Saturday Teatime 1.3: The Daleks

Once you read a few of these projects you start to see some patterns emerging. For instance, just about everyone falls in love with Jacqueline Hill; everyone concludes that Susan was a flawed idea; and everyone ends up a bit down on Terry Nation.

This last one isn't entirely unfair. Nation's writing (and occasionally his work ethic) had some severe problems but he also had a writing career on Doctor Who extending from 1963 to 1979. Yes, this is mainly due to the fact he held the copyright on the Daleks and had first refusal on writing the script whenever the BBC wanted to use them but there are other factors. He was commissioned to write a second script for the series before anyone decided the Daleks needed to return.

And you know what? I don't want to be down on Terry Nation. The first Doctor Who story I ever saw was Planet Of The Daleks and that story made me fall in love with the series. So here as we meet him and his most famous creations for the first time (sorry if you're the world's only massive Kraal fan) let's forget about the future and just enjoy ourselves. And that isn't difficult, there's a lot to like here and much of the Terry Nation Cliché Bingo Card fails to make an appearance (if nothing else it would be hard to self-plagiarise on your first script).

So let's give Nation some props because one thing he is absolutely fantastic at is set pieces. This is because his approach to science-fiction is very much the 1950s Flash Gordon movie serial form. Luckily, Nation's script is paired with a designer who realises this and turns in a bunch of sets and monsters that were a bit retro even in 1963 and so aged oddly well. Lucky for Nation, for us fans and for the survival of the series but considerably less so for designer Ray Cusick. Cusick was a fantastic designer who did a lot of work in the early years of the series, not least of which were the TARDIS console room and the Dalek casing. Everyone counts him as one of the series' most important visionaries. Everyone, that is, except Terry Nation, Terry Nation's lawyers and the BBC Royalties Payments Department.

Yes, it was a work-for-hire job and so he got a small bonus (£50, I believe) because it was great work and received not a penny or even an on-screen credit since.

So the production is on the same page as the writer and in some cases several pages ahead. We're doing movie serial sci-fi from ten years ago here, which is probably a good thing to be doing on TV when no one had really done ongoing science-fiction before. On this note its probably time to note that my theme of “early Doctor Who was more modern than I thought” pretty much curls up and dies here because no modern series would have Ian suggesting they all split up to search the seemingly deserted city without a post-modern joke asking if he'd ever seen a horror movie.

Good set pieces are a very important part of adventure serials, arguably the most important part. You get the set piece then a pause when some talky stuff happens that sets up the next big set piece and after that cycle repeats a couple of times you get the cliffhanger. Nation turns in some very pacey numbers here: escaping the Dalek cell, the lift scene, and the expedition party leaping across a very modestly proportioned chasm. Another very movie serial element of the plot if that there are basically two stories here. The first four episodes are about the four regulars exploring Skaro, encountering and being captured by the Daleks and then escaping whilst quickly helping out some more photogenic locals. It could have ended right there at the end of episode four but then Ian reveals that the Daleks took the fluid link from him when he was captured and now they can't leave. Thus begins adventure two: an arduous journey through the wilderness of Skaro so they can enter the city from an unexpected angle, beat the baddies and go home. Well, try to get home.

The reason I link this to the Flash Gordon movie serial format is because those serials tended to reuse sets, either by using them for different places or by setting a couple of stories in the same place. Don't get me wrong: this works, especially at this stage where individual episode titles mean we're dealing with a continuous series rather than separate stories.

It works because a lot of effort is made to build the world of Skaro before our eyes. As previously noted this world-building is enhanced by the set design and the fantastic, dry ice shrouded model of the Dalek city but it all extends from the decision to start with an episode featuring only the four regulars with nary a Dalek, Thal or ostentatiously camp schoolboy to distract us from the exploration of Skaro. Other characters are introduced slowly: first a Dalek sucker menacing Barbara (there will never be a better Doctor Who scream), then the Daleks themselves followed by Susan meeting the Thal Alydon...

Actually, best to stop there a mo. More Thals turn up later but the scene between Susan and Alydon requires some short examination because it contains the very first racefail in Doctor Who. I'd completely forgotten the scene and expected to start talking about racism two essays from now in Marco Polo but there it is: a Jewish girl kneeling on the floor, staring fascinated at a towering Aryan man and declaring him “perfect”. An Aryan whose people will later be involved in an act of genocide. This is especially problematic as one of the qualities that got Carole Ann Ford the job was her “Unearthly” elfin appearance or, to put it another way, her non-standard beauty.

Oh, there's far, far worse to come but monsters are born in this scene when we find out that the mechanical Daleks share their planet with pretty people and guess who ends the story annihilated and who gets to rebuild civilisation?

Not that even the Daleks are monsters yet. I mean, they clearly eat. This might seem like an insignificant detail but at this stage we're still looking even at the bad aliens as creatures who have civilisation and needs such as food and shelter. The whole plotline with the Thals is about them suffering a bad harvest and striking out in search of new food supplies. There's a sense of history to the two societies and not just in the scene where the Doctor is treated to a short history and astronomy lesson from Diony (Terry Nation Bingo Card: cross out Sole Female Guest Character). There's also the nature of the Thal's pacifism.

The story requires that the Thals end up fighting the Daleks so, obviously, they're going to come around but the story allows that pacifism might not be a mistake here. Ian and Barbara argue the point with Barbara pragmatically pointing out that if the Thals don't fight she and Ian can never leave Skaro whilst Ian is more sympathetic to their beliefs. It all comes down, in the end, to whether or not the Thals really believe in pacifism or if its a fear of conflict brought on by the consequences of the last war. This is a world where food is hard to grow because most of the planet has been devastated by neutron bombs so its not difficult to understand the perspective. Ian proves to Alydon there are things he'll fight for when Ian threatens to take Diony to the Dalek city as a prisoner, whereupon Alydon proves that even in pacifist societies they have action movies as he delivers a leading man uppercut to Ian's chin. It's that realisation that spurs Alydon to action and to recruit volunteers to aid him in storming the city (Terry Nation Bingo Card: cross out Prosaic Speech About Bravery).

I'm not going to argue that this story is entirely respectful to pacifism, it does largely reject the philosophy, but it at least phrases it as a debate and floats the idea that there are circumstances where pacifism is a reasonable response. There are worse ways to treat pacifism, we'll be dealing with some of them later in the '60s.

And then there are the Daleks, did I mention them? One of the things about Nation's 1960s scripts are that the Daleks are very much a work in progress and will vary quite a bit between stories. It won't be until The Daleks' Master Plan that Nation will settle on the default characterisation the Daleks become known for and even then the last few steps will be taken by David Whitaker in Season Four. That's the future, though, and we'll never see these Daleks again: Daleks who refer to themselves as “I” an awful lot, who grow vegetables for food and have large stores of toilet paper (bit weird, that one). The static electricity thing gets a token mention in their next story but pretty much disappears from there, mainly because it is very, very limiting.

The Daleks are almost people here, very alien and well on their way to being monsters but essentially still people. Doctor Who doesn't do monsters just yet. Even when monsters start to be a thing, when the series resurrects the Daleks for a rematch, they're very much a unique case for the rest of the Hartnell era. That's one of Nation's enduring legacies in the series: he created the first monsters and when he took his ball and swanned off to America the series began to generate more and more monsters in an attempt to capture the magic again.

Like most of Nation's legacies, it's a mixed one. 

Dwarf names are fun!

I doesn't feel like a proper army project until you've named a few characters, does it? Giving the characters names and backstory is one of the things that stop a game from being just a very pretty mathematical exercise.

And these are Dwarfs so I get to be really ostentatious with the naming! You can go one of two ways with these things. The first is to find two names of Celtic or Scandinavian origin and slap '”sson” or “sdottir” at the end of the the second one. The other route is to come up with some medieval title in place of a family name like Grudgebearer or Longshanks.

Thus we have my Thane Dammin Asgarsson of Karak Norn, a poor hold in the mountains by Athel Loren. He's accompanied on whatever mission I choose to send him on once I know what this campaign is about by the Master Engineer Hodor Grimmhammer and the Old Guard of his Longbeards Storr Thunderbrow.

I still haven't worked out a name for the Organ Gun. I'm trying to come up with something better than “Old Reliable” since Organ Guns aren't that old by Dwarf standards.

A Tale of 1 Gamer #1 (Army selection and first purchases)

Now that I've got the Doctor Who watch-through off the ground its time to get on with another project I've been meaning to get around to for some time: doing my own version of White Dwarf's classic Tale Of Four Gamers series.

Okay, so the quick rundown: in A Tale Of Four Gamers a quartet of GW staffers were set the task of collecting an army to a strict budget and timetable. In 2005 they were given £50 to start and £25 a month thereafter. Adjusting for inflation (and the fact I'm not actually trying to simulate a pocket money based economic model) I've decided to go with £75 for this first month and £50 thereafter, paid into the hobby budget on the first of every month.

Now, I do have a big project going on at the same time as this: my Bretonnians. I already have all the models I need for that, unless and until there's a new Army Book, so that wasn't a good candidate for this series. I'm going to be using the Brets in a campaign next year with some friends and one idea that's floating about right now is that we might have secondary factions for each player.

I was going to do Wood Elves, the natural allies of Bretonnia, and I went into the store fully expecting to walk out with some Glade Guard and Wildwood Rangers, maybe order the Glade Lord with great weapon. There is, however, a character in the Bretonnia book that's always sounded interesting.

Well, I say a “character”, he's really just a name and a picture of some heraldry: Graeme, Friend Of Dwarfs. As I say, the Wood Elves are the natural allies of Bretonnia and Dwarfs are more matey with the Empire. Linking Dwarfs and Bretonnia just offers more opportunities to do something different with my background. Right now I'm imagining that Graeme was an ambassador to one of the Dwarf holds in the Grey Mountains and he's gone a bit native: can't stand wine anymore, loves beer, a bit too friendly with the common man and far too technically minded for his fellow Bretonnians.

Thus I ended up leaving the store with a bag full of Dwarfs. So, on to this month's bit of accountancy:

Starting budget: £75

King Belegar Ironhammer (£13)

Grimm Burlockson (£13)

10 Dwarf Hammerers/Longbeards (£30)

1 Dwarf Cannon/Organ Gun (£15.50) (mail order)

Remainder: £3.50

It might not seem a lot but I did buy two characters straight off the bat since they're more expensive pound for pound. A general and a support character should be enough for a while, especially in quite an elite army. I'll build the infantry set as Longbeards just so I'm starting off with a Core choice, an old habit of mine but one I'm not disposed to break. The cannon I'm not sure what to do with except I knew I wasn't going to have a Dwarf army without at least one. Right now I'm leaning towards the Organ Gun because they look cool but I have to wait for it to arrive so I've ample time to ponder and work out what they actually do. Look, I've spent five years playing Vampire Counts, I haven't had a shooting phase in half a decade, okay

Now to build the things and work out how to paint them. They're Grey Mountain Dwarfs which apparently means they're quite poor. Lots of greens, perhaps, which would also offer a nice contrast to my Bretonnians who'll all be in rich colours like reds, blues and golds.

I'm really looking forward to this. 

Saturday Teatime 1.2: 100,000 BC

(Yes, I'm doing these on days other than Saturday because I worked out I didn't have a three year project in me. At two a week it's a year and a half and that seems a decent length of time to me.)

In a way 100,000 BC is the first story in Doctor Who to be declared non-canon. The beginning of the series will be retold twice, first in David Whitaker's novelisation of The Daleks and again in the first Peter Cushing movie. These days with video, DVD, YouTube, Netflix. torrent sites and projects like this we take as gospel the televised version of events but back then you didn't have much of a chance. You either saw 100,000 BC when it first aired or you didn't have another chance until 1981 and The Five Faces Of Doctor Who repeats. The novelisation you could put on your shelf and read whenever you liked and once the movie made it to television it was a bank holiday staple for decades.

So 100,000 BC is surplus to requirements, yes? Well, yes and no. These three episodes represent three of five weeks in Doctor Who's history where no one knows what a Dalek looks like. Once you've got Daleks the appeal of cavemen arguing about fire pales somewhat, which is actually a pity. This is a very good story: pacy, well-directed, well-acted and with a strong underlying theme of fear woven throughout.

Actually, let's start with the theme of fear which motivates much of what we see in this story. Last time I made a comment about how An Unearthly Child felt surprisingly modern in some ways but these three episodes actually feel like the sort of story modern Doctor Who might tell if it did an old-fashioned “pure” historical. One of the big innovations of modern Who is to write a story around a theme: Vincent And The Doctor is all about Vincent's emotional state, his depression and his joy so even his inevitable suicide isn't seen as a defeat. Here, forty-one years before Russell T. Davies holds his first tone meeting we see Verity Lambert, Waris Hussein and Anthony Coburn get the trick right with a production that is literally all about fear.

Old Mother fears fire because she fears change; Za fears the tribe will turn on him if he can't make fire; Hur is afraid her father will give her to Kal instead of Za; Ian fears the strange new world he finds himself in; Susan fears for her grandfather's safety; the Doctor fears the mob of cavemen who capture him and demand he makes fire; and Barbara, in one of Jacqueline Hill's best scenes as Barbara, breaks down in tears as the TARDIS crew flee from the Cave of Skulls. You might think I'd be a bit hard on that last scene, especially coupled with the similar fit of tears Susan goes through when the Doctor disappears but both women get strong, empowering scenes later on: Barbara explaining compassion to Hur and Susan leaping on the back of a caveman as she spearheads the attack to save the Doctor, not to mention her "flaming skulls" plan which is both awesome and gruesome.

I just love how into it Carole Ann Ford looks

Like I said with An Unearthly Child and as I'm sure I'll say again over the next two seasons: there are far worse times to be a female companion than under Verity Lambert's producership. I'll have plenty of opportunities to lay tribute at those particular feet so let's talk instead about Waris Hussein's directing.

First off I have to say this: a lot of the praise I'm about to heap on Hussein is probably not just down to his being a good director (which he most definitely was) but also to the fact that Doctor Who is just starting. In the black and white years the series was produced almost-continuously, to the point where cast members disappear for an episode or two at a time so they can have a holiday. The series is being made on a very fast production line and that has all sorts of consequences: actors get fatigued, sub-standard scripts make it to screen because there's simply no time to replace or rewrite them; and sometimes things just plain looked like a good idea on paper but turned out to less so in practice. All these issues and more we'll grapple with throughout the Sixties and beyond but here, a couple of weeks into the series, these issues don't exist. Everyone is fresh and raring to do, the first scripts have considerable polish and everyone has had time to work out what they want to do with what they've got.

Alethea Charlton as the cat's mother

What Waris Hussein wants to do, incidentally, is most interesting with the cave people. Anthony Coburn puts in some good work here as well by giving them great turns of phrase: Kal doesn't understand the Doctor's pipe and matches so says he makes fire come from his fingers and has smoke in his mouth. Its Hussein's direction that makes them alien through hunched postures and animal movements, jerky motions as if they feel constantly under threat which ties in well with Hur not understanding compassion except in terms of a mother protecting her child, she doesn't even understand the word “friend”. Alethea Charlton as Hur, incidentally, is an absolute highlight of the story as she completely embraces the non-human movement style.

On the side of the TARDIS crew, as I say, the highlight of both directing and acting is Barbara's breakdown in the middle episode (or the third, if you're counting from An Unearthly Child, as is more normal). In later years the first trip in the TARDIS is an occasion for wonder and wide-eyed amazement but here it is terrifying and in pre-history it doesn't even have the allure Barbara will find in later historical adventures: the chance to meet people she's only read about.

This actually brings us to another way in which 100,000 BC is often forgotten: there's a slight (far from universal) tendency to skip it when listing the pure historicals and start with Marco Polo. This isn't entirely unfair, we're not actually exploring history here. Over the next couple of seasons the historical stories will tend to feature one or both of a) a famous historical figure; or, b) a historical event, though not necessarily a famous one. In spite of the title we've come to known from our programme guides there's nothing to suggest even an approximate date for this story to take place in and, this being pre-history, there are no famous historical figures. Instead we see solidly fictional cave people in a solidly fictional drama about the discovery of fire. We're in pulp adventure territory with comic strip cavemen menacing our children's serial heroes. Seeing as I like the story an awful lot it seems churlish to complain but it gives the lie to the idea that Doctor Who dropped the educational aspects of its mandate on some kind of fixed curve: the first historical features no reference to any sort of authentic history, just a Boy's Own adventure setting that happens to be set in the past. There isn't even a real explanation of how to start a campfire, which given the ways in which later stories will fail to make magnetism and condensation interesting, is probably a blessing.

If any of these seem like criticisms (and, in my view, they are not) then the best way to consider it is this: the historical is obviously not done cooking. This is a fantastic adventure story but we aren't in the “pure historical” territory the Hartnell era will become associated with.

In a way this is reflective of the series in general. This is the story where the Doctor picks up a rock, subtly but obviously with the intention of braining a wounded Za so they can escape. All that stops him is Ian and he makes a feeble excuse about how he was going to ask Za to draw the route back to the TARDIS in the soil. There's a way to go before he becomes the Doctor, either as we understand the character or as Hartnell is generally remembered. There are hints though, like the scene where he tricks Kal into brandishing the bloodstained rock/knife he used to kill Old Mother. It's a victory he wins through cleverness, dispatching an enemy through sheer bluff. This is the Doctor we want, even if his next move is to incite the other cave people to throw stones at Kal and drive him off. He is, honestly, a bit of a bully and a bit of a sulker at this point, glorying in being cleverer than a bunch of starving primitives and leading them on to ostracise someone who threatens him.

He does not, in short, have a worthy adversary yet but that's about to change.

Next Episode: The Daleks

The slightly more than Two Minute Hate

SallyP did a post recently about characters she hates and since its Tuesday and I have no ideas and no silly photos to share I might as well give this a go. If nothing else its a good opportunity for self-examination.

Lucas Bishop

This is more of a symbolic thing. Bishop as a character has never done much of anything to offend me. However, he was created at a time when comic companies felt no reason to follow through on a character's point. The point of Bishop as originally introduced was that he was from one of the endless dystopian futures X-Men continuity spawns whenever it gets bored and in that future an X-Man had betrayed the X-Men, killed them all and things had gone to hell in a handbasket from there. He ended up in the present and decided to work out who the traitor was and fix history.

This took years to resolve and not in the modern way where it was built to slowly but continuously. No, this was the 1990s and so Bishop would grumble about it every now and again, maybe accuse Gambit of being a bit shifty and then the storyline would be forgotten about until a company-wide event turned up that vaguely suited what little had been set-up.

Since then Bishop has knocked around the X-Men comics with nothing really to do. At one point, for a different crossover event, his dystopian future gained a new origin and he gained a new mission to hunt down and kill a new X-Judas (he also gained a pretty sweet futuristic plane from... somewhere).

All because he didn't have much of a point in the first place.

New 52 Iris West

There are New 52 series I like and The Flash is even one of them most of the time but there is one problem and that is how Iris no longer knows that Barry is the Flash. The erasure of their marriage I can sort of take (through the numbness of repetition, if nothing else) but almost since the day she was created the point of Iris was to be the superhero girlfriend who could be trusted with a secret. Barry and Iris had been married since the Sixties and she knew his secret the whole time.

I'm lead to believe the storyline was a rebuke to a Superman editor (not sure which one, Kurt Swann, perhaps?) who said Lois Lane should never be allowed to make the link between Superman and Clark Kent because women can't keep a secret.

Which brings us to our next hate figure...

The Original Gwen Stacy

This one's political. You see, just by existing Gwen turns Peter Parker into an emotional abuser. That Peter very strictly protects his secret identity is a big thing about the character but with Gwen it was... too far. I mean, for one thing they were actually engaged and for another she blamed Spider-Man for the death of her father, a fact that obviously caused her significant pain. Peter nobly (or stupidly, depending on your point of view) decided against telling her “No, it was Doctor Octopus who killed him, I'm Spider-Man and you know I would never hurt you.”

No, instead he kept the bloody secret, lied to the woman he was going to marry and then she died. This was a good thing, frankly, because the only thing more relationship-destroying than a lie is lots and lots of lies. Gwen was never able to properly come to terms with her father's death because she never knew all the facts and blamed someone who constantly appeared in her life and she died, in part, because she didn't even know she was at risk.

Frankly, every one of these issues is dealt with by Brian Michael Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man with its punk rock chick version of Gwen. She goes through the same process of hating Spider-Man and for the same reason but she discovers Peter's identity and goes through a process of dealing with her issues.

This just goes to show that no character is entirely beyond redemption. Just get a good writer with a good angle and I can go from hating a character to loving them. I was genuinely shocked when Ultimate Gwen died (seem to die? I'm very much not sure on that point) whilst her original death left me feeling nothing much of anything. 

Painting challenge failed satisfactorily

(It has to be admitted I've actually forgotten how my camera works, its been so long since I finished a model. Still, photos should improve again with practice.)

My determination to finish a 16-man unit in a day failed but, as the title, suggests I failed to a satisfactory standard. I got the base colours and inks done on every model, drybrushed the fleshtones and bows and even got the monk finished.

I got a bit obsessed with the monk, in all honesty, probably because I was watching Cadfael as I painted. He's hardly a production number but I feel I did good work on him. Most likely he'll pull double duty amongst my bowmen and in the Stirwood Outlaws warband I'm building for a local Mordhiem campaign. I've always loved the little extras you get on the Bretonnian command sprues: the monk, the mangy dog, the keg of ale, the snail. Yes, there really is a snail on the Peasant command sprue.

Learnt a few lessons, too. Doing the block colours as a 16-man batch was challenging given the different sculpts in the set but for the details I'll work on one design at a time. With any luck I'll be able to finish off the detail work in a couple of afternoon sessions.

After that I'll move up the social order somewhat and make a start on my Knights Errant.

One Day Speed Painting Challenge

So for the first time in a while it's Sunday and I have nothing to do. No barbecue to go to, no friends around this weekend, no family obligations, nothing needs cleaning or washing. What's more the weather has turned grotty so going for a nice walk is sort of a non-starter.

What I do have is the grey horde of Bretonnia sitting there atop my shelves, their longbows, polearms and lances pointed at me accusingly. I really need to get some of these things painted, break the block that's settled on my hobby over the last month.

Right: one wet Sunday, a stack of Companion Chronicles to listen to, 16 Peasant Bowmen and a vague sense of how I want to paint them (Artois heraldry: red and black). Results posted Monday. 

Saturday Teatime 1.1: An Unearthly Child

Well, one of the first things to note here is that I watched the untransmitted pilot version completely by mistake. I was going to skip it and start with the transmitted first episode but those jolly people at 2Entertain had other ideas and included the pilot on the Play All function.

(A quick note about what we mean by the “pilot episode” here. This name was given retrospectively and isn't how the episode was intended. It wasn't a proof of concept piece like, say, the hour-long version of Sherlock: A Study In Pink. This was filmed for transmission and remounted due to technical issues. If it had gone off without a hitch it would have been the one and only version of An Unearthly Child. As it is those issues arose and the opportunity was taken to tweak the script and direction for a second shoot. For reasons we'll most likely return to throughout the black-and-white series this was actually easier to do than just re-filming the scenes affected by technical issues.)

On the one hand this mistake enhances the project and on another compromises it fatally. There are interesting observations to be made on how the second, transmitted version polished the first (and we'll get there) but it also means that my first stop on this project to experience Doctor Who as a linear, evolving text was an episode that doesn't actually contribute to that evolution. Still, this is where we are and I can no more pretend my reading of An Unearthly Child isn't informed by the pilot than I can pretend it isn't informed by the other twenty-plus years of my fandom.

One of the things seeing the pilot reveals is that from day one the idea of a hostile, untrustworthy Doctor was something the production team knew couldn't last. This is perhaps the greatest shift between the two versions of An Unearthly Child: the Doctor's reaction to Ian and Barbara intruding on his life is markedly different.

In the pilot the Doctor is hostile from the off: confrontational with Ian and Barbara and outwardly cruel to Susan when we finally enter the TARDIS. He even calls her a “stupid child!”. Given the previous scenes lead us to suppose Susan is locked in a perfectly mundane police box it even seems likely he might hit her. In the final version Hartnell is more whimsical through these scenes. He's condescending, yes, but with an edge of charm and when he tells Ian “You don't understand and I knew that you wouldn't.” it hardly seems malicious, just weary and amused. Oddly, in the pilot, it's clear the Doctor kidnaps Ian and Barbara to prevent their knowledge of the TARDIS from contaminating history whilst the second version has him panic and take off so Susan won't leave him. Wait, hang on...

Pull back a second, I'm ignoring half the episode and focussing on the Doctor, which is more than An Unearthly Child ever does so rewind and start again. Set the co-ordinates for 5.16pm on Saturday 23^rd November 1963 and see the moment for what it really is:

What we have is 25 minutes of television based on slowly increasing weirdness in which the Doctor is one of the last elements introduced. The title, delivered within a bewilderingly psychedelic effects sequence and to the strains of gloriously weird music, has an implied question mark attached to it. The Doctor, rather the fact that Susan's grandfather is a doctor, gets a mention in Ian's first scene (the episode's third) but even when Hartnell appears his link to the mentioned grandfather is obscure for several minutes.

So absent the Doctor, lacking even that name when he appears, what do we have? The episode is named for Susan, Barbara is the first named character to get a line (the actual first line goes to a random schoolboy who says “Oooh, yes,” in a very camp manner over a girl's shoulder) and Ian seems to rank equal to her as a fellow investigator.

The first element to be introduced is an unexplained police telephone box (free for use of public, officers and cars respond to urgent calls) in the middle of a junkyard, a junkyard whose gates open of their own accord to let the camera in. It's that last detail that makes the junkyard into an uncanny space and lends the police box some mystique once the camera chooses it as a focus. The camera zooms in on the police box doors, blurs and resolves again into a school noticeboard. We go from the uncanny space of inexplicably mysterious police boxes to the mundane world of school sports, house news and camp schoolboys mocking girls in the corridors.

Susan intrudes on this world: a girl who knows too much about science and too little about the ordinary world. Her very ordinary teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, are suspicious and decide to follow her home. The story makes a point of contrasting Susan with her teachers: whilst Susan dances as if mesmerised by everyday music we get lines that establish Ian as the cool teacher who knows about pop singers and Barbara as the maternal sort who lends books and offers extra tutoring.

So the two ordinary characters follow the uncanny one home, leaving their space and entering hers: the junkyard at 76 Totters Lane. Reasons for Susan's behaviour, or parts of her behaviour, are offered by both teachers: Ian declares she's a genius, Barbara implies parental neglect for Susan's social oddities and they briefly wonder if it all might just be down to that most mundane explanation of teenage strangeness: a boy. Nevertheless, they follow her into the junkyard, into her space and gradually the ordinary world recedes. Strange objects scattered through junkyard lead to the entrance of the mysterious grandfather and a confrontation that sees Barbara barge straight out of “our” world and into the most uncanny space yet: the TARDIS console room, bigger on the inside than the out.

From a modern perspective you'd be forgiven for assuming the series will continue as this episode sets out: with Susan as the focus. It isn't an unfamiliar set-up these days: we have a “special” person and two perceptive but outwardly ordinary people of either gender who fall into her orbit and thus into her adventures. It's a familiar set-up from any number of teen genre shows these days: Buffy The Vampire Slayer in particular. The not-unnatural assumption is that Ian and Barbara will discover Susan's “Unearthly” secret and perform the dual role of sidekicks and emotional support network in her adventures as Willow and Xander do in Buffy, or Chloe Sullivan and Pete Ross in the early seasons of Smallville.

So who is the mysterious grandfather in this formulation? Taking our two modern examples above he can either be a knowledgeable, guiding figure like Buffy's Rupert Giles or an antagonistic one like Smallville's Lex Luthor. Given the Doctor's behaviour in this episode either option is available.

It can't last, of course. We're decades away from the makers of such series making the leap of realising that younger viewers will empathise more with a younger leading protagonists so episode title or no episode title Susan is not destined to be our hero. Protagonist rights will settle on Ian as action man before finally resting on the Doctor's shoulders when he becomes the single enduring character the series has to offer. Susan's agency will be a sticking point in a lot of the next ten essays but I'm going to make a statement right now:

I don't believe Susan Foreman would have worked out better as a boy. The problem isn't that she's female given the praise anyone who does one of these projects reserves for Jacqueline Hill as Barbara. A female character doesn't need to be treated the way the series will treat Susan, especially on Verity Lambert's watch. The problem is that she is young, in particular that she's the Doctor's granddaughter. We'll revisit this theme I'm sure, as all criticism of Susan necessarily focusses on it, but the familial link makes her subordinate in an unavoidable way. With the three other regulars all being older than her and all possessed of a role that makes them socially responsible for her she doesn't have much chance of agency at this stage in the history of storytelling. This would be equally true for Samuel Foreman as it is for Susan Foreman.

With which thought we close out the episode on desolate plain in an unknown time and place with a sinister shadow creeping across the ground towards that uncanny police box...

Next Episode: 100,000 BC

Time, Space and Saturday Teatime prologue

This is a project I've been meaning to get around to for years: a full watch-through of classic Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child to the 1996 TV Movie stopping at all stations.

Why am I doing this? Well, I'd bet my view of the new series would be different if I'd watched it in random order over the course of over half my life. I saw my first Doctor Who story (Planet of the Daleks, as it happens) in 1992 when I was nine and watched the recently rediscovered The Enemy Of The World three weeks ago. Aside from that one unreleased episode of The Underwater Menace it took me 21 years to experience the complete canon in no real order and at the whim of the BBC's video and DVD schedule.

So now I have the chance: the very-nearly-almost complete canon of surviving episodes on shiny disc and a full set of Loose Cannon missing episode reconstructions. As I say, I've seen it all before but never in order, the way a series is supposed to be experienced.

As a project this is, of course, inspired and indebted to those who have gone before: Robert Shearman and Toby Hadoke's Running Through Corridors (which someday might even reach its second volume), Hannah J. Rothman's Twitter Who (which recently did), Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood's About Time and Philip Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum (currently hosted at his blog Philip Sandifer Writer). I heartily recommend all of them.

Much as I love Sandifer's essays its Rothman's approach I intend to imitate. This here is one fan's journey through 697 episodes of Doctor Who, seeing how I experience it as a series rather than as isolated stories.

And tomorrow we begin, at that mysterious junkyard at 76 Totter's Lane...

Next Episode: An Unearthly Child

Audio review: The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield

I approached this box set with mixed feelings. On the one hand I grew up reading the New Adventures novels, I have immense nostalgia for them. On the other, Big Finish's revisitations of the era have been of mixed quality to say the least. The sticking point has usually been Ace, her New Adventures version being so different from either Sophie Aldred's TV portrayal or the one she's developed in the years since. Hardly a surprise, then, that she's always had trouble capturing a character whose development she entirely skipped. There's also the matter that reverting Bernice's ongoing adventures to a Doctor Who series could be a massive backwards step for the character.

Over its four episodes this box set addresses my concerns one-by-one. For a start the box isn't set during the New Adventures but in Bernice's later life. The set opens with The Revolution by Nev Fountain which very much sets up the fact that no matter whose name comes higher on the cover this is a Bernice Summerfield series guest-starring the Doctor and Ace. Bernice is the first character to appear and when the Doctor does turn up he's not at his best: recovering from cryogenic freezing, confused and without a plan.

The core of The Revolution is a comedy religion versus comedy science plot but its main job is to establish the Doctor and Benny's relationship. It's also good to see McCoy playing comedy scenes in a New Adventures nostalgia trip. The “Dark Doctor” might be the New Adventures legacy that's widely remembered but there were as many stories where the Seventh Doctor was a lighter, comedic figure as in the darker vein. Kate Orman books, in particular. God, I miss Kate Orman books.

The “this is a Bernice Summerfield story for definite” vein continues with Good Night Sweet Ladies by Una McCormack which has Bernice flying determinedly solo. Broadly speaking its a ghost story but spoilers forbid me from revealing who the ghost is. Curiously, though, of the four stories this is the one most based in the history of Bernice in the New Adventures.

Ace turns up in Random Ghosts by Guy Adams on a world where everyone wakes without memories of the previous days they spent on the planet. They all have recording devices that remind them of events every morning. The story skips from scene to scene without giving establishing context which is dislocating but, ultimately, not too hard to follow. It's actually interesting to see at what point the characters begin to edit their “reminders”, to consciously remove their bad memories. Bernice even has a relationship here and wonders about how valid it is, since their history as a couple is essentially reported to her every morning instead of actually experienced.

Random Ghosts also does a better job than usual getting Bernice and Ace's relationship to work: close but fractious, two experienced adventurers with very different methods. The portrayal of Ace also pretty much sidesteps the problems I mentioned above. This isn't “Space Ace” of the New Adventures but rather the Ace briefly glimpsed in UNIT: Dominion (a box set with a whole lot of continuity oddities but damn entertaining). It might come off a little odd to old foggies like me who remember the hardened space marine she became but the fact is those books are about twenty years old and not as well remembered by fandom at large as they are by me. Certainly given past attempts to capture the book version of Ace I'll take a version that doesn't quite fit continuity but that Sophie Aldred can play.

Which brings us to the final play: The Lights Of Skaro by James Goss. A Dalek story, you'll be unsurprised to discover, and so a story that plugs a visible gap in the New Adventures canon. Virgin never came to an agreement with Terry Nation for use of the Daleks so they made a few background appearances but never featured in a full novel (to be honest I don't know if Virgin Books even tried to get a license our of Nation). Bernice's mother was killed when the Daleks conquered the colony they lived on and her father went missing in a space battle against a Dalek fleet.

The scene where Bernice meets the Dalek Emperor is pure gold and some of the best acting I've seen from Lisa Bowerman even after all these years.

The Lights Of Skaro ties the cast together at last: Bowerman, McCoy and Aldred reunited. Having spent three hours setting up the separate components of the cast and their relationships (except the well-established relationship between Ace and the Seventh Doctor) it all comes together beautifully. Terry Molloy's cameo at the start of the disc is odd and seems to go nowhere, though, and I wonder if I'm missing something.

All three characters have long established relationships with the Daleks and Lights covers all of them, in some cases from both directions. There have been a lot of stories dealing with how the Doctor views the Dalek but here Goss does a great job looking at the long history the Daleks have with the Doctor. There's even an explanation of why there were sculptures in the Dalek city during their first story. That might sound like fan wank on an epic scale but believe me its a very significant scene.

Being a Doctor Who and not a Bernice Summerfield set there's an Extras disc which I admit to only half listening to in hopes there'd be some news of whether there was going to be a return to series as it left off in Missing Persons. Not that I'd mind more New Adventures audios in this vein given the evidence, I just miss Peter. 

On wargamer generosity

It is a truth universally acknowledged amongst wargamers that a backlog is inevitable. Things get bought on impulse or you get something to expand an army before moving off in a different direction or even on to another army. Thus we wargamers usually have a few (okay, a lot of) useless models lying around waiting for the day we "get around" to them.

There is an alternative, of course: make the backlog somebody else's problem. So it was that I was at a barbecue on Saturday, telling my friend Dave I was considering resurrecting my Ork army for 7^th ed. "Considering", mind you! Half an hour later he presents me with a cardboard box containing about 30 Boyz, 5 Nobz, 4 Burna Boyz and their mandatory Mek, a converted Warboss, a very dusty Trukk, a very lonely Bomb Squig and that really cool Space Marine Terminator Chaplain (I checked, he did want to give me that). Surprised, I remembered that he's planning an Imperial Guard detachment for his Dark Angels and offered to hunt up some Cadian Shock Troops I bought for my Lost And The Damned and never built.

I don't know if it's just my immediate circle of wargaming friends that are this generous but this isn't a rare scenario. Payment isn't even always necessary. Back in January my friend and eternal rival Matt fell in love with the new Dwarfs and decided to start an army. I reminded him I had some Dwarfs I hadn't used in years and said he was welcome to them.

"Some", incidentally, was the better part of a hundred. Aside from a few character models I was fond of I handed him a complete army. Financially speaking I probably did myself out of two or three hundred quid there.

It all comes around, though, and that's the thing, I'm sure some day Matt will end up putting something he finds useless my way. Quite besides which those hundred Dwarfs were doing me no good where they were: in a shoe box, under my bed just waiting for a family of spiders to see its real estate potential. I hadn't used the army for the better part of six years and even then I played maybe half a dozen games before realising that a slow-moving missile-heavy army wasn't to my taste. It felt like a change of pace when I bought it but it just didn't suit me.

(This isn't me saying Dwarfs are poorly designed just that the style doesn't suit bloodthirsty, combat-lovin' me.)

So, yes, now I suppose I'm committed to an Ork army. 

Submitted without comment

Comics Ramble: Black Canary and Zatanna: Bloodspell by Paul Dini

or, Paul Dini joins the resistance against the New 52

Paul Dini is certainly no stranger to the concept of reboots: he was one of the prime architects behind the DC Animated Universe of the 1990s/early-2000s and with his comics he tends towards an accessible style of done-in-ones that very consciously work on their own rather than as part of a larger continuity. He loves his mythos as much as the next comics pro but he's always been magnificently unconcerned with what such-and-such character did in so-and-so issue of whatever title a few years ago.

Part of this is how he came up in DC: Batman The Animated Series used broad archetypes of the established characters and worked them up from there, contradicting and adding to the original concept as they went and they were so good half of it was incorporated into the comics. Reboots, or at least self-contained storytelling, is Dini's established wheelhouse.

So you can imagine my slight surprise when Dini puts out a book that ignores the blank slate of the New 52.

Okay, brass tacks: Bloodspell opens with Zatanna and Black Canary's first meeting when Zee was a child and moves to the near-present with Dinah foiling a casino robbery, a case that turns mystical on her and so she teams up with Zatanna. This is all very much in Dini's style: a clean, crisp rendition of a classic team-up structure (Type A character on Type A case that becomes Type B case, enter Type B character) but spruced up a bit.

The sprucing up takes the form of delightful character set pieces including our heroes goofing off in a toy store and flashbacks to past meetings. One of the best scenes, for my money, is Zee's first day in the Justice League when she was “a geeky newbie sporting a terrified smile and the worst 'grown-up' hairdo I'd ever seen”, according to Black Canary. It's this scene more than any other that wears its pre-Flashpoint colours on its sleeve with cameos from J'onn, Ralph Dibny and a Z-list villain called the Key. We even get to see Dinah's terrible JLI-era costume in a later scene, plus she teams up with “her” Green Arrow for a few pages.

You can see where I'm going with this: the presentation isn't just pre-Flashpoint, it's aggressively pre-Flashpoint.

Not that it's pointless, the pre-Flashpoint setting lends the story emotional context. As far as I'm aware the New 52 versions of Dinah and Zee have never met whereas here their friendship is old enough and deep enough that they can go shopping together; talk to one another as equals; have funny stories about each other; and one can talk to the other whilst she's in the bath without it being weird.

This all could have been left out, though. Ultimately, Ollie doesn't need to be there: aside from a short scene of pillow talk his plot functions could be taken over by Batgirl (and even then I don't think there'd be many complaints...). Dini writes completely original flashbacks to his title characters' earlier meetings: modern Zee could have encountered the Birds Of Prey or consulted on a mystical-themed mission for Team 7. It doesn't even call back to Dini's previous run on Zatanna's solo series. This could be tweaked into a New 52 story with relative ease.

I wouldn't care as much, though, would I?

This continues an odd theme from DC's “Digital First” anthologies Legends Of The Dark Knight and Adventures Of Superman that whilst the mainstream of DC's output is focussed on building a new continuity in the Dini/Timm mould building from the archetypes up, re-visitations of their old continuity have emerged as a new form of fanservice.

Yes, this started off as a review but it rather got away from me. That's why I call these posts “Rambles” instead of reviews. You want the review part of the review then the bottom line is this: it's fun, it's frothy, it's self-contained with an efficiently written plot and well-honed characterisation plus a nice magical mystery woven in but any element of that description was pretty obvious from the sentence “Black Canary and Zatanna: Bloodspell by Paul Dini”. 

Why my 100 Model Challenge was a dumb idea

It was, there's no way around it, the entire idea was misconceived. It sounded good in my head to start with: lay off buying models for a while and get a decent chunk of my backlog done in the meantime. It started off easy when GW were releasing stuff like the Imperial Gu... ahem, the Astra Militarum (goodness sake), a decidedly mediocre release with some very odd design choices like spiky Chaos armour for Storm Troo... ahem, Scions (goodness sake).

Then the Wood Elves came along. I've been waiting years for a Wood Elves books and longer still for plastic Eternal Guard. The new book is fantastic but I girded up my loins, gritted my teeth and stayed the course.

The final straw came when I was going through my bits box for a suitably impressive sword to slap on my Bretonnian Lord and I found a Maximus-pattern helmet. I looked at it and I remembered a thought that entered my head last September when the plastic Librarian came out that it would look sweet with a Maximus helmet.

And that was it. I broke. I came to the realisation that all I was doing was denying myself enjoyment. “Life is too short,” I declared to myself and went out immediately to buy a plastic Librarian and a box of Glade Guard.

Targets are for work. Goals are fine but targets can piss off. I'll keep posting models, at least once I find a varnishing method that doesn't leave my models shining like latex fetish models ('Ardcoat), like they're covered in a light dusting of snow (Purity Seal) or dulls all colour to horrible flatness (Lahmian Medium).

And, you know what? That Librarian does look sweet in a Maximus helm. 

The Comics Ramble

You know what I forgot to buy last week? Miles Morales, Ultimate Spider-Man #1 and Original Sin #1! Because I am an idiot. Otherwise it was a pretty light week, just these two:

Everyone stinks at being sixteen (Cyclops #1)

I never pegged All-New X-Men as a spin-off-y kind of title. Naive of me in retrospect but I'm rarely this glad to be wrong.

So, situation: at the end of The Trial Of Jean Grey crossover young, time-lost teen Scott Summers decides to swan off to outer space with his space pirate, missing presumed dead Dad. He does this mainly because he finds out about his and Jean's future of marriage, multiple-bereavement and general misery at a stage when he's still only just about crushing on her. As excuses to bail out on uncomfortable social situations goes it's pretty much the best one ever. Also, if there was ever an ancillary X-character I felt could do with some extra fleshing out its Major Chris “Corsair” Summers.

Previous Cyclops/Corsair meetings have dwelt on their incompatibility: a professional soldier and a pirate, a down-to-earth civil rights activist and a freewheeling space jockey. I'm thinking in particular about a just-pre-Grant Morrison issue of Uncanny X-Men where they have a camp out and really, really get on one another's tits.

Time-lost teenage Cyclops is just glad to have his Dad back, he's happy to be in space and he sort of fancies his stepmother which is conflicting for him on multiple levels because she's his stepmother and she's a catgirl... or possibly a skunk girl... maybe an albino squirrel, I'm really not sure.

But this is what the X-Men franchise is for: taking something relatable and making it really bloody weird. Talk away the spaceship, the aliens, the sultry cat-skunk-squirrel woman and what you've got is a young man who doesn't know what he wants to do with his life going on a road trip with his Dad.

I don't know if this is an ongoing or a limited series but I am onboard for this like you wouldn't believe.

Cheap, penny-ante slight-of-hand (Loki: Agent of Asgard #4)

It has to be said, after the covert long games of Gillen's Journey Into Mystery and Young Avengers this series is surprisingly direct. Here we are, four issues in and the third wasn't even about “our” Loki, and we're already getting to the point. When Loki revealed in #2 that he was planning something I expected him to spend the better part of the year assembling his team but #4 and it's done, caper incoming next month.

I'm not complaining. Dear God, am I not complaining! I'm not an enemy of decompressed storytelling, I've been reading Ultimate Spider-Man since day one but it is nice to to see a few series championing brevity. Hawkeye has this quality as well, being mainly done-in-ones that build the ongoing storyline quietly in the background.

It was also great to see Verity Willis the human lie detector make a return because I really liked her in #2. I was less enthused by Sigurd turning up but since Ewing clearly agrees with me that Sigurd is a sleazy bastard I was won over by the idea of bringing him back.

If I have one criticism I think this Loki's origin is now established enough that Ewing could drop the flashbacks to “I am the crime that will not be forgiven.”. Not that “flashback” is actually the right word, that wasn't how Journey Into Mystery ended it was, if you'll pardon the phrase, considerably more low key and better for it.

I also admit, with zero shame, to laughing out loud at the illustration of Thor wearing an A-Ha t-shirt. 

Obligatory Star Wars essay (or, Good God, Empire Strikes Back is bleak)

You know how it goes, there are some films that have been part of your life so long and that you've watched so many times that the pictures on the screen cease to have meaning. You forget what an astounding moment seeing the first dinosaur in Jurassic Park was; how dark Back To The Future Part II is; and you forget how unbelievably, wonderfully bleak the end of The Empire Strikes Back is.

It really is, and it shows how times have changed that I can't think of a film cliffhanger in the last twenty years to match it for completely screwing over the heroes. The second Pirates Of The Caribbean comes close but Lucas and Spielberg completely destroy every aspect of the formula they've spent two films creating:

When Luke, Leia and the droids line up for the final shot they've lost virtually everything. As a group they've lost Han, they've lost another home base and they lose the Millennium Falcon when Lando and Chewie take it to search for Han which is a huge symbolic loss as well as a purely military one.

Luke has lost his hand; he's lost the fight the whole film was building to; he's lost his father for the second time; his memories of Ben Kenobi have been tainted; he's lost the comfort of believing his late father was a war hero; he's lost any hope that Leia might love him (this is still, at the time, a Bad Thing); he's lost his lightsaber; and in abandoning his training he may well have lost any right he had to call himself a Jedi.

Leia stands there having lost the love of her life (for this is Hollywood and there is only twue wuv); she's lost God knows how many people under her command at Hoth; and, worst of all, she's lost her focus. Compare the Leia of A New Hope with the one at the start of Return Of The Jedi. In A New Hope our first glimpse of her is of a gun-toting woman sneaking around a battle, risking her life to get a message out; she withstands interrogation and implied torture; she even hands over false intelligence when Tarkin is holding her homeworld hostage. Everything is for the good of the Rebellion and yet when Episode VI opens we see her taking insane risks for one man.

It's tempting to make a barbed, feminist point here but I like it, it works. The Rebels are standing up for what they believe in and what Luke, Leia and Han believe in are each other. They have to be reunited or they'll never beat the Empire. It's telling that lacking Han their infiltration of Jabba's Palace goes completely wrong. Yes, they have back-up plans but I find it hard to believe the Rancor or the Sarrlac figured in any strategy sessions.

Then comes the escape from the Sandskimmer and everyone gets a party piece to show that, reunited, they're back to being themselves. Luke gets to Errol Flynn his way through a horde of minions; Leia commits a very satisfying murder and gets to blow the whole place to kingdom come; and Han gets all the best lines and bumbles his way to saving Lando's life. Luke is a Jedi again, Leia is a commanding presence (wardrobe not withstanding) and Han is the charming rogue once more.

It's a restoration of cosmic order that injects the fun back into the series. The narrative collapsed in Empire and is restored in Jedi. It's brilliant on both sides of the coin and I don't think modern audiences would have this kind of patience. That cliffhanger stood for three years. Three years! Can you image a modern audience being asked to wait that long for resolution? We're too fond of instant gratification these days.