I’ll tell you what, Doctor Who fans don’t arf like buggering about with the show’s IMDb page. Back in 2005, the week before the first-series finale aired, some cheeky monkey went in and added Norman Lovett to the cast list – an unlikely choice for the role of Davros, which was our first red flag at the time. Now, some six years later, some bugger’s only gone and done something similar for this year’s finale.

It’s obviously bollocks, but I’m going to go ahead and put it below the fold anyway to avoid any potential spoilers. Unless you’re reading this on an RSS reader, of course, in which case RUN FOR IT.

How many of you went into “The Rebel Flesh” with preconceptions of what the episode would be? How many of you went in with spoilers and foreknowledge and all that wonderful gubbins? I’m guessing a fair few of you – Doctor Who fans are an inquisitive lot, and it probably doesn’t help that the BBC have been a bit wobbly with spoilers this series. Meanwhile I’ve managed to stay relatively spoiler-free. With a few minor exceptions I haven’t really been exposed to much about the current series of the show prior to broadcast, in part because I haven’t been actively seeking it out, but mainly because I haven’t really had the time.

The upside is that I’m going into each episode of the show with no preconceptions or expectations, although “The Rebel Flesh” works fairly quickly to instill some preconceptions during the first ten minutes. It’s an episode that fits a familiar mould – the Doctor shows up in base where people are doing something they shouldn’t be and things go tits up. Only just when it looks like it might defy the expectations you didn’t know you had and pull the rug out from under your feet, it stops tugging and, like a Mortal Kombat player who’s forgotten how to do a Fatality, just kicks you in the shins instead.

Spoilers ahead, obviously.

Tomorrow is the opening day of Gallifrey One, one of the biggest Doctor Who conventions in the US, and this reporter (ha! – Ed.) will be there, phone and camera in tow, documenting the event for all seven of you. I’m just nice like that. I’ll be tweeting from the event, assuming I can get a signal, using the official URP! Twitter account, which almost never gets used for anything else, although a word of warning: I imagine I’ll be saying “fuck” on occasion.

You’ll be able to follow other, more general “coverage” of the convention on Twitter – virtually anything to do with the con is being tweeted under #gally, which seems as good a way as any of following what other, less URP!y people are experiencing at the con. There’s also the official Gallifrey One Twitter feed, on which I’ve learnt that a film crew from The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson will be in attendance during Saturday afternoon. Which is nice.

I’ll also be posting end-of-day reports on the blog, which will invariably involve discussion of costumes, panels, events, guests, and possibly other things. Hopefully they’ll be a little more prompt than last year’s efforts which, as you may recall, went up a couple of days after the event had actually finished.

With the rights for Paul McGann’s only televised outing as the Doctor split between the BBC, Fox and Universal, it seemed like the TV movie would never see a release in the US, meaning Americans had to either import from the UK or snag a bootleg copy (which exist in abundance, by the way – I’ve seen more than my fair share at events like Comic-Con).

However it appears the success of the revived series on SyFy and BBC America has given the three companies something of an incentive to finally shake hands and get this thing pushed out of the door – the film was released Stateside on February 8th.

Rather than just crap out the original DVD release from 2001, however, Americans are being treated to the lavish two-disc “Special Edition” from the Revisitations box-set featuring the new commentary with McGann and outgoing Doctor Sylvester McCoy, along with all the other extra stuff including McGann’s audition tape (which, I’ll confess, has me a bit excited).

You can pick up the film from Amazon.com for a paltry $22.99. Or, if you’ve got a multi-region DVD player (or you live in the UK) you can grab the Revisitations box-set from Amazon UK for £24.99 – about $40, not including shipping. If you must have the film absolutely immediately then Best Buy tend to be good at stocking British TV on DVD, but be warned that their price may creep a little closer to the RRP of $34.98.

Well, I said it would happen, although to be fair that’s because Craig Ferguson hinted at it enough – the recorded rehearsal of the Doctor Who theme dance number that was originally going to open The Late Late Show‘s Doctor Who episode has finally found its way onto the internet:

I think the studio audience reaction is ours. The dance number was recorded during rehearsals before we were let in to the studio, but they did show it to us on the day and we did clap in time with the music. I can’t imagine them going to the trouble of putting in canned laughter/clapping for something like this, especially when the equipment to record our reaction hovered mere metres above our heads.

On Tuesday Matt Smith appeared as a guest on American late-night chat show The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and Yours Truly was lucky enough to be in the audience. It didn’t occur to me to actually write about it until I mentioned it to some of the other URP!ers, at which point I’m sure they all tried to reach across the Atlantic and throttle me to death with their bare hands. Or something.

Oh, if you’re not interested in reading my lengthy recap because “Studio audience story, boring”, you might be interested in reading it to find out how long Matt Smith intends to continue playing the Doctor for. Read on…

Remember Mario Paint, that basic drawing “game” for the SuperNES that came with a mouse? Remember that it had a simple little music-sequence tool built into it? Well a while back someone made a standalone Windows program based on that tool (albeit with a little more flexibility) and I recently found, via Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr, that someone’s used it to recreate the current version of the Doctor Who theme.

I can’t slap it up here – unfortunately my posting privileges here at URP! don’t allow me to embed YouTube videos – but you can click this link and check it out for yourself. It’s pretty bloody spectacular.

There were rumours that they’d be filming bits of series six in the US, and now there aren’t. This is largely because the rumours have been replaced with cold, hard FACT. The official BBC America Twitter wossname tweeted about it three hours ago, then they posted a news article about it with quotes from the Moff and Piers Wenger.

The first two episodes will be filmed in part in Utah, forming two parts of a single story (opening the series with a two-parter, eh? A bit cheeky, that). Oh, and Alex Kingston is in ‘em as River Song. Lovely.

Well, it looks like that was a temporary cover as the ridiculously-named but otherwise fantastic Blogtor Who have posted the cover artwork along with the revelation that it’s going to be lenticular, much like the Series Two cover. Amazon UK currently shows what seems to be an earlier version of the cover, using a different pose for Amy and lacking the monsters.

Meanwhile Amazon US is still using the artwork I showed you, so it’s possible that American audiences will wind up with that along with their slimmer packaging.

I live in LA now, and I had been importing my Doctor Who DVDs from the UK (I still do with the classic stuff so that my collection looks uniform on the shelf). Doctor Who: The Complete Specials was the first set I’d bought from the US. If BBC America doesn’t use the cover Blogtor Who have shown us then I’ll be left with little choice but to import from the UK. Or something.

The writing team for Torchwood’s fourth series has been named, according to the Chicago Tribune, and it’s a pretty meaty list. Returning to the fold is John Fay, who you may recall contributed to the fantastic Children of Earth, alongside three American writers of some note.

Probably the biggest name in the list is Jane Espenson, which is a name that fans of Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica will probably recognise. That’s a pretty big deal, there.

Joining Fay and Espenson are John Shiban (The X-Files, Smallville, Breaking Bad) and Doris Egan (Smallville, Dark Angel, House). Pretty meaty, I’d say. Not a bad spread for the ten-part series. Indications seem to point towards “Torchwood International” being a series-long story a la Children of Earth rather than the “monster of the week” format we had for the show’s first two series. Which is good, because those first two series are mostly shit.