Bricker - That’s no excuse. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child…”, but you’re a grown man now. We expect better judgment from you.
Drunky - Adric was a teenaged math prodigy who stowed away on the TARDIS and was adopted as a companion by Four, instead of being pitched out into the interstellar void, as he should have been. He was whiny, arrogant, emotionally needy and deeply annoying. Your basic teenaged boy, in other words. I have no idea if these adjectives described the teenaged Bricker; but he did grow up to be a Republican. :p:D
I hear ya… but the thing is that my judgement for classic Who is, like my appreciation of the Star Wars IV, V, and VI films, equally a product of their merit and my nostalgia.
I recently re-watched “Invasion of the Dinosaurs,” to pick a good illustration. Now, even back in the day the special effects were cheesy, but I had been fed a diet of “Land of the Lost,” and there was Lis Sladen on screen believing in those dinosaurs with such heartfelt conviction that I was pulled into the story and simply didn’t register the horrid stop-motion plastic atrocities. That was then.
Rewatching it, Lis was no less stellar, but my special effects palate had grown from gourmand to gourmet. The cheesy effects took me out of the story.
Adric’s ranking is a fusion of what I remember then with what I think now. Trying to separate the boy from the man in this instance is futile.
Lis Sladen was a terrific actress. There’s a scene in Brain of Morbius where she’s lost her sight and been abandoned in a post-apocalyptic wasteland full of mysterious scuttling noises and with a misshapen creature gone for a lurch somewhere in the vicinity*, and she’s blind and terrified and trying to be brave about it because she’s Sarah-Jane, and she absolutely sells you all of these things. It’s not a small feat for someone on a miniscule sound stage with a couple of papier mache boulders for dressing.
Okay, since I’ve picked up watching again (I’m now up to Series 4, Ep. 18), I have to say that Tennant has really grown on me since I started this thread. I think my “over the top” opinion was based more in the fact that I’m simply accustomed to American movies and television, where the actors in dramas are constantly grim and the actors in comedies are nonstop comic.
I’m realizing that The Doctor needs to be played with a wide range of emotional expression that can change in an instant, and Tennant is masterful at that.
BTW, what’s the deal with things so often happening on Christmas? Inside joke?
i assume this is in reference to the various Christmas specials - they originally aired at Christmas in the UK and so the writers thought a Christmas theme would be fun. It doesn’t always work so well though.
No, it didn’t. The ‘destruction’ of Gallifrey occurred during the hiatus between old and nu Who.
(Gallifrey falls no more).
My first doctor was Hartnell, and I like them all just about equally, except poor old Colin Baker, who never really had a chance. He was funny in The Five(ish) Doctors, however.
Remember in Genesis of the Daleks her urging the Doctor to wipe out the Daleks, and the Doctor saying he didn’t know if he had the right?
I thought she played that so perfectly… intense, but reasonable and controlled given the subject matter. And it allowed the Doctor to enunciate the great dilemmas he faces.
The final season with Tennant rather made it clear that The Doctor wants no more war or death. And the last few episodes of S4, Tennant’s tenure, seem to me to have made it clear that the Time Lords of Gallifrey were no better than the Daleks or any of their other enemies. The Doctor was the exception amongst the Time Lords … the one person to say, “ENOUGH! NO MORE DEATH!” And The Doctor had his counterpart amongst the Daleks, initiated during the Eccelston episodes … “ENOUGH! No more war!”
Anyway, I just watched Series 5, Episode 1, and I am immediately in love with Matt Smith as The Doctor. That was quick.
I came to Who in a bit of an odd fashion–I stumbled onto Torchwood on BBC America, and then some friends convinced me that the parent show was also pretty good.
Anyway, Eccleston was my first Doctor; I loved and do still love him dearly. (He was also on the cursed Heroes at about the same time, which may play a role.) In fact, when he was no longer the Doctor at the end of the first season, I had a hissy-cow and refused to watch Tennant for like six months.
Big mistake: I quite loved Tennant. He’s probably my most loved Doctor right now, but I don’t know how much of that is David T and how much of that is just that he has defined the role in the reboot era.
Capaldi: Despite the showrunners turning their back on the hard sci-fi roots of the show (heh), I love him to death. He’s in contention to become the new face of the franchise for me if he stays around for a few years (and why wouldn’t he–I mean, he’s a fan, he’s old… what else do you need?).
Tennant was very good, but possibly a little, idk, squirrely or something. As I recall, he was a big fan and had had a childhood ambition to be the Doctor. Matt Smith, by contrast, was agnostic/ignorant with respect to the series, so I guess that would mean he is an outstanding actor. But the Smith crack-in-the-wall series was written by Steve Moffat, who seems to be an incredibly talented script writer (e.g., Coupling). Some fans are put off by Moffat’s Who, I found it to be exemplary. The scene with Amy Pond and the Weeping Angels was more moving to me than any I can remember in what I have seen of the whole series. But, I guess, that is not a good thing, because the show is supposed to be fairly emotionally lightweight.
You know, having shared favorite Doctors, companions, and authors, maybe we could take a stab at collecting favorite regeneration scenes. Here I think nuWho clearly dominates. The whole regeneration concept wasn’t clear when Hartnell stepped down, and was slow to settle in to the framework we know now.
For me:
11 –> 12 Matt Smith’s speech was extraordinary, a fitting tribute to his being 11 for hundreds of years
9 –> 10 We only got a season of Eccleston, but his ready grin, tinged with the smallest bit of regret, as he says “So was I,” is just superb
10 –> 11 The solo scene, where I always thought it was both David Tennant AND the Tenth saying tearfully, “I don’t want to go…” was a great coda to the Tenth.
3 –> 4 The best of the Classic Who regenerations. The simple, “A tear, Sarah Jane?” worked wonders. And the Brig’s deadpan, “Well, here we go again,” was great.
4 –> 5 The hit parade of former companions was almost enough to tease out a tear from the audience, if the audience were me. The only thing I didn’t like was the “Watcher,” turning out to be the new Doctor, or some such. It made no sense, not done in any previous or successive regeneration.
8 –> War This ranks so high only because of all the backstory that gets resolved in a short scene, and a great return of Paul McGann for a brief shoot that closes his short (for us) tenure.
7 –> 8 Cool premise, death from botched operation, but since it the beginning of a movie that broke a long Who hiatus, no real attachment to 7’s loss.
5 –> 6 Meh. Spinning faces. Plus he regenerates into an asshole.
2 –> 3 Another “What’s happened?,” in that a similar exclamation came in the last regeneration. Plus more spinning faces and a voiceover. Blech. Also the beginning of the budget-crunch “exile” that kept Pertwee in London for much of his tenure.
1 –> 2 Awful. “What’s happening?” A comment that reflects the audience’s lack of knowledge AND the show runner’s.
6 –> 7 Used all the special effects budget on the space battle? A fuzzed face. The second worst.
War –> 9 The worst. No cooperation from Eccleston. This could have been great.
That was heartbreaking, indeed. I understand that they filmed it with Karen Gillan out of frame, reading Amy Williams’ afterword aloud so Matt Smith could react.
As a new Who fan working their way through the Classic series (at a snail’s pace), I haven’t seen every last regeneration, but I would reverse the positions of 10–>11, which I found to be too melodramatic in a completely forced way (why is the Doctor so upset about regeneration now, he’s done it ten times already!), with 1–>2 which accomplishes being both an iconic moment in the series, and a representation of the sort of every day tragedy of death, so unlike the Doctor. Most of them die in heroic circumstances, or after unusual accidents. What seems to kill the First Doctor is a stroke. When he takes a coat from Ben, and says in a weak, confused voice, 'Oh, yes. Thank you. Keep warm," and then wanders off, it feels almost too real. Maybe it’s that I recently lost my Grandma, but that moment hit me hard.
I love the s5 e1 ending, where Smith is reciting his credentials as The Doctor, and ends his litany with … “Run.” And the alien runs. Brilliant.
Continuing my thoughts from my post yesterday, I think I am going to adopt, “I WOULD NEVER!” as my personal motto. I was especially moved by the way he said that line, while pointing a gun at the head of the man who had just killed his “daughter”, and then tossing the gun aside. “Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the LORD.” The Doctor is not in the revenge business, and that’s one of the reasons I like him.
As I’ve said, I’m a Doctor Who noob, but I’m really enjoying the storylines and the characterizations I’ve seen. The Doctor, with so much death on his hands, devoting himself to LIFE, and the preservation thereof. A man who refuses to kill his enemies, who tries to help his enemies.
“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.” – Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The Doctor dies. The new Doctor is not the same person. He has the old Doctor’s memories, yes, but it’s not just the body that changes. The new Doctor has a new personality, new habits, new likes and dislikes. Each incarnation has adopted a new outfit, new mannerisms, and the old Doctor is no more. He is replaced by what amounts to a new person.
Ten wasn’t ready to go, and resented being in the position of having to save Wilfred by sacrificing himself. He did it, of course, because that’s who he is. And a good thing, in a way, because this Time Lord Victorious thing he started doing was Not A Good Thing. But he was not ready to go.