Doctor Who Season 15 on Blu-Ray
They’ve announced the next Classic Doctor Who Blu-Ray season set, and as such there’s an absurdly overly elaborate trailer:
Leela vs the Time War | The Collection: Season 15 Announcement Trailer | Doctor Who - YouTube
Over the last few years, they’ve been re-releasing the old show on Blu-Ray in season sets (whereas before they released it on DVD a single story at a time). They’ve become the gold standard for an archive TV release: fully restored and cleaned-up picture and sound, upscaled to HD despite having been shot in extremely not-HD, making-of documentaries for every story, historical interviews, new interviews deleted scenes, any other thing they can find that’s relevant in the BBC vaults.
The DVDs were mostly released before the show came back, so they had a sort of, not apologist attitude, exactly, but certainly defensive. Lots of interviews on the theme of “it’s not as bad as it looks, you wouldn’t believe how little money we had,” and so on. The Blu-Rays, made in a world where the new show is occasionally the biggest thing on the BCC, are much more relaxed. Much more willing to lean back and just say “yeah, this one was trash, but the next week, that one was pretty good.” That, mixed with a sense that this is their final swing at this, so there’s an impressive amount of attention to getting the details right, cleaning up things that were skipped on the DVDs, digging up any potential bonus material. It helps that physical media has gone back to being a niche thing, so it’s understood that these are a deluxe product for mega-fans, not a low-price item that someone is going to impulse by at Fry’s Electronics. (RIP)
One of the goofy new special features they do for the Blu-Rays are these announcement trailers, which have grown in complexity into being, essentially, bite-sized episodes of the old show. They get back a variety of the old actors, build sets, put credits on them.
Mostly they’ve fallen into a pattern of “let’s see what happened to the companion from this season after they left the show,” which isn’t a terrible impulse, but the answer is never interesting. The downside is that there’s a certain subset of fans who want everything to be moar epic, which is not the register in which Doctor Who operates the best. But that’s how we end up here, where poor Lousie Jamison is acting as hard as she can against a bluescreen that’s going to have Daleks added on later, because the answer to “what happened to Leela” is “she fought in the Time War”, which… okay? So what? (This also feels like someone was ticking a box, and since Leela was never in a Dalek episode, she got one here.). And it ends with a big speech about how great the (off-screen) Doctor is, and then she gets to escape while everyone else on Galifrey burns? The ethics there are a little questionable, but this was witten and directed by the same guy who wrote the episode where Space Amazon were the good guys and the workers looking for labor protection were the bad guys, so no surprise there. And this is as close as something with only one female character can get to failing the Bechtel test.
That’s the best idea you have for a mini-sequel trailer thing? Leela monologues at some Daleks and then beams away? And they’re all like that, zeroing in on some weird fan lore point with Big Speeches. The limit case for this was the Season 17 trailer, Davros Rises! which was an overwrought fan-fiction elaborating on a moment in the deeply terrible Dalek episode they did that year, which is utterly bizarre since that’s the same season where Douglas Adams wrote the single best episode of the old show with seven (authentic) Mona Lisas. (“Where are you going?” “I’m going to go see a middle aged Italian. Well, late middle-age, early renaissance.”). Which tells you a lot about who they think the target audience for these are.
Personally, if I had gotten this kind of budget to do a mini-sequel to an episode from season 15, I’d do a fake episode of In Search Of about the mysterious deaths in the 1920s at the lighthouse on Fang Rock, and have one of the locals be Leela, now mysteriously living in retirement in the mid-1970s. Put a glimpse of a Time Lord robe in her closet. K9 is in the shed.
But grousing aside, it’s all in good fun, and what a joy that my favorite TV show gets this kind of treatment.