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Davros1 posted:Well, the hair cut didn't last long: I can't figure out if The Doom Coalition is the unproduced sequel to The Airzone Solution, a lost Chick Tract, or a second-rate Marvel crossover from the 1990s.
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Mar 28, 2015 15:10
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Sentinel Red posted:Kinda is on the 'Horror' Channel right now and holy gently caress, this poo poo is so bad, I have no idea how you guys keep a straight face saying the old series are still worth watching. Or at least, the ones made in the 70s and 80s, I'll concede the 60s stuff does have a certain je ne sais quoi. Have you made it to the fourth episode yet? If not, oh boy are you in for a treat.
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Mar 30, 2015 16:36
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Burkion posted:To me that's really damning to it, because the Restaurant doesn't happen until an hour into the goddamn episode. The BBC cut the episode order to 13, I think, to make up for the 50th anniversary special. The extra-long first and last episodes made it basically the same length as a normal season, so I'm guessing Moffat did it either as a gently caress you to the BBC or (more likely) trying to make it up for the viewers.
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Apr 7, 2015 15:33
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Wheat Loaf posted:The last two McCoy seasons are two of the strongest in the entire history of the series. Those two seasons have "Remembrance", "The Happiness Patrol", "The Greatest Show In the Galaxy", "Ghost Light", "The Curse of Fenric" and "Survival". Although I think it has flaws, I feel that "Battlefield" is a pretty good serial; "Silver Nemesis" is the only one that isn't entirely up to scratch but, with the exception of "Paradise Towers", it's better than most of season 24. The only really BAD episode of McCoy's tenure is probably Time and the Rani. Everything else is at worth a watch, I think, either because Ace is great (Dragonfire) or because it's only three episodes long (Silver Nemesis).
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Apr 7, 2015 22:38
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After The War posted:I just finished The Dark Husband the other day, and it works pretty well as a comedic Seven/Ace/Hex story where they keep trying to figure out what his masterplan is. It's pretty much Doctor Who does Red Dwarf - Hex is essentially Dave Lister through most of it. I adore The Dark Husband. I don't think I've ever made it past the first episode of Red Dwarf, so I can't make that comparison, but to me it felt a lot like a Robert Holmes script minus the cynicism. It's just really endlessly clever. It nails the Ace-Hex relationship, too.
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Apr 8, 2015 17:10
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I think what the Pertwee era was trying to rectify, in hindsight, was that the show had lost its connection to anything the audience found familiar. You replace your regular contemporary companions like Ian and Barbara or Ben and Polly with people from far in the past or future. The Pertwee UNIT family is kind of an over-correction of that. But with how connected the modern Doctor is to real people through his companions (even going back to Seven in the classic series) I think that problem has basically been solved. At least for budgetary reasons as anything else the Doctor spends a bunch of time on Earth.
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Apr 9, 2015 15:44
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I'm going to take the occasion of the Big Finish Peter Davison sale to post some of my tiny reviews of those stories! I've been doing them for the past couple months but they're not long or detailed or substantial or anything so I haven't really felt comfortable just posting them willy-nilly. I've mostly just been doing it so I can quickly refer back to what a particular story was like. I didn't actually have much to say about the ones I reviewed, though, since they were both short story collections. I listened to both The Haunting of Thomas Brewster and Time Reef before I started doing reviews, and I remember liking both of them. Thomas Brewster sort of rides the line of obnoxiousness but never crosses over into it. BF 142-The Demons of Red Lodge and Other Stories Four short stories featuring the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa. Big Finish's short collections are almost always great and this is no exception. Only the first story is somewhat disappointing, but that is only in comparison to the other three. The second story gets some fun jokes out of music history, the third has a wealth of ideas and a fun running gag with Nyssa trying to get arrested. The fourth is probably the best, where the Doctor is recording a DVD commentary over a movie in which he and Nyssa inadvertently featured. A-. BF 168-1001 Nights Another short story collection, this time with three stories and a frame store riffing on, unsurprisingly, the tale of Scheherazade. That frame story, though it comes to an interesting conclusion, is a bit disappointing as the final part of the story, but the other short stories are all fine as usual. More impressively, the stories all share some themes which become apparent in the final part, helping to pick up the slack a bit. B.
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Apr 11, 2015 01:05
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Dabir posted:Wasn't it a plot device designed to be able to go "oh yeah there were these 9 other guys and Tom Baker is the last, show's over, bye"? The Morbius Doctors thing, where there were another secret 9 Doctors running around previously, is kinda weird because Robert Holmes was the one one who ever did anything with it, and also that thread resolves itself anyway. I doubt Terrance Dicks cared about it when he was writing The Five Doctors. It goes basically like this: The Brain of Morbius--Tom Baker is the Secret 13th Doctor. The Deadly Assassin--The 13th life is the last life. The Caves of Androzani--Davison isn't sure if he's gonna regenerate because it "feels different this time." He does anyway, but with a weird hallucination sequence, and then he has the worst case of regeneration hangover we've ever seen. So at least in Holmes' eyes, that plot point was finished when Five somehow beat the regeneration limit. Colin Baker being a bit crazy was the result of that.
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Apr 11, 2015 01:24
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Dabir posted:Well sure, nobody cared about the secret 9 faces thing, but that is why the limit was invented, right? I figure the limit probably came about because Holmes needed a reason for the Master to be all skeleton-y when he came back in The Deadly Assassin and that was the first thing he thought of. Then later he realized that Five was the last regeneration, under his own rules, and so he decided to address it.
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Apr 11, 2015 04:35
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Jerusalem posted:You're South African? From my American perspective, it's the hardest to understand of all the various regional English accents. I'm glad that certain scenes in District 9 had subtitles. I can understand specific South Africans I know pretty well, but seeing them in movies or on TV is a challenge.
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Apr 15, 2015 01:13
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Chairman Mao posted:like most big finish trilogies it turns to poo poo in the last audio. DoctorWhat posted:if there's a single bigger trilogy quality drop-off than the one between A Death in the Family and Lurkers at Sunlight's Edge, I've yet to hear it. I might have to go with Prisoners of Fate as BF's most egregious example of shattering an ankle upon landing. All of the Nyssa/Tegan/Turlough stories had been pretty good so far, and in particular the two before this one. And this story even makes it an hour or so before collapsing up its own rear end and topping it off with an ending only Joseph Lidster could love. But today I was pleasantly surprised by Signs and Wonders, the capper to all the Hex and Elder Gods stuff. I've never been a fan of the Elder Gods outside of the TV stuff and maybe Protect and Survive, but this story was definitely solid. It helps that it's more of a character piece and it nails the Hex stuff, as well as giving him a satisfying resolution. The end of that story got me thinking, though: Ace has never had a final story. Seven got one with the movie, Eight eventually got The Night of the Doctor, but Ace is trapped in this weird limbo where she just stopped traveling with the Doctor at some point. It's kind of weird.
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Apr 15, 2015 20:52
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Other great things about The Curse of Fenric: the theme of losing faith (the priest and later Ace) and the importance of logic to the plot (the enigma machine, the chess problem). It's a bit of a mess on a story level (but no less so than, I'd argue, your average RTD story) but it absolutely nails the emotional beats and thematic elements.
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Apr 25, 2015 04:10
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Mortanis posted:How is Dark Eyes 4? I picked it up right after it came out but haven't had a chance to listen. Normally I'm gung ho to listen but I wasn't as enamored with DE3 as I was with the first two. On that note, when are they switching back to a more serialized format for Doctor the Eighth? I thought DE 4 was the best one since the first one, and also the only one that feels like a coherent story arc since the first one. I was really down on 3, but this is a pretty good conclusion. It's still not perfect, and there are some groan-worthy moments, but it's definitely worth a listen if you're a fan of Eight. Mild warning: the first story is a one-off with no relevance to the rest of the set. They're continuing with the box set stuff, and the next one is...THE DOOM COALITION.
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Apr 26, 2015 01:59
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He's just such a fundamentally misformed character. Even if he was written well I don't think you could make the idea of C'hrizz work. A character who's ridiculously easily influence and has a murderous split personality? Turlough worked because he was fundamentally a good guy struggling with doing the right thing. Ch'rizz manages to be unbelievable, unsympathetic, and boring all at the same time.
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Apr 30, 2015 02:01
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I know everybody earlier was doing the "heh, 100 sure is a great three-part story, am i rite?" thing earlier, but I literally cannot remember a thing about Bedtime Story. I read Jerusalem's review and none of it sounds familiar whatsoever. It really must be just that bad that it self-deleted from my memory.
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May 12, 2015 02:35
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I've only been reading the Eleventh Doctor series, but that one, at least, is fantastic. Also, I could've sworn I saw a Ninth Doctor book on the rack a couple of weeks ago. Is that published by another company, or are they just not involving the book in the crossover?
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May 27, 2015 03:20
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Barry Foster posted:I recently re-listened to Castle of Fear, and it's genuinely pretty funny. Have fun. The next one, The Eternal Summer, is legit one of my favorite audios ever. It's fantastic. It does an amazing job of making all the side characters feel full-fledged. Plague of the Daleks is pretty lame, though.
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Jun 2, 2015 22:39
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Honestly, you should just skip both of these. I didn't notice Lidster wrote The Reaping, so I got tricked into that one. It's terrible! And not in a really interesting way! And I assume The Gathering is just as bad.
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Jun 7, 2015 05:15
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CobiWann posted:If The Reaping is supposed to be a Peri story...it doesn't quite succeed. Let me just get this out of the way now – for all the flak Nicola Bryant has gotten about her American accent, it's definitely NOT a Baltimore one. Not even close. Not ONE mention of Old Bay seasoning. Jesus, she's supposed to be from Baltimore? I don't remember that at all from this or Planet of Fire. That's even worse. She's passable as generic California, maybe, but Baltimore? I've been rewatching The Wire recently and Jerusalem did a great series of episode recaps for that series, so now knowing Peri is from Baltimore my mind is trying and failing to fit her into that world somehow. The Reaping is probably, to drat with faint praise, Lidster's best script, in that it's the one you can listen to for the longest before the ending ruins the whole thing. It's a mediocre Cyberman story if you shut it off five minutes early.
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Jun 14, 2015 05:18
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Bicyclops posted:She's really, really not. Nicola Bryant is a talented actor, probably, but her American accent is, was, and clearly always will be atrocious. It sounds like the Monty Python crew from their American board room sketch mixed with some kind of Canadian thing. I wince continually when I hear it, and wish constantly that Big Finish would come up with some kind of science fiction reason to let her use her natural accent, like the Doctor adjusting the TARDIS's translation circuit so that she would sound more like him, or really, anything that will free her from this prison of trying to put on an accent she has never had the capability to do. I'm being generous, of course, and she clearly has her moments when she just has no idea how to say something (the only American allowed to pronounce water "worter" is Neil DeGrasse Tyson), but I really think she's...decent. A D+ is still passable after all. What's worse than Nicola Bryant's accent, though, is the lines they make her say. I bet she'd sound half as good again if they had an American or somebody familiar with American English just going through her scripts, crossing out corridor and replacing it with "hallway," that sort of thing.
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Jun 14, 2015 12:05
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The Curse of Davros isn't a classic but it's a good deal of fun. It's a good romp, and for a good portion of the story the Doctor and Davros swap brains. (Not really a spoiler, it's one of the biggest parts of the story.)
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Jun 18, 2015 23:08
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This is pretty cool news for stuff going forward but the Weeping Angels in audio form just sounds like the dumbest loving idea. I have no idea how this is going to work unless they're an extremely minor aspect of whatever story it is.
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Jun 30, 2015 02:39
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Jerusalem posted:Jesus Christ, Vengeance really was the exception that proves the rule - everything else Martin writes seems to incorporate some kind of really creepy sexual fetish. 
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Jul 2, 2015 02:56
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I really don't care that much about the continuity of it all, to be honest. If you come up with a good script where Five, River, and Jamie fight Cybus-era Cybermen, just go for it and let nerds thirty years from now sort it out.
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Jul 4, 2015 23:40
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CobiWann posted:Year of the Pig Year of the Pig is basically exactly what I want out of Big Finish. Not that it's their best (but it is very good) or that every story should be like it, but it does something that could only work on audio. The concept is too batshit to work on TV, and if you think about what Toby looks like for too long you'll go mad. Big Finish, IMO, spends way too much time playing too closely to the classic series, but when they cut loose, they cut loose.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:48
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Both of them, even.
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Jul 8, 2015 21:37
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Jerusalem posted:Season 1 of the Eighth Doctor Adventures would have been a pleasant if unremarkable diversion if it wasn't for this 2-parter. It's sooooo good. It's definitely a welcome change from the previous Eight story where a monsters show up halfway through. I have no idea how Big Finish can pull off something like Human Resources and then still be resorting to the old "monster in the title shows up at the beginning of the first cliffhanger." Now I want to listen to Human Resources again.
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Jul 28, 2015 00:04
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Little_wh0re posted:Do you think I'll need to have listened to a particular set of stories before doom coalition 2 or will it be fairly stand alone? I want to be up to speed but I'm not sure how much bf I can afford. Well, Doom Coalition 1 isn't even out yet, but looking at the descriptions for it, it looks like the first one is a pretty clean break. All I see is that the Doctor's got a companion he met in the last story arc. I would imagine they're expecting a lot of new listeners for DC2, so I'd expect they make it fairly easy to jump into. EDIT: Doom Coalition is seriously the dumbest name.
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Jul 30, 2015 22:34
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I have seen a rather large chunk of classic Who, but I mostly stick to the stuff that's highly rated. Among those serials, I think, Tom Baker doesn't stand out too much. In a great story he's as good as any of the other actors to play the Doctor. The Tom Baker era was one of the writing high points of the series; I'd bet Davison would be a whole lot more well-regarded if he'd gotten a couple of those scripts. But I think where Baker shines is in his ability to spin poo poo into gold. Give him a guy in a lovely monster costume and he makes it fun. Give him terrible dialogue and he'll compensate with mugging for the camera. I really do think it's the way that he makes bad stuff, if not good, at least passable, that makes him the favorite of a lot of people. The "have I the right" speech from Genesis of the Daleks doesn't really have anything Baker-specific about it; I'd bet Pertwee or McCoy would do just as good a job with it. But when you have a cardboard monster falling apart while you're shooting, you want Tom Baker.
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Aug 2, 2015 14:32
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surc posted:I wonder if the BBC makes more from dvd sales/netflix paying for a new season of sherlock + Doctor Who every 3 years instead of a new season of one every year? I'd think if they weren't getting some benefit from it that they'd just be all "No, Steven, no. Work on one thing at a time and keep a schedule" at this point. (Alternatively I'd guess he's the only one making them money and they're terrified to cross him.) I would expect that's the reason we're down to 13 episodes a year. How much money does the BBC lose from people picking up the DVD box set and going, "Well, maybe if there were 13 episodes..."? They basically save a whole episode's budget.
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Aug 6, 2015 23:48
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PriorMarcus posted:Haha, I love the red supreme Dalek and seeing him being moved into the studios has been awesome this year, especially because he's had some upgrades to his build quality - that and, you know, brand new classic Daleks. Are they brand new? Or are they just bringing them out of the museum again? Either way, it's neat that they're mixing the designs. The Daleks are really the only monster you could get away with it, too; most classic Cybermen, Sontarans, etc., would look like garbage.
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Aug 13, 2015 01:09
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I don't know if I can think of a movie with better special effects than Star Wars, honestly. Maybe Alien and Aliens? Even Tim Burton's Batman, more than a decade later, has some terrible miniature shots (but terrible in the way they make you go "aww," not "ew"). Doctor Who's got a couple of high marks: the design of the Daleks, the robots in Robots of Death, the swamp in Planet of Evil. But even there Star Wars trumps Who because the Dagobah set might be the best looking set of all time.
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Aug 15, 2015 03:13
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(Un)controversial opinion: there hasn't been a good Doctor Who theme since 1979, with the (possible) exception of the revival Series 1 theme. But even that's partnered with the ugliest logo of all time, so it loses points there.
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Aug 15, 2015 23:33
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I don't like what they did to the opening bassline for Series 5/6, but I really like when it gets to to main theme. They really picked the right synth for that. Just the right amount of echo and sci-fi goofiness.
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Aug 15, 2015 23:52
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Logopolis also has one of the, if not the best, soundtracks of the series. It's this wonderful, bizarre little fairy tale and it's a great note for Baker to go out on. The whole season, really, is just of exceptional quality.
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Aug 21, 2015 23:22
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All of Seven's run is really of remarkable quality. The only story that's actually, outright, not good is Time and the Rani, and even that's still better than like half of Six's episodes.
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Aug 22, 2015 03:28
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Jerusalem posted:Seven's run has also got beautiful disasters like Paradise Towers and The Happiness Patrol where they don't quite work but you can absolutely see what they were going for and just how close they came to getting it right. Maybe The Happiness Patrol to a degree, but Paradise Towers is basically perfect. I wouldn't change a thing about it.
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Aug 22, 2015 04:09
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egon_beeblebrox posted:Oh, I know. I just think he'd be fun in the modern series. He's...decent in the Big Finish Eighth Doctor stories. Nothing special, but he's usually fun to have around.
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Aug 29, 2015 01:32
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Diabolik900 posted:Yeah, I really enjoyed this one. It was great seeing Troughton play a villain. To be honest, the only reconstructions that are more missing than existent that get any real kind of attention are Power and Evil of the Daleks, and that has a lot less to do with their quality (which is excellent) than it does with the word 'Daleks.'
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Aug 30, 2015 21:05
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Mortanis posted:I'm about 3/4 of the way done with UNIT: Dominion, based on the strength of MacQueen's stuff with McGann. I'm enjoying it and MacQueen is absurdly amazing, but McCoy sounds a little off to me. It's my first Seventh audio, but he sounds like he's trying too hard. Is that Seven's normal audio style? I don't remember his run on the show sounding so forced. McCoy, I think, is one of the more limited actors in the range. Which is not to say that he's bad, there are plenty of great actors who happen to have a limited range; Keanu Reeves, for example. But if he's not getting good direction, or if the script is week, his autopilot just isn't as good as some of the other actors' autopilots. Like, Colin Baker will sell the heck out of any crap dialogue you give him, and Paul McGann will just turn the snark up to 11. It probably doesn't help that McCoy has such a distinctive voice, which can in particularly bad instances make it sound like he's making fun of himself.
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Sep 5, 2015 23:46
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