Page 77 – Eruditorum Press

October 8, 2016

The Eruditorum Press Doctor Who Poll Results: The Top 50

And now for the grand finale. Though not before I make one last stab at pointing out that if you want Class reviews and don’t back the Eruditorum Press Patreon, you’re gonna want to change that, as there’s no way those are going to happen if you don’t.

50: Kill the Moon (57 Points, 8 First Place, 8 Last Place, 13 Downvotes)

This may be the Marmite king of the poll. I know at least some of the last place/downvotes were openly trolling me, which is a bit aggravating, if only because I’m genuinely curious how it would have done without that. But it made the top 50 by the skin of its teeth and I’m perfectly happy with that. Frankly, I wouldn’t want my favorite story not to be a bit Marmite.

49: Alien Bodies (58 Points, 1 First Place, 44 Non-Televised)

Lawrence Miles’s best placing, as well as the highest-placed BBC Books novel. Or if you’d prefer the highest-placed Faction Paradox book, but to be fair, not even the Faction Paradox Wiki counts it as such.

48: Inferno (61 Points, 1 First Place, 2 Downvotes)

Still overrated.

47: Dark Water/Death in Heaven (61 Points, 3 First Place, 3 Last Place, 6 Downvotes)

Highest-placed Cybermen story.

46: Turn Left (63 Points, 2 First Place, 1 Downvote)

45: An Unearthly Child (64 Votes, 4 First Place)

Highest-placed Hartnell story. Which… OK. I did say people could vote for it on the basis of the first episode alone, I guess.

44: Paradise Towers (65 Points, 3 First Place, 2 Downvotes)

Highest-placed Kangs story. This was 230th in the Doctor Who Magazine 50th Anniversary poll, twelfth from bottom. Not the only low-ranked story to do way better here, but obviously the one I’m happiest about.

43: Human Nature (67 Points, 1 First Place, 41 Non-Televised)

This one’s tricky – I pretty much had to give it any and all votes cast for “Human Nature,” but every single TV two-parter had multiple votes submitted under the title of its first episode, which means that some of these votes were intended for the TV version. As a result, this surely has a slightly inflated placement while the TV version has a slightly lower one. Personally I think it’d be more accurate if you just swapped their places, but oh well. Highest-placed Virgin book, in any case.

42: Torchwood: Children of Earth (71 Points, 59 Non-Televised)

Highest-placed spin-off. I can’t imagine I have to link it.

41: Enlightenment (71 Points, 2 First Place)

40: The Robots of Death (73 Points)

39: The Chimes of Midnight (74 Points, 2 First Place, 56 Non-Televised)

Highest-placed McGann story.

38: Gridlock (74 Points, 3 First Place, 1 Downvote)

Delighted this one did so well – it was firmly mid-table in the Doctor Who Magazine poll, and strikes me as an almost textbook example of the sort of story this crowd likes more than average.

37: Vincent and the Doctor (77 Points, 2 First Place, 4 Downvotes)

36: Jubilee (78 Points, 2 First Place, 51 Non-Televised)

Highest-placed Big Finish story, non-televised story, and Colin Baker story.…

October 7, 2016

And I’m Not Young; I’m Closer to Death Than Birth (Yoshi’s Island)

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There’s only one way to begin this.

In a sense of course that’s a lie – there’s a vast and multifaceted history of side-scrolling platformers to which Yoshi’s Island was the momentary apex, countless aspects of which could be used as ways into the game. But I mean it simply in the literal sense that unlike its nominal predecessor, Yoshi’s Island does not have any sort of forking path in its initial worldmap, offering a straightforward and unambiguous “first level,” and indeed a wholly linear level structure through the entire game.

This is the difference between it and Super Mario World in a microcosm. The earlier game is a demo of the Super Nintendo – an advertisement for its supposedly infinite potential, and opens accordingly with a choice so as to signify the breadth of what can happen. Yoshi’s Island, on the other hand, exists deep in the twilight of the Super Nintendo, and less than a year before Super Mario 64 transitions the Mario franchise away from the side-scrolling mechanic that had defined it for its first decade. It is not a game about showing off possibility, but rather a late masterpiece – a final demonstration of the form before it passes into history. Its structure is fixed because it demonstrates perfection, not potential.

[Here’s a secret history for you. A retcon to Nintendo’s mascot, a new first adventure for him that predates not only his first discovery of the Mushroom Kingdom in Super Mario Bros., but all the existing prehistory of Mario as a carpenter, cement mixer, and monkey fighter. The already heavily frayed notion that Mario was ever just an ordinary Italian plumber gives way. Now he is always already bound into the history of the Mushroom Kingdom, his battle with Bowser now truly eternal, defining him from the very moment of his birth. His sibling relationship is also now set in stone from the first instant, Luigi always secondary, Mario always the adventuring hero.

But what’s inserted into the narrative is not just Mario’s role as a video game protagonist, but his relationship with Yoshi (like Toad at once a singular character and a species), who turns out not to have been a random dinosaur met at the start of Super Mario World but a guide and protector who has served throughout Mario’s life.]

Is it perfect? Well… no. It’s fun, certainly, and there are some good levels, but it ends up feeling like a collection of one-shot ideas – mechanics that are entertaining for a level (or, more often, a subsection of a level) but that can’t support much more than that. It’s not so much a boutique showcase of levels as a clear-out sale of ideas that were almost good enough for previous games.

In this regard it is also significant that the game is appreciably shorter than Super Mario World, which had 74 levels and 96 total exits to find. Yoshi’s Island has a mere six worlds of eight levels each, all with single exits, along with six bonus levels unlocked if you find all the items within a world, which is a grindy tedium for only the most obsessive of players.…

October 7, 2016

The Eruditorum Press Doctor Who Poll Results: 100-51

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At last we come to the top 100. Let’s dive in.

100: The Gunfighters (19 Points, 2 First Place, 1 Last Place, 2 Downvotes)

The “Jeremy Bentham” point of view went unrepresented until the last set of votes counted. I am disappointed in whoever cast that vote. DISAPPOINTED.

99: The Face of Evil (19 Points, 1 First Place)

98: The Husbands of River Song (19 Points, 1 First Place, 2 Downvotes)

97: The Romans (19 Points, 1 Downvote)

96: The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar (19 Points, 4 Downvotes)

95: The Girl Who Died (20 Points, 2 Downvotes)

94: The Lodger (20 Points, 4 Downvotes)

93: Dead Romance (21 Points, 1 First Place, 7 Non-Televised)

Alternatively, this could be the highest-placed Faction Paradox book.

92: The Curse of Fatal Death (21 Points, 4 Non-Televised)

This is another of those ones where the order is really funny.

91: The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit (21 Points, 1 First Place, 2 Last Place, 3 Downvotes)

90: The Edge of Destruction (22 Points, 1 First Place, 1 Downvote)

89: Planet of the Ood (22 Points, 1 First Place, 1 Downvote)

88: The Green Death (23 Points, 1 First Place, 3 Downvotes)

87: The Invasion (23 Points)

86: The Sun Makers (24 Points, 1 Downvote)

85: The Also People (25 Points, 18 Non-Televised)

84: Terror of the Zygons (25 Points, 1 First Place, 1 Downvote)

83: The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone (25 Points, 1 Downvote)

82: The Waters of Mars (25 Points, 1 First Place, 2 Last Place, 3 Downvotes)

81: Castrovalva (27 Points, 1 First Place)

80: The God Complex (27 Points, 1 Downvote)

79: The Talons of Weng-Chiang (28 Points, 3 First Place, 4 Last Place, 13 Downvotes)

This was 6th in the most recent Doctor Who Magazine poll. One of the people to put it in first place apologized for doing so. Another person both upvoted and downvoted it. Personally, I’m pretty happy with the fact that it was beaten by

78: The Ambassadors of Death (29 Points, 1 First Place)

One voter went with The Ambassadors… OF DEATH. Another went with the even more emphatic The Ambassadors [Ker-Chow!] OF DEATH.

77. Flatline (30 Points)

76. Father’s Day (32 Points, 1 Last Place, 1 Downvote)

75: The Aztecs (32 Points, 2 Last Place)

74: Utopia (34 Points, 1 Downvote)

73: The Seeds of Doom (35 Points, 3 First Place, 3 Downvotes)

72: The Pyramids of Mars (35 Points, 2 Downvotes)

The two most overrated Hinchcliffe-era stories finish level on points and pleasantly far down.

71: Face the Raven (35 Points, 1 Last Place, 1 Downvote)

70: Horror of Fang Rock (36 Points)

69: The Evil of the Daleks (37 Points, 2 First Place)

68: The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon (37 Points, 1 First Place, 2 Last Place, 5 Downvotes)

67: The Three Doctors (38 Points)

66: Scherzo (38 Points, 31 Non-Televised)

65: The Night of the Doctor (38 Points, 16 Non-Televised)

Paul McGann’s highest “televised” story.

64: The Holy Terror (39 Points, 36 Non-Televised)

63: Mummy on the Orient Express (40 Points)

62: Rose (40 Points, 1 Downvote)

61: Snakedance (41 Points, 1 First Place, 1 Last Place, 1 Downvote)

The person who voted for “Dances with Snakes” flummoxed me until very late in the counting.…

October 6, 2016

The Eruditorum Press Doctor Who Poll Results: 200-101

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And now at last to the meat of the poll.

200: The Sixth Doctor: The Last Adventure (6 Points, 1 First Place, 1 Non-Televised)

199: The Turing Test (6 Points, 6 Non-Televised)

198: The Tides of TIme (6 Points, 6 Non-Televised)

197: Seeing I (6 Points, 6 Non-Televised)

196: The Marian Conspiracy (6 Points, 6 Non-Televised)

195: The Dying Days (6 Points, 6 Non-Televised)

194: The Time Travellers (6 Points, 6 Non-Televised)

193: The Room With No Doors (6 Points, 5 Non-Televised)

192: Lucie Miller/To the Death (6 Points, 7 Non-Televised, 2 Downvotes)

191: Just War (6 Points, 4 Non-Televised)

190: The Seeds of Death (6 Points)

189: Black Orchid (6 Points, 1 Downvote)

188: The Christmas Invasion (6 Points, 2 Downvotes)

187: Frontier in Space (6 Points, 1 Last Place, 1 Downvote)

186: TARDIS Eruditorum (7 Points, 1 First Place, 2 Non-Televised)

I’d have had fifteen points if I’d counted all the things that were entries of TARDIS Eruditorum here. Keep that in mind when we get to 138th place.

185: This Town Will Never Let Us Go (7 Points, 1 First Place, 1 Non-Televised)

184: Master (7 Points, 7 Non-Televised)

183: Davros (7 Points, 6 Non-Televised)

182: The Iron Legion (7 Points, 6 Non-Televised)

181: The Well-Mannered War (7 Points, 6 Non-Televised)

180: Deadline (7 Points, 5 Non-Televised)

179: Set Piece (7 Points, 5 Non-Televised)

178: The Year of Intelligent Tigers (7 Points, 5 Non-Televised)

177: Shada (7 Points, 1 First Place)

176: Death of the Doctor (7 Points, 3 Non-Televised)

175: Planet of the Spiders (7 Points)

174: The Tomb of the Cybermen (7 Points, 1 First Place, 11 Downvotes)

This was 23rd in the most recent Doctor Who Magazine poll.

173: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? (8 Points, 1 First Place, 3 Non-Televised)

172: Festival of Death (8 Points, 7 Non-Televised)

171: …ish (8 Points, 7 Non-Televised)

170: Dark Eyes (8 Points, 6 Non-Televised)

169: The Book of the War (8 Points, 6 Non-Televised)

This is arguably the highest placed Faction Paradox book.

168: The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot (8 Points, 5 Non-Televised)

167: Full Circle (8 Points, 1 First Place)

166: The Keeper of Traken (8 Points)

165: State of Decay (8 Points)

Something of a consensus regarding Season Eighteen there.

164: The Curse of Peladon (8 Points, 1 Downvote)

What do you reckon the odds are that the downvote was aiming for Monster of Peladon and missed?

162: Campaign (9 Points, 1 First Place, 3 Non-Televised)

163: The One Doctor (9 Points, 8 Non-Televised)

161: The Daleks’ Masterplan (9 Points, 1 Downvote)

160: The Name of the Doctor (9 Points, 1 Last Place, 5 Downvotes)

159: The Infinity Doctors (10 Points, 8 Non-Televised)

158: Hide (10 Points, 1 Last Place, 3 Downvotes)

157: A Good Man Goes to War (10 Points, 2 Last Place, 12 Downvotes)

156: The Eleventh Doctor Comic (11 Points, 11 Non-Televised)

Combined a bunch of votes for individual issues and various parts of the series here.

155: The Scarlet Empress (11 Points, 1 First Place, 6 Non-Televised)

154: Continuity Errors (11 Points, 10 Non-Televised)

153: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street (11 Points, 8 Non-Televised)

152: The Macra Terror (11 Points)

151: The Day of the Daleks (11 Points, 1 Downvote)

150: The Dæmons (11 Points, 3 Downvotes)

149: Terror of the Autons (11 Points, 1 Last Place)

148: The Daleks (11 Points, 5 Downvotes)

147: Asylum of the Daleks (11 Points, 1 Last Place, 2 Downvotes)

146: The Web Planet (11 Points, 1 Last Place, 6 Downvotes)

145: Smith and Jones (12 Points)

144: The Time Warrior (12 Points)

143: Doctor Who and the Silurians (12 Points, 1 Downvote)

142: The Space Museum (12 Points, 1 Downvote)

141: Boom Town (12 Points, 2 Downvotes)

140: The Unicorn and the Wasp (12 Points, 2 Last Place)

139: Shada (Gareth Roberts Novelization) (13 Points, 13 Non-Televised)

As promised, all non-televised votes for Shada went to this, which made it Shada’s highest placing.…

October 6, 2016

Margaret on the Radio

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This is post is kindasorta both a Tricky Dicky and a Psychic Landscape entry. It doesn’t quite fit into either series, but should – hopefully – be read in the context of them.

When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, so many people downloaded the song ‘Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead’ from iTunes that the BBC were seemingly forced into the position of having to play it on Radio 1, in line with their usual practice of giving airtime to songs that are currently in the charts. (In the end they copped out and played a clip – of a song that’s under a minute long anyway – with an explanation. I didn’t hear it but I’d stake internal organs on it involving use of the word ‘divisive’.) This awkward situation for the BBC, very much not of their choosing, created what is called a ‘row’, or a ‘controversy’, or a ‘scandal’. This is when the right-wing media, rather than report the facts with headlines like ‘Thousands Celebrate Baroness Thatcher’s Death by Downloading…’, instead publish stories with headlines like ‘Outrage as BBC plans to Celebrate Baroness Thatcher’s Death by Playing…’. The ‘outrage’ the paper is supposedly reporting is always illustrated with a few hysterical quotes from people the paper contacted to supply them with hysterical quotes. For instance, the Telegraph contacted Cecil Parkinson, one of Thatcher’s erstwhile cabinet minions and staunchest loyalists. Lord Parkinson proved a disappointingly philosophical commentator however, telling them – bizarrely – that Thatcher wouldn’t have cared because she’d have been too busy watching Songs of Praise.

For those of you who don’t know, Songs of Praise is the longest running television show in history. It has been aired more-or-less weekly on Sunday afternoons on BBC1 since 1961, and features recordings of Sunday church services – from a different church each week – complete with lots of hymn singing, helpfully subtitled so the viewer can join in at home. The show is notorious for depicting anomalously large congregations which fail to accurately reflect the reality of Christian worship attendance figures in the United Kingdom. As such, it is also one of the most subversive television shows in history, albeit unwittingly, being a weekly demonstration of both the psychologically deranging effects of the spectacle, and an infallible index of some of the quintessential sins of the British middle classes: pride, vanity, hypocrisy, etc.

Lord Parkinson’s idea in saying what he supposedly did was, presumably, to emphasize both Mrs Thatcher’s admirable contempt for the opinions of the people of Britain, but also her Christian piety. He didn’t bother to explain why watching a particular television programme would mean Mrs Thatcher wouldn’t find time to care about an unconnected issue. As I recall, Mrs Thatcher was quite an efficient multi-tasker. Also, based on the occasional instance of seeing Songs of Praise in my youth, I’d say that the show was singularly conducive to making the viewer think about other things… and in my day it was presented by ex-Goon Harry Seacombe, so there always seemed a muted possibility that the cloying air of respectable tweeness might at any moment be discarded in favour of an atavistic reversion to random gibbering and screeching. …

October 5, 2016

Comics Reviews (October 5th, 2016)

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Jessica Jones #1

An adequate first issue, although annoyingly hard to square away with Jessica Jones’s recent appearance in Spider-Man just a couple of weeks ago, which makes sense, as it’s obviously difficult for two writers to square up their plots in two different books, especially when there’s a major crossover going on that’s throwing all sorts of books out of sync. Oh wait, both books and the crossover are by the same writer who’s consistently a fucking trainwreck when it comes to this sort of thing. Anyway, it’s very “yes this is an issue of Alias Jessica Jones” that dumps a bunch of premise in a pile on the floor and promises to come back later and do something with it. Coin flip whether I bother to do so.

Shade the Changing Girl #1

Good premise and good art, but nothing that’s quite sparking for me. The alien weirdness, not unlike Doom Patrol, feels a bit forced – like an homage to a particular style of comics zaniness rather than something that’s actually extending out of the creative team’s interests. I suspect this is going to be the crux of my problem with the Young Animals stuff – the sense that it’s mostly the borrowed fire of twenty year old comics done with a contemporary gloss.

James Bond: Eidolon #10

An absolutely rock solid comic. Ellis moves his pieces around the board deliberately, with each of the scenes building tension and complexifying the situation until the final one, which gloriously upends everything and kicks the plot into high gear. Can’t wait for the denouement to all of this.

Shipwreck #1

Surreal, unsettling, and not entirely clear about what it’s doing yet. At the moment this seems to be Ellis in the same vein as Supreme: Blue Rose, but with Phil Hester in place of Tula Lotay. This means less avant garde art, but isn’t really a problem – Hester’s a rock solid and clear storyteller, and his jagged figures are haunted things that look like they staggered out of a fever dream. This is playing its cards close to the chest, and it’ll be a good few issues before it’s possible to declare for sure that it’s brilliant (remember how long Injection took to get to a boil?), but by all appearances it’s another triumph for late phase Ellis. …

October 5, 2016

The Eruditorum Press Doctor Who Poll: 364-201

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And with the introductory sections done we finally get to things that at least two people voted for. This’ll be the last day to be overwhelmingly non-televised material as well.

363: Doctor Who and the Fangs of Time (2 Point, 2 Non-Televised)

Wait, wasn’t this on yesterday’s list? Yes, briefly, until I noticed that in addition to the person who had entered the title as “Doctor Who and the Fangs of Doom” there was someone who’d voted for it correctly, meaning that it got two points and that I had to renumber half the damn entry. So this gets put last among the two-pointers because I now literally hate it more than anything that isn’t The Celestial Toymaker.

362. Cuddlesome (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

One voter specified the Audio-Visuals version. While it would have been funny to put the story in the 120-way tie twice because of that, I didn’t.

361. They Say (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

Wack’d was sad yesterday that the bulk of his votes for stories by lyricwritesprose were in the big messy 121-way tie, so for the record, apparently “A Problem of Background,” “Boxing Day,” “Lies Told to Children,” and “See Ye Not That Bonny Road” are also good. (Addendum: Apparently Wack’d wasn’t one of the voters for this one.)

360. Because We Want To (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

I’d somehow never seen this before. It’s genuinely astonishing how much of the Russell T Davies era is accurately anticipated by it.

359: Borrowed Time (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

One vote specified that this was for the novel. The other didn’t, and there’s technically a comic story with the same title, but I’m going to guess they meant the novel too.

358: Fear of the Dark (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

357: The Feast of the Drowned (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

356: The Fourth Wall (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

Nobody specified whether they meant the Big Finish story or the comic story, but as I remember banging on to someone or other about how obvious an idea using the Boneless in comics was, I decided it gets to be the comics story.

355: The Red Lady (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

354: The Spectre of Lanyon Moor (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

353: The Two Masters (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

352: The Dead Line (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

351: The Cruel Sea (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

350: The Cold Equations (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

349: Legend of the Cybermen (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

348: Something Inside (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

347: The Last Doctor (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

346: The Council of Nicaea (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

345: The Church and the Crown (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

344: The Cabinet of Light (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

343: Sympathy for the Devil (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

342: Prisoner of the Daleks (2 Points, 2 Non-Televised)

I was more than slightly releived, when Googling for the link there, that I was wrong and this was not the Dalek porn thing, which is called Abducted by the Daleks.…

October 5, 2016

“I’m not myself, you see”: Alice no Paint Adventure, Umihara Kawase

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And so I return to Wonderland. Because, it would seem, all ways bring me back here.

Alice in Wonderland (by which I mean Lewis Carroll’s two novels and the assorted iconography surrounding them), collectively, is my favourite story. There is literally no time I can recall in which I wasn’t profoundly shaped and influenced by Alice, or which I didn’t view my life through a lens ground from the philosophy of her story. Even those parts of my life that could have potentially occurred before I first read Alice, I now understand within the context of Alice. And Alice must have always been there, partially because Alice is part of the cosmic cultural background radiation we are all exposed to from birth, but also because I know she was. And Alice is not an it. Alice is a she.

I have previously (perhaps infamously, for longtime followers of my writing) attempted to explore and explain my experiences with video games and my understanding of their logic alongside my experience with Alice by comparing them. Probably bit off a bit more than I could chew with that one, but that’s something to grapple with in another time and another place. But Alice and games and Alice games provide a useful metaphor of a sort, in particular, the fact that a great deal of them are some manner of abortive. Of course, I am a perfectionist and have my own visions of things, and perhaps you can just chalk all of that up to me being impossible to satisfy when it comes to something like this. And that may be true: I am, after all, quite mad. But my madness is irreducible from my positionality, and my positionality is irreducible from my creative work. That’s sort of how this all works.

In 1995, there was an Alice in Wonderland game made exclusively for the Super Famicom. Developed by SAS Sakata and published by Epoch, Alice no Paint Adventure was based on the 1951 Disney Animated Canon adaptation of the story. First things first, however, I must mount a brief but necessary defense of this movie because a whole lot of Alice aficionados and Carrollians utterly despise it along with, somewhat surprisingly, a lot of Disney fans and historians. Carrollians see it as the ultimate example of “Americanization”, and you see an awful lot of teeth gnashing about its departures from the “canon text” (the idea of an Alice in Wonderland canon is even more self-evidently preposterous than canon in general already is) and pearl-clutching about fears people (read: people less intelligent and cultured than Carrollians) will get their first and primary exposure to this story through this movie, which will in turn displace the books.

What’s especially curious about this argument is the fact that in order for a movie to completely displace a book, one would think it would have to be wildly more successful than the book. For that to happen, the movie would have to be successful at all. Which the 1951 Alice in Wonderland was decidedly not.…

October 4, 2016

The Eruditorum Press Doctor Who Poll Results: The One Point Club

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Today we get the vast swath of the list that clocked in at exactly one point. The overwhelming majority of these are things that got exactly one vote, and indeed one vote off of the non-televised section. Indeed, if you want to jump straight to televised stuff, skip ahead to 382nd place. Also, I should admit that my tie-breaking ranking in these lower recesses of the charts is less careful than my adjudication of the larger extremes, generally based on mild whimsy. Which also brings us to the one tie of the poll – the one point non-televised stories that I was sufficiently unfamiliar with or indifferent to that I had no views whatsoever on what their order should be. But before that we have a one point non-televised story that I felt strongly should come in below all of them.

626: Death Comes to Time (1 Point, 1 Non-Televised)

Yes, yes. I wish you’d thought to downvote it too. Which brings us to our tie.

507: 118-Way Tie (1 Point, 1 Non-Televised)

That’s a tie among A Good Dalek, A Groatsworth of Wit, A Problem of Background by Lyricwritesprose, Almost Perfect, Beautiful Freak, Born again, Boxing Day, Brave New Town, Children of the Revolution, City of the Damned, Cloud of Fear, Corner of the Eye, Cradle of the Snake, Crusade, Dead of Winter, Death And The Queen, Death Takes a Holiday, Death’s Deal, Deep Time, Devious, Doctor Who Quiz Book of Dinosaurs, Dreams of Empire, Ecce Medicus Donnaque!, Fade Away, Fall to Earth, Flight of the Darned, Gods and Monsters, Grand Theft Cosmos, Ground Zero, Hiccups, Jago & Litefoot: Beautiful Things , Kingdom of Silver/Keepsake, Lies Told to Children, Master of Spiders, Night of the Whisper, Night Thoughts, Nothing at the End of the Lane, Now or Therabouts, Oblivion, Only the Monstrous, Outrage of the Zygons, Paper Cuts, People Used to Dream About the Future, Picnic at Asgard, Pitter-Patter, Pull to Open, Pureblood, Revolution Man, Rise and Fall, Robot Gladiators (The K-9 series’ only appearance in the poll), Second Chances, See Ye Not That Bonny Road, Sisters of the Flame/ Vengeance of Morbius, Son Of The Dragon, Space in Dimensions Relative and Time, Survival of the Fittest, Technophobia, Terry Nation’s Dalek comics, That video of Phil playing Soldeed that was offered as a Kickstarter bonus, The 12 Doctors Play DDR, The Auton Stratagem, The Autonomy Bug, The Brood of Erys, The Claws of Santa, The Crossroads of Time, The Crystal Conundrum, The Cybermen, The Dalek Chronicles, The Dalek Factor, The Death of Death, The Demons of Red Lodge and Other Stories, The Doctor and the Dalek, The Doctor Trap, The Doomwood Curse, The Eleven, The Eleven-Day Empire / The Shadow Play, The Eleventh Doctor: Conversion, The Elixir of Doom, The End of the World (the Big Finish story, as opposed to the television one), The Golden Ones, The Hero of Three Faces, The House of the Dead, The Indestructible Man, The Last, The Last Day, The Last Dodo, The Last Post, The Lost Ones, The Monsters Inside, The Nameless City, The Never Was, The Pair o’ Docs Paradox, The Reaping, The Resurrection Casket, The Scapegoat, The Shadow Planet, The Ship of a Billion Years, The Sleep of Reason, The Sontaran Ordeal, The Stalker of Norfolk, The Stockbridge Showdown, The Tomorrow Windows, Infernal Devices, The Way through the Woods, The Weeping Angels of Mons, The Widow’s Assassin, The Worlds of Doctor Who, Things They Talked About in the Playground, Time Reaver, Trading Futures, Twice Upon a Timelord, UNIT: Extinction, Urgent Calls, Valhalla, Vampire of the Mind, We Are The Daleks, Wirrn Isle, and Yellow Fever And How to Cure It. As you’ve noticed, I’m not linking those for you.…

October 3, 2016

The Eruditorum Press Doctor Who Poll Results: The Bad Stuff

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Super Nintendo Project will be along later this week. But I’ll also be gradually rolling out the results of our anniversary poll over the course of the week. All told there are a total of 761 stories on the list, compiled from 380 ballots. We kick off today with Colin Baker’s least favorite section of it, the stuff that got downvoted such that it finished with 0 or fewer points. Before we start, though, a note about tiebreaks. Basically, there are two that were applied. The first is “what got the most regular votes,” on the logic that a story with a broader base of people who like it enough to vote for it is more popular than one that got the same score on the back of first-place votes. This also means that at a given point tally the Marmite stories that got a lot of downvotes do better than the uncontroversial ones, and that televised stories generally do better than ones that got their point tallies mostly from the extra votes for non-televised stories. The second tiebreak is my personal preference, because it’s my site and that matters.

Right. On to the results. Today we’ll count up instead of down, finishing with your all-time most hated Doctor Who story. Which means that we start with the stories that broke even at zero points, upvoted and downvoted in equal proportion, and within that start with the most contestedly Marmite of the bunch. Which means that in 629th place is…

627: The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords (0 Points, 1 First Place, 17 Downvotes)

628: Invasion of the Dinosaurs (0 Points, 1 Last Place, 3 Downvotes)

629: The Taking of Chelsea 426 (0 points, 1 Last Place, 1 Downvote)

630: Planet of Evil (0 Points, 1 Last Place)

631: Nightmare of Eden (0 Points, 3 Downvotes)

632: Revenge of the Cybermen (0 Points, 3 Downvotes)

633: The Keys of Marinus (0 Points, 3 Downvotes)

634: Colony in Space (0 Points, 2 Downvotes)

635: Into the Dalek (0 Points, 2 Downvotes)

636: The Underwater Menace (0 Points, 1 Downvote)

“I got an episode recovered for this?”

637: Four to Doomsday (0 Points, 1 Downvote)

638: Planet of Fire (0 Points, 1 Downvote)

639: Engines of War (0 Points, 3 Non-Televised Votes, 1 Last Place)

640: Omega (0 Points, 1 Non-Televised, 1 Downvote)

641: The Stones of Venice (0 Points, 1 Non-Televised, 1 Downvote)

642: An Adventure in Space and Time (0 Points, 1 Non-Televised, 1 Downvote)

643: Dancing the Code (0 Points, 1 Non-Televised, 1 Downvote)

644: The Ghosts of N-Space (0 Points, 1 Non-Televised, 1 Downvote)

Next we have the only tfour televised stories to fail to get a single vote in any direction. Two are unsurprising given that they’re both completely missing, and another’s close to totally gone. One, on the other hand, is a frankly bizarre omission. But since it would be weird to have a list with four televised stories not included…

645: The Faceless Ones (0 Points, No Votes Whatsoever)

646: The Krotons (0 Points, No Votes Whatsoever)

647: The Savages (0 Points, No Votes Whatsoever)

648: The Smugglers (0 Points, No Votes Whatsoever)

Now we move on to the stuff that’s more hated than loved, starting with a story that came in 24th in Doctor Who Magazine‘s 50th Anniversary Poll.…

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