River Song Returns

Alex Kingston to reprise River Song for new Doctor Who audio plays

By Morgan JefferySaturday, Jun 27 2015, 5:00am EDT
River Song (Alex Kingston) will cross paths with the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) in a new series of Doctor Who audio plays.
Kingston will reprise her role as the time-traveling archaeologist in Doctor Who: Doom Coalition 2 from Big Finish Productions.

Best known for their audio plays based on the classic Doctor Who series, Big Finish have recently begun branching out into new series material with the upcoming box-set UNIT: Extinction starring Jemma Redgrave (Kate Stewart) and Ingrid Oliver (Osgood).
Doom Coalition 2 will be released in March 2016 - with Kingston joined by McGann, plus Nicola Walker and Hattie Morahan as the Doctor's companions Liv Chenka and Helen Sinclair.
River will then return later in 2016 with her own spinoff series - Doctor Who: The Diary of River Song, a four-hour adventure which will again feature McGann in its final installment.
Further 2016 efforts from Big Finish based on the new series will include Doctor Who: The Churchill Years - with Ian McNeice reprising his role of Winston Churchill to narrate a four-hour saga, recounting the indomitable Prime Minister's unseen encounters with the Doctor.
Meanwhile, Doctor Who: Classic Doctors, New Monsters will pit the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Doctors against creatures invented for the new series.

Well, I for one welcome the return of River Song, although I understand why some might not like the character.  And interesting how they're slowly slipping in elements of the new series.  Not so likely to get Eccleston of course, but maybe in a one-off recording one day...

<rant>Only thing I don't like about this is...blasted box-sets again.  It's such a stupid format for a digital era, hasn't exactly encouraged the best writing in the past, and accelerates the splintering of BF's offerings to such a degree that it's difficult for fans to keep track of it all, never mind afford them (single-releases, at least they can dip in and out, one manageably long story at a time).  But Briggs & Co. have made it clear that the box-sets are where everything's going, like it or not.</rant>

“The idea of River meeting previous Doctors was actually proposed by Steven Moffat,” says producer David Richardson, “and it's just irresistible, isn't it? Alex embraced the idea of returning to the role, and so she will be starring in no less than two box sets next year. And yes, we are still pinching ourselves!”

Yeah, lucky buggers.

Nuclear Freakin' Planes

Wow, that's one hell of a headline, huh ?  Nuclear-powered planes !   No possible problems with that idea.  I wonder why no-one else in the entire newsmedia is reporting on this amazing story.

Imagine flying from London to Sydney without having to stop over to change planes or refuel.

This is the dream of scientists looking to shape the next generation of air travel as they test a system of huge, nuclear-propelled aircraft constantly circling the globe.

Passengers would be delivered to the behemoths via smaller planes, along with their luggage. People could even change flights in mid-air.

Engineers are also working on “flying petrol stations” that could enable non-stop flights from Britain to the other side of the world.

Instead of touching down in ­Singapore or Dubai on the way to Australia, huge “air tankers” would be strategically positioned along long-haul routes to allow planes to refuel in mid-air, cutting the time it takes to travel the world.

Sounds cool, right ?  Full story over at the Mirror is complete with a kick-ass gallery and awesome video.  But seemingly no other supporting documentation, and no external links.    Last line of the 'article' may give an idea as to why:

But the team admitted: “Neither air-worthiness nor acceptance of the idea by the general public is within sight.”

Which idea would that be, I wonder.  So, let's go look up the Recreate Project, and see what they have to say...

Project

SUMMARY

The research done in this project is about the introduction and airworthiness of cruiser-feeder concepts of operations for civil aircraft. Cruiser-feeder concepts of operations are investigated as a promising pioneering idea enabling energy efficient air transport of the future. The soundness of cruiser-feeder concepts of operations for civil aircraft has been under investigation in the RECREATE project for 36 months. A concept with fuel transfer from feeder to cruiser, and a concept with payload transfer between feeder aircraft and a nuclear propelled cruiser have been studied extensively. For the latter nuclear cruiser concept, it is concluded that neither airworthiness nor acceptance of the idea by the general public is within sight. However, for the concept with fuel transfer from feeder to cruiser (civil air-to-air refuelling operations), the results of our collaborative research indicate a fuel burn reduction potential on isolated aircraft level between 11% and 23 % for a typical 6000 nautical miles flight with a payload of 250 passengers. It is remarked that the lower bond of this reduction potential is usually considered as large in the aerospace industry.

So actually, the Mirror didn't give these plucky researchers enough credit.  They haven't actually ruled out...mid-flight refuelling of civilian airliners.  Just...the nuclear freakin' planes.  Oh and the whole ridiculous mid-air transfer of passengers thing.

And hey, looks like they gave some free advertising to Big Finish.  That's nice.

Big Finish 162: Protect and Survive

Big Finish stories of recent years generally aren't what they used to be, but there's still the occasional rare gem, and Protect and Survive is one of these.  Since the end of the cold war, most, in the west at least, have been happy to forget the period as if the potentially world-ending conflict between East and West never happened, and the cold war has over time become a less and less common subject for popular fiction.  That this trend may now be coming to an end, as evidenced by the like of the recent BBC series 'The Game' is a sad reflection on our contemporary politics, as the idiots who run our foreign policy, seemingly desperately hungry for a new cold war, if not worse, go out of their way to seek confrontation and discord with Putin's Russia.  Strange how soon we forget, even seemingly those of us who lived through the sixties, seventies, or eighties.  How we once grew up somehow having to be reconciled with, or in denial of, the fact that we lived under constant threat of nuclear holocaust.  The threat never truly went away, and may even be greater today than it was then, but somehow with all the weight of history behind us, and all the knowledge previous generations lacked (such as just how close we really came to annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis), we'd still rather forget the uncomfortable truth of the recent past.  And as for the near-religious belief in the US in the ultimate victory over Communism, in the 'American Century', in the 'single Superpower', in 'American Exceptionalism', well that particular mindset seems bedded in for a generation or two at least.  And in the interim, as we shift political power from the generation of the Cheney's and Rumsfeld's to that of the millennials, who have grown up blissfully ignorant of the still very real nuclear threat hanging over the planet ?  Well, we're fucked, aren't we ?

Protect and Survive plunges Ace and Hex right into the very apocalypse many of us grew us fearing, and keeps them there in one of the tightest, more claustrophobic, and most atmospheric releases of recent years.  The title is taken from a remarkable series of public information films and pamphlets that were genuinely produced in the UK in the 80's with the intent of reassuring and pacifying the public in the event of a nuclear attack from the USSR.  Most Americans of a certain age are probably at least vaguely aware of the 'Duck and Cover' pieces of the fifties and sixties, but we're talking about the nineteen-eighties here, and trying to convince modern Britons that taping up their windows and hiding in their cellar for a few days would somehow protect them from the awesome explosions and fallout of the Soviet Union's most powerful weapons, each of them exponentially more powerful than those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Protect and Survive does a fine job of both capturing the ultimate futility of such efforts, and imagining the horror of facing the desperate reality of the 'survivors' of a nuclear attack, and in the case of Hex and Ace doing so over and over and over again.

This being modern Big Finish, it is unsurprisingly part of a three-part 'trilogy', and the larger story here regarding the Elder Gods frankly isn't much to get very excited about, but while the focus remains on Ace & Hex and the elderly couple whose shelter they share, the drama and tension is some of the best one could expect from Big Finish.  Sylvester McCoy's Doctor remains hidden in the shadows for much of the story, being eventually revealed as much more of the spider at the centre of the web, in keeping with his history on TV, and reflecting a theme of abandonment by the Doctor that seems increasingly common with Who, both on audio and TV, in this case giving Sophie Aldred and Philip Olivier that much more opportunity to bounce off one another and to shine in the Doctor's absence.  Sound design and editing throughout are excellent.  Would that it were financially possible for BF to return to an era of far fewer ranges, and one in which each of the main monthly releases could reach this level or better...

If you truly want to add to your nightmares, the original Protect and Survive videos are available at the Imperial War Museum (http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060022098) and elsewhere, and remember that this was our actual very recent history, and part of an imagining that could still reflect our very imminent future...or lack thereof.  Stupid humans !

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/protect-and-survive-330

Last Christmas: It was all a dream, again, and you're stuck with Clara Oswald, and me Steven Moffat, like it or not, losers...

Please God, no !?  That asshole Steven Moffat has determined to afflict us with another year (or more ?) of Clara fucking Oswald ?  Against all odds, I tried again to give Moffat 2.0 Who a chance, and really really wanted to like this Christmas Special; was yet again willing to give the show a chance.  I could overlook ripping off Alien, ripping off Inception, ripping off Big Finish (hello, why do you think the show was able to come back to TV in the first place ?), but fuck !...  And I never even published (maybe I still will) my rant about how much the obsessive and soap-opera-ish focus on Clara (to the extent of all else) ruined the last year's worth of Doctor Who.  But it's Christmas, so I suppose I should say...something nice.  Well,...I really appreciated seeing the lovely Natalie Gumede as something other than the psycho-bitch girlfriend of Tyrone on Corrie.  Wouldn't mind seeing more of her as anything other than Kirsty Soames.  And hell, I dream of the day that I can see Jenna Coleman without immediately thinking of that growing stain on Doctor Who that is Clara 'Greatest Fucking Companion of all Time and Space' Oswald.  The 'Moff' just added a year or more to the date of our eventual liberation.  Damnit !