The Other becomes The Timeless Child becomes The Doctor becomes The Curator becomes The Valeyard becomes The War Chief becomes The Master becomes The Monk becomes The Rani. I think that’s pretty straight forward and totally not confusing?
13 Likes
So, just Steve Jobs, then?
10 Likes
Don’t know enough about him
3 Likes
Of the two founders of Apple, Woz was a really good programmer and hacker, and Steve Jobs was the salesman… and also a generally terrible person. He did things like getting Woz to code Breakout for Atari, saying they’d split the money 50/50%, then giving him $350, saying that was half, when Atari paid $5000.
He was also a really terrible person to work for in Apple, and a lot of the Macintosh got made more despite him then because of him. Apple did have a bunch of brilliant people working there, though. And Steve Job was really good at selling things…
(Apple’s history is actually pretty interesting…)
10 Likes
I agree with you.
For me, it also makes the DW universe feel smaller. It’s similar when fans start suggesting X Y Z could also be Romana or a future Doctor or a secret Master, or whatever. Not everything has to be tied together.
I also think this idea somehow takes away from the real world portrayals a little - Delgado established the role of the Master (likewise Pertwee cemented the whole Doctor/Master dynamic with him). Brayshaw didn’t play the Master, he played and established the role of the War Chief. To retroactively change this just feels a bit off to me.
8 Likes
I want to also add ~
It’s odd that The War Games in Colour didn’t just make this explicit. Ben Cook suggested they made it in a way that left room for both interpretations… but they used the Murray Gold Master theme and were clearly hinting at it, so why not just go full throttle and make it explicit? It’s an alternative version of the story anyway, and isn’t replacing the original. To plaster the Delgado and Simm Master themes over the top but then say “oh but it’s upto you” feels very weird to me. Maybe that’s why it didn’t go down overly well (from what I saw). If you’re gunna do it, commit to it. If not, don’t do it at all.
They even had the opportunity to nick an audio clip of Troughton saying “the Master” from The Mind Robber, if they’d wanted to go the whole way!
11 Likes
Well, I think this is because the success of these colourisations depends so much on - and they can pretend otherwise all they like - their appeal to people mostly older than 40-years-old who have fond existing memories of the story. Yet, at the same time, they want to be bold and modern for younger and newer audiences. And to add on top of that: there’s whatever else the production team wanted to add. Sounds like a messy situation.
However on this: I think the War Chief is the Master, certainly, and that’s easy. But, hm, in legal terms, what does that mean? The BBC don’t necessarily own the rights to The War Chief like they do The Master (it is certainly notable to me that ever since the increased legal care that has come along post-2005 that neither him or the War Lords showed up in anything until that posthumous Terrance Dicks short story…) So I wonder if part of the muddled nature of execution, and Ben Cook’s half-committal (which is a rare thing from that man, as many will attest), is down to some sort of legal complexity to equating the two characters.
Either way, it really was mad to me that they plastered the Simm theme in to such a hefty weight… and then switched in the Delgado way down the line. Neither thing would twig for a newcomer, you hit the dedicated fans with the implication quicker than you do people with just vague memories of Classic Who by rolling with Simm first, and the used track is… well, at odds with the rest of the score. May as well have played in the Akinola motif, as that would’ve relatively been more in keeping with the era!
As for the question of retroactivity, well, I think Who is full of that, and though it shouldn’t be done for the sheer sake of it; it can be interesting when it adds a compelling layer. I mean, why else does The Deadly Assassin’s political humour work? Why else is The Timeless Children’s jabs at colonialism and how explorer-settler figures extrapolate native aspects of a culture fascinating? Both of those are retroactive shifts, but justified in their narrative weight. I’d argue the same here, but on a lesser scale.
6 Likes
This is a whole topic in itself, but you’re right.
It just strikes me as odd that they clearly had the chance to commit, but didn’t. But they basically heavily implied it to the point where, if you’re not meant to go with it, why have they used the really obvious Master theme from the era everyone remembers? Trying to have their cake and eat it - didn’t work for me.
Imagine plastering “I Am The Doctor” over scenes with Goronwy in Delta and the Bannermen. It’d be equally as bizarre.
Oddly, I didn’t mind the Delgado theme creeping in. At the very least it felt more in-keeping with the era, and wasn’t as obnoxious. That’s where I think this stuff works better - when they use stuff that feels like it could be of the time, rather than trying to NuWho-ify old stuff which fundamentally fails because TV is so vastly different in the 60s compared to the 2000s or 2024.
6 Likes
Hmm - I love Goronwy (he’s 100% a Time Lord but not the Doctor and as the forum’s resident Bannermen expert I shall brook no argument) and I love ‘I am the Doctor’. So would I want both together?..
Someone do me an edit and I’ll decide.
10 Likes
Has nobody done this already? YouTube has failed us! 
In this imaginary case though, my point is probably more that if they were going to re-edit Delta and the Bannermen and suggest that Goronwy was a Time Lord, I think it’d be much more suitable to play a hint of a general Time Lord piece of music (maybe a hint of “This Is Gallifrey”) over his scenes rather than a piece of music heavily linked to the Master or something.
The fact they plastered Simm’s Master theme over the War Chief, not once but multiple times, tells me they were going down that route but were too afraid to commit, which makes me question why bother to begin with. Just go for it, or don’t bother. After all, like we’ve said, it’s an alternative version anyway - the original TX version is always going to be there.
8 Likes
I mean, that would be truly bizarre. Part of the brilliance of that story is literally - the Welsh just take everything in their stride. It’s almost proto-nuWho in that sense. Burton, Ray, Billy, Goronwy. The only people confused by it all instead are Hawk and Weismueller.
But yes, I do get your general point. (After all, what was that mess that was the ‘too old, too thin’ scene redux?)
9 Likes
Oh I quite liked that bit - certainly more than the Master theme stuff.
5 Likes
I wish they hadn’t just stuck promo pictures up and called it a day. But that sort of thing was always going to happen, from the moment they announced they were going to tinker with The War Games.
3 Likes
Oof. Fair enough. To me, it’s the true ‘over the line’ moment, because aside the clunker of execution, it just narratively creates a whole mess on two fronts: firstly, the joke being that the faces are people that the Doctor would never be in the future because the Doctor doesn’t normally renew/regenerate in forced terms, and secondly, in terms of the mechanics of ‘right, if the Timelords have those faces queued up, then they must know the timeline hereafter… so, like, why are they bothering with a punishment that they know won’t work, or offering a choice at all if they already know the next however many faces the Doctor will have, and how the timeline will pan out, and have they spotted that little Time War problem in there?’
It’s a real flub to execute some that is so decidedly for a fanbase hurrah moment (at a relative expense to the newcomers that we’re pretending this is meant for, or for those people who haven’t watched the show in 1980-something) rather than narrative weight - that is aimed at the section of the fanbase that most strongly cares about the mechanics of narrative decisions.
6 Likes
Imagine if, instead, they’d used obscure in-jokes…
Richard E Grant appears - nope.
David Burton - “that won’t do at all.”
Michael Jayston - nope.
Kris Marshall - “is this the best you can do?” 
7 Likes
If they were going to do an in-joke, I would think the only decent option would’ve been to dress all the colourisation team members up in period dress, really…
11 Likes
I think the scene works better if they’re just random faces, not later faces of the Doctor. Adding the later Doctors feels just like making references to later stuff for the sake of adding references. I’m not sure what it adds to the story, seems a pointless change.
7 Likes
This is a fun idea.
What can I say, though, I wasn’t bothered by the future Doctors. Both the In Colours are very much curios for me so I don’t really care what they do with them. They’re not replacing anything so the narrative choices don’t bother me hugely. In fact the only one that did bother me was the excising the guest cast like Russell as I think they are the core of the story. They’re who the Doctor is fighting for.
8 Likes
Fannish impulses innit. This is where story logic goes out of the window and you have to roll with it because the guys making it are fans, and the main audience (however much they may try and argue) is also fans.
5 Likes
I’m with you on this. I find them fascinating and I enjoy discussing the choices made with them, but at the end of the day ~ shrug.
It’s a shame some stuff gets lost in the mix. We lost the iconic, “No, what a stupid fool YOU are.” And the mexican guy just came out of nowhere, and other characters just sort of vanish because of editing choices.
6 Likes