Dr. Who

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the fact that the kid that made the absorblof is one of the people I am seeing most disappointed/pointing out the errors of the RTD2 era is funny to me, almost Shakespearian
"Et. tu, brute"
 
Lone Star said:
I'll bite the bullet and ask the question. In real sincerity, is the series really worth watching from the start? Obviously not the recent stuff, but does the really old stuff, the very earliest stuff, actually hold up?
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Hartnell' run is rough as hell because they were making shit up as they went along, a schizophrenic tobe due to the back and forth on being both a historical edutainment show and scifi fare, and most of the lore did not exist until the very end of the Troughton/second doctor run.

Troughton's second doctor run is more widely available thanks to animated reconstructions these days and lays a lot of groundwork for the tone of the show.

Registration said:
I know, but most people won't access those media and stick to the easily consumable stuff. My favorite Star Wars of all time is a comic based on a game that is based on the Star Wars films. In series that get bigger as the years went by, even stuff like TV series get swept by.

Which Terminator fan watcheed Sara Connor Chronicles? Which Indiana Jones read a single novel in the dozen published? The same goes for any big franchise. You can create as many adjacent works possible, but the first sequel is the most important one. Another example of a bad sequel that kinda ruins the possibilities of other stories: Jurassic Park films, the second is so fucking ass.

I think even Star Trek TNG kinda fumbled with it at the start, but back then you could have two or three seasons of a middling series and get even more seasons. You had so much more episodes, nowadays you get less and less that you can't afford to fuck up.
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The problem with IJ is that Lucas was absurdly overprotective of the franchise which killed any hope of it creating a proper expanded universe. Marvel explicitly stated they cancelled their IJ comic in the 80s because Lucas kept rejecting plots and artwork, often forcing down to the wire changes that made it not worth the headache. And the less said about the young Indiana Jones Chronicles the better, as Lucas's mandates killed that show dead.
 
Indiana Jones after George Lucas abandoned creative control is worse, though. His four Indiana Jones movies are masterpieces, but without him you end up with a shitty man bad woman good movie and muh punching Nazis game.
 
Lone Star said:
I'll bite the bullet and ask the question. In real sincerity, is the series really worth watching from the start? Obviously not the recent stuff, but does the really old stuff, the very earliest stuff, actually hold up?
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I'll second most of what @MirrorNoir said, but I'll also add that pacing is a major issue in the really old episodes where they really stretched the stories (and the budget) with not enough content to justify them lasting as long as they did, an issue that would last all the way up to Pertwee. In fact, Pertwee's first season is particularly bad about this; three out of four stories of the entire season are seven episodes! I distinctly remember The Ambassadors of Death in particular not having enough plot to justify it's length. In the other hand, you do sometimes get something like The Keys of Marinus which turns each individual episode into it's own little mini-adventure.

I also have to respect The Web Planet's ambition; the big monster is just a giant pile of shredded paper, but it still impresses me that the production team felt confident enough to come up with a story with no human guest characters at all and instead giving you a bunch of blokes bumping into each other in giant papier-mache ant costumes.

Honestly, I'd say it really depends. You get shoestring budget, not all that amazing writing sometimes, and a lot of it is carried almost entirely by the actors being committed to the bit.
 
Lone Star said:
I'll bite the bullet and ask the question. In real sincerity, is the series really worth watching from the start? Obviously not the recent stuff, but does the really old stuff, the very earliest stuff, actually hold up?
Click to expand...
I'm watching all the Classic Who seasons that are mostly available on Tubi right now. My hope is to get up to Doctor Seven which I actually remember as a kid were on reruns and my first exposure because nuWho. There's some gaps in the First Doctor Hartnell era but those are available elsewhere. I'm enjoying it for the most part but some story arcs are a slog to get thru. As mentioned by others the first seasons are a bit weird because the lore hadn't been established yet. There's also a lot of production hell background when you think of it the shit going down with the recent seasons aren't all that different from the earliest seasons because since time memoriam the fucking BBC ALWAYS TRIES TO FUCKING KILL WHO. Rant over but yeah if you're not committed to watch it all maybe check out Doctor Four which next to the Tenth Doctor was the most popular Doctor Who seasons.
 
Mmemes said:
I'm watching all the Classic Who seasons that are mostly available on Tubi right now. My hope is to get up to Doctor Seven which I actually remember as a kid were on reruns and my first exposure because nuWho. There's some gaps in the First Doctor Hartnell era but those are available elsewhere. I'm enjoying it for the most part but some story arcs are a slog to get thru. As mentioned by others the first seasons are a bit weird because the lore hadn't been established yet. There's also a lot of production hell background when you think of it the shit going down with the recent seasons aren't all that different from the earliest seasons because since time memoriam the fucking BBC ALWAYS TRIES TO FUCKING KILL WHO. Rant over but yeah if you're not committed to watch it all maybe check out Doctor Four which next to the Tenth Doctor was the most popular Doctor Who seasons.
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I think two to five is the high point of the classic series personally.

Also in all fairness, the current problem isn't the BBC trying to cancel Doctor Who, it's that the BBC is a dying, tyrannical entity that taxpayers finally rightfully got fed up with and voted to see destroyed and Doctor Who is an unfortunate casualty of that. Honestly, Doctor Who's current death is the result of nationalized entertainment and broadcasting being a concept that should've been aborted after the end of World War II.
 
There's not much in the way of alternatives to Doctor Who. An intelligent, peaceful protagonist who encounters bizarre creatures and situations and solves problems with his genius rather than action. But then current Who doesn't seem much like that anymore anyway. The closest thing to Doctor Who I can think of is The Librarians. Which is a little more child-friendly - what we call Family Entertainment. Excellent cast made up of talented actors who for some reason either never hit the movie scene or didn't stay there (has Rebecca Romijn, formerly Mystique). Budget wise it's kind of like middle-age Doctor Who in its gravel pits era and succeeds for the same reason it did - intelligent writing and charming characters. Hell, it even has a dash of Time Travel and call outs to Doctor Who and others.
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I wanted to like the Librarians. I really did. But the only episode I saw was about a black woman having her idea for a movie stolen by the evil white guy she worked for, all of the male characters in the episode (save the one played by John Larroquette,) were dimwits, and all of the women were super smart and capable. Maybe I didn't give it a fair shake, but it just seemed like tow the line Lefty Progressiveness, Urban Fantasy edition, so I didn't watch anymore.
 
Pokemon Conquistador said:
I wanted to like the Librarians. I really did. But the only episode I saw was about a black woman having her idea for a movie stolen by the evil white guy she worked for, all of the male characters in the episode (save the one played by John Larroquette,) were dimwits, and all of the women were super smart and capable. Maybe I didn't give it a fair shake, but it just seemed like tow the line Lefty Progressiveness, Urban Fantasy edition, so I didn't watch anymore.
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Just FYI, I didn't get a notification about your reply due to the way you quoted me, I just happened to see the thread bump and looked.

I really had to rack my brains to figure out what episode that could possibly be. Finally scanned through a list of episodes and worked out it was "The Librarians And the Silver Screen". The one where they get trapped in someone else's script. I don't really remember any idpol stuff in it. It's quite likely with this show it's just the happenstance of casting. It was very light on Woke stuff in general. This is also from Season 4 which was the final and weakest season. Though it did have Rachel Nichols in a recurring role in it.

Cassandra is one of the smartest of the main characters, that is true. But the others are very smart too and saving the day is usually evenly divided. Flynn is the true polymath of the group but held back by certain character flaws. Often the moral of the show is that all of them need to work together on their unique areas to pull things off. Eve (Rebecca Romijn) is the Guardian. She's supposed to be preternaturally tough and the group's fighter.

I mean I don't want to oversell it - it leans more towards kids but it's smart enough that adults can enjoy it too and I enjoy the sheer number of in-jokes, references and cleverness. And it has an amazingly good list of guest actors. Bruce Campbell as Santa Claus, Alicia Witt as Morgan Le Fay, Rachel Nichols, Lesley-Ann Brandt (Maze from Lucifer if you saw that).

What I think is a sign of good writing is when something works specifically because of the characters. Stone picking out historical artefacts to hinder the villain only makes sense because of who he is and only works because of who the villain is. And the reveal of the bluff is completely a Stone thing.




I said I didn't want to oversell it. Now I am! But Flynn is the closest thing to the Doctor in character I've seen in any other media and the show is about as close to Doctor Who as you can reasonably get despite not being about Time Travel and not being Sci-Fi.
 
1000012459.webp

Hear me out.
 
really in need of a distraction lately and I don't want to pay for streaming services
unable to torrent for reasons I can't really change until a few years from now at best. Looking for a way to watch Who in as complete a format as possible. I really don't care about anything New past maybe Series 10/11 (I love Capaldi but Bill Potts is too much for me). Anybody got any good places to look?
 
Anonitolia said:
really in need of a distraction lately and I don't want to pay for streaming services
unable to torrent for reasons I can't really change until a few years from now at best. Looking for a way to watch Who in as complete a format as possible. I really don't care about anything New past maybe Series 10/11 (I love Capaldi but Bill Potts is too much for me). Anybody got any good places to look?
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The place you are looking for is Tubi.
 
12345 said:
The place you are looking for is Tubi.
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thank you for the link, friend

I hate to ask for more, but I seem to have underestimated exactly how many seasons of Classic Who are publicly available :story:

Are there any specific serials you'd recommend watching first? I've been considering just downloading everything and throwing the entire series on shuffle, but I feel like that might end up very schizophrenic with how many multi-parters I know the early series has
 
I would say 3-5 are pretty good with 4 being the longest of all the Doctors. The first couple of seasons can be a bit of a slog to get through - some people really find it difficult to get though black and white shows/movies; it's filmed differently, the whole feel is off really. First season you have them doing more educational stuff, times in history and all that. He's a grumpy old man who travels around with his granddaughter. Season 2 is more, I dunno... Space Hippy? But also grumpy just in a different way. 3 and 4 give the best insults but 3 was weird because he was going through his martial arts phase. But in all honesty ask someone different and they will probably have a core of favourites. I don't think the lore as it were really didn't start until 2 if that's your thing but I could be wrong.

Specials you'll probably want to skip unless you've watched all the Doctors involved for it to make some sort of sense. Also some seasons of the earlier episodes might seem even shorter than normal. BBC used to shoot it, show it, and then use the film again. But once they stopped doing that there were some that were lost to water damage from a fire. - Just to explain some potential gasps in the lists. I just know Tubi had it,
 
12345 said:
I would say 3-5 are pretty good with 4 being the longest of all the Doctors. The first couple of seasons can be a bit of a slog to get through - some people really find it difficult to get though black and white shows/movies; it's filmed differently, the whole feel is off really. First season you have them doing more educational stuff, times in history and all that. He's a grumpy old man who travels around with his granddaughter. Season 2 is more, I dunno... Space Hippy? But also grumpy just in a different way. 3 and 4 give the best insults but 3 was weird because he was going through his martial arts phase. But in all honesty ask someone different and they will probably have a core of favourites. I don't think the lore as it were really didn't start until 2 if that's your thing but I could be wrong.

Specials you'll probably want to skip unless you've watched all the Doctors involved for it to make some sort of sense. Also some seasons of the earlier episodes might seem even shorter than normal. BBC used to shoot it, show it, and then use the film again. But once they stopped doing that there were some that were lost to water damage from a fire. - Just to explain some potential gasps in the lists. I just know Tubi had it,
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alright, thank you for all the info. I might start from 4, then? Or 5, not sure. Reading more into 3 he really does seem to be going for more of a weird Bond-esque figure than the kind of stuff I'm looking for in this immediate moment. I appreciate the reply
 
was looking up something about Davison while watching an old episode... apparently his birthday is a day after Capaldi's?
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They're only seven years apart, which is really funny to me given the age gaps of their Doctors. Davison's the youngest to ever be cast, Capaldi's the oldest, yet the actors are relatively close in age. Funny how that works out.
I know Smith's the actual youngest, but Davison held the title for nearly a quarter-century and was more fitting to the post. I also keep thinking he's still younger just because Davison has perpetual babyface unfortunately lol. Man's nearing his mid-70s and he honestly just looks the same as he did in his 20s, except now with a bigger forehead.
 
True, but he doesn't really feel like the youngest because he was an adult when most people encountered him as the youngest. It was very very weird for me when Matt Smith came along because the doctor being younger than me was just wrong to me somehow and took a while to get used to him.

Fun facts? I know you said you were interested in earlier seasons but Tenant married Davidson's daughter and she played Tenant's daughter in an episode and now they're married and they're transing the kid. But before you find it out it's pretty cool? Tenant was a huge fanboy before he started too.
 
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