Now that Jodie Whitaker’s three-series (plus some specials) run as the Doctor is in the books, there’s plenty of time to look back on her time in the TARDIS as a whole. A lot of attention gets paid to the Timeless Child revelation and the Flux storyline, since those have vast implications that will impact the lore of Doctor Who for years to come. But, for my money, my favorite stretch of Thirteenth Doctor episodes is her very first series, which featured ten standalone episodes and one holiday special.
The relatively unheralded first series of the Thirteenth Doctor’s adventures with brand new companions gave us a continuity-light approach that allowed new viewers to jump into the show. It also brought back a classic series feel, bringing us some tropes that we hadn’t seen since before the Time War. I like this time in the show a lot, and here are some of my favorite things about it.
I’ve been putting this off for a while. Don’t get me wrong; I love the Hulk. He’s my favorite comic book character, and quite possibly my favorite literary character ever. If I ever got the chance, I’d put up with all the bullshit politics, editorial mandates, and fan whining in the comic book industry just to get a shot at writing this character. But actually documenting the number of changes he’s gone through…well, let’s just say that we’re definitely in for a multi-part rant here.
At his core, the Hulk is a simple concept. Inside each of us there dwells a raging fury. When Bruce Banner’s temper boils over, he becomes the embodiment of rage: a 7-foot tall, 1,000-pound force of unfettered fury that can casually knock over a city. Perhaps because the concept is so simple, a lot of different writers have played around with it. The result is something that can best be summed up with what I like to call the Incredible Hulk Drinking Game. The rules are simple: take a shot when, during the Hulk’s history, one of the following happens:
The Hulk changes color,
The Hulk’s transformation pattern changes,
The Hulk changes personality,
And take a bonus shot if this change is not given any explanation in the story.
(Warning: do not actually participate in the Incredible Hulk Drinking Game. You will die of alcohol poisoning.)
Following my early masterpiece The Hundreds of Ghosts in one Honted House!, I wrote two more stories when I hit third grade. One, The Giant Cat, is sadly lost to history, but featured a giant cat and a robot mouse. That’s about all I remember about it, except for the fact that I think it was written on lined paper and stapled together. Lesson learned: always get a good bookbinder.
The other book I wrote that year actually went on display at the school library. Yeah, I was a celebrity back then. I’d walk onto the playground and pick whichever swing I wanted, bullies would duck out of sight when they saw me coming, and teachers lauded me with praise. That book, The Game, survived the years unscathed. To hear it narrated by my wife Sarah, click below. To read the special annotated edition, read on.
I eschewed the use of a pen name here, opting instead for my birth name of Charles Martin. Note that I have not one but two talented illustrators here. Despite that, I specifically remember drawing some of these pages myself. I guess I’m just too modest to take credit for my brilliant talent.
I have a confession to make: I did not know anything about baseball when writing this. The only thing I knew baseball from was Peanuts strips, which exaggerates the scores for humor. Therefore, I thought that 123 to 111 was a realistic baseball score. I also thought that baseball teams had seven people each, apparently. I blame my shoddy editor for not catching these errors.
Also, note the copyright at the bottom of the page. Even when I was 8, I meant business.
I initially planned on making this book very long. I had complained to my illustrator Matthew that book chapters were always too short. When he caught me in my hypocrisy and called me on using only one-page chapters, I told him that I go where the story takes me. Yes, that’s how pretentious I was as a third-grader.
At this point in the story I forgot that baseballs used innings, not quarters. Whatever. American football is the better game anyway.
Ah yes…the Montreal Expose. Maybe if they actually wore uniforms, they could have posed a challenge.
Even I have to admit, this book wasn’t exactly a thrilling piece of prose. It reads more like a warped sports almanac than something with a plot.
Who knew I was into postmodernism at such a young age? Truly, I must have been a prodigy.
I guess it was a strike-shortened series, since there were only 21 games until the World Series.
I kept messing up on the team name. It’s supposed to be the White Sox, which was my favorite baseball team. Why did I like the White Sox? Because I had a Cabbage Patch kid with a White Sox uniform. I pretty much picked all my favorite sports teams based on the merchandise I coincidentally acquired…except for the football Giants, whom my dad brainwashed me to like.
“And 3 ties.” Best closing line since, “This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Am I right?
Sorry…double page spreads don’t work out terribly well in the format I’ve chosen.
After such a great story, don’t we need an appendix?
I’m pretty sure this is the part I wrote, added in after the book had already been printed (hence the lack of dot-matrix letters). Apparently, my friend Matthew was a sentient weregorilla, judging by the toes.
Truly, I was a man of many talents. Apparently, I also had the beginnings of a mustache going on.
Again, I didn’t know anything about baseball. That’s why I had to add in “hitter” to the positions. I didn’t know what a batter was.
Poor Geoffrey. He was the only kid in school less cool than I was. I wrote him into the story when we were getting along, then apparently edited in the “bad” descriptor when we were either fighting or when I wanted to gain some cred with the cool kids by making an unmotivated personal attack on the poor boy.
Um…I think this was maybe an aborted title page that got shunted to the back of the book instead? Maybe I was getting paid by the page?
This blurb is so full of blatant lies. I obviously knew nothing about baseball. I also didn’t know anything about basketball or hockey. And at that point in my life, I had never played Nintendo. I just mentioned it because in 1989 everybody was into Super Mario Bros. and they talked about it endlessly in class. I said I liked it to blend in. I also lied during show and tell one day and said I had beaten Super Mario Bros. and had 99 lives at the end of it.
I did play Action Max. You folks probably never heard of Action Max on account of it sucking. It was a video game system I won in a raffle that required the use of a VCR and a light gun. I had one game, and I think there might have been three games total made for the machine. On the bright side, my winning it was the reason my family got a VCR: my dad had stated that if I won, he’d buy a VCR so I could use it, never actually suspecting that I could actually win.
And so that’s The Game. I don’t mind saying that it’s probably my worst novel. It has no description for the characters, no drama, and I had a few critical research failures. However, it does play with your expectations very well; you probably came in here expecting something decent or at least mildly entertaining, and then I bored you to tears with my fanciful tale of gibberish and high numbers. That’s what a good writer does: he plays with your expectations. So even in my worst moment, I still had it, baby!
I have always wanted to be a write, but I have not always been good at writing. But my mother saved as much of my old projects as she could, which is how I still have a copy of one of my first “books,” which I wrote in first grade. The book, The Hundreds of Ghosts in One Honted House! is aptly read by my wife Sarah in the video below. And, if you want my author’s commentary on this seminal work, read on.
Years ago, I went on a rant about Buster Moon and his villainous antics in Sing. At the time, I had no intention of ever seeing Sing 2, as I didn’t need more of that awful koala in my life. But I have children, and I tend to be a permissive parent. Thus, against my will and better judgment, I found myself sitting down for a viewing of Sing 2 as part of a family movie night.
So, Buster Moon has had an entire film to grow and develop as a character. In the sequel, is he still a monster? The long answer follows, but the short answer is: YES.
Character death is a touchy subject in RPGs. Some people think the PCs should always be at risk, and that an adventure is an outright failure if at least one character doesn’t get killed off during the action. Others never have PCs bite the dust, using house rules that cause a hero to go unconscious but not die when the rules as written would have them pushing up daisies. And, as with any divisive topic with extreme opposite stances, the majority of players fall somewhere in the middle of that scale.
Classic fairy tales usually involve a plucky young child taking on something dark and dangerous that represents the unknown and coming out on top. Those tales have been told, retold, and ultimately sanitized over the generations. When you go back to the source, however, a disturbing pattern emerges. While the horrors they face are immense, the fairy tale protagonists turn into horrifying monsters themselves when the tale reaches its conclusion and they embark upon the most satisfying part of their journey: revenge.
Even when the Highlander franchise met with limited success, nobody in charge of it seemed to know how to handle it. Case in point: Highlander: The Animated Series and Highlander III. Both came about in 1994, when the TV series had hit its stride and made the franchise popular again. The logical thing to do would have been to produce films based on the series and establish some continuity in the property. Instead, we got the exact opposite.
I’m analyzing the animated series and the third movie at the same time for two reasons. First, they were both released in 1994, right around the time Highlander: The Series was in its awesome third season. Second, there’s not a lot to say about them. Yes, they are bad (well, as far as I can tell…more about that in a bit), but they aren’t catastrophically bad. Mention the animated series to a Highlander fan and they might not even know it exists. Mention Highlander III and you might get a laugh at how bad the film is, but nowhere near the seething hatred you’d find from the other sequels. These additions to the franchise aren’t good by any means, but they also aren’t terrible.
Babbling Brooks 