Creative Consulting

Continuing our semi-irregular highlighting of the works of other authors, we're privileged this week to play host to Justin Richards, who really should need no introduction.

Not only was he the editor, presiding over BBC Books' Doctor Who range 'back in my day' - and continues in his role as Creative Consultant for the range - if you want some idea of just how prolific he has been as an author, you need only check out this list on Amazon and prepare to be impressed. Even setting aside the mountain of Doctor Who books and audio dramas, he's written a host of other original series, collaborated - creatively! - with Jack Higgins, and has recently ventured into the Kindle arena with another creation of his own, The Skeleton Clock. So it's even more of an honour that he took time out of his scribely schedule to answer a few questions.



Now, for openers, I already have my copy of The Skeleton Clock on my Kindle, so technically you don't have to sell me on the book, but give us an elevator pitch for the novel. What does the story have going for it?

The main thing – I hope! – is that it’s a good, exciting story. It’s set in the City, which is London some time in the future when the sea level has risen and the Thames has flooded out across the city. The ground has fractured and moved, so there are areas that are completely under water, and others where just the tops of the buildings stick out of the flood. So it’s sort of recognisable, but very different – St Pauls Cathedral is just the dome above the water and called ‘Whispers’. If you look out from there you can see the twisted, broken remains of the Gherkin, with the glass shattered and the rusting skeleton of the structure just about intact and that’s The Twisting. But to get there you’d have to take a boat – maybe from Nelson’s Mooring, which is this statue on a short plinth sticking out of the water. Or maybe you can find a way through the old tunnel network under the city – though that can be dangerous as the tunnels are liable to flood without warning...

So it’s a fascinating environment, society breaking down and everything sort of skewed. Into that, let’s add a mysterious antique bookshop, and some nasty villains, some secret experiments, a talking statue and of course sea monsters!
Sorry – I think our elevator travelled through a lot of floors there, didn’t it?!

You are a prolific author with a host of published material to your credit. Why on earth would you choose to add to your workload by venturing into the independent publishing arena?

It’s an experiment and an adventure. I wasn’t really sure what to do with The Skeleton Clock once I’d written it, so I thought it would be a good novel to try as an eBook. Seeing the royalty rates publishers are offering, and watching some ‘independent’ novels doing so well as eBooks, I thought I’d better find out what it’s all about. I read almost everything on my iPad now, and while I don’t think eBooks will replace the physical printed editions the market is going to be huge. So I wanted to know what’s involved – the formatting, submitting, publishing... And I’m getting into pricing and promotion as well. That’s where it gets trickier as I want to be an author not a publicist or marketeer. But even in print-publishing the author these days has to be more involved in the non-writing side of things...

Has it been a successful experiment? Too soon to know – but I don’t think I’ve lost anything by trying and who knows, maybe Spielberg will find the book...

As an author, I'm a fan of having two or three different projects on the go at any given time - in case inspiration runs temporarily dry on one, I always have something else I can turn to. But with so many different series and individual titles to your name, how do you juggle the various projects?

Panic usually. Well, actually it’s a complex algorithm that combines: (a) what do I want to do today? (b) which deadline is the soonest and (c) what was I working on yesterday as that’s likely to be easiest to pick up on again.

I tend to have things at different stages. So I’ll have several projects that I’m working on proposals or outlines for, some that are coming back to haunt me in the form of rewrites or proof reading or whatever, and I’ll have one that I’m actually working on the main writing part of. So I don’t actually write several things at once. Well, not really.

Also of all the creations and series to your name, which would you consider your favourite and why? (Setting aside Doctor Who!)

Ooh, that’s tricky. In fact, impossible. I love them all as much I think. I’m very proud of my standalone novels like The Chaos Code and The Skeleton Clock. But as series go The Invisible Detective was a great breakthrough for me – and such fun to do. The I sort of moved on with the books about the Department of Unclassified Artefacts. That was never really devised as a series, but there are three of them now (The Death Collector, The Parliament of Blood, and The Chamber of Shadows) – all of which have been great fun and very exciting to write...

Then I’m also proud of the work I’ve done with Jack Higgins – which was such a privilege, working with a literary hero of mine. And for sheer enjoyment, my younger children’s spy series Agent Alfie made me laugh the whole way though – even though writing funny is very very difficult!

I remember a favourite quote, from Sol Stein, that you used to cite to me: "A writer is someone who can't not write." Obviously with contracts and commissions come deadlines and demands, but is that creative impulse still very much a part of what drives you or is making time to write purely a discipline and/or part of the job?

I’m glad you remember that – it’s a good and apt quote isn’t it? And it applies to me just as much now as ever, I think. ‘Driven’ sounds a bit pompous, but if I go for a few days without actually writing anything then I do get itchy fingers – I need a keyboard. I need to write... something.

Doctor Who formed a large part of your writing - and editorial! - career for a long while and that was clearly a labour of love. How much of that influences your writing outside of the Doctor Who universe?

I suspect it’s a huge influence. I write the sorts of things I would love to read – or see or hear. And my absolute favourite series in any format is Doctor Who. So whatever I write will be to an extent tinged with that, I think. I don’t mean I’m writing Doctor Who without the Doctor, but I love that style of story – which may be quite realistic in so many ways, but underlying it is a huge fantasy or SF or horror conceit. There is something – in the true sense of the word – extra-ordinary going on. Maybe it’s ghosts, or the supernatural, maybe it’s monsters, maybe it’s extrapolating science, or maybe it’s flooding London and filling it with sea monsters and animated toys...



Back to the Skeleton Clock. It's a great title, but where and how was the idea for that story born?

I started with the setting – which I think is probably unusual for me. Usually I have an idea for a plot or a character. The Chaos Code came from the character of Julius Venture, for example. The Parliament of Blood came from a new take on Victorian Vampires... The Skeleton Clock started to tick (as it were) when I was watching an Alan Titchmarsh series on the BBC about the making of Britain in geological terms. There was sequence where they took London back to Jurassic times, or whenever, and they used CGI to flood Trafalgar Square I think – showed the water rising to where it would have been. I watched that short sequence and first I thought it was a terrific image. Then I thought that it could happen again in the future – just like they showed. Then I started to wonder what sort of stories you could tell set in that environment.

Finally, what's your take on the age of the Kindle and ebooks? And are there plans for a paperback edition of the Skeleton Clock?

To take the second question first, I’m not sure. I don’t want to become a print-publisher. But I might well take The Skeleton Clock round and try to sell the print rights. We’ll see – for the moment it’s ticking over (ha-ha) as an eBook.
As for the future of publishing, well now you’re asking. I think eBooks will become hugely important. More than that is difficult to predict. There’s the whole democratisation of publishing as well – anyone can publish a book. So how do Publishers fit into that? Will they be gatekeepers in the sense that readers will look to see if a ‘real’ publisher is behind a book as a guarantee of quality? How will Publishers persuade authors that they can add value to their work? Because I’ve seen both sides, I know that a publisher brings editorial advice and judgement as well as marketing clout and ‘branding’. But will that continue to be important?

There was a point, I remember as I was in the computer industry, when it was obvious that the whole video-game revolution would be driven by the film studios. They had the visual authors, they had the technology and expertise to produce what would be basically interactive films the user could control somehow. But it didn’t happen. The film industry stepped away from that – or rather, never realised it was there. A whole new industry grew up instead and for a while we talked about how the film industry would die as a result. We’re at a similar turning point now – or soon will be. Print books will survive, no question. But for the new, exploding eBook industry – will the existing publishers step up and bring their expertise to that, will they reinvent themselves and learn how to add value and stay in the game? Or will a new industry develop – like the teenagers and young entrepreneurs who jumped into the video-game vacuum? So far, eBooks are just print books put online. Will that continue to be the case, or will the eBook branch off and mutate into something very different?

We live – and write – in exciting times!


You can find The Skeleton Clock for your Kindle on Amazon or for other e-readers on Smashwords.

Further information on The Skeleton Clock, including a free sample, can be found on Justin's site along with details of many of Justin's other works.


SAF

Dancing With Dinosaurs

There are some rules they don’t tell you about going to concerts. Like when the doors open on a Shakira gig, there’s no hurry because she won’t be on until much later. (She’ll be well worth the wait, mind you.) But for a Rush concert, well, rush. The clue was there in the name, I’ll grant you, but I was, for the first time in my life, late for a show.

Admittedly I took a laid back attitude to the schedule – courtesy of the lessons learned at the Shakira concert in December. Doors open at 6:30pm, show starts 7:30pm, I figured the latter time was more than good enough to aim for. But on Wednesday 25th May I should still have been at the O2 in fine time for the Canadian trio’s Time Machine Tour.

But: (adopts Reggie Perrin voice) 10 minutes late, delays on the Jubilee line. Followed by a hold-up at the doors as, thanks to having my ticket displayed prominently on the side of my fridge for the last few months, the print had faded somewhat so they had to print a fresh ticket for me so that their machine could read the bar code. Then I foolishly attempted to grab some fast food before taking my seat, and suffice to say it wasn’t. Fast, that is. It was food, of sorts.

And, perhaps as punishment for my joking on twitter about who might be supporting Rush – Hans Zimmer? – there was no support act and the main act had kicked off at or near 7:30. Ouch.

So I missed the first twenty minutes. I’m guessing about four songs. Although with Rush, that could just as easily have been two songs. Depends on which era they started out on in their Time Machine.

Ah well, all these things are part of the adventure and, like the winter wonderland outside at the Shakira concert, certainly serve to characterise a given occasion in the memory.

The fact is, I’m glad to say, missed songs aside, the band pretty much scotched all my jokes about dinosaurs and the chance to see them again before fossilisation set in. They have been around for aaaaaaaaaaaaages. I grew up with my Dad playing their albums (loud) (in amongst Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes, King Crimson and others) on Saturdays when my Mum went out shopping. Fair to say, I didn’t actually get into them myself until early to mid teens, maybe, but that still makes for thirty years I’ve been following their progress. I saw them live back in the days of yore of their Roll The Bones Tour. The memory cheats, I know, but to me they didn’t seem any less live this time out.

More so, I would say, since Roll The Bones – along with Hold Your Fire, which featured prominently on that tour - was heavier on the synthesisers and lighter on the heavier stuff. Whereas, what with Time Machine intended as a tour through their own history, this packed enough punch to defibrillate a dinosaur. Such hammering bass you could feel the vibrations in your chest. In a good way.

The set – as in physical set – was relatively simple but had a beautiful Jules Verne steampunk aesthetic going for it, backed up with fireworks (loud enough to nearly give the guy next to me a heart attack) and spurting pillars of flame, with Peart installed at its heart like a cross between Captain Nemo and Animal from the Muppets – and delivering a sensational drum solo midway through the second half.

That’s right. Second half. For all their age, Lee, Lifeson and Peart gave us a *three-hour* stormathon of recent tracks, a smattering of new material and of course the classics. Lifeson doesn’t move a whole lot but he gives his all on the guitars, while Lee bounds around the stage like a kid. One section of the show is devoted to a live performance of the Moving Pictures album in its entirety. Yay! Because I love that album. From Tom Sawyer to Vital Signs, (even if I can’t always hear Red Barchetta these days without being reminded of that damn Milky Way ad – “The red car and the blue car had a race!”) it’s something of a bridge between their purer metal years and their flirtation with more commercial leanings (like Hold Your Fire) – but at least they never did a full Genesis. It’s something of a miracle in rock genealogy terms that the three of them have remained together for so long. Whatever chemistry they have between them, it works.



On first impressions, the new songs were what I’d call dependable Rush, not blow you away stuff. But in fairness to the band, when you go to see a show like theirs, there’s a sense of an unspoken trade agreement – sure, fellas, you can play your new material as long as you give us a healthy slew of the oldies. And they held up their end of the bargain.

The one and only area I feel a bit cheated on (apart from what the O2 vendor charged me for a burger and a few chips!) is that there was no Xanadu. I have this horrible niggling feeling that maybe they opened with that track and I am going to have to put it on the CD player when I get home just to remind myself of its awesomeness. We did get the exquisite Closer To The Heart from the same era, but part of me always (and when I say always, bear in mind I’ve only seen the band live twice) feels a Rush concert is incomplete without Xanadu. I’d rather hoped it would be one of the encore numbers, but instead we were treated to the powerhouse Villa Strangiato and (oddly reggaed up to initially disguise it) Working Man. For my money, the latter was a curious choice of closing number, but on the other hand it hails from their very earliest album and I guess it’s fitting that the Time Machine ends up back at what was essentially the beginning.

It’s like if Doctor Who was a rock band, they might play out with An Unearthly Child. And that would by no means be a bad thing.

It’s an oldie but a goodie. Just like Rush. Thanks for that guys.

Not sure what kind of dinosaurs they are, but I’m sure the word ‘bronto’ is in there somewhere.

SAF

Extraordinary League

Before I get stuck into a review of Saturday’s Doctor Who episode, let me just get something out of my system:

I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!

It’s tough to be entirely objective when buoyed up by the satisfaction of having been right all along, but on the other hand it’s one helluva neat trick to deliver an episode that gives the answer you expect while also magically avoiding the trap of predictability. The Grand Moff is quite the conjurer.

A Good Man Goes To War was everything it needed to be and more. I was concerned that the mid-season break might damage the show, with too large a chunk of the audience losing interest during the summer interval. Autumn may prove me wrong, but now I’m pretty confident that anyone who watched it will be back for more. Hopefully along with a lot of others who just heard about how bloody good it was.

It was big, bold, gutsy, brave and tugged at the heart-strings. This is the first episode in ages I’ve rewatched the following morning and I shed genuine tears. In amongst the genuine out-loud laughter and woo-hoos of delight. My main grumble is that we should have had two episodes of this, instead of the dreary Flesh runaround of the preceding couple of weeks. Plainly, the Flesh plays a significant part in this season’s arc, but there was more life and excitement and suspense and emotion in any randomly selected five minutes of this than there was in the entire Almost story.

The opening scene was enough to confirm for me the identity of Amy’s daughter – the name Melody Pond on the side of the crib – so it kicked off with a little Yay! From me from the get-go. The destruction of the 12th Cyberfleet was a bit of unnecessary grandstanding and further undermined a Who monster reduced to a bit of a joke by too many rubbish stories... *but* it served to underline a key point which comes up later *and* finally gave us a Rory full of authority and maturity, one we could believe had stood guard over his beloved Amy for millennia. “Don’t give me those blank looks.” Brilliant. And then the punch: “Shall I repeat the question?” to a backdrop of a fleet breaking apart in fireballs.

Grabbed my attention.

Then we’re treated to a look-in on Demon’s Run and its residents: the creepy order of Headless Monks and the Anglican army (previously seen as good guys in Time Of Angels) - both of which have an irresistably (Robert) Holmesian flavour – and some elaborate, extensive trap laid for the Doctor by Mrs Eyepatch. Amy’s declaration to her captors is highly-charged and the subtle introduction of Lorna, watching on as Amy’s baby is taken is superbly done. I will say the gay Anglican couple were amusing, if not great in the acting department – but the horror of the fat one’s conversion is expertly dished up – without the need to show us anything but an empty – waiting – box.

Then we’re off on a whirlwind tour of time and space as the Doctor and Rory recruit their Magnificent Several for their own battle beyond the stars. And they’re a fantastically colourful collection of characters too. Sword-wielding Victorian lesbian Silurian and her maid sidekick (Tipping The Scales, anyone?); Sontaran nurse (I can just picture him in Casualty); and wheeler-dealer Dorium (“What do you need me for? I’m old. I’m fat. I’m blue!”). Storming little scenes that deftly paint the characters and backgrounds (and doubtless spawn several thousand works of fan fiction, but these scenes are honestly all we need!) And, of course, Rory the Roman turning up to enlist River.

Oh my god, I loved that scene. River: “Turn it off. I’m breaking in, not out.” The whole thing is beautifully laced with emotion and razor-wit, both of which cut deep. Is Rory the ‘Good Man’ that River kills? I ask this because although we have seen the Impossible Astronaut shoot the Doctor, I’m not sure we can be sure the young River was in the suit at the time or indeed how or by whom she would be arrested for the crime. I foresee a certain future ahead and how this all might play out, but I’m reserving speculation for the moment – partly because of the spoiler potential, I suppose, but mainly I think because I doubt the chances of my being right twice. ;-)

Anyway, what’s true of that scene holds true for most of the rest of the episode. Moffat writes rollercoasters that spiral around themselves and take you on topsy-turvy heart-wrenching rides in the best possible way. The triumphalism of the Doctor’s battle on Demon’s Run is very RTD-like, but it has the advantage of occurring early on and we know it’s all just been too easy and that there is a bitter downfall to come. We’d know it even without River’s prophesy.

Where a two-parter might have enhanced that would be in elaborating on that battle, making it a little less obviously too easy. What we get is something of a shorthand version and the bad guys’ trap might have seemed a touch cleverer – and we would have gotten to see the Extraordinary League in action some more. As it is, within the time allotted, it works – even if I did fully expect the Doctor to be revealed under one of those Monk hoods and when he says, “Surprise!”, I wasn’t really. But I still enjoyed it all the same and the story had further surprises to come.

The Anglicans chanting “We’re not fools” went on a bit too long for my tastes. That’s an incidental though and the magic carries on around it, culminating in the Doctor’s 3 mins 42 seconds victory (NB not without bloodshed as the Sapphic Silurian – thanks, iCowboy! – later claims) and is not even sullied by the pirate captain and the space spitfires turning up to remind us of two of the poorer stories in the last couple of years. The great truth is that there’s almost too much fantastic stuff going on *after the battle is over* to properly cover in the space of this review.

You know me, I never like to harp on too long. But I have to cite just a few of the special moments.

The Doctor’s anger and his breaking of Colonel Runaway. That’s the vengeance of a Good Man. Amy’s tearful reunion with Rory and her baby – and the Doctor joining them and speaking baby. The Doctor and the Silurian discussing when the baby ‘began’. The Monks and their attack prayer. River's voice-over 'Demon's Run, When A Good Man Goes To War...' recital while everything is coming undone. Dorium’s wasteful death. The Magnificent Several’s heroic stand. The ‘fool you twice with the same trick’ flesh-baby. Hands up, I did not see that coming. I feel like I should have done, but hats off to Moffat. And Amy’s reaction. I get a chill now just thinking about it, the way she screams out Rory’s name.

The Sontaran’s death and his connection with Rory: “Rory, I’m a nurse.” Lorna’s death and the Doctor’s lie: “Who was she?” “I don’t know but she was very brave.” “They always are.”




The cot. Not only a wonderfully quirky example of Gallifreyan meets Gipetto carpentry, but it raises so many fascinating questions. Some of which Amy and Rory put to the Doctor, of course: “Have you ever had children?” To which there’s clear evasion going on and surely the Doctor’s lying when he tells them the cot is his. Thank goodness he’s not a suspect in LA Noire, because I’d never have been able to read the lie. Later, River is asking him if he’s forgotten how to read and there’s a close-up of the Gallifreyan script. So it’s her cot. Sure it could have been his as well at some point in the distant past, but I don’t mind admitting I have trouble getting my head entirely around the River-Doctor timeline. Moffat cooks a mean pasta dish but I can’t wait for him to properly untangle all the spaghetti.

River’s arrival on the scene is, in any case, the crowning moment. The speech she gives the Doctor is a rude awakening for him, a home truth. It happens to echo something I’ve wondered for a while now and harkens back to that scene with the destruction of the cyberfleet: has the Doctor become too powerful? The man who can turn armies around at the mention of his name. And, as River puts it, if he carries on this way, what will his name become? What will he become?



It’s inspired, to explore the consequences of that. I wonder if it will lead to a sort of reining in of the Doctor, something of a return to his older ways where he wasn’t quite so in command all the time. At the same time, it’s difficult to see how he could take a step back from what he is now, without some kind of regeneration or otherwise cataclysmic trauma. (And who knows, with the teaser shot that followed this week’s episode, that could well be what’s coming...!)

That is ultimately part of the beauty of what Moffat has left us with. This has all the spectacle and grandeur and epicness of a season finale, with all the advantage of also feeling like part one of a however-many-parter. The ending strikes a kind of Empire Strikes Back note, with the Doctor heading off to recover Amy’s daughter while the others remain behind with, er, Amy’s daughter.

On the subject of which revelation (I knew it!), it just bears out how superbly it’s been played all along. I sensed a bond between Amy and River, a similarity even – to an extent they’ve been played like female Doctors and that has to have contributed to the chemistry that’s evident whenever we’ve seen the Amy-River-Doctor team in action. (That and you get the sense the actors have a whale of a time.) And I totally buy it, as long as River never actually calls Amy ‘mum’. That would just look/sound really odd. Temporal shenanigans will do that, I guess.

There are questions. Umpty-gazillion, I’m sure. For one, exactly who is it that the Doctor has scared so much that they’ve gone to these lengths? The Daleks? The Silence? Silent Daleks? Whoever or whatever, the season has a real villain, a real enemy at its core - no matter how long we have to wait before we see them. But what Moffat pulls off with this halfway finale is to ice this cake with a major major answer and sprinkle all those other questions on top like hundreds and thousands. And as if that wasn’t enough to make us sit up and eagerly await Doctor Who’s return in the autumn, they then promise that he’ll be back in an episode entitled:

Let’s Kill Hitler.

That alone was worth a laugh out loud and a huge round of applause.

Genius.

SAF

Death Is A Lonely Business

So said Ray Bradbury in one of his titles. And far be it from me to argue with the great Mr Bradbury, but of course that's only one reason why we might choose to explore the topic in our creative writings.

And it's a recurring theme for children's writer and illustrator, Janie Bill, who guests here today as part of our occasional mission to highlight other authors.

Over to you, Janie.




Janie's Fantastical Floridian Tales

Dying is serious business. Growing up with strong family ties, much of my childhood involved attending funerals for extended family and elderly relatives. I wasn’t allowed to wear black because back then it wasn’t a proper color for a child even when in mourning. I saw open caskets and closed ones, flamboyant floral arrangements and coffins inside homes.

Despite all the support I gave to my extended family and friends of my parents, most of whom I saw once a year at Christmas if that often, death didn’t strike me as a monumental occasion until it visited my immediate family. Although my novels intend to uplift readers, death consistently makes an appearance.

In Lochness, a boy named Lochlan drowns while saving his dog during from a Floridian hurricane. His guardian angel in the form of a dragon fairy helps him find his way through the passage between life and death. As Lochlan struggles to survive underwater, he searches for the path back to his home before being devoured by a lochness monster.




In Halo Light, a boating accident at the moment an enchanted island disappears takes the life of Ivy’s dad. Determined to bring her father back, Ivy develops her ability to understand the miracle of Halo Light. When Ivy learns fate intends to take her mother’s life also, she embarks on a quest into the Everglades where she confronts paranormal demons and discovers the secret to everlasting life.

In Mystery Under a Full Moon, while snorkeling, teenager Anatolia finds a Spanish treasure that possesses supernatural powers when placed under a full moon. An hour later her dinghy overturns and she lands on a waterlogged body floating in the lagoon. She sails through the Caribbean, hiding from the killer who hunts for her treasure, and collecting clues to reveal his identity before he attacks.

Simon, I deeply appreciate the opportunity to visit your website. Please stay in touch and discover the inspiration behind my Floridian tales at

www.janiebill.com.
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You'll also find a range of Janie's illustrations and thoughts on writing and her unique world view over on her site.

SAF

Pound Of Flesh

You know how when you bounce a rubber ball, subsequent bounces will fail to reach the same height as the first? We got to see the same principle in operation with The Almost People, this week’s Doctor Who. It basically does much the same thing as the previous episode, but with some loss of its initial energy.

What it needed to do was to expand in some way, take us in an unexpected direction, or pretty much just do anything to justify its two-part stretch. But the main impression I’m left with is that it dished up more of the same. More running up and down corridors, more rubbery CGI, more crying about human rights for mannequins, more ham-fisted hogwash. Worse, it seems riddled with contradictions and character motivations in constant flux. Even its most dramatic, shock moment managed to cheapen and undermine the entire principle it had been flogging us with throughout and ultimately all we’re left with is a molten puddle, but – unfortunately - the molecular memory remains.

As far as I understood it, the battle lines had already been drawn and the gangers were already ganging up on the humans, and yet this week we have Jennifer 2.0 turning up to whip the gangers into a war against humans. This turns into the most pitiful war in history, as it lasts for about six minutes before everyone’s changed their minds. Naturally, I can understand anyone losing their appetite for such an ugly, horrific business, but this particular war never really got as far as the ugly, horrific part. Nothing much happened.

This change of heart is nothing compared to the Doctor’s u-turn on Fleshly Rights, as he – both of him - embarks on a personal mission to convince all of us – and Amy in particular – that gangers should be treated as equals. The dull-dad ganger is good enough to take the place of the dull dad, the copy-Doctor is still the Doctor etc. But as soon as he concludes that Amy is a copy, he insists Rory stands back so he can disintegrate her. And Rory isn’t nearly as insistent about protecting her as he was about the Jennifer clone.

While a measure of hypocrisy is perfectly human, I just didn’t buy it here after the message was so heavily hammered home again and again throughout this dismal two-parter. I get that the writer wanted to deliver a shock (ooer, Rory and Amy have been rubbernecking all this time?) – and one that brought us back onto story-arc territory with a bang – but there were other ways of handling that reveal.
The implications are intriguing, of course, but the revelation generates more interest in and reflection on past stories than any prolonged contemplation of this one. I had thought that Amy might have been replaced when they rescued her from the Silence in Day Of The Moon, but I’m reminded that she saw eyepatch woman peering through a hatch as she searched the orphanage. So it would seem she was duplicated at some point during the season break, which would be a bit of a cheat, since I do like to at least feel like I had a chance to spot the clues.

Also, this story doesn’t quite remove the possibility that the Doctor we see get shot is a copy. (That line about the molecular memory enduring does hint of a potential return.) But I rather fancy that’s a red herring, since temporal jiggery-pokery is much more Moffat’s style. But anyway, I might save any further speculation for after the mid-season finale of next week’s episode. The decision to split this season in half strikes me as a poor one – a mid-season break didn’t do Flashforward any favours – but a strong halfway point should pique audience interest enough to keep them going through the summer. I just worry that the next half will have to be preceded by a massive Previously On... – the like of which tends to be attached to every episode of Fringe, Season 3.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, The Almost People.

Positives. Erm. I’ll try.

The pile of discarded Flesh was a genuinely disturbing and horrifying image.
The Doctor and Doppeldoctor were well-played by Smith, and he’s genuinely scary when he throws a complete wobbly at Amy and shoves her against the wall. The comedy double act, like a lot of the comedy in this one, is variable, ranging from amusing to the teeniest bit annoying. A touch too smug – like a Jimmy-Carr standup routine. And the whole past-regeneration schizophrenia skit was over-egged, with the dubbed-in Tom Baker voice really not working at all. Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill excellent as ever, although with similar provisos to last week’s: Rory’s devotion to Jennifer seems even more obsessive and poorly founded, Amy again has little of note to do, beyond doubting the copy-Doc.

Commander Kinko knew her original so well, she knew the chosen code word, and yet the Commander herself never seemed to be able to guess her copy’s thought processes. The wall with eyes was a bit pointless. The way in which characters were killed off to ensure there was only one of each by story’s end was corny and predictable. And the sequence with the holo-call between father and was pure Tate & Lyle. I’d rather wade through acid than that much syrup. And the shuttle that was presumably hovering above or even landing in the courtyard when the castle blew up was conveniently forgotten so we could skip ahead to the happy ending of peace on Earth and goodwill to all rubbers.

There was some, er, lovely irony in the way Jennifer who so strongly protested that she wasn’t a monster ultimately transformed herself into a weird-ass monster.
Except by lovely, I mean lame, of course. Sorry, I was meant to be trying for positives. What can I say, I failed.

Like the path of a bouncing ball, it was predictable.

In a word, rubberish.

SAF

Towel Day

"Sass that hoopy frood Ford Prefect, there's a guy who really knows where his towel is."

Ford Prefect is, of course, one of my heroes. As is the late great Douglas Adams, so I couldn't let Towel Day (25th May) go by unmarked.




In honour of the occasion then, I've decided to offer all ebook versions of my very own Evil UnLtd Vol 1: The Root Of All Evil for a mere 99 cents (or 70p in the UK!). For a limited period only, you can obtain this book - a book not quite but almost entirely unlike The Hitch Hikers Guide - for the sort of price only mad professors could conceive of from:

Amazon.com
For the Kindle

Amazon.co.uk
For the Kindle

Smashwords.com (Enter coupon code RA62R)
For all other ebook formats

Offer ends this Friday (27th May).

Happy reading and here's to DNA. Certainly an essential ingredient of who I am.

SAF

The Paceless Ones

As the title sequence ran on this week’s Doctor Who, I was hurriedly putting the finishing touches on Saturday evening dinner so I missed the bit where they flag the title and the writer who was to blame. As the story unfolded with all the haste of a an origami sloth coming undone, I honestly thought it must be the work of Chris Chibnall – you may remember him from episodes such as last year’s Silurian waste of time and space. The Hungry Earth and – the other one. I then mistakenly thought it must be by Matt Jones, the guy who gave us The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit . The clues were there in in that scene where everyone stands around and makes introductions and explains the basic set-up. But turns out this hailed from the pen of Matthew Graham, who previously brought us Fear Her, a dull and unimaginative reworking of Paperhouse, with a silly bit about the Olympics tacked on at the end.

It’s a minor distinction, except it’s Chibnall who I get the impression spells plotting with a double d. Matt Jones' The Impossible Planet does at least build suspense to a terrific three-way cliffhanger – which it then blows in the second half, but never mind. While this has barely enough going on to warrant a single episode let alone two. Seriously, the biggest surprise for me came as I was waiting for the thing to gallop towards some sort of climax, then the end music struck and I suddenly realised this was going to be a two-parter.

I groaned. I actually groaned.

But hey, who knows, maybe this one will buck the more traditional trend of second halves not living up to the first. As I’ve said before, one approach is to make the first part tedious. So far, so promising.

For now, part one was a Chibnall-level case of Drudge Dread. A special brand of horror, with nothing added and all the interest taken away. The Rebel Flesh may have been alive but the story was lifeless. (Compare and contrast with last week’s Gaiman-penned episode!)

Slavishly adhering to the principle of predictability, it managed to be a singularly poor example of something that had been done a hundred times before. I mean, the whole point of doppelgangers in a horror tale is to play with identity, the tension and suspicions (see The Thing) and yet we’re never in any doubt as to Who Goes There? Sure, on top of the horror there’s the mawkish “we’re people too!” cry of the ‘replicants’, but even that’s handled obviously and clumsily. It gave me more cause to suspect Matt Jones' involvement, with the same Impossible Planet-style pat character backgrounds thrown into proceedings in butterfingered expositional manner.

Would sir like any more ham on his fist?

Likewise the way the story revealed the Doppel Doctor like it was meant to be a major shock/revelation, well, if you didn’t see that coming as soon as he touched the liquid plastic in the tank you really need to invest in a pair of One-D glasses. Everything’s telegraphed and there’s never any sense that this story has any secrets hidden up its sleeves.

And I just didn’t buy how readily Rory warmed to Jennifer’s tearful speech *after* her Stretch Dude and Clobber Girl moment in the toilets. That might have worked better the other way around perhaps, the compassion then the horror. Who knows, who cares. Darvill pours in a brilliant performance, but his actions just aren’t convincing, Over the course of a properly paced two-parter there ought to have been room for a credible bond to form between Rory and Jennifer, but it’s far too emphatic here for such a brief acquaintance. Still, I do have to applaud the fact that he’s given a more active role, since I’ve been harping on about that for a while now. And, hey, they haven’t killed him. Yet.

Can’t fault Gillan – can I ever? - although I struggle to recall anything significant Amy Pond did, other than experience another glimpse of eyepatch woman. Which is fine and subtle enough, but the other story-arc stuff – the TARDIS pregnancy scan shtick is really being heavily laboured every week now. Are we to believe the Doctor spends every spare hour in the TARDIS standing in front of that screen and pondering the mystifying readings? Cos, if so, it’s plain dumb. Especially as he appears keen to keep Amy from finding out –the more he stands in front of that screen, the more likely she’s going to spot something over his shoulder, non?

Smith in this episode is also fine, doing his best with some variable material. The jokes are a bit hit-and-miss, as though the writer’s trying too hard to be funny.

The setting, now that I think of it, is the best thing this story has going for it. A beautiful old castle dressed up with CGI. Lovely and full of dark, shadowy passages ideal for all that pointless runaround and nicely incongruous with the, er, acid-mining operations. Huh? Don’t worry about it, they were always mining or drilling for odd resources and what not back in the days of all those Troughton Base-Under-Seige days, so there’s no pressing need for anything to make sense here. I did idly wonder why there was so much urgency to secure protective suits when they didn’t do much for the bloke who fell into the vat at the beginning, but why should we let such incidental questions spoil our enjoyment. Particularly when there’s so little else to be said for this dull escapade.



Honestly, if this is intended as Mr Graham’s homage to Fury From The Deep, say, I’d rather they just gone with the sentient seaweed. There are hints that the eponymous Flesh – the living latex – is something the Doctor’s seen before, and the notion of imprinting a consciousness in plastic inevitably calls to mind the Nestenes and Autons, but I can’t say that the possibility fires me up with any great expectations or anticipation for next week’s installment.

With The Rebel Flesh, I’m certainly not crying “More! More! More!”

SAF

Relation Ship

So The Doctor’s Wife is not actually his wife. No more than The Doctor’s Daughter was actually his daughter. The big difference is that one of those stories was so pedestrian that the TARDIS should have been a zebra crossing instead of a police box, while the other positively bubbles over with joie de vivre. Even more importantly than the vivre, perhaps, The Doctor’s Wife is full of joie de Doctor Who.

Wonderful.

Bizarre, creative fantastic, creepy, romantic, dark, colourful, hilarious, tragic, soulful, moving and not a little bit mental.

There’s one other show this would have fit very comfortably and that would have been Farscape. I can just picture Crichton, Aeryn and Dargo having to deal with the situation of Moya’s essence transferred to a humanoid body while a sentient, ship-devouring planet seeks to take possession of the vessel. (And while Rygel ferrets through the space junkyard for anything of value.) Complete with madcap patchwork characters like Auntie and Uncle and you can safely bet that alien Nephew would have looked just as odd as an Ood. Then again, I used to say that Farscape offered good pointers on how to approach modern Who. Small wonder I enjoyed the story, in that case, but let’s assume that Neil Gaiman isn’t even aware of Farscape. (I wouldn’t know if he was aware of Compassion, the human-form TARDIS from the books.)

What we have is a story firmly stamped with his personal brand of fantasy, which marries with Doctor Who extremely well. For me, his foray into the Babylon 5 playground was not a success and last week I was hoping this would be more on a par with Stardust.

And instead of a love story with a fallen star in human form, well, we get the Doctor’s lifelong affair with something borrowed and blue. His box of delights. Invited into the Who play room, Mr Gaiman plunders the toy box and gets to work with his imagination on overdrive. Time Lords, telepathic message boxes (from The War Games), the Matrix, artron energy, auxiliary control rooms, room deletion, the original theft that sparked this special bond between a Time Lord and his ship. The question of who chose Who. And a throwaway line opening the way for transgender regeneration.

Fans will love it or be livid. All that trespassing on the sacred turf of continuity.
What it felt like to me was a celebration – of Doctor Who and more specifically that relationship that has been at the heart of the show all this time without really being explored.

Interestingly, another thing that hadn’t been explored in modern Who was the rest of the TARDIS. It’s a minor shame that the first time we see any of it, it’s just a stretch of samey corridors – albeit nicely designed ones. But it’s in the way that you use it, as they say, and the scenes where Amy and Rory are lost in the shadowy TARDIS interior and Amy’s encounters with a decrepit and a decayed Rory are utterly chilling. Enough that I could postpone my cry of They Keep Killing Rory! until afterwards.

Michael Sheen provides House with a coldly sinister voice but it’s heavily treated such that it’s ultimately a bit of an anyvoice and I can’t help feeling if you’re going to hire an actor of that calibre you owe it to yourself and him to give him a more substantial (ha) role. In similarish respects, I did wonder why, given the body of a Time Lord named Corsair, the best House could do with it was lop off an arm and graft it onto Auntie. Auntie and Uncle themselves were terrific characters, but although they’d served their purpose for House – in a sort of Condo-Solon (Brain of Morbius) contract of employment – they could have served a fuller purpose in the story. Nephew is given more to do at least as the visible monster deployed by House to stalk Amy and Rory.

Still, these omissions leave more room and screen time for Suranne Jones to truly shine as the TARDIS trapped in the limited confines of a human mind. Might have been fun to give her a shock of white in her hair for a hint of Elsa Lanchester (Bride of Frankenstein), but either way it’s a magical, heartfelt, compelling performance. The fact that she has this quirky sort of attractiveness about her lends a great charm to the Doctor calling her ‘Sexy’, that just wouldn’t have worked if she’d looked like Seven-of-Nine. Matt Smith, by the way, responds to the storyline by effervescing throughout. He’s not merely in characteristic fine form here, he’s buzzing with sheer unbridled Doctorness and the two of them are, quite rightly, the main driving force whisking us along on this emotional rollercoaster.

Laced with truly laugh out loud moments (e.g. “the pretty one?”), brilliant touches (the choice of images when Amy works the telepathic lock) and pure fantastical fantasy (the cobbled-together star-like TARDIS chasing the familiar blue box), this is brave, playful and energetic stuff. Great heart, without being saccharinely sentimental.

Like a lot of fantasies, it has a rather-too-easy ending. And why could the TARDIS attack House in the main control room and not in the other control room? Possibly there’s an answer in there I’ll catch on a rewatch. For now, it doesn’t much matter because my overriding impressions are that this story is like that big, complicated, sad word that the TARDIS struggles to remember until the end:

Alive.

SAF

Swash & Go

Now I admit I enjoyed the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies, even if the third one was a tad overlong and low in Chow Yun Fat for my tastes. But they wrapped it all up nicely and I didn’t really see the need for another one. So I’m in two minds whether to give the fourth instalment, On Stranger Tides, a watch or not.

In the meantime, we have Doctor Who’s foray into Cap’n Jack Sparrow’s territory.

First of all, what a relief there was no Captain Jack (Harkness) in this one. The trouble with immortal characters is they can quickly outlive their usefulness, interest and entertainment value. Fortunately for this adventure we have the best TARDIS team in ages.

Unfortunately, Curse Of The Black Spot is not the greatest vessel for showing them at their best. It kicks off with a nod to its Caribbean cousins, fogbound ship and distinctive medallion, and while the pre-title teaser is not the captain of all hooks it is, despite hobbling at one point on some wooden dialogue - ("We're shark bait, every single one of us, stuck on the ocean." "Until the wind changes." Ah, thanks for spelling that out for us, me hearties) - decently intriguing enough.

But most of the episode seems, like the ship, strangely becalmed in too-familiar waters. There are many things this story could have been, but it falls short of being any of them. It could have been a sort of Horror Of Fang Rock – handful of people stranded in isolated maritime situation, stalked by alien predator, oodles of fog and suspense. It could have been more of an action adventure, a more definite nod to the Caribbean series. Instead it delivered token rum rations of each while never properly coming alive as either. The storm even seems thrown in because the script was found lacking at that point.

It was fun and far from being a total, er, shipwreck – loved Amy buckling her swash -, but it was leaky at best. I’m all for two ships occupying the same point in space-time (worked okay in Nightmare Of Eden), but reflections as the gateway between dimensions strikes as a bit random. (I mean, sure, pay homage to Mirrors if you want – although I couldn’t recommend it - but why in a pirate story?) And towards the end when the Doctor talks Amy and the captain into a suicide pact, the Siren appears even though the lid has been firmly replaced on the barrel. I’m all for artificially intelligent alien medical programs who don’t have a clue about human anatomy (worked beautifully in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances), but the notion that this ambulance Siren couldn’t handle simple cuts and grazes beggared belief. The remains of the alien crew looked like they had the sort of bodies that might have been prone to minor abrasions and the like. Also, she had no knowledge of human anatomy, but was able to assume the appearance of a serenely beautiful human female - well, Lily Cole, anyway. Without, as far as I’m aware, any reference material. All this while understanding the significance of a wedding ring.

Add to that the fact that the most sophisticated method of sterilisation this advanced alien medical AI has at her disposal is flame and, well, you can easily run out of digits trying to plug the leaks.

It never helps either to be thirty minutes ahead of the Doctor in solving the mystery, and I’m afraid the alien nurse theory came to me very early in proceedings. But when we encounter the scene (straight out of Coma) of all the pirates plus Rory laid out in the alien sick bay, the Doctor is still seen hurrying to piece all the clues together.

So to the good. We’ve already mentioned Amy and her swashing buckles – and she really should dress up as a pirate – or WPC, or let’s face it, pretty much anything – more often. Less superficially, she once again proves her acting chops here being perfectly at home larking about with cutlasses as well as absolutely pouring out the heartache as she believes she has lost the battle to save Rory. But even here I have to detour into gripe territory, because although Darvill is as fine as always, Rory is once more reduced to victim status. It’s getting to the stage we should have an episode called They Keep Killing Rory. I knew he was going to get cut and that, along with my alien nurse theory, was one time when I would have liked to have been disappointed. Throw in the drowning and you really have to wonder why too many writers can think to do with him is to make him suffer like the female companions of old. It’s some sort of penance, isn’t it, for all that sexism of the past. Even if some writers think of the guy as a tool, that’s just more reason to actually make use of him.

Matt Smith is on good form, bumbling his way through in hyper-Troughton mode, but as I say his Doctor seems to be dragging his mental heels just too much on this one. Hugh Bonneville makes for an oddly sympathetic captain, especially given his foolish greed and the fact that he abandoned his wife and kid. But he’s the only real character among the crew. Obviously pirates pre-dated the Star Trek red shirt syndrome, but there’re none of the standout scurvy knaves of the Caribbean series and I tend to think that even if – or possibly especially because - your story is going to be killing your characters off one by one, then you owe it to them to make them as colourful and individual as possible.

Not much to do with this particular story, but as a side note I am enjoying the little and genuinely "What the-?" appearances of the strange woman in the sliding panels who keeps cropping up to speak to Amy. (She’s this year’s crack, I guess, if she’ll pardon the expression.) And of course the ongoing pregnant-not situation, although I hope that’s not going to be laid on quite as thickly every week.

All in all, there’s probably more I could say of the Black Spot, but I think we get the picture already. It’s almost certainly not as poor as this review makes it sound – it’s just unfortunate that the positives all appear to be qualified with countering negatives. With a Gaiman story to look forward to next week – and let’s hope it’s more Stardust than Day Of The Dead (his Babylon 5 episode) – I can imagine the Spot being one of the less memorable episodes of this season. I currently have a bruise on my foot that’s similar. Must have been some impact at the time, but I can’t recall for the life of me how I got it.

As a fantasy concept, I did like the idea of the Siren’s song as an anaesthetic, although the stricken crew launching into a chorus of Cabin Fever from Muppet Treasure Island would have brightened things considerably. Just one of a number of other pirate tales on which this was not a patch. Yo ho ho.

SAF

Moon Zero Two

Doctor Who two-parters can be such a let down. The resolutions are often sloppy and hastily cobbled-together, the end results riddled with plot-holes and, more often than I’d like, culminating in a Big Undo. (I’m not a fan of all this ‘Time can be rewritten’ malarkey – that way lies unwriting. Which is fine for unwriters, but Steven Moffat is better than that.) Anyway, second episodes can easily fail to live up to the promise of the first.

It seems to me there are two keys to avoiding this disappointment. 1) Make sure the first episode isn’t any good. 2) Defer much of the actual resolution in the second episode until later.

Since The Impossible Astronaut failed so spectacularly at Option 1, Day Of The Moon took a stab at Option 2 and, I thought, succeeded brilliantly.

From the beginning, it’s big and bold, moving us three months on from last week’s incredible cliffhanger and incidentally ticks off two items on my wish list in the process: more (and beautifully grand) use of the American setting and more significant involvement for the character of Canton Everett Delaware III. The Hollywood-style action and breathtaking visuals command our attention while our minds are duly flooded with a hundred more questions.

What are those strange markings on Amy? Did she hide out in a tattoo parlour while on the run from the FBI? And, out of idle curiosity, where else on her body does she have these markings?

Oh yeah, and why is CED III chasing down Amy, Rory and River? Why’s the Doctor being held in an Area 51 hangar? What’s the story on the little girl astronaut that Amy shot? Etc, etc, etc? What the hell, in short, is happening?

It’s brave, it’s exciting, it’s sit-up-and-pay-attention TV. It’s a terrific hook. When you realise it’s all a scheme to bring the Doctor and friends all together in the secure confines of a dwarf-star-alloy-walled cell, free from eavesdropping aliens (it’s not too far removed from the Doctor’s ploy to have his Time Lord presidential office in Invasion Of Time lined with lead to keep the pesky Vardans out) - well, rationally, part of you asks where and when they had a chance to concoct this plan without said aliens overhearing, but it’s pulled off with such chutzpah and pizazz that it’s one question that’s easily overlooked until after the show.

It’s sort of like a stage magician, encouraging us to look at his pretty assistants while he exercises some sleight of hand to wow us with an illusion, and it’s not until after the show our sense of wonder is replaced with a sense of wondering how the trick was done. During the show, there’s no time for scrutinising every trick, because the magician’s already moved on to pulling rabbits (thankfully no robot hares!) out of hats and sawing ladies in half. Or, in this case, more of the Grand Moff’s beloved temporal shenanigans.

The dazzling trickery here is matched (and possibly even outshone) by the mesmerising mystery as the leads embark on their fascinating investigation of an alien species who are instantly forgotten the moment you look away. Ironically, in conjuring up these beings, Moffat has created – once again – one of the more memorable races in modern Who. It’s a great concept and serves up a deliciously creepy sequence in an abandoned orphanage, where CED III and Amy get to play Mulder and Scully – complete with (pregnant) Scully’s, I mean Amy’s, abduction - and I’m personally rewarded with the satisfaction of being entirely spot-on with one of my theories from the previous week. Namely, the relationship between Amy and the little girl astronaut. Similarly gratifying was the confirmation that these strange smart-suited beings were more than simply related to the Silence and were in fact said Silence. (Evidence enough to my mind of the passing Hush-homage, and I especially liked the shot of one of them gliding along like the Gentlemen from Buffy.) To all the kids who must surely have been given nightmares by the creatures and this episode as a whole, I can only offer this message of scant comfort: you are not alone.

The mood of that orphanage scene is so pervasive that it’s surprising how well it marries with the bolder, brassier elements. The gorgeous shot, panning back from the Doctor in the nose-cone of the Saturn V rocket must have been one of the most expensive gags in Who history, but so it should be. It was priceless. And like the episode’s wham-bam opening moments, the climax is a captivating action-packed blastathon that only gives rise to a niggly question or two after the fact.



For instance, I am obliged to query just how River (as supremely wonderful and undoubtedly talented as she is) can take out quite so many aliens arrayed around her when as soon as she looks away from any one of them she (allegedly) forgets they were there. Lightning reflexes, naturally, but if the aliens cared to move a bit more, they could have made life that little bit tougher for the sharp shooter.

By story’s end I still felt that Rory warranted better treatment as a character and a more active role, but he is very much at the emotional core of the story if not at the heart of the action. And the spelling out of CED III’s sexuality in his closing exchange with Nixon struck me as a tad clumsy next to the deftness of last week’s allusion, but more importantly I still don’t know what purpose his (older) presence served at the Doctor’s lakeside death. But perhaps we’ll get our answers there.

Because the bulk of the quibbles and/or questions we’re left with though are deliberate and the clear message that this is far from over furnishes a sense of promise and anticipation more commonly associated with a first episode in a two-parter. Which sort of leaves the true measure of this story largely dependent on another future episode because at some point the Grand Moff will have to wrap all this up satisfactorily – including the Silence and the consequences of their removal from human history, Amy’s daughter, the River-Doctor relationship, the future-Doctor’s death (surely prime target for a Big Undo?). Etc etc etc.

Even if I do wonder why the mere fact of Amy being pregnant while travelling in the TARDIS would give rise to a Time Child and even if I saw it coming, ending on the regeneration of the young girl was a master stroke.

Hooks, as it turns out, make for as effective endings as they do beginnings and there’s nothing in this two-parter that at this stage gives me anything but confidence in Moffat’s ability to ultimately deliver. Stage magician he may be, but it’s smart, clever, entertaining stuff. So don’t be surprised to learn that I’m currently sitting in the audience, applauding and calling for an encore.

SAF

A River Runs Through It

Oh. My. God. What the hell was that?

Not wishing to miss a single minute of Saturday night’s Doctor Who, I set the recorder timer five minutes early and caught what appeared to be a bizarre nightmarish quiz show featuring Jason from The Gadget Show and a robot hare. I can only pray it was some kind of one-off Easter weekend ‘treat’ and not a virus that will be attaching itself to all my future Saturday tea-time recordings.

Thank Moffat for what followed.

True to say, he’d have had to come up with something seriously screwy to look bad in the wake of the Easter Bunnybot. As it was, it was only madcap in a good way.

In some respects it was a familiar Moffat medley. Much playing with time, including the Doctor sending messages to himself; quantum-theory-inspired aliens – in place of the Weeping Angels who only moved when you weren’t looking at them, we have aliens who are only memorable while you’re watching them. An homage to a number of RTD episodes – the titles of which escape me for the moment - if ever there was one. In appearance, the creatures here are like a creepy hybrid of the classic abduction-myth alien with a hint of Oodishness and the tall, spindle-limbed Gentlemen from Buffy. Makes you wonder whether Moffat is working towards an homage to the masterful Buffy episode Hush with his ominous, mysterious ‘Silence’ that’s still a threat lurking in the wings from last season. Wherever we are headed, however, this first episode was infused with Moffat’s customary energy, drive and wit, tinged with darkness and tragedy, laced with healthy doses of downright creepiness and spiked with a dozen intriguing hooks.



It’s a potent concoction and although like many a two-parter before it, it could all fall apart next week, at this stage it’s managed to generate a positive buzz in the way that last year’s Time Of Angels did. The expectation and anticipation are all very much there for a great second half. To say nothing of a host of speculations and theories, all of which I’ve no doubt will be proven wrong. Whatever I think the answers are, another familiar element to the Grand Moff’s writing is his capacity to surprise.

There are niggles so minor they’re hardly worth mentioning, but I will just to be fair. First and by any means least, River’s gun, when she fires off a few shots at the eponymous Astronaut, makes revolver sounds but there’s no smoke from the barrel. Nothing. It’s only a stupid little detail, but it did give rise to a momentary disbelief-suspension malfunction.

It was great to see Mark Sheppard, from BSG, Firefly, X Files and a host of other things, involved as the impressively named Canton Everett Delaware III, and the throwaway reference to his marriage being illegal was as deft a hint of a character’s sexuality as I’ve ever seen in modern Who.

But his character seems a bit underused so far. I’m not sure what purpose he serves, least of all in the four invites to witness the Doctor’s death. His older self declares, “I probably won’t see you again, but you’ll see me.” So presumably he was invited there for, what? His own sense of closure, a chance to say goodbye? What? Inquiring minds need to know, Mr Moffat. Still, that’s part of the mystery – the niggle lies in his younger self’s role – apart from advising Nixon (a passable and entertaining turn from Stuart Milligan) to hear the Doctor out, all he’s done thus far is tag along and get biffed on the head. Rory, brilliant as ever, seems similarly sidelined and/or displaced. Here’s hoping we see both get to do more integral proactive stuff next week.

Likewise, since they went to the trouble of filming on location, I’d like to see more of America. I’m not talking Oval Office sets. More use of real-world setting, whether scenery or identifiably American interiors – even though I appreciate they’ve made life difficult for themselves by zapping back to the 60s.

Otherwise, fantastic. As dull as a conclusion that is, I’m sorry but I thoroughly enjoyed it. The chemistry between the Doctor and Amy (I’m sure I’ve mentioned how much I love Karen Gillan) and River (I think I’ve mentioned how much I love Alex Kingston) creates sparks all over the place and it’s all too easy to get caught up in their interchanges as well as the pace of the whole thing. And yet Moffat is careful to make sure it’s not all break-neck speed. We get moments to reflect, time outs like the lakeside picnic and River’s confiding in Rory, so that when the accelerator ramps up we really feel the rush. The suspense and the scares are all very well handled, the shot of all those aliens lurking in the tunnels, caught in River’s flashlight beam, is a particularly great slice of chill. And Amy’s and River’s grief at the Doctor’s death is played with such conviction, it’s genuinely affecting. Sure, we know he’s not dead and there will be timey-wimey trickery at work, but the reactions lend it the impact it needs. The Doctor’s immortality may be a certainty in episode one of a new season and it’s all so clearly staged like an Agatha Christie murder mystery where the host wants the guests to believe he’s dead, but I definitely feel invested in the how and why of the resolution.

Obviously I’m not going to share any of my wild speculations here, for fear that they are far too wild and I will end up looking a fool. Except, River Song is an anagram of Snog River... Coincidence? I think not. Something to ponder anyway.

Meanwhile, I am anxious to discover how long I have to go without seeing that robot hare before it fades from memory. Sadly, it hasn’t happened yet.

SAF

RIP SJS

When I first encountered Elisabeth Sladen, it was love at first sight. As crushes go, it was all very innocent: I was six going on seven years old at the time. And it’s fair to say I knew her as someone else then. A plucky reporter named Sarah Jane Smith.

The role of a companion in Doctor Who is vital. We’re enjoying the adventures in the TARDIS vicariously through them. Lis Sladen embodied that role perfectly, engaging with great warmth and charm, and a wonderfully balanced blend of intrepid spirit and vulnerability. The ability to scream with conviction when it counted without undermining the courage, strength and independence of the character. To feel the fear and face the monsters anyway.

I was there facing those monsters with her all the way through from 1973-1976.
I cried when she left. I was nine. And there have been companions in the series since – and previous companions I discovered later on in life when watching episodes that hailed from before my time - that I’ve liked and even loved, but I can’t think of any with whom I empathised to the same extent. Obviously it’d be tough for anyone to compete with someone who made such an impression on me during such formative years. But that takes nothing away from what she meant to me and so many others on our Saturday tea-time travels through time and space.

Did we see her a lot after that in any other role on TV? Even if we had, could we have seen her as anyone other than Sarah Jane Smith? I don’t know. She convinced us as Sarah so heartily, she’d created an unshakeable memory. And when she returned to the role – in K9 & Company and The Five Doctors (1983), for instance – it was always a welcome pleasure to see her. In the episode School Reunion (2006), I shed tears over her departure all over again. And then she was capturing the imagination - and I’ll bet the hearts too – of a whole new generation of young fans in her own series, The Sarah Jane Adventures.



In 2005, when I attended the Gallifrey convention in LA, I met actually met Lis Sladen for the first and only time. (I’d seen her at Longleat’s Doctor Who 20th Anniversary Celebrations in 1983, but only for a passing photo op.) You can’t know anyone from a brief encounter, least of all when your heart is aflutter with fannish infatuation, but she was warm and charming and gracious and friendly and spoke with infectious enthusiasm for Doctor Who and the role of Sarah Jane, as you might expect. And she showed an interest in what I did as a writer. That’s a memory I treasure, as is the farewell hug. I also met my wife to be but she understands the competition for my fond memories of that convention.

People often remarked on how great she looked for her age, which is true. But then, she’ll always look fantastic to me.

Today my thoughts are with her family and friends, those that knew her personally. This is just my own small farewell to a lady who brought magic to a lot of young lives and who’ll be greatly missed. Part of me is that nine-year-old boy again, shedding tears at having to say goodbye.

SAF

Epic Fail

It seems thematically fitting to follow up on my Evil April Fool’s gag with a review of an actual video game. Although make no mistake, the Evil game will happen – but when it does, I hope it will be a much more rewarding experience than Dragon Age II.

I suppose the clue should have been in the II. It’s a sequel, so it stands a fair chance of being a disappointment. Still, in my (admittedly limited) experience, the law of diminishing returns doesn’t apply as frequently in the game industry as it seems to in the movie biz. What you tend to get more often than not is more of the same - with improvements. And, for those games where it’s about more than the shoot-em-ups or the beat-em-ups, a new story. Which is great, because that is precisely what you’re looking for.

Bioware’s Mass Effect 2 is a great example of this, managing to pare down or expunge the more laborious aspects of the space-exploration experience, while retaining so much of the feel of the original game. Heck, if it hadn’t made the unfortunate error of omitting the lesbian sex it might have scored 10 out of 10.

The previous Dragon Age output (Dragon Age: Origins and the Dragon Age: Awakenings expansion) scored high on the interpersonal interaction front, quite a remarkable feat considering your character was mute, his or her words left implicit from the text dialogue choices at the base of the screen. Primitive, but it did mean you had a wide range of characters to choose from, with no worries about whether the voice talent fit the appearance. Similarly your relationship choices were broad, accommodating pretty much all tastes and (non-bestial) proclivities. The mechanics of interaction were quite straightforward and part of me still hankers for a game where the handling is subtler. (Where, for example, the hostility-friendship scale is hidden from the player and AI responses are not purely player-prompted – I mean, wouldn’t it be great if an AI unexpectedly propositioned you for a change?) But there was no denying the freedom of choice and the supporting cast of characters (in Origins at least) were a terrific bunch of misfits. (The lot in Awakenings were for the most part so lame that you’d be more likely to keep the Ring and hurl the Fellowship into the cracks of Mount Doom.)

Alas I can’t tell you whether the same freedom of choice is available in Dragon Age II, because – in contrast to the original - a second play-through just wasn’t something I wanted to contemplate. In Dragon Age: Origins your choice of hero(ine) really did alter the experience. In this next-gen version, I didn’t get that impression. I could be wrong, but frankly I’m not going to invest another 40-plus hours to find out.

40 hours. Wow. I used to think of video RPGs as interactive movies, but that’s getting on for three seasons of a US TV show. Time cheerfully invested if you’re finding it gripping and entertaining and if the main characters appeal and if it delivers with each season finale.

An especially useful analogy here, since at its heart Dragon Age II has a promising central concept: three separate years picked out from the history of one city and a hero(ine). Okay, great, because each segment can work towards a climax and developments over the years can build into a compelling overall arc.

Storywise though it’s all a bit Babylon 5. Since the war against the Blight (read Shadow War) is over, we’re mostly left with the political-economic fallout and the growing tensions between mages and templars (read Telepaths and Psi Cops). There are clear pointers that there are greater menaces to come (in Dragon Age III, I’ll warrant) but for the time being it leaves this instalment feeling a lot like filler. It doesn’t help (at all) that the big final battle in this arises from the singularly twattish actions of one character – who happens to be one of those lame chumps from Awakenings. Seriously, when it came to that point, even my noble-hearted heroine had to kill that idiot for what he does. He reminded me in fact of that complete dufus who leads the Telepaths in Babylon 5 and if B5 had been interactive he would have met a similar end at my hand, much earlier on in the fifth-season arc.

Anyway, Blandalf (as we shall call him) plunges you (and the city) into disaster and it seems that no matter which side you choose you will end up having to fight both mages and templars anyway. Call me picky, but I’d like to feel my choices made a difference. But that aside, there are two key facets of the climactic battle that make for a significant letdown from a story POV.

Imagine you have reached the last episode of the third season of that hypothetical show. Imagine that the last episode is such an immense struggle to get through you have to restart it I-don’t-know-how-many times. And then imagine that once you finally get to the end there’s no actual closure. No reward, no chance to bask, just a cryptic epilogue that appears to have more to do with leading into Dragon Age III and close to precious little to do with your story.

Sure, part of that is down to game mechanics. This is one area in which the developers elected to make ‘improvements’.

Now to be fair, where they did succeed was in borrowing from the Mass Effect series and – despite the resulting limitations on character choice – the decision to apply some voice talent to the hero(ine) does work in terms of lending the dialogue sequences a much more cimematic non-static quality. (Complete with the signature blood-spattered faces in post-battle talks.) And it’s good voice acting – which, believe me, can make or break a game – even if the female rogue does sound a bit posh. Also it’s worth mentioning that among the supporting cast, the character of Merrill, as voiced by Torchwood’s Eve Myles, is a wonderful creation. Her passing observations on the Dragon Age world are a beautifully scripted and exquisitely delivered treat. And I didn’t even like her in Torchwood. She should do more voice acting. Likewise, Kate Mulgrew makes a much better witch than she ever did a starship captain. Anyway, about half the members of the adventuring party are great characters, with plenty of appeal and I’ve no doubt any player would grow attached to at least one or two of them.

The graphics have evolved too and, with the removal of the little rings around each active combatant the fighting feels more immersive and dynamic and less tactical. The few programming glitches I encountered were of only minor irkdom level – e.g. at one point one of your team gets abducted and, very sensibly, you can’t include him in your party – but you can still go visit him for a chat over a pint in the local tavern. The music, as ever with these Bioware mega-productions, is gorgeous. Movie-soundtrack quality. And there’s still girl-on-girl action on offer.

So much for the pluses. Because the main ‘improvements’, put simply, aren’t. For one thing, that more dynamic battle feature makes it awkward to target different enemies quickly. Many’s the time I couldn’t activate a special ability because my character wasn’t lined up just-so on the screen. To exacerbate matters, your party members are driven by an artificial intelligence with a very small i and not very much ntelligence. Which means if you want to get them using their best abilities, you have to keep pausing the game and telling them what to do and point them at the desired target. Which, er, is not very dynamic. Then some weird let’s-make-it-stupidly-tough mentality appears to have crept into some of the battles.

Me, I am up for a challenge. Especially in those climactic confrontations. Bring it on. But when you’re swamped and totally overwhelmed and dying repeatedly when the game’s been notched down to casual difficulty, that’s the point at which you can stop bringing it. Game suggests to me it’s meant to be fun. Not hard bloody work. (Bloody is okay – there are swords involved, after all.)

It’s not only the final battle that’s stupidly over-egged in this way. The best (ie. worst) example comes earlier on with an encounter with a ferocious dragon. Great, because the battles with dragons in the original were something not to be taken on lightly, but they were nonetheless a challenge to be relished. They were enormous, ferocious beasts and tackling one would test your party’s abilities and if you defeated it you’d get a nice sense of satisfaction. In this, apparently the majestic mighty dragon was not enough. No, for this, what was needed was a dragon plus repeated waves of smaller dragons thrown in at intervals throughout the confrontation. Totally overdone. The game’s climactic battle felt even more never-ending and, like I said, isn’t even followed up with a chance to bask in your immense sense of relief once you’ve finally scraped your way through. It’s as though the game is finished with you, rather than the other way around.

The middle-year finale is better-judged by far, with a one-on-one duel against a tough-bastard opponent (watch this trailer for a falsely representative - but impressive - impression) and you get some time to enjoy the results of your endeavours.



Fantasy tales of yore have been replaced by a tale of chore. Epic struggles are part of adventure, tis true, but thankless toil against overwhelming odds feels too much like my day job when what I’d prefer is a dash of challenging escapism.

Dragon Age II is by no means a total failure. But the level of disappointment is proportionate to how much I enjoyed the original game. Turnabout is fair play, as they say, so now Bioware have to face overwhelming odds in convincing me to buy a third game in this series. Good luck, guys.

Not that they need worry too much. They’ll be getting my money for Mass Effect 3 later this year. The swines.

SAF