![]() ![]() But there’s no denying that many episodes can’t help but look a little washed-out and grainy (although selected 5.1 mixes certainly help punch up the sound quality) and it’s a credit to all those who have worked tirelessly to scrub these episodes up that a Blu-ray set of such compromised material has been possible at all. ![]() Over the years, though, the episodes have been cleaned up and colour-restored by the marvels of modern digital technology and they’ve really never looked better in any other physical media release format than they do here. The series’ 25 episodes famously survived in the BBC Archives either as black and white prints or prints returned from overseas TV networks then converted into unsympathetic broadcast formats. Season 8 now arrives on a lavish eight-disc Blu-ray boxset but fans are advised not to expect the crisp, sharp visual quality of previous sets culled from much later in the series’ run. The whole look of the series became brighter and more ‘comic strip’ and, significantly, one serial saw the Doctor briefly lifted out of his exile and sent by the Time Lords to sort out some rum business on an alien planet, the first signs of Letts and Dicks tugging at the narrative straitjacket of the stranded-on-Earth format. Caroline John’s brainy boffin companion Liz Shaw was out, Katy Manning’s eager, bright-eyed Jo Grant was in and the Doctor was to face a formidable and persistent new enemy in the former of rogue Time Lord the Master, played with aching urbanity by the suave Roger Delgado. ![]() Season 7 had adopted a more mature Quatermass-like style for its four serials but producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, not hugely comfortable with the ‘Earth exile’ scenario imposed upon the series as it entered a new decade, began to tinker with the formula in an attempt to skew it back to a more inclusive family audience. Who knows? Here’s to a cracking season finale.Broadcast in 1971, Season 8 of Doctor Who saw some subtle refinements to the gritty new format established for third Doctor Jon Pertwee the previous year. Godlike Missy and her agents have been appearing in the afterlife/paradise/promised land/netherspace at the ends of episodes and as the series draws to a close, it’s impossible not to wonder whether Missy and Clara are one and the same. More: Doctor Who first look-pictures from episode The Caretaker: The Doctor and Clara take on Skovox Blitzerīut the net of suspicion is drawing in. We saw the Doctor in his barn and Danny in the childrens’ home and even a descendant of Danny’s too. The Tardis seems more obliging these days and when the Doctor took the safeguards off, Clara and Tardis joined forces to take them back to the various times they’d had ‘the dream’.īut it’s notable, isn’t it, that the one childhood they didn’t revisit was Clara’s. Remember way back when, she got all grumpy about the impossible girl. The Tardis didn’t like Clara to begin with. ![]() As it probed her mind it detected Clara’s guilt for something and was ready to soupify her brain before it was distracted. More: Doctor Who season 8, episode 4: Listen – what is the Doctor scared of? Rule two must surely be that you don’t lie to the Doctor? And she’s even been lying to Danny too about her travels in Time and Space. She has deliberately withheld vital info from him and that’s a dangerous business. He did his own sleuthing in The Caretaker. Osgood?).Īnd yet she didn’t tell the Doctor. MORE : Doctor Who series 8: Clara Oswald’s turned bad according to the latest trailer for Dark WaterĬlara knows that Danny Pink is significant because we’ve met one of his descendants, Orson (and significance in the Os? Oswald. That’s surely a set-up for something huge. In Listen she met the Doctor as a boy, before he was a Time Lord, sleeping in a barn that would later see three Doctors unite to end the time war without destroying Gallifrey. Not least because she is still tumbling through the Doctor’s time stream. We don’t know much about her family and it’s just too glib to dismiss her two alternative existences as a Dalek in the future and a nanny moonlighting as a barmaid in Victorian London as just wibbly wobbly etc. Danny’s relative – Orson Pink (Picture: BBC) ![]()
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