Australis13

I actually really enjoy Tom Baker’s final season - Meglos is really the only weak link there. I thought JNT was fine early on, but after 3-4 years it would have been time for a change (and IIRC, JNT tried to find a replacement during the Colin Baker era). Unfortunately for him (and us), there was nobody else to take over and so he just kept going (I think Moffat was in the same boat for the Capaldi era).

Re Colin Baker’s outfit - yes, now that you mention it I remember reading that!

Some of the McCoy stories are fine, if very camp. I am probably in the minority in that I really don’t like Ghost Light but enjoyed Dragonfire. The core concept of The Happiness Patrol could have been really good, but it was abysmally executed. In one respect it was probably a good thing that the show ended when it did, as I am aware of “the Cartmel Masterplan” and hate the concept - like Chibnall’s Timeless Child nonsense, it would have just completely undermined established canon.

I enjoy Peter Davison, but Season 21 was clearly where the writing was on the decline. I can barely watch Colin Baker’s era and it has only been when I rewatched it with the production subtitles on that I finally understand why I don’t like most of his stories:

• Eric Saward (script editor) tended to kill off the entire guest cast, so most of the stories have a bleak ending
• JNT thought violence was the main appeal of the show at that point, hence why the show was more violent during Colin’s tenure
• Not only was it more violent, but it became more grotesque in Season 22 in particular
• Then on top of all that, Colin Baker wanted his doctor to have a character arc where he started out being unlikeable with manic mood changes, but would grow to be a likeable version over 3 years. By itself this would have been fine, but in combination with the other factors (plus the show almost getting axed after Season 22), it’s just too much.

I haven’t seen anything with Jodie Whittaker in it (apart from a few scenes of The Power of the Doctor) so I can’t really comment on her acting. Chibnall really destroyed the show for me, though, with his childhood fanfic concept of the Timeless Child and the Fugitive Doctor (neither of which actually make any sense with the previous established canon - too many problems to go into here - and to me signal complete contempt for the show’s history).

I have heard good things about Heaven Sent, but the bits I saw of Hell Bent really put me off. Rassilon was badly miscast, the Doctor needlessly killed the general (which is just not him, not to mention the completely unnecessary cringe-worthy men-bashing dressed up as humour*) and Moffat’s inability to actually commit to the ending of “Face the Raven” completely undermines the impact of that episode. I just don’t see why I would spend my time when the payoff isn’t worth it - whilst nobody’s perfect (RTD’s “Last of the Time Lords” was a mediocre resolution), Moffat rarely seems to wrap things up satisfactorily and I hated Matt Smith’s final episode for that reason.

• To be clear, I have no issue with female Time Lords or female leads. I have an issue with writing that has to put down another gender, particularly for the sake of a joke, and that instance was salt in the wound for a scene that had already broken suspension of disbelief.

Each to their own. The writing declined with every season after Matt Smith’s first (2010) and by the Capaldi era there were just too many things that were jolting me out of the show.

The irony is that, according to the article, it already does. What is changing is that the LLM will be able to use more of that data:

OpenAI is rolling out a new update to ChatGPT’s memory that allows the bot to access the contents of all of your previous chats. The idea is that by pulling from your past conversations, ChatGPT will be able to offer more relevant results to your questions, queries, and overall discussions.

ChatGPT’s memory feature is a little over a year old at this point, but its function has been much more limited than the update OpenAI is rolling out today… Previously, the bot stored those data points in a bank of “saved memories.” You could access this memory bank at any time and see what the bot had stored based on your conversations… However, it wasn’t perfect, and couldn’t naturally pull from past conversations, as a feature like “memory” might imply.

Honestly, a decent hiatus is long overdue at this point. After Capaldi’s first season in 2014, I gave up on it and consider “The Day of the Doctor” as the finale/stopping point. I watched bits of “The Power of the Doctor” (which my wife watched in full) and it just felt like really bad fanfic. Nothing I have read about the Chibnall era or RTD’s return has convinced me that it would be worth returning to the show.

It needs a good break and then a completely fresh production team to come in and start it again in future, at which point I’ll try it out again.