New Dr Who

[Loredoctor]

Has the new series began over there? Doctor Who has just finished here and will be back at Christmas.

Yeah, it has just started.

Oh, and please don't spoil the ending!

[Plissken]

I'm a complete noob when it comes to Dr Who (we only had sporadic episodes on PBS when I was a kid, and I could never figure out what was going on), but I've gotta say, I'm a HUGE fan of the Doctor they've got on SciFi right now.

When is BBC America going to start playing new episodes? I'm sure I could live without a few What Not To Wear marathons to make room in the schedule...

[danlo]

3 Dr. Who episodes have been nominated for the Hugo award.

[taraswizard]

Hugo nominees are the same ones as Nebula nominated. Empty Child and Doctor Dances by Steve Moffat, Father's Day by Paul Cornel, Dalek by Rob Shearman. Empty Child and DD are my favorites from the firs season, followed by Unquiet Dead and [/u]Parting of the Ways[/u].

[Loredoctor]

Oh god, the new series is proving to be a disappointment. New Earth was below average, and Tooth and Claw was very average.

[Queeaqueg]

The last two were quite good. Ones with the Cyber Men were ok.

[Sevothtarte]

Spoilers for those who haven't seen the complete 2006 season:

Spoiler

I'm not sad at all to be rid of Rose, never liked her much... but Mickey leaving is a shame, he was great. The ending seemed rather american to me in that they left a backdoor open - if the viewers don't like the new companion(s), there'll always be a way for the Doctor to open a passage to the parallel world and get Rose & Co. back.

[matrixman]

Oh god, the new series is proving to be a disappointment. New Earth was below average, and Tooth and Claw was very average.

I seem to recall (in some other thread) CovJr saying he was disappointed, too. This is not looking good. I'm guessing we won't see the new season here in Canada until fall rolls around.

[Loredoctor]

The Girl in the Fireplace was an original and clever story badly marred by Tennant's over the top performance.

[Queeaqueg]

Tennant over performs in all of them. I think the other guy was beter.

[Loredoctor]

Tennant over performs in all of them. I think the other guy was beter.

I have to agree. Tennant is not that good.

[Loredoctor]

Okay, they've showed most of the season and I have to say this: David Tennant's Doctor is literally the worst doctor ever. He's simply painful to watch. It's now at the stage where I don't feel like watching the rest of the season or the next series.

[Menolly]

Okay, they've showed most of the season and I have to say this: David Tennant's Doctor is literally the worst doctor ever. He's simply painful to watch. It's now at the stage where I don't feel like watching the rest of the season or the next series.

Noooo!!!

I so didn't want to hear that!!!

[matrixman]

I'm perversely more fascinated now. I want to watch it just to see how bad Tennant is, according to Loremaster.

[Loredoctor]

This review sums up how I feel rather nicely:

Throughout the New Series so far, I'd perhaps come to accept that the Doctor isn't the man he used to be anymore. The Doctor was once a character for connoisseurs, a character who lived and breathed large and literate words and the finest in art and literature. Now he is pretty much down with the kids, using slang jargon and substituting scientific terms for words like 'thingy' and 'jiggery-pokery', and he's down with modern tastes: whether they be Muppets, Reality TV, Buddy Holly or Ian Dury . I actually had plans to do a fan fiction story (don't know if I can find the time for it these days though) that would fill in the blanks somewhat and suggest that perhaps after the Time War the Doctor had consciously changed his vocabulary to 21st century slang jargon because scientific or connoisseur terms reminded him too much and too painfully of the prestigious Time Lords, and also incidentally of the scientific clinical vocabulary of the Daleks.

Unfortunately it can't help being crystal clear the real reason why the Doctor now talks like this: because they want the Doctor to be 'cool' and to pander to the simple folk, and try to win over those who would rubbish the old Doctor for his old-fashioned and 'dated' mannerisms. Now in some ways there's nothing too wrong with that: the Doctor can still be a role model for being a good and strong-willed person, who can be an individual; he can be trendy without being dumb or a thug. Mind you, I think being a bit of a thug is sometimes necessary in certain situations.

I know fans who say that the problem with the modern Doctor is that he no longer comes across as an alien, he just seems like a human who's a bit mad. For the most part, I've been able to put the blinders on this process of chavving up the Doctor, but something about tonight's episode broke the suspension of disbelief completely. To see the Doctor gelling his hair in that 50's quiff, donning sunglasses and doing that 'you goin' my way doll?' impersonations and then putting the final foot in the boot when he towed out that moped, things just got too silly; and more than that, things stopped being alien completely.

Anyone might think I was screaming blasphemy at the Doctor getting a change of image, but anyone who's read my recent articles knows that I don't really subscribe to the idea of set rules about what is and isn't Doctor Who. To me, if we're talking about Doctor Who proper, then only ten stories in the whole of old series Doctor Who reached a perfection of the ideal version of Doctor Who, and maybe about twenty-five more got as close; Doctor Who rarely took itself too seriously. But the old series did stick fairly close to the rules of the Doctor's image and attire and by doing so they made him seem alien and distinctive without even trying. Even Eccleston's leather jacket seemed like a nice extension of the character being hardened by cosmic war. This episode seems to uproot that element quite violently and the Doctor's character was left there to dribble and soak in too much ADD and popcorn.


But that's inherently the problem, the Doctor doesn't come across as at-all believable here. He is simply doing the Tenth Doctor by the numbers: do funny in this scene, do angry and shouty in the next scene; it lacks substance really, and it must be said that part of this is the fault of the scripting, but its also the kind of thing that I think Christopher Eccleston could have done something brilliant with. To be fair, David Tennant's best scenes tend to be his more serious, brooding and restrained moments i.e. his "I'm so old now, I used to be so full of mercy" moment in School Reunion and the one angry scene he did well was in The Christmas Invasion, where incidentally he managed to rise above some terrible dialogue. However, here and in New Earth his anger just seems false, hollow and done with indulgence, and seems to centre around the writer's conceit that because the audience loved the angry Doctor of the Dalek episode, they should make him an angry Doctor in every other episode; I think the character of his Doctor should be geared away from the comical, aggressive or hyperactive, because that feels too much like borrowing from Eccleston's Doctor . . . .
And the moment where the Doctor reacts with a melodramatic, vengeful promise that 'nothing in the world will stop me now' is just awful on every level; I don't object to drawing on a more vengeful type of Doctor, but only if it's done right. This however was hollywoodised, cliched, artificial, painfully predictable and ultimately has never made the Doctor's bond with his companion seem more false than it does here (and that's saying something because there's plenty of times the Doctor/Rose relationship has suffered from sledgehammer scripting).

[Trapper]

This review sums up how I feel rather nicely:

... but its also the kind of thing that I think Christopher Eccleston could have done something brilliant with. To be fair, David Tennant's best scenes tend to be his more serious, brooding and restrained moments i.e. his "I'm so old now, I used to be so full of mercy" moment in School Reunion and the one angry scene he did well was in The Christmas Invasion, where incidentally he managed to rise above some terrible dialogue.

And the moment where the Doctor reacts with a melodramatic, vengeful promise that 'nothing in the world will stop me now' is just awful on every level;

Basically what you're saying is that this incarnation of the doctor irritates you.

I'd say that about Hartnell and Troughton myself. Not to mention that red-headed dweeb that played the Sixth Doctor in the original. I never saw the 7th and 8th doctors, but what does that tell you?

I just saw the Black Hole episode in the new 2nd series and while I was only just a big enough fan of the original to read the books lent to me by a true megafan , I think that any cheesiness in the re-make is outweighed by the **** in the original.

Do you really think that the Brigadier was a believable character in the "Giant Robot" series in the Original? I'm really glad the new series only paid the briefest of homages to K-9. Because K-9 was S***. Ewoks, anyone?

Sometimes we look back with too much fondness. If I was to be honest I'd say that only a few episodes of the original really got to me. (Green Slime with maggots leading to Big Flies spurting said GS; anything involving the really-incredibly-fake-looking-Cybermats that weren't included in the New series when the Cybermen came along; the guy who used to feed people to his plants, etc)

I do wish that Ecclestone had stayed on as he was the actor that brought this new life to us.

But Tennant is not as bad as some have made him out to be.

Instead of blowing the whole series production-budget on the first two episodes of a series they seem to be delivering high-quality production values in every episode.

I watched this show every weekday night right after The Goodies in the late '70's. I'm OK with the new version.

[Loredoctor]

Something tells me you're Australian. I missed that episode as I was on a date.

I see what you mean, though. But basically, Tennant just irritates me.

[Loredoctor]

Update: I just watched The Impossible Planet, and it may indeed be one of the best Doctor Who stories ever (well, it's the first part). Absolutely outstanding.

[Menolly]

Lore, you do know you're playing with my emotions now, right?

Is The Impossible Planet from the new series or an older episode?

[Loredoctor]

Lore, you do know you're playing with my emotions now, right?

Is The Impossible Planet from the new series or an older episode?

New series.