10 and 1 Things About The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood

(Spoilers for episodes 8 and 9 of Doctor Who Series 5.)Item 1: The biggest talking point is no doubt the "new look" Eocenes. Though more or less associated with Silurians, they have more than a little in common with the Sea Devils (the mesh cloth, the gun shapes, the back of the head), but look like neither. There's been a lot of talk about the Star Trek aesthetic leaking into Doctor Who here, but there was a very good reason for Star Trek's emoting aliens, and it makes sense here as well. And had these guys been redesigned Draconians, I don't think we would have heard a peep. No, the thing here is that Silurians and Sea Devils were previously portrayed as inhuman, and some fans were let down by the design choice. I don't have a particular problem with it, though I did think the males of the species were a little too humanized in their behaviour, especially compared to the much more reptilian females. Performance makes a big difference. And while I think it's reasonable and interesting to think of the "Eocene era" as having multiple sentient reptilian races, it's surprising that they all had bases in and around what is today Great Britain.

Item 2: So that was really old school, wasn't it? Drawing heavily on the third Doctor era, not only bringing back the idea of sentient reptiles, but their entire dynamic with humanity and the Doctor. This is probably why I was a little bored by the exercise. I've seen it all before. THRICE before! Each time new Silurian cousins are discovered, the Doctor tries to make humanity share the planet with them, and every time, neither side is trusting enough to make it happen. I will be interested to know how people who didn't see the original stories felt about this, but for my part, it had an air of predictability until the last 15 minutes of Cold Blood where it was perhaps too late to redeem it.
Item 3: The "bad human" in this scenario is just a mom who's afraid for her family. And while Ambrose probably reacts the most realistically in the whole story (certainly more than wannabe companion Nasreen), she is an extremely frustrating character. As Doctor Who fans, we accept HIS point of view, and wouldn't want to admit that in that situation, we'd act more like Ambrose than Amy. However, she makes all the wrong choices, which makes us shout at the screen rather a lot. It certainly doesn't help that the Doctor piles it on with repetitive "you should have been better" rhetoric.

Item 4: Another problem I had was with Chibnall's over-reliance on coincidences and last minute reprieves. Amy gets a couple of those and they just cheapen the suspense. She gets in danger, and people just walk in an interrupt the jeopardy.

Item 5: Rory's erasure is the big surprise of the last episode, and while a shock, we get the feeling it'll all be undone by the finale. Beat the crack, return everything to reality. Right? Well, that's as maybe. For a character who started out as a second Mickey (and nobody wants that), he leaves quite a few fans pissed at his unrealized potential. I'm a little more even-tempered, and would rather have Amy as the sole companion, but I still liked Rory a heck of a lot. I just don't know how they could have gotten rid of him without breaking up the couple (which is part of the reason we like him, so that's no solution).

Item 6: There are two reasons why I think he'll be back. One is the story's structure. When an important character says his goodbyes, the episode usually focuses on him or her. That's basic television grammar. Not doing that needs a good reason. So while his death and erasure were given weight by Amy freaking out, Rory was much too marginalized in Cold Blood for it to be his farewell episode. Of course, he was rather central to The Hungry Earth (with Amy sidelined instead), so it may be a problem with the basic structure of the two-parter (especially since each part had alternative companions to take their places - Elliot and Nasreen). Or it may be that the direction didn't get the scene its proper weight.
Item 7: The other piece of evidence is much more conclusive. While Rory disappears, the wedding ring does not. There's a meaningful look to it, implying there's no way the Doctor won't be allowing Rory to remain erased forever. We've been told repeatedly in Series 5 that history can be changed (in this story and others). Is it foreshadowing?

Item 8: The piece of shrapnel inside the crack would seem to strongly imply that it's the TARDIS that blows up and cracks up the universe. Two ways to go: 1) A big fake-out because it's too obvious; 2) history can be changed so let's change it in a finale that's essentially a quest to prevent the TARDIS from exploding.
Item 9: This story features an overt appearance by a second Amy and Rory, where they wave from afar. The Doctor surmises that they've come to see a part of their own history, 10 years on. Maybe that's why he's so convinced that 2020 is a turning point and that history could be "made" with the reptilians. He may be wrong though. Other episodes have featured much more subtle hints that the TARDIS crew is doubling back on itself (to fix the cracks?). It all began with a mysterious figure running through young Amy 's house in The Eleventh Hour (Prisoner Zero had no yet learned to take on human shapes), and that door that opens on the roof in Victory of the Daleks. There are probably others. I just haven't watched the episodes enough yet. But keep an eye out!

Item 10: Fixed points. In Cold Blood, the Doctor uses the fixed point concept to illustrate exactly the reverse of what we've been told about fixed points before. For example, while Adelaide's death was meant to be a turning point that sent humanity far across the stars, the integration of the reptilians would change history at least has much and yet is allowed. He talks about creating a whole other timeline, so... a parallel? How does the TARDIS navigate back from that? It makes even less sense than usual, and they should probably stop talking about fixed points. It was much easier to understand when they just couldn't change history as it was understood by the companions. 2020 was in Amy's future, so no chance of paradox. Simple.

Item 11: But is there a chance of paradox with the rest of Doctor Who history if the reptilians come out and share the planet in 3020? Surprisingly, no. Even going back to Classic Who, there are no stories taking place on Earth around that time to put the lie to it. In fact, it sometimes seems that Earth has been completely forgotten in 3rd millennium stories. It's been abandoned. It's a legend. Perhaps they left it to the reptilians when solar flares started hitting hard (a frequent theme in Doctor Who future stories). Perhaps the reptilians came out of hibernation to an empty planet. Either they died out or left as well and carved their own niche among the stars. We don't see enough of Earth in thr 4000s and beyond to know if they made it or not.

Next week: Vincent van Gogh (pronounced Guff)!

Star Trek 1273: Splashdown, Part One

1273. Splashdown, Part One

PUBLICATION: Star Trek: Voyager - Splashdown #1, Marvel Comics, April 1998

CREATORS: Laurie S. Sutton (writer), Terry Pallot and Al Milgrom (artists)

STARDATE: Unknown (after Star Trek: Voyager #15)

PLOT: Voyager is already running low on power when it is attacked by a swarm of alien drones. Heading for their controlling signal's location, a volcanic planet in a nearby system, Janeway attempts to land the ship without lowering shields. The drones are burned up in the atmosphere, but Voyager crashes into an ocean and starts to sink. The ship takes in water, and engineering is all but flooded...

CONTINUITY: None.

DIVERGENCES: None.

PANEL OF THE DAY - Who left their cell phone on during the movie?
REVIEW: Basically a continuation of the Voyager series, with its usual creative team. Sutton has been hit and miss for me, but in this case, writes a crackingly suspenseful disaster movie. Essentially a faceless foe, the drones are no worse than the forces of nature itself once the ship makes splashdown. Pallot and Milgrom do some of their best work on a Star Trek series, I think, with strong likenesses and interesting panel transitions. Their ships look cool, the big crash especially, but the drone attack is a bit of a mess. They tried to replicate the show's special effects using coloring for phasers and shields and it's eaten up the art and made it hard to understand. Not a big complain, but there's a lot of it in the issue.

Cat of the Geek #64: Morris

Name: Morris
Stomping Grounds: 9 Lives adverts
Side: Finnicky
Breed: American Shorthair
Cat Powers: Ability to rally other cats. Has the voice of He-Man.
Skills: Eat 8, Sleep 7, Mischief 4, Wit 6, Palate 9
Cat Weaknesses: Corporate shill. Finnickyness can be a curse.
His best work:

Star Trek 1272: The Enemy of My Enemy

1272. The Enemy of My Enemy

PUBLICATION: Star Trek: The Next Generation - Riker #1, Marvel Comics, July 1998

CREATORS: Dan Abnett and Ian Edginton (writers), Andrew Currie and Art Nichols (artists)

STARDATE: "Unimportant" (between First Contact and Rocks and Shoals)

PLOT: Will Riker is a renegade running from a court-martial for feeding information to the Maquis. It's all a ruse to infiltrate them of course, which he does after he proves his intentions to Ro Laren. After losing much of her cell in a Dominion attack, she's made an alliance with Commander K'nera who in return wants the Maquis to steal the secret of the Genesis Device. Riker uses his access codes to get it, but they are betrayed by K'nera. They escape and hide on his bird-of-prey. Meanwhile, Picard has been ordered to destroy the ship the Maquis are on. Riker comes clean with Ro, and together they sabotage the bird-of-prey, allowing the Enterprise to find it. Riker is beamed off just before it explodes, and Ro escapes in a shuttle.

CONTINUITY: Ro joined the Maquis in Preemptive Strike. Sam Lavelle is still tactical officer (Star Trek Unlimited). Riker uses TOM Riker's fate (Defiant) as his reason for joining the Maquis. Ro's cell has made an alliance with the House of Kruge (The Search for Spock). Commander K'nera (Heart of Glory) is apparently part of that House and wants to regain his honor by achieving what his ancestor could not - getting his hands on the Genesis technology. Admiral Nechayev appears.

DIVERGENCES: Possibly, the novels don't allow for Riker to be off the ship for three months.

PANEL OF THE DAY - Riker's pick-up lines
REVIEW: Abnett and Edginton bring to bear their usual knack for cool bits of continuity, bringing back a Klingon from TNG and giving him an important link with the Movie era. I'm a big fan of Ro Laren, and she's pretty cool here, though it's clearly Riker's show. He gets to be more badass than on the show, with strong action set pieces to feature his skill. To protect Riker's cover, Picard gives Data a promotion, and everybody believes Riker really is on the run. So the story matters to the rest of the crew, which is a good thing too. If anything, this should have been longer to better feel Riker's hardships, but it's good material either way, with both humor and pathos.

My RPG DNA, Part II: The Rise of Genre

Continuing my four-part series on my personal role-playing experience... We left things at the end of the 1980s where, from primitive homebrew beginnings, a group of teenagers found its own particular way of having fun. After 4 years of intense sword & sorcery play, I was looking for other pastures. And when a hobby store finally opened in my area, just as I entered my first year of university, it opened up so many doors as to leave my head spinning. Suddenly, money burned in my pockets, and a number of important purchases were made: Much of the early output of AD&D 2nd edition, everything ever published for Paranoia (1st and 2nd ed.) and a lot of DCHeroes material, most notably the 2nd edition boxed set. And while we slowly finished up ye olde Temple of Elemental Evil (still not using proper AD&D rules), I was running side games using other RPGs, mostly Marvel Super Heroes and Paranoia.

My God, it's full of stars!
You'd think that after a veritable drought of real AD&D product in my area, I would have finally converted to proper Dungeons & Dragons, sending my group into a more balanced and structured world of gaming. And the amount of AD&D product I bought in those days would indicate I at least had plans to do this. Instead, I abandoned AD&D. Or rather, I didn't abandon AD&D, but sword and sorcery as a genre. Why play the same thing I'd been playing for four years when there were all these new worlds available? Through my university years - thanks to moving to the larger Moncton with its comic book/gaming stores - I almost became more of a collector than a gamer. All manner of games too. Those games that I was playing, sure, but really anything that seemed interesting, either based on magazine articles, ads or from back cover copy. I didn't get into Palladium's stuff or I.C.E.'s output. My favorites were instead Steve Jackson Games (I own almost every GURPS book there is), West End Games and IDW. I picked up the very first edition of Ars Magica and the latest in MegaTraveller. I gobbled up every Torg sourcebook. I delved into grown-up stuff like Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon. Small indy games like Macho Women with Guns became collector's items. I collected every issue of Challenge and White Wolf magazines. And all the while, I continued to buy up AD&D product, mostly the excellent Planescape setting's.

That first hobby store also sold really cool AD&D lead miniatures, and so I started painting them, sometimes with results I was quite happy with. However, I was seldom playing in games where they would come in useful.

In those early college years, my longest running campaign used DCHeroes and covered two groups (with one player in common with both). The "Free Spirits" as they'd chosen to call themselves were an 80s-style DC superhero team, as was best supported by the game's adventure scenarios. The characters were all original, and the players almost all recruited from people who'd never roleplayed before, a good portion of them women. This continued to my trend of consciously picking players among the ranks of the uninitiated. The few times I'd been exposed to real gamers, I hadn't liked what I'd seen. Name your negative cliché about role-players, and that'd been it. I guess I had little interest in clashing with such players over how I did things. Or perhaps I was just more comfortable playing with friends, whether they'd gamed or not in the past. Either way, this is an important part of my development as a GameMaster. The focus would remain off crunchy rules and more on juicy roles (which a superhero game can certainly encourage). Beginner-friendly was the order of the day.

Gone clubbing
After a year in Moncton, I'd met a guy in my class who was a gamer from Quebec on the lookout for other gamers. Nice enough chap, and we bonded over role-playing games. The following year, we set up a role-playing club at university together, based on his experience of coming into town and looking for other French-speaking gamers to pursue his hobby. The first meeting did not go well for me, further ostracizing me from the mainstream. Everybody was interested in D&D, but I wanted to try something else. I read over my list of potential games, and was met with either blank stares or mocking laughter. So you DON'T want to try Ghostbusters, well okay! Needless to say, I didn't put a lot of effort in the club after that.

I continued to run other games with my closer friends, but the club's co-founder went on to run AD&D for the players he'd picked up there. I was invited to a few games, of which I have little memory. I do remember making a Bard that followed a Paladin around, and writing songs (parodies of current hits) to accompany his adventures. I seldom got to play, but when I did (when I do), my characters are high on color and low on usefulness, when they're not outright pains in the ass. The guy who owned the apartment where we played thought it was a hoot, and then went back to the "I hit it" style of play. I was obviously trying to make things interesting for myself because I was essentially bored either by the way most people played or the genre itself. (D&D is, I can safely say, a genre unto itself. It goes beyond sword & sorcery, it's also strangely procedural, the way encounters are done, the characters' singular quest for treasure and XP... The way it's PLAYED has become its own genre, quite unlike any literary source). Anyway, that guy got arrested for lying on a job application and the game collapsed.

I would get to use the club's players for new and different things eventually. As I got to know them through those sleepy AD&D games, they started to trust me, and a little game called Dream Park would again change everything...

In Part III: The Rise of Multi-Genre!

Further reading about this era :
One of my failed attempts at playing
My miniatures from that era
Using my RPG book collection as reference for university papers

Star Trek 1271: Operation Assimilation

1271. Operation Assimilation

PUBLICATION: Star Trek: Operation Assimilation #1, Marvel Comics, April 1997

CREATORS: Paul Jenkins (writer), Steve Erwin and Terry Pallot (artists)

STARDATE: Unknown (between Conspiracy and The Neutral Zone)

PLOT: Romulan Commander Moliok is out putting down rebellions on the fringes of the Star Empire when an outpost calls for help. It is being attacked by an unknown enemy - the Borg. She is captured and turned into a Romulan equivalent of Locutus, and the outpost cannot resist.

CONTINUITY: The Neutral Zone featured both Federation and Romulan outposts "scooped out" of the ground, which turned out to be the Borg modus operandi in The Best of Both Worlds.

DIVERGENCES: None.

PANEL OF THE DAY - Your memories will be assimilated.
REVIEW: An insubstantial continuity plug-in featuring an unsympathetic Romulan (it couldn't have happened to a better person) told by Jenkins in an irritating 2nd person narrative (I hate that so MUCH). It's almost interesting to see the goings on of the Romulan Empire, there's really no story here. If the Romulan Locutus had been showcased in another comic, maybe. She isn't though, and we're left wondering why the Borg never came back to finish the job. It needed to be double-sized to do the concept justice and stands as a cheap First Contact tie-in to take advantage of Borg fever.

My RPG DNA, Part I: Early Days

Last week, I was reading Rob Donoghue and Chatty DM's recollections of their role-playing experience through the years, and I was inspired to stroll down memory lane (check for traps, ok, it's safe) and do the same in a four-part series (the SBG is like a long-lasting stick of gum, as you know). It all started 25 years ago, longer than some of my current players' ages, so some memories may be corrupted or entirely missing, but I'll give it my best try.

Even before 25 years ago
Like many hobbies that would later become fairly important in my life, I discovered evidence of role-playing's existence long before I ever knew what role-playing was. Living in a small town (population 10,000) in the Dark Ages before the Internet, there weren't many ways to get exposed to the hobby. When I was 11, my dad moved out of Canada, to Texas, and shared custody being what it was, we were whisked off to Montreal to board a plane and spend the summer in the States. Needing something to read on said plane, I picked up a couple of RPG-related books that would prove important to my initiation into that world. The first was Grimtooth's Traps, Too, a systemless book of dungeon traps, and the next summer's was the original AD&D Monster Manual. In neither case did I understand what these books were for, or what this "game" could be (I thought that perhaps it was some kind of computer thing). But since they were pretty much the only books I had for an entire summer, far from my real home's shelves, I read and reread them, and of course I wanted to learn more.

Back in Canada, I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club, and found two books that could perhaps help me. One was Dicing with Dragons, which described what role-playing was, and the other was Fantasy Wargaming, half manual, half stand-alone RPG. By the time I'd read these, I was in 9th grade, and other kids were bringing their D&D stuff to school. I saw a module or two. I heard a couple stories. I was accumulating friends who, though they'd never played, were interested in trying. Of course, in my small town, there was no way to get at D&D product. An older guy gave me my first polyhedral dice, the numbers already worn off, from one of Basic D&D's original boxes. And that's all we had. That, the Monster Manual and Fantasy Wargaming.

Homebrews
Well, Fantasy Wargaming was nigh incomprehensible to my neophyte brain, and it certainly wasn't compatible with the AD&D book. Perhaps I should have cut my losses and tried to get into someone else's group. I knew they existed, usually run by older guys (and I would later attend one, though I was unimpressed with the rules lawyering and DM versus Players atmosphere), but I didn't know any of them really. So I took what I could understand of FW (mostly the character sheet), created some kind of conversion for AD&D (so that the monsters became compatible), drew up lists of spells from the Monster Manual and gave them effects (just based on the names), stole maps from various sword & sorcery novels for setting, sat down at a friend's ping-pong table and went for it.

It was terribly unbalanced, of course. Wizards rolled for spells every level and got a random one. Could be Powerword Kill as much as Detect Magic. Though bigger XP rewards were handed out as time went along, the amount of XP required to level didn't change. Soon, the characters were multi-class epic level demi-gods and everybody was running at least 3 of them. We didn't care. We were having fun, Monty Hauling our way to the top. At least we were the kids that spoke English amongst ourselves already, so by that point, there wasn't a language barrier. Other than French Canadians trying to say the word "algae" and such.

That campaign would take us through all of our high school years. Along the way, I of course returned to Texas, where bookstores could be counted on to carry product. I bought more monster books (Fiend Folio, Deities and Demigods, etc.), but instead of the Player's Handbook and GM's Guide, I grabbed the much cheaper Arcanum. Though we kept some of our homebrew crazyness (the fun, unbalanced stuff), we converted to the Arcanum system, a D&D clone anyway, but with many more character classes. It appealed to our "more is better/cooler" attitudes. And though I would eventually get all of the AD&D books, I never really converted to that system. It just wasn't necessary. Arcanum was just fine to run Temple of Elemental Evil, a dungeon that ate up our last high school year (and beyond).

There's a whole world out there
Thanks to the few Dragon magazines I'd collected in the States, I knew there was more to role-playing than sword & sorcery, and in those latter days, we did try to homebrew systems meant for other games. Our Arcanum/AD&D combination worked just as well for science-fiction, and stats for DC and Marvel characters in Dragon were used as a template to create a superhero game as well. To take the heat off me, someone else from the group became GameMaster, though he tended towards unfair playing fields which ultimately collapsed those games. And perhaps the homemade systems weren't up to snuff, nor did we have proper experience (or even advice) on how to run those games. I remember being peeved at how NPCs died in our superhero game, for example.

But then, something happened to change everything. A hobby shop opened in our area...

In Part II: The Rise of Genre!

Further reading about this era :
How we kicked a guy out of our group WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE!
That one time I went to play in someone else's game
Props I made for those games
Grimtooth's Traps recollections
Fantasy Wargaming recollections
Arcanum recollections
Dragon Magazine recollections