Ben Saunders

[Ben Saunders]

Yeah, like how the triangle-shaped VHS tapes have gone from slightly quirky potential future tech to charmingly dated relics of the past. It becomes funny/quaint for a completely different reason. I really like how the giant floppy disc in TPL lampshades this, ridiculous and hilarious but also still fitting in with the continuity/logic of the show.

[Ben Saunders]

The “entire universe” on the scanner is so stupid. “I can’t see Earth!” Of course you can’t, dumbass, you’re looking at the entire universe.

[Ben Saunders]

Tom Baker was truly something else as the Doctor. Quite simply a league above anybody else to ever do it. To ever do anything. With time and with further viewings my appreciation of him only grows. Very mixed feelings on his actual regeneration. But he will be missed.

Odd how Peter Davison first appears post-regeneration with brown hair.

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 08/06/2026 

Bodyswap, D&A, Stasis Leak, Thanks for the Memory (lol), Confidence & Paranoia

I recognised the scene as early as guess 3 but couldn’t for the life of me remember what episode it actually happens in

[Ben Saunders]

Invasion of Time is probably my “guilty pleasure” story, though I don’t really believe in the term. Everybody else seems to think it’s crap, but it was one of the earlier ones I chose to watch on my own volition rather than catching it on TV, and I have always enjoyed it. The tone is great, very funny but they still take it seriously when they need to. Yes, the inside of the TARDIS looks suspiciously like a hospital.

[Ben Saunders]

I don’t dislike the way they look in The Sontaran Experiment, even if it is an obvious downgrade from Time Warrior. I even like the way they look in The Invasion of Time. Derek Deadman (whose name I can simply remember without looking it up because it’s so killer) gives such a strange but electrifying performance, very alien. I love him. Even the accent.

[Ben Saunders]

The Two Doctors apparently had surviving elements and whoever owned them wouldn’t loan them out frustratingly, which is maddening especially when the exterior shots even without that look really good presumably due to the lighting in Spain making everything pop so well.

I remember before I’d actually seen The Two Doctors (I was making my way through the show and was onto the Davison era I think), I caught a bit of that story on the kitchen TV while making lunch one afternoon. I saw the location footage and thought bloody hell, what is this? It looks gorgeous. Oh wait, those are Sontarans. This is Doctor Who?! I think the Sontarans look pretty great in that story actually, “oh but they’re supposed to be the same height” is like, whatever. Maybe they came from two different batches.

[Ben Saunders]

Logopolis is a bit shit. It’s very impersonal. Tegan and especially Nyssa are going through probably the most traumatic moments of their lives and they merely pay lip service to it with a couple of lines of dialogue, then spend the rest of their time following around like ducklings. Nobody in this story acts like an actual person. It’s all very heady and self-important. The only thing lending even a semblance of emotion to the whole thing is the excellent performances of John Fraser as The Monitor, and Tom Baker. Everybody else is just kind of there, Ainley is a bit moustache twirling but hardly the conduit for much actual drama. The cliffhanger to part 3 is vaguely interesting but so drawn out. There’s none of the energy or excitement or intrigue the past few stories have made me feel. I was gripped by Warrior’s Gate and Traken. This one had me checking how long was left in the episode because I felt more of an impulse to wash my hands and clear away my dishes than continue watching.

[Ben Saunders]

I’ve always felt the future city in that special edition never fit with the location footage and it jarred.

Yeah that stuff felt particularly egregious to me. And I do not hate Nick Briggs’ Dalek voices, but something about the performance/modulation on that special edition is really naff. I am impressed by the new footage they shot for the climactic battle, though. 

[Ben Saunders]

Quite honestly it’s more that since the model sequences weren’t restored the basic film qualify difference is a bit too distracting.

I can’t remember the exact details but I know the TOS stuff is a unique situation where it might just not be possible to remaster some of that material to a degree that “modern audiences would approve of”, I say in quotes because it really doesn’t bother me at all. I seem to recall somebody saying the original model effects simply don’t pass QC for broadcast anymore and so they had to do it, but I could be regurgitating false information. Gene Roddenberry used to just give people (or sell to them) original film elements from Star Trek so maybe some of it is gone forever.

[Ben Saunders]

Oh, regarding title sequences, I do think the title sequences on the Season17 Blu-Ray are too clean and obviously digital, and I’d rather they didn’t remake them entirely and just cleaned up the original ones, but I can see there are some logistical reasons as to why they might do it the way they do it. I was fascinated by the recovered Daleks Master Plan episodes having the original titles and not remade ones, and would be interested in having it like that for every release. But it’s not a big deal.

[Ben Saunders]

Directors cuts specifically is something else because then at least it’s (supposedly) the vision of the person/people who originally made the thing, and oftentimes include extra material that was actually made for the original production etc, so it’s more authentic than some blokes on computers digitising stuff 40 years later. Fan edits, I don’t really care for but mostly because they have to work with what they’ve got and are generally only ever removing stuff rather than substantially adding anything to the experience. I would rather watch Back in the Red than BitR but with a couple jokes you personally don’t like awkwardly cut out. But they can do whatever they want, I would never tell them to stop, and they aren’t replacing the episodes on iPlayer with them and forcing me to watch them so it’s none of my business. But me being forced to witness the special edition of Day of the Daleks with those crappy digital Nick Briggs voices is something I want to see real punishment for.

And yes I do watch DVDs of SD stuff on CRT if I can, I watched Peep Show that way last year and was amazed by how much better it looks in that format. And there are a couple little niggles I have with the restoration of Classic Who but for the most part they do an excellent job of just tidying things up for a seamless experience… pre-AI, anyway.

[Ben Saunders]

I recently finished going through Star Trek: The Original Series and have to admit on those I watch the updated model shots, so I can’t pretend to be THAT much of a purist.

Those are great if you like everything to be really smooth and borderline textureless and to look more like a straight-to-DVD FMV game than a 1960s science fiction production.

I’m a purist quite simply and feel like if you’re going to get into the mode of watching a low-budget TV production from the 80s, having it suddenly switch to looking like a low-budget DVD production from the 2010s is just bizarrely immersion breaking. You’re no longer in that world. You fundamentally aren’t watching Logopolis anymore, you’re watching some Frankenstein monstrosity. They’re never an improvement and they never meet their supposed remit of trying to look like something they could have accomplished back then if they had the time and the money. I watched the updated Loch Ness Monster puppet for Terror of the Zygons the other day and it’s not even technically better than the original and just seems like a massive waste of time. Maybe Mike Tucker had fun doing it but the movements aren’t even as believable and I don’t know what the objection to the original stuff was anyway. If you’re going to watch something from the 70s you should accept that it is from the 70s and is going to look like that. It’s always an awkward paste job as well, even the heralded Warriors of the Deep re-edit is clearly an edit and pretty clunky stuff, akin to the bizarre dodge Han Solo does when Greedo shoots at him in the Star Wars special edition.

But hey, there’s lots of shite I don’t like that other people for some reason seem to, so good for them. Watch your higgeldy-piggeldy hodgepodge atrocities and call me a stick in the mud all you want, I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself.

[Ben Saunders]

Accidentally started watching the CGI “enhanced” Logopolis, where instead of crap CGI from the 80s (quaint, fun), you get crap straight-to-DVD CGI from 2021 (pointless, shite).

[Ben Saunders]

Bodysnatcher gets a bit too insane. It’s a bit much, really. How much of that is in the original draft and how much was added later, I don’t know, but it doesn’t actually feel like a Series 1 episode to me. Then again it would have gone through further rewrites were it actually produced for Series 1, so who knows how it would have really ended up.

[Ben Saunders]

I just remembered about holo Lister in Ouroboros, but I was counting two Krytons for that already.

THE TWO KRYTENS

[Ben Saunders]

Nyssa’s story is so tragic. Or at least it has the potential to be so tragic. The Master subsumes her father’s body and commits unimaginably horrific acts in his guise right in front of her. And Bidmead and JNT, in their infinite wisdom, do absolutely nothing at all with it.

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 06/06/2026

Trying not to comment on how fine Katarina is. Failed

[Ben Saunders]

Daleks in Colour was fucking atrocious, I had to stop watching it during the scene where Ian pretends to be a Dalek because I was starting to get dizzy. The pace is utterly absurd, the whole thing is edited like a teaser trailer but somehow it’s like an hour long. Mark Ayres’ music is abysmal.

[Ben Saunders]

I don’t get it. Am I stupid?

[Ben Saunders]

fans who believe the War Chief is the Master

God, I didn’t watch War Games in Colour, but I heard they used the Saxon theme to imply this. They can fuck off. Not everybody has to actually secretly be somebody we already know. We can have original, one off characters. Stop making the world smaller. Bastards.

[Ben Saunders]

Well it still makes the Doctor much more of a chosen one/important figure than they need to be, even if the show tells you to ignore that. It does what the Cartmel Masterplan was gracefully prevented from doing via cancellation. The Doctor was a boy born into an archaic oligarchical who ran away because he wanted to adventure/was disillusioned/there was something spooky going on, then he had all his character development into becoming a hero as an old man thanks to Ian and moreso Barbara. That’s it. He did not exist before then. The Master was lying. All the extra bullshit is just extra bullshit.

I do appreciate “hoverhanding”, that’s a very good word.

[Ben Saunders]

Morbius is mostly good because Tom Baker, Elizabeth Sladen and Philip Madoc are all in it. Worth noting that either Dicks or Holmes or both of them hated it, hence the Bland pseudonym.

[Ben Saunders]

in the PAL region they called him Kilometres Prower

[Ben Saunders]

I love when somebody says “it’s not a bad idea on paper”. Almost nothing is a bad idea on paper. Ideas are the easy part. You have said nothing.

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 05/06/2026 

boo. boooooo

[Ben Saunders]

but the self-doubt is kind of undermined if she’s already met her old self and found she was fundamentally the same sort of person as she is now

It was a bold move to have the Fugitive Doctor tell Thirteen (and hence the audience) “oh shut up, none of this matters anyway so it’s all a bit pointless really”. Why do it then?

though the way I remember it is that reality was actively changed to make single mother Belinda a thing, not that it was this way all along but the true nature of things was being obscured

It came off as the latter to me, but I could be mistaken. It’s the same thing to me really, I think. Either way, the Belinda we all knew and… loved? Did anyone love her? Is dead and gone, and either doesn’t exist or never existed, which is the same result ultimately. I really haven’t thought or talked about The Reality War at much length because I want to just distance myself from it. I’m sure if I thought about it more certain aspects would make more sense and certain things would make me more annoyed.

[Ben Saunders]

[Ben Saunders]

Lots of funny stuff in Mechocracy. The document gag, of course. But also “a man who wiped out the crew of Red Dwarf, and killed himself… twice!”

The biggest problem with Mechocracy is that the title is so close to M-Corp that I have to constantly make sure I’m talking about the right episode.

[Ben Saunders]

I bought into the theory that The Fugitive Doctor was between the 2nd and 3rd Doctors

Unfortunately this makes too much sense. He had the perfect opportunity to do this, but decided to fuck with the very foundations of the show and open up an enormous can of ridiculous worms for no fucking reason (why does she have a police box, what was the point of Hartnell’s character development, isn’t it all a MASSIVE coincidence, should you be locked up, etc).

>Of course, revealing that some or all of the events you’ve already seen never actually happened is almost always hack bullshit

Well he basically went and did this with Belinda anyway as well. It was definitely fan cope talking so I never took it very seriously. I liked the idea people had that all the nostalgiafanwank was going to be a big meta commentary on nostalgiafanwank itself, but again that’s just wishful thinking.

The Susan shit he tried to pull is so crazy because it might actually have been worse than what we eventually got. More pointless fucking with the lore and bringing up stupid questions about canon and invalidating the original character development and forever tainting the classic stories with “oh yeah she’s the wish baby’s mother”, fucking hell. It felt like RTD trying to do Moffat extremely poorly with the whole “oh I’m not a grandfather yet” shit. Shut up!

[Ben Saunders]

I’ve been basically out of Dr Who fandom since around 2017 and believe me, I am a lot happier because of it. I dip in every now and then, and am paying attention to it now because Twitter keeps feeding me it, but it means I’ve managed to avoid all sorts of rumours and speculation. I never heard the stuff about Wild Blue Yonder so couldn’t be disappointed by it not happening.

[Ben Saunders]

Did Tom Baker’s Doctor often shush people?

He does it again in Keeper of Traken. I know he does the nose thing, possibly in Seeds of Doom.

[Ben Saunders]

Which historic Doctor Who rumours or conspiracies did you buy into or invent in your mind?

I thought the second coming of RTD would bring about a new age of at least competence for the show and that he would be a safe pair of hands.
In seriousness, not much I don’t think. I remember the week leading up to The Tsuranga Conundrum, somebody claimed that they were going to do a subplot where the Doctor gets her period and has to deal with that. I didn’t necessarily believe it, but then the episode started and she was being weirdly pissy and combative in way she hadn’t been previously, and I thought for a moment, hey maybe that one guy was right. But it turns out she was just being a dick for no reason, then a man tells her to calm down and she does.

[Ben Saunders]

It could happen in any sitcom

We’re talking about the one where the artificially intelligent vending machines go on strike because the spaceship they’re on has to be evacuated and they believe the four last people in the universe don’t respect them enough, right?

[Ben Saunders]

Russel said on the radio that there will be an announcement “within the next few weeks”, and I believe it’s an announcement on the next Doctor, whether or not that means “next Doctor following Billie Piper”, I don’t really know or care. He also said he’d love for it to be done all in secret and for nobody to know anything about it, but that’s beyond unrealistic in this day and age — it was unrealistic in the 80s.

[Ben Saunders]

It looks cool, I saw a lot of people crying over the way it looks but I assumed that was just them deflecting away from the fact that they think electric cars are gay

[Ben Saunders]

Remember when Chibbers had her kneel submissively and say “Master” over and over? That was something

It was uh… that was uhh… it was really… it was kinda…

[Ben Saunders]

Capaldi talks very posh for a Scotsman, so based on assumption alone he says Marster

[Ben Saunders]

the Master isn’t British, he’s from space

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 04/06/2026 

BtE I

13

[Ben Saunders]

What a bizarre ending. “Right Doctor, I’m off.” “Alright, take K9 with you, bye.”

Tom and Lalla try to inject it with at least a little emotion but it all happens so fast and while things are exploding and wrapping up around them.

I miss Romana already.

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 03/06/2026 

12

[Ben Saunders]

God, Warrior’s Gate is fascinating. Absolutely gripped to my screen wondering what it all means. Luckily I left enough time between run-throughs of Classic Who (over a decade…) that much of this is familiar, yet I don’t know the details very well, so it’s can still enthral and surprise me. The same happened with Pirate Planet, where I was pleasantly surprised by its ability to pleasantly surprise me. What a show.

I love K9.

[Ben Saunders]

He tried to leave after Davison’s last season (20) but was told there would be nobody to replace him. Same again after Season 22, same again after Season 23.

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 02/06/2026 

BitR III, Epideme

11

[Ben Saunders]

State of Decay is rather good, especially the ending, naff special effects aside. And those special effects are an interesting blend of quite good and quite naff. But I really enjoyed the Vampires rapidly ageing and turning to dust. It’s funny how over the years, having only watched these episodes once a decade ago, one can inherit all these ideas about how they think the episodes feel and start to believe fan consensus as to how good they really are. If you’d asked me to talk about State of Decay before watching it I wouldn’t have much good to say about it, but when it comes down all to it all those little niggles and the received fan wisdom fade away and you realise that for the most part this stuff is still really quite good. Except this:

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 01/06/2026 

Parallel Universe, White Hole, Timeslides

[Ben Saunders]

I love when they show screens in Classic Who and it’s just obviously a massive CRT, sometimes with another bezel built on top. There was an episode recently, perhaps Meglos, where it was obviously a big 4:3 CRT but they added a covering to it to make it look more futuristic and the covering ended up obscuring about 20% of the image and cut off the text. I especially like when they show a CRT feed of the in-studio cameras as a sort of CCTV system or whatever, because it gives a really close insight into what this show would have actually looked like when it was broadcast in the 80s, rather than the cleaned up modern mkv file playing off my laptop.

It’s a huge pain in the arse to video a CRT, isn’t it, I wonder if the BBC had issues with it or if they were just really good at it or it just worked because they were all on the same system or something.

I also like this scene in the Dalek movie where it appears some Daleks are watching Doctor Who:

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 31/05/2026 

Gunmen, Stasis Leak

9

[Ben Saunders]

Full Circle is great. Tom Baker does righteous indignation very well. Even at this stage when he’s half-sick, depressed and half-checked-out he’s still an electric performer.

[Author]

Replies