Russell T. Davies Returns to Doctor Who as New Showrunner
- Thread starter Allyn Gibson
- Start date
Not mad about the Pete's World human Doctor, especially if Rose is involved (why didn't he come over in The Stolen Earth, BTW?) but the fact of his being human means you've an automatic out for Tennant having aged.
By pretending to be the good doctor and putting a love spell on the Tardis that makes it love him. In fact brainwashing is what made him evil. He brainwashed himself into being able to be evil enough to stop the Time Lord's from destroying the Galaxy but then it stuck and now he uses it to do his own type of evil by becoming a kind of dark prankster exploring space fucking with people but with a Tardis he knows he can now go back and forward in time as well.
That was a deleted scene so it's probably not considered canon.
With RTD back, that won't be happening. When asked about the Doctor or Time Lords from Pete's World's universe, RTD said that Time Lords were unique to Doctor Who's "Prime Universe" and as such there are no Time Lords or Doctors in any alternate universe.
Except that there are one.
The "human" Doctor didn't come over in "The Stolen Earth" because he wasn't created until the next episode, "Journey's End". At the end of that episode, he was brought over to Pete's World for Rose.
Ah yes; it's all a bit of a blur... Still, would solve the aging actor problem.
Well, there was the Cushing doctor, but he died.
Well, that's just in my personal canon, but whatever...
They can just use ILM's Cushing model from Rogue One.
Well, he wasn't actually a Time Lord was he. and he was quite old.
So his old Tardis is around somewhere, waiting to be found and repaired...
Hmm. UK bookmakers have just stopped taking bets on who the next Doctor will be, which suggests that a large enough number have come in for one specific person to raise red flags. Something similar happened last time with Jodie going from not even being on the list to one of the top favourites just before she was announced.
Seems a little soon to be announcing the Next Doctor, but they have just announced the Next Showrunner, and seem on something of a roll with Big, Dramatic Announcements, so who knows? And, of course, their hand may be forced by potential media leaks, again.
I think they were trying to one-up the fates of Jamie and Zoe in "The War Games", by having Donna's memory erased, and to be fair the show doesn't do that too often, but cookie cutting that fate for epic emotional response without the underlying experience and depth alone is a cheat. Ditto for the number of times we see Ice Warrior big epic times, monsters invading London and trundling down streets... again... and so on. Even stories like "Turn Left" lose some of the value of the idea because it's too Earth-centric as well, while showing what's wrong with the show - all those species invading locally would have a very different outcome as well. It's still a cool idea to explore, if the Doctor wasn't there then what, but the execution is typical NuWHO modern day Earth epic empty extravaganza.
RTD is known for blending genres. Sci-fi, fantasy, soap opera, et al. I don't always care for it (in short: individual preferences everyone has when watching a show they like), but he also won me over in other stories as well. But I digress. It's saccharine, but letting some companions to have a happy, albeit "permanent" fairy tale-esque ending is supposed to be dramatic and big... which he then is quick to upend the moment fans wanted her back and balked over Martha, and series 4 was not that great. That's, IMHO, the real gripe. He goes out of his way to make BIG EPIC ENDINGS and throws in so much exposition in an attempt to make them weighty... but he throws it all down the toilet in order to bring back "crowd pleasing favorites" and his own exposition rendered it more ineffectual as a result. I was even tapping my foot over "how much longer", given Tennant's final story with all the overly contrived exposition puked out as to why "the sonic" couldn't save him - even though far worse situations got him out with ease. And people still rag on Chibnall?!
It's charming in its own way (not being snarky, for once) but whatever ideas he had in mind, once the audience screeched because the fan favorites are gone and would then stop watching... not sure if the audience was taking the show too seriously or if RTD was pandering by undoing his own narrative just to bring her back for the fans (the stereotyped millennials?! Rose at age 15 was the least interesting and most generic teenage companion the show ever had...)
Pretty much. At least they were locked in some other dimension that he Doctor fried up a star just so he could cry his bye-byes to and preventing how many civilizations from forming in the process or altering causality in some form or whatever... nope. Just cop a feelz for Rose leaving "permanently" to wring the most out of it because he'll never be able to return to do-- oops, he was quick with series 4 to upend that. People talk of incoming writers making retcons and undoing others, when RTD was retconning and undoing his own show... that and if you remove the soundtrack, the tone is different and nobody cries as much. Like how Big Bang Theory without the laugh track has a different response from the audience too.
I can find things to roll with, but "TARDISes being grown with 'coral'" was the worst sort of cringe ever scribbled out and that's an award winning level of cringe as well. If The Timeless Child was reviled because they retconned the Doctor's past, that's nothing by comparison - we have decades upon decades where the TARDIS is clearly a technological device with constrained and qualified abilities grafted on (including telepathic control for emergencies). NuWHO doing a Timeless Children long before the Timeless Children and saying it's grown like a cabbage and finds him sexually attractive and the rest of it was just so far beneath the show and its potential... or did the Doctor call it sexy? I refuse to watch that episode again where they turn a machine/organically grown thing/whocares into a glorified sex toy.
"The Doctor's Wife" is that episode's title... this somewhat ties into what I said above to Starkers as well, oddly... It's all honestly at the point where someone who's never heard or seen the show should step in and freshen it up a bit, with no more "fans" to make the show if all these franchises are now being made by fans and yet there's more wrong with them now than ever (which isn't entirely true, too.) Think Nicholas Meyer and Harve Bennett, who proved non-fans can restart a franchise and still keep true to its core and unique tenets.
