Or … The Lamentable Backwards Question Mark Strikes Again!
One of the ways the Tour looks at screen-capping Doctor Who, old or nu, is that in some sense it is an insight into editing an episode of television and the choices made, along with those of the director, that make them what they are. But, as we stated before, the exigencies of making a scene in the edit work result in that most distracting necessity, the regrettable, reversed image. The vast majority of the time it is hoped that this fleeting reversal will pass by so quickly that it won’t be noticed at all. But the Tour has a practiced, experienced eye for spotting these anomalies knowing that once they are noticed, they can’t be unseen.
And Series 13, in 2021, is sadly no more a stranger to this practice than any other. In the interest of fairness, we are not knocking instances where the Doctor (or any other established character for that matter) appears in a monitor on-screen to communicate with another character. That occurs with some regularity and, while noticeable, can be forgiven for extant reasons. We also aren’t counting various alternative worlds, It Takes You Away is an obvious example, where this can be explained away in the text of the story itself.
Both Village of the Angels and Survivors of the Flux had instances of this. In Village Jodie Whittaker, whose hair is a dead giveaway, was reversed in the tunnel with the Angel. In Survivors it was a tech on the other end of a phone call when the Grand Serpent talked to a mole to carry out instructions. The UNIT logo was clearly backwards.
A cheat? Perhaps. But do we really feel cheated?
