Absolutely! That’s one of my biggest hopes of what’s to come from Big Finish in the near future. Retroactive improvement c:
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To be clear I very much meant this as a positive observation I think it works super well and I love basically all of Flux
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Yeah I really loved Flux and The Vanquishers especially. It took me a long time to actually finish Flux and all I heard from anyone was how terrible and unsatisfying the ending was. When I finally got around to finishing the series, The Vanquishers became easily one of my favorite episodes in the revival! I love the whole story too.
The last episode is my favorite of the series lol
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They should have fired him and recast. I totally agree it ruined what was all set to be a great story
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Last of the Time Lords is one that I hate. Not exactly the ending but one of the main resolutions. Magical rejuvination of The Doctor through positive thoughts 
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He really does just get Tinker Bell-ed at the end there and it’s honestly so dumb that I almost just kinda love it lol
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I just hate ‘magic’ in my sci-fi. Actually turns me off to that story arc.
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I’m most irritated by Arachnids in the UK. I think it started really well and there’s some creepy imagery and suspense. Then it takes a turn after the Doctor lectures Robertson about the use of guns, instead preferring to lure the giant spiders into Robertson’s escape room. I was surprised that the room was big enough to physically hold them all, let alone provide them with air, food and water. Were they supposed to live out their natural lives cooped up in that little room? It seemed like cruel and unusual punishment to me. Yet, once the spiders were all trapped, they were barely given a second thought. And this was touted as a “better way” than putting them down. Why not pick them up in the TARDIS and take them somewhere that could support giant arachnids in a natural environment? It annoyed me that it could have been so easily fixed with a line of dialogue to explain that this was the Doctor’s plan, but no.
Doctor Who often has rushed or seemingly magical endings that can be a bit underwhelming which go back to the very earliest stories. Despite this, my biggest gripe with the Chibnall era is that a number of stories forgot to have any proper ending at all! Big stuff like what’s going to happen to the Spiders or the missing parts of the universe just seem to get glossed over. You don’t have to fix everything and always have a happy ending, but you do need to address the big stuff, show the impact of a sad ending or explain what’s deliberately left hanging so the audience doesn’t think that it’s just all been forgotten. Without that, there’s a slap dash feeling to the whole thing, like a writer downing tools the moment they reach a word count, whether they’ve reached the end of a sentence or
See what I did there?
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Unfinished is rather how I’d describe it. There were also times where it felt like chunks of backstory were missing, or it needed another readthrough and things to be fixed up and polished, or dialogue felt like it was just directly describing what they were doing.
Honestly, I ended up wondering if he ran out of time and had to shoot scripts that he hadn’t had time to properly polish…
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Chibnall admitted that’s what happened with The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, where they ended up shooting a first draft, but I agree that it seems like that happened all over the place in this era! What irritates me more is that so much of it is fixable by inserting a line of dialogue, even as late as in an ADR session in the week before transmission. It’s like they not only shot first drafts, but then didn’t watch the edits back to check that they made sense!
I’ll probably watch them back in a few years time and spot the various explanations and then realise that I was wrong and being dense. I’m far from infallible.
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Yeah. I have to admit that this really irritated me, too.
Yeah, and the shame is, I actually like a lot of the ideas Chibnall had in his era. I just wish they’d have been executed better.
I also remember hearing Flux should have had at least another episode or two, and, of course, a lot of it was cobbled together from what was supposed to be a different season that never happened. It’s like Trial of a Timelord in more then one way…
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i feel like The Ambassadors of Death had a lot of potential as a first-contact-esque story, but we never got to see any of the fallout of any of those events. Humanity is now certain that aliens exist; what now? What’s the significance of that? Apparently nothing.
This isn’t to say it needs more episodes, seven is more than enough, but everything that happened could have fit in the space of four and the remaining three could have been the consequences, both political and interpersonal. …And the Silurians didn’t end when the Silurian city was discovered, things continued to happen after that because it constantly answers the question “Okay, what happens because of that?” and Ambassadors could have easily done the same.
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Agreed. I think Chibnall had some great ideas story wise and behind the scenes, but the failure to draw things to a satisfying conclusion seemed to really bug the whole era. It’s a shame because so much of it had really great promise.
James Cooray-Smith has written at some length about Trial in both his Black Archive on Ultimate Foe and in his subscription publication Psychic Paper. I’m sure you’ll have probably come across it, but if you haven’t, I strongly recommend it.
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