Doctor Who

Alas, every time I watch DW now, I am reminded that it is at heart a kids’ show, and that despite my best efforts to rehabilitate my inner geek, I just can’t ignore the cavernous plot-holes, so I give up on it for another year or two…

alex> Thank you. You’ve just reminded me of ‘Tom’s putting it in now’.

I have a picture of Jon Pertwee holding my baby boy, so he’s my favorite Dcctor despite all the Tom Baker episodes I watched on channel 9 back in the 70’s and 80’s.

Pertwee was, by the way, tremendously charming and gracious. It was great to meet him and have a little banter back and forth. Certainly one of the high points of my fanboy career.

Dr. Dre, or Dr. Funkenstein.

Torchwood is still lots of fun. They advertised it as Who for adults when it’s better described as Who for randy teens. Still good wholesome entertainment about bisexual alien hunters in Cardiff. And the miniseries, “Children of Earth” is one of the darkest most grim pieces of SF I’ve ever seen on television. Worth checking out.

John: the first season of Torchwood is pretty resolutely awful. “Countrycide” and “They Keep Killing Suzie” were really the only tolerable episodes of the entire lot. The rest ranged from lazy to actively atrocious, and episode 4, “Cyberwoman,” is hands-down the worst piece of televised SF I’ve seen in the last decade. (Yes, including the boxing episode of Battlestar Galactica.)

People who’s opinions I usually trust insist that Season Two and “Children of Earth” were much-improved, but the preponderance of episodes written by Chris Chibnall (“Cyberwoman”, passim) warned me away.

Oh, and despite having owned not one but two Tom Baker scarves as an extremely geeky adolescent, I’m going to risk my fanboy cred and say: Eccleston all the way. Excitable, prickly, wracked with survivor’s guilt, and alien to the core. “I’m the Doctor — now run for your life!” I like Tennant just fine, but I still wish Eccleston had given it a few more seasons. Oh well, Who’s loss was… GI Joe’s gain?

My favorite Dr. Who episode is probably the one that featured The Doctor the least– Blink from Season 3. It seemed to me that the show really hit a stride in the middle of Season 3 that led to a number of great episodes– The Family of Blood stuff was pretty good too. Blink was just excellent, and I think good TV regardless of the show.

I never got into the show as a kid in the 1970s, and only started watching it again when Netflix made episodes from the Eccelston and Tennant years available for on-demand streaming.

Being an American, I know that there was, of course, only one Doctor, Tom Baker. That there have been other actors that have played The Doctor at different times in Britain strikes me as irrelevant.

Except to end ‘CoE’ they basically reversed the polarity of the neutron flow

The BBC does have a certain fondness for that plotline, for understandable reasons:

The British were ready for this system even before it was used. The Germans had chosen the operating frequency of the Wotan system very badly; it operated on 45 MHz, which just happened to be the frequency of the powerful-but-dormant BBC television transmitter at Alexandra Palace. All Jones had to do was arrange for the return signal to be received from the aircraft and sent it to Alexandra Palace for re-transmission. The combination of the two signals modified the phase shift — and the apparent transit delay.

We didn’t have Dr Who in Ireland in my childhood. I did see one episode of “Blake’s 7”. I have no plans to buy any “Blake’s 7” DVDs.

I thought they were all the same Doctor . . .

I think what Keith means is “now we all have the attention-span of a gnat, anything filmed before Star Wars looks like glaciers melting.” Tragically, he has a point, if not perhaps for the reason he thinks. It is very difficult to watch much pre-80s cinema without wondering why there are all these pointless shots of people walking around, staring out of windows, etc etc…

I agree with Belle LeTriste at #1 and have to go for William Hartnell. Not quite as obvious an age giveaway as you might think – there was a long delay before Australian broadcast in those days.

Of later Docs, I endorse the common preference for Eccleston, although CTers should like Tennant also.

I’m polymorphously perverse when it comes to Doctor preferences: Tom Baker, Eccleston, and Tennant are all very enjoyable, and I quite like what Pertwee and Troughton did as well. I like the darker idea of Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor as cosmic manipulator which peeked out here and there in his run (and clearly informs some of the reboot). It’s mostly about the quality of the stories: Moffat’s scripts for Tennant are pretty much my favorites in the entire history of the series, he pushes all the right buttons.

With the Eccleston/Tennant shows, about the only thing I get a bit tired of is Russell Davies’ particular form of soap-boxing on a running loop through too many stories. That got worse in Torchwood; even in Children of Earth, which was pretty excellent, there are some moments where it got tedious and predictable.

As someone who’s only seen the Eccleston and Tennant Doctors, I admire and am sometimes wondrous at how the best episodes of those seasons manage to seem totally enjoyable for kids (or at least the kids in my head) while engaging me as an adult (the farting Slitheen, not so much, or at least not until the callback a few episodes later). But the real reason I watch is because every few episodes leaves me emotionally ravaged; is that the sort of thing one can also get from the earlier Doctors, or are they more “campy entertainment/all-aboard-the-Fun-Train” style? Admitting that I am the sort of modern Philistine who sometimes struggles to stay engaged with older visual entertainments, am I going to get out of Tom Baker episodes what I get out of “The Doctor Dances” or the episode with Madame Pompadour or the Family Blood two-parter?

As others may have said, until the return it was Tom Baker for me, with Peter Davidson and Pertwee sharing second place.

But since then, although Tennant has taken over first spot the writing has, on occasion, let him down – not helped by Catherine Tate’s involvement, although that might have been coincidental. ‘Blink’ was a noteable high point. And, among other episodes, I thoroughly enjoyed the 57 Shakespearean academics punching the air.

Which leaves the unfulfilled potential of Ecclestone as a couldhavebeen contender – too short a run to tell.

As for Torchwood, although enjoyable it never quite seemed to have the courage of its convictions, but Children of Earth is definitely worth a look.

The Stephen Moffat episodes are by far the best of the new series.

Indeed, and as someone for whom Press Gang came along at just the right time, I’m glad to see him take over the helm.

Pix: I don’t know, I like a lot of the old serials but “Genesis of the Daleks” actually leaves me cold. From the Tom Baker era, my favorites are the ones that pull crazy nonsensical stunts with pop-science tropes, like “The Pirate Planet” and “Logopolis”. And, for some reason, the Hartnell serial “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” is better than all the other original-series Dalek stories; the Daleks are actually scary in it.

I guess the Doctor I first saw as a child was technically Jon Pertwee, since I saw a bit of one of the Auton stories (it may have been “Spearhead from Space”, the very first serial to be broadcast on PBS stations in the US) and got so disturbed by the way the mannequins’ hands opened up to reveal guns that I didn’t watch Doctor Who again for many years. The Doctor himself didn’t really make an impression on me at that point.

But I think my favorite Doctors are actually Patrick Troughton and Christopher Eccleston.

Matt, I don’t disagree, but while you and I might be able to forgive – or even embrace – the notion of a space pirate with a robot parrot on his shoulder, I can appreciate that some people may find it unserious rather than the original definition of freakin awesome.

Similarly, DIE is indeeed fantastic, but I read “struggles to stay engaged with older visual entertainments” and figured there was no point recommending anything in black and white. Baby steps.

Today everything is available for re-viewing, and if you enjoyed it likely to be multiply re-viewed, hence more detail can be packed in without risk — there’s far more detail in today’s Who; lots of jokes and hints and foretastes that you’ll only decode several episodes later: by contrast there’s a swathe of early Doctor Who that has entirely vanished from the world, because it never occurred to the BBC that people would want to re-watch at some time; also there were a surprising number of “nothing really happens” episodes.

I can remember being really scared by the way the Dalek raygun zapped victims into negative. I guess that only works with B&W.

There’s also the fact that audiences are more familiar with the dominant story telling tropes.

Y’know, I quite like the illusion that I’m watching characters, from time to time; it’s the deviations from or riffs on the trope that are worth watching. Reducing Die Hard to a list of its tropes rather diminishes the craft of that film, in my view. (Of course, there’s good/enjoyable film-making that is almost all tropes; I’m just trying to make the case that watching older things should be more than just going “oh yes, Plot Device #163 on the list”.)

And to be vaguely on topic: I have very little experience of pre 1980s televised DW, but presumably one will only get something out of it if one is willing, to some extent, to accept it on its own terms.

but the different side shown by the Doctor at the end would have been better had it been introduced as a way forward earlier in the Tennant years, IMO.

Ahem.

“Don’t you think she looks tired?” (from “The Christmas Invasion”)

and,

“‘Because sometimes you need someone to stop you.” (from “The Runaway Bride”)

And those are just a couple of examples. Davies scripted it in too heavy-handed a manner, as has all-too-frequently been the case for him, but there’s been an undercurrent of it all along.

Meanwhile: tiny robot suddenly grows rocket-propulsion after DW pokes it with sonic screwdriver = kids’ show! The fact that this can happen in the same episode as a major character shooting herself just to preserve a timeline opens interesting questions about what exactly ‘kids’ are supposed to be thinking about all this.

‘I discover tonight via the Doctor Who News blog that, holy crap, Michael Moorcock is writing a Doctor Who novel, but “not a tie-in novel”.’

Wow! The Doctor’s going to get a “Drain Soul” attachment for his Sonic Screwdriver.

“I can remember being really scared by the way the Dalek raygun zapped victims into negative. I guess that only works with B&W.”

I remember hiding behind the sofa for the Pertwee Giant Fly story (the Green Death, which I guess was around the time of Love Canal), and Planet of the Spiders. Scary Baker ones were the Ark of Space, Pyramids of Mars, Robots of Death, and Image of the Fendahl, and Robot. Thought the Key of Time cycle was awesome, and the Planet Makers (where everything was run by a corporation) great satire.

Odd thing is, the kid loves Doctor Who and the original Star Trek, even as I’m wincing through the plot holes and crap special effects.

Mart:

Just consider what the Tennant Doctor does to The Family of Blood in “Human Nature” & “The Family of Blood”: he pretty much traps them in torments for all eternity, with an unmistakeably cruel and power-driven mood to that resolution. I think this has been a pretty consistent part of this characterization.

I was a cusp Dr Who person, catching the last few Pertwee episodes, but mostly dominated by Baker as Who. Given that Dr Who was the only children’s TV I was ever allowed to see at my school, I enjoyed it hugely, but I have much preferred modern Dr Who in terms of plot and characterisation. I enjoyed the storylines for the Eccleston Dr, but I didn’t like Eccleston himself, who girned terribly. Tennant has been wonderful mainly because there is a really edgy darkness about his character, as those who saw this week’s special The Water of Mars, will have encountered. Can’t wait for Christmas specials with John Sims as the Master brought back.