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Here's an idea I'm toying with: Every portrayal of the Doctor descends, fundamentally, from either the Hartnell take on the role (authority figure, basically establishment) or Troughton (trickster god, basically counterculture). This is obviously very reductive, but IMO it makes some sense. Hartnell defined the character, Troughton redefined it in response to that, and all subsequent actors—while each bringing new things and learning from all their predecessors—were ultimately taking sides in their debate. Is the Doctor archetypally a scientist or a clown? Does he serve civilization by embodying its strengths or pointing out its weaknesses? My personal take on which Who was whom (Only doing TV here, which makes McGann very tough to judge.): 3: Hartnell 4: Troughton 5: Hartnell 6: Hartnell 7: Troughton 8: See below 9: Troughton 10: Troughton 11: Troughton 12: Hartnell (How to judge McGann, who has appeared in the role twice, two decades apart? I think TVM McGann was basically written Hartnellian, after accounting for the general chaos of a new regeneration for both the Doctor and the show. McGann in Night of the Doctor, informed by years of BF stories, is much more Troughton. It's almost worth judging them as different portrayals, given both the IRL gap between performances and the in-universe effect the Time War had on him.) What's interesting to me about the list above is that the old series mostly handed off between the two interpretations. More portrayals were Hartnellian, but Tom's 7-year tenure evened things out. The new series, however, has much more consistently favored Troughtonian interpretations. Capaldi is the exception, and his performance doesn't seem to sit well with the Beeb, so perhaps there's now a consistent bias against the more authoritarian interpretation of the character. Hopefully this is a fun thing to argue about. I think it's an interesting lens through which to view the series, and would pair nicely with a look at the historical contexts in which the series has been produced. E: The temperature of this take is "tepid." pgroce fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Jul 5, 2017 |
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Jul 5, 2017 17:03
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Big Mean Jerk posted:While there's an argument for 12 being more Hartnell than Troughton, I'd hesitate to call him authoritarian. He's very much a punk Doctor, to the point where I personally would consider him a Troughton, albeit a much more serious variation on the style. I put him in the Hartnell camp more for the way he ran the TARDIS. 11 and Amy and Rory were pals palling around; 12 was a teacher and mentor. Tim Burns Effect posted:I'm not even sure i'd go with that reading of Hartnell honestly, he's just as trickster-y/anti-authoritarian as Troughton, just under a less wacky exterior. He's the kind of guy that would cause mischief and blame it on somebody else while LOOKING like an authority figure, if anything I think I like this take on it: Davros1 posted:The greatest thing about Hartnell's Doctor, and one that every single actor after picked up, is that he played the Doctor as the ultimate authority figure ... who's completely and totally anti-authority. The whole series has this text of the Doctor as an anti-authority figure (ran away from the Time Lords and whatnot). But authoritarianism often exists in opposition to other authority. (The USA and the USSR, for instance.) So he always exists against (some kind of) authority. But what does he stand for? We can see that in his relationship to his companions. Sometimes it's a bunch of buddies travelling in the TARDIS, sometimes it's the Doctor taking the lead and guiding everyone (And sometimes it's stuff like Turlough and Adam, which I confess I don't have an answer for.) CommonShore posted:Not the worst interpretation. I'm mulling over the possibility of a Pertwee archetype - Troughton and Hartnell didn't do much of the running and jumping and swashbuckling we see in later interpretations. 6, 10, and 11 all go down this path, while others - 5, 7, 9, 12 - mostly avoid it. There's the trickster axis and the swashbuckler axis, with Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee, and Smith in the four corners. That's a pretty good angle, too. Sometimes the show is more action-oriented, sometimes it's more geared toward being clever. Forktoss posted:There are some that the template fits to a tee - Three and Six are obvious Hartnells while Seven and Eleven are pretty explicitly modelled after Troughton - but the ones I have most trouble cramming into either box are Davison and Eccleston. Agreed, they're hard to pigeonhole. (I did say this was pretty reductive.) I put Davison in the Hartnell category because he felt more like the father figure in a big travelling space family to me. (Maybe Baker was too? That whole companion cast was pretty set when Davison took over. But Baker felt much less comfortable with that.) Eccleston is almost his own archetype. I decided he was a counterculture subverter, but more in the mold of a veteran who saw things in combat and is now an antiwar activist. I don't get the sense he's into relying on any kind of authority, but he's more like a bitter anarchist than Loki. Anyway, good conversation. I love overthinking this show for some reason. 
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Jul 5, 2017 23:42
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docbeard posted:Resurrection is a mess, but it's the sort of mess I enjoy. Also the Daleks having to put up with a mercenary whose role appears to be to tell them "No, you idiots, THIS IS WHY YOU KEEP LOSING" will never not be funny. At one point the BBC Worldwide sent a copy of Resurrection to the US (and elsewhere? IDK) with some extra scenes, but no special effects or music in the last half or so of the serial. That was the one I recorded off the air and watched repeatedly as a kid. It sounds like it would be laughable, but I found that it made the already stark events of the script even starker. Watching Tegan at the end reacting to the wrecked Daleks and people, then running away, all in silence, was really powerful. Watching it later with the music and sound effects kind of took me out of it, weirdly enough. One thing commonly said about British TV of the era is that the 2-camera recording style promoted a more theatrical presentation. One thing theater does well is drive home seriousness with silence; that copy of Resurrection did that well, IMO. It would have been interesting to see it done as an actual artistic choice and not as an incidental part of the distribution.
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Jul 7, 2017 13:08
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I keep hoping they'll take one (or more!) of the recent Doctors and start doing movies with them. There's no reason they can't do movies the same way BF does audios. (I'm ignorant of any licensing nightmares that may preclude this.) It would be ill-timed to start now though, let Whittaker get her sea legs under her first. Mostly I just want there to be a way Capaldi can make more Doctor Who.  I never really pined for more Tennant, and I missed Smith but his tenure seemed to run a pretty natural course. Maybe Eccleston would do a movie though....
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Jul 17, 2017 18:00
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I have no reason not to think Jodie Whittaker won't do an excellent job, but man I wish Capaldi could've done at least one more year. Big Finish is great and all, but we were finally done with all the bullshit and he was settled into the character and fabulous. Another season of Bill would have been wonderful too. And now I'm even going to miss John Simm! He finally gets a few scripts that aren't 100% ham and shows that his Master is every bit as dangerous and evil as the rest of them. I get why they hit the reset button between showrunners, but there are ways that it doesn't serve the show. Sure, inheriting the previous occupant's dirty laundry is more challenging, but it isn't unfair (they did it in the old series all the time), and it lets the show grow more organically. Missy's arc had at least one more year in it, and the Doctor/Bill relationship, as well as Bill herself, deserved more time. (Nardole was great, but I imagine he'd leave before Bill.) Meanwhile, the crew behind the camera could feel out the show while the acting provided continuity. Now everyone's new and making mistakes all at once. Oh well, water under the bridge, and like I said, Jodi Whittaker deserves to be judged on her own merits, to say nothing of Chibnall. Just seems a shame to break up the gang just as it was really starting to breathe. I hope she gets more than 1 year introduction, 1 year of "Change is coming!" and 1 year to just be the Doctor.
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Jul 26, 2017 20:32
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toanoradian posted:Same. I remember more of the Next Doctor than I do Planet of the Dead. I liked the next special, the Waters of Mars. They could have literally named Planet of the Dead "Desert Bus" and it would have been both more memorable and more germane to the story. Folks who are sick of Moffat should go back and watch more of Anything's Fine As Long as it's Turned Up to 11 with Russell T. Davies.
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Jul 29, 2017 15:35
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E: on second though, I like the thread's current approach better. I liked the meta-teasing approach to The Next Doctor, but t man that whole Cyber King thing had all the RTD things—it seemed to work backwards from "giant cyberman destroying London like Godzilla! Hell yeah!" without caring much what it hurt to get there. Loved the screwdriver gag though. pgroce fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Jul 29, 2017 |
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Jul 29, 2017 17:12
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marktheando posted:I hope she gets her just deserts. You did this on purpose, didn't you? Don't think you can just do these sorts of things. docbeard posted:In the alternate reality where we got one last full season of Tennant and Waters of Mars was the midseason finale, it could have worked as a prelude to seeing him get bolder with Time Lord Victorious and getting slapped down hard a few times. My preferred way to explore this would be for the Doctor to get away with it for a while, then get called on it (positively) by the Master, which brings the Doctor to themself. E: I have to think about pronouns these days. #21stcenturydoctorwho pgroce fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Jul 29, 2017 |
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Jul 29, 2017 21:41
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sinepost posted:
Replace "punchline" with "scene" (usually the conclusion) and you have a fitting epitaph for RTD's Who.
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Jul 31, 2017 19:04
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Cleretic posted:Martha had no especially strong sexual feelings about the Doctor. Amy tried to gently caress him, but I don't think she was ever really in love with him. He was her wish-fulfillment fantasy, that was a wish. It was also a coping mechanism after a really stressful adventure. I'm surprised more companions don't struggle with PTSD or the like, actually; adventuring with the Doctor is a lot like doing combat missions. Hyper-sexual Amy and "suicide by adventure" Clara are probably more realistic in that regard.
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Aug 6, 2017 14:10
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2house2fly posted:this is very vague. What are the things about them that make you think it was unacceptable not to cast white actors in this episode? He wasn't saying they should have cast white actors in the roles. He was saying that: jivjov posted:Portraying a family of black people as space car thieves is playing on racial stereotypes. Do you disagree with that proposition? Do you not see at least three ways the story could be rewritten without them being space car thieves without changing anything else in the story?
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Aug 6, 2017 14:57
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Facebook Aunt posted:And it does seem like there is a no win situation here. There is no possible way to fix the story. You fix the story by having people of all kinds of racial backgrounds in all kinds of roles, particularly by having people other than white men in the traditional "powerful, respected authority figure with agency" roles. Then it's no big deal that one small aspect or another reinforces stereotypes, because there's a deluge of different, nuanced portrayals of the true variety of a given race/gender/etc.'s true experience and no one has to obsess over small aspects of fairly inconsequential roles. In all of media, not just Doctor Who. Sound like a big lift? Sure it is, and working for it is a long, slow process. Until it happens, though, whenever someone other than presumptively straight white people of the appropriate gender* are cast (black folks in space; a woman Doctor), people will be very sensitive to every aspect of their portrayal, because representation is scarce, and the negative stereotypes are so damaging that anything that reinforces them (or fights against them) is important. If you want black folks/women/etc. in a role to be no big deal the way white folks are no big deal, work for a system in which they are cast so often and in such diverse roles that they're no big deal. You're also likely to get better representation when the writers and producers are diverse. RTD is an example of that wrt gay representation. Some of it felt forced at times (more a general aspect of his writing IMO—he was rarely subtle), but since RTD the gay representation we've gotten has been a bit mixed—very lesbian-for-the-straight-gaze Vastra/Jenny; Shepherd; Bill, who...was actually quite fantastic. But it's not for nothing that I can count the number of non-straight characters on one hand. * There's a whole other conversation to be had about the actual stereotypical casting that occurs, like the fact that companions are almost always women, and that having strong ones (like Leela) has frequently been beyond the show's ability to carry off. RTD Who was often worse in that way than under Moffat, despite Moffat's sexist reputation. E: The discussion of how the novels treated Ace is a good complement to this discussion.
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Aug 8, 2017 23:55
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Astroman posted:I understand that. I just disagree that it exists in every single time it's pointed out. If it is that pervasive, It is. quote:it's impossible to fight, It's actually really simple to fight: Put more minorities in media in absolute terms, and in the same variety of roles we put non-minorities. Simple, but hard. Hard, but not impossible. And harder than it should be because of all the people at all levels throwing their hands up and saying "Well, we can't just do THAT" when, yes, actually, if we just made it a priority we could. quote:because it's literally everywhere at all times and in all things. No matter what, somebody could find some sort of hidden sexism/racism/anti-gay/transphobic/ableist etc message in everything. Yes. Because the pervasive omission of their experiences in our media effects both the majority of places where they are conspicuously absent and the few places they are represented, because absolutely every aspect of the representation is a large part of their total representation in media, and because people tend to take things from the environment that reinforce their worldview and discount things that don't, so the troublesome, stereotype-reinforcing parts are asymmetrically more troublesome than the uplifting, assumption-breaking parts are redemptive. quote:You can't every make that world better without the most extreme measures of censorship or Harrison Bergeronesque measures. Wrong. You make that world better with more representation, as I outlined above. But you don't stop pointing out the problem, because then people will assume it doesn't exist, because that's what they want to be true anyway. We aren't advocating censorship, we're pointing out problems with the already-heavily-censored status quo and advocating relief of that censorship. Forget he Doctor and companions, we need a black female showrunner and a show where the Doctor can meet Marsha P. Johnson and take Harriet Tubman out to fight Daleks and go back to Churchill and call him out for being a murderous colonialist rear end in a top hat. If that offends you, you're not being offended by censorship, you're being offended by the prospect of seeing speech that you find off-putting, which is kind of the opposite of being offended by censorship. And if that doesn't offend you, why does a little "BTW, that one portrayal had some racist bits to it" criticism put you in vigorous opposition for several pages?
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Aug 9, 2017 13:30
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Wheat Loaf posted:I imagine that if he was set on having a woman as the Doctor, he'd have, at a minimum, at least thought about Colman, seeing as she was also one of the main characters on his old programme. Having just watched Broadchurch (soon to be rechristened The Other Three Doctors), I'd be disappointed if he hadn't at least thought seriously about Colman. Speaking of: S1 of Broadchurch is fantastic, but it doesn't exactly reassure me that Chibnall is a good choice for showrunner. He's clearly come a long way since Torchwood, but he still seems captivated by that which is darkly problematic about the human condition. Doctor Who is about the parts of the human spirit that triumph over evil, Broadchurch (along with Torchwood) is about the parts that find it seductive and/or can't overcome it.
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Aug 15, 2017 17:15
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Gaz-L posted:He's a comedian, actor and TV personality, most well-known these days for hosting an extremely popular game show called The Chase, as noted, but was also on the long-running soap Coronation Street and one of the leads on Law & Order. For Americans... think if Craig Ferguson or Aisha Tyler was the new companion to get a rough idea of the sort of area this is in. And why isn't Craig Ferguson a companion yet, anyway?
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Aug 23, 2017 03:01
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Wheat Loaf posted:I feel like it's because the Second World War - and perhaps more to the point, the appeasement (real or imagined) of Germany in the 1930s - was very much a living memory at the time, certainly much more so than it is now. Indeed, dealing with Nazis now is souring some people on non-violent responses to them. I can only imagine how it must've been if you'd fought a devastating war with them recently.
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Aug 24, 2017 17:00
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Came in here to see lost episode/Mugabe jokes, but there are none in the last two pages. You’re slipping, Doctor Who thread.
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Nov 18, 2017 17:50
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Oh yeah, BTW: The link in the OP to the spoiler thread is to the old spoiler thread.
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Nov 19, 2017 03:19
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When he’s pretending Symphony will become the sexiest word ever, he sort of turns it into the sexiest word ever.
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Nov 24, 2017 22:26
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