Is Doctor Who Stuck With The Anoraks? (MrTARDIS Stream Highlights)

A lo-fi and lo-res chat about the power balance we might be expecting to see from the next era of Doctor Who. An excerpt from MrTARDIS' weekly streams. Subscribe here: / @mrtardis
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[@DantheManIamIam]

It just doesn’t help that “the era you loved is back” is so much less exciting a prospect than it used to be. Like every franchise has brought the old guard back, almost never for the better. Even when it’s done well it’s blatantly at the cost of potentially telling a new story and producing new voices.

[@group2gaming]

I like to compare it to crawling back into bed in the morning. There's nothing to be gained from it and you risk staying asleep for too long.

[@joniejoon2]

Just look at the Big Finish Short Trips range. So many people are capable of writing strong and creative Doctor Who stories. Yet on TV, it's always the same few people. The talent is already there, but they just don't get a platform. They're not in the clique, so they're treated as second rate. That's incredibly disappointing.

[@kingemerald4622]

Cry more the fact that you support a guy that doesn't want to associate with queer people is hilarious the show is in good hands and has a guy that actually cares about said property unlike tardis who is clearly doing this for money he doesn't care about the franchise all he wants is to make a quick buck I care about this franchise unlike this prick I think we should wake up and realise what this tardis guy is doing to us and put a stop to it once and for all because he doesn't care about us nor the fan's he just wants money he's a wiry twat

[@MoonLitChild]

I also think that it's just, culturally harder to trust older-middle aged white men these days. No matter the situation there's some sort of kneejerk reaction and somewhere down the line, that kneejerk gets justified somehow. And Davies has already past that point with a loooot of people, in Dr. Who, and outside of it in his broader writing career. The call for new voices isn't just to break the old guard and actually let the younger generation speak, it's because we just don't trust who people like Davies are as a whole. He's the UK's answer to Joss Whedon-- he has all these fans who praise him to the entertainment gods for pushing for diverse stories, and for younger, non-white writers, but he's still show runner, and as Davis brought up that's the case with Chibnall too. I think if we're looking at how the behind-the -scenes creative process is done, the question we need to ask instead is, should there be just *one* show runner? Should script writers be allowed to duck in as show-runners to see their stories brought to screen as they imagined them? Logistically that's a hard question to answer but then I remember the episodes of Blake 7 that were actually *written* by Paul Darrow and how, even if they were super wacky, they did something different at a time the show was being drug along by the same formula week after week. It's *gotta* be worth trying, hasn't it?

[@TyrannoNoddy]

Honestly hearing your discussion here helped me understand your perspective better, I did think for a while maybe you were too harsh or blowing things out of proportion, but it's wild how much of a difference seeing someone actually speak in real time VS making tweets will do. I'm interested to see what the new era is gonna be like and I do like to be optimistic, but I do still often feel like it would be good if we had more new voices. I did hear a rumour about a potential new writer for S14, but also sandwiched between more veterans, so eh. Honestly, as much of a shill as I can be for my fave franchises, I do often bemoan the fact that things are being forced to go on and on and nothing new is really encouraged. Obviously original and new stuff IS out there, but we're naturally more drawn to what is familiar (insert Fry's quote about TV from Futurama here lol). It's fun to play in these big sandboxes sure, but adding something new would add to it and help it stay more relevant. Let's just hope that S15, the spin-offs, etc end up bringing in more new talent.

[@scifislack]

Honestly, if RTD is saying this it feels unfaithful to precisely what his first run was. When it comes to doing diversity right I still point to him, characters that feel real and human. I think bringing him back on is the right idea, in general bringing his team back has already reinvigorated fans back into the show without it even being back yet. But I think what they really need to do is get writers in, writers that could potentially showrun the next regeneration of Dr Who after RTD leaves. They also need to make sure to get interesting talent in the show again like Neil Gaiman, like Douglas Adams, like Maxine Alderton, like Paul Cornell. There are so many talented and creative people that constantly want to work on Dr Who but aren't getting the opportunity to. That is part of what makes classic who so fun because each story takes a different voice for that branch of episodes, good or bad it was a writer trying something different.

[@badwolf66]

The Doctor Who ShowRunnerShip has become more of a dynasty nowadays!

[@andrewbowman4611]

I think what Russell T Davies is saying is that there are too many young writers writing polemics rather than stories. If someone wants to write about growing up trans and the hardships that come with that, great. However, there needs to a story around it, not just a character piece that trundles on whilst contemplating its navel. That simply isn't interesting for a wide audience. It isn't necessarily bad writing, but there needs to be a way in for the viewer. A writer I'd love to see contribute towards the show is Michaela Coel, who wrote and starred in the brilliant I May Destroy You. That's an example of issue led drama that is compelling in its own right. Sadly, however, that quality of writing is sorely lacking at the moment. The trick is to write a story that is entertaining in and of itself, while exploring the issues the writer wants to include. Basically, if you've still got a solid story if you removed the polemical text, then that's good writing. However, if the whole thing falls apart without said polemics, then that's bad writing. I suspect that it's the latter point that RTD was making.

[@SamyulDavis]

And what if I decided that Years and Years was this?

[@andrewbowman4611]

@@SamyulDavis Having not seen Years and Years I can't really comment on it. My understanding though is it takes the concept of Turn Left and builds on it. Also, I was going to point out that a more seasoned writer is more likely able to strike that balance more successfully, although I didn't for the sake of brevity. Saying that, I don't think Years and Years was that popular at the time, so maybe that serves as a case in point in and of itself. It's a Sin, on the other hand, was hugely popular and issue-led, so there's that to consider. All told, I think that to write successfully for a medium, you should want to write for the medium in and of itself. RTD himself has said that the best way of learning how to write for television is to watch television, in much the same way as the best comic book writers grew up reading comic books. You've got more chance of absorbing the form the more interact with it, I would suggest.

[@KitchenSinkSoup]

@@andrewbowman4611 My experience with a lot of Davies work outside of Who is that it often has a message he reallllly wants you to take away, and he will bring it up again and again and again to do so. I really enjoy his non-Who work, but much of it has a polemical quality to it. Hell, Nolly which came out this year has a big push about how older women were and are pushed out of TV/film for being old and women and the show is in no way subtle about that angle in the slightest (See the bus scene in ep 2).

[@KitchenSinkSoup]

and to make it clear, I agree with Davies 95% of the time, it's just a little silly if he's complaining about polemics given what he often writes.

[@andrewbowman4611]

@@KitchenSinkSoup As I mentioned in my other comment, it takes a writer as skilled as Davies to weave the polemic into the narrative in the way that he does. He writes from a particular perspective, certainly, but first and foremost he writes for the medium of television (mostly). From Why Don't You? to Queer as Folk, via Chucklevision, Children's Ward and The Grand, RTD has the experience to write for a wide range of audiences. Yes, he's become a more overtly political writer in recent years, but I think he's earned his stripes there. Finally, I thought Nolly was brilliant as well.

[@rennythespaceguy7285]

See, what I'd hope is since RTD trusted Moffat so much in his first era Moffat will simply take a slot RTD would of had otherwise, like maybe he does episode 2 or something, this era so far hasn't earned that level of good faith from me though

[@stanley5745]

Oh excellent, I still had the second half of this to watch, very interesting discussion.

[@daveunbelievable6313]

I think the show just needs a bit of a life line, as it has basically been out of popular consciousness since the later capaldi era. RTD 2 hopefully will deliver that, but the fear of a lack of fresh blood is my greatest concern.

[@BoatPui]

RTD is a legend!!!

[@joniejoon2]

Did you even watch the video?

[@BoatPui]

@Jonathan , yep, still a legend. 🫠

[@IErikSteve]

II think one of the biggest coincidences of my life just happened. I was looking up random BF audio covers on Google and literally when I searched for "The Mind of Hodiac" you guys talked about it in the video. Insane.

[@ms.antithesis]

25:30 i overall agree with Mr.Tardis' point here but the way he words it rubs me the wrong way. to say "sometimes misandry is ok" isn't something i'd argue is right to say. Yeah being annoyed at the lack of representation for female voices in some industries, valid. But Misandry is intentional bias against men. which, isn't as valid, same way as Misogyny isn't valid.

[@Tanooki_Billy]

How many times are you gonna upload this same video

[@SamyulDavis]

Well this is the second, as the first had an error

[@ms.antithesis]

andrew cartmell is Ep for eurovision now

[@laylamouat9862]

I could maybe hope for, if the rumour of Russell writing almost all the episodes is true, that the spin offs are kind of the experimentation zone. If Russell wants to keep a tight grip on the show for his run, ok. Russells a great writer so it'll almost definitely lead to great stuff. I just hope for the stuff off to the side to let it's hair down a bit and give younger writers a chance.

[@bethos9215]

Yo, really love your content man, shits awesome. Just asking if you would ever be interested in possibly making a video about explaining the ‘War In Heaven’ stuff? All this sounds really interesting to someone like me who really only knows the time war.

[@najawin8348]

Hey, Sam doesn't actually know _that_ much about it, iirc. He keeps meaning to get around to it, but other stuff gets in the way. I'm one of the guys who writes the Faction Paradox summaries on the wiki. Do you have anything in particular you want to know?

[@bethos9215]

@@najawin8348 Hey man thanks for reaching out! Honestly I'd love to know everything! but since I know that's not possible to really just put into a yt comment, I'd really just love to know who the Enemy is and what his ordeal is, and what the doctor does to the being in the end.

[@najawin8348]

@@bethos9215 Okay, so easy things first. The Doctor is probably not important to The War. He's generally thought to have died in the first battle. There's some ambiguity on this point, as the Faction Paradox series is notorious for not being clear with its answers and the source we're using for this is an in-universe text that's explicitly an unreliable narrator, but he's probably dead. (Edit: To clarify, dude dies, we know this for certain. It's just a question of when he dies in the context of The War. Probably in the first battle, within the first 50 years of The War.) There are some caveats to this, a few other books actually reference The Doctor and place him in _potentially_ more important roles within The War, but they're never very explicit about anything, and it's like two or three references. He's not a particularly major player in the war. (With one giant caveat we're going to get to in a moment.) The Master is! But The Doctor isn't. Gimme a sec, next comment will be a long one.

[@najawin8348]

@@bethos9215 Okay, so who's The Enemy? That's a.... Complicated question. It depends on who you ask. So the major caveat above is that The Doctor might be The Enemy. Or at least part of The Enemy. The Enemy is not so much a single entity or force as they are a way of thinking, this much is explicitly told to us. There are a few references in the text to things that suggest The Doctor might be the enemy, for instance, in _The Infinity Doctors,_ Rassilon realized the true nature of The Enemy and gave out four names of people to be killed, and his was one. Now, _The Infinity Doctors_ is a weird book that doesn't quite fit into _any_ specific time placement in the series (the version of The Doctor in question looks like 8 but hasn't yet left Gallifrey, and there's other weird stuff), but Lance Parkin wrote for the FP line and his FP book also contains a line suggesting that The Doctor is The Enemy. Simon Bucher-Jones is a big fan of the idea that The Enemy is the Eight Legs from _Planet of the Spiders._ There's some weirdness that happens where instead of the 3rd Doctor regenerating on Metebelis 3, he actually regenerates beforehand due to contact with The War. There were plans for a book to be written with the 4th Doctor encountering the Eight Legs called "Beneath the Planet of the Spiders", but we don't know what was going to be in it. There's a fair number of references to spiders now though, because Bucher-Jones keeps putting them in. Lolita is almost certainly _not_ The Enemy, but we should probably discuss her. She's The Master's original TARDIS, who he experimented on until she became fully self aware and could take humanoid form. She's also part vampire and malicious and is manipulating both sides of The War for her own gain. Speaking of TARDISes, let's discuss an interesting theory that exists in _The Book of the War._ It's suggested among some Gallifreyans that TARDISes, being time-alter structures, caused their own existence, and engineered the ascension of Time Lord society to the point where they could create TARDISes, thus creating themselves. Now this raises a question. What would happen if the TARDISes ever decided that they no longer wanted to work with Time Lords? What if they wanted to work with another culture? What if this had _already happened?_ This is one option for The Enemy, the aborted potential future of Posthumanity. The specific reasoning for it given in the book is a little oblique and metaphorical, but it's suggested that Time Lord society is in some way a cultural shadow of human society, that human society is more fundamental, even as it's more technologically limited. There's some references to posthumanity and The Enemy having connections, but nothing explicit and almost an outright denial that they're the same thing, they're just not advanced enough. _The Book of the War_ is very much a difficult read, it's intentionally vague and explicitly unreliable. So what The Enemy is seems to change over time, and this is suggested to be part of the point in the anthology _The Book of The Enemy._ It's not made explicit, but there's some suggestion that The Enemy is something like a metafictional postmodern virus that corrupts narratives, infinitely generating new potential versions of itself for the Time Lords to fight, impossible to ever pin down into a single shape. In a sense, it's the literal concept of enmity and paranoia.

[@bethos9215]

@@najawin8348 Holy fuck this is so interesting.

[@nightowl8477]

I think Doctor Who features variety, as a quirk of format; I don't think anything can be *about* variety. It's about variety only as far as Coronation Street is about consistency. Worth saying too: if allowing space for new creatives is a priority now, cancelling Doctor Who needs to be on the table. It and its spin-offs will be taking up a lottttt of slots and money, and until we move to streaming wholesale (where money is easier, turn-arounds are faster, and scheduling is no issue), that's gonna make pitching new shows that much more harder. This is where the three-part one-series gems BBC is known for fall, to give rise to Line of Duty: Series 10 and alike. And Doctor Who, Russell at its helm, is leading that march.

[@nightowl8477]

Doctor Who will do just lovely under Disney, and on streaming altogether come 2027. Russell knows what the cost is to its neighboring programming, and yet he seems just fine with that. _"No children's spin-offs."_ Yeah, okay, CBBC is burning and instead of helping it, you want to help the show. The persistence to keep this corpse walking is killing the industry. It's fucking shakespeare.

[@SamyulDavis]

Best British format for British anthology sci-fi

[@nightowl8477]

@@SamyulDavis - that may be so, but it ain't got no _"About"_ about it.

[@najawin8348]

"Worth saying too: if allowing space for new creatives is a priority now, cancelling Doctor Who needs to be on the table." The show should have ended with _The Doctor Falls._ Don't @ me. Now I want to see a spinoff have a story that features people using the corpse of (totally not the Doctor) as a puppet to continue to go on adventures, which they film, long after the character has died. So thanks for that Nightowl.

[@nightowl8477]

@najawin8348 - ahh, I think it can end on a nice note. You are right. The Doctor Falls is about killing Doctor Who; Twice Upon a Time about ressurecting her. But I still think the latter could be an ending. An optimistic _"Adventure Goes On"_ one. Even if the former better reflects my current view of the show.

[@popculturejackh9201]

I think if they do spin-offs they need to get new writers doing them to prep the next gen

[@ms.antithesis]

finally got around to watching this, honestly I actually agree with most of your points. but I think I get what Rtd means, I just think he said it to the wrong people at the wrong time. Rtd is just saying that a lot of new younger writers seem to prioritise the message of love and diversity over a good story, something that will only get them ridicule and give the right more stigma for for their bigotry (HBO's Velma is a great example of this). a take, I overall agree with. but he said it a right wing paper who are of course going to take this to mean "Ah diversity bad" which is not what he's saying at all. i think hiring a trans companion was a statement of intent on that front. But Rtd has always ALWAYS, been a populist, when it comes to his writing style, his interview style, and his way of showrunning. And we live in an age where maybe more than ever, people are divided in what they want. and Rtd has always sided with the mainstream audiance, whilst trying to give the fans and the critics as much as he can, but he's a populist, and the mainstream audiance are a bunch of dirty fucking tory scum. (which is why I think newspapers should be legally required to give full unedited transcripts of all interviews shortly after publishing without much beaurocracy)

[@RabbiB0Y]

13:34 this is a very ignorant comment these people do exist and they are very loud and they are very oftenly the same folks who defend Ai "art" is there alot of them no but they do exist

[@SamyulDavis]

And Russell thinks those AI types are all his students? Bit of a stretch. My point is that people who pick a hard, cliquey industry out of a need to write for telly probably do not hate television. His stereotype for the young does not hold water.

[@triplejazzmusicisall1883]

If Russell is saying he wants to make DW great again than this proves he was lying before when he was saying the Chibnall Whitaker era was great. I for one have no idea what to expect which normally I would be excited by yet strangely like many DW fans I have this kind of almost inertia growing as if to protect myself if I don't end up liking what is coming.

[@rory4127]

anorak?

[@najawin8348]

Refers to a type of coat, iirc, has come to mean some sort of stereotypical nerd in the UK for some obscure reason.

[@SamyulDavis]

​@@najawin8348 it's a very specific kind of 80s nerd.

[@qqqqqqqqqqqq121212]

RTD and Tennant returning is already short sighted - we should’ve been having this discussion ages ago

[@Screact]

steven mofat is not a good writer in general. they write some good stuff but also some truly bellow mid stuff