It really is a nightmare brief from a lot of perspectives: you’re not bringing back a show that a lot of adults have fond but blissfully fuzzy childhood memories of. You’re taking the reins of a notoriously difficult production that’s now a decade past its ratings high-water mark and which pretty much everyone agrees…

I may have the timeline wrong but didn’t RTD’s husband’s cancer diagnosis come during Miracle Day’s production?

Yes, Chibnall wrote Cyberwoman. That was the joke. :)

I don’t think there’s a single person on earth less capable of convincing Eccleston to have anything to do with the show than RTD.

If a side effect of this is that Doctor Who is gonna get even gayer, I think a fairly large section of the fandom will be pleased.

!!!!

This is gonna be the great open question of latter-period Who fandom, right up there with “could Colin Baker have done a good job if the production team hadn’t been completely and unfixably incompetent and if his ex-wife hadn’t been dating Michael Grade?”

Yeah, hard agree on all points. It really does seem to be the model for most modern prestige TV production, but I feel like just because The Sopranos and The Wire were commercial and artistic successes (well, okay, The Wire was a huge artistic success at least), and for that matter because everyone has fond if hazy…

I agree that in general the Chibnall era has been mostly a forgettable 60Hz hum, but if Orphan 55 doesn’t count as a car crash, what does?

I loved Mathieson’s scripts, but I don’t think his resume was ever going to put him in serious contention: running Doctor Who is notoriously one of the hardest, most stressful gigs in TV, and in terms of production experience he’s basically got one miniseries that he did for E4, and an Associate Producer credit on one…

It could have been worse, you could have actually watched Cyberwoman, which is a strong contender for the single worst story put out under the expanded Dr Who label in the post-cancellation era.  Man that episode was terrible.  I hope whoever wrote it was quickly put out to pasture...

Credit to Jodie Whitaker for drawing a full salary for basically just standing still while Sacha Dhawan had to jump up and down repeatedly while explaining the plot to the camera.  I hope she was getting some quality shut-eye during all of the over-her-shoulder shots.

FWIW, speaking as someone who thought Kill the Moon was unwatchable nonsense... you got off at just the wrong time! Right after KTM is IMO when the Capaldi era finally finds its feet: Mummy on the Orient Express followed by Flatline, Dark Water and Death in Heaven, all of which are somewhere between “very good” and…

Strongly agreed that they didn’t figure out what to do with Clara until they basically rebooted her for the Capaldi era, but I think a lot of that was just the total production chaos of seasons 6 and 7, with Karen Gillan deciding that she’d had enough and checking out early -- Clara always felt like a last-minute…

You make an excellent point, DrMemory.

I think I speak for all Doctor Who fans everywhere when I say:

Some (but not all) CitiBikes have electric pedal-assist motors, so there may well be a lithium battery explosion happening there.

Long Time, No See.

OMG, Cookie Monster! LTNS!

Doubly so because the last thing NYC needs is another reason for the MTA to be prickly about people bringing bikes on the subway.  Thanks, nameless asshole!