Doctor Who TV Show • Page 14

I dunno about classic, but I enjoyed it a fair bit while watching. it had a slightly funner yet tenser tone than the last few have had which lent it some weight. but thinking about it afterwards and reading Ellard's notes on twitter made it kinda fall apart in hindsight

 

I enjoyed it, mainly for that little P'ting, but I still felt like something was missing. Just found those Ellard Tweets and I totally agree with some of the observations there.

For me, the Rosa episode was top level Doctor Who and I enjoyed the opening episode, but the rest have had basic flaws in the writing which have left me not fully satisfied. I really want this to succeed for Jodie and I think she's great so far, I just think the stories are letting her down.

 

I don't know I've been enjoying them all. I don't think too much about plot holes and stuff though which probably helps. This week was a pretty fun episode and I liked the pting. And the brother/sister dynamic with the captain. The pregnant man also felt like such a typical doctor who thing haha And Ryan convincing him to give fatherhood a try was surprisingly touching. I'm still enjoying watching Ryan and Graham's relationship unfold and watching as Ryan starts to let Graham (and Yaz) in more and more.

 

I don't mind plot holes, but what I'm experiencing across this season (minus Rosa) is information that is given in a way that makes it seem like it's really important but is never used in the plot - it's essentially making up the time and not furthering the plot. It's not a hole, more a vacuum of information that doesn't aid world building and doesn't forward the plot. I find this undermines the enjoyment and leaves for a dissatisfied feeling at the end.

I'm still enjoying watching it but it's not the kind of thing that is making me want to watch it again and again. I also feel if it continues like this for the rest of the series, it might have problems keeping the audience long term.

 

Yea that's fair, I get that, it's just not something that bothers me cus I guess I just don't pay that much attention. Like I'd ask what even were the examples from this weeks episode, but I'm not sure I want to... haha

 

Ha! I'll give you the main one that frustrated me so not to annoy you too much: it is said that the android clone thing was the only person on board that could pick up the P'Ting but then never does (instead Yaz does with a fancy space blanket). It's not a hole, it just has no need to have taken up a minute to explain for no reason.

I think the only reason that I'm bothered is because this isn't my experience with previous Doctor Who series. Usually the information either aids world building or aids the plot. Something about this series so far has felt off in that respect. Hence the dissatisfied feeling.

I have high hopes for what could be though. The potential is there with Whittaker being excellent so far.

 

Also, this:

 

Maybe they are hoping to make the show less predictable by not having every single piece of dialogue be necessary to the plot.

 

Ah yea see I just never would've thought of that again, but I do get it. It makes something feel off - almost like they're just winging it as they write it. But I also agree with what @Matt said, that they may be doing that to keep it less predictable. Throw some red herrings in there. Plus I think that just emphasized the danger of the creature.

I think some of what's throwing people off is that it seems like they're trying to simplify it all a little bit to bring back in a casual audience after Moffat made it really complex (even though i personally enjoyed that)

 

That is an interesting theory but not one I can fully buy into after reading a few threads of the scriptwriter above on Twitter. Thanks indeed to @Rowan5215 for introducing me to Andrew Ellard!

I would also argue that it could actually confuse the casual audience. Maybe I'm overthinking it? I understand that not everything needs to be explained (Rosa is the perfect example of this). I just think that other episodes haven't necessarily done a good job at this (the water that burns your skin off is another good example from episode 2). These moments seem to serve no purpose whatsoever and for me added complexity and make you think about something that you don't need to think about.

 

It's often giving me a feeling that they had bigger ideas for an episode that they couldn't cram into the time slot. Either that or they've hastily re-written stuff and then just left these random little things around, which pertain to another version of the same story.

Quite enjoyed the one this week. I'm enjoying the more slightly more silly, monster based episodes. Although, not sure why we needed the brain dump on the mechanics of the engine core.

 

Personally I loved to hear the Doctor wax poetic about how beautiful the engine was lol

 

I don't think it would confuse them, because they're not even going to remember. A casual audience just follows the story they don't think back to the beginning and try to thread everything together. And I don't mean to say anyone's wrong if that's what they do do, but most people just kind of go with it and aren't gonna think that much about it. I mean even I don't think about a lot of these things and I'm a pretty attentive tv watcher.

 

sorry, but there's a way of doing this in an interesting way where it furthers characters or adds to a unique tone, and there's just throwing out useless bits of information that never figure into either of those things or into the plot. Chibnall does a whole lot of the latter and almost none of the former, and it just comes down to writing that feels very first-draft and unedited. as was pointed out earlier, all the info about the antimatter, the facts about the Pting's skin being toxic and it only eating non-organic matter are all absolutely useless to the episode and could have easily been cut to, I dunno, give Yaz more than three lines?

no worries, he's a great critic who words his critiques thoughtfully without just jumping on hate bandwagons. he's had something really insightful for every episode thus far and always makes me look at them in a different way

 

I think Chibnall has been/will turn out to be a great showrunner. the changes he's made to the music, special effects and location filming have paid off with some of the best visuals/audio/stylistic identity the show has ever seen, his line-up of guest writers is great, and there really couldn't have been a better choice for the role than Jodie (and Bradley Walsh!). he's also, maybe, just not that brilliant at this genre and style of writing. I'd say pretty good at the best. and maybe that's okay, because if Rosa is any indication, he's made a sandbox in which the guest writers really could take the show to some new heights, and I am incredibly excited for the next four weeks to see what the show can do with those other writers at the helm. hell, at the very least it's an interesting position to be in - both Moffat and RTD were fantastic writers who weren't necessarily the strongest at showrunning, I'm down to see what happens when that situation gets reversed

 

I'm not saying you don't make any points or that the writing is flawless, but I think the skin being toxic and the only eating non-organic matter are both pretty crucial. It's a small creature so that's why they can't just pick it up and toss it off the ship or something. And then it eating non-organic matter was absolutely central to the plot of the episode, as that was how they disposed of what was really the even bigger threat which was that their ship was going to be blown up... which brings us back to why we needed to go to the antimatter engine. I mean yea I'd agree some of the stuff about how that engine works wasn't necessary, but it was interesting and furthers the Who lore, and was just a fun little scifi part, plus it shows us more about this Doctor, who is very in awe of technology and appears to be very tech savy (for example building her own Sonic).

 

...well that was my favourite episode so far, I think this season's strengths and weaknesses are pretty apparent now

 

I really enjoyed it too.

 

much like Rosa it very much followed the Vincent and the Doctor formula of showing people's lives in the past as complex and even nuanced things, but where those episodes suffered from underwritten or forced-in villains, this one gave us a truly brilliant bait-and-switch which built up a tense first half before a reveal that should have been relieving for the characters (eg the aliens weren't evil) just ratcheted up the feeling of dread 1000%, because we and all the leads knew who was going to die and team TARDIS was absolutely powerless to stop it. it played out almost like a Greek tragedy in those final few minutes!

...and the idea of reformed alien assassins who now travel the universe mourning for people is one of the most quintessentially sentimental and just genuinely wonderful ideas I've seen on the show in years

 

That was a very dark ending for a kid's show.

Increasingly feeling like this season is full of good ideas, but some of the writing is so cumbersome at times.

 

loved the writing this week, except for the nagging thought that surely Yaz's Nan would have thought at some point 'hey my favourite granddaughter really looks quite a lot like that random family member who appeared out of nowhere in the 1940s and tied my hands with my first husband's that one time'. but that's a very Doctor Who problem to have

 

Yes, I loved the idea of reformed alien assassins. It was nice to have a different kind of alien motive.

Yeah, my wife turned to me at the end and we were both like "woah".

Can definitely relate to the good ideas but cumbersome... but thankfully I didn't think that about this episode.

I genuinely thought the nan was going to mention this during their conversation at the end and was surprised that she didn't.

 

Haha. You'd think it might have stood out a bit...

"Man, remember that time India was partitioned and my family came to visit. My British, racially diverse family, who dressed kind of odd."

 

However, putting aside being glib, I wonder if her refusing to talk about it was a kind of tacit admission that she knew something beyond belief had happened.

 

I kinda thought the episode was going this way when she insisted that the watch could never be fixed, but that wasn't really followed through on. in general the 1940s characters pretty much fail to ever react to the demons after the first time they're seen, but I guess they did kind of have more pressing things on their mind... one more scene post-Prem's death showing Umbreen processing everything that had happened would have been welcome, or at the very least showing her realise he was dead, considering how important she is as a framing device but is totally absent from the climax