Science Fiction – Page 19

Doctor Who Project: Colony in Space

July 23, 2023April 23, 2017 by Chris Baer

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.

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.

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?

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

July 23, 2023April 9, 2017 by Chris Baer

Who rpg Like 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.

Doctor Who Project: The Claws of Axos

July 23, 2023March 24, 2017 by Chris Baer

Well, gentlemen. There’s your enemy.

From the very beginning of Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s “The Claws of Axos” (Story Production Code GGG), it’s clear that the titular aliens differ from the gold-skinned idealized humanoids they’ve disguised themselves as. Their claws are in the story’s title, after all, and if that’s not suggestion enough, the initial shots of their spacecraft approaching Earth are intercut with quick frames of unnervingly quivering heaps of tentacles. The viewer operates with advance knowledge of what is to come, a fairly rare occurrence in Doctor Who, and yet this story nevertheless provides a moment of real surprise.

The story’s opening moments with the Doctor, the Brigadier, and the bumbling bureaucrat of the day, Chinn, center around UNIT finally deciding to do something about the Master. We’re expecting him to be involved somehow, and soon, given that this is a four episode story. It’s to the writers’ and director’s credit, then, that when the Master does finally appear near the end of the first episode, we’re genuinely surprised: he’s a captive, bound to the walls of a living spaceship, in one of the most shocking and well-earned narrative revelations in the Third Doctor’s era.

Craven as ever, the Master has bargained with the parasitic, space-travelling, hive-mind organism known as Axos, leading it to the rich feeding ground of Earth in exchange for his freedom. Axos buries itself, as aliens always do, in southeast England, and calls for help. The British government’s response to a first contact situation near a massive power plant is to appoint a minor functionary, Chinn (Peter Bathurst), with full military and diplomatic powers to act on behalf of the government. It’s as though this kind of event happens every day, which, as the show’s history suggests, isn’t far from the truth…

Time Flippers: Doctor Who Pinball Table

July 23, 2023March 15, 2017 by Chris Baer

Some three years after Doctor Who’s ignominious cancellation in 1989, a pinball machine based on the series appeared in arcades and bars, a time-bending feat only this redoubtable series could achieve. Thanks to a recent Kickstarter project (well, not all that recent, but only recently fulfilled, in the way of most Kickstarter projects these days), a faithful digital recreation of this 1992 Bally/Midway table has surfaced as part of the Pinball Arcade collection (on most major computer/mobile/console platforms), bringing the sullen face of the Master, the pepperpot pastels of the Daleks, and, of all things, the Whomobile to life once more.

Doctor Who Pinball Table in Pinball Arcade

With a whopping 7,752 units produced, according to the Internet Pinball Database, the Doctor Who table was not some niche product in the pinball world but a substantial investment in a licensed property that, though no longer airing new episodes, still held significant cultural cachet. I’m not sure how long a pinball machine gestates in design and production before being introduced to market, so it’s unclear whether the table was approved for production/design prior to the show going off the air or not, but the enduring draw of the Doctor has to account for the pinball machine being introduced three years after the show no longer aired regularly in Britain. With PBS being the primary driver of Doctor Who in the United States at that time, this might be the only pinball machine to ever be based off of a show from the public broadcaster (unless I never paid attention to a Sesame Street table in my youth).

I’m no pinball wizard, being a mere plebeian flipper, so I can’t comment much on the gameplay as represented in the Pinball Arcade version of the table. The iconography, however, is striking for its use of all of the Doctors to date. The display of the Doctors on the back glass focuses on the most recent iterations first, with Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor getting top billing, rather than putting Tom Baker front and center. Davros and the Daleks round out the rogue’s gallery behind the Doctors on the back glass.

On the table itself, each Doctor features along with a representative companion or companions: Susan and the First Doctor; Jamie and Zoe with the Second Doctor; Jo (and Bessie!) with the Third Doctor; Leela with the Fourth Doctor; Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan; Peri and the Sixth Doctor; and Ace with the Seventh Doctor. It’s an exhausting litany of detail, and the table designers didn’t merely rest on recent iterations—they went all the way back to the beginnings and worked from there. There’s quite a bit of understanding of the show’s history in this table, even if it’s all drawn in broad strokes.

The Doctor may have been gone from the screen during the lean years of the ‘90s, but his adventures were only a quarter away and are now playable again.

Doctor Who Project: The Mind of Evil

July 23, 2023February 20, 2017 by Chris Baer

Yes, it’s going to be one of those days.

With the recent introduction of the Master, season eight of Doctor Who gathers quite a bit of momentum, as amply illustrated in Don Houghton’s rather frenetic “The Mind of Evil” (Story Production Code FFF). As with Houghton’s last story, “Inferno,” this six episode story splits its action into several disparate threads that all, somehow, tie together in the end, rather hastily in this case. Only another bravura performance from Roger Delgado as the Master, not to mention several classic bits of gurning and general overacting by Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor, keeps this overstuffed tale on its rails.

The Doctor visits Stangmoor Prison to witness the Keller Machine, a breakthrough in penological science, in action. This device removes the evil thought processes of convicted criminals, rendering them infantile but incapable of harmful behavior. To the discomfort of no one but the Doctor, these thoughts are somehow stored inside the machine itself.

Meanwhile, UNIT has been tasked with securing the World Peace Conference in London, where the Chinese delegation has been complaining of strange break-ins in their quarters. And, just because UNIT doesn’t have enough to do, the task force also must transport Thunderbolt 2, an outlawed nuclear-powered missile, tipped with a nerve gas warhead, to a dock for dumping at sea. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart thinks so little of this last assignment that he delegates Captain Yates to lay on a small motorcycle escort for the deadly weapon, because that never fails.

By the end of the first episode, it’s clear that all three situations will come together somehow, but just how remains tantalizingly out of reach. The typical single-minded scientist who will brook no impediment to his plans, as seen in Houghton’s “Inferno” and in Malcolm Hulke’s “Doctor Who and the Silurians,” seems to be the villain du jour, but in this case, our suspect, Professor Kettering, just up and dies, drowning in a dry room, victim to the Keller Machine’s ability to manifest its prey’s deepest fears in order to kill. But then we learn that while the Keller Machine is a danger, it’s not the villain per se. That honor belongs to…the telephone repairman?

Capaldi Calls It Quits: Twelfth Doctor to Regenerate

January 23, 2025February 1, 2017 by Chris Baer

It took the original run of Doctor Who eighteen seasons to reach its Fifth Doctor. The new series has reached that milestone in ten seasons, as the BBC has announced that Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor (fourth of the current run) will be leaving the series at the end of Series Ten, due to start April 15th of this year:

The decision seems to be on the part of Peter Capaldi rather than the BBC, which I imagine would have liked to have a familiar face on screen as new showrunner Chris Chibnall takes over for Series Eleven. Not that I can blame Capaldi, since the series has seemed an afterthought on the part of the BBC for some time, with extended hiatuses the norm.

The Twelfth Doctor

I must confess that I never quite warmed to this iteration of the Doctor. Though I greatly appreciated the return to the more mature and irascible sort of Gallifreyan as depicted by William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, Capaldi’s Doctor never seemed to have scripts with sufficient depth of character to allow him to really shine. His portrayal might have fared better in the original run; I can see him performing quite well in some of Troughton’s stories, and Capaldi has always appeared to have a love of the show and the character that matches Hartnell’s similar appreciation for the role.

The timing of the announcement seems a bit odd, as an entire series of Capaldi’s era, plus a Christmas special, remains to be aired. Ostensibly, there’s no way to keep this news silent once the decision is made, but I wonder if the inevitable speculation frenzy over the next Doctor will overshadow the stories to come. And will the BBC choose (and announce) a new Doctor a good year before we can expect a Series Eleven? Only time (which Time Lords seem to have in spades) will tell…