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Doctor Who — Page 82

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Warbler said:

Anchorhead said:

Warbler said:

LordZerome1080 said:

Warbler said:

ChainsawAsh said:

Warbler said:

ChainsawAsh said:

Warb, are you seriously bothered by the fact that the advertising for the first season with a female Doctor emphasizes the fact that the Doctor is female? What the fuck did you expect? It’s advertising designed to attract an audience,

a pro-feminist audience.

Don’t understand why that’s an issue. Any network will always want to increase their viewership, same as any company will always want to increase their profits (as for television, more viewers = more profit). This is the first woman Doctor, so why wouldn’t they try to target feminists (or pro-feminists, if that’s even a thing) in their advertising?

it’s not necessarily indicative of any stance the episodes may or may not take.

I didn’t say it was indicative of any stance that episodes may or may not take

Then what’s your point?

Warbler said:

It is clear this is marketed to feminists. ugh.

So you are an anti-feminist. I’m glad you’ve admitted it, which is the first step towards solving your problem. The next step is moving out of the sexist 1950s and into the 21st century.

mods, if you want me to give this the response it deserves(which would be against the rules), I suggest you tell him to back off and not call me anti-feminist again.

I suggest you stop telling the mods how we should handle your threats.

Cat got your tongue, SilverWook?

Forum Moderator

Where were you in '77?

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 (Edited)

SilverWook said:

Warbler said:

Anchorhead said:

Warbler said:

LordZerome1080 said:

Warbler said:

ChainsawAsh said:

Warbler said:

ChainsawAsh said:

Warb, are you seriously bothered by the fact that the advertising for the first season with a female Doctor emphasizes the fact that the Doctor is female? What the fuck did you expect? It’s advertising designed to attract an audience,

a pro-feminist audience.

Don’t understand why that’s an issue. Any network will always want to increase their viewership, same as any company will always want to increase their profits (as for television, more viewers = more profit). This is the first woman Doctor, so why wouldn’t they try to target feminists (or pro-feminists, if that’s even a thing) in their advertising?

it’s not necessarily indicative of any stance the episodes may or may not take.

I didn’t say it was indicative of any stance that episodes may or may not take

Then what’s your point?

Warbler said:

It is clear this is marketed to feminists. ugh.

So you are an anti-feminist. I’m glad you’ve admitted it, which is the first step towards solving your problem. The next step is moving out of the sexist 1950s and into the 21st century.

mods, if you want me to give this the response it deserves(which would be against the rules), I suggest you tell him to back off and not call me anti-feminist again.

I suggest you stop telling the mods how we should handle your threats.

Cat got your tongue, SilverWook?

I just don’t know why you didn’t give me the warning yourself when it was you I PMed and you that locked this thread.

¯\(ツ)

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You’ve been unbanned for like a week man maybe you shouldn’t keep poking the bear so hard.

Granted SilverWook is gorgeous enough to warrant a nice poking. 😍

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To elaborate a bit, a large percentage of Who fans consider “Blink” to be the greatest episode ever. When I first saw it, it blew me away, and I had already been a fan for close to 20 years. I’ve watched it at least 6 or 7 times and I still enjoy it. By contrast, some of the more recent episodes are too “drama-heavy” for my taste – the whole Rose period, and the River Song stuff, all kinda detracted from the quirky-time-traveler episodic flavor that attracted me in the first place. In short, there are a wide variety of styles over the years, and you are likely to find some you like, and others you don’t.

For modern Dr. Who, I tend to prefer Capaldi - some of the episodes in the most recent series were fantastic. I also very much liked his predecessor Matt Smith, especially his first episode (“The Eleventh Hour”), but some of his later ones became too drama-heavy for my taste.

As for the older, “classic” Who, Tom Baker is certainly the quintessential Doctor. Way too many wonderful episodes to list. “Genesis of the Daleks” is one of the best, with a fantastic climax… some people consider it the best episode ever. It also would give you a sense of the slower-paced approach of the day, where a single story stretched and developed over a few weeks. Some younger viewers find that pace too slow, but in my opinion there’s no better way to spend a relaxed, rainy saturday morning with some coffee and toast 😃

For these older eras, I have known some women to prefer Peter Davidson, because he was good looking. A former fiance of mine had a big crush on him (she is the one who actually got me hooked on the show). Davidson was in several excellent episodes… “Caves of Androzani” for example. I liked Sylvester McCoy too, and although he was in some dreadful episodes, he was also in a few excellent ones (“Curse of Fenric” and “Remembrance of the Daleks”). Newcomers should avoid Colin Baker episodes (not to be confused with Tom Baker, mentioned above).

One of the cool things about the series, is that each Doctor is encouraged to inject their own “style”. So the various doctors are VERY different from each other, while still retaining some irreverent British humor as a consistent thread. The Dr. Who universe also is replete with a number of repeat-villains. The Daleks, The Master, The Cybermen, etc. It is interesting to see how the villains changed as the budget increased over the years.

"Close the blast doors!"
Puggo’s website | Rescuing Star Wars

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^ Re Peter Davidson - it’s surely the wearing of the celery too? Even for the 80’s that was a bold move wearing a celery stalk on his lapel 😃
 

(Quality post, Puggo. Capaldi is my favourite since Ecclestone’s short term, though I do wish he’d had better writing for some of his tenure - or at least more stories focusing on him.)

A little patience goes a long way on this old-school Rebel base. If you are having issues finding what you are looking for, these will be of some help…

Welcome to the OriginalTrilogy.com | Introduce yourself in here | Useful info within : About : Help : Site Rules : Fan Project Rules : Announcements
How do I do this?’ on the OriginalTrilogy.com; some info & answers + FAQs - includes info on how to search for projects and threads on the OT•com

A Project Index for Star Wars Preservations (Harmy’s Despecialized & 4K77/80/83 etc) : A Project Index for Star Wars Fan Edits (adywan & Hal 9000 etc)

… and take your time to look around this site before posting - to get a feel for this place. Don’t just lazily make yet another thread asking for projects.

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Capaldi is fantastic, but most of his stories rely somewhat heavily on knowledge of earlier episodes, especially in his better seasons (9 and 10).

I’d probably recommend Mummy on the Orient Express as a Capaldi episode for a newcomer, though it is pretty heavy on Clara arc stuff. Listen is another excellent one but, again, a bit Clara arc heavy, and also a little reliant on overall series lore.

I don’t like recommending Blink to people as a first episode because it’s a Doctor-lite episode, and as such doesn’t really represent the show as a whole. But it is an amazing episode.

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I wouldn’t recommend starting with Matt Smith or Capaldi. Moffat tried really hard to appeal to long-time fans that most episodes are completely incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the show. The whole extended family was over and we ended up watching that year’s Christmas Special… no one knew what the hell was going on.

I would say starting with the revived show at the beginning, with “Rose”, is your best bet. However, I strongly recommend checking out the original show at some point.

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My local PBS station would run entire stories on weekends, so I’ve seldom experienced classic Who drawn out over weeks.
Tom Baker was the only Doctor I knew as a kid, since very few American markets ever got the Jon Pertwee episodes back in the 70’s.
Having seen more of Patrick Troughton’s era, thanks to recovered episodes and animated reconstructions, he’s currently my second favorite these days.

I still marvel at what they could pull off with limited resources and technology in the 1960’s era.

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Where were you in '77?

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Puggo, that’s all well and good, but I don’t think that’s very helpful in giving a newcomer a starting position. You’re more just listing good episodes.

And FFS, people, it’s Davison and Eccleston, not Davidson and Ecclestone.

I agree that Blink is a bad first episode, however, I have a come up with an untested viewing order of Blink, Love & Monsters, and then everything else starting with Rose. This order builds up the Doctor as some mysterious figure, with people trying to find him until we finally are properly introduced to him personally partway through Rose.

As for Mummy on the Orient Express, although having not seen it since it aired, you’re not alone in recommending it to newcomers.

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Handman said:

I wouldn’t recommend starting with Matt Smith or Capaldi. Moffat tried really hard to appeal to long-time fans that most episodes are completely incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the show. The whole extended family was over and we ended up watching that year’s Christmas Special… no one knew what the hell was going on.

I would say starting with the revived show at the beginning, with “Rose”, is your best bet. However, I strongly recommend checking out the original show at some point.

Do you mean Matt Smith’s first Christmas special? What outside knowledge was required for that one? The companions have their own backstory, but they’re basically written out of most of the episode (and all you need to know is that they’re on a honeymoon, which you’re told). It’s actually the episode that got some of my family watching the show, and I think of it as one of the most standalone ones there is.

And there would be even less chance of confusion coming off of season 5. I’m struggling to think about how season 5, itself, could be incomprehensible to a newcomer. You miss River’s first story, but she’s reintroduced. Other than that, not much attention is paid to RTD’s storylines.

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towne32 said:

Handman said:

I wouldn’t recommend starting with Matt Smith or Capaldi. Moffat tried really hard to appeal to long-time fans that most episodes are completely incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the show. The whole extended family was over and we ended up watching that year’s Christmas Special… no one knew what the hell was going on.

I would say starting with the revived show at the beginning, with “Rose”, is your best bet. However, I strongly recommend checking out the original show at some point.

Do you mean Matt Smith’s first Christmas special? What outside knowledge was required for that one? The companions have their own backstory, but they’re basically written out of most of the episode (and all you need to know is that they’re on a honeymoon, which you’re told). It’s actually the episode that got some of my family watching the show, and I think of it as one of the most standalone ones there is.

And there would be even less chance of confusion coming off of season 5. I’m struggling to think about how season 5, itself, could be incomprehensible to a newcomer. You miss River’s first story, but she’s reintroduced. Other than that, not much attention is paid to RTD’s storylines.

I agree with this.

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As we can see, everyone has a different opinion as far as how to start. For me, clever, self-contained individual stories are EXACTLY what hooked me, not long romantic story arcs which tended to leave me cold. That said, I liked the mummy episode quite a lot too 😃

"Close the blast doors!"
Puggo’s website | Rescuing Star Wars

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 (Edited)

Do you mean Matt Smith’s first Christmas special?

No, one of the later ones. It might have even been his regeneration show… why that was the Christmas Special, I do not know. Series 5 was definitely the best of his era, but it’s impossible to approach the later seasons (and any of Capaldi’s) without being much more familiar with the show. It’s a lot like the original show in the 80s. And… well, both eras saw a huge drop in viewership.

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I was never a fan of Time of the Doctor being made a Christmas episode. Then they did the same thing again with Twice Upon a Time, but at least then it was a little more of a one-off with the Twelfth Doctor hanging out with an exaggerated caricature of the First Doctor instead of spending 90 minutes wrapping up all his loose storylines.

That being said, I actually like Time as a finale to Smith’s era, it was just dumb to make it a Christmas special instead of its own thing.

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I wish the First Doctor was treated better.

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Yeah, his treatment in Twice Upon a Time was an embarrassment and insult to the character and to William Hartnell. No knocks to David Bradley, his portrayal was fine and has been continued with solid writing from Big Finish. Big Finish in general has treated the First Doctor very well.

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I’ve watched quite a few of the original hartnell episodes and I thought twice upon a time was good fun. What’s so awful about it?

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It wasn’t awful, I just wish the First Doctor was treated like an actual character more akin to the original show. As it was, he felt like a punchline.

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Yeah, pretty much that. Especially all the forced sexism jokes.

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I knew Handman had to be referring to Time of the Doctor. I thought it was obvious by the way he described his family’s confusion. I guess it could’ve been the Husbands of River Song, but for some reason I was just thinking of Matt Smith. Personally, I think Christmas Specials would work better as post-regeneration episodes, since it’s more climactic to have the regeneration episode be the series finale. Wanting Christmas Specials to be accessible is just another reason to add on to that.

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Yeah, agreed. Which makes me wonder why they didn’t stick with that precedent after The Christmas Invasion…

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Handman said:

Do you mean Matt Smith’s first Christmas special?

No, one of the later ones. It might have even been his regeneration show… why that was the Christmas Special, I do not know. Series 5 was definitely the best of his era, but it’s impossible to approach the later seasons (and any of Capaldi’s) without being much more familiar with the show. It’s a lot like the original show in the 80s. And… well, both eras saw a huge drop in viewership.

Ah, fair enough. I agree that Time of the Doctor (while I actually love the episode, unlike most people), is possibly one of the very worst episodes to start on.

That said, I think the beginning of Moffat’s run, as some have suggested, is indeed a great place to start.

It depends on the person you’re recommending the show to and their tastes. Though we are only 13 years out, people are already seeing series one as rather dated. There are some parts of the RTD era that newcomers (perhaps more so for Americans) struggle with. I’ve heard at least a couple people doubt they should keep watching once they get to the ‘farting aliens’. Again, depends on the person. People who like British drama from that time period might enjoy the era more.

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Yeah, I first started watching the show five years ago, starting with the first series, and it wasn’t dated at all for me… but looking back, it is now. However I do feel that Eccleston’s run was a definite high point, and much more consistent than Tennant, who was very hit-or-miss with me and the whole romance angle.

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I actually remembered Eccleston’s season as being a mixed bag until I rewatched it before the 50th.

It’s actually very consistent, more so than perhaps any other season of the show. The farting aliens episodes are actually really good with the sole exception of the…well…farting aliens.