I think I'll pass, thank you.

Yeah, funny thing...we never actually saw anyone get off this ride at the PNE...

- Sid

"And the weatherman says something’s on the move…."

The climate is what you expect; the weather is what you get.

Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

Texas is currently dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, which made its landfall late on Friday with winds of 130 miles an hour and torrential rains. So far eight fatalities have been reported, and the region has been devastated by the combination of wind, rain and flooding.*

This kind of catastrophe seems to be the new normal of climate and weather in the new millennium, and it may well be that as time goes on, unchecked global climate change will continue to worsen the situation.  Hurricanes could become stronger, and the gaps between them shorter, until ultimately an constant stormfront gnawed sullenly at the Eastern coast of the United States.

What option would the future United States have when faced with an opponent of this magnitude? 

Retreat.

In that future, the United States finally abandons the East Coast, moving everything and everyone 100 miles inland.  However, the US economy depends on a ceaseless flow of seaborne cargo, so the waterfront must remain open.  The result:  Festung America - its ports bunkered emplacements of concrete and steel, like a Maginot line around a beleaguered country. And, like the Maginot Line, ultimately a futile gesture, outflanked as tornadoes brutally march across the American Midwest, and temperatures in California continue to climb above this year's record high of 125° F.

Remember when this sort of thing was more like science fiction?

- Sid

P.S. For some excellent reading in which weather conditions are part of the plot rather than the background to the story, I strongly recommend that you pick up Heavy Weather, by Bruce Sterling, and The Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi.

* It's getting harder and harder to say anything that doesn't sound trite in terms of support and sympathy, there have been so many disasters in the past few years that it feels like everything has been said. I guess the simplest things are still the most true: good luck.  You are all in everyone's thoughts.

"Once upon a time there was light in my life..."

 

10:17 PDT - total eclipse starts.

2:47 EDT - total eclipse ends.

World did not come to an end - check.

Trump still president - check.

Oh well, you win some, you lose some....

- Sid

"Not that it's a B-52 in outer space."

"We spent weeks and weeks building it up, encrusting the set with pipes and wires and switches and tubing and just about anything we could lay our hands on.  Then we painted it military green and began stenciling labels on everything. Ridley came back from the States and said, 'That's it, you've got it,' and then told us to keep going."

Alien Art Director Roger Christian, The Book of Alien

My workplace has recently retired the two simulators that we were using for crane training. (If you're curious, we replaced them with actual cranes - it's actually more cost effective to buy a crane solely for the purposes of training rather than disrupting the regular flow of work by having trainees operate production equipment.)

The simulators have been torn down, and our facilities manager has invited bids from anyone in the company who want the elements of the unit for their own use.

I took a look at the bits and pieces that are up for grabs, and my first thought was that if I bought everything in the room, I would have a damn good start on turning our apartment into something very much like the bridge of the Nostromo, the spaceship from the original 1979 Alien film.

Swiss artist H. R. Giger's unique designs for the alien spaceship and the titular xenomorph tend to receive most of the attention when Alien is discussed, but it's impossible to ignore the strength of the design and art direction for the ship which is the backdrop for the action.

The initial designs were created by two of Britain's premier conceptual artists, Ron Cobb and Chris Foss, with the final look of the ship's interior based primarily on Cobb's artwork.  Cobb describes himself as "a frustrated engineer" and as such his designs are solidly based in practical reality. Cobb's design philosophy is aimed at enhancing the story rather than conflicting with it:

I resent films that are so shallow they rely entirely on their visual effects, and of course science fiction films are notorious for this.  I've always felt that there's another way to do it:  a lot of effort should be expended toward rendering the environment of the spaceship, or space travel, whatever the fantastic setting of your story should be - as convincingly as possible, but always in the background.  That way the story and the characters emerge and they become more real. If you were to set a story on an ocean liner, there would be bits of footage to explain what the ship was like docked or at sea, but it would remain at the background of the story.  It should be the same with science fiction.

The concepts were combined and refined by art director Roger Christian to create the final look that gives the movie its gritty, realistic feel.

 

"Ridley showed us Dr. Strangelove, and he kept saying, "That's what I want.  Do you see?  Not that it's a B-52 in outer space, but it's the military look.' You can't really draw it...but I knew what he was saying because I had done it in Star Wars, so I said...'Let's have a go at it.' "

In order to make the set as believable as possible, every control on the bridge had a practical function, so that if an actor hit a swich, it would have an effect - a light would go on or off, a view would change, and so on.  The set was deliberately built to have a ceiling low enough to be visible, which combined with the fighter-bomber influenced overhead consoles to give the bridge a tight, claustrophic feel.

I can easily see how our apartment hallway would change into one of the ship's corridors, the second bedroom could be the escape craft set, and the living room would be the perfect site for the bridge of the Nostromo.  Heck, there's even a cat to fill in for Jones, the ship's feline mascot, although Jaq is a bit more solidly built than his movie alter ego.  Now all I have to do is convince Karli that this is something that we want to do to our home.  Gosh, that seems easy enough...

- Sid

"So put me on! Don’t be afraid!"

There’s nothing hidden in your head

The Sorting Hat can’t see,

So try me on and I will tell you

Where you ought to be.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Today at lunch I went to the bank to get some cash for an upcoming getaway to the Okanagan Valley with my partner Karli and her squad.  I work near Vancouver's Downtown East Side, and in order to get to the nearest branch of the CIBC, I have to pass Main and Hastings - possibly Canada's most notorious crossroads - walking past addicts and beggars, people selling drugs or selling their bodies, and people who have lost their grip on reality due to mental illness of some sort.

Every time I walk past that particular intersection, I wish that I were Harry Potter, armed with the Sorting Hat and a magic wand.  Everyone in the DTES would line up, and the Sorting Hat would look into their minds to discover the real reason for them being where they are.

"A regular person, a little bit stuck

All out of money and down on their luck." 

A tap of the magic wand, and they've got an entry level job and a decent place to live.

"Addiction to drugs is a terrible curse

That takes the afflicted from bad into worse."

Tap of the wand, and poof, rehabilitation - then a job and a home, just like first group.

"Mentally ill and right out of your head

Lost in the dark when off of your meds."

Magic wand:  proper medical care and a safe haven for those poor souls who wander the DTES screaming at a world that they can't understand.

"Criminal, villainous, evil and cruel

Refusing to follow the civilized rules."

Unfortunately, there may well be people who should not pass GO or collect $200, but rather should go directly to jail. Some of this last group needs rehabilitation and redemption as much as addicts or the mentally ill, or may just need a job and a new start, but the hat will tell us exactly what is in everyone's heart - if you're just a bad person, you pay the consequences.

And then, when everyone had put on the hat and been tapped by the wand, Hastings and Main would just be another address.  How sad that it would probably take magic to make that a reality.

- Sid

Fallout 4: Not to mention Kevin Costner.

I've found four or five people equipped like this in Fallout 4 - hopefully SF author David Brin was amused by the post-apocalyptic nod from Bethesda.  (The bad news is that they were all corpses, which may be the most probable result of running around after the end of the world trying to scam people by pretending to be a postman.)

- Sid

Fallout 4: The Life Aquatic.

As part of my Survival mode replay of Fallout 4, I've also been exploring parts of the map that I just didn't get to previously, such as Spectacle Island*, located in the ocean to the southeast of the city.  Because I'm unable to fast travel to locations, I've also been using bays and lakes as shortcuts to speed up my travel time.

As a result, I've been spending a lot of game time underwater - which, quite frankly, creeps me out.  I had a bad experience with water as a small child, which has left me with a lifelong aversion to swimming.  I realize full well that I'm just looking at pixels on a screen, but my chest tightens a bit whenever I jump into a body of water and the weight of my power armour pulls me down, down, down to the bottom.

It tightens even more whenever I find myself forced into deeper water for any reason - it's one thing to enter the ocean by walking into the water from a beach, a completely different thing to discover that, in order to make your exit, you have to detour deeper to find a path out of a shipping channel.

Granted, if you stay underwater long enough, your armour will eventually run out of air (which, again, creeped me out more than a little the first time it happened and I realized that I was in trouble) but there's also an upgrade perk which allows you to breathe underwater, so now that I have that, presumably I could spend as much time as I want marching around in the wet.

Unfortunately, the game programmers haven't done very much to make it worth my while.  There's a bit of seaweed, some sunken cargo containers, the occasional ditched aircraft or drowned house, at least one suit of submerged power armour, and my trip to Spectacle Island revealed massive enigmatic pipelines running under the water, but that's about it. There are amphibious monsters in the game, but I haven't run into anything dangerous under the water, all of my encounters have taken place in the air.**  In fact, it's not even possible to deploy weapons when submerged.

If anyone from the game development group at Bethesda Softworks is reading this, I'd like to strongly recommend that they change all that. Making the underwater environment as fully featured as the land would be a huge opportunity to add additional depth (no pun intended) to the game.

As hinted by the appearance of dead fish and beached mutant shark-dolphins on the shoreline, it would be easy to create an underwater ecology to match the surface one.  Whereas on the surface the player harvests plants and shoots animals - either for food or in self-defense - the submarine survivor would be dredging up seaweed, prying open shell fish, and defending themselves against whatever undersea menaces the creative minds in game development could come up with.

And, obviously, there would have to be an armoury of subsurface weaponry:  spear guns, tridents, and so on, as well as modifications to the existing catalogue of surface weapons to allow underwater usage.  (After all, a knife is a knife, whether you're on land or under the sea.)

To make it even more involved, the concept of underwater settlements would be an interesting addition.  Whereas on the surface, settlements are restricted to certain areas, the oceanic equivalent would be abandoned undersea bases which the player would have to pump out, supply with oxygen, and equip with defenses against pirates or aquatic creatures. There could even be one or two of the experimental Vaults that sheltered a selected few from the atomic holocaust - perhaps one with a secret tunnel connecting it to another Vault located on the mainland.

The creation of submarine wildlife would be simple. Instead of birds, there would be fish, the amphibious mirelurks would have a larger role as we discovered their underwater nests and communities, and the reptilian deathclaws would only need gills and fins to make the change to life in the ocean.

Frankly, I'd like them to stop there.  As we go further from land, the bottom drops away to vast dark gulfs, alien to light and warmth, where unimaginable horrors may lie in wait...

Seriously, the underwater parts already make me nervous, I don't need to have nightmares.

- Sid

* An actual island near the real-world Boston.  Thompson Island, located closer to the mainland, didn't make the cut for the game.

** Although  I do seem to recall being attacked while wading around in the sewers in Fallout 3.

“Is the future going to be all girl?”

What does it feel like to be the first woman Doctor?

"It feels completely overwhelming, as a feminist, as a woman, as an actor, as a human, as someone who wants to continually push themselves and challenge themselves, and not be boxed in by what you’re told you can and can’t be. It feels incredible."

-  Jodie Whittaker

And so, without an excessive amount of inappropriate fan-boy fallout*, the first woman Doctor: 34-year-old English** actor Jodie Whittaker. Whittaker fits nicely into the profile of Doctor Who leads since the 2005 reboot: she's an experienced professional with a solid portfolio of work, but her acting profile isn't extremely high, which makes her an affordable casting choice for the show.*** (As per previous discussion of budgets, salaries and so on.)

That being said, I hope that her wage packet is comparable to her predecessors, given the manner in which the BBC is currently struggling with gender pay gap problems. In one of this season's episodes, the Doctor commented that the Time Lords are "billions of years beyond your petty obsession with gender and its associated stereotypes" - BBC management would do well to follow their example.

As fans adjust to the change, it's fair to say that Ms. Whittaker will have to accept some changes as well.  Apparently in the past she has been happy to go unrecognized by people on the street, preferring a low profile in public - ah, well, I have some bad news for you there, Jodie...  

Similarly, she'll need to prepare herself to answer questions about life in the TARDIS that have little to do with her craft as an actor.  I recall interviews with Liam Neeson regarding his work as Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace in which he was so obviously baffled by questions about lightsabers and the Force, rather than character development and acting decisions.

Whittaker has worked with two previous Doctors:  she shared the stage with Christopher Eccleston in a theatrical production of Antigone in 2012, in which she played the title role, and more recently appeared with David Tennant on Broadchurch.  When asked for his opinion on Whittaker's casting during a recent appearance on The Tonight Show, Tennant commented:

“You know, sure, Jodie is from a different gender than anyone who has gone before, but that will be irrelevant almost immediately once she takes the part.  It’s about finding the right performer at the right time, and that’s Jodie, without a doubt.”

He's completely correct - Whittaker's gender should be irrelevant, she should be judged on the quality of her work rather than her sex. However, I suspect it's going to be challenging for people to avoid commenting on her status as the first female Doctor when discussing her performance  - I think of this as the Obama Effect.  Hopefully she'll be able to make her mark based on more than just being the first woman in the role.

But let's not diminish that milestone.  The last couple of years have been very positive for the genre in terms of strong female leads: Rey in The Force Awakens, Jyn Erso in Rogue One, the massively successful Wonder Woman movie, and now a female Doctor. To quote an exchange from the final episode of this season:

The Master: “Is the future going to be all girl?”

The Doctor: ”We can only hope.”

- Sid

* I somehow doubt that many of the naysayers are fan-girls, although you never know.

** I bet we'll have to wait a LOT longer for the lead in Doctor Who not to be from the British Isles.  It's been surprising enough that two of the last three were Scottish.

*** I've also seen photos of Whittaker that demonstrate a slightly maniacal grin, which seems to have become one of the prerequisites for the part.

"Happy birthday to you...."

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the Curiousity rover on Mars - and, with apologies, a belated anniversary greeting to its older brother Opportunity, still operating after thirteen and a half years of travelling the Martian surface.  Best wishes from your organic brothers and sisters on Earth!  It's a commonly known fact that you play "Happy Birthday" for your anniversaries - I wish there was cake, too*.

 - Sid

* Candles would be a nice touch, but a bit of a challenge given the atmospheric conditions:  the Martian atmosphere is only 0.13% oxygen, as opposed to 21% here on Earth.

"More heads, more deads!"

 

You know, it was just a fluke that I decided to switch on the TV.

Karli and I were sitting on the couch, we'd been chatting, she was looking at texts on her iPad, and I idly decided to turn on our new 65 inch 4K set from LG, if for no other reason than to admire the picture. (And it is very nice.)*

As you might expect, I jumped to the Space Channel, and to my astonishment, they were broadcasting A SCIENCE FICTION SHARK MOVIE!!!!!

Ish.

Admittedly, Three Headed Shark Attack didn't qualify for recognition from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences due to its direct-to-video release in 2015 - in case you didn't know, a film must show for seven consecutive days in a commercial motion picture theater in Los Angeles County to be considered for an Oscar - but that's not the point.  My ongoing complaint with Space's odd prediliction for shark movies is that they haven't qualified as science fiction, either.

However, the presence of a three-headed mutant garbage-eating Great White does sneak this production over the line into SF, however unfortunate that may be for the reputation of the genre at large.  As such, I have to give kudos to Space for finally, FINALLY addressing this ongoing issue in their programming.  Presumably they started with Two Headed Shark Attack, and followed up with the sequel, Five Headed Shark Attack.

And Laurie, I hope that you enjoyed all three of them.

 - Sid

* No money was received from LG for this unsolicited testimonial, although should someone there read this posting and decide to cut me a cheque, I'm good with that, too.

"I could never resist a countdown."

 

"Is this Neil Armstrong?"

Bill Potts, God Save the Queen, Doctor Who

My girlfriend Karli has been watching this year's season of Doctor Who with me, which is a wonderful thing for her to do.  I honestly feel that it's a labour of love, because Doctor Who is not always as approachable as it could be.  (Which is an odd comment to make about a mass market televison series, but it's generally agreed that Doctor Who may not be for everyone.)

The down side of this shared experience is that, due to scheduling issues caused by work, social obligations, grocery shopping, laundry, and all the other things that make up life as a couple, we're down a few episodes - the final episode of the season has already been broadcast*, and we've just recently watched Episode 9, God Save the Queen.

As you might expect from a program that's over 50 years old, there are Doctor Who scripts that rely heavily on nostalgia - in this storyline, they revisit the Ice Warriors of Mars, who made their first appearance on Doctor Who in 1967. Unfortunately, that's not enough to save the episode. This is one of those disappointing outings by the Doctor that has an intriguing premise, but which fails to follow through to an innovative and interesting conclusion.

The BBC production department versus...

I was also a bit disappointed by the BBC's set design for Mission Control at NASA. The episode begins with a NASA ground crew anxiously awaiting the video stream from a Mars probe. It's okay, but compared to something like the sets for The Martian, the BBC version comes off a poor second.

...The Martian's set designers versus...

But let's be fair, The Martian had a budget of $108M USD, compared to the £800,000 to £1M per episode** of Doctor Who, although obviously you need a lot more money to hire Matt Damon than Peter Capaldi.*** (No offense, Peter.)

On the other hand, NASA has an annual budget of $19.5 BILLION USD, and I don't know if the real thing is all that impressive.****

....the United States Government.

 Ah, but the actual NASA version is already just sitting there, no production costs involved - maybe the Doctor Who principals should have just flown over to Florida and shot a few minutes of video there, which would only have cost the BBC some equipment rentals and a couple of tickets on British Airways.  And I almost guarantee that they wouldn't need to hire extras - I'm willing to bet that there are more than a few people at NASA who would be happy to make a free cameo appearance in a Doctor Who episode.

- Sid

* And frankly, the BBC's YouTube™ channel makes absolutely no allowance for people who aren't up to date - have they not heard of PVR? Damn it, you could at least make the thumbnail frames free of spoilers!!

** Probably. I was unable to find a hard statement online regarding the Doctor Who budget, but there seems to be a general consensus of about £13M per season, give or take.

*** $25M USD for Mr. Damon's turn at Mark Watney, versus about £17,000 an episode for Mr. Capaldi's work as the Doctor.  And now you know why everyone wants to work in Hollywood.

(Actually, even with the conversion rate on the pound, that doesn't seem like a ton of money for being the last Time Lord.  By comparison, the stars on The Big Bang Theory pull in a million bucks an episode.)

**** To be fair, the Jet Propulsion Lab version looks a bit cooler (or least their photographer is clever enough to kill the room lights:

And finally, the original Saturn mission control - old school cool, but let's be honest, the gigantic screens were NOT part of the original setup:

No blade of grass.

Even this far from shore, the night stank. The sea moved lazily, its embryo waves aborted before cresting by the layer of oily residues surrounding the hull, impermeable as sheet plastic: a mixture of detergents, sewage, industrial chemicals and the microscopic cellulose fibers due to toilet paper and newsprint. There was no sound of fish breaking surface. There were no fish.  

John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up

Do you want Godzilla? Because that's how you get Godzilla.

One small problem - this isn't a bad movie. This announcement is part of a far more threatening scenario for the future than the genesis of Japan's favourite kaiju.

Modern history is full of ecological disasters: Minimata, Bhopal, Love Canal, the Summitville mines, Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, Chernobyl and Chelyabinsk, the list goes on and on, each entry with its own associated tally of deaths, birth defects, ruined ecosystems, blighted landscapes, and so on.  Fukushima had already made the list, and it seems either blind, stupid, or arrogant - perhaps all three - to decide that the resulting toxic waste is a suitable candidate for aquatic disposal.

Time and time again, science fiction has painted a future in which the accumulated sins of the industrial age have come home to roost. It can be in the background, as in The Postman, the Mad Max movies or The Road, or the focus of the story as in The Sheep Look Up, The Death of Grass, The End of the Dream, The Last Hope of Earth, or a host of other grim outcomes.

Right now, the various crimes against nature have been widely spread across the globe, and relatively small in size, like pinpricks compared to the planet itself.  However, it only takes a pinprick to pop a balloon...
 
Come to think of it, a giant lizard with atomic breath might be the best we could hope for.

- Sid

"Swedish for common sense."

At some point, we will begin to colonize the rest of our solar system.

Science fiction - and science fiction fans - just take that as a given.  How could we not?  And as such, science fiction is full of examples of Moon bases and Mars colonies and space stations and so on.

However, the finer details of the process are frequently left to the imagination.  I've been rewatching The Martian, the excellent 2015 adaptation of Andy Weir's equally excellent novel*, on Netflix™ and it occurred to me that they never really discuss where the Hab module on Mars comes from.  In the movie, it's apparently quite a solid structure, although in the novel, it's just a bubble, held in shape by air pressure (which makes the scene where the airlock blows out a bit more challenging for the abandoned astronaut Mark Watney, because the entire structure collapses).

But it takes more than air pressure to make a house a home, to misquote Walter Brennan.  It takes desks. It takes desks, and beds, tables and chairs, shelves and cabinets, and all the other bits and pieces that make up a functioning living and working space, whether it's on Mars or the Moon.

Ignoring the question of how the Ares 3 team put all this together in a couple of Martian weeks, how did all the bits and pieces get there?  We're looking at a situation where both space and weight are at a premium: every milligram matters when it comes to fuel consumption, as demonstrated by the process of demolishing the Ares 4 Mars Ascent Vehicle so that it has enough fuel to take Watney to a rendezvous with the Hermes.

So far, this sort of thing hasn't been a real problem for NASA.  The International Space Station is constructed from prefabricated modules that have been boosted into orbit and assembled** over a time span of almost 20 years, and it doesn't need furniture as such - lack of gravity makes wheeled office chairs a bit redundant.

However, as soon as we start setting up a base in any kind of a gravity well, furnishings will become an issue, and NASA will need to look at the logistics of transporting all the associated bits and pieces required to create a functioning and livable habitat to another world. It will require lightweight modular furniture, packaged so that there is no wasted space, and which can be assembled easily and quickly with a minimum of tools.

But where can they go for this sort of expertise?  Hmmm...oh, wait, I know...

- Sid

* To be honest, I feel that the novel is a bit more excellent than the movie.  It's certainly more sciency.

** Shout out to both the Canadarm and the Canadarm II.

And the winners are...

It's the 150th anniversary of Confederation*, and although it's not officially part of the celebration, Prime Minister Trudeau chose Canada Day to announce the names of the two successful candidates in the recruiting process for Canada's next astronauts, chosen from 3,772 applicants over the course of a twelve-month selection process.

This process was designed to find the people with "the right skills and character to become Canada's next astronauts", to quote the Canadian Space Agency web site.

Candidates were subjected to an exhaustive array of tests:  medical, logic, intelligence, physical fitness, strategic thinking, critical reasoning, dexterity, resourcefulness, motivation, leadership and, in the final stages of the process, robotics, health and communications, followed by a final interview with a special committee of CSA executives, industry experts, and astronauts, both former and active.

And the winners are?  Joshua Kutryk and Jennifer "Jenni" Sidey, both originally from Alberta - Kutryk from Saskatchewan and Sidey from Calgary.

Sidey has worked as a combustion scientist and a mechanical engineer.  She has two degrees in engineering, including a Ph.D. from Cambridge. Kutryk, a Lieutenant Colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces, has been both a test pilot and a fighter pilot, and has degrees in mechanical engineering, space studies**, flight test engineering, and defense studies.

It's interesting to look at the stats from the start of the process.  It's not too surprising that the majority of the candidates were from Ontario and Quebec, but it's intriguing that Alberta had the third highest percentage of applications - British Columbia's population is 13% larger, but submitted almost 5% less applicants. Is there something about life on the prairies that makes people dream of space? Or something about life on the coast that makes them less eager for adventure?

The saddest statistic on this infographic is the total number of applications started versus the number completed.  I'd like to express my sympathy to the 4,021 people who started on the challenging path to space travel, but then discovered that it was a path that they could not follow. Dreamers, optimists, or just people who had one too many drinks - I feel for you during that moment that you decided that you weren't the right stuff.

My congratulations to Jennifer and Joshua for having the determination to follow their dream to success. Please remember that you're there for all of us - especially those 4,021 others.

- Sid

* Why do we not call ourselves the Confederation of Canada?  It has a nice "United Federation of Planets" sound to it.

** You can get a degree in Space Studies?   Apparently - although according to their website, it appears to be a minor.  http://catalog.erau.edu/daytona-beach/minors/space-studies/

Counting down II.

With one week to go until Canada's 150th birthday, here's a video about the distinctive nature of our country from one of our great national icons: Dave Hadfield.

And his brother Chris.

- Sid

(My favourite part of this video is at 3:11, where we watch Canada's best known astronaut solemnly launching a thirty-five dollar model rocket.)

Y meddyg sy'n profi.

(Contributed by Chris Sumner)

When I was exploring Cardiff during my recent trip to England and Wales, I texted Sid with a couple of pictures of landmarks from Torchwood, the Doctor Who spinoff - the front entrance of the secret headquarters and also its side entrance.  (This headquarters got blown up in the Children of Earth series.)  He suggested I write a posting on his blog regarding this and the Doctor Who Experience I had yet to visit.  Sid had been bothering me a while about doing a blog posting, and a few people he knows, including my sister, have written a guest posting.  Here is mine.

Getting back to Torchwood Cardiff, I wasn’t able to jump on the ‘lift’ at the front entrance as there was some outdoor footie screen thing going on and it was in the process of being fenced off.  There were armed guards patrolling nearby as this was a few days after the Manchester bombing at the Ariana Grande concert, so I didn’t want to pull some guerilla culture move, especially since I was wearing a backpack. I then proceeded to the side entrance.  This has become a shrine to Ianto Jones, a main character of the show who died in the aforementioned Children of Earth series of Torchwood.

The next day, I decided to go to the Dr. Who Experience near the docks.  Sid had visited the London version when it was in England in 2011 so I was interested to see what was different about this version.

I arrived several minutes before the 10 AM opening time, keen to get underway.  The show started a few minutes after ten when the first group of visitors assembled.  We had a guide that was dressed in Gallifreyan garb* – minus the head (and shoulder) dress.  He explained to us the rules of engagement of the experience. This was semi-interactive as the audience was tasked to do several things throughout.

Peter Capaldi, the present Doctor, appeared on various video screens throughout the ‘show’ and he was his cantankerous self as he cajoled and insulted the audience (and our guide) into saving the universe from various threats including the Daleks. The audience had to find three crystals in the sets we passed through.  Children were the keenest to perform this task. There was a shaking floor and other special effects to make the experience more real.  We needed to fly the TARDIS as the Doctor was unable to be there himself.  It was fun to watch Mr. Capaldi in this role and it felt like I was in a mini-episode.

Once the initial show was over, in which we were not allowed to take any photographs or videos, we went into the exhibit part of the Experience.  

 

There were pieces from different points in the Doctor’s past such as the various models of the Daleks and the Cybermen as they went through their evolution.  

 

Also present were the ice warriors, the Silence and the weeping angels, the outfits of the Doctors and some of his companions, and a small section dedicated to Torchwood.  

 

If you aren’t a Doctor Who fan this experience will probably not hold your interest, but it is certainly worth the visit if you are.  

Unfortunately, the gift shop was out of medium and large T-shirt sizes for pretty much every shirt they had for sale, so I didn’t get the T-shirt, just a mug with Gallifreyan designs.

 

The most unexpected moment was when I went to the loo before I went into the ‘live action’ portion of the Experience at the beginning.  With nothing more in mind than ridding myself of hotel breakfast coffee, I rounded a corner and came face to face with an adversary of both the Doctor and humanity.  It made me jump a little and then smile. I am sure the Daleks would be the masters of earth if they only took over all the lavatories on the planet.

- Chris

Thanks very much for a great post, Chris - and some great pictures!  It looks like they've upgraded the Doctor Who Experience since my visit - sadly, my next visit to the UK won't be until next fall, and there's been talk of retiring the Experience before then.  Ah, well, as the Doctor often reminds us, nothing last forever...

- Sid

* For the uninitiated, here's a shot of ex-Doctor David Tennant modelling a vintage Gallifreyan Time Lord costume -WITH the head (and shoulder) dress.

 - Sid