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"It feels different this time..." - The new Doctor Who Thread

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
I'm a little surprised Doctor Who hasn't done more with Halloween in the past, thinking about it. There's quite a bit of potential there.
 

ThornGhost

lofi posts to relax/study to
(he/him)
I'm pretty sure the text in the trailer is for the generous portion of the audience that's going to watch the trailer with no sound when it starts autoplaying in some social media feed.
 

Zef

Find Your Reason
(He/Him)
I definitely appreciate the floating text because, very often, the combination of regional accents, bad foley/sound mixing, and ambient sounds in my environment, can make me miss anywhere from single words to whole sentences, and there were definitely at least two quotes in the trailer where that exact thing happened.

It annoys me to no end when YTers I actually like enough to follow suddenly drop the volume of their voice and don't provide CCs of their own.
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
I don't have much to say about tonight's episode other than it was pretty alright, which was more than I was expecting. Lots of setup for the rest of the series.
 

Vaeran

(GRUNTING)
(he/him)
Agreed that this episode was... alright, but the time/location chyrons (i.e. "LIVERPOOL, 1820") just being in plain-ass Impact font was immensely distracting.

So Karvanista's species' entire life purpose is to save humanity, one human at a time, but he's willing to drop Yaz, a human, into boiling acid to accomplish this? Okay.

If the Swarm (or whatever the main villain's name is) has been imprisoned on that rock since the dawn of the universe, how does he know the Earth expression "Trick or Treat"? I'm guessing he knows the Doctor because he's also from the same universe she's originally from, which would mean they're sticking to their guns with the Timeless Child nonsense. Great.

The Weeping Angels are so boring now.

Don't like the Doctor using the Time Vortex as a kamehameha, but at least it didn't work. The TARDIS shouldn't have weapons, even improvised ones.

Every new episode brings us one step to the end of the Chibnall era, so in that sense I'm very excited for next week!
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Having slept on it, a few things that I remember liking from the episode:

- Dan rubbing Karvanista (Chibnall - think up better names. jfc) and saying he's cute was funny

- I also laughed at the Doctor going "oh, here's your house," and handing Dan his miniature house as though he'd appreciate it

- I don't know why the fuck the Sontarans were there, but their banter was slightly amusing, which was not how I thought Chibnall was going to play the Sontarans at all (I thought they'd be Super Serious For Real Baddies like in much of the later classic series, not the goofy idiots the new series has mostly portrayed them as)


Does anyone here remember what the Division is? I know it's Timeless Child related, but I have no memory whatsoever about who the Division is supposed to be
 

Vaeran

(GRUNTING)
(he/him)
My recollection is that the Division is the Time Lord black ops department or whatever, which had the Doctor working for them in secret through however many regenerations before wiping their memory and letting them go on their way as William Hartnell. I guess like the CIA (Celestial Intervention Agency) from expanded media.

Blech.
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Yeah there were a lot of pretty okay bits inside this episode, but... while I haven't been quite as down on Chibnall as some folks I really dislike the scripting style he gets into sometimes which I suspect he thinks is clever puzzle-box stuff, but really just ends up being a series of random disconnected *things* happening that the viewer has basically zero hope of linking together until later the plot comes around and says "here is explicitly how these two seemingly unrelated things link together". It's just disorienting and not much fun.

I also felt like the mixing was bad in a lot of the action-y segments, losing dialog under the sound effects, though I'll admit some of that may just have been me having trouble with the accents.

(Also, it's a silly question to ask, but where were these puppies who's life purpose is to save humanity the other several dozen times the entire Earth was about to be invaded or destroyed?)
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
I also felt like the mixing was bad in a lot of the action-y segments, losing dialog under the sound effects, though I'll admit some of that may just have been me having trouble with the accents.

Specifically the intro scene with the Doctor and Yaz handcuffed to that floating bar thing. I had no idea what either of them were saying at several points. Though, yes, the accents may have been part of the issue.
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Lord help me, I'm kinda enjoying myself. It's empty calories so far, but at least stuff is happening. No doubt I'll eventually be let down, but so far, it's alright.
 

DANoWAR

(Wheeee!)
Currently watching K-9 the Australian unofficial spin-off starring Mark II.

/fades back to obscurity
 
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Phantoon

I cuss you bad
Lord help me, I'm kinda enjoying myself. It's empty calories so far, but at least stuff is happening. No doubt I'll eventually be let down, but so far, it's alright.
If this turns out to not be crap somehow I'm totally watching it. Now Chibnall's leaving it's safe to watch again!
 

Vaeran

(GRUNTING)
(he/him)
This sucked. Just an emotionally flat mishmash of intentionally cryptic scenes interspersed with the occasional pointless monster, like Chibnall jingling a set of keys at the viewer.

Oh, I'm being pulled away again...!
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Yeah, same. If the dialogue wasn't as crap as it always is, that could have been salvageable, but it just relies on dialogue heavy scenes and that is just not Chibnall's strong point, to say the least. I mean, for fucks sake - what do people call video games if not video games? What was that about?

I'm curious what a Weeping Angels episode not written by Steven Moffat would look like, and we get that next week. I can't imagine it'll be good, but at least it's the one episode this season where Chibnall has a cowriter in Maxine Alderton, so hopefully she handles... well, all the dialogue, at least lol
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
I've reached the Whittaker era in my chronological rewatch of Doctor Who, and I forgot the Timeless Child is first referenced in her second episode, The Ghost Monument (which is still shit, by the by). It's first mentioned by those weird cloth baddies on Desolation, where they seem to be reading the Doctor's mind, pulling "The Timeless Child" out of it, meaning it's unlikely the Master will be the Timeless Child, meaning there really are pre-Hartnell Doctors. Chibnall's been seeding it since he took over, basically. It's his Big Idea for the show. It's canon and it's staying so. Ugh.
 

Vaeran

(GRUNTING)
(he/him)
Take heart. The Doctor being half-human in the 1996 movie was canon, too... until every subsequent DW production completely ignored that idea and it faded away into a footnote on a wiki page. I have my fantasies about RTD's first episode being a complete undoing of the Timeless Child nonsense, but more likely he (and every other DW showrunner with a brain between their ears) will just pretend it never happened. You can't ruin Doctor Who. It just regenerates.
 

Vaeran

(GRUNTING)
(he/him)
I feel you, but I think it was just unlucky happenstance that the first female Doctor lined up with a completely incompetent showrunner.

Unfortunately I think the odds of us getting another female Doctor in the immediate future are pretty slim as a result. The BBC is going to be aware of two things: it lost a lot of viewers over Whitaker's announcement (who can stay gone, as far as I'm concerned), and the majority of the people who remained don't have a very high opinion of her run. I don't particularly trust the BBC to be able to appreciate the nuances of why people aren't enthusiastic about the show anymore; instead they're going to remember the glory days of Tennant and Smith and want to go back to that with a very "safe" pick for the Fourteenth Doctor. They certainly have a safe pick for showrunner. The message is going to be pretty clear: Thirteen's era was a mistake, now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

RTD's a brilliant showrunner and I'm sure he's aware of all of the above, so I guess what remains to be seen is how much pull he'll have with the BBC (probably quite a bit) and how important he sees/is willing to fight for diversity in Doctor casting (unknown). Assuming he sticks around for more than one Doctor, I think we could see a relatively safe pick for Fourteen to establish trust and bring people back into the fold, and then something less traditional for Fifteen.
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
There's absolutely no way the fourteenth Doctor isn't a woman. I would be floored if she were a man.
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
As a self contained episode, I rather enjoyed that one. The season arc is still frustratingly opaque, and not in a fun way. Still, that was a good Weeping Angel episode, which I did not expect to be saying.
 
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