When BBC broadcast special, colorful editing “The Daleks” to celebrate. am a doctorLast year was its 60th anniversary, from the actual editing to the shorter runtime, the serial was left largely the same. a cute trailer To finally tease the adventures of the next 60 years in time and space. With his second take – this time on Patrick Troughton’s iconic exit as the Second Doctor “war games”—Things became very different. Very apart.
A special color TV film airs on BBC 4 in the UK starting this week am a doctorThe final black-and-white story – taking the four-hour saga and shortening it to just 90 minutes – took the opportunity to weave in answers to the questions Who At this point fans have been building a crazy checklist of references and acknowledgments pointing to the show’s future for years, which are now, in some ways, definitive parts. am a doctorConstantly evolving continuity. Here are the three biggest tweaks and changes added to the proceedings.
war chief and lord
Possibly the biggest theory, played with “The War Games”, specifically makes a connection between the original story and am a doctorIts immediate future is more obvious: one of the serial’s major antagonists, War Chief, was none other than the incarnation of the Master himself. During War Chief’s appearance in the colorization, the newly updated soundtrack included contemporaries. Who Composer Murray Gould’s award “Master Vainglorious” Theme-And you can even briefly hear its telltale sound when the War Chief is killed by the Time Lords at the climax of “The War Games” am a doctorModern regeneration SFX as his body is being dragged.
While in the original story it was always established that War Chief was a renegade Time Lord, over the years supporting material and novelizations have gone back and forth on the idea that he is an early incarnation of the Time Lord who would eventually take over. of the Master (the implication now is that he initially did this with Roger Delgado’s incarnation of the character). Terrence Dicks and Malcolm Hulke, who wrote “The War Games”, noted in their own am a doctor The Target episode novels state that the Master and the Doctor were the only renegade Time Lords who escaped from Gallifrey with their own TARDIS, implying that the War Chief and the Master were, in fact, one and the same. But later the original novel as part of the Virgin new adventure The books would also treat War Chief as a distinct character who survived the events of “The War Games” and would eventually be resurrected in different incarnations, such as the Big Finish audio drama which introduced the Master’s earlier incarnations as War Chief. Set aside.
test and doctor face
The one particularly random change occurs during the Doctor’s Time Lords trial in the story’s climax. In agreement with the Doctor after concluding that despite his laissez-faire policies there are many threats in the universe worth confronting (here embellished from the original with additional clips from others) am a doctor stories), the Time Lords still choose to punish the Doctor with exile to Earth and forced regeneration, giving the Doctor a number of possible scenarios. However, in colorization, these faces – all of which doctors still deny for various reasons – are no longer just random unknown identities. Instead, the Doctor is given the chance to regenerate the faces of many of his future incarnations beyond the Third Doctor, as the Time Lords project the images. We Know that there are actually twelfth (rejected as “too old”), tenth (“too thin”), thirteenth (“too young”), and eleventh (described only as “it won’t do at all!”) doctors. Are.
This is a particularly odd addition, given that there wasn’t really any particular theory or desire that these faces had any special connection to the Doctor beyond the Time Lords introducing them at this point. It’s not like that am a doctor The idea of ​​the Doctor not being explored by incarnations we were already familiar with – we have plenty of examples of infamous faces ranging from “The Brains of Morbius” to contemporary ones. WhoThe inclusion of John Hurt’s “War Doctor” between the Eighth and Ninth Doctors, or Joe Martin’s “Fugitive Doctor” and William Hartnell’s other earlier incarnations of the Doctor. But it’s a funny joke at this point that the Doctor has little desire to get one of the many faces as we know them that they eventually end up with later in life.
Regeneration of the Second Doctor (and dating the unit)
Using rotoscoped footage of Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee’s Doctors to establish the actual moment of the Second Doctor’s regeneration, the colorization of “The War Games” climaxes with an almost entirely new composition. Here, after the distorted view of the Doctor’s face in a shadowy void from the original serial, the action cuts inside the TARDIS, where, sitting in a chair as he hears glimpses of his departed companions, the Doctor finds himself glowing. Handles. With regenerative energy, transforming into its next incarnation. As we recently coveredThe Second Doctor’s off-screen regeneration has been covered in other supporting material outside the show (alas, no Time Lord-sanctioned Scarecrow Execution Squad this time), but now the moment has been brought in line with the depiction of regeneration in seen am a doctorThis is the modern era, for better or worse.
But that canonization is not the only new phenomenon. As the newly resurrected Doctor checks to see When? In fact he has landed – before we cut to the first scene of Pertwee from “Spearhead from Space” falling from the TARDIS into Oxley Woods – the TARDIS displays flickered back and forth sometime between 1970 and 1980. Are. This in itself is a pointer towards a more long-term am a doctor Fan theory, the so-called “unit dating controversy.” Although many of the Third Doctor’s adventures appear to be contemporary with their broadcasts in the early 1970s, two mentions date from around the career of one of his closest associates, Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart – in the 1968 Second Doctor story ” The Invasion”, which established the unit’s existence and promoted Lethbridge-Stewart to his famous rank of brigadier, is set around 1979; And the 1983 Fifth Doctor story “Mawdryn Undead”, which states that Lethbridge-Stewart had retired from the unit in 1976—disrupts the continuity.
TV show as well as other tie-in media (am a doctor At the time, for the most part, the Third Doctor’s time on Earth was largely considered to be taking place in the same time-frame as its broadcast), so although this is not the first time there has been an on-screen nod to controversy , this is the first time in some time we’ve seen this explicitly addressed, even if the answer, ridiculously, is the TARDIS throwing up its metaphorical hands in confusion.
What do these changes mean? am a doctor,
At least in the case of both stories adapted so far, colorization isn’t the only way to experience these serials – both the original versions of “The Daleks” and “The War Games” are available on physical media. and streaming at this pointSo despite the “confirmation” this latest colorization brings with it, anyone who wants to watch the original stories without embellishments can do so.
While on the surface a lot of these changes and “retcons” are minor in the grand scheme of things, the fact is that the scope of these colors expanded rapidly between “The Daleks” and “The War Games” beyond cosmetic embellishments and condensation paints. Has gone. An interesting picture of what may change in future colorization, as each new colorization brings with it an attempt to create even more connections am a doctorThe vast, and often contradictory, continuum of. It remains to be seen what stories may come next and what changes may come with them. as always am a doctorOnly time will tell.
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