Doctor Who: Classic or Dud?

Just saw this in my daughter's school newsletter:
https://i.ibb.co/dm6xdpb/Untitled.png

:)

Eccleston returning to voice the 9th Doctor for Big Finish

i hope he's doing ok. working on doctor who was obviously a really painful and traumatic experience for him :(

they talked him into it at a fan convention where he was apparently really taken with how much fans liked him so it sounds like his feelings have done a 180. would be great if he'd come back for the show at some point

Okay an Eccles/Whittaker episode written by anyone but Chibnall would be delightful

There was footage of his first convention panels, early last year, where he's explicitly surprised at how welcomed and beloved he is; given the strained nature of his departure, he says he had assumed that Doctor Who fans hated or resented him. It seems that going through therapy to recover from anorexia in recent years was a big factor in him making himself available to receive that affection.

<3 Eccles

I loved his Doctor a lot

that first episode where they introduce Eccles Doctor is still really thrilling to watch. he’s so intense & gleeful & WEIRD in the goofiest ways and then you see him unleash a little of the anger & the melancholy goodbye before Rose changes her mind, it was like WOW, he really can shift up or down into ~any~ emotional gear

and imo he has something very Bakeresque in his acting style. Like when he’s delighted, so much of it is in his eyes, they’re like headlamps
i love it

gah he’s so great

http://eyeofhorus.org.uk/images/photo/06baker/colinbaker-496.jpg

i said what i said

The only Doctor Who I've seen was Matt Smith and I hated it/him but I'm trying the Eccleston Who via HBO Max. Much better through a couple of episodes.

(I was aiming for a Baker with headlampy eyes)

If you didn't see much Smith, I bet you're likely to enjoy his first years more should you work up from Eccleston. Not all Who is for everyone, though!

sic otm

Smith is def better in the context of the other nu-who doctors, not the best one to start cold

i loved him but tired of him later on...BUT got super nostalgic for him recently & may try rewatching his arc at some point

I appreciate that this doesn't have the sheen of the episodes I saw. Hate the look of Sherlock, that Who, the series set in Wales, etc..

Ha ha, at the time the digital filters on RTD-era (2005-2009) Who were aiming to be the absolute sheeniest TV could aspire to be - now it just looks quaintly cheap & tacky in a dated way, like any given era of 20th-century Who.

(Torchwood, the RTD-created series set in Wales, was trying to be the glossy night-time version of the same thing, like Angel to RTD-Who's Buffy.)

((The sheen in the Smith era mmmight also read differently if you get there in order - there's a massive leap just in the complexity of visual literacy, with directors like Nick Hurran, the Chemical Brothers' Adam Smith, and a five-ep b2b run by Toby Haynes. But several of them also did eps of Sherlock, so maybe not!))

The Dickens episode is much better than the van Gogh episode I saw.

The Dickens episode is much better than the van Gogh episode I saw.

― Donald Trump Also Sucks, Of Course (milo z)

what even the fuck, this is some "spaced is the best soft machine record" level of rong

van Gogh ep too twee for me

The only good filmed VvG is Tim Roth

Kind of wish Eccleston had managed to escape the gravitational pull of Big Finish - like, I like him and his Doctor well enough, but it's always cool (and uncommon) when genre actors manage to give fandom the slip

the Dickens episode caused Brexit

Is it hated by Who fans?

I refuse to type the -vians appellation.

https://youtu.be/EjHTT974G6U?t=190

As far as I'm aware, Who fans who noticed that the Dickens episode was about how refugees are in fact using fake refugee status to sneak into your country to murder you and steal your natural resources, find it regretful and an unfortunate indicator of the shallow nature of its author's typical writing in most fictional media. And most don't notice, or get very very angry when you point it out.

The only good filmed VvG is Tim Roth

You've obviously never seen the Pialat VvG w/ Jacques Dutronc

Who fans who noticed that the Dickens episode was about how refugees are in fact using fake refugee status to sneak into your country to murder you and steal your natural resources

I was going to pitch in in defence of the Dickens episode, but this reading hadn't occurred to me. Couldn't a hell of a lot of Who from all eras be interpreted in a similar way, though?

The Van Gogh episode is twee by the way.

There's plenty of other Who with bad politics, or where the writer gets their own politics wrong*, and loads of blithe colonialism in the 60s etc, but as far as I recall they rarely have the untravelled, under-educated working class British companion give big rants about how foreigners' customs are disgusting and they shouldn't be allowed to move here, be over-ridden by the Doctor with a speech about tolerance and understanding, and then it turns out that the Doctor was wrong and the refugees (escaping devastation of a war that he was involved in and his people created**) were inherently evil after all and will overrun England like vermin.



* eg Robert Holmes setting out to write an anti-taxation whinge and ending up with a savage denouncement of capitalism, or Pete McTighe setting out to write a savage denouncement of capitalism, and ending up with a story saying it's okay for Amazon to murder their warehouse employees if they halve the survivors' wages afterward

** oof I'd forgotten it was actually a war, let alone the Time War - checked wikipedia's plot summary bcz I've never rewatched this due to being skeeved the first time

I've not seen a great deal of nu-Who post-Ecclestone but got this Davros DVD set with the 27 stolen planets storyline, and did wonder if that was some kind of... EU thing?

There is an ancient precedent for EU (or rather EEC) metaphors in The Curse of Peladon.

As far as I'm aware, Who fans who noticed that the Dickens episode was about how refugees are in fact using fake refugee status to sneak into your country to murder you and steal your natural resources, find it regretful and an unfortunate indicator of the shallow nature of its author's typical writing in most fictional media. And most don't notice, or get very very angry when you point it out.

― Steppin' RZA (sic)

sic has it in one, thank you for explaining

the van gogh episode is... sentimental? and there's a certain percentage of fandom that doesn't like their who to get overly sentimental. i think this is, for instance, a significant part of why "love and monsters" is so utterly despised by a huge chunk of the fandom.

i am a terribly sentimental person myself, but more than that i like it because it gets mental illness _right_, which doctor who doesn't always - i absolutely loathe "in the forest of the night" because of how it suggests that mental illness is secretly some sort of superpower.

when it comes to who, subtext is probably the most important thing to me.

* eg Robert Holmes setting out to write an anti-taxation whinge and ending up with a savage denouncement of capitalism

― Steppin' RZA (sic)

a common libertarian mistake, tbh. related - was appalled to watch "the ark in space" with infotext on recently and read about holmes' original conception for the character of vira. if he'd had his way that story would very possibly be as awful as "talons of weng-chiang". holmes just creeps me the fuck out, your classic "intellectual dark web" type.

I just spent 5 minutes crafting a post about how Love & Monsters spends 40 minutes faffing around setting up a "Pavement sucks" joke and now I suddenly like Love & Monsters

my work here is done

lol

Rose got more annoying with Tennant than Eccleston

Rose became the WORST with Tennant

Sylvester McCoy on auditioning for the Wachowskis without knowing who he was auditioning for:
"Well, I was just asked to go and see, Ms. Wachowski. The thing is that I hadn't really clicked who this was. I went along and I met this really lovely, really tall lady, and we got on really well. I mean, for 45 minutes we sat and I learned a bit of a script and after 45 minutes of us just chatting and nattering away I had the part as it were. I went back and I phoned my son and told him that I just got this part that I'm really excited about and he asked who the director was and I told him and he said "Do you know who that is? It's the director of The Matrix!" I didn't know because if I'd have known I'd been very nervous, but I had no idea. I just saw this nice lady."

aw i love it

Torchwood is weird. The nerdy guy with the date rape spray in the first episode gives me the creeps.

have started watching Eccleston with my 8 year-old, it is good fun - weird to watch them with 15 years' perspective! incredibly impressed by how much they get done in Rose. lots of hokey bits that were probably hokey in 2005 but my kid digs it.

and - something I've noticed with a lot of genre stuff - things I write off as SF cliches or limp gags are actually considered cool "makes u think" ideas or get a genuine laugh.

I actually can't imagine him being ready to watch some of the later Moffatt episodes - it sure drifted a long way back towards Bidmead/Saward kind of Who. which I also like but can understand why the ratings slowly declined (yes also other reasons for that).

Going in blind to the entire Who universe, I liked the Eccleston season (and Eccleston) much more than the 2.5 of Tennant I've seen so far.

I want to say Tennant is hammier but they were both hammy, Eccleston's has more of a crazy edge to it (vs. Tennant's wacky edge)

ham & edge

Tennant also more deliberately channeling aspects of earlier Doctors

Torchwood is not especially recommended by anyone around here btw milo

though there's an episode where Captain Jack lezzes up with Spike off of Buffy if that's of any interest

I know but I wanted to try the further adventures of Captain Jack. (he also seems like a different character, aside from being equally horny 24/7)