Okay, first of all, this has been rumoured for a while, so it’s not a big surprise, but it’s still great to have it confirmed!
Second, this is one of my favourite serials with my favourite TARDIS team, so I hope they do it justice. The fact that they cut 10x25-minute episodes down to 90 minutes worries me a bit. I’m not the biggest fan of The Daleks in Colpur - the colourisation work is stellar, but the edit and music are occasionally jarring to the point where I can’t stand it. I hope this is more balanced. The colourisation seems great based on the pics!
In addition, the episode will also feature the Second Doctor’s never-before-seen regeneration into the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee), alongside recovered footage not seen since the original broadcast.
This bit had me raise my eyebrows. Do we really need to see that and alter the canon so drastically? This goes against season 6B, which Big Finish has just started tapping into with their Second Doctor Adventures! The BBC are once again pissing into BF’s shoes!
To be fair, 6B predates this by decades. It’s originally been used to explain how Two travels alone with Jamie and looks so much older in The Five Doctors, and how he travels alone in The Two Doctors (because he was sent on solo missions for the Time Lords as part of his exile, and before his regeneration).
Also, part of the reason people suggested Fugitive fits into 6B is that her TARDIS looks like a Police Telephone Box, which it shouldn’t do if she’s pre-Hartnell because it first took that form when the Doctor landed in 1963 as Hartnell - and this has been established in the show.
We have to be fair here; using 6B as a way to decanonise or deny Jo Martin is only a marginal phenomenon and not the original intent of the theory. I like the 6B theory and find it intriguing (especially in how BF is pursuing it) and I don’t find it fair to dismiss it as only a weapon used by haters and bigots against the “wokeness” of the show.
I may be controversial here but I don’t think this edited down version of a decades old story should be considered in any way more cannon than the original, if we’re even caring about cannon here still.
like, I watched the colourisation of the daleks, and it wasn’t very good. the colourisation itself was competent, although I didn’t like the choices made for the dalek city, but the whole thing was killed by the re-edit, which was so bad at the end, it ran out of time and became so fast it was bordering on impossible to follow.
the daleks is padded, there’s stuff you can cut out to reduce the run time, not as much as was attempted, but you could feasibly bring it down to about two hours without sacrificing much in the way of quality
the war games on the other hand is longer to begin with so more would need to be cut if they are aiming for the 90 minute mark again, and is overall really well paced. At worst it is a tiny bit repetitive in places, but its barely noticeable and helps the tone of the thing. it’s over 4 hours in total I think, you would need to cut it in half to make it even remotely palitable to a modern TV audience, bringing it down to 90 minutes like the daleks, it doesn’t bare thinking about.
the war games also really slows down in the last couple of episodes as the Doctor has to slowly accept his, Jamie, and Zoe’s fates, the whole sequence with the time lords surely can’t be rushed through without wrecking it.
I fail to see who the audience for this is, classic who is a niche interest, the number of people who would want to try 60s who only if it were cut down to a shell of itself and colourised cannot be very high, even smaller would be those interested in the war games in particular. most people watching will already be pretty big fans of doctor who and would probably watch for a different story better suited to this treatment as well.
I’ll be watching but only because the car crash will be fascinating.
While there are mysoginistic fans that don’t like Fugitive because she is a woman, some don’t like the Fugitive Doctor being pre-Hartnell because they think a pre-Hartnell Doctor is a bad idea. I’m one of them; I don’t think the Doctor became the Doctor as we know until The Edge of Destruction and trying to fit a whole new incarnation that behaves as a hero before One goes through his character arc is one more example of New Who being dismissive of Classic.
That’s partially the reason I dislike the Timeless Children twist too (besides I actually prefering the Doctor to be one Gallifreyan and not the genesis of them all).
And 6b is more complicated than that, it originates in the TV comics in the hiatus between season 6 and 7 of the classic series; and recently that same gap has been explored by BF without any correlation to the Fugitive Doctor at all.
So, according to a post on Reddit (take this with a pinch of salt), the regeneration between Two and Three is an updated version of Confession Dial’s YouTube video from a year ago. They were allegedly contacted by the BBC and asked to make an updated version of the regeneration.
Yeah my bad, I was typing that while sorting out the quiz on discord so I forgot to write a bit more.
Yes, 6B has been around for a long time. And it’s an interesting idea. I’m fine with that idea, but I’m very specifically not fine with it being used as a weapon to “decanonise” the Fugitive Doctor.
But yeah it’s been used for some interesting stuff.
Don’t worry, Doctor Who has no canon
To be fair I don’t think the Fugitive Doctor behaves like our Doctor at all - she uses weapons, she works for the Division, she isn’t as friendly.
And I subscribe to the idea that her TARDIS was faulty, got stuck as a police box, then when her mind was wiped and she became the First Doctor, he picked the same TARDIS (which had been fixed) (because Clara told him to take that one) and then the fix wasn’t permanent so it broke again.
I liked what Jo said in the interview for Coda about her Doctor, describing her as acting a bit like a headmistress. The Doctor often takes on the role of a tutor or teacher, so I like the idea that Fugitive has still got a bit of that, but in a very different way.
I get your point, but it still doesn’t work for me.
It really undermines a lot of character development the classic Doctors go through for me. I hate the idea of the Doctor having a companion before Ian and Barbara, I hate the idea of them having the TARDIS before escaping from Gallifrey with Susan, I overall don’t like to know about the Doctor’s life before that point and it doesn’t help that it’s tied to the Timeless Child as I said I prefer them to be just one Time Lord in a million.
And I don’t see fitting Jo in the 6b as decanonizing her, but just shuffling the order to make that characters beats work better. That’s just me though, and I get what you mean.
Plus on that front of Fugitive being more violent and having questionable morals: I just don’t trust New Who with that anymore. I think we are in this fluffy era where the Doctor doesn’t do anything wrong (or at least they didn’t mean it, you guys!) and we know the BBC keep a tight leash on that. The War Doctor is the best example of that, he is supposedly a incarnation that commited atrocities… but he never does. He just feel guilty about the circumstances again, and again and again. And while it can work, meh, it’s really repetitive and diminishes his character for me too.
Big Finish has also been playing safe with other incarnations for some time.
It’s worth remembering that die hard fans like us are not the core intended audience for these edits. My older sister absolutely loved The Daleks in colour. Because she has ADHD and is more of casual fan, it would be simply impossible to get her to engage or for her to be able to enjoy classic Doctor Who in any other form. The idea of putting her in front of the 241 minute original is farcical, but we’re both very hyped for this!
This is outreach to new and casual fans, giving them a flavour of the show’s history. And giving the classic show a new audience. Some of whom will then hopefully dip into the unedited stuff.
