Interludes
Nitcentral's Bulletin Brash Reflections:
Doctor Who:
Audios:
Interludes
I, Kamelion
Synopsis: Tairot is a haven for technology, dedicated to improving the quality of life for its inhabitants one cerebral implant at a time. Naturally, its mad ruler is harvesting minds to create a monster and naturally, Kamelion's consciousness gets swapped with that of the human trying to save said planet, and naturally, he's devastated when they swap back and he loses his emotions, though the mad tyrant is brought down by Kamelion's recording of him.
Thoughts: I have virtually no memories of BF's Kamelion trilogy so maybe Kamelion describing TEGAN as a FRIEND isn't actually a nit but it sure feels like one. Since when has TURLOUGH being the looking-forward-to-the-next-adventure type? Why the hell doesn't Kamelion read the account of his adventure? Kamelion has never been able to have a heartbeat? I'd've thought an artificial heart would be pretty simple compared to eating, strumming a lute, etc.
Dream Nexus
Synopsis: Two years after the AI Network linking everyone's brain-implants collapsed, leaving half the population of the Earth Empire in a coma, the fungus forests of Zoda-Kappa offer a possible cure. Hebe's possessed by the trapped intelligence of the forest that's planning on taking over the galaxy, while Mel's forced into The Dream. Luckily, Mel still manages to whip up a sleeper-awakening algorithm while a jammer keeps the hollomorph at bay.
Thoughts: Drags on rather. The Empire catastrophically collapsed in the late thirty-ninth century since when? Gazillions of people are somehow kept alive in unconscious state for two years how and by whom, exactly? What with, y'know, THE ECONOMY and LAW AND ORDER having collapsed? Mel's a 1980s computer programmer, not a miracle worker. Why is the Doctor's estimation of the Marines Corps' dating out by 1,300 years?
The Haunting of Bryck Place
Synopsis: 1540s Hackney: every night a revenant rises from the grave, with strange embroidery on her jacket...until servant Agnes spots the ghost in the flesh in a pub. So the Doctor and Ace accompany her to Bryck Place, discovering that a picture frame is a decaying alien memory-vault recording 'em. He tells Ace to reboot it by giving it a memory but she wails that 'I haven't got anything worth remembering' so he gives it a memory of her.
Thoughts: Thoroughly dreary. So in order to not-see the harmless spectre, Agnes regularly abandons her post to walk for miles to London, alone, at night? Yeah, cos THAT'S totally safe. 'Doesn't look like Hackney to me' - this would be spectacularly stupid of Ace even if she HADN'T visited blacksmith-on-the-village-green nineteenth-century Perivale. Ace asks the Doctor if it's really a ghost BEFORE she asks him if it's a hologram?
Gobbledegook
Synopsis: The Fifth Doctor drops in on his friend Velar, the dried-up old lizard ex-ambassador Chief Librarian of Batearia - just as his sacred texts are turning to gobbledegook. Eventually resolving into 'We are the Thewth.' The Doctor eventually deduces that said Thewth have lost their language, memory and culture. He restores it to them - and the books to their original state - by, um, making the students transcribe their alphabet.
Thoughts: Where the hell are all the OTHER librarians? No one alerts the global - or at the very least university - authorities about this threat to their civilisation? 'You see it Doctor, oh, please, tell me that you do' - Velar already knows the Doctor can see it. Sadly fails to explain how Velar ended up with his bizarre mining career. Not sure if the plot is, well, gobbledegook or I just couldn't be bothered to listen properly. Probably both.
The Doctor and His Amazing Technicolour Nightmare Coat
Synopsis: A forlorn thread hangs from the Doctor's raiment of elegance, accoutrement of sophistication, rare habiliment of - um, anyway, he goes to its homeworld of Calpasha to get it fixed, accidentally steals a fortune from a six-foot otter while absconding with a smiley-cat-t-shirt, abandons Melty-Jane Bish to scrub loos for a month, gets hijacked, and gets jabbed by an umbrella-wielding clone before reuniting with the TARDIS and That Coat.
Thoughts: 'The Doctor is terribly good at not dying' - well, not Old Sixie so much, not that I'm complaining - 'and, at the same time, making sure people around him don't die either' - well, THAT'S blatantly untrue of ANY Doctor. So no explanation for these clones' unique telepathic powers? The Sixth Doctor is obsessed with clothes and SHOPPING? He certainly doesn't seem to have grasped the concept of PAYING for said shopping...
Frozen Worlds
Synopsis: Lying on a weak point in the space-time continuum, arable world Naurus is home to numerous pan-dimensional bat-like Flitters - whose 'bite' enables you to see loads of aborted alt-unis. Only Ace being a time-traveller, she gets trapped in an endless looping multiverse...until she finally solidifies one future by jumping into it. The Doctor uses Ace's blood to whip up a cure for the artron-mutating contamination she caused.
Thoughts: Ace: 'Doesn't every decision create a parallel universe?' Doctor: 'A common misconception' - Who really has got to gets its alt-uni stance sorted out. Why does the Doctor try to stop Ace when he's already SEEN the effects of her getting bitten - he'd be changing history? I just can't believe that Ace could wipe out twenty stars by dropping a stone on her shoe. OR that her mind runs ocean-deep. OR that she decided to stay frozen.
The Ultimate Poe
Synopsis: 'Are you perchance here to narrate my doom?' The Master's plugged the Doctor and Mel into the Matrix...with Edgar Allan Poe. So they skip from a laser-bolt-shooting raven to catacombs to dancing at a doomed masque to having the House of Usher fall on them. But Poe is valiantly attempting to protect them and they wake up to reverse the polarity of the neuron flow by flicking some switches...before returning Poe home to die.
Thoughts: Um, how did the Master capture the Doctor and Mel? Why didn't he just try TCE-ing 'em instead of hoping for some bizarre fantasy scenarios to do the job for him? Vegetarian Mel tucks into some meat? Why does it only occur to the Doctor AFTER being walled up alive that being walled up alive might not be a good idea? He loves joining book clubs? He never mentions any of this in Nevermore? Why does this go on so bloody long?
Courtesy of Emily
By Emily Carter (Emily) on Tuesday, March 08, 2022 - 2:13 am:I, Kamelion:
Um, yeah. Sadly it didn't hold my attention sufficiently to come up with more than the bare minimum of nits. I just don't care about the whole robot-turns-into-a-pink-fleshy-thing trope. And if I did I still wouldn't care in KAMELION'S case.
By Emily Carter (Emily) on Friday, June 03, 2022 - 10:20 am:Dream Nexus:
Whatever happened to those distress calls at the end of Maelstrom? Don't tell me Hebe actually hangs around for loads and loads of adventures and I have to give her her own thread or anything? Not to mention hearing her whinge about people touching her wheelchair...(And now no doubt about being possessed which even she would have to admit is more violating than people touching her wheelchair...)
Hebe's heart leapt into her throat when she saw a body that she thinks is Mel? That's sweet, given how totally she didn't give a toss about Mel apparently drowning in Maelstrom...
Why does the Empire only span one galaxy in 3895 when THREE! I HAVE SEEN THREE! in 4126? (Planet of the Ood.) Sure, conquering a couple of galaxies in a couple of centuries isn't unthinkable...unless of course your empire needs a bit of time to recover from the most horrific imaginable collapse...
By Emily Carter (Emily) on Sunday, July 17, 2022 - 1:20 am:The Haunting of Bryck Place:
'Gordon Bennet! What's that smell!' - Ace has never been around medieval-ish people before?
'Tudor London - the city that never sleeps' - isn't that Manhattan?
'To anyone else, the scream might have passed unnoticed in the din' - not from the sound effects it wouldn't - said scream is very loud, the pub-voices very soft.
'What if she doesn't believe me?' - er...you could show her the ghost. Moron.
Wait, the Doctor has a paper that 'apparently' says he's an Ambassador from Scotland? Since when did SEVEN have psychic paper?
Ace says 'You don't sound Scottish'? Yes he does!
Didn't we HAVE this 'confused house trying to exist in several different time-periods at once' done much better very recently - in Ninth Doctor audio Auld Lang Syne?
Gods, who wants angsty-Ace back after all those NAs?
I assumed it would be over in an hour, but nope, it generously provided us with an extra 20 minutes to be really really boring in.
By Emily Carter (Emily) on Saturday, April 15, 2023 - 12:07 am:Gobbledegook:
Starkey's Doctor-voice is way more like Pertwee's than Davison's.
'The comical shortness of his snout' - yeah *sigh* the Fifth Doctor just hasn't got a big enough nose to ever be considered a great Doctor, has he.
'Your skin-shedding cycle' is a rather nice way to refer to regeneration.
By Emily Carter (Emily) on Friday, May 26, 2023 - 2:45 am:The Doctor and His Amazing Technicolour Nightmare Coat:
Mysteriously unmentioned are the twelve other Abominations revealed in The Crimes of Thomas Brewster. So what's all the fuss about one dangling thread on one of 'em?
Don't say 'she yelled' in the narration if...she's delivering said line in a perfectly normal tone of voice.
Mel gives the Doctor 'the sort of smile mass-murderers give their victims seconds before lopping their heads off'. Nice image but I'm just not buying it.
'Um...does anyone know how to fly this ship?' - what does this think it IS, Airplane!? Anyway, you don't need someone to fly it so much as MEND it so you can fly it.
The hijacker dooms everyone (barring of course the miraculous presence of a Doctor) by blowing to smithereens the navigational controls of the spaceship he's on WHY, exactly? Hijacking is his planet's only source of income, you'd think they'd be better trained.
'All I need is my sonic screwdriver and...oh' - WHEN ARE YOU GONNA BUILD ANOTHER ONE YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOT.
Why does the otter leave weeks-worth of takings lying around his shop wrapped in a t-shirt?
It's trying really hard to be funny and, whilst not falling flat on its face too badly, just doesn't hold my interest.
By Emily Carter (Emily) on Monday, August 14, 2023 - 11:50 am:Frozen Worlds:
Fine, if rather too long and oddly inconsequential-feeling.
And I s'pose since New Who got on board with this nonsense about an infinity of alt-unis, there's no point in bringing up Blood Heat's statements on such matters...
By Emily Carter (Emily) on Wednesday, May 01, 2024 - 1:04 pm:The Ultimate Poe:
'Sadly I'm used to being overlooked and underestimated, but this isn't rampant chauvinism' - since when has Mel shown any signs of being aware of chauvinism, or indeed feminism?
Mel: 'I think I've had rather enough of this tale.' Doctor: 'Me too.' - me three...
'A pale-skinned young lady...her skin pale' - you don't say!
'The Doctor lifted the circlet from Poe's sweating forehead, and settled it on his own noble brow' - noble brow my arse.
'The tales and poems he gifted to the world live on to inspire and chill countless generations' - isn't this Doctor SUPPOSED to be a CAT-LOVER?!
TALK about a midnight dreary.