favourite bit of the new series so far. (‘Tough competition’ etc.)

    #238735
    Lily
    Participant

    >Hartnell’s ring was discarded by Troughton at the start of his first episode. It’s a back-reference to this, given the context of the episode.

    Thank you!

    #238743
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    >’Tough competition’ etc.
    Arachnids in the UK is my favourite episode of this series so far. ‘Faint praise’ etc.

    #238746
    si
    Participant

    Arachnids in the UK is my favourite episode of this series so far.

    Ditto. Highlights included Ed Sheeran and Ryan making shadow puppets in the background.

    #238747
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    The grime music made me want to die and the villain was a two -dimensional thinly-veiled caricature, and the Doctor’s morals were incredibly questionable (suffocating/starving to death being more humane than getting shot), and the plot is basically left unresolved, but apart from that it was…. medicore.

    #238751

    If only this was an episode of Red Dwarf we’d have formed a general consensus by now

    #238778
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    Despite not enjoying the series so far, I’m really looking forward to tonight’s episode. Either I’ll get to complain more, or I’ll be pleasantly surprised and it will actually be good. Oh joy. I hear it’s a Chibnall one (oh dear) set in space (finally)

    #238781
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    That was GREAT! Funny, tense, emotional, uplifting. Jodie is really coming into her own, now, although the writing really needs to evolve past emulating Ten, and there were some nice character moments for everybody, especially Ryan.
    I kind of liked The Doctor being talked down to and made to concede, that isn’t really something we see a lot. Also a couple good laughs in the episode, including “I’m not being hostile!” said hostile-y, and “Are you kidding/sometimes”.

    More like this, please.

    #238782
    Pete Part Three
    Participant

    Thought it was fucking awful.

    #238783
    Lily
    Participant

    Yes I really enjoyed that one. Tension, danger, running around, people dying, Doctor desperately trying to take charge and think of how to save them, all good Who stuff. I could have done without the dead mother chat which rather killed the pace for a little while, but other than that it was a good little episode.

    Shame we’ve had to wait 5 weeks for one though.

    #238784
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    The internet in general seems to think it was pish and I’m starting to wonder if I only thought it was good in relation to the shite we’ve been fed up until now

    #238785
    Dave
    Participant

    I feel like this episode bit off more than it could chew. Too many different character stories fighting for attention, and smothering what could have been a pretty tight and tense main story about the alien eating the ship.

    It felt like scenes often happened in a fairly random order, with the momentum of certain scenes being totally killed by what followed (especially the scenes that just stopped the flow dead to have the characters dole character backstory).

    That said, I think the Doctor marvelling at the antimatter drive might be my favourite Whittaker moment since the start of this series.

    #238787
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    Would have just been more generic/closer to Alien without that stuff, at least this episode tried to be interesting and wasn’t just boring dross like the past four episodes sans Rosa (which was only interesting at the very end) were

    I agree with the momentum dying at some points – not the conversation between the two companions, but there were a couple other moments (the antimatter high school physics lecture which served no purpose and didn’t even mention annihilation) where everything just sort of paused.

    The antimatter explanation was very sudden and out of nowhere but i sort of liked it – on the impetus that it would be used to set up something. But it doesn’t. It’s just there, and a waste of time, time that could be spent sorting out Dave’s first criticism.

    Somebody pointed out that the ship is for some reason stable during all the birthing scenes, which is a bit convenient now I think about it. Same person said that The Doctor being injured for most of the episode served no purpose as well, but I rather liked that, as showing her defeated/submissive etc was a nice little bit the episode did. And it allowed Jodie to stop acting like a facsimile of David Tennant and give us a little something different, her performance was more interesting and more her own, then. Not as wacky.

    #238789
    Lily
    Participant

    >The internet in general seems to think it was pish

    Oh wow yeah, they really hated it didn’t they? I mean sure, it’s no Blink, but I didn’t think it was that bad? It had a few issues but nothing that killed the show dead in the water.

    People are moaning that it was boring and confusing, but I found it neither. Just a entertaining little base-under-siege middle of the season episode. Almost feels like I didn’t watch the same show as everyone else (apart from Ben).

    #238790
    NoFro
    Participant

    The biggest problem for me is that this was the fifth episode in a row that I found really quite boring and there’s nothing worse than boring. Can’t think of another time since I started watching Who properly in 2010 where that’s happened (I dipped into the RTD era from time to time but couldn’t get on with most of what I saw).

    My partner loves Who and is similarly disappointed but we’ll both continue to watch the show in the hope that it delivers something special somewhere down the line. At this point I haven’t much hope left though.

    Out of curiosity, is there anyone on the board that is really, genuinely loving this series? If so, what are you loving about it?

    #238791
    NoFro
    Participant

    Rosa has been my favourite so far, FWIW, but I want my season high point to be a lot better than Rosa is.

    #238792
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    Series’ 3, 7 and 9 had boring stretches but you’re right, nothing has been quite so boring for so long in Doctor Who since The Web Planet.

    The next handful of episodes AREN’T written by Christ “Mediocre” Chibnall, and are being written by brand new writers, so at least we have potentially interesting scripts to look forward to.

    Remember Torchwood? Towards the end of series one that show was starting to get REALLY good, with great character dynamics… then… the finale… was a huge monster… written by Chris Chibnall… WHAT a letdown

    #238794
    si
    Participant

    No, even I thought that was a duffer. Like I said on Twitter, as much as we all ‘know’ that it’s essentially a kids’ show, that felt distinctly CBBC fare. When Eve was ‘piloting’ the ship…I thought that was pretty toe-curling to be honest. My dad (who really liked it, he said he didn’t want it to end) said it reminded him of Sandstrom in Hyperdrive (no, I know you didn’t watch it).
    I did think Pting was very well realised though, I was worried when it first appeared that it was just going to be a nasty cartoon, but it actually looked pretty cool (and a bit like a baby Slitheen).

    #238795
    Warbodog
    Participant

    Being an adult who moans about Doctor Who not going his way makes me feel worse than the initial disappointment did, so I’ll shut up until I like something again. Look – four weeks of guest writers ahead!!!

    #238797
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    >so I’ll shut up until I like something again
    And Warbofrog was never heard from again :(

    Criticising stuff is a lot of fun in my experience… it’s almost addictive… and criticism can be a good thing… somebody could write a decent sci-fi about that idea….

    #238798
    Dave
    Participant

    There was a point at which I thought they were going to go quite dark – once they established that the monster didn’t eat human flesh and they needed to stop it from eating the ship, I thought that they were going to sew it inside the pregnant man just after he had his baby.

    Probably would have been a bit weird though.

    #238799

    It’s all been a bit of a shrug for me, seeming like the writers aren’t really sure what they want to do so far. My cousins, though, who are target-audience age, they’re loving it. The youngest walked around Derby the other week quoting the whole bit in Rosa Parks which ends with Ryan saying “that’s good, because I don’t eat them.” This week’s was enjoyable fluff, I just want something more, but I can’t argue with children who say they love it.

    #238800
    Dave
    Participant

    I feel similarly.

    Over the past few weeks I’ve more or less made my peace with the fact that, for me, it probably isn’t going to be the show it once was. I liked it a lot as a kid, enjoyed lots of bits of the RTD era (and thought Tennant was very good), and I really enjoyed the Moffat era (and thought that both Smith and Capaldi were brilliant).

    On the strength of these first five Chibnall episodes it seems to be chugging along at an OK average – not awful, but not great – and if it continues like that it will never reach the heights of the RTD and Moffat eras. Who knows, things might change.

    But I’ve noticed that other people are really enjoying the new take, including my daughter who finds the show much easier to follow in general now than she did under Moffat. Others seem to be on board too, judging by the general reaction of friends and other parents that I know (both for themselves and their kids).

    So I feel like I maybe need to accept that the show is moving into a new phase that works for other people better than it does for me – and it needs to do that, to regenerate when it becomes old and tired, and turn into something else, something new and different.

    Or to put it another way: “Doctor, I let you go.”

    #238802
    tombow
    Participant

    I’ve only had a chance to see the first episode and clips of the rest so far, but from what I’ve heard talking to friends etc, it sounds like the new series is kind of very down to earth and going for a more more kid’s show, CBBC-ish feel, less epic and intense, more friendly. I think I’ll probably prefer the Capaldi era (which I’m watching now and enjoying), but yeah, good luck to the new series even if it turns out to be more for kids than older fans. And not so much my thing.

    #238803
    tombow
    Participant

    I mean..I can imagine someone like Judi Dench playing a “scary” Doctor in a more Moffat style series. That would have been good, but maybe we have to wait longer for that. Maybe the next era will be Olivia Coleman playing a more intense Doctor.

    #238806
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    I don’t know any kids, but both my parents think the show is pretty gash now. My dad is a big Star Trek guy, my mum thinks he’s called Doctor Spock. Nobody else I know irl still watches this show, it has totally fallen off in terms of pop culture relevancy and viewing figures, but it had been doing that already during the Moffat era for a myriad of reasons. The 50th and its aftermath were a brief “fuck yeah Doctor Who” globally apparently, but everybody I know irl says they stopped watching after Tennant left, which is really disappointing. Understandable that they would try to get the casual audience back, I just wish they could do so without being so BLAND. And afaik the viewing figures aren’t doing all that much better after the initial interest in the series opener, but I don’t really want to be one of those people who talks about hearsay regarding viewership, I find that a bit daft sometimes.

    Somebody said the other day that the show itself is so boring now we have no choice but to discuss things like this because the actual episodes don’t warrant all that much discussion, lmao.

    What do you think of the reference to “the timeless child” and the Doctor not even knowing about something herself? Are we getting an arc, or is it more bullshit throwaway lines like “hey remember that time on planet 42 when I did some bullshit”

    #238809
    tombow
    Participant

    I think this whole thing about the show being more of an ensemble and the Doctor not standing out as much, sound like an interesting choice. I mean, it may be boring to watch, but it’s interesting if they’re making a choice to get away from the “things get done by one awesome person and his group of inferior friends” mindset.

    #238811
    Dave
    Participant

    I thought the viewing figures had been pretty good, despite the expected dropoff after the first episode.

    #238814
    Lily
    Participant

    > I don’t really want to be one of those people who talks about hearsay regarding viewership, I find that a bit daft sometimes

    I’m daft, I’m a data nerd. I was actually having an argument with a friend this morning about this. He’s one of these “never watched after Tennant” types, who was adamant that viewing figures have been going down ever since and no-one liked or watched Smith. So I put this together to hit him with some data.

    View post on imgur.com

    Last week’s final figures haven’t been confirmed yet and obviously her average will go down over the next few weeks. The grouping isn’t entirely accurate as Ecclestone never had an Xmas episode, but it’s close enough to give an idea. I also split out the season that was half Amy, half Clara as there was a clear dip in interest with Clara around. There’s also an extra Xmas episode that I ignored, as it wasn’t attached to a season and xmas is always an outlier anyway.

    #238815
    Lily
    Participant

    Oh, poor graphing skills with no labels. It’s viewers in Millions up the side and episode number along the bottom.

    #238901
    steven87gill
    Participant

    Chibbers has written way to many episodes this series & they’ve all been thoroughly average (don’t say Rosa because you can tell Malorie Blackman wrote most of that) he should’ve stuck with the opener & closer & let the guest writers do the rest, especially now there are only 10 episodes.

    To the people who are surprised at this, trust me, the man has written for Doctor Who & Torchwood since 2006 & every single fucking episode he has ever written (save for maybe the Dinosaurs one, which was actually good fun) has been exactly like this. Just average, he’s the guy you call when you need 20 episodes of Star Trek on a deadline to fill out the rest of the run. Not someone you base an entire series around.

    #238913

    I was having a look at Chibnall written episodes of DW / Torchwood the other day.

    42 I seem to remember being a fairly decent episode, and Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is silly fun with a bit of a sinister ending. The rest can go to hell though. But the rest are mostly Torchwood.

    The difference between his previous DW work and now is that he had RTD and Moffat to sharpen up anything he delivered. And I’m sure both of them are on record (at least Moffat is) of doing fairly extensive script re-writes for guests writers.

    I’m seriously beginning to wonder if the man can actually write science fiction. Every episode I’ve been left baffled by things that weren’t addressed in episodes, dialogue being really simplistic, obvious and feeling like it’s from the first draft. Threads not coming together etc.

    He certainly isn’t painstakingly worrying in a sci-fi nerd fan boy way about how the technology etc within an episode works in the way that Moffat did, or considering the consequences of it.

    Take for example last week. The medics ship spends 4 days in space travelling to the medical station.

    #238914

    Shit, posted before I was done.

    I spends for weeks travelling through space, then when the Doctor questions how she’ll get back to the junk planet to fetch the TARDIS they say they’ll just teleport her …. across 4 days of space travel. Why bother with a medical ship if you can just teleport people across those distances. Beam them straight into the hospital!!

    #238916
    Dave
    Participant

    The thing is, it would only take the odd line to rectify stuff like that. Something about how you can’t teleport the injured because it would mess up their injury or interfere with the treatment or something like that. It suggests there hasn’t been much close script-editing. Which is odd given how long these scripts have taken to get to the screen.

    #238917

    That’s exactly it. I don’t want to be unfair to Chris because I’m sure he has spent a lot of time working on these shows, and I’m sure he is very proud of them. But it just doesn’t feel like the same care and attention has been applied in a way we’re a) used to with Doctor Who and b) is necessary in science fiction.

    Every new script essentially needs new world building applied to it, the why things happen and how they work etc -, and that doesn’t seem to be the case with a lot of this.

    I guess from the minute he decided to ignore/not explain how the Doctor survived her fall in episode one (a fall Chris set up no less) was an indication of how the rest of the series would be treated.

    #238918
    Warbodog
    Participant

    Episode for episode, this series doesn’t appeal to me any less than the early parts of some RTD runs. Stuff like New Earth, Tooth and Claw, The Shakespeare Code and Daleks in Manhattan that I’ve never desired to watch again and that didn’t feel aimed at me in the way most Moffat episodes really did. Though I found Moffat’s series 9 & 10 uninteresting for the most part as well, with exceptions, so it’s been a general decline from 2010-11 for me rather than a painful break-up.

    That decline is admittedly getting steeper since this is a brand new era that needs to impress and we haven’t had what I’d consider a great episode yet. I’m looking forward to the new guest writers more than I’ve been looking forward to the last few. Gizza Moffat.

    #238919
    Warbodog
    Participant

    * By which I mean “Gizza new stand-out writer who writes clever episodes I/we eagerly await every year and are overjoyed when they eventually give him/her the keys.”

    #238923
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    Doctor Who peaked in Series 8 for me, then the finales of each mediocre-good season after that were absolutely astonishing (TUAT is an epilogue not a finale), so it has been a very sudden and very upsetting drop in quality for me.

    RTD did a hell of a lot of re-writing scripts from what I remember, so much so that I think he claims he deserves a writing credit on a few of them in The Writer’s Tale. Moffat felt the same way, and actually started taking a writer’s credit on episodes he significantly rewrote in Series 9, which is why he gets so many.

    I agree with the comments about potentially unpolished scripts. A lot of the episodes don’t really have a proper ending, Arachnids and Tsuranga especially from memory leave a couple things unresolved, such as how she got back to the TARDIS and why they can’t just teleport anyway.

    A lot of Chibnall’s stuff is also signposted really hard and feels like conventional, by-the-numbers storytelling, the likes of which you’d read about in a how-to book. Here is the SETUP. Here comes the PAYOFF. This character is going to DIE, you can tell because we gave them loved ones and a line or two to make you care about them. It’s just very la-di-da.

    #238924
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    He also writes dialogue which is so “realistic” with characterisation he got from How To Characterise For Dummies that it comes off even more unrealistic than Moffat’s heavily stylised, everybody-is-witty stuff at its worst. Good Moff dialogue is incredible, good Chibnall dialogue is rare.

    #238927
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    How many of you have seen that clip of Chris Chibnall taking down Pip and Jane Baker (live?) on television, chastising them for how shite their contributions to Trial of a Timelord were? It’s pretty funny, and almost ironic in retrospect, how the criticisms he makes about their attempts at Doctor Who are now being thrown at his.

    #238930
    Dave
    Participant

    That was one of the better episodes this season. I don’t know if the season order was planned or rejigged to deliberately air it on Remembrance Sunday, but it felt quite apt.

    #238931
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    Well that episode was alright, got slightly emotional at moments. Still nothing spectacular.

    I’ll never get used to them ending with different music that plays over the credits, I don’t like that. I also don’t like the “hey remember when we did that thing in that place that one time” throwaway lines, like in the opening elevator scene of Attack of the Clones, it’s really lazy “characterisation”.
    And Tosin Cole still can’t act.

    I really liked the twist with the aliens in this one, it was actually quite haunting, but immediately after that reveal the episode gets boring again. All the floating heads was some nice imagery.

    #238932
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    >I don’t know if the season order was planned or rejigged to deliberately air it on Remembrance Sunday, but it felt quite apt
    A lot of crazy right wing nuts were crying about how the BBC would dare to air something that was clearly going to be anti-British/anti-White on remembrance Sunday, saying it was disrespectful etc. That lot have a real knack for pre-judging things before they’ve even seen them. They all seemed to have shut up now that the episode has actually aired, but they’ll be back. Probably trying to figure out how to mould what they just saw around their agenda. Give them a few.

    #238935
    Dave
    Participant

    The twist with the aliens reminded me a bit of the most recent Christmas special. Similar ideas at play.

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