TFARCHIVE FORUMS

Tangential to Who, but we're in the middle of a week where a whole load of recovered missing TV is being announced. Most excitingly for me is a season 1 episode of The Avengers, but there's been things like Softly Softly (an episode staring Barry Letts and half the cast of Enemy of the World!) and Dr Finlay's Casebook.

The Avengers one is especially impressive because none of that first year should really exist still (not sold abroad, half of it shown live with telerecordings on confirmed when they found Girl on the Trapeze) so now having three and a third episodes gives hope for the most unlikely of Who finds.

Oh, and not this week but a load of the lost British Fraggle Rock episodes have been found (albeit on a lot of off air old VHS tapes it seems) as well. It's slightly mental that something that recent wasn't kept.

Though apparently the entire TVS archive (including Patrick Troughton's final show in Knights of God) is in danger because all the paperwork that would allow it to be commercially exploited has been lost and new owners Disney aren't that bothered about not throwing it out as dead weight.

inflatable dalek wrote:The Avengers one is especially impressive because none of that first year should really exist still (not sold abroad, half of it shown live with telerecordings on confirmed when they found Girl on the Trapeze)

Speaking of TV shows shown live, what was that one show from the 50's about some fat schoolboy Celestial Toymaker was supposedly spoofing?

CLASS trailer

https://youtu.be/PAycTsDzW-w

Twenty seven minutes of Matt Smith "hilariously" spitting out food and being a dick to a small child. ****ing hell, we should have nuked the entire thing from orbit immediately.

HOW DOES A COMPUTER VIRUS MAKE A CLOCK GO TO 00:00 WHEN IT'S BATTERY POWERED FFS?

HOW DOES THE DOCTOR KNOW IT'S A MULTIFORM WHATEVER WHEN IT'S STILL IN THE ROOM AND HE CAN'T KNOW THAT?

HOW DOES PRISONER ZERO KNOW ABOUT THE PANDORICA AND THE SILENCE AND OH for ****'s sake why am I even bothering.

Those merchandise-friendly collect-em-all coloured Daleks really caught on, didn't they...

...I quite liked them. The universal condemnation of them means they seem to have been quietly forgotten about though. 'Victory' is an odd episode, it has some good stuff; Churchill, Daleks carrying tea-trays, the dogfight in space, but it just doesn't hang together well. And has made the name 'Dorabella' stick in my head like I don't know what. Is that even a real name?

I think they would have worked better if they were just supposed to be command units.

So, for example, in the hypothetical Haunting of the Daleks, the Dalek in charge of whatever the Doctor is going up against is, say, one of the blue ones(picked because that's the one I have a minifig of).

But as the new look, they're all going to look like that now..... They're pretty rubbish.

The whole "silence will fall" motif through series 5 is a superb example of something that makes even less sense when you actually know what it is.

Brendocon 2.0 wrote:The whole "silence will fall" motif through series 5 is a superb example of something that makes even less sense when you actually know what it is.

Boy was I disappointed when I found out what it actually was.

WHY ARE THE JUDOON PUTTING HIM IN THE PANDORICA WHY DID RIVER SAY ONE OF THE SHIPS IS SLITHEEN DOES MOFFATT EVEN WATCH DOCTOR WHO?

Oh wait hang on the Judoon are there because it's protecting the universe but they could at least arrest some Daleks while they're at it?

Presumably they'd only arrest Daleks who are wanted for crimes, maybe none of the big boy Daleks have committed any yet? Or it's just some Judoon rather than Judoon police?

You know this is Matt Smith's best year right?

I remember smiling and enjoying the ride through all this at the time, blissfully ignorant under the assumption that Moff was doing THE PLOTMASTER thing and it would all make sense in the long run.

As it transpires it's just a dry run for the flashy "oh hey look a clever twist" distraction technique that would stop him actually having to ever explain or think anything through.

I'll be glad when he's ****ed off and history can objectively file this alongside Colin Baker in the "let's all just admit it's a bit shit and move on" cabinet.

Hindsight's a cruel mistress.

I mean, I used to disparage RTD to no end, but now...

...I think I'd rather just say that the new series has some shining spots but the trouble is having to wade through all the shit to find them, regardless of who the showrunner is.

Its no secret that series 6 and 7 were made during a time where Moffat was under enormous pressure juggling two successful shows and that does show in the disjointed storytelling. The show also seemed to be having a wretched time getting made too. Its a shame, because I really like Matt Smith's Doctor and The Silence held such promise, but no, space monks flying around in a Borg ship with a silly fanfare.

Too many half sketched out ideas are just farted out on screen - Madam Kovarian, River Song just explaining who she is, the still a muddled pickle of confusion of that Astronaut stuff from series 6.

The Capaldi stuff has been on a slightly more solid footing. Having rewatched series 8 and 9, the show feels a lot more settled and Moffat has tied down a lot of the stuff he wants to do and there's less 'clever twist' stuff going on, which is good.

The done-in-one approach of the Capaldi stuff definitely helped cut down on the overcomplicated mythology and meant that, when they went back to two-parters, there was a bit more purpose to what they were doing.

Would still have been happier if Moffat had just handed the reins over to someone new rather than going "er, no, I'm... ah, too busy at the moment - it'll have to wait a year"

I'm assuming that's what happened. I can't be arsed to fact check.

He was all up for leaving, but got asked to stay on by the Beeb and some stuff about Chris Chibnall not being free to takeover because of Broadchurch or something.

I watched some of Creature From The Pit last night. That's a treat.

Cover and extras for the Power DVD are up:

http://www.doctorwhonews.net/2016/10/th ... erial.html

Nice it's fully loaded and has all the telesnaps on it, even if the alternate recon probably won't be much better than the Underwater Menace one.

Of course, tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of William Hartnell having to Go Away, so I'll probably fit in a watch of Adventure in Space and Time at some point.

Ooh, recon as well. That's funky.

Anyway I'm on series 6 and all I'm going to say is that dedicating 6 of the first 8 episodes to the stupid origin of his smug fanwank character isn't in any way self-indulgent, is it?

Oh hey, the Girl Who Waited, where wacky technobabble circumstances mean Amy gets separated from the Doctor and Rory, meaning they have to save her.

It's been a whole three episodes since we had one of those...

Anyway right, so The God Complex doggedly using the term "bad dreams" instead of "fears" is just baffling and also more annoying than when they wouldn't say "nightmares" in The End of Time.

The Wedding of River Song is bobbins. When exactly in Amy's timeline is that meeting with River at the end? Wibbly wobbly distraction technobabble etc and so on.

BUT THE ONE IMPORTANT THING HERE is that we did actually find out the Doctor's name is in fact "Look into my eye". So that's nice, isn't it.