Chibnal has erased and rewritten the canon. It violates it’s internal logic. I don’t like it!
Has anybody checked if Chris Chibnall has been replaced by a Slitheen or Cygon or something? Because how can someone create & write Broadchurch, and then lose all writing skill? Or may he just doesn't care?
I don't even care that much about contradicting previous cannon, you can expect to collide with something in 57 or so years of story.
It's that he can't create characters you actually care about, and that's the whole ball game. It's not about the supossedly gigantic reveal (that actually gets explained away that it doesn't matter IN THE SAME EPISODE). When was the last time the death of a one-off / side character on the show made you genuinley sad?
Chibnall just can't do that, and so he covers with stupid twists and reveals, knocking over old givens, stories, canon left and right. Even very basic things like the doctors arc with Galifrey in all of New Who - it took 10 years of getting from guilt over destroying it to hiding it instead to it being sort of around again. Seems unlikely she'd just push the button on it just like that again.
Jodie is great, the companions have a lot of potential, but write them better, or get someone who can, or cares.
So they make a short season, hint that it might take 2 years until we see the next one (all those owned social media accounts asking if one can really expect a season each year...) and then they end on a cliffhanger.
As far as I can remember modern Doctor Who has never ended a season on a cliffhanger - it simply was good enough so that people would tune back in on their own.
Sad how it has fallen.
Well, at least the cliffhanger should get resolved in the special in about 10 months.
To the episode itself:
Nah!
Just being a timelord has been good enough for several decades. Why discredit "The time of the Doctor"?
Why did the Timelords need to be convinced if the Doctor already had infinite regenerations?
And why would he make the face after sucking the vortex coming out of the crack in?
This would have made a great story for the end of Matts Doctor, at this point it doesn't.
It also feels like: "You don't like our stories, so we'll show you how big of a story we can tell".
Oh and to top it all off, their media writes pseudo-independant stories on how this does not break canon.
LAUGHABLE!
I liked the pacing and the Episode is a nice one in itself, but for Doctor Who this is a 4- for breaking canon and all the other mistakes being made @Undonejack laid them out pretty well in his review already, so I won't list all of it again here.
the most important episode since the 50th anniversary. the show's core is once again shaken
Okay, kids. This is where it gets complicated. Let's do the Doctor Who Series 12 finale review! I think this is going to be a bit… controversial. But it's my opinion and that's it, we move on. Here we go!
First, I want to say that I didn't like how the "game-changing" finale ended up all over the place. It was a very good episode until the resolution of the "Timeless Child" story arc at the end of the episode. And, as we all suspected, the that child ended up being the Doctor. What I mean with the "all over the place" thing is that this retcon of the Doctor's origin story doesn't quite work for me. It messes a bunch of pre-established canonical things up just for the sake of it, just because Chibnall can do whatever he likes. He's the showrunner. I mean, now we got a bunch of regenerations before William Hartnell's Doctor, we still do not know why is Ruth's Doctor TARDIS a police box, if the Doctor has always been sort of immortal, why did he died during the Trenzalore story? (potential future). We don't know much.
The Master and the Cybermen were great. Sacha Dhawan's performance is FUCKING FANTASTIC, he stole both the finale and the premiere… wow! The idea of the CyberMasters is really good and this new race feels a lot more threatening that any other Doctor Who monster did before. Despite my opinion of the finale, I think that the CyberMaster stories are becoming a recurrent finale thing and maybe people will get tired of them eventually. There are other monsters and enemies, I'm sure we can figure something out, right?
Like the Series 8 and Series 10 finale (both of these are great, though). I hope that maybe, at the end of Chibnall's run as showrunner, all these questions get an answer. I know that he intended to broad the long-lived canon, but not all things can work out. There are ways to do it. There's Steven Moffat's run, for example. He did it beautifully. So, now, the Doctor isn't a Gallifreyan, she's from another dimension, she's kind of immortal, has lived for a LONG time, has had a bunch of faces, her regeneration powers are the basic genetics for all Time Lords and they built their mighty civilisation on the Doctor's suffering. Okay.
And I think that the Doctors from the Brain of Morbius (1976) story are canon now… okay. There's that.
Chibnall is so desperate to leave his mark on the franchise that he doesn't care at all about changing canon.
Interesting ending, makes me think of when Capaldi was locked in a prison during "Heaven Spent."
I hate Chibnall changing and thus diluting the story of timelords this way. As part of the larger story it was on the level of trying to ruin the show bad.
Definitive proof that the BBC should have packed this sh*t in ages ago.
a few huge continuity changes that may the biggest ever and it's so poorly done. the "fam" add so little to this episode that it would be better they weren't in it. this results in the big reveals to be done by exposition and so much happens but because of the story telling the emotional impact is poor. it becomes a bunch of things that happen and action rather than a story and character development. it seems to me that things were added to fill in the time. with less happening the impact would be bigger.earlier episodes (especially pre 9) got this.
the reveals create huge plot holes and conflicts throughout dr who cannon and brings into doubt many of the doctors decisions since the 4th doctor. nothing is answered and time is spent on useless graham, yaz and ryan stuff.
Jodie's acting is poor and inconsistent and lacks connection with who se is speaking to. Even Saschas acting is inconsistent and less threatening.
it is hard to accept that this was made by professionals with any respect for the character.
some will love this episode as you learn some big things but its basically eating glitter all shiny but tasteless.
this may be the who worst episode ever technically but for the way it stuffs up not just new who but the whole canon it's definitely the most destructive.
So that's what happens when you try to emulate a Moffat script.
So glad this garbage season is over. I hope they get better writers next season & get back to 1 companion.
I’m screaming, this season finale was just perfect. Can’t wait for the next season.
There were a lot of theories about this episode the past week and perhaps the one I believed most was that the human survivors from the Cyber War were going to be revealed as the Timeless Children and that The Master would also reveal that he had destroyed a pre-Timelord Galifrey, thus leaving them to repopulate and begin the Timelords as we know them. Also, the Irish cop Brendan fit in somewhere there too. But, oh boy was I wrong!
SPOILER ALERT
It turns out that the Doctor is the Timeless Child and that she arrived in our universe through the gates she saw in her vision in the last episode. She was discovered by a scientist from Galifrey who raised her until she fell off a cliff and regenerated, where the scientist then dedicated her life to harnessing the Doctor's regenerative abilities, eventually founding the Timelord council with the Doctor's DNA, making every life-form on Galifrey the same species as the Doctor. Before they wiped her memory and made her into a child again.
Sound familiar? That's because the story of Brendan from the last episode was that of the Doctor on Gallifrey. Which was disguised to look like Earth to trick the Doctor if she ever saw it. Well, she did after the Master revealed everything to her. He discovered all of this from some large data bank on Galifrey.
Well, this is going to be interesting...
Let's start with the obvious. This is an immensely ballsy move that has contradicted many existing plot lines from the past, mainly the entire plot of "Time of The Doctor" where the doctor was granted another thirteen regeneration cycles by the Timelord high council.
This new episode has made it so that this plot line was pointless because the doctor is from another dimension or universe, and helped invent the timelords. It was also revealed that the thirteen regeneration rule is an arbitrary rule placed upon the second generation of timelord children for some reason and that this does not apply to the Doctor. Making her effectively immortal in canon.
So there were an unknown number of regeneration in the "pre-Hartnell" era of the show. This is not a new idea because the classic episode "Brain of Morbius" alluded to this concept with Morbius showing the Doctor's past incarnations just before showing eight unknown faces and asking "How far Doctor, how long have you lived?". This was originally meant to confirm that the Doctor lived a life before his so-called "first regeneration" but was eventually scrapped and it became accepted by the fans that the faces shown on-screen were those of Morbius's previous incarnations instead.
Well, old Chibnall just made it canon again and it looks like next season is going to become a lot more complicated.
This conflicts with the aforementioned "Time of The Doctor" and with the reveal of the Doctor being half-human from the '97 movie. And it in all honesty makes no sense that Ruth, the first "pre-Hartnell" Doctor that we meet has a Tardis with a broken Chameleon Circuit that is stuck as a police box because she has not yet visited 1960's London to meet Ian and Barbra.
This entire thing is a mess and I hope that old Chibnall sorts this all out next season.
So, my thoughts:
This episode is convoluted with many plotholes (how come Graham and Yaz can fit inside a Cyberman despite it only being designed to hold a brain? and why weren't they detected? also the Chameleon circuit thing) but I enjoyed the quick pacing and the performance from Jodie Whittaker as always. The CGI and cinematography are still beautiful and the design of the Cyber-Timelords was cool as hell. However, the abnormal abundance of plotholes and the second destruction of Gallifrey make this episode feel cheap and poorly written.
Chibnall is banking on the familiar themes of war and the destruction of Gallifrey just like the Time War with the Daleks. This is lazy writing because all he is doing is recreating those themes with the Cybermen and The Master instead of writing his exciting conclusion that takes the Doctor in new directions.
This episode is a textbook example of a new creative lead coming into a show and taking no care to maintain the previous continuity. I feel that the big reveal is not necessarily a bad thing, but I do feel that it has alienated most of the hardcore fanbase and will inevitably hurt the show in the long run.
I know that Chibnall has some good stories to tell about the series because he is a fan. Unfortunately, he is too concerned with giving the fanbase cheap thrills in the form of sloppy retcons and lazily written storylines with the same thing we've seen time and time again.[/spoiler]
To roughly summarize it:
Everything you think you know baby
Is wrong
And everything you think you had baby
Is gone
w t f was that - what was the utility of revealing the doctor to be 1) a child experiment 2) the founder of the time Lords 3) a secret govt agent (???) with numerous lives (??????) isn't the foundation of the character that she's a renegade and running away and all, and also how did the govt agent age??????????? This gets rid of a lot of foundation for the understanding of the doctor
There are a lot of nonsensical plot decisions in dw, but at least they advance something, plot or emotion. Here it only solves the past 2(?) episodes (the appearance of the jo martin) and the doctor in no way even emotionally acknowledges any of it once the climax is over. I get that doctor who has always been a bit nonsensical about plot but at least there was some kind of emotional logic and this did not have any. Tbh from the pov of having seen 14 and only 1 2 5 9 10 in this season I could totally accept that 13 has been trauma dissociating away from her life (even before the big trauma of this season hits..)
The companions are so uninteresting, graham praising yaz is unearned.
Chibnall was mediocre before all this but this is actively bad
Did they really give us that ending and now they are going to make us wait a whole year? Not fair :smile: Also could this mean that maybe River will show up next season since the Doctor is in prison now as well. Oh my wishful thinking. :smile: Anyway, the whole episode is absolutely amazing from start to finish. Jodie and Sacha gave some of the their best performances yet, their scenes were so delightful to watch. The true identity of the Timeless Child was a bit predictable, but it did kind of make sense and now everything has really changed.
10/10 for this episode and the whole season 12.
Now we can start the countdown for the Christmas/New Year's special and the s13. :smile:
Shout by Aniela KrajewskaVIP 8BlockedParentSpoilers2020-03-01T19:55:30Z
Every time the Doctor and/or the Master were on screen: awesome. 10/10. Iconic. Legendary. Sacha Dhawan is unhinged in the best possible way (very Gollum-like, actually), and I could not love Jodie more if I tried. The reveal of the Timeless Child was maybe predictable, but still really good and I love that we didn't get all the answers (like how many regenerations the Doctor's had or where she originally came from). I have something to wonder about until the next season. Overall, great stuff.
Every time the companions were on screen: fucking boring. Also, someone tell the writers that Graham praising Yaz for her bravery or whatever does not count as actually giving her a personality. Also also, not one of them gave the Doctor a hug while she was literally going to sacrifice herself for them so they're all cancelled.
And how about that ending? Really fun cliffhanger. Although I do hate the fact that apparently anything can get into the Tardis now.