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Doctor Who II


AncalagonTheBlack

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8 hours ago, polishgenius said:

On the other hand the Earth was apparently within a shell of Lupari ships for several weeks with no effects from the loss of sunshine - and hell, why is the sun still there?

My rewatch just reached the episode where the TARDIS tows Earth across thousands, if not millions of light-years of space with absolutely no problem whatsoever, and five minutes later people on Earth seem to have forgotten it's happened or put it down to paint fumes or something.

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On 12/7/2021 at 1:27 AM, Werthead said:

I'm seeing some rumours that originally the season would have consisted of eight episodes - losing just two from COVID - and the drop to six took place when they realised how expensive working with COVID restrictions was going to be (that I can believe, Netflix have said that some of their shows are now costing $1 million per episode more to film with the restrictions, and for their lower-budget, lower-viewership shows like GLOW that just made then uneconomical to film), and it looks like the resolution to the story bore the brunt of having everything crammed in.

That said, this kind of crazed resolution plotting has been par for the course for both Chibnall and Moffat, so I'm not sure if that there needs to be that kind of explanation.

I read on Reddit that apparently it was supposed to be 10 episodes, which got cut down to 8, and then to 6... so we lost almost half of the story. No wonder some things didn't really make much sense.

Fortunately I have a really good suspension of disbelief for "soft" (or space-opera?) science fiction, so I just try to enjoy the good bits and not think about it too much ;)

Looking forward to what RTD is going to do with it though, apparently his condition for coming back was full creative control?

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11 hours ago, polishgenius said:

On the other hand the Earth was apparently within a shell of Lupari ships for several weeks with no effects from the loss of sunshine - and hell, why is the sun still there?

I assume the Lupari ships were generating a hologram of the sky, complete with sun, moon, etc. And they went back to resume doing that permanently after the Sontarans were dealt with.

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3 hours ago, Werthead said:

My rewatch just reached the episode where the TARDIS tows Earth across thousands, if not millions of light-years of space with absolutely no problem whatsoever, and five minutes later people on Earth seem to have forgotten it's happened or put it down to paint fumes or something.

Stolen Earth/Journey's End. So it's not like RTD has never done that.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Davies has confirmed his first Doctor Who episode will be the 60th Anniversary Special, likely to go out the week of 23 November 2023.

So we have Eve of the Daleks on New Year's Day, a further special likely at Easter and a finale airing during the BBC's 100th anniversary in October 2022. Then a 13-month gap to the start of the Davies era.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Pretty solid episode, the best of Chibnall's specials and the first Dalek story in ages which showed them to be ruthless and cunning.

Having downplayed the possibility of a Yaz-Doctor relationship in the last series, it's a bit odd they reversed that decision here and decided to full on mention it here, even if it never goes anywhere.  

Also, the next special (to air at Easter, probably) features the Chinese pirate queen Madame Ching and the Sea Devils (aquatic and somewhat dumber cousins of the Silurians) in their first appearance since Warriors of the Deep in 1984. Also, it looks like Dan might leave at the end of the next special, whilst Yaz and Thirteen bow out in the October 2022 special, leaving RTD with a blank slate for when he takes over.

Interestingly, reports that Series 14 will start shooting in summer 2022, some 18 months before it's due to start transmission.

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I enjoyed that a whole lot more than the last series. Smart decision to go smaller in scale and remind us that saving a couple of lives matters as much to the Doctor as saving the universe. I do like a time loop story, even if they don't always quite hang together, and this was a good use of the Daleks too.

Pauline McLynn, highlight of the episode!

Lowlight of the episode, sorry, but Nick is not just weird, he's downright creepy and it's not a great message to send that Sarah forgives him for his stalkerish behaviour. That man needs therapy, not a round-the-world trip.

I do like that they're tiptoeing further towards Yaz and the Doctor being a couple. It is still small steps but they're past the point of deniability, at least.

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33 minutes ago, mormont said:

Lowlight of the episode, sorry, but Nick is not just weird, he's downright creepy and it's not a great message to send that Sarah forgives him for his stalkerish behaviour. That man needs therapy, not a round-the-world trip.

I do like that they're tiptoeing further towards Yaz and the Doctor being a couple. It is still small steps but they're past the point of deniability, at least.

Yeah, the Nick/Sarah thing was extremely weird and didn't work at all.

I don't think Yaz and the Doctor will be a couple - they only have two episodes left and will be dodging Chinese pirates and Sea Devils in the next one, and then the Master from the sound of it in the last one - but maybe they'll at least acknowledge the possibility it could have happened if they weren't completely different species, maybe on a Rose/Ten level.

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1 hour ago, mormont said:

Pauline McLynn, highlight of the episode!

I knew I recognised her from somewhere but I couldn’t place it.

Yaz/Doctor now explicit, at least that they have feelings for each other.

I can’t recall seeing any time loop episodes before where everyone is aware they’re in a loop - not just in Doctor Who but in anything. Normally it’s just one or two people who have to tell everyone else every time.

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16 minutes ago, Maltaran said:

I can’t recall seeing any time loop episodes before where everyone is aware they’re in a loop - not just in Doctor Who but in anything. Normally it’s just one or two people who have to tell everyone else every time.

In this episode the loop was restricted to the people in the building, so Sarah's mum was unaware the loop was going on, despite her having different dialogue in each loop. A bit like Groundhog Day but where the loop is restricted to just Bill Murray's character (and, as one of my friends theorised in an interesting fashion, the groundhog: "Why?" "It's in the name of the movie!" "What?").

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3 hours ago, Maltaran said:

I can’t recall seeing any time loop episodes before where everyone is aware they’re in a loop - not just in Doctor Who but in anything. Normally it’s just one or two people who have to tell everyone else every time.

That's a good point, I also can't think of any where everyone has this level of memory. In the TNG time loop episode I seem to remember all the crew experiencing some deja vu but they didn't clearly remember in the same way.

The bit where each successive iteration is shorter is also rare, although Agents of Shield also did that.

Overall, I liked the episode although I agree that Nick was creepy rather than eccentric. It is a nice change of pace to have such a contained episode after the convoluted Flux storyline.

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I was extremely bored.

One thing this project revealed was how atrocious the BBC's scheduling for Doctor Who has been since 2017. It was pretty bad starting in 2012 (when we started getting split seasons and entire seasons spread over 18 months or more), but it got awful after Moffat left. As a result it makes the Thirteenth Doctor the second-longest-running Doctor of all time, despite only ranking ninth in number of appearances, and effectively only making 2.5 seasons (creeping up to 3 if you bundle in all the specials).

I'm doing the same thing for companions at the moment, and Yaz gets boosted to easily being the longest-running companion of all time in terms of the span of her appearances, though she'll likely end up only being around tenth in total number of appearances (behind Clara among modern companions and only just ahead of Amy).

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I'm assuming Aisling Bea wrote or improvised most of her dialogue coz Chibnall isn't that funny.

 

I agree that Nick is creepy not charmingly nerdy. Other than that, though, good episode. Not a great one, but fine.

That said there seems to be some writing/editing jank with what was going on with the TARDIS doors. Am I remembering wrong, or was it not breaking up before the Flux started and got all up in its grill? It's like they decided on that as a reason to lock them out, then couldn't be bothered to find a new one when they decided multiple doors was gonna be too much in an already packed Flux. 

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 1/1/2022 at 10:45 PM, Maltaran said:

I can’t recall seeing any time loop episodes before where everyone is aware they’re in a loop - not just in Doctor Who but in anything. Normally it’s just one or two people who have to tell everyone else every time.

Wasn't there an episode of Doctor Who during the Tom Baker years. Companion was Romana (Lalla Ward). 

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7 hours ago, sifth said:

There's rumors going around that David Tennant is coming back. Probably BS, but something I've been seeing quite a few articles for this weekend. 

Amusingly, I predicted this idea a while back, because RTD is in a bit of a bind with having to introduce a new Doctor in the 60th Anniversary Special. You don't necessarily want to combine both of those things together because they distract from one another.

One way around that is to have the Thirteenth Doctor "degenerate" into a prior form for no apparent reason, perhaps setting up a mystery that the Doctor has to solve, possibly with the help of earlier incarnations (or if they don't want to do that, just having Tennant back as "the" Doctor for the 60th could be special enough). That is then resolved and the proper, brand-new Doctor comes in after the 60th for their own special introduction.

The other, maybe more likely, possibility is that Tennant is simply coming back for the 60th (possibly alongside Smith) for the traditional multi-Doctor romp, however they handle that.

Quote

Wasn't there an episode of Doctor Who during the Tom Baker years. Companion was Romana (Lalla Ward). 

There was a limited time loop for about 25 seconds in the first episode of City of Death (Paris goes into a time loop because of Grand Maester Pycelle and the Doctor and Romana repeat the loop once but thanks to their Time Lord awareness they break free of it).

The Fourth Doctor was big on dumping thing in time loops as way of defeating the bad guys without killing them. He did that with the Vardans in The Invasion of Time and I vaguely remember one of the Key to Time story resolutions involving a time loop. We don't see the loop in either case, though.

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It would be a very bold, not to say insane, choice for RTD to take his carefully negotiated creative blank slate and use it to reinstate the same performer as his previous era. Having a 60th special which is some kind of ‘search for the Doctor’ with one or more previous Doctors is not a bad idea though.

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8 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Wasn't there an episode of Doctor Who during the Tom Baker years. Companion was Romana (Lalla Ward). 

The chronic hysteresis in Meglos? They carry out the exact same actions repeatedly, but have a bit of time at the end of each loop when they're aware of what's happening and can act freely before it resets.

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