The upcoming regeneration in the Christmas Episode of Doctor Who, Twice Upon A Time, might be the most anticipated episode ever due to Jodie Whittaker becoming the first female lead. Typically regeneration scenes only involve the outgoing Doctor with little, if any, of the new Doctor seen until the subsequent episodes are aired. With the degree of interest in this regeneration it would be a mistake to not show at least a little of Jodie Whittaker in the Christmas episode. It does appear that she probably does have at least one significant scene as Radio Times reports that Chris Chibnall will be present for her appearance in the episode. From Radio Times:
“There is a little bit of like ‘I want to see Jodie now!’” episode director Rachel Talalay admitted on the Radio Free Skaro podcast.
“What I do hope is, for Christmas you don’t have your Christmas pudding and your brandy, and say ‘OK, let’s just get to the regeneration!’ I hope you can actually enjoy the story too.”
Still, Talalay wasn’t shy about discussing some aspects of the pivotal final scene, which she shot both Capaldi and Whittaker’s parts for on different days under the direction of current showrunner Steven Moffat and new boss Chris Chibnall.
“I knew I was going to shoot both parts of the regeneration, but I did say to Chris Chibnall if you want a different director to introduce Jodie, you should have a different director,” she recalled. “Because he’s creating a whole new world.
“[But] he too was absolutely lovely and said no, we’re absolutely delighted it’s going to be you, and no-one else. And so we sat down and talked about the Jodie portion of the regeneration, and it was wonderful.
She added: “The thing I would love to talk about, and look forward to talking about in the future is how I planned Peter’s portion of the regeneration versus how I planned and shot Jodie’s.
“Because as a director, that was a really satisfying, interesting, fun challenge, and I’m really pleased with both sides of it.”
Of course, the side Talalay COULD talk about was Capaldi’s, with the director revealing that the Scottish actor had played a big part in the planning of his final scene.
“When it came to the regeneration in the Christmas episode, Peter has a big scene about it, as one would expect,” she said.
“And he and I spent some time alone on the Tardis, which is his place to sit when he wants to be quiet. We just sat there, in that space, alone, talking through that whole scene. Talking through in his happy space.
“He had a hundred notes on his script. Again, I view myself as a guide. But he was deeply into it.”
And apparently the collaboration paid off handsomely, with Talalay full of praise for the Twelfth Doctor’s last stand.
“It’s absolutely a Peter Tour-de-force as you can imagine,” she said. “I was so lucky to get to do it.”
In other words, then, it seems like we’re in for a simultaneously sad, exciting, nostalgic and forward-thinking episode of Doctor Who that contrasts with itself just as much as it does with anything else on the telly.
Radio Times has some speculation about the episode here. I posted a video from the episode last week in which the first Doctor commented on changes to the TARDIS.
The first pictures of Jody Whittaker and Bradley Walsh filming next season have been released. More pictures are here.
Last week I mentioned rumors that Matt Smith might appear in the Christmas special (although it is also possible he just visited the set to see Doctor Who history and/or the final episode by Stephen Moffat). Smith has also discussed the possiblity of returning to Doctor Who, and has had some advice for Jodie Whittaker. From Digital Spy:
The Eleventh Doctor revealed that he wanted to come back to the franchise a few years down the line, once the new Time Lord Jodie Whittaker had settled in, that is
“Why not?” Matt told MTV. “I’d come back. Yeah, if the timing was right.
“I think we’ve gotta give a few years to Miss Whittaker to get the TARDIS under her belt, as it were, and then yeah – one day.”
However, he then dashed our hopes just a little by teasing that it probably won’t be until he’s “old and grey”, but joked that that “isn’t far off”.
When pressed on any advice he had for the Thirteenth Doctor when she heads into the TARDIS, Matt added: “Yeah, I will tell Jodie what I told Peter [Capaldi] – listen to no-one.”
The Crown star has also spoken about the next series of Doctor Who, arguing that the show should be “bold and inventive”.
“I think Doctor Who is a bit like Shakespeare,” he told press, including Digital Spy. “It needs expression and it needs courage and bold ideas – and I think Chris [Chibnall, new showrunner] and his team will bring all that to theshow, so I just sit back as a fan and watch what happens.
He added: “I absolutely don’t see why [the Doctor] can’t be a girl.”
It would make sense to have a two Doctor or multi-Doctor episode bringing him back but I wonder about this being “a few years down the line” considering that most actors playing the Doctor only stick around a few years at most. He better not wait too long.
Shada is now becoming available in various formats and a trailer (video above) has been released. Radio Times spoke with Tom Baker about returning to Doctor Who:
“I think it was, you see, that probably it never left me,” Baker said in a new interview to commemorate the BBC Worldwide release of the newly-completed Shada (which combines original footage with new animation).
“I think it was, you see, that probably it never left me,” Baker said in a new interview to commemorate the BBC Worldwide release of the newly-completed Shada (which combines original footage with new animation).
“And that’s why I can never stay away from it, you know – it was a lovely time of my life.
“I loved doing Doctor Who because it was life to me,” he went on. “It’s an amazing thing to be in something that was more important – my real life was really rather drab compared to the life of Doctor Who when we were making it.”
“Sometimes, when it would get near 5 o’ clock, I used to dread the end of rehearsal. Because then, real life would impinge on me.
“Doctor Who for me was an asylum. When I was in Doctor Who in full flight, making silly suggestions and pulling funny faces to make the other actors laugh, then I was happy.
“But then of course came five o’clock – and like everyone at five o’ clock, they’re leaving work – another reality impinges. Life – I wasn’t very good at that.”
In other words, then, Baker was more than happy to return to the world of Who – and he even has a theory as to why his particular Doctor has stood the test of time (and space) to remain popular to this day.
“Well I suppose actually because I was the silliest!” he suggested. “I was the most alien, I think.
“When I got it, I felt this benevolent alien personality, which was part of me. I embraced it and it took me over.”
Den of Geek spoke with “Star Trek‘s Ash Tyler and Captain Gabriel Lorca, aka Shazad Latif and Jason Isaacs, about their Discovery characters, shared trauma, fan theories and more.” Here are some excerpts:
There are a lot of purist fans out there, how have you reacted to some of the negative feedback?
SL: When we make it I’m enjoying what we’re doing and the rest we don’t have any power over. It’s like a painting, if people don’t like it then they don’t like it. We can’t really do much about that.
JI: I thought it was just a sign of how unbelievably passionate and protective they were of this legacy, and before we were on the air they were reacting to a trailer or something. Micro-analysing every frame of it. Now that we’re on, I’m a bit disappointed that the dissent has died down. I liked when people were outraged by things, and mostly everyone’s loving it all over the world now. I seek out those people who are upset because they’re always more passionate, first in line to watch it and first to hit the internet afterwards. They’re probably more die hard fans that anybody else.
Every new series that came along was hated instinctually by everybody and slowly they were won over. I think we’ve won them over. Quickly, which is a bit of a shame…
Shazad, you’ve probably been asked this by everyone today, but are you a Klingon?
JI: I can’t believe you’re not asking me – there’s a fan theory that I’m a Romulan!
SL: That’s not the same thing. There are crazy fan theories which is, like you were saying, the power of Star Trek fandom, they’re great detectives and some things they get right and some they get wrong.
JI: I love it. The madder they are the better – superb!
How do you feel about that way of watching TV now, where it’s kind of a detective game?
SL: I don’t know why you’d want to know so much before, I get that it’s because they love it.
JI: Well it’s a mystery that they’re trying to guess. The big thing for me, not the theories because one of the great things about this Star Trekparticularly in our dark and troubled times, our credits run and the debate starts. The worst thing you can be is something where the credits run and people say “What shall we eat?”. It actually affects people and they’re thinking about it. Although it’s on Netflix it’s not bingeable so there’s a week to talk about things like there is with Game Of Thrones. The thing that bothers me – networks have asked me to live tweet shows I’ve been in before, and I want people to watch the telly not look down at their phones or iPads. Watch it and talk about it afterwards.
Is one of the reasons you signed on because of how prevalent those issues that Star Trek has always been about are right now?
SL: It wasn’t really that I was interested, I didn’t really get to choose. I had to take the job (laughs). I’m not in that position yet. But yeah that’s the whole point of Star Trek.
JI: Yeah you take good acting jobs that are interesting and challenging, and something you haven’t done before. But I’ve got two teenage girls and if they’re looking at the news and reading newspapers, they’re being told – unlike when we were growing up – that people in charge are childish or racist or homophobic or sexual predators. The world seems a very unsafe place and more and more divisive. There’s the rise of the right and so to get to do the job that we love but also be part of telling a story that sends a message of optimism. It says that maybe in the future, if we get it right, we won’t be judged by gender or the colour of our skin or our sexuality. Even species on our show. There’s an extra bonus for us that you’re putting something good out in the world when we’re getting pumped some very toxic stuff from powerful people.
Many of the complaints from purists center around how Star Trek: Discovery fits into canon. Syfy Wire looked at some of the issues.
I’ll just comment on a couple of other aspects, and I’ve also raised some of these points in more detail in my weekly reviews of the episodes.
Many of the differences come down to the look, and to a considerable degree I’d give them some leeway to take advantage of modern special effects even if this gives a more modern look than the original series which takes ten years later. Questions regarding uniforms and details of the ships could be handled with explanations such as type of ships or perhaps different services within Star Fleet. Realistically if you look at the changes from the original show to the movies, which were produced years later with a higher budget, there were also considerable differences.
The Klingons have been a problem since Star Trek: The Next Generation. While I’m not going to allow this to reduce my enjoyment of Discovery, I think that it might have been better to have them look like the Klingons of STTNG. This allows viewers to go with one of two explanations–either the genetic manipulation theory that the Klingons actually did change temporarily, or the obvious meta explanation that they have used more expensive makeup since TNG.
The bigger issue is the technology, primarily with the spore drive. I’ve mentioned a variety of possible explanations in the past including reasons that it could no longer be feasible to be used by Star Fleet, no longer allowed, or perhaps that the technology is lost. I’m not particularly concerned about finding that Spock never mentioned his half-sister since Star Trek V also showed him to have a brother we never knew about. Spock was never the most talkative character.
Executive producer Aaron Harberts had these comments regarding continuity quoted by Metro:
‘We have ten years until the original series comes into play. It is a challenge creatively because we have lots of choices, in terms of how do we reconcile this [Spore] drive? This surrogate daughter of Sarek? How do we reconcile these things the closer we get to the original series? ‘That’s going to be a big discussion that we have in season two. What’s so fun about the character of Michael, just because she hasn’t been spoken about, doesn’t mean she didn’t exist. A lot of the writers on our show are deeply involved in Star Trek, their knowledge is some of the finest around, they really do help us find areas where we can steer around things.
‘But the Spore drive? Who knows. It could be classified. There are many options. Some of the best ideas come from all over the place, not just in our writers room so I love hearing about the fan ideas and theories. We’ll have to see.’ After initially creating the show’s concept, Bryan Fuller departed the series, and the question surrounding his decision to make it a prequel is still a mystery to Aaron, who was too busy catching up on Star Trek canon to question it. ‘I’m glad that it is because it set up parameters for us. Let’s say we set it 100 years after Voyager, the canvas is so broad. To try to contemplate, you’re creating a whole new mythology really,’ Aaron says.
‘I think Bryan [Fuller] was interested in the original series and I think he was interested in the lead up to where the original series is. I think he was very interested in the Klingon federation conflict, but I don’t know definitively why he picked that.’
While I agree that it should be possible to reconcile the continuity questions Aaron discussed, I find it interesting that, instead of already having a specific plan in mind, they are leaving the explanation for the writers to come up with next season. This also means that it is probably pointless to spend too much time analyzing episodes for hints as to the ultimate explanation as the show’s writers have not yet decided how things will turn out. Fortunately they do have writers with a good knowledge of Star Trek canon, leaving me confident that, even if the explanations are not one hundred percent airtight, they will be no worse than what we have already experience in following Star Trek continuity.
The Orville was off last week for Thanksgiving and will soon be completing its first season. The final episode of the shortened season will air December 7. Here is the official synopsis of the episode, entitled Mad Idolatry:
Ed and Kelly seriously reconsider getting back together. However, while Kelley is on a mission with Isaac and Gordon to investigate the origins of an uncharted star, they suddenly crash-land on a planet from another universe. Kelly then makes a decision with unforeseen long-term consequences for the planet, putting Ed in a difficult position in the all-new “Mad Idolatry” season finale episode of THE ORVILLE airing Thursday, Dec. 7 (9:01-10:00 PM ET) on FOX. (ORV-113) (TV-14 L, S, V).
The relationship between Ed and Kelly has dominated many of the episodes. While I think it has often been overdone, it will be interesting to see how things have changed now that they have both been working together, and Ed realizes that Kelly might have slept with Darulio due to pheromones she could not resist per Cupid’s Dagger.
TV Guide has eleven teases for next week’s Arrowverse crossover. Here are the first few:
1. Earth-X is full of baddies
As if being controlled by nazis wasn’t enough of a clue about how evil Earth-X is, this world is also home to some very sinister versions of the heroes we know and love. So far, we know the Reverse Flash (Tom Cavanagh), the Green Arrow (Stephen Amell) and Supergirl (Melissa Benoist) all have counterparts on Earth-X that are aligned with the regime.
2. Citizen Cold
Wentworth Miller has returned to the Arrow-verse, this time as the Earth-X version of himself: Citizen Cold. We can only assume he’s part of the Earth-X resistance movement, and it’s about time we got to see Miller kick some nazi butt.
3. Kara busts out those pipes again
You didn’t think the CW would just let Melissa Benoist’s amazing singing voice go to waste did you? Thanks to their little journey into musical theater last year, Barry decides to have Kara sing at his wedding, and we guarantee you’re not prepared for how awesome it is.
Stephen Amel discussed the Arrowverse crossover in an interview here.
Melissa Benoist discussed her role in an interview here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDBwsMIXlMk
Agents of SHIELD returns with a two-hour premier on December 1 but if you cannot wait that long, the first seventeen minutes have been released–video above. A trailer for season five can be seen here. We know from last season’s finale that the season involves going into space. Comicbook.com has some information on the aliens which will appear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGAnY6DqevY
The Magicians returns on January 10. Trailer above showing them starting their quest to restore magic, after it was turned off in last season’s finale.
