Season 2 has wrapped production, but Paramount+ canceled the show, prompting an all-too-typical passionate Star Trek fan campaign to revive it.
Oh, excuse the passion, we didn't want to act against type /s
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Yeah, the first season can drag a little. I wrote it off as an X-files rip-off at first viewing, but it comes into its own towards the end of that season. And then it's just a good ride from there on.
John Noble carries more than his part of the show as mad scientist Walter Bishop. He's a joy in himself with all the character quirks he adds to a role that's essentially irredeemable.
A news anchor says London is "now under martial law". It already was, we saw military checkpoints in the last episode.
No no, it's even more martial this episode. You have to go through multiple checkpoints to even get to a checkpoint!
Yes, I also remember wanting to see more of the prime Whoniverse Mrs Moore when I'd watched this episode!
Once again, it's fun to imagine how these 20 years old broadcasts would have been received by our current, terminally online culture. "Doctor Who is canceled, man. This is the weakest season ever, RTD has lost the plot!" 🥸
Going off on a tangent here, this double episode set the parallel universe signifiers for another show, Fringe, that stated airing a couple of years later. The Zeppelins in particular, but also the in-ear headsets (although without the Cyber-implications) and the need to carry identification.
The later development, from "Doomsday", that crossing over impacts the stability of the parallel universe, also comes into play in Fringe. The Zeppelin escape scene from the episode discussed here is copped almost verbatim in season 4 of the latter show — with Cybermen substituted by zombies.
There is also a time travelling character whose apperances are telegraphed pretty much the same way that Clive (RIP) presents the Doctor in "Rose". It would be shameless, if the creators and writers of Fringe weren't gleefully and openly borrowing from pretty much every scifi-adjacent show out there.
X-files and Twin Peaks are directly referenced more than once, and there are obvious callbacks to Cronenberg's The fly, as well as The Manchurian candidate, Firestarter, Altered states, and more.
Tangent over, the scheduled discussion will continue as planned.
The "absolutely" was my emphasis, you're right. But I stand by it, and I think it's more realistic.
The BBC has the money
Clearly not, since production stopped completely when Disney+ dragged their feet and eventually neglected to renew the show. You say it yourself, they absolutely need co-funding to make the show.
I.e., they do not have the money to produce it on their own. I think Chibnall puts that quite plainly.
There is certainly failure to understand here, yes. You'll want to look up the concept of publicly funded media like the BBC, and how they differ from purely commercial ones.
And it's not sudden, I think in most countries public service media have suffered cutbacks over decades. Again, that is spelled out in the linked article.
Thanks for TL;DR'ing the linked article. No, really.
Fans have as many individual "solutions" to making Doctor Who as there are... fans. What Chibnall is saying is, the BBC actually want to make the show, but there just isn't money for it at the moment. Hence the tender process they're going to have.
All and any fandom wishes come after that.
Those are all very valid points. These rewatch posts really remind me how all of the criticisms against the latest couple of seasons... were always there in Davies' writing. You sort of have to shrug and roll with it, or you miss the good parts.
Your father had a bike
That's such a strange offhand remark. It seems to imply that Ricky's dad had a (weirdly identical) child with another woman. But what that has to do with bicycles I dunno.
If it's suspicious to ride a bike I guess people who drive cars must have extra families all over the place, given the extra ground they can cover? 🤔 Or it's some kind of inscrutable British idiom. Probably the latter.
Disappointingly, Replacement Theory doesn't involve exact duplicates replacing the population 😞
Big caveat up front, I have no illusion that this was ever planned out, or that it's ever going to be made. I just connected some dots from Eccleston's season to our current mess. I do think that if the BBC had Pete McTighe make a 15 minute special along these lines and put it on Youtube, the fans could rest easier and the next production team might start on a blank slate.
To summarise, the last couple of seasons had a convoluted arc concerning a companion's parent issues. She was saved as a baby through time travel intervention, but not without a lot of temporal disturbance in the process. In fact, babies have been a throughline in both Ncuti Gatwa's seasons, a pattern that culminates in the Doctor rupturing the Time Vortex in order to save one child's existence. For just a probable moment there, that child is his own. Succeeding in his mission, the Doctor is then replaced by somebody looking suspiciously like Rose Tyler.
- Church.
- Baby.
- Rose.
- Temporal paradox.
- On what could be considered the Doctor's Father's Day.
Bring on the Time Reapers to sterilise the wound in time! That's why the Doctor regenerated into this face, à la 12 looking like Caecilius from "The fires of Pompeii". She needs to channel Rose as a catalyst to heal the reset 15 did to save Poppy. Besides, where Pete sacrificed himself to sort the timestream out, this time around the Reapers are attacking the Doctor and their police box. And the Doctor's current face has a very special relation to the TARDIS' living heart.
To be fair, the rest of the story doesn't really matter, this is only meant to resolve the Billie Piper twist of "The reality war". It doesn't fix fan quibbles over the Timeless Child or the Doctor being half human on their mother's side for a hot minute in 1996. Pretty much everything other than that latest regeneration cliffhanger can be ignored or picked up upon by future writers. So end this minisode on a regeneration without showing what happens next, or just leave it open ended.
Now, would I love for Susan to pop up for no other reason than to ease her "grandfather" into the credits crawl, and a future season where neither actress are seen again? Maybe an exchange to echo the Seventh's exit monologue to Ace at the end of "Survival"? Absolutely, but this could well be a one hander between Piper, some 2005 archive footage, and the janky old low-poly CGI monsters from back then.
[made a few edits for clarity(?)]
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You and me both. I tried to lure my SO into a series rewatch before watching the new season, and she was like, "... but we can skip the lame episodes, right?"
Putting it like that, there really isn't more than (generously) four watchable episodes per season. The writing on this show is as goofy as Voyager, and as aimless as Enterprise.