New Doctor Who – Forgetting the Boys

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This is going to be a crazed, foamy-mouthed, only slightly coherent rant. There will be much swearing. You have been warned.

I think one of the issues I have with New Who, other than I sometimes find the writing lazy [1], is the emphasis on the female companions. This emphasis is not from the production team, I’m assuming, but from the marketing.

Now, you’re probably sitting there going, “Um… Danny, you poor misguided slut, the old series was chock full o’ female companions.” Yes it was, but for most of the series’ history, it often had a male companion travelling with the Doctor, or not far off i.e. the Brigadier was right there for most of the Pertwee era. From 1963 through to 1975 there was at least one story a season featuring a recurring male companion. Leaving out K9, who was introduced in 1977, the next run of male companions went from 1980 through until 1984.

All these guys have been considered companions. You wouldn’t produce say, a Best of the Companions of Original Doctor Who Special and not mention Ian, or Jamie, or the Brigadier.

But that’s what happened with the New Series Special on the Companions a few years back. No mention of Mickey or Captain Jack. At all. It was all Rose, Martha, and Donna.  This despite the fact that the New Series had a reasonable stable of semi-regular male companions. Continue reading →

Classic Who – Four of my Favourites

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So it’s been way too long since I last posted here, mainly due to life getting in the way.  But you’re not interested in that, you want to know about some of my favourite Doctor Who stories, don’t you?  Well that’s good, because I feel like telling you about them!

Now, I need to note here that this is by no means an exhaustive list.  There are some stories I haven’t seen for decades, or in the case of a few Patrick Troughton stories, haven’t seen/heard at all [1].  It also isn’t a list of what I consider to be the best Doctor Who stories, or all my favourites, just four that I find myself coming back to again and again.

The Daleks’ Master Plan
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Introducing Lexx – Black comedy and fantasy SF

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This introduction to Lexx is dedicated to the memory of Lex Gigeroff.

I’d had this piece in mind for a while, and had written a first draft in early December. Around Christmas word came down that Lex Gigeroff, one of the creators and writers of Lexx, had passed away. This saddened me more deeply than the passing of many, many other creative people because he’d played such in important part in crafting a stunningly unique and surreal universe.

The first series of four Lexx telemovies came out in 1997. I was lucky enough to happen upon the first one quite by accident. Knowing nothing about the series, this was the best possible way to discover it. Within the first few minutes, during a song, I was completely blown away.

With this introduction to the series I’ve chosen to tell you virtually nothing about the characters and the situations in which they find themselves. The reason being that I honestly think the first taste of Lexx is best appreciated by knowing as little detail as possible. It’s a series that does have a sense of scope and wonder to it, and I’d like to maintain that.
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It’s not the size, it’s how you use it.

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(Contains major spoilers for Lexx season two, Spider-Man 2, Superman the Movie, and minor spoilers for Alien, Aliens, Die Hard and Die Hard 4, and both versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Has a swear word.

May contain traces of nuts.)

One of the issues I’m having an increasing problem with is size. Movies and television are both guilty, and I’m just a bit over it.

Once the scale of a thing exceeds a certain level, it’s hard to maintain a comfortable suspension of disbelief. Now that doesn’t have to just be about physical size, it can be able the scale of a concept, or the way the action or drama is built.

Hollywood doesn’t seem to quite get this, and by way of example I’ll pull out one of the many, many pointless remakes. The one I’m thinking of is The Day the Earth Stood Still, with Keanu Reeves. Let’s forget about all the ways in which it’s emotionally wrong, and the way they stuffed up Klaatu’s character, and simply look at Gort.  Continue reading →

Classic Who – The Viewing of the Lost

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I started writing this post a week or so back, and pretty much had it mostly finished when yesterday morning I found out that they’d discovered two missing episodes!

For those who are unaware, the two episodes for were Galaxy 4 episode 3, and The Underwater Menace episode 2.

The amusing thing is, they are both episodes that I don’t think are very good.  It’s the universe testing the true fans – ‘let’s see who is happy when they find out it’s these two that have been found.’

I suspect I’m a real fan, because nothing could take the shine off the fangasm I’d had from this find.  For me, any episode found is akin to winning the lottery in it’s likelihood.  Finding two is unbelievable.

Anyway, I’ve made the appropriate edits needed below.  This is basically a run down of the resources available to you if you’re curious about experiencing old Who, but aren’t quite sure how to get around the gaps caused by so many episodes being destroyed or lost.

Okay, so I suppose the first place to start is telling you what you probably already know – lots of early Doctor Who is missing.  Oh, it exists on audio, and some even have telesnaps [1], but if you listen to some fans, the loss of these episodes was as bad as any disaster in human history.  Titanic? Piffle!  The total deathtoll of all the wars in recorded history? Don’t waste my time. The Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919? A close second, but no.

Don’t you understand?  Some episodes of a television show I like were destroyed!  Who cares about all those other classic or important shows that no longer exist at all because of the cull, this is a show I liked!

Too cynical? Maybe, but if you’re one of the folks new to the fandom, you’ve probably already come across some of these people. But don’t worry, you don’t need to have your sense of perspective surgically removed to be a Doctor Who fan.

Snarkiness aside, it is a shame about the lost episodes, and possibly the best way to appreciate it is this –

William Hartnell made 134 episodes in his original run, and 44 are still missing.  That’s about 33%.
Patrick Troughton made 119 episodes, and 62 are still missing, or around 52% of his run.

So for the New Who fans, here’s the Eccleston and Tennant runs with those equivalent percentages gone.  Just try to imagine that you can never, ever, ever watch the crossed out stories again.  Oh, and that you only ever got to see them once the first time around. Continue reading →

Classic Who – The Why of the Daleks

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The Daleks just got that much cooler...

Right, after a lengthy Twitter conversation involving the lovely @knuckle_salad, I figured I’d do a post or eight-hundred aimed specifically for the new fans of Doctor Who, the ones who came in some time in the last six or seven years and know little to nothing about the original series.

Now, if you have no interest in the original series, that’s fine.  I don’t know what the heck you’re doing here reading this, but it really is fine.  We all have different likes and dislikes.  For instance, I love the original series of Star Trek, I think Next Generation is mostly good, I adore Deep Space Nine once it gets moving, Voyager was like having my mouth washed out with chunky diarrhoea, and Enterprise was one of the worst screwed up opportunities I have ever seen, except for Season Four which was really clever and interesting.

Point is, different things appeal to different people.  Despite the claims of some fans, you’re actually allowed to not like the original series of Doctor Who.  It’s not a perfect series.  Its strength was always story-telling, characters, and ideas.  But some stories are severely lacking in one or more of these elements.

Also, huge chunks of the first six years are missing.  There are some television shows from that era where nothing at all exists.  Where Doctor Who fans are unbelievably fortunate is that all the missing bits still exist on audio.  And while audio isn’t an ideal format for some stories, it’s better than nothing at all.

We also have telesnaps [1] from some of the missing episodes, so combined with the audios, we can hear and see what was going on.  Again, it’s not ideal, but we’re very lucky to have even that.

I think I’ll try recommending some stories for new Doctor Who fans next time around, unless someone out there throws me a topic too yummy to resist. Which is very likely. So don’t wait for the list, but if you have questions, write to me and I’ll do my best to answer them without lying too much making too many errors.

But this time I want to talk about the Daleks.  There are a lot of people who simply cannot understand the fascination with them.  They’re short little robot [2] dudes.  What is it about the Daleks that made them such a success right from the beginning?

Okay, to address this, you have to try to understand where they come from, from a media and cultural perspective.

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The Man the Doctor Built…

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You know, when I think about it, the effect Doctor Who has had on my life is pretty damned substantial.

It was the first SF TV show to really grab my attention because it was so different to everything else I saw. It wasn’t slick looking. It didn’t have amazing effects. The people didn’t have that vaguely-too-good-looking-to-be-real-people thing that American shows are full of.

What it had were stories with quirky and interesting characters. And unlike so much television, the quirks came across as a natural part of the characters, as opposed to something deliberately written into the script to be oh-so quirky and odd.

The Doctor and his companions were smart, but capable of making mistakes. Fearless but still able to be scared and vulnerable. They were ready to fight and kill, but it was never the preferred option. The way to beat the villains wasn’t to have better weapons, or to be more violent, but to outthink them.

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