doctor who – Page 20 – Movement Point

A Meal Fit for a Doctor: Alton Brown’s Fish Sticks and Custard

January 20, 2023October 23, 2016 by Chris Baer

Under ordinary circumstances, I would keep my distance from this particular dish, given that I’m about as far from pescatarian as is humanly possible. But Alton Brown‘s recipe for Fish Sticks and Custard, from his recently released (and beautifully photographed) cookbook, EveryDayCook, combines my abiding appreciation for Alton Brown’s approach to food with my undying love of all things Doctor Who.

Fish Sticks and Custard from Alton Brown's EveryDayCook

To explain briefly, just understand that the Eleventh Doctor manifested a craving for this particular dish upon his regeneration, a telling and touching scene involving the young Amy Pond, and Alton Brown, as a card-carrying Whovian, saw fit to include this version in his cookbook:

My version is different in that it’s actually tasty…even if you don’t have two hearts and live in a blue box.

Note, too, that the dish is photographed upon the Fourth Doctor’s scarf. A nice homage to Doctor Who indeed.

It’s interesting to note that, up to the current point in the Doctor Who Project (Season Seven, Story Two, “Doctor Who and the Silurians,”), food has played a very minor role in the series. There’s been the odd poisoned coffee and more than a few cuppas, but as yet, no stories with much gustatory focus. Indeed, thus far in the re-watch, I’m not sure if we’ve even seen the Doctor eat anything besides a very hard candy. And, as the events of “The Gunfighters” bear out, that wasn’t good eats at all…

(Image from Alton Brown’s EveryDayCook.)

Doctor Who Project: Doctor Who and the Silurians

January 12, 2025October 12, 2016 by Chris Baer

It’s a bit hard to accept one monster, let alone two.

The Third Doctor and UNIT go hand in hand. Far from being a harmonious relationship, however, the Doctor often finds himself at odds with his putative employer, and as Malcolm Hulke’s oddly titled “Doctor Who and the Silurians” (Story Production Code BBB) demonstrates, UNIT and the military-bureaucratic mindset it represents serve as a second foe more often than not, one occasionally as deadly and bloodthirsty as the monster of the week.

From a narrative perspective, the bureaucratic bumbling that prevents UNIT from mustering sufficient resources to answer threats helps drive, and pad, all the stories of the UNIT era, here allowing this tale of a reptilian civilization that has slumbered, and now awakens, in a cave network under Britain to reach seven episodes.

But more than that, this inertial force helps define the Third Doctor quite clearly, and consequently we have a more distinct understanding of his essential character more quickly than we did with either of his predecessors. For while the Doctor has always been disdainful of the martial mindset, the force-before-reason mentality, this story cements the Third Doctor as a scientist first and foremost, with no patience for rules and no qualms about subverting his relationship with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and the military organization he represents if needed to save lives.

Neatly, Hulke provides the Doctor with a Silurian counterpart who shares his efforts to broker a truce between the former masters of the planet and the current inhabitants, and the nameless reptilian leader has his own version of the Brigadier to contend with. This one, however, has the ability to kill with a third eye at the top of his head and desires the complete eradication of the “apes” infesting the Earth; our Brigadier just has a mustache and a little portable radio. But in the end, the Brigadier is the one who oversees a mass extermination.

Is There a Doctor in the Deck? Doctor Who: The Card Game Classic Doctors Edition (Cubicle 7)

July 24, 2023September 25, 2016 by Chris Baer

Sometimes, it’s like they make games especially with me in mind. Doctor Who mixed with Martin Wallace? I’m intrigued.

Doctor Who Card Game Classic Doctors Edition

Doctor Who: The Card Game Classic Doctors Edition (Cubicle 7, 2016) should, on paper, be my most favorite game ever, combining my love of all things Who with an appreciation for the designs Wallace comes up with. And yet, I can’t help but feel that the theme here is pasted onto a fairly simple filler game.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with a filler game to take up the time between plays of more elaborate games, but this license deserves something grander than reducing the Doctor (all of them from the First through the Eighth) to a numerical value to be played against enemies (Daleks, Cybermen, and other old-school baddies like the Macra (!) and the Sensorites) who are likewise just numbers.

Doctor Who Card Game Classic Doctors Edition

Some of the companions and other cards do have special abilities that attempt to bring some of the show’s unique flavor to bear, but on the whole, the game would not be changed if the cards were patterned after Babylon 5 or Space: 1999. The experience just doesn’t make for very compelling gameplay once the novelty of pairing up Nyssa and the Third Doctor against the Primords at the Temple of Yetaxa wears off. It’s a fine game, but not much more.

Perhaps I’m splitting hairs, as any focus on the original run of Doctor Who makes me happy (even as I cringe at thinking of it as “classic Who“). The components are up to standards, with nice quality playing cards and a handful of decently thick counters. I’ll certainly throw it in the bag for a filler, and if even one person is intrigued by the original series, then the game has succeeded in that regard.

One can only wish, though, for a Doctor Who game on the scale and complexity of Wallace’s A Study in Emerald. Now that would be a thing of beauty.

Doctor Who Project: Spearhead from Space

July 26, 2023September 8, 2016 by Chris Baer

My dear fellow, how nice to see you again.

Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder. Or hearts, perhaps, in the case of Doctor Who.

Six months elapsed from the end of Season Six to the beginning of Season Seven, making Jon Pertwee’s debut story as the Third Doctor, “Spearhead from Space” (Story Production Code AAA) by series regular Robert Holmes, a long awaited reunion for viewers indeed. And what a change they found when they tuned in. A new Doctor and the use of color footage, to be sure, plus a new companion in Caroline John’s Liz Shaw, but also a vigorous sense of confidence in the storytelling that manifests itself in a four episode story filled with fast pacing and dynamic directing by Derek Martinus. Never did the camera zoom in on people in various stages of horror quite so often as in this story. Shame the Doctor spends the first two episodes in bed, though.

And the cause of this extreme terror? A plastics factory run by aliens has been turning out plastic automatons, none of which are quite as terrifying as their usual line of work, plastic dolls. The establishing scenes in the factory, with conveyor belts lines with disembodied plastic baby heads, must surely count as some of the most disturbing in the series’ history.

The intended monsters in the story, the Autons, derive their menace from their nearness to human beings, humanoid without quite being human due to the slight angularity of facial features and the overall blankness in the visage. The effect harkens to the original, Mondasian Cybermen, whose obvious similarity to human beings causes a degree of ontological dread that the later versions simply lack. The Autons function quite similarly to Cybermen as well, lacking any affect or individuality and obeying the orders of a centralized hierarchy. And wouldn’t you know it, they want to conquer the Earth, too, only while wearing blue coveralls and cravats.

Doctor Who Project: Patrick Troughton Retrospective

July 24, 2023July 19, 2016 by Chris Baer

In many ways, Patrick Troughton is both the “missing” Doctor and the most important Doctor of them all.

When Patrick Troughton took over the role from William Hartnell in the famous dissolve shot at the end of “The Tenth Planet,” he proved that Doctor Who as a concept could last beyond the tenure of a single Doctor. A failure of the audience to embrace this change in actors—indeed, this change in the very nature of the character itself, from wizened curmudgeon to puckish raconteur—would have ended the series for all time. It is to Troughton’s credit that he succeeded quite resoundingly, becoming the Second Doctor, not the Final Doctor.

And yet, he’s nearly unknown to modern viewers of Doctor Who, perhaps remembered for his pipe flute and iconic showdown with the Cybermen on Telos but not recognized as the Doctor who fully advocated aggressive intervention when necessary to fight evil in all its guises, who allowed people to underestimate him (to their own chagrin and, often, peril), who managed to combine slapstick with seriousness. He’s merely that “other” black-and-white era Doctor, the one without the scarf or the car or the celery stick. It’s a status worth changing.

Doctor Who Project: The War Games

July 24, 2023July 4, 2016 by Chris Baer

I had every right to leave.

Doctor Who begins here. Or, perhaps more accurately, the Doctor begins here.

If “The Tomb of the Cybermen” provides the essential formula for what has come to be understood as a “proper” Doctor Who story, then Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke’s ten episode opus, “The War Games,” (Story Production Code ZZ) establishes the character of the Doctor for all time to come. For here, we learn that the Doctor is a Time Lord, and a renegade at that, on the run in a stolen TARDIS.

The Doctor’s people had been hinted at, if not named, back in Dennis Spooner’s “The Time Meddler,” with the Meddling Monk possessing a TARDIS of his own, and a sense of their prevailing ethos of non-interference comes through via the Monk’s counter-example. The Doctor expresses utter shock, on a moral level, not merely at the intended effects of the Monk’s mucking about with history but even more so at the very thought of any direct, intentional interference at all. “The War Games” explains why the Doctor feels that way, even as he is hoist upon his own interfering petard in the end.

The notion of the Doctor being called to task for his own interference could have been a story all its own; instead, Dicks and Hulke brilliantly weave the Doctor’s growing sense of dread at re-encountering the Time Lords throughout another story about the human propensity for war, with the Time Lords only appearing in the very final episode of the story and the season. It’s a reveal more powerful than any Dalek surfacing from the Thames or Cyberman punching through plastic, because this time, we don’t know if the Doctor will win.