Is it Jaime? Maybe Romana? No wait, I got it, Ace!
It is a tie between Ace or K9. K9 was so useful that the writers had to come up with ways to disable him and ace carried a baseball bat and made her own explosives.
Watched Day of the Daleks recently. The Doctor totally grabs a laser pistol and casually blasts two dudes before Brigadier machine guns another. Also Terminator seems to have lifted this entire plot.
Wait? Why is there an angry mob of folks with torches and pitchforks coming at me?
Because people that wanted a female doctor cant handle the fact that we had one for like two seasons
I do not recall a female Doctor appearing at any point since The Curse of Fatal Death. Saying River is like a female Doctor suggests that you misunderstand the Doctor.
I say this as someone who liked River for the most part and wants a female Doctor.
Is it Jaime? Maybe Romana? No wait, I got it, Ace!
It is a tie between Ace or K9. K9 was so useful that the writers had to come up with ways to disable him and ace carried a baseball bat and made her own explosives.
Watched Day of the Daleks recently. The Doctor totally grabs a laser pistol and casually blasts two dudes before Brigadier machine guns another. Also Terminator seems to have lifted this entire plot.
I can't remember if it was the director or the producer, but on the DVD extras he admitted that they shouldn't have put that scene in.
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Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
Is it Jaime? Maybe Romana? No wait, I got it, Ace!
It is a tie between Ace or K9. K9 was so useful that the writers had to come up with ways to disable him and ace carried a baseball bat and made her own explosives.
Watched Day of the Daleks recently. The Doctor totally grabs a laser pistol and casually blasts two dudes before Brigadier machine guns another. Also Terminator seems to have lifted this entire plot.
I can't remember if it was the director or the producer, but on the DVD extras he admitted that they shouldn't have put that scene in.
It is even crazier in the special edition since they now explode into little chunks with the new effects.
Man I hate the new effects they put on some of the DVDs (granted, switching them on is optional). They're always rubbish CGI, so what you end up with is the cheap effects of the '70s replaced by the cheap effects of today. If they'd only redo them with scale models and other techniques that are true to the time period in which the stories were made, I'd be all in favour of them.
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
Is it Jaime? Maybe Romana? No wait, I got it, Ace!
It is K9. K9 was so useful that the writers had to come up with ways to disable him. Ace was cool too, she carried a baseball bat and made her own explosives, but K9 is still the best.
There you go, all fixed.
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Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
Is it Jaime? Maybe Romana? No wait, I got it, Ace!
It is K9. K9 was so useful that the writers had to come up with ways to disable him. Ace was cool too, she carried a baseball bat and made her own explosives, but K9 is still the best.
You saw the episode with the absorby monster thing, right? I mean, it's possible you've just willed yourself to forget it, because wow. That fuckin' episode.
I actually couldn't bring myself to watch all of Love and Monsters (I watched Fear Her with my sister before I was really into the show), but that was an interesting premise with really, really poor execution. There is nothing redeeming about Fear Her, and I fucking hate the Olympics. But if you hate it more because of the WTF is wrong with you RTD elements, that's fair.
I actually hate it a bit more because of the waste of an interesting premise.
Even if that weren't the case, whatever goodwill that premise generated was entirely undone by the end scene where the dude got a beej from a cobblestone
If so, it was ok for the most part but Rose had a good point about that alien kid in the girl needing a serious spanking. And after all the drama she causes, the alien kid ups and ditches the girl the second she feels her ship fixed and leaves the girl and her mother to that evil drawing of the girl's abusive dead dad.
Are you sure that you don't mean that the episode was completely saved when a guy gets a beej from a cobblestone
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
edited February 2014
"My favorite compansions," a list by Jacob, age 34:
0. The Brigadier - doesn't quite count as a companion in the usual way, but fuck it, he remains my favorite character on the show that isn't the Doctor, and just about ties the Doctor. He was smart and cool and brave and had this impossible gravitas even when surrounded by cactuses wrapped in bubble wrap and aluminum foil.
1. Ace - she and the Seventh had a really interesting mentor/apprentice relationship that hasn't been done before or since. It wasn't paternal, it wasn't romantic, and it wasn't a pair of equals; every story was about expanding Ace's perspective, sometimes cruelly, but she was always opinionated and competent in a way that a lot of off-the-shelf "strong female characters" are not.
2. Donna - Donna is the modern companion that reminds me most of the classic ones; she doesn't have a special relationship with the Doctor or any kind of unique origin and often gets into trouble and screams a bit, but their partnership feels so natural and warm that you never once wonder why she's there.
3. Jamie - the Doctor's first and best bro. The double act of a brave, foolhardy Scottish clansman with Troughton's nervous, fidgety, slightly cowardly Doctor just sparked so well, and both actors gave off a sense of warm familiarity with each other. I love the idea, suggested in The Two Doctors, that the pair just spent unseen years traveling and bro-ing out together.
4. Ian and Barbara - Until Grace in the TV movie and Rose in the reboot, they had the unique position of being companions who were really the main characters or even heroes of the show. The first Doctor is downright sinister at points and it's the two teachers' fundamental decency that turns him into the figure we know today.
5. Turlough - I really like the different texture the show gets when the Doctor has a male companion, and the role of a secret enemy who warms up to the Doctor and becomes an ally - without ever really losing his self-interested or even somewhat cowardly edge - remains a really interesting and fresh take. It doesn't hurt that the actor, Mark Strickson, had a really lean, predatory look.
6. Romana - In both incarnations, she and the Doctor have a really cool partnership of equals and the repartee between the characters got the lion's share of the effort from the writers and it shows; their dialogue is fun and effervescent and playful. But too often the stories around them are disposable trash ("NIMON! IT IS I, SOLDEED!").
7. Sarah Jane - Sarah Jane was created with the idea that this would be a progressive, modern, feminist character, so of course the writers and staff made her a mouthy dame reporter - but that's okay, really, because mouthy dame reporters were some of the best and smartest roles actresses could get back in the day and it is still miles better than being a generic screaming victim. She played really well off of Jon Pertwee's stuffy, self-important patriarch, but I feel like as her tenure lengthened the writers kind of filed down her interesting edges and made her more generic - but by that point she was in the classic Hinchcliffe era and was being "more generic" in some of the best stories the show has ever had. So I think the modern show treating her as almost the default old-series companion is more down to the length of her tenure and the prestige of the stories she was in than any inherent quality of the character, but I'm glad that Elizabeth Sladen got a second and well-deserved chance to show her chops.
8. Rose - hatters gon hat. I like Billie Piper's performance - I would be a liar if I said I wasn't genuinely moved at times, a claim I cannot often lay at the feet of the old show, much as it excites or interests me, it rarely gutted me - and I like the conception of a companion that has a real life to leave behind and real consequences for doing so. The other thing I think is important about Rose that isn't often talked about is that she's the first time the show explicitly dealt with something that fans of all ages have thought about: the idea that travelling with the Doctor could be a way to escape a dead-end life. A lot of companions have joined the Doctor from necessity (their space station or whatever was blowing up), or by accident, or because it's their job (the UNIT companions and Romana) or just as a lark - but anyone who watched and loved this show as a kid has probably wished at some time or another that a blue box would come and spirit us away from boring school or shitty job or whatever, and Rose's story acknowledges that and made it a whole thing and I really connected iwth her character and story because of it. (Seen in this context, by the way, I view Donna as Davies doing that theme again but better.)
"My least favorite companions," another list by Jacob, age 34:
1. Adric - The problem with writing children as characters in adventure stories is the temptation to make them extra-precocious, both to answer the question of "why does the main character continually keep this child around and expose him or her to danger?" and from the sadly misguided belief on the part of certain well-meaning adults that kid audiences want to watch the adventures of the annoying prig in school who answers all the teacher's questions. It's the same impulse that gave us Wesley Crusher, but unlike Wesley, who I think was pretty much salvaged as a character in his later Next Gen apperances (like the one where the kid at school died, or the one where he and Picard are trapped in the cave with the fountain, or the one with Ashley Judd being really hot), Adric just was kind of shrilly and charmlessly written throughout. It probably didn't help that the actor, Matthew Waterhouse, was kind of a dingus. Famously, at the end of Castrovalva, you can see him looking pale and clammy from a drinking binge the night before, and between shots he slips off into the woods to hurl behind a tree.
2. Mel - I don't really hate her as such, I just find her kind of emblematic of the more pointless companions who just seem to kind of take up space and aren't particularly charming or interesting. Mel tops the list of that sort of companion because she has an ear-splitting shriek of a scream, sports possibly the most obnoxious wardrobe and general look of any compaion ever, and features in some of the absolute worst stories ever filmed.
3. Peri - see above. Peri didn't really have much of a point except to look really terrific in a bikini (which, credit where it's due, she does) - but the decision to saddle the actress with an American accent that she couldn't remotely pull off was a nightmarishly poor one. And who in the name of sanity thought "Peripugilliam" was an American name?
4. Martha - i don't dislike the character or actress - and really, I think that the combination of our generally higher modern standars for television and the new show's focus on dialogue and characterization means that even the worst-written characters in the new program feel more vibrant and alive than many characters in the old one - but the unrequited-love arc was a really poor choice. Also, I think her ethnicity caused a lot of writers to choke and write her as boringly, blandly virtuous rather than risk giving offense by endowing her with humanizing rough edges.
5. Jo - Jo is very likeable and the actress, Katy Manning, had real chemistry with Jon Pertwee and featured in many of the show's best stories, but I am kind of mildly ideologically opposed to the idea of explicitly writing the one major woman character in a childrens' show as, effectively, a bimbo. While I think someone like Adric illustrates the danger of well-meaning writers trying to create an aspirational figure for children ("don't you want to be smart and do all your math homework like Adric, boys and girls?") I almost feel like Jo occupies the other end of the spectrum, where having a character who is kind of sweetly dopey and perpetually vulnerable makes me uncomfortable.
Jacobkosh on
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Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
The only redeeming thing about Adric is that once he's dead the Doctor uses his math award pin to really violently murder a cyberman.
Unpopular view ahoy: I actually kind of liked Adric in his first few stories. Basically only his season 18 stories, though. He seemed to get substantially more arrogant and unlikeable after the Doctor's regeneration.
Cyvros on
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I just watched Full Circle and Adric isn't terrible in that - he's perfectly fine as a character in the story - but as a companion he feels like such a weird fit with Baker.
The resolution of that story is still cool but is less clever than I remembered. The organisms' life-cycle had had less detail in it than I remembered.
Rewatching it recently, I really felt Full Circle should have been trippier for some reason. Maybe I was thinking all the E-Space stories should have been in a similar style to Warriors' Gate.
The Four/Adric pairing did feel quite odd, but there was something about it I felt worked, particularly in early Logopolis, where it's like the Doctor has taken on the role of a bizarre, aloof mentor.
I just watched the first Martha episode and i like her way better than either rose or Donna
Yeah everyone thinks that in the first episode. It's a great performance and a huge relief to have a real actress instead of Billie Piper doing a poor person voice. Unfortunately the character isn't very well treated as the show goes on.
Samuel Anderson (The History Boys, Gavin & Stacey, Emmerdale) is set to join the cast of Doctor Who as a recurring character in series 8, which will also introduce Peter Capaldi as the Doctor to millions of viewers for the first time. Anderson will play Danny Pink, a teacher at Coal Hill School where companion Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman) also teaches.
If Coal Hill is going to play a bigger role in the next season, I reeeeally hope that means we'll get a cameo of William Russell as Ian Chesterton.
Butler on
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I just watched the first Martha episode and i like her way better than either rose or Donna
Yeah everyone thinks that in the first episode. It's a great performance and a huge relief to have a real actress instead of Billie Piper doing a poor person voice. Unfortunately the character isn't very well treated as the show goes on.
Martha is pretty great in her first episode, and as a character in isolation is 90% okay.
It's the one pathetic flaw she has (more to the point, that the writers have) which is a dealbreaker.
Man, pathetic is a really strong word. You guys are so mean to Martha
She has quite a number of strong moments through series 3. They're just so easy to forget when there's all the romantic dumbness going on. Like in Evolution of the Daleks and Last of the Time Lords, she proves to be quite resourceful.
First up, Steve Thompson will be returning once again. Thompson’s latest episode will be the fifth of the run and guest stars Jonathan Bailey and Pippa Bennett-Warner.
Thompson has written two Doctor Who episodes so far – Series 6′s divisive The Curse of the Black Spot and Series 7′s Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.
The mag also confirms that episode 4 is written by Steven Moffat. Both episodes are directed by Douglas Mackinnon.
Well, I thought Centre of the Tardis was great, so that's probably good. And I am choosing to believe that another Moffat episode means he is buckling down on quality because the new doctor needs a memorable first season.
Man, I would love to have the Master back. As far as I can tell, he was "controversial" among Who fans last time, but I liked him. I even liked The End of Time, although I'd love to hear how anyone thought Super Saiyan Master was a good idea.
I loved the Master the first time around mostly due to his totally rad reveal episode with Sir Derek f'ing Jacobi and was therefore super jazzed to see him again in the End of Time...
I was not pleased with the result. :c
I loved the Master the first time around mostly due to his totally rad reveal episode with Sir Derek f'ing Jacobi and was therefore super jazzed to see him again in the End of Time...
I was not pleased with the result. :c
Yeah, he was fantastic in Utopia, I wish they had kept him, and he probably would have saved us from super saiyan. But I suppose it was not to be.
That reminds me, I hope 12 visits Sarah Jane's grave, the End of Time was really not enough of a goodbye to Elizabeth Sladen.
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Wait? Why is there an angry mob of folks with torches and pitchforks coming at me?
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Is it Jaime? Maybe Romana? No wait, I got it, Ace!
Because people that wanted a female doctor cant handle the fact that we had one for like two seasons
It is a tie between Ace or K9. K9 was so useful that the writers had to come up with ways to disable him and ace carried a baseball bat and made her own explosives.
Watched Day of the Daleks recently. The Doctor totally grabs a laser pistol and casually blasts two dudes before Brigadier machine guns another. Also Terminator seems to have lifted this entire plot.
I do not recall a female Doctor appearing at any point since The Curse of Fatal Death. Saying River is like a female Doctor suggests that you misunderstand the Doctor.
I say this as someone who liked River for the most part and wants a female Doctor.
I can't remember if it was the director or the producer, but on the DVD extras he admitted that they shouldn't have put that scene in.
It is even crazier in the special edition since they now explode into little chunks with the new effects.
There you go, all fixed.
I will accept this fix.
I actually hate it a bit more because of the waste of an interesting premise.
Even if that weren't the case, whatever goodwill that premise generated was entirely undone by the end scene where the dude got a beej from a cobblestone
Let's Play Final Fantasy 'II' (Ch10 - 5/17/10)
0. The Brigadier - doesn't quite count as a companion in the usual way, but fuck it, he remains my favorite character on the show that isn't the Doctor, and just about ties the Doctor. He was smart and cool and brave and had this impossible gravitas even when surrounded by cactuses wrapped in bubble wrap and aluminum foil.
1. Ace - she and the Seventh had a really interesting mentor/apprentice relationship that hasn't been done before or since. It wasn't paternal, it wasn't romantic, and it wasn't a pair of equals; every story was about expanding Ace's perspective, sometimes cruelly, but she was always opinionated and competent in a way that a lot of off-the-shelf "strong female characters" are not.
2. Donna - Donna is the modern companion that reminds me most of the classic ones; she doesn't have a special relationship with the Doctor or any kind of unique origin and often gets into trouble and screams a bit, but their partnership feels so natural and warm that you never once wonder why she's there.
3. Jamie - the Doctor's first and best bro. The double act of a brave, foolhardy Scottish clansman with Troughton's nervous, fidgety, slightly cowardly Doctor just sparked so well, and both actors gave off a sense of warm familiarity with each other. I love the idea, suggested in The Two Doctors, that the pair just spent unseen years traveling and bro-ing out together.
4. Ian and Barbara - Until Grace in the TV movie and Rose in the reboot, they had the unique position of being companions who were really the main characters or even heroes of the show. The first Doctor is downright sinister at points and it's the two teachers' fundamental decency that turns him into the figure we know today.
5. Turlough - I really like the different texture the show gets when the Doctor has a male companion, and the role of a secret enemy who warms up to the Doctor and becomes an ally - without ever really losing his self-interested or even somewhat cowardly edge - remains a really interesting and fresh take. It doesn't hurt that the actor, Mark Strickson, had a really lean, predatory look.
6. Romana - In both incarnations, she and the Doctor have a really cool partnership of equals and the repartee between the characters got the lion's share of the effort from the writers and it shows; their dialogue is fun and effervescent and playful. But too often the stories around them are disposable trash ("NIMON! IT IS I, SOLDEED!").
7. Sarah Jane - Sarah Jane was created with the idea that this would be a progressive, modern, feminist character, so of course the writers and staff made her a mouthy dame reporter - but that's okay, really, because mouthy dame reporters were some of the best and smartest roles actresses could get back in the day and it is still miles better than being a generic screaming victim. She played really well off of Jon Pertwee's stuffy, self-important patriarch, but I feel like as her tenure lengthened the writers kind of filed down her interesting edges and made her more generic - but by that point she was in the classic Hinchcliffe era and was being "more generic" in some of the best stories the show has ever had. So I think the modern show treating her as almost the default old-series companion is more down to the length of her tenure and the prestige of the stories she was in than any inherent quality of the character, but I'm glad that Elizabeth Sladen got a second and well-deserved chance to show her chops.
8. Rose - hatters gon hat. I like Billie Piper's performance - I would be a liar if I said I wasn't genuinely moved at times, a claim I cannot often lay at the feet of the old show, much as it excites or interests me, it rarely gutted me - and I like the conception of a companion that has a real life to leave behind and real consequences for doing so. The other thing I think is important about Rose that isn't often talked about is that she's the first time the show explicitly dealt with something that fans of all ages have thought about: the idea that travelling with the Doctor could be a way to escape a dead-end life. A lot of companions have joined the Doctor from necessity (their space station or whatever was blowing up), or by accident, or because it's their job (the UNIT companions and Romana) or just as a lark - but anyone who watched and loved this show as a kid has probably wished at some time or another that a blue box would come and spirit us away from boring school or shitty job or whatever, and Rose's story acknowledges that and made it a whole thing and I really connected iwth her character and story because of it. (Seen in this context, by the way, I view Donna as Davies doing that theme again but better.)
"My least favorite companions," another list by Jacob, age 34:
1. Adric - The problem with writing children as characters in adventure stories is the temptation to make them extra-precocious, both to answer the question of "why does the main character continually keep this child around and expose him or her to danger?" and from the sadly misguided belief on the part of certain well-meaning adults that kid audiences want to watch the adventures of the annoying prig in school who answers all the teacher's questions. It's the same impulse that gave us Wesley Crusher, but unlike Wesley, who I think was pretty much salvaged as a character in his later Next Gen apperances (like the one where the kid at school died, or the one where he and Picard are trapped in the cave with the fountain, or the one with Ashley Judd being really hot), Adric just was kind of shrilly and charmlessly written throughout. It probably didn't help that the actor, Matthew Waterhouse, was kind of a dingus. Famously, at the end of Castrovalva, you can see him looking pale and clammy from a drinking binge the night before, and between shots he slips off into the woods to hurl behind a tree.
2. Mel - I don't really hate her as such, I just find her kind of emblematic of the more pointless companions who just seem to kind of take up space and aren't particularly charming or interesting. Mel tops the list of that sort of companion because she has an ear-splitting shriek of a scream, sports possibly the most obnoxious wardrobe and general look of any compaion ever, and features in some of the absolute worst stories ever filmed.
3. Peri - see above. Peri didn't really have much of a point except to look really terrific in a bikini (which, credit where it's due, she does) - but the decision to saddle the actress with an American accent that she couldn't remotely pull off was a nightmarishly poor one. And who in the name of sanity thought "Peripugilliam" was an American name?
4. Martha - i don't dislike the character or actress - and really, I think that the combination of our generally higher modern standars for television and the new show's focus on dialogue and characterization means that even the worst-written characters in the new program feel more vibrant and alive than many characters in the old one - but the unrequited-love arc was a really poor choice. Also, I think her ethnicity caused a lot of writers to choke and write her as boringly, blandly virtuous rather than risk giving offense by endowing her with humanizing rough edges.
5. Jo - Jo is very likeable and the actress, Katy Manning, had real chemistry with Jon Pertwee and featured in many of the show's best stories, but I am kind of mildly ideologically opposed to the idea of explicitly writing the one major woman character in a childrens' show as, effectively, a bimbo. While I think someone like Adric illustrates the danger of well-meaning writers trying to create an aspirational figure for children ("don't you want to be smart and do all your math homework like Adric, boys and girls?") I almost feel like Jo occupies the other end of the spectrum, where having a character who is kind of sweetly dopey and perpetually vulnerable makes me uncomfortable.
The resolution of that story is still cool but is less clever than I remembered. The organisms' life-cycle had had less detail in it than I remembered.
The Four/Adric pairing did feel quite odd, but there was something about it I felt worked, particularly in early Logopolis, where it's like the Doctor has taken on the role of a bizarre, aloof mentor.
It's the one pathetic flaw she has (more to the point, that the writers have) which is a dealbreaker.
Yeah everyone thinks that in the first episode. It's a great performance and a huge relief to have a real actress instead of Billie Piper doing a poor person voice. Unfortunately the character isn't very well treated as the show goes on.
If Coal Hill is going to play a bigger role in the next season, I reeeeally hope that means we'll get a cameo of William Russell as Ian Chesterton.
Well that is the saddest
So, I guess Mr. Pink is a character from a show I haven't seen
but I read this and thought Reservoir Dogs
now I'm sad that Steve Buscemi isn't in Doctor Who.
She has quite a number of strong moments through series 3. They're just so easy to forget when there's all the romantic dumbness going on. Like in Evolution of the Daleks and Last of the Time Lords, she proves to be quite resourceful.
For the curious, this is Jonathan Bailey and this is Pippa Bennett-Warner.
The second is the Eighth Doctor in the Eleventh Doctor's TARDIS. No biggie.
I was not pleased with the result. :c
That reminds me, I hope 12 visits Sarah Jane's grave, the End of Time was really not enough of a goodbye to Elizabeth Sladen.