bunsen_h | Entries tagged with doctor who

I was on my way to bed last night, somewhat too late after a pleasant party at Farthing Party. In the bathroom, sitting in darkness with my eyes dark-adjusted... I saw spatters of something glowing on the wall beside me. I thought it might be a reflection of light from the hallway, under the hotel room door, but exploring it with my fingers and trying to block the light with my hands made it clear that that wasn't the case. I turned on the light... and there was nothing to see. Just the wallpaper. I turned the light off again, and again I could see the glow.

Looking around the area, I found more glowing spatters on the wall in the little alcove that held the ironing board.

The glow didn't decrease visibly after several minutes. The phosphorescent materials that I know about usually fade more quickly.

I turned the light on again. I still couldn't see anything on the wallpaper. Light off... still glowing. Could it be under the wallpaper? Some kind of hole in the wall, with a lit area on the other side? Some kind of LED display, papered over? There seemed to be too many tiny glows, distributed oddly, for something like that.

Light on. Still nothing to see.

Something radioactive? Some kind of Whovian crack in reality? A Lovecraftian thing oozing through the wall?

I eventually decided that it probably wasn't anything like that. But it took me a while to get to sleep. When I woke up again in the wee hours, I went back to check, and the glowy stuff was still there -- much fainter than before. I turned the light on for a few seconds, and the glow went back to being bright. That was a big reliief -- it was following normal laws of physics.

Before I checked out of the room this morning, I borrowed a UV light from Jon Singer to shine on the walls. As I expected, that made the stuff glow very brightly.

I haven't any idea what was going on. When I checked out, I told the woman at the desk about the glowy stuff. She suggested that it might be residue from a "glow stick", but I don't think that stuff phosphoresces..? And I don't know if it would be completely invisible on the wallpaper.

If I start glowing, or turn into a mutant with amazing glow-stick powers, or disappear leaving behind only a cryptic written gurgling, the clue may lie in room 1119 of Hôtel Gouverneur Place Dupuis in Montreal.

Jack Harkness could have screamed.

So. Close.

Just one more good hit would take out the Dalek mothership. Though it was calling for help, it was practically defenseless, screens down, interceptors used up. But Jack's ship was hardly in better shape. His only functional weapon system was the mass driver, and he'd thrown everything that was loose, everything that he could pry loose. Food and utensils, loose change, then clothing. His briefs had made a nice dent in the Daleks' hull, but hadn't penetrated.

If only there was something else here, maybe 75 kilograms, that I could stuff into the launch tube, he thought, as his reflection in the viewport caught his eye.

***

And that, O Best Beloved, is how the Face Of Bo came to be.

The assumptions built into the recent Doctor Who stories, and the emotional buildups followed by the goofy hack resolutions, continue to annoy me.

There's a Fixed Point In Time based on the Doctor being observed to die... ooh, the angst... then it turns out that the paradox can be resolved by a look-alike.

There's a Fixed Point In Time based on the Doctor and TARDIS being unable to visit New York at such-and-such a date to see Amy and Rory... ooh, the angst... but they blithely skip past the possibility of him traveling to some other city, waiting a bit, and taking a train.

( Spoiled warning for "The Name of the Doctor" )

This running gag of Clara being "The Impossible Girl" was just silly. In this context, as in so many others, "impossible" merely means "I haven't figured out the trick yet." Considering how many times the universe has been rebooted with the guiding influence of someone associated with the Doctor, "impossible" is a word that he shouldn't be using. (By now, he should also be avoiding the phrase "I promise", especially in a sentence like "I promise that you'll be safe" or "I promise I'll protect you.")

That four-beat pattern from the Doctor Who episode "The End of Time" is a lot less creepy and ominous if one starts humming/whistling Ravel's Bolero along with it.

A-PO-PHAL-LATE! A-PO-PHAL-LATE!

I was thinking the other day that for the next Doctor Who, they should get Daniel Radcliffe. He's British, he's already known for wearing a set of distinctive unusual clothing which includes a long scarf... and he's famous for waving around a ~~sonic screwdriver~~ wand to unlock things and to disarm opponents and to do other magical stuff. (The sonic screwdriver seems even more magical than the wand — with the wand, one has to specify the effect one is looking for, whereas the screwdriver seems to be just point-and-click.)

"EX-TER-MI —" "Expelliarmus!" And the Dalek's gun-arm goes flying across the room...

"Time isn't just fractured. It's twisted and knotted like a Christmas ribbon-y... thing. There are towns in America where time doesn't change. There's a tangle in Korea where the Korean war has gone on for eleven years and no one has noticed." — The Doctor, "The Wedding of River Song", deleted dialogue

This evening on Torchwood: Miracle Day, I saw:
( Spoiled warning for Torchwood... )
Who do these people think they are — Star Trek?

I got to see most of Doctor Who and the End of Time this afternoon, with

mentisiterinvit . (My first time using ParaTranspo, and a lovely visit.)

There's an odd scene early on which appears to have been nicked from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In it, a group of villains takes a sample from their victim... by pressing a cloth to her lips. Apparently what they need from her late husband is still imprinted in the lipstick she's been wearing in jail for the last couple of years.

It's so bizarre that, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that there might have been an earlier draft of the script that got bounced from BBC's Broadcast Standards department so hard that it emitted Cerenkov radiation:

( (Cut for some vague semblance of good taste) )

The Eye of Rassilon

This ancient Gallifreyan artifact appears to be a fine faceted citrine, about an inch and a half across, and has a faint indeterminate magical aura. If an adventurer attempts to look through it, s/he may (10%) see a brief image of the past or the future, or from an alternate past, present, or future -- and at the same time will receive a Suggestion to place the gem into his/her own eye socket to allow better divination.

If the Eye is placed into an empty eye socket, it will instantly graft itself to the skull and cannot be removed without the death of its owner. The Eye grants the following special abilities:

Sense nearby disturbances in the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey continuum
Tongues (as the 4th-level Cleric spell, not the 2nd-level Courtesan)
Regeneration (Gallifreyan)
...

I'm not sure how else to explain this. (From "Spider and Scorpion"; only the most hypersensitive of arachnophobes is likely to be bothered by a goofy sketch-cartoony spider.)

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a bit of a discussion about which actor might take over the role of Doctor Who after David Tennant retires from it in a year. One of the leading contenders, at least as far as fan speculation goes, is Paterson Joseph, who played the Marquis de Carabas in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

One acquaintance, long active in SF fandom, objected strongly to this. "The Doctor is white. They shouldn't go changing things out of political correctness."

I was surprised by his attitude, and puzzled. I pointed out that the Doctor has been through a lot of physical changes. And that from what I'd seen, Joseph was a decent actor; as long as the show's producers thought that he would do a good job, it was fine by me. It might lead to some interesting story lines.

"Well, hell, if you're going to do that, why not make him female while you're at it?" he demanded.

I thought for a moment and gave a "sure, why not?" shrug. "Well, that'd be different." (As in "different from how things are right now", I hasten to point out, not "an unacceptable case, different from what you were suggesting before".)

The conversation didn't get much farther.

I just don't see the problem. Like I said, we've already seen the Doctor wearing some very different bodies; why balk at a possible change of skin colour, or even of sex? The concept isn't exactly a novel one in science fiction. Maybe it's "political correctness" that would motivate the show's producers to consider a non-white Doctor, though it seems to me that their main goal would be to find a good actor who'd be suitable for the part. But to assume that that's the reason -- and to insist that the Doctor must never be played by anyone but a white man -- there's some unpleasant stuff going on there.

I'm catching up on Doctor Who, and just watched the episode "The Unicorn and the Wasp".

I must admit that I'm not fond of the way the series has handled the pseudohistorical stories in which the show's characters have interacted with significant real historical characters, and this was no exception, though I didn't find it as bad as the episodes with Dickens and Shakespeare. At least, not as far as the historical character herself was treated.

But... when a werewasp character is losing control of his human form and lapsing into a giant wasp (oh, let's not get into square-cube law, shall we?), why is his talking interrupted by his making buzzing sounds with his mouth?

I have a nagging recollection of an insectoid character in a book speaking with a lot of buzzing, but I think that in that case, it was still rendering human speech by modulated buzzing in the first place.

Who's he supposed to be, Gaspode the Wonder Dog? "Woof."