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Tag: Nu-Who

A Look Back on Looking Forward

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Review of The Runaway Bride / Partners in Crime / The Fires of Pompeii

It wasn’t until I sat down and started rewatching The Runaway Bride (which, if memory serves, I didn’t much like the very first time I saw it) that I realized how very much I’d missed Donna. And it wasn’t until Donna saw Rose’s jacket and accused the Doctor of abducting other women that I realized how very much I hadn’t missed this mopey Doctor.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2006 BBC

I will own up to my roots: I was a hardcore Doctor/Rose shipper (though I didn’t even know that was a term at the time) when I first started watching Doctor Who. After all, my first episode was “Rose,” and I binge-watched the Ninth Doctor and Rose falling for each other (it’s a perfectly valid reading, hush). It’s honestly part of what drew me into the show.

But this long after the fact, I don’t feel the same kind of emotional impact. Mostly, I feel annoyed at how much that one Companion/Doctor relationship influenced the two that followed immediately after it. And while I’ve come to appreciate Martha Jones more now than I did at that time, I have always appreciated Donna’s straightforward, no-nonsense approach to her adventures with the Doctor.

Well, almost always.

As I said above, I found her really abrasive at first. The way she was so outwardly selfish (witness the way she and her groom Lance got together, especially as misleadingly retold to the Doctor) really put me off. She was really unlikeable.

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Confession #164: I Need Novelty

I’ve long since stopped browsing most social media for Doctor Who news, so I really can’t even say for sure how many crumbs the production team has put out there to keep fans interested. Given the fact that almost nothing has filtered down to my corner of the internet, though, there can’t have been anything really big. Sadly, that makes it super hard for me to stay engaged with the franchise.

You see, one of the side effects of the initial COVID lockdown in our household was that we realized, one by one, that we are all ADHD here. Half of us have formal diagnoses, and the other half don’t (including me), but there are enough clues to be certain. For example, I’m led to understand that neurotypical people don’t simply forget to eat sometimes. (Sounds fake to me, but apparently it’s real.)

One thing about being ADHD is that without constant stimulation, I lose focus. I start to care less, even about things that once interested me deeply. Unless something is some combination of interesting, challenging, novel, or urgent, it’s unlikely to keep my attention. So when Doctor Who goes off the air for :checks calendar: thirteen months, it’s only natural that my brains skips off into the sunset to follow other pursuits. (That helps to explain why it’s been increasingly more difficult to maintain the blog, too.)

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Confession #162: I Barely Remember Series Four

My kids’ birthday is coming up. Birthdays often make me think of the old game where Whovians gauge each others’ age by what episode aired the week they were born (mine was in the Pertwee era, but my kids had Tennant’s Doctor). Then I got to thinking about what modern era stories aired “this week in history.”

As I looked through the Wikipedia article listing episodes, I had lots of “Oh yeah, that one!” moments. It was like a rusty old door opening in the architecture of my memory. Sadly, I think that door only opens partway now.

There was a time when I could just rattle off the episodes in any given “new Who” series—in order—with barely any pause for thought. That time has long since passed. If I hadn’t had the page open in front of me, as I looked over the dates and associated them with episode titles, I wouldn’t have been sure what position in the series any of those episodes held.

I found that oddly distressing, in particular for Series Four. That series has been on my mind a fair bit lately (more so than other RTD-era series, for sure), with the impending return of Donna and a Tennant Doctor. (I am going to be fighting calling that one the “Fourteenth Doctor” for a long time, I can tell.)

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Confession #161: I Am (Still) Psyched for Ncuti

Humans aren’t often good at existing in liminal mental spaces, and I’m no exception. Between times are rough. Even a hint at when to expect the transition into the next state of being can help, though, so I cling to those little details like my life depends on them.

That’s one of the reasons going to Gally every year is so important to me. Among other things, the conventions closes out with the annual “Year in Review” video, compiling clips of Doctor Who press—interviews, features, and announcements—from the prior year. It’s a quick hit that reminds me of all the exciting things that have happened and reinvigorates me for what is to come.

The most important of those upcoming attractions is unequivocally Ncuti Gatwa.

Of course, we needed to give Jodie her due as the outgoing Doctor. She has been absolutely brilliant in the role (whatever any given fan thinks of the scripts she was given), and fully deserves to be celebrated. I’ll also admit that I’m excited to see the return of Donna Noble (less so Tennant’s Doctor, but I’ve complained about that elsewhere) in the 60th anniversary bonanza.

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Welcome to Year Thirteen

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Triskaidekaphobes may not care for the idea that I’m highlighting this as the thirteenth year of the blog, but in my household thirteen is actually one of our favorite numbers. Further, we’ve just ended the Thirteenth Doctor’s era, and I can look forward to meeting Jodie Whittaker herself at Gallifrey One next month. I’d say Year Thirteen is worth celebrating.

This year will, as I’ve hinted before, be the last for the blog. Now that I’ve finally sold some fiction (you can find my first published story here, if you’re interested; I use a pen name), I want to focus more of my time and energy on that kind of writing. There are also several other personal stressors that have ramped up recently, and I simply have less energy to dedicate to blogging.

That’s not to say this year will be lax. I hope to be able to announce my part in that project to which I alluded a couple of years ago. I’ll be reporting on my experiences at Gally as usual, with the bonus of having one of my kiddos with me to provide fresh eyes. And I will finish up my Everything Else series of reviews of the Classic adventures.

Given that there are only five of those left, the blog schedule gets a bit loose around mid-year. But here is the schedule for those final five stories:

  • Jan 25: The Dalek Invasion of Earth
  • Feb 08: Enlightenment
  • Mar 22: The Invasion of Time
  • Apr 26: Frontier in Space
  • May 24: The Pirate Planet
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Confession #160: I Miss the Holiday Specials

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Doctor Who holiday specials have never been particularly high on my list of “must see TV.” Aside from them being Doctor Who, which gives them inherent watchability in my eyes, having something over-the-top fluffy (or even silly) that doesn’t necessarily fit within continuity (that is, if you eliminated one entirely, the arcs of the stories surrounding it wouldn’t really be affected) doesn’t particularly appeal to me.

As an American, I’ve not had the cultural tradition of Christmas specials designed for the whole family to sit down and watch together on Christmas Day (presumably at least in part to keep the peace for a while in the event that one’s family doesn’t even get along). At most, the TV traditions around here were watching Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer or The Year Without a Santa Claus, but those were always aired well before the holiday itself.

So imagine my surprise when I found myself feeling a bit distraught at the idea that there would be no “festive” Doctor Who episode airing this year (on either Christmas or New Year’s).

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The Power of Fan Service

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Review of The Power of the Doctor
Warning: This review may contain episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

There was nothing subtle about The Power of the Doctor. It was pure fan service, from start to finish. Some of it we knew about beforehand, and some of it came as a surprise—again and again—but it was blatantly obvious that showrunner Chris Chibnall wanted to check off every single item on his bucket list on the way out.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2022 BBC

For the most part, I was happy to go along for the ride. Only in the final thirty seconds or so did I balk. (Yes, we’ll talk about that more, but under the cut.) It made me want to use my full-on Mom Voice: I’m not upset with you; just disappointed.

But let’s back up for a while, and leave that moment for later. First, let’s talk about the bonkers hour-and-a-half of Jodie Whittaker’s last episode in the lead role. This was Chris Chibnall’s ultimate fanfic moment; he threw in every plot thread and character he could think of (and book), and wrote a huge fix-it fic.

For those who may not be familiar with fanfic (I am only peripherally so, as I don’t read fic myself, though my kids do), the biggest purpose of the genre—as far as I can tell—is to tell the stories with beloved characters that the fan writer really wanted to see/read in the original media property, but was never given. (In other words, all of modern Who is basically fanfic of Classic Who, show-run by Classic fans.) And one sub-genre of fanfic is the “fix-it fic,” in which the fan writer fixes something that they felt was inherently wrong with the original.

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Confession #158: I Already Miss Jodie

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Although the exact date hasn’t yet been confirmed (to the best of my knowledge), we know that Jodie Whittaker’s final episode as the Doctor, one billed as a “centenary special” as part of the celebrations to honor a hundred years of the BBC, will air some time in October. Presumably she will regenerate at the end, or at least begin the process (maybe we’ll get that long-since-filmed sequence next year instead, at the official beginning of Ncuti Gatwa’s tenure), but we don’t even know that for sure.

What we do know is that in a matter of weeks, Whittaker will be gone, and fandom will be awaiting the reign of a new Doctor. (Although it’s probably both a bit on-the-nose and Too Soon™, saying “The Queen is dead; long live the King” here does seem to fit…) And I already miss her.

It’s strange the way human brains work. We have this amazing capacity to anticipate the future, which can be a fantastic advantage. But it can be problematic, too, because sometimes we spend far too much time either looking forward to or dreading things to come. And that’s exactly where I’m at in my current Doctor Who mindset.

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Confession #155: I Am Behind on Casting News

I had hardly finished posting the last casting news when more casting news hit the streets. I’m basically a month behind on the news of David Tennant and Catherine Tate’s return, and Yasmin Finney’s debut in Doctor Who, but since Tennant’s rumored return was a hot topic a few months ago, I figured I go ahead and add my 2¢ anyway.

For the most part, my feelings are the same as they were before we knew Ncuti Gatwa would be the new Doctor: I’ll be excited to see Tennant back for the 60th anniversary, but I don’t want him for more. RTD has been very cagey about the whole thing, as he is wont to do, so I don’t believe we’ve had any solid indications of whether Gatwa will actually be portraying the Whittaker Doctor’s immediate successor (rumors to the contrary are rife). Although I will be extremely disappointed if he’s not, I will wait to see what RTD has up his sleeve with Tennant and Tate before making any final judgements.

The fact that they’ve also announced Finney, a Black trans woman who shot to popularity for her role as Elle in the Netflix adaptation of Alice Oseman’s webcomic Heartstopper, and told us her character’s name is Rose, means that (a) RTD is committed to continuing the trend toward more inclusive casting (which I applaud heartily) and (b) he’s totally trolling us. I am over-the-moon excited to see Finney in Doctor Who, and utterly suspicious about how her character will fit into the overall Whoniverse, because there’s no way we’re going to have any real idea until the show actually airs.

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Ships and Shipping

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Review of Legend of the Sea Devils
Warning: This review may contain episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

The middle installment of Jodie Whittaker’s last hurrah of three specials, one that thankfully has nothing to do with Easter or any other holiday despite the timing of its broadcast, Legend of the Sea Devils is enjoyable nonsense. Although certain details of the plot don’t make a whole lot of sense (par for the course), it had a great soundtrack, fantastic costuming, and impressive effects—just the sort of thing one needs for a fun one-off episode.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2022 BBC

I had really, really been looking forward to finally getting a story set in historical Asia—something I think we could use a whole lot more of; anything outside of Britain/Europe, really—and I think this episode proved that it’s possible to do that respectfully within the Doctor Who format. But I had to laugh at myself for how, after more than two years of soaking in Asian dramas, I just couldn’t make sense of the panicked villagers shouting to each other in English in the opening scene. (Yes, yes—TARDIS translation circuits. That’s just not what my brain was expecting in that setting.)

There was a lot to love here (and a fair amount to decide not to look at too closely). Having Madame Ching herself on screen was fabulous (though I felt they could’ve done more with her; after all, at her height she commanded hundreds of ships). The rebooted Sea Devils looked fantastic (though we never really got an answer as to why this particular individual had such extreme views or how they rose to power). And the cast all did a fantastic job with what they were given (though I might personally have given some of the guest characters something different/more to do).

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