God Season One Of Nuwho Is So. Your Budget Is A Half-eaten Cheese Sandwich. Your Props Department Is

with how often the bbc tried to cancel doctor who in the 80s, one might very well accuse them of being serial killers

Doctor Who (2024) / Doctor Who (2015)

people don’t spray paint “bad wolf” in cryptic areas like they used to

this time he died. because of reasons

Where is "rose is watching her planet die while the doctor is slaying in the corner" I haven't seen her on my dash in a while I miss her

I'm watching the edited version of the War Games (it's on BBC4 right now and my parents wanted to see it), so, have some thoughts.

I'm normally a bit iffy on colourisation but this is genuinely very well done. The titles are gorgeous.

Squishing it into 90 mins makes the opening very zippy. The pace feels a shade too quick if anything.

It also gets a bit weird when the cliffhanger is turned into continuous action.

This is despite the fact that they only cut about 10 mins of episode one.

They drink a lot of tea in the War Games but it comes across as even more when you cut out of the non-tea-drinking bits.

OK, there's some very fun editing around the redcoat and Buckingham remembering the mist coming down. (Dare I say possibly an improvement on the original?)

But then it goes back to feeling too zippy, but least because episode 3 is brutally cut. Very little of it left.

Gah, I'm trying to like this, because it's clearly been lovingly made and the colourisation is genuinely superb, but the grinding relentlessness of the War Games has been replaced by rattling through the plot at a frenzied pace and it's not really working for me.

Ooh, Murray Gold's Master theme has been added over the War Chief's appearance. Not sure how I feel about that, but it's certainly an interesting choice.

They've dealt with the cliffhanger issue at the end of episode 4 by taking it out entirely.

The little added CGI bits are not hugely successful - they look oddly plasticky. Which is a bit disappointing, because have I mentioned how good the colourisation is?

It's taken my dad until the episode six cliffhanger to note the place where the original cliffhanger was.

(My mum has given up because she doesn't like how much fighting there is. Not sure if the original edit would have been any better on that score.)

Episodes 6 and 7 are so thoroughly chopped up that it's tricky to trace the original storyline. It's neatly done but it's not really the War Games any more.

More of the Master's theme when the War Chief admits to knowing the Doctor.

My dad comments that this bit seems like it was inspired by the Prisoner (which he also watched when it first aired).

It feels a bit weird when it switches from Murray Gold to 1960s incidental music.

This really centres the War Chief et al over the rest of the storyline.

"Complete loyalty and devotion" - oh, Jamie. This loses a lot of character beats in favour of the Time Lord-centric storyline, but not all of them.

Oof, their last desperate attempt to escape is still just as grim and desperate in the edit. Like there's still part of me wondering if they might somehow get away this time.

There are new Who-style images of Gallifrey on the view screen.

"Is the next episode The Trial of a Time Lord?" asks my dad, who has seen all of Doctor Who, but mostly not very recently.

The middle bit of episode 10 is cut, which means that I can watch the ending without crying for once.

Lots of establishing shots of Gallifrey.

The too old/too young/too thin shows a series of New Who Doctors. Not entirely sure how I feel about that choice either.

And it ends with the Doctor regenerating in the TARDIS - again, New Who style - before the date ticks back and forth erratically between 1970 and 1980, a joke that will appeal to a small number of people that includes me, and finally the very opening scene of Spearhead from Space.

I think if you accept the premise that a 90-min version of the War Games could be done, it's about as good as it could be. A few of the choices make it pretty clear that this is primarily for a New Who audience - particularly that it becomes a very Time Lord-centric story - not really for existing fans of the War Games.

Still, I wasn't expecting to love the colourisation as much as I did, and it made me wish I could watch a colourised version of all 10 episodes.

love this emerging genre of doctor who episode where you think it’s a surface level commentary on one topic (social media; ai), but then the rug gets pulled out from underneath you and it’s actually a more severe social commentary (racism; misogyny/incel culture), BUT THEN it’s actually a pretty adept illustration of how the first and second topics are part of the same problem (social media allows people to create echo chambers which reinforce racism and fear mongering to the point of denying their own lived reality; ai masks human biases as technological progress and exacerbates regressive movements like incel culture)

regeneration is like if "died and came back wrong" was a normal and regular feature of a society