Anyone For Cricket? Some Random Thoughts On The Fifth Doctor. And Voles.

I absolutely would not be posting today if not for Blaugust so whatever this is - and I have no idea yet what it's going to be - it'll just have to do. I'm great at handing out advice about not worrying about getting your 31 posts in and being ready to stop when it's not fun but I'm not so great at taking it. 

Then again, scrabbling to meet deadlines, especially when they're coming at me like trains down a tunnel, is fun for me. Always has been. It's like playing chicken. Which, I am going to say, I never did. 

I think, given the circumstances, I'm just going to ramble and the first thing (Might be the only thing if I really get into it...) I'm going to ramble on about is Dr. Who. 

I grew up watching Dr. Who. I'm fairly, although not completely, sure I saw the first episode when it was broadcast in... I think it was 1963? Maybe 1964? Hang on, have to fact check that...  

Yep, 23 November 1963. I would have been five.

I have the faintest memory of watching that episode and not finding it all that engaging. Five would have been to young, I guess. I'm not at all convinced I watched much more of the first season but I know I got a Dr Who annual every Christmas from the first onward because I still have them all. I guess I must have been interested enough to ask for one from the start.

By the time the second season came along I was I definitely into it. I vividly remember the storyline with the Zarbi, the giant ants. They turned up in Episode 17. 

I think I was so taken by them (And the Menoptera, the bee-people.) because I was one of those kids who's fascinated by all kinds of wildlife, including insects. A lot of kids like insects because they're generally the easiest to get your hands on. Some schools and educators call them Mini-Beasts now to make them seem even more exciting.

I didn;t need any encouragement. We had a lot of garden where I grew up and an orchard and we lived by a river so there was no shortage of insects and bigger animals to watch. 

Not that I left it watching. I'd catch them if they couldn't get away fast enough. I caught plenty of toads, the occasional frog, a couple of slow worms, a bat, a hedgehog, a poisoned wood pigeon that we nursed back to health and which then flew straight into a window when we released it and broke its neck... Oh, and some voles... 

Short-tailed voles must be the easiest small mammals to catch. Well,  after dormice, but you don't see many of those. 

Dormice are very rare and now protected, although I doubt they were back when I caught one. It didn't take much catching. I was going down a long path to a rocky beach on a day out at the estuary about twenty or thirty miles from where I lived. It was a warm summer day and there it was, sitting by the path, half asleep in the sun. I picked it up and it just sat in my hand, quite happy, until I put it back down. Then it wandered off into the bushes. No wonder the Romans used to eat them. 

Voles aren't quite that easy to catch but it's close. I used to put a piece of galvanized metal down in the long grass in the orchard, wait a week, then pick it up and often as not there's be a vole or two looking up, dazed by the light, wondering where the roof had gone. I 'd just pick one up (With gloves on, just in case it bit, which they never did.) and voila! Pet vole.

They domesticate incredibly quickly, too. They'd feed out of my hand the next day. They acted like they'd had a stroke of luck, finding themselves magically transported to somewhere with comfortable bedding and free food. I didn't keep them long, just a few days, then I'd put them back. 

I only really did it a couple of times Interest wanes quite quickly where voles are concerned, I've always found. They don't do a lot.

Hang on. Wasn't this post supposed to be about Dr. Who?  Hasn't been much about him so far, has there?

Well, that's what I get for starting at the beginning. I don't know why I bothered going so far back. It's not like I need to explain who Dr. Who is to anyone reading this, I'm sure. Why don't I just get on with what I was going to talk about? 

Peter Davison. That's what it was. Or who. 

Peter Davison was the fifth Doctor. I watched most of his three series when they were first shown, from 1982 to 1984. That was right after I left college. It was right after my favorite Doctor, Tom Baker, had left and I didn't think a lot to seeing Peter Davison in the role, unsurprisingly. 

Worse was to come with Colin Baker, although obviously I didn't know that at the time. And, honestly, I don't know it now, either. Not until I get to his stint, anyway. Who knows? Maybe I'll find out he wasn't crap after all.

Last year, I think it was, or it might have been the year before, I started re-watching, or in some cases just watching, the entire run. For reasons I can't exactly recall now, I started in the middle of the Patrick Troughton years (He was the Second Doctor.). Now I'm almost at the end of the first Davison season.

Peter Davison is better than I remember but he's not great. Troughton, Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker were all, in their own ways, excellent. William Hartnell probably was, too, although since I skipped his era I can't say for sure. Davison had a lot of expectations to live up to and I think it shows in his performance, which seems oddly tense much of the time. He seems perpetually worried, which isn't really what you want from the Doctor.

Where Troughton was whimsical and puckish, Pertwee confident (Over-confident, really,) and Baker just a pure force of chaos, Davison is... not dull exactly, as I remembered him, nor bland but oddly frustrated, trapped, locked into what looks very much like a performance he's not wholly at peace with.

There's a bit - and it is a bit in the Vaudevlle sense - in the his first episode, where he tries on various looks and appearances, eventually settling on the cricket whites he wears for the rest of the season and very probably the entirety of his time as the Doctor. It's a decent attempt at a signature look and he's almost obligated to have one, since all the Doctors before him did, but not only does it feel inauthentic, forced even, but by the end of the first season he looks like he knows it.

With the benefit of post hoc foreknowledge, I can say, without even having got there yet, that Davison's "Victorian" cricketer shtick (I thought it was supposed to be Edwardian until I watched the video above.) is going to look positively naturalistic compared to whatever the hell Colin Baker is going to think he's wearing but at the moment it's just adding to the sense that Davison is uncomfortable in the Doctor's skin.

It doesn't help that he's inherited probably the worst set of companions in the entire run up to that point - and this is the 19th season so there have been a few. All three of them were passed down to him by the outgoing Tom Baker, who would probably have been glad to get rid of them, if by that point he hadn't clearly lost interest. 

Nyssa, played by Sarah Sutton,is fine. She doesn't have a lot of personality but she at least adds a much-needed element of stability and calm. Tegan is well-enough played by Janet Fielding but her personality is wearing and that's being polite. She complains almost the whole time and shows very little sense of either humor or proportion. 

She's a positive pleasure to watch, though, compared to Adric, who is just unbearable. Not only does he have a gratingly self-centered personality with a chip on his shoulder a mile wide but Matthew Waterhouse is deeply unconvincing. I won't say he can't act but if he can he certainly doesn't appear to be doing it in any of the episodes I've seen. And he died in the last one, so I guess that's that.

Even more unfortunately, he's not the only one whose acting is less than convincing. A few months back, when I'd watched all the Troughton and Pertwee and about half the Tom Baker episodes, I made a point of telling Mrs. Bhagpuss how consistently very much better the standard of acting was than I expected or remembered. And it wasn't just the principal actors, either. 

Almost every supporting actor, even in the smallest roles, seemed to be taking it as seriously as if they'd been cast in Play for Today. It was evident the standard was far higher than a half-hour sci-fi series, primarily aimed at children, needed to be and it went a good way towards explaining why the show broke out of that niche and became so widely watched by adults.

The same, sadly, cannot be said for the Davison era, or at least not the first of his seasons. There's still some committed and skillful acting going on in places but there's a lot of pretty obvious going through the motions too. It's not bad but it does feel a little tired and sometimes perfunctory. Knowing how much longer the show had to go, it's not hard to see why it ended when it did. 

Apparently there was a deliberate move to make the show more serious following the anarchy and sometimes silliness of the Tom Baker years. I'm not sure how apparent that was at the time. I remember feeling the it had just gotten a bit dull. Watching it now, it looks strained. 

And that, while by no means all I have to say about it, is all I'm going to say for now. If and when I ever get to the end of the whole first run, which is to say the end of the Seventh Doctor, I might attempt an overview of the whole thing. Maybe even a ranking. I do love a numbered list.

For that, though, I'd have to get through another two seasons of Peter Davison and three of Colin Baker and I'm not at all sure I can do it. It's so tempting to skip straight to Sylvester McCoy, who I remember as doing a very good job with what looked like zero budget.

If I stop this post now, I might just have time to fit in one more episode before I go to sleep. Or, if the last few are anything to go by, I'll get about ten minutes in before it sends me to sleep.

 Season 19 really is very dull.

Colors, Companions And Catching Up

In an all-too-familiar story, I'm writing this now because a game I wanted to play has decided to re-download its entire 44gb client just so it can "update". I'm getting far more used to this kind of annoyance on Steam than I would like but this time the game isn't even on Valve's platform. It's Wuthering Waves, which uses its own, proprietary launcher and with which I have previously had few problems.

Okay, it does have an irritating habit of asking to restart after every minor update rather than just carrying on when it's done but that only takes a moment. Why it wants to replace the full client this time I have no idea. We're not at the next step in the storyline already, surely? I haven't finished the last one yet. 

Hang on. I suppose I ought to check...

Oh. My. God. We are!! Seriously, has it been six week since Riniscita? It can't have been. But it has.

Give me a minute while I watch the trailer. Better yet, watch it with me.

Make that five minutes. They don't stint on the trailers, do they?

So, the new update is called "Waves Sing, and the Cerulean Bird Calls", a typically poetic and evocative phrasing although the placement of the comma is strange. It's there in the press release but not on the title card, I notice. Does that mean anything?

Also, I never much liked the word "cerulean", largely because I'm never sure how to pronounce it. I bet there's one of those pronunciation guides on YouTube though... yep.

So, yes, that is how I say it and that's one reason I don't like it. It's an ugly sound for a word that's intended to evoke a beautiful color. It's also obscure enough to detract from the meaning of most sentences in which it's used. It certainly doesn't do this one any favors. Why would a bird be "cerulean"?  

Is the color of the bird relevant  anyway? Clearly what we need to know is that it calls, not what color it is. Unless, of course, there are other non-cerulean birds that aren't calling...

This kind of close textual analysis might seem a tad unnecessary when applied to the name of an update to a video game but frankly if the writers don't want this level of attention they should stop being so literary in their choice of language. (I hope they don't do that, obviously.) 

I haven't, I don't think, mentioned it before but Wuthering Waves is stuffed with references to outside sources, many of them quite highbrow, some less so. In this update there's a nod to Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" and another to the agit-prop band Rage Against The Machine. 

Maybe I'll call these calls out more often, when I notice them. They're generally well-used and a credit to the writers' breadth and depth of cultural knowledge, unlike the self-conscious winks and smirks to pop culture in some MMORPGs I could mention, World of Warcraft probably being the worst offender.

Anyway, what's in this update? The usual, I think it would be reasonable to say. And that's a good thing.

There are two new Resonators, Phoebe and Brant, both of whom we met in the previous update. It looks as if Phoebe is the main companion in the new story, which I don't mind at all. She's quite an interesting character. Brant, I don't think I know enough about yet to take a stance on.

I use the word "companion" here very much in the sense it's long been employed in Dr. Who. That show is foregrounded in my thoughts at the moment because I've embarked on a largely unplanned (re)watch of the very long-running series. 

I discovered, entirely by chance, that all 26 Seasons, dating back to 1963, are available on the BBC iPlayer. It always used to be that the BBC was loathe to give free access to the older seasons, presumably because they made good money selling them, first on VHS and later on DVD. I can only imagine that the bottom has finally fallen out of that market, making it more commercially savvy to include them in the iPlayer package, which presumably is in competition with the likes of Netflix and Disney+

Whatever the reason, it seemed like an unexpectedly generous windfall and I started watching immediately. I could have started at the beginning but perversely I chose to come in at Season Six.

Growing up, I saw the first two or three seasons as they were broadcast, when I would have been about five to seven years old. Then, for various reasons, partly nightmares induced by the monsters in the show but mostly the fact that we didn't have a television at all for a couple of years, I didn't see any more until towards the end of the Patrick Troughton era. 

That's where I decided to start this time, reasoning, probably falsely, that the Hartnell years would feel too dated. I was also hoping to avoid too many of the cheaply-animated episodes that have been slotted in to replace the ones where the originals have been lost.

I've gone through Seasons Six and Seven and I'm halfway through Eight, which brings me into the Pertwee years. I remember watching these when they were first shown. This time, though, I'm seeing them in color, which makes a significant difference. I can't remember exactly when we got a color TV set but it wouldn't have been until Tom Baker arrived, if even then.

I imagine I'll do a post or two about the show at some point but for now I'll just say that it's considerably better than I remembered. I mean, I was a big fan of it as a child and even as a teenager, so I expected to enjoy watching it again, but I hadn't appreciated just how good some of the scripts are and, more surprisingly, most of the acting. 

There are a lot of inept extras, behaving as though they're in panto at the village hall, but the featured and supporting cast along with almost everyone who has any kind of speaking part, perform at the standard of any serious, adult drama of the period. It's very impressive.

My point, now that I remember I had one, is that the Doctor always has one or more "companions", people he meets in the course of his adventures, who end up tagging along with him for variously extended periods, before eventually leaving to go back to their own lives. This, I can't help but notice, is the exact same structure used in Wuthering Waves. 

Rover, the player-character, roams around the world, bumping into other Resonators everywhere she goes. Many of them join her for a while, sometimes just for the many, many cut scenes, sometimes in combat and sometimes as members of her fighting team. At every point it seems as though the relationship will last indefinitely but inevitably Rover's journey takes her out of the latest companion's hinterland and another takes their place.

The analogy breaks down mostly because the player can still choose to include any Resonator they have access to in their current team. This is a meta-feature that absolutely breaks narrative continuity and requires a great deal of double-think to ignore. I have people in my Go-team right now, who also send me occasional messages about what what they're doing a continent away. I pretend it's not happening. It's the only way.

Getting back to the update, there are the expected new weapons to win in the gacha game I mostly avoid but also some new Echoes, most likely obtainable in the game itself. I still don't fully understand Echoes, either in the lore or in their role as combat pets. 

Luckily for me, the update includes additional, automated guidance on choosing and using Echoes. I hope it's better than the current version, which every guide I read last year recommended shouldn't be used. I could certainly do with some help in that area.

There are also some improvements to the camera, by which I mean the actual camera you use in the game to take screenshots, not the way the camera moves as you play. I'm always happy to have more options there but I was fine with the ones I had. 

The update brings a bunch more events both permanent and temporary, most of which I probably won't even find time to look at before the next update arrives, not if the last few months are anything to go by. There's far too much content in Wuthering Waves for me to keep up with. I have my work cut out just catching up with the main storyline.

Speaking of which, there's another installment of that, too. It seems we'll be going beneath Riniscita to explore and then escape from a series of vaults. I hope it's not too claustrophobic.

It all looks very entertaining. The game finished updating before I finished this post so I guess I'd better log in and carry on with the story from where I left it. I'll do my best to catch up before this new update is replaced by the next. I'm not sure how long that gives me.

I'm guessing six weeks. It won't be enough...

Did Someone Call For The Doctor?

EVE Online is not a game I play, nor even one I write about. Nevertheless, I feel I ought to mark the day. It might well be the most unexpected mmorpg news story of the year... and it's only January 5th!

Here's the official promo video.

The comment thread that follows the video on YouTube is not pretty. I wasn't aware the current incarnation of the Doctor was so unpopular. I haven't watched Dr. Who at time of broadcast since the Peter Davison era, although I did eventually catch up, all the way to the end of Sylvester McCoy's run. I own most of the revival-era seasons on DVD but haven't broken the shrink-wrap on any of them yet.

I suppose I could have guessed what the hardcore Whovians would think of the current iteration but I have no knowledge of whether the negativity comes from the expected antideluvian attitudes of the entrenched core or if the show really isn't much good right now. As for EVE fans, I've been reading a lot of late about how unhappy they are with the direction the game's taking. It's hard to imagine this making many of them feel any better about it. On the contrary, it looks almost calculated to make them madder than ever.

The Nosy Gamer has a very good post up with all the details and some pithy commentary. I can't wait to hear what Wilhelm has to say.

Dr. Who, of course, can survive any amount of off-brand messaging. If you need proof, try this eighties classic, by the KLF offshoot The Timelords.

That made #1 in the UK charts in 1988 and the Doctor still managed to come back from the embarassment. Here's Orbital at Glastonbury, six years later with a harbinger of good things to come.

Whether EVE can regenerate into an equally successful new incarnation after this remains to be seen. At least there aren't any NFTs involved. This time.