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Russell T. Davies Returns to Doctor Who as New Showrunner

Feel free to show me where I said that. Moffat had higher highs than Chibnall, sure. But also much lower lows. And more of them. Moffat was peaks and valleys. Chibnall's first two seasons, for me, maintained a pretty consistent competent but not mindblowing level.

I'm also curious how many of the Moffat rules/Chibnall drools brigade are longtime fans. You can easily find runs of episodes in 1963-89 Doctor Who that make Chibnall look like high art. Twenty years from now I don't think anyone's going to be talking about the Chibnall era as one of the low points in the show's history.
You're right. I'm not a longtime fan. I am, however, a fan of all of Who, having seen the entirety of the show and attempted to view portions of the era again with audio stories slotted in for an added viewing/listening experience. I still don't like the Chibnall era.

Also, I would like to know which episode of Chibnall's are "high art" comparerd to OldWho, especially considering that each piece of entertainment was made in its own era and has added benefits to adjective quality of production/writing. I can see an argument for, maybe, Twin Dilemma and maybe even Warriors of the Deep in account of ghastly and horrendously made they are... but even then, the latter at the very least has Peter Davison being so utterly convincing in his plight to prevent a human/Silurian war from taking place, he alone makes it watchable to a degree, which is something I've never been able to say for Jodie Whittaker's case.
 
Personally I would rate The Tsuranga Conundrum, Kerblam! and Orphan 55 way above Kill the Moon, In the Forest of the Night and Sleep no More.

Well okay maybe not Orphan 55.
 
Also, The Tsuranga Conundrum, Kerblam! and Orphan 55... seriously, better than Kill the Moon?
I love "The Tsuranga Conundrum" (but I realize I'm in the minority) and "Kerblam!" is a lot of fun. Neither of them are even close to being as awful as "Kill the Moon." The fact that "Orphan 55" has a few Farscape qualities to it lifts it above "Kill the Moon."
 
^ Shame as it means you missed the four best episodes of Whittaker/Chibnall Who (IMO)

Fugitive of the Judoon
The Haunting of Villa Diodati
War of the Sontarans
Village of the Angels

Plus some enjoyably ok episodes like Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror.



As the old saying goes, one man's mince is another man's steak. ;)
 
It's almost as though people are allowed to have different opinions. FWIW, I became a full-on Doctor Who fan in 2001, but I'd seen some Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker episodes here and there starting in the 1980s, read a couple of books and comics, and watched the 1996 TV movie when it originally aired.

Moffat was one of the best of RTD's writers. I was excited when I heard he was taking over. And then I was a bit disappointed. I'm not going to say he suddenly became awful, but there was a certain discipline or restraint in writing for someone else that went out the window when he wrote for himself. His arcs were either horribly convoluted (the whole Doctor's death at Lake Silencio business, for example, and River's timeline) or asked questions with obvious answers: yes, the Doctor is a good man. And there were moments of brilliance, like the sudden appearance of the War Doctor and the Night of the Doctor minisode. But Kill the Moon wasn't just awful, Moffat and the episode's writer never clued in that they'd created a bad anti-abortion story. At least, that's the story from interviews. They never intended the episode's most obvious reading.

As for the Timeless Child, we don't have the whole story yet, and maybe we never will, just as we don't know how the Eighth Doctor was human on his mother's side, or who Susan's parents and grandmother were, or whether the Seventh Doctor really was more than just another Time Lord. The Morbius Doctors were a mystery for decades. Chibnall just built on that and other writers are free to run with it or ignore it. There was a time, after all, when all the Daleks and Time Lords except the Doctor were gone. There was a time when viewers didn't even know the Doctor was a Time Lord.They're all just pieces of the puzzle that is the Doctor. Chibnall's added a few pieces but he's taken none away. Another thing I've said before and will again: people piss on Chibnall for doing the same kind of things any number of past writers and producers have done.

As for comparing Chibnall Who to pre-2005 Who: a lot of the JNT era is dire, sometimes for prolonged stretches. As much as I love Pertwee, one of the first Doctors I ever saw, many of his stories are two or three episodes longer than they needed to be. With the possible exception of Flux, about which I'll have a more considered opinion after some time and rewatching, his stories don't overstay their welcome.

YMMV.
 
Oh I wouldn't want the Jo Martin Doctor to go away under any circumstances, she's great.

Though if the BBC phones me up one day and tells me I'm the new Doctor Who showrunner I'm totally retconning it so that she comes between 2 and 3.
Yes! Either that or Whitaker regenerates into Martin. (I know there are some contradictions for the latter, but I'm fine with that!)
 
Why would Morbius ask how long the Doctor has lived while those images played if they were his faces? And then FFW, why would Morbius' previous incarnations turn up in The Timeless Child blast through the Doctor's previous incarnations?
 
Yeah whether you're happy with the Timless Child or even the Mobius Doctors, they exist, they're canon, they're not going to go away (well they might be 'forgotten' but they won't retcon them out of existence)
 
I'm not sure why you took it to a racial place. The Doctor has long been ambivalent towards military folk.

"Mickey the Idiot" wasn't military. Eleven may have teased Rory by calling him Rory Pond, but Nine and Twelve repeatedly showed actual contempt for Mickey and Danny in their early meetings. Was it explicitly because they were black? Of course not. Did they treat any other companions' partners the same way? Not that I can think of. Race is what the two companions' partners who were treated like crap by the Doctor had in common. I'm not the first person to pick up on that.

Not to derail things but they aren't the Doctor, they're Morbius' past regenerations.

That's the easiest way to read it, but it's not explicitly excluded by anything, either. The Doctor didn't show up in 1963 and say, hi, I'm a Time Lord from Gallifrey, this is my very first incarnation, I have a limited number of incarnations, the Time Lords can choose to give me more incarnations if they so desire, I can regenerate into a body of another sex or colour. All of that was revealed when they had a story in which it seemed like a good idea to reveal it.

It's like people who bitch about why Spock never mentioned having a human adopted sister. He didn't tell Kirk and the gang who his parents were until they showed up on the Enterprise. He didn't tell anyone he had a half-brother until he showed up, either. He didn't tell anyone he was betrothed until it was necessary. He didn't tell anyone he was going to smuggle Pike to Talos IV. He didn't tell anyone he was going to Romulus. All of Spock's past secrecy about his family and his life made it perfectly reasonable for Discovery to add Burnham to the family. It's consistent with Spock's portrayal since the 1960s.

These characters aren't real people. Writers make up the characters' traits and backgrounds as needed by the stories they're working on. Or because they amuse the writers. Or because the writers want to do something with it later, whether they get around to it or not. Or because they don't realize they're contradicting something from an earlier story. It may seem unlikely now, but there was a lot of conjecture years ago that RTD and the 2005 Doctor Who writers might exclude McGann's Eighth Doctor from canon. (Because it was an American production and because RTD's characters in Queer As Folk said "McGann doesn't count!") The question of the Morbius images was widely discussed for decades. It's no more surprising that Chibnall did something with it than it is that Davies brought back the Macra. Somebody may bring back the Valeyard on the TV series some day, or confirm or deny whether the War Chief was the Master some day, and some fans will have their favourite theories blown up. It happens.

(Note: edited to fix the blooper identified below by Photoman15.)
 
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Spock didn't have a "human half-sister". She was his adopted sister. Neither Sarek nor Amanda were her parents.
 
Spock didn't have a "human half-sister". She was his adopted sister. Neither Sarek nor Amanda were her parents.

D'oh. Right. Holding too many points in my head at the same time while trying to type them, and Sybokified Michael. Oops.
 
Every retcon has to be judged on its own merits. I think the majority of fans accepted the War Doctor because he didn't contradict anything, he was an interesting idea, and he was played by John Hurt. The impression I get is that most people also liked the Fugitive Doctor right away and were curious about whether she was going to really come before Whittaker, and where she fit in.

The idea of regenerations before Hartnell annoyed a lot of people though, because it contradicts the Eleventh Doctor's final episode which had his regeneration limit as an important plot point, and more importantly it diminishes the First Doctor's character arc. We've always known that the Doctor had a long life before we met them, probably hundreds of years, but we also know that Hartnell's Doctor didn't start off the nicest person. He didn't even start off with a Tardis stuck as a police box! It was his travels with humans like Ian and Barbara that taught him to be a better person, and eventually a heroic figure who believed evil should be fought. The classic series showed him evolve into the person who could do the things that the Fugitive Doctor did over the lives of several regenerations, but it's especially unsatisfying for me that they've reduced Hartnell's Doctor to just another incarnation who was figuring himself out.
 
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... Kill the Moon is, actually, rather good...

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