set the controls for the heart of the sun

Am I mistaken, or is the Director General of CERN in Japan on the day that the most significant CERN experiment in ages is taking place in Geneva? Could that be the other side of the planet, by any chance?

The biggie is the switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider filled with protons stripped from Hydrogen and ramped up to a 'back to the future' style voltage of 3.5 Trillion electron volts (TeV).

Quite powerful.

Then the ikkle protons buzz around and get excited until they are deflected to collide creating all manner of new and otherworldly sparks.

1000 million times hotter than the sun. In a tiny space.

My guess is that the beings from distant planets will spot this sign of galactic level science and decide to point their telescopes and time-travel devices our way.

Earth. Mostly Harmless. As the hitch-hikers guide says.

Nanoo-Nanoo.

blue is the colour of four knocks

I've been chained to my desk again today and I'm just about to start my evening shift. I did take a short break for food and watched the Bowie base on Mars being attacked in Doctor Who.

But not by spiders. The Waters of Mars.

There were water based organisms that made people into smiling cracked faced Zombies.

The Thing meets Shaun of the Dead.

It was quite an enjoyable episode, with plenty of references to other movies. Silent Running's hydroponic garden, a rather cranky Meccano robot that could have been from Short Circuit or Wall-E. A joke about dog robots.

A colony with a chain of modules that looked like the main space ship from 2001 dug into the dirt.

Some blippiness in the soundtrack from 2001. Come to think of it, an 'open the pod bay door' kind of moment.

Some pulled back scenes that could have come from Thunderbirds.

Running through lots of empty hangers whilst talking about the cost of shipping bicycles to the planet. I was wondering how much metal there was in the apparently wasted space they had to run through. It would have made a lot of bikes. And shorter corridors.

There was also some good ensemble wobbliness in the first part. Kind of ancient Doctor Who acting. Wooden handshakes and a few long pauses. Like a live show where someone has almost forgotten their lines. I'm sure it was some kind of homage.
And the really cool ray guns and walky talkies, like something from Mars Attacks. Water pistols that fire death rays.

Of course, it turned into a proper story about moments in time. Fortunately, the Doctor has a perfect memory and could recall the exact web pages describing the doomed fate of the fledgling space colony.

Boom.

And he knew it was one of those moments, like Pompeii, that you are not supposed to change. Not even as a Time Lord.

So we moved from 'base under attack' to 'fatalistic ending - it has to explode'.

The Doctor should leave. But he hesitated in his special crash helmet and came back.

Maybe he could be a god and change everything? Even when he wasn't supposed to. Could he rule time?

Then we saw the countdown of the space station's inbuilt bomb. And how cool were those graphics? Someone had a lot of time on their hands to make the numbers look so interesting for people about to be blown up.

Of course, with a single leap, they escaped.

Kind of. We see a blue flash as the base captain kills herself (we assume!?) to reset time. The Doctor is clearly on the edge of going dark.

What finer than a snow bedecked setting for a few ghosts to appear and four knocks to sound the end of this particular Doctor?

We shall see.

At Christmas.