Tag: Doctor Who

Fear

Simon Reynolds had an interesting piece in the Graun the other day about why he still blogs years after blogging passed its peak. There’s a number of interesting points it raises, and I might come back to discuss those, but I want to look in particular at a blog post he highlights in the article called “Wiki-Fear“:

I call it Wiki-Fear. You know what I’m talking about. That twinge of apprehension just before clicking open a Wikipedia entry. It could be a song, an album, an artist. Something new to me – or something I’ve known for years without ever knowing much about. The trepidation comes from experience: there’s a pretty good chance you’ll learn something that’ll spoil your enjoyment. […]
Thing is, as much as you might strive to separate singer and song, follow the adage “trust the art, not the artist,” you can’t unknow these things once you’ve learned them. I sometimes forget the details (my brain these days being sieve-like when it comes to input sticking) but a tinge of uneasiness clings on. And it’s easy to refresh that knowledge – it’s just a click away.
Despite all this, it’s still irresistible to go searching on the Internet, when you’ve just listened to (or watched or read) something new and exciting, or when you’ve rediscovered an old favorite about which you never knew much simply because there was nowhere to go to find out. And often the things you find out end up enriching your enjoyment. Or they are just interesting tidbits that sit harmlessly alongside the enjoyment. But always there’s the possibility that you’ll discover something nasty.

This, alas, was timely cos that very thing happened for me a couple of days ago with the passing of Richard Franklin, beloved of Doctor Who fans as Captain Mike Yates during Jon Pertwee’s tenure… Yates was interesting cos he was one of the reasonably rare secondary characters on the show to have a proper character arc, in that he gets hypnotised to kill the Doctor in “The Green Death” and the trauma from that leads him to become part of Operation Golden Age in “Invasion of the Dinosaurs”, leading to him quitting UNIT but redeeming himself in “Planet of the Spiders”. Popular character, popular actor, and Franklin’s passing on Christmas Day aged 87 obviously made a lot of people sad; it drove me to look him up on Wiki to see what else he’d done, and I found his career encompassed quite a number of things, theatre (acting and criticism), writing, various TV roles, Big Finish audios, a Star Wars film… and politics. As part of UKIP.

In fairness to him, his political career does seem to have started with the Liberal Democrats in the early 90s, a time when I gather the LibDems were still respectable before Nick Clegg took them into their incomprehensible coalition with the Tories, but he evidently shifted right soon enough; a few years later he was standing as part of the Referendum Party, a Eurosceptic mob that helped pave the way for UKIP, for whom he stood as a candidate in 2001. After that he formed his own party, the Silent Majority Party, and, well, “Silent Majority” is a phrase that should always set a cloister bell ringing about the person using it.

So yeah, RIP Richard Franklin, but Reynolds is right, unfortunately: you can’t unknow these things, and that tinge of uneasiness is going to linger now…

“The Church on Ruby Road”

OK, so I knew about the goblin song:

This actually got released as a sort of teaser for the Xmas episode a few weeks ago. Eyebrows were raised about it, mostly because of the lyrics about eating babies. Somehow, though, I never got around to actually hearing it myself, and I’m actually kind of glad about that cos hearing it in the special for the first time with the accompanying visuals made it… something else. I knew about the song. Someone I was still not prepared for the full musical number, especially when the Doctor and new companion Ruby join in. And when the lyrics about eating babies accompany images of a newborn baby about to be devoured by the goblin king… JESUS FUCK. The goblins could actually be one of the most conceptually horrible monsters on the show since the Wirrn.

So yes, good stuff, perhaps more “New Who” than New Who has been before. Ncuti Gatwa OWNS the lead role immediately. I said in my last review how he broke the usual mould of the Doctor being at least somewhat malfunctional after regeneration, how he was pretty much immediately on top of things, and he’s even more so here. Authoritative straight away. Him and Millie Gibson are going to be a very solid team. Given that we apparently won’t be seeing his first full season proper until May or something, though, I’ve got plenty of time to watch Sex Education so I can catch up on his TV career so far…

50 years of “Lavinia”!

So we were all excited by the 60th anniversary of some TV show or other recently, but today also marked the 50th anniversary of one of its most important casting changes:

Lis Sladen making her debut as Sarah Jane Smith (posing as her aunt to break into UNIT) in “The Time Warrior” on December 15, 1973. I always thought she got a pretty rum deal at the end of her time, just getting dropped off at the end of “Hand of Fear”, so I was pleased to see her getting a second chance on the revived show and with her own series. After all, if you were going to bring back a classic series companion, she was the obvious first choice.

“The Giggle”

HOLY SHIT but the people who wet themselves over the Timeless Child are really going to lose the plot over the end of the third Doctor Who special, aren’t they? That’s if their heads haven’t already exploded by the fact that this guy…

…isn’t wearing any pants on the show. But, of course, it’s the people screaming about Ruth Madeley crossing her legs a couple of weeks ago who’ll REALLY shit the bed this week when she STANDS UP. It’s almost like Russell knew exactly how people would respond to that bit of business and so decided to really rub it in their faces this time round…

So, yeah. The Toymaker’s back and instead of being a Chinese stereotype he’s packing a “wacky” German accent cos apparently he needs to be racist towards someone, it’s a nice bit of continuity I suppose… Neil Patrick Harris is very good, I imagine his line about turning God into a jack in the box will raise certain eyebrows, and there’s some weirdly disturbing stuff when our dynamic duo get stuck in his realm (really, some of the creepiest shit I’ve ever seen in the show). And isn’t it kind of delightful to see Mel again? Even if it does rather complicate the timeline (given that when she leaves with Sabalom Glitz in “Dragonfire” it’s about two million years in the future, how does she return to Earth in the 21st century?), but it wouldn’t be Doctor Who without details like that being hand-waved away…

They are, of course, not going to be able to do that with the whole “bigeneration” thing…

“Well, fancy seeing ME here…” “Where are your pants?”

I did see a spoiler a few days ago that this was how Tennant would turn into Gatwa, i.e. by frankly pushing him out of himself, which is basically what happens (I’ve seen a number of fan “theories” about the 60th specials and I think this is the only one that was right)… I know Russell promised us canon-breaking developments and I suppose this fits that bill, but at the same it’s actually a throwback to Tennant’s beginnings and how his dismembered hand from “The Christmas Invasion” later becomes a full clone of himself… it’s just that this time he pops out his actual next incarnation. Who, it should be noted, is the most immediately fully functional newly regenerated Doctor in the show’s history, which I suppose is another canon-breaking detail; he’s ready to go as soon as he’s been pulled out, even if he’s… casually dressed. I must say I’m actually glad I read that spoiler, though, cos I’m not sure the show itself actually explains what happened too clearly. Also, I’m sure people will complain about how you can’t have multiple Doctors roaming around time and space as if they haven’t crossed paths multiple times…

Anyway—on the whole, a satisfying episode, satisfying end to the specials (and technically to the series itself; I understand now why they’re calling the next series “series 1” now), and I’m less bothered about RTD coming back to the show than I was before I saw any of them. I think this show might go far once Ncuti puts some pants on…

“Wild Blue Yonder”

So this week’s Doctor Who episode, then. I have one reservation about it, which is that, frankly, I’m not really into colour-blind casting with historical personages like it does here. I mean, we laugh at the idea of John Wayne playing Genghis Khan, as I think we rightly should, but I’m not sure doing it the other way round—in this case, noted white person Isaac Newton being played by Anglo-Indian Nathaniel Curtis—actually serves much purpose. Anyway, I haven’t observed it directly, but I gather Twitter is having the requisite meltdown over it (and the amusing bit where the Doctor expresses his man-crush on him, and I’m sure some people are losing their shit even more over the episode acknowledging the whole “timeless child” thing), and I’m not even bothered by the casting so much as I am the silliness of the scene.

Be all that as it may, the rest of it is damned fine, and for everyone moaning about the sonic screwdriver’s increasing capabilities over the years and especially the previous episode, this was a particular blessing for them cos the Doctor has to cope without it… John Nathan-Turner would’ve been happy about that, if no one else. Much of the hype around the episode was that the BBC were giving away no information about it, for no apparent reason than that they could, and to be honest I’m not really sure the end result merited that (apart from the closing scene with Wilf that we knew was coming at some point anyway, and which was apparently the only thing they were able to get with him).

On its own terms, though, the end result is, as I said, fine; I was never actually the biggest fan of David Tennant as the Doctor back in the day but I found myself most impressed by him here, cos both he and Tate basically have to play most of the episode as a sort of two-hander, where each is playing their normal roles and also these “not-things” taking on their shapes. They both pull this off really well. Kind of sorry they only have one more episode.

SO… where does that leave said one more episode?

With A FUCKING JUKEBOX in the background, apparently! Trailer’s already out for the next episode and this shot of Ncuti Gatwa is already circulating as a result; I’m guessing this is where UNIT is finally going to put in its appearance, and obviously the Toymaker at last, and I have a feeling it might be a bit hectic. Looking forward to it…

Doctor Who and the Disability Discourse

I know all the meltdowns on social media were about the trans character and actress on the new Doctor Who, but what about the disabled one? Cos Shirley Anne Bingham is evidently cis and played by a cis actress, Ruth Madeley, but still, casting a disabled person as a disabled character is as “woke” DEI representation as a trans one, right? Someone’s got to be aggravated by that, surely? Twitter did not disappoint:

Cue a bunch of people advising his majesty that some people in wheelchairs are actually capable of doing that, including me:

Which was a slightly… aggressive response, perhaps, and it drew a response from someone that went “Ew no, I don’t want people like this in my community” which I’m still not sure if that was aimed at me or him, though I suspect it was the latter, i.e. she was more appalled at this clown potentially becoming part of the disabled community than at the clown wishing disability upon him. Anyway, I stand by it, and as you may see I’ve had an awful lot of likes on my tweet, more than I can ever remember having (except maybe for one I made after 2013 when I congratulated News Corp for winning that year’s federal election).

As for Garbageman, he’s since deleted his account. Which means that, however inadvertently, I took part in one of those Twitter activities I’ve always abhorred, i.e. I participated in a pile-on that drove someone off the platform. Somehow I feel less bad about this than I suspect I should, I’m actually kind of OK with this. Oh well.

Anyway, our next subject is still there; after asking a similar question the mobility of Shirley Anne’s legs, someone whose posts are private replied and then he said:

Because—as he actually said to someone else who called him out on this shit—a fully disabled actress would be “more representation” as if representation were something you can actually quantify and measure. Just how disabled is “fully”? Would you settle for the character and/or actress being paraplegic? Quadraplegic? Dead? Cos you don’t get any more disabled than not being alive at all. You tell me. I mean, Ruth Madeley needs those wheels to get her around, but she’s not completely paralysed. Not only does she have spina bifida, she has the fucking nerve to only be disabled to a degree that these goombas find insufficient. I mean, FUCKING LOOK AT THIS:

Being disabled and flexible enough to do that? Political correctness gone mad, obviously. What a cow.

And he called me a “mozza” when I called him out. What was that even supposed to mean? Did he compare me to Morrissey? Good grief. I haven’t been this insulted in a LONG time. He is, of course, whining about being called “ableist” and such things… honestly, just accept the fuck-up and that some people know more than you about some things. It’s OK to learn.

The funny thing is, I never even noticed what Ruth Madeley’s legs were doing in the first place. It was these dickheads going off about it that drew my attention to it, and got a bunch of people snapping back at them. All I know is that, if the day comes when I have to rely on a chair to get around, I want it to be packing heat like Shirley’s…

“The Star Beast”

Goddamnit, this having to wait a whole week for the next episode is going to be more irritating than usual, isn’t it?

This grifting cunt has never seen the show, has he? I mean, apart from it not being Korean enough, it’s been “woke” ever since the show decided evil was bad and something the characters should fight against. “Dislike for the unlike” has somehow never been such a pertinent line from the show…

Wokeness gone mad, I tell you. Anyway, the reaction I’ve otherwise seen on the socials before watching the episode has been 1) generally hugely positive and 2) specifically that the anti-woke mob were going to hate it. I completely understand both those points now that I’ve seen it. It really does feel like a throwback to oughts Who, which I suppose is understandable given the people involved, although the story actually goes back even further; it’s essentially adapted from a 1980 Doctor Who Weekly comic strip (THAT’s how old it is!), which was actually kind of “woke” itself in that Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons gave the Doctor a black companion in the strip, long before Martha Jones was a thing in the series… though the show one-ups that by making Rose (not Billie Piper’s Rose) both mixed-race and trans.

This, of course, was the thing that was really going to make the anti-woke mob mald: having a trans performer play a trans character who’s actually presented positively and indeed helps save the day at the end, and yeah, Oli and his ilk do indeed seem to be losing their shit over it, which I’m fine with… I mean, the show handles the issue with, frankly, minimal grace and subtlety and it’s a bit cack-handed when it comes to things like the pronouns scene. It doesn’t always help itself in that respect… on the other hand, giving the disabled UNIT character a weaponised wheelchair? Not bad, Russ, not bad… awfully interesting twist after the discourse about able-bodied Davros from last week, too.

Murray Gold’s music was, well, music by Murray Gold. Still not really a fan.

On the whole, solid comeback for Tennant and Tate, who I always thought were an intriguing duo. Imperfect but one of the better new series episodes. I look forward to seeing how this develops in the next two specials…

The Colour of the Daleks, again

On Bluesky at least, the reception to the colourised Daleks serial has been thoroughly mixed, and… yeah, so’s my reaction now that I’ve actually watched it. OK, let’s get into it… So, the colour itself is not too bad. It didn’t seem quite as extra in video form as the colour stills from a few days ago did. It does have that sort of “1960s” visual character I spoke of earlier, so it definitely has more of an early 60s B-movie feel (further enhanced by the editing). It doesn’t cope very well with dark scenes like when our heroes find the room in the Dalek city with the Geiger counter, but on the whole it’s fairly impressive. I particularly liked the luridness of the petrified forest.

And yet the overal visual feel is still a bit… off somehow? I don’t know how to explain it. Cos we have to remember, all of William Hartnell’s episodes were shot using 405-line video cameras—which were obviously kind of low-res enough as they were, rather less than what we now call “standard” definition (525-line NTSC or 625-line PAL, depending on where in the world you are)—but all the extant episodes only survive as film telerecordings, mostly 16mm, and quite a lot seem to be suppressed-field recordings which means the film only has about half the visual information of the original picture. When you have to blow that up to 1080p… well, I’ve been impressed by the blu-ray upscales of the original series so far, but even so (and there were artifacts of the suppressed-field prints I noticed this time that never struck me before too). It doesn’t quite look like film or video somehow. Maybe it was just the *cough* dubiously obtained copy of the program I had? I don’t know.

Still—like I said, the colour work is generally impressive. How it’s cut and how it sounds, on the other hand…

So, as we were told, the story was cut to 75 minutes, compared to the 171 minutes the original serial (including opening and closing titles of each episode). That’s… a lot to lose. It’s not exactly a massacre on the order of Stroheim’s Greed, but an awful lot of material has been ditched to slim it down. And it means the pacing of the thing is, frankly, kind of indecent; it moves at a clip that feels alien to the original series. It gave me the sense, indeed, that not only had the video been cut, it’d been sped up slightly as well. Which I don’t think it was, but it felt like that somehow. The editing is mostly fine, technically, some of it’s actually quite clever, it’s just… I missed the magnodon. I missed the food machine. And I don’t know that the “flashbacks” worked either (though I did like the new Dalek POV inserts).

But the editing is nowhere near as egregious as the sound. The program wrong-footed me immediately with Mark Ayres’ reprocessing of the opening theme WHICH DIDN’T NEED THOSE EXTRA NOISES MARK IT WAS FINE AS IT WAS… ahem… to say nothing of his actual music, some of which is admittedly effective but a lot is… not. It’s ill-fitting and it never sounds like it fits the visuals, in that it’s obviously been produced six decades after the program was made and it doesn’t sound like the rest of the program. The new Dalek lines are the same, not just because they’re obviously Nick Briggs at work but they don’t sound like the originals did. And I know that it’s a minor thing, really, but cleaning up and correcting one of Hartnell’s more infamous Billy fluffs? Oooh. THAT made me weirdly angry for some reason. Not thrilled by Murray Gold’s closing music, but then I never was particularly thrilled by Murray Gold…

So, a thoroughly mixed bag, an experiment that only partly worked, and one that I suspect actually probably worked well enough for what I’m sure was the target audience, i.e. fans of the revived series who haven’t seen anything of the original and who the BBC thought they might be able to draw in by… well, kind of misrepresenting it. The really important thing now is that I’ve also *cough* dubiously obtained the actual new episode, “The Star Beast”, and the prospect of that is currently drawing me more than colour Daleks. I’ll be back with thoughts on that later…

But you’ve discovered television, haven’t you?

Happy 60th anniversary of a certain BBC science-fiction program to everyone but Stef Coburn. In honour of Doctor Who‘s anniversary, let me present to you possibly the greatest behind the scenes photo ever taken for that show:

William Hartnell, out of costume, apparently demonstrating to someone very much in costume how he gets a million years to the gallon from the TARDIS. I had no idea who the cowboy was and a quick replay of “The Gunfighters”—the comedy western serial which had to have been the logical source for the picture, right?—turned up no one I could see with that combination of sideburns and moustache… which, apparently, is because this picture isn’t actually from that story; Clayton Hickman says it was actually taken just before the recording of “The Feast of Steven”, the infamous Christmas episode of “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, and the cowboy is one William Hall, the film critic for the London Evening News (the belt apparently did turn up in “The Gunfighters” a few months late). How William Hall came to be an extra on Doctor Who, exactly where and how he appeared in that episode (presumably the old Hollywood film set scene?), and why he was already in costume before recording but Hartnell wasn’t are further mysteries I would now love to see answered…