Whoniversaries 2 September: Eileen Way, Roy Castle, Tomb of the Cybermen #1, The Ribos Operation #1

i) births and deaths

2nd September 1911: birth of Eileen Way who played the Old Mother in An Unearthly Child (1963), the old woman in the woods in Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966) and Karela in The Creature from the Pit (1979).

2nd September 1994: death, two days after his 60th birthday, of Roy Castle, who played Ian in Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965), the first of the Peter Cushing films.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

2nd September 1967: broadcast of the first episode of Tomb of the Cybermen, starting Season 5. The Doctor, Jamie, and new companion Victoria land on a deserted planet and encounter an archaeological expedition exploring the eponymous tombs. But they may not be as dead as all that…

2nd September 1978: broadcast of the first episode of The Ribos Operation, starting Season 16 (the Quest for the Key to Time). The White Guardiuan visits the Doctor and gives him both a quest – the Key to Time – and a new companion, Romana. Landing on Ribos, the two Time Lords are trapped with the savage shrivenzale….

2nd September 1995: release of Downtime – I wouldn’t normally note the release of spinoff video like this, but the reunion of Victoria, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane Smith and the Yeti is quite remarkable. Usually in a good way.

iii) date specified in canon

2nd September 1666: The Fifth Doctor starts the Great Fire of London, as shown in The Visitation (1982); I guess we assume that most of the 17th-century scenes in the story are set on that day.

One thought on “Whoniversaries 2 September: Eileen Way, Roy Castle, Tomb of the Cybermen #1, The Ribos Operation #1

  1. It is interesting that you brought up the example of “macs.” Back in 2000 I ranked “macs” 5th out of the 5 nominated short stories on my Hugo ballot that year. When I was questioned about it in an online forum, I said that I thought “macs” was a mean-spirited story because it portrayed victims’ families as being willing to punish innocent clones of the murderer for the Oklahoma City bombing. The person who had questioned me insisted that “macs” was not mean-spirited, though she offered no reasoning for her view.

    As I was reading “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” I was having much the same reaction that you had. I didn’t think I was going to rank it highly on my Hugo ballot. I thought that if the story is just going to catalog some wartime atrocities and preach about them, maybe its existence is not justified. Maybe non-fiction would better deal with this. But there is a revelation near the end of the story about secrets the physicist wife kept from her historian husband. I think this is a powerful revelation, beautifully handled. It made me feel the story’s existence is justified. It achieved something that pretty much only fiction can do. And I marked it #1 on my Hugo ballot.

    I don’t recall people complaining about Schindler’s List on the same basis. Are the rules different for science fiction?

    Alan Heuer

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