For reasons beyond my control, my reading time has been changed from 11 AM on Friday to 2:30 PM on Friday. This change won’t be in the program book, but it will be reflected in the mobile version of the program and the printed grid. Sorry for any inconvenience this last-minute change may cause!
You can see my entire, updated Readercon schedule here.
Readercon 28 is fast approaching on the weekend of July 13th-16th! Here’s where you can find me on programming:
Friday, July 14th
12:00 PM Back from the Dead. Judith Berman, John Crowley, N.S. Dolkart, Nicholas Kaufmann, Sioban Krzywicki (leader). There are many characters in SF/F who die in what appears to be a permanent fashion, only to be brought back from death. Examples, left intentionally vague to avoid spoilers, appear in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, Daniel José Older’s Bone Street Rumba books, and as far back as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. How do the characters interact with resurrection (their own or someone else’s) and in some cases even prepare for it? When do readers feel like this works and is believable and satisfying, and when does it feel like a cheap trick or a cop-out? What is it like to read these stories while grieving, or keenly aware of one’s own mortality?
(I’m so psyched to be on a panel with the great John Crowley, and to get a chance to talk about why I made Trent from Dying Is My Business and Die and Stay Dead a hero who can’t die.)
2:30 PM Reading: Nicholas Kaufmann. Nicholas Kaufmann reads from a work in progress.
(I’m not 100% sure what I’m reading yet, but I’m leaning toward something from the novel I’m currently working on, The Scarred Man. Or maybe I’ll read something else. Come on by and be surprised!)
6:00 PM Kaffeeklatsch. Nicholas Kaufmann.
(Come hang out with me, drink coffee if you like, and ask me all sorts of questions! Or just sit there and stare at me creepily, I don’t care.)
As you can see, my programming schedule is Friday-heavy this year. The rest of the time, you’ll definitely find me attending other interesting panels and readings, as well as hanging out in the lobby/bar with friends and perusing the Readercon Bookshop. I will also be happy to sign any of my books for you! Feel free to come right up and say hello!
***MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD***
And so we come to the end of the tenth season of the revamped Doctor Who (who knew it would last this long?) as well as the almost-end for Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor. “The Doctor Falls” is the second half of the two-part finale, which began with the impressive, captivating “World Enough and Time,” but I have to admit I found the conclusion a bit of a mixed bag. As usual, the performances are excellent, from Capaldi to Pearl Mackie to Matt Lucas to Michelle Gomez, everyone brought their A-game. (I very much enjoyed seeing John Simm again, but I felt his Master was underwritten and, for most of the episode, underused. He lacked the charm, menace, and biting wit of his season-three days, in my opinion. Also, at one point two weeks pass and we get no indication that the Master has been up to anything, evil or otherwise!) The Doctor gives another of his barnstormer speeches like he did in last season’s “The Zygon Inversion” that really cements Capaldi’s portrayal for me. “Where I stand is where I fall,” he says, and he doesn’t do it out of anger or vengeance, but out of kindness. I’m so sorry to see Capaldi leave.
But even with everyone giving it their all, this is Missy’s episode. Her interactions with Simm’s younger incarnation of herself are worth the ticket price. (But there’s no way Missy would turn down the Master’s invitation for hanky-panky. You know the Master would have sex with himself every chance he gets!) We get some answers as to where the Master has been since 2010 Tenth Doctor episode “The End of Time” — they fixed his “condition” on Gallifrey, presumably meaning the drums in his head and his unstable resurrected body, and booted him out again, but then at some point his TARDIS got stuck on the Mondasian ship (I’m only sorry we never actually get to see the Master’s TARDIS in this episode, that’s always fun) — and we also get the answer of how Simm’s Master regenerated into Missy, and I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s the highlight of the episode.
It’s worth noting that before the actor Roger Delgado’s untimely death in 1973, the Master’s arc during the Third Doctor era was going to come to a close with the Master sacrificing his life to save the Doctor, showing that there really had been a basis of friendship between the two before (and perhaps even while) things went bad. Missy deciding to help the Doctor in “The Doctor Falls” but getting killed by the Master follows that trajectory, although I would have actually liked to see her and the Doctor team up against the Cybermen even briefly first. But the idea of the Master killing himself rather than standing with the Doctor makes perfect sense in context, and the scene where both Masters are lying on the ground, dying from the mortal wounds each has given the other, and laughing maniacally at the perfection of their fates is chilling, tragic, and superb all in one. If there was a character arc to the Twelfth Doctor era, it wasn’t the Doctor’s, it was Missy’s. Her fate, should it be final, and I assume it is, is impeccable.
I wasn’t sure how the show would handle Nardole’s exit, since I assumed he wouldn’t be in the next season, and I think they did a fine job with him as well. Like Nyssa during the Fifth Doctor era, who stayed on Terminus to help heal the Lazars, Nardole’s travels with the Doctor led him to find his calling and leave the Doctor to go help people who need him. I’ll miss him. Matt Lucas is great in everything he does, but Nardole in particular was a fantastic role, and such a great addition to the Doctor Who companion roster. Here’s hoping for future cameos!
But I can’t talk about the aspects of “The Doctor Falls” that were less exciting to me without mentioning Steven Moffat’s propensity for telling the same story over and over again. In “The Doctor Falls,” the Doctor makes his last stand defending a town with lots of children and relatively primitive weaponry against an advanced invasion force of classic Doctor Who monsters — which is exactly how the Eleventh Doctor went out in 2013’s “The Time of the Doctor,” although it was Daleks then, not Cybermen. (Although “The Doctor Falls” is a thousand times better than “The Time of the Doctor,” which I’d say is one of the worst Eleventh Doctor episodes, of which, it is my opinion, there are many to choose from.) Bill has been converted into a Cyberman but sees herself in her regular body, which is exactly like Oswin Oswald who was turned into a Dalek in the 2012 Eleventh Doctor episode “Asylum of the Daleks.” (Again, I found it much more affecting here, since I have grown over the course of the season to care about Bill and had only met Oswin that same episode.) At the end, Bill, restored but not quite human anymore, leaves the Doctor to go traveling the universe with her space girlfriend Heather from the episode “The Pilot,” which, while utilizing different details, is exactly the same end Clara got last season in the episode “Hell Bent,” in which she went off in a TARDIS with her friend Ashildr to travel the universe.
Speaking of Heather, while her appearance at the end is a total deus ex machina, I was still glad to see her rescue Bill from a tragic fate for two reasons. One, Bill deserved a happier ending than to be turned into a Cyberman, and two, after setting up the possibility of seeing Heather again so well in “The Pilot,” I was worried the show was going to forget about her. (It wouldn’t be the first time Steven Moffat has dropped a plot line!)
There’s a lot of handwaving, too, which at this point I’ve come to expect from the show but still get annoyed by. The way the Doctor reprograms the Cybermen on the bottom level to come after Time Lords as well as humans felt rushed and half-baked. Nardole using his computer to remotely blow up parts of Level 507 didn’t make much sense, nor did the Doctor somehow absorbing that computer program into his sonic screwdriver, which basically turns it into a magic wand to blow up Cybermen with. Missy telling the Master to always carry a spare dematerialization circuit from now on, and then pulling one out of her pocket, is like something out of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and doesn’t deserve to be here. These may be quibbles, but they tend to stick out for me.
Something is going on with the Doctor’s regeneration. At the end of “Empress of Mars,” Missy looks the Doctor up and down and asks if he’s okay, as if she can see something wrong in him, some illness perhaps. In “The Doctor Falls,” we see the Doctor fight off his regeneration at one point when he’s simply walking through the woods with Bill. He fights it off again at the end of the episode. We’ve never seen the Doctor fight off a regeneration before, so something is definitely up. (We did see him sort-of regenerate without changing his appearance in the 2008 Tenth Doctor episode “Journey’s End,” but I always thought that was such bullshit I was surprised it was even mentioned in “The Time of the Doctor” as an expended regeneration.) Was the Doctor mortally wounded by the Cyberman who zapped him on the rooftop at the beginning of “The Doctor Falls,” or is it something else, something Missy saw inside him in that earlier episode? I hope this will be explained in the Christmas special.
One of the true joys of “The Doctor Falls” for longtime fans is the many, many callbacks to the classic series, so how about a heaping dose of Doctor Who neepery? Jeez, where to begin? How about at the start when the Masters are asking the Doctor about the different ways he’s “died”? The Master asks if he’s ever burned to death, which the Master appeared to do in the 1984 Fifth Doctor serial “Planet of Fire.” Missy says she knows the Doctor has fallen to his “death” because the Master basically knocked him off a radio telescope in the 1981 Fourth Doctor serial “Logopolis,” which triggers his regeneration into the Fifth Doctor. The line repeated throughout the episode, “Where there’s tears, there’s hope,” is a version of the last words the Third Doctor said to Sarah Jane Smith before regenerating into the Fourth Doctor (“A tear, Sarah Jane? No, don’t cry. While there’s life, there’s…hope.”) Similarly, his line when he wakes up in the TARDIS — “Sontarans perverting the course of human history!” — are the first words of the Fourth Doctor after his regeneration, a reference to the 1973 Third Doctor serial that introduced the Sontarans, “The Time Warrior.” (Since Twelve is very much a mixture of the Third and Fourth Doctors in my mind, this was perfect.) Right before his regeneration, he has memories of all his previous companions saying the name, “Doctor,” as well as his enemies doing the same, and that’s a callback to the Fourth Doctor’s regeneration into the Fifth, during which the same thing happened to him. Something similar happened when the Fifth Doctor regenerated into the Sixth, although in that instance the images of his companions spoke full sentences of encouragement instead of just saying “Doctor.”
But wait, there’s more! As the Doctor is blowing up Cybermen with his sonic screwdriver, he rattles off a list of all the planets where he has met and defeated them over his lifetime: Mondas (1966’s “The Tenth Planet”), Telos (1967’s “The Tomb of the Cybermen”/1985’s “Attack of the Cybermen”), Earth (1968’s “The Invasion”/1982’s “Earthshock”),Voga (1975’s “Revenge of the Cybermen”), the battle of Canary Wharf (2006’s “Army of Ghosts”/”Doomsday”), the moon (1967’s “The Moonbase”), and hilariously, Planet 14. Why is Planet 14 hilarious? Because in the long history of Doctor Who, that battle has never been shown. Instead, it’s simply mentioned in the Second Doctor serial “The Invasion” as a previous occasion when the Doctor fought the Cybermen. Though the story has never been told, it’s kind of cool that they include it in “The Doctor Falls”! (The Doctor also lists Marinus as a planet where the Cybermen were, but the only Doctor Who serial involving that planet is the 1964 First Doctor serial “The Keys of Marinus,” which doesn’t involve the Cybermen at all. Maybe this is another untelevised adventure, like the events of Planet 14?) And of course, the biggest callback of all: At the end of the episode the Doctor encounters his first incarnation, which he has previously done on two other occasions: the 1973 tenth anniversary serial “The Three Doctors” and the 1983 twentieth anniversary special “The Five Doctors.” (In fact, the line “I’m the Doctor. The original you might say” is spoken by the First Doctor in the “The Five Doctors.” Additionally, the line, “You may be a Doctor, but I’m the Doctor” is something the Fourth Doctor says to Harry Sullivan in his very first serial, 1974’s “Robot.”) Twelve and One were both present at the climax of the 2013 fiftieth anniversary special “Day of the Doctor,” but I’m not sure we can say they actually met then.
I’m looking forward to the Christmas special. It’s going to be so much fun watching the Twelfth Doctor interact with the First. Of all his incarnations, Twelve and One are definitely the grumpiest!
