If it stinks like it, then it probably is...

A brick, a possible last word in the phrase Chibnall writes with all the subtlety and ingenuity of a...




Last week I suggested Chibnall had no talent for writing drama. In fact he makes you realise just how good Pip and Jane Baker actually were.

This week not only would I underline everything I said previously but also point out the script was misogynistic.

Yes, we are most definitely in the Moffat era now. Tonight we were taken back to the old everything bad that could ever happen is down to women theme which underpinned Jekyll. Yes, we had two Silurian females whose dialogue was taken from every bit of clichéd rhetoric imaginable and it was the human woman who murdered just to provide some shallow hokum. No story, no characterisation, no drama just mindless, badly written prejudice.

There really is no point in making a comparison between tonight’s episode and the original Hulke story. It would be like trying to compare profanities daubed on a wall of Bedlam using blood and shit with The Second Coming by Yeats. Well, maybe. I suspect the Bedlam daubing would stink less than anything written by Chibnall.

I’m playing Requiem from Pink Elephants by Mick Harvey just for you Chibnall. Twice as loud as I was last week.

A Glove Across the Face

OK, now I'm really pissed off.

An infinite number of monkeys would have struggled to write something as bad as Chibnall in their first few hours of typing.

Doctor Who: The Hungry Earth

So, let me explain just why what happened tonight is as far from good as is possible to create in easy to digest points (a) for the idiotic wasting which fandom has become and (b) in the hope that Chibnall gives up writing for a while and re-thinks his life priorities.

1) Dialogue. Malcolm Hulke stated in Writing for TV to avoid cliché and constant questions. Chibnall did neither. If a character was not asking a question they were spouting something which has been heard throughout the history of bad drama since TV began.
2) As stated before bad drama is dangerous. It corrodes culture and damages the evolution of the human race.
3) If incapable of creating genuine mystery and tension just take the Spielberg opt-out clause of putting a child in danger.
4) Hulke wrote stories. Chibnall writes plots. If you do not understand why a plot is bad then I suggest you fuck off right now and watch Avatar because there is no hope for you (it's a pointless piece of shite but has lots of pretty colours to keep you amused).
5) Hulke’s stories were imbued with moral complexity and questioning, there was no overall right or wrong but people being led by instinctive notions of fear and racial prejudice. Tonight Chibnall reduced the Silurians to a green, scaly version of Al-Qaeda.
6) The Silurian's were previously tragic in their motivations. They were in danger of extinction and wrestling with the problem that evolution had overtaken them and their place in their world was irrevocably lost. For Chibnall they are just an excuse to have a B-movie green monster re-modelled on the creature from Predator and the Tractors from Frontios. There is a difference between theft and revisionism. The Hungry Earth was theft, badly executed.
7) Incidently, it is a different race the Doctor met before not a different species. At least get the basics of science correct.

I’m playing Requiem from Pink Elephants by Mick Harvey just for you Chibnall.