/who/ - Doctor Who General

How would you guys feel about a fan series made in Gmod/SFM?
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Best part of Kill the Moon incoming

Best part of The Pyramid at the End of the World incoming

Best part of The Lie of the Land incoming

EDA thoughts incoming.

Longest Day. So, this is Stephen Cole’s first EDA (despite being credited under the pseudnoynm Michael Collier*). He would later invent Fitz, and write some pretty important material in co-writing Parallel 59 and The Ancestor Cell? Do I have that right? Anyway he’s okay, bit better at character than some of the early writers, bit worse on making a plot coherent.

*The Doom Coalition 1 finale, The Satanic Mill, is regarded by many to have been written under a pseudonym (I’d agree), and is credited to “Edward Collier”. Are the “Collier” family Doctor Who’s most elusive lot?

The timey-wimey planet reminded me of 8’s new audios, which feature something similar. It wasn’t very well-written imo, Cole wasn’t great at keeping it all straight. The plot mostly felt like a chore. A bit of Alien Bodies stuff popped back up (Sam remembering the other, original Sam)- foreshadowing Cole’s eventual overriding of Loz in The Ancestor Cell? I kid, I kid, I don’t even know what the deal with is all that yet.

Anyways, the best bit of the book was unquestionably the following…I laughed from surprise on the train while I was reading it

>Blue Skirt swayed its head round the corner, and grinned malevolently at the sight of the frantic Doctor at the wheel.
>'Come - ON!' he insisted, and the engine finally bit. Squealing away with the smell of burning rubber, the Doctor turned another corner and on to a straight. Another Kusk stepped out from an intersection directly in front of him. The Doctor braked on instinct, but it was too late. The huge biped smashed into the bonnet of the car. The windscreen went dark as the brown twists and nodules of the treacle-bark body slammed into the protective glass, then there were two painfully loud crashes. The next thing he knew he was looking at the body of the flailing Kusk on the metal floor in the rear-view mirror.
>"Tut tut,' remarked the Doctor. 'Clearly never heard of SPLINK!'

Legacy of the Daleks.
War of the Daleks was a hilariously insane clusterfuck of trying to retcon a tonne of Dalek stories to make “””sense”””, so I expected something like that here. I thought the EDAs were finally shying away from fanwanking over past eras instead of establishing their own (and this novel was commissioned earlier, when Nuala Buffini was editor of the range instead of Stephen Cole, so it makes since it fits into that pre-Alien Bodies era a bit more). And then this book brings out not just the Daleks, but Susan and the Delgado Master and oh god, what was I in for? John Peel writing a combined sequel to The Dalek Invasion of Earth and prequel to The Deadly Assassin? How bad can an EDA get?

But…I’m still sorting through my thoughts here, but…honestly, I found myself enjoying it more than most of the EDAs.

It’s not good, mind you. It’s not anywhere near really good, like Alien Bodies and Vampire Science, or average-ly good like some other ones. But goddamn it, it tries.

Like Alien Bodies, it’s bursting with ideas, unfortunately it doesn’t really unify them in any coherent way. The feudalistic setting makes no sense. Donna (not that Donna) and 8 have a conversation that touches on this, but it’s never resolved. People just randomly began hailing random families as royal. I feel like Peel just liked the idea of knights fighting Daleks, mashing up fantasy and the Dalek Invasion of Earth setting, but didn’t bother to actually worldbuild it, or make it make any sense.

Best part of Smile incoming

There were a few times I thought Peel was going to actually draw interesting parallels with Sam and Susan and justify the novel’s extremely contrived premise (seriously, the scenes at the beginning and end when 8 haphazardly contrives a reason to take this detour are painful), but most of the time he either backed out or just struggled to make the parallels meaningful. The ending got kinda close though (pic related).

Peel’s writing style is bad. Look, some exposition is fine, it’s expected in genre stuff like this, not many writers are skilled enough to effectively bypass it.

This sort of exposition is clunky, but pretty normal for these sort of books:

>She had never expected to see Robomen again. They were the living dead –
people whose minds had been wiped of all personality and independent action, completely unrecoverable. The only thing that kept their bodies functioning was a small radio receiver in the helmets that they wore. This was a tiny computer that issued Dalek orders to them, and updated directives.
>Robomen were grotesque creatures, shambling, and totally loyal to the Daleks because they had no other option.
>Luckily, this lack of independent thought made them marginally slower than a healthy human being.
>Swiftly, she punched out with her right hand at the Roboman’s stomach.

This sort of exposition is not:

>Confused again, Donna waited for him to come out. Had he been claiming she was wrong? But how could that be? It was the only logical way to explain his statements, and logic always worked.

>What she found refreshing was the lack of machismo in his words after years of listening to her colleagues glorifying their tales of combat. She could tell he loathed the death and destruction that seemed to dog his footsteps.

>Donna

RTD clearly plagiarised John Peel!

I can go on. I can go on and on and on when it comes to Peel's clunky writing.

>He turned to wink at Donna. ‘It’s a weakness of his,’ he confided. ‘He tries to look and sound so bold, but he’s actually quite insecure. He’s always trying to excite my imagination and approval for his nasty little plans.’

>The Doctor...and with a new face. He’d used up another of his lives, obviously. Probably through some foolish good deed or other. Despite his best efforts, he had never been able to convince the Doctor of the pointlessness of attempting to do good in a chaotic universe. The only important thing was power, which he understood perfectly, and the Doctor refused to grasp. Survival of the fittest – the weak being led by the strong. That was the way of life, and the way things inevitably had to be. The Doctor struggled against the natural order of things, his foolish head filled with notions such as compassion, love and pity. Idiot.

>As you know, the Dalek war efforts extend over thousands of parsecs.

HE ACTUALLY USES “AS YOU KNOW”

>‘This time, I’m the one with the weapon, Master of nothing. Get to your feet, or I swear I’ll kill you where you grovel.’

WHO TALKS LIKE THIS

kek, there's a moment where Peel actually says "Doctor Donna" too.

Most of the EDAs so far are not super well-written, they’re very workmanlike, but they’re not flat-out BAD like that. It’s distracting. That’s not where the writing weirdness ends though. When we see what Susan has been up to since The Dalek Invasion of Earth, I wasn’t expecting to read…that she looked like a teenager and would have sex with lingerie on to calm down her husband.

>she still had the body and desires of a human teenager….put on a revealing outfit, play up to one of his fantasies, and then bed him before he had the time to remember [that he was angry]

What a bizarre thing to read. I was interested by my initial reaction, which was really taken aback. One of the reasons I’m harsher on certain audios than most people is because I take issue with Susan’s characterisation, or lack thereof. I’ve banged on citing Sandifer’s ”problem of Susan” idea before. I think making her (and the Doctor, for that matter) sexual beings makes plenty of sense. And there’s storytelling potential in her not ageing while David does, that’s a Moffat-y idea in a way. But it felt vaguely creepy to me. Would I have entertained the idea more if Kate Orman or Jacqueline Rayner wrote it instead of John Peel, yeah, probably, but to his credit he doesn’t indulge the creepier aspects of that disparity further on in the novel really.

Peel does try to reconcile the irreconcilable, godawful appearance of Susan in The Five Doctors with both The Dalek Invasion of Earth and here, bless him, but of course it doesn’t really work and just feels like mindless continuity plugging.

please, for everyone's sake, no

He actually kinda, sorta, nearly makes Susan being the cause behind crispy Master and The Deadly Assassin work though, partially because he (fuck, I don’t even know if this was intentional honestly) actually melds her characterisation with her actions in The Dalek Invasion of Earth and distinguishes her from the Doctor in how merciless she is. I was actually impressed by how non-cliche that sequence of Susan crispyfying the Delgado Master was, she doesn’t think “durr am I just as bad as him by doing this” or anything like that once, she’s ultra committed, I was impressed there, by her and by Peel. The mindset behind I mean. The scene itself is, eh…she expositions her mindset for like five pages in a super clunky way, and it’s all pretty poorly executed, but I appreciated at least Peel was trying to root it at some level in characterisation instead of just continuity wank.

Elephant in the room, Big Finish did the things this book does entirely different, the Master
stuff in their relatively recent Master trilogy, and the Susan stuff in the EDAs…but not the ones you were expecting. I dislike the “durr BF are more legitimate because actual performers/Night of the Doctor/whatever other excuse” line of thought, but it’s hard to escape just how impactful and well known their handling of these elements was, whereas I’ve never even heard of this book before, and had even forgotten it had Susan in it at all, although McGanon has told me so a few times.

Do I prefer Peel’s incomprehensible follow-up to The Dalek Invasion of Earth or Platt and Briggs’? The latter set a better story there, but I really don’t think either of them did a fantastic job. Both relegate Susan too far into just being a wife/mother, when the character has so much fucking potential beyond that, both sidestep nearly all the actually interesting storytelling opportunities there, and run off before genuinely iterating the character in any meaningfully way.

But…fuck it, I’m going to say it…I think Peel did a better job with her than Briggs. Just her characterisation. I don’t think either of them did a good job, but I think Briggs’ completely vacant handwaving of her characterisation was worse than Peel’s half-assed writing of her which I feel was probably more motivated by continuity hole-plugging than earnest engagement with the character, but still, at least there was some characterisation of her and Peel actually moved her into the “next stage” of her story. I think what cinched it for me was Peel actually exploring Susan’s mindset after a loved one died, when I have complained before about a certain other story not doing that. Peel didn’t always just treat her as a prop for his plot and the Doctor’s characterisation, and I appreciated that, even though I think he mostly bungled things. But I feel like he tried. I hope.

I wish when writers got really continuity-heavy they’d have more of a story to tell than just what often feels like “hey, what if X happened” or “what if I explained Y with Z”. I feel like there’s the germ of an interesting story here, but most of it is spent flatly doing a lame Master/Daleks plot in an incoherent setting, occasionally plugging some continuity gaps from Classic Who. I’m not asking for Alien Bodies or Jubilee here, just a bit more inspiration…some of these authors seem to have so much freedom, but so little daring.

The timey-wimey explanation of the TARDIS telepathic message 8 received was actually done pretty well, Peel didn’t even overexplain it when 8 worked out what exactly had happened there. Lot of lazy storytelling like two different Time Lords getting shot, but both just having the wounds graze and not hitting anything important. 8 monologued excessively in the TARDIS early on too, was War of the Daleks the early EDA that did that excessively as well? Can’t remember, but I remember complaining about it.

It’s a fucking mess of a book but at least there’s enough there that I could readily smash out 2000 words on it without even meaning to, I can’t say that for most EDAs. The book really doesn’t work, and it’s a lot duller than I make out (the majority of it really is a very flat schemey storyline, all the continuity nonsense is mostly at the very beginning and end), but Peel touched on a lot of interesting stuff here. I can’t exactly say I enjoyed it, but I definitely will remember it, which is a lot more than I can say for most EDAs.

Jesus Christ, enough with this turbo autism

You're either OP or

Why SFM when you can use a text to speech program?

based

Not me. i'm amused by the irony of OP complaining about autism though!

Jesus Christ OP, enough with this turbo autism

half life: full life consequences style doctor who series would be epic

what would we call it though? who will be the john freeman to the doctors gordon freeman?

And here's my proof by the way

Even though I haven't read it and I still checked the spoilers, really interesting stuff there. Are there ANY good Dalek novels?

It failed in an interesting way...quite a few Who stories do that I suppose. Quite a few Dalek stories too really.
Maybe it's because I'm so used to Briggs' voice and endless Dalek audios but I feel like the Daleks are hard to do in a book. No more Dalek books in this series since apparently these 2 only happened because Peel was buddy-buddy with Terry Nation.

Doctor Who is dead.

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would be more canon than the post christmas stuff will be

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>no roundels

Remember when you called Neo a turbo autist for posting about Doctor Who on /who/
while you meanwhile made that?

reddit poll www.strawpoll.me/14340770/

>Amy beating out Clara

twitter.com/edwardrussell/status/928245746733932544

Who is this?

A white woman

An Indian woman.

>Adam “More Food” Orford
>Adam “Restraining” Orford
>Adam “The Sandwich Bandit” Orford
>Adam “Heard You’re A Virgin” Orford
>Adam “Cardiff’s Most Wanted” Orford
>Adam “I Fap In Jenna’s Napkins” Orford
>Adam “First I Revolt, Then I Assault” Orford
>Adam “At My Hardest In The TARDIS” Orford
>Adam “GirlyLetters Makes My Dick Wet” Orford
>Adam “Open Your Minge For This Ginge” Orford
>Adam “You’ve Got An Audi, Let’s Get Rowdy” Orford
>Adam “Chris Chibnall’s Most Hated Individual” Orford
>Adam “Thirty More Pictures Or You’re A Bitch” Orford
>Adam “First I Tick Your Box, Then I Dick Your Box” Orford
>Adam “Jenna’s Just Frigid, Not Cause I Was Rigid” Orford
>Adam “Bet You Thought There’d Be No Set Reports” Orford
>Adam “I’d Push Past Kiddies To See Jenna’s Tiddies” Orford

The singer-songwriter behind 2016's smash hit "Celestia".

She's just a girl that I've been dreaming of ever since I was a little girl

>"These Anons can't see 13's outfit yet... It's not time..."

You're welcome, user

Costume reveal this evening.

Can any /who/re tell me with a straight face they don't get hype when the song picks up around 2:33? youtu.be/7vHnCoURs7E

ITS HAPPENING

Any /who/ regulars from outside the Anglosphere? It feels like the majority of us are Brits, Americans or Aussies.

Hi.

Oncoming is a Russian.

The hype bit of the song is the climax at 5:38

>/who/ Waifu Wars: Which Waifu Wins?

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neo is Chinese,

>/who/ Husbando Hostility: Handsome or Hideous?

Do one with kamelion and the cyber woman!

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5 Irishmen too

They are already going abroad to film series 11? did Chibnall finally press the BBC for a proper budget?

what are the nationalities of the trips

Reminder we will never get that Kino
Irish Doctor and Japanese Companion pairing.

Here we go boys Doctor Who Set reports are starting again!!!! more KINO DRAMA AWAITS!!!!!

WTF is that meant to be an eclipse or sun or some shit?

N-nilso??
Cats, kindanonymous and myself are Australian

Was this picture taken from inside an abandoned house?

It's a big ball

Australian degenerates.

filming in newport on the 9th apparently

...

Looks like a weird sun. I hope to god it's not a return of that sentient sun from chibnalls shitty episode in series 3.

I understand cats so much more now

might not be though

twitter.com/drwhodwsr

I just want to say, whoever made this bot is based

so which trips aren't white

I live in Newport, saw Jodies costume it's a blue coat, and she wears a white t shirt underneath. I couldn't tell what the trousers were.Lot's of extras about dressed as what appears to be Celtic Druids.

Doctor Who is dead.

Even though this is a fake, blue jackets are kino.

PLEASE CHIBNALL OMG COULD THIS BE A RETURN OF OCCULT WHO???????
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
GIVE US OCCULT GOODNESS.

We need a sadistic companion next series

Doctor who is not dead

>Lot's of extras about dressed as what appears to be Celtic Druids.
How many were black?

Clara was sadistic.

And we all hate each other for being from the wrong part of Ireland

Immigrant and cloister are black

How long will it take them to film ten episodes?

Could we get the show before autumn next year then? Maybe late summer?

Shatterpoint when

Cloister is black? what the actual fuck. He sounded white all this time.

when it's finished babe

2 weeks approx. The budget has been cut and it'll all be filmed in Chibnalls back garden. His shed will double as the TARDIS

No, Clara was just a bit of a cunt.

It takes 8-9 months usually.

Should be filmed within 6-7 Months tops.

I need my Winstone doc fix!

>tfw femdom companion never

Holy shit is the Irish historical episode actually real? twitter.com/a_heartlessbean/status/925909971216355328

Chibnall is actually tackling Ireland. The madman!!!

Take this as a momentary fix

yo who is that

Mark Gatiss finally doing his Irish Bog body zombie episode?

Kek I'm pretty sure that was based on a fake spoiler posted to /who/ recently

HYPEEEEEEE

>There will be a Troubles episode in your lifetime
Chibnall really pushing the boundaries

Maika Sakuranomiya from Blend S: youtube.com/watch?v=UoHcnpWH0-Y

They bought the Cu Chulainn is a Time Lord who meme.

Link to cloister voice

Please be an Irish mythology episode, I don't want to see a British interpretation of Irish history it will be biased and stupid.