Yeah, but how long was it until the writer's really starting hitting it out of the ballpark for Capaldi's Doctor? Mid second season or so, I'd say.
I'm mostly enjoying the new series. It's just not feeling very Dr Who at the moment. This weeks was a paint-by-numbers job. 'Uman rights at t'mill? T'owtamahted mill? By gum! By eck! Them Amazon types have got them Luddites reet worked oop. I know they're not wanting to use traditional enemies of the Doctor, but it turning out to have been an enslaved Cyber Leader asking for help could've been a nice flip - the Cybermen as the victims for once. Or as Matt says, bringing back the Nestene. Don't know what's missing, I mean all the ingredients are there for a great Dr Who series - social commentary, bit of history, bit of horror.
And yet, that describes The Sun Makers perfectly. No real enemies except human greed. Perhaps we're jaded to "humans are the real monsters"? Which is bad because we haven't stopped.
There wasn't even any greed in the story. The main gripe was machines were taking work from people. Oh no. People have time to paint, write poetry, pursue other interests than commute to work, do work, commute home and watch shit reality TV instead of interacting with their family and friends. Yeah, very fucking fiendish. I mean switch robots for immigrants and it was Dr UKIP. There was even a bit about work improving lives - which it does if, say, you're 1970's China and most of your population are uneducated farmers and the only less economically developed area is inhabited entirely by penguins. A couple of generations working in shitholes means the grandkids can be surgeons, accountants and web designers. I don't really buy it when you've a transporter even Scotty would be jealous of though. It was just a bit messy. Someone in the writers room obviously came up with a couple of half baked ideas about Amazon and automation, they got glued together, and by the time filming came along you had something still not fully baked. Maybe if Kerblam had been automating other worlds, purposefully turning their populations into Eloi-like societies for nefarious ends?
I severely doubt those unemployed humans were having a good time. They were probably struggling to get by on welfare, if welfare even existed. Judging from the foreign workers I've known, presumably anyone on that moon with a family was sending most of their salary back home.
The writers knew exactly how to use plots, speeches and music cues to make Smith an inspiring hero from his first episode, they intentionally withheld all of that from most of Capaldi's first season stories. Flatline was the first time I recall feeling like Capaldi heroically saved the day. With Whittaker it seems like they're trying to keep her as inoffensive as possible to avoid any predictable backlash. It's similar to what they did with McCoy back in the day.
With respect, if you think that is in anyway comparable to McCoy you really don’t know the show’s history so best not to use that emoticon. If you want to know why the Doctor changed in the final two seasons of classic Who google “Cartmel Masterplan”. JNT didn’t have some grand plan going in to season 24. And Whittaker is already getting a backlash, and it’s not for being female but indeed not being Doctorish. Being the first female Doctor Chibnall can’t wait an entire season to make her feel like she fits the part. This is even more relevant if the industry rumours of them both leaving after the next season are to be believed.
If 90% of everything is automated, costs are likely minimal. Machines mine. Machines build. Machines look after machines. Humans wrap and scrub the toilets. Costs are pretty much down to power and material, borderline post-scarcity society. A Ferrari is probably pennies. Just doesn't add up. You can only get away with things like that if they're purposefully irreverent these days, I expect a little better from Nu Who. Hell, if they wanted to mine a greed line have Kerblam having vertically integrated the whole supply chain (like Amazon are actually trying to do by the looks of things) and then screw everyone on cost. I'm a bit weary of lazy writing.
Yes, this. A good story could be told about a society that, while affluent due to automation, still clings to the old labour model, creating a destitute class looking for meaningless work in order to earn their keep. That's not so far removed from a problem we are about to come up against. But then the story can't be solved by rising the human workforce to 50%. A better script would have required someone writing about future labour conflicts who had an interest in saying something about future labour conflicts. AKA, Science Fiction.
hypothesis: Whitaker being female is a problem but not in the obvious sense, but that the writers haven't gotten a handle on how to write her in the swashbuckling somewhat arrogant white-knight bravado that they had a habit of doing with male actors lest they (in their worries) fuck up and make her come across as bitchy or some other female stereotype. That is, they are afraid to write her the way they might have written hr recent predecssors.
I'm obviously prejudiced...only started watching nuWho because of Capaldi. Try watching it a second time. It gets better. I may do that with Whittaker, but I don't like Chibnall's writing, not for this (S1 and S2 of Broadchurch, yeah, but S3 was also meh). Demons of the Punjab was good because someone else wrote it.
Possible. But think of any of the women in The West Wing (except Amy the Whiner). Even lil Annabel had gumption. Nancy McNally? Oh, yeah.
The Witchfinders (AKA tracking down that asshole at Amazon that leaked the episode a week early). A pseudo-historical this week - not afraid again to show us a dark period in human history with a ducking stool death (despite the Doctor's intervention) and 35 other women having been accused of witchery. Alan Cumming is on hand as James I to lighten the mood with some extreme hamminess, although he gets some good quiet moments to show he's largely either putting on a front or buying his own hype. I was worried for a mo that we were going to get a "no-one's fault except the scared humans" story, but there are indeed bad guys here - up to three (depending on how you feel about James) main ones for the Doctor to rail against or try to convince to be better. Once again, the show is relying on characters and our ability to relate to them. Yaz gets more to do this week interacting with a scared young girl and correctly identifying her "sickness" as not medical or due to alien activity, but psychological fears caused by the thought that she has no allies among the townsfolk - much as Yaz herself once felt totally isolated due to a prolonged bullying incident at school. And if you predicted that the Doctor would end up being accused of witchcraft, well... you and everyone else.
Average to good ep I thought. And a lot of it seemed a bit familiar I can drive 15 miles to see Pendle hill. The Pendle witches were tried and hanged here, they had their last drink in a pub I go in often
Better. Nice scary monster. Still tired of the "but you're a girl" motif, but this one wasn't bad. Consistent with history, too, in the sense that James did give up his witch-hunting.
Apart from the Rosa ep, I haven't seen much "but you're a girl" stuff. Even the Trump stand-in didn't seem to ignore the Doctor because of gender but because of his own arrogance. The Indian ep had the Doctor left out of the boys' hut during the wedding prep, but that would have just been flipped for Capaldi (who would have sent in Clara or Bill instead of Graham and Ryan). The other episodes have either had accepting characters like the companions or future human(oids) who are past sexism (but not racism, it seems).
What I meant was that The Doctor can't help reminding us that she's a girl, both in words and deeds. JMO. BTW, nice performance by O'Brien from Downton Abbey, and predictably hammy by Cumming.
Yes, but if I had spent more than two millennia as a man and only been a woman for six months, I might mention it now and again as well. It's still less than the Capaldi doctor mentioned his own eyebrows.
Oh, seriously. The "attack eyebrows" in "Deep Breath" (a wonderful play on Scottish independence, if you listen closely) and when else? Other characters may have mentioned them, but not 12 that I recall.
And then the first period kicks in, and it's like "okay, novelty has warn off, I want out of this! ".
I remember how many of you were whining about the River Song story arc. It bothered me a lot less than the Amy/Rory "eternal love" saga. And it ended (or began?) at the Towers of Darillium. Lovely. Again, good writing + good performance = magic.
I loved the Towers, and the only thing that really bothers me about the whole River Song story is that I still can't figure out what the hell happened at Lake Silencio. But I'm not complaining; I'm just saying I see no reason to complain about the new Doctor mentioning she's female a bit either. I do think the writing has been hit and miss so far though, and while Whitaker can do great things, she plays the Doctor very one-note -- everything is breathless emphasis. Surely she has more different emotions than that?
^Lake Silencio is only one of many things I don't understand about nuWho. I just roll with it. Always more interested in performance than timey-wimey stuff.
Silencio is a complex attempt to force the Doctor's "scripted" death to change from Trenzalore (where Kovarian's faction got fed up fighting him and anyone else who showed up trying to find the Time Lords) to Silencio by having River both commit and witness the Doctor's murder. But she buggered with it anyway, disabling the suit's blasters. Since she'd already seen it happen, it became a paradox and time went wibbly. The Doctor put stuff back on track by convincing her to go through with events as witnessed. The paradox though WASN'T that she'd seen the Doctor die and then refused to murder him. It was that she'd seen herself SHOOT and then didn't. That had to happen, not least because the Doctor had already met versions of River who were in jail for his murder. That he fooled everyone into thinking he was dead using the Tesselecta is besides the point.
