Russell T. Davies Returns to Doctor Who as New Showrunner

[Steve Roby]

Being deliberately obtuse about that is not making your case.

I'm making a point that you're ignoring. The foundations you think the Timeless Child has shattered were not in place in 1963. The Doctor's background and character were developed in bits and pieces over the years. The Doctor is a strange person who travels through time and space in a box. That's it. That is the foundation of the character. That is untouched and unchanged.

Also, who says I like the Timeless Child? I'm intrigued by and open to the concept, but the story still feels unfinished, questions unanswered, and I hope for a bit more context for Jo Martin's Doctor, among other things. I'm not convinced how well it works, how well it's been thought through, but I'm open to it all because there it is on the TV screen. It's part of who the Doctor is now. I'll watch and see how Chibnall winds it all up. In the long run it's not likely to be any more important than the existence of the War Doctor or the Doctor being half human. If Davies and whoever follows don't like it, they'll do what every Doctor Who producer has done: tell the stories they want to tell and use the parts of the past that appeal to them.

 

[Mr Awe]

You're acting like Chibnall doing it is anathema,, but Terrance Dicks/Robert Holmes and Moffatt doing it was okay.

I never even mentioned Dicks, Holmes, or Moffat!

I don't like the scope of the changes that Chibnall made. Short and simple. YMMV.

 

[Mr Awe]

I'm making a point that you're ignoring. The foundations you think the Timeless Child has shattered were not in place in 1963. The Doctor's background and character were developed in bits and pieces over the years. The Doctor is a strange person who travels through time and space in a box. That's it. That is the foundation of the character. That is untouched and unchanged.

Also, who says I like the Timeless Child? I'm intrigued by and open to the concept, but the story still feels unfinished, questions unanswered, and I hope for a bit more context for Jo Martin's Doctor, among other things. I'm not convinced how well it works, how well it's been thought through, but I'm open to it all because there it is on the TV screen. It's part of who the Doctor is now. I'll watch and see how Chibnall winds it all up. In the long run it's not likely to be any more important than the existence of the War Doctor or the Doctor being half human. If Davies and whoever follows don't like it, they'll do what every Doctor Who producer has done: tell the stories they want to tell and use the parts of the past that appeal to them.

I'm not ignoring anything. Yes, they were developed in bits and pieces. I never said otherwise. But in one fell swoop, Chibnall changed vast portions of those pieces.

Again, pretending that Chibnall didn't change vast pieces of the show's history is silly. He made large changes. That's a fact. Opinions can differ about whether they're good changes or not.

For me, it's the scope of those changes that are problematic. Particularly because they undo what we saw developing over time. Yes, you can wallpaper over it, as Allyn creatively did. But I'd rather they didn't monkey around with it to begin with. Viewers spent years watching the Doctor's story unfold learning about him. Why not let that history be and create something interesting moving forward?

To close, I'll agree with you that hopefully the TC is no more important than those other elements you mention. Maybe it'll end up being an excuse to have Doctor Who Unbound event movies starring big names as the Doctor and companion?

 

[DigificWriter]

But in one fell swoop, Chibnall changed vast portions of those pieces.

And, again, so did Terrance Dicks slash Robert Holmes and Steven Moffatt.

I never even mentioned Dicks, Holmes, or Moffat!

And therein lies the problem.

You're treating Chibnall's choices in introducing the lore of the Timeless Child as if they represent the first time the Doctor's personal history has been drastically altered and also treating said choices are some gigantic sin.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

It's hard to really be too bothered about the Morbius Doctors drastically changing canon when you can watch the episode and not realise that any attempt at a retcon had even happened. Then you can watch later episodes and confirm that the show didn't realise it either.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

You don't understand the definition of canon.

I know the definition of canon, but i simply have no interest in the Chibnall era, so my own personal canon of the show is Hartnell is the first doctor, and at present Capaldi is the last doctor, and that works for me perfectly.

 

[DigificWriter]

I know the definition of canon, but i simply have no intrest in the Chibnall era, so my own personal canon of the show is Hartnell is the first doctor, and at present Capaldi is the last doctor, and that works for me perfectly

The only response I've got to this is the paraphrasing of a comment from a former Doctor, Colin Baker:
"she (Jodie) IS the Doctor whether you like it or not!"

 

[Haggis and tatties]

^^^Well i am willing to take the chance that the canon police don't appear at my door and arrest me for refusing to own or watch anything from the Chibnall era despite being warned about it here. lol

 

[Sci]

Sadly, that's not just restricted to Doctor Who fandom. Star Trek fans are quite vocal in their complaints about the current showrunners, I remember one person actually comparing Rick Berman and Brannon Braga to serial killers once. Star Wars fans are the ones who coined the term "raped my childhood" in response to the changes made to the Star Wars movies with the Special Editions in 1997. Every fandom has its vocal angry mob.

There is a certain segment of fandom who think they're upset at the direction their favorite franchise is going in, but they're not actually upset about that. What they're actually upset about is that the new installment of their favorite franchise can't make them feel like they did when they watched earlier installments as children, because they are adults and their favorite franchise can't change that. But they lack the self-awareness to realize that what they're really upset about is that they can't be children again.

 

[jaime]

Yes, I too remember many people being upset with Moffat changing the character of the First Doctor in "Twice Upon a Time."

I thought it was clumsy and heavy handed and didn’t like it much at all, but easy enough to overlook. (It’s 1.5 or so,e thing after all)

 

[jaime]

There is a certain segment of fandom who think they're upset at the direction their favorite franchise is going in, but they're not actually upset about that. What they're actually upset about is that the new installment of their favorite franchise can't make them feel like they did when they watched earlier installments as children, because they are adults and their favorite franchise can't change that. But they lack the self-awareness to realize that what they're really upset about is that they can't be children again.

You know, for a long time I thought that was true, or near enough. I wandered off.
Then I started reading the EDAs.I drifted a little, Then the new series began. It had ups and downs, and really, I started drifting after some misfires in the Capaldi era, but then there would be something really *good*.
And by episode 2 of Chibnall’s run, I realised it absolutely wasn’t true, and sometimes shit writers get good jobs.

 

[jaime]

You're acting like Chibnall doing it is anathema,, but Terrance Dicks/Robert Holmes and Moffatt doing it was okay.

Dicks/Holmes was a blink and miss it ‘what if hmm?’ Which they themselves ignored in fairly short order and went on writing for the show that had completely said ‘nope’ to the ‘what-if’.
Moffat made a nip and a tuck to comparatively recent events — that he himself had been involved in writing — using existing gaps to help fix a production problem, and made it pretty seamless. (The War Doctor)
TUAT was clumsy, but knowing it would be, he wrote get out clauses into the script itself (it’s not exactly the first doctor, it’s somewhere mid regen) and in retrospect some of it look suspiciously like taking the pee out what he expected to come next. A warning, almost. It even ends with the character basically writing into lore the old off camera definition of the character. (Never cruel or cowardly) It wasn’t great, but it changed the square root of naff all.
The only episode of Who that snarled the past even a little was The Two Doctors, and it really wasn’t that much. Certainly not compared with turning The Doctor into a cross between Connor MacLeod and John Rambo.

 

[Starkers]

It seems a weird thing to get that bent out of shape by the Timeless Child. My honest view? The concept is interesting, I just find Chibnall's execution incredibly clunky. It could have created additional mystery but Chibnall explained way too much (IMO obviously) and the use of a Police Box, and the character even being called the Doctor can be explained but needs some contrivance to do it.

As I've said before it doesn't effect my appreciation of the Doctors 1963-the present day. It doesn't matter that Hartnell wasn't the First Doctor, because from his perspective he was. He had no memory of anything before his own existence, aside from what Thirteen has learned, the Doctor's entire character and personality is based upon the Doctors Hartnell to Whittaker, which is what, about 2000 years of character development?

 

[Steve Roby]

As I've said before it doesn't effect my appreciation of the Doctors 1963-the present day. It doesn't matter that Hartnell wasn't the First Doctor, because from his perspective he was. He had no memory of anything before his own existence, aside from what Thirteen has learned, the Doctor's entire character and personality is based upon the Doctors Hartnell to Whittaker, which is what, about 2000 years of character development?

Yep. Unless the Doctor gets back memories of everything that came before Hartnell, the Doctor's personality is essentially unchanged.

A question: was making the Ninth and Tenth Doctors full of guilt and angst for destroying Gallifrey a problematic change to the character? Was undoing that by revealing in "Day of the Doctor" that they only thought they'd destroyed Gallifrey a problematic change to the character?

 

[Allyn Gibson]

As I've said before it doesn't effect my appreciation of the Doctors 1963-the present day. It doesn't matter that Hartnell wasn't the First Doctor, because from his perspective he was. He had no memory of anything before his own existence, aside from what Thirteen has learned, the Doctor's entire character and personality is based upon the Doctors Hartnell to Whittaker, which is what, about 2000 years of character development?

This is exactly it. Hartnell is the First Doctor as far as he and all of his successors know. Even Whittaker, when she gets the key to unlock her lives pre-Hartnell, decides she doesn't want to. So it's not really a contradiction that there are pre-Hartnell Doctors and Hartnell is the First -- as far as the Doctors we've seen since 1963 are concerned, Hartnell is the First and anything before that is just trivia.

 

[David cgc]

TUAT was clumsy, but knowing it would be, he wrote get out clauses into the script itself (it’s not exactly the first doctor, it’s somewhere mid regen) and in retrospect some of it look suspiciously like taking the pee out what he expected to come next. A warning, almost. It even ends with the character basically writing into lore the old off camera definition of the character. (Never cruel or cowardly) It wasn’t great, but it changed the square root of naff all.

A lot of the Moffat era comes across like this in retrospect. Putting aside the nuts and bolts of the Timeless Child storyline, just in terms of dramatic function, the Twelfth Doctor's first and second seasons seem like direct repudiations of it. He spends the first year of his regeneration mired in self-doubt about who he is on a philosophical level, questioning himself the way the entire revival had been questioning the character of the Doctor up until that point, before deciding that he's who he wants to be, and the Doctor can't be weighed down or defined by circumstance or the events he finds himself embroiled in as if its his fault that monsters keep trying to destroy the universe or terrorize innocent people just because he's always there to stop them. But then we've got the Timeless Child, and now the Thirteenth Doctor is absolutely hooked by this idea that circumstances and events can redefine her, even without her knowing about them. The Doctor doesn't decide who the Doctor is, the Doctor is who other people say she is, the Master, or the Division, or Tecteun, and the Doctor's only recourse is to try and find out who she's been defined as by other people.

Then we've got season nine, with the by-that-point obligatory Arc Words seeding the season finale, but it turns out to be a red herring mixed with a deliberate literary ambiguity, in contrast to the Timeless Child, exposition about which is totally unambiguous and is the narrative goal and lynchpin of two seasons so far, but affects nothing about the characters and their relationships except making the Doctor kind of a grouchy asshole, which isn't that special or hard to do historically.

I had a suspicion that, in retrospect, the Moffat versus RTD debates would be seen as quaint, and in the long run, they'd both have much more in common with each other than Chibnall's run, but I didn't expect it to be like this where the entire conception of the show seems to have turned totally inside-out.

Certainly not compared with turning The Doctor into a cross between Connor MacLeod and John Rambo.

I was thinking more "Jason Bourne," with the memory loss and history as an assassin or secret agent of some sort for an amoral all-powerful secret agency.

 

[jaime]

A lot of the Moffat era comes across like this in retrospect. Putting aside the nuts and bolts of the Timeless Child storyline, just in terms of dramatic function, the Twelfth Doctor's first and second seasons seem like direct repudiations of it. He spends the first year of his regeneration mired in self-doubt about who he is on a philosophical level, questioning himself the way the entire revival had been questioning the character of the Doctor up until that point, before deciding that he's who he wants to be, and the Doctor can't be weighed down or defined by circumstance or the events he finds himself embroiled in as if its his fault that monsters keep trying to destroy the universe or terrorize innocent people just because he's always there to stop them. But then we've got the Timeless Child, and now the Thirteenth Doctor is absolutely hooked by this idea that circumstances and events can redefine her, even without her knowing about them. The Doctor doesn't decide who the Doctor is, the Doctor is who other people say she is, the Master, or the Division, or Tecteun, and the Doctor's only recourse is to try and find out who she's been defined as by other people.

Then we've got season nine, with the by-that-point obligatory Arc Words seeding the season finale, but it turns out to be a red herring mixed with a deliberate literary ambiguity, in contrast to the Timeless Child, exposition about which is totally unambiguous and is the narrative goal and lynchpin of two seasons so far, but affects nothing about the characters and their relationships except making the Doctor kind of a grouchy asshole, which isn't that special or hard to do historically.

I had a suspicion that, in retrospect, the Moffat versus RTD debates would be seen as quaint, and in the long run, they'd both have much more in common with each other than Chibnall's run, but I didn't expect it to be like this where the entire conception of the show seems to have turned totally inside-out.



I was thinking more "Jason Bourne," with the memory loss and history as an assassin or secret agent of some sort for an amoral all-powerful secret agency.

Yeah, Bourne is a good one. And ‘amnesiac doctor’ is something book fans lived through so often we don’t even notice anymore xD

I think a lot of the underlying stuff in Chibnall’s run (ignoring the big seemingly accidental contradictions, like Blonde Doctor shopping an Indian Master to the effing Nazis) is attempting to get different answers to questions his predecessors already handled and answered, just because it seems a thing to do.
RTD spent a lot of years showing how to define the doctor without a heavy dependence on continuity (it was what, three years in before we got explicit references to the past doctors in an actual episode? In an alien PowerPoint presentation that people were actually pleased to see I think.) and Moffat spent a lot of time questioning if the Doctor could really lay claim to non-violence and pacifism, having spent a very long lifetime laying waste to evil. Right from episode 2 (if I do this I won’t be the doctor anymore) of the Elevenths run, through to the very end of TUAT, that tension was examined, questioned, and answered. It even had its mirror in the rehabilitation of The Master/Missy. (Which took the emotion of The Masters heel/face turn at the end of Tennants finale and ran with it in a really interesting way) Even the figure of Cyber Bill seemed to reflect on this question of good/evil and perception of others.

Chibnall… well. As I said, I don’t think he gets it. He’s repeating things, and getting things wrong is the kindest way I can put it. There’s a horrible political disconnect going on the heart of his writing (I don’t mean ‘woke’ business or anything to do with gender or identity politics either) where he keeps landing in the wrong place. I feel like this Doctor really does need to ask ‘am I the baddy’ because she’s definitely been accidentally written into it, on a character level, thoughtlessly. She’s the most right wing doctor ever, in some ways, which is… really weird, and almost certainly not the intent.

 

[The Knappos]

Thing is, from why we’ve seen of Jo Martin’s Lighthouse Doctor, if Jodie opens that watch there absolutely nothing to suggest the Doctor will be any different other than they once had a gun that look like it comes straight out of a 90s X-Men comic.

But, but, but The Doctor never uses guns? See Remembrance of the Daleks (where he makes one out of scraps and fries some Daleks), Dalek and End of Time.

Apart from that, what’s different?

It looks to me like the Division wiped The Doctor’s memory because they became a conscientious objector and then that personality pretty much prevailed despite the memory wipe.

In effect, the timeless child changes nothing except gives us more Doctors.

 

[jaime]

Thing is, from why we’ve seen of Jo Martin’s Lighthouse Doctor, if Jodie opens that watch there absolutely nothing to suggest the Doctor will be any different other than they once had a gun that look like it comes straight out of a 90s X-Men comic.

But, but, but The Doctor never uses guns? See Remembrance of the Daleks (where he makes one out of scraps and fries some Daleks), Dalek and End of Time.

Apart from that, what’s different?

It looks to me like the Division wiped The Doctor’s memory because they became a conscientious objector and then that personality pretty much prevailed despite the memory wipe.

In effect, the timeless child changes nothing except gives us more Doctors.

The very rare times the doctor picks up a gun, to use, it carries weight for the most part(hence Dalek, and you misremember Remembrance… notable because the actor at the time knew the doctor doesn’t shoot enemies, and the end of the serial was rewritten as a result. The scrap invention simply confuses them… someone else does the killing. Except when they don’t.) but that discussion is solved, done, beaten into the ground, and only seems to crop up with people who are quite fond of guns.

Timeless Child made the Doctor from a person whose curiosity about the universe and morals led to them wandering and fighting evil and injustice, simply because it was right and sometimes no one else would (particularly his own old and powerful people… you can argue this makes the Doctor colonialist if you really like) into someone with a Destiny, twice over in fact, and someone who was Atoning, a Chosen One figure, cheated of their birthright by nefarious beings, but also guilty of Dark Acts, and the Messiah who brought Eternal Life, but was a Victim, and even got a Capitalised Legend Title with Mysterious Portent, and a Parental Founding Figure, who Abused them.

It made the Leekly Bible look like Dostoevsky.

Bleargh.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

It seems a weird thing to get that bent out of shape by the Timeless Child. My honest view? The concept is interesting, I just find Chibnall's execution incredibly clunky. It could have created additional mystery but Chibnall explained way too much (IMO obviously) and the use of a Police Box, and the character even being called the Doctor can be explained but needs some contrivance to do it.

As I've said before it doesn't effect my appreciation of the Doctors 1963-the present day. It doesn't matter that Hartnell wasn't the First Doctor, because from his perspective he was. He had no memory of anything before his own existence, aside from what Thirteen has learned, the Doctor's entire character and personality is based upon the Doctors Hartnell to Whittaker, which is what, about 2000 years of character development?

This is exactly it. Hartnell is the First Doctor as far as he and all of his successors know. Even Whittaker, when she gets the key to unlock her lives pre-Hartnell, decides she doesn't want to. So it's not really a contradiction that there are pre-Hartnell Doctors and Hartnell is the First -- as far as the Doctors we've seen since 1963 are concerned, Hartnell is the First and anything before that is just trivia.

See, I hate all that. The idea that the journey we witnessed the Doctor undertaking, from ambiguously abducting Ian and Barbara to willingly and unambiguously determined to sacrifice all of time and space just to have more fun adventures with Clara, was just false. The idea of "more Doctors" is inherently stupid, because if they ever appear they'll have to be Doctor-ish, so that will take away from the post-Hartnell Doctors who had to earn that, and they will take away from Ruth's Doctor, who was the first, apparently, supposedly, who flew away from Gallifrey. Also, the Doctor's reputation as the Oncoming Storm was something that felt earned by his very reputation and word of mouth of his adventures, as per the lifetime he endured from Hartnell to certainly McCoy, who was the first Doctor who started cashing in on his reputation as a universal anarchist. The Timeless Children diminishes all that, suggesting that that reputation might've been earned by previous unknown Doctors, and that's just simply an unattractive prospect, because it will never satisfactorily explained in any way shape or formr. Like, I rather take the suggestion it was the first two Doctor who might've dealt with the Elder Gods than any other ones, and I despise fans who suggest the latter.

I guess my point is, the lukewarm reception of the worries, concerns and arguments by fans like us receive is frustrating, because its continuously brashed aside as unimportant. Except it isn't. If Twin Dilemma had aired exactly as it did back then and there was internet... Yeah, I would count myself among those who would voice their disapproval, and loudly.