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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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MarsPearl posted:The problem is that as a general construct militaries of some kind have literally always been necessary and useful for every single large organised civilisation in the entire history of the planet, without a single exception. The crimes of the military are not the crimes of soldiers, they're the crimes of the people ordering, training, brainwashing, and sometimes conscripting and even enslaving the soldiers. This gets made extremely awkward by Danny being a black working class man and The Doctor being very heavily coded as an upper class educated intellectual white British man. Horrible genocidal regimes like the Daleks (who are basically nazi stand ins) weren't in fact overthrown or defeated by clever words and plans and pacificism, they were overthrown by soldiers, soldiers of the working class and soldiers who weren't white, especially within the context of Britain, where black and brown soldiers helped win British wars while their populations were starved, enslaved and genocided by the British. Alternate perspective: The military is used by the state as a form of extraction of value from the global south. In order to convince otherwise sane and non-homicidal human beings to take part in that murderous, ecocidal process of resource extraction, military service offers multiple social and financial benefits within the imperial core. Doctor Who is frankly too soft on the military and far too soft on cops, who regardless of their demographic replicate the military model of resource extraction at home. Becoming a police officer is an extremely effective method of upward economic and social mobility as long as you are willing to brutalize people.
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Jan 1, 2024 07:52
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DavidCameronsPig posted:In the UK at least, being a police officer is not a well paying job that enables an extremely effective method of upward economic and social mobility. It barely falls into the bracket of being an average paying job. I have no idea where you're getting this idea from, but it's not founded in any sort of actual reality. Here in New York City, police officers live outside the five boroughs and accumulate triple their salary to sit around playing Candy crush on overtime and perform frivolous arrests at the ends of their shifts to further rob our pockets while our schools and libraries are defunded. Meanwhile because they all commute in by car and hold pedestrians and cyclists in contempt, they make our communities unsafe through illegal parking and dangerous driving. Being anywhere near a police precinct is one of the most alienating antisocial depressing experiences you can have in New York City. And New York City cops aren't special.
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Jan 1, 2024 14:43
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Plucky Brit posted:None of this would apply when fighting the Daleks. The Doctor explicitly rejected a soldier who was fighting in a war against a genocidal enemy that wanted to exterminate everything that wasn't them. He was never called out for this bizarre stance. The doctor doesn't want to travel with soldiers because the doctor wants companions who are creative, self-directed, and will challenge him. The entire purpose of military training is to take thinking feeling human beings and turn them into reliable executors of amoral orders.
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Jan 1, 2024 15:20
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I've watched a lot of Pertwee and the Doctor is constantly in conflict with the militarism of UNIT. His very second story ends in tragedy because the Brigadier murders the Silurians because the Brig's military inclinations and the Doctor's desire for understanding are in fundamental conflict. The fact that later UNIT stories become so enamoured with charming characters in a military context that they dispense with this fundamental conflict in favor of a workplace family dynamic doesn't mean that conflict was never meaningful. I've been paying too much attention for too long to be duped by narratives of brilliant, brave, self-sacrificing soldiers. If the purpose of military organizations was to make people brave, smart, and selfless for social benefit, that money would be spent on public works projects instead of bullets and bombs. And yes, I'm familiar with the Army Corps of Engineers and other military funding of public works. But we can all recognize that operations like engineering and coast guard work are entirely out scaled by imperially-motivated police action and regime change operations that alchemize chaos and death in the global south into economic benefits for the MIC. DoctorWhat fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 16:00
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I said that the purpose of military training is to produce a class of soldiers who act directly according to amoral orders. What other purpose could there be in such rigorous training and adherence to hierarchy than to create a soldier who will act before they think? Whether this strategy reliably dehumanizes people to the total degree intended is another question. I'm sure there are people in this thread who are basically functional human beings despite previous military service. But sublimating yourself to a hierarchical structure of state violence should actually disqualify you from the TARDIS crew, because the US and UK militaries aren't fighting Daleks and neither was Danny. Danny signed up for a job where he and his colleagues, just like their real life counterparts, were killing human children for the benefit of empire and oil companies.
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Jan 1, 2024 16:12
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In no way did this constitute a derail. Doctor Who is a science fiction and fantasy television program that frequently explores and addresses sociopolitical themes including militarization, imperialism and resource extraction. Using real world analogs and examples to engage with these fictional uses of political ideas and themes is appropriate.
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Jan 1, 2024 16:43
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Khanstant posted:Dehumanizing people because they were in the military once isn't appropriate or okay though The military aims to dehumanize people. It's very difficult to succeed entirely but that is the institutional goal. Me saying "the military aims to take human beings and change the way they think, in furtherance of imperial benefit" is not me saying "soldiers have forfeited their humanity forever". Separately from this, joining with a police force or military unit is, at least in the UK and US, a conscious choice. It's a decision to say "the improvements to my circumstances caused by joining this organization outweigh the costs that my participation will inflict on others". There are conscientious objectors and police abolitionists all over the world and history, refusing conscription because they refuse to take that bargain. Military volunteers have had enough hagiography.
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Jan 1, 2024 18:58
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It's almost as if art produced in the imperial core is weirdly obsessed with redeeming and sympathizing with the agents of imperial violence
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Jan 1, 2024 19:03
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lines posted:I'm not sure why you keep giving American examples (like the Army Corps of Engineers). I'm by no means saying that the British armed forces are clear of all wrongs, but you seem to be continually conflating the practices and institutions in quite different countries. I suppose you would say that they're all part of the imperial core or whatnot, but that appears to be particular to the ideological standpoint you're operating from. UK involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were direct extensions of imperial foreign policy. The lives and life experiences of Iraqis and Afghans were judged to be valueless in the face of the oil-lust of the global north. Blair and Bush and the rest were architects of mass death for profit, and the fiction of the victimized, bamboozled soldier is one finger of a larger cultural project to make war permanently ambiguous - complicated and sad and tragic but never a crime, never evil, never a choice made on the premise that some people count LESS, or not at all. Danny Pink signed up for that and through his direct actions a child died. That's the sanitized, redeemable version. The one where you learn a little lesson but the soldier remains now and tragic.
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Jan 1, 2024 19:09
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Sydney Bottocks posted:And while we're on the subject...if the Brig etc. are all just mindless pawns of the MIC, doesn't that make the Doctor even worse than them? He certainly has no problems willingly using UNIT's resources, equipment, and manpower, or throwing his UNIT credentials around whenever it suits him, even after he's left the organization. You said you wouldn't engage with me further and I appreciated that because your form of engagement was to put words in my mouth. The Doctor is written with an extremely complicated relationship with the military industrial complex and with our societal notions of war and soldiers. As I said previously, culture in the Imperial corps is extremely preoccupied with the internal life of the soldier and the cop and spends much less time considering the lives of the people who suffer at their hands. The Brigadier was introduced as a fairly antagonistic figure with multiple serious character flaws into which the Doctor came into conflict. But the charm of Nicholas Courtney as an actor on set chemistry and the predispositions of writers for the series, especially later on once the Brig had become a legacy character and held in reverence, softened the brigadier into an uncontroversial ally representing only the positive qualities of militarism. Culture is preoccupied with the internal life of the soldier. Sydney Bottocks posted:Matthew Modine said that originally, his character was supposed to die at the end of Full Metal Jacket; but he managed to convince Kubrick to let him live, because to Modine that was the true horror of war. Surviving a war, and having to live with the knowledge of the things you did to survive. When did I accuse Moffat of saying "tough luck"? He created a story where a soldier could have a tragic backstory where he murders an innocent non-character, and then demonstrates that same soldier's virtue by reversing the bargain and dying for his victim. This is a manifestation of the same preoccupation. DoctorWhat fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 19:27
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Who really decides what orders are lawful. Come on.
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Jan 1, 2024 19:59
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He also plays a upsetting caricature of a mentally disabled man in an audio with Colin and Maggie
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Jan 11, 2024 17:33
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Detective No. 27 posted:Imagine thinking you’re gonna die in a couple days and then deciding to go visit James Corden. "Well this sucks. If life is gonna be like this I guess dying isn't so bad."
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Jan 12, 2024 19:18
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Angry Salami posted:This should really happen more often. Have the Master claim to be a future Doctor and see if he can make it five minutes before blurting out "Fooled you all!" Big Finish did this once and it loving ruled.
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Jan 30, 2024 09:01
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A.o.D. posted:Y'know, we've seen the Master be the Doctor (sort of) as Prof. Yana, and we've seen the Doctor (particularly #10) do some poo poo that would make the Master say "oh my!", what I'd like to see is a story where they have to take up the other's role and the find out to their dismay that they're way too good at it for their own liking. Again. Alex MacQueen in UNIT: Dominion
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Jan 30, 2024 23:48
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A.o.D. posted:Big finish productions aren't universally accessible, so I hope you'll forgive me for not knowing what any particular audio play has done. It's a UNIT style story with the 7th Doctor and a mysterious future Doctor who turns out to be a new Master. The doctor is largely displaced from the contemporary England narrative and the Master fills his role, getting chummy with UNIT's staff, saving lives, and being clever. At the end, it's observed that the Master seemed genuinely happier pretending to be the Doctor
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Jan 31, 2024 00:42
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It was also only the second appearance from the Master in Big Finish in 9 years. not the FIRST - that was in a 4DA, so they could advertise it and keep Dominion on the down-low. It's a genuine twist, which is why I still spoiler tag it 12 years later.
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Jan 31, 2024 02:36
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I think the material with Good!Klein and how that all relates to the twist is really good but I agree with that criticism otherwise.
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Jan 31, 2024 03:31
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Also, the Doctor sucks the Creature off on-screen.
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Jan 31, 2024 05:03
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It doesn't fit me anymore. My shoulders got too broad. I should probably look into rehoming it.
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Feb 3, 2024 01:30
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Detective No. 27 posted:I love Big Finish but it’s funny how they kinda hinge on the premise of “hey what if the Doctor cheated on his companions when they weren’t looking?” There's an arc of Seven stories (largely recorded when McCoy was triple-booked making The Hobbit) about two groups of 7's companions discovering he was two-timing them.
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Feb 4, 2024 05:42
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A major problem with that era of 7 stories is that the actual finale they were building towards, Fifty-Fifty, never got made. Fifty-Fifty was the planned finale by the guy who wrote Death in the Family. It would have revealed that all the Old Gods were breaking into the universe because something was moving very fast, breaking holes in space and time. That "something" was the Eighth Doctor's TARDIS, breaking all the laws of time to cross his own timeline in the hopes of stopping Seven from going too far and becoming a total Machiavellian monster. It looks like some of those ideas are making their way into The Last Day, but The Last Day is not getting good reviews.
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Feb 4, 2024 16:43
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Live 34 might be in the top 10 BFs of all time. And in a very casual way, it doesn't feel like it's trying to be amazing, it just rules.
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Feb 4, 2024 17:57
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Big Finish has been on a decent kick with over queer inclusion and social themes lately but they have a big problem: their audience. It's sort of like what dragged down large parts of the Young Justice revival. A large portion of their audience is either in desperate need of 101 education or is predisposed to be actively hostile to queer themes. The result is that is that explorations of those themes end up slow rolled or feel obvious and plotting to already-receptive audiences because they have to accommodate more retrograde portions of the listener-base. Sometimes this works out anyway. For all the issues the Perfection arc had, I thought that the Doctor's conflicted feelings about how it all shook out, vs. Mel and especially Hebe's more experientially-informed sense of "good riddance", felt broadly appropriate. But BF only cut loose its active transphobe collaborators a couple years ago so there's absolutely still a clumsy trend, especially in their 4-5-6-7 stuff that's most appealing to boomers. I understand that their Torchwood and New Series material is much less trepidatious.
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Feb 5, 2024 00:14
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The story had a perfect "out" built in for having a slightly uncanny depiction of the First Doctor. He should have been part of Testament, imperfectly remembered.
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Feb 8, 2024 14:35
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Open Source Idiom posted:I've said this before, but the episode makes no sense as a straightforward abortion metaphor -- in terms of the typical premises of the debate, at least. It's not about whether abortion is morally wrong, whether life begins at moonception or after 30 million rotations, or whatever. The drama's taking place at a point in the birth that these kinds of questions are irrelevant. My main takeaway from the episode killing the moon baby seems fine, as a moral statement in a vacuum (i.e. it's not taking a deontological stance against abortion per se) -- but rather, the problem is genocide, and whether the survival of the human race is so important that the potential for its death overwhelms the definite genocide of moon baby's people. "The man who never would" is from an RTD era episode, Moffat didn't write the line. And Chibnall wrote the Silurian two-parter with minimal oversight.
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Feb 11, 2024 08:16
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Open Source Idiom posted:Huh, I'm forgetting about the "never would" thing. In my head it's that slightly insipid thing that someone says about him in Day Of The Doctor when talking about Gallifreyian children, and that's more of what I was thinking about. Moffat wrote all the crack/Rory material but you can observe that stuff is almost conspicuously siloed off.
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Feb 11, 2024 16:29
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Harness and maybe Moffat clearly had a cute idea that the real world audience would turn their lights on/off to "vote" when it aired, making it into a television event.
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Feb 11, 2024 17:42
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Watched The Happiness Patrol for the first time yesterday as part of a season 25 + 26 watch through. drat they figured out how to make Doctor Who good huh. They got seven or eight really good stories in basically in a row right before they got taken out behind the barn. drat.
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Feb 12, 2024 00:46
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Open Source Idiom posted:Doesn't the Tenth Doctor fall from orbit at one point or am I forgetting. Yes but his death was time-locked by Ood prophecy to the radiation chamber/Wilf knocking. He literally couldn't die until then.
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Feb 12, 2024 19:50
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Open Source Idiom posted:Nah i don't buy that. Foreknowledge can be reinterpreted. Ordinary prophecies can be ambiguous, but Ood Sigma's foreknowledge was granted by the time-destroying foreshadow of Rassilon's plans to collapse reality and ascend beyond the material plane.
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Feb 12, 2024 20:24
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We know for a fact that the 10th Doctor can survive 30 feet.
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Feb 12, 2024 21:01
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There were always Shobogans.
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Feb 16, 2024 19:49
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Like I said before there is a coherent argument for the doctor not carrying guns and being dismissive of guns. Guns are a tool with almost exclusively the purpose of killing things. If you have a gun or a death ray at your immediate disposal it becomes a crutch you fall back on. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The Doctor's promise to themselves, never cruel or cowardly, is a constant struggle. Why make an instrument of death your first recourse? But the show rarely articulates this point of view.
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Feb 17, 2024 02:15
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Open Source Idiom posted:They don't have the money to scrap things. When the Torchwood line had to withdraw the David Tennant play (and delay recording on another four) the deficit was so severe that James Goss had to write about ten plays in a row in order to ameliorate costs. What David Tennant play? I missed this I think.
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Feb 19, 2024 06:29
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Hey, big good news! https://twitter.com/Tardis_Wiki/status/1761838956717428905?t=Vij_wO0iu-VFzZ5qg0pESQ&s=19 The TARDIS Wiki is moving to Tardis.Wiki and away from Wikia/Fandom. Update your bookmarks and never give fandom.com a single click again, because they're awful.
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Feb 26, 2024 02:22
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Yep. But God willing all the talent and creative focus will be placed on the new wiki and with time the better product will win out even ahead of Fandom's SEO power. You're also going to see independent wikis exclusively crosslinking with the new Tardis wiki as a show of solidarity. The Transformers wiki has already begun the process.
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Feb 26, 2024 02:28
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They fixed that poo poo. Deadnames are cleared off and the wiki appropriately disavows figures like James Dreyfuss. https://tardis.wiki/wiki/James_Dreyfus
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Feb 26, 2024 03:33
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LividLiquid posted:I understand that part. I'm asking why. What'd they do? Fandom.com loads their pages with extremely invasive advertisements and content management schemes. These advertisements, pop-ups, and intrusive interactive features are completely debilitating for mobile browsing and reading in general. In addition, the CSS requirements to deliver these intrusive advertisements limit the abilities of wiki editors to organize and display relevant information. They also obstruct and delay compliance with creative Commons licensing requirements to allow for forks. They threaten and bribe editors to remain with fandom rather than splitting off independently. They also briefly operated a nerd journalism rag for about 6 months and then fired everyone without severance or insurance.
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Feb 26, 2024 06:21
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Confusedslight posted:I didn't mean to be such a downer. I love big finish for the most part! I'm just sad that with how much each release costs to buy the covers aren't slightly better. Extreme first world problems I know. Big finish prices are inflated because they don't have economies of scale. They might,, except that piracy of big finish is so widespread overwhelming that huge sways of their audience will never spend a cent.
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Feb 29, 2024 17:35
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