h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've managed to avoid the hype surrounding Saxon
Mind you I did see them filming one of the bits involving him in Cardiff but all I learnt from watching that for about 10 minutes was that an election campaign must figure in the plot

Blues, I for one have no idea what you're talking about. I ALWAYS switch off before we see the "next week on Dr Who" bit and I seem to manage to always avoid any spoilers. So if the discussion is going to head down the "come on, we all know that THIS is gonna happen" road, can we have a spoiler alert? Cos we don't all know.



Deb

Simul-post there with Blackberry Cat

No intention of it going down that way. I'd have been royally p*ssed off if someone had told me the pay-off for series two (and I seem to have been the only one in the country who didn't...)

It's just I've not been able to avoid the news. Even the bloody Guardian reorted it.

"Interestingly, of course, the BBC/RTD could decide to kill of the daleks now and you'd never know. Who's to say that Khan wasn't the dalek they found in Arizona? "

It's Caan.

Seems unlikely to me that Caan was the Dalek from err, Dalek.
That Dalek appeared very much to be a normal Dalek footsolider. It squealed for orders and committed suicide when it realised it was becoming something other than pure dalek, and it didn't have a name.

Caan has a name, and was one of the cult of Skaro - he was built to think differently from other Daleks, and he was involved in the plan to create Dalek/human hybrids. Even after Sec was killed, the other three still went ahead with their plan. I just don't see a radical free-thinking Dalek acting like the one in Dalek.

It may be unlikely, though in fairness it took the other three the best part of two episodes to realise Sek was a mad as a lorry on helium. They spent a lot of the time squealing for orders and obeying them before that.

Besides, it doesn't need to be likely, it needs to be at least semi-plausible in the event of the Nation Estate sticking it to the Beeb.

(I actually rather enjoyed this story. Particulalrly the wonderful line. 'You told us to imagine. We imagined your irrelevence'.)

I decided (in the absence of any supporting evidence) that the spelling was probably Karn, partly because Kahn and Caan are already taken.

Nope, it's Caan for sure, check out the BBC Doctor Who site.

Oh, and a fundamental reason why Caan can't be Van Statten's Dalek - that Dalek didn't know how teh Time War had ended. It didn't realise it was the last Dalek. Caan would know that, and wouldn't have had to ask the Doctor what teh fate of the Timelords was.

And Karn's already taken in the Doctor Who universe, it's the planet where Morbius tried to raise an army against the Timelords - Tom Baker visited it in the story 'The Brain of Morbius'.

I've done my level best to avoid spoilers, so while I'm aware who is playing "Mr. Saxon", I'm still pretty vague on who he will appear to be (new PM of GB after Harriet wotsit? Murdochesque media figure? Head of Torchwood?), and who he will turn out to be really. As a fan I obviously have my suspicions (e.g. there's a new, male, basic humanoid villain. There's a massive list of possibilities, but LIKELY possibilities total, by my reckoning, just one: R Mate Seth, who liked his anagrams).

SoRB

Appalled to admit it wasn't until Charlie Brooker pointed it out, that I realised Torchwood was an anagram of something.

What, Crowd Hoot? I must have missed that edition, although I saw most of the Screen Wipes.

SPOILER WARNING: BELOW!!!!

I've tried to avoid reading spoilers but, from what I have been unable to evade gathering, SoRB's final suggestion is correct.

END SPOILER WARNING.

It was pointed out once in Brooker's Screen Burn column, in the Grauniad TV guide. Which is excellent.

Ow! Chod Rot.

1) What is Torchwood an anagram of? I can't see Brooker's program, don't have bleedin' digital tv.

2) I think dalek's have been used rather lazily with a sort of 'just sling them in and they'll be scary' attitude, rather than making an effort to make the episode as whole scary. As usual with this doctor, there were some good lines and David Tennant seems to be able to carry any episode where he gets enough screen time. I was disappointed that the Daleks, far from being sprung on us by surprise, were waved rather blatantly in our faces from the word go.

Alright, forget I asked about Torchwood, I figured that out.

"the Daleks, far from being sprung on us by surprise, were waved rather blatantly in our faces from the word go"

But that's the way it always was in the old series. Practically every story in the old series had a title like "XXXX of the Daleks". Planet, Power, Evil, Day, Genesis, Destiny, Revelation, Masturbation, Resurrection, Remembrance. (I made one of those up...)

Point being that bizarrely in at least two of those (Planet and Destiny) the cliffhanger surprise reveal was that - shock! - there's Daleks in it! Which is just weird. There were some attempts to do series with known baddies whose presence was a surprise. The most successful was probably "Earthshock", where the new improved Cybermen really were a shock, as the secret had been kept quite well. Less successful were Anthony Ainley's various prosthetic applications and anagrammatic credits, and probably worst of all discovering that the invasion of time was being "masterminded" not by the Vardans (undoubtedly the series worst baddies ever) but by a short cockney Sontaran and his two mates.

In the new series, I don't think it shocked anyone that there was a Dalek in "Dalek". Finding the Daleks behind the gamestation did actually come as a surprise to me, a spoiler-avoider. And they certainly came as a surprise at the end of "Army of Ghosts". But then I don't read the tabloids or the fansites for gossip.

I have to say though that once again, the BBC managed to completely fluff a cliffhanger reveal by putting the human/Dalek on the cover of the Radio Times! An absolutely bizarre decision, I think.

Interesting point: an exception to the "XXXXX of the Daleks" rule is "The Chase", in which the Daleks build a time machine and, well, chase the Doctor. To a dying desert planet, a haunted house, the Marie Celeste, and, before ending up on Mechanus... the Empire State Building. There was obviously also "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" and "The Dalek Master Plan". And "Death to", rather than "of". OK, it's not a cast iron rule, OK?

SoRB

Well I can't comment on the history of doctor who, but I agree with your point about sliging a human dalek on the over of the radio times. And indeed, the conversation in the sewer didn't really seem to work either. I know people were critical of the Daleks vs Cybermen thing, but I thought that was a cleverer (?) use of the Daleks than this occasion. They weren't really scary, their threat level never seemed right (enough that this should be really nasty, but not so bad that the doctor can't worm his way out of it somehow) maybe they are running out of plausible dalek ideas. Thank God for David Tennant.

What was 'Masturbation of the Daleks' like anyway? Is that what they use the plunger for?

"I am a human dalek!"

Oh come on.... I know it's supposed to be for kids but is that level of dumbing down really necessary?

Masturbation Of The Daleks sounds very close to Gay Daleks from Victor Lewis-Smith's show TV Offal.