Doctor Who 2018 S11*

This is true. In 'The Doctor's Wife', the Doctor says to the woman Idris (who has absorbed the 'soul' of the TARDIS) that "You never took me where I wanted to go" and Idris responds "No but I always took you where you needed to go".

 

I would say that we're not at all close AGI or Artificial General Intelligence. This is the specific term used to differentiate human level (general) intelligence from narrow, domain specific AI, of which there are countless examples today. AGI is still way beyond reach...

I agree it was pretty stupid, but if I had to be a script apologist, I could argue that target practice was required in order to calibrate robot targeting systems with the weapons they use. Of course these robots skipped that class entirely, given that they couldn't hit the side of barn!

I mean, how hard is it in editing not to make the targets look like sitting ducks (and thus make the shots appear harder)?

 

The scientists did write that they were trying to sabotage the weapons and monsters they built before they could be used. Maybe they succeeded in misaligning the robot’s targeting systems. Just an idea.

 

Not as far beyond reach as time travel...

 

And a thinking AI would have put them on the planet, not stranded them in space with 15 seconds to live and just hoping the pilot of the space ships would a) see them b) decided to help them c) manage to save them in time.

A thinking AI just reinforces how stupid a plot it was.

 

The TARDIS doesn’t “hope” they will pick them up, because it is aware of all past and future events it KNOWS that they will be picked up. If it sent them to the planet then the male racer at minimum would have died. If he died then the Doctor would never have survived the rags without his cigar. It’s all cause and effect. We clearly have different opinions on what constitutes a good script. You seem to think a plot is bad if it doesn’t spoon feed you all of the answers. I prefer some wiggle room so I can fill in some blanks for myself.

 

The TARDIS just used to be a ship and one that was faulty at that. Giving it supernatural powers to cover gaping big plot holes is just poor writing. It's pretty much up there with the Infinite Improbability Drive that Douglas Adams created as a joke. There was still lots of positives regardless and it certainly looked fantastic. My biggest issue is that for a planet that's designed to kill no-one really seemed in that much danger. From early on you kind of knew no one was doing to die and it was all resolved rather simply. Though that was always my worry with Chris Chibnall, he writes okay Doctor Who but never anything truly outstanding. Be interesting to see how the other writers do.

 

I liked it!

 

Regardless, “The Doctor’s Wife” was written precisely to explain the plot hole as to why the Doctor is always at the right place at the right time through strange coincidence. It’s now canon. If you’re going to blame anybody for that, don’t blame Chibnall, blame Neil Gaiman.

 

Well, the show used to be a LOT of things. They have retconned a ton of stuff since it was rebooted 13 years ago. It’s best to treat everything from the original series as things that happened in a parallel universe.

 

As I said, I missed the start!

 

My issue surrounding your issue was that all the water was supposed to be infused with flesh eating microbes. One wonders how said flesh eating microbes could survive on a planet devoid of any animal life to sustain them. It's silly little things like that (and the others already mentioned), that show that very little emphasis on logical thought is put into these scripts.

 

And the fact that they were splashing though some water, granted a minimal amount but it was there, in the tunnels below the surface.

 

So the show has to crawl to a standstill to go into an in depth explanation of the biological processes of every alien lifeform before it can move on? Give me a break. That isn’t a plot hole because it isn’t essential to the plot. You can come up with your own theories about that if you gave it two seconds thought, one of which it is a well known fact that terrestrial microbes can lie dormant for literally decades if not thousands of years before being activated again.

 

No, the show just doesn't need to make stupid statements that instantly trigger a WTF? reaction in the audience (which it did for me). There was absolutely no need for it. They could have just said that the water is highly acidic or toxic and any exposure would lead to severe burns - done!

 

But that would just lead to an equal amount of over thinking. At least microbes are capable of reproducing themselves. How would an invasion force be able to make enough acid or poison to contaminate an entire world’s water supply to the point of near instant death the moment you touch it? If anything your idea just dumbs the whole premise down for the lowest common denominator to understand. It certainly doesn’t create a more efficient or realistic alternative.

 

I think some of the complaints so far fall under the category of "nitpicking" or "looking for things to complain about". To be fair the show is not perfect but some of the examples given don't even rate a mention.

 

I don't think that's fair as most of these things are major plot points. The scripts appear to be rushed and not thought out. To buy into any sci-fi show you have to trust the makers to retain some internal logic or else it all falls apart.

 

Both episodes would get 7/10 from me. But, allowing that it's Chibnall, I give them an 8/10. He's done better than I would have thought, and Jodie is just wonderful, even when the script isn't.

Production quality is very good. Whoever said it looked cheap - wow, you're wrong!

The supporting cast are strong, and I like the time they are given to grow as characters.

 

No, eddiel is right about being nitpicky. These things that are being complained about are NOT major plot points, they are merely incidental. We don’t need to know why the robots have a shooting range to follow the story. We don’t need to know the dietary needs of microbes in the sea to follow the story. We don’t even need to know how they got picked up so fast to follow the story (as if Doctor Who has never cheesed its way out of a cliffhanger before now. Right.) You may not like how they occur, you may find it lazy writing, but not knowing these things in and of themselves does not disrupt the flow of the storyline, which is what a true plot hole would do.

 

You may consider it nitpicking and in the end it's subjective to a degree but certain elements pulled me out of the story which I never consider a good thing. Every story ever written is probably flawed in some way but the key is while you're watching or reading it you don't really notice. I would agree with a previous post I'd give both stories a 7/10 but with a little more care in the script writing they could have been a 9/10.

 

Episode 3 was appalling tripe.

 

Swiped it from Quantum Leap, sounds like.

 

Well today’s episode was pretty much an episode of Quantum Leap. Getting lots of love on Tweeter but did absolutely nothing for me.

 

I think the tighter continuity focus on ST:TOS raised the bar for a lot of other fantasy shows which were written as if kids never asked questions, so don't think too much about it ("Now this is a big action scene, so when you fly the space ship, be sure and punch a whole lot of buttons, and keep pulling that lever over there..."). Who got locked into its' own reputation and tropes as anything else would when it made it easier to "just do cool things" if all you had to depend on was the budget and the imagination of the writers, real-world consequences be irrelevant. The backstory was never airtight to begin with in the first place.

It just seems pointlessly critical to take a 40-year-old series to task because a viewer recognizes a stylistic change from one decade to the next ("Well, DUH! K-9 was always stupid, we were just stupid enough to go with it back then!"). But you have to have some constants of continuity that give more seasoned viewers some idea that they have an affinity for the show this used to be (which I suppose, is why the Enterprise isn't a cube or something). But you have to remember, they're putting those legacy bits and traditional plot themes in their for your benefit, not so The Doctor would not be able to exist in the Real World without them. So, if your TARDIS doesn't "think" like the TARDIS of yore...I think you could cut them a little slack, and just be patient and see where their story takes you.