tomatohater
Golden Sun 4?
Not a member, but I am currently watching 'The Science of Doctor Who'!
Pretty interesting, and I cannot wait for the 50th episode!
Pretty interesting, and I cannot wait for the 50th episode!
(Will-powered Spriter, I know we all have the number eight on the brain right now, but you did mean nine days, right? Or are you using your Oxford witchcraft to get the special a day early just like you apparently got the minisode a week early? :O )
-elyvorg/Amelia
stupot: Hi! If you'd like to participate in this club's discussion, could you please read the first post and fill in its joining form? Then we'll be happy to welcome you.
cwertle, I'm pretty sure the episode is being shown practically worldwide. I don't know the exact details since I'm British myself, but the US should definitely be one of the countries it's airing in. If you look for it, I'm sure you'll be able to find somewhere to watch it today without having to resort to... other means.
Thanks for that other prequel, The Green Blockhead. I'd heard vague talk about another prequelly thing but not been able to find it myself. (Although you could have just linked, rather than embedding it straight in the post, but eh, that works too.) I enjoyed it. It didn't exactly tell us anything we didn't already know, but I feel it told its story in a very neat way.
Yeah, there have been a few more little preview clips floating around. I for one don't mind them at all; they're barely spoiling anything, and if people do mind about getting spoilers for even the tiny, barely-spoilery moments then they can just choose to avoid them, surely?
There were also preview clips shown on a recent episode of The One Show which had John Hurt and Jenna Coleman as guests, and these clips I don't think have been circulated beyond that (well, unless anyone's uploaded footage from the show onto Youtube, which wouldn't surprise me but I haven't looked). I feel like talking a little bit about what was in them, even though I doubt many other people have seen them and those who haven't would probably prefer to just wait until the episode to see for themselves rather than read me boringly listing facts from them.
The main one had the War Doctor meeting Rose, who just appeared out of thin air when his back was turned and said something about wolves. So, yeah, seems like Rose's presence here is going to be as timey-wimey and Bad-Wolfy and definitely-not-from-mid-series-two I expected. I'll be looking forward to potentially interesting reactions from the Tenth (and maybe even Eleventh) Doctor if/when he realises that she's there-but-not-there.
Then they showed another couple of clips without sound (they were sort of showing in the background while the presenters talked to the guests). One of them had the Doctor and Clara talking in the TARDIS, seemingly shortly after she zooms in on the motorbike. I would have liked to have heard their conversation, but one thing I didn't miss out on was the fact that Clara made the TARDIS doors shut by snapping her fingers! Which is awesome, because there's no way the TARDIS would let someone she doesn't get on with tell her when to shut her doors, so this means that the TARDIS actually likes Clara now! This is clearly an important development. *nodnod* Perhaps it was the lengths Clara went to to save her Doctor at the end of last series that made Sexy reconsider what she thought of her.
Meanwhile, the Tenth Doctor seemed to be talking to a rabbit. Quite sternly, if his facial expression was anything to go by. ...Your guess is as good as mine.
So I watched Doctor Who: The Ultimate Guide earlier today, which among all the many things on around the BBC this week was one I was most interested in seeing as it was mostly about the Doctor himself, and what all his different incarnations were like and what makes him such an enduring, likeable, intriguing character. Ultimately it wasn't quite as interesting as I'd hoped it would be, but it was still a nice way to pass the time and make it two hours closer to 7:50. And, silly as it was, I did rather like the framing device of a couple of presumably-not-canon scenes with the Doctor and Clara, in which the Doctor had accidentally erased his memory by messing up something in the TARDIS so Clara had to help him get it back, hence two hours of people talking about who the Doctor is. The exchange between them the end, after he'd got his memory back, was lovely.
Clara: And every time you go to a place and there's something wrong, you could turn and run, but you don't. You never do. You stay; you help.
The Doctor: Wouldn't anyone stay and help?
Clara: No! And because you don't know that, and because you'll never understand it, that, my friend, is what makes you the Doctor.
It really summed up the way the Doctor often doesn't realise what a good man he is, and he needs people, like his companions, like Clara, to remind him of that and keep him going. This is a theme I imagine there will be hints of in The Day of the Doctor - a certain someone's presence is probably going to bring the Doctor's self-loathing a lot closer to the surface than usual, so hopefully Clara will be able to reassure him that that's not all he is and he's still a good person at heart.
And speaking of the Doctor being ultimately a good person despite everything, I've been thinking a bit about the War Doctor and what he might be like, so I may as well get this out now before the episode airs and I'm potentially proven hugely wrong.
The thing is, regeneration never seems to change who the Doctor fundamentally is at his core. It only really changes things on the surface: his personality, what sides to him are shown in different circumstances, exactly how he deals with threats. It may change how well he shows it, but it doesn't change the simple, enduring fact that he instinctively wants to help people wherever he goes. And I don't think the Sisterhood of Karn's fancy regeneration-fixing potions could ultimately make this any different. They may deliberately bring the most warrior-like aspects of him right up to the surface and bury the parts that hate seeing death and bloodshed as deep as possible, but they could never erase the latter parts altogether. The War Doctor still cares just as much as the Doctor always does; that's what I think. I believe what the Sisterhood did for him was essentially just give him his new personality as a defence mechanism with which he could fight the war he needed to fight while most effectively blocking out how much he hated to do it. The Eighth Doctor would never have been capable of that because his outward personality was just too nice (so I gather) that he'd have just broken down and been unable to cope with the horror of what he was doing.
The Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors' subsequent refusal to acknowledge that the War Doctor even existed would then be just his attempt to cope with the horror of what he did while in that incarnation by blocking it out completely. He'd be insisting that his eight-and-a-halfth incarnation wasn't "the Doctor" as a way to try and tell himself that it wasn't really him who went through that and had no choice but to do those terrible things, so that he can distance himself from the memories so that they don't hurt as much. It's not that the War Doctor actually was such a genuinely horrible person that he didn't even deserve to be called "the Doctor"; I don't believe any incarnation of the Doctor could ever truly be that. This is why I'm happy to still refer to that incarnation of him as "the Doctor", despite the Doctor's own insistence that that's not who he is. Ultimately I don't think the "JOHN HURT as THE DOCTOR" caption at the end of last episode was wrong after all, despite it seeming that way at the time.
Buuut this is all just my speculation and interpretation and I could turn out to be wildly wrong. Whether I'm right or not, I'm sure the War Doctor, as well as his future selves' reactions to seeing him again, will be fascinating. I expect my usual Sunday ramble to be ridiculously long. :3
~less than five hours to go!~
-elyvorg/Amelia
Yeah, but I don't have bbc channel...
You don't have BBC-America? What provider do you have, and where do you live? Someone's plan not having BBCA is rare, far as I can tell...either way, it should be available online by tomorrow, I would think.
My partner and I are planning to watch the special from home, with no one to bother us but our cats (unless the landscapers decide that 3 in the afternoon is a perfect time to do the things they forgot yesterday, in which case they will find themselves on the receiving end of their equipment).
Oh, and here's another mini-sode incase anyone hasn't seen it.
[video=youtube;Eem2Ehq_xBI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eem2Ehq_xBI[/video]
The beginning of the Time War, eh? Didn't like how the Gallifreyans talked casual, wish there'd be more diversity between alien races, unless they're human and they came from Earth.
Woop! Day of the Doctor! Woop!
Cannot wait! Does anyone know when it starts?
Don't wanna miss a second!
WOW! That was brilliant! Really enjoyed it!
The only thing that could have been improved would have been if Tennant could have seen Rose again due to the 'Rips' in Time! That would be interesting! Rose or Queen Elizabeth I?