Sundry Observations on Doctor Who

David Tennant announced he's leaving Doctor Who after the run of 2009 specials. I am surprisingly okay with this. (Not that it would matter if I wasn't...)

It'll be four seasons of him as the Doctor, which makes him one of the longer-lasting incarnations (only Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker lasted longer*) and he's had a good innings with stories like "Blink" and "Human Nature". And he's doing the lovely thing of quitting while he's ahead. He's certainly one of the best Doctors ever, and he -- or the new production team -- won't bugger that up in his time left (*fingers crossed).

Soon, I'll be able to go back to fancying him, which is impossible to do with someone playing the Doctor.

And I'm excited to see who the new Doctor is. If I were as famous as Brian Blessed is, I'd just /say/ it was me and the papers would publish it. But I'm not.

I'm not quite as excited as everyone else seems to be about Steven Moffat taking over as executive producer. I haven't mentioned it because I'm still pondering it over. Lawrence Miles posted his thoughts on the subject, and I was inclined to agree. He may be mad, but he is a very good critic**, and he pointed out that this season's "Silence in the Library"/"The Dead Forest" two-parter is a fairly weak retreading of Moffat's previous stories. However, all the rest of his stories are top-notch, so I'm keeping a sort of guarded optimism. His casting of the new Doctor will be very telling...

By a weird coincidence, I managed to get a hold of the Trial of a Time Lord box set and The Brain of Morbius release both this week, and have been drowning in a sea of stories I haven't seen since... well, since the VHS of Trial came out and... a long, long time for Morbius. The older story is a bit better than I remember; Trial is... well, Trial.

Some observations:

1) Joseph Lidster (Who writer and audio playwright for Big Finish and screenwriter for Torchwood) is way cuter than I expected. He appears on an extra for "Terror of the Vervoids", a special that talks about cliffhangers. Could maybe somebody stick him in front of the cameras for the roughly 800,000 spots BBC America needs for ads shilling their up-coming broadcast of Series 4 instead of Moffat?

2) Apparently, the production team of "Vervoids" asked Bonnie Langford to scream in the same key Dominic Glynn's Season 23 arrangement of the theme tune stings in on. This is, unintentionally, hysterically funny once you know. It gives visions of the Mouse Organ from Monty Python.

3) I have all three novels of the extant "Missing Season" published by Target. Now I want to read them again, although they seem pretty fishy.

4) Brian Blessed is god.

*There's an argument to be made that both McCoy's and McGann's tenure was longer (both at 9 years apiece, 1987-1996 and 1996-2005, respectively, since work featuring their Doctor came out, but it's non-TV work.

**I'd link to it, but like most of his more... contentious posts, it's been taken down.