Beautiful Idiot

Hello, Pretty! Thirty years ago this month:

 I was on the verge of leaving Hamilton Grammar for good.British Marvel was enjoying a resurgence and it was the last hurrah for the Bronze Age at DC, as thier product slowly became ever more indistinguishable from Marvel. You could still buy comics off the spinner rack on the ground floor of Lewis's in Argyle Street.
A decade earlier, I'd got this in Glasgow-possibly in Queen Street Station:

and twenty(!) years ago, when I was living in Sannox Gardens, prior to the time I started working in the Census office:

On the one hand, Simonson's very modern take on the FF; on the other, a DC miniseries set in the 50s. There's one of my favourite Earth-2 villains, Slaughter Swamp's Solomon Grundy. This ghoulish zombie gangster has been played as DC's Hulk and held the JSA at bay in the late 40s.
Those pics are supposed to serve as a segue from the comics-heavy blogs of the last few weeks to this oft-postponed Dr.Who-centric post. Before I review the past few episodes of the tv series, I want to recap the audio adventures I've been listening to.

I withdrew this selection from Elgin Library a couple of days before I heard about the passing of Elisabeth Sladen. I wish she'd been able to read this adventure- the debut of Sarah Jane Smith- but Jeremy (Boba Fett) Bulloch does a good job, particularly with Irongron and the eponymous Sontaran, Linx. Bulloch's impressions of thses characters are perfect evocations of the original performances. However, his Pertwee Doctor is so bland as to be inconspicuous but on the plus side, Terrance Dicks' space battle prologue is crisp, pacy and highly effective. He could be a very deft writer when the mood took him. The story peters out towards the end but it's an enjoyable listen.

Big Finish's To the Death, the final Eighth Doctor/Lucie Miller adventure, attempts to ape the kitchen- sink finales of Russell T. Davies. The Daleks have decide to re-stage their "Invasion of Earth 2150 AD" with the assistance of Graeme Garden's Meddling Monk and the Doctor and his extended family have to stop them.
 This is a rather flat rehash of The Stolen Earth/Journey's End which also, confusingly, draws upon the Sixth Doctor audio Patient Zero. I was reminded of the 80s X-men blurb "This issue-everybody dies!" The death of Tamsin Drew surprised me and underlined really how pointless her arc had been- although it did afford the Monk some character development. I was equally surprised that Susan survived while the Doctor's grandson Alex did not. The loss of a family member was overshadowed by Lucie's sacrifice in one of the most affecting scenes in the play. A literal breakdown in communications leads Lucie to assume that the Doctor is in agreement over her suicide mission to destroy the Dalek scheme. It is a stirring if inevitable exit for the feisty Lancastrian who had become my favourite audio companion.
The grief and rage expressed by the Doctor, who was absent and then passive in the course of this two-parter, would have been an effective catalyst for the Time War; were it not for the fact that there's some hi-jinks with Mary Shelley to come this autumn.

 I found the latest entry in BF's Lost Stories range more rewarding than Briggs' reheated Dalek epic. Thin Ice was called Ice Time when I first read about it over a decade ago in Dr. Who Monthly. It was one of the stories that was supposed to have been part of the unmade Season 27 and would have written out Ace.

I don't know how many times I read this article- remember, this was a good couple of years before BF's audios began and the BBC had just started their series of Eighth Doctor books. There was no great likelihood that Dr. Who would ever return to tv other than, maybe, as repeats on Theme Nights!  My absolute favourite part of the (purely fictional) feature was the spotlight on Richard Griffiths' portly, alternative Eighth Doctor and his companion Kate Tollinger, played by Julia Sawalha. It's a shame that I can't post the late Phil Bevan's Steampunk illustration of one of the Tardis's most elegant pairings.
Anyway, Thin Ice is the audio realisation of that Ice Warrior story fourteen years later and introduces Sam Tollinger, now known as Marcus Creevy.  Ricky Groves, formerly Walford's Garry Hobbs, plays my favourite new character (a kind of  Michael Caine archetype) and I rather hope he's featured in the other stories in this miniseries. Posh safecracker Raine is born in this play; the Kate/Sam- Raine/Marcus pairing prefigures both the stock-earthiness and domesticity of the Powell Estate. Unfortunately, like the Cybermen, the Ice Warriors are very dull on audio; their culture has been explored in depth by BF and unlike the Daleks, I don't feel any excitement when I hear them. A lengthy hiatus would be most welcome.
Since Ace doesn't enter the Prydon Academy at the conclusion of Episode Four, it's unclear where exactly-if at all- the story fits in the chronology of her adventures. It would be brave of BF however to finally close the book on one of  the longest-serving companions.

I put this blog off for a couple of weeks because I'd posted several times on Facebook that I was irritated and frustrated by the developments in this season of Doctor Who. For a while, I was wondering if my ardour for the series was finally cooling off after all these decades...
I watched the second episode, after a couple of  glasses of wine with Emma on a sunny Spring evening. From  the sweeping landscapes of the American west, The Day of the Moon swiftly descended into a  murky David Lynch-style take on the conspiracy thriller, visited ad nauseam by The X-Files about a decade and a half ago. There were several disquieting moments in the orphanage but yet more questions  were raised with no resolutions on offer: is River Song the child in the spacesuit? Who is the eypeatch woman?  
Not the first time, the Doctor had a genocidal solution to the menace posed by the Silents. That ruthlessness didn't bother me as much as the enigmatic codas. Amy Pond's quantum pregnancy and the regenerating girl were more frustrating than jaw-dropping in a willful, self-styled "blockbuster" which seemed designed to baffle the audience. Allegedly, this is what the "Thinking Fan" enjoys. God help them.

The Thinking Fan also seemingly enjoyed the meandering, plotless sprawl of the unlamented Lost; another series which habitually followed up "shock" endings with episodes of unrelated wheel-spinning. Curse of the Black Spot was just such a piece of  inconsequential fluff; an unconvincing cash-in on the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The episode was a muddled mishmash of shop-worn  tropes- is the Siren an alien parasite? No, suddenly, she's the Emergency Hologram from Star Trek: Voyager. Beyond Captain Avery's extremely improbable ability to appropriate and  fly a spaceship, there was no exploration at all of the character's criminality -just a superficial and saccharine subplot with his moppet son. I hadn't been so disenchanted with the series since the days of Martha Jones and the Quaterm-Lazarus Experiment.

I had misgivings about The Doctor's Wife; I was expecting superfluous fawning over Neil Gaiman's script. But while the story recalled the Compassion arc in the EDAs around ten years ago, there was a freshness and charm about it and also some dark, disturbing imagery, in an episode that borrowed from the nightmare nursery worlds of Tim Burton. I figured out that Idris wasn't Romana, the Rani or Zurvana a couple of hours before the episode aired but Gaiman employed the mythology and iconography of the show deftly and without any of the cloying soap operatics that RTD would have indulged in.

The Rebel Flesh last Saturday was a trad Base Under Siege story on the surface but also asked some interesting questions about identity (although quite why machines couldn't be used in mining acid wasn't sufficiently explained). It remains to be seen whether this first half of the split season will tie up any of the numerous loose ends to my satisfaction.One thing I can say:  my mum approves of Matt Smith.

On my trip back up the A9 from Glasgow to Inverness on Sunday, I finished reading Paul Finch's Hunter's Moon. Last year's Sixth Doctor Lost Story Leviathan, which Finch completed from his late father's scripts, shares rather quaint touches of  Seventies sadism and sexism with Moon. I found the hunters became a little indistinguishable toward the end and the human trafficking premise reminded me of the earliest Ninth Doctor book Winner Takes All. A pacy read without any real surprises, Moon isn't offensively bad: just a little cliched and old-fashioned.
Next time, I may take a look at April and May's comics ; or I may blog on the 70s Secret Origins reprint series; or perhaps the genius of Gil Kane.