A Creation Which I Devastated (The Halloween Apocalypse)
It’s October 31st, 2021. Adele is at number one with “Easy on Me.” Ed Sheeran, Elton John and Dua Lipa, Coldplay and BTS, and Lil Nas X also chart. In news, well, there’s ten fucking months of it. Failed coup in the US, successful one in Myanmar, the Ever Given running aground, Discovery acquiring Warner Brothers, Netanyahu briefly losing power in Israel, wildfires, heat waves, winter storms. The usual.
The real story, at least in terms of the qualia of being alive, is the slow lurching of the world towards approximated normality. COVID, of course, never goes away. It’s just a new illness we live with and that kills and disables people in large and horrifying quantities forever. But vaccination picks up speed and things start to reopen. Penn, Anna, and I take a trip to Chicago in September to go to nice restaurants for the first time in over a year. As is by now usual, my wife declines to join us. On the day that we’re heading home, my Twitter lights up with the news that Russell T Davies is returning to Doctor Who. I subsequently spend every rest stop along the twelve hour drive dealing with what is, effectively, being unexpectedly called into work.
One of the first decisions that I make based on the knowledge is that I’m going to write a Whittaker era Eruditorum. This had been largely up in the air—my stated position was that I’d only do it if some subsequent era made me want to write about the show in depth again. But the return of Davies was if nothing else sure to be interesting, and so I decided I’d do it.
I forget who watches this one with me. I think it might have been just Penn. (I eventually, writing these essays, just stopped telling him I was going to watch things so he’d stop doing this to himself.) Anticipating the fact that by this point in Eruditorum I would be struggling to find things to say, I only offered a capsule review on Patreon. I forget the exact text, and bothering to find it would probably take a solid 10-15% of the amount of time I spent on it in the first place, but the basic structure was that I described this as the “best Chibnall episode ever” because all it had to do was write checks that other episodes would fail to cash.
Which is to say that at this point, you just feel bad for the poor show. If The Timeless Children was Chris Chibnall being haunted by the vengeful spirits of Pip and Jane, here we see him pulling the same feat as John Nathan-Turner as he dragged Trial of a Time Lord through production despite the dramatic flouncing of the script editor, death of the writer mid-finale, and the fact that the show had literally just been cancelled. In both cases the result is a sort of heroic triumph of getting extremely bad television to air on BBC One and get coverage in mainstream newspapers.
It is worth considering the full scale of making Doctor Who during COVID. The bulk of the workplace guidelines—and the BFI firmly positioned them as best practices, with the words “where possible” and “consider” sprinkled liberally throughout—simply had the effect of slowing everything down. Various departments were encouraged to do their work serially instead of concurrently so that fewer people were on set at a time. Cleaning and sanitation requirements added further delays. Everything went slower. That’s why a year-long production block yielded only nine episodes.
There were other impacts. Indoor filming was far more challenging, hence the first block shot—the three Jamie Magnus Stone episodes—making such substantial use of outdoor locations, including the triumphant return of muddy quarries for War of the Sontarans. Face to face blocking was also discouraged, a fact that, once you know, you’ll suddenly start thinking of more or less every other scene. Perhaps most substantially, the season was largely structured to separate the Doctor and Yaz, and by extension Whittaker and Gill, so that if one got sick they could continue shooting with the other.
And then, of course, there was Chibnall’s decision to essentially solo-write an entire nine episode stretch of Doctor Who. This was the most episodes anyone had ever written in a single production block, a fact that’s only slightly leavened by how extended the production was. It’s easy enough to see how this happened—the production was chaotic, requirements were shifting constantly, and adding links to the chain was only going to slow things down further. But it was a devil’s bargain at best given that he’d been buckling under the time pressures before COVID.
And, of course, he made it far worse for himself than it needed to be. As with Trial of a Time Lord, there’s a fundamental hubris in undertaking a giant season-long story under trying conditions when you’ve been routinely fucking up under less trying ones. “Barnstorming epic” has always been a dodgy mode for Doctor Who to begin with, and these were plainly not the ideal circumstances for it. If ever there was a time to revert to having decent actors sitting in a basement arguing instead of massive CGI set pieces and globe-trotting hijinks, the middle of a pandemic was surely it. Well, not a basement. But fine, decent actors standing in a quarry arguing. Instead, however, Chibnall attempted to condense an arc that was previously reaching the crashing lows of The Timeless Children down into a six episode epic under newly appalling conditions. Needless to say, he comes nowhere close to landing it.
I mean that not merely in terms of quality, but as a kind of ontological truth about this story. It’s notable that for all that the Flux and the fact that the Doctor was adopted both came up twice in the first four episodes of the RTD2 era, Tecteun and the Division have not. And how would they? Of everything that The Timeless Children introduced, the Time Lord superspy organization was by far the least urgent and compelling, doubly so once they’re established as moustache-twirling lunatics bent on destroying the universe for specious reasons. And yet Flux is ultimately built around them. We open with the Doctor hunting the last Division operative, who conveniently also happens to be obliged to protect the Earth from the Division’s universe-ending Flux. The focus is not on the Doctor’s role in establishing Time Lord civilization, nor her extra-universal origins, but her day job when she happened to be Jo Martin. The result is a six episode epic to nowhere, its aporia so vast that Davies is able to anchor a coherent emotional arc out of a couple beats of gawping at a single one of its unresolved threads.
In this regard The Halloween Apocalypse’s tone of breathless setup is a microcosm for the sound and fury of the larger whole. There’s a fifteen minute video up on YouTube of Chibnall and Whittaker explaining the plot, of Flux and it’s genuinely painful, not just for the painfully labored explanations that are given of the handful of bits that broadly made sense (Chibnall goes on at considerable and ultimately unsurprising length about the nominal emotional content of the Doctor dropping the watch into the console) but for the complete failure to even bother explaining the bits that didn’t, which is to say most of it.
The air of disposable pointlessness isn’t helped by the newfound regular cast. John Bishop’s Dan is an absolute nothing of a character whose main role ends up being making you appreciate just how good Bradley Walsh was—he’s so comprehensively uninteresting that Penn asked who he was during War of the Sontarans, having managed to forget every single one of his scenes in this over the ensuing week. Jacob Anderson marks another non-triumph of casting midlist Game of Thrones actors, though he makes the best of a bad part. Swarm and Azure have pleasantly unsettling designs, but quickly get annoying as actual characters. The best part is frankly hearing Jodie Whittaker say “what’s the floox” in the recap every week, and even that gets dropped before the end.
The rest is mostly six hours of flaccid characters flitting about tedious lore that isn’t even as well shot as last year’s poorly made stuff. And that basically makes up the remainder of the Chibnall era—that and a couple specials, all of them feeling like the television equivalent of bonus tracks. A sustained tone—essentially three and a half years pass between The Timeless Children and The Star Beast—of Doctor Who that blatantly isn’t in conversation with prestige television but with shovelwatch cult shows like Wynonna Earp or Supernatural, and that isn’t even faring well with that comparison.
It’s terrible. But look, Chibnall must know that. This is a man who demonstrably understands how bad Terror of the Vervoids was. Hell, he understands how bad The Battle of Roman Reigns’ Clingshorts was, at least based on his interviews. This can’t have been what he wanted either. He’s plainly having as bad a time as the rest of us at this point. But as with Trial of a Time Lord, a story in which Robert Holmes dying midway through the finale wasn’t even the biggest thing that went wrong, getting this onto television screens was a genuine accomplishment.
And much like Nathan-Turner, some of that credit should go to Chibnall throughout his run. We ought not forget that he was working under a BBC being run by an actively hostile government that was aggressively choking its funding. Since 2005 Doctor Who had been an ambitious project to run on BBC budgets. At the end of the day it was tensions over how the production team handled the cold reality of that fact in the first days of production that drove a wedge between Davies and Eccleston. And that was the show being made at a relative high point for the BBC, as a passion project of key executives. By the Chibnall era basic infrastructure that previous eras had—things like a brand manager—were stripped away. For all that Chibnall’s spoiler-phobia is egregious, no small part of the constantly botched publicity for the show was simply that the BBC were no longer as on the ball about running publicity campaigns. Similar issues existed in literally every department. COVID was the last and largest of the production challenges that faced the era, but it was the culmination of a long and substantial series of them.
Notably, one of the first things Davies did upon taking the helm—indeed the entire point of Davies Taking the helm—was that going forward the show was to be made by a third party production company who would sell the international rights to a streamer. It’s not the only thing he did, and the BBC was already intending an approach along those lines, but the fact that it was so clearly necessary says a lot about what Chibnall was facing. And if nothing else, this is the tipping point where that fact feels larger than the fact of how terrible the actual show is. I look at The Timeless Children and in my heart and soul I still see a piece of television I wish did not exist in the world. I look at Flux and I see a harmless goof that, like Underworld or The Time Monster or, yes, The Mark of the Rani I’m at the end of the day charmed by, albeit not so charmed that I expect to watch it again. (Actually, Mark of the Rani is in with a chance…)
This isn’t a judgment of quality—not really. Rather it’s one of odiousness, read through the profoundly fannish perspective of someone who actually cares whether Once Upon Time is better or worse than Timelash. (Worse, because it lacks the Bandril Ambassador.) The Timeless Children was an unforced error. Flux is largely a lengthy series of forced errors alongside some intermittently effective efforts at mitigation. They hit different. That doesn’t make it any easier to talk about, or even necessarily to watch, but for all the tedium, at least there’s a sense of “it’s OK; it’ll all be over soon.” The Chibnall era isn’t going to give us any new reasons to hate it. The worst is largely over. Like I said on Twitter after this aired, just eight more to go.
September 16, 2024 @ 5:49 am
A sideways comment as we reach Flux, about Chibnall’s ability to create some of the best episode titles, yet also some of the absolute worst. With a huge dose of nostalgic tradition too.
“The Ghost Monument” is a great title. A not-so-great episode, but such an evocative title. One of the best. I also love “The Haunting of Villa Diodati”. With Chibnall’s era, it feels like you could strike gold or fall flat, with titles, and this one works a treat. In another timeline, we would’ve had “The Desolation Mystery” and “The Lone Cyberman”, respectively. At least these episodes don’t go for the obvious. More on that later.
“The Tsuranga Conundrum” is just sci-fi nonsense. ‘Conundrum’ feels like it was chosen because he opened a thesaurus at ‘problem’, but ultimately it’s a lame title because, uh, every episode has a problem for the characters to solve. (TTC also crops up again the year after, and becomes so infamous that anyone who writes “TTC” knows which episode it refers to even though it’s shared with another episode.) This episode is tricky to find a half-decent title for though. Maybe it should’ve just gone for the at-least-intriguing-to-audiences, “P’ting!”
“The Witchfinders” feels plucked out of the Hartnell era, and I love it for that.
“The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” is another nonsense. The episode doesn’t contain a battle, and Ranskoor Av Kolos is just sci-fi guff again. Worse, it’s just unmemorable, to the point where it’s become way more fun to give it wacky alternative titles every time it gets mentioned. I also can’t help but think back to The Writer’s Tale, in which RTD comes up with a “Battle” title and then kicks it to the curb because “battle is a rubbish word.” Mind you, at least we didn’t get “The Ux Dilemma” or “The Legend of Tzim-Sha” or something equally naff.
“Resolution” is so vague a word… but also fitting thematically… but it also feels like it should have “of the Daleks” tagged on… but it also feels like that would’ve been too obvious… but “Resolution” also feels like Chibnall wrote an epilogue episode (a truer finale) to Series 11 and couldn’t actually come up with a title so he just went with the working title of “[Series] Resolution” instead.
“Spyfall” Parts 1 and 2 is the first of its kind since “The End of Time” in 2009/2010. It feels like it’s been done to be epic, but (cynically) it also feels like Chibnall couldn’t come up with another title/James Bond pun. I guess, given that it was originally planned to air consecutively over 2 days, it does make it feel a bit more of a grander feeling. It’s also the first two-parter of Chibnall’s era, so fair enough. Aside from that, however, it’s also a terrible pun. Wordplay on “Skyfall” from James Bond but that was the name of his home in that story – so what the heck is “Spyfall” trying to do?! It’d be just as crap IMO, but surely “From Gallifrey With Love” would’ve worked better, or pretty much anything else fans have come up with whilst playing with Bond puns. It makes for a fun game; my favourite crap Who/Bond title is “Kasaavin Royale”.
“Fugitive of the Judoon” is fitting, but also kind of a shame given we’ve already had “Prisoner of the Judoon”, “Judgement of the Judoon” and “Revenge of the Judoon”. Two of those weren’t on TV though, at least. It’s also the first “X of the Y” title for a returning monster, and this becomes a pattern for Chibnall – like fannish tradition. We’ll come to those shortly.
“Ascension of the Cybermen” – again, it works. The Cybermen want to ascend. But for some reason I can’t help but think this was Chibnall with the thesaurus out again, because we’ve already had “Rise of the Cybermen”. It feels empty, the way “Attack of the Cybermen” does, to me. It’s also strange that Series 12 opens and closes with a two-parter, yet the first is “TITLE Part 1 / Part 2” and the finale is two distinct titles. Just feels odd in the same series. Maybe I’m overthinking it.
Then we get an 1980s throwback, “R of the Daleks”. After the previous NYD special, it feels almost like an apology to those fans who thought the earlier special should’ve been “Resolution of the Daleks”. I don’t mind the fact it’s another “R of the Daleks”, honestly, but it gets jumbled in my head because we also have “Evolution of the Daleks”. Given the shopping list nature of the episode, it just feels a shame he didn’t give this a more unique title. I feel as though it would’ve had something poetic or abstract had it been in the Moffat era.
“The Halloween Apocalypse” – can’t decide if I love it or hate it. Again, part of me thinks Chibnall is riffing on another seasonal title, “The Christmas Invasion”. (Shame the Sea Devil special isn’t “The Easter Calamity” or something for a nice set of three.) Then again, at least it isn’t “Trick or Treat” or something lame.
“War of the Sontarans” brings me back to my earlier point, which I’ll elaborate more on. Aside from “Resolution”, all the returning monsters get “X of the Y” when they come back. “Fugitive of the Judoon”, “Ascension of the Cybermen”, “Revolution of the Daleks”, “War of the Sontarans”, “Village of the Angels”, “Eve of the Daleks”, “Legend of the Sea Devils”. Only the Master misses out, though he’s never featured in an episode title to date. “War of the Sontarans” also feels inanely bland – they’re war loving potato heads, for goodness sake, so we know their whole shtick is war. It just feels like one of those titles which could feasibly apply to any Sontaran story – it’s not unique or interesting, which sucks given the episode feels like it’s trying to do new things with the Sontarans. Heck, it’s not much of a change, but I feel like “Occupation of the Sontarans” would’ve been slightly more interesting.
“The Vanquishers” doesn’t pass the same way “The Witchfinders” did. This one feels like a lazy title, especially one coming at the conclusion of a six-part serial. Maybe it’s fitting, however, that a crap title sits at the top of a crap conclusion. (The previous week’s “Survivors of the Flux” is also pretty generic and forgettable, given that the episode itself brings in more of Passenger, the Ravagers, Division and Tecteun, etc.)
“The Power of the Doctor” is in a similar vein to “The Day of the Doctor”, I guess, in that it’s kind of generic but befitting a big standalone special. The problem is… what’s the power in question, really? The power of friendship? The power she has to magically implant hologram-Doctors for plot convenience? Having ribbed it a little, it’s hard to imagine what else such an episode could be called since it’s rammed full of nostalgia. “The Power of the Doctor” at least sounds all-encompassing, and works for PR, posters, etc. in a build up to a standalone regeneration special which they want as many people to tune in for as possible.
September 16, 2024 @ 6:25 am
Oh, no, “Fugitive of the Judoon” does not work! I will not give it that! It’s bad syntax is what it is. “Fugitive of the [Pursuers]” is not a structure that had ever been used before this script, and I deeply regret that Big Finish’s “Fugitive of the Daleks” has created precedent for using it again. You don’t say a wanted criminal is a “fugitive of the police”! That’s not how “of the” works! I try not to be a prescriptivist in most things, but that one really rubs me the wrong way for some reason. I guess because it smacks of smacking keywords into the “X of the Y” structure without actually thinking it through.
September 16, 2024 @ 6:42 am
Should’ve just called it The Fugitive.
September 16, 2024 @ 12:22 pm
“I didn’t kill my space wife!”
“I don’t care.”
September 16, 2024 @ 2:51 pm
I agree that “Resolution of the Daleks” is too obvious. I’m not sure that not actually using the whole thing makes it less obvious. It’s an “R of the Daleks” title that’s pretending not to be and not fooling anyone.
September 16, 2024 @ 6:30 am
Continuing a trend from your bafflement at certain reactions to RTD!Sutekh, I’ll register that I, for one, thought Swarm and Azure were more than “pleasantly unsettling” (though they are that, too). More seriously, not only are the designs striking, but the performances really are great — not just the two primary ones but also Matthew Needham as Swarm’s previous incarnation, for what little material he gets. And Whittaker has more subtext-charged-enemies chemistry with Spruell’s Swarm than she ever had with Dhawan, even though I wouldn’t say the Whittaker/Dhawan pairing fails to throw up sparks precisely. I have no idea in which sense you thought of them as getting “annoying” — well, except for the small matter of their overall plotline being an underwhelming shaggy-dog labyrinth. But that’s not a problem in individual scenes at a vibes level.
September 16, 2024 @ 8:53 am
They’re unsettling and they’re deliciously hammy, but mostly I am let down by the fact that they seem to have no particular motive and LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE the purpose they serve in the story is muddy. The series has a dozen different villains with different agendas, and these two are the ones coded as the “real” villains, but… They’re not overly responsible for the overarching storyline, their motives are just “We are agents of chaos and destruction who just like being evil”. There’s only one point where they present any sort of threat to the main characters, and that’s quickly dispensed with, and the characters themselves are casually dismissed by someone else at the end of the series (When in good time we get to it, I will have feelings about the anthropomorphism of Time, an idea I absolutely love for its Sapphire and Steel-ness, but which predictably Chibnall completely fails to do anything of value with).
September 16, 2024 @ 5:24 pm
I don’t remember what Swarm and Azure’s plan was, and I struggled to grasp it even back then – in any of the six episodes. I remember watching week to week, frustratedly asking “but what are they doing, and why?!” Am I being thick? I can’t bare any rewatch.
Shame that Azure is largely redundant as a character too. Not sure why she even exists. I’m not entirely sure the story knows either.
September 16, 2024 @ 11:03 pm
I think it was just “destroy the universe and rule the ashes”. But it doesn’t really change much about the story if they aren’t there at all.
I THINK the Division conspired to release them because their MO of releasing the time storm to ravage the universe helped with their plan to use the Flux to destroy the universe? (This turns out to have been a bad move, of course), but it’s not clear they actually accomplished much in that respect. They do take out Division, but only… To just go ahead and do the same thing Division was already planning?
It’s all just such a mess. I’ve had it explained to me, but I still struggle to make sense of the narrative as a whole; it’s mostly just “things happen and then more things happen” with no underlying “why” or “to what end?” to link it together.
September 16, 2024 @ 9:11 am
My brain has seized on the line “A sustained tone—essentially three and a half years pass between The Timeless Children and The Star Beast—of Doctor Who that blatantly isn’t in conversation with prestige television but with shovelwatch cult shows like Wynonna Earp or Supernatural, and that isn’t even faring well with that comparison.”
Because…is Davies or Moffat Who routinely in conversation with prestige television? Possibly at times (you could point to Dot & Bubble and Rogue as very obviously in some kind of relationship with Black Mirror and Bridgerton respectively – though are those prestige TV? Maybe 73 Yards, with its focus on Ruby’s interiority and lack of easy technobabbly answers, though those features left El a bit cold in practice…) but not, arguably as a basic and reliable mode. Certainly The Star Beast, in which Miriam Margoyles plays a naughty space hamster who can mind control soldiers, is unrepentantly genre fare, albeit genre with a heart and a decent social conscience. Wild Blue Yonder is in conversation with Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Moffat and the Giggle is mostly concerned with its relationship with Doctor Who itself, past and future.
I don’t think it’s necessary to elevate other eras of Who to the ranks of prestige television (or conversation with prestige television) in order to denigrate Chibnall’s efforts. I think both are unrepentant genre TV, it’s just Davies’ version of it is far more often better produced, better written and cares about things outside its own mythology. Chibnall’s is poorly written on a line by line basis, and shambolically produced.
In some respects, Chibnall’s Who resembles one version of prestige TV more than Davies. Flux, in its location hopping structure and focus on the intrigue of different agencies resembles a cargo cult Game of Thrones. Just…not very good.
September 16, 2024 @ 11:56 am
I think this line has to do with the fact that when Chibnall Who debuted, it was marketed and discussed as if DW was being elevated to a Broadchurch-level of prestige British TV. Davis and Moffat DW never tried to be that (well, maybe some of Moffat’s, but never Davies’).
September 16, 2024 @ 11:59 am
Indeed. The Chibnall era clearly WANTS to be compared to prestige TV, that’s very visible in the filming style, the cinematography, the aesthetic trappings, and as you say the explicit comments of the creatives themselves about wanting to ensure the show could compete with such prestige TV big beasts. Which I think it only half-succeeded at seriously, visibly attempting in Series 11, and half-succeeded is probably pretty generous at that.
September 16, 2024 @ 2:51 pm
Indeed I think being really good television is actually broadly incompatible with being prestige television, because prestige television has to fit in with the cultural hegemony and tell high-status people that the power structures they sit at the top of make sense and they really are more important and deserving than low-status people. That the system is not the problem.
September 16, 2024 @ 3:28 pm
does it…? have to do that…..?
Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, Mr. Robot…?
September 17, 2024 @ 12:41 am
Yeah, I’m with Weronika in her complete puzzlement, with “the Wire” and “Mr. Robot” being great shows about the total moral bankruptcy of the system. Beyond those, hmm; “Halt and Catch Fire” tells the story of non-wealthy tech folks who try to make the budding computer industry be about doing good, far more than about making money, and it’s clear that they lose in the end. My friends tell me that “Succession” is about what dreadful and destructive people the Murdoch family are. If “Fleabag” and “the Good Place” count as prestige TV, and they should, neither of them are pro-establishment and the latter questions everything.
To me it always felt like Moffat tried hard, in series six, to put Doctor Who in the prestige-TV conversation. He failed and moved on.
September 16, 2024 @ 11:34 pm
Thumbing your nose and making fart jokes at something is a conversation.
September 27, 2024 @ 12:56 pm
The first Davies era sort of predates (or at least coincides with) the rise of Prestige Television as a cultural force that dominated the conversation around television. Series 6 (the BBC America season, aka The One With All the Money) was, to me, very obviously an attempt to turn Doctor Who into a kind of Prestige show, or at least a show that nobody is embarrassed to push at Americans.
September 27, 2024 @ 5:29 pm
I would even say that the first Davies era was one of the big formative influences on the rise of Prestige Television, even though it did not fall under the auspices of it itself.
September 16, 2024 @ 12:05 pm
It’s pure heresay, but I read somewhere, can’t remember where, that Chibnall was offered the showrunning job 2 or 3 times before finally saying yes. Not sure if it was in the same source, but I also read that he said yes because no further Who was planned after Twice Upon a Time.
So we have a showrunner working under duress, making a TV show under direr and direr circumstances, simply because he doesn’t want his fave show to end. No wonder the era feels like it’s the very definition of treading water. It’s the one thing that softens my opinion of him as a DW showrunner. Because personally I don’t think, if the show had ended after Moffat, that Davies would have come back for RTD2.
September 16, 2024 @ 5:29 pm
And yet, Chibnall has said this:
So he did have ideas…? Or did he only start formulating ideas after he realised they wanted him for the job? (Cynically, the whole Timeless Children stuff makes me think it was some half-baked fanfic he came up with aged 8 and finally got chance to make ‘canon’.)
September 16, 2024 @ 1:39 pm
If you wanted to end Doctor Who, that last trilogy of Moffat stories wouldn’t have been a bad note, to be fair. After “The Doctor Falls” I’ve always had a “Well, we’ve said everything that could be said with this character.” sort of feeling to new Doctor Who. Not that I’m actively against more but more that I don’t exactly NEED more and, when it’s not good, I don’t have the same kind of loyalty to check in week-to-week.
September 16, 2024 @ 5:34 pm
I’m on exactly the same wavelength, and articulated it better than I’ve been able to. By the end of Capaldi, we’ve done just about everything seemingly possible with the lead character (we got the grandpa one, the cosmic hobos, the harder edged ones, the young ones, the old ones, the manipulative ones, the foppy ones…) and the show has explored pretty much every genre several times over. I struggled to see Capaldi as the Doctor for a while, as it aired, but by his finale I truly felt like his Doctor was the one that felt most like the encapsulation of literally every incarnation prior to him. This was an incarnation who’d had one more shot at life than he’d anticipated (Smith gets given new regeneration energy, thus a whole new cycle/life he never thought about before) and decides, actually, in The Doctor Falls, nah, he’s done now. It’s very much a full stop, until Twice Upon A Time happens and, obviously, the show goes on. But everything since has felt like a show I can take or leave. It feels like the story of Doctor Who was done in 2017, and now we’re just (to use El’s own analogy) getting some bonus tracks.
September 16, 2024 @ 9:41 pm
Quick question for the series in general- which new books which came out since the finishing of past Tardis Eruditorum entries would deserve their own Time Has Been Rewrittens?
September 16, 2024 @ 11:33 pm
I don’t really keep up with the book lines.
September 17, 2024 @ 1:16 am
I think Dan was possibly the worst companion of the new era. Probably my least favorite since Peri and Tegan. He started off as someone the Doctor rescued and dragged around the cosmos, but they had surprisingly little interaction. He was really more like Yaz’s companion, and I honestly wish less time had been spent on the Doctor’s tedious story and more on Yaz, Dan, and Jericho being all Tomb Raider in ancient Egypt.
But the thing I hated most about the whole Flux storyline (aside from the fact that nothing was ever explained) was that it was my worst nightmare about Timeless Child made manifest. It turns out that the Doctor’s greatest enemy, one who puts the Master and the Daleks to shame, was someone we’ve never heard of who she defeated millions of years earlier in some of Chibnall’s fanfic.
I will give Chibnall this: He had one genuinely clever idea–the Lupari, a race of highly intelligent, humanoid dogs who apparently were genetically engineered in the future to be man’s best friend. And they kind of recent mankind for it. So naturally, Chibs has to exterminate them all for shock value. Just like he killed off Jericho because “here’s an interesting character! I better kill him off for cheap shocks and also so RTD can’t use him more effectively than I did.”
September 17, 2024 @ 2:02 am
Especially because at least from my opinion, the Lupari were quite an impressive achievement in costume design. You’d think after seeing how well they were realized you’d want to keep a race like that around for future stories.
But I guess we really needed to soak in that Karvinista (yes I had to look his name up) and the Doctor now have a commonality of both being the last of their kind so we can have that important exchange of the Doctor going “So what will you do now?” and Dogface basically going “Ehh, fuck if I know.”
And of course, that whole “possibly the Doctor’s first ever companion?” thread that as expected went absolutely nowhere.
September 17, 2024 @ 5:05 am
The Halloween Apocalypse just seemed like a massively long trailer for the upcoming season rather than an actual episode.
There was one thing I liked about Flux which was that disruption to the universe and the displacement of the characters felt as if it really did reflect what the world had just gone through, but I’ve no idea whether that was intentional.