The TV movie has always been a source of fascination for me ever since I got into Doctor Who. For a very long time it was the only piece of televised media to feature the Eighth Doctor, and (presumably because of rights issues) its something that existed in a bit of a bubble. While New Who would reference various parts of Classic Who, the events of this film always seemed to be glossed over aside from the Eighth Doctor being an incarnation that existed. I was even aware that other characters from the film hadn't made their way into expanded media the way other characters and companions from the show's history had. So going into this I was so curious what it would be like, and if it felt like part of either Classic Who or New Who.

The long and short of it is it doesn't quite feel like either - but it also doesn't really serve as a bridge between them. While in the classic 4:3 aspect ratio, the way its shot is cinematic in a way no other part of the franchise really is, and tonally does feel like the kind of retooled American version of the show it technically was. There's plenty to like about it, but I ended my viewing with no doubt in my mind why this wasn't picked up as an ongoing series.

Unlike the Classic and Modern series, this film is not available for streaming anywhere for American audiences that I could find, so I utilized other means.

( But it was a childish dream that made you a doctor. You dreamed you could hold back death. Isn't that true? )

So my plan of watching all the Wilderness Years content in 2022 didn't pan out for one reason or another, nor did my planned New Who rewatch in 2023 (which has been surprisingly Doctor Who-lite in general). I have spent the past year tinkering with my approach a bit, which involved dividing this era into three sections as well as the TV movie, and it seems like it's mostly worked. The one part I've been going back and forth on is whether to include Reeltime and BBV films in the same ranking or to split them up. In the end I decided since these lists are gonna be divided up as it is why add another. (I will add that I am not watching any BBV material while providing any sort of financial support to the company, in light of what happened last year. Read into that as you will.)

Going into this I was expecting a dip in quality, mostly from visual production and scripting. However, the most common issue I ran into is sound quality, which I'm bringing up here because I suspect the sound mixing may have been fixed in versions of these releases I do not have access to, making it a marginally unfair metric to hold against it. That said, this aspect is important since I had trouble following what was happening in at least two of these. I actually ended up pretty impressed with how most of these turned out visually, to be honest.

Overall, this review covers video content from the '90s released prior to the 1996 TV Movie. This includes two officially licensed "special" productions by the BBC, and four independently-made spinoff films with officially licensed characters and/or monsters. I've ranked each story based on these two designations.

( Mum used to think that you were some sort of spy. We used to hope it, because at least that would be interesting. )

It's been a hot minute since I've made a more casual post, and I want to start doing more of these instead of exclusively using this account for giant Doctor Who reviews or motivating myself to write fanfic.

☆ Writing: I started a bunch of fic drafts last year (and the year before) that I never got around to finishing. New mini-goal for 2022 is to finish at least some of those (and fill in more spaces on the 100ships challenge). Also lowkey wanna start writing some Fortnite fic (because I am a clown) but I'm probably gonna have to untangle the lore a little fic first even if I just end up writing about Jonesy getting dicked down lmao.

☆ Gaming: Been playing a lot more Animal Crossing and just got into the Happy Home Paradise expansion. I'm also still in Fortnite hell, and I've started playing some Indie Games on the Switch because of a sale they had towards the end of last year. So far I'm really digging Figment and Wandersong but I'm hoping to play more once I've finished with those.

☆ Television: I'm halfway through the most recent season of You, but honestly I haven't been that inspired to watch much Live Action TV the past month or so aside from Drag Race (and Queen of the Universe and Drag Race Italia were pretty big letdowns imo). I'm excited for the new US season but I really feel like I'm in a rut... which may not be a bad thing? I was consuming a lot of content for a very long time so I could probably stand to slow down a little.

☆ Movies: Encanto and Spider-Man: No Way Home were great, but - especially with the Omicron variant - my big return to watching movies hasn't really panned out. Even before that I never got around to watching Dune, and I did see Eternals but thought it was really bad. Trying to jazz myself up to watch The Matrix and Scream movies for the first time but so far no dice.

☆ Doctor Who: I really liked Eve of the Daleks, but I didn't think it was remarkably better or worse than Flux like a lot of the takes have been. (Though admittedly I guess I liked Flux more than most?) I'm currently wading my way through the "Lost Season" season 27 Big Finish audios, before I figure out how I'm gonna tackle the actual Wilderness Years content and the TV Movie. I also finally started The Edge of Reality... but the controls on Switch are kind of difficult (and it's very obvious that it was originally designed as a VR game) so I kind of haven't gotten back to it. Either way, I'm happy that I still have a wealth of content to get through considering the next two specials seem to be the only New Who we are gonna be getting for quite a while.

So last year I bailed in a major way on Star Wars because in the fallout from The Rise of Skywalker, interacting with the property in any way was making me miserable and it got to the point I needed to divest for my own sanity. (And this was even before the pandemic lockdowns started!) However, the final season of The Clone Wars was also finally released last year, and so I decided that on May the 4th, when the final episode was released, I'd spend the day binging the whole thing (as well as the last string of episodes of Star Wars Resistance).

And I had a really good time.

At the time it had been four months since I'd touched Star Wars at that point and I think the time away did me good. I got to close out two Star Wars properties I was already invested in and they both had the added benefit of being really good. I decided that, when new content came around again, instead of getting tangled up in the day-to-day minutia, I'd save it for May the 4th and binge it then.

So yesterday on May the 4th, I sat down to watch season 2 of The Mandalorian, which I'd heard decidedly mixed things about (and that's even before taking into consideration all of Gina Carano's bullshit). And, I, uh, couldn't get into it. Like, I was never as into season 1 of The Mandalorian as other people were but I still enjoyed it, but I couldn't bring myself to care about anything that was happening in the episode or even continue on from there. The new show that premiered yesterday, The Bad Batch, is also a continuation of The Clone Wars and a prequel to Rebels, two shows I enjoyed, but I also couldn't muster up the motivation for that either.

And now a day later on "Revenge of the Fifth" I can't say I really care anymore.

So I think I'm gonna call 2021 as the year I've successfully divested from Star Wars. It had been a steady, positive presence in my life for four years (2016 - 2019) and pretty miserable presence on-and-off for another (2020) and I think it's served its purpose. I never watched it as a child so I don't have any baggage of that nature attached to it, so I'm pretty comfortable making a clean break. Now I just have to decide how much of the limited merchandise I have I'm gonna bother to keep and what I'm gonna give away.

"Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to." - Kylo Ren

I signed up for the smallfandombang, which I'm optimistic I'll be able to tackle since it's one story rather than multiple fills, and actual gives me an excuse to hyper-fixate on properties that no one aside from me really cares about. I've also made some headway on my buffyverse bingo fills - especially now that the deadline is later than I thought it was. At the very least I should have something fun to contribute to the amnesty round assuming my brain doesn't turn to pudding after the election.

I've been making my way through the other Halloween sequels and I'm starting to resign myself to the fact that no shlocky horror movie sequel is gonna hit quite like A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 did. I did end up really digging The Boy though so maybe that sequel will offer up something I can latch onto. Assuming my schedule isn't thrown off I plan on spending part of this weekend watching those '00s horror movie reboots all in one sitting, so maybe one of those will surprise me too.

In semi-related news I'm gonna try to rewatch Hocus Pocus tomorrow so I can make an attempt to make it through the rest of that novelization/sequel that came out a couple of years back, especially in light of an actual sequel being greenlit. Since I know the "lead" of the novelization sequel is queer I'm kind of rooting for it to be an adaption of that, but either way I'm just hoping to enjoy the book. I did enjoy the author's take on some of the clumsier elements of the film.

I haven't posted an update entry like this in a while. I've mostly been spending the past month doing Doctor Who stuff (as previously reviewed) and starting series binges of Leverage and Wynonna Earp, which I'd never seen but had been meaning to get around to. I just finished the first season of both last night and I'm enjoying each of them so far. I've also been watching RuPaul's Drag Race and my takes on it are, apparently, hot. I'm a little over halfway through season 3 right now but I'm probably gonna take a big break after All Stars 1 because it is a lot.

I've gotten some writing done, but I'm aiming to get the rest of my nordipalooza multi-chapter done this month along with the final chapter of that Hetalia fic I've been chipping away at for nine years. I also have some Doctor Who oneshots I'd been working on alongside the one I just published and I'm hoping I'll at least get the summer-themed one finished while it's still actually summer. It's not like a have a lot of other things to do considering I'm gonna be trapped inside in perpetuity. (I also have a couple of bingo squares I should probably make more headway with before it becomes a mad dash to the finish line).

Halloween stuff has started getting officially cancelled and while I'm not surprised (and glad people are still taking COVID-19 seriously) I was really looking forward to it this year because it's on a Saturday and it's the last one of my 20s. I have a bunch of horror movies I still need to watch, including all the Halloween sequels, and I suspect I'll start up with those again sooner rather than later. I'm still thinking about A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 almost a year later (because I am gay and thirsty I guess) but I wonder if any of them will really hit me creatively the way that one did.

So for the past month and a half I've been waiting for my landlord to patch some holes in my ceiling from when they did pipe work, and because they kept saying "soon" I've been putting off doing any large-scale cleaning of my apartment and now I've found myself living in a giant mess. Like, some of it is clutter, but since I made an effort to move stuff into corners to keep it out of the way of "construction", the mess itself is more disorganization and a LOT of dust. I've gotten assurances that the work won't be done this week (because I'll be away at Katsucon this weekend) but I'm really going to get on their case to get it done when I get back because I want to clean and also go through my things to decide if there's anything I want to get rid of or regulate to storage in my parents' attic. (And since my parents are helping I need to comb through my apartment and hide all my pornography in my car lmao).

I saw Weathering With You on Friday and Birds of Prey last night and I really, really loved both of them! I hadn't been to the movies in about a month because it didn't work with my schedule, and I'm glad I figured out a way where I can go after work and still be home in time for my workout. I highly recommend both films, and they were both visual feasts that offered interesting story and characters. I'm kind of bummed I missed out of Weathering With You's IMAX run because I was sick, but even on a normal screen it was gorgeous. And Birds of Prey is easily the best looking DCEU film even though I think it has the smallest budget (except for maybe Shazam!?).

I don't have much more to say about this season of Doctor Who other than I am enjoying it. The only complete dud this season was "Orphan 55" vs. series 11 which had... a lot of duds, so a season with a couple of greats but mostly pretty goods is a definite win. The character writing has also noticeably improved. I just hope that they stick the landing with the two part finale in a couple of weeks, especially since they're wading around in the waters of the franchise's foundations.

As mentioned above, this weekend I will be going to Katsucon in DC (well, National Harbor MD) again this year, and I'm really looking forward to it even though I think this has the fewest number of friends attending yet. I wish it was easier to travel to, because I've found I tend to enjoy this con (and the venue) more than Anime Boston - which is the one all my friends attend, and will so this year. I'm just going to do reskins of my Ichimatsu cosplay though I'd like to make an actual new cosplay at some point.

Also, the heat in my office is super broken so I've been sitting in an 82 degree oven for the better part of a month and my skin feels awful and I desperately need to shave, and then shampoo my whole head when I get home today. It's been raining so I can't even pop outside to even things out temperature-wise. This vacation can't come soon enough!

This week, in preparation for the premiere of The Rise of Skywalker, I'm rewatching all of the live-action Star Wars films. Some for the first time in years. As I go along I'm collecting some of my thoughts on how each film has changed in my own estimation, and how well I think they hold up overall in the story as it stands.

Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi is my favorite Star Wars movie. I'd maintained over the last couple of years that it was a solid second after The Empire Strikes Back but nope, it is hands down my favorite in the franchise. Which is why JJ Abrams may soon be my sworn enemy, but I digress. Honestly, going into this, I was struck by how much it gave off the vibe of "the last film made a ton of money so this one has an actual budget" - even though I know The Force Awakens had a similar budget. Really, I think it boils down to your skills as a producer and a filmmaker. And, judging from this and Knives Out, Rian Johnson is one hell of a filmmaker.

( That's how we're gonna win. Not fighting what we hate, saving what we love. )

This week, in preparation for the premiere of The Rise of Skywalker, I'm rewatching all of the live-action Star Wars films. Some for the first time in years. As I go along I'm collecting some of my thoughts on how each film has changed in my own estimation, and how well I think they hold up overall in the story as it stands.

Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens is a film that has been criticized for aping too many plot points from A New Hope. It's a criticism I never put all that much stock in, because aside from some broad strokes I didn't think they were that similar, and the new characters were so different from the original cast. However, upon rewatching all of the movies just prior to revisiting this, I have to say it does borrow an awful lot from not only A New Hope, but The Empire Strikes Back as well. I mean, there's a reason for it: this structure is solid and it's a logical way to revive a franchise while injecting new elements into the story as well. And while I do think those new elements were strong enough that it was a successful gambit, it does make this film seem much more unimaginative and safe compared to all the others.

( I'm being torn apart. I want to be free of this pain. And I know what I have to do, but I don't know if I have the strength to do it. Will you help me? )

This week, in preparation for the premiere of The Rise of Skywalker, I'm rewatching all of the live-action Star Wars films. Some for the first time in years. As I go along I'm collecting some of my thoughts on how each film has changed in my own estimation, and how well I think they hold up overall in the story as it stands.

Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi leans further into the fantasy elements of the franchise than any of the other films, an element I found slightly off-putting the first time I watched it. However, upon each viewing I gain more of an appreciation for the decision to go this route, not to mention the way it resolved its central conflict is key to shaping what Star Wars would become possibly more than anything else. It's impact is felt all the way from The Phantom Menace to The Last Jedi, where the idea of humanity and redemption for the villains is given it's due. Sorry guys, Luke Skywalker is the original woobifier of your problematic faves.

( Strike me down with all your hatred, and your journey towards the dark side will be complete! Good! Use your aggressive feelings, boy. Let the hate flow through you. )