chainsaw_metal1

Member: Rank 8
I actually thought he worked quite well with Tom in Traken and Logopolis, but as soon as Peter and Co. turned up it was goodnight Vienna.
Agreed. I think Romana kind of kept him in line. My theory is that there was an unfortunate incident that involved Turlough, Adric, a Dalek eyestalk, and Tegan walking in on them.
 

ant-mac

Member: Rank 9
I used to love playing the record at the slower speed back in the day and it was awesome!
JB
This version is in a different key, but I think it still sounds excellent.

I've rarely heard a version of the DOCTOR WHO theme I didn't like.

Although I wasn't crazy about the Matt Smith version.
 

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
Yeah they did seem to get on great in those two stories! but how did Tom like Matthew back in the day and I'm not talking about the Gin and the pub story!
JB

According to Matthew's book Tom seemed to take great pleasure in terrorising everyone, blowing hot and cold from one day to the next. Janet Fielding observed at the time that Tom worked it so that - if he was actually nice to you for once - you would be relieved and grateful. She was having none of it. She also noted that he had very short legs on a long body, which is why he wore long coats, to hide that fact. And Lalla Ward was just as snobby and contemptuously rude to anyone she considered to be of a lower social strata - which was basically anyone except her and Tom and maybe a few of her dress designers. Julian Glover did not get on with either of them, saying that Tom and Lalla considered themselves a joint intellectual powerhouse, above everyone else. Lalla was appallingly rude to and about a poor man who was just trying to do his job, taking pictures for the viewmaster toy, saying "how can I work while this horrid little man is photographing me", which led to JNT (to his shame) telling the poor man off later on. Matthew made a point of being very nice to the same man when he returned to do viewmaster slides for Castrovalva. The man said that the previous Doctor Who shoot had been the worst he had ever been on.
 

johnnybear

Member: Rank 6
Wow! Tom has short lickle legs on a large body!!! No wonder he picked on people!!! Lalla or the Lady Sarah Ward was bound to be snobby considering her upbringing, not that I'm condoning it for one second! Maybe she and Tom fell out over an answer in the Times crossword or something? :emoji_astonished:
 

ant-mac

Member: Rank 9
Wow! Tom has short lickle legs on a large body!!! No wonder he picked on people!!! Lalla or the Lady Sarah Ward was bound to be snobby considering her upbringing, not that I'm condoning it for one second! Maybe she and Tom fell out over an answer in the Times crossword or something? :emoji_astonished:
I can't say I've ever seen any evidence to back up Janet Fielding's claim of him having very short legs. This includes his appearance in DAY OF THE DOCTOR.

And considering her general attitude and personality, it makes sense that Lalla would marry a world-famous atheist who was determined to destroy God...

She didn't like the competition. :emoji_wink:
 

johnnybear

Member: Rank 6
Matt Smith's was a mixed bag of onions for me, not keen! Tennant's final series music I liked with the added beat!
JB
 

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
Mind_Robber.jpg









I know it's controversial, but I am increasingly liking the idea that THE MIND ROBBER is the story that shows the true origin of the Doctor (and never mind all that later Time Lord from Gallifrey malarky of THE WAR GAMES and beyond.... Or the Cartmel Masterplan....).....



http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/were-all-stories-in-the-end-the-mind-robber/



The clue is in episode two, in which Gulliver makes a comment that the Doctor is a traitor to the Land of Fiction. What on Earth could that possibly mean? (Yes, like all of Gulliver's lines, it's actually from Swift, but we are, I think, meant to assume that what he says is true, if oddly phrased) The obvious answer is that the Doctor is originally from the Land of Fiction. In fact, if we take Gulliver's line at face value (and there is admittedly some reason not to, though it seems to me given the rest of the story there's more reason to), the Doctor must hail from the Land of Fiction. You cannot be a traitor to a land you are not from.
The simplest explanation of all of this is that, on some level, the Doctor has always been a part of the Land of Fiction - intended to be its master and controller. And that he escaped.




In other words, months before The War Games, The Mind Robber has quietly given us an origin story for the Doctor that is almost, but not quite, what we eventually get from the later "official" version. (After all, it is not as though no writer in the first six years had a guess on where the Doctor came from. If I could dig up David Whitaker and ask him one question, in fact, it would be what he thought the Doctor's origin was.) The Doctor fled from a position of responsibility, stole a spaceship (or, in this case, storytelling medium), and ran off to have adventures. Except that instead of being a Time Lord from Gallifrey, he is the designated Master of the Land of Fiction - the writer and creator of all stories. And he's gone on the run to live the stories instead of simply writing them.

Notably, this never quite gets contradicted, even when, later in this season, this shadow theme of The Mind Robber gets done as the main plot of two episodes. Because the Land of Fiction is outside of the universe, and because the Doctor fled it into the universe, he presumably became "real" instead of just fictional. And thus he became something else that served much of the same narrative function - instead of a wanderer in the dimension of narrative, he is a wanderer in the dimension of time. The Time Lords, with their "look but don't touch" ethos and distance from the world, are a fair enough metaphor for the Land of Fiction itself. So the fact that, outside of the Land of Fiction, he is something else is hardly an issue.
But more important than the fact that this theory can survive almost any canon challenge thrown at it is the fact that it makes sense beyond mere continuity. What defines Doctor Who is the fact that its story never has to end. That any story worth telling can be told as a Doctor Who story, and that there is no upper bound to the number of Doctor Who stories that can be told. Of course the Doctor is the destined and designated Master of the Land of Fiction. Who else possibly could be? What other person in the universe, real or imaginary, could possibly have the job of telling every story that ever was?

THE MIND ROBBER (1968):

https://www.imdforums.com/threads/the-mind-robber-1968.3673/





.
 
Last edited:

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
I've never picked up on that one to be honest!
JB


I think I'm going to adopt it as official head-canon!

It also explains the nonsensical storytelling of New-Who. Clearly - after a long initial run of good quality Controllers - numerous idiots have recently been running the Land of Fiction - and the poor Doctor has been having to live through the crap that they have generated. Hell, they even made him and the Master into women at one point.
 
Last edited:

johnnybear

Member: Rank 6
Funny you should mention the woman aspect of the franchise as I'm currently reading Prime Time which came out in 2000 and has a scene involving the Seventh Doctor trying to enter a futuristic television centre on an alien planet called Blinni-Gaar and trying to get into the building with a group of young ladies and then he being told by the commissionaire that he looks nothing like one of these lovely girls and he replies that he might do one day! So this ludicrous idea of gender swapping has been put into canon even that far back and by Mike Tucker who worked on the eighties version of the show with Sylvester McCoy!!! :emoji_rage:
 
Top