Doctor Sinister

Very nice. Illumination is always a nice thing to do to a LEGO TARDIS. Here's mine. Dr. S.

The Aurora class of space station from Sinister Industries can be easily assembled in a Low Earth Orbit and is suited to any one of a multitude of purposes. The model seen here is a scientific research station comprising of two habitation modules, one service module, a generator module and two science research modules, but other options are available. The station is capable of generating its own power through two large deployable solar panel arrays, or alternatively with the use of its own on board nuclear generator. For safety purposes, the generator is housed inside a separate section of the station – seen here at the top of the photo, and accessible only by spacewalk from the main sections of the station. The two science modules are also housed at the ends of large booms radiating from the central core of the station. Again, this is for safety reasons, so that the station is not contaminated if an experiment goes awry. These modules are also only accessible by the means of a short spacewalk through gantry sections. The station has two large thruster modules which can be used to induce a clockwise spin about the central axis, if this should be desired. Such a spin will typically generate up to 1/3 Earth gravity in the outer science modules, and a small amount of gravity in the habitation modules. Some clients prefer to swap the positions of these modules around, to provide the habitable areas with gravity instead. Alternatively, the station can be left essentially motionless if experiments require a totally weightless environment. The station has ten external airlocks, six of which face outwards and which can accommodate standard space shuttle designs, and four inside the superstructure, used for EVAs from one section to another. Shown with LEGO Space Shuttle Adventure (set 10213) for size comparison. The solar panels can be rotated 360 degrees and can fold back. Oh, and they are translucent, I used trans-clear baseplates to make them, you can see the light shining through one in this photo: And I shall hug it and squeeze it... Dimensions: 76 Studs High. 98 Studs Wide. 43 Studs Deep. Dr. S.

You might think so, but more than half the signatures so far are from the US. Dr. S.

Calling All Doctor Who LEGO Fans! Facebook page. Petition. Do YOU want to see an official range of LEGO Doctor Who sets? Would YOU like to help me petition LEGO for such a range? Hopefully LEGO fans reading this will be aware of the LEGO Ambassador Program – where Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOLs) nominated by their respective LUGs can interact directly with the LEGO Group to dicsuss ideas, themes and trends. I am pleased to be able to announce that for the 2011 cycle, I have been accepted as a LEGO Ambassador on behalf of The Brickish Association, the UK Forum for Adult Fans of LEGO. I am happy to serve and I will endeavour to do so to the best of my ability…but I would also like to be able to use this position to attempt to persuade LEGO to take the plunge and open discussions with the BBC about a range of official Doctor Who LEGO sets. There are a great many AFOLs out there who are also fans of Doctor Who – myself included. There are also huge numbers of children out there who I am sure would be delighted to see two of their interests, Doctor Who and LEGO, merge together to create what could be an extremely exciting range of figures and sets. Such a range would be potentially unlimited in scope, featuring all eras of history, including future history, and any world in the universe. Doctor Who has a rich strain of stories, characters and alien creatures to call upon – this could be the ultimate LEGO range. LEGO’s response to date has always been that Doctor Who doesn’t have enough of an international following to be successful – a response that I don’t accept, and I’d like you to help me try to prove them wrong. To help prove the point, I have set up an online petition and I would ask anyone of the same mind as me to complete this to help in my campaign. In addition, I am keen to acquire testimonials from AFOLs about their specific interests in a Doctor Who LEGO range – for example, do you have children of your own who are crying out for such a range? Give me the information, and I will present it en-masse to The LEGO Group. You can sign the petition here, you can participate in the Facebook group, and/or you can e-mail your testimonials to doctorwholego@blahblahblah.co.uk Obviously, I cannot promise that we will get a result, but we can at least perhaps hope to raise the global profile of Doctor Who with LEGO. Dr. S.

Episode 18. Responding to a distress call from the planet Grenulos IV, a world suffering from hideous overpopulation, the 83rd Doctor and Millicent had to negotiate a tricky landing to avoid injury to the local people. With the Doctor having picked what he thought was a suitable arrival spot where the relative density of the biomass was lower than the teeming hordes of people in the surrounding area, the TARDIS nevertheless caused a significant number of casualties when it finally materialised. Alas, the spot picked for the landing was nothing less than the Grenulon Council Chamber, an area that was indeed less densely packed than the surrounding city, but nevertheless a room which was still filled to the rafters with the entire leadership of the planet. With the President, Vice President, Defence Minister, Home Secretary, Education Minister and Foreign Minister squished beneath the mass of the time machine along with several hundred other Civil Servants and aides, no-one else on Grenulos IV could quite recall why the Doctor had been summoned in the first place. Thus after a quick clean up and some heartfelt apologies, our heroes departed the planet shortly thereafter, only to see Grenulos IV smashed to atoms by a marauding battle fleet of Skeletoids who happened to be passing through the area, a fleet that the Grenulons had spotted several days previously and the cause of their original distress call. Dr. S.

Episode 17. Whilst attempting to evict the evil Master from the Matrix (the Time Lords’ repository of all knowledge in the universe) the 83rd Doctor and Millicent found themselves embroiled in an increasingly strange series of artificially generated cyberspace adventures as their nemesis tried to prevent them from thwarting his plans. Having been boiled, shot, beheaded and dropped from a light aircraft into a volcano without a parachute, our heroes still somehow managed to survive their ordeals, clinging to the certain knowledge that everything around them was an illusion. The episode culminated with the Doctor and Millicent ostensibly finding themselves on the set of Masterchef where the Master, predictably, was the chef and who proceeded to present to the Doctor a series of mouth-wateringly tempting recipes to distract him from his efforts. This was in fact a cunning attempt by the Doctor Who Producer to increase ratings by tying in the show with other popular BBC light entertainment titles. The recipes presented were real enough, and indeed many people downloaded them from their TV sets to make in their own homes. However, with the writers realising that the episode would have to come to some kind of conclusion, the story suddenly veered without warning back to the main plot to see that the Master’s main course was nothing other than “Millicent Casserole”. The Doctor, in a desperate attempt to save his companion, tried to rescue her with the use of his trusty Sonic Hammer but slipped on a carelessly forgotten fried egg and awoke moments later in real life to see that the Master had escaped with all the secrets of the Matrix in his TARDIS, which was disguised as a fridge. Millicent, having been finally killed inside the Matrix, awoke moments later and required a substantial period of counselling, having been chopped into little tiny pieces in the virtual world. Unfortunately, several members of the viewing audience failed to distinguish between the real recipes given earlier in the show and the aforementioned Millicent Casserole, causing local Police forces around the country some considerable headaches for quite a long a period of time due to the subsequent increase in cannibalism in the provinces. Dr. S.

The one-man LL-447 "Mantis" is a ground-based multi-role combat starfighter that is primarily used for long-range high speed interdiction and heavy strikes on enemy assets. Able to mount up to four Class IX "Ship-killer" missiles or tactical warheads, the "Mantis" excels in deep strike missions undertaken without capital ship support, and is also capable of operating as a space superiority fighter if the need arises. Utilising and building upon many of the design concepts of the LL-444 "Gnat" interceptor and the LL-445 "MayFly" shuttle, the LL-447 also differs from those designs in that its design is solely reliant on a single heavy-duty powerplant for function. Just another ship in the Neo-Classic Space colour scheme, albeit this time I've actually bothered to design it from the outset to have proper landing gear. The result of two evenings of boredom, this took about 12 hours to build and another 5 hours to make the photos look pretty. Click on each image for a larger version. Click here for a full set of images. Dr. S.

Yep, no butchering involved, cutoffs from LEGO stickers. Dr. S.

It's green "goo" which came free with the latest issue of Doctor Who Adventures. It comes off in one go, no residue. Dr. S.

Episode 16... Yeah, it was lazy of me to just reuse LEGO set 5891 for this episode, but I thought it made for a funny picture, and it’s a lovely set. So sue me… Apparently giving up on his travels in time to settle down in London, the Doctor decided to operate a Pizza Delivery service from the safety of his TARDIS. Operating under the promise of a “Guaranteed delivery half an hour BEFORE you place the order or your money back!”, our heroes received a nasty surprise at 32 Acacia Avenue to discover that a horde of Cybermen had taken up residence. To make matters worse, the Cybermen’s order for six Double-Pepperoni Feasts had accidentally gotten mixed up with a separate order for two Vegetarian Specials by the Vervoids next door, and the normally stoic and unemotional Cybermen got very annoyed indeed. The rest of the episode was a typically unimaginative runaround which saw the Doctor and Millicent pursued up and down the streets of London to the tune of an endlessly repeated Ralph McTell song until the Doctor was able to evade capture when he accidentally discovered that Cybermen were allergic to Cajun Sauce, whereupon he was able to escape in the TARDIS and resume his proper travels in time and space, forgetting of course to even consider what the Cybermen were doing on Earth in the first place and missing the perfect opportunity to foil their plans. I love run-on sentences, don’t you? As ever, brilliant Cyberhead design by JimmytheJ, used with permission. Dr. S.

Episode 15... By season 342 in the year 2338, Cambridge-Smythe’s new “showtime” direction for Doctor Who had led to a complete absence of tension, fear or peril in many episodes. One story in particular saw the Doctor and Millicent star in a musical adventure with the Daleks in a largely nonsensical plot that nonetheless bore more than a passing resemblance to the Rodgers and Hammerstein story The Sound of Music. The episode saw the Doctor and Millicent arrive in Salzburg, Austria, where they became embroiled in the lives of the von Trapp family who were being hounded by a squad of Daleks. The Dalek task force had, in turn, been sent back in time and disguised themselves as Nuns in order to persuade the family to come and sing for them on their home planet of Skaro. Although suffering heavily from Venusian flu, the Doctor was able to discover that the Daleks’ evil plan was to stage a concert in the distant future featuring thousands of kidnapped musical acts from throughout time. This once-in-a-lifetime “ultimate concert” was to be broadcast simultaneously by hyper-wave to every planet in the known universe, and whilst everyone was distractedly viewing their telemonitors in excitement, the Daleks would then stage an invasion and conquer all of space in an instant and without resistance. Featuring such classic tunes as “So Long, Farewell, Exterminate”, “Hover Over Ev’ry Mountain” and “How do you exterminate a problem like Maria?”, many viewers wondered how the BBC were able to get away with such blatant plagiarism. However this was easily achieved by changing several of the lyrics to the songs, such as the opening lines of “Do-Re-Mi”: “Dough – some cash, a lot of cash Ray- a beam from a gun” And so on… The song “Edelweiss” was also altered significantly and renamed simply and inevitably to “Exterminate”: “Exterminate, exterminate Ev’ry morning they flee me Small and white Clean and bright Humans don’t look happy to meet me Explosions grow Ash falls like snow Bodies pile up forever Exterminate, exterminate Bless the Dalek race forever” The episode concluded with the Doctor inadvertently assisting the von Trapps as they fled to Switzerland by infecting the Dalek squad with his Venusian flu and causing many of the mutant creatures to explode inside their casings. Alas, the Daleks’ final plan was merely delayed, not thwarted by the Doctor, who had gone back to bed, and several thousand years in the future, the universe fell to Dalek oppression amidst the nasal tones of Bob Dylan. Dr. S.

I realise all these TARDIS pictures are annoying, but my love of Doctor Who overrides my love of LEGO and being able to combine them both is a dream come true. So it’s something I have to get out of my system. Here, the TARDIS has arrived on the hangar deck of the ISS Europa, where two curious fighter pilots stare at it, bemused. No Photoshoppery here, this is straight from the camera. Dr. S.

Episode 14... The Season 341 adventure simply entitled “Stoned” was one of the more intelligent scripts of Derek Deadman’s tenure as the Doctor. Unfortunately this was one of the exceptions to the rule and even this story saw the Doctor completely fail to to prevent the villains of the piece achieve total victory in their plans. Arriving on Earth for the 2022 Glastonbury Festival, the 83rd Doctor found himself victimised by a group of deranged Hippies who were drawing up plans to plunge the Earth into a global “love-in” which in turn would allow them to seize control and pass the balance of power to the trees. Having had his drink spiked with illegal substances, the Doctor retreated to the TARDIS to recover and passed out, emerging the next day to tackle his monstrous foes. Unfortunately he forgot to reset the TARDIS intertial drift compensator and unseen, the machine slipped backwards in time by some five billion years, where it became encased in lava and was effectively fossilised. Realising his error and unable to defeat the Hippie menace without his time machine, the Doctor and Millicent spent some days calculating whereabouts on the planet the TARDIS had materialised all those millennia ago. Stealing a taxi and driving halfway around the globe, our heroes were then forced to spend a week chipping away with the Sonic Hammer at a remote cliff face to uncover the fossilised TARDIS and revive their machine. This was one of the rare events that the Sonic Hammer actually proved useful. Unfortunately by this time it was far too late to do anything about the new world government that had seized power, and our heroes had no choice but to leave quietly in case they woke up any slumbering plant life. Here is my “stone” TARDIS: Identical construction to the blue one, just made of light bley bricks. I have another colour too…but that’s another story. Dr. S.

The missing tenth instalment! This one was initially created as an exclusive for James Shields to include in a LEGO/SF related fanzine at the 2010 Worldcon. On the basis that the event has now finished, I can post it here. Paying a visit to the famous floating rocks of Krebulon VI, the 83rd Doctor and Millicent found themselves in a spot of bother after the TARDIS materialised on one of the smaller rocks, and an absent-minded K-9 sent them tumbling over the edge. In a slightly existential twist necessitated by budgetary constraints, our heroes were forced to spend the next 45 minutes contemplating the meaning of existence before being rescued by their robotic friend whom, it was revealed, in a highly unlikely twist, had rockets built into the sides of his body all the time that enabled him to fly. Still, if it was good enough for R2D2, then it was good enough for K-9, albeit 336 years later. It is not without a certain amount of irony that this episode, aired in 2338, was entitled “Hanging On” – since by the middle of Season 342 of which it was a part, the series was in dire straits, having suffered the lowest ratings in the program’s history, and was close to cancellation. Therefore, in a desperate attempt to boost the audience appreciation scores and to recreate the past glories of earlier, cannier Producers in 2006, 2145, 2157 and 2288 respectively, the robot dog character of K-9 was reintroduced to the series. However, true to form on the part of current Producer Cambridge-Smythe, this revamped incarnation of the Doctor’s companion was played strictly for laughs and was portrayed as a bumbling, forgetful, accident-prone character that kept breaking down and bumping into things. This did not sit well with the half-dozen or so people still watching Doctor Who, but since this audience consisted for the main part of a group of quadriplegics on a particular hospital wing that suffered a faulty television that couldn’t be switched over to another channel, there was little they could do about it other than to tut loudly and flicker their eyelids a lot. The addition of comedy bells and whistles whenever K-9 moved on screen was an additional miscalculation, as was the high-pitched camp voice dubbed in post-production. To make matters worse, K-9′s complete inability to move in a straight line was not always the result of the scripts, and much like the original K-9 prop used between 1977 and 1981, the creation proved extremely difficult to control on set. Despite the 361 years of advances in technology, the machine spent more time being repaired than actually being used for filming. One particularly nasty incident occurred on location for this very story – with K-9 hurrying to the rescue of the TARDIS crew, the polarity of the machine’s remote control receiver was reversed, causing an erroneous signal to be sent back to the control unit which promptly recalibrated itself to a default factory setting. Unfortunately, this setting matched one being used at a nearby nuclear reactor for the control of a robotic arm to manipulate control rods, and within minutes, the reactor went critical and suffered a minor but catastrophic explosion, releasing tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere and irradiating half of the country. The incident was hurriedly covered up by the BBC as they could not afford another scandal, having only recently been bailed out by the British Government for enormous debts, partly incurred by senior management in their massively expensive and excessive coverage of yet another Football World Cup fiasco, and in any event, since most of Britain in 2338 was full of retarded celebrity-obsessed dullards, the radiation appeared to cause no real additional ill-effects. K9 model by Louise Dade. Dr. S. Most records from the Derek Deadman years as the 83rd Doctor are of course lost on the basis that the BBC wisely destroyed all recordings of this era of the show, and the subsequent Fandom Wars saw the destruction of many more off-screen archives. However we have recently uncovered some exclusive off-air stills of the opening title sequence that ran during seasons 340-342 (2338-2338). Larger version here: http://www.tabletownonline.com/blog/2010/09/08/found-the-lost-derek-deadman-doctor-who-title-sequence/ Dr. S.