• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Doctor Who [Spoilers]

The Mistress?


Yeah, you're right.

Actually, I think they should go for someone totally unassuming too. As we discussed elsewhere, Richard Attenborough was chilling as Christie in "10 Rillington Place" because he was so ordinary.
 
Doctor_Occupant said:
Survival. Towards the end of the story, the Master is supposed to reveal that although the he and the Doctor are supposed to be old school chums/rivals, he has no idea who the Doctor really is and no memory of him 'at school'.
I don't remember "Survival" - when was that, Doc?

Doctor_Occupant said:
Anyway, if we must bring back The Master...pick someone touted as playing The Doctor.
Better still, remember how Romana regenerated by choice, just because she saw a face on someone else that she liked the look of? Here's a thought - Peter Davison to play the Master. I saw him play a cold-blooded killer in something or other on the TV a couple of years back, and he was pretty effective. Maybe the Master saw the fifth Doctor's face, and thought "No-one will ever suspect me looking like that!"
 
I don't remember "Survival" - when was that, Doc?

It was the last McCoy adventure to be broadcast. It had it's moments, not least the rather splendid make-up on the Cheetah People.
It was rather marred though, but the inclusion of 'comedians' Hale and Pace.
 
Yeah - Dr Who lost it big time last time round when they started going all post-ironic. Russell T Davies beware! It's a fine line between knowing winks and an all-out pantomime cheese-fest.
 
William Hartnell : 23rd April 1975 (poss April 24th?)
Patrick Troughton : 28th March 1987
Jon Pertwee : 20th May 1996

Sorry what I meant was that in this series the Doctor is the last of the time lords. So when did the rest of the time lords die?
 
Yep - Survival: last of the McCoy series and last 'Classic' Who episode.

The Plot: errr...best not talked about really. Bit shash. But the Doctor and the Master end up going toe to toe, literally, and the Master loses.

At that point, the Master was supposed to call the Doctor's true nature into question, but this was cut by JNT later.

Which sucks, because the old Cartmel Master Plan was nice work.

The Time Lords die off somewhere between the last time we saw the Doctor (the 90s movie) and 'Rose'. The story goes that there was a war, and we gradually find out that the Time Lords ALL fought in it, and apparently lost. Later, we find out who they were fighting against.

If you don't already know, take a guess.

Survival suffered from a number of things: the cheetah people makeup was far more than originally intended (it was supposed to suggest cheetah, not outright confirm it) and the god-awful animatronic cat was meant to never be seen in closeup.

Regenerating The Master: Yep, nice idea. I'm wondering whether there's any reason why an Earlier Version Master couldn't crop up at some point, but there are lots of questions to answer about the Time War and I'm sure there's a really good explanation as to why the Doc's Tardis is the only one left and in working order.
 
Doctor_Occupant said:
The Time Lords die off somewhere between the last time we saw the Doctor (the 90s movie) and 'Rose'. The story goes that there was a war, and we gradually find out that the Time Lords ALL fought in it, and apparently lost. Later, we find out who they were fighting against.

Regenerating The Master: Yep, nice idea. I'm wondering whether there's any reason why an Earlier Version Master couldn't crop up at some point, but there are lots of questions to answer about the Time War and I'm sure there's a really good explanation as to why the Doc's Tardis is the only one left and in working order.
This does raise a question or two when we try to get our heads round the concept of time travel, as applied to Doctor Who:

Just because the Time Lords died in the Time War, does that mean the Doctor (or anyone else) cannot travel back to a time before they were killed?

Are dead Time Lords dead throughout all time, if you see what I mean?

Could the current Doctor therefore meet an old version of the Master, or not? I'm guessing that the answer should be yes, because Troughton and Baker (Colin) met up almost by chance in the Two Doctors, unlike the deliberate nature of the other multi-doctor stories.

Whenever a companion or enemy dies - think Madame de Pompadour in the recent story, or Adric in "Earthshock", to name but two - the Doctor reacts as if this cannot be undone. Is the reason he cannot travel back in time to right wrongs a physical or a moral one? Maybe by travelling back to your own past, you create a paradox or a parallel reality, as some theories would have it?

I know that these are all very silly questions in the cold light of day, but as a Who fan of some 30-odd years, I like to resolve any plot holes to the best of my ability - the show may be a bit daft, but as long as it obeys its own rules of daftness, I'll be happy!
 
Some of the answers are given 'in show'.

First: you cannot have the same person present twice in the same timeline. The Timelords have been known to fudge this issue, creating special circumstances where it becomes possible. Who Canon refers to this as the 'Blinovich Limitation Effect'.

Second: As the Doctor has mentioned, once the Tardis lands he becomes a part of an established timeline and he can't retroactively mess with it. What happens, stays happened. If it unhappens, or re-happens differently, it creates a paradox. We saw the current repercussions of that in Father's Day, where someone ripped off a Stephen King short story called The Langoliers.

Third: It's been speculated that in order to travel in time at all, you need a baseline 'now' to work from. For the Timelords, this is the history of Gallifrey. Because they can't mess with their own history without serious problems, whatever happens in Gallifreyan Real Time has to stay happened too. So when the Time Lords recalled everyone to Gallifrey (we assume) to fight the Time War, they pulled everyone into the same Timeline.

So although there are still 'earlier versions' of The Doctor wandering around out there, we can't meet them. There will still be an earlier Gallifrey (unless something really cataclysmic happened) but The Doctor can't visit it.

Did that make sense? Just some idle speculation.
 
They've just been to a dimension where there was an alternative Mickey called Rickey (remember Eccles kept calling him Rickey, and Mickey said 'but my names' Mickey' and the doc said 'yeah, of course it is'), an alternative Rose (of sorts) but certainly an alternative Jackie and an alternative Daddy Tyler.

So it stands to reason that this other parallel with it's alternative Cybermen (and likely Alternative Daleks too), will have had an alternative Doctor.

But in the same way Mickey was actually called Rickey, in this alternative timeline the Doctor is called "The Master". Hence how you get round the whole "last timelord" malarky.

So the master travels to our parallel, bringing cybers and daleks with him and he comes here because his gallefray has been destroyed only to find...

yep...

our Doctor destroyed it.

Likely we don't find out that the master made it possible or made it through the parallel till season 3... and away you go, end of season baddy season 3... the master. played by...

David Tennant? I could see that happening.

That's my theory anyway. Tennant playing the master aside, I think it likely that the big bad will be the master at the end of season 3, with perhaps a hint that it is at the end of season 2.
 
I hope that an alternative universe won't be an excuse to bring everything the writers fancy back just for the hell of it.

Isn't the Master still trapped inside the Tardis? That's what happened at the end of the TV movie.
 
Yeah.

The thing about that is...according to one source, the heart of the Tardis is something called The Eye of Harmony. According to events in The Deadly Assassin, the Eye of Harmony is on Gallifrey and is a captive black hole created by Rassillon, Omega et al to power the initial time travel experiments. And according to the most recent TV show, the Tardis gets its power from the Universe, but the heart of the Tardis is connected to the Space/Time Vortex and exposure to the energy therein is fatal.

At the start of The Christmas Invasion, we see 10th Doc belch out some energy which disappears off into space. Now, this is supposed to explain how the pilot fish critters and the bad guys find the earth in the first place, but if you want a really, really convoluted way to bring the Master back, it's right there.

We know that the energy in the Vortex regressed a Slitheen to an egg, so it might conceivably have placed the Master in the Vortex and left him there. When Rose cracks open the console in Parting of the Ways and absorbs the energy, and the Doctor absorbs it from her in turn, it sets the Master free to scoot off and build himself a body somewhere.

[Emp edit: Seems we have created a monster of our own. This has been consigned to some prison dimension and a new one started here:

www.forteantimes.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=26651 ]
 
Oooo, and there were me thinking it were a rant about how they insist on calling the current series Series Two, when it's actually series 28 or summat.

Well, my favourite episodes so far -
The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
The Girl in the Fireplace

Least favourite -
Well, much as it pains me to say it - the Cybermen. I looked forward to them so much, and they looked great, but I just thought the episodes were rather weak.
 
The thing about that is...according to one source, the heart of the Tardis is something called The Eye of Harmony. According to events in The Deadly Assassin, the Eye of Harmony is on Gallifrey and is a captive black hole created by Rassillon, Omega et al to power the initial time travel experiments. And according to the most recent TV show, the Tardis gets its power from the Universe, but the heart of the Tardis is connected to the Space/Time Vortex and exposure to the energy therein is fatal.

Well, looking at the snippet for next weeks' show (which appears suitably 'off-world' - and rather epic, I must say) it seems that a black hole is a major plot point. I understand that this is the first episode of a two-parter in which the Doctor meets someone claiming to be the devil.

Hmmm. OK, I know RTD has said that we won't be seeing the Master in this series, but maybe this devil guy is such a 'mephistolean charmer' that it leaves a lot of viewers wondering. Whatever happens, it's sure to turn out interesting - RTD has stated that this story will illustrate the Doctor's 'beliefs', so it looks like we're going into SF-meets-theology territory. So hopefully it'll be a bit controversial, too.

As for 'The Idiot's Lantern': thoroughly enjoyable, made even more so by...faceless people! And what's weird is that though the 'blank face' effect was fairly ropy CGI, it was this very ropiness that made it better. It gave the impression that the faces themselves couldn't really be fully grasped by the eye; there was a dreamlike fuzziness to them that implied more a psychological effect than a physical one - as if the change was such that the mind couldn't quite get the hang of what it was seeing. Very good stuff indeed.
 
Really enjoyed tonights episode. I think also that Gatiss wrote for Rose well too. She wasn't annoying in this episode. Which shows that Tennant can chew his way through a terrible episode and make himself still watchable, but Piper has a lot of acting jobs to do before she can carry off the same.

Great stuff.
 
Ravenstone said:
Oooo, and there were me thinking it were a rant about how they insist on calling the current series Series Two, when it's actually series 28 or summat.

Yep indeed - 28th season of Dr Who Broadcast unless you want to count McGann as a whole season to himself!

Gordon
 
I thought the faceless effect was done with masks (as it was in the Twilight Zone movie).

Good episode although all the Little Shop of Horrors-esque "feed me now" business got a little grating after a while.

When I get the DVD I am going to have to check to see if any of the shots were actually done straight. It can work as a dramatic device but when used all the time like that it rather loses its impact.

---------
Anyway DVDs....

I think I mentioned Volume 2 part 1 is out:

www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000ESSTB0/

Box set is scheduled for November:

www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000FFL702/

Pity the piccie is a placeholder as I got excited thinking it was a Cyberman!!
 
Mark Gatiss does it again, an excellent episode. The faceless aspect made me think of Sapphire and Steel or that episode of Star Trek where Robert Walker Jr plays the petulant, psychic teen who makes the woman's face disappear at the party. All this and the Doctor quoting Kylie as well!

But does anyone know why Mr Gatiss was completely bald when interviewed in Doctor Who Confidential on BBC3? I'm hoping it's for a role.
 
he's playing Johnnie Cradock in "Fear of Fanny" for BBC4 next. Johnnie Cradock was bald.
 
I didn't like the blurred faces, thought they would have looked better as masks!

I like the look of the squid things coming up next week though.
 
gordonrutter said:
Yep indeed - 28th season of Dr Who Broadcast unless you want to count McGann as a whole season to himself!

I do believe I've said before that I try to block out the whole McGann experience and pretend it never happened.... ;)
 
min_bannister said:
I didn't like the blurred faces, thought they would have looked better as masks!

I like the look of the squid things coming up next week though.
Masks, or CGI, it's still a bit unlikely, isn't it?

How would they breathe, for one thing? It all seemed a bit more metaphysical, than science fictional.

Not that I didn't enjoy it. :)
 
Ravenstone said:
Least favourite -
Well, much as it pains me to say it - the Cybermen. I looked forward to them so much, and they looked great, but I just thought the episodes were rather weak.

Season 2 has generally been very, very weak so far. New Earth was ok-ish, School Reunion was fun but felt like a huge waste and the Cybermen episodes were dismal. Plus Billie appears to have forgotten how to act at times, though Tennant is ecellent as the Doctor.

However it has had The Girl in the Fireplace which is possibly one of the best bit of Who ever.
 
Mob1138 said:
Ravenstone said:
Least favourite -
Well, much as it pains me to say it - the Cybermen. I looked forward to them so much, and they looked great, but I just thought the episodes were rather weak.

Season 2 has generally been very, very weak so far. ..... and the Cybermen episodes were dismal.
I agree that the Cybermen episode did over-egg the pudding a bit: it felt like they'd fleshed it out to two episodes just so they could jam a cliff-hanger in the middle. However, I totally disagree that it was dismal. And I'm enjoying this series over all: good stories (by and large) nippily told, rather than spreading one wonky premise very thinly over six weeks.
 
girl in the fireplace has been my favourite episode thus far.

The cthuloid squidish ood look cool as did the trailer for the imposible planet. Looking forward to it.
 
I've enjoyed it all so far, apart from Tennant being Shouty Threat Doctor Who Never Delivers on the Grandiose Comments.

And even that's fun.

Especially this week, when he gets handed his gallifreyan behind by a right hook. So much for 'The Lonely God'.
 
Back
Top