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Currently going through Series 2 again, started a full rewatch with a good friend of mine. The Sarah Jane episode, what a heartfelt episode, but man, the Doctor is just outright pathetic in his reasoning for leaving her behind.
Very excited to watch her series soon.
Very excited to watch her series soon.
Well you're half-right
Tenth Doctor comes across very oddly in some S2 episodes, and I wonder if it's to do with Tennant still getting his feet on the ground and figuring out how he wants to play the Doctor (his performance imo feels noticeably more confident as a whole in S3 and even more in 4) or the writers still writing with Eccleston in mind and not necessarily making the adjustments, or knowing how yet to make adjustments, to better match Tennant's personality. School Reunion in particular comes off to me as an example of this. His "I am so old. I am out of mercy." exchange with the headmaster in that ep just felt extremely incongruous with how Tennant both looks and sounds, and seems like the kind of world-wear threat that would've paired better with Eccleston's Doctor.
School Reunion is definitely an episode that hit me way more after having gone through a bunch of classic Who episodes.
School Reunion has one of the best pieces of unreleased Doctor Who music.
I've watched The Satan Pit two parter a couple of times recently. I'm still uncomfortable with the theme, which is basically a satanic horror pastiche, but I'm beginning to warm to it. I am now fast running out of New Who stories I don't completely enjoy. Maybe Rings of Akhaten will be the next to fall, and after that I really don't know what else will remain to dislike.
There's occasionally been discussion in this thread about getting started with Big Finish, and something has come up for their 20th Anniversary that might help in that regard: Next month, they're going to be livestreaming a marathon of stories.
Not sure what's in it yet, but might well be a good place to get started.
Not sure what's in it yet, but might well be a good place to get started.
I love that episode. Espcially the "before time" stuff which stumped the doctor.
Listening to the current Doctor Who theme tune, and I think it sounds like one that would've suited the War Doctor more, for some reason. I've heard the one by Big Finish, and I'm not really a fan of it.
Season 4 Specials are the next special cover Blu-Ray release. Also includes Dreamland and Infinite Quest
Amazon Link
Amazon Link
I'd say no if you're in the UK / another region that supports 50Hz / own the compatible hardware. Playback speed is wrong.
They're pretty compressed on DVD tho, so there IS a slight image quality improvement. I guess it depends on what you value the most, but for me that's a dealbreaker.
I am. Shame, maybe they should have gotten the restoration team to work on these lol. Thanks for the info.
The actual upscaling is perfectly fine, the problem is that they went for 1080p24Hz instead of using 1080i50Hz for the UK for whatever reason, so the show is slowed down by one frame per second. Not really terrible, but disappointing that they went with that instead of the correct speed.
I saw Jon Pertwee trending on Twitter and wondered if he died again, or come back.
But today would have been his 100th birthday.
In honour I'm watching his last story, Planet of the Spiders.
But today would have been his 100th birthday.
In honour I'm watching his last story, Planet of the Spiders.
Does anyone know if there was any HD film footage added to Season 10 for the boxset? I mainly got it for completionism but I'll rewatch any stories with genuinely upgraded footage.
do you mean rescanned film like some of the later seasons? I don't think so. my set came today and I had a quick look at three doctors but the film stuff looks really soft, but studio stuff looks amazing. It's not suddenly 4K but it does a look better than a DVD upscaled.
and 100 times better than the TV series Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Bluray.
I watched The Daemons over the past week, for Pertwee's 100th birthday, which was apparently his favorite Doctor Who episode. It was also the first Pertwee serial I'd ever seen and well...I still don't like it, haha.
I do appreciate some of the UNIT family dynamics better now that I've seen more Pertwee eps and I got a kick out of the Doctor constantly chiding Osgood (who I assume is meant to Oswin's father?). The demon/black magic ritual plot doesn't really make any sense, Azal and the guy running around in the spandex gargoyle costume are some of the worst looking Doctor Who monsters I've ever seen, and man was I tired of hearing Delgado yell "AZAL! AZAL!!!!!!" every episode, lol.
It's probably on the lower end of my Pertwee list, but I can see why he might have liked it so much: the entire UNIT cast + Delgado are here, and they're all on holiday in a village instead of hanging around BBC sets.
I do appreciate some of the UNIT family dynamics better now that I've seen more Pertwee eps and I got a kick out of the Doctor constantly chiding Osgood (who I assume is meant to Oswin's father?). The demon/black magic ritual plot doesn't really make any sense, Azal and the guy running around in the spandex gargoyle costume are some of the worst looking Doctor Who monsters I've ever seen, and man was I tired of hearing Delgado yell "AZAL! AZAL!!!!!!" every episode, lol.
It's probably on the lower end of my Pertwee list, but I can see why he might have liked it so much: the entire UNIT cast + Delgado are here, and they're all on holiday in a village instead of hanging around BBC sets.
One of the restoration team guys mentioned on GB that the source for the film footage in the Three Doctors is just bad looking to begin with.
Just started watching The Three Doctors, the filmed footage looks a bit... Off? It's not bad by any means, but it's not really good either. I can't quite put my finger on what the thing is. Oddly, I'd say that the studio footage looks actually better on this first episode. I'd even argue that the studio footage looks better than season 18 and season 19 oddly enough...
When 3 Doctors was made, the telecine (edited 16mm film transfered to video) was usually done in the studio (literally played into the scenes where they occured and often the resultant quality was dependent on a number of variables. You get things like fields merging
from the original DVD article on the restoration team website
"A Polygon telecine machine had been used to replay some of the film into the studio (episodes 1&2), and unfortunately this type of machine had the effect of smearing the film frames together giving the impression of a standards conversion. The start of the story begins with an exterior sequence shot on film and after examining the frames closely it seemed that one field of the video frame would be a blurred mix between adjacent film frames, whereas the other field was unblurred."
Spearhead is so good and it *looks* fantastic. Such a shame they couldn't shoot more episodes on film like that.
I had a good chuckle when Doctor Who was credited by all three actors in the credits, one by one. I don't remember them doing that in other serials in New Who, unless I never payed proper attention. But man, I love Pertwee as the Doctor, never seen a serial with him before, so this is some good stuff as an introduction!
It's a weird positive and negative at the same time. On the one hand, if they managed to film everything just as Spearhead, a ton of amazing stories we know wouldn't have been possible simply by the nature of how the series was produced. But on the other hand, the series does look a bit cheap in part because of the taped nature of it all. Honestly, I'm mostly annoyed some of the new stuff wasn't recorded in HD from the start. Tape just looks like tape, but it looks decent. The first four series of New Who just look bad in general. Even the blu-ray upscales are a bit iffy.
I honestly reckon we'll be buying algorithmicly upscaled 4K Blu-rays of old Who at some point, but particularly the RTD era, where it's now kinda frustrating it wasn't HDTV from the start.
New spoilers from The Mirror. They are usually spot on
As much as I liked how the Cybermen were used in Capaldi's run, the fact that they were in two of his three finales mean I could go a bit of a longer break before we see them again.
Though I'd be lying if I said I don't want to see Jodie's Doctor face off against them, and using them in a story about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein is a good touch
Though I'd be lying if I said I don't want to see Jodie's Doctor face off against them, and using them in a story about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein is a good touch
The interesting thing is that there's a Big Finish story, Storm Warning, where the 8th Doctor basically says he had a hand in the Frankenstein story, with him quipping that the story isn't entirely accurate to the real events that inspired it, heh.
To be fair, though, at one time or another Doctor Who has been known to make a similar quip about just about every historic event well known to English speaking audiences.
Classic Doctor Who already had 3 different explanations for the destruction of Atlantis, had the Doctor dropping apples on Isaac Newton's head, was involved peripherally in the Great Fire of London, wrote "this is a fake" on the back of the Mona Lisa, etc, etc.
"Boney, I said, an army marches on it stomach."
The Doctor also claims every famous quote was originally his.
New Doctor Who doesnt name drop historical figures as much but we're more likely to actually see the Doctor meeting them.
I mean, more specifically, The Silver Turk is literally the 8th Doctor and Mary Shelley meeting the Cybermen. Her mini arc kind of zaps her of any creative agency in an icky way.
I really don't mind those kinds of contradictions tbh. I guess Who cares a bit more about its continuity nowadays, but this kind of thing has happened plenty of times in the past, both with Big Finish stories and within the classic era.
The way I see it, my nerdy interpretation is that these events might have been changed through timeline shenanigans, but from the perspective of the Doctor they'll always have happened. Remember the whole cracks in time storyline in series 5 in which the Doctor explained time travellers would still remember erased events? Yeah, it's convenient, but it's how I try to explain away this kind of thing whenever it occurs. :p
The way I see it, my nerdy interpretation is that these events might have been changed through timeline shenanigans, but from the perspective of the Doctor they'll always have happened. Remember the whole cracks in time storyline in series 5 in which the Doctor explained time travellers would still remember erased events? Yeah, it's convenient, but it's how I try to explain away this kind of thing whenever it occurs. :p
I've always regarded concepts like canon and large scale continuity as more of a hindrance to good story telling. The Hammer Productions films took huge liberties with canon, making Doctor Who a human inventor, but the essence of the story survived well. Even the 1996 film chose to make him half human.
Moffat invented a universal mcguffin which can be applied like duck tape to heal plots. "The Doctor lies." There, now isn't that better than worrying over every tiny detail in a fifty-five year old drama series?
Moffat invented a universal mcguffin which can be applied like duck tape to heal plots. "The Doctor lies." There, now isn't that better than worrying over every tiny detail in a fifty-five year old drama series?
I know, right?
I'm guessing that they're doing Blu-ray sets to kinda match the budget DVD counterparts that came out last year.
Yeah, exactly. It's a show about time travel, so things happened, and then maybe they unhappened, and then they happened again another way, but it doesn't take away the story we saw the first time or change the fact that they happened that way from from the Doctor's perspective.
It's like how people got all shrieky like "OH SO CLARA PICKED OUT THE TARDIS FOR THE DOCTOR!? MOFFAT HAS GONE TOO FAR" about Name of the Doctor, when the whole point of that story is that things always happened the way we knew them to have but that then the Great Intelligence went back and messed around with the Doctor's life and the Clara splinters were just nudging things back towards how they originally happened.
Like, I try not to get too hung up on continuity anyway, but when the show is specifically about time travel anyway I don't see why you wouldn't want to be as loose with it as possible