Salon post: March 9

[jenett]

I mentioned in a lock post, there was no post last week because I was still getting over being miserably sick.

Welcome to this week's salon post!

Topic of the week
Getting conversations going is something that I think about a lot, between online spaces like this, being staff on a Pagan forum, and just generally.

I've mentioned in a locked post that I've noticed a significant drop off in comments on the salon posts, and I'm wondering if there are things I (or other people who were interested) could do to help.

Is it timing? Starting discussions a bit differently? Something else?

What I've been up to:
Having finished the Classic Doctor Who rewatch, I am now a season into New Who. (With a bit of skipping episodes, since I've seen the first couple of seasons several times in the not too distant past.)


House rules:
This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.

* Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to.

* If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)

* If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.

Comments

[jenett]

I will be adding a "Hey, you may want to track this post" to future ones, so we'll try that.

And ooh. Good question. I am going at this from 'specific serials I just liked or found interesting', not a 'these are the highlights anyone else should watch' or anything conclusive about the series.

Structurally, I've found I tend to prefer the shorter lengths (so New Who, which runs about 45 minutes, or the 2-3 parters in Classic Who. Four parters were okay, but a lot of the six parters felt like they dragged a lot, because of a certain amount of repetition due to the original airing timing. (And I don't blame them for that, but it made them a bit tedious to rewatch in a binge.) I'm also a little tired of both Daleks and Cybermen.

I like a lot of Hartnell in all his crotchety glory, and I liked seeing the development of how they structured stories (and how they played around with things) in that era - the historicals like The Aztecs or The Gunfighters compared to the much more SFnal Planet of Giants or the quest structure of Keys of Marinus.

In general, I liked Troughton a lot more than I remembered doing in earlier watches (which in his case might have been just once, actually). I didn't dislike him based on that, but I just liked his approach. (Also, I pretty much always would like more Jamie. Jamie is fun.)

I particularly liked The Enemy of the World both because it's set in 2017 (so that was a fun comparison!) and because Troughton plays both the Doctor and a look alike evil dictator. And then The Web of Fear which introduces Lethbridge-Stewart, who I've always had a fondness for. (I mean, he has his moments where you want to throw things at the TV, but.)

I like Pertwee's approach to being stuck on Earth, and his insistence on being reasonable and figuring out what the other parties want, in as much as that's feasible (which, Doctor Who being Doctor Who, sometimes it isn't. You just can't reason with Autons.)

I also found some of the 'let us look at this society' fascinating, even if they were often more minimally developed than might be ideal - the two Peladon serials, or Carnival of Monsters.

And on the rewatch, I found The Daemons hilarious on a 'let me geek the ritual theory and magical folklore applied to this episode' front.

For Tom Baker, I have a lasting fondness for Pyramids of Mars - on my trip to London a couple of years ago, I got to go to a lecture at the Petrie for its 40th anniversary by a grad student at University College London who analysed how accurate the Egyptology was (short version: really quite good for when it was made, with bonus references to "If you look at that case there in the break, you can see an example of X item that is not a prop.")

I also really liked The Masque of Mandragora (If you have noticed a "I have a soft spot for people doing ritual magic" serials, you would not be wrong. Either I find them theoretically intriguing and like geeking where the details came from, or I find them hilarious. Often both.)

I am also generally a fan of anything that involves Sarah Jane or Romana.

Davison remains one of my most fav Doctors, for a variety of reasons. I still love Black Orchid for the awesome concentrated Gothic horror aspect of it. I'd remembered not liking Turlough and the serials he was in much, but liked them a lot more this time around.

I have a fondness for The Awakening, and it's also one of the only serials I watched from the canonical position of 'behind my grandmother's sofa because it was terrifying'. (We would not have been visiting her in England when it first aired, so it must have been a repeat later that summer, but I hadn't seen it in the US yet.)

For Colin Baker, I found Trial of a Time Lord structurally really interesting, and The Two Doctors was just a lot of fun if utterly ridiculous in places.

For McCoy, I really like Delta and the Bannermen for the 1950s holiday camp setting and the bees! Plot-important bees! And Ghost Light was just as creepy as I remembered.

[senmut]

You highlighted a LOT of great serials. I'm still trying to get my ducks in a row to subscribe to BritBox so I can start watching Classic!Who for the first time in ages.

[jenett]

Yay! I am glad to discuss when you get there.

I found watching with the Wiki open for that serial really rewarding, since it sometimes gave useful background. (There are some spoilers for future things, so if that bothers you, it might be frustrating. But also references to stuff in the audio and books that I am not going to be completist about.)

[haptalaon]

Do you watch the Classic Who as a single unit (all 6 episodes at once) - or as aired?

I definitely made the mistake of consuming serials as a single complete movie. Some of the Pertwee especially is intolerable watched that way. Now, I try and watch them as originally aired - 20 minutes, and then a break of at least one day. It helps you understand the context in which they were watched, and most of them feel a lot less repetitive and a lot better structured viewed as they were designed to be.

Have you seen Enlightenment? That's my favourite. Very spooky.

[jenett]

I did, mostly because of how I watch. (It's the thing on while I'm doing online stuff at home which is not writing) - if I only did an episode a day or every other day, it would have taken me forever to get through, and I'd have interwoven a bunch of other things, which is not great for my brain.

(One of the lasting things of the major health crash I had in 2010-2011 is that managing huge complex plot lines/casts of characters is still a lot of work for me sometimes, a lot more than it used to be. One of the good things about the Who rewatch was that I could pull up the relevant wiki page and get a "Wait, what happened last episode with that again?" if I needed. But putting too much space there can often make it more work than pleasure, which is not the point. It's a lot easier for me to manage stuff that's in recent memory, or that I've got good notes for.)

Enlightenment is great fun! I'd meant to mention that as one of the Turlough era ones I'd particularly liked, since the secondary characters are rather better developed (while still being very alien) than many.

[haptalaon]

Fair enough :) I'm mostly thinking of how much I loathed Planet of the Spiders, which I watched without realising how long it was - have never forgiven it.

Enlightenment is the only Classic Who episode to both be written and directed by women - which is to say, it's something special. Not because women are inherently better or worse at the things, but to make it in the 80s you had to be the best you were at what you did (and then some) to overcome the hiring bias of the day. For a long time, it was the only episode of any Who to be so - but I think a couple of episodes now have that distinction. I definitely think that's why it stands out so much, as being something unusual and different, and putting a lot more thought into how it explores the world than most episodes.

Are you a Blake's 7 person? Fiona Cumming directs all the best episodes of that show too. She's a real hero of mine, capable of taking all sorts of lousy scripts and cheap shows to another level of excellence.

[jenett]

I have not gotten into Blake's 7, though I've heard enough commentary that I eye it periodically. (But am not likely to do so any time soon, either, so.)