Dr Who

(24-11-2013 15:52 )bytor Wrote:  Seeing Tom Baker made me yearn for his return. Pertwee and Baker were by far my favourites. Their Doctors had a depth of character and used their brains to resolve problems logically, rather than run around all over the place and coming up with bizarre and seemingly random resolutions.

Exactly, and usually involving that bloody sonic screwdriver.

I found it great in parts and yes the bit with tom Baker was a nice touch, but however I think had we experienced the 3D effects that was shown in the cinema at home it would have been more enjoyable.
was a bit disappointed that maybe more could have been done with the other doctors (Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee Mcoy, Davidson, et al). To limit them to that small segment when they came into the story was too short and I felt that didn't do their parts any justice. It would have been nice to have had Davidson's doctor involved more. I agree John Hurt would have been fantastic as a doctor. (Was he ever offered the role and I guess if the Spielberg film that was mooted to be in development at one time, and if it had been made), that probably would have when he would have been involved. I am looking forward to Christmas specials. (I think now they have been established as being a part of Christmas TV)
And I think have we really seen the last of the Daleks? It would be great to see Peter Capaldi's introduction see him come up against them. And one storyline for the future I would live to see is him being pitched againast the Ogrons (the ape like allies of the Daleks in "Day of the Daleks" from Pertwee's era) or maybe the Sea Devils make a return. What do you guys think?

The program could have been great but I found it a mess. John Hurt simply didn't work for me. Time for some multi episode adventures and less trying to get a feature film's worth of action into 45 mins.

(24-11-2013 16:35 )Digital Dave Wrote:  

(24-11-2013 15:52 )bytor Wrote:  Seeing Tom Baker made me yearn for his return. Pertwee and Baker were by far my favourites. Their Doctors had a depth of character and used their brains to resolve problems logically, rather than run around all over the place and coming up with bizarre and seemingly random resolutions.

Exactly, and usually involving that bloody sonic screwdriver.

I did like John Hurt taking the p**s out of that - "What's with the pointing ?"

I hope Elizabeth the 1st is not going to be a recurring character. That stuff was just embarrassing.

And haven't we already done to death the comedy potential of Matt Smith falling out of the TARDIS while flying over London, wasn't that in his first story ?

I didn't mind a lot of the other comedy between the Doctors - the 10th and 20th anniversary specials also made play of grumpiness and comedy interaction between the different versions of the Doctor as part of his character; and you got the sense it was also done in a spirit of putting the words of the fan criticisms into the mouths of the various Doctors themselves - particularly John Hurt taking the mickey out of Tennant and Smith for being juvenile; so I thought that was reasonably well done.

The "stasis paintings" were a nice way of inventing a plot point to justify a 3D gimmick.

But I agree the Zygon plot was totally unresolved. They seemed to be a bit wasted - I think they were very well reimagined but deserved to be reintroduced in a story wholly about them and not as a kind of filler for a story which was really at the end of the day much more about the Doctor's own personal moral choice in the Time War.

So for me the Zygons got the short end of the stick and were just perfunctorily dropped to get on with the "main event" finale of "saving" Gallifrey.

Are they all still there ? Humans and Zygons have just agreed to be nice to each other ? Zygons don't know they are Zygons anymore and all the people that were copied over hundreds of years have just got identical twins walking around ?

And as a result is Matt Smith not really piling up all these un-foiled invasions of Earth : the Silence?, the Silurians ? and I imagine there are probably a few more I haven't even seen.

Not having watched any of the last couple of Matt Smith's seasons or specials I was dreading having to follow Moffat's tortuous plotting and references to episodes I haven't seen.

But apart from oblique references to the Doctor's future death and "Trensilore(?)" (Has the Doctor been killed by Moffat yet again, is this another "death" that we're going to see magically reversed at the end of a future season - oh spare me please this is getting so old I don't think I missed out on much.

I would say if you hadn't a clue about the whole way the mythology of the Time War has affected the Doctor's character and how that has been built up over the all the seasons in recent years you might have been left slightly wondering what all the fuss was about :

There's the odd bit of flash back to an epic looking Dalek War with John Hurt really going for it, albeit just shooting up a wall rather than any actual Daleks. (Probably more casual viewers are expecting to see a lot more of this type of thing, as it seems more like a big epic 50th anniversary type event ?). But no instead we see quite a lot of John Hurt sitting in a shed talking to Billie Piper - John Hurt and Billie Piper being very good in my opinion, but still just basically sitting talking and then showing him a bit of his future. It's like Jimmy Stewart in It's A Wonderful Life with Billie Piper as Clarence the Angel ; or possibly Scrooge and the ghost of Christmas future ? Makes me think this might have made a lot more sense if it had been presented as the Xmas special gimmick, no ? Maybe that would have been too cute. Then John Hurt meets his two other selves in a forest for some light comedy, and then they sit in a dungeon to do some more taking the piss out of each other , while in between times some reasonably scary but possibly under-explained shape-shifting orange foetuses with fangs menance the side-lined Doctor's assistant and try to take over the Tower of London for some reason - 3 Doctors turn up and stop this in an instant in a way nobody quite knows how - but hey quick skip over that now here's ALL the Doctors , most of whom you probably can't even remember doing some whizzing about in their TARDISes and hey presto we're done. Oh look, there's that old one who used to have the hat and the scarf, remember him, he was good, doesn't he look old, haven't seen him for years, he's Little Britain Voice isn't he, oh is that the end ?

Yeah that's a fairly indigestible paragraph right there, but that's what possibly what it felt like to the uninitiated watching it.

So from the point of view of those just tuning in for it as a one-off event and it being accessible to anybody who had even half-watched the Ecclestone or David Tennant versions and have since then given up, I would say it was probably reasonably entertaining enough : but maybe not as ultra spectacular as all the hype might have suggested ? Realistically the programme couldn't have coped with THAT many previous Doctors having too big a part to play in the action, it's really a different programme now and most of the actors are either dead or too old now.


It was a reasonably entertaining bit of fluff and it did seem to move along at a pace that meant it didn't outstay its welcome, and didn't end with a cliffhanger non-ending to try to make you tune in to a future episode. And that's more than you can say for a lot of self-important TV drama these days.

Decided to celebrate Dr Who's 50th anniversary by buying the Jon Pertwee classic, The Daemons.
A shame that the one thing that the BBC have failed to do is run a select screening of episodes portraying all the previous Doctors. Who the fuck wanted that after party shite on bbc3 last night with Zygon Ball and her 'jobs for the boys' mates.

As someone else posted, I feel Dr Who would benefit from stronger storylines spread over several episodes rather than the rushed efforts we now see so often.

(24-11-2013 20:08 )bytor Wrote:  Decided to celebrate Dr Who's 50th anniversary by buying the Jon Pertwee classic, The Daemons.
A shame that the one thing that the BBC have failed to do is run a select screening of episodes portraying all the previous Doctors. Who the fuck wanted that after party shite on bbc3 last night with Zygon Ball and her 'jobs for the boys' mates.

As someone else posted, I feel Dr Who would benefit from stronger storylines spread over several episodes rather than the rushed efforts we now see so often.

Weren't the Daemons sort of Satan like creatures? remind me.

Also i'd love to see them go back to the way the original series were done each story broken up into several episodes. At least back then you could see a good storyline developing. i'd be just as happy to see more two or maybe three part episodes.

(24-11-2013 20:08 )bytor Wrote:  Decided to celebrate Dr Who's 50th anniversary by buying the Jon Pertwee classic, The Daemons.
A shame that the one thing that the BBC have failed to do is run a select screening of episodes portraying all the previous Doctors. Who the fuck wanted that after party shite on bbc3 last night with Zygon Ball and her 'jobs for the boys' mates.

As someone else posted, I feel Dr Who would benefit from stronger storylines spread over several episodes rather than the rushed efforts we now see so often.

The very first story "An Unearthly Child" was shown on BBC 4 last week after the "Adventure in Space and Time" drama about the Making of Dr Who (which was actually quite watchable)

If you've got Virgin TV, or know somebody that has, you can catch a bunch of classic episodes in their On Demand section just now as part of the 50th anniversary :

City of Death (Tom Baker)
Planet of The Daleks (Jon Pertwee)
Remembrance of the Daleks (Sylvester McCoy)
The Daemons (Jon Pertwee)
Tomb of the Cybermen (Patrick Troughton)
Trial of a Timelord (Colin Baker)
Genesis of the Daleks (Tom Baker)
Ghost Light (Sylvester McCoy)
Resurrection of the Daleks (Peter Davison)
Caves of Androzani (Peter Davison)
The Three Doctors (Jon Pertwee / Patrick Troughton / William Hartnell)
The Movie (Paul McGann)
The Time Meddler (William Hartnell)
The Two Doctors (Colin Baker / Patrick Troughton)
Vengeance on Varos (Colin Baker)
Web of Fear (Patrick Troughton - epsiodes only recently rediscovered, DVD not due until 2014 I think)

as well as all the New Who series 1 - 6 including all the specials and 4 series worth of "Dr Who Confidential" (if you really must?!)

Not sure how long they'll be on for; but they've been up for at least a month in the run up to the anniversary and are still all there at the moment.

These are usually free to watch as part of the subscription if you have one of the larger TV package bundles, rather than pay per view on an individual story basis. As with most On Demand programmes they're encrypted so unfortunately you can't record them.

I was just thinking how in past Who storylines, there have often been hidden messages in anagrams of characters names, so I have been mucking round with the new character and came up with :

THE WAR DOCTOR = WHO DETRACTOR

It may be complete nonsense but you know the way the writers think.

(24-11-2013 20:24 )babelover48 Wrote:  

(24-11-2013 20:08 )bytor Wrote:  Decided to celebrate Dr Who's 50th anniversary by buying the Jon Pertwee classic, The Daemons.

Weren't the Daemons sort of Satan like creatures? remind me.

Yeah - there was basically a giant alien Demon with beard and horns and with hooved legs who was hidden in a buried spaceship who was the last of some all-powerful race that had basically controlled Earth's development a la Quatermass and the Pit and whom the Master was conjuring up to get his powers off him. The Master also had a henchman-creature that was a sort of living "gargoyle" which was probably an inspiration for the "Weeping Angel" statues.
The Daemons is a pretty good story - the original Master and UNIT are in it; and it is a mix of things like Quatermass and the Midwich Cuckoos/Village of the Damned (for the idea of a country village cut off by an alien forcefield, but not the creepy alien children), It even has a TV channel news documentary being made in it for "BBC Three" in it with a really annoying presenter working for it - a pretty good prediction for 1971!