The Angels Take Manhattan. The Muppets were a lot nicer about it.

Is this a happy ending or a sad ending?
It’s an ending. That’s enough.

Behind the scenes bits, running over twenty minutes total.

Behold the Nekross from Wizards Vs. Aliens!

They're sort of spiny Twi'Leks in armour. With eyes on the end of their head tails.

Toys!

The Rory figure for the Doctor Who toy range has finally gone on sale - just over 48 hours before his final episode. Still, lovely to have him.

Photos here.

And thanks to Escher at DWAITAS for reporting The Brigadier and Jo figures!

And a Shoggoth Gel Guard since it’s apparently The Three Doctors set despite having three figures and no Doctors. If I were going to have Alistair and Jo and one monster it would be Boc. But never mind, it’s a very nice Shoggoth. I particularly like the Brig’s “really, Doctor...” expression.

The Little Essentials Of Life

Today’s Google Doodle is about the 14th birthday of... Google.

Still, considering what an effect it has every day, this straightforward search engine page is worth noting. I didn’t get online until 1999 and it was already ubiquitous and essential, coming from nowhere.

Which inevitably has me thinking of ubiquitous and essential things coming from nowhere, and who might be behind them, and to what end. Google has lasted because it’s (mostly) neutral about passing out information accurately, but imagine something redirecting such an everyday essential to its own ends. What if an indispensable became an inescapable? That’s how ATMOS worked and Cybus Industries got started...

Think of the going out before you enter.

10 Best Doctor Who Companion Departures (And 5 Worst) from SFX.

Some great examples to follow, and some... less so.

DWAITAS discusses the end of a character’s run, giving it more thought than many RPGs, reflecting its importance (sometimes properly addressed, sometimes not) in the series.

The Bad Trait “Unadventurous” in its Major form is expressly designed to write characters out, which may be a bit much but certainly reflects some of these departures.

Otherwise, the general advice is to make a departing PC’s (and particularly a departing player’s) last adventure as big a deal as you can (depending on how much warning you get, of course) and that’s advice worth taking to other games.

The Waters Of Europa

A Great Lake of liquid water on one of Jupiter's moons.

The Review Of Depth

Thanks to Siskoid's look at The Daemons this week, I looked up the recent review for DWM and discovered it and many more by Gary Gillatt are on his Wordpress page. Huge, thorough, opinionated and often hilarious.

Cubed

Or The Power Of Three. Thankfully not a Charmed crossover.

SFX pretty much covers what I think. Including the mystery versus resolution issue.

Behind The Scenes with CHIBNALL! this week.

Time Lords and no companions?

From this DWAITAS thread about a game where the players are all Time Lords:

In rules terms, this shouldn't be a problem. The characters might feel a bit samey, as they all have much the same superhuman abilities (regeneration, boosted Ingenuity) but different opinions, styles and gadgets should counter this.

An alternative would be to have all the characters be remarkable in different ways - so there's a Time Lord, an unkillable man from the future, a Nestene duplicate with a human soul, a Victorian Silurian ninja detective...

One thing you could lose in character terms is the sense of wonder and surprise about travelling in time and space. Time Lords (even less experienced ones) can be blasé about meeting alien races, seeing the birth and death of stars and planets and the like. It could feel very different from regular Doctor Who.

Peter Jackson would love to direct an episode

So would many of us, but Peter Jackson saying it is rather more newsworthy.

We know it doesn't work for Daleks any more...

A bit of a spoiler for a week and a half from now.

RTD on the creation of Wizards Vs Aliens

PIRATES! again

I mentioned International Talk Like A Pirate Day (that really needs to be shortened) on the main gaming blog that you should also be reading (ahem). With links to free PDFs and everything!

I discussed classic PIRATES! last year when covering The Curse Of The Black Spot. But of course the Doctor has also met that space opera classic Space Pirates, and more recently sort-of Zombie Pirates (also in space) and once hung out with a Time Lord/Lady who called him/herself the Corsair and sometimes kept a parrot. So there be room for plenty o’ piratical action within or beyond the Golden Age of the Spanish Main.

(See also Grace O’Malley.)

An Inspector of Space and Time

Any resemblance to Inspector Spacetime is completely coincidental.

Ahem.

I have returned! Which is nice.

How would you do on Doctor Who Mastermind?

I got the last three.

The Quality Of Mercy

500th post! I wish it could be something constructive, but still posting from work.

Still, while I’m online, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill on life after the TARDIS.

A Town Called Mercy (aka The Gunslinger)

Please Stand By...

We are experiencing technical difficulties.

As you may have seen on my general blog (go see my general blog!!!!1111one) I am currently sans internet at home.

So in the meantime, here are some RPGnetters' ideas for Doctor Who episodes.

More soon, hopefully.

The Sun Of Death

So a friend on a social media site commented that this and last week’s episode concepts could be the result of choosing elements at random.

So I linked to The Vortex Oracle...

and got this:

The Sun of Death

A powerful man and his revenge for an ancient wrong.
An archaeological dig.
A busy port.
A run-down shelter.

Just noting it here for future reference.

Dinosaurs On A Spaceship

Hrm. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood.

Liked the asides - Brian, Nefertiti, Tricie, the ISA - didn’t like the central conflict or the resolution. It just felt rather... off, a bum note instead of a character turn, especially in an episode that otherwise felt particularly kid-friendly. A bit where I’d ask the player “are you sure you want to do that?” And the Story Point cost for the solution must have been quite high...

(Oh well, here’s mini-Confidential. The Triceratops was lovely.)

Asylum Of The Observation

Gaze upon this not till you have seen the episode:

The Smell Of Doom

A current deodorant advert (which I won’t link to due to evil but the advert is called Anarchy) takes another deodorant’s old “men can’t help acting on it” idea a long way past its logical conclusion. It shows people so overwhelmed by lust for random passersby that they tear off their clothes in broad daylight, crash their cars, a nurse lets the wheelchair she’s pushing roll into the street, and it ends with sirens wailing, emergency service helicopters flying in, and the city on fire.

“Yes folks,” it says, “our new product will destroy civilisation.”

Which really doesn’t work for me as an advert...

But it does absolutely work as a Torchwood plot.

The main question is who dosed the city and why?

(The final DWM Eighth Doctor comic strip The Flood had the Cybermen do the same thing with fear and anger, as a way of softening humanity up for conversion.)

Dungeons And Daleks

Linked by C7's Twitter, no less:

How the it's-mad-just-run-with-it feel of the new series can influence RPGs of a suitable Weird Level.

Aww, Rory!

Den Of Geek points out a detail I missed during Pond Life:

Rory has a Roman Centurion lunchbox!
"Which is brilliant. Do you think the other nurses laugh at him though?"

Recycling in action!

Nice to see the rather nice robots from Mission 2110 getting work in Dinosaurs On A Spaceship rather than going to waste.

I was totally going to use them as robots in a Door In Time episode some time, too...

Updates

Steven Moffat discusses writing for the new companion.

“In these five episodes the Doctor is practically the adopted son of Amy and Rory. He’s gone from being the wonderful man from space – Space Gandalf, as he wants to be – to being that troublesome kid that they try and keep under control. They even talked about getting babysitters for him in one unfortunately cut scene. They love him, but they know he’s a big kid, they know they have to look out for him, check he eats and all that. Whereas with the new companion he’s back to being the mysterious spacefarer.”

And this prequel is late!

And The Doctor’s Wife won the Hugo, and Neil Gaiman’s acceptance speech included saying “... Only a fool or a madman would try to do it again... so I’m on the third draft.”

Which according to Hugo-winning io9 poster Charlie Jane Anders, is true!

Ooooh.

Big Chief's reveals of their 12" scale Fourth and Tenth Doctor figures, and Fez and Stetson (and Ganger?!) Eleven and... a Weeping Angel. eeeee.

To Be Continued

Via Siskoid, Twelve Brilliant Doctor Who Cliffhangers.

Includes undue swears and a rather harsh analysis of the Fifth Doctor, but I can't really argue with the cliffhangers themselves. Except that I would have included The Stolen Earth, where for a week afterwards we were telling ourselves "they couldn't have... not really..."

The Life And Death Of The Corsair

From the 2012 Brilliant Book, as written by Neil Gaiman.

Apart from the note at the end about the parrot. Maybe it isn't that the chap with the parrot is the Corsair... it's that the parrot is the Corsair's parrot... and really is the one in charge.

"What do you know of the Dalek Asylum?"

Right then. Where do we begin?

Spoilers. Obvs. Enorms ones.

And a reference to an old fake Serenity spoiler:

The Daleks are made of chocolate!

Interviews!

Karen Gillan talks to The Mary Sue about, among other things, visiting a distant future to see if humans are so lazy our bodies end up being pretty much useless.

And then Caro Skinner about, among other things, the accuracy of historical episodes and the scale of The Daleks Take Manhattan.

And then Matt Smith about... well, hopefully not too many spoilers, but also about how cool New York is.