The Doctor Who Spoilers and Speculation Thread V3 - "Oh, brilliant."
832 replies, posted
I just saw someone on reddit call the door in Heaven Sent 'the longest serving companion' and it has made me laugh probably more than it should have
I take back the positive praise I heaped on Kerblam! when I first watched it. When re-visiting it mentally I realized that it's pretty dire in structure and its mixed, muddled message ultimately ends up being absolute garbage. Plus the 'Oh Well People Died' shit is Moffat-tier arse sniffery that made me feel really cold and disgusted when thinking it over.
I think I mentioned it before, but I still have distaste for that scene where everyone finds the vat that's full of dozens of liquified corpses of innocent employees, and the reaction for when they discover it is "ewww! icky! anyone got a tissue? xd"
I feel like it might have been darker or handled more seriously in the original script, then Chibnall came along and decided they didn't like it and made it a joke instead.
I mean earlier that same episode you had half the crew watch that girl they liked get killed right in front of them while they could do nothing to stop it, so it's not like everything dark in that episode was handled as flippantly
I thought the ending was extremely strange too, like, the episode had this weirdly pro corporate message and then suddenly does a turn heal right at the very end when they decide to go with the guy who was trying to kill everyone's plan.
In unrelated news the Classic Doctor Who Twitch Marathon is back, it will be running till the 25th.
Of course I learn this when they are playing The Gunfighters so, swings and roundabouts I suppose
I liked the twist that it was the system fighting a knowing and brutal war against a terrorist rather than the system killing people because beep boop hate human as is typical for Doctor Who, but the way they handled all of the deaths was fucking despicable, Moffat tier shite.
You know what bothers me most about season 11?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzCghIPHFI0
It's that in all this talk of friendship and love, there's not a single scene with any character that demonstrates it as well as this. The season that's meant to be about the value of treating others fairly and loving one another, with a diverse cast just doesn't compare to a grumpy old man who's just been betrayed by his best friend.
And that really just frustrates me, because there's so much that could have been done with this season's ideas to actually let them resonate instead of just falling flat. The whole time it just seemed like the Doctor was just saying "love good, hate bad" instead of actually exploring why racism is bad, or at least setting up interesting character situations like the above. Demons of the Punjab comes close but still feels so far, and I just can't get over how much of a missed opportunity so much of season 11 was.
What I find interesting about that scene in context of the rest of his run is how it feels like he's putting on the grumpy persona, and the series 9/10 Doctor is underneath, but we never get a great reason for why he acts so abrasively earlier on.
Well the meta or rather real world explanation as to why he changed is that there is a large section of the viewship of the show who hated the abrasive nature of Capaldi's Doctor. For many it was one thing that the new Doctor was an old man (I mean shit, I lost count the number of angry comments about how "The Doctor is supposed to get younger with each regeneration not older!" or variations of that sentiment that I saw shortly after he was announced) but to have one who was not old but mean and bitter was a bridge too far.
For them the Doctor was quirky, energetic, warm and gregarious, yes the previous Doctors of the Modern run had their darker and more brooding moments this was how the Doctor was performed and written for the best part of nearly a decade prior and when given a new Doctor who was, shock horror, actually different to his prior incarnation in more apparent ways than just 'Bow Ties are Cool' it was something they could not reconcile.
The decision to make him softer was course correction, something they announced really early into his first series if I remember correctly and it is why it feels so odd to get him as seen in the clip above to how he is introduced the series after, in viking times riding a tank wearing sunglasses and playing an electric guitar then later driving Davros's chair and having a cup of tea from nowhere because 'He is the Doctor'.
Personally I enjoyed him in his first series and the idea of making him softer could have worked for me had it felt more like character development and less like the beeb leaning on Moffat to fix it.
As to why he did act the way he did, well I am sure there is some fan theory explanation or some novel or comic that explains it but I get the sincere feeling that Moffat wanted Capaldi to be his version of the First Doctor, much how Smith's Doctor feels so much like a tweaked version of the Second and how Amy and Rory feel like a tweaked and gender flipped Jamie and Zoe. Plus there is the whole 'fan service' angle of it. Moffat has said that the idea to cast Capaldi came from seeing people online saying how he should play the next Doctor around the time Tennent left, I remember full well seeing on sites like Twitter and Facepunch people posting videos and GIFs of Capaldi's character from The Thick of It saying "Oh boy, wouldn't it be funny if he was the new Doctor!" "Imagine him saying this to a Dalek", very rarely did I see anyone saying about his quality as a performer and actor it was just "Oh boy, imagine if the Doctor called Davros a cunt!". And to a degree that is what we ended up getting, or as close as one could get with still retaining the spirit of the Doctor as a character whilst still getting someone who would be as abrasive as Malcolm Tucker given the timeslot and the nature of the show itself.
Of course that is not to blame any party in this and I am happy Capaldi was able to get a full run on the show (even if there are rumors he was done with the show midway through his second series to the point they were already preparing for him to not be in the next series) and wasn't sacked like Colin Baker was but as far as I remember there is no explanation in universe as to why he acted the way he did in his first series and why it is so different to his following two.
he slowly gets nicer because that's his character arc... that's like the entire point of the season 8 finale and you can already see it start to take shape in Last Christmas (which was written before s8 so the stuff about him being softer because of the BBC I'm not really sure is true at all and feels more like speculation imo)
It is? Hmm, I shall have to go back to rewatch the series 8 Finale as I did not get that at all the first time I saw it. He opens up a little towards the end of the story, particularly his last scene with him and Clara in the cafe but not to such an extent that makes his personality in the following series feel like development to me. Granted I've not seen it since first broadcast though so there is that. And the Beeb making him softer, I could have sworn reading something about it at the time, but can't for the life of me find reference to it.
This is one of my (if not my definite) favourite scene in modern doctor who.
It's the whole, "Oh I'm Doctor Idiot and not The Oncoming Storm, right, forgot that for the third time this week." Which I felt was a large step back for the Doctor's character as a whole.
It could be argued that his big mistake with Davros in the series 9 opener also opened his eyes and got him out of his post-regenerative grumpy funk.
Part of my (Watsonian) rationalisation for the Twelfth Doctor's grumpiness in Series 8 is that, y'know, he just spent the good part of a millennium on another planet, almost as long as his entire lifespan up til then. Then suddenly in the span of a day, it was torn away from him, he had to go back to being the man in the box again, and, oh yes, he died. (I know that regeneration isn't exactly like death but you can imagine it probably screws you up a bit). He also had barely any time to recover from his post-regeneration trauma and had to spend most of that time working out why the hell a dinosaur was in London, and then why the hell everything else that was happening felt so familiar to him - one might think that being forced to delve into things that one had experienced a millennium ago might be quite taxing on the freshly-regenerated mind.
He was then forced to reevaluate his relationship with Clara and humanity as a whole, all in the knowledge that his people, whom he still hasn't entirely forgiven and had spent the last 900 years having to keep out of this part of the universe, are still out there somewhere, still trying to get through, and he could do next to nothing about it. Basically, there was a lot going on in his head, and he'd gone from a dozen human generations of gradually getting to know everybody he was saving to suddenly being thrust into random adventures across space and time where he's expected to sympathise with and care for people he's never met; hence his struggles with the 'duty of care'.
So my perspective on the concept is that the kinder, goofier Twelve is actually the real Twelve, but that he needed a few weeks/ months and a few adventures to realign himself with his general modus operandi; obviously that's topsy-turvy from how things actually went, but I find it hard to imagine that he wouldn't have softened somewhat as his character developed even if the Beeb had never told Moffat to do so.
"I'm trying to deal with a lot of emotions right now and... what the fuck... is that a fucking balloon made out of human fucking skin? I'm pushing you out."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzkItR1jkKY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDLjf05ODM0
v
Chris Chibnall was not available as he was busy writing a 10 minute expository speech from Graham.
what if the person credited as "The Woman" in The End of Time is actually the Doctor's dad, making the parallels between Wilf ("I'd be proud. - Of what? - If you were my dad.") and her even stronger
not that I guess there's even really a difference for timelords, maybe
Doctor Who
gasp
alright lads, ElectronicG19 here popping in to say I'm not dead, I deleted my facebook in January and that's what I used to log in to FP lol.
Anyone got any juicy filming news? The last I heard, they were in South Africa.
Aren't they on a one year hiatus now until the next season starts filming?
nah the new season started filming last month
it's not really a full hiatus year, s12 will probably start airing very early 2020 (maybe starting off with another new year special? god I'd rather it went back to christmas)
Damn, a few months on and I can remember so little of S11. Even Resolution feels like something I half-watched 2 years ago
Series 11 was such a weird fever dream of disappointment.
Reflecting back on it, I did enjoy some episodes like The Tsuranga Conundrum, Demons of the Punjab and The Witchfinders. Really, the attempts at epic drama or what-have-you were so bad that something like The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos should've been like halfway through the season, and had the show underplay the finale with It Takes You Away.
The episodes I liked didn't seem to be playing into anything the show did intentionally so I can't say what I'd like them to focus on from it.
I don't know... series 11 felt like it didn't have its ideas fully formed to the point where it was comfortable leaning into them.
