Russell Two Davies

[Nick R]

Apparently, today there was some news about a change to Doctor Who’s production staff, in some obscure behind-the-scenes role. I don’t know if anyone else heard about it?

Topic

[Flap Jack]

Somewhere out there, there’s an EastEnders fan who got into it because they saw Dimensions in Time.

Bonus points if they’d never seen Doctor Who before either.

[Renegade Rob]

Also, if someone’s hopping on board Doctor Who just to watch Jenna Coleman, I’d actually just have them start with Series 8. Deep Breath is a clunky-ass opener, but it’s when Moffat finally realized he needed to start consciously fleshing out modern Clara as an actual character with a consistent personality. Jenna Coleman was fun as Oswin and Victorian Clara but Series 7B is trash and deliberately underutilized her since her whole arc there was the Doctor being suspicious of her with the punchline being that she really was just a perfectly nice ordinary person. I get that she could never replace the Ponds so he had to figure out a new companion dynamic with the Eleventh Doctor, but as a result, it’s just not a good showcase for Jenna Coleman or Clara. Series 8 is when she “starts” for real and  comes into her own (I’ve always loved how rightfully pissed she was at the end of Kill the Moon), and she later becomes actively great in Series 9. 

[Professor Flibble]

On the subject of beginners’ choices:

Been trying to work out which story is the perfect representation of each Doctor’s era for a beginner, while also keeping it balanced in terms of, each of the big monsters and villains are represented and the Doctor has their iconic companion.

Only problem is there’s a few future of humanity stories, no alien planets and not enough historical stuff. Everyone’s gonna say Tomb but I think Seeds of Death is a microcosm of the Troughton era. Same with Claws of Axos for Pertwee.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth 

The Seeds of Death

The Claws of Axos

The Ark in Space 

Earthshock 

The Two Doctors 

Remembrance of the Daleks 

[Ben Saunders]

I didn’t care for Deep Breath very much on first viewing, but to me it’s one of those ones that is a lot better in retrospect once you’ve seen where everything goes after that. I think it’s great. Clara in 7B is a nonentity, just spinning the wheels and running on fumes while Moffat does 5,000 things at once.

The more I think about The Seeds of Death the more I think it might be the best Doctor Who ever. It’s just great. I don’t know if y’all have seen the Dalek6388 video on the direction of that story, but it’s a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ywnju4jOig

[Renegade Rob]

On the subject of both Series 7B Clara AND Seeds of Death, officially retconning Gia Kelly to be a Clara Time Splinter is an insanely ballsy thing to do. 

[Professor Flibble]

I forgot about that. 😐

[Warbodog]

I liked Deep Breath, but as an important premiere it felt like the show was self-harming into an acquired or mature taste and it made me worried at the time. I preferred it being for kids and coincidentally me.

[Asclepius]

I’m a massive Doctor Who fan, and my first experience of it was Dimensions in Time. You can start anywhere.

I’d started watching with Time and The Rani, when I was 7. I’m not sure who trumps who here, on the Awfulness scale.

But…it must have been the early 90s before I was allowed a blank VHS of my own to put my own things on. So, of course, Dimensions in Time was the first Who I was able to record and keep. I rewatched it a lot. I didn’t get *why* it would be bad, and I did enjoy it.

[Warbodog]

I think I watched Dimensions in Time passively, or turned away and did some drawing or something. 1995’s Smell-O-Vision is the only Children in Need I remember being invested in, in the attentive rather than charitable sense.

[Dave]

[Ben Saunders]

I still haven’t seen Dimensions in Time actually, maybe I’ll pop it on between Survival and the TV Movie for the authentic experience.

[Rushy]

I interpreted series 7 Clara as like the modern version of a classic companion. If you put the silly arc to the side, she’s just a normal person who tags along on the adventure. There was no internal melodrama between her and the Doctor. It was refreshing at the time. 

But from Day of the Doctor onwards, I really couldn’t stand her. There’s a specific sequence, when she guilts the Doctor about the children who died on Gallifrey. “These are the people that you’re gonna burn?”

1. You already knew he did this. And you were completely okay with being his bestie. But now that you see kids, now it’s a problem. How shallow can you be?

2. Do you really think he did this on some whim, and hadn’t spent years considering every possible alternative? 

3. Did you miss the part where he said everyone would die if he didn’t do this? Including all the children everywhere? Including the ones he’s going to kill? 

And that’s kind of the attitude she has from that point onward. “You – the 2000-year old professional – are an idiot, and me – the inexperienced 25-year old schoolteacher – I know how to handle alien encounters and solve all moral crises.”

It’s stupid, and stupidity isn’t appealing. 

I also thought the idea of her having weekly “appointments” with the Doctor was very strange. The Ponds were trying to build a family and settling down. Fair enough. But how am I supposed to relate to a character who treats unlimited time/space adventuring like it’s something she has to squeeze into her calendar? Where’s the wonder in that? 

Anyway, to me 12/Clara was the low point of the entire television run, and I was very pleased with 12/Bill giving Capaldi’s tenure something of a redemption. 

[Rushy]

On the subject of beginners’ choices:
Been trying to work out which story is the perfect representation of each Doctor’s era for a beginner

When I was younger and just getting into Classic Who, my instinct was to purchase Dalek, Cybermen and multi-Doctor stories to get a grip on what each era was like through some familiar context. 

The Five Doctors in particular was one of my earliest favourites, even though I’d never seen any of them before (save for Davison’s Time Crash appearance). 

[cwickham]

Series 7 Clara is the “Moffat always struggles with characterisation and it really comes to the fore in a difficult shoot with little time to refine scripts” companion.

[Flap Jack]

The pre-Series 8 Clara era did bring us the iconically creepy “A mystery wrapped in an enigma squeezed into a skirt that’s just a little bit too… tight”. I don’t know if it was Moffat or Gaiman who wrote it, and I don’t know which would be worse either.

So I prefer the Capaldi era just because it stopped writers trying to give The Doctor sexual tension with Clara. Ageism is still bad but it came in handy there.

[Dave]

[Renegade Rob]

Early on they made it seem like Series 7B Clara’s whole thing would be that she isn’t brave or particularly well-suited for danger and monsters, which I respected (she seemed understandably freaked out during Cold War) but that got abandoned and she quickly became a little too competent and slick by the time Nightmare in Silver and Name of the Doctor rolled around. Which is a shame, since the reason the 9th Doctor is my favorite is because he always made it seem like random people getting killed off actually ruined his day, like it would for any sane person, and it gave a sense of scale and stakes to his adventures. 

[Professor Flibble]

Did you miss the part where he said everyone would die if he didn’t do this? Including all the children everywhere? Including the ones he’s going to kill? 
And that’s kind of the attitude she has from that point onward. “You – the 2000-year old professional – are an idiot, and me – the inexperienced 25-year old schoolteacher – I know how to handle alien encounters and solve all moral crises.”
It’s stupid, and stupidity isn’t appealing. 
I also thought the idea of her having weekly “appointments” with the Doctor was very strange. The Ponds were trying to build a family and settling down. Fair enough. But how am I supposed to relate to a character who treats unlimited time/space adventuring like it’s something she has to squeeze into her calendar? Where’s the wonder in that? 
Anyway, to me 12/Clara was the low point of the entire television run, and I was very pleased with 12/Bill giving Capaldi’s tenure something of a redemption. 

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it explained so well. This. This is why I don’t like her.

[sleepey]

Clara takes the grown-up role because the Doctor lost his social skills in the regeneration, & she develops a big head that ends up getting her killed. To me this is just the plot of the show, I’m not sure where all the ire is coming from. They have good chemistry & it’s at least kind of novel for the companion to fully keep their home/work life going during their run (even if stuff like The Caretaker isn’t the best)

Edit: do you ever just start writing a post to see where it goes & work out your opinion on something, only to accidentally press submit halfway through & have to quickly edit the rest in

[Dave]

I’m not sure where all the ire is coming from.

I think that for a lot of people, me included, Clara just isn’t very likeable and doesn’t have great chemistry with the Doctor (in stark contrast to the Ponds who came immediately before her).

There is a sense of smugness and superiority that probably stems largely from the season 7 plot of her ending up being this super-important character who is splintered throughout the Doctor’s life, but continues into future seasons in a way that becomes irritating and tiresome.

Fair play to the show for then factoring that arrogance into her downfall, but even that ends up being essentially reversed so that she can basically become a Doctor in all but name by herself by the end of Hell Bent.

When Bill showed up it was so refreshing to have a normal, grounded companion again. I wish we’d had longer with her.

[Flap Jack]

So basically,

[Rushy]

Clara takes the grown-up role because the Doctor lost his social skills in the regeneration

This is 

1) Very silly

2) Very inconsistently portrayed

The writers are clearly taking their cue from Hartnell and Colin on this, but neither of them lost their social skills or understanding of basic emotions. They just cared less about how they were seen by others. 

[si]

Good luck with that one.

[sleepey]

She’ll never leave sinister puddle and we know it

[Flap Jack]

You know I did think as I posted that, “Should I clarify that I don’t mean it in the romantic or sexual sense? Nah, it’ll be fine”.

[Professor Flibble]

I would, uh, go with Clara.

[Rushy]

It’ll take another century before anyone matches Wendy Padbury on the TARDIS console

[Professor Flibble]

In all seriousness, to me Clara I find annoying because she’s constantly taking the Doctor’s agency away. She always knows better than he does, she’s always one step ahead of him (except, idk, that scene in Dark Water), even when she’s motivating him, (run, you clever boy etc) it still just reeks of she’s always telling him what to do. It makes a large chunk of Capaldi’s era hard to watch because you have this companion who genuinely believes she’s just better than the Doctor rather than being a normal human being who challenges the Doctor when he’s being a dick. And with her hopping on and off the TARDIS all the time, and constantly coming back after we think she’s left, she just removes the sense of wonder from the show. 

Even at the start, the ending of Rings of Akhaten wound me up. I almost get the sentimentality of it and the Doctor’s grandstanding gets annoying but it really is “a leaf is more interesting than the Doctor’s adventures because it lead to Clara existing”

[Warbodog]

The Doctor’s grandstanding in The Pandorica Opens is great because he’s being set up for a fall and they’re all laughing at him up there. I liked how he learned to be less of a big shot. So doing an I’m so epic speech in The Rings of Akhaten just came off as cheesy and for the sake of quotes.

[Professor Flibble]

Yeah, I like the Doctor’s speeches when they feel like dialogue and not like they’ve been written to be shared on Facebook.

[Professor Flibble]

Equally, I’m not a fan of the way the New Series does the big regeneration speeches, makes each Doctor feel too much like literally different people. The Ninth Doctor’s scene is still one of the best, manages to perfectly say goodbye to Eccleston while being subdued.

[Ben Saunders]

The season 5 finale is such a brilliant subversion/deconstruction/whatever of the typical Who finale up to that point, at first being your typical RTD-esque “oh no the Universe is at stake” reset-button finale, but then turning it around and making it much more personal and really effectively marrying the impossibly high stakes with the smaller character beats. Exquisite stuff. He would go onto do it again in Series 9 and piss everybody off, except me and like five other people apparently.

Equally, I’m not a fan of the way the New Series does the big regeneration speeches, makes each Doctor feel too much like literally different people.

They were getting fairly melodramatic already in Classic Who, only they were forced to stop doing that by Colin being fired and Sylvester not getting a finale. Who knows what their actual regenerations would have been like if they had gotten them during the show’s run.

[Renegade Rob]

Equally, I’m not a fan of the way the New Series does the big regeneration speeches, makes each Doctor feel too much like literally different people.

That’s why the best regeneration speech is the Sixth Doctor’s. 

[Flap Jack]

Regenerations in the new series also take a bizarrely long time. Basically all of the main ones except for Nine’s gave time for The Doctor to at least have a sizeable farewell party before the actual change kicked in, Twelve’s took an entire episode, and Fourteen’s is arguably still ongoing. Plus both Ten’s and Eleven’s cheated by having them be healed and youthed before they even changed.

It’s OK if The Doctor is dying in a slow but unavoidable way, but if they cross the threshold where the regeneration should kick in, it should actually kick in. No “I refuse to change!” shenanigans unless they’re actually choosing to die.

These regenerations play out less like deaths and rebirths and more like they’re just retiring and are basically fine and healthy but are leaving anyway just ’cause. (I mean, I know that’s the metatext, but it shouldn’t be so close to literal.)

[Technopeasant]

[Rushy]

(except, idk, that scene in Dark Water)

Even that is completely ridiculous.

Firstly, that the Doctor didn’t immediately cut off her time travel privileges and direct her to the best therapist in the universe. 

Secondly, that he genuinely indulged the idea of having the TARDIS go find Danny’s soul in the afterlife, or whatever it was. Like what did he actually expect to happen when he plugged Clara into the telepathic console? 

[Dave]

Regenerations in the new series also take a bizarrely long time. Basically all of the main ones except for Nine’s gave time for The Doctor to at least have a sizeable farewell party before the actual change kicked in

I really like the sneeze-like suddeness of the change from Smith to Capaldi when it finally comes, imagine if they’d done a regeneration like that without the half-hour of buildup.

[Unrumble]

I really like the sneeze-like suddenness of the change from Smith to Capaldi when it finally comes

I liked it too, if nothing else it was nice that they were actually trying something new, that deviated from the at this point formulaic new series regen-template.

As I recall, some people felt cheated and were enraged by the suddenness. But Doctor Who fandom will fandom.

[Rushy]

I wasn’t terribly keen. Not that I’m resistant to change, but I think of regeneration as a biological process. I just feel as though it should take longer. 

But in fairness, I also love the idea of each Doctor being a somewhat separate entity (“some new man goes sauntering away”), so what do I know? 

[Dave]

I wasn’t terribly keen. Not that I’m resistant to change, but I think of regeneration as a biological process. I just feel as though it should take longer. 

I think it was fair enough given the fact it was a new cycle and Eleven had already gone through the whole biological reset. (That post-regeneration-energy-attack sequence where only his feet are shown climbing up the stairs was a massive tease.)

[Professor Flibble]

See I don’t like the “some man goes sauntering away” thing cause it takes away from the magic of it being the same character played by numerous actors. Each incarnation has different traits brought to the forefront but at their core, they’re very much the same being, like how real people change throughout their lives and go through phases, just a bit more drastic. I liked the point of Matt’s regeneration speech even if the speech itself was overblown.

Didn’t like the sneeze regeneration because it didn’t allow for a proper transition between Smith and Capaldi, and however they experiment with the regenerations these days, it’s still just variations of the golden firey energy. I mean if every Classic regeneration was like that too, sure, but it feels a bit predictable now.

[Dave]

See I don’t like the “some man goes sauntering away” thing cause it takes away from the magic of it being the same character played by numerous actors.

I see that line as part of the increasing trend towards making regeneration speeches more meta and commenting on the transition of actor. I think there’s an overwhelming amount of contrary evidence that makes it clear that the Doctor definitely does consider all of the previous Doctors to be facets of the same person rather than different entities.

[Professor Flibble]

Yeah that scene in Empire of Death irritated me, “oh that was some other man,” not “that was me when I had curly hair and wore a long scarf.” Pair that with the End of Time stuff and the bigeneration and it’s like Russell’s been trying to ruin the concept of regeneration. Moffat didn’t help either with how much the Doctor could just summon regeneration energy to heal people or something, like it’s a superpower.

[Rushy]

See I don’t like the “some man goes sauntering away” thing cause it takes away from the magic of it being the same character played by numerous actors. Each incarnation has different traits brought to the forefront but at their core, they’re very much the same being, like how real people change throughout their lives and go through phases, just a bit more drastic. 

I totally get the appeal of that. And I do believe that overall, the show wants us to believe this.

But for me personally, I think there’s something more profound in the idea that each freshly regenerated Doctor is a new person, a child who then suddenly gets the memories and experiences of all the previous Doctors downloaded into his head. And he’s then left to sink or swim in terms of figuring out who and what he wants to be with that context. 

They are the same person… but they’re also not. When they die, their time really is over and they have to content themselves with the knowledge that someone else will carry part of them onwards. Similar to how our children carry parts of us. 

[Professor Flibble]

It’s weird cause I’m ok with only a fraction of that being true. If that makes any sense? Like it’s kinda spiritually true but not literally true.

[Dave]

Interesting interview with RTD here. He still really doesn’t seem to get how badly he ended up doing with his second tenure on the show.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/oct/03/russell-t-davies-interview-doctor-who-fierce-fandom-love-grief

Also this extract from his memoir confirms what we already knew, that the Billie thing was a desperate fix that they hadn’t really thought through beyond that.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/oct/03/russell-t-davies-memoir-the-queerest-of-folk-extract

That second one in particular becomes a real rant about how leakers ruined the show, how he’s glad he’s left it behind, and how endlessly creative and successful he’s going to in future. It all sounds a bit unhinged.

[cwickham]

I came away from reading the memoir extract a bit more sympathetic to him TBH. It can’t be great to have all your future plans appear in plain view on the internet months in advance and not be able to do anything to stop it.

[Dave]

To me it sounds like the Disney deal was the big mis-step in all of this. It seems like the uncertainty over renewal ended up tying their hands, and leaving them unable to move forward at a point when Gatwa needed to know whether to commit, which led to all the Billie silliness. The whole thing sounds like a bad idea from the start.

[Rushy]

I think the big mis-step was letting Russell write two years of total crap…

[Ben Saunders]

We had entire episodes leaked previously, the black-and-white rough cuts of Series 8, I simply ignored them and it didn’t affect my enjoyment. I don’t remember things actually getting leaked for Ncuti’s era, although I’m sure they did. But I wasn’t spoiled on “Ruby is no one and it snows for no reason”, “the Rani bigenerates lmao”, or “The Reality War is dogshit”, and I don’t think knowing beforehand would have made it any worse. A strange thing to blame.

I already knew the plot of Genesis of the Daleks before I watched it again earlier in the year and it still blew me away. Just have faith in what you’re doing and execute, if I managed to avoid these spoilers then the general audience certainly can as well. It’s only turbonerds who want to ruin things for themselves who go out seeking this shit.

All this fixation on The Reality War in particular also helps bury the fact that most of the rest of his tenure was lukewarm leftover soup otherwise anyway.

I’m glad he’s gone.

[Author]

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