Saturday 29 October 2011

101+ Plot Ideas Involving Time Travel

101+ Plot Ideas Involving Time Travel

Some killers already:

ADamiani: The hidden kingdom of Agharti, said to appear for but one day every seven years somewhere in the remote Himalayan mountains, is actually a *time ship* making a long journey through the human-occupied era.

petros: A photograph of western Europe from space. There are no lights or cities visible. The serial numbers in the image seem to indicate that the image was taken in late 2007.

Thursday 27 October 2011

Strange sources of ideas, part eighty-six or so

Doctor Where

From an entire book of Who-y puzzles out in time for Christmas.

Makes the Cyberman invasion about 87% less scary.

Monsters acting whimsically out of character has an illustrious history in Doctor Who, from these outtakes showing some of the above behaviour to Evil of The Daleks. This sort of thing actually happening in-character can seriously undermine a monster's ongoing credibility, but Evil was going to be the Daleks' final bow and, as a rule, players love a chance to deflate a monster even more than a chance to defeat one. So don't be too surprised if next time you present them coldly logical killer robots they rewire their common sense subroutines.

Wednesday 19 October 2011

The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Man Who Never Was

Well timed for the launch of the new iWhateverItIs, the satire on flashy product launches is just a minor aside really, about as significant as the charming Peter Bowles cameo.

Monday 17 October 2011

A Night In The Lonesome October

Coming sometime this week...

Doctor Who Magazine

DWM, or is was originally Doctor Who Weekly, is 32 today (or six days ago, but it was marked today). Its weekliness has now been taken up by Doctor Who Adventures but the grumpy old man in me feels that the standard of its comics isn’t quite up to the Wagner/Mills/Gibbons run starring the Fourth Doctor.

Seriously, the likes of The Iron Legion and City Of The Damned permanently affected my idea of what Doctor Who could and should be - space opera adventure stories, funny and scary and fast, brimming with great visuals and mad ideas. The show never really matched up with the comics until 2005.

So it’s a small regular delight that even though the kids have Adventures now and IDW have full-issue Who comics, DWM still carries on, and collections of the strips right back to The Iron Legion are available.

Gibbons’s run spanning two Doctors, backup strips by Alan Moore (sadly unreprintable), John Ridgway’s surreal epics for the Sixth Doctor, the ad hoc not-sure-we-can-afford-this Seven strips cycling back to higher quality, the eight-year run of the Eighth Doctor (and Izzy, as old as DWM itself) that almost became canon when Russell T Davies offered them the regeneration, the sadly slim volume for Nine that includes a dry run for The Shakespeare Code, as one of the three books for Ten shows the original version of The Lodger...

Saturday 8 October 2011

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Sky

With Doctor Who off until Christmas (barely ten weeks, never mind!) The Sarah Jane Adventures has returned with the final three stories.

“Never careful, always prepared!”

Another random adventure hook

Torchwood House as a Children's BBC 5pm slot supernatural timeslip adventure.

So then... what happened?

15 Unanswered Questions

Some of which have been answered, but never mind. Still, the one about blowing up the TARDIS is still hanging.

And the ducks.

Monday 3 October 2011

Fanart Win

When Steven Moffat says nice things about your episode sketch, you're doing well.
The adventures of the 17th Doctor.

Largely silly, but there's at least one rock solid plot hook in there, by TrojanRat:

Although that one episode where the Doctor and four other groups were playing tug of war over one person's personal history to get the guy to make one specific choice at one specific point in time was hilarious. Even if everyone else calls it the new "Love and Monsters".

Saturday 1 October 2011

Time is what stops everything happening all at once.

A phrase not used this week, though if there were ever a week to use it... (Or at the end of the recent run of Primeval but that’s another matter.)

Death Is The Only Answer

Just a quick bit this, since it was only three minutes long and all.

Great title, very threatening, makes no actual sense.

Technobabble by ten-year-olds, charmingly wrong, a reminder of how babble is as important as techno.

I do like the portrayal of Einstein as someone who’s given the Doctor trouble before and likely will again.

Pterodactyls are vermin. Do not feed.

The Wedding Of River Song was given shorter shrift than killing Hitler in Let's Kill Hitler!

I should probably spoiler-cut this, for those in other territories who haven't already watched it through back channels.