One thing with some modern sci-fi shows is that it's more of a message with a disguise of a story rather than a story with a disguised message.
The writers justify the change by saying (correctly) that the message is important and that right now is the most important time to say the message. The message became more important than the vehicle that it travelled in so poor story writing is acceptable.
It's like Christian rock music, it's okay and if you are Christian you might enjoy it both for the message and the music but if you just want good music you are likely not going to enjoy it as much as regular "secular" rock.
But there's also rock music that everyone can enjoys which contains (not sure the word to describe it) non obvious but religious-adjacent themes.
Nah, politics in shows is great. It's like CGI. It can really make a show pop if it's well thought out, subtle, and feels realistic.
People complain about it when it seems to be used as an excuse for a lack other aspects of the show, or it makes everything seem unrealistic because they were more keen on putting it in than actually caring about whether it was realistic or at least made things feel realistic to the viewer.
The OG Jurassic Park had lots of politics and lots of CGI. No-one complained about it, because it was well done. If they had a jerkily animated raptor judo flipping a t-rex for no other reason than the director thought it would be cool to include then people would be saying the CGI was awful.
Everything is political. If you think it's not, you're just benefiting from the status quo and blind to it.
Even ignoring that history loves to repeat itself, plenty of politics in all forms of media has aged excellently, and plenty of politics that haven't aged well are still insightful into the period of the piece.
There's a striking difference between telling and tone deaf preaching and when people complain about politics they always, without fail, mean the latter.
The stance of "everything is political" itself is extremely tone deaf.
its usually not good though. If it was good they would not market it as Christian. Lots of bands have Christian lyrics without Christian marketing - U2 for example. I suppose that is the equivalent of the SF story with the disguised message.
Please go back and re-read some pulp scifi from, say, 70 years back and then spend some time scrolling through microfilm copies of newspapers from the same era.
You will find that SciFi has been mostly social commentary for quite a long time; what tends to throw us is familiarity!
Having read a ton of sci-fi from that era, they were entertaining even if one overlooked the social commentary. Young me did not give a hoot that Star Trek's "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was supposed to be social commentary but I can still recite the USS Enterprise's destruct sequence from memory because of the tension the cast and director put into that scene.
Being entertaining comes before social commentary, period. Modern entertainment is scorned by the public precisely because they do the opposite.
On Star Trek, Nichols was one of the first Black women featured in a major television series. Her prominent supporting role as a bridge officer was unprecedented.
She was once tempted to leave the series; however, a conversation with Martin Luther King Jr. changed her mind.
No, there's a massive difference. Taking Star Trek as an example: most of the time (not all the time, I am well aware), old Trek series were careful to present social commentary in a way that trusted the viewer to draw his own conclusions. The writers may have had an opinion, but they avoided obviously taking a side and tried to present reasonable points of view all around even if they did gently nudge things to make one side seem better. By letting the viewer come to a conclusion naturally, they actually had persuasive power because they didn't antagonize the audience. New Star Trek, on the other hand, has the writers openly preaching to you. They have one side of an issue represented by paragons of virtue, the other side represented by the scum of the earth, and have characters say what a bad person one must be if they come down on the wrong side of this. There is no subtlety whatsoever, and it has no persuasive power because the writers are more interested in flipping the bird to those whom they consider evil than actually trying to educate or persuade the audience.
And while I'm speaking specifically of Trek, this happens a lot with modern sci-fi. There is so much bad, preachy writing out there. And while that may have always existed to some extent, it wasn't the norm. Now it is the norm and it sucks.
Which Star Trek was "trusting the viewer to draw their own conclusions"?
Was it the one where Kirk used "half-breed" as an insult so horrible and hurtful that it would reveal an android as an imposter (in a period where segregation was still legal in the US)?
Was it the one about a long-standing war between two peoples based entirely on the color of their skin?
How about the one with the Nazi planet?
Surely you're not referring to the one with the first interracial kiss - something so political that the network debated censoring it and caused Shatner to intentionally ruin takes of an alternative version?
Are you talking about the one which involved Kirk explicitly promoting contraception and calls out the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed "pro-life" alien race?
No, perhaps you're thinking of the one involving the torture of the leader of a revolutionary group.
"Patterns of Force" was broadcast within living memory of WW2; that the Ekosians were villains was as uncontroversial as water being wet. I always suspected they went with the WW2 German uniforms for the bad guys for that episode because they could rent them cheap (there were plenty of WW2 movies filmed in that era) to save on budget.
And the crew kissed aliens aplenty; an interspecies kiss was surely much worse than an interracial kiss to those who were uptight about such things.
It was probably the one where Picard refused to play god for an alien race because religion was a primitive superstition.
Or the one where they recover cryogenically frozen people from the 20th century and Picard shits on a venture capitalist.
Or the one where an alien race is outcast because they don't conform to gender norms and this is a bad thing.
Or the one where an admiral starts a witch-hunt on board the Enterprise trying to weed out a conspiracy and Picard goes into an anti-fascist rant.
Or the episode of DS9 that takes place during the 1950s where Sisko experiences racial segregation, and Star Trek is a sci-fi story he can't sell about a future he wants to live in.
Or the one that establishes the Bell Riots, a widespread anti-capitalist revolt that takes place among the homeless and immigrant populations.
Star Trek exists because Gene Roddenberry's military drama was cut for making political statements[0], so he moved the political statements to be in space in the future.
As someone with "Don't Panic" tattoo'd on my left forearm, and as I pointed out in another comment: Adams' Magnum Opus is in no avoiding its messaging, the politics/author's opinion is extremely clear.
Can you give an example of the old, subtle (that's the word you were looking for, it's a subtle reference/theme) sci-fi show that was a "story with a disguised message" instead of the current "message with a disguised story"? I'm just trying to level set here.
Can someone give me examples of beloved, well written and respected sci-fi that was not overt political/social commentary to go along with all the discoloration of the above comment or is this just the standard "I like Rage Against the Machine because they're angry, but hate that they get political" nonsense?
Frankenstein: Political AF.
Asimov: So fucking political.
Dick: It's nothing BUT politics.
Anything in the cyberpunk genre: Why do you still need me to spell this out?
Asimov had plenty of stories with little to no politics, did you just read Foundation and skip his other works? Some of them are basically logic puzzles. Sure, Frankenstein has social and political commentary, but that's not what people remember it for (to me it's more philosophy than social commentary, but YMMV). Dick is more famous for being weird than being political, but that's just my own experience and how I was introduced to him, so again, YMMV. I’d say cyberpunk is in a similar position. Sure, it’s political, but you can enjoy the story without really engaging with the politics, and tbh, something like Snow Crash is so aggressively satirical and over-the-top that calling it a straightforward political statement feels like missing half the joke.
As for current stuff? The Martian has some politics w/ NASA and the cooperation with China, but it's certainly not what the book is about.
And I think you're not engaging with the actual complaint: poor, overly preachy writing is a terrible way to communicate a political point, much less persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
I should very much like to watch the Tom Baker seasons again, Sadly, I can see only the 1965 season 3 videos on the channel. The Shada link (and presumably all the rest of it) are "The uploader has not made this video available in your country" :-(
For me, I see things like https://imgur.com/a/ekehKDx on the page. If I didn't have access to it, I'd be tempted to hunt down a VPN that would allow me to watch it.
I'll be honest, I think Dr Who is due for a 1989-style shelving for a while. I've loved watching the show since I was young, but I think the quality has fallen off significantly recently. Capaldi was the last "great doctor" in my opinion. Whittaker is a good actress, I thought she performed well in Broadchurch (ironically also written by Chibnall), but her writing was just awful, and it feels like they've just spent the last couple of seasons nostalgia-baiting the fans, like with the Midnight episode
Much like the show in the latter years of its first run it collapsed under the weight of its own canon, and writers/showrunners that enthusiastically embraced that canon and alienated the casual audience.
IMO they should never have brought back the Time Lords. That was the genius stroke of the 2005 reboot. Just make the Doctor an intergalactic oddball, let the adventures run from there. What's weird is that Russell Davies was the one who understood this... then when he came back to the show he shoveled nostalgia on top of nostalgia and sank the thing.
I never even watched the Chibnall era so I'm not fully informed but from reading about the Timeless Child arc it just sounds like a show disappearing up its own arse. It's supposed to be a family show, younger kids don't care about that kind of stuff. Just make it fun.
The Chibnall episodes sucked, but then Russell T. Davies came back as showrunner. If you haven't seen the first three episodes he did, with David Tennant returning as the Doctor, you're missing out!
I liked the regular season that followed too. It had good and bad episodes, just like the last time RTD was showrunner, but the good ones were very good.
(I haven't watched the most recent season yet, but that's less because I'm unexcited and more because I want to save it.)
Capaldi had strong episodes throughout his run, but yes, I personally did dislike some of the storylines. The Zygon stuff felt very weak to me, and I never understood the "The Hybrid" storyline. But heaven sent/hell bent were bangers, and I definitely enjoyed his finale Cybermen episodes.
But yes, the moon suddenly reappearing in between shots, perfectly fine and identical to before, was very silly
Maybe Capaldi ended on a high note. I was done with the show after the moon episode and quit watching. I couldn't keep suspending disbelief after that. It wasn't just one bad episode the whole thing felt tired.
Capaldi was a great actor and it was nice that he got some good scripts (I really liked the one where he was in Doctor Prison, great concept), but his run felt to me like a show running out of ideas.
I didn't watch the Whittaker doctor. Heard it was awful and wasn't surprised. I eventually saw the pilot and it was indeed, awful.
Back when it was airing, I sort of lost interest around Capaldi. I think his episodes were a bit too "mature" for me, when I preferred funny scifi show. But I've come to appreciate a lot of his episodes more. But he did have some really dogshit ones, like the moon episode, The Caretaker (Where a school gets attacked by a dalek knockoff), and Sleep No More, which was so bad that me and my girlfriend spent the whole episode talking about other stuff when having a marathon rewatch. Both of us are big fans of doctor who in general
Implying it hadn't already fell apart in the Matt Smith era, where there was a season finale that made less sense than the end of Neo Genesis Evangelion (I think I'm talking about The Pandorica Opens, but it's honestly all a blur, and was at the time I watched it too). Moffat hyped up future episodes but could rarely deliver, RTD just hit you with a massive sucker punch on the 2nd or 3rd last episode and WOW.
Also implying that the wheels weren't kinda getting loose when 10ant said his final farewell at that (otherwise fairly underrated IMO) episode where the Master was hungry.
All of the big franchises are collapsing under the weight of nostalgia and self-reference. Reboots like Picard are shockingly, almost insensitively, retrospective.
It deserves a "1989-style shelving" much more than it did in 1989 itself. The viewing figures are tumbling off a cliff at a time when the BBC in general needs them more than ever.
Thanks for posting that. Good to know the BBC is moving on from Davies, and investing in a full season with a new production company.
Star Trek is in far worse shape these days. According to Riker, this is the first time in decades where there is no TV or movie even in the planning phase.
Yes, I agree on Andor. But that was a quiet side-project done by good people, and not the main focus of Kathleen Kennedy and her recruits. Both it and Rogue One were made by Tony Gilroy.
Main line Star Wars is a train wreck, unfortunately. I was one of the apparently few people who was looking forward to something new, even deconstructive, in the sequel trilogy. I'm so sick of Palpatine vs. Skywalker chosen bloodline nonsense you can't even imagine, and the last thing I want is to have my nostalgia pandered to.
The ancillary stuff is a lot better however. I hear good things about Star Wars Visions but I haven't seen it.
There is a new movie in the early stages of development. Some news was teased at Comic-Con in July and the directors spoke about it a few weeks ago.
"After years of an unclear future, it seemed as though “Star Trek” finally found a path back to the big screen as “Spider-Man: Homecoming” writers and “Game Night” and “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” filmmakers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley boarded the film."
Development on ‘09 started after production wrapped on enterprise in March 2005, although there wasn’t a lot in it. Production in earnest was certainly underway 18 months after.
I love Star Trek, I love Star Wars, and I love Doctor Who. I have very fond memories of watching Tom Baker's episodes on PBS back in the day.
But once you have nothing to draw on but nostalgia I think it's time to move on. I liked the Doctor better when they were just an outlaw Time Lord in a stolen car doing good and getting into adventures, and not the eldritch abomination they've become, whose mere name causes the galaxy to shiver in terror. I liked Star Trek better when the humans weren't the most powerful force in the galaxy, one-shotting Borg cubes, but they were an upstart species getting a foothold in a universe bigger, stranger and far more dangerous than they imagine. In both cases, nostalgia leads to a sort of narrative power creep.
Star Wars has the same problem. Everything has to be about the Palpatines versus the Skywalkers. It would have been such a better story if it turned out Rey really was a nobody, if the entire plot had the courage to examine its own mythology from the outside and establish that the universe really is bigger than these two players, but we don't dare subvert tropes when the viewer has the media literacy of a mollusk and can't accept a protagonist who isn't Space Goku.
There's no wonder left to any of it. No mystery, no awe. No sense that the universe is bigger than you can imagine. God forbid something take a risk with the fucking franchise. Maybe we should just let it all die.
> Everything has to be about the Palpatines versus the Skywalkers. It would have been such a better story if it turned out Rey really was a nobody, if the entire plot had the courage to examine its own mythology from the outside and establish that the universe really is bigger than these two players, but we don't dare subvert tropes when the viewer has the media literacy of a mollusk and can't accept a protagonist who isn't Space Goku.
This isn't anything to do with "media literacy" - that as a criticism is quite vague, I think. The actual reason is because the two directors were fighting to undo each others' work, and spend hundreds of millions to do so.
I just recently read the novelisation of "shada"[0]. it was altogether delightful, and reminded me of the time in college when I was a huge fan of dr who novels despite never really getting into the TV show.
The part that they generally leave out is that Shada is mostly terrible (although Christopher Neame's delivery as Skagra is very funny and over the top), and Douglas Adams's run on Who was mostly terrible. Adams himself was embarrassed by it, and a remember reading a quote somewhere with him saying that he dodged a bullet by Shada never getting out there.
The fan-animated remake is better than the commercially released animated remake, and the guy who did it also redid part of it with early gen AI and that's pretty great, too.
The best part of Shada is how awesome Victoria Burgoyne looked in it. Her career went nowhere, but at least she's here.
I recoverd a 3/4” studio broadcast VCR/P that when checked, contains a tape that says Doctor Who.
I also at once recovered a wire recorder, with a wire spool inside, and another time wax cylinder recorder, with cylinders.
All sitting there as minor mysteries.
;)
One thing with some modern sci-fi shows is that it's more of a message with a disguise of a story rather than a story with a disguised message.
The writers justify the change by saying (correctly) that the message is important and that right now is the most important time to say the message. The message became more important than the vehicle that it travelled in so poor story writing is acceptable.
It's like Christian rock music, it's okay and if you are Christian you might enjoy it both for the message and the music but if you just want good music you are likely not going to enjoy it as much as regular "secular" rock.
But there's also rock music that everyone can enjoys which contains (not sure the word to describe it) non obvious but religious-adjacent themes.
Nah, politics in shows is great. It's like CGI. It can really make a show pop if it's well thought out, subtle, and feels realistic.
People complain about it when it seems to be used as an excuse for a lack other aspects of the show, or it makes everything seem unrealistic because they were more keen on putting it in than actually caring about whether it was realistic or at least made things feel realistic to the viewer.
The OG Jurassic Park had lots of politics and lots of CGI. No-one complained about it, because it was well done. If they had a jerkily animated raptor judo flipping a t-rex for no other reason than the director thought it would be cool to include then people would be saying the CGI was awful.
> Nah, politics in shows is great. It's like CGI. It can really make a show pop if it's well thought out, subtle, and feels realistic.
Is this a joke?
To me both CGI and politics have the same issue which is aging poorly. Nobody thinks The Phantom Menace looks better than A New Hope.
Everything is political. If you think it's not, you're just benefiting from the status quo and blind to it.
Even ignoring that history loves to repeat itself, plenty of politics in all forms of media has aged excellently, and plenty of politics that haven't aged well are still insightful into the period of the piece.
everything may have a relevance to politics, but there is a line between art and propaganda.
There's a striking difference between telling and tone deaf preaching and when people complain about politics they always, without fail, mean the latter.
The stance of "everything is political" itself is extremely tone deaf.
It reads like you are using tone deaf as a substitute for 'somethign I dont like'
Surely you can see that one follows the other.
Dick aged well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F5bMFSYPvE
> It's like Christian rock music
its usually not good though. If it was good they would not market it as Christian. Lots of bands have Christian lyrics without Christian marketing - U2 for example. I suppose that is the equivalent of the SF story with the disguised message.
Please go back and re-read some pulp scifi from, say, 70 years back and then spend some time scrolling through microfilm copies of newspapers from the same era.
You will find that SciFi has been mostly social commentary for quite a long time; what tends to throw us is familiarity!
Having read a ton of sci-fi from that era, they were entertaining even if one overlooked the social commentary. Young me did not give a hoot that Star Trek's "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was supposed to be social commentary but I can still recite the USS Enterprise's destruct sequence from memory because of the tension the cast and director put into that scene.
Being entertaining comes before social commentary, period. Modern entertainment is scorned by the public precisely because they do the opposite.
I remember reading about star trek, and in particular uhura.
"Uhura" comes from the Swahili word uhuru, meaning "freedom"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyota_Uhura
On Star Trek, Nichols was one of the first Black women featured in a major television series. Her prominent supporting role as a bridge officer was unprecedented.
She was once tempted to leave the series; however, a conversation with Martin Luther King Jr. changed her mind.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichelle_Nichols
No, there's a massive difference. Taking Star Trek as an example: most of the time (not all the time, I am well aware), old Trek series were careful to present social commentary in a way that trusted the viewer to draw his own conclusions. The writers may have had an opinion, but they avoided obviously taking a side and tried to present reasonable points of view all around even if they did gently nudge things to make one side seem better. By letting the viewer come to a conclusion naturally, they actually had persuasive power because they didn't antagonize the audience. New Star Trek, on the other hand, has the writers openly preaching to you. They have one side of an issue represented by paragons of virtue, the other side represented by the scum of the earth, and have characters say what a bad person one must be if they come down on the wrong side of this. There is no subtlety whatsoever, and it has no persuasive power because the writers are more interested in flipping the bird to those whom they consider evil than actually trying to educate or persuade the audience.
And while I'm speaking specifically of Trek, this happens a lot with modern sci-fi. There is so much bad, preachy writing out there. And while that may have always existed to some extent, it wasn't the norm. Now it is the norm and it sucks.
Which Star Trek was "trusting the viewer to draw their own conclusions"?
Was it the one where Kirk used "half-breed" as an insult so horrible and hurtful that it would reveal an android as an imposter (in a period where segregation was still legal in the US)?
Was it the one about a long-standing war between two peoples based entirely on the color of their skin?
How about the one with the Nazi planet?
Surely you're not referring to the one with the first interracial kiss - something so political that the network debated censoring it and caused Shatner to intentionally ruin takes of an alternative version?
Are you talking about the one which involved Kirk explicitly promoting contraception and calls out the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed "pro-life" alien race?
No, perhaps you're thinking of the one involving the torture of the leader of a revolutionary group.
"Patterns of Force" was broadcast within living memory of WW2; that the Ekosians were villains was as uncontroversial as water being wet. I always suspected they went with the WW2 German uniforms for the bad guys for that episode because they could rent them cheap (there were plenty of WW2 movies filmed in that era) to save on budget.
And the crew kissed aliens aplenty; an interspecies kiss was surely much worse than an interracial kiss to those who were uptight about such things.
> an interspecies kiss was surely much worse than an interracial kiss to those who were uptight about such things.
It wasn't. Neither NBC nor the producers expressed any concerns over interspecies kisses.
It was probably the one where Picard refused to play god for an alien race because religion was a primitive superstition.
Or the one where they recover cryogenically frozen people from the 20th century and Picard shits on a venture capitalist.
Or the one where an alien race is outcast because they don't conform to gender norms and this is a bad thing.
Or the one where an admiral starts a witch-hunt on board the Enterprise trying to weed out a conspiracy and Picard goes into an anti-fascist rant.
Or the episode of DS9 that takes place during the 1950s where Sisko experiences racial segregation, and Star Trek is a sci-fi story he can't sell about a future he wants to live in.
Or the one that establishes the Bell Riots, a widespread anti-capitalist revolt that takes place among the homeless and immigrant populations.
Sci-fi has always been political.
Star Trek exists because Gene Roddenberry's military drama was cut for making political statements[0], so he moved the political statements to be in space in the future.
[0] https://collider.com/gene-roddenberry-the-lieutenant-series/
As someone with "Don't Panic" tattoo'd on my left forearm, and as I pointed out in another comment: Adams' Magnum Opus is in no avoiding its messaging, the politics/author's opinion is extremely clear.
Can you give an example of the old, subtle (that's the word you were looking for, it's a subtle reference/theme) sci-fi show that was a "story with a disguised message" instead of the current "message with a disguised story"? I'm just trying to level set here.
Adams is a good example of a story with a message. A message with a story is more like today's TV sci-fi.
The way the message is being told has changed because the message is incredibly important.
Have you ever watched Star Trek? Either the Original Series or The Next Generation?
Because apolitical they were not. Like, emphatically. Sometimes they were subtle, other times they were pretty heavy-handed.
Sci-fi has never, ever, been apolitical.
Can someone give me examples of beloved, well written and respected sci-fi that was not overt political/social commentary to go along with all the discoloration of the above comment or is this just the standard "I like Rage Against the Machine because they're angry, but hate that they get political" nonsense?
Frankenstein: Political AF. Asimov: So fucking political. Dick: It's nothing BUT politics. Anything in the cyberpunk genre: Why do you still need me to spell this out?
Asimov had plenty of stories with little to no politics, did you just read Foundation and skip his other works? Some of them are basically logic puzzles. Sure, Frankenstein has social and political commentary, but that's not what people remember it for (to me it's more philosophy than social commentary, but YMMV). Dick is more famous for being weird than being political, but that's just my own experience and how I was introduced to him, so again, YMMV. I’d say cyberpunk is in a similar position. Sure, it’s political, but you can enjoy the story without really engaging with the politics, and tbh, something like Snow Crash is so aggressively satirical and over-the-top that calling it a straightforward political statement feels like missing half the joke.
As for current stuff? The Martian has some politics w/ NASA and the cooperation with China, but it's certainly not what the book is about.
And I think you're not engaging with the actual complaint: poor, overly preachy writing is a terrible way to communicate a political point, much less persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
And the response to that complaint is:
So you're not actually complaining about politics in sci-fi. You're complaining about bad writing in sci-fi.
nobody ever got hurt listening to mewithoutyou
speak for yourself, I have def been bopping along to The King Beetle and tripped over something at some point :D
The wikipedia entry is well worth a read for anyone interested in this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shada_(Doctor_Who)
The tie in between Shada and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective agency is worth noting.
The unfinished original is one of my favorites, and the 2017 animated version is also wonderful.
I feel like the animated version filled in gaps I hadn't even realized were there in the old one that just had the voice overs.
If you like classic who, Adams, or both, and haven't seen it buy the blu-ray!
What are they called?
Btw, Dr. Who has full episodes on YouTube.
Shada | FULL EPISODE with BONUS Animation | Doctor Who: Classic - https://youtu.be/Qt7JdpWXmtE
The channel is https://www.youtube.com/@ClassicDoctorWho
I've been enjoying going through the Tom Baker series... you never forget your first Doctor.
I should very much like to watch the Tom Baker seasons again, Sadly, I can see only the 1965 season 3 videos on the channel. The Shada link (and presumably all the rest of it) are "The uploader has not made this video available in your country" :-(
Seems to be only available in certain countries.
For me, I see things like https://imgur.com/a/ekehKDx on the page. If I didn't have access to it, I'd be tempted to hunt down a VPN that would allow me to watch it.
Likely the 2017 Doctor Who Shada release:
https://whospecialfeatures.fandom.com/wiki/Shada_(2017_Anima...
Exactly so. I just found that it's on prime video (for a few bucks) as well if you don't want the blu-ray features.
If you've seen the old VHS version of Shada where Tom Baker narrates the missing pieces, you'll probably enjoy the animated version replacements more.
https://www.primevideo.com/region/na/detail/0RNSB5JYFHDMUJ0U...
Who exterminated the 2026 Christmas special[0]?
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c621ln7vx7qo
I'll be honest, I think Dr Who is due for a 1989-style shelving for a while. I've loved watching the show since I was young, but I think the quality has fallen off significantly recently. Capaldi was the last "great doctor" in my opinion. Whittaker is a good actress, I thought she performed well in Broadchurch (ironically also written by Chibnall), but her writing was just awful, and it feels like they've just spent the last couple of seasons nostalgia-baiting the fans, like with the Midnight episode
I think it just needs fresh blood.
Much like the show in the latter years of its first run it collapsed under the weight of its own canon, and writers/showrunners that enthusiastically embraced that canon and alienated the casual audience.
IMO they should never have brought back the Time Lords. That was the genius stroke of the 2005 reboot. Just make the Doctor an intergalactic oddball, let the adventures run from there. What's weird is that Russell Davies was the one who understood this... then when he came back to the show he shoveled nostalgia on top of nostalgia and sank the thing.
I never even watched the Chibnall era so I'm not fully informed but from reading about the Timeless Child arc it just sounds like a show disappearing up its own arse. It's supposed to be a family show, younger kids don't care about that kind of stuff. Just make it fun.
The Chibnall episodes sucked, but then Russell T. Davies came back as showrunner. If you haven't seen the first three episodes he did, with David Tennant returning as the Doctor, you're missing out!
I liked the regular season that followed too. It had good and bad episodes, just like the last time RTD was showrunner, but the good ones were very good.
(I haven't watched the most recent season yet, but that's less because I'm unexcited and more because I want to save it.)
It fell apart in the Capaldi era. The "kill the moon" was the "jump the shark" of neu-Who
Capaldi had strong episodes throughout his run, but yes, I personally did dislike some of the storylines. The Zygon stuff felt very weak to me, and I never understood the "The Hybrid" storyline. But heaven sent/hell bent were bangers, and I definitely enjoyed his finale Cybermen episodes.
But yes, the moon suddenly reappearing in between shots, perfectly fine and identical to before, was very silly
Maybe Capaldi ended on a high note. I was done with the show after the moon episode and quit watching. I couldn't keep suspending disbelief after that. It wasn't just one bad episode the whole thing felt tired.
Capaldi was a great actor and it was nice that he got some good scripts (I really liked the one where he was in Doctor Prison, great concept), but his run felt to me like a show running out of ideas.
I didn't watch the Whittaker doctor. Heard it was awful and wasn't surprised. I eventually saw the pilot and it was indeed, awful.
Back when it was airing, I sort of lost interest around Capaldi. I think his episodes were a bit too "mature" for me, when I preferred funny scifi show. But I've come to appreciate a lot of his episodes more. But he did have some really dogshit ones, like the moon episode, The Caretaker (Where a school gets attacked by a dalek knockoff), and Sleep No More, which was so bad that me and my girlfriend spent the whole episode talking about other stuff when having a marathon rewatch. Both of us are big fans of doctor who in general
Implying it hadn't already fell apart in the Matt Smith era, where there was a season finale that made less sense than the end of Neo Genesis Evangelion (I think I'm talking about The Pandorica Opens, but it's honestly all a blur, and was at the time I watched it too). Moffat hyped up future episodes but could rarely deliver, RTD just hit you with a massive sucker punch on the 2nd or 3rd last episode and WOW.
Also implying that the wheels weren't kinda getting loose when 10ant said his final farewell at that (otherwise fairly underrated IMO) episode where the Master was hungry.
All of the big franchises are collapsing under the weight of nostalgia and self-reference. Reboots like Picard are shockingly, almost insensitively, retrospective.
It deserves a "1989-style shelving" much more than it did in 1989 itself. The viewing figures are tumbling off a cliff at a time when the BBC in general needs them more than ever.
Thanks for posting that. Good to know the BBC is moving on from Davies, and investing in a full season with a new production company.
Star Trek is in far worse shape these days. According to Riker, this is the first time in decades where there is no TV or movie even in the planning phase.
And Star Wars. Complete train wreck. Disney just has so much money to burn from live action remakes they can limp along.
Andor was really good and only finished in 2025.
Star Wars Jedi Survivor was also highly enjoyable.
The big films have been sad except for Rogue One.
But there is some Star Wars stuff that is out there and is really good.
Yes, I agree on Andor. But that was a quiet side-project done by good people, and not the main focus of Kathleen Kennedy and her recruits. Both it and Rogue One were made by Tony Gilroy.
Main line Star Wars is a train wreck, unfortunately. I was one of the apparently few people who was looking forward to something new, even deconstructive, in the sequel trilogy. I'm so sick of Palpatine vs. Skywalker chosen bloodline nonsense you can't even imagine, and the last thing I want is to have my nostalgia pandered to.
The ancillary stuff is a lot better however. I hear good things about Star Wars Visions but I haven't seen it.
There is a new movie in the early stages of development. Some news was teased at Comic-Con in July and the directors spoke about it a few weeks ago.
"After years of an unclear future, it seemed as though “Star Trek” finally found a path back to the big screen as “Spider-Man: Homecoming” writers and “Game Night” and “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” filmmakers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley boarded the film."
https://www.darkhorizons.com/next-star-trek-film-tackles-cor...
Development on ‘09 started after production wrapped on enterprise in March 2005, although there wasn’t a lot in it. Production in earnest was certainly underway 18 months after.
I love Star Trek, I love Star Wars, and I love Doctor Who. I have very fond memories of watching Tom Baker's episodes on PBS back in the day.
But once you have nothing to draw on but nostalgia I think it's time to move on. I liked the Doctor better when they were just an outlaw Time Lord in a stolen car doing good and getting into adventures, and not the eldritch abomination they've become, whose mere name causes the galaxy to shiver in terror. I liked Star Trek better when the humans weren't the most powerful force in the galaxy, one-shotting Borg cubes, but they were an upstart species getting a foothold in a universe bigger, stranger and far more dangerous than they imagine. In both cases, nostalgia leads to a sort of narrative power creep.
Star Wars has the same problem. Everything has to be about the Palpatines versus the Skywalkers. It would have been such a better story if it turned out Rey really was a nobody, if the entire plot had the courage to examine its own mythology from the outside and establish that the universe really is bigger than these two players, but we don't dare subvert tropes when the viewer has the media literacy of a mollusk and can't accept a protagonist who isn't Space Goku.
There's no wonder left to any of it. No mystery, no awe. No sense that the universe is bigger than you can imagine. God forbid something take a risk with the fucking franchise. Maybe we should just let it all die.
> Everything has to be about the Palpatines versus the Skywalkers. It would have been such a better story if it turned out Rey really was a nobody, if the entire plot had the courage to examine its own mythology from the outside and establish that the universe really is bigger than these two players, but we don't dare subvert tropes when the viewer has the media literacy of a mollusk and can't accept a protagonist who isn't Space Goku.
This isn't anything to do with "media literacy" - that as a criticism is quite vague, I think. The actual reason is because the two directors were fighting to undo each others' work, and spend hundreds of millions to do so.
There have also been a couple of audio versions over the years (one with Paul McGann).
There was also a partial BBC attempt in late 80s/90s that was released on VHS with Tom Baker narrating the missing scenes.
I just recently read the novelisation of "shada"[0]. it was altogether delightful, and reminded me of the time in college when I was a huge fan of dr who novels despite never really getting into the TV show.
[0] https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Shada_(novelisation)
I recently discovered his text adventure bureaucracy.
The part that they generally leave out is that Shada is mostly terrible (although Christopher Neame's delivery as Skagra is very funny and over the top), and Douglas Adams's run on Who was mostly terrible. Adams himself was embarrassed by it, and a remember reading a quote somewhere with him saying that he dodged a bullet by Shada never getting out there.
The fan-animated remake is better than the commercially released animated remake, and the guy who did it also redid part of it with early gen AI and that's pretty great, too.
The best part of Shada is how awesome Victoria Burgoyne looked in it. Her career went nowhere, but at least she's here.
The book is good, at least...
I recoverd a 3/4” studio broadcast VCR/P that when checked, contains a tape that says Doctor Who. I also at once recovered a wire recorder, with a wire spool inside, and another time wax cylinder recorder, with cylinders. All sitting there as minor mysteries. ;)