Dr. Who

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KANGZ conspiracy theories
Cartmel predicted this
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I’ve been avoiding this thread because I wanted to try and watch this series in a vacuum and judge it for myself. But I’ve just watched that last episode and... Jesus.

Do you know why John Nathan Turner kicked The Other storyline into the long grass and it ended up being restricted to sources that were ambiguously canon? Because he rightly recognised that it would destroy the mystique of the Doctor, which is integral to the show. People have given JNT a lot of shit over the years, but he was right on the money with that one.

But you know what? The Other storyline has nothing on this. Even with the Other, they were still just nudging and winking, and going “Maybe this happened, maybe it didn’t, who knows?” It was an intriguing (and plausible) explanation for who the Doctor really was, while still leaving some room for debate as to whether it was true or not. And being the third mysterious founder of Time Lord society is a hell of a lot more impressive than the person they nicked the regeneration gene from.

The woke aspect of this is actually the least of its problems. I literally couldn’t have cared less about that. It’s just fucking dumb in general. The Hartnell line of doctors reached the end of their regenerative line with Matt Smith. But apparently the Timeless Child can regenerate ad infinitum. So did the Time Lords grant the Doctor a new set of regenerations unnecessarily? Does the Timeless Child get a new cycle of regenerations with every mindwipe? I don’t fucking know.

At least with stuff like “Love and Monsters” or “Orphan 55” they were just bad episodes. You could forget about them and move on. But this? Even if I go back and watch Classic Who now (which I was planning to do this evening), I’m going to have this hunk of shit rattling round my head the whole time. And Big Finish aren’t going to ignore this because they take their marching orders from the BBC. I can’t believe the Doctor isn’t even a fucking Time Lord anymore.

I wanted to give Chibnall the benefit of the doubt, I really did, but he’s spat in my face at every turn. The female doctor isn’t the problem here. That could’ve worked just fine. It’s the shitty writing that’s the problem, and it’s reached a new floor with this. As bad as Series 11 was, its worst crime was that it was boring. At least it kept its hands off the Doctor’s backstory. As others have said, even Moffat was never dumb enough to attempt this. I’d take muddled story arcs and irritating Mary Sue companions over this any day.

The one good thing I can say about this series is that as @Ponderous Pillock said, Sacha Dhawan is bloody brilliant as the Master. He’s better than Simm and Gomez put together in my eyes and I dearly wish I didn’t forever have to associate him with this nonsense. Jo Martin is also a really likeable Doctor, and again, I wish I didn’t have to associate her with this.

The only way they can possibly get around this is by saying that it was a vicious lie the Master made up to troll the Doctor, but as others have pointed out, they probably won’t do that for fear of being called racist. I know Doctor Who continuity makes absolutely no sense if you really look at it, but you shouldn’t fuck with the basics.

Bravo Chibnall. You actually made me miss Bill “did I mention I was a lesbian?” Potts. Bra-fucking-vo.
And herein lies my single biggest bone of contention, not just with doctor who, but with pretty much all #woke western media for the past decade. It is really fucking easy to write a progressive story, have a progressive cast of characters, and show progressive themes throughout a work....all without ever dipping into cringy forced #woke shit.

The only reason this shit is ubiquitous nowadays is because it has been communicated to the higher ups at various companies by PR people, marketing departments, overpriced seminars and diversity workshops alike that making your product woke* will automatically make every single ethnic and sexual and religious demographic on the planet swarm to buy your product.

This in and of itself is bad enough, but has been magnified tenfold by the fact that its also been made clear to mediocre frauds and disinterested hacks at every level of the creative process that they can massively inflate their portfolios, get fawning adoration from supposedly respectable media sources, and be able to smear all their critics as hateful and inhuman monsters by aggressively and mindlessly pushing this shit everywhere they can, no matter how incompetently and carelessly it is implemented, and no matter how badly it winds up making progressive works look as a whole

Thus you get the situation where higher ups are rubberstamping everything touted as #woke without any thought or concern, and everyone who is part of the resulting production being massively incentivised to either aggressively and performatively push for the most radical and extreme sounding #woke shit they can think of, or to keep their mouths shut and do whatever they are told by those pushing for this shit for fear of blacklisting and smearing both in and outside the company.

This is all done with zero people giving a shit about the quality of the work, let alone any actual progressive ideals.

And when the quality predictably tanks and people start asking why its so shit, the cynical assholes above will eagerly start with the blanket condemnations of "bigoted manbaby entitled nurdbros who hate everyone not a straight white male and who support slavery and rape and every other bad thing" which leads into a wider media/social media pile in and inevitably results in a mass backlash against anything that looks halfway woke, which is why we have seen so many internet wars over pop culture swarm up these past few decades.

.......and all of this could so easily be avoided if the people involved were not so damn lazy and unwilling to improve their writing enough to write progressive works to a halfway decent standard and thus not only get the mythical #woke points, but to also have a decent chance of maintaining a decent audience, and would also allow them to both create popular works of fiction and to provide a positive depiction of progressive ideals.

But sadly these people dont care about this. People like Chibnall dont care about the quality of their work or how it reflects on progressive ideals. They just want immediate asspats from other disingenuous media people and the ability to smear any criticism into irrelevancy.

* i.e. a hamfisted and unsubtle morality play where trendy current events and trendy activist causes are explicitly picked out rendered down to caricatured "pure good vs pure evil" scenarios, every fashionable demographic is heavily tokened into the setting at every opportunity, and the most pedestrian and universally uncontroversial viewpoints imaginable like "slavery is bad" or "rape is wrong" will be depicted as radically stunning and unprecedentedly brave statements despite being the social norm for decades or centuries
 
And herein lies my single biggest bone of contention, not just with doctor who, but with pretty much all #woke western media for the past decade. It is really fucking easy to write a progressive story, have a progressive cast of characters, and show progressive themes throughout a work....all without ever dipping into cringy forced #woke shit.

You think it would be easy to create a woke franchise and it would soon eclipse all the previous non-woke inferior franchises. For some reason, they always instead poz up existing franchises with decades long histories and existing fanbases. Out of kindness, I suppose.
 
I stopped watching Doctor Who late in the Capaldi run. I liked Capaldi but Doctor Who was going off the rails by then. I did watch the Two Masters arc which other than Bill Potts being saved by the most hand-wavey crap I've ever seen (omnipotent alien has a crush on her) was pretty good. And even at the end it still had good moments like Twelve punching his way through that wall and each time around getting just a little further through his story, just one more skull in the moat. But I watched a little of the Thirteenth Doctor because I have really liked Jodie Whitaker in other things (Broadchurch, St. Trinians, Four Lions) and figured she could be good as the Doctor. At least until I started reading interviews about what she wanted to do with the show. And sadly though I tried to ignore everything outside of the episode and just enjoy it for what it was, it was really bad.

This though? This is beyond bad. This is an attempt to kill the show and I think it will succeed. It's like watching the descendant of a long, proud family tearing up the family portraits in a rage because he's not as good as them. All he has left is contempt for what came before. I kind of half want to ask if in all those clips of the Doctor cycling through races and sexes if any of the many incarnations were ginger.

But I don't think I even can. What does it matter anymore?

And Big Finish aren’t going to ignore this because they take their marching orders from the BBC. I can’t believe the Doctor isn’t even a fucking Time Lord anymore.

Big Finish's audience is wall to wall hard-core Who fans. I have bought a number of their productions myself. If Big Finish really want a shot in the arm for sales and publicity they should rebel. I mean actually publicly announce that they are rejecting the new lore and not including any reference to it in their productions. Effectively try to fork cannon. And you know what - this isn't as crazy an idea as it sounds. Hear me out here. 'But hey are beholden to the BBC who own the actual IP' you are currently thinking. Yes - totally. But the BBC can't force them to do stories that include references to this. The BBC has only one stick they can wield which is to withdraw the licence altogether from Big Finish. But why cause a public rift with the BBC if you can just quietly not include that stuff anyway and avoid diplomatic fall out? Because you gain from it. You will achieve a tonne of good will and press for doing so. SJW's will call you racist and sexist but SJWs don't buy your product anyway and the more noise they make the more people find out about your work. It will be the best marketing move Big Finish will have made since they got Tom Baker back. Better even - they wont have to pay for it. And as to the BBC wielding that stick and pulling the licence? They can't follow through on that threat. For one, can you see Big Finish fans following through to another company if the BBC sold it to anyone else? Because I can't. Especially given the circumstances which would be the BBC pulling the licence to punish fans for not liking the show. And you know what else, I can't believe that the people at Big Finish aren't themselves some of the biggest fans of Doctor Who and love the show as much as any of us. Let them do it. On paper the BBC has Big Finish by the balls. But in reality the BBC doesn't have its own balls. The fans, the actual customer base of Big Finish, would love it. And they would back Big Finish to their core.

And herein lies my single biggest bone of contention, not just with doctor who, but with pretty much all #woke western media for the past decade. It is really fucking easy to write a progressive story, have a progressive cast of characters, and show progressive themes throughout a work....all without ever dipping into cringy forced #woke shit.
You think it would be easy to create a woke franchise and it would soon eclipse all the previous non-woke inferior franchises. For some reason, they always instead poz up existing franchises with decades long histories and existing fanbases. Out of kindness, I suppose.

To both of you - though I think deep down you know this anyway - the goal isn't to have things you like. It's to make sure other people like the things you like. Social Justice is about creating the society you want. Can't do that by leaving other people alone.
 
Big Finish's audience is wall to wall hard-core Who fans. I have bought a number of their productions myself. If Big Finish really want a shot in the arm for sales and publicity they should rebel. I mean actually publicly announce that they are rejecting the new lore and not including any reference to it in their productions. Effectively try to fork cannon. And you know what - this isn't as crazy an idea as it sounds.
I want to believe that they'd do this, but they've capitulated to every other demand from the BBC, including slapping the hideous new logo on all their CDs in place of the classic one. You don't even get reversible covers anymore where you can flip it so that it has the relevant Doctor's logo. Also, things like gender-bending regenerations are now commonplace in Big Finish stories rather than being something that happens once in a regeneration cycle.

I know neither of those things are as huge a shake up as the entire show's backstory being rewritten, but Nicholas Briggs works on the actual show and from what I know about his personal politics, he'd cave in if the BBC brought the hammer down. I don't think they will rebel. Don't get me wrong, the fans would love them for doing it (you should see the Chibnall hate that goes on in their comments sections), and it would definitely be a smart decision business-wise, but I don't think it will happen.

The good news is that their current licence only extends to the Twelfth Doctor era, so I don't think they could reference this even if they wanted to at the moment (although the BBC had given them some leeway with the licensing in the past), but once the licence gets extended, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a spin-off series about the Timeless Child Doctors.
 
I'd be amazed if Big Finish wasn't already planning a "Doctor Ruth" box set.
 
I saw this coming when the cringe Rosa Parks episode aired. Why rehash the American civil rights movement when you can do something new, (and British), like the Windrush Generation scandal? Introspection is what writers are good at but Chinball isn't a writer, he's a hack.

Edited to add I just remembered Call the Midwife is better at portraying black folks in the UK as a matter of fact and that's a hokey tv show for old people and drunk wine aunties.
 
You know, I'm really curious about what Moffat is thinking right now.

On one hand, I have no doubt in my mind he really was a hardcore Doctor Who fan and genuinely loved the show. And he used his time on the show to canonize his fanfics and fan theories he had when he was a kid.

On the other hand, like others have said, he was the first to introduce the woke elements like men bashing or making the first doctor sexist.

I'm sure he knows speaking up would be career suicide in the current year, but he must be, at least, a little bit angry how Chibnall gave the middle finger to his era, like retconning River Song and everything he did to establish that Hartnell was the first doctor and that Capaldi was the 13th regeneration.
 
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I saw this coming when the cringe Rosa Parks episode aired. Why rehash the American civil rights movement when you can do something new, (and British), like the Windrush Generation scandal? Introspection is what writers are good at but Chinball isn't a writer, he's a hack.

SJWs are all American, even when they're British, apparently. America uber alles. You have to take your morality from white upper class America and nowhere else.
 
I'd like to remind you all this is someone who smugly shit talked pip and Jane baker on open air back in 86
Somewhere in hell John Nathan Turner is laughing his ass off
 
I'd like to remind you all this is someone who smugly shit talked pip and Jane baker on open air back in 86
Somewhere in hell John Nathan Turner is laughing his ass off
If I had a T.A.R.D.I.S., I'd go back in time and bully the fucking nerd, to the point where he lacked the confidence to ever get into television in the first place.
 
I'd like to remind you all this is someone who smugly shit talked pip and Jane baker on open air back in 86
Somewhere in hell John Nathan Turner is laughing his ass off

Walking proof that gingers have no souls.
 
I'd like to remind you all this is someone who smugly shit talked pip and Jane baker on open air back in 86
If I had a T.A.R.D.I.S., I'd go back in time and bully the fucking nerd, to the point where he lacked the confidence to ever get into television in the first place.

You know, as much as I think Chibnall is an idiot and the worst thing that has happened to Doctor Who, I do think he is just a symptom and not the illness itself. If this was an isolated incident, and it was just Doctor Who, I would think it's all Chibnall's fault, but that's not the case.

Kurtzman and J.J for Trek, Kenedy, Johnson (and also J.J) for Star Wars, and Chibnall for Doctor Who. What are the chances that 3 idiots just happened to get the reigns of the biggest sci-fi franchises in the world, despite working in completed unrelated studios, and all happen to have the exact same agenda of destroying the past and going woke?

Not to mention all other incidents in many other franchises, too many to count, that have fallen victim to wokeness.

Point is, Chibnall is just a useful idiot, and had it not been him, someone else would have done this. Like those guys at Clownfish tv pointed out, the BBC was already attacking the fans before this episode aired. Chibnall didn't do this alone. They, the BBC, knew exactly what they were doing:


I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist. Because I don't know if this is just some kind of fad like 90s antiheroes were as an attempt to appeal to today's youth, or if a conscious sabotage effort with someone pulling the strings behind the scenes. Heck, we already known gaming journalism does have a clique with an agenda:


But I do know this isn't as simple as just one bad showrunner. It's too widespread to be just that. This is a large scale phenomenon and Doctor Who was just one more casualty.
 
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I saw this coming when the cringe Rosa Parks episode aired. Why rehash the American civil rights movement when you can do something new, (and British), like the Windrush Generation scandal? Introspection is what writers are good at but Chinball isn't a writer, he's a hack.

Edited to add I just remembered Call the Midwife is better at portraying black folks in the UK as a matter of fact and that's a hokey tv show for old people and drunk wine aunties.

Oooh, I like that idea. Like a relative of one of the companions suddenly faces deportation, but the paperwork the family kept was lost sometime in the late 50s probably during a house move. Cue the team heading back into the past to see if they can find where it wound up, only for them to be the ones to help "lose" it in the first place.
 
You know, I'm really curious about what Moffat is thinking right now.
Him and his hatchet man Mark Gatiss have been running damage control for this since before the reveal.

I’ve seen the “Doctor Who canon was always changing back in the day” argument thrown a round a few times now in defence of this. While that’s certainly true, it was in the early days of the show when they were still trying to figure things out, and it was pre-internet. Loads of shows have teething problems with their world building in the beginning. But to completely throw a basic part of the show’s backstory through a loop nearly 60 years in when you should know better is inexcusable.

Some of the quotes from the article say it all really:

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This just reeks of rotten fucking ego. 50+ years of established lore shat on so some self-aggrandizing dweeb could pull one big virtue signal.

Oh, you introduced the first openly gay companion? Well I'M going to make the Doctor a woman and then establish that the Doctor was not only originally a woman but a woman of colour. And then Moffat old chum, I will be the wokest* of all and I will be the gender non-specific ruler of woke.

Chris "maybe now girls will talk to me" Chibnall

*Grammarly suggested I change this to worst. Even Grammarly is pissed.
 
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