Gavin WintersEven given the wild extremes of the #DoctorWho universe, perhaps the sight of people turning into a child’s drawings, which then move on the page, was a bit much for the main show. Might have been more suited to the Sarah Jane Adventures.
All the shit that Chibnall got for having 13 enter people’s minds without permission, and here the 10th Doctor just casually mind-melds with a child and puts her in a trance, in front of her mother, without asking either for consent… 🤷🏻♂️ #DoctorWho
“Not you too Bob!”
The commentary on the Olympics throughout is utterly mental, some of the most bizarre dialogue ever in #DoctorWho, especially “the Olympic dream… is over!”
Just because the runner dropped the torch??
People seem to hate the ending where the Doctor runs with the torch and lights the Olympic flame, but actually… I like it. Best part of the episode for me. It’s goofy but fun. #DoctorWho
Army Of Ghosts /Doomsday: RTD takes the ‘TV show references’ bit from the season 1 finale and tweaks it into his patented trick of a montage of actual celebs reacting to whatever wacky events are going on.
And why does Jackie’s TV pick up French and Japanese channels? #DoctorWho
Hard not to see Yvonne Hartman’s Torchwood through a UKIP/Brexit-y lens now, with all its guff about “Britain being truly independent!” #DoctorWho
Can’t believe it’s taken me 17 years to notice that Mickey first appears at a distance, as just some bloke in a corridor that Rose follows to the room with the sphere, before he’s properly revealed. 😳 #DoctorWho
The surprise reveal of the Daleks emerging from the void ship was the most thrilling thing. Finally, the long held fan fantasy of Daleks and Cybermen blasting the crap out of each other was to become reality. #DoctorWho
But first, their bitch-off was quite entertaining too…
“You are superior in only one respect!”
“What is that?”
“You are better at dying!”
Generally I don’t think season 2 has aged that well. At the time the barnstormingly popular casting of Tennant carried it through, but a lot of it isn’t as rewatchable as season 1 was. Or as I suspect later seasons will be. For me it’s the weakest year of RTD1 #DoctorWho
And it’s not helped by the fact that there are no words to express just how much I. Do. Not. Give. A. Shit. about the Ten/Rose “romance”. 🙄 It leaves me completely cold.
Top comedy moments here. Should have had a laugh track. 😜 #DoctorWho
The Runaway Bride: right from the off Tennant and Tate have fantastic and funny chemistry together, perfectly in keeping with the ‘1930s screwball comedy’ tone they were going for with this one. #DoctorWho
Donna pulling the Santa mask off the taxi driver to reveal a robot is a nod to Terror Of The Autons, surely?
That whole motorway chase sequence is still brilliant. Pity the poor guy whose car roof gets bumped by the TARDIS. How do you claim that on the insurance? #DoctorWho
It’s a feature of RTD’s #DoctorWho that he always kept in mind how kids / casual viewers might only have general memories of previous stories, not specifics.
People don’t care about the exact details of the Robot Santas, they’ll just remember “Oh, the bad guys from last Xmas!”
Unfortunately we’re now into the era of the Tenth Doctor moping over Rose every bloody episode.
Cheer up mate, it’s Christmas! 😜 #DoctorWho
Lol at the Wile E. Coyote moment of Donna swinging on the rope, missing the Doctor and clattering into the wall. #DoctorWho
The Racnoss Queen is such a crazy character, with her peculiarly mannered way of speaking and a seeming fascination with Christmas, weddings, etc.
And the creature itself looks great, just a shame they couldn’t stretch to a single CGI shot of her scuttling about. #DoctorWho
Smith And Jones: I love the confidence of how this opens. The question the media always asked in season 1 was “Can #DoctorWho work for modern audiences?” With season 2 it was “Can it work again, with a new Doctor?” But by now it’s like ‘Screw you, we’re a success and we know it!’
It’s a brilliantly economic bit of writing from RTD that in the first sixty seconds we get to know Martha and all her family, even down to the Dad’s new girlfriend, and immediately understand the dynamics between them all. #DoctorWho
“Where are they from, the planet Zovirax?”
The single most dated reference in all of #DoctorWho! 😄
Only in this show could the monstrous alien villain be little old Anne Reid in a nightdress, threatening people with a bendy straw. #DoctorWho
Martha gets one of my favourite ‘bigger on the inside’ moments, with the Doctor mouthing it along with her.
Welcome aboard, Miss Jones! 😀 #DoctorWho
The Shakespeare Code: you get a slight sense of the show expanding its visual capacity around this point, with the repeated CGI shots of medieval London. Even adding some tiny CGI people running about near the end. Just makes the scale a little grander. #DoctorWho
There’s still a tiny lingering worry that kids may not connect with an historical episode, so you get the Doctor’s quick summary of how “similar” everything is to the modern world - ‘recycling… global warming’, etc. #DoctorWho
They literally do the “there was only one bed” thing from fanfiction. 😄
Honestly Doctor, Freema Agyeman in bed next to you, looking longingly… and you go and ruin the moment blathering about bloody Rose…
You idiot! #DoctorWho
“Oh, 57 academics just punched the air!”
There it is - Russel’s favourite number! Is that the first time it was used in dialogue? #DoctorWho
To be honest, the technobabble (or bafflegab) explanation of how exactly the Carrionite technology works is a bit weak. It’s really just an excuse to have a fantasy concept like witches in #DoctorWho’s sci-fi universe. Best not to think about it too much and just enjoy the story.
Gridlock: always loved this one, definitely the best of the loosely-connected ‘New Earth’ trilogy. Very inventive how they just redress the same set for all the cars, but done so well you don’t really notice. And with such a crazy variety of different characters. #DoctorWho
Random Macra cameo! I suppose there is a thematic connection to their original appearance, with everyone refusing to accept their existence. #DoctorWho
One thing that RTD sometimes went slightly overboard with is having other characters becoming instantly besotted with the Doctor and start eulogising him. Brannigan’s known him about five minutes before breathlessly talking about how he’s “a little bit magnificent!” #DoctorWho
Tennant’s talk with Martha at the end, with his teary-eyed description of Gallifrey, is some of the best acting he’s done in the show so far. #DoctorWho
And it made this old fan very happy with the callback to Susan’s description of ‘silver leaves on the trees’…🥲 #DoctorWho
Daleks In Manhattan/ Evolution Of The Daleks: the first slightly iffy Dalek story of the modern run. Apparently RTD fell ill during production and it had to be completed without his oversight, and it shows. #DoctorWho
Where would time travellers be without random discarded newspapers to tell them what year they’ve arrived in? #DoctorWho
I’m sure fans of, er… certain niche adult entertainment were pleased with the design of this character… 👀 #DoctorWho
I know Talllulah is supposed to be a bit ditzy, but does it really take her that long to recognise Lazlo? Surely she’d recognise his voice straight away? #DoctorWho
I love the moment of the two gossipy Daleks, talking about Dalek Sec, with one checking behind him first to make sure they’re not being overheard. #DoctorWho
The bit about “Time Lord DNA” being conveyed down the lighting strike (?) is the point where the plot feels like its unravelling.
And the scene of the Doctor saving Lazlo seems rushed and almost improvised, sort of “oh, just do what you can with the available props.” #DoctorWho
The Lazarus Experiment: there was often a bit of a mid-season slump in the RTD years, and never more obviously than in season 3. There’s nothing too terrible here, there’s just much better episodes coming soon.
Still, a whole episode without a mention of Rose. Result! #DoctorWho
Hmm, so you conduct a dangerous and untested scientific experiment, in a huge spinning machine thingy… slap bang in the middle of a party with people having drinks and nibbles? Health & Safety nightmare! #DoctorWho
Tish comes across as incredibly shallow considering she was repulsed by Lazarus when he was a lecherous old man, but is suddenly all over him once he becomes younger. #DoctorWho
The CGI for the creature is generally very good and holds up well… except for the human face. 🫤
On DW:Confidential the CGI artists proudly talked about how they’d managed to get Mark Gatiss’ features in there. Er, really…? #DoctorWho
The Saxon story arc is ticking away nicely in the background. It’s worked into the season much better than Bad Wolf or Torchwood ever were, which were just… words being mentioned.
So who was this guy and what did he whisper to Francine to make her go so mad? #DoctorWho
42: I recall there being some very daft criticisms of this one, mainly people claiming that it was “exactly the same!” as Impossible Planet/Satan Pit from the previous year.
What, just because you can’t see past the grimy industrial aesthetic? #DoctorWho
Also fans grumbled because they thought it was our sun that’s revealed as a living entity, when its actually far across space.
Like the later ideas of ‘the Statue of Liberty’s a Weeping Angel’/‘the moon’s an egg’. People can’t cope when this stuff’s too close to home. #DoctorWho
The doors having been reprogrammed to only open by answering trivia questions is a bit of a silly contrivance to string things out a bit longer. There was possibly a less convoluted way of having that happen. #DoctorWho
The space sequences are all extremely well done. From Martha and Riley floating away in the escape pod, to the Doctor’s rescue attempt, to McDonnell’s sacrifice.
We’ve come a long way from Pertwee on very obvious wires in Frontier In Space! #DoctorWho
Tennant is very good at being possessed by the entity too, leading to a rare confession from the Doctor of being scared.
A decent, if not Earth-shattering debut from Chibnall. 🙂 #DoctorWho
Human Nature / The Family Of Blood: this was the beginning of a stormingly good sequence of episodes from here to the finale, maybe the best run in the entire history of the show?
How are there two versions of this story, given the novel? Ah, the Time War changed it. #DoctorWho
There’s a simplicity to most of the FX work here, as if they decided that too much flashy CGI would intrude upon this particular story. It recalls the ingenuity of the 1970s - nearly everything to do with the alien Family is represented by just a bit of green light. #DoctorWho
Tennant rises to the acting challenge of portraying the two distinct characters, and there’s a brilliant bit of subtlety in the scene in the spaceship at the end, when he has to do ‘The-Doctor-playing-John-Smith-but-not-as-good-as-David-Tennant-plays-him’ acting. #DoctorWho
The fates he inflicts on the Family are a rare glimpse of what the show often hints at, but we only occasionally see, of the Doctor being an unstoppable godlike force of nature, almost unfathomable to us mere mortals. #DoctorWho
But the most powerful moment is left for when Joan rightly questions him over whether anyone would have died if he hadn’t come here “on a whim”, for which he of course has no answer… #DoctorWho
Blink: as Moffat himself said, the Weeping Angels are a ‘movie-level’ quality of idea. We should be very grateful we got such a fantastic concept in #DoctorWho instead. The impact of this episode meant a return was inevitable, but I doubt their debut can ever be bettered.
Laserdisc Turtle (Ewan)@gavinwinters Agreed, they were a fantastic one off villain who feel like they've been watered down with every repeat appearance.
Ever since I saw Blink I always wished that this had been the pilot episode to brink the series back; it really feels like it was written with that in mind. All the mystery over who the doctor is, finding the TARDIS, all the little hints...Maybe a bit too ballsy for them to try though.
Looking back, it’s surprising it took until season 3 for Moffat to try a story with his trademark ’timey-wimey’ time-loop type of material, which he does so brilliantly here.
(We’ll forgive him for nicking that bit with the letter from the end of Back To The Future 2) #DoctorWho
Hindsight also makes you view Sally and Larry as clearly a proto-Amy & Rory. The smart, quippy beautiful girl and the bumbling loyal bloke. #DoctorWho
Moffat knows the geek audience too well. When Sally says the 17 DVDs on the list are all the ones she owns, millions of us yelled at the screen “She’s only got 17 DVDs??” seconds before Larry did. 😄 #DoctorWho
The bit where the Angel suddenly appears in the room, just as Sally and Larry have finished looking at the Doctor’s message, is the only moment in the entire history of #DoctorWho that genuinely made me jump…
…slightly.
…just a tiny bit, okay? 😜