DOCTA HOO [ORIGINAL THREAD NAME CHANGED]

Lame. But at least he'll better than Chibnall? I hope?

I'm 80% happy with this and 20% not. The 80% is that it's someone who has a clear love and passion for the show, is obviously over being burned out on the whole thing, and has (obviously) about as solid a track record as one could possibly hope for. On the other hand... I'm not massively thrilled to see the show going backwards. I'd rather they took a bigger swing, though if the waiting-in-the-wings theory is right I suppose that's OK in the same way that Barry Letts came back to help oversee John Nathan-Turner's first season way back when Tom Baker was still in the scarf. OTOH there was plenty of "oh Chibnall's only there because they're marking time until [SOMEONE'S FAVOURITE WRITER] is free, and that's not worked out, so words of caution all round I would suggest.

I'm 100% that RTD's base-level of quality will be higher than Chibnall's but as liebkartoffel points out it's only really Chibnall's first season that's really weak, and even then a lot of the artistic instincts (no overarching plot, no returning monsters etc) are defensible even if the execution is very poor. And, Timeless Child bullshit aside, much of his second season is not only markedly better but it's actually turned out to be a pretty overall strong season. Sure, the TC stuff is fanwank of the worst order, but nobody claims Turn Left sucks just because Journey's End spectacularly shat the bed. Rewatching Chibnall's second season its actually matured very nicely (I recently watched chunks of it on a loooong train journey and would heartily recommend revisiting it) and only The Timeless Children (which still has a few great non-continuity moments) and Praxes being outright busts. Spyfall, Fugitive Of The Judoon and The Haunting Of Villa Diodati - the latter especially - are terrific, and Can You Hear Me? is actually pretty damned great as well.

TL;DR Optimistically cautious.

I too thought it was fine. I'll probably write up Flux once the six episodes are over rather than doing one by one, but reviewing an episode like this on its own makes a fairly limited amount of seise so I'm not going to. Saying that I mostly enjoyed what is, indeed, just a bunch of set-up but I rather liked the fact that it didn't hold the audience's hand. Yes it was a little bewildering in places, but there was also a confidence about it that I warmed to greatly. Things like the fact that the 13th Doctor was a little harsher is actually a good example - rather than trying to be everyone's mate it's ok to write her as having edges and borders and parts of herself that aren't just "wheee fam fun!" and that's of great benefit to the character. Lovely to see more of Yaz too and I love that Yaz had no compunction about calling the Doctor on her BS. John Bishop was... fine. I've never seen him act before but he neither blew my socks off nor stank up the joint. We'll see where that goes.

Of course it wasn't perfect - it's a Chibnall script after all - but it's left me cautiously optimistic, which after The Timeless Children and a bog-standard holiday special I wasn't really expecting. The Flux itself seemed like a very real threat in the way that a lot of Doctor Who threats don't - cough Davros wants to destroy the universe cough - and little moments like the reveal of the vast alien fleet not being an invasion force but in fact quite the reverse was a genuinely nice moment, so credit where it's due. Even the brief Weeping Angel moment worked well and Claire is intriguing enough. So basically - we're off, don't fuck it up.

I'd still give the edge Moffat. Yeah, there were some clunkers with "Kill the Moon," "Sleep No More," the entirety of series 7, etc., and he made a critical mistake in assuming that audiences would be as enamored with River Song as he clearly was, but I'll take Moffat's foibles over RTD's any day. RTD's lows--*cough* booty-shaking farting aliens *cough* *cough* lightning zombie Master *cough* *cough cough cough* "Love and Monsters" *cough cough hack choke wheeze gurgle faint*--were very, very low indeed.

I don't care, in my head this is canon

Well that, like most of Chibnall's run, was a giant incoherent mess. Nice seeing everyone again, though.

I'm irrationally excited about the return of the Celestial Toymaker to Doctor Who. As a puzzle geek, the concept of the character evokes nostalgia of playing with action figures as a child, inventing scenarios in which the villains force the heroes to play games and solve puzzles for no good reason. As a adult, I now realize it's a dumb concept, and I'm trying to lower my expectations.

(I'm also remembering that my first encounter with the character was not the Michael Gough incarnation, but a fanfic I read in a Doctor Who Fan Club of America newsletter, before I ever saw any black & white episodes. The Toymaker kidnapped the 5th Doctor/Tegan/Nyssa/Adric and placed their minds in robot bodies without their knowledge. If I recall correctly, the Doctor accidentally cuts his arm, and the other characters have to point it out to him because he doesn't feel the pain. He looks down and sees oil leaking out instead of blood, sees Terminator-style metal pistons moving around inside the wound, and faints from shock. Mind-blowing for a kid, and I doubt the actual show can live up to that)

I watched The Daemons the other night, and idly looked up when it was originally broadcast: the first episode went out on the day my parents got married. I realise this is of no interest to anyone other than me, but here it is anyway.

Anyway, The Daemons wasn't great, but I was amused by The Master in occultist mode quoting Aleister Crowley.

In the United States at least, the free streaming service Tubi also seems to have added a ton of old Dr. Who episodes.

One of the very few Doctor Who stories I've seen is that very first arc with Hartnell as the Doctor that you said was missing from BBC iPlayer (it also doesn't appear to be available on Tubi).  It wasn't very good (I don't know how highly any of this era of the show is rated by most people), and mainly I was struck by what a thoroughly unlikeable asshole he was.  It was the closest thing there was to any charm to the story, this dogged insistence that on the part of the show that you, the viewer, actually care about this incredibly disagreeable and argumentative old man who just generally kind of sucks as a person.

The first three stories - An Unearthly Child/The Daleks/The Edge of Destruction are essentially an arc of him his starting out a grumpy arsehole and developing, through experience and exposure to Barbara and Ian, into the person we now think of as The Doctor. The Edge of Destruction is the one that really makes the change, and there's a huge (and brilliant) confrontation between the Doctor and Barbara that visibly changes him.

This arc stumbles a little since it wasn't a "planned arc" in modern terms (they just thought, "this is too much, tone it down a bit" and they already had to re-record the pilot to tone that down too, among other reasons) and also the story that follows on from that, which would cement the "new" approach is Marco Polo and missing entirely from the archives.

I thought it was perfectly cromulant. Really liked Miriam Margolyes, liked the "eat shit JK Rowling," but parts of it were super-clunky and it felt much more like a regular episode than any kind of anniversary special. I think if it had been episode four of season 14 it would have gotten a better reception.