THE BBC ANNOUNCER SAID THAT THERE’S AN EXTRA DOCTOR WHO SCENE AFTER THE END CREDITS SO PLEASE DON’T TURN OVER WHEN THE EPISODE ENDS SPREAD THE WORD
doctor who
Some important things about Doctor Who that often get forgotten
- It was created primarily by two Jewish people, Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert.
- Actually, that deserves repeating: CREATED PRIMARILY BY TWO JEWISH PEOPLE. Shout it loud.
- And yes, Verity Lambert’s contribution is erased about as often as you’d expect. Not by the show itself – she’s had characters named after her, an episode dedicated to her – but Wikipedia’s Doctor Who page hasn’t even given her a creator’s credit! Humph.
- Doctor Who’s first director was Waris Hussein, a British-Indian Muslim. (And he lived to see himself played by Sacha Dhawan in An Adventure In Space And Time.) Enjoy the visuals of An Unearthly Child? They’re down to him.
- Daleks are based on Nazis. Yes, they really are. After a while, the show started to veer wildly about as to whether there are any ‘good’ Daleks, how the Doctor should react to them etc – but…yeah.
- Russell T Davies, creator of the revived show, is gay. (He wrote the original Queer As Folk.) Which is also forgotten slightly more than you’d expect.
- Jack Harkness is roughly based on John Barrowman himself. (People often say ‘Moffat can’t possibly be homophobic because he invented Jack’ but from what I can tell he didn’t seem to have much say at all into what Jack’s sexuality was.)
- Not too far into Freema Agyeman’s era as Martha, the Sun (godawful British tabloid) wrote a small article clamining she’d been fired from the show due to being ‘difficult to work with’. Not true, obviously. Freema got a lot of crappiness in general due to her status as the first WOC companion: this must not happen again.
- Helen Raynor is the only female writer to have written for the revived show. (Four episodes.) Afterwards, she got abuse of the ‘women shouldn’t write for Doctor Who!’ kind from (the male-dominated side of) fandom. This also must not happen again.
- Speaking of females behind the scenes: the sheer gorgeousness of the most recent episode, Dark Water? Down to Rachel Talalay.
- Mickey Smith exists! He does! And he’s wonderful.
soufflesimmons:
I’ve been putting together the shots of all the post-it notes that Clara has at the beginning and I’ve noticed something.
Clara is telling Danny everything. Absolutely everything. Not just the truth he asked her for, corrections of her previous lies. She’s telling him everything he doesn’t know, about the dinosaur in London, about Courtney on the moon, about Robin Hood. Back before she even knew him, to Vastra and Jenny and the half-faced man. She’s telling him about her interference in his past. She’s telling him loads of things that put her in a bad light, but she’s telling him the truth.
This is a complete and total loss of control, which is what Clara is absolutely terrified of. This is the biggest sacrifice she can make for someone, bigger than jumping into a timeline. Something simple but so difficult, and something very very human.
I’m so proud of her.
I don’t want to derail from being proud of Clara (I am too, for this decision), but – look at all the interesting character stuff hidden in her bookshelves! Lots of classic literature. Some things that look like they’re from adventures we didn’t see (Hyperscape body swap tickets?!) Lots of travel books, echoing back to the desire for travel she had before the Doctor even came along. A picture of Danny in a rare relaxed moment. A picture of Clara’s dad (this one, actually.) God, I love it when set designers put the effort in.
I do have big qualms about the way the new female Master was written, but considering it wasn’t that long ago Russell T Davies was saying there shouldn’t be a female Doctor because “it would simply introduce genitalia into family viewing“…I think ultimately she’s a step in the right direction.
[via claraoswin]
It fascinates and concerns me that the last person we saw him display this “I’ll forgive you no matter what you do” attitude around… was the Master.
rosecutietyler:
“You know when sometimes you meet someone so beautiful, and then you actually talk to them, and five minutes later they’re dull as a brick. But then there’s other people, and you meet them and you think ‘not bad, they’re okay’, and then you get to know them, and their face sort of becomes them, like their personality’s written all over it, and they just they turn into something so beautiful…”
