Yee-hah, after ages of strenuously avoiding the threads here, my sister exercised her journalist privileges and got me episodes 1,2,4 and 5 of the new Dr Who.
It's really really good! Just enough of a nod to the old series to, nice pacing, good production values and fairly good stories. My favourite so far is 'the end of the world'. My sister thinks the Doctor holds Rose's hand too often, but I dunno. I can see it from his point of view.
I love the Northern accent jokes ("plenty of planets have an 'up north'") and the aliens look good. It could have been foul; twee updating, overusing CGI, trying too hard to be new and cool, but it avoided all those things. Sweet!
question; what was the other song in 'End of the world"?
my only objection; the Tardis is too big inside and there should be a chair.
thassall
Britney Spears - Toxic
Soft Cell - Tainted Love
Absolutly agree Floyd, I saw The End of the World on Saturday, awsome episode. Nothing beats the wait for it to start on Saturdays, atleast 5 or 6 of us are starting to gather on Saturday nights ready to watch. Eccleston(if thats how you spell it) is a joy to watch and Billie proves shes not just a pretty face(but boy she sure is pretty). Have you noticed the slightly insane edge this Doctors showing? related to this whole Time War thats been mentioned a couple of times already, I'm intrigued. It is a shame they wont be ratining the main actors for another season but if the writting stays at this standard I dont see there being a problem with the transition(except trying to explain how the Doc's got even more regens left in him? I thought Time Lords on;ly had 8)
CU Krestel
I've noticed this Doctor showing hints of deep and meaningful loopiness, doubtless caused by the war he keeps dropping hints at.
The moment when he walked through the big slicey propellor things with his eyes closed was very effective. Afterwards I thought, if he could do that, why didn't he do it at the start so that the hot-to-trot tree lady wouldn't have had to burn up? At the time it worked. Ecclestone can say "You're made of wood!" without seeming silly".
Billy Piper certainly has her moments. As for how he gets the necessary number of regenerations to continue this series, who cares? Probably frequent flier points.
...fan boy geek alert, the doctor/timelords with the gift of regeneration can change 12 times so that would make 13 doctors, however in a past story the master was offered another regeneration cycle as he had used all his up so it must be renewable, so the question is can the number of regenerations be set? i think it would be a nice surprise in say 15 years time when the 13th doctor is about to die at the end of the season and then at the cliff hanger regenerates, that would be brill and no-one would be expecting it cause it shouldnt happen...
Rumours that Billie is set to quit half way through the next series, are countered by rumours in the sunday papers that she's sticking around for all the second series as well.
But wasn't the regenerations thing born of some throwaway line in one episode that then became canon? They'd just as well drop the idea, which would irritate the fan-boys, but perhaps less so than the BBC saying "we're cancelling Doctor Who again, because he's run out of regenerations". Then again, if the Time Lords are all gone anyway, you might argue that they restricted the number of regenerations, and now that restriction is removed.
Of course, it's all academic anyway: nothing says the series will last or won't get affected by diminishing returns. I'd love to see it still around in a decade, with the same level of enthusiasm, decent acting, excellent effects and very good scripts, but I'll be somewhat surprised if it is.
Re: the tree-lady being vulnerable to heat/flame because she's "made of wood"...
That irritated me some. Imagine a raging bush fire. There's a tree and a man standing in the middle of the inferno. Which one is still standing the next day when it has all burnt itself out? Oh look, it's not the man, is it?
But then a tree usually isn't the same size as a man...
She's a special self-sacrificing, highly flammable tree that finds Christoper Ecclestone arousing. For obvious reasons, it's an endangered species
Nice line from last night "that lot'd show up for a weather balloon"