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Doctor Who
2005 · TV series · 13 seasons
ActionAdventureDramaScience FictionFantasy
The Doctor is a Time Lord: a 900 year old alien with 2 hearts, part of a gifted civilization who mastered time travel. The Doctor saves planets for a living—more of a hobby actually, and the Doctor's very, very good at it.
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I really enjoyed this article. It was a very pleasant read. The author should write a book and or movie script. The original Doctor Who Silurian episodes were fun to watch. Makes sense to connect dinosaurs or the remnants of Silurian civilization to dragons and deities. Star Trek Strange New Worlds S04E01 deals with the dinosaurs and Mars @ 65 million years ago. The story is rather intriguing and fun to watch as well. Invincible S04E04 deals with the various ages that planet Earth has gone through and has a different take on the meaning of Hell and Satan and why they exist. Last episode of the Season 4 is rather interesting, as well as it relates to the possible next phase or not, of human evolution.
One thing I find weird is that despite the stock photo of the Terminator's shiny endoskeleton holding a gun being used to illustrate so many AI news stories, now we have ChatGPT people keep saying "how can AI possibly hurt us?"
We've even had the dichotomy of some Doctor Who episodes where the self-driving car crashes itself to kill the occupant to silence them, against repeated real-life news stories about self-driving cars killing people, and yet the connection isn't getting made that software controls hardware.
I think if we're being pedantic, the character's name is "The Doctor". The TV show is named "Doctor Who" but the character doesn't call themself that and a name is what something is called.
[Edited to avoid assigning a gender to a character who has had different genders]
For those who need more context of who the Time Lords are
The Time Lords are a fictional ancient race of extraterrestrial people in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. In-universe, they hail from the planet Gallifrey and are stated to have invented time travel technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Lord
British TV in that era was enormously, shall we say, frugal. As soon as they discovered videotape, which was both cheaper than film and reusable, they went all in on it. BBC especially (and ITV as well, it appears) often wiped their tapes and recorded over them to save money, since they saw no reason to think anyone would be interested in their shows in the future. For this reason, some early episodes of Doctor Who are lost forever, at least until some foreign TV station finds copies in their vaults, which has happened over the years.
There's this TV series, Doctor Who. Its two most recent seasons have been produced in partnership with Disney.
The latest Doctor's era started with a Christmas special. The episode is told from the perspective of Ruby, his soon-to-be assistant, who appears to be troubled by a suspiciously consistent streak of really bad luck in her life. The Doctor is first shown as a mysterious figure suddenly showing up out of nowhere to catch a glass that Ruby just dropped at a club before it reached the floor, just to disappear a moment later without any introduction. He makes an impression of some "fairy godmother"-style character that stays hidden in the background, pops up to help Ruby and then disappears. Some time afterwards Ruby gets into a really serious trouble and the Doctor finally steps in to triumphant music to save the day and starts fully interacting with Ruby. Pretty common and effective way to do a build up to an introduction of a mysterious character, you'd say.
Except... there's one extra scene with him placed in between. As a yet another instance of Ruby's mysterious bad luck, a huge promo installation depicting a snowman is about to fall from a building's elevation onto the taxi she's riding in. She's completely unaware of the danger, but of course, the Doctor is there in the background to save her again; he makes the traffic lights switch faster so the taxi is already gone before the snowman falls. However, that's not the end of the scene - it appears that the snowman will now fall onto some pedestrian who now entered the crossing, who appears to be a mother with a child in a baby stroller. The Doctor rushes to push her away, the snowman falls onto him instead, though it turns out to be empty inside so he isn't harmed after all and the stroller turns out to be filled with Christmas presents rather than a baby. A policeman shows up, questioning the Doctor for a bit about what just happened there. The Doctor introduces himself in a short conversation with the policeman before he goes away.
I was quite baffled while watching that scene and once I finished that episode I kept wondering what was it about. I couldn't see the point of it, it wasn't telling us anything new that we didn't already knew about Ruby, the policeman is nowhere to be seen again either, it only seemed to diminish the later scene when the Doctor finally gets into the action properly and steals the spotlight. You can't successfully build up to an exciting entrance when you just had another less remarkable entrance already. It also felt out of place as this one moment wasn't being told from the Ruby's perspective anymore - the taxi with her inside was already far away. He still introduces himself to Ruby later on, so you could just cut that scene entirely and no value would be lost. In fact, I'd say you would actually add some value this way, as it felt to me that the episode would simply flow better without that scene.
Fast forward some time and I stumble onto commentary track of one of the episodes. Here I hear the episode's writer (and showrunner) talking a bit about how the collaboration with Disney goes. He says that he has plenty of creative freedom and Disney is rather off-hands, but they do come back with some notes from early screening panel testing that he isn't required to act upon but which he considers useful regardless. As an example, he mentions that the Christmas special episode got a feedback from Disney - it took quite some time for the episode to introduce the main character and the test audiences were getting impatient, wanting him to be introduced earlier. The writer then concluded that he decided this feedback makes perfect sense, so they did late shoots to include an additional introduction scene - the one I described above which existence baffled me while watching. This explained everything: the Doctor's triumphant entrance was clearly meant to be the moment of his big reveal, but now it just wasn't anymore, all because of applying seemingly reasonable feedback that was meant to make the episode better.
This is kinda what applying LLM feedback to your writing feels to me. You see some argument being made and it makes sense when you think about it, so you apply the proposed changes, forgetting about what made you write it the way you did it in the first place. In the end, the result gets worse for one reason or another. You "fix" things that were actually load bearing and allowed the reader to connect with your thoughts better.
At the time, there was also real concern about what that estrogen was doing to other people too, people around women who were on supplements. I used to be a competitive swimmer. There was a real debate in the 90s/2000s about how much of that estrogen was ending up in pool water. The question was whether it was healthy for children, boys and girls, to be literately swimming in a not-insignificant amount of supplemental estrogen. Testosterone patches were also an issue in pools, but they were much less common. With the change in treatment the debate is now largely moot.
There is a line in a Doctor Who episode (Torchwood?) where a character comments that he can taste estrogen in the rain. In real life, it was detected in rainwater.
Red Dwarf had a tiny budget initially, you just need good writers and actors
I can’t imagine Yes Minister’s budget was particular high either.
And it’s not just confined to the 70s and 80s. The IT crowd budget was pretty low, gave us some classic relatable episodes.
You don’t need a big budget. Even the “big budgets revival of Doctor Who with Edleston in 2005 paled in comparison to the budget of the most recent series, but the quality was so much better.
Some wealthy techbro from /r/datahoarders is going to purchase this to store all episodes of Doctor Who in uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2 FFV1 Matroska remuxes with redundant PAR2 recovery archives.
I remember this old episode of Doctor Who where the Doctor scoffs at a postcard with the Mona Lisa on it and derides souless "art made by computers."
As a digital artist, of course I rolled my eyes at the time, but these days I just keep thinking about that storyline more and more.
We'e basically transitioned to a world where digital art is almost the default, but I think the world is going to value physical art much nore highly in the coming years.
Scope creep is my main problem with SCP stories. It's structure is for anyone to take a good idea and bang out a fun scene or two exploring it. The more you go the worse it gets.
It's not just an SCP writing problem. The first episode with Doctor Who's "angles" was so small and contained it was about 1-off characters. In a single house. With 4 scary statues. It's a common go-to example of the highs the series can achieve. Later on there's an angle episode that includes tragedy for a series regular, and the last occurrence of some starring characters. It screamed "high stakes" and "please care!" at every turn and just kinda sucked.
Whilst I agree that Keanu is a most excellent human, he was hardly responsible for the concept of the Matrix. In my opinion, Philip K Dick was a major influence (I'm a fan and consider him the prophet of the modern age), though Gibson's Neuromancer was likely a big influence too. (Also, there's the old Doctor Who episode "The Deadly Assassin" which features the Matrix).
It always seems to me that the far right are bereft of original ideas and always co-opt other pre-existing concepts. There's exceptions, but I always find that right wing works are always lacking humour or irony (c.f. Ayn Rand's works).
There are a lot of known lost episodes out there that collectors saved from thrash. The BBC knows it, everyone knows it, but the collectors won't come forward because they are afraid they are going to be prosecuted. They basically stole property which was meant to be destroyed.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/nov/11/lost-doctor-who-episodes-found-owner-reluctant-to-hand-them-to-bbc
Equivalent to an iterative displacement map? (Or is the displacement map dynamic as well?)
Very cool regardless.
Reminds me too of playing around with the feedback from pointing a video camera at the monitor displaying the camera's output. (Probably most famously demonstrated in the opening credits to a particular period of the TV series Doctor Who.)
Of course by both rotating the vide camera, zooming in on the display, you have two of those three transforms.
> In my opinion he's one of the few people in the industry who actually knows how to skillfully write a coherent TV show.
He had this idea around 2004 of rebooting Star Trek: https://web.archive.org/web/20060628131520/http://bztv.typepad.com:80/newsviews/files/ST2004Reboot.pdf
And on a few occasions he also said he'd try steering Doctor Who
Reminds me of this scene from a Doctor Who episode
https://youtu.be/eg4mcdhIsvU
I’m not a Doctor Who fan and haven’t seen the rest of the episode and I don’t even what this episode was about but I thought this scene was excellent.
I was once on a bus and I could hear some teenagers talking. One asked a girl for her phone number and she told him a number starting with 07709, the UK's "555". I only knew that because a Doctor Who episode had recently used the same prefix.
"Since 2023, I and a couple of other key members of the Film is Fabulous! team have been aware of a large collection of films, thousands of films, that have become vulnerable. That collection contains some very important material including a missing episode of Doctor Who."
I assume this refers to Network (now defunct UK home video company) founder Tim Beddows, who passed away unexpectedly in 2023. I remember reading an article about the drama that unfolded thereafter (sorry, no links), which mentioned him having a large, private collection of vintage material, and the first thing I thought is that he probably has a missing episode or two of Who.
Obviously the missing episode of The Web of Fear is out there somewhere [0], and I recall speculation, probably from the Roobarbs web board [1] that "a couple lost episodes of The Dalek Masterplan are in private hands".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Web_of_Fear [1] https://www.zetaminor.com/roobarb/forum.php
I remember a Doctor Who episode where he said, paraphrasing, "You never get credit for the crisis you prevented before it happened".
Sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
I play video games through emulation, mainly because if I were playing, for example, Dissidia Final Fantasy on a regular Playstation Portable, I wouldn't be able to scan the text with my screen reader, or get AI image descriptions. I tried to buy all the PSP games I wanted to play, but that store was shut down. So now I don't think I could pay Sony for these games even if I wanted to.
Blind people use audio description to watch television and movies. And yet, none of the streaming services have Doctor Who with audio description, for example, in the US. So even if I paid to watch it, I'd have to pirate the audio description track.
And yet, companies can pirate all the books, videos, art and music they want, and have the best lawyers on staff to remind the courts who are really in charge. May the rich be brought low, or the poor be lifted up.
You should definitely watch the Doctor Who episode Partners in Crime.
And in 2007, a Doctor Who episode featuring the Titanic... In space!
I’ve never had Alexa control a device via a TV show’ audio but playing back a video of me testing my home automation (“Alex, do X”) triggered my lights.
I’d love a no-wake-word world where something locally was always chewing on what you said but I’m not sure how well it would work in practice.
I think it would only take 1-2 instances of it hearing “Hey, who turned off the lights?” in a show turning off my lights for real (and scaring the crap out of me). Doctor Who isn’t particularly scary but if I was watching Silence in the Library and that line turned off my lights I’d be spoked and it would take me a hot minute to realize what happened.
So this is the "having stuff weighs you down thread", I guess tomorrow something people like will get deleted off streaming services and we'll have the "owning physical media is The Way" thread.
The thing about archives is that it's never clear what will turn out to be important or valuable. You're buying and storing a pile of lottery tickets. Yes, they're probably worthless. But only probably.
I suspect a lot of people's thinking is informed by the long saga of missing Doctor Who episodes, too.
Edit: here's today's "keep forever" thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41665593
Myself, I hoard in moderation and don't even have a home media server.
They also have all the 'classic' Doctor Who episodes and they are very well organized.
https://tubitv.com/search/Doctor%20Who
> they discover a battered Union Jack flag on the surface and a handwritten note, dated some 65 years earlier, claiming the moon on behalf of Queen Victoria. Stranger still, the note is written on the back of a court summons for one Katherine Callender from the village of Dymchurch in England.
This reads like the beginning of a Doctor Who episode.
This isn't new. Lots of old (pre-Internet) media was lost forever because storage was expensive and it was considered not worth it. As an example, there are a bunch of Doctor Who episodes which are lost forever because the BBC back then didn't consider it worthwhile to keep them and overwrote the tapes.
> Flagged
If we had to flag submissions for occasional faults...
For that matter, signs of grave intellectual deficiency are at the beginning already, at
> shooting ... debris up to 20 miles (32.1 kilometers) in the air
Where you are told that volcanic debris has 100 meters precision, starting from a figure that has 16 kilometers fault of precision (use of "precision" here imprecise). These people should not be allowed to leave the house, they fail verification of intellectual competence at the basics (use of "verification" here imprecise). Yet... Yet sometimes their effort does not lead to complete disaster. Be very wary as they are wearing flashing warning lights, but do not throw away the good if it miraculously is there.
--
Edit: and it contains a chunk, «In episodes of the TV series “Doctor Who” and “Loki”». By coincidence, the next the eyes met came to be the shout of TheConversation: «Academic rigour, journalistic flair». What do we do, we throw away all of it? Probably not. It is a very imperfect world.
There are multiple ongoing efforts to find or sometimes recreate media which has been lost to time, including media which was originally published only digitally. The difference is that I can make new furniture which looks similar to or even indistinguishable to older pieces, but it becomes quite difficult (essentially impossible) to recreate for example, early episodes of Doctor Who. In general, I'd have to say it's irresponsible to not at least look to see if someone else has a good quality digital copy first - surprisingly often, they do not.
If something goes on too long without progress it has to end.
They waited way too long to make the third set of Star Wars movie to the point where the only people who cared were toxic fans. If they had some sense they would have made a Doctor Who movie instead because the casting would have been appropriate.
Intel has burned me with numerous screw-ups such as two desktop replacement laptops I had where the "dual GPU" mode caused web browser malfunctions and the one way to make the system usable was to turn off the Intel "GPU". They found out everybody was doing this but instead of fixing the problem they just made it so you couldn't disable the iGPU. The same way Mozilla killed Pocket by trying to shove it up everybody's noses and Microsoft has killed numerous products (OneNote wasn't that bad but when you shove five icons for it on the desktop and on the toolbars you are not advertising it, you are anti-advertising it.) Intel GPUs have dragged my computers down for more than a decade and the one thing I want to hear is that they made a chip that doesn't waste a square micron of space on a GPU I don't want.
>That's such a different attitude compared to people today, who would be giving interviews and posting on social media why they hate something at length,
I don't think this is particularly true. A modern working writer in the Hollywood system would probably expect to be blackballed from a studio if they dissed a studio's movie. A working writer for a comic book company would likewise expect to be fired or lose career opportunities if they dissed a comic book company's output. Individual writers working in prose seem to have a bit more leeway in what they can get away with saying, but are likely to be labeled "jealous" if they write a bad review, in particular if it's of a more successful author.
And media tie in authors probably have no independence, I believe Lawrence Miles was banned from writing Doctor Who books because he once wrote a bad review of a doctor who episode.
I think the default today is forced positivity if anything.
It's a quote from the Doctor Who episode "Blink"
It's a Doctor Who reference to the episode “Blink”, which introduces a villain race of statues that can move, but only when unobserved.
Incoherent snippets of dialogue seen on a DVD turns out to be half of a conversation being had with a specific viewer in the future, a transcript of which goes back in time.
> Do you own your trash after you throw it away?
In a similar story that’s the center point of the lost Doctor Who episodes case.
BBC literally throw away the reels > workers saved them from thrash > BBC now looking for the lost episodes, everyone knows who has them but they are reluctant to give it back in fear of prosecution (BBC can’t grant clemency)
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/nov/11/lost-doctor-who-episodes-found-owner-reluctant-to-hand-them-to-bbc
There is not any significant DRM free digital movie marketplace, and the reality is that movies aren't fungible: if I want to watch Strange World or Doctor Who, I'm not going to just instead watch an indie arthouse film that happens to be available without DRM
Digital media can also disappear. There's Doctor Who episodes that are missing from streaming services as well because the licensing for the music also ran out. Spec Ops: The Line was just pulled from various games services because the license for the music ran out as well. Thankfully they didn't make the pull out retroactively existing libraries. But I do worry that the next time it happens, that the lawyers may see that end users still having access to digital copy of some media is undesired.
As you say, having a DVD drive on everything may not be a priority. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that there's no value in owning physical media.
I've been getting very low view-count videos lately too, but they're at least tangentially related to whatever I've been watching. I'll watch a video about Doctor Who, then I'll get some random person's episode review or convention recap. This never happened before.
Some are alright, some are just weird, and some are unpleasant hatespeechy screeds, but I haven't had even a single shock video recommendation so far.
It is supposed to save the environment, serve social justice and stop discrimination, etc. It is just another way to make a company woke or else it doesn't get investments from banks. Ask Disney, they followed ESG standard and lost a lot of money on the Marvel and Star Wars movies by going woke.
LGBT rights are human rights, women's rights are human rights, etc. But if you mess with the formula of the movie or TV show with bad writing but diverse characters, well even Doctor Who did it and lost. They blame the fans, but the fans know it is bad writing and bad acting. Forced diversity is a failure, crate new characters and make them diverse instead of changing established characters into diverse characters. That's my opinion.
Of course canada loves piracy. Canada is part of US and UK media culture but is often blocked by licensing restrictions. Every time a canadian is refused the ability to stream a US tv show, a pirate is born. Every time a canadian clicks on a link and is hit with "not availible in your country", a pirate is born. Tell me I cannot watch the Dr Who christmas eve special until after christmas? Ill defend that torrent in court with my last breath.
(Fyi, the first season of the Doctor Who reboot was cosponsored by CBC, making it canadian. Look at the credits of most every movie these days and you'll find it recieved canadian tax benefits, yet Canada is often blocked or delayed at release. And half of US actors are secret Canadians.)
Honestly needed this explanation. I opened this expecting this was something that happened in a 70's Doctor Who episode
Things like that is why I too always tried to avoid reading back covers or jackets. Way too often they reveal crucial parts about the story. Spoiling Ender's Game makes reading the book 90% pointless.
I also avoid film trailers like the plague, except for pure zero-content entertainment and visuals-only stuff like Marvel movies (to the extent I even bother with them anymore). Every other type of trailer I block or avoid watching. One problem I remember having with British TV series, in particular Doctor Who, is that they would spoil the next episode by showing a trailer of it in the previous one. In the end it made me stop watching it altogether.
For books of (to me) unknown authors I'll read the first couple of pages, that'll quickly reveal if they're of the "show" or "tell" type of authors, and other things about their writing style. Other than that I'll try to skim the headline of the summary but avoiding reading more than the bare minimum to get an idea about what it's about but nothing more. Sometimes I read books completely without any idea about what's it going to be about.
Maybe you should ask your wife, because as I understand it the prosecution has to prove a crime occurred beyond a reasonable doubt, that's the legal standard, it's the same standard as in Britain as I understand it. You seem to think that someone with some sort of legal authority on behalf of the victim has to testify that the item was in fact the victim's and was stolen-- this is not correct, it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt with any admissible evidence. Or maybe you agree with me and we are talking past each other, I don't know?
To go back to the Doctor Who example, there's clearly concern by the archivists that admissible evidence exists to show the film was stolen by them. Whether this is likely to be prosecuted and conviction is likely to occur is a different matter.
In honor of the 10th anniversary discovery of the lost Nigerian Doctor Who episodes, I'm going to assert that the whole thing is a nefarious plot by The Master to suppress them:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/oct/11/doctor-who-lost-episodes-found-download-bbc
At some point, someone probably sent an email explaining that a Nigerian television station had found a priceless box of lost episodes, and then requested assistance with preservation and/or shipping.
At first I read that as “Winston Churchill”, which made it sound like a Doctor Who episode.
Any takers on how long before we get a candidate that simply does whatever their LLM tells them to do? Pretty sure there's at least two short stories, five Doctor Who episodes, and one Star Trek A-plot that explores this. It usually did not end well.
I remember reading about the efforts to restore colour to material that had only been preserved in black and white.
Before magnetic tape for video really became feasible (1970s), to make a record of television broadcasts, the BBC (and many other broadcasters) would film a quality TV monitor with a film camera. Black-and-white film recordings exist of a number of Doctor Who episodes originally broadcast in colour in the late 60s and early 70s.
Black-and-white analog televisions, like used in the BBC telecine recorder, receive the same signal as a colour TV. They receive a signal with colour information, encoded at very high frequency within the otherwise black-and-white compatible TV signal. On a black and white TV, that high frequency colour information, shows up as fine variations in texture with repeating patterns. It's almost imperceptible really, which was the hack that allowed compatible colour TV. But it's there on the B&W display. And it's preserved on the film recording, too. That colour data can be recovered with appropriate software:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_recovery#From_chroma_crawl
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/dec/11/digital-video-restoration-dad-s-army
Wikipedia has a whole fascinating article on lost (and in some cases recovered in peculiar ways) Doctor Who episodes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes
Yes, unfortunately, the title is clickbait. Generally "Golden Age of Hollywood" is a nebulous term, but only tends to encompass the last few years of silent films (if that).
In general, as I understand it, silent films were lost primarily for two reasons:
A) The film medium of the time was nitrocellulose, which unfortunately is highly flammable (several films were lost to vault fires) as well as being susceptible to decomposition.
B) With "talkies" becoming the dominant form after the late 1920s, the silver content in some of the old silent films was seen as being more valuable than the actual content. In other cases I think films were just dumped, being seen as not having any value and worth the storage costs anymore.
Television underwent a similar phenomenon from the beginning until the 1970s-1980s, due to videotape being expensive and reusable, and older material being seen as not economically valuable (especially after the transition from black and white to color). Doctor Who is probably the most famous example of a serial with missing episodes, but my understanding is that more rigorous archiving was not the norm for entertainment seen as more "disposable" (eg game shows, news programs) well after television companies archived their prime time programs.
> Can you or someone explain why so many Brits want to watch UK television from abroad?
As an example, Doctor Who sometimes releases new episodes. BBC doesn't just have UK television — they have an "on-demand" offering that actually works, and isn't sparsely populated with 15% of the episodes like some other services (cough Xfinity cough).
I'm looking forward to someone recreating the missing episodes of Doctor Who using the audio recordings and set pictures
In its defense, I saw The Matrix at 12 or 13 and adored it because I felt like it was something more serious—-that I could appreciate it was a sign I was maturing, and I was grateful for that
Of course all kids are different. I always loved the Back to The Future movies from a young age. Moon is also harder fare while being less violent than The Matrix.
You might also enjoy watching the modern Doctor Who together? Or Star Trek?
As for more books, maybe introduce him to Hitchhikers Guide?
Part of the plot of the episode Oxygen (Series 10, episode 5) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_(Doctor_Who)
It's an interesting watch (especially with the context of labor relations in mind).
And definitely not Blink, the scariest episode of Doctor Who ever.
I do happen to be a John Wyndham fan and try to track down adaptations, and yes, the BBC one is the best (I remember watching it when it was first aired). The newer remake with Eddie Izzard was disappointing. I'm often surprised that his stories don't get more adaptations - where's Kraken Wakes and The Chrysalids? (Chocky was made into a good kids TV series back in the day).
I hadn't heard of Survivors, but that looks right up my street. I used to be massively into Doctor Who and the Terry Nation novels. I can only find the first season easily.
Interesting, I first found the word in a Doctor Who episode. It was the favorite smell of one of the main characters of that season.
I wonder how many other different pieces of media have introduced others to the word
Obviously not literally everything was there, but for example Disney stuff was and now it's on Disney+, NBC stuff is now on Peacock, CBS stuff is now on Paramount+, etc. etc.
I'm sure it's true in quantitative terms that new streaming services are net new content, but there's a very long list of popular movies and shows that used to be on Netflix and no longer are, and a very long list of publishers that use to make new content available on Netflix and no longer do.
A very abridged list of existing content that Netflix lost: Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Disney movies, The Office, Parks and Rec, The West Wing, Lionsgate movies, Doctor Who, 20th Century Fox movies like X-Men, ABC Shows like Scandal, Naruto, most Star Trek shows, and on and on
All of this is regionally dependent I think, some things are probably still available outside the US.
That kind of thinking still exists. The most recent example I can think of is Ghosts on CBS as the US version of the UK Ghosts. CBS' streaming service (Paramount+) will even recommend the UK original and you can compare them side-by-side.
(Another somewhat recent example to mind was FX's Wilfred as the US version of the Australian Wilfred TV show. Hulu picked up the Australian show so that you could compare them side-by-side. For streamers this is easy content recommendations.)
TV and Movie executives are always looking for "low risks" and "proven formula" will always be a way to lower risk. Shows and movies from the same originating country get "rebooted" all the time. Doing a fresh take across cultural boundaries is interestingly a higher risk as studios try to figure out if the original premise has legs in the new country. Some of what we see is survivorship bias: The US Office was huge so that gets mentioned a lot. But there were a lot of similar attempts that never made it past the pilot because the risks were too high or it just didn't seem to work or whatever.
Off the top of my head, similar to this US IT Crowd pilot there are also "lost" pilots you can find for US Doctor Who and US Red Dwarf. The fascinating thing about both of those attempts occurred during different points of the height of the PBS/BBC partnership. Up until about the late 90s/early 00s PBS was the most common importer of BBC programming from the UK. (That shifted when the BBC decided it could be a stronger revenue stream, starting chasing bigger bids from US cable channels, and then eventually cofounded the BBC America cable channel.) At various points in time PBS' biggest audiences tuned into Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, and Blake's 7 (among others on the sci-fi side of their programming), so even in the "old" TV era these US attempts knew there was some pre-existing audience familiar with the original UK shows through PBS at the time. So streamers have exactly created that as a "new" idea or new thinking so much as shifted the economics of it. (PBS was public funded and not making a lot of money for how popular its showing of UK shows were. Streamers are all big for-profits that use multi-cultural content for moats around their subscription fees. Including BBC America's current home AMC+.)
It does, but it’s also a frustrating demonstration of the access problem. It’s mostly a cavalcade of endless police/detective/murder mystery shows. It has Red Dwarf and classic Doctor Who, but the panel show selection is spotty and they don’t bother to add new seasons in a timely fashion. It does have much of Would I Lie To You but they don’t add new episodes when they air in the UK. They seem to have given up on adding new seasons of 8 Out of 10 Cats Dows Countdown.
> I looked back into the science-fiction literature to try to find the earliest example of a story featuring a nonhuman industrial civilization on Earth. The earliest I could find was in a Doctor Who episode.“
> That 1970 episode of the classic TV series involves the present-day discovery of “Silurians” [...]
That can't possibly be the first example of that concept in sci-fi, can it? Nothing against Doctor Who, just seems unlikely. Trying to think through the early sci-fi I've heard of or read though and I'm not coming up with anything with that concept.
Often media was reused by the studio, for cost reasons. This is one reason there are missing episodes of culturally significant television programs like Doctor Who.
This is almost the plot to the Doctor Who episode Gridlock.
See also, "Extremis", modern Doctor Who series 10 episode 6 [0]:
"Only in darkness are we revealed. Goodness is not goodness that seeks advantage. Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit, without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis."
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6340130/characters/nm0524240
In Doctor Who, one of the Series 12 (2020) stories had that twist, and what stands this story apart from almost all other uses of this trope is that the twist was not an ending, and we see how characters process that reveal.
Please be careful if you gonna read TV tropes page linked in a sibling comment, as the title of that episode is in the list of examples on that page in Live-Action TV section, so you can accidentally spoil yourself all the fun.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Like, when exactly did that happen? Most people who enjoyed the new show and dropped out did so with the Thirteenth Doctor (Whittaker). There were some episodes that made me roll my eyes (e.g. the Rosa Parks one) but personally I mostly I lost interest because of the pacing and the IMO blandness of the characters and the lack of chemistry between them (again, this is just me).
But the show was pretty much about identity for most of its first ten series, not to mention that you could say that there is an inherent aspect of transness to the character of the Doctor (especially their experience with other characters familiar with past incarnations of the Doctor). The show plays a lot with gender, especially around the timelords.
Heck, even on a purely literal textual level the show is extremely LGBTQ from the start. Captain Jack Harkness is openly bisexual (or pansexual) and flirts with the (male presenting) Doctor who is clearly intrigued. The "love triangle" subplots largely play out more as depictions of polyromantic relationships rather than sources for drama. Even without featuring any clearly trans characters, the show is fundamentally queer if you even barely scratch the surface of it.
I guess if you want to consider the show overly "woke", that started as early as when Martha Jones became a companion because her race became relevant to the plot. The only thing that changed with the newer series is that the writing IMO got sloppier.
For general media, Netflix/Amazon? iTunes? ThePirateBay? PornHub? The number of organizations generating and/or delivering content so vast and diverse that I cannot understand how any small group could get their hands around most of anything. I watched a Doctor Who episode today (horrible, bad effects, bad acting). Which of the six owns the BBC?
It's the same story with things like the lost Doctor Who episodes; people just didn't think this children's show from a few years back that they were never going to air again would ever attract anyone's interest and they needed the space (storing lots of stuff isn't free!) so in the bin it went.
This problem still exists today, too. How do you know what will be interesting to people in 20, 30, or 50 years time? You don't always know that, and storing everything is expensive and time-consuming. In a few decades people will be lamenting lost media that was created today.
Another aspect which is often neglected in movies of today is character development. A character's backstory is either completely unknown, or is told instead of being shown, or is shown in a couple seconds, and then something happens to them that was aimed to supposedly instil some emotions in me as a viewer, but no, I don't care about this character. If they die, I guess they will be replaced by another character I don't care about. Example of this chasm between the old and the new is Moffat-era Doctor Who vs post-Moffat Doctor Who. This YouTube review shows it best: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMbZkR9vOrw>
Also, romantic scenes all look the same, completely generic. They're basically copy-pasted between movies. They're so flat and devoid of any genuine feeling I end up hitting the right arrow to skip them entirely.
Usually I don't have those issues with older movies (and movies of a couple selected directors still making good movies to this day).
The thing about Adams with regards to world building is that it was always story first. This is why he wrote four different versions of the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy story. One for radio, one for the book, one for the television series, and one for the movie. There are differences, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, between all of those versions. Many of those tweaks were there to make the story fit the intended medium better.
He also wasn’t afraid to co-opt his universe and shoehorn in a story from a different source, if needed. I believe that the third book started life as a Doctor Who script.
Although, hilariously, they did have a Doctor Who episode where everyone had abandoned London on Christmas Eve because aliens had invaded the previous couple of Christmas episodes.
> I enjoy the fact that these show get a limited run of 10 - 30 episodes. The stories are focused and have less unresolved threads in the show. Compare this to modern Doctor Who, ST: Discovery, or Lost, where you have story details that don't get resolved for seasons, if ever.
I agree 100% with that. That's probably one of the reason that I've been watching more Korean series lately. They seem to be very standardised to tell a complete story in exactly 16 episodes. Starting and finishing a series is a known 16 to 20 hours time commitment. In comparison, starting any new US series is a scary proposition. If it's successful, it might get 10 seasons and 2 spin-off. If it's not, it might stop abruptly at anytime with no resolution to the story.
My partner has been watching a ton of foreign dramas and romcom series the past few years. It started with Midnight Diner and Samurai Gourmet on Netflix, then to K-Dramas, and now we have a few Asian Languages streaming services.
My partner enjoys the fact that these aren't meant to appeal to everybody. They have tons of genres and settings that you can pick and choose. She also enjoys that these shows aren't designed to appeal to the general American audience and tastes and give a taste of other cultures. For example, sex is less overt due to many of these countries having decency laws. (Think Hays Code for older American movies, some things have to be implied instead of shown)
I enjoy the fact that these show get a limited run of 10 - 30 episodes. The stories are focused and have less unresolved threads in the show. Compare this to modern Doctor Who, ST: Discovery, or Lost, where you have story details that don't get resolved for seasons, if ever.
If you have Netflix and want to try some more lighter shows I can recommend: Strong Girl Bong-soon, Love O2O (series or movie), and My Holo Love.
Probably the least understood: Pants. There is a line from a Doctor Who episode, "My house full of soldiers and I'm in my pants." That joke doesn't make sense in America.
I was watching QI a couple years ago. One of the guests was a Canadian actor who had been working in the UK for years and still she still had not realized the different uses of the word.
> Hint: being able to cite Plato does not make you in any way, shape, or form, more "intellectual" than the guy at the end of the bar who knows every Man U soccer game score, who scored, against whom, in which game, at what game time, using which strategy.
> Having consumed a 500 page book does not make you more intellectual than having consumed 500 episodes of Coronation Street. Consumption, in general, is a low hanging fruit, intellectually. Your love for Doctor Who doesn't make you smarter than someone's fanning over Rihanna.
> Intellectuals are rarely lonely. Because true intellectuals see value in information, no matter the sender or matter. Restrictive topic selection is pretty much the definition of anti-intellectualism, in my opinion.
Big red flag anytime anyone prefixes something with "true." First you stubbornly deny what an intellectual is, then you redefine its meaning to suit your narrative, with your "true intellectual."
> On the flip side, I have found a startling amount of people genuinely don't really have many passions / interests.
That'd describe Perell well. He doesn't have many passions/interest. He's bowing out of one interest to flee back into his singular comfort zone of unchallenged isolation, where no one "tests" his chops and he can fly on the wings of his self perception to whatever height he desires.
He shuns every passion/interest that does not align with his narrow view of which passions and interests make a person "intellectual". He's the kind of guy who will use his superior training as "guy who writes things on the Internet" to start arguing medicine with me, and then leave the party because few people share his interests and he just can't contribute to theirs. Because we're not as intellectual than him.
... in his narrowly defined niche of what makes a person intellectual.
Hint: being able to cite Plato does not make you in any way, shape, or form, more "intellectual" than the guy at the end of the bar who knows every Man U soccer game score, who scored, against whom, in which game, at what game time, using which strategy.
Having consumed a 500 page book does not make you more intellectual than having consumed 500 episodes of Coronation Street. Consumption, in general, is a low hanging fruit, intellectually. Your love for Doctor Who doesn't make you smarter than someone's fanning over Rihanna.
Intellectuals are rarely lonely. Because true intellectuals see value in information, no matter the sender or matter. Restrictive topic selection is pretty much the definition of anti-intellectualism, in my opinion.
Peacock has Battlestar Galactica but the Caprica prequel is on NBC only for cable customers. Disney+ can’t put the Spider-Man movies next to the other Marvel movies. When Doctor Who first came to HBO Max, you couldn’t watch it on a Roku TV because it wasn’t HBO Now or HBO Go. The industry is littered with exclusive regional contracts that continually expire and don’t make sense to the customers.
My kids have no concept of linear TV. My 9 year old came back and told me that a friend had a broken TV as when they turned it on, the program was already half way through.
Their 'channels' are netflix, amazon and disney. When I had the choice and they were pre-school then sure, we watched things like Alphablocks on iplayer. I can force them to watch Attenborough or Blue Peter, and they enjoy it, just not enough to want to watch them over things on disney. There's so much competition of things to do.
I do watch BBC (iplayer obviously) occasionally, but the material I'm interested in isn't as accessible as it is on disney/apple/prime/netflix/youtube.
We watched Eurovision and Euro2020 (England games) this year. Aside from that the only BBC output we watched was Roadkill about a year ago, and the one Doctor Who episode which had John Barrowman in. I would watch have I got news for you, but whenever I remember to watch it, it's not on.
This itself might not say a lot, and I still have a TV license despite the limited direct value I get (listen to a lot of BBC radio, and the news website), but what's interesting is I actually work for the BBC. If my household barely watches it, where does the future lie.
Linear TVs days are numbered, but the underlying cultural links that prime time TV provided in the 60s through 90s has already gone. 1 in 4 people in the UK used to watch the same shitty sitcoms in the 80s because there was very little choice.
It's not just BBC or the UK that has this cultural difference. "It's a wonderful life" is an American classic. It is because it was shown on every channel every christmas year after year, generation after generation, and kids watched it, because it was that or reading a book.
I think Star Trek was right with its outlandish prediction from 1988. TV as a form of entertainment won't survive much past 2040 (I think linear TV will still be going in 10 years time, but probably not 30).
"I suspect that there might be more carnivorous plants out there than we think."
Now we just need to bio-engineer them to ...
Somehow I'm sensing the onset of something that might have once been the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster.... or an episode of Doctor Who.
At least you get them eventually! Imagine never getting them.
I've been studying Japanese for about 15 years. Japanese media almost never comes to the US, and if it does, it's usually dubbed. Anything that isn't dubbed is forced subtitled. The one exception is anime, but even that has no JP subs. The best you can do is JP audio and no subs.
But if I buy media from Japan (at a huge markup over their already-insane media prices) I can get JP audio and subs.
And this is pretty much true for all foreign video, except certain British shows like Doctor Who. Even a lot of Canada-specific shows don't make it here (Canada's Worst Driver), though there are a lot of shows/movies produced in Canada with the US in mind from the start.
It's ridiculous. Sell digital goods to anyone willing to buy them. Period.
On the other hand think of the reaction people had when watching the First Star War Prequal when the opening crawl started on opening weekend(we didn't know yet), Avengers: Endgame when Tony got the Gauntlet. Watching all of the Doctors show up at the climax of the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Episode simulcast in theatre. Its a communal experience then. the first glory shot of the Enterprise in 2009, The cheer of the crowd knowing everyone else is feeling the same as you are is a amazing feel you cant get at home watching you 80 inch flat screen.
All we have to do to get the lost Doctor Who episodes is invent FTL drives, fly far enough away and wait for them to reach us!
They made a tv show too, some of the cast being the ones from the radio show. It's definitely in the original doctor who style of special effects, and I really enjoy it!
That is not probe, but a prosthetic replacement for their exobrain. The Ood are generally good in Doctor Who, it's humans who are horrible abductors for them. If that image is from "Pond Life" mini series as suggested by the title on the first two frames on Figure 2, that's the butler of the eponymous family.
I suggest you to just watch the relevant episodes as an exposure therapy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ood#Appearances
The core idea of capturing a child's imagination with a learning toy by framing it as an object from the universe of a beloved TV show is a great idea.
I can see some flaws in this particular implementation. The Doctor Who tie-in is very unevenly applied - the toy shares no visual design elements with the TV show, and I think the example project of "intergalactic weather service" would have strained my suspension of disbelief even as a child (while "Send and receive emojis" represents complete abdication of the attempt).
However, they do seem to have gone to a lot of trouble on the art side, with illustrated "story mode" lessons narrated by Jodie Whittaker herself. One can only hope the plotting is of a higher quality than recent seasons of the actual show...
This isn't my experience at all. On certain subjects, YouTube will start relentlessly pushing an agenda. If I watch some videos where people talk about sci-fi movies or TV, my recommendations become flooded with videos about how SJWs are ruining Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who, etc. It's gotten to the point that I now only watch such videos in Incognito Mode.
Here's an example of the UK use of the word "series", which would be called a "season" in other places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_(series_10)
> The tenth series of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who premiered on 15 April 2017 and concluded on 1 July 2017, and consisted of twelve episodes, after it was announced in July 2015 that BBC Worldwide had invested in a tenth series of the programme in its annual review. The series is led by head writer and executive producer Steven Moffat, alongside executive producer Brian Minchin. It is the third and final series overseen by the two as executive producers, as well as Moffat's sixth and final series as head writer. This series is the tenth to air following the programme's revival in 2005, and is the thirty-sixth season overall.
In the UK, Doctor Who is clearly an outlier. The other really long-running shows are soap operas like Eastenders or comedy panel shows.
But in the US, there seem to be an awful lot of outliers, and it's on the strength of those series that Netflix initially established their following: Friends, The Office, Park and Rec, Seinfeld, Community, The Walking Dead, The Blacklist, Gilmore Girls, Grey's Anatomy, West Wing, That 70's Show, Supernatural, Criminal Minds, and I could keep going, honestly, for quite a while.
So yes, there's an extent to which 5 or 8 seasons is less common, but the goal for US shows has been 100 episodes for decades now, which is usually 5 seasons of 20+ episodes each.
If Netflix is adopting a more UK-like approach, that might result in better TV eventually, but it would be nice for creators to know they have to tell their story in 16 episodes rather than 100.
It's acclimation. Since the 70s, the BBC has produced series for a particular number of episodes and then dropped them. There are some exceptions, like Doctor Who, but that has been the practice. In the US, historically, we just keep running until the ratings tell us to quit.
I was seriously excited when I heard they were rebooting Dune. It is one of my favorite books and movies. Modern graphics, sound, music, actors would have been wonderful. Then I found it was may have fallen victim to being "woke". All of my favorite franchises are being wrecked. Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who and now Dune. In this case, Liet Kynes has changed gender and ethnicity. It doesn't even make any sense. The original Dune already had plenty of diversity and arguably some of the most powerful female characters in all of SciFi. I wish I knew how to fix this.
That style of clockwork reminds me strangely of the Doctor Who episode The Girl in the Fireplace (1), with the clockwork robots, which in turn is the same kind of "odd" feeling I get from Khufu's ship, or steampunk in general (2).
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_in_the_Fireplace
2) https://i.imgur.com/eSsrlSh.gifv
It feels weird to see this called super paranoid, I've been backing up my data ever since my first PC went belly up on me. Didn't have much on it but lost some photos, so now I keep everything backed up and still break out into a sweat the moment my laptop starts making any unusual noise.
Technology isn't perfect so a backup is a must for anything of value: whether financial or sentimental. For a good example of why backups matter, look at the history of Doctor Who. They didn't leave any backups of parts of the original show because they figured those were pointless, re-recording on the physical copies instead. Now the old episodes of the show are being searched for across the Globe, I believe some were even found at some man's home in Brazil. Backups and archiving stuff is essential.
Also not near Moffat, Steven, the person famous for being showrunner behind BBC TV series Sherlock and Dracula and few seasons of Doctor Who, who was born in about 85 kms from that forest.
With the number of people chastised in later life for old tweets, this could be interesting.
However, it's such recordings that have saved many an old TV show as the studios reused tapes as well. Kinda how few Doctor Who episodes got saved.
Ha I learned about this watching a recent episode of Doctor Who
The deepest hole we have ever dug (bbc.com) = Doctor Who, season 12.
(j/k)
Until you try to open your door once and it goes "intruder alert"... Wasn't that a Doctor Who episode? :D
Bit of a long mess, to be honest. While I am not proud of the things I did, I am thrilled I found her, as we are perfect together.
My wife and I met on Tinder and went out on a couple of dates that went really well — we connected instantly. I was young and stupid at the time — I am just dumb now — and was on an "I need to find myself" phase of my life, so we talked and agreed to stay friends. We started seeing other people, while still meeting every weekend to watch Doctor Who. After the episode, I would usually help her find someone on Tinder, and she would help me.
Eventually, after about a month, I started dating another girl, and she found a guy she liked too. We would still meet every weekend to watch Doctor Who, with our respective dates now, but would also go out for coffee during the week — I work remotely, so I was always at a coffee shop anyway. In one of those meetings, which we now call "The Friday of Temptation," it became clear that we still felt a strong attraction to each other, but we did nothing. She broke up with the guy that same day.
On Saturday — which we call "The Saturday of Betrayal" —, we were texting while she was at a birthday party that she didn't want to go. After a panic attack hit her, I offered to go pick her up as her panic attacks usually get better when I am around.
I called a cab, went to the party, picked her up, and brought her to my apartment — we didn't have any intention of doing anything, as far as I remember. I spent the rest of the night and the beginning of Sunday morning talking to her and calming her down. Eventually, we started rewatching our favorite Doctor Who episode — Empty Child. We started talking, one thing leads to another, and we ended up in bed.
The next morning I took her home, told her I had to speak with my then-girlfriend and would talk to her on Monday. So I went back home, called my girlfriend, she came over, I explained what happened, and we broke up — she reacted better than I did, to be honest. My now-wife had a flight scheduled to the next day, as she was going to spend a few months with her parents in another state, so I got on a plane a few days later and went to meet her — we talked and on December 25th, 2015, I asked if she wanted to make everything "official" — as in, girlfriend, not wife. She agreed to, and we have been living together ever since — although, in my book, we kinda have been living together since day one.
Anyway. I proposed to her on December 25th, 2016, and on December 1st, 2017, we got married. Been together ever since, got two companies together — a photography studio and a WordPress hosting company —, and have been thinking about moving to Romania — we are currently in Brazil — and adopting a dog — we have two cats.
I have no idea how Tinder and other dating applications are these days, but I would definitely say they are worth it. I had an incredible year when I started using it, learned a shit ton about myself, made tons of friends — which later became clients of our studio —, and met the love of my life.
It pays to be honest and have patience. I was brutally honest on my profile description — I made it very clear that I consider myself an asshole, and hey, I proved myself right! —, and "filtered" the people I wanted to talk to not by their look, but by how the initial conversation inside the application went.
Worked for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But the last two words in your quote are "United States."
PBS, like all distributors, licenses content from producers of content--sometimes PBS is the producer, often it is not--for distribution inside a defined territory.
For example, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Downton Abbey, and Are You Being Served are all British TV shows licensed by PBS for distribution in the US. PBS can't stream them worldwide same as the BBC can't show some of the content it distributes outside of the United Kingdom.
Non-fiction I read this year:
Michael Benson - Space Odyssey - The detailed story of the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you're a fan of the movie, or of Stanley Kubrick and/or Arthur C. Clarke in general, you should read this.
Atul Gawande - Complications - Fascinating look at life in the medical profession.
Christina Thompson - Sea People - Detailed, well-researched history of Polynesian-Western contact and relations. As a New Zealander I was interested in this, although American or European readers with no personal connection may be less so.
Peter Singer - Marx: A Very Short Introduction - What it says on the tin.
Robert C Allen - Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction - Also good, but inaccurately titled; it should have said "Global Economic History Since the Industrial Revolution".
Fraser A Sherman - Now and Then We Time Travel - A thorough if somewhat superficial survey of time travel in the movies.
Alec Nevala-Lee - Astounding - A history of the magazine Astounding Stories, and the four men most closely associated with it: John Campbell, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Ron Hubbard. Very thoroughly researched and annotated; it reveals a lot of new information and debunks a lot of old myths. (Whichever version of the "FBI visits Campbell to complain about A-bomb stories" you've heard, I can pretty much guarantee it wasn't the real one.)
Elizabeth Sandifer - Tardis Eruditorum 1: William Hartnell - The first volume of a thorough study of Doctor Who, with a combined fannish and scholarly point of view that I enjoyed.
Randall Munroe - How To - It's by Randall Munroe, what else do you need to know?
I have always felt a personal annoyance about this, as it interrupted an episode of "Horror of Fang Rock" - one of my favorite Doctor Who stories.
Compelling. I wonder what else this could be applied to in addition to psychedelics? Anti-anxiety and other sensory affecting drugs?
If you wanna get Black Mirror-esque, perhaps a Soma-like medication from Brave New World (essentially pacifies/zombifies you by creating endless bliss) could be made. Or the "bliss" drug episode of Doctor Who.
I think that the main inspiration for the political part of Beeblebrox's story was probably 1976 Doctor Who episode "The Deadly Assassin" because Adams was heavy Doctor Who fan who made other borrowings from the show (for example using towels as tools was inspired by Forth Doctor's scarf usage) and soon later wrote a few episodes for it and became a showrunner.
About 30 years ago I saw “The Five Doctors” (the 25th anniversary episode of Doctor Who). Ever since then I’ve believed the smell, and associated feeling, were due to “positive ions”. In all that time I’ve never fact checked that line, but I think about it every time I notice the smell after a storm.
From the screenplay: TURLOUGH: It's marvellous here. I feel so calm and relaxed. DOCTOR 5: It's the high bombardment of positive ions. TEGAN: It's like Earth after a thunderstorm. DOCTOR 5: Same cause and reason.
IIRC Doctor Who is in fact unusual in that audio recordings (fan tapings?) survive of nearly all the lost episodes.
This is the same old out of touch attitude that led to the “you wouldn’t steal a car would you” commercials.
Nobody has to watch the content but they want to. You have fly-by-nights and unethical operations abounding that make everything only a google search away, sometimes with a single click. I agree that people should not be entitled to the intellectual property of others. However, like the war on drugs and sex education sometime the best answer is to recognize the reality and stop pushing teetotalism.
Content providers had a good thing going with Netflix and Hulu. Those two services had a recognized impact on content piracy. Yet here we are, repeating the mistakes of the past while the customer takes the path of least resistance. Right now if I pull up “Doctor Who” on my Apple TV I can watch all the episodes. I just have to switch between 3 different services, sometimes in the middle of a season, to do it. Yes I pay for those services, one included with my cable subscription.
But all of this is pretty silly to argue about to be honest. We’re absolutely spoiled with so much entertainment and media at our fingertips. The “us” of 20 years ago would wonder WTF were arguing about and pay out the nose for these capabilities.
But ... why should the Beeb be the one owning the streaming app on my phone. I (re)watch Doctor Who episodes on Netflix (or amazon or whatever). I dont care what device I watch on, I just want to watch content I want.
Which is kind of the point. (Keep) making great content. Worry less about the streaming client.
It'd certainly be interesting to see the stats here, as well as how it breaks down when actual violence is taken into account. Gaming has seen a lot less actual violent assaults/fights than sports, and even arguably quite a bit less than film/tv/music.
There aren't any gaming hooligan groups I've heard by any means.
For online toxicity it may be a bit closer, but again, it'd be interesting to see the breakdown by hobby or interest. Stuff like the last series of Doctor Who and Ghostbusters and Star Wars have certainly seen a few controversies recently, and it seems reactions to films/online film criticism can at least as acerbic as anything said about games.
It's worth exploring exactly what's meant by "proprietary insulin". Insulin can't be proprietary - it's a natural, widely available molecule of publicly known composition. What's actually proprietary in scenarios like these is some encryption key that will persuade the device to work - the fact that the key is embedded in a memory chip glued to the container is a red herring. In the case of a life-essential substance that is consumed at a predictable rate, there is no logical distinction between this and a Mafia protection racket - pay them periodically forever, or die.
It shouldn't be surprising that companies will do this if they can. There was an episode of Doctor Who not too long ago where employees on a space station had to buy oxygen from the company store.
There are still lots of good science fiction written today. Unfortunately in the past many of the writers did it because they in turn loved science fiction.
Many (most?) writers in the past barely made a living off their writing and many had to have a second source of income to continue. In other words they did write thinking it would make them rich.
Today with science fiction movies like Blade Runner, Star Wars and Star Trek, and TV shows like West World and Doctor Who and successful books on the Best Seller list writers think there is big money to be made.
This has us ending up with a lot bad writing from people hoping to break in without learning even the basics of science fiction much less learn real science itself.
Perhaps the loss is a feature and not a bug.
It's been remarked that present culture is over-dominated by the recapitulation of 'baby boomer era culture' (for lack of a better word) and that youth revolutionary culture has been largely subsumed by it. (Is there anything now among 15-30 year olds that is as 'shocking' as rock and roll used to be? I can't say I can find anything. To be sure, there is plenty about which the older generations complain in relation to the younger, but that isn't the same.)
The other thing is, we're never going to stop loss (or, that is, that would be what my money would be on). We'll always be subject to the framing problem. And we might be better off to try and manage our anxiety about the world changing. Because that, to me, seems the real fear: we accept that, for us to exist as we are, the world had to change [at many points] but now we want to arrest, we are the pinnacle of humanity, the only means by which we can remain thus is for either the future never to come (change to be averted indefinitely) or for (as William Gibson pointed out) we have to imagine our future descendants as evolved to the point where their spindly legs and effete physiques barely managed to hold together beneath the crushing power of their ginormous brains[1].
Perhaps this is also connected to why so many complaints are lodged against franchises such as Star Trek and Star Wars and Doctor Who: we're no longer twelve, and we're never going to be again, and we can't get it back no matter how hard we try.
But, also, perhaps it's an idea we're going to have to get used to in a big way, because, if the state of all that currently rapidly decaying early film stock is any indicator, and I would bet that it is, the state of copyright, which will become only more oppressive as the 'knowledge economy' does more of whatever it keeps doing, half of the twentieth century and perhaps everything between now and some truly dystopian societal collapse stands likely to suffocate beneath the oily sea of private ownership where (in some cases) the only person with the rights to a given cultural artifact is the third cousin twice removed of the someone aunt's brother's half-sister's niece by a second marriage, who is currently in a vegetative state, never to emerge; whereas, on the other hand, we have cultural artifacts merely have to owner that anyone can identify at all. So I would be tempted to say that I would wonder if, looking back, future archeologists, if there is any such thing, are going to have quite (generally while imbibing large quantities of alcohol) a time hypothesizing as to why there was such a cultural dark age around this point in history.
Or maybe it's that we have reached and gone past the 'Death of God' (in the actually sense that Nietzsche meant it) and in the interregnum between that which came before and that which came after, we are trying to patch over the destruction of tradition by simply replacing it, trying to fill-in the gap. But, like cracking open someone's chest to replace a meat heart with a plastic toy replica, it just won't work. And neither can it be replaced with a heart from a corpse.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/16/william-gibson-interview-the-peripheral
would be great for a doctor who episode, I dunno
To clarify, most of the fan-recorded Doctor Who episodes recovered were of the audio only. Home video recording was extremely expensive until roughly the 1980s -- I am not aware of video recovered by home fan enthusiasts. Most of the recovered video episodes have been 16mm telerecordings intended for overseas broadcasting.
Doctor Who is lucky in that there was a nice size fanbase from the get-go. Some not so popular programs from that era are indeed gone forever. (An example I can think of offhand is the 1960s soap opera United! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United! -- reportedly all 147 episodes of that program were wiped.)
As far as this act goes, my initial impression is that standardizing a mechanism for mechanical royalties is probably a good thing overall, same with the added protection for those on the production side. But the CLASSICS act portion strikes me as very rent-seeking in nature, I'm not a fan of infinite copyright economically.
Actually those old Doctor Who episode were recorded perfectly legally. UK Copyright legislation has an exemption for recording off-air broadcasts for personal use for the purpose of timeshifting. It doesn't say how long you are allowed to shift the time.
Some of the more obscure stuff does end up lost entirely. This is more of a problem with digital formats, especially games, where copying is intrinsic to preservation. The arcade machines with self-wiping "DRM" systems are a particularly strong example. Most of the old Doctor Who episodes that have been recovered have been from copies that were not supposed to have existed.
And there are people who go missing. Eh, maybe they got attacked by something they couldn't see/detect with their senses...
But seriously, this sounds like the kind of plot that'd work pretty well in a Doctor Who episode. And the logic I gave there was how they tried to justify the existence of stuff like the Weeping Angels and Vashta Nerada in story.
It's funny that there are US production teams considering the British way of writing TV episodes given that over here in the UK, there's talk of a few shows like Doctor Who moving to the US model instead:
https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-05-03/doctor-who-considering-us-style-writers-room-under-chris-chibnall/
Would be kind of amusing if over time, the British way of writing episodes became the American one and vice versa.
I also recommend Van Gogh: Painted with Words, a BBC biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch who acts and narrates Van Gogh's letters.
If you like Doctor Who, there's an episode on Van Gogh with Bill Nighy that's sweet and sci-fi silly but they have an incredible scene where they animate one of Van Gogh's paintings. Sort of like the 360 degree VR animation of Starry Sky that is floating around Facebook.
It is the internet misinterpreting some perfectly valid scientific investigations. A rational discussion of quanta and quantization, how observable information is coded in our universe, morphs into talk of whether that universe actually exists inside a big computer. To correct such rants one must explain quantum physics, something nobody wants to do anytime soon. It made for a half-decent Doctor Who episode.
> Google might as well be the official record for many people.
An interesting point, troubling because it seems likely.
Google the names of the team I was in right after I graduated and you would think a games company had employed the director general of the BBC, a famous rugby player, a horror film director and Doctor Who writer, an actor, a CBS news anchor, a cinematographer involved with several Marvel films, the Archdeacon of Harlow, and someone who (according to BBC reporting of the Paradise Papers) hid £28 million.
And before anyone says “oh but it would be ridiculous to mistake us for them”, my mum thought I had made the website belonging to aforementioned Doctor Who writer.
I'm 33.
I had a lot of friends when I was in college. I think I hung out with like four different groups of people, and I'd often introduce people in different groups to each other.
After I graduated, everything slowly fell apart. As the years went by, we all slowly but surely drifted away. I'm at the point where I hang out with very few people in real life anymore. I have one very close friend from college who I still go out drinking with every few weeks, but he's it. Facebook has been a life saver here: I still talk with old friends all the time on Facebook, but our friendships are mostly confined to Facebook. Every once in a while, someone will say to me "We should totally hang out again sometime!", and I'd be like "Sure, that sounds awesome!", and nothing ever comes of it. I don't think there's anything malicious involved; I just think that both of us are too socially awkward to actually schedule a time and a place to meet up. There have been a couple of exceptions, where "We should totally hang out again sometime!" turns into concrete plans, but those are few and far between.
And it's worse if they're married and doubly so if they have kids. I think, before I go any farther, I should point out that I have no interest in ever having children, and I'm aromantic, which means that I am mentally incapable of feeling romantic attraction for another person. Though I'm technically a lesbian, I'm functionally asexual just because I have no interest in being part of a couple.
Take the guy I used to call my best friend, for example. As soon as he met the person who eventually became his wife, I never saw him alone again. This was a guy who was like a brother to me; we'd often stay up late at night and talk to each other about anything and everything, and we'd often confide things in each other that we'd never tell anyone else (for example, he was the first person I ever came out to). But as soon as he met her, I couldn't hang out with him without his girlfriend/fiancee/wife tagging along. Hell, when he got engaged, I invited him out to a bar so I could buy him a glass of scotch to congratulate him on his engagement, and he brought her along there! It got to the point where I couldn't have a serious conversation with him. It also really annoyed me, whenever we'd hang out at a bar, she'd decide she was tired and wanted to go back. They'd tab out ASAP and leave as soon as their credit card came back. I am, by the way, talking about a bar that's literally right across the street from their apartment. They'd disappear before I could even finish my last drink... before he met her, when one of us would get tired and decide to end the night, we'd at least both stick around until we finished our last drinks and then go home at the same time.
Or, for some of people I know who have kids, their kids are all they talk about. I've had to unfollow a lot of people on Facebook because their Facebook feeds just become constant streams of pictures of their kids and updates on their kids' lives (the only person I make an exception for on this is my cousin, and that's only because her kids are my family too). I've heard from a lot of people my age that they make most of their new friends by befriending the parents of their children's friends, so being childfree that completely cuts off the main avenue of making new friends for people my age (and honestly, it sounds like a terrible way of making new friends, where the only thing you have in common is that your kids like each other).
Making new friends at my age sounds more like pretending than anything else. I dread the idea of joining someone's existing friend group and struggling to understand all their little in-jokes. And even when I do understand them, they won't have any emotional impact on me because I wasn't there when the joke started. And if they're my age, they're going to be spending a lot of time reminiscing over the good old days, and that will always make me feel left out because I'm the newbie who didn't share the good old days with them. I'll always be the fifth wheel.
And then there's the fact that some of my former friends have become genuinely shitty people. Take my former best friend who I was talking about two paragraphs ago. Over the last few years, he's gone down an extreme alt-right rabbit hole. He'd always been a libertarian and a Christian, but he was always one of the good ones, and now he's gone full blown religious right extremist. His Facebook feed has largely consisted of memes with transphobic slurs, Nigel Farage videos, videos about how gay people can't get into heaven, screeds about how Jimmy Fallon's son deserved to die, the "piece of shit" meme about single mothers, etc. He went from being one of the most caring and compassionate people I knew to an utter monster. And, yes, his wife is partially responsible for this. She's an extreme tradcon who believes that a woman's highest calling is to be a 1950s housewife, and she's brought out the absolute worst in him. Eventually, after realizing he's too far gone to ever come back, I started ghosting both of them. I haven't spoken to him in over a year, and I actively avoid going to places where I know they like to hang out. I do, however, take a perverse pleasure in watching my count of mutual friends with him on Facebook drop like a rock. And they're all from people unfriending him. One of those people was a groomsman at his wedding, who publicly told him to "fuck off" after he posted something really heinous. The only good thing to come out of this though is that him going off the deep end has rekindled my friendships with his exes. The last two times "We should totally hang out again sometime!" actually resulted in something concrete happening have been with two of his exes, and we bonded over how he's turned into a horrible person. One of them even said that meeting me was the best thing that came out of dating him (and she's one of my friends who has a kid, but she's one of the few people I know who has kids where I can have a conversation with her about something other than her kid).
But, honestly, losing the man who was at one time the closest thing I had to a brother fucked me up really badly. I don't have anyone who I could talk to the way I talked to him back in the day. We'd been through so much together, and he'd been right there with me for every single important milestone in my life since I was 19. We got each other into music, TV shows, hobbies, etc. He got me into goth music, and I got him into Doctor Who. I took up photography for a time because I wanted to be like him. I can't replace that. There is nobody I can meet tomorrow who I will ever have that kind of deep friendship with, because all these important milestones in my life have already passed, and I'll never get to go back in time and experience those milestones with someone else. I have one close friend left (the guy I still go drinking with every few weeks) who I went through a lot of these milestones with, but I never spent nearly as much time with him as I did with he-who-shall-not-be-named, and our relationship wasn't quite as deep. Oh, don't get me wrong, it's deeper than most other friendships I've had, and he's far more than just another drinking buddy, but not to the extent of thinking of him as my brother. I'm just not going to find another brother (or sister) at my age, as it's the kind of relationship you have to start cultivating when you're very young. The way I see it, I have another 30-40 years left in me before my body gives out, and I'm going to spend all of them without having the kind of friend I had from 19 to 31. I don't really know how I'm going to deal with that.
The truce was the basis of today's Doctor Who Christmas episode. This appears to be aligned with one of the most watched shows every year to provide a bit of background for curious Whovians.
If I understood correctly there's no evidence for such a football game. In the new Doctor Who episode from today – funnily being set around this event – they show a scene in which soldiers play football together.
i thought they were getting into Doctor Who episodes about statues that come to life.
The problematic scenario goes like this:
1. You're in a coffee shop. The WiFi sucks today. You turn off WiFi so you can use your cellular connection instead.
2. Many hours later, you go home, having forgotten about #1.
3. You binge-watch the entirety of Doctor Who streaming on your phone, not realizing the phone is still using cellular.
4. Large bill from your provider.
You are not alone. I had terrible trouble parsing the end of the title because I've literally just finished watching yesterday's episode of Doctor Who.
I really believe (mostly) self replicating robots are necessary for any serious space colonization. Starting with just humans is way more effort than it's worth. Imagine just sending a few rockets to the moon. Waiting a few years, and then humans arrive with a base and infrastructure already set up for them.
Last week's episode of Doctor Who had an interesting take on that scenario:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile_%28Doctor_Who%29
CGI, like the rest of the film/tv industry, will go where the money is best. There is nothing in film/tv production that cannot be loaded into a truck and shipped elsewhere overnight ... people included. Work is moving to canada for the tax credits but you'd be surprised at how many "canadian" productions are actually filmed overseas. TheBorgias was canadian. Versailles, filmed in france with brit actors, is supported by the canadian government and RBC (my bank) no doubt for some tax advantage. Even the first season of the Doctor Who reboot in 2005 was a joint production with the CBC. Check the credits. No matter where it is filmed, canada supports it.
I saw Tron Legacy in 3D in theatres, and it was one of the most well-done 3D movies I've ever seen, in large part because they almost never used it. Except they did, it just wasn't obvious, and when it was it was obvious for the right reasons.
Likewise, the 3D in the Doctor Who Day of the Doctor special, which I saw in theatres, the 3D was well done because they used it in specific spots and in subtle ways.
3D should be an accent, not a centrepiece. Some movies get this right, lots get it wrong.
I'm a native English speaker with the world's most broadcast accent (the main Hollywood movie accent) and I'm a fan of Sherlock and Doctor Who. Those programs are produced with the most well known UK accents.
And yet I still have to rewind a few times in every episode for dialogue that I just can't decypher. Sometimes I never quite get the words.
After saving an old laptop at work from landing on the garbage pile, I took it home and, on a whim, decided to install OpenBSD on it.
I expected problems of some kind or another and was mentally prepared to install Debian instead, but I was pleasantly surprised that all of the hardware worked out of the box. Since it is old an fragile, and the battery lasts about five minutes, I don't do much with it but keep it around for good luck.
Guess I'll be upgrading this weekend. As luck will have it, I am also binge-watching Doctor Who currently, which fits in nicely with the cover art. ;-)
Author here. I wasn't sure if it was bad etiquette to submit my own article to HN but decided in the end that it might actually interest the community.
For fans of metal and sci-fi, I should mention that Dutch musician Arjen Anthony Lucassen does much more than just write science-inspired metal operas for Ayreon. He also has another project called Star One[0], where each song is based on an iconic sci-fi movie, book or series (Blake's 7, Doctor Who, Dune, Alien, Star Trek, A Clockwork Orange...).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_1
Here's the problem.
Let's look at something non-controversial like Doctor Who. There's /r/doctorwho, which allows posts like "My cat pretending to be Matt Smith" and "My girlfriend made me this bow-tie - look how cute it is on my cat!".
Then there's /r/gallifrey, which only allows posts about Doctor Who. Then there's a few others (/r/classicwho for episodes before the reboot).
Now, imagine if /r/DoctorWho banned criticism of Moffat. Obviously, all the Moffat haters would get banned, and go to /r/gallifrey. You'd suddenly have a large Moffat hating sub, and a large sub that couldn't understand why every other sub seemed to hate Moffat. These people wouldn't politely debate anything, because they'd get more upvotes and positive responses for attacking the other side than trying to be reasonable.
FWIW, I dislike Moffat, because I think Doctor Who works better in a more episodic format - long arcs don't work when the Tardis is in the mix. But that's not the kind of nuance you get when there's two subs that both have a bunker mentality, throwing bombs at the brainwashed idiots on the other side.
Anyway, reddit is not a "free speech" site. It's a site that lets mods do what they want, for their sub. It's architecture is not one that allows a free, civil discussion of ideas, so much as a place that encourages group-think. (And while you can blame the "SJWs", there were prominent "hate" subs, like Fat People Hate, that behaved the same way - it's just the way the site is designed and run).
Hulu only has commercials on their second-run (day-after-air) content from broadcast sources. They have a substantial back catalogue of stuff that doesn't include said commercials.
I get why they have commercials: a $10/mo. service that provides shows the day after they air would devalue that content too much without commercials and would be uncompetitive when pricing to exclude them. For a comparison: a season pass for the newest season of Doctor Who (S9) on iTunes/Amazon Instant costs around $31 (it happens to be a featured show on iTunes), or about $2.58 per episode. It does not include commercials, and can be cached and viewed offline, and is available the day after it airs. After three episodes, you've just about met the budget for a full month of Hulu Plus.
I love my AppleTV, and I would buy an Apple TV if one came out, for a few reasons. I actually only use my ATV to watch Netflix and buy Doctor Who and Archer off iTunes, but I'd buy a TV made by Apple because I feel like they would do a good job.
My TV, when I hit the power button on the remote, takes about 5 seconds to give me any indication that it heard me; I then get another 5 seconds of the LG logo before I get dumped onto whatever input I was last on.
In comparison, when I move my mouse on my computer, my Apple cinema display wakes up almost instantaneously (display), and my AppleTV goes from sleep mode to showing me the last menu I was on in less than a second (processing).
Thus, I expect an Apple television to be on and available to use within moments of my requesting it, and off as soon as I tell it I'm done.
The AppleTV 3rd Gen also maxes out at about 1W of power used[1], which means that there's no reason why the brains of a smart TV shouldn't be able to be on 100% of the time, ready at any moment to power on for incoming content, rather than having my television add 30s to the simple act of showing someone a YouTube video.
That said, Apple make their money by making high-quality, high-margin devices, and not by racing to the bottom of the price structure and selling out customers to make ends meet.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/6834/apple-tv-2013-a1469-short-review-analysis-of-a-new-a5
Not that the Netflix launch was anything cheer about. A random glance back then showed Netflix being a year or two behind on Doctor Who seasons.
Never mind that there is an aspect that keeps being overlooked, social interaction. A popular TV show or movie is not just about the experience itself, but also the chatter afterwards. Be it over the lunch room table, or over the net.
And the latter is what drives many to pirate even if they know the episode will eventually be broadcast locally. This because they are involved in the chatter about the show online, and there people will discuss the latest when it aired initially, not when it aired in some nation or other.
I claim the opposite: one of the rejections was obviously made by a time traveler who has seen a yet to be shot Doctor Who episode written by the scenarist mentioned by the paper's author. Quite a mise en abyme.
I wanted the punch line to be about how that producer resold movie rights to Steven Moffat so he could make that Doctor Who episode.
Or if these rights were non-exclusive Nemiroff could contact Doctor Who staff himself.
I have never heard it put quite that way before, but I know that if I ever see someone in a suit, I start distributing more resumes. The same goes for an all-hands meeting scheduled for Friday afternoon.
The beautiful people just don't talk to nerds without some compelling reason to do so. (And they don't consider new episodes of Doctor Who to be compelling.) So when they do, you have to find the hidden motive. If you can't find it, the motive is to screw you somehow.
In my anecdotal experience, if they talk to me at all, it's usually to say some subset of the following: "We lost the contract, sold/merged the company, and now your office will be closed down, all of you are fired, and whatever work it is that you do is getting tossed in the trash. You get no severance pay. If you had options, they aren't worth anything as of this moment. If they are worth something, the IRS will want 300% of whatever you get from them because that way the company can save 0.5% on its own taxes. Vacation will not be paid out, since you don't have any. Remember how we merged it with sick leave and trimmed 33% to make it flexible leave? You will be getting your COBRA packets shortly, giving you the option to pay $4000 a month out of the $600 you will get from unemployment to continue having health insurance in lieu of food and/or shelter. Have a good weekend."
So yeah, be very, very wary. In fact, you might just want to prep for the bad-news meeting by stashing a current copy of the employee emergency contact list in your car and walking in with an already-active audio recorder.
The Doctor Who reboot: http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0436992
Overall kinda consistent, but very scattered if you look at the episodes individually.
I'd like to disagree. I used to pirate quite heavily back in Switzerland, due to the legal situation, now after having moved to Japan, I do not pirate anymore because I don't want to risk my visa over it (plus we have hulu here which is okayish). I never found the user experience nice at all, and much rather than price, a good legal experience would've made me switch in an instant.
The only reason I ever pirated was/is availability. There was either not watching the content or piracy. One could argue that not watching is a reasonable alternative, but I wanted to see what this whole craze was about for example Doctor Who.
Even with a much worse paying job than what I have, I would pay much more than I currently do for hulu to have access to new movies, TV shows, music... I am fully aware that this might only be true for me.
I have the same complaint about Star Trek. Star Trek pretends to have explanations for things, but they are never consistent, because it's random technobabble. Because of the Monster of the Week format, with little continuity between episodes, an explanation crucial to the plot in one week will be ignored the next. Voyager is the worst series for this, Enterprise has it the least, because the first few seasons of Enterprise had significant overarching plots. But in Voyager, they are trying to reach home, and find many cool technologies along the way -- extremely useful ones even. But most exist only for the length of the episode. Occasionally, a plot device will return for a second episode, but not much more than that.
Don't get me wrong, I love Star Trek and Doctor Who, and you are right that Doctor Who is very loose on strict continuity, but I think Doctor Who is more honest with its technology. I admit, Doctor Who often solves the problems in its plots with a solution completely that is made up in the last 5 minutesWho ith no foreshadowing, but they call back to previous episodes very often. Anything that was taken as fact in one episode can be rewritten at any time, and often is, but as often as possible, they use something from the huge array of existing plot devices. I like that. You can tell that the writers like the lore they have created. They leave enough hints that when old plot points reappear, they fit -- like a riddle, they are on obvious in hindsight.
In Star Trek, however, the technobabble explanations are just fill-in-the-blanks. The writers write a script, then later on someone fills in some scientific words. All of the numbers are random. Occasionally, whoever is filling in those numbers or tech words will be able to reference a past event, but most of the time it's just another spacial distortion that does what the writers say.
In short, I think that Doctor Who respects its canon more by using previously established lore when it serves the plot, but a acknowledging and embracing the ridiculousness of the world they've created. Star Trek, on the other hand, rarely cares about previously established lore -- each episode gets a new species or new temporal disturbance. In many ways it's very good and very interesting -- going where no one has gone before -- but it feels like they could explore the already existing things a lot more. Each alien species wears one hat -- they are all plot devices, because when the 6 acts of the episode are over, the Enterprise will warp away never to return. Their purpose is fulfilled. Maybe that's why I'm a fan of DS9 -- it focused less on exploring strange new places, and focused on just a few species and planets.
Also, availability is a huge issue. For me in Germany it is nigh impossible to legally watch a recent episode of Game of Thrones. And Breaking Bad or Doctor Who has only recently become available via the new service watchever.de. And even there they are published far too late if you want to participate in the online discussion of an episode.
Yes, but did you know it was missing?
My comment was to agree with the concept that its easy for me to blindly believe in what the big tech companies publish. Mapping or otherwise.
I love Doctor Who episodes where on the surface everything looks normal, but on closer inspection things are very different (eg Weeping Angels or The Silence).
Couldn't agree more. Its like a Doctor Who episode.
- It shouldn't be there?
- Try telling that to the local population...
Blink was a awesome episode. I have used it to convert at least 4 civvies into Whovians. However, I think Doctor Who is getting less and less scary and more and more dramatic/epic. Oh the other hand, I started watching DW when I was already 20 years old - I don't think Daleks are that scary to 20 year olds as they are to 8 year olds :)
Doctor Who Online is reporting that lost episodes indeed were found. "Not as many as 100".
https://twitter.com/DrWhoOnline/status/386850513909600256 https://twitter.com/DrWhoOnline/status/386850763349041152 https://twitter.com/DrWhoOnline/status/386851026038296577 https://twitter.com/DrWhoOnline/status/386863277134721025
This has been cycling around at Bleeding Cool for months. Their latest update explains how the still unsubstantiated rumour got out of control
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/10/06/video-sky-news-get-in-on-the-doctor-who-missing-episodes-rumour-too/
Exercise / Sports (participating) - mountain biking is my main thing, and I sometimes dabble with a little trail running. In the past, I wrestled, practiced jiu-jitsu, and messed around with some amateur powerlifting. I still lift weights from time to time, but not so seriously these days.
Sports (spectator) - I am a huge NFL football fan, and I make it a point to watch all the Miami Dolphins games that I can. #PHINSUP
Reading - I read a lot: fiction, nonfiction, whatever. I read everything from pulp-fiction crap like those Jack Reacher novels, to more "serious literature" like Dostoevsky, Melville, Pynchon, etc.; non-fiction spanning topics from Arduino, to electronics, to string theory and cosmology, from philosophy and mathematics to history and folklore... biographies, etc., etc.. Right now I'm working on the 3 James Bamford books on the NSA.
Movies: I watch movies from time to time, whether it means going out to the theater or just bit-torrenting something, or watching something I own on DVD. My movie tastes are fairly typical male hacker fare, I suppose.
Music: Going to live concerts is something I enjoy, but don't do nearly enough of. I think the last live show I saw was Steel Panther at the House of Blues in Chicago last summer. If all goes well, I hope to catch the Iron Maiden show in Raleigh in a couple of months. I'll go take in a performance of the NC Symphony Orchestra every now and again.
Comedy: I'll go to somewhere like DSI Comedy Theatre in Carrboro for some live improv on occasion.
Political stuff: I attend LPNC meetings every once in a while, but not nearly often enough these days. In the past I've done crazy shit like running for Lieutenant Governor of NC as the Libertarian Party candidate. Right now I'm working on getting a Cypherpunk meetup organized in the Raleigh/Durham area, and doing some education/advocacy work around crypto and anonymity tools.
Hackerspace: I hang out at SplatSpace (Durham, NC) sometimes and work on various projects. Sometimes I go there to work on the startup, but other times I'll go up there and tinker with other shit... I started building a coilgun, but that's kinda paused right now. I keep planning to start a Mantis PCB mill, but never seem to have time. Eventually I want to build one of those, then a 3D printer. Right now I'm looking into starting on a project to build a neat case to house about 8 Beaglebone Black boards, so I can make a nice small, self-contained HPC/Hadoop cluster to play around with.
TV: Doctor Who. I also like Grimm and a couple other series, but don't really have much time for watching television. :-(
If it's on the radio I believe I can record it and play it at my leisure - as a 12 year old with a budget of $0, this is how I obtained most of my music. Has time shifting become illegal? If not, I am not at the mercy of the whims of a DJ, no more than I am at the whims of when a TV station plays episodes of Doctor Who - once it's on my DVR I have it forever.
It strikes me that the BBC is hilariously bad at archival. They scrapped dozens of Doctor Who episodes in the name of saving space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes).
Oh, Tron Legacy OST is the thing! You could also try Doctor Who soundtrack from season 5 and 6, it can do wonders, but sometimes you have to skip at track or two (as they are just too good and make you drop everything you are doing and listen) Bastion OST is nice too!
Never thought I'd actually see this word used outside of an episode[1] of Doctor Who. That or maybe an episode of Jeopardy. It certainly doesn't appear to be a well known word.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doctor%27s_Wife_(Doctor_Who)
The behaviour of the people in the ad is exactly the type of behaviour that facebook can thrive off. Glance around in public occasionally and note that half the people looking at their phones are looking at facebook. I think this is the first time that facebook has so blatantly approved of that behaviour, though.
Side-note: Was the adversary in the recent Doctor Who episode (Bells of Saint John) a metaphor for this type of facebook behaviour?
In the Doctor Who episode The Fires of Pompeii, the romans in pompeii constructed a digital computer using blue prints given to be them by some aliens and doctor who destroyed it.
Geographic location plays a part too. I would happily pay for GoT but I am in the UK and cannot get HBO. If I want to watch it legally i have to wait 3-6 months, alternatively I can download a copy 5 minutes after the episode ends in the US.
This delay actually impacts on the UK broadcaster as they pay for the rights to show a programme but by the time it is shown many of their target audience will have downloaded the episodes. Same thing applies to movies. Works in reverse too with things like Doctor Who.
There really doesnt appear to be a good reason for these delays between national markets other than "that is how it has always been done".
Deficient public transit systems create areas where owning a car is THE thing that lets you into the middle class - this is bad for the environment, bad for traffic, and creates a barrier to social upward movement. Here on Long Island in New York, the bus system only serves /certain/ areas and the train system (Long Island Railroad) is expensive and designed to bring people to and from Manhattan and back and does anything else quite poorly.
p.s. Anyone remember the Doctor Who episode Gridlock - where people actually lived and died in traffic? (:
I find Netflix and Amazon Instant complement each other nicely. I watch as much of a series as Netflix has, then I can watch the remaining seasons on Amazon Instant. Amazon Instant also gets me current shows, like the newest Doctor Who episode.
I think he's excellent. What's amusing is, before he took over as The Doctor, some pictures of him circulated, where he has this total "sketchy emo kid" look going on. A lot of Doctor Who fans had a "WTF? No way can this guy be The Doctor" reaction. But from pretty much his first episode, he's been great. His rendition of The Doctor reminds me a bit of Patrick Troughton's.
Completely agree with you on Matt Smith. I hated him at first, but I think I just wanted more Tennant. After clearing my head and going back in, he’s now my Doctor.
(Although I disagree with you on last season. It didn't feel like traditional Doctor Who, but I really liked the direction, and although Season 5 was much better end-to-end, Season 6 had some of my favorite episodes.)
And thus we lost dozens of episodes of Doctor Who, and almost lost all of Monty Python (if Terry Jones hadn't stepped in), because someone thought the material was no longer relevant and archival not a chartered function (thought the economics of maintaining an archive are valid).
(1) I don't have "effects" really; I don't have some delusion that someone other than you is reading this. I am perplexed because you defined a problem as, "if the unwillingness of people to buy copies because they can easily avoid paying, results in these first copies not being produced". That phrasing perplexes me quite legitimately because you have literally said that the problem is "if you won't buy something which does not exist because you can easily avoid paying for it." So I was very cautious to reread the problem in words much closer to what you're now saying -- "that people will not produce goods if they don't anticipate making a profit" -- in an effort to parse the sentence.
(3) No, I mean the British Broadcasting Corporation. You know, those guys who make Doctor Who. They are not funded by a mandatory annual license fee on computer users, and I would not describe them as a state owned software company. Nonetheless, when they produce a new episode of Doctor Who, it rapidly appears on BitTorrent networks.
It could be worse. Imagine you were trapped in a giant reality TV show the size of a planet, set up for the entertainment of a ruling elite, who through generations of decadent luxury have degenerated to the point where recreating the 21st century actually seems like an amusing thing to do with their essentially unlimited resources.
Kind of a "The Matrix" meets "Doctor Who: Bad Wolf" sort of thing. Maybe our unseen overlords are just too lazy to make good TV, and want a planet of genuinely suffering artists to do it for them?
But really, who knows? Strong AI, automation, and resource recycling might head off a lemming-like bust in the next 100 years.
> To argue that we can somehow replace this very right-brained activity with crowd-sourcing or algorithms is untenable.
For now maybe. Ten years ago if you asked me if I'd spend 2 hours watching a movie because a computer said so, I'd laugh. Netflix recommendations, while not perfect, are still very good. Had I not told Netflix that I loved District 9, it would not have suggested Torchwood: Children of Earth to me. Had it not suggested Torchwood, I wouldn't have discovered that Doctor Who was back on air. Right now I get about 50% of my entertainment discovery done via algorithms. Sure, fashion is difficult and subjective but I don't see it as being any different from music or entertainment in the big picture sense.
Btw, that was a very well-written article. Thanks for sharing.
IMHO, Amazon's free collection that comes with a Prime membership is quite horrible. Or maybe you like different stuff than me.
And their interface on Roku is even worse
- ugly, long lists of movies with no way to search or skip through the list
- all seasons for a series (I think Doctor Who has some 20+ seasons there) are placed in the above list as individual shows (rather than being grouped together), and are not even in chronological order
Netflix's interface on Roku is a godsend in comparison.
Interesting... but I'm not convinced this "proves time travel is impossible." I am not sure we know enough about time, and how it operates (if that's even the right word) to really speculate about how time travel would work, if it were possible.
I mean, Superman movies, Star Trek movies and Doctor Who aside, how much thought has really been given to how we would travel in time, even hypothetically? I know there has been some but is this something serious scientific minds spend time considering???
I was very excited about this until I read the words "Facebook credits" and "streaming."
If I'm paying for video, I need to be certain that I'll be able to see the entire thing uninterrupted, even if I'm offline or my connection becomes unreliable. This is where Apple and Amazon get my money, and streams don't.
The Facebook Credits idea is even worse. Here's the experience:
1. Go to the Doctor Who page on Facebook. I can't see the content until I agree to "like" the page. Annoying. What if I just want to see a BBC video? It's a bit presumptuous to assume I like something I haven't seen yet.
2. Once I agree that I "like" the page, a small grid of videos appear. Clicking on any video then redirects me to an app page, telling me that if I still want to watch a video, "liking" wasn't enough. I now have to grant BBC access to my private profile data, and allow them to post messages to my wall.
3. Fine, BBC, I "like" you, and you can come into my house, look at all my stuff, and talk to my friends on my behalf. Now how do I watch a video? Facebook Credits. Each video is 15 Credits. Ok, I'll go get some.
4. I click "watch," and am prompted to go buy some Credits. How do I want to pay, Visa, Western Union, other? I don't know, how much do they cost? How does Facebook know my credit card number? I don't remember entering that, but there it is.
5. Bravely moving on, I click through and see the price of Credits. 50 Credits = $5. So, 15 credits = $1.50 a movie, right? Oops, no. What a funny coincidence, 50 isn't divisible by 15. I'll always have $0.50 that I'm loaning to Facebook until I build up enough Credits to use them all up.
And they wonder why people download videos from "pirate" sites.
Looks like each portion of each episode is 15 facebook credits, which is $1.50 USD.
That makes each doctor who 'movie' from Netflix cost $6 USD to watch once. (Or as many times as you like within 48 hours.)
Seems a bit pricey to me. I'll likely pay for any I can't get on Netflix, but only those.
Well, there's Netflix: http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Doctor_Who/70142441
Do you mean brand-new episodes? I suppose you could go to the BBC site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/dw) and fake a UK HTTP header.
I am biting my tongue here to keep myself from making references to recent episodes of Doctor Who.
I'm another person who cancelled cable and started watching things I normally wouldn't on Netflix. I'm rewatching the Doctor Who new series now and loving every minute of it. Wife and I watched Dead Like Me, Arrested Development, Pushing Daises, and lots of documentaries and movies.
Not so much. My first thought, after all, was "Hooray, now I can watch Top Gear and Doctor Who episodes which aren't split into six different sections!" I don't really want to watch 60-minute videos of someone's cat.
(Incidentally, before anyone gets on my arse about copyright violation which I usually disapprove of, I feel justified in pirating Top Gear and Doctor Who since they're shown for free on the (Australian) ABC or SBS. I pay Australian taxes despite not being resident there, so I damn well should be able to watch what I've already paid for.)
Didn't I see a Doctor Who episode just like this? The Doctor must defeat the head of the space program, who turns out to be the Marquis de Sade doing a Doctor Strangelove-flavored Werner Von Braun impression?
One of the most memorable scenes is the one where the Doctor and his companion sit down to dinner with the villain and debate literature. Suspicions are aroused when the villain laments the unhappy ending of Apollo 13. "Why couldn't it have been more like The Perfect Storm?"
In the end the guy is stalked and killed by the spectral ghost of Laika the dog.
Wikipedia thinks it's an encyclopedia, but fairly often, I use it as a Doctor Who episode guide or something.
This is a fine essay on the importance of having a marketable concept.
That said, I'm a bit concerned that he's overgeneralizing from a biased sample set: His major examples (besides his own comic) are TV series. TV series often take time to get started; they always have. To pick some examples close to the geek heart: Star Trek:TNG had a crappy first season. Babylon Five had a very spotty first season.
There's a reason for this: traditionally, the first half-season of the typical TV show was written by a team of more-or-less freelance writers who worked from a "series bible": A big book written by the series creator that describes the characters and the setting and some of the possible plot directions. [1] They might also have had a pilot script, or even an actual pilot, to work from. But these writers would not necessarily have seen the actors performing in their roles. They might not even have known who the actors were. So their scripts would form an odd patchwork that would be stitched together by the producer, the director, and the actors on the fly. By the third season, however, things would have sorted themselves out: The producers would have found a stable of writers they like, the writers would have seen the older episodes and have some idea of how the actors inhabited the characters, there would be a canon to draw upon, and so on.
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[1] This has changed, of course, particularly for drama series. Heroes was awesome from the first moment; most people agree that it was all downhill from season one. Other shows -- Firefly, the new Doctor Who -- also exhibit the pattern of initial awesomeness. This is arguably because the economics of TV series production has changed a lot: The rise of DVD box sets has changed the target audience and the product life cycle for TV series, and the way shows are pitched, produced, and financed has changed. And it's probably also because writers and producers have learned from the experience of shows like Babylon Five and X-Files and, later, Buffy: Show runners seem to have a greater tendency to be highly capable writers who are given much more control over the early episodes, often to the point where they will write most of those episodes personally.
One trick I found to get myself to the gym was to pick a TV show I liked (Doctor Who or whatever floats your boat) where I was several seasons behind, and I would ONLY watch that show on my iPhone while at the gym doing cardio.
Obviously when you move to the weight machines you can't keep watching the show, but it solved several problems for me:
1) It kept me from getting bored while doing cardio, which is a big issue for me.
2) It made me push for a 40 minute session doing cardio, so I could finish the episode.
3) It made me MUCH more likely to come to the gym the next day, because I wanted to see what happened next (it's good to pick a show with long story arc and end-of-episode cliff-hangers).
Did you notice the first picture of the LHC on that page looks just like the Reality Bomb apeture from the recent Doctor Who episode? http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Reality_bomb