Write in Gallifreyan

Oh, this is fun. Here is “Doctor Zen” in Gallifreyan writing from Doctor Who.

I have to be careful, or I’ll spend hours translating things into this script.

 External links

Gallifreyan translator

Belated Dalek Day

 Ooh, it’s been a while since I’ve used the “personality quizzes” label on here...

Yes, I am a day behind on Dalek Day, the 59th anniversary of the best television monsters. I should have posted my results for the “Which Dalek are you?” quiz yesterday, but better late than never.

The future is female

This year has seen something special. There’s been a hunger for new heroes. You can see it in these projects.

Hidden Figures. It challenged the pop culture juggernaut Star Wars at the box office, and got Oscar nominations, too.

Wonder Woman. The biggest hit of the summer, still going strong.

And now... the thirteenth Doctor.

It’s going to be fantastic.

Congratulations, Jodie Whitaker! I look forward to seeing you pilot the TARDIS and fight the monsters!

Added: Reaction to the latter.

The winner of the “Best euphemism for lying” award goes to...

Kellyanne Conway, who coined the term, “alternative facts.”

This was in reference to yesterday, when the White House press secretary’s lied, stating that the recent American presidential inauguration had, “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”

Coincidentally enough, 40 years before Kellyanne Conway coined the term “alternative facts,” Doctor Who broadcast “The Face of Evil,” which contained one of my all-time favourite quotes from a show loaded with great quotes:

You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

The Doctor, “The Face of Evil”, Part 4, Doctor Who Season 14 (Production code 4Q). Written by Chris Boucher, directed by Pennant Roberts, originally broadcast on the BBC on 22 January 1977

Powerful and stupid makes a particularly nasty combination.

At least, unlike back in 2011, when Senator John Kyl’s office said the Senator’s lie about Planned Parenthood was “not intended to be a factual statement,” Conway got called on it much more strongly:

Kellyanne Conway on @MeetThePress: Spicer offered “alternative facts.” @chucktodd: “Alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods.”

Never let yourself become a fact that needs altering.

Update, 23 January 2017: io9 also wrote a story about the Doctor Who quote. Unfortunately, it left out the important last line that served as a warning.

External links

Trump's inauguration crowd: Sean Spicer's claims versus the evidence
Doctor Who quote about 'alternative facts' sounds awfully relatable 40 years later

The book chapter you’ll never get to read

A while ago, I wrote about the importance of talking about failures. I thought I’d share this failure, because the release of the newest series of Doctor Who this weekend makes it kind of timely.

I submitted this proposal for a planned academic book titled Doctor Who & History. Even though I keep swearing off writing book chapters, I submitted it because I thought this might feel more like fun than work.

They wanted fifteen chapters, and got 50 proposals. This was one of them. It wasn’t selected. I have to commend the editors, who gave me one of the nicer rejection letters I’ve gotten.

The history of science in Doctor Who

The character of The Doctor is a scientist. Doctor Who was originally created with the goal of teaching history and science, but the show rarely mixed the two in its plotlines. This chapter will examine how the scientific history is treated in, and reflected by, Doctor Who. When set in the past, the show usually features social and cultural leaders than scientific ones. For example, Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens have both appeared in Doctor Who, but Charles Darwin, their contemporary, has not. The real history of science has rarely warranted more than The Doctor dropping the name of a famous scientist into a conversation. The show’s portrayal of its fictional scientists (other than The Doctor) is often suspicious and critical, with several stories centering on ambitious scientists overreaching, with disastrous consequences. But in their search for new plot material, writers often looked to emerging scientific ideas and worked them into their scripts. The most famous example of this was the creation of the Cybermen, which was inspired by research on organ replacement. Sometimes, the show’s scientific and technological elements would be familiar to any contemporary viewer. The many 1960s stories that incorporated crewed spaceflight would be completely familiar to people living in the middle of the space race. Less often, but more interestingly, Doctor Who sometimes used scientific ideas before they were well incorporated into popular culture. The supercomputer WOTAN threatened the world by joining a network of computers long before most people had even seen a pocket calculator let alone a computer, or that computers would eventually be connected by the Internet. “Earthshock” featured the dinosaurs being wiped out by a crashing spaceship just two years after the suggestion that an extraterrestrial impact first appeared in scientific journals. Since the show’s revival, living scientists, like physicist Brian Cox, have appeared with The Doctor. Therefore, Doctor Who provides insights into the history of science over the last half century and how those scientific discoveries percolate into popular awareness.

Update, 21 July 2017: The book is out now!

Related posts

Low points

External links

Doctor Who and history 
Publisher’s site 

Save the Day essays #8: The world turns

The whole world turns upside down in ten years, but you turn upside down with it(.)

- Spider Robinson, 1977, “The Time Traveller,” The Callahan Chronicles

As it happened, I got a Doctor Who anniversary story for Christmas. Not “The Day of the Doctor,” the fiftieth anniversary story that was released on DVD this month... but the fortieth anniversary story.

Unavailable for years, “Scream of the Shalka” was an animated story that played on the BBC’s Doctor Who website. Richard E. Grant was the Doctor, though he’s now become a villain (Dr. Simeon / the Great Intelligence).

Watching “Scream of the Shalka” again impressed upon me how much can change in a decade.

In 2003, Doctor Who hadn’t been on television for years. It had died in the 1980s, had a failed comeback attempt in the 1990s. It appeared on the BBC’s website under a section labelled as “Cult TV.” There were new stories as books and audio, but for me, they weren’t anywhere near as satisfying as the show had been. And judging from the “Making of” featurette on the “Shalka” DVD, only a few dedicated fans were actually that keen to commemorate that anniversary with a story. “Scream of the Shalka” is a good story, but it wasn’t very outward looking. It wasn’t aimed at bringing the Doctor to new audiences.

It’s almost hard to believe that Doctor Who has been back on the air for almost eight years now. When Doctor Who did come back on the air in 2005,the way I experienced the show was perhaps less than convenient. There was initially no plans for airing it in the United States. But... it was a co-production with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), who showed it very soon after it appeared in England.

Being Canadian, I reached out to a few of my contacts in fandom... oh, who am I kidding. I pleaded with my parents to record it for me. They were nice enough to do it, and sent me VHS tapes – tapes! – through snail mail. Every few weeks, I got new tapes that I devoured. It was so, so good. I loved it.

Then it showed up in the US on the SciFi channel (before it became SfFy). And something amazing started to happen: Americans started to fall in love with Doctor Who: the eccentric little English show that even other science fiction fans viewed as fringe. People started recognizing the TARDIS in my office. I couldn’t believe it.

I was mildly annoyed when the show moved to BBC America, because I didn’t have it as part of my cable package, and because I get cable through my apartment, I didn’t have an option to add it. I started begging a colleague with an extended cable package to record it for me, this time on blank DVDs. I was again indulged. But I was pleased that the delay between the British broadcast and the American broadcast got shorter. I remembered in the 1980s when it could be years between a season in England and it being purchased by a local public broadcasting station. Being a North American fan was always to feel a little disconnected from the show.

Then, I started getting the show on iTunes, so I no longer had to beg for my fix. And the show went to high definition.

And the culmination of all this? This year, I can watch Doctor Who within a day of anyone in the world. And the show is so successful that it ran in North American theatres, in high-definition 3-D. It’s wonderful.

The world does turn upside down in ten years. But even though you turn with it, sometimes, you can notice.

Related posts

Approaching 40...

Save the Day essays

Save the Day essays #1: Restoration
Save the Day essays #2: Recovery
Save the Day essays #3: Family
Save the Day essays #4: Rewatching the rebirth
Save the Day essays #5: Playing favourites
Save the Day essays #6: Anarchy in the U.K.
Save the Day essays #7: How the Doctor made me better

Hat tip to Tom Scott’s brilliant “Flash mob gone wrong” Ignite! presentation for drawing my attention to the Spider Robinson quote.

Would you like a jelly baby?

I’ve done a “What Doctor are you?” quiz before, but since today is a special day for Doctor Who, I am sucker enough to try another version of the quiz...

Your result: Congratulations! You’re the Fourth Doctor

Do people refer to everyday events in your daily life as "mad schemes"? Do they sometimes call you "impossible," but happily accept the sweets you are quick to offer round as soon as you meet new people?

Do you have clothes in your closet that other people simply would not wear, but somehow you make them look pretty good?

And are they always on the alert, in case you are seized by an alarming impulse and suddenly have to dash off out of the room?

Yeah.

Related posts

Great balls of fire!

External links

‘Doctor Who’ Personality Quiz: Which Doctor Are You?

Save the Day essays #7: How the Doctor made me better

The man who makes people better. How sanctimonious is that?

– The Master, “The Sound of Drums,” Doctor Who, 2007

Doctor Who helped make me become a scientist.

True, I might have been a scientist if I never watched Doctor Who. I had a lot of personality traits that helped pushed me towards being some sort of technical career. I was always inclined to science as a kid (dinosaurs and spaceships littered my rooms), I consumed a lot of science fiction, and I was a “smart kid” who got good grades in school.

But there’s a big difference between things that you do when you’re playing as a kid, and sticking out a long haul in graduate school to make science your life’s work. Grad school is tough. It has a high attrition rate. Lots of people do not make it. To make it, you need something to look forward to that can keep you going.

When I introduce myself to students, I joke that, “I went to grad school so I could be called Doctor Zen, and sound like the villain from a bad kung fu movie.” That gets a laugh, but it’s not true. (Though I am prouder than you know that “Doctor Zen” is a role-playing game villain; see here and here.)

The truth is that one of the things that kept me going in grad school was that if I made it, I could be called, “Doctor.” Just a little bit like one of my heroes.

Doctor Who made the title conferred by a Ph.D. important to me in a way that nothing else ever did.

For most people, “doctor” means “physician.” I never, ever, had any interest in going into the health professions. Of all the other scientific characters that I loved from science fiction, none of them really brought the title to the fore. Spock from Star Trek was always, “Mr. Spock” (I guess Spock only ever finished his master’s). Buckaroo Banzai was just, well, Buckaroo Banzai.

Doctor Who made me want to be a doctor. So I could be called “Doctor Zen.”

I didn’t have direct inspiration from the TV series when I was in grad school.

“Survival,” the last episode of the classic series (above) aired the year I started grad school. A series of books (“The New Doctor Who Adventures”) rarely satisfied me. The TV movie (right) aired after I defended my dissertation. I became a doctor when the Doctor was missing.

I wrote back in 2003 when the show’s rebirth was announced:

The Doctor represented so much of what I thought a scientist should be. Adept in solving problems of all sorts, whether it be preventing a Dalek invasion or patching a piece of broken equipment. That “Renaissance man” aspect in particular is one I love... . Not taking the word of authority ... Traveling the universe. Good companions. .. And it’s one reason why I sometimes suggest people call me “Doctor Zen” – it has the sort of same slightly cool ring as “Doctor Who.” At least it does to my vain ears.

It’s not just me:

I see so many children in schools who, because of their love of this silly old show, want to act, write, record music, sing or become scientists.

And it’s not just Doctor Who. Jacquelyn Gill wrote:

Watching The X-Files again reminds me of how big of an inspiration Scully was to me. Bigger role model than any living scientist.

I mentioned Spock before. The actor who created the character, Leonard Nimoy, has met lots of scientists that trace their lineage back to him.

(B)ecause Mr. Spock and Star Trek have inspired so many young viewers to become scientists, researchers who meet him are always desperate to give him lab tours and explain the projects they’re pursuing in peer-to-peer terms. Mr. Nimoy nods sagely and intones to each one, “Well, it certainly looks like you’re headed in the right direction.”

There is a lot of concern in the scientific community to provide scientists with role models and mentors. Those are important. But let’s never forget how many people are inspired by heroes from fiction. Dare I say, those made up characters might matter more in making decisions about what kind of person we want to become.

We tell the tale of heroes to remind ourselves that we also can be great.

- Tao of Shinsei

The Doctor is one of my heroes. I have yet to fight monsters or save the day, but I do love that in my job, I get to imagine and discover new things. The Doctor taught me that there’s a whole universe out there to explore.

Come on. We’ve got work to do!

Save the Day essays

Save the Day essays #1: Restoration
Save the Day essays #2: Recovery
Save the Day essays #3: Family
Save the Day essays #4: Rewatching the rebirth
Save the Day essays #5: Playing favourites
Save the Day essays #6: Anarchy in the U.K.

Related posts

A role model returns
Titles
Nerdcore

External links

Carrying the torch – Doctor Who at 50

Save the Day essays #6: Anarchy in the U.K.

A lot of fictional heroes are either police, or very thinly disguised police. And this was probably more true in the 1960s than now. Go back to that time, and you won’t see Batman as a vigilante, but a hero often working closely with Commissioner Gordon and the police.

When you strip away all the glamour – the cars and booze and women – James Bond is a civil servant. He’s an authority figure who’s working for “the man.”

The Doctor is an unusual hero because he doesn’t fit that mold.

In story terms, Doctor Who starts with a rapid succession of crimes by the show’s ostensible hero. Off screen, before the first episode starts, the Doctor steal his TARDIS (not “the” TARDIS, because there was originally more than one in the story) and goes on the run with his granddaughter Susan from his own people. This is promptly followed by kidnapping his granddaughter’s teachers, Ian and Barbara. Then, he’s hefting up a rock in an (unsuccessful) attempt to kill a caveman.

While the fugitive aspect of the Doctor was toned down even during Hartnell’s era, the Doctor remained, perhaps not a criminal or an anarchist, but certainly an anti-establishment character. In some of the classic series, it seemed that “toppling oppressive regimes” was a very close second to “stopping alien invasions” on the Doctor’s to do list.

The Troughton and Pertwee stories often played with the Doctor as a defiant figure. The Doctor was in conflict with the Time Lords, the established authorities on his planet. And how the Doctor resented the times he was yanked around like a dog on a chain to carry out missions from the Time Lords.

On top of that, the Doctor was forced to work with the authoritarian military (U.N.I.T.). This conflict led to some of the show’s most interesting relationships, the Doctor and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. There were frequently sharp words between the pacifist Doctor and the military man. That conflict never really died away even, as the characters became close. The Doctor respected the Brigadier personally, but never what he did professionally.

That slightly anarchic side of the Doctor continued through the classic series, whether in large strokes (the season-long battle when the White Guardian yanked the fourth Doctor’s chain, much like the Time Lords had before) or tiny details (the eighth Doctor pulling an alarm, being asked why, and responding, “To liven things up!”; the second Doctor being told, “You”re not allowed in there!” and saying, “Me? Not allowed? I’m allowed everywhere!”). The Doctor’s suspicion of Time Lord authority had been proved to be well-founded, as later stories showed an a system rife with political corruption and backstabbing.

I don’t think it’s any accident that many of the show’s biggest, best, most popular, most effective villains are authoritarian military regimes (the Daleks, the Cyberman, the Sontarans) and a despot, who name is authority incarnate (the Master).

When the show returned, the Doctor couldn’t be the tamed agent working for the Time Lords any more. They’re gone. The Doctor couldn’t rebel against that authority. The series played with the Doctor becoming the voice of power. In “New Earth,” he says:

I am the Doctor. If you don't like it, if you want to take it to a higher authority, there isn't one. It stops with me.

That theme goes even further in “The Runaway Bride” and “The Waters of Mars.”

Adelaide: Little people? What, like Mia and Yuri? Who decides they're so unimportant? You?

The Doctor: For a long time now, I thought I was just a survivor, but I'm not. I'm the winner. That's who I am. A Time Lord victorious.

Adelaide: And there's no one to stop you?

The Doctor: No.

Adelaide: [Noticeably angry] This is wrong, Doctor! I don't care who you are! The Time Lord victorious is wrong!

It might have been easier for the Doctor to be a rebel in the 1960s when he was young (so to speak; the show was young, in any case). It got more complicated the Doctor for the Doctor to fight powers when returned in the twenty-first century, middle-aged (the show as in its 40s).

But... But! The point of those stories is to show that the Doctor rejects having that much authority. The point of those stories is that he realizes he needs to be stopped from doing whatever he wants. He doesn’t become the thing he hates.

After you’ve watched your hero for a long time, you can lose track if some of the elements that resonate with you are because you have those character traits to begin with, or whether you picked them up from watching your hero.

That deep uneasiness with authority is something I share with the Doctor. I don’t automatically respect people in the military. I enjoy (sometimes more than I should) rattling cages and pushing back against overly rigid system. I like to rebel just a little bit. To liven things up.

But, like the Doctor, as you go, you tend to accrue more authority. You’re given responsibility, and the chance to make decisions that genuinely affect other people’s lives. The question becomes what you do with it: embrace it completely and wield it like a club to suit your own ends? Or do you try to use it sparingly, to genuinely improve the lot of others?

In the end, the Doctor is never part of “the system.” He’s powerful, but never “the power.” He’s one person in a box.

Related posts

Save the Day essays #1: Restoration
Save the Day essays #2: Recovery
Save the Day essays #3: Family
Save the Day essays #4: Rewatching the rebirth
Save the Day essays #5: Playing favourites

Save the Day essays #5: Playing favourites

When the matter of a favourite Doctor comes up, for fans of the classic series, Tom Baker is usually mentioned. For fans of the new series, it’s David Tennant who is usually mentioned as a favourite.

My favourites from the old series and the new?

In theory, Tom Baker should be “my” Doctor, because he was the first one I saw, in Episode Three of “The Seeds of Doom.” And yes, I did have a very long scarf. But now, when I watch his stories, there is something that is just a little too self-indulgent about the performance.

For a while, I thought of Colin Baker as a favourite. I liked the uncompromising nature of his Doctor... and I liked him partly because others didn’t. It was a shame he never got a chance for some of the long-term plans he had for the character to be played out.

Classic series favourite: Jon Pertwee

As time has gone on, though, I think I have settled on Jon Pertwee’s portrayal of the Doctor as my favourite from the original series. His performance, with its elegance and charm and slightly over-the-top-costume, solidified the character of the Doctor, and the Doctor’s been that way more or less ever since.

Some of the moments I remember most strongly about Pertwee were the moments of moral outrage. His Doctor had a strong sense of right and wrong. Given that much of the third Doctor’s tenure was spent in the company of the military, the Doctor, a pacifist action hero, often had a lot to be angry about, railing against the blunt methods the soldiers around him favoured.

But Pertwee’s Doctor was also kind and generous, even to those who often exasperated him, like Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. And he would turn from exasperated to warm in second... and you believed those two emotions were both just there under the surface.



The third Doctor was a bit more of a straight scientist than most of the other portrayals, and as a working scientist today, that’s another element that appeals to me. Maybe it’s one reason why a personality quiz said this was the Doctor I most resembled.

Third Doctor video playlist

New series favourite: Christopher Eccleston

He saved the show.

If Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor hadn’t worked, Doctor Who would have had one season in 2005, died, given classic series fans one more DVD boxed set for their collection, and that would be that. I am absolutely convinced of that.

I’m also convinced that the show wouldn’t have been as successful if it had launched with David Tennant’s Doctor. It’s a worldwide hit now, but I remember when even within science fiction fandom and the the geek community, Doctor Who was a tiny specialized fan niche. The show was viewed as something of an embarrassment by a lot of people: too convoluted, obsessed with its long history, and too eccentric.

The ninth Doctor was the most grounded Doctor. Eccleston’s was probably the first interpretation of the character that wouldn’t look out of place walking down a street. The Doctor’s trademark leather jacket was not such an obvious costume as previous incarnations, but it was a great symbol of a traveler. The Doctor’s eccentricities were toned down a little. Doctor Who needed that kind of performance right then for new audiences to get into the show.

Like Pertwee, when I think about Eccleston, some of his angry scenes sometimes come to mind. Like Pertwee, Eccleston’s Doctor had that sense of moral outrage, and sometimes he wasn’t kind. My favourite ninth Doctor moment is where he is maddest, in “Bad Wolf”: “It means, ‘no.’”


But it’s also when he’s his strongest and most resolute.

And when I rewatched his stories earlier this year, I was struck by how often he was grinning. Madly. With complete exuberance. While he was described sometimes as the “gunslinger” Doctor, a man who was wounded and lonelier and more vulnerable than ever (watch him meet the last Dalek), there was always that joy of exploring the universe, and being excited to see what was around the next corner.

Finally, when talking about favourite Doctors, there is always a hint of, “Which version would you most like to be, or feels closest to you?” Let’s just say I own a leather jacket and leave it at that. And that personality quiz I mentioned above? Ninth Doctor was second choice.

Chris Eccleston saved Doctor Who. He saved a show I loved and help make it into a worldwide success and ensure that I got many, many more stories from the TARDIS. And I will always be grateful for that.

Ninth Doctor video playlist

Coda

Once, when I met actor Nicholas Courtney (Brigidier Lethbridge-Stewart) at a convention, he was asked which was his favourite Doctor. He replied with a line from “The Five Doctors” that sums up my feelings, and those of a lot of fans, near perfectly:

Splendid chaps. All of them.

Related posts

Save the Day essays #1: Restoration
Save the Day essays #2: Recovery
Save the Day essays #3: Family
Save the Day essays #4: Rewatching the rebirth
Great balls of fire!

Save the Day essays #4: Rewatching the rebirth

Earlier this year, I started rewatching Doctor Who from its rebirth in 2005 with someone who had never seen it before, or even knew anything about the show. I was a fan of the classic series, and had seen pretty much everything there was to see, and it was fascinating to watch the reaction of someone seeing the series cold.

I knew she was hooked when she gasped when the store dummies moved in “Rose.”

It was shocking to her when the Doctor regenerated. “I thought this series was about those specific two characters!” But even more interesting was how exactly her reaction mirrored that of Rose. In “The Christmas Invasion,” Rose says something like, “This wouldn’t happen if the proper Doctor was here,” which prompted an emphatic “YES!” from the woman sitting next to me.

Ultimately, like Rose, she not only accepted David Tennant’s tenth Doctor, but now he’s her favourite Doctor (so far).

Then we hit “Doomsday.”

My god, I had almost forgotten how completely and utterly devastating that episode is.

We kept watching though the next season with Martha Jones. She didn’t like Martha very much, and said more than once, “Why couldn’t he have Donna as a companion?” (It took so much willpower for me not to even hint, “Just wait...”.)

On re-watching the show, it was the seasons after “Doomsday” that cemented in my mind how brilliant the new Doctor Who was, and how different than before. If it had been the old series, Rose would be all but forgotten after the next story. There might be a line or two, but then a new companion would be introduced, and on we go. (Watch how Liza Shaw is written out, or how long the Doctor refers to Sarah Jane Smith, in the old series.)

This time, the Doctor mourned. And he kept mourning for a long time.

That the Doctor didn’t just “get over it” was a testament to the show’s commitment to honesty in its emotions (even as it engaged in hand-waving and frippery over the details like what the sonic screwdriver could do). That honesty was part of the reason the new series was so successful in reviving the show.

I can’t help but wonder if it was being so committed to making sure those relationships in the show mattered was why, so often, Russell T Davies would hurt his characters so deeply. He said in an interview before the new series launched, “There will be times when it’ll just break your heart.” There aren’t many happy endings when companions leave in the new series.

Maybe it’s because when we cry, Davies know he created something that is meaningful to us watching.

Related posts

Save the Day essays #1: Restoration
Save the Day essays #2: Recovery
Save the Day essays #3: Family

Save the Day essays #3: Family

For a show about a lone wanderer through space and time, ironically, Doctor Who has been at its most successful when it’s been about family.

It’s easy to forget that the very first companion in the TARDIS was Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter.

Since then, there have been a lot of crews in the TARDIS, and the most memorable ones have been the ones that felt most like a family.

The second Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria had the sort of close-knit feel of a family, which was, somewhat amazingly, retained with Zoe joined. (This was no doubt due partly to the good working relationship between actors Frazier Hines and Pat Troughton.)

During the third Doctor’s exile on Earth, the U.N.I.T. team – Jo, the Brigadier, Benton, and Yates – was often described as a family. Even the villain, the impeccable Roger Delgado’s Master, became part of the family.

That sense of family weakened for a long while. The fifth Doctor had a little TARDIS crew for a while, but it always felt more thrown together and lacked a certain closeness in the scripts.

When the series returned in 2005, it was a family drama in more ways that one. “Nine hundred years of time and space, and I've never been slapped by someone’s mother.” Mothers and daughters and boyfriends and fathers and all those relationships were there in full force.

It may have been a dysfunctional family, but Rose and Jackie and Mickey and Captain Jack and Sarah Jane – how wonderful, Sarah Jane again, better than ever! – gave the Doctor an odd new family. I think that one one of the elements that contributed to the huge success of the series’ return.

Amy and Rory? Family again. And didn’t the dynamic get even more interesting when Rory’s dad got added to the mix?

While the Doctor and companion as pals and partners-in-crime can work (the seventh Doctor and Ace, the eleventh Doctor and Clara), the times the show has had the tight-knit, frequently recurring cast have been some of my favourites.

Related posts

Save The Day essays #1: Restoration
Save the Day essays #2: Recovery

Save the Day essays #2: Recovery

I went to a Doctor Who convention in 1986. John Nathan-Turner, then producer of the show, was asked about efforts to recover the old missing stories. He said something like, “They may have dried up, and there may be no more to find.”

He was wrong.

We got back most of “The Ice Warriors” in 1988. We got back all of the epic “Tomb of the Cybermen” in 1991. We got back an episode of “Galaxy 4” in 2011, to name a few. But there is always this fear that the next recovered episode from the 1960s could be the last to be recovered.

If, not too long ago, you had told me that during the fiftieth anniversary year of Doctor Who, that there would be nine episodes recovered (completing one story and almost completing another)...

And that one set of those (“The Web of Fear”) would be a story featuring the Great Intelligence, a villain that had been brought back to the current show just months before (“The Snowmen” Christmas special from 2012, “The Bells of St. John,” “The Name of the Doctor”)...

And that I’d be be able to download them online and watch them mere days after their discovery had been announced...

I would have brushed that off as the most wishful of wishful thinking. It sounds too improbable, too good to be true, to have so many coincidences align.

The moral of the story is that sometimes, the improbable happens. And it can be wonderful.

Save The Day essays #1: Restoration

My “Save the Day” essays will be a series celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who, which is less than a month away.

I didn’t start watching Doctor Who at the beginning. I was part of the early wave of Doctor Who fandom in North America. Like a fair number of people, I’d started watching Doctor Who in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the fourth Doctor series were syndicated to public television in the United States.

I learned many of the old Doctor Who stories were lost. Many original tapes had been wiped, because the BBC considered television ephemeral. Most of the old black and white stories from the 1960s existed because someone had pointed a 16 mm camera at a TV screen and filmed episodes for overseas sales.

I was excited when I learned that our nearby American public television station would be showing all the existing stories from the show’s beginning. But at first, I was disappointed. So many of these stories felt so bad to me.

It wasn’t until years later when I started seeing some of the DVDs that I realized my judgment had bee compromised. I wasn’t just reacting to the show; I was reacting to the low quality of the images. What I saw on public television were unrestored 16 mm prints, with scratches on the frames and hiss on the audio.

Seeing the restored versions on DVD were a revelation. This comparison of an original and restored frame (from Seeds of Death, a second Doctor story) shows how huge the difference could be. Here’s the sort of image I saw broadcast:

And here’s the DVD.

The difference is stunning. Episodes that looked cheap and tired suddenly looked professional and even ambitious.

I realized that I was responding to the scratches on the film far more than I’d even thought. I hadn’t been judging the old stories on their own merit, but I’d been heavily influenced by the presentation of them.

I had a similar reaction when I started to watch DVDs of old Godzilla movies. Like Doctor Who, I’d seen the movies on low quality prints that had scratches and crummy reproduction. I love them, but they seemed cheap. Seeing them remastered on DVD from original negatives, and with subtitles instead of dubbing, completely changed my thinking about the movies. They looked glorious. What I thought was a bad production was actually bad reproduction.

It makes me wonder how many things I rate lower than they deserve because of incidental flaws in how they are presented.

External links

Doctor Who Restoration Team

All I needed to know about the Universe, I learned from Doctor Who

What’s the point in being grown-up if you can’t be childish sometimes?!

You can’t change history – not one line. (The First Law of Time.)

Aim for the eyestalk.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Nothing is rubbish if you’ve got an inquiring mind.

Have a jelly baby.

A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points… but it is by no means the most interesting.

Logic merely allows one to be wrong with authority.

Of course we should interfere; always do what you’re best at.

You can always judge a man by the quality of his enemies.

When you make a plan, plan in depth.

Computers are really very sophisticated idiots.

Scientists earn their right to experiment at the cost of total responsibility.

There are no other colours without the blues.

Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.

Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, somewhere else the tea’s getting cold.


Happy 49^th anniversary, Doctor Who!

By me, apparently around 30 January 1994 (that’s the date on the computer file, anyway).

Self archiving science is not the solution

I can’t watch “The Power of the Daleks.”

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), feeling that television was a disposable, ephemeral medium, junked many tapes of television series like Doctor Who. They even junked notable ones like the first episode of Patrick Troughton’s second Doctor facing the best known and most popular villains of the entire series.

Archiving is a tricky thing.

The card game Legend of the Five Rings is about 15 years old. But it’s almost impossible to find material about the game’s influential first couple of years. A lot of key discussion happened on a company email listerv. The one copy someone from the company was keeping was lost when a hard drive crashed.

I went looking for a podcast of a story I’d heard on Quirks and Quarks about singing mice. I wanted to listen to the audio again. But their online archive goes back to 2006, and the story I remembered was from November 2005.

You might think. “Well, that’s just pop culture,” but the same issue plague science. Physicist Slava Turyshev, who is working on the Pioneer spacecraft, noted:

To study the Pioneer anomaly we needed the probe’s navigational data. But mission tapes were normally saved for only a few months and then thrown away, so you’re lucky if you can find what you need.

Today, some experiments generate so much data that chucking the data away is a necessary part of the process because we just can’t keep it all. This happens at the Large Hadron Collider, for instance.

Just as I posted this, I learned a personal subscription to Nature only gets you papers back to 1997.

I mention these because one of the ideas to reform the scientific publishing enterprise is one where journals are removed from the picture entirely. Scientific communication should be replaced by blogs and self archiving, according to some. This is not a vision I can get behind, because I’ve hung around with taxonomists.

Taxonomists are often accused of being too conservative and hidebound in publishing. The botantists required species descriptions paper and Latin species descriptions until very recently. But I have to say, as a group, they made me more aware of the importance of archiving than any other. Taxonomists are often routinely revisiting literature that is centuries old. How am I going to make sure someone can read my papers in the twenty-fifth century?

Björn Brembs argues that libraries can effectively take the place of journals. That is certainly an improvement over self-archiving, though I think we have a long way to go on that front. At our institution, one enterprising librarian started an institutional repository for faculty, where we could deposit not only our reprints, but more ephemeral work like conference posters.

But she quit. And since then, I’m not even sure who, if anyone, is in charge of the repository. It’s been a while since I deposited anything there.

While I personally plan to live forever, in the remote chance that some accident occurs where I don’t, how can I make sure my scientific contributions are available to researchers one hundred years from now? Two hundred? Three? Sticking my own PDFs on my own university server is not going to cut it. I can’t control what happens to my papers after my death. Maintaining the scientific record needs to be done by communities and institutions, not individuals.

Hat tip: This grew in part out of a conversation that bubbled up over at Living in an Ivory Basement.

She’s packed her goodies and gone

The very first episode of Doctor Who I ever saw (“The Seeds of Doom”) opened with Elisabeth Sladen frantically digging around in snow, trying to find the Doctor.

And it was so wonderful to see her back in The Sarah Jane Adventures, where her part was such a great counterpoint to typical television heroes (young and male). She was an action hero at an age when most actresses have to play the nurses in Shakespeare plays or the grandmother.

She died of cancer today at the age of 63. Very sad.

Photo by Danacea on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Greyhound, over and out

I met Nicholas Courtney in 1986.

He played Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in Doctor Who in the 1970s all the way up to the character’s final appearance in The Sarah Jane Adventures about a year ago.

He was warm and friendly to me, and to others, even though he had reasons to be in a bad mood. The convention, for which he was one of the guests of honor, had failed to come up with their promised appearance fees. But Courtney and the other guests went on and continued to appear for the fans, who had showed up in good faith. (I learned some years later that Courtney and the other guests never saw a dime.)

I had the fun of telling him how great it was to meet the man who played Lethbridge-Stewart, because I had come to the convention from Lethbridge, Alberta.

In one of the Q&A sessions, I asked the guests what their favourite line was. His was from his favourite story (and that of many fans), The Dæmons, and is one of his most famous:

“Chap with wings there. Five rounds rapid.”

Courtney was so completely successful in the part that although the organization his character headed, UNIT, has reappeared in the show, none of his successors have been able to recapture the magic that Courtney brought. Courtney and the writers made Lethbridge-Stewart a complex, fully drawn character, who was often difficult. Part of the Brigadier’s charm was that the was not always charming.

And he was one of the few characters who routinely got the better of The Doctor.

He said in 1986 that he would relish the chance to play someone who wasn’t an English army officer. Even one of the times I saw him outside Doctor Who, in Yes, Prime Minister, he was playing a police commissioner. Another officer. I hope he got the chances he wanted to play those other parts.

I was so sad to hear he died yesterday, at 81.

He’s pictured here in The Five Doctors in 1983, and Battlefield in 1989; three years before and after our paths crossed.

Related pages

Tom Baker, the fourth Doctor, on Nick Courtney
Doctor Who website

Tuesday Crustie: 47th

This edition of Tuesday Crustie falls on the anniversary of Doctor Who. And at least once, a crustacean has been the monster! Fear... the Macra!

The only reason these clips from The Macra Terror still survive is because they were censored in New Zealand because they were too scary. But many pictures still exist, and have been compiled into a photonovel. Audio from the story also exists, and has been released as an audio book (available on iTunes).

And because Russell T Davies is such a fanboy, he actually brought them back decades later...

File under, "We didn't listen to the warnings."

Last night, I was thinking about the fragility of a world economy made dependent on high-efficiency travel.

Watching the news? No, I was watching Doctor Who. And not the new series with Matt Smith, no. I was watching some old school Who: “The Seeds of Death.”

That’s right: back in 1969, writer Brian Hayles was worried about the risks of globalization and how easily interdependent economies can be disrupted if travel stops. It’s a teleportation system called “T-mat” in the show rather than good ol’ airplanes, but still. And the parallels don’t stop there.

A major part of the plot concerns the abandonment of rockets... and now we’re looking at the last space shuttle flight with no replacement on the near horizon.

The cause of our current woes? Eyjafjallajökull, a volcano in Iceland. (And seriously, you cannot tell me the name of that volcano sounds like the name of a Doctor Who baddie. You just can’t.) The cause of the woes in “The Seeds of Death”? Ice Warriors!