doctor who – Page 31 – Movement Point

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.)

Doctor Who Project: The Keys of Marinus

August 21, 2023June 6, 2009 by Chris Baer

Now, now! Twist the dials!

The First Doctor and his companions, having left China behind, find themselves once more at the mercy of the wonky time mechanism in the TARDIS, arriving on a glass sand beach surrounded by acid seas. Over those seas and far away are the titular Keys of Marinus, four of which this fab foursome will be coerced into finding.

Much like the preceeding “Marco Polo,” Terry Nation’s “The Keys of Marinus” (Story Production Code E) is a sweeping epic of a story, stretching a simple “fetch and carry” plot over six episodes. Four Keys must be found, each in a different location on the planet Marinus and each accompanied by a different type of story. Finding the first Key involves psychological suspense, with a struggle to separate reality from illusion. And there are brains in jars.

The second Key is in an overgrown laboratory with violent plant life, and in finding it, Ian and Barbara undergo a horror-type encounter with eerie whispering from creeping vines. To find the third Key, Ian, Susan, Barbara, and two new helpers run around a frozen waste in an action episode, fending off wolves, a burly trapper, and ice warriors who come to life when heated up. And the acquisition of the fourth Key requires solving a murder mystery that is nowhere near as puzzling as the very awkward jump between episodes four and five, when we go from Ian escaping the trapper’s hut to Ian being knocked out in a vault with no explanation.

The New Doctor is . . . Who?

August 27, 2023January 3, 2009 by Chris Baer

Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7808697.stm After months of speculation about the next regeneration of Doctor Who, the BBC today announced that Matt Smith will claim the coveted role of the wandering Gallifreyan.

Um, Doctor Who?

The youngest actor to play the lead role in Doctor Who, Smith follows on the heels of David Tennant, who will be stepping out of the role after some specials to air in 2009 and early 2010. Per the BBC article,

Piers Wenger, head of drama at BBC Wales, said that as soon as he had seen Smith’s audition he “knew he was the one”.

“It was abundantly clear that he had that ‘Doctor-ness’ about him,” he said. “You are either the Doctor or you are not.”

I must confess that I was hoping for a female Doctor this time around, if only for the story line possibilities. Every new Doctor must build on the work of his or her predecessors while imbuing the role with something special, something new. I suppose skewing younger will bring a fresh take to the role, but the Doctor is, after all, 900-odd years old.

The very first Doctor, William Hartnell, was in his mid-50s when he stepped through the TARDIS doors. The Doctor is definitely not young at heart—the Doctor is capable of deep, dangerous emotions that betray his age and the scars of time.

I trust that Steven Moffat, the new show runner from 2010 on, will remember that what a younger actor brings to the show is energy, not youth.

(Image from BBC)

Who Knows "Who"?

January 25, 2022July 30, 2008 by Chris Baer

After forty-odd years of being on television and in popular culture, Dr. Who still requires an introduction, it seems.

In the July 21, 2008, issue of The New Yorker (the one with all the cover fracas, in fact), Benjamin Wallace-Wells pens an article about Garrett Lisi’s quest for a Theory of Everything, noting that the good Doctor can be a soothing respite for an introverted physicist and his partner:

The weekend I visited, Lisi and Baranyk were getting ready for a party in Reno, forty minutes away, to which they’d been invited by someone Lisi met on a ski lift, and for which they were dressing up as giant rabbits. But most nights they stayed in and cooked. They sometimes watched videotapes of the British science-fiction show “Doctor Who,” but they preferred board games.

Has the Doctor not penetrated sufficiently into public consciousness that the show can be introduced simply as Doctor Who, with the expectation that it will be understood? Or will it always require an appositive to provide needed context for those who might otherwise think some obscure medical drama were being watched?

Perhaps these are just the grumbles of a niche fan who cannot understand his favorite show being relegated to late-night PBS airings. After all, one doesn’t bother to explain Star Wars as “the American science-fiction film based loosely on Joseph Campbell’s work” or Harry Potter as “the British children’s series, loved by adults, about a boy wizard.” Or perhaps it’s just good journalism to provide explanations for anything that might be unclear to your widest possible audience. Let’s go with that.

I’ll have to make a more thorough search of The New Yorker’s archives to see how the show is mentioned, if ever before, in its pages. The online archive is less-than-full-featured, and I despair of installing the kludgy, proprietary interface for the complete DVD set (which I treasure nonetheless), but we all make sacrifices for the Doctor.

(Image courtesy of recurrence, via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike License.)

Level 58 Time Lord: Envisioning a Doctor Who MMORPG

January 25, 2022June 23, 2008 by Chris Baer

One of the ways to reach Movement Point is to type “doctor who mmorpg” into a search engine, owing to our twin fascinations with Dr. Who and gaming here. This site doesn’t show up until the third or fourth page on that search, though, so you have to be pretty desperate for news about a potential Dr. Who Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game to click through to here. And yet my site stats indicate that someone did.

I can understand the desire. Over forty years, Dr. Who‘s writers and producers have populated the show’s more-or-less coherent universe with plenty of planets to explore, characters to revisit, and enemies to defeat yet again. MMOs, and role playing games generally, put the player into the story universe, to shape it and become a part of it, a form of “active” fan fiction. Millions log in to fight dragons daily; it’s not such a stretch to imagine gamers going online to take down Daleks.

So what, then, would a Dr. Who MMORPG look like?

First Impressions: Torchwood

April 9, 2017March 28, 2008 by Chris Baer

CSI: Cardiff. I’d like to see that. They’d be measuring the velocity of a kebab.

I realize that I’m coming somewhat late to the party, but I’ve just begun watching the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, which recently came out on Region 1 DVD.

Featuring Captain Jack Harkness, one of the Doctor’s occasional companions, and his band of alien chasers and tech scavengers, Torchwood is a much grittier and mature show than its parent program. It’s refreshing to watch science fiction with a bit of an edge, particularly in the television/episodic format. I often wonder what a show like Babylon 5 would have been like without the particular strictures of network television.

There’s a fine line between gratuitous and developmental, though. When a show pushes typical boundaries to tell a story more fully, then adding a more adult “sheen” serves a purpose. But adding adult contexts to a show merely to titillate cheapens the storytelling and the show in general. Does Torchwood burnish or tarnish the whole Doctor Who franchise?