#plot doctoring

[finifugue]

Imagine being Jack Harkness, seeing the Doctor flirt and fall in love with a brown-haired, blue-eyed, cocky, sardonic american man from the future in period dress only in it for the money with a cool ship and a tragic backstory who risks his life to save his blonde female friend and gets left behind to die and being like. dude.

[luthqrs]

original post

[little-alien-duck]

if I were doctor who showrunner I would instigate a policy that every season should have one episode where the stakes are so low. like the worst possible outcome is our characters are incredibly embarrassed, just some good low stakes shenanigans (pranks, good-natured competition, etc) however I would also instigate a policy wherein every season should have one episode that lacks violence entirely but is still so wildly fucked up and unsettling that you are afraid to go to sleep that night and haunted by it for years to come. these two episodes CAN be back to back. 

[goldenkid]

'there's something so bad the tardis ran away' as if the tardis doesn't run away all the time. like the tardis lands feels bad vibes and fucks off till the end of the episode. one time the tardis dematerialised because she didn't like a mermaid. the stakes do not have to be high

[havesomewafflefrys]

The doctor, standing there, with a face of pure jealousy and discust, as he watched Rose pet a fucking cat. Will NEVER not be funny to me.

[celestetcetera]

Wild Blue Yonder really emphasized the Doctor not knowing the answer, huh? He’s wrong about Donna 3/4 times, he doesn’t speak the alien language, he doesn’t know what the creatures are nor is he very familiar with the space they’ve landed in. Hell, he even has a line admitting he’s wrong often.

But you know what else this episode did? It emphasized Donna’s brilliance. She may think she’s stupid, but she’s sharp as hell. She’s the one who figures out the imposter after giving a Doctor-level tangential speech. She’s the one who’s able to clear her head. She asks the right questions— why are their doubles scaring them?

Her imposter thinks she’s dumb at first, but when no-thing Donna realizes the real one’s actually smart, that’s when she’s able to break through the salt spell. Unfortunately Donna being brilliant means her imposter must be too.

Anyway. Love the role reversal. But for it to come at a time when the Doctor is feeling lost and confused, when they’ve just discovered they don’t even know themselves— it probably stings. Because what are they if not the smart one? When you take away all they’ve learned of this universe, there’s nothing left.

[mizgnomer]

Interviewer: [Because there's a Doctor Who reference in Good Omens], does that mean David Tennant, the actor, exists in the Good Omens universe?

David Tennant and Michael Sheen discuss Doctor Who in the Good Omens Universe (and good Doctors)

Source [ comicbook.com ]

[jvlianbashir]

"the creator said in a reddit thread -" "the official twitter account posted that -" "the actors confirmed in a livestream that -"

i don't care and that's not real to me. put it in the text.

[le-moons]

And he has 2 hearts

[bumblebeebats]

Must scifi be "good"? Is it not enough to watch David Tennant and Catherine Tate run about, yelling? and also a nonbinary transwoman is there?

[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

[ace-whovian-neuroscientist]

next on doctor who: ruby steps on a sidewalk crack. they find her birth mother by searching for people with broken backs

[gotyouanyway]

something about the doctor doing his "do you get it" monologue to ruby who's already dead.. the companion as a tool, a vehicle for exposition, a body in the room for the doctor to talk to. that he NEEDS to talk to for the exposition to work

[mossflower]

ppl complaining about the master showing up too much in nuwho are wrong. personally i don’t think they’re around enough. they should be in at least one episode a season doing gay arch nemesis shit and every time they should die in increasingly bizarre and improbable ways and every time the doctor should buy it 100% and be baffled when they show up perfectly alive in the next season

[fritzmonorail]

I love Jamie. He’s down for anything as long as it’s with The Doctor. It was not that long ago that he was getting sick just sitting in a normal air plane, and here he is just like

“rocket? Sure, not only do I understand what that is but I’m totally willing to strap myself in one immediately” This man is from the 18th century. I’m from 2024 and the very idea of doing this would scare the fuck out of me. He didn’t even know how to read when he started and now look at him. I’m so proud and also a little worried. He’s so brave and loyal.

[sparrowlucero]

Even if a creator is a bad person it's still okay to like their work. People need to mind their own business.

Honestly it's not really that sort of situation. I'll actively defend Steven Moffat here.

There was a huge hate movement for him back in the early 2010s - which, in retrospect, formed largely because he was running 2 of the superwholock shows at once, one of which went through extremely long hiatuses* and the other of which was functionally an adaptation of an already well regarded show**, making him subject to a sort of double ire in the eyes of a lot of fandom people. Notably, his co-showrunner, Mark Gatiss, is rarely mentioned and much of his work is still attributed to Moffat (and yes, this includes that Hbomberguy video. Several of "Steven Moffat's bad writing choices" were not actually written by him, they were Gatiss.)

People caricatured the dude into a sort of malicious, arrogant figure who hated women and was deliberately mismanaging these shows to spite fans, to the point where people who never watched them believe this via cultural osmosis. It became very common to take quotes from him out of context to make them look bad***, to cite him as an example of a showrunner who hated his fans, someone who sabotaged his own work just to get at said fans, someone who was too arrogant to take criticism, despite all of this being basically a collective "headcanon" about the guy formed on tumblr. Some if it got especially terrible, like lying about sexual assault (I don't mean people accused him of sexual assault and I think they're making it up, I mean people would say things like "many of his actresses have accused him of sexual assault on set" when no such accusations exist in the first place. This gets passed around en masse and is, in my opinion, absolutely rancid.)

On top of that a ton of the criticism directed at the shows themselves is, personally, just terrible media criticism. So much of it came from assuming a very hostile intent from the writer and just refusing to engage with the text at all past that.

Like some really common threads you see with critique of this writer's work, especially in regards to Doctor Who since that's the one I'm most familiar with:

A general belief that his lead characters were meant to be ever perfect self inserts, and so therefore when they act shitty or arrogant or flawed in any way, that's both reflective of the author and something the show wants you to view as positive or aspirational.

An overarching thesis that his characters are "too important" in the narrative due to the writer's arrogance and self obsession (even though this is a very deliberate theme that's stated several times)

A lot of focus on the writer personally "attacking" the fans or making choices primarily out of spite.

A tendency to treat the show being different to what it's adapting as inherently bad and hostile towards the original.

Just generally very little consideration and engagement with the themes, intent, etc. of the shows

This one's a little more nebulous and doesn't apply to all critique but a lot of it, especially recently, is clearly by people who haven't seen the show in like 10 years and their opinion is largely formed secondhand through like, "discourse nostalgia". Which. you know. bad.

I think these are just weird and nonsensical ways to engage with a work of fiction. I also think it's really sad to see the show boiled down to this because that era of who is, in my opinion, very thematically rich and unique among similar shows, and I'm disappointed that it's often dismissed in such a paltry way.

This isn't to say people aren't allowed to critique Steven Moffat or anything, but the context in which he basically became The Devil™ to a large portion of fandom and is still remembered in a poor light is very tied to this perfect storm of fan culture and I just don't agree with a ton of it.

* I'm sure most people have seen the way long running shows and hiatuses will cause people to fall out with a show, with some former fans turning around and joining a sort of "anti fandom" for it while it's still airing. That happened with both these shows. ** Doctor Who will change it's entire writing staff, crew, and cast every few years, and with that comes a change in style, tone, theme - the old show basically ends and is replaced by a new show under the same title. As Steven Moffat's era was the first of these handovers for the majority of audiences, you can imagine this wasn't a well loved move for many fans. *** I know for a fact most people have not sought out the sources for a lot of these quotes to check that they read the same in context because 1) most of them were deleted years ago and are very difficult to find now and 2) many of them do actually make sense in the context of their respective interviews