Dr Who Essentials

Oh and another question: should I watch The Infinite Quest before I get started on S4? Or it's never referenced from that season?

I haven't seen it myself... didn't even know what it was 'til I Wiki'd it

Whoops, wrong post

JJ

You're either gonna love or hate the S4 companion to start with... but I can almost guarantee you'll like her by the end

Since you're done with S3 now, I think I'll ask this again.

Just refering to season 3:
Favourite episode?
Least favourite episode?
Favourite monster/enemy?
Least favourite monster/enemy?
Any other comments on S3?

Oh, and how far are you into S4?

Just a classic series update-

The 2nd Doctor finale "The War Games" and the 5th Doctor Black Guardian Trilogy (Mawdryn Undead, Terminus, and Enlightenment) will be released on November 3rd.

Coming up in January is "The Keys of Marinus" (1st Dr.) and "The Twin Dilema" (6th Dr. opener) and later on in the year are a "Myths and Legends" box set (comprising of "The Time Monster [3rd], "Underworld" and "Horns of Nimon" [both 4th]), "Masque of Mandragora" (4th) and "Time and the Rani" (7th opener).

Personally I'm exciteed for Keys of Marinus, Masque and Horn of Nimon. All some of my favorites- and yes I know how BAD Horns of the Nimon is.. that is what makes it FUN!

Starman, curious what you thought of Blink, since it was another Doctor light episode like Love and Monsters.

Donna Noble is played by Catherine Tate by the way, who's a famous comedian here in the UK, just fyi

People seem to really dislike Love and Monsters. I thought it was kind of amusing, although I don't think I'd want to watch it again.

Yeah, I hate her stuff too... and I was worried... but she was a really good companion after all

That explains a few sites I found petitioning her NOT to be the next companion (didn't really read into them.)

Also noticed that that woman has a great potential for looking UGLY. She is OK for her age in the show (now know she is 41, does that make her the oldest companion yet?) but man, there are some photos of her looking horrendously ugly, I presume on purpose, though.

I'd definitely see Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart as a companion. He was very much a main character with Doc #3 and popped in from time to time for long after.

But are you only counting the age at start of companionship? 'Cause Sara Jane is still around.

Hey, a new Who fan! Alas that I am late to this thread, though. I have to say that as a longtime Who fan, when the new series started I was initially put off of Eccleston because I found *him* to be less quirky than most of the prior Doctors (with the exception of the Fifth, played by Peter Davison, who is my least favourite Doctor and the one I found to be most mundane).

Eccleston grew on me such that I was sorry to see him go, however. Many of the Doctors have exhibited humour, sarcasm, and general weirdness to varying degrees.

I've seen very little of the first and second Doctors. The first comes across as a cranky old man who is overly cautious. The second seems to be a jovial fellow who worries about his companions (and humans in general), seems out of sorts most of the time, and generally seems to be playing everything by ear (except his recorder/flute thing, unless the ear be tin).

The third Doctor was trapped on Earth for much of his run and showed a fair amount of impatience and bitterness towards the humans he was stuck with, often in the form of sarcasm. This really played well with his military associates, particularly the Brigadier who would generally be unflappable in the face of it and indeed seemed more amused with the whole situation the more put out the Doctor was.

The fourth Doctor tended more towards weirdness and humour. And more brash arrogance than you'd think one could fit under a hat that size, no matter how floppy. He's perhaps the most well-known, or has been up until recently.

The fifth Doctor was the nicest of the bunch. He came across as prim, proper, and polite to a fault. But he also had The Five Doctors episode, which is one of my favourites. And I enjoyed the Black Guardian arc.

The sixth Doctor was crazy, and not necessarily in a good way. A lot of people didn't like him, but I never had a real problem with him. He was perhaps the most careless of the bunch, though. Or at least it often seemed that way in his dealings with his companions.

I haven't seen as much of the seventh Doctor as I would have liked. He seems very polite on the surface, almost whimsical really, but he has a dark streak. One episode was simply him bringing a companion to a dangerous place from her past in order to force her to face her fears.

The 8th Doctor had only the FOX television movie to work with. And it wasn't very good, having perhaps the worst showing of the Master ever, not to mention all that half-human nonsense. That said, Paul McGann made a likable enough Doctor.

I recommend filling in as much of Doctors three and four as you can stand, but I may be biased in that regard. Seeing the Key to Time and Trial of a Time Lord arcs (Doctors four and six respectively) is essential, I'd say, as are any of four's dealings with Gallifrey (the Doctor has an important political history). And you may find any stories dealing with the Daleks or Cybermen to be relevant. Potentially any episodes dealing with the Rani as well.

/ramble

Man, I love Doctor Who. I wish we had more shows like it.

True story. When I was an early teen, my aunt, who worked for the local PBS station, suggested that I watch it. I really hadn't watched public television since Sesame Street (with the notable exception of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, but I digress...), and being a snotty kid spoiled by Hollywood, considered it, well, lame.

Nevertheless, I plopped my hiney down and watched about an hour of it one Saturday night. It was a Tom Baker episode. I didn't realize at the time that the epispode was two hours long. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, the series ran on most public television stations here one episode after another, with no commercials, through an entire story arc. (It was originally broadcast in Britain, I believe, in 15-minute cliffhanger segments. Personally, I like our way much better. )

So anyway, an hour in, I thought that it was one of the most awful shows I'd ever seen, turned it off, and didn't think about it again for probably a couple of years.

Then one night, I was really bored. Nothing to do. I turned it on and decided to give it another go. It plodded along unmercifully, but by the end, I got interested in the story, and when all was said and done, I felt, I dunno, satisfied. So the next week, I watched it again. This time, I ended up genuinely interested. By the end of the third whole episode I watched, I was hooked. (It didn't hurt that his companion at the time was Loise "Leela" Jameson, who is the epitome of sexy sidekicks, and I was an impressionable teenager!)

Ooh, brief Doctor Who funny tangent. I was well hooked on the show and had been watching it for at least a couple or three years. A couple of Saturday nights in a row, though, as teenagers sometimes do, I had something going on and missed it. No worries, I thought, it's not like the episodes really built on continuity; they were all pretty self-standing. So anyway, the following week, I plop down and start watching. Instead of Tom Baker, I see some straight-haired young blond guy in the opening credits. "What the fudge?" I thought. Did Tom Baker leave the show? Who was this guy?

After watching the show, by which time any explanation of regenration had been bypassed, I was sitting there griping to my mother. "They've got this new guy, and he doesn't even look like Tom Baker! I mean seriously, what are they trying to pull? Do they think we wouldn't notice? He doesn't even act like the Doctor!"

It wasn't until much, much later that I figured out the whole regeneration thing.

Still, I pine for the Tom Baker days. Eccleston was great, Tennant was great, but I still don't think they had anything on Tom Baker. Eccleston and Tennant are just a shade too dark for my taste. I still like them, but Tom Baker will always be The Doctor to me.

Oh, while I'm reminiscing, I think that the most incredibly moving moment I've ever had in front of a television set was Adrick's last episode. The episode ran long here. Keep in mind that sometimes there were a few more or a few less 15-minute segments in an arc, so a show here might last two hours, two and a half hours, sometimes even three hours or more. We didn't subscribe to TV Guide, so I never really knew how long an episode would be until I watched it. Also, keep in mind that we had ZERO previews, no Internet, no 24-hour cable channels dedicated to revealing spoilers, and the mainstream media never printed a damn word about the show, so every episode was a complete surprise.

So anyway, at the end of Adrick's last episode, they didn't run the normal credits. Instead, they rolled the credits in silence over a background of a broken star. I was literally staring at the screen speechless. Seriously. Dumbstruck is maybe closer to what I was, I didn't know what to think, but I had never been so utterly shocked like that, and I don't think I ever have since. One episode of Firefly came close, but not quite. And go figure, it wasn't even a Tom Baker episode.

My second favorite Doctor is probably John Pertwee. A few years later, after they stopped making new episodes, the public television station started running the series from the start, as much as they could given that a lot of the early episodes were missing. William Hartnell just didn't do it for me. Patrick Troughton was way too whiney. John Pertwee, in my mind, is the first actor (and one of the few) who really "got" The Doctor. Plus, I really dug how he was made so vulnerable by being stranded in one place and time. Can you think of any punishment more excruciating for someone for whom all of space and time is his playground?

Peter Davison was always kind of "blah" to me. He didn't really add much personality to the role, in my humble opinion. Which is really a shame--some of the best writing for the show happened while he was at the helm! He had started to get better by the end of his run, though. I hated Colin Baker. No no--I loathed Colin Baker. I didn't get to see enough of Sylvester McCoy to make a good judgment before the show was yanked off the air.

The Doctor Who movie with Paul McGann was a travesty. I remember telling some of my sci-fi geek buddies that Doctor Who would make an excellent American television show and/or movie, if it's given a decent budget, but only if they got the original writers to work on it and didn't try to "Hollywoodize" it. If that's what they had in mind, I'd rather they just not make it. I wish they hadn't. It sucked. Hard.

Eccleston was really good. Tennant, especially by the end, was really good. This new guy, though, not having seen him, I'm very skeptical about. Doctor Who is supposed to carry a bit of an, I dunno, patronly air about him. He needs to be able to pull off being an authoritative figure. Tennant was barely on the edge of believable in that respect, but he did have his moments. Now they've gotten someone even younger. Not that they need another William Hartnell, but damn, at least get someone in their mid- to late thirties.

I'll wrap up my thoughts on the show with this. I absolutely adored Nyssa. Best. Companion. Ever. Smart, sexy, and fun, she was the complete package. That character is one of the first television crushes I ever had, and decades later, I suppose I still have that crush. I so wish the she had killed Tegan in her sleep and made it look like an accident, but otherwise, she was perfect.

/endramble