Doctor Who: NuWho Thread

[monkey!]

Yeah... I mean... a female doctor? A nurse, sure.

[nacho]

Yeah... I mean... a female doctor? A nurse, sure.

And eventually we'll get a Black Doctor! Which is only 3/5th of a Doctor. #southernamericanhumor

[monkey!]

Yeah... I mean... a female doctor? A nurse, sure.

And eventually we'll get a Black Doctor! Which is only 3/5th of a Doctor. #southernamericanhumor

Affirmative Action Doctor Who.

[nacho]

The 60th Anniversary isn't getting too much fanfare from the Beeb, which is weird. But this fan made video is lovely: https://youtu.be/8TYc7B8Big4?si=NNMrVn_dx_IO2gUl

[RottingCorpse]

So, I've discovered certain college kids (not just DnD Nerds) are way into NuWho. They're all TENant-heads, so the Beeb's decision to focus on him for the 60th anniversary makes sense from a viewership perspective.

[nacho]

So, I've discovered certain college kids (not just DnD Nerds) are way into NuWho. They're all TENant-heads, so the Beeb's decision to focus on him for the 60th anniversary makes sense from a viewership perspective.

While controversial, it's a wise move. You know, I can't recall a single episode from the abysmal Capaldi/Whittaker run. And Matt Smith's run was a muddled mess. Tennant is the best NuWho simply because, during his term, they were still doing Doctor Who.

I hope Disney handles this property correctly. Their Star Wars universe is 90% insultingly unwatchable.

[monkey!]

Doctor Who needs to stop.

[nacho]

Struggling to get excied for the 60th. This ham-fisted attempt to close the loop on the not-at-all-interesting-in-the-first-place Doctor-Donna subplot seems an odd pick for the 60th. The 50th was big and bold -- the battle of Gallifrey, Daleks, explosions, an ultimate weapon.

For the 60th we're going to have a quiet analysis of the mental trauma suffered by Donna Noble and bring back an easily defeated and very boring one off villian from 1966?

I want this new era of Doctor Who to actually just be....Doctor Who. A little adventure in time and space. But that'll never happen, will it?

[RottingCorpse]

Between NuWho, our Star Wars woes, and the absolutely horrendous Exorcist "legacy sequel" I sat through last night, I'm wondering if we're starting to see the bottom of the nostalgia porn era.

My Horror buddy in Charlotte absolutely berated me for going to see Exorcist: Believer arguing the box office validates these abortions. He's not exactly wrong, but I promise you nobody is clamoring for the next Exorcist movie except Blumhouse who spent the GDP of a third world nations on the right. And yes, the curse of the IP is that producers want as close to a sure thing as possible, so original shit doesn't get greenlit. Yet I think that's a shortsighted strategy. Like we see with Star Wars, these properties more and more play to a small niche audience, which would be fine if Disney hadn't paid <checks notes> $4 billion for Star Wars rights.

To the point Nubbins made in another thread, there's just too much shit out there... so much that viewership for even seemingly "monoculture" IPs like Star Wars and Dr. Who get watered down.

And by the way, young folks aren't watching this shit. I informally polled my film class as to who watches Marvel movies or Star Wars and only like two people raised their hands for each. They're watching TikToks, Twitch streams, and YouTube. Not movies or hardly even TV.

Hollywood need the big cash-in project to fund all the other stuff. It's been this way since the blockbuster era started in the 70s, but the margin for error gets smaller and smaller as audience attention splinters more and more. There's no sure thing anymore. Yet small vocal pockets of fandom resist any kind of change or evolution of these properties. They just want the dopamine hit from their inner 12-year-old. And teh stakes. are so high for the stake-holders that they an't risk takin a chance an alienating those pockets.

So we get Tenant & Donna, Ashoka, and

Spoiler

90-year-old Ellen Burstyn getting her eyes stabbed out with a crucifix

.

[Nubbins]

I also think the studios shoot themselves in the foot with spinoffs, sequels, prequels, TV series, etc. What they do when they flood the market with is make fans/semi-casual fans of stuff like Star Wars feel like, "Well... I can't watch Ashoka because I haven't seen Mandalorian yet," ... same with Avengers. Nothing against the movies... I'm sure I'd love them, but I have no idea where to start, so I never have. It feels insurmountable when you're staring down starting a franchise with 25 movies and you've got 460 other things right in front of you to entertain you right this very minute.

And I can't be the only one who's spent 45 minutes trying to settle on something to watch only to start it, get 5 or 6 minutes in, and then realize I've been staring at my phone screen reading something and I've missed the entire plot of whatever it is I'm "watching".

I'm just so exhausted by all of it, honestly. Like, I'm sure I can dig up threads on this forum from 2008-2010 era where we were downloading and sharing stuff willy-nilly and it felt at the time like, "Holy shit! The future is here! The world's at my fingertips and I can save all this stuff to my hard drive and have it forever!" Even then, it felt like you were in the future, but were building on your own personal collection of stuff, be it music or movies or whatever, and you'd be able to curate this perfect entertainment scenario with all killer, no filler. Now it's just like... I have 8 hard drives, some of them 15+ years old and filled with shit I've never watched or heard. I subscribe to so many services that in total, they're probably more expensive than a cable bill. And I watch nothing. I put on records because, for the love of fuck... just let me listen to something for 45 minutes without having to make a choice or shuffle or hit fast forward or tell Siri to play that thing I was just reminded of. It feels like the world has given me ADD and everything's just a rehash of some idea you've seen a million times already.

A couple weeks ago, we took the kids to visit my Dad in Tennessee. We rented this cabin in a state park and there was a TV in it that just had standard, old-school cable. Like, you had to find the guide channel to see what was on before deciding what to watch. There were only about 35 channels. My kids had no idea what was going on. All weekend, they kept saying, "Play SpongeBob!" and couldn't grasp that with TV, you just watched what was on. This is what real TV looks like... you turn it on and the show is the show, man.

Anyway, enough rambling, tangential nonsense... in conclusion, I agree and I'm old I've fully become my parents and get off my lawn.

[nacho]

In other news, the full orchestral 60th anniversary theme is amazing:

https://x.com/bbcdoctorwho/status/1712528794630717704?s=20

[nacho]

And to the larger discussion: My secret dream is that the internet will fall apart and we'll all be able to go back to those simpler days. I think Musk might just be able to pull it off! For the first time in 10 years, subrights folks shopping for my books have said they don't care about the author's social presence anymore. Boom, motherfucker! The pendulum swings...

[Nubbins]

And to the larger discussion: My secret dream is that the internet will fall apart and we'll all be able to go back to those simpler days. I think Musk might just be able to pull it off! For the first time in 10 years, subrights folks shopping for my books have said they don't care about the author's social presence anymore. Boom, motherfucker! The pendulum swings...

Yup? I believe it was 2021 or 2022 that vinyl outsold CD?s for the first time in decades.

[nacho]

RC reminded me to review Star Beast -- the new Disney new-NuWho new.

It sucked.

The bad guy was the Meep from the comic books, very unfortunately channeling Moopsy vibes from Lower Decks which makes an already laughable villain even more stupid.

The first half was spent with everyone patting themselves on the back for X-TREME INCLUSIVITY! *puts down megaphone* Donna Nobel has married a Black man and they have a trans kid who is *picks up megaphone* AWESOME AND POWERFUL BECAUSE THEY ARE BEAUTIFUL AND DIFFERENT. Throw in a long dialogue aside about misgendering and pronoun usage and some light intolerance from the only Boomer on the show which immediately results in the narrative screeching to a halt so they can chastise the Boomer for not being able to see that *picks up megaphone* TRANS PEOPLE ARE BEAUTIFUL!!!!

Meanwhile, all Moopsy The Meep wants to do is inexplicably destroy London after easily taking over UNIT. The Doctor's replacement at UNIT is a girl in a wheelchair with James Bond rocket launchers fixed to it. But we're not supposed to care that she's in a James Bond wheelchair because *picks up megaphone* DISABLED PEOPLE ARE POWERFUL AND BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!!!

Wheelchair woman spends most of the episode reminding us that she's awesome despite being in the chair (where she crosses her legs and moves like an obviously abled person) and saves the day because I'm not sure this is about the Doctor anymore. This feels more like a spin-off.

The Meep loses as predicted ever since the trailer two months ago and it turns out that it was just a plot device to let Neil Patrick Harris know that the Doctor was around.

It's nice to get Tennant back. The 14th Doctor is openly just the 10th Doctor, so no real personality change. He rocks the scenes he gets and brings back that charismatic energy that's been woefully missing since he left. People praising this trash episode are no doubt just so motherfucking relieved that Tennant is back they don't know what to do with themselves. 11, 12, and 13 all sucked to various degrees. It's been a hard, hard road for this show's fans for a long time now.

However, I'm not happy about the message here. It's the 60th Anniversary, but instead of trusting the new Black actor you hired to be the Doctor you shoehorn in the modern era's most favorite white doctor and his ginger companion to helm the Anniversary and hand the torch to the Black guy? So much for inclusivity.

[RottingCorpse]

LOL-erskates. Sounds super Disney.

The inclusivity problem in recent media isn't that some of these groups are *finally* getting on screen representation. It's that it's wedged in so hamfisted by producers working through white liberal guilt rather than being a natural exploration of the reality minorities exist in. (That episode was written by a white person, I'll bet you a beer.) It's distracting in it's pandering.

Poeple bitched to high heaven that the trans character in the Hogwarts Legacy game was pandering. (And it probably was.) But I wouldn't have known that character was trans if they hadn't told me. The character being trans had no bearing on the story. There was no messaging about their trans-ness. They just happened to be trans. To me it was great representation, because it said "This person is equal to the other person."

There are good examples of proper representation out there. I just don't think any of them are made by Disney.