Both RTD and Moffat had written for the various BBC/Virgin book series during the cancellation era, and while I guess it’s debatable to what extent that counts as experience with scifi writ large, they definitely had some background in Doctor Who itself.

Honestly this is the strongest possible argument for handing the show to Jamie Matheison. :)

I’m kinda allergic to the Big Finish house style, so I’ll have to take your word for it.

That’s an interesting question that I’ve never once seen addressed and honestly I wouldn’t expect to ever get a believable answer until a couple of years after the Chibnall era wraps up.  He certainly seemed to have been designated as the heir apparent relatively early on (Moffat agreed to do series ten because…

That’s actually interesting, and I hadn’t heard that story, but it certainly explains a bit about the weird last act of that one — they seemed to be going out of their way to give the putative villain minimal screen time and I guess in fact that’s exactly what they were doing.

Opinions differ strongly on Kill the Moon (I’m in the “overwrought mawkish nonsense” camp myself) but Dark Water / Death in Heaven are amazing and for my money the first time anyone actually made the Cybermen work arguably since The Tenth Planet and maybe ever, plus Michelle Gomez just completely kills it.

Yeah, I’m mostly joking sadly: she would have obviously been brilliant in the part but even if she’d been interested if her agent had been even halfway competent he’d’ve had her tied down and sedated until the urge passed. :)

I think Capaldi got sandbagged by the expectations set by the three actors prior to him: the old series had originally established that the Doctor would regularly vary between “crazy old professor/grandfather/coot” and “dashing action hero” and all points in between (with Tom Baker achieving a weird synthesis of…

Strongly agreed.  On the whole I was pretty underwhelmed by series 11 but refusing to do continuity stories and returning enemies was by far Chibnall’s best and most defensible decision.  The same weaknesses were there, but relatively little invited direct comparison to the high points of the Davies/Moffat era so…

I find it fascinating how pretty much everyone agrees that 2 out of 3 of Capaldi’s seasons are basically really good, but practically nobody agrees on which two.

As a postscript, I want to be clear about this: Whithouse is a terrible writer and the idea of a Whithouse-run Doctor Who gives me nothing but the creeping horrors. (I just re-watched “Lie of the Land” so this is recently on my mind.) But would the general standard of Whithouse-Who have been at least 15% better than…

One of the maddening things about the Chibnall era is that Moffat — having finally realized that he was going to kill himself and the show if he tried to maintain S5-7's production pace — assembled a murderer’s row of supporting talent for his last few seasons and if you wanted to pick a showrunner out of them you…

I think bluntly we got spoiled by the fact that RTD is, by his own self-description, an utterly insane workaholic who was unburdened by any other responsibilities -- other shows, children, an expectation that he would regularly go to bed at the same time as his husband -- and completely willing to spend 18-20 hours a…

I dunno. I’ve been re-watching the show chronologically with my kid and the Moffat years turned out, on a re-watch, to hold up much better than I’d recalled on the first watch. Don’t get me wrong: you can still see the moment in series seven, when attempting to work on DW and Sherlock simultaneously turns Moffat’s…

“Let’s remind people of other, better stories” is generally a bad plan.

A lot of the weirdo NoI-spinoff cults have followings, large or small, inside the prison system.  I’d bet a small amount of money that the plea deal involved him going to a facility where he was reasonably sure he wouldn’t be murdered or gang-raped by virtue of having some friends to land amongst.

I was wondering what “THE ALL” was about.

I’m of the opinion that he exhausted his “limited dose” sometime back in the 1990s, but your milage may vary. :)

Years and years later, but: yes, this. Rickman took a character who was written as Generic Eurovillian #277 and made him someone who you desperately wanted to know more about. Was he part of the Baader-Meinhof gang? Did he decide to become a thief instead because the Stasi killed his girlfriend?

Noted!  2020 has... kept me a little pre-occupied with other things :)