The Time Lord Victorious

This is a bit exciting: the BBC has announced a major new series of releases under the umbrella title Time Lord Victorious. So far, it's been the Beeb and Big Finish who've released the initial info, but it's set to include material and experiences from everything from comics to escape rooms. The main press release gives some information, while the teaser trailer is pretty nothing-y.

It's not set to start till September, which might actually be a little optimistic if they're pushing live experiences like escape rooms, given we might still be under lockdown then. We'll see though. If it is as broad as it sounds, it will likely be very expensive to buy all the different media and experiences for the story, but hopefully there'll be a solid core story that can be enjoyed without breaking the bank. It puts me in mind of the huge comicbook crossovers that Marvel and DC do from time to time, that require buying several issues from multiple titles to follow the overall story, and are almost inevitably disappointing. On the other hand, it's exciting to have various different ranges, which are usually quite separate, working together on a storyline. The last time there was a concerted effort for spin-off material to work together was probably in the mid-nineties when Doctor Who Magazine tied its comics directly to the New Adventures novel line. (It also means I'll probably end up re-subscribing to DWM after letting my sub end for the first time in almost twenty years.)

I'm very excited to see the Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Doctors involved in a story together, which is a combination we've never had before. It's very rare that 20th and 21st century Doctors meet in expanded media (Eight isn't exactly Classic Series and he's more 21st century than 20th but he did arrive in 1996 and his licensing is mostly tied up with the original run.) I expect we'll have audioplays featuring both McGann and Tennant, hopefully together, although I highly doubt that Eccleston will be involved in any way. It would be an amazing and welcome surprise if he was though, and having Nine facing Ten, even just in prose or comics, is something to look forward to.

Given the title, and the scary, beaten-up Tenth Doctor in Prydonian robes, I think it's safe to assume that this involves the Doctor at the end of The Waters of Mars, possibly going off on a tangential timeline rather than getting to grips with himself. The official Doctor Who site's story page even has a placeholder entry for it after Waters which is a unique step, so it's safe to say this ties into the Doctor's crazy dangerous turn in that episode. I imagine we'll see Eight and Nine confront Ten rather than simply working with him, although I'd put money on everything being reset at the end so it can proceed to The End of Time and the regeneration. And defending "the universe from a terrible race"... that's got to be the Time Lords, hasn't it?

CAPTAIN'S BLOG: TNG 2-10 - 2-11

2-10) The Dauphin
or
Oooh, Wesley in Love

The Mission: Transport a princess from her inhospitable safe world to her equally inhospitable homeworld.

Planets visited: Klavdia 3 and Daled 4: Two planets with almost identical atmospheres. They don't look very pleasant from orbit, and we don't see the surfaces. Daled 4 has at least one inhabited moon (where Anya is from), and the planet is the homeworld of the allasomorphs. The planet completes one revolution per orbit, so it is permanently locked with one side in day and the other in night. The two sides have been at war for their entire recorded history. Salia's parents come from different sides of Daled 4, and so she is destined to reunite the two factions.

This isn't a planet. It's a picture of a planet.

Alien life forms:

Allasomorphs: Shapeshifting beings whose natural form is a sort of glowing white ribbon of energy. Both Anya and Salia are allasomorphs, capable of shifting their molecular structure into that of other life forms. They've both taken human form for the voyage, Salia as a beautiful young woman, her protector Anya as a nasty old bag. Behind closed doors Anya turns into a serious fitty when she's trying to reassure Salia, then a sort of teddy bear thing that's probably supposed to be cute but is frankly terrifying. In sickbay, Anya decides she has to kill a contagious crewman and turns into a huge hairy beast, more than capable of overpowering Worf. She's a cocky bitch and thinks she's far more powerful than anyone on board (they could just beam her into space). When she threatens Wesley, Salia turns into an even bigger monster.

Shut Up, Wesley: It's a Wes episode. He falls head over heels in love with Salia the moment he sees her (I guess that's why they call him Crusher). In fairness, she's a beautiful girl who's into magnets, so she's a science nerd's wet dream. Wes gets so distracted he forgets to go to work, and spends his time asking various staff members for love advice. He then loiters outside her quarters until she comes out.

Amazingly, he manages to get somewhere with her. He woos her with chocolate, because while she's an alien, she's still a girl and girl's love chocolate, right? It helps that he's a total choco hipster snob. He takes her to see planets and asteroid belts on the holodeck, and continues to see her even after Anya and Picard both warn him off, but he treats her like shit when he realises that the pretty girl he's been snogging isn't her real form. He comes round in the end though.

The Picard Manoeuvre: 

Number One: Riker gives Wesley a crash course in romance, which consists of a series of nauseating lines that make him seem like a complete creep. He tries them out on Guinan, though, and she's totally into it. No wonder she got married twenty-three times.

Son of Mogh: His advice to Wesley is terrifying, but there's a hint that he's taking the piss. He begins by screaming at him, before suggesting that women throw stuff and claw at you, while men recite poetry and duck.

He's emasculated by Anya's ass-wipping of him, but develops huge respect for her and hopes to meet her again, to fight on the same side. (He should have looked her up during the Dominion War, she would've been handy then.) He says "the body is just a shell," and that you shouldn't be fooled by someone's appearance.

In Therapy: Troi can sense that the aliens are hiding something, and that their emotions don't match their outward appearances, but that's about as useful as she gets in this episode.

Stellar Cartography: By this time, only 19% of the galaxy has been charted. On the planet Thalos 7, they age cocoa beans for four hundred years.

Sexy Trek: Wil Wheaton got his first screen kiss here from Jaime Hubbard, who's ten years older than him. Good for him.

Space Bilge:  Riker says of Klavdia 3: "How could anyone exist in an environment so totally hostile to human life?" apparently forgetting that they're ferrying aliens. The crew also express surprise at how similar the atmospheres are between the two planets, which is surely the point. It wouldn't be much use sending Salia to a safehouse on a planet where she can't breathe.

Why does Picard continually open channels to Salia's quarters and then ask if he can turn the viewer on? Is he trying to catch her in the nip?

Everyone is stunned to meet a shapeshifter, who have apparently only been rumoured before, but even restricting to episodes broadcast before this Starfleet has documented shapeshifters including Vendorians, Excalbians and Antosians, and the Enterprise crew have met Q, for crying out loud.

The Verdict: Given that it's a Wesley episode, and Wesley romance at that, this episode isn't bad. In fact it's rather sweet. Still, anyone who thinks Wesley's life is wild and fascinating really has had a sheltered upbringing, and it can't be that hard to impress someone who's never tasted chocolate before.

Lockdown ramblings

I think the above is rather beautiful. All the living Doctors (well, nearly) together to praise the doctors and carers and medical supporters of the UK. Matt Smith has a very nice house, I like that Colin Baker's wearing a Thirteenth Doctor T-shirt, and if anyone wants to bitch about Jodie Whittaker and Jo Martin being on there, they can fuck off. It's a pity Eccleston didn't do it, especially as he's such a vocal NHS supporter, but there's a lot of complications between him and the BBC so better not go there. Tom Baker is OK! Although he's looking so old now. David Bradley is missing too, although you can watch him on season two of After Life, if you don't mind crying your bloody eyes out.

It's a good, important message. I've not been joining in with the raucous applause and saucepan rattling, mainly because it winds the dog the hell up as it is, but I totally support people celebrating the NHS like that. I support the idea of Comic Relief and Children in Need coming together (which isn't that big a deal, they're both run by the BBC) to raise money in an impromptu event, to support those in particular need right now. Even though there's still the sour taste left by people in luxurious mansions telling us flat-dwellers "we're all in this together" and the super-rich asking that we delve into our pockets to donate. Stephen Fry and Prince William had better have coughed up some serious money.

That's the problem. With every glorious coming together like this, I can't silence my cynical side. (Which is, you know, my main side. It's probably three sides out of four, like a grumpy rhombus.) The Big Night In event wasn't to raise money for the NHS per se, but that's the unspoken understanding. I'm not going to go into the government's response to the pandemic in much detail, there were mistakes but I think it's been largely sensible except for the baffling refusal to engage with the EU over ventilator supplies. However, having spent ten years systematically defunding the NHS, then making all foreign-born doctors and nurses feel unwelcome in our country, clapping for them seems a bit offensive. The NHS isn't perrfect, but we're lucky to have it, and it's been so utterly shafted by the Conservative government that it's barely able to cope with the normal level of healthcare needed.

No we have old men and women raising money for it, and doing incredibly well. It's amazing that they've achieved that, and if anyone wants to give extra to the NHS, good for them. But the NHS is not a charity, it is a national organisation that is paid for by taxation. We have already paid for the NHS, only to see funds diverted and the organisation eviscerated. This is a clear step along the path to the NHS becoming a private organisation supported by donations, and that is appalling.

Meanwhile, we have tax dodgers like Gary Barlow asking us to donate to national causes, and the Prime Minister, among others who voted against a rise in nurses' pay, clapping the workers they've deliberately harmed. It's sickening.

Please come together and celebrate, and give what you can. But don't believe it when we're told we're all in this together.

Doctor Who Lockdown - More Shadows

Doctor Who alumni continue to spoil us with new stories and performed texts to accompany the watch parties that have been running throughout the lockdown. As I said before, new Doctor Who by Paul Cornell is a good thing, and he has followed up "The Shadow Passes" with two narrated stories, "Shadow of a Doubt" and "The Shadow in the Mirror", to form a "locked-in" trilogy.

When Human Nature was published back in the 1990s, it made a huge splash among fans, as did most of Cornell's New Adventures novels, and its reputation was such that it became one of the novels made available for free on the BBC website. It was no surprise when Cornell adapted his own book into the script for the episodes "Human Nature" and "The Family of Blood" in 2007 for the Tenth Doctor and Martha. The original got a new lease of life in the last few years with Lisa Bowerman - Bernice Summerfield in the Big Finish audio series - narrating the BBC audiobook release off the back of the 50th anniversary.

The two versions of the story, one with Ten and Martha, the other with Seven and Benny, had a lot in common but also some huge differences, being written for different central characters, different media and a different century. To those of us who like our Doctor Who to fit together into a seamless whole - which is impossible, but never mind - it was hard to see how both versions of events could have happened to the Doctor. The new stories not only follow up the Doctor's inhumanly harsh judgments in the TV version, but also nod at how both versions can still be "real" in Doctor Who's multiverse.

The Tenth Doctor's punishment of the Family of Blood was his most alien moment in the series, and the whole story saw him act both cruelly and cowardly. Perhaps, though, this wasn't his inhuman side, but his most human nature coming to the fore. It depends how you look at it. Either way, his imprisonment of Daughter/Sister-of-Mine in the realm of mirrors was both fantastically evocative and horrifying, and has inspired multiple incidences of fan fiction (all still valid in this storyline) to see the Doctor coming to terms with their actions. "Shadow of a Doubt" sees Benny encounter the alien girl in the mirror, with Bowerman performing, and "The Shadow in the Mirror" sees the Thirteenth Doctor, a more compassionate incarnation, fresh from her own isolation in "The Shadow Passes," finally take pity on the girl. Lor Wilson reprises her role as Daughter-of-Mine almost thirteen years on to read the story.

They're both excellent, and I love the little nods at other versions of the Doctor - future, past or parallel - that hint at every story being a valid as every other. The girl mentions both the Seventh and Twelfth Doctors, but also a "thin, white aristocrat" (I want to say Lance Parkin's 42nd Doctor, but it could be any number of versions, most probably the Shalka Doctor since it's Cornell); "the one who couldn't walk" (the child-like version in a wheelchair glimpsed in RTD's novelisation of Rose) and "the one with red hair who thought he was the last." That final incarnation being the Doctor who will become known as Merlin, whose presence was felt throughout the New Adventures and hinted to be the Doctor's ultimate future.

As Parkin once wrote for the Doctor to say: "...one of the things you'll learn is that it's all real. Every word of every novel is real, every frame of every movie, every panel of every comic strip."

Doctor Who Lockdown: "Farewell, Sarah Jane Smith"

This one brought tears to my eyes. With the lockdown fan rewatch of "The Stolen Earth" and "Journey's End" coincided with the ninth anniversary of the death of Elisabeth Sladen. So Russell T. Davies gave us a brand new short story about her funeral, some undisclosed time after the end of The Sarah Jane Adventures.

I can't begin to cover how much this means to us as Doctor Who fans. Liz Sladen was probably the single most beloved companion actor in the classic series, and bringing her back in the revived series made her beloved by a whole new generation of fans. A kid who started watching SJA when they were five would be eighteen now. Even the new kids have grown up now.

Part of me wants these characters to carry on forever after their actors have passed away, and there's no reason they shouldn't. There can still be endless stories set in years past for Sarah Jane (and years future, this is a time travel show).  But giving the character an end like this, and a heartfelt send-off, is a beautiful way to pay tribute to not only the impact of the character but the actor behind them.

Jacob Dudman is as excellent as ever in his reading (is that his studio? Does he have that at his home?) just like he was in RTD's last video story. But what really sets this apart is the inclusion of other actors paying tribute. Katy Manning and Mina Anwar appeared alongside Sladen during SJA, while Sophie Aldred would have made an appearance in the fifth season had it been completed. It's nice to know that their story together still "happened" in the Whoniverse.

It's a pity Yasmin Paige doesn't appear as Maria, but Daniel Anthony and Tommy Knight are back as Clyde and Luke, and blimey, it's like they haven't aged. The beautiful Anjli Mohindra appeared on Doctor Who itself this year as the Skithra Queen, but it's wonderful to have her appear without the latex. There's no mistaking the emotion they show here, it's so moving.

The story itself is slight, of course, but it's there to hang the emotions on. When Katy Manning appeared as Jo back on SJA, RTD couldn't help but throw around new fates for every companion he could had time to mention. He does the same here, dropping little snippets of character development and new adventures. Luke's married to Sanjay - his best friend mentioned in the series who would have been revealed as his boyfriend had it not been cancelled - and it turns out Nyssa and Tegan are a couple, because of course they are. I can't wait to hear how Big Finish try to twist their continuity to fit that in. He even drops a mention of Grace Holloway in there.

It's a pity the Doctor doesn't make an appearance. I can understand why, but a little cameo could have worked. Could Tom Baker have not phoned one in? (Has anyone checked on him, by the way? Is he OK?) It's still utterly beautiful though. I'm not ashamed to say I shed a tear (Suz bawled her eyes out).