Doctor Who Grab Bag
The PR machine is gearing up, and as such they announced all the episode titles and writers for the upcoming season over the weekend, along with a new trailer: Doctor Who's New Trailer is a Time-Traveling Delight
I’m hoping someone eventually writes a gossipy behind-the-scenes book about how this iteration of the show came about. The stories around the campfire sure makes it sound like the show really was effectively canceled after Chibnall & Whittaker left in ’22, and then something happened and now Davies is running a new show with the same name as part of a co-production with his old friends at Bad Wolf and spending Disney’s money to do it. It also sure seems like there wasn’t that much time between that deal happening and the new-new show going into production.
Backing some of those rumors up is the fact that of the eight episodes this year, RTD is writing six of them. The two he’s not writing are the long-rumored and half-heartedly denied return of Steven Moffat for what’s likely to the best show of the season, and the previously announced pair of Loki’s Kate Herron with Briony Redman.
Doctor Who never had a writer’s room in the American TV style, nor did it usually do the BBC-style single author, instead it tends to use a rotating bench of freelance writers, which helped give the show it’s “anthology but with the same regular cast” vibe. Having nearly every episode be written by the showrunner raised eyebrows in some corners of the ‘net. But I suspect there isn’t anything more to it than the fact that they had to stand up a new production essentially from scratch, and fast, and there wasn’t time to find and spin up a batch of writers, especially if there was a chance they would need any handholding. So, RTD leans into the throttle and does most of them himself, and then pulls in the one other guy whom he knows can deliver a script without any assistance, and then the woman who directed what was effectively the best season of Doctor Who in years.
Meanwhile….
If two weeks ago was “Caves of Androzani” at 40, that means the next story, “The Twin Dilemma” also turned 40 over the weekend. “Twin Dilemma” is mind-wrenchingly bad, and not in a fun way, just 4 25-minute slices of pure anti-quality, the mathematical opposite of entertainment.
One of the funniest things about classic Doctor Who is that one of the all-time best episodes aired back-to-back with the absolute worst. This is a power move very few shows attempt? Star Trek, for example, had the basic decency to put “City on the Edge of Forever” and “Spock’s Brain” on opposite ends of the run, you know?
Back before the show came back, we spent a lot of time trying to convince ourselves that the show’s early-80s implosion wasn’t as bad as it really was, that there were some gems in there, that you could appreciate it on its own merits, but also maybe there were some Lessons that could be learned.
Which brings me to last week’s other pair of Doctor Who-related anniversaries, as last week also marked 19 years since the new show came back, and 20 since they announced that it woud.
Because after the show came back, and was just casually wildly successful, we could all relax. The good parts of the old show were still good, but we didn’t have to convince anyone else—or ourselves—that the bad parts were otherwise. Because the only lesson from that part of the old show was actually “don’t hire people bad at TV to run your TV show.”
With all these popping in March, it feels like there’s a spring metaphor in here somewhere, but that would be crass.
And finally…
From basically the first moment it was announced that Davies was coming back to run the show, everyone assumed his first call was going to be to Moffat, in a sort of “If I have to come back, so do you” way. Moffat’s response to this was to give a series of very carefully phrased denials, where he never actually said he wasn’t coming back, and the fact that he was coming back after all became one of those worst-kept secrets around. The word on the street was that he was writing episode 3 of the season, and then it leaked via a producer’s CV that he was probably also writing this year’s christmas episode.
And so they finally admitted that he was coming back a week or two ago, with this vaguely embarrassed air of “why did we cover this up, again?” Because he is, in fact, writing episode, titled “Boom”, and still strongly rumored to be writing the christmas show, rumored to be called “Joy to the World.”
Armed with that knowledge, I’d like to call your attention to this interview from the end of January, from well before anyone admitted he was coming back (seriously, it’s only a minute or two, go watch and I’ll meet you under the link):
Doctor Who's Steven Moffat on possible return: "It's fine without me!" | Radio Times
My favorite part is the little pause where he builds the sentence in his head and works both his episode titles into his non-denial denial that he’s coming back. This is the guy who wrote an entire season that locked into place around the Tardis being all four parts of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” and also built a joke in “Blink” around trolling a specific web forum; glad to see the old magic is still there.
This is gonna be really fun.
Doctor Who Season 1/14/40
As long as I’m linking to trailers and embedding video, there’s a trailer out for the new season of Doctor Who:
Wait, did they do the Akira slide… with the Tardis?
Hot Takes on Lightsabers
This Monday dose of Hot Takes (tm) is brought to you by my having watched the trailers for both the next Rebel Moon1 and the new Star Wars show The Acolyte2 over the weekend.
I have some hot takes on Lightsabers.
Hot Take №1: Every Movie Should Have Lightsabers
I think the science-fiction movie community should do what fantasy novelists did with Tolkien’s elves, and just body Star Wars and run off with them. Put them in everything. The one thing from the Rebel Moons I fully endorse is the attitude of “it’s been long enough, we’re taking these.”
Hot Take №2: Movies With Lightsabers Should Use Them Less
A stylistic thing that the original trilogy did was that whenever a lightsaber powered up, it was a big deal. Partly, this was because they were expensive and hard to do, but the result was that they only3 came out at major story pivot points; when you heard that sound stuff was about to go down. Pulling a lightsaber out shouldn’t ever be casual, you know? It’s a sign the movie just shifted into a new gear.
This is where I segue and say I really like that Andor doesn’t have Jedi or the like, but I’d really like to see what that team could do with one (1) lightsaber fight.
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Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver; Yeah, it looks like more Rebel Moon!
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The Acolyte; On the one hand, the track record for modern non-Andor Star Wars isn’t great? On the other hand, it’s being run by the same person who did Russian Doll?
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Okay, the one genuine exception to this is the part in Return of the Jedi where Luke fights off the last speeder bike. But…
- This is Return of the Jedi, and that whole movie is a little thematically and structurally sloppier than its predecessors
- Plus, the whole middle chunk of that movie, from the sail barge exploding to Wicket telling 3PO about the bunker’s back door, is a total mess
- It’s pretty cool though, so we’ll let it slide
Tuesday linkblog, video-game-trailer-edition
After some shenanigans the trailer for GTA 6 is out. Looks like GTA all right. Tome Petty song! Like those gators!
My first reaction, though, was “man, I feel like I’ve already played this game about, oh, five times”.
On the other hand, I guess it has been a decade since the last one? I supposed doing a sequel/redo every decade or so to see what the next generation of game hardware can do is a fair way to go? I wish we could get a PS5 version of Rock Band.
On the gripping hand, I also don’t think I’m in the target audience for this anymore? The GTA game I always wanted finally came out: Spider-man.
This is not a joke. I distinctly remember the first time I saw GTA 3 running on a friend’s computer. It was one of those moments, like Doom before it, where you sat there going “wow, they can do this now?” And then you sat there imagining all the other games that just became possible. I turned to my friend and the first thing I said was “I can’t wait for them to make this game, but you’re Spider-man.”
Anyway, I hope they mix the gameplay up more than it looks like. Like by adding Spider-man.
So Long, Apple Trailers, and thanks for all the fish
Well, they finally pulled the plug on iTunes Movie Trailers. Starting life as a website to showcase the then-new Quicktime video format, it evolved into an iOS ecosystem app, and quietly spent two decades as the best way to see trailers for new movies. It made it a long time; my first memory of it was using the original web version to slowly load the first teaser for Episode I over dialup.
I’ve seen some speculation that this was all part of a rebranding exercise to redirect traffic to the Apple TV app (not to be confused with the Apple TV streaming service, or the Apple TV hardware product,) I suspect it’s more likely that whomever had been keeping it running since the late 90s had finally retired? Or maybe it really just didn’t fit in with Apple’s expanding streaming/services future.
So a moment, then, to note the passing of a small, single-purpose service that did one thing, and did it perfectly. Becase that’s all it did—had a library of trailers for upcoming and recent movies. Search, sort, organize by release date. High quality video, no muss, no fuss, no other advertising glop. It was remarkably up to date, had a trailer for basically every new movie, and frequently had any other EPK-type promo video as well.
It was a constant on my Apple TV (the hardware). “Hey’ let’s see if there’s any new trailers!” was a common request in the house. It was fun, it was simple, we liked it. So yeah, they shut it down. Two months or so past the shutdown, it’s left a surprisingly big hole! What are the alternatives we’re left with?
It goes without saying that the Trailers section of the Apple TV app, like all other sections of that app, is unmitigated hot garbage. Not only is it hard to find, but it doesn’t even have all the trailers from the old app! Bad sorting, no release dates, and it doesn’t seem to be nearly as complete or updated near as often.
YouTube seems to be the standard answer, but that’s also such a step back. Sure, all the trailers are there, somewhere. But, search on the Apple TV’s (the hardware) Youtube app is terrible, and every trailer has dozens of crappy copies, re-uploaded with somebody else’s watermarks, or other ads tacked on the front, or some guy “reacting” to it, or worst of all, it’s not the real thing at all, just some fan edit. And sure, that’s YouTube, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I just want the damn trailer. YouTube’s biggest problem is the amount of noise to signal; which is great if you’re looking for the noise, but sometimes you want to go watch the actual signal, you know?
And like so many things from the early web, we used to have a thing just for that which perfectly, but now it’s just gone, with no real replacement. The world doesn’t get smaller, but it sure keeps getting emptier.
Let me rephrase what I said up at the start: I hope they shut it down because someone retired. It would be beyond depressing if they killed off a perfect single-use (and probably cheap) service that we all liked that did one thing really well because it wasn’t making a 300% return on investment for some streaming sub-division.