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“I was very certain that I didn’t want David to appear in Jodie’s costume. I think the notion of men dressing in ‘women’s clothes’, the notion of drag, is very delicate. I’m a huge fan of that culture and the dignity of that, it’s truly a valuable thing, but it has to be done with immense thought and respect,” Davies—an openly and unabashedly queer man—told DWM. “With respect to Jodie and her Doctor, I think it can look like mockery when a straight man wears her clothes. To put a great big six-foot Scotsman into them looks like we’re taking the mickey.”
According to Frazer Hines in an interview on the audio CD of The Invasion, Sally Faulkner's skirt kept getting blown up around her neck whilst climbing up the rope ladder to the helicopter. To avoid the same thing happening to his kilt, he remembered reading somewhere that The Queen had lead weights sewn into the hem of her skirt to stop this from happening to her. It so happened that Frazer's dresser was a keen fisherman, who sewed some lead weights into his kilt.
Finished The Invasion tonight. Fun action romp, but it really didn't need to be eight motherloving episodes long.
- I mentioned in my last post that I'm not shipping the Doctor and Jamie, but I absolutely ship Isobel/Zoe. Their chemistry comes across even in the animated reconstruction of episode one. Speaking of Zoe, her Missile Command speedrun (working out the trajectories to take out all the incoming Cyber ships with as few missiles as possible in 30 seconds) was a delight. It's a rare treat to see classic-era companions get to do something proactive and useful, entirely without the Doctor's assistance.
- Classic DW background music ranges from really catchy to unpleasant plinky-plonk synthesizer noise, but I appreciated the moody themes that accompanied sneaking around at International Electromatics. This piece popped up a number of times and added to the atmosphere.
- Tobias Vaughn is a delicious Bond-style villain, though his continued usefulness to the Cybermen is highly questionable. I have to imagine the discussion on their (unseen) end re: his repeated demands tended toward the "listen, we're going to delete this nitwit as soon as we get boots on the ground, so just keep him happy for now" side of things.
- The series hadn't yet settled on gold as the Cybermen's (goofy) weakness, and if we absolutely must have an anti-Cyber weapon then I prefer The Invasion's idea of a machine which induces emotions in a race that has forgotten how to handle them.
- As always I love a good UNIT story, as I think the existence of an organization that deals with Weird Space Shit independently of whatever the Doctor happens to be doing that week makes the world feel larger and richer in storytelling possibilities, and the Brigadier is always a welcome sight on my screen. Think I'll keep rolling right into the Pertwee era.
Show a little leg, you coward! I never get to have any fun.
Zoe is great for that - one of the best scenes in the entirety of the classic series involves her and the Doctor in The Krotons (not a great story overall, but a good one, at least) where she bests the Doctor in a test and brags a bit, and the Doctor gets flustered and Troughton and Padbury act the hell out of the scene. I adore it.
The Pertwee era has its charms, and while it's my least favorite classic era of the show, there are some stone cold classics in there. I've been watching The Three Doctors again lately, having a great time, and I adore all of Pertwee's first season, even if it's very strange to call that season "Doctor Who" (you'll see what I mean).
Somewhat related - my wife likes the show "Outlander," and the author of the original books named the main character "Jamie" after our be-kilted young man, who she found quite fetching in his kilt. That show is nothing like Doctor Who, of course, but I thought it was a fun fact lol
Oh, I'll definitely have to check out The Krotons then (I always want to call them The Croutons), because that sounds great.
I just wanted to clarify that I have seen quite a bit of the classic series already, so I'm familiar with what a near-total reboot of the show's core concept the Pertwee era was at first.
(My problem is that I skipped around and watched most of the serials that people regard as legendary classics first, and now I'm sort of left with the B-tier and below stories. I really should just sit down and watch the whole thing through in order as you did, but I don't think I have the patience/attention span for that.)
This delights me. :3c
The Doctor uses magic (?) to "disappear" that tape or whatever,
I'm excited for you to watch Marco Polo, too - which version have you got? There was a black and white version that was released in, I want to say, 2014 or so, that is VASTLY superior to the one that was done in color like in 2002 or whatever. They've got more pictures and the sound is much more easy to parse/understand. The color one is cool - and was the first version I saw - but the story is much, much easier to follow with the later black and white one.
The Very Special Lesson On Condensation (not a joke, folks, queue up classic Doctor Who right now! Lol)
I forget the details despite having watched this earlier this year - wasn't Tegana's plan to negotiate with the Khan in conjunction with Noghai's army invading at the same time, only to find out Noghai's army was stopped and in a panic, he whips out his sword? I may have that all wrong, because the serial does a great job getting me sucked into caring about the TARDIS crew finally getting away after all that time so I forget about the details lol
I'm stealing from El Sandifer, but the opening line he wrote for the Dalek Invasion of Earth is a stonker: "Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man."Terrance Dicks was a genius. He'd never write a world shattering work of literature but by crikey he could smash out novels with some really arresting turns of phrase as a bewildering place.
I'm stealing from El Sandifer, but the opening line he wrote for the Dalek Invasion of Earth is a stonker: "Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man."
Yeah, the first lines of a book are supposedly the hardest part to write but you'd never pick that up from a Terrance Dicks book.I'm stealing from El Sandifer, but the opening line he wrote for the Dalek Invasion of Earth is a stonker: "Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man."