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23 July 2014 at 21:06 #29270
One month to go…
23 July 2014 at 18:03 #29261@fatmaninabox – yay, you! Though I’ll have to go for the Third Doctor’s nice little wine from The Day of the Daleks.
Here’s to the job prospects. 🙂
22 July 2014 at 00:57 #29240Much happier with this than Black Orchid. Tegan is indeed whiny, but I’m wondering if Janet Fielding is deliberately going for ‘starting to have difficulty coping’. As @phaseshift says, when Tegan’s relatives disappear, the usual explanation is ‘horribly murdered by aliens’.
I think the explanation for the extra location work is simply that it’s easier to show off the location work in a two-parter. Any location work will take up an entire filming day – but if you’ve only got a 50 minute story, each of those filming days will fill a bigger proportion of the total story than would be the case for 4 episodes.
@blenkinsopthebrave – It is a horror rule that all small villages will have a secret history of annual ritual murder. This helps support the oft-cited suggestion that writers are bad at maths – given one ritual murder per year, with the victim drawn from the young adult population age 15 – 25, in some of the smaller villages you’d have a one in seven chance of getting slaughtered before reaching 25. No doubt this explains why young people have a tendency to leave their native village for the nearest large town and the slightly desperate villagers have to resort to passing Australians. 😉
The special effect is indeed blocky. I kept expecting a rectangular ‘bat’ to appear and knock one of the lights to the other side of the screen… and how the heck did Tegan do that dress up by herself?
And yes, that’s the Doctor. If you open the crack in time to its full extent, it’ll snap shut. Of course it will. Everything’s going to be fine. 😉
20 July 2014 at 16:34 #2920318 July 2014 at 12:48 #29087@phaseshift – I seem to recall that Vengeance on Varos Special Edition is mentioned by Mr C. Baker, in the Five(ish) Doctors reboot, as having ‘extra me’. So my vote is for Vengeance.
Besides, some weird bloke has just locked all the doors and windows and is refusing to let me out until I vote for it… 😉
18 July 2014 at 12:16 #29085@phaseshift and @fatmaninabox – Birmingham isn’t on the World Tour list, but the Beeb might well respond to the leak of the rough cut by running some fan-event previews. If they know they’ve got a great opening episode it would be an excellent way of shifting word-of-mouth in their favour.
@scaryb would know more than I would if that’s a likely response to the leaks of unfinished material.
It could also be another simulcast – since the 50th Simulcast was such a massive success in terms of tickets sold, they could be trying to test the waters and see if Who has got a general cinema audience – at least for the ‘big-ticket’ stuff like ‘new Doctor’.
17 July 2014 at 15:42 #29057For those of you able to get down to London – the ballot for the World Tour London screening (Thursday 7th August at 6:30pm) is now open.
Tickets are £16, £12 concessions.
14 July 2014 at 11:38 #28991@craig – fixed! 🙂
14 July 2014 at 10:29 #28987@craig – I now can’t get rid of the message notification number next to my name.
Email has been duly deleted. And I echo your ‘Grrrr….’
13 July 2014 at 16:59 #28965Sorry, I can’t talk about the Scottish team’s parade kit. I just can’t. 😉
But, if anyone else is thinking of going to Loncon 3, the World Science Fiction Convention(Thursday 14th to Monday 18th August, at the ExCel), the Observer is running a competition with two free 5 day passes as the prize.
Weird costumes will be available.
13 July 2014 at 13:09 #28960@wolfweed – I was reading the Radio Times website last night, and they were saying that there were five video files on the server in question. So someone, very likely, has the first five episodes.
The Radio Times also said – how true it is, I dunno, but I’d guess they still have the contacts even if they are no longer BBC in-house – that Doctor Who wasn’t the only show to have their scripts and videos hacked. Doctor Who is just the most high-profile. Other scripts include The Musketeers and Call The Midwife.
Basically, it sounds like most of the BBC’s autumn line up.
12 July 2014 at 23:12 #28949@wolfweed – ‘The TARDIS translation circuit, trying to cope with the new Doctor’s potty-mouth, had resorted to visual aids.’
12 July 2014 at 23:10 #28948I can understand why the cast was dismissive. From an acting point of view, the script offers very little to work with; it’s a nice pastiche, but everyone’s made of cardboard. There aren’t any decent red herring characters and it has that quality that actors dread – no subtext.
When Lady Cranleigh decides she needs to say nothing she … says nothing. When the sergeant is about to go into the TARDIS, Tegan says he’s in for a surprise. Meanwhile, the Doctor is announcing that he’s an alien (I agree with @phaseshift, how is that going to help?) and the writer doesn’t seem to have much of a clue what to do with Tegan and Adric (props to Janet Fielding for making us not notice that the writer has no idea what to do with her).
And the one good line is a quote from Charley’s Aunt. 🙁
The direction was also full of things actors hate. One thing I particularly noticed in Episode One was that poor Sarah Sutton was basically abandoned during George-strangling-servant, so she’s hanging around for what must have felt like hours watching someone get murdered – and doing nothing. No trying to escape and getting tripped up by a stray curtain, not even a decent scream. There was a similar scene in Episode Two, where all the actors got to charge on to the patio in a nice little crowd. And then stand around basically wondering what on earth they were supposed to be doing. I dunno whether Matthew Waterhouse missed his cue, or whether he really was supposed to convey a dramatic rush to rescue Nyssa while staying on the same mark…
In fairness to Ron Cook, this was his first ever show as a director – he’d just completed the Director’s Course. And the actors do manage to very largely overcome their character and direction problems – what you end up with is a very entertaining ‘Agatha Christie’ style drama.
But I can see why they wouldn’t have liked doing this story.
12 July 2014 at 20:53 #2894512 July 2014 at 18:23 #28941Bit of a weird one. It really is like the writer was happily off on an Agatha Christie pastiche and then got a phone call from Eric Saward saying ‘err… did doing Four to Doomsday put you off Doctor Who?’
I blame Adric, myself. 😉
The cricket scene is later reprised in The Lodger, except with football. And we see in Human Nature that the Tenth still remembers how to bowl.
I think they have steam trains on Gallifrey, but probably steam turbine with the steam produced by nuclear fusion. 😉
We’ve also seen Michael Cochrane in Ghost Light.
12 July 2014 at 17:43 #28935If you’ve ever seen a rough cut of a show, especially one that relies on CGI, you’ll know – don’t watch. It’s like trying to drive a Ferrari that’s only got the frame and the engine.
Possibly Peter Capaldi should just have admitted he’s the Thirteenth Doctor … shall we all hope this is his ‘Apollo 13’ moment? 😈
12 July 2014 at 11:24 #28920@miapatrick – waah-heyyy! Celebration avatar coming out to play!
Oh, and the Distinction is great news as well. 😉
10 July 2014 at 23:16 #28880@scaryb and @TheCrackInTheWall – the Vashta Nerada have been living quite happily in the Library since it was sealed a hundred years ago. So I reckon we can presume there are other sources of lunch on the planet.
😉
9 July 2014 at 09:14 #28835@craig – what, the Sun making a news story out of twisting leaked confidential material? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you! 😈
I think Moffat’s already made his comment on Scottish independence, when he had future-Scotland setting off on its very own spaceship (The Beast Below).
8 July 2014 at 11:40 #28827Have you been asked to do a survey or online interview-style questions for your homework/assignment?
If a survey, you need to rewrite some of the questions and add some others. For example, question 3 is a bit of a leading question – for more genuine answers, you could try asking ‘have they been presented differently’ and see what comes up. Question 2 also covers an awful lot of companions.
6, also, is meaningless unless you have some way of telling how often your respondent watches the show currently. If they watch it now, and won’t watch it with a female Doctor, that tells you one thing. But if they don’t watch it now and will watch it with a female Doctor, that tells you something else.
You also need a ‘how often did you watch Doctor Who episodes when Rose/Martha/Donna/Amy/Clara was the companion’ type question and some way of working out how much of the old series people have watched. Because, at the moment, you will have no idea whether any of your respondents have watched the old and the new series, the old series only, the new series only, started the new series when Amy was the companion and never saw Rose/Martha/Donna…
… again, this is because someone telling you that the female companions of 1963 were presented in a sexist way is meaningless – if all they’ve ever seen is one clip of Susan twisting her ankle.
If you are doing a survey, the site Survey Monkey is well worth a look.
8 July 2014 at 08:32 #28819@craig – you’ve got the scripts? Colour me impressed. I’ll just have to imagine you in full ‘Emperor’ mode, evil chuckle to the fore, as we spoilerphobes theorise away.
(Whatever colour ‘impressed’ is. Does ‘impressed’ even have a colour?)
Anyway, if you’re willing to stand guard, I’d agree that we don’t need to go into full-scale lockdown mode. This should be the time when we collect our next set of new members.
Welcome to the Doctoriad. You will be assimilated. 🙂
7 July 2014 at 18:45 #28806@wolfweed – thanks for the warning.
Spoiler-free details are now on BBC news online. I particularly liked the dry comment “The scripts … are marked ‘private and confidential’. 🙁
That’s 47 days of avoiding the Guardian … anybody got a bunker I could rent out?
7 July 2014 at 00:08 #28789The Adipose make me giggle. Every time. Whether it’s the CGI expressions, the little waves, or the various tones of the baby coos, I just start giggling.
The rest of the episode is also pretty funny – as quite a few people have said, screwball comedy. You can see that Tate and Tennant have non-romantic chemistry in buckets; they just work so well as a double act. I think this was my favourite pairing of the Tennant era.
I believe they got the fx on the cheap, as the people who’d done the huge scale armies for LOTR wanted to show that it was useable for TV work. But, yeah, the one black van does look a bit like ‘spent all the budget on the fx’.
6 July 2014 at 22:24 #28785I too think the animated guide sequences add a lot to the TV version. I particularly like the zeroes blowing a quick raspberry at the viewer. Colin Jeavons also gives a lovely visual performance for his emcee, as does Jack May, simply dripping contempt.
Of the Doctors, Seven’s probably in the car-park sabotaging some villains’ spaceship, the Tennant Doctor is nursing a lonely drink, and both Four and the Smith Doctor have a nice table for two. Not with each other – they’ve brought Romana and River on a date. They’re just about to realise that they booked the table next to each other. 🙂
6 July 2014 at 21:24 #28782@phaseshift-
repetition may have dulled its impact somewhat
I admit I prefer the radio version. As the old joke goes, the pictures are better. But, that said, the small furry Alpha Centuran is worth the price of TV admission.
And I too spotted the BBC chalk pit.
5 July 2014 at 00:31 #28721The BBC has released another teaser.
4 July 2014 at 23:41 #28720Oh, you have to love Mark Sheppard.
My favourite Mark Sheppard story comes from his Who stint.
The filming ran over by a day or so, meaning that he had to negotiate a late start for his Supernatural filming. He was apparently overheard on the phone to Supernatural’s showrunner, anxiously explaining “But you don’t understand. This is Doctor Who.”
😉
4 July 2014 at 15:05 #28703@blenkinsopthebrave – have they named the director for the Christmas Special yet?
If they have snagged Peter Jackson (who is said to be very keen), I’d expect him to be given the extra long, bigger-budget episode. Which is written by a writer he knows and has worked with. Like, say, Steven Moffat.
There’s also the point that if Series 8 is Moffat’s last series, he’d probably like to go out on the high of having his final story as Head Writer directed by an internationally famous director.
4 July 2014 at 01:46 #28696@jimthefish … we could go for the pilot – ‘Serenity’ – on the grounds that it introduces the ‘Wild West’ feel and has Mark Sheppard in it.
Or we could go for ‘Shindig’ on the grounds that it includes a high-society hoedown and has Mark Sheppard in it…
3 July 2014 at 22:35 #28692I used it as a bowl for my Cornflakes this morning.
Ah. That would explain why you’ve been eating the same cornflakes for three days running – and why I found a cob of maize down the back of the sofa this lunchtime.
😉
3 July 2014 at 15:34 #28683(Mind you, it is an integral part of Who history and that might be as good a reason as any for tackling it.)
::bluesqueakpip starts constructing time-loop device::
The Twin Dilemma is certainly unforgettable. Just not in a good way. 😈
Now, has anyone seen my field interphase stabiliser?
3 July 2014 at 14:01 #28677A two part Baker mk. II story
@phaseshift – if it’s The Twin Dilemma I will hunt you down, place you in a time loop, and send you back to the beginning of the decision making process so you don’t make that terrible mistake a second time.
My vote’s for Vengeance on Varos.;-)
3 July 2014 at 13:54 #28676@phaseshift and @jimthefish – I also like the rootin’ tootin cowboys retrospective. It’ll be interesting to compare A Town Called Mercy with The Gunfighters, and I’m always up for a Firefly rewatch.
I may be classed as a heretic by saying this, but I can take or leave Red Dwarf. :-~
30 June 2014 at 15:23 #28614@wolfweed – yeah, I noticed. The massive spoiler, that is.
I suspect they decided that it was going to hit the Internet the second they got them out on location, so they might as well get their behind-the-scenes photo out first. 😈
30 June 2014 at 14:15 #28609@phaseshift – do we have a winner for Peter Davison?
28 June 2014 at 23:21 #28564Talking about continuity snarls, exactly how many causes are there for the beginning of life on Earth? Are we to presume that if the Jaggaroth ship hadn’t exploded, a crashing Cybership would have provided the necessary jump start?
Obviously some redundancy in the life department. Perhaps it’s a fixed point in the sense that something will bloody well explode at the right time, even if Time itself has to crash an entire Cyberfleet onto the blasted planet…
What else? Well, the cameo by Eleanor Bron and John Cleese just adds to the whole ‘classy’ feel of this story. Now that Doctor Who is in the Premier League rather than the Championship (copyright Peter Davison), it’s difficult to remember those days when it didn’t have any money, never got further than the BBC quarry, and certainly couldn’t afford famous actors (unless they were doing it as a favour for an old Footlights mate).
City of Death is the story where everything, weirdly, came together. The writer who was just about to hit the big time, the grudging release of some cash for an actual foreign location, the up-market cameos and finally, the ITV strike.
Oh, and the wobbly set (that was last week). There is an actual wobbly set, with a clear and obvious wobble. This story has everything!
Except, thankfully, details on the Count and Countess’ sex life … 😈
28 June 2014 at 22:24 #28554Okay, for a bonkers theory 🙂
Hows about – the fob watch that the Smith Doctor seemed to be wearing recorded his personality a la Chameleon circuit. The Smith Doctor, if you recall, was expecting to die. He wanted his memory recording to be sent to the Library to be with River. [Awww… I can be a sentimental b*gg*r at times].
The Capaldi Doctor has post-regeneration amnesia that won’t go away – but, given the choice of restoring from back-up, chooses to keep his 2000 years + of memory in back up storage. He starts again.
The ring is the back-up storage. The Doctor can access his memories when he needs to know stuff, but he’s not crippled by 2000+ years of memory/50 years of incredibly convoluted continuity.
28 June 2014 at 22:05 #28552@blenkinsopthebrave and @wolfweed – well, the “it’s there so Capaldi doesn’t have to take his wedding ring off” theory is a bit of the blue boringers. 🙂
But given that Moffat managed to confidently weave the “Matt Smith has shaved his head for another part and now has to wear a wig” into the plot-line of ‘Time of the Doctor’, I’m sure he can come up with some plot related reason for “We can’t get Peter’s wedding ring off his finger, is that going to be okay?”.
[Blenkinsop: the second ring is the one the Master wears]
28 June 2014 at 20:37 #28548@blenkinsopthebrave – interesting, isn’t it?
Could be either: the Doctor’s wearing a wedding ring because he still considers himself married, or it’s simply a ring he wears (do Gallifreyans even wear wedding rings?).
I’m more curious about the very peculiar angles – Capaldi is looking straight at the camera/audience, but Coleman is looking up and off to one side. They’re obviously not looking at the same thing. Furthermore, Coleman appears to be about to walk out of the TARDIS.
They both are wearing similar style shoes. Why?
28 June 2014 at 13:02 #28525@phaseshift – if it’s effectively a double parter, which they’ve decided to show as one episode, then it should be 90 minutes.
Interesting that they’ve got a new set of directors – that does hint at a real change in style for the new Doctor.
28 June 2014 at 11:45 #28522Other official information – it’s ‘feature length’ (90 minutes? 75 minutes?) and it’s called ‘Deep Breath’.
I would say that the teaser hints that the regeneration amnesia is certainly lasting at least part way into the first story.
24 June 2014 at 01:03 #28426Soundgarden, long time no hear.
They seem to be making a bit of a comeback after ‘Live To Rise’ became part of the Avengers soundtrack. They’re supporting Black Sabbath at BST Hyde Park on the 4th July.
Thinks… Doctor Who connection … uh, Avengers is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where Guardians of the Galaxy is set, and Karen Gillan is in Guardians of the Galaxy! 😀
24 June 2014 at 00:41 #28424@thekrynoidman – no, she did a nude scene for Not Another Happy Ending.
23 June 2014 at 00:22 #28405@scaryb – sorry to hear that you haven’t been feeling too well.
I’d also say that Last of the Time Lords didn’t live up to The Sound of Drums – which only got beaten in the ‘downer ending’ stakes by The Pandorica Opens.
Yes, I will join you and @phaseshift in condemning the shiny floaty forgivey Doctor. At the time, I did wonder if young Lucy had been somehow told to kill the Master – death was so obviously preferable to having to listen to another of the Doctor’s ‘forgiveness’ speeches. A Time Lord lifespan having to listen to that sanctimonious twaddle? Shoot me now. 😈
22 June 2014 at 18:58 #28403@phaseshift – I think Lalla Ward has joked that the alternative costume was Zoe’s jumpsuit.
I agree that – while she’s not as experienced as the Doctor, and so makes silly mistakes – she’s essentially a female Doctor. Just a very, very young one. Her barely reined-in exasperation with Duggan is indeed pitch perfect, as is the moment of compassion when she hands him her coffee.
After working for the Borgias, the guard is ready to believe anything. In the 20th Century, I’m beginning to wonder if Hermann is madly in love with the Count. And Tom Chadbon is now playing in a much less farcical style – a man out of his depth and obviously wondering why everyone else seems to be talking so seriously about the insane idea of time travel. He has, however, just brains enough to realise that six Mona Lisas bricked up for several hundred years with seven modern buyers ready to buy them is certainly very odd.
Now can he thump someone? 🙂
Every major historical event ever is due to aliens. Perfectly simple. What I do wonder is why all these aliens keep rocking up to Earth. What are we, the Watford Gap of the galaxy or something?
21 June 2014 at 17:00 #28388@thekrynoidman – feeling better now? 😀
This was also the episode that spawned the “Doctor and Master are gay” thing.
No. Really, really no. The idea that the Doctor and the Master may have been in a relationship that went a bit beyond ‘just good friends’ long predates this episode. I can recall the possibility being mooted during the Peter Davison era. It might have been floating around since the Pertwee era’s introduction of the Master, for all I know, but I was probably a touch young to get those vibes. Both RTD and Steven Moffat are riffing off a well known fan theory that’s been around much longer than they’ve been professional writers.
You know that ex-boyfriend who turns out to be a psycho stalker? That’s the Master.
Incidentally, for every person who finds Simm’s mad-as-a-box-of-frogs interpretation irritating, there’s another who likes it (::waves::). He may well have not wanted to be this OTT (there’s a lot of stories that the OTT-ness is RTD’s doing rather than Simm’s), but having got the remit he didn’t so much chew the scenery as bite huge chunks off and spit them out defiantly.
In the direction of the Doctor, of course. 😉
20 June 2014 at 19:41 #28353I wouldn’t have thought that dvd sales was the primary rationale for these retrospectives
Even in these electronic times, not everyone has a broadband speed that can manage streaming a 24 minute video…
20 June 2014 at 19:14 #28349The only problem with pairing up Black Orchid and The Awakening is that they’re not on the same DVD. The Awakening, in fact, has been mysteriously combined with The Gunfighter.
20 June 2014 at 17:06 #28345@phaseshift – Kinda is remarkable in that was one of the first stories to have undergone a serious academic analysis. Nowadays, that type of thing is ten a penny – what with Buffy Studies being an entire discipline – but back then the idea that anyone would study television seriously was a bit weird.
Well: unless you were learning to make the stuff, of course. 😉
Kinda is available as a DVD, but it comes with Snakedance whether you want it to or not. Considerably cheaper from the BBC shop, btw.
Despite this (or possibly because I know Kinda very well indeed), I’d agree with @jimthefish and go for The Visitation (also available from the BBC Shop in both normal and Special Editions); Kinda would be my second. The Visitation is huge fun, has a great performance by Michael Robbins and proves yet again that aliens are involved with every famous historical disaster on Earth. 😀
18 June 2014 at 13:14 #28333@whisht, – it’s just occurred to me – perhaps Duggan, while obviously being played for comedy, is supposed to be obvious?
That is, if Count Scarlioni is known to be about to steal the Mona Lisa, but is too important to arrest – perhaps Duggan’s real job was to make the Count aware that the Louvre knows exactly what’s going on and has detectives on the case?
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