Any Doctor Who Fans? **UK AIR-DATE SPOILERS ABOUND**- Page 21

[kec]

Posted: 12/21/09 at 8:29am

I think you can find bits of it on the BBCAmerica Website's Doctor Who page. There are several video clips there of David talking about his time on Doctor Who.

Also, David will be making an appearance on the Catherine Tate Show this week; it's titled "Nan's Christmas Carol," and DT will be playing the Ghost of Christmas Present. An audio clip can be heard at the link below:
David Tennant in Catherine Tate Show

[kec]

Posted: 12/22/09 at 2:41pm

To accompany the above audio clip, David-Tennant.com has posted a photo of Tennant and Catherine Tate in their roles as the Ghost of Christmas Present and Nan:
Nan's Christmas Carol photo Updated On: 12/22/09 at 02:41 PM

[kec]

Posted: 12/26/09 at 5:29pm

Since we didn't celebrate Christmas until today, I managed to find End of Time.

Oh -- My -- god.

Also, David Tennant on the Catherine Tate Christmas Special is a must see -- available if you check YouTube.

[spiderdj82]

Posted: 12/26/09 at 5:29pm

I just watched Part 1 of "End of Time." Um....I am sad to say that I am slightly disappointed in it. John Simm, of course, was brilliant but the place they brought his character seemed WAY too hokey. And the Doctor didn't really do anything. I am not going to spoil the end, but I don't know how I feel about it. There were about 2 or 3 BRILLIANT scenes but if Part 2 is not any better, I am going to be SUPER PISSED.

[kec]

Posted: 12/26/09 at 5:35pm

What about the revelation at the end by the narrator?

Re DT on Catherine Tate, his bit can be seen in part 3.

[spiderdj82]

Posted: 12/26/09 at 5:39pm

Yeah, the revelation. I really, REALLY don't know how I feel about it

[Chrysanthemum62001]

Posted: 12/26/09 at 10:40pm

uch...i totally agree. i'm really hoping part 2 is better.

[Plum]

Posted: 12/27/09 at 12:30am

Rusty is definitely on the bad drugs now. This episode was incoherent, went nowhere for most of its length, and kept so many things back in an effort to stay "enigmatic" or "suspenseful" that nothing ended up making any freaking sense. I counted maybe 3 nice things:

1. Ten nearly crying in the diner with Wilf. A all-too-rare moment of true acting from Tennant and real emotion in the script. The speech abut regeneration was atrociously inaccurate, though.

2. The Doctor and the Master in one of the latter's sane interludes, talking about Gallifrey and confirming that the drums are real. Tennant and Simm have smoking hot chemistry, which only makes it all the more ridiculous that seemingly half the episode was spent having those two staring at each other from a distance of 200 feet. WTH?

3. The Master "fixing" the regeneration device. Simm can do so much acting without words, and his expressions were saying all too clearly how very, very stupid it is to hand a Time Lord a fancy computer and think that you're going to manipulate him.

RTD keeps adding unnecessary folderol to the Master - drums, insanity, zappy lightning powers, that ridiculous "hunger" - but when he just drops all that crap and lets the character come out, Simm is totally up to the challenge and it works. RTD needs to stop getting in his own way.

[spiderdj82]

Posted: 12/27/09 at 1:10am

That is the main reason I can't wait until next season when Davies gets the hell away from these characters. His scripts are the least impressive ones out of the group (minus a couple of episodes).

Plum - I don't understand how the speech about the regeneration is inaccurate?!? When 9 became 10, he said, "Every cell in my body is dying." Also, they get a new bone structure, way of acting, etc. I would think it would feel like dying and being replaced.

[smartpenguin78]

Posted: 12/27/09 at 2:53pm

I'm still not sure how I feel entirely. As usual I agree with Plum' points but tend to come out in a different place once those elements are added up.
Basically my thoughts cannot be completed until after part 2. Only with all the story together can I really say how I feel about this one.
I can say this though, the scene with 10 and Wilf in the cafe was worth any issues the rest of the episode may have had. Great, great stuff.

As for the speech on regeneration, I agree with Plum about it being inaccurate in the sense that it is incomplete. As you note DJ, all the cells die and the incarnation of the doctor "is no more" so in some ways he does "walk away" forever. But the mythology is that he is dead, but he isn't. He is a new man, but all the others are still there, distinctive and distinct, within his inner self. Just as the memories and personality traits are inside and can resurface. I have no idea if that was Plum's issue, but it was mine.

As for the revelation, I like it. I think the Moffat series should be released from the limitations RTD brought to the series (as much as I loved many of them), it is time to tell new (old) stories.

[spiderdj82]

Posted: 12/27/09 at 5:24pm

Well, looky here. Welcome back to the thread

I know he is the essence of the Doctor (as he remembers stuff from past regenerations) but, essentially, he is a new man. His mannerisms, His body (obviously), his outlook on certain things, etc. are all different. I think he was just trying to tell Wilf in the most basic of terms what it feels like to regenerate so he can understand what the Doctor goes through each time.

[Plum]

Posted: 12/27/09 at 6:32pm

But he's still the Doctor after each regeneration - some personality aspects come out more strongly, some fade a bit, but his memories, his essential self, they're all still there. From One to Ten, the Doctor is the Doctor, you know?

I'm all for this thing where Ten fears death/regeneration - it makes absolute and total sense for his character, and RTD's gotten a couple of great scenes out of it so far. But to pretend that Eleven will have nothing in common with Ten is ridiculous.

[spiderdj82]

Posted: 12/27/09 at 6:46pm

Well, if you look back in to the classic Who series, when the 4 or 5 Doctors met each other, #2 and #3 HAAAAAAATE each other. #3 thinks #2 rushes into things too quickly and #2 thinks #3 is too full of himself (Did that make ANY sense? lol). And with each Doctor, the personality changes. If you look at the regeneration between #5 and #6, the personality is different as night and day.

Yes, it is the same Doctor and all of the versions of him have things in common, but, in essence, it is a new man that comes out of each regeneration.

Updated On: 12/27/09 at 06:46 PM

[Weez]

Posted: 12/27/09 at 6:54pm

Right, been thinking, drawn these conclusions:

Tennant, Cribbins, and Simm cannot be faulted in their acting. They've also had a few nice character-driven scenes to propel them along. I hope to see more wondrousness from Donna despite the bad things Rusty did to her brain. But that aside, that was LAME. New Year's Day better redeem itself! RTD is on crack in a bad bad way, and Moffatt's tenure won't be starting a second too soon! In fact, I'm still sad that Tennant and Moffatt won't be bringing excellent darkness out in each other next series.

Anyway! We'll see how it goes. ^_^

[smartpenguin78]

Posted: 12/27/09 at 8:06pm

That's the thing, I think you are both right about the facts. But Plum has the idea down as I see it, whatever the essence of the being known as "the doctor" is, it is the same from regeneration to regeneration- even as every piece of his body dies and changes and his "outer" personality is different (in some ways). Exactly the opposite of, "Yes, it is the same Doctor and all of the versions of him have things in common, but, in essence, it is a new man that comes out of each regeneration."

I think that, as you say Plum, 10 fears death/regeneration, perhaps more than any other version had (certainly more than 9, who if anything was longing for it) Because of this, he may actually think of it the way he says it to Wilf, he is saying it for his own benefit, he wants to be special, more so than all the others. So to him this is it. I think he knows, deeper down, that 11 will be him continuing on, but he has to learn it, live it, in order for it to settle in. I'm hoping 11 is quiet, reflective, less manic. That is how I see all this journey of 11 best paying off.

(and yes, it has been awhile, but hey I'm back around for a bit. )

[spiderdj82]

Posted: 12/27/09 at 8:13pm

I agree with you and Plum but my brain is wrapping around the concept a bit differently, I guess.

I also think that 11 will be less manic. If you look at the stories that Moffatt wrote for the Doctor, he is subdued more than the others. He still has his moments of hyperactivity, but mostly he has a goal and he goes towards it.

[Plum]

Posted: 12/27/09 at 8:49pm

Spidey, just to go back to something you said above, I couldn't agree more about it being RTD's time to go. In some ways I think the first regeneration was his time to go, but that's a whole other thing. Davies is capable of writing perfect, emotionally resonant character interactions in a matter of a few lines - Ten and Wilf in the diner, for instance, or so many other examples. When he's writing about people, he usually has at least a handle on what's going on.

But he can't handle a long-term arc to save his life, and every time he's tried to raise the stakes for a finale or special, he's failed. Seeing a million Daleks in "The Parting of the Ways" was suspenseful because up to that point New Who fans had only seen the awful destruction caused by one Dalek. It was a raising of the stakes because nothing on that scale had been done in the new series before. But from that point on? Every successive apocalypse became dumber and dumber, louder and more garish. And this appears to be no exception.

Davies is always best when he's trimmed down, down, down - with the mysterious echo villain in the capsule episode "Midnight", the dinnertime conversation between Nine and Margaret Slitheen, the governmental (rather than outer-space) nastiness of "Children of Earth". His best apocalypse was the one that involved no special effects at all, just two lovers and a plate of spaghetti. (That was in The Second Coming, which is available on R1 DVD and is well worth watching. He pretty much should have patted himself on the back for a job well done after that series and stopped writing about his Jesus issues from that point on.)

Giving him a big CGI budget is a mistake - he'll confuse loud and shiny with impactful every time.


As for Ten and regeneration - this is the hubris Doctor we're talking about, the wannabe godling. Of course he'll want to deny death, just like he wanted to deny the laws of time in "The Waters of Mars".

I think that in the book canon, the Time Lords once had some kind of old-school religion that centered on the three things beyond their control - death, time, and pain. Ten's time has been one in which pain has repeatedly been "fixed" - Rose given a replacement dad and Jackie a replacement husband, Mickey getting a second chance with his dead grandmother, Martha's parents getting un-divorced, Rose getting a clone!Doctor of her very own. (Not to mention the biggest reset button of them all, the literal one in "Last of the Time Lords".)

Now, I think all those fixes, barring the last, were creepy and wrong, but they have been a definite pattern. This is the denial Doctor. Which is why it makes total sense for him to try to pretend he won't die, either - he'll fiddle around for as long as he can before seeing the Ood for their prophecy, he'll make jokes about how the TARDIS chirps like a car now - but he's wrong, like he was wrong about Adelaide, and he will die. I just hope there's some poetry to it, instead of the yelling and banging we've gotten so far.

[spiderdj82]

Posted: 12/27/09 at 8:59pm

Yeah, I saw "The Second Coming" a couple of weeks ago. I really liked it.

And I agree about Davies.

[Plum]

Posted: 12/27/09 at 9:13pm

Hee, now do you see why I was hopping up and down with glee when I found out Lesley Sharp would be on Who?

[kec]

Posted: 12/28/09 at 11:01pm

FYI, David Tennant will interview Russel T. Davies on BBC Radio 2 on Tuesday, December 29 at 5 p.m. UK time, 12 noon EST.
BBC Radio 2

[Plum]

Posted: 12/30/09 at 6:34am

There's another "End of Time: Part 2" clip out, if you want to take a look. No real spoilers as far as I can see. (It isn't a spoiler to say it features the Master and the Doctor being very, very gay for each other, right?)
EoT Pt. 2

[spiderdj82]

Posted: 12/30/09 at 6:42am

Why was it I was expecting "Let's Get It On" to play in the background? lol

I love when David and John are together. They bring out the best in each other

[Plum]

Posted: 12/30/09 at 7:20am

Why was it I was expecting "Let's Get It On" to play in the background? lol

Well, we know how much the Master loves bondage. *cough*

[spiderdj82]

Posted: 12/30/09 at 7:35am

The Master: "WHAT'S MY NAME, DOCTOR? WHAT'S MY NAME?"

Doctor: "MAAAAAAAAASSSSSTTTTEEEERRR"

The Master: "That's right, bitch. Now get me a coke"

[SoonerOrLater]

Posted: 12/30/09 at 11:33am

lol. That clip is an extension of the 'say my name' scene-10 obviously has some unfinished business there

I liked part one, though I'm saving overall judgement for after part two. Something I read elsewhere sums it up I think 'If you liked Davies' era you'll lap it up otherwise Matt Smith will be here soon' (I'm paraphrasing but you get the idea)