there is now!
bout time if you ask me. there’s also rumors of Capaldi leaving with him, which i’m mixed about. thought he had finally come into his own Doctor after the last few episodes.
I like Moffat, which is i guess a really unpopular opinion, but he’s been at it for 8 years now, i agree it’s about time. However there is nothing that excites me about his chosen successor other than that he ran a sometimes decent TV show, and plenty of things that unnerve me like his track record of shitty Doctor Who episodes (wrote that ghastly Silurian two-parter in Matt Smith’s first season, and 42, and Dinosaurs on a Spaceship which i liked the first time and have disliked more and more with every reviewing).
Like say what you will about the Moff, but he had a recognizable style and interesting motifs and a bunch of damn good episodes under his belt (I’m comfortable calling the Empty Child story a stone-cold classic)
Anyway there is not going to be much to say in this thread besides talking about the news unless we start to ramble about old episodes. There’s no new episodes this year until next Christmas!
moffat’s low point was s7 and chibnall wrote what I thought were two of the only pleasant episodes in s7 but otherwise his contribution to the show has been pretty unremarkable
capaldi basically saved the show as soon as he came on which was really something given that I thought I was a lot more sick of moffat than I was of smith but I suppose he has robbed the show of its youthful urgency and its ratings, and I actually liked s8 a little better than s9 on balance
maybe davies will come back
Got to say, I think these last two series are the best that Doctor Who has been. Ever, really. Capaldi is of course a revelation, but it’s interesting that Moffat is getting his act together as a writer and producer so late in the game. This is kind of what I was hoping for from the start of his era. In my mind I can kind of pretend that Matt Smith never happened, and just skip from Davies’ era straight to series 8.
Now we’re getting Chibnall, well, in two years. And Capaldi may well stay on for a fourth year, which would be great, though we don’t really know.
What are we thinking about Chibnall now? As Felix says, somehow weirdly his scripts were the best thing out of series 7a, and then there’s the Broadchurch thing. A few years ago I’d have considered Chibnall the second coming of Eric Saward, but… I’m not so sure now. Chibnall is really good at broad melodrama, and at developing empathy for characters with certain difficulties. Rory’s surely aspie dad, for instance, is just adorable. Sweet, a bit sad, a bit exasperating.
Given that in its classical model Doctor Who basically is an overwrought melodrama, maybe given the room to build his own remit, Chibnall would do wonders with it. He certainly seems to have grown as a writer.
Yeah, his Silurian story kind of… pisses me off, actually. It’s such a facile remake of one of the best-ever Doctor Who stories, by a writer who had actual things to say about the world that we live in. I had a few exceptions to earlier scripts that year, but the Silurian story is what put a foul taste in my mouth for the whole Smith era. But… charitably, Chibnall was writing to a difficult remit, and some of the best stuff that lends the on-screen action emotional and logistical context, sounds like it got cut. And that was six years ago. So… hmm.
There’s off-screen stuff, over the next year. Lots of gimmicky Big Finish: John Hurt stuff, Tennant/Tate stuff. The Titan comics tend to be kind of crazy good, also. At least, the Tenth Doctor ones do. The others have their moments.
And I think there’s still a hell of a lot of stuff to unpack about series 9. I keep going back to “Heaven Sent” over and over. This is just such an amazing, what is it, 55 minutes of television.
yeah, but hell bent really didn’t work for me
I like where it went. For me it’s basically all about that moment in the extraction chamber, where the Doctor loses his battle with himself and lets his grief and rage get the best of him.
What did you want it to do differently?
the structure of the episode – from the way he’s talking to Clara in the same bar from the beginning of series 6, to the way he’s received on gallifrey, to the return of maisie Williams’ character so soon – felt wrong after wrong after wrong to me. I did like the extraction chamber scene, but I wasn’t getting along with anything before or after it. I should give it another go. I think I wanted to see gallifrey come back as an ordinary plot device this time and they closed that door as soon as it opened, again.
I guess there may be different levels of expectations at play here, as after her setup I presumed that Maisie Williams would serve some role in the final episode, and I got the impression that Gallifrey’s return would be sort of (yikes, here we go) a MacGuffin for the personal drama and thematic work around the Doctor and Clara.
Or catalyst. Let’s say catalyst, and allow Hitchcock some rest.
The framing device certainly is peculiar! The way I see it, we were expected to expect that this last episode would be about the Doctor finally saying goodbye to Clara, and so the story leaps ahead of us to say, yeah, the end has happened. We basically know what’s going on, and we’ve known for a long time. So this final episode is going to be a post-mortem while we muse about what all of this means.
Given that these last two series seem to be defined in part by an unprecedented use of literary devices, this structure doesn’t stand out to me as much as it might have in, I don’t know, 2006. It’s more like, oh, that’s interesting. We’re doing this now. Okay. So, what does this device tell me about the substance of what I’m seeing?
I liked “Heaven Sent” a lot more than i expected to (considering it’s a modern DW finale that takes place on Gallifrey, pretty much a recipe for a clusterfuck disaster)
Modern Who is at its best when it uses the big dramatics to make a point about character instead of just being dramatic for its own sake. In “Heaven Sent” you have the Doctor violating all of his ideals and putting the fate of Gallifrey and THE UNIVERSE on the line to save his best friend, but ultimately they have to split up not because of some bullshit pseudoscience chronolaws but because he and Clara realize their relationship has become toxic. It is also a wonderful send-off for Clara in that she finally gets to become the Doctor in her own right, zipping around in a diner-TARDIS with her immortal companion.
Oh yeah and shoutout to Moffat for revisiting the Doctor-Donna memory wipe plot point and basically telling it to fuck off. I always hated Donna’s exit and felt like it was a vile thing for the Doctor to do.
I absolutely agree that seasons 8 and 9 have been the best the new show has done (and yeah possibly the entire show). S8 is unquestionably my favorite new Who series (i still get giddy (aunt) when i think about how good “Listen” and “Flatline” were) and Capaldi/Coleman are likely my favorite Doctor/companion double act in the new show. Likewise agree that looking back the Smith era is pretty shaky, it has some really memorable episodes but i think only the S5 finale lives up to the promise of his first story.
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Oh yeah and shoutout to Moffat for revisiting the Doctor-Donna memory wipe plot point and basically telling it to fuck off. I always hated Donna’s exit and felt like it was a vile thing for the Doctor to do.
Absolutely. It just strikes me as a very thoughtful way to resolve their story, with that same attention to themes that I liked in series 8, except even more so.
I like Hell Bent too, particularly on the scale of Doctor Who finales. Heaven Sent, though, is like the bottle episode to show up all other bottle episodes. It’s curious for an episode so drenched in continuity and divorced from so much of the furniture of Doctor Who, but I really feel like I’d want to show that episode to anyone new to the series, to illustrate what it can be. I think it would stand alone fairly well as a movie, without having to know any prior continuity…
I think I’m one of the only people I know who likes S6 a lot better than S5, even though S6 was when everyone started to rightly become very skeptical of moffat’s plotting
the angels two-parter and the lodger are great but otherwise I felt like 5 was asking way too much. 6 is a bit more nonsense-foreboding on the whole but it’s fairly exciting and has almost no duds.
The best classic-series competition, to my mind, would have to be season 7 (Pertwee’s first, with Caroline John) and the tail end of the Cartmel era. The latter is disorganized and under-funded, but it’s so earnest. They were trying to make something out of the show.
The Zygon two-parter is basically a modern-day answer to The Silurians. This is what Chibnall’s story should have been. Though there are a few troublesome messages that seem to have crept in, I’m going to charitably suggest less due to malice than because it was mostly produced by Western middle class white men…
I think, actually, aside from a few episodes in the first half of series 5, my favorite part of the Smith era is 7b. Clara may be underwritten, but Coleman does so much with what she’s given. After the self-involvement of the previous companion, it was refreshing to have an adult in the role. Someone with empathy, who listened to people and wasn’t out to prove anything. The Rings of Akhaten is such a great showcase for Clara. Both the Neil Cross episodes, actually.
People don’t like Akhaten much, and that seems to be because it has singing and a kid in it. And then there’s that tortured denouement that’s pretty much like every other tortured denoument in modern Who, so I don’t know why you’d single it out here unless you were looking for things to complain about. I like that it makes an effort to build a world, in a way that you rarely saw during Smith’s era. I like how much time it allows for the characters to talk, and express fears and desires, and work to address all of this stuff. It’s not just a clockwork plot.
If you include Snowmen and Day with 7b, then it’s absolutely my favorite part of Smith’s tenure. If you include Time… er. Well, nothing’s perfect.
oh i guess i meant “Hell Bent” when i said “Heaven Sent” womp womp wooommp
I fucking loved “Heaven Sent” and thought it was pretty daring for a new Who episode
The Cartmel era is my favorite classic era! It feels like something i would have seen on PBS as a kid and adored. Unlike most people i even really like the first season of it (Paradise Towers is low-key one of the best stories)
Huh, I thought 7b was just awful start to finish, to be honest – well, Snowmen was good, but from there it seemed like they were writing Clara, and the Doctor’s relationship to Clara, as way too manic and important.
heaven sent was absolutely fantastic, no argument there
Pretty excited about the remake…
Heheh.
I hated 7b until “Name” (and i really liked “Time”, um, thematically at least). “Day of the Doctor” is better than it has any right to be.
I think i just couldnt jive with the pacing, too fast and blustery. I actually tuned out at “Akhaten” when it was running – went into that episode with high hopes but i just hated the piss out of it. Checked in again a few episodes later for “Nightmare in Silver” and was so thoroughly disappointed that i didn’t come back until “Day” came out.
Full disclosure, I’ve not gone back and rewatched any of series 7 since first broadcast, aside from the Cross episodes. It definitely was Moffat at his most plotty-wotty and solipsistic. But I think I was just used to that at that point. And in terms of the chemistry between the leads, it was like a breath of fresh air after the Pond Show. For any stumbles along the way, I felt like I was getting my show back. The Gatiss episodes weren’t even too bad!
Oh, also it has the best title sequence.
I think my impression is further colored by 7a, which was such a low point in every way.
Oh yeah you reminded me the one straight-up bad thing about Capaldi’s run so far is the abysmal title sequence. What the fuck’s up with that spinning clock vortex shit