Yeah, I definitely agree with that, though it's not really a Moffat issue. Although the classic series had moments of it here and there (7th Doctor especially), it was Davies who entrenched it. Moffat continued it, and I doubt Chiball will change it. At this point, it feels almost obligatory: in "Twice Upon a Time", when all the grandiose titles were read out, the Doctor immediately undercut it with a joke about taking the jokes out. Maybe a certain kind of fan gets excited by it.

But I rather liked the rest of the story, it managed not to rush anything and just savour the moments, and avoided having a villain or main threat. The 12th Doctor era has been good for that. The last-words speech at the end went on a little long though. Only children can hear his name? Okay, I get it: his name is Who. :)

This new thing for holding back regenerations is bugging me. Regeneration used to be imminent and unavoidable. The 5th Doctor delayed it in "The Caves of Androzani" as part of his desperate effort to save Peri while dying of poisoning and, though few fans noticed, it worked well as a plot element. Now it's become this self-indulgent thing for long goodbyes and post-death moping that goes on and on, suggesting the Doctor could just choose not to regenerate and it's not even clear what he's dying of. It takes away the threat of death, especially now the Doctor's on extra lives.

Even the third doctor delayed it long enough to return to UNIT. But yes, both cases they were clearly dying - and arguably, in both cases it made their new incarnation a bit crazy, even by his own standards. Tom might be considered now the only classic doctor to give the new series ones a run for their money in the polls, but when he started he really was quite... eccentric, even by the standards already set out. And I don't need to mention Colin...

Eccleston's or Smiths regenerations weren't too bad but Tennant's was pretty horrendous in regards to extending it.

Oh yeah, I forgot the end of "Planet of the Spiders" (but I usually have a blind spot for that bit; one of my earliest and most often seen serials seen was "Robot"). I think that was more a case of slowly dying of radiation poisoning, prior to the triggering of regeneration.

Hmm, in any case, the 3rd Doctor didn't return to Earth until three weeks later after being lost in the Time Vortex. Paul Cornell made it worse in his NA Love and War (1992): he implied the 3rd Doctor was stuck lying on the console floor unable to move for 10 years, which is shockingly mean.

Has the Doctor ever weaponised regeneration? BlondTrav, backed up against the nearly literal wall, played a thanatos gambit. Also, that particular Traveller, in my playing her over 10 years of IC play, had huge guilt issues from the Time War and was always a touch suicidal. I like to think that Gary and I came together for an exciting ending for that incarnation. This new Traveller is still developing. She's a lot more serene and self accepting than the Blond was, since 5th Trav was the Traveller who immediately followed the Marshall, and then after Louise (5th Trav was *lots* like Louise and was every inch a Rogue Scientist from Rifts, although you guys wouldnt know that.) Both came from worlds of violence.
This message was last edited by the player at 04:42, Sat 30 Dec 2017.

Weaponised? The end of the 11th Doctor in "The Time of the Doctor" was exactly that – he regenerated and blew up all the bad guys. The novel The Ancestor Cell, which ended the last time war, had a Time Lord suicide bomber powered by regeneration. Both were pretty bloody stupid, IMO. I dislike the wild destruction that now results from regenerations, with the 10th and 12th Doctors wrecking the TARDIS. Why does the Doctor keeping blowing up?! A moment of rebirth and new life should not involve such destruction, especially so such an old friend as the TARDIS.

Back on delayed regenerations, back in 2005 Davies permitted the DWM comics to do a 8th to 9th regeneration, but then forbade depicting the 9th Doctor with anyone but Rose, though he would be travelling with Destrii. Davies's suggestion was to have the Doctor stuck in a blaze of regeneration light obscuring his face for however many stories like a Doctor Strange villain. Which would've been stupid. Because the comics writers had restraint and respect for their wor, they decided to do a walk into the sunset instead. Which left an opening for a lost era of the Time War and the War Doctor and all that followed.

Yeah, I can see that. At least Trav had a purpose - Save sweet boy and the team and try to take the TAROT away from the Beast. I forgot about 11 and how gratuitous that was.

I like the explosion, but I prefer it to be like Eccleston's regeneration - just a big burst of light.

Whilst I hated and despised the 11ths (...12ths? 13ths?) regeneration, you can't really say it didn't have a purpose. His whole purpose in the new series is to 'kill the daleks, once and for all'. Whilst I hate the swing we got from Ecclestons version which was that he could only kill the daleks by killing the timelords, and how annoyed he was that they still came back, because it made his sacrifice worthless to the point of deciding the timelords were just as bad as the daleks (though to a certain extent, Moffatt moved away from that), he has always been consistent about wanting to make sure the Daleks stayed dead.

It probably doesn't surprise anyone to hear that I preferred the less-explosive regenerations, with one of my favorite regeneration scene being Pertwees, but at least Eccleston's could play in to 'every regeneration is different'.

Twitch is showing a lot of classic Doctor Who episodes for the next couple of weeks (free). It already started yesterday with some first Doctor episodes and the next batch will start in <30 minutes (they show the same block three times a day). For a schedule you can look here
https://www.doctorwho.tv/watch/twitch/#US

I hope everyone is well. When is the new season of Who coming on?

It'll start on the 8th of October.

New Doctor Who!

Um... Is anyone else completely underwhelmed? I mean, it's okay, but nothing grabbed me like the last few seasons have done. It was just meh.

Whittaker's Doctor is right in the mold of the Tennant and Smith Doctors, which I suppose is the New Series's Generic Doctor characterisation – the Doctor you write and perform when you can't do anything more distinct. Are they playing it safe because she's the first female Doctor? I hope she grows into it and makes it her own. But damn, I hate that accent. Sorry England.

The direction was a bit sloppy, lacking, I guess, visual continuity. It's not always clear how scenes link up, as characters and things appear and disappear and the focus is on the wrong things. I was confused throughout.

There were way too many characters tagging along with the Doctor as companions/companion substitutes, so they tended to be left standing and watching and asking questions, their characterisation and motives disappearing. The police officer removes her uniform and forgets all about being a police officer. Ryan has a physical disability, which could be interesting, except the sole effect of this is being unable to ride a bike.

Some of the scene set-ups seem bizarre. Why go all the way into the hills to a slippery, sloping, grass track to practice riding a bike? Why did Nan and the old guy leave Ryan in the hills looking for his bike while they went to catch a train without him? Why is the construction site being operated at night in near total darkness? Why did the Doctor and the tentacley thing both land on the same train?

I had more fun watching "Time and the Rani" around it.
This message was last edited by the player at 01:37, Tue 09 Oct 2018.

The story didn't wow me.  But I think The Christmas Invasion is the only modern intro story that had anything interesting going on as a story.  And I take it as promising that Whittaker was the best thing in it.  I appreciated that the episode was willing to take time for the Doctor to puzzle things out and build contraptions, and even when she sonic'ed things it made sense.  And that the Doctor-as-legend stuff seems to have been dialed down somewhat.

I really shouldn't read these, but as I'm waiting till my partner is out of hospital before watching modern-who again...

The Doctor-as-legend is the worst thing ever. It is arguably one of the main, if not the main, reason I prefer the classic series. (And yes, I know that McCoy stories were often a bit like this, but it wasn't quite as bad).

I found Whittaker's Doctor charming, and I saw that as per much modern television that they were setting up for interpersonal drama with Ryan being the lead, talking about non-visible disabilities. I expect Ryan and Graham to be engaged in friction as they grieve for their loved one's death.

Another thing I really like is how they are setting up to use the Doctor's gender ambiguity to explore genderfluid/queer issues. By definition, the Doctor is now a trans and queer icon, and I love it. As a bi cis male, I have feminine components to my personality and am slightly gender fluid, and this Doctor speaks to me in ways not even Trav does (Trav is more solidly cis, for example.)

Of course, I can't help but be biased because I've been doing the female time lord thing since 2007.

I only like the Doctor-As-Legend (and by extension, Traveller-as-legend) stuff when it's to a degree subverted (like when Trav fucks up and makes mistakes, is unsure of herself, and so on.)

About building stuff - it's *FUN*. I adore it when Trav kitbashes and screws around with stuff, from a player perspective.
This message was last edited by the player at 12:54, Wed 10 Oct 2018.

Looking at some reviews, I concede that there were some improvements in the plot: the whole purpose was to save one ordinary person's life, which is a good shift away from the focus on saving the Earth or saving the universe or more arcane plots.

And, as Guardian says, the Doctor-legend confrontation was dialled down, to the point that Tsimsha didn't seem to know or care about it. I get the sense that these things are obligatory and put in to please a certain sort of New Series fan. So, maybe it was just done here as an echo of the past to ease transition, and hopefully they'll move away from it.

In reply to Smoke Alarm (msg # 575):

So, the TARDIS now has a muffin button.

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

"The Ghost Monument" was another load of boring, but "Rosa" was an improvement, though maybe it tried way too hard to justify itself. It managed not to be an offensive mess about it though, but the lack of any nuanced white characters made it a sledgehammer message.

This time, rather than trusting to ABC's poor streaming quality, I just torrented it (something I could get free, yes). The credits looked so much better, the visuals less murky, so I guess that helped. I could also turn on subtitles to understand everything they're saying

I still like the shift away from overused save-the-world/universe or story-arc-related crap, with the focus of each episode so far being on saving a few people and small events.

Is the Doctor more caring and considerate now because she's female? While it's not a bad trait, I'm not sure that's the best logic.

Whittaker's Doctor still seems too close to the Tennant and Smith New-Series Generic Doctor. Maybe the writers were still thinking of the former Doctors. Still, between that characterisation and the excessive number of companions, I get the impression they feared this Doctor couldn't stand on her own and needed to do what had worked in the past and be obscured by companions.

For accompaniment, I watched "Delta and the Bannerman", because it also involves fake Americans and a bus in the 1950s. :D

On a related note, if 13's TARDIS has a Muffin Button, of course Trav still has the Fizzade machine in the control room.

I just watched the New Year's episode. We did Dalek survivors better. I even suspect that they may have read our PBP Gary. It was still amusing.

This message was added to by the player at 01:05, Sun 12 May 2019.

Hey Fam, new Doctor Who is on. Have we been watching the Episodes?

I absolutely adore O.I want Bluetrav to meet him.

I quite hope they do not write him to play bonkers as much as his recent predecessors.  The most I've seen Dhawan is in Iron Fist, where he absolutely *smolders*.

There is something very sexy about him. And I think he takes most of his cues off of the Simms master.

EDIT - Now, think about this guy having a confrontation with Michelle Yeoh Bluetrav. Holy shit. Blake Lively was my girl for years, but that confrontation would be terrifying (because Yeoh can be scary as shit when she wants to be, and has the acting chops.)

I can assume Always Time To Travel is on hiatus because she's killing it as Mirror Georgiou on Star Trek Discovery.
This message was last edited by the player at 07:33, Sun 26 Jan 2020.

I can't even muster a rant against new Doctor Who these days. I'm dragging my heels to watch each episode; the last was "Orphan 55". The stories are just so lazy and pedestrian, trying for nothing more than being like the days of the 10th and early 11th Doctors without doing anything new and just doing a lot less. It's not for the actors; Whittaker's best Doctor was in Attack the Block, Dhawan a better villain in Iron Fist. It's not for having a female Doctor, but the scripts not giving her many real villains or chances to show strength, anger, or authority is telling.

It's just Chibnall is rubbish at this. It's fitting that he first appeared on TV to complain about "Trial of the Time Lord", when he also got a year off to fix things and failed, when he's this generation's Pip & Jane Baker.

Okay, I mustered a rant after all.
This message was last edited by the player at 09:24, Sun 26 Jan 2020.

Chibnall reminds me of one of Marti Noxon - not a bad writer, but not for this style of writing. He has written good stuff - just not for sci-fi.