Responding To The Chibnall Who Essay Backlash

I need to get more pictures of the 13th Doctor in my image library. The same two over and over are getting old.

One of the things reviewers and commentators get to hear when they discuss something they haven’t seen, whether they’re judging from the marketing or other reviewers who braved the media they already expected to hate that confirmed everything they were expecting. This is especially true when you know it’s going to be a terrible adaptation regardless of the quality of the work (*ahem*). It’s gotten to the point where these defenders of “you can’t review it until you see it” don’t always practice what they preach. They’ve already made up their minds that ANY rebuke of something that’s been reworked to cater to their preferences is racistsexisthomophobicbigotry and you will so not convince them otherwise that you shouldn’t have even bothered saying something contrary to what they think. They don’t want to know WHY you don’t like it, they just don’t want to hear you put down something they love…while constantly putting down, trashing, and sometimes outright remaking something they hate and declaring it wasn’t “made for you”. That’s the essence of the “everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeee” crowd.

For example, before I went offline I brought you a five-hour essay by Jay Exci going over everything Chris Chibnall did wrong as showrunner for Doctor Who, which included things like unnecessary retcons, stories that make the heroes look like the baddies because going after the sociopolitical target of the day was more important, not giving Jodie Whitaker’s Doctor a personality to act with (that’s the 13th Doctor, not the actress–you work with what the script and director give you, even when it’s bupkis), and not really understanding the source material. Not to mention the butt-ugly control room that makes wish they went with the coral room of Davies. Yes, it’s that bad, and Chibnall was handing the best design in New Who and said “nah, I want a big honking crystal in the center that looks like a volcano died mid-eruption and a claustrophobic version of McGann’s pylons where you can barely get a good camera angle”. If you’re going to put your own mark on something, make sure you have the creativity and respect of the work you are now steward of to make it good. The video made the case that he didn’t.

So watch the original video before you watch the following video. I know its five hours but worth it, and will give you an edge over the protestors who clearly didn’t watch it at all before making rage rants that caused Exci to make this follow-up video (don’t worry, this one is just under 30 minutes) where he clarifies his previous critiques and pushes back against those who didn’t even watch it before saying it was garbage. Note that both contains profanity. I like to warn people because I don’t use it myself so it’s good to have a heads up in something I can’t edit for PG

Catch more Jay Exci on his YouTube channel.

I just did a check, and the original video is still the first thing that comes up when you search for “Doctor Who” on YouTube, followed by promotions for the show, Big Finish trailers, and the current topic of Chibnall and Whitaker leaving after the end of this season. Doctors only hanging around for three years is a tradition rarely broken (only the two most popular, Tom Baker in the classic era and David Tennant in the new era, have gone longer while Christopher Eccleston left due to various issues he was having with the BBC at the time as well as I think in his personal life) but the showrunner only staying that long is interesting. Clearly this is doing well for YouTube, who only cares if the videos make them money these days.

When I first watched the original video it was out of curiosity. It came up a few different times in the recommendations (and still does) and I eventually because curious how much critique there was in five hours (which is why recommendations matter so much to YouTubers) so I watched it. What I saw was a thought-out critique of decisions Chibnall and his staff had made about the show versus previous versions and some jokes to keep the thing from being a stale essay. Even if you disagree with him it’s a good example of how to make a video essay, especially something lasting longer than an hour. The criticisms were sound and that’s why I posted it. (That and I wanted to lighten my load before going into surgery, the same reason I did that week-long tribute to Superfriends intros.)

I’m actually more bothered about the Doctor getting a female regeneration than he is. I stated my reasons why and all were based on story. However, it isn’t too unlikely that for whatever reason the Doctor’s estrogen levels went higher than the testosterone levels, and supposedly they wanted to explore this in the classic period. The problem was WHY they did it, not because of the story but because they wanted to make this or that group happy even if never watched the show before, during, or since. That said, go back to every one of Exci’s arguments and ask yourself “if they had gotten a white man, maybe Alasdair Beckett-King so he could finally be ginger, would any of Exci’s arguments be any different and would they pose a problem?” and if nothing else changes in his arguments then the Doctor having Dalek bumps isn’t the problem. (If you didn’t get that reference I’ll explain later.)

Don’t just write off the video as some angry rant. I did more research into Masters Of The Universe: Revelation, a show I actually can’t watch at this time, than they did on this video. The everything for meeeeeeeeeeee crowd and those fans who don’t like ANYTHING bad said about a property they enjoy, whether it actually is garbage or not because they’ve had to defend a hobby for so very long, are against ANY criticism of what they like, but will happily tell you why something they don’t like is garbage without actually giving it even so much as a surface watching. That’s rather hypocritical of them, but that would require them to care about something that isn’t for them. If they could that they wouldn’t be hypocrites.