April 26, 2008

• Haven't watched any of 'em yet, but they're sitting on my HD ready to burn.
• I'm not sure about the Doctor's new sidekick. I'd never heard of her and totally forgot the episode she was in two seasons ago. She's not known outside England I suppose. Not that I knew Rose or Martha but I liked both of them a lot. And I also like how Rose's whole family was involved, especially her mother. Ah well, I really liked the previous Dr. Who (Christopher Eccleston) also much better but now I'm used to David Tennant he aint that bad. So I'll get used to Catherine Tate as well I suppose.
• Eccleston was the PTSD Doctor, and that was very interesting. It would have been nice if he'd have continued his run, but I've learned to like Tennant since then. Honestly, Tennant seems more in line with the Doctors I grew up watching, Tom Baker and Davison, and I appreciate that. Did any of you catch the Tennant/Davison crossover, Time Crash, from the Children in Need special this year? That was glorious. I'm curious as to how far into the series you are, mare. I was already warm to Tate after her talk with her grandfather in Partners in Crime, but I was firmly won over by her friction with the Doctor in Fires of Pompeii. I like that a companion is questioning the Doctor in unexpected ways, and I think she really opens up some interesting areas to explore in terms of big-picture/little-picture morality.
• I'm current. Just seen the Oods. And I agree she's different and interesting, but that doesn't make me like her. Yet.
• I fear they're yielding to the same syndrome that killed the programme the first time - not taking it seriously. To be brutally honest, I blame David Tennant for his lazy acting, his false Cockney accent and "'ere, ennit good, eh? Thass brilliant! Oh, iss awright, less do some more aliens, then. I know it all. Don' bovver me." manner, but the short turnover of stories and the marked tendency to take on comedians and other slebs is also playing a damaging part. Come on guys, it needs to be science fiction, not horror, fairy stories, or pantomime; it needs to be played for real; and it needs to be unsettling/frightening. Otherwise, we're back with Sylvester fucking McCoy.
• Yeah, I gave up on it a while back, and it's disappointing because during series 1 and 2, looking forward to the new ep was what got me through the week. Pleg descibes it perfectly. I agree that the recent episodes have heakened back to some of the 1970's stuff, but I think that they're hearkening back to the worse stuff and not the better. Maybe if they had't set the bar so high early on, but damn. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Empty Child/Doctor Dances was without a dount the finest two hours of television I've ever seen - drama, comedy, AND scifi. There's just no comparison.
• Mommy!
• Ergh, haven't seen it yet, currently using sorcery to bring it to this shore. Guess I'd better drop out of my own discussion thread for a bit.
• Empty Child/Doctor Dances was without a dount the finest two hours of television I've ever seen And I hear with a donut, it's in fact beyond sublime, TUM.
• Well, the current incarnation and production is still drawing huge viewing figures in the UK, so don't expect the formula to change any time soon. Other than that, I agree with Pleggers, in fact I stopped watching Who (heresy!) sometime during Sylvester McCoy's run due to the pantomime style, in fact my girlfriend of the time used exactly that word to describe it. Every week, Alexei Sayle or Rula Lenska etc as the guest alien or whatnot. Which is strange, because I used to revere McCoy when he was on Tiswas and getting nails hammered into his head by Ken Campbell on stage. Apparently that guy who played the latest version of Jekyll/Hyde is going to take over from Tennant, which I think is a move in the right direction, because I prefer the Doctor to be a bit darker in persona. Even Tom Baker had his dark bits. Tennant is rather too young and light for the character.
• Mmm, donuts.
• I thoroughly enjoyed the first two seasons but just couldn't get back into it after Eccleston's departure.
• I'm liking Catherine Tate - she's a good actor as well as comedienne. And the stories need to be balanced between scary and serious and funny and whimsical. Some of my favorite moments this series have been things like the Donna and the Doctor completely missing each other at the fat-office place, or Donna sassing the Doctor. He needs people to put him in his place. SPOILER . . . I did find the Ood episode a little disapointing - I don't find the idea of a species developing with part of their brain so exposed to be very realistic, but there was also the fact that really it was the Ood and the scientist who set them free, not the Doctor and Donna - and that should have been recognised at the end. . . . /end SPOILER
• I fear they're yielding to the same syndrome that killed the programme the first time - not taking it seriously. I have to say that I couldn't disagree more. The fact that it doesn't take itself too seriously is, for me, a large part of the charm. With children's television, there's a sort of free-license to deal with very big issues: slavery, racism, the power of good, the evils of selfishness. This can be very valuable for us, as a society, because adults rarely have to deal with these things head on. We get to go around in our oh-so-polite world, turning our faces away when we see the manifest evils of our world, pretending that we can do nothing about it, pretending that evil has the same right to flourish as good... pretending, all to often, that those things which are good for us must be somehow all right for the world. But with kids, we feel like it's ok to deal with these issues, because we don't assume that children can just do that kind of thinking by themselves. So art for children gives us this special space, a get-out-of-jail-free card for 'bad people are bad' art that otherwise would be too trite to express. The trouble with this is that 'bad people are bad' can be unbearably heavy-handed. In order for it to be palatable it has to have that light touch, to spring over the dreary and into the wonderful. I've seen children's art that does this by being very exciting, that does it by being very human and touching, but Doctor Who does it by carefully balancing on the edge of the silly. Rumour has it that the producer turned down higher production values, specifically to keep the show from becoming too slick, to maintain that light touch that, I think, makes the show work so well. Furthermore, I would also argue that the lightness, the borderline campness, of the show, make it all the more powerful when genuinely serious things do happen. Doctor Who balances on the edge of the silly, but it also balances on the edge of the deeply serious and occasionally, and very deliberately, it dives over. When it does so, it asks the viewer to go on a journey from one emotional extreme to the other and, for me, that very much heightens the emotional impact of the moment. Also, Blink was teh awesomz.
• There's going to be more than a few spoilers in this thread. We should be careful about divulging info from episodes that haven't aired anywhere yet, but I don't think we can avoid talking about the specifics of ones that have. I agree with Dreadnought, that it's important to remember that Doctor Who is (while not exactly a kids' show) supposed to appeal just as much to children as it is to we grown-up geeks. Obviously it can do that and still remain highly compelling for adults, and obviously it sometimes crosses too far into "pantomime" (whatever the hell that is, we Americans don't have such a thing on our TVs), but I can't say I mind some inspired silliness from time to time. And a show that can include the campy brilliance of Gridlock, the horror and suspense of Blink, as well as Rose's heartrending departure at the finale of Doomsday is still managing to get more right than it is wrong, for my money. Anyway, just saw the Sontaran Stratagem and I have to say I was well pleased. A fun story so far. I've never been a big fan of Sontarans in general, but I think they're well handled here. Their militarism comes off as a bit ridiculous, a bit menacing and quite interesting. As for the cliffhanger: it's good to see the Doctor at a complete loss for once. Also, is it just me, or are an awful lot of things "deadlocked" against the sonic screwdriver this season?
• Also: BREAK THE FRIGGING GLASS!
• If I have any criticism of the most recent incarnations of The Doctor, it would be in the heavy-handed script approach to developing and maintaining mystique around a character that should already have been laden with mystique, and certainly was without all the very obvious 'isn't he special?' interactions on behalf of the companions. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that a lot of the recent storylines come across (to me) as fanfic writing -- a classic example being the story in which The Doc finds himself back when The Empire State Building was being constructed, and a Dalek manages to cross-mutate with a human, and that Dalek-human hybrid sacrifices himself to save The Doctor. It has that sort of fan-based, "Wow, you know what would be so, like, totally cool?" element to it that I don't remember from the show when I was growing up. Still, mildly vacuous and annoying Doctor Who is still much better than no Doctor Who at all.
• Or the Face of Boe calling him "the Lonely God." Ergh, no thank you. Apparently the classic series had a bit of this toward the end as well, with some sort of master plan to turn him into not-just-a-time-lord but, in fact, THE LORD OF ALL TIME LORDS or some such nonsense. I'm sufficiently impressed by *a* Time Lord, no need to get all George-Lucas-making-Vader-a-virgin-booth about it, thank you very much. But, for the most part, the references to Lonely Gods have been ignorable enough.
• Apparently the classic series had a bit of this toward the end as well, with some sort of master plan to turn him into not-just-a-time-lord but, in fact, THE LORD OF ALL TIME LORDS or some such nonsense. I remember a Sylvester McCoy episode in which The Doctor said to Davros something along the lines of, "Do you still think I'm just a Time Lord?" or somesuch nonsense, so yes, there was an effort to rewrite the character larger than previously, even back then. But for me, this has gone truly berserk with Tennant as The Doctor -- whoever heard of The Doctor imprisoning creatures in mirrors and dumping them in black holes and so on? Bah. It makes me want to mumble about how it just wouldn't have have been stood for back in the Tom Baker years.
• The first doctor used to kick peoples' arses.
• The first doctor used to kick peoples' arses. Actually, the very first Doctor -- William Hartnell -- was kind of a craven character. He had a lot in common with Dr Smith, from Lost In Space, if I remember correctly. It wasn't until the 2nd Doctor (or the 3rd, if you include Peter Cushing in the conventional list, but his Doctor was really a different character), Patrick Troughton, that some ass-kickingness really began to take place. Still, whoa, in reading about some of the earlier Doctors I just discovered a Time Lord I never knew about: Rani.
• Kate O'Mara rules.
• Ass-kickings by previous Doctors (and I'm including Nine) just seemed a lot more natural, and rising out of the circumstances involved instead of just "I'm gonna kick his arse for shock value."
• The mirror imprisoning bit didn't work for me either, I have to say. I loved that story, but the end just didn't sit comfortably. I *get* it, though. I mean, he is basically a sort of god as far as we mere mortals are concerned, I'm cool with that. But do they have to keep *saying* it all the time? It's going to go to his head.
• I just watched one of the Rani ones. Not a bad character. Unlike the Master, who is EVIL just because he is EVIL, she has a philosophical reason for being EVIL in that she's a scientist who just doesn't care about the humans who die so she can meet her goals. She was only in two episodes, The Mark of the Rani, which I thought was pretty good (despite the Rani's evil plan involving landmines that turn people into trees, oooh, scary), and Time and the Rani, the first Sylvester McCoy one, which is completely unwatchable.
• Well, in the TV Movie with McGann from years ago, the symbology pretty much hinted that he was Jesus, so be happy for small mercies.
• Oh, I don't think we've quite avoided that this series, Hank. Voyage of the Damned anyone? The classic series' "much more than a time lord" thing was called the Cartmel Masterplan, and revolved around connecting the Doctor to "the Other", a godlike figure from Gallifrey's mythic cycle. Yes, I spent my morning looking this up.
• It will be necessary to elevate the character to some other mythic level for the same reasons the Cartmel plan was written, that is just story need. And at some point he will have to get a new bunch of regenerations, too, which up until now we were lead to believe only Timelords on Gallifrey could engineer. What I want to know is, what is the current situation with the Eye of Harmony? I mean, what happened to it? Gallifrey was destroyed so how does the Tardis run without the Eye?
• BBC removes Doctor Who fan’s knitting patterns from the Web
• That's stupid of them. The online community sustained interest in the show long after its cancellation, and arguable is the only reason the BBC ever saw fit to bring it back. Why would they take steps to alienate the fans over something so harmless? The bad press is bound to be worse than whatever loss of revenue they fear in fan-published knitting patterns.
• Yes, surely a bad error of judgement; it's not as if the patterns were being sold. Surely common sense must prevail in the end - or maybe this thread should be deleted in case we're infringing the BBC's rights by discussing their programmes.
• *increases Plegmund's license fee*
• Maybe the fan-knitters could argue that they own the copyright, and the characters just happen to look like the characters from Doctor Who. Frankly, I don't care if the characters look like Who characters - I think the creative aspect of these knitting patterns are the patterns themselves - the BBC has no moral right to say they can't share them. If there were profit being made, I could see that the BBC would have a moral right to ask for a cut of that profit. But yeah, bad move from the BBC. The BBC is suposed to fight against evil, not for it. Free patterns created by fans for other fans with no profit motive? Way to kill your free advertising and fan community building.
• What, we can't knit Fraleks anymore?
• Sunset On The Lost Planet Of Gallifrey
• Great find!
• Steven Moffat, screenwriter of fan favorite episodes "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances", "The Girl in the Fireplace," "Blink" and "Human Nature/Family of Blood", slated to replace Russel T. Davies as Lead Writer and Executive Producer in 2010. I'd like to be the first to say, "Fuck yeah!"
• Whoops, he didn't do Human Nature/Family of Blood after all, that was Paul Cornell.
• OK, I may start watching again.
• "Silence in the Library," the first part of which airs this weekend, is a Moffat penned story, FYI.
• I didn't realise Moffat is also behind Coupling, so I love him even more now.
• Wait a minute - he wrote "Girl in the Fireplace," too? That was my LEAST favorite episode of all time. Talk about your polar extremes.
• Least favorite? My. I mean, I can see not loving it, or even disliking it, but putting it below tripe like New Earth or Daleks in Manhattan? What inspires this hatred, TUM? Also, Moffat wrote the miniseries Jekyll, which I hear is quite good. I've got it on the ole Netflix queue.
• I really liked Girl in the Fireplace, one of my favorites. I think my least favorite was the Satan Pit.
• whereas I loved The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. Finally we got away from Earth! Finally we got away from everything being about Rose and her goddamn family! It was much more like old-school Who. I'm excited to see what the Mofferator will make of the series once he stands at the helm.
• "ARE YOU MY DADDY???"
• I guess my main problem was that it was the first time I looked at the characters and said, "Who are these people, and why are they inhabiting these familiar bodies?" I found especially distasteful the demotion of Rose to Supporting Moron #2, under Mickey's Supporting Moron #1, and Tenneatn becoming tripolar instead of the usual bipolar.
• Tennant is a man of many poles.
• Way-hey!
• Robert Carlyle to Play Eleventh Doctor? If this happens, I'll definitely start watching again.
• ZOMG. That would rock!
• I just got used to Tennant! Also omg! Is this finale not awesome?!
• It's official: David Tennant confirms he's leaving the TARDIS after 2009.
• NOOOOO
• Someone came up with the idea of Idris Elba, which would be AWESOME.
• Sigh. Good run.
• Someone also mentioned Dylan Moran, and I think a perpetually drunk and misanthropic Doctor who needs to be dragged out of the TARDIS to keep Manny from fucking up history is a fantastic idea.
• Hamish Macbeth as the Doc? Kinda liking that. I was a huge old school Who fan- and have really liked the new series, so I trust them.
• The odds favour a black Doctor...
• OOOoooo yes Paterson Joseph! That would *rock*. He's a fantastic actor and would make a great contrast in style with Tennant's doctor I think. Although if we're talking Green Wing alumni, how 'bout Mark Heap? According to the UK Beeb (as opposed to US Beeb in Pleggy's link above) there is another favourite in the running: David Morrissey, who could also be amazing (he did one of the hands-down finest performances I've ever seen on telly as Schoolmaster Headstone in the adaptation of Our Mutual Friend that they did a couple of years back which you all should totally watch if you get a chance, it's just brilliant all round) Dylan Moran can do no wrong, as far as I'm concerned. That's an inspired bit of casting there, mct. Idris Elba? HELL YES
• What happened to my UK Beeb link? We can has perview button etc Here
• Problem-ish with Paterson Joseph is he was in the first season as a game show contestant on the satellite, the guy who won "Weakest Link." And Idris Elba would have to do the whole thing with his Stringer Bell accent, because that would be funny.
• I haven't the slightest idea who any of those guys are. Except for McAvoy, whose career is probably too hot for this right now. Not that I watch. I did, for a while, but never got into it the way others did. I can see the attraction, it was just never my thing. Enh.
• I haven't the slightest idea who any of those guys are Not even Idris Elba? Does that mean that you haven't watched The Wire?? Get ye to a DVD vendor and grab all five series NOW. You will thank me.
• What is it with you guys and "The Wire"? I have a hard time just keeping up with the stuff on basic cable, nevermind trying to cut down on teevee consumption or renting DVDs... Stewart and my Stories -- that's and hour and a half daily, then the Friday night movie on WNED, the double bill on TVO's Saturday Night at the Movies... TOO MUCH TEEVEE. Yet where do I cut?
• Dude. Watch the Wire. Seriously. It's a slow burn at first, but WATCH IT and become ONE OF US.
• "A frail old man lost in space and time. They give him this name because they don't know who he is..." The Genesis of Doctor Who, from the BBC Archives, including concept notes and some great pictures.
• Eleventh Doctor to be announced tomorrow!
• Waah!
• *hopes it's Ricky Gervais*
• Not to hijack, but the new Kings show looks like it will either suck or be really awesome. Firmly in the awesomeness column: Ian McShane.
• Love Ian McShane. But still, this is about NO MORE TEN. We watched the Christmas Special last night and I had a tiny freakout at the title ("The Next Doctor). Turned out to be pretty awesome, if light on the Christmasness. No evil Santas?
• *hopes it's Ricky Gervais* I will kill you if that happens.
• I am a little disappointed that the David Morrissey option got used in the Special - if he'd been allowed to play the Doctor, as opposed to someone playing at playing The Doctor, if you see what I mean, he would have been amazing. As it was, it was kinda hammy. Which was I suppose the point, but still. I was a little downhearted after that.
• It's going to be Dirk Benedict. You just wait.
• Hmm.
• Youngest ever, biggest hair, arguably biggest chin. Hmm. I've never seen him in anything, so can't really comment. Am slightly sceptical. Too young. Hmmm.
• I am not crazy about the hair.
• Also, I'm not crazy about his non-Dirk Benedictness.
• BBC link now features video, which only serves to enhance the inappropriateness of his hair and his bereftness of Dirkitude. Man, I was really really hoping for Idris Elba. He would have been a fantastic Doctor.
• I'm not impressed.
• #2 says I hate change. Whatever.
• Raise your hand if you're now, for the first time in your life, older than the Doctor.
• *raises hand* I thought I'd be right at Tennant's age, but he's even older than my wife, to whom I used to affectionately refer as "Mrs. Robinson."
• He looks...odd. Something about him is in the Uncanny Valley territory, at least to my eyes.
• *raises hand*
• He'll be fine.
• The Doctor Who Fan's Phrasebook.
• Just watched the last 3 eps of S5 in a row last night. I'm ambivalent. Loved Vincent and The Lodger (Eleven playing footy!). Turned out, as usual, I ended up liking their choice of Doctor. A good mix of previous doctors, I think, while being himself.