Topic: The TV Show Thread

@PegasusActual93 In certain aspects, I guess maybe? Like the really bad trance music combined with actors very very painfully pretending to be drunk and high is entertaining in a car-crash sort of way. It’s mostly just painful though which, to be fair, is a lesser crime when it comes to Doctor Who than the boring episodes. A lot of Six’s stuff from the 80s is rubbish but entertaining schlock, which can’t be said for the times Moffat thought he was the smartest man alive or Chibnall’s utterly banal writing during the doldrums. Some of my favourite episodes on the show are the utterly stupid and camp ones so there’s maybe a glimpse of Tony Blackburn fuelled fun to be gleamed.

Rewatched "The Haunting of Bly Manor" - it's beautifully constructed (far more noticeably so the second time through) but a couple of the performances (child actors excepted) are borderline inadequate which rather let it down. More moving than scary but not as inferior to "Hill House" as I first thought. Turned the much vaunted "Frasier" reboot off after about 10 minutes. Some characters (and formats) are just better off left in the past.

Started watching Scavengers Reign. It's a new animated scifi series about spaceship crash survivors who are stranded on a mysterious planet. Quite good, the characters are slowly being developed and the environments and ecosystem of the planet is well thought out with some unique alien designs. It's also just refreshing to see more adult animated series that don't rely on crass sex jokes or nothing but shock value.

I completely agree with this assessment and as soon as I "got wise" to that fact when I watched it, I started enjoying it on a different level. I have yet to see "Midnight Mass", but I must say that Flanagan's Netflix output is quite strong, overall.

Makes me cautiously optimistic about his "Dark Tower" project

The Sandman - not that one, the Doctor Who audio.

Six has always been maligned for one reason or another but mostly because he’s a f***ing psycho at times including choking his companion. This audio basically asks ‘what if a whole planet sees The Doctor as the baddie’ and it works because Colin Baker plays up on being a pantomime villain. It’s a good one to be honest, even if Evelyn, his older companion, doesn’t have much to do.

@FuriousMachine "Midnight Mass" is solid as well. It very much wears its Stephen King influences on its sleeve (several of his stock characters and themes make appearances in one way or another) and the acting is excellent across the board. Some people found the show slow to get going and self-indulgently talky (pseudo-profound monologues aplenty) but I only took issue with the horrendous last episode - it took the whole enterprise from a 7 down to a 5 for me, so be warned!

@LN78 Sounds like my kind of jam, so will definitely check it out!

The Church and the Crown - Fantastic 5th Doctor audio adventure, my favourite archetype is the historical stories so this was right up my alley. No aliens, no monsters, just the Doctor and his companions thrust into Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu’s court amidst Buckingham’s plot to conquer France for his King/boyfriend (look it up). It’s hard to create companions for exclusively audio adventures but Erimem, a Pharoah who was removed from her time in a previous story, is superb here. Peri continues to prove that she was massively underserved on screen too, although I’m not sure if showing a whole history she had with the 5th Doctor before his regeneration in Caves of Androzani actually undermines the idea that he sacrificed himself for a companion that he barely knew.

If there was ever a story that I’d want adapted to TV, it’s this one. There hasn’t really been a true historical since what, the Troughton years? The TARDIS is a Time Machine so I wish they’d lean into that more without relying on aliens.

@nessisonett I'm enjoying reading your reviews of these Doctor Who audio adventures, not least because I'm currently trying to catch up with the Jodie Whittaker era, so that I'm up-to-speed for the forthcoming specials (as I'd previously bowed out after Peter Capaldi's departure). Me passing through here this evening is oddly perfect timing, given your last post about a "true historical" adventure, because the two episodes that've stood out the most from Thirteen's first series are 'Rosa' and 'Demons of the Punjab', the former making me cry floods of tears and the latter being the closest thing to a "true historical" outside of its totally inconsequential trailer-fodder aliens. Both of them felt fresh and were utterly brilliant, standing head and shoulders above their surrounding episodes (which've sadly ranged from average to bad). It's fair to say that every Doctor has their classics, but right now I'm struggling to see how Thirteen will top 'Rosa'.

@RogerRoger I didn’t really gel with most of Whittaker’s episodes, especially the space ones, but other than the wildly over the top ending song to Rosa, it did at least stick in the memory in a good way. I honestly think her best episodes come in the Flux miniseries, with a couple that I really did enjoy, and her final episode was very watchable, if slightly messy.

@nessisonett The time-travelling racist villain in "Rosa" was also pretty laughable as I recall. It's definitely no "Vincent and The Doctor" but it is the least bad episode of that first batch. Which isn't saying much.

Bang-Bang-A-Boom - I never thought an audio play could sound garish but here we are. A parody of both Eurovision and Star Trek, it’s a sometimes entertaining mess of jokes that either land or really, really don’t. Graeme Garden is brilliant but you’d expect him to be, the fake Terry Wogan honestly is one of the funnier characters which is a hard act to do, speaking as a long time Eurovision fan. Bonnie Langford is so much better than she ever was on screen, following a long list of companions so much better served by audio. Sylvester McCoy is equally funny and insanely hammy, which sort of works. The woman doing a ridiculous ‘Valkyrie based alien race’ accent just sounds like Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles which is both a bit irritating and honestly quite funny. I’m not sure I ever wanted to hear Sylv pretending to have his face smooshed in a woman’s buxom and acting like a strange horny old man affected by pheromones but there we are.

A complete car crash that is occasionally funny, that’s about as generous as I can be. It does come across a bit up its own arse though, to be expected given it’s co-written by notorious self-arse-immersion enthusiast Gareth Roberts. Plus, it wouldn’t exactly be an unfair statement to say that Star Trek’s output from the time Doctor Who was off-air was a million times higher quality than almost anything that the BBC could muster post-Davison. It feels a little snide and bad-faith to send up Star Trek when they completely reinvented sci-fi in that time period while Doctor Who was a relic past its sell-by-date. It did rub me up the wrong way a little. I wouldn’t say this was anywhere near as bad as The Rapture but honestly, poor Seven has been a bit under-served in the audios I’ve listened to recently. Colditz was great, give me more of that instead!

Bonus - try to listen to 5 seconds of the squirrel alien character from this story without your ears bleeding. Makes Jane Horrocks sound like Barry White.

@LN78
I think the racist time traveler is right where I stopped watching Doctor Who. I haven't seen any of the last two seasons and have no real urge to go back.

@nessisonett I'll look forward to the Flux specials then, cheers. It's a real shame because the assembled cast and higher production quality deserved much stronger scripts. Too frequently it settles for being by-the-numbers, killing time until whatever 'Bad Wolf' equivalent they're cooking kicks in. At least I don't have to cram as much now, though, as they've announced the broadcast dates for the new specials and they're not 'til the end of November. Gives me a little more breathing room.

Speaking of things sticking in your memory, I doubt you'll forget that latest audio adventure anytime soon, for better or worse! If nothing else, it does sound fitting for the Sylvester McCoy era.

@RogerRoger Very excited when I saw the air dates, but I do think that I’m slightly disappointed I have a whole month to wait still. At least all of Classic Who comes on iPlayer on November 1st!

Jubilee - Brilliant Sixth Doctor story that formed the basis for Eccleston’s Dalek. Probably better than that story to be honest, it’s darker for sure even if the time travelley stuff can get a little convoluted. Only real criticism is that a couple of the ‘dark’ bits are a bit too grimdark, but it’s understandable given it’s 2003. Not much to say other than it’s very very good and a must listen!

I won’t be listening to the next story however, Nekromanteia, due to the widespread condemnation surrounding it. Apparently the writer thought it would be a good idea to stick a rape scene of a companion and then never mention it again and not have the perpetrator even have any consequences. Peter Davison was so enraged he requested the writer never write for his Doctor ever again.

@PegasusActual93 I was just coming here to comment on Scavengers Reign. I am quite impressed. The uniqueness of the aliens or I guess the humans are the aliens in this respect, but what each creature and plant can do is amazing. Fantastic so far, 6 episodes in and I want more.

Really sad news about Matthew Perry if the reports are true. Friends maybe wasn’t the best show out there but it gave me plenty of laughs growing up - and still does - and Chandler was the character I resonated with the most.

@KAIRU Pretty sad trajectory by all accounts. Sad news to hear. The conversation around fame and its effects has changed in recent years so life stories like this may become less common.