Suggestion: Series.Doctor Who

Well, I suppose we technically have an image of 12, even if it's only just his eyes.◊

Yotsuyasan's suggestion makes sense. I think it's a reasonable one, until Capaldi has established his wardrobe.

I don't think there's too much trouble to just put it up and change it later. The real work is getting the image in the first place, and that's already done anyway, so it's not that much extra work.

Alright. Here's 12 doctors. I thought 9 was a little too small, as were some of the others. So I made them larger.

That works great for now.

Isn't this taking the spoiler policy way too seriously? I think eveyone knows by now who the new doctor is. ;-) Anyway, the version with 12 doctors is very pretty as well.

29 is very nice, but I think people are getting way too uptight about Twelve's pic in the previous pic with the TARDIS.

^^ Not including the new Doctor has nothing to do with it being a spoiler. We have pictures of the actor but not the character.

Indeed. It is nothing about avoiding a spoiler. It is about having a picture that makes sense. Pictures of twelve Doctors and one actor who plays the Doctor doesn't make sense. I mean, would we put up a random picture of Peter Davison in place of the Fifth Doctor?

For a more extreme example, on this page, if for any reason a suitable picture of Gollum was unavailable, would it not be preferable to not have a picture at all, rather then putting up an image of Andy Serkis? (Not to downplay Serkis's importance to the role, mind you. But an image of Sirkis ≠ the character of Gollum.)

edited 27th Nov '13 5:42:13 PM by Yotsuyasan

I would rather see an image that doesn't duplicate The Nth Doctor, which the current one does.

How about an image of the TARDIS surrounded by all the Doctors' faces?

edited 27th Nov '13 5:52:03 PM by Stratadrake

Huh... That is a bit of an issue, but kind of a separate issue... But I suppose the same people would likely be talking about it, so is it worth making a separate "Duplicate Image" thread?

Anyway... I think the above discussed picture is better suited to the Doctor Who page. Maybe for The Nth Doctor, we could use this similar image of The Master◊?

edited 27th Nov '13 6:07:36 PM by Yotsuyasan

That works, although it looks a lot like the image on The Master. I'd really like to use a non Who example, but I can't see any that I'm really familiar with.

Re: Duplicate Image for The Nth Doctor

Huh. Well, I'll be. Given that it uses the same image of Delgado, I wonder if whoever made that just grabbed the six-panel image of the Master that I suggested from Wikipedia, slapped five headshots of non-Doctor Who characters named "Master" over it, and called it a day?

Still, the one I suggested would be approximately 83.334% not a duplicate image with The Master. Much better then now when it is a 100% duplicate image with Doctor Who. I'd stand by that suggestion if no one thinks of a better one.

edited 27th Nov '13 8:08:30 PM by Yotsuyasan

Ummm guys.... sure its big now but as time rolls on including John Hurt's War Doctor is probably going to be a bit confusing to people who not familiar with DW and possibly a bit dated for others as time goes on.

Sure its a huge story now, but its just one story. In universe too apparently, unlike Eight. Will Hurt still loom as large months and years from now?

He's still officially unnumbered and will remain unnumbered too. That makes it rather untidy to include as an incarnation for what should be a quick bite of basic information.

If Hurt then why not the Valeyard or Metacrisis Human Ten once we get off main incarnation? Or heaven help us the less-canonical ones like Rowan Atkinson. Heck Peter Cushing was noted in the caption not too long ago.

A single picture need not and probably shouldn't try to push in every detail. Simplicity is a virtue here.

I disagree. If we're going to have a picture that shows all of the Doctors, Hurt's Doctor disserves to be a part of it. He's not like the Valyard or the Watcher or the Dream Lord... He's a proper regeneration from between the incarnations played by McGann and Eccleston. Going just by televised appearances, he's as much a Doctor as McGann's with a total of one feature length episode. Would you exclude McGann, too?

Pseudo-Doctors such as the others you mentioned?

Cushing is not canon to the television series (his two films are a separate continuity) so he'd have no place on an image for Series/DoctorWho.

The Valyard (and the Dream Lord, if they don't end up somehow being one and the same) are not properly "The Doctor," as much as they are strange personifications of the Doctor's darker nature.

The Watcher (not mentioned by you, but often brought up in such arguments, so I thought I'd rebut it in advance) is not a specific incantation of the Doctor, but was rather a strange artifact of the regenerative process between Tom Baker and Davison.

The "Metacrisis Doctor" is a separate character, who just happens to have been created from the Doctor, share his memories, and the appearance of his eleventh incarnation.

Various parody Doctors (such as Atkinson in Curse of Fatal Death), or the Shalka Doctor, or other "what if" Doctors even if presented in BBC or officially licensed productions... Well, just like Cushing, they're not canon. So there's no reason they should be included in a picture of the official incarnations of The Doctor.

So if your argument is, "If we include Hurt, then shouldn't we include every other Tom, Dick, and Harry that ever played any being vaguely related to being the character of the Doctor?" then no, I don't agree.

Hurt should be there. He's an official incarnation of The Doctor. You fear that in years to come, casual fans might not recognize him? Well, by that logic, the picture should probably only ever include the current Doctor and, at most, the previous two or three. You think a casual fan would know or care about (just to randomly pick one older Doctor) Pertwee? I doubt it. And to a non-casual fan, now that he has been established, excluding him would be a glaringly obvious omission.

If you think a simpler design is in order, however... why not submit a suggestion? Maybe others will agree with you. Maybe it will lead to a vote. You never know. But personally, I'll stand by my support of a grid of the current twelve (including Hurt between McGann and Eccleston), with the expectation that it will be updated once more once we have pictures of Capaldi in costume.

edited 29th Nov '13 12:28:18 PM by Yotsuyasan

edited 29th Nov '13 3:41:17 PM by Stratadrake

And the Tenth Doctor is, as we now know, the eleventh incarnation.

edited 29th Nov '13 3:48:18 PM by Yotsuyasan

Whether or not people would recognise a character is irrelevant. Part of the purpose is to show faces of character people don't recognise, so that they learn something new about the series.

If it is a character who, by the theme of the image, should be there or not, is pretty much what the question is. I've got no clue about the series, so I'm staying out of it.

Here's some random GIS findings:

• Eleven Doctors with logo, from [1]
• Wallpaper with eleven Doctors, the TARDIS, time and space and Daleks◊
• Eleven Doctors and the TARDIS◊, from [2]

Now while all the Doctors are nice, it still leaves the matter of only showing off The Nth Doctor and leaving out one of the series's most important staples - the Doctors' Companions. So with that in mind...

• Eleventh Doctor, TARDIS, and Amy Pond◊, from [3]

As for brainstorming The Nth Doctor himself, I actually rather like this one:

• eleven incarnations of The Doctor◊, from [4]

edited 30th Nov '13 5:13:51 PM by Stratadrake

My opinions on

The first three suggestions all kind of ignore that part of what is going on here is a desire to add Hurt into his proper place. That aside, I also think that the second and third ones have an issue of possibly not looking quite as good when reduced down to the proper size for use here.

The fourth option... great as a representation of the Matt Smith era, but a picture that is already somewhat outdated (as Amy's no longer the current companion) and soon to be even more so with Matt Smith's impending departure.

As for your final suggestion... I am rather fond of that picture, especially the updated version that the original poster pointed out. Wouldn't last long for Series/DoctorWho if, as would probably be the case, we wish to add Capaldi come spring. (Unless the BBC is nice enough to update it again.) But I suppose it could work for The Nth Doctor. (Although personally, I'd rather go with my Master suggestion, as I think it'd be fun to use a character other then the Doctor for the page image for The Nth Doctor.)

Not the end of the world, as I don't object to the image that is up now... but is it my imagination, or did the image on the page get changed while this discussion was theoretically still ongoing?

Looks like it happened on Saturday, and it was changed to the image in the original poster's suggestion in this thread... but I don't recall seeing where a consensus was reached?

Yes, someone called goldenroad. I'll call them in.

I like the new image just fine. It fits the page more.

The updated image cut, cropped, flipped, and enlarged for the quote-right justification we use for pages here.

edited 2nd Dec '13 12:26:12 AM by Paktra