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You Were Expecting Someone Else 13 (The Video Games)

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Right. We should finally get around to dealing with this backlog of Doctor Who video games I haven’t been dealing with, shouldn’t we? I don’t really have a clever introduction here – this is just one of those “we needed to do it eventually, and here’s a nice big gap between stories that begs to take a post or two like this, so let’s take advantage of the transitional nature of the era” posts. Let’s get on with it.

The curiously named Doctor Who: The First Adventure is an odd duck – a collection of four minigames each flagrantly ripped off of an existing game. In sequence you took the Fifth Doctor (or at least, he was the one on the box) through a Pac-Man-like maze to find the three segments of the Key to Time, a Frogger-style prison break, a Space Invaders-inflected battle with “Terrordactyls,” and, finally, a 3-D Battleship clone searching for the Box of Tantalus, which presumably contains a satsuma at the bottom, just a bit further down than you can actually reach. There are other snarks to make here – the fact that apparently the Doctor has nineteen regenerations total these days, for instance, and that the TARDIS on the packaging looks as though happiness did, in fact, prevail.

The interesting point, however, is that there’s a clear arbitrariness to this. This sounds nothing like a Doctor Who plot. Indeed, it doesn’t sound like much of any other kind of plot. It sounds like an excuse to stitch together Pac-Man, Frogger, Space Invaders, and Battleship(s) into a single computer game. Which, not coincidentally, it probably was. Similarly, the next two Doctor Who computer games were fairly straightforward executions of existing genres. Doctor Who and the Warlord was a standard issue text adventure, and Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror was a sequel to another game that got reskinned as a Doctor Who game midway through development. These are, in other words, not so trying to make a game about Doctor Who as they are games that Doctor Who has been cudgeled into. (Doctor Who and the Warlord, I’ll admit, may be an exception – Graham Williams is apparently among the developers. I can’t get it to run easily on anything I own, and while what I can read makes it sound like a bog standard text adventure, I also suspect there could be more to it. But it sounds unpromising.)

This leads us to an important observation to start with about video games, which is that they are not narrative devices in the same way that other popular media are. That’s not to say, as some extreme positions in game studies have, that narrative is completely extraneous to video games. It’s clearly not. But they’re only indirectly narrative objects. A video game, at its core, is about the interaction of a player and a set of rules through a specific mechanism of control. Most good games are first and foremost about exploring the implications of these controls.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 35 (Star Trek: The Next Generation)

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There are several angles from which to approach Star Trek: The Next Generation in terms of Doctor Who. Most of them entangle themselves in a sort of anxiety of influence, either picking over the ways in which Star Trek and Doctor Who’s histories are intertwined or stomping their feet adamantly over the ways in which they are fundamentally different. I think the more interesting relationship, staring from a post-2009 vantage point, is one based far more on material conditions of broadcast and production. But let’s deal with what everyone else is interested in first.

As I noted when last we talked about Star Trek, at the time they were both being made in the 1960s the extent of influence the two shows had on each other was “none whatsoever.” Short of elaborate theories, it’s just not possible to posit that anyone involved in one show had even heard of the other, little yet seen enough to be influenced.

Come the 1970s, though, when Star Trek was off the air, it began having considerable influence on Doctor Who. The obvious one is the roundel in the Season Fourteen control room, but the larger influences come in the Pertwee era. Under Letts and Dicks the show never became a Star Trek clone, but it nevertheless existed in what was clearly a post-Trek era of science fiction. Colony in Space, The Mutants, Frontier in Space, and the two Peladon stories all clearly existed in a world that presupposed a human-dominated Galactic government with at least some degree of colonial leanings. Being written in a country that had experience in colonialism instead of longing for it, Pertwee-era flirtations with Star Trek’s themes were always short on the military pageantry and longer on a political messiness, particularly when Malcolm Hulke was involved. Star Trek, in all of its incarnations, is terribly fond of being Master and Commander or Horatio Hornblower in space, whereas Doctor Who, when it’s intersected those tropes, has tended to take a less reverential approach (c.f. The Pirate Planet and The Space Pirates, or Beryl Reid in Earthshock), and, more to the point, has never been prone to collapsing space imperialism and the Hornblower aesthetic into being one thing.

On the other hand, there is something to say about the UNIT crew having some Star Trek influences. Certainly there’s something to the fact that Doctor Who introduced a regular set of military characters in the immediate wake of Star Trek airing in its timeslot during the off season. But again, what stands out is the sardonic quality of the influence. Star Trek unfailingly saw Captain Kirk as the pinnacle of American masculinity. The Brigadier, on the other hand, even though he represents a cultural ideal of masculinity just as much as Captain Kirk does, is less straightforwardly viewed as the best the world has to offer, not least because he’s continually shown up by a glam rock space messiah.

So while Star Trek was unquestionably an influence on Doctor Who, the influence was fairly diffuse.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 31 (Atom Bomb Blues)

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It’s December of 2005, and Doctor Who fans are eagerly awaiting the proper debut of David Tennant’s Doctor. Meanwhile, the Past Doctor Adventures line stutters to a stop, some nine months after it was officially relegated to being a historical footnote to a now resurgent series. These final books are an interesting spur road of the series’ history – a last legacy of what is now thought of as the classic series that persisted past the point where it was surpassed.

It’s oddly appropriate, then, that the final book of the series tacks back to the final days of the television show, filling in the space between Survival and Timewyrm: Genesys and tucking the wilderness years into a loop, if not a neat one. Andrew Cartmel, who oversaw the program’s last days, now returns to them nearly a decade after his last writing for that era (though he did a Fifth Doctor story for Big Finish and a Second Doctor one for Telos in the intervening years).

The result is strange. The novel is great fun, but arguing that it’s a successful piece of Doctor Who when you have to slot it in between Parting of the Ways and The Christmas Invasion is a stretch. It’s clearly a step backwards. But, odd as this may sound, I don’t mean that as a criticism. The very act of publishing the novel in this position, as the finale to the Past Doctor Adventures, is a conscious step backwards – a rolling back of the clock. To complain that a book that is self-consciously striving for 1989 doesn’t fit well with 2005 is an odd complaint, although, to be fair, it’s an odd problem as well.

Of all things, reading Atom Bomb Blues felt most evocative of reading a Terrence Dicks novel. This is odd, as Cartmel’s prose is hardly the well-defined quantity that Dicks’s is. He’s only done three other Doctor Who novels, and the only bit of those I remember with any vividness is a description of violence in Warlock that, for some reason or another, stood out to me. (I’ll say more when I cover the novel, as I don’t even remember its context or trust my memories of the description) So it’s not like I’m reacting to the sort of linguistic warm blanket that Dicks prose by default invokes in anyone who grew up with Target novelizations. And yet there’s a sense of deep familiarity to this book.

Certainly many of the concerns of the Cartmel era are well reflected here, with or without a big degree of appropriateness. His anti-nuclear weapons program is firmly in place some sixteen years since the end of the Cold War took some of the bite out of his final season on the program. His enduring infatuation with Ace remains clear and oddly charming, a crush frozen in time. (Cartmel’s love of the character, historically, walks an odd line between a crush on Sophie Aldred, which not nearly as inappropriate as one might think given her character [he’s only four years older than her], and a clear love of the character herself, which is actually somewhat stranger given the level of artifice involved in her.)…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 30 (Thin Ice)

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Understanding Thin Ice outside the context of wilderness years nostalgia is a tricky business. The first major piece of understanding of it that we had, at least so far as I can tell, came in Doctor Who Magazine #255, where Dave Owen outlines a fictitious history of Doctor Who past 1989. But to understand how Thin Ice, then called Ice Time, fits into this narrative it’s worth looking at the larger picture Owen paints – most notably his description of “scenes which now define the series in the public eye – the closing moments of The Last of the Daleks Part One, for example, in which the Eighth Doctor and companion Kate find themselves surrounded by the Time Lord’s greatest enemies.” OK, it’s certainly a believable scene for Doctor Who, but as a moment that now defines the series in the public eye? A Dalek story, with the Daleks in the title, whose first part ends with the Doctor being menaced by Daleks? This is what the wilderness years was clinging to as the sort of image that would have rescued Doctor Who? Here’s a fun game – name a classic series Dalek story whose first story cliffhanger isn’t some variation of “Oh no! It’s the Daleks!” Practically all of them do. This is not a path back into the public’s graces.

(Answer: The only one to completely eschew “ZOMG DALEKS” as a first cliffhanger is, of all things, Revelation of the Daleks. And even there the four episode cut does it at the end of episode one.)

There is, in other words, a clear element of fantasy to accounts of where Doctor Who would have gone post-Survival, and, more to the point, of not particularly grounded or realistic Which is to say that the erased Season Twenty-Seven is an object of totemic power. Owen’s piece drifts off into excessive speculation in more than a few places, and it’s fairly clear that not a heck of a lot of Season Twenty-Seven was actually worked out at the time. Still, with three detailed features (two in DWM, and one on the Survival DVD) of Andrew Cartmel and company obligingly nattering on about what they would have done, there’s plenty to build up a fan myth.

By the time that the third of these features, in Doctor Who Magazine #433, came out the stories had been repurposed for Big Finish’s Lost Stories line, with Andrew Cartmel returning to script edit the virtual season. And one of the things the writers talk about in that piece, actually, is the difficulty of pulling stories together out of the fanon-built edifices of what Season Twenty-Seven supposedly was. All of them also freely admit nothing like finished scripts or outlines existed for any of this – nor even titles, which were invented by Dave Owen.

The “Endgame” documentary on the Survival DVD makes it reasonably clear that things were much more seat-of-the-pants than the totemic image of Season Twenty-Seven requires. The writers admit that their ideas for the season were tentative and amounted to a couple of high concepts and hook scenes.…

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People Made of Smoke: The New Adventures

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Right. So that’s Doctor Who, done and dusted. (And thank you all for the excessively nice things you said about me in the comments section of the last post.)

Except, of course, it’s not. There’s still a lot to cover, and I expect this blog will keep us busy until the early 2014. But obviously, as the line goes, it means I’m gonna change. For the remainder of the year, the primary focus of this blog is books. Specifically the Virgin New Adventures line, which provided the official continuation of Doctor Who from 1991 through to the TV Movie, with some chronological eccentricity at the end.

It’s reasonable to ask why I’m doing this, especially given the marginality of the books compared to the series. The answer, glibly, is “because they happened.” Doctor Who has a history through the 1990s, and even if it was a more obscure history than its history through the preceding three decades and the next decade, it was a history. More broadly, were I to just jump to the TV Movie and then to Rose then I wouldn’t have the context necessary to adequately discuss either. And, well, these books deserve mention and analysis. They’re good books worthy of being talked about. I have things to say about them. So I’m saying them. 


That said, I know these are more obscure. Indeed, they’re out of print, which is absolutely dreadful, and I really wish they’d go back in print, as they’re wonderful, and as the only means of acquiring them these days are either prohibitively expensive (some of the later ones still go for upwards of $50) or illegal, and either way don’t actually get the authors any money. I’m sorry about that. It kinda sucks.


(For what it’s worth, while I’m certainly not going to link to any sites, I wouldn’t think less of someone who downloaded them, so long as, if the books ever come back into print, they were to buy copies then. Others, I know, would disagree with this approach. And for the record, having said that, I have a complete run of the New Adventures, all bought as new copies, from which the authors got their royalties.)


In any case, to mitigate against that I am going to shift the format of the blog ever so slightly when I cover them, opening with a brief summary of what the book is – not so much a plot summary as a bulked out version of the About Time “Which One is This?” sections/a compressed version of the overall basics section. Then we’ll get into our usual “It’s #DATE. #BAND is at number one with #SONG” stuff.

Once we get into the swing of this phase of things, the plan is that books will be covered on Mondays and Fridays, with Wednesdays devoted to something else – usually, but not always, a Pop Between Realities. That said, it’ll take a bit to ease into that schedule – I’ve got six posts scheduled between Survival and the first Timewyrm books, and the schedule is a bit eccentric around those four books.…

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Run for Your Life! (Survival)

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Wasn’t that bit of the Olympic opening ceremonies where Mary Poppins fought Voldemort in defense of the NHS great? Here’s a fun fact – in the US, instead of the NHS we have this cool alternative where people can’t afford necessary medical care to deal with debilitating illnesses. It’s just like the NHS, only instead of being worth celebrating in front of the world in spectacular fashion it’s an abiding source of shame that leads to needless suffering. One such person suffering is a friend of mine named Valéria, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis while in grad school and without adequate health insurance. As a result, she could really use some help affording her medical bills so that she can keep doing frivolous things like “walking.” If you can chip in even a few bucks, pounds, euros, or whatever over here, I’d be tremendously appreciative, and it would make a real difference to someone who could use it. 

Sophie Aldred receives instructions from the director in
the Big Finish studios.

It’s November 22nd, 1989. Doctor Who goes out to the tune of New Kids on the Block’s “You Got It (The Right Stuff),” which is almost sadder than the cancellation itself. Iron Maiden, UB40, and Big Fun also chart, so really, it’s dismal through and through. In real news, a bomb attack on the President of Lebanon’s motorcade kills him. The Velvet Revolution takes place in Czechoslovakia, bringing down the Communist government and, in late December, bringing Václav Havel to power in a more or less unprecedented moment of a nonviolent revolution deciding “what we really need is for a playwright to be in charge.” Marc Lépine guns down fourteen women at École Polytechnique, blaming feminism for his rampage.

While on television, as mentioned, Doctor Who ends with Survival. One of the things that the dismembering of Doctor Who’s chronology engendered by non-linear DVD releases has done is to obscure some of the subtler shifts in what Doctor Who does. For instance, there’s a big and often missed shift we pointed out back with The Hand of Fear, a stark dividing line that ended a period stretching back to The War Machines where nearly half of all Doctor Who stories were set on contemporary Earth and began one stretching forward to Survival where only about fifteen percent did. But because most people experience the classic series non-linearly the nature of this shift is obscured – Survival looks like a very standard “Doctor Who in contemporary Britain” story because it came out between Logopolis and Robot, and about six months after The Invasion, all of which spend time there.

In reality, the last time the TARDIS landed in contemporary Britain was Silver Nemesis, where it mostly hung out at tourist sites. The last time it just landed in “ordinary” Britain, so to speak, was Attack of the Cybermen, five years ago. To get one where a majority of the action took place in contemporary Britain you have to go back six years to The Awakening.…

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Take Hitler and Put him in the Cupboard Over There (The Curse of Fenric)

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Bloody hell, is it the Arockalypse again?

It’s October 25th, 1989. Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers are at number one with “That’s What I Like,” which is unseated after two weeks by Lisa Stansfield’s “All Around the World,” which rides out the story. Phil Collins, Belinda Carlisle, Kylie Minogue, and New Kids on the Block also chart. This being rather dismal, let’s note that Kate Bush’s The Sensual World comes out during this story, which is an altogether more fitting analogy.

In real news, Nicaragua ends its ceasefire with the US-backed contras, and Douglas Wilder and David Dinkins become the first African-American governor in the US and mayor of New York City, respectively. The General Assembly of the Church of England votes to allow the ordination of women. Increasingly desperate measures are taken to deal with an ambulance strike in Britain. And oh yeah, the Berlin Wall falls.

While on television we get The Curse of Fenric, which is one of the best things ever. It is also, of course, oddly incoherent. The biggest howler by its own logic is pointed out by Tat Wood. Much of the plot hinges on the fact that everyone at the base is a descendent of the viking settlers. These would be, of course, the viking settlers who were all killed by vampires, according to the inscriptions. Oops. And yet I’ve watched Curse of Fenric more than any other Doctor Who story, and I never noticed this problem. I’ll bet that an overwhelming majority of you haven’t either. And this is an important observation that provides a lot of insight into how we have to understand Curse of Fenric.

Rather more of you, I suspect, have noticed things like the fact that the chess puzzle and its solution are completely non-sensical, that a mate-in-one puzzle that stumps an ancient god for ages is ridiculous, that nordic runes are a strange way to make a logic diagram, that no understanding whatsoever of how to crack a German code would also be able to translate a language, and that the inscription does not, in fact, read “let the chains of Fenric shatter” but instead reads “Leek, Abracadabra, Presto Chango, Leek.” (OK, possibly only my good friend Anna noticed that last one. Incidentally, there’s a big line of commentary I’m just dropping here about the Norse mythological roots of this story. That is because towards the end of August Anna is providing us with a guest post on the relationship between McCoy’s Doctor and Odin.)

It may seem strange to harp on the plot holes of this story, given that I don’t usually do that. After all, it’s not like the understanding of Norse runes in this story is actually any weirder than the series’ understanding of physics in many other stories. But there is something subtly different about the distortions here. For one thing, this starts to tack towards playing fast and loose with history, something Doctor Who has, of course, never ever done in any way shape or form.…

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Puny, Defenceless Bipeds (Ghost Light)

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Reach out and touch faith.

And so look, I’m just going to be flat-out cutting and nasty to a segment of the world here. And I’ll admit, I’m doing this in part for personal reasons, because the same “it doesn’t make sense” arguments that are raised about these stories are trotted out for large swaths of postmodern theory and philosophy that are kind of important to me and my life, and they’re used to marginalize my discipline in ways that are directly responsible for why there are no jobs in my field and I’m living in my parents’ basement. So I take this “it doesn’t make sense” argument a little personally, and in that spirit, I’d like to point out that the argument is not “it doesn’t make sense” but rather “I’m too thick to understand it.” It’s just that in a handful of cases – television and the humanities mainly – one’s inability to understand something is somehow the fault of the people who do understand it. Curiously, this logic does not apply to, say, quantum physics. Though increasingly it does seem to apply to climate change and evolution.

In light of this it is worth looking to the end of the story, with Ace’s assertion that she should have blown Gabriel Chase up instead of burning it down. This is perfect. Ace rejects arson, an approach that leaves a physical remnant – a Ghost Light of the mansion – in favor of explosion, an approach that would have blasted Gabriel Chase outwards, laying waste to the very notion of its identity as a fixed and certain point in space. Note also that the Doctor’s response, “Wicked,” is not merely a reiteration of Ace’s own slang but a reiteration of what Mrs. Pritchard accuses Gwendolyn of being when she begins to reject the constructed reality of Josiah’s household in favor of the truth about who her mother is, “wicked” being, in other words, a synonym for the rejection of illusion in favor of material practicality.

But it’s not right to suggest that Evil of the Daleks provides an origin for this story’s viewpoints. Ghost Light isn’t just a reiteration of 1967’s themes. It’s a return to them after a significant and substantial departure imposed by the implications of The War Games. The fact that the program drifted away from the unfettered mercury of the Troughton era and here returns to it full force is distinct from its development. Negating the negation of the mercury is distinct from mercury itself. Even the rooting of the program in mercury is fluid and changing, shifting endlessly.

The other major antecedent is, of course, 100,000 BC. Both stories, after all, feature cave men who worship overtly solar figures. Light is a reiteration of Orb. And so the very starting point of the series – its first story – is made suspicious. Light, a dangerous figure because he represents absolute and unchanging stasis – symbolically reflects the actual starting point of the series. Of course, the specific part of that story it reflects is the one nobody talks about – the lost back three quarters of the opener.…

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A Good Wizard Tricked (Battlefield)

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K-KLACK!

It’s July of 1991. Songs that hit number one this month are Jason Donovan’s “Any Dream Will Do” and Bryan Adams “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You,” while Erasure, Paula Abdul, and Guns N’ Roses also chart. In real news, the Warsaw Pact is dissolved, Boris Yeltsin becomes the first elected president of Russia, and Mike Tyson and Jeffery Dahmer are both arrested.

While in literature, the final Target novelization of the Sylvester McCoy era comes out as Ben Aaronovitch’s Battlefield is novelized by Marc Platt. For its part, Battlefield was transmitted from September 6-27 of 1989. During this time Black Box were at number one with “Right On Time,” while Alice Cooper, Tears for Fears, Tina Turner, Madonna, and, once again, Jason Donovan also charted. In real news, the IRA murder Heidi Hazell, the wife of a British soldier. John Major replaces Nigel Lawson as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The final election held under apartheid takes place in South Africa, and Vietnam withdraws from Cambodia after eleven years.

(In the gap between Battlefield and Greatest Show in the Galaxy, for reference, the famed fatwah on Salman Rushdie is issued, leading to the UK and Iran breaking off diplomatic relations. The Ayatollah Khomeini also, coincidentally, dies. Communism begins to fall on a number of fronts, most notably in Poland, where the recently unbanned union Solidarity wins elections. Communism stands up rather better in China, meanwhile, which just runs people over with tanks instead of allowing democratic reform. The poll tax is introduced in Scotland, the Exxon Valdez crashes, and the Hillsborough disaster kills 96 Liverpool supporters in Sheffield, followed by what is a strong contender for the most sickening moment in Rupert Murdoch’s career as the Sun falsely blames Liverpool fans for the tragedy.)

But in many ways, all of this is secondary to the Battlefield of 1991, and this fact is very important. Because one thing that happened during the Sylvester mcCoy era was that the novelizations of stories suddenly became important in a way that they hadn’t been since Malcolm Hulke was writing them – a fact that would prove extremely important when the series found itself continued as a line of novels from Virgin Books.

It’s a small sample size, due to there just not being that many Sylvester McCoy stories. There are about four novels that people really point to as dramatically expanding the scope of what the novels were: Remembrance of the Daleks, Battlefield, Ghost Light, and The Curse of Fenric. But these four proved to be significant simply because they provided the blueprint that the better entries in the Virgin line would follow.

They also, by and large, reflect a significant change in how Doctor Who was written in the Cartmel era. The writers of the Cartmel era, as discussed previously, were the first generation to have largely grown up on Doctor Who. And for several of them – most obviously Aaronovitch and Platt – the novelizations were a part of Doctor Who.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 34 (Press Gang, Doctorin’ the TARDIS)

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In 1989 Doctor Who ended and Steven Moffat’s writing career began. This latter event provides a bookend for Doctor Who’s 25th season, propped up on the other end by The KLF/The JAMs/The Timelords hitting number one with “Doctorin’ the TARDIS,” all of its explorations of the program’s history suspended arbitrarily between these two events.

1989 is a conceptual oddity for me – a year zero in every sense of the term. It is the first year I have any associations with – the first one in which I was aware of the calendar as a force unto itself. There is no visible reason for this. It was the end of first grade and the beginning of second, and in that regard a transition from something of an idyllic year in my childhood to something rougher and more uncertain. But those are school years – a calendar that my life has always been well attuned to, but a separate one from the calendar. I am aware that 1989 existed, that it is the first year I have any memory of as a year, but it is an empty signifier, carrying weight but no content.

I was too young to grasp the nature of the fall of Communism, although it is in some ways difficult to imagine that I was completely insulated from them. We learn our eschatologies young, and they are always imminent. A shift in the nature of the end of the world such as the winding down of the Cold War would have been noticed, if not understood. But I remember the end of the year, at my grandparents’ house outside of Dallas, realizing that the calendar marked something significant this time.

I was unaware that less than a month earlier Doctor Who had ended. Or, for that matter, that twenty-six years earlier it had begun. Still, my grandparents’ house carries some significance in this regard. Their PBS station was showing Doctor Who late, and my first copies of the Colin Baker and early Sylvester McCoy stories came from them. The first time I ever watched Doctor Who transmitting, on a television screen, was Time and the Rani (oh well) at their house. I read the novelization of Survival there. Their local Blockbuster had videos of stories I’d never seen – it was where I first watched The Web Planet and The Mind Robber. More broadly, on long and somewhat boring summers there I would get books on tape out of their local library, marathoning Douglas Adams books. There’s a beautiful, formal neatness to the association I have between this place and 1989, marred only by the fact that it is a complete reconstruction after the fact.

But that’s my paternal grandparents all over. Living as they did in Texas they were always the side of the family I felt some distance from. It was my mother’s side of the family – largely my grandmother’s, specifically – that I knew. New York Italians. My maternal grandfather was Irish, though his family was an absent presence – he’d had to leave home very young because of the intense poverty he grew up in, and I never got to know any of his relatives well.…

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