Doctor Who – Page 12 – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Doctor Who: The Enemy of the Web of the World of Fear

“People spend all their time making nice things and then other people come along and break them!”

I’ve been rather quiet on the blogging front of late – it’s been a lovely summer, and I’ve enjoyed being out in it rather than spending evenings tapping away on a keyboard. But if there’s one thing guaranteed to make me put fingers to keys once again, it’s a new episode of Doctor Who.

Or in this case, not entirely “new”. I started this blog way back in the dim and distant 2007 primarily to review Doctor Who, but I never thought I’d be in the position of reviewing episodes from 1967/68 that I – and everyone else born since then – had never been able to see before. Yet thanks to the sterling efforts of one Philip Morris (not the one who makes cigarettes), we can all now enjoy two stories long held to be classics – The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear.

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Doctor Who: Series 7, Episode 14–The Name of the Doctor

“I’m Clara Oswald. I’m the Impossible Girl. I was born to save the Doctor.”

Steven Moffat loves to engage with the fans of Doctor Who. And he particularly loves to bait some of the more humourless fans whose presumed ownership of the show makes their gorges rise in anger at the thought of anyone doing something with it that they personally don’t like. He’s got form, provoking them with titles like Let’s Kill Hitler and The Doctor’s Wife (which turned out not to be literal), then having the Doctor seemingly actually get married – or did he?

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Doctor Who: Series 7, Episode 13–Nightmare in Silver

“Hail to you, the Doctor – the saviour of the Cybermen!”

Having penned the instant classic The Doctor’s Wife, renowned author Neil Gaiman was back this week for a second stab at a very different kind of Doctor Who episode. Nightmare in Silver was an attempt at something more like a horror story, something which Neil can do very well – read Sandman issue 6 for a good example. And the Cybermen are good fodder for horror, as their 1967 story Tomb of the Cybermen shows.

There were more than a few deliberate echoes of that classic here; but even as a fan, I’m not sure Neil Gaiman really pulled off making this an effective horror tale. The mechanical horror of the Cybermen sat rather uneasily with his trademark quirky and whimsical imagination. Both aspects of the story were great, in isolation; together, I’m not sure they entirely gelled.

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Doctor Who: Series 7, Episode 12–The Crimson Horror

“We must get to the bottom of this dark and queer business!”

In the late Victorian era, there was a peculiarly lurid, cheap and sensationalistic form of literature known as the ‘penny dreadful’. Capitalising on the recent upswing in literacy, these cheap, sordid tales (costing a mere penny, hence the name) were salacious, excessive, romanticised pulp fictions – so named because they were printed on the cheapest of pulp paper. The newly literate working class devoured this stuff with a passion.

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Doctor Who: Series 7, Episode 11–Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

“Don’t get into a spaceship with a madman. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?”

This week’s hotly anticipated episode of Doctor Who was always going to divide its ever-fractious fandom. Any episode that explores the mythos of the show always does, and especially when it’s one dealing with the show’s one constant (other than the Doctor himself) – the TARDIS. Neil Gaiman managed the virtually impossible last year, pleasing virtually all of fandom with his ‘character dissection’ of the Ship, The Doctor’s Wife.

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Doctor Who: Series 7, Episode 10–Hide

“I’m talking to the lost soul that abides in this place. Come to me. Speak to me. Let me show you the way home.”

I like haunted house thrillers. So much so, in fact, that my final piece for the TV production module of my drama degree was one (one day I’ll get round to posting that on YouTube to embarrass myself). My DVD collection is crammed with the likes of The Haunting, Legend of Hell House (music by Delia Derbyshire), Poltergeist, The Shining, Stephen King’s Rose Red and so on and so on. Naturally, then, I was pleased to see Doctor Who delving into this most traditional of genres, and keen to see if they’d pull it off.

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Doctor Who: Series 7, Episode 9 – Cold War

“My people are dead, they are dust. There is nothing left for me except my revenge.”

A very nostalgic episode of Doctor Who this week, as we saw the return of a classic 60s ‘monster’ beloved by the fans but in no way as embedded in popular culture as the Daleks or the Cybermen. The Ice Warriors were back, in a genuinely interesting period piece that revisited one of the most defining aspects of the 80s without miring itself in big shoulder pads or terrible hairstyles.

For those of us who grew up in the 80s, the looming threat of nuclear armageddon was probably a more all-encompassing menace than Thatcher and a bigger cultural phenomenon than New Romance. It was, as we all knew, the ‘Cold War’. What better war to reintroduce the cyber-augmented reptiles from the freezing planet Mars – the so-called ‘Ice Warriors’?

The Ice Warriors (name coined by a minor human character in their first story, which uncannily turned out to be what they were always known as) are one of Doctor Who’s more inventive aliens; inventive in the sense that, unlike the Daleks or the Cybermen, they had individuality, depth, and a proper culture.

We saw, in their first few stories, that they could be bad guys. Then, along with the Doctor, we had to face up the idea that as individuals, they might be capable of good as well as bad. 1972’s The Curse of Peladon is a groundbreaking story, the first demonstration that ‘monsters’ were actually people, and that it might not be the case that an entire race were ‘bad’ even if the ones we’d seen up to that point were.

As a result, the Ice Warriors have become something of a fan favourite, their ‘honourable warrior’ culture much explored in the Virgin New Adventures and other such fan fiction. But this is their first appearance on your actual television since 1974’s The Monster of Peladon, where they were back to being the baddies. So how did they fare?

Well, it was a script by Mark Gatiss, whose work has been somewhat variable on the show. A huge fan, whose Virgin novel Nightshade was genuinely superb, as a TV writer he’s rocketed from the excellent The Unquiet Dead to the fun but inconsequential The Idiot’s Lantern and then the pretty awful toy relaunch Victory of the Daleks. His work has been so variable, I’ve come to think of it as rating on a ‘Gatiss scale’. Cold War, on that scale, is better than Victory of the Daleks, on a par with The Idiot’s Lantern, but not quite up there with The Unquiet Dead.

On top of being an Ice Warrior re-introduction and a period piece, Cold War also took on the tall order of being a genre piece too – a submarine movie, like Das Boot, Crimson Tide or my all-time favourite, 1957’s The Enemy Below. On that score, it didn’t work out too well. Those movies depend on actual conflict, while this utilised the claustrophobic submarine setting but little else.

Nevertheless, it (perhaps intentionally) reminded me of another aquatic Who story – the less than classic Warriors of the Deep, itself a re-introduction of sorts for classic monsters the Silurians and the Sea Devils. Warriors of the Deep was actually made at the height of the real Cold War, and reimagined it in a future setting. It was still an obvious allegory for the situation that was, at that point, current.

Mark Gatiss, a child of the 80s every bit as much as me, obviously had his own adolescence as sullied as mine by the threat of nuclear holocaust. With that in mind, it was refreshing that he chose to set his story on a sub belonging to the ‘enemy’ – the Soviet Union. The sub (not, as far as I noticed, named) was populated by the usual Gatiss cast of varying depth (pun intended).

Commander Zhukov (presumably named after WW2 Marshal Georgi Zhukov) was played with some dignity by the excellent Liam Cunningham, Game of Thrones’ similarly seaborne Ser Davos Seaworth, but not really given any more depth than the standard ‘base commanders’ of the Troughton episodes this was reminiscent of. Less, really; he was more like the forgettable Commander Vorshak from Warriors of the Deep.

His (I assume) political officer Lieutenant Stepashin was a good enough performance from Tobias Menzies (especially his doomed attempt to ally himself with the Ice Warrior), but an obvious lift of Tomas Arana’s rather more threatening equivalent in The Hunt for Red October. The rest of the crew, sad to say (even the pretty James Norton as Onegin) were given little more depth than the average Star Trek redshirt.

With the exception of David Warner as the New Romantic-obsessed Professor Grisenko. Warner, a firm genre favourite and veteran of more Star Trek roles than is reasonable, is one of the greatest Doctors we never had, having given us a glimpse of how good he could have been in two ‘alternate Doctor’ Big Finish audio stories. Here, he was as charismatic as ever – I never expected to hear him sing Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ – but while the part was good, and he was good in it, I couldn’t help feeling that his long-awaited appearance in Doctor Who should have been something more significant than, essentially, a comedy bit part.

But what of the Ice Warrior, thawed out in minutes under very similar circumstances to the creatures’ original appearance? On that, Gatiss did really well, exploring aspects of Brian Hayles’ creations we’d always theorised about but never actually had spelled out. It was a given from their very first story that they had some kind of cybernetic augmentation, and certainly their built-in sonic weapons (little used here) were not the product of natural evolution.

Gatiss here did what we’d always wanted – demonstrated that the big green carapace was a removable suit of cybernetic armour. And also that, out of his armour, Grand Marshal Skaldak was at least as much of a threat as he was in it. Douglas Mackinnon’s clever, old-style direction steered clear of showing us the unmasked Warrior until the very last minute – a good strategy, as it turned out, as I wasn’t entirely convinced by the CG facial expressions. Nonetheless, as it stalked the sub picking off unwary crew members, the creature was (again presumably intentionally) a credible threat reminiscent of the original Alien.

And to add menace, we discovered that the armour could be used as a weapon in itself, as Skaldak summoned the empty suit to gun its way tot the command deck. We also learned more of the (somewhat Klingon-inspired) Martian code of honour; Skaldak’s hostility was basically a reaction to the Russians having started the fight, and he was honour-bound to meet them in combat. Discovering (he thought) that his people had died off during his 5000-year slumber, his bitterness against a race whose nations he didn’t distinguish between was understandable. And more than a little affecting, with his stories of his past, and the combat alongside his daughter in “the red snow”.

Matt Smith was (as usual) on good form as the Doctor, though he seemed to slip into Tennant’s ‘Estuary English’ accent at one point. The aspect of the Third Doctor overcoming his (understandable) prejudice against the Ice Warriors, and realising their race could be good as well as bad, was a central plot point of The Curse of Peladon. Here, it seemed like a lesson learned, but the point was well-made that, whatever the Doctor thought of himself, Skaldak would see him as a ‘soldier’ every bit as much as the Russians.

So, as is often the case since 2005, it was his companion who saved the day. There wasn’t much of the self-conscious ‘arc’ stuff about Clara this week, which thankfully gave Jenna-Louise Coleman a chance to showcase her character on its own terms. She is, as we know, the standard Moffat self-reliant spunky young woman; I still find her a little identikit in that regard. But that’s no disrespect to the actress, and Coleman was enjoyable here. Her belated acceptance of Grisenko’s invitation to sing ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ was the tipping point that stayed Skaldak’s hand in mercy, reminding him of his daughter singing. It was both amusing and touching.

Aside form the obvious nostalgia value of the Ice Warriors returning, we also got the fanboy-pleasing reference to the HADS – Hostile Action Displacement System – not used or even referred to since 1969’s The Krotons. It was more than a fan-pleasing gesture though, effectively answering the obvious question I asked early on – “why doesn’t the Doctor get everyone out of there in the TARDIS?” Still, alongside last week’s oblique reference to Susan, it’s plain we’re getting 60s references to celebrate the 50th anniversary year. No bad thing, in my opinion; the references aren’t so central as to alienate new fans who won’t get them, and give a little thrill to those of us who do.

All told, while I thought the story wasn’t that inventive, this was an excellent re-introduction of a classic alien – probably the best since 2005’s Dalek. I hope they’ll be back. I also hope that, if they are, the nuances of their culture seen here are retained, and they don’t just become another Big Bad.

Doctor Who: Series 7, Episode 8–The Rings of Akhaten

“Can you feel the light on your eyelids? That is the light of an alien sun.”

I was a bit tipsy yesterday afternoon.

As a result, I struggled to stay fully awake during Doctor Who, and rewatched it today to properly follow it. In the interim, unusually, I was able to digest what many of my online friends thought.

The reaction from many people I knew was pretty negative. “Slow, predictable, cheap tacky sets, no larger plot arc, no character developing, cheesy maudlin flashback (wtf??), and dull as fuck” opined one friend. “They’ve given Matt Smith his very own Fear Her,” said another (damning indeed!). “Utter pigshit,” was one more blunt opinion. The only voice I heard raised in its favour was my boyfriend Barry, who rather enjoyed it, comparing it to surreal 1965 serial The Web Planet, which similarly is not well-regarded.

Well, I actually love The Web Planet. And I may be tacking into the wind of disapproval here, but I rather enjoyed The Rings of Akhaten as well. True, it was unabashedly sentimental, which I can see would put some people off. It was also heavily dependent on Murray Gold’s admittedly OTT emotion-tugging music, which as usual frequently swamped the dialogue. And yes, the show might have bitten off more than it could chew with such an effects-heavy story (though I didn’t have any complaints on that score).

But it was also, more than ever, a sign that this era of Doctor Who is very much science fantasy rather than science fiction. I’ve heard some fans carping about the scientific impossibility of the Seven Worlds of Akhaten (from the perspective of gravity, atmosphere etc), or the ‘space moped’ which our heroes rode without the benefit of spacesuits or a roof.

Well, you could have dealt with that in the dialogue with some Star Trek-style technobabble. But why bother? Technology, in recent Who, is often a shorthand for ‘magic’ – it does whatever the plot demands. Sometimes that’s irritating, when it’s used to short circuit a proper conclusion by way of a deus ex machina. But when it’s just covering minor details, I don’t have a problem with that.

Speaking of deus ex machina, this was another story that, like a few recently, seemed to heark back to the style of Russell T Davies. It followed the established Nu-Who template for the introduction of a new companion – start with a story on contemporary Earth (where they’re always – disappointingly – from), then whisk them off to a weird future location full of a Star Wars-style menagerie of odd-looking aliens.

Kudos to the production team for not taking the ‘cheap’ option of reusing the many existing alien costumes – all the creatures on display here seemed entirely new. Indeed, the visuals seemed fairly sumptuous, from the costumes to the effects, evoking – for me – early efforts by French fantasists Jeunet and Caro, like City of Lost Children. True, the set design for the dusty streets was functional rather than inspired, but it seems harsh to criticise that when there was so much invention on display elsewhere.

And the concepts were, for me, as inventive as the look of the thing. True, Doctor Who has done ‘false gods’ any number of times before; they almost always turn out to be power-mad computers, or, as here, parasitic aliens. We even got one last year in Toby Whithouse’s enjoyable The God Complex.

But the god here, with its domination of an entire solar system who lived in fear of it and routinely sang it lullabies to keep it asleep, seemed genuinely terrifying – signposted by even the Doctor being terrified of it. Writer Neil Cross (creator of Luther and, less favourably, recent adapter of Day of the Triffids) came up with the fascinating concept of it feeding on treasured memories and stories, to the extent that they even formed the currency of its worshippers. That’s reminiscent of a recurring theme of the other Neil – Mr Gaiman himself.

Like Neil Gaiman’s similarly inventive script for The Doctor’s Wife, this gifted Matt Smith with some cracking dialogue to get his teeth into. “We don’t walk away”, summed up the show’s philosophy nicely, as well as providing a riposte to anyone wondering why they didn’t just get in the TARDIS and leg it. But the Doctor’s final speech to the ‘Grandfather’ was obviously a showcase moment, and Smith seized it with both hands to chew the scenery (but in a good way):

“I saw the birth of the universe and I watched as time ran out, moment by moment until nothing remained, no time, no space, just me. I walked in universes where the laws of physics were devised by the mind of a mad man.I watched universes freeze and creations burn,I have seen things you wouldn’t believe, I have lost things you will never understand – and I know things, secrets that must never be told, knowledge that must never be spoken…”

Hints of things to come, I wonder? Speaking of which, the ep also gave us more of an insight into Clara, with that prologue in which the Doctor, basically, stalked her parents through from their meeting to her mother’s death. That actually could seem more than a bit creepy, and Clara was probably right to be slightly weirded out when she ‘remembered’ it – the implication being that the memories were fresh, since the Doctor had only just taken that trip.

Clara’s apparent impossibility was the only ongoing plotline here, though. That may annoy those who are fans of the ‘arc’ episodes above the others, but I’ve personally found Steven Moffat’s arc-heavy approach hard going these last couple of years, and am glad that it’s taking the more background approach of the early RTD seasons.

Clara did get to show some real mettle here, as we continue to get to know her. I still bemoan the fact that she seems like ‘Moffat spunky young woman type #23’, but her morale-bolstering heart to heart with little Merry (Emilia Jones, excellent) was a magical moment that could only be resisted by the most hard-hearted and cynical. And her ultimate rescue of the Doctor, speeding to the Pyramid on the space moped then giving up her most treasured memory, was lovely; especially the Doctor’s remark about the monumental difference between “what was and what should have been”. Could Clara’s mum, and her apparently premature death, figure in why she’s such an impossibility?

There was some creepy stuff too, which was still in keeping with the imaginative visuals here. The Mummy in the Pyramid was pretty standard Who-fare, but the creepy looking Vigils will probably have given many a young child a few bad dreams. With their blank faces and Graf Orlok costumes, they were again reminiscent of the creations of Jeunet and Caro, not to mention David Lynch. Indeed, their apparently sound-based weaponry called to mind nothing so much as Dune.

I found The Rings of Akhaten to be a visually sumptuous, life-affirming piece of fantasy, very much in the style of the work of Neil Gaiman. I wouldn’t want Who to be like this every week, lest it turn into Farscape or Lexx, but that’s the beauty of the show – its flexibility. Next week, it looks like we’ve got a trad submarine thriller (albeit with aliens). That’s good too; but I’ve always got time for some out and out fantasy, if it’s done well, and I thought this was. Still, what do I know? I like The Web Planet Smile

Doctor Who: Series 7, Episode 7–The Bells of Saint John

“Human souls, trapped like flies in the World Wide Web.”

So which is it – series 7 episode 6, or the opener of a whole new series? Steven Moffat’s experiments with the scheduling of Doctor Who mean that it’s hard to know, with lots of people referring to new ep The Bells of Saint John as a ‘season opener’.

Whether it is or not, it certainly had the hallmarks of one – a bit spectacular, with some awesome London locations (rather than Cardiff pretending to be the capital) and some super set pieces (which actually fitted into the story context rather than being shoehorned in because they looked good). Most importantly, it was a bit of a mini-reboot for the show, with the Doctor reinventing himself in the wake of losing Amy and Rory; that process feels ongoing, having begun in the Christmas special and carrying on here. Along with the new console room revealed at Christmas, the Doctor now got to pick out a new outfit, something traditionally reserved for an incoming new Time Lord.

The ‘Moffatiness’ so common of late was dialed fairly low in the mix. This story was straightforward enough, with no head-scratching time paradoxes, there was fairly little smugly flirtatious witty dialogue, and River Song didn’t even appear (though odds on she was the mysterious ‘lady in the shop’ who gave Clara the TARDIS phone number). Nevertheless, some of the usual Moffat trademarks were in evidence, notably in the ongoing mystery of who exactly Clara is, and the unexpected return of an old villain as the mysterious ‘Client’ – even if that villain turned out to be the same one as in the previous episode.

It did have another Moffat trope at its heart, though it’s one he inherited from 70s script editor Robert Holmes – the central concept took something very ordinary and familiar and turned it into something scary. Here, very much tied up in the zeitgeist, it was Wi Fi networks, and the Cloud. What if, the script asked, the human mind could be linked to a computer, and programmed or downloaded like any other system? If anything, that should have given us a clue as to who the real villain was, but it still came as rather a surprise to me.

We’re all familiar with the list of odd looking Wi Fi networks we see when our mobile devices try to connect, so it seemed not too much of a stretch to assume that one of those weird looking networks might be an alien creature intent on sucking out our brains… well, maybe a bit of a stretch, but not in the world of Doctor Who. As this situation was explained in an X-Files-like precredits teaser, it was reminiscent of nothing so much as the cursed videotape from Ringu; you log on to the network, and 24 hours later, you’re dead. But your mind isn’t – it’s ‘”integrated into the cloud”, for an alien to feast on.

For me at least, this seemed a trifle unclear. The Doctor managed to ‘download’ the prone Clara back into her body – but surely if the body is dead for more than a few minutes, there’s no coming back? When he accomplished having all the minds ‘re-downloaded’, there was some acknowledgement that not all of them would still have a body to return to; I’d say that was probably most of them. Given that Moffat scripts of late have lacked real jeopardy because of his apparent unwillingness to kill characters off for real and permanently, I suppose it’s not too surprising that he left this somewhat unclear.

Still, that was about the only criticism I could find of this rather enjoyable episode (though I’m sure the fan forums will find plenty more). Matt Smith was, as usual, excellent; he’s still plainly loving the role. I liked the return of the fez, and the fact that his bow tie is kept in a little treasure chest. Jenna Louise Coleman, as Clara, has still to truly convince me as a character though. It’s a good, sparky performance. It may not be naturalistic, but Doctor Who acting often isn’t (Smith himself being a good case in point). But, appealing though she may be, Clara still strikes me as almost a stock Moffat leading lady; not a bad thing in itself, but still not vastly different from Amy Pond.

Of course, Clara has an ongoing mystery (thankfully the only convoluted element in this episode). It’s possible that the more of this is revealed, the more interesting I’ll find her as a character. And is it significant that she happened to be the one to ask the question “Doctor Who?” (much to the Doctor’s near-orgasmic delight, it seems)?

I imagine we’ll see more of this kind of thing (and, presumably, the return of River Song) as the series progresses. For now though, the only other element of this story that wasn’t truly standalone was its villain. The script revealed the agency behind the webnapping of human minds fairly early on, with the sinister black office headed by the marvellously frosty Celia Imrie as Miss Kizlett. But from the outset, it was clear that they were acting for somebody else. The mysterious ‘Client’ who knew all about the Doctor and his box – I found myself resorting to that oft-asked question of Sue Perryman, “is it the Master?”

But no (fun though it would be to see John Simm’s barmy renegade again), it turned out to be none other than the Great Intelligence, making this also a sequel to The Snowmen. The plan was very much in keeping with what we’ve seen the Intelligence do before; we know it can possess humans from The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear, though on those occasions it could only manage one at a time. Obviously the advancement of technology has helped, and Wi Fi now enables it (and its minions) to hack into any human brain at any time.

This led to a series of Matrix-like moments where various anonymous passersby turned into conduits for threats to our heroes, including the BBC newsreader. Though I did have to wonder how many uncontrolled viewers found the one-sided conversation rather baffling…

The Intelligence is now represented by the face of its one-time puppet Dr Simeon, meaning it’s now played by Richard E Grant. Shame though it is to lose the voice of Ian McKellen, it’s not like Grant’s any less of a star catch. Since he ‘got away’ in the end, I wonder whether he’s shaping up into the next Big Bad of the story arc?

Director Colm McCarthy, plainly with a bigger than usual budget for the show, had a field day with London locations – barely an exterior shot went by without at least one major landmark in the background. It was hard to begrudge though, and amusing to think that for the classic series, leaving London seemed like a Big Occasion; and these days, having the real London and not a dressed-up Cardiff was a cause for visual extravagance!

McCarthy also did well with the various set pieces. Again, these were pretty ambitious. The Doctor materialising the TARDIS inside an about-to-crash plane was audacious (lucky the passengers were asleep, trying to use the toilets could have ended up with several of the roaming the TARDIS corridors). It was a well-directed action set piece, but topped not too long after by the Doctor employing a flying motorbike to roar up the side of the Shard offices.

Yes, that is pretty over the top, even by action movie standards, and I’m betting some fans will think it’s fairly gratuitous. For me though, it fitted in with the tone of the show – and more importantly, made sense within the context of the story, in a way that such set pieces often don’t. I refer you to – the window cleaning lift in Partners in Crime, the lift cable slide in New Earth, Spitfires in Space in Victory of the Daleks… And many, many more.

So – a good story, that made sense on its own terms without requiring in depth knowledge of a convoluted arc. Some thrilling action set pieces. Great performances from, in particular Matt Smith and Celia Imrie. And the usual self-consciously witty dialogue kept to a controlled minimum (probably because River Song didn’t show up). Whether it’s a season opener, a mid-season opener or whatever, The Bells of Saint John was one of the more straightforwardly enjoyable Doctor Who stories in a couple of years. Please keep it up, Mr Moffat.

Gallifrey One: the 2013 experience

Regular readers of this blog (all three or four of you) may have noticed a distinct absence of posts on the usual topics recently. There’s a reason for this, as there is this time every year – I’ve been off in sunny Los Angeles with 3600 other people celebrating my favourite TV show at the world’s biggest and longest-running Doctor Who convention – Gallifrey One.

The history bit

Gallifrey One has now been running annually for 24 years. Back in 1990, it had a whopping attendance of 660 people. The first time I went, in 2005, there were 737. Then the show came back on the air, and it got a little bit popular – hence the fact that this year, in the much bigger Los Angeles Airport Marriott, there were about 3600 there, including con staff and guests.

Shaun Lyon – a man of infinite patience.

Co-ordinating this madness, as he has done since the beginning, is the ever-gracious Shaun Lyon, a man who must have the patience of a saint to put up with the growing sense of entitlement from some of the show’s less… socially skilled fans.

Working with Shaun is the legendary Robbie Bourget, a woman whose organisational skills are no lesser, but who leaves the fronting primarily to Shaun – much to his joy. And with both of them are a loyal team of volunteers who take on the thankless task of stewarding for 3000 unruly costumed lunatics. Unpaid. Given my years of experience in customer service and the impression it left me of the general public, I believe these people deserve some kind of medal.

Are they ‘costumed lunatics’?

Well, that’s maybe a bit unfair. Most of the cosplayers (for so they are now known) are wonderful people, and some of them are very good friends. Besides – it’s a sci-fi convention, you expect to see costumes. And you’ll see some of the best here. At any given time of day, roughly half the people there are costumed in some way.

Most of the costumes are Doctors, of course, with a preponderance of Tom Baker – the most familiar Doctor in the US, as his shows were broadcast ad nauseam by PBS in the 80s and 90s. However, the show’s newfound popularity means a veritable plethora of David Tennants and Matt Smiths too, probably outnumbering the Toms. Here’s Tristan Eisenberg doing Matt and Tom, while still resembling Richard Ayoade from The IT Crowd:

Sylvester McCoy has his fans too (handily, as he happened to be there). Dominic Francis does a terrific Sylvester, but my favourites are Miranda and Sam as a female Seventh Doctor and a male Ace:

If you want to be really obscure though, TV writer, creator of The Middleman and all-round ball of unstoppable energy Javier Grillo-Marxuach came as the Rowan Atkinson Doctor from The Curse of Fatal Death. Does this photo make him canon?

What about the monsters?

Oh yes, there are monsters. Gallifrey One is one of the only places where you can find things like this lurking round hotel corridors:

And, inevitably, there are Daleks. One of them even found its way onto a hotel balcony overlooking the swimming pool:

So who are the kings of cosplay? Every year, on the Saturday evening, a masquerade is held to find out. Those who enter parade their costumes on the main stage in variously successful comedy skits, one of the most popular events of the weekend.

For many years, the winners were my good friends Mette Hedin and Bryan Little; these days they tend not to enter, graciously giving other people a chance to win. Nevertheless, their costumes are usually the highly-anticipated highlight of the weekend. Here’s a few from this year, also including their friend Radar as Bill S Preston, and a disco-lighted Stone of Blood:

But there are panels featuring people from the show, right?

Indeed there are. That’s technically the main point of the con, and Shaun has always excelled in getting a marvellous selection of guests, with at least one Doctor every year. This year, it was the effervescent Sylvester McCoy, who took total ownership of the con’s main room by wandering off the stage into the audience with a microphone to take questions, leaving his hapless interviewers Nick Briggs and Jason Haigh-Ellery to trail behind in bemusement.

Legendary costume designer June Hudson was there too, with one of the most fascinating panels of the weekend as she talked us through her history, techniques and philosophy of designing costumes for the show in the 70s and 80s:

Biggest draw of the weekend was probably Freema Agyeman, making her first American convention appearance and causing the autograph line to stretch way, way out of the door:

And so many others – 1970s producer Philip Hinchcliffe, Rose Tyler’s dad Shaun Dingwall, legendary character actor and Winston Churchill impersonator Ian McNeice, Mark Strickson, Fraser Hines with his collection of classic anecdotes (some of which could be heard several times this very weekend). We even got a non-convention appearance from the star of Community’s affectionate Who parody Inspector Spacetime, Travis Richey:

Some keep themselves to themselves when off the clock, but others (especially Fraser) can be found mingling with the fans (especially when there’s alcohol nearby). Warning – do not go up and bow to them gasping “I’m not worthy!” They are mostly fairly normal (even Fraser), and will happily have a normal chat.

I got to chat to Inspector Spacetime over a beer about his new costume, and after the con was over, had the pleasure of Philip Hinchcliffe sitting down with me and my other half Barry for a quiet chat in the lobby. Even on Wednesday, three days after the con was technically over, Sylvester McCoy was still there, and was nice enough to join me and a group of friends for lunch at LA airport’s rather freaky Encounter restaurant:

The Seventh Doctor encounters his deadliest enemy – the Shrimp Cocktail.

What to expect from Gallifrey One – a brief guide.

1. Enormous quantities of alcohol.

Each night (but especially on the last night, Sunday), an unofficial gathering of the more alcoholically minded takes place outside hotel bar Champions in the hotel lobby. This has become known as Lobbycon. Much alcohol will be consumed there, while discussing such lofty topics as whether Steven Moffat is a better writer than Russell T Davies, or whether next year’s returning monster really ought to be the Nimon.

Terror of the DVD Content Producer: When Steve Roberts Attacks

Also, there are room parties, at which people bring their own (vastly cheaper) booze. One of the best is the Friday night bash in room 110, run by the splendid Shawn Sulma, Andrew Trembley and Kevin Roche. This year, Kevin brought a small robot which dispensed cocktails of prodigious strength at the press of a keypad. I may have had too many of them.

2. A certain amount of debauchery.

Contrary to popular opinion, not only do Doctor Who fans have sex drives, they sometimes even get to exercise them. Stick hundreds of them in a hotel with many rooms, lots of alcohol, and a hot tub, and occasionally adult-themed things happen. These are, of course, totally unofficial.

Also contrary to popular opinion, many Doctor Who fans actually are rather attractive, which helps grease the wheels (so to speak). Me being me, it was the men who took my eye, and I took some pictures (with their permission) to prove that nerds can be sexy too. And no, nothing happened with me and any of them – I’m a good boy.

3. Enormously long autograph queues.

I don’t really do autographs. But a lot of my friends do. And so do a lot of other people, especially now the con’s getting so big. If you want that precious signature or photo with the show’s stars, have patience – it could be a long wait.

4. Gary Russell.

Former actor turned Who scribe turned all-purpose Who superstar Gary is there every year, usually functioning as interviewer on the panels. As an interviewer, Gary is brilliant – sharp, bitchy, clever, and with a perfect rapport with the guests, many of whom he’s known for years. He has the great interviewers’ gift of making the whole thing seem effortless – knowing when to be quiet and give the guests their head, when to prompt them, and how to put them at their ease. Any panel with Gary hosting it is usually worth seeing for him as much as the guest he’s interviewing.

5. Meeting lots of new friends.

Gallifrey One is, more than any other convention I’ve been to, a friendly event built as much on social interaction as showmanship. Every year, I come away with a crop of new Facebook friends, many of whom I then see the next year, when I meet more. It can end up being quite difficult spending more than a couple of minutes with some of them every year when you know so many people – to those I barely saw this year, I can only apologise and say that next year, I’ll try harder! And don’t worry if you (drunkenly, perhaps) don’t remember their names when you see them next year – that’s what name badges are for.

6. Ribbons.

A recent phenomenon (over the last few years), the ribbon-collecting craze has reached epic proportions. These are small ribbons with a sticky edge that you attach to the bottom of your name badge, and then to each other, until you have a Tom Baker scarf-style length of them. They usually have funny, or cryptic, or downright dirty quotes and allusions to the show, the con itself, or people you might actually know. Above are the ones I collected over the last two years; a puny amount compared to this lady, who made a skirt out of them:

The etiquette of ribbon trading is technically that you’re meant to have your own made to trade with those of others. Here’s a useful guide to having them made. In practice, I’m never organised enough to do this, but people tend to be generous enough with them for that not to be a problem. But I try not to be pushy about asking when I’ve none of my own to give out. Next year, perhaps (though I say that every year).

So that was Gallifrey One 2013 – bigger than ever, but still just as much fun and just as sociable. Thanks as always are due to Shaun and Robbie, and their army of patient volunteers, along with the guests and all my friends who I only see once a year, too numerous to namecheck here. I’ll be back reviewing the shows I usually review soon – though given the number of episodes I’ve missed, it may be posts featuring several episodes in one go. For now, check out this fantastic video of Gallifrey highlights from the BBC’s own Ed Stradling, which provided one or two of the screencaps used here, and sums up the fun with the aid of the Traveling Wilburys:

Fun fun fun till the hotel take the Daleks away.