“Fun” is the missing ingredient. I watched Smith and Jones last night for the first time in years. It’s not a standout episode by any means, but the comedy, energy and sheer charisma is head and shoulders above anything Chibnall has created. The Whittaker era is, even at its best, quite stodgy.
bleary
mrbleary
JAG (Judoon Advocate General)
I think the speech at the end of Orphan 55 was the lowest point in that regard. The Doctor’s description of time, destiny and the future sounded like it was from an entirely different show.
The Doctor desperately tries to broker peace by showing his short film, “THE SILURIANS, A GREAT BUNCH OF LADS.”
That actually makes sense, although it’s pretty sloppy writing. Why awkwardly introduce a semi-magical McGuffin, explain its powers, have it transformed, and then explain its new powers, all in the space of twenty minutes? Why not start with “here’s a McGuffin and this is what it does”? See also: the Cyberium. There's…
On ongoing problem with nuWho is the increasing deification of The Doctor. RTD’s Doctor is a living god by the end who can make armies flee at the mention of his name. Moffatt (who wrote a lot of that) deconstructed the whole idea and knocked the Doctor down a few pegs, but he’s still basically nerfed.
- The Boundary always takes you to a random point in the universe. We’re stopping the show to explain this, so it’s safe to assume this is correct. No, wait, it’s a gateway to Gallifrey.
Kicking Rassilon Up The Arse
The memes in the meme sketch were very 2012 (although WHEN GREEN BOOK ON HBO was pretty funny)
Wrestling is good
Most risque Simpsons joke imho is in Deep Space Homer: “Hello, President Clinton? I figured if anyone knew where to get some Tang, it’d be you.”
This is my point - most of today’s movie producers are Gen X. What’s in the cinema today is the output of Gen X. The Sonic movie that came out last week, for example, was greenlight by people who probably had a Sega Genesis when they were teens. Cultural stagnation is the fault of the grown-ups in the studio, not the…
None of this stuff was created by Generation X though. We were gifted this stuff when we were kids. Now we're the generation that's supposed to be producing new culture and what have we come up with?
It’s not the series itself, it’s the larger cultural context within which it exists. It’s symptomatic of the Ready Player One-style pop culture heat death.
I love you
I am. I feel embarrassed by our attempts to be 12 forever.
There’s something immensely depressing about the whole concept of this series. I think it’s the fact that we seem to have decided that the greatest products of Western culture are the things Gen X enjoyed when they were kids.
I watched the '86 version with the kids recently and it went down a storm. No need to update it.