Sea Devils And Die: GeroniMoffat's Doctor Who In The 2010s

and THEN, when the BBC took the Doctor Who license back from Virgin, Virgin spun off into a new series using Benny, the Doctor's most popular Virgin book companion, which had its own set of weird canon synchronicities with the official BBC book line

Like, seriously, never mention Canon to Who fans. Wiggy McGann doesn't count for some people because 'The Movie' was technically that, a film, so doesn't count.

This idea of preserving a canon for a fictional character who has been handled by dozens of writers in multiple formats over many years is quite odd, really.

Holmes canonists are the real mentalists imo.

Oh, and UNIT DATING CONTROVERSY.

Like I've said before, if they can't even agree on the day of the earth's desctruction then consistency is basically out the window from the start.

xxp idk at least you can say "Conan Doyle and only Conan Doyle is canon", and then have fun arguments about e.g. Watson's wandering wound. Maybe he was never in the army at all!

Holmes canonists are the real mentalists imo.

lol this allows a gret tie-in to All-Consuming Fire, the Virgin NA that ties Holmes canon and Doctor Who canon together:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2d/All-Consuming_Fire.JPG

Xpost ... I picked up The Writer's Tale from a slush pile at work and was genuinely surprised by how much it made me despise RTD. Not just for his seat-of-the-pants approach to the show, but for the attention-seeking neediness that seeped out of every single sentence.

again, none of this would have been surprising if you'd read Damaged Goods back in 1996

I was so happy that "Rose" didn't feature Billie Piper bewilderedly watching an all-male frottage party that none of his other storytelling issues really bothered me. (little did I know he was saving that type of thing for Torchwood, lol)

Anyone here going to watch the new Torchwood series on Starz? The promo for it made it look like it could be good, but.

You know, it will still be Torchwood.

I am VERY tempted to order Starz for it (much like I ordered HBO for "Game of Thrones") because I liked "Children of Earth" so much. I hope it leans more on the apocalyptic creepy side and less on the "everyone in Torchwood has sex with each other" side

(I recognize that, without that latter side, it isn't really Torchwood)

bill pullman is in the new series. i hope he doesn't have sex with anybody.

it's RTD, Bill Pullman is likely to have sex with everybody

Rusty has already said Nu Torchwood will have more sex, gay sex, sex and explosions/ridic car chases than the BBC ever let him have. He also has a helicopter (presumably this will pan out the same way as JNT spunking away the budget of Battlefield).

I am bracing myself for a scene where Gwen stops chasing a monster so she can strap on a dildo and peg Rhys

Didn't you watch Series 2? That was hinted at in the wedding episode iirc.

holy shit, are these books canonical + like approved by the estate?

the... Who family estate?

Didn't you watch Series 2? That was hinted at in the wedding episode iirc.

I vaguely remember that...?

Alium posing as Cuntstubble Gappy's mum as I remember it. Long discussion in a Mexican standoff about them all shagging.

In TV the director's not the boss, the producers are. There's a number of reasons for that but the main one is that Dr Who needs to look and feel like Dr Who, just like ER needs to look and feel like ER. There's precious little room for putting any sort of individual stamp on the acting, the camera movement, the lighting, etc. So the only differences from week to week are going to be in the scripts.

Stanley Kubrick's DOCTOR WHO

Is he?

WOULD WATCH

a pivotal subplot involves an HIV-positive gay man lusting after the Doctor's male companion, who before this book had been described as a relentlessly upbeat former cop from the 30th century who was relentlessly, deadly serious about his procedural work, but for some reason in this book decided to fuck the HIV-positive man in the middle of a stakeout

oh god I think I had managed to cut that out of my memories somehow. Cheers for the summary. My god.

In fact I'm pretty sure that that scene was the moment when I went from being intrigued by Davies's take on DW (I read it in 2003 or something) to just thoroughly wtf

Doctor Who New Series 2005 (spoilers ahoy) <-- evidence of me liking this book and making allowances for RTD, sigh

I know! I was basically all "... o_O uh waht"

Even better was reading rec.arts.drwho at the time; Kate Orman (co-plotter of that book) and her soon-to-be-husband Jon Blum were regular posters and were very keen on slapping the homophobe tag on everyone who objected to Rusty's... interesting, and not backed up by any other author before or after him, take on Chris Cwej. I think I even got into it with them or their acolytes, under the reasonable-to-me argument that Chris having a gay encounter wasn't a problem, but him having a gay encounter in the middle of a stakeout was so painfully out-of-character that there was no way to read the scene other than to think Rusty really, really, really wanted to blow a fictional blonde future Adonis, and the "justifying" coda was in actuality horrifyingly tacky and awful.

Actually perusing back through the archives, I had an overall positive impression of the book at the time even though I objected to the irrational out-of-character sexcapades, which kind of reinforces my post upthread re: forgetting everything I actually liked about the book, lol.

Yeah, I distinctly remember enjoying the book (probably giving space to the new showrunner at the time tbh), but now that you've mentioned that stakeout it has come flooding back to me in sharp relief. I never read much Cwej so the out-of-character behaviour didn't jar for me nearly as much as the fact of the scene itself.

I mean you get used to seeing McCoy getting about in question marks and standing off against giant liquorice all-sorts, and then suddenly his mate's gobbing it in a cab.

Cwej as introduced and in pretty much every book up to that point was the quintessential "good cop"; almost always cheerful, tendency towards optimism, laid back and fun when off the clock and really, really focused on his job when on the clock with a staggering level of proficiency. He was supposed to be a perfect foil to his older, wearier partner Roz, who had just as strong of a justice streak but was MUCH more cynical and way more likely to presume guilt. It would have totally been within Roz's character to get fed up with a stakeout and do something else (likely not sexual, but more along the lines of say breaking into wherever they were staking out to look for clues) but Cwej was, until that scene, way more of the "these are my orders and I am politely carrying them out; sorry for the inconvenience" type.

xp: lolololol

(Benny, Chris and Roz are one of my favorite TARDIS crews of all-time)

A bit of me cheers every time new Who does something to fuck up incorporating the books into canon, ans all but one of my attempts to read them has been frustrated by the fan-wanking continuity crap, feeble prose, and the writers determiantion to make every event and every companion from the books SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than anything that ever happened on TV

The only good book I finished was the one, title now forgotten, written from the POVs of Alan Turing, Graham Greene and Joseph Heller

AS all but one, I mean

that was a BBC book by Paul Leonard, The Turing Test

IMO the best writers they had were Lawrence Miles, Jonathan Morris and Ben Aaronovitch

Loooooove The Tomorrow Windows.

The first half hour felt like the days of Rusty throwing ideas together while wanking hoping everyone agreed with how great he is. The last 20 were OK, but River Reveal was decidedly average. The only great bit imo was "fool you twice with the same trick".

We mentioned the Rustyesque feel too. Still not quite sure how River can be Amy's daughter when she died before Smith and Amy even came into existence.

And we sussed Melody = River quite early on, but surely would be Song River?

Let's Kill Hitler?

I mean, it sort of makes sense that River keeps in with this doctor what with him zipping around with her mum and all. Doctor + River flowchart needs an update now.

reveal was too predictable in the end but didn't quite get why

a) river didn't take part in the battle
b) why this secret had to be kept until this particular point anyway

it really did feel ghost-written by RTD. the sontaran had the best lines anyway.

Ptime Pterodactyls from Father's Day, innit.

River can never meet Tiem Babby or they will start killing random people.

But didn't River meet Time Baby when she's in the astronaut outfit? Or I guess she didn't know who she was in that case...
See what you mean about the Rusty thing up to a point, but it was much better done. LOLed at the Stevie Wonder gag too...

I sometimes enjoy being an idiot who doesn't twig the most obvious and telegraphed reveals until they are revealed. i would hate to miss out on that suspense and surprise.

And we sussed Melody = River quite early on, but surely would be Song River?

ah the gamma forest people just do names the other way round. btw is gamma forest a thing from previous ep or just made up for this? his pretending to remember lorna when she was dying, with "didn't we run?", yeah that was good.

The River Song reveal seems to give away a lot. Presumably River is in the space suit and she kills the 'Best Man She Ever Knew'. But it's the Flesh Doctor she kills. But perhaps that's a deliberate misdirect? Afterall, surely a Flesh Doctor would turn to gloop, unless he stabilises himself in the Tardis. I'm wondering if killing the Doctor is something to do with bringing him back down to size, making him humble and wise again, rather than some feared superhero? But why go through this elaborate rigmarole to kill off one version of the Doctor?
Gamma Forest seems to be new, but it's probably not the last we've heard of it. Perhaps we'll meet Lorna Bucket again?
Compelling episode, but like all of Moffat's episodes this season, there wasn't much of a self-contained story, just the resolution of certain story arc elements along with some set pieces. Also, what happened to the space pirates etc etc - did they get killed by the Headless Monks? Or did they just turn up for the ambush and bugger off once the mission was accomplished? Cramming too much in to one episode so that characters are just forgotten about?

So is River in jail for killing the Doctor when she was a little astronaut girl?
hoping for a spinoff series about Lesbolizard and her trusty sidekick maid fighting crime in Victorian England.
(now there's a sentence i never thought i'd type.)