Docteur Qui

I think it's a bit rich for Spielberg to get on his high horse about the death of the movie cinema. The blockbuster trend that he and his contemporaries gave us has led to a state wherein the only thing any cinema will run at any given time is a Marvel or Star War. Companies like Disney are essentially blackmailing cinemas to screen their tentpole films at every available showing with the threat of blacklisting them if they don't comply. I get that Spielberg himself isn't responsible for this, but it's pretty tone-deaf blaming streamers for killing cinema when the reality is that there's far more variety and good quality material to watch at home, plus you can eat food that doesn't cost a second mortgage and your firstborn child.

I'd also worry about if/when RTD steps down as executive producer of the show. It's one thing for Disney to let him have control but another thing entirely for his eventual successor. That said, that's possibly why Bad Wolf productions is the driving force of the new deal, to ensure that the balance of control remains constant in the future. Count me as one of those - Jo Martin's Doctor is thrilling and she did a wonderful job in the role, which is why I didn't completely write the idea off when it happened. But she easily could've just been another "lost" regeneration between established ones, à la John Hurt. It's not as if Chibnall was averse to just repeating what others had done first and better; "The Power of the Doctor" plays like a greatest hits record of RTD's era, right down to the camp Master dancing along to a pop song while enacting his plan.

I mean, there's also nothing in the show that fundamentally prohibits an episode depicting the entire run of the series as having been dreamt up by a young Sydney Newman asleep in the waiting room before he goes in to see some BBC executives in 1962. Doesn't mean it's particularly good telly. Some things are better left to the imagination, and the idea of pre-Hartnell Doctors, for me, is one of those things.

I actually made this faux pas commenting on a friend's instagram story. Congratulated them and everything before they corrected me.

Nice use of guitar in "Mother and Son". One last score to confuse people about which John Williams is which.

Wow, that's way sooner than I was expecting - but not complaining at all because I can't wait for this series. I've got high expectations for it and hopefully they're met.

Woweeee, that's exciting! So happy to see John Noble joining the best show on telly, he's a great asset to anything he's in.

I got around to buying the Cinematic Studio strings and woodwind libraries earlier this year and after a little bit of time I've really been loving what it's capable of. I made this mockup of the End Title from Williams' Dracula using the libraries plus a few other of my usuals, just in time for Halloween: And while in the spooky spirit here's a composition I made late last year, I've shared it already but I'm still very proud of it. Heavily influenced by Williams'The Witches of Eastwick, with a heaping of Danny Elfman and Grant Kirkhope's classic N64 game scores (particularly Banjo-Kazooie):

It had higher individual highs - episodes like "Hush", "The Body", "Passion", and "The Gift" are undoubtedly some of the best episodes of television full stop. (I'll quietly add that I find "Once More With Feeling" to be extremely overrated; the songs are neither terribly good nor are they memorable, and I will die on this hill). But Angel took more risks that more often than not paid off; the Wolfram and Hart soft reboot combined with the Illyria storyline in Season 5 was a stroke of genius and took the show to new heights - it's a tragedy that the show was axed just as it was ascending . While its fourth season was uneven with all the Connor/Cordelia stuff (ugh), it was no worse than Buffy's fourth season which was incredibly bland, nor was it ever as bleak and mean-spirited as much of Buffy S6-7. Buffy also has the dishonour of featuring absolute stinkers like "Beer Bad" and "I, Robot... You Jane".

I was disappointed that this track isn't on the album release, I really loved it in the episode. I get why it wasn't - it is pretty similar to many of the statements of that theme across GoT, but I still would've liked it as a listening experience. I was also blown away by this theme. It 100% should've been used for the opening credits instead of just tracking in the GoT theme. Gah I'm so disappointed they did that - I'd love to know if Djawadi pitched new title music and made full demos; a choice like that reeks of corporate meddling in my experience and opinion.

Fair enough, though I still don’t quite agree. Hope you enjoy the finale!

I hope you're sticking with it, because I couldn't disagree more about Emma D'Arcy as Rhaenyra. They're utterly dazzling in episodes 7, 8 and 10; whatever "it" is, D'Arcy has it in spades.

I was a massive Buffy fan back in the day. I occasionally re-watch some episodes and they hold up really well. Season 5 is one of the best runs of sci-fi/fantasy TV I've seen, culminating in the excellent "The Gift". If the show had finished there and then it would've been a brilliant send-off for the show. The influence of Buffy on modern "genre" television storytelling can't be ignored; Russell T Davies has frequently cited it as the inspiration for how he structured the season-long arcs in Doctor Who when it was revived in 2005. And while shows like Doctor Who and LOST popularised the storytelling we see all the time now, IMO it was an art that was perfected by the writers of Buffy in their prime. I wish Angel had gotten a longer run. At its height it was equal if not slightly better than Buffy, and was overall much more consistent in its quality.

Good point. I think it’s telling that I found it a bit over the top when it aired in 2019, just prior to the pandemic. Nowadays though…

And Olivia Colman as well?! Good cast.

That, combined with propaganda to show the might of the Targaryens and boost Aegon II's claim to the throne in the eyes of the realm. It's the same reason Allicent had him crowned with Aegon the Conqueror's crown (instead of Viserys', which Rhaenyra now has) and his sword Blackfyre.

My favourite thing watching Years and Years was just how camp and over the top it all was. Near-complete economic collapse of the Western world? Check. Threat of nuclear war? You betcha. Humans integrating with technology and trans-humansism? WTF? "More of this please", I yelled at my TV. Even if he did return to the concentration camp well that has become a bit of a crutch in his high-concept human dramas.

There's nothing wrong with comparing the two. There wouldn't be a LOTR show if GOT wasn't such a massive success for HBO and ushered in the era of big-budget cable TV shows, but nor would GOT exist without the LOTR books and their adaptations. It was no accident that both shows aired at the same time either; both Amazon and HBO actively wanted us to compare them and decide which one we want more of. For me Rings of Power was the more consistent show in terms of its storytelling, and its overall aesthetic was certainly the more dazzling to experience. But House of the Dragon had a much more compelling story from the outset, and the performances by its leads (particularly D'Arcy, Smith, Considine and Ifans) were spectacular. I don't dislike Galadriel in Rings and Morfydd Clark is enormously talented, but I'm nowhere near invested in her story as I am with Rhaenyra Targaryen, and that is ultimately more important to me.

I'd partially put that down to the fact that there's a good mix of Classic and Revival fans here, neither of which are interested in postulating that their Doctor/showrunner/era is the best and all the rest are shit. I find that nu-Who fans tend to be the most toxic in online spaces (and I'm one of them - I regrettably haven't watched or listened to a great deal pre-2005, though I'm slowly trying) because they haven't had the same level of perspective about the show as classic fans - it's a constant flame war about whether David Tennant/Matt Smith is the best Doctor or how RTD/Moffat is literally Hitler. The truth about the show couldn't be any further from that - it's not the single vision of some auteur genius that fans worship like in other IPs - it's the result of half a century of different writers, producers, and actors creating the most hodge-podge thing you can imagine. Doctor Who has always been amazing, compelling, dreadful, or a little bit rubbish, often in the same episode, and I think everyone here understands that.

To be fair GRRM signed off on the show when they said they'd do it in 7 seasons, so he must've been okay with it at some point. It was only after they ran out of source material and began floundering that GRRM came out saying they needed more seasons, so they added an eighth. The narratives that have been spun around the duo by the fandom are insane; I understand disappointment in the final seasons but the bad-faith arguments about what happened are as questionable as they are numerous. No-one knows what really happened behind closed doors except HBO and D&D, and as far as I know GRRM hasn't spoken on the matter in detail. They spent 12 years on that show; show-running is gruelling work and would burn anyone out (Sapochnik lasted all of one season). If they really did want out they admittedly should've handed the show on to someone else, but who knows if HBO would've accepted that?

I liked this as well, it was a lovely idea and very well executed. Having Graham as the group leader was a nice touch and very much in character for him. Despite the fact he didn't get to interact with the Doctor at all, it was nice that he came back - he was my favourite companion of the trio. Holding out for an announcement about who's scoring the show next. I'm placing bets on Gold coming back for the anniversary special(s), and that someone else will take over for Ncuti's series proper. That's how I'd do it anyway.

Fair enough, I can see why it works for others. But like the monologue that precedes it, it tells us very little about this version of the Doctor, and what it does say has already been done before, much more deftly.

To be fair, almost the entire first season is setup and prologue to the real meat of the story as it was written, which is only a few hundred pages in length total. There's seven chapters in Fire and Blood that cover the Dance of Dragons, and the first of those chapters is essentially what was covered in the first 8 episodes of the show: starting from the Great Council (seen in the prologue of the pilot) up until King Viserys' death. The show put a lot more effort into setting things up than it could've - things like Rhaenyra and Allicent's childhood relationship (which is the lynchpin of the show) are glossed over fairly quickly in the book. As to whether you should read it, just be mindful that it's not really a novel, but a history book using the secondhand accounts of several unreliable narrators, none of which are major characters in the show. The accounts of what happened frequently contradict one another, and the true motivations of each figure are thus impossible to determine. As a narrative style it's not uninteresting, but comparatively not nearly as compelling as there's no true insight into what any character is actually thinking at any given time.

"Here we go... The long way round" "A tear, Sarah Jane? No, don't cry. While there's life, there's..." "Before I go, I just want to say you were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And you know what? So was I!" "Physician, heal thyself" "I will always remember when the Doctor was me" "Doctor... I let you go" "Tag, you're it" Jodie's final words just about sums it up for me. Despite her best efforts and natural charm, her time as the Doctor had no weight and had all the impact and gravitas of a children's game. She was not without her moments though, I'm just sad to see her go without being given the material she deserved. But let's hear it for Mandip Gill, she was the MVP of the show particularly in the last stretch of episodes where she wasn't competing for screen time with the other companions. Her chemistry with Jodie was excellent and she really gave the performance 100%.

It's been a little patchy IMO - I felt the same as you about the Daemon/Crab King sequence. A lot of CGI smoke that flattened the action somewhat, and the blocking was a bit stilted especially compared to Sapochnik's previous efforts (Hardhome, Battle of the Bastards etc). I'd put it down to the new showrunners finding their feet. The most recent episodes have had some tremendous sequences that equal or top many of Thrones'. It's faith in custom, honour and in chivalry - ironically the exact same faith that got Robb and Cat Stark killed while being hosted by the Freys - though in this instance it wasn't treachery that resulted in tragedy, but the caprice of dragons. Rhaenyra correctly assumed that the only time Luke would be separated from his dragon would be inside the court of Boros Baratheon's, where guest laws then take precedent. She would know that even if Boros had already knelt for Aegon (which he did), allowing harm to come to an envoy in his court would be a grievous sin in the eyes of many houses of Westeros and be an affront to all the religious faiths in the land. Sending him was a risk worth taking - who would dare harm a dragonrider when his dragon is right out the door? Another dragon of course, and here's where the real naivety of the characters lies, and what the show has been building up as its core thematic idea: there is no controlling the dragons when they have a mind of their own. I have to say I wasn't really expecting that to be the show's take on the dragons, particularly after spending so much time in GoT building up the mythology of the dragons as tools and weapons. But it's one that I really like, and is true to the larger ideas of GRRM's universe about power and control.