Day of the Doctor (novelization) and the Cushing Movies (spoilers)

Discussion in 'Doctor Who' started by marillion, Apr 6, 2018.

  1. marillion

    marillion Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Sep 3, 2003
    Location:
    Burque, baby!
    Well, well, well...

    I know there's a Doctor Who book thread already, but I thought this was nifty enough to have it's own... I'll put this in spoiler code just to cover my bases. It's kind of ham handed but also kind of a cool nod to the movies.

    The Day of the Doctor novelization is out and apparently references the two Peter Cushing Dr. Who movies as being in-universe films that the Doctor loved. It goes so far as to say that the Doctor and Cushing were great friends and that he even loaned Cushing a waistcoat for the films.

    SYFY Wire story
     
  2. Nightowl1701

    Nightowl1701 Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Oct 29, 2011
    Location:
    Orlando, FL
    It was actually written for the episode itself, but cut for time. The 'future cameo' is a clever new touch, though.
     
    Qonundrum and marillion like this.
  3. Ar-Pharazon

    Ar-Pharazon Admiral Premium Member

    Joined:
    May 19, 2005
    Location:
    Far North Chicago Suburbs
    So, were the Cushing movies done by that Linda lot?
     
  4. Redfern

    Redfern Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Sep 28, 2006
    Location:
    Georgia, USA
    As I understand it, we would have seen a small movie poster pinned upon one of the cork boards within the "Black Archives" repository. Other than the camera panning across it surrounded by photos of classic series companions, nothing would be said about it on camera. The unspoken notion is that Barbara Wright, after returning to Earth with Ian, wrote a screenplay for a family sci-fi film, obviously inspired by her visit to Skaro, but passing it off as fiction.

    But I read that the BBC had to purchase rights to show that poster on camera and were not willing to fork out the additional fees, so it was dropped.
     
    OCD Geek likes this.
  5. The Wormhole

    The Wormhole Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jul 23, 2001
    Location:
    The Wormhole
    Not time, but rather money. BBC wasn't willing to pay for the rights to show the movie posters on screen.
     
  6. Lonemagpie

    Lonemagpie Writer Admiral

    Joined:
    Jan 31, 2007
    Location:
    Yorkshire
    Doesn't this just follow on from the Continuity Errors short story of Moffat's (about the Doctor serving as technical advisor on a Dr Who movie)...
     
  7. Redfern

    Redfern Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Sep 28, 2006
    Location:
    Georgia, USA
    I'm guessing the Wormhole has me on "ignore" because he posted the exact same thing I did within the last sentence of my post just 20 minutes earlier.
     
  8. Haggis and tatties

    Haggis and tatties Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Dec 27, 2002
    Location:
    Glasgow
    Makes no difference to me, i see the these movies as part of the Who universe anyway and Cushing is just the movie version of Hartnell's doctor regardless of the differences in the charactor and regardless if they are seen as by TPTB or not, they won't decided for me, i am no controlled Roboman, and one day we will force them to see them our way, obey motorised dustbins and their masters, NEVER!, and they will see that!

    (Radio on table comes to life with a loud static splutter.......)

    "This is the BBC, Surrender your views on these two movies and you will live. Resist and you will be exterminated. Show yourselves in the streets immediately with your Blu-ray copies and obey the orders of your masters, the BBC!" lol
     
    Gavin70 and Captaindemotion like this.
  9. Allyn Gibson

    Allyn Gibson Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 16, 2000
    Location:
    South Pennsyltucky
    That's not a conclusion I'd jump to. Many a time I've posted a reply to someone, only to realize after posting that someone else had said the exact same thing because I hadn't scrolled down and seen other replies before hitting "Reply." I could delete such postings or edit them, but I leave them as a reminder to myself that I'm an idiot who doesn't read and posts before thinking. :)
     
  10. The Wormhole

    The Wormhole Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jul 23, 2001
    Location:
    The Wormhole
    Or I replied before scrolling down to see your post. But you know, feel free to jump to unfounded conclusions.
     
    Brefugee likes this.
  11. Gavin70

    Gavin70 Commander Red Shirt

    Joined:
    May 7, 2018
    I don't need any such reminders myself. I'm very self aware of my own idiocy. And if I wasn't I've got three children who are happy to remind me regularly.
     
  12. Allyn Gibson

    Allyn Gibson Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 16, 2000
    Location:
    South Pennsyltucky
    I'm finally reading The Day of the Doctor. I'd ordered the five Target-esque novelizations through work, and they arrived over the last four weeks. First printings! I guess they were on a slow boat. :)

    It's not at all what I was expecting.

    I'm not sure where the River Song scene is supposed to go in her timeline. It must come right before "The Husbands of River Song," since she says a company wants to hire her to crack open a library.

    The backstory on the tenth Doctor's relationship with Elizabeth reads like a lost episode of Blackadder II. It should have been Lord Melchett beating up the Doctor, not the Duke of Norfolk. :)

    Moffat uses some very interesting narrative tricks. For example, I had to reread the scene with the theft of the Moment twice before I realized what Moffat had done.
    I initially thought that scene was narrated by Missy!
    For another, I like the way he handles the three different timelines colliding, and because Moffat can go inside the Doctors' heads in prose we can see how the Doctors perceive and remember events in ways that weren't entirely clear on television. (To be fair, there are hints of that in Matt Smith's performance, where he "backs out" of a scene to give one of the "younger" Doctors the space to make the realizations he already knows, like the scene in the Zygon HQ or the scene in the barn after he says, "I've changed my mind," letting Hurt and Tennant have the epiphanies. In prose it's more explicit.) Things that didn't quite make sense on screen, like Smith having flashbacks to Hurt in the Gallery, now make more sense in prose.

    At the same time, Moffat's characterizations of the Doctors don't always ring true to me. He plays up the buffoonishness of the tenth and eleventh Doctors a little too much, imho. They both have "comedy moments" during their time, but I don't think of either as "comedy Doctors." Maybe Moffat was trying to convey their quirkiness in prose, but at least in the first third of the book it comes across, at least to me, as something closer to mockery.

    Very readable. Can't wait to get to Chapter Nine. :)
     
    DS9Continuing likes this.
  13. The Nth Doctor

    The Nth Doctor Infinite Possibilities... Premium Member

    Joined:
    Jul 20, 2000
    Location:
    Lost in a temporal and spatial anomaly
    Thanks for the half review, Allyn. I don't normally got novelization of episodes but I might check this one out.
     
  14. Nightowl1701

    Nightowl1701 Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Oct 29, 2011
    Location:
    Orlando, FL
    Thanks for not spoiling Chapter Nine - that was the highlight of the whole book!
     
  15. DS9Continuing

    DS9Continuing Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Jun 29, 2001
    Location:
    Manchester
    I finished this recently and thought it was really excellent. Moffat did a remarkable job of retelling the same story but with panache and enough of a twist to make it worth the purchase - unlike "The Christmas Invasion" which was the straightest of straight transcriptions. I laughed out loud many times.

    I loved the distinct characterisations he gives each version of the Doctor - including Eight in the "Night of the Doctor" scene. I was also fascinated by the same scene Allyn Gibson notes, what a brilliant way of misleading both the other Time Lords and the reader. I loved that he added new scenes that weren't in the episode, and similarly didn't slavishly include every moment from the screenplay either. It was the same story, but a different perspective on it.

    .
     
    Allyn Gibson likes this.
  16. Gavin70

    Gavin70 Commander Red Shirt

    Joined:
    May 7, 2018
    It was great wasn't it. Shame more people don't seem to remember it.
     
  17. Turtletrekker

    Turtletrekker Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Aug 23, 2003
    Location:
    Tacoma, Washington
    All this talk about chapter 9 has convinced me that I need to buy this book.
     
  18. Emperor-Tiberius

    Emperor-Tiberius Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Jul 30, 2005
    Location:
    Kavala, Greece
    Its enormously entertaining a read, but I can't take it seriously in the least. I don't think Moffat did, either.
     
  19. Gavin70

    Gavin70 Commander Red Shirt

    Joined:
    May 7, 2018
    I'm not convinced that Moffat sees Doctor Who as something that should be taken seriously. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think some people tend to take it way too seriously. At it's heart it's entertainment and as long as it succeeds in that, then anything else is just a bonus. Although I will admit there are some points where I personally wish he'd taken it a bit more seriously. For example, if he'd had an episode where the moon turned out to be a giant egg, that would have been taking things too far (in my opinion). But fortunately that never happened!!!!!
    ....
    ....
    ....
    ....
    ....
    Yes I am good at denial, why do you ask?
     
  20. David cgc

    David cgc Admiral Premium Member

    Joined:
    Apr 3, 2002
    Location:
    Florida
    Just finished the novelization myself, and I loved it. I haven't read a lot of Doctor Who prose, but this contrasted with what I've had in that it wasn't afraid to get inside the Doctor's head, while the short stories and novels I've been aquainted with in the past almost seemed afraid to show his perspective (though that could be an editorial mandate, I have a vague memory of reading something like that).

    I did notice the point about the Eleventh and Tenth Doctors being played more buffoonishly, but I think that might've been a correction, or perhaps simple hindsight. DotD, it's been observed, had an issue common to multi-Doctor stories, where the incumbent Doctor is the "star," and the visiting Doctors tend to be heightened, greatest-hits, almost caricatured version of themselves. I think Moffat may have been trying to shift things around so the Tenth Doctor wasn't carrying quite so much of the baggage of being the comic-relief Doctor, and also it could've just been a difference in his perspective since, when he was writing this, the Eleventh Doctor had stopped being the Doctor and joined the pantheon as a Doctor.

    I do hope we see more prose from Moffat in the future, either novelizations or new stories. Given the tidbits he dropped about his thought process regarding "Heaven Sent," I wonder what he could do with that. I can imagine him coming at the twist from a completely different angle, for one thing.
     
    Last edited: Jul 22, 2018