fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2221 ]

[ SECRET POST #2221 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2221 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 022 secrets from Secret Submission Post #317.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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It's cracky, has a few tidbits of extremely dubious supplemental canon that most fans ignore, and is oddly... un-Doctor-Who-ish? The producers were trying to revive it for an American audience, so things got a bit weird. On the plus side, though, Paul McGann is a fantastic Doctor and I like Grace, the companion. It's best taken with many, many grains of salt (and perhaps some lime and tequila, if that's your style), but its reputation as a disgrace to the Doctor Who canon is seriously overblown.

I recommend watching it, and then if you find you like McGann, he's also done a crapton of Eighth Doctor audio plays produced by Big Finish. And those are made of awesomesauce with an amazeballs cherry on top--I can't recommend them enough.

AYRT

Thank you for the detailed explanation! I've been trying to figure out which DVDs to by to check out the other Doctors so the movie on my list but this secret made me nervious.

What's with the half-human comments others are making? Just something the producers decided to thrown in randomly when they did their movie? that's baffling to me even having only watched the new series so far.

Do the audio plays try to resolve any of the discrepancies?

Oh, the TV movie is more than worth it for McGann.

Ahaha yes the half-human thing. At some point the Doctor needs to distract someone and goes, basically, "Can I tell you a secret? I'm half-human. On my mother's side." I think the Powers That Be had some grand plan laid out where the Doctor goes looking for his father, but thankfully that never saw the light of day and we're left with a one-liner that everyone tries to handwave away.

My personal explanation? He was trying to cause a distraction by repeating a joke first told to him by an itinerant preacher he met in Galilee, but in his post-regenerative fuzziness he didn't realize it was only funny the first time. :p

I don't recall the audio plays ever touching the events of the movie, except maybe via wink-wink nudge-nudge references.

AYRT

Ah, that sounds better! that it ended up being a one-liner that can be handwaved away easily - and I like your explanation!

Okay so the audio plays use the character (voiced by the same actor) but kind of run in a different direction than the movie did?

Yup. Eight's still voiced by McGann, but with a completely independent storyline that almost has a NuWho feel at times. A lot of the people who wrote for Big Finish went on to do scripts for the new series--Paul Cornell, Rob Shearman, Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts. And personally I love the audio play format; hearing narration read out in books on tape doesn't really do it for me, but this is like listening to an episode on headphones with no picture. (Which they occasionally use to do things that could never have been properly filmed.)

If you want to get into the Eight audios, I'd recommend listening to the first one, "Storm Warning," and then skipping directly to the second season starting with "Invaders from Mars." The rest of the first season's a bit shaky, but the second season has one of my favorite Doctor Who story arcs ever--the Doctor breaks time by rescuing someone who was meant to die, paradoxes up the wazoo, Time Lords being terrifying bastards, and the finale is a completely bonkers multi-Doctor multi-companion extravaganza with a very special take on the TARDIS in human form.

AYRT

Very cool, I will have to check them out sometime. Thank you!

There's this, too: http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/webcasts/shada/

He was trying to cause a distraction by repeating a joke first told to him by an itinerant preacher he met in Galilee

...I am literally in love with you.

...by an itinerant preacher he met in Galilee, but in his post-regenerative fuzziness he didn't realize it was only funny the first time.

A++ headcanon.

One of my personal favorite nods to the movie comes from a Seventh Doctor story--don't remember which one--when he yells that he will "not be killed by elevator music!"

Heeeee!

Which reminds me that apparently Mark Gatiss had to cut a line from Idiot's Lantern where Ten grouses about what happened the last time he had to climb a radio tower.

That was cut? WHY??????????

For time, I think. Tragic.

My personal explanation? He was trying to cause a distraction by repeating a joke first told to him by an itinerant preacher he met in Galilee, but in his post-regenerative fuzziness he didn't realize it was only funny the first time. :p

Best. Headcanon. EVER.

The half-human 'subplot' (if it can be called that; it's really more a handful of lines) is a remnant from the first draft of the movie, which was a ground-up reboot, as opposed to a revival. The bulk of the story was the Doctor searching for his father, a Time Lord named Ulysses, and the revelation that his mother was a woman from Earth. Also, the Master was his brother, and Borusa (High Chancellor of the Time Lords) the Doctor's grandfather. And the Master created the Daleks.

Yeah, I've never encountered anybody who's bummed that story didn't turn out working. The Doctor Who Wikia has a super interesting article on the creative process behind the movie. (Fun fact: Christopher Lloyd was so close to playing the Master, and the studio's first three choices for the Doctor were Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, and Jim Carrey).

Though I haven't listened to all of Big Finish, to the best of my knowledge, they don't really address much of it? But then one of the other tricky thing about Eight's timeline is that there's so much of it: a book series with seventy-some books, comics that ran in Doctor Who Magazine, and Big Finish's audio adventures. And all of them sort of contradict each other. It's complicated.

(Fun Fact #2: In one of Eight's books, it's hinted that his extremely complicated and paradox-ridden life has given rise to three potential Ninth incarnations: the one we see in Scream of the Shalka [Richard E Grant], the one from Curse of Fatal Death [Rowan Atkinson], and the one from the show proper [Christopher Eccleston]).

AYRT

Thanks for the info! Wow, there really is no end to the stuff I need to check out, is there? LOL!

Hah, there's a lot! The TV show proper, Big Finish, the what-if stuff Big Finish does, and then maybe four or five book series? And then there's the spinoffs, with Torchwood and Sarah Jane and K-9...

You'll pretty much never run out, that's for sure!

That's the thing about Doctor Who fandom. "Oh," you say, "half a dozen seasons that aren't even very long? I can totally get caught up on this!" And then you find out about the twenty-six seasons of Classic Who. And the movie. And the spinoffs like Torchwood and SJA. And then you find out about the giant ball of wibbly-wobbly canony-fanony stuff that consists of the Big Finish audios, another half-dozen book series, the audiobooks, the comics, the Peter Cushing movies, the Red Nose Day comedy sketches, the webcasts and animated features, and the perpetual moving target that is Shada, all of which is mutually incompatible and most of which has been Jossed by canon at some point.

Doctor Who fandom: bigger on the inside.

Personally I think it is one of the charms of the show, but his is also why I find it inexplicably hilarious when fan, especially Classic Who fans, get really butthurt about canon. I mean, even canon doesn't care about canon all that much and it's even worse in Classic Who!

The bulk of the story was the Doctor searching for his father, a Time Lord named Ulysses, and the revelation that his mother was a woman from Earth. Also, the Master was his brother, and Borusa (High Chancellor of the Time Lords) the Doctor's grandfather. And the Master created the Daleks.

...

[brain explodes]

Yyyyeaaah. I mean, I unironically love the movie and all of its faults, but that would have been way, way too much.

(though personally I don't really see the problem with the Doctor being half-human? *shrug*)

My issue with it is that I love the idea that he likes and helps Humans just... because. Making him half-Human gives him a personal connection with Humans and makes him helping us feel less altruistic.

This is my issue with it too.

Actually, one of my favorite short-fics is partially about how the Doctor fell in love with humans that's exactly what happened in canon, but with the perspective of an old man looking back: http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=43724

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(Fun fact: Christopher Lloyd was so close to playing the Master, and the studio's first three choices for the Doctor were Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, and Jim Carrey).

Thank God Almighty that this mess never came to fruition! D:

Hah, yeah. Apparently, Ford didn't want to work in television, Hanks was a fan of the show and went "shit no, he should be British," and Carrey had no clue what Doctor Who was.

And come on, Christopher Lloyd as the Master would have been incredible.

Hanks was a fan of the show and went "shit no, he should be British,"

I utterly adore him for this.

And come on, Christopher Lloyd as the Master would have been incredible.

Yes. John Lithgow would've been good, too. LOL

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