Doctor Who

[Yorkshire Square]

Any other fans out there? Thoughts on the new Doctor?

I've found the last couple of regenerations hard going, mainly due the quality of writing. I think Capaldi was a bad choice, but Whitaker could have been better with stronger material.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-61371123

[pjt]

Any other fans out there? Thoughts on the new Doctor?

I've found the last couple of regenerations hard going, mainly due the quality of writing. I think Capaldi was a bad choice, but Whitaker could have been better with stronger material.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-61371123

I an very intrigued what it will be like. I loved Jodie as the Doctor, but Chibnall was not on par the first two seasons. It was kinda disjointed, and the kid and the dad were really not developed characters. Yaz was, but that wasn't enough. This season, The Flux was really great. Chris is in his element when he does big overarching stories like Broadchurch was.

I'm a diehard Moffat fan, and a huge 11th Doctor fan, but I loved both the 9th and 10th doctor. And Donna, lol (and Capaldi was totally okay, after I get used to him being all gruffy). So I very curious, and very positive.

Edit: As for Ncuti Gatwa, yay Scottish, and Russell said he already had another actor almost certain as the Doctor when he did the casting and changed his mind immediately. I am very, very curious.

[Soundwaveseeker]

To be honest, I only know the old doctors - which I love. Got stacks of dvds from the first Doctor on up to Sylvester McCoy. I have a soft spot for that stuff, but never got around to taking in the newer doctors from the 2000's to now. Nothing against them, just haven't jumped in yet or found the time to. Seen a few of them, mostly David Tennant ones, they were fine and I liked them well enough. But the old ones - can't go wrong with those rubber monsters and soundstage spaceship hallways.

[Ash Armstrong]

I gave up watching at some point early in Malcolm Tucker's tenure. He wasn't in the role that long though, was he?
I saw the beginning of Jodie Whittaker's Who, and there were so many companions, and the writing was really poor, as was much of the acting, that I failed to finish the episode.
My favourite Doctor was Jon Pertwee.

[Frumious B]

Chibnall has been awful so no way to go except up. I trust RTD and based on the clips I’ve seen of Gatwa he is a talented, vibrant and quirky actor. I think he can bring the energy and hopefully some otherworldly alienness too.

[Frumious B]

And Capaldi was my favorite new series Doctor.

[Gilly Goodness]

Some critics felt a gender-blind written Whittaker failed to grasp the opportunity of a female doctor.

Will a colour blind doctor do the same?

[Grey Wolf]

I stopped after a few episodes with Whittaker because of the writing, I was losing interest during Capaldi's run anyway. Liked the actors, didn't like the writing and all the deaths. Killing people was always part of the show, it just seems like it got so much grimmer.

It's such a bloodbath sometimes. Maybe Barnaby and Jones* from Midsomer Murders need to investigate this Doctor person. Lock them up and save a lot of lives.

* or whoever is the DS these days, I've lost track.


P.S. Good luck to the new guy, hope they write better stories.

[Gilly Goodness]

It's such a bloodbath sometimes. Maybe Barnaby and Jones* from Midsomer Murders need to investigate this Doctor person. Lock them up and save a lot of lives.

* or whoever is the DS these days, I've lost track.

Nick Hendrix plays Jamie Winter.

Season 23 greenlit.

Holly "dishy" Willoughby to cameo.



_____________________


Winter: "So why did The Doctor slay all the old people
of Midsomer Malham?"

Barnaby: " Love. Sargent. The oldest motive there is."

[RelayerI]

Any other fans out there? Thoughts on the new Doctor?

I've found the last couple of regenerations hard going, mainly due the quality of writing. I think Capaldi was a bad choice, but Whitaker could have been better with stronger material.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-61371123

Big fan. Big Finish buyer here !

I liked Capaldi.

Jodie made some bad acting choices,which direction should have eliminated. The gurning to the camera was a no brainer.

Pretty much all of the rest of the problems apart from the costume (which I think she had input in) were dialogue (Fam ?) script and plot related.

I've found things to like in Jodie's run but got two episodes into Flux and can't seem to raise any interest to watch the rest. Glad to see Chibnall move on.

I think RTD is a crappy scifi writer but a great character writer and a good showrunner. I get the impression he'll be overseeing a larger Whoniverse of spin-offs soon after the relaunch so the less writing he contributes the better.

If he does a good job I think this could be a very good time to be a Who fan.

[Chris2210]

The last time I followed it Tom Baker was the doctor. They should have guested him on this last series. I can just hear it: “M’[Time]Lord, you have a woman’s policebox “. Could have been magical.

[Yorkshire Square]

The last time I followed it Tom Baker was the doctor. They should have guested him on this last series. I can just hear it: “M’[Time]Lord, you have a woman’s policebox “. Could have been magical.

Opinion differs on the matter... 😉

[Soundwaveseeker]

Coincidently I've been in a Who kick this past week or so and grabbed some dvds off the shelf - a few of the Peter Davison ones and a Sylvester McCoy. Got at least something from the first 7 Doctors. I couldn't tell you my favorite, they all are different. I might want to watch a Jon Pertwee one, haven't seen one in a while. Colin Baker - underrated. Tom Baker was probably the most known Doctor here in the US, prior to the Doctor Who resurgence in the 2000's. But I remember the other ones being aired back in the 80's too.

Just haven't plunged into any of the newer (post 1989) Doctors, I'm still catching up with the original wave. Nothing against any of the newer ones, just haven't got time to jump down that rabbit hole. I'm probably missing good stuff, but I'll stick to the old ones for now.

[Frumious B]

The last time I followed it Tom Baker was the doctor. They should have guested him on this last series. I can just hear it: “M’[Time]Lord, you have a woman’s policebox “. Could have been magical.

Tom Baker did make a guest appearance a few years back.

[downbyariver]

I'm not familiar with the new doctor's prior body of work as an actor, but I trust that he'll do a fine job.

I kept joking with people the last couple years that casting a woman was not nearly as dramatic a step as casting a Scotsman as the doctor, and here they are with their second Scotsmen out of the last three doctors. Oh, and he's also black.

I kid, but I do like the gender and ethnic diversity.

I'm about to talk about the show itself, including storylines and revelations from everything except the most recently air special, which I haven't seen yet.

So, SPOILERS FOR ALREADY AIRED EPISODES (EXCEPT THE MOST RECENT ONE) BELOW.

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Though I'm sure it was controversial in Who fandom, when the doctor was revealed to have not been originally from Gallifrey, with the Time Lords being a result of the people on the planet he wound up on eventually incorporating his genetics into who they were (Originally, the doctor could regenerate, but they couldn't.) and then retconning their own history so as to reflect a false narrative that they'd always been able to regenerate and had some sort of manifest destiny type claim over time and space (predicated on that falsehood), I was blown away. I thought it was a really bold decision, and something I honestly didn't see coming, but which could be said to in retrospect have had a clue or two dropped*,

They further revealed that the doctors we've known have all come after a mind wipe, essentially, and that there were a lot of previous regenerations that the doctor has no memory of. They even showed one of them- a black woman (Technically, the earliest black person and the first woman we've seen in terms of the internal chronology of the doctor to date, even though she wasn't ever the doctor we followed the adventures of on-screen).

The doctor sort of opted not to restore his memories by throwing them into the heart of the TARDIS and asking her to keep them somewhere the doctor wouldn't be able to find them unless and until they were needed. It'd be nice to either have the doctor get those memories restored (With the viewing audience getting the highlights), or having him/her/they find out organically what he/she/they were up to before the person we know as the first doctor appeared on our television screens, what prompted the doctor to agree to have his/her/their memory erased (Or did he/she/they agree?), etc..

If throwing the memories down what is only a small step away from literally qualifying as a memory hole was part of a plan for the doctor to need the memories sometime soon and have them resurface, cool. However, my concern is that it was the show's way of dropping the storyline or putting it off, and that we'll neither see it in the literally one special we have left from the current show runner or anything from the new show runner. It doesn't seem like RTD's type of plot line (And, of course, it's entirely possible that his type of plot line or not, he'll just opt to pick up stuff from his first run and go with that), but this was a real shocking reveal and a very important storyline. I'd like to see something done with it.

I mean, I guess it could be revealed as some sort of elaborate subterfuge, but if that's the case, explore that, and tell us who the doctor who preceded his mindwipe, who definitely seemed to have the doctor's personality, mannerisms, toys, and TARDIS really is.

I feel like they could bring a lot of interesting stuff from the past of the series into it if they decided to cast the newish status quo as accurate. For example, for decades now, people involved with the show have been trying to explain away, or simply dismiss as somehow not counting, the line in the 1996 telemovie where the doctor says his mother was from earth. Now, in retrospect, it could be that the doctor's mother was from earth (Obviously with an alien father of some sort), and that the reason he only mentioned it once, is that because he didn't consciously remember it- it was only in confusion of a recent regeneration that the memory surfaced in fragmentary form for just long enough for him to spit it out. That would also provide an in-canon explanation for why he's always hanging around earth so much with human companions- that it's a subconscious kinship and protectiveness because he's a native, even though he didn't know it. The TARDIS might even know it and keep spitting him out there for that reason. Maybe his mother used to wear a scarf and had a weakness for Jelly Babies candy.