I think the key going forward is to make a lower-budget Doctor Who. This doesn’t mean doing what they’ve been doing for the last few years, but with worse effects. Rather, a fundamental shift in how episodes are constructed. We don’t need skies full of spaceships and continuous world-ending stakes; Doctor Who was never about spectacle. Instead, tell smaller stories with scaled-back settings and limited characters. But more importantly, focus on character, atmosphere and tension.
There definitely needs to be a push to add more enemies to the roster. The fact that they brought back the Rani really felt like they were scraping the bottom of the barrel for villains to bring back. But as with all things, there needs to be balance. There’s no harm in bringing back a few old favourites; there is a reason that they resonated in the first place. Just make sure there is a story to tell and remember that even if they’ve appeared before, there will be some in the audience experiencing them for the first time. And your exposition must be better than stopping the plot dead so characters can watch the old episode!
I did laugh at Clive Owen of all people being a tech bilionaire and organising a gathering at a high tech hotel in an inhospitable location. How very Bond villain of him…
Finished the series…there are other Bond similarities - one of which must have been a coincidence as it’s to First Light and both this series and IO couldnt have known they were doing the same thing at the same time.
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the quality of Doctor Who, and whether the producers and writers should be catering to a more diverse audience. The two most recent Doctors were played by a woman and a queer Black man, which led to plenty of sexist, racist, and homophobic criticisms within certain sectors of the fandom. Regardless of whether these factors played any role in the current state of Doctor Who , Chibnall wanted to make it clear that, amid that noise, it is “very easy to miss the point that this is primarily about money .”
Interesting take by Chibnall and he does have a point. Some of the insults thrown at the series have been going on for several seasons already, didn’t stop BBC from marching on regardless what the tinier-minded critics slung at it. Then again, it’s possible that background noise didn’t agree with Disney in the long run. In Burbank they probably didn’t expect to buy into a series at the tip of the culture wars when they signed up with Who.
That said, Chibnall is absolutely right that it’s increasingly difficult for public broadcasters to produce fiction in a market that is now cornered. The strain on finances and production budgets makes shows like Doctor Who a luxury not just for the BBC but across the public broadcast sector.
This. James Bond is a successful enterprise both on film and in novels because of who he is as a character and what he stands for. Change him and you might as well rename the story’s hero something else. Bond is iconic for a reason–both for his strengths and his weaknesses. If you’re working on a Bond film (or novel) and are embarrassed by any of that and would prefer to fundamentally change any of his characteristics, then you should step away from the project and go and work on another film (or novel) where you can do the type of story you want. But leave Bond alone. He is great as he is.
Liking it too. I was unsure about the grounded tone but getting to know the characters first and easing the audience into the mythology is a good idea. Green Lantern can be a complicated universe for people to get their head around. This should be a bigger property for DC than it is. Hopefully it’s the launchpad for something bigger, even if just another season.
…this series gets cancelled.
