Original Me: An Overanalysis of "The Doctor Falls"

If you met yourself, as a different gender, would you not spend all your time fucking?

I know I'm in the minority in saying this but, despite thinking this was a good season (albeit not as good as Capaldi's other two seasons), I thought the two part finale was just so-so.  I mean, it's got some great moments, and the first two-Master episode is a certainly a prospect that I was excited to see, but "The Doctor Falls" set up a lot of expectations that it didn't deliver on.  The two Masters together were woefully underused, and I think there could have been a lot more fun interactions with those two.  Also, I expected this episode to explain the Master's motivation for turning Bill into a Cyberman, and the answer in the end seems to just be "to be a dick."  Frankly, I would rank this as the weakest Moffat finale, as even Moffat's disastrously weak 7th Season still ended strongly (even though I said it didn't at the time).

They keep calling this the origin of the Cybermen, which makes little sense because it's been well established that Mondasian Cybermen come from...well, Mondas, not a Mondasian colony ship.  Even if this isn't explicitly stated in their debut episode, "The Tenth Planet," it is in what is generally considered the best of the Doctor Who audio stories (which, remember, are canon) Spare Parts, in which the 5th Doctor visits Mondas just before the creation of the Cybermen to see their real origin.  Moffat tries to fix this in the dialogue by saying that the Cybermen start a lot of places, here, Mondas, Telos, Earth.  Okay, not only does that not explain the fact that these Mondasian Cybermen are identical to the ones in "The Tenth Planet."  Also, the Cybermen never started on Telos.  Telos is the planet that the Mondasian Cybermen moved to, displacing (or killing, I don't remember) the residents because their home planet of Mondas had been destroyed by their own stupidity.

And what does the Doctor accomplish with this episode, anyway?  He manages to leave Nardole behind to continue to help protect the people from the Cybermen for eternity.  Good luck with that Nardole, you useless lump.  But there's really no climactic scene in this episode.  There's a big, muddled scene of the Doctor battling the Cybermen (and the sonic screwdriver is used as a weapon, which is breaking a rule of Doctor Who) and the Doctor is basically killed and then he spits out a 1st Doctor quote that's based on a 4th Doctor quote, but nothing really feels like a climactic moment of the episode, and I think that's what I disliked about this episode the most.

I also didn't feel satisfied with the interactions between The Master and Missy interactions.  In "Day of the Doctor," I felt like Moffat hit all the right notes of everything I wanted 10 and 11 to say to each other.  I didn't get that from the Master and Missy.  I did love the Doctor's speech to them to stand with him, and that, at the end, Missy tries to but the two Masters kill each other.  But I didn't get why the Master was so opposed to standing with the Doctor.  The last we saw the Saxon Master, he was standing with the Doctor against Rassilon.  And then he got sucked into the time lock and cured of being Skeletor (which seems unlikely, but okay) and this is him after the events of "The End of Time."  So why has his tune changed so much?  Missy's right in "The Magician's Apprentice," the Doctor and the Master have always been as much friends as enemies, and the Saxon Master is no exception.  There were plenty of moments where he and the 10th Doctor had a mutual respect and admiration for each other.  Where'd all that go?

I thought it was a shame that the Doctor never explained the concept of regeneration to Bill (even though he demonstrated it to her) so she just leaves him not knowing she could stick around and wait for him to regenerate.  Although, she does repeat the Doctor's line about it being a big universe and hoping she'll run into him again.  And I've been having the same argument about this episode that I had about "Time of the Doctor":  Heather showing up is not a deus ex machina.  Something that was set up previously cannot, by definition, be a deus ex machina.  It's just another one of Moffat's methods for killing off a character but not really killing them off (but really killing them off).

The Doctor then wakes up and starts babbling phrases from other Doctors before him, and people are already complaining about this Doctor not wanting to regenerate and it being like 10's big whiny speech about not wanting to go at the end of "The End of Time."  But that's not a fair comparison.  My problem with 10's speech was that a man was about to die if the Doctor didn't spend a regeneration.  That's not happening this time.  Very.  Big.  Difference.

Me every morning before work.

And then the 12th Doctor runs into the 1st Doctor (played by a new actor, of course, because Billy Hearts is long dead) and the 1st Doctor repeats the same 1st Doctor line that the 12th Doctor said earlier.  Moffat couldn't leave us without lying one more time, because he said like 6 months ago that there would be no more multi-Doctor episodes, and he's clearly just set us up for a 12th Doctor/1st Doctor Christmas Special.  It looks like a lot of fun.  But I have to say, what right does the 1st Doctor have to be criticizing the 12th Doctor about not wanting to regenerate.  He's the 1st Doctor.  He hasn't regenerated yet.  As old as he may look, he's a child compared to 12.  He should shut the hell up.

Well, that's it.  My last blog entry for Moffat's final season.  I put together Julie's Punk Rock Doctor Who Playlist Season 10 of songs that represent season 10 for me, partially based on my blog titles, partially based on what I would have titled the blogs I skipped, and a little editing to make sure no band gets used twice.  I can't throw up a link to it like last season because I'm on Apple Music, not Spotify, now and I don't know how to do that, so I'll just write it out.  Feel free to put it together on your device and play along with me:

1.  The Pilot - Drown With the Monster by White Lung
2.  Smile - Smile Smile Smile by The Dollyrots
3.  Thin Ice - The Unseen Tears of the Albacore by The Vandals
4.  Knock Knock - Safe European Homes by The Clash
5.  Oxygen - For Your Lungs Only by Alkaline Trio
6.  Extremis - Bad Catholics by The Menzingers
7.  The Pyramid at the End of the World - Pyramid Scheme by Mad Caddies
8.  Lie of the Land - Die for Your Government by Anti-Flag
9.  The Empress of Mars - God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols
10. Eaters of Light - All My Best Friends Are Metalheads by Less Than Jake
11. World Enough and Time - Hospital for Heroes by Direct Hit!
12. The Doctor Falls - Original Me by ALL

That's it until Christmas, where I'm going to be really sad because we're not just saying goodbye to a great Doctor, we're saying goodbye to the best showrunner Doctor Who has ever had.  Fuck the haters.  Until next time:

The Dead Doctor Scrolls: A Roundup of News About the Recent Found Episodes

On Sunday, the UK's Daily Mirror reported that 106 long-lost Doctor Who episodes had been found in Ethiopia at the Ethiopian Television and Radio Agency.  Fans immediately became skeptical, especially since similar rumors have been floating around for years and nothing has ever come from them.  Furthermore, the source that the Mirror quoted was someone who claimed to have heard the news from a friend.  Everything pointed toward some sort of hoax.  Then, it was confirmed that this news was at least partially true, and now the entire thing is steeped in confusion.  I'm going to try to provide everyone with a little background on this, as well as trying to work through some of the confusing and contradictory reports.

Now, for those of you who don't know, many early black and white episodes of Doctor Who have been lost for decades.  In the 1970's, the BBC showed a shocking lack of foresight when it taped over many old episodes of television shows in an attempt to save time and money. Apparently they didn't anticipate a future where people would pay good money to own such episodes for viewing in their own homes.  At the very least, you'd think they'd have the common sense to realize that these episodes would be useful to rebroadcast in the future.  Instead, many of the best BBC shows from before the 1970s are now lost, probably forever.  Doctor Who wasn't the only show to receive such shabby treatment, as BBC did this with many shows on hand at the time.  For example, many episodes of Til Death Us Do Part and Steptoe and Son--which were the basis for Norman Lear's brilliant American remakes All in the Family and Sanford and Son respectively--are now lost for the same reason.

Over time, lost episodes have turned up in the oddest of places.  Episodes from "The Dalek Masterplan," for example, turned up in a Mormon church in England which was on a property they bought from the BBC in the 1980s.  Imagine being the person cleaning up a freaking LDS church to find a copy of "The Dalek Masterplan"!  Private collectors seem to turn up a lot of them here and there.  Some episodes were sold overseas, meaning that the networks that aired the episodes in other countries have found old film reels of the episodes.  The first regeneration scene of the First Doctor into the Second Doctor only exists because a news program did a special interest story about the regeneration and they showed the footage on air.  While the episode in which the regeneration occurred was lost, someone miraculously saved the news report and got the footage from there.  You'd think that would be an episode someone would say "Hey, that's important enough to save!"

Only episodes from the black and white era--meaning only William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton episodes--remain lost.  While some Jon Pertwee episodes were wiped, black and white prints of the lost episodes remain, meaning that some episodes only exist in black and white, but all of them still exist.  Patrick Troughton got the short end of the stick on this one, as many more of his episodes were lost than Hartnell's.  It's a shame because, if we had to lose an entire Doctor's work, I'd rather it had been Hartnell's.  Troughton's performance as the Doctor was brilliant, and it's the main reason that the show has the longevity it now has.  Only 6 of Troughton's serials remain fully in tact.

Luckily for fans, every episode's audio still exists perfectly in tact.  This has led to a number of groups and individuals putting together what are known as "recons."  Recons are episodes that are reconstructed by combining the existing audio with still photos from the production, what little video remains, narration to explain gaps, and/or original footage to fill in for the lost footage.  These recons vary in quality a great deal.  The most well known company that does recons is Loose Cannon.  Loose Cannon's recons are a little overrated, though, and the fact that they refuse to sell any of their episodes in anything other than VHS quality means that the quality of the episodes suck.  The best recons come from this random dude named Richard who makes them with Windows Media Maker (which is a horrible program, but somehow he does a great job with them) and actually includes the assisting narration to the episodes that is fully available for free from the BBC!  Why nobody else ever thought to include this narration is a fucking mystery to me.

This is above average quality for a reconstruction.
Some of these are more painful to watch than that "Miracle of Life" video we all saw in high school

So what happened in Ethiopia?  Well, the Mirror's announcement that 106 episodes had been found seemed a little too good to be true, specifically because 106 is the exact number of episodes that remain lost.  The idea that every single episode could be available once again is a prospect that would make every Whovian orgasm simultaneously.  Therefore, we're all very weary of such promises.  The story on the Mirror's website was inundated with comments from fans who were all calling bullshit on this.  Some of them, understandably, had trouble with the fact that the article cited Doctor Who "expert" Stuart Kelly, whose first sentence of his quote began with "I was told by a friend..."  It's not something you normally hear in credible news reporting.  "An inside source at the White House today said that he heard from a friend who heard from a friend who heard from her cousin that Osama Bin Laden has been killed."

A commenter named Phil Cooper commented with great confidence:

"Ethiopia only got 77 episodes, and didn't GET any Troughton stories, and it only got half of the Hartnell ones. The most we could hope for from Ethiopia is 11 missing episodes and 66 that we've already got."

I saw this same comment repeated on Facebook and it dashed my hopes for a while.  But while Stuart Kelly's "friend" is a fairly weak source, so is someone who's commenting on The Mirror's website.  I decided to wait and see what the newspapers said the next day and see if anything is confirmed.

When Radio Times confirmed the news, that's when people started to sit up and listen.  Radio Times was founded by the BBC and, up until 2 years ago, was still a part of the BBC.  Even if there's no official connection between the magazine and the BBC anymore, the magazine isn't likely to publish bullshit rumors about its former owner.

Radio Times, however, didn't say the exact same things that the Mirror had said.  For starters, it made no claims about all 106 episodes being found.  It simply stated that the BBC would be making some long-lost episodes available for purchase this week.  It said that they were rumored to be from a "haul" found in Africa, but that details were "sketchy."  It seems to strongly imply that they know that there are more episodes that have been found than the few that are being released this week, but it didn't have a number:

Asked by RadioTimes.com if there were around 90 missing episodes from the 1960s a BBC statement said: “There are always rumours and speculation about Doctor Who missing episodes being discovered – however we cannot confirm any new finds.”

A spokeswoman added: “We can’t confirm because it’s not true, as far as I’m aware."

Doctor Who Online said on their Twitter page that they could confirm that the episodes were found, but also stated that they have heard it is not as many as 100.

Less than 24 hours after their original story, The Mirror returned to the interwebs to defend their original report.  When they talk about the statements that have contradicted their original report, they claim that the BBC is very secretive about Doctor Who news, pointing to their report in 2012 that Matt Smith was leaving at the end of 2013, which turned out to be true.

So now their is a press conference on Tuesday with a screening, presumably of the lost episodes.  Journalists are supposed to learn which episodes exactly have been found.  However, there's one thing I'm very happy about:  Radio Times seems to be very certain that these are Troughton episodes that are being released this week, not Hartnells.  Bleeding Cool was told that they can expect the episodes to be from "Enemy of the World" and "The Web of Fear," both of which are episodes I'd absolutely love to watch in their entirety!

But how many more episodes have turned up?  The Mirror's blind optimism seems too good to be true, but I also have to remind myself that they're just applying my own Rule 1 (Moffat lies) to the entire BBC.  In other words, I can't make fun of them that much if they sound kind of like me.  I'd love to be pleasantly surprised to find that they were right.  While they make a good point about their report about Matt Smith leaving turned out to be true, it should be stated that it may have been a coincidence and that the decision for Matt Smith to leave could very well have been made after their report.

Either way, I'm going to be happy to see a few new Troughtons soon!  I'll try not to get my hopes up too much about what else is coming, because the truth is that the worst case scenario at this point is still very good news.  At the very least, we have a few more Patrick Troughton serials, most likely "The Web of Fear" and "Enemy of the World."  That's still means that, potentially, Patrick Troughton could come to be more appreciated by other Doctor Who fans.  No matter what is to come on Tuesday, that's still really good news!

"Chuck Norris ain't got shit on me!"

Whatever Happened to Jenny and Susan?

Scientists have confirmed that Georgia Moffet is the most attractive woman in the world.

Five years ago, the episode "The Doctor's Daughter" opened up some exciting and amazing possibilities, none of which have been fulfilled.  The Doctor, the "Last of the Time Lords," is no longer the last.  Technically, Jenny is also a Time Lady, and she is still out there somewhere in the Universe.

In the episode, in case you don't remember, the Doctor's DNA was stolen and, through a process called progeneration (which sounds scientifically impossible, but then again, I'm not a hard scientist), some soldiers on the planet Messaline created a soldier that is technically the Doctor's daughter, with the Doctor's genes making up both parents (which I don't think is scientifically possible, but I'm not a hard scientist).  In the end of the episode the Doctor's new daughter, Jenny, is shot.  The Doctor watches her die in his arms, and says that she won't be able to regenerate.  It is not until the Doctor leaves that Jenny proves him wrong by sort of regenerating (although not changing her appearance somehow) and leaves in a stolen spaceship, meaning that she's still alive out there somewhere.

It's been said that Steven Moffat t was the reason that Jenny didn't die at the end of the episode.  Even though he didn't write the episode, Moffat supposedly knew he was going to be taking over the show soon, and he asked the writer, Stephen Greenhorn, to bring her back to life, as he thought he might like to use her after he's taken over.  Yet, to date, in the three whole seasons Moffat has been in charge, he has never used her.

When the epsiode "A Good Man Goes to War" was coming up, I was tricked into thinking Jenny was coming back.  On the Doctor Who Wiki, it was reported that Jenny would return in this episode.  The source this came from was actually the actress, Catrin Stewart's, official website.  On it, it listed upcoming roles she was going to play.  One of them said "Jenny" in the episode "A Good Man Goes to War."  Jenny is a Time Lady, and therefore should be able regenerate.  Therefore, literally any woman in the world could, theoretically, play her.

When the episode aired, myself and many who thought they knew what was coming, were sadly disappointed, as Catrin Stewart was not playing the Doctor's daughter, Jenny, but an unrelated character named Jenny Flint.  In the episode, Jenny Flint's character's name was not spoken in such a way that it really drew my attention to it, so I kept looking at Lorna Bucket, hoping she was going to be a regeneration of Jenny.  She didn't turn out to be a regeneration of Jenny in the end (although she did seem to be suspiciously set-up to be a future character, and she has yet to come back either).

At the time, I was slightly worried that a main character who was also named Jenny would prevent Moffat from being back the Doctor's daughter Jenny.  Writers rarely use multiple characters with the same first name.  While it would be more realistic, as, in real life, we often encounter people with the same first name as ourselves.  However, it's far too confusing in fiction to keep track of people with the same first name.  So this is generally avoided, unless the name needs to be used for two different characters for reasons integral to the plot (think Heathers).  But, happily, Jenny Flint seemed pretty inconsequential.  She was Madame Vastra's lesbian lover/assistant/ass-kicking sidekick.  I didn't think she'd be coming back.  However, Moffat later decided he loved Jenny, Vastra, and Strax so much, he wanted to make a spin-off about them.  It never happened because he was too busy with Sherlock, so he decided to bring them back instead!  Now, Jenny Flint is a significant character, having appeared in 3 episodes in the latter half of the season.  You can tell Moffat is really interested in the characters becoming very central as he let another writer write for them.  Special characters like River, Dorium, the Silence, the Weeping Angels, or Madame Kovarian are reserved solely for Moffat-written episodes.  He doesn't seem to let anyone else write about them.  But he once allowed the sadly inconsistent Mark Gatiss to use the very funny yet lamely named "Victorian Trio" in his episode "The Crimson Horror."  Special recurring characters are Moffat's, but real, full time companions can generally be handed over to someone else.

So now, with the addition of Jenny Flint as an important recurring semi-companion, the other Jenny's reappearance becomes much more unlikely.  Why on Earth would Moffat name another character Jenny?  What was he thinking?  He could have used any other female name in the world.  Why Jenny?  Is it possible he knew what he was doing?  Possible, yes.  But not likely.

Of course it's possible that Jenny Flint is secretly a regeneration of the Doctor's daughter, but it's not likely.  I don't know why Moffat would wait so long to reveal something like that.  I don't understand why the Doctor wouldn't have figured it out by now.  The Doctor is supposed to be able to recognize his own kind when he sees them.  It seems difficult to believe that, in all this time, he failed to recognize his daughter.

Then there's the Doctor's granddaughter, Susan.  My friend Victor Infante told me that he wrote an essay once called "The Susan Foreman Problem" about Susan "illuminating" everything to come in the series, especially in the new series where they're willing to admit she exists.

Susan will stab you like you're a lounge chair.

In the audio adventures, which are mostly considered cannon, the 8th Doctor actually reunites with Susan and her son, the Doctor's great grandson.  If we're to believe that this is cannon and happens in the same exact reality as the TV show, then Susan was, at the very least, still on Earth before the Time War.  However, it was established that only two Time Lords survived the Tie War:  The Doctor and The Master.  The Time Lord This doesn't necessarily mean that Jenny is dead.  Even though the "Visionary" said that the Master and the Doctor would be the last of the Time Lords, it was because they were the only ones to survive the Time War. Her prophesy didn't seem to apply to Time Lords (or Ladies) who somehow managed to be born after the Time Lords were wiped out in the Time War.

But the prophesy should apply to Susan.  The Visionary said only two Time Lords would survive the Time War, which means Susan must have returned to Gallifrey to help defend her people in some way.  The only way she could be alive is if somehow the Visionary was wrong.

Ending, burning, falling, all of it falling, the black and pitch and screaming fire, and bizarre vague crazy shit!

I always hated The Visionary in "The End of Time" for two reasons:

1)  Doctor Who doesn't take place in a magical universe.  The scientific explanations may be thin, but there is almost always a scientific explanation, with the notable exception of "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit," and even that was left ambiguous.  At the same time, it's true that, in the Doctor Who universe, there are psychics and even people with precognition, but there's a certain science behind it in this universe.  So there is plenty of precedence for someone like "The Visionary" to exist, but everything about her just reeked of magic.  She just seemed out of place in the Doctor Who universe.  Even the term "Visionary" sounds like something the Time Lords would have turned down their noses at.

2)  Her prophesy presents a problem that future writers are going to have to deal with one way or another.  We all know that, sooner or later, another Time Lord is going to have to come back.  Whether it's Susan or the Rani or Omega or someone we haven't met yet, some writer some day will want to bring back a Time Lord.  The show can, theoretically, go on forever.  You're not going to tell me that nobody is going to want to bring back a Time Lord at some point.  Davies really shat the bed on this one.

So now, for Susan to be anywhere out there, the Visionary has to have been wrong somehow.  Who knows if the narrative will even bother to address what the Visionary said.  Maybe, much like the "I'm half human on my mother's side" comment, they'll simply ignore it.

The spot of hope comes from the fact that the Doctor's status as a father and a grandfather has been coming up a lot more often in the past few seasons.  The Doctor, in "The Doctor's Daughter," mentioned his former family for the first time since the 1st Doctor era.  In "The Beast Below," Amy asks if he's a parent, and he suspiciously dodges the question.  In "A Good Man Goes to War," he brings out a cot from his TARDIS to let Amy and Rory put Melody in, and says that it was his cot from when he was a baby.  However, in Doctor Who Confidential, Alex Kingston (River Song) said that we should be asking "Who else slept in that cot?"  Something about the Doctor's role as a father or as a grandfather is coming up very soon.  I don't know how or in what way, but it's definitely coming.

Whether it's about Susan or Jenny or someone else entirely is a huge mystery, but it has to come up very soon.

The Order of Rassilon #11: William Hartnell, The Crotchety Old Fool

Every Doctor Who blog should include a ranking of the Doctors. Who is best and Who is worst in Who? So, with the series now on hiatus, I thought it might be a little fun to count down the Doctors, from worst to first. I call it "The Order of Rassilon."

I look forward to hearing who agrees with me, and who vehemently disagrees with me. So we're going to start it out with the worst in the history of the franchise, the First Doctor, William Hartnell.

I wear a weird ugly hat now.  Weird ugly hats are cool.

Yes, he started the franchise.  Yes, the original show couldn't have survived without Hartnell's unbridled enthusiasm for the show, keeping everybody's spirits up during filming.  Good for him.  Punk wouldn't have gone anywhere without the Sex Pistols, but they still sounded like a special ed class playing guitars.  Honestly, I don't know what it is about Hartnell that made the show so popular that it could survive a replacement of every single cast member (several times over).

Famously, film was so expensive during the black and white era and they had to keep shooting even when things went horribly wrong.

If this was the stuff that was deemed suitable for air, I want to see what exactly a Hartnell blooper reel would look like.  What's the stuff that he fucked up so badly that they couldn't salvage it for television? I'm sure it has to exist.  He'd have to have, like, wet himself or something.

As old and feeble as he looked, would you believe that Hartnell actually played the role from ages 55 through 58?  My dad is 79 and he looks about 20 years younger than Hartnell did in his Doctor Who years.  He must have done some really hard living in his younger years.  I imagine him waking up every morning and drinking a big glass of paint thinner and smoking about a carton of cigarettes.  When they brought him back for the 10 year anniversary episode (keep in mind, 68 years old), he was so feeble that they had to write the script in such a way that Hartnell could perform the entire episode sitting down.

He could have shot this on the can and nobody would have been the wiser.

So yes, when it comes to Doctor Who, first is worst.  But then again, the whole point of the series is that it's supposed to be constantly renewing itself, and constantly getting better.  For all we know, Hartnell might have been very proud of the fact that every Doctor that followed him surpassed him.

Probably not, though.