Doctor Who IV - Everything Whovian - Would you like a jelly baby?

[Kirby101]

So 15 minutes in and the Doctor is completely useless. One of the problems I've had with this Doctor. She'll win in the end of course, but she seems less able than the previous Doctors.

[Indian Ink]

Just seen the latest episode. Overall impression is pretty dam good!! It is however only the first of two, and they have to bring it all home. There's a lot of weird stuff going on and there could be a huge pay off grand story wise, but if they fail ....... it's going to stink.

Noticed nitpicks; the drones were silly looking, what was their type of propulsion? Hell forget about type, just give us some sort of flyable appearance. They should have looked to the cybermats.
Blooper with Policeman actor, as he started turning to the cliff before being told to.
They make it sound as though a group of people are the last in existence at one point and then refute it later. Just as well, because the group is way too small to be genetically viable.
Why would the Cybermen want to kill off humanity? They need us to reproduce. It doesn't make sense.

[Indian Ink]

So 15 minutes in and the Doctor is completely useless. One of the problems I've had with this Doctor. She'll win in the end of course, but she seems less able than the previous Doctors.

Agreed. She's less able and loses her cool; which shows a lack of control and power. And some say the show's gotten too PC, but this female Doctor seems the lesser of all the reboot Doctors.

[Kirby101]

Agreed. She's less able and loses her cool; which shows a lack of control and power. And some say the show's gotten too PC, but this female Doctor seems the lesser of all the reboot Doctors.

Yes, the last three Doctors, you had whole races afraid of him. This Doctor seems so much less imposing.

[Deathstroke]

I hate to say this, but I'm kind of bored with the season. Instead of telling good stories, the show seems more interested in "watch how we change what's been history for the show for 50 plus years just so we can be what we think is cool".

[Nate Grey]

I hate to say this, but I'm kind of bored with the season. Instead of telling good stories, the show seems more interested in "watch how we change what's been history for the show for 50 plus years just so we can be what we think is cool".

Sadly I agree. It's also why I'm still behind on every ep post the Ruth Doctor. Ironically that was the first time in a while since the show felt like Doctor Who. Reading everyone's opinions on the eps post Ruth...I'm not in too much of a hurry.

[The Darknight Detective]

Sadly I agree. It's also why I'm still behind on every ep post the Ruth Doctor. Ironically that was the first time in a while since the show felt like Doctor Who. Reading everyone's opinions on the eps post Ruth...I'm not in too much of a hurry.

Yeah, the Ruth episode did indeed feel like a Doctor Who episode to me, too. The others? In varying degrees, not so much. Picking up the tempo would help, IMO.

[Indian Ink]

Ouch!! I was fairly sure the viewers would pick up for the final two episodes, but the UK overnights were the lowest yet of Whittaker's run. Only 3.71 million watched, given the present viewing pattern, Dr Who might have the lowest consolidated Viewers within 7 days since new Who started.

[ChrisIII]

Looks like there's going to be another Doctor/Master physical fight in a barren wasteland going by the previews.

[ChrisIII]

Are those cliffs Brendan falls over the same ones used in Broadchurch? Never saw the show but of course there were many promos during Doctor Who back when it came out.

[the illustrious mr. kenway]

Graham has a meet cute.



As for the rest of the episode i enjoyed it. I'm not a huge Cyberman fan but i thought Ashad was great. I'm curious where the Brendan c-plot is going.

I'm gonna try and catch up on the few episodes i missed before Sunday.

So far series 12 is an improvement over series 11 but not by leaps and bounds.

[ChrisIII]

Brendan theories seem to be mainly that he's a Cyberman, Time Lord or the Doctor


I have a bit of a theory that perhaps the Time Lords used the Chameleon arc on themselves (at least mentally) to cover up their own dark secrets. This could explain in part why the Doctor's memory of the Timeless child is somewhat fragmented-as we saw with Smith, Yana, and Ruth, the camoflague/memory supression isn't 100% perfect. Also it seems that Brendan was hooked up to a Chameleon arch like device to 'forget' something.

[Indian Ink]

Something they're going to have to answer is;

why can Brendon not die,
why does Brendan age, but not his parents.
Explain why, if his parents are some sort of evil agents, they adopt a baby, they themselves find abandoned on a country lane.
Where did this baby Brendon come from in the first place.

Answer all this in a way that is both satisfying and fulfilling to Time Lord mythos, if indeed it does involve time lord history. One hopes that the Time Lord aren't revealed to be irredeemably evil to the core of their origins. I would be a little less than happy if that's the case.

[ChrisIII]

Both adoptive parents and the officer aged up to the point where he fell off the cliff. It's after he's elderly itself that's kind of weird. It's possible that these are duplicates/doubles of some kind. They seemed rather cold too, which the father definitely wasn't in the earlier parts.


As for the Time Lords, there was of course "The dark times" and the fact that Five Doctors implied Rassilon might've been a bad guy, which was pretty much confirmed in End of Time and Hell Bent. Plus there's been a ton of Gallifrey stories involving time lord corruption of some kind.


Kind of curious if the Daleks somehow figure into this too. There was filming of Daleks around October on a bridge, but no sign of them in season 12. Some wonder if it was intended for a holiday special, or some other thing.

[Indian Ink]

As for the Time Lords, there was of course "The dark times" and the fact that Five Doctors implied Rassilon might've been a bad guy, which was pretty much confirmed in End of Time and Hell Bent. Plus there's been a ton of Gallifrey stories involving time lord corruption of some kind.

Certainly the Time Lords have been corrupt, but mostly in an Ancient Rome kind of way. There were some rotten eggs to be sure, but more a stabilizing force for civilizations in those times they did get involved (The Time Lords that is), than a cause for harm. I fear they they may be revealed in such a way that there's no coming back from. A moral black hole horizon event as it were.