RhettButler posted:During the original run (63-89) the stories were 4-6 episodes, so a really good story could be developed, now it seems like they are mostly wrapped up in under an hour.
Yeah, just about every story had time to really breathe in those days, but how often did the four-parters struggle to fill those 90 minutes? For every Talons of Weng-Chiang or Pyramids of Mars, there was also a Robot or an Underworld (where even the writers give up halfway through and start amusing themselves with lines like "Whatever blows... can be sucked!" ). Meanwhile, we get three cliffhangers a year these days, or just under half of each season with exactly the same amount of time available to the writers. Not such a bad deal, really; have there been any stories since the show got going again where you found yourself saying "Christ, have they been captured again? When will this end?"?
By and large, I preferred Sylvester McCoy's run to the others (though even I won't make excuses for The Greatest Show in the Galaxy), but I'd love to see something new along the same lines as the old Hartnell story, The Chase. Not in terms of the writing or acting, mind you, but the idea of quickly blowing through a handful of short stories instead of laboriously building up to yet another massive CGI invasion of Earth... it appeals to me for the same reasons that I mostly read magazine articles and short stories these days and generally pass on novels/entirely pass on series.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/22/2010 08:36PM by morakanabad.