Doctor Who Project: The Myth Makers

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Now come on, start thinking! It’s you against the Doctor now!

After a story (well, an episode/teaser) where the Doctor and his companions aren’t present at all, we have a story where they might as well not be. The real stars of Donald Cotton’s “The Myth Makers” (Story Production Code U) are the Greeks and Trojans: Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Paris, Priam, Cassandra, and Troilus, thanks to a classical British education that made these characters quite readily familiar via the Iliad and the Aeneid.

Long stretches of “The Myth Makers” are given over to the various Greeks and Trojans absent our time travellers, who conveniently separate from one another and then find one another at the worst possible moments to provide some semblance of narrative motion. And the guest actors make the most of their screen time, playing with gusto. This story has perhaps the least dialogue for the main characters of any since “The Crusade.”

But at no point does the viewer have a sense that the Doctor and company are in any danger, because of the assumed familiarity with the underlying story. Not, of course, that even the most casual of viewers would think that they could ever be in real danger—we’re still several stories from the first regeneration and have yet to experience the first companion death—but even the episode cliffhangers lack drama, because everyone knows that the Trojans wheeled the Horse into Troy and were thusly caught unawares by the Greeks. As Vicki herself says to Cassandra, “I don’t have to prophesy. Because as far as I’m concerned, the future has already happened.”

Indeed, the only real danger is to the set, because the actors playing Paris (Barrie Ingham) and Cassandra (Frances White) practically chew the scenery. For a story that ostensibly took some pains towards historic verisimilitude (alas, the footage is missing, leaving only audio recordings), the Greeks and Trojans speak mostly like contemporary Englishmen fresh off the West End stage.

Still, unlike the earlier historicals, where the Doctor inadvertently causes, inspires, or otherwise motivates historical events to occur (Nero’s burning of Rome, the fall of Robespierre), in “The Myth Makers,” the Doctor gives the Greeks the notion to build the Trojan Horse, even though he initially rejects the idea as “some good dramatic device” invented by Homer.

This direct intervention in history, albeit under duress, can, perhaps, be squared with his insistent “hands off” approach formulated in “The Aztecs” by noting that the Doctor here doesn’t change history; he merely sees it through to its “proper” end. The Greeks conquered the Trojans, according to the myths, and just because they conquered the Trojans with the Doctor’s help doesn’t mean that they didn’t always have his help, even though the Doctor gets the idea for the Trojan Horse from stories about the Trojan War written after he helped. Chicken, egg, time, loop . . .

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A Silver Thread: Washington Metro’s New Map

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This past Thursday, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority unveiled the new Metrorail map, featuring the first phase of the soon-to-open Silver Line. The map, thankfully, looks very much like the original, only with the Silver Line threaded in between the Orange and Blue Lines, providing a nice contrast and emphasizing that the Silver Line runs on the main East/West core route for much of its run.

Detail of Final Silver Line Map from https://planitmetro.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Final-Map-without-addresses-07-13-600x671.png

While Metro’s map may not be quite as iconic as the London Underground’s map, the relatively clean look of it is unmistakable at a glance. Even video games set in Washington use riffs on the snaking colored lines to conjure up the map without having to get permission to use the real thing, as in Fallout 3.

Fallout 3 Metro Map

Metro brought the original designer, Lance Wyman, back to revise the map, and according to Metro’s blog, PlanItMetro, he and his design team made the following adjustments:

  • Made street abbreviations consistent
  • Improved the geographic accuracy of the stations where possible
  • New icon for stations that are serviced by three rail lines: the traditional station dot with white extenders
  • Made the rail lines 24% thinner to ensure room for the Silver Line
  • Added the Anacostia National Park
  • Added the Metro Transit Police phone number
  • Added a note that the map is not to scale
  • Lightened the Beltway and jurisdiction borders to improve readability

I’m quite pleased with the final result. There’s a high density of information on the map, but it’s not cluttered at all. One perhaps wishes that the station names didn’t overlap the iconography of the monuments, but that’s a small quibble. I look forward to seeing the full-size versions of the new maps on trains and in stations soon.

(Image via PlanItMetro.)

Beyond that Blue Event Horizon: Frederik Pohl 1919-2013

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Gateway Cover via The Way the Future BlogsIt was with some sadness that I learned this morning of Frederik Pohl’s passing, on his own blog of all places. He was a giant in science fiction, writing prolifically in many forms.

For me, his seminal accomplishment will always be Gateway, with its mysterious spacecraft pre-programmed on journeys to fortune or, more often, doom, and the men and women who risked all to take their chances with them. When I first read it in 1984, my science fiction diet to then had been space operas and little else; now, suddenly, there is deep characterization, a bit of suspense, and a robotic psychiatrist.

I still try to read Gateway once every few years, preferably in the mass-market paperback version I had as a kid. Some books just don’t work in hardback or trade paperback for some reason.

And Pohl wasn’t just a significant writer. His contributions to science fiction, from its relative infancy mid-century to the present, extended into publishing as well. Jo Walton over on Tor.com points out his importance as an editor:

But Pohl was also a truly great editor—he edited Galaxy and If for more than a decade in the sixties. He also edited for Bantam, and bought and published Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (both 1975). He was one of the most imaginative editors the genre has ever seen, always prepared to buy things in new styles and move ahead.

It’s tempting to view his passing as him taking a trip on his own Heechee spacecraft into the unknown, but I get the sense he was too much of a curmudgeon to have appreciated that view, so I’ll just bid a fond farewell and dig up my tattered copy of Gateway instead. That, I think, he would appreciate.

(Image via The Way the Future Blogs)

A New Who: Peter Capaldi is the Twelfth Doctor

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Evil, by Stuart Crawford on flickr.com, via a Creative Commons Attribution/Noncommerical/No Derivatives license.Well, that didn’t take long. A scant two months after announcing that Matt Smith would vacate the role of the Doctor, the BBC has announced that Peter Capaldi will be the next inhabitant of the TARDIS.

Unlike, well, all the new Who actors to play the Doctor, I actually knew of Capaldi’s work prior to the announcement, though solely from his turns on Torchwood and, interestingly, Doctor Who (in “The Fires of Pompeii”). I’m heartened by the fact that an actor with some considerable experience has taken on the role, particularly after the relative neophyte Matt Smith. Though hard to imagine, Capaldi is roughly the same age as William Hartnell when he took on the role of the First Doctor in 1963; and, like Hartnell, Capaldi brings both a dramatic and comedic background to the role.

I don’t find it difficult to see a sharper Doctor in Capaldi, one with a harder edge than Smith or Tennant, closer, indeed to Hartnell, but with some of the impishness of Troughton. I can’t imagine this Doctor being gravitas-deficient.

Time will only tell if showrunner Steven Moffat allows Capaldi to shape the character in an uniquely personal way or if he’ll simply ask Capaldi to parrot some catch-phrase (“Bow ties are allons-y!”) while the younger companion(s) run around chasing some MacGuffin that promises to tie up a season’s worth of loose ends in an utterly unsatisfying and frankly insulting manner.

(Image courtesy of Stuart Crawford via a Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license.)

Road Bites: Bojangles’ Biscuits

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Biscuits every hour of the day! Filled with sausage and other fine meats! That’s road trip worthy right there.

As it turns out, I didn’t actually need to travel south towards Greensboro, North Carolina, to stop at a Bojangles—there’s one in the food court at Union Station in DC. But have you ever been in the food court at Union Station around lunch time? Much simpler to drive six hours for a biscuit fix. Plus, I’m convinced that, much like hoagies and cheesesteaks are best within twenty miles of the Schyukyll River, biscuits get better the further south you go, even if they’re institutionally made.

Besides, I was already in North Carolina on a road trip, and I made sure that one of our first stops was at the Bojangles just off exit 214 on I-40. Super friendly staff (making sure I didn’t miss out on any deals and offers, unlike some places I stopped on this trip) only helped make the experience better. But frankly, for these biscuits, I would have endured surly.

Bojangles Steak Biscuit (left) and Country Ham Biscuit (right)

My culinary companion and I sampled several types of filled biscuits—for some reason, I don’t feel comfortable calling them sandwiches—and the clear winner is the country ham biscuit, two thin slices of salty ham nestled in a fluffy, slightly crumbly biscuit. Any more ham and the saltiness would have overwhelmed the experience, but those two slices brought just the right amount of flavor to the biscuit, which was thus allowed equal play in the taste.

The cajun chicken filet biscuit was acceptable, if a little low on the spice. There was some cajun flavoring that snuck up a few bites in, but it seemed tame to me, and the size of the filet rivaled that of the biscuit itself, making the proportions a bit off kilter. Much better was the steak biscuit, a piece of country-fried steak that found a better fit, proportionally. It might seem slightly odd that you would eat a breaded piece of meat between bread, but frankly, it works.

For actual road trip purposes, these biscuits are not ideal. While not greasy per se, there’s a bit of grease involved in eating them, and one doesn’t want a sheen on the steering wheel. So pull over, go into the restaurant, and eat them. A true road trip doesn’t have a timetable.

Doctor Who Project: Mission to the Unknown

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It is done. The seven great powers of the galaxy are one.

Obviously, far too much time has passed since the Daleks last appeared on Doctor Who in “The Chase,” a whole eight episodes ago. And so, to set up their epic return in the twelve-part “The Daleks’ Master Plan” one story hence, we are treated to Terry Nation’s “Mission to the Unknown” (Story Production Code T/A), a one episode “prologue” also known as the Dalek Cutaway but mostly known because there’s no Doctor in it. At all.

From the start, one imagines “Mission to the Unknown” to be Terry Nation’s vision of the Daleks outside of Doctor Who, with neither the Doctor nor his Companions even mentioned in the episode. The music itself seems a departure from the established series norm, with an excessive use of musical “stings”—quick, crashing, slightly discordant sounds more commonly associated with horror or thriller films.

Opposing the cumbersome pepperpots this time is not a Time Lord but Marc Cory, an agent of Earth’s Space Security Service (also called the Special Security Service in this episode). Had Marc Cory survived the episode, I would have suspected an Earth vs. Dalek spin-off series in the making. But one feels nothing for the deaths of Cory and his unwitting colleagues Garvey and Lowery; they are essentially set dressing.

Ultimately, the episode serves as an info-dump more than a teaser. The actors (Dalek and human alike) fairly stumble over big blocks of text as Terry Nation spends most of the story in expositional mode, setting up the scenario (a thousand years after the last Dalek invasion of Earth) and letting us know what the Daleks have been up to in the intervening years (conquering planets millions of light years away). And now they’re back for another crack at Earth, this time in a great alliance with the galaxy’s six other great powers, noted in the script as Gearon, Trantis, Malpha, Sentreal, Beaus, and Celation. And note, too the black dome of the Dalek Supreme.

As is somewhat typical of early (and, who are we kidding, current) Doctor Who, astronomical terms are thrown around with imprecise abandon. One of the delegates at the Daleks’ alliance meeting, from Malpha, proclaims:

This is indeed an historic moment in the history of the universe. We six from the outer galaxies, joining with a power from the solar system: the Daleks.

Universe, galaxy, solar system? Even the location of the planet Kembel, where the action takes place, is unclear. Cory and his fellows suggest that Earth has a huge galactic network, though, so Earth is no slouch in terms of colonization and, perhaps, conquest.

As with “Galaxy 4” before it, “Mission to the Unknown” no longer exists on film, and given the effects work hinted at in the publicity stills and the script, one hopes fervently that a copy turns up at a jumble sale somewhere after decades in an attic, if only to see the giant headed cone alien walk around.

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