This Time He Died. Because Of Reasons

𝗱𝗼𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘁𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁𝘀; 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝟱.

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been lovingly made and the colourisation is genuinely superb, but the grinding relentlessness of the War Games has been replaced by rattling through the plot at a frenzied pace and it's not really working for me.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.

immediate thought whenever i hear the word ‘alphabet’ in a doctor who setting

Space Babies / The Final Chapter / Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible / Cold Fusion

The Doctor still doing the whole "last of the Time Lords" thing is so funny

i really enjoy reading the doctor as an experiment in queer masculinity. he very often appears to be conventionally masculine on first appearances - but so often he subverts that. he can be violent, but he's against killing; he strives for peace, and remains a hero. he espouses kindness, compassion, acceptance - he's a scientist, not a military man. he keeps an open mind, and encourages understanding, even for that which most people think of as disgusting. he sees a dying insect, monstrous to human eyes, lethal to human bodies, and considers it beautiful. he dresses in a traditionally masculine manner, and yet his clothes are almost always a strange mix of styles, or several decades out of date. he's deeply rooted in victorian/edwardian fashion, which often just has the effect of turning him into a gay magician. he's often a towering, six-foot-plus, deep-voiced Authority Figure, and yet he is so gentle. sometimes he's queer in that he loves men, and kisses men, as someone adjacent to masculinity (true of practically all of his incarnations from eight onwards); sometimes he's queer in that he loves everyone, regardless of gender; sometimes he's queer in that he doesn't love anyone, and is an aromantic or asexual figure; sometimes he's queer in that he's detached from human or time lord understandings of gender; sometimes he's queer as in queer, as in weird. he's flamboyant. he's eccentric. he's your gay uncle. he can regenerate into bodies which humans are quick to identify as female, but throughout it all he seems to carry some vague inner sense of identifying with masculinity, but rejecting it in its conventional form. the doctor is queer, yes, capable of expressing himself in a whole array of ways, but more than that, he's queer and masculine. and i love that.

it feels like this season, doctor who is dealing with the fundamental rules changing. it was strictly sci-fi, you could always logic your way out of any problem with technobabble and a clever plan.

but it feels like so much of the plot is wrapped around poking at the medium of being a television show, of being a story. we have multiple characters looking at the viewers, we have the maestro playing the theme tune, we have such clear parallels to season 1 (2005) that it feels like a universal coincidence. like the whoniverse itself is recognizing its a medium and playing with its tropes.

the genre is changing too - we are leaning more and more into fantasy, rules like you would see in stories about fae, not sci-fi. musical numbers out of nowhere that no one seems to question, with rain inside and musical sidewalks. the vocabulary of rope and power in coincidences. hell, even the way that time travel works is changing! suddenly stepping on a butterfly (specifically a trope in scifi that has been mocked/debunked previously) has consequences. the doctor swiping away the translation circuit's effects with the wave of a hand and breathing life back into a creature without breaking a sweat.

not to mention the way that space babies foreshadows to a universe that creates a story with all the ingredients it knows are supposed to be there (re: bogeyman - there's supposed to be a villain so it made one)

something IS going on. there is a bigger player - bigger than tecteun, bigger than the toymaker. could it be rtd just having a grand ole time using canon as is playground? maybe. but i hope it's something cool.

I loved the line "I thought that was non-diagetic" I love the implication that the Doctor has been able to hear the theme all this time but decided they didn't need to know about all that

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