Lost in time.

Honestly, I expected to just have a relaxing long weekend getaway in Whistler with my wonderful wife - we've been there before, and other than Whistler Village's unnerving evocation of the Village from the 1967 cult classic TV series The Prisoner, I really didn't think that there'd be anything blogworthy.

It took us some time to find our AirBnB, the numbering in the rental complex was surprisingly nonlinear. There must have been some kind of rational system, but we never did figure it out.  We finally found the right door, keyed in the entry code and made our way upstairs with our luggage. 

Karli had found us a pleasant little two-level condo, with an outdoor deck on each level - it says a great deal about life in Whistler that the upstairs deck was considerably larger than the living room area.  We unpacked and, while Karli was getting ready for go out for a walk around the village, I casually turned on the TV to see what was available.

I was intrigued to discover that the listings included a Classic Doctor Who channel, which was in the middle of showing The Hand of Fear, a Tom Baker episode originally broadcast in 1976.   

A little research revealed that Classic Doctor Who is part of the Britbox offering, which probably shouldn't be a huge surprise - although it's a bit confusing given that the new Doctor Who episodes are on Crave, it seems odd that they'd split them up. It seemed equally odd that it was part of whatever streaming package our host had chosen for his rental guests: with the best will in the world, not a lot of people are going to ditch their weekend plans* in favour of catching up on the full catalogue of the Doctor's classic adventures, in all of their cardboard-tube-and-bubble-wrap** special effects glory.

Although, in a way, it's not completely accurate to talk about the full catalogue of Doctor Who episodes.  There were 253 episodes of the series produced between 1963 and 1969, and 97 of them are missing.

This sounds like a tragic mistake in the era of fandom and franchises, but in the 1960s, the standards were completely different. During the 1960s, BBC productions were generally videotaped for broadcast. The tapes were quite expensive, and as such they were erased for reuse shortly after they were shown.  In fact, none of the Doctor Who episodes from the 60s have been recovered from videotape, they were all erased.

However, the episodes were also distributed internationally, and due to the differing requirements of global broadcasting, the solution of choice was to use a telecine process to transfer the episodes to film masters, which were then used to create copies for distribution.  As time went on and space ran out, many of the original masters were disposed of, but over the years, many of the copies have been recovered from archives and storage lockers all around the planet, and in some cases borrowed from the libraries of private collectors, and used to digitally recreate the episodes. 

However, the random nature of the recovery process has resulted in a number of alternative solutions for recreating missing episodes.  Animated versions have been created based on amateur audio recordings of the episodes***, and low resolution NTSC videotapes have been used as guides for colourizing scans of 16mm black and white versions. 

To illustrate the degree to which these missing episodes have become valuable items to the serious collector, twelve cans of film were discovered in Nigeria in 2013, including the full six episodes of The Enemy of the World and five missing chapters of The Web of Fear from the fifth season of Doctor Who. Before they could be shipped to the BBC, Episode 3 of The Web of Fear vanished, presumably stolen and sold to the highest bidder.

Up until now, we've somehow avoided adding Britbox to our otherwise comprehensive collective of streaming services, but now that I'm aware of the classic episodes channel, I'm giving serious consideration to signing up, so as to have a replacement for my treasured but aging selections from the BBC's DVD releases of the Doctor's classic adventures.  Hmmm...let's take a look...it IS only $9.99 a month, but would it be worth it...okay, they've got Blake's 7, Red Dwarf, Eleventh Hour, The City & The City, the 1981 version of The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy and David Tennant in The Quatermass Experiment as well, right, I'm in.

- Sid

* Nor did I.  I did watch a couple of chapters while Karli was doing other things, but I would never have suggested that we spend the next three days watching TV, however tempting it might be.

** Yes, we're looking at you, The Ark in Space.

*** I kind of love the random nature of this solution.  Imagine that you're a Doctor Who fan in the pre-VHS era, and the only way that you can display your dedication to your beloved Time Lord is by recording audio versions of the show and imagining the visuals.

"Je ne regrette rien."

You Know You're a Geek When, Part 4.

Gimli: Legolas! Two already!

Legolas: I'm on seventeen!

Gimli: Huh? I'll have no pointy-ear outscoring me! [kills another one]

Legolas: [shoots two more arrows] Nineteen!

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 

My workplace is currently going through a process of reviewing and optimizing our procedures in hopes of improving efficiency and creating a more streamlined system.  This isn't an easy process - among other issues, we're ridiculously paper-based, considering that it's 2022.  And I do mean ridiculously, I personally print over a million* pages of training support material on an annual basis.

As part of the review process, everyone has been tasked with logging their productivity on a daily basis.  It's not as onerous as it sounds, but there have been some challenges in establishing appropriate scaling for metrics.  We were discussing this during one of our morning productivity meetings, and I raised the problem of measuring quantity rather than size in terms of productivity.  Sadly, it turned out to be a bit of a weregeek moment.

"It's like the second Lord of the Rings movie, where Legolas the Elf and Gimli the Dwarf are competing to see who has the higher kill count in their various battles, right?"

Silence and blank faces.  Undeterred (and obviously unwilling to read the room) I continued:

"And at one point, Legolas takes out a huge war elephant, this gigantic tusked monster.  He slides down the trunk of the fallen creature and hops off to stand nonchalantly in front of Gimli, who frowns at him and shouts, 'That still only counts as one!'  It's the same sort of problem - we have to look at scale rather than just counting events."

More silence followed - I think that the other attendees were either puzzled, confused, embarrassed for me, or all three, I've never had more people avoid eye contact. Well, too bad, I regret nothing, it was a perfect analogy for the problem, geek reference or not - muggles.

- Sid 

*Yes, ONE MILLION, to quote Doctor Evil.

"I create myself."

Rose: I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. I take the words, I scatter them in time and space. A message to lead myself here.

The Parting of the Ways, Doctor Who

In the first season of the 2005 Doctor Who relaunch, writer and showrunner Russell T. Davies started the idea of introducing Easter Eggs for the show's finale that would appear throughout the season.  For that first season, it was the phrase "Bad Wolf", that appeared as a project development title*, in conversational references, on posters, as a TV channel, a corporate name, and several times as graffiti. 

In the final episode, Rose Tyler, the new Doctor's first companion, gazes into the Time Vortex and becomes temporarily omnipotent.  She names herself the Bad Wolf and then broadcasts those words into her own past as a signal to herself in the future.**

Yesterday I saw bad wolf painted on a brick wall in Gastown, and a small part of me asked, "Rose...were you here?"

- Sid

* Albeit in Welsh.

** Wibbley wobbley, timey wimey...