Science Fiction

Doctor Who Project: The Keys of Marinus

by

Now, now! Twist the dials!

The First Doctor and his companions, having left China behind, find themselves once more at the mercy of the wonky time mechanism in the TARDIS, arriving on a glass sand beach surrounded by acid seas. Over those seas and far away are the titular Keys of Marinus, four of which this fab foursome will be coerced into finding.

Much like the preceeding “Marco Polo,” Terry Nation’s “The Keys of Marinus” (Story Production Code E) is a sweeping epic of a story, stretching a simple “fetch and carry” plot over six episodes. Four Keys must be found, each in a different location on the planet Marinus and each accompanied by a different type of story. Finding the first Key involves psychological suspense, with a struggle to separate reality from illusion. And there are brains in jars.

Doctor Who 005 (1964) Hartnell - Keys Of Marinus4 on flickr.com by Père Ubu via a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license

The second Key is in an overgrown laboratory with violent plant life, and in finding it, Ian and Barbara undergo a horror-type encounter with eerie whispering from creeping vines. To find the third Key, Ian, Susan, Barbara, and two new helpers run around a frozen waste in an action episode, fending off wolves, a burly trapper, and ice warriors who come to life when heated up. And the acquisition of the fourth Key requires solving a murder mystery that is nowhere near as puzzling as the very awkward jump between episodes four and five, when we go from Ian escaping the trapper’s hut to Ian being knocked out in a vault with no explanation.

Read more

To Boldly Go Beneath the Tree: The Star Trek Bridge Play Set

by

Über-Blog Boing Boing points out that one of the two most brilliant toys ever to be deposited beneath a Christmas tree has been re-issued:

The Star Trek Bridge playset was, hands down, the best toy I owned as a child. I played with it for approximately 10,000 hours. Especially the whirly-twirly transporter cubicle. I loved the psychedelic cardboard viewscreens, the tippy chairs and furniture, the stick-on UI for same that was as inscrutable and ridiculous as the authentic show computers.

Apparently these figures and the play set have been available for a year or so, but this is the first I’ve seen of the toy since, well, longer than I care to admit.

The Starship Enterprise bridge play set beamed down to my Christmas in, I think, 1976, and I have photographic evidence to prove that I actually received this amazing gift.

Set Phasers on Fun!

That’s right. Not just one, but two goateed Klingons! No waiting to beat up on a bad guy for Kirk and Spock—they each had one to deal with.

It’s interesting to note that the play set came out several years after the end of the Original Series in 1969. These action figures and accompanying props were tied rather to the Animated Series of the early 1970’s, or at least drew on the audience that the Animated Series was sustaining.

Read more

Be Seeing You

by

Be Seeing You “Who are you?”
“The new Number Two.”
“Who is Number One?”
“You are Number Six.”

Patrick McGoohan passed away yesterday at the age of 80. He will long be remembered as No. 6, the eponymous Prisoner kidnapped and deposited in the Village after retiring from his life as a spy.

From the story concept to the unforgettable visual design, McGoohan’s The Prisoner remains a landmark television show, one of those rare series that extends the medium beyond its boundaries.

If you haven’t yet experienced the brilliance of The Prisoner, AMC provides feeds of all seventeen episodes, to promote their somewhat blasphemous re-make of the series.

He was never a number; he was always a free man.

The New Doctor is . . . Who?

by

Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7808697.stmAfter months of speculation about the next regeneration of Doctor Who, the BBC today announced that Matt Smith will claim the coveted role of the wandering Gallifreyan.

Um, Doctor Who?

The youngest actor to play the lead role in Doctor Who, Smith follows on the heels of David Tennant, who will be stepping out of the role after some specials to air in 2009 and early 2010. Per the BBC article,

Piers Wenger, head of drama at BBC Wales, said that as soon as he had seen Smith’s audition he “knew he was the one”.

“It was abundantly clear that he had that ‘Doctor-ness’ about him,” he said. “You are either the Doctor or you are not.”

I must confess that I was hoping for a female Doctor this time around, if only for the story line possibilities. Every new Doctor must build on the work of his or her predecessors while imbuing the role with something special, something new. I suppose skewing younger will bring a fresh take to the role, but the Doctor is, after all, 900-odd years old.

The very first Doctor, William Hartnell, was in his mid-50s when he stepped through the TARDIS doors. The Doctor is definitely not young at heart—the Doctor is capable of deep, dangerous emotions that betray his age and the scars of time.

I trust that Steven Moffat, the new show runner from 2010 on, will remember that what a younger actor brings to the show is energy, not youth.

(Image from BBC)

Who Knows "Who"?

by

After forty-odd years of being on television and in popular culture, Dr. Who still requires an introduction, it seems.

The Tardis, by recurrence, via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike license

In the July 21, 2008, issue of The New Yorker (the one with all the cover fracas, in fact), Benjamin Wallace-Wells pens an article about Garrett Lisi’s quest for a Theory of Everything, noting that the good Doctor can be a soothing respite for an introverted physicist and his partner:

The weekend I visited, Lisi and Baranyk were getting ready for a party in Reno, forty minutes away, to which they’d been invited by someone Lisi met on a ski lift, and for which they were dressing up as giant rabbits. But most nights they stayed in and cooked. They sometimes watched videotapes of the British science-fiction show “Doctor Who,” but they preferred board games.

Has the Doctor not penetrated sufficiently into public consciousness that the show can be introduced simply as Doctor Who, with the expectation that it will be understood? Or will it always require an appositive to provide needed context for those who might otherwise think some obscure medical drama were being watched?

Perhaps these are just the grumbles of a niche fan who cannot understand his favorite show being relegated to late-night PBS airings. After all, one doesn’t bother to explain Star Wars as “the American science-fiction film based loosely on Joseph Campbell’s work” or Harry Potter as “the British children’s series, loved by adults, about a boy wizard.” Or perhaps it’s just good journalism to provide explanations for anything that might be unclear to your widest possible audience. Let’s go with that.

I’ll have to make a more thorough search of The New Yorker’s archives to see how the show is mentioned, if ever before, in its pages. The online archive is less-than-full-featured, and I despair of installing the kludgy, proprietary interface for the complete DVD set (which I treasure nonetheless), but we all make sacrifices for the Doctor.

(Image courtesy of recurrence, via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike License.)

Game Preview: Lensman (or Return of the Retro Rockets)

by

From io9 comes news that a wargame based, sort of, on E.E. Smith’s Lensman space opera series, will be republished in a tidied up version. Originally published by Phil Pritchard in 1969, Lensman features multiple levels of play, from basic conquest to full-blown exploration and expansion:

Lensman provides three versions, each more complex and detailed than the last. Game 1 is a fun, quick game that plays in a few hours. Game 2 is a longer game with exploration, industrialization, production and lots of combat. Game 3 is the most complex version with tactical combat in deep space or in star systems uniquely generated for each game.

Most interesting is the design decision to provide two versions of the map and counters, one version keeping the essential look of the original and another updating the graphics to more contemporary standards. I assume that the map and counters will be double-sided, with one version on each side.

Playtest Lensman counters, taken from https://web.archive.org/web/20080523084920/http://www.lensmangame.com/ppl-newgraphics.html

I suppose that’s one solution to the age-old debate between NATO symbols and figures on wargame counters, though I’m fairly sure there’s not an established symbology for interstellar dreadnoughts at present. I’m partial to the “retro” version, if only because it allows me to imagine the dreadnought’s appearance myself.

No firm ETA or pre-ordering information on the Lensman game site as of yet, but the world needs more science fiction wargames, so I’ll be monitoring this one.

(Via io9.com; image from Phil Pritchard’s Lensman)