Last Classic Who Story you watched
- Thread starter Pindar
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One would hope he'd fixed that obvious flaw sometime during his travels. The key lock seems a little too accurate to a normal lock for a TARDIS, anyway. You'd think, even trapped as a police box, that a TARDIS's locking mechanism, regardless of what it looked like, wouldn't be removable or effected by things that would screw up normal locks. Then again, I doubt they thought too hard about that stuff back then, and its a fairly entertaining way of keeping The Doctor trapped somewhere.
The idea that opening the lock is more complex than just turning the key is in The Daleks (in the pilot, the Doctor moves the keyhole aside and then opens the ship by shining his pentorch into the hole). Sensorites is the last reference to it, but the notion that getting it wrong causes the ship to disconnect from the police box, so people can't just force their way in, is rather nice (Wheel in Space has a last echo of it).
If the TARDIS force field is newly installed in Galaxy 4, as is implied, that might explain why the Doctor's ok with a more simple lock after the quick fix in Masterplan (Tom era books claim the key still has a telepathic element and only works for people the Doctor has OKed).
If the TARDIS force field is newly installed in Galaxy 4, as is implied, that might explain why the Doctor's ok with a more simple lock after the quick fix in Masterplan (Tom era books claim the key still has a telepathic element and only works for people the Doctor has OKed).
I figured that the locking mechanism that the Sensorites removed, while disguised to match the rest of the Police Box exterior, was actually, on the inside, a much more advanced mechanism that allows the doors to open at all. Note that this was back when the TARDIS had interior doors that generally had to be opened using a lever on the console. It's only been on the new series that the TARDIS doors on the inside even match the shape of the exterior police box doors.
I just finished "The Daleks" & "The Edge of Destruction." A few notes about early series continuity:
When the Thals first appear, they refer to their ancient enemies, the Daleks. But, later in the story, the Doctor mentions that, prior to the war, the Daleks were called "Dals." "Dalek" is presumably a name the Dals adopted after they mutated. But, at the beginning, the Thals don't even seem entirely sure that anyone else survived the war, so where would they have heard the name "Dalek" from? Shouldn't they just be calling them the "Dals"? (Never mind the fact that "Genesis of the Daleks" firmly states that, pre-mutation, the Daleks were called the "Kaleds," not the "Dals.")
Of course, "The Daleks" suggests that the war on Skaro was extremely short. This matches up with the general thought in the 1960s that a nuclear war would only last a few hours at most. But subsequent depictions of the war show it as being incredibly long, lasting decades. Davros was a young boy in "The Magician's Apprentice" and the war had already been going on longer than anyone could remember. And yet, he's an adult in "Genesis of the Daleks" and the war is still going!
In "The Edge of Destruction," Ian listens to the Doctor's heartbeat and doesn't seem to hear anything unusual about it. I think this may be the first ever on screen implication that the Doctor has only 1 heart, which is of course contradicted multiple times later on. (When was the first reference to the Doctor having 2 hearts?) Of course, maybe that's why the Doctor seems to be in such poor shape in the episode; he's half gone into cardiac arrest!
I just finished "The Daleks" & "The Edge of Destruction." A few notes about early series continuity:
When the Thals first appear, they refer to their ancient enemies, the Daleks. But, later in the story, the Doctor mentions that, prior to the war, the Daleks were called "Dals." "Dalek" is presumably a name the Dals adopted after they mutated. But, at the beginning, the Thals don't even seem entirely sure that anyone else survived the war, so where would they have heard the name "Dalek" from? Shouldn't they just be calling them the "Dals"? (Never mind the fact that "Genesis of the Daleks" firmly states that, pre-mutation, the Daleks were called the "Kaleds," not the "Dals.")
Of course, "The Daleks" suggests that the war on Skaro was extremely short. This matches up with the general thought in the 1960s that a nuclear war would only last a few hours at most. But subsequent depictions of the war show it as being incredibly long, lasting decades. Davros was a young boy in "The Magician's Apprentice" and the war had already been going on longer than anyone could remember. And yet, he's an adult in "Genesis of the Daleks" and the war is still going!
In "The Edge of Destruction," Ian listens to the Doctor's heartbeat and doesn't seem to hear anything unusual about it. I think this may be the first ever on screen implication that the Doctor has only 1 heart, which is of course contradicted multiple times later on. (When was the first reference to the Doctor having 2 hearts?) Of course, maybe that's why the Doctor seems to be in such poor shape in the episode; he's half gone into cardiac arrest!
I finished The Sensorites. It was a pretty good serial, although I think it was about two episodes too long. The aliens were interesting, even if the costuming/make up was pretty cheap even for Classic Who. I liked The Doctor a lot in this episode, he got to do a decent amount of stuff and show off a lot of his personality. One of the episodes has a pretty (unintentionally) funny moment where one of the aliens completely messed up his line and then just recovered and kept going because they weren't going to refilm the scene 
I know Hartnell kind of did that alot, but this was pretty blatant and from a guest actor. Overall this was a good serial, even if it felt a bit padded.
I know Hartnell kind of did that alot, but this was pretty blatant and from a guest actor. Overall this was a good serial, even if it felt a bit padded.
Well, the new series and the Peter Cushing movies.
Maybe Terry Nation rethought the name between episodes. Or maybe it was a flubbed line.
"Genesis" originated the idea that the war had gone on so long that it had started out with extremely advanced technology and degenerated to cruder weapons (as an excuse for the distinctly 20th-century look to the battlefield). "Apprentice" revisited and expanded on that notion, a nice bit of continuity (which, needless to say, is far from a given in Doctor Who).
"Spearhead from Space," I think. It wasn't even definitively established that the Doctor was alien until the Troughton era. The Hartnell stories sometimes referred to the Doctor as human, or at least had him offer no correction when others addressed him as such. It was implied that he and Susan were humans from the distant future (though not from Earth).
I know the phrase make some fans clench their teeth, but I've come to attribute the seemingly contradictory origins of the Daleks to "wibbly, wobbly, timey, wimey" due to the Time War.
From the Hartnell Doctor's perspective (and thus the audience's) after a very short M.A.D. detonation of a single massive neutronic bomb to thwart aggressively invading Thals (Hey, they admit their ancestors were the "bad guys") the Dals started to slowly mutate. After many generations of debilitating ailments, the city bound survivors of that war eventually encase their failing bodies in travel machines and start calling themselves Daleks.
But, if we factor in the concept of the Time War, it's possible both the Time Lords and the Daleks were attempting to rewrite history. Yes, it's been noted that the 4th Doctor's diversion to Skaro was considered the "first strike" of that war, but given both factions have time travel, it doesn't mean from the perspective of Skaro, it wasn't the first or only "exchange". A bit like the battle of "one upmanship" in "The Curse of Fatal Death", both sides kept returning ever earlier in Skaro's timeline to outdo or cancel the actions of the other.
So, from the perspective of the 4th Doctor and the CIA guiding him, it's the "first strike", but from a "g*d's eye view", the war has already been waging. So many events have been tweaked and canceled that now the war for the denizens of of Skaro has waged for centuries and the Daleks are developed within a single lifetime, almost the reverse of the situation in "the Dead Planet".
From the Hartnell Doctor's perspective (and thus the audience's) after a very short M.A.D. detonation of a single massive neutronic bomb to thwart aggressively invading Thals (Hey, they admit their ancestors were the "bad guys") the Dals started to slowly mutate. After many generations of debilitating ailments, the city bound survivors of that war eventually encase their failing bodies in travel machines and start calling themselves Daleks.
But, if we factor in the concept of the Time War, it's possible both the Time Lords and the Daleks were attempting to rewrite history. Yes, it's been noted that the 4th Doctor's diversion to Skaro was considered the "first strike" of that war, but given both factions have time travel, it doesn't mean from the perspective of Skaro, it wasn't the first or only "exchange". A bit like the battle of "one upmanship" in "The Curse of Fatal Death", both sides kept returning ever earlier in Skaro's timeline to outdo or cancel the actions of the other.
So, from the perspective of the 4th Doctor and the CIA guiding him, it's the "first strike", but from a "g*d's eye view", the war has already been waging. So many events have been tweaked and canceled that now the war for the denizens of of Skaro has waged for centuries and the Daleks are developed within a single lifetime, almost the reverse of the situation in "the Dead Planet".
Well, things like RTD's Time War and Moffat's cracks in time were both basically attempts to rationalize the perpetually flexible continuity of the original series, and to free themselves from having to be consistent with past stories that put alien invasions and manned Mars missions in the 1970s and transmat and global weather control in the early 2000s.
Of course, the real explanation is that it was a kids' show and they expected their target audience would age out after a few years, not to mention that television programming was considered ephemeral and they didn't even bother to keep all the episodes. So continuity with anything more than a few years old was considered unnecessary. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised they didn't do what a number of similar shows did and remake old scripts. If they had, then some of the missing stories might still survive, just with a later Doctor and companions acting them out.
Just stated with Pertwee, finished spearhead and now i am onto The Silurians, plus i watched Invasion of the Dinosaurs as well, really good story in that one, and the Whomobile, but just a pity about those bloody dinasours, if only they had let Blue Peter make them. lol
I needed something short and sweet to watch recently, so I popped "Remembrance of the Daleks" into the player, as it has been a while since I'd seen it. I still like it, love all the location work in the episode, and it takes us back to 1963 of course, which is also fun. This time, I was also struck by how much Terry Molloy's performance as Davros reminded me somewhat of Julian Bleach's in the way he delivered some of the dialogue.
"The Silurians" is awesome. Particularly in Black and White.
First two hearts reference is in The Dominators, but when Jamie is scanned and only has one, they just assume the Doctor is the same. In hindsight, we could maybe think that the Doctor was thinking "Wow, that's lucky."
Just to be clear, though, the reference is to the Dulcians having two hearts; nothing is established about the Doctor's circulatory system.
Yeah in The Wheel in Space, the Doctor is scanned and no anomalies are found.
Apparently some fans theorize that he didn't have two hearts until his third incarnation.
It's possible. Most references can be waved away as 'the person checking him didn't think to check for a second heart', but in Wheel in Space the Doctor seems to be entirely human (which is totally contradicted by Spearhead, not just heart-wise, though some of the stats might only be accurate while the Doctor is in a comatose healing state, rather than normal).
The Virgin books assumed that the second heart came with the first regeneration (which doesn't solve the Wheel problem, which is the big one).
The Virgin books assumed that the second heart came with the first regeneration (which doesn't solve the Wheel problem, which is the big one).
I've started watching The Mutants. I thought it was familiar, but it was still on my list of serials I need to see. It turns out, looking at this thread, that I got about 4 episodes into it in February of last year, then got tired of it and moved on to another serial, meaning to get back to The Mutants after that. Well I never did, so now I'll go through The Mutants no matter how bad it is, so I can get to better 3rd Doctor serials.
It might be my pick for absolute worst Third Doctor serial - poorly written, poorly acted, and all around poor.
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