/who/ - Doctor Who General

Human Nature/The Family of Blood edition
What does /who/ think of the only Doctor Who episode adapted from a Doctor Who book?

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Is Heaven Sent a good episode to introduce people into the show?.

no

No, it's great but it's completely atypical. Same reason Blink is a terrible starting point.

I know a lot of people who got hooked with Blink.

Nope. Magnificent episode, but not a good intro. You have the Hybrid shit, Gallifrey and Clara kind of bog things down, on top of it starting with him being teleported in and the TARDIS only seen as a figment of his imagination there's just way too many things that need to be explained for a new audience to comprehend what is happening. I mean it's great as a stand alone, but if you actually want them to start watching the show you could probably find a much better episode.

>What does /who/ think of the only Doctor Who episode adapted from a Doctor Who book?
Being adapted from a VNA means it didn't steal nearly as much from the EDAs as most other episode. But still very good.

>the Hybrid is literally nothing
Defend this.

why would I defend it? all the season arcs are shit

Before we knew how much of much of a bullshit cracks are it was great.
RTD arcs are pretty ok too. Not very annoying, but cute. Except maybe S4.

The difference being Blink doesn't really have all that much going on to appreciate it. You get the Doctor is a time traveler which is a very easy premise to grasp when starting it, but jumping in with Heaven Sent you need them to understand what Gallifrey is, what happened to it, who is Clara, why was she important to the Doctor, what happened to her, why does it start with him being teleported in, the TARDIS is misrepresented as his own personal psyche instead of being his mode of transportation and home, what regeneration is, what species he is, etc.
Sure you can explain this stuff as you go but the best way to enjoy this amazing story is to already get what is going on in the show.

>Is Heaven Sent a good episode to introduce people into the show?

I love this episode, but prefer other episodes to introduce newbies. Eg 'Rose' or 'Eleventh Hour' because both are natural starting points without loads of prior knowledge needed.

>gallifrey
home planet he couldn't visit
>what happened
doesn't matter
>who is clara
his companion and friend
>why was she important
he liked her and she died
>what happened to her
she died
>why does it start with him being teleported in
doesn't matter
>the tardis
its his time machine and he's seeing things
>what regeneration is
doesn't matter
>what species
doesn't matter

Doesnt seem so hard to me.

One of the lads kept telling me that Haley Atwell is the next Doctor Who. Can't find the news anywhere on the internet so I'm guessing it's some kind of hush-hush rumor thing, and this would be the best place to find it, so is there actually anything confirmed or is my mate just messing with me?

>Human Nature
Good job transposing the "Doctor experiencing being human" theme from 7 to 10, but overall it's more interesting with the less-human 7. (Or maybe it's more interesting with the less-personal early VNAs as the contrast?)

Great job translating WWI anxiety to a different medium, and tying it to 10's more-extreme-than-other-incarnations pacifism.

Great job using Martha to explore racism from a class-conscious rather than pure-identity-politics viewpoint (and surprising, coming from New Labour types like Cornell and RTD).

Dropping everything else was disappointing, but almost certainly for the best—there's only so much you can cram in 90 minutes, and better to do a few things well than a ton of things badly.

Better ending than the book, even if it doesn't really fit 10 that well.

I love that it's just barely possible that both versions of the story happened to the same guy, but not that likely, because it trolls canon nerds on both sides perfectly.

>actually anything confirmed
Chibs almost certainly hasn't picked the next Doctor yet, much less announced her. It's just that scientifically, it's 100% certain, unless the Mule hypnotises Chibs, and even then, the Second BBC will eventually get human history back on the right track.

I think it's bit too generous to say RTD did story arcs. They're literally just saying the same word over and over.

It was better than what we got in s6 and s7. And s9. Missy was fine.

RTD absolutely did season long story arcs, it's just that for some reason they get conflated with the yearly gimmicks like Bad Wolf etc.

>the Mule
>the Second BBC
What?

>RTD arcs are pretty ok too. Not very annoying, but cute. Except maybe S4.
Except S4, RTD arcs aren't really story arcs, they're just marketing tag words.

But that's fine. Who decided Doctor Who needs arcs? Nobody has ever said Trial of a Time Lord was the best classic season, or Key to Time Four's best year, or the Divergent Universe Eight's best two years with Big Finish, or the Collapsing Multiverse stuff the best run of the novels, have they?

The entire setting, except for the TARDIS and its crew, changes every episode. And that's part of why the show works.

If RTD knew that, and was pretending to do arcs because he'd pitched the show based on its similarity to Buffy and Babylon 5, but knew that real arcs were a bad idea, that was pretty clever.

If RTD thought he was doing B5-style arcs and just failed miserably, that was pretty lucky.

...

Google Isaac Asimov Foundation.

>Doesnt seem so hard to me.
Yeah, because you already know all the answers. Someone who is completely unfamiliar with the series is going to be wondering about these things, which detracts from the episode's actual mystery.

The only good arc was S8's character development arc

is this a fucking joke

Saying it doesn't have the same impact as experiencing it. All those "doesn't matter" carry emotional weight that effect how you experience the story. The reveal at the end doesn't have the same impact if you watched the show from the beginning. Understanding who he is, his struggle, his perseverance through the story all effect the quality of the episode. Blink doesn't have that problem, because understanding who the Doctor is and what he does has very little to do with the story at hand.

Plus, even knowing the answers isn't enough.

When you hear some random person on the bus talking about their problems, it's a lot less interesting than if it's your friend or your sister or your wife. It's not because you can't guess whether or not random guy loved that brother who died, it's because you don't care. You have no emotional investment in who random guy loved.

Movies have to spent much of the first arc building up your emotional investment to the characters and everything going on in their lives. TV series can assume that you already watched at least some of the last 10 episodes and take that investment for granted.

Not just that, but everything about the story relies on empathy. Knowing Gallifrey was lost is one thing, but the reveal just wouldn't have the same impact to someone that actually watched the show and knows what a big deal it is. If you liked Clara and seeing her die gives you that emotional connection to 12 through out the story. Knowing he's lost emotionally while being stuck there makes the story that much better when you feel what he feels. Just flat out saying "yeah she died who cares" takes away from what made the story so great. The whole story would feel completly different to someone that has never seen the show, and while it would still be a great story it's not being experienced in full and the way it was intended.

Must be. Anyone who thinks Jo got more character development in season 8 than in season 10 has forgotten that her entire trajectory means so much less without The Green Death. :)

OK, I think I can scrap my reply, because three different people already said basically the same thing better than I could…

>clara becomes more like the doctor to the point where they're so alike they part ways after lying to each other because they thought it was making the other happy

literally the only well executed plot in doctor who

It's the best Moffat arc but I wouldn't put it above series 1.

>literally the only well executed plot in doctor who
Nonsense. There are lots of great character stories in Doctor Who: Evelyn, Charley (if you stop after Neverland), Fitz… I hear there's also a TV show connected to the audios and books, but I don't know enough to comment.

the hybrid arc was great

it was like a typical nuwho arc and made you think there was going to be a dumb hybrid villain in the finale and then it turns out the doctor was the villain in the end.

The doctor was *maybe* the villain in the end. They never actually confirm what the hybrid was, just present a few possibilities and leave it at that

>The doctor was *maybe* the villain in the end
what? he was definitely a villain in hell bent.

Clara is the worst, the least likeable, the most annoying, the least developed NuWho companion.

I will never understand people who defend her.
It's the biggest mistake of Moffat era. A way worse than River mistake, way worse.

I was somewhat okay with her staying one season as a impossible girl, but everything after this - a total bullshit. She ruined Capaldi's run in so many ways. FUck it.

They never confirm him and clara are the hybrid, it's only a suggestion among many others

I disagree

>the hybrid arc
The Hybrid arc is just barely a story arc—if they left Ashildr out, it wouldn't be on at all. It doesn't twist any of the stories around, or make you rethink them in retrospect, or determine where the show goes from episode to episode. It's just something that gets mentioned a few times before being explored for the first time in the finale.

But not having real story arcs is better than having mediocre story arcs, much less actively bad ones, and just as good as having good ones. I was impressed at how well Moffat pulled off S5 given what a bad fit Doctor Who's format is for story arcs, but I was also impressed that my cousin was able to walk off dropping a 50-pound table on his foot, and that doesn't mean my cousin should keep dropping 50-pound tables on his foot. There are better uses for feet, and for Doctor Who seasons.

>you will never offer jellybabies to the Mule
Why live?

meanwhile, the doctor is an asshole and continues to be an asshole for the rest of S8. it's like they could only handle one character's development at a time, and clara's wasn't even that strong

Reminder that Moffat almost made the "half-human" line officially canon

What if Bill becomes the hybrid and they're basically gonna do the Cartmel thing

-dresses like Ace
-second companion to a Doctor who's experiencing declining popularity among the masses
-calls him Professor at least once

Oh, yes.
The Asian child.

>Reminder that Moffat almost made the "half-human" line officially canon
Except that the line already is canon.

Unless you don't accept that McGann is the Eighth Doctor and the guy between McCoy and War is the Briggs Doctor or something?

And, given all the fun the novels, audios, and TV show have had playing with that line in as many different ways as you can imagine, I'm glad it exists, as stupid as it was at the time.

The TV movie is canon, but everything produced afterwards chose to ignore the half-human line. Most fans claim that it's non-canon, and RTD said it was bollocks.
And then Moffat snuck it into Hell Bent.

>What if Bill becomes the hybrid and they're basically gonna do the Cartmel thing

-is a much more interesting companion than her predecessor
-grows as a character over the next two years
-kicks a Dalek's arse with a baseball bat

Yeah, that would be terrible.

DOCTOR CHAAAAAANG (Lee)!!!

Moffat would be begging the ratings to decline if he continued doing anything with the Hybrid shit

It's pretty silly to call the movie canon and then insist that one line from the movie is not—especially since the movie doesn't actually work if you take that line out.

As for "everything produced after", there are at least a dozen takes on that line in the novels, and a couple more in the audios.

And RTD didn't insist the line never happened, he explicitly endorsed the idea from one of the novels that the line was part of a trick the Doctor played on the Master.

Meanwhile, there are so many contradictions about the Doctor's history that this one barely registers. He's a future human colonist, he has Time Lord parents, he has no parents because he was loomed, he sort of has pre-Time Lord Gallifreyan parents because he's the Other reincarnated, he has two Time Lord renegades for parents but they had to use bioscience to do it, he has a mother who's clearly a high-ranking Time Lord, and he has a mother who's clearly a low-ranking non-Time-Lord Gallifreyan. How does adding a Time Lord father and human mother into that make it any worse? The Doctor's history is horribly inconsistent, but then what do you expect from a renegade time traveler who's survived multiple Time Wars and had multiple people trying to edit his history and disappeared and got remembered back into existence by Amy Pond?

>especially since the movie doesn't actually work if you take that line out.
Doesn't it? As far as I remember the plot in no way depends on the Doctor being half human, it's just sort of there.

The thing that's always confused me is why fans latched onto the "on my mother's side" line. Regardless of what behind-the-scenes facts say, within the movie itself it's always been clear to me that that part was intended as a joke.

>intended as a joke

It's a part of the plot, user.

>Doesn't it? As far as I remember the plot in no way depends on the Doctor being half human, it's just sort of there.
The Doctor rekeyed the Eye of Harmony in his TARDIS so it can't be opened by other Time Lords. That's why the Master needs to force the Doctor to open it for him.

But then he gets a series of visions in the Cloister Room—the Seventh Doctor, the Eighth Doctor, the Master's retina, and a human retina—and he figures out that he can just have Chang Lee open it instead.

So, if the Eighth Doctor isn't half-human, you need some other explanation for why he has a human retina—and why the Master exclaimed "half-human" upon seeing an image of a human retina.

And the fact that every TARDIS (or at least the Doctor's) now actually carries around the Eye of Harmony is a much bigger stupid retcon than the whole business about the eye.

No it's not. Read my post again.

>It's a part of the plot, user.
The half-human bit is part of the plot. The "on my mother's side" could still well be a joke.

For example, Gary Russell's take on it (I think from one of his novels, but maybe in the comics?) is that the Doctor is "half-human" in the sense that each time a Time Lord regenerates, he takes on some characteristics of the people around him, and after seven times doing it around humans instead of Gallifreyans…

And that does work just as well with everything we saw in the movie as him being half-human because Ulysses knocked up an Earth lady.

>you need some other explanation for why he has a human retina
I think this is the one RTD liked:

The Doctor rekeyed his lock to human retinal patterns because he's probably the only Time Lord in the universe who's always got a human around willing to help him out. The Cloister Room visions were a deliberate ploy that he set up to make the Master think opening the Eye was going to require forcing the Doctor to do it rather than just hypnotising or tricking any random human, but that kind of backfired. The line to the professor was either the Doctor trying out the ruse to see how it goes over, or joking about it to relieve his worry.

Isn't there also a theory that the whole "Third Doctor regenerating on Dust" episode put human content into his biodata somehow?

Those are both good ways of addressing it. Honestly I'm cool with any interpretation where it applies to McGann's incarnation but not the others, but retconning Doctors 1-7 to being half human triggers me and I do think that was the original intention.

>Isn't there also a theory that the whole "Third Doctor regenerating on Dust" episode put human content into his biodata somehow?
I'm pretty sure people did discuss that on RADW. But I think it actually came from Miles giving it as an example of the stupid things one of the other stupid writers was probably going to come up with because they didn't get his ideas, not from one of the writers actually thinking it up.

Just finished Season 6. What should I expect for the next one lads? I kinda liked Season 5 more, and I haven't seen any other seasons of this show yet but I'm liking it.

S5 is better than S6. S7 is worse than both

>I do think that was the original intention
Yes, it definitely was. If you read the Bible, or any of the interviews with anyone involved, or any of L'Officier's stuff, the plan at the time was to introduce a renegade Time Lord named Ulysses living on Earth, and by the end of the first season we'd learn that Ulysses and his human assistant Penelope were the Doctor's parents.

But the novels only used the Ulysses thing as a red herring (actually, two different ones, one by Kate Orman and Jon Blum, the other by Lance Parkin).

I seriously recommend that you pause and go back and watch a lot of classic stuff. You're moving into the anniversary year, and it's littered with references to the past, and at its climax comes the 50th anniversary.

Why not interleave classic and new?

Actually, it could be kind of fun picking out specific classic stories with the goal of getting in all the most important stuff before the 50th, while trying to pick classic stories to precede/follow each NuWho episode thematically.

Well fug.
Should I jump back to David Tennant's stuff, or even earlier? I saw the two River Song episodes with Tennant before and I enjoyed those too. Or should I jump all the way back to pre-reboot Who?

Hop back to Rose. Classic series is a bit daunting for a newbie.

>Should I jump back to David Tennant's stuff, or even earlier? I saw the two River Song episodes with Tennant before and I enjoyed those too. Or should I jump all the way back to pre-reboot Who?
Wait, is S5-6 all you've seen?

Even if you don't go back to classic Who, definitely go back to Eccleston, not just Tennant. It's only one more season, and it's one of the best.

Meanwhile, if you're not sure about classic, try something small. Episode 1 of An Unearthly Child works without the other three episodes, and it should go great with Rose. Then maybe City of Death, but just one episode at a time whenever you want a break from Eccleston, instead of binge-watching it. Then maybe Inferno, one episode at a time, whenever you want a break from Tennant.

Yeah, you're missing out on a lot. I'm sorry that you chose the wrong Doctor Who experience.

>I'm sorry that you chose the wrong Doctor Who experience.
My sister's first Who experience was Timelash, and it only took me 22 years to get her to give it another try…

I dunno, The Eleventh Hour was kinda nice for an introductory episode.

Just listened to this - cracking stuff (even if I did know the twist going in). Nimrod's one of the most underrated villains in Who, and Colin does an amazing job changing his performance for the clone Doctor - the scene where he finds the room full of failed copies is all sorts of messed up.

>dat Evelyn foreshadowing

At the very least, see a Tom Baker story (City of Death's a good pick, as said) before watching Day of the Doctor.

>Nimrod's one of the most underrated villains in Who
If only the first Forge/Nimrod story didn't have "Twilight" in the name, maybe more people would give it the chance it deserves…

>If only the first Forge/Nimrod story didn't have "Twilight" in the name
"Lazarus" isn't as good a name in 2017 as it was in 2003, either. Thank, Gatiss.

Gatiss didn't write The Lazarus Experiment. Anyway, I think Lazarus is generally an overused reference. Like there's a rule that any sci fi story where someone comes back to life has to slip the word "Lazarus" in there somewhere.

Yeah, it's pretty overexposed even outside SF. At least in this case it kind of fits since Nimrod gives everything a melodramatic codename.

What are you listening to /who/?
youtube.com/watch?v=NRS62nccwmw

>Gatiss didn't write The Lazarus Experiment.
Yes, I know, he just played the character, and came up with the idea of modeling his old-face after Vincent Price. And I'm not seriously suggesting that it would have been a great episode with, I don't know, Peter Serafinowicz in made up to look like old Peter Cushing instead. It's just more fun to blame Gatiss than Greenhorn.

Plus, I suspect people who are too uneducated to know the Biblical connection are probably going to think DC comics (or, more likely, Dark Knight Rises or Arrow and its spinoffs), not one Doctor Who episode they haven't watched in a decade, even when thinking about a Doctor Who audio.

And even if it were an unfortunate name, it still wouldn't be in the same league as Project: Twilight. Who would have guessed that two years later—right around the time NuWho started and people started looking at Big Finish's back catalog—"Twilight" would suddenly mean sparkly vampires for 13-year-old girls?

why do we do this to ourselves

>why do we do this to ourselves
Are you asking about the "reading Sup Forums", the "waiting 18 months for Doctor Who", or the "pushing red-hot pokers into both ears"?

For the last two, that's easy. For the first, not so much.

mostly the spending large amounts of our time discussing doctor who, or watching doctor who, or listening to doctor who, or reading doctor who

Could be worse; could be Star Wars.

>the worst
Martha

>the least likeable
Rose

>the most annoying
Donna

>the least developed
Adam

>I will never understand people who defend her.
They think she's cute

>the biggest mistake of Moffat era
Matt Smith leaving was the biggest mistake of Moffat's era. Though, not Moffat's mistake.

>A way worse than River mistake
The worst mistake regarding River was not showing Amy and Rory finding and raising baby Melody in 1970s New York.

>I was somewhat okay with her staying one season as a impossible girl
Series 7 Clara was worst Clara. And it was only half a season.

>She ruined Capaldi's run in so many ways
Clarabemypaldi is best Clara, Impossible Pancakes is worst Clara. Series 9 was a Clara too far, though, I can't argue with that whatsoever.

I still can't get over that the retconning of Doctor leaving Gallifrey because he was afraid of a hybrid.

Canon.

Honestly, the movie doesn't treat it that way, even. The movie treats it as literally one half of him being human. I always just went with some variation on that being the explanation, especially with that cut dialogue by RTD about how being half human was "a 48 hour bug".

Genesis of the Daleks is way more relevant to the anniversary year (and, really, to nuwho in general) than Inferno or City of Death, fun as they are.

Does that nigga have lightsabers coming out of his kneecaps? Or are they just fire jets? Either way wtf.

I know what you mean...

>/who/ is shitposting general
>Adam Orford and Neon Visual have completely deleted the wiki
>Doctor Who remains on indefinite hiatus
>Chibnall Who inching closer every day
>Capaldi enters final series suffering advanced stages of Arteriosclerosis
>Michael Grade publishes full page ad congratulating Moffat on "a job well done"
>Gatiss promises "You will breathe no more!" in Series 10
>Charges of pedophilia raised against Matt Smith by several young children
>Jenna Coleman photographed on set of Victoria suffering from extreme anorexia
>Big Finish license up for renewal, BBC considering rejection
>Georgia Moffet photographed with black eye, David Tennant's agent issues statement she "ran into a doorknob"
>Cloister currently out on bail on charges of possession of child pornography
>Colin Baker's transition well underway, according to family
>Phillip Morris: "I traded the complete Dalek's Master Plan for a whole season of Z Cars, BBC wasn't interested"
>Sylvester McCoy responds to recording of 14 minute racist tirade in Tesco's checkout line: "Make Scotland great again!"
>Nicola Bryant headlines: "Doc #5 Drugged, Molested Me!"
>Ian Levine to replace Murray Gold
>Paul McGann "hasn't come out of the basement in over a year" according to family
>John Barrowman has begun an aggressive treatment regimen for HIV
>Peter Harness hostage video released by ISIS
>Nicholas Briggs undergoes emergency surgery, vocal cords completely removed
>Russel T Davies: "If Chibs asks, I'll write whatever he wants."
>Christopher Eccleston on Brexit: "I'd do anything just to get rid of every stinking ape in this country."
>Catherine Tate #StandsWithLeslie, calls for massive twitter bannings
>Video surfaces of visibly drunken Karen Gillan smoking crack: "They killed me on Who, they killed me in Guardians 2, they killed my show, why live?"
>Tom Baker, writing from hospice care: "The end is near, but the moment is being prepared for."

>Genesis of the Daleks is way more relevant to the anniversary year
Sure, but there's time while bingewatching 4-1/2 seasons, and I figured it would be better to watch that during S4 than during S1-2.

>tfw you don't live in the worst timeline where all of this is true
phew.

>/who/ is shitposting general
>Capaldi is leaving
>Chibnall Who

It's already the nightmare scenario.

...

I bought the 5 inch Missy fig today, the one with the black outfit. God, Character is a shit company. I mean, it could be worse, it could be Mattel, but still. Practically no resemblance, practically no articulation in the legs. I put a slit in her dress to give her a bit of freedom (and for sexy poses) only to discover she has bare naked legs from her black panties to the tops of her black laced up knee-high heels. I chose to take that detail as canon.

Hey, at least you can use it as a dildo.

post pictures

If you're talking about this video youtube.com/watch?v=hnLbNmW_ImA

She doesn't call him professor, she says "firstly"

Is Capaldi that good?