Dr Who

I've only recently discovered this thread and I've carefully read all of the posts. Let me start by telling you where I'm coming from. I'm a big fan of Classic Who but that's not to say I'm totally against NuWho. I can remember back in 2005 eagerly awaiting the reboot and getting a tingle down my spine when I heard the theme tune for the first time in years. I actually really enjoyed the Ecclestone era and I watched all episodes with the Ecclestone, Tennant and Smith Doctors, but missed a few of the Capaldi and Whittaker ones. The fact I never bothered to watch them on catch up tells you everything you need to know about the way I feel the series has deteriorated.
So where did they go wrong?
I feel the writers/production team made two big mistakes right from the start.

1) The majority of stories have lasted for just one episode. This has meant that the stories and characters haven't had time to develop, and everything has felt too rushed, particularly given the more complicated plots and story arcs from the Smith era onwards. At the end of most episodes my initial response has usually been "what the hell was that all about?" In Classic Who, six part stories were not uncommon during the second and third Doctors' tenures, thereafter four-parters became the norm. Yes, there was a lot of padding, particularly in some of the Pertwee stories (he did love a good chase sequence) but the more leisurely pace gave the viewer time to digest everything that was going on. I was never left scratching my head in puzzlement.

2) Since the reboot in 2005 there has been an increasing emphasis on the companions and their personal lives, to the extent that the stories often revolved around them and not the Doctor. In Classic Who the only time I can recall even the remotest hint of a companion's personal life was when Jo Grant married that chap from The Green Death, and Captain Yates and/or Sergeant Benton may have had a thing for her, but the emphasis was always on the adventure. we neither knew nor cared about the companions' personal lives. I can just about forgive season one of NuWho for this as it introduced us to Rose's mother, who I'd quite happily give one to, but this increasing emphasis on the companions has been to the detriment of the show.

There are many gripes about individual things that have occurred on the show over the last 15 years, but I've said enough I think. As M-L-L said (and I really couldn't put it better myself):

(19-10-2013 20:50 )M-L-L Wrote:  Looks amazing but does make me nostalgic for the old creaky "classic" series though, where not every story had to be part of an over-complicated arc or be overly obsessed with continuity / "Whoniverse" spin offs etc ; not every story had to have a direct link with the companion's back story; not every story had to take the Doctor or the companion on an "emotional journey" ; the season didn't have to build to an impossible "topping the last season" climax every time which now means writing themselves into a cul-de-sac and having to come up with an implausible "with one bound they were free" escape (Oh look we've destroyed the universe/blown up the TARDIS/ killed the Doctor, oh no we haven't let's just undo time/ it's a robot etc).

It's just a shame they didn't stick to the format and ethos of Classic Who. All I (and probably loads of others too) ever wanted from the reboot was for them to do that but with modern production values and effects.

You hit a fair point with your post & I think what you are essentially saying is did we expect too much with the reboot, di we expect to continue with the way the classic who stories were written filmed and transmitted? I would think many of us expected something along the lines of what the classic series was like and probably felt let don the format had been simply brushed, thr closest we get to that is with the two part finales that often ended each season. I think one advantage that the technology has over thr way the classic series was made is that it probably is far easier and cheaper to make one episode storylines than it probably was to shoot a six part story.

Two questions remain in my mind ; -
1) Was the Time War ever mentioned in any of the classic series or not? I've forgotten. I hsve a feeling that Genesis of the Daleks probably had a link somewhere in to the Time war.

2) Will Gallifrey ever be able to resurface in a future story?

(02-07-2020 12:46 )milfspotter Wrote:  I've only recently discovered this thread and I've carefully read all of the posts.

Bloody hell, your poor sod


Er, I mean, welcome to the party...

(02-07-2020 13:22 )lovebabes56 Wrote:  Two questions remain in my mind ; -
1) Was the Time War ever mentioned in any of the classic series or not? I've forgotten. I have a feeling that Genesis of the Daleks probably had a link somewhere in to the Time war.

Unless it happened at the fag end of the McCoy era which I didn't watch, then to my knowledge no, the Time War was never mentioned.
The reboot has retrospectively hinted/suggested that Classic Series stories like Genesis of The Daleks (where the Time Lords explicitly sent the Doctor on a mission to try and prevent the Daleks becoming dominant in the Universe by stopping their creation or messing with their DNA) or Remembrance of the Daleks (where McCoy blew up Skaro, I think did he ? I never bothered to seek it out again after its first transmission) were "first shots" in The Time War, but I don't believe the idea of a Time War between Time Lords and Daleks is actually mentioned anywhere in the Classic TV episodes.

Whether it's mentioned in spin off novels or audio adventures, I couldn't care less, none of them count they are just glorified fan fiction invented by professional fans to give themselves a sense of importance and income and to keep unemployable old actors and writers from the Classic Series off the streets

(02-07-2020 13:22 )lovebabes56 Wrote:  2) Will Gallifrey ever be able to resurface in a future story?

It's a time travel show so there's nothing to stop them going back to a period where Gallifrey isn't destroyed ?
It's been reasonably established I think that the Doctor's personal timeline doesn't necessarily always follow the transmission order of stories in the show.

They've been back to Skaro in the Capaldi era, Dalek city, Davros and all.

The series makes up these loop-holes as it goes along - events are supposed to be Time Locked and then they turn out not to be when it isn't convenient or dramatic for this to be rigidly adhered to.

There's no reason a future Doctor can't go back to a point in time and have a story where he stops the Master destroying the Panopticon.

Moffat invented an unseen Doctor between McGann and Eccleston; now Chibnall's invented a potentially unknown number of Doctors preceding Hartnell, and hinted at some kind of nefarious "Secret Agent" past working for a Gallifrey version of the CIA (Robert Holmes's Celestial Intervention Agency from the 1970s The Deadly Assassin?) or probably more likely a wannabe Time Lord "Treadstone"-Jason-Bourne-style sinister past that he/she can't remember;so we can have yet more twists on the endless heavy handed hints that have surfaced throughout the reboot series that the Doctor isn't morally perfect and has got a horrible past; because it's too boring for him just to be good all the time, we have to have flawed and tortured heroes now.

I could see it isn't - as yet - beyond the bounds of possibility that a future story could come along and rewrite or reverse all the stuff with the Master destroying Gallifrey, or even to say his revelations about the Doctor's origins are just completely made up or are distortions in the Matrix, like events in Trial of a Time Lord.

Moffat's already turned the first couple of NuDoctors' arcs in the reboot on their head by undoing the Doctor destroying Gallifrey at the End of The Time War in the 50th anniversary special "The Day Of the Doctor".

I think the McGann incarnation was one they should have made more use of

He was a decent actor but the movie was just dreadful.

At least the failure of the project seemed to have convinced folk with sense that the way to go next time around WASN'T to try and pander to what was (mistakenly?) thought to be appealing to American audiences, so didn't try the same thing in the later reboot.

This is brilliant and very funny.

(21-08-2020 19:37 )Rake Wrote:  This is brilliant and very funny.

It is funny but I am slightly uncomfortable about some of the nuances.

A diverse cast can only be a good thing, if the characters are underwritten or the plot doesn't make sense, that is nothing to do with the race or gender of the actors involved.

I don't personally believe the criticism of the actors "not giving a fuck" is entirely fair.

Saying that a white middle aged man can't be the comic relief without that being racist is just beyond belief. Where do we end with that kind of nonsense, we just disappear into a social media vortex of whomever shouts loudly enough they are offended is in the right ? White middle aged men appear, on the whole to have got a reasonably good deal for themselves throughout human history, let's get a bit of perspective.

My personal opinion is that in a format of 45 minute episodes (with "2-part" stories 90 minutes equivalent to an old "4-parter") there is rarely if ever enough time to construct a dense or complicated enough plot that can give meaningful roles to 3 companions plus the Doctor.

People say "Oh but William Hartnell had 4 companions". Yes but famously one of them (Carole Anne Ford playing "grand-daughter" Susan) left after 2 seasons because of not having enough interesting things to do, and the other two both left after another season; the Doctor was a "doddery old man" so couldn't run around or do "action", which gave a reason for having another male "lead";the majority of stories were generally 6 parts and routinely split the companions and Doctor up for long periods of the action and gave them all individual narratives, often having entire episodes where the Doctor, or one of the companions would appear only very briefly or not at all, to allow the actors concerned to go on holiday during the punishing weekly production schedule.

People also probably forget in those sort of comparisons that for the first 6 years of Dr Who, it was on the air for about 40 (!) odd weeks a year, not the 26 x 25 minute episodes a year that became routine from 1970 until 1989.
That's about a 1000 minutes a year in Hartnell and Troughton's time, as opposed to 650 minutes in the succeeding years.

Now since the reboot, a season is only 12(13?) 45 minute episodes, that's about 585 minutes, at least 65 minutes or an episode and a half less than the series from 1970 to 1989.

During the 1970s there was a vague feeling that it maybe wasn't the done thing for the companion to be a helpless female and gradually characters like Romana started to address that. (In 1974, Tom Baker had Sarah Jane and Harry Sullivan as companions, and it was always Harry who was the "dunce".) But at the same time the format was still depending on a main character who had all the answers and a supporting character whose function was to get in trouble and to ask the main character what was going on at strategic points so the audience could follow the plot.

OK, you might say, but the characterisation (sorry I am not going to change the "s" to a "z" no matter how many red wavy lines you put under it, computer) in the classic series for companions was still shit.
Well maybe it was by today's expectations, but that wasn't necessarily the priority for the series at that point. And quite often arguably the actors involved would rise above the written material and put the human touches in however small and fleeting. But it was a children's/family adventure series when it started, and it was only 20 odd years since the end of the 2nd World War and people were still supposed to be stiff upper lipped and not whine and/or hug each other all the time. (Which is too often today's cliched answer to giving people "character" - to make them over-emotional).

Does all that mean the new series can't be a childern's/family adventure series and not address "social" issues at the same time ? No. But I'd argue that's more difficult to do without appearing "preachy" in a single 45 minute episode where there's barely enough time to set up anything vaguely convincing in terms of a world or plot and shoe-horn a "message" into it at the same time. So if it is sometimes done clumsily, it's understandable. If the programme as a whole is boring or dull then that's a problem.

Is the new series really that disastrously bad on those terms ?
Maybe it's clunky, maybe I don't personally like it, maybe I think the focus can suddenly jarringly disappear into a narrative side-issue that is too clunkily obviously "P.C" for my tastes, but then again I'm a privileged white male middle aged old fart with no dependants who's going to be well-dead before climate change kills the planet so maybe I can't take the moral high ground.

EDIT: and since when was popular culture supposed to appeal to the middle aged ? It was a badge of honour that it would offend them and have them switch off.
But I suppose that was before the all the "hope I die before I get old" generation of rock stars got old and found they needed an affluent geriatric audience to continue to buy their records and go to their gigs to support their superannuated lifestyle.
And TV and films presumably felt the need to follow, though now that the "kids" don't actually need to pay TV licences or watch "TV" (as long as their parents pay for their Wi Fi that is) who knows.

Wow something else needs to be posted so this rant isn't the last post on the thread.

But more than one is required so we can turn the page.