All New Who

more thoughts

Spoiler:

{{ So, a strange thing happened. I tuned in for the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary episode and instead there was just an old RTD episode with 10 and Donna.
So imagine my even greater surprise when I realised no, this was the Anniversary special. And thank goodness the BBC has been promoting it as such so heavily because if they hadn't there is no way in hell this would have stood out from a run of the mill RTD episode, let alone as an Anniversary Special. Even the few callbacks we got were almost exclusively devoted to the 10/Donna era.
Its funny now remembering how worked up fans were before the 50th and how angry they threatened to be with Moffat if he didn't show proper respect in an Anniversary episode to the shows history and past, and even after the 50th was a massive success there was still a vocal section complaining he hadn't brought back every living Doctor and companion.
This didn't even feel special. Yes the general budget felt up- it probably ironically cost more than the 50th did, it certainly had a much longer prep time and RTD wasn't writing two shows plus the special all the same time for the BBC. And yet this felt in no way special and even less like an anniversary of anything. The 50th felt like event TV, even going global in its broadcast time including across cinemas globally, this just didnt feel any sort of event.

I suppose the main antagonist of all this Beep is a call back, to something that never appeared in the  show but only in a comic and which almost no one but hard core Who fans had ever heard of until this was announced, so its a pretty poor callback to the shows past.

It begins with one very clunky and one better monologue to audience explaining the relationship between the Doctor and Donna and how it ended and the stakes for her remembering (don't worry about that, this is RTD he'll just hand-wave it away in the last five minutes and does but I'll come back to that) unfortunately it reminded me of the much better done minisode prequel He Said/She Said, in which 11 and then Clara also monologue to the audience, musing on their relationship with each other, its more interestingly shot, they aren't just standing there but wandering through a set of props from their time on the show, like its their minds junk-pile of memories of time in the TARDIS, and the deliveries are simply better given and performed and the final line from each, setting up what's to come is suitably ominous and intriguing enough to make you want to find out what's coming next. These stilted monologues to camera from Tennant and Tate do not make you want more, though she does it better.

From there we get the set up for the meat of the story, the Doctor meets Donna in an oddly contrived feeling scene that plays for laughs but felt more clunky than witty dialogue to me, particularly from Tennant in this who doesn't seem sure if he's supposed to be playing it as 10 or a bit different. RTD has been insisting he's not 10 but a new Doctor, so why not immediately convey this by letting Tennant use his own accent for this version? If he's not 10 why does he still sound like Dick Van Dyke? And bar two linesof dialogue he acts exactly like 10.

Anyway a spaceship crashes, an alien furball called Meep escapes and is found by Rose, Donna's daughter, though she shouldn't be that old its only been 15 years, you even point that out in the episode RTD and she hadn't been born yet, oh and she is also trans. A lot, by which I mean expect it to be mentioned a lot and used in the plot in a manner that hasn't made me cringe so much since I last spilled a hot toadie in my lap.

Meep is cute and adorable and per the comic source pretty true to character. There are some nice touches, the ET rip off having the Meep hide among the stuff toys might seem a little like plagiarism but the twist at the end that all the toys are subconscious memories of aliens Donna encountered passed into her son at birth, whose now her daughter, informed her design choices for her toys. That was nice and I hadn't spotted the similarities so hats off to the toy designers who made them familiar looking but not on the nose. No hats off to the RTD hand-waving going on in the hopes you don't think to much about how this is supposed to work, or why when Rose gets her metacrisis movement and is a genius who knows everything she would instantly choose to not be, and the excuse given, that she finally  'feels like me' is very weak and so high on the cheesey-ometer a Frenchman would turn his nose up at the stench.

Another bunch of aliens turn up hunting for Meep, who says they are monsters that want to kill him/her/it for its fur. As one of the few who has actually read the comic and knows Meep is insane homicidal maniac this stuff with cute Meep goes on way too long. Meep is much more fun in the comics, and in this when they are being their evil worst, and it takes way too long to get to the fun in this, way too long, 33 minutes of an hour running time in fact.

In order to carry out its plan of getting away in its spaceship, which to launch will use up all of London for fuel (but don't worry RTD will hand-wave all the damage away in the end as all the burnt up fuel is reconstituted and returned exactly back where it was as roads and tarmac and stuff. I don't know I didn't write this rubbish! I just had to watch it!) and to do so Meep recruits a bunch of Unit soldiers. This is done by the power of the psychedelic sentient star that went mad and whose radiation turned all the Beeps into homicidal maniacs. This is explained in a hurried dialogue blurted out when it needs explaining.
And this brings me onto a bigger issue, this episode as adaptation, it is adapted from the comic of the same name, and indeed the comics writer Pat Mills, and its artist Dave Gibbons, both get credited alongside RTD on this one. But in the comic, the backstory, the sun, its all got time to be told properly, same goes for the comics ending which plays out in less of a blitz of babble and hand-waving explanations. As adaptation its got the main beats from the comic especially regards Meep, but everything around it is pure RTD invention. As such its interested in RTD stuff, meaning most of this episode of Doctor Who is like watching a cross between Queer as Folk and Eastenders, and the actual Who scifi fun story of the comic sort of gets squeezed in around it, and at times almost squeezed out.

The solution to stopping Meep launching its ship is for Donna to become the Doctor Donna again, which will also kill her. But the set up for this happening is, well I'll explain it.

The Doctor and Donna have got into Meeps engine room. The Doctor is running about this more or less circular room flipping switches and things, trying to stop Meep, but he cant do it and Meep manages to begin the fuelling sequence, destroying bis of London as it does so, for now. Whilst trying to fix things by pressing some buttons a clear partition descends from the ceiling splitting the room in half and separating the Doctor and Donna, now the Doctor cant flip and press buttons on the Donna side and he really wants too. And the only solution is for Donna to become as brilliant as him so she too can press buttons and flip switches by becoming Doctor Donna again then dying.
If its supposed to have the emotional impact of 10 and Wilf's similar separating, or reminiscent of 10 and Rose on either side of a wall it fails miserably to elecit any emotional repsonse at all. Its so contrived nothing feels real anyway.
And why is that clear partition there at all? Why does it descend then? Why does the Doctor roll back and forth under it, especially the last time when its clear he will be separated from Donna and away from all the shiny buttons he so desperately wants to press?  Its so contrived. Like a lot of what happens in this story it happens because that's what needs to happen for the next scene to happen, there's no internal story logic going on here.
Compare to the 10/Wilf scene in End of Time, in that we see the partition Wilf is destined to get stuck behind throughout the episode, we see it being operated and how its used in the running of the machine at least 3 times before Wilf ends up trapped in it. If that had been written like this it would just have descended out of nowhere in that scene to trap him, with no explanation or set up and the scene would have been a lot less effective. Like this scene, which is also non effective at creating drama becuase its not properly set up, or set up at all, the stakes are unknown until they've actually happened so the viewer doesnt even get time to be invested let alone care about what's going on.

Needless to say Donna saves the day, but don't worry, she's not dead, no its all binary! Or rather non-binary. Oh how RTD must have patted himself on the back at that little connection back to Donna Doctor having her melt down, except on that occasion it made more sense for binary to refer to numbers, but hey lets not let that get in the way! Her daughter took some of the Doctor Donna into his head at birth, ok, and so when Donna remembered, so did her daughter for some reason and it made her a genius too, long enough to reverse the engines of Meeps ship and that miraculously fixes all the bits of London that had collapsed into flaming pits and were burnt up for raw fuel. They just sort of pop back up into place exactly as was. And then she and Donna decide they don't want to be brilliant geniuses with knowledge of Time and Space so just give it up. And Rose tells us all how happy she is to finally be herself. And I may have thrown up about then, Americans could have written this overly sentimental garbage!!!
But what struck me most about the ending over all is something I never thought I'd say about RTD's writing, the dialogue was often incredibly clunky and unnatural sounding, I mean take this back and forth at the climax-

Doctor- We're binary.
Donna- She's not. Because the Doctor's...
Doctor: ...male and female.
Rose: I'm neither. I'm all.

No one talks like this.

I should mention among all the trans stuff, the UNIT lady with the wheelchair I forgot to mention, as compared to Osgood also introduced in an anniversary episode, she is instantly forgettable, oh apart from her chair, as it's supplied by Q from Bond, with missiles and guns built in making it more memorable than the person sitting in it (talk about screwing up your message!) and the use of 'binary'' to save the day and the way it makes sure to hit you over the head with the Message every five minutes or so in-case you'd forgotten or somehow not noticed it yet, the actual bravest thing in this entire episode is said by Donna-

“Rose's school play! OK maybe not that, she can't act, she's terrible but I don't know how to tell her”.

Now that's brave given the actor playing Rose has all the acting abilities of Ryan from Chibnal era, both facial muscles sometimes move, but I suspect that's just a nervous twitch, it certainly wasn't acting. I think my favourite delivery of hers, so good its the only time I laughed out loud was in response to learning Meeps plan would kill about 9 million people in London, and she says “9 million people” in the same tone of voice and with as much emotion as you might say to someone pointing out a carrot, “Yeah, it's a carrot.” I suppose if you insist that only a trans actor can play a trans character you limit yourself when it comes to choice of quality of actor. Especially in a country with an acting pool as small as the UK's. It's not so much scraping the bottom of the acting barrel so much as she could be used to make the barrel.

What's really bad about this is I at least expected to be engaged in the character stories in RTD era, but these were flat, contrived or driven by the desire to get the message across loud and clear, but its at the expense of the comics original narrative or telling a fun tale, and more surprisingly natural dialogue.
I realised at the half hour mark, as the big street battle was going on that I was bored out my head, really bored. The story nor the characters were engaing to me in the slightest, I wasn't excited I wasn't concerend for anyone and it wasn't the fun celebration of the show as it should be.
I was even slightly disappointed in Talalay's direction, there are a few nice bits of framing and everything is super competent and its all well shot, but its also not anything that stands a head above any other decent Who director, and I don't feel it would have made too big a difference which of them was helming this story, it would have come out much as is. Its a workmanlike script that only needs a workmanlike direction. I think Talalay works best when there is a solid driven narrative and artistic merits to the work she can respond to. This story has none of those things, its as run a mill a RTD Who story as you get with a new lick of glossy paint and a more prominent messaging. One that means the actual story has to rush its ending, wrap it all in a few minutes and repair all the damage and  then end on a really awkward scene where Donna spills coffee an the new TARDIS,which explodes and we get a super clunky finishing line that's only missing a classic 70's style freeze frame ending to complete its cheesiness- “We could end up anywhere in Time and Space!”
Really? Then it just cuts awkwardly to credits. Its weird. Did that happen in the edit for some reason or was that actually planned to end like that?

On random things about Who RTD dicked about and changed for no good reason and are probably going to be bad- the sonic screwdriver projecting interactive screens onto thin air is pretty annoying, but its nothing to its new found ability to manufacture space shields by drawing them in the air, shields that once drawn and made you can then shove and slide about to hide behind- well there goes any threats with a gun up to and including Daleks! Why RTD? Didn't the sonic do enough already?
Then there is the new TARDIS which half the time looks like a freshly sterilised hospital and the rest like RTD's favourite gay disco when all the roundels light up in sequence. I like it has levels, always like TARDIS with levels, but its too big oddly enough, Jodies was cramped and this is too expansive, neither achieved that slightly familiar cosy feeling of also being the Doctors, and temporarily companions homes in the way it did with 10 and Rose or 11 and 12's TARDISes.
And I hate the console, it looks like they took a normal console and got a really fat man to sit on it.

So to sum up, its an anniversary special celebrating nothing, its a mediocre Who story and a mediocre adaptation of the comic. It has some terrible acting in it, a lot of clunky and unnatural dialogue and more contrivance than me confronted with my bar tab, which after watching this is about to get a lot bigger I fear! And it has a rushed conclusion with a lot of babbled dialogue to try to explain everything and a Message it really cannot shut up about for more than five minutes at a time.
So basically it was a classical average RTD Who story, only somehow worse.

4 out of 10 and the the 4 is for Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons original bits. }}

What have we learned from the fascinating, intriguing and memorable character of Rose?

1. There was once a Rose, who in one episode, conveyed all you needed to know about her character, and made you want to see more because she was so refreshing and attractive. She showed you, didn't tell you, all about her life, her dreams, her faults and her wonderful bits and even down to how she liked the 'smell of chips'. She wasn't defined by her gender, she was just Rose. She showed human emotions, it was written on her face.

2. There now is another Rose. And after one episode all we know about her is she is trans. She is totally defined as a trans, she is nothing else, just an empty shell with nothing inside. This might have been helped by great acting skills, she may have been able to act her way out of this suffocating stereotype, but no, not one human emotion passed over her wooden face. Not even a fucking crashing spaceship, aliens on the streets and her toys coming to life made her more than mildly interested. She acted like a minor character, not a potential companion. The Message was all, it was an insult to trans people.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{ So, a strange thing happened. I tuned in for the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary episode and instead there was just an old RTD episode with 10 and Donna.
So imagine my even greater surprise when I realised no, this was the Anniversary special. And thank goodness the BBC has been promoting it as such so heavily because if they hadn't there is no way in hell this would have stood out from a run of the mill RTD episode, let alone as an Anniversary Special. Even the few callbacks we got were almost exclusively devoted to the 10/Donna era.
Its funny now remembering how worked up fans were before the 50th and how angry they threatened to be with Moffat if he didn't show proper respect in an Anniversary episode to the shows history and past, and even after the 50th was a massive success there was still a vocal section complaining he hadn't brought back every living Doctor and companion.
This didn't even feel special. Yes the general budget felt up- it probably ironically cost more than the 50th did, it certainly had a much longer prep time and RTD wasn't writing two shows plus the special all the same time for the BBC. And yet this felt in no way special and even less like an anniversary of anything. The 50th felt like event TV, even going global in its broadcast time including across cinemas globally, this just didnt feel any sort of event.

I suppose the main antagonist of all this Beep is a call back, to something that never appeared in the  show but only in a comic and which almost no one but hard core Who fans had ever heard of until this was announced, so its a pretty poor callback to the shows past.

It begins with one very clunky and one better monologue to audience explaining the relationship between the Doctor and Donna and how it ended and the stakes for her remembering (don't worry about that, this is RTD he'll just hand-wave it away in the last five minutes and does but I'll come back to that) unfortunately it reminded me of the much better done minisode prequel He Said/She Said, in which 11 and then Clara also monologue to the audience, musing on their relationship with each other, its more interestingly shot, they aren't just standing there but wandering through a set of props from their time on the show, like its their minds junk-pile of memories of time in the TARDIS, and the deliveries are simply better given and performed and the final line from each, setting up what's to come is suitably ominous and intriguing enough to make you want to find out what's coming next. These stilted monologues to camera from Tennant and Tate do not make you want more, though she does it better.

From there we get the set up for the meat of the story, the Doctor meets Donna in an oddly contrived feeling scene that plays for laughs but felt more clunky than witty dialogue to me, particularly from Tennant in this who doesn't seem sure if he's supposed to be playing it as 10 or a bit different. RTD has been insisting he's not 10 but a new Doctor, so why not immediately convey this by letting Tennant use his own accent for this version? If he's not 10 why does he still sound like Dick Van Dyke? And bar two linesof dialogue he acts exactly like 10.

Anyway a spaceship crashes, an alien furball called Meep escapes and is found by Rose, Donna's daughter, though she shouldn't be that old its only been 15 years, you even point that out in the episode RTD and she hadn't been born yet, oh and she is also trans. A lot, by which I mean expect it to be mentioned a lot and used in the plot in a manner that hasn't made me cringe so much since I last spilled a hot toadie in my lap.

Meep is cute and adorable and per the comic source pretty true to character. There are some nice touches, the ET rip off having the Meep hide among the stuff toys might seem a little like plagiarism but the twist at the end that all the toys are subconscious memories of aliens Donna encountered passed into her son at birth, whose now her daughter, informed her design choices for her toys. That was nice and I hadn't spotted the similarities so hats off to the toy designers who made them familiar looking but not on the nose. No hats off to the RTD hand-waving going on in the hopes you don't think to much about how this is supposed to work, or why when Rose gets her metacrisis movement and is a genius who knows everything she would instantly choose to not be, and the excuse given, that she finally  'feels like me' is very weak and so high on the cheesey-ometer a Frenchman would turn his nose up at the stench.

Another bunch of aliens turn up hunting for Meep, who says they are monsters that want to kill him/her/it for its fur. As one of the few who has actually read the comic and knows Meep is insane homicidal maniac this stuff with cute Meep goes on way too long. Meep is much more fun in the comics, and in this when they are being their evil worst, and it takes way too long to get to the fun in this, way too long, 33 minutes of an hour running time in fact.

In order to carry out its plan of getting away in its spaceship, which to launch will use up all of London for fuel (but don't worry RTD will hand-wave all the damage away in the end as all the burnt up fuel is reconstituted and returned exactly back where it was as roads and tarmac and stuff. I don't know I didn't write this rubbish! I just had to watch it!) and to do so Meep recruits a bunch of Unit soldiers. This is done by the power of the psychedelic sentient star that went mad and whose radiation turned all the Beeps into homicidal maniacs. This is explained in a hurried dialogue blurted out when it needs explaining.
And this brings me onto a bigger issue, this episode as adaptation, it is adapted from the comic of the same name, and indeed the comics writer Pat Mills, and its artist Dave Gibbons, both get credited alongside RTD on this one. But in the comic, the backstory, the sun, its all got time to be told properly, same goes for the comics ending which plays out in less of a blitz of babble and hand-waving explanations. As adaptation its got the main beats from the comic especially regards Meep, but everything around it is pure RTD invention. As such its interested in RTD stuff, meaning most of this episode of Doctor Who is like watching a cross between Queer as Folk and Eastenders, and the actual Who scifi fun story of the comic sort of gets squeezed in around it, and at times almost squeezed out.

The solution to stopping Meep launching its ship is for Donna to become the Doctor Donna again, which will also kill her. But the set up for this happening is, well I'll explain it.

The Doctor and Donna have got into Meeps engine room. The Doctor is running about this more or less circular room flipping switches and things, trying to stop Meep, but he cant do it and Meep manages to begin the fuelling sequence, destroying bis of London as it does so, for now. Whilst trying to fix things by pressing some buttons a clear partition descends from the ceiling splitting the room in half and separating the Doctor and Donna, now the Doctor cant flip and press buttons on the Donna side and he really wants too. And the only solution is for Donna to become as brilliant as him so she too can press buttons and flip switches by becoming Doctor Donna again then dying.
If its supposed to have the emotional impact of 10 and Wilf's similar separating, or reminiscent of 10 and Rose on either side of a wall it fails miserably to elecit any emotional repsonse at all. Its so contrived nothing feels real anyway.
And why is that clear partition there at all? Why does it descend then? Why does the Doctor roll back and forth under it, especially the last time when its clear he will be separated from Donna and away from all the shiny buttons he so desperately wants to press?  Its so contrived. Like a lot of what happens in this story it happens because that's what needs to happen for the next scene to happen, there's no internal story logic going on here.
Compare to the 10/Wilf scene in End of Time, in that we see the partition Wilf is destined to get stuck behind throughout the episode, we see it being operated and how its used in the running of the machine at least 3 times before Wilf ends up trapped in it. If that had been written like this it would just have descended out of nowhere in that scene to trap him, with no explanation or set up and the scene would have been a lot less effective. Like this scene, which is also non effective at creating drama becuase its not properly set up, or set up at all, the stakes are unknown until they've actually happened so the viewer doesnt even get time to be invested let alone care about what's going on.

Needless to say Donna saves the day, but don't worry, she's not dead, no its all binary! Or rather non-binary. Oh how RTD must have patted himself on the back at that little connection back to Donna Doctor having her melt down, except on that occasion it made more sense for binary to refer to numbers, but hey lets not let that get in the way! Her daughter took some of the Doctor Donna into his head at birth, ok, and so when Donna remembered, so did her daughter for some reason and it made her a genius too, long enough to reverse the engines of Meeps ship and that miraculously fixes all the bits of London that had collapsed into flaming pits and were burnt up for raw fuel. They just sort of pop back up into place exactly as was. And then she and Donna decide they don't want to be brilliant geniuses with knowledge of Time and Space so just give it up. And Rose tells us all how happy she is to finally be herself. And I may have thrown up about then, Americans could have written this overly sentimental garbage!!!
But what struck me most about the ending over all is something I never thought I'd say about RTD's writing, the dialogue was often incredibly clunky and unnatural sounding, I mean take this back and forth at the climax-

Doctor- We're binary.
Donna- She's not. Because the Doctor's...
Doctor: ...male and female.
Rose: I'm neither. I'm all.

No one talks like this.

I should mention among all the trans stuff, the UNIT lady with the wheelchair I forgot to mention, as compared to Osgood also introduced in an anniversary episode, she is instantly forgettable, oh apart from her chair, as it's supplied by Q from Bond, with missiles and guns built in making it more memorable than the person sitting in it (talk about screwing up your message!) and the use of 'binary'' to save the day and the way it makes sure to hit you over the head with the Message every five minutes or so in-case you'd forgotten or somehow not noticed it yet, the actual bravest thing in this entire episode is said by Donna-

“Rose's school play! OK maybe not that, she can't act, she's terrible but I don't know how to tell her”.

Now that's brave given the actor playing Rose has all the acting abilities of Ryan from Chibnal era, both facial muscles sometimes move, but I suspect that's just a nervous twitch, it certainly wasn't acting. I think my favourite delivery of hers, so good its the only time I laughed out loud was in response to learning Meeps plan would kill about 9 million people in London, and she says “9 million people” in the same tone of voice and with as much emotion as you might say to someone pointing out a carrot, “Yeah, it's a carrot.” I suppose if you insist that only a trans actor can play a trans character you limit yourself when it comes to choice of quality of actor. Especially in a country with an acting pool as small as the UK's. It's not so much scraping the bottom of the acting barrel so much as she could be used to make the barrel.

What's really bad about this is I at least expected to be engaged in the character stories in RTD era, but these were flat, contrived or driven by the desire to get the message across loud and clear, but its at the expense of the comics original narrative or telling a fun tale, and more surprisingly natural dialogue.
I realised at the half hour mark, as the big street battle was going on that I was bored out my head, really bored. The story nor the characters were engaing to me in the slightest, I wasn't excited I wasn't concerend for anyone and it wasn't the fun celebration of the show as it should be.
I was even slightly disappointed in Talalay's direction, there are a few nice bits of framing and everything is super competent and its all well shot, but its also not anything that stands a head above any other decent Who director, and I don't feel it would have made too big a difference which of them was helming this story, it would have come out much as is. Its a workmanlike script that only needs a workmanlike direction. I think Talalay works best when there is a solid driven narrative and artistic merits to the work she can respond to. This story has none of those things, its as run a mill a RTD Who story as you get with a new lick of glossy paint and a more prominent messaging. One that means the actual story has to rush its ending, wrap it all in a few minutes and repair all the damage and  then end on a really awkward scene where Donna spills coffee an the new TARDIS,which explodes and we get a super clunky finishing line that's only missing a classic 70's style freeze frame ending to complete its cheesiness- “We could end up anywhere in Time and Space!”
Really? Then it just cuts awkwardly to credits. Its weird. Did that happen in the edit for some reason or was that actually planned to end like that?

On random things about Who RTD dicked about and changed for no good reason and are probably going to be bad- the sonic screwdriver projecting interactive screens onto thin air is pretty annoying, but its nothing to its new found ability to manufacture space shields by drawing them in the air, shields that once drawn and made you can then shove and slide about to hide behind- well there goes any threats with a gun up to and including Daleks! Why RTD? Didn't the sonic do enough already?
Then there is the new TARDIS which half the time looks like a freshly sterilised hospital and the rest like RTD's favourite gay disco when all the roundels light up in sequence. I like it has levels, always like TARDIS with levels, but its too big oddly enough, Jodies was cramped and this is too expansive, neither achieved that slightly familiar cosy feeling of also being the Doctors, and temporarily companions homes in the way it did with 10 and Rose or 11 and 12's TARDISes.
And I hate the console, it looks like they took a normal console and got a really fat man to sit on it.

So to sum up, its an anniversary special celebrating nothing, its a mediocre Who story and a mediocre adaptation of the comic. It has some terrible acting in it, a lot of clunky and unnatural dialogue and more contrivance than me confronted with my bar tab, which after watching this is about to get a lot bigger I fear! And it has a rushed conclusion with a lot of babbled dialogue to try to explain everything and a Message it really cannot shut up about for more than five minutes at a time.
So basically it was a classical average RTD Who story, only somehow worse.

4 out of 10 and the the 4 is for Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons original bits. }}

Yep completely agree Petty, thinking it over I'm gonna downgrade it to a 4/10 as well

It was a generic schlocky throaway runaround with nothing deeper to say (other than the hamfisted social commentary at the end), it felt like standing at the sidelines of a party I wasn't invited to-I was looking in slightly bermused trying to figure out why people were in on the jokes/having fun and not understanding why...

Generic, emotionally hollow and frankly boring, it had a series case of https://www.southparkstudios.co.uk/wiki/Member_Berries(character)

Mrs Figg wrote:What have we learned from the fascinating, intriguing and memorable character of Rose?


2. There now is another Rose. And after one episode all we know about her is she is trans. She is totally defined as a trans, she is nothing else, just an empty shell with nothing inside. This might have been helped by great acting skills, she may have been able to act her way out of this suffocating stereotype, but no, not one human emotion passed over her wooden face. Not even a fucking crashing spaceship, aliens on the streets and her toys coming to life made her more than mildly interested. She acted like a minor character, not a potential companion. The Message was all, it was an insult to trans people.

I think the bigger insult to trans people was the implication she was only trans because she inherited the Doctor Donna's non-binaryness...why couldn't she just be Trans naturally? did it really need a special explanation? Transgender people are real people with real lives and I think it is frankly insulting for it to be explained away as caused by space magic. As with the recent reveal that Davros is no longer crippled this seems like RTd meant well to be more inclusive but went about it in a utterly ham fisted way.

About as subtle as a sonic screwdriver to the face.

Well my parents thought it was kinda...boring? (and they sat through the Whittaker years!) Both indicated it was oddly emotionally hollow and a poor shadow of Tennant's old episodes, my mother felt it was a bit strange their was a more filmic blockbuster look (in terms of the effects/cinematograhy) and such a cheesy storyline. My dad wondered why there no other doctors in an anniversary special and was completely confused by the climax of the story.

So I guess I can say it was consistently dissapointing to different demographics at least.

Based purely on this episode I'm not holding out much hope for the RTD2 era to be a brand new reinvention, I think it's going to be more of the same, just even less subtle with the social messaging and slightly better SFX.

So a few weeks ago someone leaked the plot of The Star Beast online...virtually all of the leaks turned out to be true...the same person also leaked the following about 'The Giggle' the third and last special:

Rumoured story leaks for the 3rd Special-potentially massive spoilers:

See this thread on reddit for further info:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gallifrey/comments/183ul2g/leak_so_the_leaks_were_true_whats_your_thoughts/

Assuming this leak is true...sheesh RTD has really gone off the deep end...

At least it is easier to watch Who now that it is on Disney+. It was oddly enough less preachy than I expected, but only because I was expecting Chibnal level of writing with caps lock. Good to see 10 and Donna back together. Great actors doing surprisingly well with an very odd script.

But.

Let it go? Really? Let it go.

I think the bigger insult to trans people was the implication she was only trans because she inherited the Doctor Donna's non-binaryness- Malick

{{ I've been thinking about the trans thing and how it was handled in this, and you are right about how clumsy it was done Malick, like wheelchair lady whose name I can't remember as her chair was more interestingly written than her. But I think the most cowardly bit probably because it's also sneaky, was to fudge Rose's age. She should in this episode be at the very most 14 (assuming Donna was pregnant but not showing at her wedding) more likely Rose would be aged between 12-14.
So why isn't she, the episode goes out its way to mention it's been 15 years, so why make the daughter too old by at least 3-4 years? (The actor is 20).
Well it avoids all the controversy, if she's 12 or 13 as should be and trans then you have to deal with the topic seriously, have to deal with hormone replacement, medical procedures, the rights and wrongs of letting a minor make decisions that will affect them physically and mentally for the rest of their lives, and RTD only wants to present trans in a totally positive it's all good and simple and right manner. And for me that's the worst thing about it, if RTD was determined to go down this road I wanted him to do it as a proper writer, to write it well and bravely and unafraid, this is not that. This is just promotion of an ideal whilst hiding from view its more difficult side. It's a cowards choice and it's duplicitous as it allows RTD to present a 'finished product' version of Rose, an adult whose made her choices offscreen and they were all good with no downsides, but all those difficult choices are skipped over and avoided by just making her too old for the part. And that's disingenuous and worse, dishonest of RTD to do that and hugely disappointing he'd simply avoid it altogether by changing how old Rose should be. }}

I wouldn't mind 'The Message' if the actor had been good. You can forgive all sorts of rubbish if Rose had been a fantastic actor instead of being an obvious diversity hire. Unfortunately, she didn't have good dialogue to work with, well she didn't have any really, apart from the BBC/Disney propaganda. She was not allowed to do anything more than stand around and spout cringe inducing insufferable bollox. However, she could at least have made an effort to emote. Also showing wheelchair lady on an obviously high metal gantry was stretching credibility to the max.

I may be getting it wrong - it was badly written after all, but I thought it was the doctordonna thing they gave up, and Rose was glad to be back as Rose.

Little confused as I didn't think non-binary and trans were the same thing, but there's a lot to be confused about here.

The plushies were a fun touch, very cute.

{{ The ending doesn't seem to make a heap of sense or worth much scrutiny Amarie- if they can just give up being the DoctorDonna why did the Doctor have to wipe Donna's memory to save her life in the first place? Why not just say "Oh you'll have to give that up it's going to kill you otherwise" job done. If you think back to how Donna was after she became DoctroDonna, how she was 'Time Lord Plus' even better than the Doctor- timelord plus human imagination, she loved being that version and did not want to stop being her, and the first thing in this she does after becoming DoctorDonna again is bemoan her normal stupid self giving all the money away, why would she instantly then choose to stop being brilliant and go back to that? Why would anyone?
Why would Rose even? The closest thng we come to any character motivation for her throughout is making her toys for selling, and she does that she says to help out her Mum and Dad with extra cash- well now she is a genius who can guarantee her parents secure future, so whats her motivation to stop being brilliant? Because now she feels like her self? Why? What changed by temporarily becoming brilliant that made her feel that all of a sudden, for that matter where was the set up for her not feeling that way beforehand? It's all a mess.}}

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be "female logic/wisdom - you wouldn't understand".

{{ Ah of course, I forgot I'm 'male presenting' I can't understand or empathise with half the human race as they are a different gender from me, naturally. However should I feel a sudden desire to become a woman and transition I also get all the empathy insight and understanding of both men and women? I think that's what RTD was saying with having Rose saying she is not male or female but both in one and the Doctor as 'male presenting' wouldn't be able to understand.

I also had an issue with wheelchair lady's dialogue, when she goes with UNIT to board Meeps ship and is confronted with a gantry of stairs the UNIT officer just sort of goes "ah" and she immediately responds with "Don't make me the problem" What? You're in a wheelchair there's lots of stairs you want to go up - that is a problem! Having been in the situation of having to take someone places with stairs in the way I can assure you it is a problem. I know its a problem, and so does the person in the chair! And it's not deliberate on anyone's part there is a problem, there just is.
I always wasn't too keen on her saying about having guns in her chair, "We all do." was that supposed to be a joke? Patronising? Or what?
I suspect she will be a companion going ahead- given the the new TARDIS is minus steps of any kind and now looks like my hotwheels set up from when I was a kid, random ramps in all directions. If she is I hope RTD gives her a personality at same point thats not a wheelchair user with massive chip on their shoulder, which is how what little personality she had came across to me. }}

Ah. Wheelchair accessable... you might be right... She did seem like she'd be a regular character. I rather liked her, despite the weird dialogue. Guess we'll just have to wait and see if any of these people gain a proper personality.

{{ Im not contesting your right to like any character, but I am puzzled as to what you liked? As every line of dialogue she has seemed to me either snarky or to refer to her being in a chair. As 'personalities' go she seemed really flat and weak to me- as I say last time we got introduced to a new UNIT Head Scientist in an anniversary special it was Osgood, who whilst not the most developed character in the world was at least memorable and fun. }}

Good question, I think it is more that I like the idea of her character, which might be interesting if done right. Capable non-gushing female who happens to be in a wheelchair.

This whole episode is a fraction better than a Chibnall episode, but it's not good. I'm not mentally accepting this as proper Who yet. Too disappointing.

{{{ I am generally opposed to real world issues in the TARDIS- wheelchair users, Grahame and his cancer and such, they dont belong in Who. Not because it should exclude them on principle but because the very premise of the show denies any real use of such a character. In a show where the main character can just whisk you off to a future hi-tech space hospital where you'll be up about on a new pair of legs in no time, or where they can cure cancer with a single shot means you can only belittle the experience of such people. And the only possible excuse for not doing something to fix things is for the character to say "I dont want to be able to walk and run, this is who I am" which sounds noble and all but I've never met a wheelchair user, even those from birth who think that way. Yes their chair is as much a part of themselves, yes they have developed to simply get on with things and deal with inconveniences, yes the experience of being in a chair has informed their personality, but I've never known anyone who thinks its preferable. Or if I could have said if I click my fingers you can walk would say no to such an offer.

So you either need an unbelievable excuse for why the Doctor would not help a companion out medically, or you need to pretend the ability to do so in a show where you can go anywhere in time and space doesn't exist (and that ignores previous examples- such as Nardole, the kid from Class, the woman from the doppelganger one with the brain clot thats cured with a single tablet, or the many references over the years to the Doctor having spare body and organ parts in the TARDIS for emergencies. }}

Very true. I wasn't thinking she'd be a companion, but a familiar face at UNIT. Maaaaybe stretching it to experimenting with dalek hover tech.

Why did wheelchair lady have to be so smug?

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{{ I am generally opposed to real world issues in the TARDIS- wheelchair users, Grahame and his cancer and such, they dont belong in Who. Not because it should exclude them on principle but because the very premise of the show denies any real use of such a character. In a show where the main character can just whisk you off to a future hi-tech space hospital where you'll be up about on a new pair of legs in no time, or where they can cure cancer with a single shot means you can only belittle the experience of such people. And the only possible excuse for not doing something to fix things is for the character to say "I dont want to be able to walk and run, this is who I am" which sounds noble and all but I've never met a wheelchair user, even those from birth who think that way. Yes their chair is as much a part of themselves, yes they have developed to simply get on with things and deal with inconveniences, yes the experience of being in a chair has informed their personality, but I've never known anyone who thinks its preferable. Or if I could have said if I click my fingers you can walk would say no to such an offer.

So you either need an unbelievable excuse for why the Doctor would not help a companion out medically, or you need to pretend the ability to do so in a show where you can go anywhere in time and space doesn't exist (and that ignores previous examples- such as Nardole, the kid from Class, the woman from the doppelganger one with the brain clot thats cured with a single tablet, or the many references over the years to the Doctor having spare body and organ parts in the TARDIS for emergencies. }}

...I had genuinely never though of it like that before...it does makes you question the doctors morals a bit and wonder how a disabled companion would actually be handled by the writers...

I often think you missed your calling as a script editor Petty, you have a great knack for pointing out obvious flaws and plot holes that somehow make in into production...

I think we can all agree that at the very least this episode was vintage RTD for better or worse, he's cheesy zany and sometime sbeats you in the face with the message, but at least his stories are rarely boring or empty like Chibnalls were.

This also has me actively posting again which is good

you have a great knack for pointing out obvious flaws and plot holes that somehow make in into production...- Malick

{{ The untold powers of being a crabbit old bastard combined with rampant buckie consumption, dont worry Malick, your young yet, you'll get there!  

This also has me actively posting again which is good- Malick

It is indeed. }}

Pettytyrant101 wrote:you have a great knack for pointing out obvious flaws and plot holes that somehow make in into production...- Malick

{{ The untold powers of being a crabbit old bastard combined with rampant buckie consumption, dont worry Malick, your young yet, you'll get there!  

This also has me actively posting again which is good- Malick

It is indeed.   }}

Well, I'm certainly starting to get more and more cynical the older I get so I'll ctach you up eventually

And yeah it's good to stop by and talk with you guys/gals/scottshobbits again