Universe of the Daleks: Chapter one

Might as well post my Doctor Who novella here, serial style. There's so much stuff on AOO, it's difficult to get noticed without frequent posting, and I've pivoted to another graphic novel. Anyway. Here be...

Chapter One: The Impossible Visitor

Colonel Sergei Valentin Malevich checked the forward hatch of his Soyuz capsule as it swung around the earth at 27,600 kilometers an hour.

Satisfied everything was in order for docking with Salyut I, he spun about and propelled himself into the descent module.

As he passed through the ring, there was a tremendous impact against the hull that slammed Sergei’s stocky frame against the inner hatch rim, knocking the wind out of him.

A clatter of sharp metallic pings against the hull, then silence.

A micrometeoroid's impact could be catastrophic... and this was significantly larger than that!

Out the porthole, bright blue oceans flicked to the black void of space and back, again and again, like a strobe light.

There was no time to waste. The pilot-cosmonaut slotted down into his moulded Kazbek command seat and buckled himself in. He took a brief moment to smile at the crumpled, faded photo of his wife Sofia, and little Anya, affixed to the dash. “I will get back to you,” he said, and fired controlled bursts of the attitude control thrusters.

Slowly, gradually, the craft’s spin slowed, then stopped.

The blur of iridescent blue and jet black out the window resolved into a hazy line separating both. He squinted: dozens of bright metal shards, gently curved arcs of gleaming silver and iridescent nodules, spun through space outside the porthole, along with sections of… the Soyuz capsules’ heat shield.

He exhaled expletives.

He flicked the radio switch on, opening a channel to Roscosmos Control.

Silence.

He toggled the switch several times.

Nothing.

The Rassvet communications system was down.

A faint hiss alerted him to another issue: hull integrity had been compromised!

Sergei sighed and slumped back. Misfortune was the price of aiming high.

When it rains, it pours, as the farmers of his home town in Siberia were so fond of saying.

He cycled through options. Donning his spacesuit and depressurizing the hull seemed the best option. He just needed to reach the space station, contact ground control, and wait for a relief mission.

It would be fine.

No cause for panic.

He fumbled for his bulky helmet as a dark shadow passed over the window. Curious, he leaned over, pressing up against it, his breath fogging the glass, and peered out.

A large, conical object floated into view. It moved with deliberation, as if under power, yet he saw no evidence of thrusters, or propulsion of any kind. Magnetic perhaps?

It was a meter and a half tall; the lower-half was faceted, with rows of embedded nodules running the length, topped by a gleaming dome, out of which jutted what was unmistakably an eyestalk. Two short cylinders flanked the stalk, atop of the gleaming dome.

As he gaped at it, the cylinders flashed with a fierce blinding light, and a hysterical machine voice rang inside his head: “Infection detected. Exterminate!”

Alarmed, Sergei snatched the attitude controls and fired thrusters. “Do svidaniya!” The Soyuz spacecraft lurched forward, and the unwelcome guest vanished from view.

The periscope camera showed a debris field of fragments ahead. They pinged harmlessly against the hull.

Sergei’s eyes went wide as the unwanted visitor slid back into view out the porthole. He initiated erratic firing, jerking the capsule this way and that, to no avail. The guest easily maintained its relative position.

What was this thing? A capitalist ship killer? American sabotage? Did the corrupt West even have such technology? Or could it be even more fantastical? Aliens, lying in wait for humanity to slip the surly bonds of earth, only swat us back down like an upstart fly?
“Go away, you stupid machine!” he raged as his fear and frustration rose.

“EXTERMINATE!” roared the shrill voice again.

Sergei’s heart sank. Perhaps little Anya had been right. Perhaps he shouldn’t have volunteered for this mission after all.

With his free hand, he rummaged in his Sokol flight suit pocket, plucked out a flask of vodka, and took a long, final swig.

------

The Doctor stood, legs planted on softly humming deck plating, before the gleaming hexagonal console of the TARDIS, head downcast, while he contemplated eternity as only a Time Lord could. With drama aforethought, he tilted his head upward, one eye on the console mirror. He grimaced, dissatisfied. “Nah, doesn’t work. No audience, and even if there was, I’m just not as portentous!”

He stalked around the control pylon, hands thrust deep in coat pockets, muttering to himself. He stopped abruptly and snapped fully upright.

“I’m bored!” he exclaimed, grinning broadly. “That’s what it is! Must be why I keep all those humans around… Oh dear.” He slumped against the console and ran a hand through his spiky hair. Personal revelations flowed: “Without them, I… don’t know what to do with myself. What does that even mean?”

An alarm squawked and shook him out of reverie. Console lights flashed and data feeds chittered excitedly.

“Now, now, steady on, old girl” he soothed the TARDIS, patting the console. “I’ve plenty of—wot’s that?” Hazel eyes darted over readouts: the exquisitely sensitive TARDIS detectors had picked up an emergency time shift!

Who was left to mess with time, but him?

“Not too far off,” mused the Doctor, tightening the scanner scope. “Jackson was, what, 1851? We’re… ah! May 5th, 1971. Earth orbit… that’s odd.” He gave a blinking readout a sharp tap. Alien text flowed across the tiny scope. “Dalek. Unmistakable. Up to new tricks, eh? Well, I’ve come up with a few of my own!” He scampered around the console, flipping switches, spinning dials and pressing buttons. “Once more into the breach!” He flipped the materialization switch.

With a great wheeze, the central column flared white. It rose and fell like some kind of temporal butter churner. A groaning, shuddering sound filled the ship.

------

Outside Soyuz, the whisk-like appendage protruding from the alien’s casement dazzled Sergei’s eyes with a brilliant green light. Then, somehow, the light turned in upon itself, and the machine… rippled. Chunks of it collapsed at angles Sergei’s eyes couldn’t make sense of, as if it were happening in dimensions beyond his perception.

“SPATIAL ANOMALY!” grated the disembodied voice. “ALERT! VORTEX–AAIIEEEE!”

There was a blinding flash, a resigned wheeze, and all at once the alien was replaced with a British police call box.

Sergei gaped again.

He looked down accusingly at his flask, then back out the portal.

He blinked.

It was still there.

He’d seen these police boxes on his tour of London back in ‘61, with Yuri.

“Chto za huynya?” he blurted. There was no rational, sane reason for one to suddenly appear 450 kilometers above the surface of the earth!

Then the rough wooden doors of the blue box flung inward. Golden light flooded out.

He squinted and held up a hand to shield his eyes.

The silhouette of a man appeared, framed by a shimmering halo. Behind him was a vast control room, far too big to fit inside the box.

As Sergei’s eyes adjusted, he could make out more detail: the man wore a sharply fitted pinstripe blue suit and a taupe overcoat. His hair was spiky at the front, and he had a big, stupid grin on his face.

Alarmingly, the man wore no protection against the harsh, cold vacuum of space.

Impossible!

As if reading his thoughts, the stranger grinned even more broadly, reached out, and tapped the porthole. He stabbed a forefinger at the docking hatch, and spoke. Despite the vacuum, Sergei could hear him cheerily say, in fluent Russian no less, “Privyet, comrade! You’ve got some good sized gashes in your ablator plating. Fancy a lift back down?”

Sergei stared, dumbfounded. Then he drained the last of his flask, pocketed the picture of his family, and propelled himself towards the bow of his wounded ship.

One had to deal with reality, however unreal, after all.

------

After setting the TARDIS cortex onto the trail of the Dalek, the Doctor sat down for a quick, convivial tea with the bewildered cosmonaut. The poor fellow was clearly having difficulty processing, which was understandable.

Nothing like tea and crumpets to settle the mind!

Temporal disruption eddies faded quickly, The Doctor explained: it was vitally important they find out what the Daleks were up to, and why.

The prospect filled The Doctor with giddy excitement. A tantalizing new challenge! Something for his vast looping intellect to sink its proverbial teeth into. Puzzles and problems and more!

He did love them so.

It would be great to have a mission again. A purpose. Meaning.

As warm fuzzies washed over him, without warning, the TARDIS was struck by a jitter. Queen Victoria’s fine china spilled onto the floor, erupting into a cascade of porcelain shards.

“Well, t-that’s n-n-not g-gooood!” The Doctor exclaimed as he shot to his feet in a staccato of fractured temporal shards. He stumbled forward, grabbing at the hexagonal console to steady himself. Had he left the TARDIS’s brakes on again?

Sergei dodged his own oxygen tank as it careened erratically across the deck plating. “W-w-what is this? What is happening?” he spluttered, holding up a dainty china cup in one hand.

As the vessel lurched violently forward and back, the Doctor hauled himself along the console. He looked as if he were climbing Everest; reaching out with a trembling hand, stretching with every fibre of his being, he flicked one ruby red switch.

The TARDIS snapped back into the flow of time with a thunderous crack.

A blur of out of sync selves rippled around Sergei, who was now bug eyed. The poor fellow looked like he was about to toss his biscuits.

The Doctor’s haze of multi-timeline selves, however, were nonplused. He wobbled over to Sergei, an accordion of visages contracting and splaying out, and patted the cosmonaut on the shoulder reassuringly. “I’m going to see where we are-re-re-re...” his voice echoed. “It’ll settle down in a minute.”

------

The Doctor poked his head out of the TARDIS. Took a sniff. Satisfied, he slipped outside and took a few unsteady steps; a fading blur of iterations flowed after and through him, each bemusedly half-aware of the others. Small wonder the poor cosmonaut was overwhelmed, this sort of timey-wimey nonsense was challenging even for a Time Lord. Loops of consciousness from multiple realities interwove, cross-pollinating, implanting memories of other realities into the recesses of his already crowded mind.

He steadied himself on the still warm faux-wood TARDIS frame and took a deep breath.

The echoes finally faded, and he suddenly felt very alone.

“Well! That doesn’t happen every day.” He patted his striped blue suit down, snapped taut the taupe overcoat, and fully took in his surroundings.

The TARDIS had landed in a clearing between several ruined buildings. Dark grey clouds loomed menacingly overhead. The ground was littered with concrete chunks, half-melted steel beams and copious debris. There were stacks of bricks and rotten wooden planks dusted with ash resting against the ragged remains of a wall that cupped the TARDIS. A tattered poster declared, in faded red lettering:

EMERGENCY REGULATIONS: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO DUMP BODIES INTO THE RIVER.

“Charming,” sniffed the Doctor. “Not taking a dip then.”

To his left, a broad river, about 60 feet down a gravelly slope, cut through the ruins of what had once been a great city.

It all felt disturbingly familiar.

“Have I been here before?” he chortled to himself. “Or am I yet to come?” A noise behind him and whirled about. It was Sergei, the cosmonaut, stumbling out of the TARDIS.

“Tovarish!” called the man. “What was that? I could see myself, hear my thoughts, mine yet… not mine.”

“Temporal jitter,” said the Doctor, scanning the horizon. Far to the north, columns of smoke crumpled into the crisp grey sky. “It’ll pass.” Smokestacks jutted above the ruins to the south.

He felt a chill of recognition. It couldn’t be!

He had to get a better look. See what they were attached to.

He scampered up a concrete outcrop; from this vantage point he could see the stacks led down to… the Battersea Power Plant! The remains of it, anyway: two of its great brick smokestacks were missing, the outer walls pockmarked and scorched. A large metal sphere loomed beside it, streaked with rust and ringed by a narrow walkway. Low pressure gas storage, the Doctor mused.

“Incredible,” said Sergei. “Where… where are we? It looks like Leningrad, during the war.”

“Not quite. London, circa 2164,” said the Doctor softly. “Give or take a decade.”

This is where he’d bidden farewell to his granddaughter, Susan, all those lives ago.

Or would.

He wasn’t sure which timeline he was even in, thanks to that temporal jitter. Time travel was inherently multi-universal, flitting about infinite possibilities interwoven into a great big ball of timey-whimey stuff.

“Pizdets,” swore Sergei, as realization sunk in. “We finally did it. Nuclear war.”

The Doctor shook his head. “No… Not this time.”

A breeze from the river reached them. It carried the unmistakable stench of death. “Come on!” The Doctor clambered over the loose rubble to the water’s edge, with Sergei close behind.

At waters’ edge, jumbled flotsam and waves gently lapped at cracked remains of a pier. The mud brown river beyond was filled with corpses. Hundreds of them, bloated, purple, bobbing and spinning, carried along by a swift current.

The Doctor frowned.

Earlier, then.

Maybe 2140, when the plagues seeded by the Daleks were still doing their work.

“So much for the emergency regulations,” mused the Doctor quietly. “How very unlike Londoners.”

Sergei pulled out a handkerchief and placed it up against his face.

The Doctor clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and thought back to an earlier life. Lives. The journey of at least two selves had intersected here, both times with the Daleks. This place was temporal taffy, a knot in spacetime, pulling in the same players repeatedly, across realities. But the specifics… ah, the specifics! Jumbles of capricious whimsy, a million-billion dice rolls.

Every Dalek attack proceeded with the same pitiless logic: asteroid strikes against major population centres, military installations and the moon bases, closely followed by genetically engineered plagues to ravage the world’s human infrastructure. The beleaguered survivors were left isolated, confused, vulnerable.

Just the way Daleks liked humans.

Other than dead, that is.

He explained the invasion to Sergei. “The object that hit your ship? That was a Dalek. A Time Strategist, to be specific.”

“The alien salt shaker.” Sergei grunted, troubled by the memory. He had felt its cold, merciless hatred in his mind. “Machine creatures.”

“Actually, inside the shell is a living dumpling of hyper-intelligent hate. Terrible at cocktail parties. Even worse everywhere else. I hate cocktail parties.”

“What brought them here? What do they want?”

The Doctor shrugged. “Oh, some batty scheme involving gravity. Planets as ships. Depends on the timeline, but it’s always grandiose. I have to give them props, you know, for engineering evil.” He sniffed the air. “Smell that? The faint metallic tang? ”

Sergei shook his head.

“Residual ozone of cosmic ray bombardment. Degrades DNA. Nasty touch.” The Doctor sniffed again. “Ten years, tops.” He pondered. “This Dalek task force is pre-time travel. Yet I traced that Dalek Time Strategist’s emergency temporal shift here, to post-apocalypse London. Curious…”

Sergei’s brow wrinkled. “What is it doing here?”

“No good! But exactly what kind of no good? Why wasn’t it locked down in the Time War? Is it starting a new one? Is it a precursor?”

“Time war?”

“Aaaah,” groaned the Doctor. How could he explain the Time War in a single, comprehensible sentence, using cultural touch points Sergei would understand? “Imagine the universe… is a film, written by a thousand thousand writers who hate each other and spend eternity rewriting each other’s material.”

Sergei made a face.

“Exactly. More and more so, the longer it goes on. Infinite recursion. Ouroboros eating its tail. Well. I’m mixing metaphors. You get the idea. Doubt any English teachers are left to correct me. Let the double negatives fly…” He frowned and slumped as realization weighed down upon him: they couldn’t leave. Not until whatever kinks the Dalek added to the timeline were smoothed out. Sooner he got to it, the sooner they could get out of this mournful place.

He gave Sergei a quick tap on the back, and set off Westward. “Alons-y! Time to go.”

“Go?” blurted Sergei, perplexed. “Go where, tovarish? It’s ruins in every direction!”

“Wood Lane, tube station. Resistance has a bunker there. Or did. Reality’s a bit interwibbly.” He interwove his fingers and wiggled them. “Like so. Keep an eye out for Dalek patrols. Been a cosmonaut long? Chop chop.”

What's going on? Why are we revisiting a Who Classic? Has the writer lost his mind? Tune in next time to find out!

Max Zing LIVES!

After a short ten-year hiatus, the comic no one missed is back on The Duck with both new old strips and recent ones!

The character Cyber-Death Rat, a drunkard space admiral, is more timely than ever. 

For some reason I have been inspired to write more for his character.

Strange, that. 

New strips are going up once per week, so it'll take time to get around to him. 

First are strips about my nemesis, passwords, which were fresh and new 10 years ago but now seem rather old hat. Like debuting Warlord of Mars after Star Wars. 

Ah well. 

I did put some up on the Max Zing blog.

Universe of the Daleks wraps up at An Archive of Our Own

The story is set in the Tenth Doctor era, mashed into a First Doctor story, thanks to an insolent Dalek Time Strategist hijacking that narrative. 

Timey-whimey, you know.

Much of the Dalek's appeal is due to the incredible design work of Raymond Cusik, who deserves at least as much credit as Terry Nation. 

Originally, the Daleks were just horribly mutated survivors of a nuclear war. They were selfish and nasty, but not yet the one-note fascist villains they ultimately became.

Don't get me wrong: they're awesome one-note villains! 

Here I attempt to give them a little greater depth while reinforcing their narrative function. 

I had fun fleshing out the Dalek mindset; the story features several distinct Dalek characters and gets into their headspace, which obviously isn't possible in the TV show. Named Daleks may not be canon, but I wanted to break out of the show's limitations and go a little deeper. Put more meat on the bone, as it were.

You can check it out here.

Unleashing chaos: The US attack on Iran

Many people are wondering about why the USA invaded Iran.

So am I.

The US government has floated more than half a dozen reasons. Of them, regime change seems the most comprehensible. After all, didn't they 'obliterate' the Iranian nuclear program last year?

My issue with regime change isn't a lack of clarity. 

My concerns are: 

1) Regime change has never been accomplished solely through air power. Pre-1945 military theorists waxed eloquent on its efficacy and potential; Post-1945, theorists expounded endlessly on its limitations. The US firebombed German cities; it dropped more bombs on Vietnam than in the entirety of WWII, but both fought on, despite millions of deaths. 

The best case for air power remains the nuking of Japan. That, however, was not conventional air power. Second, the little known (in the West, at least) Soviet invasion of Manchuria captured millions of Japanese troops and hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of territory, occupied Sakhalin island, and threatened to invade Japan along with the Americans. It was a catastrophic for Japan, and it is arguable this had as much, or more, impact on the Japanese surrender. 

2) Mountainous regions like Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Scotland, the Southern Appalachians, and Iran produce highly tribal, honour oriented warrior cultures. They are relatively isolated in mountain valleys, so defeating one has little impact on another. They are notoriously difficult to conquer. 

3) Iran has one million men under arms. This is something of an occupation force, meant to keep local minorities subdued than an outward directed one. But it is massive. It knows the terrain, and has tens of thousands of drones for which the Americans have no ready defence. Defeating the Iranian army would likely take a force larger than the first and second Gulf Wars combined, cost trillions, and cause unthinkable civilian and military casualties. 

4) Ensuring a friendly regime is installed and maintained would require millions of occupation troops. Even with that, I doubt subduing all of Iran would be possible. Chaos would engulf everything outside core, US occupied population centres. The US military struggled to subdue Afghanistan, which had far fewer resources than Iran and a small fraction of the population, and ended in disaster and defeat.

5) Loss of central control in Iran would atomize the country into dozens of competing factions. It would make the internecine fighting in post-invasion Iraq look like a picnic. State support systems and infrastructure would collapse, leading to humanitarian disaster. Iran has 90 million people. This is at least 3 times as large as Iraq, and that was mostly flat desert. This will be more like a turbo-charged Afghanistan. 

6) Regions that fall into chaos and anarchy tend to produce terrorist groups and violent political movements, for obvious reasons. That will sow chaos around the world for decades to come. They also produce huge waves of desperate refugees that destabilize other countries. 

7) The Strait of Hormuz is in Iraq's backyard. They occupy one side of the strait! Securing passage for giant explosive tanker targets is going to be all but impossible. The damage to the world economy and supply of fuel to both Europe and Asia will be devastating. The US doesn't seem to have considered this. At all. Hegseth just said they didn't have to even worry about it. Breathtaking! Mind you, Iran is letting tankers bound for China through safely. That will reduce the global impact of the blockade on oil prices.

8) Trump's call for 'unconditional surrender' suggests he is living in a fantasy world where he can appropriate the glory of the Allied victory in WWII and make portentous declarations that shape world destiny, except this time without even an iota of wisdom. They say history repeats: first as tragedy and then as farce. We're in the farce stage now.

9) The dead Ayatollah was apparently against getting a nuke. His son, on the other hand, is a proponent. Iran is now highly incentivized to get nukes. Some pundits say they have the material to make 16 bombs already, and the US doesn't know where the material is. Peachy.

10) The American goals do not match their strategy. Any of them. Worse, they cannot end the war without Iran's consent. Sure, Trump can declare victory and walk away, ignoring the Iranians. That doesn't help the oil tankers trying to get through the Strait of Hormuz, and it leaves the Middle East a chaotic mess. Trump, of course, delights in chaos and destruction. 

11) The US is not dependent on Middle East oil, but they do take a good deal of their fertilizer inputs from the region. That will impact American farmers, and drive up prices further. Former American Allies will be hit much worse. Combine this with the disruption to world food supply caused by the war in Ukraine, and things could get dicey. Ukraine exported a lot of wheat to Africa.

12) Iran could hit the desalination plants of the Gulf States. Without them, the population will have to disperse or die of thirst. The US can block missiles, but not the swarms of drones. 

13) The US claims it has eliminated 90% of Iran's missiles and 95% of its drones. I am very sceptical of this claim, but even if true, the Iranians can produce new drones in a local garage. It should also be noted that German aircraft production peaked in 1944, at the height of the Allied bombing campaign. A campaign that was ongoing and cost the lives of thousands of airmen and even more civilians. Is the US going to be pummelling Iran for years to come? 

I hope I'm wrong, that I'm ill informed, that it will all work out for the best. Iran does have a weak point in Kharg island, which processes most of their oil. The Americans may try and occupy it, or hit it with missiles. That would escalate the conflict and prompt the Iranians to hit key infrastructure in the Gulf states.

The US attack looks like a disaster in the making.

F1 vs Weapons

F1 is about something. 

Weapons... not so much. Or at least, it's not about anything in a way I found very compelling.

The main theme of F1 concerns our need to prove ourselves, and the damage we can do in blind pursuit of validation and status. Only by relaxing that laser eyed focus on dominance can one truly excel. We collaborate to compete more effectively; fighting your own team because your ego can't handle, at any point, not being number one, is a losing strategy. 

PJ is the young turk driver in F1, out to prove himself to a tiresome degree, and Hayes is his old veteran foil. Cue lots of old man jokes. 

PJ is an unlikeable ass at first, which is naturally is key to his character arc. 

I'm not a big fan of racing movies, but F1 is sumptuously shot, races are phenomenal, and (joy oh joy) advance the character arcs. It's not just an excuse to film cars going fast. Well. Maybe it is, but there's more than enough character to keep you invested, even if you're not keen on the cars.

Through the scaffolding of car racing, the old codger finds his state of grace, the car designer proves her detractors wrong, and the young buck learns to let go of ego primacy. 

Sweet. 

Now that's a movie with something to say. 

Weapons... has no discernible character arcs. None. Everyone is the same at the beginning as they are at the end.

Unless they're dead.

Frankly, I'm not sure being turned into a vegetable by a witch counts as a character arc.

If you're looking for jump scares, this isn't the movie for you. 

This is a classier kind of horror flick, not a slasher, and it's full of atmosphere and tension. All of that is fabulously well done.

It's unpleasant, but then, it is a horror movie. 

The actors are great, they sell their characters well, but... none of them is very likeable or interesting. 

The villainess is properly nasty and menacing, but also shallow. She needs more depth to be compelling.

Both movies are solid entertainment, but odds are F1 will stick with you longer. 

Villain stagnation and the Universe of the Daleks: Chapter 3

One thing I found frustrating as a kid was how stagnant the Daleks were. They were cool but limited villains, stuck in a repetitive loop of stories that rehashed all the same elements and added little. Good stories, mind you, but it felt like they could go further. Of course, one of the key traits about villains is that they are incapable of growth, instead doubling down on flaws. 

One of my absolute favourite Doctor Who Classic stories is Genesis of the Daleks. This one retcons their origins, but it also moves them forward the furthest since their introduction. It also introduces Davros, an absolutely fantastic character, played to perfection by the fantastic Michael Wisher. Davros has been described as Hitler crossed with Stephen Hawking (basically, a physically crippled yet frighteningly brilliant mad scientist-eugenicist), although that's not how I'd put it. 

Recently, Davies retconned Davros and made him physically abled. Why? Because he felt evil was being associated with disability. I don't agree, and find the retcon patronizing. Not to mention that, despite disability, Davros is one of the most dangerous and compelling villains to ever grace Doctor Who. That said, I get the sentiment. 

Beauty as good and ugly as evil is a trope in the same vein, which runs through fiction and particularly fairy tales. Goblins, trolls, witches, demons, devils, monsters, etcetera are all evil and ugly. Elves and angels are beatific, and therefore good. 

Underlying this logic are biological imperatives: beauty relates to youth and fertility, while the long noses, big ears, and wrinkles of witches and orcs code them as old. So favour the future generations, and discard the old and defunct. Old is dross, young is desire. 

So, should we redo orcs and goblins as beautiful, and elves as ugly, to fight this trope? 

Personally, I'd rather not mess with oodles of originals, and prefer just setting earlier work in context, rather than to 'fix' it. 

I do enjoy NEW work that plays with all manner of tropes. Something I wanted to do more of in future volumes of Dragon Garage. 

Anyway...

Mashing together WWI, space Nazis, eugenics, V2 rockets and body horror into a cracking good story, it also features Tom Baker at his dramatic best, supported by two of my favourite companions. 

True, the effects can't, and don't, live up to the narrative ambition, and the attack of the immobile giant clams is somewhat less than convincing, but the acting and the narrative sell it for me. I don't think kids these days can appreciate it anymore, they're too dependent on glitzy special effects to consume narrative with a less slick surface, but the story really fuelled my imagination as a child.

Heck, I accepted dinosaurs that were obviously hand puppets.

Story editors rejected several Terry Nation scripts because they were repetitive, which pushed Terry to come up with Davros. Stories after Genesis relied on Davros like a crutch, leaving the iconic villains in the background as glorified minions. 

And so, the Daleks remained one note villains: excellent at that one note, but little else. 

No flesh on the bones, so to speak. 

One of my goals with Universe of the Daleks was to flesh them out a bit, show the inner life of Daleks, while at the same time remaining true to their nature, and the thematic and moral purpose they serve in storytelling as villains.

One possible reason for their stagnation could be rights related: they're licensed from Terry Nation's estate, so what can be done with them may be very limited. On the other hand, the god-awful rainbow chiclet Daleks, Moffat's so-called 'new paradigm', would seem to refute that thought. 

You can catch chapter three of Universe of the Daleks over at an Archive of Our Own here. 

Give it a gander and let me know what you think.

I'm releasing a new chapter every Saturday afternoon, matinee time. 

Seems appropriate.

It's a proper old Hinchecliffian tale in style, with (some) banger cliffhangers, and an admittedly slower pace than the more frenetic reboot. 

Mind you, it does star the Tenth Doctor, who's fabulous fun to write for. 

Did I succeed? Did I fail? You decide!

Universe of the Daleks.

It's admittedly not kinky (AOO's real jam). I may post it here eventually instead.

NOTE: I found out there's a Dalek Universe line of stories, so changed the title to Purity of the Daleks, only to find someone has a Purity of the Daleks story out there already, so I changed it back. 

Doctor Who and the Universe of the Daleks: Chapter one

I wrote a fan fic! 

I kid you not. 

Eleven chapters.

The first one has a grand total of 2 views so far!

Two!

Millions cannot be far behind.

It's an old school Doctor Who story, a little Hinchecliffian (my fav era of the show, naturally). 

Talk about back to the future... 

I've never tried Fanfic before, unless you count spec scripts. 

I suppose that's fanfic in a way.

Archive of Our Own posting rules for date of publication: you can't schedule to post in the future (that'd be helpful!) but you can pick any date in the past, so if I want to publish in 1896, I can! 

I don't get it. 

Maybe people are reposting old stories from other places?

Check out the first chapter here.

Plur1bus season finale and recommendation

Plur1bus is visually stunning. The framing of the last few episodes especially so: many shots were so striking and beautiful it was distracting.

In the season finale, Carol has a brief sojourn into bliss with her romantic ideal, Zosia, before The Hive rudely pulls her back down to earth and smacks her head into the pavement a few dozen times. 

Figuratively speaking, of course. 

We get a bevy of other info drops, learn where the signal originally came from, and some strongly hinted at vulnerabilities of The Hive.

Vince Gilligan’s team of writers doesn’t have everything worked out yet, but from the interviews I have listened to, I have confidence they’ll stick the landing. 

This is one of the sharpest, best written shows on air today: I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Give it a watch.

Plur1bus episode 7 review: People are meaning, meaning is people

The episode is split between Carol and Manousos Oviedo (played by Carlos-Manuel Vesga), and it’s visually sumptuous, with plenty of wide, beautifully composed shots of our protagonists on golf courses (Carol) and South American jungle (Manousos). 

Some people are saying that nothing happened this episode, but I believe they're missing the point.

In episode 6, the hive has the James Bond playboy (who's been busy marinating in his superficial extrinsic values) tell Carol it wants to reestablish contact with her. 

She's missed. 

Her response? 

“Fuck’em.” 

Carol don't need nobody, has no vulnerabilities, and doesn't care about anyone's feelings. She's contemptuous of towards... well, pretty much everyone. She's an invulnerable rock! 

Or so she tells herself.

This episode shows Carol’s defiance in socially isolated revelry: she goes golfing, practices her swing on office building windows, heads out solo for a fancy dinner, and even purloins a Georgia O’Keefe original. 

What if we had the zombie apocalypse, but instead of eating brains, they were all really nice, but kept their distance? 

Carol indulges in all the trappings of material wealth, but right from the get-go it’s obvious where this will end, because it’s all so transparently hollow and empty. If your idea of meaning is the accumulation of wealth and possessions, you are in a trap: to maintain equilibrium, you have to keep accumulating more and more and more. It never stops, because material wealth cannot fill the black hole at the centre of a human soul. That’s why billionaires, and our new trillionaire Elon Musk, are never satisfied. The means they use to self-regulate is flawed and insatiable, and ends in despair.

By the end of the episode, Carol’s run into this inevitable conclusion. She has rejected entirely her need for others until now. But total isolation, even for an independent minded misanthrope like Carol, is too much. 

Why? 

Because the universe is meaningless. 

Without people, for example, material wealth doesn’t exist. Wealth is a result of the competition for resources, but if there’s no one else, there’s no competition. There’s no one to envy, no one to lord over, no status to be gained, nothing to share with that special someone.

We give the universe meaning.

People. 

With no one else around, Carol (relatively) quickly realizes her avoidant and anti-social disposition leads to a dead end. 

And she starts to destabilize and fall into despair.

She looks into the void, and it stares right back. 

By the end of the episode, she’s reconnected with the hive, and has an emotional reunion with Zosia (Karolina Wydra). She runs up to her and hugs her tight, bursting into tears. 

She’s realized the truth she's tried so hard and so long to deny: she needs people. She has vulnerabilities.

She's not a rock.

What gives life meaning is human connection and interaction, especially that magical connection we oh so rarely feel, and only with very specific individuals.

That, right there, is meaning.

This is the most revelatory moment for her character in 7 episodes. It's fundamental. Primal.

The more surprising journey is Oviedo’s: he’s travelling north in a spiffy sports car, at least until he reaches the narrow isthmus between North and South America. 

Then he has to proceed by foot. 

The hive pops out of the bushes to warn him, to dissuade him from this dangerous trek, which will surely kill him. 

This leads to one of the most powerful exchanges in the entire show: Oviedo rejects the hive’s offer to fly him to Carol. Instead, he says that nothing on earth belongs to the hive, that they do not belong here, that they have stolen everything. 

Then he tosses a match on his sports car, which he’s doused in petrol, like a badass.

At first, I thought Gilligan might be setting up Oviedo as the Nietzschean Uberman, the rugged individualist, who conquers the world through sheer force of Will. The totally independent human, who relies on no one. 

It’s a childish and egotistical conceit befitting a sophomore that denies the fundamentally social nature of human beings. 

Gilligan, to his credit, doesn’t take the ideological route here, just as he didn’t with Carol. Oviedo’s an impressive, self-reliant guy, to be sure. And he’s got dollops of willpower. He marches through 100 miles of jungle practicing what he's going to say to Carol, while hacking dense foliage with a machete. When he’s poisoned by plant barbs (or the cuts gets infected, whatever), he heats up his machete in a fire and presses it on the wound. 

A second badass moment for Oviedo. In one episode!

And he marches indomitably onward, making Ayn Rand proud, until… he finally becomes delirious and collapses flat on his face. 

Above him, we hear the thrum of helicopter rotors, and see a hive member repelling down a rope to rescue him. 

Gilligan, then, is not interested in simplistic ideological agendas. Rather than didactic simplicity, we get nuanced complexity. 

Personally, I think that better represents the universe as it really is. And it makes the show, and the struggle of the characters, more resonant and meaningful. 

Because Giligan is wrestling with fundamental questions of human existence: the push pull between individual and collective, the poisonousness of extremism, and the nature of meaning. 

Personally, I think this has been done superbly. 

It’s a thinking person’s show, no question, and it has something to say. 

How will things progress from here? 

We’ve seen the thesis, the antithesis, and await the synthesis. 

Carol and Oviedo will meet next episode. Together they’ll discover a way to unlink the hive. What Giligan has planned after that I have no idea. Perhaps the aliens will arrive. Perhaps the hive will open up about its true purpose. 

It knows, how could it not? 

It’s just not been directly asked. 

Yet.

Poggy has an interesting but different take: