Snowflakes falling

Morning, everyone. Or I suppose it could be evening, where you are. Or maybe you live in space, in which case who knows what the hell time it is?


Whatever the time, it's an odd time to be alive. For many reasons. Here's today's.

Yes, it's the Daily Mail again. But don't worry - I'm not here to specifically kick them in their nasty, lying, racist face. Well, not for long. I'm here because they've provided an excellent example of something which has been getting on my nerves for a while.


So. The top of the page is a follow up to a story from yesterday. See the picture of the two women, with their legs all plastered over in red? That's Theresa May - evil Queen of the Country Formerly Known as the UK - and Nicola Sturgeon - First Minister of Place We All Want to Run Away To And Where Midge Ure Comes From.


Yesterday the Mail ran that same picture on their front page, except without the red 'CENSORED' sign over it. They were very excited, you see, to find a picture of two women with legs. They giggled and squealed like tiny little boys might. They even thought of the awesome pun 'Legs-it'. Which sounds a bit like Brexit. Which is clever and funny.

A man opening the Daily Mail, yesterday.

Anyway, many people thought this was terrible and stupid and childish and sexist and the sort of thing only dickheads do. They thought it was demeaning and reductive to define two powerful women by their physical attributes. Especially in the context of it being 2017 and not, for example, one of those films where Robin Askwith climbed up a ladder to see a lady's bum.


The headline we see above is the Mail's reaction to this criticism. They've called it a "Legs-it storm". And they're attacking the people who complained. And it's this that bothers me.


There are two phrases here that have been chosen to attack the complainers. "Get a life" and "Censored by the left". I'm hearing phrases like these a lot recently, and it's no accident.

"Get a life" is a favoured tactic of the right to dismiss the concerns of dissenting voices. I've seen it a lot on comments boards, when discussing the recent protests against Trump, or debating the rise of racism in the UK. It suggests that the only reason you're complaining is because you're a pathetic individual without any friends. A sad, lonely obsessive who gets cross about pointless trivia.


It's part of the 'snowflake' narrative. You've seen that, I assume. The idea that anyone complaining about anything is a delicate, over-emotional weakling, who can't cope with the real world. That the supposed 'heat' of real issues causes them to melt, so they need to hide away from life.


That's why they've chosen the word 'censored', in that headline. They like that word. It suggests that freedom of expression, freedom of thought itself, is under threat from pathetic snowflakes like me. That I'm so afraid of being upset, I'll clamp down on your freedoms to make sure I stay safe.


That I don't like "Legs-it" because it offends me.



But here's the problem with that narrative. It is, as William Shakespeare said, total horseshit based on a false initial premise, and thus totally bloody worthless.

I'm not offended by the Daily Mail. Well, Ok, maybe I am a bit. But that's not why I object to their constant stream of unfiltered wankjizzle.

I object to them because they are morally wrong. Their actions are harmful. The things they say and do make the world worse. That's not being offended. That's having an intellectual opposition to their ideology.

Their emphasis on May and Sturgeon's legs is problematic because, like so much the Mail says, it furthers a narrative which objectifies women. It tells every woman reading it that it doesn't matter how powerful or successful you become, you will always basically be judged on your body. You are there to be commented upon, looked at, evaluated and, ultimately, either desired or rejected based on how well you conform with our idea of what it is to be attractive.

And it tells men pretty much the same. Women are not as good as you. They are not deserving of your respect. They are things. Objects.

It feeds into anorexia. It feeds into violence. It feeds into suicide. It feeds into the constant struggle for men and women to work out who the hell they are, and how to relate to each other.


We're not offended by your headlines, you parasitic worms. We're not crying because we think women's legs need censoring, as if we just got here on a coach party from Victorian England.


Being offended doesn't mean anything. People are offended by seeing breastfeeding in public. They used to get offended at finding a black person in their bathroom. Some still do. It doesn't mean anything. It's certainly not the basis for an argument.


What we've done - and this is what bothers you - is we've seen what you're doing and we think it's wrong. We have a calm, clear moral objection to you. We think your ideology is nasty, cowardly and self serving. We think you are run by old, white men who are terrified of change and will use all their power to stop it happening.


We've worked out that you love money more than reason. That you have no shame. That you are weak minded, timid anti-intellectuals who'd rather make things worse, on a daily basis, than face up to the fact that the world doesn't just belong to you.


That's not being offended. That's having used logical thought and come to a conclusion. You'd love it if we were offended, because that would suggest we hadn't really though it through and were just relying on gut instinct. What scares you is the idea that we have thought it through. Because when it comes down to it, you have no argument.


You are snowflakes. You are cry-babies, who scream "She's offended" every time someone calls you out on your bullshit. You are hypocrites, who pretend that every argument against you is born of emotion, yet spiral into a fits of anger if anyone dare criticise you.

I said I wasn't going to just attack the Mail, didn't I? Well, it's not just them. This is an epidemic, whereby everyone hides from criticism by playing the "Offensiveness doesn't matter" card. It's all over the internet, like a rash. People avoiding responsibility for their words and actions, because they revel in being 'offensive', and their freedom of speech. You don't like my racism? Stop being so easily offended!


And there's Trump and his followers, of course. The thin skinned, easily riled personification of stupidity and entitlement. Assuming that people are 'offended' by racism, sexism and disablism. Rather than, for example, genuinely concerned that such language and behaviour cause massive harm and make the world worse.


Finally, it bothers me because we play into it. By 'we' I mean sort of decent, reasonable people. People who would rather vomit on the Daily Mail than read the thing.  Sometimes we play into the hands of these idiots, giving them ammunition for their stupidity guns, by saying that their words and actions are offensive. We assume that 'being offensive' is inherently bad.


It's not. It's arbitrary, and cultural. Don't fight things you find offensive. Fight things you find morally wrong. Sometimes they'll be the same things, of course, but know why you're fighting. Fight them not because they outrage you, but because you can see that they do harm.


That's how we'll beat them. That's how they'll lose. And, most important of all, that's how we get to keep on being offensive ourselves. Because don't forget - we're kind of dicks a lot of the time, too.

Saint Adric's Day

On March 16th 1982, Adric died, so that we might live.


He didn't mean to, of course. He thought he was going to be fine. He thought that Doctor Who was going to save him.


He was wrong. Doctor Who did not save him. Doctor Who was off doing something else. And so Adric crashed into some dinosaurs and exploded.

It happened in episode four of a Doctor Who story called 'Earthshock". It had been a great story. Peter Davison was Doctor Who, and I was just about getting used to his frantic, excitable version of my hero, after a period of uncertainty following the loss of Best Doctor Who Ever Tom Baker. Davison was particularly good here, careering through the story with energy and humour and quite a lot of exasperated eye rolling which I've only just realised is quite a large part of my personality now.

And there were Cybermen in it! I loved the Cybermen. They looked great - massive silvery giant monsters with guns. And they bickered petulantly all the way through, constantly belittling each other's ideas in a passive aggressive monotone. They seemed like fun monsters, who had weird lives of their own - stars of a TV show called "The Amazing Adventures of the Brilliant Cybermen" which we just saw little bits of.

I watched the story with great excitement. I was 11 at the time, and had just fallen in love with Doctor Who in a big way.


And then came episode four.

March 16th 1982. I sat alone in the living room. I assume I had banished the rest of the family, lest they ruin the experience by talking or breathing. I was eating Smarties which, for some reason, I had tipped onto a plate and separated into their individual colour groups. I don't know why I did it, and I don't know why I remember. Feel free to psychoanalyse.

I was reading a book at the time, which lay face down and open on the chair arm. It was, I'm afraid to say, a Doctor Who book. I was a child consumed by singular desires.


The episode drew to an end and the Cybermen had made it so that a spaceship was going to crash into Earth and explode and kill everyone. All our heroes were on the spaceship too, which was worrying for them. They did not want to crash, or explode, or get killed. And so Adric went, "Oh, I can make it so that the spaceship doesn't crash into Earth." And so Doctor Who said, "Well, good luck with that," and ran off in the TARDIS with all the other companions. Adric got on with doing some sums and prodding a computer, hoping that this would make the spaceship not crash, and thus not explode.


And of course I thought, "Oh, I wonder how Doctor Who will save Adric?" I liked Adric. He was young, and slightly out of his depth, and often made the wrong decisions. Perfect for my nerdy idiotic self to identify with.


Well. Adric did manage to stop the spaceship crashing into Earth, except that he did it by making it go back in time. Which meant that it crashed into Prehistoric Earth instead, which is where the dinosaurs lived. Bad news for the dinosaurs and bad news for Adric, who exploded and died.

I was quite astonished. The credits rolled in silence and I sat, also in silence. I ate a couple of orange Smarties. I picked up my book - The Face of Evil, if you're wondering. But I did not want to read it. One of my TV heroes had died. It was weird and unsettling. Worse than when the cat got run over. Sorry cat.


I'm not sure why the death of Adric was such a thing. I suppose I just expected everything to always turn out OK.  I don't know why, though. The TV of the early 80s was full of death. From the massacre at the end of Blake's 7 to the routine slaughter of everyone in Blackadder, to the Young Ones going over a cliff in a bus to the destruction of the whole Earth in Hitchhiker's. There was something in the air, in the 80s, that suggested maybe we were all for the chop.


An odd place, in retrospect, for a teenage mind to take shape. The death of Adric prompted me and Best Friend Paul McGrath to come up with "Saint Adric's Day". Every March the 16th we would abstain from Mars Bars in honour of our fallen hero. We would draw on our hands a five pointed gold star, like the one Adric used to wear. Sometimes we would draw pictures of Cybermen and then scribble them angrily out.


I don't do those things now. I don't eat Mars Bars anymore, so the sacrifice would seem banal. Drawing a star on my hand feels uncomfortable in these times when symbolism is so easily misinterpreted. I suppose I still do draw the odd Cyberman. I like doing that.


And I do remember, every year on March the 16th, that a fictional character accidentally flew a spaceship into dinosaurs. And, somehow, it brings me comfort. I'm not sure what it means. I'm not sure what anything means. Happy St. Adric's day, everyone.

My Back Pages

Afternoon! How's the wife? The husband? The life partner? The dog? The crippling sense of existential angst? Whoever it is that you go home to. How are they?


Good. Probably. I wasn't listening. I was thinking about something else. I was thinking about books.

Yesterday was World Book Day. And everyone spent all day saying, "Books are ace!" Parents sent their kids to school dressed as characters from books. I know because they put millions of photos of these kids on Twitter. It seemed to be Harry Potter, mostly, which is fine. Though there was the occasional example of a poor child dressed as Offred from The Handmaid's Tale, or something similar - a confused but obedient pawn in the war between parents who were trying to out-clever one another. "Oh, Jemima's dressed as the Struggle of the Proletariat from Das Kapital. Yes it's her favourite."


I did not dress up. Unless, somewhere, there's a book about a middle aged man trying to disguise his excessive wine consumption with a range of exciting waistcoats. That would be a good book. But no. Instead I posted, online, the covers of some books that had meant something to me, in my formative years.


The first of those books was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a Doctor Who book. Doctor Who and the Daleks, to be precise. It's a powerful, totemic item for many a geek of my generation. It was the beginning of many things that are still important to me and, like so many books, a fundamental part of who I was to become.

Here's how it started.

When I was nine I went to Middle School and I was put in Mrs Skelding's class. She was a tall, possibly-Scottish woman who enjoyed reading out loud and was mostly very pleasant. In the corner of her classroom was the Best Thing Ever - and that best thing ever was a shelf.


On the shelf were some books. Very specific books. Doctor Who books. Apparently her son had owned them and no longer wanted them. What a moron! Why did he do that? They're great! And now I was allowed to borrow them!


I first went for The Dalek Invasion of Earth. I'd recently seen the film version on a Saturday morning matinee at the Odeon, and I had loved it with all my tiny heart. And here that film was again, living inside this book. All the colours and explosions and heroes and traitors and races against time. Wonderful.


And that was my gateway drug. Mrs. Skelding's idiot son had given her loads of books, and I read every single one. What an amazing world of stuff to discover. Dozens of wild, insanely creative stories, ranging across time and space. All in the company of a magical crazy space guy who made me feel OK to be weird.

The books existed before VHS and DVD, so they were the only way into the past of Doctor Who. He was still kicking around on television, in the gangly, toothy form of Tom Baker, but his past adventures were a mystery. These stories - novelisations of the adventures that had been broadcast before I was born - were all I had.


I'm glad, for many reasons, that my exposure to these stories was through the novelisations. If I could have watched the actual old TV stories, back then as a child, I might not have fallen in love in the same way. Brilliant as Doctor Who is, there are things in the old TV stories that might have proved offputting to a young creature like myself.


The novels are fast and thrilling where the TV could be slow and ponderous. Monsters, planets and spaceships flew colourfully around my head, carved into life by the words in these brilliant books. Having watched the TV versions in recent years, I can testify that the special effects do not always live up to this promise.

Best of all, for an introverted young thing like me, books allowed you inside the heads of the characters. I could read their minds and know their feelings. I knew that the heroes were often scared on the inside. Villains were rarely just evil, but often believed that their actions really were for the best. Nothing was simple, and that was true for the grown ups too.


The writers of these books gave life to characters who might only have a few lines on screen. Everyone was important. Everyone had a story. As the Doctor would say, years later, "I've never met anyone unimportant."


I loved these books and I still do. They became part of who I am and I was very much formed by them. Unlike Mrs. Skelding's insane son, I never gave mine away. I don't know if I'll ever read them again but they sit in the attic, in correct chronological order, their pages mumbling with tales of Sea Devils, dinosaurs and Daleks. They're wonderful.

Time is Relative. Season 6. part three.

Many people have done impressive things. But has anyone watched all of Doctor Who in order, all the way through? No. They haven't. They can't have. They'd be lying if they said they had, and we'd be within our rights to hurl bricks at their stupid lying mouths.

But I'm better than those liars. I am watching all of Doctor Who and, get this, I've got to the end of the black and white episodes. That's amazing. You should worship me. That's the hardest bit! And I've taken lovely photos to show you what it was like.

Here are the last three stories of Season Six, which makes them the last three stories of the 1960s, which makes them the last three black and white stories. Two of them are quite good. The other is... less good.

Enjoy.


The Seeds of Death

A delightful shot, to start off. There's Jamie and Zoe, wondering what's going to happen next in this madcap life of theirs. And there's Doctor Who, giggling like a maniac. It's almost as if their adventures don't always result in loads and loads of horrible deaths.

Here are some space guys, doing space stuff. I think they're in charge of the moon, or something, which is what the story is going to be about.

The lady guy is trying to hide from the man guy. It has not worked. He's still talking to her. "Anyway I've got this spare ticket and, I mean, I don't know if you like space jazz, but..."

She hates space jazz. So she's standing very still, pretending to be some art.

It's a good shot. I like how weird it is. There's a lot of arty directing coming up, so get ready to be amazed.

Doctor Who and his friends turn up and meet the Moon Guy People. It's taken them quite a while, because Zoe had to find a skirt shorter than the one she wore in The Krotons. Which Doctor Who said was 'theoretically impossible.' But she's done it.

Right now they're not on the moon, they're in a museum that's all about space. Don't worry - they're not pretending that's a real rocket. The Moon Guys are cross with Doctor Who, because he's not meant to be in the museum. Also, something has gone wrong with the Moon.

This man is still on the moon. He's met the villains, and he's looking right at them. Except it looks like he's looking at us. We're the aliens in this scene, I guess. He doesn't seem that scared of us. He's all "I'm the King of the Moon. How do you like them apples?"

This is the leader of the villains. He's an Ice Warrior. They've been in Doctor Who before, and they go "Hisssss" a lot. This one wants to be King of the Moon. So he kills the other man, and now he is.

If I'd have been the other man, I wouldn't have been so cocky. This guy looks like an actual nightmare has come to life. And put on a hat.

The Ice Warriors take over all of the moon. I forget how. I think they're just so weird looking that everyone goes "Fair enough," and lets them do what they want. Sensible.

I like the way that the humans just get on with things, even though they're now being bossed about by evil space lizards. I'm not sure if we should be proud of our resilience as a species, or deeply ashamed at the fact that we'll obey anyone, no matter how evil, if they shout at us enough.

Later, Zoe does something.

I don't know what it is. I don't care. I just want to bathe in the glory of her excellent face.

Doctor Who goes to see the Ice Warriors, on the moon. They are delighted to see him, because it means they can go "Look, we made a big killy seed pod thing!"

Villains are always desperate to show off to Doctor Who. You can tell that the leader is going, "Yeah, it's the biggest and most killy of its kind. I can't imagine you've ever come across something as basically evil as what we have here."

To his credit, Doctor Who always pretends to be impressed. He doesn't have to do that. He could say, "This is significantly smaller than the bombs the Daleks use and frankly their overall aesthetic is more compelling." But he knows it's important for them, so he just pulls a face that suggests "Gosh indeed!"

A lot of the story is spent with this Ice Warrior going to look for humans, so he can kill them and tell the leader that yes, he killed the humans. Jamie is pretending that this is a big deal, and that they must hide, and that he must stroke Zoe vigorously. Zoe is growing sceptical of this. The monsters are always rubbish at looking, and she's pretty sure it's not because of the stroking.

Doctor Who runs away from the Ice Warriors, to give everyone something to do. This is lots of fun. Here he meets millions of other, infinitely recurring Doctor Whos. Or a couple of mirrors. This being the 1960s, it's hard to be certain.

What a great shot. You don't get your other science fiction heroes doing this kind of 'screech to a halt in a panic' business. Oh, I know Han Solo kind of does it on the Death Star, but he still sort of looks cool when he's doing it.

Actually, now I come to look at them, it's pretty similar. Did George Lucas watch the Seeds of Death? He started writing Star Wars not long after. And there is that bit later where Zoe turns off her targeting computer so she can blow up the Ice Warriors' battle station.

No, there isn't. I made that up.

Later, an Ice Warrior goes to Earth, to make the Seeds of Death happen. He's trying to hide between these trees. He's having limited success. He feels self conscious and wishes he could have stopped on the moon, where they get to chase Doctor Who up and down.

This is a better attempt at hiding, but still ultimately flawed. This is from the point of view of a soldier, who has been sent out to find the Ice Warrior. The soldier has found him. And the Ice Warrior has seen the soldier.

They stare at each other in an uncomfortable silence for what seems like ages. Then the Ice Warrior murders the soldier and wanders off. But I like to think he often reflects on what might have been.

The Ice Warrior in the background has found an excellent place to stand. Right in front of the great big 'Wall Of Light' that is, apparently, a vital part of making the Moon work. He knows that he looks fantastic and moody.

Later he will be asked if he can come and help fight the humans. He pretends not to hear. This will be his Facebook profile picture for months.

The Ice Warrior leader talks to his boss, over the TV. His boss has an amazing spangly disco helmet and, it seems, a mirrorball in his office. If this was made now, he'd be played by Matt Berry and there'd be extreme funk playing every time he phoned up.

Much time has passed and many people have died. Vain posing Ice Warrior guy has not moved even one inch.

There is a man in the middle looking sad. He has betrayed the entire human race. He is too remorseful to join in the Ice Warrior dance party that has spontaneously broken out.

Remorseful sad man is explaining to the Ice Warrior Leader that he doesn't think this 'betraying the human race' thing is working out, and maybe he's going to go back to college or something.

The Leader is not really listening. He's thinking, "Vain posing Ice Warrior was right - this is a great place to stand. I'm going to make this my profile picture, and forbid him from doing the same. We can't both do it."

Doctor Who gets some solar reflectory things and does some science to them so that they are extra hot. Then he murders the Ice Warriors with them. For some reason this is not the same as him using, say, a machine gun, or stabbing them with knives. It is clever science.

Doctor Who is explaining to the Ice Leader that he has won. The Ice Leader is shocked - he though he was winning. But Doctor Who is very convincing. He's been in enough stories to know when it's the end. And it's now. The Ice Leader is disappointed, but doesn't want to be seen as childish, so goes home.





The Space Pirates

This story features some really rather good model shots, like this one.

Mostly this one.

They use this one a lot.

It gets tedious.

 The plot is about this lady - who has space hair - saying, "Oh, I don't like the Space Pirates!" to the other guy, who is busy mansplaining space in the background.

She is lying. She loves the Space Pirates. She thinks they're great, and maybe she is one. Or something. She's certainly on their side.

The other guy is too busy talking about himself to ever find out that she is lying. I think Doctor Who tells him later. He's very cross.

 This is the only other photo I took from this story. Partly because it is one of those stories where most of the episodes are missing, so I didn't have that many options. But also partly because it is very boring for quite a lot of the time it is on the television.

Here, Doctor Who and his friends are clinging onto a spaceship, because it is going fast, in space.

Surely all spaceships go fast in space. Isn't that their thing? You don't see the crew of the Enterprise all clinging onto their chairs for dear life, shouting "Aaagh! It's so fast!"

I'm beginning to wonder how accurate Doctor Who is, scientifically speaking.

Anyway. it is a fun picture nevertheless. Zoe appears to have abandoned skirts altogether.






Now. I was going to do three stories, but I think I've gone on a bit. And I've taken loads of pictures of the last story - The War Games - because it's very long, and very ace.

So, The War Games gets its own entry - here.

Or, you could amuse yourself with my past viewing experiences. Take a look here, and see where it gets you.


See you next time!

Time is Relative: Season 6. Part two.

Morning. Love what you've done with your hair!

You join me in season six of Doctor Who, all the way back at the end of the 1960s. The colour scheme is monochrome and the quality variable, but I'm watching it all anyway.

My thoughts and photos from the beginning of season six are here. And now it's time for part two.



The Invasion

This is one of those stories where the BBC got drunk and lent all the episodes to their friends, but then forgot who it had lent them to. And some of those friends never brought them back. Because sometimes friends are jerks who borrow your DVD of, say, 30 Rock Season One and then totally pretend you never lent it to them, like, at all, in the first place.

Anyway. Some of this story has been made into an exciting cartoon version, as you can see. It's pretty good, I think. Cartoon Zoe doesn't look as nice as real Zoe, but that's not the animators' fault. She has an ethereal beauty that would be hard to capture.

After a couple of stories set in weird fantasy worlds, this story is suddenly in the real world, where guys on motorbikes shoot other people to death with guns. It's  quite the gear change, a bit like a friendly drunk who goes from chatting about Scooby Doo to suddenly trying to glass you in the face.

Jamie and Zoe makes friends with Isobel Watkins, a supremely irritating woman who takes photos and spends most of her time making shrill giggling sounds. I don't like her much, but I do like that she has lent Zoe this feather boa thing. She looks nice in it.

Isobel never shuts her mouth, as you can see here. Squawk, squawk, squawk. Jamie is saying "Could you please, even for a second, stop your constant wittering?" Zoe, on the other hand, is thinking that they could probably just kill her, and hide the body, and then she could keep the boa.

 

The Cybermen are in this story. They live underground, in some sewers. This one is drunk and spends a lot of his time stumbling round in the tunnels, shouting at people. It's fun to see a Cyberman really letting itself go. Normally they're so sensible and calm. If they were more like this guy, they could probably just come and live on Earth, without having to invade it. People would think they were ace.

This is the main bad guy for the story, and he's fantastic. He's called Tobias Vaughn, which is the sort of name you'd expect to find hosting some BBC show about vintage toys or something. Tobias is a big important businessman and spends a lot of time in his massive office, laughing at people and telling them that they are jerks.

He's got a big evil Cyber Brain Thing in his cupboard. Every now and then he gets it out and they have a chat. Their chats are always the same. Brain Thing says "I want to do an invasion." And Tobias says, "Yes, I'm on it," or, "We'll do it in a bit."

This time he's saying, "I can't do the invasion today. Doctor Who has turned up, and you know what he's like."

And the Brain Thing says "Oh no! Not Doctor Who! I hate that guy!" And Tobias says, "Tell me about it!" And they have a good old moan about Doctor Who, and they laugh about how stupid his trousers are.

Tobias has made a machine that makes the Cybermen go mental, by doing emotions to them. Cybermen do not like emotions. They are stoic. See their faces? That's not just a mask. That's how they actually feel about things. If they saw the Pixar film "Up", they'd still look like that, even when it got to the bit where Carl reads the big adventure book and realises that, for Ellie, the big adventure was her life living with him.

This machine basically makes them feel like you should do when you watch "Up", which is to say, it makes them overwhelmed with a deep sadness, shot through with a beautiful sense of joy and warmth at how wonderful life is, leaving them with a determination to live each day to the fullest and make the most of each moment with those they love.

Their response to this is to wander up and down the sewers, making electronic gargling noises. Tobias is delighted with this. He thinks "Up" is overrated. He is evil.

The Cybermen live inside big bags. When it is time to do an invasion, they burst out of the bags. This looks great and was an excellent idea of whoever thought of it.

It's interesting the difference angles make to the Cybermen faces. From the front, this one looks positively menacing, like you'd better pay him the money you owe him, or he'll use household tools to hurt your fingers and toes.

But from this angle, he looks like he's taken a shedload of pills and is going to dance to the music in his head until he dies of dehydration.

The Cybermen are excited because they are getting to do their invasion, at last. I like the composition of this shot a lot. It's not often 1960s Doctor Who relies on its visuals to sell an idea, but this is really well directed.

I also respect how organised the Cybermen are. If it was a bunch of me and my workmates trying to get up a ladder, we would not be this organised. We'd all be standing at the foot of it, trying to go up at the same time, then all apologising, then all standing around waiting for someone to go first, then all trying at the same time again. We wouldn't ever get round to invading anything.

The second Cyberman here hasn't been allowed to bring his gun for the invasion. He kept playing with his gun during the invasion planning session, and making "Pew! Pew!" noises when the Cyber Controller was trying to explain Sewer Protocol. He was warned that if he didn't stop, he would have his gun taken off him.

He is now regretting his playful instinct.

The one in front of him his carrying his gun in an unnecessarily ostentatious manner, as if to say "I behaved in the planning session."

This is another of those photos that is quite commonly used to show how exciting Doctor Who is, and with good reason. The Cybermen are doing excellent invading.

I like to think that the Cybermen put photos of this moment on Facebook and tag in the Daleks. "Just invading earth, about a hundred years before you did. And what's this? Stairs? Oh no, guess we better turn back! Or shall we just WALK DOWN THEM ON OUR AWESOME LEGS?"

The Daleks will seethe with envy, and wish there was a 'Don't like' button.

Zoe is instrumental to the defeat of the Cybermen. She does some great sums, and blows up all the Cyber Spaceships. She is so much better than Victoria or Dodo, both of whom would have just screamed or cried or pawed pathetically at Doctor Who shrieking "What shall we do?"

Also, her face is great.

This show should be called "Zoe Who" and when she leaves, it should follow her to see what she does next.

Doctor Who goes to see Tobias, in his massive office. Doctor Who is thinking, "Maybe I'd like a massive office." Tobias is looking out of the window thinking, "I hope it snows. Snow is great."

If it did snow, it would spoil the invasion. Everyone would stay at home and the Cybermen would turn up to all the important places and there would be no-one there. This would be embarrassing. If you invade a building, but no-one is there, does it count?

I don't think it does.





The Krotons

The TARDIS lands in a quarry. This happens a lot in Doctor Who, but rarely so definitively as here. The TARDIS is thinking, "I look great in this quarry."

Doctor Who and Jamie are excited about something or the other. Probably a bit of rock or a door or something. It's not a very interesting planet and you have to make your fun where you can.

Zoe thinks they should all be still talking about how great she is for blowing all the Cybermen up last week. She thinks that if Doctor Who had done it, they would still be in the TARDIS listening to him go on about it and drawing pictures of himself killing Cybermen on a whiteboard.

The Krotons isn't very good. The planet is a bit tedious and the people who live on it have little character to speak of. But it's enjoyable watching this TARDIS team hang out together. They have a nice dynamic and seem to be having fun, even when the plot makes no sense. Plus, one of them is Zoe. Look at her lovely, cherubic face.

It's a Kroton! He's quite impressive, in his own way. Though I'm not sure which way round his head is meant to go. Maybe he doesn't either. That would explain his irritable disposition.

The Kroton is cross with Jamie. I forget why. I think maybe Jamie has snuck into the Kroton's secret room. No-one is meant to go in there. They haven't tidied in ages, and there's a big bubbling vat of something in the middle of the room, which can't conform to health and safety regulations. If Jamie was to burn himself, they would be liable.

Doctor Who and Zoe, meanwhile, are outside, being hassled by the other Kroton. They don't seem particularly scared. They seem like they've been caught shopping, when they said they were too ill to come to work today.

Having caught Zoe, the Krotons do something that makes her face go all bendy and weird. I think they might be trying to suck out her cleverness. This is a great, trippy sequence where everything just goes mental for a bit. I like that about 1960s Who. It just does what it wants, as if it knows that soon it will be the 1970s and it will have to start behaving itself a bit.

What a great bit of design. It's like the Sydney Opera house had little robot children.

These are the only two Krotons in the story. Despite this, they still spend most of their time talking about their mission. You'd think they'd have some Kroton stuff to discuss, like who'd they'd like to play them in the film of their life, or something.

At the end, they die, horribly, because Doctor Who puts acid in their drinking water. That's pretty dark. They were a bit evil, I suppose, but you've sometimes got to wonder what goes through Doctor Who's mind.





That's enough for now. There are three stories left in Season Six, and then we're done with black and white, the second Doctor Who, and, distressingly, Zoe. See you soon.


Click here for Season Six, part three

Go back to Season Six, part one