Canadians Miss Out On Doctor Who Season Finale 303
darthcamaro writes "Canadians were among the last people in the world to get the season 4 finale of Doctor Who which already aired in the UK and Australia. The Canadian public broadcaster — CBC — decided to cut out nearly 20 minutes from the episode, leaving fans wondering what was going on. Doctor Who isn't the easiest show to follow at the best of times — but Canadians are now up in arms (or at least hockey sticks) over their taxpayer-funded broadcaster's lack of respect for SciFi hosers."
BitTorrent (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:BitTorrent (Score:5, Interesting)
The wife and I watched it months ago. The Internet is my TV station.
As you mention BitTorrent, I'm assuming there were no commercials in the version you received. Since you're paying a "tax" on things like blank media anyway, I'm surprised more Canadians don't do this.
Re:Spoiler alert! (Score:2, Interesting)
Almost as difficult as keeping track of how many times the Borg attacked a Federation vessel (and failed; pretty pathetic for an advanced race).
You know what I never got? There are what, trillions of borg drones? They probably outnumber the combined population of the Federation planets (and Klingon/Romulan/Cardassian Empires), and they obviously had superior firepower, so why did they pussyfoot around? If they just would have launched a full scale invasion of the Alpha quadrant, they could have assimilated everyone and been home by lunch.
That always really bothered me.
Plot/Series Branching (Score:5, Interesting)
Doctor Who really seems to make the most sense if you watch it in the UK in sequence with its spin-offs such as Torchwood or the Sarah Jane Adventures, because in the Season 4 finale there are tie-ins to the spin-offs as well as some earlier episodes in the season that refer to story lines happening on the spin-offs. In other words, watching Doctor Who in America on the 1 season delay sans spin-offs leads to confusion because you don't know what's going on.
I applaud the BBC folks for thinking so creatively about spin-offs playing off against Doctor Who, and vice-versa, but it falls apart against the reality of the region-segregation that they still like to practice.
It's a pity, because many BBC shows are more cutting-edge than Hollywood fare these days and they would play really well here as-is. Except, Hollywood likes to re-produce and re-package them as watered-down, lamer versions. A couple examples are "Coupling," a Friends-like show written by Steven Moffat that was hilarious, that Hollywood tried to Americanize and which was done so poorly that it was DOA; "Top Gear," which is an entertaining auto program and which would do just great here, but which Hollywood has again felt the need to destroy by Americanizing it. "The Office" and "What Not to Wear" are two other examples.
Accordingly, maybe Bit Torrent is the only real way to go in the end.
Re:Spoiler alert! (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah, in fact, that part of the plot in which the borg were first introduced. The borg ships seen in Next Gen had all been sent out long before from the Delta Quadrant, but Q sent the Enterprise into borg space and thereby demonstrated that a more full scale invasion would be profitable.
The general implication as I understood it was that although the Federation could (barely) hold its own against what amounted to an advance scout party, a full scale invasion was only a few decades away, and unless they did something drastic, extinction was inevitable.
Voyager not only castrated the borgs both as a concept and as believable episode-to-episode villains, it also essentially derailed a basic underlying facet of the universe.
It's a pity, a series set, say, fifty years in the future could easily have done quite well focusing on desperate measures to unite everyone against the coming borg. ...of course, now that I think about it, it would have been an even more blatant knock-off of Babylon 5 than Deep Space 9 was.
Re:BitTorrent (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, Doctor Who is produced in conjunction with another organisation. Amusingly enough, that organisation is the CBC. So Canadian taxpayers (who actually FUND the program) are more than entitled to download it, I reckon.
Re:Spoiler alert! (Score:5, Interesting)
Because - oh god, this will cost me karma! - Star Trek autors are pretty pathetic themselves. (The best example is that nearly all extraterrestrial life [not just "humanoids"] is like earth, just extremely different where you can't look at.)
If they had invaded and won, the authors would have been unable to come up with a continuation. In Star Trek, everything has to be OK at the end of a show. Only Movies are allowed to change fundamental things. They would be forced to end the show.
If there were more creative authors around, an won invasion by the Borg would be the greatest opportunity of all!
Think of that invasion happening in a movie.... and the movie ending with the borg winning and dominating the whole federation. People would have thought: "What the fuck? Why did it not have a happy ending?" But they would never forget it!
The following TV show would have a continuous storyline. Starting with everybody - and I mean everybody - being Borg!
Then the magic would happen: Somehow, a child of a Human and one of the other major Species, would be able to resist in it's innermost Soul. Like i tiny flame in a storm, struggling to survive. You would experience this feeling with that child.
No cheap tricks about a special race, a data disguising as a Borg, or some crap. No. Just the plain spirit of Humanity and the Federation... ...fighting, and growing... ...spreading to other humans on earth too... ...until the resistance would be so big, ...that the whole Borg collective would be assimilated by it!
Assimilated by the spirit of individuality and freedom of the mind. By what we think is right an wrong.
And the Borg would not know how to handle such a very strange weapon / enemy within. They would traverse all kinds of strange changes in their society, to cope with it, making the Borg something far from what they originally were. All their technology would be useless.
The Borg would be assimilated themselves. It would be a very very hard war on so many and so strange fronts as the mind itself.
Until just a small group of some thousand Borg would be caught... the last resistance against the new resurrected Federation. (Everything would still be very temporary, unstable in the background territory, and semi-Borg, using Borg technology.)
But the surviving Borg were changed so much, that they were no enemy anymore, but a helpless race, struggling to survive... with right so survive on its own.
So the Federation would let their old enemies live, and make a historic agreement with them, adding them *to* the federation, as the first advanced - and now good - race.
This would also make for some very interesting inner conflicts in the later federation! (27th-31th century?)
As a last plus, the Federation, together with Borg technology, and the new born power of the inner spirit (explained as some electromagnetic power of the brain),
would make humanity a new advanced race themselves.
And just as with the first warp flight, this would call for some other advanced - elder - races, who would ask them for contact, allowing inter-galaxy flights and contacting a ton of non-humanoid species (which is possible, now that CGI is good enough).
Oh: If anyone important reads this and wants to contact me, to work on a realization: Bring some money with you! I have much, much more ideas! :)
Re:Plot/Series Branching (Score:1, Interesting)
BBC America butchers everything they show in the names of getting the standard 10 minutes of US advertising for every 20 minutes of show. Then if the time constraints weren't enough, they further cut out material to placate the FCC or something. I have no idea why since FCC regulations don't apply to cable TV stations, but they do anyway.
Then there's the PAL to NTSC conversion, which loses even more quality.
In short, you get the same edited crap on BBC America that you do on any other US station that shows BBC shows. Your only legal way to get BBC originals in the US is iTunes. The only other option is piracy, since the US DVDs have the same NTSC issues that BBC America does.
Re:A new companion? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll admit that I wasn't very pleased with the decision to have 'the bride' return as a regular companion for the Doctor, precisely because she was portrayed by Catherine Tate. The only thing I found remotely humorous on the Catherine Tate Show was Lauren ("am I bovvered"); the rest was just unfunny (IMHO).
I stuck with it though. As the series progressed I got over the things that annoyed me (I think they toned her down a little as time went on too, which helped) and ultimately I think I'll miss her a little now that she had to have her memory wiped and leave the Doctor's side.
I'm with the other posters who mentioned this too: I think the rate at which Doctor Who is going through companions lately is too rapid and they're not really fully coming into their own.
I'm also going to miss Bernard "Diggin' a 'ole'" Cribbins, for entirely different reasons :)
As for TFA, that's quite appalling. Cutting 20 minutes nigh on halves the length of the episode. Tsk, tsk, CBC, and tsk again. It's little wonder people are downloading shows, it's possibly now the only way they can be sure it hasn't been ridiculously cut down to size.
Hold on... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Spoiler alert! (Score:3, Interesting)
No. You misunderstood me. I think the whole concept of the existence of a "soul" is horsecrap, just like religion.
My idea was more like: We have something special. A will/power to survive, that outweighs even the Borg assimilation nanites.
Of course, in reality, such a thing does not exist too. But it can be explained on a basis of physics in the movie.
The whole experience of seeing that struggle of humanity to survive, when it's as close to dead as it possibly could be... is the point of it. The rest only exists to serve that purpose. That special power is just a tool. And a pretty good one, from the perspective of the transmission of feelings.
But who am I arguing with. "totally sucks" is such a deep and good argument... ;)
I wonder if you ever studied the psychology of movies/games in depth like I have? (It's my job.)
Re:A new companion? (Score:2, Interesting)
I wholeheartedly agree, if only to see more of the delectable Georgia Moffett lighting up the screen :)
In my opinion having Jenny in the main Doctor Who series as opposed to a spin-off would work well; there would be that whole father-daughter dynamic that I thought worked really well. I guess the scriptwriters don't want to explore that and are perhaps wary of having the Doctor lose any of his mystique as a result. Hopefully later she will return for a longer, if not 'permanent', spell.
Reinette however wasn't really setup to become a companion as far as I could see. If you hadn't mentioned her I wouldn't have considered her at all, but I can see how that could work, and work well.
BTW I never noticed the 'contemporary Earth' thing before. I'd hazard a guess that it is the scriptwriters' aim of making them seem more familiar to the general audience. If that is the case, I would think that an extraterrestrial/'other-time' companion would open up the possibilities story-wise.
As it happens, Jenny would be the perfect compromise here in my view.
Re:A new companion? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A new companion? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually Catherine Tate is a rather talented character actress who has her own comedy show. I don't think she is especially like her character in Doctor Who, at least not in the interviews that I've seen.
TV is a horrible method of judging someones character. If I want to know what someone is really like I talk to their Black Jack dealer.
Re:A new companion? (Score:3, Interesting)
So, you know her in real life then?
I thought not. Look at her other work (I somehow doubt you've seen any of it) and you'll see just how wide her range is. "Donna Noble" is not Catherine Tate.
For some reason she is now slated to be a more permanent companion for the fourth year of the New Series.
Obviously you're not much of a fan if this is news to you. She's not eyecandy like Billie Piper(Rose) or Freema Agyeman (Martha), but she certainly can act.
Re:So that's what happened... (Score:3, Interesting)
I it too!
However, I think it is perhaps over-wrought in general. any 'positive' feelings equally overblown. The Doctor (and companion) seem to transition from maudlin to flippant within a fraction of a second.
For lack of a better term springing to mind the show seems bi-polar. Week in week out I find that a bit tiring to watch.
I wouldn't mind the next incarnation of The Doctor being a bit more enigmatic, I don't think we need every emotion thrown at us in such an amplified fashion.
Errr stupid... (Score:3, Interesting)
You do know who makes Dr Who don't you? Its the BBC which is pretty much quasi-government (its independent in terms of editorial control but its budget gets set by the government).
So your argument that a government controlled entity can't possibly show decent quality TV produced by another government controlled entity really doesn't make sense. The BBC is probably the finest global broadcaster in terms of overall content, originality and political coverage. HBO will have a shot from a quality perspective but politics?
Government control can indeed be a very bad thing (look at Italy or Venezuela) but one thing you can't do is complain about it in a thread talking about Dr Who.
Re:A new companion? (Score:3, Interesting)
I only mentioned Tennant's term coming to an end because he's so terrific; even only seeing most of his first season, he's one of my favorites, and - in that limited sense - his departure is too soon.
I agree. I wouldn't mind seeing Tennant rival Tom Baker's seven seasons.
Eccleston's one + Tennant's four(ish) seasons are still below average.
4 seasons is perfectly average for a Doctor. Ecclestone's one season was a disgrace, though. (In longevity, that it. He was a perfectly good Doctor.)