- The First Doctor
BBC America documentary on William Hartnell’s time in the Tardis.
- In The Future, All Space Marines Will Be Warhammer 40K Space Marines
M.C.A. Hogarth’s problems with Fames Workshop.
- Verified Facts
Generate your own conspiracy theory!
- Does Ireland need a “Borgen” government?
Jason on parliamentary minorities.
Torchwood, Series One (Second Part); & Runaway Bride & SJA pilot
Continuing the New Who rewatch with the rest of Torchwood's first season and a couple of other Whoniverse stories first shown around the same time.
There's a trivia question that starts by listing Victor Pemberton, Glyn Jones, Mark Gatiss… And then someone buzzes in to say that Noel Clarke has both appeared in Doctor Who and written a TV story for the franchise, the only regular cast member to do so (though of course Colin Baker has written several short stories and a comic, Ian Marter wrote novelisations and a spinoff novel, and Big Finish allows us to invoke others such as Nick Briggs, Barnaby Edwards, and rather surprisingly Ingrid Pitt).
And, because we are doing these in original broadcast order, we suddenly switch from Torchwood to a couple of episodes from the two other main BBC Whovian shows. Luckily for my schedule, these two hour-long stories fitted into my weekend, rather than having to be chopped into different parts of the commute.
Three Whoniverse stories were broadcast for the first time on 1 January 2007, which is a record. 1 January is also the anniversary of the last appearance of the Meddling Monk (1966), the first TV Daleks in colour (1972), the first appearance of Leela (1977), and the regeneration of David Tennant into Matt Smith (2010). But none of the three broadcast on 1/1/7 were Doctor Who per se; we were treated to the first of The Sarah Jane Adventures in the afternoon and then the two final parts of the first Torchwood season late at night. This time I took three days over it. I think I would recommend dedicated rewatchers to do it all in one go; that way one is sufficiently worn down to be less perturbed by the awfulness of the closing episode of the three.
Well, the first season of Torchwood has its ups and downs, but most of the latter stories (with one crashing exception) are actually decent efforts, with the peaks good enough to show that it had potential for more. It is notable that most of the better episodes were written by women. (Audience ratings were consistently more positive than the fannish consensus, or even my more charitable views, which indicates that the show was delivering on some metrics anyway.) The rewatch mix is greatly improved by the Donna Noble and Sarah Jane episodes.
OK, it's the Doctor and Martha next. That will be fun.
< The Curse of Fatal Death | The Webcasts | Rose – Dalek | The Long Game – The Parting of the Ways | Comic Relief 2006 – The Girl in the Fireplace | Rise of the Cybermen – Doomsday | Everything Changes – They Keep Killing Suzie | Random Shoes – End of Days | Smith and Jones – 42 | Human Nature / The Family of Blood – Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords & The Infinite Quest | Revenge of the Slitheen – The Lost Boy & Time Crash | Voyage of the Damned – Adam | Reset – Exit Wounds
Links I found interesting for 05-02-2013
- ATOS declare Richard III fit for work
“The dead monarch, Richard Plantagenet, was called for a reassessment of his fitness for work by ATOS – which carries out disability assessments on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – after it was discovered the deposed King had spent years lying in a Leicester City Council car park doing absolutely nothing.”
- Peter Sellers: A Hard Day’s Night
…in the style of Lawrence Olivier as Richard III.
Links I found interesting for 04-02-2013
- Richard III: unveiling day arrives for skeleton that would be king
Announcement due Monday morning!
January Books
Way behind with bookblogging as with other things. Still weight out of 16 to write up for January.Anyway here is the snapshot as of last Thursday.
The Doctor’s Monsters, by Graham Sleight
Making Ireland English, by Jane Ohlmeyer
Challenges for EU foreign policy in 2013, ed. Giovanni Grevi and Daniel Keohane
TARDIS Eruditorum – An Unauthorized Critical History of Doctor Who, Volume 2: Patrick Troughton by Philip Sandifer
Chicks Unravel Time, ed. Deborah Stanish and L.M. Myles
fiction (non-sf) 1
Faces in the Pool, by Jonathan Gash
sf (non-Who) 3
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Jack Glass by Adam Roberts
Doctor Who 6
The Indestructible Man, by Simon Messingham
Human Nature, by Paul Cornell
Casualties of War by Steve Emmerson
Step Back in Time: Extra Time, by Richard Dungworth
Step Back in Time: The Water Thief, by Jacqueline Rayner
A Big Hand for the Doctor, by Eoin Colfer
Comics 1
The Hive, by Charles Burns
~4,200 pages
4/16 by women (Ohlmeyer, Stanish/Myles, Collins, Rayner)
0/16 by PoC
Bechdel pass 7/11
Bechdel fail 4/11 – 2 at first step, 1 at second step, 1 at third.
Rereads: 2 (Neverwhere, Human Nature)
Acquired 2011 or before: 4 (Neverwhere, Human Nature, Casualties of War, The Indestructible Man)
Acquired 2012: 7 (Step Back in Time x2, Faces in the Pool, The Hive, The Hunger Games, Making Ireland English, The Doctor’s Monsters)
Acquired 2013: 5 (Chicks Unravel Time, TARDIS Eruditorum 2, Jack Glass, Challenges for European Foreign Policy in 2013, A Big Hand For The Doctor)
2013 reading project: up to chapter 11 of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Also started:
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
London Falling by Paul Cornell
Slaapkoppen by Randall.C
Coming next (perhaps):
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
The Castle by Franz Kafka
The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier
Swallows And Amazons by Arthur Ransome
1632 by Eric Flint
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
Doors Open by Ian Rankin
The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple
A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor
The Peoples of Middle-Earth by Christopher Tolkien
Toward the End of Time by John Updike
Daystar and Shadow by James Weldon Johnson
The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century by Brendan Bradshaw
Starship Fall by Eric Brown
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Menagerie by Martin Day
Original Sin by Andy Lane
The Turing Test by Paul Leonard
Fugitive by Tony Lee
Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl
The Unfree French by Richard Vinen
Empty Space: A Haunting by M. John Harrison
Links I found interesting for 03-02-2013
- Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age
Argument framed in an odd climate change way, but interesting evidence.
- Paperman
#fb Lovely short film with romantic enchanted paper aeroplanes.
- Interactive 360° Video From A Helicopter Flying Over Four Erupting Volcanoes
Amazing. #fb
- Live Thog’s Masterclass (2004)
It will be twenty years this Easter since Thog emerged.
- Applebee’s Overnight Social Media Meltdown: A Photo Essay « R.L. Stollar, Journalist.
How to lose the argument, in a few easy steps.
Links I found interesting for 02-02-2013
- Mercator Puzzle!
Fantastic – there was one country at the end that took me a while to get!
- My Big Study
Francis tells us about his PhD, in Up-Goer Five.
Links I found interesting for 01-02-2013
Peter Robinson, on being a Tottenham Hotspur supporter:
“Tiocfaidh ár lá!”
(It is turning into a slightly bizarre evening.)
Links I found interesting for 31-01-2013
- It Takes Planning, Caution to Avoid Being ‘It’
“Once I step foot outside the rectory, all bets are off,” the priest says. “I have to be a little more careful.”
- “Westvleteren 12” retains status of “best beer in the world”
Hooray!
Links I found interesting for 30-01-2013
- China Is Burning Almost As Much Coal As the Rest of the World Combined
And no sign of slowing down.
- War, Death and Hubris
Afghanistan, Britain and Ireland in the 19th century.
- First Evidence of Life in Antarctic Subglacial Lake
Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!
- A name that’s particular
Oxford colleges’ domain names.
- Cambridge college domain names
In case you needed to know.
January Books 8) The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch – this is the Capitol’s way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving another rebellion. Whatever words they use, the real message is clear. “Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do.’
I had almost no expectations of this book except that I expected it would be a competent enough YA novel. It is better than I anticipated, a pretty ruthless indictment of reality television and game shows (nihil sub sole novum; The Goodies were satirising this king of thing in 1976) combined with a pretty strong socio-economic critique making it one of the most politically interesting sf books for the target audience that I have read for a while. It is also well written; although one has a fairly clear idea of how the books will end, there is enough tension and well-described imminent danger to keep the pages turning, and also by the last page there remains considerable emotional baggage to sort out. So I will probably get and read the next in the series.
Torchwood, Series One (first part)
Next in line of my Doctor Who rewatch is the first ever Who spinoff to run for more than an episode. Well, it's better than K9 and Company in oh so many ways…
Though of course that is not really the point; it's about her being Rose, encountering the charismatic, strangely costumed King of Adventure and joining his team. And for her and us, it is learning about Torchwood. There's Captain Jack; there's the doctor who did the autopsy on the alien pig, though she seems to be a computer geek now; there's two good-looking men and a girl who dies. Apart from the stashes of alien technology, it is quite difficult to associate this crowd with the people who shot down the Sycorax and hosted the grand battle of Cybermen versus Daleks in London. The first and last words Jack says to Gwen in the episode are "What do you think?" After the first 50 minutes, I'm not quite sure.
The whole of Torchwood is a guilty pleasure for me; I like it much more than I probably should (though it's worth remarking that audience appreciation index ratings were generally in the mid-80s), and it was great fun watching these episodes again.
Next up comes the rest of this first series, also Catherine Tate's Who debut and the Sarah Jane pilot.
< The Curse of Fatal Death | The Webcasts | Rose – Dalek | The Long Game – The Parting of the Ways | Comic Relief 2006 – The Girl in the Fireplace | Rise of the Cybermen – Doomsday | Everything Changes – They Keep Killing Suzie | Random Shoes – End of Days | Smith and Jones – 42 | Human Nature / The Family of Blood – Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords & The Infinite Quest | Revenge of the Slitheen – The Lost Boy & Time Crash | Voyage of the Damned – Adam | Reset – Exit Wounds
Links I found interesting for 29-01-2013
- Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands to abdicate for son
One of the better royals around.
- The big space battle of January 2013
- Nabokov. Lecture on “The Metamorphosis”.
You will mark Kafka’s style. Its clarity, its precise and formal intonation in such striking contrast to the nightmare matter of his tale. No poetical metaphors ornament his stark black-and-white story. The limpidity of his style stresses the dark richness of his fantasy. Contrast and unity, style and matter, manner and plot are most perfectly integrated.
Ow ow ow
A few weeks ago I booked in for an allergy test – the one where they tape lots of potentially allergenic substances to your skin to see if it reacts.
I should have done it last week, but had to postpone when I unexpectedly spent last Monday in an ice storm in Munich airport and needed the rest of the week to catch up.
So I went to the dermatologist this morning, and she merrily stuck squares soaked in various substances to me, covering it all over with a huge bandage. She will check them on Wednesday and make a final assessment on Friday.
And I can’t have a shower until Friday. I think it is decades since I went as long as four days without a shower. (Obviously I can wash by other means, but Thursday evening’s posh reception will be interesting.)
And the worst of it, as I am now realising, is that the bandage is really itchy; it is deliberately placed in the most inaccessible part of my back, and in any case, if I actually am allergic to any of these things, of course it’s going to bloody itch – until Friday, for the next four days!
I just hope I actually am allergic to something or other, to make the whole exercise worthwhile.
Links I found interesting for 28-01-2013
- Nicholas Stern: ‘I got it wrong on climate change – it’s far, far worse’
*gulp*
- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
A hypertext version. Pride and Prejudice first published 27 January 1813.
January Books 7) Challenges for EU foreign policy in 2013 ed. Giovanni Grevi and Daniel Keohane
"The profile of the Union is not tainted because others are threatening it or advancing alternative, more viable political or economic models. What chiefly dents the credibility of the EU is that Europeans have not been practicing what they preach as consistently and effectively as they committed to do, at home and abroad." (Giovanni Grevi, in the introduction)
This is a 100-page book brought out earlier this month by the Spanish-based think tank FRIDE, which is producing better and better material these days. It is a good global review of the political situation in various parts of the world, with some policy ideas for how Europe could deal with them. "Europe" here is writ pretty large, with an emphasis on collective action by member states rather than tinkering with the Brussels machinery, and this is no self-indulgent back-slapping exercise of misty-eyed idealism about peace and harmony. It leads upfront with three areas of foreign policy where the EU has not delivered on its rhetorical commitments – promoting democracy (by FRIDE director Richard Youngs), fighting climate change (Bernice Lee and Diarmuid Torney), and developing a security/military capability (Daniel Keohane) – and takes a hard look at why the EU is failing in these areas and what could be done to reverse the drift. Of the other chapters, I particularly appreciated the ones on supporting democratic transition in the Arab world (Kristina Kausch) and on crises in Africa (Damien Helly).
This is not a book about the problems of the Euro or how to solve the economic crisis, but it lurks behind every chapter; the fact is that EU leaders have been too absorbed with fixing the finances to look outside over the last few years. In addition, internal leadership on this issue is, to be charitable, weak. In my own opinion the EU is actually a less powerful foreign policy actor now than it was ten years ago. In 2003 European peacekeeping troops were deployed to Macedonia. Now a civilian mission is securing an airport in South Sudan. It's rather a drop in scale of ambition and effort. FRIDE's analysis is a good starting point for discussing both how to try harder and if it s even worth trying.
January Books 6) Human Nature, by Paul Cornell
‘I’ve discovered a lot in the last few weeks,’ Smith began. ‘I’ve found out that being the Doctor… it’s not about having special knowledge or abilities. It’s about not being cruel. It’s about not being afraid.’ He walked into the middle of the clearing, searching for the right words. ‘There are monsters out there, yes. Terrible things. But you don’t have to become one in order to defeat them. You can be peaceful in the face of their cruelty. You can win by being cleverer than they are.’
This is still the only Who novel to have been adapted for television rather than the other way round. I first read it, gulp, seven years ago – the first Seventh Doctor novel I ever read – and would have been rereading it anyway as I shall be rewatching the TV episode soon.
Now that I have read the previous 37 New Adventures, I still think this is one of the best in the series. It is better than most Who novels as a standalone (though Niall Harrison found the continuity heavy going), the major reference to previous novels being to Benny’s loss of her lover in the Albigensian crusade. The Doctor is absent from most of the book and needs to be explained to his own alter ego, John Smith, whose final sacrifice is very effective.
An easy Bechdel pass with Benny bantering with a group of women at a bar in the prologue.
Links I found interesting for 27-01-2013
- The Only Way to Get Important Things Done
Programming yourself, apparently.
- New photos, videos and app shed fresh light on Anne Frank’s family life
#fb
- George Packer: The Political Isolation of the American South
As late as 1950, there were just three Republicans among the South’s hundred and nine congressmen, and none in the Senate; a decade later, the numbers had barely moved.
January Books 5) Faces in the Pool, by Jonathan Gash
I heard his voice exclaim, ‘Listen to the noisy sods.’ And a female voice, husky with love, said, ‘Never mind them, darling. Come back here.’ And I thought another thought, except this one was even more stupid. I actually recognised her voice, until I corrected myself. It couldn’t be, never in a million years.
This is the most recent Lovejoy book, published in 2008, and since the author turns 80 this year I guess it may well be the last. (Though not for me; eleven down, thirteen to go.) It is a rather confused affair; an older Lovejoy, more narcissistic than ever, gets swept up in a massively weird conspiracy by the stranded dregs of colonialism (who of course tend to have retained fantastically valuable antiques). As well as Lovejoy’s East Anglia base, we get taken to various parts of England with a climactic scene off the coast of Blackpool. Lovejoy turns out to have a son who has inherited his gift of divvying (the supernatural ability to detect genuine antiques) and is the most memorable new character in the book; also, remarkably, his long-suffering apprentice Lydia develops a sudden burst of characterisation, not that it does her much good. And Lovejoy manages to bed pretty much every female character over the age of consent, though not very explicitly. I won’t recommend this as a book to start reading the series with; though it seems that this is where it finishes.
Fails the Bechdel test at the third hurdle. There are many women characters, who frequently talk to each other, but Lovejoy himself is invariably the topic of conversation.
January Books 4) Making Ireland English, by Jane Ohlmeyer
“My advice to you is to marry as soon possibly as you can. Do not marry in England; for such a marriage will prove your ruin… There are some good Catholic wives to be had in England; but now it is a great venture. Never bring a Protestant wife into your family. Marry in your country as all your predecessors have done.” (Lord Trimleston to his son, 1686)
A pretty massive book in which Ohlmeyer looks at the turbulent seventeenth century in Ireland (really the shorter period between the Flight of the Earls and the Williamite victory) through the lives and deeds of the people who saw themselves as Ireland’s natural leaders – the resident peerage. My personal interest in the subject is that the Sir Nicholas Whyte/White of the day (not the Elizabethan statesman, but his grandson) married the daughter of Viscount Moore and managed to bag Viscount Galmoye (probably), Viscount Dillon and the Earl of Carlingford as sons-in-law; though the White/Whyte family are not mentioned directly in this book, their relatives certainly are.
Ohlmeyer’s argument, to summarise brutally, is that the Irish peers were engaged in a nation-building project, almost all of them committed to support for the British monarchy (as it became in 1603), but not necessarily to the Dublin government (let alone the English parliament), and committed to a paradigm of honour which included most importantly serving the Crown in peace and war, but also meant ensuring that the peasants didn’t starve and securing the familial succession so that succeeding generations could keep up the tradition. This last point comes up again and again; Ohlmeyer denotes substantial and separate chapters to birth, marriage and death among the peerage, and it is striking how often lines simply expired – underage heirs might be vulnerable to disputed successions and seemed to die early themselves rather often, and of course the wars of the 1640s and 1690s took their toll as well.
A lot of the noble houses switched religion over the decades – not just as a result of mixed marriages, but also as a result of individual conversions; but there always remained a critical mass of Catholics, if a minority, among the peerage, accepted by Protestant peers and by London as a critical part of the fabric of Irish society, until the 1690s when most of them converted or fled, ending the nation-building project. I still find it quite difficult to get my head around the fervently Catholic Irish peers wishfully thinking that James I and VI or Charles I or II was going to restore Catholicism, or even allow them to hold the public offices from which they were barred, and I suppose it is a triumph of Stuart statecraft that allowed them to think so (having said which, they were not the only ones who thought the Stuarts might be soft on Romanism, and if they were reading hard line Protestant pamphlets they would have had fuel for their fantasies).
Ohlmeyer sends a rather exhausting amount of time on the statistics and patterns of landownership (and the maps used to illustrate are not terribly clear). But one point I took away that I had not previously realised related to the Cromwellian land settlement. Ohlmeyer confirms the traditional historical version that many Catholic landowners were dispossessed entirely or transplanted to Connacht. However, a significant minority of these dispossessions were overturned on appeal to Charles II, particularly of peers who had good connections at court (and the Irish peers, Catholic and Protestant, had by and large supported Charles in his exile, which turned out to be the way to bet). Either way, peers as a group ended up owning more of Ireland’s acres at the end of the process; it was the smaller and less influential dispossessed or transplanted landowners who had no redress.
Anyway, a minority interest, but plenty of food for thought.
Links I found interesting for 26-01-2013
- Has a passenger ever landed a plane after the pilot was incapacitated?
Kind-of, yes, once or twice.
- Opinion: Cameron is wishing for an EU that already exists
“…the speech is either ignorant or disingenuous about the reality of the EU on several counts… Cameron calls for a council of ministers to deal with the Single Market, but ignores the existing Competitiveness Council, which does just this… in terms of flexibility, Britain already has various opt-outs on the euro, border controls, justice, policing and working time rules.”
- @Telegraph fakes a plot by the EU to control British press
@BrunoBrussels lying again.
- David Cameron may have finished off the Tories – but he had no choice
Peter Oborne of @telegraph gets it right. (Really.)
Links I found interesting for 25-01-2013
- Fog in Channel, Cameron Cut Off (by @timjudah1)
Quote from me at the end!
Links I found interesting for 24-01-2013
- The Schengen Curtain, by Marko Đedović
Wonderful immigration policies which penalise the innocent traveller and encourage criminality.
- Cameron’s backward-looking speech
Mark Leonard: “a miscalculation which will leave everyone frustrated”.
- David Cameron’s argument will fool no-one, and will relegate the existing EU-UK relationship to the periphery
Julian Priestley doesn’t mince his words.
Links I found interesting for 23-01-2013
- The Secret Mansion (with images, tweets)
Baron Hill on Ynys Môn, abandoned since WW2.
- Obama, Marshmallow Cannon Creator Joey Hudy Pose For Science Fair Pictures
Fantastic videos of airguns in the White House.
- Dear brilliant students:
Why you should not do a Ph D.
- The best (and worst) media errors and corrections of 2012
Some of these are hilarious.
- BBC News – Norway goat cheese fire closes tunnel
“This news item contains the words ‘Norway’, ‘goat’, ‘cheese’, and ‘fire’.” – Dominic Green
- Up-Goer 5: Social Justice Edition – Ozy Frantz’s Blog
Privilege: Some groups of people get bad things other groups of people don’t get.
- Seven EU myths you should never believe
The ‘Thatcherite free-marketeer’ Polish foreign minister: “Even your cooking has improved.”
January Books 3) The Hive, by Charles Burns
This is the second of a trilogy by Burns which started with X’ed Out, and leaps between three different storylines: Doug’s memories of his life in our world, in particular his enigmatic girlfriend Sarah (who has a fascination with Louise Bourgeoisalter ego Nitnit in the alternative insectoid world of The Hive; and the romance comics which are common to both worlds. It seems almost as if Burns is interrogating the medium of comics from two different directions, Bourgeois’ startling and disturbing images and the conventionally fluffy romance stories. There is also clearly a deep revelation to come in the third and final volume about what happened between Douglas and Sarah, and I find myself rather hoping that it is something sufficiently disturbing to justify the emotional energy of the story rather than some relatively generic story about growing up.
Bechdel fail at the second step – it is a tight narrative of a male viewpoint character (or characters), and while there are numerous female characters, none of them talk to each other.
Doctor Who Season 2 (2006), Second Half
(Tardisodes: first, communications between Gemini and Preachers; second, Cybus taking over the world.) I had forgotten just how good Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel actually is. The visuals are superb – the Zeppelins over London (and the spectacular Zeppelin scenes at the end), the marching Cybermen, Battersea Power Station as slaughterhouse. The story doesn’t shrink from killing off sympathetic characters – Jackie, Ricky, Mrs Moore. Sure, some plot elements are lifted from Genesis of the DaleksThe Five Doctors.)
I have written previously comparing the politics of the parallel world here with that of Inferno, which ended Pertwee’s first season. But another aspect that makes the parallel world story effective is that both Rose and Mickey find that their loved ones are still alive in Pete’s World; and yet it is far from being a perfect place. (I do hope that they nailed down that carpet before going to Paris.)
Mickey is the first companion in New Who to leave the Tardis of his own volition. (The only other one is Martha. By contrast, it was more usual than not in Old Who for companions to apparently decide for themselves that their time was up.) I cannot be alone in finding the Doctor’s mockery of him, especially in Season One, rather uncomfortable viewing; it’s not enough to steal the guy’s girlfriend, you have to rub it in as well? But Mickey is much better served by his Season Two character arc: he comes to the realisation that he is no more than Junior Sidekick (as he puts it, “the tin dog”) to the main characters, expresses his distress, gets nowhere and decides to do something else with his life. It is a more compelling story than most Doctors get, never mind their companions.
(Tardisode: the Wire consumes Grandma’s face.) I liked The Idiot’s Lantern more on this viewing than previously, but that is not saying a lot. The concept is good, and the faceless people are genuinely horrific; the Doctor and Rose, liberated from caring about Mickey, are on top form; and Euros Lyn shoots a lot of it from tilted cameras to keep us watching. Maureen Lipman is not given a lot to work with but doesn’t with great gusto, and I also liked Debra Gillett as Rita Connolly.
But the Connolly family subplot doesn’t work for me. This is not a Very Special Who episode of Doctor Who about mummy and daddy not loving each other any more; the presentation of the parents’ relationship is both clichéd and unrealistic (how fortunate that the house is in Grandma’s name!), and for me the story is the weakest since New Earth as a result.
NB that there is no such person as the King of Belgium. Our head of state is the King of the Belgians, and presumably has that on his business cards.
(Tardisodes: two linked pieces about Captain Walker, a book found by the Galis expedition, and the Ood. Apparently they still have MacBooks in the future.) I fear this is becoming a boring refrain, but I had forgotten how good The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit actually is. I think it is our first proper base-under-siege story in New Who (perhaps arguments can be made for The End of the World or Dalek, but I won’t) and perhaps it’s a return to that comfort zone of Old Who, with the difference of a more diverse base crew than Old Who would have had (the black guy would never have been in command in the old days, and the smart woman would never have been chief scientist). The scarily different bit is not so much the monster – though it is well done, both the descent to the pit and the technical realisation of a superhuman incarnation of evil – but the Ood, who are very creepy indeed. Having a slave race never works out well in Who, but here the message is that by exploiting the Ood, humanity has opened a potential route for its own destruction. Terrific stuff.
(Tardisode: Kennedy, played hereby a different and presumably less expensive actor, tracks down LINDA and eats the woman who makes his tea.) Love and Monsters is one of the most daring episodes of Who ever. Paul Cornell has written a spirited defence of the story as an episode about fandom, about the show Doctor Who rather than its central character, and he makes a good case. But the fact is that this had not been done before in New Who, and only really in passing in Old Who (most notably in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, though talk of fans of the Doctor goes back to The Savages). The episode is doubly daring in that it is the first of the Doctor-lite episodes that we now accept as a regular event in New Who. It is a bit bizarre, and it doesn’t fit with the previous run of the programme at all, but I think it’s OK for Who to be experimental occasionally and that it more or less works.
(Tardisode: a Welsh bloke appears to be doing a children’s version of Crimewatch in a London street. It is rather bad.) I was a bit surprised to be reminded that Fear Her was by far the lowest rated episode of New Who in the DWM top 200 stories poll a while back. It is a simple low-cost story, thrown together at the last minute because Stephen Fry’s script didn’t work out, but it is tremendously effective at what it does. It addresses dysfunctional families and child abuse far more effectively than The Idiot’s Lantern from only a few weeks earlier, and Nina Sosanya is simply superb as Trish (and young Abisola Agbaje very impressive as Chloe). It has a couple of weak points – poor Huw Edwards gets given an awful lot of info-dumping, and the emotional climax goes on for a bit too long – but I feel this one is unfairly underrated. Note the Doctor’s casual reference to having been a father once… Also, this story, like Dalek, is set in 2012, which seemed safely distant at the time of broadcast but now feels so last year.
(Tardisodes: a journalist gets scrobbled while investigating Torchwood; another gets scrobbled by Cybermen while reading the news.) David Tennant’s first season finale has a lot of good bits and some less good bits. While the ghosts themselves are rather intriguing, the means and motivation for the Cybermen to disguise themselves in this way are never explained (as often with RTD episodes, we invest in a very detailed set-up referencing contemporary culture which then turns out to be irrelevant); and much though one’s heart melts for Rose and the Doctor, perhaps the final scenes in Canary Wharf go on a bit. But this isn’t actually a pair of episodes about plot; it’s a series of dramatic reveals – Mickey’s reappearance; the Daleks’ reappearance (which had us and even some visiting non-fans on the edge of our seats when first broadcast); Pete and Jackie’s reunion; Yvonne’s survival; and the parting of the ways again. And all of those, with a partial reservation about the last, are done very well, and it looks good, and you believe that ten square metres of plasterboard in a studio is a gateway between dimensions at the top of a skyscraper. And New Who turns a corner, having replaced its main cast within two years of starting; Old Who didn’t completely change the guard until two stories into its fourth season. It is important to demonstrate that the show can go on even if the faces change, and now we have got there.
(And I was completely unaware of Catherine Tate’s existence before seeing her at the end of this.)
I was uncertain about whether I should do a separate write-up for Jackie. But her appearance in Love and Monsters convinced me; this is actually someone whose life is in general worse off because of the Doctor’s intervention. Just as Mickey reasonably resents the man with the blue box stealing his girlfriend, Jackie hates him stealing her daughter, and the show is often more sympathetic to her than the title character. Jackie is a reminder that while the Doctor may be saving worlds, his effects on people at the micro level can be pretty destructive. (Sarah Jane Smith, of course, actually comes out and says this.)
I’ve just finished the second volume of Philip Sandifer’s Tardis Eruditorum collections of essays, and he has some particularly interesting things to say about Victoria, as the first Old Who girl companion picked who was already a child star, and that making her a “female peril monkey” rather than the audience identification figure is a very big and unexpectedly successful step. RTD (and Bilie Piper, of course) made Rose the audience identification figure, but gave her two things a companion had never had before: non-Tardis travelling friends and relatives who we see in their first story who don’t immediately die, and a strong romantic relationship with the Doctor. It is a considerable report of the show’s treatment of Its regular characters, and it grated a wee bit for some of us Old Who fans who remembered nostalgically the days when companions appeared out of nowhere, enjoyed travelling with the Doctor platonically and left as abruptly. But we were wrong and RTD was right.
And the bat-shippers therefore do have a point. The first two seasons are as much about Rose as about the Doctor. She’s not just an audience viewpoint figur who has to have stuff explained to her; she’s not just (indeed, hardly ever is) a screaming peril monkey; she’s someone who goes on adventures with her exciting new best friend, who she would quite like to be more than a best friend – not so much audience identification as audience wish fulfilment. The show has never had a companion like that, and Piper does it very well.
The Tardisodes have been largely forgotten since 2006, and on the whole this is fair. The best one is the prequel to The Girl in the Fireplace, which briefly and effectively shows us the fate of the Madame de Pompadour and her crew. The later ones look like cheap afterthoughts, trailers for a slightly different show. The prequels of the Moffat era have generally been better conceived.
Overall this is a decent run. The closing two-parter isn’t actually as good as the two previous two-parters, but it’s still good enough. The Idiot’s Lantern Is weak, but much of Old Who was worse. Most importantly, the show demonstrates that it can one again triumphantly survive a change of lead actor, and Rose gets the best departure arc of any Who companions before Rory and Amy. And she deserves it.
OK, on to Torchwood…
< The Curse of Fatal Death | The Webcasts | Rose – Dalek | The Long Game – The Parting of the Ways | Comic Relief 2006 – The Girl in the Fireplace | Rise of the Cybermen – Doomsday | Everything Changes – They Keep Killing Suzie | Random Shoes – End of Days | Smith and Jones – 42 | Human Nature / The Family of Blood – Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords & The Infinite Quest | Revenge of the Slitheen – The Lost Boy & Time Crash | Voyage of the Damned – Adam | Reset – Exit Wounds
King’s Landing
(Also known as Dubrovnik.)
My job in Up-Goer Five
Describing my job using only the thousand most common words in English:
There are people who run some places (or who would like to run them) who do not find it easy to talk to people who run other places, but would like to do that more often and better. I help the first group of people to talk to the other people.
Links I found interesting for 20-01-2013
- Why I like Martin Luther King Day
(Note to self: Americans have a holiday tomorrow.)
- Forget Harry Potter
John Crowley speaks out for Joan Aiken’s “Wolves of Willoughby Chase”, etc.
- Books on books — recursive but fun!
Lois McMaster Bujold: Essays on a Modern Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy