Honestly? 'Tweendeckers is probably pretty dire. I mean, it's a soap opera set in the Quarian Union. Mostly on one deck of one ship in the Quarian Union, no less, for a budget of diddly to the power of squat. Not even the people who make it are sure why it's popular anywhere else, but it's huge in Zeta Cygni and the Crown Colonies for some unfathomable reason. :)

>Although there were actually more shows about giant robots.

This is only the Friday afternoon block. Most of the giant robot shows are on Saturday morning.

--G.
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Given the general state of the galaxy in 2410, one imagines the giant robot shows are also largely known as "the evening news."

-Merc
Keep Rat

Somewhere in my files I have an image of five Daleks as the Sailor Senshi, which I could not help but think of when I saw that entry...

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

I hope you haven't also thought about their Transformational Twirl. I did, for a few milliseconds — OK, who had the brain bleach last...?

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

------
Jon Helscher

Oh God, it was me. I was the grognard all along.

i htae u all

--G.
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

... yes, well, to offset that, everyone, please accept this entirely fun image:

A Dalek - possibly Oswin the Friendly Dalek - doing Dalek-adapted versions of Claptrap's various idle animations from the Borderlands menu screen.

"Unce! Unce! Unce! Unce! Oh come on! Check me out! Unce! Unce! Unce!"

(On the show, Oswin speaks in a normal voice; a normal girl's voice, which tends to take people slightly aback the first time.)

--G.
"Phew! Those bandits really have it in for us Daleks."
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My brain now sees this version of Clara/Oswin as the one that traveled with the Doctor, which can only end in awesomeness and hilarity.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

"I'm sorry, I'm still not used to having a Dalek on my side." He thought for a moment, flipping a couple of random switches. "On the other hand, you're certainly much more competent at being something other than a warrior than Strax is."

In idle moments, I keep imagining an alternate version who's been physically restored to human form (this is a very major but thoroughly doable biosculpt job in the UF universe), but is still driving her (accordingly modified) Dalek shell around, because she has lingering agoraphobia/boundary issues from the conditioning and just doesn't want to come out.

This is silly, but - weirdly - not entirely without precedent; in the very first Dalek story, there's a scene in which one of the Doctor's companions commandeers a Dalek shell and somehow operates it. OK, so that was the second serial ever, deep in the heart of the cardboard sets era, but still. :)

--G.
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Wasn't that the one where they were powered sort of like bumper cars, but by contact with the ground rather than an electrified thing overhead?

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

The Cushing films bear no continuity or mythology relationships to the TV series, FYI.

It's been some time since I found that Hartnell story arc on Netflix (and I'm not entirely sure that my understanding of it isn't warped in some way), but, IIRC, the principle weakness of the Daleks in that serial was that they had no internal power source, and were limited to their city because of it.

By their second appearance, of course, they'd gotten away from that, AFAIK. (My direct exposure to pre-revival Who is limited.)

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

Well, yeah, they don't take place in the same universe (Peter Cushing's character in the films, for instance, is an eccentric inventor, not an alien) - but since Doctor Who and the Daleks is a loose big-screen adaptation as the first Dalek TV serial, there are many similarities between the two. One of which is the character-hijacking-a-Dalek scene.

(Similarly, Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD is a loosely adapted film version of the second Dalek TV serial, The Dalek Invasion of Earth. It's a shame they didn't keep doing that, with the film versions digressing ever more wildly, like the 007 movies. By the time they got to, say, Day of the Daleks, the movie would've been as different as the film version of Moonraker was from the book, which, in the case of Day of the Daleks, might've meant it was good.)

But yes, in their next appearance on TV, the Daleks had gone to wireless broadcast power (they had little dish antennae on the back of them), and subsequently it's not really mentioned what powers them. In "present-day" UF, I assume they each have their own onboard energy source - tiny fusion reactors, probably.

--G.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Hartnell era trivia:

If you watch the very first episode of Doctor Who ever, "The Unearthly Child," at almost exactly the ten minute mark (where Barbara and Ian are entering the junkyard where the TARDIS is hidden) you can see, in the foreground, what is very clearly a Weeping Angel.

... well, it looks like one to me.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Well, that would be fitting if true, since that's where they belong.

--G.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

---
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends

Perhaps. They do not exist in the UF universe, though it is an open question among multiversal xenologists whether that's because the laws of physics don't work that way, or if it's just that the UF universe - apparently unlike the Doctor Who universe - is liberally supplied with FUCKING SLEDGEHAMMERS.

--G.
OK, so the real answer is that I hate them and I'm in charge, but
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... would that work?

I'd always operated under the assumption that at some point, the Doctor (or possibly River) tossed off some explanation about how due to their whole "slightly outside of time" schtick, the Angels are largely immune to conventional harm, which is why you can't just hit them with hammers while maintaining eye contact. I'd just assumed that I either missed seeing it, or forgot about it.

If that's actually not the case, though, they go from "concept I thought was awesome, but was executed well ONCE and then never again" to "that's fucking dumb."

-Merc
Keep Rat

It works for me. That's all that really matters here. :)

No, seriously, there's a douchey brushoff of the idea at some point, which has to do with the preposterous notion that they're literally not alive when anyone's looking at them - which places them somewhere just to the right of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal on the "idiotic concept" scale, I should think - and "you can't kill a stone".

If it helps, then, let's go with "the laws of physics don't work that way". Shit, in UF not even magic works that way. Things that are made of stone and yet alive, sure, that's basically what the Prague Golem was. Things that are sometimes made of... something... and alive, and sometimes made of stone and not alive, interchangeably based on an incredibly crocky apprehension of the observer effect? That's just somebody not having a goddamn clue how quantum mechanics works. :)

--G.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Things that turn into not-things when people are observing them is actually kind of cool. That would be a rather effective form of camouflage, really; if anyone observing you (and assuming that electronic or other forms of remote surveillance counts) can't see what you really are because you literally are NOT that thing anymore, then a whole world of possibilities opens up. Like a more extreme Somebody Elses Problems field, really.

But did they seriously say "you can't kill a stone?" Because that is indeed an idiotic concept. You can't KILL a stone, sure. You can't kill anything that isn't alive. But you can make it stop being a stone. Or you can render it unusable for it's intended purpose. Turning a statue into a pile of rubble doesn't kill it, but it does destroy the statue.

You'd think they could have put some thought into it. Just off the top of my head, you could set up some sort of mutually-reinforcing protection thing; you can't kill the Angel by destroying the statue because, indeed, you can't kill stone, but you also can't destroy the statue because it's only a statue some of the time and the not-statue part of it will just keep reconstructing the statue.

(I'm reminded of the relationship between Dworkin and the Pattern in Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles, where Dworkin's big theory was that neither he nor his Pattern could be hurt because he'd protect the Pattern and the Pattern would protect him.)

It took me two seconds to come up with that, and I'm not paid a lot of money to write Doctor Who.

>If it helps, then, let's go with "the laws of physics don't work that
>way". Shit, in UF not even magic works that way. Things that
>are made of stone and yet alive, sure, that's basically what the
>Prague Golem was. Things that are sometimes made of... something...
>and alive, and sometimes made of stone and not alive,
>interchangeably based on an incredibly crocky apprehension of the
>observer effect? That's just somebody not having a goddamn clue how
>quantum mechanics works. :)

Well, to be fair, trying to bring actual science into either Doctor Who or UF is risky business at the best of times. Usually "good enough to get past peoples suspension of disbelief and/or seem really cool" is the threshold to beat, it seems.

I mean, I know personally a couple people with physics backgrounds who have a lot of trouble with any sci-fi that involves FTL travel because their brains are constantly yelling "THE UNIVERSE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. CAUSALITY AND FASTER-THAN-LIGHT TRAVEL ARE FUNDAMENTALLY INCOMPATIBLE" at them.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Yeah, but you see, you're missing the point: I'm not inclined to be fair to the Weeping Angels. They suck too much. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

If it doesn't, then the traditional response is always an option: "nuke 'em from orbit, it's the only way to be sure"...

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

Considering that the way the Weeping Angels were dealt with in in their debut episode, "Blink," was to have them all looking at each other, if the FUCKING SLEDGEHAMMERS (really, that's the only way to write it) don't work, then just plop down a mirror in front of them. Seriously.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

I don't see it as working like that. The whole blowing-them-to-bits thing, I mean. Sure, they might not enjoy it very much (I assume; paraphilia in xenobiology is an unexplored field outside of the West Country), but I don't think it'll actually kill them. Or even particularly inconvenience them. You see, I tend to think of them as weird collectives, more like the Vashtanerada than conventional lifeforms. Maybe they're the fragmented remains of the two people we see the Lord President doing something to during The End Of Time, I don't know.

My point is, each Weeping Angel is a gestalt rather than a normal alien, rather like a colony of bacteria. When the bits break off - and they will, with the FUCKING SLEDGEHAMMERS &c - you aren't directly watching those bits, so they bugger off and regenerate somewhere else. I'm assuming a lack of conventional-to-humans reproduction here - we know that if they look at each other the defence mechanism triggers.

So when you blow them up or smash them, they let you, because that's how they breed. And then they turn up later and steal your time.

---
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends

Sleep tight...

This is a commonly held misconception. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

--G.

---
"She's old and lame and barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day."
-- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory