Doesn't surprise me. They use proper English, after all! ;-)



Personally, I liked Kerblam! (about robots in dilivery serivce) and It takes you away was almost good (if Doctor hadn't spill the whole story and chewed explaination about Antiuniverse or whatever halfway through). Everything else, as I've said, seemed very mediocre. Ridden with plotholes and character motivation made little sense. Like those guys from finale that literally had godlike power of creation, for some reason decided that some dude from teleporation accident is God.

I'm sorry, but on every level, the latest season needed more of this.

To be honest, as non-native English speaker, I could barely understand Graham's and Ryan's pronounciation.

The show was always "preachy". It started as an educative show. The reboot was always moralist and progressive. It showed exemples of very mixed couples (human and cat in "Gridlock" !) seen as normal and homosexuality or bisexuality being a non-issue in advanced societies, in general in very throwaway lines. You had "a man who never would". And then you got awesome stuff like :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLZOFZggG4w

But now, the preach got so basic, so kid-like and consensual. A long straighforward speech about good managers having to care for their employees or else they are not good managers and the employees are sad ? Flat expositions about how being bad is not good because it's wrong ? Lectures delivered like saturday cartoon conclusions mid-episode, finger lifted... I imagine how the "man who never would" would have been conveyed in this season.

A dimension of elegance and cleverness is gone. And I attribute it to the authors' levels. They have less to say, and they have less means to say it. It becomes contrieved, cheap, and simply poor.

So yeah, for me it's not (as I've read here or there) that the show is more "politically correct" or "militant" than it used to be. Since the reboot (I'm not a old school whovian), I always remember it as such, and loved it for it. But it ceased to be as classy and intelligent in the way it does it.

Again, it's not preachy when you show things as part of the norm, IMO. It felt like a brick to the face, as in "LOOK AT ME! I'M DOING SOMETHING COMPLETELY PROGRESSIVE AND YOU MUST LOVE IT BECAUSE I SAID IT IS AWESOME!!!" It's not the progressive nature of the show. That never bothered me. It's being hit in the face with the sledgehammer of progressive thought that makes the show feel like they are preaching. Also the proxy for Donald Trump (played by Christopher Noth) was a bit over the top as well. Weeeell, not over the top, but unnecessary.
I think your last line sums it up quite well for me. It's not that it's PC, it's been that since New Who started. It's that they are about as subtle as a brick to the nose in showing it, and are in fact featuring it as plot points.

Eh..... I was asleep what did I miss or something..... Screw this I'm going back to sleep or play a game or I dunno?

F#CK!..... My foot has swollen up to the size has an egg shape on top of it great that's what I get for falling asleep in front of my computer.

Oh FFS this pain in my lower right abdomen it's like a Permanent STITCH it's Burning and Stinging right now I think I will have to call it a night.

A RAT just walked across my foot it was all fluffy and grey and had a very long tail, FFS I need to get this place pest controlled again.

The rat just stole my last chocolate bar the little.... Hang on how the f#ck did it get it open?!?

Does anybody here yawn and get cramps in the jaw too, If so what do you do for it, Can someone tell me because I almost just got a cramp in the jaw yawning?

Political correctness and mediocrity go hand in hand.

It's no coincidence to me why so much of everything reeks of suck nowadays. The 'geniuses' in charge of our entertainment have thought that by tossing some social issues and PC placeholders into previously enjoyed genres and mediums, then somehow we'd all forget just how dry the well truly is.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Turning a male character into a female one, or turning a white character into a black one DOESN'T ADD VALUE. Playing mr potatohead with tv and movie actors doesn't make stories more engaging or add interesting depth to characters.

Dr. Who? More like Dr. Who... the hell cares.

Yeah, but I liked the proxy for Donald Trump played by Toby Jones in Sherlock's "The lying detective", though.

Okay, that was aimed at Jimmy Saville, actually. I'm less familiar with him than with the president who could "stand in the middle of 5th avenue and should somebody and not lose any voter", so that's where my mind had drawn the analogy. But still, my point is : Unnecessary over-the-top proxies can be fun. They just require a Moffat-level writer.

All this sh!t nowadays make me want to build a space craft and get the hell off this sordid, morbid, sh!tbin of a planet that's not me being cute or funny either I f#cking hate it, The whole world has gone f#cking nuts!

The problem is the plots basically sucked and were full of holes. We should care about human-eating spiders because it wasn't their fault? Don't shoot them? Maybe if the Doctor would quit spouting off one-sided poorly thought out PC mantras all the time, we'd have more suspense and drama. Compare it to something like ST:TNG. You'd have serious plots with moral dilemmas. And yes, it "preached" a new way of thinking, but did so in a more even-handed discussion with usually reasonable counter-points. This Who, everything is just completely black and white. All violence bad. At least Star Trek knew that sometimes rules are meant to be broken...

I found about half the episodes to be "ok". The other half made so little plot sense, they were trash. I liked the Pakistan/India episode probably best. It was actually blocked out in a suspenseful dramatic way and generally made sense (outside of the usual anachronisms that are inherent of Who).

No need to go that far, I'd say. Compare it with the first seasons of the Who reboot. The outbursts of violence towards the Dalek. The wrath against the Family of Blood. The latent megalomania that spiralled out of control in the absence of companions. The self-loathing. The pragmatism of Harriet Jones and Torchwood. There was quite a lot of grey in the reboot. A lot of questionning of the Doctor's ways and arrogance (also he was a jerk).

The clean-cut childbook moral is seasonal, with simpler standalone plots and a nicer sweeter Doctor (oh I would have loved a female Doctor more in the tone of Michelle Gomez' Missy, it could have been hilarious). Preachy for preachy I felt like it was lecturing children instead of adults, on easy simplistic matters instead of less obvious ones. It's true that the "It takes you away" was nearing interesting psychological matters.

I realise that the other episodes that I liked were interesting as history lessons or reminders, very independantly from the Doctor Who scifi elements. They would have been actually better without aliens and The Doctor. We're far from how cleverly the Doctor has been inserted in a lesson about Van Gogh, for instance.

Anyway, I saw this season as weird Doctor Who lite. Or for kids (as opposed to the universality of Tintin). I still consider this series as a whole, or most of its previous seasons, as much better than any Star Trek. But again, I'm really not a ST person.

And then there is the issue of presentation. I watched an episode on BBC America, left the channel on and it was followed by a Capaldi episode. I didn't really like the Capaldi run, but in comparison, the Capaldi episode was blocked very well. There was tension. It drew you in to what might happen next (even though I'd seen it before). This Who, instead of drama, it seems to be filled with Whitaker talking a lot and asking a million questions.

This might be in poor taste, but it reminds me of something Henry Rollins once said about Robin William's comedy. It's truly amazing how Robin could talk so fast and put out so many thoughts. It's not funny, but it's amazing he can talk that fast.

I'm not saying a question or two shouldn't be posed 4th wall, just that we don't need quite so many, and all the time in lieu of drama. Sometimes a little space for the viewer to think for themselves does wonders.

Whitaker isn't a problem. It's clearly the writing and what she has to work with.

I agree that there was a missed opportunity there.

Missy was amazing. She was a female character with spirit, an interesting personality, and her own motivations outside of boys and playing nice. The doctor needed to be a foil to that. Someone with teeth who is of the same cloth (they are best friends!) but not willing to go about things the way MIssy does... at least, not noticing that they do it anyway. Just playing nice and being sweet and vulnerable does not do that.

Such a shame.