MovieCat's profile

652 Messages

 • 

12.4K Points

Saturday, December 9th, 2023

Closed

Solved

Cleaning up the Doctor Who title

The current version of Doctor Who has runs of episodes put together as "seasons", but then drops in numberless "specials" regularly. What this means is that the Doctor Who title - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436992/reference/ - is starting to build up an excess of episodes listed under "unknown", and multiple runs that are out of order.

The IMDb is following the "season numbers" given by the BBC, but I put it that this is untenable for the IMDb listings to work properly?

Here's an example of what I mean:

Season Four - 13 episodes running during 2007/2008 with David Tennant

Specials - Four largely standalone specials with David Tennant running from 2008-2010. Not listed as a "season", you have to go to "unknown" to find these.

Season Five - 13 episodes running during 2010 with Matt Smith. Advertised by the BBC as "season five".

Now, the problem here is that if you change the season numbers in logical order they'll eventually be completely out of synch with the "season numbers" listed by the BBC. But as it stands, the series is represented in a random order, as there's just been three specials, which, again, will air between "seasons" and will go into "unknown".

(Slightly unrelated, but the very first episode of the original series from 1963, which had an unaired pilot as a separate entry, now seems to have been merged and listed under "alternate versions" - is there any way I can find out my original rating, as it seems to have retained my rating for the unaired pilot version, not the one I gave the final episode?: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0562828/reference/)

Oldest First
Selected Oldest First

Champion

 • 

5.1K Messages

 • 

118.7K Points

2 years ago

Because they have the same Dr. Who as Season 4, the 4 "unknown" 2009 eps could be labeled as, say, s4.e101 through s4.e104, so they fall after the official season eps. Even better might be if the ep number itself could have a non-numeric, say s4.ex1 through s4.ex4.

However, if specials were prequels with the next Who, would IMDb cope with sN.e001 through sN.e009? I think I've seen e0 or e00 somewhere, but can it do e001?

Assigning ep numbers seems preferable to leaving them dangling in Unknown territory, since the Seen feature only lists eps with numbers.

https://www.imdb.com/seen/tt0436992/

is missing the Unknown eps.

2 Messages

 • 

72 Points

Episode numbers do allow viewers to look through what they want to watch in order. That is currently impossible to do.

You do raise a good point about the "prequels" to the new doctor being difficult to number though. Personally I'd go for using something like a ".9" prefix on the previous season. So regular season, then the .101 episodes... and finally .901, .902 for any prequels to the NEXT season. 

Is the new doctor really going to be identified by BBC as an entirely new season?

Anyway the main thing is allowing users to click "next" and see the actual next episode (etc). If it copes with .001, .002 and can display everything in order that's probably better. 

(edited)

Employee

 • 

5.6K Messages

 • 

58.9K Points

2 years ago

Hi @MovieCat -

There is an open ticket reference number D106040478 to decide how listings on that series should be. Once decision is made all will be fixed.

Cheers!

652 Messages

 • 

12.4K Points

@Bethanny​ I see the BBC decision to make the current series a "new" run of Doctor Who has kind of made this easier, in a way, because it's now locked off and in the past.

I think on reflection it'd probably be best to keep the season numbers as the BBC have them, and add the various specials as season numbers within this range....?

652 Messages

 • 

12.4K Points

2 years ago

Another issue is that I understand there are several shorts on the BluRay releases with the main cast that aren't on the system.