Via the AP: ‘Battlestar Galactica’ franchise steams ahead.

Via the Guardian’s organgrinder: Edinburgh TV Festival 2008: don’t rule out Doctor Who feature film, says Steven Moffat

Other Moffat/Who tidbits:

Via the Telegraph: Daleks may be exterminated, says Doctor Who producer.

That’s probably good, although I can’t imagine that they are gone for good. Having them out of view for a while (at least one series, if not more) would be a very, very good idea.

Quite honestly, RTD over-played the Dalek card. I liked the first series episode Dalek and it might have been interesting to see a sole Dalek versus the Doctor, rather than bringing back the Daleks en masse multiple times. The Cult of Skaro thing wasn’t bad either (I especially liked the whole “Daleks with names” bit). Daleks v. Cybermen was also cool in a fanboy sort of way. Bringing whole attack fleets that were then wiped out in the flick of wrist was , however, rather lame.

Also, via the BBC: Moffat promises new Who monsters

Now, about those trans-fats…

source: Worth1000.com

h/t: Darth Mojo

Spoilers for Journey’s End included herein.

We finally got around to the Doctor Who finale last night, and while I enjoyed it, I have to say that RTD has too great a penchant for these stories that build to armageddon² to only end in some remarkable solution that makes all the bad guys vanish in some magical blink. Really, we have had some version of that for all four seasons of RTD’s run on the show (Rose and the heart of the TARDIS in series 1, the Doctor sucking the Daleks and Cybermen into the void in series 2, the whole hitting the temporal reset button in series 3. Really, while I think RTD deserves a lot of credit for many great things about the return of Who, it does seem that it is time for him to move on, and so I look forward very much to series 5 and the Moffat era.

One generic thing I did like about the show was the inclusion of so many of the Doctor’s family/army (although I would have liked to have seen more character moments–although granted, there were a lot of characters to deal with).

This leads me, however, to what I think was a major missed opportunity, especially with the Davros-Sarah Jane presence in the story. One of the things that I have long wished the show would deal with is the fact that the Doctor had the chance in Genesis of the Daleks, to wipe out the Daleks once and for all before they became the menace that they would become, and he decided that he could not commit genocide, not even of the Daleks. Yet, in the Time War, he was forced to commit genocide (chronocide?) of both the Daleks and the Time Lords as a means of stopping the Daleks. As such, the choice he made in his past came back to bite him, and bite him hard. Beyond that, despite his dire choice, the Daleks keep coming back to threaten the universe time after time, with the Reality Bomb being the most dire of those threats.

Given that Davros was there, and Sarah Jane was present when the Doctor chose not to eliminate the Daleks, it would have been extremely interesting for all of that to be revealed. Surely, Davros would have loved to have rubbed that in the Doctor’s face there at the end.

In terms of the resolution to the situation, I would have preferred either of the following over the Deus ex Donna bit on the Dalek ship:

• The quasi-Doctor and Donna actually succeed in their original plan to make the Reality Bomb target Davros’ DNA and therefore all the Daleks. That would have been cooler (and made quite a bit more sense). Why the quasi-Doctor did the whole Rambo charge at Davros made no sense, nor did the fact that the feedback device looked like some funky gun. Surely it would have made more sense to take the TARDIS straight to the Reality Bomb itself to then sabotage it?
• Or, instead of creating the quasi-Doctor, it would have been more interesting for Donna to simply have merged with the Doctor’s hand/regeneration energy and then as the DoctorDonna saved the day, only to ultimately sacrifice herself. Of course, that wouldn’t have provided the whole resolution to the Rose situation with the quasi-Doctor.

I would also note the following:

• Davros’ exact role in the situation was wholly unclear. Was he really a prisoner? If so, why?
• Why didn’t Davros’ imprison Donna as well as the quasi-Doctor? That was just lame writing.
• Why was there such important equipment in the vault that Donna was so easily able to manipulate?
• One thing the two-part finale underscored to me was one of RTD’s big contributions to the show, and that is the extended “family” of characters that have been a hallmark of the new Who. In the past we never would have seen characters like Wilf, Donna’s mom or Jackie Tyler in the pre-RTD days. I think the degree to which traveling with the Doctor is shown to have other effects back on Earth has been a fabulous edition to the show. I loved the riff in the 1st series when the Doctor first brings Rose home and instead of a day passing, a year had passed and Jackie had missing persons posters out all over the place and had accused Mikey of foul play. The involvement of the Master with Martha’s family is another great example. And who couldn’t like Wilf?
• A side note: clearly we are going to utterly ignore (thankfully) the idea introduced in the 8th Doctor’s movie that that Doctor is part human.

io9 reportrs: Caprica Series Gets Picked Up In The UK.

Charlie Janes Anders at io9 offers the following advice on How To Discover Classic Doctor Who In 3 Easy Steps.

As a fan of the original incarnation (previous regeneration?) of the show, I think that this is a pretty decent set of recommendations. The only thing I really disagree with is the evaluation of The Caves of Androzani (the 5th Doctor’s last episode). I found it a big plodding and the Master not quite right, but it may just be a matter of taste (my memory of this one is fresh, btw, as I did watch this one fairly recently, back in December when I decided to hook-up my VCR again to specifically partake of the Whos I recorded off of SoCal PBS back in the late 80s).

I would add The Face of Evil to the list of Baker episodes worth watching, as it was one of the ones I recently viewed that struck me as lines and behaviors that could have as easily come from David Tennant as they did from Tom Baker. Like almost all of the pre-current era shows, it does suffer from some pacing issues (see below).

I very much agree with Ander’s inclusion of both Baker’s Pyramids of Mars and The Robots of Death (the latter, in particular, I also saw as showing long-term character consistency between the 4th Doctor and the 10th–identical no, but I felt like they really were the same character).

A key piece of advice:

Try to take breaks between episodes. I should have mentioned this earlier. When I lived in England as a kid, we would have a week between 25-minute episodes, and those silly cliffhangers would feel all-consuming. A lot of stories feel stretched out and slow if you watch them all in one sitting, but they feel urgent and super-fast if you watch them an episode at a time. Although the Tom Baker stories were frequently shown in “movie” format in the U.S., with all the episode breaks edited out, and they seemed to hold up fine. (I remember watching a 7-part Jon Pertwee story in “movie” format, and I nearly clawed my face off.)

I have to admit that one of the greatest obstacles between the new Who and the pre-RTD days is the old serialized format (even more than the f/x and more child-oriented tenor of some of the shows) and the concomitant pacing issues. The original show ran in 25 minute weekly segments, and therefore has a very different flow from a modern hour-long format. When the shows are in the ominbus format or even viewed on a DVD one after another, the timing issue emerges. In short, the show is often painfully slow and frequently padded beyond belief. To be fair, not all of that is Who-specific, as it seems that in the late 1960s and early 1970s a lot of directors (movies and TV) where all too interested in showing things like cars parking and people walking up to the door of buildings and such (early Pertwee (3rd Doctor) is full of such stuff).

At any rate, I have genuinely enjoyed all of the Doctors, although my experience with 1st is quite limited and it likewise not too great with the 2nd. I have seen close to all of the 3rd-8th (and obviously the 9th and 10th). Tom Baker (4th) is my favorite, and Colin Baker (6th) clearly my least. Sylvester McCoy (7th) was a mixed bag, with some of his eps being quite good, and others being quite awful.

If I were listed just episodes, I have not made an actual ranking, but will admit that probably all of my top-five would be from the current era, indeed probably from the 10th.

Off the top of my head, Blink and the two-parter Human Nature/The Family of Blood would be in that top 5 (and it is noteworthy, I guess, that Blink was a “Doctor Lite” episode and the two-parter was originally a novel featuring the 7th Doctor).Update: I would add “School Reunion” to the list as well, another 10th Doctor ep, but with a clear link to the 3rd and 4th (especially the 4th).

At some point I may come back to that issue (favorite eps) as well as my own guide to classic Who.

A movie trailer is a commercial, yes? Often trailers make it to YouTube or to other video-sharing sites and frequently they are soon removed for copyright reasons.

Now, here’s the part I don’t get: if the trailer is a commercial, why in the name of Adam Smith would a company be upset over the free distribution of a commercial? Wouldn’t more eyeballs be a good thing in concert with the very purpose of the trailer?

Just sayin’

Via Topless Robot: Topless Robot - The 7 Biggest A**hole Computers in Science Fiction.

An amusing list. I have to admit, while I fully understand why Hall 9000 was #1, you have to admit, the fact that Skynet brings the nuclear holocaust upon the Earth ought to get a 1a at least.

Via the SciFi Wire: Battlestar Finale Will Answer All

“Yeah, yeah, everything,” Bamber said in an interview at the Television Critics Association summer press tour in Beverly Hills, Calif., over the weekend. “I can’t really think of a really loose thread. … Not off the top of my head. I’m sure there are a couple, but I can’t think of one.”

May it be so.

And may it be satisfying.

Via TV Guide: Caprica: The Battlestar Galactica Prequel Explained.

Not a bad tagline: “The end of humanity has a beginning.”