The Infinite Oswin?

It’s smaller on the outside.

Clara Oswin Oswald, Doctor Who: The Snowmen  

Good evening. I'm a lizard woman from the dawn of time, and this is my wife.

Madame Vastra, Doctor Who: The Snowmen

This year's Doctor Who Christmas Special, The Snowmen, was all about snow, and, like snow, it was elaborately structured, full of little gaps, and, well, flaky.

It's not all bad, there's a lot of clever bits - it's the sort of brilliant dialogue and very good acting that makes Doctor Who a pleasure to watch in spite of the occasional dodgy plotline.  Sadly, this is one of those dodgy-plotline episodes, with one too many odd coincidences and forced plot advancements.

This episode marked the arrival of Jenna-Louise Coleman, the widely promoted new companion for the Doctor, although we'd sort of already seen her in Asylum Of The Daleks back in September where she first appeared as Oswin Oswald the soufflé-baking Dalek, who didn't survive the episode. In The Snowmen, she also plays an Oswin, Clara Oswin Oswald in this case.

Ms. Coleman's Oswin, in both incarnations, is plucky and perky, clever and cute - which is pretty much the standard shopping list for the Doctor's companions since they rebooted the series.  Unfortunately, at the end of The Snowmen, she's also dead.

Two Oswins down and counting, with a third Oswin on deck at the end of the special.  My god, imagine if that's all the Doctor does this season, travel from place to place and from time to time, having adventures with different iterations of Oswin who always die at the end!!  (Perhaps not as much fun as it sounds.)

I realize that on Doctor Who, being dead isn't a barrier to quiet enjoyment, but didn't we just spend the last couple of years killing off Rory and/or Amy every ten minutes?  Let's just hope that the next Oswin manages to get through more than a single episode.

Regardless, I would be remiss if I failed to recognize the introduction of what may well be the first married human-lizard lesbian couple on television. (I have to wonder where they found a member of the clergy in Victorian England who was willing to conduct the ceremony.  On the other hand, they do have access to a time machine.)  However, this may be premature. If anyone in the readership is aware of another married human-lizard lesbian couple on television, please do speak up. After all, I didn't watch any of the V reboot, who knows what they got up to.

 - Sid

 

I know, some people decorate the tree.

Has everyone had a happy holiday season?  Personally, I spent most of the night before Christmas trying to find a way to get my brain back into my head.

Perhaps this requires some explanation...

Having somewhat unexpectedly finished off Arkham Asylum, I thought it might be fun to revisit Fallout New Vegas (the sequel to Fallout 3) with the aid of some downloadable content, or DLC as it is more commonly known.  Personally, I think that DLC is one of the best innovations in gaming for quite a while, allowing game developers to easily add value to a game purchase over time without having to develop a whole new game engine - or having to invest in packaging and disk burning, for that matter.

I purchased two additional modules for FNV and started out with Old World Blues, a visit to the Think Tank at Big Mountain, a hidden scientific base originally dedicated to pure research which later became involved in weapons development as part of the war against Communism.

After the transition from New Vegas, I awakened in the main dome only to discover that while I was asleep, the disembodied brains making up the Think Tank had shared the wealth by removing my brain as well.  Even worse, when they weren't paying attention, one-time Think Tank member Doctor Mobius had somehow stolen my brain and taken it to his dome in the Forbidden Zone.

I eventually fulfilled the main quest for the module by defeating the evil Doctor Mobius and his robot scorpions - well, to be fair, the overly confused and not terribly malicious Doctor Mobius - after which he generously offered to let me ask my brain if it wanted to be reunited with its body.

Of course, my brain wasn't interested, and I was required to find a way to convince my wayward cerebellum to return to its home in my cranium.  Which might not have been too bad until I discovered an unexpected glitch in the game which stuck my brain in a loop of reminiscences about shared memories (if one can share memories with their own brain...anyway, you get the idea.)

But let me tell you, whatever the challenges of overcoming my brain's distaste for life in my body might have been, they were nothing compared to the challenges of getting the damn game to function properly, a challenge made even more difficult due to the need to reboot the computer every time the program started to loop.

The down side of the sort of freedom offered by an open world game like Fallout is that it's impossible for game developers to anticipate every possible configuration that a player might create, and as such it's not uncommon for bugs in the software to prevent players from accessing certain portions of the game.  Generally, there's only one solution:  reload a previous save of the game and change as many parameters as possible going into the nonfunctional area.

So - back out into the crater containing Big Mountain to kill some more of my fellow Lobotomites (I wasn't the only visitor to be relieved of their grey matter) until I leveled up and felt that I could take another shot at the buggy brain conversation. To help load the dice, I did everything I could to alter the parameters before initiating the conversation with my brain: dropped some weapons, loaded some Intelligence and Persuasion modifiers, and even stood in a different place in the dome.

And then, after all that, although I managed to get past the problem and my brain finally agreed to rejoin its body, I unwittingly went through the wrong exit at the end of the game and launched the "He decided not to restore his brain" conclusion.  At which point I wrote the whole thing off as a lesson in humility, and left my brain in a bottle.  And you know what?  There were no problems starting the next module without a brain.  This may well be some kind of larger editorial comment on computer games - or at least on the players.

 - Sid

A cracking gift!

Today at work my department had its seasonal potluck luncheon and Secret Santa gift exchange, and I have to say that it's a pleasure to work with people who don't fool around when it comes to gift selection.  Someone showed the remarkable good judgement required to get me a Wallace and Gromit Liquid Clock 7000, a toy so dangerous to assemble THAT IT CAME WITH A SET OF ACTUAL SAFETY GOGGLES.  Yes, Glen Williams received a radio controlled car that would drive up the wall, but hey, safety goggles, Glen - SAFETY GOGGLES.

And, and, it works.  The clock is powered by a simple battery made of zinc and copper strips in vinegar (orange juice was the other option for an acid - sorry guys, but vinegar has a much longer unrefrigerated shelf life) and after carefully following the assembly instructions, I now have the digital clock cheerfully ticking away.

My only complaint is that the name is too simple for a Wallace invention.  It would have to be something like the Liquid-powered Clock-o-matic 7000 to really qualify.

On the other hand, I'm not so sure about where I myself qualify on the "Only for use by children over ten years old" scale.  Because, well, I'm still pretty excited about the goggles.

 - Sid

P.S.  Is there anyone in the audience who doesn't know about Wallace and Gromit, Great Britain's cheese-loving, tea-drinking, invention-building, stop-motion marvels?  A Grand Day Out?  The Wrong Trousers?  A Close Shave?  The Curse of the Were-Rabbit?