philosoraptor42

There's been this thing recently where newcomers to Doctor Who are getting upset whenever the actor playing the Doctor changes and instantly complaining about the new replacement. They are also realising that the one they like the best often has some connection with when they began to watch the show. "That was MY Doctor" they say.

I can get behind this theory pretty easily because personally MY Doctor has always been Sylvester McCoy. A lot of old school Whovians thought he was a bad choice, but for me he defined what Doctor Who is supposed to be. This Doctor had a mixture of silliness and darkness to him. He has an odd way of speaking which I did not realise at the time was a result of him covering up his remote Scottish accent. As a result he has a tendency to roll his rs which is actually something I've always loved about his performance.



The first Doctor Who story I ever saw was "Remembrance of the Daleks", but I hadn't realised at the time quite how important it was that I came to Doctor Who at that precise time. My first ever Doctor Who storyline was also a number of other firsts:
- The first (and actually the only) Doctor Who story where Sylvester McCoy confronts the Daleks.
- The first Doctor Who story to actually SHOW how Daleks get up stairs.
- The first Doctor Who story to feature Ace as the fully fledged new companion.



I thought Ace was great straight away. Sure, she was a tomboy essentially. She wears a black bomber jacket, she makes explosives and she can handle a baseball bat pretty well. She's a companion who is prepared to face right up to a Dalek shouting "Who are you calling small?" She actually has a love interest in "Remembrance of the Daleks" but I wasn't concerned with that and was happy when it didn't work out. After all, at just five years old I wasn't interested in lovey-dovey stuff.

I had a brief stint working my way through re-watching some of the series I saw as a child. I've also checked out a few other Cybermen-related classic Who storylines.


Doctor Who - Dragonfire

Okay, sorry, what? This cannot be Doctor Who. It is so ridiculous obvious that it is a television studio and a very brightly lit one at that. Doctor Who is being offered a treasure map (seriously?) and his companion is loudly and enthusiastically hamming it up like a cheery enthusiastic primary school drama teacher.



The introduction of Ace here is just weird. This is the first story where she turns up, but she doesn't become the companion until the very end. She's only just met the Doctor, but she gets started right away calling the Doctor "Professor"; a trend that would get existing Whovians extremely annoyed.

( To read more about "Dragonfire" click here... )



Doctor Who - Genesis of the Daleks

Naturally I have already seen "Remembrance of the Daleks" a million times and I think its an absolutely wonderful Dalek story, so I decided to skip that one here. However, I would absolutely recommend it to anyone. "Remembrance of the Daleks" is pretty definitely my favourite Doctor Who story of all time.

However, I decided to try out a classic Dalek story to see how well it stands up by comparison to Remembrance of the Daleks. I checked out "Genesis of the Daleks", the first story to ever feature the creator of the Daleks: Davros.



( To read more about "Genesis Of The Daleks" click here... )


Doctor Who - The Happiness Patrol

This is definitely a step down in quality from the "Remembrance of the Daleks" storyline, but it's nothing like as slow and boring as "Dragonfire" and Ace is still awesome. On a planet in the future, the government has a strict rule that everyone must always be happy. Anything negative or sad is banned and punishable by death.

I'd heard that this was supposed to be a critique of Thatcherism, but Thatcher would certainly have no trouble letting experience sadness. It's not until towards the end of the final episode that we finally have a confrontation with the Doctor which gives us some idea how Thatcher might have any relation to the dictator on this planet at all. I mean sure, we see protests by workers, but that's hardly unique to Thatcher.



( To read more about "The Happiness Patrol" click here... )


Doctor Who - The Greatest Show In The Galaxy

This storyline is creepy as hell. The story takes a long while to actually get going, but what we DO get is a clear sense that something is seriously wrong with the Psychic Circus which Ace and the Doctor are visiting. This is Doctor Who with evil clowns and our first view of the main evil clown is when we see a black hearse driving along and see him revealed within when he winds down the driver-side electric window. Meanwhile we see other workers from the circus making a run for it but, apparently, being tracked by kites with a giant eye painted on them.

Creeeeeepy!



( To read more about "The Greatest Show In The Galaxy" click here... )

Update: Okay apparently there is at least one person on my f-list who doesn't want to know who the new Doctor will be and actually expects to avoid being told (even though they've probably heard accurate rumours already). For that reason the wonderful news is now hidden under a cut, but trust me, there's really cool stuff in under there. Check it out!

This is the twelfth Doctor! (Or is it thirteenth now that John Hurt is apparently the incarnation in between McGann and Eccleston?)....
( Find out below... Plus really cool videos and my own discussion... )

Oh yeah, series 7 is coming....

I wasn't able to resist watching the big long trailer for the new Doctor Who series, but perhaps you can. Anyway, just going to place this link here. If you have the willpower not to click on it so you can go into the new series entirely unspoilt then let me just tell you, it looks AWESOME.

Oh yeah, and that IS a "special weapons Dalek" from the best Dalek storyline ever...

Excellent article on Io9 explains the different styles that the Doctor Who show came to have over the course of its history.
It makes a lot of sense and it's really interesting to think how these different elements came to be mixed and matched in order to shape the show as we see it today. It's also good to see some recognition given to the quality of storytelling during Ace's run as the Doctor's companion.

Dalek: "Small human female sighted on level three."
Ace: "Who are you calling small?"
*Smashes up Dalek with baseball bat enhanced by the power of the Hand of Omega*
Dalek: "Under Attack! Under Attack!" *Ace breaks off the eye stalk* "Vision Impaired!"

So yeah, this is about all the interest I've taken in the whole thing tbh. Monarchy is mainly for the tourists really....

(Via DoctorWhoTV)

Wow, a whole load of stuff turned up.

First of all check this out:

Click on image for the Deviant Art account....

Cosplayer shows that it's actually possible to leap about in a Lara Croft outfit:

Click images for the Deviant Art gallery.

Also, here's a cat that looks like Voldemort:


Filmdrunk says:
"A British cat was abandoned when its owners failed to realize how awesome it would be to have a cat that looks like a Harry Potter villain.  It’s sad, people can be so shortsighted I mean cruel."
(Via Filmdrunk)
(  Even more cool s*** under the cut... )

Ah, watching the new incarnation of Doctor Who has been a somewhat punishing experience, but then again so has been my trips of nostalgia into old classic Doctor Who series. Oddly enough the standard for me has always been the Sylvester McCoy story "Remembrance Of The Daleks" which was my first ever Doctor Who story.

The new Doctor Who series has been a mixture of absolutely fantastic moments and horrendously cringe-worthy moments (often in the same episode and sometimes even in the exact same moment). In this degree, it's not really so different from the classic series I guess. Still it's been notable that some of the best episodes have been from Stephen Moffat and some of the most awful episodes (especially the series finales unfortunately) have been from Russell T. Davies.

Still Davies has done some good episodes. He co-wrote the Children Of Earth series which took the Christmas Invasion intro scenario of threatening extra-terrestrials making demands of the government and looked at what happens if Doctor Who doesn't turn up straight away and kiss it all better. (I realise that die-hard Torchwood fans were often disappointed by COE, but as someone coming to the series without the background of the previous two Torchwood series I thought it was brilliant.) He also wrote Midnight which was an absolutely fantastic exploration of a simple but effective idea. (The lack of long speeches from the Doctor and the simple realism of the little gang of characters involved makes me seriously doubt that Davies actually wrote it.) We would have thought that when making the final finale of Doctor Who ever, he'd be on his best behaviour..... Yeah whatever...

(BTW I'm not bothering with big caps lock spoiler alerts. This is your lot. I'm going to presume you've seen it already, so if you haven't then you read on at your own risk.)

( Read more... )