Doctor Who- this might be the last straw even for me.

[TinselAngel]

For fucks sake

Juno Dawson as a writer.

Your wish is my command

I agree @UtopiaPlanitia - I've seen it described as bait and switch tactic.

It is wider than sci fi I think BBC drama department got a reputation for it in early 2000s Agatha Christie works being a target. They seemed to have quite the contempt for the source material at some points. I'm not consistent though as unlike many fans I actually do have time for Kenneth Branagh films - there's enough elusive "essence" even when it's not book Poirot and in last film one a murder that make no sense - to keep me watching.

I'm a lot less excited about new projects than once was as there's been so much rubbish. Even when there good series - like the Umbrella Academy or Mandalorian they can fuck it up at some point so much it taints the rest of it - Game of throne being the classic for that.

There's a you tube channel Lost in Adaptation that is quite fun - looking at difference between source books and film/TV - a few occasions completely re-writing the source material is what make it work - thinking Forest Gump example.

As I said, I think he's terrified of being cancelled like Barrowman and Noel Whatsisnsme.

I vaguely remember RTD saying something like that he was going to queer the shit out of DW.

Honestly, this is one of the things I really like about hanging out with men.

Gosh, I hated River Song. I just wanted to punch her whenever she spoke, and I'm not usually a violent person.

She really strikes me a stock Steven Moffat woman character, basically someone he thinks he'd like to shag.

My feeling, more and more, is they are overtly trying to squash the ideas and themes that anchored these stories.

Take Star Trek, and forget Roddenberry's whole idea that it would be about humans who have overcome a lot of our most serious social and psychological issues, going out into the universe to explore. Then you get crap like Discovery or Picard, and the whole thing is actually a corrupt morass.

Or Star Wars and the Jedi are suddenly bad, and the Force something totally different and you had it wrong all alone, and Luke Skywalker doesn't believe in anything anymore. At which point the whole original trilogy is just a meaningless waste of time.

They treat individual characters the same way too, take an iconic character and undermine him in every possible way seems to be the approach.

There is no way that's just a lack of understanding.

I had the Agatha Christie and classic dramas in mind too when I was mid-rant but thought I'd better not mention them cos then it would turn from being a rant to being a screed 😬

I'm sorry but, what is wrong with scriptwriters who think they can improve on Christie, Tolkien, Sapkowski, Austin or Tolstoy??? I think, for the BBC, this tinkering started with Andrew Davies and his 'sexing up' of Pride and Prejudice. He felt Austin could be improved upon 🙄 and set the trend going.

I agree with you that a good first series is no indicator of a steady writers' room - S3 of The Mandalorian ranged from patchy to outright snooze fest (yes, I'm looking at you Lizzo and Jack Black) compared to S1-2. The last couple of years of GoT were awful - it was very obvious they had run out of GRR Martin plot and dialogue.

Thanks for the YT channel recommendation, I'll have a look.

We have a phrase here in N Ireland that I like: we describe a straightforward and/or honest person as 'having no backdoors in him/her'.

I tend to prefer straightforward people, so I tend to get on better with men (who have respect for women) on the whole (and when I was younger, I nearly always got on well with the middle-aged women in whatever workplace I was in because they took no shite from anyone - great role models 😊).

Subverting the characters and world building is such a popular thing with scriptwriters at the moment. From DW to Trek to Witcher, writers and showrunners really want to subvert things or break down popular legacy characters in order to make their own creations/interpretations shine.

I love Trek because it is aspirational and has faith in humanity's potential. In its heyday, 1966 - 2005, it was stories about competent, well-trained Starfleet officers with developed ethics exploring the galaxy while navigating danger, contact with alien civilisations, interpersonal friendships and the chain of command. Nowadays NuTrek is just characters snarking at each other on dimly lit sets, rushing around for no particular reason, crying and hugging, and no-one pays attention to the chain of command until Burnham (inexplicably) becomes captain of the Discovery despite constantly ignoring orders from superior officers 🤷‍♀️ Strange New Worlds is a fractional improvement but not by much because the characters all behave as if they were written by Joss Whedon rather than Trek writers.

And I don't think Headland had to subvert the Jedi to write an interesting story about the Sith - I would have found a good story told from the Sith POV really fascinating (Manny Jacinto shows hints of what it could have been like in his performance in The Acolyte) but I don't think she had the skill to tell that story.

Doctor Who has suffered the same fate - they've taken the iconic character of the Doctor and reduced his gravitas, as well as his importance in his own show, in order to give more attention to female companions (that are written like the showrunner's idea of a dream girl) and an emphasis on romantic entanglements. Also, I'm not interested in the home lives and family circumstances of his companions: I know very little about the background of Jamie, Tegan, Mike Yates, Jo Grant, Sarah Jane, Lyssa, Turlough or Adric and I still found them to be fascinating characters. We lost intelligent plots dealing with science and ethics to plots with explosions and fights and London being invaded and general timey-wimey nonsense. Plus, stop expanding what the sonic screwdriver can do, it's turning into a Deus Ex Machina Multitool.

I can't understand why writers and producers want to make things they don't understand or like enough to treat faithfully and well. Look at what Denis Villeneuve did with Dune - he stuck to the lore as much as possible and made as few changes as he needed to to translate a complex book full of interior character monologues into a film. Why can't we have more of that sort of thing?

Yeah, there's a place for deconstruction, but these days I feel it's the lazy option for writers. Maybe they've all spent too much time reading TV Tropes.

One example of good writing that I remember from recent years was in a strange little throwaway comic that almost nobody read. By way of background, since Warner Bros owns DC Comics now, it's possible to cross over DC characters with Looney Tunes. So someone had the idea of publishing a Batman vs Elmer Fudd one-shot.

The lazy, predictable thing to do would be to just treat Batman as a joke and make the whole thing silly. But that's not what it did. Instead it told a noir story that built up Elmer Fudd as a badass villain with a shotgun who could be a legitimate threat to Batman. It worked pretty well.

I think the building up is the key. What we're used to seeing now is a nihilistic tearing down, and it's just depressing.

I wonder if part of it is that they don't really want the setting or the lore - and maybe in some cases the "franchise" doesn't really need more stories anyway.

But those are the only high budget sci-fi things that will get made?

I kind of disagree about Dune though. It seemed to me he focused in on a single theme from the book, simplified it even, and then stripped out anything he thought would be hard for the audience - and I don't think he gave the audience much credit.

@UtopiaPlanitia I love Trek because it is aspirational and has faith in humanity's potential. In its heyday, 1966 - 2005, it was stories about competent, well-trained Starfleet officers with developed ethics exploring the galaxy while navigating danger, contact with alien civilisations, interpersonal friendships and the chain of command. Nowadays NuTrek is just characters snarking at each other on dimly lit sets, rushing around for no particular reason, crying and hugging, and no-one pays attention to the chain of command until Burnham (inexplicably) becomes captain of the Discovery despite constantly ignoring orders from superior officers 🤷‍♀️ Strange New Worlds is a fractional improvement but not by much because the characters all behave as if they were written by Joss Whedon rather than Trek writers.

I think you've perfectly expressed why I really disliked Star Trek Picard, and gave up on it after a few episodes. I was initially pleased to see more of Picard (and Seven of Nine), but the whole thing was so dark (in more than one sense) and unTrek-like I rapidly lost interest.

Plus, stop expanding what the sonic screwdriver can do, it's turning into a Deus Ex Machina Multitool.

Exactly! You've hit the nail on the head (with your sonic hammer)!

I'll forgive ST Picard a lot for the sheer fun the old crew had in the last series and especially Worf.

This is true.

These are producers or writers who don’t have the skill to write or develop their own very successful programmes so instead they are like cuckoos - laying their egg in another’s nest and when the chick hatches pushing the other chicks out of the nest whilst taking all the sustenance the parent provides.

That is a good way of putting it.

Unfortunately, they also don't appear to value good storytelling or character development. They are also not subtle about lecturing the audience.

I don't mind the endless rewrites and retakes and reboots of beloved IP. I think of those shows and characters like the modern version of mythological chraracters that can be endlessly reinvented, looked at from different angles and updated to contemporary mores.

I just think it's a shame RTD, who did some great TV in the 90s and 00s, has become obsessed with rehashing LGB representation and politics of 30+ years ago into superficial TQ+ versions because he believes incorrectly they are the same thing.

Thanks for the Trek comments. I was irritated by Discovery, Michael's whinge, whisper and wail performance was so one-note and dull, they screwed up the Trill, and I only survived what they did to the Klingons by reminding myself that it was just cosmetic gene enhancement anyway, easily changed in another generation (Worf and B'Ellana had the most beuatiful hands in all of Trek, why waste that ?). Then I felt a bit fed up with the one season of Picard I watched because they killed Icheb, had ships they called orchids that looked nothing like orchids, and a silly up in mid air lab set-up on ?Hawaii? I'll probably still watch it at some stage, but I'd sooner have a DVD of season 3 of the Orville.

Never saw post early-70s Dr Who until about 1995, by then it was too English for me.

Best modernish sci fi I've seen recently was Eureka.

I never understood the reason why Christopher Ecclestone left at the time as he was the one that kick started Dr Who all again. Thanks to this thread I read up on it and it sounds like there have been two decades of problems.

He was excellent, my favourite Doctor. He's said that he just couldn't work with RTD and the others in the production crew, and didn't want to be involved in the "politics".

Eccleston was my favorite as well. Exciting, aloof, caring, brilliant, and above all, alien.

OK, Wikipedia has kindly informed me why I have no idea what is going on on this thread. I was about 3 years old when the original set of series ended and about 19 or 20 when the current set of series started. It has never been on my radar.

Is it worth watching? I can watch almost anything through the miracle of Kodi. Where should I start?

I’d like to see that last series, but it wasn’t available on Amazon Prime when I had a trial of it. I can’t remember which streaming service I’d need to subscribe to in order to see it.

Probably start with the first series of the revival, the one with Christopher Ecclestone. The three David Tennant series that followed it are good too, in my opinion.