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Doctor Who Series 13: Goodbye, Mr. Chibs

Started by Norton Canes, August 10, 2021, 01:08:47 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

daf

Quote from: Mister Six on August 31, 2021, 11:11:11 AM
or developed time travel.

First trip -  to the BBC junking unit to rescue copies of The Myth Makers!

purlieu

Quote from: Midas on August 30, 2021, 10:15:58 PMhow much longer can they keep churning this series out?
I think the dramatic difference between the version of the show in 1963 and the show in 2013 shows just how adaptable it is. If it can last 50 years on a small number of core ideas and otherwise almost infinite flexibility, then there's no reason it can't go on for another 50, provided the right people are behind it.

Replies From View

The entire point is that the show can be whatever 'exhilarating adventure' means within the era it's being made.  It isn't bound by any previous concept of this, unless you happen to be burdened by a showrunner who believes that it should be.  If for example the show is being run by a terminally shit man who hasn't had a single new thought since the age of 16, has no grasp of drama or character and only an obsession with shoe-horning pedantic references to 1970s episodes, then you would have a problem with Doctor Who probably becoming a bit shite for a while.

Thomas

Besides, 21st century Who has been on for almost(ish) as long as the 20th century series was, and it's given us some of the best stories. Diehard classic loyalists mightn't agree, but there's stuff across series 3, 5, and 10 especially that's up there with the great stories from the '60s and '70s. Also some of the best actors in the lead role.

I don't want them to retire the show yet, largely because the timing would be so regrettable. If they wanted to put Doctor Who to bed, they had the perfect opportunity after Capaldi's final episodes. They had a bang, and then they commissioned three further series of whimper.

The BBC have given themselves a moral responsibility to make the show good again before being allowed cancel it.

olliebean

It would be particularly unfortunate if it were cancelled immediately after the first female Doctor, given that a certain sort of person would take that as perpetual license to go on about how wokeness had killed Doctor Who.

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put to sleep by wokeness, eh lads!!!!



not so "woke" (awake) then, haha!!!!!!

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it's like all those spoons everywhere when what do you need only?  correct, a knife

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and it's like raaaaaaaaiiiiiuuun in four weddings and a funeral when he doesn't even notice





alanis morissette would have made a good gallagher brother if truth be told


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Midas

It could easily exist as an innocent escapist fantasy series in perpetuity; the sandbox is large and flexible enough to adapt itelf to whatever vision the writer wishes to conjure. But should it? My frustration is that I'm increasingly feeling as though within the bigger picture of the series this can only set out to denigrate meaning. With the series up until recently, there seems, to me, to have been the (obviously) ridiculous unspoken notion that everything happening was transitory; the character has only a limited number of lives. If the series has any message at all it's probably something about life being short and precious, questioning authority, going out and enjoying being alive, and so on. Hasn't this been lost now? How can anything be meaningful if it's destined to never end?

A criticism of the timeless child was that by turning the Doctor into an infinitely old immortal being, it nullifies the importance of any one incarnation. Assuming this is a valid criticism, couldn't you say this about the show itself? That by continuing on forever using, re-using and (attempting to) re-invent every science fiction trope under the sun they're only going to undermine the significance, and to some degree, meaning of what came before. I think this is illustrated with episodes like Kerblam!, where subverting audience expectations is prioritised over making a compelling anti-capitalist point because killer robots have been done in the series already. It's apparently better to place the Doctor in a scenario that doesn't make sense and re-invent the character as morally-bankrupt than to succomb to clichés.

When you take away the threat/promise of an ending, the series can only set itself up to go round and round in circles within an eternal Neverland, and I'm not sure if that's really a good thing.

My current thoughts about the 21st century are a bit esoteric and I probably shouldn't go into it but essentially I think when people look back in 100 years time the cultural landscape we occupy at this moment will be viewed as a peculiar coda to the 20th century; broadly-speaking, we stalled at the starting line around the mid-nineties and took to losing ourselves in initially-ironic but gradually earnest nostalgic reverie about the best! century! ever! because it's easier and more comforting than trying to address the serious and complex miseries on the horizon. Few are more guilty of this than me.

Quote from: Replies From View on August 31, 2021, 11:34:59 AM
Must say I don't understand a desire to separate out the 20th and 21st centuries and leave something behind within a century.  Is this our reward for allowing people born after 2000 to become adults and speak their minds?

'Fraid so grandaddd/maaa. I was born pre-2000 tho so you could psychoanalyse my desire to leave it behind as being more self-destructive than odepial.

McDead

Two great, thought provoking posts, Midas

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QuoteIf the series has any message at all it's probably something about life being short and precious, questioning authority, going out and enjoying being alive, and so on. Hasn't this been lost now? How can anything be meaningful if it's destined to never end?

Because the show should always be viewed through the lens of the companion.

Mister Six

And because the core audience is kids who'll grow up and move on, and be replaced by more kids, not spods like us who overthink an inherently daft (but wonderful, theoretically if not always in practice) show.

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The mistake was always to focus on the Doctor and not his or her companions.  You can reset the show every three series with new companions and they need never get any closer to knowing or understanding the Doctor than the previous lot.

Endless repetitions of being awestruck at the TARDIS being bigger on the inside is shorthand for where the companions should always be within the fabric of the show - they should never become experts or bored by any of it.  I'll grant exceptions like Victoria, Liz Shaw and Romana who balance out the Doctor's intellect in certain ways but they still mustn't focus hard on the Doctor and chip away at the mystery for the audience.  Really, this should be basic stuff for a showrunner who has apparently lived as a fan of the show all his life.

Midas

I sense I might irritate people if I continue this line of thought so I won't go on about it - after one more post of course! :))) Also cheers McDead.

Doctor Who functioning as an enormous, multi-coloured, patchwork coat made by thousands of chattering contradictory minds making everything up as they go along has allowed occasional peaks of brilliance but, even when the series changes its appearance, I feel it's sometimes suffocated by a deep-seated, immutable mediocrity not helped by a predisposition to continue along the same path in perpetuum. I was thinking about this theoretically more than anything - that sometimes greater meaning and poignancy can arise out of the absence of something - that sometimes there's something to be said about knowing when to stop.

Midas

Quote from: Midas on September 01, 2021, 01:10:30 AM
that sometimes there's something to be said about knowing when to stop

why don't you lead by example then you complete fucking TOSSER

purlieu

Quote from: Midas on September 01, 2021, 01:10:30 AMthat sometimes greater meaning and poignancy can arise out of the absence of something
Yet another thing that I like about Chibnall's first series on paper: the total lack of familiar enemies. As a kind of clean slate point, with very few references to the past, throwing in some of the educational aspects of the historicals, it could have been a really great way to refresh the show. Even some of the blander aspects could have been ignored as first year nerves. But then his second year went back on just about all of that, sadly.

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Three series in the style of series 11 would have been as dull as Broadchurch, but at least ignorable in the long term.  What Chibnall has committed since is the worst of all worlds.

Jerzy Bondov

I was watching Twin Dilemma today and you know what I quite like Colin being a mental cunt. At least it's interesting. This is what Chibnall's Who has done to me.

purlieu

Quote from: Replies From View on September 01, 2021, 03:25:00 PM
Three series in the style of series 11 would have been as dull as Broadchurch, but at least ignorable in the long term.  What Chibnall has committed since is the worst of all worlds.
Indeed, it'd just be a blip rather than for fuck's sake why.

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Quote from: Jerzy Bondov on September 01, 2021, 03:27:25 PM
I was watching Twin Dilemma today and you know what I quite like Colin being a mental cunt. At least it's interesting. This is what Chibnall's Who has done to me.

Plus he is sexy at the end of the story, you think

Jerzy Bondov


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daf


pigamus


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Weird that it was easier for them to do whatever they did there, putting Colin Baker's head onto a completely different body and background, than to just tint his costume black for the clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrjg-wUGLkw

pigamus

Actually, maybe Colin should have been the Master, I've never thought of that before. He was a villain in The Brothers, wasn't he?

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