Episode 62
Circuit Boards Glued to a Piece of Wood
Sunday 17 January 2016
It’s the start of an exciting new season of Doctor Who. Terry Nation’s back and Mary Tamm isn’t, but we still manage to pull ourselves together long enough to discuss Destiny of the Daleks.
Buy the story!
Destiny of the Daleks was released on DVD in 2007/2008. That was simple. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Notes and links
In 1980, Tom and Lalla recorded a series of Australian ads for minicomputer company Prime Computer. These are available as a DVD extra on the Destiny DVD, but you can also see them on YouTube.
In 1979, Tom recorded a series of three ads for conservation group Keep Australia Beautiful. You can see a terrible videotape copy of two of these on YouTube as well.
The nightmarish scenario of wars run by computer will later be taken up by Matthew Broderick in War Games (1983), which you are all too young to remember. Damn you.
Star Trek’s Wil Wheaton interviews Doctor Who’s Jenna Coleman and Peter Capaldi on the Series 9 DVD and Blu-ray releases. You can watch some short excerpts from that interview here and here.
Nowadays, the word meme tends to refer to photographs of cats with hilarious writing superimposed on them. However, it was originally coined by Lalla Ward’s husband Richard Dawkins to refer to a unit of culture which spreads through imitation.
Chaos on the Bridge is a 2014 documentary written and produced by William Shatner, chronicling the first few difficult years of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s available on Netflix. (Not any longer, apparently.)
Mark Michalowski’s short story The Lying Old Witch in the Wardrobe was published in 2003 as part of Big Finish’s anthology Short Trips: Companions. It explains — whimsically — why Romana regenerates at the start of this story, and suggests that the Romana we see here is not exactly who we expect her to be.
The impasse faced by two perfectly logical computer opponents is an outworking of game theory, used by mathematician John von Neumann to model, among other things, the interactions between the US and the USSR in the Cold War.
The same impasse is also the basis of the short story Fool’s Mate, first published in Astounding Science Fiction in March 1953. In this story, two computerised battle fleets are frozen, unable to attack one another, until one decides to put its attack strategy under the control of a complete madman. Which just goes to show, really.
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Bondfinger
It seems such a long time since there was a new episode of Bondfinger, but don’t worry, we’ll be releasing a commentary track on Casino Royale (1967) early in February. Until then, you can enjoy our first five commentary tracks: You Only Live Twice (1967), Thunderball (1965), Goldfinger (1964), From Russia With Love (1963), and Dr. No (1962). You can keep up with the Bondfinger news on our website, as well as on Twitter and Facebook.