Or "Geronimo" if you prefer.

Dalek, sonic screwdriver, and ... allons-y.

- Sid

The Day of the Doctor.

 "We are here!  We are here!"

Doctor Seuss, Horton Hears A Who.

All the Whos down in Whoville, the tall and the small...

Hello to the fellow Whovians in the audience - twenty minutes to the fiftieth anniversary broadcast of Doctor Who:  are we all ready? Have you gone to the toilet?  Have you put on your fez, scarf, or sprig of celery, depending on your favourite Doctor?  Do you have your sonic screwdriver in hand?

One of the key reasons for the longevity (no pun intended) of Doctor Who is the flexibility of the concept.  Each of the actors who has portrayed the renegade Time Lord has brought something different to the role:  the Doctor has been a father figure, a comedian, a sage, a scientist - and today, if the intriguing online prequel episode is a reliable guide, we meet the Warrior.

The Doctor has always had a sort of fragile, contradictory covenant with the concept of non-violent solutions - he won't even accept the phrase "we'll kill them" as a metaphor for success at football - but he is also responsible for ending the Time War, apparently by wiping out both sides of the conflict, the Daleks and his own people, the Time Lords of Gallifrey.  I'm hoping that today's episode will shed some light on how all of that came about, how the Doctor was able to reconcile all the elements of his character in order to commit genocide - twice.

Ooops, nine minutes to go, off to the telly - more to follow.

- Sid

"Clear skies with a chance of satellite debris."

Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón's homage to mass and inertia, is a great movie.  Sandra Bullock gives a gripping performance as orbital disaster victim Dr. Ryan Stone, supported by scripting and direction that combine to present an intimate, emotional experience against an epic backdrop. The film beautifully balances and contrasts the awesome beauty of planet Earth as seen from orbit with touches of humanity: country and western music, bits of everyday life like chess pieces and pens, and the crying of a baby over a radio.

But the really impressive thing about Gravity, the thing that really caught my attention?

It's not science fiction.

The settings of space shuttle, International Space Station and Soyuz flight module are real settings; the spacesuits are real spacesuits, with clumsy gloves and fogged faceplates; and the dangers being faced are real dangers, no more fictional than the perils of being killed during a bank robbery or waking up in a burning house.   

Yes, we as a species have now reached a point in time where it's possible to make a 90 minute movie, set in space*, in which the heroine narrowly escapes death by satellite debris impact, lack of oxygen, zero-gee combustion, freezing, explosive decompression, and burning up on re-entry to Earth's atmosphere, and it's not science fiction. In fact, when it finally dawned on me that I wasn't watching a science fiction movie, I was almost embarrassed, as if I had gone to the theatre under false pretenses. 

 And the next step?  The next step is we start shooting on location...

- Sid

* Okay, near-Earth orbit if you're going to be picky.