#(with chibnall)

[ancientfrozenglaciershark]

The 13th Doctor was so private, she totally didn’t tell her friends her age for probably months. They totally thought she was just a normal aged alien until she slipped up one day and casually said something like “I haven’t had a cheese ball in 400 years”

[icklewolfiekins]

you ever learn something you wish you didn't? I, for example, just learned that between 2008 and 2015 not a single episode of Doctor Who aired that was written by a woman. Between The Sontaran Stratagem, a story with David Tennant as the Doctor, and The Woman Who Lived, a Peter Capaldi story, not a single episode was written by a woman.

[fanonical]

all steven moffat episode titles be like "The Impossible Of The Doctor"

all chris chibnall episode titles be like "The Timaeus Event PART 3: Proliferation of the [classic who monster]"

all RTD episode titles be like "grass"

[olympain]

Happy Lunar New Year!

[spoutin-doggerel]

Chibnall's Doctor Who is really funny to me because it feels like a very conservative person's attempt at writing a progressive show. Like "Episode about giant Amazon company except the corporation was the good guy all along and the villian is the striking workers" "Episode about Rosa Parks except it cheapens her activism by portraying it as a spur of the moment coincidence" "The Doctor refering to a formerly enslaved species that he fought to save as "conditioned to serve". Maybe just don't write a show like Doctor Who.

[bellamysgriffin]

favorite doctor who quotes: 65/?

[gryffindraws]

i really did enjoy the 13th doctor HOWEVER, if i could change anything (other than chibnall's flmisy political messaging) i wouldve made yaz a social worker in training. it literally made no sense to make her a cop, especially when she was constantly comparing herself to the doctor, who is literally the opposite of a cop in every way. and if she had to start off as a cop, she should have resigned and pursued social work or something similar that matched her backstory as a trouble teen AND the doctor's pacifist ideology. the idea that she felt a renewed interest in becoming a cop was sp dumb. why the fuck did he make the doctor's companion a cop when they fucking hateeee people of authority. wwtdd? not be a fucking cop

[thedoctor-and-donna]

I have decided that Thirteens run is one of my favorites purely because of how the show runners treat The Doctor.

Hear me out!

With Thirteen, they actually started embracing the “this character is NOT human” aspect. The other Doctors did a little bit but not near the amount of Thirteen

Thirteen with talk to her Tardis, knowing the companions can’t hear the ship talk back

Thirteen will eat dirt and sniff people and lick stuff because that’s how Time Lords work. It’s how they use all their senses to figure stuff out

Thirteen makes mentions of her past bodies all of the time. Not just because they’re male bodies, but because of how different each body is to the others

Thirteen uses her telepathy SO MUCH MORE. One of my favorite things about The Doctor is their telepathy. The fact that this run actually uses it instead of just forgetting about it warms my heart so much

They show that The Doctor is not a human so much more during Thirteen’s run than the others. It’s something that, to me, is missing a lot in this show.

Yes, The Doctor looks human to us, but they are not and never will be human. The other Doctors lean into the “I look and act human” bit so much it’s easy to forget they are not human

Thirteen’s run doesn’t do this. They don’t let you forget that The Doctor isn’t human, they remind you all the time

This is why I love Thirteen’s run so much

[robiniswriting]

the thirteenth doctor’s regeneration does not get the credit it deserves. despite knowing that she’s losing herself, she doesn’t run from it like ten or twelve. she doesn’t hide the terrifying truth of what will happen and how exactly she might change from the companion she loves like nine or eleven. she doesn’t remain in the TARDIS, her true home and safe haven, where everything is familiar, like all the rest choose to do, despite knowing their regeneration energy will likely damage their beloved ship.

instead, she holds off just long enough to have ice cream with the woman she loves. to give her companion a goodbye, a real goodbye, something none of the doctors before her had managed to do for any of the others that came before. she finds a cliff with a stunning yet unfamiliar sunset, and faces the end of her story — her new beginning, the unknown — with a quip and smile.

in the end, I think she was truly the bravest of them all.

[headcanonsandmore]

I'm sorry; I hate to be a party-pooper but WHY wasn't Yaz mentioned? Virtually every significant romantic relationship was mentioned at some point, except the one the Doctor literally had three episodes ago!

[kitmarlowe]

"It’s really important, I think, in any era of Doctor Who, for the Doctor to have an emotional journey, to have an arc and go on a voyage of discovery through their time on the show. I always knew this was going to be the arc for Jodie’s Doctor."

CHRIS CHIBNALL ON THE TIMELESS CHILD

[aletterinthenameofsanity]

I would like to thank RTD for making so many people look back at Thirteen's Era and start to go "you know what? Maybe we judged the writing too harshly on this one." Maybe it is a good idea to bring in new writers and more women and people of color behind the scenes and allow them to write and direct things like Demons of the Punjab (top 5 ever Doctor Who episode) and the Haunting of Villa Diodati and Fugitive of the Judoon. Maybe Thirteen WAS camp, because the universe who decided to be a frog and the mud that did witchcraft and the Pting and the plastic that ate birds were unhinged and fun. Maybe we got some GORGEOUS cinematography out of it. Maybe Thirteen's take on gender is more interesting than the 60th anniversary specials. Maybe Yaz DID get an arc in the Flux/standalone specials and people just didn't pay attention. Maybe the Power of the Doctor paid more respect to former eras of Doctor Who than any of the 60th anniversary specials did. Maybe Chibnall acted with far more grace to the RTD Era (Jack) than RTD did to Chibnall (treatment of Yaz and Thirteen). Maybe it was actually cool to see less well-known or underexplored historical figures like Mary Seacole and Ada Lovelace and Nikola Tesla and Noor Inayat Khan end up onscreen. Maybe Thasmin wasn't queerbait, it was an interesting exploration of the doctor/companion romance IN KEEPING with Thirteen's established character with one of its keystone episodes written by a queer woman.

Yes, Chibnall was flawed. I'm never gonna pretend that the Battle of Ranskoor Av Kalos wasn't a piss poor finale that felt like a first draft of themes and idea. I'm not gonna pretend like the multiple companions in the TARDIS ever felt properly balanced or explored. Yes, the moment with the Master and the Nazis was FUCKED UP. The Timeless Child might have deserved more than one episode for the ImplicationsTM to be fleshed out. But EVERY Doctor Who Era has its flaws, ESPECIALLY when it comes to racism, and I'm TIRED pretending as if Chibnall's writing is significantly worse than the other two showrunners.

[notvictorhugo]

You guys remember how Twelve's last adventure, involving letting Missy and Bill try their hand in a fairly chill place, on their own, with no help, barely supervised, to see if they'd learnt from him, ended with his student's death, Missy's betrayal, and his own regeneration in an impossibly bad, unwinnable situation?

And how Thirteen ended up being extremely hands-on with a let-me-do-it-you-guys-just-tag-along approach?

Cuz I do, constantly

[vroomvroomwee]

Doctor Who started off with terrible CGI but with stunning writing and as it progressed the two switched places. The CGI might be phenomenal but the writing is a dumpster fire.

I think that's partly why everyone is so excited for the 60th special. You've got the CGI and the writing this time now that RTD is back.

[innocet]

the fact that we've been having bitch fights about whether the dr is just some guy or not since at least the late 80's.... truly the pedant's spirit is unbreakable hate and war on planet drwho

[dandelionjack]

the ninth doctor trusted rose enough to believe she would stay with him after his face changed. and twelve took some convincing but towards the end of deep breath accepted that clara would stay by his side no matter how old he looked. but thirteen was so used to losing people. her previous self had loved clara and lost her, he had looked after bill and failed to save her, he had tried to redeem missy and (to his knowledge) lost that cause too. no wonder she wouldn’t trust yaz to stay for her fourteenth face. no wonder she believed she ‘had to do this next part alone’. she had grown quietly distant with the new knowledge that she was no longer even an ordinary gallifreyan, not something of this universe, but outside of it, alien even to the aliens. isolated and inaccessible, standing on an invisible pedestal her ancestors placed her on — a pedestal that more resembled a cage. glass walls on all sides like the forced regeneration chamber. thin glass wall between her and yaz now, transparent but too solid to break through. harder than azbantium when there’s no solid footing to stand on.

of course yaz would run when she saw her new self. of course she would leave. companions would never stay now, they would never fully understand. when thirteen said that she would need to do ‘this next part’ alone, by ‘next part’ she meant ‘the rest of her (potentially eternal) life’. it’s the classic gambit: push the one you love away before they get the chance to reject you. because they always will, now. either that or they die in horrible circumstances. better to flee like you’ve always done.

this is why the bigeneration was a narrative necessity, why the giggle was the perfect vision of a positive finale. the original version of the doctor gets to settle down with people that he won’t lose. people that he won’t turn away from. people whose hearts he won’t inevitably break. he’s sitting there in the back yard and he’s not going anywhere…

…yet somewhere out there in sheffield lives a police officer named yazmin khan. she’s not all sunshine and rainbows — all cops are bastards, after all. sometimes she takes her nameless rage out on a shoplifting suspect. sometimes she hands a parking ticket to a kid that didn’t deserve it. and sometimes she does genuine good for the community, sometimes she goes to the club and dances with strangers, sometimes she sits on the sofa and watches a documentary about space exploration and laughs at the painful inaccuracies. and many miles south, the doctor spends time with his family, but he’ll never get the courage to visit her. because she’d want to run away with him again. and he could never give her that, not anymore. anything but running.

yazmin khan loved the universe in the eyes of her doctor. oh, that doctor in the garden? the stay-at-home-doctor? he’s brilliant, but he would never be enough for her. his presence would never replace the cosmic vistas and myriads of stars thirteen gave her. and she’s never coming back