• Niger ambassador to Belgium, wife found dead
  
  Jeepers. I met him last April, we had a great conversation about Mali.
  (tags: Death )
• It’s all about the lies
  
  Re Armstrong: “When he says he’s sorry now, how do we know he’s not still lying?”
  (tags: Dopingscandal )
• Eastercon now has a code of conduct.
  
  …or, How to Make Sure Everyone Has A Good Time.
  (tags: Behaviour )

	Goodreads		Librarything
	number	average	number	average
2312, Kim Stanley Robinson	1445	3.41	267	3.65
Dark Eden, Chris Beckett	138	4.09	30	4.50
Intrusion, Ken MacLeod	115	3.40	64	3.97
Jack Glass, Adam Roberts	79	3.89	18	5
Empty Space: a Haunting by M. John Harrison	52	4.19	31	3.5

NB that only one Librarything user has rated either of the last two, which is why those numbers are italicised.

Full shortlist (including short fiction, art and non-fiction) is here.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

• Seven hazards for Cameron
  
  By Michael Emerson.
  (tags: EU )
• 4 Years On
  
  Live-tweeting the end of the conflict in 2009
  (tags: srilanka )
• How to withdraw from the European Union? Confronting hard reality
  
  Another CEPS piece.
  (tags: EU )

• Irvine Welsh: Scottish Independence and British Unity
  
  “Better together? Yes, certainly, but better independent and free together.”
  (tags: scotland ukpolitics )
• Advantages of social media are poorly understood
  
  My grandfather began school at a time when trust was defined by physical locality, and often marked by the boundary of the parish. In the spring of 1879, aged seven, he was part of the first generation of Irish kids to attend national school in Fanad, Co Donegal. It was his first lengthy engagement with the English language; and it’s likely that the main technology he used during the six years of his formal education was a stone slate.

  Three generations – and 120 years or so – later and, at half that age, his great grandson’s favourite educative tool is already an iPad.
  (tags: ireland technology )

• 22 Stairways That Lead Nowhere
  
  I think we all feel like that sometimes.
  (tags: photos architecture )
• Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking And Inspirational Story Of The College Football Season, Is A Hoax
  
  Good reporting.
  (tags: Media )

• 50 stories for 50 years: 1982
  
  Andrew Hickey: Why Earthshock succeeds, against the odds.
  (tags: Doctor who )
• Katesbridge: The legend of Northern Ireland’s ‘frosty hollows’
  
  Why is it so cold in Katesbridge (and Castlederg)?
  (tags: Weather northernireland )
• Czech presidential vote marks shift in EU relations
  
  (tags: EU czechrepublic )

• What Cameron *should* say on Europe (WSJ)
  
  Wishful thinking: “…the idea that I am going to hold the euro zone to ransom at a time of acute financial stress by blackmailing our closest trading partners with some cobbled-together list of vague and probably unachievable ultimatums, risking years of damaging uncertainty, simply to appease a faction in my party who will never be reconciled to EU membership anyway, is completely absurd.”
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )
• Links: Britain and Europe
  
  “The Americans have never wanted the UK out of the EU. If they did, they’d say it.”
  (tags: EU ukpolitics )

“You’re not the Doctor. It’s a trick. You’re one of those doubles, Mr Mackenzie told me.”
“I don’t know who this Mr Mackenzie is, Jamie,” said the Doctor. “But I assure you that I am definitely me.”
“You’re dead.” He looked the Doctor up and down. “You’re not the Doctor. I want to go back.”

A slightly unusual Past Doctor Adventure here: the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe end up in a future which is based very strongly on the work of the late Gerry Anderson, the Tracy family of Thunderbirds fame translated into the Sharon family with their Lightning rescue craft, and various other adaptations from parts of the Andersonverse that I don’t know as well.But this future is a dystopia where society had collapsed globally, and which is under threat from the Myloki (who combine attributes of both the Mysterons and the attackers of Earth in UFO). It is lovingly drawn, and my lack of familiarity with the source didn’t spoil my appreciation of the detail. Messingham also has the Doctor and companions go through hell – the Doctor so badly injured before the story starts that he almost regenerates, Zoe drawn into a doomed love affair, Jamie traumatised and distrustful – which is not at all true to the series of the time, but does take the characters to interesting places. However, though I liked the setting and what was done with the regulars, I wasn’t really grabbed by the plot such as it was, and too many of the borrowed Anderson characters – especially the women – were simply background coloration.

A bare pass for the Bechdel test (and I think some readers would fail it). Zoe is often thrown together with some of the aforementioned cardboard women characters and it is suggested that they have conversations, which may not always be about men. (I am going to try and systematically tally this for all fiction I read this year.)

How much do monsters have a choice about being monstrous, and how much can they outgrow their natures?

Getting the year off to a good start with Graham Sleight’s analysis of 29 of the Doctor’s best known monstrous adversaries, and what they actually mean in story terms. Fellow fans will enjoy Sleight’s take on the various creatures, whether we agree or disagree – for instance, he argues that if Kroll had been realised better on screen, The Power of Kroll might have a far better reputation as a story. But mainly he looks at the effect of monsters on the other characters in the story, on the viewer and to an extent on themselves. The people who will really get something out of this book are those with a strong interest in cinematic and television depictions of monsters, combined with a passing familiarity with Who, rather than the other way round.Having said that, the book looks very much at Who in its own terms without tying it particularly to other screen sf or fantasy, and jumps around quite a lot in historical timeline (which I think was a good way of getting the Whovian reader to think about it a bit more; the non-Whovian reader won’t care). The Daleks get four separate chapters – original story, pre-Davros, post-Davros and New Who – and the Cybermen get three – up to Return of the Cybermen, Earthshock to end of Old Who, and New Who. 

My copy unfortunately was marred by production errors, including a complete lack of page numbers. The material deserved better from the publisher (I.B. Tauris), but Who fans and media fans more generally will enjoy it anyway.

F and I made two excursions yesterday and today to the clutch of restaurants around the Zoete Waters near where we live, to try and replicate the settings of various old photographs and postcards. The weather was not with us – the sun was mostly in the wrong place yesterday, and it was actually snowing lightly this morning – but I am fairly pleased with the results.

This is the Brasserie St-Jean, at the corner of the crossroads by the lake, a favourite resting spot for an outing from Leuven for many years.
It is undergoing renovation at the moment, but the date of construction – 1908 – is still clearly visible. (This one taken by F with his 3DS.)

The side view of the Brasserie St-Jean give a good sense of the size.

And a hundred years on, cars are still being parked in the same place.

Across the pond is this peculiar building, dating from the sixteenth century, one of the oldest buildings in the village (though our church tower was built in the eleventh century). In the old days it was a forest warden's house. The first of these cards is in French only, the second in French and Dutch, so I make the sweeping assumption that the first is older (the message on it is in French). The site had been the home of the Lords of Steenberghen who were the local feudal rulers, but by the sixteenth century they had sold off most of their patrimony to the Oranje-Nassaus who still rule our northern neighbours.

It's now a medium posh restaurant, Het Spaans Dak (the Spanish Roof). I was interested that the colours of the trees in these two photographs taken at the same time – the first from F's 3DS, the second from my iPad – are so very different.

I was intrigued by this building, which didn’t quite match any of those visible at the crossroads, but I thought must most likely have been rebuilt into In De Molen, opposite the Brasserie St-jean, because they share the basic arrangement of a taller wing built onto a long shorter one, with shutters on the nearby windows:

But the more I looked at it, the more I was dissatisfied. In De Molen (a sixteenth century watermill, renovated in 1782) has four windows and a door in the shorter nearer wing, whereas this cafe has only three. And the heights of the buildings are very different. Also the road appears to be going uphill away from the camera in the old picture, rather than flat or down as with In De Molen. Then I discovered the truth, which I should have guessed from the whacking great clue written on the wall: this is the old, pre-1908 Brasserie St-Jean, which burned down and was replaced with the current building. The picture is taken from the crossroads, looking along the side of the old building towards the point where the second pair of pictures above were taken.

Apart from buildings burning down, there have been other changes at Zoete Waters. In this early twentieth century picture, you can see that In De Molen’s southern end had a very different upper storey.

More significantly, the long narrow pond leading up to its front door has now been concreted over into a car park. Our new local council promises to ban on-street parking at Zoete Waters; alas, this probably means more pressure for off-street car parks.

I find this last pair of photographs the most startling contrast. This is the building which now houses the Agua Dulce restaurant, but in those days was the Hôtel des Eaux-Douces. As you can see, the road in front of it is a miserable little lane crumbling into the lake.

Flash forward to today, and while the building has barely changed (apart from the terrace added at the side), the water has again been pushed back and the road widened considerably; it is a secondary route between Leuven and Wavre, and a key artery in our own little commune. It is easy to forget just how much road traffic infrastructure has developed in my own lifetime (here is a reminder from my original homeland). Meanwhile, the Zoetwater railway station (close to the bridge which was sabotaged in 1943) has been closed for years.

A pleasant pair of excursions. I will be more careful with the sun next time.

NB – most of the photographs were given away by the local news magazine Achter d’Oechelen a few years back. The others are of cards on sale at delcampe.be.

• Leadership That’s Working?
  
  Welcome to the Northern Ireland that won’t vote itself out of the Union but won’t give Unionism majority support.
  (tags: northernireland )
• Aaron Swartz
  
  Remember yesterday, when we were all crowing about the wonderfully geeky White House response to the tongue-in-cheek “build a Death Star” petition? Just remember that the same people were in charge of the Federal prosecutors who destroyed Aaron Swartz.
  (tags: death )

• Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Release Announced
  
  “Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann will all reprise their roles as, respectively, the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Doctors… Louise Jameson reprises the role of the savage Leela, Sarah Sutton plays the scientist Nyssa, Nicola Bryant is American botany student Peri, Sophie Aldred is streetwise kid Ace and India Fisher returns as Edwardian adventurer Charley Pollard.” Hooray!
  (tags: Doctorwho )
• Revisionist Romps With The Revolutionary Twosome
  
  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, via Viz.
  (tags: comics )
• Britain’s relationship with the EU is none of Barack Obama’s business
  
  @telegraph: fiendish Yanks pushing Brits to surrender to Herman Van Rompuy. About as incisive as Viz on Marx and Engels.
  (tags: ukpolitics Eu )

And so we enter the David Tennant era, with the first of the Children in Need specials, the only interactive episodes so far, and the first four Tardisodes as well as the first five proper Tenth Doctor stories.

The first quarter of the 2005 Children in Need Special is a reprise of the closing moments of The Parting of the Ways

Let's face it, a lot of The Christmas Invasion makes No Sense At All.  One of the silliest moments of the episode is the new Doctor's emergence from the Tardis and successfully demanding that the Sycorax, who have just summarily executed two other characters, take a time-out from killing people for 90 seconds while he says hello to everyone else. But, I mean, really; pilot fish, targeting the Doctor? What is the narrative point of the Mars probe, other than a satirical reference to the loss of the Beagle two years before and a continuity hat-tip to Ambassadors of Death? Blood magic – which actually turns out to be harmless? It's just a mess.

The point of the episode is, of course, not the plot, but the presentation of David Tennant as the New Doctor, winning over the confidence of the audience (as viewpointed through Rose, Mickey, Jackie and Harriet Jones) and working out for himself what sort of person he now is. Though despite the episode's internal disorganisation, it is setting up a lot of stuff for the future: the return of UNIT, the emergence of Torchwood, and, in what looks like sheer whimsy but in fact turns out to be a brilliant (or fortuitous) bit of forward planning, the Hand. And there are a lot of eyeball kicks (a Bruce Sterling term which I got from Graham Sleight's excellent The Doctor's Monsters). Still, as opening stories for Doctors go, this is more in the league of Castrovalva than of Rose or An Unearthly Child.

I covered webcasts in a previous entry, and now I turn to what I think is still the only interactive episode, Attack of the Graske, which was made available to suitably equipped BBC viewers immediately after The Christmas Invasion screened on 25 December 2005. It is pretty short, only three scenes with Jimmy Vee playing a short prosthetic-face alien wreaking malicious Christmas mayhem. The very first Doctor Who Christmas episode, exactly forty years earlier, had ended with William Hartnell turning to camera and wishing a merry Christmas to "all of you at home"The Christmas Invasion at four times the length. You can play the game here still; to save you time, the answers are 1, 3, 1, 2, 8, 3, 3, 2, 3, 1, and 1.

(Tardisode – the first of thirteen – presented as a promotional video for the hospital that then reveals that Something Is Wrong.) I don't want to sound too judgey, but New Earth is rather minor stuff. I had forgotten the pre-title sequence where Rose bids farewell to Jackie and Mickey, pointedly failing to return the latter's protestations of love. The main episode then has two plot lines, the Sisters' nefarious plan, based on Ursula Le Guin's "The One Who Walk Away From Omelas" except much sillier, with a very very silly solution, and the much more interesting question of Cassandra's desperate quest for survival through body-swapping, though this is played too much for laughs. The one excellent thing is that it gives Billie Piper a chance to shine in another role as Cassandra-possessing-Rose. I must say that rediscovering how enjoyable her performance actually is has been one of the highlights of this rewatch.

(Tardisode: spaceship crashes, old man gets hunted down by werewolf.) I find Tooth and Claw a welcome return to form. Provided you can swallow Scottish warrior monks and some other historical solecisms, it has decent acting from Pauline Collins, David Tennant using his real accent, and some excellent action scenes; the plot is fairly straightforward and Rose doesn't get to do much, but sometimes it's as well not to overstretch and just concentrate on delivering a good version of a standard story. I see some people complaining about the CGI wolf, but I like it a lot – it's way better than the Slitheen chase sequences in the previous season. One particularly nice touch is the minor key variation of the theme music while the Queen and the Doctor are discussing death over dinner. And of course Queen Victoria could hardly have passed haemophilia to her children years after they were born, but I think the Doctor is just teasing Rose.

(Tardisode: Mickey works out that something is up at the school, summons the Doctor and Rose.) I love School Reunion with an unabashed fanboy's love. For viewers of roughly between my age and David Tennant's, Sarah Jane Smith is the first companion we remember, and her return could not be more welcome; we dreaded of course the prospect that it might be done badly (as it had been in Dimensions in Time) but it was done very well, with Tennant, the biggest fanboy to ever play the Doctor, surely not having to act too hard to show his enthusiasm for Elisabeth Sladen. He and the script are particularly good at showing the Doctor, not subject to human change, explaining that it affects him too. The reconstruction of the Doctor / Sarah relationship is just sheer delight, with an emotional freight to Sladen's performance in particular that is exceptional. (And I don't believe for a moment that she spent the intervening decades mourning the Doctor, though of course it seemed that way to her when they met again.)

And, and, and! Anthony Stewart Head as the leader of a group of winged alien teachers,' stalking the school like vultures, eating stray pupils and doomed members of staff! K9's noble self-sacrifice! Mickey's moment of aelf-realisation! So much is good here – though the one bit that rings badly is the (quickly corrected) initial cattiness between Sarah and Rose, a bit out of character for Sarah in particular. I can watch this one again and again, and could go on about it for much longer. (By the way, Melissa turned up the other day in Outnumbered as Jake's pole-dancer girlfriend.)

(Tardisode: the most effective of these four, shows the spaceship hitting the ion storm and the robots' destruction of the surviving crew.) Fandom as a whole rates The Girl in the Fireplace as the best episode of the season. It certainly looks fantastic, both the Eighteenth century and the grungy future spacecraft well realised, and the clockwork aliens quite superb (not to mention the stunt with the horse). And Sophie Myles is brilliant in the central role of Reinette, combining an understated eroticism with a keen intelligence; the scene where she reverse-penetrates the Doctor's mind and diagnoses his loneliness is especially effective, and it's an interesting counterpoint to the previous episode's exploration of the relationship with Sarah. I like it a lot, but not as much as School Reunion which ticks so many fannish boxes for me.

Note that the original Sally Sparrow (in the 2006 Doctor Who Annual, rather than Blink), as well as the better-known Amy Pond, also have crucial encounters with the Doctor as young girls and then find him coming back into their lives in adulthood. Of course, that was true for a lot of Old Who fans of both genders after 2005.

The Girl in the Fireplace got by far the most nominations for the 2007 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, and its strong lead on first preferences was reinforced by transfers from Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, which came second as a joint nomination, and School Reunion which came fourth, behind the Battlestar Galactica episode Downloaded but ahead of the Stargate SG1 story Episode 200. Also on the longer nomination list, but well below the cutoff, were the Torchwood episode Out of Time and the Who stories The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, The Age of Steel/Rose of the Cybermen, Love and Monsters and Doomsday on its own. The Torchwood episode Captain Jack Harkness also got enough nominations to be reported on the long list, but would have been ruled ineligible as it was first broadcast in 2007 not 2006.

This run had a ropey start, with The Christmas Invasion really only held together by Tennant's energy once he wakes up, but the last three of the five full stories here are all very good.

NB that consecutive stories in this block provide the foundation myths for both Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures.

< 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

• A Much-Needed Literary Award
  
  Was it generally known that Le Guin declined the Nebula Award that went to “The Bicentennial Man”?
  (tags: sf )
• Australia turns purple
  
  6 of the 20 hottest days ever recorded in Oz have been in *2013*.
  (tags: climatechange )
• What Did We Learn About Climate And Energy In 2012?
  
  …that it is a big problem which is getting bigger.
  (tags: climatechange )

Every four years I get an uptick of interest in my web page on facial hair and US presidential elections. There have been a total of only five American presidents with beards, starting with Abraham Lincoln and continuing through the rest of the nineteenth century. I offer a couple of trivia questions about them.

Quick trivia question #1: Of the five bearded presidents, how many were Democrats and how many were Republicans?

Answer: All five were Republicans. The Democrats have never even had a candidate with a decent beard, and of their presidents only Cleveland even went as far as a moustache.

Quick trivia question #2: Which state were most of the five bearded presidents born in?

Answer: Ohio. Lincoln, born in Kentucky and elected from Illinois, was the only exception. Grant, Hayes, Garfield and Benjamin Harrison were all native Ohioans; Grant, however, was elected from Illinois and Harrison from Indiana.

Slightly surprising to have such a political and geographical concentration of beards, but no doubt it is merely a visible manifestation of less visible trends.

…also known as "What has it got in its pocketses?"

This being the first weekend of the year, I find my pockets weighed down by change accumulated over the Christmas break. To be precise, I have 39 coins of various denominations, from nine different euro zone countries.

15 of the 39 – 38% – are from the country where I live, Belgium, and feature King Albert II looking firmly to the left. I have at least one Belgian euro coin in all eight denominations.

The next largest group of 10 coins – just over 25% – is from France, one of our neighbouring countries. The €2 and €1 coins feature the tree of liberty, the 20c and 50c coins a stylised sower, and the 5c coins a slightly theatrical Marianne.

Germany is also a neighbouring country and the biggest economy of the euro zone, but I have only five German coins: the 1 German eagle, the 50c Brandenburg gate, and three oak twig coppers.

I was slightly surprised that Spain, Italy and Austria came next; I was in Spain briefly in October, but I haven't been to Austria in over a year and Italy in even longer, so I guess this represents coins in circulation in Brussels. Peace campaigner Bertha von Suttner looks out from two Austrian €2 pieces; the Italian €1 coin celebrates Leonardo and the 50c Marcus Aurelius; and King Juan Carlos adorns the Spanish €2 coin with the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela on the 1c piece.

Finally we have three rulers of three different countries: one dead, the Greek leader Ioannis Capodistrias on the 20 cent (or as it defiantly informs us the 20 λεπτά) piece; and two living monarchs on their respective states' 10c pieces, a rather stylised Queen Beatrix and a slightly more recognisable Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg. (Again, I am slightly surprised that I do not have more currency from these last two neighbouring states.)

So, fellow euro-zone inhabitants: what have you got in your pockets?

Over at www.pepysdiary.com, they have again started issuing the great diarist’s journal entries for each day, 1660 reflecting forward to 2013. I have syndicated to livejournal at . The opening months are particularly dramatic as he witnesses at close hand the collapse of the British government after ten years of the Cromwellian commonwealth and finds himself intimately involved, though at junior level, with the installation of the new regime in May. Strongly recommended.

• Space Station tour: Commander Sunita Williams shows you her orbiting home.
  
  Wow. Just, wow.
  (tags: space )
• Inside disputed Western Sahara
  
  Al-Jazeera gets into it.
  (tags: westernsahara )
• The Discworld Reading Order Guide
  
  All in one nice graphic.
  (tags: pratchett sf )
• Swedish Academy reopens controversy surrounding Steinbeck’s Nobel prize
  
  …as he beat Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell.
  (tags: nobel books )

• Why an exit from EU would be bad for British business
  
  Richard Branson speaks.
  (tags: brexit EU )
• What happened to netbooks? Apple’s iPad and Macbook Air killed the $400 former future of computing.
  
  And a good thing too.
  (tags: Technology Internet )
• My bustle’s stuck!: Women vs. Victorian values in “The Snowmen”
  
  “What’s wrong with Victorian values?” asks Dr. Simeon as the Doctor faces him down, and for once the Doctor (and the show) spell it out.
  (tags: Doctorwho )
• X-rays reveal hidden secrets of Tudor portraits
  
  Walsingham more iconic than he realised!
  (tags: history Art )
• Celebrating The 50th Anniversary Of Doctor Who
  
  Penguin to publish an ebook each month from January to November.
  (tags: Doctorwho )
• Top 10 skywatching events not to be missed this year
  
  Two naked-eye comets, one of them very bright!
  (tags: Astronomy )

proposed earlier in the week to lead a project of posting a picture a week to Flickr, based around a common theme for each week of 2013. This seemed to me a good reason to reactivate my Flickr account and try to hone my own photography skills. A picture a day, as some dedicated people do, is quite a commitment, but one a week is surely manageable.

Sensibly enough she has proposed “New Year” as this week’s theme. I suspected that I might get something appropriate from the newly started Irish presidency of the European Union, and when I peeked into the Justus Lipsius building, where all the EU summits are held, on my way back from lunch, I realised I had timed it just right: they were literally in the act of raising the Irish presidency banner in the atrium.

So the European semester begins, and so too does this project. It is a little askew, and suffers from being taken through bullet-proof glass, but one has to start somewhere.

Eszter Hargittai has eloquently explained why one might want to undertake such a project in the first place, and I have signed up for her Flickr group too. After all, two photos a week is surely manageable. I think.

I don’t understand why people don’t like The Long Game. I think it does two things very well. First, we have a rare case of an sfnal Big Idea in Who – what if aliens controlled the news media? I don’t think this is just about Rupert Murdoch (and I think if it really was meant to be about Murdoch the satire would be much less subtle; see the show’s treatment of Tony Blair earlier in the season and of reality TV later on). It is about an insidious take-over of human culture where all that is left to argue about is office politics. The second thing thtat the episode does well is the fall of Adam, who figuratively tries to eat of the tree of knowledge and is consequently expelled from the paradise that is the Tardis. (We never actually see him inside it, do we?) We may sometimes wonder why time-travellers in the Whoniverse don’t use their powers to generate vast wealth (though we are given to understand that Irving Braxiatel does do this to a certain extent). Adam tries breaking the rules and pays the price of having an unusable hole in his head.

Other things I love about this episode are how the office politics between Cathica and Sukey turns out to be integral to saving the world (all the supporting cast are great); and the wobble of the Doctor’s version of history, so soon after he assured us of the longevity of Harriet Jones’s government. He may be a Time Lord, but Time is getting unruly.

I like Father’s Day more every time I watch it. Picking up from my previous point, here the Doctor loses control of Time completely, and we see how dangerous messing with history actually is. (Of course, this is building up to the season climax.) The show here has the audacity to have the Doctor eaten by a monster, leaving only one man to save the timelines at the cost of his own life. Shaun Dingwall is superb as Pete; a character all too aware of this own limitations, but smart enough to work out what is really going on at a very early stage, and also to work out on his own what he must do to set matters right. Indeed, he rather quietly outshines the regular cast; Ecclestone does a lot of glowering in this story. Having said that, the Doctor’s assurance to Stuart and Sarah that they are important, that he’s never had a life like theirs, is my favourite Ninth Doctor quote. And the effects are fantastic – the vanishing car, the Reapers, the glowing key; yet the most effective visual is the one that isn’t an effect at all, when the Doctor opens the Tardis to find that it is just a blue box.

The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances won the 2006 Hugo Award in the newly created Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form category, with Dalek second and Father’s Day third. (Interestingly, Dalek had by far the most nominations, Father’s Day second most, and The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances actually behind the Battlestar Galactica episode Pegasus, presumably due to uncertainty about its eligibility.

The win was well deserved, anyway. Moffat’s first story for Who since The Curse of Fatal Death takes us to a richly imagined wartime London (the sets and backdrops are auperb) and brings in Captain Jack Harkness, who is shortly to get his own TV series. The gas masked child asking “Are you my mummy?” is one of the most successful horrific images the show has ever produced, and Richard Wilson’s turn as dying doctor is brilliant. Yet it is leavened with a colouring of humour, largely about Jack’s flirting and competing with the Doctor, and delivers a happy ending where everybody lives and the Doctor, having at last become comfortable in his own new body, dances. (The only bit that doesn’t grab me is the Doctor’s tribute to the British. It may fit the national ideology, but it is out of character.)

Perhaps it was just my New Year’s Eve mood, but I found Boom Town much stronger than I had remembered. It’s not so much the core plot, though it is still an interesting variation to foil the alien plan barely half way through the story and then agonise about capital punishment; it is more what it shows about the central characters, Rose firmly embedded with the Doctor and Jack in the Tardis crew (having explicitly had several adventures together since we last saw them) and Mickey, excluded, trying to work out where he goes, a bit like Xander being the Zeppo in Buffy. Indeed, the Doctor, Rose and Jack are basically not very nice to Micky, and the viewpoint is sympathetic to him; sometimes it is important to see that our heroes have flaws.

The pursuit of Margaret Slitheen is a bit slapsticky, but as I said I don’t think it is the real focus of the episode. The other important part of the story is Margaret’s warping of reality and of her personal fate by looking into the heart of the Tardis, which seems a bit of a cop-out at first but turns out to be crucial to the resolution of the season as a whole. It is also the first episode set in Cardiff to make full use of the setting – the previous episode set in Cardiff was actually shot in Swansea, and other previous episodes shot in Cardiff were actually set elsewhere. We will see a lot more of this in Torchwood.

It is seven and a half years since it was first broadcast, and I am very surprised by how well the reality TV segments of Bad Wolf have in fact endured. Sure, some of the shows are no longer on the air in the same form; but to be honest I hardly watched them in the first place, and I can now happily accept this as broad satire of popular entertainment rather than specifically targeted jabs – admittedly this was not my first take, but it was my second. (I wonder if viewers in another seven years will feel the same? We can be certain that the clips of Trinity and Susannah will be used in their obituaries when the time eventually comes.)

I had also forgotten the amount of misdirection here – in particular the introduction of Jo Joyner’s Lynda-with-a-‘y’, who is presented as a rival potential companion for Rose at a couple of points. It is a shame that the Daleks were in the previous episode’s trailer, or their introduction at the end of Bad Wolf – with a couple of shots very consciously mirroring their original appearance in December 1963 – would have come as a fantastic reveal (as it did the following year).

I had also forgotten how well the end of the season ties together the preceding episodes, going back to Dalek. The links of Satellite Five and the heart of the Tardis are clear, of course. But Rose’s report of her encounter with her father turns out to be crucial in encouraging Jackie to change her mind, and provide the crucial assistance that enables Rose to go back and save the day.

The ending, until that Rose ex machina moment, heads firmly towards Gauda Prime territory. All the defenders are killed, including Lynda-with-a-‘y’ and Captain Jack, and the Doctor is then caught in his own morality and unable to actually implement the plan for which they died. But Rose, like Sara Kingdom all those years ago, ignores the Doctor’s instructions and comes to help him; and as with Sara Kingdom, the results are fatal, though the Doctor is able to substitute himself instead. And as he bade her farewell, I found I had something in my eye.

Jack Harkness was a regular companion only for those last five episodes (Sarah Kingdom fans point out that she was in more episodes as a regular character, and also more in total if you also count her audios.) I made the point in my Old Who rewatch that Steven, Ben, Jamie and Harry all share vaguely military, or at least uniformed, backgrounds, and Jack is partly cut from that mould, with also the moral ambiguity of Turlough (who also wears a uniform) at the beginning. Though in fact the moral ambiguity aspect is dumped before the end of his first story, and Jack’s selling point becomes his assertive open sexuality, a contrast to Rose, who isn’t innocent herself but is made uncertain (as are we viewers) as to whether Jack is a potential target or a potential rival for her affections, or both. (Again, I can see where the bat-shippers are coming from; as with Adam’s brief appearance, a lot of Jack’s contribution to the show has to do with Rose.) Rose of course resurrects Jack, transforming his character with results we don’t see on the show for over a year (but will be in this rewatch later this month).

Christopher Eccleston’s portrayal of the Doctor is a triumph. I like my Doctors to be a little inhuman, to be obviously alien; and while Nine doesn’t score as highly on this metric as One, Four or the new lad Eleven, he definitely isn’t one of us. At the same time he has been through the unimaginable trauma of the Time War, thinking that he was the only survivor (and bearing that survivor’s guilt) and then gradually discovering that others survived too. Rose (and to a certain extent Jack, Micky and even Jackie) teach him not so much to be human but to love again. I think it’s the strongest character arc for any Doctor (other Doctors who contra Tom Baker, experience character development include One, Seven and Ten) and it is performed by one of the best actors to take on the role. Eccleston’s recent failure to deny that he might return for the 50th anniversary this autumn raises unreasonable hope in my breast.

I have previously written up my feelings about the season as a whole here and here, though I also strongly recommend Graham Sleight’s essay here. The run of stories from Dalek to the end is pretty good by the standards of any era of Who, before or since. And I was able to fit The Parting of the Ways into my commute this morning – it usually takes me an hour and a quarter door to door, with enough of the intervening minutes on the train that I can look at a screen in a stable environment. This will get tricky with the longer specials, but I will cross that bridge when I come to it.

< 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

• The Frozen Mirror
  
  Execellent analysis of The Snowmen.
  (tags: Doctorwho Doctor who )
• How the dominance of English kills the European debate
  
  I think this is slightly exaggerated – many in the Brussels bubble ignore the UK debate in the hope that it will just go away – but it’s a fair point.
  (tags: Eu )
• The elephant in the room
  
  Rosie’s advice: sleep better, eat less sugar, lift heavy things.
  (tags: health )

The traditional end-of-year poll of books read – there are a lot more over on the community if you look.

There is a slight discrepancy between the list below and my own calculation of my end-of-year tally, in that the three Sophocles plays are taken together, as is each of the 2-in-1 Doctor Who books, and the two unpublished manuscripts are not listed. (I’m also still a little uneasy about the categorisation of the Lovejoy novels, which often crucially depend on his supernatural activity to tell real antiques from fakes, but am leaving them with non-genre for now.)

And if you haven’t, please give me recommendations for 2013.

• The True Meaning of Smekday – Adam Rex
  
  Alien invasion in 2013.
  (tags: 2013 )
• The President’s Last Love, By Andrey Kurkov
  
  Ukrainian politics, starting in 2013.
  (tags: 2013 )
• Fay Weldon | Chalcot Crescent
  
  Broken Britain in 2013.
  (tags: 2013 )
• The Book of Water by Marjorie B Kellogg
  
  An elemental dragon appears off the coast of Africa in 2013.
  (tags: 2013 )
• 8 Post-Apocalyptic Works of Fiction Set in 2013
  
  Four films, four games, some dodgy maths…
  (tags: 2013 )

Non-fiction: 4 (2012 total 53)
The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, by Ronald Hutton
My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall, by John Major
The Bible
The Comic Strip Companion: the Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who in Comics: 1964-1979, by Paul Scoones

Fiction (not sf): 3 (2012 total 48)
The Ten Word Game, by Jonathan Gash
Bleeding Hearts, by Ian Rankin
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

SF (not Who): 2 (2012 total 62)
Non-Stop, by Brian Aldiss
The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 25th Annual Edition, ed. Gardner Dozois

Who: 6 (2012 total 75)
The Colony of Lies, by Colin Brake
Sanctuary, by David McIntee
The Burning, by Justin Richards
Scream of the Shalka, by Paul Cornell
Devil in the Smoke, by Justin Richards
Doctor Who Annual 2006, ed. Clayton Hickman

Comics: 2 (2012 total 21)
Ōoku: the Inner Chambers, vol 6, by Fumi Yoshinaga
Aldébaran 2: La Blonde, by Leo

~7,200 pages (2012 total 77,800)
1/17 (2012 total 65/259) by women (Yoshinaga)
1/17 (2012 total 12/259) by PoC (also Yoshinaga)
Owned for more than a year: 8 (The Burning, Bleeding Hearts, Non-Stop [reread] The Year’s Best Science Fiction 25, Stations of the Sun, Sanctuary, Scream of the Shalka, The Colony of Lies, War and Peace [reread])
Other rereads: none (2012 total 20/259)</p>

Also started:
Making Ireland English, by Jane Ohlmeyer
Faces in the Pool, by Jonathan Gash

This really is a book for completists, in that it's difficult to imagine anyone other than the diehard Who fan wanting to get hold of it, but it is equally difficult to imagine that diehard fan being anything other than tremendously happy with it.

I guess I was vaguely aware that there was a whole extra slice of comics continuity for Who beyond the TV series, the books and the audios with which I am familiar. But I hadn't appreciated that the decision to start a weekly strip in TV Comic (and its successors) from November 1964 until May 1979 would mean scores of different stories, some of them from the sound of things rather forgettable, but some of them much more interesting. Fascinating snippets for me:

• The First Doctor meets Father Christmas, King Neptune and the Pied Piper, being less constrained by the sf vs historical format of the TV programme;
• the comics strip, unable at first to secure a license for the Daleks, featured Dalek-like monsters called the Trods, who eventually get wiped out by the Daleks when the licensing agreement is reached;
• John and Gillian, introduced in the first story as the First Doctor's grandchildren, survive almost four years until the Second Doctor enrolls them in university in August 1968, making them the longest-lasting companions of any medium in the 1963-89 era;
• the Second Doctor is exiled to Earth by the Time Lords in late 1969 and has several months of adventures there before his appearance is changed and he becomes the Third Doctor – evidence of a kind for Season 6B;
• Katy Manning was unwilling to allow her appearance to be used so the Third Doctor strips of her time feature UNIT and the Master but not Jo;
• several Third Doctor strips, and one Second Doctor strip, were "Doctored" to become Fourth Doctor strips for the last year of the strip's run in TV Comic

Much of this information was already in books and DVD features which I already on, but it is fantastic to have it all pulled together in a single set of covers. An that is not all; Scoones also covers the comic strips in the Doctor Who annuals and the Dalek annuals and books, and the intense two-year Dalek strip from TV Century 21 in 1965-66. He even makes me want to read some of the early Countdown strips (the Doctor Who strip was moved from TV Comic to Countdown in 1971, though Countdown was then gradually renamed TV Action and eventually merged back into TV Comic in 1973). The only strips I had read of those covered in the book are the ones from the Who annuals, some of the Dalek annuals and books, and one Countdown annual.

One other point, though: the first female names mentioned in a creative capacity, as far as I could tell, were Louise Cassell and Christine McCormack, who recoloured the First Doctor strips for republication by Marvel in 1994-95 (Christine McCormack's sister Rosie is mentioned later as a colourist for the Second Doctor strips). They appear on page 570 of a 603-page book. Even more than the TV programme, the comics (at least in the 1964-79 phase) appear to have been a very male affair.

Anyway, excellent stuff, and a good end to my 2012 bookblogging.