The Gamer's Quarter

[aderack]

Anyway, current episode list:

4.01 - "Partners in Crime" - RTD
4.02 - "Planet of the Ood" - Moran
4.03 - "The Fires of Pompeii" - Temple
4.04/4.05 - "The Sontaran Stratagem" / "The Poison Sky" - Raynor
4.06 - "The Doctor's Daughter" - Greenhorn
4.07 - "The Unicorn and the Wasp" - Roberts
4.08/4.09 - "Silence in the Library" / "River's Run" - Moffat
4.10 - "Midnight" - RTD
4.11 - "Turn Left" - RTD
4.12/4.13 - TBA / "Journey's End" - RTD

I like the titles this year. Votes on the "Bad Wolf" title for episode 12? Something simple like "Davros"? Something extra-specially spoily?
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[Ashura]

Episode 12:

The Doctor and the Doctor
The 9th Doctor returns to engage in epic combat with Doctor 10 in a match of wits and mindgames and mayhem. Also, some stuff about time travel.

In seriousness, if they've let ALL of this stuff slip (all the companions and stuff filming), there has to be something even bigger going on here.

[aderack]

And the DOCTOR totally being EXTERMINATED, YO.

That would be a good title: "Exterminate!". With the bang.
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[aderack]

Ah, episode twelve -- the title has three words, none of which begin with "D". Apparently.

http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/blog/2008/04/up-pompeii.html

And Harriet Jones confirmed.
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[baron patsy]

"The Doctor's Daughter" intrigues me. Sure seems like there's a lot going on this year. And I wonder if one of the words in 12's title is "the", considering the popular "The [adjective] [noun]" convention.

[aderack]

That would be the best title ever.
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[Westacular]

[Cycle]

Just hi-jacking this thread for another moment to talk aboue LIFE ON MARS again.

I just watched the final episode, and man, it was amazing. Seriously, if you ever get the chance to watch this show, don't pass it up. It's (kinda) about time travel too!
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[aderack]

Jack's brother was miscast, and (as others have noted) it is odd that he pops out of the ground 2000 years later in mid-sentence, apparently unaffected by the experience. Also, weirdly low-key and a bit underwhelming for all they set up about Owen earlier in the season. Not that low-key is bad in itself.

Some good stuff in there. All the past stuff. Although he's played mostly as comic relief, sometimes to the point of eye rolling, Rhys is still the most fun character in the show.

So they need a techie and a medic. I guess we know who, out of the existing character (and Torchwood staff or liaison) pool, to call.

If John Barrowman isn't around next season, will James Marsters take his place? Looks like they're pushing in that direction.
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[Westacular]

My vote is they recruit that pair of sadistic lesbians from Torchwood: 1900. They could be in that freezer, too!

[baron patsy]

So wow. Apparently there's a quick Rose Tyler appearance in the new episode. I guess you can't accuse them of wasting time! Also a mention of bees dying!

[purplechair]

That whole episode was basically just the Doctor and Catherine Fucking Tate running around a bit and then meeting up. With some incidental alien stuff tacked on the side.

That said, it seemed better than most episodes.

I really, really hate Catherine Tate though. This whole series is going to be a real drag.

[Harveyjames]

I like Catherine Tate!

[baron patsy]

Assuming talk of such things is kosher, the first episode is up on thebox.bz, along with the Confidential that goes with it.

[purplechair]

[Dracko]

[Ashura]

I liked her in Partners in Crime. For the most part, she plays it completely differently than she did last year.

[Harveyjames]

She's a very talented actress! Not to mention BEAUTIFUL

[Dracko]

You're taking the piss, right?
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[aderack]

Never fear, Dracko. You can keep it all. I know you'll need it.

And yes, I like Catherine Tate. And I think she's got some of the best chemistry with the lead in the history of the show, really. By which I mean, the last forty-five years. I'm really curious to see where this will go over the next twelve weeks.

I've not commented on the episode, I notice. I will, maybe.
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[Harveyjames]

Yeah, the last two assistants were a bit stage-schooly and nondescript. I reckon Tate is going to bring a lot to it.

Is it commonly accepted that the worst assistant was the fat girl with the lisp, Tank or Tonk or Bonk or whatever her name was? She was rubbish.

[Harveyjames]

I watched the episode! It was pretty good. I think I'm going to be watching this series.

By the way the woman who played Foster is familiar to a British audience as Rachel Watts, who was a really ditzy character in Coronation St. about 10 years ago.

[Dracko]

[baron patsy]

I'm actually looking forward to this series. It looks like there will be some interesting things happening, what with Davros, the Sontarans, the new and improved Magic Rose, and speculation about the "Shadow Proclamation".

I wasn't too happy with this episode, but it was certainly better than, say, "New Earth".

[aderack]

Yeah, the episode certainly wasn't perfect, though the premise made me fear the worst -- and this is way better than the worst! Actually, strictly as a season opener, I think it did its job more effectively than the other three to date. Smith & Jones was a way better story in its own right, and Rose did a great job at establishing the show. This, though, gives a really good sense of anticipation as to where things will go over the next three months.

Tank, Tonk, Bonk? The lisp makes me think of Mel (Bonnie Langford), but your description calls to mind Ace (Sophie Aldred). Though Ms. Aldred may not be the best actress in the world, her character was one of the most developed and interesting since 1965 or so.

Mel is generally regarded as the worst of the companions. Still, she works well with Colin Baker. A lot of people hate Adric, because he's a sulky teenager. Still, he works well with Tom Baker. Dodo (from way back in the '60s) is supremely useless. After that, consensus begins to scatter.

I find actually the male companions tend to be the most interesting. There aren't that many, yet each brings something new.
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[Westacular]

Yeah, this was a fun episode. Not sure why it was rumoured to be so bad. Could it have been better? Sure. But it was fun and whimsical and totally appropriate for starting the year and bringing back Donna, and a welcome break from the pathos of the previous few stories.

Making the little fat marshmallow babies so marketably cute was a smart choice. Giving them a more traditional "monster!" look would have broken the tone and sent mixed messages, whereas with this look it's unmistakably meant to be taken as light-hearted fun. And for once, it works!

[Westacular]

I think what I like most about the episode it breaks from the established patterns in so many little ways. Because the things that those patterns are composed of... they've done that already. Time to subvert it by doing something different.

(I'm thinking particularly of the Donna moving into the TARDIS, talking about Martha, etc., bits here)

[Harveyjames]

I thought there were some genuinely hilarious moments in it! Some corny ones, too, but all in all it was good stuff.

I'm just looking at the 60's Doctor Who. It's pretty great! I get the impression that 70's and 80's Who is to this what Dragonball Z is to Dragonball.

[aderack]

From what little I've paid attention to Dragonball, that sounds right.

That's not even one of my favorite '60s stories there, though man if it doesn't have nice production values. Almost looks like A Hard Day's Night. I'd forgotten just how much location filming there is, and how well it's done. Is that Douglas Camfield on the camera (in the field)?

No, it's Michael Ferguson. Ah well! Looks like Camfield.

This is the one I mentioned was weird, earlier, because someone kept writing it so the computer refers to the Doctor as "DOC-TOR WHOOOO", and nobody caught it and fixed it. Then again, the new production team was kind of confused in general.
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[digi]

whoo-who! firing up the new episode now!

....oh SHIT what did they do to the theme song god dammit
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* Me Profile * Me Blog * Me Photos *

[aderack]

Yeah, that's unfortunate. I actually rather liked the Voyage of the Damned mix. Now it's been... um. Polished up? When the big thing the Voyage theme had going for it was its roadhouse rock quality, which seemed to fit Tennant rather well. Now it's just a mess.
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[aderack]

I notice that people (not here, particularly; out in the wild) keep... not understanding what's going on with the show. There are long discussions even amongst reasonably intelligent people, criticizing the unbelievable world that Davies has set up, where the world keeps being invaded and society hasn't broken down and there aren't riots in the streets and people keep being surprised, as if this is all a big oversight somehow, rather than comedic.

So. How to be droll:

1) Take an insane world

2) Populate that world with reasonable people who act perfectly logically within that world's rules

3) Introduce someone with an outsider's perspective

This is more or less Davies' formula.

Part of the point of Donna's character is that, thanks to the Doctor's outside perspective, she has started to wake up and notice how insane her world is -- though she is still mostly rooted within it.
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[aderack]

Character Options now has a classic series license as well:



Interesting that Colin has his sonic lance. What, did he use that once, ever? Everyone needs to be sonicked up!
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[Harveyjames]

Character options can't spell 'fourth'.

[aderack]

His real name is Sally.
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[Harveyjames]

Those three guys in the bottom right are cool, who are they?

[Westacular]

[aderack]

I believe I read half that book on the toilet, once.

In the intro, doesn't he talk about how one of the patients was named Colonel Crapping or something?

Eitch-Jay: They look like sentai characters, don't they. The two in the middle are "Voc robot" service automata from The Robots of Death. The dude on the right is a Zygon, from Terror of the Zygons. The dude on the lower-left is from The Talons of Weng-Chiang, a yellow terror pastiche that is supposed to be the best Doctor Who story ever. These were all either written by Bob Holmes, supposedly the best Doctor Who writer ever, and they all aired in the same couple of seasons produced by Doctor Who's all-time most beloved producer, Philip Hinchcliffe.

...

Nice monster designs, anyway.


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[aderack]

[aderack]

When Hinchcliffe came in, he made a lot of sweeping changes. I mean, offhand tell me whether this sounds like a good set of ideas.

1) Any continuity, either long term or from serial to serial, goes out the window, effectively making every single story standalone. This also means no recurring characters or monsters; all ties are broken. Anything that does return is rendered unrecognizable, in appearance and motivation.
2) Instead of basing stories on social issues or scientific or theoretical concepts, nearly every story is a pastiche of whatever Hammer horror movie is playing at the moment.
3) This kind of ties into the first. Let's do a huge retcon of the show's mythology. Instead of being omnipotent, terrible gods, the Time Lords are recast as dusty bureaucrats who can barely hold their society together.
4) Suddenly Hartnell is no longer the first Doctor, and Tom Baker is the twelfth! And suddenly Time Lords only have thirteen incarnations! Whenever the Doctor is in a jam that he can't possibly get out of, let's invent a new previously-undisclosed alien ability to get him out of it, then never reference it again.
5) To attract more adult male viewers, let's cast our first companion not as an audience identification figure, but as a jungle woman in a bikini. Sort of Tarzan meets Barbarella.
6) And let's make the show as violent and gory as we can possibly get away with in our time slot, just for the sake of doing so.

I'm just going off the top of my head, here.

Later eras undid some of the damage (particularly, ignoring the changes to the Doctor; Hartnell is still explicitly the First Doctor, as he always was). A lot of this, though, became ingrained into public perception of what the show was supposed to be.
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[Westacular]

[Harveyjames]

I never really read it as a satire of British culture. I mean, beyond the obvious (everyone in Britain is obsessed with dieting so here's an alien MADE OF FAT!!) That's not a particularly British thing, though, more a western thing.

[Westacular]

I was only talking about their reaction to repeated alien invasions -- not the rest of the stuff.

There's something to be said for that comment in the episode calling Britain "the most obese country" (or something, I can't remember the wording), which is the sort of wrong comment that only a British writer would make, because anyone from any other country would know better:



Of course, since this is a comment on the fact that it's a British-written show, and not merely showing British people, viewing it as deliberate satire requires there be an additional level of metatextual intention that I'm not inclined to assert.

[aderack]

There's always been a weird myopic anglocentric slant to the show, from the UK having its own advanced space program to it being the primary target for alien invasion to it holding the keys to all the nuclear bombs in the world (for safe keeping, you understand). Sort of a post-Imperial thing, I guess.

It is true, at least, that the UK is the fattest part of Europe! Which I guess is as far as the telescope reaches. Though at least the telescope does cover a wide variety of peoples, unlike the American one.

Anyway, Davies seems conscious of this business, as shown in his playing up the space program during The Christmas Invasion and various other winks and nudges. It's the kind of thing he's always concerned about, and the way he shows his concern is through ridicule. The Christmas Invasion was, in part, about the Falklands War.

Also, you know, all the business about stupid apes and Pringles. And Torchwood. "For the good of the what?"

He also openly criticizes the royal family every chance he gets. Thus, werewolves. He seriously meant to destroy Buckingham Palace; he just couldn't find the budget for the model. So instead, he had the Queen say "Happy Christmas" because he hates it when people say that.

True that not everything Davies lampoons is explicitly British; a lot of the inanity is generically human, or at least Western. He just likes to play up that angle, presumably because Doctor Who has become such a British icon itself, and deals so much with British iconography.
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[aderack]

Again, maybe the Welsh thing factors in to some extent. "Not in Cardiff. London doesn't care! The southwest coast could fall into the ocean and they wouldn't notice... Oh. I sound like a Welshman. God help me, I've gone native."

So of course Torchwood plays up Cardiff as a sexy, exciting, important place (to the confusion of BBC license payers everywhere), with the secret base right underneath a landmark in the center of town, near the production offices.

There are levels of subversion here that I'm sure I just don't have the background to get.
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[Harveyjames]

Possibly the fact that Cardiff is a shithole factors into it.

[aderack]

It occurs to me that the places they're going in series four also sort of tie into the "wrapping things up" motif this year.

So okay. First destination: Pompeii. As referenced in series one. Volcano day. There was even supposed to be a Pompeii episode earlier, in a completely different form. Too expensive at the time, though. Instead we got Boom Town.

Second destination: the Ood Sphere, to explore the background of the Ood as described in series two.

Third destination: back on Earth, to finally get an actual UNIT story, after being teased with them for three years.

Fourth destination: I don't know where this is (The planet Barcelona?); recall, however, the line that Davies had Graham add to "Fear Her". So it seems he was roughing out series four at least as far back as series two, which isn't too hard to swallow when you consider he was thinking about the series three finale when "Dalek" was still being written.

Fifth Destination: "I know, Agatha Cristie! I bet she's brilliant!"

Sixth Destination: Moffatland, which is its own universe. Never mind; move along.

From here on, it's a bunch of unknown Davies stuff. "Midnight" is set on a pleasure planet of some sort. Beyond that, it's up in the air.

Still! Of what we do know, it mostly seems like unfinished business.
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[aderack]

These are interesting.
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[purplechair]

[purplechair]

Also, the reason I don't like Catherine Tate is that she always seems to have this huge ego behind her performances. I didn't like her sketch show at all, because she just seemed to be screaming out catchphrases and expecting people to laugh. I mean, it's like she watched a load of Fast Show tapes and concluded that people like to hear catchphrases over and over, and didn't really appreciate the reason why it worked. The Cathering Tate Show just reminded me of those Lazy Comedy Slags bits that Lee and Herring used to do. (As did Little Britain, The Office, and countless other recent shows, but nevermind hey.)

Anyway. Basically, in everything she does, I just always get this weird "DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM?" feeling from her. Like, I thought she was really irritating in The Runaway Bride, and now, judging from the tone of the episode, I'm supposed to really get behind her and stuff, and be like "Fuck yeah, she's back with the doctor!", when really I was much more excited about Billie popping up briefly. I mean, Rose is a likeable character, and we've seen her going through all sorts of stuff. But this Donna... I just want the Doctor to throw her into the sun or something.