Tagged: Doctor Who

The genius of Gollum

  • News
  • April 2, 2007

Andy Serkis – a.k.a. Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilory – has been cast as Albert Einstein in an upcoming HBO / BBC co-production, Einstein and Eddington. The "Eddington" part of the title refers to astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the man who actually understood Einstein’s theory of relativity and promoted it to a skeptical scientific community back in 1920. This particular Sir Arthur will be played by David Tennant, who is wrapping his third season as the lead in Doctor Who.

The script was written by Peter Moffat, who previously brought another genius – Stephen Hawking – to the BBC screen.

It’s hard to imagine Serkis playing Einstein, but at least he’ll be doing so in the flesh and not in CGI.

MATT RAUB Reviews Doctor Who season 3 premiere

  • News
  • April 1, 2007

2007-01-12-9724203The Doctor is back, and not only does he get a new companion but a new Sonic Screwdriver to boot! I just set my peepers on a back-to-back marathon of last year’s “The Runaway Bride” and the brand-spanking-new season 3 premiere, “Smith and Jones”, and I figured I’d drop in to throw down my two cents on the episode. Be forewarned, there are some spoilerific parts to this review, so if you decide you want to wait until Sci-Fi finally airs the show in 2023, then I’d turn away now.

From the first episode in season 1, I was a huge fan of Billie Piper as Rose Tyler, I thought she was gorgeous, and had incredible range. Though there were a good 12 episodes or so where she cried through the majority of the program, I still couldn’t dislike her. With that said, I was pretty hesitant to like this new companion, the intelligent and attractive medical student Martha Jones, played by Freema Agyeman. We first get a taste of Agyeman in last season’s “Army of Ghosts” as she was one of first victim of the Cybermen. We now find out she was the cousin of Martha Jones, and that’s a clever touch.

Looking back, this episode can very easily be put in stark comparison to season 1’s opener, “Rose.” Much like in that episode, the majority of this episode is exposition on our new companion’s life, an unexpected conflict, and the random entrance of the Doctor to save the day. Also, there is a scene very reminiscent of “Rose” where the Doctor grabs Martha’s hand and tells her to run…sound familiar? Of course, the doctor is still pining over the loss of Rose, but as established in “Runaway Bride,” it was time to find someone new.

The concept: the hospital where Martha Jones works gets transported to the moon. The Doctor, posing as the meandering patient John Smith, discovers that the transportation as by an intergalactic rhino-police (that’s intergalactic police that look like rhinos, not intergalactic police that only police the rhino population). The transportation was to single out a fugitive that they believe is hiding out in the hospital. The Doctor and Martha jump on the case to find the criminal and get the inhabitants back to Earth before they all lose oxygen.

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Exterminate… crochet… bake… exterminate

  • News
  • March 31, 2007

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For the lucky ones who will be watching the Doctor Who season opener soon – and for those who think Daleks make for lovely bric-a-brac – here’s some things to do around the home on a rainy day, courtesy (again) from our friends at Bibi’s Box!

From time to time this blog receives visits of people searching for Daleks. Those incredible extraterrestrial mutant creatures from Doctor Who series are much more popular that I imagined. The first time I made a post about the Daleks I had no idea that it wouldn’t be enough to cover it. Then, a while after, I saw a very nice tutorial of How to Make a Dalek and IR Control Daleks.

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Of course that wasn’t enough. Every time there are new stuff about them: crochet and more crochet Daleks (via Quiddity), Dalek cakes and many other kind of related Dalek stuff that fans collect. For fans it’s never enough. And to keep you busy for a while, here is a list of tutorials to you make your own Dalek. Chose the material and start working:

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Dr. Who 3rd season previews

  • News
  • March 29, 2007

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Admit it, you’re jonesing for "Smith and Jones", the first episode of the next season. Or if you aren’t, Gold and Ostrander sure are. And we’re good little enablers over here. With that in mind, we point you to FreemaAgyeman.com, where the Doctor Who BBCi Red Button Preview Video is appearing.

Will that hold you for a while?

Hugos for Who?

  • News
  • March 29, 2007

hugoaward-8543783The 2007 Hugo Awards, most prized of the science-fiction awards, just might wind up in the hands of longest running s-f teevee series of all time

Three episodes of Doctor Who from the past season were nominated in the best dramatic presentation – short form category: "School Reunion," the episode that reintroduced Sarah Jane Smith and written by Toby Whithouse,  Steven Moffatt’s "The Girl in the Fireplace," where the Doctor saves Madame de Pompadour from really neat looking robots, and the season’s two-part finale, "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday," written by executive producer Russell T. Davies and featuring the Cybermen and the Daleks in a battle scene that made 300 look like a Disney flick.

These three shows are up against an episode of Battlestar Galactica ("Downloaded) and an episode of Stargate SG-1 ("200."). As usual, the winner will be announced at the World Science Fiction Convention, to be held in Yokohama, Japan from August 30th to September 3rd.

The new season of Doctor Who begins in England this Saturday.

JOHN OSTRANDER: Fire-bombing Dresden

  • News
  • March 29, 2007

ostrander100-8914753I’m a big fan of The Dresden Files. Which is why I can’t take The Dresden Files.

Maybe I should explain.

About a year ago or so I picked up a novel by Jim Butcher about a wizard-for-hire working out of modern day Chicago. It meshes the hard-boiled detective genre with the wizard and fantasy genre. If you know me, then you know I’m already into what I’ve called narrative alloys – the blending of genres. And I’m still a Chicago boy at heart so of course I was drawn to the book series. Butcher, not a Chicago native, sometimes gets his Chicago geography wrong – one book refers to what is obviously Hyde Park as Lincoln Park which is a very different neighborhood – but he generally gets the feel right.

As the series has progressed, the world of his hero – Harry Dresden – gets richer. He has an army of wonderful supporting characters and an overall interlocking story has emerged. While each book can be read on its own (I read them way out of order); they’re all connected and events in one book have ramifications in later books. Butcher has thought out his magic pretty well, its consistent and believable. In short, he’s created not only a wonderfully interesting main character but his own world that just happens to intersect the real world in a city that I love a lot.

In short, I’ve become a fan and I was really excited when I learned that it was going to be made into a series on the SciFi network. I remained excited – up until I started watching it.

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MIKE GOLD: The secret Luddite?

  • News
  • March 26, 2007

mikegold100-6701130Yesterday, I turned on my cell phone for the first time in about two weeks. I was at I-Con in Long Island New York and was waiting to meet up with some friends. I only turn on my cell when I’m out of town or at a convention, and the fact that I didn’t have to have it on in two weeks had made me happy.

First among my 19 voicemails was a message from Harlan Ellison, admonishing me for misspelling Edgar Allan Poe’s name in a ComicMix news story back when. He’s right, and I should have caught it. I’ve been a fan of Poe’s longer than anybody except maybe Jack Kirby. The problem is, when I’m under deadline pressure (and with the Internet that’s 24/7) I over rely upon my spellchecker. Sadly, those suckers ignore words that are misspelled into other real words. I let it do my thinking for me; my bad.

Mr. Ellison often refers to himself as a Luddite, disparaging our computer-communications society. I sympathize. Coincidentally, the very night before my wife and I had watched the first half of a Doctor Who serial, "The Mark of the Rani", which was set in 1811 at the birthplace of the British Luddite movement. They did a good job of disclosing the reasons behind the movement, except that I don’t think a pair of Gallefreyan Time Lords encouraged the Luddite movement.

For the history-challenged out there, the Luddites were members of a movement of English workers at the dawn of the Industrial Age who destroyed the machinery that they thought was taking their jobs. It is believed the media named the participants after Ned Lud, one of their ilk, although that might be apocryphal.

You can hardly blame them. The ruling classes always instill such fears in their workers as a means of keeping wages low and discipline high. There are always all sorts of odd ramifications to this philosophy – for example, our marijuana laws were imposed under the belief that they would deter Mexican immigration and take jobs away from the “common man.” If this sounds like our current immigration attitudes, well, that’s no coincidence.

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Delicious extermination!

  • News
  • March 5, 2007

chocodalek-8429416I know ComicMixers Martha and Glenn might disagree, but in my opinion knitted Daleks have nothing on chocolate ones!  Via BoingBoing, here’s how to make a chocolate Dalek.  Decadent and tasty!  I will be assimilated, gladly!

Meanwhile, Series 3 of the new Doctor Who programme is said to begin on the Beeb on March 31, start airing on Canada’s CBC in June, and debut in the US… Who knows when?  No announcements yet from Sci Fi, although they’ve posted a nice interview with star David Tennant.

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