egon_beeblebrox posted:

I hope Eccleston works with Big Finish soon. Few hours of recording a week, nice environment. Maybe they'll get him.

saucerman posted:

I'm kinda jealous of people who, a few weeks before work is supposed to start, have no idea how they will be ready in time and still produce a brilliant piece of art.

egon_beeblebrox posted:

I hope Eccleston works with Big Finish soon. Few hours of recording a week, nice environment. Maybe they'll get him.

NarkyBark posted:

And how good was he! One moment as the Doctor and he nails it. He totally gets it. And he was lovely about being in it. I wasn’t there on his last day, but he gave a little speech and said something like: “I don’t want anyone to think I took this lightly or thought I was slumming it. This really meant something to me, to be the Doctor.” He was quite insistent, saying to me and to others: “So I am properly Doctor Who now. I am a Doctor Who. I can say it?” He loves the fact that he’s Doctor Who. Only having to stay in Cardiff for three weeks, he gets to be Doctor Who.

quote:

I took Louis up and, across the room, Sylvester saw us arriving. He leapt up from a sofa – and he’s not a young man – and he spun his walking cane like the Doctor’s umbrella and said, “Louis, Louis! I’m falling over. Could you just come and help me?” So Louis rushed over and helped Doctor No 7 and he thanked him very much. He’d turned into the seventh Doctor like that [clicks fingers] and I cannot now hear a bad word about his Doctor.

quote:

RT: The icing on the cake was getting Tom Baker to do a cameo towards the end of the special. How did that come about?
SM: Tom Baker, that was sort of awesome. That voice, unchanged since the 70s, those eyes, that smile – all back on the Doctor Who set. And everyone just standing there, staring. Like after all this time on Doctor Who, Doctor Who had turned up. Wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but he was word perfect, showed up with all his business sorted out, and nailed it, take after take. Magical. I can say I was actually there, the day Tom Baker came back.

Jerusalem posted:

Eccleston still keeps up with the show well enough to know about Amy Pond

jivjov posted:

It's just one clip, so I don't want to draw any sweeping conclusions, but he sounds really off in that one clip. Not nearly.....gravely enough.

PoshAlligator posted:

Should have just stuck with Victoria nanny Clara.

She had much more depth than "real" Clara - balancing her two lives.

Rhyno 10 Years Ago posted:

I just have this horrible feeling that Tom is never going to come back to the role.

Davros1 posted:

They already have my money. All of it.


Nah, the Jamie and Zoe thing was part of a trilogy earlier this year, where a future incarnation of the Doctor found himself transported back to an earlier point in his timeline, so you had Seven wth Jo, Six with Jamie & Zoe, and Five with Steven & Vicki.


Though Six did have a brief quadrilogy with Jamie a couple years back.

Astroman posted:

Rhyno posted:

Yeah and look how long it took him!

CaptainYesterday posted:

Well, if we count Dimensions in Time, it took him 12 years to reprise his role as the 4th Doctor.

Bicyclops posted:

Hang on. I leave for a couple of months and Big Finish starts doing Ten and Donna audios? And John loving Hurt is recording a few?! Do they just flat-out have a license for all of New Who? I had better get back to catching up!

Jerusalem posted:

They are now allowed to openly play around in the revival stuff, which is great. There's going to be a range soon of Classic Doctors facing off with Revival Monsters, there's already a new UNIT series, Strax has hooked up with Jago & Litefoot, there's 10/Donna stories coming, War Doctor stories, River Song is going to be appearing in an 8th Doctor story, and they're going to do a Time War story set in its early days when the 8th Doctor was doing his best to stay uninvolved.

Good times, good times.

Acne Rain posted:

if this wasn't her death scene how long and drawn out will her real death scene be

BSam posted:

It will be next seasons arc.

The_Doctor posted:

12 episodes of screaming, moaning

Jerusalem posted:

Short Synopsis: Star Trek: The Eurovision Frontier

Long Synopsis: The 7th Doctor and Mel stumble into a mixture of diplomatic incident, Eurovision song contest, and shoddy Poirot antics all taking place in an episode of Star Trek. Incompetence, wild deductions, and "humor" abound... also the Doctor almost gets laid.

What's Good:

• The "Detective" Story. From the moment the Doctor and Mel find themselves on a space shuttle with two dead bodies, they know they've a mystery to solve. Both take very different approaches to this, with the Doctor content to let the clues come to him, sitting back and evaluating data, trying to figure out motivations and actions and solve the puzzle he's discovered. Meanwhile Mel rushes about enthusiastically making wild deductions based on little to no evidence. When the Doctor calmly shoots down her many theories (all of which make sense but are based on absolutely NOTHING), she quickly finds another person to hang out with who seems more willing to put up with her excited but baseless theories. Mel's complete impatience with the usual trappings of the mystery novel is a lot of fun too, at one point the Doctor tries to do the typical parlor "You're probably wondering why I gathered you all here" scene and Mel just irritably insists he stop teasing them with discarded theories and just tell them who the guilty person is. Perhaps the best part though is this brief exchange between the Doctor and Mel, which sums up their respective absent-minded brilliance and eagerness to correct natures:
  
  Doctor: Every Poirot needs his Watson.
  Mel: Hastings.
  Doctor: Lovely place.
  
  
• The Star Trek parody. Though the names of the crew is apparently based on Space: 1999, it is very obvious from the get-go that the station, crew and even general settings is meant to evoke Star Trek. A weird mixture of TOS, TNG and DS9 to be sure, but still clearly Star Trek. The space station is called Dark Space 8, an obvious reference to Deep Space 9 - the crew feels like a mixture of TOS/TNG characters, with most of the background adventures they reference being obvious parodies of the type often faced by Captain Kirk and his crew, even the fact the station is hosting an intergalactic conference seems apropos. Given enough time I'm sure they would have started talking about Nazi Planet and Cowboy Planet. When the humor is good natured like that, the parody works quite well, and the (oft-forgotten) use of logbooks as a framing device works quite well, especially in the epilogue.
  

What's Not:

• Meanspirited. Unfortunately too often the parody falls into meanspirited territory. The Doctor (not the titular character) and the Professor are incompetents, more interested in workplace relationships and reminiscing about past adventures than actually doing their jobs. The reveals for why each are so useless feel especially mean - one is a drunk and the other is a fraud responsible for hundreds of death to satisfy her own desire for excitement/adventure. The latter is at least called out by Mel, who refuses to let the Doctor just smoothly gloss over these crimes. The entire song contest and all the contestants are treated as jokes, stereotypical caricatures in a contest that nobody REALLY cares about apart from the extraordinarily shallow and moronic. Now maybe this is an accurate depiction of Eurovision itself (All I know about it is that all the other countries are in on the joke that the contest exists purely to make sure England doesn't win it, just to see England get mad about it) but when everybody (including the contestants, the commentators, and the station crew) are constantly making fun of the contest it doesn't exactly make me the listener care at all about it.
  
  
• The mystery. Almost from the beginning the bad guy seems so obvious, the red herrings so clearly red herrings, that there is a sense it can't possibly be that simple. And then it is. There is no "mystery", the bad guy basically stomps around shouting,"I'M THE BAD GUY AND THESE THINGS I AM SAYING ARE LIES!" while other characters say,"THAT GUY MAY BE A JERK BUT HE'S DEFINITELY NOT THE BAD GUY!". The revelation of the mystery doesn't necessarily always need to be the big moment in the story, but the sense I get from listening to this is that it was intended to be - the Doctor's revelation of the true baddie was meant to make the listener go,"Oh wait that puts all his actions in a new context!" instead of,"Yeah.... obviously?"
  
  
• The accents, oh God the accents. Sadly this happens a lot in Big Finish, and there is no exception here. The accents are atrocious - a Valkyrie warrior who bellows and moans in a thick accent constantly and a squeaking Alpha-Centauri style voice for the mouse-like arbiter mean that there is a a constant stream of loud, annoying, grating voices assailing the ears. One alien character can only communicate through a staticky crackling so that is constantly showing up as well. A stronger story would make these bearable, but the plot and characters aren't strong enough and what is meant to be comedic just becomes annoying.
  

Final Thoughts:

Bang-Bang-a-Boom! makes no bones whatsoever about being a comedy, and a parody to boot. Unfortunately, while humor is subjective, I'd argue that the comedy here mostly falls flat, and the parody comes across more mean-spirited than anything else. The cast at least seem to throw themselves into their roles with relish, but the entire story has an air that Big Finish itself wasn't taking things seriously... to the point that it seems to be poking fun at how ridiculous/dramatic/campy the story is... but it is still THEIR story, don't make fun of something that you yourself are producing! A few good moments are surrounded by campy schlock, and the "mystery" itself and the big reveals are so incredibly obvious that it makes you wonder if the Doctor wasn't just holding back on his reveals because he knew there were two hours of content to fill. Comedy is fine and the odd self-effacing story is to be applauded, but it is very very easy to get that stuff wrong, and is such a subjective genre that there is a good chance it is going to fall flat for a significant proportion of viewers. For me it fell flat, and even so soon after listening to it I'm already starting to forget most of it. That's what this ultimately is, a very forgettable story, the primary memory of which will be the mental image of the startled Doctor with his head buried in a large set of breasts (not Peri).

The_Doctor posted:

12 episodes of screaming, moaning and flailing in the background.

NarkyBark posted:

Magical. I can say I was actually there, the day Tom Baker came back.

Neddy Seagoon posted:

"He just sort of wandered onto the set while we were filming out of nowhere and started rambling at Matt Smith, so we made sure to record as much as we could".

Jerusalem posted:

(All I know about it is that all the other countries are in on the joke that the contest exists purely to make sure England doesn't win it, just to see England get mad about it)

BSam posted:

quadrilogy

NarkyBark posted:

SM: We had to work out what else to do. At that point neither David nor Matt were under contract either. I had Jenna [Coleman]. And I did come up with a plotline that was just Jenna. It was a nightmare. We’re weeks from filming. A production team is assembled, people are doing storyboards and I don’t even know if anyone who has ever played the Doctor is going to be in it.

[...]

RT: Didn’t John Hurt say something like “I received the script on Friday and was on set on Monday”?
SM: It wasn’t quite as fast as that but it was bloody fast.

Jerusalem posted:

Short Synopsis: Star Trek: The Eurovision Frontier

NowonSA posted:

Yeah, as much as we can talk about how a writer or a producer or a showrunner is doing a bad job, very few people get to the point of being involved at that level on a T.V. show without a fair amount of talent. The few that do are always pretty noticeable, there's certainly no shortage of bad comedy shows and horribly made movies, but generally if you made it to the top echelon of the entertainment industry you know your poo poo. There's also the fact that the product they're producing can vary wildly based on how they've changed and the hundred-plus other people involved. The same guy that made The Sixth Sense made The Last Airbender, after all.

Basically, sometimes you need to whip up a 50th Anniversary script in about two weeks to remind the people in charge to keep those cars full of money coming to your door.

Jerusalem posted:

Especially that story, it's really good! Not quite as good as The Seeds of Death, but then very little is

saucerman posted:

I'm kinda jealous of people who, a few weeks before work is supposed to start, have no idea how they will be ready in time and still produce a brilliant piece of art. That's why they get paid the big bucks, I guess.

HD DAD posted:

E: I didn't like The Magician's Apprentice at all. However, a draft of the script appeared online not too long ago, and it works much, much better on paper.

Wheat Loaf posted:

The thing that most bothered me about this was the guy doing the bad Terry Wogan impression.

saucerman posted:

I'm kinda jealous of people who, a few weeks before work is supposed to start, have no idea how they will be ready in time and still produce a brilliant piece of art. That's why they get paid the big bucks, I guess.