lol the absolute state of the entertainment industry



They should have just brought back Jenny as the Doctor. I think just about everyone loved that character.

Dr. Who doesn't have value because instead of adding things into the box, they gave the doctor a box.

This season started out with big ratings and went flat on mediocre storytelling and a lack of vision from the writers.

i like the new Doctor, but i don't like the writing in this new Season, it doesn't feel like Doctor Who.
the writing is just bad in comarison to all the other(newer) seasons, and even some of the old B&W seasons are way better then what we have now in Season 11.

(just my two cents)

Have to agree with most others here. With all the furore about making The Doctor female, they brushed over the fact they were making the series into a tedious blend of a middle school history lesson and an editorial in The Guardian. I think these have to be the most lazy and two dimensional plots since the reboot.

I understand they were trying to make it less about The Doctor after Moffat insisted making every episode about how amazing he was and how complicated a plot he could write (and also that The Doctor was an amazing incarnation of Steven Moffat). What they failed to do was replace that with something of substance. I'm not sure there really was any character developed in the series. They occassionally pushed forward one of the companions with a very obvious "here's my story, here's my difficulty, you must relate to me about this", but it was only really the older dude in that I could see any kind of actual character forming.

Whilst the BBC wount admit to it, its clear that they aimed it at kids. I watched part of the new one (and aside from the reasoning behind the decision to have a female DR), what came across most was that its gone from being like 7PM family show to a show that would most likely be suited more for CBBC.

The new series just seems like its Sarah Jane's Adventures (which was shown on CBBC.)

I liked Sarah Jane Adventures more than this. Yeah, the stories were dumbed down, but they were still decently written despite a younger target audience. If only K9's rights weren't temporarily sold to the Aussies...

Well,that's interesting. Do I smell? yuk yuk yuk.

Not to mention, SJA had stuff like Whatever happened to Sarah Jane? up its sleeve. I can't see the show delivering anything remotely like that right now.

Real talk, though:
You book the first female Doctor. Yay.
But you have her follow Capaldi, whom you could give the phonebook as a script and he'd still turn in a god tier performance.
Then you give her three companions, so there's a decent chunk taken out of her screen time.
And the comparatively slim amount of dialog she's left with is 90% exposition.

Is that deliberate sabotage?

Who's that?

There is a difference between preacing and edicating. Showing variety of cultures with intricate customs and norms (santaran, selurians, ood) with occasional social commentary here and there is different than constantly telling (through the Doctor) "this is good and this is bad". And yes "political correctness" is one of the reasons for that. Too many efforts put for the show to be non-offensive for "vilnerable" groups, that no resources left for making stories actually interesting.
The most finny thing that he was right about spider queen. Her death by being shot by him was far easier, than death of spiders whom Team Doctor locked in the vault. They either slowly suffocated, or if there was a oxigen regeneration system in the vault had to eat each other, since spiders obviously couldn't open containers with food.

There's always that ambiguity, when discussing clunky preaching, where it creates an artificial sense of agreement between those bothered by the form and those bothered by the meaning. I remember being one of the few to dislike the "Dead poet society" movie, because it felt cheap and manipulative in form, and then being shocked by the discovery of people who also disliked it but because of its apology of subversion (in their eyes, the strict school order represented the "good guys"). Being heavy-handed, being a bad metaphor, is one thing, but I'll always distinguish it from being a bad message.

That being said,

That's more or less what I've felt lately. A couple of days ago, I had started writing for this very thread :

"I came to the conclusion that gender is too much of a stake both for conservatives and for progressives. Of course you have the conservative twats who start crying that they detest a show as soon as they feel deprived of one more testosteroney role-model, but on the other side you have the progressive ones who, once they've managed to switch a character's gender, consider they grand work done, their brilliant pitch written, and are all baffled when people ask about the rest of the script. As if their grand revolutionary idea was self-sufficient, and the rest could be ad-libbed (ghostbusters) or jolted on a napkin between two burps (doctor who).

Heads-up to pseudo-feminist writers : If the act of selecting a different gender already drains all your creative energy, if it gives you alone such an early sense of self-satisfation, then maybe you're not fetishizing gender less than reactionaries do."

Then I decided to not post it, because it felt too antagonizing (towards everybody). And also because it was focusing too much on this gender issue as an indirect explanation of the season's weakness (in all fairness, it may be a purely coincidental sloppiness). But, deep down, I do get the growing impression that gender swap is used as a self-sufficient pitch in the same way as a shootout idea in a Tarantino movie (just watched, again, the promisingly intricate plot of "Hateful eight" being dismissed mid-movie in favor of cool looking brainsplosion galore) or a monster of the week in X-Files. To be fair, Doctor Who has also been guilty of half-arsed throw-a-pitch-for-its-own-sake episodes, reducing the plot itself to a sprint towards some magical reset button, but here it's as if the pitch had replaced the whole season.

And it's not even a pitch. Gender swapping shouldn't even be "a thing" (just like respecting minorities shouldn't drain energy). So much that I wonder if I'm not, ironically, the one making it "a thing" by giving it such a causal responsability. In a way, I hope so.

Same thing in the last episode. The big baddie (whose teeth-face, actually, is one idea I liked in this season) is not executed (that would be mean) but locked for all eternity inside a space cupboard (which is nice).

And don't get me started on Kerblam (trashy space age Amazon company uses human workforce in a soulcrushing taylorist environment but yay at least they will hire more human semi-slaves instead of using robots ?). It's so superficial that it borders on parody.

It discourages me almost as much as the Ghostbuster fiasco. Again, maybe a false parallel.

yer just a misogynist who hates wimmins. At least when you don't like something put forth on its own merits regardless of the gender of people involved, that's what you're told if they have female protagonists.