Интересный тред:

This is 2 eps in a row with the 13th Doctor doing some of the best scenes of her tenure away from the rest of the regulars and it's interesting to think about why. Partly it's as simple as "no one's known what to do with a 3-person TARDIS crew since the late '60s." But I think there's some other factors at play.

Chibnall and the other writers don't just need to make a 3-person crew work, they need to figure out what a 3-person crew means for the new series of Doctor Who, which is way more demanding toward the Doctor-Companion relationship.

Basically Russell Davies set the table here: the Doctor-companion relationship is one of co-dependent fixation that is often borderline-romantic or even fully romantic. Even with Donna and Bill, where romance was explicitly taken off the table, the intense attachment remains.

For all of Moffat's departures from RTD, he never really challenged this structure: there's the Doctor and a key companion they fixate on and who in turn becomes fiercely attached to the Doctor right back. Even with Rory and frequent appearances by River, the show is explicit that the bond is between Eleven and Amy. She persuades him where River can't ("fish fingers and custard"), he tries to get her to leave Rory behind in "Angels Take Manhattan." It keeps coming back to 2 people.

The Chibnall era hasn't figured out how to expand this co-dependency to four. Maybe it doesn't want to, maybe it wants to find a healthier dynamic for a TARDIS crew - which could potentially be cool - but we haven't actually seen that emerge either. Mainly we've just seen overcrowding, an insular arc between Ryan and Graham, and Yaz getting neglected.

But a big part of it I strongly suspect is that Chibnall - very understandably - super doesn't know how to approach the idea of borderline- or fully-romantic fixation coming from a Doctor who's a woman. This is really new territory in terms of audience assumptions/associations. Perhaps it *shouldn't* be any different, but it is. Gets into a whole host of issues. If Thirteen developed a 9/10/11/12-type fixation on any of the 3 companions, we'd be having a whole host of complicated reactions. I suspect Chibnall doesn't want to touch it w/a 10-foot pole. A big crew keeps the TARDIS noisy and jokey, there's no risk of a quiet moment, a lingering glance - that's what you do when you want to keep most of the audience from thinking romance. (Of course shippers will ship no matter what, that's a force of nature.)

But I think this has been the biggest example yet of: *no one knows how to make Nu-Who outside of the Russell T Davies model.* He so thoroughly defined it, at a structural level. You can innovate within its parameters, but no one's figured out how to explode it.


Могу ошибаться, но, мне кажется, это ещё и к вопросу о том, насколько близки последние сезоны олдскула с первыми сезонами ньюскула: этот аспект в какой-то мере присутствует у Седьмого и Эйс.