Dr Who

It's confirmed that the Christmas episode will be shown on New Year's Day instead of Christmas Day.

(14-11-2018 22:17 )southsidestu Wrote:  As for this episode i enjoyed it a lot more than the previous two as well as the pilot, trying to bring to life the human element of historical events has worked well in this series (this episode & Rosa), as well as having a writer that is not Chris Chibnall. I love that in these episodes they are stressing the importance of non interference, it has created two really powerfull moments in the series as the have had to either sit idly by or walk away as something bad is happening.

To hell with non-interference. It's supposed to be a fantasy adventure series not a historical sight-seeing tour.

We want to see some really bad aliens get their asses kicked

There is no reason you cant do both, the non interference refers to major aspects in time that are fixed points (like why the Dalek didnt kill a youg Adelaide Brook) incidents such as Rosa Parks & the partition of India would qualify. Then you would have the rest of time that is more wibbly wobbly timey wimey that you can interfere with.

Whilst i like the non intereference aspect i would not want it to be over used, i think the two incidents in which it has occured is enough for the series, once more of its well written.

Then we can get back to kicking alien ass

Lorenz' Butterfly Effect and chaos theory indicates that the smallest events (and therefore micro-interferences) can and will have very large effects down the time line. So by merely their presence, the Doctor and her pals will change events henceforth in unforeseen and very substantial ways.

Politics in Sci-Fi: the wonderful original TV series of Star Trek with its global crew of nations and races working on the bridge was beautifully idealistic and invited the viewer in to share and participate and enjoy it on an equal level. It was naive and idealistic, yet also subtle. It was grounded in science fact. As opposed to nakedly political, blunt and partisan. Star Trek rightly celebrated cultural and racial and gender differences through gentle stereotyping (Scotty, anyone?). This Dr Who, like so much other BBC output, wags a disapproving, superior finger at the audience as it seeks to promote inter alia, an urban bubble sub-culture of biological difference denial and gender denial/fluidity.

Star Trek TNG is my favourite tv show a few weeks ago i went and binged watched a lot on Netflix & whilst I loved it all the same I was struck by just how heavy handed it was. The original crew had two of America's most recent enemies represented, Japan & Russia. If that were the case today the crew would have a middle eastern muslim & a North Korean or indeed another Russian and there would be no doubt cries of PC.

I think a lot of it is an age thing as well, most of the people who i have encountered who feel it is too political (Dr Who now) are from a generation above me, where as my generation tend to view it as the norm. I work in the service industry where we hire a lot of students & have a large turnover of staff, because of the oil industry Aberdeen attracts students globally. I have been on shifts where as a white person i have been in the minority & thought nothing of it, I have over 100 friends on FB from outside the UK and thats not even close to all that i have worked with. My generation is also more open about sexuality as well, LGBT individuals are not as hidden to me as they were to my parents. Due to immigration policies such as Windrush & FOM i have grown up with the changes in our society, i havent had to adapt to it, its what i am used to.

People often talked about how Bill's sexuality was in there faces but i watched a vlogger on Youtube and he went through the show and found that of all the companions when it camed to references of their sexuality Bill ranked 3rd but because society is still largely hetronormative her references stand out more. This is something i notice too in work, it's how stereotypes happen, sometimes i might serve someone who is not the same race or nationality as me and they might do something and i think that is characteristic of their culture but when i think about it I realize that white british people do it just as much but because they have a different accent or look different to me it stands out in my mind and so this is how you get the notion of Bill's sexuality being forced down our throats when in reality it isnt

Absolutely. But it's the manner of representation and overbearing nature the production team's politics have on the episodes, the consistency with which the same old issues are being envoked time and again, that is proving troublesome to recent Who seasons. It distracts and weakens the drama rather than enhancing it. The engaging action adventure is ramped up by the intriguing analogies of Genesis and the rest; modern Who's preminent political agendas on the other hand, often punch the viewer on the nose with their obviousness and overt placarding, stopping the action in its tracks every time while the show does a burst of 'right on' nodding from its writers. (For instance: How did the pregnant man segment intertwine with the main plot in the most recent failing? It didn't; it was an idea that was bolted on to the gremlin plot - as it could have been to almost any episode - only justified by virtue of making the main setting a medical one. Notably the hospital surroundings being a circumstance the story otherwise barely required in its main action.)

In the examples from the classic series that you sight the politics involved are there for all to see granted but it is as a subtext for the viewer to spot - a reflection of human history or news of the day rather than a direct representation of our politics - laid on with a trowel, a sure sign of disrespect for the audiences' intelligence in intrepreting material and in their ability to formulate opinons for themselves without handholding to the point. (Likewise some of the worst original ST episodes are those where the creators' right wing colonialist politics shine through too blatantly in the scripts. NextGen occasionally showed its liberal credentials too clearly in its effort to compensate.)

A big problem with NuWho is that its irritating heart on sleeve ernestness is there for the production team to crow and preach rather than to provide an interesting counterpoint to the human condition through an action adventure storyline. They are not reflecting society with their representations but overstating the case and proding people with patronising virtue signalling. IMO, though the Sun article is a little premature and overhyped (there are undoubtedly other reasons for the fall in ratings of Whittaker's early episodes) this issue will eventually help kill the series if allowed to go unchecked. People tend to dislike being talked down too.

I don't have a problem with the series attempting these issues, but for me it's not being done terribly well.
They should have the courage to say "Ok, this is one story where the historical events/ actions ARE the story" and leave out the timey-wimpy (auto-correct, but I'll take it ) aliens nonsense.
(In this story the aliens served no purpose other than to perform the function of the person YET AGAIN handing the Doctor the explanation of what was going on on a plate, destroying any chance of mystery/drama.)
After all, what's more scary than genocidal bigoted human beings killing each other?
BUT for me in trying to shoehorn in some scary teleporting aliens, they just botched the real sources of peril : being of the wrong ethnicity in a warzone and having to avoid creating a Time travel "grandmother" paradox but also not let said grandmother get killed either.
So neither of these plots, which don't NEED aliens, were dealt with in a satisfying way?
Doctor and co were neither REALLY menaced by the sectarian warfare, nor did they REALLY make a difference in saving the grandmother, other than the fairly passive persuade her to safety while her husband faces danger trope.The uncertainty/mystery of should the husband be a survivor not - what is the "grandfather" paradox danger here - are we saving the "correct" grandfather?, was just thrown away by being found out too easily. We genuinely shouldn't have known what the right thing for the Doctor to do was until the very end - any potential tension was wasted imo.
(To compare to Star Trek, Yaz should have been taking some course of action historically dangerous, or at least potentially so, but motivated by family loyalty, and Doctor should have been on side of history but looking like a villain as a consequence : like the episode where McCoy tries to save the anti-war pacifist when history requires her to die for events to play out the way they actually should/did.)

^ Spot on mate. The drama of the India story was undercut by having yet another alien menance in it that wasn't actually all that threatening after all. I can see the point Chibs and associates are trying to make with all this (don't judge a book by its cover and all that) but to pull variations the same trick each week as they have been is now just serving to highlight this doc's ineffectualness. (The issue with examining 'fixed points' in history - what is fixed is always going to be a moralistic judgement call but there you go - is that your protagonist can end up with the ambiguity of essentially just observing history or walking away from it as here. That in itself can be a powerful moment of course but has dangers for your main character's credibility as a central figure if repeated too often.)

The trouble is monsters and Who are so associated in kids minds by now that the production team haven't the balls to do episodes without the former when they are desperate to retain a certain demographic in their audience.

^^ Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

Doctor Who used to do pure historical stories - the very first story was about restoring the knowledge of firemaking to a group of cavemen, and Hartnell also travelled with Marco Polo, visited the Aztecs, France during the Revolution, Rome during the reign of Nero, and the Crusades with Richard the Lionheart. He was at the Gunfight at the OK Corral, and encountered 17th Century Cornish smugglers. Troughton met Jamie McCrimmon on the battlefield at Culloden, and not a single one of those stories involved an alien or any science fiction element whatsoever except for the Doctor and his companions. And they also did stories set in the past where aliens WERE involved: Daleks wandering around ancient Egypt, a time-travelling Monk in the Middle Ages, and the Daleks scaring all the sailors of the Marie Celeste into the sea. You were never sure when it was a historical episode whether or not some aliens would turn up.

And then they stopped the pure historicals completely, except for the Davison two parter Black Orchid.

They could have done both Rosa and Demons of the Punjab as straight historicals. In Rosa they could have just decided to watch the drama unfold, and then realise at the end that they had to get on the bus themselves to force the confrontation. And the Demons themselves were just unnecessary.

Oh, the episode about Amazon was easily the worst and most boring this season. And Lee Mack must be wondering why they bothered casting him if he was only going to be there for two minutes.