The DOCTOR WHO Thread

[Ben]

I believe she’s from Coronation Street, our longes running soap over here. No idea how long she’s been in it, but she’ll be well known enough to a good portion of the audiences here. We happened to be watching Children In Need and saw the reveal, which kind of felt thrown in last minute and not very eventful…kind of a weird way to announce it without any buildup. And then kind of awkward how she left at the end; this wasn’t very well setup or stage managed for what coulda shoulda been something of a minorish big deal. And, no offence to Millie, but rather a collective shrug across the nation as a result, unfortunately.

[Daniel]

To be fair it was announced on Twitter that morning:

Get ready to meet the new #DoctorWho companion tonight, exclusively on @BBCCiN in the UK

But I guess you mean within the show. Well, they have done Doctor Who segments in the past so maybe it was to be expected?

[Ben]

Even worse if they did already tee it up in advance…just felt very thrown together without any sense of it being an event.

[Daniel]

Ncuti interviews Millie:



Loving their chemistry!

[ShyViolet]

Even though I haven’t kept up with Who in a while (OK since Capaldi ) I just about died after watching this clip!!

https://youtu.be/wQTj4xsAwpw

Might get back into it after all (especially since it’s about to start airing on Dis +)

[Ben]

To be fair, the Jodie shows were not always the best. I kept up, but often found myself forwarding through just to get the gists. No wonder they went back to Davies to save it, as the writing just wasn’t strong enough to support the huge cultural shift to the Doc being a woman.

And, while I thought it was kind of stupid that the Doc can change sex in the first place — there’s never been ANYthing to hint at that in nearly 60 years — what really narked need is that was not *once* touched in the show. I mean, he has noticed a new accent (inexplicable anyway) and noticed new teeth (to nice comic effect), but he doesn’t really pay much attention or give any botherance to the fact he is now a she suddenly with boobs and a lack of…well, you know. I mean, the teeth get noticed but not the boobs?

And then this was never addressed — at all — like in what to wear, how to do her hair, adjusting to shoes or different attire. Why would he have any female clothes in the TARDIS' closet? Yes, you could imagine they may have been old companion cast-offs, which is a little creepy in itself, but it was never given any context. Just like "they fly now", it was just "done". I get that they *didn't* want to draw attention to it, for whatever woke reasoning — it can just happen, right? — but it was too much of a diversion to just never really questioned or explored.

Now, completely conversely, and as woke again as it may be, but I have zero "problem" with her successor. The Doc can be young, old, plump, thin, tall, short, (gay?), northern accented, or with a south accent, kind or terse, warm or frosty, so no real reason why he can’t be black, be it old or young. But he’s always been a man, a male specimen of his species.

I at least had an impression that his appearance might have been based on subconscious memories of people he had seen, come into contact to, or had some kind of connection to, however brief, where the regeneration just arbitrarily picked an image of a person. There’s no real reason, if that was the case, that he couldn’t become female, particularly, if that was the case, just as the TARDIS can theoretically look like anything it supposedly wants to (if it wasn’t stuck…why doesn’t he fix that!?).

But they’ve never, to my knowledge, explored that idea, so him becoming Jodie, and then *never* really reacting to something so huge (for him as a male and for the show itself as a huge shift) was a mistake that I don’t think helped fuel the small-minded "well that’s just stupid" brigade who were just anti-female/woke. I wasn’t "against" it myself — it was, after all, kind of inevitable — but I didn’t think it was handled well, done for any sensible story or character reasons, or properly developed and explored. And that didn’t really ever help the plotting, by extension, and a weak overall tenure…purely all down to the writing.

[Daniel]

Happy Doctor Who day!

[EricJ]

Now, completely conversely, and as woke again as it may be, but I have zero "problem" with her successor. The Doc can be young, old, plump, thin, tall, short, (gay?), northern accented, or with a south accent, kind or terse, warm or frosty, so no real reason why he can’t be black, be it old or young. But he’s always been a man, a male specimen of his species.

I always saw the Doctor as basically Sherlock Holmes, whom Conan Doyle also imagined as an infuriating genius oddball, living in a messy apartment of intellectual clutter, and in search of constant mental stimulation. (And who played a violin badly, instead of a pennywhistle badly.)
The Companions were his confused Watsons, trying to get a handle on his unusual thinking, the Brigadier was Inspector Lestrade, whose old-school king-and-country methods weren't above asking for a bit of help, and the Master, of course, was Professor Moriarty, and with about as much backstory before being introduced as a villain.

Similarly, Holmes can be Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Peter Cushing, Robert Downey Jr., a Miyazaki-animated anime dog or even Benedict Cumberbatch, but make Holmes female, and all of a sudden, you've got Netflix's insufferably gender-carded "Enola Holmes", who needs to "prove" something with solving her mysteries, rather than pursue an oddball need for mental adrenaline.

Again: Even if you were never anti-woke in your life, whether it's the Doctor or 007, nobody does Woke like 21st-century Britain does woke.

[Daniel]

Miriam Margolyes joins cast. Love her as Mother Mildred on Call the Midwife!

[Daniel]

Costume reveals:



They look amazing. Those shorts are totally Tardis blue!

[Ben]

Her: adequately passable.

Him: not trying hard enough.

She looks quite sassy, but is it right that he looks younger!?

[ShyViolet]

New promo!

https://youtu.be/C5eYrUvHnqI

[Daniel]

Beep the Meep!

[Ben]

More on that teaser:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv ... 235287559/

Where's Rose…?

[Daniel]

"Will someone tell me what the * is going on here?"

I'm itching to see that line in context! According to Russell, the background is entirely fake. The cloudy sky hides the actual location which would be a huge spoiler. Oh man.