Guitar Hero: Nu-Who Season 9

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

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

this is otm. i see him more as someone who has genuine affection so might dial down the "comedic" bit but yes, his execution in no way matches his appreciation, and that in itself suggests his appreciation is deficient in some way. that poor adaptation of the tractate middoth lacked fear and shade. he can play very well with the method but struggles to allow the darkness into his framework.

I'm sure chibnall is competent, but nothing he's done inspires confidence - i though both series of broadchurch were laughable. however he isn't victim to gattis's fatal frivolity.

gatiss' biggest flaw, as far as i'm concerned, is his tendency to lapse into "talons of weng-chiang" levels of offensiveness. which is a very serious problem, but i'd still pick him over someone whose greatest strength is his ability to put together a theoretically watchable episode of television wherein nothing of note actually happens. i'm worried that he's going to start adapting old "law & order" scripts as doctor who episodes mid-season and nobody will actually notice.

I gave Gatiss a pass for a long while because his first season episode, the Dickens one, was a so great (at least in my memory), and I remember getting really excited thinking, "ah, this new series might not suck after all".

And then everything's he's done since then has been the total pits - that larky Victorian episode with Diana Rigg being the absolute bottom, and then the Baskerville episode of Sherlock somewhere below that.

On the plus side - I thought the ending of the (otherwise horrible) Sleep No More, with the narrator's face disintegrating into sand - that was as memorable an image as nu-Who has delivered since it began.

(I presume it was nicked from something else.)

his first season episode, the Dickens one, was a so great (at least in my memory),

I think that's the sort of thing that rusho's referring to as "weng-chiang levels of offensiveness" - the way white middle-class writer man doesn't think there's anything wrong with a story where immigrants seeking refuge turn out to ACTUALLY be bloodthirsty marauders bent on stealing our jobs and destroying our way of life.

His last five scripts have been at least decent meat & potatoes Who imo*, and generally getting better or more interesting. Sleep No More was the worst ep of last year, but it was trying to do things that neither the programme nor Gatiss have attempted before, which - over two decades into his career as an occasional Who writer - is pretty admirable.

Working so closely on Sherlock seems to have made Moffat better at commissioning Gatiss to a brief, too - giving him an outline that caters to one of his strengths/obsessions, rather than letting all his weaknesses blurt out.

*the arrow resolution to Sherwood aside.

one of the things i like about moffat is, even though he overthinks things, he does go back and try and fix his mistakes. the zygon two-parter was fascinating to me because it's addressing serious flaws in the anniversary zygon plot i hadn't even seen mentioned on the net. of course other people would take "kill the moon" as equivalently offensive to "the unquiet dead", but my take on "kill the moon" is that all sufficiently complex texts generate problematic readings. gatiss doesn't get that deep into things, but he can take a one-line concept like "ice warriors on red october during able archer" and execute it well, and that's really all you need. compare to something like "mummy on the orient express", which in gatiss' hands would be about a mummy on the orient express.

Hey guys, I just finished watching all nu-Who this week. What Who should I watch next? I've tried starting at the beginning with Hartnell but I find it too slow paced, and not well-written or well-filmed either. Is Torchwood worth watching?

I only watched the first two seasons of Torchwood which were patchy at best, but a lot of people say it gets better.

Some Hartnells are very well written fwiw, but the pace remains old-fashioned, shall we say.

Torchwood is pretty good.

I like Tom Baker era Who which is a bit closer to current than Hartnell was. it's 10 years later and I think the difference in culture shows.
I think several of the recent Whos have cited Patrick Troughton as n influence. Unfortunately there's less of them than one would really like thanks to the BBC wiping old episodes. A couple of complete stories appeared in Africa a couple of years ago, though one episode of Web Of Fear the Yetis on the London Underground system story was nicked before it made it to the West.

Pertwee is also really good.

I don't really like the Davison era overmuch. I never really connected with the doctor and weird things happen with aliens costumes tahnks to lack of budget etc though i guess that might be a constant to the series, 2 people in a horse costume playing an alien seems to be an absolute nadir. having Linda Bellingham karate chopping the main alien in the same story seems about as bad.
Colin Baker was a decent actor who had some pretty naff scripts.
I like Sylvester Mccoy as an actor but again he had some decidedly naff stories though he did have a couple of semi decent ones.

I think Hartnell did have some pretty interesting stories, may have loosened up as he went along too.

There are a number of other British Science fiction series from the era too. Sapphire and Steel, Doomwatch, UFO to name a couple.

Torchwood: Children of Earth is the best Who-related program of the nu-Who era.

It's Ingrid Pitt that karate chops the Myrka.

Back end of Children of Earth is a bit of a mess imo, I think S2 is about as good as it got. Just never go near Torchwood: Giant Space Vagina.

oh man THAT one is the one where IMO the end just spectacularly falls apart

I might re-read that thread just to see us all say Giant Space Vagina repeatedly.

Torchwood is almost all terrible.

If you'd like a list of recommended stories from each Doctor for a newbie, that's been done a few times on the Who threads. Or I can just give you a correct list.

lol sic

Which Hartnell serials are interesting? I'm at The Sensorites (#7), and so far the only one I'd say was decent all the way through would be The Aztecs (although I have problems with its theme).

Sensorites is mostly pretty boring. Try The Time Meddler, or The Ark.

I have just read the Torchwood thread, which about 20% people going Giant Earth Vagina (mainly me), and have just lost my shit when Tuomas claims a paving slab can engage in consensual sex.

Wait, that's your problem with the scene? I thought that it was 'jokey'?

Great Hartnells:

The Daleks
The Time Meddler
The Aztecs
DIoE
The Romans

YMMV but I love:

Reign of Terror
Planet Of Giants
The Ark

My Love is inexplicable:

The Web Planet

I love Planet Of Giants so much

The Daleks isn't not meandering in fairness - there's an episode which is just hiking through caves, and another which is Ian trying to convince the Thals to punch him in the face (and Ian is very punchable).

It also suffers in modern viewing from the fact that it's called The Daleks and the cliffhanger at the end of the first episode is OMG it's a Dalek - a defect passed on in its DNA to every other Dalek story.

Dalek Invasion of Earth >>>> The Daleks

Glad you liked The Aztecs already. Sensorites would make a good four-parter.

Dalek Invasion is good (but the movie is paced better), first ep of Space Museum is great but bail out if you get bored during later eps, Time Meddler is fantastic, I love The Gunfighters and you might too if you don't break down crying with frustration if your children's TV show has the temerity to do a comedy story occasionally, instead of spacemen shooting laser guns. Never read or seen The Rescue and The Romans but they're probably good given the writers. The Tenth Planet is worth watching when you get there.

(if you can handle a recon or a narrated soundtrack, carry on into Troughton's Power Of The Daleks. There are no complete stories at all from his first season, though.)

You might want to move to the C or D thread.

Yeah, that's a better thread for this.

https://twitter.com/bbcdoctorwho/status/838803941458608128

Stoked for Automated Bessie.

I hope they ignore "Attack of the Cybermen" and come up with an understandable explanation.

everybody should ignore "attack of the cybermen"