The point of no return....

I've been wondering today what does it take to actually qualify as a 'point of no return' moment for Doctor Who?

After all the show has previously kept going and come back from moments that most would think would've been sure franchise killers. Whether the toothless pantomime shenanigans of Season 24, the way that Time-Flight or The Invasion of Time showed a writing team that plain doesn't care about making any of this fiction hang together anymore, or the objectionable moments of Season 21-23 that sometimes were troubling and questionable enough to take viewers out of the fiction and out of sympathy with the Doctor altogether and left them not wanting to get back in.

Nonetheless, most would conclude that with stories like Caves of androzani or Remembrance of the Daleks, the show overall bounced back and kept us on-side with it after all.

Even in New Who sometimes the reward of the occasional Moffat story, or indeed his first season at the helm felt momentarily like something that made grumbling through RTD's worst excesses worth it after all. Despite everything there was a hope we clung onto. And for me personally, sometimes in the Moffat era's worst slumps of quality, I would simply think "he delivered a great Series 5 once, and maybe given time he can still be that good again"

But I think it's safe to say that for most of us, the point of no return has definitely been reached. If not by Love & Monsters, Last of the Time Lords, or Let's Kill Hitler, or even Jodie's first season, then definitely by this recent Ruth retcon.

I've been pondering what the difference really is, between classic and new.

And I think what it is, is that classic Who seemed to have an inherent dogged determination to it to get back on its horse and soar again. Sometimes in the low periods it wasn't at all apparent that it had that, but it eventually surprised us nonetheless.

New Who under RTD also had a dogged determination, but unfortunately it seemed to point to the wrong way, and to chasing the most philistine, trashy things. And in Moffat's era it seemed to lose all direction at all. And moreover the things it pursued tended to yield less and less rewards or sense of an earned challenge. And this applies to the Ruth retcon as well. In some ways it was the easiest thing for the writers to do, for the most cynical and patronising of reasons, and it was the most dumbfounding.

The biggest problem with NuWho is that it will never admit to being in the wrong. That's why it repeats the same mistakes over and over again. If someone on the production team had actually bothered to listen to fans this whole travesty might have been avoided.

The point of no return was when Nu Who became as one with the virtue-signalling establishment. Unlike the old show it doesn't stand apart from the crowd, it's its representative. And for me that moment was the General's sex/race change double-deal in Hell Bent: it's absolutely beyond saving now.

Unfortunately the media would go after anyone who cancelled it now because it represents so many things that the entertainment world wants desperately to be associated with, regardless of whether it's any good or not.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. Missy.

That was the first time something huge in DW had deliberately been broken beyond repair.

You'd had characters being messed about because of clumsy writing, stupid retcons, and taboos being broken like the Doctor snogging his companion.

However with Missy, Moffat not only deliberately threw everything that made the Master, the Master in the bin, but he botched it in such a way that the Master could never be the Master again.

Even if you don't like the Master, feel that he's boring, overused etc, it should have worried every DW fan that as big an icon as that can be tossed aside.

If the Master's not safe, nothing is and indeed in the 6 years since all of the icons have been fucked with.

The Brig is now a Cybermen, Daleks have a concept of mercy, Davros has eyes, Time Lords have no concept of gender, Rassilon's an old fart that gets kicked off of Gallifrey no problem, the First Doctor is a sexual braggard, there's a new pre Hartnell regeneration cycle from the looks of things, and the Time Lords have been killed off again.

All of that can be traced back to Missy and spineless fans who said she chanelled Delgado. If they'd have made a stand against that abomination, we might have been able to save the show, but alas no.

Pepsi Maxil wrote:The biggest problem with NuWho is that it will never admit to being in the wrong. That's why it repeats the same mistakes over and over again. If someone on the production team had actually bothered to listen to fans this whole travesty might have been avoided.

The New Who writers were the kind of snobbish, bourgeois elitist fans who just see other fans as utterly beneath them and as a bit like some distant older relatives they're slightly embarrassed by.

In some ways I can understand keeping fan opinion at a distance. Not every fan is going to want the same thing, and the worst thing the makers ever did in the 1980's was listen to the likes of Ian Levine. But the New Who makers seemed to go the other extreme of just treating fan opinion with no charitability at all (and indeed as something to deliberately double down against the sensibilities of). If you had an issue with their approach or their changes, it was automatically seen as evidence that the problem lies with you and that you're undesirable somehow.

This indeed is part of the problem. The likes of Cornell and Chibnall became obsessed with issues of diversity representation in the show (in Discontinuity Guide, there's a bit in The War Games where Cornell seems to completely geek out about the possibility that one of the offered faces for Troughton's next regeneration appears to be black/ethnic, even though the moment is less than a second in the story), because in their circle it was seen as more important and less sad than fixating on continuity or other geeky things.

burrunjor wrote:Even if you don't like the Master, feel that he's boring, overused etc, it should have worried every DW fan that as big an icon as that can be tossed aside.

If the Master's not safe, nothing is

I would say for me it was definitely a sense that if this long-standing element can be so fundamentally altered in such a way that breaks the fiction with a huge moment of authorial fiat hijacking the narrative, then nothing about the show matters anymore. It all suddenly felt so hollow and meaningless.

Because of course, if anything can happen or indeed anything can unhappen, then nothing is interesting.

Arguably the moment they began implying that Rose's romantic fixation on the Doctor was mutual.
I would argue that Missy as such was not necessarily the moment, as it could have been (and some fans tried to say it was) a bodysnatcher-type thing. However the moment they had Capaldi confirm that Time Lords are all genderbenders, despite this never having been mentioned before and indeed flat-out contradicted by the various Time Lords we've seen change multiple times and always into the same gender, it was fucked.
And if that wasn't enough, the travesty of revisionist history attacking the First Doctor was the end of the road for me, and should have been for any fan with an ounce of self-respect. If anyone really had any lingering doubts that the "First female Doctor" was about anything other than pandering to disgusting man-hating psychopaths, that little shat on the grave of William Hartnell and Verity Lambert should have removed it altogether.

That's why I don't care what retcon bullshit this shitshow pulls from now on. I ain't never going back to it, and it will never be canon to the original regardless of what desperate sad virtue signalling fantasies Chinballs and his Twatter lover brigade twat themselves off to.

I hate that basted fucktard chibnall what he has done

iank wrote:Arguably the moment they began implying that Rose's romantic fixation on the Doctor was mutual.

This^

But what the hell happened during the Moffat era? He was the best writer they had under RTD, and then series 5 (while still not that great by true Who standards) was such a huge step in the right direction. Then in 6 and 7 we were back to RTD-style Who. Then in 8 they started even more seriously crapping all over the original show - turning the Master into a girl, and the Brig into a fucking Cyberman. And the less said about that toilet-clogger of an episode: Twice Upon a Turd, the better...

The way I see it no New Who is fit to be called Doctor Who. But, no New Who after The Doctor Falls is even fit to be called "New Who." - it's just shit - A big flaming pile of cat shit...

Fendelman wrote:But what the hell happened during the Moffat era? He was by far the best writer they had under RTD, and then series 5 (while still not that great by true Who standards) was such a huge step in the right direction. Then in 6 and 7 we were back to RTD-style Who. Then in 8 they started seriously crapping all over the original show - turning the Master into a girl, and the Brig into a fucking Cyberman. And the less said about that toilet-clogger of an episode: Twice Upon a Turd the better...

I think the BBC might've been putting pressure on him to ape RTD's fast and loose style more. Apparently even during Series 1, the BBC had concerns that The Unquiet Dead was too slow-paced for the mainstream and sent memos about it.

But I think the main problem is that Moffat wrote best under tight restrictions. When he was only writing one story a season he couldn't afford to be indulgent with the budget or leave things unsatifyingly open-ended. Silence in the Library is probably River's best story because she doesn't outstay her welcome, and because Moffat wrote it with the possibility in mind that this might be her one shot onscreen, and so he couldn't just take the audience liking her for granted.

Give him a whole season and he'll get the idea to string the audience along, and do the bigger, more expensive set-pieces or blow the budget on nonsense, and gradually lose his focus. It might also be that the more story ideas he has to contrive a season, the worse and less inspired they start to get.

But also I think Moffat's always had a strange, neurotic embarrassment about having been a fan, and for some reason when he became showrunner, a lot of those fan neuroses started to run wild, and he seemed to be using the show to assert his more laddish notions of truisms about the Doctor, and try and prove how cool the show and the Doctor can be (even if it means literally retconning the old show to do so).