With Covid being a rather major part of Joy to the World, our latest special, having fairly recently finished Stranded which ends with a story about The Doctor and Co struggling through living in 2020, and seeing a lot of mixed reactions to both, I figured it was worth creating a thread to discuss this.
Do you think Doctor Who should touch on this ‘era’? (Why/Why not?)
Should Doctor Who touch on the political side of Covid (e.g. ‘partygate’)? (Why/Why not?)
Are there any stories that touch on Covid that you enjoy, any stories that touch on covid to the detriment of their story, or any stories you feel would be enhanced with mention of Covid?
And on a more personal note, did people join in with any of the Doctor Who Lockdown stuff while that was all going on, or do you have any other stories about your relationship with Doctor Who over Lockdown?
Covid to me was when I really hardcore got into Gallifrey so I am grateful for that.
I think now a few years have passed since the initial lockdown and the shock of it all (not that covid is gone!!) I am more willing to see stories that touch on it. Best Year Ever in Stranded was way too soon, way too raw, and way too rushed to feel like anything but doing it because they could.
Joy to the World was okay for it - I still myself do not want stories about it but I think JttW was purposeful so I didn’t mind it so much.
I don’t know if we need Covid stories, but I don’t mind if its handled in a story. They don’t need to make a story explicitly about Covid but making it a part of it in a natural way, as in Joy to the World, could work.
Honestly, I tend to find it almost more weird when stories set around 2020 don’t mention COVID at all. Like it shouldn’t be a big thing in every story set there, and should be treated with respect, but it was so influential for culture and lifestyle and people so I did like how they did it with Joy. Even though I didn’t lose anyone or got majorly sick, with it starting for me at sixteen it was very scary and influential for my personal development and relationships, so it’ll probably always have a heavy impact on me and it feels odd for it to go unacknowledged
Covid is when I got more involved in the fandom. Before that I kept to myself. I agree with ColdStream. It doesn’t need to be a main focus of an episode. Just having it mentioned by a character or two is fine.
Idk really, since any acknowledgment of covid happening on that version of Earth would mean that stories set after the lockdowns would have to either a) have some sort of miracle cure/vaccine to explain why no one is taking precautions or (more likely) b) go full covid denial like most of the world atm saying the pandemic is “over” when it very much is not
The thing is, during COVID there really should be lots of people wearing facemarks and the streets fairly deserted. (At least based on my experience in Australia. I assume Britain was similar?).
If a story is actually set in 2020 it’s not really the sort of thing that’s sufficiently covered by a few passing comments.
I think in later years you can get away with it because yes, COVID is still around but the visible signifiers of it are mostly gone.
(Also I can’t figure out how the option to reply to individual comments works. )
If you press the blue reply button at the bottom of the thread, you post a general reply to the thread. If you want to reply to a individual comment, you can press the reply button under said comment. If you want to quote someone to reply to them, like I’m doing here, you can highlight the part of a comment you want to quote and then choose “Quote” or “Copy quote” from the menu that pops up. That will then automatically open the comment box and reply to the person who you are quoting.
COVID was - and still is - such a massive part of all of our lives. Doctor Who is, at it’s heart, about humanity, hope, compassion, and death. I thought it was truly cowardly of Chibnall not to even touch on COVID in the main show, acting like it never happened, and I thought Moffat’s decision to write an entire special about it was brave and made a meaningful piece of art that hit the spot in the best possible way.
So, yes, I think Who should touch on this era because it’s exactly what Who deals with already. Yes, absolutely, it should touch on partygate - if a sci-fi show isn’t exploring the current political climate then what’s it even for? Very few Who stories touch on COVID sadly, but I think Flux. Flux was delayed due to COVID, written during COVID, and all about a terrible tragedy that kills people sweeping through the universe. Come on. Could’ve been a perfect oppurtunity for a hard-hitting analogy… again, see my ‘Coward’ point. And, no, I had no idea that that was even happening until well after it had ended. Lack of promo during Chibs era was real
To be fair to Chibnall, I’m pretty sure (may have my dates wrong) that the whole thing would have been written and planned in advance before they started filming in 2020, right?
So it’s not like he could have changed the entire story as soon as news about COVID was announced?
Although I do agree he could have added something, maybe to the later specials.
Or he could have not wanted the Doctor to look stupid when she dropped everyone off in 2020 after The Haunting of Villa Diodati and then The Timeless Children …
If you’re starting a sentence with “to be fair to chibnall”, you’ve already lost /j
No, he famously was super duper late with scripts - he had an entire extra year to write it because of lockdown and he still was finishing them late!
He wrote at least some of it during lockdown.
Given how much the BBC, like most media outlets, pushed the “back to normal” narrative and how controversial even basic covid precautions became, I doubt they’d be allowed to address it tbh. The Chibnall era was absolutely flaccid when it came to political statements, partially probably bc having a woman playing the doctor was already seen as “too political”
Yes– I think War of the Sontarans and Village of the Angels were holdovers from what had previously been planned for the series? Possibly just Angels.
I remember listening to an interview with Chris (Radio Free Skaro) where he went into detail about the extensive changes made to s13 after/during Covid. I still don’t like his writing very much, but that interview did made me like him as a person– he was very warm and genuine.
Were the 60s production team cowards for not addressing/featuring WW2 during their time? It was a whole 18 years since the end of the war.
Chibnall featuring Covid in Flux would have created the same backlash Moffat including it in Joy to the World has received - only x100. He would have been branded insensitive. He would have been branded as peddling whichever conspiracy theory the person complaining wanted to debunk/promote etc etc.
He got enough grief for having a soapboax moment about climate change in Orphan 55.
Calling him a coward is, to my mind, hyperbolic and unnecessary. Was the BBC full of dramas about the pandemic? Was he an outlier in drama? No, he wasn’t. I’m not sure anyone is aware of how Covid may have affected him personally so who are we to say he should have written some analagous story about it.
Doctor Who rarely deals directly with real world concerns let alone real world history - and certainly not recent history. It took till the 1980s before a story was set in the 1950s. It took till the 1980s for a story to be explicitly set during WW2. The War Games features WW1 but that is a ‘fake’ and studiously avoids actually includng WW2.
I think Moffat including a personal experience of Covid was the absolutely right way of opening the door on that period in a show which, ultimately is there to entertain us. The ‘entire special’ wasn’t about it either. It was a defining element of Joy’s character but wasn’t part of the ‘plot’ aside from being a way of breaking Joy’s possession. The story wasn’t about Covid, any more than it was about the Star of Bethlehem.
To be fair, the grief I at least saw directed towards him for Orphan 55’s Climate Change message was less about the message itself, more about the delivery being extremely clumsy
My complaints about Orphan 55 were less the message itself and more that it was a mediocre episode, everything seemed to indicate nuclear war, we only find out that it’s Earth about halfway through and once we’re back in the TARDIS we’re kinda blindsided by a “only you can fight climate change” message that kinda tried to indicate that the nuclear war was the result of climate change. There’s nothing wrong with a climate change message whether you agree with it or not. The biggest problem was that it seemed to come out of nowhere and was so clunkily delivered. This kinda thing had done so much better in Classic Who. The Green Death had a strong environmental message encased in an engaging story and The Mysterious Planet did the whole “this random planet is actually Earth” so much better and more naturally.
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