I’ve raved previously over my love for this series and I was both relieved and bummed that the American adaptation never took off. If you want an idea of why I love this show so much you can check out a lot of clips of it on YouTube. I’d embed one, but it appears embedding is disabled on all of the clips.

Alas the show itself still isn’t available in the U.S. so I’ll have to resort to downloading it off the BitTorrent networks. I really wish they’d at least release the DVDs here so I could buy the damned things.

This gets me worked up on two levels: First it gets the whole Krismas vibe going and then it gets me all excited about new Who. This just makes Krismas day that much more wonderful.

Outpost Gallifrey: David Tennant Leaves Doctor Who

The Guardian newspaper this evening broke the story prematurely, reporting on their website (in a report subsequently pulled down) that Tennant is “vacating the TARDIS and leaving the BBC’s Doctor Who series at the end of next year. Tennant’s decision brings to an end his popular four-year tenure as the time lord.“ The article went on to say that the BBC had confirmed that the actor “would complete the filming of four special episodes to be screened this year and in early 2010, as well as 2009’s Christmas special.“

The BBC Doctor Who website has now posted the full news: “I’ve had the most brilliant, bewildering and life changing time working on Doctor Who. I have loved every day of it,“ the actor says. “It would be very easy to cling on to the TARDIS console forever and I fear that if I don’t take a deep breath and make the decision to move on now, then I simply never will. ... I’m still the Doctor all next year but when the time finally comes I’ll be honoured to hand on the best job in the world to the next lucky git - whoever that may be.“ Tennant added that he “always thought the time to leave would be in conjunction with Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner who have been such a huge part of it all for me. Steven Moffat is the most brilliant and exciting writer, the only possible successor to Russell and it was sorely tempting to be part of his amazing new plans for the show. I will be there, glued to my TV when his stories begin in 2010.“ He furthermore says that he feels “very privileged to have been part of this incredible phenomenon, and whilst I’m looking forward to new challenges I know I’ll always be very proud to be the Tenth Doctor.“ Says Russell T Davies, “I’ve been lucky and honoured to work with David over the past few years - and it’s not over yet, the Tenth Doctor still has five spectacular hours left! After which, I might drop an anvil on his head. Or maybe a piano. A radioactive piano. But we’re planning the most enormous and spectacular ending, so keep watching!“

I wonder if he’ll follow in Eccleston’s footsteps and show up in some American TV series for a short while. Either way we can start speculating on who the next Who will be come 2010.

Would the CDC really burn a plane?
In Fringe’s premiere episode, the CDC was the first in the plane, and after taking some air samples, the government agency set it ablaze on the runway—but even this is fabricated. In reality, state and local health departments are the first on the scene, and the CDC has to be invited in. Even then, they wouldn’t actually be the ones with the torches.

“When appropriate, we make recommendations for ways to decontaminate things,” says the CDC’s Rotz. This would most likely involve quarantining the plane in a separate hanger or, at most, applying heat using autoclave-like equipment to burn off any hazardous contaminants before disposing of the plane. “It wouldn’t be lighting a match.”

It says something about how accustomed to standard TV tropes I’ve become that I didn’t even think about that one. At least one or two of the comments left on the article show why this debunking is a good public service:

Does no one else remember when the “experts” declared that flying by humans was impossible? They are hammers, and all they can see are nails.

Nope, don’t remember that myself, but then I wasn’t around back before 1903 when the Wright Brothers managed to get their asses up in the air for at least a short while, but for the record not all “experts” claimed human flight was impossible. Some did, but not all of them.

Thanks for the review—sounds like pure scifi, which is fine as long as people don’t take it seriously. However, on the last point: there is no way to get information out of a dead person’s brain now—but if they were to be cryonically preserved, they could probably be uploaded and then questioned in a few decades. Click my website link above for more info.

Look for cryogenics to show up in an upcoming episode of Fringe. It fits in with all the other nonsense pretty well.

Simon Baker will star as The Mentalist, a man who uses his keen abilities of observation to solve crimes. He can pick up small clues and then synthesize them, allowing him to see the big picture in a case. It’s a bit like “House”, but for a detective and not a doctor. The CBS website has clips and background info on the show, and there is also a clip on YouTube, but for some reason — CBS, this is the 21st Century, hello! — they have disallowed embedding.

[...] It looks like The Mentalist will be all about this. The main character, Patrick Jane, once made a ton of money pretending to be a psychic, but has since reformed. Given the preview clips, I have a lot of hope that this show will mainstream the idea that the so-called psychics you seen TV are either self-deluded or frauds. It’s amazing to me to see these performers fish for information, doing a very sloppy job trying to fool the public — yet succeeding so well that they make millions of dollars. It’s very aggravating to see people allowing themselves be fooled so utterly.

I’m going to have to set up the DVR to record this as I’ll be in class when it airs. Given the bad taste Fringe left in my mouth with its portrayal of skepticism being completely wrong perhaps I’ll find this show to be much more palatable in tone.

[Update:] The behind the scenes clip is not embeddable, but the teaser is:

I’ve got a love/hate thing going on with J.J. Abram’s newest show on FOX called Fringe. Various previews of the show described it as a bit of a knockoff of The X-Files, Altered States, and the Twilight Zone, so I was looking forward to checking it out and after two episodes… well… it’s annoying. The basic premise of the show, according to its Wikipedia entry, is as follows: When an international flight lands at Boston’s Logan Airport and there are no signs of life, FBI Special Agent Olivia Dunham, a scientist, Walter Bishop, and his son Peter uncover a deadly mystery involving a mysterious plague and a series of unbelievable events. It all revolves around fringe science; a new branch of science dealing with mind reading, levitation, invisibility, and even reanimation of the dead. Olivia, Peter, and Walter are in charge of investigating all strange events, some of them even seem to look like “experiments”.

Click to read more...

You won’t get many plot points from watching this, but it gives an idea of the breadth of this show over the years and if you’re a long-time fan there’s several moments that quicken your heart to see again.

How would you like to help in designing the look of series 3? Specifically, you’d be helping us choose the stuff that litters the main set. I’m talking about posters, comics, fanzines, T-shirts… anything you’ve seen in the last few months that you think is pretty cool or captures the spirit of the show or a particular character. By now, most of you know the kind of things I like…weird toys, indie comics, sci-fi, geek references, internet memes, boardgames…normally I’d delight in tracking down the stuff myself, but as I say, it’s just not going to happen this time round.

In the very first draft of the show I described the set as looking like “a cross between a comics shop and the batcave”. I wanted it to feel like a geek Shangri-La, and in each series I’ve felt we nearly got there. Maybe this time, with you guys involved, we’ll finally nail it.

Please send your suggestions to ben.catel@talkbackthames.tv
We also need to get legal permission to use the stuff, and we need to get it fast, so please include as much information as you can regarding contact details etc etc.

How cool is that? I’ve already got a couple of suggestions in mind and as soon as I track down sources for them I’ll dash them off in an email. Got a favorite meme, toy, or t-shirt you think would be a good fit? Then let them know!

Found via Boing Boing.

The fourth season of the BBC’s time-travel saga Doctor Who has rocketed to a demented conclusion. And now there’s no more Who until Christmas, or even longer outside the U.K. But fear not — before Doctor Who was a new-millennium phenomenon, it ruled the British airwaves for a quarter of the last century. And some of your grand-dad’s Doctor Who episodes are actually still worth checking out. Here’s our complete handy guide to old-school Doctor Who for new-Who fans. With some spoilers.

Step one: Discover Ace, the Proto-Rose.

The last couple of years Doctor Who was on the air in the late 1980s, the writers started experimenting with the often-boring relationship between the Doctor and his cute travel companion. They introduced Ace, a rebellious teenager with a love of explosives. At first, the Ace-Doctor relationship was just a little spicier than the traditional Doctor/ambiguous-friend pairing, but over time it became a lot more. The Doctor started putting Ace through a series of tests and forcing her to confront her fears. She, in turn, started questioning the Doctor’s goals and methods more than any companion before her. The Doctor-Ace relationship provided an inspiration for some of the more fully realized companions of today, like Rose.

I have to concur that starting with Sylvester McCoy’s seventh Doctor is probably best as the show was making great strides in both storytelling and special effects during this period, though the effects were still nothing compared to the current series. Ace was definitely one of the first companions to really challenge the Doctor and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she was a big influence on the folks who created Rose in the new series. Sylvester’s portrayal of the Doctor is second only to Tom Baker’s in my mind. The Seventh Doctor was also the first hints we got that the renegade Timelord might be of much more importance to Timelord history than originally let on.

If you follow the suggestions in the guide you may find yourself addicted to the original series before too long. Even some of the older stories have a lot to offer with many of them standing the test of time. Even for those that don’t, however, it’s fascinating to look back and see how the show started way back in 1963 and how much it’s changed over the years. Coincidentally, one of the free offerings on AT&T’s U-verse on demand video service this month is Tomb of the Cybermen with the second Doctor played by Patrick Troughton. Courtney wasn’t terribly impressed with it until I pointed out that the show was as old as I am. It aired from September 2 to September 23, 1967 and I was born on August 25th of that year. Considering what they were working with and the time period it’s actually pretty good and quite a few details about the Cybermen established in that episode would be repeated in following Cybermen stories over the course of the series.

Created by the folks over at Gamer’s Prodigy it pretty much says it all.

For comparison here’s the Discovery Channel’s original version:

Yeah, never get tired of that one.