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Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter (or possibly multiple chapters for this one) of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.
Two chapters again. One is short and while the other is technically long enough to review on its own it’s not so long that the three page chapter before it can’t be lumped in. So it’s another double chapter review for this book.
Last time it looked like our heroes were making a mistake. Unlike the first book, though, it doesn’t give the appearance of incompetence. That was one of my problems with the first novel. The main cast looked like fools, while the guest cast were far more interesting and I would have rather followed them. Somewhere between books, this technically being their third assignment and the first mission was supposedly a disaster according to backstory, our team actually learned to work together and not be morons. I can respect that. If the book wasn’t filled with useless trivia and odd chapter choices based on location and time it might be a better book. Instead, they only solved one problem.
Still, let’s see if they can at least solve their current dilemma, stopping a war and a coup, which oddly are not tied together the normal way.
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“How come you get weapons and I have to use my hand to shoot people?”
Ultraverse Premiere #2
Malibu Comics/Ultraverse (April, 1994)
This is another flipbook, on the back of Mantra #10, another comic I wouldn’t be reading back in the day. So that means I would never have known about these books until the next issue, which flipped with an issue of Prime, that comic this reading list refuses to let me read. Since most likely these would have been on shelves and spinner racks on the Mantra side, all you’d see is a very expensive issue of Mantra at first glance. I don’t know. I don’t see this as a good idea since not everybody is going to read the comics on the flipside and not know about your three new characters unless they did.
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Then again, do we know this king is noble?
Would a King be a nobleman, or even a former nobleman? I’m not up on my Medieval European terminology.
Well, as we head into September I’m hoping to get back to decluttering and The Clutter Reports. However, it depends on my schedule. My plans of having an article buffer proved to my benefit, as during this month I only missed one feature article without shirking my responsibilities to my dad during his surgical recovery. I’m all out of those, but he’s healing up pretty well. I’m hoping to have time to make a real buffer, so if I need time off you won’t know it unless I miss the comic reviews. Maybe I can even buffer those, but my priority is feature articles, then daily videos and weekly article links, then the comic reviews, and finally the Jake & Leon comics. With the buffers done I want to get back to video content and that Let’s Play series/channel I’ve wanted to do for years. It all depends on what happens next.
So this week we have the next Chapter By Chapter review of Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image, and I’ll definitely replace that with a shorter book. All I’ll say now is I know what series, but not which individual book. I’ll also have something besides Doctor Who for this week’s Saturday Night Showcase, though we will come back to the time-traveling spaceman and his magic box in the future. As for the rest, it depends on what time I have and what events inspire me.
Have a great week, everyone!
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If I were to have done this in order of favorite Doctor Who crossovers rather than airdate, the list would be:
- The Five Doctors: It’s the debut of my favorite console with my favorite classic Doctor, and seeing four of the five Doctors working together is just fun for me. It’s too bad Tom Baker didn’t take part, but supposedly he had scheduling conflicts. Given his disinterest in Companions or working with other Doctors in Big Finish, part of me wonders if that’s the only reason.
- The Three Doctors: Probably the best written of the classic team-ups, watching Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee play off each other was a delight. It’s a shame they didn’t get to team up more. I’m letting the fanboy choose this list, not the story critic.
- Time And The Doctor: Not available for Saturday Night Showcase as of this writing, David Tennant and Matt Smith (the latter being my favorite New Who Doctor because I seem to choose the one after the popular favorite) has the same chemistry and it’s a great story, though forced to introduce the War Doctor because Christopher Eccleston wanted nothing to do with BBC Wales while the same people were involved. I would love to see the trio team up in Big Finish at least. Too bad they broke the crossover name pattern.
- The Two Doctors: Tonight’s finale in the Doctor crossovers. John Nathan-Turner wanted to do another crossover, and for whatever reason chose the Second Doctor. Seeing the two Bakers play off each other might have been frustrating, as both tend to be the more confrontational Doctors, I suppose they could have gotten Hurndall back as the First, it was probably too soon for the Fifth, and I’m not sure Pertwee’s Doctor and Colin’s would have gotten along any more than the two unrelated Baker Doctors. Plus it would be Troughton’s final appearance as the Doctor before his passing, and the two apparently appeared together before, in a children’s show called Swallows And Amazons Forever!, though I don’t know if they shared the screen.
I do like how in tribute the episode opens in black and white, as that’s what the entirety of Troughton’s main run was in. Not having the console from that time, they did have the previous console, which stood in to make it look like the older–well, I guess it would be newer depending on perspective–TARDIS, though they had to use the same walls and monitor that was in use from Tom Baker to the end. I would have liked more with Troughton and Frasier Hines as Jamie, since they’re probably the best Doctor/Companion pairing of the classic era. Meanwhile they name drop Victoria to set a time frame, but it would still be a time in which the Doctor was still on the run from the Time Lords. Fans have tried to come up with an explanation for how it could be happening, but officially this is a plothole.
As for the present team, Sixth is teamed with Peri, my choice for the cutest of classic Companions, and an American…in character, as Nicola Bryant clearly wasn’t. Consider it payback for all the fake British accents some American actors try to pass off. It works for the show’s homeland but not the character’s. Their opposition are the Sontarans, and two member of the Androgum, writer Robert Holmes (a vegetarian) doing for meat eaters what the creator of the Ferengi tried to do for capitalists by making them over the top in their meat eating habits. Fortunately for the Ferengi they had other writers and directors come along and tone them down and make them less silly. The Androgum will not get that chance. Still, you can tell what Holmes thinks of anyone who enjoys a hamburger, and I found the part with the Doctor and one of the Androgum, Shockeye, to be a rather uninteresting sequence. There’s even a swipe at butterfly collectors if you pay attention to how he’s written.
Otherwise the episode isn’t terrible, but clearly a step down from the other crossover. Still worth enjoying for the performances and Troughton’s last turn as the Doctor.
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I enjoy a good novelization. Novelizations are adaptations of movies, and follows the reverse of movie adaptations. You need to pad out the story for proper book length just as you take stuff out to fit a movie run time, so you add information that wouldn’t be in the movie. Scenes that were cut either during filming or editing may still be in the latest draft the author had available to get the book out on time, so we get to see what might have been in there. The author tries to fill in gaps or explore characters, hopefully with information from the creative process to not be too far off from the director and screenwriters’ intentions. They’re quite fascinating and any movie buff who also enjoys reading should try them out.
So for trivia I’m grabbing this article from the Movie Novelizations fan site going over what was out there in 1981. Did you know you could read one of your favorite movies?
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