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r/gallifrey•
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/r/Gallifrey's No Stupid Questions - Moronic Mondays for Pudding Brains to Ask Anything: The 'Random Questions that Don't Deserve Their Own Thread' Thread - 2017-09-25

NO STUPID QUESTIONS

Or r/Gallifrey's NSQ-MMFPBTAA:TRQTDDTOTT for short. No more suggestions of things to be added? ;)

No question is too stupid to be asked here. Example questions could include "Where can I see the Christmas Special trailer?" or "Why did we not see the POV shot of Gallifrey? Did it really come back?".

Small questions/ideas for the mods are also encouraged! (To call upon the moderators in general, mention "mods" or "moderators". To call upon a specific moderator, name them.)

Please remember that future spoilers must be tagged.

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Posted Sep 25, 2017, 11:00 AM UTC

4241
this_old_can•

Here's the Big Finish Podcast News for the week of the 24th of September!

#Doctor Who News

  • On Wednesday, the 27th of September, A Heart on Both Sides will be released. The first of two Time War Short Trips released this year will be read by Sarah Sutton, and is written by Rob Nisbet.
  • The Short Trips Rarities range will be expanded to include various Subscriber Short Trips, previously available only to those who take out a subscription to the Monthly Range. These stories will be released slowly with at least a two year delay. The next five releases, released sometime in the near future, are as follows:
  • The Young Lions, an Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller story, read by Stephen Critchlow and written by Alice Cavender
  • Twilight's End, a Seventh Doctor story, read by Beth Chalmers and written by Cavan Scott
  • Intuition, a Sixth Doctor and Melanie Bush story, read by Stephen Critchlow and written by Rob Nisbet
  • Waiting for Gadot, a Fourth Doctor story, read by Hugh Ross and written by John Dorney
  • The Switching, a Third Doctor and Jo Grant, read by Duncan Wisbey and written by Simon Guerrier
  • While details haven't been announced, in light of the plethora of Short Trips news this week, there will be sales all week long featuring various stories from the range. Nick and Benji teased that at least A Full Life and Short Trips, Volumes 01 through 04 will be available on sale at various points this week.

#Other Big Finish News

  • Several Captain Scarlet releases are scheduled for release on Friday, the 29th of September, in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the first airing of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. These releases include the following stories:
  • Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons 50th Anniversary Limited Edition Deluxe Box Set: contains five exclusive to audio mini albums, and eight TV episodes, adapted for audio, alongside a new, sixty minute documentary examining the history of the original TV series. (EDIT: According to Facebook and Twitter countdowns, this set is scheduled for tomorrow, Tuesday the 26th of September, even though promotional material prior to this week has said it would be out on the 29th. I'm going to go with what the most recent thing is saying and say that it'll be out tomorrow, but I'm not 100% sure, nor am I sure when the Spectrum Files releases are out.)
  • Spectrum Files 1-3: audiobook adaptations of three original 1960s novels by John Theydon.
  • Big Finish's latest H.G. Wells Adaptation, The Martian Invasion of Earth (an adaptation of The War of the Worlds) has been delayed. Author Nicholas Briggs explained that the writing of the story took a much longer amount of time than expected, and that while recording will be conducted in the coming weeks, they have been forced to delay the release, and will announce a new release date, along with cast and cover art, at a later date.

#Listeners' Emails

  • Nick was asked about the possibility of producing t-shirts featuring characters from Torchwood: Aliens Among Us in the future, and Nick said that there may be rights issues there. Asked similarly about behind-the-scenes material for those sets, Nick stated that he had passed that along to producer James Goss, noting that it is required to do some behind-the-scenes interviews in the contracts.
  • A listener asked about the future of Big Finish's Sherlock Holmes series, and Nick was happy to note that the first episode of an upcoming, unannounced box set, has been recorded, and will be available for purchase separately at Christmas time this year. The full set, including this story, will be available most likely in March 2018, as a three-story set, with future details to be announced later on.

Don't forget to check out the rest of the podcast, which includes such features as...

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galloog1•

I've watched all the new Doctor's (2005+) but have always been afraid to dive into the older ones. What are some good episodes to help mitigate this and get me into it?

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Androktone•

Most people start with Genesis of the Daleks, since it's the most popular (for good reason), is self contained, and is a pretty representative of the show

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blerg34•

Yes, it's certainly one of the best. I left it off my list only because it's a 6 parter. But it is among the most well paced ones.

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blerg34•

Try: (4th) City of Death, Robots of Death, (5th) Snakedance, Caves of Androzani, (7th) Curse of Fenric, (3rd) Spearhead from Space, Carnival of Monsters.

If you want to try some 60s episodes (Black and white, slower paced, more 6+ parters): (1st) Dalek Invasion of Earth, Time Meddler (2nd) Enemy of the World, Web of Fear

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Sutcliffe•

Not a direct answer to your question (there's some great suggestions here already), but don't be put off by one bad episode either. Some seasons are rough. Some people don't like certain Doctors or companions.

I just don't like the fifth Doctor or Adric for example. So if I started Earthshock, a serial that's often praised, I might be inclined to nit get into it. But then I would miss Ark in Space, City if Death, the Pirate Planet, and... well all the other episodes that I love.

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aderack•

It's a different mode of TV, and depending on your prior experience you may need to attune yourself to its headspace. 20th century Who is stagey, seriously low-budget, and paced in something more like real-time, due partially to being shot more or less "as live". It almost makes one think of a soap opera.

None of which is a bad thing. But, it may weird a person out or seem off-putting to the unprepared.

Something else people won't tell you is that the first 12 seasons (and half the later ones) are heavily serialized, with ostensibly standalone stories often leading into each other, characters developing over time, and stories referencing events from weeks back. So you can pick-and-choose, but you get way more out of it if you start at a jumping-on point and watch from there.

Start with McCoy. It's the easiest transition. His first season is fun, but maybe best to save for later. The real jump-on place is Remembrance of the Daleks. If you're in a rush, then skip ahead and watch all of season 26. (If you do the DVDs, watch the re-edited versions of Battlefield and Fenric. They straighten out a bunch that was lost in the original TV edit.)

Then, if you're cool with the monochrome (Some people aren't, I notice. Weird.) or dig The Twilight Zone or Outer Limits, jump back to the 1960s, where the show is at its most ambitious and weird. Of course, a bunch of this stuff is missing -- but seasons 1, 2, and 6 are mostly whole. An Unearthly Child is a good start, of course. Really, seasons 1 and 2 are some of the best Doctor Who there's been.

There's only so much surviving Troughton, so I'd suggest watching what you can get. But whatever you do, catch Enemy of the World, The Mind Robber, and The War Games. So many different ideas!

After this, check out Pertwee, starting with all of season 7. If you're in a rush, follow that with almost anything by Malcolm Hulke.

Tom, do season 12 in order (with Zygons, its originally intended finale). Then it meanders for a while, with the occasional good story. The Deadly Assassin. Horror of Fang Rock. The Pirate Planet. City of Death. Season 18, the show finds a purpose again with one of the more deliberate, authored-seeming seasons there has been. Do all of that.

From there it's a smooth transition to Davison's first season. His era rarely reaches a height, but if you go sequentially the momentum will carry you a while.

Colin, uh. Good luck.

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janisthorn2•

Don't be afraid. If you watched all four (five) New Who Doctors and were okay with the personality changes between them you'll probably enjoy Classic Who. All the Classic Doctors do a really nice job in the role. There's nothing to be intimidated by. It's just more Doctor Who to watch. Check out the different Doctors, find the one you like the best, and roll with it. :)

The Classic series multi-Doctor stories are fun, and a good way to check out the different actors. The Three Doctors is probably the best. The Five Doctors is silly (and actually has only four Doctors in it), but still worth a watch.

Apart from that, try Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Mind Robber, Tomb of the Cybermen, Spearhead from Space, The Daemons, Pyramids of Mars, Genesis of the Daleks, Mawdryn Undead, Vengeance on Varos, or Remembrance of the Daleks to get a feel for the different styles and eras. Have fun!

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buddhadan•

That's really good advice about starting with the multi-Doctor specials. That's exactly how I began, with Pyramids of Mars.

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janisthorn2•

I did, too. My video store back in the day had The Five Doctors and Pyramids. As soon as I started watching the broadcasts I wanted to see as many Doctors as I could.

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Ender_Skywalker•

*Doctors

If you can put up with a lack of color, pure historicals (not that they're bad, but some poeple might not like them), missing episodes, and filler, start from the beginning, with An Unearthly Child. If not, start with Spearhead from Space. Not only is it the first color episode, but it's like The Eleventh Hour in that it introduces a new Doctor, new companion, new producer, and new everything, making it a perfect jumping-on point. There are also no missing episodes in the color years.

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platon29•

I watched the Five Doctors as my first classic episode and it made we want to watch more. You're millage may vary though.

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Yavoth•

Why does episodecalendar.com still show TBA in place of the "Twice Upon A Time" title? It really pisses me off.

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CharaNalaar•

Why does the SeriesGuide app now show David Tennant as the show thumbnail?

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Androktone•

Doesn't he have the most overall episodes? With all those specials he did

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CharaNalaar•

It used to show a current thumbnail from the latest season.

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not_shadowbanned_yet•

anyone really believe there were black lords and ladies in elizabethan england? or that half the people in renaissanse europe were black? anyone else bothered by this? if being bothered by this makes me a bad person, why is that?

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alexbaldwinftw•

Moffat has referred to it as a "better version of history". More diversity always equalling objective better is a minefield all of its own, but my take is this:

Doctor Who is a family show and is primarily focused on the power of intellectualism over ignorance and fear. Normalising gay/black/Asian/whatever to as many kids as possible as early as possible is a fine pursuit. It's not an accurate historical drama. I hate the "history is a whitewash" bullshit, but I think it'd get tiring having a family show have to constantly acknowledge racism and sexism.

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edwajame•

But how is just accepting that the ethnic makeup of Britain used to be different 'acknowledging racism?' It's just not creating a massive anachronism.

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crombiecron•

I think if any young or older person watching this show who uses Doctor Who as the basis for their historic knowledge in their lives is making a big mistake. I understand that race and gender are a big part of history but doctor who these days uses history as a backdrop more than a basis. If we had to spend significant time acknowledging the ethnicity or gender of a companion or doctor every time they went to a time period in the past it would just overshadow whatever plot they were aiming for. Doctor Who does a lot of Victorian era episodes because it’s cheaper than others. There are countless period piece shows already in production and the country is littered with old buildings and landmarks. I know that it doesn’t make much sense for them to brush over it most of the time but I’d rather have fun watching the show with aliens and time travel than constantly wrestle with the moral and ethical aspects of history.

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edwajame•

That's fair enough. I'm not saying they should acknowledge it every time, if Bill steps out into Medieval Britain then I'm not suggesting there has to be a big song and dance about how she's the only black person. But I don't retroactively changing the historical ethnicity of British people is the best way to avoid that problem.

Ironically I think there is a good line in the Shakespeare code where Martha asks the doctor if she should be concerned about being enslaved or something and he says something to the effect of 'just walk about like you own the place, seems to work'

Honestly the best solution for the BAME companions ect is to just not mention the racism thing rather than start shoving tons of black extras into a historical British setting. That makes more distracting of it than if they just ignored it altogether.

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platon29•

I'm not going to get on with Doctor Who if they do this with Nah, bro. Spoiler

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Podaroo•

There could have been. The image I linked is of a man who served in the Brussels court of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, but research using primary sources such as letters and family records shows that black people were present in Tudor England.

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edwajame•

It's all pretty far and few between though. A few black people sprinkled throughout British history doesn't rationalise how every other extra in scenes set in historical Britain seem to be black. The presentation of historical scenarios with current levels of diversity IS extremely anachronistic and it's not rationalised away by the fact that there were a minuet number of Black people knocking about at the time.

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Podaroo•

Yeah, but there weren't Daleks working for Churchill in WWII either. Maybe Doctor Who takes place in a universe similar to (but with a more racially diverse and full of daleks UK than) our own.

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edwajame•

Haha, yeah maybe. Maybe Martha and Mickey travel back in time to early medieval Britain and change the gene pool with their kids ;) Timey Wimey!

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Adekis•

In a general sense, I suppose I'd say "there might've been but they'd be rare as fuck", "no but there were probably fewer than zero black people", "yes", and "why on Earth would you think that being more invested in historical accuracy than Doctor Who of all things might make you a bad person?" respectively.

Which story specifically are you talking about? The only story I can think of in Elizabethan England is Shakespeare Code and I don't think there's any named black folks in it but Martha Jones (though the Doctor's claim that she ought to walk around like she owns the place is terrible advice and quite likely to get her killed if the story wasn't so self-indulgently unrealistic). If you're talking about Thin Ice, with its relatively large cast of black characters and extras, that's hardly "renassance"; it takes place in 1814, less than twenty-five years away from Queen Victoria, and white boy Percy takes over Sutcliffe's lordship, not black girl Kitty (though she's still probably the boss). The Doctor's claim that Percy had to be Sutcliffe's fake heir rather than Kitty because she was a girl rather than because she was black was obviously true, though as it's hard to imagine a black boy becoming the heir, I suspect the Doctor's decision to leave race out of it was just a misguided attempt at politeness.

The story is also very straightforward about what a racist, sexist asshole Lord Sutcliffe is, and there's absolutely zero reason to believe he's alone in his prejudices. As for the sheer number of black folks, that's a plot point. Bill's as surprised as you are, and the Doctor's claim that only the "respectable" classes were peopled exclusively with white folks seems reasonable enough to me. Probably there were a few more non-white folks than would've been realistic, but it's not as ridiculous to me as making Shakespeare into an Elizabethan version of Russel T. Davies.

But again, Doctor Who isn't all that interested in being historically accurate more often than not. I think we can expect this conflict between historicism and fun to get even more pronounced in the future, for fairly obvious reasons, and I don't think it's problematic to see it as problematic. That said, I also think it's sort of necessary to be able to shrug the discrepancies off.

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edwajame•

If doesn't make you a bad person. I find it very distracting too. It's an absolutely bizarre inclusion for the most part, since I know and you know and everyone watching knows that there were not countless people in a crowd in Stuart or medieval England or whatever with black skin.

It's just strange that the BBC wants to pretend that current ethnic makeup is representative of the whole of British history. I just don't understand the point? Who are they fooling? It's weird because they spend all this money making these lavish great looking historical sets and then kind of undercut them with a massive anachronism that anyone over the age of 7 can spot.

Dunno, I mean it's basically harmless, but it's just ultimately unnecessary and silly.

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Falolizer•

The only recent episode set in "Medieval" England was the Robot of Sherwood, which if I remember correctly didn't have a single non-white character with any lines. In Thin Ice, the racism of the society and the erasure of marginalized people from our popular understanding of history is baked into the episode's plot and themes. You might be able to argue that statistically the representation isn't strictly accurate, but would you complain about the over-representation of the upper classes in historical episodes? After all, aristocrats and royalty were few and far between, why do they always have to include them?

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edwajame•

I mean I was using medieval England as an example.

I can think off the top of my head the magicians apprentice, robot of sherwood, the woman who lived, and the Shakespeare code as having a plethora of anachronistic black extras in every episode.

I actually think thin ice isn't really an offender, as you said, it's worked into the plot sufficiently.

I think you have missed my point entirely about representation. I'm not saying that black people (pre 1950's) are overexposed in new Who - if Chibnail wants to do a story specifically about 1 of about 20 black people who was living in england during the war of the roses for example - that would be fine.

My point was that it would be blatantly anachronistic to claim that there was in fact the 21st ethnic make up of Britain at all points in history, which the BBC/Moffat have attempted to do by the specific inclusion of BMAE extras in historical scenes.

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Falolizer•

I understand your point better. And I would definitely prefer that the show's historical episodes actually visit non-white/non-European parts of the world over the occasional bit colourblind casting in historical episodes set in Europe. That said, portrayals of the past in media are always affected by our modern sensibilities. The Fires of Pompei has a very "modern" depiction of an Ancient Roman family, The Shakespeare Code portrays Shakespeare as very consistent with our modern idea of a celebrity, and the portrayal of Vikings in the Girl Who Lived is full inaccuracies that nevertheless fit with how we imagine vikings (horned helmets, actually identifying themselves as Vikings). I think asking the show to put out "white only" calls for extras in the name of a historical accuracy that wasn't even there in the first place is very ill-advised.

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