Chris Baer

Doctor Who Project: The Daleks’ Master Plan

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Three time machines in one infinitesimal speck of space and time! Tsk. Of course, a coincidence is possible—but hardly likely.

They just don’t make them like they used to. The multi-episode story structure used by Doctor Who allowed quite a bit of flexibility when planning a season, and while most stories of the First Doctor’s era fit into the standard four-episode format, one story in particular stretched the limits: Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner’s twelve-episode epic “The Daleks’ Master Plan” (Story Production Code V), which first aired in weekly installments from November 13, 1965 through January 29, 1966. Nothing like it had been seen in Doctor Who before. Except, um, Terry Nation’s “The Chase” and “The Keys of Marinus,” six-episode stories from which the structure of “The Daleks’ Master Plan” is cribbed.

Both “The Chase” and “The Keys of Marinus” feature whirlwind tours of disparate locations, either climactic extremes (jungles, deserts, acid oceans) or quasi-realistic settings played for laughs (top of the Empire State Building, an animatronic house of horrors). So too with “The Daleks’ Master Plan”—the deserts of ancient Egypt; the lush jungle of planet Kembel; the swamps of planet Mira; northern England at Christmas; the, ah, manicured cricket lawns of The Oval; and 1920’s Hollywood are all stops for the TARDIS in this story. And why does the TARDIS flit from place to place? Because it’s being chased through time and space, not just by Daleks (as in “The Chase”) but by the Mark IV TARDIS of the Meddling Monk, also known as “The Time Meddler,” because, as a Dennis Spooner creation, he’s of course in this one, too. Can’t let Nation and his Daleks have all the fun.

Still, even if we know, broadly, what to expect from a Terry Nation story, “The Daleks’ Master Plan” works, well, masterfully, with but few exceptions. The story starts somewhat slowly, with the usual Nation technobabble—in short order we are introduced to two different types of spacecraft by brand name (the Spar 7-40 and the Flipt T4) and both ultraspace and ultrasonics, neither of which get any explanation. But most importantly, we are introduced to Mavic Chen (Kevin Stoney), the idolized Guardian of the Solar System (essentially the leader of all humans), whom we quickly find to be in league with the Daleks. Why rule a mere solar system, when you can rule whole galaxies?

Today the Solar System, Tomorrow the Universe!

Meanwhile, the Doctor desperately needs medicine for a wounded Steven and lands, by happenstance, on the planet Kembel, last seen as the location of a secret Dalek base in “Mission to the Unknown.” Before long, the Doctor, Katarina (picked up in ancient Troy during “The Myth Makers“), Steven, and a headstrong Earth security agent named Bret Vyon (future Brigadier Nicholas Courtney) stumble into a conference being held by the Daleks with representatives from several different galaxies. It’s at this conference that the Daleks’ Master Plan is unveiled.

Gearon, Malpha, and the Dalek Supreme. Or is that Celation?

And, as with most Dalek plans, it’s actually kind of stupid.

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A Game by the Fire: Blizzard’s Hearthstone

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Several months back, when World of Warcraft studio Blizzard teased their new game, everyone was thinking big. Way big. New MMORPG, perhaps? Another real-time strategy game? Something even more amazing?

Well, yes and no. It wasn’t big, but it was, in its own way, amazing. Blizzard unveiled Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, a, um, digital collectible card game.

Hearthstone's Field of Battle

I recently snagged a spot in the closed beta for Hearthstone, which still has no firm release date, and I’ve been cautiously pleased with what I’ve seen. Drawing art and sound assets from World of Warcraft, Hearthstone captures the feel of that game quite well, taking nine classes from WoW as deck archetypes. The card play itself is fairly standard—mana grows turn by turn, allowing the play of cards from your hand; creatures usually cannot attack the turn they are played; and the object is to whittle the opposing hero down to zero health. So, essentially, a very streamlined Magic: The Gathering, gussied up with particle effects.

The emphasis is on fast play. Interaction during your opponent’s turn is almost nonexistent. Indeed, you cannot even chat with your opponent beyond a few pre-programmed emotes. And, given my long experience with World of Warcraft, that’s a feature, not a bug. The AFK timer is rather efficient at burning through an absent opponent’s turn, too.

Hearthstone will be free-to-play, with Blizzard making money through the optional sale of booster packs and entry into a drafting format. One can earn enough in-game credit by playing other people to purchase a booster pack probably two to three times a week with regular play. The matchmaking engine thus far has done well pitting me against players of similar (which is to say, limited) skill, enabling me to get a fair number of wins. Play against the computer is possible, but quickly becomes boring. At a certain point, AI play is only good for testing a new deck.

As a collectible card game, there are quite a few cards to accumulate, both class-specific and neutral cards usable by any class, though once you obtain more than the maximum hand limit of two of any card, you can “disenchant” the extras to form a crafting material that can then be used to create cards you want. A slow process, but if there’s a card you really want, you can get it, eventually.

The card collection interface is unwieldy and looks designed more for tablets than computers, but then I have yet to see a really good digital collection interface.

Hearthstone Collection Interface

While the limit of nine constructed deck slots makes sense with the nine classes you can play, I do wish there were more slots for creating multiple decks of the same class. One hopes Blizzard will not monetize that particular feature.

On the whole, I think Blizzard has (yet another) winner on its hands with Hearthstone. The gameplay is accessible for people without prior exposure to the collectible card game genre, appealing to World of Warcraft fans, and fast playing enough to make up for the slight lack of tactical depth (at least as compared to Magic: The Gathering). Besides, you can summon chickens to attack your opponent. That’s a win right there.

Troughton’s Trove: Nine Missing Doctor Who Episodes Recovered

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It reads as though from a movie script: hands gingerly picking up a dusty object from a forgotten archive, wiping off decades of grime, unearthing a lost treasure. In this case, the treasure is eleven episodes of Doctor Who, nine of which had been previously missing, from a television archive in Nigeria, according to the BBC.

The episodes, recovered by Philip Morris, complete the story “The Enemy of the World” and fill in much of “The Web of Fear,” both Second Doctor stories from Season Five. Coming on the heels of the recovery of single episodes from “Galaxy 4” and “The Underwater Menace” in late 2011, this huge recovery gives hope that there are more caches of forgotten Doctor Who episodes scattered about the Commonwealth. This discovery, and its attendant publicity, should spur some careful searching of dusty film closets. They have to be out there somewhere.

Still from The Web of Fear

While we wait for yet more discoveries, the BBC has remastered the episodes and made the two stories (with stills and audio narration for the missing episode of “The Web of Fear”) available on Apple’s iTunes at a relatively reasonable $10 each—a policy I would very much like to see them take with the other extant stories. It’s a small price to pay for Yetis in the London Underground and Patrick Troughton playing both the Second Doctor and an evil Australian dictator named Salamander, I think.

Doctor Who Project: The Myth Makers

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Now come on, start thinking! It’s you against the Doctor now!

After a story (well, an episode/teaser) where the Doctor and his companions aren’t present at all, we have a story where they might as well not be. The real stars of Donald Cotton’s “The Myth Makers” (Story Production Code U) are the Greeks and Trojans: Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Paris, Priam, Cassandra, and Troilus, thanks to a classical British education that made these characters quite readily familiar via the Iliad and the Aeneid.

Long stretches of “The Myth Makers” are given over to the various Greeks and Trojans absent our time travellers, who conveniently separate from one another and then find one another at the worst possible moments to provide some semblance of narrative motion. And the guest actors make the most of their screen time, playing with gusto. This story has perhaps the least dialogue for the main characters of any since “The Crusade.”

But at no point does the viewer have a sense that the Doctor and company are in any danger, because of the assumed familiarity with the underlying story. Not, of course, that even the most casual of viewers would think that they could ever be in real danger—we’re still several stories from the first regeneration and have yet to experience the first companion death—but even the episode cliffhangers lack drama, because everyone knows that the Trojans wheeled the Horse into Troy and were thusly caught unawares by the Greeks. As Vicki herself says to Cassandra, “I don’t have to prophesy. Because as far as I’m concerned, the future has already happened.”

Indeed, the only real danger is to the set, because the actors playing Paris (Barrie Ingham) and Cassandra (Frances White) practically chew the scenery. For a story that ostensibly took some pains towards historic verisimilitude (alas, the footage is missing, leaving only audio recordings), the Greeks and Trojans speak mostly like contemporary Englishmen fresh off the West End stage.

Still, unlike the earlier historicals, where the Doctor inadvertently causes, inspires, or otherwise motivates historical events to occur (Nero’s burning of Rome, the fall of Robespierre), in “The Myth Makers,” the Doctor gives the Greeks the notion to build the Trojan Horse, even though he initially rejects the idea as “some good dramatic device” invented by Homer.

This direct intervention in history, albeit under duress, can, perhaps, be squared with his insistent “hands off” approach formulated in “The Aztecs” by noting that the Doctor here doesn’t change history; he merely sees it through to its “proper” end. The Greeks conquered the Trojans, according to the myths, and just because they conquered the Trojans with the Doctor’s help doesn’t mean that they didn’t always have his help, even though the Doctor gets the idea for the Trojan Horse from stories about the Trojan War written after he helped. Chicken, egg, time, loop . . .

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A Silver Thread: Washington Metro’s New Map

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This past Thursday, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority unveiled the new Metrorail map, featuring the first phase of the soon-to-open Silver Line. The map, thankfully, looks very much like the original, only with the Silver Line threaded in between the Orange and Blue Lines, providing a nice contrast and emphasizing that the Silver Line runs on the main East/West core route for much of its run.

Detail of Final Silver Line Map from https://planitmetro.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Final-Map-without-addresses-07-13-600x671.png

While Metro’s map may not be quite as iconic as the London Underground’s map, the relatively clean look of it is unmistakable at a glance. Even video games set in Washington use riffs on the snaking colored lines to conjure up the map without having to get permission to use the real thing, as in Fallout 3.

Fallout 3 Metro Map

Metro brought the original designer, Lance Wyman, back to revise the map, and according to Metro’s blog, PlanItMetro, he and his design team made the following adjustments:

  • Made street abbreviations consistent
  • Improved the geographic accuracy of the stations where possible
  • New icon for stations that are serviced by three rail lines: the traditional station dot with white extenders
  • Made the rail lines 24% thinner to ensure room for the Silver Line
  • Added the Anacostia National Park
  • Added the Metro Transit Police phone number
  • Added a note that the map is not to scale
  • Lightened the Beltway and jurisdiction borders to improve readability

I’m quite pleased with the final result. There’s a high density of information on the map, but it’s not cluttered at all. One perhaps wishes that the station names didn’t overlap the iconography of the monuments, but that’s a small quibble. I look forward to seeing the full-size versions of the new maps on trains and in stations soon.

(Image via PlanItMetro.)

Beyond that Blue Event Horizon: Frederik Pohl 1919-2013

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Gateway Cover via The Way the Future BlogsIt was with some sadness that I learned this morning of Frederik Pohl’s passing, on his own blog of all places. He was a giant in science fiction, writing prolifically in many forms.

For me, his seminal accomplishment will always be Gateway, with its mysterious spacecraft pre-programmed on journeys to fortune or, more often, doom, and the men and women who risked all to take their chances with them. When I first read it in 1984, my science fiction diet to then had been space operas and little else; now, suddenly, there is deep characterization, a bit of suspense, and a robotic psychiatrist.

I still try to read Gateway once every few years, preferably in the mass-market paperback version I had as a kid. Some books just don’t work in hardback or trade paperback for some reason.

And Pohl wasn’t just a significant writer. His contributions to science fiction, from its relative infancy mid-century to the present, extended into publishing as well. Jo Walton over on Tor.com points out his importance as an editor:

But Pohl was also a truly great editor—he edited Galaxy and If for more than a decade in the sixties. He also edited for Bantam, and bought and published Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (both 1975). He was one of the most imaginative editors the genre has ever seen, always prepared to buy things in new styles and move ahead.

It’s tempting to view his passing as him taking a trip on his own Heechee spacecraft into the unknown, but I get the sense he was too much of a curmudgeon to have appreciated that view, so I’ll just bid a fond farewell and dig up my tattered copy of Gateway instead. That, I think, he would appreciate.

(Image via The Way the Future Blogs)