Published in September 2010 by the Oxford Doctor The Tides of Time Who Society. PRESIDENT Jonathan Nash (Exeter), SECRETARY Jane Goodenough (New), TREASURER Adam Povey (St. John's). Copyright in article texts Issue 34 Michaelmas Term 2010 remains with the original contributors. This magazine is a work of homage and there is no intention to Editor Adam Povey violate the copyrights held by the British [email protected] Broadcasting Corporation, BBC Worldwide Ltd. or any other copyright holders. All images obtained from the public domain without permission. The editor may not be held liable for the effects of the density of Contents: Colin Baker in this issue on a human mind. Arc Light 3 Matthew Kilburn explains how Doctor Who got Why Is It Happening Again? lost in a philosophical ramble between Gallifrey and Amsterdam. It is half past eleven and I have work in the morning. I've spent the last five hours meticulously collecting Doctor Who: The Adventure Games 7 screenshots from one of my least favourite episodes Adam Kendrick provides a casual and/or and swearing at OpenOffice (it's just as painful as Microsoft Office, but free). I'm beginning to notice hardcore gamer’s review of City of the Daleks, the lack of heating in my room and my dressing gown Blood of the Cybermen and TARDIS. implies the fact that my room is plummeting towards a cold star. I'm fairly sure I had dinner at some point. My Top Seven Non-recurring Considering I probably don't do five hours of good Doctor Who Villains 10 work in a week at my actual job, why am I putting all A brief look at those whose villainy is perfectly this effort in? contained in a single story from Thomas Keyton. Because it's fun. Because I love getting a new article The Closet Behind the Couch 12 off someone I know that brings some element of Who A brief consideration from Adam Povey of the to life in a new way. Because with each issue of Tides I produce, the contributors get more enthusiastic and deviations of modern Doctor Who from the more willing to do the work. Heck, a few of the heteronormative paradigm. articles in this issue were made because I asked the author to do it and they did. I cannot stress how Doctor Who and the Country surprised I am at this. House Hotel 15 Thoughts from Matthew Kilburn about last As such, I ask everyone reading this issue to take a term's Society trip to the Utopia convention. brief moment and applaud the effort of all the contributors. They've put their valuable drinking time Trial of a Time Lord 17 into writing something to distract you from life for a A sonnet presented by Thomas Keyton brief while. That's worthy of applause – even if they can't hear it. The Ground Beneath Their Feet 18 I'm also writing this issue as Steven Moffat has yet The novelization of Doctor Who and the again destroyed my brain. After knocking Battlestar Silurians reviewed by Matthew Kilburn. Galactica off the top spot of Best Show EVAR with the sublime Press Gang, he went on to make the most Timelash – A Commentary 20 enjoyable season of Doctor Who I've seen. It's not Words by Thomas Keyton, Arrangement by perfect. However, the fact I couldn't finish an article Adam Povey, Bad Telly by the production team. examining the inconsistent writing of Amy Pond goes to show how superficial I find these faults. Moffat has Three Great Doctor Who Episodes taken the show to its purest, most entertaining and pulpy form. From the Indiana Jones-ification of River That Never Were 32 Song to The Underhenge (winner of Best Word of the Emma Lewis recalls how she didn't work out the Year) this year has been something modern television great twist of three new Series two-parters. seems to have forgotten about. – pure entertainment. Share and enjoy, Adam Povey Tides of Time 34 • Michaelmas Term 2010 • 2 A study in in-excellence by Matthew Kilburn Arc of Infinity shares with Time-Flight the ignominy Arc of Infinity are clearly a higher caste, mediating of my having two off-air UK Gold copies from what between the material universe we experience, and the seemed at the time an endless cycle of Doctor Who invisible forces which govern the material universe, repeats in the 1990s and early 2000s. I'm not certain where the distinction between the physical and the that I ever got round to watching either; thus the spiritual is blurred. society viewing earlier this year was the first time I had seen Arc of Infinity for a very long time. I The script for Arc of Infinity provides perhaps the remembered it vaguely as a procession of missed most sympathetic depiction of the Time Lords seen in opportunities: dull design, duff dialogue and meagre Doctor Who. In The War Games, the Time Lords menace. I came away having found it unsatisfactory, were dispassionate to the extent that they could be but also striving towards thematic unity: the effect promoted as the villains of the final episode. In their was that of a tapestry seen through the eyes of a various appearances between Terror of the Autons colour-blindness peculiar to early 1980s studio- and Genesis of the Daleks they were both remote and bound Doctor Who. manipulative, and in The Deadly Assassin and The Invasion of Time they are inward-looking and petty. Johnny Byrne's earlier script, The Keeper of Traken, Arc of Infinity portrays them striving for omniscient was influenced by a interpretation of the universe as a compassion, even if this compassion acts in ways realm kept in balance by an essentially benevolent, if which to the individual might seem cruel. A sector of mysterious, entity or collective which interpreted the fandom at the time of broadcast read Arc of Infinity's actuality of the universe on behalf of lesser beings. A portrayal of the Time Lords in the shadow of the full assessment of Byrne's ideas would require a ongoing debates about their nature prompted six familiarity with Aristotle, Plato, and the years earlier by The Deadly Assassin. Richard Neoplatonists of the late classical period and the Landen's review in Doctor Who Monthly enthused Renaissance, which I do not possess. On Traken, the that Arc's Time Lords were but one step away from Keeper was the highest possible mortal being, the the 'omnipotence' of the Time Lords of The War Source itself being near-immortal; the Time Lords in Games. Tides of Time 34 • Michaelmas Term 2010 • 3 in its own right: he was a major force in both Space: It's easy to 1999 and All Creatures Great and Small. It's not read Arc's surprising that he was chosen to write this story given Time Lords the decision to film on location in Amsterdam was as Landen part of the production office brief. He also seems to did, because have tried to divine what the series format was by where Robert identifying characteristic features of early 1980s Holmes saw Doctor Who and applying them in Arc of Infinity. the very Vulnerable youth is a theme which could have been power of the extracted from Full Circle: the backpackers are Time Lords unsympathetic sulky naive youths on the model of the leading them into stagnation and corruption, for Outlers, their dialogue somewhat artificial in the age Johnny Byrne the Time Lords inhabited one of the of Grange Hill and Tucker's Luck. Doctor Who's highest planes of what the twentieth-century treatment of the attractions of Amsterdam for American philosopher Arthur Lovejoy called, “the students was not necessarily bound to be as cautious great chain of being”. A theme from The Keeper of as its depiction of London night-life seventeen years Traken is repeated - the introduction of a disruptive before in The War Machines, but neither of its figure into a harmonious society and the corruption leading lights in 1983 were close to mainstream youth of one individual threatening the fall of all. Traken culture, and it shows. and Byrne's Gallifrey are both Edens, tenuously self- preserved. To make a crude parallel with John More remarkable is the assimilation of the Doctor to Milton's Paradise Lost, Omega is a regretful Satan, the model of the vulnerable youth himself. Wide-eyed who might have thought it better to reign in Hell than with the awe of a naif at the sight of the Arc of Infinity serve in Heaven, but (after the defeat of The Three itself, the Doctor is violated at the deepest physical Doctors) now strives to return to his former sphere. and spiritual levels by a being who turns out first to be closely allied to an admired paternal figure and Hedin emphasises that Omega wants to return to take then turns out to be one of the fathers of Time Lord up his place on the High Council, not to destroy, nor society. One might reflect that, as yet, we know of no to rule; but Omega's method of entering Paradise mothers of Time Lord society - it is born from the (Gallifrey) is to violate and ultimately displace the technological cross-fertilization of Rassilon and Doctor. The Doctor is still at this point conceived (in Omega. Marc Platt's Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible the wake of Christopher Bidmead's reinterpretation gave the Pythia to New Adventures readers, but her of the character for the 1980/81 season) as an rule could be read as presenting female influence as Everyman, and as such in Miltonian terms might be stifling.