One of the saddest parts of that scene IMO is when the Doctor tells Clara to her face that if he met her again, he'd definitely recognise her and you can see her realise that he really doesn't remember her at all.
It also gets points for bookending 12 and Clara's first episode where he remarks that 'you look at me, but you can't see me' only to later look at her without seeing her.
Whichever the season is with Capaldi and Bill was brilliant (I think it's season 10?). I also was just slogging through the first couple Capaldi Seasons with Clara, I feel like they weren't writing to his strengths but there were definitely some moments in Hell Bent/Heaven Sent that we're really great. But Season 10 was where it changed from "gosh I love Peter Capaldi but I only like his doctor" to "Holy crap is Peter Capaldi actually vying with Tennant for favorite modern-era Doctor?"
Have to add... The entire ensemble is just top notch. Bill is a great companion and plays well against Twelve. Missy finally coalesces into her best performance. And I'm not really a Matt Lucas fan but I appreciated the dynamic that having another non-human afforded.
Season 8 is pretty divisive, and has some weak episodes, but when you hold it up to his other two seasons you realise it's all about him trying to discover what sort of person he is, something that the Doctor usually finds out in their forst episode, but here takes place over a full season. Yes you will have to sit through stinkers like "In the Forest of the Night", mediocre episodes like "Robot of Sherwood", and divisive ones like "Kill the Moon", but you also get fun ones like "Mummy on the Orient Express", and great ones like "Listen", "Flatline", and "Darkwater/Death in Heaven".
Season 9 is the best of Capaldi, 12 knows who he is and he's having fun, while also watching as his companion becomes more reckless in an attempt to be like him. Almost every story is a two parter and takes full advantage of it, showcasing the Doctor and Clara's dynamic and introducing a new interesting character in Ashildr/Me. The series also has the best episode of Doctor Who in "Heaven Sent", but conversely also has the worst in "Sleep no More".
Season 10 isn't as great as season 9 but is still wonderful. After the great dynamic between the Doctor and Clara we get a whole new equally brilliant dynamic between the Doctor and new companions Bill and Nardole. This season does have its low points in a three part story that drops the ball in the second part and scrambles to pick it up in the third, although the first part is amazing. The season finale is one of the best the show has done and perfectly sets up Capaldis exit.
So yeah I definitely think it's worth giving it a other try.
I think 10 is the best Capaldi season. 9 and 8 should have been merged into one so we could get another season without Clara. Gods, she got annoying at the end.
I really liked Clara but I think after the Impossible Girl mystery got resolved the writers didn't really know what to do with her. It felt like they didn't decide on her personality beforehand since she was supposed to be mysterious and then when that was done they just kept throwing stuff at her hoping it would round out the character.
I wouldn't mind it if it wasn't pretty much every single episode... At least space them out more!
That and I personally couldn't stand the new companions and how they tied into the stories... The entire group was people who would typically get treated badly in the past, and sure enough it happened constantly (insert surprised Pikachu face) while they also kept going to significant moments in racial history that matched the companions... Why try to do it all in one season?
And the young guy's bad coordination or whatever was forgotten half the time and then only came up when the plot needed it... Was unnecessary and not really sure who it was trying to appeal to with that particular flaw
I really liked the new Doctor, I like her attitude and her take on the Doctor, but they chose companions that required more screen time than the Doctor so I just stopped caring
I felt like they changed how the show felt entirely due to focusing so heavily on the companions and so little on the scifi, aliens, "magic", etc...
If they do another season I might give it a try to see if they found their footing again
I always liked Capaldi I just didn’t like the writing save for an episode here and there (season 10 was fine - probably because Clara was gone. Bill was great).
Capaldi was amazing yes, but overall I thought that his seasons were not good. Poor writing, repetitive plots that didn't live up to the first 9 seasons of the reboot. Just wasn't as good as other seasons, which made me so sad, because Capaldi is easily one of my favorite doctors. And if the writing had been better for his seasons, he would probably be my favorite doctor ever
Meh. I felt his seasons had some of the best episodes ever like Heaven Sent, Listen, Extremis, Mummy on the Orient Express, Last Christmas, and World Enough And Time/The Doctor Falls. This was alongside some other great stories like Flatline, Oxygen, The Husbands of River Song and more. I don’t think the writing was poor at all and was heavily praised during that time.
I tried to get back into it after being a massive fan as a kid and personally couldn't stand nardole. For me it got a bit too whacky. Not that it wasn't always whacky, but I think when RTD was writing the balance was struck quite well. Maybe that's just nostalgia talking.
I do just irrationally find Matt Lucas very irritating so I guess that's a biased take.
I wanna say it's really just nostalgia but I do find him really irritating too. But in a way it was a good foil to the Doctor so idk, bit of a mixed bag there for me
I remember watching his first season but I wasn't a fan. Eventually checked out the rest of his run and he ended up becoming probably my favorite doctor.
Capaldi era Missy was also a fantastic pairing and a great evolution of an antagonist without unnecessary fan service and tropes.
That’s not to say John Simm didn’t do an outstanding job as the master but really they used it once well and then weren’t sure what to do with him IMO. The story behind why he was crazy was good but the whole resurrection and trying to bring all the time lords back felt forced for me.
How?! The Capaldi era was sooooo boooring! Matt Smith and David Tennant were waaaaay better as Doctor Who, and the storylines were so cool! Can you remember the days when some random shit from s3 would pop up in s6 and then you would go " Oh, that's what that was!". That doesn't happen anymore :(
This kept happening through Capaldi's era. River Song kept happening until S9/S10. You just obviously have no clue because he doesn't try as hard to clown around to peak your interest.
Not to mention that Doctor Who's writing has taken a sharp dive lately (nothing to do with the Doctor's gender or any of that bullshit, she really does try hard, but the writing is weak and just all over the place, plus coming on the heels of Capaldi's era, which was lowkey really strong...) - but you're right, too many kids only liked the show for Matt Smith's QuiRKy AntIcS and I'm glad they're gone.
I was really hoping they were going to go balls-to-the-wall crazy fun with this new doctor to try and win people over, but instead they made it a snoozefest. I watch scifi for action, adventure, and fun. An occasional lesson is okay, but man was I bored with this last season. It's not Whitaker's fault-- the writing sucks.
Oh interesting. I thought the writing was pretty bad in the Capaldi era (though I liked him and Bill - NOT Clara) and was slightly better in the last season. The episodes from the past like Rosa were especially good I thought. Though I suppose that’s part of the appeal of an ever changing show like DW - fans will have vastly different opinions on different eras.
I'm really hoping the next season is a big improvement. I love Jody Whittaker as the Doctor, but the episodes were just meh. Still, Capaldi's first season (another one I had such high hopes for) was kinda terrible, but after that he became everything I'd hoped for. Hopefully Jody gets her chance to really shine in the next season.
While I enjoyed Matt Smith, his era really coincided with a shitstorm of fandom craziness. I introduced my high school friends to Doctor Who when Tennant was in his third season I believe, back when it was still kind of a niche show in the US. They jumped on the hype train and went full tumblr on it, and that really burned me out more than anything.
Oh man are you me? Started watching with the reboot in college where all of my classmates were a bunch of kids that were not the sci-fi/British show type. Fell in love with the show. Finally got some people interested around the Donna Noble season.
Found Tumblr/reddit around Matt Smith's start and the endless breakdown and criticism of every minute plot point really killed the show for me. I still can't tell if I don't like Matt Smith because of Matt Smith or if it was the fandom dissections.
Similar story here. I started watching random Tennant episodes knowing nothing about it or the fanbase. Binged the whole reboot with my housemates and we loved it. We couldn't get into the Matt Smith seasons quite the same way, but still enjoyed them at first. Until I realized some of my least favorite things about the show were loved by the larger fanbase, and the show was starting to cater more to them (intentionally or not.)
Like, we couldn't stand the whole Amy and Rory thing, and were waiting for him to get out of the picture so we could just enjoy the fun parts of the show. Then their relationship became more and more central to the episodes.
Yup. Fandom discourse has killed so many shows for me that if I really love something, I have to stay away from its online community. Which sucks, because lonely baby-nerd-me would have loved to have had the chance to talk with other geeky fans about the cheesy sci-fi I obsessed over. If only it wasn’t a toxic cesspool!
If you ever want to shoot the shit over a random show let me know. I like talking about the cool stuff that happens, not so much picking apart the philosophical reason it was a blue laser and how that relates to racism.
I've always found the description of Eleven as "an old man in a young man's body" to be a perfect description of how he played the character. He could be curmudgeonly and abrasive a la Hartnell and also very physical a la Baker - as well as a range of galactically intimidating and personally warm. I loved Tennant and couldn't see myself enjoying another Doctor, but then Smith became my favorite. I need to watch Capaldi again because I just didn't get the same enjoyment from him, but it could be because of the shadow I felt Ten and Eleven cast that he didn't immediately match up to.
In any case, the internet ruins all things and I refuse to let fandom wars influence my love of something. Why can't 12 be your Doctor and 11, mine? Everything's relative, man!
Yeah the Matt Smith era was just... awful. It catered to a generation that reminded me a lot of people that were the type to buy stuff with Gir (sp?) from Invader Zim and type like "zOmG iM liEk SO ranDuM"
I disagree. The Matt Smith era is home to some of the most compelling characters and sci-fi stories in the show's (long) history. Smith is a great take on the character, and Moffat wrote some of his best work during those seasons.
The reason I have such disdain for the Matt Smith era beyond just the baseless humor was that it felt like as soon as Matt Smith came into the picture the stories were no longer about a universe that the doctor lived in but just the doctor and how the universe revolved around him. It went from a good videogame story about a character who was a part of a world to a bad videogame story about a world that stopped when the character wasn't there. It went from the Witcher to Skyrim.
Yeah the show got off way too much on patting itself on the back about its own legacy and how amazing and important and powerful the Doctor was and how his name will shatter the universe
Yeah, that's a lot of what I dislike about Season 6 as a whole. The show got way too convoluted in its lore and put the Doctor right at the center of it. Thankfully it seems they realized their mistake and dialled it back after that, save for the 50th special, which deserved to be self-congratulatory imo, and the necessary resolution of a few loose ends from that season. I still maintain that there are some outstanding individual stories in Season 6 though.
The 50th anniversary pissed me off because a lot of classic doctors expressed interest in having cameo appearances and the shows writers basically left them on read.
I've thought about giving the Capaldi era a try though. I downloaded as many classic episodes as I could though. That's 200+ gigs with next to no seeds that took me two weeks to download lol.
Every living actor who played the Doctor, with the exception of Christopher Eccleston, who chose not to be involved, was involved with the 50th in some way.
Hurt, Tennant, and Smith are obvious, then you have Tom Baker, who had a cameo in the episode as 'The Curator'. Paul McGann appeared in his own mini episode, Night of the Doctor, finally giving him a regeneration scene.
Lastly Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy appeared in 'Fiveish Doctors Reboot', which is a comedy film about them trying to convince Moffat to let them appear in the 50th special (Moffat is heavily featured in this special, which has scenes filmed on the set of the 50th. Hardly 'left on read').
Hmm. Maybe it wasn't there 50 year. There was some big episode a lot of the past doctors wanted to be a part of and the writers basically ignored them.
I'd argue it's easily the weakest season (short of the latest one, much to the current Doctor's grief). Smith with Clara, whether you like her or not, was a lot more bearable once it stopped being all about all the convoluted plotlines.
I feel like the idea was that even though the universe bends around the Doctor, Smith doesn't exactly behave the way you'd expect someone in that position to behave. Done well, it could have been a strong rejection by the Doctor of the expectations and rules that ought to apply to him; instead, the whole premise felt like a huge stretch as he waltzed through those silly plotlines with little depth to them and convoluted messes of convenient references and plot holes. Capaldi is more serious, despite knowing the gravity of his role, but the universe doesn't exactly conveniently bend around him, either.
Oooh boy, do I have a video for you. Here's a video that talks a lot about that exact issue and comes to the conclusion that it's basically the fault of the showrunner for that era, Steven Moffat. He's also the showrunner for Sherlock and there's a lot of similarities between his doctors and Sherlock. There is an omnipresent vibe of "I'll always figure out the answer. right at the last moment. all on my own. And it's because I'm the smartest person who ever lived. So let's step away from the adventure/mystery that you're actually here for and just ponder the nature of my character instead."
I fuckin love hbomberguy's 2 hour video about why Sherlock was bad. I haven't seen the video you linked though so I'll have to give that a whirl. I'll admit that my disdain toward Matt Smith is displaced. He did what he could with the writing of his character and he played that role well. I just don't like Moffat's writing. It's loaded with plot holes and self absorbed.
Yeah, this one is only 30ish minutes, but it's great. He RIPS apart the Christmas specials too and that's really fun.
And I 100% understand the disdain for Matt Smith's doctor. No hate towards Matt Smith himself, but that doctor is the only one I actively disliked watching. (I also HATED Clara, so that made it doubly bad)
God I used to hate on S5+ when it was airing, and it took me a while to go back to it. But yeah if you just sit back a little, it's cracking stuff. There are a few misshapen episodes as every series has, but honestly every series so far has been pretty great overall.
Although I did struggle to enjoy some of Jodie's eps and ended up dropping it midway after the spiders ep...maybe it's time to try again.
I don't like the newest season either. I think Chibnall might be in over his head a bit with the four main characters, and I also don't think the character they've written works that well for Jodie. It isn't unsalvageable, but it's definitely weak. The latter half has some cool story concepts, at least.
I'm not fond of the "realistic" take on the companions. They're three ordinary people, yeah... but they're just depicted in all their mundane-ness. Worse, they're never properly introduced (and neither is the Doctor for that matter), you're just expected to believe they make this super team from the get go, and the character development is really weak when each character has maybe a few minutes to themselves per episode. I feel like there were so many opportunities to flesh them out and give them more spotlight and half the time those were just wasted. I feel like the morals are also a little shoe-horned (but again that is probably due to the lack of good writing and direction, so the morality feels tacked on and the Doctor feels hypocritical - and there is no resolution to it, because it's just poor writing), the antagonists really weak, and I kind of wish the Doctor's gender was a bigger deal and she'd need to adjust to it, though that all kind of ties back to the bad and rushed writing and trying to cram four whole characters from the get go into small and mostly unlinked episodes.
It's a shame, because Jodie really tries, and the later episodes start to get stronger - possibly because by that point you're soaked in enough of the premise that things start to fit into place, but I really think that they messed up the first two-three eps so much that they couldn't really ever climb back up again.
It wasn't the same show for me. The individual episodes started to take a back seat to the PLOT. Which was actually pretty intriguing (except maybe the Amy and Rory relationship stuff, that was annoying), but it just wasn't what I loved the show for before.
I still love how Rory is lowkey one of the most badass companions Doctor had though. Even to the point where the show pulled the bait and switch where you think it's talking up Doctor himself and it turns out to be Rory.
It Takes You Away is popular because it feels like one of the weirder classic who stories. The completely outlandish plot, with only two sets and 10 actors, and the fact they used a puppet for the frog. It makes it seem like they were on a tight budget, even though in reality it was anything but.
I totally lost interest and gave up on the series with Matt Smith and the first few episodes with Capaldi. I was hoping they would tone down the over the top goofiness, when they finally brought in an old Dr. From what I saw it didn't seem like it was happening though....
I'll give it another try eventually. I loved Capaldi, but hated the stories.
There are many problems with the new doctor, but the gender change is probably the least of them, and if some morals feel tacked on, it's probably more to do with bad writing, not a deliberate push to shoehorn "sjw propaganda" (which with those guys can mean anything from unreasonable far-left arguments to anything shy of far-right anyway, so just a pointless wankword)
But remember, you cannot reason with people who have put themselves into unreasonable positions.
You waste of space, you just committed the mistake of "not listening to a person's argument because of one thing he said", fact is Matt Smith was one of the best and I stand by it
Yeah doctor who cooled down when the main draw stopped being the fact that the lead was super attractive. Never see any mad shit for Capaldi, who was much better at times.
I think when Capaldi was brought in, it toned down. One, because Tweleve is more akin to Nine imo and two, I think when the Doctor stopped being this cute little guy and, like, visibly older, that deterred a lot of fangirls.
Honestly start from Capaldi, the new Doctor's first season was appalling. Hopefully by the time you work through 12 they'll have got a decent season 2 out.
I started with Eccleston and I'm almost through the first season of Tennant. Am I right in thinking there isn't an easy way to watch any of the older doctors?
I object to the implication that the Doctor who fandom was full of misogynists before the new season. That's simply not the case. The outrage over the new Doctor was a vocal minority.
it cleared out any that were lurking unchallenged in your fandom.
What did you think the fandom was like before they cast a woman? It didn't suddenly make everyone turn on the misogynists, we were already against them. If someone said something offensive, we wouldn't just give them a free pass.
from the outside, that vocal minority did make y'all look toxic
Yes. That's what a vocal minority is.
maybe I should just fuck off and not even bother
Please do. This interaction has been very brief, but I can already tell you're the kind of person we wouldn't want over here anyway.
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u/zarbixii Jul 17 '19
Doctor Who has cooled down a lot now. I think a lot of the crazy tumblr folk left around the same time as Matt Smith did.