It wasn't the best ep tonight, but it was definatley better than RB and TCI.

Why does everyone hate it so much?

Because the rest of Xmas telly was so poor. This was the one show you hoped would lift the gloom.

It was a bit poor, but not if you like your soaps. Plus it wasn't overly bad was it?

I agree it was the best Xmas episode yet-but I also thought it was one of DT's worst.
However I enjoyed the episode and the whole family was hooked for the full thing and if it keeps my lot sitting quiet for that long its done something right!

BBC had us all glued from 6.20 until 8.30 in fact!

Nope, it was actually OK.

But you'd hope it would be better than OK, given the effort that goes into making the show.

Because they want rid of RTD.


Some Whovians treat the exec producer in the same way as the press do the England football manager. Great & supportive at the start, then they start sniping, then they go all out and are not happy until they oust him.

Nothing he can do will be good enough for them, even if they secretly enjoyed it.

The irony here is that this thread is moaning...about the moaning...

Emphatically not.
I don't care who writes the episodes as long as they are good. And this one was rubbish.
One of my favourite episodes ever was Gridlock, and I think RTD wrote that one.

...and you're moaning about us moaning about the moaning!!

Frankly I think you ought not to be moaning about the poster moaning that there is a thread moaning about the moaning.

I enjoyed it had to watch it twice to make sure i think its because you wait for it for a few months getting little teasers here and there and like xmas day itself the build up can be more exiting than the event.
7/10 for me.. that score may rise after a few more viewings "love the new theme..sound of drums mix epic"

Wouldn't want the England manager playing on the pitch.

If RTD wants to be exec producer or script editor, fine.

There are better Who scriptwriters than him, though.

Couldn't see it as the credits aren't meant to be read but does the New Series Who have a script editor? I've seen bits in Confidential where RTD is said to tinker with other writers scripts to make them work better but does anyone go through RTD's scripts to make improvements to them?

There is, of course, that other main reason for all the moaning.

We're British!

Basically everything you said, (especially about Gridlock- one of the most underrated episodes ever IMO).

Why can't people just dislike an episode simply because they didn't think it was very good? why must their be an ulterior motive of some sort?

I rewatched Gridlock a few days ago and yes it was great, despite the rather pointless return of the Macra. The bit where they all sing a hymn was very moving and the CG sunlit city was magnificent.

we're moaning because it was awful awful awful

I stopped watching after half an hour

It's because these are Doctor Who fans, who, as a class, are insane freaks!

I had my first foray into DW fandom in the early nineties when I was at uni, and I found the way that some of them carried themselves to be bordering on disturbing.

One guy refused to watch any DW that came after Earthshock (as it was all JNT patronising crap apparently) - another guy believed that the last DW story ever made was 'The Talons Of Weng Chiang', and everything subsequent was a 'forgery' bearing the DW banner - he made a fascinating case, in his little deranged way, of how the JNT & Williams eras were actually 'illegal'!

All complete fruitcakes who should be elevated on the very podium of world psychiatry!

I exited DW fandom shortly after that, but kinda got back into again recently.

And nothing's really changed at all:

1) The producer is largely despised;
2) Criticism of the show is delivered in a completely over-the-top, hysterical manner, usually stated as 'fact' - 'that's an hour of my life I'll never get back', indeed...LMAO, just listen to yourself!

All very, very sad stuff. The big thing now is that the show is actually popular again, and for the right reasons - it's well-made, well-scripted, well-acted, well-plotted and perfectly pitched at the modern audience - hence the awards, the overwhelming wave of positivity from the media, the ratings, the audience appreciation indexes, the critical reviews etc...

I think a lot of long-term DW fans resent that DW is no longer their exclusive, special little plaything that they could feel hubris in liking.

Certainly the fact that VOTD had a very enthusiastic write-up from long-time TV critics in respected newspapers like The Times and The Independent, yet it gets slated on fan message boards, just goes to show the extent of the disconnect.

Regards,

Cypher

I was referring to the schedule not the show.

I haven't seen anything from every cult show that has a figurehead in charge (Star Trek, Red Dwarf etc) to Formula One
teams (my sport of choice but as you say it happens in football too) to Prime Ministers to whatever else.

New administration comes in, fans react with glee.
"Thank you for giving us something new to bitch about" they say.

Nothing new with Dr Who, even in the old series the powers that be used to get a lot of flak, they just were "fortunate" not to have the internet where fans could gather to launch attacks. And of course where one group attacks so another group will want to defend. (They even had a guy with three initials in charge to criticise....JNT! History repeating itself or what? )

I do think this "RTD is the devil/saviour of Doctor Who" has gone far enough.
Both groups are ruining threads now in an effort to prove their point and that the other group are wrong.
He's just a producer, one that yes should be credited for bringing back the Doctor to our screens and yes has written some poor eps, but in reality probably the reason he has more duff episodes than other writers is that he writes more episodes than anyone else so his hit/duff ratio is more noticeable.
He's not worth all the praise that he gets here and if he took
internet threads seriously he'd have committed suicide already after the level of vitriol you get in some attacks.
He's just the guy in charge of Dr Who.

Now can we discuss proper things instead of decamping into the usual "like/hate" groups?

Thank you, sorry, had to get that off my chest!

Merry Christmas!

That's an analogy that doesn't work. For RTD to be like a football manager "playing on the pitch" he'd have to be acting in the show.

I haven't read any of the other threads on it so dont know what people have been saying.
That Dr Who to me tonight though was definately not very Dr Who. What exactly was scary about it.
In a lot of way it almost reminded me more of a Die Hard xmas film with them having to escape from the ship much more than Dr Who. Those 'hosts' just didn't seem like anything scary, they were just people doing what they were told, or could easily have been people, the didn't have any special powers, anyone can take a halo from their head and throw it at someone else.
The only monster was the prickly thing that turned out to be a cybourg but he wasn't scary.
And the man at the end, he was human it just so happened he was being kept alive by a portable live support machine.

I'm not too sure if i didn't know who was in it and I didn' know the schedule that if I'd just turned on I'd have really thought of it immediately as Dr Who.

I'm not moaning about it though, I dont really like all the monsters, dont normally watch Dr Who except at xmas but do watch Torchwood. It was a gentle episode and fitted in nicely with what was going on in EE.

That's a good point. Rick Berman was exec producer on Star Trek from 1990-2005, in all that time he wrote just one TNG episode on his own. Just one out of over 500 episodes of TNG, DS9 and Voyager. Other than that & co-writing the premier & finale episodes he left the actual writing to a head writer and his/her team who worked under him. It wasn't until Enterprise that he started writing more and messed things up.

I'd love it if RTD would do the same. He's clearly a great producer, but when it comes to writing, I dunno... sometimes he doesn't fulfil his potential. I suppose doing both jobs must be taxing.

i know this might sound bad am 23 ok and i watched the old series on uk gold in the 90s i was sooo happy when it came back on the bbc but now i kinda feel like its not our show anymore like its someone elses show

Internet forums are for the expression of all opinions, not just positive ones.

Could you imagine how boring it would be if everything was constantly praised and if everyone agreed on everything all the time? It's easy enough to skip over negative posts if you don't want to read them.

If it wasn't for RTD, Doctor Who would be still be re - runs on UKTV Gold.
He dragged it kicking and screaming, into the 21st Century, and improved it. Like the old series, some stories were hit and miss, so Whovians should be grateful for what he did.
I've followed Doctor Who from the very beginning.