What's a good jumping on point? When did it start to not suck?

Season 2.

I think I stopped watching some time in season 1 and felt like I should figure out exactly where and pick up where I left off, but maybe I'll just jump to season 2...

Yeah, I stopped in S1 because I couldn't stand whatshisname, the dude who was also on Doctor Who. Arthur something? Maybe? The dude in charge. He was so awful I gave up. (I hear he's gone, but I never went back to check it out.)

Oh dear God I just watched the latest Doctor Who and BUBBLE WRAP! It's Doctor Who and the big threat is BUBBLE WRAP! It's a payoff to a relationship stretching back 43 years, pretty much as long as bubble wrap has existed within the public consciousness. Bubble wrap is the key to understanding a fundamental element of classic Doctor Who. (In other words, I thought that was just hilarious.)

For this one we're going back to one of the greatest of the classic adventures, The Ark in Space. (I give it 10/10.) Question: what really sets classic Who apart from the new series? Somewhere near the top of the list has to be that audience favourite - dodgy special effects. Wobbly sets, unconvincing models, glaringly obvious CSO, men in rubber suits. Exhibit A: gifs from the Third Doctor adventure, Invasion of the Dinosaurs: [link] My favourite scene is one where a T. rex and Brontosaurus apparently share a snuggle.

(In fact, it was never really that bad. It was produced on a shoestring and sometimes it showed, but the design team more often got away with it. Case in point: the design of the Daleks.)

Back to The Ark in Space. This was the first adventure from the production team of Hinchcliffe and Holmes, and announced that Doctor Who was now all about the horror. Ark in Space does a brilliant job of translating Alien for a family-friendly audience. Even more impressive in that it came out four years before Alien. (As far as I'm aware, there's no evidence that Dan O'Bannon or Ridley Scott had seen Ark in Space.)

Basic plot: a space station carrying the hibernating remnants of humanity is invaded by space wasp-like creatures who intend to lay their eggs in the sleeping humans like they were caterpillars. You can see the design of the creatures here: [link] Larvae on top, adults on the bottom. Oh, and here's a gif of one of the larvae in motion: [link]

They go straight for the body horror in episode 2, when the human leader ignores the Doctor's warning and gets himself bitten on the hand, and starts transforming into one of the space wasps. You can see a pic from the episode 1 cliffhanger here: [link] He's rather further gone by this stage: [link]

The point of linking these pics is: Noah's transformation (yes, they call the Ark's commander Noah) and the larvae were realised via a fairly new and interestingly textured packing material going by the name of bubble wrap. The crawling larva is a stuntman wriggling along the floor in a roll of bubble wrap. Noah's arm? Wrap it up in bubble wrap and spray paint it green. In space, no one can hear you go poppoppoppop!

(It really did go poppoppoppop. They couldn't record sound for the crawling stuntman larva because of the bubble-popping cacophany.)

For a modern audience, of course, it's pretty obvious that Noah's just got his hand stuck in bubble wrap. Less so at the time, as it wasn't widespread yet. Interesting exercise to graph the term's frequency over time: [link] Still, today it's clear it was done on the cheap. But Kenton Moore (playing Noah) goes for it, trying his best to convey the horror of seeing yourself transforming into something monstrous. He's acting for a drama, not a kid's panto. Even if there's something absurd about being slowly encased in packing material, he's acting like the effects are as good as Alien.

And from this - and the point of this whole thing, really - comes a term familiar to many Doctor Who fans, that goes a long way to explaining why the classic series got away with it: believing the bubble wrap. If the actors take the dodgy effects seriously, then the audience will too. (Up to a point, I mean those dinosaurs.) When actors came on Doctor Who and started hamming it up like it was 'just for kids', that's when the spell's broken.

So anyway, that's why I found it hilarious that they weaponised bubble wrap. I'm pretty sure they knew just what they were doing too.

Edit: damn, that was supposed to be my short comment on Kerblam!. I have more to say about the ep itself.

Legends of Tomorrow really wasnt great the first season . They kept writing themselves in corners then they realized it's time travel there are no corners!

And now it's the weird show that has giant stuffed blue toys that are worshipped as God and sometimes fight a demon and has unicorns and a pirate episode and a bunch of other wacky stuff and still occasionally makes me cry.

What's his name from doctor Who is in the second season but he gets less important.

That's cool, billy tea, I didn't know any of that!

Believe the Bubble Wrap

I'm only on ep 3 this season of Doctor Who, but reading the billytea comments here make me want to devote more hours to catching up!

Ok, now my actual thoughts on Kerblam! I really quite liked it. In some ways it's the most Doctor Whoish ep this season so far, and the Doctor's more effective than she's been all season. (And it continues the streak of me preferring the eps not written by Chris Chibnall.) The setting works ("Space warehouse" is emphatically within the range of what Doctor Who can do), the robots were the right blend of cute and creepy, I enjoyed the story. (Agree with Jessica's summary that "the plot turns from Evil Bosses to Evil Robots to Basically White Space Killmonger.") Plus, kudos for the dedication to end an episode called "Kerblam!" with a big explosion.

It's also the most right-wing I can remember Doctor Who being since at least the Third Doctor. One comment I've seen, which I can't really argue with, posited that for all the kids watching Kerblam! the takeaway message is "I hope I'm lucky enough to get chosen for a job in a place like that". There's 50% unemployment, and it'd be even higher except companies are obliged to create make-work jobs (there's fulfilment for you). The message, contrary to pretty much everything you hear about conditions in Amazon's warehouses, seems to be that you can trust big business to look after you, and labour activists are one step away from terrorism.

Other bits I thought were morally incoherent: The Doctor foils the plan by having the robots teleport back to the warehouse, thereby thwarting the evil plan. Then - with no imminent threat that it can be re-enacted - she orders the entire room full of robots to commit mass suicide (after earlier upbraiding someone else for prejudice against robots and stating that she has robot friends). Meanwhile, the AI tries to convince the AmazUnabomber that it's wrong to kill innocent lives in pursuit of his goals by killing an innocent life in pursuit of its goal.

But back to the cuddly corporation. DW has a long and proud tradition of making corporations and businesspeople into villains. I'd put the Second Doctor adventure, The Invasion, as the first example, where the electronics mogul Tobias Vaughn helps the Cybermen conquer the Earth. The Third Doctor fought mining companies on distant planets and plastics and oil companies here on Earth. Robert Holmes penned a savage rebuke of corporate greed in The Sun Makers, against a race actually called the Usurians. (Technically it was against excessive taxation, but the government is a corporation running Pluto as a business venture and squeezing the workers in the name of profit.) One of the few (two?) noteworthy additions to the pantheon of monsters during the Sixth Doctor's tenure was Sil, a slug-shaped Ferengi. The Sixth Doctor's Dalek adventure had Davros running a food company and spouting lines like "That would have created what I believe is termed 'consumer resistance.'" (The Seventh Doctor feels like a natural fit to fight capitalism, but it all went a bit weird. Closest he got to fighting commercial ventures were stopping a circus housing the Gods of Ragnarok and stopping a villain running a supermarket to pay for a mercenary army.)

The new series continued in that vein with eps like The Rise of the Cybermen or Sleep No More; and last year's astonishingly savage Oxygen. The point being that for most of its history, whenever it's come up, Doctor Who has very clearly been on the side of the workers. It's been more or less radical (and Oxygen was pretty damn radical), but consistent. Until now.

There are ways in which I think it actually helps the story. It certainly makes the end more of a twist. It doesn't really spoil my enjoyment (and for the record, I did think Oxygen's politics were kind of over the top - which didn't spoil my enjoyment there either). However, it also means I feel obliged to have a careful discussion with Ryan about its message. When Rosa aired, I opined that Doctor Who really couldn't do stories like that, because if it were set on any other planet, the Doctor would burn it all down. Turns out now that under Chibnall, that's no longer the case.

I couldn't stand whatshisname, the dude who was also on Doctor Who. Arthur something? Maybe? The dude in charge. He was so awful I gave up. (I hear he's gone, but I never went back to check it out.)

Arthur Darvill.

(hides Arthur Darvill from the mean Steph.)

I have no idea why they couldn't use the actor well on a wacky show, other than that the character was poorly conceived from the beginning. There's a decent amount of cast turnover, which kind of helps keep things fresh.