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Okaaaay...... that's kinda strange..... but I wondered why they were like every other alien race..
~ conquer/blow up Earth, (Slitheen, Sycorax, etc)
~ destroy/convert human race (Cybermen, Daleks, Toclafane)
..... and the Family of Blood, which I'm not sure where that fits in.. like they only needed a certain number of bodies or something..... but nevermind that.


You've got excellent reasons why not to bring back the Rani, which probably means they will bring her back, in some attempt to make her like the other villains and control the world at some point. rolleyes

This is going to be long >.>


If you have a better idea than I'd love to hear it. Even though he had aliens invade almost every Christmas I personally enjoyed how each one was different.
Well be happy there are not candy monsters trying to invade Earth... and the way you put it makes it bad but in my opinion they were very well written. I would actually enjoy something different over Daleks because as everyone knows that there has been a Dalek in every season of the new series. I hope he does not over kill the Daleks. Maybe if they did something like Human Nature/ Family of Blood for a final or something like the Impossible Planet/ Satan's Pit


*is not a fan of the Rani it's only a guess*

I fully agree with you. I never thought the Rani had much to add to the story at all. In fact, I never liked the Rani. She just seemed to be like a female version of the Rani. The only reason why I thought the Master's wife killed him was because she realized that she is a Time Lord. Also one of the writters said at Dragon*Con a couple of years ago that she would be in series 3 but now typing this he did not mean her. Fortunate for me I was very, very young during that time and whenever my dad mentions it he gets pissed whenever he brings up John Nathan-Turner. I've only got the chance to see the classic Doctor Who from video tapes. I'm personally am glad it is back and that RTD does an amazing job with writing, something that Star Trek could never do.

Well, since I like and trust the current creative team a fair bit more than you do, I tend to think it probably means they won't bring her back. smile

We'll see though... fiddling about with DNA and clones and genes and biodata and possibly fake daughters looks to be the through-line of the season, and the Rani is primarily a biologist.



3nodding Who wouldn't.
I notice that the backstory Davies wrote for the Time War followed the continuity of the novels and audios and had her as president of Gallifrey during the lead-up to the conflict, which might mean her return could open up some interesting story-space.



smile JN-T will always be a hate-figure for a certain generation of Who fans, but the guy didn't deserve quite the amount of flack he got. (DWB, the first of the semi-pro fanzines, the first to go pro and the loudest voice in pre-internet fandom was essentially a periodical campaigning for his public hanging).

He made a lot of horrible mistakes, the worst of which was listening to the fans. In the sixties and seventies then Doctor Who had been aimed at a general audience - at everyone, at everyone's mum, at everyone's younger brother and at everyone's dog. It was mass entertainment for the masses.

Then something horrible happened - John Nathan-Turner noticed that there was, within that audience, such a thing as fandom and started to make the show for them rather than for everyone. It went from being mass entertainment for the masses to being cult entertainment for a cult.

To watch Attack of the Cybermen you first had to be au fait with the continuity of The Tenth Planet, Tomb of the Cybermen and Resurrection of the Daleks. Tricky for any family sitting down in front of the telly on a Saturday night with thier egg and chips, since two of those stories hadn't been seen since the sixties and were thought lost for ever. The titles sequence might as well have had a big caption saying, "Non-geeks Keep Out! You're not welcome!"

Now in the long term then that's suicide (the main reason the Welsh series is getting such incredible ratings and audience appreciation figures is because the current team are smart enough to know they don't have to listen to fandom AT ALL), and JN-T was to blame for that protracted sucide by turning Doctor Who into a cult show. But...while a cult show will always have a limited lifespan, there's nothing to stop a cult show from being bloody good. I'll wager most of the shows loved by anyone reading this are aimed at a 'cult' demographic rather than at a mass audience.

Of course, to the eyes of many (particularly the eyes of those fans that the show was tragically trying so very hard to please, like a spurned wife trying to hang on to her man by offering herself up to shocking degredations) then much of 80's Who wasn't bloody good. It was bloody awful. This is the bit that JN-T doesn't deserve the blame for.

Welsh Who works on the American model of the Writer-Producer... having a showrunner who is also the lead writer in that Whedon/JMS/Chris Carter way...but English Who didn't work like that at all (in fact there were strict BBC regulations preventing it from working anything like that back then). JN-T wasn't a writer, and wasn't even very involved at a story level. I can only think off-hand of one story he personally commisioned himself, which (irony of ironies) was Time and the Rani. Back then the creative direction and vision of the show was very much set by the script editor who decided what the shape of a season would be, what would go in it and how it would flow.

Nowadays the script editors just edit scripts, but back then they were the key storytellers of the show at the content level. Script Editors decided what the show was going to be about, and producers worked out how they were going to pay for filming it. Which was great news if the script editor was Dennis Spooner or Robert Homes, but a catastrophe if the script editor was someone like Eric Saward.

Which sadly, as the show lurched towards the 'cancellation crisis', it was. True JN-T appointed him, but Saward's the real villain of the 80's whose cynical, grim, unfunny, sour and joyless take on the series ran it into the ground.

Once he was out of the picture and the new team had got things back on track then what we were left with was a good cult program. The last two seasons of the English series are as good as anything anywhere in Doctor Who. The sad and horrible thing though is that by that point everyone had stopped watching. sad

I don't. I like interesting. smile



If the themes of Voyage of the Damned are any indicator of how the next season is going to play out, you may be in luck here.

If that story's plot (Doctor promises to save everyone. Fails) the imagery (At his nadir the Doctor 'ascends' surrounded by robots - a pathetic fake Christ flanked by pathetic fake angels) and the dialogue (Mr Copper's warning) are any sort of indication of the waters into which we're sailing, then we're about to see the Doctor learn that he needs to ditch his Messiah complex pretty quick, because it's just not working.

Given that we can be pretty certain who's the big bad of the forthcoming season and that most of us can recite his most famous speech it's looking likely that the story we're about to see is one of the Doctor deciding whether or not he really wants to be "up above the gods."

So we're going to see the 'self-appointed god' angle exploded anyway. But whatever happens I doubt we'll see an uncomplicated 'easygoing' Doctor come out of it. That'd be pretty much the opposite of drama and would be something the Doctor's never really been before (When exactly was the Doctor 'easygoing'?).


How could we possibly know what the Rani might or might not be like when written well since the Rani never has been written well? twisted

The Doctor is supposed to be interesting--the Time Lords are supposed to be those boring guys in the background the Doctor is determined NOT to be like. And it's fun to go someplace boring and stuffy like Gallifrey and turn it upside-down & fluster all the pompous, boring people once in a while, which can't happen anymore.



OK, maybe a bad choice of words...but you must admit, our old Doctor was NOT driven & haunted & suffering from survivor's guilt like the new one is. By comparison, he seems easygoing.

I'm hoping they won't go too far with destroying his "godhood" though--we still want our HERO at the end, whom we can trust to come to the rescue and save the day. Not some guy pretending to be a god, just our good, kind, rather eccentric guy who does everything in his power to fix the situation. People DIDN'T all get out of it alive in the old days; often nearly everyone in the area would be dead before the Doctor managed to get the threat contained or destroyed, but he didn't go around promising to save everyone and constantly apologizing when things went wrong.



I think there's a difference between "done right" and "written well". You can write a really crappy script, awful plot, terrible dialogue, but manage to get a character's motivations down correctly.

I really really wanna click it, but I also really really don't wanna ruin it for myself.

I clicked it. cry

You didn't miss much. Dimensions in Time was made as a 30th anniversary episode, and I have to say, with great regret, it was rubbish. The Doctor Who cast ended up in Albert Square, home to Eastenders.

Oh, and I know I'm not a mod, but [Ramek], please watch your language.