DVDs the Week…

Updated on November 4, 2010 By Ken Begg 10 Comments

A few items of interest.  The Christmas release rush will start soon, though.

The first season (last season? Is that still going?) of the redo of V is now available, on both DVD and, of course, Blu Ray.  I haven’t given this a look.  Is it any good?  The old mini-series was pretty decent, actually.

Plus, two classic Doctor Who releases this week:

The biggie is the Tom Baker series The Revenge of the Cybermen.

Meanwhile, there’s also the Sylvester McCoy adventure Silver Nemesis:

Next week also sees the release of the first season of the new Matt Smith era, Jim Henson’s Doctor Who Babies.

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  • Ericb

    I’ve got the Matt Smith Who on my netflix queue. I hope it works out.

  • Ericb

    And, cool, netflix will be sending me Revenge of the Cybermen tomorrow even though it was listed as “very long wait.”

  • BeckoningChasm

    Sylvester McCoy had the potential to be one of the great Doctors, but his stories were terribly, terribly written. “Curse of Fenric” comes closest to being a keeper, but even that is overstuffed with elements and can best be described as “muddled.”

  • Arthur

    You kid, but I actually think Matt Smith’s first season has done more to capture the spirit of old Who than any other season of new Who. Actual character development! A Doctor who doesn’t actually want to date his companions! A proper ongoing plot arc, rather than a few buzzwords lazily scattered around! What more could you love?

    @BeckoningChasm – The tragic thing is that the later McCoy stories really were starting to pull things together in the right direction (I seriously need to rewatch Ghost Light at some point soon – which IIRC was actually the last one filmed), and some of the ideas for the next season sound fascinating.

    But it was too little too late. The chronic lack of funding the series had been suffering is often blamed, but you’re right – too many of his stories were badly written (you can pretty much forget about any of the stories before Ace showed up), and that really shot his chances in the foot. If the earlier part of his tenure had been stronger perhaps the series would have had a shot of surviving.

  • Toby Clark

    The new V has a few writing problems but I think it does do a couple of things better than the original miniseries. What keeps me watching is the number of characters who keep us guessing what their agenda is. In the original you could pretty much figure each character’s allegiance (Visitors, Resistance, Fifth Column, Collaborators) from their first appearance. Hell, I knew Robert Englund would be part of the Fifth Column before I knew there was a Fifth Column.
    In the new one I can name at least three humans and two visitors who could still go either way, and most of them have direct counterparts in the original series, which supports my belief that the new one does characterisation better in general.

    Matt Smith and Sylvester McCoy are both great Doctors, right behind David Tennant IMO. That said, I think Steven Moffatt was a bigger part of what made this last series work.

    For the record, my favourite McCoy moment would have to be his rant to Davros in Remembrance of the Daleks:

    Davros: We shall become all-
    The Doctor: -Powerful! Crush the lesser races! Conquer the galaxy! Unimaginable Power! UNLIMITED RICE PUDDING! Etcetera! Etcetera!

    Also, his scene with Ace in the class room earlier:

    The Doctor: Do you remember the Zygon gambit with the Loch Ness monster? Or the Yetis in the underground?
    Ace: The what?
    The Doctor: Your species has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity when trying to destroy itself.

    I have to agree that Ghost Light is better with repeat viewings. Shame it wasn’t half an hour longer though.

  • Not-So-Great Cthulhu

    I agree with Arthur. I found Matt Smith’s first season to be excellent. Several of the first few episodes were hit or miss, but the rest were very good in general.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Actually, my favorite McCoy in his entire run was his reaction when he thought he was safe from the Dalek, because he was at the head of the stairs. Classic – he is genuinely flabbergasted.

    That underscores one of the problems with his stories – he seemed to know everything that was going on well before anything started happening. “Yes, I expected them to do that,” came out of his mouth a lot.

    “Ghost Light” had gobs of atmosphere and a terrific score, and was on target most of the time; I would probably include that as a keeper as well. I still think that McCoy suffered from awful writing. The Daleks story was the most ham-handed study in racism I’ve ever seen, and clearly that was the whole idea (along with Cutesie in-jokes). “Battlefield” seemed designed solely to bring back the Brigadier, rather than say much about Camelot. And so on.

  • Arthur

    Yeah, I think McCoy’s Doctor knowing everything before it happened was a problem. I can see where they were going with it – it was part of his portrayal as a masterful time manipulator whose schemes spanned millennia – and, perhaps, regenerations (didn’t it turn out that Remembrance of the Daleks was all a big trap that he’d set for the Daleks, using an item he’d left behind on Earth at the very start of the series back in 1963?).

    But “ah, I knew that all along” can be a very irritating trait for a character to have. And it’s all very well revealing that the Doctor took on the role of Merlin in Arthur’s court in order to set up everything he’d need to defeat the evil forces in Battlefield, but it’d be nice for once to actually see him set up one of his time manipulations on-camera rather than having pop up as a deus ex machina.

  • Lawyer Ku

    Wasn’t the original V: The TV Series a Jabootu-sized disaster? Not the mini-series, but the week-to-week series?

  • Toby Clark

    Lawyer Ku: I haven’t seen it, but by all accounts the weekly series started promising but quickly went downhill. The first miniseries was excellent and the Final Battle was good but a step down.