Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
7 May 2015 at 19:33 #39951
That doppleganger thing happened to me all the time. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had conversations with perfect strangers convinced I was this other person that they knew. Eventually, I just learned to go along with it. I guess I have one of those bland faces.
7 May 2015 at 18:35 #39949First two seasons of Torchwood were fine. Fun, off the wall, sexy and campy.
Season three stepped down quite a bit. No longer fun. Dark, gay-angsty, mean-spirited.
Season four was like stepping off a cliff.
Notice how there was no season five? That’s because they spent the previous four seasons systematically and with gathering speed eviscerating everything that made the show watchable.
But that’s just me.
7 May 2015 at 18:33 #39948Well, I look at it this way. If the Doctor has some degree of subconscious or conscious control over his regenerations, then he may well be influenced by Lobus and is borrowing his face.
However, the Doctor never ever ever met Frobisher, so far as we know, and had no significant interaction with him… at least, not one that was ever depicted or recorded. So Frobisher is irrelevant.
The only way Frobisher would be relevant is if the Doctor’s regeneration was influenced by some external force which had knowledge or contact with Frobisher and/or Lobus, and inserted them into the Doctor, or possibly manipulated Lobus to cause his reappearance or at least his facial reappearance in Frobisher for its own inscrutable reasons.
As we’ve yet to see signs of such an entity at work and proximate I tend to discount it. But hypothetically, it could be some super-plot by Missy. Or by the Beast, etc.
7 May 2015 at 15:25 #39944For what it’s worth, Torchwood and Doctor Who didn’t cross over strongly. There wasn’t a lot leakage the other way, with Torchwood characters, ideas, monsters, stories crossing back into Doctor Who. Mostly, the transmission was from Doctor Who to Torchwood, with a key Torchwood character coming back to Doctor Who now and then.
The Sarah Jane Adventures were also in continuity with Doctor Who with Sarah Jane encountering the Slitheen family, the Judoon and the Sontarans. In the case of the Slitheen and Sontarans, their stories were direct spin offs from their encounters with the Doctor in his main series. You didn’t need to know the Doctor Who stories in Sarah Jane to appreciate those stories though, and if you were just watching Doctor Who you didn’t need to know the Sarah Jane stories at all. Both the Tenant and Smith Doctors made appearances in Sarah Jane though, something that they never did with the Torchwood series. As with Torchwood, a lot of stuff there doesn’t make it upstairs to Doctor Who.
Oddly, Sarah Jane is in continuity with the David Tennant CGI Doctor Who story ‘Dreamland’ – sharing the robotic ‘Men in Black’ and a few other tropes, images and story points. I suppose that means Dreamland is canon through the back door. Time, it’s wibbly wobbly stuff.
Basically, shared universe, some points of contact, but not a lot of real crossovers.
7 May 2015 at 14:45 #39942None of this, of course, means anything in the Doctor Who/Torchwood verse, because they can just make up any rules or situations they want.
However, in terms of production decisions, I’d consider it vanishingly remote that Capaldi was hired on to play Frobisher because he’d played Lobus. To the extent that was a decision in casting, it would just be part of his resume. I don’t believe that anyone involved with Torchwood at the time (and it was a completely different production crew, set of writers, directors, producers and decision makers) sat there thinking … ‘Hmmm, he played Lobus, we can use that.”
It’s possible that in choosing Capaldi, Moffet was paying attention to both Lobus and Frobisher and thinking he could use it, but it’s in a post-facto sense. No masterplans around. As to what goes on in Moffet’s mind, I’ll not speculate.
7 May 2015 at 13:53 #39941@ichabod A few points. First, I don’t believe that the Doctor ever met John Frobisher. So assuming that there was some conscious or unconscious volition in choosing a particular face the Doctor may have been influenced by Lobus. But not by Frobisher.
Second, Vesuvius explostion was 79 AD. Lobus was a quite mature man at that time, and he and his life were likely past childbearing. His children were grown. assuming reproduction at say 60 AD, and assuming an average 30 years from birth to breeding, that’s 65 generations. Now assuming no substantial incest, Lobus’ particular set of genes is halved every generation. That is, Lobus contributes half the genes to his children. His children contribute half the genes to his grandchildren.
After 5 generations, Lobus will account for roughly 3% of his descendants DNA, less than a thirtieth. After 10 generations its roughly 0.1% or one tenth of one per cent, or one thousandth of Lobus’ DNA, by the twentieth generation, we’re down to 0.0001% or one millionth. There’s 45 more generations to go…
Maybe it makes some goofy sense in a literary way to connect Lobus and Frobisher and visit the sins, salvations and decisions of one on another. But biologically and logically there’s no sense to it at all. Realistically, Lobus genes may have theoretically spread to hundreds of thousands or even millions in 65 generations, but even with generations of controlled heavy duty incest, Lobus actual genetic contribution… is simply meaningless.
As for Torchwood, technically it is in the same Universe as Doctor Who. The central figure – Captain Jack Harkness and his backstory of the Time Patrol originates in the Ecclestone season. Torchwood as an institution originates in the Tenant era. The Doctor Who story of the Cyberman invasion of Canary Wharf is referenced directly in the Torchwood episode, Cyberwoman. Harkness’ character returns from Torchwood to guest in Doctor Who a couple of times. On one of those occasions, other Torchwood characters appear on Who. Martha Jones, after leaving the Doctor, shows up in a few episodes of Torchwood. The Doctor’s severed hand from Tenant’s beginning appears as a background prop through Torchwood’s first season. There’s just endless cross-references. The final season of Torchwood does not mention the Doctor by name (at least I don’t think so). But there are several unmistakeable references to him.
But as I’ve argued, this is all basically irrelevant when it comes to Lobus and Frobisher. Frobisher is just a guy who coincidentally looks like Lobus. Hell, we run across dead ringers all the time even within our own span of time. Stretch that out 2000 years…
7 May 2015 at 00:47 #39923@cathymac706 Welcome aboard. Unfortunately, I don’t have any tickets, but I wish you the best of luck. Have you tried craigslist?
6 May 2015 at 03:49 #39904@purofilion We find out about terrific stuff, either by stumbling across it ourselves, or having people lead us to it. So it’s cool.
You’re correct in that a lot of fan films are terrible, and really of interest only to their makers and immediate family. But within those terms, that’s cool.
But there are terrific and interesting ones, and if I can lead you to one or two that you really enjoy, then I’m happy. I do enjoy your comments on the videos you watched. You’re a perceptive observer, and spot things I missed.
As for whether I’m a nice person or not, we’ll agree to disagree. 😉
5 May 2015 at 21:41 #39899@gamergirlavatar Interesting theory. How does it explain Jack’s immortality shutting off during the miracle day story?
5 May 2015 at 18:06 #39886@craig Okay, here’s the deal. All I really want to do is write fully developed reviews of fan films that I think are worthy and make a meaningful contribution to Doctor Who and post them where people who might be interested in such things can find them.
There are a lot of fan films out there, good, bad, interesting and wretched. It’s hard to find your way amongst them, it’s often really a hit or miss process and given Sturgeon’s law, that’s not a good way to go about things. And yet, there are intriguing fan films, there are even brilliant ones. They deserve to be appreciated. What makes them work should be discussed. There are flawed works, and those flaws should be examined, partly to understand why and what went wrong, and perhaps to forgive them. I think that some may be worth more then “Huh, liked this” or ‘yeah, that sucked ass.’ I think that a lot of them may just deserve to be scene.
In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to do this at all. Someone else would have done it for me, and all I’d have to do is look up well written comprehensive reviews and then go and pick and choose among really good or interesting Doctor Who fan films that I might like to watch. That would be perfect. I don’t live in that world, so I’ve decided to try doing it myself, on the theory that there might be a few people out there with a similar point of view who might like this.
Now, while noodling away I might occasionally, by way of interest, look in on and participate in discussions. I think I have that right. I might have opinions that differ from other peoples, and other people may have views that I don’t agree with. That’s cool. There might be some basis for an interesting exchange of views. My interest in topics is not unlimited – I couldn’t care less, for instance, whether Missy placed the Doctors hand on her left or her right tit, or the significance of her kissing his nose after she kissed his mouth. I understand people getting into that, that’s fine, I just don’t invest. I dislike Clara Oswald as a character and think she’s bad for the show, but I’m not staying up all night throwing darts at a picture of her face. Neverthless, I might still participate in discussions to the point of making my views felt.
I have no interest in flame wars, argument for the sake of argument, personal attacks and all that passive aggressive bullshit that we sometimes find on the internet. I massively do not care what people think of me, especially on the internet. None of us know each other personally, we’re all just collections of electrons lighting up each other’s computer screens in lines of text. That’s not something to build much of a relationship on, either love or hate.
I do not especially care to cause offense. I try to be polite and courteous. I try to avoid personal attacks and aspersions. If I offend someone over something, and have it pointed out to me, assuming its legitimate offense and unintended, I am inclined to apologize. I don’t normally intend to tread on toes, and where I’ve done so, or violated unwritten rules, I am happy to make amends, if it is explained to me. But I don’t apologize for breathing, and I don’t apologize for having opinions, even if they are disliked.
I have explained this to you: I am not a nice person. If I get into it, I don’t hold back. I don’t respect boundaries. My only goal will be to find a way to make it hurt… a lot. I will be very unpleasant. It really is a good thing not to go there. I don’t particularly like not being a nice person and I try to guard against. I set great stock in trying to be polite for that reason. But I am of an age where you learn to accept your true nature for good or ill.
As for Bluesqueekpip or whatever his name is (I’m not good with names so it’s not a deliberate effort to give offense if I’ve got it wrong) as for him – we seem to have been on the edge of getting into something. However, our last interaction was quite civil and possibly even friendly. If he (she?) is good with that, then I’m good with that.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to what I was doing, and posting reviews now and again. I would invite you and anyone else to read them, if you have a mind to. But if you want my real feelings, I’d much rather you watched some of these videos, because they are quite amazing and people have worked amazingly hard for them – that is something to appreciate and treasure.
Be well.
5 May 2015 at 16:14 #39882Are we having a fight? Do we really need to? If it’s all the same to you, I don’t see the point.
5 May 2015 at 16:06 #39880Craftsmanship is all about tools, and being skilled in their use.
Working to a deadline is the definition of a professional.
Not giving a shit about the work is a definition of a hack.
You don’t have to be a professional to be a hack.
As for being concise, I refer you to Mr. Faulkner. He never used one adjective where ten or twelve would do.
4 May 2015 at 23:38 #39855I am a hired gun myself, and there is no dishonour in this. What we choose to call ourselves is one thing. That same word for others, can have quite a different effect. I refer you to Biggy Smalls.
As for being concise, that’s just a tool.
4 May 2015 at 23:08 #39850I take no real pleasure from it. It came years too late, after a failed marriage and on the same morning (within half an hour) after receiving word from my father’s cancer. There was a time when it was all I wanted out of life, my dream, my ambition. Now, all I taste is ashes.
I wake up in the morning, and I want to smash the whole fucking world in the mouth. Then I put away that urge and get on with my day.
4 May 2015 at 23:05 #39849And in hip hop, ‘bitches and ho’s’ simply means women. So I take your point that culture and context have a bit to do with it.
Words are tricky things. A number of black people might call themselves the N**** word. But that doesn’t mean you or I could walk into a bar filled with black people and fling it around. Biggy Smalls might describe himself that way, but I don’t think your or I could describe him with that term.
4 May 2015 at 22:20 #39845@ichabod. I look at it this way. Certain terms are inherently derogatory. It is derogatory to call a lawyer a ‘mouthpiece.’ It is derogatory to call a policeman a ‘pig.’ It is derogatory to call a woman a ‘whore’ and it is derogatory to call a writer a ‘hack.’
Let’s look at the word ‘whore’ because it is strong, blunt and admits to no misunderstandings. For some women, the word certainly applies in the clinical and narrow sense of the term. There are people who feel it is appropriate to use generally, either as a misogynist sentiment or as some philosophical reflection, or just generally disparaging. On the other hand, if you use it with respect to other women, then you should expect to be picking your teeth up off the ground. But pretty much wherever you use it and who you use it for, it’s derogatory. You would trust that I would never refer to your mother this way, regardless of her habits.
Hack is a derogatory term. There are certainly writers out there, and writers in the history of the old and the new series, to which the term Hack would apply. There are writers who are not Hacks, but who, like all of us, are sometimes required to do ‘hackwork’ to pay the bills. Doing hackwork doesn’t make a writer a hack, any more than having had multiple partners makes a woman a whore. There are certainly writers out there who will have you pick up your teeth neatly off the floor, should you refer to them such to their faces. And as a general observation, I would counsel you as a courteous and decent person not to use the term generally to writers.
Now, I’m not a professional writer, but I have recently had a novel accepted for publication. I’ve published numerous short stories and received honourable mentions in several Years Best collections. I’ve got a few small credits on the imdb. And I’ve had enough credibility as a writer to apply for and receive arts grants. So I do admit to being sensitive to slurs on a field I have some love for.
I am also not a nice person. But I am polite. I set great stock by that. Hack is not a polite word, and it should be used sparingly, if it all.
4 May 2015 at 21:56 #39843@bluepipsqueakpip Hmmm. Never thought of it like that. It’s a workable theory.
4 May 2015 at 20:36 #39840@janetteb I assumed that Clara Oswald was pregnant. That was why she was calling Danny Pink and having that bizarrely narcissistic conversation with him as he walked into his death. She was working up to telling him. Seriously, she must have had a point in that conversation. So she’s knocked up, has a baby, names it after his father, and thus the Pink line.
4 May 2015 at 20:26 #39839I do not wish to flame anyone. But I would suggest that we have a little respect for writers. To shower the writers of the classic series with contempt is both unbecoming and misguided. Some quite talented people worked on Doctor Who as writers and script editors – Douglas Adams, Robert Holmes, Malcolm Hulke, Barry Letts, to name a few. It’s quite insulting to these people to simply dismiss them one and all as ‘jobbers’ and ‘hacks.’
These gentlemen worked under conditions of a far more intense production schedule – 24 or even 40 half hour episodes a year, not twelve or thirteen. They didn’t have the luxuries of computer generated imagery, to composit backgrounds, add to scenes, create effects or characters. They certainly didn’t have the budgets or the array of resources. They didn’t have the advantage of the modern internet, search engines, email, word-processors and all those wonderful things that make writing and the business of writing so much more efficient. They certainly didn’t have the decades of post-modern awareness and half century of evolution of the television form. They worked under far more onerous restrictions in terms of censorship and acceptable content. And they had to do this, in a serial format ranging from 2 to 12 episodes, which meant that you had to create incredibly layered narratives, with multiple concurrent plots and subplots and bring them to maturity and resolution in a measured way.
I have nothing but respect for the writers of the classic series. The best of them, and their best work, holds up against modern standards even today. Certainly no modern writer for the relaunched series has been able to come up with aliens or threats as enduring and iconic as the Cybermen and the Daleks.
As for the worst of the classic writers…. well, I’ll acknowledge that the Twin Dilemma and Underwater Menace are wretched to the nth degree. But personally, the bottom has now been claimed by Kill the Moon, and I can’t imagine a story that will pry it loose from its death grip on the abyssal ocean floor.
As for the Female Doctor, my own sentiment is that the Female Doctor came and went, and she was very nice, thank you very much. But in that respect, I will refer you too my blog reviews on the Seattle International productions of Doctor Who. One might argue that it’s not official, which is a perfectly fine argument. But it’s certainly proof of concept.
4 May 2015 at 17:22 #39830@bluesqueakpip Why do you insist on trying to argue with me in such a clumsy inept way on a thing I care very little about? What’s wrong with you? What’s your problem?
Was my disinterest in your opinions and arguments on this subject not sufficiently clear? Did you not get the message?
Look, let me try this again. I’m here because I like to do certain things. I enjoy doing these things. They give me pleasure. And at least a few other people seem to enjoy them all around. Win win for everyone. Now, you may not be interested in the things I’m doing, that’s fine with me. Or you might like them, if you gave them a chance. Who knows. If you wish to try and engage me in a civil way about something I’m interested in, you’ll find me courteous and thoughtful in my response.
But that’s why I’m here, and the discussion you propose is a stupid distraction, which will take me away from things I find interesting and enjoyable. So I have no particular wish to engage.
Now, I suspect that this might hurt your feelings and I’m sorry about that. But let me be very clear: I don’t care about your feelings. I don’t care about you. I suspect that this might be an unpleasant realization for you, but there it is.
To be clear: I bear you no ill will. But… No thanks, not engaging, not interested enough. Peddle it somewhere else.
PS: Be nice to Gamergirlavatar. Just because you seem to have an issue with me doesn’t mean you have to be an all around pratt.
4 May 2015 at 01:37 #39801@ichabod, @bluepipsqueak I seem to have offended you by having an opinion you didn’t like, and then having the temerity to explain that opinion. Please accept my apologies.
The world is a diverse place, and we are not all so fortunate to march in lockstep to your views. Some of us ‘go off the reservation’ so to speak. But I feel that such dissent is perfectly legitimate. I have read your posts, and read them with considerably less rancor and revulsion than you seem to have experienced reading mind. Alas, I did not find them persuasive. It seems we will continue to disagree.
I am going to decline your explicit and implicit suggestions to continue to engage the subject of Clara Oswald. I see no productive purpose to doing so.
Among other things, you both seem passionately enamored of the subject, perhaps a little too much so. I could see a discussion devolving rapidly into a flame war, and that’s always a pointless, pointless undertaking.
And to be honest, the truth is, I don’t care. I simply don’t care about Clara Oswald all that much. She’s an irritating, useless character who drags the stories down. I’ve stated that, and explained it. What more is there to say. She’ll go away someday. Hopefully. I just don’t see investing time and rhetoric in an unpleasant triviality.
To be honest, I don’t know either of you either. I can therefore have no opinion of you, except the simple observation that our tastes differ and you don’t seem to take that very well. But overall, there is no opinion of you, either good or bad. You don’t know me, except that I seem to have an opinion that threatens you. Your opinion of me is meaningless.
N0w, if you wish to continue talking about Clara Oswald… feel perfectly free. But I’ve said all I need to say about her, and I have no need to continue to participate in that discussion.
Frankly, I have better things to do with my time on this board, that’s not some passive-aggressive way of insulting you, it’s just the truth. There’s things I enjoy doing that give me pleasure, I’m having fun writing fan film reviews, I find that satisfying and productive.
I don’t see much pleasure to be derived from an Oswald discussion. Maybe that’s your cup of tea. Have at it. But have it without me.
I will thank you, however, not to libel me, not to call me a troll. That is impolite and unworthy.
I will particularly insist that you not insult or berate people who choose to defend me.
That is offensive.
3 May 2015 at 17:21 #39777It’s a personal thing. Back when I was a little boy, Clara Oswald shot my father down in cold blood. He weren’t doing nothing, and she walked up and shot him in the back! And then she went and robbed the bank and burned down the liquor store.
More seriously – Clara Oswald is a terrible character. She’s poorly constructed, uninteresting and shallow, inconsistent and essentially a roving plot device. Clara is not anchored or rounded in the way that Dona Noble, of Rose or even the Ponds were. There’s no real sense of her having a place in life, a point of view, any meaningful identity. In place of that, we simply get tropes. Clara needs something to do, we’ll make her a school teacher. She’ll need a boyfriend, we’ll make Danny.
She’s essentially the Doctor Who version of the Simpson’s character ‘Poochy.’ For those who don’t recall that episode, ‘Poochy’ was a creation of the animation company doing the ‘in-universe’ Itchy and Scratchy. Fearing that they were losing touch with their audience, they decided to create a ‘hot new character’ – a skateboard riding dog who would be the epitome of cool, but who was actually a collection of traits and tropes. They pushed this new character relentlessly, with Itchy, Scratchy and all the other cartoon characters going on about how cool Poochy was. The problem was that Poochy was merely a soulless cynical marketing effort. He was dramatically worthless, unfunny and dragged the show down.
Clara Oswald in a nutshell. Every character in Doctor Who has to expound on how wonderful Clara is. The Doctor moons over her to the point that he instantly overlooks her betrayal, an idiotic plot that would have killed them both horribly, he endorses her outrageous whims. Every episodes revolve around her. Her trivial moods are treated as portents from Olympus. She is consistently presented as perfect, brilliant, witty, insightful, amazing, gracious, compassionate…. yadda yadda yadda. All that’s fine, but its not interesting and its not good storytelling.
Back in the 1970’s, there was a market for plucky girl heroines, making their way in the modern world: Mary Tyler Moore, That Girl, Rhoda, Phyllis, etc. It’s all very nice. I’m sure there’s a market for the Clara Oswald Show. I’m just not interested. In Doctor Who terms, she’s the modern Mel.
Clara has been endlessly debated among fans. So it goes. I doubt that we’ll add much, discussing it again.
3 May 2015 at 15:08 #39769I really don’t have a strong issue one way or the other with Danny Pink. He seems to have been a repository for things that didn’t come off.
I’m looking forward to Clara Oswald leaving the show.
29 April 2015 at 15:04 #39720Okay, tell you what, let’s start with the ‘Wrath of Eukor’, August, 1984, starring Barbara Benedetti and Randy Rogin, by Ryan Johnson.
Someone explain to me how I open up and post a blog, and we’ll work from there…
28 April 2015 at 19:34 #39717Hi guys. Been gone for a while. I’m thinking of writing reviews on some of the better or more interesting Doctor Who fanfilms. There’s some very good ones, and they really should get more attention. I’d be proposing to cover things like Wrath of Eukor, Phase Four, Fire and Ice, Downtime, things like that. Serious detailed critical analysis, but hopefully readable and fun. Maybe some historical and cultural context. A few thousand words at a pop, with links on where to find them, etc. Would that interest anyone?
30 November 2013 at 04:19 #22014@janetteb Welcome aboard. Hugs.
30 November 2013 at 04:18 #22013I think that by definition, anyone who travels with the Doctor will cease to be ordinary. I mean, they see things, they do things, the often end up far away or quite different from who they started out.
Jamie was a Highlander
Leela was a futuristic savage.
Romana (either) was a Time Lord.
Turlough was an alien.
Nyssa was an alien.
Adric an alien.
Sarah Jane Smith’s life was changed to the point that she was a de facto supernatural investigator.
They often ended up in different places in space and time, they married alien war chiefs or kings. Sometimes they died.
29 November 2013 at 23:40 #22008@timelordninja You had a terrific idea there, no fault no harm, and I’m glad you shared it with us.
You should wander over to TVtropes.org and browse around. You’d love it. But I warn you, it’s seriously addictive. One of the hidden Tropes that gets referenced over there is that a lot of fictional characters must actually be Time Lords – given their many incarnations, penchant for showing up in impossible places, and stories whose plot holes are so huge that the only way it can make sense is if the protagonist has a time and space machine working overtime offscreen.
29 November 2013 at 04:32 #21957WhoHar one of the cool things is so many people involved with the show have such histories of being unabashed fans. They bring love to it. That counts for a lot.
29 November 2013 at 00:57 #21950@jimthefish The presence of the Yeti in the Five Doctors has always bothered me too.
I suppose on the one hand, it’s pretty simple – there was a Yeti costume, or enough parts of one to shoot around, sitting there in the props department so why not?
But then again, isn’t the Yeti the intellectual property of Lincoln and Haisman, the original creators of the Great Intelligence and the Yeti. They certainly weren’t using Daleks because of rights issues with Terry Nation (or so I’ve heard). But the BBC had had a huge falling out with Lincoln and Haisman, which had resulted in no more GI or Yeti stories. So how did the Yeti get in here – production wise – was there an unauthorized use? Or was the use limited to some threshold, after which they’d have to pay royalties? Or did they just get a small license?
Within the context of the series, the appearance of the Yeti here didn’t make any sense based on only the Abominable Snowmen and the Web of Fear. Clearly within those stories, its a robot and not an autonomous entity, so who was controlling it and why? Is the GI involved? Was it Borusa’s agent?
I think that the Name of the Doctor adds more options to it, if for no other reason than that it depicted the intelligence as having far greater and more extensive abilities to project itself effectively, and much more interest and knowledge of the Doctor. Moffat isn’t just a showrunner and writer, he’s a Doctor Who superfreak, so I could imagine him re-watching old episodes or audio’s, and looking for little plot holes or discontinuities that inspire him to do new things. Process is process, whatever works.
29 November 2013 at 00:12 #21948Wrapping things up
This will be a little different in style, possibly pretentious, bear with me…. 😉
Okay, so let’s assume I’m right.
Let’s assume that the Atkinson Doctor is a real Doctor, and he regenerates into the Grant Doctor. Let’s assume that the Grant Doctor allies with the Cyborged Pryce Master, who becomes the Cyborged Jacobi Master, and that the two of them have adventures together, and are used as pawns of the Time Lords in their Time war, and that the Jacobi Master eventually flees to the end of the Universe, and the Grant Doctor ends up as the Great Intelligence….
How? And Why? And how is it that the Doctor seems to have misplaced or failed to notice two incarnations? Or that one of his incarnations somehow hived off into a malevolent bodiless entity?
I dunno.
Geez, what I have to do all the heavy lifting?
Well, all I can say is that like season 6B, the evidence implies that there must have been a really screwy series of adventures occurring off Camera.
Here is what we can say though:
* The Atkinson and Grant Doctors have only three possibilities.
(1) One is that they’re future regenerations of the Doctor. We haven’t seen them because they haven’t shown up. The difficulty here is that this seems inconsistent with internal references that suggest that the Atkinson and Grant Doctors are somewhere around 9 and 10, rather than teens, and we are now past the Time War, the Time Lords and the Daleks and possibly the Master should be dead letters in the future, it just doesn’t seem consistent with the various events in the two specials. On the other hand, you never know – as of Day of the Doctor, Gallifrey is still out there, the Daleks keep coming back, and the Master is the Master.
(2) Or they are hidden or lost regenerations, much like the War Doctor, and possibly occurring within the same frame – it appears that the Tenant and Smith Doctors are unaware of, or have forgotten about, or someway blocked out the Hurt Doctor. Even Clara couldn’t quite see the Hurt Doctor, while standing in the Doctor’s timeline. So they may be two or more examples of that. This is somewhat valid theory, since we see the War Doctor regenerate, but we don’t actually see him regenerate into the Ecclestone Doctor. There might be room to stick a few extra Doctors in there. However the Atkinson Doctor seems rather soft hearted, and by the time the Grant Doctor shows up, the Time War should be over or close to it, there’s no one left to pull his strings, and the Master is hiding out at the end of the Universe, so that’s not a perfect fit either.
(3) Finally, they could be side-Doctors. Somehow, the Doctor’s lifeline got split by a traumatic event, and there were two Doctors going their separate ways, perhaps unaware of each other. There is something of a precedent for this in the Tenant Era, in Journey’s End, when a screwy regeneration interruptus resulted in a second half-human Tenant Doctor, and Donna Noble containing a Doctor Donna identity – Three Doctors. However, for this to happen, given the limited example we have with the Tenant Doctor, you would need a profoundly, profoundly, profoundly traumatic event. A trauma even greater than the Dalek’s taking over, killing all your friends and you, blowing up the Tardis and reshaping the Universe. A Trauma so profound and comprehensive that it would not only schism the Doctor, or schism a side-Doctor, but leave the two Doctor’s willingly ignorant of each other. Oh, and split the Tardis, or take place somewhere that a side-Doctor could get his hands on a second Tardis.
…. You mean…. something like a Time War? Like perhaps a gigantic history encompassing Time War which ultimately destroys the Time Lords and the Daleks, half of the universe and countless other civilizations and histories and rewrites the universe horribly over and over again?
Hmmm…. I suppose something like that… maybe. I think we’d need something more….
…. You mean, like maybe the Doctor finding himself having turned into the Valeyard or some Genocidal, Mass Murdering, Civilization destroying warrior/warlord War-Doctor who eventually apparently destroys Gallifrey and stands in direct opposition to everything that the Doctor has ever held dear?
Errrm…. That’s pretty bleak.
…. You asked.
Well…. I suppose that those two things taken together might do the trick. If, hypothetically, there was an event like a Time War that catastrophically awful, and the Doctor did turn into or find himself turning into such an appalling being.
….. If, hypothetically, those things were to happen…
Yes….
….. There might be a lot of spare tardises lying around, waiting to be stolen… Even the Master could probably get one.
Good point.
…. Assuming that the energies involved in the trauma itself didn’t create a duplicate Tardis somehow, or they were using the actual Doctor’s Tardis but from a future point…
But…. what about the Great Intelligence? What could possibly happen to turn the Doctor, or the Grant Side-Doctor into a ruthless, discorporeal entity, unbound in time and space, suffering anger and identity issues? You would have to have another huge trauma of some sort. Some incredible, vast cataclysm….
…. As if the Time War was still going on?
Errm…. I suppose, if we hypothetically allowed for a Time War, and circumstances bad enough to split the Doctor and create a couple of Side-Doctors, then… maybe at some later phase in the War, some further event could commute the Doctor into a bodiless intelligence.
….. Like Rassilon wanted?
What…. ?
…. Rassilon… Lord High Poobah Time Lord, founder of their civilization, the guy with the sash, the tomb, the harp, the hush puppies….
We all know who Rassion is.
…. Well, in the Tenant Episode, ‘End of Time’ Rassilon wanted to win the Time War by erasing the universe, while turning the Time Lords into a race of beings of pure bodiless consciousness, much like the Great Intelligence.
“RASSILON: We will initiate the Final Sanction. The end of time will come at my hand. The rupture will continue until it rips the Time Vortex apart.
MASTER: That’s suicide.
RASSILON: We will ascend to become creatures of consciousness alone. Free of these bodies, free of time, and cause and effect, while creation itself ceases to be. (End of Time)”Exactly like the Great Intelligence, when you think about it. You know, a creature of consciousness alone, free of a body, free of time….
What’s your point?
Oh nothing.
Okay.
Except…. how did Rassilon know that whole ‘create a person into a bodiless intelligence, unless he’d tried it out on someone. Someone he really disliked… And maybe destroyed their tardis in the process.
I have no idea. Listen, I’m trying to talk to people here.
Funny, how in the Matt Smith era, there’s something badly wrong with the Tardis and it’s all blowy uppy. That’s never quite been resolved or explained, when you think about it.
“DOCTOR: Space and time isn’t safe yet. The Tardis exploded for a reason. Something drew the Tardis to this particular date, and blew it up. Why? And why now? (Big Bang)”
We all assume that it had something to do with the giant Time Paradox in the next season that gets sorted out in the Wedding of River Song, but there’s nothing in that episode that actually says that. If it wasn’t that, then what?
Are you getting at something?
No, just thinking out loud.
Well, shut up. You have no idea how distracting a bodiless voice can be.
Sorry.
I’m trying to talk to people here, about serious Doctor Who stuff. Your blather and free association isn’t helping.
Sorry.
Okay, where was I?
No idea.
Shut up! Anyway, if the Atkinson and Grant Doctors are side Doctors, there’s no way to tell where or when they split off from the Doctor’s main timeline. They could have split off anywhere from the first Doctor to the last.
Except for the hat and scarf?
What?
Well, if you look at the opening of Curse of the Fatal Death, it looks like Tom Baker’s Scarf and Sylvester McCoy’s hat are hanging off a coatrack in the Doctor’s Tardis control room. So we can be sure that the Side-Doctors take place after Baker and McCoy at least.
Oh….
Probably during the Hurt Doctor, when you think of it, all the evidence points that w—
SHUT UP!
Shutting up.
Sigh. Okay, let’s take a new track. Let’s look at the Atkinson Doctor. Interestingly, there’s a sort of parallel – Rowan Atkinson is most famous for Blackadder.
Mr. Bean!
…. (coughs significantly)
Shutting up.
Blackadder. And in one of the final Blackadders, he accidentally builds a time machine and goes back and forth through history. Although this Blackadder behaves rather more like the Master. But, of course, it’s impossible to come up with a theory to reconcile the Blackadder time traveller with the Atkinson Doctor.
I bet I cou….
(glares)
Shutting up.
But as I was saying, let’s look at the Atkinson Doctor. We don’t get to see much of him, but we do see more of him than any other version in Fatal Death. What are his distinctive features?
He got laid.
I’m ignoring you.
Really. It’s official, he got laid. Quote:
“DOCTOR: I remember you lot, of course. And, er, you’re my fiancée?
EMMA: You remember me then?
DOCTOR: How could I possibly forget the only time travelling companion I’ve ever had?
EMMA: You’ve had lots of companions.
DOCTOR: The only time travelling companion I’ve had.
EMMA: Oh, right. (Curse of Fatal Death)”Unquote. The Doctor was a dog, the Doctor got a bone, the Doctor buried his bone. Pre-marital sex. This is the first confirmed Doctor Sex in like since before the ‘Unearthly Child’. And with a Companion too! Well, I suppose there’s River Song, but that was probably marital sex, if at all, or marriage without sex. Certainly the Doctor didn’t seem to be gagging to see River. But with Emma…. URK!!! (Strangling noises)
Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for that. We’ll acknowledge for the record that the Doctor did have sex and did intend to settle down and make an honest woman of her, both definitely firsts in a Doctoral history which involves a lot of chaste relationships with a great many attractive men and women, and a history of leaving them. But there’s something deeper.
First and foremost, he wants to retire. He’s tired of saving the universe. He wants to quit. I think that’s significant. This is a Doctor Who is making a conscious decision to try and leave the good fight, or the bad fight. He just wants out.
“DOCTOR: Very well. I recently calculated that I have saved every planet in the known universe a minimum number of twenty seven times. But you know, I have grown weary of all the evil in the cosmos. All the cruelty, all the suffering, all those endless gravel quarries. And so I have decided to retire, settle down and get married. (Curse of Fatal Death)”
Interestingly, this would be reflected in a throwaway comment from ‘Name of the Doctor’…
“DOCTOR: Always thought maybe I’d retire. Take up watercolours or bee-keeping, or something. Apparently not. (Name of the Doctor)”
Now, it’s interesting, the Doctor doesn’t seem particularly upset or despairing about the decision. This might be because in Emma, he’s found or decided upon a positive reason for retiring – ie, he’s moving toward someone, rather than running away from something.
“DOCTOR: Yes. Without even knowing I was looking, I have found a woman to love. A woman more fascinating than all my travels through time and space. A girl more exciting than an escape up a ventilation shaft. A lover more thrilling than an army of cybernetic slugs. (The Doctor and Emma kiss.) (Curse of Fatal Death)”
In many ways, he’s the same Doctor we know through all the incarnations, quick witted, a touch ironic or sarcastic, articulate, clever, brilliant. He’s clearly a compassionate Doctor, as he makes his effort to save the universe, and as he mourns the Terserons. But the defining feature of this Doctor is that he wants out. No more saving the universe, no more travelling, he wants to get married, settle down and retire.
There are some interesting details. He feels the need to announce his marriage and retirement to the Master? There’s something going on there.
And there’s an overlooked element of bathos? Where does he go to announce his retirement and marriage to the Master?
“DOCTOR: The Planet Terserus, once home to the Terserons, the most kindly and peace loving race I’ve ever encountered. And yet one of the most shunned and abhorred species of all history. (Curse of Fatal Death)”
To a dead world. A world whose people the Doctor describes as wonderful and shunned. A world whose past he visits, but whose end he cannot change. There’s a hint of underlying sadness. It reflects the often bittersweetness of the Doctor, the self loathing beneath the enthusiasm.
If we accept that the Atkinson Doctor was born from the despair and rage of the Hurt Doctor, then that might make sense. The McGann Doctor tried to sit out the Time War, to continue on his way, as a neutral ‘good guy’. The Hurt Doctor is the one who commits to fighting the time war whatever it takes.
The Atkinson Doctor is almost the opposite of the Hurt Doctor, he just wants to walk away, he’s quitting the game altogether. He doesn’t want to care about the universe, no longer wants to save it, he wants to focus on one person, making a commitment he’s never been willing to give a person before. If we see McGann in the center, the Hurt Doctor goes one way from McGann, the Atkinson Doctor goes the opposite direction.
In the end, the Atkinson Doctor is killed because he cannot give up on the Universe. If the Hurt Doctor was the one that hardened, that girded for war and brutality, then the Atkinson Doctor was the one that hung onto the moral core.
We can assume that the Grant Doctor kept that same moral core, and shared at least some of the Atkinson Doctor’s traits. We know at the end of Curse, that his relationship with his companion and intended wife, Emma, is over. The Grant Doctor worries about this when he first appears, but despite her efforts, by the time the Lumley incarnation shows up, she’s had enough. Even if the final version returned to the Grant Doctor, she might well have been outof there.
It’s possible that this relationship breakdown is what the Grant Doctor is suffering in Shalka. Every other time, he’s been careful not to let Companions get too close, not to open up too fully. Well this time, he went all in, and it blew up in his face. The thinking has been that the Grant Doctor in Shalka is haunted by Tragedy, but the Doctors have lost companions before and got over it. Maybe this time its heartbreak.
If the hints of something with the Master is anything to go by, the Grant Doctor in Shalka is also sexually active, and even more of a drinker. Yet in Shalka, he retains that Doctorish moral core, and a willingness to eventually live again. But there’s also some clear indication that the Doctor here is under the control of the Time Lords.
This may be part of the deep loathing of the Great Intelligence for the Doctor…. keeping in mind that the Great Intelligence went on to do horrific and ruthless things. It remembered the original moral core, even if it no longer followed it. And it saw the surviving Doctor’s lineage as the line that repudiated that moral core utterly.
But, getting back to the Grant Doctor existing parallel to the Hurt Doctor, this leaves us with the prospect in the Time War of two Doctors as active agents. The Hurt Doctor as a dangerous renegade, trying to pull it all down on both the Time Lords and the Daleks, Rassilon’s nemesis, and the Grant Doctor as Rassilon’s pawn. Carefully used, kept out of the way of the other Doctor.
Was the Grant Doctor’s eventual fate the result of his and the Master’s rebellion against Rassilon? A rebellion that left the Grant Doctor a bodiless intelligence, and sent the Master fleeing to the end of the Universe.
We don’t really know. The Time War is a giant empty space at its core, where anything might have happened. All we can say is that in that vast blank space, it is possible to write this story. How’s that?
Not bad.
Thank you.
So, want to hear my Theory on Blackadder and the Doctor…
No.
28 November 2013 at 23:56 #21946@craig Not to worry. I take no offense. It’s quite easy online for people to say things more harshly than they are meant, or for thing to be taken the wrong way, so a certain amount of good will is a good thing. I know that I often rub people the wrong way. I have no patience for genuine Trolls, but we find those anywhere. As far as Shazzbot goes, he or she pointed out a legitimate error, I acknowledged the error, that’s the long and short of it. As far as I’m concerned, Shazzbot and I are good.
28 November 2013 at 23:49 #21945Also good point about chronology with Smith’s encounter with the GI technically being the first. And has it ever been explained why he doesn’t seem to remember the GI in that episode?
I don’t think so. I think that it might be possible that it has honestly slipped his mind, there’s six or seven hundred years between the last encounter of the Troughton Doctor and the first encounter with the Smith Doctor. My own take on it is that he’s misdiagnosed the Great Intelligence in the Snowmen. He remembers clearly the being he twice encountered as Troughton, but he’s formed an exclusive theory of ‘psychic snow’ – in essence, he completely misunderstands what he’s dealing with. This is why he’s so shocked when wiping Simeon’s memory doesn’t dissipate the Great Intelligence. He might figure it out on reflection, especially after remembering that he gave it a London Subway map for the 1960’s and what that might lead to.
But this highlights another problem for the Great Intelligence – the Abominable Snowmen has it coming to Earth in the 1600’s, and the Snowmen seems to show it coming to Earth in the 1800’s.
If the GI is a disembodied, formless thing, could a case be made for it being unaffected by time also? Therefore it can’t necessarily follow the chronology of its encounters with the Doc but merely that it is somehow linked to him and that he is the enemy?
I’ve wondered about that myself. The Great Intelligence seems able to boot itself to Trenzalore on the other side of whever in the far future/past, while harassing the Doctor’s pals in the 19th century. This implies that it may not be bound by space and time, or may not be required to experience space and time in the linear sense that we do.
In which case, things get very strange. The only chonology that we could construct for the great intelligence would be in the context of relationships in its own life. So let’s see…. We would then know that the Snowmen takes place before Web of Fear because of the London Subway map connection. And we would know that the Name of the Doctor is the last event of its life. That seems to be pretty much a lock.
Apart from that, Abominable Snowmen, Web of Fear, Downtime and the Five Doctors all feature Yeti, which seems to have been its ‘go to’ instrument. But the Yeti robots don’t make sense as constructs outside the Himalayas, so we’d have to assume that it genuinely started using Yeti in Abominable Snowmen, and possibly continued to use them later in its ‘life’ as useful tools in Web of Fear and Downtime. Which would mean that the Great Intelligence’s existence was roughly matching linear chronology. Or maybe they were just accessible tools at those particular points in time and space, in which case, we can’t tell.
Downtime probably relates to Bells of St. Mary’s because in both cases its using a very similar tactic. But in Bells of St. Mary’s, it’s using a lot more sophisticated constructs than Yetis. Is that just the tools available to it, or does that suggest its a more mature entity? Again, useful to speculate, but difficult to say.
As to your final point, are you saying that with all the links between Scream and the new series that Shalka Doc is meant to be connected to the GI in some way. As I said above, that’s about the only way I could countenance the Shalka Doc being canon. Or are you suggesting something else?
I think that my basic thesis, as developing, is that the Great Intelligence is in fact the disembodied, formless, remnant of the Grant Doctor of Scream of the Shalka, that Doctor having regenerated from the Atkinson Doctor in Curse of Fatal Death. Basically, the Atkinson and Grant Doctors represent a ‘hidden line’ in Doctor Who – and something really awful ended up happening to the Grant Doctor which produced the GI.
1. That the events of the Web of Fear ended up with some of the Doctor’s mind being uploaded to the GI. That the GI essentially became Doctor-ised at this point. Wouldn’t this account the link you posit between the Doctor and the GI and its fascination for the Doctor.
2. That the GI could somehow be the Matrix, sundered from the time-locked Gallifrey and having gained (or been given) sentience.
Holy Crap!!! Those are terrific ideas! Not ones I’m advancing myself, as you can tell, I’ve gone off in a different direction. But both of them make very interesting theories as to the GI’s fascination with the Doctor and his super-ordinary and apparently impossible knowledge of the Doctor’s life.
Let me throw in a wild card, just to make things interesting. My main argument is that the GI is actually a disembodied fragment or rendition of the Doctor, derived from the Grant Doctor. Okay, I still think that’s pretty nifty, cause it folds in all three Grant appearances, and explains the knowledge and obsession of the GI. Interestingly, the GI also goes by the name ‘Doctor’ – ‘Doctor Simeon’. I was thinking ‘Doctor Simeon’ might be a little tip off to the GI’s true identity. But go and look at ‘Abominable Snowmen’ – the GI inhabits or possesses the Monk. And what is the Monk also called by in the story…. ‘the Master!’ Well, just the ‘Master’ the exclamation point is mine. But you get where I’m going. The interpretation that the GI is actually a disembodied version of the Master seems to work almost as well.
You’re probably right that I should revisit Shalka. I’m just not sure I could bring myself to do so. I just remember thinking at the time ‘if this is the future of Who then I’m done with it’. The revived series was such a damn relief for me that that wasn’t the last gasp of Who. But fair play to you for persevering with it and giving it a second chance.
I remember in the early 90’s, watching a fifth generation VHS dub of Dimensions in Time, in a crappy little Library audiovisual room, on an aged TV and VCR, sitting on the most uncomfortable chairs ever made. Five minutes in, I was bleeding from my ears and eyeballs. Ten minutes in blood vessels in my brain were exploding like firecrackers in self defense. By the time it was over, I could feel reality unwinding. It was that bad.
Almost twenty years later, I had occasion to watch a much better image in comfort on youtube, and I was surprised at how I was able to enjoy it. I mean, oh my god – what a piece of crap! But still, there was something to love in it, the way you might love a retarded, crippled dog whose hindquarters have been crushed by a car, so that it’s dragging itself around by it’s forelegs, leaving a trail of drool and piss behind it, but somehow, looking up at you with big brown eyes and just wanting yout to pet it.
So what does this mean? Wait 20 years to watch Shalka again. Maybe not that long. But tell you what, give it another try when you feel ready. You might be surprised by your willingness to forgive and enjoy.
28 November 2013 at 19:23 #21920Correction: Bells of St. John. Thank you for pointing out that glitch.
28 November 2013 at 18:53 #21915The Great Intelligence is foe from two adventures in the Troughton Era, ‘The Abominable Snowman’ and ‘Web of Fear’, who appears in three stories of the Matt Smith era, ‘The Snowmen’, ‘Bells of Saint Mary’s’ and ‘Name of the Doctor.’
For what it’s worth, the Great Intelligence also features in Reeltime productions ‘Downtime’ along with Victoria Waterfield, Sarah Jane Smith and the Brigadier. Downtime’s been looking a lot better since the character of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, created here, migrated to the main series. Also, it’s got the best Yetis ever (in some ways, that’s like being the World’s tallest Midget, the Shortest Giant, the Skinniest Fat Lady, etc., but … just go with it).
In terms of the Great Intelligence’s Chronology, it appears very very roughly as follows:
* Unknown – the Monk Padmasavambha meets the Troughton Doctor. The Doctor recalls meeting the Monk centuries before and is surprised he is still alive, but shows no indication of having encountered the Great Intelligence before. (Abominable Snowman)
* 390 years ago, the Great Intelligence makes contact with and possesses the Tibetan Monk, Padmasavamha. (Abominable Snowman)
* 1860 it apparently comes to Earth and makes contact with the rather sociopathic and lonely child Walter Simeon. Simeon will grow up and found the Great Intelligence Institute. (Snowmen)
* 1892-93 the Great Intelligence is manifesting carnivorous snowmen and trying to build a human body. The Doctor and Madame Vastra foil the Great Intelligence, Simeon dies, but the Great Intelligence takes his name and face. The Doctor gives it a map of the London Subway system for the 1960’s and tells it it’s important. (Snowmen)
* 1895 (approx) the Great Intelligence interrupts a seance of Madame Vastra and her associates, as they try to commune with River Song and Clara Oswald in the dreamtime. It also sends information to a prisoner, with the coordinates in time and space for Trenzalore. (Name of the Doctor)
* 1935 the Great Intelligence, controlling the Monk Padhasavambha, encounters the Troughton Doctor in Tibet. Either the Monk or the Intelligence remembers the Doctor from a pervious meeting. It appears intent on creating a corporeal body. It possesses the mind of one of the Doctor’s Companions, and animates the body of Padhasvambha after he dies. In the meantime, until a body comes along, it uses ‘robots’ disguised as Yeti. (Abominable Snowmem)
* 1966 the Great Intelligence attacks the London Subway system, once again using Yeti Robots. It possesses the mind of one person, reanimates another deceased body. It also manages to hijack or draw the Tardis down somehow, to this time and place. It turns out its entire plot and main objective is to absorb the Doctor’s mind. (Web of Fear)
* 1970 the Great Intelligence manipulates one of the Doctor’s former companions to create a ‘New Age’ University in England as its tool. It gets into computers and tries to rule the world from the Internet. It also employs Yeti robots, and can somehow transform people into them. (Downtime)
* 1995 the Great Intelligence uses the internet to suck peoples minds, but is foiled by the Brigadier and Sarah Jane. The Doctor doesn’t get involved in this one. (Downtime)
* 2013 the Great Intelligence is sucking people’s minds out through the computer Wi-Fi through the use of ‘spoonhead’ androids. It swallows thousands of intelligences and personalities before being foiled by the Doctor. (Bells of St. Mary’s)
* Unknown Time, Gallifrey – A Yeti attacks the Master and Troughton Doctor in the Death Zone, in the Five Doctors. That poses some questions. The Yeti is a tool of the Great Intelligence, and inanimate without it. The monsters in the Death Zone were apparently recruited by the Time Lord Borusa. Did Borusa recruit the Yeti? Did he operate it? Was the Intelligence operating the Yeti? With Borusa’s consent? Or as an independent agent with or without Borusa’s knowledge? Could the Intelligence reach all the way to Gallifrey? Is the Intelligence connected to Gallifrey in some way? Interesting to speculate, but no hard information. (Five Doctors)
* Unknown far future, deep space. The Great Intelligence forces the Doctor to Trenzalore, follows him there, forces the opening of the Doctor’s tomb, and merges with the Doctor’s timeline – resulting in its death.
So what do we know or not know about the Great Intelligence? Well, we don’t know where it comes from, whether outer space, the astral plane, some other dimension, the past, the future, or wherever. We don’t know its origin or creation story. We don’t know if it previously had a body and lost it, or if its always been what it is.
PADMASAMBHAVA: Intelligence. Formless in space. I astral travelled.
DOCTOR: I see. You made mental contact with this intelligence?
PADMASAMBHAVA: It used my mind. It controls my body.
DOCTOR: But why?
PADMASAMBHAVA: Experiment. Wished material form. A voice, it said. I believed. Experiment. But now. Help. (Abominable Snowmen)In the ‘Abominable Snowmen’ there’s some indication that the Great Intelligence may have encountered the Doctor before, or knows of him. It speaks with substantial familiarity:
GI [OC]: (harsh and rasping) The Doctor. So. He has returned.
GI [OC]: …..we must make certain that Doctor learns nothing of what is happening. He is a man of great knowledge and intelligence, but he may not show sympathy for the powers that guide us. He may even seek to hinder the Great Plan. (Abominable Snowmen)
Chronologically, of course, the Abominable Snowmen takes place in 1935. Technically, the Doctor’s first encounter with the Great Intelligence is in 1892 in London, in the Matt Smith episode, ‘The Snowmen.’ So apparently, from the Intelligence’s point of view… assuming that the Intelligence itself isn’t bopping through time as well, it has met the Doctor before.
But controlling Dr. Simeon in London between 1860 and 1892 seems inconsistent with possessing or manipulating Padmasambhava in Tibet for three hundred years up to 1935. Can it be in two places at once? Was it commuting back and forth between London and Tibet? Was it just multitasking like crazy? Maybe the Great Intelligence can move through time and space, and the Monk and Simeon are two different places along what it experiences as a linear timeline. Who knows…
It might get a little tricky. In The Name of the Doctor, the Great Intelligence moves all the way from invading dreams in the 19th century, to the planet Trenzalore in deep space far in the future or past. And as we’ve speculated, it might have been active on Gallifrey. This implies that the Intelligence isn’t really bound by time or space, which make figuring its timeline a mugs game.
Padmasambhava has encountered the Doctor before, centuries before, during his protracted life. But the Troughton Doctor doesn’t seem to have encountered the Intelligence, then, or possibly at all.
DOCTOR: Oh no, it isn’t. I know Padmasambhava. He’s my friend. Where have you come from? Why are you using his body in this fashion? (Abominable Snowmen)
These passages tell us some very significant things. This is new to him. He has no idea what it is, or where it comes from. So if he did encounter the Intelligence in Pamasambhava, it concealed itself from him. Or if the Intelligence has encountered the Doctor apart from that, then it must have been a later Doctor, most likely the Smith Doctor in the Snowmen.
In the Doctor’s timeline, the Troughton Doctor really has no idea what the Intelligence is, where it comes from, or what it wants. In the next appearance, in Web of Fear, set in 1966, (third encounter for the Great Intelligence chronologically) it’s clear that the Doctor has only the vaguest idea of what it is:
COLONEL: ….tell me, Doctor, this Intelligence, exactly what is it?
DOCTOR: Well, I wish I could give you a precise answer. Perhaps the best way to describe it is a sort of formless, shapeless thing floating about in space like a cloud of mist, only with a mind and will.
COLONEL: What’s it after? What’s it want?
DOCTOR: I wish I knew. The only thing I know for sure is that it brought me here. (Web of Fear)In Web of Fear, it’s the transfer of some of the Intelligence’s relics to London that enables it to reactivate there in the 1960’s. The Troughton Doctor has no idea why the Intelligence is attacking the London Underground. But of course, we know that in the new series, in the ‘Snowmen’ the Smith Doctor gave it the map on a lunch box and told it it was important.
The Smith Doctor theorizes that it’s just a psychic snow, reflecting back and amplifying the child, Walter Simeon’s growing psychosis, he calls it a parasite. Of course, the Smith Doctor could be wrong, it continues to thrive and survive without it’s Simeon host.
In the Web of Fear, it becomes clear that the Great Intelligence is very interested in the Doctor. It’s established early on that it is the Intelligence that has drawn the Tardis to London in the 1960’s, and is holding it there. Ultimately, the Doctor is the target of the Intelligence’s plot.
GI: Through time and space, I have observed you, Doctor. Your mind surpasses that of all other creatures.
DOCTOR: What do you want?
GI: You! Your mind will be invaluable to me. Therefore I have invented a machine that will drain all past knowledge and experience from your mind. (Web of Fear)So what do we get from that? It’s also apparently powerful enough to draw and hold the Tardis. To what purpose? It wants the Doctor’s memories. Oddly, it seems almost civil about the whole thing.
VICTORIA: But you’ll kill him!
GI: Oh no, he will survive, his mind unharmed. Only empty as a newborn child’s. (Web of Fear)Ironically, in the new series, that’s exactly what the Doctor will end up doing to the Intelligence’s host, Doctor Simeon, in the Snowmen in 1982, and to a lesser extent, will inadvertently do to the Intelligence’s human pawns, in 2013. Erase their memories, leaving them unharmed but as empty as a child.
The Great Intelligence is clearly a bodiless, incorporeal identity or intelligent being. We don’t know if it ever had a body, but we do know that it seems to want one now. Despite this, it can possess or control living human minds, and it can reanimate dead bodies. You’d think that would be enough, but it wants one to call its own, apparently. Both the Snowmen, and the Abominable Snowmen deal with its quest to create a physical body. To the extent it has a self image, distinct from the minds it possesses or bodies it animates, it’s Richard Grant’s face.
The Great Intelligence, for all its moralising in Name of the Doctor is not a nice being. It kills a bunch of poor people for laughs in the Snowmen. In the Abominable Snowman, it kills several monks because they’ve gotten in the way. It’s indiscriminately murderous in Web of Fear. And in Bells of St. Mary’s and Downtime…. let’s just say, it’s no respecter of free will and personal space. While it can be quite civil and occasionally personable, it is entirely ruthless.
So what exactly is the thing going on between the Great Intelligence and the Doctor? Well, the events of the “Name of the Doctor” are very intriguing. Among other things, the Great Intelligence is very knowledgeable about the Doctor’s history. Too knowledgeable.
GI: Welcome to the final resting place of the cruel tyrant. Of the slaughterer of the ten billion, and the vessel of the final darkness. Welcome to the tomb of the Doctor.
GI: It was a minor skirmish, by the Doctor’s blood-soaked standards. Not exactly the Time War, but enough to finish him. In the end, it was too much for the old man.
VASTRA: The Doctor has been many things, but never blood-soaked.
GI: Tell that to the leader of the Sycorax, or Solomon the trader, or the Cybermen, or the Daleks. The Doctor lives his life in darker hues, day upon day, and he will have other names before the end. The Storm, the Beast, the Valeyard.
VASTRA: Even if any of this were true, which I take the liberty of doubting, how did you come by this information?
GI: I am information. (Name of the Doctor)That’s peculiar when you stop to think about it. The Great Intelligence knows a lot more about the Doctor’s career than its own run ins with the Doctor. That’s kind of interesting. When we’ve encountered other villains or enemies, like the Cybermen, they often go over their own history with the Doctor. I remember one old series scene where the Cybermen reviewed the different regenerations of the Doctor that they’d fought. But this is different. Somehow, the Great Intelligence knows, not just its own history with the Doctor. It knows the Doctor’s whole history.
Specifically, the Great Intellligence is aware of and referencing recent specific actions of the Doctor that it simply was not present for, not involved in, and shouldn’t and couldn’t possibly know – the death of Solomon at the ‘hands’ of the Doctor in ‘Dinosaurs on a Spaceship’ and the Sycorax in ‘The Christmas Invasion.’
Now, the Sycorax… I can understand that, after all, that was pretty public stuff, it was right there in all the newspapers, the British government had all sorts of files. The Prime Minister got brought down over it. All the Great Intelligence really has to do is snoop the internet.
On the other hand, what went on in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship…. That takes place in the future, when India is a superpower, and it takes place in deep space, on a long voyage ship. Not even the Doctor’s companions, apart from Nefertiti got the full skinny on that one, and its not like there were a lot of other witnesses. Nefertiti wasn’t leaving stuff on the internet. So how did he know about that? Where would he get that information?
Okay, so maybe the Great Intelligence was just paying attention to the Doctor…. including the Doctor’s adventures in the future of Earth?
GI: ….The Doctor lives his life in darker hues, day upon day, and he will have other names before the end. The Storm, the Beast, the Valeyard. (Name of the Doctor)
The Great Intelligence knows about the Valeyard, the Doctor’s final, evil regeneration, seen in trial of a Time Lord. That’s many incarnations down the road. Not only several regenerations from now, but on Gallifrey, in the Matrix, in the future, and probably not the sort of information that the Time Lords are interested in getting out. I suspect that knowledge of the Valeyard is restricted to the highest members of Council.
How does he know about the Valeyard? Was the Great Intelligence present at the Trial of a Timelord? Did it raid the Matrix or go galoophing on Gallifrey? Because right now, Gallifrey is toast, as is everyone else who should or could have known about the Valeyard…. You can’t even reach Gallifrey’s past, its under a time lock. So how does the Great Intelligence know?
GI: It was a minor skirmish, by the Doctor’s blood-soaked standards. Not exactly the Time War, but enough to finish him. In the end, it was too much for the old man. (Name of the Doctor)
Okay, so here, the Great Intelligence is alluding directly to the Time War, and apparently knows all about that. And he knows about the final battle where the Doctor died…. Throw in the reference to the Cybermen and Daleks…. And its clear that the Great Intelligence knows a lot about both the Doctor’s past and the future, the Doctor’s entire history.
How does the Great Intelligence know about Trenzalore?
RIVER: You too, Strax. Wake up now!
(River throws her champagne into his face. Strax sits up in Glasgow, surrounded by the same creatures. Apparently they are known as Whisper Men. They are also with Clara and River.)
WHISPER MEN: Tell the Doctor. Tell the Doctor. Tell the Doctor.
CLARA: Tell him what?
(The face of the Great Intelligence appears.)GI: His friends are lost for ever more, unless he goes to Trenzalore.
GI: The doors require a key. The key is a word. And the word is the Doctor’s.
GI: Open the door, Doctor. Speak, and open your tomb.
GI: The key is a word lost to time. A secret hidden in the deepest shadow and know to you alone. The answer to a question.
GI: Doctor, what is your name? (Name of the Doctor)How does it know any of this? How does it know what Trenzalore is? Or that it’s the place where the Doctor died? How does it know that there’s a tomb there? The secret of the Tomb? How does it know the key to opening the Doctor’s Tomb is the true name of the Doctor? How could the Great Intelligence possibly know this…
And for that matter, how does the Great Intelligence get around? Yeah, it’s a disembodied intelligence, but you know, it accosts Madame Vastra in the 19th century, how does it get all the way out to Trenzalore on the other side of the universe, long after the Doctor has died? Clearly, the Great Intelligence seems to be able to move through space and time. What about that?
DOCTOR: I know. I’m sorry. Now then, Doctor Simeon, or Mister G Intelligence, whatever I call you, do you know what’s in there?
GI: For me, peace at last. For you, pain everlasting. Won’t you invite us in?SIMEON: Less poetry, Doctor. Just tell them.
DOCTOR: Time travel is damage. It’s like a tear in the fabric of reality. That is the scar tissue of my journey through the universe. My path through time and space from Gallifrey to Trenzalore.
GL: The Doctor’s life is a open wound. And an open wound can be entered. (Name of the Doctor)
Here’s the thing – the Great Intelligence doesn’t just know where the Doctor died, and where his tomb is. It knows what’s in the tomb, what it represents, and how to use it.
How could it possibly have this information? Madame Kovarian would have given her ovaries to have that information. The Silence would have shouted for joy to get it. The Companions certainly don’t know it, never heard it.
In fact, at this point, it should be almost impossible for the Great Intelligence to know. The Doctor, after his adventures with the Silence, Madame Kovarian and his apparent death by the impossible astronaut has taken steps to erase his records from the universe. As we see in the mini-episode “The Inforarium.”
So where does the Great Intelligence get this information? How? If the Doctor’s erased all records and information about himself, if he’s concealing himself from History, how is it that the Great Intelligence seems to know the Doctor’s past and future, on and off earth, including seemingly impossible things, so intimately?
How? Or Who?
The only other person who knows, the only person who could possibly know, apart from the Great Intelligence…. is the Doctor.
GI: Welcome to the final resting place of the cruel tyrant. Of the slaughterer of the ten billion, and the vessel of the final darkness. Welcome to the tomb of the Doctor. (Name of the Doctor)
The contempt and hatred of the Great Intelligence for the Doctor in this episode is profound. He describes the Doctor as basically a world class monster, a genocidal, destructive force. This seems a bit harsh… until we realize that if the Great Intelligence knows about the Doctor’s present and future, he may also know what the Doctor did in the Time War, may have been a witness to the Hurt Doctor.
In short – the Great Intelligence really hates the Doctor, and he states reasons that the Doctor deserves to be hated…. He doesn’t just hate the Doctor, he’s got a case, examples and everything. Several of which he shouldn’t be able to know. Weird.
Now…. let me take you to another Tenant Episode, “Amy’s Choice” and a conversation that Doctor has with a character calling itself the ‘Dream Lord’:
DOCTOR: Drop it. Drop all of it. I know who you are.
DREAM LORD: Course you don’t.
DOCTOR: Course I do. No idea how you can be here, but there’s only one person in the universe who hates me as much as you do (Amy’s Choice)And later in the same episode….
DOCTOR: No, no. No. Sorry, wasn’t it obvious? The Dream Lord was me. Psychic pollen. It’s a mind parasite. It feeds on everything dark in you, gives it a voice, turns it against you. I’m nine hundred and seven. It had a lot to go on. (Amy’s Choice)
That’s pretty suggestive. There’s only one person in the Universe who could hate the Doctor that much…. There’s a streak of self loathing in the Doctor. The comment in Amy’s Choice is the most blatant of course. But you can find similar sentiments running through the Doctor’s history, even in the old series. There’s a lot of regrets in there.
So not only does the Great Intelligence possess an apparently impossible level of knowledge of the Doctor’s past and future, he holds a loathing much like the Doctor’s own self loathing.
In the end, the Great Intelligence merges with the Doctor’s Timestream. Allegedly to take revenge upon the Doctor. To destroy the Doctor, and avenge all the injustices and injuries perpetrated by the Doctor… even at the cost of the Great Intelligence’s own existence.
Hold on a second there – the Doctor says that it will destroy the Great Intelligence, to which the Great Intelligence replies ‘fine, I’m down with that, buckaroo’ (he didn’t really say it, but that’s the gist.) But minutes later in ‘Name of the Doctor’ Clara Oswald goes in. Let’s go back and take another look, shall we… What does the Doctor actually say is going to happen to the Great Intelligence:
DOCTOR: No, it would destroy you.
DOCTOR: It will burn you up. Once you go through, you can’t come back. You will be scattered along my timeline like confetti. (Name of the Doctor)And here’s what the River says is going to happen to Clara Oswald:
RIVER: Whatever you’re thinking of doing, don’t.
CLARA: If I step in there, what happens?
RIVER: The time winds will tear you into a million pieces. A million versions of you, living and dying all over time and space, like echoes.
CLARA: But the echoes could save the Doctor, right?
RIVER: But they won’t be you. The real you will die. They’ll just be copies. (Name of the Doctor)That’s pretty consistent. But that’s not quite how the Great Intelligence see’s its own fate.
What the Great Intelligence says, is easy to overlook or misinterpret. The Doctor and River are claiming that the same things will happen to Clara and the Great Intelligence. But the Great Intelligence subtly contradicts the Doctor…
GI: The Doctor’s life is a open wound. And an open wound can be entered.
DOCTOR: No, it would destroy you.
GI: Not at all. It will kill me. It will destroy you. I can rewrite your every living moment. I can turn every one of you victories into defeats. Poison every friendship. Deliver pain to your every breath. (Name of the Doctor)And this….
GI: For me, peace at last. For you, pain everlasting. Won’t you invite us in? (Name of the Doctor)
“Not at all’? “Peace for me at last?”
There’s something peculiar here. The Doctor talks about both the Great Intelligence and Clara being torn into confetti, scattered over a million moments. That’s what he means when he says ‘destroy you’, and that’s what he talks about to both Clara and the Great Intelligence.
But listen to the Great intelligence. He is arguing with the Doctor. The Doctor and River may be right on in terms of what happens when Clara enters his time stream. But the Great Intelligence got a subtly different take on what will happen to him when he merges with the Doctor’s time stream.
“Not at all.”
– It won’t destroy him, he’s not going to be torn to confetti and scattered over a million moments of the Doctor’s life. “It will kill me.” “Peace at last.” Killed, rather than destroyed. He’s going to be ended, stopped, erased. He will find oblivion, not confetti. “Peace at last…”
And then he makes the emphatic point – “It will destroy you.” The Great Intelligence is killing itself, ending itself, to destroy the Doctor. And then there’s this “I can rewrite your every living moment…”
Not just being there, like Clara, not just kind of being this person who perpetually shows up everywhere, over and over, in life after life… he’s going to rewrite the Doctor’s life. Meaning, he’s going to be there, living in the Doctor’s life and rewriting it. Well, there’s only one way that works.
And of course, here’s the thing – when Clara enters the Doctor’s timestream, she sees all sorts of Doctors, and all the incarnations of his memories. Even the one he won’t remember. But there’s someone missing. Where is the Great Intelligence? The Great Intelligence should be right there at every moment that Clara is.
Why isn’t the Doctor’s history one of Clara eternally tussling in the background with the Great Intelligence? She never sees it, hears it, never encounters or runs across it. Unlike Clara… the Great Intelligence vanished when it hit the Doctor’s timestream, merged with the Doctor’s existence in a way that Clara didn’t.
It seems to me that the story is saying, and the Great Intelligence is pretty clearly saying here that it is the Doctor, and it is intent on suicide, but not just suicide of itself, of retro-suicide, erasing the Doctor’s whole history. “Peace at last.” Well, to quote the series… Who else could hate the Doctor so much as to want not only death, but to unmake his history?
You put all this together, and really, it’s hard to avoid the possibility that the Great Intelligence is some sort of disembodied, half-insane incarnation of the Doctor.
Okay, but you’ll say to me… the fact that it might be possible that doesn’t prove the Great Intelligence is actually some sort of schism or avatar of the Doctor.
Yeah, it’s all circumstantial evidence. I’ll admit, that if all I had to go on was the Day of the Doctor, and the other appearances of the Great Intelligence in the Troughton and Smith eras…. well, I’d have a suggestive case, but it wouldn’t quite be proof.
But let me remind you, that the face of the Great Intelligence in three episodes was the face of the Doctor in Scream and Curse. In short, you had an actor who had established somewhat as the Doctor, playing the Great Intellligence. Within the logic and continuity of the series and the productions, that’s pretty suggestive.
And let’s face it…. the producers and show runners knew Richard Grant’s prior turns as the Doctor when they cast him. Steven Moffat, who wrote ‘Curse of Fatal Death’ certainly knew Grant’s turn as the Doctor in that special, clearly knew his turn as the ‘Doctor in Shalka’, and wrote every episode featuring the Great Intelligence in the new series… So it might be a coincidence… Or it might not be. It’s entirely possible that it was in their minds, you can’t rule that out.
And then there’s the other stuff: Throw in the Jacobi Master. Throw in the similarities in tone and style between Shalka and the modern series. Throw in the Doctor/Master connections between Curse and Scream. Throw in all the connections that Curse has to the old series, new series and even the movie. And the circumstantial evidence becomes overwhelming.
One bit here, we could discount that. Even a couple of bits, something here, something there, well it can be overlooked. But after a while, the sheer volume of connections and overlaps and crossovers starts to become insurmountable, the weight of it becomes irresistible.
Ladies and Gentlemen, voila…
One more hat trick…
28 November 2013 at 18:40 #21912@jimthefish Is it unnecessary? Yes, certainly. But then, everything worthwhile in life is unnecessary. The question is, is it fun? Is it interesting?
I can understand where you are coming from. I hated the Scream of the Shalka on first run through. The crappy flash animation and unfriendly download format was incredibly distracting, the Shalka Doctor starts out as a cold and unappealing fish, and you can clearly tell that everyone involved – actors, directors and animators were struggling with a format that was new to them. I came away with a very bad first impression.
But after sufficient time had passed for the bad taste to fade a little, I began to consider the circumstances and format, and particularly the limitations of 2003 bandwidth. I took another look, made allowances for teething, and was quite surprised and pleased to find the characters and the story warming up after a decidedly rocky start. A couple of episodes in, and I was starting to like the Shalka Doctor, in part because the character itself was becoming likeable – on an emotional journey from unlikeable isolation to caring about people again, and in part because Grant actually did seem to be getting a handle on both the role and the particular requirements of doing a ‘voice only’ role.
So, I’ve come to forgive the Shalka its sins, and even come to like it. It’s a quirky addition to the history of Who. And an interesting ‘road not travelled.’ Any new thing has bugs and teething problems. I think that if the Shalka Doctor had proceeded we might have seen considerable improvement as it found its feet and worked out the kinks.
I dunno. I guess I’m contrary. I find I’m willing to be quite forgiving of small productions which honestly try hard but have their flaws, and I can be quite unforgiving of gigantic and expensive productions which indulge in the stupid. I suppose that it comes from being an original Whovian, where at points, I was just asked to go along with a plastic garbage bag being an alien, or giant salt and pepper shakers being a cosmic threat. Let’s face it, there’s much in Doctor Who that is tosh, or even outright crap. But you have to look past that, to the strengths and imagination of the series.
Just don’t get me started on Jurassic Park: Lost World, hundreds of millions of dollars spent, state of the art CGI, top line actors, and I felt that I was being punched in the face by the stupid all through the movie.
But on to the great intelligence….
28 November 2013 at 17:43 #21905@scaryb Just a quick follow up thought on some of your remarks. It got me thinking – yes, Day of the Doctor and Name of the Doctor shows us that the Doctor can easily overlook an entire regeneration/identity, either ignoring it or actually blocking it out or forgetting it. And as you’ve pointed out the presence of the Baker Doctor at the end seems to mean that the Doctor can return to previous ‘incarnations.’
Following up on that, the official story which seems to be bruited about in anticipation of Time of the Doctor, is that the Tenant Doctor had a full regeneration in Journey’s End. Okay. Well, that wasn’t how I saw it back when, but hey, weird, weird stuff went on, so people can characterize it however they want. Apparently for story purposes, the Tenant Doctor is now 11th and 12th – ie, he essentially regenerated into himself.
Well, that opens up all sorts of bizarre possibilities. If the Doctor can regenerate back to an earlier form, or regenerate into himself, then hypothetically, we could have any number of ‘intermediate’ or ‘hidden doctors’ – The Barbara Benedetti Doctor from Seattle International Pictures, could well have been a regeneration from Colin Baker and then a regeneration back. The Doctor’s life could be more complicated than we imagine.
28 November 2013 at 17:23 #21903@scaryb Thank you for your feedback. I have more to go…..
Scream of the Shalka got shouldered out of official canon, but as with all things Doctor, that can be open to reconsideration, particularly in light of subsequent developments.
For instance, take the episode Night of the Doctor, featuring the last gasp of the McGann Doctor. Canon? Continuity? Apparently so. But in it, the McGann Doctor references all his companions from the audio adventures, which up to this point, have never been canon. Apparently they are now.
Or let’s take the character of Kate Stewart, the blonde daughter of the Brigadier in Power of Three and Name of the Doctor – good solid canonical episodes, part of continuity, you betcha. As Who as Who can be, all official like. Except that Kate Stewart originates in the Reeltime Production Downtime, which, despite having the Brigadier, Professor Travers, Victoria Waterhouse, Sarah Jane Smith, the Great Intelligence and Yeti… wasn’t canon… Until now, apparently.
So let’s take another look at Scream of the Shalka.
The Shalka story, just to get this out of the way, is that the Doctor’s Tardis materializes in a small English town where everyone is acting kind of weird. At first, the Doctor doesn’t want to be there and is fairly pissed off about it. But as things go along, we learn that there’s an invasion from a race of underground, insectoid aliens called the Shalka, they use ‘sonic technology’ hence the scream. The Doctor adopts a barmaid as a companion, UNIT gets involved, we discover that the Master is living in the Tardis as a companion… and he’s a robot. Eventually, after a rough start, the Doctor wins out.
Here are the downsides – the Animation is just flipping awful. I’m sorry, it’s flash animation, which is just hard to watch at the best of times, and it was designed for the Web, which back in the bad old days of 2003 just didn’t carry as much bandwidth as we are used to now. And of course, back in 2003, we all had these crappy little cathode ray monitors. So, bottom line, its pretty harsh territory.
With the harshness of the animation comes a certain awkwardness in reading and voices. Simply doing voice work can be tough, you obviously can’t use your body or your eyes. You might not even be in the same room or working at the same time as your fellow cast members. Your entire performance is in the voice work. It takes some getting used to. The pacing can go right off. Richard Grant in particular seems to struggle with this initially, to the extent that some people complain he phoned in his performance. Grant warms up as he goes along, as do other actors. But matching dialogue to the animation, and gaps in dialogue sometimes makes it play slow and awkward. Only Derek Jacobi, playing the Master, seems to catch it right away.
So for this reason, the Scream of the Shalka initially comes across as poorly. Initially. As I’ve said, it warms up as it goes along, or as we become used to its visual meter and pacing. The concepts are intriguing, the characters grow on you, the Doctor beomes warmer, and it works well.
This time, out, we don’t have the endless visual backstage connecting factors that seem to tie Curse of Fatal Death to the old series, new series and the movie. Shalka is a web (flash) animation, so it’s not like they can borrow the physical Tardis prop, raid the wardrobe department, or re-use CGI or visual effects sequences. As far as I can tell, they don’t even recycle the old series music all that much.
Rather, there are two principal backdoor connections to the main series –
The first is that this was a BBC production, technically, it was BBCi, which I assume is an online division, with permission of the BBC itself. Indeed, the BBCi project was going to be official Doctor Who, and for a while, the Shalka Doctor was the officially BBC recognized 9th Doctor, before he got unrecognized. What seems to have happened is a sort of BBC turf war. Basically, Doctor Who as a property was in the hands of another BBC corporation, BBC Worldwide, which had made the McGann Doctor Movie in a co-production with Fox, and had tried to get a series going. The McGann movie hadn’t done well enough, the series never took off. But Doctor Who was still a pretty lucrative commodity on the international market, so BBC Worldwide held onto it for the next few years, continuing to try to flog it, without any particular success. So when another division, BBCi came up with an online animation as an official continuation of the series, the BBC essentially said “Sure, why not?”
Make no mistake – the BBCi project was intended to be official Doctor Who. The Shalka doctor was the guy, and there were plans for a series of web adventures. An online fiction story, “The Feast of the Stone” was published. A second animated episode, “Blood of the Robots” was being written. It was a happening thing. There might have been some other issues there. The 40th Anniversary of Doctor Who was coming up. There wasn’t a movie anywhere close to being in the works. The BBC had to commission or support something, and the online animation looked like it might be cheap and efficient, get produced in time, and would be a nice calling card to show depressed fans that “Hey, twelve years after the show went off the air, and six years after the movie flopped, we here at the BBC aren’t giving up on the Doctor.” Well…. okay.
So what went wrong? Well, basically, BBC One, persuaded BBC Worldwide to give up on its international movie co-production, which wasn’t going anywhere, and let BBC television take a stab at running a new series. Of course, when that happens, everything is up in the air. It’s like Highlander “there can be only one” official Doctor Who, someone’s head is going to get cut off while the other guy dances around in the sparkly light show, and its usually the little guy that gets it.
BBCi in this case is definitely the little guy. Let’s face it – they were doing animation, and it was kind of rubbishy online “flash” animation, as opposed to TV animation. Better than Mighty Marvel Marching Heroes from the 1960’s, but still miles below the Simpsons. And they were proposing a series of six fifteen minute episodes, strung into something that might amount to a full typical 90 minute serial, to be followed up by a few more in the same vein. BBC TV was just going epically bigger in every possible way.
BBC Worldwide had given up, so that was fine with BBC TV. The McGann movie was a dead letter, the series it was to give birth to had died aborning. Simple enough to just glom over and incorporate the McGann Doctor. The Shalka Doctor was a live project by a rival BBC faction. It was going to get quashed, and not in a nice way.
For a while there was some debate over whether BBC TV’s project was going to recognize the Shalka Doctor as part of the continuity. Human nature being what it was, any sensible observer could see the response as ‘over my dead body.’ You don’t kick a rival into oblivion and then offer up a courtesy like that. The commitment to obliteration means you’re not going to be nice about things…. at least not then and there.
So, no surprise, the Shalka Doctor got de-officialised, un-canonized, dumped, eviscerated, cancelled, nuked, toasted, roasted, exploded, steamrollered, run over, pile drived, decapitated, defenestrated, they had a whip round over to the Shalka Doctor’s mothers home, punched her in the nose, and pissed on her rose bushes.
Russell T. Davies publicly said at one point:
“I thought he was terrible. I thought he took the money and ran, to be honest. It was a lazy performance. He was never on our list to play the Doctor.”
(quoted from Wikipedia)
Well, Grant’s performance has been legitimately panned in reviews. Some people like it, some people see a lack of effect. Grant himself, appeared to be holding his nose on the production, claiming not to know anything about Doctor Who (notwithstanding having appeared as the the Doctor in Curse of Fatal Death, and being from England – gee whiz, an Englisman not knowing about Doctor Who is like an Englishman not knowing what Piccadilly Square or 10 Downing is, give me a break) (Of course, he’d made a similar claim in Curse of Fatal Death, so maybe he just didn’t get out much – television deprived as a youth?) which might support Davies assessment.
Still, that tells us something – you see, people in show business, like people everywhere, by and large are a bunch of catty, backbiting, gossip-snipers, but it’s show business – the person you denounce this week might be the person you have to work with next week. So the thing is, they might say these things to each other and their pals or behind backs, but they’ll never ever say it out loud to an interviewer from a publication…. unless your intent is to nuke and sew the ground with radioactive salts.
And you have to look at it from Russell’s point of view. They’re starting a new Doctor Who series after sixteen years, the budgets are huge, everything is untried, untested, it’s a total crapshoot, and everyone’s breathing down his neck. It might fall flat on his face, and with it, his career.
He doesn’t want a rival production. If it’s crap, it’s just going to bring down his brand, pee in his swimming pool, and degrade the image of his own product. Even worse, heaven forbid people should go around saying that the ‘rival online Doctor Who is better!’ So really, it might seem trivial in hindsight, but it’s a cutthroat business and its throat cutting time.
The timing is dead tight. The Shalka project seems to start up around March or April, 2003. In July, 2003 they make the official announcement, with airdates to commence in 13 November, 2003 through to December 18, 2003. Meanwhile, things are in the works with BBC One, BBC Worldwide and BBC TV, so that by September 26, 2003, the new Doctor Who TV series is announced – after Shalka is announced as an official product, but before it airs. Come on, it’s Highlander time.
So that was that – Shalka got canon, then uncanoned. Life is tough. But if its official once… doesn’t that mean that it’s still kind of official? Can they really take away your continuity badge? And if they can… is it taken away forever… or can it get it back?
It seems to me that it’s got to be one or the other. If Shalka was once recognized as a real Doctor… then it still is. Or alternately, if Shalka’s status as real Doctor is something that can be withdrawn, then maybe it can be conferred or reconferred or regained.
Anyway…
Oh yeah… What’s the other big backstage connecting factor to the new series? People: Cornell and Goss.
Principally, we have Paul Cornell. Not quite a Russell Davies or a Steven Moffat, Paul Cornell would eventually go on to write three episodes of the new series. Human Nature, Family of Blood and Father’s Day. And Cornell has written a lot of published Doctor Who, over a dozen novels – he did the Discontinuity Guide, created Bernice Summerfield, etc.
There’s also James Goss, credited as a producer, who has done a large number of fan documentaries about Doctor Who. But intriguingly, he’s also credited as a producer for the David Tenant animated adventure, ‘Infinite Quest.’
So…. kind of interesting and significant, in its own way.
Scream of the Shalka gives us the Richard Grant Doctor. No idea how long he’s been the Doctor, he doesn’t regenerate to or from in this sequence, he just walks out the Tardis and there he is. So technically, we have no idea where he fits in the succession of Doctors, apart from some comments that people take to alluding to being ninth (but when you look at them closely…)
But things are a bit different for this Doctor. For one thing, he’s got the Master for a companion. They seem to be getting quite on. The Master is trapped in the Tardis, seems somewhat genial if still quietly menacing, and appears to be wholly or partly cybernetic. It’s definitely the Master, but it’s not clear how fleshy he is.
According to Cornell, the Master’s soul or consciousness is downloaded into an android body. Cornell is a huge fanboy though, as I’ve said, it’s pretty much a lock that Cornell has seen Curse of Fatal Death and what happens to the Master therein, so this may have influenced him, consciously or unconsciously, much like the Atkinson Doctor could have made him consciously or unconsciously coy about whether the Grant Doctor was actually ninth or tenth.
The tone is darker. The Grant Doctor in this phase is similar to the Ecclestone Doctor, he’s a bit haunted, got a bit of tragedy to him, and there are hints that something bad has happened to a human companion. Cornell writes on his website, at paulcornell.com, about the Shalka:
“I’m also proud of the number of decisions we made that the live action show also went with when it returned, notably a weary, post-traumatic Doctor who finds salvation in a working class human companion.” (Paul Cornell)
Cornell in describing the backstory of the Grant Doctor, comes very close to the background of the new series. In an interview online at Kasterborus.com he said:
“I had it all written down: Gallifrey had been destroyed; the planet was still there but all the Time Lords were in the Matrix. And I think the Master had been downloaded into the robot.” (Paul Cornell)
So, sounds as if something like the Time War has or is taking place, Gallifrey has or is fallen the
Doctor is traumatized by the loss of a companion, he’s isolated, afraid of getting close, but needing to. This Doctor makes several references to alcohol and is becoming a drinker, suggesting that maybe he’s dulling some psychic pain. Also from the Kasterborus interview:
“It’s interesting to see the choices. The nature of the companion is very Rose [Tyler], because that’s simply the geography – if you’re bringing back Doctor Who in this day and age, that’s what she would be like. [A bored student barmaid?] Yeah, but with a family, a series of relatable figures around her. No more orphans, you know! I think I went in entirely the opposite direction with the Doctor, all aristocratic and isolated and alienating, and no; you don’t want that on Saturday night on BBC 1. You want Christopher Eccleston, who is also a bit alienating and distant, but the character and the acting tell you that he’s relatable. You feel his pain, you look straight at him and you think, ‘I know what that’s like, I know who he is.’ And with Richard E Grant’s Doctor, he was very much saying to everybody around him ‘Go away’.” (Paul Cornell)
The Grant Doctor is also not quite in control of the Tardis, someone else is at least occasionally directing its journey, an experience that is common to the Pertwee, Tom Baker, Davison and Colin Baker Doctors. He’s been apparently sent to some English village, and he’s quite resentful and peevish about it. It seem’s that he’s still a pawn of the Time Lords in their machinations.
As I’ve said, this seems similar to bits of both Pertwee and T.Baker where the Time Lords would direct the Tardis’ movements, much to the bitter anger of the Doctor. The implication here is that the Grant Doctor is an unwilling tool and is quite fed up with it. It’s this conflict, and the apparent interference of the Time Lords which suggests to me that the Grant Doctor may well be embroiled in the Time War as a somewhat unwilling agent. Whether Cornell intended the Time War or not, or how closely his vision coincided with what would become the series vision, the vague allusions in the Shalka fit pretty closely into what gets established as main series continuity – or at least don’t contradict.
If you go back to the original series, there are indications that the Time War was reaching all the way through the Doctor’s history.
The Hartnell adventure, the Chase, featuring the third appearance of the Daleks, had the Daleks pursuing the Doctor through time and space – technological capabilities that they clearly had during the Time War, but not in many of their other incarnations. The Daleks level of technology, and mastery of time Travel varied widely from one story to another… which makes sense if its different points in their history. The point in their history where they’re able to pursue a Tardis is probably in or pretty close to the Time War.
The Tom Baker Adventure, ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ had the Time Lords sending the Doctor back to commit genocide – normally a ‘no no’ for Time Lord ethics… They put Colin Baker’s Doctor on trial on a charge of genocide. So wiping out the Daleks doesn’t make sense, unless this was a part of the Time War.
So what tips us over to including it in continuity with the new series? Apart from the behind the scenes stuff?
Two characters – the Richard Grant Doctor, and the Derek Jacobi Master.
We’re not lucky enough to have Richard Grant play the Doctor explicitly in the new series. Connecting his character in the new series to the Doctor is a project in itself. So instead, let’s start with the Master, who we’ve already kind of linked loosely to Curse of Fatal Death. We’re not going to revisit that. Rather, let’s go on to the other challenge:
How does the Shalka Master link to the new series?
Now, here’s an interesting thing: Derek Jacobi also plays the Master in the new series. In Utopia, in the Tenant Doctor era, Jacobi is kindly old Professor Yana, who it turns out, is actually the Master in hiding. Basically, the Master was unwillingly recruited into the Time War, fled to the end of the Universe, and used the Chameleon Arch to disguise himself as a regular human being and forget he was a Time Lord. Until the Doctor shows up, and he remembers…. The Jacobi Master, shortly after recovering himself, is iced and becomes the Simm Master.
There you have it – Derek Jacobi plays the Master in both Shalka and in the series itself. Hell of a coincidence. And a ‘solid’ link connecting the series to Shalka. I mean, he plays the same character in both…. What more do you want?
(Okay, yes, he got de-borged apparently, so what?)
Maybe I’m making too much of this. After all, David Tenant has a voice role as the ‘Caretaker’ in Shalka. And Sophie Okonedo, who will appear in the Matt Smith era as the Queen of England in the new series has a major role as ‘Alison’ a bartender. But we’re not using them to bolster the continuity argument. The truth is that England is a small place, and really, there are just a handful of actors, so if you wait long enough, they’ll show up in everything.
Still, the difference between Jacobi, Tenant and Okonedo here is that Tenant and Okunado are not playing their new series characters – they play explicitly different people. Derek Jacobi is actually playing the same character, the Master, in both Shalka and the new series.
Now, this makes things particularly interesting. We have the Grant Doctor in Curse and Scream at least loosely connected to the Doctor Who universe through the linkage of the Master. And Shalka and the new series directly connecting through the actor playing the role of the Master.
Here’s where it gets cool: We also have Richard Grant in a recurring role as the Great Intelligence. Is there anything to connect the Great Intelligence to the Doctor, beyond the fact that they’re adversaries?
28 November 2013 at 04:46 #21823Okay, so Curse of Fatal Death. I remember I was in Minneapolis when I found that released to VHS. It was a thrill. We grabbed it, rented a VHS machine, hooked it up to the hotel TV, watched with rapt fascination. Real Who, after all these years. Who, a new approach, a new vision, not perfect but by God, after the elation and disappointment of the American movie, this was classic British stuff. There was a comfort to this Who that just hadn’t been there with the movie, you could tell, this was made with love.
And of course, its got a full slate of Doctors who don’t fit anywhere into the old or new series. So how do we work around that?
We don’t.
Instead…
Baby steps.
How about, instead of connecting Curse of Fatal Death to the continuity of the new series…. we try connecting it to the continuity of Scream of the Shalka?
Let’s look at what goes on in Curse of Fatal Death – basically, we open with Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor, and Jonathan Pryce as the Master. The Master is in the middle of some scheme to destroy the Doctor, when the Doctor invites him to the planet Tersurus to tell him he’s retiring and getting married. There’s some Bill and Ted style time travel dueling, which results in the Master getting dumped into the sewers of Tersurus. It takes him 312 years to climb out, but luckily, he’s got a time machine. He gets dumped two more times, spending 936 years climbing sewers.
The Master allies with the Daleks, who restore his youth and upgrade him with Dalek technology – which means the Master has gone cyborg. The Daleks plan to double cross the Master, however, so the Doctor sends a warning. The Atkinson Doctor gets killed in the second half, trying to save the universe from the zectronic beam, regenerates as the Richard E. Grant Doctor, who is almost instantly killed, regenerating into the Jim Broadbent Doctor, killed again, literally a minute later, and regenerates into the Hugh Grant Doctor, and killed a final time, regenerating into the Joanna Lumley Doctor. The Daleks renounce evil. The Master allies with the Doctor(s), and after Emma breaks the engagement, ends up going off with the Lumley Doctor.
Pryce’s Master plays like a cross between Delgado and Ainsley. In the first half, the Master wears a kind of rubbishy version of the Time Lord’s ceremonial robe, but later, he switches to the conservative black uniform reminiscent of Delgado and Ainsley.
Now, we tend to focus on the Doctor, but he Master provides some interesting developments it gets really interesting. Although the Master in the Scream is played by a different actor, Derek Jacobi, visually, the Jacobi Master fits quite closely into the pattern established by Delgado, Ainsley and Pryce. Slick dark hair, goatee, arch features and a severe black uniform.
But there are two things that really tie the Curse Master to the Scream Master. In Scream, it’s shown that the Master is a Cyborg. We don’t know how much of a Cyborg, or whether there’s any fleshy bits left in there at all. But he’s definitely the Master, and he’s definitely got robotics.
Well…. in Curse, we see the Master getting upgraded into cyborgery with Dalek technology.
The Daleks, by the way, are aces at borging up humanoid robots. In the Hartnell serial, The Chase, they actually build a Hartnell Doctor Robot to try and fool his companions and take over the Tardis. In the new series, Victory of the Daleks, they build a robot Professor to pretend he’s building Daleks for Winston Churchill in WWII. So good is the Robot Professor that he doesn’t realize he’s a Robot, and when he realizes he’s a bomb, he deactivates it so he can go off to Scotland or wherever. So either way, the Daleks are probably good enough to enhance the Master with cyborg parts, or to provide him with an entirely robotic body to inhabit. After three 312 year climbs out of the sewers of Tersurus, the Master is looking pretty ratty, but when we see him with Dalek enhancement (bumps!) he’s looking like his old self.
And then, there’s the fact that in Scream, the Master is the Doctor’s companion in the Tardis. Which is basically how the Master went in Curse – allying with the Atkinson Doctor against the Daleks and becoming increasingly close through the next several incarnations.
And in the Curse, the Master’s something of a pansexual. At one point, he refers to:
MASTER:’dung slugs for food…. and occasional company on those long lonely nights’…, (Curse of Fatal Death)
later he gets Dalek bumps which seem strategically questionable, and even flirts with the Grant Doctor before hooking up with the Lumley Doctor. Now, go to Scream and listen to the ‘answering machine message’ that the Grant Doctor and the Master have left:
DOCTOR (on recording): *giggle* — You have reached the good ship TARDIS. *giggle* We’re rather — *giggle* — busy at the moment, *giggle* *giggle* so leave a message after the beep and we’ll try to get back to you before you called. *giggle* — Stop that! *giggle* *giggle*
MASTER: [beat] We really should change that message. (Scream of the Shalka)
… nuff said.
The big thing, of course are the Doctors themselves. Richard E. Grant, as we’ve noted, plays the Doctor in both Curse of Fatal Death and Scream of the Shalka. We know where the Grant Doctor in Curse comes from, we see him regenerate. But we don’t know where the Grant Doctor in Scream comes from, or goes, we don’t see him regenerate there. The Shalka Doctor just is. So it opens the door to the possibility that the Grant Doctor in Curse is also the Grant Doctor in Shalka.
There are odd bits of overlap – in the Curse, the Richard E. Grant Doctor asks for a bottle of champagne, one of the only times that any Doctor is seen to drink alcohol. (Actually, the Pertwee Doctor tippled from time to time). While in the Scream, the Grant Doctor there is hinted at being quite a drinker, referring a couple of times to spirits. Both the Atkinson predecessor of the Grant Doctor in Curse and the Grant Doctor in Shalka seem to be fed up with adventuring and would just like to quit.
If you want to look a little further – in Scream, the Doctor alludes to a bad experience with a previous human companion. The hint is that they probably died or something. But in Curse, the Doctor is about to throw everything over to marry his companion Emma…. who dumps him in the end, after witnessing several regenerations, including into a woman. So is the Shalka Doctor’s issue not so much about a companion dying, but about a failed romance with a companion, is he upset about being dumped? I dunno. It’s a small thing, perhaps smaller than the Master’s pansexuality or the Grant Doctor’s drinking problem. But it’s another piece that can fit into the puzzle.
Of course, the big problem is that in the Curse, the R. Grant Doctor is replaced, in the course of a few minutes with the Broadbent Doctor, the H.Grant Doctor and then the Lumley Doctor. Well, how do we get around that?
1) Within Curse of Fatal Death, it’s established that potentially time passes between scenes. The Master falls three times into the pits of Terserus takes 312 years to climb out each time – so as far as the Master is concerned, at least 916 years have passed before he gets the upper hand on the Doctor. It’s possible that in actuality, we’re skipping ahead, and a large period of time is taking place between the beginning of the R. Grant Doctor and the Broadbent Doctor and the rest. Basically, after the Grant Doctor regenerates, he nips offstage into the Tardis has a whole bunch of adventures, and then eventually returns to the Curse timeline to get zapped and turn into the Broadbent Doctor. … I dunno, not my preferred solution. Among other things, we don’t actually see him nipping into the Tardis, and there doesn’t seem to be a scene that allows him to disappear…. Unless it’s the one where he goes behind some machinery.
2) The other explanation, is that the rapid transition of four doctors in the space of a few minutes Doctors is actually just a single extended regeneration. Within the both the old and new series there’s evidence to support this.
(a) The Troughton Doctor, when forced to regenerate, appears to see several possible bodies.
(b) Romana, the T.Baker Doctor’s companion, undergoes an extended regeneration where she actually spends some time selecting among different bodies, and even walking out with them into the Tardis control room to show them to the Tom Baker Doctor before settling on her final form.
© The Tom Baker Doctor experiences a ‘two body’ phenomenon going into his regeneration, with a strange ghost self, the ‘Watcher’ appearing as some sort of premonition, and wandering around talking to people, piloting the tardis and acting independently that vanishes or merges when he regenerates.
© The Davison Doctor, coming out of the Tom Baker Doctor goes through regeneration poorly and requires extended recovery, including having to be carried in an isolation box.
(d) The Tenant Doctor has an extended regeneration period which is still in some sort of flux as he travels from the Tardis, to Rose’s apartment, to the Sycorax’ ship – during which period, which allows him to grow back a hand instantly.
In all these cases, it takes more than a few minutes to move to a stable new form – rather, it seems to involve a period of instability and flux that might well last hours. So in this case, its possible that all the apparent regenerations are actually from a single regeneration period, and that after repeatedly being traumatized and jolted into different pseudo-incarnations, the Doctor eventually reverts and settles into his R. Grant persona. It’s a stretch, but hey, I think we’ve established that the regeneration period can produce an extended period of instability.
There’s also a meta issue, in that both Atkinson in Curse, Grant in Scream, and Eccleston in the series are described as the 9th Doctor. Neither Atkinson nor Grant explicitly says “I’m the ninth Doctor” but each work make references that seem to show pretty clearly that they’re ninth, and the productions thought of and announced that they were ninth Doctors. For a while, it was a big thing as to whether the Shalka Doctor would be included in continuity and whether Ecclestone would be considered the ninth or tenth, depending on whether Grants Doctor was included.
But in the actual scripts, things are a bit more ambiguous. In Curse, the Doctor doesn’t claim to be the ninth, but the Master does, and in no uncertain terms. But does the Master really know for sure:
MASTER: I think not my child. This is only his ninth body. He has many, many more. Behold, the miracle of the Time Lord! (Curse of Fatal Death)
By the way, I should stop here and make an acknowledgement. All of the quotes from Doctor Who in these articles – including Curse of Fatal Death, Name of the Doctor, Amy’s Choice, End of Times, etc., are taken from: http://www.chakoteya.net/doctorwho/ This is a truly amazing site wherein a group of people have done an astonishing amount of work transcribing the Dialogue from literally the whole of Doctor Who. If you want to know, for instance, exactly what Colonel Lethridge-Stuart had to say about the Great Intelligence in Troughton’s Web of Fear… This is the place. A marvellous research tool, and an amazing accomplishment.
With the Shalka Doctor, there are two references in the script, but both have a certain ambiguity:
DOCTOR (referring to a dead cat): He must have used up his nine lives, rather like me. (Scream of the Shalka)
This is interesting because its often used to say that the Shalka Doctor is the ninth Doctor. But if you read this carefully, he actually seems to be saying that he’s the 10th. He’s used up nine lives, like the cat – the cat is dead, he’s on his tenth.
DOCTOR: A friend of mine, Andy Warhol was his name, said, “They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” Wonderful man. He wanted to paint all nine of me. (Scream of the Shalka)
This is also pretty compelling, until you read it carefully. At which point, all that he’s saying is that when he knew Andy Warhol, he was on his ninth. Doesn’t mean that he’s the ninth now. He could be the ninth… Or the tenth… or the eleventh.
Given that the Shalka Doctor was intended by BBCi and was going to be recognized by the BBC as the ninth, is this ambiguity an accident, or deliberate?
I would argue deliberate. Why? Because the Scream of the Shalka was written by Paul Cornell. Paul Cornell was and is a Doctor Who ubernerd. He and a couple of others wrote the ‘Doctor Who Discontinuity Guide’, published in 1995 and reprinted in 2004, and which among other things, focused on continuity and continuity snarls. Now, a guy like that, would have definitely been aware of and completely up on Curse of Fatal Death, odds of him missing out on something like that are zero.
So, he would know that McGann through the movie was eight, Rowan Atkinson had a claim on ninth. He would know that Richard Grant followed Atkinson in Curse of Fatal Death. He would know that he’s writing for a Grant Doctor here here. Would he have consciously or unconsciously built in a bit of ambiguity into his lines to allow for the possibility of the Atkinson Doctor? I think he’s exactly that kind of guy. As I’ve said, might have been conscious, could as easily have been unconscious. Lawsuits have been decided on less evidence.
Of course the new series explicitly contradicts this. We aren’t yet at the point of talking about the new series, but we might as well get this particular issue addressed. There are several episodes where Tenant and Smith are established as the 10th and 11th respectively, or where they say it outright. Which makes Eccleston definitely the ninth. This apparently prevents either the Atkinson or the Grant Doctors from being anywhere on the timeline from McGann to Eccleston to Tenant, who were officially 8, 9, and 10.
But that’s been mooted by recent developments – the Hurt Doctor turns out to have been forgotten or deliberately ignored. Eccleston is actually the 10th (at least) Doctor, or at least the 10th body, and no one knew.
If Eccleston is actually the 10th after all…. We see the Hurt Doctor beginning to regenerate, but we don’t actually see who he regenerates to. Think about that. The Eccleston, Tenant, Smith Doctors have worked so hard to forget that part of the past, they may have lost more than the Hurt Doctor.
So even if the Atkinson Doctor seems to be the 9th…. well… the truth is, even the modern Doctors in the canonical new series have lost track of things, and have forgotten or overlooked at least one entire regeneration, maybe more.
There’s also the possibility that the Atkinson and Grant Doctors are a side-branch. If the Tenant Doctor could experience an aborted regeneration in the ‘Stolen Earth’ and ‘Journey’s End’ that produced three of him, then its possible that a regeneration, or an aborted regeneration could have produced a second Doctor, so that there were two lines of Doctor’s running around simultaneously.
The bottom line though, is that between Curse of Fatal Death, and Scream of the Shalka, there’s enough argument for in-story continuity, in terms of the Richard Grant Doctor, and in terms of the arc of the Master, that we can at least make an speculative case for the two specials being in the same continuity together.
Come on, it just makes sense that the Richard Grant Doctor in two different specials is probably really just the same Doctor.
28 November 2013 at 04:27 #21822As a general rule, I subscribe to the “Duck” theory of canon or continuity. Basically, if it looks like a Duck, walks like a Duck, talks like a Duck, lays eggs like a Duck, has feathers like a Duck, swims like a Duck… It’s a Duck. It’s about as simple as that. There are other approaches to continuity. There’s the ‘serial number’ approach, the ‘word from on high’ approach, etc. But for me, it’s about the Ducks.
So basically, if it fits all the Duck criteria… it’s a Duck. Unless of course, it’s a Platypus or a Hadrosaur or something like that.
So really, the big question for my test, is “It a Duck” or is merely a gigantic reptile with Duck features, or a small poisonous mammal with an identity crisis.
So let’s take Curse of Fatal Death. Canon, non-canon. Duck or Platypus? Why do I care? Why should I bother?
Well… I guess I came to being a Doctor Who fan in the 80’s. I remember being a University Student, walking through the Student Union Building, and there in the TV area, there was a show about a guy with an insanely long scarf. And he was dealing with two spaceships that had somehow warped together, with reality projectors and an infestation of alien apes, and a subplot about drug running. He was charming and eccentric, and somehow, that entire mess of a story was filled with incident and characterization and in the end it all came together. I was entranced. That’s when I became a fan.
Actually, I think even before that, as a ten year old going to the local Saturday matinee’s, I think I might have seen a rerun of Dr. Who and the Daleks, with Peter Cushing. Watching it years later, so many of the images, the best of the imagery, surreal and alien and haunting, came back to me. Of course, at that age, we don’t keep track, the world just keeps on turning. I enjoyed, moved on. But maybe there was something there, the memory of the blue box, that made me stop and watch the man in the scarf.
Doctor Who became a staple then, Fridays on Prairie Public Television, I worked my way through Tom Baker. And then Peter Davison. Then Colin Baker. I joined a fan club, and discovered Pertwee and Troughton. I watched ridiculously awful fifth generation VHS dubs of Sylvester McCoy adventures, thrilled to the Barbara Benedetti Doctor, and was even bemused by Wartime and K9 and Company.
And then it was over. 1989, end of the story. Finished. Not even a proper closing, no farewell, not even an acknowledgement of the end, just a stop….. and nothing.
And the abyss.
I suppose I should make some comment about young whippersnappers and all that. But here it is. I was watching Doctor Who before it was cool. When it was an obscure cult thing, and VHS tapes were traded from hand to hand. Where maybe one Video store in a half dozen might stock something from the serial, where you couldn’t just buy or download whole seasons. There was no merchandise, no memorabilia, except the occasional stencilled mug offered by Public Television on fundraisers. But it was a live show, brilliant and mercurial, changing, intriguing….
And in 1989…. stopped.
2005, Christopher Ecclestone and Rose Tyler walk through a blue box and we’re on again. Season after season, adventure after adventure. We have specials and minisodes, and animated episodes. You can buy memorabilia at HMV and collectors stores. You can download who. You can collect whole seasons, old and new on DVD, there’s actually theme packages. It’s great! More than that, it’s popular! And this is where a lot of you may come in, and its terrific, all of you, welcome aboard.
But between 1989 and 2005, there’s this vast empty gulf of 16 years, like the empty starless void between two galaxies, when the series didn’t run, when it might never run, where there might never be a future, just the old episodes getting older each year.
In those years, all we had to go on was hope. And the only thing that fueled that hope, that kept it going as we fans got older and Doctor Who risked fading away was that every few years, there’d be some new Who. Some proof, some affirmation that it wasn’t all just a dream or a fading memory, that we weren’t alone in our love for the show, that there was something going.
1993 – Dimensions in Time
1996 – The Movie
1999 – Curse of Fatal Death
2003 – Scream of the Shalka
You guys, with a live show that you can count on, specials that you can mark the days to it and debate spoilers, it was different then. These four productions were like the slow heartbeat of a coma patient, a sort of ticking over of the body, just enough to show us, to assure us, that there was life in it, that Doctor Who might just have a future as well as a past.
Of these, only one, the movie, got to be in the canon. That just feels unfair to me. So why not take another run, why not write about these overlooked and dismissed and disrespected bits of Who history.
So anyway, back to the Duck theory of continuity. And to the question of how to tell a Mallard from a Trachodont. Well, inconsistency obviously. If the critter has a feature absolutely incompatible with a duck, then it’s something else. But here’s the thing, not all Duck’s look alike, so sometimes, it takes a bit of analysis and theory. Sometimes you see something that, on its face, might not be a Duck. But if you look at it right…
27 November 2013 at 18:21 #21782Well, since the fever of the Day of the Doctor has come and, if not gone, then stabilized, I thought I would follow up with some explorations of interesting, unofficial corners of the Doctor Who Universe.
Okay, let’s talk Curse of Fatal Death, which is not officially in continuity with Doctor Who. This was a 23 minute special produced by the BBC for Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day. Originally broadcast in four parts, it was later re-edited into two parts, and then eventually released to VHS. No DVD’s out yet, but I think you can find it on Youtube.
Officially, ‘Curse’ is not ‘in continuity’ and not part of the ‘canon.’ Officially. When you take a look at the production however, it’s like the Kevin Bacon of the Doctor Who universe. Curse’s production connects to the old series, new series, and even to other specials like Dimensions in Time, the Doctor Who movie and Scream of the Shalka. Let’s take a look.
Connecting to the old series:
* The Tardis exterior is the same prop used in the series during the 1980’s run of Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy;
* The distinctive electronic title sequence was borrowed from the Tom Baker era, with Tom Baker’s face removed.
* The voice of the Daleks in this episode, Ray Skelton, had been providing Dalek voices for seven of the old serials, beginning with ‘Evil of the Daleks’ with the Troughton Doctor, all the way up to ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ with the McCoy Doctor. He’d also done Cyberman, Kroton, Monoid and Computer voices and appeared as an onscreen character in a couple of episodes.
* The other credited Dalek Voice, Dave Chapman, had also worked on the original series in visual effects, since the Tom Baker era. This was his first dalek voice, or any kind of voicework, but he definitely had history with the show.
* Speaking of Effects, Special Effects are credited to Andy McVean, who had also been doing special effects during the McCoy era.
* Mark Ayres, the Music composer for Curse, had also composed for several McCoy era serials.
* The soundscape for Curse borrowed heavily from the original series, with musical cues coming from episodes of the Third, Fourth, Fifth and Seventh Doctors.
* The planet Tersurus, the setting for Curse, is also mentioned in the Fourth Doctor episode, ‘The Deadly Assassin’ as a base of the Master.
There’s also a carry over connection to Dimensions in Time:
* The Tardis box used for Curse and for the 80’s series, was also used in Dimensions.
There’s also an interesting production detail that links it to the McGann movie:
* The opening image of the Tardis flying through space, is lifted directly from the McGann movie.
Here’s another peculiar production detail linking Curse to both the McGann movie, and the two Cushing Movies:
* According to Wikipedia (I wouldn’t have picked up on this myself) the Tardis interior appears to be lit, when viewed from the outside. This is a trope it shares with the McGann movie, the new series, and oddly, Cushing’s Doctor Who. It wasn’t used at all in the original series.
Regarding Scream of the Shalka:
* Both share Richard Grant playing the role of the Doctor.
Finally, there’s some crucial production details that link it to the new series:
* Steven Moffat, writer and executive producer, of course is the big one. Moffat, as we all know, was a writer for the Ecclestone Doctor – doing ‘Empty Child’ and ‘The Doctor Dances’, he’s gone on to be the head writer and executive producer by 2010, and the Matt Smith era.
* Richard Curtis, the other executive producer, has also gone on to write for the new series.
* The Mill, responsible for the visual effects, has done the visual effects here.
* Richard Grant is back in the new series, not playing the Doctor, but playing a mysterious ‘Great Intelligence.’
In general, there’s the fact that it’s a BBC Production. And it got a VHS Release, something Dimensions in Time could never manage. (PS: All of this is sourced from the Wikipedia articles relating to Curse, its production and the people involved, as well as IMDB.com, and various Doctor Who Websites. I’m not smart enough to dig all this up on my own.)
So basically, in terms of production, for a ‘non-continuity’ piece, Curse is actually linking very strongly to the old and new series, and in fact, to just about every significant big of Doctor Who out there, including the McGann movie, the Cushing Movies, Scream of the Shalka and Dimensions in Time. They’re using the actual musical cues, dalek voice actor, the actual tardis exterior prop and opening sequence from the series. It’s a paradox. How do you get around that?
With all that going on, I think we’ve got an obligation to at least take it seriously as potentially fitting into the continuity in some way. The problem, of course, is despite all the connecting factors, Curse gives us a Doctor, a series of Doctors we’ve never seen before, for which we have no provenance, and no clear way to match them or fit them anywhere into the known Doctor Who lineage and Universe.
Well, it might require a little imagination and initiative, but I think I might be up to it…. 😉
27 November 2013 at 18:01 #21780Certainly the Doctor is a huge cultural figure for the Daleks. Their version of Satan and Gilgamesh, rolled into one.
27 November 2013 at 13:43 #21766ScaryB There’s also Barbara Benedetti as the female Doctor, produced by Seattle International Pictures (really just Ryan Johnson and his friends), who had four half hour adventures. The Benedetti Doctor, obviously is an unofficial and non-canon production, there’s absolutely no connection to the BBC. The budget was only a few thousand dollars, and the quality varied from episode to episode. But Benedetti does a good job, and they’re worth hunting down.
As for Curse of Fatal Death, I have a very good bonkers theory to incorporate it into continuity. It’s well worth hunting down on Youtube.
27 November 2013 at 13:39 #21764@geoffers Your notion that the Doctors repeated encounters with Daleks may have triggered or created their hatred and fear of the Time Lords and fed into the Time War is quite interesting and worth thinking about. Certainly one of the themes played with in the Matt Smith era is the ‘Batmanesque’ theory that the Doctor has become so large and such a force that he’s created his own enemies, or that the reaction to him has created adversarial forces. So there’s something to it.
On the other hand, these are Daleks we are talking about. And literally from the beginning of their historical and chronological existence they’ve always been hateful, genocidal mutants each of which was riding around in an armored chassis. That’s what Davros created them to be. They hate and fear anything that’s not Dalek. And in particular, their choice of who to war upon is contingent upon (1) proximity; (2) vulnerability. It was inevitable that when the Daleks became powerful enough, they’d go after the Time Lords.
27 November 2013 at 05:22 #21733geoffers I’m not so sure that all of the Doctor’s skirmishes could be considered part of the Time War. Some of them definitely were. The thing is, that the abilities of the Daleks, and their magnitude of threat seem to vary from serial to serial.
For instance, in ‘The Chase’ the third adventure of the Daleks in the Hartnell era, the Daleks exhibit time and space travelling abilities on a par with the Tardis. They certainly don’t show these abilities in the original Dalek encounter, or in their invasion of Earth in the 22nd century, in the second Hartnell/Dalek story.
On at least some stories in the old season/series, it really does appear that the Time War Daleks are at work. But quite often, what we seem to be dealing with are earlier, more rubbishy Daleks with less sophisticated technology, and less mastery of Time and Space.
Having said that, there’s clearly stuff that was part of the Time War. For instance, in Genesis of the Daleks, the Tom Baker Doctor is sent directly by the Time Lords to try and stop the creation of the Daleks. Essentially, genocide. Something that the Time Lords normally frowned upon. I think that that mission was probably at the behest of Time War Gallifrey. Planet of the Daleks also has Gallifrey piloting the Tardis to a confrontation with earlier era Daleks. Such early Daleks that the Thals of Skaro are still fighting.
What it looks like to me, is that the Gallifrey of the Doctor’s future, the Gallifrey of the Time War, was at least on occasion reaching back through time, covertly, and firing the Doctor at various periods in their history to try and weaken or cripple them in some way. That’s my theory, for what it’s worth.
26 November 2013 at 23:56 #21717@bluepipsqueak I have to take offense, speaking as a partly French person from a partly French country. The way you go on, you almost describe the French as some slime dripping, tentacled, weirdly otherworldly alien manifestation. That’s not the French. That’s their cuisine.
26 November 2013 at 23:54 #21716@scaryb Unfortunately, ours got out and ran amuk in the world. Shudder….
26 November 2013 at 19:46 #21697I’d be very skeptical of any kind of direct parental relationship between Kate Lethbridge-Stuart and Osgood. I just don’t see any foundation for it, and no sign of anything like familiarity.
26 November 2013 at 19:16 #21695@jimthefish I kind of liked Colin Baker actually. True, he was saddled with a horrible costume, and he got some really tosh scripts and direction. But when allowed to do his job, he could be quite a good Doctor. When on his game, he projected a unique and very hard to achieve blend of charm, compassion and brutality. He was the Doctor as ‘runaway locomotive’ unstoppable.
26 November 2013 at 19:06 #21694@Shazzbot Testing your patience am I? I’m sorry, I think that there’s been some miscommunication and misperception of my tone.
Brian Cox is in fact a very good actor, and I am well aware of his performance as the original Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter. In many ways, I prefer it to Anthony Hopkins performance as Lecter. I think that they started out in very similar places, but where Cox maintained and developed his Lecter effectively, Hopkins increasingly hammed it up as he went along. In terms of Cox, he’s always underplayed his hand, turning in quiet but effective performances. Look at his work in the ribald comedy, Super Troopers, or in the esoteric Adaptation. The man’s not a showboat, he inhabits the part, he makes it effective, and he’s as deft with slapstick comedy as high tension drama. He’s a craftsman who knows his trade. No disrespect at all.
I was actually making fun of Ewan McGregor, who went from a brilliant turns in Shallow Grave Trainspotting, to something approaching shite in the Star Wars prequels, and then basically phoned it in in Jack the Giant Killer. Let’s not even talk about Velvet Goldmine, or for that matter, the Island, or Moulin Rouge, all of which featured different flavours of emptiness. Now, maybe we can slag George Lucas for the abysmal performance in Star Wars, but the reality is that probably more people have seen those movies than all the rest of his oevre put together, so his reputation stands or falls there. In any event, he had Brian Singer as a Director for Jack the Giant Killer, so he can’t really blame anyone but himself for his department store mannekin of a performance there. I don’t know about Salmon Fishing in Yemen, but as far as it goes with McGregor, the man seems to have gone the way of a one beer six bottle performer. Now, if the Ewan McGregor fans (hard to imagine there’d be such a thing) wants to come and take a run at me, well then, I’d say “Old Mrs McGregor, put up your dukes and we’ll have it out.”
-
AuthorPosts
