Using the new Doctor Who Limited Edition Gift Set, your noble author will make his way through as much of the modern series as he can before the Christmas episode,The Snowmen.

Dear Sweet Sarah Jane.  She was the queen of the companions, and when she showed up on screen again, decades vanished.  The Doctor and Sarah are up for a…

SCHOOL REUNION
by Toby Whithouse
Directed by James Hawes

“Oh my God…I’m the tin dog.”

Mickey has called The Doctor and Rose back to earth after learning about strange goings on at Deffry Vale High School. The Doctor is posing as a teacher, and Rose is posing as a lunch lady.  The Doctor has met students who possess knowledge that outstrips Earth Technology, let alone an eighth grade textbook, and Rose watches a fellow lunch lady taken into a back room after getting what looks like toxic waste poured on her.  So there certainly seems to be something going on.  But things take a nostalgic twist when journalist Sarah Jane Smith comes to the school to investigate the school as well. The Doctor doesn’t tell her who he is right away, but when she finds the TARDIS while snooping around the school at night, it’s not hard for her to connect the dots.  After a very emotional meeting, and a scream, they’re off and running.  Rose and Sarah start off quite catty, each making fun of the other’s age, what Mickey calls “Every man’s worst nightmare — The Missus and the Ex”.

The school has been taken over by batlike aliens called the Krillitanes.  The team makes their way out of the school, but The Doctor think he needs to head back in to analyze the mysterious oil the aliens have been sneaking into the food.  Sarah Jane has another alternative – in her car is K-9, albeit in need of repair.  While The Doctor repairs K-9, he and Sarah Jane have a heart to heart talk about what it’s like to travel the universe one day, and be back on Earth the next.  The Doctor looks guilty, but says nothing.

The Krillitanes’ plan is to use the mentally advanced schoolchildren like a massive shared-processing biocomputer, all of them running code on their PCs, attempting to crack the Skaksas Paradigm, AKA the unified field theory.  If they can do so, they will have the cheat codes to the universe.  And their leader comes to The Doctor, and offers him a chance to join them, letting his wisdom guide their new power.  He refuses of course, which starts the running up again  Chased to the kitchens, The Doctor realizes the oil they’ve been using on the kids is a perfect weapon against the aliens – their form has changed so many time, the product of their own planet is now poisonous to them.  K-9 volunteers to remain behind and set off the vats, an act that will likely result in his destruction.

There’s a lot of emotion in this episode. When Rose and Sarah Jane are introduced, the emotions are priceless.  They start off snipping at each other, and as soon as they get a chance to bond, they turn their commentary about The Doctor.  They’re perfectly written as if they’re the new and old girlfriend, each jealous of the other.  The explosive laughter when The Doctor bursts into the room after they start dishing was legitimate – David Tennant had a moustache painted on, which was hidden since his back was to the camera.

Mickey also goes through some changes as well — as he says himself, he’s not the tin dog, and he does do a good job of helping out.  But look at the look on Rose as Mickey asks to come along.  She’s not happy about it.  She’s just gotten used to the idea that she wasn’t the only person The Doctor traveled with, and she doesn’t care for the idea of Mickey sharing it with her.  It’s another sign of the rather new and unique vibe that she and The Doctor have.  But the part to realize is that no matter what he says about how he’d never leave her and all that, he does, and he’ll do it again, and come Christmas, we’ll see him find a new friend, and it’ll be off for another ride.

Elisabeth Sladen was glorious.  Coming back to Doctor Who connected the new series to the old better than any villain or baddie or witty reference ever could  Her spinoff series, The Sarah Jane Adventures, was glorious.  It’s amazing to realize that for a couple years there, we were no more than a couple months between new Doctor Who material.  she was taken from us too, too early.  But we had her for a time, and then a second time, and that’s more than we can say about a lot of people we like.

I wanted to see The Dark Knight Rises as much as I’d wanted to see any movie. When the film opened, I decided not to see it: the mass shooting that occurred during an opening night screening of the movie screwed me up but good.

I was not being noble trying to make a stand for the victims or against the gunman. As much as I’d like to see the gunman gutted like a fish and left to die a painful slow death on national television and my heart did and does go out to the victims and their families, my refusal to see the film was because of personal events in my life which in my head I link to the mass shootings and then link that to The Dark Knight Rises.

Watching that movie after the shooting would have been much too painful it would had been near impossible for me to separate the incident from personal recollections of a tragic event. There is just something about the way my mind works and how I connect incidences to each other that seldom even makes sense to me so I know some people think my thought process is just bizarre.

Those people can kiss my ass, it’s my head, stay the hell out of it.

As the months went by I felt more and more confidant that I was ready to see it. Waiting for it to be available on home video soon became as unbearable as waiting for the movie to open.

The day the Blu-Ray went on sale I was at my neighborhood Target when they opened at 8:00 am just so I could have it in my greedy little hands, even though I was not going to watch the movie that day.

No, I was planning a decadent movie night. Bad food, tequila, 80 inch big screen, Bose sound system cranked up so loud my neighbors call the police and when they show up I wouldn’t hear them.

Friday night December 14^th was my big night with the Bat.

Friday morning December 14^th a crazed gunman killed 20 kids and six adults at an elementary school in Connecticut.

Once again my heart goes out to the victims and their families. Once again I will have to wait for The Dark Knight to rise.

WEDNESDAY: Mike Gold

Author Mark Finn (“Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E Howard”) joins New Pulp Author Van Allen Plexico to indulge in their passion for Richard Stark’s PARKER, the hard-boiled master thief from the typewriter of Donald E Westlake, star of more than twenty novels, and as seen in “Payback” and other films.  And just in time for the new movie starring Jason Statham and Jennifer Lopez.

Episode 8 of The White Rocket Podcast is now available on Podbean, iTunes, via the Podcast app on iPhone/iPad, or you can use the mini-player at the White Rocket site.

The White Rocket Podcast is part of the Earth Station One Network.

I’m sure it will shock no one to learn that I went to see the midnight showing of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey last Thursday. And despite being a tad bit (okay a lot bit) tired at work the next day, it was great fun. I don’t do that many midnight showings (seeing as how many of them land on weekdays) but when I do, I definitely experience that extra little thrill of being amongst the first to see something new, and of sitting in a movie theater with a bunch of friends in the wee small hours when by all rights, we should all be in bed.

Along with the general excitement of it all, I’ve been looking forward to seeing The Hobbit movie for seemingly forever now, ever since it was first announced (and even after they announced that it would now be three movies (!!)). I first read the novel in fourth grade English, where it was one of our assigned reading books. Looking back, I’m pretty impressed that our teacher managed to inject it into the curriculum. At the time, I vaguely recall having the feeling, in that childhood my-spider-sense-is-tingling way of feeling adult tension in the air, that this was some sort of tiny act of rebellion on her part against the mostly very sensible curriculum of books we were reading (many of which were also great, although whoever decided to include Dear Mr. Henshaw will not be getting my thanks anytime soon. Yawn). But my English teacher, bless her, decided that reading a fantasy adventure story, and a probably challenging one for that age group, was an important part of our childhood development; and so it was.

Many moons later, the story – in which the hobbit Bilbo Baggins joins the wizard Gandalf and thirteen dwarves in a quest to reclaim the dwarves’ homeland – is just as fun and full of adventure as it was then; but how does it translate to the big screen? Lucky for us, Peter Jackson has endeavored to find out. Jackson is, if you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere, the mastermind behind The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, one of the most amazing and epic motion picture trilogies of all time (as well as the highest grossing worldwide). That trilogy, especially in the extended edition, is both a spectacular adaptation of Tolkien’s story, and a moving and cohesive collection in its own right. It’s also a serious and dark story, and despite the warmth and occasional humor of the character interactions, pretty intense from start to finish. The Hobbit is a slightly different kettle of fish.

Tolkien wrote The Hobbit first, and as more of a children’s story; whereas by the time he penned The Lord of the Rings, he had developed both his world and his style into something more epic and cohesive than his original idea (and, in fact, as he wrote LoTR he went back and added bits to The Hobbit that tied the two together more closely). The story does get darker as it progresses (about when the dwarves arrive in Laketown), but overall, it is still lighter, and smaller in scope, than the trilogy.

(Warning: Possible Movie Spoilers Ahead, although it’s not like most of you don’t know the story already.)

The movie follows the book in that sense. While there is plenty of action and danger, I found myself smiling or laughing a surprising number of times throughout the first act of The Hobbit (i.e. An Unexpected Journey, which is all we shall see of the story until December of next year, when part two of three comes out). In part, that’s thanks to Martin Freeman, who has wonderful comic timing and does an excellent job as the younger Bilbo, who is by times amusingly befuddled or subtly, wryly humorous. There is also a fair bit of humor in some of the dwarf characters and in Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, who is a slightly more whimsical and mischievous wizard than the one we see in Lord of the Rings.

Some of the humor, however, comes from very enjoyable scenes that would not fit snugly in Lord of the Rings but seem perfectly at home here – scenes such as the dwarves “cleaning up” after their party at Bilbo’s house, haphazardly flinging and bouncing Bilbo’s mother’s best china hither and yon throughout the hobbit-hole while Bilbo looks on in distracted despair before walking into the next room and discovering it’s all now neatly stacked away. This scene also gives viewers an important sense of the personality imbued by the dwarves of The Hobbit, which is pretty helpful considering it’s a bit hard to remember which dwarf is which: thirteen is a fair number of small bearded main characters to keep track of.

Another humorous scene I still remember as one of my favorites from my first childhood reading is the one in which Bilbo endeavors to trick a trio of mountain trolls out of eating the whole company; and a fair bit of time and humor is devoted to that scene in the movie, much to my delight. These scenes work wonderfully within the whole. And yet, as my friends and I left the theater, a few of them complained that in places the movie is a bit hokey… and I didn’t disagree. From the best fun scenes, through the more obvious gags that are still funny (such as Bilbo insisting the whole company must go all the way back to Bag End because he forgot his handkerchief, and then one of the dwarves helpfully flinging him a dirty old piece of cloth to use instead), the movie does arrive at a few scenes that are wince-worthy.

The most notable of these is the one with Goblin King. He is fascinatingly grotesque in appearance, and his appearance comes at a dire time for the dwarves, who have been captured and are being held deep underground by what seems like thousands of goblins. The Goblin King is threatening to (and then does) alert the Dwarf King Thorin’s mightiest living enemy, the orc leader Azog, who is on the hunt for Thorin, that the goblins now have him. Logically, it should be a serious moment in the movie. And yet the Goblin King’s demeanor is comical (and not in a good way) and his threats, issued with laughter, are anticlimactically not very menacing at all. (Threats issued with laughter can be super menacing. A good evil laugh can actually make threats more menacing. In the case of the Goblin King, this…is not the case.) Even the bit where he tells another goblin to send word to Azog is off-kilter, with the secretary goblin being a weirdly stunted specimen who apparently gets around the goblin caverns on a zip-line.

This scene and a very few others in the movie are jarring; however, as a whole, the movie is thoroughly enjoyable. Despite the weirdness of the Goblin King, almost without exception the rest of the characters (and actors) are wonderful; and the visuals are just as stunning as those in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. And there are some fantastic scenes as well. These include the delightful opening of the movie, which ties The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings by having the elderly Bilbo, in the midst of preparations for his 111th birthday party, writing the narrative and chatting with Frodo (hooray, Elijah Wood cameo!). They also include the scene in which Bilbo and Gollum are having a contest of riddles, all alone in the darkest tunnels of the goblin realm, which was one of the darkest and most ominous scenes, and wouldn’t have been out of place with the tone of The Lord of the Rings.

Overall, despite the dwarves’ very serious quest, this movie feels less serious of purpose than The Lord of the Rings; but that is something I attribute to the original book, rather than the movie’s production. Just as Jackson tried to be faithful to the tone and sense of the trilogy, here he has been faithful to the source material, and I think remembering that as you go in to see the movie (or in thinking of it afterwards) contributes to the enjoyment of it. Going in with the expectation of seeing another Lord of the Rings might leave you feeling surprised, as I was, at the differing tone of this movie; but going in with the mindset that this is an adventure, a romp, and a fun journey will leave you feeling satisfied with the end result. And, of course, it’s important to remember that this is only part one. I suspect that through the second movie and by the end of part three, the tone will shift, as the book’s did, until it arrives in the territory of Lord of the Rings and leaves us with a fairly consistent six movie collection. I personally can’t wait to see what comes next.

Until next time, Servo Lectio!

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis

WEDNESDAY MORNING: Mike Gold

 Could Tarzan and Zorro be headed back to the big screen and small screen, respectively? It looks that way.

According to a Variety article, The USA Network is currently deciding on a present-day reimagining of the legend of Zorro called simply “Z” executive producers Naren Shankar (CSI, Grimm) and Louis Leterrier (include “The Incredible Hulk, Clash of the Titans), and writers Whit Brayton and Zack Rice.

Set in modern-day Los Angeles, “Z” will chronicle the rise of Diego Moreno from an orphaned teen and raising his sister with little supervision, to an infamous hero fighting to save the city.

For all the details, please visit www.variety.com/article/VR1118063664

The latest issue of Entertainment Weekly announced that Harry Potter director, David Yates is working toward a new Tarzan movie with True Blood actor Alexander Skarsgard stepping into the ape man’s loincloth. See below for details.

For ten years, The WWE has celebrated the holidays with their tribute To The Troops. This year, however, there a few new twists. WWE Superstars John Cena & Shamus explain it all, plus are you really surprised that AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #700 has shown up on eBay?

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