By that logic there are like 26 years of Trek
Spoilers The Woman Who Fell to Earth grade and discussion thread
- Thread starter The Nth Doctor
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Yeah, I figured that was what Saul meant but it still doesn't quite work since not every year is a full season, plus the movie, plus other works, plus it's just silly to cover only the airtime space. 
Still, a gap of 15 years when people assumed the series was dead and gone for good is a different matter from just an ordinary hiatus between seasons. So I think saying "40 years of Doctor Who history" is a valid way of putting it. It's not the only way of putting it, but I wouldn't call it wrong.
It's not wrong but it is incomplete.
And silly.
And silly.
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I avoided almost everything except a handful of snippets, and the naming of Jodie as the new Doctor, and was excited to watch the episode completely unspoiled, which I got the chance to do so last night (thanks Spectrum on Demand for having it ready!). After watching the opener, all I can say is that I love it! She's a perfect fit as the Doctor. It just felt right the first moment I saw her on screen. I didn't even blink twice when she appeared. I just said to myself, "finally, The Doctor's here!" and we were off. I can't wait to see more of her adventures. ♥
Finally have time to watch the episode. I'm halfway through. So far....she's very, very much like David Tennant. She even has a few of the same inflections and says certain words just like him. I like it so far, but I'm not wowed. The important thing is, she's good. And she gives a better first impression than Capaldi did. I do like the Yorkshire accent.
Edit: The alien is rubbish. Good lord. And there were a couple of times where I literally said, out loud, "Jodie you're trying too hard, jeez." But I don't think it's her fault, really. Probably more the director telling her to do things a certain way. I'm sure she'll settle in as the episodes go along.
Edit: The alien is rubbish. Good lord. And there were a couple of times where I literally said, out loud, "Jodie you're trying too hard, jeez." But I don't think it's her fault, really. Probably more the director telling her to do things a certain way. I'm sure she'll settle in as the episodes go along.
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A new Doctor’s first episode always has a lot to do, so I don’t mind that the alien bad guy in this didn’t impress me much. Fortunately, pretty much everything else did impress me. The show looked good. The characters felt right. The music didn’t annoy me (sorry, not a Murray Gold fan). Seeing a city that isn’t Cardiff or London was a nice change of pace. And wasn’t Jodie wonderful? There was some 10/11 stuff early on, but at times she reminded me more of 9. I have no doubt, though, that she’s going to become her own Doctor, and a darn good one. All things considered, I’d rate this higher than several other Doctors’ first outings.
Jodie forced the comedy way too much, though the comedy itself wasn't all that great to begin with, and I don't think the show needs to be a repeat of the Tennant years as well. But her forceful standing up to the baddie was genuinely brilliant and she used her wits more than the sonic screwdriver, whose construction and new teleportation features are as far-fetched and ridiculous as every time DW has tried to do stupid stuff with a po-face. But classic DW never had the character falling from above orbit and crashing through a train, getting up immediately without as much as a bruise, and later does the hurt acting. All this combined leaves a taste of "Chibnall's being way too lazy here". Then again, compared what was shown to doing exposition on it all, he probably made the right choice. The only flawless regeneration story that exists is- well, none. Partly because "The Power of the Daleks" doesn't exist in the archive...
And I have to remember, this was the first filmed episode to a new era. As with all the others, there are bumps in the road. Jodie's rightly cast, just overplayed scenes - as @sttngfan1701d mentioned - are more likely due to director or others telling her how to do it.
And I have to remember, this was the first filmed episode to a new era. As with all the others, there are bumps in the road. Jodie's rightly cast, just overplayed scenes - as @sttngfan1701d mentioned - are more likely due to director or others telling her how to do it.
What teleportation feature?
But "The Christmas Invasion" did have the Doctor lose a hand and grow it back due to lingering regeneration energy hours after the fact. No doubt this has the same explanation.
Speaking of regeneration energy, when the Doctor exhaled that blob of regen energy and it drifted away, I wondered it was going anywhere in particular. Maybe that will be followed up on later.
It's a matter of degree. Previous character introduction stories may have taken place in "the real world", but they didn't go so far as to move the Doctor into our world as a replacement to getting the audience to explore the Doctor's universe. Huge difference, that. But "Logopolis" had Tegan's friend murdered by the Master and in 1963, the Doctor himself kidnaps Ian and Barbara in fear of exposing his secrets - of which Susan rightly said they'd be dismissed. Both didn't go overboard the way NuWHO has done since day one, and "Logopolis" surprisingly underplayed the human element.
Having said that, Grace may have been a more fun companion than Ryan or Yasmin, but I like the trio of Yasmin, Ryan, and Graham and am excited to see what's coming up. Especially as they're trapped in time and space and she might not be able to get them home. The show feels like a proper reinvention of Classic WHO. Even the incidental music is great. NuWHO fans might be shaken up by the new approach, which was pointed out to me because I'm so used to the Classic formula whereas many NuWHO fans haven't had any exposure to what worked for more than a quarter century.
Funny. I distinctly remember you announcing you‘d only watch the second episode as the season opener wouldn’t be real Doctor Who.
I must have missed the actual premier cause you watched this one.
Personally, I liked Jodie a lot.
Her friends seemed mostly like (very good) guest stars of the week so far.
Curious to see them develop and gain proper companion status.
I‘d like to hear a clear version of the Doctor‘s hero theme when she built her screwdriver.
I've watched a lot of pointless stuff when I didn't need to. I could have easily skipped this, since it only had about 5 minutes of actual plot that is in anyway relevant to The Doctor herself, but its not like I had anything better to do at the time.
I will never stop watching Doctor who. So, sorry, you'll still have to see opinions that don't agree with yours in episode threads going forward. It would take The Doctor regenerating into jenna Coleman to make me drop the show permanently. That is literally the only situation where I could see myself dropping the show. Well, that or them making Lungbarrow canon, but that seems even less likely.
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To the first point, I'm okay with the regeneration process granting a certain limited invulnerability after the fact - it's just that it's not been seen to be needed in most cases. Plus the Doctor has fallen from a spaceship, through a glass ceiling, landed, and gotten up pretty much straight away without any street pizza effect. He's also fallen fatally from a radio telescope, but that was after being electrocuted, so YMMV as to what actually caused that particular regeneration.
To the second, I rewatched the opening bit of "The Eleventh Hour" and found what Thirteen to have gone through to be very similar, right down to the leftover glowey hands, puff of energy to nowhere, and dialogue from the Doctor suggesting they were still in the (tail end of the?) regeneration process. Ten ALSO did an energy puff after changing from Nine, but he was conscious at the time. So there's lots of precedent.
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I, for one, got a kick out of the sonic screwdriver scene. 
I as well. It wasn't a TOTAL giveaway as she used bits of Tim's pod to build it, so the tech is in there, and The Doctor's built all sorts of stuff out of local (and often non-technological) technology. The speed with which she did it is a bit suspect, but it didn't really take me out of the story. The doctor has been seeing doing things at speed on occasion, so it's hardly out of the blue.
In any case, the Doctor has never been seen to build a sonic. The last two were literally created for him by the TARDIS, and it's unknown just what input he had in its construction. Heck, one could argue that he built the function into the TARDIS in the first place, to save the time and trouble of firing up a double flamethrower every time.
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In any case, the Doctor has never been seen to build a sonic. The last two were literally created for him by the TARDIS, and it's unknown just what input he had in its construction. Heck, one could argue that he built the function into the TARDIS in the first place, to save the time and trouble of firing up a double flamethrower every time.
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I never realized I needed a double flamethrower until that scene.
I can accept the depiction of both deaths. As much as loved all of the Doctors from 9 on, the stories relied too heavily on the Time Lord’s pronouncement of the quality of the deaths suffered, the cost of the lives lost, and the appropriate amount of mourning to be expressed. It was, until now, up to the Doctor to tell his associates—and the audience—whether the price paid for the party was sufficient or not.
This one episode, though, left it the viewers and the companions to work out the significance. The grandfather’s end was a well-turned horror trope (tropes have their place, chief among them Doctor Who and such entertainments).
Nan, on the other hand, shows just how dangerous friendship with the Doctor can be. We saw heroism and folly; sacrifice and senselessness; resilience and quiet, dignified surrender. All this, without a hint of magic resurrection. True grief, real consequences.
That’s a hell of lot to get from a show about a magic box that can re-set all of time and space at will.
I don't want to wade through 13 pages, and this has probably been brought up, but why didn't the Doctor just heal Grace with regeneration energy? He's done it before. He also gave a ton of it to Davros. Maybe bringing someone back from death would be too much, but that's the first thing I thought. Regeneration energy would be like a super defibrillator and could knit broken bones back together quickly if the plot wanted it to. I guess they wanted Grace's death to have impact
I haven't read this whole thread, but it's just occurred to me that this year's TARDIS crew are all accidental travellers - people who stumbled into the episode and kept on going by necessity and not choice, with an initial mission of simply getting home. In all of modern Who, every companion has been invited along at the end of their introductory adventure (except Donna, but she was also invited after her reunion with him), and they've all willingly said yes. Here, none of them were invited along or even wanted to teleport off, and until they get back will be unwillingly following along.
We haven't had this sort of thing since arguably Tegan got stuck with the gang in "Logopolis", and it really harkens back to Ian and Barbara being kidnapped, or other companions over the years who were effectively swept away in the Doctor's natural associated chaos. Nice.
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We haven't had this sort of thing since arguably Tegan got stuck with the gang in "Logopolis", and it really harkens back to Ian and Barbara being kidnapped, or other companions over the years who were effectively swept away in the Doctor's natural associated chaos. Nice.
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Seen to, no, but said to, yes. The Eleventh Doctor once said he'd "invent[ed] a new kind of screwdriver," and it was always implicit that he was the maker, given how its design kept changing and how he wasn't exactly in a position to pop back to Gallifrey to buy the newest model from the Sonic Store.
That's what I figured. Just as it started out as a simple, quite literal sonic screwdriver and accumulated more and more functions over the years through the Doctor's tinkering, the Doctor probably eventually decided to program a screwdriver-creation app into the console room's "desktop theme."
I guess Chibnall didn't want to abuse the trope as a deus ex machina the way Moffat sometimes did. Fine with me. Moffat tended to make Time Lord abilities a bit too magical.
Yes. The thing is, for the majority of the classic series, the Doctor either had no control over the TARDIS's destination or could steer it unreliably at best. It wasn't until maybe the Sixth Doctor's era that he got consistently good at steering the thing. So it was possible for companions to be swept away reluctantly and be unable to get home. These days, the Doctor has perfect control of the TARDIS, so the only companions we get are voluntary ones. Moffat particularly abused this by giving us commuting companions -- people who didn't live permanently in the TARDIS but just went off on trips with the Doctor and then went back home at the end, which took a lot of the wonder and commitment out of it. When Capaldi first appeared and asked Clara "Do you happen to know how to steer this thing," I was hoping he'd lost the knowledge in the regeneration and we'd be back to having companions who couldn't just get dropped off at home after every adventure. No such luck then.
But maybe this time we're back to having a more swept-away approach again, either because the TARDIS is missing for at least a part of the season or because maybe its near-destruction damaged it enough that the steering is unreliable. Still, I got my hopes up last regeneration, so I shouldn't expect too much this time.
Late to the game, but here is my take!
I rather enjoyed it, in fact I was pretty impressed.
Even with the necessary evils that comes with new companions and a Doctor (exposition and introduction over load), I thought it was a good solid story. In fact I found it was extremely good at introducing the new Core Fore, dare I say much better at some of the previous introductions, some of which I have found to be unnecessarily convoluted... Love them or hate them, both Davies and Moffats often felt the need to go over the top with wizz-bang technicolour and breakneck paced stories.
It was a simple but solid story. And that is what impressed me, in that a lot was how ordinary (I don't mean that in a bad way) the overall plot was. No need for Impossible Girls, Man eating Wheelie Bins her. I liked the fact It was a basic hunter/pray storyline with minimal technobabble and even the arsenal and tracking devises Tim Shaw had on him didn't feel out of place (and I did enjoy the fact that Tim Shaw was 'cheating' with them.
As for Jodie... OMG I am in love. She just melted into the role of the Doctor so fast and just became the Doctor. I feel she is going to have that delicious feel of alien-ness that Smith projected well and Capaldi, I felt, kinda lacked.
One of my biggest gripes with Moffat was the lack of a 'bigger world' for the companions, people that care for them back home. (Rory's dad kinda got tacked on at the very end, and it was a struggle to even bother connecting with a character that the viewer had no history with and logically be gone a few episodes later). And the family's of other companions where barely existent (Amy/Bill) or weirdly tacked on (Clara - which is amazing given the fact there was a minor plot point at the beginning about her parents meeting). Anyway back to my original point, you didn't get the connections in the Moffat era that you did in the Davies era, which might of been okay if the series was nothing but travelling space of time as long as you can, but instead Moffat gave us part-time companions.
Ergh, the point I am trying to make is with a ready built family already as companions, I am hopeful this tangent with go well.
Other thoughts - I do hope they get the TARDIS back quickly. I am not sure I care for a TARDIS-less season.
I kinda guessed Grace was going to kick the bucket. Either that or Grahame was really only a part time companion, I just couldn't see her sitting at home knitting quietly while her husband and grandson where on adventures (though I suppose as twist ending like we got plus faulty/cranky TARDIS like we had in the 60s might of been a good way around it)
Also is Vinette Robinson going to play Rosa Parks? In the Guest Star bit at the end, she really did look like the classic images we have of Rosa.
Also Chris Noth, the Law & Order/Doctor Who crossover we never knew we wanted, but now we really need!
I rather enjoyed it, in fact I was pretty impressed.
Even with the necessary evils that comes with new companions and a Doctor (exposition and introduction over load), I thought it was a good solid story. In fact I found it was extremely good at introducing the new Core Fore, dare I say much better at some of the previous introductions, some of which I have found to be unnecessarily convoluted... Love them or hate them, both Davies and Moffats often felt the need to go over the top with wizz-bang technicolour and breakneck paced stories.
It was a simple but solid story. And that is what impressed me, in that a lot was how ordinary (I don't mean that in a bad way) the overall plot was. No need for Impossible Girls, Man eating Wheelie Bins her. I liked the fact It was a basic hunter/pray storyline with minimal technobabble and even the arsenal and tracking devises Tim Shaw had on him didn't feel out of place (and I did enjoy the fact that Tim Shaw was 'cheating' with them.
As for Jodie... OMG I am in love. She just melted into the role of the Doctor so fast and just became the Doctor. I feel she is going to have that delicious feel of alien-ness that Smith projected well and Capaldi, I felt, kinda lacked.
One of my biggest gripes with Moffat was the lack of a 'bigger world' for the companions, people that care for them back home. (Rory's dad kinda got tacked on at the very end, and it was a struggle to even bother connecting with a character that the viewer had no history with and logically be gone a few episodes later). And the family's of other companions where barely existent (Amy/Bill) or weirdly tacked on (Clara - which is amazing given the fact there was a minor plot point at the beginning about her parents meeting). Anyway back to my original point, you didn't get the connections in the Moffat era that you did in the Davies era, which might of been okay if the series was nothing but travelling space of time as long as you can, but instead Moffat gave us part-time companions.
Ergh, the point I am trying to make is with a ready built family already as companions, I am hopeful this tangent with go well.
Other thoughts - I do hope they get the TARDIS back quickly. I am not sure I care for a TARDIS-less season.
I kinda guessed Grace was going to kick the bucket. Either that or Grahame was really only a part time companion, I just couldn't see her sitting at home knitting quietly while her husband and grandson where on adventures (though I suppose as twist ending like we got plus faulty/cranky TARDIS like we had in the 60s might of been a good way around it)
Also is Vinette Robinson going to play Rosa Parks? In the Guest Star bit at the end, she really did look like the classic images we have of Rosa.
Also Chris Noth, the Law & Order/Doctor Who crossover we never knew we wanted, but now we really need!
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