The_Doctor posted:

Thanks, Rusty!

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHu_COcNB_n/

OldMemes posted:

According to reports online, Matthew Waterhouse told a convention this weekend that Tom Baker isn't doing anymore home recording, and is retiring from his work with Big Finish. They haven't confirmed it yet, and apparently there's a huge backlog of Fourth Doctor audios still to be released over the next few years.

Anyway, I listed to one of The Lost Stories - The Nightmare Fair. This was one of the scrapped season 23 episodes, and sees the Sixth Doctor meeting the Celestial Toymaker in Blackpool. While the opening is a delight (and you can really picture the planned location filming in your head), it loses its way in the second half, and feels like a story that really needed visuals to work. David Ballie is good as the Toymaker, but Solitare and The Magic Mousetrap are much stronger stories for his version of the character.

OldMemes posted:

According to reports online, Matthew Waterhouse told a convention this weekend that Tom Baker isn't doing anymore home recording, and is retiring from his work with Big Finish. They haven't confirmed it yet, and apparently there's a huge backlog of Fourth Doctor audios still to be released over the next few years.

Jerusalem posted:

At least Ben and Polly had stronger reasons than most companions to leave, figuring out that they were back on the exact same day they left (so London was assaulted by War Machines within like the last week or so? ) and realizing they could pick up their lives right where they left off.

Zaroff posted:

And The Faceless Ones leads straight into The Evil of the Daleks, where we find Daleks are in London 1966.

What did the Doctor say at the start of The War Machines? He had a sensation in his hand which he gets when Daleks are around.

Jerusalem posted:

I love that, the idea was obviously to try and make the titular War Machines seem like a big deal but it all wraps around to "gently caress, there were Daleks about. Goddammit" and they've nicked the TARDIS but from a different version of the Doctor later in his life (when he was younger!).

Evil also ends with the Doctor and Jamie throwing on a rerun of Power of the Daleks (I think?) for Victoria's benefit which is just delightful

Edit: Or am I mixing that up with Zoe after The Wheel in Space?

The_Doctor posted:

Doctor Spaceman posted:

I love the round things.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

I love the round things.

Action Jacktion posted:

it doesn't make up for the fact that this is the same book in which Dodo is raped and murdered by the Master.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

I love the round things.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

I love the round things.

Vinylshadow posted:

Doctor Who S41: I Love The Round Things

Silver2195 posted:

Why is the spin-off material so weird about the 60s and 80s companions? And some of the audio-only companions too, come to think of it.

Fil5000 posted:

Doctor Who had literal decades where barely anyone at the BBC was paying THAT much attention to the spinoff stuff so naturally a bunch of horny perverts with sexual violence fetishes revelled in the opportunity.

Open Source Idiom posted:

I think that's really unfair. I think people just liked telling stories with more visceral stakes, possibly because they had things they wanted to say or because they wanted the series to grow with its audience, and possibly overcompensation for the show not being on television anymore. And sure, there were pervs, but my god if we chucked every bad taste pervert out of Doctor Who then we wouldn't have RTD or Moffat or Hinchcliffe or Holmes. There wouldn't be a show.

The idea was -- and has always been -- that Doctor Who could be anything, go anywhere. If you follow that statement through to its logical conclusion then stories about sex, violence and transgression are inevitable. It led the storytelling to be more far more consistently experimental and expressive than the series is now, but there were a bunch of reactionaries that could only ever see the series in alarmist terms, and as the story overall has moved back to more typical, traditionalist storytelling the "rad" ("vs trad") crowd has stopped maintaining its interest in the series. The reactionary side has been allowed to dominate the narrative.

I won't pretend they were always successful at what they were doing, they very much weren't. But the storytelling resonated with people, the books were popular enough to sustain themselves. People look at The Man With The Velvet Mask now and talk about it in the most reductive ways, but it's a genuinely well written story with deeply felt humanist themes that's trying to do something original because that's what the writer was passionate about. The series is genuinely lucky to have that kind of thing, it's unique and precious in and of itself.

Open Source Idiom posted:

I think that's really unfair. I think people just liked telling stories with more visceral stakes, possibly because they had things they wanted to say or because they wanted the series to grow with its audience, and possibly overcompensation for the show not being on television anymore. And sure, there were pervs, but my god if we chucked every bad taste pervert out of Doctor Who then we wouldn't have RTD or Moffat or Hinchcliffe or Holmes. There wouldn't be a show.

The idea was -- and has always been -- that Doctor Who could be anything, go anywhere. If you follow that statement through to its logical conclusion then stories about sex, violence and transgression are inevitable. It led the storytelling to be more far more consistently experimental and expressive than the series is now, but there were a bunch of reactionaries that could only ever see the series in alarmist terms, and as the story overall has moved back to more typical, traditionalist storytelling the "rad" ("vs trad") crowd has stopped maintaining its interest in the series. The reactionary side has been allowed to dominate the narrative.

I won't pretend they were always successful at what they were doing, they very much weren't. But the storytelling resonated with people, the books were popular enough to sustain themselves. People look at The Man With The Velvet Mask now and talk about it in the most reductive ways, but it's a genuinely well written story with deeply felt humanist themes that's trying to do something original because that's what the writer was passionate about. The series is genuinely lucky to have that kind of thing, it's unique and precious in and of itself.

Silver2195 posted:

Wait, how were Hinchcliffe and Holmes perverts? OK, I guess Hinchcliffe must have approved Leela’s outfit, and Holmes wrote a couple of the mid-80s stories with Peri that FreezingInferno mentioned.

FreezingInferno posted:

Honestly that's just a reflection of mid-80's Doctor Who: look at any televised Peri story and you've got some creepy bastard leering at her and going "MMMMMRGH PRETTY PRETTY GIRL" or something.

Fil5000 posted:

I wasn't saying that's ALL there was, but stuff like Nekromantea and that BBV softcore Zygon thing could only happen because no one in charge of the Who brand cared enough about it to say no to. There were plenty of people doing more grown up takes on Who, I'm specifically responding to the point about there being some nasty poo poo done to supporting characters.

The_Doctor posted:

egon_beeblebrox posted:

Pretty weird that "The Eleventh Hour" is 15 years old today.

Open Source Idiom posted:

Anyway, nice and gory, fun and thoughtful. Good stuff. Four half a babies out of five.

The_Doctor posted: