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Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials | Official Trailer
- Thread starter ManaByte
- Start date
StealthGoblin
Banned
The Whoniverse on iPlayer is really great.
I've been watching Tales from the TARDIS and it's a joy to see Five and Tegan, Jamie and Zoe etc again.
Looks like Doctor Who is being positioned to be the brand we all know it can be again.
I've been watching Tales from the TARDIS and it's a joy to see Five and Tegan, Jamie and Zoe etc again.
Looks like Doctor Who is being positioned to be the brand we all know it can be again.
Pagusas
Elden Member
Seems to be only available in the UK
StealthGoblin
Banned
Seems to be only available in the UK
It's apparently because the BBC funded this itself, not Worldwide or the house of mouse.
Pagusas
Elden Member
You'd think they'd want to recoup said funding via profits from BBC international subscriptions.
FunkMiller
Gold Member
I actually thought it was quite clever how RTD made the trans character’s ‘transness’ make sense inside the narrative.
Every far right mentalist will be frothing at the mouth, but the twist feels like the absolute first example I can remember where having a trans character makes sense. I had no issues with that.
Doctor Who is still fucked because of nearly ten years of shit writing, character and story… but this episode felt like Doctor Who again.
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StealthGoblin
Banned
TARDIS' is gorgeous
Bulletzen72
Member
I was sadly not too impressed with it. 14th Doctor was barely indistinguishable from the 10th Doctor which is bizarre because he has the added experience of 11, 12 & 13, so I had hoped there would be a different nuance to his performance. He could at least have changes his accent. It's the same face but it's supposed to be a different Doctor and I just didn't feel it.
StealthGoblin
Banned
It's a kids show. If you go in with any other expectation then that's on you.
Dr.Morris79
Gold Member
Oh no, was it really bad then?
Was looking forward to a bit of Tennant
It is your typical slacktivist written crap with some member-berries through in to draw eyes to franchise driven into the ground by awful writers. If you loved Donna and Tennant, I would avoid this unless you want their legacy in the shown ruined.
Dr.Morris79
Gold Member
I hoped the BBC wouldn't mess this up, I should have known better with the way the beeb has been going for a while
Was really looking forward to that!
ManaByte
Rage Bait Youtuber
They never looked at the camera and scolded the audience for being transphobic the way they did in this.
Captain Jack/Torchwood were just well written/fun. They weren’t heavy handed that constantly insulted/patronized the audience with heavy handed modern slacktivism.
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They scolded homophobes though, for every good episode in the RTD era we also had very openly gay stuff, remember the lesbian cats in Series 3?
j0hnnix
Member
Great. I was talking with a coworker about things might change this round.. guess I'll continue to wait for the good days.
DeafTourette
Perpetually Offended
As the parent of a trans child (she's in her 20s... But she'll always be my child), conversations like in the special were commonplace in the early days. It still is sometimes. I recognized the conversation between Donna and her mom and because I've had it with other family members and some friends. It wasn't heavy handed at all... Those are conversations that are still going on in 2023. But if you're focusing on that, You're missing out on the absolutely cheesiness and fun of that whole special!
Maybe the whole pronoun part with The Meep was a bit too much but it was played for laughs. Fell a bit flat on that though...
The only thing that confused me was how Donna and her daughter even knew The Doctor was a woman previously. I'll have to watch again to see what I missed.
The Meep was great misdirection! LMBO! A psychedelic sun!
Tams
Member
It airs at 6:30pm, early prime time, so no, it's mostly nostalgia bait.
It was a kids show. It's a family show now, with slacktivist writers.
StealthGoblin
Banned
Yes, with the basic audience being kids. There'll be enthusiasts like me, who's watched every episode and listened to almost all of the Big Finish stuff, and then there'll be kids in there. My two children loved it more than me and my eldest was a Beep doll.
At a basic level, RTDs writing is aimed at children more than Moffat and Chibnall's.
For my personal tastes Moffat's best episodes are up there with the best Who has ever produced, but I rank him lower as a showrunner.
For my tastes I think the gender discussion was too on the nose, but I think if anyone knew anything about RTD he'd address it, especially when it's the obvious joke about the creature.
I thought it was a fairly good adaptation of the comic strip, but my main criticisms are just how quick and hand-wavey the meeting between 14 and Donna was at the start, the absolute barrage of gobbledegook ship mechanisms and sequences, and I think the Unit representative was too on the nose for inclusion when Kate would have been more in place there.
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Soodanim
Gold Member
I'll have to watch this today and see where I land on this quite wide spectrum of opinions.
I didn't watch Torchwood, but I remember Jack being a horny bastard that was played for laughs. It's been a good few years, but I don't recall any "woke" stuff. Woke didn't even exist then, did it?
FunkMiller
Gold Member
I remember an awful lot of people getting very angry when Jack and The Doctor kissed.
FunkMiller
Gold Member
Great. I was talking with a coworker about things might change this round.. guess I'll continue to wait for the good days.
It‘s honestly not that bad. The trans talk is way too on the nose, but the way they actually have the trans character in the plot makes sense. If anything, I bet a lot of the screaming blue hairs will hate it, as RTD just doesn’t plonk the character in there with no explanation for why she is the way she is.
Tennant is Tennant, Tate is Tate, and there’s a genuine sense of pace and adventure back, that’s been missing since Matt Smith left. The Doctor is best as a young(ish) man. Outside a couple of Capaldi episodes, this feels the most like the show in a decade.
Soodanim
Gold Member
In all honesty I watched it all on Netflix long after it aired, I missed all that. I don't remember thinking anything was particularly if your face, but it has been a while
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StealthGoblin
Banned
Given Davies' view on Davros, I'd have loved to have seen his face when Moffat wrote that Capaldi stole his wheelchair and was riding around in it.
I think we'll see a lot of shoehorned inclusion this time around. I don't have a problem with it, but it's far far too on the nose. To the point where it's preachy again and actually more on the nose than anything Chibnall got shit for.
I think we'll see a lot of shoehorned inclusion this time around. I don't have a problem with it, but it's far far too on the nose. To the point where it's preachy again and actually more on the nose than anything Chibnall got shit for.
FunkMiller
Gold Member
RTD was always preachy as fuck, it's just that these days the cultural climate is a lot different, and Doctor Who was a lot more popular back then, so it wasn't noticed as much. Chibnall fucked the whole thing up because he was preachy, but also absolutely fucking terrible at making Doctor Who stories. You can do preachy, as long as its packaged in something with a fair degree of quality. Last night's episode wasn't above a 6 or 7 out of 10, but compared to Chibnall's diarrhea for the past seven years, it feels like a return to form.
RTD can preach as much as he likes about trans people, as long as he ret-cons that fucking Timeless Child shit at some point.
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StealthGoblin
Banned
He's already said he's not doing that, and the next episode recanonises it with a reference.
FunkMiller
Gold Member
Welp, then it can get fucked
If he's sucking on the BBC teat too much to know how badly that went down with Doctor Who fans, then he deserves everything he gets.StealthGoblin
Banned
Welp, then it can get fucked
I don't think he'll lean into it and explore it, but I don't think he's going to say it isn't a thing. He kept a lot of the jank from the classic series too when he rebooted it and whether we like it or not, having a loose canon is probably for the best.
He's also realllly good friends with Chibnall (who I suspect will be overseeing at least one spin off)
DeafTourette
Perpetually Offended
AJUMP23
Gold Member
A male presenting doctor could never understand. But a female one would.
DeafTourette
Perpetually Offended
Yeah, that part was cringe and unnecessary.
FunkMiller
Gold Member
Yeah, that was fucking stupid. As was the trans kid telling the Doctor off for pronoun usage. Lazy, hackneyed shit.
But, as I say, RTD can at least wrap his preaching around a half decent story. So he gets more of a pass than whatever the fuck it was Chibnall was shitting out on a weekly basis.
EDIT: Ratings still pretty damn low at 5.08 million... which just goes to show how much damage Chibnall did. They can't get anywhere near the Smith era, even with Tennant back.
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DeafTourette
Perpetually Offended
Only thing I can say is she's meant to be like 16 or 17... Kids these days are like that ... "Don't assume their pronouns!" ... My daughter did that to me once. LoL
TaylorSwiftFan
Member
Should have told her that her pronouns are she and her until she gets sex reassignment surgery.
GeeseGoose
Member
I rather enjoyed it. Felt like a return to form, yes there was some very clumsy modern messaging thrown in towards the end, but because it was not an american show, then the characters were human and not a stereotype, so I don’t mind.
Darkmakaimura
Can You Imagine What SureAI Is Going To Do With Garfield?
FunkMiller
Gold Member
Dudes like Nerdrotic will slate it whatever it does, because his clicks and earnings depend on it. Outrage YouTubers are the absolute worst.
ResurrectedContrarian
Banned
Disagree strongly with this.
There was nothing in the original RTD era that even approached the level of preachy absolutism in this episode. I'd even say this one hour already vastly exceeds the entire sum total of political posturing in that era.
One thing Doctor Who didn't do during any of the watchable seasons: take a hot-button political and cultural topic of the moment, majorly and publicly align your entire hiring scheme around it (they have multiple "trans" actors lined up and announced for this season already, and they were announced in series almost the moment we heard that RTD was taking over), dedicate your entire opening episode to condescendingly giving a take on that same political topic, and generally just descend into being a vehicle for the worldview of the narrow slice of people who own the show.
In the past, it had some sense of being a people's show and a children's show, which can have some mild messaging but never something pitted antagonistically and openly against the views of an enormous portion of its original viewer base. It's a disgrace now, just one more pawn in a class and culture conflict, and has lost all responsibility for being a unifying series for the masses.
Vyse
Gold Member
I just finished it and enjoyed it as well. Tennant was my favorite Doctor. Very cool to see him back.
