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Doctor Who: now discussing Empire of Death (with spoilers!)
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it immediately shrugs that off and ignores it in favour of typical DWM antics
I may be misremembering this but isnt there some some sort of rule around Dr Who saying that things like the comics and audio dramas cant have an impact on the TV show as the show is publicly funded via the licence fee and that viewer should not have to pay cash money to het information vital to the story. Is that a thing? Or have I totally made this up?!
I’m not sure but either way the magazine makes a big deal of highlighting the idea that this strip means the show and the magazine are now in synch, and this is the first proper adventure of the new Tennant Doctor.
Which led me to expect something more meaningful than the silly light romp we got, which like Martin says feels like a generic cartoonish adventure that could have been published in any era.
Also, I agree that the price is high for what you get in this mag. Some of the features are a good read and it’s nice to get a RTD column and so many details of the new crew for the RTD era, but beyond that it’s not a thrilling read really.
(Luckily I’ve managed to flog my copy for triple what I paid for it, on ebay. I don’t know if this issue has sold out or is hard to find or what, but it’s going for more than £20 already.)
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Oo, I might look into doing that as well.
Bruce, that was certainly the reasoning given for not doing a film (or at least why a film wouldn’t have the current Doctor) back when that was a concern.
It does seem odd to have Tennant’s new Doctor going off into standard japes when the trailer has him seemingly doing post-regeneration angst/confusion. Supposedly this year’s worth of strips are going to cover only an hour though, which doesn’t allow for much in the way of depth, I’d suspect.
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I don’t believe there is anything legally binding like that but let’s be honest, as much as people like the other media stuff it is and always had been disregarded by the TV show. The comics and audio adventures – it is Elseworlds material.
The Doctor never had a penguin as an assistant, the stories were fun but it’s just the same that the rabbit character from the 80s Marvel comics isn’t a key part of Star Wars.
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If you can’t get away with just about anything in a series entirely built around time travel, then where can you?
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The Doctor never had a penguin as an assistant
At one point in the time war, he totally did. And then he didn’t, and then Merlin was a time-lord, and then the time-lords got very boring and ‘gun’.
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Guess I’m watching Children In Need tonight. (Though I thought I saw somewhere off-handedly say a few months ago that it’s a black trans actress playing a character called Rose who is the new companion, but that might have been crossed wires over some other casting).
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Although his post doesn’t say anything that it’s her so could be another companion altogether.
As it turns out, that is the answer.
Ruby Sunday, running late for Tuesday.
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Guess I’m watching Children In Need tonight. (Though I thought I saw somewhere off-handedly say a few months ago that it’s a black trans actress playing a character called Rose who is the new companion, but that might have been crossed wires over some other casting).
Yasmin Finney’s going to be in the 2023 specials playing a character called Rose, but I guess not continuing after that. She’s a regular in Heartstopper, which was renewed for back-to-back seasons, so she might not have been available for a full series.
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Although his post doesn’t say anything that it’s her so could be another companion altogether.
As it turns out, that is the answer.
Ruby Sunday, running late for Tuesday.
I’ve seen her in the odd episode of Corrie. She’s a decent actor and not exactly hard to look at either.I can see her being very popular…I’m just really glad they’re going back to one companion again.
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She’s a decent actor and not exactly hard to look at either
RTD is smart enough to remember the For The Dads factor.
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You’d think by this point Character Options would be able to do a pretty dead on David Tennant head and yet…!
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I kind of like it. Distinctive and a nice mix of old and new.
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Looks good. I’m also looking at it and going: Could do with a new look in the new year…..
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Looks good. I’m also looking at it and going: Could do with a new look in the new year…..
I always remember Capaldi saying that one of the reasons he favoured the hoodie/coat look for Twelve (and then the sonic sunglasses) was that it would all be relatively simple and cheap for fans/cosplayers to imitate. Looks like they’ve taken a similar approach here.
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How will Doctor Who fuck you up? (Classic edition) pic.twitter.com/26GDSmhYHe
— Iain Coleman (@Iain_Coleman) December 10, 2022
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The Doctors new style.
It looks nice and distinct, but the colors remind me of a sofa from the 70’s.
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Perfect for hiding behind.
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Technically, it was just a trailer. But what a goddamn trailer!
Looks to have a major cash injection, it all looked good but….
Not out until September. Balls.
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Looks pretty cool.
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Not out until September. Balls.
Is it even that soon as the anniversary is November? Or are they timing the final special for the actual anniversary and we get a triptych over Sept, Oct, Nov?
The CGI on that white furry thing looks a step above what the show has managed before.
This could be a positive long term on the scheduling, SFX are usually last to be added so they seem to have this mostly or fully done many months before it airs. RTD answered a fan question saying no more schedule creep and delays for the show.
If you read his book on showrunning Who the first time he doesn’t half live on the edge of deadlines but until Tennant took his sabbatical for Hamlet he did deliver full series to schedule. Bearing in mind too it’s not just him back but his original producers in Tranter and Gardner who own Bad Wolf Productions maybe we can see full Gatwa seasons in 2024 and 2025 to some level of discipline.
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I am curious to see why they’re fighting Kamen Rider
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Also an interesting spot from Rich Johnston, 3 of the characters in the trailer look very similar to the Doctor Who Weekly comic strip by Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons.
The ‘Meep’ character befriends a young black girl like in the trailer. Could be nothing but RTD mined the novels in his run so could be taking bits from the comic run too.
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Yeah, I was going to say, isn’t the white one Meep or Beep or whatever (I’ve not actually read the story he’s from). Didn’t recognise the second one. It would play into RTD’s strengthening of ties to the DWM comic if they are, wouldn’t it?
edit: also, releasing a trailer on Christmas Day definitely feels like RTD reclaiming that space for the show. I hope he goes back to Christmas specials. Chibnall really squandered something special when he allowed the show to get pushed to NYD, amongst all the other drama series starts.
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I am curious to see why they’re fighting Kamen Rider
Corporate synergy
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John Wagner’s confirmed that Mills and Gibbons have been paid for the use of their DWM creations on screen, which is good to hear.
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Hmm, how reliable a source is the Mirror?
Exclusive: Lost Doctor Who episodes brought back using cartoons to mark 60th anniversary
Lost Doctor Who episodes are being brought back to life using cartoons and colour.
To mark the sci-fi show’s 60th anniversary this year, two stories from the 1960s are to be drawn and released on Blu-ray and DVD.
They are William Hartnell’s penultimate story The Smugglers, and Patrick Troughton’s third adventure, The Underwater Menace.
Both four-part stories were originally transmitted by the BBC, before film prints were sold overseas, and the original tapes were destroyed.
Episodes two and three of The Underwater Menace have been recovered, but only brief clips from The Smugglers story exist.
An insider said: “Fans have been delighted as the show’s fourth season has been slowly restored through animated episodes.”Only 10 of the 43 broadcast episodes still exist, so we’re getting to see the missing classics.”
Last year, the BBC ended the release of animated versions after BBC America stopped funding the restoration of early stories. But new funding has been arranged. BBC bosses plan to colourise certain stories from the Hartnell and Troughton eras (1963-69), for broadcast next year. This is likely to include the very first story, An Unearthly Child. The animation deal is not connected to the show’s tie-up with Disney+.
The 60th anniversary will be marked on BBC1 with three autumn specials featuring David Tennant, 51, as the 14th Doctor, before Sex Education’s Ncuti Gatwa, 30, takes over.
UKTV is also having two of Tony Hancock episodes, Twelve Angry Men and The Blood Donor, colourised for broadcast this year.That they know that the previous batch of animations were funded by BBC America, who aren’t paying for any more, suggests they’ve more understanding of the situation than you might expect of a disinterested tabloid journo.
Anyway, it’d be great to have the Smugglers animated. Less so the Underwater Menace, given it’s had a release with a photo-slide recon (even if it was a pretty terrible one).
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I believe he has what the kids call “drip”…This definitely confirms that this regeneration fucks.
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That’s interesting that they’ve recast Sarah Jane (with Liz Sladen’s daughter) and Harry, along with the first three Doctors.
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That’s interesting that they’ve recast Sarah Jane (with Liz Sladen’s daughter) and Harry, along with the first three Doctors.
Yes. I don’t keep up with Big Finish,. but I’m sure, back in the day they said they wouldn’t recast. Something like…
I will not recast those three Doctors under any circumstances – to do so would I believe be the height of bad taste. On TV they got away with it in The Five Doctors, and that should remain a unique event. William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee were three great actors whose memory is better served by enjoying what we have rather than muddying it with sound-alikes. And to ask their family members to impersonate them would be insulting them and their fathers. It’s a definite no-no.
Change, my dear!
And to be fair that statement got made many years ago.
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Let’s revisit statements made +20 years ago, that’ll work out well, right?
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I’ve just finished reading Father Time an 8th Doctor novel by Lance Parkin.
It’s the first Who novel I’ve read in ages. Well, I read Infinity Doctors a couple of years ago and before that none for… I dunno, eight years or so? I’d gone big on them after Who was relaunched in 2005, tracking down second hand copies of well over a hundred of them, alongside getting into Big Finish. But eventually I just burned out on them. Father Time is one I’d kept aside to read last (of the ones I had) for reasons long since forgotten. And, having sold off most of the books, I finally got around to that this month.
It’s a decent book – Parkin is a good writer – but it also really reminds me of why I went off the novels – both Virgin and BBC’s. It’s just full of pointed ambiguity about wider continuity. The book is about the Doctor adopting Miranda, the last descendent of a future tyrannical emperor of the known universe, who has been hidden in the 80s. And the book is just full of cute, sideways references to said Emperor being a future version of the Doctor without outright saying it. Which doesn’t sound too bad in and of itself, but there’s multiple layers of that kind of thing – obscure allusions to other stories, visions of unspecified characters from past (and even yet-to-be-published) stories. And trying to pin down what half of it is – on the internet after the fact – inevitably leads to a rabbit hole of references to the Enemy and the War In Heaven and bottle universes and the four elementals as seen in no-license spin-off novels like the post-Doctor New Adventures and Faction Paradox line and Miranda’s own comic and random short stories and prose fragments in charity anthologies and…
Honestly, it’s just kind of exhausting. Really makes you appreciate that RTD took a year or two to even use the name Gallifrey on TV when the show came back.
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I picked up a couple of more Who Ray sets from CEX the other week and I’ve been making my way through season 8 first.
Not my favourite season, to start with, and as a box set, it’s a bit odd. It’s 8 discs, but a lot of that is taken up with alternate versions of stories.
The Claws of Axos disc has a longer cut of episode 1, which I watched and only seemed to be a minute longer, at best (I’m pretty sure I put the right version on). Nothing else really new there beyond Behind The Sofa.
Terror of the Autons has new CGI effects, which I didn’t notice the option for until after I’d watched it (I wish they’d make those clearer in the menu rather than only in the special features, given you can’t watch them in isolation).
Then there’s two complete versions of Colony In Space across two discs. The first is a new restoration that adds colour to a black and white film copy of it, at the expense of a few pixels cropped from the edges (due to the film recording). The alternate version on the other disc is the previous restoration, from the DVD release, which isn’t cropped, but doesn’t look as good. I guess it’s nice they’ve included both, not that I suspect anyone really cares that much about Colony In Space (a story I have at least twice and could remember nothing of before watching it again the other night and had it completely confused with The Mutants) but it would have been nice if the booklet in the set explained the differences. There’s again not much in the way of new special features for Colony beyond Behind The Sofa.
Next disc is The Daemons, with a few special features. The disc after that is the 90 minute omnibus edit of the Daemons that was shown on TV one time (but restored to the same level as the main version). I’m not wild about the Daemons, so I decided to give that one a go rather than the full five episodes. Which means that it feels very quick getting through those discs (because who is going to watch both versions of Colony and the Daemons in the same run?). And again, given all these different versions and the restoration challenges involved in all these stories (which were wiped and had to be restored thanks to NTSC copies in one way or another) it’d have been nice if they’d commissioned a new featurette about all that. Instead there’s just a 20 year old bit about Reverse Standards Conversion and a clip from Tomorrow’s World about the colour restoration on the Daemons, both of which are interesting but out of date and totally superseded, I think.
The Behind The Sofas are interesting though. There’s three pairings: Katy Manning and Stewart Bevan, who trot out mostly the same things Manning always says; Sarah Sutton and Janet Fielding who aren’t quite as repetitive as that despite being regulars on special features; and then Anjli Mohindra (Rani from Sarah Jane Adventures) and Sacha Dhawan (The Master), who have a sort of modern, outsider perspective on it.
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Listening to the podcast Who Back When. The guys are funny and the nostalgia factor takes me back.
Nice behind the scenes production anecdotes and humor about the sets, costumes, plot holes and so on.When it came to City of Death, they said Timelords in Paris, Romana dressed as a schoolgirl, the plot about the Mona Lisa was Thomas Crown Affair. 🤣
And I finally built this thing and worked out the wiring:
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Murray Gold is back for the 60th anniversary specials:
https://www.doctorwho.tv/news-and-features/award-winning-composer-murray-gold-returns-to-doctor-who
WHAT? YOU’LL HAVE TO SPEAK UP, MURRAY GOLD IS BACK DOING THE MUSIC, SO I CAN’T HEAR YOU.
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I hear that Ncuti Gatwa is a bad mother-
Shut yo mouth!
is the blond in those pictures the new companion? because she looks uncomfortably like Jenna C.
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is the blond in those pictures the new companion?
She is. I don’t think she looks that much like Coleman and it probably doesn’t matter either way as there’s a different showrunner.
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Christoph Waltz as the Doctor?
Well, Waltz is up for it.
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That is some hair on Tennant
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Not that I particularly have a problem with this but it is a little odd to be doing a direct adaptation of a DWM strip at the same time as making a point of saying the DWM strip is canon.
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I think past history says RTD doesn’t give a shit about canon but just good story. They adapted a novel with a different Doctor which by default removes it from canon but that’s not really what Doctor Who has ever been about. It’s a Star Trek thing to try and tie in everything that way and draw up dictionaries and ship specs.
Which is fine but Doctor Who is always very fluid and vague, it kind of has to be. Time travel is very hard to parse and 60 years of time travel stories even worse.
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Bonnie Langford is back:
Also, I must have missed this:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2023/doctor-who-indira-varma
Excellent news as I think she’s great in pretty much everything she’s in.
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Mel was a bit of a misfire of a companion, but it will be nice to see what happened with her. Her exit was needed but one of those classic “I’m going to explicably leave with this guy” rush-jobs. Shame Tony Selby died and can’t reprise Glitz.
Was Mel in that companions support group thing at the end of Whittaker’s last episode?
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My claim to fame is having dinner with Bonnie Langford
(Full disclosure: I was having dinner at one table, and her party came in and sat at the next table.)
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Was Mel in that companions support group thing at the end of Whittaker’s last episode?
Yup.
I basically gave up on the show when she was on it and came back for the end of McCoy’s run but that was mainly bad writing, with a good writer I’m sure she could be fine.
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Another one of those blu-ray trailer mini-episodes, for season 20.
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Miriam Margolyes is Beep The Meep:
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There was a little Doctor Who teaser ad on after morning live this morning, with a string of BCD. A quick conversion into ASCII and it says
Saturday 23 September
BBC One 6:10PMWhich is five minutes before the start of the new series of Strictly (which would explain why there was a bit of Strictly music in the mix of the ad). So I guess it’s a new trailer.
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but I’m pretty sure that was a virtual set when the Doctor was yelling “Your fight is with me!”
You mean David Tennant wasn’t really standing on a giant floating platform thousands of metres above London?
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That was superb.
It also had, by YouTube standards, perfect subtitles! I never get those and it made the trailer so much better.
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I have to say that I am looking forward to this.I’ll probably get the BBC Player amazon channel for a bit to watch it.
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The blurb under the trailer on YouTube says November
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That was superb.
Love the trailer but I also just love RTD as a writer.
Having read his philosophy in ‘The Writers Tale’ which revolves around character moments, then work the plot around them. It is to a huge degree the antithesis to most sci-fi fans thinking, which is primarily imagined science and plot logic. The Star Trek fans that buy a manual of how the Enterprise works but most modern Star Trek is really tedious as a result.
I know that has weaknesses, there can be bits where it goes over the top, but all my favourite writers have ‘tics’ that annoy others. I have always loved Claremont or Heinlein or Sorkin that do that. Russell post his Dr Who stint has the best monologues in TV in ‘Years and Years’ and ‘It’s A Sin’. It may often be flawed but nothing he does is boring. I can’t wait and it really looks like like the Disney+ deal has increased the budget.
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Wow, this is huge, goes active 1 November for Who’s 60th anniversary:
“Episodes from Doctor Who’s extensive back catalogue of classic programmes will join the post 2005 revival of the show, available for fans to watch on iPlayer for the first time, and enabling them to revisit the Doctor’s formative adventures and some of the series greatest moments.
This includes First Doctor William Hartnell’s first encounter with the Daleks, the first episodes made for colour TV with Third Doctor Jon Pertwee, and fan favourites from Fourth Doctor Tom Baker’s iconic run, including City Of Death and The Brain Of Morbius. Also included is the 1996 TV movie with Paul McGann, featuring him taking over from Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy.
Every episode on iPlayer from the back catalogue will be available with multiple accessibility options, including subtitles, audio description, and sign language.”
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The sign language interpretation is very cool, because I’m pretty sure almost all of that would have to be new, and that’s not a cheap thing to do.
I finished rewatching the Eccleston series last night and two thoughts:
I’ve seen Boom Town loads of times, obviously, but I don’t think it’s ever struck me before the full (intentional) absurdity of Margaret’s plan. Not just blowing up Cardiff with a faulty nuclear reactor, but that they’re demolishing Cardiff Castle to do it. It’s only mentioned in one line, I think, and it’s apparently just drifted past me on previous viewings.
The Eccleston-Tennant regeneration is still the best the show has ever had. Part of that is because, while it has, for the time (and compared to the original run) a spectacular new regeneration effect, it doesn’t go OTT with it like every regeneration since, where they seem to think the size of the explosion is proportional to how dramatic it is. But side from that, (and even donkey’s years later, being fully familiar with him being the Doctor – twice!) there’s something just so Other about Tennant when he stands there in Eccleston’s clothes. This fresh-faced stranger who just feels completely wrong in the moment. And it’s not even just from Rose’s reaction – which is great and really helps sell it all – just in those few close-ups at the end of the episode, there’s this almost unnerving quality to it that the show hasn’t really managed to do again since.
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Adding all the accessibility options would have been a huge undertaking, but they did it.
For all the BBC gets a political kicking from all sides I can’t think of another organisation that would do this and drop it for free access, in a form that more people can access.
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The realistic version:
Nuclear reactor promised
Cardiff Castle demolished despite huge opposition
Nuclear reactor cancelled
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The realistic version:
Nuclear reactor promised
Cardiff Castle demolished despite huge opposition
Nuclear reactor cancelled
You missed out the bit where all the close friends of the Tories get payouts.
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