Monday, December 7, 2009

8th Doctor - Orbis (ii)

Book(s)/Other Related -
Dr Who: Night Fall? Knight’s End!
The Ninth Doctor - Year Zero
1001 Uses for New Age Crystal Heads


Fluffs - Paul McGann seemed gritty and Northern in this story.
"I’ll shove this sonic drive-screwer where the suns never shine, you clam shits!" Destrii shouts at a critical moment in bed for some baffling lack of reason.
"Ah, Destrii. Your eyes are so dark. You are my nightfall. Or was it you are my sunshine? Or was it, you steal my sunshine? I fancy you, that’s the basic gist of it..."


Goofs -
Apparently it is impossible for trinary star systems to support life. It’s fine to have a completely different universe created by an alien named after pasta who kept the universe in a crystal, but a habitable planet orbiting three suns is just stupid. I hate science.
Why does Ace beat Lucie to death twice instead of just replaying the original beating? Is it just for the hell of it? Why beat her up in the pool when the water there will cushion some of the blows?
How come the Handjob of Moby switches off three suns after six centuries at the bottom of the ocean doing absolutely sod all? Did some passing whelk switch it on or something?
Seriously, how the hell did the guy playing Sor become an actor in the first place.


Fashion Victims -
With her new brunette hairstyle and shiny lip gloss, Lucie has never more resembled a very slutty anthropomorphic duck. Who spends a lot of the story naked, moist and having fights with other teenage girls. Some may call this titilation, others pornography, but me I call it the sole damn reason I keep buying these stupid CDs!


Technobabble -
"See, the noises the shells make tell me where distant objects are, so we can use this to track the sun to the other side of the horizon!"
"Fascinating! You’ve developed a powerful radar telescope using esoteric crystal technology!"
"Yeah, and it works by bouncing sound off a target!"
"...through the vacuum of space?"
"Uh-huh!"
"May I please withdraw my earlier ‘Fascinating’ comment?"
"Hey, this is a telescope for the blind!"
"Yes, and it’s also a gizmo for the scientifically illiterate! Destrii’s right, the science here is all made up!"


Links and References -
There is a Tetrap from "Romp of the Rani" in the background for one scene joining Sor’s cult. This is particularly noteworthy, since it would require ALL FOUR EYES to be removed before it could sign up – now that’s dedication!


Untelevised Misadventures -
600 years’ worth of living in an idyllic utopia with no monsters, TARDISes, Dustbins or other returning characters, apparently. I can hear the fan fic being typed up even now!


Groovy DVD Extras -
All the funky comic strips Destrii was in – and marvel at how this story completely contradicts EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM!!!!

The original version featuring the Ninth Doctor as played by Eddie Hitler and his marvellous Christopher Eccleston impression.


Dialogue Disasters -

The Doctor on his relationship with Destrii –
"I never wanted devotion. All I wanted was a shag."

Ace: We are heading a layer of cosmic sediment where the dregs settle.
Lucie: Like the bottom of a pint?
Ace: ...shut the fuck up.


Sor: This is the City of Light!
Lucie: Bollocks! It’s not a bit like Paris!


Doctor: I’ve studied the three suns and their movements...
Destrii: Your science is all made up.
Doctor: ‘Made up’?
Destrii: Like a song. And with the three-object sky, it gets annoyingly repetitive.
Doctor: You’re saying you think astronomy is a disco beat?!
Destrii: Yeah.
Doctor: ...DAMN IT, I JUST LOVE YOU FISH PEOPLE AND YOUR METAPHORS!


Ace: You can’t pilot the TARDIS! You can’t even work a pedal pin!
Lucie: Ey, I know what I’m doing!
Ace: What, have you read the manual?
Lucie: Nope, not a page. But it’s only 17 volumes, how tough can it be?
Ace: "17"? You mean the ones the Professor stands on to reach his ‘Post-Op Reader’s Wives’ magazines?
Lucie: Yeah.
Ace: That’s not the manual, that’s the Quick Start Guide! The manual has it’s own library to stupid dozy cow!
Lucie: Hang about, what does that button do?
Ace: It’s the Warp Brake, clearly marked "Do Not Press"!
Lucie: Ooooooh! A challenge!
Ace: Uh-oh...


Doctor: Now, we can’t get everyone into the keep, so prime specimens will have to be chosen based on age, weight, general health usefulness to rebuilding civilization, eye colour, breeding potential...
Sor: Hark at the Lifestyle Fascist!
Doctor: Oi! Anyone who disagrees with me can jump off a cliff!
Sor: Hah!
Doctor: Oh, you are going DOWN for that, Blind Pew...


Dialogue Triumphs -

Doctor: Prophesized nightfall swallowing up unbelievers? Superstitious claptrap. You lot of gullible fish-people will be believing in reincarnation next!
Destrii: You mean the ability for an individual to survive death and be reborn in a brand new body?
Doctor: Exactly.
Destrii: Like you say you do all the time?
Doctor: ...yeah, but I’M not a gullible fish-person, am I?


Lucie: Mmm! She tastes like sushi!
Destrii: STOP LICKING ME, YOU FREAK!!!


Aton: Stars – all the Stars – we didn’t know at all. We didn’t know anything. We thought three Stars in a universe is something everyone had matching towels the Stars didn’t notice is Darkness forever and ever and ever and there goes the manta ray and the walls are breaking in and we didn’t know and anything and motion in the ocean it wasn’t a rock it was a rock lobster – rock lobster rock lobster rock LOBSTER – down – down – down said a giant clam clapping dolphin’s wedding lobster rock lobster oohah oohah flippers flipping rock rock LET’S ROCK!!!


Ace: Destrii’s a bit jailbait for you, Professor, isn’t she?
Doctor: I’m not all that old, you know! I may have been here a few hundred years, but we’re an ancient lot us Time Lords. And to be honest, I lost track of how old I really was aeons ago. I tend to round it down a bit, making a few adjustments for variations in year length across the cosmos. I could be four hundred years old, seven hundred, nine hundred; or in some parts of a particularly obscure galaxy, I’d be just... er... two. Right, that should please all you anoraks out there trying to work out my true age – because, however old I am, I’ve STILL got the moves!


Destrii: I didn’t imagine you’d leave us, even though it’s tempting...
Doctor: And where would I go?
Destrii: Cardiff?
Doctor: Cardiff!
Destrii: Perhaps you’ve forgotten what it is you love about Cardiff?
Doctor: Perhaps, Destrii. But I can clearly remember what it is I hate about the place! I’m not leaving here – I’m happy here! My life here means everything! Perhaps I WAS a time-travelling lathario monster-killing crime-fighter, but these centuries of sexy fish-girl action has... changed me. When I got teleported into the ocean, you took me in, nurtured me, nourished me, slept with me... nothing kinky. Unless YOU fancy it?


Sor: This pink prawn, your protector?
Destrii: I happen to like seafood cocktails, OK?


Lucie: Is my blossoming womanhood driving you to distraction?
Doctor: A clue: no.
Lucie: Don’t be mean to me!
Doctor: Oh, sod off and develop a nesting instinct or something!


UnQuotable Quote -
Destrii: I like your sex games, Doctor, I like them very much.


Viewer Quotes -

"This special coincided with the release of Bob Dylan’s new-yet-at-the-same-time-classic album "Together Through Life" and I am more excited about Dylan. After all, an understanding of the career of Dylan is an understanding of Doctor Who - Dylan reinvents himself regularly in a desperate attempt to prolong his work kind of like the Doctor regeneration. Also Dylan makes a direct reference to the Doctor in the song 'Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again', it’s just no one else has ever spotted it. Not even Dylan himself."
- Sparacus "Flamingo" Jones (2008)

"Anxiously waiting as my download crawls along...it really *is* like
a new series of Doctor Who! "94% downloaded"? CURSE YOU INTERNET! NOT CONTENT WITH DELIVERING MY PORNOGRAPHY SLOWLY YOU SLOW MY DOCTOR WHO TO A CRAWL TOO! DAMN YOU!" - Nigel Verkoff (2009)

"All thought and desire passes through Lucie as she finds herself a giant of thought but also flesh, lying upon the highest mounts of the filth world, legs open to creation from the gardens of Eden to revelations at dusk. A generation of fish people worship within her expansive motherhood like Jonah inside the whale. The Doctor cannot take it, as too much time has been wasted and the sacrificial lamb needs to drain itself of white blood. All the elements gush in ecclesiastical time and Lucie’s waters drown the Apocalypse Chaser like a surrogate whore of Babylon! EVERYONE LIVES!"
- Joshua Wynne-Cunt (2009)

"THIS was the season opener? THIS is their attempt to try and bring in new listeners? I’m sorry but this is just... shit! It’s like Moffat starting Matt Smith’s era with a remake of The Weird Planet! Which, for new fans, IS NOT A GOOD IDEA! All this undergraduate goofiness! I WANT GRAVITAS, DAMN YOU!" - Dave Restal (2009)

"It’s one of those lovely ‘realisation’ cliffhangers, as opposed to the more traditional ‘peril’ ones that when the reality of it sinks in, is downright brutal. The listener feels like killing Lucie, never mind letting Ace do it!" - T. Venables (2010)

"Am I the only one who finds Sheridan Smith as Lucie Miller simply an
amazing Doctor Who companion? The one constant high point IMO is the wonderful character of Lucie. She out-acts Paul McGann consistently, and for my money is the best new Doctor Who companion in years, and that includes all the new series TV companions. I feel Lucie is the way
Rose SHOULD have been, and Ms. Smith can out-act Billie Piper in her sleep as far as I’m concerned! Oh, Lucie is sweet, funny, cocky and even wise in her own way. Oh, I wish she would stab me to death!"
- Yellow Sticky Fluid (2007)

"Holy Crap! I didn’t see *that* one coming – and neither did the blind cultists! DAMN YOU!"
- Andrew Beeblebrox (2009)


Psychotic Nostalgia -
"Wow, after the last fifteen times the Eighth Doctor got his amnesia, I was shocked when he was actually able to remember something and it was Lucie who’d lost her memory... anyway. I’ve cut off my fingers. Try one in some soy sauce. They’re nice and crunchy. Mmm. Extremities."


Paul McGann Speaks!
"The main attraction of these stories, their greatest strength, is that we can take the Doctor and his companion in any direction we want. We’ve taken them to so many places and we’ll take them to plenty more, and maybe even do some stuff about how the Doctor is when he’s alone, how he lives with himself, how he views his own psyche... assuming of course David bloody Tennant isn’t doing that exact same thing and we get Cardiff telling us we can’t do that script for the next financial year and by that time, of course, everyone will be going ‘Tch! The TV series did that ages ago - and much better!’. You just can’t win, sometimes, can you? But generally speaking, we have creative freedom. As long as we segue perfectly into Russell T Davies’ version of Doctor Who, which began if you remember, with me being killed off forever. And that knowledge is a great comfort, as knowing my Doctor’s life is set in stone and CAN’T suddenly regenerate into Nick Briggs breaks that psychopath’s twisted heart every day. Good times. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there lots of Doctor Who fans, adherents full of zeal making these stories, and they’re not HALF as disturbed as Briggsy, and I’d hate to give that impression. No one should be associated with that toothbrush-wielding nutter if it can at all be avoided."


Sheridan Smith Speaks!
"It’s heartbreaking, really, at first. After all they’ve been though together, she doesn’t have a clue who he is - Lucie’s totally forgotten who the Doctor is in, like, thirteen minutes. What a bitch. You just want to shout in her face! It’s frustrating and upsetting, just thinking about! I punched the wall when I read the script. But really, it shows her incredible egomania. There’s no companion quite like her, with her head jammed so far up her own arse. I was honestly hoping she’d died at the end of the last story, but this is Doctor Who, and there’s always a cop out. Mind you, quantum beatings are a lot cleverer than Lucie somehow miraculously surviving in an escape pod or something. It could easily have been me just turning up out of the blue and saying, ‘Oh, Doctor, blumin ell you’ve been naive, ain’t ya?’"


Laura Solon Speaks!
"I was intrigued by the role, as I’d never played a nympho fish-girl before. Destrii’s clearly lusting after the Doctor, in a slightly creepy way. No matter how often they’ve bonked during the day, whenever he falls asleep, she tries to have sex with him. He’s probably woken up once or twice and wondered what the hell she was doing straddling him when both were naked, but she would have had a really clever excuse. And that lifestyle appeals to me."


Eddie Hitler Speaks!
"Anyway, Obituary. What a lovely bundle of fun. Pity about the ending, which isn’t so much ‘inspired’ more sort of ‘cold-turkey-induced hallucinations’. I’m not 100 per cent what I drank before I wrote this, but I have a nasty feeling it was a bottle of bleach knocked back with some old spice mixers. Ah. TAXI! THE COPACOBANA!!"


Trivia -
The production code for this particular story is not 3.1, it’s not 3.2, it’s 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944. I bet you didn’t know THAT, did you?


Rumors & Facts -

For reasons no one is really certain of because thinking deeply about just leads to all kinds of depression, there was no full-length season of Doctor Who in 2009. The BBC were determined to try and fill the gap with a new season... ON RADIO! With the Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller!

Observant audience members, however, had noticed that the 2008 season of Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller stories had ended with the former falling off a cliff and dying while the latter was beaten to death by a baseball-bat-wielding Ace. Thus the idea of either of them returning in any way, shape or form was just a tad unlikely.

As he was single-handedly responsible for getting them into this mess, Nicholas Briggs was sent in to try and resolve the cliffhanger. After six months of uninterrupted effort, Briggs’ sole result was a vague suggestion they rip off that Sherlock Holmes story The Empty House - since it revolved around Holmes’ miraculous survival after falling off a cliff when some kinky wrestling with Moriarty got out of hand.

Executive Producer for the BBC7 Audio Adventures of the Eighth Doctor, Edward Elizabeth Mguabe Hitler, realized this wasn’t going to help. The new season needed a fresh start, a reboot accessible for a completely new audience accustomed to the high standards... well, the standards of the BBC Wales TV series. As such, despite Briggs’ very clear ideas of plagiarizing more 1970s stories, was categorically NOT allowed to write the story resolving the cliffhanger. He wasn’t even allowed to give a detailed synopsis, but that didn’t stop him trying - and it was, as ever, just The Empty House with Holmes replaced by the newly-regenerated Doctor played by Nicholas Briggs.

Disaster struck two hours after the season had been commissioned when Briggs started spreading scandalous rumors that Sheridan Smith was no longer interested in playing Lucie Miller and had decided to emigrate to the United States. This bit of bare-faced slander was spectacularly unsuccessful, as Smith was in the room at the exact time that Briggs was spreading the rumors, and was actually saying at the time how much she’d love to do another four seasons with Paul McGann, who she still had the screaming thigh sweats for.

Unfortunately, McGann really WAS no longer interested in Doctor Who - assuming you could look someone in the eye and say he’d EVER been interested in Doctor Who - and besides, his new TV show Collision had a ridiculously-extended recording schedule ending sometime in September 2157, making him unable to record a single play. The news caused Briggs to scream in ecstasy, which disturbed and nauseated everyone pleasant.

Smith announced that if "Billiard Ball Bonce" was chosen to play the Doctor, she was walking and, to be honest, so was Hitler. In desperation he decided the only thing to do was reveal that the Eighth Doctor perished in Vengeance of Moby and regenerated into the Ninth Doctor, played by ANYONE who wasn’t Nicholas Briggs. It eventually came to Hitler’s attention that there was ALREADY a proper actor strongly associated with the role of the Ninth Doctor: Christopher Eccleston.

Thus, it was decided that the new season would be the first series of the Ninth Doctor and Lucie Miller. When Alan Barnes pointed out that Eccleston’s life had already been fully explored on TV, especially as Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor was on screen seen to regenerate into Eccleston after being hit and run by Billie Piper in a VW Beetle, Hitler responded: "Oh piss off, you sad anorak!"

Hitler decided the next season would be Year One for the Ninth Doctor, giving him a completely different emotional story arc with a totally separate blonde teenage chav. This would reboot Doctor Who and make it accessible for a new audience! There was just one problem - Paul McGann had mixed up his dates and was, in fact, totally available to record the season that was now written for his big-eared Northern successor.

After much thinking, much discussion and much, much drinking, Hitler decided that simply cutting the scene where Lucie notes the Doctor’s changed his face and copied her accent would be enough of a rewrite. He was confident that, even though the other stories in the season had the Doctor bitching about "stupid apes", declaring things "fantastic" and regularly introducing himself as "the Ninth Doctor", no one would notice such irregularities or suspect the truth. And even if they DID, Hitler had the cunning backup of not giving a shit either way.

The non-regeneration of the Eighth Doctor arguably stuffed up any kind of dramatic weight Obituary possesses - with the Doctor as sheriff of a small town who has hung up his spurs, whereas could once have been a monumental life-changing development full of passion and drama as we wonder if the new Doctor will regain his mojo... turns out to be a passing fad of the old Doctor who shrugs it off within half an hour and acts like absolutely nothing has happened.

All in all, there’s a lot to enjoy in this story. It’s a sick, sad start to the season, setting the perverted standard for the subsequent stories at a high level bordering on requiring police assistance. It would have been a triumph... if it weren’t for that godawful remix of the theme tune hanging around like the musical equivalent of anal warts. Should we admire Big Finish for standing their ground in the face of such universal criticism? Or demand to know what the fuck is wrong with these people that they like making their listener’s ears bleed with despair at the opening of every story?

Worse, the publicity blitz that engulfed the third season of Eighth Doctor and Lucie stories made the last four years of televised Doctor Who look like a vague mention in some toilet wall graffiti. There were flyers printed, bill posters put up, whole websites devoted to spamming the inboxes of everyone living in Britain, death squads threatened to randomly assassinate people unless they tuned in, and whole channels of TV and radio were emptied of nothing but trailers for the new show.

Indeed, Obituary was the first story offered to the public via the funky BF download service. This proved to be a monumentally-bad mistake, as everyone was so Who-starved and desperate they all tried to download it at once and the amateur on-site server promptly melted under the strain, without a single person managing to get an episode on their iPods.

As the IT support team were all getting pissed and laid at the Glasgow Literary Festival, no replacements were offered and the entire fanbase turned away in frustrated disgust and vowed never to fall for Big Finish’s lies about "professionalism" ever again.

The irony was enough to clog arteries - having spent ages writing and crafting the perfect jumping-on-point for newcomers, no newcomers were actually able to hear the bloody thing. All the balanced fan-pleasing guff and accessible unsubtlety was utterly wasted and the 2009 gap year remained completely unfilled.

Upon learning this, Hitler knocked back a can of lager and mused, "Treat em mean, keep em keen! See ya next Saturday night, you bastards!" before falling over and lying very, very still.

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