Doctor Who Project: The Highlanders

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You should have paid more attention to your history books, Ben!

With the regeneration and the obligatory Dalek story out of the way, the Second Doctor has the opportunity to stand on his own in his sophomore outing, “The Highlanders,” (Story Production Code FF), written by Elwyn Jones and Gerry Davis. Set in the waning moments of the Jacobite rebellion in 1746 Scotland, the story feels like a change of pace from the Doctor’s last two outings, both of which featured futuristic settings, but in truth, it’s not much different in tone from “The Smugglers” some three stories back, complete with shipboard scenes and a change of heart by an English officer. Only this time, Polly is the action hero, not Ben.

“The Highlanders” is widely regarded as the last of the proper “historical” stories on Doctor Who, with actual historical settings and personages with whom the Doctor interacts, a fitting change to go along with the new Doctor and the series’ new, more youthful approach. The show’s original educational remit has been abandoned (along with the prohibition on monsters and such), but for a final outing in the past, “The Highlanders” manages to convey what made the historicals some of the best stories of the show’s run, mostly by ignoring their rules.

Image via https://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/photonovels/highlanders/

History imposes certain limitations on the Doctor. He lives under a self-imposed restriction against changing history—or, at least, Earth history that has happened prior to the 1960s—often causing him to witness rather than engage. In stories such as “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve,” this stay on action works to strong dramatic effect; conversely, as in “The Romans,” the Doctor finds that on occasion he inadvertently brings about the history he is at pains to preserve, in this case inspiring Nero’s burning of Rome. In any event, non-intervention is the watchword in the historicals; what will be, will be, until we get to “The Highlanders,” where the Doctor intervenes quite a bit without one whit of concern for the sanctity of history.

The story centers around the flight to France of the followers of Bonnie Prince Charles, the Stuart Pretender to the English throne, and where in prior historicals the Doctor and his companions would be engaged on the periphery of this historical crux, in “The Highlanders,” they conceive of and implement the plot which enables the flight to take place. Absent the Doctor’s direct intervention, this bit of history does not happen. The story manages to be engaging and action-packed, with pistols going off and sword-fights galore, but, one must say, the First Doctor would have had none of it. The series has changed along with the Doctor. Indeed, could one have imagined William Hartnell’s Doctor in a dress?

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The G-Man Revisited: Mangialardo & Sons

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Back in early 2011, I reviewed the iconic G-Man sub from revered Washington, DC, sandwich shop Mangialardo & Sons on Capitol Hill. My experience wasn’t the greatest, but I have a respect for sandwich places that have managed to survive for decades with essentially the same menu the whole time, so I vowed to go back.

It took me a few years, but I’ve recently been twice more, getting the G-Man each time. This time around, I was in gustatory revels. Where the initial sandwich in 2011 was indifferently constructed, these recent subs were crafted with care, down to the tight wrapping in butcher’s paper, a dying art form in its own right.

The G-Man from Mangialardo & Sons

At $6.50, this sub was loaded with salami, ham, mortadella, and mozzarella, all of high quality. The roll was decent, though not spectacular, and the toppings were fine and applied judiciously. I’m almost pleased that it’s a thirty-five minute round trip walk to the store from my place, as I could see making this place a habit.

My boon companion speaks highly of both the tuna salad and the meatball subs, so they’re not just a cold cut establishment. The menu isn’t extensive, but they focus on what they do best—putting meat in a roll.

Besides, you have to love a sub shop whose scanned paper take out menu (.pdf) appears to have grease stains on it.

Blue Line to Venus: The Subway Map in Destiny

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If you ever find yourself in the Ishtar Collective on the planet Venus sometime in the far future, you can rest easy that you have several mass transit options available, at least according to Bungie‘s new console game, Destiny.

Destiny Subway Map

A hybrid first-person shooter/role playing game with a shared online game space set in the future, Destiny visits several close-in planets during its twenty-odd mission story campaign, including a terraformed Venus where subway stations apparently don’t need to have names. Computer games, particularly shooters, often use subway maps as set dressing in order to suggest a deeper, wider world, creating an illusion of depth and breadth beyond the narrowly confined channels the developers want you to walk down. A subway map drives home the point that, though now gone, people lived and worked here.

Rather than feeling a sense of a wider world, though, seeing the map just confirms how small and lifeless the game’s world really is. The map serves as a metaphor for the game itself. There’s no subway station nearby to explore, no tunnel network to search through. (A later game level, set on Mars, does have a constrained transit station.) There are hints of more to come in Destiny, of detail under the surface, but it’s just not there. The game simply provides a series of set piece locales with a varied—and quite often beautiful—mise en scène in which to fight aliens and other players. An odd complaint, perhaps, to make of a game billed primarily as a first-person shooter, but it speaks to my slight disappointment with the game, as I wanted it to be a more engrossing and detailed exploration experience than it turned out to be. I was hoping for a faster-paced Fallout 3 rather than a Halo re-skin with random loot drops.

Fallout 3 Subway Map

Fallout 3 provides both a subway map (loosely based on the real Washington, DC, Metrorail map) and the ability to travel to quite a few of the stations via the subway tunnels themselves, but then it is a role playing game with shooter components rather than the reverse. Fallout’s structure encourages such exploration, whereas Destiny herds you from objective to objective. I can’t fault Destiny for not being the game I wanted it to be; I just hoped that the creators of the Marathon series could find a way to combine a cutting-edge first-person shooter with a captivating world that rewards exploration via something to find rather than new things to shoot. Marathon and its sequels, though purely first-person shooters, told a story to those willing to look for it in way Destiny, twenty years later, does not.

Still, I’m enjoying my time with Destiny, even if I can’t get hopelessly lost in the imaginary tunnels of the Venusian Green Line.

Doctor Who Project: The Power of the Daleks

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So he gets himself a new one?

The Doctor might be new, but the foe is not. To usher in Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor, David Whitaker’s “The Power of the Daleks” (Story Production Code EE) relies on the everyone’s favorite aliens to ease the fledgling Time Lord (and the audience) into the new era. Viewers uncertain about William Hartnell’s replacement could still be expected to tune in for the Daleks, last seen some ten months prior. But, as is standard with Dalek stories, we do not see one until the end of the very first episode, leaving room for Ben and Polly to ask questions of this interloper, whose entire appearance and demeanor have changed.

Care is taken to reassure the viewer that there is a strong continuity between manifestations, particularly with a shot of Hartnell’s visage when Troughton looks into a mirror. The Doctor rummages through a chest and pulls out objects from past adventures, such as a dagger from Saladin and, ominously, a chunk of metal that causes him to mutter, “Extermination!” Oddly, though, he does not refer to himself as the Doctor once in the entire story, even referring to the Doctor in the third person during the first episode when asking if the Doctor kept a diary.

Image via https://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/photonovels/power/

Viewership figures (as reported in Wood and Miles, About Time 2), come in at nearly eight million per episode for the six-part story, far stronger than those for recent stories like “The Smugglers” (less than five million per) and even “The Tenth Planet” (starting at five and a half million and peaking at seven and a half million as Hartnell exits). The audience, clearly, accepted Patrick Troughton, but do Ben and Polly accept the Second Doctor as the Doctor?

Polly does, almost immediately; her concern is whether this Doctor is so different that he will not want them along. Ben takes somewhat longer to warm to the idea. Clearly, this new figure knows his way around the TARDIS, flicking open the door switch without looking, but Ben calls him out for not checking the monitors to ascertain if it’s safe to leave. The Doctor drilled that notion into all his companions’ heads; if this strange figure doesn’t even bother, how could he be the Doctor? But the reply puts Ben rather in his place:

Oxygen density 172. Radiation nil. Temperature 86. Strong suggestion of mercury deposits. Satisfied, Ben? Now are you two coming or are you not?

The regeneration (a phrase not used in this story) is explained, broadly, as a function of the TARDIS. The exact phrasing—”I’ve been renewed. It’s part of the TARDIS. Without it, I couldn’t survive.”—leaves open the possibility that the Doctor’s life force is connected to the TARDIS not just for regeneration but for his very existence itself, bringing a hint of mystery to the ship that we haven’t seen since “Inside the Spaceship” back in the first season.

Image via https://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/photonovels/power/

If “The Power of the Daleks” is known for anything, though, it should not be for the difficult task of selling the first regeneration as much as for making the Daleks scary again. An empire of Daleks can be (and has been) played for laughs; one Dalek is frankly terrifying.

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Continental Drift: End of Empire 1744-1782 (Compass Games)

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My wargaming tastes skew decidedly modern, with the vast majority of my collection covering conflicts from the First World War forward. And yet, something about End of Empire: 1744-1782, the latest offering from Compass Games, covering the battles of the final five decades of British domination of North America, grabbed my attention.

The Battle of Quebec

Based on William Marsh’s earlier Command magazine game of the same name, End of Empire presents an operational-level view of King George’s War, the French and Indian War, and the American Revolution, plus assorted minor tiffs of the era. Two full-sized maps, linked horizontally, provide coverage from the Eastern seaboard west to the Mississippi and Lake Huron. Four and a half 5/8″ countersheets with striking graphics round out the handsome boxed package, which retails at about $100.

Recently, I had the opportunity to take two of the smaller introductory scenarios out for a spin with regular opponent (and all-around good guy) Mike Vogt at one of our game sessions at Labyrinth Games in Washington, DC. We played the Invasion of Canada scenario and also the War of Jenkin’s Ear scenario, both with a limited number of units and a short time frame. Our experience was mixed.

Leadership sits at the heart of the game system. Most units are severely constrained in their abilities unless stacked with a leader, who himself needs to pass an initiative die roll to do anything other than sit in bivouac on a given turn. While representative of the era’s command-and-control capabilities, a string of poor rolls can leave a player in a dire (or bored) situation. Mike’s Americans in the Canada scenario burned almost half the game in an immobile state, and in Jenkin’s Ear, we basically just rolled dice over and over for thirteen blessedly-brief turns until someone had a chance to move. The need for effective leadership also leads to giant stacks under the leaders with strong initiative. Again, likely representative of the historical reality, but the effect is odd for gamers used to maps filled with counters rather than dueling Death Star stacks.

For Jenkins and his ear!

I admire systems that foil player plans and prevent omniscience from becoming omnipotence, but for playability’s sake, there needs to be a middle ground. Our sense was that the system buckles a bit with smaller scenarios—the larger scenarios, covering forty to fifty turns and with hefty unit allocations, likely smooth out poor initiative results. We’re hoping to find out by taking the full American Revolution out for a spin via PBeM using the VASSAL module, thoughtfully approved by Compass. I do appreciate the inclusion of the shorter scenarios, if only so that I can claim to have gamed one of the decisive battles of the War of Jenkin’s Ear, complete with a thwarted Spanish amphibious invasion of the Florida coast.

End of Empire stands out as a near-definitive operational-level study of the conflicts of the British Empire in North America. Compass has already demonstrated exceptional support for the title, not only through the VASSAL module but also by sending out mounted errata counters to customers at no cost and providing additional scenarios and rules updates online. Very few games deserve second editions; End of Empire is one of them, and I’m happy to have this non-modern outlier in my collection.

Doctor Who Project: William Hartnell Retrospective

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Doctor Who Project: William Hartnell Retrospective

Over twenty-eight stories, spanning three years and four seasons, William Hartnell was not the First Doctor; he was, simply, the Doctor. As such, he played a more significant contemporary role in Doctor Who than his predecessors, if only because the actors who followed were understood to be interchangeable, transient, and ultimately fleeting. Viewers in the mid-’60s, tuning in to the BBC for this show ostensibly pitched to children, had no idea that there would be a Second Doctor, let alone a Twelfth. Hartnell was it.

And, at the end of “The Tenth Planet,” he is gone.

The cliffhanger, with Hartnell’s face dissolving into Patrick Troughton’s, takes place not at the end of a season but at the end of the fourth season’s second story. Only a week of waiting was required for the transition to be explained (and, hopefully, accepted). The change-over did not take place in a media vacuum; viewers knew what was happening behind the scenes even as it occurred, though perhaps not to the extent that William Hartnell had become progressively weaker and, to credit the tales, cantankerous. But all the exposition in the world matters little if the character does not live on in the new actor, and that basic characterization, that ur-Doctor, passed from iteration to iteration, comes from William Hartnell’s portrayal of the Doctor.

So what core attributes derive from Hartnell’s time as the Doctor?

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