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Spoilers The Reality War grade and discussion thread

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The one hiccup with the theory is if Ruby were the S2 companion, who would Lucky Day have been about instead? The only other possibility I can think of is Rose Noble, and instead of Ruby's PTSD making her believe there are aliens everywhere, it becomes Rose's enthusiasm and desire for adventure making her believe there are aliens involved. Problem is, given how much of a piece of shit Conrad was, I can't imagine wanting to fake a relationship with Rose, even with the intent of using her to discredit UNIT.
Conrad and Mel making doe eyes at each other? I'd 'ship that :guffaw:
 
Reminds me of George Lucas and the prequel trilogy. Dunno if I've posted that here before or not.
I think that's an apt parallel. Clone Wars showed what was possible with the ideas of Attack of the Clones when written and executed well.
 
So "Andrew" has revealed what I suspected, that there were two corrections to the ending, one major reshoot to write out Ncuti and then, at the last minute, writing in Billie while season 2 was already airing.

Apparently even those were a reshoot on a reshoot.
 
The idea that Ruby was supposed to be the companion for both seasons really does make far too much sense when you look back on the second season. One issue I did have with Belinda is that she did seem to take a liking to the Doctor way too quickly for someone abruptly removed from her day to day life (and now we know, a daughter) and seemed surprisingly tolerant of the fact they had to jump around to different time periods to use the vindicator in order to return to May 2025. Now if it were Ruby, that would be easier to accept, given her pre-existing relationship with the Doctor. Sure, she's annoyed at the disruption to her routine, but given she knows the Doctor she could quickly fall back into the rhythm of their friendship.

The one hiccup with the theory is if Ruby were the S2 companion, who would Lucky Day have been about instead? The only other possibility I can think of is Rose Noble, and instead of Ruby's PTSD making her believe there are aliens everywhere, it becomes Rose's enthusiasm and desire for adventure making her believe there are aliens involved. Problem is, given how much of a piece of shit Conrad was, I can't imagine wanting to fake a relationship with Rose, even with the intent of using her to discredit UNIT.

Lucky Day probably would have been the same, but Ruby is just hanging about on earth a while.
 
it could have been that Ruby, after another near death experience in The Well, needed some time of to deal with her PTSD.
Well, no, since the whole point of the season is the Doctor can't reach modern Earth. The closest he gets before the finale in The Story and the Engine, visiting 2019. If Ruby were the companion and he was able to drop her off at an earlier point in 2025 right after The Well, there'd be no point to the rest of the season. She could just stay at a UNIT safehouse until her disappearance on May 23 and then return to her life from there.
 
Well, no, since the whole point of the season is the Doctor can't reach modern Earth. The closest he gets before the finale in The Story and the Engine, visiting 2019. If Ruby were the companion and he was able to drop her off at an earlier point in 2025 right after The Well, there'd be no point to the rest of the season. She could just stay at a UNIT safehouse until her disappearance on May 23 and then return to her life from there.
Good point. But then Ruby won't work as the companion for the whole storyline and be the main character of Lucky Day. Unless the story was told as a flashback.
 
Good point. But then Ruby won't work as the companion for the whole storyline and be the main character of Lucky Day. Unless the story was told as a flashback.

Lucky Day isn’t tied to a specific date the way the finale is. It’s why it could happen at all in the first place.
Getting Belinda home is a confection for just that character, then has the Poppy stuff gasli— I mean retrofit onto it.
(There’s the temporal schism thing in episode one that I suppose can hide a multitude of character and story sins)

If anything Lucky Day is the one story they had to bring Ruby back for, as it’s another soft launch for the Unit thing, and Ruby’s the best tie between the current series and all of that. (You *could* do the episode with Rose Noble, but she’s a kid, and you could do it with Mel but she’s basically old in every way that matters for the series at the moment.)
 
The problem is that RTD isn't great at endings. On It's a Sin or Years and Years that's not a problem, because while the story ends for some characters, other carry on. But on Who...
 
The problem is that RTD isn't great at endings. On It's a Sin or Years and Years that's not a problem, because while the story ends for some characters, other carry on. But on Who...

He starts with some characters. Then adds some spectacle. Then gets caught up the spectacle and loses all sight of the characters and any story logic.
 
To quote WC Fields, "If you can't dazzle them with brillance, baffle them with bullshit." (See also, Steven Moffat.)
I feel like the fundamental issue of the RTD2 era is that he thought what Moffat did during his run was really cool and is trying to do more of that kind of thing in the show, but RTD doesn't think in a way that makes it natural for him to construct a Moffat-style storyline, so he's invoking the sound, but not the language. If you look at it at the largest thematic level, or at the smallest micro-level, there's lot of traits that are descended from seasons 5 through 10, but the middle scale parts that make the narrative machinery function are still all RTD romanticism where it needs Moffat's clockwork plotting to work. That's not to say one approach is intrinsically better than the other, but that each writer has different strengths and their personal styles tended to play to those strengths at their best, and they were weaker when trying to do thinks they didn't have the same facility with; Moffat had the same issue when he was writing Amy and Rory's reaction to Melody's abduction; it's very check-box-y and perfunctory, rather than informing and infusing their characterizations during that arc in an ongoing way (though, the first example I can think of doing that right is another Moffat-era episode, with Amy's reaction to Rory's erasure in "Vincent and the Doctor").
 
There was also a screenshot of a scene that never took place as well.

The episode was originally going to end with the Doctor, Belinda and the other good guys partying in a club. Then the Doctor would notice Susan staring at him as the cliffhanger (from what reddit says anyway.)

qLd8egU.jpeg


Look how happy Belinda would have been without an unwanted child!
 
Chibnall got screwed over by COVID so Flux wasn't what it was originally intended to be. It looks like RTD2 wasn't what it was supposed to be either, but we can only guess for now what screwed it over. The Disney delay and Gatwa being in demand seems pretty plausible, though. Meanwhile, my expectation that some of the people who loudly rejoiced that Chibnall was gone and Davies would save the show would end up hating RTD2 seems to be right.

I very much enjoyed seeing Jodie Whittaker again, she was great but I don't know quite why she there.

I'd like to think RTD did it as a hearty "fuck you" to the haters. Davies, Chibnall, and Moffat get along and respect each others' work no matter how much some people expected Davies to overwrite Chibnall. I don't know that the scene was really necessary from a story logic point of view, but it made me happy.
 
I mentioned it elsewhere in this thread, but seeing her back was such a blast. They clearly wanted to mirror his first episode sharing the spotlight with the Fourteenth and his last with another Doctor, but this felt really special, cause you have two Doctors who, by now, have the most unrealised potential - either because of inept writing or unfortunate streaming business realities - share and feed off of each other, to the point that Fifteen redeems Thirteen's awkwardly handled (to put it mildly) romantic affiliation with Yaz that I loved every minute of it. Felt a lot of Time Crash in that sense.

However, if I have to be pentadic, I have to say that the unfortunate effect of that moment is that it does feel like a scene that, contextually, doesn't belong to the story. If anything else, its the Fifteenth comforting the Fourteenth, when the narrative demands the opposite should occur.
 
I was thinking about when that scene could happen from Thirteen's perspective, and given how unfazed she is by suddenly being in her future TARDIS with her future self, I figure it makes sense that it was during the last part of Flux where she was triplicated and was appearing and disappearing across different places and times.
 
I feel like the fundamental issue of the RTD2 era is that he thought what Moffat did during his run was really cool and is trying to do more of that kind of thing in the show, but RTD doesn't think in a way that makes it natural for him to construct a Moffat-style storyline, so he's invoking the sound, but not the language.
I'm virtually certain that Moffat actually helped plot the course of the season in some manner. Scott Handcock of Bad Wolf told me they brought in Moffat to help for the 2nd season but unfortunately there wasn't enough time to clarify exactly how. So, Moffat was involved to some extent but uncertain how much.

I guess all of that is to say it could be a case of too many cooks, along with other issues.
 
I'm virtually certain that Moffat actually helped plot the course of the season in some manner. Scott Handcock of Bad Wolf told me they brought in Moffat to help for the 2nd season but unfortunately there wasn't enough time to clarify exactly how. So, Moffat was involved to some extent but uncertain how much.

I guess all of that is to say it could be a case of too many cooks, along with other issues.
In what capacity did Handcock tell you that? Was it a convention or in an interview (or something else)?
 
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