Actually, thinking about this a bit more, I guess there’s some thematic/symbolical connections to be made - the Doctor as the policeperson of the universe and the TARDIS stuck as an early 20th C police telephone box.
OB
OB: Okay, good point. If that’s the case, that whole sub story needed a better link back to the main story. It didn’t work for me.
Ah on the resolution of the (other) Doctor. I’m not sure that works for me.
I guess I’m with HMHW’s summary. Too much crammed into it for us to accept without any foreshadowing. I agree it takes away from what the Doctor did. And I agree that Jodie could do it.
This is why I have wanted them to go smaller, not bigger so that they don’t step on what has come before. Matt Smith’s Doctor said he felt the end of his life. No more regenerations. (One of the great moments by Moffat, in terms of counting the regenerations.) It was a big deal for the Time Lords to give him another set. This cheapens that.
I’m a RPGer and this is what I feel like happened. Chibnell told the actors to go make characters for a fun, breezy, basic campaign. They all go off and do that. Then, Chibnell changes his mind, or he wasn’t honest, and creates a series of dark adventures that are big, not the small things they were told. Chibnell then tells them they can’t modify their characters. So they all have their personalities and characters fleshed out for a fun game and get put into something completely different. That’s how it feels to me.
Oh and destroying Gallifrey, when Jodie’s Doctor was trying to find, and doing it off screen, was also cheap, imo. I also have a tough time believing that Rassilon wouldn’t squish the Master, given what happened with Tennant’s Doctor. Sure, Simm’s Master fought it, but he wasn’t going to win against the council. He just wanted to show he wasn’t going to be used.
That’s why I think this Master is the regeneration after Simm’s Master, as he’s angry and wants revenge on the Time Lords. I’m also got the impression that catching up to the point in the timeline where the Time Lords gave him the constant beating of his hearts would end that. I thought that’s how Missy could go for redemption in the first place, because nothing to drive her insane?
But I pick nits and think about things a lot, especially with things I love.
Thanks for the discussion!
The finale felt to me like the kind of stories Roy Thomas used to sometimes write for Marvel Comics in the 70s. A story that had nothing to do with the characters as they exist in the present day, but served only to fill in backstory. A story whose only purpose was to explain or modify 50-year-old continuity. The problem with those kind of stories is that they only appeal to folks who are deeply into long-term franchise history.
In this case, I’m not sure how much of it was needed, and I object to a lot of its implications. First of all, was there really any need to answer the burning question “How did regeneration start?” Is that really something anyone had been wondering about all these years? Time Lords are aliens, they can do weird stuff. That’s all the explanation you need.
That the Doctor was the one who started it all, and has been manipulated into being the universe’s watchdog/protector since the early days, seriously undermines the Doctor’s character, as Half Man Half Wit says. Rather than the Doctor being a rebel, violating Gallifrey’s laws and rejecting its culture because of a fierce desire for justice and a deep-seated hatred of oppression, we now see the Doctor as a mere pawn, doing the Time Lords’ bidding the whole time without even realizing it.
And I really don’t like the notion of the Doctor as The Chosen One; the one who was special and super-powerful right from the start, set apart since birth from everyone else. The Doctor, in my opinion, works much better as an ordinary person who got fed up with the Time Lords’ restrictions and decided one day to make a difference.
Very well said. I didn’t need regeneration explained. Further, just like too much alien intervention takes away from human agency, having regenerations from another source takes away from Gallifreyan ingenuity.
The best book I read back in the 80s/90s was speculation on how the Gallifreyans created regeneration. Now, could it have come from someplace else? Sure but when you have a race that already had advanced space travel, time travel, and enemies that it fought back (vampires, daemons, guardians, eternals, and others) how is regeneration asking that much of them to have figured out?
Yes, the Doctor being an unwitting pawn flies in the face of established lore. The second Doctor to the third Doctor was all due his having to ask for help because it was too big. The Doctor’s exile on earth. Indeed, it also doesn’t make sense because several stories are some Time Lord giving him a mission (Genesis of the Daleks, Brain of Morbius, some third Doctor stories) so was that a different group? The same group? And I can’t see every single thing coming from this group. I mean, if they could do that, how did they not stop the Master??
Ugh.
Thanks for the discussion!
Yeah, that annoyed me, too. There’s entirely too many Chosen Ones around these days; the Doctor always was different in the sense that she wasn’t chosen, but herself chose to defy convention. Plus, there’s an underlying theme of celebrating the ordinary in much of the show (‘900 years of time and space, and I’ve never met anybody who wasn’t important’)—having the Doctor be born special contravenes that. It’s not the classic hero’s journey with some capital-D Destiny always guiding the way, but about a person making their own destiny because they decided to do what’s right.
I was thinking that the Irish story and The Division were threads to be explored next season.
Seems like we’re due for a reduction in companion count: Doctor Who star Bradley Walsh 'QUITS his role in the BBC sci-fi show after two series' | Daily Mail Online
Both Bradley Walsh (Graham) and Tosin Cole (Ryan) have announced that they will not return to their roles after the Christmas special this year, leaving only Mandip Gill’s Yaz as companion. Well, here’s to hoping this will facilitate some tighter storytelling.
WHAT.
I am not really a Doctor Who fan, and only watch it because of my other half, but Ryan was one of the few things I really enjoyed about this cast of characters.
Bleah
Ugh Yaz is the worst. I can’t stand her. I’d have been happy if it were just The Doctor & Graham.
Yaz could have been an interesting character - using her police training to make observations and deductions.
I *am *a Doctor Who fan, and my favorite of the companions by far is Graham. I will miss him if he goes. Ryan is too wooden, and Yaz hasn’t really developed a personality.
Maybe the Doc should ditch all three of them and try again with a new one.
Yeah, I was clarifying that I know my opinion doesn’t really count.
And I should know better than to get into love/hate companion discussions!
I cannot stand the actor who currently plays the Master. He does not have the cult leader presence of John Simm or the cold poisonous personality of Michelle Gomez. He looks like some trust fund brat who projects absolutely no menace whatsoever but thinks he does. Regenerate him now.
Oh, I like him, but I think he could have been another Time Lord than the Master and it would have been more effective. I guess not many are out there, but if they can fabricate the negative-number Doctors like they just did, they can fabricate anything.
In fact, trust fund brat is not a bad start. He could have been, much like the Time Lords, arrogant and full-of-themselves and he learned the truth of the Doctor.
I kept looking at my wife saying, “Remember, that’s Missy from the last few season.”
:rolleyes:
I despise him. He’s creepy and scenery-chewing and has no nuance whatsoever. I liked the actor as Waris Hussein in the movie about the First Doctor, but in this one I just felt like he needed a bath and a nice long nap. He didn’t come across as a genius or a world-class schemer as the Master should, but rather as a petulant bully who was pissed because somebody took his toys away.
I do hope he blew up. I know the Master always finds a way to come back, but please, please, get a new actor.
Just watched it finally, and yeah, not a fan of the new Master, either. He’s so over the top, I assumed that they created the “destroyed Gallifrey” set by letting him chew on it. Granted, John Simm could be hammier than a pig farmer’s convention, but he was also good at conveying the woundedness and rage that drove the Master, and made him, if not a sympathetic, then at least a comprehensible villain.
I just watched it again with the subtitles on as the music and effects masked some of the dialogue. As the citadel explodes the Master says something like ‘quick all of you, through here’. So we probably haven’t seen the last of him and his time lord cybermen.
I’m also not quite clear on what the reason is for the timelords to delete the Doctor. Was this a one-time thing, or do they do this periodically? I originally thought the latter, but now I’m not quite sure this was actually intended. But really, why put this whole thing into motion? Why conceal her history from herself?
The Time Lords aren’t supposed to interfere with history. Except for a secret elite squad who are tasked to interfere with history. The things that they do are so secret that they have to occasionally flashy thing each other.