Neil Gaiman: "My Doctor Who experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth"

I feel like Crimson Horror and Nightmare in Silver have a sort weird feeling of very good elements but very poor execution. And they feel oddly similar. I wonder if Moffat being "hands off" and occupied with Name..., Day..., Night..., & Time... meant the other producers had greater input in story, production, direction, etc. over 7b.

As above, 7a was sort of a mixed bag. The "push" to have only one parters hurt the Chibnal mystery box episode (which was really good, but so packed it became muddled) and the Angels Take Manhattan could have used more time to breathe. The shenanigans with Clara in 7b are also odd. But then you have the Song of Akhaetan, which is stellar. By the time you get to Day of the Doctor everything feels a bit more set and Clara was clearly soft rebooted after Name of...

 

A lot of the problem with Clara in 7B comes in retrospect in that she doesn't seem to resemble the character she becomes in later seasons. Part of that I suspect has to do with the quite literally last minute decision to make her from modern day as opposed to Victorian era as was the original plan, and indeed Gaiman even said when he first started writing Nightmare in Silver, it was with a Victorian Clara. Season 7B Clara seems to be a hip young millennial every-person with an active social life while Clara of the Capaldi era is apparently a somewhat nerdy teacher devoted to the job to the point she has no human friends outside of Coal Hill, even her love interest is another teacher at the school. She's apparently out of touch with what is "cool" and can't relate to the kids she teaches, despite the fact in season 7B she was the cool babysitter of her neighbour's children.

Although, I certainly don't agree that Coleman and Smith had no chemistry. If anything, the open attraction to each other they played the characters having and was a refreshing new take on the relationship of Doctor and companion. Indeed, Day and Time of the Doctor is really good at showcasing this side of their relationship, especially as Clara is no longer the mystery which needs to be solved. I'm kind of disappointed we didn't see this continue on past Time, though I guess it wouldn't have been the same with a mid-50s Peter Capaldi and a late twenties Jenna Coleman.

The episode itself, not really. The Paternoster Gang certainly are divisive, and I guess your opinion on the Gang determines your opinion on the episode.

 

I agree with you about their chemistry. I'm not sure if it was written on the page that way or if Smith and Coleman decided, much like Davison and Sutton twenty-five years earlier, to play it that way, but I got the sense that the Doctor and Clara were boning by "Day," and the Christmas dinner with the family in "Time" plays that way, too, and Clara's reaction to the regeneration is suggestive, too.

 

Woa...I always saw a "more then just friends"-romantic type relationship...but it NEVER crossed my mind that there was any horizontal gymnastics going on...

 

Maybe Coleman and Smith were boning, but I doubt the Doctor was. He even said in Time that he could perform the sexual acts, but he's rusty.

I do think she definitely had the hots for him, though. Isn't that pretty much a given?

 

But if the episode was already written, why couldn't they have made it with Tennant & Martha? Why would it matter if Fry himself was busy? And given that Tennant & Rose have been coming back for Big Finish, any chance we might see an audio for the episode?

Point taken. Smith/Amy/Rory is my favorite TARDIS team and I do appreciate what more of them we can get. Still, their Season 7a work ranks up as fairly middling compared to their peak stuff in Seasons 5 & 6.
"Asylum of the Daleks" just isn't as scary as the title implies.
"Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" actually is pretty fun. I love Rory's dad.
"A Town Called Mercy" is actually pretty solid but I dock it several points because it starts talking down to the audience and feels the need to highlight that THIS IS A MORAL QUANDARY WITH SHADES OF GRAY!!!!! It's a shame because Toby Whithouse is usually better than this. (I still think he'd be a better showrunner than Chibnall.)
"The Power of Three" is a fun little thing but I feel like it covers a lot of the same territory for the Doctor that we already covered in "The Lodger" & "Closing Time."
"The Angels Take Manhattan" has some great moments but it features both convoluted time travel mechanics & over-the-top angst. It's like the worst instincts of Steven Moffat & Russell T. Davis smushed together.

"Cold War" is definitely Gatiss' best. "The Crimson Horror" is OK. I like the beginning when it's trying to be a backdoor pilot for a Paternoster Gang spin-off. But once the Doctor shows up and the plot really gets going, it's just a mess. However, I have to give it credit for the funniest line from the entire Matt Smith era...

OK, you want a controversial episode from Season 7, I think this is the one! I've heard that lots of people love this episode. My best friend will often try to steer Doctor Who conversations back to this episode. I think it's fine but I think the ending is a bit too conceptual to work as a visual medium. I suspect it would work better as a novel.

I think maybe the turning point for Clara was in "The Time of the Doctor" when they're first exposed to the Truth Field in Christmas and Clara blurts out "Bubbly personality concealing bossy control freak!" Now, maybe Moffat always intended that Clara be depicted as a control freak but that's not at all how I would describe her prior to Season 8. Perhaps none of the writers nor the actress realized it prior to that either.

Given that I had to put up with 2 seasons of that with Rose, I don't think it was new or refreshing at all.

I wonder how much of that was the writers wanting to move away from that anyway, how much of it was realizing that it would look a lot weirder with Capaldi in place of Smith, and how much of it was Capaldi himself wanting to move away from the notion of the Doctor as a romantic figure. I often wonder how much influence the modern series actors have on elements of their version of the Doctor. Like, Eccleston kissed Jack in "The Parting of the Ways" but Tennant didn't seem to respond to Jack's flirting at all.

I like the Paternoster Gang a lot. The married-lesbian-lizard-woman jokes wore thin pretty quickly but I could totally see Vastra carrying her own series. And Strax suggesting ultra-violence as the solution to every problem will always be funny!

If the Doctor & Clara were sleeping together at the time of "The Time of the Doctor," why did she act so embarrassed to see him naked in the TARDIS? Why did the Doctor sound so surprised when Clara asked him to pretend to be her boyfriend?

 

Because, as already stated, the original draft of the script was too expensive to shoot and would've needed to be rewritten. Fry was not available to do the rewrites.

https://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Stephen_Fry

 

My problem with The Power of Three is barely a month prior to it airing, in the week leading up to the season premiering with Asylum of the Daleks, we had the "Pond Life" webisodes, which basically cover the same material covered in Power of Three.

 

Add to that, Clara's reaction to Vastra suggesting it in 'Deep Breath'.

 

When it comes to The Doctor sleeping around (after he left Galifrey at least, because he obviously had at least one kid in order for that kid to have Susan, plus his dialog in The Doctor's Daughter outright said he had a family), I think he either never did (Timelord's probably aren't as sex obsessed as humans), or if he did I only seriously consider Romana and River as being people he probably slept with. I certainly don't think he slept with any of his normal human companions.

 

Nah, we know reproduction on Gallifrey is courtesy of the Looms...

 

Thank god those were made non canon by a bunch of NuWho episodes, so even people that think every BF and most books are canon can't argue for them. We know The Doctor was a baby with a crib (A Good Man Goes to War) and had kids in the human style way (The Doctor's Daughter, the existence of Susan regardless of the stupid Lungbarrow's explanation for it).

But, I'm sure you know that, I just have to take jabs at the stupid looms whenever they get mentioned, since they are literally the stupidest shit ever connected to Doctor Who in any media.

 

Not a fan of the Looms, myself. Not only did it do the opposite for the mythology than it was supposed to (add mystery to the Doctor, but actually making it more convoluted in the end), but its also an impractical idea to showcase, because it was never referenced, and after its resolution it was never adressed ever again.

 

How does less than half a dozen partners in several thousand years constitute sleeping around? that's insanely puritanical.

 

That assumes that it actually is less than half a dozen. There's at least four off the top of my head (Susan's grandmother, Benny, Elizabeth I, and River). And lots of room between the first two for more (whether it's existing characters or new ones).

 

Benny??? I didn't know they'd gone there. Seems an odd match, assuming it was with Seven.

I've always assumed that Four and Romana II were lovers. They certainly acted like it, at least when Baker and Ward were together.

Anyway, it's hard for me to believe the Doctor would be attracted to humans. We're a different species, and it would be robbing the cradle from a Time Lord's perspective. I can live with the idea of him being with River because she was part-Gallifreyan herself, but a full human? I find that unlikely.

 

Eight, actually, in The Dying Days.

 

I could only really think of 4 as well, I just meant generally.

 

Ah. I was thinking it was a situation more similar to "The Doctor's Wife," where they wanted to do it towards the end of the previous season but they ran out of money for that season (which seems fairly typical, thus why the episodes right before the big finale are almost always the cheapest looking of the season), thus they bumped it back to the beginning of the previous season, when they would have more money to spare. But if it was cost prohibitive full-stop, I can understand why they would need Fry for further rewrites.

I'm not even sure that I would count Romana on that list. I can picture them romantically linked but I don't know that they would have ever gotten around to getting physical.

Then again, I have a hard time shaking the impression that the 9th Doctor, Rose, & Jack were having all kinds of kinky 3-ways behind closed doors. I don't like it, not one bit, but I can't shake that image out of my headcanon for some reason. (Does that ever happen to anyone else?)

Given how immature humans in their late teens & early 20s tend to be, I generally can't accept the notion of some hot young thing like Rose or Clara being able to turn the Doctor's head for any significant length of time, at least not in a romantic sense. I feel like they need a little more of a mystique, some otherworldly oomph to be someone that the Doctor could possibly see in that way. Romana & River certainly fit the bill. I also think that the 1st Doctor would've dated Barbara if he could've.

 

Why wouldn't they? Assuming we're talking about Romana II (since Romana I had a much cooler relationship with the Doctor), they were together for an uncertain amount of time with plenty of unchronicled downtime between stories, since they were well past the era when one serial led directly into the next. Since they were both Time Lords, they could've traveled together for decades between stories, for all we know.