Doctor Who 2018 S11*

My wife, daughter (age 12) and I absolutely loved it. I put it on as a surprise because my daughter loves the old Dr. Who episodes, and she flipped out when she saw what it was, and that the new doctor was a woman.

 

Of course you can be a Time Lord if you're a Time Lady. There's Romana (both of her), the Rani, the President during 5th / 6th Doctor. Plenty of them kicking around during the reboot too.

 

Sure, I always assumed the "Mistress" move was to soften the blow in the run-up. But then why the fan reaction in the first place...

 

Great stuff.. and definitively feeding into the fandom for her. Big parenting win, right there.

 

Because a male non-violent, thinking hero stands out against the usual bunch running around shooting everybody. A female doing the same is just normal. If you want strong female characters, write some. It just shows surprising lack of originality and a paucity of ideas. The female Master was awful. The series was gradually turned from something the BBC didn't like and cancelled into a soap, with companions families tagged on like it was Eastenders or Hollyoaks. Turned into a different show. If you need a fictional character as a role model then you probably need to get out more. I have found the reboot to be less and less interesting as its gone on. I'll stick to the original.

 

I like to think Doctor Who succeeds less as "an institution", and more as "an entertainment". Longtime viewers tend to read too much into their tv choices. I think when they become ubiquitous, writers and showrunners look too often to what the public is saying about them, take their cues from that expectation, and water-down the "surprise" factor, going more for the "reassurance" angle.

 

You must be joking. Until the reboot, the show has always looked low budget to me. It's no where near as bad as you are making it out to be.

 

Episode 2 still largely dull but an improvement over last week I felt. Looked fantastic throughout and one or two scenes where I nearly felt she was the Doctor.

 

Agreed. The plot was rather basic and derivative - a quest through dangerous lands to win a (awfully convenient) prize.

On the up side, it looked terrific! The production values were way above average and the planet looked terrific.

But, the other problem I had with it was the badly overused magic screwdriver. It felt like it was whipped out every 3 - 5 mins to obtain some vital bit of information for the plot, or open doors or whatever. It really was too much. I wished the Doc relied on her wits more than her digital crutch.

 

Nice to see (hear!) that it was broadcast in 5.1 this week after episode 1 only being in stereo. Don't get a lot of the negative comments I've read on here and other forums, but everyone's entitled to their opinions. As for me I'll never stop watching Doctor Who as I've done since the first episode in November 1963.

 

Bring back Bessie!

 

I gave up after the first 20 minutes it was so badly written.


They reckon a human can last 15 seconds in space without a suit. So we are supposed to believe that they appeared in space and within 15 seconds, in a trillion to 1 shot, they are lucky enough to have some passing spaceship be in the exactly correct position to rescue them. Twice. Ridiculous. They would be dead (see Guardians of the Galaxy 1 for how to do this right).

Then one ship lands on the planet and then the other ship crash lands in the exact same position. The chances of that happening? Millions to one.

I am prepared to suspend belief in these types of things but not when it’s as stupid as this. It’s just bad writing.

 

You forget that the TARDIS is sentient and damn near omniscient. Even separated from the Doctor it makes sure that it gets her where she needs to be. It wasn’t an accident that landed them in space at that particular point in time. It was basically saying, “ You will find me but you need to help these people first”.

 

OK....

 

I did like the new theme version because it's very close to a version of the classic theme that I like the best. Not exactly the same, but very close.

 

You say that sarcastically, but it is simply canon that that is how the Tardis behaves. It almost never sent him where he wanted to go. The Doctor was homing in on the Tardis signal and it sent her floating in space where she would be quickly picked up. You call it bad writing because of probability but these coincidences where he/she is in the right place at the right time isn’t without precedent in the series, and are certainly more than plausible when the main character has a thinking machine that can see both forwards and backwards in time.

 

Perhaps they've all got Infinite Improbability drives. Was there a fella with two heads?

 

No offence but that's a huge cop-out. So any bad writing can be explained by this TARDIS out. That's just silly. It's bad enough they rely on the sonic screwdriver to solve plot holes and get them out of a hole but the TARDIS thing is going a step further. It is bad writing as they have to rely on these things to prop up the (badly) written plot. It was like in Russel T's run where he was very good at set-ups but then had no idea how to resolve the mess he had put the Doctor/world in, so we have some ridiculous ending and resolution, like the Doctor becoming jesus or whatever.

 

Given that the Master was going around stealing bodies instead of regenerating, they easily could have had him steal a woman's body rather than the regeneration into "Missy."

 

We had cable issues, so I missed the first half of this episode. But why in the hell do robots need shooting galleries? I mean, that wasn't just stupid, it added nothing to the plot. And we didn't need her "I hate guns" speech. If we learned anything from He-Man it was that it's always ok to blast robots. That's what they're there for. Also, these robots seemed to have been programmed to shoot by Imperial Storm Troopers.

 

The thing is, look at how close we are to AI in the real world, and we can't even travel to Mars. The TARDIS would pretty much have to have AI.

 

That was necessary to differentiate her from all the hundreds of other shows where the female lead goes round shooting everybody all the time.

Doesn't fit the agenda. Moffat can't write women. They all turn out the same; annoying.

 

Nevertheless, this was verified in “The Doctor’s wife”. Week after week, The Doctor conveniently lands in a scenario where he is desperately needed. You can either chalk it up to extreme coincidence, or you could take it as the Tardis’ doing as the most logical explanation. It’s a certainly better one than what we get with Murder She Wrote and why she is always present when there is a murder, or Kolchak: The Night Stalker where he always bumps into monsters... which is nothing.