Author: Vinnie Bartilucci

Matt Smith leaving “Doctor Who” at Christmas, Internet asks for tissue

Matt Smith as the Eleventh DoctorThe BBC announced officially this weekend that Matt Smith, current star of Doctor Who, will be leaving the series in the Christmas episode.

Both Matt and showrunner Steven Moffat have already been quoted heaping glowing praise on each other, and rightly so.  Doctor Who fandom has already kicked into overdrive, showering tumblr and other blog pages with a deluge of tribute graphics, please to remain, and other spontaneous eruptions of raw emotion.

Doctor Who fans will now once again pass through the seven stages of grief, a process that some have never experienced, being new to the show, some have already seen once or twice, or for older fans (raises hand), seven, eight, or as many as eleven times.

One of the most amazing things about Doctor Who is this process of regeneration.  While other actors have been replaced on television shows, Doctor Who invented a process that made it a part of the narrative.  Time Lords, the Doctor’s people, have the ability to completely rejuvenate themselves in times of extreme trauma, completely reborn, with a new body and a new personalty.  It allows the show to not only move on past the departure of its star, but forge into brand new directions.

Along with the regeneration process will be an equally traditional series of events:

The news media will kick the rumor mills into high gear – Names will be floated, denials will be made, and actors will play coy, taking advantage of the publicity to get their name in the sun.

The betting will begin – Gambling is legal in the UK, and the local bookies have traditionally taken wagers on the identity of the new Doctor.  And the aforementioned media will report the current oddsmaking, as if it has some connection to reality. As in the rumor mill, new names will emerge and rise and fall in the rankings, and it’ll be a delight to watch.Unless you’ve put money down, in which case it’ll be harrowing.

The discussions about making The Doctor a woman will re-emerge – So too making him black, or Asian, or any of the other “types” of people a character can be.  Both Mike Gold and Yr obt svt. have discussed the recurring meme, more about the fervor and hysteria around it.

The fans will swear blind it will never be as good as (insert name here) – Nothing is ever as good as what you have now, or if you are older (just leaves hand in air), than what you had when you were younger.  Each Doctor was perfect, and nobody can ever replace him, until about five minutes into the first new episode when the new guy grabs you and rubs your tummy with his acting and makes you forget the last guy’s name for a moment.  The show will careen off in a new direction, just like a trip in the TARDIS itself, and the trip will be thrilling and terrifying, and ultimately satisfying.

Someone’s life will never be the same again – Moffat has it right – “Somewhere out there right now – all unknowing, just going about their business – is someone who’s about to become the Doctor“.  The show was popular during its original run, but now it’s dead center in popular culture, and the person selected to play The Doctor will shoot  to super-stardom before a frame’s been shot.  Matt Smith has already taken advantage of the opportunities the role has afforded him – he’s currently filming Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut How to Make a Monster, and plans to direct himself.

With six months to go before the final Smith adventure airs, and several weeks before it starts filming, fandom will be filled with many emotions, a rampant desire to learn new details, and will spent a great deal of time trying to separate reality from fantasy.  Moffat and the BBC will begin the arduous process of choosing the actor to entrust with their golden franchise (if, indeed, they haven’t already started…or even finished), all the time trying to ride the line between keeping it all a secret and letting just enough details slip to keep the media hungry.

There may be an important wrinkle to the new Doctor’s story that may take the show in a dramatic direction.  Matt’s Doctor is the eleventh regeneration, but events at the end of the final episode of the series suggest that there’s one more to be accounted for.  John Hurt was revealed to be playing The Doctor as well, and fans has surmised he may be (have been) a regeneration between Eight (Paul McGann) and Nine (Christopher Eccleston).  If so, even though Matt’s calls himself the eleventh Doctor, he’d be the twelfth…and the next one would be the thirteenth.  According to the show’s history, a Time Lord can only regenerate twelve times, for a total of thirteen bodies, which would make the next Doctor…the last.

Which will likely never occur.  Russell T. Davies has already said that when the time to get around that little plot device that seemed SO far away when they came up with it decades ago, “I’m sure someone will wave the Amulet of Zog and sort it all out”.  But it’ll be the process to get to that eventual happy end that will make the show all the more exciting,.

Interview: The MC Bat Commander dishes on “The Aquabats Super Show”

Christian Jacobs started out as a child actor playing the slightly older Joey Stivic in the All in the Family spin-off Gloria.  Since then, he’s not only triumphed as the creator of kid show juggernaut Yo Gabba Gabba, but as The MC Bat Commander, has been the charismatic leader of superhero ska band The Aquabats.  After a long career in the clubs of the world (coming up on their twentieth anniversary) the band broke into television last year with The Aquabats Super Show on Hub Network. Lauded by critics and attracting kids in droves, the show’s second season premieres this Saturday on the network (check local listings).

Christian took the time to speak to ComicMix about the series and the long strange trip it took to the screen.  He’s proud to get the show on the air, and even more happy for it to make a second season. “We’re blown away” he explained. “We would have been happy just to get ONE season. But having said that, we put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into that one season, and to be ‘one and done’ would have been a little disappointing.  But if you take a step back and think about the miracle that The Aquabats even got to make a TV show…having a second season is just mind-blowing.  A real-life band that got to make a fake, goofy show about themselves…I don’t think that’s ever happened before.  You have shows like The Monkees, where the bands were put together by the studios; Big Time Rush, things like that.  But a real band…being a part of that miracle, and getting to do it twice, is just unbelievable.”

The desire to get The Aquabats to the small screen has been part of the plan almost as far back as the band’s been in existence, Jacobs explains.  “Right about the time we did The Fury of the Aquabats, Between that and Floating Eye of Death!, we did a pilot for Disney.  And that was something we all thought was going to go somewhere. But looking back, looking at that pilot, I was all, ‘Oh, wow, THAT didn’t work out…’ “

The Aquabats!

He’s got a good idea as to why the show worked now, as opposed to years back –  “It seems like the timing, although it’s been almost twenty years, the timing is almost perfect.  I think the sensibilities in the show…kids are more sharpened to stuff that’s random and silly, and doesn’t make sense sometimes.  I think maybe even more than kids, cause kids are always down with that. I think there’s enough shows that doing stuff like that, and being successful, that studios are letting things go. Like, there’s no chance there would have been an Adventure Time, fifteen, twenty years ago; it’s just too crazy and random.  And that’s rad!  And it’s the same with [us]; without a network like Hub Network, you don’t have a show like The Aquabats.  Because people don’t wanna take risks.”

The show has been the hit with kids as it was intended, and that new audience has started to flow back to the band’s live performances.  “We played a local show here, last summer, right after the show started airing. And the influx of young kids at the show definitely created the thought, “Wow, we definitely need to have a different show when we go tour; do a matinee and an evening show.  It’s not that the crowd doesn’t mix, we have kids that want to slamdance and get rowdy, and that’s okay, it’s always been like that. But when you have SO many kids, nine and ten year olds, in the pit, it makes things a little bit different.”

Christian and the band are quite proud of the show.  “What’s been great, and really gratifying, is that all of us in the band have been so close to the show, for so long…in the back of my brain…heck in the front of my brain, I’m thinking, ‘I hope kids like this, because I like it, I think it’s funny.’  I like all the references and everything in the show, but is it gonna resonate with kids?  Cause it sure resonated with me, I like all that stuff, I think it’s stupid. But there’s a lot of inside jokes, a lot of references, that adults get, but kids maybe not so much.  But the fact that kids do love it, and that’s the demographic we’re aiming at, that’s a big relief.”

Part of the show’s appeal is the constant barrage of references to pop culture, both old and new. Their mobile headquarters, the Battletram, is equal parts the eponymous vehicle from Ark II, the Doctor’s TARDIS, and the Big Baloney from The Kids From CAPER.  “We want to wear our references on our sleeves.  We don’t want to rip any of that stuff off, we want to glorify it; we want to say “How awesome was the stuff we grew up watching?”  Now here it is again, in a big loaf.  That’s what The Aquabats show is – it’s a loaf, it’s a big loaf of stuff. You can quote me on that. “

While trying to get The Aquabats on the air, Christian took a big of a turn and started looking at the state of entertainment for an even younger audiences.  “We were really having trouble getting the Aquabats show sold, getting people to buy onto it. We had a couple of ten-cent pilots, and a couple of things we’d done, but we were having trouble getting people to say ‘OK, yeah, you can go and make your crazy show’.  And a big part of it was the climate in TV at the time.  Reality shows were just breaking, and they were just breaking HUGE.  Survivor was getting really big ratings, so it was hard to get people behind our show.  So my buddy Scott (Schultz, YGG co-creator) and I, around that time we were trying to develop the show, we started having families of our own.  We were watching kids’ TV, and I noticed there was a big shift in younger kids’ programming. It seemed like everything was very compartmentalized, like “this show is for kids aged 1.5 to 3.2”. Very homogenized.  Whereas we grew up watching The Electric Company, and Sesame Street and Zoom, all this variety. All this singing, and songs, and you never knew what was coming around the corner.  And my parents would watch the shows with us, and chuckle, at like, Ethal Merman jokes. I didn’t know who Ethel Merman jokes, but my parents would laugh. You don’t get that from the majority of preschool shows today – they don’t have pop-culture references in them.

So we said, hey, let’s shift things up a bit; let’s keep The Aquabats in our pocket. What if we try and do a preschool show? Let’s try and do a classic magazine-format show that could include parents. That could have hip-hop and punk, and electronic and dance, and different things in the show. Not just musically, but visually; art, animation, and style. And almost immediately we thought, it has to be a show with walkaround characters, like The Banana Splits or H.R Pufnstuf. And we’ve got two walkaround characters we’ve already built (Cyclopsis and Weedy, who became Muno and Brobee respectively), and they got great responses live (at Aquabats shows).  People would go nuts when they came out on stage, people loved the characters.  So I knew right away, from the audience, that those characters would work.”

With next year being the twentieth anniversary of the band, Christian has more than a few events planned, including a new Cadet Summit (their recurring fan conventions) and most importantly to newer fans, new Cadet Kits.  “Definitely next year!  The cadet kits have always been such a rad thing, but we’ve always done it ourselves.  It’s been very hard to find the right fulfillment partner, cause we need help.  We can’t do it ourselves anymore; to put it in the envelopes, and lick the stamps, it’s crazy. “

New Who Review: “The Name of the Doctor”

Crossing one’s own timeline is a cardinal sin for a time traveler.  Walking over one’s grave even worse.  So when The Doctor is forced to do that…

THE NAME OF THE DOCTOR
by Steven Moffat
Directed by Saul Metzstein

Re-appearing after its defeat a year previous, The Great Intelligence forces The Doctor to the location of his grave, wherein is hidden the physical manifestation of his timeline, a map of his life, which in the hands of the wrong people could be used to re-write his life.  The Intelligence chooses to do so, at the cost of its own existence.  The only way to save The Doctor, and all the good works he did, is with another sacrifice.

Emotionally, the episode worked exceedingly well. We got a solid River Song story, one where we finally see The Doctor admit his feeling for her.  But narratively, we’re very close to seeing the same story three years in a row.  An attack on The Doctor results in all of time and space being thrown out of whack, and only through a well-placed sacrifice can everything be undone. We saw it even before the Moffat years in Turn Left, where Donna Noble is manipulated so as to have never met The Doctor, resulting in his death fighting the Racnoss queen, and all of the events afterwards changing.  The big twist here is it’s The Doctor who makes the final save of his companion, and not them saving him.

Having The Crimson Horror so closely preceding this episode somewhat diluted the fun of seeing The Paternoster Gang back – it might have been better to be a week ot two back, spread them out just a tad more. As much as people are clamoring for a spinoff series, the characters would need more fleshing out to stand up weekly viewing.

It all got a little needs-more-explainy at the end, but as is traditional, the emotional impact trumps any questions about how things could have happened as they did. And just in case they didn’t, that last scene is enough to forgive all sins, real or imagined.

GUEST STAR REPORT John Hurt (The Doctor (?)) has a staggering list of work in sci-fi and fantasy.  Perhaps best known for being the incubator for the eponymous creature in Alien, (not to mention a brilliant parody of that moment in Spaceballs), he was also in 1984, V for Vendetta, the Harry Potter films, really too many things to list.

THE MONSTER FILES – The Great Intelligence returns this episode, taking the visage of Dr. Simeon, last seen in The Snowmen. Considering the Intelligence seems to have been destroyed, the likelihood that they’re using the other media’s claim that it is indeed the Old One Yog-Sothoth (from the H.P. Lovecraft stories) is exceedingly slim.

The Whispermen didn’t get a whole lot of chance to do much save for showing off an ability to phase their hands into people’s chests and stop their hearts, and speak in verse.  Like The Shakri from The Power of Three, they certainly are interesting enough to warrant a future return, but it’d likely require a bit more explanation.  It’s unclear if they’re created by the Intelligence as temporary forms for its energy, or something else.  They bear a great resemblance to The Trickster from The Sarah Jane Adventures, leading many fans to believe that’s who was coming back.

BACKGROUND BITS AND BOBS – Trivia and production details

I CAN NEVER GET IT IN THE RIGHT ORDER – Once again we’re seeing River Song out of sync with past appearances.  She’s calling herself Professor again, which means we’re seeing her from near the events of Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead.  Indeed, since she has knowledge of her own death, she pretty much needs to be coming from AFTER that adventure, from when she was saved in CAL, the database in The Library.  The whole point of the episode is about how you can’t cross your own timeline – she wasn’t aware The Library was where she was going to die when she got there, so somehow she was able to join them in their sleep-meeting from within CAL.

Which is why I can’t grasp why people seem to think this will be the last time we’ll not be seeing her again.  What we saw was The Doctor coming to grips with the fact that River has at some point died.  The image that faded was the mental link image Clara was connected to – River simply closed the link.  We know for a fact that there are two adventures that have not yet occurred for The Doctor – he has not yet told her his name, and he has not giver her that adapted sonic screwdriver she had in that first/last story.  She will be back, and that’s that.  What we ARE seeing is their timelines starting to fill in.  In the two hundred or so years The Doctor was away before The Impossible Astronaut (remember, he goes from nine to eleven hundred years old) a lot of the stories in their diaries match up (Jim the Fish!), but not ALL. Plenty more to come.

“On the fields of Trenzalore, at the fall of the eleventh” – Dorium first names the place and the prediction at the end of The Wedding of River Song. “Silence will fall when The Question is asked”, and indeed that’s what happened – When Simeon asked for The Doctor’s name, it gave him the opportunity to undo all of his deeds, including keeping Davros from destroying the universe. So indeed, it’s possible The Silence was fighting the wrong enemy, and they should have been trying to stop The Great Intelligence and The Whispermen.

“I was born to save The Doctor” – It’s funny that one of the rumors about the upcoming 50th anniversary story was they’d be inserting Matt Smith into past Doctor footage – it turns out it was done here.  In addition to using Hartnell footage to present the first moment of The Doctor’s adventures, we see her appear in footage from The Invasion of Time, Arc of Infinity, and Dragonfire. Most impressively is we see her standing behind Ten and Donna as they survey The Library in River Song’s first adventure.  We see Troughton and Pertwee from footage in The Five Doctors, and stand-in versions of the remaining Doctors.

“But not in the name of The Doctor” – As with the first episode of the semi-series, the title did not mean what it seemed it would.  This new Doctor appears to have done things that the rest of his incarnations, the rest of himself, can’t bear to deal with.  It’s fair to guess this includes causing the end of the Time War, but that’s not yet guaranteed.

BIG BAD REPORT / CLEVER THEORY DEPARTMENT – Pretty much we’re just looking backwards now.  We can see what the common threads were during Clara’s appearances, and for the second half of the season.

“I don’t know where I am” Oswin says it in Asylum of the Daleks, Clara says it in Bells of St. John, and says it again here.

“They’re my echoes” – We heard references to ghosts and echoes throughout the series as well.  The mysterious creatures in Hide (not to mention Clara’s statement that “we must all be ghosts to you”), the memories and experiences in Rings of Akhaten, the Ice Warrior out of time in Cold War, all creatures out of their proper place in time.

NEXT TIME ON DOCTOR WHO – Well, we know a little bit.  After that setup, there’s going to be a GREAT deal of rumormongering and Clever Theorizing over the next half year.  But even what we know is pretty damn cool.

  • David Tennant and Billie Piper are returning for the 50th anniversary episode, and so far, none of the other original Doctors are.  We don’t know from what point of Ten’s timeline we’ll bee seeing him.  Since it appears he and Rose are still traveling together, it’s likely from before Doomsday.
  • Jemma Redgrave will return as Kate Stewart, new head of UNIT.
  • The Zygons will return to the series, and appearances by Cybermen and Daleks are also rumored.

Other than that?  Who the hell knows?

 

New Who Review: “Nightmare in Silver”

New Who Review: “Nightmare in Silver”

Not since Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park has the an amusement park been made the center of a thriller so perfectly.  The return (and re-threatening) of a classic villain, a heck of a guest cast and a script by Neil Gaiman.  Seems like a dream, but mix it all together and it’s a…

NIGHTMARE IN SILVER
by Neil Gaiman
Directed by Stephen Woolfenden

After last week’s last-minute extortion, Clara’s charges Angie and Artie are granted a trip on the TARDIS to Hedgewick’s World, the greatest amusement park ever.  But hidden beneath it is a dangerous secret – A vast sleeping army of Cybermen, under repair and improvement for a thousand years…and they are ready to return.

GUEST STAR REPORT

Warwick Davis (Porridge) has a list of genre longer than … OK, it’s long.  Starting off with Wicket in Return of the Jedi and Willow Ufgood in the film of the same name, he’s been the star of an amazing list of sci-fi and horro films.  He’s been featured in the Harry Potter films, and was Marvin in the film adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Most recently he was the star of Ricky Gervais’ latest project Life’s Too Short, where he played an over the to version of himself.

Jason Watkins (Webley) is a very busy comedic actor in Britain with quite a resume in genre work. He played Herrick on the British version of Being Human and DI Gilks in Dirk Gently. He was featured in Psychoville, the latest production of Sheersmith and Pemberton from The League of Gentlemen, and just worked twice with the delightful Miranda hart on Call the Midwife and her own show Miranda.

Since Neil Gaiman (writer) last wrote a Doctor Who script (last year’s The Doctor’s Wife, he’s written four of five new books (including children’s books [[[Chu’s Day]]] and [[[Fortunately, the Milk]]]), his novel [[[Neverwhere]]] was adapted for BBC Radio, and he’s probably won a few more awards (including the Hugo for the aforementioned Doctor Who script). He’s in the middle of what he calls his last book signing tour, and is still quite happily married with the musician and internet-enrager Amanda Palmer.

THE MONSTER FILES – The Cybermen are certainly The Doctor’s greatest enemy after The Daleks.  Originally from the tenth planet in our solar system, Mondas, the planet left the sun’s orbit, and to survive, the denizens of the planet began to replace their body parts with mechanical replacements, eventually becoming more machine than humanoid.  They fought The Doctor though many eras, taking many forms as their systems adapted and improved.

In the parallel universe known as “Pete’s world”, the Cybermen were created on Earth, by over-reaching scientist John Lumic as an improvement to the human race.  Things went bad quickly, and soon the world faced a global war with the Cybermen, one they believed they won.  They eventually crossed over to our world a few times, presumably meeting and allying (alloying?) with their Mondasian counterparts, eventually forming the version we see in this episode.

BACKGROUND BITS AND BOBS – Trivia and production details

This episode owes a debt to several past Cybermen adventures.  Neil Gaiman noted that he found the Troughton episode Tomb of the Cybermen to be the most scary of the cyber-adventures, and this story parallels it in many ways.  Both are set many years after the Cybermen were believed destroyed forever, and both feature a massive armory of Cybermen in suspension, awaiting awakening.

A chess-playing Cyberman was the center of one of Mark Platt’s Big Finish Audio adventures, The Silver Turk.  Both Platt and Gaiman’s reference the original (fake) chess-playing automaton, also known as The Turk, run by a chess master hidden within, as Porridge did here.  One of Platt’s plots was used as the base of the first new series adventure, Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel.  Russell T. Davies made sure Platt was paid in full as if he’d written the TV script, and he received a “Thanks to” line in the credits.  The Turk was also the inspiration for the Clockwork Droids in The Girl in the Fireplace.

“Or don’t you have the processing power?” Even the last trick is a classic Sci-Fi move – give the computer an impossible problem to solve and it applies more and more power to solve it.  Spock told the ship’s computer to solve for Pi on Star Trek, and Arthur Dent almost killed everyone on the Heart of Gold when it asked the Nutrimatic machine if it knew why he wanted to drink dried leaves in a cup, boiled. As is true of all literature, it’s not what tools you choose to use, but how well you use them, and Neil uses them expertly.

UPGRADE COMPLETE – More than a few science-fiction fans have drawn parallels between the Cybermen and the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation.  The similarity was brought into te light in the recent Doctor Who / ST:TNG crossover in IDW comics, where the Borg and the Cybermen formed a brief alliance.  Here, we see the Cybermen take a bit more of a page from the Borg playbook, with the rapid adaptation and instantaneous assimilation of human beings.

TAKE MY ARMS, I’LL NEVER USE THEM… – Matt Smith’s portrayal of the battle in his head was dramatic and well-done, but the ever so slightly over the top portrayal of the Cyber-planner made me think of Steve Martin playing half of Lily Tomlin in All of Me.  And comic fans will note a parallel evolution in Dan Slott’s current run of Superior Spider-Man, with Peter Parker fighting for control of his mind and body, right down to trying to write messages on nearby pads.

JUST GIVE US ALL YOUR… – Gold has been a steadily growing threat to the Cybermen even since first mention of it as a weakness in the Tom Baker adventure Revenge of the Cybermen.  Originally it coated their respiration systems, causing asphyxiation.  As time passed, gold seemed to affect them as badly as silver did a werewolf.  Here, even in this advanced form, the weakness to gold survived, still in a physical fashion, allowing The Doctor to use it on the exposed circuitry to short out the Cyber-Planner’s control of his mind.

“The Biggest and best Amusement park there will ever be” – Considering the amusement parks that have been mentioned on the series, that’s saying quite a bit.  Disneyland Clom featured the Warpspeed Death Ride, as mentioned in The Girl Who Waited.  There’s been more than a few mentions of Disneyland in the series – a bunch of alien tourists were trying to go to Disneyland and ended up in Wales in Delta and the Bannermen.  The seventh Doctor and Ace visited The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.

“Let me show you my collection” – They raided the prop closet to fill the sets of Hedgewick’s world – there’s a slightly refitted version of the Doctor’s spacesuit from The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe, a ventriloquist dummy from The God Complex, and various aliens from Rings of Akhaten.  There’s a few Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood alumni as well, including a Shansheeth, a Uvdoni, and a Blowfish.

“Do any of you play Chess?” – The Doctor certainly does.  He claims the Time Lords invented Chess; it’s not impossible as one of the traps in The Five Doctors resembled a giant chessboard.  He’s played regular games with K-9, and a high-stakes (and voltage) game against Gantok, an agent of The Silence in The Wedding of River Song.

“You are beautiful” – The Doctor has made a bit of a habit of complimenting particularly well-built enemies.  He similarly admired the Clockwork Droids in Girl in the Fireplace, and the werewolves in Tooth and Claw.

“See You Next Wednesday” – Fans of John Landis perked up at that line – it’s a running gag from his films.  Originally a line from the video call in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s been a movie poster, a film shown in Feelaround, dialogue in a horror movie, and more than a few other things in his various films.

“The Cyberiad” – As well as having a lovely Roman sound, mimicking several other terms the Cybermen use like Legion, it’s also a deliberate tip of the hat to the classic Stanislaw Lem novel.

“You’re deleting yourself from history.  You realize you can be reconstructed from the holes you left?” – Somewhat verifying the theme that’s been coming up most of the season, following up from The Doctor’s desire to “step back into the shadows”.  But it’s important to note that the first place that was done was in the Dalek database, and it was done by…Oswin Oswald.

BIG BAD REPORT / CLEVER THEORY DEPARTMENT –

“I feel like a monster sometimes” – Warwick Davis delivers a solid performance in this episode, referring to the actions of The Emperor in the third person, and really getting across the heaviness of the crown.  And once again we get a reference to the term “Monster”, that we’ve heard in several episodes. And once again, his actions could easily parallel the way The Doctor feels about himself.

“She’s not our mother” – I can’t help but notice somewhat of a similarity between Angie and young Mels, as played by Maya Glace-Green in Let’s Kill Hitler.  The sass, the overuse of the word “stupid”, but yet the interest in seeing the TARDIS.  And when Clara describes her as being “full of surprises” one has to wonder if there’s not one more coming…

“You’re the boss” – And in this episode…she is.  She’s given charge of the Imperial platoon, and does a VERY good job of taking charge.

“You’re the impossible girl” – While it’s not the first time she learned about The Doctor’s fascination with her, it’s the first one she remembers, presuming she indeed doesn’t recall the events of Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.  And with the finale only days away, we clearly haven’t got long to wait to learn more.

NEXT TIME ON DOCTOR WHO – The Question is asked.  Who will hear the answer? The Name of the Doctor, this weekend.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtaIpkjF6Ss]

Babblr: anatomy of a misfire, and how to avoid launch mishaps

Babblr: anatomy of a misfire, and how to avoid launch mishaps

Tumblr is a micro-blogging site, tending more towards short posts with pictures and video attachments, and with over a hundred million blogs (including mine), it is officially more popular than blogging itself.  It’s populated by an amazing assortment of creativity and madness.  Memes flower and spread with a speed heretofore unseen (seriously, go look up “Moon Moon”), and the love the users shower on its fandoms is staggering. So when a new third-party app called babblr began to get serious buzz, promising real-time chat for tumblr users, excitement was high. When it was released on the 7th, there was no surprise that it was downloaded quickly and used heavily.

Well, maybe a little surprise.

The creators of the app were expecting perhaps 50,000 users in the first day.  They got 50,000 downloads the first half hour.  I would bet you could fry eggs on their servers.  Someone must have spilled the butter, because hours into the launch, the app and its servers shut down.

It has not been a good week for the three fellows who wrote babblr.  Hopefully, future app designers can learn from their mistakes.

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE INTERNET – If there are one hundred million tumblr blogs, even a fraction of one percent of that is a staggering number.  So to make your first beta release available to the entire Internet is at the very least, a risk. Compare to Thrillbent, which proudly weathered their first Reddit storm earlier this week.

COMMUNICATION IS KEY – In a vacuum, facts appear spontaneously to fill the void.  When babblr shut down, people immediately began spreading rumors that it was in fact a hack program, designed to drain your bank account, spam your email box and delete your reaction GIF folder.  And there wasn’t nearly enough data coming from babblr to stem the tide.  Save for the odd tweet to the effect of “we’re working on it” and “It’s not a hack!”, there was little information forthcoming.  They needed to post a LOT of data, on their main website, the one that you want to download the software.  A generic “the download is unavailable” message is insufficient.

YOU HAD ONE JOB – Make an app that worked.  Reports claim that it did work rather well before it crashed, but people began reporting that even when it wasn’t running, the add-on seemed to interfere with other popular tumblr customizers  like Xkit and missing-e, causing some functions to fail, adding fuel to the “hack” rumor frenzy”.  It clearly needed more testing (with other popular apps) before ANY release, especially one as wide as they went for.

ASKING FOR MONEY AFTER YOU DELIVER A BROKEN PROGRAM IS A UNIQUE BUSINESS MODEL – Two days after launch, and one after the servers curled into a ball and died, an update was posted on their website.  The app will be repaired shortly – if everybody ponys up a couple bucks.  After offering the app for free, it will now be made available to a limited number of users who pay for the privilege.  In short, they will have the Beta program they should have had in the first place, and get paid for it.  Assuming anyone goes for it, that is.

THERE CERTAINLY SEEMS TO BE A MARKET FOR AN INSTANT CHAT PROGRAM FOR TUMBLR, DOESN’T THERE? – That’s the big message to take away from this.  Tumblr users jumped onto this like a starving man on a Ritz cracker.  Should an app come along that has what it takes under the trunk to deliver what tumblrers clearly want, it could do very well.  I expect we’ll see at least two new entries in this brand spanking new market by end of year.

New Who Review: The Crimson Horror

Gated communities are usually met with some suspicion and mistrust – in this case it’s rightly founded.  Something is wrong in Sweetville, and The Doctor is red in the face about it.  A bunch of friends reappear to help combat…

THE CRIMSON HORROR
by Mark Gatiss
Directed by Saul Metzstein

People are turning up dead in the canal in Victorian Yorkshire, their bodies in varied states of petrifaction and their skin a lobster red.  Madame Vastra and Jenny are asked to investigate, and when they realize that The Doctor is somehow involved, they hurry to investigate.  A woman is establishing her own ark on dry land, planning to survive the next torrent, not of rain, but of poison.

Mark Gatiss balances comedy and horror with a deft hand, being given the reins on the investigating Silurian and her companions.  This may be the closest we ever get to a completely solo Vastra and Jenny adventure, and it’s a delight.  The Northern accents alone are worth the price of admission.

GUEST STAR REPORT

Dame Diana Rigg (Mrs. Winifred Gillyflower) really should need no introduction, but there are young people who think The Avengers is only a comic book.  As well as playing Mrs Emma Peel (rightly described by comedian Rick Overton as “One generation of boys’ first serious erection”) on The Avengers, not to mention the Countess Teresa di Vicenzo (AKA the briefly Mrs. James Bond) in On her Majesty’s Secret Service) she started out at a high point, and kept on going higher,  In addition to a house favorite The Assassination Bureau (also starring Roger Delgado, the original Master) and a wonderful version of King Lear with Olivier, John Hurt and Leo McKern, she’s gone from Strength to Strength.  She also burning up basic cable in a popular turn on Game of Thrones.

Rachael Stirling (Ada Gillyflower) is Diana Rigg’s daughter, and this is the first time they’ve worked together.  She’s had an impressive career in acting, including a couple episodes of shows featured on Mystery!, which her mother was hosting at the time. Recently she was in Snow White and the Huntsman and the series The Bletchley Circle.

Two guests this episode have the distinction of playing several members of the same alien race, several times, over the course of the new series.
Neve McIntosh and her delicious accent played sister Silurians Alaya and Restac in the two-parter The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood last year, and plays Madame Vastra here.
Dan Starkey (Commander Strax) also played two Sontarans in one story, The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky. He almost shot Mickey Smith and Martha Smith-Jones as Jask at The End Of Time, and first played the funniest wet-nurse you’ll ever see in A Good Man Goes to War. Since the Sontarans are a clone-race, having one actor play various members makes perfect sense. Christopher Ryan (Mike “the cool person” from The Young Ones) has also played two different Sontarans in different episodes. Dan also appears in Russell T Davies new series Wizards vs. Aliens as Randal Moon, hobgoblin extraordinaire.

THE MONSTER FILES – Mr. Sweet, a parasite species surviving from the Jurassic period, and possibly longer, is far from the first being getting the help of a human, though in this case it might be said that Mrs Gillyflower was the brains of the outfit.

BACKGROUND BITS AND BOBS – Trivia and production details

SET PIECES – Yorkshire was played by Cardiff in this episode, with a picturesque side-street getting a lovely touch-up, including a full set of gates and columns

…IS ONLY A MOTION AWAY – Dame Diana and Rachael Stirling are not the first parent and child pairing to appear on Doctor Who.  Mark Sheppard and his father William Morgan Sheppard both played the same role, that of Canton Everett Delaware III, in The Impossible Astronaut. David Troughton, Patrick’s son,  has appeared a couple of times, once as the Prince in The Curse of Peladon, once many years as Profiessor Hobbes in Midnight, and first, many years before, in his father’s last adventure The War Games.

WHOLOCK – With Gatiss and Moffat also being in charge of the oh-so-very popular Sherlock starring Bilbo and Smaug Benedict Cubmerbatch and Martin Freeman, there are ever going to be in-jokes that trickle through.  An unrecorded adventure of Sherlock Holmes was “the repulsive story of the red leech” as reported in The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez.

“Do you know what an optigram is?” – The Doctor used a process to read the last images off the eye of a Wirrn in a Tom Baker adventure The Ark in Space.  Rather than just one image, he was able to read several minutes of footage.

“Will you be preserved…when judgment rains down upon us all?” – One of the finest bits of foreshadowing i quite a while, Mrs. Gillyflower tells everyone her plans right then and there, and nobody catches it till much later.

“I once spent hell of a long time trying to get a gobby Australian to Heathrow Airport” – That would be Tegan Jovanka, long-time companion of the Doctor mainly during the Davison years.  Sarah Jane Smith investigated some of The Doctor’s friends, and said that at last report, Tegan was home in Australia, campaigning for Aborigine rights.  The reference is sent home with the following line “Brave heart, Clara”, paraphrasing Five’s motivational to Tegan.

“Doctor and Mrs. Smith…you’ll do very nicely” – Doctor John Smith was The Doctor’s go-to pseudonym when working on Earth during the Pertwee years.  He used it, or tried to, in Midnight.

“And you will have reached your destination” – I want to know how long Gatiss sat in his study giggling to himself over that wildly anachronistic reference to the TomTom GPS (Satnav) system.

“This one’s on me” – Can I just marvel in the delicious irony of a British woman kicking ass in a catsuit in an adventure featuring Diana Rigg?

“It’s you.. my monster” – Not the first time we’ve heard the word “monster” this season.  The line “Every lonely monster…needs a companion” in Hide was also clearly not just about the scary alien.

“Very enterprising” – There’s another parallel to The Snowmen here – in both cases, the antagonist finds something brand new, so different as to be alien (literally in the first case, figuratively here in Mrs. Gillyflower’s case), and in both cases, as The Doctor puts it in The Snowmen, both follow the Victorian ideal and try to find a way to profit from it.  Not even financially, but a way to achieve their ends.

BIG BAD REPORT / CLEVER THEORY DEPARTMENT –

“It’s complicated” – The Doctor was aiming for London 1893, the year after the events of The Snowmen, where The Doctor first met Victorian Clara.  This is the first time Vastra, Jenny and Strax have met Modern Clara, and found her most confusing.  Her look at “herself” in London of 1892 will almost certainly cause some questions to be asked a week hence.

NEXT TIME ON DOCTOR WHO – Neil Gaiman. I could stop there.  But I don’t have to, because there’s also Cybermen, Warwick Davis and Neil Gaiman.  Did I say that twice?  Nightmare in Silver, a week away.

REVIEW – The Movement #1

Gail Simone is at once challenging, provocative and blisteringly funny in her writing. One moment she’s introducing new transgendered characters to the mainstream DCU, and the next she’s announcing on the electric-type Twitter that her next project will feature an all-quokka cast.

As well as her triumphant (and briefly interrupted) run on Batgirl, Gail has introduced a new Superhero…perhaps “team” isn’t the right term.  The title describes it best; The Movement.  Too easily waved off as a play on the Occupy folks, The Movement is also equal parts urban watchdog group, police oversight committee and street gang, with a bit of Anonymous and Teen Titans thrown in.

It’s set in new fictional DC town Coral City, a town high in crime and police corruption.  As a pair of dirty cops offer to let a pair of young people go if the female offers them a free show, they are quickly surrounded by members of The Movement, clad in masks (which had BETTER be getting handed out at cons this summer, thank you very much) and cell phones, recording and disseminating the cops’ indecent proposal.

The part of town known as “The Tweens” is under the protection of The Movement, which seems to have both powered and non-powered members.  Incursions by the police, even the precinct’s honest captain, are not welcome, and are met with force.  The Movement has the might to

There’s the hint of a theme first touched on by Mark Waid in his last (and sadly underappreciated) take on Legion of Superheroes, in which the Legion was more of a youth movement than simply a superhero team.  As here, they represent the idea that since they are not being watched over by anyone, they will watch over themselves.  The Movement has organization and the power to make sure their part of town is not threatened from without, and protected from those within.

Freddie Williams’ art has a very loose line, , far better suited for a more character-oriented book like this.  The panel layout is very interesting, often a large splash image hiding under numerous smaller panels – the storytelling is dense, and fast-paced.  It’s a unique look, very well used in this very unique book.

This is far from standard DC fare, and Gail fills it with very interesting characters, about whom you immediately want to know more.  I expect the tale of how these people got their powers, and how they found each other, will all entertain and interest readers for some time.  Being a unusual title, I’m hoping it finds an audience, maybe even one outside of the normal clientele of comic shops.

New Who Review – Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

  • News
  • April 29, 2013

She’s the only character on the show to appear in almost every episode.  She’s the TARDIS and she’s as important to the series as The Doctor himself.  So it’s nice when we get a story that features her  in a major way.

JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE TARDIS
by Stephen Thompson
Directed by Mat King

Trying to get Clara and the TARDIS to get along,  The Doctor tries letting her fly the ship, shutting off some of the higher more complex functions…like the shields.  This exposes the ship to outside detection, and detected it gets, but space salvage collectors the Van Baalen Brothers.  Using an illegal magna-grab system, they grab the TARDIS, causing a massive overload in the ship, one that flings The Doctor out of the doors, and Clara rolling back deep into its corridors.  The Doctor is forced to engage the brothers to help him save Clara, and later, keep the TARDIS from exploding and destroying much of the universe.

The main threat of the episode is effectively a condensed version of the arc plot from Matt Smith’s first series – the destruction of the TARDIS causing a rift in time, and held in stasis by the TARDIS itself.  Even the solution – the Doctor telling himself what to do to fix it has been done in Moffat’s two-part short for Comic Relief Time and Space, and to a more in your face level, the earlier special Time Crash.

THE MONSTER FILES – The TARDIS is both the setting and primary antagonist of the episode, trying to keep itself safe as well as keep the Van Baalen Brothers powerless.  There have been a number of TARDIS-centric episodes of the series, in an attempt to give some glimpse into its workings. The Edge of Destruction was way back in the first series, and was the first opportunity to both open up the backstory of the show, and the first time it was suggested that the TARDIS was at least some form of sentience – it tries to warn the crew that it was heading back to the beginning of time. We got a mini-tour of the ship in The Masque of Mandragora in which we first see the second control room, and a very large boot cupboard.  The Invasion of Time promised a deep look inside the TARDIS as The Doctor must face invading Sontarans- alas, a strike meant that the planned TARDIS sets were never built, leaving them to film in a disused hospital. We saw sevela new rooms, including a wardrobe and the Zero Room in Castrovalva.  Neil Gaiman’s previous episode The Doctor’s Wife showed a lot of the interior of the ship, as well as a major insight into her character. One of the downloadable video games, simply titled TARDIS, gave a look at many of the rooms in the ship as well,

GUEST STAR REPORT

Steven Thompson (Writer) has admitted in interviews that he has a handful of dream episode he planned to pitch for the show, including a way to bring back the Krynoids from The Seeds of Doom. Moffat pithced this story to him, he decided it was a much better idea, and went off to write it. Thompson  has written three episodes of Sherlock, last coming over to Doctor Who for The Curse of the Black Spot.

BACKGROUND BITS AND BOBS – Trivia and production details

A WHOLE LOT OF RUNNING – Last seen in the aforementioned The Doctor’s Wife, we get another iteration of the classic “endless corridor” gag in this episode.  Doctor Who is notorious for this set-up – a simple set of two or three corridors, set at an angle to each other, and with a bit of careful cinematography, you can make them look like an endless set of twists and turns.  At least a couple of these corridors were built right along with the new set – we see The Doctor head down one to look for his the garage in The Bells of Saint John.  In the case of The Doctor’s Wife, the corridors were built expressly for the episode.  They also knew the episode was coming, so they left the Tennant control room set standing expressly for its use.…AND A ROOM AND A ROOM – We get a fleeting look at the swimming pool (last seen in Invasion of Time), the library (and a VERY interesting book), and what looks like an observatory.  The Telescope within is very reminiscent to the light collection weapon from Tooth and Claw.  It’s likely that it’s just a quick re-use of the model by the special effects team as opposed to it being the actual device from that episode.WE NEVER THROW ANYTHING AWAY – In that storage room Clara enters we see The Doctor’s (and River’s) crib, one of Amy’s hand-crafted TARDIS toys, a magnifying glass used (among other times) by Donna Noble in The Unicorn and the Wasp, and an umbrella that many presume is Victorian Clara’s from The Snowmen, it actually more closely resembles the umbrella carried by the eighth Doctor in Paradise Towers. VOICES FROM THE PAST – As Bram starts to dismantle the console, we hear voices from past adventures, including Susan, The Third, Fourth, Ninth and Eleventh Doctors, a couple of the Companions, and finally Five, complaining that Ten had “changed the desktop settings”.  Susan was allegedly the one to name the TARDIS, but in later adventures the name seems to be an official one.  Pertwee was the first to use the term “dimensionally transcendental”, techspeak for “bigger on the inside.  Baker’s line is from the single best explanation of  dimensional mechanics ever, given to Leela in Robots of Death.

“Basic mode? What, because I’m a girl?” – Well, The Doctor tried to teach Rose to fly the ship once, tho just as practice, and if she’d been actually been doing it, she’d have killed them both.  So for The Doctor to actually let Clara try flying the ship at all if quite a gesture of trust.  Glad it went so well.

“Well put – ‘Whoa’ and “awesome’.” – The Doctor describes the TARDIS as “infinite” – likely he’s either just engaging in hyperbole to make a point, or he’s referring to it being infinitely configurable.

“So that’s who…” – The mystery of The Doctor’s name has been a running theme for most of the current run of the show, and has become a major plot thread since the end of last season, supposedly culminating in the last episode of this series, The Name of the Doctor.  Theories have flown thick and fast as to the secret – is he hiding an act of evil in his past, or is he simply keeping it a secret so he can’t be traced back to his youth and destroyed?  In many cultures, knowing an enemy’s true name is the key to controlling or destroying them.

“The Eye of Harmony – exploding star in the act of becoming a black hole” – Mentioned just last week, the Eye of Harmony was first mentioned in The Deadly Assassin as the primary power source of the Time Lords.  Initially described as an actual black hole, here tweaked to be one in the act of a-borning.  Also, while initially described as being buried under the council chamber of Gallifrey, here we see the Eye is within, or at least accessible from, the interior of the TARDIS.

BIG BAD WOLF REPORT / CLEVER THEORY DEPARTMENT –

Many have expressed regret that all of the events have been forgotten by The Doctor’s companion and the Van Baalen brothers, to which I retort, exactly how much have been forgotten?  Gregor doesn’t remember the events of the adventure, but certainly recalls his shred of decency, resulting in him treating tricky with more…humanity.  And Clara says she doesn’t want to forget “all” of what’s happened.  She’s traveled in time enough that she’s potentially able to keep events erased from time in her mind, as The Doctor tries to do with Amy about Rory at the end of Cold Blood.

“What are you? A trick? A trap?” – For two weeks running we get validation that there’s nothing special about Clara, save for being a strong feisty girl.  Here she gets told about her other iterations, and doesn’t know a thing about them.  But again, it’s not known how much of this revelation she’ll remember.

NEXT TIME ON DOCTOR WHO – Mark Gatiss, Diana Rigg, Strax, Jenny and Madame Vastra.  The Crimson Horror, one weekend hence.

Toledo Mud Hens transform into Wookiees for May The Fourth Be With You

  • News
  • April 26, 2013

 The Toledo Mud Hens, home team of Maxwell Q Klinger,will be decked out in Star Wars inspired jerseys the weekend of May The Fourth Be With You and The Revenge Of The Fifth.  The team will be decked out in Chewbacca-themed jerseys for the May 4th and 5th games, as part of their Star Wars Weekend celebration.

Other attractions will be appearances by Vader’s Fist, the 501st Legion, Star Wars – themed fireworks, and the use of sound effects from the films during the games.

The jerseys will be auctioned off after the games to benefit charities – proceeds from Saturday’s jersey auction will benefit Read for Literacy. Sunday’s proceeds will go to the Spina Bifida Association of Northwest Ohio.

Minor and major leage baseball has teamed with Lucasfilm before for publicity and fundraising.  Several teams hosted Star Wars Nights to celebrate Star Wars Celebration VI, with proceeds helping Stand Up To Cancer.

While the jerseys will not be available for regular purchase outside of the silent auction, they have made a Star Wars-themed t-shirt available in their online shop.

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