I used to be a big fan, from Tom Baker on. But BBC-America has filled its programming the past week with Nu-Who and I try watching it, but I find myself drifting off.
It isn’t just the baddies, though Daleks and Cybermen overstayed their welcome decades ago. And I like the Doctors and companions, though Jodie’s staff is on the overstuffed side. It’s just that the adventures are more talk than adventure, and they bore me.
Chris Chibnal tries to stuff too much into an episode, so it ends up with too many scenes of the Doctor explaining things.
I loved the Eccleston & Tennant years, and both Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi had some great episodes, but I am finding Jodie Whittaker’s run to be so boring. I barely remember anything about her first season. I used to download the episodes the day they aired on the BBC back in the Tennant era because I couldn’t wait for them to air here, but now I have about 4-5 episodes of the current season waiting on the DVR for me to watch.
I did solve one problem for myself, which is that I couldn’t understand at least half the dialog due to accents and speed of talking – I got through most of Capaldi’s episodes somehow but Whittaker is too much for me. So I turned on subtitles. Now I have discovered that most of the show is not worth the trouble of reading it. So I’m just waiting for the next series and the new show runner.
Don’t feel bad. I loved the original Dr. Who, especially Tom Baker, but lost interest when the production values got higher. There was something pleasingly quirky about the original material that, in my humble opinion, got lost later on. I haven’t watched in years.
Matt Smith started losing me and the Capaldi & Whittaker years have been pretty bad sadly. I mainly blame the showrunners though.
Tennant was probably the best of all Doctors, better even then Tom Baker and that was my Doctor as a kid.
My late brother would say, that for him Tennant worked because he reminded him of Tom Baker (our “original Doctor”) insofar as the balance of danger, fun, cleverness, wisdom, and nuttiness, and that in the cases of other Doctors some of those aspects got raised to the detriment of others, or even foisted over to some companions.
His and my issue with NuWho as time went by was that the Doctor became tangled up in the Superman Problem. That they had to keep bringing up ever greater threats to overcome and feats to achieve and after a while you get trapped in an escalating spiral that stops impressing you (especially if you begin undoing the previously accumulated background…)
I will say that today’s New Year’s episode was a step up.
I loved the singular Eccleston year, and really wished he’d stayed around for more. His working class/PTSD from the Time Wars version of The Doctor brought a feeling to the character that no one else has ever brought. I’d have liked to see more of that, before they went back to the more Optimistic & Slightly Goofy Doctor.
Really, really liked Eccleston and wish that they had given him another era or two.
Tennant was, by far, my favorite Doctor, eclipsing Baker with ease.
I completely agree. Tennant managed/manifested a shitload of characteristics of the Doctor without it seeming forced or “wrong”; no one else has been able to approach that multi-faceted aspect which is, IMO, so very, very important to the character.
Kinda in the same boat as the OP. I have this whole season on my DVR, and haven’t watched a single one. I hate to say it, since I started watching Doctor Who back in the Tom Baker years, but it’s lost something since Moffatt left. I really, really wanted Jodie to succeed, just to shut up all the incel “Waaahhh! The Doctor can’t be a girl!!!” fanbois.
But three seasons in, and she hasn’t really sold me on her version of the Doctor. To much lovey-huggy, too much “Team TARDIS”, too much Manic Pixie Dream Time Lord; she hasn’t yet shown the character’s depth. The Doctor has always had a certain core of arrogance - he knows that he’s the smartest one in any room, and every now and again, he lets it show.
Which is not by any means to say that a woman can’t do that;’ Jo Martin nailed it perfectly in “Fugitive of the Judoon”, which is why she’s my pick to replace Jodie when she leaves.
Jodie and Chibnall have had some interesting episodes - “Rosa”, for example, and “Demons of the Punjab”. But even those, I think, were carried more by Bradley Cooper and Mandip Gill.
I place most of the blame on Chibnall’s showrunning; but unfortunately, Jodie bears some responsibility, too.
I must whole-heartedly disagree with you, here. In my mind, Peter Capaldi is the finest actor I’ve ever seen in the role, and I’ve been watching the show since the Tom Baker years. I periodically go back to watch the his war monologue from “The Zygon Inversion” (and wonder why he and Jenna Coleman did not win BAFTAs for that episode"). The short “Hello, sweetie” scene opposite Alex Kingston in “The Husbands of River Song” is a master class in non-verbal acting.
It’s true some of his episodes were pure stinkers -::cough, cough:: “Kill The Moon”, “Robot of Sherlock”, cough:: - but he also had some of the most compelling, interesting, and thought-provoking stories in the canon; I’m thinking of “The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion”, “The Woman Who Lived”, “World Enough And Time/The Doctor Falls”, and especially “Heaven Sent”, a profound meditation on grief and guilt.
Not to mention that he had one of the best versions of the Master, in Michelle Gomez’ Missy., which led to one of the greatest villian scenes in the show, when John Sim’s Master engaged in snark-on-snark combat with Gomez’ Missy.
For the record, he’s the one who wanted out because he didn’t like the environment and culture on set. He’s only recently come back around. (And, yes, I do hope having the same showrunner when he was on doesn’t change that.)
You’re not the only one. I still haven’t managed to find the time to watch the rest of “Flux” (the current season episodes). I’ve watched two out of six of them and nearly fallen asleep during both.
It’s not that I don’t like Jodie’s Doctor–I just don’t like the overly complicated storylines, and I don’t care for any of her companions (Graham was the only one I liked, and they got rid of him). I really don’t like the “Tardis Fam” thing, because it puts too much emphasis on the companions and too little on the Doctor).
I loved Ten’s run, most of Eleven’s, and almost all of Twelve’s (I agree with Slow_Moving_Vehicle that the speech from “The Zygon Inversion” was magnificent, and IMO one of the finest bits from all of Who). I feel kind of sorry for Jodie because she’s getting screwed by lousy stories.
That would’ve been a hell of a thing. 
While there’s a lot I like about the new doctor—like the actors—overall I just don’t find it interesting.
I started watching it around the time of the Galactica reimagining and I was expecting a rewrite along those lines, but it struck me as fundamentally still a kids’ show.
And a few of the aspects really get on my nerves—
I basically quit soon after Blink because that story was so much better written than the rest of the series that i decided it wasn’t ever going to be my taste.
I’m a bit of an exception in that I couldn’t stand Missy - I found her “evil Mary Poppins” personal overly calculated and unspeakably twee (plus, I hated her for killing Osgood). I preferred John Simm in the role. Whereas Gomez’s character came across as someone only pretending to be crazy, Simm’s Master seemed genuinely unhinged.
The Universe is no longer a massive, unending cosmos. The Whoniverse is now like planets in the Star Trek universe: it’s the size of a city block. There are now universes outside of the universe.
In the Flux storyline, there is now all the sudden a race of dog soldiers that are supposed to look after every individual on Earth. They surround the planet in a protective gridlock that blocks out the sun, and somehow nobody notices. In turn, the Sontarans manage to ambush all 7 billion plus dog ships, take them over, and nobody notices.
There’s now the Division, which operates from outside the universe to manipulate it. This universe that is billions of light years wide and takes millenia to travel can easily be controlled by an old lady, who then gets dissolved by blue-headed aliens, with no fight or fanfare. They not only introduce an impossible scenario, but they discard it in 2 minutes. What was the fucking point?
The Doctor doesn’t even technically save the universe. The two blue-headed aliens take her to their master, who turns out to be pissed that they didn’t spring him from his imprisonment, and so he kills them. Let’s see, my minions are about to destroy the universe with a time flux and bring me my archenemy, all in my honor, but they didn’t spring me from exile soon enough, so bugger them. It’s like the producers decided their content will be whatever the most outlandish shit they can think of and leave it to intern writers to supply continuity.
I liked the final Missy episodes ( World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls). To me, it was an interesting (if somewhat unrealistic) use of timey-wimey tenets (pun intended) to drive the story.
Similar to “Blink”, I thought it was an interesting story that takes advantage of the fact that the Doctor travels through time and can go anywhere and anytime he wants and uses it to tell a story that is somewhere other than Cardiff.
I actually liked Jodie’s Doctor, but didn’t particularly care for most of the stories. Like much of “New Who” it suffers from some of the same problems:
I must have something wrong - I’ve found it boring since 1963.
British Sci-fi is so…British.
Whittaker was much more of The Doctor in The Flux and the New Year’s special, finally finding a voice that had thread with the past with its own new quirks. The Flux however still suffered from the combination of a story that was so overstuffed that the writers could not keep track of it, and a lack of any chemistry between the Companions and each other or The Doctor. Supporting players did better.
The special was better until the reveal that we have another companion in love with The Doctor. Especially off partly as “The Fam” dynamic gives it an incestuous vibe but more because there is NO romantic vibe between them to date. More parent or older sib at most. Or pet and owner.
Supporting players and their Groundhog Day growth though were well played. A bit of work to set up that Ex terminated therapy joke though. Those two would be great companions!
Whittaker deserved a better show runner.