Where no Doctor has gone before

So, Dr. Who is doing The Venture Bros. thing and splitting the season into two parts. In the meantime, we've got quite a cliffhanger to keep us hooked.  There's a lot of spoilers coming, so don't read this if you haven't watched the first half of season six.

Things started off in classic Moffat style. He obviously comes from the same school as J. J. Abrams (figuratively speaking, of course). Both of them write scripts designed to exploit the audience's fears. They both take everyday objects and situations and do their best to imbue them with a sense of horror. For example, Moffat has taken water, shadows, even statues and tried to make them terrifying. (That's why I say these shows draw more on the tropes of the horror genre than sf). This time around it was an Apollo spacesuit which he turned into something menacing. Right off the bat it kills the Doctor. (Obviously they can't kill the lead character, and we got some hints later on that it might be the Doctor's doppelgänger that actually got killed.) Then there were some entertaining episodes involving a pirate adventure and one by Neil Gaiman in which the TARDIS gets turned into a "mad bitey woman" that the Doctor finds sexy. All good fun.

Then followed a pair of episodes written by Matthew Graham revolving around the genuinely sfnal concept of remotely controlled artificial people (called "gangers"). Unfortunately that concept is lifted almost entirely from David Brin's novel, Kiln People (2002). No points for originality there. In any case, these episodes established that gangers are just as real as their originals, and that there is a ganger Doctor. He gets dissolved at the end, but it's hinted that he might be able to survive that. Is that who we saw get killed at the start of the season?

Then there was a major plot twist when it was revealed that Amy has been a ganger since the season began! I didn't see that coming. The reason she was seeing that eye-patch woman all the time was because she was actually being held captive somewhere else and her personality was being projected into the ganger. Now, there are a couple of problems with this. Amy mentions one herself when she questions how the signal could have been beamed into the TARDIS. Good question, Amy. What's more is that in "The Doctor's Wife" they all traveled outside the universe. How could the signal possibly have reached them there? To top it all off, when the Doctor reveals Amy's situation he then promptly liquefies the ganger Amy. This is after they spent two whole episodes driving home the point that gangers are people too! WTF?

Anyway, the big revelation of the mid-season finale is that, yes, River is in fact Amy's daughter. I kind of suspected that. And I while I wasn't disappointed, I do think it was a little bit of a cheat. Let me explain. The question of River's identity has been a mystery dangled before the viewers ever since season four. Now, let's draw an analogy to a mystery novel. In the classic Fair Play mystery the reader has all the clues presented to them and has the opportunity to solve the mystery before the solution is revealed in the last chapter. But that's not what happened here. For nearly two seasons we've been trying to solve the mystery of River's identity without having all of the clues. Suddenly at the beginning of this season we find out that, surprise!, Amy has a daughter, and the kid grew up to be our mystery woman. There's no way you could have worked that out form the clues in the previous two seasons. That's why I say it's kind of a cheat. It's not going to put me off the show or anything, but I would have preferred a proper mystery.

But I have been enjoying the show. Matt Smith is pitch-perfect as the Doctor, and Karen Gillan is great as his sassy Scots sidekick. That last episode was a rousing yarn. It all ended on a suspenseful note as the evil baby-snatchers made off with Amy's baby. (Just like the evil baby-snatchers in Lost were after Claire's baby. It's that whole exploit-the-fears thing again.) In the final scene the Doctor takes off on his own in the TARDIS and we'll just have to wait until September to see where he ends up.

R.I.P. Elisabeth Sladen

Elisabeth Sladen (1st February 1948, Liverpool, England - 19th April 2011)

She was one of the most popular companions of all-time, and one of my favorites. Her long-time co-star Tom Baker expressed what a lot of us are feeling.

She can't be dead. But she is: she died yesterday morning. Cancer. I had no idea she was ill; she was so private, never wanted any fuss, and now, gone. A terrible blow to her friends and a shattering blow for all those fans of the programme whose lives were touched every Saturday evening by her lovely heroic character, Sarah-Jane Smith.

It sad that she's gone, but she'll always live on in the hearts of her fans.

Doctor Who Series 6 Trailer

Do you know who I think River Song is? I think she's the Jenny later in life, although I think it would be even cooler if she turned out to be Susan. Who do you think she is?

[via Dangerous Minds]

Doctor Who - Electro

R.I.P. Nicholas Courtney (1929 - 2011)

Doctor Who Theme - Electro Remix

Fionn Hodgson's remix of the Doctor Who theme

Mystery Science Radio (Vintage 2003)

Doctor Who Tribute

Ancient artifact from the Arcturan archive.

Doctor Mop-top

Some classical music in honor of Doctor Who's birthday.

Meanwhile, in the past...

Algernon Blithers, the Doctor's forgotten companion, was having a deuce of a time fighting off those prototype Daleks.

Doctor Who rocks Glastonbury

Glastonbury is an annual UK festival of music and arts that this year featured a special appearance by the Eleventh Doctor performing with legendary electronica duo Orbital. Awesome.

Update: The Beeb killed that right quick. To see the video you now need to click here.

Doctor Who: The Anime Movie Trailer

This is too cool. Paul "OtaKing" Johnson gives us a glimpse of just how awesome Doctor Who would be as an anime. The trailer stars the Third Doctor, though for some reason he dosn't use Venusian aikido in the fight scene. There's also some sweet Dalek vs. Cybermen action. Now if only somebody would do a Star Trek anime...

Moorcock's Doctor Who novel

(Art by thecosmicdancer)

"Big news!

Moorcock's Miscellany is honored to announce Michael Moorcock's new Doctor Who novel THE COMING OF THE TERRAPHILES! This exciting new novel is brought to you by BBC Books and is to be released October 28, 2010. See this announcement for all the details.

Thank you,
RdF"

Trippy Time Lords

The new Dr Who is set to premier this weekend and it will be interesting to see where they take it.



David Tennant will be a hard act to follow, but I'll keep an open mind until I see what they do. Unfortunately it looks set to continue the pattern of of having a bored and/or frustrated middle class woman who meets the slightly eccentric but charming Doctor who then whisks her off on a series of thrilling adventures. I can't shake the feeling they're targeting the same sexually frustrated audience that loves Twilight.

And in an odd bit of news, Mick Farren blogged yesterday about documents that have turned up which show that the Doctor's regenerations were modeled on bad acid trips.

“Internal BBC memos have revealed how Doctor Who's regenerations were modelled on bad LSD trips. Documents published for the first time describe how the Doctor's occasional transformations were supposed to convey the "hell and dank horror" of the hallucinogenic drug."

No wonder the Fifth Doctor was stuck in that wheelchair for so long after regenerating.

Comrade Who

The other day Mick Farren pointed out that across the pond in Britain they're in something of a tizzy after realizing twenty two years after the fact that -- brace yourself -- some episodes of Dr. Who involve social commentary. Shocking, isn't it? Specifically, it's the "revelation" that the Seventh Doctor's adventure "The Happiness Patrol" (1988) was a criticism of the retrograde politics of Margret Thatcher that has the Brit's knickers in a twist.

Can you spot the vicious egoist?

The episode's impact was undoubtedly blunted by the fact that Sylvester McCoy ranks down with Colin Baker as one of the least popular Doctors of all time. But it did make Den of Geek's list of "Ten Under-rated Classic Doctor Who Stories" last year, where it was described as "...a great mix of anarchic Troughton-style Who and heavily Eighties-style, political comedy/thriller."

What makes this such a bizarre controversy is that at that same time the BBC was airing another show called Yes, Minister (1980-1988), which was consciously intended to discredit democracy and advance a right-wing ideology. So apparently in Britain right-wing propaganda passes without comment, but left-wing allegories are scandalous decades after the fact. No wonder the BNP is winning elections.

Doctor Who and the Silver Spiral

When you think of hard sf you don't usually associate it with Doctor Who, but this piece of fan-fic by an astronomer has the Doctor and Martha witnessing supernova SN 2007gr firsthand. Definitely worth a read.

Doctor Who and the Silver Spiral

'Far across the universe, something big was about to happen. The explosion would outshine an entire galaxy and be visible billions of kilometers away. Its light would travel across the universe for millions of years but, aside from a few astronomers, it would go unnoticed on the Earth.

With a grating, wheezing noise, a small blue box flickered into existence.

"So, where are we?"
"Have a look..." the Doctor replied, tapping a control, "but... don't step outside."
The door of the TARDIS clicked open, and Martha gave him a quizzical look. "Why, what's out there?"
"Take a look" he said, a lopsided grin on his face.
Gingerly, she pulled open the door of the police box and looked out.
"Oh my God," exclaimed Martha. "Is that real?" She was looking out at a vast star-scape, hundreds of stars embedded in swirling clouds of gas, stretching out as far as she could see.
"What? Of course it's real!" he laughed, looking out over her shoulder.
"It's amazing! Where are we?"
"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." he quoted thoughtfully.
"What?"
"Sorry. We're in a galaxy the local species call the 'Silver Spiral'. From Earth, it's a tiny, faint speck in the sky, somewhere in the constellation of Perseus. You'd never even notice it without a telescope. These stars are part of a cluster formed just a few million years ago, out in one of the spiral arms."
"It's beautiful. But... why are we here?"
"Why not?" he said. "Have you ever seen a star explode?!"
She stared at him.' 

Continued...

[via i09]

"I'm writing the new Doctor Who"

Michael Moorcock has an article over on the Guardian website going into detail about how he decided to write the new Dr. Who novel. Well worth reading both by Whovians and travelers of the Moonbeam Roads. The New York Times has it's moments, but The Guardian proves once again to be the only major newspaper giving the genre serious attention.

About the only real science fiction I've written since the 1960s was The Dancers at the End of Time stories, all done in the 70s. They're comedies set in the distant future with a nod to the fin-de-siècle of Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, Ernest Dowson and The Yellow Book. Both comedy and SF depend on compression and exaggeration and are very often entertaining when combined. There's a long tradition of it: even Wodehouse wrote a funny, futuristic story early in his career (The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England). In the SF magazines, writers such as Henry Kuttner, Robert Sheckley and L Sprague de Camp were best loved for their comedy. Douglas Adams, of course, hit the jackpot in the 1970s with The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Davies and his writers realised this when the Doctor made his comeback some five years ago with Christopher Eccleston and then David Tennant in the role. Both actors have a talent for comedy and melodrama. The plots became increasingly complex, playing with ideas of time and space, and I became an addict again.

Of course the paradox of TV sf is that Dr. Who, a show premised on time travel, seldom employs the tropes of the traditional time travel story, whereas Star Trek, a show premised on space exploration, not only turned the Enterprise into a flying time machine but involved so much time travel that they eventually had to introduce the Department of Temporal Investigations into the U. F. P. bureaucracy. So as I see it, MM is under no constraints to write a time travel story as such. And I can't wait to see what he does with the Who mythos.

"It flies sideways through time..."

If it weren't for SF Signal I would've missed this and it wouldn't have blown my mind...

Michael Moorcock says, "Looks like it's official. I'll be doing a new Dr Who novel (not a tie-in) for appearance, I understand, by next Christmas. Still have to have talks etc. with producers and publishers but we should be signing shortly. Should be fun."

He goes on to say, "I've been watching Dr Who since it began. Haven't liked all the doctors and after Peter Davison stopped watching regularly until the new BBC Wales series." And, "Since the Tom Baker series, a lot of my ideas crept into the stories and so in many ways I'll be writing a story which already echoes my own work." And much more.

Far out, man!

No word yet on how Charlie "Don't get me started on Doctor Who" Stross is taking the news.

I wonder if Dr. Who will encounter Dr. Technical and his Silver Machine?

Good news, bad news

First, the good news.

Tom Baker, who is the best Dr. Who ever, period, is back in the BBC audio drama, Doctor Who: Hornets' Nest. I love audio dramas since they give your imagination free rein to picture things in the mind's eye. Although now that the voice of Dr. Who is going to be the same voice that narrated Little Britain things could get confusing. If I can just resist the urge to visualize Lou and Andy in the background of every scene I'll be doing good.

Now the bad news.

Dave "QuasarDragon" Tackett, who tirelessly rounds up free sf on the web, has found something better to do with his time.

"QuasarDragon will be going on hiatus for an indeterminate amount of time. However, I will still be sending links to SF Signal so please check them out for free fiction links (e-fiction, audio fiction, comics, etc) as well as all the other cool stuff they regularly post."

It's not terribly bad news since SF Signal is a great site and I check everyday anyway. That's how I found this link to an awesome post about The Zepplin Pulps, which includes the following tidbit:

'During the late 1920s Frank Armer (1895-1965) was the man behind Ramer Reviews, a publisher of four minor pulps, including Zeppelin Stories, which was best known for Gil Brewer’s lost apes-and-zeppelins classic, “The Gorilla of the Gasbags.”'



Apes-and-zeppelins is now my favorite genre.