His finales are all the same; he can’t bear to kill off a companion and actually keep them dead (Clara and Bill have almost identical exits) and his ‘story arcs’ rarely made sense - who were the Silence/Silents; the Hybrid smacked of being made up as he went along.
But you know what - I ADORE the 11th Doctor and Rory and there are some cracking episodes in his tenure.
I really do appreciate where you are coming from @turnoftheearth and I hope our vibe here is allowing us to have this debate without making anyone feel ‘wrong’ in their opinions. I did have problems with the finale (more than I realised until I wrote them down) and I appreciate the fact we all have a safe space to air these views whilst still allowing for people to challenge us.
I know I often change my view on episodes - usually for the better, sometimes for the worse ( Minuet in Hell) and hopefully we can all listen to different points of view in the spirit we want this forum to continue.
Ironically, the Hybrid storyline I think has plenty of comparisons to be drawn with this one. Lazy might be the wrong word, but “half-baked” springs to mind a little bit.
I can come to accept that basically every DW writer of note is a “gardener.” The big plan is the big plan, but it can be adjusted and changed on the fly and very rapidly. Sometimes those changes are obvious, and sometimes they aren’t.
My ire would not be as great, and really, where most of this comes from, if I hadn’t been so disappointed that after a couple of episodes where we really push the boundaries of Modern Who, we immediately drop back to late 2000s business as usual stuff, dressed up with a lot of “But we’re doing new things!” propaganda. That’s all, really.
I always ignore the propaganda because a lot of the time it’s just there to keep the show in the ether. The ‘redacted’ silliness of WBY has proven that to me. I try to take every episode as it comes and go in with as few expectations as possible.
I fell foul of that myself with The Devil’s Chord. I saw those dance scenes in the trailer and was so excited for a musical episode (I love musicals) and when it happened found that the song was awful and the whole thing just fell flat for me (I didn’t even recognise the Strictly duo as I don’t watch Strictly and they’d put Johannes into one of the worst wigs I’ve ever seen).
He ‘killed’ all of his companions - Amy, Rory, Clara and Bill - even Nardole was technically dead before he joined the crew. River dies in her very first story.
I’ve always felt that there’s nothing to choose between Moffat and RTD. Both, in their way, are capable of some of the finest Who and both (as I’m sure they’d be happy to admit) have their off days.
There are only two Moffat finales that ever really landed for me (The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang and World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls). In both of them he makes choices that I am really not fond of, but I respect both hugely as DW stories. His others fall flat for me every time even though I find elements I enjoy. With RTD, I find his finales have a better hit rate though I’ve always accepted he has a tendency to fudge the ending a little. I forgive this because I always enjoy the ride. This, of course, is my opinion and I know there are others. That said, how lucky we are to have writers of the calibre of RTD and Moffat writing for Who, and for a second time around at that!
Ironically, Russell usually does this! This is what I meant when I mentioned earlier that usually, I can like his finales a lot more because the cost is felt. The impact of what is lost to achieve the victory is part of what makes the victory satisfying, even if sometimes how we get there is a little wobbly.
Nothing was lost here. Nothing was paid, the victory came at almost no cost to anybody and the bow we tied it up in at the end was too neat. Now, I am not entirely opposed to the idea that this is actually leading up to a much bigger plot about expectations in media. Again, I am currently working on a “Sutekh as fandom” analysis because I think it works, and knowing Russell, might have been intentional (Sutekh has been watching us since Pyramids, he’s desperately compelled to find out the mystery behind Ruby (like we were), you could sort of argue that the Death Wave could be some sort of metaphor for the way obsessive fandom analysis basically kills anything about the show, although I’d say that’s a stupid metaphor that’s maybe 30% true) to some extent.
People think I disliked this because I have a lot of criticism about it, and they’re extremely wrong. I can go on record and say that there is not a single episode of Doctor Who that I would consider unredeemably bad. I love every story made for its individual reasons. I hope it doesn’t sound like entitlement when I say that I pick this show apart because I love it to death and think that it deserves the best possible attention given to it. That attention, I feel, was missing at some points in this season.
Well, for this example specifically, I don’t think anybody thought that once Kate and UNIT got dusted they weren’t coming back. So all the stakes of the episode were effectively erased within the first five minutes. So once you’ve lost the “oh my god, all my cool friends are dead, bugger, this is A Big Deal” emotional beat, we fall back on the other part of Doctor Who - “How is our incredibly clever protagonist going to work his way out of that one and how will it affect him!” and most of the answer to that was “the script magicked him a solution.”
You know what would have fixed a lot more of this finale for me? Make the Death Wave the part one cliffhanger! Let us spend a week thinking everyone is dead!
When I saw Kate die my heart actually stopped and I made an audible noise. Then a split second later I realised the whole UNIT team were dead, they’d spent a lot on this set - not to mention the Vlinx - and a big reset button was coming. I don’t like big reset endings for the reason you said.
Apologies if I jumped down your throat. I just don’t like people calling people who clearly are trying really hard, and probably saved the show from another wilderness period, for being lazy. I genuinely think RTD loves this episode. Maybe he needs more advisors to get it perfected. But oh well, I always enjoy the ride!
No, not at all; I will admit that “lazy” is a charged word, but I’m not using it in the traditional term. Like I said, I know Russell is working incredibly hard. Bob Holmes also worked incredibly hard to give us one of the most defining periods of the show, but it makes it all the clearer when he’s phoning it in a bit.
I think the incredibly hectic production schedule and also the amount of work on the showrunner means that a lot of Russ’s scripts probably don’t go through the drafting and editing process that they should. And because he’s the big man at the top, I also assume that there’s less people to say “Hey, maybe do another pass on this and cut Lenny’s wheelchair machine guns, it makes you look like a hypocrite.”
(I apologize for this wall of text; I’ve been away on business and didn’t have the opportunity to answer some of the comments earlier).
Christel is a guest on the latest episode of the official Doctor Who Podcast, but I don’t remember her bringing up anything related to the foundling stuff while discussing the finale.
I believe this as well. I mean, RTD knows what he’s doing, he’s an experienced enough writer to avoid such things. There were plenty of mysteries surrounding her but nothing that strongly and explicitly hinted at her being anything else than human. And the very first hint, way back in Space Babies, hinted at her being human (the Doctor checked ger scans on the TARDIS monitor, and found nothing out of the ordinary). Sure, the snowing wasn’t properly explained (or perhaps it was), but we might come back to that or it might be the Sutekh thing brought up above.
The “pointing at a sign to name the baby” thing was stupid, for sure. But I don’t have a problem with Ruby’s mom wearing a hood and being all mysterious at 15. We accept that there is an alien with two hearts, who is thousands of years old and travels across time and space in a time machine, surely we can accept the fashion choice of a 15-year-old. My point is that there are more fantastical things in this show that we accept than the mystery of Ruby’s mother and how hard it is to track her.
This one has brought similar buzz to when Michelle Gomez kept showing up as the mysterious woman across Series 8, which had people guessing all throughout the season, only for her to be revealed as Missy in the finale. I think RTD is pulling a similar trick with Mrs Flood, but stretched out over 2 seasons (or more?). And I don’t think she’s the Master or the Rani or any other Time Lord.
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I much prefer being able to tell what’s coming than having something surprise me. I don’t care about being surprised, I want the story to make sense! And while I fully had the speculation of Ruby’s mum being a normal human, I said time and again that it doesn’t work with the setup.
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Fair enough, this is a good point. We are seeing this from different angles, which is fine. I didn’t have a problem with the setup, because I didn’t think it was setting up anything specifically - all I saw was fans trying to fit the puzzle pieces in various ways, resulting in more or less likely solutions.
I don’t know if this was directed at me specifically, or more broadly speaking, but my earlier comment was more a general opinion on how a lot (not all, and not most, but a lot) of fans set up their own disappointment with speculation, sometimes based on very obvious clues and sometimes not. I was not trying to say that that would be the main or only reason they dislike something, and even if it was, that’s fine. I don’t think there are more or less valid reasons for liking or disliking something, as long as you express your opinions clearly enough. And I do understand that if you have certain expectations that aren’t met, that might affect your overall opinion on something. That often goes hand in hand with other issues: a weak script, bad performances, shallow emotional dimension, bad pacing, weird editing, flat jokes etc.
This, I can agree with. This is a general problem in New Who. The writers don’t dare kill off companions or recurring characters. Which usually means that when we see one of those die these days, we know it will be undone in one way or another later. This is why I didn’t feel very strongly about Kate being dusted; I knew she’d be back by the end.
This would be as effective as all those Classic Who cliffhangers that put the Doctor in mortal danger. We’d still know that by the end of the story, everyone is fine, especially if the dead people are key characters.
This has always been a problem for DW, and it was even worse in the early days of the revival. The budgets are tight, the schedule is punishing and there are a lot of people working on a lot of things simultaneously, so keeping all of that together while delivering consistently good scripts is surely very difficult. The showrunner position is one that a lot of writers don’t want because of this. But this is also why it would be better for RTD to bring in more writers for Season 2 and beyond, to perhaps ease his workload a bit.
It’s a masterpiece of camp, made even wilder by Russell “Don’t Point The Sonic Like A Gun For The Kids” T Davies giving the literal child heavy firepower.
The more I think about it the more I sort of love it.
RTD said making Ruby’s mum normal was his reaction to the latest Star Wars movies where, spoiler, in the second movie Rey is said to be totally normal, then in the third movie they change it so she’s the daughter of the Emperor, and RTD preferred the first version. He said this is his reaction to that.
Also he even mentioned the cloak that Ruby’s mum was wearing, and laughed about it, “Why she wore an ancient, medieval cloak to the church… haha…” and he said he imagined it was Time shrouding her. So perhaps it wasn’t literally what she wore? But the same reason we couldn’t see her face?
weighing in on the whole discussion about the mystery. Ruby’s parents being ordinary people was always what I thought was most likely (I talked about why I thought it might be the trickster a lot but I never seriously believed it), however the way it was done was thuroughly unsatisfying to me, it felt like a rug-pull because it didn’t make sense with what we’d been shown. The snow made sense to me, but the song in Ruby’s heart from The Devil’s Chord, or the fact the memory changed were not things I understood after watching the episode (other people may have explanations but they either weren’t in the episode or at the very least they weren’t made particularly clear).
The one that particularly annoyed me was saying Ruby’s mother was pointing at a road sign in order to name her, and so apparently it wasn’t the paramedics or a social worker who named her, it was her mother, or at least that’s what all the characters believe. It makes no sense to me, there was nobody else there to see her point, or if there was and they were out of shot there’s no way they could see her well enough to tell where she was pointing. I mean the Doctor was right there, Ruby was right there and they could barely tell, its absurd.
Not to defend 7B, but the impossible girl is a similar arc, (who is this character/their parents, answer: ordinary humans) done in a way that is much more satisfying, or at least not unsatisfying, as aside from the Doctor obsessing over the mystery, from what I remember there was nothing after The Snowmen that indicated Clara was anything other than an ordinary person, in fact everything you could point to as a clue after The Snowmen that indicated her to be anything other than an ordinary human, so when that’s the answer it works much better
I do want to make clear that I don’t always want answers or direct explanations to all mysteries, but this mystery needed them, it was the series arc and about strange things related to a main character, but it all got handwaved away.
Even if all the weird stuff around Ruby was properly explained, or attributed elsewhere, Ruby’s mother being ordinary isn’t particularly interesting for her as a character. I do not believe she particularly cared whether or not her mother was anything other than human, she just wanted to know her. She gets what she wanted and it’s easy, her mother is ecstatic to know her, her mum (Carla) is happy to fold Ruby’s mother into their lives, she gets to find her father as well. Nothing about this challenges Ruby as a character or, its so sickly sweet and uninteresting its almost boring.
Perhaps this whole thing could be saved for me if Ruby’s mother had not wanted a reunion and Ruby would have had to confont the fact that she would not be able to get to know her mother. Or something like that, I’m not a writer nor do I care to think more deeply about what might fix the arc for me, and besides, there wasn’t time to do anything particularly complicated.
It’s not Ruby’s mother being ordinary that is uninteresting, it is the fact that it is so perfect as to be empty. What are we left with as Ruby’s character arc for the series if she gets everything she wanted in every way. It feels empty to me
Minuet in Hell) and hopefully we can all listen to different points of view in the spirit we want this forum to continue.
