Alden Bates' Weblog

TSV 28 is now online. It includes some cool stuff like interviews with Paul Cornell and David Halliwell, the last part of Jeff Stone's Murder at Midnight, an analysis of The War Machines, and some pretty cool artwork and cartoons. :)

There are one or two pieces still to come for that issue as well...

So bear with me. :) I came down with some sort of flu last Wednesday and have been suffering ever since.

We've now got ADSL connected, so once the wireless network is set up, I'll be able to use it from this computer. Xtra, apparently, is happy enough to supply the service, but they won't provide helpdesk support for it. This is typical of Xtra. Hopefully there won't be any problems with it.

Yesterday it was announced that Prime TV have picked up the license to screen Doctor Who in New Zealand. This has had mixed reactions as only about 75% of the population can actually get Prime, and in some places the signal is marginal. It's still preferable to Sky getting it, as Sky is pay TV and even less of the population has it.

They do it on purpose, I swear... Big Finish authors, that is. I was starting on the DCG entry for Arrangements for War on the weekend, and there was one of those annoying alien words in it that I had to listen to five times to work out what they were saying. In Arrangements the word was "Quisapen", a country on the planet Világ. I'm still not sure whether I've spelt it correctly.

Previous such words include:

• The Axis of Insanity: "Molenski Univarious"
• The Twilight Kingdom: "Ondrokkan"
• The Creed of the Kromon: "Eutermesan" (the liner notes were a great help here)

I wonder if the original DisContinuity Guide writers had this problem.

Currently we're about 6 audios behind in the Guide. Two entries are in the process of being compiled, and I've at least listened to The Harvest. The next three Doctor Who audios are sitting on my desk, still in their wrappers... taunting me... daring me to unwrap them... ARGH!

:P

I now have TSV 27 HTMLed and up on the site.

Jon Preddle's article on the chronology of the UNIT years isn't up, because it's all covered in his book Timelink. Part 2 of Murder at Midnight is, of course, plus an interesting article on the Timewyrm Quartet (Or quadrilogy as I guess it could be called :) and there's also quote a lot more artwork this time.

We'll start to catch up more quickly temporally speaking from now on, as 1991 was the last year to have 6 issues.

The Doctor Who logo for the new Chris Eccleston series was revealed today. Do we like it?

Sure, why not? Very new-SF and shiny

The desktop-sized version shows more detail. Just what are the strange cylindrical structures behind the CTO and WH?

With the filming of the new Doctor Who series in the UK, there's been talk of a regeneration story. I have to agree with the idea it would be silly to have a regen story (I'm going to abbreviate this to save typing :P) at the start of the series, due to the fact that after a regeneration the Doctor almost always starts out with an unstable personality and it'd be better to start out with an established Doctor so the audience have a better idea what to expect.

OTOH, I'm all for them doing a flashback to a regen story later in the series. Of course, it's unlikely to be like any regen story we've had before.

Most regen stories are along the lines of "The Doctor regenerates at the start and then has this unrelated adventure". I would think that a modern regen story would make the regeneration part of the story. Little really has been done with the concept of regeneration during Doctor Who's run, other than to use it as a plot device to change the leading actor occasionally.

You could have a story, for instance, where the bad guy tortures the previous Doctor to death, followed by regeneration, then the Eccleston Doctor kicks the bad guy's arse and steals his leather jacket. Or my favourite concept, where the previous Doctor and Eccleston Doctor meet up at the start of the adventure, and at the end the previous Doctor is wounded and sent back in time to the start of the story where he regenerates into Eccleston and encounters his previous self. Just to make things confusing.