Timelords Corner: Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord (Stories 144 - 147)

Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord (Stories 144 - 147)



Part two of my now I guess maybe continuing series on why Colin Baker was not the worst Doctor. He only played the part of the worst Doctor, and he did a hell of a job with what he was given to work with. Although his first season and some of his second were butchered at every turn by my arch-enemy John Nathan Turner, his outing as the Doctor returned the character to his roots as a cranky (this time not so old) genius, and he did it with style and grace.

His second season was almost a proto-Children of Earth miniseries. Actually a lot of the mid-eighties stuff, starting with the stab-happy intergalactic foodie cannibals of The Two Doctors reminds me of the dark direction Torchwood allows these days. That and Peri's swimsuits and cleavage shots.



The story of the whole second season is that the Doctor has been recalled to Gallifrey to stand trial for his involvement in events that lead- and this is where it gets good, to Peri getting her head shaved and lobotomized, replacing her personality with that of an evil dying slug mutant. It was super creepy and a most welcome change for the character, and the idea predates Epitaph One by thirty years or so. Isn't that correct, Mr Whedon?

The comments by the Doctor, the Valeyard and the judge during the trial seem half-metatextually to be putting the character of the Doctor, or rather the show itself, on trial. It's almost as if they were daring the BBC to cancel the show. Fortunately, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred provide a fine rebuttal in the Seventh Doctor and his excellent companion Ace, but sadly their redemption came too late, and Doctor Who finally went off the air in 1989, after 26 years.

The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg

The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg

I've actually started reading, like, real books since I came to California. My roommate doesn't have a TV, and I've found it kind of refreshing.

I was browsing the free book cart at the Santa Monica Public Library (a lovely place, but I won't be able to get a library card until I changed my driver's license over). I happened to pick this one up to look over when the cart was whisked away. Turns out it was a serendipitous find.

Schulberg is a fellow alum of Dartmouth and is probably best known as the screenwriter of films like The Harder They Fall and On the Waterfront. My screenwriting professor held up the latter film's script as a paragon of screenplay format and plotting. Being a (fairly) recent Dartmouth grad and having made my way out to L.A. to work in entertainment myself, I take this find as a promising omen.

Famously (among Dartmouth folks, anyways), the (mostly true) story of the book goes like this: Schulberg was a junior writer just starting his career after graduation, and had written a treatment for a sweet nothing of a romantic comedy set on campus during the annual winter festival. For obscure reasons the studio brought in no less a luminary than his literary hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald, to punch it up and give it some respectability.

The resulting film: Winter Carnival (1939)

However, Fitzgerald was a recovering alcoholic, and when the strain of traveling to New Hampshire to see the Carnival first-hand proved too much for him, he fell off the wagon in a big way. In an ethanol-fueled haze of a trip from Hollywood to New York City to New Hampshire and back, Fitzgerald and Schulberg try to massage the flimsy story into something more substantial.

It's by far the best book I've read in a long time, and it's positively criminal that it's been out of print since 1989. Schulberg's prose demonstrates a torrid love affair with the English language, and his humor and pathos as he goes from idol-worship to, well, disenchantment for his hero is engaging nearly from cover to cover. And he succeeds most of all in making real the feel of Old Hollywood in the 1930's. This atmosphere and many elements of the story itself were an obvious inspiration for the Coen brothers' bizarro version Barton Fink, which substituted Faulkner for Fitzgerald as the dipsomaniacal writer in decline before veering off into a glorious existential hell.

...

By the way I'm not going to be adding any more books to my Amazon store's inventory. It was great fun back when I was doing the fulfillment myself, but when I moved that was no longer an option, so I shipped all my books out and set up Fulfillment by Amazon. Since then, it's just been a sucker's game of constantly checking my prices and lowering them by a penny every couple of days. Maybe it's worth it if you have lots and lots of inventory to sell, but the profit margin gets cut more than one would expect, and if you set the price point below $3.50, you lose money on the transaction. I went from pocketing to 74% down to 55% of my sales. So now I'm just running out the clock, trying to break even. And I haven't had a sale in over a week? Blah.

Time Lords Corner: Doctor Who: The Two Doctors (Story 141)

Doctor Who: The Two Doctors (Story 141)

Oh, what the hell. I do have one VHS tape for sale, so it's semi-relevant to this blog. Also, I don't read much.

A little backstory: I really liked the 2005 version of Doctor Who when I finally got into it. So much so, I decided to start at the beginning (1963) and watch the classic series in chronological order to its cancellation in 1989, and the one-off TV movie in 1996. Including the new series, currently going into its seventh year, it all adds up to over 294 hours of surviving serials.

It's the Appalachian Trail of marathon television-watching.

Someone suggested that I blog about the project, but it doesn't meet my blogability threshold. I can't imagine the details of my little journey being interesting to anyone else but me. I have, though, compiled a spreadsheet breaking down every episode's status and running time, with pictures of each character indicating their first appearance.

So this is a random sampling, but I found "The Two Doctors" a fascinating gem in the wasteland of 80's Doctor Who. It brings back the great lost second Doctor, Patrick Troughton (most of the original tapes of his episodes were tragically recycled in the 70's). And he brings along Jamie McCrimmon, one of my favorite early companions and favorite doppelgangers, for that matter.

The sixth Doctor, Colin Baker, gets a bad rap. He was only on for two seasons, and in his first two serials has some "regeneration issues" giving him an absurdly manic-depressive personality. He was also saddled with my least-favorite companion, Peri. She spent her first outing in a bikini being ogled by the camera and bleating in a wandering American accent that makes her sound like an ersatz Judy Garland in the uncanny valley.

I don't blame Baker, he had to work with what he was given, and at the center of the black hole of Doctor Who in the eighties is the bane of my existence for the last month, John Nathan-Turner. He announced his arrival on the scene by ruining the opening and closing sequences (the latter ends with the screen going white in an enormous cringe-inducing explosion), and gave us nearly a decade of companions that spend most of their screen time complaining.

After several false starts that represent some of the least watchable episodes of the series, Baker finally finds his stride as a serious-minded but self-centered genius, and he more or less maintains the persona for the remainder of his two short seasons before regenerating into the seventh and final Doctor of the original series.

"The Two Doctors" is all over the place. The bad guys in this outing are the Androgons, a society of advanced Epicurians. The muscle of the Androgon faction is Shockeye, a creepily-gluttonous monster, an intergalactic foodie fixated on tasting human flesh. Troughton's Doctor gets his DNA mixed up with Shockeye's, resulting in a pair of ravenous culinary aesthetes on a quest to sample Earth's finest delicacies, resulting in the following exchange:

Shockeye:  "Do you serve humans in this establishment?"

Waiter:       "I believe 100% of our clientele is human, sir"

Shockeye:  "Human MEAT, you sniveling imbecile!"

Perhaps it was the relief of a surprisingly watchable episode after Baker's first few miserable episodes (again, not his fault), but I actually enjoyed "The Two Doctors." It was funny and weird, but most of all, I was actually able to pay attention to almost all of it.

P.S.- Real Time Lords shop at Time Lords Vintage.

Typewriter in the Sky by L. Ron Hubbard

It's funny, but after over 250 books sold, not a single person ever commented on the bibliomantic scrap of paper tucked inside almost every single one, cannibalized from a Scientology manual in the furtherance of enturbulation through the stochastic forces of the MEST universe.

Hubbard didn't just write lists of things he thought of, though. He also composed today's book, Typewriter in the Sky.



Like Fear, it's not a bad story. This one about an author out to kill his main character, in whose personality is trapped his best friend, was cited as an influence by Philip K. Dick. It's also an easy book to get a hold of. Like all writings of L. Ron Hubbard, sales of the books are highly subsidized by the Church of Scientology and its members, who end up with stacks of the things. So the entire secondary market is flooded, hence second-hand copies end up having negative value.

The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley

Grade:	A (Excellent)
Status:	Sold
Sentimental Value: Selling Price:	$333.93  $39.98

The Book of Lies: Which Is Also Falsely Called Breaks: The Wanderings of Falsifications of the One Thought of Frater Perdurabo (Aleister Crowley) Itself Untrue


I picked this up, along with a pair of Corcoran boots, in Greenwich Village on my first trip to NYC. I immediately removed the dust jacket, as it didn't do anything for the aesthetics of the volume. 


This is a very strange book, full of obscure Qabalistic riddles and inside jokes, and purportedly contains the key to the 9th degree of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Crowley alleged that Theodore Reuss immediately inducted him to that degree after reading ch. 69: "The Way to Succeed; and the Way to Suck Eggs."


The initial page gives the complete, ridiculously long title of the book in all its glory:

The publication data on the next page goes on to tell us "There is no joke or subtle meaning in the publisher's imprint." I can't recall whether I ever found it, but I believe it may refer specifically to the first edition of the title. 

Finally, to give you an idea of how crazy these little poems are, here are the first and second pages proper. Elsewhere referred to as "The Soldier and the Hunchback":

It's not so much a book that you read from cover to cover, but very useful, for example, for bibliomancy. Or you could immerse yourself in qabalistic knowledge for a decade or so, in order to understand (most) of the jokes contained therein.