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Doctor Who – Resurrection of the Daleks
by Eric Saward

Story # 134, 1984
Peter Davison as The Doctor
Janet Fielding as Tegan
Mark Strickson as Turlough

There are eras during the long run of the original Doctor Who that could seemingly do no wrong, and then there were others that could do no right. The John Nathan-Turner era fell into the later category. It should hardly come as a surprise that I don’t care much for this story.

This is the third story in the “Davros Saga” which began with the exceptional Genesis of the Daleks, devolved into the pathetic Destiny of the Daleks and now finds itself even more muddled and confused.

The “Plot”
It is now 90 years after the events of Destiny of the Daleks and the Daleks have lost the war with the Movellans. The Movellans developed a virus which proved fatal to Daleks, wiping out the Dalek armies and scattering the remains across the universe. Their forces depleted, the Daleks require armies of human(oid) soldiers who appear to be cloned and/or genetically engineered duplicates of humans they’ve collected on their raids.

For some inadequately explained reason, they’ve established a time corridor to 1984 Earth, the London Docklands, where they’ve stored several cannisters of the Movellan virus.

The TARDIS gets caught in the time corridor and narrowly escapes, but lands nearby.

Meanwhile, in the future, the Dalek ship attacks a prison space station, which is holding Davros, who was captured at the end of Destiny of the Daleks. Davros has been in a state of suspended animation on the station since then. Hopelessly outnumbered the stationis quickly overrun. The few survivors spend their time in repeated failed attempts to destroy Davros before the Daleks can get him.

The Daleks want Davros to find a cure to the virus, and they also want him to think they are serving him. Meanwhile Davros is plotting to gain control over the Daleks, or, failing that, destroying them and building a new race of Daleks, obedient only to him.

Meanwhile, with all these subplots bumbling along, the Doctor wanders rather aimlessly though the story. At one point, he does take it upon himself to finally go kill Davros, but, he fails.

Davros seemingly kills himself when he releases the virus and discovers that he’s also susceptible to the Movellan virus. (Imagine that, he is the last of the Kaleds, the race the Daleks were made from.) In the end, Tegan can’t stand the carnage and leaves the Doctor.

Analysis
So what’s wrong with this story? Well, if it isn’t obvious from that synopsis, the first and foremost problem is the poor story. Eric Saward’s script has far too many subplots, few of them make any sense, and after a while, it becomes ridiculous at how many people have the opportunity to blow Davros up and save the day, but fail to accomplish it.

This episode is near the end of Davison’s era, and at this point they have been setting the stage for his regeneration. Nyssa recently left, Turlough will leave soon and Tegan leaves at the end of this story. Despite that, she spends almost all of her time lying down on a cot doing nothing. It’s hardly a memorable departure for a companion. Turlough gets far more screen time and all he does is skulk around the sets.

Even if you like Daleks, this just isn’t a good story.

It’s frequently pointed out that Resurrection has a higher body count than The Terminator, and I don’t doubt that’s true. This story has a huge cast and all of them are killed, only the Doctor, his companions and three Dalek agents survive. While I suppose this was some attempt to make the Daleks seem menacing again, it actually just makes everyone appear incompetent.

I often lay blame on Doctor Who’s demise on John Nathan-Turner’s poor handling of the series, equal blame probably falls on Saward’s shoulders as he was the script editor during Davison and Colin Baker’s time on the show, and the scripts show a considerable and inexorable decline during that era.

Back in day there were lots of fans who defended JNT and his team and, at the time, I was willing to concede that outside pressures may have been a greater influence, but these DW DVDs, with all their extras, interviews and production documentaries really show how screwed up this production team really was. It’s a testament to the enduring love of Doctor Who that it survived 8 seasons under JNT’s helm.

I haven’t decided if I’ll break down and watch Recombobulation… er… retread… er… rerun… um… reflux… no, no, no, that’s not it… ah yes, Revelation of the Daleks (the fourth and hopefully final Davros story) tomorrow or I’ll wait and buy Inferno in a week and see a classic Doctor Who instead.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Doctor Who, Review, Video

Little Storping-in-the-Swuff => Mouse Update

Simon over at Little Storping-in-the-Swuff has recently been grappling with a mouse invasion.

It looks like the problem has been solved, but his latest update on the progress has given me a terrific idea.

To explain that idea, I’m going to have to take a trip around the subject for a while. Please bear with me for a few minutes.

For some time now, people have been using photo sharing sites like flickr. Flickr allows you to “tag” your photos with user defined… um… tags, that allow you to classify your photos. For example, I tag all my Taiwan photos with a “Taiwan” tag, and often tag them further with the name of the city, whether or not it has my “family”, “animals”, “costco” or “pizza” in it.

This allows people to search flickr by those tags and find related photos of interest to them. (My guess is “nude”, “naked”, “breasts” and “female” will be the most searched for tags on flickr, but I might be being cynical.)

Arising from that was the phenomena of “geotagging”. Posters would include a tag of “Geotag” on their flickr photos, and a tag of the GPS coordinates.

This week, flickr took that quaint hobby one step further by officially introducing a geotag mechanism imbedded in their database.

You can now take your flickr photos and, using a built-in interface to Yahoo! maps (nothing’s perfect), drag the photos onto the location you took them and they are entered into flick’s geotag database. Others can now go to a map of an area they are interested in, and browse photos taken at or near that spot.

Flickr introduced this facility earlier in the week, and within 24 hours had 1.2 million geotagged photos.

The interface needs a lot of work, but it can be fun browsing an area you know and looking at other peoples’ pictures.

When mice are captured humanely – that is, captured and released, rather than captured and drowned, you’re supposed to take them more than 2 miles away or they’ll just come back. (OK, I don’t actually buy that mice act as homing pigeons, by why risk it?)

So, this brings me back to my idea.

Simon’s recent capture update was accompanied by links to Google maps indicating the rough area the mice were released in.

I propose the following:

• People releasing mice should take a picture of the mouse at the point of release.
• Post said photo to flickr
• Enter the photo into the geotag database
• include the following tags “Mouse” “Mouse Release Program”

The practical upstart of this is that if you happen to be looking for a mouse to adopt, you can check your area and find if any previously domestic mice have been released in your area. With a little luck you can find them and give them a good home.

I can see a couple possible unintended consequences to this idea, though.

For example, what if you found a mouse in your home and were able to identify that it had been released by someone else in your area. Could you take legal action against them?

Or, perhaps you don’t like mice, could you use the database to locate released mice and kill them? Perhaps even posting pictures of the kills in the geotagged database?

I can envision all sorts of new games that can be devised using geotagged flickr.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Natural Sciences, Science

This photo came off of flickr by way of Michael Turton’s blog, The View From Taiwan.

I make note of it here because of the absolute gibberish that makes up the English portion of this sign. To quote:

Origin
The Tainan city government because domestic and overseas goes sightseeing the traveling service quality unceasingly to promote, in the anticipation to the home, overseas goes sightseeing the passenger to present the prefectural city historical site, the ecology, the city scenery, can provide goes sightseeing the passenger home away from home international service level to enjoy. Therefore the Tainan city government attempts from sympathizes goes sightseeing passenger’s psychological stratification plane to begin, carriers out “the Tainan City Travel Insurance Card”, the penetration medical service, the police network, the language translation, the government information center and service and so on most important traveling safe insurance provision, links from the spot to the line to the surface whole, molds the prefectural city is traveling security city.

This most certainly demonstrates why you don’t use a computer to do your translations for you…

I just hope that Tainan’s “penetration medical service, the police network… … the government information center and service and so on” is better than their “the language translation”.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Taiwan

WorldNetDaily => Evangelist drowns trying to walk on water

Oh, please, please, PLEASE let this be true!

An evangelist who tried replicating Jesus’ miracle of walking on water has reportedly drowned off the western coast of Africa.

Pastor Franck Kabele, 35, told his congregation he could repeat the biblical miracle, and he attempted it from a beach in Gabon’s capital of Libreville.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Commentary, Paranormal

OK, as you can imagine, after bringing my MacBook home and shortly thereafter it tanked on me, I was… shall we say… a bit perturbed.

I was also not thinking to level-headedly either. Since it was too late to take it back to the Apple store, later that evening, I performed the “normal” diagnostics, including resetting the PRAM, which seems to have resolved the problem.

I’ve also since installed the latest MacBook firmware update, which supposedly only modifies fan behavior,but so far the machine is running fine.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Applecare, Blog, Computer, Mac, MacBook, OSX

I got my Macbook back today.

A quick check this morning revealed that Applecare had Fedexed my Macbook back to the Apple store. It was already in Phoenix last night, and I could reasonably expect it to arrive today.

As I left work, Fedex showed it had been delivered several hours earlier, and, since the Apple Store is on my way home, I swung in to see if I could pick it up.

It hadn’t be unpacked yet, but they were kind enough to check with the testers downstairs (apparently there’s a basement) and one of them uncrated my machine and brought it up for me.

We powered it up and checked it out. I seemed to be working normally.

There are, to my knowledge, 6 commonly mentioned problems with Macbooks

1. Mooing
2. Random Shutdowns
3. Random Wireless loss of signal
4. Stains forming on the case
5. Screens showing white with colored bars

Mine has been doing the Moo thing since I got it, but, it’s so quiet it really doesn’t bother me. Apple just released a firmware patch that addresses that issue, and my hope was that it would be already installed on my newly refurbished Macbook. It wasn’t, but when we powered it up at the Apple store, it was ready to download and install it. I choose to postpone that till I got home on electrical power.

Of course, mine was experiencing the random shutdowns and wireless losses, which is why it was in the shop. So that makes 3 problems that should have been addressed.

The staining had not been an issue at all with mine, but I discovered that Applecare had replaced the offending plastic parts anyway. Can’t complain there, that’s 4 problems addressed.

Finally, the color streaks… I’d never seen any sign of it. Until I got it home today and rebooted, and now it doesn’t work.

Looks like it is back to the Apple Store tomorrow. This doesn’t leave a good impression.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Applecare, Blog, Computer, Mac, MacBook, OSX

I remember the good old days when “monsoon” season meant rain every day, not once a month. Now, monsoon just means high heat and high humidity.

We do still get some nice cloud build up at sunset, though.

Technorati Tags: Blog

You know, normally, I really, really just don’t care what the neighbors do with their landscaping.

I know that a lot of them get all goofy when someone’s lawn is 1 inch longer than regulation, or there’s a plastic grocery bag blown into the hedges, but I just generally don’t care.

Live and let live, I say.

But this is over the line. Last Sunday this car caught fire about 3 houses down the street from me. It’s been a week and the burnt out hulk is still there. I’m getting rapidly tired of the neighborhood looking like a set piece for a Mad Max movie.

Besides, they haven’t even bothered to sweep up the debris in the road surrounding the wreck.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Commentary, Rant

My baby is on its way home!

(Took long enough, didn’t it? Hope that means I have a new revision motherboard now.)

Technorati Tags: Apple, Blog, Computer, Mac, MacBook, OSX

camerongray.net => This train is delayed until Windows reboots

Oh heck, it’s just fun to pick on Windows some days!

In this case, the train scheduling system for a UK train is no longer operating because of low Windows virtual memory. See the article, and more importantly, the picture for more details.

Picking on Windows is just a relief for my frustration as they’re still waiting on the part to fix my Macbook. (arg)