It’s based on a YouTube fan video.
On the plus side, it’s not generic. It’s highly stylized and conceptual, in a way we haven’t seen since 1989.
On the minus side, it’s not implemented all that well.
And, I mean, Peter Capaldi.
Hey that’s a pretty good Hartnell drawing
Yeah, he went to a fine arts school for a while until he dropped out to front a punk band with Craig Ferguson. He has a short interesting documentary he did on the surrealists.
Hey, look! It’s Felix!
You know, I genuinely like the TV movie. The metaphors are not subtle. The plot is nonsense, particularly the moment it passes the halfway mark. Yet, I love the tone of the thing, the atmosphere – it’s so evocative of its time, in the mid '90s. Paul McGann is so sweet in his performance here. And when the script allows him to just talk, rather than spout rapid fire exposition about a story that doesn’t begin to make sense even within its own parameters, I swear this is some of the best Doctor Who stuff there was before the series came back.
And whoa, I thought they skipped the TVM TARDIS for Lego Dimensions. Apparently not!
I really like Paul McGann’s doctor, but I think he only really started to shine in the Big Finish audios, particularly when people like Paul Magrs wrote
There’s a great push-pull between the cynicism of McGann’s audio performance blended with the campy sincerity of Magrs’s scripting that makes that particular era particularly memorable for the ~5 people that ever listened to it.
Seems pretty clear this was just a little skit written to introduce the character – possibly the audition piece, put in front of a camera.
This new companion… I realize we’ve very little to go on, but she’s really feeling Wilderness Years to me. Sarcastic genre-aware black lady with an apparently male name. That’s like something out of the Virgin New Adventures or the Eighth Doctor comic strip. Or Big Finish, at that – except anything progressive they’ve ever done has been accidental, as a result of absorbing something independently progressive.
But, this is like Izzy or Sam Jones. Or, I guess, Charley. In personality, maybe a bit like Lucy Miller.
That’s not a bad thing in itself. It’s just curious. The Doctor Who produced during the Wilderness Years was aimed at a very different audience from modern Who. Yet, this does seem to fit the trajectory that Moffat has been on. It feels like the last few years have been a big effort to dial back the separation between the new and classic series, reset the show to its original template, and reclaim the Wilderness Years as a legitimate part of the show’s legacy. He’s talked about how he imagines a different world where the show stayed on the air and we actually had John Hurt as the Doctor through the 1990s, and he agonizes over the era that we were denied. Hurt’s Doctor basically serves to embody and resolve that gap.
I don’t know. Undoubtedly reading way too much into my tea leaves here.
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Bill also has elements of pre-wilderness years Ace (definitely not the Ace of the Wilderness Years, who was defined by 90s ‘edginess’.)
I think you’re perhaps a bit too harsh on the Big Finish era, or I’m not sure what you mean by ‘progressive’. Paul Magrs’s audio dramas were easily as interesting and unusual as anything from the New Adventures era
Yeah, I’m just being a grumpy jerk. When I think of Big Finish, the first thing that comes to mind is safe, overwrought fan-pleasing gunk. But there is other stuff, of course. Rob Shearman, for instance.
Also… she’s wearing a Prince shirt…
Certainly that’s true of the bad ones, but that’s also true of the bad virgin new adventures and bad doctor who in general. OK there’s also the opposite extreme of bad that happens less often where it just tries too hard to be experimental and clever and ends up navel-gazey and kind of smarmy. The worst of New Adventures was totally like this for anyone that has read real books. Also, some of the worst episodes of any era of Doctor Who fit into this category. Over-reaching instead of under-reaching
Definitely get some Ace-y vibes off her, which i like.
Is…Bill supposed to be from the eighties (assuming this because of the “back to the future” statement)?
That could be fun or deeply annoying, depending on how she’s written.
It’s possible. Her fashion would fit. That quote, I just took as a bit of Moffat silliness – he’s referenced the movie before in the show – crossed with a fourth wall wink about the show not returning untilnext year.
Remember when the early press about Amy made us all assume that she was going to be a cop?
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But, DUH, she has hair! So she can’t be a cop. Clearly she’s a stripper kissogram.
Anyway, if anyone missed it, Capaldi is in all probability staying on through at least Chibnall’s first series. He has no plans to leave, and that’s as far ahead as anyone’s looking right now.
Which meaaans my favorite Doctor of the modern era will also be the longest-lasting Doctor outside of Pertwee and Baker, at least if we’re talking seasons.
(Because of the super-long 1960s seasons, Hartnell and Troughton have approximately five latter-day seasons’ worth of material apiece, even though they’ve only six seasons between them. So really, Hartnell, Troughton, and Pertwee all have comparable run times.)
The tragedy, of course, is that many of troughton’s episodes are lost
huh, somehow I keep forgetting that tennant and smith both only did three seasons each
I know. It’s curious; it’s really only seasons 3-5 that suffer, but this just so happens to cover one of the most important periods of transition the show has ever had.
Still, hey. We’re better now than we were a decade ago. And who knows; maybe Phil Morris is sitting on a few more discoveries until he’s ready to talk about them. Probably not, but far from implausible.
