Doctor Who 2008: Sontarans cometh, RTD Ood 'ave 'im etc.

The eruption of Vesuvius could be an amazing setpiece. So, what massive alien space station is hidden in the core of the volcano then?

Season 4, Episode 1: Partners in Crime
Original Air Date: 5 April 2008
Donna must track down The Doctor to save London from an alien emergency.

Again?

To be fair if you ruled out saving London from an alien emergency you'd lose vast swathes of all Doctor Who.

kind of getting bored of it being the plot of every season (excuse me, series) premiere.

guest star suggestions (bit late now tho):

Harry Hill (straight role)
David Essex (space pirate)
Dean Gaffney (as himself, and his EVIL TWIN)
Stephen Merchant (UNIT dude)
Montserrat Lombard (well she's in everything else)
Paul Putner (Davros)

Dean Gaffney (as himself, and his EVIL TWIN)
Stephen Merchant (UNIT dude)

Or they could just work at a cell phone shop that's been taken over by aliens.

At least it's not all American cities being attacked by aliens for a change.

The aliens do seem curiously uninterested in any of Brtain's great cities other than London and Cardiff, though.

Well, the werewolf wanted to bite Queen Victoria in rural Scotland (not a euphemism).

Yeah, a bit of alien action on the Tyne wouldn't go astray.

'cwor, our famous bridge is gworn'

why don't they ever want to attack torquay? or, continental europe?

Why dont they fucking go to some planets!

That's what Hyperdrive's for.

Amy Winehouse as The Rani anyone?
http://www.nme.com/news/amy-winehouse/35547

"Lots of planets have a Priory"

(Look at the date, Anna!)

I'm really tired today.

Also, it doesn't seem quite stupid enough to be an April fool. This probably says quite a lot about both the NME and Russel T Davies.

Purely from an image standpoint it would be inspired casting, I've got to say.

Well, see if the story's still up at noon as it stands, also ought there be a writer credit on it? It's already being disseminated by a bunch of music sites.

1. Partners in Crime
2. The Fires of Pompell
3. Planet of the Ood
4. The Sontaran Stratagem
5. The Poison Sky
6. The Doctors Daughter
7. The Unicorn & The Wasp
8. Silence in the Library
9. River's Run
10. Midnight
11. Turn Left
12. TBA
13. Journey's End

6. The Doctors Daughter

"I was a dad once..."

thought it was supposed to be a son he had/has

RTD sez

"At 6.20pm, it'll get 1.5m less viewers than it already has," he said, speaking at a Broadcast event in London. "I've told them this, but they won't shift at all. You need to maintain slots and they've gone and cocked it up now. Maybe they're right, but I think they're wrong."

The producer, who was behind the revival of the show, also confessed to rewriting others' scripts if he did not like them. He said: "I'll rewrite 100% if I have to. With Steven Moffat's scripts, I don't touch a word, but anyone else's I do...

"We're not there to experiment and we're not there to let someone fail. You've got to do everything you can to make it brilliant every week."

so just think how bad some of the scripts must've been before re-writing!

Oh God, please tell me that "The Doctor's Daughter" has absolutely nothing to do with that awful Lance Parkin book...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41JY8GBG18L._AA240_.jpg

AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID

NO WAI

RTD is bit grumpy this year, isn't he? What changed?

6.20 is a stupid time. Fucking reality tv must go out at 7.

Lance Parkin wrote two of my favorite Who books (Just War, Cold Fusion) and then followed them up with a bunch of mediocre-to-bad ones.

Does this mean they're bringing back Susan?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8d/Whitney_Houston-_My_Name_Is_Not_Susan.jpg

How great would it be if Whitney was Susan?

yeah and have the doctor's granddaughter be a massive druggie.

That would be kinda woah.

TS William Hartnell vs Bobby Brown

悪狼

Why the hassle over the broadcast time, doesn't everyone have a video or sky+ or tivo or something these days? Also, it's not like it doesn't get repeated on BBC3 or anything.

Ratings innit

BBC innit, ratings shouldn't matter that much.

Also it's DOCTOR FUCKING WHO you'd think the thing would be popular enough that enough people will switch on whatever happens regardless of half and hour here or there. Especially with some decent promotion.

why not make it 6.23pm

BBC innit, ratings shouldn't matter that much.

^lol

Probably want people to miss it and watch on iPlayer then the bbc can point to what a roarinf sucess iPlayer is.

damn thing stalls every time i try and watch Torchwood on it (not so bad with other shows)

The Sontaran Stratagem

that would be sontarans then. hello ILX

Probably want people to miss it and watch on iPlayer then the bbc can point to what a roarinf sucess iPlayer is.

-- Ed, Wednesday, 2 April 2008 21:45 (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

Doctor Who most-viewed iPlayer show
12 April 2008

This weekend's Doctor Who's fourth season premiere is the most popular programme in the iPlayer's history, a BBC spokeswoman said today.

The episode, featuring Catherine Tate's debut as a regular in the series, was requested by 2,830,000 computers in the UK. Director-General Mark Thompson is a git.

Maybe the Sontaran's strategem is ... erm ... not to appear in the episode!

A friend has just asked me to participate in his fan fiction. PARTICIPATE. As of this moment I have nfi wtf he's talking about.

Is that like cosplay, life modelling or just being written in, whichever it is I fear you may be finding out if the doctor's little TARDIS is bigger in or out.

man i have no way of watching this, and it is bothersome

you're right it's all shit

Bit of a retro 60s pop-art vibe to the new trailer. I approve.

I suppose it's up to Moffat how he develops this stuff, but I'd be surprised if he and RTD didn't consult each other over the changeover.

Yeah there were really obviously teasers for the Moffatt era in here, maybe things that he'd asked Rusty to include. Namely:

- The Weeping Angels as the descended prisons of the 'good' Timelords who didn't sign up to Dalton's plan, it's possibly a way of getting the Timelords back without the dead end RTD's written them into.

- Whoever that woman was, pretty sure we'll be seeing her again.

Also that trailer looks pretty great - think Matt Smith will be brilliant at doing the bewildered young fogeyish academic thing. And I like 'geronimo'.

the 'weeping angels' thing made me sort of... angry? rtd's desperate need to EXPLAIN AWAY EVERYTHING is super-irritating to me, there's something territorial-pissing about it, I'm sure it used to feel like just playful nods to continuity and canon but by now it's like everything has to be tweaked to fit into the rtd-verse.

Pretty sure this is a Moffatt idea rather than a Rusty one.

Also the space canteen section made me realise that in five years Rusty hasn't really created any memorable monsters of his own, and I won't be annoyed at never seeing any of those creatures ever again. Especially the Ood.

Ood as noble savage-esque simple wise folks of the galaxy or w/e is very, very annoying.

The dialogue in this was really terrible, plus they dragged it out something rotten. I didn't enjoy it at all.

Bernard Cribbins I think would have been v good as the doctor.

RTD's best monsters are the kind that likes to take over human bodies and don't really have a form of their own. xp

so why didn't the gallifreyans do this the last time the master took over the world

the master didn't have 6 billion masters trying to triangulate the signal before (man that sounds so lame when you're trying to explain it).

oh ok

Rusty monsters: I liked the Judoon, mostly for their speech. "Rol gol shol fol mol tol". Lol!

I don't mind the Ood, they look cool at least. They were best in The Impossible Planet. The water monsters in the Mars one were good.

figured it was time for new thread at last

Sea Devils And Die: GeroniMoffat's Doctor Who In The 2010s

At least Donna got a happy ending.

I know, finally!

Said it before upthread, but I'm bored with shape-shifting/possession monsters - done to death, and often seem like lazy writing.

At least Donna got a happy ending.

I was afraid she was going to get killed off, so yeah. But it does make me sad that there's no way she can ever remember her travels w/the doctor. RTD comes up ridiculous hand-wavey explanations to accomplish things, surely he could have found some way to restore her memories.

nice to keep a bit of tragedy - also, sod Donna and her lottery millions

i know i really shouldn't think too hard abt RTD plots but seriously lol @ timelords. of course their plan to escape the time lock would involve relying on the most unlikely and ridiculously specific chain of events ever.

Scuttlebutt is that the Old Woman is Susan, from her place in the heart of things to her reaction to Wilf asking her identity.

o ye forgot about the national lottery like this couldn't get any more shit may as well do this shit thing

I've only just watched it.

Jesus fucking Christ Davies you big fucking bell-end.

Assembled timelords looking like the Old Republic senate didn't bother me. You have a shitload of members of an interstellar race who have a history of tending to have their heads up their asses. of course their meeting hall is going to look big and pompous.

I don't know, I thought it just didn't fit. The Time Lords shouldn't be depicted they way they were in the finale for a couple of reasons. First, because the character of the Doctor is pretty much defined by the fact that's he's a renegade Time Lord. If they all start acting like him, traipsing around the universe en masse, it makes him less interesting.

Second, I always imagined them losing the Time War not because they didn't have the means to annihilate the Daleks, but because they couldn't be bothered to do anything about it until it was too late. Because they are isolationists in the extreme. Just making it a clash between two super-powerful alien races, both perfectly content to fight and take revenge, etc. is kind of boring, and is far outside the realm of Doctor Who. That's Babylon 5 shit.

The Time Lords are supposed to be a pompous but decrepit race, so insular they're a little nuts, like Grey Gardens, not pompous and bombastic. They wouldn't cheer some speechmaking president... they'd all want to make their own speeches before committing to any course of action, and it would be boring as hell and go on for years. That's why the Doctor stole a TARDIS and split!

Well, that was better than the first part. Just.

Yet again with Rusty, he forgets not only main Who continuity, BUT HIS FUCKING OWN. We all suspect that the Doctor might die from jumping out of a spaceship (without even considering that something that needs to survive in a vacuum - and presumably faster-than-light travel - has a hatch you can just lift with your hand, or that while travelling at 400mph minimum you can manage to hit a glass dome, never mind take out the angular effects so you fall vertically) because he dies from a fall in Logopolis and arguably Time and the Rani - but he doesn't. Though we don't need to worry about the radiation (despite the demise of Wurzel Doctor and the Wet Vet) because Rusty wrote in Smith And Jones that the Doctor can absorb enough radiation to kill the entire world and just do a funny dance and shake it out of his foot and be all right. Oh no, wait, we do, it kills him.

We invest over 10 minutes in a piece of melodrama between two characters (including "I'd be proud of you were my dad" OH JUST FUCK OFF AND DIE) in which the WHOLE POINT is that the Doctor realises killing the Master will free the Earth. This then gets entirely undone (in much the same way as the return of Rose ruined the ending of the first EmoDoc series, or that he fucks with the ending of the Catherine Tate series by "subtly" changing "if she remembers it will kill her" to "if she remembers it'll save her, then make her a bit tired") by having Rassilon deus ex machina that plot away as soon as he turns up.

Incidentally, how did Rassilon come back to life after the Five Doctors? And is this confirmation that the Doctor isn't The Other, as surely Rassilon would have called him that?

So, the Doctor killed all the Time Lords and the Daleks in the Time War. WHY THE FUCK IS HE MOPEY ABOUT THEM FROM THE VERY START THEN? Back as far as The End of the World he's talking about how sad it was, despite it having pretty much just happened. In fact, doesn't he blame the Daleks for it in Dalek? And more to the point, as soon as the first dalek turns up doesn't he realise his super weapon failed and there are bound to be Time Lords about as well? The only conclusion that can be made for how it's all got "timelocked" is that the Doctor does it somehow (presumably using "the moment"? This really was a 'cram in as many cool names as I can think of! HOOT!' session), so once you realise your lock is easily picked...

When the plot got resolved (!) and there was still 25 minutes to go the first thing I thought of was Return of the King, and in a way this story was very much like that - you'd sat through enough shite before then that you were still vaguely interested and had to see it through, but you knew it was time utterly wasted that you would never get back and you felt kind of dirty and used afterwards.

Let's put it another way. The End Of Time was about the same length as an old 6 parter, in fact looking at the DVD cover I see it's 7 minutes shorter than Genesis of the Daleks which is probably nearly all consumed in the extra credits. So, let's try and rewrite Genesis so it follows the same structure as the End of Time:

Ep 1: Nyder magics Davros using The Secret Books of the Thals from some dust and a used tissue. Some daleks using their brand new extra fast flying power and the Doctor run about on the wastes of Skaro not really chasing each other shouting EXTERMINATE and JELLY BABIES at each other. Harry gets some other people from the Navy to help him find Sarah Jane, who he thinks might be in Orpington.

Ep 2: The Doctor and Mogran have a long chat about how Sarah Jane could get a man if she just wore better clothes and how the Doctor wishes she wasn't in Orpington and was on Skaro. They both cry a bit. We see Davros' laboratory, and Ravon is introduced as a comedy gay.

Ep 3: Davros works in his laboratory a lot, monologuing and overacting, until the Doctor and Mogran arrive. He announces he has perfected his dalek. SLOW PULL BACK TO LONG SHOT SHOWING GIGANTIC DALEK FACTORY. MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS OF THEM. HOOT!

Ep 4: Harry and Sarah Jane turn up, then Sarah passes out and Harry gets stuck in a giant clam. The Doctor has a long chat with Bettan about how he'd like her to adopt him. Bettan gives him the Time Ring.

Ep 5: It turns out that the Time Lords let Nyder resurrect Davros deliberately just so they could put The Doctor in the position of feeling a bit awkward. They let him wonder for a bit about whether he should kill him or not before magicking away all the daleks, turning Davros back into dust again, ending the war on Skaro, unmutating all the Kaleds and Thals, waking up Sarah, freeing Harry and activating the Time Ring to send them all home.

Ep 6: The Doctor takes Harry and Sarah, gets them on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and slips them the answers. He then goes to stand about and look at Jo Grant, Liz, Jamie, Zoe, The Brigadier, Victoria, Ben, Polly, Vicky, Dodo, Steven, Ian, Barbara, Susan and Sara Kingdom from a distance, twiddling the end of his scarf. A Wirrn appears and they both look a bit sad. Then something blows up, so the episode finsihes with a bang.

Hardly a classic, is it.

So, farewell Rusty. I suppose the best thing I can say about you is that you hung about for shorter than JNT.

DOUBLE DEAD LOCK THREAD.

damn dude

don't like that the master dresses down. hoody and jeans? shape up man.

whoas
xposts

tho also
lols
awesome

i don't know how i feel. sorta annoyed by 'plot'/'rationality' but also, shrug. i miss tennant's doctor already, sigh.

Thought the end of Genesis of the Daleks was pretty ropey in its own right TBH.

Hush you.

don't like that the master dresses down. hoody and jeans? shape up man.

As far as I can tell from Britishes new outlets a hoodie is the most SINISTER thing a person can wear in public.

So it works as a super-bad-guy top.

It doesn't really connote Machiavellian genius tho but.

Yeah neither does being like 'AWR MEAT GOTTA EAT MEAT FLESH MEAT NOM WHERE'R MY IHOP" for five straight minutes.

but scruffy master is soooo cute

Looking forward to a Telegraph think-piece on declining standards in Super-Villainy next week.

"In 1965 a world-threatening megalomaniac was required at the very least to have a solid PhD in Nuclear Physics. Today's enemies of mankind get by on dumbed-down GCSE grades and an insatiable lust for so-called Big Macs."

The MASTER? More like the ASSOCIATE'S DEGREE.

Scruffy Master is wickedly bringing out my inner caps lock.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9b/Delgado.jpg

1972

http://somelikeitnotcrushes.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/dappy.jpg

2009

The MASTER? More like the ASSOCIATE'S DEGREE.

I think he's still working on a certificate from DeVry.

City & Guilds in Villainy and Basic Plumbing

http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2009/363/0/5/The_Master__s_Facebook_Page_by_The_Hellish_Gnome.jpg

i love john simm but i thought he really whiffed this one. he never found anything to do with the master beyond leering.

it would have been neat if the doctor's farewell tour included a stop somewhere we hadn't seen before, with a character we'd never met, and she blushes, and he winks

^^ that's what i'm talking about!

it would have been neat if the doctor's farewell tour included a stop somewhere we hadn't seen before, with a character we'd never met, and she blushes, and he winks

That would have been great.

So the RSC production of the Tennant/Stewart Hamlet is online from the usual sources now...