[achilles @replies]

I am the Master.  You will obey me (or at least, the way I looked when going to the cinema for the 50th anniversary globalcast).

I think I have you all beat – or most of you at least.  Yes, I saw the very first episode.  November 1963, starting with the shot of a policeman on the beat, walking past the scrapyard containing the Tardis (and how special that the first shot of ‘The Day of the Doctor’ featured a policeman walking past a scrapyard, right after the original title block…)

For years I couldn’t shake the feeling that the first episode had been screened twice, and that I’d actually seen the second screening.  Then, last year, I saw the BBC ‘An Adventure in Time and Space’, the story of how the show got started and the Hartnell years, and found out I was right!  I didn’t actually see the first screening because a series on ‘the other side’ (there were only two TV channels in Britain at the time) featured a young actress I was dopey about at the time.  That must have been November 23rd, because originally – and for decades – the show broadcast at 5pm on Saturdays, on ‘Children’s Hour’ (always assuming the BBC didn’t extend the already 5-hour Saturday afternoon sports program ‘Grandstand’ over Children’s Hour because it was the must-see regional lacrosse championship or the vital Wales vs. Portugal table tennis semi-final….)  It was the day after the assassination of JFK, and the viewing public were more interested in the real world than the world of fantasy, so the ‘pilot’ never had a chance.  So I must have seen episode 1 on November 30th.

Other memories?  I never really noticed Elizabeth Sladen in the Pertwee/Baker years, but when she reappeared in Tennant’s time I found someone else to feel dopey about.  And was, like everyone, devastated by her death.

My favorite episode?  Tough question, especially with so many great recent ones, but if I had to choose, it would be ‘Blink’.  Yes, I know the Doctor and Martha hardly appear in it, but it has everything else:  great writing, suspenseful camerawork and directing, a thoroughly original story, touching moments, good acting (especially by Carey Mulligan) and a great ending.  I believe it’s the first appearance of the Weeping Angels (?), which makes it all the creepier than Angels episodes usually are.  Behind you!  Don’t blink!  Too late!  ;~)

I think Capaldi is a good successor to Smith, and a change of pace from #s 10 and 11 – or is it 11 and 12?  (John Hurt came in and threw a wrench/spanner into the whole numbering system……)

I think that whereas Tennant and Smith had a largely hail-fellow-well-met semi-comic nature, Capaldi has returned us to something closer to Hartnell and the early Pertwee – crusty, irascible, not one to joke around;  appropriate, since even with the lighter touch of 11 and 12, the plotlines were darkening through both their incumbencies, preparing the way, as it were, for the more curmudgeonly #13.

Loving Moffatt’s writing.

Want to see River Song return, so we can see their timelines reach the point where he knows her better than she knows him.  (And who wouldn’t want to see stories featuring a strong woman character who can pilot the Tardis better than the Doctor can?

“It hasn’t landed.  It didn’t make that woo!  woo! noise.”

“That’s because you always leave the brake on.”

Keep on traveling, Doctor.  And take us with you.

 

[Author]

Posts