Should there be a return to more traditional WHO stories?

[Professor Zoom]

I guess my problem with this years arc is that we really know the Doctors not going to die at the end of the series. I'd just as soon get the damn thing over with and get on to more interesting stuff.

That's not the arc at all. The arc is about how the Doctor is going to get out of dying. We've already been given two clues as to how this might happen - one being the Gangers and the other being, of all things, Miracle Day.

You mean Torchwood's Miracle Day? No. That won't even be MENTIONED on Doctor Who. The "Blessing" won't come into play. At all.

For one thing, it would require other people to have watched Torchwood to get it--even the kiddies. And the BBC won't want kids watching it...

My bet is something Timey Wimey.

 

[Sindatur]

The irony of course is today's Doctor Who is doing nothing different than what the original series did for 26 years and that everyone recalls with fondness. The only difference is the length of the stories. I've seen plenty of classic-era Doctor Who ranging from things like The Keys to Marinus to Talons of Weng-Chiang which would have had viewers today making the exact same criticisms of "get on with it" and "it's taking too long" that have been levelled by impatient fans against Moffat and Miracle Day.

Alex

None of the classic seasons had you waiting years for revelations about the characters though like what we're getting with River Song. It's been four years since she's been introduced and we still somewhat in the dark about her.

Yea, I'd put the Tesselecta ship alongside the Ganger for a 2nd choice of "Get outta Death Free", long before the Blessing.

 

[The Nth Doctor]

The irony of course is today's Doctor Who is doing nothing different than what the original series did for 26 years and that everyone recalls with fondness. The only difference is the length of the stories. I've seen plenty of classic-era Doctor Who ranging from things like The Keys to Marinus to Talons of Weng-Chiang which would have had viewers today making the exact same criticisms of "get on with it" and "it's taking too long" that have been levelled by impatient fans against Moffat and Miracle Day.

Alex

None of the classic seasons had you waiting years for revelations about the characters though like what we're getting with River Song. It's been four years since she's been introduced and we still somewhat in the dark about her.

To be fair, it's been three years.

The irony of course is today's Doctor Who is doing nothing different than what the original series did for 26 years and that everyone recalls with fondness. The only difference is the length of the stories. I've seen plenty of classic-era Doctor Who ranging from things like The Keys to Marinus to Talons of Weng-Chiang which would have had viewers today making the exact same criticisms of "get on with it" and "it's taking too long" that have been levelled by impatient fans against Moffat and Miracle Day.

Alex

None of the classic seasons had you waiting years for revelations about the characters though like what we're getting with River Song. It's been four years since she's been introduced and we still somewhat in the dark about her.

Yea, I'd put the Tesselecta ship alongside the Ganger for a 2nd choice of "Get outta Death Free", long before the Blessing.

As well as the timey-wimey shenanigans of "The Girl Who Waited."

 

[throwback]

I find the new Doctor Who to be more richer in characterization than the original. I miss the scope - the original visited more worlds. I would think with today's technology that they would be able to do more with locations.

 

[Whofan]

I do like the idea of the Doctor going undercover (IE faking his death so his enemies don't look for him anymore). Kind of reminds me of the Bond film "You Only Live Twice"....what also could work is the Doctor erasing knowledge of himself from the Whoniverse, perhaps using a perception filter or something. I know similar storylines have been done in comic books (Flash and more debatedly in Spider-Man), but it might work in WHO better.

 

[I am not Spock]

The last couple have been standalones. 'Night Terrors' and 'The Girl Who Waited'.

 

[Ubik]

The problem with the Moffatt-era storytelling is not that the episodes are arcs. Lost had fantastic arcs at least for the first 2 or 3 seasons. DS9's arcs were great. BSG's arcs worked for at least a season or 2.

The problem with the current Doctor Who arc is that it's meaningless and boring. There is no pace, no thrill, no excitement, no emotional connection. It's aloof, and cold, and distant, and off-putting, and confusing, and boring. It's about nothing other than itself. There is no depth, there are no themes, no revealing character levels.

I thought I would prefer some standalones. But now I find that the standalones aren't great either.

I dunno. I've never found Doctor Who so consistently disappointing and uninvolving before. Sigh. I just kinda want someone else to take over the show. Moffatt's vision of what Doctor Who feels like just isn't working for me. At all.

 

[Starkers]

Well the good thing about Doctor Who is that eventually someone else will take over. Maybe you'll love them and I'll hate em?

Way of the (Who) world.

I will say this, for all the faults of the Moffat era (and there are several) I've yet to be as 'I-want-to-throw-something-at-the-telly' annoyed as I routinely was under RTD.

 

[The Nth Doctor]

Well the good thing about Doctor Who is that eventually someone else will take over. Maybe you'll love them and I'll hate em?

Way of the (Who) world.

I will say this, for all the faults of the Moffat era (and there are several) I've yet to be as 'I-want-to-throw-something-at-the-telly' annoyed as I routinely was under RTD.

I have to echo this. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Moffat's version of Doctor Who isn't entirely what I expected and hoped for, but I don't feel the frustration I felt with RTD.

I've said this in a few threads already, but the arc episodes (and especially the fans' reactions to them) remind me of LOST and its fans. As a huge LOST fan, this doesn't bother me but I can see how others could be frustrated. Me? I say keep bringing it on just as long as we still get gems like "The Doctor's Wife" and "The God Complex."

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

I long for an episode or two of The Doctor and his companion landing on some weird alien planet, uncovering some nefarious shit, sorting it out, and then leaving.

That's certainly the feeling I get after some of these jam-packed arc episodes like "The Impossible Astronaut" or really personally emotionally intense episodes like "The Girl Who Waited."

I'll stick to just watching Star Trek it's less confusing. Of course I was fortunate enough to never miss an episode of Babylon 5, if I had I'm sure I would have given up watching that too. (as many people obviously did or it wouldn't have been cancelled prematurely)

Sarcasm? Babylon 5 wasn't "canceled prematurely". It made it to the end of the story. Crusade on the other hand.....

To be fair, it was cancelled at the end of S4, and then saved by TNT for S5 (and that uncertainty ended up costing us Ivanova in S5) and then of course, TNT sabotaged Crusade,because they changed their mind, but, were already halfway in.

And IIRC, it wasn't cancelled at the end of Season 4 due to low ratings but due to its production company going belly-up.

 

[The Squire of Gothos]

I don't get the appeal of a story arc. If all the serious writing and important character moments are to be reserved for a handful of episodes and everything in between is more or less filler in terms of the character lives within the franchise, it's not going to hold my interest.

Besides, I don't see the Who arcs as anything more than a season opening and closing and some Easter eggs scattered along the way. Oh, look, another "Bad Wolf" moment!

 

[Kelthaz]

Story arcs are great, but Doctor Who sucks at them. Making throwaway references to a word or a phrase throughout the season and then bringing it to the forefront in the season finale does not a story arc make. Bad Wolf / Silence Will Fall / Mr. Saxon are faux story arcs. I'd actually like to see Who do an actual season arc similar Buffy.

 

[23skidoo]

None of the classic seasons had you waiting years for revelations about the characters though like what we're getting with River Song. It's been four years since she's been introduced and we still somewhat in the dark about her.

I was talking about storytelling. In terms of character revelations, uh, 48 years, the Doctor?

Seriously, though, River cannot be compared, really, to classic Who characters because on the whole they were more simplistic without the depth we've become accustomed to (sorry, but it's true - and I'm a huge fan of Leela, Romana, etc). And while yeah it's been 3-4 years since we were introduced to River, most companions in the classic series lasted a year, maybe two, except for a few exceptions, so there was no incentive to create character arcs back then. Frankly I'm happy if the show keeps things a mystery for several more years, and never answers some questions because we never get all the answers in real life. I don't want to know who "The Woman" was in The End of Time, for example. It's more fun guessing and speculating. We'll probably find out what the Silence are all about in a few days, but I'd be just as happy not finding out and having instead more layers of the onion unpeel.

Alex

 

[DWF]

None of the classic seasons had you waiting years for revelations about the characters though like what we're getting with River Song. It's been four years since she's been introduced and we still somewhat in the dark about her.

I was talking about storytelling. In terms of character revelations, uh, 48 years, the Doctor?

Seriously, though, River cannot be compared, really, to classic Who characters because on the whole they were more simplistic without the depth we've become accustomed to (sorry, but it's true - and I'm a huge fan of Leela, Romana, etc). And while yeah it's been 3-4 years since we were introduced to River, most companions in the classic series lasted a year, maybe two, except for a few exceptions, so there was no incentive to create character arcs back then. Frankly I'm happy if the show keeps things a mystery for several more years, and never answers some questions because we never get all the answers in real life. I don't want to know who "The Woman" was in The End of Time, for example. It's more fun guessing and speculating. We'll probably find out what the Silence are all about in a few days, but I'd be just as happy not finding out and having instead more layers of the onion unpeel.

Alex

There was no incentive to make storyarcs on the old show was because it hadn't been done before, when it was attempted in The Key To Time season the writers and Tom Baker hated the very concept of a story arc.

The way the old show was structured a person could get into it at anytime that's not the case now though,

 

[Neroon]

It's all a matter of preference, with no inherent superiority to either technique. Doctor Who is such a rich, open, wild set of circumstances that in the right hands either works just fine. Consequently, I don't really care if they go back to the alleged "more traditional" types of stories, because I've enjoyed both. All I am concerned about is that it's done well. It might be fun to return for a time to earlier eras, to give folks a taste of the way the show used to be, though.

 

[Starkers]

You know its funny, I've just watched the Guardian trilogy from 1983...almost thirty years ago now, and it amuses me just how like Moffat's brand of NuWho it is. There's obviously an ongoing story arc, and in terms of screen time you're talking about roughly half a modern series, in fact probably the same amount of screentime as the second half of series 6.

Obviously the ongoing story is of the Black Guardian's attempts to get Turlough to kill the Doctor (a bit like the Silence attempting to get River to kill the Doctor).

In Mawdryn you have a story that practically could have been written with the words timey-wimey in mind, and all three stories have plots that might be described as overly complicated (even Terminus which is the weak link has some cracking ideas at heart).

Obviously there are a lot of differences as well, and the Guardian trilogy was a break from the norm in some respects, but I still find the similarities intriguing. Classic and Modern Who, not always so dissimilar as you might imagine.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

I'm starting to think that the more claustrophobic feeling I've been getting in Season 6 has been due to budget cuts more than anything else. The apartment building, hotel, & department store settings of "Night Terrors," "The God Complex," & "Closing Time" all smack of being designated cheap episodes.

You never got cheap episodes on the classic series. Production meetings during the classic series seemed to go like this:
"I want to have a giant monster and set it on a massive space station."
"We don't have the budget to make that look even remotely good or convincing."
"We're doing it anyway!"

 

[DWF]

I'm starting to think that the more claustrophobic feeling I've been getting in Season 6 has been due to budget cuts more than anything else. The apartment building, hotel, & department store settings of "Night Terrors," "The God Complex," & "Closing Time" all smack of being designated cheap episodes.

You never got cheap episodes on the classic series. Production meetings during the classic series seemed to go like this:
"I want to have a giant monster and set it on a massive space station."
"We don't have the budget to make that look even remotely good or convincing."
"We're doing it anyway!"

Which was part of what was wrong about the Graham Williams' era, despite having a higher budget the show was hirt with double digit inflation and a wildly out of control budget. It was even more bizarre that they alllowed the guy who signed to checks to take over from Williams after they fired him.

 

[Yminale]

I'm starting to think that the more claustrophobic feeling I've been getting in Season 6 has been due to budget cuts more than anything else.

The new doctor who was always claustrophobic. I think it's more due to the fact that they us more indoor location then use sets on a sound stage.

I watched Pertwee era's Day of the Daleks and it does feel more open.

 

[Yminale]

It's all a matter of preference, with no inherent superiority to either technique.

I have to agree. It's not the technique, it's the content. The whole River Song arc has become a convoluted mess. I use to love River Song (I was a closet Benny Summerfield fan) but I can't stand her now. It certainly ruined the great idea behind "Let's Kill Hitler". Season 5 arc was much better (even thought the ending was rubbish).