Doctor Who 12.10 – The Timeless Children

The thing about being a fan since the eighties and reading lots of fic, professional and not, and lots of theories, ridiculous and not, is that the revelations of “The Timeless Children” are not remotely shocking. What is shocking is how badly they are told. Telling me that there are pre-Hartnell Doctors and that our hero had a long life she cannot remember has been done before. In novels, Lance Parkin hinted at it, Marc Platt insisted upon it. In interviews, Andrew Cartmel winked at it. Onscreen, Lady Peinforte dropped tantalizing clues. Weirdly, the Cybermen were in that story as well.

The first problem is that Chris Chibnall decided to embrace this fan origin silliness within the confines of another chunk of action-adventure tedium, all cliché and no heart. Does the Doctor say something like “I started this and I’ll finish this… alone” before going out on a suicide mission that a random supporting character will complete for her, sacrificing himself so the hero can have more adventures? Of course she does. This would have been approximately a million times better if the Doctor had said “The Master’s expecting one of those ‘one last confrontation’ showdowns that we keep having, and I’m not giving it to him,” and thrown the ultimate hand grenade out the TARDIS door, impact button first, to thump against the far wall and detonate. Maybe the audience might have protested that they were robbed of a big climax, but it’s the same big climax that they have already seen in everything else that looks or sounds like this. Besides, the Master assuredly had the same transmat / teleport / trap door that every other writer has already used. We’ll have another “one last confrontation” showdown same time next year.

But even a million times better, this would still be a disappointing mess of infodumping and mansplaining. All the business with the Cybermen is utterly unimportant because the core of this story is a man telling a woman, at incredible length, who she is. This is triply unfortunate because the most entertaining thing in the episode is the Master’s conversation with the Lone Cyberman, and Sacha Dhawan is great. “Oh, you mean robots. You’ll be robots.” I enjoyed that a lot. The kid liked the whole hour, of course. Oh, and it has the best flashback scene that the program’s ever done, accompanied, wonderfully, by the theme tune.

“The Timeless Children” wants very, very badly to be “The Deadly Assassin”. It evokes that earlier story in the dialogue, just to make sure viewers recognize the recreation of its set. “Assassin” has a lot that annoys and disappoints me as well, mainly in part four, but all of its wild revelations and retcons are not its problem. Instead, there’s a totally effortless feel to “Assassin,” as all that we learn about Time Lord society and regenerations and Borusa and politics come naturally. Extremely little is fed to viewers there. Its writer, Robert Holmes, was among the very best writers to ever work on Who, and let viewers and characters learn things together in a natural and interesting way. This is just clumsy, and very, very boring exposition. I respect that Chibnall is in charge and can make whatever decisions he wants about the hero’s past, present, and future. I just wish that he had chosen a better and more entertaining way to let us see them unfold.

Doctor Who 12.9 – Ascension of the Cybermen

Last time, our son reminded us that he really did not like the creepy Cyber-ghost story of “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” but that he was looking forward to seeing this one again. After telling us, in that perfectly ten year-old way, that he remembered 64% of it, he was again very satisfied. This is definitely a crowd-pleaser for younger viewers who want some big, stomping Cybermen action and lots of explosions. I’m a little less taken with it.

One of my complaints is that this is a very, very ordinary action-adventure runaround, with just about none of the spark, life, imagination, or silliness that makes for great Doctor Who. It’s extremely well-made for ordinary action-adventure – the opening location filming is as good as or better than anything anybody is making in any medium and it has a great guest star in Julie Graham – but after several minutes of this, I was ready for some farting aliens or some Kandymen. That Doctor Who is presently capable of looking like the most competently-made show on television is certainly very nice, but great Doctor Who should look and sound like nothing else. This is so ordinary that the Doctor throws a grenade at the Lone Cyberman. That she does this in front of Ryan, who, last season, she chastised for using a rifle to shoot robots, shows where this one is.

That said, I do like that this is a very interesting look at the Cybermen that the show hasn’t really done before. This one is set very, very far in the future, and probably in another galaxy. Here, the Cybermen have just about won. There are fewer than a dozen humans left. What’s curious about this is that up to about 2006, the Cybermen may have been very popular with fans and audiences, and they racked up a big body count on and offscreen, but there was always the understanding that while they could be huge and formidable threats, their time on the galactic stage was very limited. In “Earthshock”, which this story resembles in many ways, they’re on the brink of a big interplanetary war that will destroy their growing empire. By the time of “Revenge of the Cybermen”, set in the 29th Century, they are only “a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship.” The Daleks, in “Doomsday”, don’t think of them as rivals on the universal stage; they’re just pests to them.

I think what this story does is take a cue from “Nightmare in Silver” and move the story very, very far out and very far away. “Silver” mentioned that an entire galaxy had to be destroyed to stop the Cybermen some time before the events of that episode. That’s a scale far greater than anything the show had previously done; the Cybermen of most of Doctor Who hid in sewers and poisoned sugar and fired pathetic little laser bolts which didn’t bother Daleks no matter how many times they shouted “upgrade” first. Obliterating galaxies is overkill for Cybermen, unless these are very different Cybermen fighting very different wars, with very few survivors. So yes, the teenage fanboy in me is thrilled with this one’s scope. He probably would have liked the action-adventure feel to this one, too.

The other thing I don’t like about this one is that there’s a side story which is not explained at all – and even then not fully – until the next episode. It’s about a policeman named Brendan in a small Irish village full of people who don’t age. I think it’s sort of bold storytelling, to say it kindly, to have an entire B-plot running through your hour of television without a single connection point between the two, not even at the cliffhanger. Normally I bristle when people commenting on TV they don’t enjoy rely on the old chestnut “Why should I care about these characters,” because if you have elected to watch their story, you have elected to care. But I didn’t elect to watch Brendan’s story. If it’s part of the Doctor’s story, then the hour needs to show me how, even if right at the very end. Not next week!

Doctor Who 12.8 – The Haunting of Villa Diodati

“The Haunting of Villa Diodati” is definitely a story that divides opinion in our house. The grownups like it a lot – Marie noted that its scope is small but its perspective is wide, which strikes me as just right – but our son really dislikes it. There’s far too much creeping around in dark corridors for him. Funny, I thought that was the best part. It’s very Sapphire & Steel. The second best part is Lord Byron hitting on the Doctor.

Naturally, details like who Lord Byron and Mary Shelley are will escape a kid who was eight when he saw it and didn’t like it. I reminded him of the beginning of Bride of Frankenstein as we got started; that film also introduced us to this bunch. I like the fact that even though this is set a little more than two hundred years before the present, the historical characters are among the most creative and intelligent people of their day. This is a story that does not need to be bogged down with explanations; Mary Shelley knows what’s going on. There are also some really good callbacks to “Fugitive of the Judoon”, where we learned the Doctor would soon meet a Lone Cyberman and to not give it what it wants. We saw just that very thing last night on SG-1, where a green wire is foreshadowed.

Anyway, while the kid really doesn’t like it, I think it’s easily one of Whittaker’s finest stories. It was written by Maxine Alderton, who also wrote the best chapter of “Flux,” and I certainly hope that Russell T. Davies has her number. I enjoy the Lone Cyberman a lot. His name is Ashad, although I don’t think it matters too much, and he’ll feature in the next two stories. Great villain.

Doctor Who 10.12 – The Doctor Falls

The kid didn’t like it. He liked the ending, which is nice. I love the ending too.

When I hear about fans of other programs getting mad at the networks that ran them, I always shake my head. The example of recent vintage is Browncoats being angry with Fox for the four whole months that Firefly was on the air. They’re still in the nursery compared to us. Doctor Who fans have been mad at the BBC for decades. I went into the previous episode incensed that they’d already given away the return of the original Cybermen and the return of John Simm, and they just about redeemed themselves with the blinding cliffhanger at the end of this story.

So to prep the kid ever so slightly, I cued up part two of “The Tenth Planet” before we watched this. I had two objectives: first to let him know that he was mistaken, and that the original design for the Cybermen was incredibly effective for that appearance, because those Cybermen were not the stompy army of robots that they’d become, but victims of a terrible, terrible decision. True, they needed to be “upgraded” to become the threat that they’d become, but those first Cybermen had a chilling impact on their own. He agreed.

I also drew comparisons to how lots of science fiction TV in 1966 was obsessing about capsules and mission controls and getting astronauts back down from outer space. “The Tenth Planet” was made in the same era as the original Thunderbirds. The episode “Sun Probe” immediately came to mind. Gerry Anderson was big on this kind of action, in part because it was comparatively simpler to shoot largely stationary puppets looking at dials and readouts and counting things down, but also because this was totally fueling the imagination of kids at the time. It still works, too: Mondas first shows up onscreen and it’s clearly the planet Earth, upside down. Our son turned his head over, instantly figuring it out with a huge smile. Sure, it’s stupid, but it’s the sort of visual clue you want the kids in the audience to get.

But as for this episode, the kid didn’t like it. That’s okay. I think it’s amazing. It might be my favorite Doctor Who story of all.

Time’s late and the blog’s meant to be more about the kid than me, and I don’t feel like writing a further 500 words gushing about just how right Steven Moffat and Rachel Talalay got it this time. It’s a desperate, amazing story full of hope, and full of the two Masters providing welcome relief. It’s a story where the Doctor fails his companion more horribly than any since Adric, and everybody gets a wonderful and occasionally heartbreaking farewell. But the Masters might get the best of them.

Obviously, I’m not as enamored with Chris Chibnall’s time as the program’s showrunners as I am his predecessors, despite many very good decisions and a Doctor who I do enjoy. I also like Sacha Dhawan’s Master. But I absolutely hate the idea that his Master follows Missy, which at least has never been formally established onscreen. She gets a perfect finale here. She gives Simm’s Master a fatal blow, and leaves him to go and stand with the Doctor, and dies, unable to regenerate, on the cusp of redemption. I can’t reconcile that with what “Spyfall” and “The Timeless Children” presented, and I don’t want to, although I understand a story in one of the yearbooks does formalize it. I’d much, much rather that Missy be wrong about what happened to Simm’s Master next, and he regenerated into Dhawan, or even somebody else before Dhawan.

But Missy should be the last, and I’ll be heartbroken, infuriated, and grouchily resigned and resentful that it’s another damn thing this stupid show did wrong if they ever canonize it. I hope Dhawan sticks around to bedevil the 14th, the 15th, the 16th, and as many more Doctors as he desires, and I hope that he regenerates into Michelle Gomez when he decides to go. Deep down you know I’m right.

Doctor Who 10.11 – World Enough and Time

“Didn’t like that cliffhanger, did you?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said, with emphasis.

I knew our son would hate it. The last four minutes of “World Enough and Time” are a masterclass in taking a bad situation and making it exponentially worse with each new reveal. I rewatched it again recently and tried to see it through his eyes, remembering how badly and tearfully he absolutely hated the end of “The Pandorica Opens” when we watched it one year ago. Our kid’s tougher now, a tiny bit more mature, and also not as sleep-deprived as he was on that fine evening, but I knew the hopeless tone of this cliffhanger, plus the presence of the Cybermen and the Master, wouldn’t thrill him.

“But be honest,” I said, “you were kind of enjoying it until it fell off a cliff, weren’t you?”

“I was… in the middle, leaning more toward like, but it didn’t just fall off a cliff, it fell off a cliff onto a tall tree and then it got shredded in a tree shredder.” Harsh kid.

Well, never mind him. “World Enough and Time” is an amazing and dark story with a brilliant premise and an ugly, ugly vibe of body horror. It begins with the Doctor really believing he has mostly reformed Missy after talking at her for fifty or seventy years, and Missy may not be particularly enthusiastic about answering distress calls – neither are Bill and Nardole – but events overtake her in the end. It’s set on a colony ship five hundred miles long which is parked too close to a black hole. The top of the ship and its farthest point are experiencing gravity compressing time at radically different speeds. We saw this before in the Stargate SG-1 episode “A Matter of Time”. And a tip of the hat to our regular reader Ben Herman for recommending Frederik Pohl’s extremely entertaining 1977 novel Gateway, which plays with the same premise.

500 miles away from the control room, many generations have passed. Each of the 1056 floors are gigantic, and at the bottom, a whole city has risen and has begun to crumble. Spaceships weren’t meant to last this many centuries, and, choked by industrial pollution, the citizens have turned to conversion to keep themselves alive, and strong enough to move to the other floors. These become the original Cybermen, with John Simm’s Master – last seen in “The End of Time” about seven years before this – nicely and nastily involving himself in their development, and, perhaps even worse, reminding Missy of how rotten she’s meant to be.

Anyway, “World Enough and Time” was written by Steven Moffat and directed by Rachel Talalay, and we’ve been here before, haven’t we? Part one of the two-part cliffhanger is mostly amazing and then they mess up the landing, right? Will they nail it at last? Tune in tomorrow…

Doctor Who 8.12 – Death in Heaven

At the risk of leaving our son out of these posts, I’ll start tonight by mentioning that while we were on vacation, the condo we rented had a previous occupant’s Hulu account logged in, so the kid sat down to a few hours of Animaniacs. I interrupted him to play him the notorious “Frozen Peas” tape of Orson Welles having a series of tantrums while recording commercials in the UK for Findus. Then we looked at the Pinky & the Brain installment “Yes, Always.” Famously, the Brain’s voice actor, Maurice LaMarche, perfected his Orson Welles impersonation by playing and replaying the “Frozen Peas” tape, and in “Yes, Always,” the Brain does an overdub session for some previous episode or other. The script is a mildly edited transcript of the “Frozen Peas” tape, ensuring that a generation of kids knows that a gonk is a bang from outside.

Returning home, that led me to dusting off Tim Burton’s masterpiece Ed Wood, in which LaMarche was called to overdub Vincent D’Onofrio in the role of Welles himself, because no matter how much we love D’Onofrio in so many great parts, especially Detective Bobby Goren, no living actor can do Welles as well as LaMarche. So he and I talked about how and why overdubs like this work, and then I let him know that Peter Capaldi and Michelle Gomez performed the lines from the previous episode revealing the Master’s identity silently, so nobody in the crowd on location would learn the secret, and overdubbed them later. So see, I’m always looking for coincidences and connections. Narf.

Something really, really funny happened on November 8, 2014.

Did you know we have a food blog? There’s a link on the right-hand side, right down at the bottom of the page. It’s mostly dormant, in part from burnout and in part because we just don’t travel with food and old restaurants as our principal destination anymore, but we had lots and lots of fun and learned so many stories from 2010-2018. I used to be in the habit of taking off for two days of just driving around listening to loud music and eating barbecue many, many miles from home.

And so at 11 AM that November 8, I entered the Skylight Inn in Ayden NC for the very first time and had the best plate of barbecue I’ve ever had. I’ve taken Marie – and our son – back twice, in 2017 and in 2019. It was mindblowing and perfect, and, if I do say so myself, it resulted in such a delightfully quirky and silly blog post that it is, in all honesty, my favorite of all the hundreds of food posts I’ve written.

So there it was. At eleven that morning, I found my all-time favorite restaurant. And twelve hours later, back in Atlanta, at eleven that evening, I sat down to the encore presentation of Steven Moffat’s “Death in Heaven” and found my all-time least favorite episode of Doctor Who.

It is an absolutely appalling piece of television. It out-Timelashes “The Twin Dilemma” and it under-Underworlds “Fear Her”. It is a towering icon of terrible taste and absolutely brainless narrative decisions, of which, making the Doctor the president of Earth might just be the pinnacle. No, it’s the Cyber-Brig. No, it’s something else. It resolves the “Am I a good man?” and “the Doctor hates soldiers” storylines by swinging a sledgehammer around them so that they need never be discussed again. I’ll grant you that had this been Jenna Coleman’s final episode, then the farewell scene with the Doctor and Clara lying their goodbyes to each other would have been something new, but it ends up not mattering since she comes back in seven weeks.

But the weirdest thing actually showed up a few years later. Something about this, atop all its other misfires, really didn’t sit well with me that dark and disappointing night in 2014. It’s that now that the Master is a female, she reveals that she did all the evil things that she has done for the benefit of the male hero. She wants her friend back. I said that felt wrong at the time, that the female villain shouldn’t be reduced to needing a male lead’s approval. And then, on January 15, 2017, in the absolutely execrable final episode of Moffat’s Sherlock, which I swear I enjoyed nine out of thirteen times, we meet Sherlock and Mycroft’s younger sister Eurus, who reveals that she did all the evil things that she has done for the benefit of the male hero. She wants her brother back. The female villain shouldn’t be reduced to needing a male lead’s approval, and here it was again.

I’ve been back to the Skylight Inn twice and it was every bit as amazing as I remember it. I watched “Death in Heaven” for the second time tonight and it was every bit as terrible as I remember it. It was a funny day, that November 8.

Doctor Who 8.11 – Dark Water

And then there was that day, that terrible, terrible day in 2014. We’d come to the end of an absolutely remarkable story. It was written by Steven Moffat and directed by Rachel Talalay, who seemed like she wanted to kick down the doors and demand that she be considered in any discussion about who might be the very best of all Doctor Who‘s directors. It started with Danny Pink dying in a freak accident, continued through Clara willing to betray the Doctor to change her timeline, and provided a brilliant one-off chance to smile in this dark story when the Doctor asks, quite rationally, whether the scientist who detected human speech in some of that white noise / EVP rubbish was an idiot. Then the Cybermen showed up, on the steps of St. Paul’s, even!

It was so, so good. And then Missy revealed herself.

It could have been worse. A good friend of mine confessed that she’d spent several minutes in horrified silence afraid that Missy was Romana, gone bad.

I’ve got no problem with Time Lords changing gender. Beginning with season nine, Michelle Gomez would become second only to Delgado as my favorite Master, ever. But she does nothing in these two episodes to impress – and what Moffat makes the Master do in the second part is going to prompt a pretty pained response in tomorrow’s post – and the cliffhanger landed with a thud with me because the Master has been completely and utterly uninteresting since 1976. All the promise, all the mystery about this strange woman and the Nethersphere, all the possibilities… and it’s the Master?

It’ll get better. But it’s going to get worse first.

Doctor Who 7.16 – The Time of the Doctor

I think you can fairly make the case that Steven Moffat had a task none of us would envy. The problem with putting together long, long-running storylines is that when your lead actor decides that it’s time to move on, you kind of have to rush to wrap everything up. With that in mind, I honestly don’t believe for a minute that “The Time of the Doctor” is entirely everything he wished he could do, and it’s incredibly rushed in places, with information thrown at the audience very, very fast, but it’s nevertheless surprisingly coherent considering what a mess series six had been, and occasionally excellent in places. It would have been nice had Matt Smith agreed to another, say, six episodes, so the whole business of the Papal Mainframe, Tasha Lem, and the Silents could have been set up much more naturally in its own story so it could breathe a little easier, but what we got still mostly works.

It’s a greatest hits wrapup, with Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, Weeping Angels, Silents, Trenzalore, an explanation of Madame Kovarian and River Song, and one last visit from the Crack in the Universe from series five. The music mix is terrible and possibly the most incoherent the program’s ever been, the regeneration energy destroying all the Daleks is just plain lame, but I can embrace just about everything else, particularly loving “bubbly personality masking bossy control freak,” the Doctor unpacking a trinket that he stole from the Master way back in “The Five Doctors”, and just the wonderful concept of our hero spending hundreds and hundreds of years protecting one town from one monster after another. And Matt Smith gets a great, great final scene. “Raggedy Man… good night.”

The best, and the worst, are yet to come, as we get to the Doctor I love the most and the two episodes that I loathe the most. We’ll start series eight of Doctor Who in May. Stay tuned!

Doctor Who 7.13 – Nightmare in Silver

“Kids like explosions and action-packed stuff,” our son reminded us. This was after he protested that he didn’t actually like this story, because, as he keeps claiming, he doesn’t like the Cybermen. But while we were watching it, he was in seventh heaven. He enjoyed this one tremendously, but he backpedaled at the end, finally allowing that the “action-packed stuff” only temporarily held his attention. Uh-huh.

I’m not a big fan at all myself, but it really starts amazingly well, doesn’t it? Neil Gaiman wrote this one, and while I don’t think it’s a patch at all on “The Doctor’s Wife”, I love the effortless world-building of this planet so incredibly far away from Earth. Up to this point, the Cybermen were a comparatively easily-contained threat local to the Milky Way over the course of a few hundred years, and memorably dismissed by the Daleks as just pests. These Cybermen are way the heck out somewhere very, very far away, where humanity has built an absolutely massive empire. These Cybermen are such a threat to the empire that the entire Tiberian Spiral Galaxy had to be destroyed to stop them in a war a thousand years prior to this story. Perhaps this is the same area of time and space where “Ascension of the Cybermen” in series twelve is set.

So I enjoy the world and I like guest star Warwick Davis very much. I’m less a fan of Matt Smith’s performance as the Cyber-planner; I think he’s more animated and emotional than I’d have wanted. There are lots of little things I don’t care for in the story, but Gaiman did such a good job creating a sense of place that I don’t mind how ordinary the nuts and bolts of it are. And after all, there are explosions and action-packed stuff.

Doctor Who 6.12 – Closing Time

Longtime readers know that I’m an old school Who geek, and I’ve enjoyed a whole heck of a lot of time spent debating and discussing such pressing issues as UNIT dating and how old the Doctor might really be. So Gareth Roberts’ “Closing Time” tickles me in one wonderful regard. The season began with “The Impossible Astronaut” revealing that the Doctor we saw die was two hundred years older than when Amy and Rory last saw him. So there you have it: assuming he wasn’t lying again, two hundred years pass for the Doctor since the previous episode.

I love this, and I love all the fun speculation about what the Doctor did for two centuries, other than go on dates with River and appear in Laurel and Hardy films. He calls this his farewell tour, and I choose to believe that for a chunk of it, he did one better than his little check-ins on old companions (as seen in “The End of Time” and expanded upon in “Death of the Doctor”) and he went to see everybody. He went everywhere and visited everybody he possibly could, from making sure that the Tribe of Gum had enough fire to ensuring that the Tivolian fellow we met in the last story got back home to see his planet invaded properly, and somewhere in between, he paid for the finest accommodations at a nursing home for his old friend Alistair.

But he chose to end the farewell tour visiting Craig and Sophie and their new baby Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All, in Colchester, 2011, where some Cybermen have woken up underneath a department store, and are being much more creepy than stompy. James Corden is back, although sadly Daisy Haggard was mostly unavailable due to another job so she only has a couple of short scenes. Lynda Baron, who had been an Eternal pirate queen back in 1983’s “Enlightenment”, has a small role in this story.

The kid almost completely loved it, and I think this must have been the highlight of the season for him. There’s an epilogue with River Song and the Silence that had him scowling, but he laughed and smiled all the way to that point. I don’t recall the last time he enjoyed an adventure with the Cybermen this much. I think he’s softening on them. He actually asked for more Cybermen action figures for Christmas, figuring he needs to beef up his army of those since he has enough Daleks. Don’t tell him, but he’s getting at least two.

Doctor Who 5.12 – The Pandorica Opens

This didn’t go as planned. I was really looking forward to watching this again and moved it up a day, and it all fell to pieces in the end. Our son, I mean. A cliffhanger ending hasn’t hit him like this in years and years. He was devastated.

For a good while, though, he was enjoying this as much as a kid could. We hear Dalek voices from space and then Cybermen voices and then River lists a gang of alien ships in the atmosphere and he was hopping around, so completely thrilled we told him to knock it off. Everything the show gave us just blew him away. I loved hearing his little incredulous voice when the Roman legionnaires’ hands drop away to reveal guns. “…Autons?!”

If you’ve never seen this, it ends with one of the most over-the-top cliffhangers ever. Everything goes wrong, everything falls apart, to the point that Steven Moffat honestly spent the next five series in charge of this show trying for something else with the emotional and narrative oomph of this revelation. The Doctor is imprisoned in a trap designed to lock him away forever. About the only thing I ever figured out before Moffat revealed it was that the box was built for the Doctor, and oh, how delicious it was to see that unfold. Amy is shot dead by Rory, who’s somehow been reincarnated as an Auton, and River is trapped in the TARDIS, which has materialized in rock and is exploding. Then all the lights in the universe go out, fade to black.

Among the named baddies that we don’t see among the Alliance: Draconians, Drahvins, Chelonians. They stuck some Silurians and Roboforms and a Hoix in the room but I guess they didn’t have room in the budget for some new costumes for a one-off. Nice of them to pay for Christopher Ryan to come back and play another Sontaran general, though.

Ah, but the poor kid. Overstimulated, he let his worry for the characters bubble over, and exhausted, he let his annoyance that the story wasn’t finished bubble over, and wishing for a happy ending, he let his frustration that it looks a lot like the heroes have failed bubble over. He wept and stormed and we had to have a long talk about treating anger as a warning sign and needing to calm down. It’s okay to be disappointed, but anger is a little troubling to us. He felt a lot better after a good talk, and then Marie went upstairs to read his night-time story: David Whitaker’s novelization of “The Daleks,” which probably won’t help the overstimulation issue much.