Exiern Christmas Special 2017
Merry Christmas, everyone! We hope you enjoy this very special update. As luck would have it, it’s a very auspicious day for Doctor Who this Christmas and as it happens, it’s not a million miles removed from the world of Exiern this time around so it only felt right to commemorate the occasion.
Also, after everything Typh’s been through lately, a hug was needed, don’t you think?
Art by Colin Wells, lettering by Sean Harrington.
If the Doctor Who Christmas Special is something that interests you, check your local listings and on-demand services as to when it would be screening in your area. As Doctor Who is paid for by the British taxpayer, the earliest you’re ever going to see it broadcast outside the UK is probably after they’ve seen it.
Don’t forget your local cinema either, there’s a few places it’s showing on the big screen (with bonus features) in a few countries at least. Also don’t forget to use the opportunity of the comments sections for the next couple of weeks to tell us what’s on your mind and what you’d like to see going forward from here. Scott will, of course, read everything.
luckily we can watch it directly from the beeb, even though we are in NL (yay cable)
The Doctor has had a long run, shame it had to end like this
Obviously, it’s not ending given what the image is saying for starters but I know what you’re getting at and that’s really funny being that it’s here of all places.
Pfft, it really is one of those once-in-a-generation moments isn’t it?
Merry Christmas everyone!
While the episode was great, they missed a wonderful opportunity to produce some more First Doctor stories (seeing how there weren’t that many to start with), butt even the TARDIS… not sure how much more can comment to avoid spoilers
Will say this: if they were so fixated on having a female Time Lady, they could have brought back The Rani, or Susan (Doctor’s granddaughter), or introduced Susan’s mother, or Doctor’s ‘daughter’ (who was last seen stealing a ship and flying off somewhere), or any number of other female Galifreyan’s
Okay, Tiff is obviously Doctor Three (hope she has enough jelly babies), butt, who is P-cups supposed to be? Missy?
From the top:
“some more First Doctor stories (seeing how there weren’t that many to start with)” – Back in the day, the production schedule in the 60s was punishing.
In three years, he did 29 stories (134 episodes) in his run and appears in almost all of those episodes – those were in the 20-25 minute range back then. He did a lot and most of them still survive.
Typh as Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. Peonie is clearly Romana in Princess Astra’s outfit from The Armageddon Factor in the last story from the Key to Time arc. I thought that was obvious. Colin got it straight off when I described what I had in mind for this.
The youth of today just aren’t studying history or the classics anymore and I for one am very disappointed.
As for the ending of the Doctor Who Christmas Special … (spoiler warning)
… an adventure that concludes a segment of the action with the lead character abruptly being caught in a sudden blast of supernatural power that ends up transforming him from a long-haired man of action into a blond woman is quite a preposterous idea and such a premise obviously doesn’t have legs. I don’t know what they were thinking when they did that.
The thing is, Exiern is, in a way, the antithesis to the quoted message. Typh changed against his/her will, and for the longest time was a “man trapped in a woman’s body”, trying to reclaim his lost masculinity, before eventually coming to terms with just being herself, in that body.
So it’s both against the idea that it’s better to be a woman (quite the contrary), and also against the idea that you should aim for the body you think you should have.
Shan: who you calling ‘youth’? Was sure Baker was the Third (didn’t he come before Pertwe? who then became Davison?)
The schedule may have been rough, but they still didn’t expect to do any more, certainly didn’t envision the regeneration bit
OMG NOOOOO!!!!
PERTWEE (TWO E’S) THEN BAKER THEN DAVISON
Don’t they teach anyone anything these days???
(Props for spelling Davison right, though. A lot of people get that wrong.)
New there was something wrong with Pertwee, just couldn’t be bothered fixing it (totally miss Old Bess, that lovely yellow jalopy)
Don’t know what they teach nowadays, haven’t been in school in decades
“Typh changed against his/her will, and for the longest time was a “man trapped in a woman’s body”, trying to reclaim his lost masculinity, before eventually coming to terms with just being herself, in that body.”
My takeaway has been more the reverse has been going on, actually. I got the impression that first off, Typh wasn’t in the slightest bit bothered by the body transformation (which was a good way to convey that in this world, even if it’s rare it’s not unheard of).
Presumably it was also the case that under ‘normal’ circumstances, these events are usually reversible which is why he wasn’t worried, the freakout didn’t happen until he realised his case was different and he could be stuck like that for the rest of his life.
But prior to that, he didn’t care if he was called Tiffany instead of Typh or whether people used female pronouns and there was the whole sequence we saw with what dress to wear to the ball because he wasn’t thinking of it past beating Teresa in what he saw in the narrow frame of a competition.
He also had a fair bit of other female attire he must have been wearing casually which we saw when he came back from The Wild North and tossed his entire wardrobe with the intention of getting a new wardrobe (and stole Phi’s clothes).
Since then, he’s been very insistent on his original name being used and male pronouns to to the point of correcting people when they get it wrong such as the confrontation with one of the main characters of our last arc just before a number of them went over the cliff in that rather large explosion and resulting rock slide.
Up to now, though there’s been signs that the amount of scope for Typh to assert his original masculine identity is narrowing, however most notably what happened to his trying to what happened to Phi’s clothes after he tried to wear them …
I do wonder if the curse is going to keep on reducing what he’s allowed to do in terms of dress and appearance, not to mention identity expression as time goes on. I guess we’ll see in time.
Imagine that… this webcomic is still around.
A female Doctor Who was too long in the coming, should have happened ages ago.
There’d been talk about having a female Doctor since the 80s by people involved in the production but the cancellation for the best part of 15 years didn’t help with that.
The lead in to the 13th Doctor was handled well, I thought. They built up to it, first with mentions of the possibility and a Time Lord who’d had a few female regenerations. Then they showed a female version of a previously male Time Lord and most recently, an actual regeneration shown on screen of the same thing. When they had that dialogue which is at the top of this image, I knew for certain they were going for it this time around. So, I thought it was nice they had the setup and build up for this over years instead of just springing it on us out of nowhere.
However, in that vein and especially since we’re here of all places, I have to ask … when are we getting a female Typhan-Knee, Scott?
The only two cases of a male Time Lord changing gender, were that old fart on Galifrey and The Master, in both cases it was not ‘normal’: the first one did it to hide his identity from The Doctor, and The Master had had his normal regenerations removed, and still don’t know how he did that
@ Shan:
“The youth of today just aren’t studying history or the classics anymore and I for one am very disappointed.”
The same goes for the history of the Star Trek universe. The kids today are just not keeping up with the Cardassians.
Firstly, let’s show some respect. That character of Gallifrey (two l’s) was the General in charge of all the armed forces, thank you very much. Also, on top of the Master, there was the Corsair. The other thing you have to think about is how many Time Lords do we know as characters anyway? It’s probably at most a couple of dozen. So, now adding the Doctor to that number, that’s a decent proportion of them. We really don’t know how common it is in the society as a whole. Also, uncommon =/= abnormal.
The history of the show has always been a night at the improv. The concept of regeneration came about as necessity around 3 years into the run of the show, when William Hartnell couldn’t continue the role, they had two choices, either find another actor who looked a lot like him and pretend nothing had happened or go in a radically different direction. By going with the latter, it’s probably why the show has still been with us for most of the last 50 plus years.
Even the concept of Time Lords wasn’t really defined until about 6 years in with Patrick Troughton’s final episode in his final story when we meet them for the first time. Before that, there wasn’t very much and the writing staff hadn’t really set out what others from the Doctor’s race was like at all.
Doctor Who has always been reinventing itself and I think this is an opportunity to do more new things that had never been done before. I think it’s potentially quite exciting, so I’m willing to give it a shot when the show comes back. Even when things don’t work out for me, it’s rarely dull. So, I don’t think because we haven’t specifically seen something happen before on the show means it can’t happen anytime in the future. I think everything’s going to be all right.
In the context of Exiern, I only discovered it around the 10 year mark and I got to see the entirety of it up to that point in one big hit. It was certainly interesting to see how much it had changed over the years and it made for an entertaining experience. I think change is good, keeps things interesting.
As for the Cardassians, how about that Gul Dukat? Quite the player, wasn’t he?
This ‘change’ has nothing at all about ‘reinventing itself’, anyone who believes otherwise is deluding themselves
I’m not seeing the problem here myself, if anything it opens up whole new avenues of storytelling. On top of the increasing number of hints that this was coming, I think it makes sense that if Time Lords change so dramatically each regeneration and since I haven’t heard anything to suggest that male and female Time Lord DNA is anything more than slightly different in the same way human DNA only varies slightly in comparison to the whole between sexes, I can see how once in a while something a bit more different happens.
Full list of clues I can think of that led to this coming (and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve still missed some):
The 8th Doctor being offered a choice of a female regeneration (but as we know, he went with War!)
The mention of some of the Corsair’s lives.
The Master’s most recent regeneration.
The General’s on-screen regeneration.
Clara for all intents and purposes playing the Doctor in Flatline (while he’s stuck in a minaturised TARDIS, she has to act in his place for the most part).
Clara actually trying to fool the Cybermen into thinking she’s actually the Doctor in Death in Heaven, they even used her eyes instead of Peter Capaldi’s in the opening sequence.
Then, like I said before, when they had the exchange of quotes between Capaldi’s 12th Doctor and Simm’s Master as above, then I knew they were going for it. Once again, after all of the above and especially that dialogue, I would have been more surprised if they hadn’t done it than if they had at that point.
Anyway, the long and short of it is, you’ve got to keep things changing and keep it fresh (on that note about Exiern, yes Scott is looking into that all the time) and I’m going to end this (lengthy) comment with a quote that should need no introduction.
“The first face this face saw. We all change, when you think about it, we’re all different people; all through our lives, and that’s okay, that’s good, you’ve gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be. I will not forget one line of this, not one day, I swear. I will always remember when The Doctor was me.”
Is there supposed to be a comic or picture on this page? I don’t see one, nor on the next 5 pages, but then the comic shows again. Is there something different about these 6 archive.exiern.com pages?
Yes, and we finally fixed it!