Strangely enough, I never considered Steve Carell’s Michael Scott my favorite character, but when Carell left the show, wisely sensing it was running out of steam after seven years, I quickly lost interest. I think I made it through roughly half the eighth season before opting out. Robert California, the replacement Regional Manager, was a disaster, despite being played by the superb James Spader. His character stuck out like a sore thumb. He belonged on a completely different show. Every plotline that focused on him was tedious. On top of that, I just couldn’t get into all the Andy and Erin romantic angst. They were no Jim and Pam. Not even close.

So I stayed away from the show for a year and a half, but I decided to tune in to this week’s series finale, and I’m glad I did. I laughed a lot, and even got a little teary-eyed, just like I used to during the show’s heyday. (Though Ryan abandoning his baby was pretty questionable as far as funniness goes. I mean, come on, you guys.) Still, it was a great sendoff to a once-great sitcom. So long, The Office, and thanks for all the great memories. I forgive you for Robert California.

I don’t review books on this blog anymore. It got too time-consuming, so now I do it over on my Goodreads page instead. But I wanted to take a moment to talk to you about a book I really loved: John Mantooth’s The Year of the Storm. I thought this story of a 14-year-old boy convinced his mother and autistic sister, both of whom went missing during a huge Alabama storm, are still alive in another world that exists beside our own was so amazing I wanted to share my Goodreads review with you here, too:

Mantooth’s debut novel shows a sure and steady hand in creating a fully believable, literary coming-of-age story peppered with hints of the supernatural. He writes compelling characters with authentic motivations and emotions, all in an evocative, confident voice. Don’t miss this one. It’s a strong contender for best novel of the year. (5 out of 5 stars.)

I read it as an ARC. It’s coming out from Berkley in trade paperback in June. Check out the last two sentences of my review again, and then order a copy for yourself. You’ll be glad you did.

Spoilers follow! Be warned!

What do I mean by squandered opportunities and lazy storytelling? Well, for starters, suddenly Clara’s charges Angie and Artie are traveling in the TARDIS, too. When did that happen? How did Clara bring it up to the Doctor? What was the initial meeting between the Doctor and the children like? We’ll never know because it’s never shown to us. Instead, they’re just there, and as a result some scenes with truly amazing potential are simply skipped over. Instead, we get the children acting like spoiled brats (What? You’ve been to space before?) and then being almost immediately kidnapped. Once the Cyberiad (what?) has them and begins to upgrade them into Cybermen, it tells the Doctor that it needed children to revive the Cybermen, for reasons never actually explained, and the Doctor has brought it children, thereby unwittingly becoming the savior of the Cybermen. Oh no! Except after it claims the children are vitally important, the children do nothing at all. They spend the rest of the time standing around in cyber-comas while the Doctor plays chess with himself. Because nothing is more exciting than watching someone talk to himself while playing chess!

Of course, the whole chess match with the cosmos at stake thing was already done, and done better, in the 1989 Sylvester McCoy 7th Doctor serial “The Curse of Fenric.” Speaking of, “Nightmare in Silver” has a weird atmosphere and tone problem that reminded me a lot of the worst of the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy years, where everything was either literally or tonally about juvenilia and carnivals gone bad. Here, it’s a far future amusement park, where our heroes decide to hide from the Cybermen in something called Natty Longshoe’s Comical Castle. “Does it have a moat and drawbridge?” Clara asks, wondering if it’s a defensible spot. “Yes,” comes the reply, “but…comical.” And when we get to the castle? There’s nothing comical about it. Like, nothing. It’s just a castle. “Squandered opportunity” doesn’t even begin to describe this.

As for lazy storytelling, how about “We’re all going to die and there’s nothing we can do about it” being answered with “But wait, I’m secretly the Emperor of the Universe and even though this plot twist was not earned in any way by anything that came before it, I can get us all off the planet before it explodes!” Yes, you read that right. Someone is secretly the Emperor of the Universe and will use that to save everyone at the last minute. No, really. Here’s another example: The same person explains his situation with, essentially, “I didn’t want to be Emperor anymore because it’s so lonely, so I ran away so I could hide inside a box where no one will ever see me and operate a fake Cyberman chess game.” Or how about there not being a smidge of romantic chemistry between Clara and Porridge, what with them having maybe four scenes together, but he asks her to marry him anyway, because Steven Moffat? Or how about the Doctor fixating for a moment on how tight Clara’s skirt is, which is not just lazy storytelling but bad storytelling, since there is not a smidge of romantic chemistry between them, either, no matter how much this show likes to try to force romantic chemistry between the Doctor and his companion. Give it a rest already, people! There’s nothing there!

Once again it’s mentioned that the Doctor has been erasing himself from historical records, and once again it makes zero sense. One might assume the Cyberiad (or the Daleks, or any race, really) has its own memory banks and record books, rather than everyone jacking into the same cloud storage or whatever. So how did the Doctor get into the Cybermen’s memory banks and change it? When did he do that? Did he have to fight or trick his way in? What else did he find in there? Wouldn’t that have been a much more interesting story? You don’t have to answer that last one.

I could go on, but why bother? The episode is crap and I’d rather forget it. Like the worst of the Moffat years, it doesn’t even feel like Doctor Who. It feels like some weird, cheap, tonally deaf mix of Doctor Who and bad SyFy Original Movies. There’s only one episode left this season, plus the 50th Anniversary special in November. If those aren’t any better, I might just finally give up on Doctor Who.

The great Ray Harryhausen passed away Tuesday. He was 92.

I have a lifetime’s worth of fond memories of his work in stop-motion animation: Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad trilogy, Clash of the Titans, Mysterious Island, and so many more. He meant the world to me before I even knew his name. I have a feeling it was that way for lots of Monster Kids, who only learned who Harryhausen was years — maybe even decades — after his films had already burned themselves indelibly into their minds.

I loved the sense of awe and wonder that emanated from his best work: Talos the living statue from Jason and the Argonauts, the cyclops vs. dragon fight in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth, Medusa in Clash of the Titans, Joe in Mighty Joe Young, the enormous cephalopod in Mysterious Island, the centaur vs. griffin fight in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. God, I could keep listing things until dawn. Everything he created was magic.

The Sinbad movies were my favorite of his oeuvre. (One of my earliest moviegoing memories is of seeing 7th Voyage during an early-1970s re-release at a New York City movie theater with my grandmother and brother. I cried when it was time to leave, because I didn’t want the experience to end.) The Sinbad movies launched a thousand daydreams of my own adventures with magic and monsters, and set me on the path to becoming the writer I am today — a job where I’m allowed to continue those same daydreams. So thank you, Ray Harryhausen, for everything you gave us. They just don’t make movies like yours anymore, and I think we’re all the poorer for it.

No spoilers here, but they tend to turn up in comments, so consider yourself forewarned!

“The Crimson Horror” is a very entertaining episode, and it’s probably no coincidence that the Doctor doesn’t even show up until 15 minutes in. I had no idea how much I needed a break from Matt Smith! Well, yes, I did know, at least theoretically, but in practice it works very well. Instead of the usual ham-handed opener of the Doctor and Clara getting lost on the way to somewhere or other (though, rest assured, that scene is shown to us anyway in flashback because WHY), we open with a mystery in Victorian Yorkshire that draws Vastra, Jenny, and Strax to the scene. This threesome, first introduced sans origin story in “A Good Man Goes to War” and reappearing in the most recent Christmas special, “The Snowmen,” provide excellent comic relief (especially Strax, who keeps wanting to blow things up and often mistakenly refers to Jenny as “boy”) and nice stay-at-home companions for the Doctor. I’ve heard there is some fan demand for a spin-off series, but I suspect they work best in small doses as special guest stars. Thirteen episodes of Strax offering to blow something up would get tiresome, I think.

The real meat of the episode, however, comes from Diana Rigg as Winifred Gillyflower and Rigg’s real-life daughter Rachael Stirling as Winifred’s blind daughter Ada. (I’m convinced the scene where Jenny beats up the baddies while wearing a black leather catsuit is a direct homage to Rigg’s Emma Peel days.) With two such amazing actors in the cast, even a terrible script can shine. The script for “The Crimson Horror” isn’t terrible (despite being written by Mark Gatiss, who, after this and “Cold War,” seems to have taken a class on how to write better) but like so many other Doctor Who stories, especially during Steven Moffat’s tenure, it falls apart if you examine the details too closely. I promised no spoilers, but as usual it’s an overcomplicated plot on the part of the baddies that really doesn’t come to much of anything, and also as usual, sadly, Matt Smith goes for comedic mugging in spots where he should be acting with outrage or concern (such as when Ada takes her revenge on Mr. Sweet). Though his Frankenstein’s monster-like performance in his first few minutes onscreen is actually pretty funny. So is the running gag of the fainting client. (The “Thomas Thomas” joke is less so. I mean, is the TomTom GPS so culturally relevant as to warrant a nod?)

There’s a giant missed opportunity here when Jenny and Vastra ask the Doctor how Clara can still be alive. Instead of answering in a way that would let the audience share the Doctor’s sense of irresistible mystery, he pretty much blows off the question. I found that lazy and disappointing. There’s also a coda with Artie and Angie, the children Clara takes care of, that felt forced and didn’t quite work for me. The kids accept the possibility of time travel much too readily.

Ultimately, “The Crimson Horror” isn’t a great episode, nor a bad one. It is funny, thrilling, and entertaining, though, and for Doctor Who in the overcomplicated, overwrought Steven Moffat era, that’s enough for me.

And now, some brief Doctor Who neepery: When the Doctor and Clara leave the TARDIS upon arriving in Yorkshire when he meant to go to London, he mentions he “once spent a long time trying to get a gobby Australian to Heathrow Airport.” This is a reference to Tegan Jovanka, an Australian stewardess who wandered into the TARDIS in the final Fourth Doctor serial “Logopolis” after the Master killed her aunt, helped the Doctor through his regeneration, and then accompanied the Fifth Doctor for the majority of his adventures. Tegan once described herself as “a mouth on legs,” and indeed she spent most of her time arguing with or yelling at the Doctor. (There’s a story about a young fan asking Peter Davison if the Doctor and Tegan are married because they argue so much.) Tegan was never all that well suited for adventuring — really, she just wanted to get back to Heathrow and resume her work — and whenever danger arose the Doctor would tell her, “Brave heart, Tegan.” That line is echoed in “The Crimson Horror” right after the Heathrow line with “Brave heart, Clara.”

NOVEL

• The Drowning Girl, Caitlín R. Kiernan (ROC)
• The Devil in Silver, Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)
• Edge, Koji Suzuki (Vertical, Inc.)
• Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn (Crown Publishers)
• Immobility, Brian Evenson (Tor)

NOVELLA

• 28 Teeth of Rage, Ennis Drake (Omnium Gatherum Media)
• Delphine Dodd, S.P. Miskowski (Omnium Gatherum Media)
• I’m Not Sam, Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee (Sinister Grin Press/ Cemetery Dance Publications)
• The Indifference Engine, Project Itoh (Haikasoru/VIZ Media LLC)
• “Sky,” Kaaron Warren (Through Splintered Walls, Twelfth Planet Press)

NOVELETTE

• “The Crying Child,” Bruce McAllister (originally “The Bleeding Child,” Cemetery Dance #68)
• “The House on Ashley Avenue,” Ian Rogers (Every House is Haunted, ChiZine Publications)
• “Reeling for the Empire,” Karen Russell (Tin House, Winter 2012)
• “Wild Acre,” Nathan Ballingrud (Visions, Fading Fast, Pendragon Press)
• “The Wish Head,” Jeffrey Ford (Crackpot Palace, William Morrow)

SHORT FICTION

• “Bajazzle,” Margo Lanagan (Cracklescape, Twelfth Planet Press)
• “How We Escaped Our Certain Fate,” Dan Chaon (21^st Century Dead, St. Martin’s)
• “Little America,” Dan Chaon (Shadow Show: All New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, William Morrow)
• “The Magician’s Apprentice,” Tamsyn Muir (Weird Tales #359)
• “A Natural History of Autumn,” Jeffrey Ford (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July/August 2012)
• “Two Houses,” Kelly Link (Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, William Morrow)

SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION

• Crackpot Palace, Jeffrey Ford (William Morrow)
• Errantry, Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer Press)
• The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, Andy Duncan (PS Publishing)
• Remember Why You Fear Me, Robert Shearman (ChiZine Publications)
• The Woman Who Married a Cloud, Jonathan Carroll (Subterranean Press)
• Windeye, Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY

• 21^st Century Dead, edited by Christopher Golden (St. Martin’s)
• Black Wings II, edited by S. T. Joshi (PS Publishing)
• Exotic Gothic 4:  Postscripts #28/29, edited by Danel Olson (PS Publishing)
• Night Shadows, edited by Greg Herren and J. M.  Redmann (Bold Strokes Books)
• Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, edited by Sam Weller and Mort Castle (William Morrow)

Congratulations to all the nominees, but especially to my good friends Victor LaValle, Jack Ketchum, Ian Rogers, Nathan Ballingrud, Jeffrey Ford, Kelly Link, Robert Shearman, Christopher Golden, and Mort Castle. Not that I’m playing favorites!

The 2012 Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented on Sunday, July 14^th at Readercon 24 in Burlington, Massachusetts and will be hosted by Guest of Honor Maureen McHugh.

Spoilers follow, but trust me, you don’t even want to watch this episode anyway!

First and foremost, how the fuck does the Doctor fall out of the TARDIS when it’s taken on board the salvagers’ ship? What exactly is the toxic substance that is making the TARDIS’ interior so deadly? Isn’t it the exact same substance the Doctor is able to effortlessly vent out of the console room as soon as he regains access to the TARDIS? How are the time zombies (you read that right, and if you’re not rolling your eyes already something is dead inside you) — who are essentially dying, seriously injured, burned up bodies — strong enough to attack people and chase them around the TARDIS? Why do they attack them? (The director, Mat King, cribs a technique from Danny Boyle’s Sunshine by never showing the time zombies in focus, because he knows they look ridiculous!) If the Doctor’s name is such a well-kept and important secret, why do the authors of the book Clara finds in the TARDIS library, The History of the Time War, know it and print it with impunity? (The book could not have been written by the Time Lords themselves. They didn’t survive the Time War to write about it!) Why would the Doctor even allow that?

It is insufferably stupid to have the Doctor set the TARDIS self-destruct mechanism, then admit there is no self-destruct mechanism, then act like a dick about it, and then be all, “Oh shit, the TARDIS really is going to blow up!” But even stupider is Tricky not realizing he’s actually human when he thinks he’s an android. It reminded me of Crayford in the 1975 Fourth Doctor serial “The Android Invasion,” who thinks he’s been turned into an android by the Kraals who rescued him from a rocket crash, but actually there was no crash and they didn’t turn him into an android. How does he discover this? He lifts his eyepatch and discovers he still has two eyes! It never occurred to him to lift his eyepatch before then! It’s much the same with Tricky. Apparently, he never wonders why he, as an android, is in the family photo with his two brothers and his dad. The whole thing is just shockingly stupid in an episode that is already shockingly stupid to begin with.

And of course the biggest, most pervasive question of the episode is: How come when Doctor Who finally has a plurality of black characters in one episode, they essentially turn out to be thieves and chop-shoppers?

But it’s okay, because in the end none of it happens! That’s right, this is one of those “time travel is magic” episodes where everything gets super shitty and then the Doctor does some timey-wimey bullshit and the entire timeline is changed so that it doesn’t happen. Thank goodness there are no rules to time travel! Except the ones that are occasionally necessary for plot purposes, of course. But when the plot demands there not be any rules, there aren’t. NAILED IT!

“Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS” is an episode best forgotten in a season that so far, with a couple of exceptions, is best forgotten as well. Much like most of last season. And most of the season before.

I’m growing to hate the fact that Steven Moffat will be the one in charge of the 50th Anniversary special.

No spoilers this time, though some may appear in the comments, so proceed there with caution!

As haunted house stories go, it’s a good one. It draws a bit too much from the well of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House — the loud banging noises, the “I’m not holding your hand” gag —  but the spooky atmosphere works. So do the characters of Alec Palmer, the ghost hunter masterfully played by Dougray Scott with understatement and humility, and empathic psychic Emma Grayling (Jessica Raine, keeping up with Dougray Scott quite well). Of course, this being Doctor Who, we know from the start it won’t really be a ghost. While the supernatural does exist in Doctor Who, there always turns out to be a scientific explanation, usually aliens or alien technology. That’s not quite the case here, but I’ve promised no spoilers because this one actually has quite a good solution to its central mystery. A rarity for Doctor Who these days.

I also quite liked how they keep the mystery of Clara going, without it being ham-handed like the crack that showed up at the end of every episode in Season 5, or the eyepatch woman showing up randomly in Season 6. I’m interested in finding out what the deal is with Clara, but also dreading the inevitable Moffatisms that will no doubt come into play upon the mystery’s solving. I still think Matt Smith is mugging too much for the camera, though, playing the fool in situations where he should be graver. But I have a strained relationship with the Eleventh Doctor. Sometimes I warm to him, and other times I just roll my eyes.

And now, some good old-fashioned Doctor Who neepery!

This isn’t the first haunted house the Doctor has explored. In the absolutely dreadful 1965 serial “The Chase,” William Hartnell’s First Doctor — along with Ian, Barbara, and Susan replacement Vicki — go on the run from the Daleks’ newly invented time machine and wind up in a variety of locales. One of them is a haunted house occupied by — I shit you not — Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster. Of course, it turns out they’re merely animatronic robots in a future Earth haunted attraction, but the whole episode is a low point for Doctor Who, even among those first few choppy years.

Much better is the 1989 serial “Ghost Light,” in which Sylvester McCoy’s Eighth Doctor and his companion Ace wind up in a haunted house in London in 1883. I’m not a fan of that many of the Eighth Doctor serials. They tend to be overcomplicated to the point of incomprehensibility, and “Ghost Light” is perhaps the prime example of this. Still, it’s an enjoyable adventure featuring a crashed space ship under a manor house that’s causing all manner of fuss.

There is a reference in “Hide” to a blue crystal from Metebelis 3. This, too, has been mentioned before. Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor would talk about Metebelis 3 all the time, and in the 1973 serial “The Green Death,” he uses a blue crystal from Metebelis 3 as a telepathic tool to defeat the baddies. Then he gives the crystal to his companion Jo Grant as a wedding present. The following season, in 1974′s “Planet of the Spiders,” the Doctor realizes the blue crystal he took from Metebelis 3 is super important to the giant spiders who rule that planet. The spiders decide to invade Earth to get it back. The Doctor eventually goes to Metebelis 3 to defeat the Great One, the leader of the giant spiders, but in doing so his body gets poisoned with radiation. He returns to Earth, to UNIT headquarters. There, in front of Sarah Jane Smith and the Brigadier, and with the help of K’anpo Rimpoche, a Time Lord hiding on Earth as a Buddhist abbot (!), he regenerates into Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor.

Warning: Spoilers follow!

First and foremost, “Cold War” is a “monster loose in an enclosed space” story, which it turns out is exactly what Doctor Who has been missing amid all these overly complicated, nearly incomprehensible, Steven Moffat-era plots that fall to pieces under the slightest scrutiny. The setting, a Soviet submarine during the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, is perfect, and one we haven’t seen before in Doctor Who. (It’s interesting to see a “historical” episode that takes place during a time when classic Who was on the air.) While the tensions of the times and even between crew members could have been played up a bit more by the script, it’s strength really does stem, ironically, from being a straightforward story with a simple setting.

The addition of a classic monster we haven’t seen before in new Who adds a lot to it as well. I knew we would eventually see an Ice Warrior again once David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor referenced them, albeit obliquely, in “The Waters of Mars.” (Much the same way he referenced Davros obliquely in season three before the creator of the Daleks made an appearance in season four. Which makes me wonder if the Doctor’s similarly oblique reference to his granddaughter Susan in “The Rings of Akhaten” might mean we’ll be seeing her again for the 50th Anniversary.) The use of an Ice Warrior here is a great echo of the Cold War of the setting, both for the pun and for the militaristic mindset of the Ice Warrior himself, who decides that he must be the last of his kind and will therefore launch the sub’s nuclear missiles to go out in a blaze of glory. And for the first time in what feels like ages, the climax plays out perfectly for the story itself, rather than being hobbled by Moffatesque moments of “wouldn’t it be cool if?” (“Wouldn’t it be cool if the sun were actually the monster and it eats stories instead of people?” No, Steven. No, it wouldn’t.)

Special guest star Chancellor Gorkon David Warner is great in the small, gentle role of the rather goofy Professor Grisenko, a scientist aboard the sub who is obsessed with ’80s New Wave acts Ultravox and Duran Duran. (How I loved seeing that old, bulky Walkman clipped to his belt!) Grisenko is one of those character types that have been there since new Who started in 2005, the interesting, charismatic person who winds up sacrificing himself to save others, but amazingly, that’s not how the story plays out. For the first time in a long time, (almost) everyone lives. Given how superior this episode is to what came before, I’m surprised it was written by Mark Gatiss, the man who brought us “The Idiot’s Lantern” and “Victory of the Daleks” (not to mention the absurd ”Hounds of Baskerville” episode of Sherlock)!

It’s not all perfect, of course. The Ice Warriors are needlessly retconned into cyborgs whose shell armor is actually mechanical in nature, thereby making them pretty much exactly the same as the Daleks or the Cybermen. As soon as the Ice Warrior slipped out of his armor to sneak around the sub, I knew we were in for an absolutely awful looking CGI creature, and I was right. There’s a needlessly distracting callback to Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” during the tense climax. Matt Smith mugs for the camera too much when he really needed to play this one more seriously. The TARDIS disappears as soon as the trouble starts because plot device.

But despite all these nitpicks, it’s not a bad episode. Dare I say, it might even be a good one. If the rest of this season’s episodes follow the example of “Cold War” and keep their stories this straightforward and uncomplicated by Moffatisms, it might just salvage season seven. The next episode looks like it might do just that, too, with the Doctor and Clara exploring a “haunted” house. Sign me up.

And now for some of that Doctor Who neepery you secretly come here for!

The Ice Warriors were never a top-tier villain like the Daleks, the Cybermen, or the Master. I don’t think most fans would even put them on the same tier as the Sontarans or the Silurians, although they did make several appearances through the years. The Ice Warriors first show up in the 1967 serial “The Ice Warriors,” in which Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor foils a Martian invasion of Earth. (The plot is actually strikingly similar to “Cold War,” with frozen Ice Warriors being discovered in the Arctic, getting thawed out, and going all aggressive on everyone when they learn Mars is a dead planet now.) The Ice Warriors returned in the 1969 serial “The Seeds of Death,” where the Second Doctor discovers they’ve taken over the Moonbase and plan to try their invasion again. They didn’t show up again until Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor took the reigns. The 1972 serial “The Curse of Peladon” found the Ice Warriors much evolved and now part of the peaceful Galactic Federation. They even help the Doctor foil a coup against King Peladon. The very last time we saw them, before “Cold War,” was in 1974′s follow-up serial “The Monster of Peladon,” but this time the Doctor encounters a rogue unit of Ice Warriors who are trying to muck things up again. Nearly 40 years later, it’s fun to see them once more, and interesting to see how the show has kept their evolution going.