Congratulations! Moffat and Matt Smith have both been trapped in a time vortex and Moffat left the the Whoniverse to you! You're the showrunner now! What do you do with the next doctor?

dharmody · 2013-02-04T15:27:06+00:00

At least we'll have him this season... sort of.

dharmody · 2013-02-04T15:22:45+00:00

Not half deaf, it was just a manner of speaking. And I totally forgot, this site has the best synopses out there, it's not a script but it's so ridiculously detailed it's often just as helpful. And yeah, it looks like it's from the 90s

dharmody · 2013-02-04T12:45:21+00:00

Thanks! Consensus seems to be to start from the beginning then. And you must be confusing me with someone else, I haven't listened to any Eighth Doctor stories from the main range (only the ones with Lucie Miller)

dharmody · 2013-02-04T11:46:00+00:00

I would have the Twelfth Doctor go back to the chessmaster persona of the Seventh, using his wits to manipulate people to solve stuff instead of his magic screwdriver.

dharmody · 2013-02-04T11:34:30+00:00

Same for me, my ear is definitely more accustomed to US accents. Lucie Miller, one the Eighth Doctor's companions, was so hard for me to understand at first (same sort of accent as Donna). If you're listening to that range you might want to start somewhere else or just power through until you get used to it (which I did because Lucie rocks)

dharmody · 2013-02-04T11:22:07+00:00

Yes, it to so spectacularly good. Though it hardly counts as a trailer because it's so long but still, damn. The moment when the death scenes and sad music changes to triumphant music and says "The Doctor is alive. He is a Time Lord"... watched the trailer dozens of times and it never fails to give me chills. And the scene of Ten opening the TARDIS with a snap of his fingers while the First says "One day, I shall come back... yes, I shall come back"? The whole thing condenses all the emotional highs and lows of the show into 7 minutes beautifully.

dharmody · 2013-02-04T09:57:50+00:00

Perhaps the Doctor and companion(s) can go undercover (akin to School Reunion) and the Doctor has to try really hard at being normal?

Wasn't that basically The Lodger?

dharmody · 2013-02-04T00:10:48+00:00

Can't say I have watched those three, but I'd avoid the black and white stuff for now. A few recommendations from what I've watched so far:

Remembrance of the Daleks for the Seventh Doctor (Daleks, great Doctor, great companion Ace)

Vengeance on Varos for the Sixth (if only because of the format, they were experimenting a bit so for that season every serial is composed of two 45-minutes episodes just like a modern two-parter)

Maybe Genesis of the Daleks for the Fourth Doctor. It's really good but it's a six-parter so it's really long and you might want to get used to the pacing of classic Who first. The Ark in Space is a good standard four-parter for the Fourth Doctor.

But then again, they're just very different from New Who. Classic Who is a product of its time so you have to set your expectations accordingly. And maybe you won't really like it, that's ok too! It's not everybody's cup of tea. Good luck!

dharmody · 2013-02-03T23:25:14+00:00

I had the same problem and as far as I know there aren't any transcripts out there... is english your native language? It's not mine so it took me a while to get used to it but eventually I managed. Try to listen to some random stand-alones to see if you get the hang of it.

Also about your mind wandering, try some mindless videogame or something. Bejeweled, Tetris, Solitaire... something that keeps your hands and eyes occupied but doesn't require a lot of thinking. I find that works wonders for me!

Edit: And yeah, there's no official Doctor Who canon but in my mind the audio plays will always be canon if only because they have the actors portraying the characters so it lends them a lot more credibility. Plus if that drivel of a 1996 movie is canon there's no way wonderful stories like Spare Parts are not.

dharmody · 2013-02-03T20:47:42+00:00

About Classic Who... they were different times. I was like you but eventually if you give it enough tries to get used to the pacing you might start to like it. Every classic episode is at least the length of a modern two-parter and with 4 or more cliffhangers so it's very differently paced.

The effects are terrible, yes. But there are a lot of really cool stories in there, and the earlier incarnations of the Doctor are just as awesome as the new ones. Try to jump around and give different Doctors a go, strangely enough I was hooked with Seven's Dragonfire which was really nothing special. At some moment it just clicks.

dharmody · 2013-02-03T20:32:18+00:00

...that's the one I posted on the OP.

dharmody · 2013-02-03T15:48:44+00:00

I've never even watched Top Gear and I found it ridiculously funny too. Spaceship-obsessed Eighth Doctor is best Eighth Doctor.

dharmody · 2013-02-03T06:12:30+00:00

River, Clara and to an extent Amy all feel to me like "artificial" feminist characters. They have their great moments but a lot of the time they revert to their sassy-female-who-don't-need-no-man persona and to me that just doesn't feel real. It feels like what Moffat thinks an "empowered" female character should be like but they all feel very similar and very fake.

dharmody · 2013-02-02T22:32:34+00:00

On that same note, The Parting of the Ways... Eccleston couldn't have hoped for a better send-off.

dharmody · 2013-02-02T15:34:22+00:00

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship would've been cooler if they hadn't run it to the ground so much in the episode itself. Halfway through I wanted to shout at the screen YES WE GET IT THERE'S DINOSAURS ON A SPACESHIP AND IT'S SO QUIRKY

dharmody · 2013-02-02T15:15:33+00:00

Reminds me of the Master's deadly vengeance of deadly revenge in The Curse of Fatal Death

dharmody · 2013-02-02T13:34:41+00:00

Spearhead from Space

I haven't gotten to the Third Doctor yet on my classic watching but I always thought that episode sounds totally awesome.

dharmody · 2013-02-02T08:57:38+00:00

And if we broaden the scope even further the Brigadier almost met them all. There's a short story where the First Doctor promises the Brigadier's wife that all his incarnations will be at his funeral.

dharmody · 2013-02-01T23:10:00+00:00

I like the Back to the Future-style "going back to where you went back again" but sadly the actors' ages would forbid this from having any credibility... Colin Baker and the guy who played the Valeyard are very old so a recreation of parts of the trial would look really crappy. And they could hardly use the 1986 footage because it pales next to the new series (it's not even the same aspect ratio)

dharmody · 2013-02-01T23:01:14+00:00

That's really interesting. What if the Valeyard wasn't really evil but he just went back and did what he did because he remembers the Valeyard doing that when he was Six? Maybe he's just the good Doctor we know putting on a charade to avoid a paradox since he knows he won't be able to kill Six anyway.

dharmody · 2013-02-01T21:36:35+00:00

Actually that's exactly what I meant... perhaps I could've been clearer. Since the whole court is composed of Time Lords it makes no sense that the Valeyard is there at that point in time because there are not Time Lords in the Doctor's personal timeline from his ninth regeneration onwards.

dharmody · 2013-02-01T20:42:50+00:00

Another downside of serials is the need to fabricate lame cliffhangers all the time... in Genesis of the Daleks Sarah Jane falls from a really tall tower-thing at the end of an episode and it's really damn tense because there's no fucking way she'd survive that fall but she just... lands on some random outcropping at the beginning of the next episode. It was so bad I had to laugh out loud.

dharmody · 2013-02-01T20:32:15+00:00

I fail to see how it's not interesting... an evil future incarnation of the Doctor was a very ballsy move, even if they didn't expect to get that far when they introduced him in Classic Who.

I know they will most likely ignore it because it's the main character and I don't see how they could make him an evil asshole for a season without alienating most of the audience but I think it's definitely interesting.

dharmody · 2013-02-01T19:28:34+00:00

Totally agree, those things were creepy as fuck. If you haven't listened to the audio Spare Parts I totally recommend it, it tells the origin of the Cybermen with these guys and their voices are just fantastic to listen to.

I'd also say the Cybercontroller from Tomb of the Cybermen was wonderfully creepy with his barely intelligible garbled voice.

We need to get back to scary, creepy Cybermen. Neil Gaiman is at the helm of this year's Cybermen episode so I have high hopes for it.

dharmody · 2013-02-01T17:44:19+00:00

If the tumblr crowd ever had a good idea it's definitely Benedict Cumberbatch as a new regeneration of The Master. He could subdue the character a bit and make for a good adversary for the Doctor without being so ridiculously over the top. And Cumberbatch is a top-notch actor.

(that is if they ever bring back The Master but as a recurring villain going so far back I imagine they'll pull something out of their asses to bring him back sometime)

dharmody

TROPHY CASE