Mindless Ones

Or what does this have to do with Promethea anyway?

Crossposted at Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!, for reasons that will become apparent.

On March 7, 2007, I was at the Royal Festival Hall in London’s South Bank Centre, which has been the scene of some of the most profound artistic experiences of my life

The Caves Of Androzani is, notably, the only actually good Doctor Who story from 1984

The twentieth anniversary of Doctor Who was obviously a special event, and who better to write it than the man most associated with Doctor Who, Terrance Dicks?

Earthshock is almost universally considered one of the very best Doctor Who stories of Peter Davison’s tenure in the role, with only The Caves Of Androzani offering it much competition. In Doctor Who Magazine‘s 2009 reader’s poll ranking the first two hundred televised stories, it was rated number 19, and was one of only three stories from the 1980s to feature in the top twenty (in contrast, a full ten of the bottom twenty were from that decade).

It’s therefore a good case study to look at exactly what went wrong with the show

It’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for…

L is for Logopolis

Shada is a television story from 1979 starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, Lalla Ward as Romana and David Brierley as K-9, the incomplete parts of which got a video release in 1992.

Yes, it’s an extra-special double review!

In which I look at the last two episodes of the most recent mini-series of Doctor Who

One of the little tricks Steven Moffat has been playing to keep the fans onside is to have, as an undercurrent in his series, references to a specific previous era of the show. Last year, there were a lot of little nods to Patrick Troughton’s last year on the show, almost all of which will have passed the casual viewer by.

This year, Moffat seems to have chosen William Hartnell’s last year or so to pay a sneaky ‘homage’ to. In the year when Steven Taylor was the companion, there was a Dalek story featuring an actor who later went on to play a companion, in a different role (in fact there were two), there was a story about a space ark, featuring the crew interacting with extremely large animals, with a dubious moral message, a trip to New York (coming up tomorrow in this series)…

and the story often considered the worst in the series’ history.

Dave Sim, who since the death of Will Eisner has been probably the greatest living all-round comics creator, is releasing his classic graphic novel High Society as a Kickstarter-funded digital version on October 10.

To promote this release, he is doing a virtual tour of comics sites, including Mindless Ones, on October 10, answering interview questions. However, he’s doing it with a twist — he wants us to post the questions we’re asking here *now*, in advance of the blog tour, and leave comments open for readers to ask questions, some of which he will also answer. Anyone whose question is chosen will receive a free autographed back-issue of Cerebus, with a personalised head sketch.

Questions, and explanation of who Sim is, under the cut