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2005-02-01 Entry: "2 Point 4 Doctors"

I really should be continuing with B5, but I feel like taking another break... this series is daunting to get into... so instead we'll go with 2 Point 4 Children, series 1, which may or may not be as funny as I remember it. Actually, the three episodes I watched were quite amusing still... even with the first actress playing Jenny (who, to be fair, is the least funny member of the cast).

And then, as I was cataloguing Doctor Who for DVD Spot, I ended up wanting to rewatch Remembrance of the Daleks. Having read the synopsis on the back of the box and seeing that it harkened back to the first episode (I'd obviously missed that fact when I first watched it), I decided it was worth rewatching. But there really aren't all that many links back to the start of the show (of course, it'd be difficult considering most of the cast of that would be dead now).

And this is the suitably mysterious and all-knowing seventh Doctor that we know and love, a break in the silly episodes that went before and took up the rest of this season. He regains the air of manipulating everything around him when the final series of the show starts. And to be fair, that's the seventh Doctor I love, from Battlefield and the continual hints that he may have been Merlin, to Ghost Light's continual manipulation of Ace, to The Curse Of Fenric's chess game against the evil head of the vampires.

It'll be interesting to see what sort of Doctor they're writing the new one as... I'm not a big fan of Ecclestone, and the thought of having failing songstress Billie Piper as companion is a scary one, but then I guess it's no worse than Bonnie Langford. Are they going for the effete dandy of the third and sixth Doctors, or the mysteriously knowing expert with a bit of darkness in his past of the second, fourth and seventh Doctors? Or do we even have to put up with a return of the cluelessness that the fifth exhibited? And yes, I'm stereotyping horribly here, but it does sort of match up with my preferences for which I like.

Seven, Two, and Four... probably in that order. The rest are all much of a muchness, although Five and Six lose out due to having really annoying companions... Nyssa is watchable, but Tegan, Adric, and Peri need to be taken out and shot. Of course, two of them appear to die horribly, so I can't complain too badly!

But is there any logic to the DVD releases? Ignoring the USA only release of the Key To Time series, they're fairly scattershot in their releases. A story here, a story there. I know there's a whole lot of stories to release, but it'd be nice if there was a little logic...

Of course, in the case of the first two Doctors, they're constrained by the fact that there are big chunks missing. And in the case of the last two, they're contrained by the fact that there just aren't all that many stories to release. And there's some logic in wanting to release a story for each Doctor each year, as there will be people only buying the stories from some Doctors. But it'd be nice if the Tom Baker and Peter Davison stories were being released in some sort of order. I mean, how am I supposed to follow any sort of ongoing storylines?