Did it meet your expectations? How did the lore retcons work for you? What happened to the Osirians? Answer below.
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Oh. Uh. Nevermind.
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(And, uh, if you get a physical copy of 1 and 2, I left you a message on the fork. Cheers.)
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Bart Simpson
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@Anastasia Cousins btw, if you haven't gotten Boulevard 2 yet, there's new 13 Day Republic stuff in it.
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Faction Paradox, duh
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@Anastasia Cousins I believe what the BBC technically said is that in comparison to other shows it's going well. In terms of raw numbers, which they've released, it's continuing to drop.
@LauraBatham Disney+ will, from time to time, put out rankings on how well shows did relative to other shows, and from that plus sometimes putting out numbers for specific shows, you can bound the numbers on their shows generally. I can't recall the specifics, but the two part premier did worse than some of their old back catalogue shows on the week it was released, iirc. (fwiw, as a complete bystander, with no inside information, my guess is that Disney isn't thrilled with this, but they're probably putting in less than 3m per episode, so it's relatively cheap original programming for them compared to their Star Wars or Marvel stuff, so they'll probably consider it worth it.)
@FH2104 Also releases on midnight on iPlayer.
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But they won't. They've had chances to, they resolutely refuse to move the show forward. So this is the next best option, a new wilderness years.
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Oh, I think all the criticisms this article has are stupid. I just think the show needs to go on hiatus for the time being in order to get away from the same old creatives controlling it and to bring in new, fresh voices.
People like Briggs basically got their start as fan creators and then pulled the ladder up behind them - very rarely looking into new talent outside of the stable of writers they already know and trust.
Davies seems creatively drained, he decided that the best way to attract new viewers was to do a sequel to a story from the 70s.
Rogue is the first episode not written by someone who was involved in S3 since Haunting.
Cornell, Gatiss, Moffat, Davies, all of these people wrote for the VNAs at one point - and the VNAs had an open submission policy - anyone could submit work to them. The EDA's started out with one as well! Nobody has a general open submission policy these days, and Big Finish only opens submissions for a restricted, specific, thing once a year, accepting one winner. (Obverse and some smaller presses will do so for an anthology every once in a while, but they tend to take far more than just one person.)
Hell, this doesn't even mention people like Cook or GRussell, Morris or Magrs, or the ton of people at BF other than Briggs. Doctor Who has been captured by a generation of fans who didn't have any competition for writing for it in the 90s, worked to bring it back, and since then have been very selective in who they allow into the good ol' boys club, making it hyper competitive, when they themselves were given so many opportunities that people these days lack. Are some people making it? Yes. Some are. But it's damn harder than it should be. And the easiest way to fix this, imo, would be a 10 year or so hiatus. Which would also solve the problem of the failing creative energy on the part of the show.
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Yay! Really exciting news if true. (Though my suspicion is that it'd go back to just being a BBC production without Disney funding - Moffat has been very clear that it makes the BBC a ton of money in merch.)
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Can't discuss it here. :) Just figured you'd see a ping here fastest and I'd be able to figure things out from there.
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@Anastasia Cousins Do you have a print copy of Boulevard 1? Or do you know someone who does? Neither myself, Scrooge, nor TheChampionOfTime do.
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Yeah, the episode, lmao.
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"It's not unreasonable to imagine the scanner showed alternate universe regenerations"
Well, aside from it being complete and total speculation that has no support in the text, and when we had an explanation for this not 3 episodes earlier. ("Higher dimensional life form, complex space time event")
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If there are clear explanations for them, yes?
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"But doesn't she die the second she leaves the Tardis?"
No? Where are you getting that? Hell Bent rather suggests the opposite - "the long way round", and expanded media explicitly confirms the opposite.
"Death is a universal theme we can all engage with. Becoming Doctor Who is not."
Sure it is. Anyone can become the Doctor, it's a promise. You don't even have to be real to be the Doctor.
"Why have the Time Lords even created a prison where it's possible to escape without doing the only thing they put him in there to do in the first place? Either through cleverness or through death?"
Confession dials are already existing Time Lord technology that they've perverted for this purpose?
"Surely there must have been a first time he did the circuit round the place, so with no "BIRD" clue how did he know what to do? How are his dry clothes there the first time? Why don't they disappear if the rooms re-set? Why doesn't he use the shovel instead of his fist? Why, when he says "The Tardis: just one confession away", does he not just confess to something really mundane? Again, why are the Time Lords even giving him so many—or even any—clues about how to escape when the only reason he's there is so they can extract information?"
So technically the closed energy loop is about the rooms within the confession dial itself, rather than the boundary or the things brought into the dial. He explained all this in a DWM article. One of the first loops involves him setting up those hints, they're not from the Time Lords. Another one of those first loops involves him leaving his clothes there for the next version to find, inadvertently. Some of the loops involve him using a shovel. And it's a specific confession, not a general one. He's explained all of this, these plot holes simply aren't there. But, moreover, people don't ask these things. You ask them. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink, people can always find flaws if they're looking for them. Again, eppur si muove.
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"might I suggest then that cherry-picking which people you consider as valid and which ones you don't may lead to a skewed result"
Who said I'm cherry-picking? Your criticism was that "critics" wasn't the same as "experts" and my response was that I'm not including random people who aren't published as "critics", so I have a further metric. Damned if I do, damned if I don't.
"I find the idea that "this isn't about Clara's death, it's about her ascension" such a silly one I think it's safer just to pretend I've never read it. She's human, so it's the same thing"
She stole a TARDIS from Gallifrey, has an irregular heartbeat, a companion, is unable to die, and is on the run from the Time Lords. She's the Doctor. It's about her ascending into her role as the Doctor. This is all very blatant.
"Proving that in Moffat's Who, nothing can ever be sad, because nothing is ever over."
So the last time companion departures were sad was Adric? This is silly. Come now. But certainly it's intentional that in Moffat's work the Doctor is able to keep sadness at bay - he has a time machine. It would be a moral abomination for him not to.
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"but them voting for the same thing over and over again is still not evidence it's true. It's probably the same people voting every time! So of course it's going to be the same result."
This would surely be the case over a short period of time, not over a period of years.
'And while I'm sure Steven Moffat would be grateful to you for the admirable defence, you cannot seriously be telling me that something that is part of a room should "clearly and obviously" be subject to different rules because it's also part of the boundary.'
YES!?! Boundaries are often times radically different from internal behavior. (0,1) contains no integers. [0,1] does. The behavior at the boundary is markedly different. This isn't even slightly controversial, I'm just astounded that someone actually thinks there's a point to be made here.
"But I do appreciate the notion that the readers of DWM are so unfamiliar with the Whittaker era that they didn't bother to vote for the Capaldi ones either."
"Uninterested" is the word, not "unfamiliar".
"Yes, I saw it, and yes, I thought it was an error on Moffat's part for featuring Clara in this at all."
So did you think Moffat was mistaken for doing the thing he did, or did you not understand his reasoning? These two explanations are at odds with each other. If it's the first, well, "eppur si muove". And this trilogy isn't about her death or about her avoiding death per se, but about her ascension. It would be weird for her not to haunt the narrative given that context. If it's the second, I reiterate my previous point, he had a specific reason to do so, a reason you said you didn't understand, not merely that you disagreed with.
"Many experts are not critics. And very many critics are not experts."
I mean, sure? I'm not including any random guy with a podcast, I'm talking about people who engage with Doctor Who and/or media in general critically for a living. Often with degrees in relevant subjects or published works.
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"Given he went to the lengths of giving it a specific room number, I don't think expecting it to follow the same rules as the other rooms that he invented is an outrageous affront to logic."
You are, once again, confusing being in the dial with being part of the dial's boundary. The room is in the dial. The wall is part of the dial's boundary. These are two distinct things that are clearly and obviously different. It's confusing (0,1) with [0,1].
"I certainly can't fathom why he felt the need for the almost unbearable mind palace scenes with Clara in the Tardis"
You did watch Hell Bent, right? It's very clear in Hell Bent, the juxtaposition of the Clara in his mind vs the Clara in reality.
'But I don't share your industrial-scale faith in the idea that "everybody thinks this, therefore it must be right".'
I certainly don't believe this? I gave a variety of data points, general popularity is only one of them.
"For one thing, yes, it won the overall DWM poll, but it actually didnt win the individual Capaldi vote. So had the vote been formatted differently, it wouldn't have even made the shortlist."
Aka "Yes, it's the most popular episode of all time, but when you have a smaller sample size of voters by pairing the episode with the least popular Doctor in recent memory you can get some weird results."
"Critics, I mean. They can think what they think, and get paid to think it, and then to write it. I enjoy reading criticism but don't believe the purpose of it is to be taken as fact."
Shockingly, when experts tend to agree on things, that makes that thing more likely to be true.
"And I'm not sure what you mean by the "obsessive section of the fanbase", and suspect I don't want to."
Oh, r/Gallifrey. It kept winning their "best episode" polls by such an extreme extent that they had to ban it to give anything else a chance.