Guitar Hero: Nu-Who Season 9

aw

I can never remember if realness is meant to be good or bad

if anyone who has this thread bookmarked doesn't know, soref is running a Classic Who ballot poll over here: Doctor Who original series (1963-89) ballot poll voting thread

Has anyone read the prequel novel to 'Day of the Doctor'? Looks like a page turner!

fair warning: if you're watching the Christmas special on some platform that has the option for closed captions, turn them on. this is by far the worst Murray-Gold-mixed-higher-than-dialogue episode ever, with entire scenes drowned out completely.

(apart from that, second or third best Xmas spesh so far, and Capaldi is having an absolute ball.)

I wasn't, tbh

fantastic episode, with several nods to Douglas Adams and genuinely touching ending. Capaldi and Kingston work great together, so much chemistry.

Really a bit of a waste casting Greg Davies as a 12-foot tall monster alien robot, and then never having him actually walk around being tall at people.

(Or indeed, appearing in shot with any other members of the cast: the only time he does that's not obviously an effects shot was an overhead shot of him lying down and River standing by his head. So possibly that's fake and he was never on set with anyone else.)

Seconded on the subtitle recommendation. Great episode though - terrific script, which makes the soundtrack issue even dafter.

"Sheer poetry, my boy"

was there a chair with a panda on it?

Clara and Me could go pick up Steven from the Savages planet and get his panda with him. Purves might be up for a serial or two.

Is Clara effectively immortal now (at least until she returns to her raven hug)?

Yes, that was the implication. She is stuck on her last heartbeat before death.

I know that she's stopped aging, but what if she receives what would otherwise be a mortal wound?

She already has one, so IDK

same as Me (and the Doctor pre-1985): can live forever, can be killed normally

Only just caught up on the special, thought it was really excellent.

Hmph.

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-01-22/doctor-who-showrunner-steven-moffat-quits-to-be-replaced-by-broadchurch-creator-chris-chibnall

Ouch, no Doctor Who in 2016 except a Christmas special.

xp ARE YOU HAPPY NOW, TUMBLR? T_T

boradchurch (typo but leaving that in) was shiiiiiiiit

it was fucking awful (season 2 anyway, I liked season 1 a bit).

Well, at least it wasn't Gatiss or Harness or Neil Cross.

I was hoping for Toby Whithouse.

Same, or Gareth Roberts.

anything that keeps broadchurch season 3 from happening

roberts would have been awesome, in theory anyway.

Broadchurch season 3 is happening though.

I'm not too pessimistic about this, I think Chibnall's better at making people talk like people than Moffat is at least.

Assume he won't be bringing back the vervoids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irIqTPQqgvQ

More annoyed by lack of new season than changeover, tbh.

Second season of Broadchurch was one of the worst things I've ever seen, considering cast/budget

Jodie Whittaker as new companion please

no, all she did was whiine and scream on broadchurch

charlotte rampling for old racist companion!

Chibnall is the second-worst writer in Dr Who history.

Well, at least it wasn't ... Harness or Neil Cross.

Phew, lucky we didn't get an idiosyncratic, imaginative writer when we could have the author of Cyberwoman instead!

And the first worst is...?

The team that teenaged Chibnall once tried to battle to their faces on TV.

william emms. geoffrey orme. haisman/lincoln. eric saward. anthony steven. glen mccoy. kevin clarke. frank cottrell boyce.

I don't write anyone off on a single script, as it's impossible to judge their breadth from that (but the one ep of Galaxy 4 I've seen was interesting enough, and Forest Of The Night works well on its explicitly being-a-fairytale level).

Haisman & Lincoln wrote one that was standard for its season, then one that was a huge improvement and long regarded as an all-time classic, then one they took their names off & refused to write for the series again when it got dicked about with.

Saward, tragically for him, would probably have been a better writer if he hadn't been given the staff job - for all the faults of his credited scripts on the side, they do tend to have a clear or interesting motivating premise, some well-drawn character moments, and do generally improve year-on-year, culminating in one that's actually kinda good, and certainly one of the only two Colin TV stories worth watching.

(Haven't seen the existing eps of Underwater Menace. Concur with your judgment on the single scripts of Steven, McCoy and Clarke. Although I also suspect it's unfair to wholly blame the writers of stories that were edited by Saward...)

What's the story on Capaldi, hope no new series this year doesn't mean he's more likely to leave earlier. I've been enjoying him.
Seemed to be some more rumours since Xmas of him leaving.

There is no change to the plans for Series 10.

i'm sure capaldi will see it out through season 10. I'd love it if he stuck around for another few years but 3 years seems to be the running max these days

There is no change to the p1ans for Series 10.

i too will not write someone off on a single script- even if that script is "cyberwoman"- because bob holmes' first two "who" scripts were flat-out garbage- but if a single script is all i have to judge by, i'm going to assume that their other ideas for writing for the show were even worse.

case in point: emms kept submitting scripts to the show, but the show were wise enough not to take him up on any of them. the only other who work i've read of his is a "choose your own adventure" book he wrote in the '80s, which was not up to the sterling literary standards of pip & jane baker's book for the line.

haisman/lincoln are probably my most controversial pick. they wrote a script that was a very good ripoff of "zulu" and then wrote "the dominators", with a premise straight out of jack webb's fever dreams that was simply grossly offensive on every level (though at least it wasn't "the prison in space"). then one of them went on to write "holy blood, holy grail". they get the gas face from me.

saward's dogged insistence on attempting to adopt the 2000AD ethos to doctor who, while a good idea on paper, was just completely inappropriate. sure, he got better (as has chibnall, incidentally), but he never got _good_, and while he was hamstrung by his script editor position, so was douglas adams.

agree that it's not fair to wholly blame the writers of episodes during the show's prolonged attempted suicide, and accordingly i will strike glen mccoy from the list, as it's wholly possible that "timelash" could have been a good story in theory. on the other hand, even if one attributes the doctor's domestic-violence fugue to editorial, "the twin dilemma" is simply an irredeemably terrible story, and saward's major mistake on it was green-lighting it in the first place. everything about the story was a bullet in the face for who.

cottrell boyce is there for two reasons. first is that he doesn't know how to write for television, so that whatever else his episode may have been, it was a bad television program. second is that i found his suggestion that mental illness is actually a magical power slightly problematic, particularly for a show that had already gotten it right in "vincent and the doctor".

Holmes is indeed the object lesson in not dismissing someone. And anyone who never wrote again could have not done so because they didn't like the show, or because they hated what was done to theor script in editing or rewriting or production, or because of a clash of personalities, or because they got another job elsewhere, or they died, or they simply never existed in the first place, like both great and terrible writers of single stories for the show. You're not a "Doctor Who writer" until you've written more than one Doctor Who story imo.

great zing on the CYOA. I had Pip & Jane's one.

I'll reiterate that you can't condemn Haisman & Lincoln for a script that they took their name off and quit the show over, and especially not over a book that one of the pair wrote a third of 14 years later.

Saward/JNT is by far my most unliked era of Who, and I still reckon his dual role makes it too complicated to judge him just as a scriptwriter (nb: I do think he was shit), but here's why he's better than Pip & Jane: he knew enough to know that Pip & Jane were so bad that lawyers should be engaged to stop them from even being allowed to look at his scripts.

he got better (as has chibnall, incidentally)

I mean, it's been nine years since Cyberwoman, and he's ascended to the dizzying heights of people saying that the first quarter of Broadchurch was kind of all right even if the last two quarters were terrible and racist and pointless, but his last Who script proper was Power Of Three, which had about four minutes of cute domestic conflict between Eleven and the Ponds, and 40 minutes of completely fucking senseless bullshit that failed to connect anything to anything else in a way that had any narrative or thematic coherency. Plus a little RTD news montage pastiche.

first is that he doesn't know how to write for television, so that whatever else his episode may have been, it was a bad television program.

It wasn't one of the best of the year, but it functionally told a story shot with cameras in 45 minutes.

second is that i found his suggestion that mental illness is actually a magical power slightly problematic, particularly for a show that had already gotten it right in "vincent and the doctor".

You say "got it right," I say "depression represented as an invasion from a giant invisible alien chickenbear."

(Vincent is telling a story about mental illness and creativity, chickenbear aside; Forest Of The Night is telling a fairytale to kids. I don't think it's intentionally saying parents should treat bipolar offspring as an early warning system for ecological space-attacks.)

None of Chibnall's episodes are even particularly memorable, they're virtually all mid-season filler. And that's accepting that being a showrunner is completely different to submitting one amazing script per year.

I'm actually vaguely relieved it's not Gatiss.

Gatiss seems to have lately been torn between being peeved that the Beeb didn't think him capable of the job, and not actually wanting to give up his entire life and endure years of virulent abuse to do the job.

I remember 42, but I remember it for the pub quiz airlocks.

I don't mind Gatiss writing the occasional episode, but he is a sort of ironic comedic caretaker/curator to the m.r. james/hammer horror/dr who tradition, obvs worked well with league of gentleman (local shop for local people ho ho ho) but that was a comedy ... did not at all like what he did with the m r james xmas special

At the same time there's that he gives a fuck about dr who