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I decided to check out an early Big Finish release, so I fired up The Fearmonger on Spotify. It's not as polished as later stuff sure (the sound design is still a work in process, the secondary characters aren't fleshed out and sound too similar so its easy to mix them up), but it was a surprisingly mature story, and the Seven/Ace chemistry was seamless.
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Apr 3, 2021 19:09
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The evolution of big finish stories is really fascinating. I think a lot of people would agree that that modern BF stuff isn't as bold or daring as older stuff, and I would love a comprehensive breakdown of that shift. I'm sure a lot of is down to the tv show coming back and becoming an international sensation--weren't they pretty open about curtailing the 8th Doctor Divergent Universe storyline due to not wanting their flagship audio series to be so "weird" at a time of increased interest in the franchise?
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Apr 3, 2021 19:33
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It just seems these days it's more about quantity then quality. Not to say there weren't some questionable earlier big finish releases.
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Apr 3, 2021 21:57
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Disclaimer: I listened to basically the whole line circa 2015 or so and majorly burnt out, so I've listened to nothing since then. Big Finish is very good at producing technically sound audio dramas. Which is unsurprising since they've been doing it for two decades, but I've heard an awful lot of bad audio plays so it's important to point out. Now... RTD wrote 39 Doctor Who scripts of 45 minutes. Moffat wrote 55 Doctor Who scripts of 45 minutes. Terrance Dicks wrote, charitably, seven serials and Robert Holmes is at 17, maybe. Nicholas Briggs, as far as I can count, has written well over 100 Doctor Who scripts of 90 to 140 minutes, and has managed to do so without (again, as of 2015) noticeably improving as a writer. Some of the other early guys are around RTD/Moffat level of influence based on number of stories, and far over that level if you use minutes as your criterion. And none of them were particularly good writers to begin with. When that's the core of your operation, I don't know how you can produce anything more than technically sound mediocrity, and boy, do they do a lot of that. Are there some great stories from the post-2005 era? Sure, but I think that's more because when you release 26 stories a year some of them, on average, are going to be great. I think BF gets lent an air of authenticity because they have access to the original actors. Nobody would be talking about, I dunno, that time Winston Churchill fought the Cybermen with the Sixth Doctor or whatever if you didn't have Colin Baker and whoever played Churchill in that one episode doing the lines.
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Apr 3, 2021 23:10
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If I'm understanding it right, a lot of Briggs' writing work is editing other people's scripts (and having other edit his), and he seems to do a lot of the directing (Lisa Bowerman does a lot too, it seems!), so its not like he's running the whole show himself, even if he is the face of the company. I think what makes Big Finish stand out is that even in mediocre stories, you know the regular cast is going to give at least a good performance. You might get a bad Sixth Doctor story, but there's a good chance Colin Baker is still going to try and deliver the material in a fun way. Or maybe there's a weak 7/Ace story, but at least McCoy and Aldred will have some good moments bouncing off each other. The end of the monthly line is an interesting move. They're quite strong when they can fill in the gaps that the franchise gives them (who would have thought Eric Roberts would have ever reprised the Master role, for example? Or John Hurt doing more War Doctor stuff? Or new 1st Doctor material outside of audiobooks?) But maybe they do have too many spin-offs? Ones focusing on popular characters who have been fleshed out, or offer a different experience to the core Doctor Who experience with fan favourite characters? Sure! Some I'm not sure who they're even for? OldMemes fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 01:09
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Yeah, I understand the argument than the main range got way too huge and it's kinda an impenetrable wall of "oh god where do I start" especially if you're wanting to follow the ongoing relationship between a given doctor and a big finish original companion...but ending the range and changing to a "here's boxsets every so often" seems like an odd way to fix that. If I'd asked, I would have suggested just splitting the display for all those stories off into separate screens for 5 through 8, and then just updating each doctor's page for a given story.
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Apr 4, 2021 03:06
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OldMemes posted:I decided to check out an early Big Finish release, so I fired up The Fearmonger on Spotify. It's not as polished as later stuff sure (the sound design is still a work in process, the secondary characters aren't fleshed out and sound too similar so its easy to mix them up), but it was a surprisingly mature story, and the Seven/Ace chemistry was seamless. I love The Fearmonger. It really captures the feel of "This could have been a Season 27 McCoy episode" just right. That's not necessarily a good thing, I mean it's 80s as hell, but I loved it.
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Apr 4, 2021 04:04
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OldMemes posted:If I'm understanding it right, a lot of Briggs' writing work is editing other people's scripts (and having other edit his), and he seems to do a lot of the directing (Lisa Bowerman does a lot too, it seems!), so its not like he's running the whole show himself, even if he is the face of the company. I think what makes Big Finish stand out is that even in mediocre stories, you know the regular cast is going to give at least a good performance. You might get a bad Sixth Doctor story, but there's a good chance Colin Baker is still going to try and deliver the material in a fun way. Or maybe there's a weak 7/Ace story, but at least McCoy and Aldred will have some good moments bouncing off each other. The end of the monthly line is an interesting move. The end of the monthly range is an economic choice catalysed by Brexit, but also influenced by the death of physical media, an aging audience, etc. etc. They're still going to be releasing the same number of stories a year, they're just doing so in a new format -- one that they've already been using as a production model, just not as a release model. That said, I put it to you that the monthly range has mostly been producing mediocre stories for quite a while now, and that these stories are frequently burdened by poor performances from the regular cast -- particularly Sophie Aldred and Sylvester McCoy (though Colin Baker gives a noticeably vulnerable sounding performance in The End Of The Beginning, the kind that makes me worry for his physical health). Of the last dozen or so Sylvester McCoy releases, for instance, you've got The Silurian Candidate, The Dispossessed, Warlock's Cross, The Monsters Of Gokroth, The Moons Of Vulpana, An Alien Werewolf In London, The Flying Dutchman, and The Grey Man of The Mountain, all of whom are tremendously poor releases, riddled by poor dialogue, incomprehensible plotting and characterisation, and some very bad performances from Aldred and McCoy. Continuity has become an absolute minefield, to the point where Aldred talks about in the extras that she has no idea what version of the character she's playing any more (and it's pretty clear the writers have no idea either). They're a mess. A mess with the occasionally good idea (e.g. Ace's romance in The Grey Man Of The Mountain), but they're a mess. But the new release model isn't going to fundamentally change any of that, and it means that they're still going to have to deal with dropped plots (including the traumatic death of one of the Doctor's companions, which hasn't been mentioned since), inconsistent characterisation (Nicola Bryant stepped away from the part for a while after she complained about how poorly the scripts treated Peri) and the range's preponderance towards some terrible loving writing. jivjov posted:The evolution of big finish stories is really fascinating. I think a lot of people would agree that that modern BF stuff isn't as bold or daring as older stuff, and I would love a comprehensive breakdown of that shift. I'm sure a lot of is down to the tv show coming back and becoming an international sensation--weren't they pretty open about curtailing the 8th Doctor Divergent Universe storyline due to not wanting their flagship audio series to be so "weird" at a time of increased interest in the franchise? Yo, as I understand it: Gary Russel and Jason Haigh-Ellery were running the show back in 2005. J H-E wasn't a fan of the Divergent Universe arc, and with the arrival of the the 05 series, he pushed to have that arc curtailed, arguing that the arc would put off new listeners. So Gary Russell and Alan Barnes finished off that arc two years early in 05, and cannibalised as many of the partially written DU scripts as they could to tell more generic Eighth Doctor main range adventures (Scaredy Cat, Time Works and Something Inside were all earmarked for the third season of DU stories, and you can tell). This didn't work to boost sales, partly because the new series was the new hotness, and partly because the range's scripts took a significant downtick for a while. This was also partially impacted by new censorship rules form the BBC -- BF Who scripts could no longer feature explicit scenes of characters having sex (no great loss, though you can see how badly it impacted Stewart Sheargold's Red, which is explicitly about sexuality), but they could also not feature scenes of a satanic nature (Pier Pressure) or scripts that featured cannibalism (Live 34)), forcing rewrites for those stories. The latter rule about cannibalism is still in effect as of last year; James Goss talks about having to rewrite Masterful to remove a subplot where the Master feeds refugees to other refugees. Gary Russell retired from Big Finish with The Year Of The Pig, leading Briggs to officially take over with Renaissance Of The Daleks (which is around when they started their visual rebrand, which was a mistake IMO, compare the covers of the two releases I just mentioned if you want to see more). A lot of these scripts were developed under Gary Russell, and caused some friction. Briggs was interested in pushing for a more adventurous, trad, romp-y vibe with the monthly range, but a lot of these scripts were a bit more dark and cerebral, and violent. (Scenes of a violent nature, like those found in Red and Night Thoughts, were still permissible under the BBC guidelines, but Briggs has been on record as not approving of that tone, and has talked about how he regrets pursuing that even in his own scripts.) As a result, there was a fair bit of drama around scripts -- I know that Stewart Sheargold's The Death Collectors was massively tinkered with by Nick Briggs, leading its reduction from a four-parter to a three-parter, with an additional single episode (The Spider's Shadow) ghost written by Nick Briggs but released under Sheargold's name. There was a lot of drama around the range's celebratory 100-th release, called 100 -- Paul Cornell's script was a first draft he submitted, and was sent into production without his awareness, and I'd bet good money that Jaqueline Rayner's script was too. Marc Platt has also talked about being frustrated with spending less time with his scripts than he did under Gary Russell. Generally, you get the sense that the extended drafting and script finessing process that existed under Gary Russell seems to have largely gone out the window around this point; you can see Briggs transition towards a more efficient model, based around finding safe pairs of hands (like John Dorney, Matt Fitton and Jonathan Morris) that could reliably produce content, pumped up by event content like recurring monster returns. Briggs also made some moves to sure up the modern professionalism of the range; both C'rizz and Erimem, problematic companions, were quickly written out, and the Eighth Doctor is transitioned to a new range helmed by Briggs and Barnaby Edwards. This range, which was meant to consciously resemble the 05 revival under RTD, was broadcast by BCC7, and was as such typified by a more orchestral score, a higher proportion of guest stars (which coincided with a trend of placing "name" actors on the cover in some terribly photoshopped images), and faster, zippier plots. A lot of them are very good, but the tendency for weirdness was pushed to the background (Briggs has gone on record as to how much he disliked Paul Magr's contributions to this range, both of which are deeply ironic slices of dyspeptic weirdness). Meanwhile, the main range transitioned to three episode mini arcs (many of which weren't arcs at all), partly based, one suspects, out of the convenience of scheduling, budgeting and recording releases together in a set. Some of the early arcs see various writers trying to organise their material and create interwoven plot arcs (e.g. John Ainsworth's work on the Klein arc, or Simon Guerrier taking point on the Key2Time) but this had largely fallen away. Certainly by the time you get to the Hector arc, then it's clear that none of the arc writers had anything but the vaguest idea of what the other writers in the arc were doing. This largely led to the removal of arcs from the monthly range entirely, or a general trepidation as to how to engage with them. Pretty much all the recurring companions are impacted by this; continuity goes out the window, a character is written out "off-screen", Ace, Peri and Mel mentally regress to the characterisation from their introductory stories despite massive things happening in their arcs. A character is de-aged because fans didn't like the idea of the character being older. A character dies, just straight up dies, and is replaced with a clone. No one ever talks about this again. It's around about this time that BF starts to diasporise, with many of the best writers disappearing into side ranges (or disappearing all together). Shearman has a four-hour script fall through concerning the Seventh Doctor being stuck in the Borgia equivalent of I, Claudius, and never writes for BF again. Steve Hall has an Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller script fall through (resulting in a terrible last minute script from Alan Barnes) and never writes for BF again. BF uses Andrew Cartmel's companion Raine without his knowledge or permission, and she's never seen in the range again. Cartmel makes one more appearance, about two years ago, reading his own short story for a James Goss production. Conspicuously, he's the only writer to do so, all the other short stories are read by Lisa Bowerman. Simon Guerrier moves to writing Graceless and the Early Adventures, Steve Lyons moves to Blake's Seven. The main range largely becomes a space that only the same half a dozen or so writers work in -- Marc Platt, John Dorney, Matt Fitton, Eddie Robson, Andrew Smith, Jonathan Morris, Nick Briggs and Alan Barnes -- and the attempts to inculcate new talent there becomes a mess, bringing in such notably bad authors as Mark Morris, Jason Arnopp and Rick Briggs (legally distinct from Nick Briggs). The range generates a reputation for delivering mediocrity. Following the success of Dark Eyes, an event release featuring the Eighth Doctor following up on the ending to the Lucie Miller series, Paul McGann transitions to a series of arc based boxsets. The first few of these releases are consciously based on the serialised plotting of contemporary television, partly out of an interest in aping modern trends -- something Matt Fitton and David Richardson seem very interested in -- but partly out of necessity, as both Paul McGann and Ruth Bradley (who played companion Molly Sullivan) became suddenly unavailable during the recording of the Dark Eyes boxsets, forcing the creation of supporting cast members who were strong enough and important enough to take up the slack. This move towards increased prominence of guest star characters has led the Eighth Doctor series (and the supporting Time War series, including Gallifrey and the War Doctor) to start consciously aping the structures of DC and Marvel releases, based around a series of recurring character team ups and multiple different competing plot arcs. Both The War Doctor quadruple boxset and the Doom Coalition quadruple boxset followed Dark Eyes, seeing the introduction of several new threats / frenemies, including multiple different incarnations of recurring timelord villains The Eleven, Straxus and Cardinal Ollistra, the introduction of minor recurring timelord Narvin into the main range, the introduction of River Song... etc. etc. but it was around this point that the perception became that these series could get too exclusive, and would appeal only to hardcore fans thanks to continuity lockout and heavy serialisation. (This has, it must be said, become only more of a problem as the range has continued.) So it was decided that the series would also dial back on the continuity with the next pair of event four-boxset releases, Ravenous and The Time War. (I'd argue that this didn't go particularly well.) Meanwhile, over in Torchwood, Scott Handcock and James Goss is doing a lot of the work that BF has been criticised for not doing. They're employing new writers, women writers, writers of colour, and telling serialised story arcs, pushing creative boundaries and engaging in experimental works, and these releases are selling -- a lot. They're also attracting big name actors who have no interest in doing Who, or scifi generally, but were impressed by the quality of the scripts being produced (e.g. Michael Palin, Simon Russell Beale). Last I heard, his stuff is BF's second most successful line after Who. So BF do the smartest thing they can, and poach a lot of the writers for the main range. This is good for Who, though it's been bad for Torchwood (and has effectively resulted in the gutting of that range, both in terms of the total number of releases but also in terms of the total number of writers. Of the seven releases announced this year, over half of them were written by James Goss, several apparently written during a period when he had Covid-19). However, it has meant that BF now includes at least one woman writer for every four releases they produce, though it usually is only exactly one. They've also yet to bring in any of the people of colour or trans writers who have worked with James Goss, of course. The success of Torchwood has also seen them start to incorporate characters and plot structures that range employs in their event releases -- the current Eighth Doctor release, Stranded, is very consciously based on Goss's Torchwood, down doing a fantastical riff on Maupin's Tales Of The City and featuring two Torchwood operatives as regulars. This has resulted in an uptick for both the Main Range and the Fourth Doctor range, the latter of which had become very bad indeed. BF is still a bit of a production house, and still seems a little overly cynical in the way it employs event releases, but the pool of writers you saw so frequently before have been expanded, which has resulted in a more varied narrative voice. e.g. Guy Adams, Una McCormack and Tim Foley are super big socialists, and tend to tell stories that dig into the show's leftist politics more than someone like, say, Matt Fitton or Nick Briggs. James Goss writes a lot of portmanteau scripts, Lisa McMullin writes magical realism, Helen Goldwyn writes character dramas. There's still gun, but there's now also frock. The overall standard of the main range isn't as high as it once was, but it's become a lot better. The less said about the Seventh Doctor releases, however, the better. Here ended the effort post, but you did ask.
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Apr 4, 2021 04:48
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Open Source Idiom posted:Here ended the effort post, but you did ask. It was a good post, thanks for making it! Open Source Idiom posted:Gary Russell retired from Big Finish with The Year Of The Pig Well at least he went out on a high note. I adore that story.
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Apr 4, 2021 05:01
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Thanks so much for that effort post! I really appreciated that. Tbh the main range is my least-listened of all of BF's ranges due to 5-7 not really being "my" doctors. That explains why I've still been super positive on BF since I'm listening to all of the ranges that apparently are still doing super well
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Apr 4, 2021 05:34
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Open Source Idiom posted:Rick Briggs (legally distinct from Nick Briggs). This made me laugh a bit more than it should have.
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Apr 4, 2021 08:47
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The Main Range had it's plus and minus points. Sometimes if you wanted to follow a thread of overarcing plot with a given Doctor and companion(s) you had to hunt and peck because they might do 4 in a row, then it bounced to other Doctors and when that one came around again they were doing stories in another point of time with other companions. OTOH, while the box sets can be fun to get that chunk of continuity, there are times when it was nice to drop $12 on a story for a drive instead of $30 or $40. Or buy 4 stories from 4 different Doctors.
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Apr 4, 2021 13:49
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There will probably still be the option to download the stories separately, like you can with a lot of the other boxsets.
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Apr 4, 2021 14:48
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Some things that were missed out in that post was, when Gary Russell was the producer, he used to do everything. Not only was he producing, he was also the main director, script editor, and casting person. Briggs told the story how it wasn't unusual for him to pass by the Big Finish offices in the middle of the night and find Russell still working. When he took over he insisted on splitting the roles among other people. For a while, Barnaby Edwards was the casting person (now the producers of each range handle the casting), which is why you saw a greater number of different actors hired to play roles, instead of Russell's reliance on a set of stock actors. Gary Russell could also be difficult to work with. Jonathon Blum, author of The Fearmonger, talked about having a nervous breakdown while writing the story when dealing with Russell, describing what almost sounded like abuse from him. Paul McGann was quite blunt in saying that in '06, he was going to walk away from the role, no longer enjoying the process. It was only the introduction of Sheridan Smith and The Eighth Doctor Adventures that reignited his love for the series. The cover redesign came about because the cover artists were complaining that the original cover design, the one with the big McGann logo, was difficult to design for, because the logo was just too hard to work around. So while the "Black bar" cover seems like it has less space, the artists preferred it because it the logo wasn't taking up half the cover. (Gary Russell did try to get the BBC to let them use the Ninth/Tenth Doctor "taxicab" logo, but the BBC insisted that they had to use the "classic" series logo for their product). If you compare the number of women writers in the 52 monthly Torchwood series announced so far, and compared it to the last 52 Who monthly releases, the Who monthly series has had more women writers.
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Apr 4, 2021 15:58
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Wish these were mine! https://twitter.com/The_Cybermatt/status/1378395551914409995?s=20 https://twitter.com/The_Cybermatt/status/1378395569786347525?s=20
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Apr 4, 2021 16:22
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Yeah, it'd be nice to see Raine again, Beth Chalmers was really good in UNIT Dominion. I'm guessing that working remotely hasn't helped this year - it must be much more difficult for the cast and crew who are used to working together to have to record remotely, and have less feedback and interaction than normal. I remember reading that Sylvester McCoy has struggled with his recording because he's not that great with technology. I think Big Finish just need to get the balance right between smaller, more experimental stories, the big epics, and the standard Who fare. I know people praise the Divergence Universe arc for being experimental, but the Divergence Universe itself wasn't THAT interesting. Plus C'rizz was incredibly unlikable (in Terra Firma, isn't it implied that he killed Gemma off-screen for the fun of it, and he muses about killing Charley too, iirc), with a gimmick that doesn't work on audio, and he just bogged down the normal 8/Charley dynamic. I know the run in between Terra Firma and The Girl Who Never Was gets a lot of criticism, mainly because C'rizz is the worst. The boxset format really works for the 8th Doctor, but there were some fantastic main range stories too. I'll be honest, I remember liking Zagreus, mainly because of how deeply insane it was, rather than going for the standard crowd pleasing multi-Doctor story.
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Apr 4, 2021 16:29
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Davros1 posted:Wish these were mine! Supposedly we were extremely close to this happening.
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Apr 4, 2021 16:37
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Rhyno posted:Supposedly we were extremely close to this happening. The problem with Who lego is, other than the console rooms and maybe Bessie and the Whomobile, there really isn't anything iconic to build out of lego. Character Options ran into this when they did their building brick line. But yeah, every Who storyline Big Finish does first has to be submitted to the TV series production office for approval before it can be made. Example, big Finish had submitted a story in during the RTD era where the Seventh Doctor was to team up with Agatha Christie. The production office put the kaboosh on that, because they had their own Agatha Christie story in the works. Though sometimes I wonder if the TV series didn't crib ideas from the audios (and I'm not talking about things they acknowledged, like "Jubilee" or "Spare Parts".) In Sept of 2011, both the TV series and Big Finish released stories in which the Doctor is trapped in a mysterious hotel where they and the people they're trapped with are forced to face manifestations on their fears. (The God Complex and House of Blue Fire). Also, ever since the series came back the BBC has been far more protective of the brand than they were in the past. They're not willing to take a chance on anything that they feel may be hurtful to the image. So any more "out there" stories may be rejected. (Though I wish the BBC had been this vigilant when Virgin Publishing had the book license ... maybe we wouldn't have gotten so many lovely NAs) Davros1 fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 16:41
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Davros1 posted:The problem with Who lego is, other than the console rooms and maybe Bessie and the Whomobile, there really isn't anything iconic to build out of lego. Character Options ran into this when they did their building brick line. Who needs anything more than the console rooms and endless character blind bags?
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Apr 4, 2021 16:48
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Davros1 posted:The problem with Who lego is, other than the console rooms and maybe Bessie and the Whomobile, there really isn't anything iconic to build out of lego. Character Options ran into this when they did their building brick line. I feel like they'd work best as those little $9.99 small box sets, with a doctor and companion minifig, an alien minifig, and a TARDIS exterior set. Then your Lego TARDIS can just pop up in other Lego environments. E: second, unrelated thought. The big effort post cited Erimem as a "problematic companion"--I've only listened to a couple stories with her, and it's been a while, so I likely have either forgotten something or not gotten to it, but what's wrong with Erimem? jivjov fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 16:49
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jivjov posted:I feel like they'd work best as those little $9.99 small box sets, with a doctor and companion minifig, an alien minifig, and a TARDIS exterior set. Then your Lego TARDIS can just pop up in other Lego environments. An Egyptian character played by a white English actress.
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Apr 4, 2021 17:00
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Midsomer Murders is great for spotting Who actors. This ep on right now has Annette Badland, Mark Williams, and Louise Jameson! Edit: also Siobhan Redmond, who played the BF version of the Rani. The_Doctor fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 22:20
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You know how some people count sheep to sleep? Well my mind goes on random tangents and I came to realize that the 11th's overall plot line was...well, tell me if I have this correct. And JUST IN CASE I'll stick the whole thing under spoilers even though these episodes are years old. Time Of The Doctor: After everything that is to come, Eleven arrives on a planet where his no longer extinct race are subtlety communicating. This Is A Problem, because some space church thinks/knows that if the Time Lords come back, the Time War will restart and devastate the universe, and also a bunch of the usual bad guys show up to do just that. The Doctor fights against his usual villains, while the church tries to stop him and eventually ends up siding with him. Mainly because a renegade splinter group decide to take super drastic measures in stopping any chance the Time Lords come back and head back in time to screw up events that led to this. Season 1: The splinter group, nee the Silence, decide their first plan will be luring the Doctor to the Pandorican ultra prison that they can lock him in. But for some reason, this will make the TARDIS explode and destroy every star in the universe. Or the Silence did that as well, never mind how insanely counterproductive that would be. This causes a new timeline where Earth is the only planet and the TARDIS stands in for the sun as a time looped explosion in the sky, and eventually the Doctor and co figure out a way to use it to reboot the universe. So the Silence are right back where they started and their first attempt royally screwed everything up. Season 2: The Silence try an even more complicated and stupid plan that involves seeding their race throughout Earth's history as a background for kidnapping Amy and Rory's child who was born a Time Lord due to being conceived right near the Heart of the Tardis. They then steal the baby and attempt to raise it as a weapon to kill the Doctor, which involves even more ludicrous hoop jumping involving letting her go, having her regenerate, go meet her mother as a child and grow up alongside her as a substitute for raising her, then dragging them off to kill Hitler which is just another distraction to get regenerating into River Song and poisoning the Doctor, only to change her mind and using up all her remaining regenerations to heal him. However it's all pointless because even before all this we saw the Doctor die and we're heading towards that moment, except after more nonsense River, who was the shooter, 'changes her mind' on the 'catch up' loop, which causes all time to collapse to a singular point. In fixing this, the Silence are essentially wiped out, and the Doctor uses his usual plot devices to get around 'what was meant to happen' and great, that's done. Season 3: The Silence are done, so along comes returning after a very long time villain the Great Intelligence to serve as the season's villain. The doctor thwarts some of his plans and then Clara thwarts the GI's final plan to jump into the Doctor's 'corpse' and erase all his deeds, and oh look here's some guy who claims to be the Doctor in the mindscape. Then we get Day which is basically 'let's time muck with the events established at the end of the Time War, and oh yeah the Zygons are back and doing something but that's unrelated to the main plotline over the seasons' and I really wish Christopher Eccleston had come back for it, but oh well. Then we actually get to Time which sets off all the events of seasons past and at the end the Doctor gets more regenerations and Capaldi takes over. Did I get the basic gist of it all right?
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Apr 5, 2021 09:40
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I think the Pandorica itself was just the plan of the Alliance to End Doctormania brewed up by the Daleks (who begrudgingly let everybody else in on the deal because gently caress the Doctor that's why), and paradoxically THAT plan was built out of the discovery the Doctor's TARDIS was gonna blow up and destroy the universe, so they accidentally set in motion the event which would cause that to happen. Where it also gets a little complicated is that the reason the TARDIS blew up in the first place appears (it was never outright stated) to be a result of River's brainwashing by the Silence faction, so she unknowingly set it all up to explode... which caused the cracks in time which caused the Daleks et al to want to imprison the Doctor which caused River to travel in the TARDIS which caused the TARDIS to blow up etc etc. Whether the Silence faction intended for the events of the Pandorica to happen I don't know, they may have just been trying to make it harder for the Doctor to escape the trap and inadvertently caused the problem in the first place, but they don't actively seem to start loving with the Doctor until season 6. A lot of Moffat's stuff isn't actually all THAT complicated at its heart, it just tends to be presented in a way that makes it look more complicated than it is (kind of like a far lower budget version of Christopher Nolan's films) which usually works out great and sometimes okay and thankfully rarely really horrible. It certainly hit a hell of a lot more highs than Chibnall's has so far, sadly.
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Apr 5, 2021 10:59
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The best part of that entire story is just after he flies the pandorica into the explosion. The Doctor wakes up in the TARDIS and the second or third thing he does is check for the fez. <touches head, shrugs> I can buy a fez.few. It's a tiny thing but I adore it.
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Apr 5, 2021 11:22
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Matt Smith was a true delight in the role, particularly that first season. I'm still not entirely convinced he is human
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Apr 5, 2021 11:31
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The silence stuff had some great characters, ideas and some excellent episodes, but the overarching plot was presented in a messy and confusing way - it's like the Enemy stuff in that way.
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Apr 5, 2021 12:16
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The Doctor waking up in the TARDIS and basically going,"Oh I survived? Great, love it when that happens!" was also wonderful, as was him realizing,"Oh wait a second, no I didn't!" and also just rolling with it 
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Apr 5, 2021 13:15
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Moreau posted:Matt Smith was a true delight in the role, particularly that first season. I'm still not entirely convinced he is human Pretty much every actor who plays The Doctor has tried to emulate Troughton, and Smith got the closest which is why he's so good, it's as if Troughton himself regenerated. I think this does mean that Amy is his Jamie, and their names rhyme, and they BOTH WEAR TARTAN! Time to start a Youtube conspiracy channel!
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Apr 5, 2021 13:32
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Troughton died in 1987. Anyone know offhand when Smith was born...?
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Apr 5, 2021 14:27
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Zaroff posted:Troughton died in 1987. Anyone know offhand when Smith was born...? 1982
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Apr 5, 2021 15:27
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Vinylshadow posted:1982 Well, you wouldn't want to start from scratch, and kids don't get personalities until they're around 5, so the theory holds!
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Apr 5, 2021 16:08
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Cornwind Evil posted:You know how some people count sheep to sleep? Well my mind goes on random tangents and I came to realize that the 11th's overall plot line was...well, tell me if I have this correct. And JUST IN CASE I'll stick the whole thing under spoilers even though these episodes are years old. Eleven years old as of a couple days ago in fact  https://twitter.com/bbcdoctorwho/status/1378288937005879297
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Apr 5, 2021 16:15
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how has it been 11 years already 
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Apr 5, 2021 16:18
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See kids this is why you (re)watch what you like constantly so when it's revealed it's been forever and a day since they aired, you don't feel ancient because it's still fresh in your mind
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Apr 5, 2021 17:33
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never put more thought into unraveling a story than the writer put into creating it in the first place. disappointment is inevitable
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Apr 5, 2021 17:38
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BooDooBoo posted:Pretty much every actor who plays The Doctor has tried to emulate Troughton, and Smith got the closest which is why he's so good, it's as if Troughton himself regenerated. Just to add fuel to the fire.... Matt Smith's agent who got him the part was Wendy Padbury 
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Apr 6, 2021 00:24
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Apparently Nick Briggs has had to state that no, Gordon Tipple is not getting a boxset as the Master. I never did understand why fans were so taken with that version of the character - with no disrespect to Mr. Tipple, in the version we actually saw in the release version, he's clearly meant to be a stand-in for Anthony Ainley's Master. I'm also surprised Tom Baker and Lalla Ward worked together again. I assumed that the recent 4/Romana stuff was recorded remotely during lock down, but I was surprised to see that they'd done some recording a few years ago, especially considering their quite public strained relationship. I guess Nick Briggs is just that persuasive.
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Apr 6, 2021 00:54
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Jerusalem posted:Just to add fuel to the fire.... Matt Smith's agent who got him the part was Wendy Padbury She was/is Colin's agent too! And Janet Fielding's first phonecall as agent was about her client Paul McGann auditioning for Doctor Who in 96 (The TV movie will be 25 years old next month, FYI.) OldMemes posted:
They can still record separately in person, and then just edit the various days together. They did this with the first Doctor Who/Benny boxset, as Syl was filming in Brazil while the rest of the cast recorded together. He came back to the country to record his bits later. Davros1 fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 00:54
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| # ? Jun 3, 2024 05:46 |
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That's true, but voice acting tends to sound better when actors record together: it tends to feel more natural, because they're reacting to other people. If they ever do a 9/Jack audio, they'll probably have to record separately, because apparently Eccleston doesn't like Barrowman at all. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any more infamous behind the scenes feuds between actors: unless we're counting Davidson and the Kamelion puppet, or Baker and the K-9 prop that was too loud and got stuck on the floor during filming. The TV Movie is fascinating, mainly because it was because of it failing that we got much better Who stories years later. Some of the pitches for the Fox series were utterly dreadful, especially the Dalek redesigns. I do like the slick 90s cable TV production values, which make it feel dated in a charming way, but an entire series would have been grating: because it failed, we got the 8th Doctor audios and nu-Who, which worked out better than spider-daleks and 'what if the gunfighters, but again' and the Doctor's father and snoke looking Davros and other not very good ideas. OldMemes fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 01:02
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