Season 2 of New Doctor Who kicks off with meat-and-potatoes Russell T Davies storytelling. Were there too many empty carbs, or was that a Chip problem?
An unscripted word of thanks to my friends at Radio Free Skaro.
Q: What do Garfield and the Doctor have in common? A: A possibly contagious sense of superiority.
A ten-minute sequence stops "Joy to the World" cold, yet turns out to be the heart of the 2024 Christmas special.
Is Disney the best global partner for showing Doctor Who outside the UK? My doubts are growing.
"Empire of Death" epitomized RTD's approach to season finales that he deployed to popular (if not always critical) acclaim during his first stint as showrunner. What happened this time?
A check-in after November 5, a promise about Empire of Death, and thoughts about the way forward. Mastodon: thatchipguy@zeppelin.flights Bluesky: ThatChipGuy Threads: William Sudderth Facebook: Two-minute Time Lord
In case you missed me on The Incomparable's Doctor Who Flashcast, here are some last-minute thoughts about TLoRS and where it fell down prior to the season finale.
This is a double edition of 2MTL covering "Dot and Bubble" and "Rogue," two episodes that were absolutely tonally identical and left you feeling exactly the same way after each of them, amirite?
We're catching up on the Discourse about a loved and hated mysterious episode. I'm still on Team Love.
Finally, I catch up on "The Devil's Chord" and hold two opinions at once.
"Pace and energy" and high concepts give way to a man with a foot on a landmine for the duration of the story. Tension-filled bottle episodes are rare for Doctor Who, although there are a lot of parallels between this one and 2009's "Midnight." How does Steven Moffat's return to Doctor Who fit with his showrunner's current experiment?
"Would you like to see the baby?" Your answer probably had a lot to do with how you received "Space Babies," but the first-or-second episode of new Series 1 had a LOT to cram into a too-small container, and that was an issue as well.
The first episodes of Series 1 (not counting the Christmas Special) have finally launched, and there's RTD upon RTD on top of more RTD in "Space Babies" and "The Devil's Chord." We'll look at these episodes individually soon, but going that hard was a gutsy, even necessary choice.
In which your interlocutor admits that he wishes to hear less of a composer he loves. A graphics whiz, Chip was not, when he shared this on social media years ago
After "The Church on Ruby Road," there should be no question that Ncuti Gatwa will master the role of The Doctor. However, we do need to address the fact that this is now a show with goblins and flying wooden ships....
Celebrating a regeneration, a retirement, and a renewal of the whole darn series. On to Christmas!
How do you make a special episode "special" when you only have two actors and a big spaceship? Russell T Davies has a pretty good answer.
Meep? What I wouldn't have given for the Meep to give an order to "reticulate the splines." (Oh, yeah: I loved this one.)
You can't expect David Tennant to not be David Tennant, but I really want the Fourteenth Doctor to be meaningfully different from the Tenth. I have my hopes, but the Fourteenth Doc comic in Doctor Who Magazine and even the Children in Need short didn't offer any clues....