It only took 9 episodes to bring us an excellent episode!
More of this and a Season Story Arc/Mystery next year please.
And I would be happy seeing a few old faces next year:
At least River or Captain Jack if I could choose.
It was a good episode.
I would love to see Captain Jack.
I hope to never see River Song ever again. Never ... Ever ...
I agree it was a good episode.
Why does everyone want Doctor Who to copy the many American shows that maximises hype to "hook" viewers? I am sick of hearing about "worlds', "worldbuilding" and "arcs" - so much self-important cliche-ridden leaden thinking. Not everything in fiction is supposed to be "vast" and "amazing" and "superpowered". What does the Doctor have to prove? This is the very thing that has lead to problems in Doctor Who.
But Doctor Who had Story Arcs since forever. Early on - they had stories that span over multiple episodes and since 2005 they had multiple story arcs or season mysteries:
copied from here: http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_story_arcs
Series 1 - The Bad Wolf meme
Series 2 - The Torchwood Institute
Series 3 - Harold Saxon ("You Are Not Alone")
Series 4 - The Medusa Cascade, disappearing bees, lost worlds, the return of Rose Tyler
2009 Specials - The Tenth Doctor's regeneration ("He will knock four times")
Series 5 - Cracks in Time, the Pandorica
Series 6 - The Silence, Eleventh Doctor's death, Amy Pond's pregnancy, River Song's identity
Series 7 - The Impossible Girl, the Great Intelligence
Series 8 - Missy, the Nethersphere
Series 9 - Ashildr, the Hybrid[disputed statement]
Series 10 - The Vault, Missy's rehabilitation , the Monks
Over Multiple Seasons - The Time War / War Doctor
And even though not every Arc ended well - looking at you Astronaut "killing" the Doctor - it gave the episodes a feeling of greatness and connectivity.
To be honest with you, all of those "arcs" in each series (apart from Amy's pregnancy) amounted to me thinking, "I bet whatever that is will be significant in some way in the final episode or two."
That's it.
Barely more than easter eggs, or a promise that the series finale will be... something or other.
There were minor and bigger hints/mysteries/arcs but I still enjoyed them. And yes - most of them were answered in the season finale - but the good ones kept us guessing and we got hints throughout.
My favorite was Amy seeing the Door/Window with a woman checking on her at random points in the episodes. That had a great turnout.
True, but I never found the New Who arcs very interesting. They are not good at names or with intriguing language it seems to me. The emphasis on those narratives never really seemed to sell the concepts. I think it was a slightly different story with Classic Who - the concepts were fairly well defined and not gimmicky: "The Key To Time" related to the Doctor's capacity to travel dimensions and thus he was clearly suited for the job of trying to complete the quest; "The War Games" was relevant to the Doctor dealing with meta-situations; the Third Doctor's ongoing quest in the background to rediscover how the TARDIS operated during his exile on Earth, etc.
shareI've been wondering for a while if we should have something like the key to time or e-space arc across a whole series.
I do like the arcs in new who most of the time but with RTD it was just an easter egg, a word repeated. Series 5 is probably my favourite new who series and I liked how we learnt stuff as the series went on. The silurian episode is far from the greatest the show has done but the end scene with the doctor pulling part of the tardis out of the crack was a great moment for me. Series 7 did go a bit overboard with too many stuff going on becoming like lost. It also felt weird when the doctor just decided to fly off and ignore the arc for a bit - obviously so we could great a monster of the week type episode but the way felt a bit odd. Most of the arcs had something to them though although I thought the hybrid one just didn't work. Certainly considering we already had timelord/dalek hybrids in the daleks take manhattan and there was nothing about this hybrid then. Also the whole looking for Gallifrey thing didn't really work
The good thing with an arc is it keeps you guessing and people talking about the show. This however doesn't always work if things are dragged out too long. A lot of people didn't like the reveal of who river song was because it was something that had been asked for a few years so everyone had guessed every possibility and wouldn't be happy with any. This is the same reason the show can never reveal the doctors real name.
While a bit off topic I've always thought the doctor should suffer a problem with the tardis that makes the doctor unable to fully pilot the tardis, instead the tardis landing on random planets. I miss the days when the Tardis would land somewhere unknown and the doctor would have to explore. Often these days the doctor knows where he has landed taking the mystery out.
In the beginning (1963 onwards) it was chock full of serials, like from Season One through to Season Seven there where 39-45 episodes in those seasons and all had serials going on in them, Season Three that had 45 episodes had 10 serialised stories. Sure the episodes where generally
25 minutes in length and weekly over those 39-45 episodes, however that is how it has been traditionally done up until this season and why people miss it.
This is a good list of it all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Doctor_Who_episodes_(1963%E2%80%931989)#Season_1_(1963%E2%80%931964)
A couple of the stories this season Rosa Parks and Demons of the Punjab could have really been any other show doing the stories, for one Quantum Leap and Sam could have leapt into them. Even DC's Legends Of Tomorrow could have done a couple of the stories, The Witchfinders for one and even the two mentioned above. As Eleazar says above it was the serial form that gave the episodes a feeling of greatness and connectivity over the past 55 years, now it feels like it is just any other show doing time travel stories.
Have I found most of the episodes enjoyable ... yes I have, however they feel to me not very Doctor Who like, they've made the character of the Doctor an anyone from another show type character (and that's not in my mind Jodie's fault).