Mark

That's really rather nice. Cool.

This is all sounding surprisingly not-discouraging. Blond doesn't bother me much, English/London-ish is nice but not a deal-breaker either way, but Neil Marshall directing the pilot suggests that (a) there's a reasonable amount of confidence in the project, and (b) something about it is promising enough to get an a-list (TV) director involved. Hurm.

Heh. Splendid work.

Just that she hasn't been seen around these parts for years, I think. She is missed, as are others.

I like it. Pertwee-esque, but not excessively so (similar to the way Smith's original costume echoed Troughton's without directly copying it). I'm a sucker for a dark-coloured jacket with a red lining. My only real grumble is that it's a lot closer to the final iteration of Matt Smith's outfit than I'd have wanted it to be - it's not a huge change at all - but that's only based on a single photograph. Overall, it gets a cautious thumbs-up.

you know the views that have been expressed by certain folks here, so some assumptions are being made

All else aside, and somewhat irritatingly for the comforting sense of self-righteous indignation I like to bring with me to any debate, I was guilty of exactly this - I was arguing not so much with the Avaunt who's posting in this thread, but the Avaunt with whom I've argued with on similar issues in the past. So, um, sorry about that, at least.

Tony, for all that I disagree passionately with you on a small handful of very specific points, I don't think of you as a sexist arsehole or as a terrible misogynist. For all that we tend to end up at each other's throats when it comes to the underlying philosophy of feminism, I think we're absolutely on the same side when it comes to the majority of substantial, how-to-actually-behave-in-the-real-world issues, and I've got absolutely no desire to simply steamroller over your opinions about the rest. So in the hope that you'll do the same, I'll do my very best to drop it.

At least until we get a chance to sit down in a pub together and chat properly, face to face - where I strongly suspect we'd find that we agree on a lot more than we probably think we do, and would find it a lot easier to gladly agree to disagree about the rest. Although we'd also probably end up talking about other, far more fun things anyway.

Basically, I wouldn't worry too much - you'd be very low down on my long list of people against whom I'll be deploying the Thought Police when I take over the world.

Nice guys are the worst.

Word.

There's a world of difference between "good person" and "nice guy", and the latter - especially self-described nice guys - have an unfortunate tendency to be passive aggressive, manipulative arseholes.

No, it's because the gender imbalance makes the simple fact of being out in a public so massively, inconceivably different for an average woman that it is for an average man. When, at some hypothetical future point, we've reached a point where at least one in four women won't be subject to rape snd/of serious sexual assault at the hands of men, , when women aren't somewhere in the region of 80-90 percent more likely to be attacked by a man than by a woman, and when there's ANY widespread incidence of severe female-on-male violence in the public or domestic sphere by comparison, , then we might be able to have a meaningful conversation on this subject. As it stands, though, you're assuming an equivalence of experience between the genders that simply DOES NOT EXIST, and it's leading you into some extremely dubious conclusions.

Statistically, men unequivocally DO represent a *potential* threat to women in a way that women don't to men. In that context, of course there are going to be differences between the ways the two genders, as a whole, interact with and/or approach one another as strangers. That shouldn't be the case, but it is, and the only way to change it is for men to STOP DOING THIS SHIT. This problem actually is gendered, and pretending it isn't in a "What about the men, don't we suffer discrimination as well?" sort of way is to wilfully ignore reality.

Love & War (NA)

 

Well done.

I went with TV stories first, on account of how they've actually got Sylvester McCoy in them. If I was just going for "best 7th Doctor stories", though, a few more of the NAs would have made it in, especially 'Left-Handed Hummingbird' and probably 'TimeWyrm: Revelation'. Also possibly 'Damaged Goods', which I hated the first time I read it - way too heavy on the senseless violence and gratuitous, widescale death for my liking - but which has grown on me substantially in retrospect. Like a lot of RTD's writing, in fact.

And while 'Enemy of the World' still wouldn't make my top 2 or 3 Troughtons, it'd have been a contender for my top 5 (the two I mentioned above, plus 'Mind Robber', 'Fury from the Deep', and either 'Evil of the Daleks' or 'Enemy...' depending on my mood) even before it was recovered. I've long felt it was a bit of an overlooked gem.

1x Hartnell

The Romans

2x Troughton

Power of the Daleks

The War Games

3x Pertwee

Inferno

Doctor Who and the Silurians

Carnival of Monsters

4x Baker I

The Ark in Space

Genesis of the Daleks

City of Death

Warrior's Gate

5x Davison

Kinda

Snakedance

Enlightenment

Caves of Androzani

The Kingmaker (BF)

6x Baker the Lesser

Vengeance on Varos

Revelation of the Daleks

...Ish (BF)

Jubilee (BF)

Davros (BF)

Peri & the Piscon Paradox (BF)

7x McCoy

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

The Happiness Patrol

Remembrance of the Daleks

The Curse of Fenric

Ghost Light

A Death in the Family (BF)

Love & War (NA)

8x McGann

The Dying Days (NA)

Alien Bodies (EDA)

The Scarlet Empress (EDA)

The Natural History of Fear (BF)

Scherzo (BF)

Father Time (EDA)

The Adventuress of Henrietta Street (EDA)

Withnail & I

That's more than enough of that, anyway.

There's nothing bigoted about a woman being sceptical towards a guy she doesn't know. It's basic common sense, it really is.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umc7BFEhWz0[/media]

I really hope you don't take the following link as an attack on the entire male gender - mainly because it isnt one - but it's worth a read just to illustrate how completely different a woman's basic experience of the dating world is from that of a man inhabiting the same space, and why a woman has absolutely every reason to be at least slightly sceptical of a man she doesn't know until she has some reason not to be...

http://kathearding.n...ut-being-maced/

Whereas I find Nyssa to be about as interesting as the slightly wilted celery on Davison's lapel :-)

Agreed on Dr. Todd, though. Somewhere out there is a parallel universe in which JN-T spotted the onscreen chemistry she had with Davison and hired her as a full time companion on the spot. And it's a much better universe than the one we got stuck in.

There's a reason I left both Liz (Shaw, I presume you mean) and Romana out of the list of identikit companions. :-) Ace, Adric and Turlough,, too - all flawed efforts to break the mold, perhaps, but efforts nonetheless.

I don't want to seem too down on the 70s/80 companions - Jo and Sarah Jane are both salvaged by splendid performances and great chemistry with their respective Doctors, for example - and holding anyone up to the standard set by IanAndBarbara, clearly the best companion ever, is a bit unfair. But the real point I was aiming for was that Tegan is just a really, really good, distinct and memorable character. Whingeing and all.

She starts out as an interesting idea for a character, and the 'Eliza Doolittle in Space' angle works well up to and including 'Talons of Weng-Chiang', her third story. Sadly, it never really goes anywhere after that - all the interesting rough edges are filed off by her second season, for which she's largely written as a generic Doctor Who companion in a skimpier-than-usual costume.

Video gets plus infinity.

ALL prejudice is wrong and a faulty way of dealing with reality., as I just demonstrated by being surprised as fuck that Russians could so amusingly take the piss out of themselves.

 

 

 

I thought about that dating thing. The real (seeming) difference here in NZ is the addition of a "Get a friend of the same sex as your target to talk to them for you" trope.

That's a sensible thing to do just about anywhere, really. I wouldn't always go so far as to "get a friend to talk to them", perhaps (depends on context, really - there are situations where that would be appropriate, and situations where it would just seem bizarre), but if you're out and about in town*, having at least one or two female friends in your party is an immediate signal to anyone who might potentially be interested in you that you're capable of maintaining a friendship with women, and are therefore probably not a complete creep and/or predatory asshole. Which, given that there are a lot of creeps and/or predatory assholes out there, is quite a good thing to be able to demonstrate.

*for a straight guy, obv

I love Tegan. There are surprisingly few Who companions I especially care for from the post- black & white era. A lot of the later companions are essentially cut-and-paste generic clones - for all their varying backstories and different performers there's very little on the page to distinguish Jo Grant, Sarah Jane, Nyssa or Peri from one another. In light of that, Tegan is a wonderful breath of fresh air - occasionally irritating, perhaps, but always a distinctive and entertaining character in her own right.

The '60s, by contrast, have a lot more variety. You couldn't easily replace Barbara with any other character without having to make significant changes to the scripts (circumstances made it necessary to do so for 'Galaxy Four', and it sticks out like a sore thumb), any more than you could slot Zoe in to replace Victoria, or Polly to replace Vicki. Vicki is, it must be admitted, essentially just a substitute for Susan a lot of the time, but since they clearly learned from some earlier mistakes making Vicki into Susan Done Right, I can live with that.

Let us never speak of Dodo or Mel again.

wait what is the issue with a Teegan and Nyssa sans Turlough episode?

Well, there are only three of them, and two of those are absolute shit on toast (the near-legendarily awful 'Time-Flight' and the just-not-very-good-at-all 'Arc of Infinity', the story that finally renders the Time Lords, and Gallifrey, so utterly antithetical to interesting story-telling that just wiping them out becomes the only sane option for any future writer). The third of them is 'Snakedance', though, which is pretty thoroughly excellent.

To Moore's credit, he's already knowingly turned down potentially huge amounts of money on a number of occasions under similar circumstances. Whatever else can be said of him (and "increasingly crotchety old twat" isn't entirely out of order...there are only so many times a man can fall out with former friends/colleagues so comprehensively as to end all contact before one starts to think that maybe, just maybe, there's a common thread between all these cases and it isn't "Alan Moore has been unlucky enough to make friends with and subsequently be betrayed by a long list of treacherous bastards with whom everyone else seems to get on fairly well"), he's repeatedly shown himself to be admirably willing to stand by his principles even at considerable personal cost.

Counterargument:

The War Games

City of Death

Ghost Light

Alien Bodies

Gridlock

Vincent & the Doctor

...actually, we come pretty close to agreeing on most points (of the ones where we differ, both Silurians & The Doctor's Wife would probably be my second choices, and Dalek wouldn't be far behind. Lungbarrow is still shite, though - a fairly well-crafted turd, but a turd nonetheless :-P ).

Not much of a counterargument, really.

Yeah, that one is a lot better than its reputation might suggest. It works well if you follow it up with Enlightenment too, my recommendation of which very much stands - after Androzani and Kinda, that one rounds out my top 3 Davison stories.

Kinda or Enlightenment. Especially Kinda. The visual realisation is really, frustratingly shit - native tribespeople straight out of a Timotei advert, a forest set in which the studio floor is clearly visible, a giant snake that might actually be the single worst special effect in the entire history of Doctor Who - but the script makes up for it by being one of the best, most thoughtful and intelligent things ever written for the show.

EDIT: Oops, missed the "nothing upon to Turlough" stipulation. Sorry. In that case, Frontios by a country mile. Dead good, if a bit on the grim side.

http://www.philipsandifer.com/2014/01/outside-government-enemy-of-bane.html?m=1

The latest entry on Phil Sandifer's consistently marvellous TARDIS Eruditorum blog (by far the best writing about Doctor Who i anyone's been doing for the past couple of years) is nominally a look at the Sarah Jane Adventures story 'Enemy of the Bane', but is actually a rather lovely tribute to Nicholas Courtney, and the character of the Brigadier. Well worth a read - I may have teared up a bit.

Yeah, that line is in the sketch. Gatiss has apologised repeatedly since, apparently :-)

Which book is that, Dom?

Bili - there's a lot more worthwhile to the McCoy era than one might expect - McCoy himself is an...interesting choice for a prime time leading man (although he's perfect for a children's pantomime - I adored him when I was 8), but there was a real creative resurgence in the final couple of years. A bit too late, of course, because nae bugger was watching by then, but the final season or two are up there with the best of the old show, for me.

Colin Baker also played Doctor Who on television.

... 11. The 'Space Adventure' stock music used in, among other stories, 'Tomb of the Cybermen'. You know the one..."ba ba-ba baa-aa, ba ba ba"...

 

Isn't that the theme from Star Wars?

You're thinking of "ba-ba-ba baaa baa, ba ba ba baaa baaa". Do try to keep up.

Further "yes, that too" comments to all of dogpoet's examples, although I don't love Sil quite as much as he does (and I prefer 'Revelation' to 'Varos', although there's not a lot between the two of them, and an awful lot between either of them and anything else). The "assemble a cupboard" line was a particular favourite of mine, too.