Also Jack shows up, ok, I'm unfortunately not as excite about him because he doesn't ask before kissing people and I VERY DO NOT want them to go "lol she's finally a girl so they can be canonshipped now", but still, w000t!
I just really need to catch up, and I've seen various reactions about last season and this season's beginning that concerned me, but we'd BETTER get to keep Ruth!Doctor and she'd BETTER have a good arc.
I- think it goes up and down, but I don't remember for sure if it does. The wall behind 13 is the display screen (I think, it had a cool hologram screensaver going in the ep).
I love the grunge (9+10) and nonsense (11 part a) TARDIS console rooms, but only in the 'he has continued to repair it off of stuff he found in junkyards because time,' but Gods have I missed the stark clean iPod look (and the round things).
Cynically, I have to note that introducing her midway through another Doctor's run, with no lead-up hype, probably saved the showrunner months of the kind of racist dogpiling we've gotten every time a person of color has been suggested for the role.
The War Doctor stuff at least makes sense with regards as to why he was this odd one-of. I'm kinda hoping Ruth Doctor is 14, and that there's some cute technobabble to explain away the lack of recognition.
Also introing her this way might be a way of 'testing the waters' so to speak to see what kind of overall reaction a person/woman of color playing the Doctor would get from fans without having the inevitable racist/sexist comments that would come out of the woodwork with a more hyped/publicized announcement.
This way she skips any pre-new-Doctor harassment and when she finally takes the console helm it'll be old news because she's already the Doctor, no takebacks.
OHHHHHH I get why everyone's speculating that she has to be a really early Doctor -- saw another clip and she doesn't seem to recognize the sonic screwdriver. Which was introduced in the middle of Two's era. Which would mean she can't be between Two and Three.
BUT she already has the TARDIS and didn't Moff already show Bootleg!One taking it? Which I was mad at at the time, partly for the idiotic use the plot made of Clara, and partly because I didn't really want to see that far back.
But since we did, I'm 100% open to it being changed, because I didn't like that plot and would be perfectly happy to have it.... shall we coin Johnsoned for the version of Jossed which retcons actual canon?
And even if it's a fairly recent thing to introduce an out-of-order Doctor (/eyedart at the Valeyard), it's not new for any Doctor to have a memory full of holes (/eyedart at Eight) or for the show to contradict itself (/eyedart at the three incompatible accounts of the events involving the Mary Celeste).
This is a show where it really isn't unusual for retcons to change the meaning of things (/stares at Genesis of the Daleks) or for big reveals to never be mentioned again ("half-human on my mother's side").
I mean I'm personally of the opinion that the answer to a messy setting is not to just tip the whole thing over and stomp around in it, but then I'm a worldbuilding addict who gets annoyed by the implied density of the planetoid in Alien not making sense
intellectually I get that not everything is a labor of love by people who value consistency and understand and value the source material, but I still wish everything was that
And pretty much every time, it's a writing thing, not a Doctor thing: characters and actors who deserve better than the story they got. Sometimes retcons make them better -- see that Eight minisode.
I have problems all the way back to Nine. But really the only reason I don't have the same about all the earlier Doctors is that they were done by the time I got into fandom and those discussions had been had already.
(Like. I hate that Nine left Adam back in his own time with a clickhole in his head, and I hate the "I only take special people with me" thing. I hate "doesn't she look tired?" I hate what happened to Donna. I hate the gun thing.
I hate cannibal!Master and the Statue of Liberty angel and River being reduced to a ghost whom Eleven doesn't acknowledge because his pain is more important. I haven't even been able to get through Twelve because of his constant negging.)
(I've only recently started to put together how it's more exhausting reacting to an open canon because things like this happen and it hits right now instead of being a past thing that no one can do anything about anymore.)
...I'm usually willing to play along with things that at least make sense (e.g. I was not happy about Donna but unfortunately the mindwipe made some sense, and about 1000 times more sense than Metacrisis!Donna) but some of them are just "what was even the point???"
...which he gets better about, sort of, but it takes him like a whole season, and then the next season is all about him being a bad influence on Clara?????
like... Eleven ignoring Riverghost was not great, but I felt like it was clearly a failing on his part, not a blithe statement on the priority of manpain but this of course may just be me fixficcing Eleven in realtime in my head
I mean, when it's a flaw in characterization, rather than the story going in a direction I don't like, I have a much harder time swallowing it //points at the talk about Twelve//
I think I've been going through stuff in re story construction and character arcs and "character growth," and the timing of the showrunners piling on The Doctor Is The Problem, Look How Toxic He Is, He Might Even Do Something Really Wrong, Let's Explore How Badly Messed Up He Can Be was unfortunate for me.
All this after I leaned on DW hard to learn how to value my differences from Regular People but still learn to have positive interactions with them and strive to make the world better.
I have mixed feelings about some of them (e.g. "doesn't she look tired")... ...I don't love it but I'm not sure I would have liked it much more if he just sort of huffed and left as an answer to what was basically cold-blooded mass murder.
that being said I think that's more likely with Eleven, who, for all that people accuse Moffat of exaggerating the Doctor's importance as a world-saving hero, I find is generally less likely than Ten to cook up quasi-supernatural punishments for everything he dislikes
...maybe I'm just blanking, but I don't remember anything quite like that with the Brigadier. >_> I mean they didn't always see eye to eye, obviously, but...
Pretty sure he wiped out a whole bunch of Silurians in an ep. And he was always ordering UNIT to fire on things despite Three constantly arguing with him about Shooting Things Bad.
And while it made sense to have an angry response to the cold-blooded murder, the plot eventually argued against "doesn't she look tired" as a smart or correct thing for the Doctor to have done (it undid the Britain's Golden Age future and paved the way for Saxon!Master),
but then Harriet Jones was killed off heroically instead of any actual discourse between her and the Doctor about what would have been right, which makes the whole thing pointless.
But going back to Ruth<Doctor, I feel like the NuDoctors have done even more jumping into bits of their own timeline than the classics did, and there was always a threat of accidentally changing big chunks of their own timeline. (And inconsistent explanations for when and why they remembered those incidents, but nvm.)
I really really doubt they're going to actually substitute her for a previous Doctor, which (in my head, right now) leaves Cool New Doctor Is Just Extra And The Timeline Will Have To Deal. XD
.......I guess in theory she could be shoved between 2 and 3 and say 3's memory of her was erased, and 3's banishment to Earth was decided on as a safer punishment than conscription?
It honestly makes very little sense that the Doctor hasn't been subjected to more cloning/transporter accidents/magic-tech duplication over the centuries. A Thomas Riker incident could explain it, especially since she has a transporter.
Idk what he's said aside from "real Doctor no parallel universe," but here's a wild theory. The Time Lords found out the Doctor would eventually destroy Gallifrey so they decided to kill him first. This Doctor is actually alt!Two. She escaped and that's why the Judoon are hunting her.
The effects of this have not yet propagated through the timeline (/handwave handwave it's more dramatic that way) but IF I WAS WRITING THIS she and Thirteen, after much drama, would eventually stabilize it so all incarnations, including her, are preserved.
...so part of my concern is that while there are things that could have been better about War Doctor, etc, it was ultimately a quasi-elegant solution to "the Doctor did a seemingly un-Doctor-ly thing" and was rooted in 9-11's emotional journey and capped off with a nice "even when you think you're doing your worst, maybe you're doing the best you could do"
............I'm not sure what this is mounting onto, emotionally, so to speak, or where it's going, and it kind of feels like it's just sort of... trying to rhyme with Moffat and RTD blindly? Like how "the Master destroyed Gallifrey!!!" rhymes with the whole art of s1-7 but in a sort of hollow "so you're just undermining what came before" way, IMO.
which, one of my criticisms of Moffat is that he often seems to take something RTD did and Do It More without stopping to think whether more is actually better
Valid concerns, yeah. Idek what I think about Gallifrey because it's been destroyed and undestroyed so many times at this point, but Moff's continual failure to tie his own stuff together (and the continual failure to call him on it
or hold him to any kind of story-structure accountability) does leave me with Concerns over how much that's baked into the production routine at this point.
I love this new Doctor's energy and want her to be securely and satisfyingly established, and there's so much we don't know yet and so many ways it could go wrong.
And the fact that she's the first black woman Doctor makes it vital that they get it right, even though it shouldn't have to because the show and the people it's worried about pleasing should have already been ready for this.
The War Doctor was a solution to Chris not coming back to play Nine though. It's important to remember that a lot of the writing calls there were practical cast availability.
Do we know if Chris wouldn't come back for that just because he'd already decided not to interface with the DW production machine again, or if he didn't like the story?
(I remember there were various thinkpieces about it at the time but the BBC was putting out false information about him while he was still the Doctor so)
but yeah given the constraints I honestly can't think of a much better solution than something at least similar to War Doctor and it was nice to have Hurt show up when we had the chance
The only practical uses were 'AngelBob talking allowed for some better exposition' (but honestly you could write around that), and the Series finale set-up.
Oh, the one thing Moffat has on the other two showrunners is 'fuck around with non-linear storytelling and make it work.' But yeah, the Angels were not great here.
Angels in Manhattan, barring the stupid thing I know the stupid thing, let's forget the stupid thing for a second, is great in all ways other than the stupid thing.
Fucking up the time stream around Manhattan to the point the Doctor can't go back there/then is a solid enough technobabble to work. And creating a paradox is a big enough event to make that make sense.
well I don't mean that aspect, so much as "now he can never see them again because eventually they'll be buried there" is a pretty weak argument in a show about time travel
Technobabble for finality is honestly fine, because if you try to make sense of literally any plot in any season from any showrunner your head explodes.
Give us that TARDIS set as the regular TARDIS you cowards.and I VERY DO NOT want them to go "lol she's finally a girl so they can be canonshipped now", but still, w000t!Alternatively she's lying, which would also explain away things.consolehelm it'll be old news because she's already the Doctor, no takebacks.intellectually I get that not everything is a labor of love by people who value consistency and understand and value the source material, but I still wish everything was thatbut this of course may just be me fixficcing Eleven in realtime in my headthat being said I think that's more likely with Eleven, who, for all that people accuse Moffat of exaggerating the Doctor's importance as a world-saving hero, I find is generally less likely than Ten to cook up quasi-supernatural punishments for everything he dislikes"that's murder."
She's all the Doctor's drama distilled from between the first and second incarnations XDDDwhich, one of my criticisms of Moffat is that he often seems to take something RTD did and Do It More without stopping to think whether more is actually betterso this feeling of "oh yeah they did that so I'll also do that" is making me very uneasyand it was nice to have Hurt show up when we had the chancethat and he made a hell of a lot more sense as written than 12 did, I'll say that muchI'd argue they didn't find the right groove until sometime in s8 or 9 when they started letting Capaldi have more control over the characterI mean that and it was a pretty painfully contrived excuse to get rid of the Ponds in a way that didn't really make a lot of sense