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Fandom Feels the Love

As we inch ever closer to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who in November, more and more little nods to this cultural icon and its fans are cropping up. One of my new favorite such instances is the wonderful fan-written ode to the show titled Celebrate Regenerate.

This 300-page book is a multi-part love letter to the entire run of Doctor Who, written by a wide range of fans at the behest of editor Lewis Christian. The idea began in mid-2012, when Christian began soliciting submissions in a thread on the Gallifrey Base forum. Before he knew it, he was getting retweets from the editor of Doctor Who Magazine, writers, actors, and others closely associated with the show. Pieces began pouring in, until he hardly knew what to do with them all.

Nearly a year later, there are articles covering every televised story from An Unearthly Child through The Name of the Doctor; artwork of five decades of Doctors, Companions, and foes (including the cover seen here, by Alejandra Ramírez Giraldo); and special features from interviews to speculative theories to an overview of where else the show has gone, off-screen.

One of the most unique and wonderful attributes of the book is that since contributors could choose which episodes they wanted to discuss, every single article (including three by me) is written from the perspective of someone who loves the story in question. So that one that everyone loves to hate? Guess what—someone else thinks it's the bees knees! Or your guilty pleasure? You're not alone!

Find the relevant page for any one story that you don't care for, and read what the other fans have written. I challenge you to come away without at least once nodding and saying, "well, okay, they've got a point there." And fans are not fools; someone reviewing an oft-reviled tale will acknowledge its flaws while making a persuasive argument that it's actually pretty awesome in its way even so. It is this attitude on every page that makes the collection exactly what it says on the cover: a celebration.

If I've piqued your interest (and hopefully I have), you can get your own copy of Celebrate, Regenerate either as a free PDF download or in paper (at cost, via Lulu) through the official website. It's out today!

 

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Retro-View #13: The Celery’s Fresh, But G’s Wilting

Castrovalva (Story #116, 1981)
Viewed 24 Jun 2013

Doctor/Companion: Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan Jovanka
Stars: Peter Davison, Matthew Waterhouse, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding
Preceding Story: Logopolis (Four, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)
Succeeding Story: Four to Doomsday (Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)

I had high hopes for this story going in. G seems ready to try a new Doctor, and despite the fact that my kids are home on summer break from school, they have plans for how to occupy themselves while the grown-ups are involved with their silly videos.

And it starts out well. The regeneration scene is recapped, and the action continues on right from that point. The guards catch up to our heroes and drag them off. Tegan huffs, “Take your hands off me. This is an official uniform!”, causing G to chuckle and declare “I like her the best.” Finally—someone who shares my fondness for the Mouth On Legs!

G asks some good basic questions, too. “Why did the Master do that?” she wonders when he materializes in middle of the fray, then seems to go running, allowing the Doctor to escape into his own TARDIS, and leaving Adric behind to be rescued. “So he’d still have a good adversary?” Now if she’d take her speculation to the next level, we might make a Fan of her yet…

I’ll admit that I still enjoy the whole regeneration regression part (as the Doctor does impressions of himself) far more than G does; I don’t even bother to pause and explain when he spouts “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” and she doesn’t laugh with me. Then again, maybe she didn’t even hear it. After several moments that I’d expected to get a reaction from her get none, I realize she’s left me.

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Technicolor Triumph

Review of The Mind of Evil (#56)
DVD Release Date: 11 Jun 13
Original Air Date: 30 Jan – 06 Mar 1971
Doctor/Companion: Three, Josephine “Jo” Grant, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning, Nicholas Courtney
Preceding Story: Terror of the Autons (Three, Jo, the Brigadier)
Succeeding Story: The Claws of Axos (Three, Jo, the Brigadier)

Although the BBC archives include all six episodes, The Mind of Evil is unique in that none of them (currently) exists in the original color format. Due to that fact, this serial has never before been released on DVD, making it—until now—the only Pertwee adventure I had yet to see.

Through technical machinations, color information buried in Episodes 2 through 6 could be pulled out and used to re-infuse them with a semblance of their original character. However, Episode 1 had no embedded color, rendering the chroma dot color recovery technique used on the other episodes useless. Instead, some seven thousand keyframes had to be hand colorized by the ridiculously talented (and dedicated!) colorizing artist Stuart Humphryes, better known by his YouTube handle BabelColour.

I’ll get to the story in a moment, but first I want to convey exactly how bloody brilliant BabelColour’s work is. I would put money on it that someone watching this DVD for the first time, never having been told about its history, would never guess it was anything but a cleaned-up original color print—until they got to Episode 2. At this point, the color seems to pulse every couple of seconds—it’s particularly egregious on faces in a couple of spots—and one realizes just how seamless a job BabelColour had done in that first episode. While I wouldn’t wish the horrendously long, painful, probably underpaid hours on him again, I know I’d dearly love to have him colorize all the other episodes (in this serial and others) that have so far only been done with chroma dot. His work is vastly superior.

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Whovian “Badge” of Honor

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A friend and frequent commenter posted about this site on Facebook (via a link to Joe Hill’s Tumblr—in which he’d gotten the result “Stephen King”; funny once you realize who Hill is). It’s an automated engine that takes a sample of your writing and compares it to a bunch of well-known authors based on your word choice and writing style.

Initially, I tried a piece of my fantasy writing (if you’re into that kind of thing, you’re welcome to pop over to that blog, too; it’s called The Dryad Chronicles, and I write there under the pen name Rachelle Wright). Depending on which chunk I chose, I was told I write like Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, or Ernest Hemingway. Hmmm…

Knowing that my fiction and my blogging are a bit different, though, I thought I’d try submitting one of my posts, just to see what kind of difference it would make. I chose my review of The Name of the Doctor, as it’s most recent. The result could hardly have been more appropriate for a Whovian. Here’s the “I Write Like” badge I got:

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Dialing It Down

Review of The Doctors Revisited – Fifth Doctor

By now you know the drill. It’s time to look back at the Fifth Doctor and his stint piloting the TARDIS. What made him unique?


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

Well, for one thing, at 29 years old, Peter Davison was the youngest actor ever to play the Doctor (a record he held until Matt Smith came along and beat him by two years). For another, he was already fairly well known, not least because he’d spent the previous three years or so as Tristan Farnan on All Creatures Great and Small (I’ll admit it took me quite a while to think of him as “the Doctor” instead of “Tristan” when I started watching pre-Hiatus Who).

Perhaps most importantly, though, he was the first one to go from watching the show every week to playing the lead. He knew what it meant to fans, because he was one of us.

All of these traits informed the way Davison played the Doctor, and helped make him an interesting contrast to the Fourth Doctor. Previously, iconically over-the-top Tom Baker had made the Doctor very alien and unpredictable. Davison’s Doctor had a more steady, “down-to-earth” and human quality. As Janet Fielding, who played Companion Tegan Jovanka, put it, Five was “less self-consciously eccentric.” (Fielding appeared in interview sections along with Davison himself; other Companion actors Sarah Sutton, Matthew Waterhouse, Mark Strickson, and Nicola Bryant; and post-Hiatus cast and production team members Steven Moffat, David Tennant, Marcus Wilson, Noel Clarke, and Hugh Bonneville.)

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Retro-View #12: Melancholy Moment

Logopolis (Story #115, 1981)
Viewed 03 Jun 2013

Doctor/Companion: Four, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan Jovanka
Stars: Tom Baker, Matthew Waterhouse, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding
Preceding Story: The Keeper of Traken (Four, Adric, Nyssa)
Succeeding Story: Castrovalva (Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)

It seems to me that by the time Logopolis rolled around, Tom Baker was more than ready to leave his role as the Doctor. He just seemed tired, pensive, and like he simply wasn’t having very much fun any more. Luckily, it fits well with the story, and doesn’t translate into any sort of loss of quality.

G is immediately intrigued by the way the police box and (Master’s) TARDIS merge, and in on alert when Tegan and Auntie Vanessa pull up next to it with their flat. “Ooh dear. And they’re by the box.” Then when the Doctor’s TARDIS turns them all into dimensionally transcendental matryoshka dolls, she catches onto the danger right away. “This is serious. It’s like he’s ingested poison by materializing that guy in there.” She proceeds to make an analogy with holding mirrors up to each other to make an infinite regression, well before the possibility is mentioned on screen. G’s all over it.

The Watcher has her fooled, though. She reads it as all first-time viewers are meant to: a slightly creepy threat. I can’t help but think of it as the precursor to Ten’s departure, though in this case it’s only the Doctor, rather than the whole audience as well, who anticipates what’s to come. We both enjoy this particular conceit, though. When the Doctor tells Adric that “nothing like this has ever happened before,” G declares that “that’s the fun part.”

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Reader Poll Roundup

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You may have noticed that every week there was brand new Who, I posted a reader poll inviting visitors to the blog to rate the latest episode. It’s been fascinating to see the results, watching the overall trend toward high or low score – often away from my personal rating – and the distribution of votes. I had so much fun playing with the data, as a matter of fact, that I decided to share some of my findings publicly. (You can always go back to the poll archives to check my work yourself, if you feel so inclined.)

To start, I’m going to present the chronological list of ratings for all the Series 7 stories (7A, 7B, and the Christmas Special). These are the average (mean) ratings over all votes received. In other words, I took each star rating and multiplied by the number of votes the rating got, then added all those results and divided by total number of votes. This is how it panned out:

As you can see, the season overall was very uneven. I find it interesting that Series 7A yielded an inverse bell curve, with A Town Called Mercy being the nadir according to the sampled voters. In 7B, there were several dips, but the low point of the entire series – again, according to the votes received – was The Rings of Akhaten.

For those of you already trying to figure out how they all stack up against each other, try this on for size:

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Worth Visiting

Review of The Visitation: SE (#120)

DVD Release Date: 14 May 13
Original Air Date: 15-23 Feb 1982
Doctor/Companion: Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan
Stars: Peter Davison, Matthew Waterhouse, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding
Preceding Story: Kinda (Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)
Succeeding Story: Black Orchid (Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)

I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on why I like this story so much, but it’s high enough on my list that I chose it to show to the Ladies two years ago. Maybe it’s because, crowded as it made the TARDIS, this particular crew really epitomizes Five’s tenure for me.

It’s kind of typical classic fare. The Doctor steers the TARDIS wrong, then his curiosity gets the better of him, then everyone’s in trouble. There’s some lovely character development at the beginning as Teagan and the Doctor get angry with each other and then apologize, and later when Adric complains of feeling useless.

And, of course, there are some wonderful lines. A long-time favorite of mine is the Doctor’s jibe at the Terileptil about his attitude on war, but the one that jumped out at me this time was this conversation between Nyssa and the Doctor:

“So, what are you going to do if we find them?” she asks.
“Oh, twist their arms a bit to let me take them back to their own planet.”
“I hope they have arms to twist.”
“I’ll find something.”

The revelations about the man’s darker nature in the Series Seven finale put this exchange in a new light. Maybe Five isn’t a totally warm, fuzzy, sweet kind of guy after all.

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What’s in a ‘Name’?

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Review of The Name of the Doctor
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

So many conflicting emotions. Parts of this finale were brilliant, and I really wanted to love the whole thing. I’m afraid I’m going to have to admit that I’m turning into something of a curmudgeon, though; this show is not entirely for me anymore.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

I’m betting there are few Moffat fans (perhaps more specifically “River fans”) who didn’t adore this episode. For my part, as someone who has been a Doctor/River denialist rather than a shipper, the otherwise lovely bits of the story were somewhat tarnished by the saccharine (Brits would say “twee,” I suppose) farewell between them.

I’ll admit the way River was used through the rest of the episode was clever, and overall I like her. I’ve just never bought that there was a strong, romantic love between them (at least, not reciprocated by the Doctor), so while I was completely caught up in the “you can see me?” conversation, as it ground inexorably toward a big, wet smoochie, I found myself thinking, “Oh, no. Please don’t. He’s gonna – aw, damn!”

One thing that really gets me about this new, post-Library River (who knew that was even possible?) is the fact that we’re left to conclude that she has literally been haunting him for years. I’m not sure I care for that idea. Makes him rather a jerk to ignore her that whole time, doesn’t it? Is she less “real” – does she “count” less – because she’s in the mainframe, and so it’s OK for him not to think about her feelings at all? Way to respect the person you supposedly love, Doctor.

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Now With More Alien Madness

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Review of The Doctors Revisited – Fourth Doctor

By the fourth month of BBC America’s Doctor-by-Doctor celebrations of the show’s history, we’ve rolled around to the man who many still equate with the role: Tom Baker.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

Perhaps more than any other actor who portrayed him, Tom Baker embodied the Doctor. As the man himself said, “I was Doctor Who. There was no acting involved at all.”

Something about Baker just clicked, and no one before – or arguably since – was ever more perfect for the role. This new Doctor was all about humor – at his own expense, from time to time – to defuse situations and get himself out of trouble. As the narration puts it, “Suddenly a big kid was in charge of the TARDIS.”

Other key changes mentioned in the first section include his alien-ness, his bohemian wardrobe – notably, the ultra-iconic scarf – and his break from UNIT, as he finally swans off for good. Given that Third Doctor Jon Pertwee’s tenure had been almost entirely earthbound, it was a notable change, and allowed for a wider variety of storytelling.

Turning next to the Fourth Doctors Companions, interviewees (who, throughout the whole documentary, included Steven Moffat, David Tennant, Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, John Leeson, Marcus Wilson, Nicholas Briggs, and Neil Gaiman) talked first about Sarah Jane Smith, who had actually come on board with the Third Doctor. Gaiman goes so far as to dub her the “greatest” of all the Companions (and there are plenty of fans out there who would agree). Perhaps what made the chemistry between these two work so well was how they viewed each other as best friends. It made for a wonderful, fun-loving dynamic that could withstand his “difficult” nature unscathed.

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