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What do you think of the new international distribution deal? This poll is closed. |
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| Hate it |
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12 | 16.90% |
| REALLY hate it |
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16 | 22.54% |
| Hello, my name is Bob Chapek |
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43 | 60.56% |
| Total: | 71 votes | ||
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I watched Troughton's run recently and really the only season where it gets samey is season 5, where six of the seven stories are Base Under Siege jobs - they're much thinner on the ground in seasons 4 and 6.
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Aug 14, 2023 10:45
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 16:30 |
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Then there's the Celestial Toymaker, who is dressed as Fu Manchu for no reason, and could happily have a total redesign to get away from tbat, but never gets one in tie-in media.
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Aug 14, 2023 11:22
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Fil5000 posted:Apparently "celestial" was a term used for Chinese immigrants back in the 19th century so it manages to be even more racist than is immediately obvious. Yep. If the Fu Manchu costume went then "celestial" would be a completely innocuous term for "cosmic" or "otherworldly" or whatnot but in combination with that costume, nah.
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Aug 14, 2023 14:50
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Gotta admit that one of the things putting me off giving new-Who another chance is knowing that when the production team apply themselves to producing something in the same universe but much lighter in the way of "here's that nostalgic imagery you like, clap and smile!" moments, you get Torchwood. A real Emperor's New Clothes deal l
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Aug 15, 2023 00:22
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Open Source Idiom posted:Naur, I think the argument is that Torchwood is what you get when you mostly can't draw upon continuity. Not so much that as the core conceptual underpinnings and imagery of the show, so no Doctor/no TARDIS. Without the goodwill which comes with the Doctor and the familiar trappings around the Doctor you get RTD wanting us to be very impressed with how cool Jack Harkness is, just like in the mainline show you'd get Moffatt wanting us to be very impressed with how cool River Song or Clara are. The new show is much more caught up in convincing us of how cool the Doctor is too, a lot of the time, but at least if you are a fan of the old show you are primed to agree with that. But I can't stand any of the characters they tried to force me to think was cool, and I grew weary of the new iterations of the Doctor once I noticed how fannish the writing was. Warthur fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 17:49
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The other thing I don't like about it is that it keeps making the Doctor the ultimate lynchpin the entire cosmos revolves around, which the Doctor never was in the classic series and which makes the universe seem small and lacking in wonder and mystery. Why would the First Doctor have ever needed to leave Gallifrey to explore the universe if he is ultimately the only person of significance in the universe? Given how the new series talks about him sometimes he could take in all the wonder and majesty to be seen in the cosmos with one glance in a mirror.
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Aug 15, 2023 20:05
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LividLiquid posted:River Song and Clara were cool. Even if I agreed, it would bug me how much the show loudly wanted me to agree.
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Aug 15, 2023 20:15
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Rochallor posted:Honestly I really like the last Tom Baker/first JNT season. It's damning with faint praise to say that's the best that Adric ever works, but excepted The Leisure Hive and Meglos, it's a really strong run of episodes. Zoe = plucky young maths genius. Why does Adric get such hate? Been a while since I saw stuff with him in it and I've not looked at that period in detail but what I have seen is inoffensive (what I have seen is The Visitation and Earthshock, mind).
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Aug 16, 2023 00:48
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Thanks. I'm working on watching through the whole classic series in order and one thing which does stand out is how a change in Doctor demands a change in companion dynamics. Like, the least successful Troughton companion lineup was Ben/Polly/Jamie, because whilst Hartnell often needed three companions (early on because his Doctor was often more aloof, later on because he was often too ill to contribute), Troughton really didn't. Just got to Pertwee so a one companion at a time norm is going to kick in for a good long while, so it'll be interesting to see how the shift to more companions from Baker to Davison pans out when you watch in order.
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Aug 16, 2023 01:28
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Big Mean Jerk posted:Right, River Song was cool at one point, but rapidly became one of the most obnoxious characters on the show.
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Aug 16, 2023 18:15
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Just got to The Ambassadors of Death in my full-series rewatch and drat it's good to finally get that cliffhanger synthesiser sting.
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Aug 17, 2023 14:08
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Rochallor posted:The Ambassadors... OF DEATH! title reveal gets bandied about a lot but more than that it nails the cliffhangers so much better than anything that comes after. They're so abrupt and send out the episodes on a high note. Compare the cliffhanger of episode 2 (start from about 22:50) with just about any other cliffhanger, which consist of 30 seconds to a minute at the end of an episode of the Doctor gurning on the floor/the Master laughing maniacally/a companion screaming in silent horror as the sting plays over the final moments of the episode. That said, I think the sting really helps in general. It adds spice to a good cliffhanger, perks up a mediocre one, and whilst it can't save a bad cliffhanger, it does at least announce that the ordeal is over.
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Aug 17, 2023 15:13
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So re: the Timeless Child stuff, the way I would resolve this is as follows: - Gallifreyan culture evolves, goes through its life cycle, invents regeneration and TARDISes, encounters a species-threatening problem it cannot fix, goes extinct. Call this Iteration 1. - The Doctor was the last survivor of Iteration 1, sent back in time to early Gallifreyan history so that they would acquire and master regeneration earlier, which in the long run lets them survive. Call this Iteration 2. Done. No more need to hypothesise a Time Lordier culture of Time Lords beyond the Gallifreyan Time Lords for the Doctor to have hailed from. Doctors who cannot be fit into the Iteration 2 timeline came from Iteration 1.
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Sep 14, 2023 15:01
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Narsham posted:I'm not sure I can truthfully say I'd be interested in RTD trying to resolve this stuff. A throwaway line about how the destructiveness of the Flux got undone wouldn't hurt, and if the show decides to have a mini-arc where the Doctor goes back to that intergalactic station and ends up exploring another galaxy, that might be fun, but I never got the sense RTD believed the show to be limited to a single galaxy, where Chibnall did seem to think that, so I dunno. Maybe best to pretend the whole thing never happened.
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Sep 14, 2023 17:23
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Given that Big Finish a) love alternate Doctors and b) have worked with David Banks and c) never saw a gap in the franchise they didn't want to try and explore, it's weird they've never done a story with Banks as his one-off version of the Doctor he did for Ultimate Adventure when Pertwee was ill.
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Sep 21, 2023 13:17
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OldMemes posted:The BBC doesn't like them having new actors as alternative universe Doctors. It's why the Unbound series stopped for so long despite apparently selling really well.
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Sep 22, 2023 16:49
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Open Source Idiom posted:No cannibalism*, no black magic(!?), no new Doctors other than ones already previously created before the show came back (so Arrabella Weir would be fine).
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Sep 24, 2023 00:18
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CommonShore posted:I've said it before and I'll say it again - Chibnall had too many galactic+ level threats. Higher stakes does not mean a better story, particularly when those stakes become meaninglessly big. This is a lesson the new show repeatedly fails to learn, even though the classic series learned them over the span of the 1960s Dalek stories. The First Doctor ones are a constant escalator of escalation until Masterplan has them plotting to conquer an area of space so vast that even if you escalated beyond there to "all space" and "all time" you are well in the area of diminishing returns because you are already at a scale beyond what anyone can reasonably imagine anyway. Then the two Second Doctor serials dial back the stakes and make them awesome again. Not one of the post-2005 showrunners has had the courage to do a low-stakes pure historical. Even though Vincent and the Doctor would have been improved greatly by being one.
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Sep 26, 2023 20:13
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Wait, are you telling me that Moffat did a variant of the Arrested Development "analrapist" joke for a crucial plot point in a serious drama?
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Oct 3, 2023 10:58
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If we are talking regeneration stuff, I would say the thing I like about 13 to 14 was that it did something very different and made regeneration weird and unpredictable again, like it was for most of the classic Doctors. Enough of this generic regeneration energy stuff, show me Time Lords producing tulpas of their future selves as they sense death approaching. Also, I don't like how the new series always has regeneration happening standing up, after the Doctor has had a chance to wander around and do some farewell scenes. The classic Doctors went out lying down, broken, and vulnerable. Make it feel like they are dying again, not like they are about to do a big glowy fart.
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Oct 23, 2023 13:02
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Parsing the press release it looks like these are feature-length "here's an overview of this Doctor's tenure to give you a taster of what they were like!" things with a nice story in the framing device to give warm fuzzies to people who already know and love the eras in question. Not a terrible idea. I note that they have pairings for all the classic Doctors except the Fourth - maybe they're going to do that later? Or perhaps they decided they really need to do two given the wide scope of tones his period took in. Tom and Lalla are on speaking terms these days, right? I guess the thinking behind the Third Doctor pairing is that the Brigadier, Third Doctor, Sarah Jane, and Liz Shaw are too dead to participate, Mike Yates is too cancelled due to that whole "pressuring a fan into sex" thing, and Benton... didn't return the BBC's calls? I dunno.
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Oct 30, 2023 21:43
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Open Source Idiom posted:No, I don't think they are. Never mind then. I really like the Sixth Doctor's new look! They should CGI that in to his original stories.
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Oct 30, 2023 22:50
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So the Tales of the TARDIS thing is up and I had a quick peek to see what it is. Essentially, each episode is a repackaging of an old serial, stripping out the old intro and credit sequences and putting in the odd bit of commentary from the characters. The explanation is given in the last one by the Seventh Doctor fairly directly but is alluded to in other episodes - it's a "Memory TARDIS", which seems to exist to bring people together to remember stuff. Picking Jamie and Zoe seems an especially poignant choice in that case. Either way, it is literally a nostalgia vehicle, which shows some self awareness. It's basically a professional version of the sort of fanfic you get where characters sit around and have conversations about stuff that happened in canon, though the intro and outro segments of the Seventh Doctor and Ace ones are the most interesting, partly because in the intro of that the Seventh explains the gimmick and also says that timelines are a funny thing and in some he regenerated, in some he didn't, which effectively means New Adventures and Big Finish and your fanfic are all canon, and partly because in the outro of that, unlike in the others, the Doctor and Ace aren't satisfied to just sit there and fondly remember as the credits fade out (I think it's implied that people get sent back where they were summoned from once they've given the memory TARDIS its fill, or maybe they were only memory-phantoms and they dissolve or something) they hijack the thing and go on adventures. The story choices (in the episode order they've picked): Fifth Doctor - Earthshock Second Doctor - Mind Robber Sixth Doctor - Vengeance On Varos Third Doctor - Three Doctors First Doctor - Time Meddler Seventh Doctor - Curse of Fenric The commentary sections are really saccharine. Basically new series in full emotional manipulation mode saccharine. As I said, it's a very fanficcy concept. I am sure some people will enjoy them but, beyond being reassured that all the off-camera adventures you want Doctors to have happen in some timeline and seeing 7 and Ace reunited for implied new adventures, I'd prefer to just watch the old episodes. Oh, biggest problem. Because of the way they have edited the episodes, they strip away the episode-closing synthesiser sting, which means that unfortunately the re-edited episodes are doomed to be rubbish. EDIT: After further clicking around, the other endings: Fifth and Tegan decide to take the whole thing as a form of therapy and just keep chatting. Zoe and Jamie sit there and vow not to forget again. Six and Peri also hijack the Memory TARDIS/their iteration of it and go on new adventures. Jo sends Clyde home and then has an implied encounter with Doctor Jones, who it's suggested has died. Vicki and Steven use the Memory TARDIS to summon the shade of the First Doctor. Warthur fucked around with this message at 13:36 on Nov 1, 2023 |
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Nov 1, 2023 13:15
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It's even worse. Because of the way the edit works, they ruin the best bit of Vengeance On Varos - namely the episode 1 cliffhanger.
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Nov 1, 2023 13:36
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A funny detail: Steven and Vicki are sad enough about the First Doctor to be able to conjure a memory-shade of him. Jo is sad enough about her dead husband to call up a memory-shade of him. The Fifth Doctor and Tegan are sad about Adric... but are happy to leave him in the past. Don't even consider calling up a memory-shade.
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Nov 1, 2023 13:51
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Rochallor posted:Heavy agree, my jaw dropped the first time I saw that cliffhanger. It feels very biting and more than a little self-referential in a way that's years ahead of its time.
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Nov 1, 2023 13:53
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Fil5000 posted:Just to note, if you go and watch the episodes in the non "tales from the tardis" section of the site, the episodes are all intact, Varos's cliffhanger and all. Tales is it's own thing independent of the original episodes. Yep, that's understood and is how I'll be watching going forwards (iPlayer is generally nicer and more stable than Britbox). Last thought. The Tales of the TARDIS thing just has new intros and outros, there's no cut-ins during the stories or commentary to my knowledge (i have not seen the full things so I don't know if they have dubbed anything in). Nonetheless, they could do an Eighth Doctor one of these and make it brilliant. but they would need to change the format a tad and pair him with some decidedly noncanon companions... 
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Nov 1, 2023 14:00
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Rochallor posted:Related to the Tales of the TARDIS, I was on wikipedia trying to figure out which companions were still alive and learned that not only has Big Finish produced 6 (!) boxsets starring the robots from The Robots of Death, but also that this isn't even the first time a range of audios has revolved around the robots from The Robots of Death: there was an entirely separate audio series produced in the 2000s by a different company. I am now officially starting to wonder if this whole audio drama thing is just a front for, I dunno, drug smuggling, because how do those make money? Kaldor City! I've been meaning to look into that since it's explicitly a crossover between Blake's 7 and Doctor Who, or at least Chris Boucher's corner of Doctor Who (and Boucher was arguably the real showrunner of Blake's 7 anyway).
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Nov 1, 2023 15:53
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The_Doctor posted:Wild Blue Yonder is meant to be the actual anniversary special, but it’s very very under wraps. As is "not going to write something which keeps it in but puts a different spin on it". Wasn't it mentioned somewhere in the 8th Doctor tie-in media (BBC Books line?) that, owing to being as active a time traveller as he is and being involved in as many conflicts with time-travelling opponents as he has, the Doctor's background is in flux anyway? So the Lungbarrow backstory works, the half-human backstory works, the "random Gallifreyan who got bored" backstory works, the Timeless Child backstory works... It would be hard for RTD to outright contradict other backstories whilst being precious about Chibnall's take without looking at least a little hypocritical there. Why does Chibnall deserve more respect than the people who contributed those other ideas?
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Nov 1, 2023 18:56
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That sounds like "I will contradict the half-human thing from the TV movie because I had fanrage about it and wasn't involved in the show, but I won't contradict the thing my friend wrote."
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Nov 1, 2023 19:18
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The Timelords are rad because they did the best Doctor Who novelty single of the 1980s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsAVx0u9Cw4 On a more serious level, I like the Deadly Assassin, but I like it mostly because it shows that somewhere between the War Games and that the Time Lords lost their grip and went into a steep decline. That's cool and fine, let that happen and then let the Doctor go do Doctor stuff. The more their society collapses the more the Doctor's decision to leave is exonerated.
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Nov 2, 2023 00:35
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So interestingly Tales From the TARDIS seems happy to go with canonising a Tegan/Nyssa relationship, which is both a fan favourite and something RTD did for a short story he wrote set at Sarah Jane's funeral, but also got elided by Chibnall in Power of the Doctor where Tegan shows up and mentions a string of husbands but does not allude to Nyssa at all. So I guess RTD is not regarding Chibnall canon as immutable despite any interview answers.
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Nov 2, 2023 11:48
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 16:30 |
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armpit_enjoyer posted:Actually, the line you're referring to is calling back to the Blu-Ray trailer from a few months back, also written by Pete McTighe. I mean, maybe, but in that context shouldn't "hey, I think the Mara is still messing with me" take priority over "let's sadly remember Adric, but not enough to actually have him come back as a memory shade because he was kind of a misogynistic douche".
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Nov 2, 2023 16:56
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