The latest classic Dr. Who coloring has made some wild additions

When the BBC broadcast a Special color editing From “The Daleks” to celebrate Doctor Whomarked its 60th anniversary last year, and aside from actually being tweaked down to a short runtime, the series has been left largely untouched, apart from Cute trailer Ultimately to thrill the next sixty years of adventures in time and space. With the second shot – this time at the famous exit of Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor “War Games”– Things have become completely different. very various.

The color TV special was broadcast on BBC 4 in the UK earlier this week Doctor WhoThe final black-and-white story — which takes four hours and compresses it to just 90 minutes — took the opportunity to weave in answers to questions from Fans have had for years at this point, creating what feels like a crazy checklist of pointed references and acknowledgments for the future of the show that are now, in some ways, defining parts of Doctor WhoContinuity of continuous development. Here are three of the biggest tweaks and changes added to the proceedings.

Warlord and Master

Arguably the biggest theory ever played with “War Games” in Color specifically made one connection between the original story and Doctor WhoThe immediate future is even clearer: that one of the series’ main antagonists, the Warlord, was none other than an incarnation of the Master himself. Throughout War Chief’s appearance in color, the newly updated and contemporary soundtrack has been incorporated from Composer Murray Gould is creative “Mr. Vainglorious” theme.– When the Warlord is executed by the Time Lords when they reach the climax of the War Games, you can even briefly hear an alarm sound Doctor WhoModern SFX regeneration as his body is pulled away.

Although it was always consistent in the original story that the Warlord was a rebel Time Lord, for years additional material and novelizations have swung back and forth over the idea that it was an early incarnation of the Time Lord who would eventually take the mantle. The Master (the implication now is that he initially did this with Roger Delgado’s incarnation of the character). Terrence Dix and Malcolm Holke, authors of War Games, go on to point this out on their own. Doctor Who Target episode narratives that the Master and the Doctor were the only renegade lords to escape Gallifrey using their TARDIS, implying that the War Master and the Master were indeed one and the same. But later original novels were part of The Virgin New adventures The books will also treat the War Chief as a distinct character, one who survived the events of “The War Games” and will eventually regenerate into different incarnations, as is the case with the Big Finish audio drama that created previous incarnations of the Master separate from the War Chief.

The trial and the faces of the doctor

One time in particular, the random change comes at the climax of the story during the Time Lords’ trial of the Doctor. After agreeing with the Doctor that there are many dangers throughout the universe that are worth confronting despite his non-interference policies (embellished here from the original with additional clips from other clips Doctor Who Stories), the Time Lords still choose to punish the Doctor with banishment to Earth and forced regeneration, giving the Doctor several options for possible destinations. However, in coloring, these faces – all of which the Doctor still rejects for various reasons – are no longer just random, unknown identities. Instead, the Doctor is given the opportunity to regenerate into the faces of many of their future incarnations after the Third Doctor, as the Time Lords display images that… we The well-known ones are actually the Twelfth Doctors (rejected as “too big”), the Tenth (“too skinny”), the Thirteenth (“too small”), and the Eleventh Doctors (simply described as “This will never do any good!”).

This is a particularly strange addition, considering there’s no theory or particular desire that these faces have any particular connection to the Doctor outside of the Time Lords he’s showing them to at the moment. It’s not like Doctor Who He didn’t explore the idea of ​​the Doctor having incarnations beyond the ones we were already familiar with – we have plenty of examples from the infamous faces glimpsed in “The Brains of Morbius” to the contemporary fromAdding incarnations such as John Hurt’s “War Doctor” between the Eighth and Ninth Doctors, or Joe Martin’s “Fugitive Doctor” and other incarnations before William Hartnell’s Doctor. But it’s a funny joke in the moment when the Doctor has little desire to have any of the many faces we know she’ll eventually end up with later in life.

The Second Doctor’s Regeneration (and Lonely Dating)

The colorization of “The War Games” reaches its climax with an almost entirely new addition, using grainy shots of Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee’s Doctors to mark the actual moment of the Second Doctor’s regeneration. Here, after the trippy sequence of the Doctor’s face writhing through a mysterious void from the original series, the action shifts to the interior of the TARDIS, where the Doctor sits in a chair as he hears flashes of his departed companions, bracing himself as he glows with renewed energy, transforming into his next incarnation. As we covered recentlythe Second Doctor’s off-screen regeneration has been covered by other additional material outside of the show itself (no Time Lord-approved Scarecrow execution squads this time around, unfortunately), but now the moment itself is consistent with the depiction of the regeneration as being seen in Doctor WhoModern times, for better or worse.

But this reverence is not the only gesture offered by the new landscape. The newly regenerated Doctor also checks to see when It lands just as – before we cut to Pertwee’s first scene of Spearhead from Space, collapsing from the TARDIS into Oxley Woods – the TARDIS screens briefly flash back and forth between 1970 and 1980. This in itself is a signal towards another long term Doctor Who Fan theory, the so-called “unit dating controversy”. Although many of the Third Doctor’s adventures appear contemporary with his broadcast in the early 1970s, dates are given surrounding the career of one of his closest allies, Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, a 1968 Second Doctor story entitled “The Invasion”, which establishes UNIT’s existence and upgrades Lethbridge -Stewart to the famous rank of Brigadier General, established approximately 1979; and the 1983 Fifth Doctor story “Mawdryn Undead”, which states that Lethbridge Stewart retired from the Unit in 1976 – throwing continuity into disarray.

There have been several attempts to at least acknowledge, if not completely fix, this notable continuity error over the years, across both the TV show itself as well as other associated media (Doctor Who At the time, for the most part, I pretty much treated the Third Doctor’s time on Earth as occurring in a similar time frame to his broadcast), so while this isn’t the first time there have been on-screen nods to the controversy, it is the first time in a while We’ve seen this addressed explicitly, even if the answer is, hilariously, to have the TARDIS throw up its metaphorical hands in confusion.

What do these changes mean for Doctor Who?

At least if both stories have been adapted so far, coloring isn’t the only way to experience these series – both the original versions of “The Daleks” and “The War Games” are available on physical media And the flow at this stageSo, despite the “confirmations” that this recent colorization brought with it, anyone who wants to see the original stories without the embellishments can do so.

While many of these changes and ‘changes’ on the surface seem minor in the grand scheme of things, the truth is that the scope of these colorings grew rapidly between ‘The Daleks’ and ‘The War Games’ beyond cosmetic decoration and extensive painting. An interesting picture of what future colors could modify, as each new coloration brings with it an attempt to make more connections across Doctor WhoIts broad, and often contradictory, continuity. It remains to be seen what stories could come next – and what changes could come with them. As always with Doctor WhoTime will tell.

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