On the Sofa (part 2)
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27 May 2013 at 08:50 #11104
A slightly new sofa, until I work out what was happening to the links to the old one.
You can still visit the old sofa here:
27 May 2013 at 09:48 #11108Ooh, nice new sofa 🙂 Tardis blue, with a built in fish tank!
Thanks @craig (Hope we haven’t broken the other one!)
27 May 2013 at 09:57 #11110@Shazzbot – my post about the Sky/Dr scene in Midnight wasn’t directed at anyone in particular, just that @phaseshift‘s great post of the Clara/Vastra/Jenny scene put me in mind of it (and it’s one of my fav stories).
Speaking of fav stories, anyone got any suggestions how to limit your list to 20??? 😉
27 May 2013 at 10:49 #11117Ooooh. A Chesterfield!
27 May 2013 at 13:54 #11132Announcement – The Doctor Who Forum Lost Property Department
Found down behind the cushions during Sofa Maintenance
1 x Rubber Duck wearing miniature Fez
1 x Quantas Club Lounge Entry Card (Expired)
3 x Avatars (Low Res)
1 x Gentleman style underpant (slightly soiled)
1 x empty bottle Montes Alpha MerlotIf you wish to claim any of the above on sentimental grounds, please contact us at the usual address.
Sundry comestibles including 4 Maltesers, a “wham” bar, a half eaten Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer and 27 Jammie Dodgers have been fed to our natural herd of Billy Goats.
The collection of loose coinage of various international currencies netted approx £1.37 GBP, and has been donated to “The Benevolent Care fund for the families of Slaughtered Trolls.”
27 May 2013 at 14:05 #11133Just a quick note for any fans – “Horrible Histories” returns to CBBC today at 16:30!
If you have any thoughts on how you are going to fill your TV hours in between now and November why not tell us on our General TV thread? We may all need some recommendations as it’s going to be a looooonggg wait.
27 May 2013 at 14:06 #11134Anonymous @
@phaseshift – only one empty wine bottle? Have you checked the recycle bin? 🙂
27 May 2013 at 17:39 #11137I’m doing this math project which requires me to ask people questions for a poll of sorts. So can you answer this question?Which genre of TV or Web-series do you watch?Reality, Drama, Action, Mystery, Sci-fi, Comedy or Cartoons (Animes included)
I thank you for your wibbly wobbly timey wimy…stuff.
27 May 2013 at 23:25 #11156The TV Movie is 17 today! Is the ‘sequel’ due in 6 months?
28 May 2013 at 19:36 #11236
Happy Birthday, Kylie!28 May 2013 at 19:46 #11238Left to right: @wolfweed, @phaseshift, @chickenelly, @pedant, and @craig all wonder which Kylie to put forward in TCGT (The Commonwealth’s Got Talent).
28 May 2013 at 19:55 #1124228 May 2013 at 20:47 #11247I don’t think they got my best side….
29 May 2013 at 11:02 #11290Hi @denvaldron
Just in case you missed it, some Cushing love on the Guardian (because of the DVD and Blue Ray reissues of the films)http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2013/may/28/doctor-who-1960s-video
Just ignore the commenters!
29 May 2013 at 11:09 #11294@pedant – “I don’t think they got my best side….”
It took me two hours to get your comment. 😆
29 May 2013 at 19:18 #11341Always signpost your special spots…
30 May 2013 at 12:30 #11362Just wanted a quick bounce on the new sofa.
I just finished reading “Shada” the ‘sort-of-lost’ Doctor Who story by Douglas Adams (finished off by Gareth Roberts). I haven’t read any Who fiction before but needed something to fill gap and this seemed like a good choice as I’m lead to believe it is canon. I’d recommend it to you all. It’s set in the Tom Baker years and has a good bit of Timelord/Gallifrey history in it.
I also signed up for a months trial of NetFlix to see the new Arrested Development episodes and was pleasantly surprised to see it has a number of Classic Who episodes, Cartoons, all the Ecclestone & Tennant eps and the McGann TV movie! Not bad to keep me entertained for free for a month 🙂 I just re-watched ‘Rose’ and it was a rather odd experience considering what has changed in the show over the last 8 years
30 May 2013 at 14:14 #11369@thommck – perhaps you could give some of your thoughts over on the ‘Faces of the Doctor’ thread? I agree, watching ‘Rose’ now, with all the intervening history and arcs and new Doctors and character losses / development etc, is a weird experience. For me, it feels like how River describes 10 in Silence in the Library: ‘It’s like seeing an old photograph of a friend, from before when you knew them, and they look … unformed somehow.’ [paraphrased]
If you have thoughts on changes in the Doctor – perhaps after getting your Netflix Doctor Who re-watches under your belt! – you should post something describing your take on those changes.
31 May 2013 at 01:00 #11414Can someone here explain in simple words what canon stands for? I found several things but nothing seems to fit really. I can either mean rule or a lot of stuff related to church such as canon law or canon (list of saints?!?) as well as a special kind of song canon (several people singing the same lines but not in sync-someone is always starting while another one is ending and another one is in the middle of the song…) makes me think of cannons as well ^^” and I am honestly confused.
What is a canon and what does it not have to to do with DW?Thanks in advance!
[P.S.: Oh and honestly the first thing that came to my mind were cameras. A name of a camera manufacturer…. Canon – which is only a name with no meaning to my knowledge. But I am eager o learn.]
31 May 2013 at 01:06 #11415Hello Sweeties,
Teaser before bedtime. Picking on the hivemind again for something I’m thinking of pitching and writing. Who do we think are the Doctor’s most rubbishest opponents? Those most easily defeated? Aside from the Daleks (diminishing returns), the Cybermen (gold/bad scripts) and Melody (being in love with him) …from both old and new, who does everyone think, “oh just go home love and let’s not even bother with this 4 parter?”
Jammie Dodgers all round for the most fun suggestions. And we’re celebrating #RiverSongDay over on the Gruan tomorrow (today)
x
31 May 2013 at 01:21 #11417@timeloop: Canon = officially accepted. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_(fiction) for details.
31 May 2013 at 01:26 #11418@danmartinuk – first of all, you post at 01:06 and describe it as ‘before bedtime’? Dontcha know tomorrow is a work day??! We Whovians do have actual lives, thank-you-very-much. 🙂 (erm, slightly diluted by my replying to you even later than your post. {sigh} )
You have a major flaw in your thesis, if you are including Melody Pond i.e. River Song as a ‘rubbish opponent’. Shame on you, shame. She is the one who pointed out that the signature Tardis sound of ‘eeeh-hhhaaa-eewww-hhhha’ was simply due to Him Indoors leaving the brakes on all the time. 😀
Speaking of the delectable Alex Kingston (and I post as a solidly hetero female!) I’m glad the Guardian is recognising River Song Day. It’s the least you could do. 😆
btw, Autons, anyone?
31 May 2013 at 01:31 #11419First of all, I’d love to see a 4 parter in the next season.
The Slitheen were pretty bad and the maggots in the Green Death were pretty feeble. The ‘minotaur’ in Nimon. The Abzorbaloff, ’nuff said.
31 May 2013 at 01:35 #11420@whohar – Of course, the Abzorbaloff! The most rubbish of them all. @danmartinuk, take note. 😀
31 May 2013 at 01:35 #11421@danmartinuk I don’t know about being easily defeated, because having seen a trailer I couldn’t be bothered to watch the actual episode, but in terms of naff ideas for DW opponents I think the adipose have to be a leading contender; they look like cuddly marshmallows. And in a similar vein from Classic Who there’s Bertie Bassett – sorry, I mean the Kandy Man. I did watch that adventure, unfortunately.
31 May 2013 at 01:41 #11422@mtgradwell – but that episode wasn’t about the Adipose being an ‘opponent’, it was instead the ‘Nanny’ who was supposed to be the monster/opponent. And she was Quite Interesting as an opponent/monster, in that she was supremely sure of her correctness and equally doomed to die as a result of that.
Drat, you’re right, the Nanny was actually pretty rubbish. But at least it brought the Doctor and Donna together again. They were a magic duo, those two. {sigh}
31 May 2013 at 01:42 #1142331 May 2013 at 01:44 #11424Adolf in Let’s Kill Hitler.
31 May 2013 at 02:15 #11425Adolf…brilliant!
31 May 2013 at 02:38 #11428Any suggestions from the realm of Doc’s 1 or 2?
I’m only seen a few episodes, so not best placed to comment on them. The Krotons come to mind as looking a bit daft but I don’t know if they were easily defeatable or not.
31 May 2013 at 04:50 #11429Funnily enough, two of the most rubbish monsters come from two of my all-time favourite Hartnell episodes.
In the absolutely brilliant “Dalek Invasion of Earth”, that saw the heart-rending exit of Susan, there is this thing called a Slyther. Well, anyone who has seen that episode will know what I am talking about! Even the impressionable 12-year old that I was when I watched it could tell that this giant fungus that was very unsteady on its feet and sounded like it was suffering from a bad case of croup was, well, embarrassing!
The other was from another favourite episode, “The Chase”, that saw the departure of Ian and Barbara back to 1960s London. It was the robot version of the Doctor created by the Daleks. Unlike the tesalector version of 11 (that fooled most of us), this poor duplicate unfortunately looked nothing like William Hartnell! Come to think of it, even the Daleks were pretty rubbish in that story. But to be fair, it was, for the most part, played for laughs.
Ah, but somehow, in spite of those two rubbish monsters, those two episodes of Doctor Who will remain fondly in my memories forever. Why? Because the show was always more than the sum of its rubbish monsters. And that is why I am still here, enthusing over the show.
31 May 2013 at 05:31 #11431@timeloop Doctor Who has no canon. RTD and SM agree on this. All stories are Doctor Who stories. (That last sentence is my opinion, heavily informed by the dude at the TARDIS Eruditorium site, not RTD or SM. Wanted to make that clear.)
31 May 2013 at 07:46 #11432Rubbishest monsters – good idea – are you going to do a top monsters as well btw?
Agree with several above re Abzorbaloff, but the little Adipose were cute! Problem with naming and shaming DW monsters is that although the costumes/models were sometimes, objectively speaking, awful (giant clams anyone?), often the idea behind them was scary enough to transcend their appearance eg someone is bound to mention the Zarbi and the Sensorites, both of which had me behind the sofa and thinking about them for months after. Seen in hi def production pics you can see the joins (and often the strings!) but seen through fingers over 6yo eyes on a 60s TV screen they were terrifying! (Much the same point made by @blenkinsopthebrave above)
Speaking of should be crap but are actually very scary – Troughton and Pertwee Who got an amazing amount of mileage out of foam creeping up a pipe! The seaweed monster in Fury from the Deep for example, was terrifying. (And it had Oak and Quill as backup!
I found the Mara really creepy – until the reveal of what it actually looked like blew any possibility of suspension of disbelief completely out the window. “OK everyone, you must hold these mirrors and make sure the puppet doesn’t escape” – nice idea, but there are gaps everywhere in the circle!
Sorry – back to rubbish monsters – Well, as @whohar mentioned the maggots in Green Death look pretty feeble in daylight and the animation is dire, but again the green slime slapping up a pipe and the IDEA of giant maggots worked for me. And then there’s that cliffhanger, with Jo 😉
For truly awful I’d have to nominate either the War Machines (Hartnell) – again, BIG mistake to film in daylight, and for a superbrain WOTAN seemed pretty feeble. The War Machines themselves looked like cardboard boxes playing at being daleks. On the other hand it was the story that introduced Ben and Polly so it’s hard to hate it.
My top nomination would be the Dominators – you just can’t take them seriously, what with the shoulder pads and the squabbling; and especially the Quarks, who looked like they’d fall over if you blew on them too hard! The kind of look that a 3 year old would be embarrassed by as a fancy dress costume! And about as effective.
31 May 2013 at 08:00 #11433@danmartinuk #RiverSongDay on the Graun – yay! Better get the armour plating ready tho – that’ll bring out more trolls than a Fellowship of Hobbits on a quest!
31 May 2013 at 08:12 #11434Re canon. haha – Who fans even argue over the canonicity of the canonicity of its canon.
For me, and this is just a personal view, the following were established in An Unearthly Child –
1 The Doctor is called the Doctor ( 😉 )
2 He’s not from earth
3 He’s a time & space traveller
4 He’s got a Tardis (even in the Pertwee years, when he was grounded, the Tardis was still a story-driver)
Now obviously whoever’s currently making the show has the final say on how/what they want to write and they could throw all that out the window if they want – in a show about a timetravelling alien with access to the massive tech that’s the Tardis it’s remarkably easy to reinvent anything and everything – but those 4 things encapsulate the magic of Dr Who for me.
31 May 2013 at 08:25 #11435We Whovians do have actual lives, thank-you-very-much
Errrr…..
@whohar – for those over the age of 18, a quick test is: in which life do I have to pay the rent/gas bill/mortgage?
The other one is the real one. 🙂
31 May 2013 at 08:41 #11436I think the adipose have to be a leading contender; they look like cuddly marshmallows.
@mtgradwell – the adipose were supposed to look like cuddly marshmallows. They’re baby adipose; looking cute and cuddly is a baby’s main defence mechanism.
They were a counterpoint to the Doctor and Donna’s first meeting – where he killed off all the baby Racnoss. The evil Nanny probably would have been more suited to the Sarah Jane Adventures – I remember thinking at the time that she’d wandered in after being made redundant from the alien fizzy drinks factory – but she was in Who’s long line of managerial/corporate-villains.
31 May 2013 at 08:57 #11437‘Canon’ in fan slang does derive from ‘Canon Law’. It is all material accepted as ‘official’; for example, in the universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ‘canon’ is the TV episodes and those comic books later approved by Joss Whedon, Buffy’s creator. Generally, if a writer on a show deviates from (usually) previously broadcast ‘canon’, they’d better have a damn good explanation handy for the fans.
To use a Buffy example, in Season Five, Buffy suddenly acquired a never-before-mentioned sister; an event that broke the show’s previous ‘canon’. It turned out that Joss Whedon did have the said damn good explanation. 🙂
Some Whovians take this, and argue that the television episodes of Doctor Who are ‘canon’. Future Who writers should base their continuity on the broadcast TV episodes. If no Daleks escaped from the battle of Exxilon in the original story, you can’t later introduce Dalek survivors of Exxilon.
This is despite the fact that both Post Gap showrunners have explicitly said ‘there is no canon’. Who is a show about time-travel, and one of its rules is that The Doctor can change time. There is NO fixed version of past events, even if we did see it happen on the telly. There never was; even the Pre Gap writers changed stuff.
31 May 2013 at 10:02 #11439@danmartinuk – my list of the truly awful monsters:
The Loch Ness Monster (Skarasen). Mainly a special effects failure – but even as a kid, I was ‘is that a rubber turtle, or a toy dinosaur?’ It was rubbish! That monster completely destroyed any sense of drama the second it appeared.
Shockeye from The Two Doctors. Both Doctors must have been suffering brain damage from the Androgum transfusion to let that particular adventure go on as long as it did. And the giant red eyebrows really deserved a series of their own…
Ogrons – they were just plain dull.
From the Post Gap Series
The Scribble Monsters in Fear Her. The idea of being trapped in a painting has been done so much better (in the Five Doctors – only there it was being trapped as a wall sculpture for eternity).
Soloman’s robots in Dinosaurs on a spaceship. One of those ideas that must have looked good on the page, probably looked fine on the set, and very possibly sounded okay in the recording suite. It was just that – when you put it all together – these were the least scary killer robots Who had ever invented. Even when they were firing at the cast, the only fear I felt was that they might irritate me to death.
31 May 2013 at 10:49 #11440@timeloop @bluesqueakpip — there is no canon, true enough, as both RTD and The Moff have said. And even if there was, the Moff has definitely killed it off now…
@danmartinuk — worst monsters, good idea. For me the ‘worst’ ones are the ones that are in stories that would otherwise be stonking classics — the clams in Genesis of the Daleks, the Giant Rat in Talons. They have an effect of distracting from the narrative. I still don’t know why no one has done a Talons special edition with a decent CGI rat in it.
But worst one of all time. Possibly the Myrka surely. I’ve always thought that Drashigs were a bit rubbish too. I never could understand why they were one of the Third Doctor’s ‘scariest’ memories. But I’d go for the Raston Warrior Robot. The most perfect killing machine ever devised — but unfortunately looks like a mincing performance artist at the Brighton Fringe. Kills most of its prey by making them laugh themselves to death…
31 May 2013 at 10:59 #11441Who do we think are the Doctor’s most rubbishest opponents?
In one way, The Master (although I love watching them).
Delgado era – the Doctor just has to wait until his latest alien allies turn on him, he swaps sides and they work together to defeat them.
Ainley era – The Doctor just has to wait for his latest really overcomplicated scheme to collapse under the weight of its own stupidity. Fun Fact: The Ainley Master had an Advanced Diploma in Crap Plans from the Wile E Coyote Academy.
Simm era – The Doctor just has to emote at him a lot for him to voluntarily commit suicide/run away into a timelock to escape him.Rubbish Monsters – The Candyman. Bertie Basset wannabe who wouldn’t last two minutes if you unleashed a classroom of sugar deprived seven year olds on him.
31 May 2013 at 12:11 #11443@danmartinuk s article for River Song day is up at the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2013/may/31/doctor-who-river-song-divide-fans
31 May 2013 at 18:46 #11458@ Everyone After @phaseshift ‘s fantastic write up about Colin Baker, I received @htpbdet ‘s latest blog post today, which is also about Baker. You can read it here:
http://www.thedoctorwhoforum.com/the-doctors/colin-baker-the-garish-bully/
In addition, he has still not seen the final episode but hopes to this weekend, and thinks he will be back with us, hopefully, next week, which is great news. 😀
31 May 2013 at 18:46 #11459@danmartinuk – Rubbishy opponents: The Vardans (kitchen tin foil) & the Plasmatons (giant grey turds).
31 May 2013 at 18:57 #11460Hi… I’m TheSenileTARDIS. I’m new here. So… hi?
31 May 2013 at 19:18 #11465Waves at @theseniletardis welcome to you! And to all the other new folks.
Wow @craig – you are the Web-Master of an expanding universe.
Thanks for the heads-up on @danmartinuk ‘s blog post on River Song over on The Graun @phaseshift – I’ve nipped over there to post something. Must see what the BBC site is doing to celebrate the glorious curly-haired one today.
31 May 2013 at 22:46 #11472ah, thanks @craig for the update on @htpbdet
Jeezus, that means that he won’t have read any of the comments on the thread for TNotD (and probably elsewhere), so when his health does allow him back, can we treat him as a slightly-time-travelling companion?
He’ll have missed loads of conversations and thoughts, so lets bring him up to speed gently, as he brings us up to speed on the context, thoughtfully.
31 May 2013 at 22:51 #11473Hi @theseniletardis – welcome!
best get stuck in. We’re friendly. Any spoilers on the spoilers thread. theories on the 50th thread.
Memories of past Drs on the past Drs thread….. Music on the erm…hmm….. I’m not good with words and fear I’ve done the here’s-how-to-suck-eggs thing so I’ll shut up!
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts wherever you post them!!
;¬)
31 May 2013 at 23:55 #11480@whisht When I was in conversation with him I offered to raise a little fund for DVDs and reading material but he said that had already been taken care of. At the time I didn’t think that might mean us! We’ll keep him busy for days.
1 June 2013 at 00:02 #11482LOL @theseniletardis – great name, great avatar
@craig Good to hear HTPBDET’s on the mend – He sure is going to be busy catching up! Have loved his blog posts on the various Drs.
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