The Strange Case of the End of Civilisation as We Know It

This essentially forgotten TV programme is a quite extraordinarily bad one-off ITV comedy from 1977, written by and starring John Cleese. In it, Cleese plays a descendant of Sherlock Holmes, and it co-stars Arthur Lowe and Connie Booth as descendants of Dr Watson and Mrs Hudson respectively. Lowe's portrayal is the archetypal Stupid Watson, putting even Nigel Bruce's origination of the trope to shame in how incompetent and oblivious he is. Also, Watson is partially bionic, because this was made in the 1970s.

It is hard to believe that this was made in the same era as Cleese and Booth were in the middle of making Fawlty Towers, so far apart are they in quality that it would take Michael Palin an entire series to travel between them. The theory that Cleese gradually lost his comedic sensibilities between Fawlty Towers ending and the present day is disproved by the existence of The Strange Case of the End of Civilisation as We Know It, which shows he was just as capable of making missteps back then - and I'm not talking about the Ministry of Silly Walks there, mew!

The issue is that, even when it has a good gag (of which there are a few), just about every single joke in the film is laboured until it ceases to be funny, and is then laboured a bit more for good measure. It is dreadful. Quality guest stars are wasted, with most of them - such as Joss Ackland and Stratford "Belkov" Johns - enthusiastically overacting and chewing on the scenery in a way that would make Darrow proud, but the material just isn't there for them to make it actually any good. Denholm Elliott just about gets out with his dignity intact, but I'm not sure anybody else did.

One thing to praise it for is the lack of typical '70s blackface and yellowface. When representatives of the five continents gather, the Asian delegate is played by Burt Kwouk, and the African delegate by Christopher Asante - the latter of whom I most recently saw in Rumpole and the Golden Thread, one of the best Rumpole episodes. This small step in a progressive direction is then entirely undone by a terrible joke about simultaneous translation, where Kwouk's character hears the most stereotypical faux-Chinese imaginable, and Asante hears the sound of jungle drums!

The plot sees Cleese's Holmes gather together the world's greatest detectives as part of a plan to draw out the descendant of Professor Moriarty. This is a trope that was inexplicably popular around this point in the '70s, with resemblances to the film Murder by Death (1976) and a 1976 episode of The Goodies, Daylight Robbery on the Orient Express. Here, in addition to Poirot (called "Hercules Parrot," mew) we get send ups of contemporary detectives including Columbo, Kojak, and McCloud... No, me neither.

The ending sees Moriarty successfully bring about the end of civilisation as we know it, which fortunately prevented them from making any sequels. Cleese, meanwhile, should never be allowed to criticise anything other comedians have done (especially not Monty Python's Flying Circus season four, the one the others did without him) without having this immediately thrown back in his face. 

Although it's still a better version of Sherlock Holmes than the BBC's Sherlock.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Six

After the double disappointment of the spaceship being fake and the lack of any Death-Watch-style showdown, Starcat has given up on this story. Instead, keeping me company for the final part, I have with me my friend Mr Purple Cat (and also Dragon). I warned Mr Purple Cat about the scary dinosaurs in advance, but he said that he wasn't frightened of dinosaurs because he knows they evolved into birdys, and what cat was ever scared of a birdy? He's right! I wish I had known that five episodes ago, mew.

Hah, you don't frighten me now, Mr So-called-tyrannosaurus-rex!

It does frighten the Doctor, though, and when his jeep breaks down he has to try to run away. Luckily for him the tyrannosaurus decides to have a fight with another dinosaur instead of him. This fight is suitably epic, as befits the climactic episode, though it would have been even better if it had taken place in the Death-Watch building.

The Doctor is reduced to being a spectator in his own show, though I don't think he minds that too much. It gives him a chance to run away.

General Finch drives in to capture the Doctor, but then the Brigadier also drives in, just afterwards and from a different direction. Maybe it is their turn to have a climactic fight? Not quite, though they do have a bit of a staredown before Finch gives in and lets the Doctor go with the Brigadier and Benton.

Doctor: "Look, face up to it, Brigadier. General Finch is involved just like Grover."

Brigadier: "Is everybody in this conspiracy?"

Doctor: "Well, Captain Yates certainly is."

Brigadier: "Now that I can't believe."

It's not that surprising that the Brigadier can't believe that Mike Yates would be a baddy, since Yates has been his colleague and friend since all the way back in Terror of the Autons, and Mike's betrayal of his commanding officer is the unkindest cut of his, even more so than of the Doctor or Benton. Also he probably just expects that Yates has been hypno-eyesed again. But the Brigadier is soon faced with the truth when Yates comes in with a gun 

Yates stops the Brigadier from telephoning for help from "International UNIT HQ" so that Whitaker can Get Operation Golden Age Done. The Doctor has deduced what "Whitaker's machine" will do, so he knows what their plan is. He tries to reason with Yates, saying

"There never was a golden age, Mike. It's all an illusion."

and

Doctor: "Look, I understand your ideals. You know in many ways I sympathise with them. But this is not the way to go about it, you know? You've got no right to take away the existence of generations of people."

Yates: "There's no alternative."

Doctor: "Yes, there is. Vote Labour Take the world that you've got and try and make something of it. It's not too late."

Yates gets momentarily distracted, and Benton overpowers him, not waiting to see if Yates had been persuaded by the Doctor.

The Doctor looks disappointed, though from their manner I think the Brigadier and Benton were both furious with Yates and couldn't wait to get their claws on him. Now that he's been captured, that's the last we'll see of him, which is surprising because it means Yates gets no chance at redeeming himself - whether by the standard method of self-sacrifice or otherwise - which is in total defiance of the Genre Conventions.

Sarah has escaped from the cupboard where the Butler put her, and managed to get back into the fake spaceship. She tries to persuade the mannys there that the spaceship is fake (something which she could easily have done by leaving the door open) but most of them would rather stubbornly persist with their collective delusion about being the "chosen group" and so they allow Ruth to convince them Sarah is "mad."

Mark believes Sarah (though he has the advantage of having seen her open the door and leave), and there is enough doubt in Adam's mind that he contacts "Spaceship One" and asks to speak to Grover.

The Doctor and the Brigadier dodge dinosaurs as they drive to the secret base. The Doctor drives a lot of jeeps in this story, I'm surprised he didn't want to take his own brand new car, the novelty can't have worn off already, can it? The Brigadier says

"Well, I never thought I'd find myself blowing up a tube station."

even though a plan to blow up a tube tunnel was one of the very first plans that the then-Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart and the Doctor ever did together.

Grover comes into the fake spaceship wearing a fake spacesuit to fool the mannys there. He confronts Sarah and Mark, but Adam listens in so that when Grover explains the evil plan (he just can't help himself) it means Adam hears it too. Even now Grover doesn't want to kill Sarah and Mark, which makes him one of the more complicated Doctor Who baddys - he doesn't mind wiping out "generations" of mannys, but can't kill (or order killed) two that he has met. So when Grover leaves Adam comes in and releases them.

Benton gets briefly captured by General Finch, but manages to overpower him too. 

Finch: "You'll be court martialled for this, Sergeant!"

Benton: "Yes, sir. Very sorry, sir!"

It cuts away just before we see Benton beat the shit out of Finch.

Sarah opens the spaceship door to prove it is a fake, then leads a lot of very angry mannys outside to "demand an explanation" of the mannys who tricked them. The Doctor is also loose in the secret base by now, where he encounters the Butler and uses Venusian Oojah on him, although it looks more like thumping him in the stomach to me. I can't remember the last time I watched a story in which our heroes were so pissed off at the baddys and, therefore, so determined to give them a kicking.

The mannys from the fake spaceship arrive just in time to stop Whitaker from activating his machine. Adam says to Grover

"You're going to destroy all the civilisations of man. Leaving Earth for another planet, that was one thing, but this is evil!"

He thought they were going for a science victory, but it turns out they were trying to wipe out all the other players. The ultimate twist of this story - it was actually just one giant game of Civilization.

The Doctor enters, followed by the Brigadier and Benton.

Whitaker pulls a lever, which causes a special effect to freeze everybody except the Doctor. He is able to pull the lever back and stop the effect, then he presses some buttons that means when Grover pulls the lever again only he and Whitaker and the machine disappear, Whitaker's last words being

"No! He's reversed the polarity!"

The Doctor pulled a Superman 2 on them. Sarah realises the Doctor wasn't effected in the same way as all the other mannys because he is a Time Lord, which seems fair enough and is not a cop out at all, because it was established as early as part two that the Doctor wasn't affected by the SFX in the same way as the mannys were.

We hear from the Brigadier what happened to Mike Yates in the end:

"Extended sick leave and a chance to resign quietly. Best I could do."

This is very generous of him. And of Malcolm Hulke for that matter - Yates got let off much more lightly than Captain Hawkins did, after all, and he didn't even betray anybody.

The story ends with Benton telling the Doctor and Sarah about how he got to "punch a General on the nose."

"Just don't make a habit of it, Benton."

says the Brigadier, lol. And then the Doctor tries to persuade Sarah to come with him in the TARDIS for more adventures - hopefully ones with less evil baddys next time, like maybe only the Daleks.

What's so good about Invasion of the Dinosaurs?

Dinosaurs!

Making this story at all must have been a tremendous technical achievement, especially on a BBC budget. I mean, it was 20 years before Jurassic Park, when Hollywood gave dinosaurs the blockbuster treatment. And there was no CGI in the 1970s, making this even more impressive.

So how did they manage it? I can only conclude that Barry Letts must have somehow gotten some real dinosaurs for the show. This must have been done under conditions of total secrecy, or else every manny and his theme park would have wanted one - and this might explain why some of the effects were made deliberately poor, to fool viewers into thinking the dinosaurs were only models, or maybe mannys in costumes.

However, to the observant viewer there are several clues that give the game away. Firstly there are occasions when, by using the greater picture clarity of DVD that wouldn't have been available to the casual viewer in 1974, we can clearly see that the dinosaurs aren't models - these include the pterodactyl attacks in parts one and four, plus the bit in part six where the jeep goes under a dinosaur, a neat bit of stunt driving.

But for me the real clincher is the very obvious CSO used to put the actors in the same frame as the dinosaurs - this would have been essential because dinosaurs are very dangerous and, just as Kirk Vilb didn't fight a real lion, they wouldn't have wanted the likes of Jon Pertwee or Nicholas Courtney to get et by being too close to a tyrannosaurus.

Pertwee Six-Parter Padding Analysis

While there is some padding, particularly in part five where it seems to be needed to keep the cliffhanger in the right place, this is an impressively paced story that could even have justified more than its six episodes, because of all the parts to the plot that we didn't see on screen.

Part one began in media res, when the Doctor and Sarah joined the story, with London already evacuated and UNIT already aware of the dinosaur invasion (there are some similarities here with The Web of Fear, which also saw London deserted before the TARDIS arrived, although that had a prologue in which Professor Travers accidentally reactivated a Yeti control sphere), but we could have been shown scenes from when the baddys' plan was just starting, and maybe seen something of the Brigadier and UNIT trying to cope without the Doctor's help.

We are given very little backstory for any of the baddys, nor do we see how they came together to form their not-so-little (considering how many of the named characters of this story turn out to be in it) conspiracy. I suppose none of that is strictly necessary, and we can still enjoy watching Grover, Whitaker and Finch being fairly archetypical baddys without it, but we don't even see how Mike Yates came to join them, or much of a reason why he should - the scene where he says he likes London in its deserted state barely qualifies.

This means Yates's betrayal of his friends, without having been coerced or hypno-eyesed in any way, feels like something out of the blue crystal. We are left to infer that he must be the sort of gullible idiot who would fall for every fad and scam going. In the modern day, left to his own devices, he'd probably be into all manner of wacky conspiracy theories on the internets, while living in the UNIT era (an early '70s vision of the near-future) he'll probably be into meditation, Buddhism, and other hippy bullshit.

Five TV shows Patrick Stewart was in before Star Trek: The Next Generation

So synonymous has Patrick Stewart become with his baldy-headed English-French captain of the Starship Enterprise, who he played from 1987 until 2002 (and then recently brought out of retirement again for one last job), that it is easy to forget that he already had a long and distinguished list of film and TV credits to his name before he ever made it so.

Here are five of my personal favourites from British TV shows.

#1. Civilisation (1969)

 

Civilisation, if you’re unfamiliar with it, was Kenneth Clark (Not That One)’s 13-part BBC documentary series about the history of western civilisation from the Dark Ages to the 20th century, as seen through the lens of its art. It recently got a sequel series, almost 50 years after the original, but is probably best known today for inspiring the long-running series of computer strategy games of the same name… if not the same spelling.

By episode six, Protest and Communication, Clark’s chronological approach has reached the time of Shakespeare, and he illustrates the Swan of Avon (Not That One)’s contribution to civilisation with three scenes from his plays: King Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet, with actors brought in specially to perform the scenes.

In the excerpt from Hamlet (act 5 scene 1), Patrick Stewart is Horatio to Ian “House of Cards” Richardson’s Hamlet and Ronald “Avon’s friend” Lacey as the Gravedigger. Horatio has by far the least lines of the three, and with the benefit of hindsight it seems a waste to get Patrick Stewart in just to say lines like

“E’en so, my lord.”

but nevertheless it is umistaikably him, and it is amazing to see how little he has physically changed over the years from how he looks in this very early TV appearance.

#2. Fall of Eagles (1974)

 

I have already discussed Fall of Eagles extensively on this blog. Here Patrick Stewart is playing Lenin, and as such is in one of the five(ish) most important roles in the series. For all that, he’s only in three of the 13 episodes, with the second of these, Absolute Beginners being one of the very best of the series largely thanks to Stewart’s amazing, powerful performance.

#3. I Claudius (1976)

 

The next time Patrick Stewart would turn up in a BBC historical costume drama it would be in a bad wig as Lucius Sejanus, the ruthlessly ambitious captain of Tiberius’s praetorian guards, in four episodes of I Claudius. He makes his first appearance in the scene after the one where Augustus dies, and helps to fill the hole left by the departure of BRIAN BLESSED’s larger-than-life character. In the following episodes we see Sejanus’s scheming gradually come to the fore, as he plans to marry his way into the imperial family and remove all those standing in the way of his rise to absolute power.

Even acting alongside the likes of George Baker, Derek “Shakespeare-denier” Jacobi, and of course Sian Phillips as Livia, Stewart makes his portrayal memorable as we see his two-faced machiavel rise and rise and then, eventually, fall. It is with Caligula’s help that Sejanus is finally brought down, paving the way for the unforgettable performance by John Hurt to dominate the next phase of the series.

#4. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and Smiley’s People (1982)

When the BBC adapted the first and last parts of John le Carré’s ‘Karla trilogy’ they were obviously going to need somebody to play Karla, head of the Soviet Union’s “13th Directorate” and the hidden antagonist behind Gerald the mole and all the plots against George Smiley’s secret service “Circus.” Well, I wouldn’t be mentioning it in this article if they hadn’t chosen Patrick Stewart for the part.

Because Karla is seldom encountered directly, for all that his long shadow is cast over everything that occurs in both stories, the part is much smaller than you might expect for what is essentially the main baddy. (Exactly how small? Well, if you’ve seen it you’ll already know what I mean. And if you haven’t…) But that just makes it all the more remarkable how much Stewart does with so little. Alec Guinness is rarely challenged in the acting stakes throughout either series, but when he’s on screen with Patrick Stewart, it is Stewart that you have to watch – partly that’s because we see so little of Karla that his scenes stand out the more, but it’s also because Patrick Stewart steals those scenes out from under him.

#5. Playing Shakespeare (1982)

Well I began with Shakespeare, and this final entry brings us full circle. In 1982 a nine-part documentary series was shown on ITV about theatre director John Barton, with help from a bunch of actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company, giving a ‘masterclass’ with examples of how they go about preparing to put on Shakespeare plays. The list of actors involved include some very well known names, including Ben Kingsley, David Suchet, Donald Sinden, Jane Lapotaire, Judi Dench, Serena McKellen, and (of course) Patrick Stewart.

Patrick Stewart appears in five of the nine parts, but he is mainly featured in one episode in particular, Exploring a Character, which sees Barton discussing with him and David “Purrot” Suchet the similarities and differences in how they each played Shylock in The Mov. Now you might think that 50 minutes of that would be boring but, on the contrary, I found it anything but, and could happily have watched them continue for twice as long or more. Especially interesting were the bits where Stewart and Suchet would perform a scene together, then afterwards swap roles and do the same scene again in a different – sometimes only subtly different – way.

The series has moments of pretentiousness and can slip into jargon at times – it was deservedly mocked for such by Nigel Planer in his Nicholas Craig The Naked Actor series – but Barton is aware of this and so does not take himself too seriously (at one point referencing an early sketch by Fry & Laurie in which they sent up exactly this type of luvvie pretentiousness), which helps make the series fun. Shakespearean language has a reputation of being dull and difficult among mannys who were bored rigid when taught it badly in their schools, but this series makes the subject not only fascinating, but approachable and comprehensible.

The Day the Universe Changed

Now, I like history documentaries. And I like science documentaries. But which is better?

There's no need for them to fight, Harry Hill-style, because even better than either are History of Science Documentaries. These include such classic TV shows as The Ascent of Man (1973) and Cosmos (both Carl Sagan's original 1980 series and the more recent version with Neil deGrasse Tyson from 2014), as well as shorter, arguably lesser efforts from the likes of Brian Cox and Jim Al-Khalili.

It's no surprise that most of these, at least the ones I know of here in the UK, were made by the BBC. Another such example from the BBC is one that I only became aware of quite recently, called The Day the Universe Changed.

This was a 10-part series from 1985 presented by James Burke. Burke had a long history of presenting science TV programmes before this, including Tomorrow's World and even the BBC's coverage of the first moon landing.

The format of The Day the Universe Changed is very similar to that of Cosmos, combining what is essentially a televised lecture delivered by the presenter to the viewers with filmed reenactments of the historical events described. Indeed the style, and even the film quality, of the reenactment scenes look very similar to that of Carl Sagan's series from only a few years before.

However, this series puts its own spin on things in two ways. Firstly, each episode is focused around a single discovery or advancement in science at some point in history, with sections on what things were like before the discovery, the circumstances surrounding the advance being made, the people involved, and then the consequences and how they are felt even by us today. The episodes are set in roughly chronological order, starting with the development of the first universities in the Middle Ages, then the discovery of perspective that led into the Renaissance, then the invention of printing, and so on.

The second thing that makes this series stand out is the presenter himself. As well as presenting from a series of unusual and exotic locations that help illustrate his point for him, Burke has an eccentric style of delivery that always keeps things interesting, and is consistently witty if not laugh-out-loud hilarious in his turns of phrase. The best documentary presenters are those who can make complex subjects accessible and entertaining, and Burke certainly manages that. Perhaps the closest resemblance is not Sagan or Bronowski, but rather Terry Jones.

The series has one main drawback, which a lot of older TV documentaries suffer from, which is in how dated some of its attitudes are. The focus on the science of "Western" civilisation (meaning Western Europe, the USA, and their allies against the Soviet Union in the Cold War) is not intrinsically bad - it is simply a question of the scope of the series, and while it is unlikely that it would be made that way today (compare the original 1969 Civilisation with the 2018 Civilisations) this series is as of its time as any other.

But even with that in mind The Day the Universe Changed goes further than it needs to, with Burke presenting some sections from the deck and control room of a US Navy Destroyer, bringing the Cold War conflict into his narrative where it really doesn't need to be, and laying it out in us-versus-them, right-versus-wrong terms that seem very strange (in a TV history of science documentary, I mean) to us from the point of view of 30 years after the Cold War ended.

I think James Burke would see the irony in this, since his central point - that gives the series its name - is that the people of the past saw things in a different way to how we see things in the present, as illustrated by a surprisingly graphic sequence of the trial and burning of a witch in episode 10. Between those times "the universe changed" because our understanding of it changed. And between 1985 and 2021 it has clearly changed again.

Civilization: Beyond Earth

This computer game from 2014 was the successor to both Civilization V (released 2010) as well as the spiritual successor to the greatest computer strategy game of all time, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (released 1999, and usually known simply as Alpha Centauri). Civilization: Beyond Earth (or just Beyond Earth for short) suffers when compared to either of these older games, as it seems the makers could not improve on what had come before in some very important respects.

With 15 years elapsed since Alpha Centauri came out, it is no surprise that the mechanics of Beyond Earth are an improvement over it. Although some might argue that certain mechanics were backwards steps, I for one am glad to leave the days of increasingly tedious sprawling empire management and stacked armies of doom in the past - and if you do prefer that, the older games are still there for you.

However, there are three key areas in which Beyond Earth compares unfavourably with its immediate predecessor, Civ V, and these are much less understandable mistaiks considering how similar the engines behind the two games are.

The first and most significant issue with the game mechanics that makes Beyond Earth less fun for me to play is how the game has no option for reducing the abundance of native aliens. The aliens fill an important part in the setting of Beyond Earth, but mechanically they fill much the same role as barbarians do in Earth-set Civilization games, and Civ V had a nice, easy option for a player to turn the barbarians off (or turn them up, if so desired).

I'm not even sure turning the aliens off completely would be necessary, but the game could definitely have done with a way of turning their rate of spawning down, because I found so many games were made much less enjoyable by my early exploration of the planet being blocked by aliens and their nests, in addition to the mountains and canyons (twice as many terrain types as in Civ V) which already block movement. 

Secondly, the actual moment of winning a game feels much less satisfying than in Civ V. In Beyond Earth, you see a victory screen, and then have the choice of exiting or to keep on (pointlessly) playing. But with Civ V, as well as these options you can also see your score and how well you rank compared with the other civilisations in the game or with famous leaders from history, and also watch a replay. These may not seem like much, but I think they add a lot to the gaming experience. Your final score is then entered into the 'Hall of Fame' where you can see how your score ranks against those from other playthroughs. Beyond Earth is also supposed to have one of these, but (at least in my copy) it has always been borked with no scores recorded. 

The third problem is with the Wonders/Secret Projects. Or rather it is really two problems in one, since either of these individually would not be nearly so detrimental to the game as they are with both problems together. In Civ V the Wonders are (with a few exceptions) well balanced, powerful enough to be worth the significant investment of resources it takes to build them without being game-breakingly good in the way some Wonders from earlier Civilization games were. In Beyond Earth not only are most of the Wonders underpowered compared to their build cost, but also they require you to research optional "branch" technologies in order to build them at all - the combined opportunity cost in both science and production is too high for many of the Wonders to ever be worthwhile attempting.

In spite of all I have just said, these mechanical issues are not enough to prevent the game from being fun to play on the whole - my first objection about the aliens is the only one that can really ruin a game, and that only occasionally (albeit randomly). Where the game really lets itself down is in the setting or 'flavour' elements. A failure in flavour may not affect the game mechanics, but it certainly affects the game-play experience.

There are three key areas where Beyond Earth failed to live up to comparison with the flavour of Alpha Centauri - the benchmark against which its setting was always going to be measured, much more so than against Civ V, since they are the two sci-fi incarnations of Civilization, and by 2014 Alpha Centauri had already achieved the status of a classic, All-Time-Great computer game.

Of crucial importance to the setting are the main characters and factions in the game. Alpha Centauri from the very first got this absolutely right, with all seven of its original factions (and their leaders) being iconic, and the seven from its expansion only marginally less so. Beyond Earth made the mistaik of not wanting to give its factions strong identities, so that the player could shape their own character during play by their choice of in-game Affinities. But the result of this was that the main characters were all left bland, with little (though not nothing, to be fair) to distinguish between them.

Alpha Centauri also had the faction leaders' personalities woven throughout the game, with their dialogue giving flavour to the researching of new technologies, the building of new... er, buildings, and the completion of Secret Projects. The voice acting of each of these leaders brought them to life, which leads me to the second of the ways in which Beyond Earth failed - despite also having quotations from the various faction leaders accompanying its technology breakthroughs, buildings, Wonders, and even Affinity levels, they were all read out by the same voice actor. 

Having a single actor doing all the voiceovers worked well in the historical Civilization games (whether read by a famous actor such as Leonard Nimoy or Sean Bean, or not) because they were quotations from historical figures who, pretty much by definition, carry more real-world weight than the fictional characters invented for the sci-fi setting, who need all the help they can get to be brought to life. Having a single actor do all their voiceovers robs them of distinctiveness and makes them all blend together.

What makes this an even more baffling decision by the game's makers is that they did employ multiple voice actors to play the different characters - for their diplomacy screens only!

The third and final flavour issue is, as with the mechanics, the Wonders. Alpha Centauri had short animated movies to accompany the completion of each of its Secret Projects, several of which were among the most iconic parts of the game. Civ V didn't manage to have movies to go with its Wonders (I don't know why not), but at least it had appropriately memorable still images in their place - Chichen Itza is a personal favourite of mine, for example.

Beyond Earth cannot even manage that. The pictures are all very similar, depicting the blueprints of fictional buildings that don't even give you much, if any, indication as to what the Wonder actually does. In Alpha Centauri or Civ V you get a sense of triumph when you complete a Wonder. With Beyond Earth, the sense you get is more like that of disappointment.

My hope for the future is that one day we will get a Beyond Earth 2 that can somehow keep the many genuinely good elements of Beyond Earth's gameplay while at the same time improving upon the areas of weakness I have described here. For all that Alpha Centauri casts a long shadow over the genre, it would not need to slavishly copy the setting in order to be good... if it did, it would be more like Alpha Centauri 2.

Actually, now I've said it, that sounds like an even better idea...

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who and the Silurians: Episode Five

Green Face stops Pink Face from killing the Doctor, and we learn that Captain Hawkins and the other UNIT mannys aren't ded (phew!) but they are trapped and running out of air.

The Doctor continues to try and warn the Silurians, but now he is warning them that mannys will retaliate if they get killed. Major Baker tries to stop him, for some reason, but only gets hypno-eyesed for his trouble.

Pink Face conspires with another Silurian who appears to be his friend. Meanwhile Green Face talks with the Doctor.

"This is our planet, we were here before man. We ruled this world millions of years ago."

Actually the planet belongs to cats because cats are best. This is the story's big twist moment, although it has been carefully foreshadowed with things like the 200 million years old globe that the Doctor and Liz found. The Silurians aren't aliens at all, they are Earthlings - a clever reversal of the twist in Quatermass and the Pit where mannys turn out to be aliens.

The Doctor realises that the Silurians are really very stupid, and were having sleeps to hide from a "catastrophe" that "never happened."
Major Baker calls the Doctor a "traitor" because he is after the coveted position of most stupid character in this whole story. So far he is winning easily, in spite of the large amount of high-calibre competition he's up against.

The Silurians were only able to wake up when the mannys built their nuclear power station nearby. Or at least that is Green Face's excuse - I think they were just being very lazy. The Doctor tries to convince Green Face that there is room for mannys and Silurians to both live on the Earth in peace, and asks him to release the trapped UNIT mannys as a sign of good faith... and to counteract trapping them to die, which was a sign of bad faith.

One of the trapped mannys goes mad and attacks Captain Hawkins, like the manny in the hopistal did to the Doctor back in episode one. Green Face releases all the UNIT mannys just in time, and then tells Pink Face what he has done and why.

"This other species has developed its own civilisation. We must accept them as equals."

No! Not that kind of Civilization, Gandhi!

"I disagree! We must destroy them!"

Pink Face loses his shit and storms off in a huff.

Pink Face's friend is watching Major Baker on a Silurian TV, even though the real Major Baker is right there in front of him. He changes channels on the TV using his hypno-eye. It has so many uses. Pink Face wants his friend to help him become their new leader, and threatens to hypno-eyes him if he doesn't.

The Brigadier makes it back to the power station and Dr Lawrence's office set, where Liz and Masters were trying to be competent, but being hindered by Dr Lawrence and Miss Dawson acting like dicks.

Green Face and the Doctor reach an agreement, unaware of Pink Face's Starscreamesque plotting. Green Face leaves the Doctor behind an invisible door, giving Jon Pertwee an opportunity to show off his miming skillz.

Pink Face releases Major Baker as part of his plan, after first having secretly infected him with his friend's manny-killing plague. Green Face is angry when he finds out what Pink Face has done, and Pink Face says

"You are no longer fit to lead us."

to his face. Like Megatron, Green Face responds by saying

"I shall destroy you if you defy me again."

but he doesn't actually destroy him. Instead he tells the Doctor what has happened and gives him some of the plague in a jar as a present, hoping the Doctor can use it to find a cure (since the silly Silurians didn't think to make one).

Major Baker arrives back first and pretends to have escaped. The Doctor gets there soon after and tells him

"Major Baker, you are ill. You are very, very ill."

and there are signs of the plague on Major Baker's wrist. The Doctor gets everybody to stand back, at least two metres away from Major Baker.

Pink Face pewpewpews Green Face so that he can say 'I Pink Face am the new leader of the Siluricons!'
This must be the equivalent of a Silurian election, because all the other Silurians seem happy to go along with him after he's done it.

Major Baker gets taken to the hopistal so that he can start spreading the plague there. The Doctor tries too late to get the mannys to do a quarantine, but they are as hopeless as the UK government in 2020 (little bit of politics there, cats and doggys, oh yes indeed). Masters, for example, heads straight off to London, despite his starting to feel unwell before he has even left the office.

When the Doctor and the Brigadier arrive outside the hopistal in Bessie, they see Major Baker running around in his dressing gown trying to get away - by this point he has made more escape attempts from the hopistal than Number Six from the Village. But this is his last, because soon he goes

"Is he dead?"

asks the Brigadier, after unwisely touching him. Wash those paws, naughty Brigadier!

"Yes. The first one."

replies the Doctor - topical cliffhanger!

Fall of Eagles: Dress Rehearsal

Dress Rehearsal is part 9 of 13 and yet is the first to feature all three "Eagles" within the same episode. Even then the focus is on Russia, with Kaiser Wilhelm and Emperor Franz Josef limited to a one scene cameo each, and none of them appearing together.

The main character of the episode is Russia's egotistical foreign minister Baron Isvolsky, excellently played by Peter "Denethor" Vaughan. He has a plan to force the Ottoman Empire to open the Bosphorus strait to the Russian fleet by getting all the other countries of Europe to side with Russia against the Ottomans.

The Tsar has expressed his wish for this, but the new prime minister Stolypin (Frank Middlemass, a Shakespearean actor who I recognise from playing the Fool in King Lear and Cardinal Beaufort in the Henry vi plays, as well as the Master of Baillie College in Yes Minister) predicts that Russia will have to give away more in concessions than they will gain from it.

Most of the episode sees Isvolsky proving Stolypin right, as he travels Europe meeting important minor characters representing their countries, including French foreign minister Clemenceau, played by John "Li H'sen Chang" Bennett (proving he can play a Frenchmanny just as easily as a Chinamanny).

The trouble is that Isvolsky is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is, and it is with the Austrian foreign minister Aehrenthal that he more than meets his match - agreeing that Russia will recognise an Austrian annexation of Bosnia, which would mean betraying Russia's supposed ally Serbia, and foolishly doing so in writing without the agreement of the Tsar or Stolypin.

Then when Austria annexes Bosnia straight away, before Isvolsky is finished making all his deals, Russia has effectively given away Bosnia for nothing. This leads to a great scene where the German ambassador makes it plain to Isvolsky how outmaneuvered he has been, and that he has to go along with what the Germans and Austrians want if he does not want the secret deal made known, or else shoot himself. The First World War only fails to start several years early when Russia backs down.

In the end Britain's King Edward vii asks his foreign minister Grey if all this politicking and backstabbing has been worth it for anyone - all that has been achieved is the change of status of Bosnia from occupied puppet to an annexed part of the Austrian empire (it sounds to me like he's been playing Civilization V). But it has firmed up the alliances between Britain, France and Russia, and between Germany and Austria. The two mannys realise that if a war happens, it will be between these two sides.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Battlefield Part One

Battlefield is the first story of season 26, the last season of Doctor Who the BBC made before they cancelled it for 16 long years... not counting one-off returns such as Dimensions in Time, I mean that this is the length of time it went without a full series being made.

Battlefield stars Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace, and it was written by Ben A A Ronovitch who also wrote the previous season's opening story so I anticipate this being of a similar level of quality to that one.

Notoriously, when Battlefield was first broadcast in 1989 it was on BBC1 at the same time as Coronation Street was shown on ITV, which resulted in part one having the lowest number of viewers of any Doctor Who story: 3,100,000. This still seems like quite a lot of mannys to me (since the BBC only counts mannys, apparently, and the number of cat viewers in 1989 is not, to the best of my knowledge, recorded for posterity), but it is supposedly really very bad.

Fortunately by the time of part four the viewing numbers had increased to 4,000,000 exactly, meaning that in the intervening weeks 900,000 mannys had heard how good Battlefield was - possibly they heard it from their cats, I don't know - and so decided to watch it instead of Coronation Street.

Unlike with seasons 24 and 25, there is no pre-titles sequence. It starts with the unexpected appearance of Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, who we haven't seen in Doctor Who since The Five Doctors - if he has turned up for the 25th anniversary then I'm afraid he is a little late.

He is retired, telling Mrs Doris Lethbridge-Stewart his "blood and thunder days are long past." Hmm, I wonder what this could possibly be ironically foreshadowing?

In the next scene UNIT soldiers (ones who aren't retired), led by Brigadier Bambera, are having a spot of difficulty with their truck being borked. It has a nuclear missile in it, so they are understandably concerned. I mean, Gandhi might need it if he wants to play a game of Civilization.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor and Ace are receiving a distress signal from Earth and they go to investigate. They get a lift (by using the Richard method of hitch-hiking, only more successfully) from Peter Warmsley the archaeologist, who can't wait to give them the exposition they need about what's going on at his dig.

"The dig, as a matter of fact, is a hobby. A battlefield."

Clang! He drops the story title.

Some space knights come to Earth using a bad special effect.

The Doctor tries to use his old UNIT pass to get involved in the plot but, because his face doesn't match his photo, Brigadier Bambera turns him and Ace away. This is far too sensible behaviour for a guest character to display. Fortunately her second in command, Lt Zbrigniev, is there to remind her that a shapechanging alien is a far more likely explanation than an enemy impersonator. Even so, she takes some persuading:

"He changed his whole physical appearance."
"His whole appearance?"
"And his personality."
"How could he be the same man if his appearance and personality have changed?"

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart gets a 'phone call from UNIT Headquarters in Geneva, but he doesn't want to go back to W-word for them (sensible manny) until he hears that the Doctor is back. Here we see him rapidly pass through several steps of "The Hero's Journey" as he receives The Call to Adventure, then he Refuses the Call, until he Hears the Doctor is Involved.

When next we see Brigadier Bambera she has teamed up with the Doctor and Ace, with their difficulties having all been resolved off-screen to save time. They go to a hotel to meet some more of the guest cast - Pat the hotel manager, Elizabeth the blind manny, and Shou Yuing the random hotel guest/friend for Ace.

Brigadier Bambera is driving around on her own when she gets caught between the space knights having a pewpewpew gun battle. Her catchphrase appears to be "oh shame!" which is a bit rubbish really, but you probably couldn't get away with "oh for fuck's sake!" in a show that kittens might watch. The space knights start fighting with swords so Brigadier Bambera runs away.

In the hotel there is a scabbard that the archaeologist dug up, and the Doctor asks him about it.

"For the scabbard's worth ten of the sword."
"Said Merlin."

No, it was the Doctor that said... aha, I see what they did there. This bit makes sense once you know what happens later on.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is now back dressed as a soldier, about to go and join in the plot. Mrs Lethbridge-Stewart doesn't want him to go. He says it is his duty to go but really he does want to go after all. He gets collected by a helicopter. There are lots of gratuitous shots of the helicopter, it must have been expensive.

The space knights are having another pewpewpew fight, this time including using space grenades. At the same time Ace is talking to Shou Yuing about explosives, and saying "Boom!" a lot. Subtle this bit is not.

One of the knights gets blown up and into the brewery near the hotel, and this is seen by the Doctor, Ace and Shou Yuing so they all go to investigate.

There they meet Ancelyn, who is handsome so must be a good knight. He calls the Doctor "Merlin," knowing him by his "manner" rather than his "aspect" and so making this one of the most evocative ways of having a character recognise the Doctor across regenerations that I have seen in the series.

Brigadier Bambera comes in and tries to arrest them (I bet Russell "The" Davies loves that bit), but then the baddy knights come in and their leader says

"Kill them. Kill them now!"

Despite some questionable SFX, and some directing choices that perhaps weren't quite as effective as the makers thought they would be ("Boom!") this is a great first episode. A lot happens, but it is clear that a lot has still to happen - Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart still hasn't arrived in the main storyline, and neither has the main baddy Morgaine (although we have seen her in brief cutaways).

The way in which Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is (re)introduced is interesting - with so much focus on his difficult decision about whether or not to return to help the Doctor, the story seems to be setting him up for a tragic ending where he will save the day but die in so doing. If this was a war movie then that would definitely happen, or else why place so much emphasis on what he is giving up if he does not, in the end, need to make the self-sacrifice?

While that could make for a very Shakespearean ending to Battlefield, I hope that it is not the case and that the Brigadier can live happily ever after. Just like Avon, Captain Kirk, and Willie Caine.

Civilisations

The BBC's long-awaited sequel to their groundbreaking 1969 documentary series Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark (Not That One) has controversially opted for the lesser used sequel naming convention first popularised by the Alien movie franchise.

The nine-part series is split between three different presenters, with Simon Schama taking all the odd numbered episodes, Mary Beard parts two and four, and David Olusoga the remaining parts. I was not acquainted with Olusoga before seeing him in this, but I was very impressed by what I saw - particularly the episode First Contact, which was centred on Captain Picard's unresolved issues with the Borg art inspired by the clashes between different cultures - in the future I will be looking out for other series presented by him.

With hindsight Simon Schama seems the obvious choice for main presenter, with his 2006 series Power of Art practically being a dummy run for the style used in his episodes of Civilisations - especially apparent when the subject matters cross over, such as when Caravaggio, Rembrandt or Van Gogh (each the subjects of a Power of Art episode) make their appearances in this.

Civilisations does a remarkably good job at counterpointing the original Civilisation without too much overlap. While the old series was (almost exclusively) focused on the culture of "Western" Europe and America, the new one goes global. Sadly, with only nine parts to cover the whole of history and the whole of the world, there is obviously not enough room to cover everything - I think music, which was a big part of the old series, misses out the most.

The biggest issue with the series, however, is that once you have noticed Simon Schama's eccentric way of pronouncing the word mountain "mounTAIN", you can't unnotice it.

Since Lord Clark's original series came out there have been multiple versions of the spin-off computer game Civilization, of which my favourite is Civilization V. The new series made sure to reference this by featuring lots of the World Wonders that you can build in the game. I counted Petra, the Terracotta Army, Angkor Wat, the Parthenon, Haigha Sophia, Taj Mahal, Pyramids, Louvre and Eiffel Tower, all of which would get you a very good score!

The entire series is currently available to watch on the BBC iPlayer here.

Wouldn't it be terrible if...

Wouldn't it be terrible if Britain was the only country in the world that didn't have nuclear weapons?
That would leave us completely at Gandhi's mercy!

There are over 200 countries in the world according to Richard Osman of Pointless (also Wikipedia), only 9 of which have their words backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!

Of the more than 190 countries whose words are not backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS! only one of them (Japan) has ever been on the receiving end of said nuclear weapons.

So I think Britain would be just fine if it did not have nuclear weapons, since it would not in fact be the only country in the world without them, it would be in the company of the great majority.

Cosmos: A Sky Full of Ghosts

“What actually transpires beneath the veil of an event horizon? Decent people shouldn't think too much about that.”

-- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "For I Have Tasted The Fruit"

As I begin writing this, I think it will perhaps be a shorter review this week, as it is taking time away from my playing of the new computer game Civilization: Beyond Earth. Supposedly Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey was an influence on this game, but another obvious influence is the previous Civilization-in-space Alpha Centauri. And this episode of Cosmos reminded me of Alpha Centauri, as we shall see...

The narrative line of A Sky Full of Ghosts concerns William Herschel and his son John. William is credited with the idea that looking into space is looking back in time, because of the speed of light and the distances involved.

Tyson gives examples of how far things are from the Earth as measured in light minutes/hours/years, from the moon (at 1 light second away) to the first galaxies and the big bang, as far away and as far back as we can observe the light. Considering this light is billions of years old, Tyson takes a swipe at Creationists who take the Bible literally, saying that if the universe was only 6,000 years old, then only the light from within 6,000 light years would have had the time to reach us.

As the previous episode dealt with light, so this deals with gravity, taking us (briefly) through the discoveries of Newton, Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and finally Einstein, with a bit more time spent on the latter's thought experiment about travelling at the speed of light that gave rise to his Theory of Relativity.

A less well-known scientist who gets discussed is John Michell, who predicted the existence of Black Holes, or "Dark Stars" as he called them - you can't see them because they (by definition) give off no light, but we can now detect their gravitational effect on nearby stars.

Staying with the subject of gravity, there is a very vivid scene where Tyson visits a New York street and 'turns off' the gravity to see what happens, and then turns the gravity up to many multiples of Earth's normal gravity. As with the soundwaves scene last time, this is a visually impressive  and imaginative set-piece.

Back on Black Holes for the remainder of the episode, Tyson takes us through how giant stars become Black Holes at the end of their natural lives, and how scientists discovered the first actual Black Hole, Cygnus X-1, using X-rays and the effects it had on a nearby star. This led on to detecting giant Black Holes at the centres of galaxies, including the Milky Way.

Finally Tyson takes his Ship of the Imagination into a Black Hole, speculating about what lies beyond the Event Horizon - a tunnel to somewhere else in the universe, or maybe even another universe, raising the possibility of universes within universes, and these with their own Black Holes, layered infinitely.

This bit cannot help but remind me of the Singularity Inductor project from the Alpha Centauri game, with the quote I gave at the beginning of the review ironically tying in here - what Zakharov warns against is precisely what Tyson is doing.

On The Planet Isopterus

This is a terribly lazy story. And I'm a cat saying that! One of the few things about it that is not lazy is the way that here, on the first page, we see the Doctor explain to Adric (today being played by Eartha Kitt) about the device he will later use to solve the plot, instead of just pulling the device out of his pocket as and when he needs it.

On the other paw we here see the TARDIS console looking nothing at all like the TARDIS console usually does.

"Away with him, away with him! he speaks Latin."

-to quote the Bard. It is surprising that Adric knows words of Latin, especially something like "isopterus". But maybe that is a Time Lord gift that the Doctor shares with him? I don't know. I'm only a cat; I don't even speak Latin.

"But they're huge - those mounds must be thousands of feet tall!"

Clearly the budget couldn't support the drawing of huge mounds, but luckily Nyssa is there to tell us how big and impressive they look.

So they get captured by the giant termites and then meet a friend who gives them the exposition. His name may actually be Friend, since he is never called anything else in the rest of the story (another example of laziness).

I think Friend is being played by Lord Clark, presenter of the TV series Civilisation.

An interesting choice of guest star, and a typical example of the sort of stunt-casting that went on in Doctor Who during the 1980s.

Realising that there are only two more pages to go, the Doctor wastes no time in bringing out the gadget from page 1. It is lucky he had it with him, isn't it?

...And so they escape and that's the end of the story. Peter Davison couldn't be bothered to come back to be in the last picture, so they had to get Gary Lineker to stand in for him.

This is a particularly bad story - aside from the laziness I have already mentioned, it has inconsistent artwork and an absence of peril - the potential threat of the giant termites is squandered by them being dealt with so trivially, and they don't even reappear after the third page. It may be only 6 pages long but other stories have managed to make far better use of this limited amount of space. Awful. Mew.