Hello everybody! DWx2
Dec. 17th, 2018 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
circular_timeI have a bunch of new follows from fellow Who fans -- hurrah! And I need to go through them. But I semi-promised I'd post something today, for those of us logged off Tumblr. Besides, what's the good of a DreamWidth fan blog if I don't use it to fan about Doctor Who?
So, let me see. I'd like to share some memories of being a Who fan in the early 80s in the states. I'm afraid some of you have already read this in one form or another, so please bear with me.
I had one buddy, another nerdy girl, who helped me get started on Who around 1978 or 1979.
At the time, PBS (public broadcasting stations) of a few major US cities had picked up Doctor Who, and would alternate between showing reruns on an ever-lengthening loop (originally Pertwee through Tom Baker) and showing batches of the new season's episodes as they arrived, half a year to a year after broadcast. As a result, I started with Pertwee and Tom Baker, and Peter Davison was soon the "new" Doctor. After the broadcast of The Five Doctors for the 20th anniversary -- we saw it even before British fans saw it! -- PBS added existing First and Second Doctor stories to the rerun loop. I still need to see recons of those that have never been found, and catch up on ones that have been found since the early 80s.
A lot of my Christmas presents from my parents were incentives from PBS pledge drives: TARDIS mugs, the Doctor Who Cookbook, an early Who-logo t-shirt, Doctor Who roleplaying game by FASA, and my precious Peter Haining books like Key to Time and 25 Years of a Timelord, which were the ONLY way I knew about companions like Victoria, Katarina and Sarah Kingdom! I pored over episode synopses and companion profiles in those books, and sketched Jo, Sarah Jane, Leela and K9 on my desk blotter from black and white photos in these books.
I knew no other Who fans until I reached college (where practically all the fans I met were women). I knew almost nothing about behind-the-scenes other than some of the names in the credits. I certainly didn't know about companion exits or new Doctors in advance. They were always surprises, "live." Earthshock was absolutely devastating! Which is why I still hate spoilers and tend to avoid trailers.
At my women's college, we all wanted to be or date Ace McShane, the new companion. (I also liked Mel, a computer programmer like myself at the time). We had an early college mainframe, a VAX, where we posted group Doctor Who self-insert fanfic. Or roleplay. Or...something.
It wasn't anything like fanfic nowadays. The rules were were that our self-insert character was a Time Lord and a CIA agent, and our "companions" had to be characters who had apparently died in their own timelines. I had Kassandra of Troy and Cally of Blake's 7. Someone else had Avon. There were characters from Robotech, Amber chronicles, Pern, Sandman... a slice of pre-internet fandom in the late 80s and early 90s. (The internet coalesced into one network when I was a college senior). We all wrote each other's characters and companions as we got to know them.
Doctor Who was cancelled at the end of my first year of college. I gradually moved away from fandom because I was in mourning. I didn't really come back to Who fandom until the 50th anniversary, when I learned Big Finish was making new audiodramas with "my" Doctors and companions.
I've come to love all the classic Doctors, although I didn't properly appreciate poor Colin Baker back when they gave him the worst possible start. Also, while I thought Paul McGann was a great Doctor from the moment he appeared onscreen, I wasn't much impressed with the movie at the time, complaining that it was too Americanized.
I'm still catching up on new Who, since I missed many seasons during grad school. I liked Eccleston from the moment I saw him... yes, he was the Doctor! I've seen some Tennant and liked him, although it's not quite the style of Who I'm used to. (I loved School Reunion, and I've watched a few SJAs). Matt Smith is growing on me, but he was the hardest to grok. I don't like it when the Doctor is boasting about his awesomeness, something that sat badly in Capaldi's mouth as well.
I wish Capaldi had gotten a chance with a different showrunner who might have found an approach that suited his classic-Who-Doctor better. He was brilliant (Heaven Sent is a tour de force) but sometimes struggling to fit his classic sensibilities to Moffat Who's superhero-style larger-than-life character.
I love Jodie.
(I wasn't quite sure about the idea of a woman Doctor, but Patrick Troughton was right back in the 80s: if this being can regenerate a foot taller or shorter, with different complexion, hair color, eye color, build, weight, bone structure, age, and every other facet of the body, what would cause that one tiny bit of the genome to remain fixed from regeneration to regeneration, when all the rest is fluid? As soon as he pointed that out, I was sold. And it really is a delight for girls to be able to identify with the Doctor instead of the companion -- not that we didn't sometimes identify with the Doctor, too, but in that case, why can't boys identify with female leads? It probably is good for them to learn the same form of mental gymnastics girls are expected to learn.)
Ahem. Sidetrack.
I love Jodie. Her energy, her adorable Yorkshire accent, her can-do tinkering, her running straight at danger. I want her Doctor a little more proactive, but I very much appreciate that she's no longer spouting off about the Nature of the Doctor and is just getting on with it. I'm pleased to report her Doctor -- and Yaz :D -- showed up in my dreams a lot faster than most of them have.
I'm still digesting this season and haven't seen all of it. It's a refreshing new start, but sometimes I feel it's a little too timid, too small-scale? Still, I'd rather they start out small with room to grow.owa Trds the end of Moffat's tenure there were an awful lot of stories where they kept trying to best themselves, and it kept getting more and more angstful and over the top. Everyday, normal Doctor-companion dynamics morphed into various unhealthy ones, from Amy and Rory and the Doctor to the weird stuff with Clara to Twelve being rather neglectful of Bill while distracted with Missy.
(I'm still so, so irritated that Bill said she wanted to see the future because she wanted to see that people are happy, yet she never got to see anything happy, only grimdark and depressing stuff.)
I think my favorite story in Series 11 so far, even above and beyond Rosa, was Demons of the Punjab. Like a lot of Who historicals, it suffers from the problem that the Doctor can't interfere much, and therefore can't DO much. But I liked the twist with the aliens, and I appreciated the raw vividness of Yaz's family and the love in that story. Also, the visuals and soundtrack were gorgeous.
I think, before I natter much more, I need to catch up on the last three episodes of series 11. I'm about to go visit family for two weeks, but I'll have my Amazon prime with me, so hopefully I can slip off at some point to watch them.
OH!
I guess I shall finish by saying:
My favorite Doctor Who story is the audiodrama The Emerald Tiger.
There's something about the older!Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough and Fifth Doctor team that is sheer magic (they're all good actors, and some of them have gotten better with age), plus my buddy Barnaby Edwards -- director, writer, actor, and Chief Dalek Operator, as well as artist, cook, and lovable gay man -- wrote a hell of a script for it. (I didn't know him when I fell in love with that story; I've gotten to know him a bit at cons and online. It never fails to amuse me that such a lovable person is usually inside the lead Dalek on TV.)
Other favorite Who stories in no particular order: Masque of Mandragora, Enlightenment, Primeval (audio), 1001 Nights (audio), The Time Monster, Battlefield, The Mind Robber, Falling (audio), Castrovalva, the Jago and Litefoot Revival with those two gents plus the tenth and eleventh Doctors, and, of course, Circular Time.
I'm a Fifth Doctor fan above all, with Sixth a close second thanks to audio, but I started out as a Third Doctor & Jo groupie when I was a child. Favorite companions include Jo, Leela, Ace, Tegan and Nyssa, Vicki, Zoe, Liz, Benton, the Brig and Jamie, and thanks to the audios I've become a huge Polly fan. (Anneke is also a hoot).
Most of all, I'm a Nyssa/Sarah Sutton fan. And I just missed her birthday on the 12th, and I'm kicking myself.
So, let me see. I'd like to share some memories of being a Who fan in the early 80s in the states. I'm afraid some of you have already read this in one form or another, so please bear with me.
I had one buddy, another nerdy girl, who helped me get started on Who around 1978 or 1979.
At the time, PBS (public broadcasting stations) of a few major US cities had picked up Doctor Who, and would alternate between showing reruns on an ever-lengthening loop (originally Pertwee through Tom Baker) and showing batches of the new season's episodes as they arrived, half a year to a year after broadcast. As a result, I started with Pertwee and Tom Baker, and Peter Davison was soon the "new" Doctor. After the broadcast of The Five Doctors for the 20th anniversary -- we saw it even before British fans saw it! -- PBS added existing First and Second Doctor stories to the rerun loop. I still need to see recons of those that have never been found, and catch up on ones that have been found since the early 80s.
A lot of my Christmas presents from my parents were incentives from PBS pledge drives: TARDIS mugs, the Doctor Who Cookbook, an early Who-logo t-shirt, Doctor Who roleplaying game by FASA, and my precious Peter Haining books like Key to Time and 25 Years of a Timelord, which were the ONLY way I knew about companions like Victoria, Katarina and Sarah Kingdom! I pored over episode synopses and companion profiles in those books, and sketched Jo, Sarah Jane, Leela and K9 on my desk blotter from black and white photos in these books.
I knew no other Who fans until I reached college (where practically all the fans I met were women). I knew almost nothing about behind-the-scenes other than some of the names in the credits. I certainly didn't know about companion exits or new Doctors in advance. They were always surprises, "live." Earthshock was absolutely devastating! Which is why I still hate spoilers and tend to avoid trailers.
At my women's college, we all wanted to be or date Ace McShane, the new companion. (I also liked Mel, a computer programmer like myself at the time). We had an early college mainframe, a VAX, where we posted group Doctor Who self-insert fanfic. Or roleplay. Or...something.
It wasn't anything like fanfic nowadays. The rules were were that our self-insert character was a Time Lord and a CIA agent, and our "companions" had to be characters who had apparently died in their own timelines. I had Kassandra of Troy and Cally of Blake's 7. Someone else had Avon. There were characters from Robotech, Amber chronicles, Pern, Sandman... a slice of pre-internet fandom in the late 80s and early 90s. (The internet coalesced into one network when I was a college senior). We all wrote each other's characters and companions as we got to know them.
Doctor Who was cancelled at the end of my first year of college. I gradually moved away from fandom because I was in mourning. I didn't really come back to Who fandom until the 50th anniversary, when I learned Big Finish was making new audiodramas with "my" Doctors and companions.
I've come to love all the classic Doctors, although I didn't properly appreciate poor Colin Baker back when they gave him the worst possible start. Also, while I thought Paul McGann was a great Doctor from the moment he appeared onscreen, I wasn't much impressed with the movie at the time, complaining that it was too Americanized.
I'm still catching up on new Who, since I missed many seasons during grad school. I liked Eccleston from the moment I saw him... yes, he was the Doctor! I've seen some Tennant and liked him, although it's not quite the style of Who I'm used to. (I loved School Reunion, and I've watched a few SJAs). Matt Smith is growing on me, but he was the hardest to grok. I don't like it when the Doctor is boasting about his awesomeness, something that sat badly in Capaldi's mouth as well.
I wish Capaldi had gotten a chance with a different showrunner who might have found an approach that suited his classic-Who-Doctor better. He was brilliant (Heaven Sent is a tour de force) but sometimes struggling to fit his classic sensibilities to Moffat Who's superhero-style larger-than-life character.
I love Jodie.
(I wasn't quite sure about the idea of a woman Doctor, but Patrick Troughton was right back in the 80s: if this being can regenerate a foot taller or shorter, with different complexion, hair color, eye color, build, weight, bone structure, age, and every other facet of the body, what would cause that one tiny bit of the genome to remain fixed from regeneration to regeneration, when all the rest is fluid? As soon as he pointed that out, I was sold. And it really is a delight for girls to be able to identify with the Doctor instead of the companion -- not that we didn't sometimes identify with the Doctor, too, but in that case, why can't boys identify with female leads? It probably is good for them to learn the same form of mental gymnastics girls are expected to learn.)
Ahem. Sidetrack.
I love Jodie. Her energy, her adorable Yorkshire accent, her can-do tinkering, her running straight at danger. I want her Doctor a little more proactive, but I very much appreciate that she's no longer spouting off about the Nature of the Doctor and is just getting on with it. I'm pleased to report her Doctor -- and Yaz :D -- showed up in my dreams a lot faster than most of them have.
I'm still digesting this season and haven't seen all of it. It's a refreshing new start, but sometimes I feel it's a little too timid, too small-scale? Still, I'd rather they start out small with room to grow.owa Trds the end of Moffat's tenure there were an awful lot of stories where they kept trying to best themselves, and it kept getting more and more angstful and over the top. Everyday, normal Doctor-companion dynamics morphed into various unhealthy ones, from Amy and Rory and the Doctor to the weird stuff with Clara to Twelve being rather neglectful of Bill while distracted with Missy.
(I'm still so, so irritated that Bill said she wanted to see the future because she wanted to see that people are happy, yet she never got to see anything happy, only grimdark and depressing stuff.)
I think my favorite story in Series 11 so far, even above and beyond Rosa, was Demons of the Punjab. Like a lot of Who historicals, it suffers from the problem that the Doctor can't interfere much, and therefore can't DO much. But I liked the twist with the aliens, and I appreciated the raw vividness of Yaz's family and the love in that story. Also, the visuals and soundtrack were gorgeous.
I think, before I natter much more, I need to catch up on the last three episodes of series 11. I'm about to go visit family for two weeks, but I'll have my Amazon prime with me, so hopefully I can slip off at some point to watch them.
OH!
I guess I shall finish by saying:
My favorite Doctor Who story is the audiodrama The Emerald Tiger.
There's something about the older!Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough and Fifth Doctor team that is sheer magic (they're all good actors, and some of them have gotten better with age), plus my buddy Barnaby Edwards -- director, writer, actor, and Chief Dalek Operator, as well as artist, cook, and lovable gay man -- wrote a hell of a script for it. (I didn't know him when I fell in love with that story; I've gotten to know him a bit at cons and online. It never fails to amuse me that such a lovable person is usually inside the lead Dalek on TV.)
Other favorite Who stories in no particular order: Masque of Mandragora, Enlightenment, Primeval (audio), 1001 Nights (audio), The Time Monster, Battlefield, The Mind Robber, Falling (audio), Castrovalva, the Jago and Litefoot Revival with those two gents plus the tenth and eleventh Doctors, and, of course, Circular Time.
I'm a Fifth Doctor fan above all, with Sixth a close second thanks to audio, but I started out as a Third Doctor & Jo groupie when I was a child. Favorite companions include Jo, Leela, Ace, Tegan and Nyssa, Vicki, Zoe, Liz, Benton, the Brig and Jamie, and thanks to the audios I've become a huge Polly fan. (Anneke is also a hoot).
Most of all, I'm a Nyssa/Sarah Sutton fan. And I just missed her birthday on the 12th, and I'm kicking myself.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 09:03 pm (UTC)I enjoyed the season just gone, on the whole - I really appreciated having the show scaled back down to something smaller and more intimate - but also felt that the whole ended up being somehow less than the sum of its parts, if that makes sense.
On the whole, I think if I had to summarise the season in one word it would be 'mild'. Doctor Who-lite. I think the ideas were sound enough, I can't think of an episode that wasn't solidly Doctor Who in concept. Technically it was excellent, with some truly lovely cinematography. The new characters are bursting with potential (a lot of it still unrealised, after a full season). I really loved Whittaker's sunny, optimistic, hands-on take on the Doctor. But somehow there seemed to be something missing, and the problem I think was in the execution. There was no bite to the season. Nothing to get our teeth into and truly engage with. No focus, to draw it all together. And I'm annoyed with myself for saying it, because I have long held that Doctor Who doesn't need an intricate story arc - too many of those it has run have been badly handled - but I do feel that a stronger, clearer theme woven through the season might have helped, because the season ended up feeling a bit aimless and underwhelming. I came out of it feeling that this new era isn't really sure what it wants to be.
But then I remember how badly alienated I became from the show during the Clara seasons, and I find that I don't mind the lack of spice this season quite so much!
no subject
Date: 2019-01-29 12:13 am (UTC)Yet. Great characters. Great Doctor. An almost total reboot. i'm willing to let them feel around and find a new way of doing Who. I remember how I loved Star Trek: TNG when it started, but it took more than a season to really find itself. The potential, the heart, and the good characters were there from the start.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 10:52 pm (UTC)I was very excited when the show returned in 2005 and felt the series balanced the adult and the childish well for an early Saturday evening broadcast. Since then it has swung back towards adult, and universe scale threats, until Thirteen scaled things back down to the human.
edit: 13, not 14. John Hurt was robbed!
no subject
Date: 2019-01-29 12:10 am (UTC)Watching six was indeed challenging. Poor Colin.
and how neat that you had a grandfather to share it with you! THis show truly transcends time amd generations.