I'm very much a fan of that new tardis design

@RedRiderX OMG I know right.

I think it confirms for me how much of a call back to the Davies era the new orange aesthetic is.

This weeks story, however, seemed a bit hollow

The metal grillwork feels very old-school Gallifrey, and the console's more Tennant-y with all the wibbly bits to act at.

I liked the story, but in part because it felt rather old-school also. The interstellar space race, the Doctor just dropping in and mucking things up, the pacing and how it gave us plenty of time to sit with the characters.

It almost could've been written assuming they'd film it in a quarry.

And theme-wise I think it was pretty great: the two racers embodied the Doctor's own arguments with themself before regenerating, and reinforced which side this Doctor's come down on.

@BESW It's true that it did need to leave lots of room for the new characters.

There were several scenes that reminded me of the times in Second Doctor stories where two characters would sit down apart from everyone else and find something unexpected in common with each other.

Maybe I'm just used to stories that make the Doctor frown more but I half expected the Tardis to be the cause of the devastation.

Like in "Tomb of the Cybermen" when Two and Victoria bonded over grieving for family.

It just seemed weird to bring up this idea of it showing up for thousands of years and have that not matter at all.

It mattered emotionally, not plot-wise. That's important.

The last few minutes with the Doctor and the TARDIS resonated more because we knew the TARDIS had been without the Doctor for so long: letting the Doctor in without a key, for example, wouldn't have meant so much if the TARDIS had just been without a Doctor for a day.

Scene?

Sequence?

eh

The Doctor missed the TARDIS... and the TARDIS missed the Doctor.

Both of them were literally adrift in space and/or time without the other.

And while the TARDIS waited, it thought about what the new Doctor would like, and made itself ready to welcome her back. With a biscuit.

I'm very much on board for a series that takes time to do those emotional moments without tying them into the plot, because that's where a lot of Moffat's faceplanting happened (like "The Angels Take Manhattan").

And I feel like we can have some different kind of emotional moments with this new doctor as well

She's just so... supportive?

She still is quite aware she's the smartest person in the room, but doesn't feel the need to remind everyone every 5 minutes or so.

Well, we've seen her despair. We've seen her criticize. We've seen her outraged. We've seen her mourn.

Heck, we even saw her make a culturally insensitive joke about someone's name.

oof I missed that one then

She refused to call T'zim-Sha by his proper name.

That was a bit uncalled-for, I think, which might actually have been good if it was on purpose--it took the shine off the character and showed some of her flaws.

If the writers actually thought it was funny to deliberately mispronounce someone's name because it sounds weird to you, that's less okay.

Hmm yes

(I won't believe for a minute that Mr. Raxacoricofallapatorius regenerated into someone who can't pronounce T'zim-Sha.)

Though I feel like the doctor has a rich history of insulting names for their enemies.

Oh, sure. But that kind of insult, in the modern context... interesting choice, if it was a choice which I hope it was.

True

I'm not entirely confident it was on purpose though, given how they handled Grace in the same episode.

I will say, I loved how they took Ten's "I'm so sorry" which tended to just be after-the-fact "wow it sure stinks to be a secondary character in Russell T. Davies' universe," and turned it into genuine empathy and speaking up to say that she notices the toll events are taking on people, and working to support them.

And she's got Five's habit of delegation, which is nice to see.

@BESW Yeah exactly.

Maybe it's just the whiplash of coming off of one of the more abrasive Doctors, but this might be the "nicest" Doctor

A lot of the Doctors (not just New Who but especially New Who) don't notice the misery of their own companions. Remember Rory deliberately called Eleven out on that, and all it did was cause Eleven to make them even MORE miserable by trying to make decisions for them.

That's what I mean when I said she seemed so supportive of the people around her

But she's not thoughtlessly supportive either!

Like, she was seriously critical of Epzo when she thought he deserved it.

Yeah, there's a lot more emotional intelligence overall there.

She just wasn't cruel about her criticisms, and always held out hope that he'd change.

Which is why the "Tim Shaw" thing stood out so much, especially since she then gave him the "you can change" speech too.

Weird.

Now I'm trying to think if 12 was the coldest doctor...

Thinking back... Two and Five and Seven had good emotional intelligence.

One was definitely the coldest, though he warmed up toward the end.

Well he was just an asshole

Six gave him a run for his money though.

I don't know why but I think he's just off the chart

Nine ignored other people's pain by being desperately glib because he was working through so much of his own.

Shalka was massively cold, though you got a glimmer of something else in his relationship with the Master.

Ten... I think one of the reasons I dislike Ten so much is that I know people like him: they want to be good and nice and considerate but only know how to do it through grand gestures, they've never mastered everyday little kindnesses.

So everything they do "for" other people winds up being about making a spectacle themselves.

Ten didn't know how to decline Martha's love gracefully, but he made a copy of himself for Rose to snog.

(Have I mentioned that my head canon is that the Time-Crisis duplicate of Ten goes on to become the Valeyard after Rose breaks up with him?)

Yeah that is a good head canon

I forget did they ever really wrap up the valeyard as a character?

He's probably dead, per the prose works.

Oh, I'm also disappointed but not surprised that there's a series arc about an evil alien empire.

I kinda hoped to not have some massive series arc for once, I think we're quite weary of that, but it's basically obligatory for TV shows now.

mm

well also I sort of assume Dr Who is used to,... having that just by itself

@trogdor Not really, for the first three Doctors the closest they came to a through-line was a loosely shared excuse for a series of unrelated adventures like "the Doctor is trying to get these people home but the TARDIS is broken so it just goes wherever."

The key to being a series arc, broadly speaking, is that the adventures are connected by something other than the Doctor and companions showing up in them.

oh well sorry I meant New Who specifically

For this new series, the first episode's villain was trying to become ruler of the alien race who are responsible for the desolation of the planet they visit in the second episode.

Ah, yeah, Moffat's Who in particular had all these complex throughlines.

RTD's version of New Who had a lot more stand-alone adventures. The first series was very episodic, didn't really have an arc except for Nine's redemption. The second series had the Bad Wolf thing, which barely counted because it didn't DO anything except hint at the finale.

well I still count the Bad Wolf thing

personally I wish they didn't do it

but I count it because they pulled the BS to try to use that to tie everything together somehow

Also, I know they're doing everything new, no old villains, but this new villain seems like a perfectly good waste of an opportunity to use the Shadow Kin from Class.

Class?

During the 2016 gap when there was basically no Doctor Who for almost a whole year, they tried to fill the gap with a new spinoff series, Class.

It starred actors pretending to be teenagers in the high school from the original 1963 pilot episode, which Twelve had returned to in the previous season.

I liked it okay, but it was another spinoff attempt which thought the way to differentiate yourself from the main series is to be "darker, edgier."

ah