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Doctor Who |OT| Pre-Series 8 Discussion - He's A-Coming

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twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
very surprised that matt smith beat david tenant (but happy all the same)

day of the doctor at number one...hm
 
some info from the top stories / Doctors from the latest DWM:

I look forward to see Day of the Doctor's gentle tumble a bit over the years. 1st overall is definitely a result of it's recency. Same thing with Smith being 2nd on the Doctor list. I think Tennant (or maybe someone else...) will end up reclaiming it eventually. Also, it's cool to see Troughton ranking pretty highly. In older polls, he ranked much lower. Hooray for finding lost episodes!
 

Boem

Member
I'll never understand the love Rings of Akathen gets on GAF. I think it's easily the worst Matt Smith episode, and one of the worst of the entire series overal - outside of the great speech towards the end that is. The rest of the episode just makes me cringe. That awful, awkward barking scene, that terrible child actress, the flimsy plot and a villain that's defeated by self-indulgent singing... Gaf's opinions just seem the polar opposite of me and the people I watch it with. I watched it with a friend and his new girlfriend. It was her introduction to the show, and almost made her swear of the entire series.

Oh well, different tastes and all that. I also wouldn't have placed Day of the Doctor so high though, as fun as it was. I don't know what I would place as the best DW story ever - maybe the War Games, but a lot of the fun of that episode comes from having seen everything that came before it. It's just the perfect end to the black and white era.
 
some info from the top stories / Doctors from the latest DWM:

http://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/the-top-stories-doctors-according-to-dwm-2014-63506.htm

Top Ten:

1. The Day of the Doctor (92.06%)
2. Blink (91.87%)
3. Genesis of the Daleks (91.60%)
4. The Caves of Androzani (90.60%)
5. City of Death (90.30%)
6. The Talons of Weng-Chiang (90.15%)
7. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances (89.48%)
8. Pyramids of Mars (88.26%)
9. Human Nature/The Family of Blood (87.90%)
10. Remembrance of the Daleks (87.88%)

Bottom Ten:

232. The Space Museum (53.78%)
233. The Rings of Akhaten (53.44%)
234. The Dominators (50.32%)
235. The Space Pirates (47.23%)
236. Underworld (46.68%)
237. Time-Flight (45.74%)
238. Timelash (45.22%)
239. Time and the Rani (45.09%)
240. Fear Her (42.68%)
241. The Twin Dilemma (40.18%)

Favorite Doctor:

1. Tom Baker (21.69%)
2. Matt Smith (15.57%)
3. David Tennant (15.49%)
4. Patrick Troughton (12.09%)
5. Jon Pertwee (8.72%)
6. Peter Davison (6.11%)
7. Sylvester McCoy (5.38%)
8. Christopher Eccleston (4.39%)
9. William Hartnell (4.04%)
10. Paul McGann (3.31%)
11. Colin Baker (2.52%)
12. John Hurt (0.68%)

The Day of the Doctor is not even top 20 material for me, so I'm surprised it's number one for so many people, although as said that'll probably disipate as time goes by. Everything else deserves to be there. As I said, it'd be remembrance or war games for me.

The Space Museum doesn't deserve to be anywhere near that worst ep list, simply on the strength of it's first ep. Yes the rest are pump, but there's a lot of Who that's bad all the way through - The Web Planet isn't even there!

Doctors is a lot more subjective but being in the new series which is aired constantly on tv helps a lot. My personal favourite is McCoy.
 
I don't even think the Akhaten speech is all that great. A little over the top. Smith at his most indulgently overblown. In fact, I'm not really that keen on loud, speechifying 11. I prefer him when he's quiet and more contained.
 
Oh, yeah, take DOTD's placing with a huge pinch of salt. It's an excellent episode that nailed every element that it set out to accomplish, but I certainly don't think it's the best episode that the series has ever put out, and I don't think it'll be considered as such in years to come.

Of course, the best episode of Doctor Who ever made is nowhere to be found, but I've grown accustomed to people ignoring Gridlock's brilliance by this point. :(

I don't even think the Akhaten speech is all that great. A little over the top. Smith at his most indulgently overblown. In fact, I'm not really that keen on loud, speechifying 11. I prefer him when he's quiet and more contained.

I like big, grand speechifying 11, but I like him even better when he gets slapped down in short order. The Pandorica Opens and A Good Man Goes To War are the best examples, but it's a big recurring theme of his era- 11 should stop making his speeches, because it never solves the issue and almost always drops him in far worse trouble.

Also, Seven over Nine?

Never thought I'd see that.

I think fandom as a whole has massively cooled on Eccleston over the past year- hard to separate his real world attitude to the show from his portrayal, I suppose. A shame, really, although he brought it on himself.
 
Also, Seven over Nine?

Never thought I'd see that.

0cEMfE2.gif
 

Boem

Member
I do agree that the speeches lost some of their impact after getting so many of them. Matt's farewell speech sadly didn't do much for me because of that.

Best Modern Who season: season 5, without a doubt. I think the later seasons, especially season 7, suffered from trying to recapture the magic of that set of episodes, instead of trying something new and fresh. Best Modern Who episode: Vincent & the Doctor. A very brave episode for a show like Who, and I like it when they make their stories a bit more layered and symbolical.

Best Doctor: Throughton. Best companion: Jamie. Maybe Romana 2, before Lalla Ward divorced Tom Baker, ruining their on-screen relationship as well.

All other opinions are wrong, obviously.
 

Blader

Member
I'll never understand the love Rings of Akathen gets on GAF. I think it's easily the worst Matt Smith episode, and one of the worst of the entire series overal - outside of the great speech towards the end that is. The rest of the episode just makes me cringe. That awful, awkward barking scene, that terrible child actress, the flimsy plot and a villain that's defeated by self-indulgent singing... Gaf's opinions just seem the polar opposite of me and the people I watch it with. I watched it with a friend and his new girlfriend. It was her introduction to the show, and almost made her swear of the entire series.

Does anyone actually *love* Akathen though? I think it's just okay but forgettable myself, and I can't imagine most other impressions are any more positive than not. I think it's just more that it's probably one of the 10 worst ever in the show's history.
 
I liked it, but I wouldn't consider it one of the three best episodes of that season. Love is definitely the wrong word to use.

But there's no way it's so bad as to be one of the 10 worst episodes of the show's run. I just don't see it.
 
Problem is, if we bring Big Finish stuff into consideration, I would personally rank McGann well above Eccleston, at least tied with Tennant/Smith, easily.

I was thinking about this recently actually, since I've been listening to a fair bit of Big Finish to tide me over, and I totally agree. Only slight against him is that you can tell he's phoning it in sometimes if he doesn't think much of the script.

Either way, if we ever do get more televised McGann he'll easily top the list for me. I don't know what it is about him, but he just sums up what the Doctor should be like for me.
 

Dalek

Member
I'll never understand the love Rings of Akathen gets on GAF. I think it's easily the worst Matt Smith episode, and one of the worst of the entire series overal - outside of the great speech towards the end that is. The rest of the episode just makes me cringe. That awful, awkward barking scene, that terrible child actress, the flimsy plot and a villain that's defeated by self-indulgent singing... Gaf's opinions just seem the polar opposite of me and the people I watch it with. I watched it with a friend and his new girlfriend. It was her introduction to the show, and almost made her swear of the entire series.

Oh well, different tastes and all that. I also wouldn't have placed Day of the Doctor so high though, as fun as it was. I don't know what I would place as the best DW story ever - maybe the War Games, but a lot of the fun of that episode comes from having seen everything that came before it. It's just the perfect end to the black and white era.

I think it's awful too. Even the set design for the "audience" scene looks SO cheap...just a bad, corny episode all around. I agree-worst of the Smith run.
 
Either way, if we ever do get more televised McGann he'll easily top the list for me. I don't know what it is about him, but he just sums up what the Doctor should be like for me.

Feel the same way. If you'd asked me to describe the Doctor before I got interested in the series, McGann is what I'd have described.

"Where are we going?"
"Back of the ship."
"Why?"
"Because the front crashes first. Think it through."

So damn good.
 

Ser Goje

Member
If you're judging McGann by the TV Movie alone, you're doing it completely wrong. Dip into Big Finish some time.

Yeah that's why i said it.If they would've gave McGann a chance he would probably become on of the best Doctors. Big Finish, The Night of the Doctor. Really good stuff.

And Hurt too, he wasn't even supposed be a Doctor, He was an old man tired of war, and he Portrayed it perfectly.
 
4. Patrick Troughton (12.09%)

There's a headscratcher. I only saw one story + the Three Doctors, but he's really flipping annoying.

Also, Fear Her is better than half the last three seasons, even if it isn't great. Come at me!
 

odiin

My Apartment, or the 120 Screenings of Salo
4. Patrick Troughton (12.09%)

There's a headscratcher. I only saw one story + the Three Doctors, but he's really flipping annoying.

Also, Fear Her is better than half the last three seasons, even if it isn't great. Come at me!

I don't understand why people like Star Wars so much. I saw part of episode 1 once and I thought it was real bad.
 
If my sampling of Troughton is off, I'll take recommendations. The other story I saw was the one with the Fairytale world.

As far as Fear Her, it was a toothless unoffensive episode, which puts it ahead of much of the last three seasons, which were often both boring and very random. At least I cared what happened during it, which is more than I can say when you can see the reboot/undoing of the episode coming before you are halfway through.

In case it's not clear, I really don't like Moffat so far as showrunner. The overarching arcs are really forced and bad, and the gems are among the standaolne episodes. And I don't like Matt Smith either, though he got better over time.
 
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troughton2.gif

troughton3.gif


Troughton is one of the better Doctors. He's the one other Doctors always say they admired the most. He doesn't have has many complete stories at other Doctors but his middle season was for a long time considered one of the best seasons the show had.

Try Web of Fear, The Ice Warriors, Enemy of the World, Tomb of the Cybermen. If you don't liked 60's Who, these aren't going to change your mind. They were making 40+ episodes a year performed almost live.
 
So, for fun I went a looked at a list of episodes. And my statement was probably hyperbole. But Fear her isn't even the worst episode in the season it's in, let alone the whole of the revival. I'll take it over Vampires of Venice, Daleks in Manhattan, Idiot's Lantern, etc any day. Or what is my personal worst, Voyage of the Damned. And that's even-handed and not overly influenced by my Matt Smith dislike.

I probably reacted most to its inclusion not because I love it, but because I can think of so many more really heinous episodes, and I hadn't most of the other bottom ten. (I can't even remember Rings clearly, but it also didn't seem that bad.)
 

odiin

My Apartment, or the 120 Screenings of Salo
First two eps of space museum are good. But the last two are why the story has a "Fear Her-esque" reputation.

space-museum.gif

The first one in particular is really eerie and ominous and you don't quite know where it's going and then it's almost as if the writer had a stroke or something and then they brought someone else in to write the rest with no clue what the writer had planned.
 
The first one in particular is really eerie and ominous and you don't quite know where it's going and then it's almost as if the writer had a stroke or something and then they brought someone else in to write the rest with no clue what the writer had planned.

It does have Boba Fett in it as the leader of the rebels. He kills more people in this than in any Star Wars movie.

vlcsnap-2014-01-05-13h55m27s42.jpg
 
I think it's awful too. Even the set design for the "audience" scene looks SO cheap...just a bad, corny episode all around. I agree-worst of the Smith run.

Yeah, Akhaten is just bad. I know it's supposed to be a showcase of the weird aliens, like the cantina scene in Star Wars, and it's supposed to show us something about Clara as a character (caretaker?) but it just kinda falls flat in all those areas, cheap looking sets and costumes and confusing motivations being part of the problem. Plus the always-annoying screwdriver-as-a-weapon/shield scene that's become way too common recently...

The doctor's speech at the end though, amazing. Then Clara has to come up and ruin it with her stupid leaf.
 
Yeah, I overstated it. But Fear Her still gets all kinds of hate I don't understand. Heck, it *made sense* which puts it out of the bottom quartile just for starters.

I don't hate "Fear Her" and I don't really understand why other people seem to quite so much either... aaaaaaand I might just be the only person on the planet who really liked the whole torch lighting thing, I wish David Tennant had really lit the torch at the London Olympics :\ Does that make me a bad person?
Maybe
.
 

Dalek

Member
Yeah, Akhaten is just bad. I know it's supposed to be a showcase of the weird aliens, like the cantina scene in Star Wars, and it's supposed to show us something about Clara as a character (caretaker?) but it just kinda falls flat in all those areas, cheap looking sets and costumes and confusing motivations being part of the problem. Plus the always-annoying screwdriver-as-a-weapon/shield scene that's become way too common recently...

The doctor's speech at the end though, amazing. Then Clara has to come up and ruin it with her stupid leaf.

I love the Sonic Screwdriver-but that episode in particular is the epitome of it being used as a "Magic Wand"
 

Bluth54

Member
I love the Sonic Screwdriver-but that episode in particular is the epitome of it being used as a "Magic Wand"

I think they said in that episode that the monsters were sound based, so it makes sense that the sonic would be more effective against them then other monsters.
 
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