The new series IS 'Tru Who'

shan164 wrote:

Mr. Happy wrote:Face it Shan, you are no Garlicbutter523.

Welcome though, it's nice to see you are no one post wonder.

To be fair, I should earn that by both going a bit more distance and providing at least some quality to go with the quantity (and at least trying to maintain that quality/quantity ratio at not being too poor).

May not get off to the greatest start with what I'm about to say but I also believe in at least trying to be as honest as possible. Also, seems like if you're reasonable, people here will be reasonable back even if they disagree with you. If anything, it's good to talk with people who disagree with you because you can learn new ways of looking at things.

I got here through a link from Gallifrey Base

I grew up on the original show and I like the return of the show.

When I say 'like', I take the view that if I thought every episode of the current run starting with Christopher Eccelston was an A+ episode, the show would have been off the air in as little as six weeks. What I like isn't going to always be what enough other people like enough of the time for the show to keep on the air.

So, to keep getting the episodes I really like, there has to be a lot of ones I really don't with the eventual aim of keeping enough people watching enough of the show enough of the time to keep it on the air from my point of view. I accept that like the original run of the show, it seems likely that this one will have to return the show to "hiatus" status at some point. Better rest and recharge than shambling along like a reanimated corpse. YMMV as to whether it's there yet.

My hope is that I get at least 2 episodes every three seasons which I think are excellent and so far it seems to be managing that. I seem to really like the atypical stuff like: Blink, Midnight, Turn Left, Listen, Heaven Sent and the like. IMO some of the best stories I've ever seen on any show but not really representative of your usual Doctor Who now, is it?

That's an interesting utilitarian take on things. And mostly I would agree, except that Series 9 fell flat for me. 10 had a huge lag in the middle with that Monk trilogy. Though, I am still hopeful for the next series despite being a bit put off by some the bits that have filtered through.

Interesting that most of the stories you listed as exceptional had strong plots and were at least partly character driven. Stuff that has really failed for me has been Kill the Moon, Into the Forest of the Night, the Caretaker and (one of your faves) Listen. Do you feel the new series is too dependent on soap opera drama?

Also, I don't think you would get many complaints if every story was like Blink, Turn Left, Midnight or Heaven Sent. The only bit of Heaven Sent I disliked was the emotional hyperbole. I am not anti-character or anti-emotion it's just that Moffat lays them on so thick that it's just saccharine sweet hyperbole. The Caretaker was similar in that it couldn't successfully meld the action and the character orientated bits

Mr. Happy wrote:

shan164 wrote:

Mr. Happy wrote:Face it Shan, you are no Garlicbutter523.

Welcome though, it's nice to see you are no one post wonder.

To be fair, I should earn that by both going a bit more distance and providing at least some quality to go with the quantity (and at least trying to maintain that quality/quantity ratio at not being too poor).

May not get off to the greatest start with what I'm about to say but I also believe in at least trying to be as honest as possible. Also, seems like if you're reasonable, people here will be reasonable back even if they disagree with you. If anything, it's good to talk with people who disagree with you because you can learn new ways of looking at things.

I got here through a link from Gallifrey Base

I grew up on the original show and I like the return of the show.

When I say 'like', I take the view that if I thought every episode of the current run starting with Christopher Eccelston was an A+ episode, the show would have been off the air in as little as six weeks. What I like isn't going to always be what enough other people like enough of the time for the show to keep on the air.

So, to keep getting the episodes I really like, there has to be a lot of ones I really don't with the eventual aim of keeping enough people watching enough of the show enough of the time to keep it on the air from my point of view. I accept that like the original run of the show, it seems likely that this one will have to return the show to "hiatus" status at some point. Better rest and recharge than shambling along like a reanimated corpse. YMMV as to whether it's there yet.

My hope is that I get at least 2 episodes every three seasons which I think are excellent and so far it seems to be managing that. I seem to really like the atypical stuff like: Blink, Midnight, Turn Left, Listen, Heaven Sent and the like. IMO some of the best stories I've ever seen on any show but not really representative of your usual Doctor Who now, is it?

That's an interesting utilitarian take on things. And mostly I would agree, except that Series 9  fell flat for me. 10 had a huge lag in the middle with that Monk trilogy. Though, I am still hopeful for the next series despite being a bit put off by some the bits that have filtered through.

Interesting that most of the stories you listed as exceptional had strong plots and were at least partly character driven. Stuff that has really failed for me has been Kill the Moon, Into the Forest of the Night, the Caretaker and (one of your faves) Listen. Do you feel the new series is too dependent on soap opera drama?

Also, I don't think you would get many complaints if every story was like Blink, Turn Left, Midnight or Heaven Sent. The only bit of Heaven Sent I disliked was the emotional hyperbole. I am not anti-character or anti-emotion it's just that Moffat lays them on so thick that it's just saccharine sweet hyperbole. The Caretaker was similar in that it couldn't successfully meld the action and the character orientated bits

I like that they try new things. Even if most of them don't work for me, when it does, up to now some of the results have been really outstanding IMO. There's been about a half-dozen things I've really liked and another 6-12 which I think I have been quite good.

Peter Capaldi's era has been quite a roller coaster, I agree. He's my favourite of the new Doctors and the good ones good (and the great ones great) but there's really been some duff ones. And by duff, really plumbing the depths there sometimes.

As for soap opera drama ... I'm going to need a new post for that. Lead in, though - like I said, Peter Capaldi's my favourite of the new series and I really like it when I can see some of the others in him now and then. Overall, with the new show ...

Well, let me put it this way - when Tom Baker said in City of Death "You're a very beautiful woman - probably", that really drove home the point that he may look human but he's anything but (I wouldn't be surprised to one day find out this is equally applicable to both the Doctor and Tom Baker).

However, now personally with the Doctors, those walls have broken down a lot (actually wound back a bit at least with Peter versus his last few predecessors).

Commander Maxil wrote:

Mr. Happy wrote:I miss Dalekbutter or whatever his name was

I suspect he'll become part of what I call "the one post to his name" squad where the member only ever posts once and is never heard from again. This has happened many times in the past.

Ouch! I'll better break that rule then!

I've just finished watching / listening to all the black and white episodes of Who. Marvellous! A nice focus on simply telling stories. The Doctor is also fascinating - two very different interpretations of his character by Hartnell and Troughton. Even in Troughton's day he is not sold as obviously "heroic". He is a bit shifty, quietly brilliant, genuinely eccentric and one step ahead of everyone else. I love the way he is written in The War Games. He actually shows he is a great thinker, something that the modern show does not do very often. And I have noticed the modern show interprets "eccentric" as "idiotic". The new Doctors are all over the place, running around, shouting and being "zany". I much prefer the understatement of the original series. I keep thinking of Hartnell's marvellous insult to Bret Vyon when he guns down Daxtar - "You brainless idiot!" is conveyed with such scorn. I can imagine him saying that to all the modern Doctors.

It's funny, I'm not usually one for romance in Doctor Who, if he ever were to be involved with someone it'd be a very alien way of going about it rather than human conventions or behavior.

To that end, I did write up a short story (you can find it here somewhere) which hinted he was privately married to Sarah Jane Smith and had been ever since "School Reunion" (the idea was the hug he gave her at the end was some kind of Gallifreyan commitment ceremony where departing travelers would take a partner and then bugger off leaving them to get on with their lives 'till they returned)

Yes, I'm weird. Very weird.

I agree with Shan's point (welcome, by the way) that when Nu Who veers away from its formula it produces its best work - which is then generally derided by those who adore the template. Well put, sir : if I hadn't been in Norway I would probably have been making that point myself!

I also think the original poster has gone away, finally watched season 2 of Broadchurch and realised just what Chibbers is, erm, capable of.

Thanks for the welcome again.

Trying to answer a few more points and things posed to me:

I liked Listen (and Midnight) because you had a mystery that was never really answered but was quite ingeniously conveyed almost completely through dialogue and was quite a bit creepy. The bit in Midnight where the repeated dialogue caught up and then overtook the person saying it was very chilling and cost the SFX budget $0 (or equivalent in pounds).

"That's an interesting utilitarian take on things."

The episodes that are my favourite, I really like. I think I could put together a list of as many as 20 episodes from the new series I'd rank as very good to excellent. But to get those, the show has to stay on the air and there has to be episodes that don't appeal to me (and maybe even actively hate) - so the show basically has to keep enough of the people happy enough of the time overall.

"And mostly I would agree, except that Series 9 fell flat for me. 10 had a huge lag in the middle with that Monk trilogy."

It is starting to stutter a bit, isn't it? Felt in kind of starting pulling out of the dive the last season was in at least a little with the last two episodes of season 10, episode 11 more than 12.

"Though, I am still hopeful for the next series despite being a bit put off by some the bits that have filtered through."

I know absolutely nothing about it. Debating whether to wait until it's all over and watch it all at once and see how that goes for me, it's a strategy that seemed to work for me and the last two seasons of Orphan Black.

"Do you feel the new series is too dependent on soap opera drama?"

I think I did like it more when the Doctor was more mysterious and more apart from the companions for want of a better term, given he's a completely different species, for starters. Some things the various Doctors did worked, other script elements, not so much.

The Caretaker is something I was going over on Gallifrey Base, regardless of what you think of the character of Danny Pink, they were really going overboard with the Hate Train towards him and soldiers in general there, weren't they?

I guess all up, I would like a bit more show and less tell with the show sometimes and other times, well ... maintaining a bit more mystery.

One last thing for this post, I would like a move back to not every single companion being a vital cog in maintaining the superstructure of the universe and you know ... go back to at least some of the time being just people if that's all right with the people making it perhaps?

shan164 wrote:One last thing for this post, I would like a move back to not every single companion being a vital cog in maintaining the superstructure of the universe and you know ... go back to at least some of the time being just people if that's all right with the people making it perhaps?

What's wrong with that?

At least there's still the Doctor to be the God-like companion's weaker, humorous sidekick. Though Bradley Walsh will probably buck the trend as he's a white, middle-aged and middle-class male: he'll be made the sci-fi equivalent of the daft dad character we see in frozen food adverts...

Colon Baker was the first of what I consider to be TDWSNHB (The Doctor Who Should Not Have Been)
Whittaker is TDWSNHB II
That's right, Colon is still first place. I respectfully maintain Colon is was a far worse change than this gender gimmick.

Mott1 wrote:

shan164 wrote:One last thing for this post, I would like a move back to not every single companion being a vital cog in maintaining the superstructure of the universe and you know ... go back to at least some of the time being just people if that's all right with the people making it perhaps?

What's wrong with that?  

At least there's still the Doctor to be the God-like companion's weaker, humorous sidekick. Though Bradley Walsh will probably buck the trend as he's a white, middle-aged and middle-class male: he'll be made the sci-fi equivalent of the daft dad character we see in frozen food adverts...

Well, one problem I can think of is an escalating spiral of one-upmanship which really doesn't have much further they can go unless they want to start entering Lucifer's Elaine Belloc or Akira's Tetsuo level territory.

Since I'm here, for fun, here's my list of good/very good and above episodes IMO. There's probably a few more but this is my first pass at it.

Dalek
Father's Day
The Girl in the Fireplace
Blink
The Fires of Pompeii
Midnight
Turn Left

Going to have to come back to Matt Smith (need to think about that era a bit more) but I did really enjoy the combination of:

The Day of the Doctor + The Night of the Doctor + The Five(ish) Doctors and An Adventure in Space and Time

Listen
Heaven Sent

as I said before and hmmm ... going to have to go back through Peter Capaldi's time once more.

I guess to reiterate - 6 or so episodes I thought were really outstanding, maybe 12 or so which I quite liked and maybe that many again which had parts/elements/scenes I would certainly think stood out. I guess I'm going to need to have another crack at this.

shan164 wrote:The Caretaker is something I was going over on Gallifrey Base, regardless of what you think of the character of Danny Pink, they were really going overboard with the Hate Train towards him and soldiers in general there, weren't they?

The soldier-hate never made sense with his connection to the Brigadier and the War Doctor incarnation. Mind you, McGann's reluctance to fight in Night of the Doctor never tallied up with Troughton's speech in the War Games that there are things that must be fought. But yeah, season story arcs always were a particular Achilles heel of Moffat's, I do think RTD did better in that area.

Getting back to something you brought up earlier about Season 9 and 10:

I think Peter Capaldi was a great Doctor but I was starting to struggle with the latter half of the last season and unfortunately for me, IMO I found the entirety of his run just a bit too variable and inconsistent for my liking. Picked up for me at the end there but the Christmas Special left me a lot colder than I would have liked.

Coincidentally, I just came across this article that berates Moffat for relying on the same template for Capaldi's Doctor and Sherlock https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-im-kind-of-tired-of-the-smartest-man-in-the-room-1673944061

Mr. Happy wrote:I do think RTD did better in that area.

Only because he kept the arcs ridiculously simple.

Season 1 was effectively a buzzphrase that makes little to no sense semantically, and only serves (tenuously) as a guiding force to lead Rose to the events of episode 13.

Boofer wrote:

Mr. Happy wrote:I do think RTD did better in that area.

Only because he kept the arcs ridiculously simple.

Season 1 was effectively a buzzphrase that makes little to no sense semantically, and only serves (tenuously) as a guiding force to lead Rose to the events of episode 13.

Did you prefer Amy's crack? (oo-er!)

Mr. Happy wrote:

Boofer wrote:

Mr. Happy wrote:I do think RTD did better in that area.

Only because he kept the arcs ridiculously simple.

Season 1 was effectively a buzzphrase that makes little to no sense semantically, and only serves (tenuously) as a guiding force to lead Rose to the events of episode 13.

Did you prefer Amy's crack? (oo-er!)

That was fucking stupid too. My brain had switched off by then. Something to do with The Silence and Trenzalore (blah).

Prior to that knowledge, it just used to appear at the end of episodes as an 'ominous' sign in order to feed mystery into otherwise dull episodes.

I couldn't give a fuck as they didn't seem to be attached to anything meaningful or prescient. Maybe I missed something.

Shitpost or not - it isn't. It never really was.

RTD didn't even make much effort to encourage NuWho as a continuation. There was no regeneration, no 'Season 27', no returning characters or continuing storylines aside from some anomalies; the format changed; the themes changed; the production changed. Aside from the basic premise and opening music - everything was gone.

It was always just a misguided remake - de facto.

Every episode of New Who is now on BBC I-Player

http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/doctor-who/news/a858594/every-doctor-who-episode-bbc-iplayer/

Zarius wrote:Every episode of New Who is now on BBC I-Player

http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/doctor-who/news/a858594/every-doctor-who-episode-bbc-iplayer/

And not a shit was given that day.

Yeah, I watched the first few minutes of "Fear Her" on the iPlayer and I forgot just how shit and ghastly it was. Terrible acting and some of the crappiest attempts at creating tension and suspense I've ever witnessed. Can't say I'll be watching any of the others anytime soon.

I can't watch NuWho on anything less than 3x playback speed, 4x for the shittier episodes (most of them).

iank wrote:A cunt, in other words.
Welcome cunt. We look forward to calling you a cunt on a regular basis.

Did we ever get to the bottom of who the cunt was? A shame they disappeared: it's not as if they didn't get a warm welcome!

I've seen him on other forums. He's not a troll, but very much a fully paid up NuPoo Kool-Aid drinker.

Dalekbuster523 wrote:So after 54 years of white British males playing the role, the Doctor is finally a woman.

It's about time.

I have been hoping for a female Doctor since I first became a fan of Doctor Who in 2005.

That last bit tells you all you need to know.

NuWho fan with fuck all idea about the Classic Series or the conventions and limitations to regeneration or about the Time Lords.

Dalekbuster goes by the name "Sean the Mondasian Cyberman" on twitter.
Of course he thinks the current series is a golden age of Doctor Who.

https://twitter.com/WhoPotterVian/status/1059172625614802944

No surprise to find out from his twitter profile he's autistic, which explains the bizarre opinions,his lack of a sense of humour and single minded obsessions.