Random Crap

Ron "GAHHH!" Mallet has taken down his site. All those... incomparable stories have been lost. Those incandescently arrogant treatise on why the new series was ripping him off. His vile-filled BF reviews. That annoying background hum to his website. All gone. Oh well. I've still got the stories on the harddrive and apparently they're stinking up Teaspoon and an Open Mind, but maybe we should wear black arm bands in respect. Maybe have a minute's fevered ranting that RTD is a spiteful sexual deviant out to destroy everything we hold dear. Or, you know, maybe just party?

Sapphire & Steel 3.0. The expression "what the fuck?" leaps to mind as I listen to the first few minutes of their new adventure. I was prepared for the fact the new duo were young Australian bodybuilders but... well. As Will Anderson pointed out, an Australian's accent expands out of control the further you get from the mother country, which must be why 80% of BF Aussies sound utterly awful and unconvincing EVEN THOUGH THEY'RE PROPER AUSTRALIANS. But even that did not prepare me for the fact that the story is, pretty much, a word for word remake of Assignment 1, the first story with Joanna Lumbly and David McCallum. A reboot version with these... newbies. While the whole 'regeneration' thing is part of the confusing mystery of who and what S&S are, the point was they seemed to be the same people no matter what they looked like. These two seem completely different. The cold, formal and icily polite Steel is now grunting, "Let's ave a captain cook at yer bedroom" and describing the formerly warm, friendly and compassionate Sapphire as "a hardarse". All of it gives the nasty impression that Sapphire and Steel have shuffled off this mortal coil and two strangers have been drafted in and got the same codenames. And bagging out DVDs of The Tomorrow People? Please!

So... Lemon Bloody Cola was taking the piss all along. It's disappointing yet reassuring simultaneously. Good that he finally revealed the truth though, otherwise it would be like Little Britain where you have to wait for a season finale to get any kind of decent punchline to the catchphrase-based skits. And he also managed to stay so completely in character everyone who thought him a gimmick poster began to wonder... and fear. The question of whether "crack-addicted looters kill the Tenth Doctor" Sparacus is just as serious. And in retrospect, the boycotting of LBC BC fics seems reasonable, dunnit?

Christ I hate the dentists. I've only been on the operating chair three times in my 23ish years. The first time I swore off them when the dentist offered me SWEETS. Even if I could stand the things, I know when someone's touting for business, wanting to get my teeth rotten so I'll come back. Then, one night, lump of tooth comes loose. Next day, go to a dentist and SUFFER. Now, I am no wuss. I say that as a matter of fact rather than any boasting, but even I'm not butch enough to cope with a razor-sharp hook being jammed into my gums. Repeatedly. By a specialist who has just told me how bloody sensitive they are. Seriously, I'd have thought that after years in the dental profession they'd know how to AIM for the bloody teeth. And the thing is, you can't do anything about the pain. You can't scream, joke, roll your eyes, move, pace, distract yourself. You have to stay still as they do strange scraping things to your teeth, your teeth you were 98% happy with and until the tooth lump incident swore blind you'd be buried with. And then, when the torment is over and my teeth STILL hurt because all the 20 years of insulating plaque that kept them safe and warm is gone, the bitches offer me whitening of the teeth. For $400! I bet if I'd been a regular there, they'd offer me sweets.

Gosh, I never actually got round to bitching that Turn Left could be considered a rip off of my Season 4 pitch. Mainly as it only just struck me. I was trying to avoid a big epic season finale (obviously getting entirely the wrong direction from RTD) and my idea was a simple Sontaran/Rutan conflict that ended with the Doctor apparently dying. This would lead to an ep with the Doctor ascending to Heaven and then meeting Martha Jones, interspersed with Donna staying on Earth and watching it cope sans Doctor. Of course, the ep would reveal the Doctor wasn't ACTUALLY in heaven, but his "soul" was being stolen with some unscrupulous aliens, and he found this out by continually questioning the nature of heaven. Like why he was the only Time Lord there, stuff like that. I had a great bit where he finds a tower with a huge TV into it and shows you where the dead end up, and pretty much everyone he knows went to hell for crimes like theft, murder, blasphemy... Then Martha (evil alien Martha) would point out, "You don't mind a system that gives eternal reward, but if it balances with eternal damnation, that's just not on, is it?" It ended with the Doctor returning to life to find himself in some strange situation, kind of like Deadpool or Cerebus, where brief trips to the afterlife are an excuse for wierd shit of Mind Robber proportions to occur. Will I ever do a Season 5 pitch, I ask myself?

It's mindboggling to realize I'm literally drowning in Doctor Who at a time when I've been so bummed out the TV series is temporarily no more. A whole heap of comic strips from every and any Doctor (even the Peter Cushing one! Fighting Daleks! ON MARS!!!!), a massive amount of 8th Doctor audios. Books too, and even the first ever bit of Doctor Who fiction, The Invasion from Space (yeah, titles not so good then), plus bunches of FASA role playing games I still can't wrap my head around. How the hell do you play them? It's just a bunch of fact files about stuff I already know. Is it just supposed to fire my imagination or something? I boggle.

I've also got on the backberner The Slide and Aliens in the Mind - oddly enough, two 1960s Doctor Who stories whose first draft stages have been turned into radio plays. The Slide was the original version of Fury from the Deep, except it's set in a rural English village struck by mysterious earthquakes with evil possessing mud rather than set on a North Sea rig struck by mysterious foam and evil possessing seaweed. And get this, they hastily changed the character of the Doctor to a passing scientist Gomez... played by Roger Delgado. Oh, my head! As for Aliens of the Mind, it's either the infamous lost Robert Holmes story (imagine Tomorrow People meets Midwich Cuckoos) which was about the only plot he offered that never made it to screen in some form... or it's something else entirely. Should be worth listening to.

Seriously, would Big Finish bring back Adric and not have him played by Matthew Waterhouse? It's just there's this Fifth Doctor and Nyssa story called The Boy That Time Forgot where they go back to the Jurassic and find an old man in a cave who recognizes them and they him... I hope it isn't. I mean, even in the 1980s Waterhouse could act. More or less. When the script wasn't portraying him as a complete fucknuckle. I feel confident that 30 years later the guy's acting would have matured to somewhere around "acceptable". Actually, why am I complaining when the very IDEA of revealing Adric didn't die is... STUPID! I've already ranted to anyone who listens that the poetic tragedy of Androzani is undercut at the very idea that the Doctor knew Peri for longer than an afternoon, let alone the Erimem business. Bringing back ADRIC? Doesn't that, you know, contradict 81 billion stories. And not just books. That's... look, I like Adric, but suggesting that at some point between seasons 19 and 20 the Doctor found out he was alive and well, and never actually mentioned it. That's stupid. Ben Chatham being canon is more reasonable. I mean, the brilliant bit in Terminus where the Doctor tells Tegan to let Turlough have Adric's room, then hurries off into the depths of the TARDIS to brood suddenly looks incredibly retarded and childish. Surely I'm not the only one this buggs?

Is Avon a psychopath? No. I was just laughing hysterically at Jared's 'date with Iago' which shows an awkward romantic liason as embarassing as one that Nigel Verkoff might have had, when it struck me with my new "no, Alan Stevens IS talking bollocks" outlook, that a psychopath by definition is unable to empathize with others. Every possible psycho is a variation on that basic premise. But Avon's life is littered with examples of him being quite able of understanding how people think and feel, his uncaring demeanour quite clearly a survival mechanism. Look at Countdown. A psychopath would not have saved Del Grant. Or even wasted time talking to him. Or felt guilt. But the ultimate proof that Avon never was a psycho can be found in Sarcophagus. As the Alien begs Avon to let her live, look at his face. Regret. Anguish, perhaps. But when he tosses the ring into the fire, it is a real "lesser of two evils" thing. The Alien's not as important as Cally. Now, this is NOT "Paul Darrow keeping his face completely expressionless and my puny emotions being overlaid", because you get to see Ghost Avon doing that. But the real Avon looks sad.

Gosh, 12.50. Best retire.