Gallifrey Outpost: New Dr Who Discussion

I watched the "Beginning" box set this week, and finished "Edge of Destruction" last night.

By modern standards, the pacing is glacial, and the dialog stilted and padded.
For the time, however, these were amazing, fast paced, and scarey. EoD reminds me of the recent Tennent episode on the train/bus. Also, the older episodes weren't as loud and rushed. THe slower pace makes more room for thought, which since the show was intended as a children's educational, thought provoker, make sense. I think they still hold up pretty well. EoD ends with a couple of speaches by William Hartnell that are nicely understated, but also remind me of Tennant when he's marvelling at some aspect of the universe. And the budget that those episodes were made on! 2500 pounds sterling per episode! OK, that's 1960s 2500 pounds, which translates into... I don't know what. Probablly 1/2 to 1/4 of what StarTrek TOS episodes cost.
Unearthly child spent 25 minutes to introduce concepts that can now be glossed over in about 4 because everyone in the fan base knows what's going on, and modern society has a much broader understanding and SciFi background. THe Caveman story had to take a rediculous idea and get people wearing furs in a broiling hot studio to act like they were cold. Heck, just getting people to take being dressed as cave men seriously was a stretch.
The Daleks at 7 episodes feels very padded. But it was the first fully sci-fi story, and again, they were dealing with topics that were thought-provoking--how would humans survive a nuclear war? what would be the result. The first episode is just them looking arround the forest. Then there are a lot of man-vs-elements/nature scenes to really pad out the episodes. Psychological exploration of the characters that probablly isn't necessary in the long run, but adds a lot more depth to the story, and which I haven't seen in any of the RTD stories.

Tried watching Dark Shadows. Ran into the problem of not caring about any of the characters. Also their labelling system was misleading. "The Beginnings" was the first season that Barnabus appears, whereas to see the actual first episode, you have to start with "The Early Years".

 

The Doc steps off the TARDIS... and gets shot.

If I had a nickel for every time I was yelling at the TV at the Master/Daleks/Cybermen/aliens/humans to simply SHOOT him, I'd be the world's richest man.

He regenerates from dying... not death. Hollow-point to the skull and he's done!

Also, I have finished seasons one/two of New Who. I now 'ship Ten/Rose and hate the end of 'Doomsday'. I prefer my fanfic version where the Vong are shifted into that reality and Rose stays with Ten.

 

I hated that part. It's on my list of things the movie does wrong.
The Doctor almost always checks the scanner first to see what the area outside the Tardis looks like. Not so much the new show, but in the original, yes.

Then there's:
The doctor is not a Messaih figure
The doctor is not a Frankenstein figure
The Doctor is not a Highlander Immortal
The doctor does not kiss women
The doctor does not have a torture chamber in his Tardis
The doctor is not half-human
The Tardis is not the batcave
The Tardis is not a victorian gothic library/temple
The Tardis does not house the Eye of Harmony
The Master is not a vampire
Doctor Who is not about car chases with guns blazing (OK, there was some of that with UNIT during Pertwee's reign, but mostly not).
And the ending shows a level of understanding of the Laws of Time even more juvenile than the worst time-travel episode of StarTrek (any).

But that's just my opinion.
I'd rather see the rumours of a movie staring Jonny Depp as The Doctor come true (they won't--it was just an idiottic internet-spawned rumor since discredited by studio and actor alike).

 

I'm surprised koohii that you are hung up about the Doctor kissing his companions, but everyone does have their own perceptions on who the Character of the Doctor is/should be I guess...


In other news...

The 2011 series will be shown in two halves
Article here

This has apparently been requested by Moffat specifically and it will mean 7 episodes in around April and then 6 episodes around Autumn (ie. Septemberish).

This is being presented as providing the opportunity of a 'game-changing' cliffhanger in the middle of the series. I'm cautiously optimistic about this approach and it's definitely a positive not having to wait so long between the end of the series and the Christmas special, but I feel as though the flow of the series will be dramatically different...

 

'Fear Her'. Doc lands the Tardis and steps out... his way blocked by the side of a dumpster. No scanners there!

Also...

1. Messiah? Why, because he came back to life? I'm not sure he was fully dead!

2. Frankenstein... ho-kay,

3. Save that for 'The Christmas Invasion' where swords do come into play.

4. Susan Foreman has to come from somewhere, and I find the whole "The Doc does not know about sex!" to be rather eye-rolling at best. He found someone he could love. Oh, for heaven's sake!

5. Admittedly kind of odd, but meh.

6. Wait-WHAT??? That makes no sense! Is it the look, because the interior's changed a number of times. The size... it's bigger on the inside!

7. Again, the interior can change. It's changed a number of times.

8. This is Doctor Who. Continuity is fluid at best. And who says it doesn't?

9. He's been a body-snatcher and an undead zombie. Why not a vampire?

10. The movie had car chases and guns, but was not about car chases and guns. There is a difference.

11. Umm... Time travel in Who hasn't exactly been consistent... ever.

So... yeah. I'm gonna try to ignore you from now on.

 

Your choice.
I said almost always. And the scanner could just have been pointing to the street, not the direction the door was facing.
1&2 are essentially the same scene gripe, after the regeneration (which had the highlander Quickening lightning bolts), The Doctor yells out "I'm Alive, I'm A-LIiiiIIIIIVVVEEEE".
3 There was also a fencing duel between 3rd and The Master.
4: actually, that's one of my least objections, which was mainly an over-reaction from one of the US developers' suggestions that The Doctor should be blayed by John Cleese, and he should get drunk and start harrassing/attempting to rape his assistant. Fortunately, none of those ideas came to pass. Also, in Big Finish's Bang-Bang-A-Boom (great title), "Mel, You know me. Things I always do. Things I never do?" "Well, you generally run into trouble and solve people's problems. And I've never seen you. Well. IYou've never. You know. No! No Way! With Angvia? After 700 years of celebacy, that's a pretty strange place to start!" Books also imply that he had sex with Bernice Summerfield. (Basis for the Archeologist that 10th met?
5. Seriously, why would he have a torture chamber. the closest thing I could see would be archaic medical instrumments.
6. Yes, it has had a number of different looks and shapes, but the console room has always been a practical size, with other items like chairs an hat-stands added as flavor. Other important rooms were separate rooms.
9. Because vampires were wiped out by the time lords!! Only a few scraps and rumors remain on planets they've visited.
10: Again, the car chase reminded me of the original Highlander, with the Kurgan ataking Brenda for a ride, and of H3, the talentless remake with Mario Van Peeples doing the same thing.
11: It hasn't been entirely consistent between stories, but the individual stories have been consistent internally. This one wasn't even close.

 

"Last of the Time Lords". Nuff said.

It's meant to invoke the feelings of that sort of scene.

Not before then, no. But look at the new series. Seems to happen at least once every series since it came back...at least during the RTD era.

The console room has changed many times during the show's run. Ignoring (for obvious reasons) the wooden console set of Series Fifteen and the new series' sets, there's also the redesign in "The Time Monster" and the new console from "The Five Doctors" onwards. It's implied in the Big Finish audio "Excelis Decays" that the Seventh Doctor has built the console room we see in the TV movie. (There's also "Time Crash" which implies that it's as easy to change the console room design as the average computer desktop.)

Satellite Eye.

No, he's not. But he had been infected by the influence of the Cheetah Planet in Surivial (the story chronologically following the TV movie), so maybe that's it.

That scene also gives rise to a very Doctor Who scene: when the Doctor is stopped by the cop, he pulls the gun, but instead of threating to shoot the cop, he threatens to shoot himself.

 

Eleventh Doctor and Companions coming to America.

 

The Doctor is now immortal according to BBC

Yep, the old 'only 12 regenerations' limit has been quietly ditched.

Not sure how I feel about it - on the one hand it means we won't have to worry any longer about them running out of regenerations in the future for the show, but on the other hand I was always curious how the Doctor would ultimately meet his end one he was down to his final incarnation.

I'm a bit surprised though that they decided to go this route - back in the 70s/80s there was one episode where the Master was offered extra regenerations by the Time Lords (implying the limit could be gotten around), which I was half-expecting to be utilised as an excuse to give the Doctor more lives once he ran out.

 

"My people can live forever, barring accidents" 2nd Doctor to Jamie, The War Games.
The Doctor has been far from careful, and had more that a few accidents. Also, he was talking to Jamie, so 1400 years would seem like forever.
I do with the series got the age right.
"953? of course. That's my age. And the Rani's."
So did the Doctor get younger during the time war?

It was in The Five Doctors that the TimeLords tried to bribe the Master with regenerations. Another factor in that offer was that the Master was in a Traken body.
Interestingly, the Master's personality and look didn't change that much in the old days when he regenerated...

Haven't seen the new eps yet--have to wait for DVD or instant download.

 

I'm of two minds. On the one hand, this is obviously a hurdle they'd have to deal with sooner or later, so I'm glad that they did. On the other, I was kinda hoping for a little more mysticism to the whole thing instead of the head cheeses saying ?oh, by the way, the whole thirteen regenerations thing? Rubbish.?

Ah, well. Hopefully they'll work it into the show like that somehow.

 

Not just that, but MARK SHEPPARD IS IN IT TOO
Oh...and River's back (rather unsurprisingly, but to be honest I wasn't expecting her in the first two episodes).

As far the 12 regenerations being chucked out the window, I think that's a shame, and I don't think it was RTD's place to do the chucking. It could've made an interesting plot point when the 13th regeneration comes along, it should've been the then-current showrunner's decision how to handle it.

 

Hm, not really sure I like it either. I had been wondering what they were going to do, as probably in less than a decade they would've hit the twelfth incarnation of the Doctor at the rate they were going (we've already been through three different Doctors in the last decade, and we were already at the Eleventh). I liked the idea that the Doctor was mortal. Very long-lived, and especially as mentioned in the last Tennant episode regenerations are still essentially death for that version of the Doctor, but I thought there would be an eventual limit. Although there would probably be ways around it, but most of them usually didn't sound very savory or nice or natural, and might've been out of character for the Doctor. And sounds like they'll just be ignoring old canon. If there was some accident or incident that ended up giving the Doctor more regenerations, that's one thing, but oh well, guess this is the simplest, brute force method of just ignoring a sorta minor part of old canon to keep the franchise going on for the indefinite future.

 

Even RTD admits the 507-regenerations line was a half-joke that the fans are just gonna ignore anyway. "That 13 lives is stuck in people's heads."

Honestly, the 13-regeneration limit is the best thing, both for the character and the saga as a whole. The whole "Time Lord Victorious" episode with Tennant was a sign of where the Doctor could go if he didn't have that limit staring him in the face. Take away the limit and make the Doctor immortal, and you'll eventually, inevitably wind up with...well, with Rassilon.

Plus, you just know the final adventure of the Thirteenth Doctor will be the blow-out to end all blow-outs. There'll never stop being new stories of the Doctor anyway, thanks to all those comics/novels/audio dramas that keep getting pumped out.

 

After seeing and hearing about it.. I'm about 99.999% convinced he was just messing with Clyde and also wanted to shut him up. Nothing much more than that.

 

Remember that this is coming from RTD, known among fans for winding them up in the worst way.

Also, the release date of the TV Movie was announced earlier in the week: February 8th, 2011 (alongside "The Mutants".)

 

RTD has as much as admitted that he leaked the immortality announcement to the press just to sit back and watch the outrage and yuck it up.
It's one thing to spread mis-information, another to use a rep for spreading mis-information to leak spoilers no one would believe, and another still to be a &*%$ing Ass. RTD, as far as I'm concerned, has stepped over the line, firmly into the last category.

He may have restarted Doctor Who, given it new life, and brought together 2 successful spin-offs, but between his last couple stories for Who and Torchwood:CoE, and this utterly pointless fan-baiting, I have lost almost all respect for him.

 

Craig Ferguson explains Doctor Who![/url]

To quote one of the commentors,

"The triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism" might be the? greatest explanation of Doctor Who I've ever heard and is also my new manifesto.

 

Anyone watched the Christmas special yet? It's not on for another hour and a half here in Australia...

 

Got disk 1 of season 5 from netflix today.
Eh. waiting to see.

Lightning & blue clouds in the opening titles are ok, but when it switches to the orange firey clouds, it reminds me of CGI depictions of sex ed videos. And the new DW logo... yuck. I still say a brainstroming session by a basic art&design class could have done better.
Ah well.
Disk2 next week.
Looks like they did something stupid with different numbers of episodes per disk. Ah well.

 

Thoughts on Season 5:
First episode does more to establish the companion than the new doctor. "Not finished cooking" got old really quickly. Ending was good--probablly the best part. "Cracks in Time" seems a little heavy handed and obviously leading up to the season finale' story.
Second episode continues to establish the companion more than the Doctor. Another Crack in The Universe... Hmmm. Yup. seems really heavy handed slap in the face.

And, why not show her the wardrobe room? Making the poor woman run around in a slip and nightgown for the whole episode? I think that would be a little more important than, oh, floating her into space? Maybe they wanted to give her a female Arthur Dent look?

Even Peter Davidson at his most limp and weak established more personality than Matt Smith has so far. (hey, only the second ep!)
Don't know if it's the writing, directing, and/or acting.

Don't really like the new Tardis Interior. Just doesn't work for me. The last one was OK, but I still like the classic version better. (OK, maybe dim the lighting a bit so it isn't over-saturated white)

Hopefully disk 2 will bring more life to the character.

 

i loved the Christmas special. every time i thought i had figured out the next move it was just a little bit different. that was the first time i thought Matt Smith was channeling the Doctor. i had actually gotten a little bored with Matt Smith version. no, i think i just dont like the redhead. maybe that's why i liked it. she is barely in it. i may start back up with the Doctor.

 

Christmas Episode Spoiler stuff:
I was talking with a friend who told me about this. He said the big ending had an older version of a character hugging a younger version of himself, which was the big, dramatic resolution. Now, we know that this is a major problem, and two versions of the same person cannot touch, not only from the classic series story Mawdren Undead, but also from the Series 1 episode "Father's Day." So... what the hell? Kinda ruins the whole thing when the writers don't pay any attention to what has been established. It would be like saying all daleks have only ever been pink, or ice warriors have turned blue. One thing if it was a throw-away line in a random episode from 30 years ago, but it was a significant plot line 5 years ago. The Doctor can touch his previous incarnations because they are different, and even that is not supposed to happen (except under extremely unusual circumstances. The scene that was described to me sounded rather sacrine and over the top, but I won't see it until some time next year, after the series box set has been released.
Oh well. The series has never been perfect about continuity, but that was a pretty bad hiccough.

 

Actually, you'll be seeing it in February, since that's when its getting released on DVD.