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This week, Liz, Tim, Jill and Sean join Summer to talk wall-to-wall Doctor Who.
There were 8 episodes selected as “The Doctor’s Finest”, and they aired weekly during August & September as an lead-in to Season 9 before it’s premiere. But were those 8 truly the “finest” episodes of the modern era one could recommend to introduce new viewers to Doctor Who?
Slice of SciFi even took a poll on the matter. Either way, we discuss and maybe change the list a little bit.
Next we chat about Season 9’s premiere episode, “The Magician’s Apprentice”, and speculate on many things about where the Doctor may be headed, then Liz gives a rundown on what’s scheduled to take place at the next Gallifrey One convention in February 2016.
We ran out of time to talk about the books and comics, so we’ll have to do that another time (yeah, twist our arms!)
And of course, this is what you get when you bring a rock-n-roller to an axe fight:
And this is a “behind the scenes” of the recreation of the “Abbey Road” album cover, with Daleks (since I brought up The Beatles):
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I really tried to get into Dr.Who. I got the first few seasons on DVD (new, not classic). What I didn’t like was how innocent people kept getting killed. I remember one episode where an alien gargoyle ate a little orphan girl (it was the one K-9 came back). I nearly shut it off right then and there. Do they do anything to cut down on the body count or is that an inherent part of the series?
I think that’s part of what keeps the series grounded. Not even the Doctor can stop everyone from dying, innocent or no, and that’s not what he does, or even believes he should do.
My take on it has been he fixes the things that would cause millions or billions to die where the cause was something that was anomalous to the time stream, or an act of destruction (take Daleks). But if a handful die along the way to saving the lives of those millions, it’s a loss, but wouldn’t it also be worse to save that handful and allow an entire planet or species to die?
I’m sure Tim or Liz might have a more succinct opinion, being more familiar with the history and the old series and a far more studious observation of the new series than I 🙂
Alverant, I’m sorry to say that the body count isn’t really reduced. I think what you may be responding to – what I respond to – is that, because of the Doctor, I really *feel* the pain of those deaths. By contrast, in a series like Star Trek or Star Wars, deaths are simply a metric to indicate how “dangerous” a situation is to the main characters who we know won’t die. The tragedy of the Doctor is that he genuinely cares, and both his hearts break when he can’t save everyone. In “The Doctor Dances” the Ninth Doctor cries out, “Just this once, Rose, everybody lives!” and it means something. Conversely, the Twelfth Doctor starts out hard and cynical, but he can’t maintain that pose for long. It is an emotional journey, no doubt.
Alverant-
Death, like pain, is a part of life, and anyone who says different is trying to sell you something. Any drama that does not acknowledge this is failing its readers/viewers. As Tim and Summer said, in other shows it is the faceless redshirts who die, you never get any investment in the character. Or it is someone that you don’t mind seeing die. Dr Who takes the opposite approach. Just like in war, innocents die. But, the Doctor feels guilty about every death, and does his best to stop them. In many ways the Doctor is preventing even more deaths. He is stopping wars before they start and therefore preventing even more deaths.
I have to ask, what shows do you watch? Did you watch the New BSG? What did you think of the deaths there? True, there were many “redshirt” deaths of faceless characters, but also deaths of characters that viewers grew to know and became invested in.
Death has to mean something in a drama, when it doesn’t it cheapens the whole thing. I am honestly surprised that no companion has died under the current crop of Doctors. This is probably because the Doctor is not travelling with multiple companions that much.