Carruthers Ten Years On: December 2012

December 2012 amounted to a single post. I've just re-read for the first time in ten years and it's better than anything else I wrote for the Carruthers blog in 2012, probably longer. It articulates my disappointment that there wasn't more to write about and manages some gags along the way that I still like.

So, that's it. No more Carruthers Ten Years On posts and probably no more Carruthers posts at all. Looking back at the Carruthers blog with the distance that a decade can provide has brought a lot of things back. The frustration that we didn't manage to do more. The pride in some of the things that we did achieve. I'm enormously grateful to Andy Cartwright and Mike Everhard for all their hard work on scripts, sketches, songs etc. We had fun, but I think we should have had a lot more.

2020 Vision

About this time in 2019, I pitched an article about how the futuristic sounding year of 2020 had been depicted in science fiction:

2020 VISION

Sci-Fi predicts the New Year
(Originally written for Hero Collector, published 30 December 2019

Science fiction is full of predictions about the future and with 2020 stretching ahead of us now seems like a good time to take a look at what to expect from the year ahead. David Black plays Nostradamus.

People of Cwmtaff, Wales, don’t walk on the grass! The ground will begin swallowing people up after a large drilling installation bores down to over 21km beneath the Earth’s surface. As Doctor Who proved in The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood that the Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond and Rory Williams will discover a subterranean Silurian city. Humanity and Homo Reptilia will clash and in an effort to prevent an all-out war the Silurian elder will order his people back into suspended animation for a millennium. As a result of the conflict, Rory will be killed for the first time and then wiped from history altogether by a crack in time. Back on the surface, the drilling operation will be destroyed in the explosion. The Doctor will give humanity an ultimatum to be ready to share the planet by the time the Silurians reawaken.

Unremittingly bleak 1987 children’s TV classic Knights of God shows us a Great Britain in the grip of a fascist religious order. Resources are scarce, fuel shortages abound and agitators are sent to workcamps or re-education centres. In 2020, the resistance fights back from bases in the Welsh mountains and what the Knights have dubbed ‘the Wasteland’, formerly known as Yorkshire and Lancashire. The Archbishop of Canterbury will be killed by the Knights of God for protecting the sole surviving member of the Royal Family. The Knights will begin to fight amongst themselves and the resistance will take full advantage of the opportunity. They will press home their attack and the upper echelons of the Knights of God will be slain. The resistance will restore the monarchy and the people of Britain will rally around their new king, Gervase I.

Reign Of Fire warns that dragons will render humanity almost extinct, but that this is the year that a small group will finally rise up and slay the dragons in Great Britain and begin to rebuild the human race. A note of doubt comes from polygon role-playing video game 7th Dragon 2020, however, which predicts that dragons will maintain a stranglehold on Tokyo.

It’s usually good advice to be yourself, but the Dollhouse finale, Epitaph Two – Return, informs us that by 2020, it’ll be much more of a challenge. Half the world’s population will have had their identities wiped by technology that originally came from the Dollhouse in Los Angeles a decade earlier. These blank canvasses are known as ‘Dumbshows’ and they wander the world ready for an imprint of a different personality. They are often hunted by ‘Butchers’, individuals imprinted with violent tendencies. Only a handful of ‘Actuals’, people with their own personality inside their own head, remain. A small group including ‘Dolls’ and staff from the LA Dollhouse will risk life and limb to use a pulse-bomb device designed to wipe the remaining population to return everyone’s personalities to their original owners instead.

If you find yourself on the opposite coast of the USA, make sure you don’t need saving. Arno Stark, a relative of Tony Stark, will inherit Stark Industries and use its resources for unscrupulous ends as witnessed in Iron Man 2020. Rather than using Iron Man’s armour to achieve anything superheroic, he will instead use it to commit acts of corporate espionage to cripple his competitors and to act as a hired mercenary for the highest bidder.

250 men, women and children will live and work in Sealab 2020, an underwater complex built atop Challenger Sea Mount a submerged mountain. Under the command of Captain Mike Murphy, the oceanauts will face red tides, green fever, blue whales and white sharks, but they will make no mention of microplastics or rising sea levels.

Book your holiday early this year as intricate time-travel thriller Dark has shown us that the apocalypse will begin in the German town of Winden on June 27. The day before the local nuclear power plant is due to be decommissioned, a police investigation will unearth a repository of toxic waste in an old mothballed reactor. A ‘God particle’ will form and will be influenced by similar particles in 1921 and 2053. The particle expands exponentially destroying the power station and its surroundings. Only a handful of people will survive in underground locations and alternate realities.

Away from Earth, 2000’s Mission to Mars showed us not one, but two Mars missions that will land on the red planet, where the astronauts will discover a crystalline formation which they believe to be a sign of subsurface water. Further investigation will find that the crystalline structure is part of a large humanoid face and the weather will be decidedly inclement. The construction of NASA’s Mars base will be completed this year. The base will then be promptly destroyed by an army of androids from the planet Guk. The androids, led by an individual named Zelda, will set up a base of their own on Mars as a bridgehead to an invasion of Earth as seen in Terrahawks.

According to some sources, this is the year that dormant Daleks from a spacecraft crashed in the mercury swamps on the planet Vulcan (not that one) will be reactivated by a scientist from the nearby human colony. Doctor Who’s The Power of the Daleks shows us that the metal mutants will initially act as servants to the colonists until they are able to reproduce themselves and then they will attempt to take over a human colony. Only the efforts of the newly regenerated Second Doctor will prevent them from being successful.

Elsewhere in space and, centuries before it will collect Captains Kirk and Picard in Star Trek: Generations, the Nexus will cross the universe again as it does every 39.1 years.

In sports news, Super Baseball 2020 has shown us that ‘America’s Pastime’ will see many upgrades made to the game, including robot players, body armour and jetpacks. Real Steel reveals that boxing will also see the Queensbury rules expanded as robots replace human competitors. Whether this need for automation will spread to other sports is, as yet, unclear.

On Tuesday, November 3, 2020, arachnophobe Jack Robertson, fresh from his appearance in Doctor Who’s Arachnids in the UK, will challenge Donald J. Trump in the 59th quadrennial US Presidential Election, however, Years and Years has shown us that he will be unsuccessful and that Trump will win a second term. The defeat of the Democrat party will be blamed on Russia, Florida will become embroiled in a voting scandal and France will refuse to accept the validity of the election.

A virus will wipe out most of humanity with only a handful of survivors. Believing himself to be The Last Man on Earth, Phil Miller moves into an opulent, gated community and when not hoarding priceless artworks and pornography, he proudly uses a swimming pool as a toilet.

2020 is the year in which you will almost certainly die whether under an oppressive regime, a virus or quantum physics gone rogue. If you manage to survive then existence will be tough and the best places to wait for civilisation to get back to normal are either outer space or at the bottom of the ocean. Steer clear of dragons and Daleks and stay close to some decent sanitation.

Happy New Year!

- - -

The obvious elephant in the room is that a fatal virus did hit humanity in 2019, but after I submitted this. I got very ill at the end of 2019, months before Covid officially reached the UK and long before the vaccine and testing, so I'll never know if I had it then. Covid didn't wipe out the human race in 2020, but it has killed 6.61 million people at the time of posting.

Trump did not win a second term, he was beaten by Biden. France did accept the result of the election, but enough Republicans pretended not to have lost that Trump was able to promote a conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from him, despite a conclusive absence of proof. He monetised this lie and raised $250 million which he then did not use as promised. Trump supporters seeking to overturn democracy were responsible for an armed insurrection on the 6th of January 2021. Faith in democracy is at a depressing low.

Outside In Walks With Fire

I had planned to write extensively about the released and writing of Outside In Walks With Fire, ATB Publishing's tribute to Twin Peaks, which I have an article in. I failed to mark the book's release, so I'm posting about it now.

More details about my article soon. Outside In Walks With Fire is out now and available here.

The Many Deaths of Janeway

With the demise of Eaglemoss and the subsequent disappearance of its website, I'm going to start posting my articles for them here. As many of the articles were written to coincide with the dates of particular anniversaries, I'll try to keep to those dates, but the evergreen ones I'll try to post on here regularly.

Here's the first: 

STAR TREK: THE MANY DEATHS OF JANEWAY
How many times has Janeway 'died'?
(Originally written for Hero Collector, published 18 April 2019

David Black adds up the many times the Voyager captain has met – and survived – her end.

Captain Kathryn Janeway of the USS Voyager is a woman of great achievements. She has travelled across the Delta Quadrant, made first contact with dozens of new species and hyper-evolved into a salamander. One of the most amazing things about her time aboard Voyager is how often she died and how little it affected her career. Let us count the ways...

Death #1

Time And Again

Cause of Death: Polaric explosion.

While investigating a planet that is the site of a polaric explosion, Janeway and Paris are drawn back in time to the day before the explosion. During a search for evidence of Janeway, Kes, using her newly discovered telepathic abilities, says “She was here. This is where she died.”

Janeway realises the attempts by the Voyager crew to rescue them from the future are the cause of the explosion and prevents her own rescue, which prevents the explosion and therefore she never visits the planet and this renders that timeline redundant.

Death #2

Deadlock

Cause of Death: Explosion when Voyager self-destructs.

As a result of a journey through a plasma drift to avoid a Vidiian ship, all the matter on Voyager is duplicated, including its captain and crew. However, the antimatter remains unaffected and with two ships drawing on it, supplies quickly run low. One duplicate Voyager is badly damaged and suffers losses, the other seems largely unaffected. The undamaged Voyager is boarded by the Vidiians and its Janeway sets her ship to self-destruct and is killed in the resulting explosion and freeing the other to continue the journey home.

Death #3

Coda

Cause of Death: Strangulation

Janeway and Chakotay are on a mission in a shuttle when electrical interference forces them to crash on a planet. The captain sustains critical injuries in a shuttle crash, but Chakotay revives her with CPR. They are captured by the Vidiians and Janeway is strangled by a Vidiian in a cave.

Death #4
Coda

Cause of Death: Shuttle explosion

Janeway and Chakotay find themselves back aboard the shuttlecraft in space and suspect a time loop, when they are again attacked by the Vidiians. They are both killed when the Vidiians destroy their shuttle.

Death #5

Coda

Cause of Death: Asphyxiation

Again, the captain and her first officer are in the shuttle en route to their mission. When the Vidiians show up again, they return to Voyager. Janeway has contracted the Vidiian phage and unable to find a cure, the Doctor uncharacteristically euthanises her with a neural toxin.

Death #6

Coda

Cause of Death: Massive cerebro-vascular collapse

Once more, Janeway finds herself on board the shuttle, but only briefly. She has an out-of-body experience as she watches Chakotay perform CPR on her prone form. He is unsuccessful. Janeway wanders Voyager’s corridors like a ghost, while her crew search for her and eventually give up looking. She attends her own memorial. An alien, masquerading as her father’s ghost, is inhabiting her cerebral cortex, attempting to convince her to relinquish her life willingly, but she fights back, denies him sustenance and awakes on the planet.

Death #7

Before & After

Cause of Death: console explosion to the face

An elderly Kes in a state of temporal flux finds herself jumping back in time to earlier points in her life. At one point, she jumps back to the beginning of the “Year of Hell” (see below) and witnesses a Chroniton torpedo hit that causes a bridge console to explode killing both Janeway and Torres. However, what we see here is merely one possible future.

Death #8

Worst Case Scenario

Cause of Death: Phaser malfunction

A holographic tactical-training program concerning a potential Maquis mutiny takes on a life of its own. Tuvok’s program was rewritten by Seska before she left the ship, including a malfunctioning phaser rifle that kills the hologram of Captain Janeway.

Death #9

Year of Hell, Part II

Cause of Death: Explosion

After 257 days of Hell, that have left Voyager beyond repair and the crew forced to abandon ship. Janeway singlehandedly pilots what is left of Voyager during a battle with the Krenim Time Ship. With the weapons unavailable, she rams the other vessel, and the resulting explosion completely destroys it. The captain goes down with the ship. A shockwave erases the Krenim ship and the timeline it created from history.

Death #10

Living Witness

Cause of Death: Unknown

Some seven centuries after his time aboard Voyager, the Doctor’s back-up module has been discovered by archaeologists. He is reactivated in the Museum of Kyrian Heritage. Accused of war crimes and the Doctor is forced to defend his crew’s reputation for their role in the conflict between the Kyrians and the Vaskans. Either way, after seven hundred years Janeway is presumably pushing up daisies. As the Doctor himself puts it “Somewhere, halfway across the galaxy, I hope, Captain Janeway is spinning in her grave!”

Death #11

Timeless

Cause of Death: injuries sustained in a crash landing

In an effort to get home quicker, Paris and Kim create a quantum slipstream drive. On its maiden flight, the Delta Flyer piloted Chakotay and Kim makes it all the way home, but Voyager is pushed out of the slipstream and crash lands on a frozen planet killing everyone aboard.

Fifteen years later, Chakotay and Kim return to the crash site to discover their dead crew mates, including the captain, frozen solid. With the help of the Doctor and Seven of Nine’s corpse they manage to send a different course correction back in time which collapses the slipstream and saves Voyager.

Death #12

Course: Oblivion

Cause of Death: Acute cellular degradation

Radiation from an enhanced warp drive employed by a bio-mimetic duplicate of Voyager causes a loss of cohesion. Captain Janeway’s duplicate dies on the bridge and her ship and crew are not far behind her. The real Kathryn Janeway is completely unaware of their sacrifice.

Death #13

Relativity

Cause of Death: Explosion

The USS Voyager is destroyed by a temporal disruptor while Janeway is on the bridge, however Seven of Nine and Janeway are recruited by a Starfleet ship from five hundred years in their future to prevent the device being planted in the first place. They successfully apprehend the saboteur and the events of this alternate timeline never come to pass.

Death #14

Barge of the Dead

Cause of Death: stab wound to the neck

The entire senior staff are massacred by a couple of Klingon warriors. Captain Janeway is cruelly, and dishonourably, cut down from behind whilst making a speech paying tribute to the achievements of the Klingon Empire. It’s all in B'Elanna's dream and so Janeway lives to fight another day.

Death #15

Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy

Cause of Death: console explosion

In the very next episode, another crewmember fantasises about Janeway’s death. It would be hard not to take that personally. The Doctor daydreams that he takes over control of the ship and to do that requires the captain to be out of the way. During one of his flights of fancy the Borg attack and one of the bridge consoles explodes killing Janeway, but once again it’s only a dream.

Death #16

Shattered

Cause of Death: Unknown

When a spatial rift causes time aboard to become fractured, Janeway and Chakotay meet by a Naomi Wildman and Icheb from an alternative future. They are told that they died seventeen years earlier, but they are given no details about how they met their demises. Janeway, Chakotay and their crew are reunited from across various time periods and successfully bring the ship back into sync. This renders the alternative timeline potentially null and void.

Death #17

Endgame

Cause of Death: neurolytic pathogen

Captain Janeway encounters an Admiral Janeway from 26 years into her personal future. The captain injects her future self with a neurolytic pathogen, with her permission, and the admiral allows herself to be assimilated by the Borg Queen. The pathogen infects the wider Borg Collective and they fail to prevent Voyager arriving home via a Borg transwarp hub out of the ashes of a Borg shipwreck. Captain Janeway gets her crew home early and that changes the timeline, so the future that Admiral Janeway came from may not come to pass.

There you have it, Janeway has cheated death on no less then 17 occasions. If you hope to learn from her example and you find yourself in a potentially fatal situation, ideally make sure it is an alternate future you that dies instead, or it’s a dream, or maybe reveal you were a hologram all along, then you’ll be fine.

- - -

I knew that Eaglemoss were releasing a bust of Captain Janeway, so I pitched this in the hope that they wanted an article to tie into it. 

Originally entitled The Many Deaths of Kathryn Janeway, my pitch read: Captain Janeway holds the record for being the character most often killed in all of Star Trek, no less than seventeen times. This article details each and every time she kicks the bucket and how she manages to carry on regardless.

At the time, I had completely forgotten that Harry Mudd had killed the crew of the USS Discovery in Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad no less than 56 times, and when I remembered, after this article was commissioned, I neglected to point it out to the editor.

This was the second article that I wrote for Hero Collector, but it was published third, possibly due to the release date of the bust. Oddly, this meant it appeared on the website just before Easter, which could have seemed a little controversial.

When I wrote this, it seemed pretty unlikely that we would ever see Janeway again, but the fortunes of the Star Trek franchise have changed significantly and now she has featuring been given a new lease of life in Star Trek: Prodigy, and could also return in Picard, Lower Decks or another as-yet-unannounced Star Trek series, therefore there could be another chance for her to die (and probably survive it) in her future...

Carruthers Ten Years On: September 2012

September 2012 was when I finally lost interest in the Carruthers blog. The Riddle Of The Sands came to its natural conclusion and I managed a couple of posts using photos that I took like in the old days: Snake Bake and Charge!, neither of which were particularly impressive. I clearly intended to do more and something got in the way.

Carruthers Ten Years On: August 2012

August 2012 on the Carruthers blog. In between The Riddle Of The Sands and the terrible tats, I began to make an effort once more. Even if I was only really reposting snarky notes and comedy posters.

Carruthers Ten Years On: July 2012

July 2012 on the Carruthers blog featured terrible tattoos and the text of The Riddle Of the Sands, but frankly not much in the way of content from me.

Carruthers Ten Years On: June 2012

June 2012 saw the Carruthers blog reach 1500 posts. Sherlock, quotes from the great and the good and posts on Buffy and Angel references were the order of the day. The Carruthers blog was something I sat down to 'write' in one sitting at this point. I used to get it out of the way at the end of the previous month, which probably shows how little I was enjoying by now.

On a lighter note, here's Mike sat on a duck.

Carruthers Ten Years On: May 2012

May 2012 on the Carruthers blog. More Sherlock, more quotes tangentially related to the sketches we performed. I should have stopped this nonsense by now.

Carruthers Ten Years On: April 2012

April 2012 on the Carruthers blog continued in the same vein as March. More treading water: Sherlock Holmes, quoting luminaries and Fast & Furious, which I clearly spent a lot of time researching and have never seen a single instalment of, all because of a reference in the FistKrammer sketch.

Carruthers Ten Years On: March 2012

March 2012 on the Carruthers blog was the worst yet. I contributed almost nothing, alternating between Fast & Furious posts and quotes from various celebrated figures.

Carruthers Ten Years On: February 2012

February 2012 on the Carruthers blog featured videos of The Fast And The Furious (not that one) and its remake The Chase. I didn't watch either of them and tacked a Doctor Who video on to the end of the latter. There's also a post about X-Men references.

I quite like Love And Death and this English translation of Vin Diesel.

Top Ten Bond Pre-Titles Sequences

Every James Bond film since 1963's From Russia With Love has opened with a teaser sequence before the titles that has been sometimes intrinsic to the plot of the film, sometimes not even slightly. I watched the beginnings of all of the films up to and including Spectre and ranked them, then I wrote this article about the top ten. I would love to have had the time to watch the full films, but I have a toddler and so needed to watch these snippets while he napped. 

There's no No Time To Die, because I hadn't seen it and this was written to tie into the the ever-changing release date of the film. I'll have to watch No Time To Die again to decide where the pre-titles sequence might fit.

Maybe I'll post the full ranking when the next Bond film comes out, but in the mean time here's a top ten.

Big Damn Heroics: R. Tam, Session 416 - Second Excerpt & Episode Death Tolls

Spatial Anomaly also covered the first of The R. Tam Sessions, Session 416 - Second Excerpt.

Accompanied by an article about episode death tolls exclusive to patrons.

Please consider popping over to Spatial Anomaly for a butcher's.

Auton Artwork Not Final

Here is the cover for my Auton novelisation that was featured in the pre-order announcement is very clearly stated to be NOT FINAL. I don't know if it is likely to remain, but I would be pretty happy with it if it did.

They are available for pre-order in the UK here or not the UK here.

Star Trek's Oddest Crossovers

Star Trek is no stranger to crossovers. Characters from one series can and have popped up in another. There's an article in that, but this is not that article. Instead this about something much weirder: examples of crossovers with other shows from Webster, Here Come The Brides, seaQuest DSV, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Men, Green Lantern and The Carol Burnett Show.

I wrote this about Star Trek's Oddest Crossovers.

Announcing Auton

So, the cat is out of the bag. The Top Secret thing that I have been writing is a novelisation of Auton.

Auton is a direct-to-video Doctor Who spinoff produced by BBV in 1997. It's a sequel to Spearhead From Space, the first story to feature Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor. With the help of UNIT he foils an attempted invasion of Earth by killer plastic shop window dummies. Auton picks up the story decades later as the invasion resumes.

Now the company is novelising much of their back catalogue. Novelisations are a part of the lifeblood of Doctor Who. The Target novelisations are an institution in themselves.

Auton is now available for pre-order as part of a bundle of three books. The other two appear to be the Krynoid tale The Root of All Evil by Paul Mount and The Choice from BBV's brace of Adventures in a Pocket Universe, featuring K9 and the Mistress.  

They are available for pre-order in the UK here or not the UK here. More news as and when I have it.

Carruthers Ten Years On: January 2012

January 2012 on the Carruthers blog relied heavily on Sherlock Holmes again and a trio of posts listing the references to Quantum Leap, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and Spaced.

Pointy was really the only one that was worth posting.

Sci-Fi's View Of 2022

As has become an annual tradition I have written an article about science fiction predictions of the year we have 360 days to get used to calling 2022.

My 2021

It's been another weird year.

I can confirm that looking after a two year old, is much more difficult than looking after a one year old. This rate of mathematical progression does not fill me with confidence in light of my impending duty to look after a three year old.

As far as I am aware I did not not get Covid, but instead I did get two vaccine doses and booster, which was pretty incredible given where we were this time last year.  

I wrote twelve articles for Hero Collector: Doctor Who Top 10 Modern Cliffhangers, Beat Blue Monday, George Lucas' THX 1138 @50, Star Trek End of the Enterprise, X-Men: First Class @10, Attack The Block @10, The Earth is Doomed!, The Expanse @10, Captain America @10, 007: Top 10 Pre-Title Sequences, Dark Season @30. and The Expanse Boasts A USP For Sci-Fi Fans. That's almost one a month.

Outside In Wants To Believe was published containing my article, You Say Goodbye, And I Say Hello.

Spatial Anomaly published Big Damn Heroics episode guides about the Firefly episodes: Serenity: The Pilot, The Train Job, Bushwhacked, Shindig, Safe, Our Mrs Reynolds, Jaynestown, Out of Gas, Ariel, War Stories, Trash, The Message, Heart of Gold and Objects in Space, as well as The R. Tam Sessions 416 Second excerpt, 1 and 22.

While there were articles that were exclusive to patrons about the deleted scenes from Serenity: The Pilot, Our Mrs Reynolds and Objects in Space. episode orders, opening narrations, character profiles of Badger, Niska, Saffron and the Hands of Blue, A History of the 'verse Part One & Two, Top Ten Firefly Flashbacks, Screentime, Top Ten Death Tolls and an analysis of the opening titles. 

Spatial Anomaly was neglected in the second half of the year, but I'm planning on continuing it in the new year.

There was also a top secret project that took up any free time that I had. I'll let you know what it was as soon as I can...