This TARDIS is Non-Operational

Due to being three weeks behind and now having no computer, The Horror of Fan Blog is on indefinite hiatus.

Calling All Skeletons: An Overanalysis of "Smile"

It's basically an early predecessor to the sonic screwdriver, yet the Doctor always looks at a smart phone with such contempt.

I made myself a rule last year that I was going to make the rest of my overanalyses in Peter Capaldi's tenure from that point on were going to be named after punk songs, in honor of the 12th Doctor's guitar playing and Peter Capaldi's actual punk band he had with Craig Ferguson.  (Except I already know what I'm going to call the overanalysis of this year's Christman special, and it's alternative, not punk, but I have to use it because it's so perfect.)  Hey, guess what?  Do you know how many punk songs have the word "smile" or "happy" in the title?  Very, very few.

But this episode was goddamn amazing, especially considering it comes from the writer of "In the Forest of the Night"!  This is good, old fashioned sci-fi.  Machines coming after humans, entirely because of a lack of understanding of human emotions.  This is like something pulled out of I, Robot, only with more action.  There's an old classic series serial called "The Happiness Patrol" about a society that policed happiness and punished sadness severely, and I was worried that this episode would turn out too much like that.  But, where "The Happiness Patrol" is about the political suppression of negative emotions, "Smile" was about robots making a mistake that lead to them suppress negative emotion, so it didn't actually feel anything at all like "The Happiness Patrol."

It also didn't have The Candy Man, which is simultaneously the most goofy and most fucked up villain the classic series ever created.

I missed a lot of hints and clues and build ups for the bigger story arc of the season last week and I'm kicking myself for it.  For one thing, I completely ignored all of the Doctor's talk about an oath he swore.  Why did I skip all that?  Because honestly, he said it with so much conviction I actually thought it was something I was supposed to already know about.  Me, the girl that writes a literal "overanalysis" blog, thought she missed a big oath the Doctor swore at some point.  Yeah, that sounds like me.  So, now, we do have an ongoing question of the season:  "Why did he make this oath, and what the fuck is in that vault?"

I loved that Nardole was barely in this episode.  Let's keep it that way.

I love in this episode where the colonists figure out that The Vardy killed their families, so they start grabbing guns.  You're inside an enormous building made out of them, what's a half dozen laser guns going to do?

How long until Think Geek starts selling Bill's rainbow top?

I loved the Doctor pointing out that there was an evacuation of Earth, and that he's run into a few of their ships over the years.  Besides running into one in "The Beast Below," there's also the classic series episode "The Arc in Space," and probably several others I can't think of right now.  But if he even points out that there were multiple ships, that he's been to a few before, why does he literally say that The Vardy are threatening to kill what's left of the human race?  You've already explained in episode why that's not true, Doctor.  Pay attention!

This week, I got a Facebook message from some of the members of my old podcast, The Mile High Who Podcast.  It's been on indefinite haitus for a while, and that will probably be a permanent haitus now that Shelley, the founder of our whole group and the originator of the podcast, moved back home to Kansas City.  But as soon as we finally got a new episode last week, Shelly wished we could still podcast.  So she messaged us all to talk about the new episode, and she pointed out to me something that I missed:

Okay, so my disagreement with Shelley over terminology here is that I, and I think a lot of other people too, use "Mondasian Cybermen" to differentiate from Russel T. Davies's idiotic invention, the "Cybus Cybermen," or "Pete's World Cybermen."  It's been implied that "Nightmare in Silver" was a return to (what I call) Mondasian Cybermen instead of Cybus Cybermen, primarily because the former are the only ones ever shown to have a weakness to gold.  But other people, like Shelley, and apparently all the press that's come out about this season, us "Mondasian Cybermen" to refer only to Cybermen from the era before Mondas was destroyed.  That encompasses only one serial of the classic series, The First Doctor's final serial, "The Tenth Planet," and one Big Finish Audio story called "Spare Parts."  My argument is that they're still Mondasian when they're homeless, and they're still Mondasian when they forcibly take over the planet Telos and make that their new home, in the same way that I'm Irish even though I don't live in Ireland.  So a lot of reports have come out lately about "The Mondasian Cybermen," but I'm going to refer to those, in this blog, "Tenth Planet Cybermen."

Yes, the reports have confirmed that the Tenth Planet Cybermen are coming back this season, and boy am I excited to see them.  And with the clue that Shelley showed me, it implies that they're going to be the main villain of the season.  The original, Tenth Planet Cybermen had a much campier design than the sleeker, modern Cybermen, and they were much easier to defeat, but there was something really retro cool about their look.  I also really loved their bizarre speech patterns, but if the voices coming from the puddle in "The Pilot" were any indication, they won't have those speech patterns.

But what are they up to?  The Mondasian Cybermen come from Mondas, which is a twin planet to Earth that drifted away from the sun and needed to augment their people to continue to survive.  But when that proved to not be enough anymore, they came to Earth for...some reason.  Invasion?  Spare parts?  I don't rewatch First Doctor serials very often.  But it resulted in Mondas being destroyed.  This is why I prefer Mondasian Cybermen, because they actually have a very sympathetic back story.  Everything they did, they did to try to survive.   They were just willing to kill innocents to do that, something the Doctor will never abide.  If they've jumped forward 11 Doctors to come for the Doctor's 12th incarnation, I'm guessing their goals are back to what they were in their first few appearances after "The Tenth Planet":  changing the timeline to bring back Mondas.  But why did they need a pilot who was made of water and not metal?  She's definitely coming back.

The ending, where the Doctor landed in the wrong place and time and that leads us into the next episode, is a very Classic Series style ending.  The first two Doctors didn't have the ability to steer the TARDIS, and once the third Doctor figured out how to do it, he and his successive regenerations were still not great at it, and the accidental landings often set up for the next episode.  Next week's episode is written by Sarah Dollard, who gave us the beautiful first part of last season's three-part finale, "Face the Raven," so I trust it will be pretty good.  Until next time!

A Borg by Any Other Name: An Overanalysis of "Nightmare in Silver"

Disclaimer:  No silver was actually used in the construction of these Cybermen.
Cybermen are made out of steel.

Let's start this week off with "quotes from the girlfriend":

GF:  Why is the Cyberman moving so fast?  It's like zombies.  The reason they're scary is because they're slow, but you still know that there's nothing you can do to stop them because they'll never give up. Once they get fast, they're not as scary anymore.

GF:  Why is he putting her in charge?  She doesn't really seem to be qualified for that.

GF:  (Regarding the Doctor becoming the Cyber Planner) It's like when Picard became Locutus of Borg.

GF:  Was Neil Gaiman under the impression that he was writing an episode of Star Trek and when he figured out his mistake he just swapped out the characters for Doctor Who characters?

GF:  When your episode is already knocking off Star Trek, to the point where their "freeze chamber" or whatever looks exactly like a Borg cube (she Googled a picture of a Borg cube to prove this to me), you need to do something other than transporting everyone at the end of the episode.  That's just the final nail in the coffin.  It's a "transmatter"?  Seriously!?

She's not wrong

GF:  I just feel like, if you're going to have a season like this without a good overarching plot, you need more interesting individual episodes.  Otherwise it's not worth it.
Me:  Well, I think that he ran into difficulty because of the companion shift taking place mid-season.
GF:  Right! And since then, we've only had one overarching mystery which is "Who is Clara?" which he just keeps saying.  He hasn't gotten any closer to figuring it out.

-----------------------

Okay, she has some points and some things I disagree with.  As a 28 Days Later fan, I actually like fast "zombies."  I think they're far scarier.  But I see her point about the Star Trek stuff.

I outlined some of the main differences between Mondas and Cybus Cybermen in my last post, but I forgot one main thing:  Mondas Cybermen were much less Borg-y.

Star Trek and Doctor Who have always had a really symbiotic relationship.  You can sift through either franchise and find countless references to the other.  They are each their own country's most iconic science-fiction franchise, and they started around the same time.  Therefore, it's natural that these two shows draw influences from each other from time to time.  The Sontarans, for example, were a blatant knock-off of the Klingons.  To their credit, though, the writers of Doctor Who put their own ironic twist on their version of the Klingons:  where the Klingons look like a great fighting force in the galaxy, the Sontarans look like the opposite of intimidating.  They're short, fat potato men.  Where you would expect something that looked like a Klingon to be a warrior, you would expect something that looks like a Sontaran to be a door stop.

As for the Cybermen and the Borg, it should be pointed out that the Cybermen predate the Borg by over 25 years.  That being said, the Mondas Cybermen (the Cybermen of the classic series) were much less Borg-y.  By that, I mean that turning other people into themselves was not their primary objective.  They did it, plenty of times, but it was not the be all and end all of their plans.  For the most part, they sought power.  They sought control over new worlds in lieu of the one they lost attacking Earth.  They tried to change time to bring their planet back.  They tried to gain weapons that would make them a more formidable force in the Universe.

The first Borg episode of Star Trek aired in 1989, the last year of the Doctor Who classic series's run, only a few months before both the Doctor Who finale, and only a few months after the final Cyberman episode of the classic series.  It could not be said that the Cybermen were knock offs of the Borg.  Nor is it that fair to say, the other way around, that Borg were a knock off of the Cybermen.  Certainly there seems to have been some Cybermen to Borg influence, but, as I pointed out before, the Mondas Cybermen weren't that Borg-y to begin with.

The only thing I can say for sure is that, when the show came back for the revived series, the newly rebooted Cybermen had completely gone back and, rather than playing off of the more complex motivations that moved the Cybermen in the classic series, they literally just turned them into a Borg clone.  The Cybermen were not a knock-off of the Borg, but as soon as they had a chance to do a Cybermen episode in the years after the Borg were invented, they turned them into Borg.

Another reason the modern, Cybus Cybermen are so much more Borg-y than the classic series, Mondas Cybermen is that the Mondas Cybermen weren't as automated.  They didn't need a less robotic person, like John Lumic, Mercy Hartigan, or, in this episode, the Cyber Planner, to speak for them.  There was always a lead Cyberman who was able to have conversations with the Doctor that almost hinted at crude emotions.  The Mondas Cybermen considered themselves to be above and devoid of emotion, but their desperate desire to restore their home planet suggested otherwise.  There was always at least one Cyberman with enough personality to taunt the Doctor.  The Cybus Cybermen are so robotic that they can't really threaten or intimidate the Doctor.  They function as an anonymous whole, just as the Borg do (or as they did before the introduction of the Borg Queen).

Now, it was rumored that these were going to be Mondas rather than Cybus Cybermen.  While this was never stated outright in the episode, these Cybermen had a few old Mondasian traits.  The first was their weakness to gold.  The Mondas Cybermen's respiratory units were clogged up by gold (but not, I should point out, by having a thin strip of gold-colored paper stuck to their faces).  Early on they could also be destroyed with certain chemicals found in cleaning products, as the Doctor mentioned.  They were able to overcome the chemical weakness, but never really the gold one.  There has been no indication before that Cybus Cybermen share this weakness, although, since they are parallel, there's always a possibility that they share the same weakness. The fact that the Doctor could partially fight off the Cyber Planner's control using gold was a hint that these might have been Mondas Cybermen.

Another hint towards them potentially being Mondas Cybermen is the Cyber Planner.  The Cyber Planner actually only appeared in 2nd Doctor Cybermen episodes, "The Wheel in Space" and "The Invasion."  Again, since Cybus Cybermen are parallel, it's possible for them to have a parallel Cyber Planner, but it still hints towards Mondas.

There were a lot of other nods back to the Mondas Cybermen as well, but none that definitively proved that these were Mondas Cybermen.  One is their facial design, which was a little more old-school than we've seen in the Cybus Cybermen.  The longer mouth looks a little more Mondasian, particularly like the Cybermen in "Tomb of the Cybermen" (unlike the Daleks, the Cybermen's design has changed significantly over the years).  This episode also bore a striking resemblance to "Tomb of the Cybermen" in certain plot elements, which makes sense as Gaiman said that he was partially inspired by "Tomb of the Cybermen" for this episode.  The plot of "Tomb of the Cybermen" is that a group of archeologists,  believing that the Cybermen are now extinct, look for the fabled "Tomb of the Cybermen" on their adopted planet, Telos, only to find that "tomb" was a codeword for "fully functioning cryogenic storage units that the Cybermen can easily be awakened from when disturbed."  The insistance that the Cybermen were extinct and the fact that they were in similar "tombs" shows a strong influence from "Tomb of the Cybermen."

And while we're on the subject, why the fuck did they think that the Cybermen were extinct?  We, as viewers, know that the Cybermen were still alive as recently as "Closing Time."  But that could have been a small ship that nobody else in the universe knew was still out there.  So then we have to go back to "A Good Man Goes to War" for our last Cyberman reference.  There, the Cybermen were a huge military presence in the universe, one that was feared by all races.  They had massive fleets all over the galaxy.  They didn't seem very extinct to me.

Therefore, it's possible that what they really meant was "Mondas Cybermen are extinct."  Still, that's not definitive.  As many fans have pointed out, the Cybermen in "A Good Man Goes to War" and "Closing Time," and even (I think) in "The Pandorica Opens" all lack Cybus industry logos.  This could mean that they were Mondas Cybermen.  Or it could mean that they no longer had any loyalty to their creators, Cybus Industries, and stripped themselves of their logos.  What is more likely, as I've stated before, is that the writers don't care about the different types of Cybermen anymore.  Cybermen are just Cybermen, they exist all over the universe, and they don't think the backstory is important so they just focus on the Cybermen's present.  I understand why this simplifies things, but it also reduces the Cybermen to a much less interesting character than they were in the classic series.  It just makes them Borg.

And, of all people, I thought Gaiman would be up for ferreting out this distinction between Mondas and Cybus Cybermen.  His script for "The Doctor's Wife" was so nerdy that even the stage directions had classic series references, referring to the bubble universe as a "76 Trotters Lane at the end of the Universe."  "The Doctor's Wife" was filled with so many fun, fanboy references.  "Nightmare in Silver," unfortunately, lacks most of these, and when it does indulge it is very subtle.  Harkening back to the old Cybermen was a little cool, but there was a lot more he could have done.

The choice of setting was almost Moffat-esque.  This story could have taken place virtually anywhere in the Universe, but Gaiman thought it would be more fun to place it in an abandoned amusement park.  And he was right.  Like I said, whenever Gaiman thinks he's being scary, he isn't scary, he just creates a general air of creepiness.  But he's always good at creating that air of creepiness.

The Time Lords invented chess?  That's a nice "Fuck you, India" from Gaiman.

The addition of the children that Clara was taking care of was very interesting.  I was happy to see that. Moffat might be moving towards putting them in the TARDIS with the Doctor on a regular basis.  There's an upside and a downside to it.  The upside is that, after having two companions for so long (Amy and Rory), a single companion makes the TARDIS seem a little lonely.  Certainly, the show has always gone back and forth between single and multiple companion eras, but something about the Doctor-Amy-Rory dynamic was so good that I think I at least want to see the TARDIS turn into a sort of family home again, regardless of who the characters are.  The downside, of course, is that it's much more perilous for him to be bringing small children into danger.  It's one thing for him to bring fully consenting adults wherever danger may rear its head.  It's another thing to do the same with kids.  It might not be something that parents groups are going to want to see.

It might also help if Clara and the Doctor started to click a little more.  Clara is a wonderfully strong companion, I strongly believe that, but I don't feel like she and the Doctor have the kind of chemistry that Amy and the Doctor had at this point in their relationship.

Matt Smith did an excellent job of playing himself and the Cyber Planner at the same time.  If we ever needed to see Matt Smith play an evil clone of the Doctor, we now know how good he'd be at it.  He can play a villain just as well as he can play a hero.

The greatest quote this week from the Doctor Who message board Gallifrey Base was this:  "Is this the part where you regale me with a long list of dramatically interesting televised chess scenes?"  He's right:  Playing chess is not very exciting unless, as we saw in "The Wedding of River Song," the queen gets increasingly and fatally electrified the more you move it while futuristic Andy Warhol people cheer you on.  But the Doctor's "mate in 3" ploy was pretty cool.

But let's be honest, that was a bit of an easy ending.  If the midget Emperor just activated the bomb at the beginning, none of this would have ever happened?  I understand why he wanted to preserve the planet and why he didn't want to be the emperor, but at least one person died, and there were more lives lying in the balance, two of them children's.  Just activate the thing, you dick!

Overall, I found this below average for a Gaiman episode, but above average for a Cyberman episode.  It was a good bit of fun with the old Cybermen, and it subtly revelled in Cyberman lore, but not quite in the joyful way that Gaiman did it in "The Doctor's Wife."  Still, I want him to write a lot more episodes so that he becomes a viable candidate to take over for Moffat when Moffat leaves.  Hey, it's not impossible, right?  #anyonebutgatiss

But we now come into the season finale, which looks like it could change things significantly, even if--as I suspect--it will not actually reveal the Doctor's name.  And it will be nice to get the Clara mystery out of the way.  I was interested in it at first but, as the girlfriend pointed out, all we've gotten has been the Doctor saying over and over again "She's not possible!"  Very few clues have emerged.  We're not very much closer to knowing who she is than we were before.  It could have been a great mystery, but it's time to just get it over with if they're not going to add anything to it.

But the Doctor's name is something much bigger.  It is the culmination of everything that has come so far in the Moffat era, as well as the culmination of the great prophesy we were first introduced to with Prisoner Zero's cryptic warning:  "The Pandorica will open.  Silence will fall."  We now know what the Pandorica and the Silence are, but their entire purpose had to do with keeping the Doctor from going to the fields of Trenzalore.

Next week...off to Trenzalore.

Cyber Bullying: A Doctor Who Book Report on The Cybermen

The Cybermen were first introduced in 1968's serial, "The Tenth Planet," which has the distinction of being the first serial to see a Doctor regenerate.  Somehow, they took hold of people's imaginations so much that, even though they are practically just Daleks with legs, they developed enough popularity to become part of what I call the "unholy trinity" of Doctor Who villains:  The Daleks, The Master, and The Cybermen.  These three villains have been used more than any other villain.

The fascination with the Cybermen probably began because their original design
make them look like a horrifying early prototype for The Human Centipede.

When Doctor Who was revived in 2005, Russell T. Davies had a lot of very good ideas about how to bring in new fans, not just please the old ones.  He really seemed to have learned from the 1996 movie, which did a great job of alienating both old and potential new fans.  The most famous change he made was the Great Time War, which just tossed aside a lot of the really long back story that had now been built up for both the Time Lords and the Daleks, allowing them to slowly reintroduce that back story.  The Cybermen, however, had no part in the Great Time War, and so another way had to be devised to bring back the Cybermen while erasing their backstory.  And, to be honest, the Cybermen's story had become far more overly complicated than either the Time Lords' or the Daleks'.  So Davies, who I always said was a better show runner than a writer, decided to do this by going to an alternate universe to create a new race of Cybermen.  These two separate sets of Cybermen are known by two different sets of names:  The Doctors' Universe/Pete's World Cybermen.  That one is a little bit bulky.  Instead, I like to refer to them by their more simple names.  The classic series Cybermen are "Mondas Cybermen" and the new series Cybermen are "Cybus Cybermen."  I'll explain.

Once upon a time, Earth had an identical twin planet called Mondas which had existed right along side Earth.  The only difference between Earth and Mondas was that the continents were flipped upside down.  Yet, while Earth remained in its orbit, Mondas drifted away, somewhere referred to as "the edge of space."  Without the heat of the sun, Mondasians needed to find ways to adapt using technology.  Over time, they eventually got to the point of replacing their own body parts with machines.

In 1986, Mondas had an energy crisis, so they found a way to pilot their planet back to Earth so they could invade it and take their energy to power Mondas.  This backfired as the energy overloaded their planet and destroyed it.  Many of the Cybermen's subsequent plans were designed to try to reshape time to save their own planet.

The Cybermen, desperate to find a new homeworld, found the planet Telos, which seemed to be abandoned.  The native inhabitants of Telos, the Cryons, could not live in temperatures above zero.  For a long time, Telos was cold enough for them.  But one day, the planet began to warm up to a sweltering still-cold-enough-for-a-human-to-freeze-their-tits-off and the Cryons had to build refrigeration units underground.  The Cybermen, who are dicks, came in, killed most of the Cryons, and used their refrigeration units to keep Cybermen that were in suspended animation.

The Mondas Cybermen had one really easy weakness to exploit.  They were essentially allergic to gold.  That's right.  Somehow, gold clogged up their respiratory systems and they choked to death.  This resulted in someone developing a defense against the Cybermen in the form of a "glitter gun" that shot gold at them.  Not kidding.

A website for a small group of Cybermen who actually prefer to be covered in gold glitter.

Now, we all know that, in the new series, the Cybermen are completely different.  They were started in a parallel universe where most things end up strikingly similar, but essentially different, to our universe.  Fuck free will.  This allowed a new race of Cybermen, the Cybus Cybermen, to be created, who would come across the void to invade our universe.  While the Doctor thought he got rid of them in "Doomsday" and "The Next Doctor," he seems to have failed.  There seem to still be Cybus Cybermen in this universe.

Starting around "A Good Man Goes to War" the Cybermen stopped featuring the Cybus logo on their chests.  This means one of two things:  either they're Mondas Cybermen, or they just decided that they have no loyalty to their creator anymore.  I think it's more likely that the current series' writers have an attitude of "Fuck it."  They're just Cybermen.  They don't care to specify which type of Cybermen they are.

The Doctor Who wiki, The TARDIS Data Core, says that this week's episode, "Nightmare in Silver," will feature Mondas Cybermen. The funny thing about a wiki is that, as long as you link to a source, people will assume that your information is correct and won't delete it.  Nobody bothers to check to make sure that the site that you linked to for your source actually gives the information you claimed that it does.  The link that supposedly proves that these are supposed to be Mondas Cybermen leads you to a page about the episode that mentions nothing of the sort.  I'd fix it if I knew how to delete such things.  So, it's possible that we're looking forward to a great Mondas Cybermen episode.  It's possible that we're looking forward to a great Cybus Cybermen episode.

What I'm certain about, though, is that it will be a great episode.

Moffat said he brought in Gaiman for this one because Moffat wanted to make the Cybermen scary again.  If "The Doctor's Wife" is any indication, when Gaiman thinks he's being terrifying, he's actually created something that's really just creepy.  I'll settle for creepy, though.  It's Neil Mother Fucking Gaiman.  It has to be awesome.

Never Trust Anyone Over 50 (Part I): A Preview of Season 7 (Part 2)

Just because Moffat decided to be a spoilsport this season and get rid of all the twoparters doesn’t mean we have to.  Welcome to the new home of my Doctor Who musings, “The Horror of Fan Blog.”  We’re going to start things off here with a two-part introduction to the season in the days leading up to the March 30^th premiere.  I had so much to say about the 50^th anniversary season, that I had to chop it up into separate pieces.

SPOILERS!!!

Okay, so, in retrospect, I realize now that Moffat might have had the 50^th Anniversary on his mind for longer than we thought, because, if you think about it, he’s been rolling out the whole rogues gallery this season.  First we started off with the all time most iconic villain of the series, the Daleks themselves.  Then we had sort of a Silurian episode, albeit without many actual Silurians appearing on screen.  But it was still Silurian-centric.  Then we saw, once again, the most popular recurring villain to have originated in the new series: the Weeping Angels.  Hell, even the Christmas Special was actually the return of an old recurring villain, The Great Intelligence, even though they only revealed it to be The Great Intelligence in the last seconds of the episode.  On top of that, the special even had a Sontaran and a Silurian (as good guys!).  Now, in the second half of the season we’re going to see the return of the Cybermen and the Ice Warriors, and who knows what else is there to surprise us.  Because, on Doctor Who, there really should always be surprises.  That’s what the classic series was always about.  But that won’t stop me from trying to guess what those surprises are going to be.

First, let’s talk about Villains We Know Are Coming:

The Cybermen:
We’ve all been getting bored with the Cybermen, to be honest.  Frankly, how the series has ever had room for both Daleks and Cybermen has always baffled me.  You’d think they’d be so similar that people would lose interest in the Cybermen.  But since their appearance in the 1^st Doctor’s final episode, their popularity has endured.

Moffat, realizing that the Cybermen had grown dull, decided he wanted to make them scary again.  While Moffat is really good at making something scary out of something mundane, he doesn’t really seem to have much desire to try to do that with classic Doctor Who villains too much.  So, what did he do?

He called Neil Mother Fucking Gaiman, that’s what he did.

That’s right, “The Last Cybermen” will be the Sandman genius himself’s second episode of the series.  Keep this up, Neil, and hopefully you’ll take over the series after Moffat leaves (#anyonebutgatiss).  If there’s anyone who can make the Cybermen scary again (or, well, creepy anyway), it’s Gaiman.  He’s said that he took the Cybermen from their first two appearances in the black and white era (“The Tenth Planet” and “The Tomb of the Cybermen”) and tried to bring back that style, but without forgetting everything that’s happened with them since.

The Ice Warriors:

The Ice Warriors were introduced in the 2^nd Doctor era and were last seen in the 3^rd Doctor era, although they haven’t appeared as a villain since the 2^nd Doctor era.  Rumors have been floating around of their return forever.  If the classic series hadn’t been cancelled in 1989, the writers said they would have brought the Ice Warriors back in the next year in an episode on a college campus in the 1960s.  In deleted material (that I wish they had never deleted) it would have been revealed that what happened in “The Waters of Mars” was actually a trap set by The Ice Warriors (it still probably was).  And they’ve appeared many times in expanded universe material.  If you wonder why they haven’t been around much, it’s probably because they’re a little too much like the Silurians and, even though the Ice Warriors came first, the Silurians seem to have captured more people’s imaginations.

The Ice Warriors are the ancient inhabitants of Mars who had a flourishing civilization 250 million years before even the most basic forms of life formed on Earth.  That’s why there is no sign of life on Mars:  It’s been so long, the civilization has faded to dust.  Somehow or another some of their race were frozen (I don’t remember how) and, over time, they eventually thawed out with the intention of turning Earth into their new home so their race can survive.

Also they hiss a lot.  Like snakes.  It sounds really cool.

The Ice Warriors episode, called “Cold War,” is going to involve an Ice Warrior stuck in a submarine.  That sounds awesome!  It’s written by Mark Gatiss.  That sounds much less awesome.  (#anyonebutgatiss)

The Trickster:

A promotional poster about this coming second half of the season was released recently and it has some clues hidden in the image.  The image shows the Doctor and Clara crashing through a giant window and, if you look at the images in the reflections, you can see some of the villains who are going to be in this second half of the season.  The largest version of the image I’ve been able to find was right here (click to enlarge):

Now, there aren’t too many things that this taught me.  There are some Cybermen and Ice Warriors who are very visible, but we already knew about them.  There are creatures in the bottom left and right of the image (who look like they might be the same creature) but I don’t recognize them, although they look vaguely like the Sycorax.  The middle right and left have some strange image in them that look like old gas station pumps with oval heads coming out of them.  Don’t ask me what that’s supposed to be.

But then, up in the left corner, not all the way up, but more than halfway up, and all the way up to the top right you see a man in a top hat without eyes.  Creepy looking, ain’t he?  That, my friends, is The Trickster.

For those of you who haven’t heard of the Trickster, that’s because, for the most part, you’re not supposed to have heard of the Trickster, because he’s not a Doctor Who villain.  He’s a villain from the Doctor Who spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures, which was a fun but much more kid-based show than Doctor Who.  SJA was a very wholesome show about a journalist and a group of very age inappropriate children who hung out at her house and went on life threatening adventures with her without their parents knowing about it.  As much as we all love Sarah Jane, when you think about it, that show was really weird.

As most of you know, SJA was cut short by the shocking death of Elizabeth Sladen, who played Sarah Jane Smith, after her long but very silent battle with cancer.  She died around the same time that Nicholas Courtney, who played an equally iconic character in the same era as when Sladen started out (The Brigadier), and the show has made two in-universe tributes to the Brigadier.  The first in “The Wedding of River Song” where the Doctor tries to call the Brigadier and finds he’s dead, the second in “The Power of Three,” when the Brig’s daughter is now in charge of UNIT.  Hopefully, the appearance of the Trickster means that there will be some sort of tribute to Sarah Jane.  It would be offensive to try and suggest that Sarah Jane died of anything other than natural causes, but bringing in the Trickster might mean the Doctor is extra motivated by the death of his old friend.

And, while I haven’t watched much of SJA (just the pilot and the two episodes the Doctor is in), I’m sure there are some loose ends to clear up.  The show didn’t get a finale since the lead actress died unexpectedly.  Maybe we’ll see some of the characters from SJA show up to give the show its real finale.  That’s a pretty old tradition with spin-offs and shows from the same creator:  to finish off your story on your other show.  Remember that horrible show from the creator of the X-Files called Millennium?  Since that got cancelled early and they didn’t get to finish the story, they tied up the loose ends of Millennium in an X-Files episode.  Same with the X-Files spin-off, The Lone Gunmen.

The Trickster has been forced outside of time and space and can only barely push his way into our world sometimes.  The only way he can gain access back into our universe is to feed off of the chaos that he creates.  The Trickster created The Trickster’s Brigade, a group that seeks to make changes in history simply to feed off of the ensuing chaos it creates in the timeline.  You’ve actually met a member of the Trickster’s brigade on Doctor Who:  she put the scarab on Donna’s back.  It was only mentioned in passing dialogue at the end of the episode that the scarab was part of the Trickster’s brigade, hence why there was this woman who seemingly had no motive to change time.  She wanted to create chaos.

Now, the fact that the Trickster’s never been on Doctor Who doesn’t mean that the Doctor has never met the Trickster.  The Tenth and Eleventh Doctors both made guest appearances on SJA, and the Tenth Doctor was in an episode called “The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith” where the Trickster tricked Sarah Jane into thinking she was in love with a human and about to get married, but there was some sinister plot behind it.  I don’t remember the whole thing.  SJA wasn’t very good.

Still, I’m excited at the idea of an SJA crossover.  The Trickster’s a cool idea for a villain, someone who cares about nothing other than creating chaos in the universe.  He could be a force to be reckoned with.  Some people have already suggested online that, perhaps, Clara’s splintering across the timeline was something the Trickster did.  Far fetched, but not more impossible than River being Amy and Rory’s daughter.

Villains I Think Might Be Coming Back

The Master:  Okay, okay, okay, hear me out!  I know some of you are bored with the Master, and frankly I don’t understand why.  He’s the anti-Doctor.  Sometimes it’s fun to see a hero up against a villain who plays to the heroe’s greatest weaknesses.  The Joker is chaotic, and Batman can’t understand chaos.  Lex Luthor is an intellectual villain, and Superman is a brute force hero.  But sometimes it’s fun anyway to see a hero matched up against someone who has his exact same strengths but uses them for evil.

Now, John Simm has denied rumors that he’s returning, but we all know what denial means on this show.  But here’s the reasons I think the Master is coming back anyway:

1.  The Master doesn’t have to be played by John Simm.  Simm was, more or less, the 6^th Master.  (The Masters are a little hard to count because, in the classic series, he was out of regenerations so he didn’t regenerate, he just stole bodies to stay alive.  The first Master we ever saw was, presumably, the 13^th Master.  Then there was the Master in “The Deadly Assassin” who was supposedly the same Master as the one played by Roger Delgado, but he was shown as being burnt to a crisp like a piece of overcooked bacon, allowing another actor to play him.  Then there’s whoever played the imprisoned Master at the beginning of the 1996 movie, and we have no idea what incarnation he’s supposed to be.  It’s all complicated.)  In the new series, he’s regained his ability to regenerate, so he can be played by whoever they want.  Also, last year reports were coming out that the rumors that Benedict Cumberbatch (who plays Sherlock Holmes in Moffat’s 21^st Century adaptation of Sherlock) was going to be the new Master were not just rumors, but that he was in serious conversations with the producers about replacing Simm.  Personally, I can’t think of a better actor to play the Master.

2.  Like I’ve said, the entire rogues gallery is coming back this season.  The Daleks, the Cybermen, The Silurians, The Sontarans, The Ice Warriors, the Weeping Angels, and even the Great Intelligence.  This isn’t an accident. This is an anniversary celebration, for certain.  Moffat’s trying to make this season a full on celebration of everything that makes Doctor Who great.  Where Davies did a good job of bringing the original unholy trinity of Doctor Who villains (The Daleks, The Cybermen, and The Master), Moffat’s done a lot to bring back all the recurring villains, even the minor ones.  With such a parade of classic villains, it seems hard to believe that Moffat would overlook The Master.

3.  The Master’s appearances should always be unadvertised surprises.  This was especially true of the 5^th Doctor era.  In every episode in which the Master appeared, he spent at least the first 30 minute segment in disguise.  Unlike Dalek, Cybermen, and Sontaran episodes, his episodes were never labeled with his name in the title.  Sometimes, Anthony Ainsley would even volunteer to not be credited in the first episode so that it wasn’t obvious that he was in the episode in disguise.  Not only does it make sense to bring back The Master, it makes perfect sense for his return to remain a surprise.

The Rani:  No villain has received so much demand from fans to return without the fans wishes being fulfilled.  She only appeared in two episodes, one Sixth Doctor episode, “The Mark of the Rani,” and the Seventh Doctor’s first episode, “Time and the Rani.”  Still, she seems to have made quite of an impression on fans, perhaps because she was the one to kill the least popular Doctor in the history of the series.  The Rani was a Time Lady who, in her youngest years, was part of a popular social circle at the Gallifrey Academy which was made up of her, The Master, The Doctor, possibly the Meddling Monk, and a few others.  The Doctor seems to be the only member of this group to come out of it with a conscience.  At the end of “Last of the Time Lords,” one of the producers called the hand that took the Master’s fob watch “the hand of the Rani,” completely as a joke that he thought nobody would take seriously because he thought nobody would remember who the Rani was.  He was wrong, and had to apologize for giving them a false hint.

And there was a very large segment of fans who thought River Song was going to turn out to be a regeneration of The Rani.  Thank God that isn’t true.

The Rani is a brilliant concept for a villain.  Not so much a megalomaniac (although she kind of was in her second appearance), but her main purpose was as a biochemist.  She studied the chemicals in brains.  The problem was, she had no sense of scientific ethics.  She would play with people’s minds as an experiment without any regard for how it would affect the subjects.  While she became more bent on universe domination in her second appearance, her first appearance made her very interesting in that she wasn’t immoral, merely amoral.  That can make for a pretty dangerous villain.

The problems with this are that The Rani does come from the least popular era of Doctor Who history, the notoriously reviled, gruesome, dark, and generally rejected Season 22.  While the show wouldn’t be cancelled for a few years after that, the show was forced into hiatus for about a year because of the complaints about how violent the show became and the meaner attitude of the new, Sixth Doctor.  While they squeezed a few more seasons out of the show, I honestly believed that those were just a courtesy and that Season 22 was the reason the show was cancelled.  The producers might be reluctant to bring back a villain from that era.  Additionally, as a Time Lady, she can’t return unless we find she somehow avoided the Time War, which would contradict the Oracle’s prediction in “The End of Time (Part 2)”.  But, let’s face it, there will be more Time Lords somewhere down the line, and so, sooner or later, somebody is going to have to contradict the Oracle.  The plus side of bringing back the Rani, of course, is that, as a Time Lady, you could cast literally any woman in the world to play her.

Omega:  Before the Time Lords were the Time Lords, they were just the Gallifreyans.  Three men—Rassillon, Omega, and The Other—came up with an idea that they thought might give them the power of time travel.  This idea involved harnessing the power of a supernova.  Obviously, that was dangerous.  Rassillon and The Other survived, but Omega was sucked into the black hole, putting him in a universe of anti-matter.  Twice he tried to escape his universe, but anti-matter and matter, when they touch each other, create a huge explosion (which is one of the few instances of Doctor Who being scientifically accurate).  He still desires revenge on the Time Lords for abandoning him and not trying harder to rescue him after he gave them the gift of time travel.

(Most of this story was only hinted at in the series, and more fully articulated in a short comic called “Star Death” by Alan Moore.)

In “The Big Bang,” many fans thought that the voice that said “Silence will fall!” and then cracked the Doctor’s viewscreen in the exact pattern of the cracks in time, was Omega.  It’s possible that some still believe it since, once we saw a Silent, we could hear that their voice didn’t sound like that voice in “The Big Bang.”  I’m more inclined to chalk that up to the producers not having decided yet, by the time they made “The Bing Bang,” what the Silence should sound like.

Omega is another character a lot of people want back.  And, if they’re going to finally acknowledge that the Doctor is really a reincarnation of The Other, which I think they’re going to (more on that later), then a great plot line could be made out of Omega.  Of course, if the Doctor is the Other, and Omega is coming back, you need to bring back one more person…

Rassilon:  In the classic series, Rassilon was long dead.  He was a great historic figure in Time Lord history, by far the most honored.  He had managed, somehow, to leave a form of his own consciousness behind in his tomb to warn those who would disturb his tomb (and other stuff, long story), but he was still dead.

In “The End of Time,” Rassilon was alive again with no explanation.  I think the only thing that established him as Rassilon was the Doctor saying it at the very end, as Rassilon was being sucked back into the time lock.  So now you’ve established, twice that the Time Lords can somehow bring people (or, at least, other Time Lords) back to life.  The Master flat out said that that’s what they did to him, and now somehow they have the ability to resurrect their greatest historical figure.  All of this seems to have been just for the Time War.  Where the fuck did they get that technology?  Do the Time Lords have a Lazarus Pit?  I guess that's why Rassilon became evil only when he came back from the dead.