Doctor Who Children in Need 2009

[strange_complex]

Hahaha! Gotta love what they can do when it ain't part of the 'proper' series. Shagging Good Queen Bess indeed - no wonder she was so annoyed! I thought the locking the TARDIS joke was a bit over-played, though.

Odds on we're going to see quite a bit more of what's been happening on the Ood-Sphere during the episode itself, as I doubt all that effort with sets and special effects would have been gone to just for the preview clip.

Looking forward to it!

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Comments

[my-mundane-life.livejournal.com]

What time is it on at? Don't really want to watch all of Children in Need!

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

It was on at 8:15 - hence me knowing what was in it when I wrote this post. You can probably find it on YouTube by now.

[my-mundane-life.livejournal.com]

Oh right - I got confused when you talked about 'the episode itself'

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Oh, no - I just meant at Christmas. :-)

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

As I understood it, we are going to see all of the preview sequence, Good Queen Bess and all, as part of The End of Time, Part One on Christmas Day, though not as a continuous scene.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Oh, I thought I'd heard that it was a separate standalone, like the similar one they did for The Christmas Invasion when he'd just regenerated and was babbling about Barcelona a lot? Perhaps some bits of it will be in the actual episode and some bits not - and if so I would guess that the more serious stuff about 'he is returning' will be, but the Good Queen Bess material definitely will not because of the explicit reference to him shagging her. For all the recent emphasis on romance in the TARDIS, it would still be very odd to include a reference to the Doctor actually having sex with someone for the first time ever in the televised show just as a passing line in a throwaway joke.

Either way, it's also just occurred to me how clever it is that even though the Queen Elizabeth stuff fairly obviously is just a light-hearted throwaway (with a particular nod to those fans who'll always be annoyed about the unresolved plot thread in The Shakespeare Code), it still also constitutes a darker reference to his new-found willingness to change history at the same time. He didn't say he could now explain that she'd never really been a virgin all along - he said "not any more". It's a pretty awesome set of resonances and references for just a few lines of comic dialogue.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

There were plans for a separate standalone, but it didn't go ahead through lack of time. All this material was shot for the Christmas broadcast - and the Elizabeth I reference was ambiguous enough to go out. After all, it could just mean that she is Bad Queen Bess...

[gervase-fen.livejournal.com]

That sounded like Brian Cox to me as the voice of the Oodfather...

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

It seemed to be the consensus after Waters of Mars that his was the voice on the trailer, and presumably the 'Hollywood star' who recorded his contribution to The End of Time in October.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see. Wow, in that case! That is definitely going to be the closest the TV series has ever come to explicitly painting the Doctor as an inter-galactic alien love-machine by quite a long way. Just one more element in a richly nuanced picture of a Time Lord spinning gracefully off the rails - or RTD getting a bit demob happy towards the end of his incumbency? You decide!

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Absolutely - it'll be interesting to see if the line is cut, but I'd like the whole spiel to go out as it stands just because it manages to take the 'light' Tennant Doctor and show him on the run from his fate while at the same time not alienating (I hope) those Christmas viewers who aren't that interested in exploring the depths of a Time Lord's soul.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Yes, it definitely has the potential to work on a lot of different levels. Down with having to wait more than a month now to see!

[davesangel.livejournal.com]

It's definitely part of the first episode which will be shown over the Christmas period (http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/s4/features/bulletins/bulletin_091113_05)