Doctor Who Project: Day of the Daleks

Doctor Who Project: Day of the Daleks

Changing history is a very fanatical idea, you know.

For a show ostensibly about time travel, Doctor Who features very few stories actually about time travel. Louis Marks’ Season Nine opener, “Day of the Daleks” (Series Production Code KKK), tries to explore the paradoxical intricacies of altering history but, oddly, is kept from doing so by the lead villains, who make a rather flat return after nearly five years’ absence from the screen. For this story, about a ragtag band of guerrilla fighters in 22nd Century Earth travelling back in time to stop World War III from breaking out in the 20th Century, would have worked better without the Daleks at all.

Behold the gold Dalek

UNIT summons the Doctor and Jo to investigate the strange appearance (and disappearance) of an armed intruder in the home of Sir Reginald Styles, a British diplomat attempting to broker a peace between China, the UK, and the rest of a world on the brink of all-out war. When the would-be assassin is later found injured in a nearby tunnel, the Doctor surmises that he’s from Earth’s future, armed as he is with a disintegrator gun, made with Welsh-mined metals, and a crude form of time machine. This conjecture is confirmed when the assailant’s accomplices show up and capture the Doctor and Jo, who have lain in wait for them in Style’s study (after helping themselves to the diplomat’s well-stocked larder and wine cellar).

Be very afraid. We're from the future!

Through a series of misadventures—and Jo’s on-again, off-again skill with “escapology”—both the Doctor and Jo separately wind up in the 22nd Century, Jo in the custody of the Dalek-led human government and the Doctor with the guerrillas who are, it turns out, fighting against the Dalek regime. And what horrible fate awaits Jo at the hands of her captors? She’s offered grapes and wine and the promise of a feast. The Daleks have really lost their touch…

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Cincinnati or Bust: 1846 (GMT Games)

Once upon a time, GMT Games produced wargames and nothing but. Luckily for the gaming public at large, they’ve long since diversified their product line with games on everything from lemmings to stock cars, including their first foray into the niche realm of 18XX railroad games, Tom Lehmann’s 1846: The Race for the Midwest.

1846 GMT Games Edition

Originally available through Deep Thought Games, a bespoke and apparently defunct 18XX producer renowned for a several year waiting list, 1846 serves as a relatively simple (yet still cutthroat) introduction to the 18XX family of games. GMT’s lavishly produced and reasonably priced edition offers this game series to a wide audience, hopefully converting some new fans to the financial skullduggery of these railroad games.

I recently had the opportunity to play through much of a game of 1846 with my good gaming friends Mike and Jess at Labyrinth Games in Washington, DC. Neither of them had much experience with the series, but they both picked up on the fundamentals quickly and we criss-crossed the Midwest with rails before long.

Unlike the most well known of the 18XX games, 1830, 1846 has a streamlined process for launching corporations and also gives them the ability to deal in their own stocks. I launched a single corporation while Mike and Jess each launched a pair. My B&O focused on Cincinnati and environs; Jess tried to get into Chicago from the east and south; and Mike worked the routes around Lake Erie. Forced train purchases (caused by technological progress in the game, resulting in old trains being removed) pretty much drove all three of us into bankruptcy, as we hadn’t optimized our track purchases—or much of anything else—leaving us without enough funding for new trains. Though player bankruptcy doesn’t end the game, we decided to call it while the game was still in the third of five phases and while we still had some dignity left.

We all want to come back to it, though. There’s something about 1846, and indeed 18XX in general, that speaks to that part of the brain that wants to get an economic engine ticking just so—all while fending off the predations of others seeking to profit off of your every miscue. Brutal games indeed, and brilliant for it.

Doctor Who Project: The Daemons

Doctor Who Project: The Daemons

I’ve cast the runes. I’ve consulted the talisman of Mercury.

If the BBC didn’t pay royalties to Erich von Däniken for “The Daemons” (Story Production Code JJJ), perhaps they should have. The premise of aliens having guided Earth’s history, as put forth in von Däniken’s 1968 book Chariots of the Gods?, forms a central conceit in much of Doctor Who, and that ur-plot essentially starts here, in the Season Eight finale. There are hints of ancient aliens in earlier stories, notably “Doctor Who and the Silurians,” but in “The Daemons,” Guy Leopold (actually producer Barry Letts with Robert Sloman) makes the Chariots connection explicit by linking the alien in question to the Devil.

Gargoyle come to life.

As the Doctor explains—at the Cloven Hoof Inn in the English town of Devil’s End, just in case anyone missed the point—the Daemons, from the planet Daemos, came to Earth one hundred thousand years ago and helped homo sapiens defeat the Neanderthals as a sort of science experiment, in the process forever imprinting the notion of powerful horned beasts into the collective unconscious. The rituals that evolved around the Daemons came to form religious and magical beliefs, though the Doctor avers that because the Daemons are attracted to psychic energy, these rituals, passed down through generations, merely serve to focus human emotions, neatly squaring the science/magic circle.

The Doctor is not the only one who knows of the power of the Daemons, though. The Master is also in on the secret, and he’s dressed to play the part, posing as both the newly installed local vicar and as the head of the local black magic coven, the better to harness the town’s mental energies to summon the last of the Daemons, Azal. Conveniently, Azal just happens to have parked his spaceship in the nearby Devil’s Hump burial barrow.

I'm here all week. Try the veal!

The story goes off the rails quickly enough, with several long expository sequences given over to a giant heat barrier surrounding the town once Azal manifests, and as usual, the Master has set into motion a plot more likely to kill himself than anyone else.

For all the Master’s cunning, he really doesn’t think these things through, assuming that the ability to summon an ancient alien from an advanced civilization using a rooster somehow confers power over said creature (the Daemon, not the rooster). But then, the biggest threat to the Doctor comes not from Azal, nor Azal’s pet gargoyle that for some reason does the Master’s bidding, but rather from the Master’s chief henchman, a newspaper-clipping-clad Morris dancer. That’s the kind of story this is…

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Mister Doctor Men: Doctor Who Meets Roger Hargreaves

The various incarnations of the Doctor have long lent themselves to caricatures: the Second Doctor’s flute, the Fourth Doctor’s flowing scarf, the Fifth Doctor’s, um, celery. So a combination of Doctor Who and the art style of Roger Hargreaves, of Mr. Men and Little Miss fame, seems, in retrospect, blazingly obvious.

Image from Dr. First by Adam Hargreaves, available via Penguin Books

Adam Hargreaves has carried on his father’s work, and in collaboration with the BBC and Penguin Books, he’s turned out a series of Doctor Who children’s books that plans to devote one installment to each Doctor. The First, Fourth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctor books have already been released, with the Second, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth in the queue for this summer.

The results so far are certainly charming, though also undeniably aimed towards, well, children. (Of course, there’s an argument to be made that the entire series is aimed towards children, but we’ll ignore that debate for the time being.)

Image from Dr. Fourth by Adam Hargreaves, available via Penguin Books

For adult Whovians, the thin volumes serve as delightful little confections, priced perhaps a bit high for the amount of time one might reasonably spend with them but otherwise a nice addition to any Doctor Who book collection. I’m certainly appreciative of the inclusion of all of the Doctors, even the oft-overlooked Eighth. And for those hoping to introduce our favorite time traveller to young children, I can think of no better entry point than these cheerful and oddly respectful volumes.

(Images from Dr. First and Dr. Fourth by Adam Hargreaves.)

Doctor Who Project: Colony in Space

Doctor Who Project: Colony in Space

The man they arrested last time turned out to be the Spanish ambassador.

One can hardly accuse Malcolm Hulke of burying the lede in “Colony in Space” (Story Production Code HHH)—the very first scene features the Time Lords fretting about the Master, who has discovered the site of a buried Doomsday device. And yet we hear no more of this ominous development for four episodes, during which the Doctor deals with an entirely different set of difficulties involving colonists on an infertile planet and a greedy mining corporation bent on taking the planet from them.

Watching Doctor Who as one does now, with all the episodes available immediately, the omission seems strange, as a Doomsday device should ostensibly be the focus of the story rather than poor cover crop yields and bountiful durilinium deposits. But at the time, when viewers had the show parceled out in weekly chunks, the surprise when the Master is finally revealed carries with it the frisson of remembering that moment from the beginning of the first episode, obscured as it was by the intervening action.

Who did you expect?

It’s certainly not the first time that the Master’s appearance has been teased; “The Claws of Axos,” immediately prior to this story, similarly featured the Master showing up in the middle of the action after his appearance had been suggested at the very beginning of the first episode. In that story, however, the Master was directly connected to the appearance of Axos on Earth and thus to the main thrust of the plot; in “Colony in Space,” he shows up opportunistically, his story arc only tangentially connected to the central plot. Hulke has, essentially, smashed two stories into one here, either of which might have made for a decent story but the sum of the parts not adding up to much at all.

Time Lord Tribunal

The colony arc that gives this story its title starts promisingly enough, with the Doctor and a slightly shanghaied Jo Grant being whisked off to the planet Uxarieus (a quarry, of course, but our first alien quarry-planet in color, one with a lot of mud) at the behest of the Time Lords, who send the TARDIS there so that the Doctor can defeat the Master’s plans. However, the Time Lords don’t actually tell the Doctor to expect the Master, either a signal vote of confidence in his abilities or a fear that he would reject helping them. (Or, perhaps, just a clever narrative elision to extend the story to six episodes.)

The Doctor immediately gets excited to explore the mysteries of why the colony is failing and, with unexplained murders happening right after his arrival, he’s drawn quickly into events, but just to be sure he sticks around, the TARDIS is dragged off by the voiceless “primitives” who are native to the planet. As if the Doctor would try to run away after he realizes that the murders were committed by a mining robot that has fake animal claws attached to it?

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Rolling with the Doctor: Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA)

Who rpgLike an immutable law, at some point, every long-lasting science fiction franchise attracts at least one role playing game based on its setting, lore, and characters. Doctor Who proves no exception to this rule, with several different role playing games to its name over the fifty-odd years of its existence.

FASA produced the first of these in 1985, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game: Adventures Through Time and Space, a boxed set featuring three booklets: one for the players, one for the gamemaster, and one a sourcebook with information about the world of the show. All three are illustrated copiously, though only in black and white (an unintentional homage, no doubt, to the early years of the series), a mix of photos from the show and drawings of varying quality. Later years saw the publication of nearly a dozen sourcebooks and adventures to supplement the core rule books.

The game system itself broke no new ground upon publication, being a fairly standard attribute-based system using skill checks to determine the success or failure of actions the players wish to take. Players are allowed to take on the role of the Doctor or other Time Lords if they wish, though the rules suggest new players stick to being companions; regardless, the assumption is that all players are members of an organization known as the Celestial Intervention Agency, a shadowy organization introduced in “The Deadly Assassin” and tailor made to provide a framing narrative for the core rule books and the supplements to follow.

And, indeed, the degree to which the writers employed by FASA for this project added backstory to the Doctor Who universe makes this game interesting. These inventions are certainly not canonical in any form (though, as any brief perusal of my Doctor Who Project posts will attest, adherence to a consistent lore did not figure greatly in the concerns of the show’s production team), but they represent an early attempt to formalize certain aspects of the show’s setting.

Who rpg stats

From attempting to judge the relative strengths of Daleks versus Silurians to postulating the existence of a standard time zone based in Gallifrey, from providing a user manual for K-9 to summarizing visits to Earth by Time Lords other than the Doctor, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game makes for compelling reading, albeit in a form punctuated by charts and game statistics.

I’m not sure contemporary role players would find the game experience to their liking, being too casually designed for those who like a bit of crunch in their rules and too restrictive for more free-form gaming. As an artifact of mid-1980s thinking about Doctor Who, however, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game provides fascinating insight into the areas of the series’ universe never fully explored in the show itself. This active fan engagement with the series beyond passively watching it on television speaks to its enduring legacy today.