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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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DoctorWhat posted: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. 1. Tell me you've never served in the military, without telling me you've never served in the military. 2. I see someone never watched the Pertwee years.
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Jan 1, 2024 15:32
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DoctorWhat posted: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. Nobody said anything about "narratives of brilliant, brave, self-sacrificing soldiers". That's just as much a fiction as your apparent belief that the military turns people into mindless drones with no sense of ethics or morals.
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Jan 1, 2024 16:03
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ikanreed posted:It's not so much that it does as it's intended to do so. Having actually gone through military basic training, I can assure you that it isn't. A mindless drone that can't reason or function for themselves without someone giving them orders is useless to a military unit, because they can't make quick decisions under stressful circumstances. DoctorWhat posted: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. See my response above. You're making the fundamental mistake that the military just wants the human equivalent of Cybermen. It does not. quote:I'm sure there are people in this thread who are basically functional human beings despite previous military service. Gosh, thanks.  Get down from your loving ivory tower.quote: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. Jesus, you're so far up your own rear end, I'm surprised you're able to watch the show. Done engaging with you any further.
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Jan 1, 2024 16:26
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CommonShore posted:drat this sure is some fine Doctor Who discussion You're right and I apologize for my part in the derail.
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Jan 1, 2024 16:38
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I must've missed the part during Pertwee's era where he told the Brigadier et al. that they weren't fit to travel in the TARDIS because they were all just pawns of the military-industrial complex. Maybe I'll do a rewatch, just to be sure 
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Jan 1, 2024 18:28
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In all seriousness, while the Doctor (at least, the Third Doctor) decried what he saw as the military mindset, he did so without having to dehumanize or reduce his friends in UNIT to being just mindless drones in his eyes. He even chewed Jo out over it, when she was poo poo-talking the Brig one time, telling her he was doing his best under very difficult circumstances. The Doctor knew that just as there are idiots and incompetents and blood-thirsty maniacs in the military, so too are there essentially decent people who are just trying to do the right thing, which is what he saw in the Brig, Benton, etc. In other words, just like the real-life actual military.
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Jan 1, 2024 18:41
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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. If the Brig and co. are all just mindless drones brainwashed by the military machine to do nothing but follow orders, what does that make the Doctor, who willingly associates with them and uses them for his own purposes? At least, given that "mindless drone " worldview, they have a (bullshit) excuse. What excuse does the Doctor have? Sydney Bottocks fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 19:11
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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. Steven Moffat is hardly Stanley Kubrick by any measure, and lord knows I'm hardly one of his defenders, but I'm sure that was what he was trying to go for with the character of Danny. He probably handled it in the most ham-fisted way possible, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't going "a kid died, tough luck, huh".
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Jan 1, 2024 19:25
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lines posted:And neither did it try to say it was only the fault of his commanders - because actually soldiers do have moral responsibility and if they kill a civilian then that's not alright, that they were following orders isn't a defense, and indeed I think soldiers are trained to question orders that might be illegal. (In this case it seems it was some kind of accident or misjudgement, but while that might change the legal situation I would assume it doesn't change the guilt). That is correct, when I was in the service we were told during basic training (and at other points during my time in the military) that it was not just a responsibility, but a duty to refuse to obey an unlawful order. As one of our trainers put it, "The Nazis didn't get away with 'I was just following orders', and neither will you." E: and I'm still going to do a Pertwee rewatch, though it's not like I really need an excuse to do one 
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Jan 1, 2024 19:58
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Narsham posted:Three also has a sizable number of stories where his allies are military and the villains are also military. I can see how someone might not like that because the show is definitely showing militarism in a positive light (government bureaucrats come off worse than UNIT pretty consistently), but it's also frequently nuanced and concerns itself with people. Contrasting some of One's and especially Two's stories where all X are bad (Ice Warriors, say), Three's run of stories sometimes insists that we as an audience treat "monsters" as people, with differing motivations and distinct personalities. It doesn't always hold to that. We get the Silurians and the "Ambassadors" and the Ice Warriors (in Curse of Peladon) on the one hand, but we get the Primoids and the Ogrons, too. And the Sontarans, where the initial joke is "they are actually all exactly the same, but we only ever see one." I think it's because the producer of the Pertwee era, Barry Letts, was both a practicing Buddhist and a Royal Navy veteran, who likely felt a duty to show the duality of things. The idea of UNIT as a largely peacekeeping force vs. UNIT (and other military agencies, both fictional and real) being used strictly as instruments of force. The Doctor both rebelling against authority and authoritarian structures, while cozying up to it when it suits him. That sort of thing. That's also evidenced in several stories where the villains aren't presented as just having a black-and-white worldview (though there are certainly more than a few of those during Pertwee's run).
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Jan 1, 2024 20:23
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Fil5000 posted:Fun fact, I read the novelisation of Frontier in Space long before I saw any Pertwee stories and for a good long while the idea of what a Drashig was and why it terrified Jo so much would really mess with my head. Imagine my glee at finally seeing one. Same here, I think I chuckled more at the costumes the humans and aliens were wearing than I did at the Drashig, though.
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Jan 1, 2024 20:49
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2house2fly posted:Steptoe And Son was a British sitcom about junk merchants that was remade in America as Sanford and Son, which kept the premise but made the main characters black. The main characters in Journey To The Centre Of The Tardis are three black junk merchants who inherited the business from their father. Those seem to be the pieces, though I don't know how they fit together to lead to that outcome Did they at least have them come out to the strains of Quincy Jones' "The Streetbeater", or have one of them say "You big dummy"?
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Jan 1, 2024 23:05
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Warthur posted:None of the soldiers in UNIT ever became travelling companions of the Doctor. At most some of them took brief trips but that's not enough to meet the criteria of Companion in my book, which is that you travel with the Doctor in the TARDIS across consecutive stories. (Liz Shaw gets an exception solely because the TARDIS was broken during her one season, and had it been functional then clearly she'd have been travelling in it regularly - by contrast it was super rare for the Brigadier or Benton or Yates to take trips in it, even in the two seasons when it was working fine.) Jo Grant did, and she was a civilian member of UNIT, which is a UN-sponsored governmental paramilitary secret police kind of organization, so my original point still stands.
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Jan 2, 2024 00:16
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SiKboy posted:Remind me what the word civilian mean? A) She's still a member of UNIT B)This entire line of conversation has been hashed out pretty thoroughly, and I'm fairly sure the thread as a whole is very sick of it, so let's just leave it lying here on the ground where it belongs
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Jan 2, 2024 00:36
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Warthur posted:Agreed, let me write the headstone on this sidetrack: Whatever, if it makes you happy, go on with your bad self. Sydney Bottocks fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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Jan 2, 2024 00:58
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Narsham posted:While I don't want to continue this line of conversation, I cannot resist pointing out that companion Harry Sullivan is a naval officer attached to UNIT who travels with the Fourth Doctor. While not quite as wasted as Yaz (it's remarkable how useful his medical expertise should be in all of his episodes), he does suffer a goodly amount of ribbing over the course of his brief tenure, which probably proves some kind of point but I have no idea which. He's an imbecile, but he's our imbecile. 
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Jan 2, 2024 01:27
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Jerusalem posted: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. Can you blame them? The man had style. 
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Jan 2, 2024 03:56
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Doctor Who: ((Scottish noises))
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Jan 5, 2024 00:12
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MikeJF posted:While there can be some nuances, in most uses acclimate and acclimatise are used to mean the same thing, but Americans will say acclimate and Brits will say acclimatise. It's just a regional variation. As George Bernard Shaw once said, America and Britain are two countries separated by a common language.
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Jan 5, 2024 21:40
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Now that the X-Men are under the Disney umbrella (thanks to Disney's purchase of Fox), they can just cast Karen Gillan as Moira MacTaggert in whatever new X-Men movie they decide to make.
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Jan 8, 2024 17:17
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Bicyclops posted:Classic Who, particularly when serials were more in the 6 episode range than 4 episode range, definitely have a lot of padding. It helps if you, watch, like one episode a day so that you get that 25 minute dose of formula serial, but we're all insane completionists and binge-watchers these days, so nobody does, lol. Having gone through two watchthroughs myself, I find the earlier black and white stuff easier to watch, on the whole, than the period of time from about when Tom Baker gets the dog bite on his lip all the way up to when Seven gets a little less goofy. On the PBS station out of Chicago (and on many other PBS stations across the US), DW episodes were edited into a 90+ minute "omnibus" format, so like most other Yanks I never had any affinity for the "watch one 22-25 minute episode a week " experience. Agreed about the later Tom thru to early Sylvester stuff, though. I rewatched Davison's run last year as part of an original plan to rewatch all of 1980s DW, and it was mostly ok (with some actual greatness in spots), but by the time I got to Colin's run I had to give up. The one-two punch of The Twin Dilemma and Attack of the Cybermen had me out for the count.
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Jan 10, 2024 01:57
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Doing my rewatch of Pertwee's era and man, that first season of his is just so good. Even with the padding in three of the season's four stories, they don't really flag or cause me to lose interest.
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Jan 12, 2024 06:13
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At least watch The Time Meddler, that's a really entertaining Hartnell episode And I echo this sentiment Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:And skip out on 2 and jamie? For shame.
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Jan 15, 2024 17:49
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Bicyclops posted:Matt Smith definitely does one of the best jobs at conveying all of the different aspects of the Doctor and it's particularly impressive that he does it so young. That scene where Peter Capaldi does a weird combination of like four previous Doctors in 10 seconds of movement is probably more impressive, but he's had a whole career and a lifetime of watching the show to hone it. I'd say once she regenerated into Romana II, that crush didn't remain unrequited for very long
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Jan 16, 2024 19:44
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Bicyclops posted:lol yeah, but the dynamic also changes then, both in terms of the performance and writing. He's back to the inscrutable space wizard and she's suddenly his pupil, from what I remember. Not really; that was more the Romana I version, who was haughty and dismissive towards the Doctor, thinking that getting better grades at the Academy than he did meant that she could blow off the Doctor's more practical knowledge and wisdom about the ways of the universe. It's only towards the end of the Key to Time season that she starts to appreciate the Doctor might actually know what he's talking about at times. We're not given a timeline as to how long Romana was traveling with the Doctor before she regenerated into Romana II, but by the time she does so, it's evident that their relationship is very much one of equals; she's nowhere near as haughty or dismissive of him, and they're relaxed enough around each other to make constant little jokes and quips that aren't just bickering or sniping. Even if someone didn't know that Tom and Lalla dated and got married off-screen, they'd likely still guess that the Doctor and Romana II were a bit more than just buddies.
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Jan 16, 2024 20:05
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Hollismason posted:I'm now on Pyramid of Mars. I guess I'll just watch Tom Baker Doctor Who for a while until I get bored and then switch around. Good news, it'll take you quite a while to get bored of Tom
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Jan 16, 2024 20:11
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Even when the stories start to get bad there's still some gems in there Yeah, there's very few outright boring stories in Tom's run. Even the ones that are considered to be very bad, are often at least entertainingly bad, in the "so bad it's good" way.
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Jan 16, 2024 20:21
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Tom was once asked during an interview if he wished people would recognize him for his other acting work, like Educating Rita, instead of his work on Doctor Who. His response was something along the lines of "well no, because I don't really rate my acting. Whereas when I was playing the Doctor, I was just being Tom." So the Fourth Doctor's eccentric Bohemian nature wasn't Tom playing a role; it was Tom just being himself. When he says he is the Doctor, he means it quite literally.
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Jan 17, 2024 01:28
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Seeds of Doom is one of my all-time favorite episodes. Two parts "The Thing From Another World" and four parts mashed together from The Day of the Triffids, The Quatermass Experiment, and the Avengers episode "The Man-Eater of Surrey Green". 
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Jan 18, 2024 05:23
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I interrupted my Pertwee rewatch because I felt in the mood for some McCoy, so I put on The Happiness Patrol, as it'd been ages since I last watched it. I remembered thinking it was a good episode from when I last watched it, but I was honestly surprised at just how much I really enjoyed it this time around. Probably because this time around I'm a fair bit older (  ), and a bit more familiar with some of the context of the various themes and allegories of the story (Helen A. and her policies being a critique of the Thatcherite regime; the subtexts that are pretty obvious nods to gay rights/representation, and so forth). But I also enjoyed it on a purely superficial level, too; the production design and lighting aren't the usual 1980s DW "flood everything with light" approach the BBC usually made the production team take, so it feels very much like a film noir. And there isn't constant background music playing throughout, either (and what does play doesn't feel like someone noodling around on a keyboard; it feels very appropriate to the scenes). And even the more annoying aspects of Ace that the writers loved shoving into stories (where she's always going around calling people "bilgebag" and waving about her Nitro-9 and so forth) are fairly toned down in this story.So yeah, overall I'd say it's a good story, well worth a watch if you haven't seen any Seventh Doctor episodes before.
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Jan 18, 2024 21:57
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J33uk posted:Well, we're definitely back in an RTD era because casting news is on the front page of newspapers. I'd tell people to be careful with what they read to try and avoid spoilers but I have no idea how that's feasible at this point. Did some googling because I had no idea what you were referring to, and the word "sheesh" sprang to mind once I read about it
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Jan 20, 2024 05:04
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lines posted:You really shouldn't skip Timelash, even if it's just for Paul Darrow. Everyone should watch Timelash to see Paul Darrow as he clearly realized the script was a steaming load; and so decided that rather than merely phone in his role, he was going to have some fun, and do his best "Olivier as Richard III" with it instead.
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Jan 21, 2024 00:48
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A far simpler and more sensible explanation would be that the Time Lords just developed weapons that can kill other Time Lords permanently, by inhibiting their ability to regenerate. That was the assumption I had when I watched The Deadly Assassin, Arc of Infinity, The Five Doctors, etc. E: also, it's important to remember that the Doctor in the classic series wasn't a superhero like he tends to be written as in NuWho, and could very easily die by getting shot, blown up, electrocuted, etc. The ability to regenerate hadn't yet become the "Get Out of Death Free" card it has become in the modern series, and there were many things in the classic series that were presented as being able to kill the Doctor outright, Time Lord tech or no. Hell, he even tells Jo in The Mind of Evil that taking certain medicines that work fine on humans might wind up killing him instead. Sydney Bottocks fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Jan 21, 2024 |
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Jan 21, 2024 04:02
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Infinitum posted:Oof forgot about Toberman in Tomb of the Cyberman If there's one thing that Tomb of the Cybermen gets amazingly wrong, it's the characterization of anyone that isn't a white British person (or perceived as a white British person, in the Doctor's case) or a Cyberman.
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Jan 21, 2024 19:26
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lines posted:Yeah I haven't watched this yet (because of the racism) but people do seem to uniformly say this, that it would be the best story were it not for that. I understand the fandom of two/three decades ago was worse and just said it was the best with less qualifiers? It wasn't just the fandom, there was a lot of casual racism on British TV throughout the 60s and 70s. Remember, The Black & White Minstrel show was only canceled about a year after Talons of Weng-Chiang aired.
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Jan 22, 2024 00:54
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lines posted:Sure, but I feel like in the 90s or early 00s there was less of it and we could recognise it for what it was? I was a small child at the time so maybe I'm wrong about this. When I got to the UK in the early 1990s, while I didn't actually watch much TV during my time there (mainly because I was a young American who was more interested in exploring Britain and meeting British people, instead of just watching them on television like I'd done when watching stuff on PBS), there did seem to be a lot less casual racism on most shows at the time. Not saying there wasn't any, but I get the impression that things had started to slowly change during the 1980s and into the 1990s and beyond. Obviously I don't know what caused this gradual cultural shift, but if I had to guess it's probably a combination of people who were part of these various communities getting increasingly tired of being mocked and made the butt of jokes by lazy TV writers, and more progressive performers and writers (such as Cartmel and McCoy and Aldred during their run on DW, as well as various performers and writers on other programs) who didn't want to pander to cultural or racial stereotypes and weren't interested in pleasing bigoted audiences.
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Jan 22, 2024 02:54
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Barry Foster posted:It wasn't just the UK, although we were as bad for it as anyone else. There seemed to be a general feeling in the 00s that sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. were a thing of the past, so everyone could just say whatever they wanted, no matter how horrible, because they didn't really mean it. Transphobia, of course, was still perfectly fair game anyway, and it's only now we're really starting to grapple with that (with all the usual reactionary pushback). Recording engineer Steve Albini (Nirvana, Pixies, Bush, Manic Street Preachers, and about a million other bands) kind of touched on this in the last couple of years; as you said, he was one of the people who assumed that racism etc. was a thing of the past, so he felt free to say edgelord bullshit for shock value because obviously he didn't believe those things, it was just done to shock. But then he started realizing that there were people who were unironically agreed with him when he said those edgelord things, and moreover there were people who he'd normally be 100% politically aligned with who were protesting or calling him out on his poo poo. I think that's where a lot of people were during the 1990s and 2000s; they obviously weren't racist/sexist/homophobic/etc. themselves, so it was okay to "ironically" make those kinds of jokes to shock people. I think the last couple of decades have seen people who aren't cis hetero white men finally start to really push back on edgelord bullshit and say "we're not going to put up with it any more", which is really great to see (along with people like Albini, who has since denounced his past actions and said that while he can't change the past, moving forward he's going to do the best he can to be an ally to these various groups). Swerving back to Doctor Who, I did watch the clip recently on YouTube from The Power of the Doctor, where modern-day Tegan and Ace meet the holographic versions of Five and Seven; and while I join in the general disdain for Chibnall's run, I really liked those two little moments where a couple of past Doctors get to reconnect with their companions after such a long time. Five going "I never forget any of you. I remember everything" and Seven going "we're more than good; we're Ace" must have stirred up some dust or something, because my eyes got a tad moist seeing those scenes.
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Jan 22, 2024 14:16
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DavidCameronsPig posted:A lot of it is that a big percentage of the British Black and Asian community was just a lot newer than, say, Afro-Americans are to the US. A lot of immigration to the UK, particularly the big cities, happened in the immediate post war period with families like the Windrush generation coming over. In the 1960s, this was still all fairly new and a lot of empire-era stereotypes were still kicking around in common culture, but by the 1980s you had a second generation of Black and Brown Brits who'd grown up in the UK, and who were a lot less willing to put up with that poo poo than their parents were. And also, white kids who had grown up with them and could see those supposed traits didn't remotely match reality in any way. One of the guys I work with is a black guy who's also ex-military (Marines), and we were talking about my time in the UK once. He'd never been over there, so he was asking about racism over there, and I pointed out some of the things you'd said. I also gave a couple of anecdotes: one from a black sergeant I'd served with, who said the only racism he'd ever experienced during his 4 years in the UK, was when he went into a different newsagents than he usually frequented, to pick up a couple of newspapers/magazines that focused on black culture (both British and internationally). When he got to the counter, the older white guy that worked there opened both papers up and started going through them, telling the sergeant that "you people" always hide magazines or whatever in them to steal them (the sergeant then basically told him to stick the papers up his rear end and left). The other thing that happened was pretty much a race riot, when some black airmen from our base went out partying one night at the local nightclub. When they went to the car park (I think it was the one near the local Tesco) afterwards to get a kebab or burger or whatever from one of the several vans that set up there (for post-nightclubbing dining), some white Brits started giving them poo poo and a huge fight broke out. It was a bit of a scandal at our base, not just because of what happened, but because the gate guard (who was a buddy of theirs) didn't report it when they came in with a busted windshield on their car, one guy who had a concussion, and the others being bruised and bloody and whatnot. I'm as white a dude as it's possible to be (blond, fair skin, blue eyes), so I never encountered racism myself while I was over there (and I tried my best not to live up to the "loudmouthed Yank" stereotype). But I'm from a town where black people are actually the majority of the population, so I'm definitely not blind to the various forms racism can take, either here in the US or over in the UK. Sydney Bottocks fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Jan 22, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 15:52
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Narsham posted:I love a good Robert Holmes story like (almost) everyone else, but he has a mixed record in this specific area. There’s some really ugly subtext that never quite goes away: The Two Doctors handles “the uplifted savage” in a pretty imperialist manner, even concluding that the savage cannot be civilized or overcome genetics. In a story where a major plot-point is identifying something genetic to Time Lords that facilitates time travel, that’s especially cringeworthy. Lest we forget, if DW hadn't been put on hiatus between Colin Baker's first season and Trial of a Time Lord, the next script Holmes was working in for the show was to be set in Singapore, with the working title of "Yellow Fever and How to Cure It". Holmes was a great writer and a great script editor for the show. But he was also the youngest commissioned officer in the British Army during WW2, and after the war became a policeman. He was absolutely a product of British imperialism, even if the British empire was pretty much finished by the time he got into the army.
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Jan 22, 2024 17:08
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lines posted:Youngest commissioned officer in the British Army during WW2? That's a weirdly specific thing to be. I suppose someone has to be! Yeah, from what I gather Holmes lied about his age to get into the army, and quickly rose through the ranks while serving in Burma. When they found out he'd lied about his age at the commissioning ceremony, apparently the only reaction was from the general in charge, who laughed and said he'd done the same thing himself when he joined up.
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Jan 22, 2024 17:49
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