It's nearly Christmas

So almost time for a new Christmas special. I haven't posted much during the last year - no particular reason - so I thought I'd have a look back at what 2010 brought us. Well, I was immensely relieved to find that all the doomsayers were proved completely wrong, and Matt Smith was, right from the word go, demonstrated to be absolutely the perfect choice to play the Doctor. On the evidence of this first year, he's become my favourite Doctor of the modern series. Certainly I admired Eccleston's performance, though I became increasingly disenchanted with the smugness and mockney mugging of Tennant - but Smith comes out of left field and keeps surprising me. He's no doubt been helped by the quality of his episodes. Don't get me wrong, there were terrific scripts in previous seasons, and there were some lesser episodes this year - been overall, Moffat has crafted a story arc of wonderful complexity. I also love the way he took the piss out of RTD's series finales by having all the monsters team up to capture the Doctor - only to pull the rug out from under the whole thing and do something more more clever and intimate for the last episode. So a huge thumbs up from me so far. Let's see what 2011 brings.

Are you getting excited yet?

I am. Ridiculously so. I haven't been as stupidly excited as this since 2005. Just under a week to go until the new series. The trailers look amazing, and Matt Smith has an interesting way of speaking and moving - his diction seems a lot better than David Tennant's, that's always a good sign. I'm just hoping that the trailers aren't giving me a false impression. No, it'll be great!

It's funny, actually, but I seem to be almost spoiler-free for this new series. I'm not a person who goes around seeking out spoilers in any case, but somehow they just seem to drip into your consciousness, especially when you spend any length of time hanging around internet-based fandom. That was certainly the case for the Tennant series, but this time around I don't seem to know anything, other than what's been released in the trailers and so on. Maybe Moffat's less of a publicity whore than Russell Davies was, but they seem to have kept it much closer to their chests this time. It just adds to the sense of building excitement.

I'm supposed to be working on an assignment for this management course I'm doing, but I just can't get my brain in gear, so here I am writing a completely pointless blog entry. Anything to keep me from what I actually should be doing. Oh well... (I've also been working on my Space: 1999 site, and I should have some updates going up on that soon. Yeah, I know, it's about time...)

The End of Time

Blimey! Nearly a year since I last posted anything. So after all that speculation last time, what have I got to say now I've finally seen Matt Smith in action? Well, he's still got legs... hopefully, that applies to the series as well! Seriously, the new series preview looked interesting, and if the vague rumours I've heard are reliable (I tend to avoid large-scale spoilers and set reports) then it looks like Moffatt might be taking the show in some exciting directions. Let me get this straight, I'm not expecting some huge shift in style - the show's a success and I doubt the producers are going to want to tamper with that - but if they can avoid some of the worst excesses of the RTD era, then I'll be happy. It's hard to tell exactly what Smith's going to do with the role, but hopefully we've seen the last of the "mockney geezer" stylings that made me want to give Tennant a good slap on occasion.

Anyway, The End of Time. I thought this was quite fun, the first episode being more lightweight (as befitted a Christmas broadcast slot) than the second. Generally, the story was entertaining, though hardly top-flight - it wouldn't be in my top ten of tenth Doctor stories (which will be going up on the Eyespider website quite soon). I found John Simm to be less irritating this time around, which was a plus. The Master's plan was absolutely batshit insane of course, but there's nothing new in that!

As for continuity issues - well, we finally got to see the Time War flashback people have been wishing for - probably about as much as we'll ever be shown of it anyway. Full marks to the producers for still not confirming which Doctor (eighth or ninth) it was who fought on the front line in the final war - that way, we can all still go on imagining it the way we each choose to. (I know, I know, most fans seem to think it was McGann who ended the war - they're wrong of course, but they can go on thinking that - it doesn't bother me...) The final explanation for the Master's madness - whilst it may be a retcon in terms of the last forty years of series continuity - at least tied up the ideas of the RTD series in a nice neat bundle. It's all been about the Time War, and its consequences, for the last five years.

It's pleasing to get confirmation of something I've been speculating about over the last few years - that when the Doctor eulogizes about how wonderful Gallifrey was (for instance at the end of Gridlock) he's really talking about an idealized vision of the world he remembers from his youth, not the world that he really lived on. (After all, if it was so shit hot, why did he run away in the first place...?) He's romanticized his memories of the place, perhaps in an effort to negate his sense of loss or assuage his guilt. This much seemed apparent from past episodes. But here, finally, he confesses that it's what he chooses to remember, and that the Gallifrey of the Time War was a terrible place - something he's not sad to have time-locked. That puts a new spin on things, but also it doesn't invalidate the destruction of Gallifrey in the eighth Doctor novels. We can surmise that the Doctor "restored" Gallifrey following the events of The Gallifrey Chronicles, but I've always been uneasy with the notion that the planet was brought back exactly as it had been, with all the same people still alive. Much more interesting if the new Gallifrey is a completely strange and unknowable place. If the Doctor did use the downloaded Matrix data to somehow recreate his world and his race, that might explain how people can be resurrected in new forms (the Master and now it would seem Rassilon).

Mind you, I'm not certain that Timothy Dalton was playing that Rassilon. Can we take that one line comment quite so literally, I ask myself. The Doctor could be using the name in a purely perjorative context - after all, when Bill Pertwee calls Captain Mainwaring "Napoleon", he's not really suggesting that the Walmington-on-Sea platoon is commanded by the former Emperor of France.

Fans often comment on the contrast between Logopolis and The Caves of Androzani - how the fourth Doctor dies saving the entire universe, whilst the fifth Doctor dies saving the life of one friend. In The End of Time, amazingly, we had both. After all the build-up and the Ood prophecies, we were expecting the Doctor to sacrifice himself to save creation - well, he does that, and miraculously survives it all - only to have to give his life for Wilf. The glass booth was painstakingly introduced in part one - it's a real Chekhov's Gun! - and yet somehow it just hadn't occurred to me what an important role it was going to play in the end. (I don't know, old age is finally creeping up on me...) But I really wasn't expecting the source of those four knocks - a fantastic resolution.

Of course, when I saw that there was still twenty minutes to go, I realized that there was going to be a protracted, sentimental wrap-up. Some have suggested that the ending was self-indulgent. Well, they're right, it was, but I don't necessarily mind that. As someone who's embraced all Doctor Who across its vast multimedia universe, there wasn't really anything unusual about the character vignettes that littered the ending. It might well be a new thing for the tv series, but the books often featured extended epilogues - and these sort of little moments are the very stuff that the Short Trips and Brief Encounters stories were made of: a character moment, a bittersweet reunion, a taking care of business. So it didn't feel particularly new or unlike Who to me.

One interesting thing, from a "Complete Adventures" perspective: the Doctor's opening scene neatly de-links the story from the cataclysmic ending of The Waters of Mars and confirms that the Doctor has been faffing around having a series of utterly silly and inconsequential adventures to try and put off facing his fate as long as possible. Since I've been worrying about where to fit the now (frankly) insane number of comic strips that Doctor Who Adventures have been churning out over the last year, this finally offers me the perfect place - because if those comics aren't silly and inconsequential, I don't know what is...

The Next Doctor

That was a lot of fun, wasn't it? Exactly what you need for Christmas Day. I know there are a lot of fans for whom Russel Davies's take on the series is too lightweight and childish. I'm not one of them. Doctor Who should be fun and adventurous. That's not to say I'm averse to something grave and serious on occasion, but you need balance. There was plenty of deep emotional drama on display here, as the story of Jackson Lake unfolded. (Let's face it, despite all the hype, he was never going to turn out to be the Doctor, was he?)

Once the mystery of Jackson was out of the way, there were very continuity issues in this story. Indeed, by removing the originally planned cliffhanger ending of Journey's End, Russell Davies has effectively de-linked the story from the tv episodes either side of it, meaning we've got a fairly nebulous spaces into which some of the spin-off material can be easily inserted. There are plenty of comic strip adventures, and even a solo-Doctor novel now (The Eyeless) that can go into a gap before the Christmas special - so thank goodness that hasn't been as problematic as in previous years!

Speaking of comic strips, I've been thrilled by the latest issue of IDW's current series The Forgotten. What had seemed to be yet another series 3 tale with Martha has turned completely on its head, and it now looks like it's set post-series 4. Great twist! As yet, I'm not certain if the story occurs before or after The Next Doctor. I guess I'll be able to make a better decision after the last two episodes have come out... Similarly, DWM have started on a new arc of comic strips with a new companion. It's looking like the "gap year" is going to prove interesting in terms of how diverse story strands are going to fit together, especially as we have no idea yet how things are going to pan out in the tv specials themselves. So we could well see the tenth Doctor adventure listings fluctuating wildly as I try to keep up with new developments...

A Fete Worse Than Death

On Saturday, I went to the Summer fete at St Andrew's church in Caversham. The vicar there, Nigel Jones, is an old friend of mine, and he asked me and another of our friends, Matthew Brookes, to come and help open the event. Why? Because more than twenty years ago, Matthew built a Dalek in the school woodwork shop. We used to take it out to conventions, Longleat events and the like. It always required a two man team to operate it, simply because it was bloody hard work and taking it in turns enabled the other guy to have a rest. (It also helped to have someone following the Dalek around to stop over-inquisitive kids pulling bits off it.)

But that was then. Now, we're on the verge of middle age with responsible jobs and bills to pay. So when Nigel asked if the Dalek could open the fete, I wasn't really sure what to expect. (From Nigel's point of view, the draw of a Dalek would ensure a good attendance for the event. He merely hinted that a "special guest alien from Doctor Who" would be appearing - but the local press got wind of it and announced it would be a Dalek. Well, it did the trick, as apparently the fete was one of the best attended ever in the parish.) For Matthew and me, it was a journey into madness! The Dalek has been in storage for the best part of a decade, gathering dust and dirt and cobwebs in the back of a garage. Since we only got it out of storage the night before the fete, there followed several hours of cleaning it up and repairing minor damage. Remarkably, all the electrics still seemed to work - most importantly, the voice modulator. Nevertheless, we needed to visit Halfords as soon as they opened, and ask if we could buy a motorcycle battery (any make, any size, it didn't matter as long as it was 12V) and some wire and crocodile clips. It was only afterwards that Matthew realized they must have thought we were bomb-makers!

Next, we loaded the Dalek into a van and drove to Caversham - we put the Dalek together inside the church (a odd juxtaposition in itself!) and discovered that the voice no longer worked. Talk about frustrating. Matthew is something of a perfectionist and wanted to take the electrics apart to find the fault, but as Nigel pointed out, the kids had come to see a Dalek and it wouldn't be fair to disappoint them. There were also press photographers, and even a cameraman from Meridian TV - I don't know if we made it onto the news however. What I do know is, the inside of the Dalek seemed a lot more cramped than I remembered - and it was a damned sight harder to move the thing than I recalled. I had one go, but in the end I was content to let Matthew get on with it. As I observed the Dalek working the crowd, it was interesting to compare the reactions of the kids now to those of ten years ago. It's quite clear that they all know what a Dalek is, and they followed it around like it was the Pied Piper. Especially once Matthew got the voice working again - he was engaging with them, answering their questions, threatening to enslave them and conquer the Earth, and so on. I don't think any of them thought for a moment that there was a person sweating away inside it. Because it's a black Dalek, several of the kids automatically called him Dalek Sec as well. And another thing that happened - as I was following the Dalek about with a sonic screwdriver in my hand, more than one kid asked me if I was the Doctor. OK, I've got sideburns, but I don't look anything like David Tennant. I was able to improvise a bit of business where I said I'd deactivated the Dalek's gun, and handed the kids the screwdriver so that they could (temporarily) shut down its motive power - enabling it to pose for photographs with them! What that suggested to me though, was that those people who think Doctor Who depends on David Tennant's personal popularity and that the bubble will burst once he's gone, are very probably wrong. My experience is that kids will accept anyone with a sonic screwdriver!

I haven't said much about the new series so far this year. Don't worry, I still like Doctor Who, and I'll be talking about it very soon. Watch this space...

Coming soon...

So the new series is almost upon us, and I find myself becoming quite excited. Not exceedingly so - after all, this is the fourth year in a row and some of the novelty has worn off now. (I'm reliably informed that I texted my girlfriend during the afternoon of 26th March 2005 that I thought I was going to explode! Still, there was a lot of anticipation hanging on that first episode - not to mention the worry that it was all going to be crap...) At least I seem to have got over some of the disenchantment wrought by the horror that was Last of the Time Lords. The new trailers have been exciting and enthralling, and have even gone some way towards alleviating some of my concerns about Catherine Tate.

Mention of Last of the Time Lords brings me back to one of those burning issues from almost a year ago: did the episodes Utopia/The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords constitute a "three-parter" or two linked but separate stories? I don't think any consensus was ever reached - but after some discussion and debate, I've decided to go with a completely different answer. My friend Nick suggested the other day that Russell T Davies doesn't really write two-part stories in the same way as other writers do - he writes two linked but self-contained episodes, often with a major change of setting, mood or tone. Looking back, I can see that this is true (to a greater or lesser extent) of all his two-part stories - but it's at its most pronounced and obvious in the third series finale. What we really have here is a trilogy of self-contained stories that together form an overall saga. Utopia is the prologue to reintroduce the character of the Master; The Sound of Drums the story of the Master's great triumph; and Last of the Time Lords is the "one year later" story of his final defeat. The "evidence" to the contrary is comparatively slight: a couple of to be continued captions, Phil Collinson calling it "a three-parter" in a podcast - I don't think those can be taken literally. Indeed, to do so is almost to deny the nature of modern television series: the "arc plot" model common to US series, where individual episodes contribute to an overall series storyline, which current Doctor Who has clearly adopted. (You know, sometimes, it seems that fandom still wants to pigeonhole everything according to the way things were in the seventies.) So, as of now, those episodes are listed in The Complete Adventures as three separate stories.

This modern style is starting to extend itself to the spin-off media as well - especially the comic strips. The new comic book from IDW, for instance: so far, each issue has been a self-contained story, although there are clearly things going on in the background that are going to build into an overall arc. To a certain extent, this is also true of the strips in Battles in Time, each instalment being self-contained and rarely ending on an actual cliffhanger - but there, each story sequence tends to be a bit more focused and continuous, the Doctor pursuing each villain or plot to its conclusion. So, I'm still listing each multi-part strip as a single story. (They're my rules, I don't have to apply them consistently...)

Just one more thing I need to mention about the new series - the timeslot! The announcement that it would start at 6:20 has sent massive seismic shocks through fandom, with terrible predictions of disastrous ratings. I love the way that fans suddenly become experts in tv scheduling at times like this! You know, I'm sure the schedulers know what they're doing. They probably expect ratings to be lower in a 6:20 slot - so they're not about to cancel the show if it gets a few million less. What they want is the best possible performance in that slot, and I think they'll probably get it. From my own historical perspective, 6:20 sounds like a fine timeslot for Doctor Who - it's the sort of time I remember it going out when I was a kid. In fact, I can recall thinking three years ago that 7:00 seemed a bit late for Doctor Who - so I've really got no problem with it at all. Roll on Saturday...

Time Crash

Well now...

First post for a while, but then the first bit of new Doctor Who on the telly for a while. And I'm still trying to get over Last of the Time Lords. So has this helped at all? The fact that Time Crash can be slotted into that final episode might give it a bit more of a feelgood factor in future viewings. We can only hope...

What did I think of Time Crash then? Reading through the comments on Outpost Gallifrey, I sometimes (no, make that often) wonder if I've watched the same programme as everyone else. Suffice it to say, I didn't cry, and I haven't watched it twenty times yet. I found it perfectly acceptable as a charity episode: entertaining and fun, with nice interaction between the two leads - good to see Davison back in character. Great while it lasted, but that was all. Probably I'm coming across as a bit of an old curmudgeon here. It's not that I don't engage with Doctor Who on an emotional level - my major difficulty is that the bit which seems to have moved people is the bit I have the most problems with: the tenth Doctor's bizarre eulogizing of the fifth, especially the "You were my Doctor" speech. It's not so much that it breaks the fourth wall - I'm all for a bit of post-modernism - more the fact that it steps outside the characters and seems to become the writer and actor directly addressing their hero. Which just feels very, very strange.

There are some interesting continuity ideas though. Shorting out of the time differential as an explanation for why past Doctors look older in reunion episodes (although the pedant in me would point out that it doesn't account for why Troughton and Pertwee look older before they're scooped in The Five Doctors, but you can't have everything). There's also the question of whether the Doctor can remember his meetings with his other incarnations once he returns to his own time: why for instance, doesn't the fifth Doctor know Borusa's the villain in The Five Doctors if he's lived through it four times already? (I remember there was even a letter to the Radio Times in 1983 asking about that...) Considering the resolution of Time Crash depends on Tennant remembering what he had to do to save the day, one can only conclude that the Doctor does in fact remember these things. But then, doesn't that mean Davison will know he's not going to die on Androzani? that the Master isn't dead on Sarn? and so on and so on. One suggestion is that these anomalous memories are somehow lost in the time differential - they're memories that belong to the tenth Doctor's part of the time stream; when the time differential shorts out, in addition to physically ageing Davison, it somehow unlocks Tennant's memory of the incident. (It's an explanation that would work in most cases - although Troughton recalls the events of The Three Doctors before he gets scooped in The Five Doctors, so nothing's perfect...)

There's been some debate on when exactly in the fifth Doctor's life this event occurs for him. Plenty of speculation and lots of suggested answers. To place the story in The Complete Adventures, I had to make some quick decisions on the night - and the most obvious clues to pick up on were those that Tennant suggested: Nyssa and Tegan, Mara - a placing between Snakedance and Mawdryn Undead seems to work. Davison doesn't confirm it, but he doesn't deny it either - and as I've just discussed, Tennant ought to be able to remember it! In the absence of any other clues, I'll stick with my original guess. (Though I've no doubt a book or audio will come along in years to come and tie it down definitely...) It's been pointed out to me that Mawdryn Undead opens with the Tardis nearly colliding with another spaceship, which offers a neat sense of symmetry.

Doing It Again...

So here’s a question: can the Doctor have the same adventure twice? Obviously, I’m going to say yes – my standard answer being that in a quantum universe, anything is possible. However, there are some fans for whom it’s a real problem: the sort of fans who insist on defining and zealously policing a rigid canon. I’ll talk about the politics of canon debates some other time, but the sad thing is, it seems to me that some people want a canon solely for the opportunity to exclude things from it. I’ve had arguments with people who want to dismiss the audio adventures as non-canonical on the basis of Jubilee being the inspiration for the tv episode Dalek. It’s not like they’re the same story in anything but basic ideas. (And if repetition of ideas was enough to disqualify stories, we ought to throw out Planet of the Daleks for revisiting The Dead Planet – or for that matter, The Caves of Androzani as a rehash of The Power of Kroll.) As if the Jubilee/Dalek thing wasn’t bad enough, I’ve even encountered someone who wanted to invalidate Spare Parts for being the same story as Rise of the Cybermen – well, it was pretty apparent that person hadn’t actually heard Spare Parts and was just going on what he’d heard third-hand from posts on Outpost Gallifrey – but he wanted a justification for his exclusion of the audio adventures and thought he’d found it. Never let the facts get in the way of a good canon debate…

The 2007 series gave the canon-exclusionists their most powerful ammunition yet, in the form of two literary adaptations. Whereas it was apparent quite early on that Human Nature would be adapted from the novel of the same name, we knew very little in advance about Blink, other than that it would be a “Doctor-lite” episode and really scary! Nearer to the time of broadcast, a few facts had started to emerge – most notably that the main protagonist was called Sally Sparrow. Those of us who’d read Steven Moffat’s story in the 2006 Annual would already be familiar with that name, of course – and so it began to look as if Blink would be an adaptation of it. At least they were honest about it, mentioning it on Confidential and popping the original story up on the website. What I found interesting was the relative lack of consternation about this adaptation – in complete contrast to the pages of argument on Outpost Gallifrey over the previous fortnight regarding the canonical status of Human Nature. It may be that an Annual story just doesn’t register on most people’s radar in the way the New Adventures did…

Nevertheless, there were a handful of comments that Blink had effectively removed the Annual story from canon. Once again, I marvel at the willingness of Who fans to discard stories on the flimsiest of evidence, but in this case, I really don’t see the need. Admittedly, the basic idea is the same, but most of the details are different. The two Sally Sparrows live in different time periods, are different in age and appearance. The settings are completely different. There are no Weeping Angels in the Annual story. It’s just the notion of the Doctor, separated from the Tardis, sending messages via a recording medium that links the two tales. It’s no more a rehash than Dalek was of Jubilee, and we survived that. I think the question only arose because Moffat named his heroine Sally Sparrow, perhaps in homage to the Annual story, perhaps because he just liked the sound of the name. If only he’d called her Mandy Magpie, I don’t think there would have been an issue.

Human Nature is another matter entirely – as probably the single most popular Who novel ever written, the adaptation was always going to cause ructions on all sides of the canon debate – arguments that are still rumbling on to this day. It seems obvious that Paul Cornell himself anticipated this, and tried to head them off with a blog entry on the subject of canon. I’m not sure if he really thought it would still the debate, but it seems unlikely. (Many, but not all, of his points I would agree with, incidentally…)

But inevitably it happened – even before broadcast, people were declaring the novels as non-canonical, again based on that spurious argument that the Doctor couldn’t have the same adventure twice, and that the tv version had to trump the novel. Even despite the fact that the novel existed first! (It’s a mind-set that’s difficult to shake off. Even for someone like me, who spends so much of his time fitting all forms of Doctor Who together, there’s still some subconscious impulse to regard the tv series as the taproot, as somehow more real than any of the other media. Certainly, I know that I can recite the dialogue from entire episodes, whereas I can’t remember more than basic details even of books I read quite recently.)

Of course, the argument soon brought NA supporters out into the open, to offer any number of reasons why Human Nature could have happened twice, without “de-canonizing” the novels. Many of these invoked the Time War, as having in some way undone the previous sequence of events. (Indeed, Cornell suggested this in his blog entry.) This is quite an easy get-out clause, though, and in fact it comes up more and more frequently these days as a catch-all explanation for continuity discrepancies. And frankly, that’s just lazy…

I suppose I haven’t been as bothered by all this as some people – it’s not as if the notion of adventures happening twice is particularly new. The Ultimate Adventure stage play happened to three different Doctors. Shada happened twice as well (and in that case, the repetition was explained in the story). Then there are a number of comic strip adventures for the fourth Doctor, that previously happened to the second or third Doctors. And all this happened long before the Time War came along to start buggering about with the timeline. In The Complete Adventures, I’ve suggested explanations for all these occurrences. One idea I’m particularly taken with is that the Doctor, on some subconscious level, is drawn towards such areas of quantum instability, as if feeling the need to restore missing sections of his timeline. (Or maybe the Tardis deliberately seeks out these space-time discontinuities…)

My quantum universe model allows for all versions of the same story to have occurred in the same continuity. There’s no need to imagine they’ve somehow un-happened. They just haven’t occurred in the current quantum iteration of the continuum. There’s an important point about Human Nature, that the canon debate has largely ignored – the tv story is not just a straight adaptation of the novel. It seems superficially very similar, certainly the closest of the adaptations so far, but it’s not identical by any means. Some of the characters are similar, but have different names. Some have the same name, but are different characters. Some are missing altogether. Most importantly, the Doctor’s reasons for becoming human are completely different – and the villains of the piece aren’t the same either. (And where were the scarecrows in the novel?) So my fundamental question is: if the events of the novel didn’t happen, who defeated the Aubertides? (As with Blink, I have to wonder if fandom would be quite so bothered by all this if Cornell had changed the names of his characters and called the story something else. Who am I kidding...?)

Here’s a theory, then: everything in the novel happened back in a different branch of the quantum universe – the seventh Doctor decided to try being human, the Aubertides came for his biodata, and were eventually defeated. So far so good. Centuries later, the tenth Doctor is in a different quantum permutation of the continuum. (It could have been the effects of the Time War, it could have been anything – but those past memories just aren’t accessible to him any more. However, we can imagine that the Tardis memory banks retain that knowledge at some quantum level.) When the Doctor activates the chameleon arch, he leaves all the details to the Tardis. The John Smith schoolmaster persona would be automatically drawn upon to create the Doctor’s new human form; and the Tardis would then locate a setting in which to place him, homing in on an area of quantum instability to try and protect the integrity of the Doctor’s timeline.

Or it could just be a massive coincidence…

Last of the Time Lords

Jesus H Bidmead....

I haven't been able to bring myself to write about this one until now. What can I say? That really was one of the worst pieces of television I've seen in a long time. Hard to believe that this sordid piece of bad taste could be written by the same person as the uplifting and moving Gridlock. Do I really want to see my heroes being humiliated and tortured as Saturday night entertainment? It's hard to see what Davies was trying to do that couldn't have been achieved with a more intellectual threat. There were the germs of good ideas there, but the execution was appalling. Generally, I like the idea of the Doctor encouraging the people of Earth to believe in an ideal - if he had somehow taught them to feed into the Archangel network and empower themselves to overthrow the Master, that would have been fantastic. But to turn himself into a god figure was just horrendously done. Still, the one good bit was the Master's death: the idea that he chose to die as the only way he could gain a final victory over the Doctor was very powerful.

Hey, never mind, earlier the same day I enjoyed The Infinite Quest, which was much more like it.

The Sound of Drums

OK... Not sure how I feel about this one. It didn't do much for me last night. There are some good bits in it, but overall I didn't warm to it. Especially Simm's portrayal of the Master. It left me feeling much the same as The Runaway Bride did: fun, but silly and ultimately unrewarding. But Bride could get away with it as it was a bit of fluff for Christmas - you expect more for a big season finale. Well, this may all just be build-up to next week, which certainly looked different from the teaser. My friend Nick said the other day that Russell T Davies doesn't really write two part stories, he writes two separate episodes that might share the same setting and characters, but could be stylistically and thematically very different. And this could well be the case here. It seemed to improve with a second viewing, so maybe this one will grow on me, especially when seen in context.

The "three-parter" debate is rumbling on. With the quite summary dismissal of last week's cliffhanger, it looks like I was right to regard Utopia as a separate entity. Unless they do pick up the whole refugee rocket storyline next week - but I can't think how they'd have the time. Some have suggested that it might be revisited next year - maybe even that the search for Utopia will be next year's arc. That could be interesting...

I doubt I was the only person to shout out "Cloudbase" when the Valiant appeared. Although the aircraft carrier was probably a lot bigger - bigger than any seaborne carrier in fact. It looked like it had three runways, with an airliner landing at one point. More like a floating airport! I'm wondering if this could be a subtle tie-in to the continuity of The Indestructible Man. But I'm probably the only one there...

And so to the biggie. There's been a lot of hand-wringing over on OG about this. The depiction of Gallifrey and the Citadel was fantastic. Interesting that they chose to stick with the look of the Gallifreyan robes and collars though, considering that they usually like to redesign the iconography. I'm not sure why the young Master was wearing "War Games" robes either. If they're Academy colours, does that mean the Doctor's trial was conducted by a bunch of students? - it might explain why they let him off so lightly! Perhaps they're House colours? Could Goth and his cronies be from the same House as the Master? Or if they were members of the CIA, could it mean that even at that age the Master had been chosen to serve the Agency? Am I just thinking about it too much?

The big problem though is the depiction of the Master as an 8 year old child. Does it contradict Lungbarrow? On the OG forum, the novel-haters are already using this to wipe the book or even the whole New Adventures range out of canon. Well, good luck to them. I know the novel fans will just find ways around it. The series has always been littered with contradictions, and as I've often said, they're a part of the fun. So on the one hand, you've got the depiction of a Gallifreyan child starting at the Academy. Placed alongside references to the Doctor's father and mother (not to mention his brother and granddaughter), to "Time Tots", to a Gallifreyan maternity service and nursery rhymes, it doesn't seem odd in the slightest. Then you've got Lungbarrow, which suggests Gallifreyans are woven from the Loom in a fully adult state, albeit with the minds of children. Gallifreyan Houses are filled with giant-sized furniture, so the youngsters still feel like children. We actually get this information from Leela, of all people, who's reporting it from what she's learned from her husband Andred. Is it possible that she has simply misunderstood the nature of child development on Gallifrey, and rationalized it according to her own understanding of child-rearing?

Of course, when we get inside the House of Lungbarrow, we see the giant-sized furniture for ourselves - but that in itself seems really peculiar. If Gallifreyans were born as full-size adults, then surely their society and culture would just accept that as normal? - it's the way their minds would work. They wouldn't need to go through some contrived developmental process designed to fool them into thinking they were children - unless it was important for them to fit in with the rest of society. So this got me thinking - the only House we see inside is Lungbarrow itself. What if it's only Lungbarrow that produces fully adult cousins from its Loom, and has to convince them they're kids? The other Houses could just weave actual children. (And I don't think the Doctor explicitly states that he himself was taken into the Academy at the age of 8.) So maybe the Loom of Lungbarrow is damaged or faulty - it might explain why the Doctor's cousins seem to be such a bunch of weirdos and nutters.

(To be generous to Leela though, I'd accept that the House of Redloom might weave adult cousins too - perhaps it's a fault in the Looms that only affects certain Houses...?)

Mind you, they might show an 8 year old Doctor next week, or reveal that actually the Master is his brother after all, which would blow another lovely theory out of the water....

Utopia

Bloody hell....

Well, a lot of interesting stuff going on in this week's episode. From a continuity angle, a lot of people have speculated on its debt to the audio play Master. The thing that hit me most in the face was the comic strip End of the Line, which seemed to have inspired much of the storyline, the setting and the depiction of the futurekind - not to mention the downbeat futility of the ending! Considering Mark Platt got an acknowledgement for the infinitesimal influence that Spare Parts had on Rise of the Cybermen, one has to wonder whether Steve Parkhouse got just credit here. (And just maybe Captain Jack's Tardis ride contains a hint of The Stockbridge Horror.)

A lot of angst is currently being expended on whether this is a standalone story, or the first of a three-parter. The initial publicity all suggested the former, but now that's not looking so sure. Even Totally Doctor Who called it the start of a three-parter. (But considering I'm a man who regards An Unearthly Child and the caveman episodes to be two separate stories, I'm not one to be bound by official pronouncements.) I think I'm going to reserve judgement until next week's episode. Certainly, the trailer makes it look like a new story - different setting and so on. Perhaps this is more a Frontier in Space/Planet of the Daleks situation. On the other hand, the rocket to Utopia storyline may continue through the next couple of episodes... We'll see. It looks like it's going to be fun whatever happens.