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Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, Review, TV | Tagged: doctor who, Phil Collinson, The War Games
Doctor Who: The War Games in Colour Retcons Lore, Updates Story
Doctor Who: The War Games in Colour remastered, re-edited & colorized the classic - along with some interesting story and series retconning.
Doctor Who: The War Games is this year's remastered, re-edited, and colorized story designed to introduce new and younger fans to the classic series. It's not just a cleaning up of the video to make it pretty for modern audiences but added some surprises that may have retconned the story to bring it in line with the current series. Russell T. Davies and producer Phil Collinson know what fans of the modern era of Doctor Who like and want to drum up their interest by giving it to them in unexpected ways. They ended up doing is retconning the story and the lore.
"The War Games" is the longest serial in the show's history with an epic story where The Second Doctor and his companions discover a renegade Time Lord snatching armies from Earth's histories to fight war games in preparation for conquering the universe. It was one of the most significant stories in Doctor Who because it introduced the Time Lords and the Doctor's home world for the first time, though it wasn't yet named "Gallifrey." It was the last story of the 1960s and the last one shot in black and white. The colors work better than the overly bright hues of "The Daleks in Colour" and make it feel like a story from the 1970s.
The original ten-part serial version of "The War Games" ran for over four hours in total and had long patches in between The Doctor and the other characters just running from one location to another. The 90-minute cut makes the story feel breathless as it rushes through the plot. Some of the major scenes and setpieces in the middle were cut to explain how The Doctor meets all the factions and how they come to know each other when he forms the resistance. Their first meetings are now implied. The shorter cut gets rid of some of the character moments between The Doctor and his companions, but any loss is made up by the final twenty minutes, which features the Time Lords whisking them to Gallifrey (which updated shots of the city). There, the Doctor's trial becomes a more urgent focus as the Time Lords agree not to execute him but to return Jamie and Zoey to their own times before forcing the Doctor to exile on Earth after forcing him to regenerate.
Retcons for Modern Fans
The sudden burst of The Master's Theme by Murray Gold when the Second Doctor sees the War Chief for the first time uses music to retcon the character into being an early incarnation of The Master. When the Time Lords execute the War Chief at the end, the new version inserts the regeneration sound effect to imply he was regenerating and possibly into the Master, as played by Roger Delgado in the Third Doctor era. That was clever using musing to retcon a story and a character without altering the story at all. Then, of course, there's the new regeneration scene where Doctor is seen regenerating into the Third Doctor, which was created by a fan group using CGI and rotoscoped footage of Jon Pertwee from later stories.
Doctor Who: Always About Change
Any change in Doctor Who is controversial because hardcore fans just can't get through a week without declaring something about Doctor Who controversial these days. The original version hasn't been erased but remains intact on streaming and physical media. Russell T. Davies certainly knows this and doesn't care, or rather, cares enough to fan it because nothing keeps Doctor Who in people's minds more than paranoid controversies. The show continues to get attention and drama queen fans get to have more drama! Everybody wins!
Doctor Who: The War Games
8/10
Any change or re-edit of a classic Doctor Who story was always going to be controversial to fans of the classic serial, but this one updates the pacing of the original with its reduced runtime of 90 minutes, down from four hours, to bring it up to the standards of modern television pacing. The colours are vibrant, the retcon of a character into a longstanding series villain and the new regeneration scene is as good as a "remaster" of a 1960s story is going to get.
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