He's back... RTD returns as Doc Who Showrunner...

[BBally81]

The NMD (Not My Doctor) crowd are treating this as if it's a victory for their cause, ignoring that RTD himself has no issues with there being a female Doctor, in fact he’s gone on record as saying that he thought Dame Judy Dench should have replaced David Tennant. So, even if we didn’t have 13 and other female Doctors making cameos in the novelisation of “Rose”, we have evidence that he’s just fine with the idea. or that he took a shot at Boris Johnson in his Rose epilogue short story portraying him as an Auton survivor from the events of that episode.

Could you imagine the social media reaction to Jack Harkness, the Van Statten character being a corrupt capitalist, or Rose & Mickey being interracial if they all happened today?

They would be labeled as "SJW propaganda" by morning. But because they all grew up with these, they get a free pass. They are somehow under the belief that politics in Doctor Who didn't start until 2018, showing they haven't properly seen the show in their lives.

In fact there was a 2005 column that was ranting about the revived series during the time Tennant was casted, where the author complains about the show suffering from political correctness and being sexist to straight males. (sound familiar?)



So, I still wouldn't put it pass the NMD crowd to start complaining again as soon as RTD provides an episode they deem as too "woke".

Especially grifters like Nerdrotic and Bowlstrek

He’s unpredictable and as such I’m not going to make a prediction about who he will choose. In fact, I think the probability of the next Doctor being a white man has gone up a little. But he’s also someone who is very aware of the larger picture and how things can damage a brand, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he casts a BAME woman as the next Doctor. It’ll be because they’re someone he thinks will be great and wants to work with (or wants to continue working with), but I’d imagine he’d also be very aware of the situation surrounding Jodie and the idea that casting a man now could send the message that “the woman was a failure, so we’re not doing that again”.

But, again, he’s unpredictable, so I’m not going to try to predict what he will do. We are, after all, talking about a man who was working on an episode where Harry Potter books leak into real life and which was going to have J. K. Rowling playing herself as the companion, until David Tennant took him aside and quietly said ”don’t you think that’s actually a bit much?”

https://gizmodo.com/the-doctor-who-harr ... -t-5050362

So who knows?

*Cough* You realise that the NMD crowd are literally as old as Dr Who is? As in ''people were declaring the show dead the moment Hartnell became Troughton?'' They are not some new thing that has popped up since the Doctor got ovaries.

Except a lot of the current crop of the NMDs like Bowlstrek have shown to be casuals at best and grifters at worst. I'm not a fan of the last two seasons, in fact Chibnall is a rubbish showrunner and good riddance he's gone and Jodie's is my least favorite Doctor (though I don't blame her for it) but a lot of these current NMDs have such weak arguments:

"Doctor Who never got political"

I take it those who say that never watched Curse of Peladon (an obvious take on UK discourse regarding the EU), The Sunmakers (inspired by the raise of taxes in the UK), The Mutants (apartheid South Africa) and a lot of times, it wasn't subtle.


"The show has never shown bias in its political stance or took shots at politicians like Chibnall did with Trump"

Again classic Who says otherwise, the Collector from The Sun Makers was a knock on then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey.

"The show never talked about topics like bigotry"

Again, The Mutants, also Remembrance of the Daleks had that famous "no coloureds" scene when Ace came across the sign, in fact bigotry was a big part of her backstory as we discover in Ghost Light, her friend was killed by a group of bigots because she was Pakistani.

Episodes like the Hartnell episode The Massacre had the topic of intolerance up in your face as the title is referring to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.

"She called her incarnation an upgrade, that's an attack on previous male incarnations!"

This isn't even the first time the Doctor's incarnations treated their form as an improvement of the previous, it happened a number of times in the Classic series.

For example: In the ending of the Five Doctors, the Fifth Doctor said to himself "It seems I'm not the man I once was. Thank goodness."

"This era is filled with white straight male main villains"

Series 11 had like what two white males (Rosa and Keblaam) that could be considered as the main antagonists (characters like the lame Trump analogue what's his face was more of a secondary antagonist), while the rest were mostly aliens, one of them being an alien queen in the Witchfinders.

In Series 12, the main antagonist of Spyfall Part 1 was a black character until the Master reveal who was played by an Indian actor. The rest of the antagonists in that season were aliens.

Also the fact one of the companions Graham, who was white contradicts to those claims.

And lets be clear on this: bringing RTD back is a blatant and cynical ploy to bring the ratings back up. This show is now pulling in ratings lower than Sylvester McCoy. And yes, true, you cannot perform a true like-for-like comparison as viewing habits have changed, but even when compared to contemporary shows it isn't all that high. And the reason for that isn't just ovaries. Its the terrible scripts, the offensive retcons, the endless in-your-face woke BS. Any one of these things would have been bad but repairable. But combined? It has been devastating. The BBC has completely misread the market.

The problem a lot of these NMDs treat the fact it's "woke" as the main and only reason for the Chibnall era's failure, ignoring the other factors you mentioned.

Bowlstrek (who admitted to mainly being a fan of New Who) has notoriously pushed this white genocide narrative regarding the show claimed Revolutions of the Dalek's main antagonist was a white straight male, a character who was killed off in the first 16 minutes of the episode. He also lied about how all the Hindus in Demons of the Punjab were the bad guys, while in fact one of the main characters of that episode was a Hindu but Bowlstrek ignored that part to push his narrative due to his bias against Muslims like me and he's been called out on this that he privatized the video, not because he realized his mistake as he showed to smug how he's right and everyone else is wrong.

My point is the NMDs should never be seen as the main voice of the fandom (if they were Jodie's debut episode wouldn't have gained higher overall viewership than a huge number of Capaldi's episodes, so it's obvious most fans were not against the concept of a female Doctor especially since the show and other DW media either hinted or confirmed that Time Lords can change genders) especially since the majority of the fans who don't like the Chibnall era like Jay Exci and Stubagful don't classify themselves as part of the NMD group.

[sayla0079]

The NMD (Not My Doctor) crowd are treating this as if it's a victory for their cause, ignoring that RTD himself has no issues with there being a female Doctor, in fact he’s gone on record as saying that he thought Dame Judy Dench should have replaced David Tennant. So, even if we didn’t have 13 and other female Doctors making cameos in the novelisation of “Rose”, we have evidence that he’s just fine with the idea. or that he took a shot at Boris Johnson in his Rose epilogue short story portraying him as an Auton survivor from the events of that episode.

Could you imagine the social media reaction to Jack Harkness, the Van Statten character being a corrupt capitalist, or Rose & Mickey being interracial if they all happened today?

They would be labeled as "SJW propaganda" by morning. But because they all grew up with these, they get a free pass. They are somehow under the belief that politics in Doctor Who didn't start until 2018, showing they haven't properly seen the show in their lives.

In fact there was a 2005 column that was ranting about the revived series during the time Tennant was casted, where the author complains about the show suffering from political correctness and being sexist to straight males. (sound familiar?)



So, I still wouldn't put it pass the NMD crowd to start complaining again as soon as RTD provides an episode they deem as too "woke".

Especially grifters like Nerdrotic and Bowlstrek

He’s unpredictable and as such I’m not going to make a prediction about who he will choose. In fact, I think the probability of the next Doctor being a white man has gone up a little. But he’s also someone who is very aware of the larger picture and how things can damage a brand, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he casts a BAME woman as the next Doctor. It’ll be because they’re someone he thinks will be great and wants to work with (or wants to continue working with), but I’d imagine he’d also be very aware of the situation surrounding Jodie and the idea that casting a man now could send the message that “the woman was a failure, so we’re not doing that again”.

But, again, he’s unpredictable, so I’m not going to try to predict what he will do. We are, after all, talking about a man who was working on an episode where Harry Potter books leak into real life and which was going to have J. K. Rowling playing herself as the companion, until David Tennant took him aside and quietly said ”don’t you think that’s actually a bit much?”

https://gizmodo.com/the-doctor-who-harr ... -t-5050362

So who knows?

*Cough* You realise that the NMD crowd are literally as old as Dr Who is? As in ''people were declaring the show dead the moment Hartnell became Troughton?'' They are not some new thing that has popped up since the Doctor got ovaries.

Except a lot of the current crop of the NMDs like Bowlstrek have shown to be casuals at best and grifters at worst. I'm not a fan of the last two seasons, in fact Chibnall is a rubbish showrunner and good riddance he's gone and Jodie's is my least favorite Doctor (though I don't blame her for it) but a lot of these current NMDs have such weak arguments:

"Doctor Who never got political"

I take it those who say that never watched Curse of Peladon (an obvious take on UK discourse regarding the EU), The Sunmakers (inspired by the raise of taxes in the UK), The Mutants (apartheid South Africa) and a lot of times, it wasn't subtle.


"The show has never shown bias in its political stance or took shots at politicians like Chibnall did with Trump"

Again classic Who says otherwise, the Collector from The Sun Makers was a knock on then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey.

"The show never talked about topics like bigotry"

Again, The Mutants, also Remembrance of the Daleks had that famous "no coloureds" scene when Ace came across the sign, in fact bigotry was a big part of her backstory as we discover in Ghost Light, her friend was killed by a group of bigots because she was Pakistani.

Episodes like the Hartnell episode The Massacre had the topic of intolerance up in your face as the title is referring to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.

"She called her incarnation an upgrade, that's an attack on previous male incarnations!"

This isn't even the first time the Doctor's incarnations treated their form as an improvement of the previous, it happened a number of times in the Classic series.

For example: In the ending of the Five Doctors, the Fifth Doctor said to himself "It seems I'm not the man I once was. Thank goodness."

"This era is filled with white straight male main villains"

Series 11 had like what two white males (Rosa and Keblaam) that could be considered as the main antagonists (characters like the lame Trump analogue what's his face was more of a secondary antagonist), while the rest were mostly aliens, one of them being an alien queen in the Witchfinders.

In Series 12, the main antagonist of Spyfall Part 1 was a black character until the Master reveal who was played by an Indian actor. The rest of the antagonists in that season were aliens.

Also the fact one of the companions Graham, who was white contradicts to those claims.

And lets be clear on this: bringing RTD back is a blatant and cynical ploy to bring the ratings back up. This show is now pulling in ratings lower than Sylvester McCoy. And yes, true, you cannot perform a true like-for-like comparison as viewing habits have changed, but even when compared to contemporary shows it isn't all that high. And the reason for that isn't just ovaries. Its the terrible scripts, the offensive retcons, the endless in-your-face woke BS. Any one of these things would have been bad but repairable. But combined? It has been devastating. The BBC has completely misread the market.

The problem a lot of these NMDs treat the fact it's "woke" as the main and only reason for the Chibnall era's failure, ignoring the other factors you mentioned.

Bowlstrek (who admitted to mainly being a fan of New Who) has notoriously pushed this white genocide narrative regarding the show claimed Revolutions of the Dalek's main antagonist was a white straight male, a character who was killed off in the first 16 minutes of the episode. He also lied about how all the Hindus in Demons of the Punjab were the bad guys, while in fact one of the main characters of that episode was a Hindu but Bowlstrek ignored that part to push his narrative due to his bias against Muslims like me and he's been called out on this that he privatized the video, not because he realized his mistake as he showed to smug how he's right and everyone else is wrong.

My point is the NMDs should never be seen as the main voice of the fandom (if they were Jodie's debut episode wouldn't have gained higher overall viewership than a huge number of Capaldi's episodes, so it's obvious most fans were not against the concept of a female Doctor especially since the show and other DW media either hinted or confirmed that Time Lords can change genders) especially since the majority of the fans who don't like the Chibnall era like Jay Exci and Stubagful don't classify themselves as part of the NMD group.

Exactly and if people can't believe it was political before an excellent example is the Green Death from John Pertwee's run.

[BBally81]

The NMD (Not My Doctor) crowd are treating this as if it's a victory for their cause, ignoring that RTD himself has no issues with there being a female Doctor, in fact he’s gone on record as saying that he thought Dame Judy Dench should have replaced David Tennant. So, even if we didn’t have 13 and other female Doctors making cameos in the novelisation of “Rose”, we have evidence that he’s just fine with the idea. or that he took a shot at Boris Johnson in his Rose epilogue short story portraying him as an Auton survivor from the events of that episode.

Could you imagine the social media reaction to Jack Harkness, the Van Statten character being a corrupt capitalist, or Rose & Mickey being interracial if they all happened today?

They would be labeled as "SJW propaganda" by morning. But because they all grew up with these, they get a free pass. They are somehow under the belief that politics in Doctor Who didn't start until 2018, showing they haven't properly seen the show in their lives.

In fact there was a 2005 column that was ranting about the revived series during the time Tennant was casted, where the author complains about the show suffering from political correctness and being sexist to straight males. (sound familiar?)



So, I still wouldn't put it pass the NMD crowd to start complaining again as soon as RTD provides an episode they deem as too "woke".

Especially grifters like Nerdrotic and Bowlstrek

He’s unpredictable and as such I’m not going to make a prediction about who he will choose. In fact, I think the probability of the next Doctor being a white man has gone up a little. But he’s also someone who is very aware of the larger picture and how things can damage a brand, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he casts a BAME woman as the next Doctor. It’ll be because they’re someone he thinks will be great and wants to work with (or wants to continue working with), but I’d imagine he’d also be very aware of the situation surrounding Jodie and the idea that casting a man now could send the message that “the woman was a failure, so we’re not doing that again”.

But, again, he’s unpredictable, so I’m not going to try to predict what he will do. We are, after all, talking about a man who was working on an episode where Harry Potter books leak into real life and which was going to have J. K. Rowling playing herself as the companion, until David Tennant took him aside and quietly said ”don’t you think that’s actually a bit much?”

https://gizmodo.com/the-doctor-who-harr ... -t-5050362

So who knows?

*Cough* You realise that the NMD crowd are literally as old as Dr Who is? As in ''people were declaring the show dead the moment Hartnell became Troughton?'' They are not some new thing that has popped up since the Doctor got ovaries.

Except a lot of the current crop of the NMDs like Bowlstrek have shown to be casuals at best and grifters at worst. I'm not a fan of the last two seasons, in fact Chibnall is a rubbish showrunner and good riddance he's gone and Jodie's is my least favorite Doctor (though I don't blame her for it) but a lot of these current NMDs have such weak arguments:

"Doctor Who never got political"

I take it those who say that never watched Curse of Peladon (an obvious take on UK discourse regarding the EU), The Sunmakers (inspired by the raise of taxes in the UK), The Mutants (apartheid South Africa) and a lot of times, it wasn't subtle.


"The show has never shown bias in its political stance or took shots at politicians like Chibnall did with Trump"

Again classic Who says otherwise, the Collector from The Sun Makers was a knock on then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey.

"The show never talked about topics like bigotry"

Again, The Mutants, also Remembrance of the Daleks had that famous "no coloureds" scene when Ace came across the sign, in fact bigotry was a big part of her backstory as we discover in Ghost Light, her friend was killed by a group of bigots because she was Pakistani.

Episodes like the Hartnell episode The Massacre had the topic of intolerance up in your face as the title is referring to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.

"She called her incarnation an upgrade, that's an attack on previous male incarnations!"

This isn't even the first time the Doctor's incarnations treated their form as an improvement of the previous, it happened a number of times in the Classic series.

For example: In the ending of the Five Doctors, the Fifth Doctor said to himself "It seems I'm not the man I once was. Thank goodness."

"This era is filled with white straight male main villains"

Series 11 had like what two white males (Rosa and Keblaam) that could be considered as the main antagonists (characters like the lame Trump analogue what's his face was more of a secondary antagonist), while the rest were mostly aliens, one of them being an alien queen in the Witchfinders.

In Series 12, the main antagonist of Spyfall Part 1 was a black character until the Master reveal who was played by an Indian actor. The rest of the antagonists in that season were aliens.

Also the fact one of the companions Graham, who was white contradicts to those claims.

And lets be clear on this: bringing RTD back is a blatant and cynical ploy to bring the ratings back up. This show is now pulling in ratings lower than Sylvester McCoy. And yes, true, you cannot perform a true like-for-like comparison as viewing habits have changed, but even when compared to contemporary shows it isn't all that high. And the reason for that isn't just ovaries. Its the terrible scripts, the offensive retcons, the endless in-your-face woke BS. Any one of these things would have been bad but repairable. But combined? It has been devastating. The BBC has completely misread the market.

The problem a lot of these NMDs treat the fact it's "woke" as the main and only reason for the Chibnall era's failure, ignoring the other factors you mentioned.

Bowlstrek (who admitted to mainly being a fan of New Who) has notoriously pushed this white genocide narrative regarding the show claimed Revolutions of the Dalek's main antagonist was a white straight male, a character who was killed off in the first 16 minutes of the episode. He also lied about how all the Hindus in Demons of the Punjab were the bad guys, while in fact one of the main characters of that episode was a Hindu but Bowlstrek ignored that part to push his narrative due to his bias against Muslims like me and he's been called out on this that he privatized the video, not because he realized his mistake as he showed to smug how he's right and everyone else is wrong.

My point is the NMDs should never be seen as the main voice of the fandom (if they were Jodie's debut episode wouldn't have gained higher overall viewership than a huge number of Capaldi's episodes, so it's obvious most fans were not against the concept of a female Doctor especially since the show and other DW media either hinted or confirmed that Time Lords can change genders) especially since the majority of the fans who don't like the Chibnall era like Jay Exci and Stubagful don't classify themselves as part of the NMD group.

Exactly and if people can't believe it was political before an excellent example is the Green Death from John Pertwee's run.

Pertwee's run in general was quite "political", it helped that that era aired during one of the UK's most political eras.

[Lazerlike42]

I'll admit to not being the biggest expert on classic Dr. Who so it's possible that this commentary doesn't apply as well as I expect, but with that caveat I would say that just because Classic Who addressed some real-world issues it doesn't mean that the modern version being overtly "woke" or addressing political issues can't still amount to reduced quality. I think it's all about how exactly it is/was done.

For instance, after having shown my wife all of TOS Star Trek I wanted to show her some of Star Trek Continues, which I've long considered to be so well done in almost every category that it basically is Star Trek - that if not for the different actors, you'd never be able to tell their episodes from the real thing. Watching through some of them again, I felt almost the same way except I noticed this time through that their social commentary gets I think a lot more "heavy handed" than in the classic series, and it's to the project's detriment.

Now classic Star Trek is famous for having addressed social issues and taken on controversial subjects. It absolutely addressed these things. What I noticed, though, in particular with an episode of ST Continues like "Lolani," is that in ST Continues the social commentary can be basically be all there is to an episode whereas with classic Trek the point was always made but the episode could also stand on its own apart from the commentary. For instance, in one of the most overt examples of addressing politics - Let That Be Your Last Battlefield - you wouldn't even know the episode is about racism until at least halfway through. The backbone of the episode is a mystery in the first act or two and a power struggle in the second, a la And the Children Shall Lead or Charlie X or By Any Other Name. The commentary on racism is there and it's very overt and obvious, but even so the episode has so much more to it than that and if you could somehow remove that commentary the episode would still work, at least from a basic plot standpoint.

With, say, Lolani from ST Continues, the entire thing is nothing other than one giant piece of social commentary. The episode doesn't really have anything to it other than the social issue. There's a brief "mystery" at the beginning, but it barely qualifies and is resolved almost immediately. The episode then flirts with becoming about whether or not the crew can find a way to right an injustice with some kind of clever trickery, but it never really commits to that plot and ultimately just spends most of an hour with people complaining about the injustice.

Again, I'm not an expert on classic Who, but if anything like this sort of difference exists between the classic examples of social commentary and something done in the modern era, I can see the objection being valid.

[BBally81]

I'll admit to not being the biggest expert on classic Dr. Who so it's possible that this commentary doesn't apply as well as I expect, but with that caveat I would say that just because Classic Who addressed some real-world issues it doesn't mean that the modern version being overtly "woke" or addressing political issues can't still amount to reduced quality. I think it's all about how exactly it is/was done.

For instance, after having shown my wife all of TOS Star Trek I wanted to show her some of Star Trek Continues, which I've long considered to be so well done in almost every category that it basically is Star Trek - that if not for the different actors, you'd never be able to tell their episodes from the real thing. Watching through some of them again, I felt almost the same way except I noticed this time through that their social commentary gets I think a lot more "heavy handed" than in the classic series, and it's to the project's detriment.

Now classic Star Trek is famous for having addressed social issues and taken on controversial subjects. It absolutely addressed these things. What I noticed, though, in particular with an episode of ST Continues like "Lolani," is that in ST Continues the social commentary can be basically be all there is to an episode whereas with classic Trek the point was always made but the episode could also stand on its own apart from the commentary. For instance, in one of the most overt examples of addressing politics - Let That Be Your Last Battlefield - you wouldn't even know the episode is about racism until at least halfway through. The backbone of the episode is a mystery in the first act or two and a power struggle in the second, a la And the Children Shall Lead or Charlie X or By Any Other Name. The commentary on racism is there and it's very overt and obvious, but even so the episode has so much more to it than that and if you could somehow remove that commentary the episode would still work, at least from a basic plot standpoint.

With, say, Lolani from ST Continues, the entire thing is nothing other than one giant piece of social commentary. The episode doesn't really have anything to it other than the social issue. There's a brief "mystery" at the beginning, but it barely qualifies and is resolved almost immediately. The episode then flirts with becoming about whether or not the crew can find a way to right an injustice with some kind of clever trickery, but it never really commits to that plot and ultimately just spends most of an hour with people complaining about the injustice.

Again, I'm not an expert on classic Who, but if anything like this sort of difference exists between the classic examples of social commentary and something done in the modern era, I can see the objection being valid.

The issue is a lot of these NMD reactionaries are not complaining about the execution, they're complaining about it being there in the first place.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

You know what I'd really like? Companions that aren't from modern earth. That's one thing from the old era I could appreciate. How about a companion who barely survived the bronze age collapse? A Rutan draft-dodger? Somebody from a post-human future? How about a member of one of those dead species that always turn out not to be completely extinct and try to use earth as raw materials to revive their race, snatched from the era before their planet got ruined?

[ProfessorDetective]

You know what I'd really like? Companions that aren't from modern earth. That's one thing from the old era I could appreciate. How about a companion who barely survived the bronze age collapse? A Rutan draft-dodger? Somebody from a post-human future? How about a member of one of those dead species that always turn out not to be completely extinct and try to use earth as raw materials to revive their race, snatched from the era before their planet got ruined?

Wholeheartedly agreed. My idea was a failing archeologist from the end of the Egyptology boom finding the TARDIS in a sealed tomb and taking the opportunity to see his subjects of study first hand.

[sayla0079]

You know what I'd really like? Companions that aren't from modern earth. That's one thing from the old era I could appreciate. How about a companion who barely survived the bronze age collapse? A Rutan draft-dodger? Somebody from a post-human future? How about a member of one of those dead species that always turn out not to be completely extinct and try to use earth as raw materials to revive their race, snatched from the era before their planet got ruined?

Agreed one of my favorite companions Romana was a timelord and another favorite companion of mine Nyssa was from Trakken (and due to actions of the master the last of her people)


youtu.be/sLl-seRlJnQ
youtu.be/LC27g_BsbxA

[clearspira]

People who say ''oh, the show has always been political so your criticisms are invalid'' are missing the point.

There was a balance.

Thirteen has political episode after political episode with nary else in between. In the Classic series you had a political episode, then a fun blowing shit up episode, then a fantasy episode, then a character episode, then a political episode again perhaps.

And even if we want to ignore the Classic series, how many political episodes were there during Nine and Ten's run? Because I have seen them all and I am straining to think of many. There were definitely some that took the piss out of the British Empire and old values such as ''The Idiot's Lantern''. But to say that any of this compares to the infamous Rosa Parks episode is a flat out lie.

You can do politics. But when your show is ONLY politics, and what's more, when your politics is solely left wing, then people are going to turn off.

[Deledrius]

I think Torchwood was a great idea marred by it going the Enterprise and Stargate Universe route of confusing "mature" with "more sex, more swearing, more asshole heroes".

Absolutely, and it was a massive shame because when it got it right, it got it really right.