Doctor Who

[ladyfiona 2,744]

Cross posting this from another thread about Ysanne Churchman and her passing.

 

 

[ladyfiona 2,744]

For anyone who wants to experience the magic of being a first time watcher. A House of the Dragon/Matt Smith fan who never watched Doctor Who, started watching the show from S5 and livetweeted her reactions. She's about to watch the 50th special and regeneration of Matt Smith in the next 24 hours. She calls Dalek's "Hightowers" and Clara "Curly Dimples".

 

 

Her excitement has attracted Dr Who's official Twitter and Moffat himself. Yesterday she was introduced to 9th Doctor by watching Dalek and the writer for that episode actually got in touch with her.

 

She's watched all the River Song episodes with Matt and 10th Doctor just so she gets an understanding of the storyline and she has seen Blink so she knows what Angel statues are. Rory and Amy's last episode nearly killed her, lol.

 

There is a Discord and everything which is moderated by friends she trusts and is only told what episodes or mini episodes to watch by a close online friend. So she understands certain lore and not get too spoiled for episodes to come.

[Youth in Asia 1,094]

Just watching the Capaldi doctor with my son. We started at Tennant and last time in 2018-19 only made it to the beginning of Capaldi. Now we started at Tennant again and we're in the second series of Capaldi - it's very good. 

[Sod's Law 494]

Carole Ann Ford really wants to return to Doctor Who and has asked RTD about it several times to no avail: 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly6kx3ywq4o

 

The bad news is that while the last series seemed to set up the stage for her eventual return, this article seems to imply she won't be coming back any time soon. 

[Lord Fellatio Nelson 6,241]

2 hours ago, Sod's Law said:

Carole Ann Ford really wants to return to Doctor Who and has asked RTD about it several times to no avail: 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly6kx3ywq4o

 

The bad news is that while the last series seemed to set up the stage for her eventual return, this article seems to imply she won't be coming back any time soon. 

If only she was a transgender one legged hermaphrodite with pronouns at the end of their name, RTD would be all over her like a tramp on a sandwich, eh!

 

[ladyfiona 2,744]

Christmas preview and it's also a Moffat written episode.

 

 

[RoverAndOut 4,771]

On 15/11/2024 at 22:41, ladyfiona said:

Christmas preview and it's also a Moffat written episode.

 

 

 

Might be feeling sentimental on Christmas Day but I really liked the Christmas special. Took a bit of time to get going, and the plot was Steven Moffat at his convoluted best, but the ending was beautiful, particularly Anita's (who will be the subject of much fan arguing about whether she's a companion or not ).

[Sod's Law 494]

I will have to rewatch this. I always struggle with Doctor Who Christmas specials because relatives always seem to arrive just as they start so I miss the first twenty minutes of dialogue. Wallace and Gromit afterwards was hugely popular with everyone though. 

[Commtech Sio Bibble 2,244]

Sadly, I thought it was kinda shit. I found the plot confusing and thought the whole thing was very emotionally messy.

 

The bad

1. Considering how much Nicola Coughlan was featured in the marketing she was barely in the episode, and I felt absolutely nothing for the character whatsoever. Waste of a great talent.

2. Maybe I missed something but the ending with her eating(?) the star just doesn't make sense to me, how did that stop it from detonating?

3. The 14th Doctor constantly crying was one of my most disliked parts of S14 and just off the top of my head I recall 3 instances of it within this one episode

4. The Silurian character, whilst it was good to see the species again, the death scene felt so incredibly forced and emotionally manipulative. He had very little screen time and for 90% of it he was possessed by the evil briefcase.

5. The COVID stuff took me right out of the episode, firstly fuck the Tories but as a cultural reference it just felt 2-3 years late. It had the same essence of when Chibnall did a Theresa May parody in the 2021 Dalek special, going on 2 years after she resigned as PM.

 

Neutral

1. Joel Fry's character. I did really like him, but again the death scene felt too emotional for a side character we've spent 2 minutes with and know next to nothing about. Wasn't really a fan of him as a hologram being able to override the programming to help the Doctor, just because he had promised him when alive, but that's a common trope and is passable.

2. The woman on the train. That scene with her and the Doctor felt very surface level and forced, not in a right-wing forced diversity way but as if I could imagine Moffatt patting himself on the back for being inclusive whilst writing it. Reminded me of a scene in Resolution with a security guard that Chibnall faced a lot of flack for. But as a straight man, I would leave that up to people with a more vested interest to judge.

3. The time hotel. An absolutely fantastic concept and I would have loved to have seen it explored more, but as a setting it felt quite wasted. However as a plot point I think it was well used.

4. Ncuti's self loathing outburst. I loved the idea of the Doctor being in a position where he is irritated by himself and pointing out that this is why no-one likes him but I think they went a bit too far, especially the bit about not noticing the lack of chairs, when in order to say it he have had to have noticed but also the TARDIS has quite often had chairs in it.

5. Ruby. The cameo had no relevance to anything and just confused the plot.

 

The good

1. Grounded for a year - The main highlight of the episode for me was the Doctor being stranded in that hotel with Anita. I found the relationship more compelling and natural than the Doctor and Ruby's throughout S14 and I'm glad that Anita got a happy ending. More of a companion than Joy imo.

2. The start - I like the initial mystery of why is the man handcuffed to the case and the set-up of the Doctor with Joel Fry's character, but that was over very quickly and I kinda lost interest as soon as Joy took the case.

3. Setup in the opening sequence - The train and Everest ropes being part of the final big sequence was a nice touch, given how throwaway and interchangeable those settings felt at the beginning.

[Sod's Law 494]

Agree with much of the above. The scenes with Coughlin were by far the weakest and Ncuti had far more chemistry with Anita. I wish she would have been the companion. The resolution also robbed Ncuti of another 'save the day' moment, which his Doctor has been desperately short on. 

 

Also, I'm pretty sure I recall Jackie and a few visitors to the TARDIS in the Tennant years sitting down on the console room chairs? Main issue with it currently is that they built a big beautiful console room set and they don't seem to have used it much throughout the last series. 

[RoverAndOut 4,771]

56 minutes ago, Commtech Sio Bibble said:

Sadly, I thought it was kinda shit. I found the plot confusing and thought the whole thing was very emotionally messy.

 

The bad

1. Considering how much Nicola Coughlan was featured in the marketing she was barely in the episode, and I felt absolutely nothing for the character whatsoever. Waste of a great talent.

2. Maybe I missed something but the ending with her eating(?) the star just doesn't make sense to me, how did that stop it from detonating?

3. The 14th Doctor constantly crying was one of my most disliked parts of S14 and just off the top of my head I recall 3 instances of it within this one episode

4. The Silurian character, whilst it was good to see the species again, the death scene felt so incredibly forced and emotionally manipulative. He had very little screen time and for 90% of it he was possessed by the evil briefcase.

5. The COVID stuff took me right out of the episode, firstly fuck the Tories but as a cultural reference it just felt 2-3 years late. It had the same essence of when Chibnall did a Theresa May parody in the 2021 Dalek special, going on 2 years after she resigned as PM.

 

Neutral

1. Joel Fry's character. I did really like him, but again the death scene felt too emotional for a side character we've spent 2 minutes with and know next to nothing about. Wasn't really a fan of him as a hologram being able to override the programming to help the Doctor, just because he had promised him when alive, but that's a common trope and is passable.

2. The woman on the train. That scene with her and the Doctor felt very surface level and forced, not in a right-wing forced diversity way but as if I could imagine Moffatt patting himself on the back for being inclusive whilst writing it. Reminded me of a scene in Resolution with a security guard that Chibnall faced a lot of flack for. But as a straight man, I would leave that up to people with a more vested interest to judge.

3. The time hotel. An absolutely fantastic concept and I would have loved to have seen it explored more, but as a setting it felt quite wasted. However as a plot point I think it was well used.

4. Ncuti's self loathing outburst. I loved the idea of the Doctor being in a position where he is irritated by himself and pointing out that this is why no-one likes him but I think they went a bit too far, especially the bit about not noticing the lack of chairs, when in order to say it he have had to have noticed but also the TARDIS has quite often had chairs in it.

5. Ruby. The cameo had no relevance to anything and just confused the plot.

 

The good

1. Grounded for a year - The main highlight of the episode for me was the Doctor being stranded in that hotel with Anita. I found the relationship more compelling and natural than the Doctor and Ruby's throughout S14 and I'm glad that Anita got a happy ending. More of a companion than Joy imo.

2. The start - I like the initial mystery of why is the man handcuffed to the case and the set-up of the Doctor with Joel Fry's character, but that was over very quickly and I kinda lost interest as soon as Joy took the case.

3. Setup in the opening sequence - The train and Everest ropes being part of the final big sequence was a nice touch, given how throwaway and interchangeable those settings felt at the beginning.

 

I'm not going to pretend it was the best hour of New Who there's ever been, because it wasn't. And there have been better Christmas specials too (including in Moffat's time, starting with the excellent Christmas Carol), but as a bit of Christmas Day don't-think-too-hard-just-enjoy-the-ride entertainment it was perfectly serviceable. To answer some of your points:

 

1. Agreed about the slightly messy handling of Nicola Coughlan but she did a good job with what she was given and it was quite a refreshing change to have a companion who is pretty clueless for the most part (except when she's possessed) rather than the usual action girl type.

2. It didn't stop it from detonating. It detonated in the sky at a safe distance from the Earth, thus shining down on everything from her own mother dying in 2020 to the nativity in Year 0001. 

3. Seen this argument elsewhere. The Doctor has been around humans for thousands of years and seen countless amounts of tragedy and heartache. Is it really that surprising he's a bit more emotional these days?

5. Do you think the fact that Covid has faded from the public's consciousness means it is no longer relevant to those who suffered loss during it? I thought it was quite a healthy reminder that the pandemic may be over but the effects are still being felt. The idea that Joy can never be at home on Christmas because it reminds her of losing her mother and saying her goodbyes over zoom. Would not surprise me to find similar stories of grief from real life.

 

5. Nice to just check in with Ruby. Not an important scene but a reminder she's still around, even if he refuses to call her. And Joy's light shines down on her too.

[Commtech Sio Bibble 2,244]

27 minutes ago, RoverAndOut said:

2. It didn't stop it from detonating. It detonated in the sky at a safe distance from the Earth, thus shining down on everything from her own mother dying in 2020 to the nativity in Year 0001. 

Right in that case, I'm then assuming that it moved from earth due to Joy now being able to control it and it somehow gave her the power of flight. I suppose that makes a bit more sense, I still think the plot was unclear though.

 

27 minutes ago, RoverAndOut said:

3. Seen this argument elsewhere. The Doctor has been around humans for thousands of years and seen countless amounts of tragedy and heartache. Is it really that surprising he's a bit more emotional these days?

14 was meant to have gone through therapy stuff for that if I'm remembering the bi-regen stuff correctly (I didn't enjoy the Giggle and haven't seen it since it first aired), but it's not really the in-universe reasoning behind the tears, it's the tears themselves. Firstly I think the over-reliance on tears weakens 'real' emotional moments and secondly I'd just personally don't like it and would prefer if less strongly emotional displays from the Doctor were present so consistently. 

 

27 minutes ago, RoverAndOut said:

5. Do you think the fact that Covid has faded from the public's consciousness means it is no longer relevant to those who suffered loss during it? I thought it was quite a healthy reminder that the pandemic may be over but the effects are still being felt. The idea that Joy can never be at home on Christmas because it reminds her of losing her mother and saying her goodbyes over zoom. Would not surprise me to find similar stories of grief from real life.

Again I think this is more a personal thing. Although I did suffer loss during the pandemic, it is something that I have moved on from, so for me it felt irrelevant, but if it is meaningful to other than that's great, at the end of the day, I'm the one missing out there.

[The Old Crem 3,708]

I’ve never liked Moffat’s writing much and that episode reminded me why. It felt a bit confusing and messy to me. It wasn’t as bad as some of his episodes during his time as Showrunner but it wasn’t a particularly good episode

[time 8,722]

Overall I enjoyed that episode, but like some previous episodes, the journey was better than actually arriving.

 

I enjoyed the Doctor-Anita dynamic, thought Nicola Coughlan was great (of course), but failed to see the point of the Orient Express woman.

 

Ruby Sunday seemed like a contractual obligation, as the story wouldn't have changed had she been omitted completely.

 

Joel Fry's character was called 'Trev'.

 

It wasn't Ncuti's self-loathing outburst, it was the Doctor's.

[Sod's Law 494]

17 minutes ago, time said:

 

I enjoyed the Doctor-Anita dynamic, thought Nicola Coughlan was great (of course), but failed to see the point of the Orient Express woman.

 

 

The whole point of the train in the plot was just to give the Doctor some force to use with his rope on the stone door and, well, it would have been a pretty empty setting without her. 

[YoungWillz 21,524]

Ok, I promised myself I would not weigh in on this but, what the heck!

 

To me, it looked all written from the end backwards. In a glorious tradition of Who, there was a superb ending...after all, Who has tackled the extinction of the dinosaurs and the Great Fire of London, for example. Why not the Star of Bethlehem? (After all, some may consider the whole Nativity as part of a larger work of fiction, but that's another argument!).

 

BUT. How to get there? And that's where all the shite toppled in, like it did on Biff in Back To The Future. The train was a device to heave the stone. The base camp was a device for the rope. The point of the war time couple eluded me. There was the whole tiresome year-long hotel stay. All compressed into an hour, where the balance was all off.

 

Lots of lovely stuff which could have been expanded. It might have worked a little better over a two-part story. Once more a lot of the sci-fi aspect put aside for the soap opera. The Time Hotel could have been explored more. There need not have been so many quick "deaths" at the start. Who and what was the arms manufacturers gig (totally a side issue in what could have been a huge expansion into the Doctor's history)?

 

I guess I just want more sci-fi and less of who may or may not make the Doctor cry or who gives him a hard on.

 

That said, I did enjoy it, but it wasn't a romp or an adventure so much as a rom-com without the rom or indeed the com.

 

IMO.

[time 8,722]

1 hour ago, Sod's Law said:

 

The whole point of the train in the plot was just to give the Doctor some force to use with his rope on the stone door and, well, it would have been a pretty empty setting without her. 

 

1 hour ago, YoungWillz said:

Ok, I promised myself I would not weigh in on this but, what the heck!

 

To me, it looked all written from the end backwards. In a glorious tradition of Who, there was a superb ending...after all, Who has tackled the extinction of the dinosaurs and the Great Fire of London, for example. Why not the Star of Bethlehem? (After all, some may consider the whole Nativity as part of a larger work of fiction, but that's another argument!).

 

BUT. How to get there? And that's where all the shite toppled in, like it did on Biff in Back To The Future. The train was a device to heave the stone. The base camp was a device for the rope. The point of the war time couple eluded me. There was the whole tiresome year-long hotel stay. All compressed into an hour, where the balance was all off.

 

Lots of lovely stuff which could have been expanded. It might have worked a little better over a two-part story. Once more a lot of the sci-fi aspect put aside for the soap opera. The Time Hotel could have been explored more. There need not have been so many quick "deaths" at the start. Who and what was the arms manufacturers gig (totally a side issue in what could have been a huge expansion into the Doctor's history)?

 

I guess I just want more sci-fi and less of who may or may not make the Doctor cry or who gives him a hard on.

 

That said, I did enjoy it, but it wasn't a romp or an adventure so much as a rom-com without the rom or indeed the com.

 

IMO.

OK, I get the train was the device for shifting the stone, and I'll accept the woman was there just because she was.

 

The wartime couple in the hotel were there to illustrate the (pseudo-)fact of there always being a door in hotel rooms that's locked, and nobody knows its function (we do now, its a portal to the time hotel (no relation)).

 

Forgot to say before, I liked the reference to Mr. Benn's clothes for all eras (or whatever).

[msc 18,676]

27 minutes ago, time said:

 

OK, I get the train was the device for shifting the stone, and I'll accept the woman was there just because she was.

 

The train lady is credited as Sylvia Trench, who was James Bond's woman at the start of From Russia with Love (which also has the Orient Express). I think that entire segment was there to lean on the 4th wall tbh!

 

The entire episode was OK. Very much a bogstandard Dr Who Christmas special, with a dollop of Moffat by Numbers on top. It may do better in a few years on rewatch when not completely overshadowed by the dynamic duo of Wallace and Gromit right afterwards.

[Sly Ronnie 950]

It was Moffat's "The Mysterious Planet" - some of the old tropes wheeled out again but cannot mask that the old magic has gone, for him and the series as a whole. W&G showed that you can have a decades old IP that can recognise changing times and still be hugely entertaining.

 

[RoverAndOut 4,771]

5 hours ago, Sly Ronnie said:

It was Moffat's "The Mysterious Planet" - some of the old tropes wheeled out again but cannot mask that the old magic has gone, for him and the series as a whole. W&G showed that you can have a decades old IP that can recognise changing times and still be hugely entertaining.

 

Admittedly with a several year or even decade-long gap between stories for absence to make the heart grow fonder. 

[Sly Ronnie 950]

1 hour ago, RoverAndOut said:

 

Admittedly with a several year or even decade-long gap between stories for absence to make the heart grow fonder. 

 

Maybe that's something the makers of Doctor Who may bear in mind, otherwise it may end up like "Zombie Simpsons", going on and on for the sake of it and having the life sucked out of it.

[Sod's Law 494]

15 hours ago, Sly Ronnie said:

 

Maybe that's something the makers of Doctor Who may bear in mind, otherwise it may end up like "Zombie Simpsons", going on and on for the sake of it and having the life sucked out of it.

If rumours are to be believed (that Disney is thinking of pulling out of the deal with the BBC after the next series and leaving the BBC to look for a new financial partner), we may soon be in for a long wait anyway. Ncuti will have other commitments which might delay production further if he's still in the series by then. 

[RoverAndOut 4,771]

16 hours ago, Sly Ronnie said:

Maybe that's something the makers of Doctor Who may bear in mind, otherwise it may end up like "Zombie Simpsons", going on and on for the sake of it and having the life sucked out of it.

 

Well, if we look at it critically, the original run was on for 26 years: 1963-1989. New Who will mark 20 years when Series 2 of Ncuti's run airs next year. So perhaps there's a shelf life. But Who at its best is still fantastic, there's been a bit too much canon busting and a bit too little fun adventures recently.