this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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My favourite Doctor is:
Whoever is currently playing The Doctor
Paul McGann (the film wasn't great but he was, and I wish we'd seen more of him than one mini episode and a quick cameo...)
I really didn’t care for the Jodie Whittaker doctor.
Which is a shame because she is an amazing actor. But the new show runner really fucked over the stories. There were so many companions that I really didn’t give a shit about any of them because I never knew them beyond “woman”, and “one of those guys”
Maybe I’ll give it another go now that the season is over and I can see some tennant after. But I’m really not feeling this show runner, the stories were dull and the villains didn’t feel very convincing, even for doctor who, where the greatest villains of all are trash cans with egg beaters glued to them.
Moffatt is back as the show runner, so the new Tennant specials were pretty good. I'm optimistic that it will be good again.
Moffats not back. Also, the new specials were the same tier as plenty of Chibnal's run (ie ok to decent). People are just nostalgia goggling themselves for Tennant/Tate.
Whittaker's really good, she carried her run until the Flux, which I watched for the first time last week. It was shit, even she couldn't save it. It was so bad that the Tennant episodes that follow it are better in comparison, despite them being pretty poor and repeating themes from RTD's run, like he didn't have any new ideas. A mysterious monster from the void of space that steals your voice and turns into you? That's Midnight.
I don't really get everyone's problems with Flux, personally. Was it perfect? No, but I've watched it twice now along with the prior seasons and it feels at least on par.
It's a pretty significant drop in quality, I was enjoying myself until I got to Flux, even though there was a clear drop it the quality of the writing before it. It spends so much time trying to build a mystery but doesn't give enough information to really make it intriguing for me, then it just solves whatever that was over the course of a few minutes and skips over to another.
Flux is poorly written throughout and it destroys everything we know about the doctor. Previously the doctor was basically a rogue escapee of a morally ambiguous and very powerful alien race, but now is instead the entire reason for that race's existence. Powerful, immortal, and with a past we now know practically nothing about...it completely changed the dynamic of the show and retconned the doctor's entire backstory just for a cheap surprise that goes completely against everything we knew, and they didn't even manage to deliver it well. May as well make the doctor "the chosen one."
*Preemptive apologies for the wall-o-text. I honestly tried to keep it brief.
It was definitely briskly paced, but I didn't feel like that made it awful. It's also worth keeping in mind that the series was made around the start of the pandemic with some pretty big restrictions. That doesn't mean it's automatically good, of course, but I feel it deserves a bit of a break for imperfections.
I guess I just don't see it that way. Change is inevitable if a show wants to keep going, and mystery is what keeps most people engaged. "What does it mean?!", "What will this lead to next!?", etc. Whether that's delivered well is up to opinion, I suppose, but I don't think Flux utterly dropped the ball there.
In regards to The Doctor's importance to the universe, they've kind of always been a not-so-directly-called-out "chosen one". I think Moffat was the most brazen with that angle, tbh. Not Chibnal.
And has "The Doctor started the Timelords" plot twist not been screaming out to everyone else for forever already? Personally I thought they would end up revealed to be half-human at some point, too, so this felt pretty mild to me in regards to "completely changing the dynamic of the show".
I dunno. I just don't see what is apparently super obvious to everyone else. It felt like pretty standard Dr Who to me and all the grousing about it feels overdone and amplified by others that are more upset about the other changes that 13 brought to the show, that the whole arc felt tainted by, which sucks. (To be clear, I'm not saying that's what you're complaining about, just that it's an ever-present shadow on 13's run).
See it didn't feel briskly paced to me, it felt pretty slow because I never knew what was happening up until the end of the episode, then it'd go into high gear for five minutes to setup a cliffhanger, often doing so in a cheap way as well. And what was happening wasn't really interesting. It's a cloud destroying the universe, it's the Nothing from Neverending Story, meh. And the villains seemed like they were taken out of Destiny, yet more noble-ish scifi superbeings.
Maybe it if it was well written I'd like it more, but it's poor and the way characters act is absurd even for Doctor Who. I mean, Yas can just walk onto an alien ship - one she's never seen before - and knows how to use its systems. Nobody reacts to things they should find unbelievable to the point of freaking out beyond a sentence saying "what was that?" These issues pop up in the preceding few seasons, but Flux is just poorly written throughout, so maybe that's why such a massive change is such an issue.
Maybe it's because what was once a rogue timelord skipping about time and space and doing good, having adventures, and saving people is actually another superbeing that is the means through which the timelords were created, an immortal being of incredible power. It just changes the context, well-meaning roguish timelord versus immortal god.
There are brighter spots. I actually liked the dog alien guy, I thought that was going to be bad when it revealed what was going on but I turned out to quite like him. Of course he was paired with John Bishop who I just don't think could pull off the role, which is a shame as I like John Bishop.
What other changes did 13 bring to the show?
In particular - a female Doctor, a black Doctor, a more concerted effort to bring in non-white actors (though still not amazing), etc. The kind of stuff Internet edgelords latch onto and make an issue out of. Again, not wanting to imply that's what you're doing. It's just impossible to ignore for me regarding the overwhelming criticism of that run, which I generally enjoyed.
Back to the writing, though. I don't think any of what you brought up makes it awful or terrible. With the "it's just x from y" critique, all kinds of stories re-use ideas or slap a different name on them. I just see that as how storytelling works. There's not an infinite amount of ways to illustrate everything, so there's pretty much always going to be apparent connections to prior media we've seen. I don't think that makes it bad, just not amazingly innovative.
And in regards to the backstory reveals, I don't really see the character as an "immortal god" anymore than I did before. Immortal ≠ all-powerful, and for all we know, they're just part of some other alien race that's no more (or maybe even less) powerful than Timelords at the height of their power. We just don't know, so it seems a bit premature to jump to "immortal god" when nothing has substantially changed other than some lore. At least in nuWho, The Doctor has always been just-shy of infallible already. Unless they start giving the character comic-book style super powers, I don't really mind it.
Oh I see, no I'm happy with that.
I mention the comparisons to other media because that media did it well and Flux didn't. You see the flux a handful of times but in the end it's just something happening on the background whilst these immensely unoriginal and boring supervillains wander around being similarly uninteresting. Even on a more basic level, it's yet another antagonist destroying the entire universe. Doctor gets between universes again, just gets jerked around constantly and only ever reacting to things because even she doesn't know what is happening. And people get teleported around constantly, often as the means it escape from danger which is unspeakably cheap, a man who has barely seen a lightbulb steps inside the TARDIS and is only mildly surprised by how completely impossible everything he's seeing is. Episode ending cliffhangers not resolved but subverted within a minute of the beginning of the next episode.
In what world is it too early to "jump" to immortal god, considering that's basically what they said in the show? Thousands of lives, she doesn't die she regenerates indefinitely forever. She IS immortal and that's the power of a god. Previously there have been references to the doctor appearing godlike due to the basically magic-seeming TARDIS, her tech, being benevolent, helping out everywhere and then disappearing. Well now it's not a naive, yet charming notion from a lifeform that's not advanced enough to understand. She IS one. She is no longer the roguish timelord objector going on adventures, which is the dynamic I liked.
Future huge story reveals will be about her past, and it'll just be unknowable, impossible to empathise with things like "oh it turns out I'm an ancient god" or "it turns out I'm the last of a different and even more powerful race now" which I think would actually be worse, imagine wading through all this shite just for it to basically be the same as before.
I like the traveller encountering problems and fixing them setup, I don't really like the "person showing up to a random problem happens to be the most important person that's related to that problem and also in the universe" really, especially when she's a god. You say you won't mind unless the doctor gets superpowers, but I wouldn't be surprised if something similar turned up. I bet there's a thing the doctor will have to do because they're a powerful ancient race, the only that race could withstand it.
On the other hand I didn't hate the Christmas special, so we will see. At least the butcher that wrote the flux is gone.
Its RTD thats back, not Moffat. Both are damn good though.
They just couldn't decide what her doctor personality was. They initially were like "she's a tinkerer" and she was making gadgets, but they dropped that really quickly. Jodie did a good job, but they really didn't give her anything interesting to work with
4 companions over the whole run is "so many"? Really?
Considering most of the other docs had like 1 or 2, yeah.
They were also just kinda… there.
Like sure that’s how the doctor originally met rose until the did the whole bad wolf plotline, but all the other companions had a compelling reason to be his companion. Martha was also a doctor who was there when her hospital got stolen by alien cops. Donna was gonna marry a guy who was involved in a plot to destroy the earth. Amy was at the center of a crack in the timeline, and Rory just happened to tag along for a lot of it. Even Clara was involved in a plot to kill the doctor.
I really liked ’the Fam’. It was a nice change of dynamic from previous (usually) single companions. And different from the Amy and Rory relationship too - grandfather/grandson and Ryan not being romantically involved with Yaz just felt different.
Plus they were all good fun and bounced well off The Doctor in their different ways.
And Jodie Whitaker was a great Doctor too. While I won’t try and defend every idea in every episode, we needed the change of pace from a decade of Moffat and Segun Akinola’s music was also excellent.
Thirteen gave me what I wanted out of a Doctor when she left - the desire for just a bit more time with her.
What are you talking about? Somehow the alien trying to kill this group is different than the aliens trying to kill the other group? There's literally nothing different about 13's companions to those you listed. They were all "just there". That's how it always works.
Re: companions, I go over that in another comment. In short, ”1-2" is not average, and 4 isn't unreasonable.
The difference is the reason they were “just there”
13s companions were literally just sitting around when she literally fell into their laps.
All the other companions of the modern show have had a compelling stories for how the doctor found them. These people were literally just milling about like they were waiting for someone to fall through the roof and change their lives.
4 is definitely unreasonable for a show known for its character arcs. How am I supposed to connect with any of these characters when they’ll get an average of a couple minutes of dialogue per episode.
They were in a train going home...
Rose was "just working". So was Martha. Donna was "just getting married". Amy was "just sleeping". Clara was "just babysitting". Bill was "just going to school". See how you can do that for literally any companion? The whole point of the characters is that The Doctor drops into their normal life and whisks them away.
And honestly, your "requirements" are just absurd. If you can't "connect" to these characters over several seasons, that's a you problem. Maybe try to meet the show where it's at instead of being so closed off to anything outside off your demands.
*forgot to add Amy
Nah, I’m an adult, I like things that I like and don’t waste time on things that I don’t.
Watched like 5 episodes and gave up on the piss poor plots and 2d companions.
If you enjoyed it, good for you. But I am always confused by people like you who feel the need to defend the virtue of a show just because someone on the internet disagrees with the quality of content you enjoy.
I didn’t like it, you did. I have watched 5 hours of a show and decided it wasn’t worth my time, you telling me otherwise isn’t going to really change my mind. I have better ways to entertain myself than wasting time on a show I know isn’t for me.
I'm not saying you have to like it, and I'm not trying to "defend it's virtue". I'm pointing out the lack of consistency in your critique, which, objectively, makes no sense.
Honestly, it'd be great if people would stop shitting on 13's run for such shallow reasons, like there's "too many companions", rather than just saying they don't like it. You don't. That's fine. I didn't like Capaldi much, but I'm not blaming his "lack of companions" or the size of his TARDIS or something else equally asinine.
I mean most only had 1-2 in the modern era.
Tenant had 3 (plus Wilfred) and their families, who count for something. Smith had 3. Capaldi had 2. Ecleston is the only Doctor with 1 companion.
And yes, 4 is still "more" than those, but it's not like it's an outrageous or overwhelming amount.
Matt Smith had 5.
as a performer mine is Capaldi, but God damn they really short changed him in the writing
I mean, he still got Heaven Sent. One of the strongest eps in the entire series.
I thought it was the writers who Poochied him but it was his idea.