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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Doctor Who Season 3 UK (No Spoilers)

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06:18 / 08.05.07

I've been trying to work out roughly where Dr Lazarus' labs were, based on Southwark Cathedral, somewhere near Borough tube station, or nearer Waterloo?

According to Dr Who Confidential, Lazlabs was set in the Welsh Assembly building, making Laz, the Doc and the Joneses dash from there to (Wells cathedral pretending to be) Southwark cathedral an epic dash of Get Carter proportions.

07:59 / 08.05.07

"Mind you, I thought Mickey was shit in the first episode of Season 1, so I could easily be wrong."

Your not alone there. Yon bloke has apologised in Doctor Who Magazine for his performance in the first episodes. He stepped off the plane from filming Auf Weidersehen Pet and started filming Who without having time to recover from that and Pat Roaches death/funeral and badly pitched the performance. He played it thinking it would be a campy kiddy affair.

Time to think, recuperate, see how the series is developing and chat with the cast and crew led to the much better performance in Boom Time.

08:13 / 08.05.07

When did this thread go all spoilery, given that we're not even allowed to fucking speculate?

Commenting on trailers is allowed though surely?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:39 / 08.05.07

Oh, don't mind me, I'm just cross that we never managed to find a middle ground between the two threads.

All Acting Regiment

14:47 / 08.05.07

Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

Was the theme tune bass line, yes? Meta! Hyper!

The cathedral and Lazarus were surely a reference to the first Quatermass, yes?

17:21 / 08.05.07

Stoatie: (I still argue that one. I want speculation, DAMMIT!!!)

Speculation's fine and it's been handled well in this thread so far. What's not fine is somebody wondering aloud and having another person give an "actually... *wink wink*" reply, which is exactly what we were getting before. Speculation based on spoilers.

18:06 / 08.05.07

Except that the summary says "without speculation or spoilers", which has always struck me as very odd.

18:41 / 08.05.07

Well, since we have had such problems with speculation shading into spoilerism in the past, much to the vocal annoyance of the spoiler purists I attempted to err on the side of caution when crafting the summary.

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

19:11 / 08.05.07

Commenting on trailers is allowed though surely?

I believe it was decided during the first season that since the BBC tends to spoil as much as the most spoilerific spoiler who ever spoiled that talk of the trailers was verboten.

miss wonderstarr

21:13 / 08.05.07

Was the theme tune bass line, yes? Meta! Hyper!

Definitely seemed like ta-ta-ta-tap, ta-ta-ta-tap. Whoooo-oooo!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

22:48 / 08.05.07

Except that the summary says "without speculation or spoilers", which has always struck me as very odd.

See? Boboss gets me.

Whisky Priestess

08:46 / 09.05.07

Sorry, I missed the trailer meeting. I thought anything broadcast on TV was fair game. I don't see the harm in talking about them TBH. Also, not so spoilery at all this time I thought.

19:26 / 09.05.07

late to the party again.
I was disapointed by the swiftness of descent into monsterdom as i thought it might be nice to actually play around with the concept and world's reaction to it (like aliens in Aliens of London) and making Mark Gatiss CGI is a bit of a waste, top neck cracking action (for some reason my head suspects his 'fall' is probably move for move choreographed to some 1950's film version of Dr Jekyll)
good action piece though with some great character moments.
Martha's mum's really hurting isn't she? Ultra protective (esp from the charming) and let's face it she's got a point...i keep trying to defend him to her but all I can come up with is an echo of Martha to her sister 'he's...the doctor'
which justifies her points at the same time.
stupidly only just twigged that all the being 'surrounded by death' comments can apply equally to any doctor...but i am often thick

Whisky Priestess

11:58 / 10.05.07

only just twigged that all the being 'surrounded by death' comments can apply equally to any doctor...

Well ... hopefully not to one's local GP. Unless he happens to be Harold Shipman.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

13:00 / 10.05.07

Or Doctor Crippin. or Jack the Ripper, depending on what drugs you take and what books you read. Originally it the inter-church action was going to take place in Saint Paul's, but they couldn't get that cleared, so it moved to Southwark instead. And apparently RTD insisted on the monster having Mark Gatiss' face, which everyone else on the production team, including the people that designed it, seemed to give the impression on Confidential that that was what made it suck, possibly because it seemed curiously static, even with the opening jaw thing.

14:47 / 10.05.07

Well, I don't think the monster sucked too badly. The face was a bit dodgy and was a bit pointless, considering it looked nothing like Mark Gatiss. It was more impressive than a similar many-legged monster, Empress of the Rachnoss and shows how dynamic and exciting The Runaway Bride would have been had they opted for the CG monster, instead of the prosthetic.

Whisky Priestess

15:33 / 10.05.07

Can you imagine trying to argue with RTD about what should and should not be in Doctor Who, though? It'd be a brave man - possibly only Terry Nation could do it, and he's dead.

20:28 / 19.05.07

That was alright! Nice and tense. Bit too much like The Satan Pit and Impossible Planet (scary, firey demon possession on a doomed ship, calling home on the super-phone etc) but liked the reverso-twist (it's all the human's fault for stripmining a sun). Enjoyed the Doctor solving things by risking himself rather than waving his thing around.

Annoyed when he was shouting "I'LL SAVE YOU!" wordlessly. Nicely shot but I couldn't help thinking, "well, go on then! Check your watch!"

Martha's mum - what a git! Surely she knows she's gonna get Martha in legal trouble or worse (presuming she's been told the Doctor's a wanted alien etc)?

In all: a decent episode but I can't really think of anything that stood out. It had a big air of 'seen it before'. Not the best episode to restart the series on.

21:00 / 19.05.07

I dunno, it didn't really work for me, which is a shame, cos I've really been rooting for a nice spaceship-bound ep.

I'm sure a 42 minute episode set in real time could work - hell, we've seen it work before, but here it seemed like there was too much going on. It felt like a story that had been rewritten and rewritten and cut back and cut back to fit the timeing brief and in the process had had all the bits that would have bound it together and made it work cut out for time reasons. I guess it reminded me of BSG in this respect.

There were plenty of good things in there - this is one of the few times we've seen the doctor genuinely scared, and particularly scared about what he would be capable of doing - but I never felt that was milked to its full potential. Likewise the sentient sun was kind of skipped over leaving no time to dwell on the sense of wonder that this could have engendered.

But, you know, this is all just on the initial viewing, maybe I'll like it more when I catch the repeat.

21:20 / 19.05.07

Good call, I did like it when the Doctor said he was scared. Very humanising, that.

Was also nice to see him work with people who were, in the majority, a bunch of miserable giving-upping bastards than his usual fantastic!oo-muns.

Speaking of which, the crew in this were nowhere near as engaging as the ones in Impossiplanet, the episode this is going to compared against the most. Hoom.

21:49 / 19.05.07

Well, the main reason the crew seemed less engaging than those on the impossible planet was that we spent less time with them, and they were less developed.

It would have been possible to develop at least some of the characters more, but something else would have been sacrificed.

miss wonderstarr

23:17 / 19.05.07

What you all said, but also not a great idea (if it was avoidable) to script an episode of a BBC series about a ship plunging into the sun, just after a big-budget feature film about a ship plunging into the sun has been released.

I'm finding Mr Saxon's arc the most interesting thing in this series so far, and it's all just glimpses.

23:31 / 19.05.07

It wasn't as terrible as I was (unfairly) expecting it to be. It was pretty standard fare for quite a lot of it, with a few standout moments, notably: the Doctor lamenting the death of recreational mathematics, Martha getting the TARDIS key and the idea of a living sun that's being strip-mined.

It had the irritating Chibnall habit of overly-clichéd dialogue, but it was leagues above most of his Torchwood output. One of the main emotional plots of the episode was McDonnell's relationship with Korwin. I would have empathised a lot more with McDonnell, if Korwin had anything remotely resembling a character trait other than being a conduit for the living sun.

Saxon stuff is all shaping up nicely. I wonder if we're going to get a lot more mention of him throughout the second half of the season.

23:35 / 19.05.07

Two final points: Loved Harper's direction and am glad he'll back for one more episode this year. It really lifted the visual standard of what could have been quite an ugly episode. Those sets were a bit too busy, I thought.

Murray Gold's music, the character based musical motifs were beautiful again this week, but there was an over reliance on the terribly irritating violin screech to indicate a dramatic moment.

01:24 / 20.05.07

I thought this was possibly the best episode we've had this year. Chibnall really surprised me. Non-stop crazy, a cool mad idea, some terrific sequences (the escape pod deploying), the Doctor as a victim, and Martha being interesting for once-- yeah, this one was great.

I loved The Impossible Planet and the Satan Pit, and I quite liked this. I guess I dig on that kind of story.

All Acting Regiment

09:32 / 20.05.07

Liked nearly dying then not Martha. I think, poster above, that he was saying "I can't save you". Didn't Martha's mum used to advertise some sort of sugar substitute on TV?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

18:09 / 20.05.07

It was broadly okay, like the last episode, but not great. Like others I found the unfortunate simularities to The Satan Pit worked against it. However, the bit when the escape pod silently disengages from the ship was very well done.

I wonder if there's any significance to the fact that several times Martha has been required to save the Doctor's life in a more physical way than Rose was (with the exception of the Bad Wolf incident), I wonder if that's important or just a side effect of the character bible presumably pointing out that she's intelligent and a doctor-in-training.

Brigade du jour

20:46 / 20.05.07

Allecto, I don't know about sugar substitutes, but Martha's mum played Serafina Pekkala in the stage production of His Dark Materials so I think a little respect is in order.

On the other hand, she was also in Casualty and/or Holby City, assuming they are indeed different things. So maybe a little respect isn't in order. ;-)

21:33 / 20.05.07

She also played one of the cat/nuns in season 2...

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

03:46 / 21.05.07

The silent "I'll Save You" made me happy in much the way the silent "Exterminate" did in Bad Wolf. I am just a sucker for that sort of shot I suppose.

12:32 / 21.05.07

I was about to say, it's easy to make silent space dialogue dramatic. Easy!

Whisky Priestess

09:11 / 22.05.07

She also played one of the cat/nuns in season 2...

Again with the recycling actors Russell! Grr arg ... although the cat-nuns are virtually unrecognisable so I suppose that's all right.

I liked this episode, but it didn't give me the sort of sci-fi happy I expect when I see grubby spaceship interiors and realise there's an alien on board. Also, someone's clearly been watching Event Horizon, and perhaps stealing a little bit of the Big Bad from that film, hmm?

I liked the thing with the sun-emitting eyes (although Event Horizon hollow eyes are spookier) but wasn't quite sure how the Doctor got infected - unless it was when he went outside the ship to get Martha back? Was it established that that was how Cindy's husband had come a cropper in the first place?

In short, I loved the look of the thing and the idea of a sentient sun is pretty cool, but I'd have preferred to soend any time at all with the characters before they got picked off. We could have lost a bit of Martha/Doctor for the sake of establishing interest in the victims. I wonder if my reservations are as simple as feeling that this needed to be a two-parter? That would certainly have solved the "no time to establish character, only have 42 minutes to save the woooorld!" pacing issues.

Also, it slightly rips off an idea in an (unpublished) story of mine, which will henceforth be seen as derivative. Damn you, Chris Chibnall.

09:52 / 22.05.07

Unlucky, Whisk. Perhaps you and MattSheppard could do a "Strangers on a Train"?

but wasn't quite sure how the Doctor got infected - unless it was when he went outside the ship to get Martha back?

Got it in one. He, against all advice from the mothers he's ever met, looks directly into the sun and gets dosed with it.

Whisky Priestess

16:05 / 22.05.07

Unlucky, Whisk. Perhaps you and MattSheppard could do a "Strangers on a Train"?

Don't think I haven't PM'd ...

16:25 / 22.05.07

Whisky's post is pretty much what I said in my mysteriously vanished one.

We could have lost a bit of Martha/Doctor for the sake of establishing interest in the victims.

We could, and easily. The biggest issue I had with this episode - ignoring the problem of it looking exactly like the only other scary spaceship one that they've done so far - was that it was lacking in any real pace. Even though the countdown keeps on getting put onto the screen, there just wasn't any tension to the direction, the script, the acting.

Worst offenders: the scene already mentioned, with the Doctor mouthing "I'll save you" over and over (okay, so get the fuck on with it, then) and its flip-side scene, the one where Martha needs to freeze him to kill the infection (and where she takes over his role in spending an awful lot of her time in telling him what she's going to do, instead of, y'know, getting the fuck on with it).

Otherwise, I thought it was okay. The helmets looked ridiculous, though, and were *so* obviously nothing more than an attempt to cut the budget back a little.

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