Movement Point – Page 28 – Gaming, Science Fiction, Culture, and Such

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…

Doctor Who Project: Terror of the Autons

July 23, 2023January 21, 2017 by Chris Baer

We Time Lords don’t care to be conspicuous.

Misery loves company, and Season Eight of Doctor Who provides our exiled Time Lord with a fellow Earth-bound refugee in the form of the Master. Robert Holmes’ season opening “Terror of the Autons” (Story Production Code EEE) introduces a renegade Time Lord, the Master (Roger Delgado), who will appear in all five stories this season, essentially creating the very first story arc in the series. Holmes, a regular writer for Doctor Who by now, reprises his Nestenes to, ah, spearhead a season once more, but everyone, from Third Doctor Jon Pertwee and new companion Jo Grant (Katy Manning) through to the Brigadier and the plastic fantastic Autons, takes a back seat to the Master.

The Master seeks to bring the Nestenes back to Earth so they can conquer it; the Doctor likes the planet and that’s evidently reason enough for the Master to help disembodied plastic entities take it over. Their shared animosity goes back quite far, and in several lines of dialogue, Holmes provides more back story for the Doctor, vis-à-vis the Master, than he has had in the series to date. We learn that the Doctor holds a lesser degree in Cosmic Science than the Master, a failing the Doctor attributes to being a late starter, and as with the Time Meddler, the Doctor uses a lesser mark of TARDIS than the Master. We do not learn just why the Master and the Doctor are at odds with one another, but they’ve obviously crossed paths many times before, being quite aware of one another’s weaknesses.

Typically the Doctor has some encounter with the main villain before the story is too far along, but not here. So strong is Roger Delgado’s presence that he and the Doctor do not even speak until the end of the third of this story’s four episodes, yet one still feels like they are at odds throughout the story. Though Pertwee does get more screen time than Delgado, it’s a close run thing. The producers seem to make up for it by allowing Pertwee to wrestle with, um, a telephone cord.

Perhaps it’s for the best that the Third Doctor has received both a new companion and a new foil, as the main thrust of the plot revolves around invasion via plastic daffodils, or, to use the slightly more menacing Nestene terminology, Autojets. But, still, they’re just yellow plastic flowers, given away in great numbers and for free. And they’re here to take over the world.

Winter Offensive 2017 After Action Report

July 23, 2023January 15, 2017 by Chris Baer

Certain occurrences trigger a realization that another year has passed, making one wonder just where the time has gone. The swallows return to Capistrano, the bulls have their fun in Pamplona, and, for wargamers of a particular bent, the Comfort Inn in Bowie, MD, opens up three conference rooms and hosts Winter Offensive. This year’s running of the gamers has come and gone again, with hosts Multi-Man Publishing putting on yet another sterling Advanced Squad Leader tournament and general purpose gaming cavalcade.

Winter Offensive 2017

Attendance this year seemed slightly down from the 2015 peak of 165 gamers, with no exhortations needed on prime day Saturday to free up table space. A minor weather scare might have dampened attendance somewhat, and with no marquee MMP product being released this year, the crowds that typically attend in conjunction with such releases also failed to materialize. But the room was still nicely packed, and while the fair majority of gamers were there to play ASL, wargamers interested in other MMP product lines, like the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War, the Standard Combat Series, and the Operational Combat Series, as well as other wargames, took up a good third of the table space by my rough estimation. It’s no longer a safe assumption that anyone you speak with at Winter Offensive will be an Advanced Squad Leader player only (if, indeed, at all!).

My gaming weekend started out with an exhaustive playtest of Red Storm: The Air War over Central Germany, 1987, an operational air combat game being designed for GMT Games by Doug Bush, one of my long-time gaming buddies and an all-around good guy. We tested one of the larger scenarios in the game, portraying a large NATO air strike on several Warsaw Pact airfields deep in East Germany.

Red Storm Playtest at Winter Offensive 2017; playtest art/not final art

Defended by a massive belt of anti-air missiles, the airfields were a tough target, one that took the full complement of Doug’s considerable forces some time to pick their way through. The game system features many rules for air-to-ground and ground-to-air combat, including electronic countermeasures and anti-radar missiles, and we used them all in this one. The scenario depicted (all art is playtest and provisional; not final art) falls on the more complex side of what Red Storm has to offer; a full range of scenarios covers actions from small fighter engagements and bombing missions through to night paratrooper insertions. Several people stopped by to ask questions and watch a few minutes of gameplay, and I think this game has quite a bit of appeal—lots of interesting and difficult decision making, cool hardware, and a well-tested game system chassis underneath.

Saturday’s main event fell on the ASL side of the equation, as Mike Vogt and I sampled 159 “White Tigers,” a classic scenario pitting Japanese attackers against Gurkha defenders in the midst of an unrelenting rainstorm near Imphal, India. Mike, another of my very good gaming buddies and another all-around good guy, took the IJA forces with the task of occupying buildings. In my defense, I had some stout Indian soldiers and, as importantly, the services of a very flooded river that served to channel the attack into three main avenues.

159 White Tigers at Winter Offensive 2017

The Japanese made good progress on two of the three fronts, Mike’s progress helped somewhat by a few of my attacks turning his cardboard soldiers into berserkers who could run through the withering fire covering the most critical chokepoint on the map. My dice were quite hot throughout, a situation Mike bore with good grace, and by the end of the ten turn scenario, the Japanese had a foothold on the final two buildings they needed to secure the victory. But time just ran out, with the remaining Gurkhas holding on for a very narrow win.

Truly, one of the best ASL experiences I’ve had in a long time—great opponent, tense scenario, and a visual treat as well. Matches like this one encourage me to try to play more of this unparalleled game, about as close to a resolution as I’ve made so far in this new year.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Winter Offensive without the side gaming, and I managed to fit in two matches of group favorite Battlestar Galactica and three of The Dragon & Flagon, a relatively new fantasy bar fight game that seemed to be a big hit (pun slightly intended) with everyone. Many old friends were in attendance, too, and having the gang back together just makes a good gaming convention even better.

Battlestar Galactica at Winter Offensive 2017

My thanks, as always, to Perry Cocke, Brian Youse, and the rest of the team at MMP for another successful Winter Offensive, and to my gaming compadres for a great weekend of gaming. It might not keep getting bigger, year after year, but it certainly seems to keep getting better.

Memories on Ice: The Philadelphia Flyers at 50 by Jay Greenberg

July 24, 2023December 25, 2016 by Chris Baer

In celebration of their fifty year anniversary, the Philadelphia Flyers have published a handsome commemorative hardback book, The Philadelphia Flyers at 50, by Jay Greenberg. The title is actually a bit of a misnomer, as the book focuses almost exclusively on the last twenty seasons of Flyers hockey, the first thirty having been covered previously in Greenberg’s Full Spectrum.

Indeed, there’s simply that much history, that much tradition to cover, and here Greenberg explores each season from 1996 through to the present in incredible depth. There’s not much in the way of filler in this nearly six hundred page book. Between Greenberg’s two tomes, you have a definitive, richly illustrated history of the Orange and Black.

Though perhaps there’s an understandable tendency towards the hagiographic in any authorized history, I appreciate Greenberg’s willingness to look critically at the team, particularly several of the years that the Flyers spent in the non-playoff wilderness during the past two decades. No one gets much of a pass for poor trades, lousy performance, or uninspired coaching—there’s a generous helping of tough love doled out, if you will. And love there is, as Greenberg’s passion for the project shows through the carefully researched work. It’s a must-read for every Philadelphia Flyers fan, and between the profiles of the top fifty Flyers heroes and the detailed explication of seasons past, peppered through with insights from players and staff, even the most knowledgeable supporter of the Flyers will find some new tidbit or anecdote.

The Philadelphia Flyers at 50 by Jay Greenberg

To that end, it’s inexplicable that the book does not seem to be referenced at all on the Flyers website amidst all the other anniversary materials. Rest assured that the normal online book retailers have copies. The Philadelphia Flyers at 50 deserves a place on the bookshelf of every fan of the Philadelphia Flyers.

Doctor Who Project: Inferno

July 17, 2023December 8, 2016 by Chris Baer

I slipped sideways.

The Time Lords may have banished the Doctor to Earth, but they didn’t specify which Earth precisely, allowing Don Houghton’s “Inferno” (Story Production Code DDD) to transport our time traveller to a parallel Earth where the biggest difference is that the Brigadier has no mustache. Oh, and in this other dimension England happens to be fascist, too.

The story starts innocently enough, with the Doctor mooching nuclear power from a massive drilling project that aims to tap “Stahlman’s Gas,” a powerful energy source trapped just under Earth’s crust. He’s bent on jump-starting the TARDIS console, which he’s had installed in a pre-fab garage near the drilling site. Apparently he believes that with an independent power source, he can use the console itself to travel through space and time, defeating the Time Lords’ ignition lock. And it works, after a fashion, briefly propelling him, well, somewhere, and allowing Jon Pertwee to ham it up for the cameras again during a scene of dematerialization gone awry.

As for the drilling project, the stage seems set for a standard bureaucratic showdown between an officious administrator and a scientist bent on fulfilling his life’s ambitions, as seen most recently in “Doctor Who and the Silurians.” Almost immediately, the dangers of the drilling project manifest themselves when a rigger is exposed to a green goo leaking from a drill pipe. The viscous viridian substance rapidly de-evolves him into a slavering, primordial being (shades, again, of “Doctor Who and the Silurians,” where encounters with the old lizards trigger a mental retrogression, with hints of the sentient seaweed from “Fury from the Deep” for good measure). Once the lead scientist, Stahlman, accidentally infects himself with the goo, the story seems set on its rails: the goo is dangerous and threatens everyone, so naturally the Doctor will step in and stop the drilling. But after being confronted with evidence of some strangeness afoot, including a a vial of the goo itself and Stahlman’s increasing derangement, the Doctor petulantly focuses his efforts instead on getting more power for his pet project.

And the goo isn’t even the real problem. In a neat bit of subverted expectations, Houghton manages to make green-skinned pseudo-werewolves into mere set dressing, because the planet is about to explode.