Moth3r said:
Occasionally I return to the Key to Time story arc; tonight I decided to watch the next installment which is The Androids of Tara - and Declan Mulholland appears in Part 1 of that story as well!
Groovey!
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A forgotten evil regeneration? ;)
Where were you in '77?
I'm recording another episode of my friends' "Playing Doctor" podcast tonight. We're covering the New Series 2 finale "Army of Ghosts/Doomsday." I know that one of the hosts is eager to get rid of Rose, I'll be sure to shed a tear for her.
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Of all the final and totally last appearances of the character it was the better of the four (so far).
I still don't know why the Tardis didn't end up going the same way as the other objects covered in the black goo.
Yeah time travel can really screw with your life and I wouldn't have it any other way. That's what makes the show so much fun.
To make matters worse your best friend is in this case is not physically there but is represented by a 'jelly' avatar who is pregnant with your wife elsewhere.
Season six was brilliant.
Oh and you aren't being shot at but a machine that looks like you but contains you is and is burned with the aid of a man who has waited for you for over four decades but you haven't met yet.
And everyone meets up with you afterwards.
^^^ That should go in the best meme's ever thread x-D
Watched the Tom Baker, Leela and K-9 serial 'The Sun Makers'. It's a satire on galloping bureaucracy exactly like Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil'... only 8 years before 'Brazil' was filmed ;-)
The Doctor and Leela arrive on Pluto in mankind's future, where the human race are enslaved to insane and draconian tax laws, admistered by the all powerful 'Collector' and his obsequious number-two 'The Gatherer'.
Both parts are played with gusto by Richard Leech and Henry Woolf. Woolf plays the twisted 'Collector' like a cross between a demented Denis Healey (No accident, he was the Chancellor at the time) and an even more insane Dr. Strangelove.
Leela's part is so well written in this story that I could have quite happily just watched "The Leela and K-9 Show" and forgotten about The Doctor (But Baker is terrific too). She's like a grenade tossed into this repressed society and soon she's threatening to "Split" and "Fillet" various people with her knife and leading an armed insurrection. It was the best element of the serial. For example...
The fact that it ends with the Doctor helping the "Goodies" to murder 'The Gatherer' in cold-blood, felt a bit odd. Writer Robert Holmes must have really, really hated the Taxman at the time (It was the 70s after all) ;-)
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I think The Sun Makers is hugely under rated. It's up there with my favorite Robert Holmes stories and I think it makes the best use of K9 of any of the stories.
I love the way the rebels are not shown as being perfect and being rather blood thirsty. I am not sure The Doctor would have worked with them if he had been given a choice but he does try to temper them a bit. This adds a level of complexity.
Oh and I think you can tell this story was written by someone who was fighting with the tax people over how much he owed them in taxes when he wrote it.
I loved the Mastercard reference.
That's some piece of plastic the Doctor has there.
Don't leave home without it! (Or you might be electrocuted... actually you might be electrocuted with it too)
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I skipped forward to Colin Baker's 'Attack of the Cybermen' which I don't think I'd seen before. So it was a nice surprise to see the return of the Lytton character (I've watched him about a hundred times in 'Resurrection of the Daleks'). However, it's a bit of mixed bag IMO.
The direction by Matthew Robinson is some of the best I've seen in classic Who. Cybermen get repeatedly decapitated throughout but the effect is so well shot and edited, that you can barely believe they didn't kill several Cybermen stunt-performers in the process ;-)
The alien lanscape (Another quarry) is shot and colour graded in this bleak and convincing way.
In my opinion, the violence went a bit too far a 'kids show' with a character having his hands crushed until blood is running all over the floor. Plus The Doctor stabs a Cyberman through the heart (If they have hearts) and then caps a load of them with a (Gasp!) gun. Also, having all the characters you've been following all needlessly killed by the end, seemed a tad mean spirited of writer Eric Saward.
I'm not a fan of the (then) new double 45-minute episode format as I really like my Who cliffhangers. The refrences back to old adventures was fun, seeing the Tardis' chameleon-circuit finally work was groovey and the "Borg-before-the-Borg" Cyberman converter things were interesting to see.
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I'm still amazed to this day that the BBC has never sued over the Borg.
Where were you in '77?
Complaining about the crushed hands in that story is like complaining about the cooked Anakin and the forced amputation of Luke's hand in a film series with Ewoks and Gungans.
It's worrying yes but Doctor Who has a history of worrying the crap out of small kids.
This worried me when I was a Time Tot :
Mason Verger for six year olds at teatime.
There is a musical cue in Revenge Of The Cybermen that I find more offensive (you hear it whenever the Lytton gang turn up). It's not quite as funny as the Dalek cue in Planet of the Daleks but is as annoying.
Bingowings said:
Complaining about the crushed hands in that story is like complaining about the cooked Anakin and the forced amputation of Luke's hand in a film series with Ewoks and Gungans.
It's worrying yes but Doctor Who has a history of worrying the crap out of small kids.
Kids like being scared by TV and film (I did anyway). I loved 'Watership Down' from as early as I can remember and that's got blood and guts fountaining all over the place. But with Doctor Who you get used to certain conventions and I thought this pushed the viloence envelope. You can't really compare Luke's hand in ESB to the mentioned episode. If Vader had held Luke down and slowly and deliberately (Instead of acting in a flash of anger) sawed off Luke's hand while Luke screamed and blood dripped everywhere, you'd have a point. Plus we'd already seen Kenobi lopping off a guys arm in ANH. But yes Anakin getting cooked did seem like a new height/depth of violence in Star Wars (I didn't have a problem with it though).
Bingowings said:
This worried me when I was a Time Tot :
Mason Verger for six year olds at teatime.
I almost got that ^ out of the library yesterday but went for another two Leela stories instead (Including her introduction) so I'll have to see how scary the Master/Skeletor is on my next visit.
The Doctor being trapped while a Dalek suddenly started hovering up the stairs in 'Remembrance of the Daleks' was my all time scariest moment.
You know what, there were a few moments in that serial that scared the cr*p out of me. Like the half-dead Dalek strangling The Doctor...
Other top scares would be, agggh, yuck what is that...
No, no Bertie Bassett is supposed to my friend, not a phychotic killer...
Yeeargh melting slug thing...
and the description of the "Smell" of the rotting flesh, is combined with this image grossed me out...
I take it all back, Doctor Who is violent and horrific from start to finish (Yay!) ;-)
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The better half is still freaked out by this even though he can't see the whole story again.
I found this as fascinating as the short film listing the sources of Harmy's reconstructions.
I am getting ready to get caught up on the Doctor Who comics after finding this deal.
It's a good deal and it helps people,it doesn't get much better then that.
Bingowings said:
The better half is still freaked out by this even though he can't see the whole story again.
I remember seeing screecaps of the two guys releasing the gas attack when I was younger. That image scared the crap out of me. (I think it was around the time in the late nineties when they rebroadcast a lot of stories. The ones I remember the most are Genesis of the Daleks, Spearhead from Space, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Moonbase and Doctor Who and the Silurians. All of them made me cower behind the sofa in terror.)
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May's Doctor Who DVD roundup, part 1 ;-)
CITY OF DEATH - Tom Baker (and Romana 2)
Tom Baker's Doctor has always looked and acted like Harpo Marx...
...but in this 1979 four-parter, thanks to Douglas Adams' script, he's firing off sarcastic comic quips as fast as Groucho. I loved it and was laughing all the way through. Despite Douglas apparently knocking this script together over a weekend fueled by a steady stream of coffee and whiskey, it's got dialogue to rival the quality of H2G2.
Julian Glover looks like he's having a whale of a time playing the campy pantomime villain. Of course, his casting only adds to my growing "GL copied Doctor Who" conspiracy theory LOL. He must have filmed this mere weeks after appearing in ESB but this wasn't Julian's first appearance in the Whoniverse. What's more notable, is that the character he plays is essentially the same as the one he would later play in 'The Last Crusade'. A similar profession in antiquities, the same self-satisfied attitude and even a similar taste in fine cut suits. Of course in TLC the big reveal is that he's secretly a Nazi but in this he's secretly a cycloptic green-tentacle-faced alien. And the Jagaroth spaceship...
...reminded me of something else JL later had a hand in (btw it takes off in the same way as the Federation Starships from that same sequence).
More SW tie-ins to come...
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If you want to feel really depressed read the comments on the youtube page for the series eight teaser,it's full of teenage girls complaining that the series has been ruined because they cast "an old fart" as The Doctor. I sure hope the fan base is broader then that and we don't see a huge ratings drop off just because Moffat didn't go with a pretty boy for the 12th Doctor.
I don't understand their complaint. Whenever I saw the last guy I had an uncontrollable urge to punch him in the face.
Those kids obviously haven't seen the Hartnell episodes
Tobar said:
I don't understand their complaint. Whenever I saw the last guy I had an uncontrollable urge to punch him in the face.
Really,Matt Smith? He is one of my favorites and I think he played the role older then any actor since Hartnell and I liked it. At times I forgot just how young he was because the character felt so old and that was completely down to the way he played it.
I think what some people are forgetting is that people in their fifties can be active these days so just because the 12th Doctor will be played by an older actor there is no reason to assume he will play the part as an old man. Indeed there is every reason to believe he will play the reverse since The Doctor just got a new lease on life and it would contrast with the way Matt Smith played the part.
I can't wait for august.