doctor who – Page 29 – Movement Point

TARDIS Database Printout?

August 14, 2023July 20, 2010 by Chris Baer

Given the vast numbers of foes the Doctor has encountered over his almost as vast number of regenerations, one wonders if he’s kept track of them.

Early episodes of Doctor Who emphasized the TARDIS’ powerful computing power, with rows of mainframe-like cabinets and whirring data tapes, and it’s not hard to imagine Hartnell’s Doctor inputting data in the brief lulls between random jumps through time and space.

The Guardian’s Datablog has taken on the task of enumerating all of the Doctor’s many foes, enlisting the hive mind’s assistance by creating a Google Docs spreadsheet, complete with motivations, number of appearances, episode titles, and which Doctor(s) they opposed:

Here’s a list of all the Doctor Who villains there have ever been since the very first episode in 1963. Whether it’s to help you put your bet on what will make a reappearance next series or just to satisfy hard-core Whovians, hopefully this will help you out.

The chart however doesn’t include villains exclusively in Doctor Who books, audio books and spin-off shows.

Definitely worth checking out the entire data set. The Daleks are, of course, tops in appearances, which is sure to annoy their rivals, the Cybermen…

(Image courtesy of Fredde Cooney Ahlstrom via a Creative Commons Attribution license.)

Happy 46th, Doctor Who

August 18, 2023November 23, 2009 by Chris Baer

Wired points out that today, November 23rd, marks the 46th anniversary of the first airing of Doctor Who, with BBC viewers tuning in at 5:15 P.M. to catch “The Unearthly Child,” the first episode of the first story, “100,000 BC,” in which two schoolteachers unwittingly stumble upon a Time Lord and are kidnapped for their curiosity.

Logo from 1963 to 1967

According to Howe, Stammers, and Walker’s Doctor Who: The Handbook: The First Doctor, only 4.4 million people can claim to have been with the Doctor from the beginning, the first episode coming in at 114th out of 200 shows that week. A repeat airing of the pilot, shown as a lead-in to the second episode the next week, did marginally better, climbing to 85th and 6 million viewers.

The show’s continued existence was, indeed, in doubt after this disappointing debut, the combination of poor ratings and high effects budgets potentially dooming the Doctor to be a footnote in the BBC’s broadcast history, until the Dalek’s appeared and decided to, ahem, Exterminate! all doubts…

So, happy anniversary, Doctor Who! Here’s to many more.

(Image from the BBC Doctor Who site.)

Re-Branding a Time Lord

August 18, 2023October 9, 2009 by Chris Baer

Funny thing about Doctor Who is that the show’s visual identity has always centered on the current iteration of the Doctor and in the swirly title graphics; the title logo has never really been a focus for fan identity.

Current Dr. Who Logo

The lens-flare-esque logo for the Ninth and Tenth Doctors is a case in point. It’s just sort of there, really, not entirely memorable as it flips and flops in the time vortex as impatient viewers wait to for the show to start.

Prior logos were similarly utilitarian, as a nice BBC image gallery demonstrates.

io9 brings news that the BBC is updating the logo for the Eleventh Doctor, incorporating that most iconic of Doctor Who images, the TARDIS:

While I’m admittedly circumspect about Matt Smith’s casting as the Eleventh Doctor, fearing that the new show runners are playing to a younger demographic than, well, the demographic that I inhabit, I like this new logo. Bit of a visual pun, and it’s surprising that the TARDIS hasn’t been used in the logo before.

But that lens flare is killing me!

(Images from the BBC Doctor Who site.)

Doctor Who Project: The Sensorites

August 18, 2023September 19, 2009 by Chris Baer

I don’t know why we ever bother to leave the ship.

Why, indeed, is it that the Doctor and his companions leave the safe (usually) confines of the TARDIS every time they jaunt, unguided, through time and space, other than the fact that there wouldn’t be much of a show without this reckless behavior? Barbara asks this very question at the beginning of Peter R. Newman’s “The Sensorites” (Story Production Code G), spurring the companions to reel off all of their extra-TARDIAL adventures to date: pre-historic earth, the Daleks, Marco Polo, Marinus, and the Aztecs. And the Doctor replies, “It all started out as a mild curiosity in the junkyard and now it’s turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure.”

“The Sensorites,” alas, is one adventure our fearless travellers would have been better off just staying in the TARDIS for. They certainly try, for as soon as they leave the TARDIS and see that they’ve materialized inside a spaceship crewed by two seemingly-dead humans, the Doctor himself is keen to get right out of there. The first ten minutes of the story seem like an apology for the plot to come, with each character in turn suggesting that they get right back in the TARDIS and leave, but as soon as you see Susan lock the TARDIS door, you just know they’re getting locked out.

By these guys, no less:

In fairness, Howe and Walker make a good point about the story’s attempt to portray an alien culture with, well, alienness and in a subtle and sympathetic vein. But the real interest for Doctor Who fans is in the continued development of the companions and the early stirrings of canonicity.

Doctor Who Project: The Aztecs

August 20, 2023July 10, 2009 by Chris Baer

What’s the point of traveling through time and space if we can’t change anything?

You can be forgiven for thinking that John Lucarotti’s “The Aztecs” (Story Production Code F) is about the Doctor and his companions’ adventures amongst the Aztecs. An understandable mistake, because it’s about the Aztecs as much as Moby Dick is about a whale. Which is to say, yeah, of course, but not really.

No, “The Aztecs” is Doctor Who‘s first real examination of time travel and its limitations and potential paradoxes. The Aztec setting is really just window dressing, both scenic and moral, in this story, with endless parades of Aztec warriors processing back and forth whenever Barbara, mistaken for a reincarnation of Yetaxa, an Aztec High Priest, needs to go anywhere, and the issue of human sacrifice serving as the focal point in the Doctor and Barbara’s struggle about whether or not to intervene in history.

The action in the story revolves around the TARDIS materializing in an Aztec tomb with a one-way door that all of our intrepid time travelers manage to go through. This device of rendering the TARDIS inaccessible has been used in every story to date, save “The Edge of Destruction” and “The Daleks,” where the TARDIS was inoperable instead, a narrow distinction. Thus far in the series, the writers have not developed a story where the Doctor would want to stay in the setting and resolve the plot’s convolutions, and “The Aztecs” begins to give us some background about just why the Doctor doesn’t wish to meddle.

Who Watches the Re-Watchmen?

August 21, 2023June 16, 2009 by Chris Baer

It’s not enough for a science fiction fan to view a favorite movie or series, or read a favorite novel, once. The whole notion of fandom involves repeated and extended interaction with the object of our notional obsession. The repeated engagement with a work of science fiction, in any medium, is not unlike any form of literary or cultural study. We re-read, or re-watch, in order to better understand the object we are studying.

Re-watching or re-reading is not simply summarizing; to re-watch is to examine a part with knowledge of the whole. Sometimes this task reveals continuity errors or plot holes; other times, re-watching reveals nuances planted early in a series that only bear fruit much later in the future.

While the whole prospect of re-reading or re-watching science fiction is nothing new—the fanzine has been around about as long as the genre itself, and parodies of devoted re-watchers raising continuity questions feature prominently in any portrayal of science fiction fandom—of late, several science fiction re-watching efforts have been undertaken online.

In addition to my own Doctor Who Project, two other groups are working their way through the numerous Doctors, including The Doctor Who Mission, a group project trying to tackle a story a week, and The TARDIS Project, which is revisiting not just stories but individual episodes within each story.

One of the problems with Doctor Who re-watching in general is the difficulty in finding all of the stories. Besides the much-lamented loss of more-than-a-few episodes by the BBC, the entire existing run of the series is not yet out on DVD, leaving dedicated re-watchers who have no desire to acquire the missing stories via peer-to-peer solutions to scramble about at library sales and online auction sites to find VHS tapes to undertake the task before they stop making VHS players.

The glee of finding some repeated trope or following the evolution of a phrase in a series is well worth the effort required to track down all of the damn things, though.

(Image courtesy of gbaku via a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.)