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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

4 Comments

  1. Mr Coxy
    April 12, 2011 @ 11:27 pm

    "But film, in the end, is just not a medium it's well-suited to. Because what makes Doctor Who brilliant is there's no such thing as the iconic Doctor Who story that captures the feel of the show. The feel of the show is the vertigo when you're pulled from one story to another. Film, focusing as it does on individual stories, can never capture that."

    Thanks for articulating something that has always bugged me about the idea of a movie. The 1996 TV movie suffered from this too. It attempted to come from somewhere (McCoy) but had nowhere to go from there and had to overload itself with exposition for the new views.

    It's not only Doctor Who that has the problem though. Other shows with a sense of continuity share the problem. An X Files movie leaves me cold, but Charlie's Angels makes perfect sense. As you point out, Doctor Who's vertiginous shifts add another layer of strangeness to the idea of a standalone movie.

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  2. 7a1abfde-af0e-11e0-b72c-000bcdcb5194
    July 15, 2011 @ 8:59 pm

    "The Daleks were still treating him as human in The Chase"

    And in "The Sensorites" the Doctor says "we humans."

    Reply

  3. William Silvia
    February 23, 2013 @ 9:42 am

    I'd like to present the argument that you're treating "film" in the manner with which it was during both your and my childhood: something that was designed to stand alone, whereas anything in a serial nature is more at home on television. In the modern era, film is more as it was in the days before home television: that is to say, serial is equally at home in film. Literally the only difference between, say, Sherlock and the average film series is that the audience has more expectation of spectacle and dramatic visuals in film, something which Doctor Who since 2005 has done very well. Add an extra million dollars to the budget of an episode of either of these shows, and it's a film as post-Lord of the Rings, post-Harry Potter, post-Twilight and now post-Avengers audiences have come to understand it.

    Reply

  4. TheGhostSquirrels
    March 9, 2015 @ 9:40 pm

    I can think of one film that almost captures the Dr Who experience you describe, Time Bandits. In its romp from one tale to the next, with almost no connecting theme, at least until the latter parts of the film, it has the feel of a season of Dr Who compressed into a single film.

    Reply

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