Holy shit the Americans goes hard. Jesus. What... what the hell have I been doing for the past four years that was more important than watching this show?

Isn't the 'pilot' just a slightly different version of An Unearthly Child?

yeah--- it's the same episode, a lot of the same footage, they just changed some scenes and how some characters behave, and the camera doesnt go in & out of focus and has better angles in the new scenes. the fixed version makes more sense. the doctor is too cranky/violent/cruel in the first one.

now just checked "the cave of skulls" which was kind of involuntarily hilarious. the doctor can't make fire without matches! wtf lol. i thought he knew physics! and there's even a chemistry teacher there. WAT.

anyway now i understand how these people got inside the tardis and why she called him "grandfather" which is a great relief to my poor tortured brains. whew!

I rewatched Pyramids of Mars the other day. Aspects of it have inevitably dated pretty badly but the story and main villain are still great.

I've only seen a handful of episodes from the Hartnell era, mainly for their historical significance. From what I've heard, the series in the beginning was designed to be more about those characters (like Susan) who'd later be used as 'companions', with the Doctor himself being slightly less central.

Hey you guys said Who Classic is on Prime, right?

*Brain light bulb*

ah! susan! well she's not exactly that ha ha ha. lemme know if you want spoilers. eh, you probably already know.

but the doctor himself sez "fear makes companions of us all" ha ha ha.


no, who *reboot* is on prime. that's where i've been watching it all along.

for the ancient version i'm renting the old version ON DISC from netflix (netflix dvd for you who have never heard of such ancient tech & company)

I've read about most of the stories I've not seen, so I'm not worried about spoilers.

As an aside (slightly), if you're into that really early period, have you ever seen any of The Quatermass Experiment? It's from the 50s and some of the episodes are lost but, in mixing elements of horror with sf, it clearly paved the way for Doctor Who. Hammer made some feature films of it, which are excellent, but you might find the original BBC tv series more interesting. Funnily enough, the BBC remade it recently with ... David Tennant.

I prefer Doctor Who for a number of reasons but purely in terms of storylines, I'd say Quatermass was better written. (Its creator Nigel Kneale is a bit of a legend among fans of Brit sf.)

ive heard/seen the name quatermass before but never actually known what it was about--now i know! i might look it up.

as for the spoilers...*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*

i guess they were in a heavy experimental phase cuz susan is not a companion proper but rather an actual timelord herself. the actual companions at least in this period are susan's schoolteachers-- the history + the science teachers. which is actually cool.

one thing that's interesting at least in this version is that the doctor is kind of a big fucking idiot when it comes to many things. it's the humans who have the most sense-- at least when dealing witht he cave people which is the only full story i've seen so far. maybe that was a feature of the classic era? a genius about some things a fool about others?

really looking forward to the next one. primitive and outdated as it it, thru blurry washed out black and white, with the old toothless actor and all, and through many implausible stupidities, like the doctor not knowing how to make a fire without a match, it really works somehow.

the next one is "the dead planet". which i'm looking forward to seeing.

**END SPOILERS

so much tv to look for! ha ha ha. thanks for the suggestions.

--

eta: the next episode im gonna watch is the first of the THE DALEKS serial! first appearance ever. wooohooo!

Absolutely! Although it varies from doctor to doctor. Tom Baker was often winging it, deliberately using made up jargon to appear like he knew what he was doing, whereas Pertwee was far less slippery like that, perhaps because his companions were often members of UNIT*, a crack military organisation, who would've been able to see through it.

* Torchwood are essentially a shadier version of UNIT. Begging the question, why go to all the trouble of inventing Torchwood in the reboot when they could've just as easily made UNIT a bit murkier? It's especially annoying as UNIT still feature in the reboot series.

A question for Sev, which probably belongs in the comic thread but we're talking about Doctor Who a lot here, so is there anyone from the DC or Marvel universes who's anything like Doctor Who/a Timelord?

Yes!
There's actually a DC character, Rip Hunter, who is totally a Who rip.

"Rip Hunter... Time Master." Haha. He's on one of those dumbass CW shows right now, but originally, yeah... very Who-esque. Check it out:

Torchwood was — I believe — intended to originally be just a story arc for whatever season they were the bad guys for (was that season 2 of the reboot?) But it became a bigger thing and its own show because they smelled $, I expect. Lots of money to be made from Who spinoffs. Now there's CLASS, which is nowhere near as good as Torchwood.

I'd like to see a River Song series. Just a couple of seasons to fill in the blanks. That would be tremendous. Bring back Matt Smith for a few eps. I'd watch the shit out of that.

God goddamn dammit.

1 disc at a time is $8/mo (dvd only, add $2 for bluray)

if you watch/return promptly you can get say 2 discs per week, that's 8 discs watched per month, or $1 per disc, because they don't exist on bluray so you don't need that plan.

the first disc is actually number 3-- go figure why they did this

eta: if you're in the mood for bingeing then a 2 at a time deal will get you there faster and at a lower cost because the shipping overlaps (1 day to the facility 1 day back while you watch the one at home, etc) and your cost per disc drop to 50c or less.

--

btw im rewatching marco polo from the start and it's more fun than i remember. now that one can download the files instead of just streaming it's a much better quality image.

Dude, I'm thoroughly sucked into the Americans right now. I can't stop/won't stop until I've seen everything. But thanks for the tips. We used to do the mail+streaming plan, but we kept losing discs or getting impatient and watching what we'd ordered somewhere else.

is there anyone who isn't in love with keri russell after watching this show?

Only on season 2 but... no. I would die for her.

Awesome. I'd never even heard of him. I'll definitely check him out. Thanks!

Yeah man no problem. Don't expect Doctor Who-like greatness though. Rip Hunter is a D-lister or below. The CW show Legends of Tomorrow has a VERY Doctor Who-esque premise, behind all the superhero shenanigans. Rip Hunter is the leader of a team of D-list heroes who travel through time on a ship (the Waverider) stolen from a group of future dudes who police time (the "Timemasters") LOLOL! It's of course a shit show like all the other CW superhero shows, but it seems to know it's a shit show, and is as a result sometimes knowingly cheeky and funny.

There are a lot of Who-esque stories in both DC and Marvel, but I think Rip is the most overtly Whoish.