[ SECRET POST #4789 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4789 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.



__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.









Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 54 secrets from Secret Submission Post #686.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

05. https://i.imgur.com/Kw6PfS5.png

[(Anonymous)]

I agree that the writing is bad. I don't think it has anything to do with being too "woke". It's just shitty writing. If it was better writing and still "woke", it would be fine.

And it's not like Doctor Who is historically apolitical. I mean, speaking personally, my favorite run of the show is the Cartmel era which was avowedly political. So the idea that being political is a problem for Who as a franchise I don't agree with. Chibnall is just a shitty writer.

[(Anonymous)]

I laugh when people say Who has never been political.

Paradise Towers and the Happiness Patrol have no political undertones, absolutely none at all.

[philstar22]

I get why people feel this way. I just don't agree. It works for me personally. But I get the frustration of not liking writing because I felt that for a lot of RTD's run.

[sparklywalls]

I get you. A perfect example being the most recent episode where Graham makes a confession to The Doctor and The Doctor reacts in a way that is actually kinda understandable, but the execution of that scene came across as really clunky and I can't help blaming the writing. I don't blame Jodie and Bradley because they did the best with that scene. As I said, I even get what they were trying to do (my mum had cancer about a decade ago, I get it...it's hard to talk to someone about it) but I just don't think the show nailed it.

[philstar22]

Meanwhile, I think they just about perfectly portrayed Gram's trauma and the Doctor being her usually socially awkward self and not knowing how to respond to Graham opening up to her. It worked for me really well. Most of the Doctor's regeneration's have either been socially awkward, have just not particularly cared about the intricacies of human emotion, or both (I'd say 13 and 11 are the awkward ones, 10 is the not care one, and 12 and 9 a bit of both). So it made complete sense to me as it was written. It felt right for the characters.

[(Anonymous)]

I was very bothered by that scene. I expected the Doctor to turn around once she figured out what she was going to say, but she just walked off and that was that. I love Graham but I feel that they throw him under the bus a lot.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I thought she was just gathering her thoughts and would say something to him, even if it was something like, "I don't know what to say and I'm sorry", but she didn't and that was just kinda confusing to me.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm enjoying this season, more than last possibly, but most of the messages are as subtle as a sledgehammer.

I think it was most obvious with the mental health theme of last week's ep, which (for me) drew some natural comparisons with Vincent and the Doctor, which was handled so much more subtly and felt so much more affecting because of it?

[(Anonymous)]

This is kind of incredible to me because even Vincent and the Doctor, while I think it's a great episode, isn't really all that subtle

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT, exactly, but it's still more subtle than last week's!

[(Anonymous)]

I've been trying very hard to push through and watch the previous series so I can catch up - but it feels like the show has as much energy as a half charged battery.

Maybe I'm too stupid to appreciate it better, and I fully accept that as someone who watches scifi for fun rather than thinking deeply/analyzing the episodes - but I'm not surprised that the ratings has dropped with the writing the way it is.
It really sucks because I'm already hearing people say that its bad because 'the doctor is a woman now' and then go on to describe how bad the story line was. They're literally describing how they feel about the writing and then go on to blame Jodie as if she had written the series so far herself, which really is unfair for her because she's a good doctor.

I mean, maybe its fine the way it is, but I think most people who have turned away were looking for escapism than having moral lessons talked at them. It is possible to have the exact amount of moral lessons and science fiction fantasy written into a story together to be good.

[(Anonymous)]

Probably an unpopular opinion, but maybe the new series could do with a couple of fun episodes once in a while?

I get why show runners wouldn't want to do it in fear of not being taken seriously, but some of the best episodes of Doctor Who have been 'silly' and were enjoyable to watch.

[(Anonymous)]

The fun episodes would also be bad if they're badly written

Shitty writing is shitty writing

[(Anonymous)]

lol true.

[(Anonymous)]

This season's episodes have felt a bit... jarring, yes.

I'd have loved to have seen a whole story about Noor Inayat Khan or that hospital in Aleppo. Instead, they feel like plot elements that were brutally trimmed down from their original story and rudely shoved into another one. Compared with the elegance of "Demons in the Punjab", it just... jars.

On the other hand, Captain Jack is back!

[sabotabby]

I'd have loved to have seen a whole story about Noor Inayat Khan or that hospital in Aleppo.

Holy fuck yeah. I read Noor Inayat Khan's biography last year and that episode barely scraped the surface of how awesome she is.

[(Anonymous)]

I did like "Can You Hear Me?", but I do think the episode would've been better if they had just centered it around the hospital in Aleppo.

For the episode with Noor Inayat Khan, I think I read somewhere that they shot a few more scenes with her in them and one was her eventual execution. I can see why they left that out since the Doctor did take away all her memories of herself, including the knowledge that the Nazis don't win, and left her in her room with the floorboards removed to boot.

[sabotabby]

Doctor Who has always been woke (for whatever the definition of woke was in its time) but the writing has been clunky. I'm finding this season loads better than the last one but there are just some flaws with Chibnall's writing. I find he doesn't have the confidence in the material, like he's vaguely embarrassed by it, if that makes sense, which is why we're not seeing a lot of classic monsters. He tends to write the Doctor as a passive observer who is there to explain, not to be the main character, and the companions as a Greek chorus. And he doesn't know how to write for a family audience; he thinks he's writing for very young children who need everything explained to them.

But like, the show has done environmentalist, or anticapitalist, or antiracist messages before. And it should. What bothers me is the need to pause at the end for the Doctor to explain what the message was how we should feel very bad and Do Something about climate change. It's not that it's woke, it's that its message is explained in a facile way via a monologue at the end, with no solution offered or suggested, where it should stand on its own.

I am seeing improvement though. The storylines are more complex this season, there's more weird shit, there's less pausing to explain what's happening to the viewer. I'm relieved that Jodie's getting at least one more season because she's really good and deserves better than some of the material she's gotten so far. Last season I was cringing a lot more, but this season I'm legitimately looking forward to every Sunday night.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, the very direct monologue is what gets me. I was explaining to a friend about the Praxeus episode and how if she'd stopped at "well yeah you all ingest microplastics all the time now", it would have been fine. We would have gotten the point just fine. But she continued into an outright moral lesson that slowed down the entire action (though Jodie's delivery was as energetic and on the money as it could be, because she's great).

[sabotabby]

It bothers me aesthetically. It's also, like, I remember watching this show as a little kid, and I didn't get all the messaging (I was in Canada, so I didn't understand, for example, that "The Happiness Patrol" was about Thatcher) but I got the broad strokes of "be decent to people, don't screw with the environment" themes that were quite often present in the episodes. And even modern children's TV does less of the "stop and explain for the audience" thing; I don't watch tons of it, but the few children's shows that I've seen in recent years have messaging without compromising the story pacing. Jodie does her best with those monologues, and she's a delight on screen doing anything, but they're so badly written.

I am digging this season though, because they've had parts where she has actually said the opposite of what's going on in her head and allowed the viewer to pick up the subtext. Like even a very young child would understand that if we see Gallifrey in flames, and then a few episodes later the Doctor says that everything's fine to her companions, it doesn't actually mean that everything is fine. I don't really remember anything like that happening last season and it really bothered me. But it's allowing the show and character to be interesting again as a narrative, and it's letting Jodie actually use her acting skills with decent material.

[(Anonymous)]

I really love Whittaker's Doctor, but the previous season had some episodes that felt really heavy-handed. This season has been a lot better (with the exception of Orphan 55, which I really didn't like), though it's still a little clunky in some parts. Shit writing in Doctor Who isn't anything new though. I really didn't like the writing during most of Eleven's run either, but I did like Eleven, so I watched it for him.

That was my comment!

[(Anonymous)]

thank you for making my comment into a secret! /hug