Watched The Macra Terror episode 3 last week. Kudos to the animation team for managing to fill what felt like 5 minutes of Jamie wandering silently around a mine shaft whilst being stalked by equally silent Macra! Heaven knows what that was like originally what with the immobility of the original props - can’t see that they were scuttling very much.
Also watched the first part of Enemy of the Bane and the sheer joy and yet melancholy of seeing Nicholas Courtney being brilliant as the Brig was almost tear-inducing. Especially alongside the hugely missed Elisabeth Sladen.
I’ve watched The Stolen Earth and Journey’s End today.
There are a bunch of good moments in it, but ultimately it just feels like RTD sitting on the floor and playing with all the action figures of the main characters from those first four series.
I love the whole fake-out regeneration with the Handy Doctor and the DoctorDonna, that’s a great idea (which is probably why he did something quite similar in the Giggle…).
And the resolution with Donna getting her mind wiped against her will was heartbreaking and a really good ending, and I think it should have stayed that way honestly.
A bunch of flying CGI Daleks gets a bit boring so it was good to bring in Davros, but I think he is played waaaay over the top. He has a moment very similar to Zaroff, but much worse in my eyes. And it makes zero sense that he tries to wipe out the whole of reality, but when it doesn’t work he calls the Doctor “The Destroyer of Worlds” in a really weird way, pot calling kettle and all that. If that had been delivered like the Malloy Davros would have, it would have carried some weight. Über-campy Davros doesn’t work for me.
And Dalek Caan
Rose is so weird in this one. The Earth has been moved across space along with 26 other planets, there are Daleks everywhere, she knows something very bad is coming with the stars going out - and still she only cares about finding the Doctor for selfish reasons, and is bitchy about Martha when she finds out she travelled with the Doctor.
And I kind of get the feeling that Billie Piper has forgotten how Rose talks.
The Warp star that comes out of nowhere is a bit stupid honestly, and the bit about a TARDIS being designed to be operated by six people is a sure way for me to see the inside of my skull.
Still this is the best of the Tennant finales from RTD 1 for me by quite a bit.
So far, you mean! You’re about to move on to the superb 2009 specials and the epic finale, The End of Time! Surely, it must be the best finale! Right?!
Doing Resurrection of the Daleks at the moment; can’t believe I hadn’t seen this one. You can definitely tell that Nick Briggs gets a lot of his inspiration from this story; plenty of military business, a grim and gritty atmosphere, Imperial Daleks smashing their way through airlocks, all of these things will have massive influence on early Big Finish, and without surprise. This is a blueprint for a Doctor Who that is only tangentially for children, I think perhaps stemming from the idea that the fanbase has aged up and needs stories with harder edges.
Sadly, Eric Saward has a lot of failings as a writer. He’s very in the Nation mould, where he’s good at linking us between big action set pieces but when it comes to actual characters, he falls rather flat. He clearly doesn’t know what to do with the companions - Tegan is bedridden for the entire first half, which is sort of horrid considering this is her final episode, and Turlough falls through the Time Corridor offscreen about ten minutes in and then spends the rest of Part 1 wordlessly sneaking through corridors and avoiding Daleks until he’s just caught at the end anyway. Five is also, to some extent, a non-character, warped and buffeted by this narrative, so clearly cribbing from Star Wars and Aliens, to such an extent that he spends half of it waving a pistol around and joins in rather willingly in gangland executioning a Dalek mutant. Wildly out of character.
But it does clip along and it’s compelling in the way that lots of explosions and deaths are. Terry Molloy’s first appearance as Davros is, I will admit, hammier than a Margate Meat Raffle, but I’ve always loved Molloy howling in evil so that’s mostly a bonus for me (even if the reveal that Davros is actually in the episode at a all is so badly fumbled.)
Actually let’s talk about that because there are two very opposite moments in this story; the first is when the Daleks smash their way through the airlock shield, which is amazing, dynamic, and actually, despite their presence in the episode title, shocking! The Daleks are a military force here, and their appearance is unexpected. On the contrary, once they start mentioning a “prisoner” we can all kind of figure that out for ourselves, but there’s no reveal! Davros is sort of just lurking in the back of the frame while they talk about him, like he’s in the dentist’s waiting room, it’s so weird!
About 8 minutes into a rewatch of The Timeless Child following my recent streak of Chibnall goodwill and… yeah, this is a rough one.
The “lets pretend to be Cybermen to escape” plot feels sort of like this began as a Dalek story and only got the Cybermen copy pasted in later. We have Dhawan at his most mid-2010s edgelord and while the energy is certainly there… yeah this is a no from me. (“It’s red because it’s bathed in the blood of our people”? seriously?)
Also… no, I really do hate that Gallifrey was destroyed again and will never understand this decision. Complain about the Time Lords being boring all you want, but undoing the moment of sheer triumph in Day and returning to the Davies status quo is another thing entirely.
The thing about being the writer is that he could easily have chosen to make them not boring I can’t remember TTC that well, but I must say I was disappointed by the Gallifrey destruction thing again too. Aren’t we kind of over the ‘last of my kind’ angst by now? (also that never made sense to me either because surely not every single Time Lord EVER was on Gallifrey that day??)
Not to mention some of them could have gotten to TARDIS’s in time, and there are a couple time lords that would normally be off planet. I think it’d be more fun if we started seeing a bunch of Time Lords that survived turn up here and there, no backing from Gallifrey, and not necessarily respecting its laws.
(Though it’d also be fun if during an episode, a random character just suddenly recognised the Doctor and called him “Lord President” as the highest ranking surviving Gallifreyian they knew of…)
With the framing of The Doctor as a “foundling” I worry that we’re going to get a return to the very dull dreary “last of my kind” nonsense so we have more excuses for Ncuti to turn on the waterworks.
My hope is that we get an actual look into what a Time Lord diaspora could look like, because functionally that’s what the renegades and the Sisterhood have always been - Time Lords who in some way or another rejected or were rejected by the society and planet that made them and forced to search for another way. It’s why I like Iris so much - she lets The Doctor interact with a Time Lord in a way that isn’t just “antagonist/protagonist” or “in group/out group” coded, it’s much more “This is what it means to have this power, and be from this place, and this is how we deal with it.”
You’ve been pretty thorough with it, but how I wish Ressurection of the Daleks was better. On paper it should be great and it does have a lot going for it, and being Davison’s one encounter with the Daleks on screen you really want it to be great but alas, it’s a dud. Narrowly escapes my bottom three for the era.
The Fifth Doctor and Davros weirdly doesn’t work for me? Both great actors but something about the dynamic isn’t working for this particular pairing.
Thankfully there’s Revelation of the Daleks the following year, a vastly superior grim Dalek story and with what I’d say is the strongest Doctor/Davros pairing we’ve ever had.
Yeah, it is one of these ones where I’ve rewatched the ending with Tagan a good deal more times then the serial, because it was the best part. (Not that she left, but how it was done.)
What I said here still stands. While Dhawan definitely improved as the episode went on, it still edged a bit too close to cringiness for my taste at times. That said, the powerpoint presentation was… a lot mor bareable than I remember? And I don’t actually hate the idea of the Timeless Child tbh, especially now RTD2 is building on it.
As a finale… yeah this is actually pretty decent. Maybe I’m delulu here cause I watched Ranskoor Av Kolos yesterday (which went in my estimations about 0.5 to 2.0) and this is better than that. The bit where the theme kicked in in the Matrix, 13 and the Master’s interactions were cool, Ryan actually got to do something, and I liked Ko Sharmus. This was a serviceable series finale and it’s gone from 0.5 to 2.5. Egads, what would 2021-era me be saying…
We know for a fact that not every Time Lord was on Gallifrey at that time because the Doctor kicked Rassilon off of the planet in Hell Bent, and the General seemed more than happy with him staying gone. So unless I missed something about Rassilon dying off camera, the Doctor is canonically not the last of the Time Lords. Though I guess I can’t blame the Doctor for *ahem* forgetting things that happened during Hell Bent.
I agree that destroying Gallifrey was pointless. It also makes no sense that it took a war with the Daleks that nearly ended all of reality to “destroy” Gallifrey the first time, but a single Time Lord was able to do it in a fraction of the time without the Doctor even noticing? I really wish we could have had some proper NuWho Gallifrey/Time Lord stories. They don’t have to be boring, there is (was ) so much potential there!
I’ve said this before but I really think destroying Gallifrey again was such a poor decision. We just got it back, in an amazing feature-length episode Chibnall!!
Bringing back the Time Lords could open up so many new story ideas that NuWho hasn’t yet touched.
And since RTD loves bringing back old characters, we could have had Leela! Romana! Even characters that originated in Big Finish’s Gallifrey series (I haven’t listened yet but I know someone above who has…)
But instead it’s back to the “last of the Time Lords”. I really hope this gets reversed soon! But then we will need an episode where Gallifrey is found to be back, which is just rehashing past stories again. Ughhh.
I can’t remember TTC that well, but I must say I was disappointed by the Gallifrey destruction thing again too. Aren’t we kind of over the ‘last of my kind’ angst by now? (also that never made sense to me either because surely not every single Time Lord EVER was on Gallifrey that day??)
) so much potential there!