…do I ever talk about anything except this, cats, and my kid? And stuff breaking? Probably not. But there’s a heap of news hitting us just before the new season starts.
2010 Christmas special, 2011 season confirmed. Already! The BBC must like what it sees. Matt Smith will still be on board, though for reasons that probably relate to some mammoth end-of-season cliffhanger in the storyline, they’re being awfully cagey about whether or not Karen Gillan will still be playing Amy in the next season. I’m all for a companion who lasts more than one season.
More throwbacks than we thought. There’s a major villain from the show’s past who will be appearing in the new season, one that had been rumored in a few places, though I hadn’t given those rumors much credence. I still don’t give the specifics of those rumors much credence, but hey, we’ll see. There are apparently also familiar faces of a friendlier nature in the first episode.
More Tom Baker audio. Apparently Tom Baker will be back as the fourth Doctor, both for Big Finish (yay!) and for BBC Audiobooks (eh…). I’ll be posting the reviews of the four chapters of the BBC Hornets’ Nest audios that I haven’t already covered in April, but the Big Finish news is exciting stuff. Apparently Baker has already recorded a follow-up to Hornets’ Nest, also written by Paul Magrs, with the overall title of Demon Quest. Big Finish, for their part, has touted Lis Sladen, Louise “Leela” Jameson and Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier for Tom’s potential audio companions. I also have a gut feeling that the recently reunited team of Jago & Litefoot, from Talons Of Weng-Chiang (and now their own Big Finish audio series), may show up again with Tom. Wild speculation on my part, but I’d be amazed if it doesn’t happen.
More SJA. The fourth and fifth seasons of Sarah Jane Adventures have been confirmed, and the fourth season is apparently already in production. It’s already being hinted that there’ll be another crossover with Doctor Who, though no one’s said that Matt Smith will be putting in an appearance on SJA. It might be far more interesting to have both series dealing with the same threat at the same time from different angles, perhaps oblivious to each other’s presence… or maybe even inadvertently working at odds!
K-9 premieres same day as new Who. The K-9 series will be premiering on April 3rd in the UK, just a couple of hours before the new season of Doctor Who kicks off. It will last 26 episodes, all of which are already shot, and features John Leeson as the voice of K-9. The first episode was “sneak previewed” late last year. Still no word on a North American outlet for this; it’s already halfway through its season in some eastern European countries. K-9 is an interesting little show, though out of copyright necessity there will almost certainly be no crossover with Doctor Who itself. It’s aimed at roughly the same young audience as SJA, perhaps skewing a bit toward the “tween” age group.
Doctor Who’s new season premieres in the US and Canada on April 17th, 2 weeks after the UK premiere. BBC America will have it in the States, SPACE will air it in Canada.
It’s a pretty exciting time to be “into” this particular fictional universe. Looking back to the 1990s, when books and comics (and, right before the end of the decade, Big Finish) were all there was to Doctor Who aside from old episodes released on video, it’s still a bit of a rock-me-back-on-my-heels experience to look at the show know and see nothing short of an embarrassment of riches. The original show isn’t hurting for attention either, as the schedule of DVD releases is ramping up, and we’re getting new action figures of – get this – Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann and William Hartnell this year. (And this is before the announcement of whatever the San Diego Comic Con exclusives happen to be.)
Even the younger-skewing shows thrill me because, well, Doctor Who just takes me back to a much earlier time in my life. It was awesome to be a kid during the show’s US heyday in the ’80s; it must be awesome to be a young Doctor Who fan now too – I hope the kiddos know how good they’ve got it these days. However much I may wax analytical about it, on a much simpler level it helps me feel like a kid at heart, and for that reason I may never outgrow it.
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