Yeah, I read somewhere that all PBS stations accidentally got that little bit of da Silva in the movie edit of "Underworld."

I was convinced she was Amy Acker for a few seconds.

I've only heard a little bit of the da Silva narration — a tiny bit of it was accidentally left in the 90-minute movie-edit version "Underworld" broadcast on Maryland Public TV, just a sentence or two, where da Silva says something like "Doctor Who and friends plunge into the underworld!" Very odd. I saw "Underworld"…

If they continue to have budget problems then I hope they do a bottle episode set inside the TARDIS and its corridors every couple of years, with fewer special effects than this one. Something like what you describe, with no guest characters, would save a lot of money. Then they'd have more money for other episodes…

Yup, I agree. As long as an actor is better than that horrible child in "Fear Her" or Kylie Minogue, then I can usually roll with it.

"Why am I suddenly over it?"

I was hoping the frozen exploding engine room would look weirder. It
should have been exploding marbles and glass and Gallifreyan cyborg
butterflies. Instead it just looked like a regular exploding spaceship engine.

I don't know, it looked relatively expensive to me, by this show's standards. I expected more of a bottle episode with more corridors actually. There was a ton of CGI. The cliff-jumping bit appeared to be an actual location — unless it was green-screen? The library looked great, the crashed leaking TARDIS with wires…

@avclub-6307a12d5c9e2fb5f23518a9a0ee8dd1:disqus Oh they're definitely showing it, it's scheduled for around 8:40 p.m. Eastern tonight (Sunday) after some talking heads ramble about the fourth Doctor, with a rerun three hours later. But like I said, it might be sickeningly stretched out to fill out a 16:9 screen which…

For a few moments I thought maybe we'd get something really dark with the time zombies — that they would turn out to be failed attempts by the Doctor to reincarnate the Time Lords, and he couldn't bring himself to put them out of their misery. But that would be too grim for this show, I guess.

They went deep into the TARDIS in "The Invasion of Time" in the 70s as mentioned in the Stray Observations above, but they did an atrocious job of it. When Alisdair Wilkins calls it "a distinctly less impressive jaunt through what appeared to be the TARDIS’s warehouse district," he is being far too kind. They just…

Also, I never got a really consistent sense of Amy's character either, so the lack of depth so far for Clara is not unexpected to me. For all his flaws and lousy thin plotting, I think RTD was much better writer of female characters than Moffat overall, within certain limits. That said, both of them give it much more…

I was glad to hear the cloister bell actually chiming in a situation where it makes sense. IIRC it's supposed to happen only if the TARDIS itself is in danger. I loved "Hide" but the cloister bell didn't make sense there. The Doctor was in danger, but not the TARDIS, not until later.

I keep seeing comments that the show's budget has been slashed again and again, but do we have any hard numbers? Can you cite anything? I'd just be curious to read more about it. Shows like Star Trek: TNG spent something like $2 million an episode back in the 90s, so I wonder if DW is under that level. Given that DW…

@avclub-6307a12d5c9e2fb5f23518a9a0ee8dd1:disqus Folks in the U.S. can see "Pyramids of Mars" tomorrow (Sunday) night on BBC America, but unfortunately they may stretch it again. I'm not sure about the HD feed, but in SD, BBCA applied a bizarre, nauseating, uneven stretch to "Spearhead from Space" last month and "Tomb…

I disagree strongly. I tried to watch this show a few times when S1 was originally broadcast and I found it laughable and pathetic. The only reason I kept coming back and giving it more chances is because I was a Usenet junkie and was fascinated to see a showrunner interacting with his fans and hyping his show.

DS9 was one of the last shows, if not the last show to use lots of models for its spaceships with little or no CGI, and the modelwork was outstanding. They were extremely well-practiced with their models by that point and they had a budget of something like $3 million per episode if I remember correctly. Even so, I…

@avclub-804bfd285116c91c935176b2b199894d:disqus Right or wrong, no advertiser will pay much for total viewers. Only pay attention to the adults 18-49, even just when talking about ratings as examples or whatever. And slipping to a 2.4 in adults 18-49 last night isn't great, but OTOH almost everything else on CBS…

I'd say a C is pretty generous. This episode was a dud and although I don't remember the pilot that clearly, I bet you have Fusco blinders on for sure. It seemed like he was totally corrupt in the beginning and not that repentant about it. Now they're trying to retcon that and whitewash him. I don't like it. It makes…

I got really curious about this and tried to find some of them online. Seems like both seasons of Survivor UK are on the good old Yerterb, from 2001 and 2002, but S01E01 of that is EXTREMELY dry. I never thought I'd see myself type this, but… it's just not trashy and flashy enough! The editing is really draggy. Also…