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Whilst The Dominators is by some way Troughton's worst story, I don't think it harms his character the way Twin Dilemma harms the Sixth Doctor. If The Dominators had been his first story post-The Tenth Planet that would have been bad, but I think the show would have recovered by the end of season 4 still, but The Twin Dilemma sabotaged Colin Baker right out of the gate.
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Nov 9, 2023 12:49
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Also, although Peri is basically unconscious for good chunks of Androzani, for the segment where she's with Five they have this really neat chemistry - it feels like they've been travelling together for years. Then you get the Peri and Six insultathon.
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Nov 9, 2023 14:09
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Arc of Infinity to Snakedance?
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Nov 10, 2023 01:04
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Edward Mass posted:Liz Shaw was just a weird choice for a companion. If your companion knows as much as the Doctor does, they can’t ask the questions the audience wants to ask! Then again, the Brigadier can be in that role just fine. The Doctor is his scientific advisor, that's all the reason you need for the Brigadier to say "so, Doctor, please summarise and explain the plot for us." The real problem with Shaw as a companion is that her skillset is redundant next to the Doctor's. She's a scientific advisor to UNIT who isn't entirely unboard with the military worldview. He's a scientific advisor to UNIT who isn't entirely onboard with the military worldview, plus he knows alien super-science and has major insight into offworld threats and knows Venusian aikido. What, exactly, is she going to do that he can't? Part of the reason she spends TAoD imprisoned and they spend Inferno in different timelines is that when they are together the Doctor can't help but overshadow Liz. Jo Grant is at least a trained intelligence agent, crack lockpicker, and most crucially can win people over with charm when the Doctor is being prickly; in practice most writers forgot the first two of those but the third was consistently true. Sarah Jane Smith has the edge that Sladen didn't work directly with Roger Delgado and so was the one major player onset in season 11 not dealing with bereavement. (Seriously, post-The Time Warrior - which is the one season 11 story produced before Delgado dies - it's very obvious that not only was Pertwee's heart not in it, but Letts and Dicks were going through the motions too as were most of the csst regulars.) Liz Shaw just didn't bring enough to the table that wasn't something the Doctor could do better. Warthur fucked around with this message at 11:23 on Nov 10, 2023 |
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Nov 10, 2023 11:17
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PriorMarcus posted:Yeah, Moffat's big mistake was thinking that the First Doctor was a character from the 1960's, rather than him being a character created in the 1960's. It was such a bizarre misunderstanding of who the character is. They have a similar (but several notches tamer) version of the same thing in The Five Doctors, mind.
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Nov 10, 2023 11:22
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Random Stranger posted:Davros building a Dalek before surviving the bombing throws a lot of really good material off. But it was fun so who cares.
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Nov 18, 2023 01:44
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Show Davros in two distinct timeframes. This one for pre-bombing is fine. For post-bombing, go with the head in a tube version from Revelation of the Daleks, becaise that takes it out of the realm of any disability anyone is likely to have any time soon. There's many ways in which Revelation wastes its potential, and one of them is the way the head-in-a-tube Davros is a fakeout, just have him be like that now.
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Nov 18, 2023 15:58
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Narsham posted:Perhaps 19 episodes out of 65? That seems to me like a lot. How many heroic characters in Who have had disabilities or specifically been in wheelchairs?
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Nov 18, 2023 18:22
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Open Source Idiom posted:The story I always feel most uncomfortable about, in terms of disability, is Black Orchid. Black Orchid somehow manages to compete with Talons of Weng-Chiang in terms of "blandly repeating the bigoted bits of old-timey genre fiction whilst entirely failing to criticise them", because you have the disability stuff and a big fat dose of racism all tied up with that too. I think Talons is worse, but only because over six episodes it can take it further. Six episodes of Black Orchid exploring the territory that Black Orchid did would be utterly miserable.
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Nov 18, 2023 18:26
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Davros1 posted:And when we did see another member of Sil's species, he was played a "normal" height (albeit shorter than average) Christopher Ryan.
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Nov 18, 2023 19:23
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If this is the New Cartmel Era, I am up for the New Cartmel Era. In terms of upsetting the right people, Ian Levine is up in arms about the Davros thing. Which is ironic because the Davros sketch probably did more for charity than a certain novelty Doctor Who-connected song Ian was responsible for...
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Nov 19, 2023 14:29
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lines posted:Right yeah I got that, I just wasn't sure why they did kung fu about it.
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Nov 23, 2023 16:06
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Yannick_B posted:Loved it! The metacrisis resolution sort of bothered me, because "we can just let it go" feels like a pretty easy solution because it's presented so quickly BUT that's essentially worrying about something that happened on tv in 2008 so I can understand they're solving it in a very quick way.
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Nov 26, 2023 03:21
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Doctor Spaceman posted:The Doctor's reply was pretty funny too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3CWXqUqPFA ...as was having the barrister's wig ready to go in the pocket. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj_y0fX--gM twistedmentat posted:The bug aliens were really neat, the practical and cgi looked solid. Though I thought through most of the special it was The Meat, not Meep. quote:So are we getting more Doctor/Donna adventures leading up to the new guy taking over? I had heard only about this special, but its listed as Special 1, and the ending makes it really clear there's going to be at least one more adventure.
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Nov 27, 2023 19:55
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Astroman posted:I like Simm, especially the more calm, menacing version from his last appearance, and that would work with the more calm 14. But if we get Dhawan it goes a long way towards breaking the new trope that each Doctor "has a Master" who must get recast at every regeneration. Ainley was great because he was against so many Doctors. I'd love to see Dhawan, Gomez, and Simm just randomly showing up over the next few years. What's that you say? Professor Yana regenerated? Well, yes. Why shouldn't the Master also have an issue with old faces coming back?
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Nov 28, 2023 17:19
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thrawn527 posted:I'd be shocked if it's brought up again. I forget where I saw it, but I think I saw RTD say he wasn't going to retcon it, but to me, that says he'll just ignore it and move on. - I think the big weakness of the Timeless Child concept is that "The Doctor is not Gallifreyan, they're from some next-tier-up society of regenerating spacetime enigma-people who are lost to the Doctor" is just "The Doctor is Gallifreyan, and their home planet is lost to them" with extra steps. You can't actually address it and resolve it without plumping for one of a) saying "it was a big lie", b) saying that it was a time loop situation, so the Doctor was the last survivor of the "original" iteration of Gallifrey punted back in time to give their early culture a leg up via the regeneration discovery to avert a disaster that could not be solved any other way, or c) just plain inventing a Time Lordier tier of Time Lords who are the real Time Lords and manipulated the Gallifreyan into being entry-level Time Lords. Jo Martin is great but any retcon can simply have her be a future Doctor who couldn't 100% level with 13 about what was going on. - I think the big strength of it is that "The Doctor's home is lost to them" is a story angle we already know works and that RTD can do good work with. If he really, really wanted to resolve it, he could and could probably find a way to make it broadly satisfying. (Hell, go with the idea which I think comes up in some of the Eighth Doctor novels of "once you get involved in a Time War you just have to kind of accept that people are going to paradox up your past so your backstory mutates every so often, the person you are now is far more important than whoever you were centuries ago.") But he doesn't need to resolve it - just make it something which adds emotional texture or complicates his relationship with Gallifrey/the Time Lords the next time they turn out to be still around in some form. Also, because it's now established as possible to revert to a previous face via regeneration, Jo Martin as Sixteenth Doctor is a possibility you can just go for without a retcon.
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Nov 30, 2023 01:17
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Mooseontheloose posted:Much like the Doctor, Time Lords and the Master are a bunch of liars. Time Lords told the Master this for ~rEaSonS~ and needed to tell him this lie to distract him. I mean, I wouldn't put it past the Time Lords to put a bunch of cannon fodder in the Master's way to turn into Cybermen for ~rEaSonS~. Perhaps they needed to stoke his jealousy of the Doctor so that he'd be thrown off his game, because they know he fucks up a lot whenever he prioritises pettiness over efficiency. Not impossible that the Fugitive Doctor is a future Doctor who got strongarmed into misleading 13 and begrudgingly went along with it because she remembered being misled and thought "well, I screw up the timeline for all the incarnations between her and me if I don't go through with this".
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Nov 30, 2023 01:38
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Gaz-L posted:The cool thing wasn't the Doctor. It was the spaceship, and she was professional but engaged and excited about that. Her reaction to the Doctor was one of meeting the guy that used to do her job. She treated him like a peer, kind of like Liz Shaw did. And you know she's had to spend long, agonising hours trying to decipher the Third Doctor's sparsely-written case reports on more than one occasion to look up crucial details from past crises which might have a bearing on current clusterfucks. You just know that he was a fiend for half-assing all the paperwork (and only even bothering to do that when the Brigadier made an especially sad face at him). Dude leaves that level of mess behind, the bloom is off the rose.
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Nov 30, 2023 20:23
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Dabir posted:It's not even Davina McCall's first appearance, right? Wasn't she the host of Big Brother? Yeah, she voiced the DavinaDroid in Bad Wolf.
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Dec 1, 2023 01:35
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Big Mean Jerk posted:It probably has the illusion of being extra secretive just because it’s a) the actual anniversary special and b) most likely filmed primarily in-studio and therefore less likely to be leaked by people just spotting the actors on location like most of this year’s leaks have been. Wait, what makes it the "actual anniversary special" when it is further away from the actual anniversary of Doctor Who first airing than Star Beast?
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Dec 1, 2023 09:41
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Dongicus posted:i would recommend you dont. its really boring/bad lol. not even in a fun way. LOL that the Chibnall era is basically the RTD2's era of the Time War, a weird thing where lots of backstory stuff happened but the default assumption is that the audience didn't see any of it...
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Dec 3, 2023 19:03
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Deformed Church posted:Weird that no-one's ever been past the edge of space until the horse got there by accident, I feel like that would be a pretty early trip to make for research/curiosity/just to say you've done it reasons. To be fair, the Flux probably made the edge much closer than it used to be...
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Dec 3, 2023 19:05
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Infinitum posted:God I wish Whittaker had a season under a different showrunner
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Dec 5, 2023 14:02
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Sydney Bottocks posted:(E: after doing a bit of googling, it looks like there were only three actual producers during Tom's run: Philip Hinchcliffe, Graham Williams, and JNT. Barry Letts oversaw Tom's first episode and was brought in to advise during JNT's first season, but he wasn't a full-fledged producer of the show like the others were. As far as script editors go, I believe there were four: Robert Holmes, Anthony Read, Douglas Adams, and Christopher Bidmead. All the producers and script editors had their own influence on the show, of course, but by and large they didn't really reinvent the series so much as just execute variations on the template that was already laid down; and if we're being honest, really the one person who increasingly dictated what direction the show should move in was Tom himself. By the time he was almost halfway through his run, he was a big enough star that the production team often deferred to him, in order to keep him happy and keep him from quitting. Again, that only really changed when JNT took over.) Showrunners in general seem to have about three good seasons in them before they need to be given a rest; Capaldi might have had a stronger start if he was working with someone less exhausted than Moffat, Barry Letts' run on the show started to get shaky in season 10 and went to pieces in season 11 (in the latter case in part due to Delgado's death, but the signs of rot setting in were there in the previous season when Delgado was very much alive). A very talented Doctor can keep things up for more than three seasons plus some specials - Tom did - but they need to a) have a take on the character that can adapt to a lot of different styles to keep things variable without seeming to be entirely undefined, and b) have fresh material to work with. Ploughing one creative furrow for three seasons rarely works out and so you need to either change Doctor about that often or change showrunner about that often or both. The new series has tended towards doing both, and it probably is because the actors in question prefer to stick with the showrunners they are comfortable with, but it's kind of a missed opportunity that nobody has even tried to see if their take on the Doctor can survive a change of showrunner since Tom Baker.
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Dec 5, 2023 17:20
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Clouseau posted:I'd actually argue that RTD/Moffat both got second winds and their middle stuff was the weakest. Like both season one and season five (imo) contain a lot of their best moments, their best ideas, and a real solid spine. Like they're finally getting their dream after all these years to do Doctor Who. Then, the next season its like "ok do more" and they're like poo poo. But I think season four is RTD's next best, and I feel like a lot of the later Capaldi stuff is extremely good too. Its the weird middle for both of them that lost me. TBH the weakness of my analysis is that it's hard to discern in the classic show how much influence producers and script editors had. Hinchcliffe never had a script editor other than Robert Holmes, and guess what - the early Williams era is both very good and an awful lot like the Hinchcliffe era. So was it Hinchcliffe or Holmes who was truly responsible for its tone? And look at JNT, who arguably had the exact same thing you are pointing at - strong start, weak middle, rallied at the end. And guess what, the weak bit of the JNT era aligns more or less perfectly with Eric Saward's stint as script editor. That said, I think I'm the sort of fan who puts a lot of stock in the quality of individual stories and can take or leave the big picture vision - so that might be affecting my analysis. A producer/showrunner with a weak vision is fine so long as the scripts are good; I don't like any of RTD's season closers other than Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways, but all his series have individual stories which are great. I think in the classic show the script editor had more sway in terms of acting as quality control on a story-by-story basis. Warthur fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Dec 5, 2023 |
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Dec 5, 2023 17:48
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Random Stranger posted:I remember having almost the same reaction to the chase scene. I was trying to give the show a chance since some people said they liked Spyfall and I'm watching that scene going, "This looks like it was very tricky and expensive to film and it's utterly meaningless." It's a perfect example of my thesis that Chibnall had big moments but couldn't string them together into a good story because he didn't care about the bits that linked them together.
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Dec 5, 2023 23:13
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What is up with the Eleventh Doctor's face? It looks like they've photoshopped him to have Gigachad's bone structure.
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Dec 6, 2023 04:54
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I imagine that every so often, Chris Chibnall has a disconcerting dream. He's sat at a convention somewhere, discussing his Doctor Who work with the audience, when somewhere out in the crowd he catches sight of a teenage boy in spectacle frames that somewhat overpower his face and an overly neat suit. He realises that it his sixteen year old self, as he was when he voiced fan complaints about the show to Pip and Jane Baker (and, phoning in to the feedback segment they were appearing on, John Nathan-Turner). He looks to his left. There, sat at the panel table with him, are Pip and Jane. He looks to his right. There's John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward. Ian Levine is out in the crowd, carrying a microphone, and Chibnall realises that the panel has reached its Q&A section. A chill runs down his spine as Levine walks impossibly slowly towards the back of the room, towards Chibnall's 16 year old self, ready to offer the microphone to take young-Chibnall's comment. Chibnall presses his hands against his ears, but they block no sound. He does not want to hear. He does not. For he knows that young-Chibnall will comment this time not on The Trial of a Time Lord, but on Chibnall's tenure as showrunner, and these words will destroy him. He looks to his left again. Pip and Jane are gone. He looks to his right again. Saward is gone. Wasn't there someone else to his right? He looks down. He is wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He realises, just before he screams himself awake, that he has become John Nathan-Turner.
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Dec 6, 2023 13:10
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thrawn527 posted:https://x.com/jetsam_shoes/status/1733574273875226646?s=46&t=_t3R3O4inwGCyXxW88QslQ Fifth Doctor cancelled the policy because otherwise he would have been obliged to teleport a K9 onto the bridge of that ship to die with Adric.
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Dec 10, 2023 23:02
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lines posted:I assume she meant 35 days leave rather than 5 weeks (28 days being the standard, which Google tells me is 5.6 working weeks).
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Dec 10, 2023 23:36
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Fil5000 posted:Huh. That's a thing I don't think we've ever had happen before.
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Dec 11, 2023 00:13
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Gaz-L posted:If they ever want to 'explain' it, then i'd go with a river and tributary analogy. When Fourteen dies, he just dissipates back into the vortex, rejoining Fifteen or whichever is the current version.
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Dec 11, 2023 00:34
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Clipperton posted:[*]Really, really not a fan of UNIT being a bunch of jackbooted riot-squad-looking thugs now. Or that they operate out of Avengers Tower, or that they have a giant gently caress-off space laser that they can blow up London with if they want. Obviously they were always explicitly military, they weren't hippies (except Mike Yates) but give me the khaki-clad, stiff-upper-lip, utterly-outgunned-by-every-threat-they-face Tommy Atkinses any day
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Dec 12, 2023 01:31
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Fil5000 posted:It is both staggeringly bad and had basically no one involved that would raise it's profile enough for it to do any good whatsoever. Like congrats Ian, you got one member of Ultravox and a guy from Starlight Express.
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Dec 12, 2023 14:57
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Sydney Bottocks posted:Let's not kid ourselves here; if Gillian Anderson said she was interested in playing The Rani for an episode or two, RTD would cast her so fast they'd start filming before the ink on the contracts was dry.
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Dec 13, 2023 18:27
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Fil5000 posted:The Rani's always been about unethical science for the sake of it, the Master is always focused on dominating the universe/disgusting the Doctor. There's room in there for both with the right story. Sydney Bottocks posted:Just as the Master is the Doctor if he was an insane murdering psychopath, the Rani is the Doctor if he was completely devoid of ethical scientific practices, or empathy for his fellow beings. I mean, you say this, but there's two Rani stories in the TV canon, and in one of them (Time and the Rani) she is definitely working a universal domination plan.
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Dec 13, 2023 19:19
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Covok posted:Honestly, and this might be daft, but why don't they do four parters again? It gives the story so much time to breath and grow. Ah, but I bet it's the budget. The show is awfully expensive to produce. And the budget for these old serials wouldn't do nowadays. Alas, the age of streaming services pumping infinite money into a show to get subscribers is dead. NuWho may have benefited from that on that blasted mouse's network It's a pacing thing as much as it's a time available thing: when New Who has more time to play with it generally doesn't take the opportunity to slow down, smell the roses, and dig deeper into an idea, it usually uses it to stuff more stuff. There's exceptions, and they're usually very good - Human Nature/Family of Blood could be done in one episode if you took out all of the "John Smith is an actual person with his own motivations and who is falling in love" stuff and similar, but it would be a bad episode as a result, likewise Silence In the Library/Forest of the Dead could have been condensed a lot but slows down to have character moments fairly frequently. (The scene where the first victim's consciousness is winding down in the system and Donna has to talk her through it is incredible.) New Who just works at a fast pace these days. It's not my preference, but it is what it is; I kind of hope that at least one spin-off is a deliberately slow-paced one to provide contrast. (If they do an Eighth Doctor spin-off and deliberately format and pace it like the classic series that would be wonderful.) Before it aired I kind of hoped that Star Trek: Picard would take that direction - "retired Admiral investigating mysteries in his twilight years" is the sort of concept which each season of that show starts out with, and should by rights lend itself to a slower, more methodical pace, but instead they overstuff every drat season and it goes off the rails every time because they're always, always, always trying to do way too much. Warthur fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Dec 15, 2023 |
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Dec 15, 2023 22:26
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Got to Planet of the Dead in my full-series watchthrough and wow, that is an episode which just slid off my brain. I had to look up wiki summaries to make sure I hadn't spaced out and forgot something, that's how little of an impression it left. The bus made me realise that if RTD doesn't bring us Iris Wildthyme on our screens whilst Katy Manning is still alive that's Showrunner Impeachment material.
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Dec 15, 2023 22:29
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Edward Mass posted:(this is a joke about the rumor that Martha Jones was a Rutan)
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Dec 15, 2023 23:06
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Jerusalem posted:The new season doesn't start till February!?!
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Dec 18, 2023 00:55
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