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Which season of Doctor Who should get a Blu-ray set next? This poll is closed. |
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| One of the black-and-white seasons |
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16 | 29.63% |
| Season 7 |
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7 | 12.96% |
| Season 11 |
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1 | 1.85% |
| Season 13 |
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0 | 0% |
| Season 15 |
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2 | 3.70% |
| The Key to Time |
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21 | 38.89% |
| Season 21 |
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0 | 0% |
| Season 25 |
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7 | 12.96% |
| Total: | 54 votes | ||
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2house2fly posted:With Rosa, I can imagine that the future racist learned that Rosa Parks was pivotal to the Civil Rights movement and so got it into his head that messing up the bus protest would mess up the whole thing. Whereas he should actually have done a Tikka to Ride and stopped Oswald shooting Kennedy
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Apr 8, 2024 22:05
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| # ? Apr 30, 2024 02:39 |
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Khanstant posted:No and I am suddenly grateful for my very terrible memory. She literally defeats the Master by loving up his perception filter so the Nazis recognise he's not white and, as far as she knows, will send him to a camp and gas him to death. This is presented as the Doctor being clever and finding a smart way to deal with the Master. Literally every other writer and showrunner up to this point has understood that this is not who the Doctor is. The Doctor would not actively throw ANYONE into the jaws of a genocide machine, regardless of what they've done. They'd hurl themselves into that machine and gum up the works first.
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Apr 8, 2024 22:06
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I mean, I think I broadly agree that it's perfectly adequate as an edutainment after school special from the 90s for kindergarteners. I just would rather Chibnall aimed for a slightly higher standard. (I'd especially have liked it if Rosa's protest was explicitly something she planned; the show has her meeting with MLK but doesn't indicate that the bus protest specifically was part of a strategy.)Fil5000 posted:She literally defeats the Master by loving up his perception filter so the Nazis recognise he's not white and, as far as she knows, will send him to a camp and gas him to death. This is presented as the Doctor being clever and finding a smart way to deal with the Master. And this is explicitly after she's already framed him as a British spy and summoned the Nazis to arrest him. She's already resolved the situation and neutralized the Master as a threat, then decides to add an extra racial element for no reason. And it's not played as morally ambiguous in any way. About fifteen minutes later in the same episode, she memory-wipes Noor Inayat Khan without her consent and dumps her back in 1943. The Doctor knows who Khan is and what her story is, which means she knows 1943 is a very bad year to be Noor Inayat Khan and that she's basically just feeding her straight into a concentration camp. They could have solved this problem easily with like two lines of dialogue: "Khan, are you sure you want to return to 1943? It could be dangerous." "Yes, but even with the risk, I have to go back. All of us are in danger from the Nazis and like so many others it is my duty" blah blah blah we all know how the "Are you sure you don't want to come ride in the TARDIS?" "No, my place is here" exchange goes. Instead, they have the Doctor brainwash her while she tries to resist but doesn't get to say anything? It's really bizarre.
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Apr 8, 2024 22:25
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Man, I used to love Doctor Who...
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Apr 8, 2024 22:28
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...I still do, but I used to, too.
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Apr 8, 2024 22:29
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Narsham posted:
Huh. Nibbler. Pet of Turanga Leela. Never noticed that.
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Apr 8, 2024 22:34
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Whereas he should actually have done a Tikka to Ride and stopped Oswald shooting Kennedy Fulfill Gene Roddenberry's vision and have the doctor be the second shooter on the grassy knoll.
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Apr 8, 2024 23:08
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Boxturret posted:Fulfill Gene Roddenberry's vision and have the doctor be the second shooter on the grassy knoll. Chibnall's gone now so we don't have to worry about him ripping off even more from The Deadly Assassin!
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Apr 8, 2024 23:10
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Boxturret posted:Fulfill Gene Roddenberry's vision and have the doctor be the second shooter on the grassy knoll. Spoiler Gene Roddenberry WAS the second shooter.
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Apr 8, 2024 23:57
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Lottery of Babylon posted:About fifteen minutes later in the same episode, she memory-wipes Noor Inayat Khan without her consent and dumps her back in 1943. The Doctor knows who Khan is and what her story is, which means she knows 1943 is a very bad year to be Noor Inayat Khan and that she's basically just feeding her straight into a concentration camp. They could have solved this problem easily with like two lines of dialogue: "Khan, are you sure you want to return to 1943? It could be dangerous." "Yes, but even with the risk, I have to go back. All of us are in danger from the Nazis and like so many others it is my duty" blah blah blah we all know how the "Are you sure you don't want to come ride in the TARDIS?" "No, my place is here" exchange goes. Instead, they have the Doctor brainwash her while she tries to resist but doesn't get to say anything? It's really bizarre. According to the actress they filmed Noor's execution scene but it was obviously cut from the final episode. Honestly the production side of the era sounded like an absolute poo poo show, that it got to the final moments of completing an episode to go "Wait a min.."
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Apr 9, 2024 00:01
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Rewatching it's kinda crazy how often you run into a scene where some extra dialogue to explain things has been ADRed in. Like the "oh this is the alpha creature which is definitely a thing and not just an rear end-pull to help explain (poorly) the final sequence!" bit from Orphan 55.
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Apr 9, 2024 00:05
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Chibnall seems very chummy with RTD and Moffat now, so you'll never get them badmouthing him, but I'd absolutely love an oral history of his era from a production side.
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Apr 9, 2024 00:15
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Figured I'd get on with the rewatch, and jot down any idle thoughts I had Rose It's fun to think what kind of stuff, thanks to later continuity, is happening just offscreen throughout this episode. Jack Harkness is loitering around corners, Clara Oswald is caving the Great Intelligence's skull in with a wrench while Billie knocks the antiplastic into the Nestene vat, the same Tardis later in its timeline is being kept locked up in UNIT by the Grand Serpent... hey is the Doctor keen to take Rose with him because he dimly remembers someone who looked like her helping him very recently? Rose having a go at the Doctor for not caring about Mickey being dead (later revealed to be because he knew Mickey wasn't dead and just didn't bother to mention it) is an early example of RTD's fondness for making the Doctor look like a dickhead. You can see Peter Capaldi in that little interaction. Also Clive's death is hilariously mean. Poor guy. First (and possibly only) person killed by the Autons. You just know Moffat would have had the Doctor swoop in and save him somehow and he'd have gone "ohmigod it's the Doctor Who!" I forgot how leisurely Rusty took things with the backstory. The Doctor mentions that the Nestene Consciousness is here because it lost its home in "the war" just mentioned casually like, you know, the war. I think it's the next episode he'll reveal he's the last of the Time Lords and the Dalek episode where he reveals he personally took them all out. Also the first instance of Rusty's blunt (in a charming way, I like it blunt) social commentary. The Nestene Consciousness likes this planet because of how polluted it is. It's literally invading for the oil.
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Apr 9, 2024 04:39
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I was rewatching S1 in full for the first time since high school last month and it really struck me how different it feels than any series that came after it. Eccleston's run feels as unique compared to S2 onward as the classic series does, just in a completely different way. Murray Gold's score has more restraint; hell, the show's entire sensibilities from its cinematography to its writing have more restraint—it feels less like the NuWho we've grown accustomed to and you can see much more late 90s/early 2000s genre TV DNA in it. It also feels intimate and character-driven in a way I don't think Doctor Who had ever been before or has ever been since. Episodes like Boom Town and Father's Day feel like they wouldn't belong in any series but Series 1. It's so good.
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Apr 9, 2024 05:12
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Lottery of Babylon posted:I mean, I think I broadly agree that it's perfectly adequate as an edutainment after school special from the 90s for kindergarteners. I just would rather Chibnall aimed for a slightly higher standard. (I'd especially have liked it if Rosa's protest was explicitly something she planned; the show has her meeting with MLK but doesn't indicate that the bus protest specifically was part of a strategy.) Chibnall didn't write it though. Chibnall was pitched a story from a beloved black children's author who wanted to celebrate a legendary civil rights figure and said 'yes, absolutely, go for it'. Could there have been space for a more complex portrayal of Rosa Parks? Sure. I think either is a valid choice, and if that's what you're looking for Rosa absolutely a failure. But it is, after all, still a British TV show (or at least it was then), and the US Civil Rights movement is covered in nowhere near as much depth in our schools as I suspect it is in the US. Of course it's going to read as oversimplified to anyone more educated on those events. But laying that choice at the feet of the white dude and therefore taking any perceived agency away from the very accomplished and beloved-to-the-point-of-knighthood black writer is, frankly, not a great look. Nor do I think depicting her wanting to raise awareness of Rosa Parks and the US Civil Rights movement amongst a new generations as 'an after school special from the 90s for kindergarteners' fair. She had a platform, and she used that platform to celebrate her heroes. That feels like something that shouldn't be diminished, and her name certainly shouldn't just be erased from the conversation just to get a few kicks in to the white dude, no matter your opinions of how she executed. There's plenty to kick Chibnall about, and the whole weaponising The Master's brown skin sure was a choice. But as well as Rosa he also got Demons of Punjab made, and the whole topic of Britain's behaviour as the empire collapsed is something we don't ever seem to bring up, ever. It wasn't remotely mentioned in school history. This is a show that leans in hard to myths around Britains past rather than the often very uncomfortable truths about our behaviour especially during the colonial period, suddenly dealing with that out of nowhere is....well, it's not what prime time family shows in the UK do.
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Apr 9, 2024 08:05
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The_Doctor posted:Chibnall seems very chummy with RTD and Moffat now, so you'll never get them badmouthing him, but I'd absolutely love an oral history of his era from a production side. I don't know how much behind-the-scenes stuff would do, since the flaws of the Chibnall era are pretty obvious to anybody paying attention, and it all boils down to pretty much the same thing: Chibnall's not a good writer or showrunner, in a very ordinary way. The most fun you could have with the era is probably the way it gets talked about here, in the sort of "oh and one more thing, she sent the Master to a concentration camp?!" The rest of it would just be oh, we didn't do anything with our characters, oh, we didn't leave enough time for the resolution, and things like that. I'd agree that we're never going to see RTD or Moffat mock Chibnall in the way they mock each other, because as I've said before, it would just come across as cruel rather than playful. But there's really no bigger diss RTD can give Chibnall than the BBC offering him carte blanche, including bringing Disney in as a producer, to come back un-gently caress-up the show.
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Apr 9, 2024 08:07
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Rochallor posted:But there's really no bigger diss RTD can give Chibnall than the BBC offering him carte blanche, including bringing Disney in as a producer, to come back un-gently caress-up the show. If the few rumors we have about Chibnall's time on the show are true then bringing in Disney to keep the BBC at arms length might end up being the best thing RTD could do.
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Apr 9, 2024 11:31
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The_Doctor posted:Chibnall seems very chummy with RTD and Moffat now, so you'll never get them badmouthing him, but I'd absolutely love an oral history of his era from a production side. Yeah, in some respects it's interesting that we don't have one yet because I can't imagine that situation left people feeling very happy about it and I'm sure there's folk who badly want to put their side of the story out there. NDAs may be a thing, of course, as is fear of informal blacklisting. But it just takes one person who decides "gently caress it, my career in television is over and I don't care any more" to spill their guts. And if you anonymise your leaks enough in this day and age it can be pretty tricky to get an NDA to bite... and if you're angry enough about the situation you may not care. I'm sure sooner or later something will slip out, there's enough curiosity and appetite for details out there that there'll always be a receptive audience.
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Apr 9, 2024 13:29
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I've also been rewatching Eccleston lately and I'm through World War III. It's interesting to see them feeling out what the show would be. I think the more goofy "kid's show" approach that you see a lot was a poor choice, it made the tone swing too widely. On the other hand, by the end of the season that is mostly gone and RTD has a much better handlebon what the show should be. The mystery box plotting I could do without. That is very early 2000s television and it never works anywhere. "Bad Wolf" just doesn't pay off no matter how much they try, though I remember being very amused at the end of Turn Left when the Doctor suddenly realizes "Bad Wolf" is everywhere. As I recall, at the time I understood that "the war" was just a convenient way to clear the decks from past continuity; I didn't know anything about the New Adventures stuff to make the connection there. I assumed it was Time Lords vs. Daleks because that was the obvious thing; obvious isn't bad in this case, of course. The whole show felt very accessible, which is probably its biggest triumph. Anyone could jump in without caring that there was a massive history behind it. In retrospect, I like Billy Piper as Rose a lot more than I used to. In these episodes she feels a lot more out of her depth and feeling her way along. It's a great, actually kind of understated performance. On the other hand, I'm cooler on Eccleston. His Doctor feels all over the place and he doesn't seem comfortable acting against special effects. He's got two settings, goofball and angry yelling, and never manages to pull things out of the role like his successors (okay, maybe not Whitaker who never had anything solid to work with).
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Apr 9, 2024 15:55
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Well Manicured Man posted:Murray Gold's score [in series one] has more restraint; This is so funny to me because boy oh boy at the time fans did not feel that way. I really love the Eccleston year too, but it is really a study here in how prevailing fan tastes change. Or at least the loudest people aren't around (or changed their minds).
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Apr 9, 2024 16:35
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Clouseau posted:This is so funny to me because boy oh boy at the time fans did not feel that way. "Murray Gold" and "has restraint" have never gone in the same sentence.
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Apr 9, 2024 16:39
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Clouseau posted:This is so funny to me because boy oh boy at the time fans did not feel that way. I remember the one poster who compared Tennent to a Nazi soldier for continuing to star in the show when they thought the quality had declined. "Just following orders." I wonder how badly the Chibnall years broke them.
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Apr 9, 2024 16:43
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Timby posted:"Murray Gold" and "has restraint" have never gone in the same sentence. To be fair the last thing the revival show needed was restraint. A theme that bellowed at the viewer "SHUT UP AND LISTEN, AN IMPORTANT THING IS ON YOUR TELEVISION" was a great move.
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Apr 9, 2024 16:49
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DavidCameronsPig posted:I think it's ok for writers from one place and culture to write stories about something that happened in another place and culture. The entire point of fiction is to try and put yourself in someone else's shoes, after all. Although when your dealing with something that is as charged as slavery, racism, the civil rights movement and the impacts that are continued to be felt today, at a minimum, you best be prepared to do your homework and treat the topic with the care it deserves. Yeah not concerned with how the Doctor looks, I am concerned that the writers wrote a situation in which the Doctor and companions actively participate in racial discrimination to "preserve history" or whatever contrivance. That simply did not need to be written that way and tanks And when I question whether the UK duo are the ones to write it, it's because of what and how they wrote it, it did not seem like they did their homework. And this topic in particular is ongoing, it is current events as much as it is history and I feel they fumbled. I don't think people should only be allowed to write about their own histories or arbitrarily local stories. I can appreciate a YA approach to making Rosa a hero and getting loosely goosey with history can be very fun in Doctor Who. But there's a gulf of difference between a financial take on some old despot's kingdom woes and a globally important series of civil rights protests that affected the whole world. Hope they hire other POC writers in general, super weird looking that episode up and see Rosa was the first time they had a black writer. I was also mildly surprised they were philosophically against any American ever being allowed to write an episode. I would've figured a matter of circumstance would ensure a nearly unbroken stream of UK writers by necessity but apparently they get real upset at the mere suggestion.
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Apr 9, 2024 17:06
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Timby posted:"Murray Gold" and "has restraint" have never gone in the same sentence. And I'm glad of it.
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Apr 9, 2024 17:23
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Rosa should have been an episode about the Bristol Bus Boycott instead - it's an important part of British history that rarely even gets mentioned in Black History Month education. Anyway, the villians in Flux made so very little sense - one is tied up in a place and eats some people who may or may not be time lords and the other is braindwashed to be....some random woman? And they tried to undo a version of the anchoring of the thread from the VNA? And then he calls himself "the Doctor's greatest enemy" even though the audience has no idea who they are.
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Apr 9, 2024 20:32
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The part of the universe where writing makes sense was destroyed by the flux before he started writing it.
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Apr 9, 2024 20:51
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The worst thing about the Passenger mask is that I recognised it. I'm a larper in the UK - I make a lot of semi-quality costume out of bits and pieces. A great source of this for modern and sci-fi larps is "tacticool" gear aimed at airsofters and preppers. As such I recognised this mask instantly because I had previously bought it and painted it gold for a 40k thing. And that was fine because I wasn't doing it on loving primetime TV. https://preppersshop.co.uk/kombat-uk-tactical-skull-mesh-face-mask---black-75599-p.asp
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Apr 9, 2024 20:51
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I'm not gonna hold recognising a costume element against it, a lot of classic sci-fi props were built around off the shelf things. Like the Ghostbusters' scanner things they use to pick up Thetans or whatever, that's just an electric shoe polisher with prongs and blinky lights stuck on.
Dabir fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Apr 9, 2024 |
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Apr 9, 2024 21:51
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Right but ya gotta glue the extra to recontextualize it. I did not recognize the mask and it just looked like some weird tactical paintball nerd mask.
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Apr 9, 2024 22:03
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Maybe not the most apt comparison because the Ghostbusters were really basically intended to be working class shlubs whose equipment was cobbled together from diverse (and occasionally extremely dangerous) parts. Even still, the blinky lights and the antennae that fly up set those devices apart and gave them a set of whimsy. Even if you could recognize an electric shoe polisher on sight it would still make sense in the setting, "they just repurposed the handle and body". What DW did (or rather, didn't do) with the Passenger mask would be as if they had the Ghostbusters just walk around with literal and obvious electric shoe polishers going BZZZZZZZZZZZ maybe painted gunmetal-grey and that's it but otherwise just RZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ usenet celeb 1992 fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Apr 9, 2024 |
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Apr 9, 2024 22:03
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Khanstant posted:Right but ya gotta glue the extra to recontextualize it. I did not recognize the mask and it just looked like some weird tactical paintball nerd mask. Sure, but it would look like that even if it wasn't one. it sucks as a prop but the reason isn't that they got it somewhere
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Apr 9, 2024 22:29
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RTD used a toy beetle as a villain once, you do what you can with the budget you have
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Apr 9, 2024 23:08
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Fil5000 posted:She literally defeats the Master by loving up his perception filter so the Nazis recognise he's not white and, as far as she knows, will send him to a camp and gas him to death. This is presented as the Doctor being clever and finding a smart way to deal with the Master. It was a bad writing choice. In universe, I'm not sure claiming the Master is "a person of color" is especially accurate, and I think it's hard to take seriously "the Master will end up gassed to death in a concentration camp" as a potential outcome of that scene, but Chibnall really should have been thinking about the world he was living in at the time, too. Moffat had Twelve abandon Missy to the Daleks, who are absolutely a genocide machine. And he had Eleven use the moon landing footage to turn humanity into unconscious genocide machines. RTD had the Doctor genocide the Daleks and kill all the other Time Lords, until that got rewritten, though at least Nine "learned a lesson" from that. And let's not even talk about Six.
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Apr 9, 2024 23:20
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I got no objection to getting it somewhere but you gotta put a little work in basically is what I feel.
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Apr 9, 2024 23:25
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Trouble is of course, with "Rosa", if you do anything other than 'we have to sit here and passively observe history', Chibnall is going to hit "Thank Goodness the Doctor, a white woman, was there to make sure things went right", and the whole civil rights movement becomes a Doctor Who story like the Dalek Invasion of Earth. Or like Timewyrm:Exodus, which is a good read, but writing off Hitler's madness as him being possessed by an alien entity kinda minimizes the horrors of the Nazis. I'm not sure what the solution is there either, beyond "don't do these kind of stories", because either version isn't going to be satisfying.
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Apr 10, 2024 01:25
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It makes sense from this end of the screen, reverse engineering it: we can't have the Doctor single handedly be responsible for ending racism, it has to have happened whether the Doctor was there or not. So what's the threat? Uhh someone makes the bus less crowded so Rosa Parks won't have to move. So how do we resolve that? We make the bus crowded ourselves! Hooray...?
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Apr 10, 2024 01:43
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The most darkly humorous thing was how Ryan draws a line from Rosa Parks to the election of Barack Obama, conveniently ignoring the man who followed him at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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Apr 10, 2024 02:29
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Have it such that Rosa's actions end up saving the doctor. Do not write a situation where the Doctor is the savior on any level but is instead through whatever contrivance or chain of events where Rosa's heroic actions have some additional doctor who thing on top of important moment in history for all humanity. I can't remember specifics but I know they've done "historic figure does historic thing and also defeats the blorgons with the Tardis club." They are also more than comfortable having episodes where the Doctor is relatively passive and others do the heroics. That episode could've been a more appropriate time for the Doctor to step back a bit.
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Apr 10, 2024 03:45
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| # ? Apr 30, 2024 02:39 |
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Rewatch continues... The End Of The World Cassandra is a great character. Defining herself as the last pure human while not even remotely resembling a human in any way, and her whole motivation being to fund her ongoing surgeries, chef's kiss. The moral ambiguity of the Doctor functionally killing her is pretty bold for Episode Two. The Doctor opening up about his planet is a deft way of delivering exposition in such a way that it doesn't feel like exposition. He's telling Rose about himself, like she asked him to and he refused earlier. A bit of character growth for him, and deepening their relationship, while simultaneously telling the lore fan boys that some serious lore has happened since 1996. When the recency effect makes you think of RTD as "John Simm shooting force lightning" and "goblins of all things" you forget how good he can be at this. Ohhh, "adherents of the repeated meme". There's another repeated meme starting in this episode, heh. The Unquiet Dead "The stiffs are getting lively again" yep this is Mark Gatiss all right. I kind of wonder how they chose whose episodes would go in what order. Davies decided "ok I've hit the ground running, got everything set up with the first two episodes, now to turn everything over to the League Of Gentlemen guy". There's probably something in The Writer's Tale or something about this, the behind the scenes is pretty extensively documented, I'm just not curious enough (or too lazy) to go looking into it. Gwyneth got psychic powers from growing up near a space-time rift?! Amy Pond was born in this episode! Feels like there's maybe too many concepts colliding in this one. Ghosts in 1869 meeting Charles Dickens, except of course ghosts aren't real these are gaseous intelligent beings. Oh but psychics are real. And this one knows that Rose is a time traveller. Charles Dickens is still here by the way. Also Gwyneth kills herself but had already been dead and was somehow still conscious the whole time? Quick let's get out-of this plot before something else hosed up happens! We accidentally inspired Charles Dickens to write about aliens but don't worry he'll die before he finishes it, roll credits.
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Apr 10, 2024 04:45
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