I love this concept. It's too bad the writing failed it tremendously.
Spoilers Legend of the Sea Devils grade and discussion thread
- Thread starter The Nth Doctor
- Start date
Even Black Orchid has speculative elements, even if they're more horror tropes than sci-fi.
I think you're right. If we do get another female Doctor I think it'll be more down to Jo Martin to Whittaker-and I hate to say that because in another universe I think Whittaker could have been great.
Well Jo Martin and Michelle Gomez obviously!
I think you're right. If we do get another female Doctor I think it'll be more down to Jo Martin to Whittaker-and I hate to say that because in another universe I think Whittaker could have been great.
Well Jo Martin and Michelle Gomez obviously!
Overall the less said about Chibs the better. And yes, Whittaker never really got the show she should have.
Chibnall was so obviously useless from the start of his career that it's a wonder that he kept getting asked to write episodes by Davies and Moffat, got asked to run a Doctor Who spinoff, ran the British version of a popular American TV franchise, went off on his own and created a hugely successful mystery series that was popular enough to be remade for American and French TV, was asked to come back to Who and was praised by Davies and Moffat as a good choice, then managed to produce a complex TV series during a global pandemic.... Makes you wonder what he could do if he wasn't an utterly hopeless, talentless shit.
I mean, he's obviously a very talented guy. He's just not cut out for showrunner of Doctor Who. Its not that hard to get that.
Except that I like what he did with Doctor Who, aside from the time the pandemic kicked in and made things a lot more difficult, which affected a lot more shows than Doctor Who. I watched the last episode of season 4 of Unforgotten last night then read how much Covid affected it; it would have been significantly different. And that's just a modern day cop show that's got to be a lot easier to make. I don't think it's fair to assess Chibnall as a Doctor Who showrunner after his second series because no one else in the show's history faced challenges like he did. Hell, even after Covid started, he did "Eve of the Daleks," which I quite enjoyed.
Read my post again. It's not just about popularity, it's about actual achievement and respect from his peers.
Edited to add: if you want to point out that Chibnall wrote the utterly crap "Cyberwoman" episode of Torchwood, well, yeah, he did. But he also wrote the really, really good and devastating Torchwood episode "Adrift," which more than balances that out.
I don't judge him by his third series at all. Its surprisingly enjoyable, even if it ultimately (and predictably) falls apart. No, I judge his run by all three series, all of which have been lukewarm, boring affairs that occassionally pissed me off and almost drove me off the franchise (which depending how the legacy of his retcons is concerned, might still happen). He's the show's poorest showrunner, bar none.
Cyberwoman was a great indicator of things that were yet to come, though.
To add, i would say that I definitely enjoyed the episodes he wrote under Davies and Moffat. I always loved The Power of Three. Its too bad his era was not populated with the same sense of fun and excitement.
Dinosaurs on a spaceship about summed it up… some good ingredients, good cast, yet somehow ends up screwed up, clumsy in places, and has a dissatisfying ending, all whilst channeling an odd feeling of mid eighties who.
Season 26 was the high bar for who when it comes to consistency even now. There have been better individual stories in NuWho, but no run of a season where nothing is worse than Battlefield basically.
Season 26 was the high bar for who when it comes to consistency even now. There have been better individual stories in NuWho, but no run of a season where nothing is worse than Battlefield basically.
Boris had those things too. Even if, in retrospect, some of them regret it now. Broadchurch was Chibnall’s Leave campaign.
He's on record as having written Broadchurch 1 purely for himself, not expecting it to sell, after a bad experience as a writer for hire on Camelot (Front Row interview).
That looks like a metaphor, but I don't know what it's supposed to convey.
Cyberwoman is not as bad as its reputation makes it seem, indeed it was one of the first Torchwood episodes that actually kept me hooked. Yes, the Cyberwoman costume is itself extremely embarrassing and perfectly represents a flaw in Torchwood's first season, IE they confused sexing things up as the same thing as being mature, but as far as the actual storyline goes, it's actually a pretty decent episode.
That a shock success was somehow seen as the keys to the big job they theoretically would like, but aren’t suited to, down the road. That in retrospect wasn’t as great as people thought it was? (I don’t watch the show, I hear later series did t go down as well)
Bunches really. Chibnall fell upwards somehow, and NuWho historically has had a fair bit of ‘who you know’ rather than ‘what you know’ attached.
I'm inclined to give Chibnall a pass on his season one Torchwood scripts; my guess is they had a list of ideas to try out and as staff he got left with the ones the freelancers didn't want. By season two they had a better idea what approach worked.
A lot of S1 Torchwood scripts felt rough and ready, like they needed another draft or two. I don't know if there's any truth in this but to me it felt rushed.
The big shift in S2 was that Torchwood stopped being pretentiously up it's own butt and stopped taking itself so seriously. From the moment that old lady shouts "Bloody Torchwood" in episode 1 it's clear you're not quite watching the same show. I don't know that S2 episodes were any better but the show was more enjoyable.
I have been a fan since Castrovalva and have seen everything before that and i can honestly say that the Chibnall era is the nadir of the whole series and this episode was just more proof of that to me. I couldn't even be bothered to watch it for a week and that hasn't happened with new DW stuff ever before.
I do enjoy the karma of a young Chibnall slagging of an era of a show only to grow up and create an even worse era of the same show....
I do enjoy the karma of a young Chibnall slagging of an era of a show only to grow up and create an even worse era of the same show....
He wanted to be Andrew Cartmel and turned out to be Eric Saward.
