"People keep giving me guns - I do wish they wouldn't!"

The Shakespeare Code was still downloading when I left for work (I sense a regular pattern forming) and I have little to say about Smith and Jones other than that it was fun and I really like Martha so far. So, instead, an expression of love for The Gunfighters.

Early Doctor Who is full of fine stories people have more or less forgotten about. (Fans should pay more attention to The Romans and The Massacre!) Alas, The Gunfighters has not suffered the same fate - instead, it's been relentlessly criticized for the best part of forty years. It's frequently nominated as a story people would cheerfully trade for The Power of the Daleks and suchlike, were it possible to get into a TARDIS and go back to choose exactly what the BBC would burninate [1]. All I can say is that now I've seen it for myself, I'm delighted that they kept it. Some of the accents are dreadful, but given how lenient we are on the special effects and wobbly sets, I can overlook them. (Overhear them? Um ...)

For those who don't know, in The Gunfighters the Doctor and his companions land in the Old West. Delighted, Steven and Dodo dress up in the silliest costumes they can find in the wardrobe, while the Doctor goes in search of a dentist to extract his broken tooth. Unfortunately, they've wound up in Tombstone and the new local dentist is a certain Doc Holiday. Finding out that the Clampton brothers are in town and gunning for him, Holiday substitutes our Doctor for himself. Wackiness, as they say, ensues.

It's very, very silly and very, very funny.

( Spoilers for a story made in 1966 are still spoilers. )

TV Meme For A Rainy Day

I am Spamy McSpamperson today, but I forgot I mailed this to myself, to fill in while bored at work. And I could hardly be more bored than I am now.

A supernatural glitch in your DVR occurs. At first you panic, hitting lots of random buttons on your remote control, but then are RELIEVED to discover that no, your entire series recording of Golden Girls has not been deleted! But then, just as things appear to be back to normal, there's a puff of smoke, and a fairy appears! You have apparently freed the TV fairy from a televised hell in which she was made to watch endless reruns of Are You Hot?, and as fairies tend to be when freed, she is very grateful and wants to grant you magic wishes.

Now, the fairy has only TV-related powerz, and so she offers you the chance to go back in time and retroactively CHANGE the history of your favourite TV shows with 3.5 wishes!

You can go back in time and erase from the fabric of TV history THREE individual episodes of any TV show you want! The rest of the series(es) will not be altered. What do you choose?

First of all, I would click my fingers and remove Voyager's The Q and the Gray from reality. Not only does it do great violence to a character I love, it's an appalling episode in every way. Expecting us to buy that Q is a man - let alone a heterosexual one - is bad enough. Expecting us to believe that the Q have monogamous relationships, or that Q and Janeway have sexual tension ... that's just silly. And not in a good way. That's without even getting into why the plot sucks. (The rebel side wearing blue? WTF?)

Next, I would go back in time and make sure that Time-Flight was never made. There is plenty of stupid Doctor Who and plenty of boring Doctor Who, but for my money nothing in twenty-eight seasons and counting is quite so stupid and boring as Time-Flight. Nothing involving two time-traveling Concordes and the Master has any right to be this dull. Of course, without Time-Flight there would be no reason for Arc of Infinity. Bonus!

Since it would take more than deleting Countrycide to turn Torchwood into a consistently watchable show, I would then get rid of the last episode of Babylon 5's fourth season. I seem to have blocked the title from my memory - something portentous and wanky, no doubt - and wish I could erase the memory of the episode itself. The bit with the holograms is merely stupid, but the scene with Delenn is the only thing in all Babylon 5 I actually find offensive. (Yes, that includes A View From the Gallery. It's dumb and annoying, but I just don't hate it with the same intensity.) JMS and I have very different views on the Great Man theory of history, clearly. ETA: I mean The Deconstruction of Falling Stars, of course. I was so right about the title!

You can go back in time and revive ONE unfairly cancelled television show and return it to the annals of TV history!* *CHOOSE WISELY, because if you attempt to revive more than one show, the wish will backfire and you'll instead be treated to a whole bunch of crappy made-for-TV "reunion" movies full of replacement actors.

You know, if I could only have one back? It wouldn't be Farscape or Firefly, which got a miniseries and a movie to provide some kind of closure. I would have another season of Ultraviolet. Not so many episodes that the idea lost its charm and originality, but it was one of my favourite TV shows ever and six episodes wasn't enough. Naturally Frances would join the squad and Kirsty would never be heard from again.

Other nominees: Crusade and The Tick. The live action version, that is, since the cartoon ran several seasons.

To balance out the historical TV viewing schedule, you now have the power to retroactively CANCEL, at any point during the series, any one show! Alternately, you can wield your destructive might and DELETE one whole entire series from ever having been made.

I would make Red Dwarf end at the end of VI, with Starbug exploding. It would be a strangely fitting conclusion, and would mean no Grant/Naylor split and NO EFFING KOCHANSKI.

Other nominees: Wire in the Blood at the end of the third season and Carnivale at the end of the first.

LIFE AND DEATH! You can now bring ONE character back from the dead... and, to restore the balance, you must also kill off a character! They don't have to be from the same fandom.

I would have Crais back in Farscape for Season Four, of course! Everyone else comes back from the dead one way and another, why not my favourite ex-PK? It would have been entertaining to see him and John agree on the Scorpius issue, and I'd have loved to see him interacting with Macton Tal in Mental As Anything. I can't help thinking that Aeryn always worked better for me when Crais was around, too, so maybe he would have somehow improved that arc as well. And if not, at least I would have something nice to look at when the show was sucking.

As for killing off characters ... does leaving the aforementioned Kochanski dead count? I like her just fine when she's dead! (Its not the character I have a problem with at all, it's the fact that the entire point of the show is that everyone except Dave Lister is dead and she screws that right up.)

Failing that, I'd have vastly preferred to have Gul Dukat die at the end of A Sacrifice of Angels than go boringly crazy. He had a couple of great moments after that - his relationship with Kai Winn is a highlight - but overall the character was past his best from then on.

I was almost tempted to kill of Giles on the grounds that he doesn't have enough to do in Season Seven, but I think that would ultimately have made the series too depressing.

Bonus tradeoff: you can delete a single scene, relationship pairing or plot arc from any series that gave you hives... AND you can plug in any one [scene, pairing, plot arc] that you never got to see!

I would delete Lorien from Babylon 5, no question. He serves no plot function that couldn't just as easily be served by Kosh with a little imagination, and he annoyingly undermines the theme of the episodes he appears in.

I would then put Ethan Rayne into the last few episodes of BtVS Season Four, on the grounds that he had just as much reason to oppose the Initiative as the heroes, if not more. Robin Sachs could hardly have failed to make that particular yawnfest (and I'm not talking about Restless) more interesting.