Movement Point

Doctor Who Project: Silver Nemesis

November 2, 2025 by Chris Baer

This is no madness. ‘Tis England.

For all of producer John Nathan-Turner’s efforts to continually reinvent Doctor Who, he always understands the value of returning to what works, as evidenced by Kevin Clarke’s “Silver Nemesis” (Story Production Code 7K). To paraphrase the old saying about IBM, “No show ever got cancelled by bringing back the Cybermen,” and on the strength of this admittedly derivative three-episode story, the advice stands. Absent from the screen since 1985’s “Attack of the Cybermen,” roughly four years and sixteen stories prior, the menace from Mondas proves fresh enough to distract viewers from the undeniable similarity of “Silver Nemesis” to “Remembrance of the Daleks” just two stories earlier. Not that Clarke’s tale tries to hide the parallels, making the linkage explicit at one point: the Seventh Doctor is settling scores with his enemies, wrapping up “[u]nfinished business,” as he calls it, as though aware his time—or at least that of the series—draws to a close.

Veteran Doctor Who director Chris Clough takes the helm for the second story running, following on from his turn on “The Happiness Patrol” (though that story will be shot after this one), and where the latter (next?) story involves moody studio shooting, “Silver Nemesis” takes full advantage of being set in jolly old England, with bright, beautifully shot location footage of various locales, including a vibrant high street and a not-quite Windsor Castle (Arundel Castle in West Sussex standing in for the exteriors). The sense of lived space, with natural light and wide vistas, helps ground unlikely time travellers from the seventeenth century, wanna-be modern-day Nazis from South America with dodgy accents, and, yes, Cybermen in a contemporary setting, the story taking place mostly on November 23rd, 1988, neatly the same day as the first episode airs—also, not coincidentally, twenty-five years after the initial airing of Doctor Who‘s first episode, a “silver” anniversary present of sorts.

Much like “Remembrance of the Daleks,” the initial episode sets up the various factions at play in the story. De Flores (Anton Diffring), a Nazi holdover hiding in South America, prepares a strike force of Aryan-esque mercenaries committed to bringing about a Fourth Reich. They plan to reach Windsor on November 23rd, and bring with them a small silver bow. Some three hundred and fifty years earlier, Lady Peinforte (Fiona Walker) reinforces the archery theme, shooting an arrow that lands harmlessly next to a pair of unimpressed pigeons in either the most deadpan, or most unintentionally funny, scene ever shot on Doctor Who. She wields a silver arrow, once, along with De Flores’ bow, part of a silver statue she had commissioned of herself from a mysterious ore that fell from the sky.

Said sculpture, the Nemesis statue, flies through the heavens as Comet Nemesis, launched there, as it transpires, by the Doctor. Lady Peinforte’s astronomer (Leslie French) calculates that it will return to Earth exactly three hundred and fifty years after being sent on its long, looping journey; and using a bit of black magic, the blood of the unfortunate mathematician, and a vague bit of knowledge about time travel acquired from who (?) knows where, she and her retainer Richard (Gerard Murphy) travel to present-day Windsor, where her home has been turned into a restaurant. The Doctor and Ace, meanwhile, are also in the vicinity at the time, enjoying a jazz brunch which is rudely interrupted by two headphone-wearing assassins who are, thankfully, not very good at their jobs, allowing our heroes to escape to the TARDIS. The Doctor checks his watch and sees that an alarm he set for this very day, some three hundred and fifty years in the past, requires his attention: Earth is in danger once more.

When the comet lands with a prodigious explosion next to a delightfully telegenic warehouse, it attracts the frenetic fascists, our haphazard guests from the past, the Doctor and Ace, and, inevitably, David Banks…

Doctor Who Project: The Happiness Patrol

November 2, 2025October 2, 2025 by Chris Baer

Time to get really depressed.

Doctor Who has long been a vehicle for discussing social problems, using the lens of science fiction to create future (or past) dystopias that subtly reflect current travails with enough distance to dissect them fearlessly. The commentary, particularly strong in the era of Robert Sloman and Robert Holmes, seldom winds up as a stirring call to action, balancing entertainment against enlightenment quite neatly, leaving audiences at least a little more aware amidst the explosions and escapades. Graeme Curry, in “The Happiness Patrol” (Story Production Code 7L), follows this tradition after a fashion, tackling neither racism nor environmental decay, neither poverty nor the ills of unbridled capitalism. He rails against being phony.

From the opening shots of this three episode story, we see a bleak cityscape with piped-in muzak and a constant suggestion of fog, barren of ornamentation or individuality, a setting conducive to nothing but misery; yet being a “killjoy” here is a capital offense, punishable by instant death from the roving Happiness Patrols, staffed by women in pink wigs, mini skirts, and copious amounts of facial makeup. Veteran Doctor Who director Chris Clough amplifies the visual disconnection between giddy expectation and sombre reality well, but the basic story does not ever delve more deeply than the notion that people deserve to be allowed to be sad, darn it!

Keeping with the Seventh Doctor’s newly proactive streak, as seen with his somewhat casual eradication of his longtime foes in “Remembrance of the Daleks,” he and Ace arrive on the human colony Terra Alpha several centuries into the future (from 1988) to investigate rumors of “something evil,” not exactly a nuanced introduction to the situation. After being arrested on an immigration violation by the Happiness Patrol, they learn of the various disappearances that take place routinely on Terra Alpha at the behest of its ruler, Helen A. (Sheila Hancock), who wants people to be happy at any cost, and viewers are treated to a scene of one particularly sticky means of execution, death by hot strawberry fondant. The action goes off the rails rather quickly after this sweetly lethal treat.

For much of producer John Nathan-Turner’s run on the show, Doctor Who has dabbled in au courant philosophical and critical concepts, with media studies in particular being a particular wellspring: “Vengeance on Varos” serves as the show’s answer to McLuhan, an extended rumination on the televised versus the real, the image versus the substance, a theme repeated throughout the Sixth Doctor’s tenure; and “Dragonfire” revels in cinematic and existential references. Here, Curry seeks to expound upon “Weltschmerz,” the ineffable pain of existing in a world suffused with suffering. Heady stuff for a children’s show.

Doctor Who can certainly contain such discussions, being no stranger to either religious or ethical debate (albeit mostly filtered through aliens and their totally-not-human cultures). The mode taken with “The Happiness Patrol,” though, leans so heavily into an over-the-top dystopia, very much akin to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil from just a few years prior, that the entirety of the story is taken up with set pieces showing off just how absurd Terra Alpha has become, leaving no room for actual examination of sorrow, grief, and happiness, to say nothing of the loaded use of the term “disappearances,” an echo of Pinochet’s Chile and the Argentinian Junta. And that’s without addressing Curry’s signal, and somewhat regrettable, addition to the show’s rogues’ gallery…

Doctor Who Project: Remembrance of the Daleks

October 2, 2025September 2, 2025 by Chris Baer

I’ve been here before.

Wheeling out the Daleks to start Doctor Who‘s twenty-fifth season, in Ben Aaronovitch’s “Remembrance of the Daleks” (Story Production Code 7H), carries with it the faintest whiff of desperation. These iconic pepper pots helped catapult the series to popularity on their debut in late 1963, and every Doctor since has faced off against them, often to open or close a season, such is their popular potency. But how do you create something new with the Doctor’s eternal enemies? Returning them to 1963 London, to the Coal Hill School and I.M. Forman’s scrap yard on Totters Lane, feels like such a blatant attempt at fan service that the initial impulse, on seeing the Seventh Doctor and Ace return to the First Doctor, Susan, Barbara, and Ian’s stomping grounds—particularly so soon after the Sixth Doctor made a social call—tends towards the less-than-charitable, the final flailings of a series that has run out of fresh ideas.

Opening with Ace toting a boombox into a corner caff for bacon sarnies and struggling with pre-decimal coinage while the Doctor climbs atop a van with a strange aerial outside the hallowed school doesn’t inspire much confidence, suggesting a flippant attitude from the start. And yet Aaronovitch, producer John Nathan-Turner, and script editor Andrew Cartmel manage to conjure an air of mystery and menace around the Daleks regardless, no mean feat given that they have yet to defeat the Doctor in over a dozen tries. Their last appearance, in “Revelation of the Daleks” some three and a half years prior, leans heavily into the omnipresence of the titular foes, rolling around everywhere and in numbers. Here, a single Dalek occupies proceedings for the majority of the first of four episodes, holed up in, yes, I.M. Forman’s yard, a reminder of how fearsome this foe can be.

After the Doctor pops into the van and meets Rachel (Pamela Salem), a scientist working with the British military to investigate strange frequencies at the school and the scrap yard, he accompanies her to the scene, where Group Captain Gilmore (Simon Williams), a Lethbridge-Stewart stand-in, is organizing an attack after one of his men has been killed via a “death ray” from an unknown assailant. It’s a Dalek, of course, as the Doctor knows at once, and he urges Gilmore to pull his troops back—calling him “Brigadier” at one point, in case the comparison to what will likely become UNIT weren’t obvious—before the Dalek kills them all. After furious yet futile fusillades with bullets and grenades, given loving attention by director Andrew Morgan, only Ace’s Nitro Nine saves the day, blowing the top off the combat casing to reveal trademark Dalek goo.

The story proceeds with remarkable directness, keeping the focus mainly on the Doctor, all the better to establish, and obscure, the various levels of conspiracy that begin to unwind. The Doctor, it turns out, knows the Daleks are following him, looking for the “Hand of Omega” which he left in 1963 London as the First Doctor. Creating events in the Doctor’s past that are unseen on screen is certainly nothing new, but choosing the very beginnings of the series to hide a McGuffin comes across quite boldly, turning what could have been throw-away canonical references into valid and intriguing plot points. Further shenanigans are afoot in the Coal Hill School itself, watched over by a creepy child (Jasmine Breaks) and a mind-controlled Headmaster (Michael Sheard), and within the military command structure, as a man named Ratcliffe (George Sewell, in a very George Sewell role) vouched for by Mike (Dursley McLinden), a member of Gilmore’s team, hauls away the Dalek remains to an underground lair at the orders of a shadowy figure seated in a Dalek casing…

Bagged Bocage: Drop Zone: Chef-du-Pont (MMP) Released

August 9, 2025August 8, 2025 by Chris Baer

A new historical module for Advanced Squad Leader, everyone’s favorite tactical simulation of World War II combat, typically lands with a thud, representing pounds of paper and cardboard that recreate, in loving and occasionally overwrought detail, the specifics of a particular campaign. Multi-Man Publishing‘s latest, however, makes a more modest appearance on the proverbial doorstep. Drop Zone: Chef-du-Pont, just released, comes not in a box but in the crinkle-wrapped plastic shrouding more commonly seen with paper-only products like Action Packs and Winter Offensive Bonus Packs. Which makes sense, as Ken Dunn’s follow on to his Drop Zone: Sainte-Mère-Église, from 2023, ships with front and end sheets (featuring cover artwork by Nicolás Eskubi), six scenarios on three sheets of cardstock, a single 22″ x 30.5″ semi-glossy paper map, a few pages of special rules for the scenarios and campaign games, and a chapter divider on glossy stock.

That’s right, no counters. And for those of us with groaning Planos that long-since lost any semblance of order or harmony, who despair at trying to fit yet another squad type or vehicle variant into the mix, it’s a welcome change, one representing an awareness that new counters are not necessary for a quality product. Sometimes, working with the colors you have proves a finer design feat than insisting on a box of crayons with a hundred subtly different shades, and Ken Dunn demonstrates his design chops here again. (There is cardboard in the package, though—MMP thoughtfully includes a piece for stiffening the bagged package, which otherwise might wobble like my defensive setups in ASL…)

Drop Zone: Chef-du-Pont focuses on the fighting between elements of the American 82nd Airborne and scrounged-together German forces around the hamlet of the same name in Normandy, which hosted a crucial river crossing needed in the immediate aftermath of the D-Day air drops and invasion. The area is best known in ASL circles for hosting 10-3 Brigadier General Gavin, of “Gavin Take” fame, and Drop Zone: Chef-du-Pont brings welcome context to the fighting in and around the classic scenario, even taking on the sacred cow by adapting it to the historical map.

Indeed, the scenarios, all by Ken Dunn, have a “traditional” feel to them, heavy on infantry engagements with minimal use of special rules. Bocage and slopes do feature on the map by Charlie Kibler, but they seem the only obstacles to jumping right in, regardless of one’s experience with ASL. All six scenarios can be completed in a sitting by reasonably prompt players, with moderate countermixes and restrained turn lengths. No night scenarios, and only one with OBA, of a sort—CdP6 Consolidation lets the German player use an INF gun as an indirect/OBA piece, an interesting tweaking of the basic rules. My pick of the cards is CdP5 Desperate Defense, probably the biggest card of the lot, using most of the map, with a scant nine elite American squads packing a single Bazooka defending against Germans marshaling captured French tanks.

Drop Zone: Chef-du-Pont might seem slim on first glance, but with a commensurately tiny US$32 retail price and six scenarios that are easy to break out at a club meeting or tournament, it’s a value. Players just starting with ASL will find much to appreciate here, with only Beyond Valor (second edition or newer) and Yanks needed to play everything in the box, er, bag. The connection to Drop Zone: Sainte-Mère-Église is thematic rather than in the nature of a sequel, so ownership of that module is not required—but it has cow counters, so why wouldn’t you? Plus you can throw Chef-du-Pont in the Sainte-Mère-Église box with no fuss.

As a fresh type of product presentation for Multi-Man Publishing in these, shall we say, intriguing economic times, Drop Zone: Chef-du-Pont feels like a positive step forward, one that recognizes most players have all the foxhole counters and German second line squads they will ever need. Though I hesitate to speak ex cathedra for ASL players as a whole, we want new experiences—with the polish we expect from MMP, that find their way to the table rather than collect dust in the “eventually” pile—rather than new stuff. I love my chrome-laden monster scenarios as much as the next person, but sometimes you just want to pull a card from the binder, throw some counters and maps down in an interesting configuration, learn a little something about a conflict, and spend a pleasant afternoon rolling dice and pushing counters you already own rather than punching (and rounding!) new counters and absorbing pages of special rules. Ken Dunn and MMP deliver that here, with a ton of bang for the buck.

Doctor Who Project: Dragonfire

September 2, 2025August 2, 2025 by Chris Baer

Is any of this important, Doctor?

World building can be tricky business, particularly on Doctor Who. Too much exposition, often from a writer in love with his or her creation, bogs down proceedings, leading to long sequences of characters talking about the setting and elucidating the backstory rather than interacting with it; too little, by contrast, leaves viewers bewildered, wondering why they should care about the fate of Beta Seven or the plight of the Greebles. With the shift to fourteen episode seasons in Season Twenty-Three, three episode stories, like Ian Briggs’ “Dragonfire” (Story Production Code 7G), become commonplace, leaving scant time to create the world through which the Doctor will cavort. One solution, as in “Delta and the Bannermen,” is to make the setting paramount, the plot something of an afterthought relative to the narrative energy created by simply exploring the surroundings. Briggs takes the opposite tack, hurtling the Seventh Doctor, Mel, and future companion Ace (Sophie Aldred) through a series of action-laden sequences in the trade colony known as Iceworld, counting on the audience’s prior experience with generic (and some rather specific) science fiction settings and tropes to fill in the abundant background gaps left by the script.

Still, viewers need to be grounded in the world somehow, and Briggs, producer John Nathan-Turner, and script editor Andrew Cartmel solve that problem through the person of Sabalom Glitz (Tony Selby), the lovable scoundrel last seen during “The Trial of a Time Lord” some eighteen months prior. Though his identity is not elaborated upon in “Dragonfire,” trusting the audience to remember his casual relationship with the truth and essentially amoral nature—a belief in the power of continuity that plagues that season-long story—context clues suffice. The Doctor’s ready rapport with the con artist signals that an adventure is afoot. For those viewers who remember him, the setting immediately makes more sense as a futuristic playground, even though it has been barely sketched out on screen.

Needing money to pay his debts to the colony’s ruler, Kane (Edward Peel), Glitz comes into possession of a treasure map leading into the caverns below Iceworld, on the planet Svartos, guarded by the legendary ice dragon. It’s the mystery of this very creature that has drawn the Doctor to the outpost, so when beleaguered waitress Ace curses her boss using a dragon-related insult, the Doctor’s curiosity immediately goes into overdrive. (It must be noted that the Doctor and Mel liken the dragon to the Loch Ness Monster, a being that the Doctor has, on two separate occasions, revealed to be an alien, albeit a different one each time.) Glitz, in need of the purported treasure to retrieve his impounded spaceship, rather too coyly lets himself be persuaded to seek out the dragon, on the condition that Mel and Ace stay behind.

Briggs and director Chris Clough intercut the scenes of Glitz, Ace, Mel and the Doctor in the colony bar, which features a motley of extraterrestrial species—extras in plastic masks and facial makeup, to be sure, but effective at creating a budget “alien cantina” nonetheless—with Kane and his second in command, Belazs (Patricia Quinn), discussing how they have tricked Glitz into entering the caverns on an as-yet unexplained mission. Kane seems to have hypnotic powers, to say nothing of his ice grip and liquid nitrogen sleeping chamber. The audience gets just enough of his creepy demeanor and strange physiology to sustain interest, even though his motive remains obscured, just like his command center, the BBC’s fog machines working overtime to suggest sub-freezing temperatures.

After Ace loses her job for chucking a milkshake at a snooty customer (Shirin Taylor), she and Mel retreat to her slovenly quarters, where the plucky teen reveals that she’s a student from Perivale, in London, with a penchant for the more explosive aspects of chemistry. An orphan, she has no desire to return to her home planet, having been suspended from school for blowing up the art room with her patented “Nitro Nine” before a “time storm” whisked her from, ostensibly, 1987, to the future. Ace then demonstrates the explosives’ potency by blowing up an ice blockage, leading to them both being arrested and presented to Kane, who seeks to enlist her in his growing army of frozen mercenaries. One threatened detonation with Nitro Nine later, the dynamic duo escapes to the ice caverns, where Briggs, aware that he only has three episodes to unspool the plot, drops them, on cue, right in front of titular beast…

Doctor Who Project: Delta and the Bannermen

August 2, 2025July 2, 2025 by Chris Baer

This is the real Fifties.

For a series regarded as quintessentially British, very few moments on Doctor Who stand out as purely—which is to say, peculiarly—rooted in the British experience. True, there have been occasional references to cricket and boarding school, and explorations of British history make up an entire sub-genre of stories, but they all remain explicable, understandable, to the moderately well-read viewer from beyond the English Channel. That is, until Malcolm Kohll’s “Delta and the Bannermen” (Story Production Code 7F), showcasing that most specifically British of all institutions: the holiday camp.

Established as an inexpensive, all-inclusive getaway in the early twentieth century, the holiday camp, exemplified by the Butlin’s chain, typically features a series of shared, spartan accommodations not unlike barracks—and indeed several camps were used as such during the Second World War—with group meals at fixed times and elaborately planned entertainments on the fenced-in camp grounds, from fun races and skits through to dances and bathing beauty competitions. A veritable army of young people would serve as camp hosts, running the festivities and doing their best to engage campers in activities. While American analogues to the British holiday camp exist, as in the Catskills resorts of the ’50s, the incessant focus on constant communal interaction sets these camps apart. The visual language of the British holiday camp—bright colors, workers in matching blazers, and utilitarian architecture within a walled compound—makes for an instantly recognizable setting, at least if you happen to be British.

Many of the holiday camp guests in “Delta and the Bannermen” are not British, instead being Navarinos, “[s]quat, wrinkly, purply creatures,” transmogrified into human form in preparation for a nostalgia trip to Disneyland on Earth in 1959. The Seventh Doctor and Mel tag along on their trip, in a spaceship designed to look like a bus, by virtue of being the ten billionth customers at an intergalactic toll booth, winning spots on the tour as a prize. Also tagging along is Delta (Belinda Mayne), whom we see fleeing from a group of armed ruffians at the start of the story, defended bravely by what, to all intents, appear to be life-size plastic green army men.

There’s a curious lack of concern on the Doctor’s part about this nonchalant excursion of aliens into Earth’s past, even after the galactic tour bus smashes into an early American satellite, causing the Navarinos to land, somewhat shy of Anaheim, in Wales after the Doctor’s intervention with the TARDIS. Rather than immediately removing the aliens via his own perfectly functional time-space craft, he suggests they all stay at Shangri-La, the holiday camp they have fortuitously crashed next to, going so far as to ask the camp’s mechanic, Billy (David Kinder), to help Murray (Johnny Dennis), the Navarino tour guide, fix the “nav pod” on the interstellar bus.

Such temporal infelicities soon pale, however, as one of the Navarinos, Keillor (Brian Hibbard), turns out to be an intergalactic assassin who recognizes Delta as the “Chimeron queen,” relaying her location to Gavrok (Don Henderson), leader of the Bannermen seen hunting her at the beginning of this story’s first episode. And as a three episode story, events must needs move fast. (Season Twenty-Four, like the season just past, is budgeted for only fourteen twenty-five minute episodes, leading to a pair of three episode stories to close out Sylvester McCoy’s abbreviated debut season.) Kohll doesn’t even wait until the middle of the story to have Mel scream, as in the first episode cliffhanger she witnesses an egg carried in a glowing disco box by Delta start to hatch an unlikely green chicken…