Canadians Miss Out On Doctor Who Season Finale

darthcamaro writes "Canadians were among the last people in the world to get the season 4 finale of Doctor Who which already aired in the UK and Australia. The Canadian public broadcaster — CBC — decided to cut out nearly 20 minutes from the episode, leaving fans wondering what was going on. Doctor Who isn't the easiest show to follow at the best of times — but Canadians are now up in arms (or at least hockey sticks) over their taxpayer-funded broadcaster's lack of respect for SciFi hosers."

Comments

BitTorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

The wife and I watched it months ago. The Internet is my TV station.

Re:BitTorrent

[causality]

The wife and I watched it months ago. The Internet is my TV station.

As you mention BitTorrent, I'm assuming there were no commercials in the version you received. Since you're paying a "tax" on things like blank media anyway, I'm surprised more Canadians don't do this.

Re:BitTorrent

[Kalriath]

Actually, Doctor Who is produced in conjunction with another organisation. Amusingly enough, that organisation is the CBC. So Canadian taxpayers (who actually FUND the program) are more than entitled to download it, I reckon.

Spoiler alert!

[iYk6]

Doctor Who thwarts the Dalek invasion of Earth. Earth is not destroyed. None of the main characters die.

Re:Spoiler alert!

[theaveng]

Didn't I see that episode back in 1967?

Or maybe I'm thinking of 1973.

Or was it 1986?

Ahhh..... it's so hard to keep track of all these Dalek episodes. Almost as difficult as keeping track of how many times the Borg attacked a Federation vessel (and failed; pretty pathetic for an advanced race).

Re:Spoiler alert!

[Hurricane78]

Because - oh god, this will cost me karma! - Star Trek autors are pretty pathetic themselves. (The best example is that nearly all extraterrestrial life [not just "humanoids"] is like earth, just extremely different where you can't look at.)

If they had invaded and won, the authors would have been unable to come up with a continuation. In Star Trek, everything has to be OK at the end of a show. Only Movies are allowed to change fundamental things. They would be forced to end the show.

If there were more creative authors around, an won invasion by the Borg would be the greatest opportunity of all!
Think of that invasion happening in a movie.... and the movie ending with the borg winning and dominating the whole federation. People would have thought: "What the fuck? Why did it not have a happy ending?" But they would never forget it!
The following TV show would have a continuous storyline. Starting with everybody - and I mean everybody - being Borg!
Then the magic would happen: Somehow, a child of a Human and one of the other major Species, would be able to resist in it's innermost Soul. Like i tiny flame in a storm, struggling to survive. You would experience this feeling with that child.

No cheap tricks about a special race, a data disguising as a Borg, or some crap. No. Just the plain spirit of Humanity and the Federation... ...fighting, and growing... ...spreading to other humans on earth too... ...until the resistance would be so big, ...that the whole Borg collective would be assimilated by it!
Assimilated by the spirit of individuality and freedom of the mind. By what we think is right an wrong.
And the Borg would not know how to handle such a very strange weapon / enemy within. They would traverse all kinds of strange changes in their society, to cope with it, making the Borg something far from what they originally were. All their technology would be useless.

The Borg would be assimilated themselves. It would be a very very hard war on so many and so strange fronts as the mind itself.
Until just a small group of some thousand Borg would be caught... the last resistance against the new resurrected Federation. (Everything would still be very temporary, unstable in the background territory, and semi-Borg, using Borg technology.)

But the surviving Borg were changed so much, that they were no enemy anymore, but a helpless race, struggling to survive... with right so survive on its own.
So the Federation would let their old enemies live, and make a historic agreement with them, adding them *to* the federation, as the first advanced - and now good - race.

This would also make for some very interesting inner conflicts in the later federation! (27th-31th century?)

As a last plus, the Federation, together with Borg technology, and the new born power of the inner spirit (explained as some electromagnetic power of the brain),
would make humanity a new advanced race themselves.

And just as with the first warp flight, this would call for some other advanced - elder - races, who would ask them for contact, allowing inter-galaxy flights and contacting a ton of non-humanoid species (which is possible, now that CGI is good enough).

Oh: If anyone important reads this and wants to contact me, to work on a realization: Bring some money with you! I have much, much more ideas! :)

Re:Spoiler alert!

[mgblst]

Then the magic would happen: Somehow, a child of a Human and one of the other major Species, would be able to resist in it's innermost Soul. Like i tiny flame in a storm, struggling to survive. You would experience this feeling with that child.

It was all going well, then you had to ruin it with this cheesey shit. Yes, humans are so advanced, that not even the borg can hold down our amazing spirit. Fuck this shit, really.

You want good sci-fi, you don't watch Star Trek.

lolwat?

[gazbo]

Doctor Who isn't the easiest show to follow at the best of times

Do you also need to buy CliffsNotes for Teletubbies?

Re:A new companion?

[mog007]

Martha Jones was The Doctor's companion in the third season, and the redhead is his fourth season companion, yes.

You've got to love the idiots who run TV stations.

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got to love the idiots who run TV stations. Why? Because they're simply perfect idiots. Cutting 20 minutes from an episode? Such amazing idiocy.

Reminds me of a couple of years ago when I set my VCR to tape the weekly episode of 24. Yes I said VCR. Now get off my lawn.

There was a football game before 24. No problem right? Game will be over. I'll still be able to get all of 24 taped and watch it when I get home.

I get home. VCR is going. Great. I'll just let it finish taping 24 and then sit down and watch it from the beginning. No problem.

Problem. The football game was over before 24 was set to air. But someone decided that it was imperative to air commentary and discussion of the football game that was just played and this ran 15 minutes or so into 24. Was there really a need for this? I mean, come on, you just watched the fucking game so you know what happened.

Did they decide to delay 24 so people could see all of it? Nope. Just cut right on into 24 minus the first portions that they'd blotted out with football commentary.

Plot/Series Branching

[Phoenix666]

Doctor Who really seems to make the most sense if you watch it in the UK in sequence with its spin-offs such as Torchwood or the Sarah Jane Adventures, because in the Season 4 finale there are tie-ins to the spin-offs as well as some earlier episodes in the season that refer to story lines happening on the spin-offs. In other words, watching Doctor Who in America on the 1 season delay sans spin-offs leads to confusion because you don't know what's going on.

I applaud the BBC folks for thinking so creatively about spin-offs playing off against Doctor Who, and vice-versa, but it falls apart against the reality of the region-segregation that they still like to practice.

It's a pity, because many BBC shows are more cutting-edge than Hollywood fare these days and they would play really well here as-is. Except, Hollywood likes to re-produce and re-package them as watered-down, lamer versions. A couple examples are "Coupling," a Friends-like show written by Steven Moffat that was hilarious, that Hollywood tried to Americanize and which was done so poorly that it was DOA; "Top Gear," which is an entertaining auto program and which would do just great here, but which Hollywood has again felt the need to destroy by Americanizing it. "The Office" and "What Not to Wear" are two other examples.

Accordingly, maybe Bit Torrent is the only real way to go in the end.

Unwatchable?

[Al Al Cool J]

I watched the CBC broadcast version and didn't notice anything odd. It was fast-paced toward the end, but then a lot of them are like that. Am watching the full-length version on their site now to see what difference I can see.

Maybe the CBC could get the same editor to cut the Pirates of the Caribbean movies down to a reasonable length. That would be sweet.

Re:Even worse

[Kalriath]

It is indeed (partially) Canadian taxpayer funded.

Re:A new companion?

[ShieldW0lf]

Who actually watches Doctor Who on CBC? It's been available on isohunt.com for a year now...

Re:A new companion?

[Zwicky]

I'll admit that I wasn't very pleased with the decision to have 'the bride' return as a regular companion for the Doctor, precisely because she was portrayed by Catherine Tate. The only thing I found remotely humorous on the Catherine Tate Show was Lauren ("am I bovvered"); the rest was just unfunny (IMHO).

I stuck with it though. As the series progressed I got over the things that annoyed me (I think they toned her down a little as time went on too, which helped) and ultimately I think I'll miss her a little now that she had to have her memory wiped and leave the Doctor's side.

I'm with the other posters who mentioned this too: I think the rate at which Doctor Who is going through companions lately is too rapid and they're not really fully coming into their own.

I'm also going to miss Bernard "Diggin' a 'ole'" Cribbins, for entirely different reasons :)

As for TFA, that's quite appalling. Cutting 20 minutes nigh on halves the length of the episode. Tsk, tsk, CBC, and tsk again. It's little wonder people are downloading shows, it's possibly now the only way they can be sure it hasn't been ridiculously cut down to size.

All Depends What You are On

[qazwart]

My sister had broken her arm. It was so bad, they put some sort of metal bar through her arm to hold her arm in a single position. Because of the pain, she was on some powerful medication. To put it mildly, she was not her normal self. Many hippies have spent decades attempting the mental state those drugs put my sister in.

She was watching TV late one night and called me up and told me about this great science fiction show. It was witty, the writing was wonderful. She laughed, She cried. She was on the edge of her seat. But she couldn't remember the name. She remembered that there was a doctor or surgeon on it and they were in a phone booth...

Dr. Who?, I suggested.

That's it!

Dr. Who? I replied again. Are you sure it was Dr. Who?

Yes, she told me, it was wonderful.

The next week, she saw the show again. This time, not enwrapped in her druggy little fog. She called me up the next day and told me she changed her mind about the show.

I've watched the show many times since then, and as far as I am concerned, being sober doesn't help improve the coherence of the plot. Frankly, I would find it hard to tell if our local station cut out vital scenes which hurt the clarity of the overall plot.

Re:A new companion?

[PCM2]

The turnover is only "much faster" because A.) you're older; and B.) the seasons are shorter and the stories aren't episodic serials anymore.

David Tennant has already played the Doctor for three seasons. That's as long as William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, or Peter Davidson, and longer than Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy. Historically most of the Doctor's companions have only lasted one season, and the current show has actually made them all into recurring characters, so you can't exactly call it "turnover."

Camp as a row of tents

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

As usual, it was a Russell T Davies campy almost-but-not-quite musical cheesefest. Just about any fact about Doctor Who that you thought was canonical was blatantly ignored. The greatest sin of all was throwing away a regeneration. For god's sake. Regenerations are probably the most precious thing in the Doctor Who universe and Davies thought he'd end his Who career (after all, he doesn't have to fix the plot holes he made) by simply throwing one away for a completely dumb plot twist. Of course it doesn't matter now that no rules are followed any more. And could anything have been more sickly that seeing all of the Doctor's wannabe lovers (and their pathetic families) fawning after him? The whole finally was nothing but laughable. The scene of the Tardis towing the Earth was beyond laughable. The faster Stephen Moffat takes over, the better.