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Post by CharlesX on Mar 26, 2024 14:55:31 GMT
Well, it seems I was definitely premature in thinking I'd seen the last of UNIT! Series 11 was pretty good. In fact, I was all set to declare it the best series so far until a disappointing finale brought it down a peg. Still, probably the best since at least Series 8: The Time Warrior This one had a fun concept - a time traveller kidnapping modern scientists and taking them back to the middle ages. I liked Linx as a villain and his relationship with Irongron, whose over-theatricality just about managed to be amusing rather than annoying. Pertwee was in good form here too, though Sarah-Jane didn't exactly wow me in her debut, especially with her assuming the Doctor is a villain based on pretty much zero evidence. Since she's probably the most famous companion of the classic era, I imagine she'll get better but I find her a bit too "plummy public schoolgirl" for my tastes. I did though like her exception to being told to make coffee - we've come a long way since Polly in Series 4! My favourite character in the episode was the hilarious Professor Rubeish - maybe he should have been the new companion. Sir Edward, his wife and Hal make pretty much no impression, even if the latter went on to be Boba Fett (at least until George Lucas replaced his voice with Temuera Morrison's that is). Plot-wise, I didn't really get why Linx was so invested in helping Irongron - the Doctor's theory that he takes a sort of sick enjoyment out of humans fighting one another didn't really seem to fit with how the character was presented. Also I don't get why he wouldn't feed his slaves if he wanted them to be efficient. Some of the action scenes were also a bit silly: I get the Doctor is a good fighter, but previously this has been shown to be due to him knowing alien martial arts techniques that his opponents don't expect - I don't really think he should have been capable of out-swordfighting Irongron and Bloodaxe together. And as for the Doctor dodging a barrage of rifle fire by slowly running from side to side... Anyway, forgiving it those silly bits, it's a fun enough story though definitely not one of the best series debuts. Since you've referenced Boba Fett, I believe the Doctor dodging bullets is comparable to another Star Wars reference:
By the way like you I thought Time Warrior was well-written if a bit silly\illogical. I liked its relatively lighthearted tone.
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kieran
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Post by kieran on Mar 26, 2024 21:22:11 GMT
I believe the Doctor dodging bullets is comparable to another Star Wars reference: Ha, I love that scene. That and the sofa bit are just brilliant. The New Hope and the Empire Strikes Back spoofs are great. Pity the Return of the Jedi spoof was a bit lazy and didn't make so many clever observations about the absurdities of the original films. I also wish they'd done the prequels even via The Cleveland Show.
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Post by CharlesX on Apr 4, 2024 20:38:31 GMT
Series 22 was an odd one that dipped very badly in the middle. But it also had two of my favourite stories thus far. I do quite like the 45 min run time - it avoids time being wasted on recaps and stupid cliffhangers. Though from what I can see, we'll be back to the standard episode length next series. The Two Doctors
I think this story suffers from two major missed opportunities. Firstly, what's the point of doing a story like this when the titular Doctors barely interact at all? Second, it would have been far more compelling if we, the viewers, were led to believe the Time Lords had carried out the attack on the space station rather than us knowing it was the Sontarans and just waiting for the Doctor to find that out too. Even aside from these problems, I thought this was a poor story. While it's nice to see Troughton back (and yes, even Jamie!), the plot is very weak, relying on contrivances and character stupidity to move things along. The Sontarans serve no real purpose and Dastari's character is just all over the place (if he was in on it, why did he need to be drugged anyway - other than to trick the viewer?). The most memorable thing about it is Shockeye, but he's more gross than funny and his speeches about eating start to wear a bit thin. A good chunk of the final episode is devoted to him and an Androgum-ified Doctor going for a meal while the other characters stroll casually around Seville looking for them. Probably seemed funnier on paper. And speaking of funniness or lack thereof, not only was actor/moth collector/restauranteur Oscar not very funny, his violent death just seemed completely out of tone. Finally, I just didn't like the idea that time travel requires some genetic component which only Time Lords possess. While I think inconsistencies are mostly avoided with the idea, I just plain don't like the concept. Is it me or are all these reunion stories quite disappointing? Ah well, at least Jamie gets to save the day for once. Interesting to see and hear Troughton's Doctor repeatedly challenge Jamie McCrimmon over his unremarkable, ordinary Scottish accent. I recall the 9th Doctor mentioning in Rose he came from Gallifrey's North and maintaining a Northern accent throughout, and neither would you think it was something that has aged well. I suppose its like these early adventures where the Doctor tells his female companions to "go make coffee".
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Post by The Editor (Alex B) on Apr 6, 2024 19:19:52 GMT
It’s more likely a case that writer Robert Holmes was being aggressively anti to the fan base. Fans at the time wanted lots of returning foes and characters, references to old stories etc. he was given a list of things to put on this story that he wasn’t happy about. So you could argue that here he is going ‘you want X?, here’s X but twisted’. Eg. You want the second dr/Jamie partnership? Here it is but the dr keeps having. Go at Jamie.
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Post by The Editor (Alex B) on Apr 6, 2024 19:21:37 GMT
Just dropping to say a few weeks ago I finally finished my series watch-in-order that I started way back in 2013. Any final thoughts? Remarkably consistent overall. Willing from start to finish to try weird things.
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Post by CharlesX on Apr 6, 2024 19:34:22 GMT
Remarkably consistent overall. Willing from start to finish to try weird things. I wouldn't dsagree with John Clute's Encylopedia Of Science Fiction, who wrote Doctor Who was(my edition was mid90s)\is amazing on the whole but had some brilliant, breaking episodes and some awful ones. Like Star Trek or Black Mirror.
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Post by CharlesX on Apr 8, 2024 15:58:47 GMT
It’s more likely a case that writer Robert Holmes was being aggressively anti to the fan base. Fans at the time wanted lots of returning foes and characters, references to old stories etc. he was given a list of things to put on this story that he wasn’t happy about. So you could argue that here he is going ‘you want X?, here’s X but twisted’. Eg. You want the second dr/Jamie partnership? Here it is but the dr keeps having. Go at Jamie. It was the same with other things like The Doctor and companions bickering at each other and too much double-crossing at the expense of character and plot development. The episode had a run-of-the-mill feel both itself and yes in terms of the writing. A multi-Doctor\fan service story could have worked if it had a more lighthearted tone (it was the opposite), or at least if the writers and cast were enjoying themselves. I get the feeling at that time there was a lot of feed-back from fans (often adult) which was probably written\spoken without truth or thought. Ironically these Who fans that later became writers have written stories more in keeping with their concept of the show than fans or - more importantly - kid audiences.
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kieran
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Post by kieran on Apr 15, 2024 15:15:02 GMT
Series 26 was very variable with one great story, one poor one, one distinctly average and one plain bonkers. It was though a very good series for Ace who really came into her own here.
Battlefield If you'd told me when I started watching Doctor Who that there's a story with semi-futuristic Arthurian knights, the Doctor taking the role as Merlin and Jean Marsh playing Morgaine, I'd probably have been dying with anticipation. Just as well I came into it blind as I was disappointed enough with this as it was. The big problem is the performances are mostly awful. McCoy is at his most irritating, doing silly voices and overpronouncing words. The guy who plays Mordred is absolutely dire and Ancelyn is barely better. Even Marsh is weak, doing a sort of phoned-in rehash of Bavmorda though, in fairness to her, her character is all over the place so it was probably hard to know how to play her. The action scenes are pretty bad too, the Brigadier getting blasted through a wall is beyond goofy. It's not totally without merit though, it was great to see the aforementioned Brigadier back and I also liked the new Brigadier and the not-long-for-this-world Lavel. It was also nice to see Bessie again. I thought the amateur archaeologist had a few good moments and the Destroyer was quite cool even if he was dispatched far too easily. I think that's another problem with this story, the villains just feel too weak. They may have handguns and grenades, but I can't imagine Mordred's knights would pose too much of an issue for the regular army. As for the climax where Morgaine decides to set off a nuclear weapon and the Doctor convinces her that's not such a good idea, it's pretty limp. Morgaine also gets a bit teary about Arthur, but as we know nothing really about this universe's Arthur and his relationship with Morgaine, I can't really say I cared. What a letdown of a story.
Ghost Light I don't think there's been a story yet where I've been so uncertain about how to review it. The closest has been Warriors' Gate from way back in Series 18 which I said bordered on incoherent. Well, there's no bordering here, this is just plain baffling. What starts off as an intriguing horror mystery gets stranger and stranger as it goes along. I didn't grasp most of the characters' motivations and by the time a personification of Light appears, it's gone completely off the rails. However, much like Warrior's Gate, I found myself mostly enjoying it, just for how surreal it was. The imagery, music, performances are all spot on and it's genuinely pretty creepy in places - especially everytime those things in the basement show up. But when it comes to story-telling, it's just too muddled and unfocused - it's not helped by the music drowning out the dialogue at times. I also didn't like the way the Doctor treated Ace throughout, tricking her into confronting a deeply held fear and even grabbing her face at one point - felt borderline abusive. Josiah Smith was an engaging perfomance and I liked the twist of Fenn-Cooper looking for himself, although I feel this storyline becoming a 'let's kill Queen Victoria' plot was a bit left-field and unimaginative. Gwendoline was a good character, I liked the way she could flip from sympathetic waif to quite intimidating and back again almost instantly. The neanderthal manservant was also interesting as was the sceptical reverend who gets turned into an ape. Some of the other characters didn't work so well for me, I couldn't follow who the heck Control was or what her motivations were and Ace giving her elocution lessons was random. Light was a disappointing villain and the way he was defeated was a variation on that hated trope of 'computer can't handle bad logic'. Maybe this story would have been been better if it stuck to a mad professor in a haunted house story rather than tossing in quite so many sci-fi components. As it is, it's definitely memorable at least.
The Curse of Fenric Wow, they went all out with this one. From the title and the early stages, I was expecting some sort of low key horror, but it quickly went into more apocalyptic territory with raging storms, hordes of vampire, shootouts and a mutant from the future all playing their part. While it verges on unwieldy at times, it just about manages to get all these disparate elements working together to create something very effective. It takes a while to work out what the Soviet soldiers are at, or what is going on with the Navy commander who sits surrounded by Nazi paraphernalia. The former end up being very sympathetic while there is an interesting complexity to the latter. Has he gone too far into trying to grasp the mindset of a Nazi that he has unwittingly made himself a Nazi? Another good character was a vicar who has lost his faith at the horrors of collateral damage being afflicted by the Allies. His story ends quite sadly; he almost finds his faith again, but just can't quite get over his misgivings and ultimately suffers a brutal death as a result. Interestingly, he fares better than his god-bothering parishioner, perhaps implying she had no real faith behind her sermonising. The character with the most faith turns out to be a Soviet captain who is devoted to the idea of the revolution - maybe just as well he dies considering what's coming in a few years! He also has a bit of a flat romance with Ace which I thought might shape into another weak exit storyline, but thankfully not. Ace gets some solid moments otherwise, unwittingly saving her mother and ensuring her own birth, and standing up to the Doctor for always keeping her in the dark - disastrously in this case. The Doctor does seem to have a bit of a new respect for her at the end. Unfortunately McCoy's acting is excruciating in places and the Fenric-possessed Judson isn't much better. Thankfully Fenric shifts over to the Soviet captain who gives a much more menacing performance. Ace blurting out the chess solution to him felt a little bit of a stretch, but the story as a whole is solid enough that I'll allow it. I'm going to really miss stories like this once I reach the rapidly approaching end.
Survival Well, here we are at what was for several years looking like the last ever Doctor Who TV story. Would it finish with a bang or a whimper? Well, neither really. I thought the first episode was good fun with Ace returning to her boring hometown which is perhaps not quite as boring as when she left (although how boring could a town with a haunted mansion on its outskirts really be?). There's some good comedy with the banter between the two shop assistants and Ace's charity collecting friend. The self-defence teacher is also pretty entertaining. I'm not sure about the evil cat that looks distractingly like Harry Hill's Stouffer though I thought the cheetah-person riding a horse across an abandoned playground was pretty cool. I liked the cheetah people in general, and the attention paid in making their behavior catlike. Their formidability seems pretty variable though. I didn't really get why the Master, if he was turning into a cheetah-person, couldn't teleport like Ace and Midge could though. Maybe I missed something. I thought the last episode wasn't very good, the self-defence teacher gets killed off rather unceremoniously and that motorbike crash was ludicrous. The Master didn't really have any terribly interesting scheme bar stirring unrest for the sake of it. I did however like Karra coming back to save Ace and Ace deciding to take up the Doctor's hat and umbrella. As usual, I found McCoy's performance pretty shaky - he's at his best in the gentle comedy of the first episode, but he doesn't convince at all in the more dramatic moments. Not a bad story all in all, but if I were a BBC exec ready to pull the plug on things, I don't think this would have convinced me not to do so.
Series 26 ranking: 1. The Curse of Fenric 2. Ghost Light 3. Survival 4. Battlefield
Since my vague memory of the 1996 movie is McCoy is reduced to a cameo where he steps out of the Tardis to get gunned down by random gangsters, I'll add him to my rankings and sadly, he goes firmly at the bottom. Occasionally he was funny, but he could also annoy in equal measure and I didn't find him convincing at all when things got serious. I felt his character was pretty vague too - sometimes he seems more warm and friendly than the other doctors, but then he'll just switch to cold and calculating on a dime.
1. William Hartnell 2. Patrick Troughton 3. Jon Pertwee 4. Tom Baker 5. Colin Baker 6. Peter Davison 7. Sylvester McCoy
Ace however fares better. Her Grange Hill schtick was annoying but it gradually faded and, especially in this last series, she showed herself as capable and deep with a capacity to stand up to the Doctor when needed. She gets a top 10 position, just behind Romana.
1. Jo 2. Leela 3. Ian 4. Sarah-Jane 5. Barbara 6. Romana 7. Ace 8. Ben 9. K-9 10. Liz 11. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart 12. Peri 13. Vikki 14. Steven 15. Tegan 16. Victoria 17. Nyssa 18. Harry 19. Zoe 20. Turlough 21. Adric 22. Jamie 23. Polly 24. Mel 25. Susan 26. Dodo
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Post by CharlesX on Apr 15, 2024 16:26:07 GMT
Series 26 was very variable with one great story, one poor one, one distinctly average and one plain bonkers. It was though a very good series for Ace who really came into her own here. 1. William Hartnell 2. Patrick Troughton 3. Jon Pertwee 4. Tom Baker 5. Colin Baker 6. Peter Davison 7. Sylvester McCoy Just like Greatest Show In The Galaxy is remembered for the unintentionally overpowered explosion The Doctor coolly walks away from, Battlefield is remembered for Ace nearly drowning after a technical accident with the water. McCoy swore loudly on set and saved Sophie's life! That's why there's some repetitition and weird shots of the water if you look closely. Yes, Battlefield 'sounds better than it is'. Interesting your ranking puts each successive Doctor lower than the last, which many would disagree with and may or may not continue either as a trend or totally. I would have put Peter Davison above Colin Baker for example, because while Peter was aloof he was less violent and arrogant than Colin's take. A lot depends on the stories, I think McCoy did well in some of the 7th Doctor stories but there were too many 'irredeemable-ish' below-average\poor stories.
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kieran
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Post by kieran on Apr 15, 2024 16:31:20 GMT
Interesting your ranking puts each successive Doctor lower than the last Not quite - Colin Baker and Peter Davison are swapped. Still, it is odd that my preferences mostly follow that pattern. I would say there are some quite wide gaps though. It would probably go something like: 1. Hartnell 2. Troughton 3. Pertwee 4. T. Baker 5. C. Baker 6. Davison 7. McCoy So plenty of space for future Doctors to slot in. When it comes to the quality of the stories, I would say the Pertwee era was probably the strongest.
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Post by The Editor (Alex B) on Apr 16, 2024 1:31:09 GMT
Did you watch the 4-part or movie-length “Special Edition” of The Curse of Fenric?
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kieran
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Post by kieran on Apr 16, 2024 6:38:13 GMT
Did you watch the 4-part or movie-length “Special Edition” of The Curse of Fenric? Just the 4-part. Didn't know there was a movie version. Is it better?
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Post by CharlesX on Apr 16, 2024 12:24:31 GMT
Did you watch the 4-part or movie-length “Special Edition” of The Curse of Fenric? Just the 4-part. Didn't know there was a movie version. Is it better? I watched the movie version on DVD a few years ago and just checked some Wiki page to refresh my memory. It has slightly better special effects* and 12 minutes of unbroadcast material (you know those annoying bits cut out of shows and films that make the narrative more coherent and logical? Yes, some of those bits). It'd add half a star out of five to a Whovian's opinion of the story, but if you weren't a fan before seeing the original, you won't be one after seeing the ordinary rework.
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kieran
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Post by kieran on Apr 16, 2024 15:10:11 GMT
Just the 4-part. Didn't know there was a movie version. Is it better? I watched the movie version on DVD a few years ago and just checked some Wiki page to refresh my memory. It has slightly better special effects* and 12 minutes of unbroadcast material (you know those annoying bits cut out of shows and films that make the narrative more coherent and logical? Yes, some of those bits). It'd add half a star out of five to a Whovian's opinion of the story, but if you weren't a fan before seeing the original, you won't be one after seeing the ordinary rework.
Thanks, I'll check it out one of these days. Currently going through the lost stories from the first 6 series before tackling the 1996 movie.
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Post by CharlesX on Apr 17, 2024 8:02:46 GMT
I watched the movie version on DVD a few years ago and just checked some Wiki page to refresh my memory. It has slightly better special effects* and 12 minutes of unbroadcast material (you know those annoying bits cut out of shows and films that make the narrative more coherent and logical? Yes, some of those bits). It'd add half a star out of five to a Whovian's opinion of the story, but if you weren't a fan before seeing the original, you won't be one after seeing the ordinary rework.
Thanks, I'll check it out one of these days. Currently going through the lost stories from the first 6 series before tackling the 1996 movie. Hi kieran obviously we would look forward to a review of the 1996 movie but if you've any thoughts on the lost episodes (e.g. that they are 'misunderstood' in some way) that would be appreciated, too.
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kieran
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Post by kieran on Apr 17, 2024 8:36:01 GMT
Thanks, I'll check it out one of these days. Currently going through the lost stories from the first 6 series before tackling the 1996 movie. Hi kieran obviously we would look forward to a review of the 1996 movie but if you've any thoughts on the lost episodes (e.g. that they are 'misunderstood' in some way) that would be appreciated, too. Yep, will share my thoughts. Feels quite nice to be back with Ian, Barbara and the First Doctor again. And Susan's there too I guess.
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Post by The Editor (Alex B) on Apr 23, 2024 8:54:15 GMT
I watched the movie version on DVD a few years ago and just checked some Wiki page to refresh my memory. It has slightly better special effects* and 12 minutes of unbroadcast material (you know those annoying bits cut out of shows and films that make the narrative more coherent and logical? Yes, some of those bits). It'd add half a star out of five to a Whovian's opinion of the story, but if you weren't a fan before seeing the original, you won't be one after seeing the ordinary rework. It also restructures a lot of material back to how it was originally envisioned during writing/shooting, as the way they often edited material out was to cut bit out of the middle of scenes. So scenes A & B would become A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, & B3 with A2 and B2 cut out and then because leaving like that would result in awkward cuts the scenes would be reshuffled to A1, B1, A3 and then B3, greatly affecting the pacing of scenes.
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