The Figures Mash (part 1)

There is a book on my shelf that makes the list of Brilliant Charity Shop Finds of 2017. Entitled Figure Fantasy, it celebrates the work of Daniel Picard, who has turned the careful posing of costumed action figures into what is quite literally an art form. Here’s the Man of Steel etching “BRUCE WAYNE IS BATMAN” onto a wall with his heat vision. Here’s the Hulk bending a tree. Here’s Darth Vader propped up at a urinal, the toilet walls lined by stormtroopers anxiously trying to incline their heads in the opposited direction. Look him up; the guy’s a genius.

I do not have Picard’s photographic skills, swanky lighting or creativity. I also don’t have the time or the patience. I have trouble enough getting the ruddy things to stand upright on concrete without wobbling in a summer breeze. However, I do have a decent-sized garden and the occasional good idea. Which has meant that as the children have got older, and the tendency to re-enact the finale of ‘Blink’ recedes somewhat, our playtime sessions have been replaced by impromptu photos in the garden. “Give me a Capaldi,” I’ll say in the manner of a concentrating surgeon or experienced mechanic, not taking my eyes from the scene I’m semi-meticulously assembling. “Dalek. Cybermen. Damn, we’ve got a wobble. Blu-tac, quick! CAN I GET SOME HELP IN HERE PLEASE?!”

Look, Doctor Who toys deserve to come out of their plastic packaging, all right? I can’t understand – truly I can’t – the mentality of people who buy them simply to have them, in order to build up a collection that does nothing except gather dust, a factory line of plastic David Tennants that sit permanently bubbled in cellophane, their tiny arms and legs bound with those irritating little cable things. Oh, they’re worth more, are they? What’s worth? How do you measure that?

So one of my Angels is missing a wing and Morbius’s leg has a tendency to drop out of its socket unannounced, but at least they get used. And such is the extent to which I have neglected this blog this year that we have a whole stack of unposted pictures, enough for a small exhibition, all hastily composed and all equally ludicrous. So this week and next, while you’re all drumming your fingers waiting for ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’, I’ll stick them all out here.

We’ll start with this one.

---

“Oh great. We’re back on Trenzalore.”

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Unused Fourth Doctor stories.

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“Right. I don’t want to panic anyone, but there’s a leek in the boat.”

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“Interesting look, Frobisher.”

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Now showing on Britbox: Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Killer Tomatoes.

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“Hello, old friend. And here we are, you and me, on the last page.”

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“Seriously. You’ve been out for like a month and a half. Don’t you think you can stop doing that now?”

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“When this baby hits eighty-eight miles an hour, you’re – GREAT SCOTT!”

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“I’m sure you’ll get the…point, Doctor. He. He he he he.”

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The Doctor and Graham get caught up in a game of Tetris.

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“Hey, anybody seen a – you know what, never mind.”

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“So. We meet again, Great Intelligence.”

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“Uh…she did it.”

---

More of the same next time! Enjoy your week.

Have I Got Whos For You (Seasonal Edition)

We’ve got something quite special turning up here at Brian of Morbius over the next day or two, but right now it’s half past six in the morning and I’m just taking a few minutes to do a meme catchup before these go completely out of date. In culinary terms, this is the blogging equivalent of that thing where you get all the leftovers out of the fridge and whisk them into a soup. I suppose. Sorry if that doesn’t work, I’ve not had coffee yet…

We open with a deleted scene from the recent finale to The Mandalorian, indicating that the series’ big reveal was originally planned much, much earlier.

I don’t know what it is; I tried every which way but when you paste it onto Matt Smith’s body it just doesn’t look like Luke Skywalker. Is this because it never did? And we simply bought it because the he had a lightsaber in his hand, had just jumped out of an X-Wing and the whole thing bore an uncanny resemblance to the ending of Rogue One? Or is my Photoshopping off this week? I’d say I think we should be told, but I can’t help thinking it’s not important in the grand scheme of things.

In any case, it’s not the first time I’ve done a Doctor Who / Mandalorian crossover and I suspect it won’t be the last.

<coughs>

Elsewhere, in a TARDIS somewhere in England, the rollout of the much-anticipated Covid vaccine is not going down with everyone, in a quite literal sense.

There are complaints when it’s revealed the Brexit Deal wasn’t quite as oven-ready as we were told.

And having nothing else to do, movie fans have launched into an epidemic of overreacting to unnecessary changes and miscast musical roles.

“AND THAT’S FOR RUINING THE PROM, YOU TWAT!”

We couldn’t end without doing something Christmassy. So here’s an unused still from series 12, part five.

—–

Trouble looms when Clara pops round to Matt Smith’s TARDIS to ask whether he’s got the turkey on.

—–

And trouble also looms beneath a Christmas tree in Oxfordshire when two unsuspecting action figures come up against a deadly enemy.

“Run, Bill! It’s Santa Claws!”

Papa Louie Pals Presents: The Doctors

I’m the odd one out in our house. I seem to be the only one of the six of us – and yes, that includes Edward – who’s never played a Papa Louie game.

“That makes two of us,” I can hear many of you say, and who can blame you? For the Papa games – which began life as a Flash-based platform game that spawned a wealth of culinary spin-offs – are fun and popular, but they’re not exactly mainstream. It’s the sort of private joke that takes too long to explain: this notion of working your way through hundreds of customers who want hot dogs and sandwiches and pizza and…well, you name it, they’ve covered it. Papa’s Wingeria does chicken. Papa’s Freezeria deals with all things ice cream. Papa’s Donuteria does – look, I’m not going to read out the whole thing. Suffice it to say Flipline have done well out of this little franchise, although my own idea for a spin-off – a toilet maintenance game entitled Papa’s Diarrhea – has thus far been met with nothing but a resounding silence.

But I never got into it. I just didn’t have the time; there were too many other games to be playing. I was content to sit, lounged in bed or next to Emily on the sofa, while the tinkly music tinkled and my better half tried to get an even spread of tomato paste and cursed when I jogged the bed and made her drop her pancake. We got used to throwing our arms up in the air with a broad grin when evening meals arrived on the table. If you have played any of the games you will appreciate this. If you have not, I’m not about to explain it to you. Perhaps you had to be there, or at least be in the immediate vicinity of someone who was – a role I was (it seemed) more than content to play.

Still. Then they made Papa Louie Pals, which is the subject of today’s post. Papa Louie Pals enables you to create more or less anyone you like, from a series of pre-defined style templates, faces and skin tones and outfit variations. The basic humanoid shape is the same for everyone – with minimal adjustments to things like girth and neck length – but all that aside there’s a considerable amount of customisation potential, even more so if you’re prepared to pay for additional content (I’m not; the new stuff is largely cosmetic).

And of course, I’ve made an entire set of Doctors.

Actually, I didn’t stop at the Doctors. I did the companions as well. But that’s content overload so we will deal with them another time. Today, you can have fourteen incarnations of the Doctor, in no particular order, randomly paired according to the way the screen grabbing worked, which led to some interesting if not unpleasant juxtapositions. Some of them are better than others. But I did painstakingly adjust the height of each incarnation so it was more or less accurate. Colour me proud, Jack. Colour me proud.

 

First up: the War Doctor and the Thirteenth Doctor. I don’t think her shoes are quite right, but I’m quite pleased with the hair. (Look very closely and you’ll see a bum bag poking out from beneath her coat.)

—

We’ll have the two Bakers next. There’s no option for multi-coloured scarves, so I’ve gone for his Season 18 look, which is reasonably good, although he really ought to be a little more grumpy. The same colours problem occurred when constructing the Sixth Doctor, and what’s presented here is about as close as I could manage. There’s a little too much red, but you get the idea.

—

I’m not very happy with the Eighth; his hair is completely wrong but there really was nothing else that fit. There’s probably the capacity for creating his ‘Night of the Doctor’ look, of course – but then you’re basically in War Doctor territory, so a distorted 1996 take will have to suffice. Next to him is McCoy; the jumper is off kilter but the hat, at least, is quite good.

—

These two came out quite well, really, largely because of Troughton’s eyes, grin and trousers. The Eleventh Doctor is halfway through the events of ‘Flesh and Stone’.

—

The Twelfth Doctor is a tricky one to do because there are three of him, depending on which series you’re watching: of all the contemporary incarnations he’s been the one who’s arguably changed the most. Next to him is Pertwee, who has the wrong hair, although it’s the best I could come up with.

—

The old man and the Time Lord who lived too long. Tennant was about the easiest one to do, although I do think those trousers ought to be a little darker (and the stripes are a bit, I dunno, deckchair). Still, his hair, like the werewolf Warren Zevon saw at Trader Vic’s, is perfect.

—

I nearly skipped Nine, just to see how people would react, but he was such an easy one I didn’t quite have it in me. Davison – with a hat that’s a little flatter than I’d like – rounds off the set. Shame there’s no celery.

Have I Got Whos for You (Indicative Vote edition)

Keep your eyes peeled for another video roundup coming not-exactly-live and by-no-means-exclusive to Brian of Morbius. That’ll be online in a week or so, once I’ve written it.

In the meantime, here’s a little something we made earlier. Well, several somethings, collated. In the first instance, it was National Potato Chip Day the other week. I didn’t even know National Potato Chip Day (or Crisp Day, if you’re British) was a thing. And while I love a bag of salt and vinegar as much as the next man, I’m really not sure whether their adulation warrants an entire day.

Still, any excuse, right?

Also, can I take this opportunity to say how much I miss Brannigans? Oh, I know you can still buy them on the internet. But it’s not the same as wandering down to your local Rusts and getting a packet of beef and mustard to have along with the wine gums and ginger ale you were going to scoff while watching Heat on rented VHS. Those were the days. I’d rent three videos and watch them over the course of a weekend, on my own, because I had no life. Or I’d buy them in the 3-for-£12 sales they’d have every week at HMV. I never saw anybody, except my parents. But I did become quite au fait with the classics, and enjoyed a great many of them, even if I still think Citizen Kane is mostly shit.

…Where were we? Oh yes, International Day of Happiness.

We could all do with a little happiness right now. Certainly it feels as if Britain is temporarily broken. It’s not so much a problem with whether or not we leave the EU – I am resigned to the fact that we probably will, and I can’t help thinking it probably won’t be as bad as the militant Remainers insist it will be. Nor will it be as rosy, of course, as the Leave campaign insist it will be, although that could all change if they keep shifting the goalposts – first it was going to be marvellous and we’d get a fantastic deal; then it wasn’t going to be quite so marvellous and yes the NHS figures were fabricated but it would still be great; then it was going to be difficult but worth it in the long run and we knew that when we voted; then we’d be better off with no deal, then the deal we had might be the best option after all, and then there’s a lot of vagueness about WTO from people who don’t actually know the first thing about it.

I mean, I don’t have a clue. I don’t! But I voted Remain not because of any particular affinity towards the EU – I am always one to err on the side of caution in these matters, and defend the status quo unless the boat is in severe need of rocking – but because I could see this referendum for what it was from the outset. It was a grab for power: a vote-winning fiasco made by a desperate man who jumped ship (to extend the metaphor) as soon as it didn’t go his way. I firmly believe that you shouldn’t let the man in the street decide this sort of thing in any case – at least not these days, when people are so unilaterally thick – but if it’s unavoidable it needs to occur under the right sort of circumstances, and this was a political hotbed. How many people do you know who voted Leave simply because they despised Cameron? Exactly.

We saw this again in the Commons, just last night: support for Theresa May’s deal improved when she said she’d resign if they voted it through. If you can’t trust MPs – who are supposed to be sensible about these things – not to be fickle and spiteful (or, if you’re Rees-Mogg, just a shade Machiavellian) when it comes to making incredibly important decisions, then what hopes for the rest of us? This was not something that should ever have been decided by the ballot box, at least not under the current administration, who are too out of touch, too insular and frankly too incompetent to carry this through. I knew that back in 2016, and that’s largely why I stuck to the Remain camp. And three years later, I turned out to be right.

Certainly there is a tangible sign of Referendum Fatigue – as up in the hills, despite the local area being a strong Leave constituency, there is a disappointing turnout on Nigel Farage’s March For Brexit.

Here’s the problem. It’s not so much the deal or no deal fiasco: we will, eventually, get through that and come to some sort of slim majority that will be heralded as a great victory by the winning side and a fraudulent travesty by whoever came second. Parliament will move on, and we’ll survive Brexit, in whatever capacity it occurs, or doesn’t. But there is a schism across our country now. You’re either a Brexiteer or a Remainer, and there is apparently very little room for middle ground. There is a sense of division, as espoused by both sides, and the fact that most of the arguing takes place on social media (which is, let’s be honest, an absolute cesspit) doesn’t help matters. Theresa May has been appealing for calm and unity – shortly before she gave up and announced “That’s it, I’m off” like a geography teacher who’s fed up with a rowdy class – but it doesn’t help that her idea of unity is that everyone do exactly what she says, however ludicrous it might be. I don’t know where we go from here. I truly don’t.

In the midst of this week’s chaos the ‘official’ Facebook page for Britain Bites Back ran a poll about whether we should leave or not, only to throw their toys out of the pram when it didn’t go their way. They then ran a second poll, which had a similar response, and then proceeded to vent about how you should only be on their page if you agreed with their views, dismissing anyone who didn’t as a ‘hacker’. You can read all about the saga here, although the jury is out as to whether this really is a genuine page or a spoof. If it’s a spoof, it’s frighteningly convincing and Poe’s law is in full effect, but I can’t help thinking the joke’s over now and they ought to back away, because somewhere along the line it stopped being funny.

At any rate, a friend of mine asked me to do something Who-related with it. So –

We end today’s little missive on a lighter note, with the news that the Toy Story 4 trailer has finally dropped. Those of you who felt that the story drew to a natural conclusion at the end of the last movie – as the characters found a new home and said goodbye to Andy – will undoubtedly consign this to the ‘sequel too far’ drawer (you know, the one that’s chronically overstuffed and has just about fallen off its runners). I can’t help thinking you’re probably right, but I’ll see this anyway because the concept fascinates me: given that the new guest star, Sporky, is a piece of living cutlery, at what point do creatures in the Toy Story universe gain sentience? Is it all about loving something enough to make it real, like it was in The Velveteen Rabbit? Do you have to cast a spell, or breathe over them like Aslan does at the end of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe? Or is it simply a matter of sticking a pair of googly eyes on something and then standing back to watch the fireworks? I think we should be told, and even if we’re not I suspect there will be several BuzzFeed articles about it.

In any event, if you think you’ve seen Sporky before, he crops up in a deleted scene in ‘The Doctor Falls’.

“I’M NOT A COMPANION!!!!”

Have I Got Whos For You (Part 379)

There’s nothing like a bit of dumbing down, is there? I mean it even happens in here. There was a time when this site was more than simply a glorified meme collection, but most of my sensible writing is reserved for other pages these days. I do have another video collection coming up, but that’ll have to wait for a bit.

What’s been happening this week? Well, the staff at Holby City had to deal with a devastating Cyber attack.

(Yes, that is a Cyberman smoking a fag in the background. You get ’em outside every hospital.)

If you actually saw the thing, it was a two-part story which incorporated various characters from both shows interacting in a joint storyline which put two of their finest on the operating table. While Connie tried desperately to save Ian, who’d overdosed to get away from his incredibly annoying sister, rival queen bee Jac Naylor was fighting to get to the sole working theatre in the building in order to save Sacha, who was clearly in a worse state than he was prepared to let on after he climbed out of the car he’d just crashed. (Inevitably they wound up saving each other’s patients, and everybody learned a valuable lesson.) Meanwhile Sacha’s daughter was downstairs with Essie, who’d had a diabetic attack and was lying prone on the floor of the radiology department, which led to Ric Griffin crawling through the ventilation ducts in a scene that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Alien. All the while, the lights were going out along the corridor, one by one, which is really not how power cuts tend to work.

It did rather remind me of The Stolen Earth. Josh watches Casualty on Thursdays with Em (yes, I know it’s broadcast on Saturdays, but they watch it on Thursdays), and Em and I watch Holby once a week. She is the only one who watches both, which led to Josh filling me in on the Casualty cast and vice versa. But when you drop in characters to both shows it gets awfully confusing. Or, as Gareth put it when Ianto and Gwen were facing off against that Dalek, “Oh great. More people from spin-offs I don’t watch and therefore don’t care about”.

Last Friday, of course, was Women’s International Day.

What? Oh. Oh well, have this anyway.

“Why oh why oh WHY,” someone said, after a fashion, “did you go with a picture of Davison when he didn’t like the idea of a female Doctor? Or are you deliberately trying to get someone to retaliate?”

“I just went with the cricket vibe,” I said. “I don’t think it matters.” You can have great fun mashing up things like this. It annoys the heck out of the traditionalists, and people who don’t understand why you’ve posted this in a Classic Doctor Who group when it’s been tainted with the ineffable stench of something that was created nine years (or sixteen, depending on how you count) after a designated cut-off point. I mean, there’s a market for separating old and new, for certain, because they are very different shows. But it inevitably leads to fallout. How long is that going to last, do we think? Will there be a point at which it’s all…I don’t know, Doctor Who?

Presumably, if and when that happens we’re going to have to find new ways of annoying the puritans. Luckily I’ve got a stack of them lined up.

This one was funny. I had someone tell me that the Daleks were older than Vader.

“No they’re not,” I said.

“21 December 1963 to 1 February 1964 first appearance of the Daleks. 1977, first appearance of Darth Vader. Yes yes they are “

“No, no they’re not. The Genesis of the Daleks happened thousands, if not millions of years in our future. Star Wars happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”

“The Daleks have a time machine and were created outside of time and space by a fallen Time Lord. There’s nothing stating that it happened in the future but according to several episodes the Daleks and their creators were at war with the Daleks in the time before time began. Ergo still older.”

“Somewhere along the line I fear you may have rather missed the point of all this.”

“No, I caught on when you commented but decided to just continue being sassy. :P”

GAAAH. I hate it when they catch me out.

What else has been happening? Well, there was tension at a house in London when Dr Simeon elected not to dress up for World Book Day.

—

And in politics, Theresa May isn’t having the best of weeks, but she did have time to upload this to her Twitter account.

(If you missed the reference, have a read of this. It was almost certainly down to the person who runs the Downing Street Twitter account, and as is the case with most things of this nature, it is very churlish to blame her directly. Watching her handle this train crash of a government I happen to think she’s probably a very nice woman in an impossible situation, and whatever my misgivings about Brexit she’s the best of a very bad lot. I also imagine she’s a lot of fun at parties.)

Much of the Brexit campaigning, of course, consisted of both sides telling us about dreadful things that would happen if we stayed in / left the EU, most of which probably weren’t true at all. It was done largely to scare people, which in turn distracts us from the really important issues and drives up internet traffic, and what was weird about it was that it isn’t something that normally happens, at least not in popular culture.

Away from fake scare stories there has, at long last, been word from the Disney front about the upcoming Aladdin remake, with a full length trailer finally released this week. And for all you Doctor Who fans, there was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Easter Egg during the magic carpet sequence.

“A whole new w-”

THUD.

God is in the detail (11-04)

Right: after that brief hiatus while I rambled around the Yorkshire moors (we may come back to that another time) it’s back to business as usual this week with our regular instalment of VERY IMPORTANT CLUES AND SIGNS.

What do we mean by this, precisely, dear uninitiated reader? Yes, you. The one who just joined the Facebook group this week and randomly clicked the link button because you thought you might get spoiler information. Well, you’ve come to the right place. Because we’ve been all through ‘Arachnids in the UK’ and combed it with the same meticulous dedication – not to mention the same grizzled expression – adopted by my wife when she’s delousing our children’s hair. As I’ve demonstrated in here on countless occasions, absolutely NOTHING in this show is an accident – and absolutely everything can mean something VITALLY SIGNIFICANT that we’re going to come back to later in the series. It’s simply a matter of sorting the wheat from the chaff – an unseemly task at the best of times, so it’s lucky you’ve got me to do that for you. Buckle up, folks. It’s going to be a bumpy ride through Conspiracy Central, so I hope no one’s just eaten.

(As an aside, Emily suggested on Sunday evening that they should do an episode of Doctor Who with giant head lice. Who’s up for Rob Brydon as a cantankerous exterminator?)

We start at the beginning, or near enough.

This, you’ll remember, is the charming scene that sees the Doctor drop off her companions in one of the nicer parts of Sheffield, just before Yaz invites her up for a little something. At the moment I grabbed this frame, Whittaker is just about to slope forlornly off into the TARDIS, presumably to nab a custard cream and have a good cry into her Joanna Trollope. But look very carefully at the exact position they’ve left the camera. The partial obscuring of the door sign isn’t an accident – oh no indeed. It’s been left that way deliberately so that the visible letters form a particular set of words – at least they do once you’ve rearranged them, which is what I did. They spell:

MEDIATE SCAR STANCE

ABLE CENTURION PLYS LOOPHOLE

This ought to serve as a CLEAR AND TRANSPARENT INDICATION of two incredibly exciting crossover events: one involving Harry Potter, and one involving Legends of Tomorrow, specifically Arthur Darvill’s time travelling anti-hero Rip Hunter. Whether or not he’ll actually be dressed in the centurion outfit Rory wore is still very much on the table, but my guess is they’ll put it in as an Easter Egg. That’s what I’d do.

Fruit is next.

There are eight items of fruit in that bowl: five lemons and three limes. The use of bananas in the Whoniverse is, of course, common knowledge, whether it’s the Tenth Doctor waving one at the clockwork robots, Matt Smith whipping away River’s gun and replacing it with something equally phallic, or John Hurt eating several bananas on the trot in Krapp’s Last Tape. Lemons are somewhat harder to place, although one notes that the Tenth Doctor knows of a planet with highly evolved, humanoid lemons, perhaps in the manner of this chap.

However, the limes are a little less abstract. They pertain to three specific objects:

• Miss Lime from ‘Zagreus’
• The Limehouse in ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’
• Lime Grove Studios

From this we can unambiguously conclude that a future series of Doctor Who will be featuring a special LIVE EPISODE filmed on the housing estate formerly occupied by Lime Grove, directed by Waris Hussein. The episode will feature Charley Pollard, coming face to mask with Magnus Greel. We know this from looking at the chair, which is positioned so that the slats mask the notes G-F-A-C-E on the piano. As I said: there is no such thing as coincidence.

(As an aside, have you seen Waris Hussein lately? He looks incredible. Somewhere in an Ealing attic there is a portrait covered in wrinkles.)

We’ll be back with more important observations, right after a visit to the bathroom.

You will note the three bottles of bath cream sat at the top of the screen. You will also note the mobile phone that is parallel with the third. In order to unpack this it is necessary to take a brief dive into history: namely 1973, the year the mobile phone was first unveiled to an unsuspecting world by Motorola’s Martin Cooper. Also of note: the left bottle is silvery-white, the second is darker. The third is the first in the sequence to escape the drab world of monochrome, assuming a tasteful blue appearance.

Thus we have one silver-haired Doctor, one with darker hair, and the first to appear in colour – and they’re grouped together in 1973, as denoted by the phone. The same year that ‘The Three Doctors’ was broadcast – although it began its initial transmission just before Christmas 1972. Coincidence? Of course not. You know me too well by now, surely?

But there’s more. You will also note that the cobweb-encrusted hand in the lower left portion of the shot is wearing a wedding ring: an object of great significance to the Doctor, as you’ll recall from the closing scenes of ‘Twice Upon A Time’. It’s a ring that signifies River Song. And if you count subsequent Doctors from those fingers, moving from the left (so as to make the whole thing clockwise) and starting with the Fourth, you’ll note that the ring finger is married (pun semi-intended) with Colin Baker, who travelled with River in The Eye of the Storm (in which they encountered Daniel Defoe) and World Enough and Time. Both were released on Christmas Day 2016, marking forty four years since ‘The Three Doctors’ – a number which CLEARLY AND UNAMBIGUOUSLY refers to the Type 44 TARDIS that the Doctor encounters in Harvest of Time. That’s the Third Doctor, folks, in case you were having trouble keeping up. You know, the one marked by the phone? Is it finally time for Sean Bean to step into the shoes of his father for another River Song series?

I mean, you read it here first, and we’ll keep you all updated as and when we have further news – but Christmas has even more significance for us today, and in order to understand why we really must move on and look at this map. I love a map. They’re layered with detail, and this one is no exception.

This is, as far as I can see, an actual map of Sheffield, because it tallies with the motorway junctions – more on that in a moment. In the episode, the Doctor grabs a thick black marker and swiftly draws an intricate fractal pattern that centres the action on a posh hotel that’s actually just outside Newport. Myself, I’d rather get the highlighters out. Because a curious thing happens when you join the dots using the right colours.

Still not with me? How about we do a little colouring in? (Please excuse the blots in this next one; my hand slipped.)

Viewed in this way, the seemingly random pattern of dots CLEARLY becomes a red-finned rocket-fish hybrid, blasting off for parts unknown – specifically to the North West, indicating that the TARDIS will be landing in Scotland next year. Could we be about to see a sequel to ‘The Eaters of Light’ that ties in with the star whale from ‘The Beast Below’? Watch this space, folks. Oh, and pardon the pun.

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed something else: the blue line that protrudes from the ‘eye’ in the middle of the rocket-fish-whale-hybrid. The line is angled in the direction of junction 34 at the nearby M1, just north-west of Sheffield. Right next to this junction is a large green space (and golf club) named Concord Park, which neatly calls to mind ‘Time Flight’, in which Fifth Doctor Peter Davison travelled on Concorde – not to mention the rocket’s OBVIOUS AND ENTIRELY DELIBERATE resemblance to Mr Spoon’s rocket from Button Moon – a programme to which Davison voiced the theme music.

However, Davison is only the link here, and not the end product: we must examine his life within the context of Christmas, as I mentioned above. And Davison’s 1984 Christmas was one of particular upheaval, because it saw the arrival of his daughter, Georgia Moffett – who went on to marry David Tennant, and who was born (you guessed it) on December 25th.

Anyone want to guess how old David Tennant actually was when he made his debut in ‘Parting of the Ways’? That’s right, folks. Thirty-four. I swear, sometimes I surprise even myself.

In the beginning was the curd

First, this.

I frequent two Facebook Who groups, one of which is devoted exclusively to Classic content (1963-1996, with concessions for Big Finish). It’s a nice, tightly run group with decent moderation and friendly banter, but one thing that occasionally frustrates me is a certain disdain towards negativity. It’s not quite the “everyone’s opinion is equally valid” rubbish that I had to put up with in GCSE RE, but it seems that dumping on the bad stuff is frowned upon. If you mention that Adric was a douche, for example, you’ll frequently get a bunch of people telling you that no, he was good, and it’s wrong to single him out, to which I typically reply that no, he was a douche.

The same thing goes when it comes to discussing individual episodes: a common response is “It was a good story, and I don’t understand the hate”. Frequently these are people who assume that if you dump on stories from 1985 you have a personal vendetta against Colin Baker. It’s as if the concept of quality control is entirely meaningless. I wouldn’t mind, but when this came up the other week the story being discussed was ‘The Twin Dilemma’. After pointing out the disastrous script, the unlikeable Doctor, the narrative-that-goes-nowhere and the dreadful acting from the twins (honestly, my dining table is less wooden), my closing response was “I think there are worse, and these things are always going to be a bit subjective, but if you really can’t understand why so many people hate it so much I might diplomatically suggest you haven’t really watched it properly.”

I mentioned a while back that whenever I’m done watching a Classic story, I’ll email Gareth a list of bullet points. I also mentioned that ‘Warriors of the Deep’ arguably warranted its own entry, and it does, just about. This is not a lengthy discussion – ook, there’s plenty of sensible critique about ‘Warriors’ out on the interweb, and you don’t need another essay from me as to why it’s the worst Silurian story of the lot (and yes, I’m factoring in ‘Cold Blood’). Instead, you may have my bullet points, occasionally embellished with images.

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– I love Tegan opening the ‘stuck’ door with no effort at all, particularly as it comes hot on the heels of a documentary I was watching this morning about women in Doctor Who and whether they were portrayed properly. (It features an irritating DW Magazine girl saying “No, I don’t think strong female villains are empowering…”)

– Someone call International Rescue, and tell the Tracy Brothers we’ve found those missing outfits.

– Stupid guard moment #1: they walk into the chemical lab, purposely looking for intruders, say “Nah, no sign of them here”, and they don’t bother checking behind the shelves. THEY DON’T BOTHER CHECKING BEHIND THE SHELVES.

– When I was a kid I watched an episode of Grange Hill when Jeremy was larking about in the swimming pool, and drowns. There is a reason, I think, why three decades later this is just about the only episode of the programme I can actually remember. The end of episode one of this is a bit like that, without the acne.

– Stupid guard moment #2: two of them, patrolling the perimeter, fail to notice an unconscious crew member left IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CORRIDOR ABOUT SIX FEET AWAY.

– The Manipulator. It’s like one of these:

– Ooh. Stunts. And the Second Doctor’s catchphrase. As long as you ignore the wobbly scenery, this is quite exciting.

– Oh dear God the Myrka.

– “Help! We’re being attacked by a green pantomime horse and I can’t get out from under this polystyrene door!”

– Hang on, did Solow really just try and do kung-fu on the horse? Because I think that’s a contender for ‘most stupid kamikaze move in history’. Almost as silly as attacking a Dalek with a baseball bat.

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– They left the TARDIS doors unlocked. They LEFT THE TARDIS DOORS UNLOCKED.

– Unfortunate, really, that the chief sea devil has a name that (in the filtered voice of a Silurian) sounds rather like ‘Cervix’.

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When I sent the Davison-does-mail-order image to Gareth, his response was “Surely there should be a Little Miss Moffett somewhere?”

I said “Funny you should mention that…”

Take a letter, Miss Jones

It’s Peter Davison’s birthday. It’s also World Scrabble Day. I’ve combined the best of both worlds, and tonight I bring you a Doctor Who themed Scrabble board centred around the Fifth Doctor.

Yes, I could have used more tiles, but I managed a respectable score. Besides, I have a birthday party to plan.

God is in the detail (part xvi)

Right. I’m running a little behind with these, so let’s crack on, shall we?

Tonight, we’re looking at ‘Time Heist’, which was a visual feast, rich with detail. We will hone in on just a few of the choice moments and determine those little bits which were VERY IMPORTANT TO THE SERIES AS A WHOLE.

First – here’s Psi, in the vault in the heart of the bank.

We will come back to this vault later, but notice the painting in the background – out of focus, but containing an interesting large-busted woman in a pose not dissimilar to the one that Jenny is doing here, in ‘Deep Breath’.

Take a look. Don’t linger too long, of course, because this is a family show. The pose is reversed, which indicates MIRRRORS. In ‘The Family of Blood’, the Tenth Doctor traps Sister of Mine in a mirror – every mirror, in fact. Mirrors also figure heavily in the finale of ‘Kinda’, which we didn’t quite reference in the deconstruction of ‘Into the Dalek’.

But the Tenth Doctor has described the Fifth Doctor, on at least one occasion, as “my Doctor”, so it’s clear that there is a link between them, and that both are fond of mirrors. CLEARLY we are about to enter some sort of mirror universe where everything is the same but reversed: The Daleks are benevolent scholars, Gallifrey didn’t get destroyed, and Noel Clarke is capable of acting.

Now let’s have a look at the Ice Warrior on display here.

Innocent enough, yes? No. Because the numbers are important. Oh, so important. We can break it down like this.

So now you know. Never mind the fact that Janet Fielding was recently observed on set. SHE’S FILMED A CAMEO.

Now – here’s the lock sequence that Psi was trying to break while Clara was being chased by the Teller.

You will observe the series of 24 lights, which CLEARLY AND UNAMBIGUOUSLY refers to the Doctor’s various incarnations – or, more specifically, the actors who played them. The first three, highlighted in green, refer to Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee, all of whom are deceased. The remainder – from approximately two o’clock round in sequence – are Baker, Davison, Baker, and so on, all the way round to the top. The use of 24 is not a coincidence, but a subtle foreshadowing from the BBC as to how many Doctors we will get through before they knock the show on the head.

You’ll note two things about this. First, if we assume that the first red marker refers to Baker, Davison is lit very brightly, CLEARLY indicating another on-screen appearance from him, alongside Janet Fielding. This assumes, of course, that we do not include Hurt among the central ring, which makes sense given that he did not intially refer to himself as ‘Doctor’ and is thus unnumbered. You will also notice that the positioning of the Tenth Doctor contains another red dot on the outer rim, clearly alluding to his dual regeneration and the meta-crisis Doctor. The War Doctor is thus positioned in the centre, at the eye of the storm, while the Valeyard sits out on the fringe, at about nine o’clock. Clearly we’re not done with him yet.

And yes, there is another dot, just out of shot and positioned alongside Troughton. Well, you have to stick Peter Cushing in there somewhere.

Back in the real world, we have Clara’s mysterious card.

251 and 339 both refer to stories in the classic run featuring assorted Time Lords – episodes from ‘The War Games’ and ‘Frontier in Space’ respectively. P was the medieval number for ‘400’ – the approximate age gap between the War Doctor and the Eleventh – while V clearly alludes to 5, and the Fifth Doctor. Meanwhile, if you add the numbers 251 and 339 together, you get 590, which refers to episode three of ‘Mawdryn Undead’, in which the despicable Mawdryn pretends to be a new incarnation of the Doctor, only to be ousted by – yes, that’s right – Peter Davison. And once again, THIS CANNOT BE A COINCIDENCE.

Now look at this.

The Brigadier, who starred in ‘Mawdryn Undead’ also stars in ‘The Ambassadors of Death’, which features characters called Cornish, Wakefield and Rutherford. You will note that while the Doctor is busy opening box 251 (‘The War Games’), Clara’s right hand is poised over box / episode 265 (‘The Ambassadors of Death’, part one) while her left is pointing at 271 (‘The Ambassadors of Death’, part seven). Conclusion: not only will Jemma Redgrave be returning as the Brigadier’s daughter Kate Stewart (which we know for a fact), but the story will be set in the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, in Oxfordshire, which is coincidentally almost equidistant (by a matter of seven miles) both from Wakefield in Yorkshire and the Cornish border.

But that’s not all. Let’s go back to that vault.

The sarcophagus is a CLEAR AND DIRECT reference to the upcoming ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’, while the perfectly preserved lion statue obviously refers to ‘The Crusade’, which is clearly one of those stories that Phillip Morris has recovered, but which the Beeb are keeping under wraps until the Isis thing has blown over. However, it’s the golden sculpture of what looks like the London Eye that I want you to look at, because if it is the London Eye, and it’s in gold, then it’s a clear reference to the Golden Rose, given the landmark’s prominent usage back in the series 1 opener in 2005 – particularly significant at Easter, when the episode was first aired. Clearly we are destined to see the resurrection of a prominent figure, thought dead and gone, having given his life for others. Never mind that Jesus Christ was the son of David. Or, if you like, a DAVISON.

Of course, it could just as easily be a reference to the Rose d’Or, which Doctor Who has never won. But I like my version better.

VeggieTales

“Hello,” he said. “I’m the Fifth Doctor.”

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