Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 345: Doctor Who

Episode Date: December 21, 2020

True to the spirit of the franchise, it's a Doctor Who Christmas Special for Retronauts as Jeremy Parish, Stuart Gipp, and Diamond Feit touch on the impact and influence of the long-running sci-fi series—and horrible, terrible, no-good games it's inspired.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, it's a wibly-wobbly, podcast-wasty, wasty kind of thing. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts this week. I'm Jeremy Parrish. Well, no, I'm always Jeremy Parrish, but this week, Jeremy Parrish is your host. I am the first and only incarnation of Jeremy Parrish, and I'm here with my companions dialing in through technology, which as we know should not be trusted yet we're relying on it anyway because that is the kind of hypocrites that we are. Who are you? Let's go in the direction of the Earth's rotation. So in Japan, hello, my name is Diamond Fight and I am talking. Thank you. He's right. He's

right. It's unassailable. It's so true. He is talking. Yes, it is a tautology. And who else is that? I am a Stuart Jit, and I'm not going to do the voice, but I would make a good Dalek. You know, I could see like this combination here of like a Wario game and Doctor Who and you're fighting the Golics. I like it. And they're like robots that zap everyone with garlic. Anyway, yeah, so this week we are talking about Dr. Who, mainly because I finally sat down after years of people saying, you really ought to watch Doctor Who and watched a whole lot of Doctor Who over the past, I don't know, eight or nine months, because what else are you going

to do during a pandemic? And it gave me something to do while I was exercising. And so I've basically run the gamut of Doctor Who. I've watched, you know, at least one season of all the vintage doctors and everything starting from the reboot in 2005. God bless you. So that's a lot of TV and specials. And there, one thing that really struck me is, I've been watching and as I've been talking about games involving time travel and movies involving time travel such as Bill and Ted's excellent adventure, I've come to realize like, wow, Doctor Who has its fingerprints all over pop culture in ways that I never really realized. And you don't really appreciate until you actually go and watch this thing that is surprisingly enduring, even though

it's extremely campy and silly. But it doesn't take yourself too seriously. So it kind of strikes that balance. It's like, you know, vintage Star Trek where, uh, before the writer's strike, where you had Captain Kirk like kind of hamming it up, but then sometimes like really bringing a great performance. I guess I was William Shatner or not Captain Kurt, but you know, they're kind of the same thing. Anyway, so, so yeah, there's, there's a lot of appeal to Dr. Who. Who. So I thought it would be worth one, talking about the franchise and, uh, its history and kind of, uh, the way it's evolved over time. Talk about the video games based on Dr. Who. although this may be a huge mistake. And finally, you know, if possible, you know, if anything pops into our minds, talk about some of the influence of Doctor Who on other media, especially video games. I don't know exactly how this is going to go, but I feel that is keeping in the doctor's MO. Just throw it out there and see what happens without really a plan. So here we go.

I was going to say let's hit the switches on the wayback machine, but that is not correct. So, gentlemen, gentle folk, gentle beings, friends from this planet, my human, human companions, tell me about. Tell me about your own history with Doctor Who. Like, I know, you know, Stuart, I originally invited you onto the show because I was like, well, a British person, clearly he's going to be schooling us, but that seems not to be the case. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be schooling anyone on anything, unless it's like 8-bit mascots, you know, that's the only thing that I know anything about, unfortunately. I feel like there were some Doctor Who comics that had 8-bit mascots in them. Like, those things were all over the place. It's almost certainly, I mean, he's been with the Transformers.

He's, you know, Death's head. He's been all over the place. You can't mess with him. Wherever you go, you're going to find the doctor somewhere. He's going to crop up. I think Mr. Bean has been the doctor at one point, even. That was a comedy special, yeah. I was going to say, I've got a Doctor Who t-shirt where it's like, it's very clearly an eight-bit version of Matt Smith.

So it's one of those two-thing t-shirts. Like it's a Doctor Who, but it kind of looks like Mario. Oh, classic. Right, right. Yeah, that's so old school. Now we're on to three things. Like Doctor Who and Mario. And Morty.

Ted's phone booth, yeah. Yes, and Morty. Like, they're all drawn as pickles. Right. Do or do not, there is no try Gandalf. Exactly. Exactly. This is free money. So, yeah, Stuart. Well, basically. Stuart, what intersections have you? It sounds like, kind of in keeping with your normal way of approaching things, you've mostly experienced the really bad Doctor Who stuff. It's sort of true.

Basically, when I was a kid, when I was in secondary school, I had a friend who was, in case they listen to this, I don't want to be mean about them, but it was just basically a huge nerd. Nothing wrong with that. I'm a huge nerd. And they got me to watch them. This show wouldn't exist if we weren't huge nerd. Yeah.

So Tom Baker, Doctor Who, I think it might have been, I want to say the green death. Is that an episode of Doctor Who? That's Third Doctor, but yes. Oh, that's Perthry, isn't it? Yeah, Pertoy. Yeah, well, it was probably him. This doesn't bode well for my contributions, and I apologize. But it was a long time ago.

And I remember thinking, this is like, this is extremely shunky. This looks like it's falling to peace. It's never showing me this again. Put the three stooges back on now. Because that was pretty much what we watched. And then that story is considered a, beloved classic but at the same time it's a lot of people like reacting in terror to what are clearly like foam worms in glow in the dark glue it's it's I was I was I was small and I

was ignorant back then and I didn't even like missed which is obviously a great game but now then in the future I made another friend back when I was in university which was a kind of more sort of academic I must if this person says this is good this must be good kind of person because, you know, lots of respect. And then he decided that he would show me time lash, which is Colin Baker. Like, I think it's considered probably one of the worst, if not the worst, Dr. Who story. Had this friend of yours seen this episode before?

Was it just like a let's jump in blind and I'll just show you? I can pick any episode off the shelf and you're going to love this show. I think it was a test of sorts. I didn't really question it, you know, because following Timelash, which was, oh, it was something else. We ended up doing trial of the time law, but we did it all in one sitting overnight.

Wow. Which I think is 12 episodes, the three stories, plus the sort of epilogue story. And that sort of transformed me into sort of something of a fan because anything that terrible, that, well, I say terrible, that nightmareishly complex, considering what it is,

that confusing and sort of esoteric and clearly based in an enormous amount of law, of which I had no, like, knowledge, I was just kind of like, well, obviously I have to start liking this now, because this is, this is spectacularly strange. This is such an odd program. Yeah, you know, there's, there's a real appeal to, I don't think you get that as much anymore, but back, you know, before media was readily available by going on the internet and just saying, I want to pirate this from BitTorrent sites, you know, like comic books and TV series, you know, Battlestar Galactica or like X-Men comics or something, you just

pick up a random issue or episode and be like, man, there's, there's a lot going on here. And I don't really get it. And it's really fascinating. Like, I remember when I was a kid picking up, you know, a friend had some X-Men comics from the, what was it called, Secret Wars era. And I had no idea what was going on. But clearly, there was like a whole lot of story there and a whole lot of like back history. And I was like, wow, I really want to learn more about this. So I can see as a long as Trial of the Time Lord is. I can see that that's still having some appeal. But basically from there, I'd watched some of the latest stuff, like some of the, mostly the McCoy stuff like Battlefield and Happiness Patrol, et cetera,

as Ghostlight was one of the other ones that I got shown. And Ghostlight, I think even among hardcore Who fans is considered ridiculous, like in terms of how complex the plot is and how hard to understand it is. And of course, I see that. And I just think, I can't believe this was a, of prime time, like, Sunday afternoon BBC program aimed ostensibly at children. Like, that's crazy. This is so... Well, there is a reason that the McQuay era was the end of the show.

Yeah. But I got sort of really into that, because I thought the Happiness Patrol was, I think it's great. Everyone online only makes fun of the Candy Man, but I think he's great too. But that, that to me was really sort of spoke to what I liked in the character, which was, like, the sequence of happiness patrol where he just talked. talks down this guy with a gun. All he does is basically describe back to him what he's doing, asking why he's doing it.

And the guy, it's quite stagey, but it really works. It really, really works. Because McCoy comes across so sort of authoritative, but, you know, compassionate at the same time. Just really questioning the ethics of this whole organization that's going on. And I was just like, this is very different. There's very little fighting. You know, it's mostly just kind of pretty, pretty good.

good sci-fi stuff, you know, I rather enjoyed it. And then, of course, when I went and looked at the reboot series, I mean, to me, the reboot series is like a whole world apart from the classic. It's totally a different show, but it's not a bad one. By any means, there's a lot of good stuff there. It's much more overblown and much more, I don't know, I don't have to describe it as blockbuster-ish. Like, they're going for a lot more.

It's more contemporary. Yeah, well, yeah. It just feels like modern TV. But I really, I liked that a lot as well. I've kind of drifted away from it, but I always check it out when it comes back. I always take a look at it and see if I can get into it again. But I don't know if it's the show's four or if it's just me having changed. Oh, man.

I think it's a combination of things. But yeah, your point to how different McCoy was speaks one to kind of the innate nature of the series and how the casting and writing decisions for each different doctor gives each little little kind of set of stories, their own kind of personality, because each doctor, each actor does bring something different to each doctor that shows up along the way. And also, yeah, the McCoy stuff showed up, you know, that was airing contemporaneously with Star Trek the next generation. Premiered the same month, Seventh Doctor and Next Generation, both premiered September, 1987. Yep, there you go. That's crazy. So, you know, Captain Picard, definitely,

they tried to make him like the authoritative statesmen who would talk his way to peace, but at the same time, you still had, like, full phaser spread. So, you know, he wasn't quite as averse to using gunboat diplomacy as the doctor was, whereas the doctor was just, like, that's his thing is, I don't use guns. He's even more, he's more strict about it than Batman. Like, Batman, there's lots of exceptions. I've played the NES game. Yeah, he shoots everyone in that game.

He's just fed up. He's had enough. So, Diamond, how about you? I know you're much more steeped in Doctor Who. And in fact, when I, you know, said, hey, I'm going to do this thing. You were like, hell yes, go for it. I am excited, but I just have to say one second, your conversation now just maybe imagine Christian Bale is the doctor. And now I'm kind of all giddy.

Like what would that be like? Probably minus the Batman voice. But yeah, for me, well, I am an American, which means I had no idea what Doctor Who was for a very very long time. Absolutely was, you know, to use Stewart's words, like, there was one friend of mine who had a Doctor Who poster on his wall. And I was like, what the hell is this? Like, it looked, it looked so bizarre. I couldn't even reckon, like, is this the doctor? What, who?

Like, like, I, like, nothing. It meant nothing to me. And it wasn't until it was about, about 10 years ago, give or take. And just some random article on the internet, people were talking, because the new show had gotten a lot of traction by that point. And I read an article online and someone wrote an article and he just said, look, the show makes no sense, but you have to watch it. It makes no sense to the point that you must watch it and understand how much it doesn't make any sense. and because this person was very reckless, they put a link to like Vimeo or Daily Motion

or some absolute pirated copy of Doctor Who like, here, watch this, watch this right now. And I read the article and I pushed this button and I saw Matt Smith running around somewhere and I was like, okay, I have to find out what this is all about. And then the police showed up because you were pirating. Well, fortunately, it was a stream. So, yeah, somehow if it's streaming, it's okay.

But yeah, I watched all of Matt Smith's first season and I loved it. I loved Matt Smith's first season, which was, you know, this is 2010. And at that point, I immediately caught up to what new episodes had existed at that point. Then I decided, well, I'll go back. Let's find out what happened before this. And I watched the ninth doctor and the 10th doctor.

And then I was like, well, this show has been around, you know, at that point for almost 50 years, now over 50 years. And I just, I went back. And, you know, it is literally impossible to watch all of Doctor Who. Like, at least 10% of it is just gone forever. Mm-hmm. But I did my best to watch as much Doctor Who as I could possibly find. find on the internets. And I see, yeah, much like Jeremy said, like I've sampled all the doctors, at least a little bit, some of them more than others. There was a time when Netflix just had

like a selection of every doctor, just a little bit of each doctor. And I would watch all of those. I showed them to my kids. My kids didn't even understand it, but they certainly watched them. And I think, I think now to watch the vintage Doctor Who on streaming, you have to subscribe to like a special British only Brit box on Amazon, I think. think. So it's like, if you want to watch these things, you have to pay for the streaming service and then a premium on top of that, which is really cool. Thanks, guys. Yeah, and it's, love the balkanization of media. Is it off, is it off Netflix now? Because that's where I watched a lot of the modern stuff. That's a shame. I don't think Netflix has it anymore. I don't think it's all

on Prime and Britbox. Like BBC, I think basically was like, yes, Jeff Bezos, we want to subscribe to your Dalek-like subjugation. So I didn't, I didn't know it was an Amazon thing. I didn't No, it was an Amazon thing, but... Isn't Birdbox Amazon? I don't think so. I thought it was, not independent, obviously, but I thought it was like a BBC ITV kind of app thing. Well, we don't have to get hung up on that.

Yes, we do. That's the next hour. Whatever that is, I promise you it's not available in Japan, which is another thing I should stress, unlike a lot of nerdy things that we talk about all the time, this show is basically unknown in Japan. I mean, obviously there's fans, there's fans everywhere, so, you know,

But if you Google it, you'll probably find, like, a eight-year-old frames-enabled, you know, fan-made website, and maybe you'll find something hyping, like, season four of DVDs or something. But, like, this show is not known in Japan. It is almost entirely unavailable. I've rented a couple things. I think they have maybe gotten up to the 12th Doctor series, probably, like, if you rent the DVD of it. But I think the 13th probably not even 13th yet. And that's, that's already been a couple years now.

So they're just, I'm here in Japan and I love it. But I think most people in Japan have never, have never even heard of it. All right. Britt box is its own thing. So there we go. We don't have to talk about it anymore. Yes. Japan.

I'm actually surprised. I'm honestly surprised it's not bigger over there. Especially the 13th doctor because it's like, wow, it's a pretty lady. She, like, Japan loves to, you know, anime up pretty ladies and put her in the lead. But I guess not. I don't know she dressed as a maid. then they'd be on board. Ah, yes.

You never know. No, there's an episode where they do spies, not maids. Yes, this tuxedo episode. Yeah, very good. But yeah, no, I, so I'm lucky that the internet exists in such a way that it has enabled me to catch up with this stuff, and I really, really enjoy it. But, yeah, I'm very much a latecomer. So for me, my Doctor Who enthusiasm, there is no nostalgia for this.

This is all me as an adult coming to the show and finding it fantastic. I like the new stuff, obviously, but I went back and watched the old stuff. And I really like the old show, too. So for me, I mean, as Stewart pointed out, they are very different. They feel very different. They have a lot of things that, you know, are loosely in common. But I enjoy, I really enjoy it all. I really, I can't say there's any part of Doctor Who that I absolutely hate.

And yes, I understand the Sixth Doctor is the least enjoyable for me, but I can't even say I hate Sixth Doctor. I just can't. Yeah, I think if I were going to go back and, you know, have experienced Doctor Who for the first time all over again. And I would give it a little more space to breathe because by the end of it, I was just kind of like super fatigued. You know, they keep kind of resetting the modern stuff where like by the end of the David Tenet era, it was basically like, I am the almighty godlike doctor. And I can do everything.

And everyone across the universe trembles at my name. And they were like, well, can't really go anywhere from here. So let's have him basically go into hiding and everyone forget him. but then you know it just still builds back up so yeah i think they have i think they you know it's like the superman video game issue when you have someone who can do anything and get out of any jam like things stop being interesting so how do you make them interesting again and i think the the most recent series really kind of suffered from that fatigue which is a shame because i was really like the fact that there was a woman as a doctor as opposed to like another stuffy

upper crust middle-aged british man like wow this is You know, this is different. It doesn't feel quite so patrician. So that might be more interesting. And she had a totally different energy, of course, than all the, you know, really, not just being a woman, just, her performance was just completely different than any other doctor I could think of. Yeah, yeah. I really, I really like, I really liked the 13th doctor herself. And I wish the writers could have figured out more to do with her. It's very kind of frustrating to watch those episodes and be like, oh, there's so much potential here. And it just kind of is, it's, I don't know, like, there's some really great. episodes and then a lot of it is just kind of like here is the doctor doing doctor stuff but as a woman I really I really sucks because as soon as the from the instant that that was even rumored you got the usual suspects going going off on the internet and everywhere and I was just you know fingers crossed just please knock this out of the park like please

be brilliant because if you're not then they're going to just get so it's going to give them so much like energy and unfortunately they gave it to Chris Gibnell. And, uh, yeah. Yeah, I don't really know who that is, but I do know that there was a creative lead change. Yeah. After, uh, the 12th doctor.

And it just doesn't seem to be quite on, on track. He wrote a lot of the less loved Matt Smith era episodes, I believe. I don't want to go into him because I don't want to, you know, have a go at, uh, this man who, who probably makes a lot of things, lots of people love. But I didn't think he was a great choice for a show run. He seems to be very much like where the previous years they kind of paced out the plot points like the master and all that sort of thing. It feels like he's really just kind of rushing into it at the moment. But I don't know where it's going.

Maybe it's going somewhere. I have no idea. But I guess I'll find out when it comes back. I would say one positive of this experience is if you look, there was a very recent poll online about your favorite doctor, which I'm sure every website does this every couple months. but this was a very recent issue, a poll, and Jody came in second, a very close second. So I think people who watch the show right now, people definitely like her, even if the show, I feel like the stories have not been up to par to, you know, to what I would like to see. But I think at the very least, she has knocked out of the park.

I think she has done fantastic. And the other, you know, the cast around her also has been exceptional. I just don't, the stories have not really held my interest as much as other doctors stories did. But I'm always on the edge looking in and saying, oh, what's, what's going to happen next? So I'm never going to go away. I'm never going to turn away from the show entirely. Yeah, I'll definitely continue following the series. But I would, yeah, I feel like a little bit of a shake-up with the creative leads would be a good idea.

And, you know, that's the whole thing about Dr. Hu is that it has been around for so long and undergone so many permutations and they've built mutability right into the series. It makes it really unique. And it's, you know, it is almost comic book-like where you can have different creative teams. And you're like, well, I really loved this artist's run on the series. But then the following run wasn't so great. But then, you know, someone else came in and really knocked it out of the park. It's like, you know, I guess you could compare it to Fantastic Four or something.

So there's like the John Byrne run, which is really classic or the Walt Simonson run, which is like crazy and way out there. And then you have, you know, Tom DeFalco. And it's just like, uh, why did you even just go, go away? I think the comic analogy is really good, just because. the fact that because Doctor Who has existed for so long, and basically everything in it is still canon somehow, like there is, even when it's, you know, rebooted, quote unquote, it's just more like, well, here's the new doctor, but all the other doctor stuff, like, that still happened. And, you know, he or she remembers it sometimes. So it's all there. It's all canon somehow. I've read that anything

that has been published in any Doctor Who official media, whether it is television, or books or comics or radio programs or audio books, it's all canon. Like somehow, even when it's totally contradictory, it's still part of it. And that is, you know, kind of a clever conceit instead of constantly doing crisis on infinite Earths, where every like five years, D.C. is like, well,

this is already too complicated to follow. So let's just reboot everything and everyone's on a new earth now. And these characters, we could tell their origin stories again. Whereas the doctor, it's just like, yeah. Yeah, this story that I'm in right now doesn't really hold any water compared to the other stuff that I've done. But whatever, it's all there. So just tag along for the adventure. I think that's a pretty good approach.

Yeah. Which is extra funny because if you consider the nature of the doctor, he has absolutely visited multiple earths in multiple realities. So it's like he can see all the earths if he wants to. That's true. Although there was that whole thing during, I guess, David Tennant's era where they were like, yeah, dimension crossing is difficult. and you can't really do it, and it's dangerous, so don't. But then, you know, in other stories, they, it's just like, oh, yeah, we changed dimensions. Whoops, how did that happen?

I think there were a couple of Tom Baker stories where he was just like, oh, I've, you know, traveled across dimensions. That's a, that's a no, no. I guess you have to, yeah, there was the whole thing where they were like an entire season. They were in, like, in space or something. I remember what it was called, but they were basically e-space. That's it. They were just trying to get back.

Yes. Isn't e-space? like a, there's like a place in Tokyo called East Base, I think, like a, a lounge or something. Anyway, whatever. Yes, they were trapped in a lounge in Tokyo for a season. I can think of worse ways to go. They resolved all of it in the, as you say, in the tenant era, because they just basically span the wheel and it always seemed to come up on Cardiff, contemporary Cardiff.

Let's go there. Right. What a miracle. Whales. I love how much this alien. It was the center of the universe. He's got to spend so much time collecting energy or something from a rift inside of Wales. All right.

How did we get to Wales? Let's talk very briefly, a brief history of time and relative dimension in space, as Stephen Hawking would say. Sorry, I just totally blinked out on his name. So, Dr. Who has been around for nearly, what would that be, 60 years? Coming up. I debuted in 1963 as a semi-educational program on BBC television. This was back, I think, when there was just one BBC, right? Like one channel? I mean, I wasn't there, but I mean... You weren't? You don't know the history of your country's broadcasting. I don't know when BBC 2 was launched, but I would have thought it was after that.

Because if it was after that, Doctor Who would have gone straight under BBC 2. That's probably true, yes. So the basic premise was that a strange old man lives in a junkyard and has a time machine that can also travel across space and dimensions. and, you know, in the very early going, he's basically this sort of mercurial, unknowable presence. Like, he is not the point of view character. He is, how would you describe Hartnell's, William Hartnell's, doctor? He's, he's an older man, you know, in his 50s, kind of a...

He's like a skullmaster. He's like a bizarre Mr. Chips or something. I don't know. Yeah, that's a good one. he's not especially likable he's very he's quite abrasive he doesn't really have time for these kind of humans all in his business i'm not sure it's not it's not easy to describe him because there aren't really any contemporary characters that are like run him hard on's doctor even when they brought him back he didn't really act like he used to when i say brought him back

i mean had someone else play him yeah the the interesting thing about doctor who especially in the very early years is that even though the doctor is that even though the doctor is the title character, and his name is not Dr. Who that we know. They've never actually said what the doctor's real name is, but I'm pretty sure it's not Dr. Who. He's not the point of view character. He's not really the main character. So the original doctor had a granddaughter. I guess all the doctors have a granddaughter, but she was a character in the show. And she was like junior high school, you know, middle schooler. What is, what is that called in the UK. Secondary school.

Secondary school. There you go. She's a secondary schooler. Yeah. And so she's also a little bit enigmatic. And the point of view characters are actually her teachers who stumble into the junkyard because they're concerned about the health of this girl who lives in a junkyard with a strange old man.

And he gets upset and they travel to basically prehistoric earth. And it all just kind of goes from there. So the premise was, you know, that it was somewhat educational. So each of those early episodes, I've gone back and watched a few of them. And they do tend to have kind of like these moments where the plot sort of stops. And they start

giving you educational information about like prehistoric life and, you know, the, you know, how Earth moves through space around the sun and that kind of thing. So it's just kind of like these little bits shoehorned in. But that's also effective padding because, you know, they were like throwing together these 25-minute episodes once a week on a shoestring budget. And a lot of it was basically shot in real time and broadcast. So they were just kind of almost making up as they went along. But I think that was just kind of the approach that BBC took to television at the time. Yeah, there's a, I'm thinking of, you know, the very second, because right from the start, the show is serialized and that each half hour is just one part of the story and it goes on.

And, you know, and one story lasts about, you know, four, five, six, maybe even eight of these half-hour segments. So the very second story is the one where they go far into the future, another planet, and that's where they meet the most famous creatures on Doctor Who, the Daleks. Excuse me, the Daleks. And I swear to you, it's a good story to watch, but I swear to you, one of these episodes is just a series of characters jumping over a very small hole. It is interminable. It's like, you can imagine that there really is. there's no other channel in the entire nation because people, like, why would people watch a series of people jumping over a whole one at a time? Like, there's nothing else happening in

this episode. But it's still a fun story to watch. Yeah, this was still when television was brand new and many households didn't even have television. So it was like, well, there's some stuff happening on the screen and we can watch it. And that's amazing. We don't just have to listen to the radio. We don't have to stare at the wallpaper. It's so cool. So, you know, Dr. Who, Better than Wallpaper. Sometimes. But the, sort of the original creative leads on Doctor Who, there was a guy named Sidney Newman, who was a veteran producer, as much as you could be a veteran for television in 1963, he's kind of credited as the show's creator. But the original show producer, who I think is pretty widely seen as having the greatest creative influence on the show and really kind of pushing it forward and making it happen.

was a woman named Verity Lambert, who was actually very young and was one of the very first women to hold a prominent, like, leadership role in broadcast television. So already you have this kind of groundbreaking progressiveness built into the entire Doctor Who premise. And, you know, I don't think it's necessarily like, it clearly wasn't a stunt or about quotas or anything like that. It was just like she was the person who was given the job. And she, took it and ran with it and created a really memorable show. And, you know, when William Hartnell, the original doctor, had to drop out of the show because of health issues, he, you know, was really suffering from physical health and mental health. He was having trouble remembering his lines. And that's kind of like a famous sort of characteristic at the first doctor is that he misspeaks himself a lot. She was kind of one of the creative leads there who said, you know, just because we have to lose the lead actor. the title character doesn't mean the show has to end and recast him as a different actor and didn't, you know, just try to say, like, let's find someone who looks like William Hartnell and talks like

William Hartnell. They said, you know, let's find someone who's completely different and basically make the doctor a new character. And that became kind of, you know, the infinitely sustainable television concept is that when one actor decides to leave or has to leave, you know, you you can bring in another actor and you basically reboot the show, refresh it, and you get an entirely different mix. And maybe it'll be a good mix. You know, maybe it'll be something that people love, like Tom Baker, but maybe it'll be something that everyone hates, like Colin Baker. You just never know. Another important person from the early days was writer Terry Nation, who was the guy who kind of came up with the Dalek concept. He definitely took credit for the Dalek concept.

And anytime Daleks show up, his estate gets credit. money. I think there is a lot of, you know, kind of like a Bob Cain Bill Finger sort of situation, like how much of the Daleks did he really come up with? But nevertheless, that's kind of how it shook out. There was even a Dalek TV series, like just a spinoff about the Daleks themselves, which to me, I've never seen that, but I just can't imagine how you can make that work. You have these like mutant blobs in invincible armor moving around screaming about how they want to wipe out all life in the universe. It's a pretty limited premise, and it's not like you want the main characters to win. So I don't know, have you guys ever seen any of the Dalek's TV series?

No. It sounds a bit like most like right-wing YouTubers, though, to be honest. Yes. More charismatic, though. Yes, slightly. But, yeah, Doctor Who's had several spinoffs. I think some more successful than others. Torchwood was pretty well received. The Sarah Jane Chronicles was, was, kid-oriented, like very, very aimed at younger children, but was very well received for what it was. Like if you go in expecting more Doctor Who, it's not going to be to your liking, but it takes one of the best-loved side characters or companion characters of the Doctor Who franchise and gives her her own show where she's basically sleuthing things with, I believe, her son and her robot dog, K-9, who doesn't love K-9? He got his own pilot as well, a canine and company, yeah.

Yes, that's one that's a little more limited, because he has about the same amount of personality range as the Daleks, except not focused on destruction. It's just like, there's not a lot to the dog. He's not so smart. He's a very good boy. He's a very good robot boy, dog. And he has lasers, and sometimes they bring him back, and he, like, he does stuff, and then he runs out of energy, and they have to solve things on their own. He's just, he's just so kitsch. I love, I kind of love him.

Yes. It's just rubbish. He's very, it's very 70s. All right. So, you know, going back to the history of the show, like I said, William Hartnell, the lead, the first doctor had health problems and had to, had to leave. He was in his mid to late 50s, but his health just degenerated rapidly. I think, you know, I think people just aged more quickly at that, back then.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I just feel like my impression is that people stay lively and young longer into their lives these days than they did in the 50s and 60s. I think the clearest, the clearest example you can make is that William Hartnell was 55 when he took the show. So the show began with 55-year-old William Hartnell. And then a few years ago, Peter Capaldi was 55 when he started his role. And look at those two people and you tell me they're the same age. No. I mean, they have gray hair. But, like, Peter Capaldi is, like, you know, a bullion.

He is, you know, he's pure energy. Yeah, it's hard to imagine William Hartnell, like, doing the heavy metal rock guitar thing. Nope. No way. With the shades. Yeah. So the Christmas special, you mentioned, Stuart, that where the first doctor and the 12th doctor meetup was actually pretty fun just because of that contrast of like, here are the two, basically the two old men of Dr. Hu. Yeah.

And it was, it was kind of interesting. to kind of put them together, and even if it wasn't actually William Hartnell, it was a good try. I thought you were going to say the first Dr. Christmas special where he breaks the fourth wall and starts a million forum arguments. I think it's called the Feast of Stephen. And at the end, at the end, he just wishes all of you as a Merry Christmas. And that started a million canon arguments, I think. Okay, so the idea of recasting the lead worked out really well, because the show ran for 36 years before being put on hiatus.

in 1989, so technically it was never canceled, but it just, they stopped making it. So that's effectively canceled. But, you know, in that time, there were, what, six, seven doctors over the span of 36 years. Some had long runs. Some did not. John Pertwee basically kind of established, like, you know, the rule, like only go for three years. Anything more than that, it's going to take over your career. And so he's given that advice to basically everyone who's become the doctor since. So, you know, starting with, I think, Peter Davison, you started seeing doctors have shorter runs as opposed to Tom Baker, who ran for seven years. And he was very, very popular. But, yeah, like that last season, he's kind of running out of steam there. Yeah, even though it's the 80s and

you've got an amazing synthesizer score and he's got a brand new outfit, which is just all burgundy. I don't know why, but I love his all burgundy look. I actually have the old, I actually have the red and burgundy, like, scarf. Because he famously had this gigantic scarf, and the story behind it is that they ordered a scarf, and they sent a bunch of colors, so the lady would choose which color she wanted. But the costumeer just, she knit every single color together. She made this gigantic scarf as a result, and it just became iconic part of the character. But at the end of his run, for some reason, they decided, you know what? Let's do the scarf again, but now only make it two colors.

And I have a version of that scarf just because I think it's just a really cool color. Yeah, but each doctor is basically kind of their own personality, and the one thing that really holds them together, I guess a few things that hold them together. One, there is the Tartis, the police box. It kind of looks like a phone booth, but technically, Stuart, do you want to explain what a phone box, a police box is for those of us who do not live in England? Not that you guys use those anymore either, but it is a part of your heritage that we don't have over in the colonies. It is a phone box, a public phone box, that you use if you need to call the police and nothing else. Because if you were walking around, for example, and you saw someone with a, like, I don't know, black and white striped sweater, climbing up a ladder with a massive bag that says swag on it, and they go in through a window, and they're wearing like one of those raccoon masks and they're looking around, real shifty, you'd run into the police box and then you'd pick it up and you'd go, hello, police, there is a bad burglar. and the police would come running with their hands on the top of their very tall hats.

Right. And they'd say, oh, what's all this thing? They'd say, oh, yeah, hello, hello, hello. And they'd be holding truncheons as well. It'll be good. They're good police. They're good comic police. They're not like current evil police.

They're good fun police. No, they're bobbies. They're just the old local bobby. Exactly. But the police box, my understanding is also it had kind of like a protective element to it. like if you were being, uh, assaulted or pursued or something, you could step inside the police box and it would lock, uh, from the inside. So then you could call the police and say, hey, there's, you know, someone trying to hurt me. Uh, can you please send help? So it's,

it's like a tiny little armored fortress, except I guess it's made of wood, so maybe not so armored, but, you know, basically just a, a one-way phone. It's like, you know, Batman's red phone that only calls Commissioner Gordon, but, you know, for the entire police department and also, you know, like a safe hiding spot if people are in trouble. But it was picked in, you know, as kind of the disguise for the doctor's time machine because they were so ubiquitous at the time in 1963. But shortly after the series began, they started to become phased out. And, you know, they would change colors and then just kind of disappeared from the streets. So, There is this kind of like historic element to the series where the entire concept behind the, the blue box TARDIS was that it was unremarkable.

It was just like you could see it on a street corner and not think anything of it. Oh, yes, there's a police box there. Not a, not a, that's totally normal. It's not something that stands out. But now when you see a blue police box there, it's basically like, what the hell is that doing here? That's, you know, 50 years out of date. So there's this kind of a ironic inversion that's happened with it. But the explanation is, in canon, is that the Tartis is supposed to be able to shape shift and disguise itself to be many different things with something called a chameleon circuit.

But the doctor's Tartis is a very old Tartis and is a little damaged. And so its chameleon circuit is broken. But you do see other Tartis throughout the series, like The Master, who is the mustache twirling nemesis of the doctor, of the doctor. his TARDIS has been different things, including a doric column and also an entire shack in the outback. So it's pretty flexible now the concept there. But the police box look is so iconic, you know, the police box Tartis that they will never change it. They do kind of update it and streamline it a little bit or, you know, try to wind back time so it looks a little more authentic. But, you know, it's only minor variations.

It's totally replaced its actual purpose in culture, I suppose. As you say, if you see a police box, you will just immediately think of Doctor Who, nothing else. You won't think, oh, I could call the police day. You will think there is a man in there and he goes in time. That is the first thing you would think. You see one of those and you want to look inside to see if it is, in fact, bigger in there than on the outside. And it never is. It never, never is.

It's just, yeah, it is very disappointing. It's just some paperwork and the phone usually, awful. But yes, that's the other thing about the TARDIS is that it is time and relative dimension and space. So it's basically like an entire office complex inside of this police box. It's much bigger inside and has, you know, like there was a running joke about the pool, like when, you know, the Tartis gets flipped over on its side. Like the pool goes spilling out and floods one of the rooms. But throughout the series, they've also had to like shed parts of the Tartis to like create energy or something. I think there have been a few times when the doctor has been like, okay, we're just going to hack off like three rooms over here to give us the power to, you know, warp through this dimensional barrier or whatever.

So, again, they don't really think too hard about the consistency. And it always just seems like the TARDIS is whatever they decided to be, which I guess is kind of fun because it's a little different with every character. That's one thing I love about the TARDIS because it's, you know, let's let's get real. It is a set. It's a set in a studio somewhere. But just like the fact that the actor can change, they can just change this. set whenever they want and the explanation is like well he's in a new control room or this has been you know he's reprogramed it or you know some of the modern version will joke about changing the

desktop or whatever but it's like yeah you can change a set and some sets have looked far out some sets have looked have looked very plain uh the fourth doctor used a set for like half a season that was all this like very old like polished wood for some reason and just you can again the tartis can be whatever you want it to be it can look whatever whatever you want to look in theory it is an infinite space inside that box. So, yeah, you can have entire episodes set entirely in the TARDIS because you can explore the TARDIS and do whatever you want. It's great.

Right. You can have a bottle episode that isn't really a bottle episode. Like, you're in one location, but there are so many locations inside of it. Yeah, I feel like they really, you know, in the vintage series, they did go inside the TARDIS a lot and you saw a lot more beyond the control room. Whereas now when you, when you see that, it's like a kind of remarkable standout episode. like there's some sort of drama happening and monsters chasing everyone through corridors and they don't know where they're going.

But you don't really see a lot of that. But, you know, you were mentioning the like the change in the desktops. And there was one kind of fun episode where they had like basically the TARDIS stores all of its old control rooms in memory. And they outsmarted the enemy by bringing up one of those control rooms. And basically it was like the auxiliary bridge on the enterprise or something. You know, they basically were able to control the TARDIS from the stored memory of a previous control room. So it is, you know, in creative, clever hands, it is a tool that has basically unlimited purpose and use and can do whatever you want. So that's another big part of the fun.

Whereas, you know, I made the comparison to the enterprise, but honestly, the enterprise is a pretty much a known quantity. And so, you know, you watch something like Star Trek Voyager. and it basically always amounts to like, you know, we're going to do something with the main deflector dish and like pump tachyons through that or the EPS conduits are blowing out. So there's like four or five different tech solutions they can gimmick up.

Whereas in Doctor Who, the doctor is just like, oh, I just remember this ridiculous thing that we've never talked about that the TARDIS can do and I just save the day. So it's great for ass pulls. Just pull something out of your ass. They've in sort of rosy I say relatively recent, this was probably like 10 years ago now, but they do treat the TARDIS like a character as well.

The doctor certainly does. And I think there was that Neil Gaiman episode, The Doctor's Wife, where I think that was what it was called, where the TARDIS actually manifest as a person. But I don't remember what happens in it. I just remember that that happens. It's exactly what Jeremy just talked about. The fact that, yeah, the TARDIS basically is put into a person and another entity takes over the TARDIS. So, Amy and Rory are trapped inside the TARDIS with this other entity who's trying to. trying to erase them, but they're hiding in old rooms or whatever while Matt Smith is working

with this lady who is his TARDIS, and he just gets to build a machine with her, and then he flies after his Tartis, and it's a fantastic episode, the doctor's wife. I love it. I remember it being great. I mean, as you say, the whole of the first and most of the second Matt Smith season, I thought were just top tier, like, all cylinder's brilliant television, really enjoyable. They were tackling a lot of these sort of iconic concepts. but we're really putting interesting spends on them in a way that doesn't alienate new, new viewers. I thought it was just really, really good stuff. Yeah, I think the entire reallon.

Yeah, I think the entire relaunch, starting in 2005. Like, I didn't mention this before, but the first time I watched any Doctor Who was like 10 years ago, and I downloaded a bunch of episodes from iTunes because they were on sale for like nothing. And I watched all of the ninth doctor, which is just one season of Christopher Eccleston, who was great. Yeah.

But then left at the end of one season because he had really strong personality conflicts with the showrunners. And basically, like, as soon as he started working on the show, was just like, I hate this. I'm not doing this anymore. And he's only very recently kind of been willing to come back into the show after 15 years, not even into the show, but just to do some audio books. Yeah, he's doing some big finish, I think. Right. So that's an entirely different topic.

But it's really a shame because I, you know, that was my introduction to Doctor Who I knew vaguely about the series. But the reintroduction in 2005 did a great job of basically like saying, hey, you don't need to know everything about the doctor. You don't need to know what Doctor Who is because we have Rose, this normal sort of working class human girl from England, and she is kind of your point of view into this bizarre, strange world of this goofy-looking guy who's kind of handsome, kind of awkward, and very self-confident, but also like there's some weird stuff going on underneath the surface, and he's got a whole lot of baggage. And you just kind of gradually learn about this baggage. And, you know, my, my favorite story about Daleks is still just Dalek, the episode that introduces them in season for The Night Doctor. Because it really, you know, conveys the threat of, like the existential threat of what these creatures are. And, you know, if you don't know what a Dalek is, you kind of take the same approach to it as Rose. And you're like, well, it seems really cruel that they've got it shackled up and it's dying here all by itself.

And you quickly understand that that sort of compassion is a weakness. where the Daleks are concerned and that one single Dalek can basically wipe out the West Coast of America if it really wanted to and it just drives home the severity of the threat

and you see the side of the doctor that up until that point you hadn't he'd been kind of this happy go lucky whimsical dude who would occasionally get serious but in that episode he's just like adamant he is dead serious he is like this is bad and it must be destroyed do not give it like an inch

And it's, I just feel like all the subsequent Dalek episodes have failed to kind of capture that. And that's probably, you know, inevitable because that was sort of a first impression. But I feel like the more Daleks you put on screen, the less impressive they are. Like when you see a fleet of a thousand Dalek motherships just with millions of Daleks streaming out over the surface of Earth, it's just like, it's kind of overload. And it just, it seems like, well, you know, the way, the way science fiction conventions work, the more there are of them, the more easily they can be destroyed. Whereas when it's just one or two, it kind of becomes a battle of wits. And in the more recent seasons, Rusty, the Dalek that hates its own kind, but also hates the doctor for making it hate its own kind, is a really interesting

character in its own right. I would like to see more of Rusty the Dalek, because it's a really interesting take on the entire Dalek concept. And I will say that I did not have a problem with the Daleks Take Manhattan or whatever that was called, where there, it's, It's like, you know, Roaring 20s, New York City and the Daleks, like, totally reinvent themselves. It was so goofy and so fun that I just, I couldn't bring myself to hate it like most people do. They, I mean, they kind of had to do that with Dalek because thanks to, like, I mean, the Doctor Who had been off the air for quite a while at that point, 2004, five. Five. Yeah, it had been 16 years.

And they kind of had to do that because the Daleks in the meantime essentially become extremely camp. even made fun of there was a TV show by Victor Lewis Smith called TV Hell which had a sketch that was literally just called Gay Daleks which was about as tasteful as it sounds Sounds great

Yeah but when you need to reframe them that way Because they were basically kind of kids characters They were seen as fun for children These Daleks you know plungers Oh they're so stupid you know They're genocidal like evil alien race But you know whatever brush over that So they really had to reframe the Daleks

in that very well-written episode, I think it was absolutely necessary. But then they kind of squandered it by having them start, like, huge floods of them blowing out the sun at the end of the season. But I think one of the really strong choices they made when they brought the series back was just, and they didn't lead with this up front. As Jeremy said, they sort of slowly dull out backstory over the course of the ninth doctor's season. And at one point he just sort of casually says, yeah, everyone's gone. All my race is gone, our greatest enemy, they're all gone, there was a big war, and I'm the only one left. And that sort of allowed the show to center on him and just, so he has baggage, but it's all like, it's in the past, like, yeah, I used to be part of a race of people, but they're all gone now.

And unfortunately, just the way the show is, they had to bring, you know, eventually they brought the dogs back, and eventually they brought all the time lords back, you know, and his whole planet is back, but maybe it's gone now. but at least for that one season it was the perfect way to break the perfect way to just sort of put everything behind him so yeah it's all gone i don't yeah and it's it's all my fault it's all my fault too was part of it they held that they held that off quite nicely up until i think it was it utopia at the end of the third season with um uh professor yana was that his name yeah yeah i thought they were quite i thought they did a good job of keeping their sort of foot off the accelerator with that there because that that episode in particular that builds to a really astonishing cliffhanger like really yeah i i knew i was familiar with the character

that he has revealed to be uh just like in in in in passing by reputation but you know at the same time i did not know that that was going to be the twist and it takes an entire episode for of like a three parts series to uh kind of become apparent and it's yeah it's really great and it builds on a premise from a really interesting story earlier in the season where the doctor basically hides himself from himself in order to, like, kind of evade some threats. Oh, the John Smith. The John Smith thing. Yes. Yep. So, yeah, the best episodes really do build on one another. And that is one of the strengths of Dr. Hu is that, you know, there is so much history here. And at the same time, you don't just have to build on the past.

You can also push forward new concepts. That is one of the strengths, I think, of the most recent doctor, the 13th doctor, is they've basically, there have been a few times where they've made some very controversial choices and said, you know what? This is how it is now. And I think people reacted poorly to that. I don't know that the writing necessarily justified it, but at the same time, I do admire the fact that they were just like, yeah, we're just going to go for it. And to me, that's more interesting than, you know, I feel like every doctor, every incarnation, except the ninth doctor has to deal with the same like handful of threats. You've got the Daleks who are the genocidal mutants living and indestructible robots with plungers and laser beams

who scream exterminate. You've got the cybermen who are genocidal robots, who are actually cyborgs. They are basically the Borg, like a decade before the Borg, who basically try to take humans and incorporate them into robots that will then spread out and assimilate all other living creatures and take over the universe that way. You have the master who is another time lord. He's one of the doctor's race, and they have a long, long history together and really dislike each other. And then more recently, you have the Weeping Angels who are a really, really cool concept that need to be used a little more sparingly because they're quickly kind of becoming cheap and inconsistent.

But the premise there was basically like they eat people's time by sending them back in time and then basically like subsisting on the energy of their lives or something. it's very sort of, you know, as they say, wibbly wobbly, timey, whimey, and doesn't necessarily make logical sense, but it made for some very, very harrowing stories. That first one, Blink, has got to be one of the best reboot episodes, period. Like, surely. Yeah, that's, it's interesting because it's an episode that barely has the doctor in it, but it is such a great way to introduce people to the entire show and the concept. I really, I really loved the two part of Time of Angels and Flutton Stone.

And I thought that was really good as well, where they introduced the concept that anything that contains the image of the angel also becomes the angel. That was a nice way of giving children horrified nightmares about watching TV, I think. Which is kind of the point of Doctor Who, to some extent, upset children, you know? It's a very valiant thing to do. It's four kids, but it's also meant to scare them. As I used to always say back here, it would have you hiding behind the sofa. That was the constant phrase that was repeated about all Doctor Who's. Oh, Dr. Who's back. Time to hide behind the sofa again, lads. I'm like, no, no one ever did that. Stop saying that, please.

Yeah. One thing I do appreciate about Dr. Who is that it has always, you know, it started with that educational remit. And it's, it lost that. But it never gave up the fact that it is meant to be accessible to children. And in fact, you know, every year you have the Christmas special, which is very, very geared toward kids. Like every, every one of those stories is like very family friendly. It's meant to be something. you sit around the television and watch together the show the franchise has never really with some exceptions in the late 80s never really gone hard said like you know it's doctor who but now it's for grownups it's avoided that like stupid comic book movie thing or even you know Star Trek with some of the more recent stuff with Picard like it's not it hasn't just said hey let's be gory for the hell of it let's let's drop some F bombs because that's that's what people want from our television these days. It still is very, very family friendly. And that's not a weakness. I think, you know, people get frustrated because they want Dr. Hu to take itself more

seriously and have a harder edge. But, you know, they tried that with Colin Baker's run in the late 80s. And they really whiffed it. You know, I think, I think you could have a more adult-oriented Doctor Who. And I think some of the media during the hiatus from 1989 to 2005, did, you know, there were books and audio plays that did have some of that harder edge that you're talking about. But the show itself is really, it is meant to be something you can watch with your kids and maybe it's going to scare them a little bit. But at the end, you know the doctor's going to prevail, he's going or she is going to win and the bad guys will be defeated again. And, you know, time and relative dimensions in space will be safe. I suppose if you wanted

a doctor who more adult, you would watch Torchwood, which was originally that kind of, yeah. Torchwood was exactly that. It's like, what if we did Doctor Who, but people had sex in it? You know, it's like, okay. But I think expecting Doctor Who to be for adults when it's got spinoffs, like, as you mentioned, the Sarah Jane Adventures, which are literally on children's BBC block. You know, you're a bit of hiding to nothing there, I think. It's, you know, kids are going to want to go and buy the Sonic screwdriver at Christmas. That's just how it is.

Yep. They're going to want their little wind-up Dalek. Yeah. I want that. the Doctor Who franchise is that, you know, it was pretty expensive during its original run. It was one of the more expensive shows on the BBC. And that's a big part of why they stopped making it, I think, because it was just like it didn't justify the budget as its viewership kind of steadily declined as more television options became available. And more recently, you know, since it's been rebooted, it is produced in Wales, which is why they're always back in Cardiff, always looking at that kind of weird super modernistic,

city hall with the monolith and everything. But, you know, BBC Wales has access to a lot of talent. And they've done a really good job, especially with the more recent seasons, of giving it kind of that filmic, cinematic quality, like that good, I don't know about good, but, you know, like it looks at least on par cinematically with the Marvel movies for a whole lot less money than the Marvel movies. So, you know, there is something to be said for that. But it's basically a kind of a budget production, and they've gotten better with their CG effects and just staging and

the overall film quality and the look of the show. So, you know, when Christopher Eccleston was first showing up in 2005, it still looked pretty goofy with some pretty shlocky CGI effects. But now, you know, you still get some parts where you're

like, oh, I see the seams, but on the whole, the CGI is pretty solid. Like, in the most recent season, there was an episode about a basically, like, Chris Noth was Donald Trump's rival hotelier, and his hotel was taken over by giant spiders, and they were actually very convincing. You don't see a lot of CGI creature effects where you're like on television, where you're like, that looks pretty convincing, but they did a good job with the spiders.

Like, you can tell their Cig. Yeah, the spiders bothered me. I was very upset watching the spider. I was like, no, this is too much. It's too many spiders. I just, I remember tuning in for the first, for the premiere of Jolie Wittaker's run, and as soon as the titles came up, I was just like, yeah, this is, this looks fantastic. This is astonishing stuff. Like, the titles of Doctor Who are always great, but that one is off the chain. I love it. It's so ominous. I really liked how Matt Smith's titles would change up a little bit to reflect some of the storyline stuff. Like at Christmas, you would get like the TARDIS flying through time, space, and snow. It was always, always kind of fun when they would make little tweaks like that. But yeah, like the, I would say even as the writing is kind of sagged a bit, the look of the show has been really good and has really improved. And I'm hoping they can kind of bring everything in line and give, you know, some of the overall vision to the series that it really needs right now. Like when Jody Whitaker first started, her first couple of episodes seemed like they were kind of going somewhere with, what was, oh yeah, like,

She lost her TARDIS, basically, and they were kind of stuck trying to figure things out. But then, you know, in the third episode, all of a sudden, everything's back to normal. Like, they hit the reset button without really following up on that plot line, which could have been really interesting. You know, you had the third doctor, I believe, mostly spent his time on Earth working with a British government agency called Unit, mainly for budgetary reasons. But it kind of grounded the show and forced the doctor to, of be outside of his area of specialty. And even though that did drag on a little long, it was still, you know, kind of a brave, interesting premise for like totally changing up the nature of the show.

And I was hoping they were going to do that with the most recent season, but they really didn't. And I feel like when they do things like that, then they can kind of, you know, after a while they can flip the switch and change things around. Like Tom Baker, who followed after John Pertwee as the fourth doctor, like his stories are probably the most cosmic stories. Like, you know, just the, I've seen like three seasons of Tom Baker. And he's always out in space, you know, in space stations, dealing with other planets, dealing with like Earth that's been dislocated in time or, you know, on the wrong

side of the galaxy or whatever. And it always seemed like big concepts. And a lot of the, the sort of storyline stuff, storyline elements and kind of backstory or just like narrative bits that that showed up during those episodes have become like long running story elements of Doctor Who and one of the more impressive things that more recent shows have done especially I think during the Matt Smith era

was to reference back to those without being super overt about it because I was watching through the episodes like I would watch one season of one doctor and then jump ahead like a vintage doctor than a modern doctor so I would I would you know sometimes really

noticed, like, these elements that carry over from one vintage franchise to the modern story. And what really struck me, I think most of all, was early in the Tom Baker run, I think, if I'm not mistaken, like his first story off of Earth, he ends up in the space station. It's like an arc, the arc in space. Yes. And, yeah, like, the story there is basically, like, the planet Earth was abandoned for a long time by humanity. And the humanity went out and colonized the galaxy because Earth was.

unlivable due to like solar flares or something. And so there were a bunch of people in suspended animation who would repopulate Earth. And there are stories during Tenet or Matt Smith, you know, like the 10th, 11th doctors that, and I think even the 12th doctor that still reference back to that. They're like, you know, they don't make a big deal of it. But it's just like, oh yeah, like right now, you know, Earth is not able to be inhabited. So, you know, we're looking at this colony ship where things are happening. And, you know, it really speaks to the deep love that who was the showrunner for Matt Smith and David Tennant? Stephen Moffat. And Russell Tee Davis beforehand. For better, for worse. Yeah. Like he was, you know, one of his strengths, I will say,

was that he was a big fan of Doctor Who and really kind of internalized the chronology of it and a lot of the story elements. And at his best, he could really, you know, use those as kind of to establish you know, a sort of internal narrative consistency. Like there is this sort of mapped out history of humanity throughout Doctor Who that the series is actually pretty good about sticking to. So, you know, when it does things like that, it's really interesting. And it is pretty unique among media properties. Like there aren't a lot of ongoing media properties besides Star Trek or like, you know, Marvel comics that really do that. And even Marvel comics, you know, they keep, they, they hit reset all the time. And Star Trek hit reset too. You know, they had the

J.J. Abrams movies, which fortunately didn't take, but Doctor Who's never really done that? It's always been like, when they brought back the series in 2005, they didn't say, hey, it's Christopher Eccleston. He's the doctor. He is the first incarnation of this crazy guy from outer space, the time lord. No, he was the ninth doctor who followed on directly from the eighth doctor. How about that? Even though no one liked the eighth doctor. Even in the most recent series, they've been doing it more overtly, I think, calling back to

not quite such a grand scale, but they've been bringing back stuff from the Russell T. Davis years, like Captain Jack's comeback, I think. And just generally reintroducing stuff like that, which hasn't been seen throughout, basically the entire Moffat tenure at all, which is nice and interesting. There's a sort of speculation, it might be a bit of a desperation move, but I don't know. I've not, unfortunately, haven't been watching the new season at all. I was surprised that even when they did the TV movie they had Sylvester McCoy in there for consistency's sake

because that was such a departure from the rest of the series that you'd think that they would just skip over that but no they didn't they even paid sort of due diligence there as well We're going to be able to be. Hey you, yeah, you. Are you like podcasts? Aren't you into anime? Does analysis happen to tickle your pickle?

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All right. So come on down to, wait. I say, come on down. To superhero stuff you should know. Part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. Okay, so before we get into the video games, I feel like we should kind of wrap this by talking briefly about the best vectors for people to enter the world of Doctor Who with. Yes. So there are, there's a list here on our notes of recommended episodes.

We've mentioned a couple. But I guess each of you make two recommendations on. a story arc to check out which doctor is it and what's so good about it. Stuart, why don't we start with you? Oh, my gosh. Well, the thing is, I wouldn't recommend starting with classic who at any respect. As much as there is great stuff there. I think, honestly, it's got to be either Rose, which is the first reboot episode, or just go straight to the 11th hour, because it's one of the best premieres ever of anything. So the 11th hour, which one is that? That's the first Matt Smith episode, yeah, with the monster whose name I forget, but it gets the central elements over really nicely. It introduces Amy, who's a great companion. And it has a very, a nice kind of epic feel while not being completely over the top, like some of the latest stuff that they did. But if you watch that and then you're not interested in watching the rest of the season, and I don't really know what to tell you, it's a very entertaining hour. Yeah, the great thing about the more current

Doctor Who series is that you constantly see companion characters or other characters who show up recurringly and you're like, oh, I know this person from like a billion other things. Like they're pretty notable. Like Amy is Amy Pond is Karen Gillen

who's been in a lot of stuff, probably best known for being Nova. No, not Nova. Nebula. Nebula. Yes. Nova's the Nova core. Nebula in the Marvel movies. Then you have the impossible girl

what's her name Clara Jenna Coleman who's in the crown and so on and so forth yeah so there's a lot of a lot of this like oh wow I know this person

they pick a good caliber of actors for their leads in the series so even though it's in Wales and you get a lot of like you know just kind of some local talent which sometimes is really great sometimes is like

okay their leads are always really strong yeah and Rory who basically is Amy's boyfriend slash husband eventually. He, a few years ago, got to be on Legends of Tomorrow, and he basically played a Doctor Who-type character as a guy who traveled through time. So it was really fun to see him on that show.

And if you go back and you watch, he's just a fun actor to enjoy. I think a lot of people would enjoy going back to seeing him if they didn't know him already from Doctor Who. All right, Diamond, what would be your two picks for interesting stories to watch? Well, I really feel that even though I do like the new stuff a lot, I would have to recommend some old stuff, though, if you really want to try it.

I think the fourth doctor, to me, is very accessible because he is just so weird. His performance is really bizarre. But there's also the fact that there's a fundamental bedrock science fiction thing going on here. That's because back then in the 1970s, there was a lot of Doctor Who stuff written by Douglas Adams. And this is before he wrote, you know, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. So he was doing this sort of in between Monty Python and Hitchhackers. He was doing Doctor Who, and a lot of his stories, I think, hold up very, very well. And one in particular that I'm very fond of is called City of Death.

Yeah, I haven't seen that one. It's the old formats. I'm pretty sure it's four or five, probably four half-hour episodes. But it's all about, yeah, it's the fourth doctor, Dr. Hu. He's, sorry, we all know who his doctor is. But he's there, and he's with another time lord who, Romana, who at the time, which is just a backstory, he and the actress playing her were actually like either about to get married or just gotten married. So they have a really nice chemistry together.

And it's just this fun, weird story of the doctor in Paris and some weird shenanigans happened. And all of a sudden they realized that, you know, the fabric of time and space is unfolding for some reason in Paris in 1970, whatever. And it's just, it's a great story. It's written by Douglas Adams. I feel like it's a really fun story to revisit. But if you don't want to go to the 1970s and you really insist, You must do modern stuff. Obviously, what Stewart mentioned was very, very good.

But I also just want to shout out an episode called Midnight. It's, I believe that's the David Tennant episode. And it's just, it's him, and he's alone on some kind of, like, a tourist vehicle or something. So there's no time travel. He's just, he's alone in this space. But it's a very creepy story because something else is on, is on board with him, and no one else can identify what it is. And even he can't identify what it is. And things just are getting worse and worse and worse until, you know,

well, everything goes straight to hell. But it's just, it's a really great, it's kind of a bottle episode, because it's just, it's him. And, you know, it's a bunch of actors in a very small set. And it's just, it's really tense. I love that episode. Midnight. Yeah, that, that one does a great job of really kind of showing why it's important for the doctor had to have companions. Like, they are this constant presence and always have been. He's always got some sort of usually human, sometimes, you know, from another species, but they're always human looking, usually. I think there was like a lizard person or something, like for two episodes, in the 70s. Anyway, like, they're this omnipresent element of the show, and this episode,

I think, does a great job of justifying their importance to the show. So, yeah, that's a really good one. So my recommendations would be Dalek, which I talked about earlier, the first appearance of Daleks in the modern series with Christopher Eccleston. And I guess I would actually recommend the Ark in Space, which is the first kind of breakout Tom Baker story, where, you know, it lays down these elements that are so important and essential to Doctor Who throughout. I mean, it has some really terrible effects and costumes, but it is interesting. It's like, it really kind of leans into the aesthetics of 70s sci-fi, which is something that I really, really miss. Like, you know, there was just this kind of like look to science fiction.

in those days. And I think Doctor Who did it really well. And at the same time, like the series doesn't really feel like it belongs to that. Like the doctor feels so out of place in these kind of spaces, these sort of anodyne, you know, like everyone's in jumpsuits and everything is like pristine white space stations. He's so out of place because he's this, you know, Tom Baker is so bohemian and just like this. like you said, he's weird. And it just makes for an interesting story. And I haven't seen that many of Douglas Adams' episodes that he wrote for the series.

I don't know if I've seen any, actually. But like going back and, you know, watching the Tom Baker era, I see so much of what informed the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gentley's holistic detective agency, you know, things like the somebody else's problem field in life, the universe and everything, whereas, like, the, you know, basically a, a field that covered an alien spaceship and basically just triggered the part of people's brains that makes you say, oh, that's weird, but it's somebody else's problem. Like, that just seems so Doctor Who. So, yeah, like, you really kind of see those elements that were carried forward. Overall,

who is your favorite doctor? Oh, boy, I've, every few years, I do, I write this over and over again to figure out where I'm at. And, I mean, in my case, Matt Smith was my first doctor, so I still have a lot of affection for him. But I keep going back to the fourth doctor. I don't think I could say, I really think the fourth doctor is my favorite, even though I'll never forget tuning in and watching Matt Smith. I just, the fourth doctor stories, I still haven't seen them all.

You know, it's seven years. He made so many episodes, and I still haven't seen them all. I actually can't see them all because I think a couple of them are gone. But I just, I love his performance. and yeah, he just, he walks in these, as he put it, he walked on set and he'd walk into a scene and he'd always seem very confused, and he was confused because they would shoot multiple episodes at the same time. So he would put that in his performance, he'd walk into rooms like, oh, who are you?

What's going on? And it just plays so beautiful in this character because, you know, he's out of time. He doesn't know where he's coming or going, and the actor presents it that way. Yeah, one thing that Tom Baker does really well is just, like, he just bullshits, basically. he'll he'll say something and then like the next sentence he'll say something that directly contradicts it and there's no sense of guile about him it's just like oh yes i'm just saying things um like you you get the the sense that he believes everything he says even when it directly contradicts something else he said it's a really it's a really strange performance and it is very unique but i have to admit that

that too much of what i've read about tom baker's personality on set makes it a little difficult for me to watch him because he's got a reputation for having been pretty tyrannical as an actor, like always walking over other actors' lines and basically just being extremely difficult to work with. And he's even copped of this himself. But yeah, like you definitely see him walking over other actors and not letting them get a word in edgewise sometimes. And you're just like, this isn't a podcast, man. You're like, calm down a little. The fourth doctor, the original podcaster. Yes. Stuart, what about you?

That's difficult, but I mean, I'm very fond of McCoy because it's not so much him as I really liked what they were doing with the show when he was the doctor. They were getting a lot more kind of meta and political and experimental. When you get stuff like silly things, like I think it's Dragonfire where the cliff hangar is that he pointlessly climbs down on a cliff and hangs there while gunning at the camera, which is just the kind of thing that makes my heart sing.

You know, the kind of production where they're like, well, we need a cliffhanger, just getting to climb down there for no reason and make a face. Perfect. I love it. And stuff like that happens to patrol, which seems sort of very anti-Thatcher, which is a lot of fun because, yeah, I love stuff like that. I like the look of his episodes because they look somehow worse and cheaper than the older ones, even though I think they had more money. Yeah, were they filmed on like videotape or something? Yeah, they look like they were. It gives the whole thing a very interesting kind of appearance. But honestly, in terms of actual performance, I really do like David Tennant. I didn't used to like David Tennant. I thought it was too histrionic and emotional, I guess. And now I kind of see that as a huge strength to it because there's so much humanity in Russell T. Davis writing.

It's something he's very good at, I think. And episodes like what I mentioned before, like Utopia, it's just that is. about the best that the reboot gets to me. It's just pure energy and sort of chaos, but everything comes together really nicely. I think he did a great job as the doctor. There's a reason that he's so many people's favorite. He won that poll I mentioned before. Yeah, they're not surprised. But I'm still picking McCoy because I think he had an umbrella with a question mark on the end of it, which is just flawless. So, got to be that. I went Acey's twine professor, and that was fun too. If people want to see The Seventh Doctor, I could definitely,

highly recommend, I believe it's called the Curse of Fenric. It's almost horror. It's kind of very creepy. It's very creepy story, but it's one of the last episodes that was made before the production got shut down. And it's very good. Yeah. I think with him, with Becoy, you can turn into almost anything and see something worth seeing, even if it's bad, which is more than I can say for a lot of the others. I've got to be honest.

But no, he's a good lad. I like him. And he was an excellent, Bilbo. Oh, that's true. Yeah. No, I really like McCoy also. I've only seen one of his seasons. And you're right, it does look very shoddy and cheap. But there was, there's something very appealing about him, especially his relationship with his companion ace, who's a teenage girl. And there's nothing creepy about it. It's very much like he is her mentor. Like he sees something in this delinquent teenager punk and wants to bring out the best in her. And like he's kind of made it his personal mission to set her on the straight and narrow and, you know, help her make her. something of her life. And it's a really great relationship. It's very kind of parental. And so there's a real warmth to it. Yeah, it comes through even in very strange, very, very difficult episodes like

Ghostlight. There's still this through line of Ace kind of, so facing up to her kind of passed in there, which I really liked. Yeah, he's the best. He's my favorite. I nominate him. But yeah, I feel like so far my favorite actors have been actors who haven't really had that much of a chance to shine, Like Christopher Eccleston, you know, really pulled me into the series. And I would love to have seen him, you know, follow through for a three-season run as opposed to one season and to see where he would have gone. Or, you know, even to have him come back as, you know, for the 50th anniversary episode instead of saying like, oh, there's this other doctor who doesn't have a number, John Hurt. He's here. He did this thing that we said Eccleston's doctor did.

You know, what do you want? And Jody Whitaker, I feel, is really, really intriguing and has a really sort of understated way of playing the doctor. And like I said earlier, I wish the writing in her episodes were more ambitious and just, you know, I don't know, there's just something about the overall arc of her seasons that hasn't really appealed to me that much. Like, they're fine. But at the end of the second season, I was just kind of like, yeah, I'm ready to move on. But I really like her and would like to see her in some better shows. I do like the incarnation of the master that she's up against, though. I will say that.

Like, he is very, very convincing. I actually really liked Missy a lot. Yeah. But I feel like the new master is, he really kind of brings the energy and an actual sense of being a threat that the master rarely has. Like, the master is such a cartoon villain. And, you know, some of the worst Doctor Who has been when the Master has been around. I like that episode where David Tenet was turned into a house elf in a birdcage. Like, I didn't like that version of The Master at all.

And his episodes were always just so schlocky. I was really glad when they finally wrote him out. But, yeah, I don't know. The Master is a character that really is difficult to do well. And I do feel like the most recent season has done a pretty good job. the master. But anyway, it's not like I'm an expert on this thing. I've only seen, you know, half of all of Doctor Who. That's barely anything. And I've read none of the books and listened to none of the audio books. So what do I know? What right do I have? Where do we, where do we feel

about Peter Cushing as the doctor? I think I watched that on riff tracks. I've never, I've never seen that one. I bought the, I bought the DVD and didn't watch it and then sold the DVD. That's the way to do it. Three stars. we've talked a lot about the TV series. We're now an hour and a half into the show. No talk to the video games at all. But that's okay because I don't think there's a lot to say about the video games. Pretty bad. So let's kind of briefly take a run through the video games. A lot of these are not really easily accessible for Americans. Having been made for platforms like the BBC Micro or there were a bunch of adventure games that were published exclusively like you could only play. them if you were online with a UK IP address for a long time. Oh, yeah. So, you know, it's, this is definitely an outsider perspective from me, but, but I did go

through and watched a bunch of YouTube footage because that is sometimes all that is possible of these games. And I've got to say, nothing here really jumped out to me and made me say, like, this is a true experience for Doctor Who fans. I'm stunned at the lack of sort of high-quality Doctor Who video games. It seems like such an easy thing to make a... I mean, that's an easy thing for me to say, but it seems like such an easy concept to grab a game from, you know?

I don't really understand why it's been so spotty, with all these weird little not really satisfying games that have been happening. I mean, the adventure games are about the closest that... The 2012 adventure games, they had like Charles Cecil from Revolution Broken Sword as a kind of a big name for adventure games. But even then they were sticky, kind of glitchy, janky, unpleasant to play. I mean, they were very authentic with all the voices from the show and everything. But they just weren't very good. And I feel like...

Well, I mean, they were free, so, you know, I have to work with those boundaries. Yeah, but were they free when they took up some of my hard drive? Not really, no. Because, you know, I could put other things in that space. more interesting like comics and mp3s but no i that's the that's the currency we're using here space hardro space okay i think part of the difficulty is a fact that because the doctor is such an unusual character that if you compare it to other sci-fi properties you know like your star tricks or your star wars there's some of those uh premises that translate very easily to games you

know you can have a space action game you can have you know you know a canyon run or something Whereas a lot of these Doctor Who games, like, well, if there's too much combat, then it's not really Doctor Who. I mean, I can tell you that one of these games that looks, it looks great and it sounds great, and it's from 1992, it's called Dalek Attack. If you watch this game, it looks fantastic, it has really good sound effects. But, like, the doctor's running around and he's shooting things with his Sonic screwdriver, which, like, it's not a weapon. It's supposed to be, you know, it's a fun little tool thing, but instead he's shooting everything. It's like, eh, it looks great, but it just, it's not really, it's not authentic to Dr. Who, which to me kind of ruins it. Yeah, the Sonic Screwdriver is a great storytelling tool, like literally a storytelling tool, because it basically kind of gives the doctor a way to get through stupid inconvenient situations.

Like, there were some seasons where they took it away. Like, I don't think Peter Davison's doctor had access to the Sonic screwdriver at all. And so you would have these episodes where he would get stuck in a, like a cage or a prison cell or something for basically an entire episode. And if he had the sonic screwdriver, he could just like, and he'd pop open the lock and they could get on with the story. But instead, it's like, how do we get out of this cage? Oh, no. So, yeah, like, it's not a gun. It is a way to just move the story forward.

And I guess that doesn't work on a, what was that, an Amiga platformer? What do you want? I think it was on DOS as well. But it was basically, I think, I remember it from the Amiga personally. I remember it being okay, but as Diamond says, it's really und Doctor Who-Hoo-ish. All right. So going back in time, as one does, the first Doctor Who game that I can find evidence of existing, at least as a license game, was from 1983, called Doctor Who, the first adventure for the BBC Micro. And this is basically not really a Doctor Who game.

It is a game, a set of games with the Doctor Who name slapped on it. And that's pretty much it. Like, it's basically, there's a vertical shooter. There's something that looks like battleship. There is a frogger, like just a straight rip-off of Frogger. And through this, you play as the doctor trying to complete these goals. And instead of having lives, you have regenerations. Briggs-canon, there are 15 instead of 12 regenerations.

My God. But that's gone by the wayside anyway, so it doesn't matter. I was on board until you said that. Now I'm not on board anymore. Yeah, right? It's trash. Frogger, though, frog is pretty sweet. So this would have come out during the Pete Davidson era. So it was right after Tom Baker. And Pete Davidson was kind of a, I think from what I've read, it was a little bit of a hard sell for people just because he was much younger and much more sort of passive. Like Tom Baker was a very sort of agro, get out there in your face, take charge kind of person.

Pete Davidson's doctor was much more like kind of mild mannered. and that was that was sort of the entire purpose there like the entire point and his story actually begins with him sort of wandering days through the Tartis and the multicolored scarf that the fourth doctor wore literally is being unraveled as he walks through the Tartis so there's a lot of visual symbolism with that particular doctor but none of that really comes through in this game which is Frogger and some other minigames there's like a Pac-Man clone you know it's just like they said, we can put together a bunch of really quicky games based on popular arcade hits and call a Doctor Who. But you don't even see The Doctor as like a character on screen.

Yeah, he's like a stick figure or a dot. It's really, it's, yeah. There's a picture of Pete Davidson on the, I think, on the box, and maybe on the, but not even the title screen. Like, it's just like, here it is. We made these games. It's called Doctor Who. It's what you like, kids, right? Here you go. Play this. Yeah. The reincarnations, the regenerations, don't look different from one another. it's like on your fourth life you don't have a floppy hat and a scarf so it's just kind of like

do we really consider this a Doctor Who game aside from just a long I mean it's the let's be fair it's the first adventure they were still finding their feet that's true it's very formative it was the heart nil of Doctor Who games yeah but it was even it predated that even this is like the pilot to the whole canon

it's the first adventure this was canon this was an official product you set it yourself this counts so this happened that's true this did happen. There was this one time that Doctor Who died 15 times while trying to complete a game of fraud. He was trying to cross the road, get to the scrapyard, and just getting wrecked constantly. I think that's pretty much what it has to be. It's before they implemented speed limits, I think. Yeah. Like literally one second before that

police officer walks in front of the scrapyard on an unearthly child, the doctor has just run across the road, finally having made it. This is my new canon. Okay. All right. So two years later, Dr. Who and the Warlord for BBC Microship, this was a text adventure that I've not played, but, you know, just, it's really hard to watch a long play of a text adventure because they're so slow, but, you know, just kind of skimming around. It does seem very doctor-ish. Did you guys play this at all? I'm afraid I didn't play Doctor Who and the Warlord. The BBC have really nailed down the license to Dr. Who here. And I'm quite impressed that they've had that kind of foresight.

But no, unfortunately not. My access to BBC Micro's was incredibly. But they had one at my old school. But it didn't have Doctor Who on it. I had Joy Racer and nobody even knows what that is. So don't even get into it. Don't even bring it up, you know? Yeah.

The only BBC Microgame I've really heard of is Elite because everyone's heard of that one. Oh, and Repton. It was Repton as well. But yeah. Probably the best graphics on the system. Maybe there should be like a full to our BBC Microepisode. sometime. That would be unlistenable to most people. So a year after that, you have

Dr. Who and the minds of the minds of terror for the BBC Micro and C64. And this is, I think this is a little more like it. This is kind of one of those like classic post-Jetset Willie 2D platformer adventurey sort of things. Whereas You know, you're running and jumping and moving around, trying to evade enemies, picking up items that you need, like, keys and, you know, tools to move forward. It doesn't look amazing, but it does, you know, watching it seem pretty confident.

I think it's supposed to be, is this supposed to be like a Colin Baker episode? It's really hard to tell with a... The sprite looks like Colin Baker to me. Yeah, there's only like three colors on screen, and you can't depict Colin Baker's outfit with only three colors. You have to have basically the entire crayon box and chew it up and then vomit it. So it's kind of an approximation, but it does seem to be Colin Baker-ish. And he has a robot cat, which has not been in any of the episodes that I am familiar with, but maybe there was a season where he was like in between choking his companion to death

and getting put on trial by time lords. He ran around with a robot cat. That was like his midlife crisis or something. I think it was called Splanky. I think it was called Splinks or Spinks or something, because I have actually... So that was a thing. No, I don't know if it was a thing, but I just remember, because I'm slightly more familiar with this game, because it was on Commodore as well, I think.

This reminded me of, like, exile, which is another similar kind of a game, but it's like one of your home computer platformers in the respect that almost everything you do will kill you. Like, you can't do anything. You can't fall more than a few feet. You can't touch anything or do anything. If you do it in a wrong order, you're stuffed. It's just...

It's just... just awful, you know? It's awful in a very different better way than the other two awful games. So I think it's okay. Plus, I'm going to give it some credit for being called Doctor Who in the Mines of Terror, which I choose to believe it's a political comment on the previous years mine closures by Margaret Thatcher. It's probably not, but that's the most interesting thing about it, I think, is if it is. So let's pretend like it is. That is something that is a recurring motif throughout Doctor Who of kind of like the 70s and 80s is the importance of mining and the political ramifications around the whole mining situation in the UK.

And that's something I don't know about, but you definitely see a lot of it. And I don't think that's just because they were like, well, here are some empty caves that we can film in and we can save a lot of money this way. It does seem to be something that was really kind of bubbling under the surface of society, you know, like the clash between working class and the Thatcher politics and so forth. but I am not an expert on those politics, so I cannot really speak to that. But it does seem to be something that shows up a lot in Dr. Hu of that era, you know, is kind of a recurring motif.

It's at the forefront of episodes of stories like Paradise Towers, which seems like an explicit attack to me. Yeah, and the green death. Yeah. But there is also the element of, as you say, it's like, well, we haven't got much to work with here. We can either have Doctor Who in the Disused Warehouse or Doctor Who in the Minds of Terror, which sounds better to you. There's also the quarry. Don't forget the quarry.

Doctor Who in the empty quarry. All right. So after 1986, Dr. Hu really took a nosedive in popularity overall. And so not surprisingly, it was another six years before they said, hey, remember that series that's on hiatus and probably never coming back? Let's make an amiga game about it. And so you get 1992's Dalek Attack, which was mentioned before. This one features Sylvester McCoy's doctor, who normally runs around with an umbrella, but here has a blaster because that's what happens.

I guess you can kind of justify it by saying like they're Daleks. So of course he's going to be really harsh to them. He's going to blow them up. But I don't know. I mean, the way I see it, around the same time you were getting licensed game of like home improvement where you run around with a nail gun shooting dinosaurs. So whatever, you know. Like, who cares? Like, just do whatever.

It's 1992. We're all rich. Let's do whatever we want. You know, I hadn't seen the title screen on this, but it's even got Davros on the title screen. We're wearing, like, sunglasses, which is weird. It's like the cool Davros, the cooler Davros. Deal with it, Davros. It's like, you know, that yearbook photo, there's Dauvros and then there's the cooler Davros.

Yeah. But, yeah, okay, so this is one of those. Again, an Amiga platformer, so it has a lot of really kind of detailed graphics, a lot of kind of dimension to everything. Everything has a nice, like, shading and modeling to it. The Dr. Sprite is a little wonky. He's, he looks like Sylvester McCoy here. He's got the hat and kind of the little bit of a slouchy Columbo look to him. And there's like giant serpents and stuff like that. But again, it does involve shooting things. And even with the sonic screwdriver, it's still a little not quite what you expect from Doctor Who. I mean, I feel like with a Doctor Who platform

where you'd want to go, you know, little Nemo for NES, where you just don't have the ability to attack stuff. And it's, it's really about finding smart ways around enemies and, you know, kind of clevering your way out of impossible situations. They did make one like that, which we'll get to in exactly 20 years time. They finally clocked that. Yes, finally. Yeah, you know, 20 years, it's all it took. But, I mean, For me, when I think Doctor Who video game, I just think, point and click, adventure, come on. Like, you know, get LucasArts on it or something. I don't know.

It just, it seems like such a, he's a kind of a passive character, so make a more passive game. Like, make a first person game or like adventure game or something like that. Yeah, I really feel like the only doctor who really was kind of like the active planner and schemer was the seventh doctor. You know, it seems like Sylvester McCoy's character always had some sort of master plan in mind. Although, again, it usually revolved around life improvements for Ace. But, yeah, like he is much more of a, oh, I found some sort of wild situation that I didn't expect myself to be in. And this could mean the end of all life in the galaxy. I should figure out something to do about that.

I mean, the downer is dialogue attack is probably the best Doctor Who game that I can think of in terms of, it's actually you can actually kind of play it and have some fun with it and you can't say that about a lot of these games unfortunately it's kind of a consistent for an Amiga game

if someone gave you it you would be like yeah this is all right but no it's unfortunately it's not that prestigious of a video game brand yeah it's

kind of a shame it does seem like it is a concept ripe for for experimentation I mean look at Kronotrigger I feel like Kronotrugur owes a lot to Doctor Who. I've talked about this in other episodes, but you have, you know,

a cavewoman named Ila, who then, you know, you find out her mother's name is Leah. Like, if that is not some sort of reference to Lila, the cavewoman from Doctor Who, I, I, the time-traveling cavewoman in the time-traveling video game. Like, come on. That just, it seems like there's got to be some sort of influence there. But yeah, there's just nothing on the, even close to the level of Chrono Trigger. And, you know, Chrono Trigger is all about combat and magic techs and stuff like that. But the overall storyline of it, you know, where you're jumping around time, like you put a different gameplay concept in there where it's not, you know, menu-based attacks with swords and things like that. I think you've got something, but it just never really happened. So jumping ahead to 1997, we have Doctor Who, Destiny of the Doctors, a personal computer, first-person adventure game. So kind of in the style of, you know, the journeyman project or missed, but. you know, post-polygons, so everything is 3D and you're moving around some very boxy, chunky

spaces, fighting, I guess, boxy, chunky dolics or not fighting, but avoiding. And the idea is that you have to rescue all seven doctors who are captive. I mean, you're kind of getting into that mist thing. Like the doctors appear on screens, kind of like Atris and his sons appear on the little book windows in mist. So definitely. definitely a game very much of its era. Very much, yeah, very much like the multimedia experience. You know, they used a lot of, they used a lot of, you know, legacy audio. But I think everyone who was still live at the time recorded some new stuff.

And there's a huge chunk of video, which of the most recent master at the time, Anthony Ainsley, he's just, you know, he's in a chair wearing a big robe. And he's just, you know, he's acting to the rafters because this is it. And I don't think he lived much longer after this either. So it was just, there's some aspects that I think are very fun to revisit at this point, but it's a lot of slow moving in, like, you're into the TARDIS, but the TARDIS also was, like, generic Doctor Who monsters in the TARDIS for some reason. You used to, like, get past them or maybe, you know, throw a switch and knock them out or something, and it's just, it didn't seem that much fun to play, even though it seems rooted in the show's history. So I really appreciate how much it, I can imagine, I mean, at the time, I didn't know anything about. or who, but if I was alive, if I was a fan in 97 and I saw this, I'd be like, oh, wow, look at all this stuff that

this is a really fun celebration. I just wish it was fun to play. Yeah, I mean, you didn't mention, but it was written by Terrence Dix, who wrote a ton of episodes and a ton of books. Like, he was a very prolific writer who contributed a lot to the vintage series. So it should have been a knockout, but it just, yeah, like nothing I've read about it seems very positive. There seemed to be around this time. It seems to be part of the same sort of era that brought a state of the X-Files tie-in game, which is a lot of first-person video.

There was even a goosebumps one, and then there's stuff like Virtual Springfield, where it's less game and more just kind of exploring. So I don't know. I wondered if maybe they would have been better going for more of a passive kind of you are in the TARDIS and you can look at things and you can look at clips

and you can explore the history of this character. That might have been more fun, like a little Doctor Who virtual museum thing. They even did one of those for the X-Files of all things. So I don't know. Doctor Who's got a lot more law and artefacts and ornaments and things you could look at. But no, they had to ruin it by putting gameplay in their mistake. How dare they?

All right. So that's it for vintage Doctor Who games. Like the TV series, the video game series took a 15-year hiatus and would not reappear until, at least as far as I can tell, until 2012 with Doctor Who the Adventure Games, which, Stuart you, referenced earlier. These are the ones that were produced by Charles Cecil, the designer of Broken Sword, and they were, from what I understand, released as free monthly downloads on BBC's website. These are the ones you had to have a UK-based IP address in order to play initially. And they were, they kind of ran in tandem to Matt Smith's first season. Yeah, I can't remember all their names. They were episodic. I think they did one season of four and then they did another. They did. They did another. they started a second season but only produced one game and then I think BBC realized it was a complete waste of time and money. They're not horrible.

They're okay. As you said earlier, they are free, but they're mostly just kind of janky adventure, sort of quasi-stealth games where the rules of the stealth don't really make any sense. Graphically, they weren't too bad. They were kind of not that far off the tell-tail look, where it's a little bit plain, but they make it kind of work for it. So, I mean, I think they're worth a look.

a fan, again, mostly because they're a new, they're a new story with the actors, with the voices of the actors from that show. And Matt Smith puts in a great performance like he always does. Worth noting about him, actually, every time I've heard him do something supplementary for Doctor Who that isn't the main series, he always puts his back into it. I think he's really impressive. I like him a lot. Yeah, I do like Matt Smith's take on the doctor. He looks so kind of just like generic Hollywood handsome guy but he's kind of quirky like he did a really good job I think of

being someone who was very young and very old at the same time and that's a difficult trick to pull off but there is a weight about his performance yeah I think he described his own version of doctor he said like imagine if an old man tried to recreate a young man that's that's how he played him you know like he had the he had the looks you know he's a good looking guy but like he doesn't quite act like a young person actually would just like you you think maybe he might be

young person but he's not yeah right he thinks bow ties are cool you know he's just a little off and I say this is someone who wears bow ties um yeah he like as I think about it I you know I might have to say that my my favorite incarnation of the doctor is Matt Smith just because he was kind of overshadowed a little bit by the importance of his companions but as an actor he just brought a lot to the role that really brought layers into it. So yeah, it's good to hear that his, his video game appearances are, you know, on par with his on-screen performances. And that is one of the advantages that the few kind of contemporary Doctor Who games have is that they can make use of the actual current talent, not have to rely on like voice clips or like, here is a guy

who played Doctor 25 years ago. And now he's him, but he sounds really old. That's, weird? Why does he sound so old? I mean, I'm not actually sure if you can play these legally anymore, these adventure games. I don't know if they're even still available. I mean, I'm sure you can pirate them from somewhere, but you probably shouldn't do that for the law. Yeah, I looked for them on the, yes, the law. Yeah. I looked for them on the BBC site and did not find anything, so. I think they were on Steam for a bit. I'm not sure if they still are. You can buy a physical disc with the first four on, I think, the first season.

But I would imagine that's probably quite expensive if that's the only way you can get them now. So I don't know how you would go about that. Yeah, and I'm on a Macintosh. So even if these were made for Mac, it wouldn't be current with the modern operating system. So anything, yeah. Well, in all honesty, you're not missing much. Maybe look them up on YouTube or something. Yeah, no, I did. Like, I kind of watched through and, you know, it's not really my style of game anyway, but it does seem like they put some effort into it, despite them being, you know, for free games, they're very impressive.

Yeah, for sure. I agree. Yeah, definitely. And then finally, well, mostly finally, there was another game in 2012 called Doctor Who the Eternity Clock, which I did not realize came out on consoles, PS Vita and PlayStation 3. Yeah. So I totally missed out on this one because I was really only looking, you know, for games that kind of obey the retronauts rule of 10 years old or more.

but someone please fill me in on this it says Prince of Persia like yeah it's not 10 years old but it's based it's a 2D side scroller so that makes it retro as far as I'm concerned in some capacity this game is so close to being good because

I think that the Prince of Persia style of platforming really suits the feel of Doctor Who that's kind of weighty it's not your athleticism is more reasonable more realistic you know doctor could run and jump over things he normally doesn't but when he does it should feel like an effort, like he's making an effort.

It shouldn't be the doctor double-jumping and then collecting some fruit or something, even though that would be amazing. I feel like Tom Baker probably could have double-jumped if you really wanted to. Yeah, probably if he felt like it, you know, and in a modern game, it's tall enough that it counts anyway. In the modern game, the scarf would trail behind him and it would look cool. Get platinum games on that. That's why I want to see.

But no. Yeah, so the problem with Doctor Who, the eternity clock is, aesthetically it's fine the gameplay idea is fine the voice acting is even better like it's I think it's genuinely laugh out loud funny some of the lines that Matt Smith comes out with he does a really good performance in this

unfortunately it's really boring like the level design is super dull and uninteresting and I can only recommend it if you really like Doctor Who and you want to see more Doctor Who stuff yeah because 2012 was really like that might have been one of the really peaks of the popularity of the doctor in the US because, you know, Matt Smith had come on the scene in 2010, and he was really well received, and, like, there was a steady building of hype.

So, like, 2012 would have been a huge year to have this game. Oh, it's a, you know, it's multi-platform. And it just, yeah, I remember I was definitely a fan at this point, and I was curious, but then I looked at it and I was like, this doesn't look like it's going to be fun to play. It sounds like fun, but it just doesn't look like it's any fun to actually, you know, engage with. So I didn't, I did not invest in it. As a fan, you'd probably get something out of it, but as a person who likes games that are good, then not so much. You know, it doesn't offer a whole lot. I know there was another, there was at least one Wii game as well, but I don't know anything about it.

They seemed to just sneak out. There didn't seem to be a lot of hype around these things. Yeah, there was a DS game also. For some reason, it's not on the notes here. Yeah. But it looked, it's, yeah, it's super bad. it's um it's uh matt smith and and uh amy uh as the companion and just looking through footage of it it's a lot of talking with these like very kind of ugly renditions of the characters and

yeah just really chatty and not very interesting like the writing didn't really jump out at me as being like oh this is this is very clever it's just like here is a lot of words in a video game, enjoy. I wonder if Doctor Who is just too big to make a video game of now. Like, it seems like such an easy goal that, and again, it's easy for me to say, I don't make games, I don't know how hard it is, but I don't know how much restriction they were under with the license and things like that, but it seems to me like there's so much to work with, like, and to even to just adapt that it's such a shame there hasn't been that great Doctor Who game yet. Yeah, I feel like, you know, the point and click style,

or some sort of top-down semi-action kind of thing where you're avoiding combat. Like, I feel like there's a lot of different models out there that would work for Doctor Who. We just haven't seen anyone really jump into it and say, let's go. I was 100% convinced we were going to get the Telltale series. It was like, that's happening.

Yeah, right. But then, no, we got the wolf among us instead. But not that. Yeah. So there are also a bunch of flash games. And there are also a bunch of flash games. And there is one other game that should be mentioned even though it's not explicitly Doctor Who, and that is Lego Dimensions, which included like basically every media property in the universe aside from Disney stuff and Marvel. So Lego Dimensions was one of those toys to life games, combining actual Lego play sets with the standard Lego game design. And I was reviewing Lego Dimensions. At the time this came out, there was a Doctor Who

expansion module. And my mother happened to be visiting. And she really likes Dr. Who. So I was like, okay, you know, I'll grab the Dr. Who expansion and she can check this out and see what she thinks of it. And she really liked the, you know, the idea of Dr. Who. And there's, there's, as with all the Lego dimension stuff, there's just a lot of love invested into representing the media property. Like, you can go into the TARDIS and depending on which doctor you're playing as, the TARDIS console changes. And when you're playing as, you know, the first doctor, it's all in black and white with film. That's really cool.

There's some really just wonderful details, but it is still a Lego game, and therefore it is very repetitive and has a lot of unintuitive goals that basically amount to, like, go to this place and hit something until it falls apart and then take all these little pieces and go some other place. Just, you know, not very interesting or fun, but, God, seeing these little Lego renditions of Doctor Who properties, like, Even though I didn't really know Doctor Who that well at the time, I was still like, this is really cool, like, just in terms of how they've represented the property. And I'm sure if I went back and messed with it now, I'd be like, wow, this is incredible. But at the same time, it's still tied to a Lego game. I mean, I didn't even know that you could play as all the doctors. Now I want to go and buy it. But they're bearing the lead here, because the most important thing about Lego Dimensions is it's the only game in which the doctor can meet Sonic the Hedgehog.

And they go, Sonic screwdriver meets Sonic Hedgehog. See, they can have that line for free. I bet they didn't even think to put that in. They probably didn't. Because I don't think the properties interact that much. It's all pretty much like they're all in little archipelagos. That's a bit disappointing. It's just kind of stuck together.

I mean, you can't have interactions between brands. That's crazy. Only brands that are owned by the same media conglomerate can interact like that. So there's not even like a hub where you can have like Gollum running up to the Ghostbusters and stuff. That's so disappointing. No, I mean, you can run around. You can run around the hub is whatever you want. Like, you're not going to have meaningful, like, dialogue interactions between these characters.

Because that would, that would, like, realistically speaking, I'm, I was being kind of flippant there. Like, I, it's not an act of laziness by the game developers. Like, the kind of hoops that you have to jump through to make shit like that happen. Yeah. Is just exhausting. Like, just, you know, I've dealt with it a little bit. And now that I'm at limited run games and we, you know, deal with, with some pretty big licenses. just being even involved tangentially with that stuff.

I'm just like, oh, my God. It's like the tiniest little thing, like copyright text printed on a switch cartridge goes through like five passes of approvals. And of course, it takes the property holders like a month to get back on the stupidest little sign off. So these things just take forever. So yes, the idea of Sonic the Hedgehog actually talking to Doctor Who, or the doctor, sorry, I can't even imagine the absolute hell it would be to try to get sign-offs on all sides for this, especially since one of those property holders is Japanese. And that is just, you know, that is another level of complexity and business relations all together.

So anyway, they'll have to stay in my fan fiction then. That's disappointing. I have to, I would be really remiss of me not to mention this. And I'm sorry, you can feel free to cut this. okay if you use now like dr who when that went off the air that uh left kind of a complete bereftness in the british sort of sci-fi scene there was very little for anyone to latch onto but there was red dwarf which is the comedy sci-fi sitcom now i love red dwarf the relevance here is if you have the lego dimensions doctor who set and you have the lego dimension's fantastic beast and

where to find them set you can unlock an easter egg that lets you go into the tardis and enter red dwarf and run around Red Dwarf with the scutters. Yeah, for real. I was amazed. Oh, my God. And I had to mention that because it's the coolest thing in the world. And, you know, it is tangentially relevant to Doctor Who. So it's out there now.

That is very wild. I would not have expected that. Yeah, I had no idea. And then when I found out, it blew my mind. So it's a hidden Easter egg. That is an entire property that presumably involved a lot of licensing money and a lot of development money to make happen. But it's just like a hidden. free thing. It seems that way, yes. There aren't any of the characters. You don't get,

you don't get Rimmer or this or anything, but you do get scutters. You do get Snacky, the vending machine, and there are a lot of references to Red Dwarf lying around, like little Easter eggs. But basically, yeah. That's incredible. You have to go to a specific level in the Fantastic Beasts thing, and then you go into the TARDIS, and then you are in the ship, Red Dwarf. And that's really cool, I think. I love stuff like that. Huh. That's weird, wild stuff. Um, yeah, so anyway, that's, that's pretty much it for Doctor Who video games. And, uh, wow, we've gone more than two hours at this point. So we've had a lot to say. I hope people have enjoyed this very

sort of extremely broad overview of Dr. Who, uh, and the franchise and its history and, you know, whatever video gaming's, video gaming offerings that has managed to dredge up over the years. Um, this, you know, this is just like the tip of the iceberg here, honestly. Like each doctor could be its own, actually, honestly, each story arc could be its own podcast episode. There are, I'm sure, podcasts dedicated to breaking down Doctor Who episode by episode. Oh, God, yes. There is so much coverage, so much writing.

This is not that. No, this is not that. This is a quick overview. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of, you know, video game appeal for Doctor Who, but I really like Stuart, I feel like it is such a video game friendly property. I feel like at some point someone is going to crack the code

and come up with a Doctor Who game that is both good and also true to who the doctor is. I feel like the time travel components alone, even if the doctor never got out of the TARDIS, you feel like there's got to be a way to tell a story through a game where just like viewing different eras,

visiting the past of a society, and going forward to seeing how it develops. Like this there's so many, there's so many options you could run with, you know? Yeah, like, I could see moving around through the galaxy, through the universe, kind of like the garden in Final Fantasy 8, where it's like this thing that just shows up on the world map, but then you go inside and it's basically an entire institution. Like, that would be, the idea's right there. It's so good.

You could even swim in the pool. You could have a swimming mini game, for God's sake. No man sky, but make it TARDIS. There you go. There you go. Perfect. There you go. That works.

No combat. Just let me fly around a space in my box. Don't give them any ideas because then they'll make destiny, but with time lords. And, you know, nobody wants that. As good as destiny is, they'd make it into a game service where you're running around solving missions with, like, ten of the online time lords. Actually, that sounds amazing, and I want it now. I know exactly how I would do it, but nobody would want it besides me. And there would be a lot of collecting fruit in it, so don't worry about it.

Well, you know, you've got to stay nourished. That was a running plot line in the Colin Baker doctor years. His companion was like super into fitness and Colin got a little ponchy between the seasons because there was a big hiatus. So one of the plot lines was like, hey, you need to slim up, buddy. So his companion was always ragging about eating more fruit. Now you'd run around and clipped 100 jelly beans and you get an extra regeneration. That's exactly how that looked at. I believe you mean jelly babies.

Jelly babies. Oh, God. I'm fired from Doctor Who now. You're right. It's not jelly beans. I can't believe it. Yeah, yeah. No, you know what?

It is jelly beans because the developers have no idea. It's more true to, it's more true to the late 80s. It's more accurate that way. Yeah. All right. So, yes, that's a lot of talking about Doctor Who. So I think we're going to call it a night. Well, for Diamond, it's a night.

For me, it's like morning. So yes, you probably need to go to bed. So I'm going to let you do that. But thank you both for taking the time to chat for many hours about Doctor Who. You know, it's like we spent no time at all. Yes, funny, time is all relative. Let's wrap up by doing the usual outroes. Stuart, where can we find you on the internet besides retronauts.com, of course.

Yeah, I am at Stupacarber on Twitter, which I once again say, a very funny username, you won't be disappointed by my swearing on Twitter. There's so much of it. If you go on Nintendo Life, you can see my reviews on there fairly regularly, and I have another podcast, and I apologize again for the language. It's called Assholevania, in which me and Andy Hamilton go and come up with the worst possible take about a video game or video game related subject. And then we tweet the take and we see what happens, basically. And it's called Arsholvania, not assholevania, like all the American people who keep tweeting me going,

can't find your podcast. Where is it? It's the British spelling of arse. We've really shot ourselves in the foot with this one. That's okay. People still type in Retronauts as in not as a not as a lot. as an explorer astronaut, but as in not as in zero. Oh, dear.

So, yeah, it's good stuff. Diamond, how about you? Well, beyond Retronauts, which is what I do most of the time these days, I am on Twitter, F-E-I-T-C-L-U-B, like my last name, Fight Club. So it's a joke that's now 20 years old. But, yeah, that's been my primary output right now as I'm doing the weekly columns for Retronauts on the Patreon. The columns are now audio, so that's been a lot of fun to write something and then say something into this microphone, and then I put some music in, and it's just people seem to be really loving it, which I'm very pleased.

Other than that, just, you know, I am a freelance writer, so I do little things here, bits and pieces. Not to tie this down, but we did do, took a game show recently, and I covered a lot of news for them for IGN. So maybe you read headlines for me on IGN recently. All right. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, as GameSpite on Twitter. And what else? Oh, yeah, Limited Run Games. I also have a YouTube channel where I do video game stuff, a lot of history stuff. It's what I do. But of course, Retronauts, the podcast you're listening to, this, by the way, is the Christmas special episode. Well, there's Bob's Holiday Special. That's coming this Friday. But there is the, you know, the Doctor Who tradition of the annual Christmas specials. So this is, This is that episode. So hopefully it's been fairly family friendly aside from Stuart cursing. I'm sorry. I just like to swear so much.

We make no promises. It's so fun. But yes, thanks for listening. You can check out Retronauts on various podcatchers. You can find us on the Greenlit Podcast Network. And, of course, you can support the show at Patreon. If you subscribe for a few bucks a month, you can listen to every episode a week in advance with no advertisements or promotions. and at a higher bit rate quality than on the public feed.

And for $5 a month, you get exclusive episodes every other Friday that you can only hear previews of on the free feed. And you also get Diamonds Columns. And there's some other stuff that we have planned down the road. So, yeah, $5 a month gets you all that cool stuff and helps us make this podcast. Because someday we're going to be able to fly on airplanes again and we'll need to pay for those flights

so we can sit together in podcast studios instead of doing the remote thing where it gets out of control when we're in person we're like 90 minutes that's the deadline but here look at this we're up to 130 already good God it's terrible that's just how it goes though

but anyway thanks everyone for listening hope you enjoyed this episode of Retronauts thank you Diamond thank you Stu for sharing your experience and wisdoms with this property and we'll be back in a week with, we'll be back in a few days with the holiday special. And next week with the Years in Review annual tradition, 1971, 81 and 1991 this time. So look forward to that. In the meantime, have a happy holiday. Stay safe. And let's hope your 2021 is better than

your 2020 was. Geronimo. Bye. Yes, Alonzei. It's the end, but the moment is being prepared for. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.