#Christ Chibnall

[13thdoctorposts]

The amount of bias against 13 era Who is a real WTF, it was like people just wanted to be negative. We've all heard 'tHe WrItInG WaS bAd'. But people also just choose to be more negative and hostile towards it... for example

Legend of the Sea Devils... people couldn't stop talking about how bad it was. It got a 3 star review from Radio Times...

The title and first line are...

Doctor Who: Legend of the Sea Devils review – classic monsters resurface in maritime mediocrity

The Sea Devils are faithfully resurrected but the adventure on the South China sea is wishy-washy.

Do you know what else got a 3 star review? The Star Beast...

But how did they frame this even though it has the exact same star rating? As wishy washy? as mediocre?... of course not it's framed in a positive way 👇

Doctor Who - The Star Beast review: Saturday night magic is back

There's a very big adventure coming.

Even though its not relevant they also had to take a dig in the first couple paragraphs of The Star Beast review at the previous era 'You'd be forgiven for wondering if we've travelled back in time, but no, this is Doctor Who in 2023, and how sorely it's been missed... Doctor Who hasn't been at its very best for a long while'... like I said this was rated the same as tLotSD... in tLotSD opening paragraph... "I feel a bit sorry for today’s young viewers. I grew up watching Doctor Who in the 1970s and, while it might not have been immense every single week, we could rely on a fairly steady stream of classics – and scares and chills agogo. Sitting through Legend of the Sea Devils is like watching seaweed dry." Same rating different framing... this put the viewer into a different mindset before watching it, it primes them to see the negative rather than the positive.

And for good measure The Power of the Doctor which got 4 stars was framed in a 'oh its good but still not great' way... 👇

Doctor Who: The Power of the Doctor review – A satisfying finale to an erratic 4-year chapter

Despite an abundance of distractions, Jodie Whittaker and Mandip Gill remain the throbbing heart of the story.

According to this star rating this episode is better then The Star Beast but you wouldn't now that from the words. The bias against 13 era Who and the writing is both real and insane and nothing will change my mind on that because we are constantly shown evidence of it.

[you-are-a-saucy-boi]

chris chibnall’s era of doctor who felt like dw wattpad fanfic, in this essay i will

[cynicalclassicist]

So, Jodie Whittaker was able to lean into herself when playing this role.

on a scale from 0 to jodie whittaker how strong is your adhd

[thelesbianthespianposts]

Dear Mr. Chibnall,

Please understand that Rosa Parks not getting arrested does not, in any way, take down the entire Civil Rights Movement. Maybe next time you write a historical episode, hire a consultant, perhaps a historian to help you out.

[rjalker]

"people who criticize poor Chris Chibnall never criticize Moffat or RTD!!!!"

Yeah, you're really just making it blatantly clear that you have literally no fucking clue what you're talking about. You are not even pretending to know what you're talking about. There were literally so many people just last fucking week talking about RTD's racism. And so fucking many of us spent literal years criticizing Moffat's bigotry.

But sure, you fucking Chibnall stans who want to pretend anyone who has a problem with racism and misogyny in 2023 is just a woman hater, you go ahead and keep making it clear you've literally never fucking listened to a single word anyone's ever said about any of these writers and their failings.

Gods damn.

You're not living under a rock, you are purposefully plugging your ears and covering your eyes so you can pretend that the poor white man who's been writing bigoted shit for decades is a victim because minorities on the internet are criticizing his bigotry in 2023.

[phyrexian-lesbian]

i’ll talk about what i liked about the new episodes before i get into what i didn’t like (because there’s a lot more of that) so here’s my positivity post about series 14 (it’s never being s1 sorry rusty fans)

as a avid deadpool fan i enjoyed the fact that maestro and fifteen broke the fourth wall so much (maestro playing the dr who theme, 15’s “i though that was non-diegetic”, then both winking at the camera)

liking the children of the toy maker storyline so far. the One Who Waits so far sounds like a cool villain. although i’m not confident after the 60th that rusty has any idea what they are (especially after t*nnant doctor came back for literally no canon reason).

murray gold, ncuti gatwa, millie gibson, and most of the rest of the team are absolutely killing it:

the susan reference??? foreshadowing???

the old lady is following them.

positive side of the post over. now time for what i didn’t like.

the babies. the space babies. every single fucking thing about them. how they were written, their concept, the goddamn cgi- they were just horrible. what the fuck. what the actual fuck.

the booger monster???? my brother in christ there is a thin line between camp and just fucking stupid.

liked the doctor’s emotional response to the bogeyman dying, but like. wrong time. this is literally a baby eating savage animal. no brainpower. it was created (by what, again? you never explained that properly) to eat children. just because it was created at the same time as the babies doesn’t mean it’s not gonna eat them when it gets the chance.

the doctor can heal dead creatures now?wow that would’ve been very useful the past 10,000 times someone had died in their care. don’t @ me with “but the butterfly didn’t have super serious injuries” because the doctor’s friends have died of relatively unserious injuries before.

mr “i can’t have davros in his transport device because it demonises disabled people” immediately made a overtly sexual drag queen nonbinary character as the villain. like pick a skewed ideology my guy.

all he had to do was interview the beatles to get a read on their personalities. dr who is a multinational franchise i’m sure he could’ve done that. but no. the greatest musicians of all time, who laid the groundwork for so many musicians of the modern age, were reduced to two dimensional characters with monotone voices.

fifteens jump to ruby’s time in the nuclear winter, although thematically cool, kinda ruined the continuity of the show. because the future ruby exists in is the one where maestro was defeated and music healed. because that’s the past they traveled to from the future. so where tf did the doctor go to find the nuclear winter

the butterfly paradox was dismissed way to easily.

the humour was not it. i’m sorry.

also the piano zebra crossing? what? hu? whattt?!

rusty immediately used the presence of a god to explain everything that made no sense away again. like the 60th. why the musical? “cuz maestro”. why the musical crossing? “cuz maestro”. nah man. fuck that. it’s bad writing.

all in all bring back moffat or chibnall or hear me out here- get. someone. new.

[cynicalclassicist]

That is at least something that makes the scene... interesting. But it's understandable how divisive this scene is.

One more titbit to share on Thirteen’s run…

The bit where Graham told her he was worried about his cancer coming back, and her doing a total bodyswerve on saying anything vaguely empathetic…I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT WAS A MEME. I THOUGHT NO ONE COULD HAVE POSSIBLY WRITTEN SUCH A GLIB RESPONSE TO SOMETHING SO SCARY AND SO HUMAN AND SO RELATABLE FOR SO MANY PEOPLE IN THE AUDIENCE. BUT THEY DID.

Fucking hell.

[thenotoriousscuttlecliff]

Just baffling that Chris Chibnall thought it would be a great idea to do an episode about Rosa Parks that treats her like a prop as the Doctor, a blond white woman, stage manages her racial persecution and takes special care to highlight the pain of the modern white man at having to partake in a racial persecution for the greater good.

Oh, and has Yaz "not all cops" Ryan when he complains about racial profiling not two episodes after she racially profiled him.

Christ this era never had a chance.

[dandelionjack]

vanquishing abaddon and then coming back from the grave after three days to say “i forgive you” to the sinner who shot you … now that’s what i call Chibnall Subtlety™️. somebody went to religious imagery and christ allegories 101 class and got a C+

this could have been sooooo good. i can see it in my mind’s eye — the life-draining force jack would have faced up against could have been an abstract portal-type threat, an elemental pillar of light, the visual representation of the vortex, hell (pun apologies) it could have been virtually anything apart from the godawful cgi demon creature that immediately sucked any pathos or seriousness out of the atmosphere which had been building up so well over the course of this episode. it would have been perfect and fulfilled the same narrative function — drawing all the life energy out of jack so he’d take far longer to resurrect than usual. that’s it.

one neat little solution all tied up with a ribbon! but hey that’s not how we do things around here, pal. every time we create an almost perfect episode we just HAVE to ruin it with some shoddy visual design for the main villain so that none of it gets taken seriously. surely we are not shooting ourselves in the foot by doing this? damn!

^my reaction

[quietwingsinthesky]

im trying to be nice to the faults of chibnall’s era because 1) jesus christ only ten episodes a season??? (ONLY SIX FOR S13?????) i can’t even imagine the shit that got cut for time that would have helped with fleshing out the companions and giving the doctor more wiggle room for inner conflict. 3 more episodes doesn’t feel like a lot but god do you Miss them when they aren’t there. and 2) because it took moffat 3 whole seasons to really get his shit together so clearly if he’s allowed to fuck up so much everyone else should get a little leeway.

there Are faults. but i think overall, it was a strong season. there were. bad episodes. bad endings to episodes particularly. i hold true that yaz Should Not Be Here because she has literally nothing to do anything going on emotionally here, even though the yaz-centric episode was one of my favorites for the season 😔 but god this really needed to be the ryan & graham show for these episodes. she doesn’t need to be gone entirely but they really could’ve done with her joining later in the season or only joining for one episode like she’s curious about this and joining permanently later.

oh but thirteen. god i love thirteen. brilliant doctor. falters a little in that i think she isn’t given much of an overarching conflict? like, there absolutely is one, to me, but her struggling to choose pacifism or inserting herself into situations just sort of fizzles out by the end? we don’t get any resolution on that unless we want to call the witchfinders episode the resolution and it really didn’t feel like it should be. felt like a turning point into changing her mind, not the end. but jodie’s so good, i love her doctor mannerisms. i love how she plays 13’s issues with touch especially, it stands out to me how uncomfortable she is being touched while also being good to go for a short bit so long as she initiates it. i love how quietly furious she gets, there’s a doctor who is five minutes from biting someone if they keep pushing her and is just barely holding onto her restraint because she wants to keep the moral high ground. thirteen i love you <3

[cynicalclassicist]

I get a sense that when you can criticise Chibnall, info from previous eras stops existing.

i really wish i lived in a bubble, where no people who love to shit on other people's fun invade. but, sadly, they insist on coming onto my posts, having opinions that, even if they hold any water, do not belong anywhere near chibnall era content

[mikelpen]

Any variation of “after Moffat and Chibnall completely ignored the RTD era, having RTD back is like the return of Christ” stands as one of the most ignorant, nonsensical things ever said about Doctor Who.

I’m happy for some of you that your fave is back, but that doesn’t mean such idiotic trash needs to be pouring from your nostalgia poisoned brains.

[jokerlennon]

gonna do some chibnall haterism bc I think you’d understand: the 13th Doctor era obviously didn’t deserve all the misogynistic backlash and “Doctor who has gone woke” or “Nurse Who” stuff. And there are things about it I absolutely enjoy and I do get that there was a lot of love put into the era. but after series 12 I watched myself like. fall out of love with 13 because I realized how mediocre, undercooked and conservative her era was. I hate sounding like the dudebros who said she ruined/killed the show when I agree that I’m not 13’s biggest fan (she didn’t kill the show, quite obviously) but to me 13 never got the stories she deserved.

Realizing I liked the idea of the 13th Doctor more than the 13th Doctor we got was heartbreaking. (And I then can at least engage with the idea of her unlike conservative dudebros. God I hope Jodie does Big Finish.)

god yeah i absolutely get it part of me feels so bad when i complain bc i do like thirteen whenever she gets to be weird and alien and an inventor eating dirt being excited etc like that's a joy to witness i do like her as a concept!! but the episodes themselves are so stunningly mediocre.. it's not even that all of them are objectively terrible (some of them defintiely are jesus christ but that's what episodic scifi tv is like it's not like if it's just a constant barrage of one godawful thing after the other) there's just something missing from them yknow... i saw an improvement in s12 but s11 was basically disappointment after disappointment with. like. two highlights. the companions and their relationships to each other & especially the doctor are so underexplored which is an enornous contrast to the past 10+ years.. like i cant rlly speak for classic who yet but nuwho is very much About The Characters and if the doctor has basically no relationship to their companion then what am i here for. the story? most if not all of these stories i wouldnt watch if it wasn't doctor who honestly. at least im seeing some character development now but it took so long....

[doctorjodie13]

Thanks for this - looks like fun! Although I am going to be seriously torn with some of these!!!❤️🤣

Hello!

So I know everyone has probably long forgotton about this tournament. It turned out making it in the middle of writing my dissertation was a bad idea. But I'm done now, and the first round of polls are ready to be posted!!

I'm going to stagger the posts but for now I will be releasing 3 of them, they will come out in 5 groups of three :D

[theburningsunset]

my adhd can't chill tf down enough to sleep so may i present this (uhhh spoilers for new-who):

Everything in Doctor Who that ought to be fixed and why:

Any time the doctor shows racism, queerphobia, sexism, ableism, classism, etc. Unless a specific prejudice of Gallifreyan society exists, it would never make sense for the Doctor to be bigoted, even the one from the '60s

Related: when Thirteen breaks the Master's perception filter so the nazis would see he's a man of color and thus endanger him—the Doctor would never.

Completely abandon former companions. Maybe some, maybe originally, but even 2000 years of lessons learned later? The Doctor is a good man, abandonment is too inconsistent with his characterization to be a reoccurring, unchallenged trait.

Wiping Donna's memory. Cruel, erased her character arc and was not a fulfilling or meaningful end. Either kill her or have her decide to retire.

The convoluted reason the Ponds were stuck in 1939 New York. C'mon, if I tried for five seconds I could come up with a sensical reason why the Doctor never saw them and they were stuck. Or just don't make them stuck 🤷🏼‍♀️ maybe they decide to adopt and retire to avoid danger to the kid but the Doctor and River still regularly visit.

The "War Doctor". Showrunners confirmed this only existed because Christopher Eccleston refused to come back for the 50th Special (no shade to his choice). It might've backfired or seemed disrespectful of Chris's performance, but they should've simply recast Nine for it.

Just throw out Kill the Moon, it was bad writing, the heavy-handed abortion allegory was exhausting and weird (regardless of intentionality) and I don't usually cry "but the science!" but...the moon being gone, even if soon after it replaced itself, would cause apocalyptic destruction on Earth and possibly wipe out humanity. The primary salvageable bit that I think is integral is the Twelve/Clara fight at the end.

Danny Pink either doesn't die or doesn't stay dead. The paradox it would cause for him to die before him and Clara have kids when her and Twelve have MET those descendants and been on two separate adventures down that family line is irreconcilable. Full stop.

Bill doesn't die. The end. (Do NOT bury your fucking gays)

Don't have Graham be the last white seat on the Rosa episode, for fucking christ's sake. Plus where the fuck is at least the mention of Claudette Colvin?

Fourteen regenerates into Thirteen's clothes, following well-established rules of regeneration (BBC were cowards for breaking that just to sidestep having David Tennant "crossdress")

Headcanon bits that aren't necessarily tied to quality/consistent writing but I think would've been great:

The Doctor does find Melody. Maybe only by age six or so, if wanting to keep the Silence story intact, but rework Let's Kill Hitler to avoid the Mel situation. It makes me sad that they never got their baby back. She can still turn out to be River, maybe the regen into River only happened post season-six, keeping the reveal. Maybe Melody was eventually re-kidnapped by the Silence and then turned into River Song, or maybe Melody was always a kind of troubled trouble-maker and took on the River Song alias on her own.

Thirteen and Yaz absolutely get together.

keep in mind I haven't finished Thirteen's run (the stink of neolib BS from the Rosa Parks episode tanked my interest in keeping up until Chibnall fucked off), haven't seen the 60th Special yet, still have 20-something seasons of Classic Who to go, and don't remember everything I have seen, nor am I always right. I think on re-watch I'd find more issues but for now it's the list I've got that exactly zero (0) people asked for.

[besidesitstoowarm]

"Partners in Crime" thoughts

bf decided wilf is the best. he is not wrong

the adipose are literally one of the creatures of all time. amongus babies + porg + autism creature. i love them sooooo so much i also kind of want to eat them. it's fine

donna and ten have i think the best chemistry of any doctor-companion pairing in all of new who, possibly ever? in new who at least the only other pairing that comes close is eleven and river and that's bc he wants her strap so bad it makes him sick. they are just so fucking funny and iconic "you're not mating with me sunshine" he is truly in his sad wet era

i don't care about the plot cause the plot's not important. i love how sylvia says donna is the only unemployed person "not like the 80s" what the fuck are you talking about. jesus christ i know jackie can be a bit grating but rose was also 19, of course jackie is protective. donna's like 30! sylvia can eat my shorts. wilf is so supportive and sweet tho, i love their convo by the telescope

do we ever fucking find out what the shadow proclamation is? does chibnall explain it cause it seems like a very chibnall era thing to do. it seems like space nato but idk how much power they could have given that ten basically said the loss of the time lords was the loss of a governing body for space law. maybe he just meant in relation to timey wimey? and the shadow proclamation handles everything else? the whole "breeding planet" stuff felt very futurama to me. popplers

i appreciate that ten acknowledged he "destroyed half of [martha's] life" now can you tell HER that. of course now that she's gone he's all sadboy ohhh i didn't appreciate her enough and i fucked her up. it feels like a retroactive apology from davies. davies i forgive you. ten you're on thin fucking ice.

and then we see the ghost of rose! kind of. not ghost. but her appearance and the music that plays (i think it might be "vale decem"?) echoes the end of the season. we get the hint at the ending right at the beginning. "it was always going to happen, she's been dead since the beginning" kinda vibe. obviously it's meant as just a little tease for the rest of the season but it really felt like a death omen, esp w peter capaldi in the next ep. you're on borrowed time!!

the last thing i want to call back to is when the doctor gives foster one chance to make it right or else he'll fuck her up. it very much echoed "no second chances" from "christmas invasion", i think the only one who ever gets a second chance from ten (not even rose, who gets her second chance with his clone) is the master, who basically never expends his chances. no second chances unless it's my gay best friend that i have a dubiously homoerotic/malicious situationship with. many such cases