'Doctor Who' Christmas Special Streams on Disney+ and the BBC (cnet.com) 65
An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from CNET:
Marking its 60th year on television, the British time-travel series will close out 2023 with one last anniversary special that arrives on Christmas Day. Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor helms the Tardis in The Church on Ruby Road, which centers on an abandoned baby who grows up looking for answers... Disney Plus will stream Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road on Monday, Dec. 25, at 12:55 p.m. ET (9:55 a.m. PT) in all regions except the UK and Ireland, where it will air on the BBC. In case you missed it, viewers can also watch David Tennant starring in the other three anniversary specials: The Star Beast, Wild Blue Yonder and The Giggle. All releases are available on Disney Plus.
But what's interesting is CNET goes on to explain "why a VPN could be a useful tool." Perhaps you're traveling abroad and want to stream Disney Plus while away from home. With a VPN, you're able to virtually change your location on your phone, tablet or laptop to get access to the series from anywhere in the world. There are other good reasons to use a VPN for streaming too. A VPN is the best way to encrypt your traffic and stop your ISP from throttling your speeds...
You can use a VPN to stream content legally as long as VPNs are allowed in your country and you have a valid subscription to the streaming service you're using. The U.S. and Canada are among the countries where VPNs are legal
But what's interesting is CNET goes on to explain "why a VPN could be a useful tool." Perhaps you're traveling abroad and want to stream Disney Plus while away from home. With a VPN, you're able to virtually change your location on your phone, tablet or laptop to get access to the series from anywhere in the world. There are other good reasons to use a VPN for streaming too. A VPN is the best way to encrypt your traffic and stop your ISP from throttling your speeds...
You can use a VPN to stream content legally as long as VPNs are allowed in your country and you have a valid subscription to the streaming service you're using. The U.S. and Canada are among the countries where VPNs are legal
I'll say it (Score:2, Troll)
Jodie Whitaker was so terrible that they brought back David Tennant, permanently.
The last three episodes were enjoyable. Looking forward to this special.
Re:I'll say it (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I think Jodie Whitaker was a good doctor, but the writing and production veered into the weeds. I am glad to see Davies back as the showrunner and bringing Tennant back to get things re-started in a good direction was an excellent idea. His successor, Ncuti Gatwa shows a lot of promise. It is interesting that they left the door wide open for further adventures with David Tennant at the same time.
Re:I'll say it (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, Jodie herself was fine as an actress.
The problem is the people running and writing the show.
The show is a sad excuse for what has gone beforre
And I've withdrawn from the show as I've already seen enough damage done to the series.
Re: I'll say it (Score:2)
It seems to have become little more than a platform for "progressive" liberal ideology. In the first 20 mins of the 1st new david tenant episode we discovered Donna's daughter was mixed race and trans and there was some head honcho in a wheelchair. All they needed was the box ticking lesbian and gay characters. Perhaps they turned up later, I stopped watching. I want a good story, not an unsubtle tedious display of the writers politics.
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It was a good story. You just missed it because you were too busy being outraged by the window dressing.
Re: I'll say it (Score:4, Insightful)
too busy being outraged by the window dressing.
Too much window dressing gets distracting and annoying.
But the "head honcho in a wheelchair" is nothing new. The differently-abled Davros first appeared in 1975. And the first female Doctor in 1999.
Captain Jack was queer in an entertaining way, not the more recent eye-rolling "how fucking woke can the BBC possibly get" kind of way.
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"Too much window dressing gets distracting and annoying."
Quite. When you realise the write is more interested in pushing his politics than telling a story its time to bail out.
"The differently-abled Davros first appeared in 1975"
Davros was half man half dalek, it wasn't a wheelchair.
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No. Davros was a Kaled scientist.
He created a bunch of mutant monsters aka the Daleks.
He was not "half Dalek"
It was a conveyance device for him. The equivalent of a wheelchair.
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"It was a good story"
Thats not what a lot of the critics wrote. Seems I missed little other than the usual childish incomprehensible nonsense punctuated by teenage politics.
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Sorry, Jodie herself was fine as an actress.
The problem is the people running and writing the show.
This happened long before Whittaker came in. The show had been going down hill for years. I gave up after the Matt Smith era, not that his replacement was bad but the writing had just become lazy and repetitive whilst the budget seemed to be spent on huge amounts of CG to compensate.
The writing for Doctor Who had never been Merchant Ivory, but it was always clever enough to compensate for the shows budget nature and interesting enough to keep the audiences attention.
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Moffat has written some of the best episodes and was a fine showrunner, but he has made it clear he does not want to run the show again. But it seems that he will be writing some episodes while Davies runs the show, as was the case for Blink, the Girl in the Fireplace and many others.
Re:I'll say it (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isn't just Jodie Whittaker, it's all the decisions that led up to that terrible choice in casting and writing. The show is dead.
Re:I'll say it (Score:5, Informative)
No doubt. Especially now with all the preachy gender bender garbage. I mean, a time lord needs to be preached about transvestites because apparently he's never seen them before in all of time across the universe. Wow I wonder why that may be lol.
And then the writers went out of their way to change an evil alien villain who couldn't walk into an old white guy who could. Their reasoning was because they don't think people with disabilities should be depicted by evil characters. Like...what? Pretty sure if they hired a disabled actor, he'd love the chance to play that role. They didn't give an explanation on why they changed him to an old white guy instead of an alien though.
It's outright historical. It's more entertaining to see everyone trash and laugh at the show for being garbage than it is to actually watch it.
Re:I'll say it (Score:5, Insightful)
This entire comment is absolute nonsensical garbage.
1) going out of one's way just to upset people? Is suicidal idiocy. In a product being aired for a profit motive? Financial and reputational idiocy.
2) "Pandering to the people who want a bland, conservative show" means you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. The show was originally meant to be additionally educational. The show was meant to be science-fiction and not fantasy. What it's doing RIGHT NOW is falling in line with the other garbage being produced now.
3) And here's where this gets fun. This show is what was responsible for turning me into a left-wing progressive over forty years ago. What the show is doing now is not "left-wing" or "progressive". Or "inclusive". And you were dumb enough to say it yourself - going out of his way to upset people. That's not inclusion, that's exclusion.
4) This is where it gets provably, non-subjectively stupid - in the self-contradictions. Even if what is now called "The Message" is COMPLETELY IGNORED, the show - that first special, was made by a mentally damaged idiot to be praised by mentally damaged idiots and it looks like that includes you.
A "male-presenting Time Lord" would never understand letting go of power? They said to the "male-presenting" whose influence is what made Donna give up the money. And when she woke up, female Donna whined and moaned about giving up the money. The Doctor as a male had previously given up the presidency of the Time Lords THREE TIMES. The Doctor originally gave up life on Gallifrey because he wanted to see the rest of the universe.
The male Doctor had given up the Bad Wolf energy to put back into the TARDIS or the Vortex. In, you know, the episode that Russell Davies had written himself.
Which means even if you completely ignore "The Message", Russell Davies is a brain-damaged incompetent moron who's fallen so far he can't do the basics of his own job - write a coherent story.
4) "and the notion of justice has always evolved over time along with real life society"
You are an idiot and a danger to society. If the idea of "justice" has changed, then we're lost. This is as good as historical revisionism. If society has changed and it gets to keep the thought that it's still a "just society" by CHANGING THE NOTION OF JUSTICE, then you've obviously always been at war with Eastasia.
And if you can't see that, if you genuinely think upsetting and excluding people is "inclusive" and "woke" then you yourself are lost, damaged, destructive, stupid and too dangerous to be allowed to interact with the public.
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For years there have been people whining that the next Doctor will have to be black, gay, transgender, an immigrant, and every other grievance imaginable. Davies knew that it was just a minority of people saying it, so he decided to lean into it and make something undeniably good.
Who has always been progressive, as you note. It's just that what is progressive has moved on, e.g. as acceptance of women in positions of power and responsibility has become widely accepted.
Again, Trek was the same. In the 60s it
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Ruth as a female, black doctor was awesome. And am I the only one that liked Bill Potts as a character? Not to mention that Martha was friggin' sexy. And as the show hadn't had a decent fantapants since Amy, they had to bring back Donna.
A diverse cast is not the problem; insipid writing is insipid writing. They let go Graham and Ryan so that they can tease us with Yaz's lesbian fling that never eventuates? John Bishop must have been disappointed he got saddled with such a dull season. And the timeless child
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>For years there have been people whining that the next Doctor will have to be black, gay, transgender, an immigrant, and every other grievance imaginable.
It wasn't whining - more that you people are very predictable. I guessed the next doctor would be male, in an effort to recover viewers they had lost. Per the progressive stack, I guessed the doctor would need to be black or gay. We'll see if the show succeeds, or if follows the other properties that replaced success with anger, then apathy.
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This is why it's important to have some diversity on screen. We are still at the point where people like you claim it's all just pandering and whatever the "progressive stack" is supposed to be.
It reminds me a lot of The Original Series of Star Trek. The same stuff was said about the non white and non male characters on that show, but it paved the way for others who came later and couldn't be criticised in the same way.
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Then make new characters. Axel Foley, B.A. Baracas, Storm, Devlin Waugh, Judges Anderson/Hershey/Giant, Northstar, Blade et al were not race/sex swaps. Yet we had all of this in the 80s and 90s.
The reason literal Nazis (i.e. normal people) walk away is because of diversity cultists crudely injecting their divisive nonsense into existing properties, ruining them in the process. Tom of Finland sold well long before it was deemed necessary to turn Superman into a gay romance.
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Maybe your aren't familiar with Who, but one of the core elements is that the Doctor "regenerates" every few years. New actor, new personality, but common elements and memories.
So any attributes like race or gender are temporary. It's been established that Time Lords can change gender when regenerating, before The Doctor did it. Well, you can't read too much into canon... One Time Lord used regeneration to try on different looks, like she was trying on different outfits, and then settled in looking like a p
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>Maybe your aren't familiar with Who, but one of the core elements is that the Doctor "regenerates" every few years. New actor, new personality, but common elements and memories.
You might not know how this worked in the UK. Everybody has a first Doctor, mine being John Pertwee.
>So any attributes like race or gender are temporary. It's been established that Time Lords can change gender when regenerating, before The Doctor did it. Well, you can't read too much into canon... One Time Lord used regenerati
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Are you really trying to claim that The Doctor was never gay before? Even a little bit?
Let's see. He hangs out with hot young women, but shows no interest in them. He's very accepting of non traditional relationships between people he meets. His flamboyant style and choice of attire is what us Brits would call "camp" at times.
As Donna noted, the signs have been there since the start. Some of the writers were gay, but couldn't have gay characters on screen due to attitudes at the time, but it didn't stop the
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>Are you really trying to claim that The Doctor was never gay before? Even a little bit?
No, I'm not claiming that. Normal people don't speculate on characters having fringe sexual habits - or any sexual habits for that matter. It's a family show.
>Let's see. He hangs out with hot young women, but shows no interest in them. He's very accepting of non traditional relationships between people he meets. His flamboyant style and choice of attire is what us Brits would call "camp" at times.
This is Alex Jones
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In other words, you could ignore the stuff you don't like (non straight while males) before, and object to writers being able to use those things openly.
As for it being a family show, it's well documented that quite a few of the companions were selected to add some sex appeal, complete with low cut tops and even the odd bikini. It's okay when it's appealing to straight men with white women I guess.
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>In other words, you could ignore the stuff you don't like (non straight while males) before, and object to writers being able to use those things openly.
Sure, go with that. Devlin Waugh: Swimming in Blood is easily in my top ten comics of all time, and that character is positively flaming. The difference is it's an original character that was written well. Also, the story wasn't anchored on Waugh being gay.
>As for it being a family show, it's well documented that quite a few of the companions were se
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Ironically the moderation in this thread proves me right. Conservatives interpret opposing opinions as trolling, so you might as well lean into it. They are going to have a pissy fit anyway, so why not just make the show you want to make?
Ratings were good. Reviews were good, at least from the critics who don't get upset about having a non binary person on screen. Pandering would achieve nothing.
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This website was polled to overwhelmingly left. Generally, it's conservative posts that are marked as trolled. I for one am absolutely surprised that my posts aren't already in "troll" status. They're actually the opposite. Turns out that pretending that men are "woman" is actually an extreme far left view. And not even the left believe in state funded propaganda by the BBC.
It's a big red flag on how extreme your views are, and how they don't even resonate with people on the left. Nobody is modding them up
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1. a) You're assuming that Davies is trying to upset people when it seems that what he is doing is celebrating people who are not often celebrated. If one feels personally attacked by someone else getting the attention, then one is seriously immature. 1b) The show is for children, who paradoxically aren't as immature about seeing people who aren't like themselves. Children themselves are not as set in stone about what "normal" is — particularly not sexual identity — and therefore do not think an
Re:I'll say it (Score:5, Insightful)
"The doctor has always been woke, fighting for justice"
And yet everybody loved the show no matter what their political affiliation was. Why? Because they weren't pushing woke propaganda and they didn't pander to specific political views. Your comments make little sense when you call it a bland conservative show while also saying that it was always woke.... The ratings were higher before they got the woke mind virus, and we are talking 30% higher.
Obviously Davies is going out of his way to anger fans. He practically said that he wanted to shove his garbage views into peoples faces. Just like Disney has said this. It's not a coincidence that Disney has also been releasing flop after flop with that kind of writing. Unfortunately, the BBC is partly tax funded, so the financial stakes are different and they can keep dropping garbage content.
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This is untrue. Back in the 70s and 80s, conservatives hated Who for being progressive and making thinly veiled commentary on then current events.
Workers striking for better conditions was particularly contentious.
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The point being thinly veiled is still veiled. People that want to just shut their mind off and enjoy the show can do so without trying to connect the political or social dots. You can't do that now.
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The eternal TOS vs TNG divide. TOS was very preachy, not subtle at all. TNG was far more subtle, on the rare occasions when it did cover political stuff.
The thing is, you absolutely can turn your brain off with this stuff. You just have to not be offended by LGBTQ people existing, or women having important jobs. What you really want is nostalgia, something from a time when such people were hidden from view.
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Offended by them existing? Most people don't even care. The right and conservatives specifically believe in an individual's right to pursue happiness even if they have different opinions than others. Are you not actually reading comments?
You know those crazy religious nut-jobs who stand on the sidewalk, scream at you, and then tell you how you're going to hell if you don't follow the book of god? Well, it's exactly like that, except 10x louder and it's everywhere instead of just a sidewalk. Nobody cares if
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You say that conservatives believe in individual rights, but who are the ones banning things like gender affirming care and drag shows?
And why can't conservatives ever seem to accept that not everything has to be for them? Whenever someone makes something that's not for their target audience, they complain bitterly about it. The last Matrix movie was a really good example of that.
If you liked 70s and 80s Who then that's great. But clearly you are not the intended audience for this iteration. Unsurprisingly,
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Right. Because a child can barely dress themselves properly, but they somehow have the mental fortitude to decide that it's best to mutilate and sterilize themselves with gender affirming care. Or to decide that they would like to take medications for the rest of their lives to pretend that they're the opposite sex. This isn't a conservative thing. This is a common-sense thing and banning that kind of child abuse it's mostly bipartisan. Only the extreme left supports that kind of abuse.
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You have been misinformed. Children of the age where they can't dress themselves cannot get surgery or medication. There isn't any anyway, as they don't even start to develop most sex characteristics until they reach puberty.
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Thanks for making sense.
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permanently?
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Guess you haven't watched the last episode.
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Negative.
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She was fully onboard with the woke. Interviews with her made it clear she felt she was a pioneer for wammenkind. She's as much to blame as Chibnall and the rest of the legion of identitarian ghouls.
Get the order right! (Score:2)
How much did this ad cost? (Score:2)
What's the price difference between getting a shill article posted on the front page vs running banner ads?
VPN (Score:2)
As a British TV license payer, I don't have too many issues with CNET's brief fixation with VPNs. This particular content has already been paid for (financed) by the BBC via license fees and presumably a hefty input from Disney+. Dr Who seems to the preserve of BBC Wales, despite the number of Scots who have been doctors. Who knows how that all works!
Anyway, its probably fully funded from the get go and all subsequent income is mostly profit. A few folks from around the world might work out how to strea
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Dr. Who is profitable for the BBC, so it actually reduces the licence fee.
Their other big money maker is Top Gear, but that seems to be shelved for now.
Let us guess.. (Score:1)
A great kids show, as ever.
The Daleks better sing (Score:1)
..."Away in a Manger" this time!
But... (Score:2)
Disney+ is not on the list of channels that I can subscribe to
Is this a story or an advertisement? (Score:3)
What the crap is this? The summary reads less like an article and more like an advertisement.... I just skimmed the article and it pretty blatantly IS an advertisement for Disney Plus and Express VPN. Oh CNET, how far you've fallen.