Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part Eight

In case you hadn't realised where this terrifyingly overlong series of articles got its name from, it's the final misquoted proverb in the final scene of Time And The Rani. To the accompaniment of one last flourish of banjo, The Doctor and Mel bid a jaunty farewell to the Lakertyans and head into the Tardis on - it has to be said - a rather uncertain note. "You're certainly going to take a bit of getting used to", muses the normally perma-chirpy companion. "Oh I'll grow on you, Mel", replies her newly regenerated fellow traveller. "I'll grow on you".

Whether you like it or not, Sylvester McCoy - and the last couple of series of Doctor Who in general - did grow on people. There were, as has already been pointed out at considerable length, a large number of fans who actually enjoyed it for what it was, without recourse to hair-splitting about the 'legacy' of the Diamond Logo or the 'classic' status of wiped sixties stories they could not possibly have seen. There was a tangible sense that while the BBC 'suits' were most definitely not behind the show, the departments involved with promotion and commercial exploitation and the actual business of what average viewers want to watch very much were. And, for better or for worse, it seemed that the general public at the very least had some idea of who the latest Doctor was and what he looked like; something that hadn't really happened since Peter Davison very first took on the role. And then, of course, 1989 rolled around and Doctor Who wandered off into a hedge muttering something about how the tea's getting cold aye unless it isn't.

After that, this momentum just seemed to evaporate as if it had stepped on a spinning globe thing. Time And The Rani immediately slunk to the very bottom of every Best Story Ever!!!4 poll, with the majority of the other Seventh Doctor stories not far behind. Or ahead. However that works exactly. Even the most battle-hardened McCoy defender would happily admit that fresh converts to the cause have been decidedly thin on the ground. Lengthy and considered ruminations on the strengths of those last couple of series - and this is in no way the lengthiest; I cannot recommend the fantastic Wallowing In Our Own Weltschmerz highly enough - are met with indignant cries of "rubbesh!!" that make that ancient huffing and puffing about 'pantomime embarrassment' seem erudite and original. In short, set out to defend the McCoy era, and you've got an almighty task on your hands.

Around the time that Time And The Rani went out, John Nathan-Turner was fond of responding to harrumphy claims that Doctor Who wasn't as good as it used to be by insisting that 'the memory cheats'. If fans could see all those cherished early stories again now, he implied, they'd find that it had always suffered from budgetary restrictions, waffly scripts, cramped studio space, limited rehearsal time and ropey effects. Back then, with about two and a half stories having been released on video at a cost of roughly eighty seven thousand pounds per tape, this was a fairly safe defence to mount. Within a couple of years, though, this argument would unravel in spectacular fashion as story after story after story came out at an affordable price and fans could judge the extent to which their memories had hoodwinked them for themselves.

In some ways, in absolute fairness, he was right - Doctor Who old and new has always suffered from all of the above and more, with far too many fans far too obsessed with concentrating on an agreed pantheon of 'classics' and 'turkeys' to bother too much about problematic questions like that. Objective and rational analysis was never actually on the agenda, though - the late eighties episodes were being attacked from a perspective of personal preference, and defended from a perspective of personal preference. And those same harrumphing fans - and, let's not forget, the general public, who couldn't care less but they liked it when it was Tom Pertwee and the maggots or something - found that yes, they did prefer those older episodes, Anti-Matter Monster and all.

So no, if taken in that specific sense, the memory had not cheated. But has it 'cheated' in entirely the opposite direction? Has - and you'll need to take a deep breath before reading this sentence - the story that they were most determined to delineate their preference for older Doctor Who against now itself come to be negatively defined by that exact same nostalgic process? Or, in short, do people now - whether through a misguided sense of nostalgia or simply a popular perception that they have subsequently picked up on - enjoy hating Time And The Rani more than they do actually having to have an actual opinion on it? Well, gauging that would require large numbers of fans to actually watch it again, which most of them seem curiously reluctant to do. And given how many of them will tell you without being asked that they 'stopped watching' after the first episode, it's questionable how many of them have actually seen enough of it to make a proper judgement in the first place.

In his excellent KLF biography Chaos, Magic And The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds, John Higgs spends a good deal of time discussing Doctor Who. Not simply because the band scored a number one hit with a House Music-styled cover of the theme tune - itself much more of an act of artistic subversion than the 'novelty hit' it gets tediously written off as - but because of its strange correlation with The KLF's own story. Approaching it from the perspective of Alan Moore's intriguing theory about the 'Idea Space', he focuses in on the moment when a once-loved television show falling from favour landed right in the path of two musical pranksters looking for a reference point to prove their theory that treasured pop culture references welded to familiar riffs and modish musical trappings could bag you a chart-topping single. This was the point, argues Higgs at far greater length and with far greater detail than it might appear here, when the slow reversal of Doctor Who's fortunes began; from the moment Gareth Roberts reached for the lemon disinfectant, through the brief but pivotal interlude when the future of the show was actually in the hands of a handful of fans with genuine talent and imagination, through the crossbar-hitting mid-nineties revival (which, lest we forget, featured Sylvester McCoy for a whole quarter of its running time), on into the general public finally starting to look back on it with affection and interest, and right up to its triumphant ratings-conquering return. It was a long and gradual increment, and one that this book argues starts right with the 1987 production team's flawed but defiant refusal to bow out quietly. You might not quite agree with this, of course, but it's worth pondering on the next time that Davina McCall and Pappy's Fun Club snicker at The Kandyman on some dribbling clip show.

You probably won't be too surprised to hear, however, that I do largely agree with it. And here's why. Paul Cornell once described Doctor Who in the late eighties as a 'bullied' programme, and in amongst the acres and acres of reams of nonsense that have been written about 'black-clad' villains and 'bohemian' lead actors, there's seldom been a truer or more perceptive word spoken. Doctor Who spent the final years of its original incarnation dodging a hail of metaphorical and possibly even literal dustbins, attracting more and more sustained abuse than such actual deserving targets as Benefits Street, Days Like These or Adrian Mole - The Cappuccino Years as even its own fans seemed bafflingly determined to drive it into the ground. Even that rancid late eighties revival of The Saint somehow got off lightly in comparison.

But note the use of the word 'dodged'. Like or hate what they did with the programme, the production team were not prepared to go without a fight, and they put up a good one against so many batterings from so many directions; as indeed did the fans who actually did like what they did with it. Maybe it didn't always quite hit the mark, but without that small but substantial display of defiance there might have been no fan-driven attempts at official continuations of the series in other media, and given that one of these fans was a certain Russell T. Davies - who included plenty of stylistic nods to the McCoy era in his own interpretation of Doctor Who (as I wrote about at some length in my book Well At Least It's Free) - you can pretty much finish that line of thought yourself. Also I think Time And The Rani is quite good. You might not have picked up on that.

Right at the end of that closing scene, as Keff McCulloch weighs in with a deliberately jarring and ponderous chord change, Sylvester McCoy leans back out through the Tardis door and doffs his hat to the Lakertyans, sporting a confident and mischevious grin that is pretty much the polar opposite of the nervous and knowingly sarcastic smile to camera that had ended his first official appearance as 'The Doctor'. He'd arrived, and it certainly gave a good feeling to at least one viewer who just wouldn't get on board with this idea that you weren't 'supposed' to like Doctor Who any more. And sometimes this kind of brash, upbeat confidence is all you want from a television show. Not drama, not menace, not 'emotion', not slick sophistication, just a good-natured ending to a good-natured bit of unashamedly cheap and cheerful in-your-face entertainment with boisterous acting, restraint-free music, and ridiculously over-the-top colours. Even if you were watching on the black and white portable.

Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part Four

While Time And The Rani was being broadcast, Children's BBC how-it-works show for under-tens Corners suddenly picked up a couple of million extra viewers. This was largely down to the fact that the show's new presenter Sophie Aldred was also set to become the next Doctor Who companion, and as well as the usual standard issue obsessive fan that has to watch every last appearance by every last actor connected with it, there were also a significant number of smitten teenagers who just couldn't get enough of their latest TV crush. While they would have to wait until 1989 to see Sophie dressed as Cleopatra and wearing a Victorian ballgown with a plunging neckline on Children's BBC game show Knock Knock, anyone who was still watching Corners in December 1987 would nonetheless have got a nice surprise of a very different kind.

During an edition devoted to 'Music', Sophie visited Keff McCulloch in a weirdly dingy cellar-based studio for a look at how he put that contentious new arrangement of the Doctor Who theme together. In a fun little interview, he explains how a synthesiser works, and essays not altogether convincing 'flute' and 'organ' tones before breaking out the somewhat less conventional sounds used in the theme, which it has to be said sounded little short of amazing when tearing out of your TV speaker in isolation. Sophie then gets to play the bassline and edit it into shape using a sequencer; she observes that 'you'd need about twenty hands to play all that', upon which Keff launches into a guided tour of the 24 Track Mixing Console, pushing the faders up and down in a way that seems barely noteworthy now but was the sort of thing that you normally didn't get to see or indeed hear back then.

You may speculate, of course, that this feature was originally intended to tie in with the abandoned single release of the Keff McCulloch version of the theme. Which I would normally use as an opportunity to plug my book about BBC Records And Tapes Top Of The Box, except for the fact that Ian Shazam and all the wacky japesters on the Charter Review committee have just announced that promoting anything to do with The BBC is very bad and wrong. Which I'm happy to comply with, as long as they are similarly happy to dodge an incessant hail of sharpened copies of Come To My Party by Keith Harris And Orville.

Anyway, one thing that surprisingly didn't put in an appearance in his actual arrangement of the theme music, but was all over his incidental music as if it was vying for prominence with that pesky banjo, was the dreaded 'orchestra hit'. For those of you who aren't familiar with it... well, let's face it, you are familiar with it. It's a blanket name for those sampler-derived bits of angular and slightly off-key punches of massed musical emphasis that you'll find roughly every three seconds in any given Pet Shop Boys single. It was an effect that had started to creep in during the early eighties, primarily via Trevor Horn, and by the end of the decade was everywhere, from Debbie Gibson's Electric Youth, through Express Yourself by NWA, all the way to that preposterous Sun-Pat 'P-P-P-Peanutritious' advert. Keff McCulloch had no searing expletive-strewn message to deliver about Black America needing to stop fighting itself before it could fight White America, though, nor indeed any phatic air-punching sentiments about how youngsters hold the 'key' if only the grown-ups would listen to them. Not even any reason to extol the nutritional virtues of a spread made from ninety three percent peanuts. He was there, purely and simply, to punctuate Gavrok thumping his fist through a flimsy paper 'loudspeaker', and didn't we know it.

First essayed in Time And The Rani, Keff McCulloch's approach to incidental music has since become one of the most widely derided aspects of the original run of Doctor Who, and in some regards it's not difficult to see why. Heavily indebted to the MIDI-er-than-thou computer-controlled samplings of The Art Of Noise - whose contemporaneous theme for The Krypton Factor would not have sounded out of place in a McCoy story - his contributions rely far too often on clinical and sterile 'funky' motifs driven by all-too-obviously synth-derived brass and piano sounds, with orchestra hits thrown in for good measure whenever a character does something dramatic like sit completely still doing absolutely nothing whatsoever. They are loud, they are mechanical, they are precise, and they are very much of their time. However, they were also perfectly good in their time, succeeding in making Doctor Who at least sound more modern than it had done since, well, ever really, and scoffing at them for having had the temerity to wear a bit badly is a bit like castigating Coldcut Featuring Yazz And The Plastic Population for not being Rich Homie Quan.

Admittedly, even allowing for this, Time And The Rani does not exactly find the beleaguered synth wizard at his best, seemingly weighed down by the need to make a good first impression, and with high-speed atmospherics careering about the place like a copy of Galactic Nightmare had burst all over the soundtrack. There are also way too many 'clever' variations on the basic theme tune melody; you can hear the first stirrings of his notorious 'Latin Version' here, if you're unhinged enough to actually want to. Ironically Keff McCulloch would do a much better job with a much shorter time to work in on the following story Paradise Towers, then really hit his stride when called on to throw in elements of fifties pastiche when they went back to 1959 - The Rock'n'Roll Years! - for Delta And The Bannermen.

There are plenty of decent moments in his Time And The Rani score, though, and the entire soundtrack does at least exemplify the one virtue that Keff McCulloch never gets anywhere near enough credit for - brevity. Unlike Murray Gold and his ceaseless attempts to shoehorn an entire symphony into every single close-up, there is invariably just enough music to make a point or set a mood and then they get on with the controversial business of actually allowing the audience to hear some of the dialogue. So much so that when some of his music was included on The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album the following year, full-length tracks had to be made up from bizarre ill-matching cut'n'shuts of much shorter pieces of music. Although, that said, the two extracts from Time And The Rani were actual full-length pieces, albeit only heard as brief background edits onscreen. Erm, as you were.

More to the point, the alarming modernity of Keff McCulloch's DX7-derived sounds were enough to lull hapless fans into a deluded notion that their 'cool' friends might start to see Doctor Who as 'cool' again. They'd probably deny it now, much like they'd deny that they ever purposefully ate McCoy's crisps in a misguided act of 'solidarity', but the truth of the matter is that every fan went through a stage of believing that the hip fashion-followers in their class could be converted to the cause if only the right 'in' could be found. And now Doctor Who had music that sounded a little bit like what was in the charts; was this the moment they'd all been waiting for? No it wasn't. It would take more than a couple of orchestra hits to tempt juvenile trend-surfers away from The Lost Boys and paisley waistcoats. It was about as liable to connect with them as that dreadful Italio House-themed Vimto ad, and the only time fans would be hearing the Doctor Who theme around school playgrounds was when the 'zany' kid sniggered and sang "OOOOOO-weeeee-oooooOOOOO" at them in a sort of out of tune sarcastic voice. The Beatmasters did not see fit to drag Roberta Tovey out of retirement for a chart-topping collaboration. There would be no We Sing In Praise Of Total War '88 by Eric B & Rakim feat. Robert Moubert.

Nonetheless, there remains a small but significant faction of fans out there who actually quite like Keff McCulloch's incidental music, and in the pre-DVD Extra age many of them would come to treasure that snippet of Corners that they'd hastily recorded between the omnibus repeats of Dick Spanner. Many would also 'treasure' off-airs of Never Kiss Frogs and Melvin And Maureen's Music-A-Grams, but perhaps we'd better not go into that. But of course, Sophie Aldred wasn't in Time And The Rani, and mentioning her so heavily in this context would be a bit like if an earlier draft of this piece had suggested that some of the additional Corners viewers "had turned on too early for Droids", when in fact the BBC didn't start showing the animated adventures of R2D2 and C3P0 until the following year. It's time to turn our attention back to what Ikona and company are up to.

Meanwhile, in a freak coincidence, there actually was a credible crossover between Doctor Who and new-fangled dance music the following year, and it would have wider and longer-lasting implications than anyone expected at the time... but that's another story.

Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part Two

Episode One of Time And The Rani is, so a lot of fans would have you believe, Where It All Went Wrong For Doctor Who. Actually, one or two of them say it's Paradise Towers Episode Two, but let's not split hairs here. This is the point at which, apparently, Doctor Who became entirely unwatchable. When it finally vaulted over the point of self-parody into what every third-rate fan writer insisted on referring to as 'pantomime embarrassment', and even its most ardent and unhinged supporters gave up, packed up, went home, and started lamenting the cancellation of Star Cops instead.

While it's all very nice and neat, this is a version of events that conveniently omits quite a few important points. For starters, there's the small matter of the two series that directly preceded it. Then there's the weaker Troughton stories, and all those times that Tom Baker was phoning it in while working from a script that the writer apparently couldn't even be bothered finishing. There's The Sensorites, there's Meglos, there's The Space Museum, there's The Dominators, there's The Armageddon Factor, there's The Two Doctors, there's Time-Flight and there's The Time Monster. Good Lord Almighty there's The Time Monster. And we haven't even got started on the average weekly reaction to any given post-2005 episode yet. So yes, it may well be that the people with their fingers wedged in their ears genuinely disliked and continue to dislike the Sylvester McCoy era; but it's also likely that it marked a convenient excuse for them to stop watching Doctor Who as they'd simply outgrown it, got bored, or had other things to do. Or, of course, preferred Coronation Street. And if you weren't actually watching at all at the time, you don't get a vote on that. Sorry. How's that Rings Of Akhaten working out for you?

Anyway, Episode One of Time And The Rani. It wasn't just fans who stopped watching - or at the very least elected not to start watching again - and Coronation Street was not entirely to blame. If we're going to get anywhere near understanding why, it's important to disregard any of the arguments that fans tie their brains into knots with and consider how it must have looked to the average ordinary everyday television watcher who'd just enjoyed an edition of Wogan, probably featuring Peter Egan. No matter what the HBO Evangelists may have to say about the need to persevere with an unfolding story arc for fifteen million episodes before you can possibly be allowed to decide whether you like a TV show or not, the cold hard fact of the matter remains that the average viewer has to be grabbed in no uncertain terms by the first couple of minutes of any television show, and if they aren't, it's Bonekickers time for everyone. And, even allowing for the huge wodge of the audience who would already have decided to watch Coronation Street instead, it's clear that the vast majority of viewers weren't hooked by the opening of the first episode of Time And The Rani. So if it's actually good and not bad like YOU thought - which of course is what we're trying to argue here - where did it go so wrong?

Well, that's a difficult question, and one that to a certain extent depends on when you were actually watching it. This widely-reviled twenty five minutes of television opens with a pre-credits sequence that is frequently held up to ridicule now, but actually seemed arresting and refreshingly different when it first went out. No, really. For a start, it was unusual to see a pre-credits sequence on any BBC programme back then, let alone one that opened with a hefty wallop of impressive visual effects, and it's this more than anything else that underlines the fact that everyone involved at least went into Series Twenty Four with the intention of doing something a bit different. In fact, especially when considered in conjunction with his liking for bringing in guest stars from theatre and musicals, cameos from popular Light Entertainers, and specially-shot trailers full of Blipvert-style fragments of flashy clips, it's almost as though John Nathan-Turner had seen the direction that American TV (and especially Doctor Who's close rivals) was headed in, and was trying emulate it on his own terms. Unfortunately for all concerned, he had neither the budget, the resources, the expensive film stock or indeed - let's be honest about this - the motivation and dedication to carry it off.

As if to labour the point, within this pre-credits sequence there are three small but significant breaks with recent tradition, all of which manage to highlight both the strengths and flaws of the entire McCoy era at the exact same time. There's a hefty dose of dazzling-for-the-time computer graphics and video effects, which are certainly more impressive than anything seen in the more lauded The Box Of Delights, but they're employed purely for show and not for any substantial dramatic or aesthetic reason. There's a guest star camping it up something rotten, in a manner that would soon become de rigueur even for more 'heavyweight' drama, but who is undermined by not having anybody to react to or interact with, and on an overlit Tardis set that had seen better days to boot. And, thanks to Colin Baker's understandable truculence, there's a regeneration accomplished with only one Doctor present on set, which is as bold a statement of John Nathan-Turner's defiant make-do-and-mend attitude as you're liable to find, only here there's no story completed to impressive effect in a car park when an asbestos scare booted them out of the studio, only Sylvester McCoy in a wig turning into Sylvester McCoy not in a wig. It all still looks and sounds great, but it's really rather empty in some respects; though, that said, as the entire purpose of the sequence was to shake off the stuffy stench of recent years and do something noticeably fresh and new from the outset, maybe that's all it needed to be. That shot with Ikona watching the Tardis plummet planetwards is good, though.

Then, with a burst of pixels and a splatter of Yamaha DX7-derived audio pyrotechnics, we're flung directly into the path of the primary weapon in the McCoy-sceptic's arsenal, their ultimate convenient stick to set about its muggy boneheadedness with; the brand spanking new all-singing all-dancing all-winking opening titles. In the interests of transparency and full disclosure, it's true to say that the new titles and theme arrangement weren't exactly universally well received even back then, but there's still an important differentiation to be drawn. Nowadays, the favoured line of attack is to scoff at how 'dated' they look and sound; technology and taste have marched on and we're all so much more cultured and aesthetic than those poor primitive fools back in 1987 with their Timbuk 3 and their Fido Dido and their Arkanoid on the Atari ST. When those poor primitive fools actually were back in 1987, however, the rumblings of dissent came instead from those who felt it was too 'modern', sufficiently alienated by the sampler'n'CAD-fuelled Shock Of The New to write distressed letters to fanzines voicing suspicion of this new-fangled McCoy man and the godless 'spray-can' effect of his dangerously modern logo.

In fairness, it's true to say that CAL Video's in retrospect slightly crammed and cluttered Elite-trouncing visuals have been long since superceded on every possible technical and artistic level, and that - as the makers of the opening titles themselves wearily sigh in one of the best ever Doctor Who DVD extras - you can do much the same on a mobile phone nowadays; a quick glance at YouTube, however, will confirm that for the majority of Doctor Who fans, the ability to do anything even halfway as entertaining with the technology remains depressingly elusive. Similarly, Keff McCulloch's bright and clipped micro-management of the theme music, resembling nothing less than an Art Of Noise record punching itself in the face, and swamped in so much MIDI that it makes Mike Lindup from Level 42 look like a lackadaisical technophobe, now sounds unnervingly similar to the sort of home-made Doctor Who theme ringtones that people gave up thinking were a good idea over a decade ago.

These are charges that, admittedly, it's difficult to refute. The first ever Doctor Who title sequence to use digital technology rather than stretched plastic bags and tape loops, it is with no small irony that it is now the most 'of its time' by some considerable distance (though that said we'll see how the current one looks in a couple of years). In its time, however, it looked and sounded little short of amazing, and again was streets ahead of pretty much everything else on the small screen back then; the camera cutting through one of the solar rings in particular was a topic of considerable excitement amongst the less luddistic fans. Yes well we had to make our own entertainment in those days. John Nathan-Turner wasn't always quite so sharp in his quest to stay one step ahead of technology - disastrous 'real robot' companion Kamelion is evidence enough of that - but here he made absolutely the right decision in reaching out to two experts at the cutting edge of their respective fields, and it's hardly any of their fault that the end result isn't quite as impressive all this time later. More to the point, you would have been hard pushed back in 1987 to find anyone cheerleading for Delia Derbyshire's sparse hand-crafted electronics or the creaky 'howlaround' effect; both were roundly viewed as primitive relics from another age and perhaps all adventurous technologies have to go through a period of derision or disinterest before they can be properly re-evaluated. Incidentally, there was a single-length edit of Keff's theme arrangement prepared, but it never actually saw release on 7". If you want to know why, though, I'm not telling you here. You'll have to get my book about BBC Records And Tapes Top Of The Box instead.

So, even from the outset, even the most titles-dazzled average viewer would probably have had at best mixed feelings about this journey to an altogether more far-flung shore, and mixed feelings do not an EastEnders-challenging ratings-topper make. Meanwhile, the end of the opening titles bring with them a sight that will strike fear into the very central nervous system of any self-respecting Doctor Who fan; no, not McCoy's wink, but a writing credit for Pip and Jane Baker. Defending the much and often rightly derided husband and wife scriptwriting team is not an enviable task in anyone's book (and given their involvement, we can only hope the book isn't Doctor Who: Race Against Time), but people aren't just asked to work on a primetime television series out of nowhere, as much as many fans may wish that was the case, and it's always worth taking a look at people's career paths outside of the show that far too many contributors' entire artistic value gets based on. The Bakers seem to have enjoyed a promising early career, contributing to several highly-rated drama series and penning a couple of well-received standalone dramas, though sadly much of this has long since been wiped. By the late eighties, though, they'd veered wildly off course, penning such groundbreaking masterpieces as children's sci-fi sitcom Watt On Earth. You'll never guess what it was about.

Anyway, there's no getting away from the fact that their four Doctor Who stories were putting it mildly not what was needed at that point, and on top of that their bullish fingers-in-ears defensiveness when faced with criticism did little to endear them to what was left of the show's audience. In their defence, though, they were quite often doing their best in difficult circumstances - one episode was as good as written overnight so that there would at least be something to go before the cameras in the morning - and were amongst the show's staunchest defenders at a time when taking that stance can hardly have brought them a wealth of professional benefits. On top of that, they frequently protested - to an equally finger-eared reaction from fans - that what ended up on screen often bore little resemblance to what they had originally written. In the case of Time And The Rani, they'd intended it for Colin Baker and had tailored the action specifically to take place on a heavily wooded planet, and some of the more notorious scenes apparently weren't even written by them in the first place. So, bear that in mind as we move into the episode proper...

...which we'll be doing in the next part, along with much discussion of rotten puns about hats, an ear-testing preponderance of banjos, and the general uselessness of Ikona. So why not join us? Or, alternately, take out a couple of half-sentences, string them together without their surrounding context, and then scoff indignantly on a forum that they don't add up with each other. Whichever way you look at it, it's all Strange Matter...