Chris Baer

Doctor Who Project: The Crusade

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You arrived?

Yes, in a box.

From the utterly fantastical, web-filled world of Vortis, our intrepid travellers careen back to Earth’s middle ages, landing just outside of Jaffa, where they encounter Crusaders doing battle with Saracens. And you know what? They don’t find that strange one bit. It’s taken them some fourteen stories, but in “The Crusade” (Story Production Code P), our jaded time travellers no longer display amazement at what they discover outside the TARDIS doors. If it’s Tuesday, it must be the Levant, ho hum.

Even when they meet King Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, there’s no real sense of wonder. Ian only wants to persuade Richard, one of the most mythologized of British kings, to help him rescue Barbara (who was this story’s kidnap victim and court intrigue player, just as she was in our last historical, “The Romans“), expecting this favor as payment for the return of the king’s shiny gold belt.

Indeed, the parallels between “The Crusade” and “The Romans” are striking—Barbara is separated from the group and used as a pawn in various court intrigues (Saladin’s court, in this case); Ian spends the entire story trying to rescue her and engaging in sword fights; and the Doctor and Vicki pal around with historical personages, dress in period clothing, talk about changing history, and have a few laughs while narrowly escaping at the end.

Given these similarities, why, then does “The Crusade” rank as perhaps the finest historical story of all of Doctor Who‘s run? Simply put, the quality of the writing and the acting. David Whitaker’s script provides strong enough characterizations of the story’s historical figures that one does not balk at sequences without the Doctor or the companions. The writing itself flows gracefully—aside from some awkward sequences with Arab characters speaking broken English—resisting even William Hartnell’s legendary efforts at mangling lines.

But then, the story would also work without the Doctor and his companions. For all of Barbara’s escaping and running and being re-captured by the evil El Akir, the story centers on Richard’s attempts to end the war with Saladin; the strongest moments of the story revolve around Richard and his sister Joanna’s arguments over her proposed marriage to Saladin’s brother. It’s as though our time travellers were dropped into a BBC period drama and wander around at the margins of the story. Very little time is given to “sightseeing” and explanations of the strange world in which they’ve arrived. Too, the story remains essentially serious, with only a minor humorous aside featuring stolen court clothing, a tone that helps reinforce the laconic response of the travellers to meeting such significant historical figures.

So what makes “The Crusade” a Doctor Who story other than the presence of the TARDIS?

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Kickstarting the Apocalypse: Wasteland 2 in Development

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These days, computer games that perform even tolerably well in the marketplace are all but guaranteed a sequel. Indeed, my current pile of Xbox 360 games is all sequels: Mass Effect 3, Gears 3, NHL 12, Fallout: New Vegas, Forza 4, and so forth.

But in the heady days of actual floppy discs, when loading a game on your trusty Commodore 64 took five minutes and Electronic Arts was amazingly cool, sequels were few and far between. So it comes as a welcome surprise that one of the finest games of the late 1980s, Wasteland, stands poised to make a return. If you ever wondered where the Fallout series came from, look no further.

Combat in the Wasteland

Brian Fargo, one of the original creators of Wasteland, is spearheading development of Wasteland 2, to be funded as a Kickstarter campaign. I spent hours and hours with the original post-apocalyptic RPG, both on floppy and later via the magic of emulators (when I finally finished the damn thing), and I call upon all true fans of the genre to pony up some cash and fund this game!

Doctor Who Project: The Web Planet

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Whatever power has got hold of the TARDIS has taken your pen! Of course, ha ha! Now then, there’s something for us to solve!

No sooner do our temporal travellers extricate themselves from a web of Roman palace intrigues then they find themselves in a literal web, with the TARDIS trapped by an unknown force on the planet Vortis, better known as “The Web Planet” (Story Production Code N).

TARDIS on Vortis

From the start, this story attempts to break new ground by creating an entirely alien world, both physically and narratively, with uneven results. One can see obvious seam lines in the background flats, and in an effort to provide a sense of space, the camera occasionally pans a bit too high, revealing the two-dimensionality of the background. Plus a man in an ant costume (a Zarbi) runs into a camera.

Zarbi go bonk

There’s plenty of running through corridors, multiple scene changes in each episode (since, of course, Ian gets separated from the Doctor and Vicki, and the three of them are separated from Barbara, all by the third episode), and often the scenery is jostled by actors. But given the limitations of studio shooting—not just spatial but temporal and financial as well— one can only applaud their willingness to go for it. In particular, the sound work, with an ominous chirping whenever the Zarbi appeared, helped strongly to carry off the ambitions of the visual effects team.

Speaking of the second episode of the story, “The Zarbi,” producer Verity Lambert noted:

This was an extremely difficult episode to do technically, in that there had to be a tremendous amount of scenery in the studio, and apart from the breaks necessary because of scene changes, there was the added problem that we had not used the Zarbi, except briefly in episode one, and it was impossible to tell until we got into the studio the kind of difficulties we would run into with dressing them and moving them from one scene to another.

(Quoted in Howe-Stammers-Walker, Doctor Who: The Handbook: The First Doctor)

They were, essentially, making it up as they went along in terms of putting an ambitious science fiction show on air in a tight time frame and an even tighter budget. So we can rightly forgive them any wires we see pulling the butterfly-like Menoptra through the air or the odd extra limbs on the pillbug-like Optera.

But can we forgive them for the plot?

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Great Moments in Cinema: The Purple Guinea Pig in Twice-Told Tales

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I’d like to believe that with Vincent Price films, what you see is intended to be taken literally, without a hint of irony or camp. Thus it is that we are expected to recoil in horror as Doctor Rappaccini, played by Price himself in his Twice-Told Tales (USA, 1963) injects a guinea pig with a poisonous concoction.

Guinea Pig in Trouble

So far so good—lots of smoke and a twitching guinea pig model. Convincingly scary as a concept played with a bit of subtlety. But then, alas, it turns purple.

Guinea Pig in Purple

See, because it was poisoned, it turned…oh, nevermind.

With any luck, once you stop laughing you’ll turn to the source material for this portion of Twice-Told Tales, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Not much laughter there, and also no guinea pig.

Together Yet Apart: Necco’s SkyBar

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Chocolate goes with just about everything—nuts, caramel, ice cream, bacon—and yet most candy bars either restrict you to one or two complementary flavors, like chocolate and peanut butter, or mix a ton of flavors together, so that you get chocolate-caramel-pecan-marshmallow-wafer in every bite. But sometimes you want to sample discrete tastes in small bites. Enter Necco’s SkyBar.

Necco's SkyBar

Four flavors—caramel, vanilla, peanut, fudge—each in its own milk chocolate compartment. The chocolate itself is of standard American milk chocolate quality, good but not great. (The slight hazing on the chocolate in the picture comes from the refrigeration of the bar for a month or so; I buy these in bulk online.)

But you’re not buying a SkyBar to sample 60% pure cocoa varietals; it’s all about the four flavors, which are quite pronounced. The peanut is not peanut butter but rather strongly peanut flavored, while the vanilla packs an agressive punch. I’m not entirely taken with the caramel or fudge segments, but they work as components of the entire chocolate symphony.

See, the real trick with a SkyBar is to eat the segments in a particular order, to balance the flavors and build an overall taste. My preferred approach is caramel, fudge, peanut, vanilla. The two outside segments are caramel and fudge, and if you orient the bar incorrectly upon snapping the first segment off, you might have to alter your approach to, say, fudge, peanut, caramel, vanilla. Once you get the first segment, you can figure out the order of the rest from the wrapper.

Like much of Necco’s product line, SkyBars can be difficult to find outside their home New England/New York market, but if you happen to see one on a candy rack, grab it. It’s two hundred calories well spent. As you’re walking it off, you can think about the order in which you’re going to eat the next one.

(Update, August 2023: Necco has gone out of business, alas. An enterprising general store owner purchased the brand name at auction and is selling SkyBars to a grateful public. I cannot vouch for the verisimilitude yet, but I can only applaud the effort at keeping this iconic candy bar alive.)

Winter Offensive 2012 After Action Report

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For many wargamers on the East Coast, the real holiday is not Christmas, when you never get the games you want anyway, but the Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, when Winter Offensive is held in bucolic Bowie, Maryland.

This venerable Advanced Squad Leader tournament, held annually by Multi-Man Publishing, has transformed from a purely ASL tournament to an eclectic gathering of gamers of all stripes. Twenty years ago, a table occupied by a non-ASL game would have been unthinkable, but now, owing in part to MMP’s growing stable of game lines, roughly twenty percent of the creaking, uneven tables in the increasingly crowded conference rooms host other wargames and even a few Euros.

Winter Offensive 2012

In conjunction with the usual band of misfits (Doug Bush, Chris Chapman, and John Slotwinski), I once again managed to play a grand total of zero games of Advanced Squad Leader. My tally for the long weekend includes a loss as the Russians in The Tide at Sunrise (played using the useless optional Naval Rules), a win as the Russians in Storm Over Stalingrad, a loss as the Egyptians in Yom Kippur, and a second place finish in a three player Le Havre using a civic building strategy that lost to the inevitable coal/coke/steel shipping strategy. A four player Space Empires finished inconclusively, though I must say that my Royal Realm of Red Ravagers was well poised to conquer known space…

As ever, MMP put on a good show, with a record attendance somewhere north of 120 participants. Any more and they’ll have to open up a third conference room, which would help alleviate some of the space issues. These non-ASL games take up some serious table space.