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Since we already got an excellent, focused, relatively understated special for the 50th anniversary, like The Three Doctors was for the 10th, I hope for the 60th we get a completely stupid, totally overstuffed and super fun mess more like The Five Doctors.
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Jan 5, 2022 20:47
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:06 |
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Isn't there like just one time in his whole run where the Fifth Doctor uses the TARDIS alone without any of his companions, and even that's off-screen between two scenes of the same story? And that's where they had to cram Time Crash and any other companionless appearances, so there's like a couple years' worth of solo adventures taking place between scenes. The moment he gets the smallest chance of spending some time alone away from his rotten kids he absolutely makes the most of it.
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Jan 12, 2022 05:52
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After Corbyn was photographed holding a blu-ray copy of Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor, he never really stood a chance.
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Jan 18, 2022 14:08
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OldMemes posted:She's been the Doctor since 2017, even if the BBC forgot to make any episodes. Absolutely crazy that it has been that long. She's almost nearing McCoy's on-air/off-air ratio as the incumbent Doctor. EDIT: I just noticed that I've been on SA for 10 years tomorrow and Whittaker's been the Doctor for almost half that time???
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Feb 12, 2022 20:03
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If you count Trial as one story then Peri is in all of Six's 
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Mar 27, 2022 15:08
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The Sea Devils are back and they brought a big sea monster with them and it's not a Myrka?? what's even the point of chibnall
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Apr 19, 2022 15:07
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Demons of the Punjab, It Takes You Away and Eve of the Daleks are the episodes I could imagine rewatching on their own merits. Fugitive of the Judoon I also enjoyed a good bit on first watch but I wonder how much of that was down to the reveal of the Fugitive Doctor and if it actually holds up on its own.
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Apr 19, 2022 18:54
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I guess the time must come in everyone's life when the next Doctor is younger than you are, but I wasn't prepared for it to happen to me. Still, very cool! Sex Education has been on my watchlist for ages, haven't gotten around to it yet but I've heard good things. Hopefully we'll get a costume reveal soon, too.
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May 8, 2022 14:55
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I believe it's already been announced that in the next series the classic Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire title theme will be replaced by Paddy Kingsland's Turlough Drives A Car Theme
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May 11, 2022 08:53
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[ D O C T O R I N D I S T R E S S ]
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May 23, 2022 16:24
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I remember listening to the Klein trilogy in 2011-12 or whatever and enjoying them a lot at the time. Tracey Childs is always excellent, and the hook of having the Doctor travel with a companion who is so diametrically opposed to him in how she conceives of the world and morality is, at least conceptually, really interesting. But thinking back, it is mostly treated as an intellectual excercise. That's not to say the audios are so tone-deaf as to treat Klein and the Doctor as morally equivalent in any way - she is as convinced of her worldview as the Doctor is of his, and she is given a background that goes some way of explaining why she's the way she is, but I don't think we're ever supposed to consider her perspective justifiable. Still, their conflict (at least in the first two parts) remains mostly on the level of snappy tête-à-tête, where it's easy to forget that one of the ideologies under consideration ends with people dead and in work camps, and the other, you know, doesn't. Spoilers for The Architects of History (not much you wouldn't know from having heard UNIT: Dominion, but still): I don't remember all the details but I don't think the Doctor's attempts to redeem her amount to much, at least when it comes to her original incarnation. She is unquestionably a villain throughout the final part. She is only "redeemed" by having the entirety of her personal history changed, so that she grows up in a completely different environment and ends up essentially a totally different person. It's a bit of a cheat, really, and I don't know if it says anything about deradicalisation or whatever that would be applicable to the real world. You could also view that in parallel with Klein's own actions in Architects - the only way she is able to make Space Nazism work in any sustained fashion is by constantly cheating and rewriting history, and the only way the Doctor is eventually able to de-Nazify her is by rewriting history so that she was never a Nazi in the first place. Again, I found this really cool ten years ago, but thinking about it now it's just a bit frustrating. The audios seem to admit that Klein can't just simply be taught the error of her ways because what makes someone a fascist is more complicated than that, which I take to ultimately mean that attempting to civilly debate actual Nazis (with the expectation of having them change the entirety of their worldview at the drop of a hat) is a fool's errand, as evidenced by the Doctor's catastrophic failure in trying just that. At the same time, the trilogy does end with the Nazi villain no longer a fascist and integrated into society, which leads me to expect that it has something to say about what can be done instead. And I don't know what that something is if all the unbreakable rules of space and time had to be broken multiple times for that to happen. The Klein trilogy sets up the question of how we should engage with and overcome fascist ideology in our midst, and in the end, its answer is "have a time machine". That's maybe fine when you're playing with hypotheticals in the realm of SF, but in 2022 when these are actual questions we have to ask ourselves in the real world, that's less than nothing.
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Aug 29, 2022 11:26
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Love this video, I once tried making a gif of it into an avatar with the text "I AM FAR MORE THAN JUST ANOTHER TIME LORD" under Sylvester stomping and jumping around but couldn't really get it to work unfortunately.
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Sep 3, 2022 10:38
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Chibnall posted:The whiteboard story grid for Eve of the Daleks. Production was catching up with us, and I had 24 hours to find a story that we could afford to make with one set, or lose the episode entirely. Now this is the sort of production I expect from Doctor Who!
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Oct 14, 2022 16:56
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Barry Foster posted:country collapsing atm Speaking of this Lord Ludikrous posted:The Dalek Invasion of Earth and this, doesn't the novelisation reveal that the man who Susan left the TARDIS for was David Cameron
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Oct 21, 2022 19:16
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Right off the start, the line "Do you know what's happening in 1916 right now?" gave me such a headache Other than that, stupid as all hell but a lot more fun and engaging than most of what we've had these past few years. Mostly explosions and references, but mostly the fun kinds of both. There's something Sawardian about Chibnall's handling of the Cybermen that I just don't like, but Dhawan's Master gets better every time (I really hope he stays on as the Ainley of the 2020s). And it really is nice to see all the old faces back, even if just for a few quick cameos. Off the top of my head, I think Polly was pretty much the only one who was missing of the old companions whose actors are alive and the character isn't dead or not on present-day Earth (though by that count Mel shouldn't be there - I guess things didn't work out with Glitz.) Too bad Colin didn't get to wear his costume when everyone else did. The Master should have worn the coat, at the very least. Much as I hated the Timeless Child stuff, I would have liked to get some closure on the Fugitive Doctor. I guess whatever happened in Flux that I've already forgotten is all there is to tell. Seems like a pretty big thread to introduce and never make much of, but whatever, I guess that's Chibnall in a nutshell. I didn't have high hopes for his era to begin with, but it really has been rough going - not just in terms of individual episodes and bigger arcs, but for the character of the Doctor too. Whittaker has been so grossly underserved by the writing every step of the way. The performance was there, but that only goes so far. I'm sorry to see her go, but at this point it's best to just clear the table and get someone completely new in as a showrunner and a whole new Doctor and start completely fresh and wHAT
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Oct 23, 2022 22:21
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The Master as Rasputin though, who even comes up with stuff like that?
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Oct 23, 2022 22:37
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Reading some of the official press around Tennant's return, it's interesting that RTD refers to Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor and Gatwa as the Fifteenth. Something weird is definitely going on (especially with how their clothes change), and it could very well be some Dark Dimension hijinks or some other outside interference, but it sounds like this is supposed to be a legitimate incarnation and not just a glitch or an intermediate form of some kind. Or maybe Russell's just stirring the pot! Also, I don't know if this was previously confirmed but it seems the three Tennant specials will all be airing in November 2023 and then Gatwa's first episode in the "festive period" of 2023 (I'll bet RTD is hard at work trying to get the end-of-year special back to Christmas but the schedules aren't locked in yet). So by the sound of it we might be getting four whole episodes next year? I'll have to give it to Chibnall and this episode, there was plenty there I didn't care about at all but good golly gosh I think I'm actually into Doctor Who again in a way I haven't been in a long, long time. It's not just the promise of RTD2, either (which I was initially a bit sceptical about but am now really looking forward to). I'm reading press releases and looking up reactions and listening to Radio Free Skaro and all that for the first time since maybe late Smith or early Capaldi. (Thinking about that era, The Name of the Doctor is a pretty good comparison point for this - another reference-heavy finale set against a backdrop of big lore revelations and leading to an anniversary special - though I probably prefer Power to Name.) I actually feel like rewatching The Power of the Doctor, and other than the 50th I don't think I've rewatched a single episode since, like, Let's Kill Hitler or something? Anyway, feels nice to be actually invested in my favourite show. Maybe I'll grow to even like it again!
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Oct 24, 2022 08:39
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Here's something that bothered me a little bit about the past Doctors' cameos but that I couldn't really verbalise right away. First off, I will naturally accept any excuse for seeing old Doctors on screen, and it's really great that they're there in person and as they are now - we're not playing around with CGI de-aging or archival footage or recasting, or even trying to explain why they look different than they used to beyond a joke or two, and in principle that's exactly how I think it should be done. And in one way having a Doctor hologram that can take different forms depending on who's seeing it is a really clever idea for doing just that. But in another way, it's a little unsatisfying, and emblematic of a bigger problem with the Chibnall era. Yes, it's wonderful that we get to see Tegan with Five and Ace with Seven, and they get to have a little back-and-forth and get some closure on their relationships. But the Doctor they interact with in those moments is actually not the Doctor at all, it's an AI and a hologram, and they know it. So Tegan and Ace are basically having an emotional reunion with a chatbot. The Doctor says that she's trained the AI to respond exactly as she would, sure, so maybe the conversation that Tegan and Ace have with the AI is the same they would have had with the actual Doctor, but it is not actually the Doctor they knew or the Doctor we know. The Doctor we know is functionally dead at that point, and so she doesn't get to have her part in that meeting either - she's left with even less than they are. It's emotional resolution for characters we've known for 40 years played out as a Turing Test for a Gallifreyan ELIZA. Because the thing is, it's not for the characters, it's for us. We see Janet Fielding with Peter Davison, and we see Sophie Aldred with Sylvester McCoy, and they really are there and it's great, so the emotional throughline is there for us. But for the characters of Tegan and Ace and the Doctor it's not, because the gimmick that Chibnall has used to make it so we as viewers can get that experience of seeing the old Doctors really there has simultaneously made it so that they really aren't there in the actual world of the story. And if it was just this one thing I maybe wouldn't have noticed, but Chibnall has shown it over and over again that he can't handle characters' emotional arcs very well. Yaz is of course the most egregious example of this - apparently the Sea Devils episode was seriously supposed to be the resolution to her falling in love with the Doctor, which was itself never developed or explored in any real way, and then the Doctor leaves her without so much as a handshake?? This, I think, is part of the reason why he struggles with them: he isn't thinking in terms of what the characters feel as real people inhabiting the world of Doctor Who, he's thinking solely in terms of what the audience sees, what the Doctor Who fan watching Doctor Who wants to get from watching Doctor Who. And what the fans want is to see Sophie and Sylvester together in their old costumes (and that's right, we do), and here's this AI hologram trick we can do to make that happen, and who cares if that's actual emotional resolution as long as it walks and talks like emotional resolution. It's a hollow replica of an actual, emotional, dramatic character arc that just superficially involves the sorts of things a character arc would have - it's like an AI hologram itself. So the overwhelming impression I get from his era is that Chibnall doesn't write drama about characters, he writes Doctor Who involving the sort of things that happen in Doctor Who. It's a fundamentally superficial approach, and though there are sometimes things to enjoy about it (many of them in this episode, which I did overall like a good bit), at the end of the day it leaves me unsatisfied because I don't feel like there is any actual substance to engage with.
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Oct 26, 2022 15:00
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SecretOfSteel posted:Someone on Twitter said "imagine if she regenerated into McGann at the end of the episode". Would have been amazing, and now I'm all bitter. Shouldn't read Twitter I guess. "I know these shoes..."
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Oct 27, 2022 04:15
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https://twitter.com/jfmouthonlegs/status/1585540362415775745?s=20&t=qlXkW8XRGMsbMDuMY6juaA If we go by TV alone, and "met" means "shared screen with" and not just "was in the same episode as" (and if we count different regenerations and not different actors playing the Doctor), by my count the record* is shared by Tegan and Sarah Jane with seven Doctors for both (1-6 and 13 for Tegan, 1-5, 10 and 11 for Sarah). * I'm not counting Clara, because that's a special case (and mostly stand-ins and archival footage).
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Oct 27, 2022 11:59
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:06 |
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AttitudeAdjuster posted:Can someone help me understand exactly what the point of the Master's plan was? I thought initially he was going to Freaky Friday himself into 13's body but then he actually forced her to regenerate into himself, physical appearance and all. If all he wanted to do was go round looking like himself but pretending to be the doctor and looking into cameras saying "I'm the Doctor and I'm a Bad Dude" why did he need the forced regeneration? Yeah this didn't really work for me either. Regeneration, forced or not, isn't generally presented as someone else replacing your body and mind, it's about your body changing to a new form, and that's a pretty clear-cut concept. What a regeneration into another pre-existing person actually means isn't that easy to wrap your head around. The Master-Doctor seems to have all the Master's memories - does he have the Doctor's too? Does he retain his experiences from when he was the Doctor when the process is reversed? A simple mindswap would have been much easier to understand. If he just wants to play at being the Doctor and tarnish their reputation, then just, I don't know, go somewhere and pretend you're the Doctor? Just Mawdryn Undead it. And besides, the Doctor's already considered a pretty Bad Dude by a good portion of the universe because of all the poo poo they pulled in the Time War. I think someone already mentioned this uphread, but fun as it was seeing Dhawan in the waistcoat and doing some little Whittaker-isms, it would have been even cooler to see Whittaker play the Master inhabiting the Doctor's body. It's her last episode, give Jodie neat things to do! Wouldn't all those Master-Doctor scenes - yelling to Yaz, threatening the TARDIS, making the little speech on Space Television(?) - be so much more impactful if it was her doing that (wearing the rainbow coat, preferably)?
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Oct 27, 2022 14:04
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