My inside sources tell me that season 5 is going to be an abbreviated season as they revamp the writers and decide whether Tenant is going to stick with the show. And when I say abbreviated, I mean maybe 2 two-hour episodes and that’s it.
With any luck, Davies will be gone at this time and Moffat will take over as well.
I heard it was going to be 5 two-hour specials, total.
You should have no need of “inside sources.” RTD has made clear that three specials (plus a Christmas special) will air in 2009, with the proper fifth series to broadcast in 2010.
What Exit: Thanks, that’s it.
Any word of when (or if) CBC will be airing season 4? Living near the border, I’ve been able to watch episodes of this show on both CBC and SciFi, and given the choice, I prefer to watch them on CBC (for one thing, they reportedly edit them less), but for the most part, I watch it on whichever channel airs it first.
IIRC, CBC aired season 1 almost a year before SciFi, season 2 well after SciFi, and season 3 just a short while before SciFi (and they took some weeks off and SciFi almost caught up!) so I have no idea what to expect from them.
Part way through the Christmas special and it is quite exceptionally good.
Alonsy Alonso!
I hoped briefly the Doctor might take Alonso as his new companion, even if just a little while.
Who is Alonsy Alonso? I can’t find an IMDB listing for him. I am guessing he was the old guy.
Well, come to think of it, I mostly watched the Tom Baker episodes on PBS when I was a little kid. But I never really associated it with specifically being “for children” any more than the various mindless sci-fi or action show one finds these days on a random Saturday afternoon on UPN or the WB. Just a bit more “British”.
I mean some of the old episodes seemed pretty dark and scared the crap out of me (well…as an 8 year old).
I have noticed that for a “kids show”, the Doctor has always managed to find himself a nice piece of eye candy as his “companion”.
Alonso is the young guy who got locked in the control room trying to save the ship. Good kid.
Can’t remember which episode, or episodes, but in the past the Doctor has used the more or less French phrase, allons-y, which basically means “let’s go!” He quipped someday he’d like to meet someone named Alonso so he could say “allons-y Alonso!” and he finally did.
Wow. I just watched it on TiVo and I came to the SDMB to see if there was a thread so I could say how horrible it was. Worst episode of the new series that I’ve seen yet.
I didn’t think all that much of the xmas special either Opal, you’re not alone.
I have two gauges, did I enjoy it and did it keeps my kids entertained. If the only questions they are asking are about Doctor Who, I know the writers and actors did their job.
My kids enjoyed it and I did too. I suspect that the small references to Douglas Adams helped and I always set my disbelief to a minimum for Doctor Who. Something I cannot do for many shows.
What did you find horrible about it?
I felt it was more predictable than even most Doctor Who episodes tend to be, for one thing. I found many of the choices ridiculous to the point of stretching even my normally enormous ability to suspend disbelief–the shape of the ship, the big steering wheel (which wobbled around horribly), the cheesy and pointless shot of the queen waving goodbye and thanking the Doctor… the little red dwarf (cute, a red dwarf, but even so) always referring to himself in the third person and by name grew tedious and pointless after the first, oh, 3 seconds of it… how did the sonic screwdriver, activated under the table, make a champagne bottle at the next table erupt? I mean to get it to unlock a door you have to hold it right up by the lock, and yet for this…? And I don’t know if it was the writers or the actors, but when you can have four sympathetic characters die tragically and it doesn’t phase me… me who will cry at a tender moment in a soap commercial… well, something has failed.
There were still parts of it that I liked, mind you. It’s just that I accept the show to be campy and cheesy and that doesn’t bother me, but this episode had way too many “oh lord. :rolleyes:” moments in it, and so I rank it at the bottom of the episodes I’ve seen so far.
Mr. Copper was Richard from Keeping Up Appearances.
You probably knew that already.
-FrL-
That’s what was bothering me about this episode; I tend to get “leaky” (as a friend of mine puts it) at things like this too, but my only reaction while watching was “Boy, they’re really going all out to play the audience this time”. My friend, who was watching it with me, went through two or three tissues.
Just as you also knew the Captain was Lionel from As Time Goes By (he also played the doctor in “The Kipper and the Corpse” episode of Fawlty Towers). A real reunion show for Britcom fans.
Other than that I wasn’t too impressed. Multiple increasingly poignant deaths (despairing self-sacrifice, noble self-sacrifice, more noble self-sacrifice), followed by a comedy Queen fleeing the Palace in robe and curlers. Too jarring.
I agree with all of that. In addition, when they resorted to having everyone swatting and batting at the halos with pipes just before the dwarf EMP, and then the chubby wife character jumped off the ledge with a rope insacrifice, I lost any sense of immersion.
I give it a pass since almost all of the Christmas episodes are corn over substance and are generally the worst of the series…but this one sank really low into stupidity.
I agree with GargoyleWB.
Of the Christmas shows, I though “The Christmas Invasion” was the best, and they are just kinda hijinky and silly - the aforementioned included.
I agree it was too much pointless death with supposed meaning. It also seemed silly to have the main aliens be … human … and not know anything about Earth when the whole series has been about humans finaly making their way out into space and thriving.
Meh. I’ll not hold a grudge agains the rest of the season to this standard. I expect it’ll get better.
I watched it as a take-off on the Posiedan Adventure, including the deaths along the way.
The one thing I didn’t catch is why Mr. Copper thought he’d get 10 years in prison if he stayed on board when the rescue team came to Titanic. I didn’t see him do anything illegal. Why’d he have to stay on Earth?
StG
He said that if they investigated the survivors that some ugly stuff could be unsurfaced. I assume about him from before the cruise.