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Vinylshadow posted:Forty trailer Speaking of which, what are the good Fifth Doctor audios to pick up? Most of them seem to be on sale at the moment. Davison is my least favorite Doctor so I haven't paid much attention to what's available there, though I fo have Spare Parts at least.
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Jan 5, 2022 18:22
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Khanstant posted:IIRC the cartoons looked really really bad. Where are they cobbling them together from anyway, just scripts and things? Hopefully the source material is at least released since I don't thin kthe cartoon was the appeal here so much as getting those lost episodes back in some form. They're a real "it's better than nothing" situation, but they're animated so stiff and flat that it felt like Scream of the Shalka had better animation.
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Jan 12, 2022 21:18
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Bicyclops posted:The War Games is my favorite depiction of the Time Lords, it's the only time they come off as terrifying and staid instead of silly and staid. Every single time the Time Lords appeared, they got worse. Even in The Deadly Assassin they feel like a step down. They wind up being so mundanely bureaucratic that they're toothless.
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Jan 21, 2022 17:51
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Jerusalem posted:I've been a fan of Who my entire life and you basically just speed-ran my experience of the show I stopped watching with the not-Amazon episode and basically cut myself off until Chibnall left. If I want the Doctor, there was plenty of Big Finish I hadn't heard (and wow, I've now heard a lot of it while waiting out Chibnall's tenure). I'm probably going to watch through all of thirteen's run in one go, like pulling off a band-aide. It's be like going through the reconstructions; once I've done them once, I won't really feel a need to go back to them.
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Jan 31, 2022 01:33
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Open Source Idiom posted:This is, depending on how you look at it, tragic, but the radio Torchwood plays have been by far the most consistently excellent Doctor Who made the last few years. If you're going to make up a lie, at least make it a believable lie. Also, I went ahead and picked up all of the Unbound line since it's on sale. I had a couple of them already and one was worse than I expected but not horrible (Auld Mortality) and the other was better than I expected mainly due to the strength of the atmosphere (A Storm of Angels). Guess I'm going to find the worst in here somewhere.
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Feb 5, 2022 03:14
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Bicyclops posted:The bad one is called Exile. It's a shame that it's bad because it's an early attempt at having a woman play the Doctor, but they just play every note wrong. I thought I'd listen to that one first to get it over with. First impressions are poor. It's bad comedy and even David Tennant can't save that. The concept isn't bad; a Doctor who gave up and retreated to a pre-An Unearthly Child state of just keeping her head down and not doing anything is a good starting point for a story. And then holy gently caress, Time Lords who regenerate by committing suicide become women to punish the consciousness of the regeneration that did that. And this is apparently doing this is some great affront to the Time Lords. Yeah, that's a real low point for Big Finish. I had that in spoilers initially, but it's incidental to the plot and something that lovely shouldn't be buried.
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Feb 7, 2022 22:18
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Bicyclops posted:I'd forgotten a lot of that, lol, it's so bad. I think it's also the one where the Doctor is drunk the whole time, but for some reason it feels like it was acted, written by and directed by a group of people who have never encountered alcohol in their entire lives. It probably has more weird burping in it than the first season of Rick and Morty. Yeah, I don't drink and even I noticed how bad the drunk acting was.
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Feb 7, 2022 22:48
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Khanstant posted:aha secret doctor revealed So, it was Doctor Two, correct? I respect Sesame Street's pun work.
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Feb 13, 2022 13:35
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Khanstant posted:I didn't even think of doing the special effects that way, this is why I'd always end up over budget. I love that, just walk from behind it. I loved the secondary control room. Very steampunk from the days before we were sick of mixing the brass and wood look with high tech. Shame about what happened to the set.
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Feb 19, 2022 06:39
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Flight Bisque posted:https://twitter.com/councilofgeeks/status/1494756409182883841?t=zHlJfht-83LRwYBOGmeeFA&s=19 Don't bork. Bork and you're dead.
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Feb 19, 2022 21:23
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Jerusalem posted:Man poor Katarina, the way she died was horrifying, probably only "beaten" by Sara Kingdom's death in the same story. It must have been amazing to watch The Dalek's Master Plan as it was airing. Yeah, it's a bit bloated to the point that there's good arguments for it being multiple linked stories but there's a shitton of crazy things never before seen happening in it. Lots of stuff to traumatize the kids watching...
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Feb 22, 2022 16:06
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I really wish that Big Finish would prorate their bundle pricing to account for audios you already own. I would have spent more except the bundles I was interested in weren't a discount at all when I accounted for the ones I have. At least I've got a lot more Colin Baker now. I don't know if other people in this thread were aware of this, but he's really great in those audio dramas. Seriously, I was listening his story in the second Old Doctors, New Monsters box set and his story was an enormous stand-out. Because I prioritized other C. Baker audios for pick up, I hadn't heard one of his performances in a while and it was a real "Oh, yeah, he's amazing!" moment.
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Mar 16, 2022 00:44
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Jerusalem posted:It really brings into even sharper relief how much he was largely let down by the awful television production (plus of course all the exterior bullshit) of his time in the show. I know it's preaching to the choir, but I think a large part of this is that the audio format is perfect for 6's larger-than-life persona. Baker has a great voice for audio and having him go big while everyone else is playing the scene straight works for the Doctor. When it comes to audios, Davidson is still beige, McCoy always has to play the manipulator which often makes him come across as a passive character, and I forget what McGann's deal is, while C Baker feels the most like the Doctor to me in the Big Finish stories.
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Mar 16, 2022 02:47
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"Laconic" is definitely how I'd describe McGann's Doctor when I'm not making jokes about amnesia. And it definitely feels like a deliberate choice: the Doctor as a Byronic hero. I don't think it's that McGann isn't interested in the role since if he didn't want to go on, this has to be just about the easier production to quit. I do think his character choices have limited him a lot more that the other actors in the Big Finish line up. I also don't think he was well served by being the linchpin of Big Finish's attempts at long form storytelling, which I think has been their greatest weakness. His Doctor isn't as flat as Davison's, but he's often dispassionate and he might have the worst writing of any Doctor in the Big Finish line (yes, he has some great stories, I'm talking about overall).
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Mar 18, 2022 18:05
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happyhippy posted:Ryan wasn't given anything to work with. It's not uncommon for some aspects of characters to just be dropped because they don't fit an ongoing narrative. It is weird when all of them are dropped. 
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Apr 21, 2022 15:08
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Davros1 posted:'cause it's a poo poo movie. Excuse me, have you seen this still image from it? Isn't that great? Now let us say no more, especially about the writing, acting, pacing, and direction.
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Apr 22, 2022 20:45
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SiKboy posted:In all fairness, I cant abide james cordon, but credit where it's due, he was actually fine in The Lodger and more or less acceptable in the other one he was in whose name I cant remember because it wasnt as good as the lodger. The Lodger was fun. Not the kind of thing I'd want every episode but Doctor Who should lean into the goofy from time to time. The other one was okay though it lacked the same charm.
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Apr 29, 2022 14:34
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:I wish it had been another woman, but we've finally broke the 'Doctor is always white' cycle. Yep. That was becoming a bigger problem with ever time they cast a new Doctor. I can't say I've got strong opinions here beyond, "Cool." I don't know enough about Gatwa to have feelings on how he'll be in the role. I'm sure he'll turn out great since there hasn't been a wrong choice in casting in the show's history and so much of how his tenure turns out will come down to the writing. May he have better stories than 6 and 13.
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May 8, 2022 12:55
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Khanstant posted:I was curious about adding Classic Who to a pre-new-era full rewatch. The depth of Big Finish's catalog is astronomical. Even if you just stick to the monthly line, that's close to 600 hours. I thought I'd start getting deep into Big Finish by getting stuff on sale and eventually transition to buying the box sets as they come out. Two years later and I'm nowhere near getting caught up on the stuff I'm getting on sale. I've got about 55 hours of stories to listen to before I finish what I currently have and I'm not even being indiscriminate with my purchases. The biggest chunk of that is the first two seasons of Gallifrey which someone here said they liked and it was only a few dollars so why not try it? It doesn't help that I'll listen to a big block and then put down Big Finish for a few weeks, though that just means I always have some more Doctor Who to listen to. Currently I'm in the middle of the Tom Baker season 7 part 2 box.
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May 22, 2022 14:41
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Jerusalem posted:As somebody who still actively embraces physical media for most of my television and film stuff, it still surprises me out when I realize people buy physical CDs of Big Finish stuff instead of just digital downloads. I love physical media. I've had companies go, "You can no longer use the thing you bought digitally from us. No refunds. Thank you, good day." And the fragmentation of the media landscape has made it so it's often more convenient to just buy something rather than hunt down where it is available and pay for yet another service. If I buy something digitally, I only do so at a steep discount since if I'm not using up those resources to get a physical copy then you better be giving me that money back I the pricing. That said, Big Finish is about as good as it gets for a digital store. Just straight up mp3s that you download and keep however you want. Virtually everything they've ever made is always available except a couple things where licenses got in the way. And they price things properly for digital releases. I have zero concerns or problems with giving them money for digital releases since I know if they collapsed, I could still have all of the stories I bought. I wouldn't have half the BF stuff I do if it was physical only.
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May 23, 2022 14:54
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The_Doctor posted:The next DWM: Wish I was better at photoshop so I could add a stand behind him...
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May 23, 2022 15:14
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I was just finishing up Big Finish's original Unbound and what a weird series that is. The premise is fine, exploring stories in other paths the Doctor may have taken. The thing is half the stories don't make sense from that concept. Mostly it seems like the series exists to let other actors play the Doctor. The David Warner stories in particular are good, but don't really do anything different. My rankings for them: Good A Storm of Angels - Really creepy villains that would have been great in a regular story and dropping them into the Doctor's steampunk Elizabethan England was fun. Master of War - A distinctive Dalek story that couldn't be done in regular continuity because it contradicts so much. So much that I don't see how one change could make it, but who cares and David Warner makes for a good Doctor. It's Fine Deadline - Really pushes the format hard as it's what would happen if Doctor Who wasn't picked up as a television series. Jacobi is the writer of the pilot whose life is lovely. My problem here is it feels like a writer's story about how being a writer sucks and forced Doctor Who into it. Sympathy for the Devil - The first Warner story in the line and it's a reasonable but not outstanding story that happens to have a fun idea for a setting and good use of its villain. Didn't Care for It Auld Mortality - If the Doctor never left Gallifrey then he wouldn't do anything. The end. There's more to it than that, but the tiny scope of this story harms it. He Jests at Scars - The Valeyard is a jerk and then the ending is just awful. Ugh Exile - Some really unfunny "humor" and transphobia. Full Fathom Five - The basic outline here would have been an awful story on its own but it goes completely toxic with the idea of exploring a "ruthless" Doctor.
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May 24, 2022 21:05
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McGann posted:100% Agree and that line kept popping into my head today as I listened to a Khmer Rouge podcast. Also, "It's Professor X night!" I think my big problem with it was that the other threat was really boring. But, yeah, there's a lot of good stuff in that one and that might bump it up a bit. Also, really great performances in general which I forgot to mention.
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May 25, 2022 00:49
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The_Doctor posted:Bring back imperial Daleks Those are the Daleks who decided to quit with he whole conquering and genocide thing and just open a spa.
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Jun 2, 2022 14:26
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Action Jacktion posted:Supposedly Maureen O'Brien said at a convention that she recorded "Behind the Sofa" segments for a Season 2 set. That's the most intact season from the 1960s; it's missing only two episodes from one story. No Dimensions in Time, no sale.
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Jun 15, 2022 17:32
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OldMemes posted:The BBC 8th Doctor books also became a convoluted mess, with plot threads thrown around and more implied than outright resolved. Like there's some great ideas, but....it's a lot. They're also semi-officially not canon, according to Night of the Doctor. I know it's beating a dead horse but the Divergent arc was so bad. It was like they had a pitch and then nobody thought it through. And it doesn't help that C'rizz is one of the worst companions to have been portrayed by an actor (I'm guessing that there's some novel or comics companions who might be worse). There were maybe four stories in the Divergent series that were interesting and all of them got brought down by trying to tie the story into an arc that made no sense. Someday I'll have to read the Eighth Doctor Adventures. I'm not expecting them to be any good, but I am expecting them to be batshit crazy and I kind of want to experience that. (Edit: There's seventy-loving-three of them?! Never mind. I don't have that much self-loathing.) Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Jun 20, 2022 |
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Jun 20, 2022 23:40
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For some stupid reason I decided to watch Class and did the Doctor break time in such a way to dump a series worth of alien monsters onto a high school and then just left telling a small group of them, "Whelp! Good luck!"? They didn't even get, "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry." Every kid who dies in this series is a direct result of the Doctor's irresponsibility.
Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Jul 10, 2022 |
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Jul 10, 2022 02:28
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Jerusalem posted:I haven't heard the audio myself but it's this post I think?: Glad I didn't pick that one up.
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Jul 11, 2022 13:10
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Narsham posted:For that matter, I'm curious what a "conservative" Doctor Who TV story looks like. Assuming we disregard the incoherent crap like Kill the Moon being an anti-abortion story (and to clarify, the incoherent crap being referred to is the episode, which I'm pretty sure isn't trying to comment at all on abortion). The Dominators? The Zygon Invasion/Inversion is all about how immigrants are out to get you. Much like Kill the Moon's abortion message, they probably didn't intend it that way, but it's hard to ignore the text of the episode.
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Jul 11, 2022 20:37
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Barry Foster posted:Looks like Murray Gooooold is back in the musical driving seat The BBC's secret plan to save Doctor Who is to make it 2007 again. Then they turn the dial too far and make it 1985 again.
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Jul 21, 2022 20:46
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Teek posted:BOO! Boo this company. I was really hoping they would step up for the the season releases of the series featuring un-animated missing episodes and actually animate them before releasing. I bet they're using the same reconstruction that's already on DVD. It's okay, but it felt a but limited even by the standards of reconstructions to me; perhaps there were fewer images available than usual for those episodes. Not as bad as The Myth Makers, though, where the people who made the reconstruction I saw must have had four pictures to work with.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:23
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Zaroff posted:They’ve not done an official Crusade recon yet? I recalled there being a full reconstruction on that, but maybe I'm misremembering.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:47
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Finally, the revival of the Doctor Who CCG is at hand! I bought a box of cards on clearance and I never played it because I could tell how bad the design was at a glance...
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Aug 19, 2022 17:20
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OldMemes posted:Just listened to Project: Destiny, which I think I picked up in another McCoy/Aldred sale (I think I got most of the Hex arc, except for the last part). The Forge are an interesting concept: a black-ops, highly militarized force who wanted to obtain alien tech for themselves - also, run by vampires. They were in the background a lot in the early part of the main range, with several one off characters being Forge agents, or having connections or funding from them. I didn't care for the Forge as villains at all, they were yet another black ops organization. On the other hand, they did have two good stories come out of them: Project Lazurus and A Death in the Family, though they're only tangential to the second.
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Aug 22, 2022 14:20
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OldMemes posted:Nimrod isn't a compelling villain by himself, but the idea that the Forge were in the background of some stories, and you could pick out their involvement by implication was cool. Hex is a great character - I heard the last few of his main arc are duds, but Philip Oliver always gave a compelling performance, and it was an interesting contrast to the more jaded Ace. I listened to the stories where Hex dies and comes back as bad Hex a while ago and I didn't really care enough to run down how it turns out. Hex was a pretty good companion but I feel like his character arc was done by that point and this change up was not doing anything for me. I'm currently listening to the first 8th Doctor Time War box set. The first two stories were really good. In the first there's a bit of disorientation that works in its favor and the second is a fun story about having to work together. The third story, though... It's like someone heard the words "Time War" and went "What if the Doctor was drafted and went through basic training?" which is such an obvious and boring way to take it. The Doctor, the guy who's best known as the ultimate rebel from Time Lord society, who single handedly has destroyed Dalek fleets on multiple occasions, and by far the best source of intelligence on the enemy would never get trained as a grunt. It's such an obviously bad idea even the Time Lords wouldn't go for it. The way to improve the idea that I immediately saw would be "What if the Doctor got drafted and made into the drill sergeant?"
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Aug 23, 2022 14:47
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Jerusalem posted:[*] No Seriously, gently caress Nazis. Mentioned in A Thousand Tiny Wings, but the climate has changed so much since this story came out (2010) that it feels near impossible for me to give the benefit of the doubt to the story/character arc that Big Finish are trying to tell. I listened to The Fearmonger the other day and it has the same problem that a story about fascism written in a time when they're easily dismissed jokes becomes a bit unpleasant in the face of actual fascism on the march. At least The Fearmonger is about fascism being exploitative and lovely, it's just got the problem that the message is "polite nudging is the correct answer to fascism; you can oppose it, but don't oppose it too hard" which a lot of material from the 90's and 2000's had. Open Source Idiom posted:Klein, at the very least, is expressly an antagonist in her stories, and the five stories that make up her initial arc are expressly, textually, about fascism -- both as a general purpose ideology and as a discussion of Nazism and its continued effects down the years. Yeah, Klein's the villain and she keeps digger her hole deeper until her timeline gets wiped and they keep the actress around playing an alternate version who is not a Nazi.
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Aug 29, 2022 13:27
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OldMemes posted:Ollistra is ruthless, but not outright evil - she rejects the Doom Coalition's plan for universal genocide, but sees the ends as justifying the means. She does help the War Doctor protect innocent planets, even if she'd rather be focusing on the bigger picture. She's an interesting character. John Hurt and Jacqueline Pearce played off each other so well. The War Doctor is increasingly disgusted by this 'win at all costs' mentality. Ollistra is a great character because she's what the Time Lords should be: imperious, arrogant, ruthless and petty like a bureaucrat loving everything over for the sake of a slightly better office. She'd a lord of time and she will lord it over everyone. And while she has to consistently lose since she's inevitably the antagonist in any story she appears in, she's not always presented as a total gently caress up (though there are way too many stories of her going "This thing that isn't really that different from what you'd find in most Doctor Who stories is the superweapon that will single handedly win the war as long as we don't lose control of it! Whoops, lost control of it!"). And Pearce's performance is consistently great even in weaker stories. She's one of the better things that Big Finish has added to Doctor Who.
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Aug 30, 2022 02:28
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Davros1 posted:re: The Sirens of Time Oh great, The Shadow of the Scourge is the next story on my list.  McCoy's stories have been a bit down my priority list for Big Finish and I grabbed the Hex stuff first. So it's only in the past few months that I filled in the early McCoy stories that weren't considered top tier and now I'm working my way through those. And Sirens of Time is a stinker. It's not "God, why the gently caress did they think it was okay to release this?!" awful, but I listened to again a few months ago and could tell you nothing about the story without a reminder. Confusedslight posted:Briggs can write a story but so many of his doctor who ones are extremely hit or miss, paired with the fact he doesn't take criticism well at all I tend to largely avoid them. If I see Briggs wrote the story or has multiple stories in a box set, I go, "Let's see what else they have." Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 14:15 on Aug 31, 2022 |
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Aug 31, 2022 14:13
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Davros1 posted:Love and War is, to this day, the only BF Who story I couldn't finish. While I finished it, it was not a story I liked so I'm always surprised that people rate it highly. My guess is it's people who liked the book.
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Sep 1, 2022 01:43
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McGann posted:With OldMemes discussing an Eleven story - how do you all feel about The Eleven as a character(s)? I thought it was a pretty cool gimmick and Bonnar does a bang up job with it. Though they appear to be doing the typical Big Finish successful villain thing where they try to shove it into everything and ruins it quickly...but so far it hasn't worn out its welcome with me because of how well Bonnar plays it. Same reason I never get sad when Rufus Hound's Monk shows up, he's just a blast. Honestly, not really enamored with them as a villain. It reminds me a lot of (and god help me for saying this) the Joker; "Look at how craaaaazy the Eleven is and watch how he crazies his way through this situation!" I find it kind of tiring and there's not a whole lot there for me to latch onto with their character. It definitely doesn't help when there's constant character shifts so I never feel like I get to "know" any of the personalities expect in the broadest sense (well, except the good one who got a couple stories in a box set to himself). As it stands, I'll listen to an audio with the Eleven, but if I have a choice between the Eleven and any other villain I'll look at the other villains.
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Sep 4, 2022 15:17
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