Has Doctor Who always been this amateur?

[user09876543]

I'm assuming it isn't doing very well since the BBC is plugging it massively but has it always been this poor? I haven't watched since Christopher Eccleston but thought I'd give it a go. It's like watching a bad village Am Dram performance. Am I missing something? Is this intentionally part of it now?

Nope. We had decades - and hundreds of doctor years - of the Doctor and the Master being men with absolutely no indication that Timelords can change sex (or race for that matter) and I do believe that if were not for the whole trans thing suddenly blowing up and becoming the centre of everything, that would never have changed. Feminism didn't suddenly make the writers think "Oooh maybe we should have a female Doctor" because that wasn't the reason they did it. If it were, it would have happened a lot sooner. It was "look kids, Timelords can change sex - it's perfectly normal for them. And they are not so different to us"

It's not diversity to take an established white male character and make them black or female or whatever. Diversity is writing brilliant NEW characters with those characteristics.

And the writing for Jodie was so sexist it kind of proves it. As a woman the Doctor becomes weaker, softer, and gathers herself a "fam" ffs.
Hardly a feminist icon.

Missy was a great character in many ways but somehow SHE was the only Master to ever cry. To ever regret her bad actions and eventually kill herself over it. Why is that, do you think?

And why is she (Jodie) dressed like a kids TV presenter with a fecking rainbow on her chest? Ugh! We aren't supposed to take her seriously.

And the writing for Jodie was so sexist it kind of proves it. As a woman the Doctor becomes weaker, softer, and gathers herself a "fam" ffs.
Hardly a feminist icon.

That is definitely true. Jodie was written as "Nervous younger woman in first big job" - constantly apologising for herself and appeasing others. Very different from any of the male doctors.

I do think a female doctor could have worked, but only if it had been written by a different team.

When the time Lords found the Doctor she was a girl not a boy the Doctor regenerates to fit in the reason he was a man for so.long was sexisim on the writers part . The Doctor has always surrounded them selves with humans so they have a family.

Yes this.

It's good to have a Who companion who is not a mere cypher nodding along quietly and there to provide a sounding board exposition but the more gabby and assertive they get, the better the writing has to be if they are not both talking over each other.

Part of the companions most important role is to be the audience in a way the person/people who get things explained to them so audience get the information in a natural way as it were. I think in the past they tried having companions as knowledgeable as the doctor as you say it can easily upsets the balance.

I did see some criticism of Whittaker companions along line that there were essentially the same thing three times - even in past with groups better writing had the companions having slightly different roles within the group dynamic which came across much more.

That is definitely true. Jodie was written as "Nervous younger woman in first big job" - constantly apologising for herself and appeasing others. Very different from any of the male doctors.

That's so true - also she couldn't do the switch from fun affable Doctor to something darker and more dangerous - DR Ruth really showed that up because that actress could as could Sacha Dhawan as the master and he had some truly awful writing to content with as well -much more than the Missy writing.

Um, wasn't that something that was just retconned in the last season?

Yup.

The writing started to go downhill just before Matt Smith left. He was my favourite Doctor by a mile. Peter Capaldi was absolutely wasted on the show, which was such a shame - I kept watching for Jodie Whittaker, hoping it would get back to it's former brilliance, but as great as some of the cast were (Bradley Walsh was an unexpected joy!) it just got worse and worse.

It's so amateur now as to be cringeworthy and unwatchable. I'd rather go back and watch the old episodes.

I've watched Dr Who from the beginning 😁. Well on and off over the years. Yes, it's very weak now. I watched a bit rolled my eyes and switched over.

The second Donnas son appeared, played by an obvious male, it became unwatchable for me.

I want to be entertained not have nonsense ideologies shoved at me.

I sometimes think the Beeb is staffed by secret Homophobes, Transphobes, sexists and snobs who yearn for the days of Empire. At least that would explain why they continually bang on and on about the same ‘causes’ , it’s to make people utterly bored and fed up with them, and so consider an alternative view ( see also Eurovision).

That storyline was written AFTER they decided to have a female Doctor.

It's all part of the same thing.

It also breaks the yin and yang of an onscreen partnership. Holmes had his Watson, but if Watson were a woman and therefore had to be as smart as Holmes, well, it could work but it breaks the dynamic. I suppose one could be the muscle, the other the brains.

Elementary was excellent. Lucy Liu played Watson.

Yes but it means the story has evolved .

Has it occurred to anyone that maybe Jodie Whitaker just wasn't very good? I watched most of the episodes and the storylines really weren't that bad. Certainly not as bad as Space Babies (making a bid to be the new Robot of Sherwood).

As far as episode 2 is concerned, I thought Jinkx Monsoon was absolutely dreadful. Unbelievably irritating and clearly can't act. For the first time ever, I switched an episode of Doctor Who off halfway through, despite Ncuti's beguiling beauty.

Maybe but he really produced some utter crap too, and the show went to shit under his direction.

Even the Weeping Angels were ruined in the end. Overuse, and changing what we knew about them to make them work in a different story, often in a way that seems weirdly arbitrary.

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I don't think I'm the right demographic audience for this new incarnation. I'm too old and remember much better script writing. I think no-one has told Russell T that his script was rotten. He's resting on his laurels, I fear. The space babies was poor. The villain in episode two was quite scary but the ending was much

Im 63 and agree totally. I’ve watched every doctor since the beginning . Looking back at the first series, the sets all looked like styrofoam and there was lots of running around corridors and pathetic alien costumes. But while there’s always been an amateur air to it, it was exciting, original and at times funny. Gradually the SWs turned into a lecturey, preach-fest, with aliens who had rough childhoods with parents/test-tubes/pure energy, who didn’t attend to their needs, leaving them emotionally scarred and intent on entire galaxy take-over bids. All the assistants had to announce their pronouns and sexual orientation every 5 minutes and the whole ethos of the show started to drown under its own right-on-ness and turned into a self-indulgent mess. I loved Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Christopher Ecclestone, Peter Capaldi and David Tennant. Since Jodie Whitaker it’s been turned into a combination of a hammy CBeebies programme crossed with a terrible broadway musical. Can’t watch it. Total waste of Ncuti Gatwa’s acting skills.

What do you mean it's "lazy"? That's not any kind of answer. Do you not think that popular tv writers have certain writing conventions and tropes about female characters.

I don't think you understood what Newspaper was saying, your response make no sense. It wasn't about having or not being able to have a female Bond, it was about how the characters work in the framework of that specific story.

(And no one said you couldn't have a pair like Holmes and Watson type pairing where the Holms-type role was a woman. It might work fine. But here is the thing - it wouldn't actually be Holmes and Watson. Because they are blokes.)

The thing was that up until the RTD Moffat era there was no real reason to think Time Lords did change sex potentially. In fact all the evidence was that they did not.

It's difficult to imagine that Moffat RTD wanted to change that just because they thought it was a nice idea, it was right in the middle of gender bending becoming the darling cause of city political progressives. It was a political statement. Just as they have made casting around sexuality, race, and disability political statements.

That's why it gets up people's craw so much , it's all meant to be understood as political commentary. Until someone points it out, and then they deny that's the case, evidence of their bigotry.

This is pretty much what I said. A female Time Lord would be fab. As long as it wasn't The Doctor. That's how they should have done it.

Hardcore Dr Who fans (eg people like RTD and Moffat) have been saying OMG what if the Doctor regenerated into a woman!? for literally decades. The final regeneration in Curse of Fatal Death 25 years ago was Joanna Lumley specifically as a nod to the fact that people had been saying "Joanna Lumley would be good as the Doctor" for years before that.

It wasn't a universally popular idea, and it does raise the statistical question of why none of the many regenerations we'd seen or heard of in the show had ever been cross-sex until The Doctor's Wife, but it's certainly not new.

Wasn't that a comic relief skit though? i.e. a JOKE.

River Song's regeneration was never "cross sex" she was Amy and Rory's daughter and remained female throughout.

I loved Blake's 7, too. It was so bad it was brilliant, and even the cast were choking on some of the dialogue and terrified to lean on anything in case the set collapsed.

Happy days!

It was a joke partly based on the fact that people had been talking about the possibility of a female Doctor, and specifically Joanna Lumley for ages.

The Doctor's Wife isn't anything to do with River Song: it's the first episode which canonically mentions cross-sex regeneration.

I do recall early William Hartnell episodes emphasising his unappealing crochety side

Yes - I remember that a) he was the oldest doctor, b) was often grumpy and curmudgeonly and c) he had grand-daughter, Susan. What happened to her?