by Catriona Mills

But How Do You Work That Into The Narrative?

Posted 20 March 2009 in by Catriona

I shall start with a disclaimer: I am actually really enjoying what I’ve read (some three chapters) of P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job For A Woman, which I’ve never read before, despite the fact that it was published in 1972 and I’m a big fan of certain sorts of detective fiction.

(I’ll be honest: I think part of what I like about it is that Cordelia dislikes Adam Dalgliesh as much as I do. Of course, she hasn’t met him, so that might change, but I do hope not.)

But what really fascinated me about the character so far is that when Cordelia is asked what her father did, she replies, “He was an itinerant Marxist poet and an amateur revolutionary.”

Really? Because that’s a complicated back story for a character who is dead before the book starts. It’s not that implausible: Cordelia’s twenty-two in 1971, so while her father may be too young to remember the rise to influence of the Fabian Society in the Edwardian period, he is certainly old enough to have been permanently inspired by the participation of some English left-wing sympathisers in the Spanish Civil War.

Or, you know, he could just have strong left-wing sympathies because he read Das Kapital at an impressionable age.

There’s just something about this that made me think, “Well, what a complex back story for a character who, as far as I can tell, is never going to appear in the book.” (If this is P. D. James’s foray into zombie fiction, don’t tell me. I want to be surprised.)

So, just in case I ever write a novel, I’ve come up with some pick-and-mix sentences that I can drop in to the narrative when someone asks my protagonist what her father does for a living.

  • He was a chiropodist, but it was really just a way for him to get paid for being a foot fetishist.
  • He provided freelance flower illustrations for amateur gardening magazines and on weekends scoured antique shops to try and improve his collection of Victorian apostle spoons.
  • He tried working as a waiter once, but apparently he had some kind of phobic response to damask.
  • He was a turtle fancier by inclination, but my mother talked him into becoming a chartered accountant on the grounds that the work was less seasonal.
  • He mostly subsisted on the loose change he found down the back of friends’ sofa cushions.
  • He shouted at the managers of struggling suburban theatre companies until they agreed to stage one of his series of five-act tragedies about Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine.
  • He had a shoe-shine stand near the station until he developed an unshakeable conviction that it was possible to buff suede. Actually, we don’t really like to talk about it.
  • He’s actually a highly paid mercenary in a war as old as time itself, fought across the dimensions and in the shadows of planets, bringing humanity and every other species in the universe to the brink of destruction without their knowledge or understanding—but we used to tell people that he managed a strip-club so they wouldn’t ask too many questions.
  • He claims he’s a steward on the Titanic, so we’re not actually quite sure what he’s been doing for a living since 1912. Really? It’s never seemed that implausible to us.

Strange Conversations: Part One Hundred and Three

Posted 18 March 2009 in by Catriona

Nick plays Bejeweled 2 on his iPhone:

NICK: You’d think, when you exploded more than one Power Gem, that it would set off a massive explosion.
ME: Sometimes it does.
NICK: But this was four, all together!
ME: And it didn’t?
NICK: No.
ME: Oh, well. These things happen.
NICK: True.
ME: But you should still feel bad.
NICK: Really?

Live-blogging Doctor Who, Season Two: The Idiot's Lantern

Posted 17 March 2009 in by Catriona

This live-blogging brought to you by the fact that I’m desperately waiting for coffee—which I’m sure will turn up very soon. I can smell it. I could make it myself, but Nick’s sorted that out.

Also, I’m still not finding this Jack Dee comedy terribly funny. Am I missing something? Maybe it’s because I’m only watching the last ten minutes or so of each episode? I just don’t see anything appealing about the character, at all. I don’t mind a character who is a little bit of a bastard (case in point, almost everyone in Green Wing), but this character is just out-and-out awful. I haven’t seen a single redeeming characteristic.

It’s becoming something of an obsession with me, how much I dislike this programme. Am I mad? Or is he genuinely horrible?

No, actually. I’m not mad. He is horrible. Of course, I’m not a great fan of unadulterated comedy of embarrassment. A little bit leavened with other forms of humour? Sure. (Case in point, Green Wing.) But not a show that’s nothing but comedy of embarrassment.

I’m sure Doctor Who will start soon.

Nick and I are now united in how much we despise this character and see no redeeming characteristics in him, at all. I mean, Guy Secretan slept with his own mother (accidentally) and we still wanted to give him a bit of a cuddle.

Shouldn’t Doctor Who have started by now?

Wait, what? Lost Cities of the Ancients in Doctor Who time?

Oh, we’ll deal with that later. Because here’s the episode.

A woman, on a television set. And a man fretting about his overdraft, insisting that he needs a miracle, as the sounds of “God Save the Queen” swell behind him.

Now another house: a family sitting around a wireless, with the mother sewing on a treadle machine, the grandmother sitting reading the paper, the father heading out covered in medals, and the son insisting they should have a television. The father says, perhaps. For the coronation, perhaps.

Now back to Mr Magpie, the man with the overdraft. Now the woman on the television is speaking to him—and sucking his face towards the screen. All thanks, it seems, to a lucky lightning strike.

Credits.

Now here comes Rose in pink stilettos and headband—and, in between, a pink skirt and a denim jacket. And the Doctor has a moped: they’re off the see Elvis at the Ed Sullivan TV studios. The Doctor hasn’t noticed that this clearly is not New York: given the double-decker buses and the red post boxes (instituted by Anthony Trollope).

Now back to the family from the pre-credit sequence. Mother, father, and son are there—but grandmother is not, and the mother is fretting about what happened to her. “That face! That horrible face!” The father doesn’t understand why they’re worried about this.

Rose is wondering why so many people have television—everyone has an aerial, whereas Rose remembers Jackie saying they were so rare, people had to pile into one room.

Rose and the Doctor see a man being taken away with a sack over his head—his wife is weeping and begging, but no one listens. Tommy, the young boy from before, says to the Doctor that it’s happening all over: people are turning into monsters.

The Doctor and Rose try to chase the car, but it’s a well-practiced maneouver, and they lose it behind some fake doors.

ROSE: Maybe we should go and ask the neighbours?
DOCTOR: That’s what I like about you: the domestic approach.
ROSE: Thank you. Wait, was that an insult?

Mr Magpie is speaking to the woman in the telly again, and she’s creepier than she was.

Now Tommy is trying to see his grandmother, but the domestic tyrant that is his father creeps up and stops him. Nick starts muttering and complaining—he can’t cope with this father character, stereotype that he is.

I like the flying ducks, though.

Rose and the Doctor are on the doorstep, fulsomely greeting the Connellys and claiming to be representatives of Queen and Country.

I can’t get over the Doctor’s hair. It’s always been . . . odd. But that pompadour?

I’ve skipped the bit where the Doctor banters with Mr Connelly about his gender politics, because it doesn’t really change anything. And having one character address the fact doesn’t really change the fact that the character is a stereotype.

DOCTOR: Union flag?
ROSE: Mum went out with a sailor.
DOCTOR AND EVERYONE WATCHING THE ABC, SIMULTANEOUSLY: Of course she did.

Things go slightly odd, as I lose my wireless Internet connection for a moment, there.

Basically, the Doctor bullies Mr Connelly into letting him talk to the grandmother—whose face has completely gone. That is rather creepy. But Mr Connelly has rung the strange men in black who took the man earlier, and they grab Gran, after punching the Doctor in the face and pushing Mrs Connelly over.

The Doctor, of course, legs it straight out of the house without looking, but Rose sees that there’s something going on with the television.

Nevertheless, the Doctor is in time this time around to see the ruse with the fake doors and the sweeping men.

NICK: Terrific lighting in this episode.

So the Doctor breaks in to where the men in black have been taking their prisoners—only to find people standing randomly in cages, none of whom have any faces, but all of whom have at least a basic survival instinct, since they bunch their fists and circle him menacingly.

Rose, meanwhile, has gone to Mr Magpie’s television shop—actually, that’s not a denim jacket. It’s some kind of dark-blue nylon—pretending to buy a television. Mr Magpie is trying to push her out, but Rose is over-extending herself a little, here. She can’t see how terrified he is—she’s pushing as though he’s the villain, not seeing his desperation.

Still, I do like to see Rose striking out on her own.

The woman on the television—identifying herself as “The Wire”—speaks directly to Rose, claiming to be hungry, and then eats Rose’s face. That’s blunter than it should be, but that’s what happens: Rose’s face is sucked off.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is being interrogated by a detective inspector, and being as glib and fluent as always. And taunting the poor old inspector. Doctor, of course he’s out of his depth. Don’t taunt the poor man.

And here’s someone else (sans visage, the inspector says, which I love) being brought in with a bag over their head—and of course it’s Rose. The Doctor is furious because they left her in the street, but I suppose that’s an advantage to the narrative, because now the Doctor’s acting all American-movie action-hero macho, which is thoroughly out of character and annoys me.

Back to the family with the stereotypical father, who is now terrorising his wife in a way we haven’t seen before. And the son is fuming quietly. But this seems not in keeping with the first scene, where mother, son, and grandmother seemed content enough, and to have a non-confrontational relationship with the father. And that was a scene that took place exclusively in the home, so why would he have been dissembling then? Perhaps he was in an unusually good mood? But we haven’t seen him in a good mood since?

Hmm. I’m having to over-think this. That’s not a good sign.

The sentence earlier where I mentioned that the father ratted Gran out to the men in black? Apparently, that was a spoiler. But it did seem quite obvious, from the way he had his hands around their shoulders.

But this scene with Rita Connelly and her husband and son? I’m not sure I buy this. Is he a typical 1950s’ father? In which case, where does the mother’s sudden fury come from? She’d be conditioned into a complementary state of mind.

Oh, look: I’m missing plot.

Tommy tells the Doctor and the inspector that his grandmother was watching telly when she changed, so they go to Mr Magpie’s shop—where they find the faces of the missing people staring out of and screaming out of the televisions around the store. Rose is screaming “Doctor!” over and over again, but she doesn’t seem to be able to interact with the Doctor, to see or hear him.

Ack! Colour television! In fact, it’s a sign of The Wire’s increasing (but fluctuating) strength. Apparently, she was executed by her people, but fled across the universe in this form. She needs corporeal form, and she’s exploiting the coronation—the first time, the Doctor says, that millions of people gathered around televisions—to get the energy she needs.

Meanwhile, she attacks the inspector, Tommy, and the Doctor, but the Doctor manages to get his sonic screwdriver in between him and the screen. He and the others are knocked out, but The Wire transfers herself to a smaller, bakelite television set.

All this frantic action is intercut with scenes from the coronation, in grainy black and white.

The inspector’s face is gone, but Tommy and the Doctor are fine. The Doctor, suddenly realising they are in Muswell Hill, recognises the TV transmitter nearby—to which Mr Magpie is frantically driving The Wire—and grabs a selection of material from the shop.

Mr Magpie is taking The Wire to the top of the TV transmitter tower: he tries to back out of their arrangement, but she’s insistent. The Doctor gets past security by apparently pretending to be the King of Belgium.

Leaving Tommy’ behind, the Doctor races up the transmitter tower, trailing copper wire behind him.

Mr Magpie is higher, though, and he plugs The Wire in, allowing her to start sucking the faces off everyone watching the coronation.

I suspect, if it weren’t such an exciting part of the episode, I could have thought of a better way of putting that.

THE WIRE: You can’t stop The Wire!
NICK: Well, it did end after five seasons.

While I was repeating that anecdote, The Wire kills Magpie. And the Doctor grabs the small television—but his plan has backfired somewhere. I’m not sure where, because electronics confuse me. Thankfully, he has left Tommy downstairs, and Tommy fixes it, so everyone’s faces snap back into place, and they’re left slightly disorientated.

And The Wire is, apparently, destroyed. She can’t have been destroyed, though? Nope: she’s trapped in a video cassette. Beta, too. Well, that’ll be obsolete soon enough. And Tommy and the Doctor watch the coronation together.

And then Gran has her face back, and Rose, too.

And Mrs Connelly is kicking her husband out, because apparently the house is in her mother’s name? I still think this sub-plot needs a bit more work.

Meanwhile, we’re at a coronation street party—where Rose and the Doctor debate, briefly, about where history takes place, and decide that it’s in the domestic sphere, not the public sphere.

(The Doctor says he’s going to tape over The Wire. That doesn’t seem like the Doctor, but then this episode is a little like that.)

Mr Connelly is walking away, but Rose convinces Tommy to go after him.

NICK: Oh, Rose! Don’t work out your daddy issues with someone else.

And—scene.

“That was the final of Doctor Who for now?” What!? Why!? How shall I finish my live-blogging? This is just odd.

So . . . I suppose that it’s for season two of Doctor Who. For now. Definitely ending with a whimper, that.

Storm at Sunset

Posted 16 March 2009 in by Catriona

What I Noticed While Watching "Outlaw of Gor"

Posted 15 March 2009 in by Catriona

I should make it absolutely clear that, fantasy fan though I am, I wouldn’t normally watch Outlaw of Gor, which is not only based (albeit loosely) on one of John Norman’s novels, but is also so obscure a film that it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page.

(It does have an Imdb.com page, though—as does its prequel, simply called Gor.)

The sole reason I watched this is because it was on Mystery Science Theater 3000, which is hard to explain, but does have a Wikipedia page, which offers the best definition of the show:

The series features a man and his robot sidekicks who are trapped on a satellite in space by an evil scientist and forced to watch a selection of terrible movies, especially (but not initially limited to) science fiction B-movies. To keep sane, the man and his robots make a running commentary on the film, making fun of its flaws.

I know: it doesn’t make much sense and may not even sound like fun, but we’re obsessed with it. Having found that a friend was a big fan, we’ve borrowed as many DVDs as possible from her, and in the last six months have watched our way through thirty or so of the worst films ever made.

One of which was Outlaw of Gor, in which I noted the following points.

1. Any film based on John Norman’s Gor books is considerably more fun once the film makers strip out the misogynistic domination fantasies that make up ninety percent of Norman’s plots.

2. Of course, then the film bears next to no resemblance to the actual Gor books.

3. And it still isn’t a great deal of fun, to be honest.

4. If your film is based to any degree on the Gor books—such as, for example, taking the name of Norman’s most frequent protagonist, Tarl Cabot, and setting the story on a planet called Gor—then no one with any degree of familiarity with the books is going to accept that your hero wants nothing better than to outlaw slavery.

5. I’m actually not going to complain—as the people who wrote reviews about this film on imdb.com did—about the fact that the Priest-Kings in this film weren’t actually alien insectoids, because, frankly, I’d rather have Jack Palance in a ridiculous hat than alien insectoids.

Luckily, this film has Jack Palance in a ridiculous hat, making this the third truly awful film in which I have seen Jack Palance—after Hawk the Slayer (the hero is, according to that Wikipedia page, “a hero in the Dark Age, where the Evil ruled the world,” which is the most non-specific sentence ever, despite the proliferation of the definite article) and Angels Revenge (we watched that as part of MST3K. When one of the robot sidekicks watched the camera follow a woman climbing up a ladder, he exclaimed, “Hey, buddy! You’re giving away the plot!” He wasn’t kidding).

6. If your hero tries to snap a sword over his knee to demonstrate his new pacifist stance, and instead simply bends it into a horseshoe, you have one of two problems: either Gor’s metalworkers are rubbish, or your props are.

7. Why is the hero a vegetarian? Or, rather, why is the sole apparent reason for the hero’s vegetarianism to introduce a scene in which he turns down a hunk of meat in favour of an apple?

I don’t think vegetarianism is a problem for a sword-and-sorcery hero—unlike the commenter on Imdb.com who called Cabot “emasculated” and said his vegetarianism “takes what is an otherwise namby-pamby hero and makes him even more so.” (I can’t link directly to that comment, unfortunately, but the comment thread is here.) I do think, though, that an apple-eating scene really only works for dramatic effect in the Old Testament.

8. The trivia section contains two facts, one of which is that the word “Cabot” is spoken more than fifty-five times in the first ten minutes of the film.

They are not kidding about this.

9. If I were a woman living in a pre-industrialised society in which there is significantly more dust than there is foliage, I would choose everyday outfits that required a slightly less rigorous private grooming ritual. Just for practicality’s sake.

Mind you, I would also make that decision if I were a female superhero living in a dystopic and alternative 1985—and, yes, I am looking at you, otherwise awesome adaptation of Watchmen.

10. Late 1980s hair is just straight-up bad. Late 1980s hair combined with beaten copper forehead ornaments and an outfit that makes you look as though you’re planning a set of aerobics tapes to rival those of Jane Fonda is hilariously bad.

Tiny Water Dragon

Posted 14 March 2009 in by Catriona

We suspect this is the little chap we spent forty minutes chasing out of the house.

Strange Conversations: Part One Hundred and Two

Posted 14 March 2009 in by Catriona

When we use verbs in different ways:

ME: Oh! Where did I put my gum?
NICK: You didn’t swallow it, did you?
ME: I . . . what? No, I meant the packet.

I’m still baffled by this. But Nick can’t understand why I’m baffled. So far, the only responses to my bafflement I’ve received have been “I really don’t understand why you have a problem with this” and “Stranger things have happened at sea, and you know it.”

Strange Conversations: Part One Hundred and One

Posted 14 March 2009 in by Catriona

Scene: a quiet afternoon in the study, Nick playing Fallout Three and me lurking on a forum. Suddenly, the peace is rudely shattered.

NICK: AAAAAARGH!
COMPUTER: Boom!
ME: Screech!
NICK: What just happened?
ME: Yes, what the hell did just happen?
NICK: I heard this noise behind me, and then, with the stuff . . .
ME: I threw something in the waste-paper bin.
NICK: Oh.
ME: And then you screamed and I didn’t know what was happening so I screamed.
NICK: I thought a giant insect had landed on me, in addition to the goddamned death claw trying to kill me!
ME: Right.
NICK: I mean, they’re the toughest roaming creatures in the game, they can kill you with one swipe, and now they’re just spawning everywhere!
ME: Okay.
NICK: Everywhere in the game, I mean.
ME: Yes, I assumed that.
NICK: So I’m just . . . I’m just a little jumpy.
ME: I can see that. But it’s okay now?
NICK: Yeah. No. Yeah.
(Pause)
NICK: Ha! Got the bastard.

Ah, immersive gaming. It immerses everyone in earshot, whether you want to be immersed or not.

When Lizards Arrange Their Own Lighting

Posted 14 March 2009 in by Catriona

Strange Conversations: Part One Hundred

Posted 13 March 2009 in by Catriona

(Is this worthy of being number one hundred? Who knows?)

Has anyone seen the film clip for Toto’s “Africa”? If not, here it is.

We watched it, and almost immediately had an argument:

ME: See, isn’t that weird?
NICK: Yeah.
ME: See, I’ve seen worse film clips, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a stranger one. I mean, is the song pro-Africa or anti-Africa?
NICK: I don’t know.
ME: I know! And who was the man with the spear?
NICK: Well, his shield had the same pattern as in the picture the guy was looking for in the book.
ME: Did it?
NICK: Clearly, he was a supernatural entity who the white guy was hunting for, and he didn’t want to be found, so he took steps.
ME: You don’t know that.
NICK: It’s supported by the text.
ME: No, it’s not! It’s a semi-plausible reading based on an ambiguous and obscure originating text!
NICK: Treen, those are my specialities.

Seriously, watch the film clip. And listen out for my favourite line, in which, apparently, the lonely wild dog seeks some “solitary company.”

I don’t know what that means, and I still don’t know what the guy with the spear is doing.

Strange Conversations: Part Ninety-Nine

Posted 13 March 2009 in by Catriona

This is what happens when you live with a hardcore geek.

To make more sense of this, we were watching The West Wing (season three) during dinner, but it was one of those episodes where Aaron Sorkin “writes back” to his critics (in this instance, unconvincingly, about his sexism. I was left with the impression that, apparently, only ugly women—regardless of their intelligence—are frustrated by Sorkin’s particular brand of gender relations, which puts me in my place, I suppose) so I insisted on a break.

I’d not been in the study—which, remember, is some ten feet from the living room—two minutes when this popped up on the Gmail chat function:

NICK: They did have muffins but I did not have any.
ME: What? What? Where? Whem? When, even? Who is this? What the hell is happening? Ack!
NICK: Just responding to something you wrote yesterday.
ME: What? I wrote what where?
NICK: Treena? Are you ok?
ME: No! I don’t know what’s happening!
(Nick comes into the study with his iPhone)
NICK: See, I’ll show you what I’m talking about.
(Shows me some fairly banal chat we had yesterday about him not having a muffin with his coffee)
NICK: See, nothing worth panicking about.

Now, Nick has claimed for years that my mulling a conversation over in my head and then saying, some half an hour later, “And you know what else annoys me?” is the most irritating thing it is possible for one’s partner to do.

I maintain that saving chats on the iPhone and then picking them up thirty hours after they’ve ended is much, much worse.

Giving The Small Lizard Some Exposure

Posted 12 March 2009 in by Catriona

The little lizard is not normally as visible as the larger one: he skulks up the back of the garden or dashes across it incredibly fast, where the bigger one tends to remain, statuelike, in a single position.

But this time I nearly trod on him as I was heading down the back steps to the laundry:

I have my suspicions that he’s holding his front foot like that deliberately. After I nearly stepped on him and then dashed back inside for my camera, I bet he twisted it round quickly so that he could give me a plaintive look implying that his mobility is impaired and that I should look where I’m going.

His mobility isn’t impaired, of course: he rapidly became unhappy about having his picture taken, and hared off down the garden. But you cannot ever truly escape the madwoman with the camera who hasn’t updated her blog in three days.

I would cue a maniacal laugh here, but I’m worried that’s it’s becoming habitual to me. And there’s nothing worse than when your cliches become habitual.

(Unless it’s when your cloches becomes habitual, which is what I originally typed.)

Live-blogging Doctor Who, Season Two: The Age of Steel

Posted 10 March 2009 in by Catriona

This live-blogging brought to you by the fact that someone threw a hubcap onto our roof last night. Or perhaps by the fact that we didn’t notice that someone had thrown a hubcap onto the roof until Nick spotted it from the bus-stop across the road this morning. Seriously, how did we not hear that? We perhaps did, and thought it was an unusually rambunctious possum.

And who throws hubcaps onto somebody’s roof? We’ve had people try to kick our fence over (after it was on its last legs, post someone driving through it), we’ve had people punch holes in our fence (unfortunately, a new fence after someone else had driven through it), we’ve had people photograph themselves next to our stricken fence, we’ve had people drive through our fence (four separate people, so far), we’ve had people wander in and urinate on our driveway when we forget to close the gates, and on one memorable occasion I had an authoritative but ultimately kind conversation with some very young boys who had woken me up by trying to use my fence as a bottle-opener.

Much of this is the price you pay for living on a direct route between the colleges and the closest pub.

But a hubcap on the roof is something entirely new in my experience.

Actually, if Nick doesn’t get back from the shops fairly soon, this live-blogging will be brought to you by the fact that I don’t know how to turn our television on, and will have to make it all up based on my last viewing of this episode three years ago.

That could be interesting.

No, he’s back. So as long as nothing thoroughly weird happens, it will be a proper, legitimate live-blogging.

Doctor Who at the Proms? Now there’s a clashing of high and low culture.

Okay, Tropical Cyclone Hamish makes me giggle and giggle every time I see news on it. Hamish, Auntie Treena thinks you rock, and if you could read, I wouldn’t have made this joke on the blog. Now we need a Tropical Cyclone Jack.

Ack! Explosion! Ah, it’s a flashback to the previous episode. Startled me a little, though. I’d stopped paying attention.

Now, the Doctor is trying to surrender, but the Cybermen don’t really want anyone to surrender. The Doctor doesn’t really have a plan here, does he?

Credits.

So we pick up where we left off, except that the Doctor manages to kill a huge number of Cybermen with the power cell from the TARDIS that he had in his pocket. Why it bounces from Cyberman to Cyberman in a chain effect, I don’t know.

Rose and Pete want to go back for Jackie, but the Doctor tells Pete that Jackie is already dead and tells Rose that she’s not actually her mother.

During the getaway, Rickey and the Brummie attack Pete, suggesting that he’s part of the conspiracy to place Lumic in charge of the goverment and that Pete has been working with Lumic for years. Apparently, they have a government mole called Gemini—which Pete says is him.

They introduce themselves:

DOCTOR: I’m the Doctor, by the way.
ROSE: And I’m Rose.
PETE: Better and better. That’s the name of my dog.

The Doctor is in favour of stopping Lumic, of course—and he removes Pete’s earbuds, in case Lumic is listening. In fact, Lumic, chatting to his Cybermen about their uniformity, is using the earbuds to control the population of London.

News reporters are trying to get people to remove their earbuds—and Rose, seeing the zombified humans wandering through the city, plans on just pulling the earbuds off, but the Doctor tells her that she’ll cause a brainstorm.

Ah! Rose mentions the head in Von Statten’s museum, and the Doctor says yes, there are Cybermen in our universe, and mentions a brief version of their origin—so that answers some of the questions that came up on the comment thread last week.

With the Cybermen coming, Rickey and Mickey scatter from the others, and there’s rather a painful scene where Mickey is seeking validation from the alternative-universe form of himself, poor sod. He really has had all his confidence sucked out in his time in the TARDIS, hasn’t he?

Meanwhile, the people controlled by their earbuds wander into the Cyber factory, including Jackie.

Elsewhere, Rickey fails to make it over a chainlink fence, and is deleted by the Cybermen in front of a horrified Mickey.

Mr Crane wanders into Lumic’s room—Lumic doesn’t know why Crane isn’t controlled, but Crane claims his earbuds must have malfunctioned and requests an upgrade. This is an attempt to get close enough to detach some of Lumic’s life-support systems. The Cybermen kill Crane, but instead of reconnecting Lumic’s systems, they take him off for a forcible upgrade, despite him insisting that he will upgrade only with his last breath.

The Brummie is devastated to hear of Rickey’s death, and insults Mickey as a worthless substitute.

And there’s a gorgeous shot of Battersea Power Station.

The group look out over Battersea, and think of ways to take out the production lines. Rose and Pete will wear fake earbuds and go in through the front door, Jake will take out the earbud transmitter on the zeppelin above the factory, and the Doctor and the woman whose name I have already forgotten will enter through the tunnels.

The Doctor, of course, completely forgets about Mickey, who volunteers to go with the Brummie, Jake, despite Jake’s vicious rejection of Mickey’s offer.

The tunnels are full of Cybermen, pre-converted by “put on ice,” the Doctor says. Still, he wants her to keep an eye out for trip systems, which seems as though it would be good advice.

Pete and Rose, though Pete is bewildered by Rose’s reasons for wanting to help rescue Jackie, join the end of the queue of people being sent in for “upgrading”: Billie Piper does a good job of looking like someone who is trying not to show any emotion while actually being terrified.

Jake and Mickey head up to the zeppelin, where they find two guards. Mickey doesn’t want to kill the guards, and Jake eventually agrees—they have a gas, one of Mrs Moore’s little gadgets, apparently—and they knock them out. They’re human guards, not Cybermen.

Meanwhile, the Doctor is asking Mrs Moore (which I originally heard as “Muir,” with the Brummie accent and all) how she became involved in the Preachers. She tells the Doctor that her real name is Angela Price, and she ended up on the run after reading the wrong file on the mainframe.

Meanwhile, something triggers the Cybermen where they are, and they end up frantically trying to climb out of a hatch before the implacable cyborgs can reach them.

In the other plotline, Rose is stopped just before entering the upgrade machines: she can hear the noises and we can see something of what’s happening in the booths. But there’s no screaming at all, as there was with the homeless men. That’s even creepier.

Meanwhile, Rose and Pete are identified by a Cyberman who says that it was once Jackie Tyler, much to their horror. They think that maybe the process can be reversed, but, of course, when they look back to her, they can’t tell which one she is in a sea of Cybermen. The Cybermen plan to “reward” Pete forcibly for his work with Cybus Industries.

On the zeppelin, Jake and Mickey look for the transmitter controls.

The Doctor and Mrs Moore are ambushed by a Cyberman, but Mrs Moore manages to take it down with some form of electromagnetic bomb.

The Doctor looks inside: the Cybermen have a central nervous system and a human brain, but they have an emotional inhibitor, so they can use the human brain without the risk of the Cyberman going insane during the process.

The Doctor, fiddling around, breaks the emotional inhibitor, so the Cybermen tells us that it is a woman called Sally, who simultaneously wants to know where her fiance Gareth is and doesn’t want him to see her on the night before their wedding.

A little manipulate-y, there, Doctor Who. It could have been traumatic without the wedding angle.

The Doctor thinks if they could override all the emotional inhibitors at once, they would be able to kill the Cybermen. I have a problem with that, but no time to go over it now.

Suddenly, Mrs Moore is electrocuted from behind.

Mickey and Jake plan to crash the zeppelin, because they can’t get to the controls—they’re behind a safety screen. And the Cyberman in the zeppelin isn’t actually dead, after all.

But Lumic has been upgraded—to a Cyber Controller, complete with visible brain.

Mickey and Jake do manage to take the Cyberman out and simultaneously electrocute the transmitter controls, so that the humans still in the factory freak out and break away.

And now is the time for the Doctor’s monologue; this one is about imagination, emotion, and how much he likes humans. (He also manages to point out that other people aren’t as clever as he is, but that’s not unusual.)

Lumic challenges the Doctor with the pain of emotions, but the Doctor won’t be taunted—he talking now to Mickey, whom he seems to know can hear him from the zeppelin, and tell him to find the code to override the emotional inhibitor.

Mickey does. The Doctor uses it. And everyone celebrates the fact that the Cybermen are so horrified, so traumatised by what has been done to them while they were unconscious that, apparently, their heads explode.

To be fair, the Doctor is not celebrating.

I’m not sure why the Cybermen freaking out also sets fire to the power station, but perhaps they’re pulling out cords and things?

Jake wants to leg it, but Mickey refuses—he calls Rose and tells her, and Pete and the Doctor, to head to the roof. They do, but a furious Lumic pulls himself free from his Cyber-couch.

I’m impressed with Rose’s ability to climb a rope ladder. I don’t think I could do that. Maybe if a Cyberman was chasing me and I was on the roof of a burning Art Deco power station. It’s all about finding the inspiration, really.

Speaking of Cybermen, Lumic the Cyber Controller is climbing up after them, but Pete very slowly severs the rope with the sonic screwdriver, and Lumic falls back into the now seriously burning factory. Isn’t Battersea heritage listed? I think there might be some questions to ask about that.

In the aftermath, Rose is offering to show Pete the inside of the TARDIS, but he refuses, especially after she hints that she’s his daughter. When she pushes it, and calls him “Dad,” he really freaks out. I can’t blame her, with all her longings to see her father, but he’s not set up to cope with this, especially given what just happened to his wife.

Meanwhile, the Doctor has got his suit back.

But Mickey—he’s staying in the parallel world. He says they’ve lost their Rickey, and his gran needs him.

Rose irritates me by asking what if she needs Mickey? (I’d be more irritated, but she’s already a bit fragile about her parallel-dad’s rejection.) Mickey points out that she doesn’t need him—and, bless you, Mickey, you’re quite right. She’s been quite horrible to you, and I can’t imagine what it must be like living in the TARDIS when its other two occupants keep forgetting that you’re there.

Rose is crying, but Mickey is absolutely making the right decision here.

Mickey and Jake watch the TARDIS disappear—and we cut to Jackie filling the kettle, to find that the TARDIS has materialised in her living room, and she’s being embraced by a semi-hysterical daughter. (And I can’t blame Rose for being freaked out.)

Mickey, meanwhile, is off to liberate Paris in a van.

Bless him.

Next week, “The Idiot’s Lantern.” Ah. Well, that will be fun.

It's Been A While Since I Ranted About A Lynx Ad

Posted 9 March 2009 in by Catriona

We’ve just seen the new Lynx advertisement, with the little claymation cave dwellers, one of whom finds an aerosol can of the new Lynx fragrance hidden inside a rock, or something along those lines.

(Of course, they may not have dwelt in caves. They may have been any other kind of early human, but mentioning cave dwellers allows me to fondly remember the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode of Cave Dwellers, otherwise known as Ator L’Invincible 2, which was not only hilarious—“It was the most unrealistic puppet he’d ever fought”—but also starred the genuinely charming Miles O’Keeffe. “How much O’Keeffe? Miles O’Keeffe!” But that’s beside the point.)

The ad. led to this conversation (and, yes, Nick is often this bombastic in the flesh):

NICK: Do my eyes deceive me?
ME: Sorry?
NICK: Was that actually a relatively inoffensive Lynx ad.?
ME: Well, sort of. It’s still kind of . . .
NICK: Yeah . . .
ME: But when they’re little claymation people, it’s less date-rapey.

So maybe that’s a lesson you can take on board, Lynx? Even someone who despises your advertisements as much as I do somehow finds them less offensive when the female protagonists look like animated Bratz dolls from the brief and ill-fated “Don’t We All Secretly Want A Caveman?” range.

I don’t know whether that’s an indictment of me or of you, actually.

Lies I Have Told This Morning To Try And Attract Nick's Attention On Gmail Chat

Posted 9 March 2009 in by Catriona

1. I’m being stalked by radioactive broccoli.

2. There’s a man here who says he’s Namor the Sub-Mariner and he’s here to view the kittens we advertised in the local paper.

3. A bomb just exploded in the living room.

4. Apparently, I’ve been elected Queen of all the monkeys, and I have to go and live on an island off the coast of Patagonia. On the plus side, I get a pension for life.

5. I’m thinking of becoming a cannibal, to cut down on the cost of groceries.

6. I adopted a giant panda. It’s called Beryl.

Unfortunately, I was just getting into the swing of it when he actually started responding.

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