Doctor Who II

[Werthead]

That was an episode that was trying to do almost too much at once, like the Secret History of UNIT, the infiltration of Passenger, the Doctor meeting her adopted mother (!), the Victorian Avengers adventure, the space station hovering between universes (!!) and a full-scale Sontaran invasion of Earth. Oddly, I kind of enjoyed the chaotic insanity of it all.

The best bit was meeting the Indian mystic who was completely bored with the usual holy one schtick, which was amusing.

Also, minor reference to 1966 serial The War Machines and apparently an off-screen shouting appearance by Corporal Benton. Pretty certain they fucked up the chronology of UNIT: UNIT was founded between 1968's The Web of Fear and The Invasion, which aired later that year but is usually held to have been set between two and five years later; it certainly didn't exist in 1963, as the Seventh Doctor had to work with the British Rocket Group in Remembrance of the Daleks instead and it's hinted the BRG was folded into UNIT later on.

However, fucking up the chronology of UNIT is a Doctor Who tradition at this point, so oddly unmoved by it.

[Derfel Cadarn]

The Brigadier states in Invasion that it’s been 4 years since Web of Fear.

I think a Mpffat episode stated placed Web of Fear in ‘68 and that it was the catalyst for Unit.

I did solve the Unit dating thing (go me!) which I may post if I get the chance.

[williamjm]

With one episode to go it does feel like there's still a lot of plot left to resolve, I think how well it does that is going to be crucial to how the season is judged overall.

[Werthead]

I think the season started off well holding a very complicated plot together and making it mostly make sense, and in the process gave us at least two of the best episodes in a decade, but it then couldn't sustain that and just totally lost the plot later on. It descended into nonsensical gibberish, albeit entertaining gibberish. Though I'm not sure where the Doctor's moral compass about genociding Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans is at these days.

Also slightly cheesy punting off the fob watch/Timeless Children resolution for another year.

[polishgenius]

It's so weird that Doctor Who, of all shows, has made Time apparently evil.
Bit disappointingly light on who Swarm and Azure actually were.

 

 

Also there doesn't appear to be any note, at the end, that they might have stopped the final end but the universe is still totally fucked. Even the genocide of Karvanista's entire people is played almost as a joke.

 

Still, enjoyed both the episode for the most part and the season as a whole.

 

 

13 hours ago, Werthead said:

Though I'm not sure where the Doctor's moral compass about genociding Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans is at these days.

 

Yeah it's a little weird that in the very same series that she blew up on someone for killing a Sontaran fleet she did the same and okay, those guys were actively attacking Earth but she also allowed the deaths of Daleks and Cybermen who were actively under a white flag at the time.

Obviously Doctor Who's always had fairly wibbly-wobbly morals in that sense but Chibnall's particuarly got a problem with the moral message- remember the finale of his first season where he essentially justified 'just following orders' and 'my faith says so' for knowingly committing genocide. This was a lot less problematic than that in that at least it's just a fairly standard 'Doctor defeats her enemies in big dramatic finale' plot.

 

New Year Special: meeeeeeeeh. Doctor Who doing Groundhog Day time loops, potential for joy. Aisling Bea, yay. But why always Daleks? Fuck's sake.

[mormont]

I do have to say this series was disappointing. It gave me the impression that Chibnall just threw any idea he found interesting into the script and didn't bother developing it or relating it to other ideas already in the script. Some of those ideas were good enough to give us some cool scenes, even good episodes. Other scenes and episodes felt like a writers' room brainstorm just thrown up there on screen without a rewrite or an edit pass, just transcribed from the sticky notes. 'What if Time were the enemy? Doctor splits in three for some reason? Division maybe going to destroy the universe?' 

The actors deserved better. They were the entire reason to watch this season. 

[Spockydog]

I enjoyed it. Pretty much delivered on what Doctor Who is all about. Plenty of entertaining moments, in a madcap, nonsensical plot, that shouldn't be taken too seriously.

 

[john]

I actually thought the ending was relatively coherent given the amount of stuff to resolve but there is still a lot of questions left unanswered and a definite impression that it would have been better if some of these ideas were, as mormont says, developed over the course of one or two episodes, rather than just thrown in for coolness.

I also don’t really know what Swarm and Azure are. Time personified? But the time lords locked them up at the beginning of time? And there’s also a planet of time?And swarm is also the name of the event eating the universe? And they apparently failed (although most of the universe did get eaten) but then they are rewarded by ascending to immateriality?

Didn’t get who the grand serpent was, or why division were guarding him at one point. Didn’t see the point of the psychic, surely the same plot would have worked without that. Did like the in utero tamagotchi and the passenger as a macguffin for getting rid of the swarm.

But the thing that annoyed me the most for some reason, was the casual notion that you can form a shield around earth with seven billion ships. I know earth is overpopulated but there’s a lot of wilderness out there, those ships, piloted by one dog person, would have to be enormous.

[Denvek]

1 hour ago, polishgenius said:

New Year Special: meeeeeeeeh. Doctor Who doing Groundhog Day time loops, potential for joy. Aisling Bea, yay. But why always Daleks? Fuck's sake.

The Daleks have just been completely wiped out (alongside the Cybermen and the Sontarans). What's an appropriate period to wait before bringing them back? How about next episode!

[Werthead]

If the specials delve deeper into the aftermath of the Flux, fine, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.

I'm rewatching the earlier seasons of the reboot and I think Davies had a monstrous advantage in having a lot of low-hanging fruit he could pluck for the scripts. Have a single Dalek roaming around and then five episodes later bring back thousands of time? Brilliant. Bring back the Cybermen, the Master, the Sontarans? All good, because the core target audience had never seen them before and it's all fresh and new to them whilst RTD could gleefully ransack 20+ year old ideas for inspiration. The current writers can't do that and, fascinatingly, RTD can't do that when he takes over for 2023. That'll be an interesting challenge for him.

I do miss RTD's rule that you can't kill off a villain or monster and then bring them back with no explanation, and he was pretty good about giving them an "out" to explain their next appearance. Moffat did just say fuck it to that that and let monsters show up willy-nilly with no rhyme or reason (I'm still extremely hazy when the "proper" Cybermen took over again from the parallel-universe Cybermen, but maybe that will become more apparent in the rewatch).

[polishgenius]

Moffatt saying 'fuck it' was kind of a theme. So many good ideas wasted coz he couldn't be fucked to finish the thought. Obviously big ones like what he did to the Silence and how did Gallifrey come back into the universe and the utter mess he ultimately made of River Song, but even little things like I still wanna know what the fuck it was from Bill's first episode that left a puddle of engine oil considerably more powerful than the TARDIS. 


Also thinking back on it it is kind of disappointing that in 16 years of New Who we've really only had three new creatures that have been established as part of Who lore, and only really the Angels that really took off (Ood and Judoon being the other two I'm thinking of). The Silence could have worked if Moff hadn't ruined them (that's still fixable, but it requires some clever storytelling). Other than that there's occasionally elements that could be picked back up and made more of - the Shakri from Power of Three could certainly be developed, Gus from Mummy on the Orient Express was almost definitely left there by Jamie Mathieson to be- but looking back it's kinda remarkable how often it's either just a throwaway monster of the week just there coz they needed a monster to justify the Doctor being in a historical period, or a returning pre-hiatus thing. 


 

2 hours ago, john said:

or why division were guarding him at one point.

Were they? I didn't catch that. 

[Derfel Cadarn]

To be fair the universe was fucked in Logopolis when entropy wiped out massive chunks of it

[felice]

2 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

To be fair the universe was fucked in Logopolis when entropy wiped out massive chunks of it

Not on the same scale. In Logopolis a significant fraction of the universe was destroyed, but the majority (including our galaxy) was unaffected. The impression I got was that the Flux destroyed almost all the universe, and Earth was probably the only world completely unharmed (beyond any damage done by the Sontaran occupation).

[john]

5 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Were they? I didn't catch that. 

I meant like how Vinder was working for him at some point, like a bodyguard or something? And then he reported on him and got exiled. At that point I thought the grand serpent was a senior division operative. Maybe he was, i genuinely don’t know what was going on.

[polishgenius]

5 minutes ago, john said:

I meant like how Vinder was working for him at some point, like a bodyguard or something? And then he reported on him and got exiled. At that point I thought the grand serpent was a senior division operative. Maybe he was, i genuinely don’t know what was going on.

I don't think the outfit Vinder was working for had anything to do with Division. Was just Grand Serpent's dictatorial government/army on his own planet, no? Did Vinder's messages back to home base reference Division, in that first episode?

[john]

32 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I don't think the outfit Vinder was working for had anything to do with Division. Was just Grand Serpent's dictatorial government/army on his own planet, no? Did Vinder's messages back to home base reference Division, in that first episode?

Pfft, I just realised I thought that because he was playing the part in the Doctor’s flashback of one of the team that went on the mission to Atropos. But you’re right, apparently Vinder just works for the space fleet of the grand serpent. My bad, although I maintain it was pretty hard to keep track of everything.  

[mormont]

The Grand Serpent... what was all that about? I mean, a fun bit of acting but, like, who is he? What was his plan? What was his purpose in the story? I don't have a clue. The six episodes are overstuffed with enemies as it is: the Sontarans, the Weeping Angels, Division, Tecteun (we hardly knew ye), Swarm and Azure (who herself is, I'm guessing, a late insertion after someone realised Swarm had too many monologues), and oh yeah Time itself (which probably seemed like a great idea but I kind of hope future writers just pretend it never happened).

I'd love to have seen an episode or two focusing on the Grand Serpent, Vinder and Bel and explaining some of their actual story. But they all got thrown into this other story instead, which was a shame.

ETA - of course that's probably the idea, potential spinoff show with Bel, Vinder, their kid and Karvanista The Last Lupari fighting the Grand Serpent?

[Werthead]

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.

[williamjm]

On 12/6/2021 at 1:03 PM, john said:

But the thing that annoyed me the most for some reason, was the casual notion that you can form a shield around earth with seven billion ships. I know earth is overpopulated but there’s a lot of wilderness out there, those ships, piloted by one dog person, would have to be enormous.

I also think that if you are enveloping the Earth while everything else gets destroyed around it there might be a bit of a long-term problem when the Flux eats the Sun.

Overall I did enjoy the series and given the frankly excessive number of ideas and plotlines thrown into it, it did still somehow end up being more coherent than a lot of the big Doctor Who finales of recent years. However, the after-effects of the Flux are one of those Doctor Who plotlines that is going to be quietly glossed over and not really mentioned again.

[SpaceChampion]

The 7 billion ships figure actually does seem reasonable.  Depends on the altitude of orbit.  If it's 500km above the earth, that's a shell (4*pi*R^2) of less than 600,000,000 square km.  Each ship is about 300x300 meters.

If you are going up to synchronous orbit however, it goes up to about  1800x1800 meter ships, assuming squareness.