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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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I don't think it's important to the point whether London cops have reached the level of Janissary that American ones have, but the point where a well-meaning teenager can honestly aspire to be a police officer because they want to help people has passed. I don't think we were quite at that point in 2014 when the Danny stuff was on TV, but even then, it wasn't handled particularly well.
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Jan 1, 2024 14:52
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 03:08 |
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SirSamVimes posted:I hate the words "the first of the Doctor Who spinoffs" When they say "fan-favorite the Sea Devils," to which fan in particular are they referring?
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Jan 1, 2024 23:51
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Warthur posted:Holy poo poo, Series 9 is so so good. I've got to The Husbands of River Song in my watchthrough and you know what? I could go for a spin-off series where the concept is that it's about the Twelfth Doctor and River going on little adventures together during their 24 years of living together on Darillium (because you know they didn't just let the TARDIS gather dust in the corner unused during all that time), because the chemistry between them is far better than River/11 and on a par with/might be better than River/10. Series 9 crew rise up, it's probably the best of the revival IMO. The new episodes got me in the mood and and I watched Face the Raven, Heaven Sent, and Hell Bent a couple of weeks ago, what a fantastic run of stories. After the last several years it was wonderful to hear even tossed-off lines with a wonderful sense of weight to them ("At the end of everything, one must expect the company of immortals.") Just the text doesn't do Capaldi's and Coleman's performances justice, but this exchange shortly before Clara's death is unbelievably good: quote:CLARA: We can fix this, can't we? We always fix it.
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Jan 5, 2024 22:36
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Covok posted:Here's a dirty secret of American TV: we don't use 90% of our regional accents or dialog in most of our media. Most characters use "neutral" accent, which is actually a midwestern accent. Most Americans see the accent as "neutral." Then, the next most popular would be the "southern" accent, which is actually an exaggerated Texas accent. New York comes up, but they are actually more common in mafia media and period pieces then anything set in a contemporary period. Outside of that, anything is a rarity. You never see a Wisconsin accent on TV or a Missourian or Kentucky, etc. And that's not even getting into the kind of racist "race based" accent casting that has thankfully been dying down over the last 20 years. Yeah, there are loads of really distinctive regional accents that get little to no exposure in media; I can't think of any time I've seen somebody with a Philadelphia accent, the Chicago accent has only really come up in that one SNL sketch, etc. Especially on the East Coast, you've got a whole constellation of disparate accents close together in a manner similar to the U.K. A bunch of them are dying out due to being perceived as low-class / proliferation of the "neutral" accent. That's something I know happens in Britain as well with RP being considered the default, but for whatever reason other accents are more common in media there than in the U.S.
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Jan 6, 2024 00:41
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The_Doctor posted:The Blu-ray collection continues with Season 15 HORROR OF FANG ROCK THE INVISIBLE ENEMY IMAGE OF THE FENDAHL THE SUN MAKERS UNDERWORLD THE INVASION OF TIME Ooh, that's a pretty rough season. Two of those are alright, I guess! Also lol at the section of the trailer that's just photos of Louise Jameson in the leather outfit looking sexy, they know their audience
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Jan 11, 2024 18:58
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Class3KillStorm posted:I just started rewatching "The Sun Makers" randomly the other day, and I forgot that it has one of the funnier cliffhangers in part 2 when they're stopped and scared by... a couple of rando guards on a golf cart coming at them slowly down the corridor. Plenty of space to roam, plenty of doors to race for well before the guards get there... but everyone has to just stop and stare for the benefit of the big musical sting. Absolute shades of that bit in the first Austin Powers movie with the one guard and the steamroller. I think The Sun Makers is actually pretty good, but yeah even by the standards of the time it looks incredibly cheap. I do like that the Doctor decides "this world fuckin sucks, I'm gonna overthrow it" almost immediately upon arrival, it really sells the level of contempt he has for the corporation on Pluto.
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Jan 11, 2024 22:59
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A.o.D. posted:I can't really recall many matte paintings in old Who. I do recall a bunch of, and I believe I'm using this correctly, naff miniatures. Maybe the BBC just didn't have a matte painter on staff back then? From a layman's perspective, miniatures are probably a little easier to teach someone to do quickly, in that part of it is just supergluing bits and pieces of plastic together. You can also reuse a miniature from multiple angles, which is handy when you need to do a dozen establishing shots over four episodes.
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Jan 12, 2024 15:05
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Open Source Idiom posted:James Goss relocated to a cave in Turkey I thought this was some weird euphemism for being canceled
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Jan 12, 2024 16:40
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I think the only story that will "ruin" Classic Who is The Curse of Fenric, in how it's really the first story to pull off tethering the plot to a character's emotional journey, a move that is now basically standard for genre TV. Also it's just really loving good in general, an absolute high-water mark of the series and a preview of what it would have looked like in the 90s. Then they canceled the show the next serial.
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Jan 16, 2024 03:02
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jisforjosh posted:https://twitter.com/WildBlueJacob/status/1747025306295148825 Anybody want to guess, without looking, how many Big Finishes they've done since then? I'm gonna go with three box sets of four stories each, plus some celebratory special where they team up with *rolls dice* uh, Winston Churchill. Jerusalem posted:Tom Baker has mentioned that he absolutely approached the role as,"I'm an alien, there should be something "off" about me", which he very deliberately made a physical part of his performance. He'd make his facial/emotional reactions slightly off to a given situation, and do things like turn 270 degrees when he could have just made a simple left or right turn to get where he needed to go. I think Tom Baker and Matt Smith both benefit a little from just looking loving weird, there is something that's a little off about both of them. Not in an off-putting way, just like they're an extra standard deviation off from what we imagine the average person to look like.
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Jan 16, 2024 23:36
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The_Doctor posted:The Crystal Maze has such an odd production history. I've heard the Boulanger era is held in plus respect.
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Jan 28, 2024 17:15
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It's rather trivial to explain away with all the weird stuff with regeneration that has come up since the revival. She's not burning through four lives, it's just one because "she's not done cooking yet." And as a member of Gallifrey's elite Romana will obviously be granted a new set of regenerations by the High Council.
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Jan 29, 2024 03:02
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Hollismason posted:Yeah okay sure Time Lords went to war with space vampires Low key I think this is one of the goofiest bits of lore in the entire show. I love that vampires of all baddies are the ancient eternal foes of the Time Lords. Presumably the monsters in Vampires of Venice are from that one chunk of the universe where everything is vaguely vampire-y, like how most of the show takes place in the part where everyone looks vaguely like a I kinda gave up on my Eight Doctor Adventures read-through, but Vampire Science is great and also has a really funny bit where one of the vampires starts talking about how she saw the Doctor and the others are like, "...but Time Lords aren't real, they're just a fairy tale, right?"
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Feb 4, 2024 00:28
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Boy you are just plowing through these. Glancing at Davison's stories for a minute, I think the signal-to-noise ratio is probably about the same as later Tom Baker, it's just that when a story is bad, it's really bad.
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Feb 5, 2024 04:09
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Warthur posted:I honestly don't mind Pip and Jane and I think people overhype how much of a bad thing they were for the show. Yeah, there's a palpable lack of ambition in Pip and Jane scripts, but they're also very obviously people who write a lot and are consequently very good at structuring stories on a technical level (also they probably turned in all their scripts on time). Should a TV show aspire to more than a C average? Sure, but that's the show's problem, not theirs.
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Feb 5, 2024 15:54
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As a trilogy I don't think it's particularly interesting, but nevertheless when Terminus is your weakest story you're in a pretty good place. I understand why Earthshock is more or less the go-to for "first Davison story" but Mawdryn Undead and Enlightenment are both absolute highlights of Doctor Who, and I don't think a couple of weird continuity scenes should preclude either of those stories from taking that position.
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Feb 8, 2024 20:37
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I don't think it's been brought up yet, but Elizabeth Sandifer of Eruditorum Press has started covering the Chibnall era. I'm only up to the Rosa entry so far, but... it is brutal, unsurprisingly.
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Feb 27, 2024 01:37
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PriorMarcus posted:I will say that her Witchfinders review, which is the most recent one, articles a point I've always been really reluctant to discuss, and that's the maybe Whitaker, even with the poo poo material she was given, just isn't a very good Doctor? Like, I was all on board with the idea that she wasn't given the scripts and material (she wasn't) but then I think about how much of her era has just slid off my brain, and how little of her Doctor I have a grasp on, and I can fairly safely say that she really didn't do anything to elevate the material. I think, with every other Doctor, that when they had bad scripts they still managed to do something memorable with them, but Whitaker just... doesn't? As difficult as it is to test the hypothesis, the counter-example of Mandip Gill always trying to find something to do despite the scripts barely remembering she exists is a good one. A lot of the discourse around Whitaker was so toxic and sexist that it kind of inoculated criticism of her among people who aren't insane. Warthur posted:I'll say here what I said there: “Jodie got sandbagged by by bad scripts” is a testable hypothesis. Colin Baker had essentially no five-star scripts during his stint, but then audios happened and it was great. But that's because Colin is an exceptionally good actor for allowing a glimpse of a better version of his Doctor to emerge in brief flashes during television stories largely designed to undermine him, and it was those flashes people used as a basis for later stories. Many of his best audios (at least of those I have heard, and I admit I’ve only heard the early ones up to The Holy Terror or thereabouts) seem to be built on the idea of “OK, what if we let Colin do more of That Thing or This Bit, in a story which better supported it?”, and to his credit he grabbed those opportunities with both hands and wholly exonerated himself. Colin is obviously much better on audio, but I don't know if I'd agree that his work there expands much on his TV performance. Like, audio Colin and TV Colin have a little in common, but they're basically as different as any other pair of Doctors. Warthur posted:I really don’t think she has any other truly great moments in her run which make you sit up and think “Yes, this is what the Doctor is supposed to be about”, particularly once you get to entire seasons based around her getting upstaged by Jo Martin The way everybody was instantly agog about Jo Martin is maybe the most damning evidence against Thirteen (largely as written, maybe a bit as acted). The first thing you want to do when introducing that sort of inverted character is make them everything that your main character is not, which requires you to think exactly about what your character is. And Chibnall, in maybe his most insightful moment across three series, correctly deduced that the inversion of Thirteen is a character who does stuff and is proactive.
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Feb 27, 2024 12:09
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Big Mean Jerk posted:Nah, ChatGPT would’ve at least been nonsensical enough to be vaguely interesting. The Chibnall era is the dry turkey sandwich of modern Who; yeah it’s good and it technically functions as something to fill you up, but there’s no joy to be had in that meal. Yeah, I think the ChatGPT comparison is a flawed one. Chibnall absolutely had a theme and an agenda running through his stories, it's just that it's one that is totally antithetical to Doctor Who. His work under RTD and Moffat is perhaps a better argument for AI-generated nonsense--and it's much better!
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Feb 29, 2024 03:55
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I'm not a UK resident, but BBC One doesn't have commercials, right? So it shouldn't really matter what the broadcast viewing numbers are, just how many people are watching it in general. The fans watch it as soon as it's out online, the families turn it on after dinner on Saturday, it's all getting the brand out there.
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Mar 15, 2024 16:59
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Timby posted:Chibnall wrote literally every episode of Flux. Technically true, but I wouldn't describe anything Chibnall wrote having "vision" or "characters" or "a plot." RTD writing basically the whole series does make me a tad nervous. He acquitted himself well with the specials and writing most of the episodes means he will, by definition, be doing some non-arc ones which is where he's strongest, but he's not going to be around forever and the show desperately needs to cultivate new talent.
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Apr 1, 2024 00:46
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Reading these reviews is really a trip because I mostly stopped watching after the start of Series 12, and I am 95% certain I watched this episode... but the plot synopsis is just as familiar to me as the one where the Doctor is an Irish cop (?). It's like trying to recall a dream ten minutes after waking.
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Apr 7, 2024 11:10
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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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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 03:08 |
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2house2fly posted:The Unquiet Dead I'm guessing Gatiss and Davies go way back; at any rate they had both written New Adventures and Gatiss wrote one or two Big Finish stories prior to the TV gig.
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Apr 10, 2024 08:18
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