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Jerusalem posted:They're all the same person so maybe they'd be the Timeless Childs I thought I read somewhere that RTD thought the Timeless Child was a brilliant idea, though that may just have been him being diplomatic towards the guy he originally hired to run Torchwood.
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Oct 26, 2021 22:23
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Can't wait for it to be tossed into the dustbin of stupid Doctor Who ideas everybody just pretends didn't happen like The Other and Half Human on my Mother's Side.
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Myrddin_Emrys posted:They need someone to helm Who, who has the guts to make it a little more serious and completely take out the camp because it is massively derogatory to the show. Chibnall could have made Jodies run amazing, but it really did fall flat. The Timeless Child ret con was just an awful thing to do to Dr Who as a whole. I am still amazed this got the greeen light. It got the green light because the guy who came up with the idea and the guy who's running the show are both the same person. The BBC doesn't care about The Lore of Doctor Who, all they care about is if the show gets big ratings and makes lots of money from merch and international distribution.
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Oct 30, 2021 13:30
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Escobarbarian posted:I also saw the Flux ad at the cinema, and I just…..felt nothing. Except for when I laughed when she said “Sontarans”. It's why I didn't/don't get it the last two or three years, when people get all "only x days/weeks until new DW!  ". It's Chibnall's DW. How can anyone get excited for his boring drivel?
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Oct 30, 2021 13:47
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Chibnall's stuff isn't even bad enough to laugh at. At best it's often cringeworthy and at worst it's boring, neither of which are particularly fun to watch or to make fun of. If Chibnall had produced something truly worthy of being considered "so bad it's good" like "Time and the Rani" or "Nightmare of Eden", then you'd be on to something. Instead his stuff is either just embarrassing, or else it just washes quietly by in a bland gray wave. I'd go so far as to say the only reaction Chibnall's gotten out of anyone since the start of his run on DW is outrage: outrage that he's wasted Jodie Whittaker (because so many people felt genuine joy and interest in her casting, only to see Chibnall do absolutely nothing with it), outrage over that Kerblam episode (because it was so clearly pro-Amazon-style business practices that it legitimately hurt), and outrage over the Timeless Child stuff (because it's one of the dumbest ideas in the show's history, which is really saying something given how long it's been running in both original and revived forms). But the actual stories that he's put on screen since taking over? Meh.
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Oct 30, 2021 15:29
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Narsham posted:As the combined showrunner, with only two others for comparison, Chibnall is worst, but by classic show standards his record looks somewhat better. I'd disagree with this because his record pales in comparison to Hinchliffe/Holmes, whose run was arguably the gold standard for the classic era of the show. quote:Taking the long view, Who may never have looked so good on the screen, had as many good actors or sets. On that note, I just read this article: Chris Chibnall Tried to Turn Doctor Who into Prestige TV quote:[...]Taken as a whole, it seems like Chibnall is turning Doctor Who into a much more generic piece of modern television. In 2012, Andy Greenwald decried the rise of shows he described as “prestige simulacra,” which mimicked the look and feel of prestigious television. It can sometimes feel like Chibnall has pushed Doctor Who into that zone. quote:It often feels like Chibnall has the idea of having the Doctor meet a key figure and learn about their importance, but no idea what the show actually wants to say. In “Rosa,” the Doctor seems to argue that Rosa Parks’ activism worked out because mankind eventually named an asteroid after her. In “Spyfall,” the Doctor wipes Noor Inayat Khan’s memory before consigning her to torture and execution in Dachau; she also weaponizes Nazi racism against the Master (Sacha Dhawan). quote:There is a sense in which the Chibnall era is insistent that Doctor Who is “serious business.”[...]The irony, of course, is that many of the big problems with 1980s Doctor Who derived from the same insistence that Doctor Who should be taken seriously. The retrofitted continuity of Chibnall’s “Timeless Child” arc recalls the convoluted fan service of something like “Attack of the Cybermen.” Similarly, the scale and spectacle of Chibnall’s “Ascension of the Cyberman” looks like nothing more than an attempt to remake the 1982 serial “Earthshock” with a modern BBC budget. E: also I'm reminded of something the late great J.G. Ballard said back in the early 1980s, when discussing British television with an American interviewer, who'd remarked how much better the British TV they saw on PBS was than the comparable American TV of the time. Ballard responded with something along the lines of "saying [Britain] has the best TV in the world is like saying we have the best junk food in the world". Sydney Bottocks fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Oct 30, 2021 |
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Oct 30, 2021 16:31
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MrL_JaKiri posted:The Nightmare of Eden has an excellent script, it just didn't translate well. The Target novelisation was one of my favourites as a lad. It was basically the combo of Douglas Adams as script editor, and Tom at the height of his popularity, that doomed it. Adams tended towards the quirkier side of things, and Tom was so entrenched in the role of the Doctor that (as he himself later admitted) he could basically intimidate directors and producers into letting him play the role however he wanted to, and that was the result.
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Oct 31, 2021 00:03
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twistedmentat posted:I can't wait to find out Gallifrey was destroyed, AGAIN! Honestly, i hated how they keep doing that in NuWho. I always loved there was a planet of bureaucrats and bean counters that would every once and a while interfear with the doctors adventures. That depends on whether or not RTD retcons the Timeless Child bullshit, because otherwise it's not just a planet of stodgy old bureaucrats, but a planet of people that tortured the poo poo out of the TC and stole their regeneration secrets. Makes going back there a bit awkward if that's still the case.
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Oct 31, 2021 00:57
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SiKboy posted:I mean, the timeless child stuff is unmitigated horse poo poo, but this particular objection... Not really? That is supposed to have happened at the very beginning of time lord society (before there were really time lords, just Gallifreyans). So its like saying the doctor should avoid the US because of how the american settlers treated native americans, or that the doctor should never visit Britain because of how britain has treated... Well, everybody really, if you give me a minute I'll dig out the map of everyone the UK has never been to war with. Except seperated by thousands (millions? hosed if I know) of years instead of just a couple of hundred. The Time Lords have done worse to the doctor more recently without making it particularly weird he sometimes goes to Gallifrey (hell, he visited Scaro relatively recently too). And "tortured the poo poo out of the timeless child and stole their regeneration secrets" is at best an extremely colourful way of describing what we actually saw on screen. "The Time Lords have done worse to the Doctor more recently" exactly how?
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Oct 31, 2021 02:54
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Also the Doctor should avoid the US over what they did to the Native Americans, if I'm being perfectly honest
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Oct 31, 2021 03:04
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SiKboy posted:the timeless child was a loving stupid story I mean, we're in agreement that it was a poo poo story, I just disagree that the Doctor might not be so eager to return to Gallifrey after being told "Gallifrey isn't your home planet, and you were forced to regenerate over and over again until one of their ancient scientists figured out just how you did it, so they could do it too".
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Oct 31, 2021 03:28
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CommonShore posted:I'm watching because it's more fun to be optimistic about stuff than it is to be a cynical bitch about everything If the showrunner wasn't someone with a proven track record of turning gold to chrome, I'd agree with you
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Oct 31, 2021 05:09
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I read that article earlier as well; from what I gather, the BBC will no longer be responsible for producing DW (or any of the spinoffs RTD wants to do). They retain merchandising rights to the series, and I think distribution as well, but the actual production, creative control, etc. all go to Bad Wolf now. Also Sony is apparently considering buying Bad Wolf, so make of that what you will.
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Nov 3, 2021 23:53
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The_Doctor posted:The BBC would still completely own Doctor Who however. They’re not giving that up at all. Oh no question, they just aren't making the show anymore once RTD takes over.
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Nov 4, 2021 00:44
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The_Doctor posted:Looks like it, yes. I bet we get Christmas Day episodes again when RTD comes in. I never liked any of the DW Xmas Day episodes, but with that said it was absolutely nuts for Chibnall to shift them to New Year's Day. On Christmas Day you have the whole family together, either watching DW or at least putting it on for the kids while the grownups start cleaning up/passing out after dinner. On New Year's Day people are recovering from hangovers...but then, given how bland Chibnall's DW tends to be, maybe that's the TV equivalent of "white toast and a glass of milk" to a person with a particularly nasty hangover and/or upset stomach. 
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Nov 4, 2021 19:49
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Maxwell Lord posted:I don't think the Sontarans have ever really been a terrifying villain on their own- their stories usually have some other hook, like Time Warrior is "what if an alien soldier landed in medieval England", Invasion of Time they only show up near the end as a surprise, The Two Doctors is mostly about the Androgums, etc. They're generic enough to be slotted in various kinds of stories. The Sontaran Experiment, where a lone Sontaran is conducting horrific experiments on humans as a method of figuring out their weaknesses prior to invasion, is pretty solid as a "Sontaran as a legitimately terrifying foe" story.
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Nov 8, 2021 06:40
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Jerusalem posted:I'm assuming it will have been The Ultimate Foe, which was notorious for the incredibly hosed up background to it where Robert Holmes wrote a draft of the first part and an outline of the second but then died, Eric Saward and JNT had their final falling out and Saward left the show but finished the script, JNT decided it was too much of a downer and hired Pip'n'Jane to finish it since they're fast (insert Anakin/Padme meme of Padme asking if its good as well as fast) writers but they were legally forbidden from even being told what the original finished script looked like. And the reason why the Bakers couldn't even look at Saward's finished script, was when JNT felt it was too bleak of an ending, he asked Saward to make some changes to make the ending less dark and ambiguous. Saward refused and instead just pulled his script entirely. Also, wasn't part of the inspiration behind Whizz Kid from "Greatest Show in the Galaxy" Chibnall himself, after that particular panel? I know the pat answer has always been "oh it's supposed to represent the know-it-all fans in general" but I like to think that at the time, they specifically also decided to take the piss out of the smug twat with the glasses and the yellow tie.
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Nov 11, 2021 02:52
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gschmidl posted:And I say that as someone who hated Blink. Here's my obligatory head-scratching at the notion that so many people (ITT, and elsewhere) said "Blink" was the episode they used to introduce people to DW, because why would you show a new viewer an episode of one-off characters that barely features the Doctor?  It's like showing someone "Mission to the Unknown" to try and get them into the classic series. (E: or rather it would be, if it wasn't a missing episode )
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Nov 22, 2021 15:54
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CommonShore posted:The argument such a person made to me is that it's an introduction to the setting and vibe of the show (debatable) where none of the story relies on any other episode, viewing, or knowledge of the show. I'm just wondering how many of those people subsequently went "where's Sally Sparrow" when they watched another episode, realized the show wasn't actually about her, and "nope"d the heck outta there. Especially if they got shown the episodes with "penis head Dalek" or "Gollum Doctor" right afterwards.
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Nov 22, 2021 20:01
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thrawn527 posted:I think I'm ready to say that Flux just isn't working for me. We're over halfway through the 6 episodes and I don't really know what we're doing other than, "Trying to survive something really bad that's happening to the universe, also the Division is a thing that is bad" and I don't really care much about anything that's happening. Unless these last 2 episodes are really impressive at bringing things home... It's Chibnall, so hope is definitely the first step on the road to disappointment here.
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Nov 22, 2021 23:07
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Glad to see the general rule that "no matter how bad/stupid/lovely something is, there will always be someone who likes it and will defend it" continues to hold true to this day
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Nov 26, 2021 20:26
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Davros1 posted:No one has ever said they liked and defended "Nekromantia". I Googled "Nekromanteia" and here's one of the first results (emphasis mine): quote:So the infamous Nekromanteia, a story so vile that Peter Davison insisted the writer never work for Big Finish again and one that appears to have left scores of listeners in need of therapy or at the very least a big hug. I was fully prepared to hate it and was expecting to do so but I am sorry to report that the whole thing was rather enjoyable and the content was nowhere near as disturbing as the previous reviews would have you believe, somewhat akin to being warned about a ferocious dog only to be confronted by a neurotic poodle.
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Nov 27, 2021 00:21
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happyhippy posted:MST3K in its first series shows 1940 shorts at the start of each episode. Each would show the hero being covered in lava, or falling off the cliff, or being blown up in mid air, and you would assume there was no way they could escape that. Quotey posted:^^ SHE DIDN'T GET OUT OF THE COCKADOODIE TARDIS Doctor Who and the Undersea Kingdom
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Nov 29, 2021 15:42
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The_Doctor posted:So, the whole UNIT thing was a deliberate mess, right? In addition to what you said: ain't no way in the world Lethbridge-Stewart's upper-crust, Received Pronunciation-speaking self served even a day as an enlisted man. Not unless he was slumming it "Sergeant Wilson in Dad's Army"-style in the enlisted ranks, and then got a "Major Major Major Major in Catch-22"-style promotion. It's basically one of those things that happens when the person writing the script doesn't know what they're writing about, and doesn't care enough to research it.
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Dec 1, 2021 03:43
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Narsham posted:An Unearthly Child arguably has no consequences beyond to the immediate TARDIS crew and possibly a few cavepeople. Or, arguably, it involves the discovery of time-traveling aliens. Also The Caves of Androzani, which has no stakes beyond the Doctor trying to save both his and Peri's lives.
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Dec 4, 2021 19:23
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Dongicus posted:they need to cancel this show again Picturing the BBC just backing up more trucks full of money to RTD's production company's offices, with a note that says "FOR DAVID TENNANT" hastily scrawled on it
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Dec 6, 2021 01:36
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Khanstant posted:Timelords can survive 3000ft falls I too also remember the end of Logopolis, when the Fourth Doctor fell from the steep heights of the radio tower, and got up and brushed himself off and said "Well that wasn't so bad" and walked off munching on a jelly baby
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Dec 6, 2021 18:59
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Davros1 posted:I remember The End of Time, when the Doctor fell from a spaceship, through a glass dome, and got up like it was nothing. Well sure; after falling from great heights once, a Time Lord becomes immune to them from then on, like becoming immune to a disease after catching it once.
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Dec 6, 2021 22:02
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Shneak posted:So after all that nothing really happened that actually matters. Christopher Chibnall you will pay for your crimes. I mean, the man ran Torchwood for two seasons, it's not like we weren't forewarned
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Dec 7, 2021 00:57
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So I did something I haven't done in quite some time: sat down and watched some 1980s Doctor Who, starting with Davison's first season. Castrovalva - enjoyable debut for the Fifth Doctor, and it's always good to see Michael Sheard in DW. Four to Doomsday - I would say "from the sublime to the ridiculous" but Time-Flight isn't until the end of the season. It's not a bad episode per se, but it ain't a great one, either. Already getting sick of Tegan's whining about wanting to go be an air hostess instead of having adventures in space and time; and on that note, if she can quickly sketch detailed fashion designs and speak an Aboriginal Australian tongue fluently enough to converse with a man who left Australia thousands of years previously, why the gently caress is she carping about being an air hostess when she could be a top fashion designer or teach ancient languages in a university instead? Oh, and Nyssa got the vapors apparently. Kinda - back on more solid footing. Boy, Adric does love to play that "villain takes him under his wing" card a whole lot. But otherwise a really great episode (especially in the dream sequences with Janet Fielding), let down only by the giant inflatable snake at the end. Also, it's probably the closest we'll see Five come to a romantic relationship similar to One's "marriage" to a lady in The Aztecs. Oh, Nyssa's better now. The Visitation - pretty enjoyable episode, though again I'm really getting irritated with Tegan griping about going back to serve drinks on planes instead of seeing the wonders of the universe. The actor playing Mace hams it up for all it's worth, but since the character himself is a large slab of hammy actor, it's actually fine. Black Orchid - I want to like this episode but between the whole "Nyssa meets her exact double" thing, the Doctor showing the local police the TARDIS as his alibi like it's no big deal, Tegan knowing how to do the Charleston, and Adric's eating...well, as Colonel Montgomery Python once said, this is all getting rather silly. It's wonderfully realized in terms of the costumes and visuals, though. Earthshock - actually far bleaker than I remembered it being, and even the much-maligned Adric's death had a lot more gravity to it than I'd originally thought. Some dud moments here and there, but overall a good episode. Time-Flight - okay, now we're at the ridiculous part.
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Dec 7, 2021 23:50
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Jerusalem posted:Edit: Oh wait, I just realized you meant the much-maligned Adric, as opposed to the death itself! Oh yeah, I mean the death was great
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Dec 8, 2021 00:24
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Bilirubin posted:(I have to admit back in the day I found Tegan's constant winging endearing) Don't get me wrong, I love Tegan otherwise (and I definitely had a youthful crush on Janet Fielding back in the 1980s  ). It just got annoying hearing her go on about her lousy job when there was all of time and space to explore. I'm thinking "lady, compared to what you'd be dealing with in regards to drunk entitled morons on a transcontinental flight, whatever the Master, the Cybermen, the Mara and the Daleks do to you is small potatoes."
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Dec 8, 2021 00:37
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Jerusalem posted:Let's see. If we go with televised only then: I vaguely recall that Zoe's human, but I don't remember if she was born on Earth, or born on a different planet, or born and raised in the space station she works on. I do seem to remember her space station had people from some different Earth countries (various parts of England of course, and I want to say maybe Scotland, Ireland, and Russia as well), so she's likely human herself.
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Dec 8, 2021 01:18
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Hot take here, but as far as I'm concerned the first incarnation of the Doctor is the Hartnell Doctor: an old man who fled Gallifrey with his granddaughter Susan for [reasons]. To me, all the Timeless Child stuff is just Chibnall indulging in the most egregious of "look how important I am" fanwank. I ignore it just like I ignore all the other dumb ideas and continuity errors I don't like from previous showrunners/producers/script editors/writers, while simultaneously embracing the brilliant ideas that I do like. Makes life so much easier that way.
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Dec 8, 2021 17:26
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Continuing on with my watching of 1980s Doctor Who, here's the big anniversary season: Season 20, with every episode featuring in some capacity a returning villain from years past (or recent). Arc of Infinity - There's the kernel of a good story in here, and I honestly felt the "Amsterdam underground" scenes were actually kinda spooky. However, it's let down by the stuff that takes place on Gallifrey, mainly because at this point the Time Lords have been thoroughly demystified as just a bunch of stodgy old bureaucrats who don't do anything. It also doesn't help that you can pretty much figure out who the "Time Lord traitor" is if you just pay attention to who's talking and how they speak. Still, it's nice to see Tegan come back (even if that outfit does her absolutely no favors; even Janet Fielding herself absolutely loathed it), and to see Nyssa break out of the "shy aristocrat" mold for a while when she's drawing down on people in an effort to save the Doctor. Oh, and some curly-haired guy named Colin ruthlessly plays Maxil. He probably won't be seen in the series again, I'd imagine... Snakedance - I hadn't seen this episode in a while so I'll just say that it really is as good as I remembered it being back in the day. Janet Fielding in particular gets a really nice chance to flex her acting muscles when Tegan is fully taken over by the Mara again. And Doc Martin is a Man Behaving Badly as the idle spoiled prince who gets sucked into the Mara's plan. Mawdryn Undead - I read somewhere that "Mawdryn" is the Welsh word for "undead" (or probably more accurately the combination of the Welsh words for "dead" and "man"), so this is Doctor Who's version of "Manos: the Hands of Fate" when it comes to having a redundant title, I guess. It's also Doctor Who's version of "Manos" in that it's not terribly good. I mean, the art deco sets of Mawdryn's ship are excellent, and we do get the introduction of Turlough (along with Valentine Dyall hamming it up for all he's worth as the returning Black Guardian). But we also get a very clumsily-handled return of the Brigadier, who previously having shown no interest in either teaching or mathematics...is discovered to be teaching mathematics at a boys' school. I know the original idea was that William Russell would return as Ian Terminus - Now this one I was looking forward to, not because Sarah Sutton decided to go full fanservice with her final story as Nyssa and basically wore a slip for almost the entirety of the story (and yes, I had a youthful crush on Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, too ), but because for some reason or other I'd never actually watched it all the way thru. Back in the day when I used to record episodes that the PBS station in Chicago aired, I think either the power went out or I ran out of videotape on the night Terminus originally aired, so I only got a little over halfway through it when I was a kid, and for whatever reasons I just never got around to watching it in subsequent years. As a story goes...it's pretty OK, I guess. I will add that, in a previous discussion about Tegan, it was mentioned that, in Tegan's first BF audio adventure, the Doctor catches up with her and starts to wonder if she might have been in love with him (a notion that Tegan laughs her rear end off at). Well, I submit that if any of the Fifth Doctor's companions might have been carrying a torch for him, it would have been Nyssa, considering she gives him a kiss at the end (okay, yes, it was a fairly chaste peck on the cheek, but still).Enlightenment - The final part of the "Black Guardian Trilogy" where the Black Guardian hovers over Turlough's every movement like a particularly bombastic micromanaging boss. I quite liked this story as a kid and I found it still holds up pretty well. The King's Demons - I quite liked this story as a kid and I found that I was probably pretty easily amused back then, as it's a pile of filler garbage. They should have brought the Meddling Monk back instead of the Master; the Monk liked to mess around with parts of Earth's history for his own amusement, whereas the whole "prevent Magna Carta" thing is strictly small potatoes by the Master's standards, a fact even the Doctor comments on. And the less said about the Kamelion robot becoming a companion (and how ill-fated a decision that was behind the scenes), the better. 20th Anniversary Special: The Five Doctors - on the whole it's pretty bad, but given its' troubled production history, how could it have been anything but? It's a miracle it even got made, really. And it did give us the classic "  No. Not the Mind Probe." scene, so you just have to love it.
Sydney Bottocks fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Dec 10, 2021 |
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Dec 10, 2021 22:23
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Jerusalem posted:Yeah, Ark in Space has obvious issues in terms of pretty poor make-up/special effects but it's still a drat good (and deeply unsettling) story. Not quite true; I think that's an urban legend that popped up when people started noticing the similarities between TAiS and Alien. However, by 1968 Ridley was already running his own production company/advertising agency, so he wouldn't have been around the BBC for TAiS anyways. What he supposedly was around for, though, was getting the nod to design the creatures for the second Doctor Who serial during the show's first season...called Darlekts or something. This particular legend has it that he was supposed to handle the design of the Daleks for their first-ever appearance, but reportedly got ill and so wasn't able to take the job. Not sure how accurate that story is, but it's definitely interesting to think of how they'd have looked if he did get it.
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Dec 12, 2021 01:51
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Watching Davison's last season, currently on episode one of "Planet of Fire" and while I'll comment on the season as a whole once I'm done with it, I had to break away for a moment and say oh my GOD the "American" accents Peri and her stepdad Howard are trying to pull off are loving awful. At times they might as well just be doing Aussie accents, they're that bad. JNT must have been snorting all the coke in the British Isles or something to think "yes, this will absolutely appeal to the Yanks". E: of course, way back when I originally saw it back in the day, I was a young lad in the throes of puberty, so at the time I was quite willing to ignore Peri's dodgy accent
Sydney Bottocks fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 03:23
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OldMemes posted:They really did Peri wrong with that accent. Nicola Byrant has a really nice speaking voice (she's done tons of voiceover work), so why they got her to do an accent she struggled with was just baffling. While Peri gets much better writing in Big Finish, the downside is that Byrant is stuck with the accent whenever she reprises the character - but she's noticeably toned it down in recent years, and it helps the character a lot. It didn't help that they also had her use common British terms instead of their American counterparts (like "lift" instead of "elevator", or "rubbish" instead of "garbage" or "trash"). And one of the most common tells that a Brit (or Aussie) is faking a Yank accent is when they say certain words like "adult" (us Yanks say "uh-dult", Brits and Aussies say "ad-dult") or "anything" (it's "annie-thing" in the US, "enny-thing" in the UK and Australia). That said, I'm watching "The Twin Dilemma" right now (purely for completionists' sake, since it's the last episode of Season 21), and I got a little chuckle out of how Yanks and Brits both pronounce the word "Lieutenant" differently: (the Doctor is arguing with Hugo Lang, Space Policeman) The Doctor: Look here, Sergeant-- Peri: Lieutenant! The Doctor and Hugo Lang: Leftenant!
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Dec 16, 2021 20:11
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Finished up the last episode of Season 21; the season that had both the Fifth Doctor's swansong, and the Sixth Doctor's introductory story. Warriors of the Deep - apparently, JNT had decided that this season needed to both continue reaching into the show's past, and also to have a bigger emphasis on monsters and creatures than the previous season. So in this episode, we get the best (well, "best") of both worlds, with the reintroduction of both the Silurians and their Sea Devil cousins. This is another one of those episodes with a troubled production history (the most obvious example being the Myrka. The costume for the creature had literally just gotten its' last lick of paint applied when they had to bring it on the set for filming; the writer envisioned the seabase to be dimly lit with the Myrka just making the occasional appearance, a la "Alien"...so of course the episode's lit up like a department store and the Myrka's seen goofily trudging down the halls as often as possible. Stuff like that), and we're firmly into Saward "everybody dies" territory here. But honestly, all the crap special effects, ill-fitting costumes (the Sea Devils in particular, as seen in at least one shot where they're visibly bumping into each other) and production drama aside? It's actually not that bad of a story. The writer (Johnny Byrne, No Not the One Who Draws Comic Books) was inspired in part by Saward's own Earthshock, and the pacing and ruthless nature of both the "future Cold War" conflict and the attack on the seabase by the Silurian-directed forces are handled very well, in my view. It's just a shame that the visuals couldn't live up to the story's ambitions. You might even say...there should have been another way (to make it look better). The Awakening - Time for the semi-occasional trek into "folk horror" territory for Doctor Who, where a rural English village is being corrupted by an ancient malevolent force. So basically Doctor Who's version of "The Blood on Satan's Claw" (which has not one but two DW connections, in both Wendy Padbury and Anthony Ainley, so I'm not just making an idle connection here). Overall a decent story, though I think it tends to fall apart a little near the end. And I know, Australia's got a ton of historical ties to the UK and all; but with her aunt, then her cousin, and now her grandad, does all of Tegan's extended family live in the UK? Frontios - Another pretty good story, though I do think it's a bit pat that Turlough has a "race memory" of the villains just so we can get an explanation of who they are and what they were doing. And it took me a bit to recognize that Brazen was played by the same actor who'd done the lead role in The Onedin Line. Resurrection of the Daleks - Again, we're back in Saward's "violence for its' own sake" stomping grounds here. Though, to be honest, I don't necessarily disagree with his argument (that showing sanitized violence, like on "The A-Team", is actually harmful because it desensitizes people to the effects of actual violence). The problem, though, is that if you're going to show violence in all its' gory glory, you have to follow it up with also showing things like people dealing with the ramifications of it, whether that be physical or mental (or both), people dealing with the loss of loved ones to violence, etc. And to its' credit, Resurrection... does actually play that up a fair bit. You have a lot of people struggling to make sense of all the violent events taking place, and a lot of them don't make it to the end of the episode anyways. The most notable one that does is Tegan, but unfortunately for her character she's given a fair bit of short shrift, spending most of the story nursing a head wound and laying on a makeshift Army cot. But it's to Janet Fielding's credit that she makes Tegan's departure from the TARDIS crew very real and emotional, with all the death and suffering that's taken place around her finally being just too much to handle any more. The stuff taking place out in space with Davros is not quite as good as the grittier stuff that takes place in the London scenes, but overall I still think it was a pretty decent story (if also a very strong harbinger of things to come, in terms of upping the violence ante). Planet of Fire - I already griped about Peri and her stepdad trying and largely failing to pull off American accents, so I won't rehash that here. This episode of course sees Peri's introduction, and JNT clearly starts as he means to go on with plenty of lingering shots focusing on Nicola Bryant's shapely figure (and I will address that in an aside here a bit later, as I think it's a very good signal of just how cynical JNT was in approaching the American TV market as it pertained to DW in the 1980s). It's also the swansong of Turlough, a character who I think didn't find his true footing until just after Nyssa's departure. It also features a very out-of-character moment for the Doctor when he just casually knocks off Kamelion after the robot's pleas for him to do so. I honestly think they could have found another way than to just have the Doctor zap him with the Master's TCE (and the less said about Peri chasing the shrunken Master around his TARDIS like something out of "Tom and Jerry", the better). Those grumbles aside, it's still a very good story, and it's notable that Davison had regrets about leaving after the next story because he found the scripts from season 21 to be consistently better than his previous two seasons. And speaking of better scripts... The Caves of Androzani - well, what can I say about it, really? Constantly topped polls of "best DW story", written by Robert Holmes, filmed by Graeme Harper in a very dynamic style, visuals are great, acting is great across the board, and even the Magma Creature doesn't look too goofy. It's just a drat good story, and I also think it's a fitting end for the Fifth Doctor: no high stakes, no universe at risk, no "end of time itself" shenanigans. Just the Doctor and Peri stumbling into the DW version of a Coen Brothers film where mistake after mistake keeps piling up and the bad guys keep escalating the pace without knowing what's truly going on...until the Doctor finally sacrifices his life to save his friend. Here's the aside I mentioned earlier: before I get into the next story, I mentioned that in "Planet of Fire", JNT clearly started as he meant to go on in regards to Peri's attractiveness. Obviously, the show had a long history of casting female companions who were pretty; "something for the dads" was established long before JNT took the reins. But while the companions that immediately preceded Peri, namely Nyssa and Tegan, were both played by very attractive women, I don't honestly recall JNT going to the lengths he did with Peri in terms of trying to ramp up the show's sex appeal. Sure, Nyssa did go full fanservice in her last story and wore a slip for much of its' running time. And sure, Janet Fielding's skirts got shorter and shorter as her time on the show progressed, showing off her (admittedly very nice) legs at many opportunities. But that said, I don't recall anyone ever commenting on Nyssa's regal good looks (not even in Black Orchid), and I only recall one time where Tegan's attractiveness was commented on (in The Awakening). But Peri? I could be wrong, but I don't think she has a single episode during her first season with Six where her beauty isn't commented on in some way (I'll probably get around to watching Season 22 before long, so I'll see if I'm wrong there), whether in passing or with dudes going full-on creeper over her. Even in the very next story, a fat evil space slug says he wants to keep her around because she's "pleasing".  I think this was definitely a part of JNT's somewhat cynical approach to cracking the American market. Not just by making Peri an American, but by also focusing on her sex appeal. At the time, the common perception was that the UK produced only quality TV; the US TV audience was by comparison a boorish and unsophisticated one, as evidenced by stuff like "The A-Team", "Buck Rogers", and cartoons that were also half-hour toy commercials. The British TV distribution companies only sent over the cream of the crop to US PBS stations; the fact that UK TV also produced its' own type of puerile garbage for louts and dunderheads during the 1970s and 1980s was a very well hidden myth for most of us Yanks (a myth that was only shattered for me when I actually went there in the early 1990s. As a kid and teen throughout the 1980s, I'd watch just about any show that featured British accents and shooting locations. In the early 1990s, while actually living over in the UK, I barely watched any TV at all). With all that said, I probably had a huger crush on Nicola Bryant than I did on both Nyssa and Tegan combined, so in that regard JNT's strategy was a resounding success. I'll stop here and go on to the final episode of Season 21 now...The Twin Dilemma - If JNT had decided to close out Season 21 with The Caves of Androzani, it'd likely have been considered one of the greatest seasons of DW ever. But he didn't; he thought that the fans would need a story that would let them get familiar with the Doctor and Peri, before the show went off the air until the following season. In hindsight, while it's not as calamitous a decision as, say, Stalin going "I'm very confident Hitler won't invade Russia" or JFK's people going "an open-top car is just the thing for the president to ride around Dallas in", it's still a pretty bad decision nonetheless. There's no way around it; this story is bad. Badly written, badly acted by all involved (excepting Colin Baker, but that's less because his Doctor's well written and more because he was given lemons and decided to make the hell out of some lemonade), and badly cast...it's just bad. There were some decent visuals, I guess, so it has that going for it at least. But all of that could have been forgiven if not for two idiotic decisions of colossal proportions: having the Sixth Doctor act extremely mentally unstable for most of the story, and that loving costume. The former was bad, because the Doctor was various shades of "rear end in a top hat" for pretty much the entire running time. Sniveling rear end in a top hat, arrogant rear end in a top hat, rude rear end in a top hat, entitled rear end in a top hat. Now, if this is the story that's supposed to set the tone and give us an idea of what the TARDIS crew will be like in the following season, then I just have one question: who the gently caress is gonna want to watch this pompous loudmouth verbally abusing the pretty "American" girl for a whole season? And especially when he's dressed like the fabric section of a craft store just threw up on him? The Sixth Doctor's outfit was just a fantastically bad idea on all levels: not only did it look like poo poo and was an affront to the eyes, but from then on, the costumers had to basically design everyone else's outfits around it. Davison's era has been derided as "the beige era" because of his outfit, but you know what? It's very hard to clash with beige, and other neutral tones, so you can have other characters wear pretty much whatever, and rely on Davison's acting to override the relative blandness of a mostly beige outfit. Colin Baker's outfit? Everyone either has to be dressed as garishly as he is, or risk fading into the background of the scene; and because he's wearing such an eyesore of a costume, he has to act louder than it, and then everyone else has to try and act loud as well just to keep up with him. Just a tremendously bad idea no matter how you slice it. I hadn't intended on rambling on at length about Peri, Six, and the costume he got saddled with, but those were things that popped in my mind when I was watching Season 21. I wasn't sure I was going to feel like following it up with Season 22, but now I feel like I almost have to, to see if the fanservice pandering, bad costume, and the increase in violence and the Doctor's more off-putting characterization are as bad as preceding season indicates they're going to be. Timelash, The Two Doctors, the groping tree from The Mark of the Rani...god help me... Sydney Bottocks fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 22:45
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Jerusalem posted:That lecherous loving tree I'll probably go into more detail when I get around to rambling about Season 22, but I used to meet up with a bunch of other Whovians once a month back in the 1980s to watch episodes. When we saw that scene, they had to pause the tape because we were all laughing so drat hard.
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Dec 16, 2021 23:29
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Stairs posted:My favorite "oops I forgot how to American" Peri moment is in ...ish when she said "kai-ster" instead of "kee-ster" for a word describing a butt. Action Jacktion posted:Revelation of the Daleks has her consistently saying "Deejay" instead of "Deejay." Another one I forgot is when she says "sawr" for "saw". If she was established as being from the Northeast, like NYC or Boston, that might be excusable. But since Peri's supposed to be from Pasadena...eh, not so much.
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Dec 17, 2021 02:35
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