Science Fiction – Page 32

The New Doctor is . . . Who?

August 27, 2023January 3, 2009 by Chris Baer

Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7808697.stm After 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"?

January 25, 2022July 30, 2008 by Chris Baer

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

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)

September 14, 2023July 25, 2008 by Chris Baer

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)

Level 58 Time Lord: Envisioning a Doctor Who MMORPG

January 25, 2022June 23, 2008 by Chris Baer

One of the ways to reach Movement Point is to type “doctor who mmorpg” into a search engine, owing to our twin fascinations with Dr. Who and gaming here. This site doesn’t show up until the third or fourth page on that search, though, so you have to be pretty desperate for news about a potential Dr. Who Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game to click through to here. And yet my site stats indicate that someone did.

I can understand the desire. Over forty years, Dr. Who‘s writers and producers have populated the show’s more-or-less coherent universe with plenty of planets to explore, characters to revisit, and enemies to defeat yet again. MMOs, and role playing games generally, put the player into the story universe, to shape it and become a part of it, a form of “active” fan fiction. Millions log in to fight dragons daily; it’s not such a stretch to imagine gamers going online to take down Daleks.

So what, then, would a Dr. Who MMORPG look like?

Becoming One with Blake’s 7

January 25, 2022April 24, 2008 by Chris Baer

Over on science fiction mega-blog-site io9.com, there’s a recent article on “How to Get into Rebel Space Opera Blake’s 7” that addresses the emotional and psychological aspects of attuning yourself to this slightly quirky show’s worldview:

Be willing to suspend your disbelief a bit in the first season. Blake and his crew have a run of good luck that’s pretty hard to swallow, including stumbling on the greatest spaceship in known space and later inheriting the most awesome computer ever built. Just run with it, because it sets up some great stories later.

Yet another of Terry Nation‘s creations, Blake’s 7 does take some getting used to, as the heroes, broadly taken, are really anti-heroes determined to overthrow the oppressive Federation at pretty much any cost. It’s widely considered one of the very first of the “arc” science-fiction shows that focus on character development over a pre-planned story line (like Babylon 5), rather than being purely episodic in nature, where one episode’s events have little if anything to do with the next (like the original Star Trek).

The io9 article does not, however, address how to actually get Blake’s 7 in DVD Region 1 countries, as they have not been released with our region coding, other than a wink and nod at the torrent route in the comments. Region 2 has the full series, and both PAL and NTSC video tapes were produced. As far back as 2004, there were plans to produce Region 1 DVDs, but there is very little information available about why the deal or project fell through. Some sites claim to have region free versions of the show on DVD for sale, but you don’t have to be Orac to realize that there’s something strange going on there.

I realize that Blake’s 7 will always be a niche show in the United States, and it’s certainly the rights holders’ prerogative to not find a way to take my money, but it would be a shame to have this unique show stuck in the proverbial film can for American fans.

(Image courtesy of Unloveable via a Creative Commons Attribution License.)

First Impressions: Torchwood

April 9, 2017March 28, 2008 by Chris Baer

CSI: Cardiff. I’d like to see that. They’d be measuring the velocity of a kebab.

I realize that I’m coming somewhat late to the party, but I’ve just begun watching the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, which recently came out on Region 1 DVD.

Featuring Captain Jack Harkness, one of the Doctor’s occasional companions, and his band of alien chasers and tech scavengers, Torchwood is a much grittier and mature show than its parent program. It’s refreshing to watch science fiction with a bit of an edge, particularly in the television/episodic format. I often wonder what a show like Babylon 5 would have been like without the particular strictures of network television.

There’s a fine line between gratuitous and developmental, though. When a show pushes typical boundaries to tell a story more fully, then adding a more adult “sheen” serves a purpose. But adding adult contexts to a show merely to titillate cheapens the storytelling and the show in general. Does Torchwood burnish or tarnish the whole Doctor Who franchise?