New Who or Old Who ?

[GoldenGreen]

I've been watching quite a lot of Doctor Who episodes recently, both recent and back to the Unearthly Child and wondered if anyone had a preference for the New Who when the series came back with Christopher Eccleston or perhaps you prefer the Old Who, or perhaps you like both ?

 

I can't help thinking watching the very first episode back in November 1963 must have been pretty mind blowing for those that watched it at the time.

 

Personally I have fond memories of watching Tom Baker , the first Doctor Who I saw as a kid, but equally love the current series as well, so I'm not sure I could really choose.

Edited January 22, 2013 by GoldenGreen

[quidditysea]

old everytime for me, i am not a fan of moffat and smith

[JacknDaniel]

I love both the old and new show, but in terms of meeting people, i'm far more interested in meeting Classic series actors. I've met all the Doctors(bar Eccleston) and all the companions(bar Tate) and have been fortunate enough to meet a lot of the classic series crew and guest actors. I don't tend to meet guest actors or crew from the new series as it doesn't particularly interest me as much, but will always campaign for Classic series Crew and guest actors

[mr fagan]

second that ANY classic who actors villans monsters doctors companions ANYONE from who 63-96 would be most welcome as to be diplomatic on such a delicate matter we need to get them before its too late as last year was a massacre.....

[Starbug]

I love both old and new who I don't mind meeting any one from who either

[timelord81r]

I do love both and to be honest its the same show!!!!! but to classify eras, classic all the way for me if I had to choose. its what I grew up with and prefer.

 

im currently on the horns of nimon in my EPIC complete Re-watch

[Kinggodzillak]

Old. The New is horrendous, and getting worse all the time.

[GoldenGreen]

Old. The New is horrendous, and getting worse all the time.

 

What don't you like about the new Who ? Is it Matt Smith as the Doctor, is it the storylines, or something else ?

[nosfer2]

I love both.

[Kinggodzillak]

Old. The New is horrendous, and getting worse all the time.

 

What don't you like about the new Who ? Is it Matt Smith as the Doctor, is it the storylines, or something else ?

 

Oh, how long have you got? :)

 

Matt Smith...could potentially have been a really fantastic Doctor. And was, for much of his first season. I hadn't realised until...ooh, that scene in The Big Bang where he's by little Amy's bedside, how much I had really missed the Doctor during the last few years. He hadn't been around much during the Tennant years, not really, but that moment where he spoke about stealing the TARDIS, he sold that beautifully. He was somehow an unfathomably old soul in a young man's body, it was just incredible.

 

But now he's unfortunately gone down the same route that David Tennant did; Doctor Who's no longer about a benevolent alien who likes exploring and helping people. Instead, it's about the 'epic' adventures of Mr Wacky, the kerazy oversexed self-described 'mad man' who cries a lot. He lives in a magical fairy wonderland where anything is possible if you just wish for it hard enough, where nothing has to make the slightest bit of sense because 'it's about the emotional journey' rather than decent storytelling, and where absolutely everyone has a tear-inducing speech to give which you won't be able to hear because the music's too loud.

 

So my first and biggest problem is that they've ruined the Doctor, taken a unique and special creation and just made him like any other 'eccentric' character you'd find on the most generic of sitcoms. Smith - who as I said before is a really really good actor - should have just been left to find his own way, the same as Tom Baker was. Instead he's being let down by the writing, and might as well have "I'M WELL WACKY, ME' tattooed on his forehead.

 

2) Ruining the classic old monsters. This one really gets to me. You have a terrific assortment of monsters that have quite rightly stuck in the public consciousness over the last 50 years...and the new series seems quite hell-bent on making them thoroughly non-threatening and turning them all into jokes.

 

Take the Daleks, last seen in Asylum of the Daleks in which we visited the world where the Daleks exile their insane comrades. Insane Daleks, you say? Alright, that sounds like a really good idea, here we go, we're gonna see some really scary stu-

 

Oh. They're just sitting around in the dark gathering dust.

 

And that's all they're doing.

 

Oh no, wait a tick! No, because now we're going into the isolation ward, to see the reeeeally extra-scary Daleks.

 

The ones that can't move and don't even have weapons.

 

 

See also; Cybermen defeated by love & the sound of crying babies, the mighty warrior Sontarans (have you ever noticed that they are short? It's not mentioned that often, how short the Sontarans are, but they are short, the Sontarans) offering to breastfeed complete strangers, and the Silurians completely forgetting their blood hatred of humans since they discovered that female humans taste quite yummy if you lick them between their legs.

 

Just a few weeks ago we had snowmen created by the Great Intelligence being destroyed by the salt in tears because everyone was crying so hard. What's next - the Ice Warriors being hugged into submission?

 

Also, along the same lines, we have the companions undermining dramatic situations by stating what is going on around them. Rory was particularly good at that; "I'm putting Hitler in a cupboard!" "I'm standing in a giant robot replica of my wife!" "I'm stating out loud the situation I am presently finding myself in in order that the audience fully appreciate the wackiness of this most unlikely of circumstances because God forbid we could have some actual drama here."

 

If they're not taking it seriously, even a teeny tiny smidgen, why should we?

 

3) The bizarre approach to storytelling; now one of the enormous benefits of the Dr Who format is that you can tell almost any story with it, but I'm talking about the extremes of complexity (or lack thereof) in the plotting. One week it's Memento and you need to be taking notes to figure out what the heck's meant to be going on (and will they slow down to give you time to even hear what they're saying?), the next it's In the Night Garden and you know exactly what's going on and how it'll end before the TARDIS even lands. More and more the stories do seem to be written for very young children though, which makes the complexity of the story-arcs fairly mindboggling.

 

And the 'story-arcs' leave a fair bit to be desired too. Under RTD it was just a word or phrase repeated every week for twelve weeks until you found out what it meant in week thirteen, and that was kind of sweet. Ridiculous, but sweet. Whereas now we have Steven Moffatt doing...well, I'm not sure, and I don't think he knows either. He's putting more effort in than RTD (although occasionally we do get characters gazing into middle distance and saying things like "The hippopotamus will lie fallow!" to set up 'mystery' for later in the season), but the end results are fairly baffling (Amy and Rory have their baby stolen, and are magically 110% okay with that because they know she grows up to be a nymphomaniac murderess? They don't even question it just a little teeny tiny bit?) and you end up with entire episodes have no real reason to exist beyond keeping the 'arc' dragging on for another week.

 

Let's Kill Hitler was a good example of that; this to me was the point where the show just threw up its hands and said "that's it, I really have no idea what I'm meant to be doing now". We don't have a plot this week, and just have to hope that a guest character will just randomly stumble along and give us an idea for something to do no matter how random. "You've got a time machine - let's go kill Hitler!". Um, yes, okay, because this is something every child in 2011 would dream of doing. And then when we get there let's spend as little time as possible exploring any potentially interesting stories that could arise from travelling back to the 1940s. LET'S JUST HAVE A ROBOT INSTEAD. We could be just as easily be watching Let's Go Say Hi To Christopher Columbus, Let's Watch Them Filming The Professionals or Let's Hug an Elderly Panda for all the relevance this 45 minutes of flotsam has to do with anything. At all. Ever.

 

I just really really miss stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end. And which aren't rubbish.

 

4) I don't think I've seen a show so smug, so unjustifiably proud of itself, and there are couple of particularly good examples of this; River Song and Oswin/Clara/Souffle Girl. I swear, she's going to be the thing that decides whether or not I stick with Who this year. I hated her in Asylum, and didn't think she was much better in the Xmas special.

 

Now for all I know she could be a decent actress, I'm not saying she isn't (I haven't seen her in anything else), but she played the role as written and unfortunately the role as written was the most Steven Moffat-esque character the show has yet produced. I can't stand that style of writing anymore; yet another smug self-satisfied sex-obsessed know-everything quip-machine designed to kill any potential dramatic situation stone-dead with her oh-so-clever banter rather than, y'know, an actual real interesting character. All I could hear whenever she spoke was "blah blah blah smug smug banter banter witty comment witty comment witty comment, have I mentioned how much sex I have had with my sex parts, banter banter smug smug I HAVE HAD SEX YOU KNOW" *cute head tilt*.

 

God forbid she and River ever met, the resulting black hole of smugness could end up destroying the Universe. Which brings me to

 

5) Every season has to end with an 'epic', an overblown mess of a finale where OMG, THE WHOLE ENTIRE UNIVERSE IS GOING TO BE BLOWED UP, AAAAH! Except, not to worry! There's a reset button over here that'll fix everything, so that's okay. Panic over. UNTIL ROUGHLY THE SAME TIME NEXT YEAR WHEN IT'LL HAPPEN AGAIN, PROBABLY! OH NOES!

 

We also get Mr Moffatt in interviews making promises he can't keep regarding how 'epic' and 'heartbreaking' and 'gamechanging' all this will be. And it never ever is. Now that's a holdover from the RTD years, but it's still pretty lame - see the 'deaths' of Rose and Donna for evidence of that.

 

So, yes. That's a brief overview of my views on Who at the mo.

[Vodkatini]

I have to say I am for 9, 10 and 11. I am old enough to remember spending Saturday tea times behind the sofa watching Tom Baker and Peter Davidson but David Tennant is my favorite doctor.

 

I struggled with Matt Smith's doctor at first but he has now grown on me and I wasn't overly keen on the storylines but I have liked the River Song twist and I am looking forward to seeing what they do with the new companion (twice dead). My family have a theory.

[Mediakelly]

i do love both but to be honest when you first meet dr who in the very first episode an unearthly child he was a nasty old man with no intentions of helping anyone he was there with his grand daughter until the teachers go to find her as they are concerned bout her outook on london in the dark scrap yard it was dark and intense, he was callous, harsh and no intent on telling people who he is, for its era william hartnell was to me the best dr who as he was who he was and made dr who what it is today matt does well with what he has and moffat is a brilliant script writer but sadly producers do have alot of say in what is produced if you compare his work to sherlock you can see the technical side of script writing but sadly when it came back was made more for children hence the baddies looking more i use the word kiddified to describe the sad factor as the baddies should b what they were but standards come into it and have to make do with what you have for prime tv these days.