Science Fiction – Page 29

Letter from a Time Traveller: Royal Mail to Issue Doctor Who Stamps

August 5, 2023December 27, 2012 by Chris Baer

Though it might be a poor use of a time machine, if given the keys to the TARDIS, I think I’d jump to March, 2013, to grab the Royal Mail’s planned Doctor Who stamps. As reported by the BBC, each of the eleven Doctors will receive a first class stamp, with various enemies on second class stamps. There’s also to be a first class stamp of the TARDIS itself.

The backgrounds for the stamps of the eleven Doctors draw from the opening titles sequences of their respective seasons and utilize the contemporaneous Doctor Who logo as well. As is typical, William Hartnell comes out looking classy as ever. (Poor Sylvester McCoy—that background does him few favors).

I’ll definitely be picking up a few sets of these when they arrive, though I do confess to a bit of curmudgeonly disappointment that the second class enemies are all drawn from the new series. Ood and Weeping Angels before the Ice Warriors and Daemons?

(Image via Royal Mail)

A Fresh Console for Christmas: New TARDIS Interior Revealed

August 6, 2023December 19, 2012 by Chris Baer

The BBC has unveiled our first glimpse at Doctor Who‘s revamped TARDIS control room, and it takes us away from the prior steampunk monstrosity back to a far more traditional look:

While I understood the prior control room as emphasizing the immense size of the TARDIS (and also providing lots of space for interesting camera angles and character positioning), this new look harkens back to consoles from earlier days with a more personal scale. The prior console took time to walk around, and the TARDIS felt like a ship rather than, well, a time machine. This is cozy without being cramped, and the lines are modern and eclectic at the same time.

Though it’s hard to tell from the photo, stairs seem to extend down behind Matt Smith, suggesting a lower deck where the Doctor can fiddle with the TARDIS to his hearts’ content. There are plenty of knobs and levers as well—the TARDIS should never have a touch-screen bridge along the lines of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The hexagonal motif in the walls also calls back to earlier incarnations of our favorite time machine.

A very promising new look here. Now let’s hope that the stories Moffat and crew tell in it are worthy of the revamp, because the first part of the most recent season left more than a bit to be desired.

(Image via BBC)

Doctor Who Project: The Chase

August 6, 2023November 15, 2012 by Chris Baer

Barbara, could I, ah, have your cardigan?

Terry Nation and his Daleks return to Doctor Who in “The Chase” (Story Production Code R), with their own time machine, ready to pursue our heroes through time and space with one aim: to exterminate. The possibilities are endless, the potential locales and eras limitless. And we wind up on a desert planet populated by fish people. And also on Earth three times. And then on a jungle planet with hungry fungi and truculent robots. By the end of the story, one mourns not so much for the departure of Barbara and Ian as for what could have been.

Much like an earlier Nation effort, “The Keys of Marinus,” “The Chase” bounces around from place to place, episode to episode, and as a result, far too much screen time is devoted to establishing the when and what of where the Doctor and his companions have arrived. This influx of exposition overwhelms any sense of anxiety about the Daleks who pursue them just minutes behind in the time and space vortex. And, of course, the intrepid travellers must conspire to get themselves separated from one another in each and every episode. That takes effort, drawing away from any depth of plot.

The action, such as it is, starts on the heels of “The Space Museum,” with the Doctor tuning in various moments in history on the Time-Space Visualizer he insisted on liberating from that eponymous institution. The Time-Space Visualizer is curiously heliocentric, with the names of the solar system’s planets around it, and indeed the entire story resounds with references to the Doctor as human, though likely an unintentional rather than prescriptive description. Shakespeare makes his first appearance in Doctor Who on the Visualizer, and the United States is referenced for the first time as well, as Ian requests a peek at Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address.

But then, in a fortuitous bit of channel surfing, the Daleks appear, chanting “TARDIS, TARDIS, TARDIS!” as they roll one after the other into their own time machine, ready to chase the Doctor and chums through time and space as revenge for the foiled invasion of Earth. They don’t seem overly concerned about the Doctor’s seeming destruction of their species on Skaro way back when, just the whole Earth thing. Because turning the Earth into a hollow spaceship to fly it around the galaxy was totally going to work.

Of course, our time travellers can’t just leave, because the party is split up on the desert planet Aridius, adding yet another lazy planet name to the Doctor Who canon. The fishy Aridians, whose planet was once water covered and who live in fear of octopus-like Mire Beasts, don’t seem at all surprised by the sudden appearance of the Doctor or the Daleks, who threaten to destroy the Aridian civilization if the Doctor and his companions are not handed over.

Thankfully, a Mire Beast breaks through a wall and eats an Aridian, allowing Vicki, Barbara, and the Doctor to escape and meet up with Ian, who has passed out from the first of two head-beatings in this story.

The Who Yorker?

August 7, 2023June 6, 2012 by Chris Baer

I fussily read The New Yorker in chronological order. New issues of the venerable magazine go to the bottom of the occasionally hefty pile, awaiting their turn behind older, as yet unread issues.

In an event almost as rare as the Transit of Venus, I recently jumped an issue to the top of the queue, ahead of some that had been waiting, patiently, for a month or more. But then, the “Science Fiction” issue demands no less, in particular a short piece by Emily Nussbaum focusing on Doctor Who (“Fantastic Voyage,” June 4 & 11, 2012).

Nussbaum looks at notions of fandom in arc-based genre television, or “cult fanhood,” as she puts it, through the lens of Doctor Who. My interest, though, is with a specific point she makes about the use of time travel as a literary device in the original and new iterations of the show:

The old “Doctor Who” dealt with time primarily as a mode of transportation: it jumped in a linear fashion, usually no more than one adventure per series. On the new “Who,” time travel is a philosophical and an emotional challenge: it braids together flashbacks, alternate realities, and so on, exploring with poetic verve some truly wrenching themes of mortality and loss.

Nussbaum’s point was timely (no pun intended), given my recent analysis of “The Space Museum,” which explores time travel as a philosophical phenomenon rather than a pneumatic tube shuttling the Doctor and his companions from place to place. I don’t seek to quibble here, as she points out that she’s not lifelong Whovian; rather, I tend to agree in broad terms that time travel, especially in the early stages of the series, remains a plot device in Doctor Who rather than an integrally woven element of the drama itself.

What time travel does, however, in the early stories, is begin to weave together a continuity, a coherent world that remains invisible to casual viewers yet imparts the very sense of fanhood that Nussbaum attributes to shows with multi-episode arcs. After a point, the fan assembles a timeline of the Doctor’s existence through asides and seemingly throw-away lines: he’s met historical figures, visited previously unmentioned planets, remembers past visits to locales in the current story, and so on. The Doctor’s ability to have been anywhere, anywhen, via time travel layers the show from its earliest days with the complex nuance that drives fandom.

Without continuity, there is no fandom. It’s important that the First Doctor wields his walking stick from “Marco Polo” throughout his tenure, without its being implicitly mentioned; its continued existence in the show remains necessary on the level of continuity. The characters, the world, had a past and will have a future. Continuity signals to the careful viewer that the creators of the show—the actors, writers, producers, directors, set and costume designers—care deeply about the world the show brings to life, that contemplation will be rewarded with insight. When a show promises continuity and then fails to deliver on it (see Lost), fans who have devoted time and energy to following the show feel slighted.

The use of time travel in early Doctor Who functions as an important literary element of the show, because it is used to further the creation (and maintenance) of a living world: no matter where in time the Doctor travels, no matter how convoluted the timeline gets, he still has his cane (or his scarf or, ah, celery stick).

(Image courtesy of willhowells via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives License.)

Doctor Who Project: The Space Museum

August 6, 2023May 15, 2012 by Chris Baer

All we have to do is wait here until we arrive!

It took fifteen stories for Doctor Who to finally tell a tale about time travelling rather than time travel. Glyn Jones’ “The Space Museum” (Story Production Code Q) begins the series’ occasional (and frequently contradictory) exploration of the intricacies and oddities of actually travelling across time lines as opposed to merely flitting between different times in search of adventures that can easily be filmed using the BBC’s props and costume warehouses.

When we first meet our travellers in this story, they all stand mesmerized before the TARDIS control console, wearing their kit from “The Crusade” along with blank stares; then, after the TARDIS materializes on a rocky world littered with spacecraft of all kinds, they stand in the same place, wearing their uniforms, their trademark cardigans and blazers and jumpers and knee socks. And the Doctor doesn’t seem to think there’s anything quite remarkable about these sartorial shenanigans, nor the fact that Vicki dropped a glass of water that promptly un-breaks itself.

Still, the Doctor’s curiosity is piqued by the collection of spacecraft from different worlds and eras outside, so a little exploration leads to the titular Space Museum, where our heroes leave no footprints and cannot interact with any of the objects on display nor any of the museum’s visitors or guards. After much wandering through the Space Museum’s labyrinthine corridors, all of which are jumbled with random assortments of gadgets, our travellers find the most interesting exhibit of all (yes, even more interesting than the Dalek shell with helpful notation: “Dalek—Planet Skaro”): they find themselves.

And how does our unflappable Doctor deal with this encounter? He becomes positively existential.

Is There a Penalty Box in the TARDIS?: Doctor Who Hockey Jerseys

August 8, 2023April 2, 2012 by Chris Baer

I’m always so very pleased when my keenest interests collide, and never more so than when they happen to be Doctor Who and hockey. Behold, then, the mind-blowing awesomeness that is the Doctor Who Hockey Jersey:

I really don’t know what to say, other than to express my disappointment that the first run has already been spoken for. A second version is apparently on tap for May, so I’ll have to keep my eye on Dave’s Geeky Hockey for that announcement. But which Doctor? I’m certainly a Tom Baker partisan, but my recent experiences with William Hartnell have put me in a First Doctor frame of mind.

(Image courtesy of davesgeekyhockey.com via a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License)

(via Geekadelphia)