TV By tomorrow night, all being well, I will have completed the Tenth Doctor era in my quest to #whowatchorbust through everything generally considered official or some other things before the 23rd November. Glancing at this, I've managed to work through all three season plus specials of the main show, two and a half series of the Sarah Jane Adventures and three series of Torchwood in a month, which to be fair now that I see it typed on a screen doesn't seem like that much of an achievement, if achievement is even the right word for sitting and watching some telly in comparison to I don't know, this (to pick something recent), but nevertheless its shorter than the original broadcast period of about four years. Being a fan of something means that the thing you're a fan of doesn't just exist as an artifact or text in and of itself. It exists at the tip of an emotional and even intellectual iceberg the mass of which is everything which happened around it. Life. Which means rewatching all of that is like time compressing, the fragments all pressing up against one another, albeit in your own head, old friends, old online discussion, reading interviews in Doctor Who Magazine, buying the dvds, all pretty mundane of course, but still enough to create an existential Proustian hurricane. I'll come back to this at a future point because let's face it you wouldn't imagine me to do otherwise.
In terms of watching them in this order, despite all the Turn Left shenanigans (see the updates at the bottom of the link, it holds up pretty well, especially for the gap year. Post Journey's End, the Doctor travelling alone not wanting to have attachments means The Next Doctor, Dreamland and Planet of the Dead flow well into one another, then the six radio episodes of Torchwood acting as a neat prelude to Children of Earth, interrupted by Waters of Mars to explain why the Doctor's not available to help them out, he's trying to avoid everything. Compressing the season and a half of SJA in afterwards is strange because of the shared Earth problem, but not as badly as you might expect considering most of them were broadcast long before the preceding episodes and although The Wedding of Sarah Jane does look initially like it should put before The Waters of Mars somehow because the Doctor seems more in character, his final look in the TARDIS when he doesn't look like he knows if he will see Sarah Jane again, plus the foreshadowing from the Trickster about The Gate in The End of Time means its actually in just the right place, the Doctor's bravado throughout masking the pain of the mistake he made in The Waters of Mars and the expectation of his inevitable downfall, assuming you can attribute any kind of pop psychological profiling to a space time event with a personality and mythologically fictional one at that.
Oh the other thing. Well, since, as usual, we're all being treated like puppies with our tongues hanging out raising our paws in a begging motion desperate for information, I don't know what to think, as usual. The People report today was a bit of a mess, a friend of a friend said they'd heard this, which for all its mainstream appearance was Gallifrey Base fodder. But the Radio Times piece is a bit sketchy too. Is it two episodes - as the story has been reinterpreted as by some - or episodes from two stories? Will the whole stories be going up online or just the episodes which have been found and if its the latter isn't that a bit stingy on the people who don't happen to have a copy of Lost In Time to hand to fill in the gaps (and I know that sounds churlish considering but it's worth asking). It also suggests they've been "digitally remastered for sale" - by whom - the Restoration Team has been denying all knowledge for months in strenuous terms. The shadowy spokesperson's an interesting figure too - at one point they suggest that it's not true that missing episodes have been found but if that's the case, why the press conference, or are they referring to the whole omnirumour and the 90-106 or whatever? Either way, even if they have been found, I can't be watching them. I've the whole of the Matt Smith era to get through first ...
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