Thanks to various Britons with the odd hobby of recording TV shows on audio tape, complete audio exists of every episode including the lost ones. AFAIK, there are fan-made restorations (of varying quality) of every lost episode. Most of them simply pair the audio with with production stills to make a sort of slideshow version, IIRC others are more ambitious and mix in some home made CGI effects.
Also the BBC has done professional restorations of some lost stories, the one that I know of did an animated version of the story using the original audio as the soundtrack.
I gave up on Dr Who when they on the Tennant episode where the bus goes through a dimension gate or something, the solution to stopping the MotW is stop that or I as “the Doctor” will ruin your day. It’s all bang crash spectacular nonsense, I don’t miss it.
Age and nationality, as Tom Baker was the only Doctor on American TV in the '70s and '80s.
It sounds like you basically skipped Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi — which I’m not saying was a bad decision — but the final season with Capaldi was a sort of minor reboot, with a lot of the clutter cleaned out. If and when you want to catch up, find the first episode with Pearl Mackie in it and start there
Damn it… its a flaky stream for me. That and I get distracted and really need to be able to pause and come back to it… god damn it - I might have to break down and buy the BBC streaming on Amazon and just binge the classics. At least Tom Baker forward. Yes, Baker is still my Doctor, something about he’s my first. I still have specific parts of episodes etched into my memory. Little nuggets that I have looked up from time to time to see that I largely didn’t imagine what I remember.
I used to have to fight my dad to watch Doctor Who. It was on at the same time as the news on PBS. Fucking weird ass monsters, bizarre, creepy sound effects, including the intro and the cliff hanger at the end. Sign me up.
Also @jlw If you checked out after the War Doctor, you missed out, man. Yeah, the writing - like many seasons - has been inconsistent. But there has been some brilliant stories with Capaldi and I am really digging the new ones with Whittiker.
AFAIK, every now and then the odd old Telecine copy crops up in some broadcasting house’s cellar and is added to the BBC’s library. Sometimes somewhere in the (ex-) Commonwealth where you’d never expect it.
Ah! True that… I think that Doctor who was a regular show on Public Broadcasting in most places here in the states through the 90s as well (before the age of BBC America, PBS was the only place to get British TV, for the most part). So maybe here as well?
Whilst it is good enough for me to keep watching, the latest series is a bit too blatantly obvious with its themes and politics and messages. Instead of the odd message being skilfully embedded in a good, classic-style Who episode, each story seems to be deliberately assembled around a point which must be made. The Rosa Parks one was the worst so far, with a protagonist who had almost zero back-story and barely enough depth to serve his only purpose which was to be the hook for the whole convoluted story. Others have been better and it seems to be maturing as the new team get to grips, but it has been a bit clunky when it comes to ‘points’ being more the raison d’etre than the stories.
Yes, but everything they do have has been released on DVD, including from Hartnell and Troughton. So you can’t own it all, but you can own all that they have available.
Apologies for not being clearer (though I am not sure who else you could think it might be). Spoiler alert: I meant the anonymous, unexplained, alien/criminal type trying to stop Rosa Parks, who was not much more than a cipher/mcguffin for the team to be there and ‘experience’ the whole Rosa Parks famous bus seat thing. What was his motivation? In the end it was all very thinly explained. That character was weak and lightly filled in and - as I said - seemed merely to be a hook for some scriptwriters to have an American civil rights based ‘adventure’.
Don’t get me wrong - I still like the latest series, but this has not been the only episode that has seemed a little clunky in ‘making a point’ - clunky enough to think the ‘point’ to be made was there before they started writing and an adventure forced around it, rather than a good idea for an adventure being the place to start, which could be used along the way to make some points as appropriate.
But yes, probably. That would have been a better choice. However…
Protagonist
the leading character or one of the major characters in a play, film, novel, etc.
an advocate or champion of a particular cause or idea.
Our alien/criminal was a major character, was the cause of (hook for) the whole story with his advocacy or championing of his cause to prevent Rosa Parks ‘happening’. Our ‘protagonist’ was the only reason the story happened, hence why I used that term. If I’d meant the Doctor, it would have been easier to just say that. I should have just said ‘baddie’
But nothing to get hung up about. It’s a kids programme, after all. Pertwee and Baker were classic Doctors and were rather less ‘theme’ based and more of a kind with Saturday morning cinema style adventure stories than has typically been the case with the reboots. Which may be why some prefer the older ones, still. They’re a bit more ‘innocent’.
Dude… the Doctoris the protagonist of Doctor Who. Flat 2D Villain-Guy was the antagonist of that particular episode.
Just sayin’.
<_<
Anyhoos, back on topic:
I’m just now getting into Classic Who, circa Baker’s era… but I’m not using Twitch; they seem to be kinda wishy-washy about the caliber of clientele they want to keep.
Well, given the definition, I contend that while the Doctor is of course the lead/title character of the series, the protagonist of this story was the baddie here. Without his actions and (flimsy) motivations, (and, for all his lack of characterisation) he was the one causing the entire story to happen and keep going until he was stopped. (That’s not a spoiler - the baddie is always stopped, eh?)
The protagonist is the primary agent propelling the story forward
Just sayin’.
I think we can agree to differ here, quite harmlessly.
And if you are only now getting into Baker era stuff, I almost envy you. I was there first time around so it’s long lost memory and impressions for me. (And there ain’t enough time to revisit / re-view or update the memories - too many other good current things to see!) Enjoy!
