An admitted last-ditch attempt to get this in during the twelve days of Christmas …
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Can it really B over a year since our last foray into the (very) occasional series of posts examining the haphazard world of Doctor Who Production Coding? Apparently so.
To re-cap the classic series used letter codes for each story which started with A (for An Unearthly Child) and ran to 7Q (Ghost Light). ‘I’ was never used, ‘O’ and ‘U’ sparingly, but as for the rest…
And the Tour followed, even extended this into nu-Who all the way forward to Whittaker. It’s also an incredibly handy way to sort stories. Previous stops in this ramshackle series included stops at ‘B‘ and ‘R‘ and ‘X‘ and ‘L.’
The least-loved of vowels has produced what seems like an incomplete set of stories, and for the stories in this ‘classic’ realm this is made all-the-more obvious with The Myth Makers, an altogether missing story. The Mind Robber is an all-time classic though, and The Time Warrior had the distinction of introducing Sarah Jane.
On the nu-Who side there’s a curiosity in that, with the exception of Planet of the Ood, all of the stories are some part of a larger multi-part story (although we admit we’re pairing The Angels Take Manhattan with The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone for effect) so talking about these stories by necessity means mentioning the other half (or sixth in the case of Flux).
So with that said … The Age of Steel did a reasonably good job re-imaging the Cybermen for the nu-Who set, Cold Blood left us, …. well, cold. We liked The Angels Take Manhattan at the time but now it feels more manipulative as well as being an ideal publicity ploy for American audiences.
The Magician’s Apprentice had lots of moments, but somehow now feels somewhat less than the sum of its parts, but we felt much the opposite for World Enough and Time, which packed quite a wallop.
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U-see? Worth the wait wouldn’t U agree?