posted
Okay, it's not REALLY a spoiler, but as a warmup to the new season beginning on BBC this weekend, the media coverage is through the roof. This past weekend, they finally introduced the new TARDIS interior for the show. Check this out:
I've taken time to properly digest the new design and I still love it. The first word that came to my mind was "glorious", and I still think so. There's just so many things about this set to like! It's been designed very well froma production standpoint, to look bigger than it actually is, with plenty of layers, nooks and cranies to make it interesting. Additionally, it has plenty of classic series nods, and lots of what I think are natural evolutions from things we knew of the previous sets. To wit:
IRREGULAR DESIGN - Only the TVM and 9-10 consoles made a real attempt at being a symmetrical shape, and even the TVM only did so in an absctract fashion (with large shadowed walls around a symmetrical console and superstructure). Here we have a mishmash of walls in an almost triangular fashion, with doors and stairs leading off in odd directions. Escher has been referenced on this thread before, and that is very evident. Even the console itself is symmetrical only in that it has six sides, but each panel looks different in size and height.
DIFFERENT WALLS - The 60s console room set had photographic blow-ups for some of its walls. This is brought into the new set in grand fashion, with at LEAST two different wall designs, not including the floor and ceiling. While it was distracting at times to see a large photograph in the back of the old sets, it's almost welcome here to make the set look less regular and bigger as well.
DOORS - If not a REAL door, you'll notice that part of one wall almost looks pushed up and out of the way of the exterior police box door. While I highly doubt the set will have tha wall piece move, it's a nice nod to the fact that we used to have the walls of the old TARDIS open up before you exited through a pair of wooden doors. It's also worth noting that the set doesn't have any internal doors leading off; this maintains a more alien feel to the TARDIS than having a fairly nondescript hinged door.
I can't wait to see where all those stairs go! An earlier post wondered why there were two sets of stairs leading down and off to one side... It looks like one leads off to a lower portal like the one opposite that leads up, and the one with the shallower steps seems to take a turn to lead to the lower level. Moreover, it's probably a cheap way for the show's cast and crew to get onto the set's main level from the floor of the studio.
This leads to my one criticism of this set, which is that it is STILL not a full 360-degree set. As with the previous set, this one is not a fully "closed" set, and seems to incorporate a large section of wall that simply isn't there. This facilitates the production crew having a large gap to place all their cameras and microphones and such (in fact, I'm reasonably certain that the slots in the platform for the missing safety rails may also allow hooking in extensions to the platform for more people to stand on). All the shots we've seen, including the one with the Doctor suspended underneath the main platform, are shot from the missing gap in the set.
The thing is, the set this time is so irregular that they may not be able to "cheat" by using a different wall fo the set to represent the missing walls (as they did recently in the Sarah Jane Adventures crossover last year as well as Tennant's regeneration scene). I could be wrong, and they in fact do have a "wild" wall that they can close off the set with, but somehow I doubt it. Instead, they did a great trick by offsetting the exterior door, which will give them many more camera angle options for entering and exiting the TARDIS than the "pan right" technique that has already been mentioned.
Regardless, I can't wait to see this set in action. I do hope that this thing will take its place as one of the most unique console sets in the series history, along with the TVM and Secondary sets. The previous set was great for its time and for the setup of the series concept, but had numerous faults that became only more obvious as the show went on. Here, we have a very complex set that will take some time for the series to explore with its cameras.
Five years ago, a production crew member suggested that the last set was the Doctor's patched up 1970s VW minivan, all rusty and held together with bailing wire and duct tape... If that's the case, then this one is his restored 1950s Chevy, complete with hot rod fins and dice in the mirror. You can tell it's been through a lot, but damned if it hasn't been made to look awesome again, under the hand of a new guy who cares an awful lot about his ride.
quote:Originally posted by Mark Nguyen: Carry the 4, you bastard!
Hmm... Whatdoyaknow, I did forget to carry the 4!
*Scribbles down a few calculations*
Wait, this can't be right. Soylent Green is people?
SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!
Anyway, I think I'm gonna need to actually see this set in an episode before I determine whether I like it or not. You're exactly right that it seems... Escher-esque.
Personally, what I really want is to hear the new rendition of the theme song, although I'm not sure how they're going to top the current one.
-------------------- "Kirito? I killed a thing and now it says I have XPs! Is that bad? Am I dying?"
-Asuna, Episode 2, Sword Art Online Abridged
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
I do hope the floor is made out of clear plastic and not glass, because the first time Matt Smith jumps up and down he'll crash through the floor.
Registered: Jun 2000
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posted
I only saw a little bit of Doctor Who in the 80s, so I only know the white set from then. But the talk of the various sets led me to look around a little bit. Per my perusal of control room pictures on Wikipedia, and with emphasis on the emotional gut-reactions from my own Who-layman-ness, then:
1. The original 60's set was evocative and interesting. Sure, it was fairly basic, but it gives you the sense of reasonably high technology, but somewhat understated. It's like the fanciful notions of a home from 1990 as drawn in 1960. I'm interested in what's going on in that room.
2. The 80's version is kinda bland . . . it's related to the 60's version, but too sterilized . . . needs hot companion chicks with the Doctor to keep me intrigued. It's not captivating at all, so they must be.
3. I'd say they lost something by not sticking to something like the 1996 style. That one looked like the study of Holmes or Moriarty with the holodeck arch parked in it, which somehow seems appropriate and inviting and whatnot. I mean, I actually want to watch that and see what's in the nooks and crannies, and that room would look fantastic with hot companion chicks lounging about.
It's a captivating room.
4. The "Christmas Invasion" wardrobe thingy . . . it's captivating and visually interesting to hell and gone, but it almost looks too busy. I mean, it's unique-ish, sort of . . . reminds me of that Kryptonian city from Supergirl . . . but I can't tell what the hell's going on.
But it's visually interesting, and I'd almost like to try to see more and see if I can make sense of the set.
5. The last set, though simpler, looks like it's trying too hard to be all science-fictiony and alieny, ending up with a poor man's Event Horizon set. Those sets enhanced the horror mood, though, whereas this one's just dull. It's old hat sci-fi set design from the 1990s, with a hint of the organicky-yucky influence a la Giger and the Borg and all the other similar uses in recent years, like you expect to see goo dripping down the curved beams and the queen drop down from the ceiling. Looking at that set, I'm entirely uninterested in whatever's going on, despite the fact that it appears the Doctor's in the picture yelling and being all animated. I'm sure there's something incredibly important going on, but I don't care what it might be.
(Edit: Is this somewhat interesting set the same as this crappy-looking one? If so, the above #5 comments might be a little too harsh, based solely on a shot from a bad angle. But it looks like they're different, to me, though based on the same principles. Funny what a little redecorating can do.)
6. The new set looks like the old one, but the directions they took with it are confusing. It's like Doctor Who: Blue's Clues, or like they took the last set and redid it for a game show, like "Who Wants to Be a Time Lord?". The tinfoil section does hearken back to the similar shape from the actual 60s set (I had no idea when I wrote that earlier), but even the 60s set doesn't look like tinfoil. It's kinda silly.
I suppose it might be more visually interesting than the last set, but only insofar as the set lowers my expectations for the show. That is, if I'm a newcomer seeing that, I'm thinking it's gonna be a stupid show, and I might watch for a few minutes just to see how retarded it is . . . and if the show surprised me, I might get interested a little.
But I'm not gonna go out of my way to watch it, unlike with the 1996 set where I was thinking that trying to track that down might be cool.
In any case, it's an improvement over the last set, where I'd just have kept surfing even if I landed on it while channel-hopping.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
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Do they regularly show additional rooms in the TARDIS, or do they mostly only show the control room? In other words, is there any chance that he'll actually walk up (or down) those stairs at some point and viewers will get to see where he goes?
Reminds me of when they *finally* showed Janeway using the other door to her office on Voyager. I was all excited for about half a second until she stepped out and it was just a regular long corridor set in complete defiance of what should've been there according to the model. Anyway...
G2K - There IS a difference between the two sets, but it's subtle. The actual set was torn down and moved to a new studio between the first two seasons, but while in transit parts of it were wrecked and replaced, upgrading the lighting along the way. So in a sense it IS a new set, but incorporating most of the old one.
Also, there were actually several permuttations of the console room set through the 60s and 70s before settling on a fairly standard one in the early 80s, replacing the console for the 20th anniversary story "The Five Doctors". This is due mostly to the fact that the console room set was set up and taken down as needed, rather than how it's been in the new series as a permanent standing set. Still, there were several times where the walls changed (including the infamous washing bowl walls), and for one season they moved to the wood-paneled "secondary" console room (which is techically the first). The console itself has changed little until the Five Doctors console, though there were several versions of it made over the years. It was also assembled with its panels in random configurations between stories since the set people didn't care much for that sort of thing at the time.
TSN - I found it rather red, actually. We'll see what it looks like for real in a couple days.
Aban - they rarely showed additional rooms in the 60s and 70s, often simply going "to the next room" which contained whatever was needed. Probably the best exploration of the early TARDIS set was "The Edge of Destruction", where the first Doctor and company were trapped and being driven mad by an alien inside the TARDIS. We saw cool stuff like the food dispenser, beds that folded out of walls, and a close up look at the bank of computers in the console room.
In the 1979-80 seasons, they built a fair number of corridor wall pieces which got assembled into various rooms and internal sets, culminating in the Logopolis/Castrovalva stories that featured a LOT of internal rooms (cloister room, various quarters, cricket room, zero room, etc.). Following the Peter Davison era though the TARDIS insides were seen less often. I think the last room seen in the classic series besides the console room was the wardrobe, which was really just a nondescript black set with no walls, and clothes scattered everywhere. This contradicts the previous and appearance of the wardrobe, which was a simple room made up of standard wall segments and again filled with clothes.
In the new series, the ONLY other room we saw awas the wardrobe, a thinly-disguised console room set. Reports of the current series suggest that we WILL see other areas of the TARDIS, and that the set itself is built to be reconfigured for other specific rooms, like a laboratory or library. We'll see what they give us shortly.
Andy - I'm in the minority that doesn't like the '96 console set, mostly because while beautiful, it's wholly impractical. Imagine going through a time storm or something with all those books and chairs and candles flying about! The place would be aflame each time the ship got hit or bumped. I really liked the central console (whose monitor setup has been reproduced in the new edition) and the steampunk stuff that supports the time column, but everything beyond was pretty disappointing and should have been kept as separate rooms IMO.
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The previous set was awful truly awful.really awful...depressing...one was horrible ...it looked like sewage works.The yellowness reminded me of poo poo.
Even my Uncle Ted hated it as it reminded him of Hirak.
Why was my post locked about joysticks eh?
I HAVE A RIGHT TO DISCUSS THINGS WITHOUT FEAR OR FAVOUR.
You seem to be bullies.Picking on me.
If you tried it face to face I would give you an answer you would remember you cowards.
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