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[mattiewheels]

Phew, been watching Who serials like crazy the past few days, and here's some scattered thoughts:

- I was worried that the first doctor's serials would be completely unrelatable/a complete bore because of my ADD/MTV affliction, but all the ones I saw were completely charming and fascinating and the great direction of the eps made the low budgets pretty forgivable. I'm not used to the doctor having that many people to bounce things off of, and sometimes it turns into the Adventures of Ian & Barbara, but I guess it was smart since this doctor wasn't as young/agile. And I was actually really into the historical serials, guess those don't really happen past these first seasons.

- Troughton's episodes are pretty hard to find, but the ones I did come across were good. He really does different things with the character that still feel 'right'. The only time he seemed out of place was "The Three Doctors", when I began to like Pewtree a lot and Troughton's doctor was probably played up more than ever as a clown for the episode, but standing side by side I was certainly more impressed with Pewtree as what you come to expect from modern docs.

- That's what's so crazy about the first 4 doctors...they change so completely with each transformation and the acting styles and demeanors really take left turns....but it always feels 'right' and always seems like an upgrade from the last one. They really made some great decisions with the character, but I guess that's why the show's 40 years old. I watched a Baker ep just now and while the ep itself wasn't so hot, I can't wait to see some really good ones to let this guy sink his teeth into, he's awesome.

 

[mattiewheels]

Also: I really want to smack the guy who ordered half the old Who episodes to be destroyed. How much money did they even end up saving (and ultimately losing) in the long run there? I'm hoping it was just one idiot in charge that forced that decision and not a consensual act by the BBC.

 

[GameplayWhore]

Troughton's doctor was probably played up more than ever as a clown for the episode

For some reason, I didn't remember seeing him play the recorder at all in the episodes that I watched (the ones in this marathon). Did he happen to go to it a lot in other serials? Because he was very nearly having an affair with it in "The Three Doctors".

they change so completely with each transformation and the acting styles and demeanors really take left turns

One of the nice little easter eggs when we get to the Fifth Doctor's regeneration (the serial I'm watching right now) is that he initially takes on personality traits of previous Doctors. It's awesome seeing Daviston acting like Hartnell and Troughton!

I watched a Baker ep just now and while the ep itself wasn't so hot, I can't wait to see some really good ones to let this guy sink his teeth into, he's awesome.

Baker had some nice writing overall, but it really helps that he had more years, so he had more good episodes. Kind of what keeps most people looking up to Tennant over Smith and Eccleston.

 

[charlequin]

Also: I really want to smack the guy who ordered half the old Who episodes to be destroyed. How much money did they even end up saving (and ultimately losing) in the long run there? I'm hoping it was just one idiot in charge that forced that decision and not a consensual act by the BBC.

Everything at the BBC was destroyed after a certain amount of time at that point, because no one believed there was any long-term use or value in any of the "disposable" content they were generating. That was the policy from day one when the BBC started broadcasting and it only changed much, much later. It's not like there was a single purge that got rid of everything -- it's just that the "master" copies were destroyed periodically for years and only the stuff that had been sold for broadcast in other countries survived.

It had nothing to do with Doctor Who in particular. There are tons of shows that were affected, just most of them (not all) are things people actually still don't care that much about today.

 

[GameplayWhore]

Everything at the BBC was destroyed after a certain amount of time at that point, because no one believed there was any long-term use or value in any of the "disposable" content they were generating. That was the policy from day one when the BBC started broadcasting and it only changed much, much later.

I'm so happy that this policy did not affect any of the other British shows I loved (Blake's 7, Are You Being Served, and The Tripods being the earlier ones).


-----

I'm also happy that Castrovalva takes place right after Logopolis, because I want to see this Doctor's beginning. Maybe it'll trigger some of my childhood memories.

Yay, the Master randomly appeared, saved Adric, and disappeared again! Can you guess what his single line during this scene was? That's right! "Heh heh heh ha ha ha ha!" Wow, we're really getting into this guy's psychology.

I like how the Doc is momentarily and visibly surprised at his change of hair, but he doesn't actually mention it or really make a fuss. In modern regenerations, the Doctor pretty much makes an auditory inspection of his entire appearance ("still not a ginger!"). Nice to have him just shove that out of the way yet stay obviously aware of it.

There an awesome moment where Davison wonderfully apes Hartnell's mannerisms. A little less than ten minutes in, he gives that signature "Hmf!" quasi-laugh, grabs at his suspenders (similar to how Doc One grabbed at his shirt), and does that thing where he turns his head around a bit with his eyes held wide open. Er, you'd know what I was talking about if you were just watching a Hartnell episode. He even calls Adric, "boy".

YES! He's doing the fraidy cat Troughton impression now! He's GOOD at this.

Anyway, this episode has a really interesting dynamic that extensively uses the back rooms of the TARDIS as a way of putting the action back, at least temporarily, in the hands of the companions. It hasn't been like this for decades, and it's nice to revisit it for a while instead of always having the God-Handyman of the Universe doing everything.

...nice. Deleting rooms from the TARDIS to use as spare mass to convert directly into momentum. That's a clever tactic to use on a ship that can pretty much have arbitrary amounts of mass inside while not being any more massive to the universe outside.

The Doctor's so fumbled up that he has difficulty counting above two. It's a nice scene where a little girl helps him with his numbers. "Stop, you're making me dizzy! We'll have to give you a badge for mathematical excellence." This actor is really good, I must say. He really seems like he's struggling to keep his mind together.

"Why are all these women here? Is this a holiday?"

Okay episode, but the Master is really at his worst when the majority (or totality) of his plan involves offing the Doctor. He comes off more like Snidely Whiplash, scheming every few scenes, occasionally noting that his plans have failed but the NEXT trap will work, HA HA HA! The saving graces here were Davison's performance and that interesting bit where the Castrovalvans tried to pinpoint locations on a map of their city, not quite being able to work out exactly what the problem was with having a non-Euclidean cityscape but knowing that something was odd with each of their shops being located in four spots on the map at once.

 

[mattiewheels]

Everything at the BBC was destroyed after a certain amount of time at that point, because no one believed there was any long-term use or value in any of the "disposable" content they were generating. That was the policy from day one when the BBC started broadcasting and it only changed much, much later. It's not like there was a single purge that got rid of everything -- it's just that the "master" copies were destroyed periodically for years and only the stuff that had been sold for broadcast in other countries survived.

It had nothing to do with Doctor Who in particular. There are tons of shows that were affected, just most of them (not all) are things people actually still don't care that much about today.

Yeah, knew they were throwing stuff away indiscriminately, not just Who, but hope that at least some people at the beeb at that time were opposed to them doing it. No home video market existed, sure, but show some respect!

 

[HolyCheck]

Heh heh heh ha ha ha ha!

I Don't know why. But I just lost my shit when I read that.

 

[Lard]

I'm so happy that this policy did not affect any of the other British shows I loved (Blake's 7, Are You Being Served, and The Tripods being the earlier ones).

By the time of Blake's 7, they had long since stopped the process.

I read a story that the only reason Monty Python's Flying Circus survived was that Terry Jones stole the master tapes and hid them in his house.

 

[mattiewheels]

By the time of Blake's 7, they had long since stopped the process.

I read a story that the only reason Monty Python's Flying Circus survived was that Terry Jones stole the master tapes and hid them in his house.

Terry saw the writing on the
wall just in time, good man.

 

[GameplayWhore]

Yay, fresh from waking after a fifteen mile hike up the length of Manhattan Island. My legs are pretty dead, but I'm taking a break to post this before continuing my attempt to create a "White Spy" (from Mad Magazine) costume for next weekend.

-----

The Five Doctors starts with awesome stock footage from Hartnell. I just wanted to say that it's cool they included the original actor in at least some small way like that. It's also a really great, if brief, speech.

Yay, it's the Second Doctor! And he makes a dig at Pertwee. So far, he's written much better than he was in "The Three Doctors". He has his personality while not going overboard with his traits, so he seems less like a comic relief guy. It's a bit of a nice touch that they don't try to hide Lethbridge-Stewart's aging. They're perfectly content to just say it's happening at the current time in history. Troughton himself doesn't look too much older, so I can overlook that. It helps that we almost always saw him in black and white before.

"Who was that strange little man?" "The Doctor." "...Who?" (augh, the pun burns my ear!!)

As with the previous serial we saw, the (current) Doctor is very philosophical, generally fairly upbeat and surprisingly infirm. I wonder if that last part is a regular trait of is or if this is just a strong coincidence. I guess I'll find out in "Resurrection of the Daleks", maybe they push him along in a stretcher the whole time.

The Master had more development in his first moments here than he did in the entire last couple serials we saw him in. He's still being described as a personification of evil, but he's interacting with people in a manner that doesn't involve direct scheming, and only lets one laugh out in two scenes. There's hope for him yet!

I like how they continued the trend of Time Lords recognizing each other despite appearances being different. Pertwee has to double-take, but he's certain of the Master's identity the moment he sees him. Hurndall (clone of the slightly-similar-sounding Hartnell) doesn't recognize him, but I can toss that away as a matter of it having been centuries ago, and it's hard to remember people you barely interacted with at school so long ago unless you've had other dealings with them.

Really digging the CGA graphics monitor on the TARDIS control console. It takes me back....

The writer put in an interesting gambit in separating the current Doctor from the earlier incarnations. It gives them a chance to have more of the spotlight and get into the action, while Davison gets to be a bit low key yet still critically important to the resolution of the story.

The actress playing Zoe looks like she hasn't aged a day. Jamie looks like he hasn't slept since we last saw him, though.

"Have faith, Brigadier. Have I ever led you astray?" "On many occasions." "..yes, well, this will be the exception!"

One amazingly great touch is that the three Doctors who initially meet at the tomb of Rassilon are the three Doctors from "The Three Doctors". In fact, the tomb scene is generally great in its details. The ancient language of the Time Lords pretty much looking like mathematical equations totally makes sense, and having the companions play compare and contrast with their respective Doctors is a fun moment. And the Master's weapon looks and sounds curiously like a vibrating sex toy. Makes sense. Most of the people I know who describe themselves with that word tend to have various interesting implements of the sort. And, naturally, the scene after that, he's in bondage.

Interesting. Terrance Dicks wrote "The Three Doctors", "The Five Doctors", and a novel called "The Eight Doctors", involving McGann's interactions with his predecessors, and it apparently is also a pseudo-sequel to "The Five Doctors". This one was a fun enough that I think I might look up the book.

 

[mattiewheels]

I'm betting the Five Doctors is a better watch than the Three Doctors from your impressions.

I've been running through the first-second seasons because they're just so darn charming. I think the quaintness of the whole thing really appeals to me, and there's some killer lines littered throughout too. I was sad to see granddaughter Susan get stranded since she was so cute, but they seem to have replaced her with someone even cuter, so no loss :lol

 

[GameplayWhore]

I'm betting the Five Doctors is a better watch than the Three Doctors from your impressions.

I've been running through the first-second seasons because they're just so darn charming. I think the quaintness of the whole thing really appeals to me, and there's some killer lines littered throughout too. I was sad to see granddaughter Susan get stranded since she was so cute, but they seem to have replaced her with someone even cuter, so no loss :lol

I didn't mention it above, but Susan (along with several other companions you'd recognise) is in The Five Doctors. She's not as cute on account of time having passed, and there's nothing really there in terms of character growth, but it's nice to see her in an "I survived nineteen years of the Dalek Invasion Aftermath" way.

Coincidental to this discussion, Jo Grant -- one of Pertwee's companions -- is a guest character on last night's and tonight's episodes of "The Sarah Jane Adventures".

Also, I'm gonna have to go back and check out the Hartnells I missed

 

[mattiewheels]

Also, I'm gonna have to go back and check out the Hartnells I missed

I just got through The Chase, and that was such a cool trip, very kitchen-sinky and full of great humor. Like when the Tardis appears at the top of the Empire State and they ask the dumb hick if he's from earth: 'No ma'am, Alabama.' :lol

 

[GameplayWhore]

Hmm. I seem to be quite delayed. I'm in contract to buy a house, which requires lots of attention, and I was spending whatever few moments of free time I had finishing my White Spy (from Mad Magazine's Spy vs Spy comic) costume for this week's Halloween parties. It came out pretty well. I'm also dealing with a busted alternator in my car, which my dad and I will patch up this weekend, I'm sure. It should be a fairly easy job. November will be my catch-up month.

-----

Resurrection of the Daleks starts with a massacre and then Jack Harkness teleporting in ... no, wait, dude's just dressed like him. Looks a little like him, too, though he doesn't seem to smile a lot.

"Are you sure you haven't got anything to eat", he asks as he stares at the man wearing the vegetable on his shirt.

The Dalek entrance music was good this time around, definitely capturing a hint of badassery that they don't normally actually display. But it doesn't seem like they really need any resurrection here. They're out in force at the very start of the episode!

Ah, the prisoner behind the smokey window looks like Davros. I ... guess I missed the story where he magically stopped being dead. Would anybody like to fill me in about that?

The voices of the Daleks get a bit more grating than usual in this episode for some reason. I can survive it, but I have known people who couldn't handle their voice effects at all. Most particularly one friend who winced every time she heard the word "EXTERMINATE"; I think it was the episode "Doomsday".

"So they have returned to their creator. Like an errant child, they have come home once more."

We've of course once again entered the realm of mind control, by the way. It's amazing how often this particular trope is used in this particular show. It's pretty rare in New Who, comparatively.

AHHHH, A KITTY, BURN IT WITH FIRE!!!

The sudden heel turn of the cowardly guy was a complete surprise, but after the matter it made sense. The character felt the whole time like he was acting afraid. Upon first glance, I just assumed he was a terrible actor, what with the obviously forced stuttering and all. He may still be, but it's possible that he's just a lot more nuanced than I gave him credit for!

Memory extraction scenes often, as they do in this episode, involve playing stock footage from previous episodes on a TV monitor. Of course, now and then they put in a shot of the main character. But isn't it kind of funny that someone's memory of themself would be in the third person?

Character development! The Doctor regrets failing to kill the Daleks back in "Genesis of..." and goes off with the specific intent of taking out their leader, something he would not have considered an option before. Of course, he still has ethical difficulty killing Davros, who goes off free. But later, he has no problems setting off a bomb to kill a Dalek, which is an equally intelligent creature. Dav doesn't even have the compassion that normally sets Kaleds (or other peoples, for that matter) apart from Daleks. The only real difference is that it's not Humanoid. This is an incredibly anthrocentric double standard. Or maybe it's just inconsistent writing.

The story's basic proposition is a bit faulty. The Dalek's are defeated due to a disease which kills them in seconds. They wake up Davros and expect him to cure the disease in a matter of a couple hours. Sure, the man is smart, but even the Doctors on the Enterprise generally have a little more time and a lot more to work with than he was given. Of course, he succeeds (with little in the way of patients of actually analyze or devices for his analysis), and the episode turns out to be a big excuse to thoroughly cancel the excellent ending to "The Daleks", wherein the creatures turned on their master. Meh.

 

[HolyCheck]

Hmm. I seem to be quite delayed. I'm in contract to buy a house, which requires lots of attention, and I was spending whatever few moments of free time I had finishing my White Spy (from Mad Magazine's Spy vs Spy comic) costume for this week's Halloween parties. It came out pretty well. I'm also dealing with a busted alternator in my car, which my dad and I will patch up this weekend, I'm sure. It should be a fairly easy job. November will be my catch-up month.

-----

Resurrection of the Daleks starts with a massacre and then Jack Harkness teleporting in ... no, wait, dude's just dressed like him. Looks a little like him, too, though he doesn't seem to smile a lot.

"Are you sure you haven't got anything to eat", he asks as he stares at the man wearing the vegetable on his shirt.

The Dalek entrance music was good this time around, definitely capturing a hint of badassery that they don't normally actually display. But it doesn't seem like they really need any resurrection here. They're out in force at the very start of the episode!

Ah, the prisoner behind the smokey window looks like Davros. I ... guess I missed the story where he magically stopped being dead. Would anybody like to fill me in about that?

The voices of the Daleks get a bit more grating than usual in this episode for some reason. I can survive it, but I have known people who couldn't handle their voice effects at all. Most particularly one friend who winced every time she heard the word "EXTERMINATE"; I think it was the episode "Doomsday".

"So they have returned to their creator. Like an errant child, they have come home once more."

We've of course once again entered the realm of mind control, by the way. It's amazing how often this particular trope is used in this particular show. It's pretty rare in New Who, comparatively.

AHHHH, A KITTY, BURN IT WITH FIRE!!!

The sudden heel turn of the cowardly guy was a complete surprise, but after the matter it made sense. The character felt the whole time like he was acting afraid. Upon first glance, I just assumed he was a terrible actor, what with the obviously forced stuttering and all. He may still be, but it's possible that he's just a lot more nuanced than I gave him credit for!

Memory extraction scenes often, as they do in this episode, involve playing stock footage from previous episodes on a TV monitor. Of course, now and then they put in a shot of the main character. But isn't it kind of funny that someone's memory of themself would be in the third person?

Character development! The Doctor regrets failing to kill the Daleks back in "Genesis of..." and goes off with the specific intent of taking out their leader, something he would not have considered an option before. Of course, he still has ethical difficulty killing Davros, who goes off free. But later, he has no problems setting off a bomb to kill a Dalek, which is an equally intelligent creature. Dav doesn't even have the compassion that normally sets Kaleds (or other peoples, for that matter) apart from Daleks. The only real difference is that it's not Humanoid. This is an incredibly anthrocentric double standard. Or maybe it's just inconsistent writing.

The story's basic proposition is a bit faulty. The Dalek's are defeated due to a disease which kills them in seconds. They wake up Davros and expect him to cure the disease in a matter of a couple hours. Sure, the man is smart, but even the Doctors on the Enterprise generally have a little more time and a lot more to work with than he was given. Of course, he succeeds (with little in the way of patients of actually analyze or devices for his analysis), and the episode turns out to be a big excuse to thoroughly cancel the excellent ending to "The Daleks", wherein the creatures turned on their master. Meh.

I find the 3rd person memories SO distracting when I watch TV shows.. it bothers me greatly.

also AWESOME costume, i'm kinda sad we don't do halloween here.. but then I'm happy I dont have annoying kids asking me for candy.

first time buying a house??? I'm 22 now.. and really don't wanna move out lol.. quite happy living here for another 2 - 3 years

 

[GameplayWhore]

also AWESOME costume, i'm kinda sad we don't do halloween here.. but then I'm happy I dont have annoying kids asking me for candy.

Thank you, and it's nice to give things to people. It fills you with a big happy feeling to see the smiles when you hand over the treats. And they don't come so often as to overwhelm you. And on the other side of the holiday, it suddenly becomes normal for a weekend for girls to dress in the most fetish-friendly ways possible.

first time buying a house??? I'm 22 now.. and really don't wanna move out lol.. quite happy living here for another 2 - 3 years

Yep, first time. This part of the world usually has quite expensive costs of living compared to income for a highly developed nation. I had to save for a long, long time to make this possible, and I will be in amazing amounts of debt for years and years. It's part of the glamour of the American Experience.

-----

The Caves of Androzani. It seems fitting that it would be this, the last Davison episode, in which the issue of the weird shirt-mounted celery is addressed. It actually becomes a very important part of the plot, or at least a very prominent Macguffin.

Hm. The control device that this guy is using has a brightness control, a contrast control, what looks like a volume control, and a number pad. There are a few additional buttons whose logos/descriptives I cannot read at the high compression and low resolution used by dailymotion.com, but I'm pretty sure he's using a TV remote to summon his underling.

There's a head fellow behind all this who's monitoring the Doctor in his cell and then laughing and giving orders to people. I'm really hoping it's not the Master, because he's already been in two of the three Davison stories we've seen here, and it would be pretty unfair to this Doctor if 75% of the stories of him we've seen were all Master-oriented (the rest being Davros, the other Big Criminal Mastermind of the Universe).

The scene with the merc who wants to exit out of his contract is really intense. The scenes with these characters are almost superfluous but do help the atmosphere behind the story.

Finally, we have a very strong example of the Doctor's non-Humanness actually having some meaning and use! In previous years, the Doctor chats a lot about how physiologically different he is on the inside and such, but this time he's able to slip past Human-killing robots without being in any real danger, resolving a situation which otherwise would have put our heroes in a serious bind. It's a nice change from all the times where big aliens go "We hate all you Humans!", and he seldom even defends his Gallifreyan heritage from this insult!

So there was a guy who laughs maniacally and a some people who act pretty grim, comparatively. In a very un-Who-like twist, it turns out the laughing guy is just a bit off his nutter, and the others are the ones who are actually villainous.

Davison is pretty bad-ass in this episode. He just played chicken with a planet.

I really rather liked this episode. It had the multilayered political aspects of some of the better Who episodes. The sets and -- except for the Ridley-monster -- effects were generally quite well done, motivations were often subtle and there were a decent amount of little twists to keep the story interesting. On top of that, there was a well-served revenge plot and we get to see the Doctor putting everything on the line to save his companion. I had reservations about this one when it started, but it really ended strongly, with several bangs, and a bit of sadness. Now I just wish this particular Doctor was healthy in more than 25% of the serials we've seen him in.

As an aside, I really like how every single regeneration has been very different from the ones before. The two (three, sort of) most recent ones, in comparison, have seemed very "samey". You know, he does the energy blasting out of every orifice thingy. I'd like to see the next regeneration (you know, ten years from now) have some element of surprise and different-ness to it. Also, this serial indirectly had the Master in it, so our entire Davison experience here has been Master Master Davros Master. But it wasn't so bad.

 

[mattiewheels]

I'll never catch up :'(

I'm stuck trying to watch all of hartnell's serials, i really am charmed by them. Guess i'll get back to Baker eventually...

 

[GameplayWhore]

I'll never catch up :'(

I'm stuck trying to watch all of hartnell's serials, i really am charmed by them. Guess i'll get back to Baker eventually...

Heh, we're just doing it in a different order. I'm doing a lot of skipping and will eventually have to make my way back to the classics again to fill the gaps. In the meantime, I would enjoy any interesting things you have to say about the ones you're watching.

 

[GameplayWhore]

Excellent. Studying for my Midterm is done, studying for elections is obviously done, and probably the hardest part of the mortgage application process -- getting the contractor in line -- is done. Better yet, I'm nearly caught up on the marathon! Also, the new show Walking Dead had what I thought to be a pretty phenomenal pilot episode. I watch very little television (currently limited to these viewings, soon to be limited to new episodes of DW as well as Futurama), but this one caught my attention in a pretty solid way.

-----

They changed the intro again. It's pretty similar to Davison's, except that there's an overlay of some sort of slightly kaleidoscopey effects. Like if you had a hundred tiny prism'd lens flares all over the place. I can't tell if it's a step up or a step down. The title sequence does seem a lot busier in comparison to anything we've seen before, though. The Twin Dilemma seems to be why did they name the two children here after those two planets in Star Trek the founders of Rome?

So, first impression is that the current Doctor is a pompous, self-absorbed, arrogant jerk. He's positively dickish, much like One, but dialed up several notches. Could be an interesting strategy, taking all the negative properties of previous doctors. He even fell on the floor and started sputtering random sentences like Four did now and then. I wonder if he's a coward like Two or frequently infirm like Five.

Ah, he's also a paranoid domestic abuser. That's a new one, I think, unless Hartnell had a habit of smacking around his granddaughter when we weren't looking (come to think of it, I recall that he threatened her with as much at one point).

They spend the whole first episode actively trying to make us dislike this incarnation of the Doctor for some reason, then the cliffhanger is that his life is threatened. Um....yay?

lol, the story has some interesting bits, but they're definitely overwriting this Doctor, which is overshadowing the whole thing. Guess what? I was right about him. At first sight of aliens, he starts cowering like Dr. Troughton!

Death by a blood clot apparently involves the victim turning green for a few seconds than pretty much instantly expiring. Good educational tip from Doctor Who.

Hm. Is this companion supposed to be American or from some other non-British area? She is corrected when she oddly pronounces lieutenant as "lieutenant".

There were elements of an interesting tale here, but it all felt like a B story next to the "look at me, I'm crrrrraaaazyyy!" renewed Doctor tale. Davison's regen did something similar but somehow made it just subdued enough for it to still be the secondary plot.

 

[Dr Zhivago]

Peri is meant to be American, yes. Twin Dilemma is widely regarded as one of the worst Who stories, by the way.

 

[maharg]

Frankly, you're into the absolute worst two doctors of the entire run and what you're seeing in that episode isn't far off what you should expect out of the rest.

There's also not a single good companion again. Donna is polite and subdued compared to the next two, and the last companion is such a boneheaded concept to begin with.

All imo, of course, but this is where the decline of the series that ends in its demise really becomes obvious.

 

[HolyCheck]

I'll never catch up :'(

I'm stuck trying to watch all of hartnell's serials, i really am charmed by them. Guess i'll get back to Baker eventually...

Hahaha don't bother I watch one or two eps when I can.. but reading GW's reviews is even better lol.

Walking dead was pretty good, and Futurama is Awesome.

You ever given Battlestar Galactica a go? I do recommend.

 

[GameplayWhore]

Frankly, you're into the absolute worst two doctors of the entire run and what you're seeing in that episode isn't far off what you should expect out of the rest.
There's also not a single good companion again. Donna is polite and subdued compared to the next two, and the last companion is such a boneheaded concept to begin with.
All imo, of course, but this is where the decline of the series that ends in its demise really becomes obvious.

From what I'm seeing so far, it seems like the problems stem from an intentional change in the direction of the show to strengthen their appeal to the younger set with less attention paid towards keeping the growing audience. To use a modern analogy, it's as if THQ looked at Nintendo's success with all-audiences titles and made the assumption that they worked because they were brightly coloured games for children, and started pumping out games intended to only appeal to kids, losing the critical adult and teen markets and massacring consumer interest for the few games they make that do have broader appeal*. A lot of what I'm seeing now is very simplified and far less subtle than what we saw in early Davison and prior.

You ever given Battlestar Galactica a go? I do recommend.

Yeah, watched it when I was a kid. Occasional greatness, occasional crapola, mostly okay, imo.

Peri is meant to be American, yes. Twin Dilemma is widely regarded as one of the worst Who stories, by the way.

I think a few of the earlier ones were worse story-wise, though the over the top characterizations made this serial seem much more horrid than it was.



* thank goodness such idiocy is merely a hypothetical situation!
-----

The Two Doctors is the final outing for Troughton, the Second Doctor, and surprisingly our second to last outing with Colin Baker. I don't know that this will give much time to really get to know Colin, since his first episode was an adjustment period in which, as Davison did, he was acting in a manner supposedly not representative of his character. Or maybe he'll still be a smarmy bastard. Let's find out....

Sweet, nostalgic start with the decision, however momentary, to begin the episode in black and white. Jamie's there, too, so it already feels more Five Doctors ish than it does Two Doctors ish. But, yeesh, couldn't they have sprung for some black hair colouring for our now quite aged actor?

Holy shit, that's Servalan, the primary villain from Blake's 7! For those out of the loop, that's the excellent British SF show that Terry Nation, creator of the better Dalek episodes, helmed.

The storyline is starting up in an interesting way. The implications of science with good natured intentions possibly leading to bad results. This is already much more substantial than last serial's "ugly monster wants to spawn and control the universe" plot.

Woohoo, Sontarans again! And a girl in a bikini!

When Colin materialised in the exact same place that Troughton had, I almost thought that I rewound the tape (so to speak) and was resuming at the beginning of the episode. Then I noticed how different everything looked.

The Sontaran makeup somehow looks substantially worse than it did a decade earlier. Maybe it's just rose-tinted glasses (from three weeks ago) at work here.

"Religion? I'm not interested in the beliefs of primitives, only what they taste like!" <-- this fellow is actually really fun to watch

"They left this illusion to make it appear that I was dead.... They wanted to prevent any investigation into my disappearance. Which means, I must be being held captive somewhere!"

Jamie remarks that the current Doctor is worse than his. He has a solid foundation of evidence to support his argument.

They pull out the occasionally used psychic powers that Time Lords have (only at times where it is convenient to the plot). Here, he starts talking about skipping about on the Astral Plane, which makes it feel a lot more kitschy than the previous instances we've observed (which are usually of the form of: "If we concentrate together, we can reflect the bad guy's power back at him!"). For some reason, it just feels sillier here than it has before. Maybe I'm just being thrown off by the Technicolor jacket.

More comments later, time for nethack.

 

[HolyCheck]

no no! The remake of Battlestar!

 

[GameplayWhore]

no no! The remake of Battlestar!

Oh, that one.

Yeah, watched it when I was an adult. Occasional greatness, occasional crapola, mostly okay, imo.

 

[brianjones]

BBC america HD has been showing the series from the beginning of the 2005 series lately.

i've watched the first 2 episodes so far.. pretty fun if cheesy.. looking forward to seeing more.

 

[GameplayWhore]

i've watched the first 2 episodes so far.. pretty fun if cheesy.. looking forward to seeing more.

The best episodes are the ones that aim for being kinda creepy. They have a couple of them per season, and they're generally really great.

-----

...back to Colin & Troughton's team up episode:

The story's relying a bit much on extra convenience. Earth, as unimportant as it is, is once again in a strategically critical area for the Sontarans. And the Doctor is being kept in a place within earshot of an area which he has already visited. Er, if you catch my drift. Earth is big, and the Doctor almost entirely visits the British Isles, meaning that the chance of him having encountered their secret hideout decreases even more dramatically to the point that it's reeeeeally pushing it here.

Huh, if the symbiotic relationship between the Time Lord and the TARDIS exclusively allows time travel for only the Time Lord and those in close proximity to him, why don't people who ride in the TARDIS when he is not present not .... like explode or something? You know, like when he fooled Rose into taking a one way trip home without him. I know, I know, inconsistant writing from then to now. Still, it makes me pout. >:|

The Second Doctor has balls. The scene when he tries to rile up the Sontaran is great. I do like that his gambit failed, though, as it was going for a fairly common trope of SF TV.

The Androgum just knocked out murdered a truck driver by hitting him in the butt with a stick.

Also, this episode has what is possibly the worst death scene I have ever witnessed. I would have stabbed the actor for real after he finished it. The killing would not have stopped there.

You know, they set up these situations which allow Doctors to exist "out of time" or somesuch in which they can interact with other and nothing that happens interferes with the normal progression of what actually happened. It would have been really cool to really play with this idea in a truly perplexing fashion. Imagine: Smith and Tennant find themselves on an adventure together via this sort of gimmick, and halfway though the story Tennant, who has been taken out of the normal flow of time, is fatally wounded. He regenerates into ... Smith! And then we have two Smiths running amok until the end, as the weirdo nature of the plot device makes it so that none of the actual show that we had experienced prior to this is affected by the razzamatazz that happened here.

(or better yet, make this the origin story of the Valeyard)

This episode should have been called "The Doctor and One of His Old Companions", not "The Two Doctors". Troughton seemed asleep for most of it. Still, he stole the show in a few of the few scenes he was in. I love the food-happy Androgums for some reason, and Troughton was in top form when his culinary instincts kicked into high gear.

Also, I would not mind if all American students dressed like Peri does in this episode.

 

[Htown]

So the new Who thread reminded me of this old thread and how behind I am on everything.

In the middle of The Tenth Planet right now.

THOSE ARE THE CYBERMEN? REALLY?:lol :lol :lol

 

[GameplayWhore]

In the middle of The Tenth Planet right now.

THOSE ARE THE CYBERMEN? REALLY?:lol :lol :lol

The later on "Tomb of the Cybermen" is actually pretty cool. I think I prefer that particular version to even the ones that came afterwards (partly because the voices are more chillingly mechanical without being hard to understand, as many Whobots tend to be).

Also, welcome back.

-----

...

It's one thing to screw with the visuals of the Doctor Who. It's another, far more evil thing to mess around with the theme song to the point that it barely resembles the amazing original. It's like these people are just making changes for the sake of making changes, throwing things up in the air just to see what sticks to the wall. And I do not respect them for this.

My suspicion this time around is that The Ultimate Foe is, in fact, Robert Holmes. He wrote this episode, and we shall see if he earns my suspicious derision by the end of this viewing.

The Master shows up early on, and he's ... interesting. He's acting like the Master actually should. Some of the other characters, like the two whom the Master sent to help the Doctor, are decidedly more two dimensional. Something about them reeks of genericity, almost as if they were NPCs in a role playing game.

One problem with enjoying this episode fully is that it is plainly obvious that we entered it partway. What, the Earth was moved billions of miles, almost fireballed out of existence, and given a funky new name? This sounds like pretty wacky stuff. I do like Colin's very loud observation about how the greatest evil forces in the universe are nothing compared to the levels of corruption capable from the Time Lords. It's a very nice precursor to the Tennant finale, where we learn that the burning of Gallifrey was in fact in no small part due to the supreme evil and power that they are capable of.

Huh. The Doctor finds himself in "The Matrix", some sort of giant computer thing where the rules of reality are arbitrarily created. I suspect I know a team of filmmaker siblings who must've been watching British TV in the '80s.

Interesting dynamic -- the Sixth Doctor is in a place where he can default his remaining lives to another person, but he's currently fighting a future incarnation of himself, so we know that he'll survive, so gambling away his regenerations don't seem to be much of a risk. Er, unless those weirdo "time lock/loop" rules apply. You know, the rules that say "Hey, we can do anything we want, because time travel doesn't make any sense to us writers, anyway!".

Sudden realization: One could almost say that Every Colin Baker story in this marathon is a story shared with one other Doctor. Last time, he was teamed up with Troughton, this time he's at odds with a future Doctor, and that first serial started mere seconds after his regeneration!

When the Doctor's companion brought him back to the trial room, I had a very strong suspicion that they were going to play tricks on us, that the situation wasn't real. I didn't know exactly what was going to transpire, but I really loved it when they did the pull back to the actual courtroom.

Why is the Master using a cheap hypnotist's trick to control someone instead of just looking into his eyes and commanding him like he used to? Mind, it's totally great what happens right afterward.

The ending sort of just came and went. The Hero finally meets the Villain face to face, the Villain says "Look at my Big Evil Machine!", the hero walks over to the Big Evil Machine and effortlessly makes it self destruct, killing the Villain. It's all very light, story-wise, so that was disappointing. I did like, though, that there were two distinct villainous characters playing off each other, but they were both done away with in such an arbitrary fashion. It reminds me of the Dalek/Cybermen thing a few years ago ("You are superior in only one respect ... you are better at dying", heh), an episode which has a similarly handwavey payoff.

 

[Dr Zhivago]

the Villain says "Look at my Big Evil Machine!"

But it was a Megabyte Modem!

Did you watch all of Trial of a Time Lord, or just the end?

 

[GameplayWhore]

But it was a Megabyte Modem!

Did you watch all of Trial of a Time Lord, or just the end?

Just these two episodes. It's interesting enough that I expect to go back to it sooner or later, though.

 

[GameplayWhore]

Ah, looks like I'm pulling ahead a bit. Had a nice, serene do-nothing weekend which helped speed me up a bit. Multitasking has been my activity of late, and it seems I'm able to quite easily enjoy survive watching these '80s episodes by focusing between doing so and playing nethack and web surfing and scanning old college SF club notebook blogs from around that period in history.

-----

How odd. After some not so great special effects, we get to see for the first time a regeneration not at the end of a serial, but at its begi-HOLY FUCK WHAT DID THEY DO TO THE INTRO!?!?

Ugggggh. It looks incredibly dated now, but I would have hated it even back then. The music is very very slightly better than it was during the last Doctor's tenure, but-DID SOME ASSBRAIN MADE THE DOCTOR FACE WINK AT THE CAMERA?

...I may need booze to survive this Doctor. Hopefully, this will suppress any more colourful metaphors I'd otherwise spew.

lol, okay, Time and the Rani starts off actually feeling a bit more like classic Who. The makeup job on the aliens are pretty good, the villain isn't laughing continuously and - hey - they have Albert Einstein as a museum piece!

My first impression of Doctor McCoy (heh) is a positive one. Except for this weird stunt where he sort of falls backwards onto the floor as ... well, I guess it's supposed to be a dodge of some sort, but it looks really goofy-- except for that, he seems to have his own personality right off the bat. He's a right to the point sort of man, the kind of Brit that you might want to have tested for ADHD. Otherwise, he's an short-tempered, diminutive fellow. As with Colin, the direction seems to be towards over the top acting, which is a bit of a shame.

This reminds me a lot of when one of Mom's sons dressed up -- poorly -- as Mr. Panucci to convince Fry that he was really still at his job.

The death globe that Mel gets stuck in is actually a really nice effect, but it seems like a long way for the Rani to go to make a deathtrap that is slightly less effective than a simple landmine.

Mel brings back the bad old days of the First Doctor, where all the women seem to be capable of doing when confronted with danger is screaming over and over again. Maybe she thinks she has some sort of sonic blast attack.

In the interest of giving this Doctor the individual type of quirk that makes each Doctor different, they went incredibly overboard. He trips a lot and sort of moves around in a manner suggestive of live action Looney Tunes. He's also given this habit of misquoting well-known English sayings, which would actually be a pretty endearing trait if he didn't do it twenty or thirty times during the course of this serial.

All in all, I'm feeling better about this material than I did about the Colin episodes. Except for that rotten intro, yeesh!

 

[GameplayWhore]

Short episodes plus no major weekend-long events taking up my time means I'm blowing through these pretty fast. After this serial, I'm going to try to sneak in the one that Miss Robotnik recommended. Meanwhile, hooray, tonight I go to the late birthday present I gave me, a fun dance party at a Russian baths, complete with brass band, booze and bikinis.

-----

The beginning of Remembrance of the Daleks is pretty cool, with the speeches and slow pullout from Earth to the approaching ship. Feels like the start to the film Independence Day, and you definitely get an ominous feeling that this episode could possibly be a good one until you get to the INCREDIBLY TERRIBLE* OPENING THEME SEQUENCE which casts some doubt by utterly destroying the atmosphere which the pre-credits scene had so carefully set up!

* I'm getting better. I didn't even swear at it this time. Said "Motherf--" out loud then managed to halt.

The Doctor's new companion seems to be a punk of some sort. But she's not a generic stereotype, and she has a personality that seems pretty distinct. I like her much more than the last couple companions.

...oh, jeez. I just realized that his umbrella is meant to be shaped like a question mark. This obsession with that particularly symbol is pretty eyeroll-worthy.

That's a creepy little girl.

And thus we have gone full circle. In the very first episode of Doctor Who, Susan remarks that the UK has not switched over to decimal currency. In this episode, Ace -- the latest companion to the Doctor -- tries to make head or tails of the earlier Age's more haphazard system of coinage, frustratedly proclaiming it stupid.

This is an incredibly trusting military. The Doctor just waltzed in and almost kind of magically inserted himself into the group. It feels very Tennant for some reason.

"I've been here before". Then we see the half-gate with the word ending in "RMAN". This is a fanwank episode, isn't it? We're back at the site where the First Doctor eventually took up residence, the old "I.M.Foreman" -- wait, did they misspell their fanwank? Well, I suppose they get points for trying.

But they really are trying hard to give us "Remembrances" of the past, especially when the Doctor refers to the Group Captain as "Brigadier". It's an understandable mistake for him to make, given that their relationship, however brief, is pretty similar.

"And now they want to conquer the Earth!" "Nothing so mundane, they conquered the Earth in the 22nd century"

"...landing pattern of some kind of spacecraft, isn't it?" "Very good" "But this is Earth, 1963. Well, someone would've noticed, I'd've heard about it." "Do you remember the Zygon gambit with the Loch Ness Monster? Or the Yetis in the underground?" "What?" "Your species has the most amazing capacity for self-deception matched only by its ingenuity when trying to destroy itself."

McCoy is much better in this serial. They dropped all the stupidity they ladened him with last time around, and his companion makes for a pretty decent counterpart so far.

Oh, hey, it's climbing the stairs. This makes the Dalek in "Dalek" not as uniquely spectacular. It's a bit more ominous, too -- I always thought it was cheesy when the latter Dalek shouted "ELEVATE" before heading upwards.

 

[mattiewheels]

GPW, your impressions are always appreciated, I'll be sure to revisit all of em when I finally catch up to where you are. Some more random thoughts about the episodes I've finished recently:

- I believe I've seen all of the DVD released serials with the First Doc, and boy does Hartnell flub his lines a lot. His performances are always spot-on though, so wonder if he was just clumsy with words or did that on purpose. Either way, his doctor is beyond iconic.

- Watching The War Machines, that WOTAN serial (aka: 'Computers Are Scary and Evil!') shows how far the show's come, much higher prod values and the stride of the show seems to have improved a lot. The only complaint is a lead in to my next point.....

- Because of the lost episodes, I keep seeing new companions every other episode, kind of disconnecting, especially in this serial where I see Dodo for the first time, and the Doctor unceremoniously dumps her at the end without even saying g'bye :lol From what I take from sampling later eps, I guess I shouldn't get to attached to any particular companion like you would with a Doctor.

- Everytime I see Troughton's mug at the beginnings of eps, all I think of is this:

But he's definitely a capable and witty Doctor. I suppose I'll have to do some serious searching to complete his run since he was the biggest victim of the BBC episode-trashing.

 

[Dr Zhivago]

- I believe I've seen all of the DVD released serials with the First Doc, and boy does Hartnell flub his lines a lot. His performances are always spot-on though, so wonder if he was just clumsy with words or did that on purpose

The budget was so tiny and the schedule so tight, they couldn't afford to do re-shoots if a line was flubbed. Even later on, Peter Davison has said he used to swear whenever he messed up to force them to do another take.

 

[GameplayWhore]

I believe I've seen all of the DVD released serials with the First Doc, and boy does Hartnell flub his lines a lot.

The budget was so tiny and the schedule so tight, they couldn't afford to do re-shoots if a line was flubbed. Even later on, Peter Davison has said he used to swear whenever he messed up to force them to do another take.

I also read somewhere that this was initially supposed to be an intentional character trait, but he eventually started making the mistakes for real.

-----

"Sugar?" "Ahh, a decision.... Would it make any difference?" "It would make your tea sweet!" "Yes, but beyond the confines of my taste buds, would it make any difference?" "Not really." The conversation starting here was pretty nice. The Doctor briefly discusses temporal philosophy with a random barkeep.

They're dropping hints about the Doctor prior to the beginning of the actual show but after his time at the academy (which was apparently at his time of enrollment populated entirely with failures and would-be renegades). Apparently, that Doctor had a small group of Humans in the 1960s who sort of kind of knew about him, and he'd left Gallifreyan artifacts behind for later use.

"This is BBC Television. The time is a quarter past five, and Saturday viewing continues with an adventure in the new science fiction series, Do-" ...amusing ad on the 1963 telly that gets cut off due to a scene change. I wonder what programme they could possibly be talking about.

Wow, Ace is a pretty cool character. Very Ian, but with a more macho bent. She just mauled a Dalek with a baseball bat then jumped through a closed window!

They appear to have drastically changed the look of the actual Dalek creatures. Previously, they had a somewhat Lovecraftian design, with ickyness and tentacles and whatnot. Now, they look more crustaceany, with pincers and soforth. Obviously, what with the jumpstart of the series half a decade ago, they reversed this change. It's still interesting, and it makes the transmat sequences, wherein the Daleks appear from the inside out, a bit more fun to watch.

Ooo, lolly, lolly, lolly....

This storyline is unravelling in a really cool way. They're trying to sort of tie together a whole bunch of events that have happened in previous episodes, and they're actually doing a pretty fine job of it. The Doctor seems to have a pretty crafty plan to get two different species of Daleks to wipe each other out without accidentally mincing Humanity in the process, using some pretty cool bait.

loooool, the "Time Controller" is just a plasma globe. That's some pretty lazy prop planning, but I guess I can't expect much from people who can't even paint the letter 'E' properly.

Holy crap, they have Artillery Daleks!

The actor playing Davros made it a bit too outrageous and comical this time. Davros is actually at his best when he is understated, not when he's screaming like a loon. In fact, he's fairly useless as a character here. He just appears at the very end, talks about how awesome it is to be evil for a few minutes, then gets defeated. Too Bondian for character typically on the more nuanced side of the spectrum.

All in all, I found this a better episode than "The Dalek Invasion of Earth". The interplay between two warring factions of Daleks is something that I very, very much wanted to see ever since Davros started talking about reengineering them back in "Resurrection".

 

[HolyCheck]

Your keeping up with this is insane, I'm jealous I haven't had the time

Hows the house hunt going btw? end up getting the one you were contracted to get or whatever?

 

[GameplayWhore]

Your keeping up with this is insane, I'm jealous I haven't had the time

It's fun to do. I thought I was shooting ahead, but an eventful weekend brought me behind the curve again. Good times, though: I learned that I can handle 217°F sauna temperatures and that women tend to get extra flirty at like 3:30am when I'm getting ready to leave the parties for home.

I'm going to probably get deeper behind on these, as this week I really want to sneak in an unlisted serial, and then this coming weekend I'll be out in extreme western New Jersey for an SF convention.

Hows the house hunt going btw? end up getting the one you were contracted to get or whatever?

I've been in contract for a few weeks. I have a general contractor who will handle turning on the utilities and fix a few minor house issues. Beyond that, I'm looking for home insurance and trying to figure out how to get this "FNMA" thing to give me six thousand dollars, which would be nice (it's some sort of new buying incentive program, but nobody I'm working with seems to know anything about how to actually go about getting it).



Edit: Ha, looks like you've morphed. Okay, what did you do, and in which thread did you do it?

 

[GameplayWhore]

I'm sneaking in The Happiness Patrol as it was recommended earlier on, and the title seems pretty interesting. You get a pretty good idea what the story might be about from that, and they sort of jump right into confirming it.

The pacing from the start is a little more advanced than we're generally used to. Usually the Doctor and his Companion mosey around for a while before realizing something's up. This time, without encountering any real badness, they both agree that something terrible is going on and decide to take it down just a couple minutes into their visit.

The Patrol seems to generally not be a happy bunch. Half of them are pretty angry, and the other half act basically in the manner of Internet trolls, saying things deliberately designed to get a rush out of people. It's kind of confusing when you have people running around pretty much going "GRRRR, I KILL ANYTHING UNHAPPY!".

So the Doctor and Ace get put into a holding area with no walls, but the lone guard threatens to shoot them if they try to escape. There's a ... go-kart there, and it's apparent that it is booby trapped. So the Doctor and Ace get on the kart, making it look like they're going to try to start it and blow themselves up in the process. the guard freaks out and runs off. Now, they could just stand up and walk away, but the Doctor goes about slowly defusing the booby trapped go-kart, then sets off on this vehicle, which is both far louder and a little slower than walking speed. Why didn't they just, I dunno, walk away as soon as the guard ran off?

Everything seems inconsistent in this story. The Patrol sometimes kills people on the spot if they don't have a smile on them, sometimes they just sort of drag them around when they're openly angry or otherwise unhappy. On the other hand, the Kandy Man has a fun design, and they're actually utilizing his candy nature in the actual storyline, which is pretty amusing. It's a comparably consistent character that seems to be my kind of silly.

Okay, the scene where the Doctor turns around the interrogation with Trevor Sigma is great. McCoy is brimming with a lot of this capability that we see later on in Tennant, the capacity to just own everyone in the scene by rapid-fire chattering. Later on, he vocally bad-asses a couple guards into throwing away their guns. These are the moments in which this guy really shines, and I think it's a marvelous revolution that we've needed since probably halfway through two regenerations prior.

I'm digging these gigantic retro cameras that the futuristic colonists are using...

"Fifi" seems inordinately small to be able to terrorize everybody in the underground pipes. I mean, she's barely larger than a Maltese. She's spikey and all, but it just seems like Ace could take her pretty much singlehandedly. The real shame here is that while the puppet looks pretty decent, they really can't move it around very well most of the time, so it generally looks like a standing target whenever it's onscreen -- any hint of threat is lost in execution.

"Blissful, isn't it Doctor? The silence..." "Not quite; I can hear the sound of empires toppling."

This serial could have ended at the scene with Helen A encountering Fifi, and it would have been great. Just a kind of emotionally powerful scene that breaks down how the character was built in a logically consistent fashion. It'd make sense to end this episode on a sort of bittersweet note like this, given the general idea of the story.

...no, no, I changed my mind -- the ending with the handshake was fantastic! This Doctor got street cred.

This serial ended up putting a smile on my face, even though it was pretty shaky to start. I'm getting really comfortable with this Doctor and his companion, especially since we're seeing occasional character development and interaction beyond "wot's all this, doctor?".

 

[DrForester]

- Everytime I see Troughton's mug at the beginnings of eps, all I think of is this:

But he's definitely a capable and witty Doctor. I suppose I'll have to do some serious searching to complete his run since he was the biggest victim of the BBC episode-trashing.

And I can't see Iggy Pop without thinking of Deep Space Nine

 

[GameplayWhore]

Got back from Philcon last night. So tired. If there's one thing geeks know best, it's how to properly intoxicate people. This was a rather unusual science fiction convention, as the male to female ratio was very high, and the prettiest girls tended to either be lesbians, spoken for or (in the case of one quite nice looking fiery redhead) had the unfortunate tendency of going home before the parties started. But this was the very first SF Convention ever made, so I guess you can say that it's understandable that it fits some of the old stereotypes. Lots of good chatter, a couple nice panels on British television. Turns out that most folks in that region regard The Lodger as a high point of recent Who, which is interesting as I got the impression that most folks from across the pond are very much not fans of that particular episode.

Anyway, I'm behind, so here begins my catching up....

-----

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy starts with a rapping ringmaster. I can honestly tell you that I truly did not see this coming.

We get to see the future of spam at the beginning. Random robot creatures that teleport into your space ship and taunt you until you give in and buy their product.

The Doctor's chat with deadly ticket robot continues this close behavioral similarity that he has to Tennant's later performance. His way of suddenly chatterboxing until things happen to go his way is still a lot of fun, and I like it even better than how the latter Doctor did it.

This is kind of a weird episode. I suppose that's saying a lot given what show I'm watching.

Bizarrely, for a time, the creepiest character in this episode seems to be Harry Potter.

One interesting quirk of the McCoy era seems to be that blunt objects do massive damage to mechanical beings with very little effort. In the last serial (on the official marathon list), Ace was picking apart Daleks with a baseball bat. This time around, the doctor and a random new friend swing a few juggling clubs as lightly as one can possibly swing and knock out the evil clownbots with ease. I wonder if they'll bean a cyberman on the head with a flagpole next time around.

The Doctor gets a bit miffed at their slogan, "Fun For All The Family". But there's nothing actually wrong with it -- it's just that it's fun for one particular "The Family", the one sitting on the audience bench.

This episode goes on about being on another planet and well-travelled groups of outer space folk, but everything we see is pretty Earthy. Captain Cook, the famous intergalactic explorer, has both a name and an outfit that screams historic Britain. The circus has an entirely Earth standard circus look and feel (save for the clowns being robots). The girl seems to be... well, they're hinting that she's a typical Earth werewolf, though they haven't showed it yet.

Okay, they showed it. They handle the transformation in the dopiest possible manner.

I love how the Doctor is able to cull together the materials for a full magician act pretty much in a couple minutes.

This was a very, very odd, offbeat episode. I didn't dislike it, the writing was actually good, but they just went go-for-broke bizarre all the way. There was a lot of stuff going on, but everything that happened seemed paper-thin. But most of the characters had just enough fleshing out too keep a semblance of reality and to keep it enjoyable.

 

[GameplayWhore]

Here's wishing a Happy Thanksgiving and Black Friday in advance to the Yanks out there!

-----

The last few serials, as well as the beginning of The Curse of Fenric, has cemented one thing in my mind: Regardless of the on and off writing quality, I am really enjoying McCoy's Doctor. Any time he's not goofy, he's just bad-ass. And he has a really solid companion, possibly one of the best overall.

Good thing the Germans Russians (whoops) have nigh flawless British accents. Convenient for us that they were ordered early on to speak only English. (heh)

Wow, are those gills or scratches on his neck?

"In the future, there will be many more computing machine ... thinking machines" "Yes, but whose thoughts will they think?"

They kind of go overboard with the Millington immersing himself in German regalia in order to "think like the enemy", but I really enjoy watching him strut around in that outfit.

I keep wondering off and on if that clawed hand is a Zygon's.

I like how the Doctor challenges Ace to figure out what's special about that particular set of inscriptions. He's really making her think. This is a good dynamic which we almost never saw before this pairing and seldom saw afterward. It still allows for the viewer to experience the world vicariously through the companion, but it does this trick without making the companion seem like an utter git.

It's like the opposite of an Indiana Jones movie. This time, it's the English threatening to misuse some sort of mystical superweapon to win the war.

LOL, the always brilliant tactic of jumping out from a perfect sniper position, ignoring your guns and beating up on the enemy. (scratch that, the characters actually meant to have a silent ambush -- this is an example of bad viewer, not bad writer, though they probably could have used their guns as clubs instead of swinging their fists around)

Ace's interaction with the young mother shows off an excellent example of faux pas by way of cultural differences. It's not abnormal for a mother to be single in Ace's time, but the girl in the 1940s considers it an abhorrent insult. You seldom see this sort of element in time travel stories, so it's a very nice addition here.

"And the halftime score, Perivale: six hundred million, rest of the universe: nil."

 

[mattiewheels]

After watching Troughton's 'The Invasion' with the animated missing episodes, it makes me sad that they never planned to do any more that way. Apparently it was too costly, but those were such a tease for a beautiful solution to the whole missing eps thing.

 

[GameplayWhore]

After watching Troughton's 'The Invasion' with the animated missing episodes, it makes me sad that they never planned to do any more that way. Apparently it was too costly, but those were such a tease for a beautiful solution to the whole missing eps thing.

I kind of wanted more of this, too. We can rest happy knowing that the Benjamin Button / Tron Legacy cgi-mask technology will likely one day make it possible and cheap to redo these episodes with the older actors' likenesses. And then we get to look forward to "The Fifteen Doctors". They'll basically spend an hour in a room bitching about each other while the Masters high five themselves about how great they are.


-----

(more on "Fenric"...)

The characters here are incredibly pragmatic for a Doctor Who serial. They meet up with the unknown scary monsters, casually chat about how vampires can't possibly exist, and then start sharpening some stakes, just to be on the safe side. Normally, by this point they would have futilely unloaded every single magazine in their armory and would be running around randomly in terror.

I love it when the general trope about crosses and vampires are subverted. There's a great story, I don't know where from, wherein a businessman is terrorized by these undead creatures. He tries to fend them off with a cross or a bible or something of the sort, but they laugh it out. For whatever reason, his wallet comes out or falls out, and the creatures retreat, because his faith is in currency. In this story, the Russian's belief in his motherland, and this is enough to protect him. (after writing this, I checked TV Tropes -- they make mention of the above story but also don't know where it comes from)

They're building up tensions between Ace and the Doctor. This feels like a long term story arc thing.

Ahh, thank goodness the Soviets are always around to save us from the evil Brits....wait, what?

The villain (well, one of them) here has an incredible achilles heel, the obsession with challenging games. Thankfully, it's not used in a Two-Face-esque final defeat manner, but instead it furthers Ace's development, involves itself in some good character moments that happen just prior and during, and leads into -- but doesn't cause -- the actual resolution of the serial, which is an excellent way of treating this kind of character trait.

That's a great moment.... "In thirty years, the baby will be grown. She will have a daughter. That daughter will be you. You've just created your own future. The baby is your mother, the mother you hate". This should have been a hackneyed moment, but it felt pretty amazing. And there's just enough in the overall Ace storyline to support the possibility that the events of this episode were planned so far in advance, that she actually was a cog in this character's long-term, manipulative game.

Wow. Wow. That ending was wow. It was really good. I saw where everything was going, then everything suddenly flipped on its head and ended in a manner completely opposite of what I was expecting. And the ending made complete sense and was properly set up and foreshadowed. I don't suppose Moffat wrote this in secret then sent it back in time, eh? This episode was outstanding, at least at the level of Inferno. A very logically put together story with powerful emotions and just enough unpredictability to put the viewer on their toes.

I look very highly forward to watching more McCoy stories, especially if they're written by the same author.

As a side note, Wikipedia notes that the scientist in this episode was modeled after Alan Turing. Coincidentally, my class is currently covering Turing Machines.

 

[GameplayWhore]

Survival is McCoy's second to last adventure, the final one in which he does anything of actual import. At the recent Philadelphia Science Fiction Convention, I did hear murmurings that he is in fact seen as a good Doctor who would have worked well with a few more quality seasons.

Hmmm, a creepy cat episode, a monster that kills in first person view, and a subdued villain controlling everything from behind the scenes.

Ha! at the poster for the musical "CATS!"

The fighting teacher seems pretty sadistic on the surface, but it's obvious that his heart is in the right place.

Fun scene where the shopkeepers sarcastically explain which irresistable qualities are attached to which cat foods by way of advertising. Clever way of getting them to talk about cats, at that.

Ace goes around asking why her friends have mysteriously disappeared. It's fitting that she gets the responses she gets, as she was the first one to mysteriously disappear.

I'm really, really happy that the baddie behind this is the Master. He's playing the so subtly that it almost makes me forgot how over the top they made him just a few years ago.

The Doctor, being perhaps the Ultimate Pacifict Survivalist, pairs and contrasts well with the Military Self-Defense Survivalist here. The planet they've been transported to feels suitably alien (they really did go through some good scouting and effects work to make one of the better alien worlds yet), and the fellow is doing a decent job of being a fish out of water.

The Master continues to be awesome. He's the god of his own little realm. He does not take it for granted, and he scowls as he ponders how to best keep and/or increase his influence. He hasn't done that stupid laugh once yet. He straight up gives the impression of being an incredibly intelligent person who happens to have negative aims. He's no longer the British Joker, and he's no longer some Inherent Embodiment of Evil. He's just the Master, and I think this may be the best I've ever seen him at doing so. It helps that they remembered that he has powers over the minds of others -- and not just while swinging a watch in front of their eyes -- and that for once they're being clever and leveraging it a little differently than they've done it before.

"Master, who's he?" "An evil genius; one of my oldest, deadliest of enemies." "Do you know any nice people? You know, ordinary people, not power-crazed Nazis trying to take over the galaxy?" "I don't think he's trying to take over the galaxy this time."

 

[Dr Zhivago]

Yeah, McCoy was just getting good when the show was cancelled.

 

[Lard]

They had a great plan with McCoy, I would have loved to see what they were going to do with it.

If you like later McCoy seasons, I recommend tracking down some of the Virgin New Adventure books.

The NAs went on a really good direction with McCoy.

 

[GameplayWhore]

They had a great plan with McCoy, I would have loved to see what they were going to do with it.

If you like later McCoy seasons, I recommend tracking down some of the Virgin New Adventure books.

I may tackle those, especially if I can find them on audio. I think I prefer the alternate universe where the show wasn't canceled and they continued on their planned path. I say this because I just took a peek at the first bits of the 1995 movie, and ... wow.

-----

(back to "Survival")

The Cheetahmen look like monsters, but they act like a species with a culture, if a primitive, animalistic one. They aren't just mindless killing zombie creatures. This is a very mature story for a tale about giant cat men who eat people.

Fangy Master is kinda creepy.

The Master made a big todo about how there's no way to escape the planet they're on, which is doomed, and that he is relying on the Doctor to figure out a solution to allow him to escape. Then, two scenes later, he transports to Earth without the Doctor's help. Sloppy, but I'm enjoying this too much to be really bugged by it.

Seeing the Master struggling to regain and retain his Gallifrenity pretty much makes him as three dimensional as we've ever seen him. Granted, he's sort of devolving into a simpler personality, but somehow it's still more complex than most of the times in the past he's been portrayed.

Apparently, the episode after this is called "The Enemy Within". Oddly, from my hazy memory of watching it a decade and a half ago, I can't recall why it would connect with that particular title, but the serial we're watching here fits it perfectly. Actually, they probably could have gotten away with swapping the two titles and no one would have been the wiser.

Thing is..... Thing is, I know this it the last episode with Ace. Question is, did the producers know this at the time? If so, well, she's in a pretty precarious position here, and they could just as likely get rid of her as not. So I actually feel a bit worried for the character, knowing that one way or another we'll never see her again.

Ahhh, he lets off one contented snicker after winning what he thinks is the day. This is the Master I love. Lets hope that future episodes have him exactly like this.

Totally didn't see the flit back to the cat planet near the end. Seriously, as a show finisher, this is pretty pull-out-the-stops. It has the main villain, the main character is put into mortal and a bit more personal danger, the last fight is on an exploding apocalyptic wasteland, confusing shit happens, and the sidekick wears the hero's hat. In the end, characters are given lasting changes (well, at least, Ace is now different on some fundamental level).

This episode was great. Back when we were painfully sloughing through the Colin Baker serials, it would have been laughable to suggest that Doctor Who would soon end not only on a high note, but with two extremely strong episodes, one of them among the best of the lot and the other a genuinely strong effort which may very well be the best of the episodes with the Master.

 

[GameplayWhore]

1996 movie ... too painful ... couldn't watch in longer than ten-minute patches ... anger can't be limited to one review!!!! will intersperse commentary on it in many posts attached to other episode rundowns ... only way to survive....

-----

The Enemy Within starts on a note that the Master was put on trial on Skaro. Wait, wasn't that planet destroyed? Oh, right, time travel. But, wait, wasn't the planet taken over by Daleks before it was destroyed? Oh, right, time travel. But, wait, didn't the planet go through centuries of devastating war before the Daleks were created and took it over? Oh, right, time travel. You know, if the Time Lords were content enough to put the Master on trial on Skaro before the big war started, don't you think they'd, I dunno, be kind enough to warn the Kaleds about the impending war so that it could be avoided? I mean, most Dalek episodes after this suck anyway, so the Time Lords would have kind of done us a service by getting rid of them while they had the opportunity..

Intro's improved since the Colin/McCoy era, though it's still not great.

There's a level of pretention here that goes quite a bit beyond wearing a shirt with question marks. The clocks all over the place, the novel that the Doctor's reading, the song lyrics, the slow motion scenes.... Meanwhile, all the explanation we're getting out of the plot come in the way of a rather awkward and melodramatic narration.

This seems like a "bang the point into the audience's head awkwardly" episode. We were already told where and when we are, so does that kid need to say the year out loud as he's signing the hospital forms? On the positive side, I do appreciate the name he chose to write on there, since it keeps a very subtle bit of continuity going.

-----
(now on to the New Who Era...)

Rose, the titular main character of this episode, is often charged with being the first companion to be utterly smitten with the Doctor. As we saw from watching the 1996 movie attempt (or will see, since I'm saving more of that pain for later), the girl there actually beat her to the punch.

The cameraman has a mannequin fetish. But can it really be called foreshadowing when the relevant action starts a minute later?

I like how the events here start from the perspective of the girl. We don't see the Doctor finding his new companion. Instead, we see the new companion being found by the girl.

The pace at the beginning is incredibly quick, but the characters' personalities and backgrounds seem to have been well thought out. In the first five or so minutes past the opening intro (which, by the way, has improved so much since the Colin/McCoy era), you see the Doctor, Rose, her boyfriend, her mother and the primary villains, and you get a really good feel for all of them.

"What are you doing here?" "I live here?" "Well, whatcha do that for?"
"I'm in my dressing gown." "Yes, you are." "There's a strange man in my bedroom." "Yes, there is." "Well, anything could happen." ".....no."

This is the second time, I believe, that we get a new Doctor without seeing a regeneration sequence (not counting the first doc, obviously). Here's the question: Was the Doctor killed by these Autons we just saw, or a little bit earlier in some other escapade?

The Doctor is trying to be short and difficult to chat with. He's not outright trying to get a companion here.

Having a fellow tracking the Doctor's appearances throughout history on the Internet is a pretty brilliant way to give people more depth to the Doctor's story for new audiences without going into the pound-you-in-the-head tactics of the '96 movie. He also brings a nice counterpoint to the goodguyness so far professed by this Doctor. And, lol, Rose's boyfriend has an adorably pathetic "dangerous" face.

Ha! Rose is so stymied by the whole TARDIS thing that she momentarily forgets she's being chased and is running for her life and goes for a quick walkabout around the box to make sure she's not gone nutty. I think I'd be daft enough to do that, too.

lol, "antiplastic".

The plot of this episode is pretty thin -- simple villain, no real mystery involved and a pretty straightforward, high concept solution to the problem. But it very obviously lays down some cool foundation for upcoming stories and strongly hints about things going on in the recent past (references to the war and not being able to save the Nestene planets), and the character-based stuff is really excellent.

 

[Dr Zhivago]

This is the second time, I believe, that we get a new Doctor without seeing a regeneration sequence (not counting the first doc, obviously). Here's the question: Was the Doctor killed by these Autons we just saw, or a little bit earlier in some other escapade?

Unknown. Most people assume Paul McGann regenerated as a result of the Time War, but there's nothing official.