P.S. Arc Words and Bob Barker Is The Key

I have sort of been intrigued with how they introduced the mythology of Darla into Angel during Season Two and there was a mention in one of those episodes (I don’t recall exactly where, maybe in The Trial or before) of Holtz chasing after Darla and Angel, so another shout-out to upcoming events in Season Three. It’s become a touchstone in several shows in recent years, such as Doctor Who or Lost, that they would mention or remark upon future key developments as arc words or teasers, like Mr. Saxon, Bad Wolf, and the Medusa Cascade. Something that attentive fans might pick up on and be eager to speculate about at the time the show was airing, or a way for fans rewatching the show, maybe years later, to reminisce on those glorious or glorificuous moments. And Bob Barker is the Key.

As for the Doctor Who stories I’ve watched since I last posted…well. I mentioned being stuck in the middle of Doctor Who and The Silurians? Maybe even that I had been watching The Two Doctors around that same time? Well, since then, I’ve seen Warriors of The Deep (Okay, pantomine horse, but they tried their best. Could it have been worse? Maybe, if they had not even tried at all. Not the best Doctor Who story by any stretch of the imagination, I agree with the opinion that the Silurians should have gotten the more flexible costumes while the Sea Devils should have been stiffer. Why couldn’t they just do makeup instead of rubber costumes? Was makeup more expensive than rubber costumes? What about face pieces instead of full body pieces?

You know, from what I’ve seen, the Silurians may be ‘advanced’, but they are just as bad as humans at starting wars between the inhabitants of this planet. In Doctor Who and the Silurians, one of them unleashed a plague/epidemic that could have destroyed humanity, for goodness sake! Not to mention the mutually assured destruction ploy of Warriors of the Deep. Okay, not all Silurians are like that, although their leaders certainly have not set a good example in all of their encounters.)

I’ve also seen Timelash. (Cough, again, not exactly the best story, but not the worst story, H.G. Wells is okay, though the Sixth Doctor can be a bit difficult to love. And that triangle Timelash tinsel tunnel [tongue twister] is not the best effect.) I’ve also seen the Awakening, which I pretty much liked, Revelation of the Daleks, an interesting setup/premise, I grant you that, especially after it had time to settle with me and I read/heard some more about it. By coincidence, I had actually seen The Loved One movie just before I saw this story, and it really did remind me somewhat of that movie/story, although the character changes with the funeral director/cosmetician…not exactly sure I liked Doctor Who’s take on that relationship, but there was promise there with those characters.

Besides the first two stories of Trial of a Time Lord, I’ve also seen Frontios (An excellent adventure/premise betrayed by terrible monster costumes. “The Tractators!” as Turlough kept screaming weren’t as scary as he made them out to be. And I still have no idea what they did to him, or should I say, his planet Trion. Ah, well, with Turlough, it seems that we’re glad to get any kind of backstory at all. I thought there would have been more in Frontios, and what was in Planet of Fire…a little too late, I suppose I should say. Like Philip Sandifer said in his own blog about Planet of Fire, there was so much promise in this season/era of Doctor Who that was never delivered upon, just a spark amidst the mess, really.) I tried to watch Resurrection of the Daleks, but the disc was cracked, and so I had to get a new one. In the meantime, I went ahead and saw Planet of Fire. So that’s where I am now with Doctor Who.

I’m going to finish watching Trial of A Time Lord, Discs 3 and 4 are coming soon, then I’m going to go back to watching Doctors 3 and 4 while also finally seeing some of Doctor 7’s first serials, and rewatching some of his that I have already seen. And maybe I really will get into Farscape as well. I tried watching the first two discs of the first season (apparently this was two years ago, surprise, I thought it was a year ago) and never got fully invested in it, or was thrown off, so I will try again to watch Farscape. Wish me luck there.

Puny Master

I just saw ‘Planet of Fire’ and with the last cliffhanger and episode for that story, I couldn’t help laughing and saying, “Puny Master, puny Master, crush him with your shoe, Peri! Why did she have to sneeze just when she was about to crush him? He was running around like a scared little mouse, climbing into and out of his console! I almost wish that he could have been talking with a squeaky little voice when she first uncovered him inside his ‘Master control box’. Ha!

No wonder he needed Kamelion to help him out of that fix. I had wondered why he was using the robot to save him, in that he had to be incapacitated in some way. I never imagined he would be so small, though, until a minute or so before Peri uncovered him.

I’m also in the middle of watching ‘Trial of A Time Lord’, so I happened to just see Peri’s last story before her first story, which is kind of strange, but oh well. I liked The Mysterious Planet well enough, a very good story with some funny/brilliant moments, but Mindwarp sort of dragged a little bit more and I did feel frustrated with it, the back and forth questioning as to whether or not the Raak attacked the Doctor and Peri and the Doctor betraying them, not to mention the fiasco with Sil and his people, the ‘rebellion’, and Peri’s ‘demise’. Brian Blessed was pretty good even with his fairly limited role, and he tried his best to make the guy likeable enough.

As usual, I’m going back and forth between watching the stories and reading Philip Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum blog on the story to see what sort of thoughts he had about it. It’s pretty interesting, and I agree with his opinions most of the time. I have also been checking out An Adventure with the Wife in Time and Space blog as well, just getting into that after hearing about it from Sandifer. Pretty funny and excellent as well, I think on a personal level, I’m somewhere in between the wife and husband in terms of their opinions of the Doctor Who episodes/stories.

I’m still watching Buffy/Angel, although a bit more intermittently, having finished up Angel Season Two (I struggled in the middle of Season Two, but at last I finished watching it. I had not realized that Lorne never revealed his name until the fourth-to-last episode of the season. And there was a bit at the beginning of Reprise…the sound effect of the bleating/crying comes from the goats, but then the camera focuses on the broken baby doll in the shopping cart with Angel in the background, so they were already thinking about Connor! Or at least that’s my opinion there.)

I have not finished watching Buffy Season Five, however. For a while there, I saw quite a few episodes, but then I stopped after I saw The Body and finished up Angel, and it’s a little hard getting back into Buffy. The episode Forever took Forever to watch.

I’ll mention the other recent Doctor Who serials I have seen later.

I almost forgot!

I was reading last month’s post about the Fields of Trenzalore, and noticed my coment at the end of it. Sigh. I know, we had not expected Matt Smith to leave so soon, but I suppose it’s for the best. David Tennant left while he was still riding the crest of the wave, and Matt Smith will be doing the same. While this does change things quite a bit, especially as our expectations on Series 8 are now a bit more up in the air and uncertain, as we wonder who will replace Matt Smith, change is a bit part of the show, and we shall hopefully find out soon. (Apparently sometime in August or September, just before they start filming for the Christmas Special. Speculation about the title ‘Twelfth Night’ has been thrown about elsewhere.)

And of course, there is the uncertainty about missing serials being discovered…is it true or is it not true? I don’t know if we will find that out for certain, but hopefully.

Doctor Who fandom etc.

Hello, everyone. In the past month or so, I have been getting into TARDIS Eruditorum, both the blog and the books. They really have inspired me to tackle some of the early Hartnell and Troughton serials again; I started off with The Rescue, and I have already gone through The Romans, The Web Planet, and the Space Museum.

“Zarbi! Ech! Ech! Ech!” The Web Planet is really funny once you think about it. The first two or three episodes were pretty great for me, but then it did sort of go downhill, with some of the over-the-top metaphors and religious talk. The Planet of the Ood, or ‘Ood Planet’ is a really much better version of the Web Planet in my opinion.

They cover some of the same bases, like the Animus and the Ood brain, the Ood singing about DoctorDonna, and the webs of light that the Menoptra will weave about the Doctor and his crew…yeah. I also checked out what ‘About Time’ had to say about this serial, and they mentioned several points at which Ian Chesterton/William Russell probably decided to leave the show, all of which made me laugh.

I plan to watch The Chase, The Time Meddler, The Gunfighters and The War Machines after that. I’m also scattering some Tom Bakers into the midst of these serials, like I had to watch The Brain of Morbius after The Web Planet, to kind of relieve the stress/ache The Web Planet had caused. That was a great plan, The Brain of Morbius really is as great as I remember it being! I watched that, and the special features, straight through in one night! Yay! It really is a perfect serial.

So as you can tell, this summer is my Doctor Who summer, basically, of watching as much Classic Who as I can stomach, and rewatching some serials that I might have seen once, but years ago online. Watching a Doctor Who serial on the computer doesn’t really compare to watching it on the telly, as it was made for the telly, really. I have a shorter attention span for watching videos, generally, when I am on the computer. I also just got a smartphone and I’ve been streaming some Red Dwarf, which I haven’t seen in awhile, and I’m getting into Black Books–I laughed to see Martin Freeman as the doctor in that first episode!

Anyway, I suppose that’s enough about fandom for now, back to my work. I’m already working on the third book of a series for which I haven’t published the final, definitive version of the first book. I know, I get ahead of myself sometimes. I did try to submit my work to several agents, hoping that it could be republished in its new revision, but no replies yet and usually they reply within 6 to 8 weeks, so if there’s nothing in this next week or two, then I shall indeed resort to using CreateSpace once more, probably with a smaller book size, 5×8 or something like that.

I just don’t know if I should pay for the editing. I may try the review service they offer, although I don’t know what that might be like, and then I might get a Library of Congress Number, especially if it’s the final definitive version. I’m also wondering about publishing former drafts, like the ‘2003/2008’ versions of my work, as they are quite different from my current 2013 version (as I’ve dubbed it), which fleshed out some minor characters a bit more and had more backstory. But the 2003/2008 drafts might be decent enough books on their own as a simpler version of the narrative. I don’t know, it might be excessive, but it could be something to explore in future.

Doctor Who fan continued

For me, it is almost two days and eight hours until The Name of the Doctor airs…roughly 56 hours.

In any case, last time I began talking about Doctor Who and how I got into the show. In the fall of 2006, they showed the second series of Doctor Who on SciFi (SyFy) channel, and I was really interested/invested in David Tennant’s Doctor from the start, especially when he emerges out of the TARDIS in The Christmas Invasion. New Earth is still a fun episode to see as well, just as it was when I first saw it. I think I had little to no complaints about the second series of Doctor Who at that time, aside from the Big Monster at the end of Love and Monsters. (You know what I mean.) So I was all ready to go to see The Runaway Bride in December of that year, but the only problem was that it wouldn’t air in the United States on SciFi channel for months yet.

So I discovered how you can find shows on YouTube at this point, tracking down parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of an episode…Runaway Bride was where my creduality for the show started to slip a little bit, in some ways, but I was still heavily invested in it. Donna at the time wasn’t my favorite companion, although I had not seen much of the show yet, but she grew on me as the episode and then the show progressed.

Around this point, on a forum, someone pointed out a website where you could get links to YouTube videos of Old Who episodes, and that is how I discovered and started watching Old Who–the first one I saw was Robot, the introduction of the Fourth Doctor, and it was so much fun to see Tom Baker jumping rope, I loved him then. I saw The Ark in Space, Sontaran Experiment, and Genesis of the Daleks after that, although I disliked Revenge of the Cybermen. Then they posted up links to First Doctor videos, so I saw An Unearthly Child, part of the Daleks, (Daleks wasn’t my favorite, still isn’t) all of Edge of Destruction, and some of the Aztecs (Even now, cannot really get into the Aztecs.)

I saw Tomb of the Cybermen, The Mind Robber, and some of War Games on YouTube, not to mention Spearhead from Space, Doctor Who and the Silurians, Terror of the Autons, Mind Of Evil and The Daemons. (I tried to get into the Peladon episodes, nope, no good.) I also first saw Terror of the Zygons, The Brain of Morbius, the Pyramids of Mars, the Masque of Mandroga, the Hand of Fear, the Deadly Assassin, the (um…Leela’s first story), the Talons of Weng-Chiang, the Horror of Fang Rock and the Invasion of Time on YouTube. It was around this point that, at last, I got Netflix, so since then I’ve seen Robots of Death, some of the Romana stories like The Pirate Planet, the Stones of Blood, Movellans V. Daleks, City of Death, the E-Space Trilogy, Logopolis/Castrovalva, almost all of Five with the exception of the Kinda episodes and most of his last season, though I have seen Caves of Androzani, a couple of Six’s first stories, Battlefield, Survival, Remembrance of the Daleks, Curse of Fenric, Ghostlight, Silver Nemesis and the TV Movie.

Right, so I’ve basically seen all of the Doctors, although it’s been years since I’ve seen some of these stories, and it hasn’t always been consistent. My advice to newcomers to Old Who: don’t be afraid to dip and wade in amongst the various Doctors. In fact, it might even be fun to mix up some of the Old Doctor Who episodes. Like…watch Battlefield, then watch Tomb of the Cybermen, then check out Pyramids of Mars, then see Spearhead from Space and so forth. A couple of them, though…how well does Five and Six mix and mash with the others?

Admittedly, Five is a little messed up, in terms of story quality and consistency, and you might have to be a big fan of Doctor Who to get into Five, Six even more so. I would say, if you want to get into Five, start watching around the E-Space triology mark, when Adric joins the team, continue to the end of Four and then go straight into Five. Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan are key to liking/understanding/getting into Five…I mean, it has been pointed out before that Five’s first story begins right in the middle of the action, it assumes you know all of these characters, that you’re a Doctor Who fan and that’s why you’re watching the show. (The 80s, you know.) Some of Five’s stories aren’t the best in the world, though they can be good/okay, although the Caves of Androzani is definitely awesome. Six does go downhill a bit, especially in his first couple of stories, but Mark of the Rani is…well, I sort of liked that story.

In any case, that’s my guide/advice to Doctor Who fans. Good day.

I lack direction

I should tell you that, at the moment, I lack direction when it comes to writing on a blog. At first, I thought that I would be writing a little bit more on my book and about writing in general, but then again, I am sometimes too busy writing and making changes to my projects, some of which I just feel like keeping private, since ideas can be used and are not subject to copyright protection. If a writer advertises their ideas too much, then they might be susceptible to usage by others, and so I am trying to keep my ideas to myself. Although I am excited about my project, which I hope to get republished in the mainstream with a commercial publisher, I cannot at this time fix Coe Baba: Life and Love.

If I fix Life and Love, I would be using the current version under a new title, which is the title and version that I want to get republished in the mainstream, and I cannot publish the second book either, which I have worked on, until the republished version of the first book comes out. And I do feel like I really want to get my work out there in the public eye, I have been hoping for that. I am waiting to hear something, I have submitted my work to some avenues, and it will be some time before I know, for positive, if it is accepted somewhere. Until then, it’s just waiting. Not too exciting.

I thought that I might try writing some sort of story on here, with my original character Tormakoff, but yeah, I don’t really have anything there. Maybe I should just try blogging in general. Writing about something I enjoy. I do like Doctor Who…

Okay, Doctor Who; I can write about Doctor Who. Now for starters, I first got into Doctor Who in 2006, when the first series first aired in the US on the SciFi (Syfy) channel (I believe it was in the summer). They advertised the show on SciFi, and I liked the commercials for it, with this unusual guy waving a device and saying, “Run for your life.” to a blond-girl. I think it was going to air on Friday nights, when I usually watch Stargate, both SG-1 and Atlantis. (I did not get into Battlestar Galactica, of which I’ve only seen the first couple of seasons, until later; and I did not get into Farscape, of which I’ve only seen 6 episodes or so, until…well, not quite yet. I started watching Stargate SG-1 when Daniel Jackson came back from being ascended, having just seen the Stargate movie, and latched onto Atlantis as soon as it aired. I did not get into Universe.

I did not get into Buffy until 2009, but I have seen all of that and Angel by now. I did watch Firefly when it aired (although I was at a restaurant when the first episode, technically second, The Train Robbery episode, aired; I think I even asked them to change the channel for me, but it was hard to hear) but I did see the first three seasons of Heroes. I skipped season 4 after a couple of episodes. I saw the first two seasons of Chuck regularly, but missed the latter half of season 3 (including the episode when Morgan found out) and watched the rest of Chuck when it aired. So…I’m rambling a bit here, but you get the picture.)

Anyway, Doctor Who…I remember seeing the first episode of the new series, Rose, in my parents’ bedroom, the only free TV in the house with my parents in the living room and my sister upstairs. I was hooked then, especially when they aired ‘End of the World’ right after that. (I am pretty sure that they aired the first two episodes back to back, unless my mind is playing tricks with me.) Or maybe I was hooked with The Unquiet Dead, when Rose and the Doctor grasped hands. Anyway, I loved the new series from the get-go, and I remember thinking to myself, this is a neat show! What a great concept! I did not know anything about the Doctor or Doctor Who before I saw it. I did not know any of its history until…well, when they first aired, I missed a couple of episodes, most notably Aliens of London (I saw the next part the next week) and Bad Wolf. When I looked up the synopsis of Bad Wolf on Wikipedia, that is when I discovered the history of Doctor Who, and all of these actors who played the Doctor. I discovered that the Ninth Doctor would regenerate into the Tenth Doctor in the next episode as well, so I was not totally surprised that it would happen, although I did not know quite how it would happen.

I also realized that, though I had not really heard of or seen Doctor Who before then, I had glimpsed Doctor Who out of the corner of my eye; I started watching The Simpsons maybe in 2000, or thereabouts, both the new shows on Sundays and the reruns that played in the afternoons, and there was that Halloween episode where the Comic Book Guy turned into a Comic Book Villain, The Collector, and started collecting famous people, including ‘Doctor Who’ or the Fourth Doctor. And, casually reading praise for Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, I realized one of the reviewers had mentioned Doctor Who when they were talking about Neverwhere, so I might have heard of or read the name of Doctor Who, but I didn’t realize what it meant.

So in any case, I will talk more about my experience with Doctor Who. I’ve also seen a number of Old Series episodes, and read some of the 7th and 8th Doctor books, so..au revoir for now.