jack_ryder | No one else seems to have broken the news

All power to Russell Davies for getting Who back on the air. But his mentorship has been a mixed blessing as far as the quality of the episodes, and the fear of being too Sf is concerned. It will be interesting to see someone else take it in a new direction. And Who is nothing if not flexible in the stories it can tell.

RTD is leaving

And there was much rejoicing.

Or so I have been led to believe.

I think he will go down in Who history as one of the better producers. He was certainly the only one able to bring the damn thing back onto the air and finally be treated seriously by the BBC for the first time ever.

Plus we've had a good run of classic stories that will get remembered by fans with the best of the old series.

Yeah, once again I'm kind of ambivalent

(Probably need a t-shirt with AMBIVALENT on it for these post-ironic times.)

Yes, it's good he got the good Doctor back on the air.

But I could have done without the fanservice (and the romantic entanglements which I still find icky in context) and the Doctor waving his magic wand and everything being all right. It's not Star Trek for god's sake.

Mark Gatiss is rumoured to take over - I'd (much, much) rather it was Steven Moffat, but then if he just writes most of the episodes I'll be happy.

(checks) Cool, he's written a 3rd season episode. Might be worth checking out what I have of the 3rd season then (Haven't gone past the dodgy Shakespeare episode even though I have a crush on the new assistant.)

I am fairly ambivalent, but there have been some bits I have enjoyed (mostly not in RTD's stories, I have been led to believe).

There seem to be rather a lot of complaints about him, but that may just be my very selective reading.

Maybe it's just producers get a hard rap -- on DW at least. For almost any other show, nobody notices them. JNT certainly did, though he produced some good stuff (and some bad).

Yes, better than JNT (but so is malaria) but who else?

(genuinely curious, not being up on my old Dr Who as much as I used to be.)

Classic stories?

The one's written by S Moffat (Empty Child, Doctor Dances, Girl in the Fireplace)

Dalek

what others would you consider classics? (i.e. remind me, not a lot of them have stuck with me)

I sort of forgive JNT because of S25 and 26. I think he tried to do interesting things, even if there were a lot of failed experiments.

Have you now?? I never thought you'd be unfaithful to Michelle F.

I have a crush, not an amour beyond the bounds of time and space. But slightly less than my amour for you, mon amour.

(Phew - bit of French fixes everything.)

And that would be my list too, except Dalek sort of annoyed me.

Yeah, I'm a heathen - I was kind of hoping for a redesign of the Daleks (and disliked the Dalek/Cyberman war episodes, even with the snarky Daleks.)

I'm not a big fan of the episode Dalek, but I do think it was a good attempt at making them a viable threat again.

Dalek was good except that the Dalek didn't need to be as magical to be threatening.

I think that some old-school fans were going to be irritated whatever the new person did with it. I've been enjoying the new series more than not, but I agree with jack's "magic wand" comment.

Undoubtedly true. There has been so much TV that has better suited me in the last few years, that I haven't been paying DW that much attention. The magic wand is certainly spot on.

Me, I'm happy to wait for free-to-air. The ABC's sure to show it. Unlike, say, 10 and BSG.

I think that the episodes "Dalek", "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances", "Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways" and "The Girl in the Fireplace" would all go down as "classics" in my view. Girl in the Fireplace in particular I think would easily make my top 10 Doctor Who stories of all time.

My experience with RTD is that the fair majority of Who fans like what he's done, and a very vocal minority tend to badmouth him from all directions. Of course Russell probably got a few of those fans off-side when he claimed he never visited Doctor Who fan forums because "the stench of lack of sex was unbearable"...

The magic wand is certainly spot on.

Yet not, I note, out of keeping with much of Doctor Who in the 1970s.

Heh

I mentioned above: Dalek, the Moffat episodes, Parting of the Ways. I haven't seen Human Nature/The Family of Blood yet, but all indidications are that it's up there in the quality stakes too.

I think a redesign of the Daleks would have been a very stupid thing to do. They're absolutely iconic, and redesigning them would have diluted their appeal to the general public.

There was Doctor Who in the...

um, never mind :-)

I'm not worried about a little crush, but Michelle might. After all, you've loved her from afar for years now (and it better stay that way). Humph.

True enough. My memory doesn't support it being quite so magic, but it was certainly magic enough.

Anyway, I vaguely recall reading that the writers destroyed it because it had become an irritating plot device. :)

I like some of what RTD has done, but I'm not a fan of his writing (he kind of reminds of me of Chris Carter - creates a good show, but the best episodes are written by other people.)

And I can't forgive him for the last scene in Love and Monsters. Blecch!

(though I'd be interested to see his early kids SF shows.)

They did, in "The Visitation" with Peter Davison.

Of course, a smarter solution might have been to stop relying on it as a plot device...

There seem to be rather a lot of complaints about him

They all seem to come from a small number of fans who really think they should have got the job, and are enraged that RTD doesn't consult them about every decision he makes. Jealousy is a terrible thing. I think the revived Doctor Who is mostly fantastic, and although it has a few ups and downs the old Who was just as erratic. That's the charm of the show. Episodes like The Girl in the Fireplace, The Empty Child, Dalek, Gridlock, Tooth and Claw and Human Nature are as good as any Who episode from any period of the show's history. What really annoys some fans is that RTD has been so successful with Who then he had the temerity to go and start another successful sci-fi series! The success of Torchwood really gets up the noses of some.

There were some good, subtly different designs in the SFX competition

They all seem to come from a small number of fans who really think they should have got the job, and are enraged that RTD doesn't consult them about every decision he makes.

My issues (rather than complaints, really) with RTD are:

He's not that good a writer (which is personal taste)

He's injected a sexual/romantic component into Dr Who which, to me, is more like fanfic than real writing

and he's playing down the science fiction and upping the fantasy (again, personal taste)

Yes, I have some issues with creative decisions about the new show - but he did get it up and running and it has had some great episodes (though I disagree about Tooth and Claw) so more power to him.

It amazes me that (some) fans believe they could do a better job over someone with a proven track record like RTD. Producing television is not something you pick up by watching it,as a few fans seem to believe, it's something you learn by doing. My major issue with RTD is that he's perhaps too much of a fan but, again, personal taste.

are as good as any Who episode from any period of the show's history

This is true even of the episodes that I don't like. RTD is, at the very least, competent and it surprises me that there are Dr Who fans who don't get that.

(Mind you, not being au fait with fandom as such, I'm only going on reports on Who fandom in the comments.)

He's injected a sexual/romantic component into Dr Who which, to me, is more like fanfic than real writing

He's hardly the first to introduce a sexual/romantic component into science fiction TV. How about Farscape? It didn't strike me as being more like fanfic than real writing. How about UFO, way back in 1969? Lots of sexual/romantic/emotional content. I don't think that treating characters in science fiction as if they're real people rather than cardboard cutouts immediately turns it into fanfic.

He's not even the first to introduce sexual/romantic content into Doctor Who. Remember The Green Death? Which I think was 1973.

I have no problems with sexual/romantic content in SF at all.

That's not what I said.

I was ambiguous about what I dislike about the new Dr Who (okay, Green Death was problematic because it wasn't me who Jo Grant was interested in.)

It's the Doctor having romantic feelings for his assistants. It's this alien / human thing I have issues with - for me, the Doctor having a thing for an earthling is the galactic equivalent of paedophilia or even (as their physiologies are internally different) bestiality. There is at least a major, major power imbalance there that goes way beyond a teacher/student relationship - and I better stop there before LJ closes my journal down.

So, just out of curiosity, what did you think of the inter-species sex in Farscape?

Haven't seen enough of Farscape to comment, but I was under the assumption that the Claudia Black character was a human derivative (like the humanoid aliens in Star Trek - according to some episode or other.)

It's more the power imbalance twixt the Good Doctor and Rose that concerns me.

(but then, if they're into that kind of thing...)

Oh yeah, there's that cat alien thingy played by Gigi Edgely.

Isn't that just a Furry Pride thing?

I stopped watching halfway through season 4, but I'm pretty sure her species was non-human. They had a different physiology - they had that massive heat intolerance thing. And Chiana had sex with the guy with the tentacles.

It's more the power imbalance twixt the Good Doctor and Rose that concerns me.

I don't really see it. She's a legal adult. She's travelling with the Doctor of her own free will. She's not in any sense an employee. There's probably less of a power imbalance than there is in many real-world human-human relationships. And if anything did happen between them I think we can be absolutely certain it was entirely consensual.

I'm not sure it's worth pursuing this particular thread as you're missing my point entirely. So I'll try to explain it better -

The legal situation or the employee/employer relationship is irrelevant.

The Doctor is a Time Lord - he has command of time and space. If Rose did anything to piss him off, he could just nip into the Tardis and fuck around with her timeline until the situation was resolved (there's a funny Steven Moffat story about him doing something similar with a librarian.)

If, however, he pissed Rose off, she could (what exactly? Hide his sonic screwdriver?)

The closest analogy I can think of is imagine Merlin having a romantic affair with his (non-magical) assistant.

Though, I guess, there's that Superman/Lois thing...

Also, there's the age difference...

No one else seems to have broken the news

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