The best worst reactions to the news that the next Doctor Who will be a woman

@Falconer

I may go ahead and just watch the ones I’ve skipped. I’ve really missed the show. I was just angry at Moffat after his sneering responses the last time around (the one comment I vividly remember is when he compared having a female Doctor to casting a man to play Queen Elizabeth – one being a fictional character who is specifically written to regenerate into anyone, and the other obviously being a real person). I was already annoyed with him because I could see a real difference in the way the companions were being written with him at the helm. So when the 12th doctor was announced and it was yet again a white guy, coupled with my already existing annoyance at Moffat’s writing and anger at his attitude toward his fans, I was done with him.

@Chie

There are other things they’ve done with Elementary besides Lucy Liu as Watson but they are more spoilery

Only seen a few eps. Think I know what, or rather who, you’re talking about, and that was fun!

I always felt like the British Sherlock has this adversarial attitude toward its audience

Not adversarial enough, imo. Moffat thinks he knows what the audience wants and throws it at em at every, even inopportune, opportunity. Made even more the problem, cos, in retrospect, he seems to think his audience is mostly obnoxious bros and a few little girls who think Cumberbatch is dreamy. Resisting spoilers, but season 4 is basically fanservice gone maddeningly poisonous. That’s my reading of it anyway…

I usually try to refrain from indulging in schadenfreude, but as a lifelong Doctor Who fan who has been rooting for a female Doctor since, well, forever, I’m LOVING the broflakes’ collective temper tantrums. Keep crying while I make more popcorn, will ya?

Ratings failure? Yeah, right. I think the hate-watchers alone will give them a bump…

I was mildly peeved when Basil Brush changed his accent; but only because I did a pretty good impression of him as he used to speak.

@Diego Duarte:

How did people get started on Dr. Who?

The 2005 revival with Christopher Eccleston, which I’m still quite partial due – never really liked Tennant or Smith in the role and I quit before seeing any of the Peter Carapaldi episodes. I watched some of the older episodes and tended to enjoys the ones with Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor the most. Makes me wish his son Sean Pertwee (whose probably my favorite version of Alfred Pennyworth, despite how awful Gotham often is as a TV show) would make a guest appearance as the Third Doctor in one of those crossover specials…

@Chie:

I was already so happy when I heard Moffat was finally leaving as showrunner. I’ve been waiting for this.

I remember, back when Russel T. Davies was the showrunner, I really liked a lot of the episodes he wrote then and wished he’d take over. I soon came to regret that when it actually happened.

As terrible as some of the episodes were during his run – I ended up missing the Davies years after a while.

@Gussie Jives:

Just on the topic of fandom, have any of the Mammotheers had a major break with any fandom of theirs?

I honestly don’t like to consider myself a fan of anything anymore, mostly because – as much as I still like certain works and the mediums they’re in – I’ve had to deal with so many comicbook fans and hardcore gamers that’ve made me embarrassed to associate with them even by that label. Part of it is the dedication of “preserving” the state of certain material ends up becoming obsessive (whether it’s a superheroine’s revealing costume or claiming videogames should only be “fun”) to an irrational degree.

For one example: a friend of mine on Facebook literally spent three paragraphs or so complaining about how, in live-action adaptations of superhero comics, they don’t refer to characters by their superhero name when bringing up Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. There’re other times I’ve had to deal with people who seem to think race- or gender-swapping fictional characters is the worst thing imaginable – while sometimes arguing that white, straight male characters can (somehow) represent non-white, LGBT, female individuals. It’s also come to the point where I almost become angry when people complain about the costumes being changed, because having to hear why Superman’s outside underpants are so goddamn integral to his character just ended up making my blood boil.

The last point because, at least to me, how the costume looks is the least consequential thing to as I care about the narrative and characterization far more than that. I’m not saying it isn’t important on some level but, well, there’s nothing that make one’s tolerance wane like reading defenses of why Power Girl needs to have a boob window so much and how it’s a “classic design” that should never be changed ever…

I can’t help but see this as being akin to people, back when cinema was just a “moving pictures” novelty, complaining about how The Great Train Robbery and A Trip to the Moon were ruining the medium by actually being about things instead of just showing random objects or people in motion.

You know, I’m beginning to think Sherlock was never actually good–it felt like the setup for something really good, and we were all excited about it in the hopes that it would turn out really satisfying.

So we were willing to overlook that Sherlock is an unrepentant raging jackoff who never suffers any consequences on the assumption that it’s the beginning of an arc. We were willing to overlook that none of the mysteries make any goddamn sense in the hopes that it would all come together later.

But nope. Anything annoying about the show only gets more so as it goes on.

I tried watching Sherlock after hearing that it emphasises the obvious autistic traits of the character… Only to see that it was done in the most offensively ableist way possible. Ugh.

Feel free to enjoy the show yourself, but I’ll take RDJ’s Sherlock any day.

Emphasizes autistic traits to the point of making Sherlock a “high-functioning sociopath” (Sherlock’s own diagnosis at the end of Season 3 I think). I don’t think that’s where autism naturally leads, Moffatt.

It’s certainly a wierd take on Sherlock, I don’t think Doyle had anything quite like that in mind. Savant, yes, eccentric as heck, yes, addicted to cocaine, a little, but sociopath? Never in the books that I read.

WTF source material was he using.

Odd though, I still like the show.

You know, I’m beginning to think Sherlock was never actually good–it felt like the setup for something really good, and we were all excited about it in the hopes that it would turn out really satisfying.

HBomberguy had a lengthy video on YouTube explaining exactly that. I actually gave it three seasons worth of attention hoping for more Blind Bankers and less Reichenbach Fall, but it never really settled into a comfortable mode where the case was what took centre stage.

I could be biased because I grew up watching them, but Jeremy Brett is the definitive Holmes for me. He was quirky, overly dramatic for sure, but with a flair of performance for his audience (be it Watson or Lestrade or the guilty party). But (and this is where House MD fell off the rails as well) whatever was happening with Holmes, his client always came first. Indulging too much in the “asshole” Holmes just totally assassinates the character.

If my fellow Mammotheers are interested in a solid mystery franchise free of any Steven Moffat shenanigans, check out the David Suchet Poirot series. The guy adapted every Poirot story between 1989 and 2013. Even I haven’t seen every episode. Some are adapted better than others and some of Christie’s stories weren’t the strongest, but when Christie was on her game, Suchet knocks them out of the park.

I actually found the last 5 series on Netflix, so check ’em out.

@ JS

I don’t think Doyle had anything quite like that in mind.

Holmes’ characterisation is all over the place in the originals*; but of course Doyle wasn’t even slightly concerned about continuity, just writing good stories. Part of the fun of Holmes is coming up with theories to reconcile all the inconsistencies. Some people suggest Holmes demonstrates symptoms of manic depression at times; but it’s equally arguable he just gets bored easily.

(*For example, as I’m sure you know, in one story he doesn’t know the Earth goes around the Sun. In another he’s just had a paper published on his theory explaining changes in the ecliptic.)

@Gussie Jives:

Just on the topic of fandom, have any of the Mammotheers had a major break with any fandom of theirs?

Yes. The Warhammer 40,000 fandom.

(Warning: the very tealest of dears.)

Maybe it was always bad and I didn’t notice, maybe I was just a different person then, but when I was a teenager I remember it being a really welcoming space. The fact that it was based around a social activity lent it structure and meant that teaching others and supporting others was prioritised. Most importantly, people were encourage to be creative: people painted and wrote, and they shared this creativity with one another. I was an awful model painter and still am, but if I showed my models to people then they would respond positively and show me theirs.

(I’ve said before that I think the experience of mutual creativity is one of the most powerful things that a community can do to make a positive space.)

Yes, the subject matter was bleak, but even that felt like a good thing. When you’re a depressed teenager, it’s often easier to participate in things which have a veneer of melancholia. Beneath that veneer, it was a way of getting depressed teenagers to feel creative and to entertain one another whilst doing so; or at least that’s the experience I got from it.

I started to drift out of the community when I got into RPGs in university, but even then it was a common touchstone with so many people. We might not play a game from one year to the next, but if someone made a Nurgle joke then everyone would get it and laugh. It was almost a nerd lingua franca.

Sometime in that period, though, the community became far less healthy. Maybe it’s just my experience, but I noticed that there was less sharing of one’s own artistic creation and more obsession with rote memorisation of a fixed body of text. At the same time, people’s armies stopped being a form of self-expression and started being determined by whatever the internet forums had decided was the optimal choice. People started using terms like viable and fluffy. Some people even started representing games as a show of dominance rather than a good time between friends.

I don’t know whether it’s a coincidence, but this is also the time (2008-2012) at which I started noticing that people had lost their sense of humour. The ridiculous over-the-top-grimdark was no longer being played as a terrible joke, and the veneer of melancholia had stopped being just a veneer. The community was becoming pretty dogmatic about it, too; whenever people wrote fluff with a hopeful or humanistic tone, it ended up buried under a torrent of Actuallys.

Maybe it was this or maybe it was the way that the community had stopped experiencing the world as a game and started experiencing it as a series of books and video games, but it seemed to me that there was just less creativity all around. People weren’t treating the official text as a starting-point for their own creations so much as a complete and unextendable canon.

Then there were the Nazis, but I remember them as being mostly after that point.

I don’t read any of the forums any more. The last game I played was an old-school Necromunda campaign, which was a blast but was almost eighteen months ago. The community is a really toxic place now. I don’t think they miss me.

Maybe it was always like that. Certainly, it was always white and male. Maybe I never noticed how bad it was. Maybe I was like that too at the time and just became a better person. I think, however, that it got a lot worse.

@Scildfreja Unnyðnes: Sweeeeet.

Put me up as someone else who is over the moon over the fact that Moffat is no longer head writer of the Whoniverse. I was afraid what he’d do with the first woman Doctor.

I am really looking forward to watching Dr Who again!