Vee

I don't think you're really supposed to invest in them. Chit's hateration doth not faze me.

I loved the Mels thing. And Let's Kill Hitler. I thought it was so Doctor Who and cracked fairy tale for them to 'raise' River that way. I never had a problem with what they did with her.

As we gear up for The Time of the Doctor and the Fall of the Eleventh - it's been heavily spoiled by British tabloids harvesting legit spoilers from Gallifrey Base, but my lips are sealed - I wanted to re-post a few clips of something that I think is crucial to the institution of DW. Namely, the Doctors and their relationship with their first and most important audience: Kids. I think this is from Christmas 2010 - Matt Smith visiting a boy and his family. I believe the oldest boy was battling a brain tumor at the time. And this is Tom Baker in a Belfast primary school in 1978 - a very dangerous time for Northern Ireland, but he did it just the same.

Every year all I ever hear is how TWD is losing it and is doomed to die a slow death. Now it comes down a bit from inflated ratings and we get the same. I ain't buying it. Personally I thought it was two good episodes - I didn't mind the diversion, but I know other people did. I think what we had in Season 4 up to now was so strong that they're allowed to take time out to do something off the beaten path, and I enjoyed it a lot. I'm sure we'll be back to the regular crew from hereon. I do think Morrissey is doing great work - that they always have with this more nuanced, real-world take on the Governor vs. the insane cartoon of the comics - but now with the eyepatch and the tank and all the trappings of Kirkman's original in full force it's time to wrap the character up this year, for good. I just hope Hershel doesn't suffer the fate of Comic Book Tyreese in the hands of the Governor - I know Hershel is almost certainly doomed, but I'd really rather avoid that scene, iconic though it is. Pete was played by Enver Gjokaj, BTW, who was one of the stars of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, IMO one of Whedon's best and most subversive works. He was up for Mekhi Phifer's part in the unfortunate Torchwood: Miracle Day but didn't get it. He's a great actor.

I liked Colin a lot.

Well, I don't think he'll ever be as nasty as they made Colin earlier on. He might be a little more crotchety but I think they know their limits on that. Matt Smith's Doctor was the old man in the young body more often than not.

I don't see how Capaldi would turn into Colin Baker. There's no comparison between those eras.

Yes, the story I have heard is they did originally have the idea in mind for it to be Eccleston. I don't know how quickly they settled on introducing the War Doctor instead, or how the shooting schedule for that vs. Hurt's quick bit in The Name of the Doctor worked. I think Matt Smith is the best Doctor since Tom Baker, though they're all great. I wish he'd done another year or two more - I'll always wish he could've stayed longer. But Peter Capaldi is just about the best present to make up for it. He's going to be incredible, and his age also is a key element that will influence the future, something commented on directly by the War Doctor in DOTD re: how the post-war Doctors regressed.

Oh, I was sick of Ten by the time he left too. But it's been a while, and I can look back with a lot more ease now than I could, say, two or three years ago - I can even rewatch the whole of The End of Time and enjoy it more, though I hate that story. The Tenth Doctor had some great times, a pretty great run, many wonderful stories, despite some other stuff that still grates. David Tennant is also a sweetheart, so talented and grateful to the show. It also really helped that both he and his Doctor were a lot more balanced in DOTD - there wasn't quite so much of the victory-lap excesses that I felt a lot of the specials in 2010 had, but I chalk most of those up to RTD. Russell T. Davies is an incredibly talented man, but he didn't curb his impulses enough near the end of his run, and that's evident in reading The Writer's Tale, where amidst a lot of other very brilliant ideas and intelligent creative musings, he confronts the problem of the Rose solution with the Doctor clone in Journey's End, and then utterly whiffs it by giving Rose a few more lines and calling that agency enough for her to choose life with a clone. But that's a whole other discussion. I took Tom Baker, the Curator, to be just what he said - a distant future incarnation of the Doctor who has chosen to revisit an old favorite face. We'll never see that Doctor, but that's alright - it will be out there, in the far-flung tomorrow. And thus Tom Baker will forever be the Doctor. There are rumors that he is not at all well IRL, which I hope are untrue, and so I'm glad they got this done. He had all his classic Doctor-ish tics back in there - the shushing, the cooing. He was unbelievable to watch, moment to moment. The look in his eyes. Apparently Hurt was a last minute substitution for Christopher Eccleston, brought in days before shooting. He did wonderfully IMO. I have a feeling we may have to wait another 25 years for Eccleston to come around a la Baker. I was a lot more intrigued by the scientist girl - Osgood - when I realized she was actually Kate's daughter, the Brigadier's granddaughter. And it was the Curator - the Doctor, Tom - who gave her his scarf.

From the A.V. Club's "Random Roles" Q&A with Mary McDonnell:

Bleeding Cool insists that the classic William Hartnell stories, Marco Polo and The Massacre (of St. Bartholomew's Eve) - both amazing stories which I've only seen the fan reconstructions of - have been found and are currently in the process of being restored. They also allege that the Patrick Troughton stories, Power of the Daleks and The Macra Terror, may be next. Both classics, both have recons out there. The Massacre, coming on the heels of the 12-part epic The Daleks' Master Plan, is also the story which featured the immortal speech William Hartnell was shown delivering in An Adventure in Space and Time - "they're all gone now...perhaps I should go home, to my home planet...but I can't!" I've seen all the reconstructions, but they can't compare. And the thought of seeing these actual, filmed stories, or The Web of Fear or The Enemy of the World before them, coming into the light of day is amazing. They're also reporting that the title of the Christmas special, Matt Smith's last story, is The Time of the Doctor, and will wrap up all our questions about the Silence/Silents, Trenzalore, and just who told River "silence will fall" inside the TARDIS in The Pandorica Opens, and why it blew up.

Some have said they wish Lis Sladen could've played the Moment. I think Billie Piper was integral and needed - she's this generation's most iconic companion and an extremely influential part of selling the show in the new millennium, and I thought she did a fantastic job playing something that was often utterly alien to Rose. She's a wonderful actress. That said, I do find myself wondering "what if" - if Billie and Lis could've shared the part, with the Moment switching between the form of Rose and Sarah Jane, scene to scene.

What they did Time Locked Gallifrey - it was confirmed to be Time Locked back during the Tenth Doctor's era. But at the time, he and the prior Doctors were all laboring under the impression that behind that Lock was only destruction. In both courses of events Gallifrey was Time Locked. The difference is the circumstances.

The Five(ish) Doctors is priceless. And it's clear there's no hard feelings, since the current production is involved along with the BBC.

I loved it. The audience reaction has fortunately been mostly extremely positive, but there's still a few too many butthurt latter-day fans online crying out because it "undid the history when they started watching"...less than ten years ago. This was always going to happen. I knew one day Gallifrey would return, and I was thrilled with how they did it. There's too many kids out there who think DW is only about an emo-ridden war survivor. I also liked the exploration of the three primary Doctors, and how they interrelate and why Hurt's War Doctor feels the others have regressed. That was fascinating. I've often felt Matt Smith's era was making a point to transition away from the now-very-tired Time War angst of the Davies years, and now that break is official and total, both in plot terms and in character exploration. The War Doctor and the Moment made a point to the others about who the Doctor is, who he has been, what he has become and where he must go. That means potentially tremendous things for Peter Capaldi's run, not that Matt Smith's was not, IMO, the best since Tom Baker. And speaking of, Tom Baker was just spellbinding as the once and future Doctor. I cried and cried. He was so 'there.' Meanwhile, little Lindalee has returned to interview Matt Smith.

The Guardian has a series of anniversary pieces up, including one with many of the companions, with a new photo shoot for each era.

Here's something.

The health care rollout will pass. The ACA is law and that's not going to change. This is all transitory story.

That's not a spoiler, that's just spec. I have no idea. Kirkman was the one who decided mid-stream that the Lilly in the Walking Dead adventure game was not the same one as in the comics, though the game's writers had already designed and scripted her as such. The Lilly in the game also had a different occupation and skill set, and her father was a different type of guy. According to Kirkman the game is canon to either the comic or the show but I can't remember which. All I remember about comic Lilly was that she was one of the Governor's foot soldiers. I can't see that happening here.

I thought that was a hell of an episode. They took a real chance with different pacing and tone - especially in the pre-credits sequence, with the erratic cutting - and I thought it really worked, and was a wonderful showcase for David Morrissey. It also continued to develop the Governor very differently from the cartoon villain I'm familiar with from the comics, and I thought that was great. Haters to the left. Get out of my life, Darn!

They won't take the Senate. Never happen. It's a Politico wet dream.

I just have no time for this thing. The idea of anyone making "Guiding Light with the serial numbers filed off" is low-rent and ridiculous enough to me - some of the cast and crew of Doctor Who barely got away with that in its wilderness years in the 1990s, and it was a British science-fiction program, a genre with a long history of fringe projects like those, and honestly they weren't very good IMO; a bunch of super-cheap direct-to-VHS stories with random characters played by actors giving knowing winks to the cameras. I just didn't like them. The idea of doing it with a soap opera, though - and one as venerated as GL - I think it only further pollutes the GL brand, which I thought was horribly damaged by everything Ellen Wheeler did, particularly after the move to Peapack. I have talked before about thinking GL could benefit from an AMC-style revamp, but that would require distancing the show from as much of the Peapack era as possible. I mean, it's Peapack! The idea of anyone from GL actually, voluntarily going back there - and bringing along Ellen who, while a wonderful actress years ago, seemed to genuinely believe herself to be some sort of self-styled soap messiah/dippy life coach, wherein her very Mormon-esque, cloistered vision of GL would somehow influence the world at large - is, I feel, horribly embarrassing. And of course most of the cast that's shown up is entirely unnecessary IMO, except for some of the vets. Were any of us dying to see Ava or Mel or Ashlee or Frank Cooper again? No, but Ellen Wheeler was. She's once again affixing her personal seal and vision to Guiding Light at large, shackling herself to it, and I think that's very detrimental for any future options for the show - putting aside the fact that they're somehow attempting to produce some sort of bootleg version of the show, which is radioactive in and of itself. And she's clearly learned nothing, because her interview has her still talking like a cult leader and meandering around about her world-shaking vision for a soap where every single member of the company is sharing the same bathroom and changing in the backseat of an SUV. I'm sorry to be so brutal because I know Carl cares about this, but I honestly just detested what became of GL. It offended me. I thought there was, at times, some very naturalistic dialogue and performances, but that's the most I can say about that time on the show. The more I watched, the more there was nothing else there. No whole, just one woman's personal odyssey. I would love to see GL return, I believe that it can, but to me this is not it. And I'd say the same if this was OLTL, AMC or GH.

I was going to use spoiler space, but my assumption is he is the Doctor.

The new minisode, "The Last Day," is now available on iTunes for free. It is a brief found footage piece, depicting the oft-mentioned "fall of Arcadia" on Gallifrey through a soldier's eyes. Another former DW star will be appearing as a cameo in this week's biopic An Adventure in Space and Time:

Oh, Jesus.