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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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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 09:09 |
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New thread! No new jukebox 
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Dec 30, 2023 06:31
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DavidCameronsPig posted:A Pond becomes a River....but.....a River....can become....a Flood... The Toymaker: Und then he vas meeting River Song again! Und River Song...... Toymaker spends several minutes rapidly blinking, the Doctor and Donna quietly leave.
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Dec 31, 2023 00:38
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Yep, they comment that Rassilon is off doing his own thing and they can't rely on him to save them/fight for them. We can presume that Rassilon's plan to "ascend" was to do so with a chosen political elite and he was willing to leave everybody else on the planet to die. Luckily the Doctor stopped Rassilon's plan in his 10th incarnation, while 11 saved all those people, including Rassilon's elite, by freezing Gallifrey and shunting it into a pocket universe. Everybody lived, especially all those children whose deaths haunted him. Then the Master just brutally murdered all of them, kids included, a little later and the Doctor just kind of shrugged and didn't give a poo poo.
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Dec 31, 2023 03:48
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Warthur posted:They do mention it in passing. What isn't clear is how Gallifrey being locked a little spacetime pocket per Rassilon's plan in that materially differs from Gallifrey being locked in a little spacetime pocket per the gambit the Doctors pull off in Day of the Doctor. I was sure he said they planned to "ascend" to something akin to the Eternals and essentially cease to exist as material/physical beings, wiping out the rest of the universe to "win" the war while protecting those Rassilon deemed worthy of joining him? I'll need to rewatch it though. As you note in your other post, I remembered a much smaller assembly of Time Lords then you say there was, so I thought it was a few hundred people at most with just a couple of the "elites" dissenting (with the suggestion they may have been Romana and Susan, or at least maybe I just made that assumption?) as opposed to tens of thousands if not more. Edit: here it is from the transcript: Rassilon: We will initiate the Final Sanction. The end of time will come at my hand. The rupture will continue until it rips the Time Vortex apart. Master: That's suicide. Rassilon: We will ascend to become creatures of consciousness alone. Free of these bodies, free of time, and cause and effect, while creation itself ceases to be. So basically Rassilon's plan was essentially very close to Davros' "Reality Bomb", except Davros intended to just sit outside of reality with the Daleks while the rest of reality was wiped out, then return to exist in a state where the ONLY thing was existed physically was the Daleks (who would promptly set about having a civil war over what counted as a Dalek, I'm sure). Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Dec 31, 2023 |
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Dec 31, 2023 04:10
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Captain Fargle posted:Honestly with the context of the recent episodes it kinda sounds like Rassilon was trying to become the Not-Things from Wild Blue Yonder. I figured a force akin to the Eternals or maybe even the Toymaker, but Rassilon being Rassilon he would definitely turn into some monstrous Lovecraftian incomprehensible horror like the Not-Things. He was already sorta kinda half-way there in The Five Doctors anyway.
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Dec 31, 2023 04:57
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Big Mean Jerk posted:Rewatched the TV movie since it’s been awhile and today is New Year’s Eve, and now I’m giggling to myself thinking about 11’s “the first face this face saw” line before his regeneration and how for 8 that face is Will Sasso. That grizzled old poacher walking down the stairs, stroking the side of Jon Pertwee's face and saying,"Medallion man... if police come by tell them you ne'er saw me near them pheasants what were poached..."
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Dec 31, 2023 10:02
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Fil5000 posted:This is all making me very sad that Harry Sullivan wasn't in the room when Pertwee regenerated because I can't think of anyone funnier to be there for Tom. A brick hits 6's head, Mel asks what the first thing he saw when he first regenerated was. He goes bright red and immediately regenerates to avoid the conversation.
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Dec 31, 2023 10:23
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I don't want to prejudge, but based on that last special and... well... every single Silurian story other than the very first one I am amazed that they would choose these to base a mini-series around. Although, to be fair, that very first Silurian story IS an absolute banger!
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Jan 2, 2024 02:33
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Looks like there's a new Peter that people are asking if it is okay to kiss 
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Jan 2, 2024 02:43
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People just got too scared about the feelings awakened in them by his Pertwee hair.
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Jan 2, 2024 02:58
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It very rarely comes up in the history books but Dalekmania was actually a cover for a blushing nation that had secretly put pin-ups of William Hartnell in their bedrooms.
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Jan 2, 2024 03:34
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No wonder Susan said the French Revolution was his favorite period of human history 
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Jan 2, 2024 04:02
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Warthur posted:"This old body of mine is wearing a bit thicc." Man, the ending to Atlanta Season 4 really hits strong
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Jan 2, 2024 06:30
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Season 12 Episode 4: Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror Written by Nina Metivier, Directed by Nida Manzoor Nikola Tesla posted:The future is mine. Here it is: a perfectly fine, absolutely adequate, kind-of-forgettable-but-not-necessarily-in-a-bad way episode of Doctor Who! Under previous show-runners, stories like this tend to be forgotten or overlooked against the absolute bangers (and stinkers), but the relative blandness of much of the Chibnall era means I hold a much warmer opinion of this episode than I might have in anything pre-season 11. It is far from perfect, and has plenty of issues, but on the whole it's a perfectly enjoyable, mostly fine-to-good episode of the show that I wouldn't mind watching again if it were to pop up. Part of that is helped by what a fascinating character the real life character of Nikola Tesla was, as well as how fascinating the kind of idealized version of him that history now remembers also is. Another part is that he's well-cast, with Croatian-American actor Goran Višnjić (best known as Dr. Luka Kovač in ER) playing the Serbian-American Tesla. While the story has to get over some really quite awful make-up effects and over-acting for the Skithra Queen (both of which call to mind the Racnoss Queen from The Runaway Bride), and aspects of the writing/editing still leaving me scratching my head at times, the overall quality of the episode is on the positive side of average. This may seem like damning with faint praise, but after the utter poo poo-show that was Orphan 55, this was something of a relief. On the negative side, while the story does admirably sit on the "gently caress you, Edison" side of history, it doesn't do it nearly enough. Seriously. gently caress Edison  Opening at Niagra Falls in 1903, Tesla is attempting and failing to convince investors to put money into his efforts to build a wireless power transmission system. After the Foreman informs him that one of the workers was killed by one of Tesla's devices, his insistence that such a thing is impossible doesn't give the best impression of him as a person, which is somewhat the point. Tesla faced numerous hurdles in his efforts to convince people to either invest or to maintain investments in his theories, not helped by Thomas Edison's "War of the Currents" with George Westinghouse, whom had paid Tesla a large amount for the patent to an induction motor that helped him develop a rival power transmission system to Edison Electric. Seeing Tesla insist his devices were perfectly safe when a man had died would not help but bring to mind some of the (horrific) "experiments" done to showcase the danger of Alternating Current, and Tesla's insistence on the quality of his own work could easily be seen as arrogance and pigheadedness, not helped by his earlier refusal to back down from a claim he had made that he'd intercepted a communication signal from aliens on Mars. With his secretary Dorothy Skerritt doing her best to placate the investors and quickly move them away from talking about Martians, Tesla sets about testing his devices, working into the night and of course discovering that while the device did kill the worker, it was due to tampering: somebody has taken parts out and left things exposed. It's then that Tesla sees something remarkable, a technology doing things even he has never dreamed of, before he and Skerritt find themselves menaced by a hooded figure with a laser gun only to rescued (well... helped to run away!) by the Doctor.   Like Orphan 55, there are some odd gaps in the edit particularly here in this early part of the episode (and again towards the end) that indicate a rushed job, a lack of coverage, unusable material or a mix of all three. The Doctor tells Tesla and Skerritt to follow her as they race through the hydroelectric power planet.... and suddenly they're on a train? A clumsy voice-over from the Doctor has her telling them that she told them this would help them escape, and they enter the cabin to find Ryan, Yaz and Graham waiting for them, all in period costumes. Why were they on the train? Why did the Doctor go explore the power plant by herself? If she hadn't arrived to the train in time, were the companions just going to gently caress off to New York without her? How far did the Doctor, Tesla, and Skerritt have to run with the menacing figure in pursuit? Knowing what we know about what that figure ends up being, why didn't it change shape and easily outpace them in its natural form? There were three train stations at the time near the falls, what if the companions got mixed up and went to the wrong one? In any case, once on the train and having detached the carriage with the menacing figure onboard, the Doctor reviews what she knows: the creature was not Silurian but had one of their guns, how does it have an alien gun (Silurians aren't aliens!)? More importantly, why is Tesla - who she always wanted to meet - a big fat liar!?! That's her amusing reaction to Tesla's obvious lie about not seeing anything unusual until the attack, but it isn't till he reaches his lab in New York that he reveals it to her (why wait?), and the Doctor figures out he has encountered an Orb of Thassor: a device made by an ancient race that wanted to spread their knowledge throughout the universe. Unfortunately, this particular orb has been tampered with, much like Tesla's machines at the power plant were tampered with, but she isn't sure why. The Orb of Thassor as a throwaway line is another example of one of Chibnall's laudable goals that never quite got pulled off in execution: he wants a sense of the Universe being a big place, history being a LOOOONG thing, and wildly amazing, near-magical powers/beings populating the universe. All great ideas, except more often that not the way they are placed here in the story (to be fair, this is NOT a Chibnall-written episode) feels more like a crutch to shortcut connections between otherwise disconnected story elements. Protestors outside the lab spot Tesla as he enters, riled up by Edison's campaign to discredit his rival (in this story, Westinghouse is discarded in favor of a direct rivalry between Tesla and Edison). This, coupled with a man is spotted taking a photograph through Tesla's workshop window being identified by Tesla as one of Edison's spies, makes the Doctor make the rather far-fetched leap of logic that Edison is somehow behind the menacing figure, the alien (Silurian's aren't aliens!) weapon and the tampered with Orb of Thassor, and sets off to confront him. As an aside, given Tesla's increased pop culture profile over the last couple of decades, there's an amusing section where Graham gently chides Ryan for not knowing what Tesla invented before having to admit to an amused Yaz that he has no idea either beyond the fact that the car company was named after him. It's also somewhat amusing/maddening that the person who owns that company is far more of an Edison than a Tesla. Much like in life, Tesla gets overshadowed for a time in this episode by Thomas Edison. For decades touted as one of the great all-time genius inventors, Edison held a dizzying number of patents for a variety of astonishing creations which would indicate he must surely have been an unparalleled genius. Even now, close to a century since his death, he's still often touted as one of the great examples of American "greatness": home schooled, a self-learner, a man who worked his way up from selling newspapers to operating telegraphs to founding one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world with General Electric. There is, of course, more to the story than that. Despite obvious intellect, curiosity for experimentation, and some genuine inventions of his own, Edison was first and foremost a Capitalist. He turned "invention" into a factory, owning the patents to anything the workers he employed created, engaging in every dirty trick he could think of to defeat his competition. Edison as seen in this episode is the show doing a fair amount to demonstrate that his perspective and values stood in direct contrast to Tesla's own, with the Doctor and the companions having no issue with seeing Tesla as the more laudable of the two. However, the episode doesn't make Edison a snarling caricature: while it doesn't shy away from him flatly laying out that his primary drive is capitalism and that he has no issue with buying his way into technological superiority, or that he used people to build his own success, when he discovers his workers dead he is mortified and angrily points out to the companions that he dined at the house of one of the victims only days earlier. This is the early 20th Century, the start of the so-called "Gilded Age", and though Edison was a jerk in many ways, he knew his workers, and yes he may even sometimes have socialized with them. Hell, one of the few known real world interactions between Edison and Tesla was Edison bumping into him early in the morning and joking with him that he must have been out partying all night, before praising him when learning he'd spent the whole night working on improving one of Edison's machines (a variation of this story in this episode replaces a falling out between Tesla and a manager with Edison himself).   At this point in the story, everything is moving along fairly well. We've established Tesla and the threat, there is some mystery as to why that threat is after Tesla and what the Orb of Thassor has to do with things, and there is even a rather chilling moment where the Doctor sets off a fire to block off the menacing figure attacking them and you see its face shift and change to reveal some thing hidden away beneath the face. Edison has been included as somewhat of a complicating factor, there both as an example of the "mundane" problems facing Tesla as well as the parallels between Edison and the Skithra that would soon be come apparent. It's just that, once Tesla and Yaz are transported onto the alien ship and find themselves surrounded by the skittering, very alien Skithra, and things are building up well.... this happens:   The Skithra as a race are essentially an exaggerated version of Edison: creatures who use others to achieve their goals, who simply take from others, who see technology and innovation not as ways to improve the world but to improve their own status. They are more parasites than they are a space power, incapable of insight, existing only to consume and dominate for its own sake (so they're Capitalism as well as Edison!). They are also constantly infighting, incapable of working together unless dominated by a more powerful force, only given a voice and direction and some measure of control due to the force of the Skithra Queen. She herself is hardly some vast strategic genius, she's just smart enough to know that a human being capable of detecting the communications from their spaceship (which he mistook for Mars) with early 20th Century technology is going to be smart enough to fix their spaceship and be used to help them maintain their stolen weaponry as they continue to make their way across the galaxy like space-locusts. But we get that represented by wild overacting in cheesy make-up that doesn't actually match up with the looks of the rest of the Skithra. Seemingly taking inspiration from the Racnoss Queen from The Runaway Bride, the look and even the performances are so close that I was bewildered the show itself never appears to comment on it. Perhaps due to the restrictions of the make-up, the actor hams it up ridiculously, and quick cuts and rushed edits appear to be in place to try and cover up just how bad it looks and sounds. It's a drat shame, because you can see what the episode is going for and with just a little more work, some more footage, perhaps a rewrite or two and a stronger edit you could really play up the parallels between Tesla's worldview and that of Edison and the exaggerated version of that which is the Skithra's. But on the plus side, the Doctor shows up to save Tesla and Yaz and it's a rare example of getting to see her written as a proactive force. She's come up with a plan, explained the limitations, and she eats up time masterfully in the best Doctor tradition as she keeps the Skithra Queen busy while she waits for the teleportation device she used to recharge so she can get the others out. This plan involves plenty of improv, as she had no idea what she was walking (teleporting) into, and her use of an old flash camera both demonstrates her ability to think on her feet as well as showcasing that she and Yaz have actually formed enough of a bond to make her plan clear to her. Once they escape, they bring Tesla inside of the TARDIS which is handled wonderfully, best of all because Edison - who you would think the Doctor wouldn't let within 100 miles of it! - aims for some measure of connection with Tesla by noting he can't understand it either, only for Tesla to remark with fascination that while he can't explain how, he does understand that it's a matter of the internal dimensions not matching the external: in other words, Tesla has a more flexible mindset than Edison does. None of this explains how the TARDIS got there though. The Doctor slightly earlier had noted with satisfaction that it had been delivered as she wanted... but by who? Tesla doesn't have any staff beyond Dorothy Skerritt (who is woefully underdeveloped as a character in this episode), did she get Edison's men to do it? Especially considering many of his employees are now, well... dead! Why would he agree to do so if asked, and could it be done this quickly if so? Anyway, never-mind, it's here!   Seeking to avoid innocent bystanders from being hurt by the Skithra, the Doctor and the others hole up at Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower where she attempts to turn his only half-formed idea around power generation into a way of blasting the Skithra ship. Things are a little unclear here, as the Doctor lays out the plan she appears to be basically running with a strategy of straight up destroying the ship and killing all the Skithra, but once we see the plan executing at the end of the episode it looks more like the ship is.... warped away? Like she overloaded the ship engines and causes it to zip far, far away from Earth with no way of being able to get back? The latter would certainly be more in keeping with modern Who's ideas around avoiding senseless murder, but there appears to be a disconnect between the writing and what we see on screen. But like when they were on the ship, this is another good example of the Doctor coming up with a plan, making use of the resources at her disposal, being aware of the limitations, laying out what needs to be done to everybody involved, and using the power of talking ("talking's brilliant!") to give her the edge she needs to overcome brute force and military might. Each of the companions gets a little something to do, and it's fitting that Yaz's attempts to use her police training to clear the streets of bystanders is overshadowed by Edison - who understands his "audience" very well - simplifying things by just outright lying and claiming Tesla is doing one of his "dangerous" experiments and everybody needs to get off the street. Thus, they achieve their goals while also giving him the bonus of furthering his strategy to undermine Tesla as a rival to his dominance of the market. gently caress Edison. We get more reminders that without the Queen's continually domineering force over them, her workers are effectively useless and prone to infighting and losing track of their goals. This enables Yaz and Edison to escape being captured, and when the Skithra Queen escapes to the ship as it is blasted by Tesla's power generator they simply join her onboard, unsure what to do otherwise, their dominance by her meaning that the Doctor's plan effectively removes all of them from the board, even if it still isn't entirely clear if they were killed or just warped away.   It's far from a perfect episode, there are all kinds of little issues with it that add up. But for the most part, it does enough well and gives the Doctor a far more proactive than (sadly) normal role in the episode that it makes for an enjoyable enough romp. Yaz rather naively thinks Tesla helping save the world will change future and he'll get the success she thinks he deserved, but the Doctor points out that as far as the rest of the world knows, all that happened is that some of Tesla's experiments caused some problems. Nothing changes, he still dies "penniless" (technically true, but while his businesses all failed he was hardly homeless or forgotten by history, his constant hotel accommodation was covered and he continued to be socially active and a semi-celebrity till his death, and he even got to pen the only actively negative obituary in the wake of Edison's death) but that doesn't change that he saved the world. Tesla himself, unaware of what the future will bring, ends the episode on a positive note. He knows he is mocked and misunderstood in the present, but his final line speaks to what we've seen in the 21st Century. Edison "won", but today more and more people are aware of the reality of his "genius". Tesla, whether the quality or feasibility of his ideas were valid or not, is romanticized heavily as the inventor who truly represented the spirit of innovation and promise of the future. Nikola Tesla posted:Well, let them talk. The present is theirs. I work for the future. And the future is mine. It's a nice way to wrap things up, and overall that's how I feel about the episode: it was nice! Not perfect by any means, plenty of flaws. But more episodes like this from Chibnall's run would have been just fine by me. Nothing game-changing, nothing that will stand out as one of the great episodes, but competently made and overall telling an enjoyable story. While, again, this wasn't written specifically by Chris Chibnall, we've seen that his attempts to really shake things up in Doctor Who has mixed results, and perhaps too often he was trying to make everything a big deal. An episode like this stands out in contrast... and based on the "Next time..." preview surely the next episode featuring a nice but confused lady in modern UK unexpectedly meeting the Judoon will be another fine but largely inconsequential episode to the greater overall history and character of the Doctor! Index of Doctor Who Write-ups for Television Episodes/Big Finish Audio Stories. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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Jan 2, 2024 11:49
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Doctor Spaceman posted:We are watching the S3 Dalek two parter and Space Cadet is convinced that their plan is to make a giant Dalek from the Empire State Building. RTD should do this in the new season, and the entire Unleashed episode that goes along with it is him pitching the idea at a writers meeting while just staring an invited Steven Moffat directly in the eyes the entire time.
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Jan 5, 2024 10:56
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Infinitum posted:I very much hope Gatwa gets a Moffat written 2 parter at some point Moffat writing for the show again under RTD would be very cool, and I'm still sad we never got an RTD script written under Moffat.
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Jan 5, 2024 11:29
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LividLiquid posted:That's one hell of a bird. An absolutely amazing line in an absolutely amazing sequence in an absolutely amazing episode. LividLiquid posted:Did people really not like 12 here? I remember those years being quite well-liked, if nitpicked a bit for funsies. 12 was extremely well liked, and most of his run was considered very good albeit of course with issues and bad episodes here and there. Remember though, the first rule of Doctor Who fans is that we we can't agree on anything (including that first rule), and it used to be a very common thing during the Tennant and Smith years at least for an episode to air and 95% of the posts to be wildly positive and optimistic, then one single person would say,"I didn't like it all that much" and somebody else would (unironically) post,"I can't stand the relentless negativity anymore, I don't care what you all say, I liked that episode, I guess I just don't "get" Doctor Who!  "
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Jan 6, 2024 03:00
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Cleretic posted:I still adore the opening. "Previously... 800 episodes ago" I really dig David Bradley and thought An Adventure in Space and Time was a treat, but his Hartnell actually in the show never quite worked for me... that said, I was over the moon to see them redo some brief parts from The Tenth Planet, that was very cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTDr-p7Nq9Y
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Jan 8, 2024 10:55
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Hartnell ending up on a chain gang and beating the guard down with a shovel is a beautiful, beautiful thing 
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Jan 10, 2024 01:03
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Having flashbacks to watching The Underwater Menace for the first time as a reconstruction and seeing that shot of the fish people swimming in the tank over and over and over again 
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Jan 11, 2024 07:59
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So I decided it was high time I tried and failed to catch up on my Big Finish backlog, but before I jumped back in from where I left off I just did a quick check of my purchases to make sure I hadn't filled in a gap I had forgotten. Much to my surprise, I saw there was an early Colin Baker story from 2002 I somehow hadn't listened to, so I downloaded it and discovered the universe can sometimes be very weirdly in alignment. The Ratings War Written by Steve Lyons This was a feebie giveaway with Doctor Who magazine all the way back in January of 2002. That was 3 years before the return of Doctor Who to television. This 6 years since the television movie (this story included a preview of Invaders from Mars, starring Paul McGann as the 8th Doctor), and 13 years since the show just.... stopped being on television. The result is a bizarre but intriguing time capsule, especially given it's only a 35 minute single episode as opposed to a multi-part story as is the usual Big Finish. It's an episode about the state of television (in the UK at least) in the early part of the 21st Century, with the Doctor effectively playing Sydney Newman pretending to be Mary Whitehouse, and it's very, very, very much aimed at a very particular type of listener (the types who buy Doctor Who magazine!) and trying to get the message out about where you could find what television was no longer giving you: i.e, Doctor Who! It's also about Beep the loving Meep! I never read that original comic, so when The Star Beast recently aired in the tail end of 2023, I had no idea of the "twist" coming that readers of Doctor Who Weekly in the 1980s already knew about. So imagine my surprise but also delight to discover that over 20 years ago Big Finish produced a quick short that was in turn a sequel to that comic which The Star Beast would also pay homage to in the current day. Maybe this isn't so much the universe aligning as Big Finish added the audio as a freebie recently to cash in on The Star Beast and that's why I never noticed it before? Regardless, it was kind of wonderful to see how the audio also tried to follow up/adapt a character originally written as a comic that would be so effectively reimagined 21 years later on television... by the guy who saved Doctor Who (twice!) who was still 3 years away from saving it for the first time when this story came out! At only 30 minutes long, it's hardly got time to breathe, and it has mixed success making effective use of the audio format. There is a fair bit of exposition that feels very artificial to explain actions seen, but you can kind of see why considering Beep the Meep's plans are ultimately foiled by a chaotic sequence where all you hear is shouting, scuffling, screaming and a couple of sound effects with the end result of Beep the Meep's patient planning all coming to naught and exposing it as a monster rather than a cuddy television mascot... but with no idea why until the Doctor smugly explains it all. The story is simple enough, a television station - it's never specifically said to be Britain, but all the voices have British accents except for the producer who has a (bad?) American one - has been having runaway ratings success with an entirely new focus on the lowest common denominator reality television/"docu-drama" trash, including their news programs turning inward to simply report on the shows and their "stars" instead of actual news. Rival stations have been struggling to keep up, especially as their own stars have an unfortunate habit of having bad accidents that take them off the air, and it's all come to a head with the live finale of their biggest reality show leading into the reveal of the ultimate winner (importantly, we never get told what the show is actually about, what the contestants had to do etc, it's just enough that the show simply "is"). It's not hard to see this as a lament/condemnation of the state of British (world?) television at the time, as it is sometimes easy to forget that "Reality" television didn't use to be the norm. Big Brother, the UK version of which started in 2000, seems the most obvious source, which again has a neat bit of mirroring in the eventual revival of the show having the penultimate episode of the first season a similar setting where the world has been lulled into stupidity by awful reality television including Big Brother. In THIS story, the Doctor shows up at the television studios seemingly to just be a busybody there to complain to the producer about how crap and dangerous his shows are (Mary Whitehouse) and how they should be educational (Sydney Newman!). That's NOT what he's really there for of course, he's come looking for Beep the Meep, having quickly figured out what was going on and tracking the radiation signature of his gun. Much of the brief runtime of the story is about the Doctor revealing he's constantly been a couple of steps ahead of Beep the Meep while buying time to try and prevent or undo as much of the damage as possible. But even at only 35 minutes it's not a tight story, with a fair amount of what feels like padding as the Doctor and Beep the Meep have a standoff of sorts trying to get or maintain the upper hand on the other, coupled with that artificial exposition mentioned earlier. As a lampoon of the state of television, it's aged a fair bit, and it's not particularly subtle which is ironic considering how much it lambasts the in-universe show for being so broad and simplistic. But where it truly shines is in, of course, Colin Baker's performance. This is lampshaded wonderfully when - again, hardly subtle - the winners of the Reality Television show are ignored by an already bored audience who eagerly ask to see more of that wonderful fellow in the multi-colored coat! Colin Baker hams it up wonderfully as he proclaims that television isn't for him, it simply can't contain his wonder, and (figuratively) tells people to go buy Big Finish audio stories instead! (it's a good idea!) Even this gets a neat little in-joke good-natured jabbing at Colin Baker, with the producer assuming that television simply isn't "loud" enough for a figure like the Sixth Doctor. All in all, this was a fun one-off story, quick to listen to, and best of all free on Big Finish! It's a fun historical curiosity both in terms of a lament for television and Doctor Who's apparent permanent divorce from it, and where the future of the show seemed to be going in that rough "Wilderness" period where Big Finish seemed like the only avenue for at least hearing more of the original actors producing new Doctor Who stories. I say it every morning when I wake up and every night when I go to bed regardless, but thank God for RTD! Index of Doctor Who Write-ups for Television Episodes/Big Finish Audio Stories. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Jan 11, 2024 |
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Jan 11, 2024 17:53
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Nightmare in Silver was such a huge disappointment We'll always have The Doctor's Wife at least!
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Jan 14, 2024 02:06
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The_Doctor posted:That ep is SO GOOD. The Doctor telling House,"You're so much smaller on the inside" was a loving incredible line too. The TARDIS just obliterating House instantly the moment they faced off in a fair confrontation rocked.
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Jan 14, 2024 03:26
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The TARDIS opening her first ever conversation with,"Goodbye!" because of course she experiences time constantly backwards/forwards/sideways and can't always wrap her head around the proper tense for these weird "linear" people ruled too.
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Jan 14, 2024 03:48
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TheBigBudgetSequel posted:"We have now reached the point in the conversation where you open the lock" "This will always be the time we talked." 
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Jan 14, 2024 04:05
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I think the idea is pretty much supposed to be that the "split" is just that eventually 14 and his TARDIS becomes 15 and his TARDIS? But yeah, the TARDIS would probably have no issue with being in two places at the same time. Hell, if Scaroth can do it...
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Jan 14, 2024 04:12
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Dabir posted:The TARDIS has frequently been in two or even three places at the same time. Day of the Doctor, for instance. Yeah, I just meant from the perspective of the "current" TARDIS being in two places at the same time if you take the perspective that 14 and 15 "split" the current TARDIS so they could both have one. I don't necessarily think that's the case anyyway, I still think 14 and 15's TARDIS are very much meant to be from two different points in the TARDIS' timeline (as much as that can be understood, given what we've just been discussing about how the TARDIS experiences "time" in the first place). Anyway, this all reminds me of The 5 Doctors where each of the Doctors appears to walk into the one TARDIS but it turns out that all of their respective versions of the TARDIS are just sitting in the same place at the same time.
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Jan 14, 2024 05:47
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Vinylshadow posted:Imagine if One had come back out and grumpily asked who added color to his TARDIS - he liked the classic monochrome, thank you very much! Even though their memory doesn't work like that (the earlier incarnation forgets after the event and doesn't remember till after they've experienced it as the later incarnation), after Twice Upon a Time, I like to imagine 1 meeting 3, seeing his hair and immediately assuming he was 12 and being confused that he doesn't remember that time they met in the trenches in WWI.
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Jan 14, 2024 07:19
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The Sandman special they did a little after the first season ended was excellent too, and starred Arthur Darvill, and Derek Jacobi too! Though Darvill was playing about as far from Rory as you could get in it 
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Jan 14, 2024 21:17
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With the benefit of hindsight, The Power of Three also demonstrates Chibnall's penchant for bringing in an "ancient species" of incredible power/technology that nobody has ever heard of before apart from the Doctor, who proceed to do gently caress all and then never come back again. The Doctor agonizing over the boring linear passage of time while hanging out with the Ponds was pretty drat great though!
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Jan 15, 2024 01:38
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If I remember the story right, Terrance Dicks had gotten fed up with Terry Nation just lazily repackaging the same Dalek story over and over again whenever he wanted to do a remodel on his house, and told him to do something novel with them, and he gave them an absolute loving classic as a result.
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Jan 15, 2024 22:51
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Bicyclops posted:To hone in on what makes Tom Baker so enjoyable to watch, I think he is particularly good at portraying the Doctor as a benevolent but unsettling alien. Some of it is probably just that he was drunk, but he always looks vaguely distracted by thoughts we could never hope to understand, his grin is both welcoming and vaguely unsettling, his jokes are all delivered like they're just for him, because nobody else will get them, etc. The only time he gets self-conscious and human is when Romana I shows up, probably because he just had a genuine unrequited crush on her, lol. 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. You definitely get the impression from him, or at least I did, that there is something "other" about him. Inhuman would be the wrong word, but he (the Doctor) doesn't act like a human would normally act, and it's mildly unsettling but also makes him utterly fascinating, you can't take your eyes off of him (which of course Tom Baker loved!).
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Jan 16, 2024 23:07
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Yeah, Matt Smith definitely had a bit of that vibe too, even if I felt he played it a bit closer to (a younger, taller) Patrick Troughton. It's definitely an aspect of his chosen performance too, because I don't really get that vibe from him at all in other things I've seen him in like The Crown or House of the Dragon.
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Jan 16, 2024 23:41
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Hinchcliffe/Holmes really was just a fantastic run for the show. Re: the Master, I never got tired of: Master: No Doctor, you see this temporary alliance with these power-hungry aliens is just to deal with Earth's forces, then once that is done I plan to betray them because I won't need them anymore  Doctor: You know they're probably thinking of doing the same thing to you for the same reasons. Master: ... 
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Jan 17, 2024 15:27
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Plus Boycie!
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Jan 18, 2024 03:57
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Hollismason posted:LMAO The Doctor just broke some dudes neck. What the hell is this. oh wait the guy is fine after having his neck broken. This cracks me up every time I think of it, the Doctor just casually snapping Boycie's neck, but so expertly that it just puts Boycie out for a few minutes
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Jan 19, 2024 02:31
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Hollismason posted:Stand out for me is Brain of Morbius , just really loved that one particularly. I adore the section where Solon lets Condo stroke Sarah Jane's hair for a second and then grumbles,"Okay stop that, she doesn't like it!" - maybe just because I always remember the people on commentary just having the best time and roaring with laughter when that happened. Man, Philip Madoc was always a great time on Doctor Who, apart from that one time they bizarrely cast him as a nobody crewman in The Power of Kroll.
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Jan 19, 2024 04:22
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Yep, Philip Hinchcliffe has been pretty open from memory of saying they just decided,"gently caress it, Doctor Who is Hammer Horror now" and the world was a better place for it.
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Jan 19, 2024 05:03
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SirSamVimes posted:So I've got my girlfriend into nuWho and we've been having so much of a blast that she's mentioned wanting to see the old era. Is there a list of recommended episodes from each Doctor that are at least watchable in some form? There's a list in the OP but here are my recommendations for each Doctor (this recommendation would be different on any given day you asked): William Hartnell: The Dalek Invasion of Earth | The Romans The former is a classic, though it is long, and marks the first departure of a "companion". The latter is almost a farce and a lot of fun, with Hartnell in particular having a good time. Patrick Troughton: Power of the Daleks | The Seeds of Death The former is a classic, but it's also only available as an animated version now since the originals were lost. The latter is one of my favorite Troughtons, just a good quality "the Doctor dealing with an alien invasion" story. Jo Martin: Fugitive of the Judoon Really interesting premise, can't wait to see how showrunner Chris Chibnall explains all the crazy ideas introduced and left hanging out there before he finishes up his time on the show! Jon Pertwee: The Silurians | The Daemons The former is to date the ONLY good Silurian story, and it's good enough you can see why they kept chasing that dragon. The latter wisely asks,"What if Quatermass but Doctor Who?" Tom Baker: Genesis of the Daleks | Horror of Fang Rock The former is widely considered one of the best Doctor Who stories ever. The latter is more intimate/claustrophobic and the only context you need for the reveal of the power behind the menace at the end is given in the episode itself. I'd also recommend Brain of Morbius normally, it's been the topic of much discussion recently. Peter Davison: Mawdryn Undead | Enlightenment The former I found very unsettling (mostly for the "monster) when I was a kid, and as an adult the ideas it had re: immortality and the splintering of time were fascinating. The latter is a blast, utterly batshit stuff involving a sailing race in space. Colin Baker: Vengeance on Varos | The Two Doctors The former is a bit of a cheat since it is slim pickings for 6's televised adventures, but the old joke about "some say it is a classic" works well. The latter is even more of a cheat because it lets me backdoor in Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines, and the Six/Jamie/Peri trio is a delight. Sylvester McCoy: Paradise Towers | The Happiness Patrol Both of these are flawed in execution but you can see the signs of the show trying to get back from a very rough period it was going through at the time. Paul McGann: The TV Movie | Night of the Doctor These are the only options! Christopher Eccleston: Dalek | Father's Day The former was a fantastic reintroduction of the titular monster, and could have also possibly served as a great "final" story for them too. The latter actually sidelines Eccleston for a large portion but in a way that makes the story even stronger. David Tennant: School Reunion | Midnight The former is incredibly charming, brings Sarah Jane Smith back into the show, and investigates some cool ideas around Rose confronting the fact that she wasn't the first and won't be the last companion the Doctor has. The latter is a great change of pace with RTD challenging himself to a very different type of story. Matt Smith: The Eleventh Hour | The Doctor's Wife The former is a fantastic introduction to the show and this incarnation. The latter is just brilliant, just goddamn brilliant. John Hurt: The Day of the Doctor  Peter Capaldi: Mummy on the Orient Express | Flatline It's a one-two punch, and it feels a shame to leave Heaven Sent and Oxygen off the list as they're also so goddamn strong, but Mummy/Flatline tell a fantastic story in two parts of Clara first rejecting and then re-embracing the Doctor as well as taking the latter too far and how it might have negative impacts on her very human life. Jodie Whittaker: The Woman Who Fell to Earth | It Takes You Away The first is a drat strong first story for Whittaker and showed a ton of promise that Chibnall never quite delivered on. The second is just a great standalone episode up there with the best that Who has done. David Tennant (again!): Wild Blue Yonder Cheating just to sneak this one in because it rules, plus it works quite nicely as somewhat of a companion piece to Midnight Ncuti Gatwa: The Church on Ruby Road This is all we have so far! Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Jan 20, 2024 |
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Jan 20, 2024 09:13
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