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Lampsacus posted:There is that old DW book where he, the fourth doctor?, and Romana are traveling backwards in time in a way. So they get to the place and everybody is like, thank you for saving us! I forgot it's title. Paradise or Carnival or something like that. Paradise of Death, by Jonathan Morris. And if you're looking for recommendations, I think the best Who option you could be looking for, if you can find it, is The Crooked World by Steve Lyons.
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Jan 14, 2021 10:31
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The_Doctor posted:Crooked World is not. Boo! It's really funny, and you cry when Scrappy Doo dies. The entire thing is caused by a sad child who asks spirits to be her imaginary friends. That's the definition of Doctor Who! This is it, it's finally it. This is my hill and I am dying on it. This will be my death. Boo I say!
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Jan 14, 2021 14:07
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Zaroff posted:Isn't Paradise of Death one of those atrocious Pertwee audios from the 90s? Oh gently caress, you're right. Festival of Death, by Jonny Morris. Paradise of Death is Jeremy Fitzoliver.
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Jan 14, 2021 15:40
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Davros1 posted:Looking for other good Who novels Anything by Kate Orman (The Year Of Intelligent Tigers), Lance Parkin (Just War), Lloyd Rose (The Algebra Of Ice), Phillip Purser-Hallard (Nobody's Children), Kelly Hale (Erasing Sherlock), Mags L Halliday(History 101), Simon Bucher-Jones (The Taking Of Planet Five) and Lawrence Miles(Down). Simon Guerrier has written some excellent short stories, and does a pretty good job editing collections. His The Time Travellers is excellent. Ben Aaronovitch is very good, though Transit suffers from a few issues. If you can track down Genis Loci or The Also People it's well worth your time. Big fan of Paul Leonard and Jim Mortimore, particularly Dreamstone Moon and The Eye of Heaven, and Daniel O'Mahoney(The Cabinet of Light) has excellent prose. Anything by Steve Cole (Ten Little Aliens), when he's pretending to be Tara Samms, is also really good. When he's not, he's often in a more workmanlike, Justin Richards type phase, though not always. Jaqueline Rayner(EarthWorld) writes good, fun, fluffy reads, though -- ironically enough -- her best stuff has definitely been before she moved over to working on the New Series novels. Finally, barring one or two shittier books, I really like Steve Lyons (The Witchfinders) and Paul Magrs (The Blue Angel).
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Jan 15, 2021 08:04
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The_Doctor posted:Mel's back! Also Season 24 on Blu-ray! lol Mel stole the Big Finish chair.
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Jan 21, 2021 14:10
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Gameko posted:Guess we'll have to wait for it to show up on Disney+ in five years. The best part is they can bring back Mr. I-ain't-gettin-no-Disney-Plus as Dr. #15: Because John Boyega is bad, and he'll need the money? Someone didn't watch Small Axe.
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Jan 21, 2021 16:34
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Gameko posted:[I hope John Boyega gets into some sort of public scandal. You know, the kind that scuppers his career prospects. Like Armie Hammer eating deer hearts. I dunno. Come up with it yourself.]
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Jan 21, 2021 16:46
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RTD's It's A Sin is so so so depressing. Very good so far (halfway through episode three), and very funny, but this is absolutely going to rip my heart out. The subplot with the Welsh flatmate is going to some sad sad places, I can feel it in my bones.
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Jan 23, 2021 07:47
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Finished It's A Sin. Thought I'd post about it here since I don't really know where else would be appropriate. Devastating, particularly the format breaking last episode. Did a bit of reading, and was surprised to find out that Jill was based on a real woman (who really lived in a flatshare called The Pink Palace). The Doctor Who sequence was not particularly important - the Les Mis sequences are bigger - but it's cute, and used to underline some themes about Thatcher. RTD always ends up writing about Nazis. I think they pop up in pretty much every thing he writes, eventually. Even Century Falls did Nazis. Was surprised to see more of a shoutout to Torchwood, of all things, in Tracey Anne Oberman and Jonny Green's casting. I hope Green really takes off after this, he's barely done anything significant outside his BF plays. I think it's interesting that the show, ultimately, stays within its own frame of reference. The characters operate with a contemporary understanding of HIV (e.g. the comment about saliva) and expects is audience to largely understand that science has moved on (as opposed to When We Rise, which did a lot of dutiful, even borderline abstemious, historical cateloguing and educating). This show just expects you to understand that the characters are operating in a limited context, or are being deliberately foolish. It's got that crueler, more ironic touch that didn't sit well with American viewers of Cucumber / Years and Years, IIRC, but it backloads a lot of (in particular) Richie's worse qualities to the third episode and further. Which probably made it more acceptable. I also like how the series walks that really narrow line between the characters forgiving Richie for being an abominable piece of poo poo, and the series not doing that. It's not that it doesn't have an opinion, but I think - and this is part of the format breaking I already mentioned - the moment it's ready to reveal its hand, the series snatches perspective away to another character and their plot, and never comes back. It's very brave, weird, and uncomfortable, and largely saves each of the show's episodes from being a catalogue of death.
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Jan 24, 2021 02:55
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The_Doctor posted:There’s the UK TV thread? Maybe spoiler some/most things there, as some people (including me) haven’t even started it yet? Man, there's less that post than was in the trailers for the show. I thought I did a pretty good job expressing my feelings without giving away the plot. I guess your mileage may vary, but I'd like to think I did a good job. And I'm not sure the UK TV thread would give a drat about the Torchwood / Big Finish stuff. I always feel like this thread barely tolerates it. Hence why I picked here.
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Jan 24, 2021 10:06
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CommonShore posted:There are only two definitley weak episodes imo and they come in the middle. I persist in arguing that a lot of the faults with the Toby Whithouse episode is because Moffat completely failed to communicate anything about what his episode should be about. The villains in that episode behave completely differently to how they behave in the two Moffat episodes, and the script keeps saying "church" and showing images of pyramids. Maybe it's too much love for his other work, but that seems remarkably sloppy for the man.
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Jan 25, 2021 20:52
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Robert J. Omb posted:Smashing! It always seemed strange to me that Pertwee didn’t face the Cybermen in his original run. May have had something to do with the burnout of Troughton battling them every second story or so... This is at least the third time BF's gone to the Pertwee / Cybermen well tho.
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Jan 30, 2021 13:47
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The_Doctor posted:Same, how is the impersonator? In terms of performance or in terms of impersonation? He's good, sometimes he's legitimately great, mostly because it's a performance first and an impersonation second. If you're looking for recommendations, I'd go with the fourth set, but neither story is going to set your world on fire.
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Jan 30, 2021 15:43
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Off the Eric Roberts chat, Masterful is really loving good and worth the buy.OldMemes posted:Eric Roberts apparently recorded all of his dialogue down the phone, in one take, in fifteen minutes. David DeCoteau basically makes movies in his house with random actors he knows as quickly as possible. Though I think the upcoming Master! is the first time he's recorded any of his lines with another cast member, like BF usually does.
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Feb 3, 2021 07:11
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OldMemes posted:Nicholas Briggs telling the story of how he and the writer of the Eye of Harmony argued over how exactly the Eye works and how the story will reconcile plot differences between The Deadly Assassin and other episodes is hilarious. He really cares about trying to keep the franchise's mismash of story ideas, throwaway lines, and implications by dozens of different writers over decades into a logical continuity. Yeah that's really gone out the window over the last few years. Trying to reconcile the continuity of the last few seasons of Gallifrey and The War Master with the two different Eighth Doctor ranges has become basically impossible. You don't need any of it to appreciate what's going on in each individual range, but trying to tie them together isn't going to work (for reasons that are largely irrelevant to enjoying any of the stories).
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Feb 9, 2021 15:50
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OldMemes posted:I'm curious now, what are the big differences? It's the Gallifreyian Presidential succession. So this is gonna get nerdy. Romana is president for the first two seasons of Gallifrey, and after a period of civil war is succeeded by an original character, Livia. Livia, though she's never named, is the current President during Dark Eyes and Doom Coalition, and is explicitly in charge during the chronologically early War Master stories. Thanks to a series of poor choices, Livia's time sees the role of President neutralised into a ceremonial position, and power is handed off to a group of generals and cardinals (the war council, whose most prominent members are Ollistra, Mantus and Rasmus). Romana and her inner circle are systematically taken off the board as the planet descends into a fascist war state. All civil resistance is crushed. The problem is that this seems to happen over the course of two different time periods -- it seems to take place both before the Eighth Doctor has entered the Time War, and after John Hurt has become the War Doctor. And it's not just about a difference in perspective, either, since there's no way the Eighth Doctor would support a regime that was actively trying to kill two of his companions, and their friends -- in fact, he's said to have actively distanced himself from all of Time Lord society during the events of Gallifrey. But, in his own line, those things have apparently already happened, and he's actively supporting them and their presidency. (Also the War Master has a similar problem -- we see him make the decision to actively abandon the war in Gallifrey, but he makes an appearance at a chronologically later date in Ravenous. But in Ravenous, we see Gallifrey accidentally summon up the Ravenous from the depths of Timelord mythology, meaning that it has to place before Gallifrey, since everyone recognises them as a common temporal threat.) It's basically an ouroboros, which would be clever if it weren't a) unintentional and b) frustrating to make sense of. Of course, poo poo like this was always gonna happen when they decided to tell one story from five different interweaving, non-concurrent, non-consecutive perspectives
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Feb 9, 2021 16:52
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Man, everyone talks about Nekromanteia -- which, in addition to all of the above, is literally the plot to Caves of Androzani told badly -- but no-one talks about Black And White. At one point, Ace hides from some Vikings under a table. One of them, Beowulf, discovers her hiding there, and assumes that she's there to blow him. He gets aggressive, and she fends him off in an action sequence. Later on she describes him "not a bad bloke, really". What does she consider "bad"? OldMemes posted:A new group is trying to take the Time Lord's place in a chaotic, unordered timeline, clearing out the time vortex of life, and killing old companions so that they can trim alternative universes and eat the lack of choices. It turns out they're crystal skeletons who look like the Doctor, and one travels to 1963 and becomes the First Doctor or something. This is never explained. Then it turns out K-9 was plastered behind a wall in the TARDIS all along by Romana, and reveals that the Doctor has the contents of the matrix in his head, and can restore Gallifrey and then something to do with the Doctor's father or something, then the novels end on an unresolved cliffhanger. I think you're being a bit glib. The novel series isn't unresolved -- and they certainly don't end on a cliffhanger! The novel ends with the Doctor about to get his memories back and restore Gallifrey; we just don't see those events depicted on the page. But it's pretty obvious what happens next, and no-one's in danger. All the other continuity problems are resolved. e.g. to address your concern about The Council Of Eight -- the crystal people for anyone reading along -- that ending where one of them "becomes" the Doctor comes about out of the time line's need to be stabilised. The destruction of Gallifrey in The Ancestor Cell was retroactive; the planet was destroyed in such a way that not only did it no longer exist, it never existed in the first place. This, plus the following power vacuum, destabilised the timeline, and the in-universe retcon of the Doctor's origins was the last step required to cement the universe's stable existence. This of course only lasts until Gallifrey is restored in The Gallifrey Chronicles, whereupon the universe is restored. All of this means that it'd be impossible for the Eighth Doctor to mention any companion other than Sam in Night of The Doctor -- and since she's mentioned in Minuet In Hell AND Absent Friends, it's not like she's been decanonised by BF. Open Source Idiom fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Feb 11, 2021 |
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Feb 11, 2021 07:18
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Yoo, maybe don't start with Colditz. It has a really, really good twist and some fantastic guest stars, but it's got some of the worst sound design in the range. My recommendations: Fifth Doctor Spare Parts - loving brilliant. Emotional, funny, gross and upsetting. Some of the best design ever for BF. Omega - fantastic plot, funny, and a clever take on the character. Son Of The Dragon - Fantastic story for Erimem, an audio original companion, and the climax of a character arc that had been building for several years. (The other stories are pretty good too.) Circular Time - romantic and swoony, but the best episode is Autumn, which is essentially a David Warner tribute album. Sixth Doctor ...ish - so loving clever, with a great handle on tone. Stars an threatening version of the Book from Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy. Davros - best take on the character, reimagining Davros and the Sixth Doctor as duelling silicon valley entrepreneurs. Generally considered the definitive take on the character. ...and the Pirates - funny, with a very clever format breaking episode. Jubilee - the basis for Robert Shearman's episode Dalek. Arrangements For War - romeo and juliet, but played as a political drama, with a very sweet companion romance. Seventh Doctor Project Lazarus - the best multi-Doctor crossover story. Sequel to a decent story, which should be heard to appreciate this, and an essential arc story for the arc that weaves through the first 100 stories. Night Thoughts - the scariest Doctor Who story. Theatrical and weird, with an ambiguous plot that leaves you wondering. The Settling - The Seventh Doctor tries to deliver a baby during a civil war. It's the single best image associated with his character. Valhalla - A satire of the job market. A rare straight performance from Michelle Gomez. Eighth Doctor The Chimes Of Midnight - one of the best things written in Who. The Natural History Of Fear - don't spoil the concept, go in blind. Upsetting. The Last - a serious arc story, but the incidental story stars one of the best ever Doctor Who villains. Caerdroia - don't spoil the concept, go in blind. Charming. Terror Firma - a big arc story, with some gorgeous spooky sound design. The other definitive Davros story, and for years it was considered his definitive final story. (It still is, technically.) Like many others in this list, you do need to have heard some of the other Eighth Doctor stories to fully appreciate it, though.
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Feb 11, 2021 12:29
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TinTower posted:Some guy on TikTok is doing "in a nutshell" versions of One serials (e.g. The Daleks), so if you fancy a laugh, check them out. Pretty sure that guy's just ripping off Keiran Hodgson's youtube stuff. That's definitely his audio, and the style's similar too. I'd prove it, but Hodgson seems to have taken all his stuff down.
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Feb 16, 2021 22:18
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The Torchwood radio plays from Big Finish are loving excellent, particularly their Seasons 5 and 6. Highly recommended -- and on sale right now. Big Finish has been putting out a lot of crap these last six years or so, but Torchwood has been consistently brilliant. Highly, highly recommended. jivjov posted:I am still convinced that Miracle Day was plotted as a 5-chapter mini series like Children of Earth was that got ballooned to 10 episodes at the directive of Starz or whatever premium network it was they had partnered with It was Starz, and yeah, that's apparently the story. It did make the most of its running time, I thought, even if it wasn't all necessary.
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Feb 19, 2021 06:40
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The_Doctor posted:That’s exactly what happened, yes. There’s a general feeling the order for more episodes came very late in the day, when the original 5 scripts had already been more or less done., because the padding episodes are very easy to spot. The plane episode, the one in the McMansion. Anything where the action just stops. The plane episode is hilarious as gently caress though. The bit where the FBI lady wanders into oncoming traffic is black comedy gold.
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Feb 19, 2021 11:47
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Homora Gaykemi posted:Medicinal Purposes is pretty bad for having the Doctor fawn over Burke and Hare He does, the script doesn't.
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Feb 24, 2021 01:06
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OldMemes posted:Last night I listened to And You Will Obey Me. I found it a bit flat, mostly because I find the Fifth Doctor a little dull, but it perked up with the Master was around, and it captured that 80s family friendly BBC adventure horror vibe with the flashbacks. Next is a story with the return of the Alexander McQueen Master, who really grew on me over the course of Dark Eyes, so that should be fun. Spoiler: the story you are about to hear sucks. The one after is pretty good though!
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Feb 25, 2021 17:38
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jivjov posted:Remember Adam? No, not the brief companion of the 9th doctor who went turbo evil in a comic. The other one. The fake Torchwood member that got his own special introduction sequence. Where is Lizbeth's moustache. 
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Mar 23, 2021 22:56
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The EDA's are good, they do resolve that plotline, and nothing is canon - plus Fitz turns up in a bunch of Big Finish stuff so...
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Apr 2, 2021 14:35
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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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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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An Ounce of Gold posted:I've never listened to a Big Finish story. Am I the only one waiting for Deep Fakes, AI, and CGI to get good enough for them to hit the "Render Who" button and make new TV episodes out of them? That sounds horrific, ngl.
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Apr 6, 2021 14:02
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I'm a big fan of the BF stories that push boundaries, rather than just replicate versions of the past. And I can't help but think that Deep Fakes would be bound to recreating the past, for so long, just to prove that they are identical to the originals. The technology is going to limit the kinds of stories that can be told.
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Apr 6, 2021 14:34
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And there's Merlin. Paul Cornell was always super big on him being an alternate future version of the Doctor with red hair. Apparently BF isn't allowed to create any more alternate Doctors, by licence. So they can only tell stories with David Warner's alternate Doctor, and I guess the Arabella Wier one. Not that they'll go there again.
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Apr 12, 2021 13:21
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OldMemes posted:Listening to Dust Breeding and it's....fine? Geoffrey Beevers is fun as the Master, but the story back flip they have to do to explain why he isn't the Anthony Ainley version is silly (his face fell off again, I guess). The warp core and the krill aren't very interesting or threatening villains, and the audio design could have done a better job at conveying the feeling of an utterly empty and bleak planet covered in dust. It's not bad, just a little undercooked - it needed a little more suspense and atmosphere to tell the story it was aiming for effectively. It's got a large rep because of the extreme tradness, but I think it's just okay. The Master lore it introduces is a bit of a plot hole, but BF has drawn on it a fair bit for their Master lore these last few years. Hard disagree on thr music/ sound design though.
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Apr 14, 2021 22:52
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OldMemes posted:Today's audio was Colditz. I liked this one - the time travel and historical elements were balanced very well and didn't feel like they were competing for the listener's attention. I'm only familiar with Klein from UNIT: Dominion, which I gather is the not evil version from the correct timeline, but she was an interesting character. The explanation of how her time travel worked off screen felt well explained without being too exposition heavy (and the nod to the alternative Eighth Doctor, at a time when they couldn't use the character was clever). There are a few things in this that are wrong -- Ace goes by McShane for quite a bit after this release, until the regime change at BF Towers, and Colditz has infamously poor sound design -- but BF definitely had access to Paul McGann at this point. They were in the middle of recording his second season! Jerusalem posted:Goddammit I'd successfully managed to forget that pile of poo poo existed. gently caress Joseph Lidster, his stories are always loving awful, pointless, needlessly cynical and lovely, and his terrible attempts at retcon are the only thing worse than Chibnall's Timeless Child bullshit. Nah, Lidster's great. The Rapture's not great, but everything else he's done is really good.
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Apr 17, 2021 03:29
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Jerusalem posted:I reiterate my earlier point: gently caress Joseph Lidster. I know if I ever see a Doctor Who story by him, it's going to be pointlessly cruel and lovely and more than likely have some big "earth-shaking revelation" that never comes up again or has any bearing on any of the characters whatsoever. I think I heard he actually, somehow against all reason, made Torchwood for Big Finish be good? Which, if I remember that right, good for him, and I hope he stays there and never comes back to the Who range. I'm gonna throw it out there that several of these were mandated by Gary Russell (e.g. Terror Firma and The Rapture), and that it's really down to the script editors (Russell, then later Alan Barnes) for not following through on these decisions. Decisions that they made! The original version of The Rapture was about Peri and the Fifth Doctor attending a UNIT Christmas party! The script for episode one's survived and is floating around out there, and it's about as fluffy as you'd expect. Lidster likes to writer emotional wringers, sure, but a) there's nothing wrong with that and b) moving away from aggressively trad who is pretty good tbh. I mean, have you heard Briggs' Dalek Universe Exxilon prequel? wtf was that garbage.
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Apr 17, 2021 05:39
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:Didn't Russel T. Davies argue that Joseph Lidster would be a good writer if he applied or something like that? I've never really read/listened to one of his Who stories (or any other material for that matter), but I was pretty surprised by the disconnect between opinions like that and how he's talked about in this thread. He's written for the Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood.
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Apr 17, 2021 12:58
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That's not really a bad thing tbh. The idea of Who going on as long as there are useful stories to be told is a laudable one. The idea of an infinite cosmos of Fourth Doctor and Romana Two deep fakes sounds deeply unpleasant.
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Apr 19, 2021 13:23
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Im gonna split the difference: Ryan's good, but de Souza is a monster. And a Whig. Throw her into the sun.
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Apr 24, 2021 10:06
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Jerusalem posted:It's one of the things I really hate about Dust Breeding, mentioned a page or two back, where the Doctor reveals he just casually keeps "lost" artwork for his own personal gallery in the TARDIS that he rarely ever visits or pays any attention to. Please stop doing that in stories, writers, it's bad and I don't like it! I'm not a fan of the Web of Time stuff either, but once you start pulling on one strand of that argument, then a lot of Who begins to fall apart, no?
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Apr 26, 2021 04:14
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Yeah, Cartmel era Who is just *perfection*.
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Apr 27, 2021 13:52
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Moffat hosed his way around the BBC studios "like a mechanical digger", his words. He cast Karen Gillen over another, apparently more qualified, actor, because she wasn't "wee" and "dumpy". I mean, you've got to ask yourself, at what point is it a line worth drawing?
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May 4, 2021 12:35
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 16:10 |
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Narsham posted:Moffat’s said enough stupid and sexist things to condemn him without distorting or twisting his words. Wasn't intentional. I distinctly remember the original quote referring to two separate women, but whatever, I'm tired and I can't find any evidence one way or the other. If you, or anyone else, can find the original interview I'd be grateful.
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May 4, 2021 15:07
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