#do it chibnall

[aq2003]

i have officially found my least favorite 10th doctor take in the entire world. this post was specifically crafted in a lab to make me fuming fucking mad

[bloodstained-ballgowns]

i just rewatched ‘the woman who fell to earth’ a couple of days ago for the first time since it aired back in 2018 and the more i think about it, the more i like it.

thirteen is the only doctor for whom i feel a tangible, rose-tinted nostalgia. she wasn’t my first doctor, but she was the first doctor i watched live, the first doctor that i spent an actual extended period of time with over the episode rollout. her intro episode has middling parts (as can be expected with most episodes of Who) but there’s also so much good that i really want to highlight.

first of all, there are some really great character dynamics set up here. much more interesting than i remember, tbh. ryan is a guy who loves mechanics but is stuck in a warehouse job he hates, a guy who obviously wants to connect to people, a guy who by the end of the episode has lost both his mother and grandmother in the space of a couple of years and the step-grandfather he didn’t really want is all he has left (minus his absent father). that’s interesting.

yaz has a keen sense of justice and this raw, intense yearning to help people, to do something worthwhile, something more - the way she has chosen to express that is through law enforcement, but it’s not quite giving her the satisfaction she wants. that’s interesting.

graham’s experience with cancer means that he constantly feels like he’s living on borrowed time. meeting grace gave him purpose, gave him family, gave him the will to fight when he fought it was all but over, but now grace is gone. he and ryan aren’t related, but they’re family, and now they’ve got to figure out how to care for each other without the very lynchpin that brought them together. once again with feeling: interesting!

“i’m just a traveller. sometimes i see things that need fixing. i do what i can.” i like that they circle back to the ‘just some guy’ portrayal of the doctor here, both because it’s the one i’m partial to and because it feeds particularly well into the whole ‘the doctor is an unreliable narrator’ aspect, especially in the wake of the increased deification in the moffat era. it's a nice set up, even if it gets completely overhauled circa series 12/13. in fact, having thirteen keep this as a persistent attitude throughout the Timeless Child of it all could have been really effective re: her reticence with her companions and refusal to address or deal with her past.

the scene where thirteen builds her sonic screwdriver might be one of my favourite sequences in nuwho. i love that it’s a hybrid of alien tech and sheffield steel. i also love that they highlight the ‘mad inventor’ side of the doctor here (her teleportation circuit is based around a microwave?) and wish that they had carried it forward more. it would have been the perfect basis for her to bond with ryan over. jodie also pulls off the humour of the episode well, considering the significant shift from moffat dialogue.

i enjoy thirteen's outfit: the vibrancy of it as mirroring her childish excitability, but also as another part of the mask - if i dress all colourful then maybe i can ignore/outrun/masquerade my great capacity for darkness! etc etc. the shopping trip with yaz and ryan is a bit shoe-horned in at the end but it's cute that she finds it in a charity shop. (back in 2018 i bought a t-shirt with a couple of stripes across the chest solely because it remotely resembled the one she wore lol. nerd from a young age, me.) jodie also looks soo hot in capaldi's outfit though so a spin on the traditional suit would also have been appreciated.

some miscellaneous points: i like that she tells Karl off (“you had no right to do that”) right after saving him. i like that she gets it wrong at first and makes it clear that she’s working on the fly. she’s following her instinct, and that instinct is to help people. doctor who has been beautiful before but the cinematography takes such a huge step this era. “it’s been a long time since i bought women’s clothes” i am choosing to believe this is about river thank you and good night.

[causalityparadoxes]

Just saw someone credit Chibnall for making the Doctor nonbinary and uhm,,, respectfully I think some of ya'll skipped 12.

Unless I'm forgetting some earlier classic who/rtd mention of nonbinary-ism, 12 is the first TV Doctor to explicitly talk about timelords not having human gender.

And thats not even getting into earlier non TV stuff like the Eighth doctor saying the line 'i don't think I've ever even been a man' in response to someone asking him if he'd ever been a woman.

Like yes casting 13 as a woman was an awesome move and a win for nonbinary Doctor fans everywhere. But please don't forget the work Capaldi & Moffat put into making Twelve a nonbinary icon

[leikeliscomet]

Honestly, Ryan wasn't even a bad companion he just wasn't utilised properly. His YouTube channel should've been a central part of his character. Maybe have him been the one to record everything. Maybe have him actually know Two Girls Roaming in Praxeus because he watched their videos or gets filming tips from them. His relationship with his dad should've been threaded throughout s11 so his appearance in Resolution stuck. Maybe he shouldn't have forgiven him in the person-forgives-neglectful-parent-because-family-can-do-no-wrong trope but chosen Graham as his new father figure so that 'call me grandad' actually hits harder. Maybe have Thirteen be his father figure instead, building on the way Ryan tends to follow her instructions the most out of the fam. His feelings about Grace should've been in the spotlight. Maybe have him find Grace in the alt universe. Maybe have him be the one to try and kill Tim Shaw. Maybe have him be the one dream about Grace in Can You Hear Me. Maybe take the Graham scenes and replace him with Ryan.. y'know.. Grace's whole grandson...? Maybe also address the fact his mum died and bc his dad left he was left all alone as a child??? And that should've been his Can You Hear Me nightmare instead of throwing in the dregs unprovoked?? His mechanic skills should've been a key trait too. Maybe have him fix the ship with Thirteen in Tsuranga instead of Yaz. Maybe have him, Tesla, and Thirteen talk about the joy of building and fixing things. Maybe have him go with Nevi and Silas in Orphan 55 to work together on mechanic stuff but also show Ryan's longing for a father-son relationship like theirs. (And make Yaz fight the dregs instead bc wasn't she the one with police training...).

His feelings for Yaz and Bella could've been sorted out properly. Maybe have Ryasmin for a few eps but stop bc space-time travel overcomplicates things or to set things up for Yaz' coming out and Thasmin. Maybe address the fact Bella likely died on Orphan 55 and have it cause tension between Ryan and Thirteen bc she refused to help her. And Ryan's Blackness. Maybe have Ryan be the one to disagree with the plan and try to help Rosa instead. Maybe have him explain who she is to the others instead of having the only Black guy in the cast not know who Rosa Parks is.

There was so much potential man. So so so so much...

[makeawishandskimit]

@ all variations of "Thirteen wasn't actually queer"/"15Rogue was more convincing than Thasmin"/"Thasmin was queerbait" etc.

[variousqueerthings]

thing about rose, for me, is that she wasn't there first -- this in a "she was first in nu!who in the sense that this was the first person to travel with nine, and the first person since the timewar, and the last person that nine was with, to the point that ten was born out of that experience/modelled on her."

and in that framing, I am a big fan of her haunting of the narrative, because it start outs with her placing herself inside the doctor's ribcage and rebooting their ability to want to feel things, but unfortunately rose is still a human, like every human the doctor travelled with before, it's just that the doctor forgot how to steel themself against that inevitability because of the circumstances around meeting rose

this is The thing that I find tragic about martha, because I think she could have been that person, if she'd been the first person post-timewar to travel with the doctor, but because she's coming in during bleeding-heart times, she's got to deal with triage instead. and yes, there are wonders, and yes, there are good times, but for a lot of it, it's shrapnel, and I think if it hadn't been, she would have had a very different attitude towards *waves hands* space and time travel and aliens and the universe (one where she wouldn't be the person trusted with something like the osterhagen key)

and donna had a sense of that Space the doctor was in post-rose (she canonically stopped the doctor from dying in runaway bride) and stepped away from it, and didn't get back to the doctor until some of that hole-in-chest had been bandaged up, which martha did a great job of, but didn't get to really benefit from, and I think that's the sad thing about martha jones, is that she absolutely got a taste of the beauty and the splendor, but never without all the violence and heave weight that was put onto her

which, again, she seems to have been very aware of, considering she joined UNIT and Torchwood. her eyes were barely ever rose tinted (no pun here) during her whole journey in the story. martha really is in my opinion the most tragic companion (that I've met so far, I know Adric straight up dies, but maybe he had some fun times before that?), because yes, donna loses her memories and rose is in a parallel universe, but that's more tragic for the doctor -- they've both built lives

in donna's case there's probably a lot of imperfection in that life, but clearly a lot of joy as well, with her and her husband and her kid and her mum, and I'm sure she'd have preferred to be the donna who saw the universe and was splendid, but martha never gets to forget, and has to continue her life one step out of sync of everything she could have been

which, maybe her life is pretty flipping fantastic, but we really don't know, which is the biggest thing I side-eye about the first nu!who era. that whole weird ending with the sontaran and mickey is like... anti-character work, it answers nothing and it makes very little sense

all I know about her at the end is that she more than anyone saw the doctor's life and became a soldier (still a doctor as well, but...) because that was the work she saw needed doing, and she's the kind of person who does what needs doing. but is she... okay? youknow?

but going back to the original point, is that framing martha through the lens of rose is all well and good in the sense that rose is the reason the doctor is at that emotional point when he meets martha -- although donna absolutely had a very big hand in that as well -- but once we've established that, martha's arc is martha's arc, and it's dull to me to frame it as the "rebound" arc or even particularly about alloromanticism (including -- and this is why i get why people do it in fandom -- some shit said by rtd, which is just less interesting than what I get out of it, so shhhh)

she's got so much going on, and her relationship with the doctor changes the trajectory of her life, and it's in many ways a more interesting and far less straightforward trajectory of bad-to-better that many companions get -- it's a wonderfully complicated narrative that (and again, I get that some of this comes from within deliberate framings of the text, even though I think it's more than open enough to do more with, death of the author and all that -- but certainly not all of this is text either, some of it is ignoring what is actually there) is done a disservice by not going through the real messed up fascinating extraordinary shit that's going on during her era + arc in s4

but also... is she ok? I want to know. it's one of my top three burning questions, since we're getting a bit of best-ofs of the noughties DW era, some of your crimes can be righted by a simple bit of martha mr davies

[scriptscribbles]

[rapha-reads]

Here's an unimportant question.

Thirteenth drops the Chameleon Arc that contains all her past memories and lives down into her Tardis.

Then Fifteenth separates the Tardis and creates a copy so both him and Fourteenth can have their own Tardis.

(I'm still a bit hesitant about that whole biregen stuff but let's accept it for now.)

Who has the original Tardis? Did everything that was in our Tardis got copied too? Or is the white, empty appearance of Fifteenth's Tardis represents the blank canvas that is this new Tardis?

In the same line, the Tardis actually is sentient. Our beautiful, sexy Idris, we know the Tardis is alive, the Tardis isn't just the blue box. So. What was copied? The blue box and the consciousness that lives in it and animates it? Either? Or?

Who has the Chameleon fob watch? Fourteenth and his Tardis? Fifteenth and his? Who has the consciousness Idris? Is she still here or has she been so damaged first by the Flux and then by Sutekh that she's gone dormant, or even left the blue box?

Is she even still Idris or has she changed, mutated? Are we going to see the fob watch again?

... Is RTD asking himself these questions and thinking about continuity or is it all going to be dropped while he does his own stuff? ... Are some of these issues explored in books, comics or audio dramas?

...

I know I said "one question" and there's like a dozen here, but ultimately it all boils down to one thing: is RTD going to close up what Chibnall opened?

Oh, and if your opinion is "the Flux and Chibnall and Thirteenth's era is bad and doesn't matter", I don't want to hear from you, thank you.

[ovenproofowl]

Despite the whackiness of the special effects, there were a lot of dark themes thrown about in this episode, but none - I think - were darker than the conversation the Doctor had with who he thought was Donna.

The fact she baits him by using the information she's learned from his mind, that she lets him think the DoctorDonna showed her everything that happened with Flux and the Doctor's own mysterious origins. And it kills me because the Doctor hasn't been able to talk to anyone about this. Not in depth. Not at all. And they're finally in a body that can say stuff like love and hug with abandon, facing one of their best friends and she knows everything, the Doctor thinks, so for just a second the walls go down and he steps forward and he's about to unleash it all.

And then the mask comes off. And it's not Donna at all, but he's still stood there with everything on the tip of his toungue with no choice but to swallow it down again. To yell and kick and scream where no one can hear him. Just like it's always been.

This was exactly how I was hoping they'd incorporate Flux and The Timeless Child into the story. I'm really wishing they'll stick to these themes going forward, with the Doctor's guilt and anger finally bubbling up, because so much could be done with it.

For now though, I am just so happy we got this.

[buildoblivion]

listen as much as I didn’t really like the whole timeless children thing I do respect rtd not just ignoring it and rolling with the drama instead

[quantumshade]

do you ever think about how there is an insane amount of antisemitism in doctor who but no one ever talks about it. do you ever think about how goyim on this website make a habit of sexualizing and fetishizing these insanely antisemitic scenes. because i do. i think about it a lot but i feel like i can't talk about it because it makes the gentiles uncomfortable lol

[bloodstained-ballgowns]

Jodie and Mandip join Big Finish = the sun is shining brighter today!

[transgenderdoctorwhomst-old]

So I've spent the past like, two weeks, trying to dissect with my partner what exactly is making 13's first season so... uninteresting and even just bad to us. And today I've finally figured it out!

Obviously just my opinions, disclaimer I've only watched up to the end of Spyfall, this is not intended as hate but rather criticism, and you are completely free to disagree or just ignore the whole post..

I'm going to put this under a cut in order to not take up the whole dash. Topics: The Doctor's autism, and the dynamics between 13 and her companions. So, let's start!

The failure to characterize 13 consistently with past incarnations, especially in regards to the Doctor's naturally rebellious nature and extremely visible autism.

As someone who's autistic, the very very consistent autistic traits in the Doctor are always extremely obvious. And for an incarnation written with that in mind, you'd think that it would be consistent, right?

But here's where something major about the Doctor is missing: so far, as of the end of Spyfall part 2, I have rarely seen 13 engage extensively with her special interests. The only examples I can think of are when she meets Rosa Parks, visits Kerblam!, and when she meets the Solitract.

The Doctor has a strong tendency to get so caught up in their special interests that they basically will not shut up about it when it comes up, often rambling without fully checking if someone is actually listening. I... feel like I rarely see 13 do it that much? Sure, she's happy to explain things when she's asked, and she clearly has special interests, the sheer prevalence it should have in how she engages with the world is just... not really there.

The lack of it makes it feel like her character is missing something major, and was hard to put together that it was this specifically that was bothering me. I can think of a million examples of each Doctor respectively engaging with their special interests near constantly, but it feels like it's hardly there for 13 in comparison.

As for her rebellious nature, 13 has so far been remarkably passive about capitalistic crimes. I'm sure we all remember her and Kerblam!. And the spiders in the hotel. You would expect the Doctor to challenge the systems that caused those respective problems, encourage the people in those systems to fix it, but she just sort of... doesn't.

She doesn't care the warehouse employees have to save up miniscule wages just to see their family once a year, that they're tracked and constantly under threat of losing what little income they have, that even though society has progressed so this can all be automated, the powers that be are not adapting with that to provide basic necessities to the public, and instead are telling everyone they're lucky if they get to be indentured to Kerblam!. The Doctor stops a man from committing terrorism (because all protesters of these systems are also serial killer terrorists, clearly), and then doesn't stop to deal with the root cause. She just tells him he's wrong, is satisfied the company will hire more humans (put more people in the meat grinder), and leaves.

The spiders episode is a whole thing, focusing more on the side effects of the actual problem, which is capitalist businessmen cutting corners for profit and ignoring regulations, and getting away with it. The message of the episode at the end comes out as "you shouldn't actively kill any living thing for any reason", citing trapping the spiders in a room to die as more humane. But I would strongly disagree.

The humane thing to do for those spiders, who were mutated, suffering, and having a negative impact on both the local spiders and humans, would have been to swiftly kill them. The Doctor cares more about not feeling bad about killing the spiders than the system that made this happen in the first place, or ending their suffering, which feels wildly out of character.

2. The companions don't feel like they have a lot going on, and lack the kind of strange connection past companions have.

So, Graham Ryan and Yaz are all kind of just boring. I see the dynamics and relationships they're supposed to have with each other, but none of it feels compelling. I don't feel any connection to them.

At first, I thought that it was because Chibnall introduced three companions in the first episode. It's definitely a contribution, since having to introduce four major characters compared to one or two isn't the easiest thing to do. But it's possible.

Torchwood introduces six characters to us at the start: five members of Torchwood 3, and Gwen. Every single character feels distinctive, they have clashing personalities that also bounce of each other. The introduction feels great, and you can immediately watch their characters develop and change over the course of the first season.

The Doctor and the Fam? I literally cannot tell you distinctive personality traits about each of them besides basic vibes. It took until Spyfall for them to start feeling distinct. I can't tell you major flaws, major anything. I can barely describe their respective relationships to the Doctor, besides "weird friend with the time machine we know nothing about."

The single thing portrayed as a flaw in the Doctor is that she doesn't like talking about herself unprompted. They don't know a lot about her, but in her defence, they barely ask.

Past companions in New Who always have some strange relationship with the Doctor. Rose is having a situationship with him after he blew up her workplace, and has complex feelings about how travelling with him affects her life at home. Martha is having this weird situation where he's using her to fill the gap left by Rose, while trying to keep his distance, and Martha is just trying to figure out how the fuck to get him to look at her as her own person. Donna decided she wanted more in life, and by god was she going to grab the Doctor and take it, assigning herself his new best friend.

Amy met the Doctor as a child, obsessed over him for 14 years, ran away with him before her wedding, and then dragged Rory along, and ended up with the weirdest family dynamics possible. Rory isn't sure how to feel about the Doctor, and the two of them for some reason take turns being the "mature" one. Clara is overly dedicated to him and deeply enjoys the power trip that comes along with having time travel.

I can't speak about Bill or Nardole, because I haven't actually met them, but I know there's some kind of dynamic going on there.

The point is, every individual has some kind of distinctive and very strange relationship with the Doctor, from the very start. Friends, but something else. Romantically interested in each other, but dancing around that boundary. The 13th Doctor has absolutely nothing strange or compelling with hers so far.

Like, I could think of at least some with what we have! 13 decides Graham is her grandson, because Ryan and Yaz have a grandparent figure, but Graham doesn't, and then extends that to Ryan with deciding to be a great-great-grandparent figure to him.

At least in her first season, she doesn't seem opposed at all to a relationship with Yaz. The Doctor is notoriously weird about relationships. If Yaz panicked and told her mom that she was dating the Doctor, the Doctor could just roll with it and now Apparently They're Dating ???. It could be so fun! But there just... isn't anything!

Maybe it gets better in her second season onwards, but these kinds of things should be established fairly quickly. Like, at least halfway through the first series. I genuinely hoped her first season would be better on a rewatch, because I watched it while it was airing, and dropped the show after because I was just so not into it. I shouldn't have to be doing this much work to make it interesting to me! I shouldn't be enjoying early Moffat Who more than this!

Anyways if you read all this, I am very happy to hear thoughts and counterpoints, just please don't send me hate anons :)

[laniidae-passerine]

catch me laughing in the club awkwardly because this season has a 19 year old blonde female companion from London, a space travelling left of law brunette queer boy who flirts heavily with the doctor, absolutely zero writers of colour and no mention of sensitivity readers…….and next season the new companion is a woman of colour. uh oh!

[thenotoriousscuttlecliff]

Moffat is delivering the goods this week.

[eleonkraken]

Ignore this post I'm just going insane about Chibnall era Doctor Who again.

These characters are so empty of heart and they go nowhere and essentially everything they do or say they only do in the capacity of being plot devices. It's like once the writers had the plot figured out they had to shoehorn the characters into it. Every single episode.

In Rose's first episode she's the one who takes out the nestene consciousness when the Doctor is incapacitated. In Donna's first episode, despite being a bit of a plot device herself, she's the one who sees that the Doctor shouldn't travel alone and alerts him to that. In Martha's first episode, she's the one who actively chooses to sacrifice her last breaths to save the Doctor so he can save everybody in the hospital. In Amy's first episode, she gets to be angry and hold the Doctor accountable for making promises he couldn't keep. In Bill's first episode, her curiosity and stubbornness is what essentially pulls the Doctor out of hibernation.

They all have thoughts and feelings and drives and motivations that shape the stories they're in and the decisions they make. They grow over the course of their tenure. They're not perfect characters, but they have a distinct core personality which drives them to do things that make a difference to the story they're in.

You'll notice I didn't mention Clara's first episode, and that's because series 7 is badly written compared to s1-6 and s8-10. That Clara is a plot device, and her character flip flops between different character traits largely without reason as it befits the plot of each episode. But in s8, they mostly fix that issue by settling on an arrogant, ambitious, fearless version of her. And when they take away someone she loves in the series finale, we get to see what that specific kind of character is capable of under those circumstances. Who she is, who she has been that whole season, is what makes that story happen.

That's compelling. That's engaging. That makes you care.

Are there equivalent moments for Chib's companions? How do their feelings and motivations make a difference to the story? How do those things progress from where they start to when they leave the Doctor?

Martha realizes she needs to leave because staying with someone she loves who doesn't quite love her back is harmful. Amy has to leave because she loves Rory so much that even the risk of not ending up in the same place or time is preferable to staying with the Doctor and not even trying. Clara's own hubris is why she ultimately has to leave the Doctor (yes, it should have killed her, but either way it's a punishment because she has to leave him forever).

Why does Yaz leave?

What is Yaz's Face the Raven moment? What's her Parting of the Ways moment? What's her Fires of Pompeii moment? What's her Forest of the Dead moment? What's her Pyramid at the End of the World moment? Please let me know if it exists and I've missed it.