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What do you think of the new international distribution deal? This poll is closed. |
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| Hate it |
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12 | 16.90% |
| REALLY hate it |
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16 | 22.54% |
| Hello, my name is Bob Chapek |
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43 | 60.56% |
| Total: | 71 votes | ||
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space is mostly empty, it just destroyed 80% of the empty space so now things are a bit closer to each other.
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Aug 11, 2023 18:03
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Zaroff posted:Here we are - the peak of Doctor Who finally animated. The Underwater Menace is one of those serials that do nothing for me, but we're running out of episodes to animate that 1) are compelling stories to animate, 2) are possible to accurately recreate via animation, and 3) aren't racist in some way.
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Aug 11, 2023 21:31
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Zaroff posted:Here we are - the peak of Doctor Who finally animated. The new Mystery Machine looking different.
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Aug 11, 2023 23:24
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Open Source Idiom posted:I don't see the Chibnall era being any different; hell, the big swings and incomplete elements are the parts that people are going to latch on to when they're re-examining the era. If you undo the Timeless Child or Flux or whatever, you're basically robbing the era of the only things that are remotely interesting about it. Well that's part of the problem though I think (and I think we're largely on the same page here?) that take away the awful poo poo like The Timeless Child and Chibnall's run was bizarrely bland considering it had such obviously high (and laudable) aspirations: a female Doctor, a black Doctor, more ethnic representation, more women working on the show etc. The run will be remembered as a missed opportunity, and I dread that because there was so little other meat on the bones, all that future writers will be able to mine from it are examining those terrible elements that seemed to so bizarrely miss the point of the Doctor. And all from a surreal insistence to "explain" that one dumb scene from Brain of Morbius that had been consistently and repeatedly either ignored or outright refuted by everything else the show had to say about the Doctor. The Doctor being some mysterious entity from another universe who was vivisected to give the Time Lord regeneration powers is just a terrible, stupid, ridiculous "origin" that he got cold feet on and basically ended up ignoring himself, making it even worse than it already was. The fact that it's one of the few things of note that he did during his run on the show shouldn't by itself be considered a defense. "It's terrible, but at least it was something" should be seen for what it is: an indictment of the failed opportunities of Chibnall's era. Also I hope it hasn't poisoned by association one of the truly good things he did, which was casting Jo Martin as an unknown incarnation of the Doctor (clearly from between Troughton and Pertwee!), and any future use of her manages to untangle her from the Timeless Child bullshit. Open Source Idiom posted:Meanwhile no-one really gives much of a poo poo about the Graeme Williams era, or, let's be honest, quite a lot of the Second Doctor's tenure. I gotta dispute this! Troughton's era has frequently been cited by showrunners and the actors who played the Doctor as something they've looked to try to emulate! And a big reason for that is that his run is remembered for the strength of the Doctor/Companions relationship and it's a gold standard others have been trying to meet ever since. That's what the show should really be aiming for as the spine on which everything else is built: the Doctor and their companions as a cohesive (but squabbling!) unit who all bring different strengths to the situations they're in. Even his worst stories work because you've got the interactions between 2/Jamie/Zoe or 2/Jamie/Victoria just being so enjoyable.
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Aug 12, 2023 03:37
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Troughton's era is probably second only to Tom Baker's as my favorite era of the original series.
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Aug 12, 2023 04:38
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I think it's a big part of what made Matt Smith's run work so well for me: the chemistry/interactions between 11, Amy and Rory were always gold. Chibnall moving to a larger core group was an interesting experiment and presumably an attempt to refine the Davison era (itself an attempt to recapture the Troughton era!) with the TARDIS feeling a bit more lively/crowded. Unfortunately Yaz/Ryan/Graham as a group suffered the same problems as Tegan/Nyssa/Adric or Tegan/Nyssa/Turlough did where there was always at least one of them getting left out while another (Tegan, Graham) got the bulk of the good stuff to work with.
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Aug 12, 2023 04:58
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Jerusalem posted:Unfortunately Yaz/Ryan/Graham as a group suffered the same problems as Tegan/Nyssa/Adric or Tegan/Nyssa/Turlough did where there was always at least one of them getting left out while another (Tegan, Graham) got the bulk of the good stuff to work with. I'm not sure that was the problem with Thirteen's group. For example, Demons of the Punjab is I think generally considered one of the stronger episodes of the era, and that's clearly meant to be a Yaz episode. And it's not like Ryan or Graham are getting any of the good stuff in it. But Yaz still doesn't really get anything to work with? She weirdly fades into the background of her own episode. I think that, even if the BBC had said "Sorry, Chibnall, you're only allowed one companion," we'd still be seeing similar issues with how they were written.
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Aug 12, 2023 06:01
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Lottery of Babylon posted:I'm not sure that was the problem with Thirteen's group. For example, Demons of the Punjab is I think generally considered one of the stronger episodes of the era, and that's clearly meant to be a Yaz episode. And it's not like Ryan or Graham are getting any of the good stuff in it. But Yaz still doesn't really get anything to work with? She weirdly fades into the background of her own episode. I think that, even if the BBC had said "Sorry, Chibnall, you're only allowed one companion," we'd still be seeing similar issues with how they were written. Having just rewatched it recently, it kind of blew my mind that not only does Yaz mostly fade into the background, but they give two of the bigger, more emotional moments to Graham. The first, to be fair, features him giving advice to Yaz, so she's part of that even if it is Graham getting the stronger lines to deliver. But he's also the one who tells Prem he's a good man, which is nice but probably really should have been a Yaz line. Given that, to her initially, he was (despite being there first) an intruder into the life of her grandmother, having her take the moment to tell the man who - had he lived, would have prevented her from ever existing - that he was a good man would have landed a lot stronger I thought.
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Aug 12, 2023 08:33
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CommonShore posted:Later the flux was reversed by, oh, lets say Moe. wasn't sure which one was funnier  
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Aug 12, 2023 12:05
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the one without the tardis is funnier but the tardis is necessary for it to work outside of this immediate discussion
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Aug 12, 2023 13:21
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I hope RTD keeps his running joke going of Donna not being aware at all of the alien stuff and she completely misses the Flux
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Aug 12, 2023 15:58
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Today I learned that the late John Challis (Scorby in "The Seeds of Doom" and Boycie in Only Fools and Horses, among his many other roles) and Ice-T were Twitter buds.
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Aug 12, 2023 17:54
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That's utterly surreal 
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Aug 13, 2023 02:49
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It's downright heartwarming.
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Aug 13, 2023 03:24
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Jerusalem posted:That's utterly surreal To continue the surreal aspect of all of this: apparently they never met in real life, but they exchanged Christmas cards and presents and whatnot as they got to know each other via Twitter over the years. At one point Challis posted a video of himself playing air drums to a Body Count cover of Motorhead's "Ace of Spades" (pausing only to ask "You haven't got any ABBA, have ya"), and when someone Tweeted "How the gently caress does Ice-T know Boycie", Ice-T replied "Because I live on Earth." dingo with a joint posted:It's downright heartwarming. It all got started when Challis wished Ice-T and his wife and daughter a Merry Christmas 
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Aug 13, 2023 04:03
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God that rules so much, I love every single word of that post 
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Aug 13, 2023 05:32
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Here's the tweet Ice-T made, when he heard Challis had passed away (along with the video of Challis playing air drums): https://twitter.com/FINALLEVEL/status/1439602799382351877?s=20
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Aug 13, 2023 19:24
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There isn't a big enough. Ice-T best T. Mister's okay, though.
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Aug 13, 2023 21:33
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Jerusalem posted:Well that's part of the problem though I think (and I think we're largely on the same page here?) that take away the awful poo poo like The Timeless Child and Chibnall's run was bizarrely bland considering it had such obviously high (and laudable) aspirations: a female Doctor, a black Doctor, more ethnic representation, more women working on the show etc. The run will be remembered as a missed opportunity, and I dread that because there was so little other meat on the bones, all that future writers will be able to mine from it are examining those terrible elements that seemed to so bizarrely miss the point of the Doctor. And all from a surreal insistence to "explain" that one dumb scene from Brain of Morbius that had been consistently and repeatedly either ignored or outright refuted by everything else the show had to say about the Doctor. Yeah, we're pretty much on the same page -- I don't like the material much at all, and it's tough to negotiate that given that I find its aspirations inherently valuable. But the difference between our approaches, I suspect, is that I'm a bit more glass half full when it comes to this lore. I absolutely think future writers could use this Ancient Gallifrey material and run with it, and that it could ultimately benefit the show in a bunch of ways. e.g. that bit from The Brain of Morbius has the basis for a number of excellent stories over the years e.g. The Infinity Doctors, Time's Crucible, Cold Fusion, Sky Pirates!, both volumes of Forgotten Lives... So I don't see why The Timeless Child is inherently poisonous. Or look at the TV Movie's half-human revelation. Poorly motivated and jarring in the moment, but Parkin / Orman-Blum / Miles took that material in interesting directions. And eventually, yeah, that was forgotten about, in the same way that the First Doctor only having one heart has largely been forgotten about, but it doesn't mean that people can't mine that material for interest. (Sidebar: I was really tickled by someone referencing the some of Orman-Blum's Unnatural History lore in a recent BF play.) Jerusalem posted:I gotta dispute this! Troughton's era has frequently been cited by showrunners and the actors who played the Doctor as something they've looked to try to emulate! And a big reason for that is that his run is remembered for the strength of the Doctor/Companions relationship and it's a gold standard others have been trying to meet ever since. That's what the show should really be aiming for as the spine on which everything else is built: the Doctor and their companions as a cohesive (but squabbling!) unit who all bring different strengths to the situations they're in. Even his worst stories work because you've got the interactions between 2/Jamie/Zoe or 2/Jamie/Victoria just being so enjoyable. The characters are appealing, if a bit shallow, though I think that kind of dynamic was more interestingly captured back with the first few TARDIS crews. But my bigger problem is that the stories from that era are mostly pretty horrible tbh. They're so repetitive; nearly every story is a base-under-seige tale, with largely the same plot beats and similar character archetypes, and the villains are reused a lot without adding an awful lot of nuance or depth. Plus there's a lot of uncomfortable racism e.g. The Abominable Snowman, Tomb of the Cybermen. Again, I think there's potential there, but the hallmarks of what that era is known for aren't really it. I think that's why people sort of mostly latch onto The War Games and Season 6B when telling new stories in that period -- but, even then, no one seems to have been motivated to give the Second Doctor a new companion or even a dynamic that wasn't already present on screen, so my vibe is that writers aren't particularly energized by this period in the same way they are by, say, The First Doctor.
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Aug 14, 2023 06:09
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I adore Base Under Siege stories, one of my all time favorite Doctor Who stories is The Seeds of Death  Plus you get gonzo weird poo poo like The Mind Robber, both his Dalek stories are all time classics, The Invasion is delightful ("....Packer  "), and while they might be more broadly placed as Base Under Siege stories themselves I'm a big fan of the Doctor and his companions in isolated/remote areas where the environment is as much a threat to them as the monster: The Ice Warriors, The Abominable Snowmen, The Moonbase, hell even The Underwater Menace!I'd say Pertwee's era (which I also loved) is probably more guilty of following a pretty generic guideline for a lot of those early exile stories: The Doctor clashes with some arrogant scientist developing a technology that he doesn't fully understand which is going to destroy civilization (i.e, England) and UNIT runs around doing impressive stuntwork while the Doctor and his companion constantly get captured and escape, also the Master is usually hanging around helping some alien until the Doctor tells him the alien will turn on him next and the Master goes  But yeah, as much as I love Tomb, and even Toberman's ultimate sacrifice, the character as written is playing off some very depressing casual racism, and it crops up with some unfortunate regularity in early Who, from Hartnell all the way through even Tom Baker.
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Aug 14, 2023 08:28
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I watched Troughton's run recently and really the only season where it gets samey is season 5, where six of the seven stories are Base Under Siege jobs - they're much thinner on the ground in seasons 4 and 6.
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Aug 14, 2023 10:45
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Jerusalem posted:But yeah, as much as I love Tomb, and even Toberman's ultimate sacrifice, the character as written is playing off some very depressing casual racism, and it crops up with some unfortunate regularity in early Who, from Hartnell all the way through even Tom Baker. Yeah, to say nothing of Kaftan and her swarthy makeup. Might as well have called her "Burka". I was really disappointed to see hear about the Abominable Snowman animated release, which updated the character designs to "rectify" the original material, instead of diverting some money to pay some actors of colour for a second audio track (or just skipping the episodes entirely if you couldn't do that). Because what that story needed was better quality yellowface. It's also a bit rich for Gary Russell to criticize the original material given that he, you know, cast and directed Dreamtime. Hell, BF had Dan Starkey play a "inscrutable" (or whatever the quote was) Chinese vendor just a few months ago. And there's the backchannel stuff about the original version of Legend of the Sea Devils, which was apparently far more racist. Hence the awful edit and dub. I guess my point is that racism never left Doctor Who.
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Aug 14, 2023 10:47
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Then there's the Celestial Toymaker, who is dressed as Fu Manchu for no reason, and could happily have a total redesign to get away from tbat, but never gets one in tie-in media.
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Aug 14, 2023 11:22
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Warthur posted:Then there's the Celestial Toymaker, who is dressed as Fu Manchu for no reason, and could happily have a total redesign to get away from tbat, but never gets one in tie-in media. Apparently "celestial" was a term used for Chinese immigrants back in the 19th century so it manages to be even more racist than is immediately obvious.
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Aug 14, 2023 11:34
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Warthur posted:Then there's the Celestial Toymaker, who is dressed as Fu Manchu for no reason, and could happily have a total redesign to get away from tbat, but never gets one in tie-in media. Well if the rumours are to be believed he's getting not one but two makeovers in the coming specials, at least.
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Aug 14, 2023 11:42
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Fil5000 posted:Apparently "celestial" was a term used for Chinese immigrants back in the 19th century so it manages to be even more racist than is immediately obvious. Guessing you didn't watch Deadwood. (You should watch Deadwood. Everyone should watch Deadwood.)
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Aug 14, 2023 11:44
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Open Source Idiom posted:And there's the backchannel stuff about the original version of Legend of the Sea Devils, which was apparently far more racist. Hence the awful edit and dub. Oh dear  I was so excited for a story about Zheng Yi Sao, she's such a fascinating historical figure and they just absolutely loving wasted her  Open Source Idiom posted:(You should watch Deadwood. Everyone should watch Deadwood.) Evergreen advice 
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Aug 14, 2023 13:44
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Fil5000 posted:Apparently "celestial" was a term used for Chinese immigrants back in the 19th century so it manages to be even more racist than is immediately obvious. Yep. If the Fu Manchu costume went then "celestial" would be a completely innocuous term for "cosmic" or "otherworldly" or whatnot but in combination with that costume, nah.
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Aug 14, 2023 14:50
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Warthur posted:Yep. If the Fu Manchu costume went then "celestial" would be a completely innocuous term for "cosmic" or "otherworldly" or whatnot but in combination with that costume, nah. It's funny how they managed to keep piling on the overt racism with that one particular story. And by "funny", I mean "incredibly depressing".
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Aug 14, 2023 15:29
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Jeremy Clarkson was still keeping the racist version of Eeny Meeny Miney Moe alive as recently as the 2010s; nothing the BBC loves more than racism. (Except noncery, I guess.)
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Aug 14, 2023 16:29
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TinTower posted:Jeremy Clarkson was still keeping the racist version of Eeny Meeny Miney Moe alive as recently as the 2010s; nothing the BBC loves more than racism. Come on now, he did eventually get fired for punching an Irishman
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Aug 14, 2023 16:37
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I listened to Torchwood: Aliens Among Us and felt inspired to write something about it. The following contains some vague spoilers about several stories in the set. tl;dr 7/10, worth a listen, likely the best instance of Torchwood that exists. &&&&& Torchwood was not a very good show. From what little I remember, it mostly consisted of characters loving or swearing, then giggling towards the camera with a glance of “bet you weren’t expecting that in your Doctor Who spinoff!” Most episodes ended with Jack Harkness having to make a terrible choice or sacrifice and then walk off screen sadly shaking his head. It was a curious mixture of horny, bland, and grim that satisfied no one and was Chris Chibnall’s worst television work (so far). Children of Earth was good, but its best scenes are the ones that don’t involve the main cast, and it’s predicated on the idea that Torchwood is bad and incompetent. Which is an alright thesis statement for the show, I suppose, but only in retrospect. So then we should ask: what should Torchwood be about? Torchwood: Aliens Among Us serves as a sequel to the television series, and given that most of the main characters died as a result of their extreme incompetence, we need to introduce some new ones. The first of these is our new POV character, Tyler Steele, guest-named by Russell T Davies (no, really! He apparently had quite a bit of input on this series, and it shows). Tyler is a tabloid reporter looking to go legit with a story on recent terrorist attacks on immigrants and Cardiff when he runs into what little remains of Torchwood. Tyler veers somewhere between dirtbag and scumbag, to the extent that some rash decisions he takes in the first story lead to him being disinvited from joining Torchwood proper. He’s a welcome change from the wide-eyed doe that Eve Myles played in her first few appearances. Aside from Jack and Gwen, the only other member of Torchwood at the start is one Mr. Colchester, who appears to be your standard civil servant brought in to exercise some authority after somebody in the government watched Series 1-4 on DVD. However, as we learn more about his past it’s not surprising that he’s able to keep up with the others in their various alien-hunting exploits. It’s worth noting that both Tyler and Colchester are gay; it’s interesting that whereas one of the original loglines of Torchwood was “everybody is bisexual,” this series leans heavily on gay male characters. (Even Jack, who was originally very pansexual and still mentions being into various aliens and whatnot, is at this point mostly dating and having sex with men.) In another suggestion from RTD about different angles of gay life, Tyler is very into hooking up and dating apps, while Colchester is married to Colin, a Muslim man, who is frequently mentioned but only makes actual appearances when something terrible is about to happen to him. And then there’s Orr, whose sexuality is… complicated. They are introduced as a “sexual metamorph” whose body (and thoughts, to a degree) changes to match the desires of those around them. Orr is as a result naturally empathetic, able to easily read the thoughts of other but also prone to being overwhelmed by them. In one memorable scene, Orr is tasked with basically becoming the main character on Twitter in order to focus the hatred of social media on a single point in order to lure out a memetic virus. It would be easy to write Orr as a jerkoff fantasy, a being that can change to match your every desire. You can imagine the same character appearing in the TV and being derided alongside the Cyberwoman bondage outfit. It’s a testament to the writing that Orr’s unique talents don’t really drift into the realm of titillating, instead shooting for more transgressive applications. One instance has Orr focusing their thoughts on a suspected pedophile, and they breathe a sigh of relief when their form settles on an adult woman with huge tits. And in another story, Orr realizes a building is sentient when they feel their genitals transform into an elevator shaft, which is a sentence I did not think I would ever write. Aliens Among Us is at its most successful when it’s about contemporary Britain, using the city of Cardiff as a synecdoche. The Cardiff of Torchwood is a multicultural city, fraught with tension over minorities and migrants and refugees. Some of the issues it brings up are sci-fi'ed up: it’s space aliens, not billionaires, buying up all the real estate in town. Some of them are not: one of those space aliens suggests that the failure of her public initiative be blamed on its use of unreliable foreign workers, a lie that will be easily believed by the public. There is a definite Black Mirror influence in this new series. All of the stories are striving to be modern and up-to-date, and while this approach doesn’t always succeed, it’s a welcome change from the Big Finish that I remember, which is, almost by definition, stuck in the past. I got very worried about halfway through a "Torchwood does racist cops" episode which revolves around a chemist implanting police officers with a remotely triggered Racism Device. It kept seeming as though it were on the verge of devolving into terminal liberalism, and while I wasn’t totally enthralled with the conclusion, there’s a series of final chilling reveals that communicate a deep skepticism of policing. Not everything works in this series. The serialized elements of it are a bit of a slog and take up more and more time as the series goes on. There’s a few bum stories, though only one of them, about a murderous escape room that largely consists of the characters describing what they’re seeing, is fundamentally misguided. There is even another “space monster makes everybody horny” episode that mostly suffers from being a bit uninteresting instead of being embarrassing for everybody involved. One story takes such a grim turn halfway through I was going to joke that it was guest-written by Joseph Lidster, but then I checked and it turns out it was actually written by Joseph Lidster. Even the stories that don’t work, though, are usually flawed in interesting ways, something I would have given my left arm to see during the Chibnall era. Aliens Among us is a series that has an agenda, which is more than I can say for Doctor Who the past several years or Big Finish in a very, very long time. It’s a little cheeky and a little angry and it wants to push boundaries. Its idea of being adult is to do stories about hate groups and worker exploitation instead of swearing and poo poo (though there’s plenty of that, too). It is, in other words, what Torchwood should have been all along.
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Aug 14, 2023 17:57
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Gotta admit that one of the things putting me off giving new-Who another chance is knowing that when the production team apply themselves to producing something in the same universe but much lighter in the way of "here's that nostalgic imagery you like, clap and smile!" moments, you get Torchwood. A real Emperor's New Clothes deal l
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Aug 15, 2023 00:22
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Warthur posted:Gotta admit that one of the things putting me off giving new-Who another chance is knowing that when the production team apply themselves to producing something in the same universe but much lighter in the way of "here's that nostalgic imagery you like, clap and smile!" moments, you get Torchwood. A real Emperor's New Clothes deal l ... the entirety of new who? Are you objecting to the fact that the 2005 season of Doctor Who has a Tardis in it?
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Aug 15, 2023 05:04
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Warthur posted:Gotta admit that one of the things putting me off giving new-Who another chance is knowing that when the production team apply themselves to producing something in the same universe but much lighter in the way of "here's that nostalgic imagery you like, clap and smile!" moments, you get Torchwood. A real Emperor's New Clothes deal l Yeah, I don’t understand what you’re saying at all. You think Torchwood was nostalgic?
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Aug 15, 2023 05:17
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The_Doctor posted:Yeah, I don’t understand what you’re saying at all. You think Torchwood was nostalgic? Naur, I think the argument is that Torchwood is what you get when you mostly can't draw upon continuity.
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Aug 15, 2023 05:21
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Imo doctor who is the strongest when it gives zero fucks about maintaining or creating continuity. I've said it for years and the chibnal era made me more sure of that. It's a transdimensional time travel show. Let poo poo get wild and self contradictory. Star Trek is the franchise that's better at that version of storytelling. And when it tries to be Doctor Who by going into the holodeck, it becomes weak.
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Aug 15, 2023 05:29
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Holodeck episodes are fantastic
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Aug 15, 2023 06:39
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Holodeck episodes? Miss me with that poo poo Holosuite episodes? NOW we’re talking
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Aug 15, 2023 09:33
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| # ? Jun 3, 2024 10:46 |
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armpit_enjoyer posted:Holodeck episodes? Miss me with that poo poo Now it’s a Torchwood!
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Aug 15, 2023 09:44
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