Doctor Who

It's more that it has continuity than it has canon.

IMO, the increasing obsession with canon from fans of various properties is kind of a bad thing. Like, yes, it's important that a show that isn't fully episodic have continuity from episode to episode. No, it doesn't really matter that much if there's a little drift in some of the details to make things work properly. Doctor Who had Atlantis be destroyed three times and some of the cute little references make something sound wildly fucked up when you notice them (like the 11th Doctor having a crystal from Metebelis III).

As long as Doctor Who isn't going around being like "the 5th Doctor never knew anyone named Tegan, what the hell are you talking about?" it's not a big deal if minor things drift.

That being said, the idea that the Master killing the Time Lords didn't "stick" in continuity is...baffling? Like, genuinely bizarre? Because there's been literally nothing to indicate that anything else is the case and not bringing up the specific details to a character with no context isn't a big deal.

But yeah, Chibnall went out of his way to establish that the time lock is gone so if another Time Lord shows up, it can just be waved away by either them being from Gallifrey's past or they just weren't on Gallifrey when the Master showed up.

Edited by Zendervai on May 13th 2024 at 2:17:40 PM

It seems to me that 8 episodes for one season is not enough for Davies. "The Devil's Chord" should have been a two-part series. One is not enough for a story that combines the Beatles and a colorful villain. About the humor in the first episode. Well, this is Davies, the man who invented the Slitheens. The main thing is that he doesn't get too carried away. I hope "Boom" turns out to be good. It's been a while since Moffat and Davies worked together.

> But yeah, Chibnall went out of his way to establish that the time lock is gone so if another Time Lord shows up, it can just be waved away by either them being from Gallifrey's past or they just weren't on Gallifrey when the Master showed up.

like a ..secret off screen Galifreyian colony that happens to have a population of sane timelords?

I wouldn't go for a colony, but like, while the Time Lords generally stayed on Gallifrey, the Celestial Intervention Agency did have a ton of agents they'd send all over the place. Those guys showing up would make sense.

Steven Moffat confirms he has written the 2024 Christmas Special, titled 'Joy to the World'

So I finally got around to sitting down and watching the two new episodes! Just in time to be an episode behind. Unfortunately I didn't enjoy either as much as the Christmas special, though I thought the second was definitely the better of the two.

Edited by Lavaeolus on May 17th 2024 at 12:31:12 PM

Boom was a solid story, echoing a lot of familiar lines and themes from Moffat's playbook. The whole build of stakes and tension, culminating in Ruby being almost killed and a damning condemnation of the dangers of provocative algorithms and letting religious devotion cloud your common sense

Also really dig how in this episode Susan Twist's mystery woman finally becomes more of an antagonist

I did think the ending was a little too...what's the word? Schmaltzy, wrapped up too neatly, and for two people who went through some harrowing life-altering situations such as losing a parent or almost dying on the battlefield, one of whom still has to travel with him afterwards, The Doctor was a general dick towards both before he headed off on his way with Ruby.

Oh, and if you haven't been keeping up with the news on the next series, you'll be forgiven for not noticing The new companion, 'Monday' appeared and had a big role in this story

Edited by Zarius on May 18th 2024 at 12:13:06 PM

So we have Ruby Sunday and now Ruby Monday? Are we seriously going to have companions being named after days of the week?

I'm going to laugh if we get Wendsday Wendsday as a legit companion and she's played by Jenna Ortega who embodies everything the actress has played over her career.

You mean Mundy?

Edited by kkhohoho on May 18th 2024 at 7:10:53 AM

So I'm not usually much for theorising on things too far in advance, and I definitely don't usually base my speculation on actor's names. However. Just this once.

The actress Susan Twist has now appeared in every episode of the new series thusfar. She was a background character when Ruby performed during "Church". She was part of the old crew in "Space Babies". She was a tea lady in "Devil's Chord". All of this could just be handwaved, the show reusing an actress repeatedly for extras, but now she's appeared again as the face of the Ambulances. It's a role major enough for me to be a little more hesistant to look past.

So you could guess that there'll be some larger reason her face keeps popping up. But if there is, suddenly I remember "Devil's Chord" ended on an otherwise somewhat-inexplicable musical number that hammered over and over again "There's always a Twist at the end." Is that deliberate? A little easter egg? I usually draw the line at scrolling through the cast list to figure out season mysteries, but someone pointed her name out to me and I couldn't stop myself drawing the connection.

I've only seen one episode of this show, but I saw someone on Tumblr create an insane alternate watch-order by organizing every episode in chronological order by the time period they travel to, and I had to mention it because that's obviously the most ludicrous idea ever.

Some people have way too much free time on their hands

Apparently someone else already spent 12 years editing it all together, scene-by-scene. Though it's only up to last year.

Yeah that character's name is Mundy Flynn.

I enjoyed this episode, though it wasn't perfect. It did feel nice to have a more serious tone, and it's a nice concept for an episode. The moralising was incredibly blunt, but I do agree with the points it's making so fair enough I suppose. I agree with Zarius above though, the ending was too neat. Splice's behaviour in particular felt odd.

X4

That's definitely something. What it is, or how major remains unclear, but it's gotta be something. I'd assume it's a fake name if not for her having a pretty established acting history. I saw someone theorise that RTD heard her name and deliberately cast her to make a meta joke and honestly that could be true.

I feel like I've seen something like that before, might have been a previous version of the same one but I see this is up-to-date with newest episodes. One of the Tumblr tags is "autism won I fear" and yeah, I can relate to that.

Oh, of course someone else had to go further. That's fans for you.

Dann, I should have done a "Moffat bingo" card for this episode. All that was missing was time travel shenanigans and paradoxes.

I liked it though, even if I predicted the twist pretty early.

Agreed. Space Babies felt like RTD at his most RTD (tying his main theme together with sentimental kitsch and gross-out humour); Boom felt like Moffat at his most Moffat (rapidfire banter, experimenting with formula, obsessive ambivalence about the church and the military without really quite understanding either, acting self-congratulatory for an episode that was ultimately pretty average).

I preferred Boom, naturally.

• This might seem odd, but the moment that convinced me Space Babies was actually good was revealing the Bogeyman is made of boogeys. I liked the logic behind the Bogeyman's existence (very Chesterton), the setting framework that created the crisis, Jocelyn's character motivations, and ultimately how quickly the space babies flipped from "we want to defeat the terrifying monster" to "we don't want our favourite villain to actually die"; that was maybe their most realistically childish behaviour all episode. :P Overall I think it was better than the premise deserved and just rolled my eyes whenever the aren't-they-cute and haha-body-fluids moments became excessive.
• The Devil's Chord was the standout. Not quite as good as The Church on Ruby Road, I think, but maybe just because I'm not particularly enamoured of the Beatles and felt that the point would be better made if it focused on my favourite genres of music. :P Maestro was great. I'm kind of apprehensive of what they signify about the season threat (there's a Pantheon? really? the outside of the universe is so small all the gods are related to each other?) but they remind me of the Word Lord and I'm excited for the prospect of more Things From Beyond that engage directly with the medium in a way that so far Doctor Who has done in novels and audiobooks but not on-screen. "I thought it was non-diegetic!" was the best joke of the season.
• I think I may be too cynical for Boom because I thought most of the twist was obvious as soon one of the clerics said that they'd never seen a single enemy combatant, and then at no point explained what kind of attacks they were defending against. Most of the plot worked really well, with the basic premise of "the Doctor can't even move" and the clashing motivations of individual characters. I think the episode would have been improved if Eleven's and Clara's Fifteen's and Ruby's what-have-we-learned-today speech at the end were cut short, since it dragged out the ending for so long, and that time spent on worldbuilding and character building details throughout the rest of the episode as an Idiot Ball-ectomy. (Principally, the Anglican Marines ^note who have less coordination or discipline than Starship Troopers, which makes their worst traits seem like a strawman and what praise the Doctor gives them at the end seem unearned and Splice ^note who apparently only cares if her father dies when it's narratively inconvenient. Ruby getting shot because she appeared to be a threat to someone with no context was a fantastic plot twist, but does the base not even have perimeter guards?

So far the theme of this season seems to be "we are breaking rules no one previously knew to break and we are mad about politics" and I think that's going quite well. Ruby clearly has a few different thematic threads, snow and childhood and music, and I'm curious where they're going to lead.

Yeah Space Babies is just a cute little run around. Perhaps the baby acting wasn't as expressive as it could have been.

The Devil's Chord feels like a waste of a setting and a waste of the Beatles (the movie "Yellow Submarine" had a more satisfying battle and it was nonsense). Points for setting the threat level. I agree it just doesn't come together though.

Boom is great. Prettiest episode so far, most tension and most quiet moments of people doing people things. My fav.

But what I really like is every episode we've got so far is so distinct. So different. Every episode feels like going somewhere new and that feels like the best of how things were in the golden age of RTD.

It is funny to me that there are two episodes with almost diametrically opposite takes on capitalism called "Boom!" and "Kerblam!"

I've posted in a few places, I don't think that's a coincidence.

I do enjoy how Villengard finally got to be the main villains of an episode after they were referenced in The Empty Child then appeared in their destroyed state in Twice Upon a Time.

I rewatched all of new who last year with a friend (first time for him) and we both did not get the "capitalism is awesome" message from Kerblam that everybody keeps talking about.

"Extreme measures are not the answer when you want to change the system" is more along the lines of the message we got. The robotic workforce was not malicious, the problem was not the robots themselves, it was the unemployment that resultet from the automation of the labour.

Edited by ZheToralf on May 22nd 2024 at 1:01:53 PM

A friend of mine did point out a pretty big flaw with the Devil's Chord.

The episode was inspired by how ridiculously expensive the Beatles song rights are and how they can't use any of their music, but the villain being this ridiculously over the top drag queen hits a really, really weird note.

It would have made more sense if the Maestro was a cold, borderline emotionless man in a suit who didn't care at all about how music impacts people and wanted to bottle it all up and make it impossible to access, not out of any passion, but just out of a desire to control it because he deserves to control it (at least from his perspective), and he wants to hold control of all the unplayed songs because "these stupid humans wouldn't know what to do with it anyway".

Like, make the Maestro into the type of record executive who looks at the Beatles and the impact they had and goes "You know what, we're going to price this music so high that almost no one can use it and we don't give a shit about how much that hurts artistic impression."

IIRC, I saw a thing a while back pointing out that Queen is way more profitable long term because people can actually like, afford to license their music and if a Queen song shows up in a movie or show, that gets people to go listen to it, but if the only way to get exposed to the Beatles is to actively choose go and listen to them, that means their impact starts to fade because there's way fewer organic ways to encounter their stuff.

Kerblam's issue is, in large part, because of the overarching scenario. They're taking a planet with a 90% unemployment rate, slapping an Amazon-a-like (that apparently doesn't pay that great) on it as the only employer of note and go "the system is fine and nice and friendly, the problem is those violent protestors who hate the status quo" and like...the status quo for that planet is genuinely horrific and it's straight up bizarre how the episode just tosses that out and totally fails to acknowledge it. It has an unintentional "yeah, company towns are great, stop picking on Amazon for giving people jobs" element to it.

Edited by Zendervai on May 22nd 2024 at 8:58:06 AM

That would have been a cool allegory, but I think Maestro as is works as well, since they're meant to be the physical embodiment of music, so it makes sense they are loud and boisterous.

Oh please, Kerblam is nothing like Amazon. They treat their employees way nicer than Amazon.

But do they treat their employees better than what Amazon wants you to think?

Like, Kerblam being a better employer than Amazon isn't the writer going "this is what Amazon should be!" because that connection is never drawn. Like, the company is just Space Amazon, it's so obviously inspired by Amazon and it paints it in a weirdly positive light for being the only employer for an entire planet, which is a horrifying concept.

Saying Kerblam treats their employees better than Amazon is not actually a rebuttal to the idea that the episode frames an Amazon-like company as the good guys and the people trying to speak up as deranged psychopathic murderers. Hell, Kerblam being framed in a positive light makes the episode look even worse.

I think the thing that really rubbed people the wrong way is that like, if the episode had just been like "Kerblam is the largest employer, the planet is fine", it would have just been seen as kinda naive. But instead, the angle is "Kerblam is literally the only reason the planet isn't completely ruined, they're the only employer of note, people should just suck it up and accept the automation and the decreasing number of jobs because the system itself is fine" and it's like...what the hell is this angle? Like seriously, why is the planet even in this situation? It's very, very strange to have this one megacorporation that employs 10% of the population and leaves the other 90% to rot across a whole planet and have the megacorporation be totally unrelated to the unemployment.

I think it also doesn't help that the job actually does really suck. Because they use the automation for like, management and sorting, but all the packing is done by humans and it's framed as incredibly boring.

Edited by Zendervai on May 22nd 2024 at 10:16:50 AM