TV Tuesday: Who By Fire
Aug. 8th, 2017 07:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bMiraculously, my computer hasn't been crashing every five minutes lately! So I've been able to watch a little more Classic Who.
The War Machines is fantastic, all the best Classic Who has to offer. I was happy to see that the titular Machines use the same egg-beater apparatus as our old friends the Daleks to murder unsuspecting humans with a blast of steam. I also enjoyed Polly being saved by The Power of Friendship (never mind that she'd only met Ben the night before; it was obviously Meant to Be).
The Smugglers is almost as good, despite being almost all lost (there are a handful of live-action scenes, most of which seem to be second-camera backups or something). The Doctor is FURIOUS with Polly and Ben for barging into his Tardis just as it was leaving London. Don't they know he can't control where it lands?? Ben just needs to get back to barracks before he gets written up, so when he thinks he's landed in Cornwall, he heads off to find a train station. Unfortunately, it's also the seventeenth century - pirates for days, but no trains in sight.
The Smugglers is followed by The Tenth Planet, an (almost entirely) complete serial featuring THE CYBERMEN! Here they are, appearing on Earth for the very first time, in the space-age future of 1986 - and even though they are just a sock mask cluttered up with BBC alien apparatus and Team Who's attempt to imagine "alien" speech patterns is as mixed a bag as ever, they are genuinely creepy when they first come cyber-stomping out of the snowstorm, with their eerie minimalist eyes and mouth.
The other big deal about The Tenth Planet, of course, is that it introduces the single best idea in the history of television, the regeneration of the Doctor. I am sorry to say goodbye to William Hartnell, as I'll be sorry to say goodbye to every Doctor, but life depends on change.
I'm looking forward to meeting Patrick Troughton in live action, but unfortunately it won't happen until Episode 2 of The Underwater Menace.
In other parties I'm late to: Supergirl has gone from my least favorite of the CW-style perky superhero shows to my favorite, thanks to ditching Cat Grant (a terribly written non-character even by the standards of this terribly-written show) and replacing her with two new characters: a beautiful pool-playing police detective/flirt and Lex Luthor's coolly pragmatic sister, who is trying to re-brand the family business after Lex fucked up the optics in typical Lex Luthor fashion. The writing is still a mess, with painfully on the nose conversations about everyone's relationships every five minutes, but the core cast is adorable, and EVERY TIME Det. Maggie Sawyer or Lena Luthor shows up on screen, I clap my hands like a baby seal on a sugar high. What can I say? I'm easy to please.
I was a little taken aback by the decision to turn Winn into an exact copy of Cisco Ramon from The Flash, but on the other hand, I like Cisco, so I can live with it.
(The Flash, meanwhile, is even purer garbage than ever. If you like your found family beats extra glib and nonsensical and your relentlessly ubiquitous romance subplots extra, EXTRA dumb, THE TRASH is the show for you! You could probably use it as aversion therapy for the cliche-addicted. Before you ask, I'm still watching it because I'm still having fun).
The other day I went to the local fandom garbage outlet (a 'bookstore' that is mostly pop-culture t-shirts and Bible paraphernalia) to see if they had any Thirteenth Doctor shirts I could wear. They didn't, but they did still have the shirt that says "My Boyfriend is a Time Lord," now inaccurate on additional levels.
I'm even more excited now that I've heard Jodie Whittaker speak.
The War Machines is fantastic, all the best Classic Who has to offer. I was happy to see that the titular Machines use the same egg-beater apparatus as our old friends the Daleks to murder unsuspecting humans with a blast of steam. I also enjoyed Polly being saved by The Power of Friendship (never mind that she'd only met Ben the night before; it was obviously Meant to Be).
The Smugglers is almost as good, despite being almost all lost (there are a handful of live-action scenes, most of which seem to be second-camera backups or something). The Doctor is FURIOUS with Polly and Ben for barging into his Tardis just as it was leaving London. Don't they know he can't control where it lands?? Ben just needs to get back to barracks before he gets written up, so when he thinks he's landed in Cornwall, he heads off to find a train station. Unfortunately, it's also the seventeenth century - pirates for days, but no trains in sight.
The Smugglers is followed by The Tenth Planet, an (almost entirely) complete serial featuring THE CYBERMEN! Here they are, appearing on Earth for the very first time, in the space-age future of 1986 - and even though they are just a sock mask cluttered up with BBC alien apparatus and Team Who's attempt to imagine "alien" speech patterns is as mixed a bag as ever, they are genuinely creepy when they first come cyber-stomping out of the snowstorm, with their eerie minimalist eyes and mouth.
The other big deal about The Tenth Planet, of course, is that it introduces the single best idea in the history of television, the regeneration of the Doctor. I am sorry to say goodbye to William Hartnell, as I'll be sorry to say goodbye to every Doctor, but life depends on change.
I'm looking forward to meeting Patrick Troughton in live action, but unfortunately it won't happen until Episode 2 of The Underwater Menace.
In other parties I'm late to: Supergirl has gone from my least favorite of the CW-style perky superhero shows to my favorite, thanks to ditching Cat Grant (a terribly written non-character even by the standards of this terribly-written show) and replacing her with two new characters: a beautiful pool-playing police detective/flirt and Lex Luthor's coolly pragmatic sister, who is trying to re-brand the family business after Lex fucked up the optics in typical Lex Luthor fashion. The writing is still a mess, with painfully on the nose conversations about everyone's relationships every five minutes, but the core cast is adorable, and EVERY TIME Det. Maggie Sawyer or Lena Luthor shows up on screen, I clap my hands like a baby seal on a sugar high. What can I say? I'm easy to please.
I was a little taken aback by the decision to turn Winn into an exact copy of Cisco Ramon from The Flash, but on the other hand, I like Cisco, so I can live with it.
(The Flash, meanwhile, is even purer garbage than ever. If you like your found family beats extra glib and nonsensical and your relentlessly ubiquitous romance subplots extra, EXTRA dumb, THE TRASH is the show for you! You could probably use it as aversion therapy for the cliche-addicted. Before you ask, I'm still watching it because I'm still having fun).
The other day I went to the local fandom garbage outlet (a 'bookstore' that is mostly pop-culture t-shirts and Bible paraphernalia) to see if they had any Thirteenth Doctor shirts I could wear. They didn't, but they did still have the shirt that says "My Boyfriend is a Time Lord," now inaccurate on additional levels.
I'm even more excited now that I've heard Jodie Whittaker speak.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-09 09:00 am (UTC)<3 Did you also like the cliffhanger where everyone else runs away as the Doctor shifts forward - William Hartnell absolutely knew how to dominate a shot!
Polly/Ben are adorable and, yes, clearly meant to be right from the start! See also: Ben's determination to rescue Polly and have their promised date, despite war machines/hypnotised authority figures, whatever. (It took me a long time, too, but also, when Polly asks him out at the nightclub, he says, "I'm no deb's delight." Which is to say that, mid60s there was a fashion for posh debutantes picking up a 'bit of rough' as their boyfriend, and he's worried this is what Polly's after.)
You now know more about The Smugglers than I do, although I think I may actually have read the novelisation at some point in the 1990s.
And you have completed One! *\o/* Here's to Two! (As you say, Regeneration is an excellent concept.)
They didn't, but they did still have the shirt that says "My Boyfriend is a Time Lord," now inaccurate on additional levels.
LOL/oh dear, oh dear. Hopefully, they will soon amend that!
no subject
Date: 2017-08-09 10:12 pm (UTC)ABSOLUTELY YES. 1000% the Doctor. <3
Polly and Ben are a delight. Two is also a delight, but looking at the missing serials, he seems to have suffered the worst desolation at all. :( I'll be glad whenever the BBC decides to stop tossing episodes on the bonfire.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-10 05:41 pm (UTC)Burnination of old telly is pretty much the opposite of the gift that keeps on giving. :-(
I'll be glad whenever the BBC decides to stop tossing episodes on the bonfire.
That'll be in the mid-1970s when a librarian arrived and stopped them, or at least stopped them doing it without checking they didn't have a copy somewhere. ITV companies just carried on into the 1980s every time one of them was bought out by another.
However, in DW terms, yeah, there's a long period throughout Patrick's run. I'm not sure where the last gap in episodes is, but at least the recovery of Web of Fear and Enemy have cheered things up a lot, in addition to also being damn' fine serials, as it turned out!