January 2015 – In My Not So Humble Opinion

Super Blog Team-Up 5: The Many Worlds of Tesla Strong

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Super Blog Team-Up 5! The theme this quarter is “Parallel Worlds and Alternate Realities.” My fellow bloggers and I will be looking at stories that make use of the concept of the “Multiverse.” You will find links to the other contributors at the end of this piece.

Before proceeding any further, I want to offer a big “thank you” to Karen Williams of Between the Pages. Karen has been doing all the crucial heavy lifting involved in organizing this installment of Super Blog Team-Up.

One of my favorite comic book tales of parallel universes is The Many Worlds of Tesla Strong, published in 2003 by America’s Best Comics / Wildstorm, and starring characters created by Alan Moore & Chris Sprouse in the Tom Strong ongoing series. Published between June 1999 and May 2006, Tom Strong featured really great work by Moore, Sprouse and various other talented creators.

I cannot help thinking that the ABC line was crafted by Moore in response to the runaway success of Watchmen, which he co-created with Dave Gibbons. Yes, Watchmen was brilliant and thought-provoking and groundbreaking. But it unfortunately inspired an avalanche of imitators, series that embraced the “grim & gritty” trappings and that tried to replicate the “superheroes in the real world” premise. The majority of these were ultra-violent, humorless retreads which contained little of the genuine creative spark that was abundant in Moore & Gibbons’ work.

Moore’s writing on the ABC titles a decade later seemed to be a concerted effort by him to demonstrate that comic books could be intelligent and sophisticated without sacrificing fun. Certainly that was the case with Tom Strong. Moore very deftly blended the archetypes of pulp adventures magazines, Silver Age whimsy, and high concept scientific theories. The characters of Tom, his wife Dhalua, their daughter Tesla, and their extended supporting cast were expertly crafted, and their adventures were exciting & thought-provoking.

The Many Worlds of Tesla Strong grew out of the events of Tom Strong #10 (November 2000) by Moore, Sprouse & Al Gordon. Tom invented the “Searchboard,” a surfboard-like device which would enable its user to travel into parallel worlds. On his first journey Tom ended up in a “funny animal” alternate Earth. There he met a counterpart, “the bunny of bravery” known as Warren Strong, who protected the woodland folk from “science predator” Basil Saveen, a fox analogue to Tom’s arch-foe Paul Saveen.

After Tom returned to his home Earth, Tesla snuck into her father’s lab and decided to give the Searchboard a go. This resulted in numerous other-dimensional versions of herself materializing. The various Teslas were soon at each other’s throats, until their accompanying alternate reality fathers showed up to haul them home. Accordingly, “our” Tom grounded his daughter for her role in the cross-continuum shenanigans.

That brings us to The Many Worlds of Tesla Strong, written by Peter Hogan, with a plot assist by Moore. Sprouse and inker Karl Story illustrated the prologue and epilogue, with an all-star line-up of artists contributing to the different chapters.

The story opens as Tesla, the talking intelligent ape King Solomon and the steam-powered robot Pneuman are cleaning up the Stronghold. Solomon impulsively leaps onto the Searchboard and pretends he is surfing. Unfortunately he accidentally activates the Board and vanishes into another dimension.

A moment later the Board returns without Solomon. Its destination log has been wiped clean. Tesla realizes that she must go searching for the super simian, who is like a brother to her. Activating the board, Tesla glides out into the Multiverse.

The first alternate Earth that Tesla arrives at is a post-apocalyptic radioactive nightmare where nearly all of humanity has been wiped out in World War III. She is met by the gun-toting potty-mouthed Tekla Strong, a counterpart she previously encountered in Tom Strong #10. Fighting off a horde of giant bugs, Tesla and Tekla duck into an immense underground shelter where most of humanity’s survivors have sought refuge. Tesla tells her other self of her quest, and Tekla informs her that she has also lost her gorilla-friend, Archimedes the Atomic Ape, who likewise vanished into another dimension. Tesla departs, continuing her search.

This segment is illustrated by Michael Golden, a talented artist who does extremely detailed work. Golden is not super-fast, and so he mostly works illustrating covers. But occasionally an anthology book such as this will come along and he will have the opportunity to contribute a few interior pages. His style is definitely very well-suited to rendering Tekla’s hi-tech, bombed-out world.

The next alternate Earth that Tesla arrives on is one where global warming occurred decades earlier, the polar ice caps melted, and most of the surface world was submerged. Tesla encounters a mermaid version of herself named Tori, who explains that her father was able to transform humanity into mer-people via gene splicing, enabling them to survive the catastrophe. Tesla is introduced to Tori’s father, a merman Tom Strong. He hasn’t seen Solomon, but his own gorilla, Poseidon the Sea Monkey, vanished an hour earlier. Tesla begins to see a pattern. “I wonder if Solomon disappearing set off some kind of quantum monkey wave.” Tesla hops on the Searchboard again and continues her journey.

Penciling this chapter is Adam Hughes, with inks by Story. Hughes is another one of those incredibly talented but not especially fast artists who mostly works on covers. This special gives him a chance to pencil some interior art, and to show off his storytelling abilities.

As Tesla’s trans-dimensional journey proceeds, the story briefly checks in on Solomon. He awakens to find himself imprisoned with numerous other-dimensional analogues. Of the gathering Solomon astutely observes, “There’s more than a barrelful of us.”

Arthur Adams illustrated this two page interlude. He is definitely the go-to guy in the comic book biz when it comes to illustrating monkey-related mayhem. Adams’ hyper-detailed rendering of Solomon and his numerous alternate selves is an amazing, imaginative, and humorous grouping.

Tesla continues her tour of the Multiverse, encountering different variations of herself and her family along the way, all of them very odd indeed. And on each alternate Earth, the story is the same: that world’s version of Solomon has also gone missing.

I was definitely thrilled that one of the segments was illustrated by legendary DC artist Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. I’ve mentioned on a few occasions in the past that I am a huge fan of his work. He depicts Tesla’s reunion with her super-powered counterpart Tesla Terrific. Garcia-Lopez is definitely the ideal choice to depict such an “old school” vignette. He possesses a style that is both traditional and extremely dynamic. His layouts on this seven page chapter are very effective, and he puts a great deal of detail into his finished art. Really, I am in awe of Garcia-Lopez’s work. It’s just so fun and brilliant.

The Searchboard eventually brings Tesla to one of the 2,057 alternate Earths that comprise the pan-dimensional “Aztech Empire” introduced in Tom Strong #3. On this particular Earth, everything is scaled to giant-sized, and Tesla meets towering duplicates of herself and her father. She is brought before the Empire’s ruler, the computer program / deity Quetzalcoatl-9, a literal deus ex machina. The serpent god recognizes Tesla to be the daughter of Tom Strong, who previously assisted him. Tesla explains what has been going on. Examining the Searchboard, Quetzalcoatl-9 is able to restore its destination log, allowing Tesla to finally learn which reality Solomon ended up in. Thanking god, so to speak, Tesla heads out to find her gorilla friend.

In an extended chapter illustrated by Jason Pearson, Tesla arrives on “Earth-B.” She is immediately knocked out in a gas attack by her malevolent counterpart Twyla Strong, Twyla’s equally diabolical father Tiberius Strong, and their cigarette-smoking gorilla Nero. Taken prisoner by the sadistic Twyla, Tesla is informed that after learning of his numerous counterparts back in Tom Strong #10, Tiberius plotted to murder them all by sending bombs to their various realities. Unfortunately the plan has backfired, and instead they ended up capturing Solomon and several dozen of his equivalents.

Incidentally, despite the fact that he is an evil other-dimensional counterpart, Tiberius Strong does not have a beard or an eye patch. However he does dress in black.

Left chained in Twyla’s dungeon, with the imminent threat of torture hanging over her, Tesla is close to despair. Then surprisingly, who should sneak in to rescue her but “gentleman adventurer and occasional science hero” Peter Saveen, a heroic counterpart to Tom Strong’s arch-nemesis Paul Saveen. As if that isn’t weird enough, Peter Saveen takes Tesla to meet his ally Ilsa Weiss, an alternate version of another of Tom’s old foes, the psycho Nazi dominatrix Ingrid Weiss…

Saveen: May I introduce my associate, Fraulein…

Tesla: Ingrid Weis?! But she’s a Nazi.

Ilsa Weiss: Ilsa Weiss, actually. And I do not know how things transpired on your world, but here National Socialism saved the lives of millions. It is a tragedy we were defeated.

Yes, that is how completely upside-down this version of Earth is; the Nazis were actually the good guys!

Saveen and Weiss reveal that Solomon and the other gorillas have been imprisoned in an abandoned typewriter factory, obviously a nod by Hogan to the idea of an infinite number of monkeys being given an infinite number of typewriters. And, appropriately enough, the sign of the factory reads “Sprang Typewriters,” an affectionate homage to Golden Age Batman artist Dick Sprang, who often populated his stories with all matter of oversized props, including giant typewriters.

Tesla finds the Searchboards used by Solomon’s counterparts to bring them to Earth-B. She takes one, and Saveen uses a stolen time machine to transport them back several hours, to before Tiberius dispatched a bomb through the dimensional gate. Hiding behind a stack of crates, Tesla sees her past unconscious self being hauled off by Tiberius, Twyla and Nero. This leads to a humorous exchange between her and Saveen…

Tesla: That’s impossible, isn’t it? For two of me to be in the same place at the same time?

Saveen: Well, you’re not, are you? She’s way over there.

Tesla hops on the Searchboard and arrives back home to find Tom and Dhalua constructing a replacement two-seater Board to go in search of their daughter. Before Tom can give his daughter one of his patented stern lectures, she alerts him to the incoming bomb. He is able to divert it to the skies above the already-radioactive world of Tekla who witnessing the explosion lets off her usual stream of expletives.

Tesla and her parents quickly return to Earth-B, where Saveen and Weiss have freed all of the imprisoned gorillas. Tiberius, Twyla and Nero are in a free-for-all with the escaped prisoners, and Tom takes the opportunity to engage his counterpart. Asking his evil duplicate why he wants him dead, Tiberius snarls “Because I am a genius… I deserve to be unique. And because… because…” At which point the villain’s rant is abruptly interrupted by a titanic paw slamming down on him. As Tesla comments, “You know, I was kind of wondering if a giant Aztec gorilla was going to show up.”

I don’t know how the rest of you feel, but I’ve got to say that any comic book featuring a giant Aztec gorilla is pretty darn cool!

In the epilogue we see Quetzalcoatl-9, at Tesla’s request, has located an empty, radiation-free Earth in his empire to which Tekla and her people can relocate. In exchange, they are given custody of the defeated Tiberius and Twyla. Despite the fact that Tiberius is psychotic, Tom promises to see he is treated humanely and to try to rehabilitate him. Tiberius and Twyla both scoff at this, vowing revenge, to which Tesla resignedly states “I guess some people, you just can’t help.”

Tesla and Tom are due back on their own Earth for a read-through of Solomon’s new play, “The State of Denmark.” Obviously those gorillas made use of those typewriters, after all! Tom, however, suggests that he and Tesla “go for a spin around the Multiverse instead,” something to which she readily agrees.

Hogan’s scripting on this epilogue was nice. One of the ongoing themes of the Tom Strong series was that, due to the cold, analytical manner in which Tom was raised by his father, he occasionally has difficulty expressing emotions or socializing in a normal manner. However, we see through scenes such as this that underneath it all Tom is a much warmer, caring figure than his father. He has a genuine relationship with his daughter. He also wants to try to provide his adversaries with an opportunity to reform.

Tesla herself is a wonderfully fun character. She was fantastic in the regular Tom Strong series and I very much enjoyed seeing her get the spotlight in this special.

Some comic book editors and writers have argued that readers cannot relate to characters that are married and have children. I definitely do not agree with this. Neither apparently does Alan Moore. He crafted an interesting, engaging family unit between Tom, Dhalua, Tesla, Solomon and Pheuman, gifting the characters with real chemistry, writing interesting stories about them. Peter Hogan, both in The Many Worlds of Tesla Strong and in later issues of the regular Tom Strong series, effectively continued with this.

I really wish that there were more comics such as The Many Worlds of Tesla Strong. It is a enjoyable book, full of appealing characters, an exciting plot, and imaginative ideas.

If you have not read any of the Tom Strong stories, I encourage you to pick up the trade paperback collections. The Many Worlds of Tesla Strong itself is collected in the volume titled Alan Moore’s America’s Best Comics.

I hope that everyone enjoyed this one. Here are links to the other great entries in Super Blog Team-Up 5:

Happy birthday to John Romita

Here’s wishing a very happy 85th birthday to legendary comic book artist John Romita, who was born on January 24, 1930. The prolific Romita has had a long association with Marvel Comics over the decades, at one time or another drawing many of the company’s major characters, as well as having a hand in designing a number of them.

Romita’s first regular assignment at Marvel was Daredevil. He worked on issue #s 12-19 (cover dates Jan to Aug 1966). It was while on Daredevil that Romita first drew the character of Spider-Man in a two-part guest appearance in #s 16-17. This actually led to Romita becoming only the second artist to draw Amazing Spider-Man, after co-creator Steve Ditko departed from Marvel. Romita’s first issue was #39 (Aug 1966), teamed up with writer & editor Stan Lee.

During his time working on Amazing Spider-Man Romita designed several new villains, most prominently the Rhino, the Shocker, and the Kingpin. Romita also made his mark as an artist who was talented at rendering beautiful women. He revealed what Mary Jane Watson actually looked like, and he gradually transformed Gwen Stacy from Ditko’s ice queen into more of a sweet girl-next-door type. He also completely redesigned the look of the Black Widow, giving Natasha her now-iconic long red hair, leather jumpsuit and wrist-blasters in issue #86 (July 1970).

Before his time at Marvel, Romita had spent nearly a decade at DC Comics working on their romance titles. This definitely made him very well-suited to working on Amazing Spider-Man. During this time Stan Lee’s stories were as much soap opera as super-heroes. Romita was the perfect artist to illustrate Peter Parker’s personal life and rocky romances with Mary Jane and Gwen.

Confession time: I am not an especially huge fan of Spider-Man, although there are certain runs and storylines featuring the web-slinger that I have enjoyed. Consequently, I do not have all that many issues of his various comic titles and most of those that I do own are from the 1980s onward. So sadly I don’t actually have many of the issues Romita worked on. I really need to pick up some trade paperbacks!

One of the Spider-Man books by Romita that I do have, though, is from much later in his career. Published in 1997, the Spider-Man/Kingpin: To the Death special was a reunion Romita in more than one way. It was his first full-length Spider-Man story in a number of years. It also saw him once again drawing the Kingpin and Daredevil. The book also reunited him with Stan Lee, who scripted over a plot by another long-time Spider-Man writer, Tom DeFalco. Romita’s pencils were effectively inked by Dan Green. I thought it was a nice collaboration. Green’s embellishment seemed to bring out the Milton Caniff influence in Romita’s style.

Although certainly not nearly as prominent as his association with Spider-Man, Romita also contributed a small but impressive body of work featuring another of Marvel’s iconic characters, Captain America. Actually some of Romita’s earliest professional work was on the very short-lived revival of the Captain America title in 1954.

After Romita became firmly established at Marvel in the mid-1960s, he illustrated Captain America on a few occasions. He drew the Cap stories in Tales of Suspense #76-77 (April-May 1966). The second of those tales, on which Romita penciled over Jack Kirby’s layouts, introduced Cap’s wartime love interest & ally Peggy Carter, the older sister (later retconned into the aunt) of his current girlfriend, S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Sharon Carter.

Tales of Suspense was re-titled Captain America with issue #100. Romita guest-penciled issue #114 (June 1969) and a couple of years later briefly became the book’s regular artist, working on #s 138-145 (June 1971 to Jan 1972). Although the writing on some of these issues was a bit underwhelming, particularly the ones featuring the Grey Gargoyle, the art by Romita was nevertheless very good.

Towards the end of this brief run, under writer Gary Friedrich, the stories got a bit better. Africa-American social activist Leila Taylor was introduced as a love interest for the Falcon who would frequently challenge his political views. Cap’s arch-foe the racist Red Skull was unmasked as an agent provocateur who was attempting to discredit Leila’s militant civil rights group by inciting them to violence. Romita’s final issue of Captain America was the first chapter of an exciting story arc that saw Cap, Sharon Carter and the forces of S.H.I.E.L.D. pitted against the hordes of Hydra. His cover to #145 was incredibly striking, with a rage-filled Cap standing over the fallen Sharon, swearing vengeance against Hydra. He worked on a number of additional covers for Captain America throughout the 1970s.

I mentioned before how adept John Romita is at drawing beautiful women. This was very well encapsulated on the cover to Marvel Age #111. Romita drew himself day-dreaming, surrounded by a bevy of the lovely ladies he had rendered over the decades, among them Gwen Stacy, Mary Jane Watson, and the Black Widow. In a humorous, self-deprecating touch, in the upper right hand corner Romita draws his wife Virginia popping in to his studio to ask him if he’s finished drawing the cover yet!

Marvel Age 111 cover

Romita’s son John Romita Jr also went into the comic book biz, himself becoming an equally prolific artist who worked on numerous titles. There are similarities between the styles of father and son, although I would describe John Jr’s work as more gritty. The two have worked together on occasion, with Romita inking his son’s pencils.

I’ve been fortunate enough to meet Romita on a couple of times at comic book conventions, where I was able to get a few of the books he worked on autographed. I didn’t have much of an opportunity to speak with him, but he seemed to be a polite, pleasant individual.

Although mostly retired nowadays, Romita does from time-to-time dip his toe back into the waters of the biz, drawing the occasional cover here and there. It’s always nice to see new work from such a talented legend.

Doctor Who: Let’s do the Time War again

“You weren’t there in the final days of the War. You never saw what was born. But if the time lock’s broken, then everything’s coming through. Not just the Daleks, but the Skaro Degradations, the Horde of Travesties, the Nightmare Child, the Could-Have-Been King with his army of Meanwhiles and Neverweres. The War turned into hell. And that’s what you’ve opened, right above the Earth. Hell is descending.” – The Tenth Doctor, “The End of Time”

When Doctor Who returned to television in 2005, viewers were informed that the Doctor was apparently the last of the Time Lords. All the other members of his race had apparently died fighting the Daleks in a vast, apocalyptic, realty-rending conflict known as the Time War.

Truthfully, the basic function of the Time War was to sweep the decks of the mountains of continuity that had accumulated during the original run of Doctor Who on television from 1963 to 1989. It enabled showrunner Russell T Davies to start with a clean slate. He was able to streamline things without having to resort to rebooting the series from scratch. It worked elegantly in that regard.

The Time War also allowed Davies and his collaborators to offer a new perspective on the character of the Doctor. The time traveler was now a haunted, battle-scarred figure suffering from survivor’s guilt and the knowledge that in order to save existence he had been the one to finally bring an end to the carnage of the War.

Of course inevitably viewers were curious to know what exactly had taken place during this infamous Time War. Hints and allusions to the events were peppered throughout various episodes over the next several years, but we never actually saw any part of the conflict itself. I believe that at one point Davies joked that he’d have needed a one hundred million dollar budget to bring the Time War to television screens.

Besides, much of what the Doctor mentioned, such as his recitation of the myriad horrors of the Time War in“The End of Time,” sounded like the sort of abstract, surrealist nightmares that would probably have been impossible to convincingly depict on TV. When we were finally granted a glimpse of the War by Steven Moffat in “The Day of the Doctor” it was presented as a more straightforward conflict, with a billion Dalek spaceships laying siege to Gallifrey. Which, of course, was still pretty damn dramatic.

We eventually learned that a previously unrevealed incarnation of the Doctor portrayed by John Hurt, the so-called “War Doctor,” was the one who fought in the Time War. The conflict had apparently spanned centuries, during which the War Doctor became a weary old man. Barring the use of archival footage of Hurt as a younger man, it would be impossible to show most of the War Doctor’s experiences.

Having said all that, I’ve often thought that the Time War would be perfect to present in comic book form. After all, the only limit on what can be shown in comic books is the imaginations of the writers & artists. I even thought of the perfect creative team: Grant Morrison and Richard Case, the writer and penciler who crafted many bizarre, nightmarish, reality-twisting stories during their run on Doom Patrol from 1989 to 1992. Just imagine the creators who brought us such peculiar menaces as the Brotherhood of Dada, the Painting That Ate Paris, the Scissormen and the Candlemaker depicting the freakish, horrifying events of the Time War.

However, it never did occur to me that prose fiction would also be another medium in which to recount the events of the Time War, at least not until I spotted the novel Engines of War by George Mann for sale at Forbidden Planet. I immediately grabbed it off the shelf, bought it, and started reading it.

Engines of War is told from the point of view of Cinder, a 21 year old freedom fighter from the human colony of Moldox. Her name comes from the color of her hair, and from the fact that she was found among the burning embers of her home 14 years earlier after her entire family was wiped out by the Daleks. Moldox and the other worlds in the Tantalus Spiral have been conquered by the Daleks, the majority of the colonists either exterminated or captured to serve as slave labor or experimental subjects. Cinder is one of the few humans to have remained free, eking out a hard-scrabble existence among the ruins, fighting a hopeless guerilla war against their conquerors.

Then, very unexpectedly, the Doctor comes into Cinder’s life, his TARDIS shot down during a space battle. Much like Cass from “The Night of the Doctor,” Cinder is initially angry at and frightened by him, believing the Time Lords to be just as bad as the Daleks. However, her desperation to escape the desolation of Moldox is so great that she tentatively lowers her guard when the Doctor offers to take her out of the warzone and to safety.

Mann does excellent work developing the character of Cinder, and writing her interactions with the Doctor. Contemplating the idea of something other than the day-to-day struggle for survival against the Daleks that has consumed much of her existence, Cinder starts to recognize the possibilities that life might offer.

For the War Doctor, so long involved in the war against the Daleks, Cinder is apparently his first extended interaction with humanity since his regeneration. At first he is hesitant to take upon himself the responsibility for her well-being. Like Cinder, the Doctor had resigned himself to the role of a warrior in a seemingly-endless conflict. Now, once again traveling with a companion, however reluctantly, he begins to let down his guard, to care. Cinder offers him an opportunity to reconsider his conviction that he no longer has the right to call himself “Doctor.”

The style of Mann’s prose reminded me of Terrance Dick’s work on the numerous Doctor Who novelizations. Mann’s writing seems directed at the teenage reader, but it is certainly sophisticated enough that adults will also appreciate it. Early on he succinctly describes the awesome, incomprehensible scope of the conflict:

Cinder had heard that in simple, linear terms, the war had been going on for over four hundred years. This, of course, was an untruth, or at least an irrelevance; the temporal war zones had permeated so far and so deep into the very structure of the universe that the conflict had – quite literally – been raging for eternity. There was no epoch that remained unscathed, uncontested, no history that had not been rewritten.

Of course, considering that it is set amidst the Time War, the book offers up plenty of examples of what Mystery Science Theater 3000 once described as “good old fashioned nightmare fuel.” There is some really dark stuff between these covers.

A War Doctor's Tale courtesy of Simon Hodges / Doctor Who Sidebar Covers — A War Doctor’s Tale courtesy of Simon Hodges / Doctor Who Sidebar Covers

Before the Doctor can take Cinder to safety, he needs to learn what the Daleks are up to on Moldox and the other worlds in the Spiral. Reluctantly the young human guides him to the nearest occupied city. The Doctor is horrified to discover that the Daleks have harnessed the energy of the Eye of Tantalus, a vast temporal anomaly contained within the Spiral, and used it to create weapons that erase their victims from history. Not only will an army of Daleks be equipped with the dematerialization guns, but the Eye itself is to be turned into a single massive weapon which will be used to wipe the Time Lord home world of Gallifrey from existence.

The Doctor travels to Gallifrey to alert the High Council to the Daleks’ plans, bringing Cinder with him. Through her eyes, we see just how much the conflict has affected them. The Time Lords had always been aloof, arrogant figures. Now, driven to desperation by their war with the Daleks, the Doctor’s people have become utterly ruthless. When the Lord President Rassilon is informed of the danger in the Tantalus Spiral, he immediately decides to utilize a stellar engineering device known as the Tear of Isha to neutralize the Eye. The Doctor, however, realizes that this will wipe out all life in the Spiral, including the billions of humans imprisoned by the Daleks.

Cinder felt her heart lurch in her chest. She felt suddenly nauseous. They were going to do it. They were really going to murder every single living thing on a dozen worlds.

“Rassilon,” said the Doctor, clearly exacerbated. “You’re condemning a billion souls to a terrible death. More. How can you even consider it?”

“What are a billion human lives to us, Doctor?” said Rassilon. “They are but motes of sand on the breeze. They breed like a virus, infesting every corner of the universe. Where some die, others will take their place.”

There are several scenes in the novel featuring the Doctor and Rassilon sparring verbally. Reading them, I was left longing for an actual live-action version of Engines of War. It would be brilliant to have John Hurt and Timothy Dalton acting opposite one another, reciting all of this wonderfully dramatic dialogue.

The Doctor and Cinder realize that not only must they stop the Daleks, but also the Time Lords. With both sides of the conflict in opposition to them, the odds seem near-insurmountable.

There are a number of excellent moments throughout Engines of War. Even though the hierarchy of the Time Lords has become inured to the violence, to the cataclysmic loss of life, Mann indicates that the citizens of Gallifrey are genuinely frightened by the War. At one point, looking over the landscape of the Time Lord capital, Cinder observes hundreds of tiny lights drifting up into the night sky.

“What are they?” said Cinder. “Paper lanterns?”

The Doctor shook his head. “No, although the principle is the same. Those are memory lanterns.”

“Memory lanterns?” echoed Cinder.

The Doctor glanced at her. “They all think they’re going to die,” he said. “All those people down there think the Daleks are coming for them, and that they’re going to be exterminated.” He sighed, and the weariness in his expression spoke volumes. “So they’re recording all of their thoughts and memories into those lanterns, and scattering them through time and space. It’s the last act of a desperate people. They’re terrified that they’re going to be forgotten, so they’re seeding themselves into all the distant corners of the universe to be remembered.”

I am curious about how much knowledge Mann had of the work that Moffat and his co-writers were doing on Series Eight when he was penning this novel. There are certain parallels. In “The Caretaker” the Doctor expressed his disdain for soldiers. In response, Danny Pink declared “I’m a soldier. Guilty as charged. You see him? He’s an officer!” Indeed, when we first see the Doctor in Engines of War, he is piloting his unarmed TARDIS, leading a large assembly of heavily-armed Battle TARDISes in an engagement with a Dalek fleet, organizing strategy, calling out orders to his fellow Time Lords; he is very much an officer.

At the end of Series Eight, in “Death in Heaven” Danny bitterly commented of the Doctor, “Typical officer, got to keep those hands clean.” That is a theme that also runs throughout Engines of War. Despite the fact that he has ostensibly embraced the role of warrior, the Doctor carries no weapons, only his sonic screwdriver. On both Moldox and Gallifrey he relies on Cinder to destroy Daleks and knock out Time Lord security guards. At one point, Rassilon’s obsequious lackey Karlax subjects Cinder to brutal interrogation by the Mind Probe, as much to verify the Doctor’s story as to fulfill his own sadistic glee. Cinder barely survives…

She gasped for air. “He’ll kill you,” she said, between shallow breaths. “He’ll kill you for this.”

Karlax laughed. “Oh no, not the Doctor,” he said. “The Doctor and I are old playmates. He doesn’t like to get his hands dirty.”

Mann also addresses the suggestion made by Davies that “Genesis of the Daleks,” when the Time Lords dispatched the Doctor back in time to abort the creation of the Daleks and he hesitated at committing genocide, was actually the first shot fired in the Time War. Early on, seeing the horrific loss of life on Moldox, witnessing the atrocities being committed by the Daleks, the Doctor is burdened by the knowledge that if not for his indecision on Skaro many years before he might have prevented all this from occurring.

Towards the end of the novel, the Doctor and Cinder come face to face with the Eternity Circle, the group of Daleks tasked by the Emperor with developing the temporal weapons. The head of the Circle explicitly refers to the Doctor’s presence at the birth of the Daleks

“Ah,” said the Dalek. “The beginning of the Time War. The moment that you, Doctor, taught the Daleks their most valuable lesson of all — that emotion is a weakness that must be eradicated. That mercy has no place in victory.”

“Not a weakness,” said the Doctor, “but a strength.”

“If it had not been for your hesitation,” said the Dalek, its tone derisory, “for your inability to do what was necessary, then the entire War could have been prevented. The Daleks would have ceased to exist.”

Engines of War is very much concerned with explaining exactly how the Doctor arrived at the point seen in “The Day of the Doctor.” What was it that finally drove him to solemnly declare, “No more,” to decide to utilize the Moment and wipe out the whole of the Time Lords and the Daleks? What was it that convinced him that there was no other choice?

Mann shows us a Doctor who, as the story opens, is already burned out, bone-weary from an unending nightmare conflict. And then he is faced with further horrors as both the Daleks and his own people pile atrocities upon one another, and each side reigns down scorn & mockery upon him for his perceived weakness and lack of resolve. When the novel finally comes to a close with the Doctor experiencing yet another soul-rending loss, you can fully imagine that this is a man who just wants it all to end, who will do anything to stop it, who will tell the Moment Interface “I have no desire to survive this.”

If there is a weakness to Engines of War, it is that perhaps it references the history of the series a little too heavily. It is inevitable that any novel set during the Time War is going to require allusions to a number of past events. Nevertheless, the nods to specific televised Doctor Who stories do come quite frequently. While for the most part Mann is able to fit them in seamlessly, on occasion they do feel superfluous. By the time a character starts playing the Harp of Rassilon, well, I couldn’t help but feel that Mann was overdoing it just a bit!

Well, aside from that, and from events jumping back and forth between the different settings, Engines of War is a good read. Mann effectively delves into a previously little-explored period of the Doctor’s life. He is successful at not just conveying the cosmic scope of events only previously hinted at on the television series, but at utilizing them to explore the character of the Doctor. Mann also examines how a conflict that rages across myriad planes of reality would affect the average mortal person on the ground, viewing the staggering events of the Time War through Cinder’s eyes.

As I indicated earlier, for a variety of reasons it is very unlikely that we will ever be provided an in-depth look at the Time War on our television screens. Nevertheless, that conflict provides a rich backdrop against which to tell engrossing stories in other mediums. Engines of War by George Mann undoubtedly proves that potential.

Charlie Hebdo, free speech, and terrorism

I am certain that everyone is familiar with the horrible events that have unfolded in the last week in Paris, France. In short: on January 7, 2015 several cartoonists & staff members of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, as well as several police officers, were murdered by militant Islamic terrorists.

I was not intending to write anything about this tragedy. But there has been , inevitably, a huge amount of debate across mass media, including the internet. This caused me to finally put my thoughts down.

There is a line of reasoning among certain people that the creators at Charlie Hebdo were somehow at least partially responsible for causing their own murders. By publishing cartoons & illustrations that were inflammatory towards Islam and that certain members of that faith found sacrilegious & offensive, these cartoonists recklessly created the resentment that led to their deaths. Or, worse yet, Charlie Hebdo’s creators were far-right racists and Islamophobes, and that they got what was coming to them.

I definitely do not agree with any of this. I find this type of rationale to be grotesque, the worst example of blaming the victims. Innocent people were murdered; there is no justification.

Free speech is one of the cornerstones upon which our society was founded. The free & unrestrained exchange of ideas is the vital lifeblood of freedom. And that means that, inevitably, there is always going to be something said by somebody that is going to offend somebody else. As others have observed over the last week, we do not possess the right to not be offended.

I have to be honest: I am not familiar with the work that Charlie Hebdo presented. From what I understand, they are an extremely irreverent publication that is deliberately provocative. However, it appears that their harsh satire is directed towards the entire spectrum of religion and politics, and not just at Islam in particular. I am sure that over the years they offended a great many people from very diverse backgrounds.

Truthfully, Charlie Hebdo doesn’t even sound like my type of humor, and I doubt it is the sort of thing I would read. But I can understand how their brand of satire would appeal to others.

Yes, it is absolutely true that free speech does not exist in a vacuum; it has consequences. One cannot simple say whatever they want and then be upset if others vehemently disagree with them. But there is an appropriate manner in which to do so.

A reaction to the Charlie Hebdo massacre by cartoonist David Pope

Obviously certain people were extremely offended by Charlie Hebdo’s commentary on the Islamic faith. There are a number of reasonable ways in which these individuals could have responded. They could have boycotted the magazine. They could have written angry letters to the editors & publisher. They could have picketed outside the offices of the magazine. They could have gone on television or created their own publication to air their grievances. They could have organized like-minded people to march through the streets of Paris in protest. All of these are rational responses; murder and terrorism are not.

Look, there is plenty that offends me. I find the contents of Fox News and the New York Post to be racist, sexist, homophobic, inflammatory, partisan distortions of the truth. Whenever possible I avoid them like the plague. While I do read the Daily News because it is more aligned to my sensibilities, even then I find certain of the pieces in that newspaper to be insulting or ignorant. I once commended on Facebook that “You don’t have to be a reactionary douchebag to get a letter to the editor published in the Daily News… but it helps.”

Yes, there are certainly occasions where I have been less than open-minded. Plenty of times I have viewed or read something that offended me and my immediate reaction was “Why doesn’t that asshole just shut the fuck up?!?” But you know what? Ideally, given a few moments to think things over, I might eventually attempt to consider whether the opinions being presented could actually have any validity to them, to try to understand where that person is coming from. (Yes, usually I do end up concluding that person is full of shit, but at least I try to be open-minded.)

Not once have I gone out and shot anybody whose opinion I disagreed with.

It is not known if the 18th Century French philosopher Voltaire actually said “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Whether he did or not, he certainly believed in those sentiments. However, in his 1763 book Treatise on Tolerance he wrote:

“The supposed right of intolerance is absurd and barbaric. It is the right of the tiger; nay, it is far worse, for tigers do but tear in order to have food, while we rend each other for paragraphs.”

Voltaire’s words are certainly as applicable today as they were 252 years ago. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are difficult; they require us to allow others to express beliefs that we may find abhorrent, and to respond in a rational manner. But without that we become willfully ignorant creatures who violently lash out at all who would differ with us. Any kind of free & civilized society cannot exist under such circumstances.

Magneto vs. the Red Skull round three: Axis

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.” – John Steinbeck

At long last here is the third and final part of my examination of the conflict between Magneto and the Red Skull, between the Holocaust survivor turned mutant revolutionary and the Nazi terrorist. For those who have not already read them, here are links to Part One and Part Two.

Previously the Red Skull, who’d had the brain of the deceased telepath Charles Xavier grafted into his own, was brutally killed by Magneto. Unfortunately, rather than ending the Skull’s threat, this caused him to transform into a new incarnation of Onslaught, the being originally created years before from the combined subconscious darkness of Xavier and Magneto’s minds.

(Or perhaps Onslaught was actually Rob Liefeld… I forget exactly.)

The Avengers and X-Men’s battle against the “Red Onslaught” and the terrible aftermath is seen in the Axis miniseries by writer Rick Remender and various artists. Magneto’s perspective of these events is depicted in issue #s 11 and 12 of his solo series, written by Cullen Bunn and illustrated by Gabriel Hernandez Walta and Roland Boschi, with covers by David Yardin.

In Axis #1, illustrated by Adam Kubert, the reborn Red Skull / Onslaught is spreading a psychic hate plague across the globe. Havok, Rogue, the Scarlet Witch and Magneto attempt to stop the Skull. It seems a hopeless task, especially as the three members of the Avengers Unity Squad want nothing to do with Magneto. Havok, perhaps under the Skull’s psychic influence, attacks the master of magnetism, shouting at him “You damn murdering hypocrite! You’re just like him, Magneto!”

The Avengers and X-Men, alerted to the Red Skull’s threat, arrive in Genosha. After long months of tense relations between the two teams, they finally realize that they need to join forces against this common foe. The towering Red Onslaught, however, is unimpressed, and he summons a pair of immense Sentinels constructed out of near-unbreakable adamantium. The Skull reveals that he previously used his mental powers to manipulate Tony Stark into constructing these robot monstrosities, programming them with the data needed to defeat Earth’s heroes.

(Side note number one: Was any of this previously seen or even hinted at before the events of Axis #1, maybe in an issue of Iron Man? Because the reveal by Remender seems to come completely out of left field, with no build-up or foreshadowing.)

Between the Red Skull and the Sentinels, the heroes have little chance, the blame for which Magneto is more than happy to lay at Iron Man’s feet. In the midst of battle, Magneto flees. The Avengers and X-Men are defeated and imprisoned by the Sentinels.

Back in his sanctuary, away from everyone else, Magneto finally engages in self-reflection, and acknowledges his own role in causing this crisis. “All that I have done… it was for nothing. I have committed unspeakable acts. I have hurt people. I have taken lives as easily as I might draw breath. All so my people, so mutants, might thrive.”

Briar Raleigh, Magneto’s human ally who sympathizes with his goals, argues that he could not have foreseen the results of killing the Skull. Magneto disagrees, informing her “After all this time, after so many atrocities committed in the name of mutants, after so many bitter failures, I was blind not to anticipate something like this.”

Attempting to spur Magneto out of his despondency, Briar plays old video footage of his brutal attacks against anti-mutant forces. She then shows him an interview with a young girl he once saved, who says “People say he’s some sort of monster, or maybe a terrorist, or that he’s insane. But I’m just glad mutants have someone like him, someone who can be angry, who can do bad things, so that we might survive.”

Grimly resolved that he is the one who has been forced into the role of making the difficult but necessary choices, Magneto sets out to recruit allies against the Skull. If the Skull’s Sentinels are programmed to defeat heroes, then he will ally himself with criminals and villains. Among those he approaches are Doctor Doom, Loki, Carnage, Sabretooth and Mystique.

Deadpool, who is not, strictly speaking, a villain, but who is certainly nuts, gets wind of all this and decides to find out what is going on. The merc with a mouth tells him “I kinda want to know what the hell you’re trying to pull. I mean, I thought you were supposed to be a good guy.” Magneto somberly responds “Not even you are foolish enough to think me a hero. Such distinctions are for those who can look at their own reflections and not despair.”

Magneto and his group of ne’er-do-wells engage the Red Skull and his Sentinels in Genosha. During the battle, they manage to free the Scarlet Witch and Doctor Strange, and Magneto tells them to attempt an “inversion spell” to revive the suppressed remnants of Xavier’s consciousness in the Skull’s mind. Before it can be completed, Strange is knocked out. Doctor Doom steps in and forces Wanda to complete the spell with him.

The inversion is seemingly successful. Onslaught is banished, and the Red Skull is returned to human form, unconscious. Immediately, though, there are problems. The Avengers want to imprison the Skull ASAP before he re-awakens. The X-Men, however, want custody of him, to see if now they can fully restore Xavier to life. The disagreement causes the two teams to once again find themselves at odds with one another, neither side willing to budge. Their fragile alliance is shattered. Even in defeat, the Skull achieves a dark victory, once again driving apart humans and mutants.

And what has happened to Magneto? Wounded, watching all of this from afar, he hears the Scarlet Witch ask “Where are the villains?” Magneto bitterly thinks to himself, “After everything we did… everything I did… these Avengers… even my own daughter… would still see me as another threat to be eliminated or contained.”

As we soon find out in Axis #4, however, the inversion spell by Wanda and Doom worked much too well. It caused everyone who was in Genosha to turn 180 degrees on the moral compass. All of the heroes who were present are now ruthless, violent and selfish. All of the villains are now moral and altruistic. Sam Wilson, formerly the Falcon and now the new Captain America, wants to lead all of the inverted Avengers in taking over the world, creating an ordered society that they control. The mutant Genesis is transformed into a reborn Apocalypse who leads the X-Men into war against humanity. They construct a bomb that will wipe out all non-mutants on Earth. Oh, yeah, and Tony Stark becomes an arrogant, greedy, hedonistic asshole. If you thought regular Iron Man could be a jerk, well, inverted Stark is about a hundred times worse.

The now-elderly Steve Rogers and the few non-inverted heroes who managed to escape being captured by the corrupted Avengers are forced to ally themselves with Magneto and the other inverted villains to stop the X-Men and Apocalypse. These events play out over the remainder of the Axis miniseries.

(Side note number two: Did Remender really need nine extra-sized issues to tell this whole story? The whole thing would very comfortably have fit into a mere six issues. I liked Axis, but it definitely suffered from being padded out with tons of fight scenes that played out over a bunch of splash pages and double-page spreads.)

Finally coming to Axis #9, with Jim Cheung artwork, Rogers and the inverted villains attempt to recreate the inversion spell. Doctor Doom manages to summon Doctor Voodoo and his ghostly brother, and they take possession of the inverted Scarlet Witch. Doom and the possessed Witch catch up with Rogers, who has located the Red Skull. The man who was once the personification of human evil has been inverted into the remorseful White Skull… seriously, even his mask turned white. How did that happen?

The White Skull begs Magneto not to once again resort to murder, to not kill Iron Man, and allow the new inversion spell to undo the damage. Magneto reluctantly agrees. Doom, the Skull, and the possessed Witch re-enact the inversion, turning everyone back to normal. Well, almost everyone. Iron Man, who refuses to go back to how he once was, is able to shield himself, and both Havok and Sabretooth are caught in his energy field. That means Havok is still a violent fanatic who hates humans, Sabretooth still has a conscience, and Stark is still a douchebag. Oh, well, can’t win ‘em all!

In the closing pages of Axis #9, Rogue and the Scarlet Witch form a new Avengers Unity Squad, hoping to bridge the gap between humans and mutants so that a disaster such as this never occurs again. Magneto, however, is in no mood to celebrate, realizing that Doctor Doom, the Red Skull and Iron Man have all escaped. We see that the Skull is now the prisoner of Doom, a potential weapon to be used by the Latverian tyrant in the future.

Hopefully Magneto and the Red Skull will meet again. Theirs is a dramatic, powerful enmity driven by mutual contempt & hatred. They are simultaneously alike and as different as night & day. Much can be revealed about Magneto through the comparing & contrasting of him to the Skull.

Magneto, as re-envisioned by Chris Claremont to be a survivor of the Holocaust, is undoubtedly a complex, complicated and morally ambiguous individual. One can certainly see Magneto as the personification of Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous warning “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Likewise the character appears to embody the old saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

I have often regarded Magneto as a tragic but dangerous figure. He is a man who experienced horrific losses in his childhood & early adulthood, and who is unable or unwilling to let go of the past. All of this has led him to fanatical extremes.

The Red Skull commits evil acts because he is a psychopath. Magneto, on the other hand, is driven by fear and guilt, by a burning obsession to never again become a victim. Unlike the Skull, it is certainly possible to understand, even sympathize with Magneto. But if in the end by his actions Magneto arrives at exactly the same place as the Skull, as an unrepentant monster, than all the rationalizations in the world are meaningless.

Doctor Who reviews: The Eleventh Doctor #6

Things are not going well for the Eleventh Doctor and Alice Obiefune. Their friend Jones, who was one day destined to become a Bowie-esque rock god, has been killed saving Alice from a power-mad Nimon, and the mysterious shape-changing robot known only as ARC has barely saved the TARDIS from being destroyed. And that’s only on the first page of our story. Or should I say the last page?

The beginning is the end is the beginning.

Writer Rob Williams and artist Simon Fraser turn matters back-to-front in Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #6, published by Titan Comics. “Space in Dimension Relative and Time” sees the time stream “running backwards in incremental jumps.” Only the Doctor, due to his Time Lord nature, is able to perceive this. “I’m aware we’re running backwards through time but no one else is,” the Doctor announces to himself.

With history repeatedly leaping back, the Doctor realizes that he has an opportunity to change events and save Jones from being killed. However, an even more pressing issue is at hand. As he tells Alice:

“We have to stop this… time can’t run backwards. It’ll destroy us. It’ll destroy everything.”

This is one of the most high-concept Doctor Who comic book stories I’ve read since Rich Johnson penned the Tenth Doctor adventure Room With A Déjà Vu, published back in 2009 by IDW. Rob Williams’ plotting for The Eleventh Doctor #6 is mind-bending, tossing the reader right into the thick of things. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the conclusion.

Appropriately enough, even the page numbering runs backwards in this issue!

Once again Williams does an excellent job at capturing the voice of Matt Smith’s Doctor. I could so totally imagine him on television having a conversation with a geranium that he’s decided to call “Dave.” Reading Williams’ dialogue for the Doctor, you can definitely “hear” Smith’s voice in your head.

This issue is more plot-orientated than the previous few. Nevertheless, even with all the regressions back through time, Williams is able to fit in a few small moments to further develop Alice, Jones and ARC. I’m interested in seeing where he goes with the trio and their relationship with the Doctor in upcoming issues.

Yes, Jones really is dead, but he'll be just fine once we hit rewind again. — Yes, Jones really is dead, but he’ll be just fine once we hit rewind again.

I am really wondering how exactly Simon Fraser illustrated this one. How do you lay out a story where on each page events jump backwards? He must have put a great deal of thought into deciding exactly how to pace this, as well as making sure all of the details lined up. However Fraser went about it, the results are impressive.

Fraser even does a good job rendering the Nimon. Now there is an old monster that I never thought I would see again. Well, actually, if I had to pick the unlikeliest aliens to ever return to Doctor Who, it would have been the Macra, who appeared in a story that aired once way back in 1967 and which probably no longer exists barring a few seconds of footage that were saved from the scrapheap. Yet low and behold the Macra popped up four decades later in “Gridlock.” So if they could return from obscurity, I suppose the snicker-inducing Nimons were capable of doing so, as well.

Actually, the Nimons were used in one of the Doctor Who audio stories from Big Finish, which makes a certain sense, since their eerie, menacing voices were definitely their best feature. Even the revived television series gave them an unexpected nod when the Doctor identified the Minotaur from “The God Complex” as a distant relative of the Nimons. So, yeah, I guess it’s not too unprecedented that one of them shows up in this issue.

Credit where it is due: Fraser does his very best with what is a silly-looking design and manages to render the Nimon to look at least semi-menacing. Fraser even gives the Nimon a handy suit of “temporal armor” which makes the creature appear slightly more imposing and less ill-proportioned.

No! Stop! You're making me giddy! — No! Stop! You’re making me giddy!

There’s some nice work on this issue by colorist Gary Caldwell. His palette of colors works very well with Fraser’s art, emphasizing the reality-bending, time-twisting elements. Caldwell’s work on the opening page (or is it the closing page?) of the issue, with the TARDIS amongst the vastness of the cosmos, is beautiful.

This issue’s time-twisty cover is by Verity Glass. The Escher-inspired piece features an endless series of TARDISes inside one another, spiraling inward into an infinite regression. It definitely suits the story by Williams & Frasier.

Christine Cavanaugh: 1963 – 2014

Actress Christine Cavanaugh passed away on December 22, 2014 at the much too young age of 51. Cavanaugh’s career as an actress spanned from 1988 to 2001. She appeared in a handful of live television shows & movies during this time. The majority of her work, however, was as a voice actress. In this capacity, Cavanaugh gave a number of wonderful performances over the years, portraying several famous characters.

Her most prominent performance was probably in the 1995 movie Babe. She voiced the title character, the sweet and innocent Australian piglet Babe who becomes a sheep-herder.

Cavanaugh worked on a number of animated series throughout the 1990s, among the Darkwing Duck, Sonic the Hedgehog, The Powerpuff Girls and The Wild Thornberries. Her two most significant roles were on Rugrats and Dexter’s Laboratory.

I always found Rugrats to be a bizarre but funny show. It is one of those series that was very much for all ages. Young kids enjoyed it for the cute & goofy humor, while adults appreciated it for the comically skewed perceptions of the world as seen through the toddler characters’ eyes.

Cavanaugh was the voice of Chuckie Finster, the nervous orange-haired two-year-old with glasses. Her delivery of Chuckie’s dialogue was both poignant and humorous. Chuckie always reminded me a bit of myself, so he was something of a favorite character. Cavanaugh portrayed Chuckie on the Rugrats television series from 1991 to 2001, as well as in the two animated films The Rugrats Movie (1998) and Rugrats in Paris (2000), the latter of which featured a central role for the character.

The other animated voice role for which Cavanaugh was known was Dexter, the main character from Genndy Tartakovsky’s series Dexter’s Laboratory. Cavanaugh voiced the diminutive boy genius from 1995 to 2001, bringing to life the character with an iconic performance. She gifted Dexter with humorous self-involvement, as well as an almost tangible frustration at having to co-exist with his annoying older sister Dee Dee, who kept invading his secret lab, mucking about with his ambitious experiments. I’ve always enjoyed Dexter’s Laboratory. It was another offbeat but humorous series that appealed to viewers of all ages.

Cauvanaugh’s vocals as Dexter were also featured on the 1998 soundtrack album Dexter’s Laboratory: The Musical Time Machine which compiled several songs from the series. Among these was “Breathe in the Good Sunshine” from the episode “Just an Old-Fashioned Lab Song,” with Cavanaugh performing alongside singer-songwriter Paul Williams.

Cavanaugh retired from acting in 2001. She moved back to her native Utah in order to spend more time with her family.

Until I read about Cavanaugh passing away late last month, I had not actually realized who she was, and the same actress had voiced Babe, Chuckie and Dexter. Voice acting is often low-profile work, and is really not appreciated anywhere near as much as acting in front of the camera. But it definitely requires real talent. Bereft of the use of facial expressions and body language, the actor must rely solely on their voice to bring a character to life, to convey emotion, to deliver performances that must be humorous and dramatic, broad and subtle.

Christine Cavanaugh was certainly capable of all that. She brought to life a trio of iconic fictional characters with her wonderful abilities, delighting millions of fans, young and old.

Doctor Who reviews: Last Christmas

Happy New Year! I see that this blog has a few new people following it. Welcome, everyone. Also, a big “thank you” to Cats at the Bar for promoting In My Not So Humble Opinion, along with a number of other excellent blogs, on The Weggie List.

I finally had an opportunity to watch the new Doctor Who Christmas special, “Last Christmas” written by Steven Moffat and starring Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, Jenna Coleman as Clara Oswald, and Nick Frost as Santa Claus. Yes, “Last Christmas” actually features Santa Claus… well, kind of sort of. As a number of the characters in this episode comment, “It’s a long story.”

The tone of “Last Christmas” is interesting. It seems to draw influence from several different eras of Doctor Who: the “base under siege” serials of the late 1960s, the Gothic horror of the mid-1970s, the surreal, philosophical quality of the early 1980s, and the seasonal, celebratory quality of Moffat’s own past Christmas specials. Moffat’s writing on “Last Christmas” very effectively entwines these disparate elements, creating a strong, cohesive episode.

So, to try to make that “long story” short: Clara, now back on Earth in 2014, is awakened in the middle of the night on December 24th to discover that Santa Claus, his sleigh, reindeer, and two elves named Wolf and Ian have all crashed onto the roof of her building. Then the TARDIS reappears, and the Doctor urges her to ask no questions, and to get into his ship ASAP.

The two of them re-materialize at the North Pole, where a scientific expedition is under attack from alien life forms. Four of the eight members of the team have been infected by creatures that have latched onto their faces. It seems that the Doctor, Clara, and the other half of the team are going to meet with the same fate when Santa Claus, the elves, and an army of wind-up toys burst into the room, giving them all a chance to escape to another part of the base.

The Doctor identifies the creatures as Dream Crabs. They are telepathic parasites that latch onto a host and literally eat their victim’s brain. In order to render their victims compliant, the Dream Crabs “anesthetize” their hosts with incredibly realistic dreams.

The Dream Crabs bear a more than passing resemblance to a certain iconic sci-fi / horror creature designed by H.R. Giger. Moffat lampshades this with some very humorous dialogue…

Albert: They’re a bit like facehuggers aren’t they?

The Doctor: Facehuggers?

Albert: You know, Alien. The horror movie, Alien.

The Doctor: There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you.

Clara is attacked by one of the Crabs, which creates a dream world where she is back at home, it is Christmas Morning, and her boyfriend Danny Pink (Samuel Anderson) is still alive. It is exactly the sort of perfect, idyllic fantasy that she would never want to leave. The Doctor is unable to reach Clara with his telepathy; she keeps ignoring the messages he sends her brain, so caught up is she in the construct. The Doctor realizes his only hope is a desperate one: he allows himself to be infected by another one of the Crabs, which enables him to bring himself directly into Clara’s dream.

At first Clara refuses to listen to the Doctor. She will not accept that Danny is dead, even though the Doctor insists that her boyfriend sacrificed himself to save the Earth. And then, surprisingly, Dream Danny announces “I didn’t die saving the world, Doctor, I died saving Clara. The rest of you just got lucky.”

Obviously we all know that this isn’t the real Danny, that it is a fantasy. If Danny is agreeing with the Doctor that he really is dead, it is actually that part of Clara’s psyche which recognizes that this is all a fantasy and that is attempting to make her realize that she must reject it and wake up. But the dialogue between Clara and Dream Danny is so well written, and is played so well by Coleman and Anderson that it actually feels like Clara is having one final opportunity to see Danny, to find some closure. It’s a moving scene.

(And I’m relieved that we were not treated to some sort of deus ex machina where Danny was brought back to life. His death was tragic, but very dramatic. Returning him to life to give Clara a happy ending would have been a real cheat.)

This also reveals just how much the Doctor, beneath his cynical façade, really does care about Clara. He is willing to allow one of the Dream Crabs to infest his mind, risking his own death, in order to try to save Clara’s life.

Clara and the Doctor are able to escape from the dreamscape, and the Crabs fall off their faces, crumbling to dust. But then the Doctor begins to wonder if any of that was real. After all, everyone in the polar base should have been incapacitated by the Crabs when they attacked earlier; it was only Santa’s arrival that saved them. And where did Santa, a fantasy figure, come from? The Doctor guesses that they are all, in fact, trapped in a fantasy. “Dreams within dreams – dream states nested inside each other. All perfectly possible, especially when we are dealing with creatures who have weaponized our dreams against us.”

This is all confirmed by Santa and his two elves. “Oh, for Easter’s sake! Of course you’ve been dreaming! Haven’t you been paying attention? …How much more obvious do you want me to make it? Because I can text the Easter Bunny, you know.”

Santa is actually a dream construct that they have all created in order to protect them, to point out the unreality of what is taking place. Finally having convinced the others of what is going on, the Doctor, Clara and the four expedition members all wake up to find they are still being attacked by the Crabs. Once again they flee to safety, locking the Crabs in another part of the base.

The Doctor, ever impatient, is ready to leave the North Pole, convinced that the other four members of the expedition who are still infected by the Crabs are beyond help. But then Clara asks him, if Santa was nothing but a dream, then how was it possible for him to have been on her roof earlier. And it suddenly hits the Doctor: everything that has happened since he was first reunited with Clara has been a dream. It’s all been a fake.

Yeah, that never gets old!

The expedition to the North Pole never took place. The infected team members are actually the four people the Doctor and Clara met, all of them caught up in a shared fantasy created by the Crabs. None of them are scientists, but total strangers who have been separately attacked by the Crabs, drawn into this false reality. And the Doctor and Clara are themselves, respectively, back at the TARDIS and at home, each with a Crab latched to their faces.

Wow. To quote a line from Family Guy, “This whole place is a giant mind fuck!”

One of the Crab’s victims, Albert, is killed. The Doctor realized that if they do not all wake up immediately they are also doomed. Surrounded by zombie doppelgangers of themselves, the Doctor announces “Come on, it’s Christmas, the North Pole, who you gonna call?” Their combined willpower conjures up Santa Claus, who whisks them all away in his sleigh. And, one by one, each of them finally awakens back in their own separate, real lives.

It was revealing to see the reserved, solemn Doctor having a chance to take the reins of Santa’s sleigh and fly it through the skies above London. Capaldi acts very much like a giddy child. It’s one of those rare moments when we see the Doctor let down his guard, allow the weight of the world to slip off his shoulders, and genuinely have fun.

For a character that is (probably) not real, Santa Claus is a real joy. Nick Frost of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz fame is wonderful, having fun with the role. It was definitely perfect casting. Watching “Last Christmas,” I pondered how Frost’s frequent collaborator Simon Pegg sort of drew the short end up the stick when he appeared on Doctor Who a decade back in the underwhelming “The Long Game.” I hope one of these days Pegg has an opportunity to return to the show in a better episode.

The ending of “Last Christmas” has a bit more misdirection. At first it appears that it has actually been decades since the Doctor has last seen Clara, and that in the real world, awakened from the Dream Crabs’ fantasy, she is now an elderly woman. But this turns out to be one more dream-within-a-dream, and in fact it has only been a few weeks since the Doctor and Clara parted ways at the end of “Death in Heaven.”

From everything I’ve heard, the original ending of “Last Christmas” was going to have the Doctor saying goodbye to the now-old Clara. Jenna Coleman had tentative plans to leave the series with this episode, but then she changed her mind, necessitating a rewrite from Moffat that reunited the Doctor with a still-young Clara, who once again joins him on his travels in the TARDIS.

While the character of Clara was uneven over Series Eight, that was really down to inconsistent writing, one of the few weak points in an otherwise strong year. Coleman seemed to do the best with the material she was given. On the better-written episodes she definitely was great. So I do not mind seeing her stay on for another season, just so long as the quality of the writing is more consistent going forward. When they’ve been given really well-written scripts, Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman have made a superb team.

“Last Christmas” was definitely one of the better Doctor Who Christmas specials. It was exciting and suspenseful and had a number of great twists. It was sentimental and festive without being overly saccharine. Moffat’s script was very strong, and the actors all gave great performances.

So that’s the wrap-up of Doctor Who in 2014. However, we are left with a few lingering questions… Was the Promised Land that both the clockwork creatures from “Deep Breath” and the robots from “Robot of Sherwood” were seeking an actual place? Since Danny is dead, does that mean his descendent Orson Pink who we met in “Listen” is now no longer going to exist? In “Mummy on the Orient Express” who was the mysterious mastermind controlling the computer Gus and manipulating events from behind the scenes? Let me know if I’ve forgotten any other subplots.