-- DSW

Nov 302011
 

It's 1986 all over again. At least superficially. The shoe finally dropped a couple days ago from the Moff himself abut the future scheduling for the series into 2012 and beyond.

"Doctor Who in the summer? All that running down tunnels, with torches, and the sunlight streaming through your windows and bleaching out the screen? All those barbecues and children playing outside, while on the telly there are green monsters seething in their CGI-enhanced lairs? It's just not right is it? Be honest.

"For me, as a kid, when the afternoon got darker and there was a thrill of cold in the air, I knew that even though summer was over, the TARDIS was coming back! So yes, that's part of the plan, that's part of the reason for this little delay. But it's not the whole story."

Okay it may not be, and granted this appears to have everything to do with long term economics than short term ratings, but for long-term fans there just has to be a little shiver that the spectre of the 18-month hiatus (in reality more of a 9-month hiatus just like what we're about to go through) and Michael Grade in this announcement.  But here's a more realistic appraisal.

Doctor Who has been, and IS, a fall-winter series, just as Moffat has asserted.  If you don't believe it just check out our calendar to see how seasons historically have either started in September or January.  The March-April time frame is strictly a modern Who phenomenon. 

It was our hope when Moffat took over that this shifting to Autumn that this would happen in 2010.  The fact that it's happening two years later means in essence that a hidden gap year (a full 12 months) has been slipped into our Who history.  But we get it.

At least it's not 1986 all over again.

 Posted by at 3:59 am
Nov 242011
 

14 Years…. 138,000 images… Many many thanks.  Happy (belated) Anniversary to Doctor Who, and not coincidentally to…. us.  This site went live on November 23rd, 1997, which according to our abacus make us 14 years old.  Somewhat awkward in human years, positively ancient by internet standards, though hopefully still kicking it  for content.  Many, many thanx for everyone who regularly uses the site and shares the content (particularly tumblr blogs… holy buckets do these sites love the Tour).

Last year on the occasion of the 13th Anniversary the Tour surpassed 100,000 images so the Tour has grown in content 38% in just one year.

When it's anniversary time we open up the vault to do the giving.

  • As always at this time of year, we've dusted off our annual Holiday tradition…. The original Doctor Who Christmas special, The Feast of Steven.
  • A modest, at least by modern standards, overall site update (about 1700 images).  Check out The Master List to find out what's what.
  • Re-instated the countdown clock for the upcoming Christmas special "The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe."
  • For the terminally curious, we opened up the "back nine" of the site with as many of the old posts as the Internet Wayback Machine could manage, some going back to 1999.  Cleaned up a lot of old bad code in the process.

Happy Anniversary everyone.  Onto Christmas!

 Posted by at 2:27 pm
Nov 052011
 

Whilst slaving away for you dear visitor on our upcoming Anniversary, we're finally addressing one of those nits that's been bothering the THT Brain Trust.  We're finally moving to a unified RSS feed that won't be dependent on the hosting arrangement being performed in the background.  These always existed on the hosted platform but somehow never translated to the .COM so we've now outsourced the whole business to make it relatively bulletproof. 

Use the RSS tab in the header to subscribe and please replace any other (non-calendar) feeds from the site you may have been using.  We're coming out of our dormant period soon for the annual holiday run-up so this should help getting the word out when site updates occur.

 Posted by at 9:17 pm
Oct 022011
 

Never let it be said that when Steven Moffat decides to throw resources behind a story it certainly shows.  Imagination, and the expenditure it often takes, were all over the screen in The Wedding of River Song.  To wrap up a story whose elements began in 2008 had to be, by definition, a daunting task.  And yet, for as much of a puzzle-box structure that Moffat seems to bring to his style of Doctor Who, in the end most of the answers provided in the story, save for the inclusion of the Tesselator, were relatively straightforward and easily guessed. 

It probably amuses The Moff to see so many fans contorting themselves to make even the most trivial inclusion relevant, and yet there's a bit of JN-T in Moffat as well.  For the second straight year his season ending story has been a self-referential continuity free-for-all, but it's been done in such a throwaway manner to remain palatable for the general public.  Still despite best efforts to make the story feel epic as happened in The Pandorica Opens and The Big BangThe Wedding of River Song felt much more constrained, almost personal, and therein lies the potential for a trap.

Here at THT Omninational we felt oddly detached for the goings on and would've preferred a two-episode wrap up instead of the episode and a fraction we got, and hence it scored somewhat low in the 2011 Dynamic Ratings Table.

Know what though?  That's more than good enough as the forecast to more nu-Who looks awfully, awfully dry for the foreseeable future.

Images and caps for The Wedding of River Song are now online.

 Posted by at 7:47 pm
Sep 252011
 

So this is what happens when you overindulge in snacks before dinner. You leave yourself not hungry for the main course.  Gareth Roberts has established himself as the change-of-pace author, cemented in last years The Lodger.  Amongst the problems with Closing Time however is not so much that it is a change-of-pace, which it certainly tries to be, but that it echoes so many other elements of nu-Who that it could make you dizzy. 

The milieu of the department store runs out of Rose.  Killing the Cybermen with love is remindful of Victory of the Daleks.  The dad (re)connecting with his son occurred only three weeks ago in Night Terrors.  It goes on and on.  Smith and Corden as an unlikely double act is fine, but since this is the double-bank story two years running it all seemed like a distant replay and as such for the main story alone comes in at the bottom of our informal 2011 Dynamic Ratings Table, even with the tonal shifts weighted by Smith and the coda at the end with River and the astronaut.  One could be forgiven if you felt it was a 40-minute prelude for a 5-minute story.  Come to that, cliffhanger aside, wouldn't we all have been better served by making River's appearance a pre-credits sequence for a longer season finale?

On the trivial side Lynda Baron now holds the distinction of having the longest appearance span in the history of the program, having sung in The Gunfighters (in 1966), been a pirate in Enlightenment (1983), and now in Closing Time.  What other program can claim such a distinction?

Images and caps for for Closing Time are now online.

 Posted by at 2:55 am
Sep 182011
 

Let's put this out there first.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with The God Complex.  It's just that…. sometimes it's the company you keep that carries the overall feeling one has towards an episode.  The company in this case is the shadow feeling running out of The Girl Who Waited.  Of course it also doesn't help that for the second week running this is an episode which to one degree or another has the Doctor/companion relationship at it's core, and in so doing inadvertently trades on somewhat familiar themes. 

Had The Girl Who Waited aired in the first half of the season perhaps then perception here at THT Universal towards The God Complex would be more favorable.  This story certainly had the requisite weirdness one might expect, but like Planet of Fire or The Android Invasion, otherwise fine stories that have been somewhat overlooked because they were hammock-ed between two other great stories, we suspect that The God Complex will look better a year or two down the line.

BTW the reference to The Horns of Nimon aside, once the minotaur's connection was explicitly made, all I could think of was "Lord Nimon!!"

Images and caps for The God Complex are now online.

 Posted by at 3:26 pm