2023 Retrospective

It's that time of year again... and, like last time, I'm going to keep the preamble short. Suffice it to say, 2023 was a difficult year and a disappointing year, in equal measure.

Not least, this has been one of the leanest years this blog has seen since it began, party due to a five month gap in postings. I've barely bought anything that wasn't discounted to half price (or less), and the Legacy line has utterly failed to engage me, while Studio Series has made a mess of the toys from the first live action TransFormers movie since Christmas 2018, and Hasbro's streams have consistently 'revealed' toys that have been common knowledge for months. As far as official TransFormers go, I think we can safely say I'm no longer an active collector... At least until they produce something a bit more innovative, that isn't deeply rooted in G1.

Though there's some cool Third Party stuff to look forward to in future...

So, let's get on with this year's retrospective:

Highlights of 2023

• Theatre trips - we started the New Year with a double-whammy of theatre: historical drama Best of Enemies, starring David Harewood and Zachary Quinto, and clever mish-mash of Dickens and Doyle, A Sherlock Carol. This was followed The Woman in Black in February, historical comedy musical Six in March, George Takei's semi-autobiographical historical drama/musical Allegiance in April, and Pygmalion in September, most of which covered by theatre tokens Courtney and I got for Christmas. Rounding off the year, we went to see another version of A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic, last Wednesday, this one starring none other than Christopher Ecclestone. Courtney got even more theatre tokens for Christmas, so we're already looking into next year's theatrical offerings.
• Phantom Peak (again) - the venue runs a special Halloween-themed event and, based on my description of the basic show that I attended with my best mate last year, I was able to convince Courtney to give it a go. Phantom Peak had expanded significantly since then, with a whole new section of town in the interior part. We only solved two mysteries in our four hour slot (would have been three, but we finished the last just as the closing ceremony began) but had a great time on a lovely October day.
• Improvements to the flat - there had been a serious problem with damp for years, and it was finally tackled this summer. Essentially, mine was the only flat in the block that had no vents in the front brickwork, so I had that fixed, and a PIV ventilation system installed, as well as a ventilation fan in the bathroom. In theory, this would not only help with the damp, but offer an improvement to our heating bill. There's currently more evidence of the former than the latter, but any improvement is welcome.
• RetCon - this has become a regular highlight of my year since I joined the team that runs it and, while the SAM Coupé contingent was smaller this year, and we perhaps had fewer 'big name' guests, it was nevertheless a great experience. For this year's show, I spent much of my birthday helping with the setup, but hadn't had any other plans to interfere with that. The day itself seemed less busy than last year, and the high score competition I ran using The Lower Caverns didn't get a massive amount of attention during the day.
• Courtney's New York adventure - while I wasn't able to accompany her, I was thrilled on her behalf that she was flying out to New York state to spend a few days in New York City with her best mate (who flew in from Canada) before heading on to Saratoga Springs for an X-Files convention which included a trip to the newly-opened X-Files Preservation Collection. Admittedly, though, being on my own at home for about a week and a half wasn't great...
• Courtney's sister qualifies as a veterinary nurse - shortly after her birthday and just over a week before Christmas, the announcement went out that she had passed her final exam. A great way to end the year, especially given her own set of struggles.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves - my own D&D playing has fallen by the wayside due to the niece not exactly losing interest, but certainly becoming less keen to play with family... so the arrival of a new D&D movie, particularly one that was actually well-written and well-executed, made up for some of that. It should be fairly obvious that a narrative gaming experience should translate well to film... but previous attempts have been awful, and failed to capture the feel of the game anywhere near as well as this latest outing.
• Godzilla Minus One - went into this one with no real expectations (I hadn't even fully realised it was a Japanese movie) and, while there were a couple of moments in the early half of the movie where I almost fell asleep (reclining seats were partially to blame), it was a very well-made movie with a decent human story intertwined with the monster madness.
• Contact (book and film) - I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I only got round to reading Carl Sagan's Contact this year. While I enjoyed it, particularly the humorous little asides Sagan added to the narrative, I found the end a little disappointing. The movie plays fast and loose with the original story, focussing entirely on Ellie Arroway, editing her four travelling companions out, vastly increasing the size of the Machine, yet also erasing the parts of the book that took the focus on Ellie's personal life even further. Also fun for being a very early role for Jena Malone, playing Ellie as a child.
• Finishing Star Trek:TNG, moving on to Deep Space Nine - while Courtney was seeing ST:TNG for the first time, for me, it was a treat to rediscover a show I saw on TV back in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Some of it hadn't stood the test of time - the first series in particular felt like a continuation of the original series in the worst possible way - but, once it hit its stride, it was able to say some profound and, in some cases, eerily prescient things about our time, both then and now. DS9, however, took it to a whole new level: some of its stories relate all too well to current events, particularly in the rise of religious extremists on Bajor, the delusional, paranoid, fascist Cardassians, particularly Dukat and his obsession with Making Cardassia Great Again, and the poorly-judged alliances between the various races in the name of protecting their own Empires from the looming encroachment of The Dominion. The two-parter Past Tense, a story set in 2024 which first aired in 1995, felt alarmingly on-the-nose with its depiction of a divided America.
• Season 2 of Reacher - I didn't expect to like the Lee Child adaptation even half as much as I did, making me think perhaps I should check out the books. Season 2 hit the ground running (perhaps not the most thoughtful description, considering the opening scene of a guy hitting the ground most definitely not running), and actual living-mountain Alan Ritchson continues to impress with his performance.
• Finally finishing The Lower Caverns - work commenced back in 2018, and it feels as though the development of this upgrade/remix has really dragged over the last couple of years. I didn't help matters this year, by suddenly deciding to replace the brick patterns I created almost five years ago, but I feel the new versions are a vast improvement. Looking forward to working on the next project.
• A little bit more work - while the hinted-at items of work 'throughout the year' never materialised, the organisation that asked me to update their guidebook for 2023 came back to me, full of enthusiasm for working with me again, and requesting a full redesign for their 2024 book. On top of that, my regular/annual website update work came through again.
• A rewarding (albeit unpaid) project - sometime in April, I was contacted by a professor at Kingston University, who challenged me to design a game based on The Empire Strikes Back, as it might have been designed for the ZX Spectrum, circa 1988. Four months later, I finalised a design document spanning about 40 pages (including a series of screenshot mockups), which can be downloaded here, if you're interested...
• A little bit more therapy - after experiencing panic attacks (on which more below), I ended up getting a handful of sessions of therapy for anxiety. While the panic attacks had stopped by the time the sessions started (several months after the event!) the advice I received was nevertheless beneficial for dealing with the day-to-day anxiety, and I was sent some material specific to panic attacks after a catch-up session later in the year.
• Unexpected compliments? - I tend not to think of myself as "a people person", because I was already displaying hermit-like tendencies even before the lockdowns of a couple of years ago, but the partner of a friend of mine described me using that exact phrase this year. I also had an unexpected message from an old Print contact of mine, looking to meet up for a few drinks and a catch-up in mid-December, which ended up in a rather upmarket bar/restaurant in Kings Cross, and was a lot of fun.
• Third Party TransFormers magic - while I'm tempted to criticise MetaGate for the myriad repaints they've produced of their Haiku mold, including at least one that isn't a TransFormers reference, their next big product - their triple-changing Shatter figure, Red Fantasy - looks to be another utterly magical bit of engineering, and very much on my Want List.
• Flame Toys' FuRaiModel kits - while Hasbro's own output has largely left me cold this year, I finally put together the Windblade model kit (which had been sitting in a drawer since February of 2022!), and then quickly ordered the Arcee kit which was released this year. The cost of the latter was significantly increased on the former, but she also feels like a significant upgrade in terms of complexity and the intricacy of her articulation. There's already concept art for a Blackarachnia kit, so I'll be on the lookout for that as well... Not only are they amazing-looking Femme-Bots, but they have reminded me how much I enjoy building model kits. On the downside, certain parts absolutely need gluing in place, as they're prone to popping off.
• The O'Donnell's Moonshine Advent Calendar (again!) - this year's introduced some new flavours of moonshine and had a decent selection of merch...
• Discovering chrome pens - except not really, since I first learned about them from the YouTube channel Toy Polloi some years back, and only got round to acquiring any this year. Being able to add chrome to newer TransFormers toys became a little addictive, and some ended up getting quite extensive coatings.
• Suella Braverman booted out... again - the irony of a Home Secretary of immigrant stock calling for harsher treatment of immigrants seems to have been entirely lost on the Conservative Party, but her hateful rhetoric - not least calling homelessness "a lifestyle choice" and essentially inciting a riot on Remembrance Day - eventually made her position untenable, and she was sacked for the second time in about a year.
• Christopher Ecclestone's response to the question of returning to Doctor Who - the epitome of succinct. The only real surprise is that none of the other actors have spoken up about it, not least Billie Piper, who stayed on for the first season with David Tennant. It was fairly obvious that the production for the first season was a mess, and Ecclestone has already told the story of the way he was let go after complaining about it, but his specific terms for making a return should be seen for what they are: confirmation of an absolutely toxic working environment under the much-lauded showrunner.

Disappointments of 2023

• Family deaths - feels wrong to lump this in the 'Disappointments' category, because it's a little bit beyond the scope of that word, but this year brought the death of my girlfriend's last surviving grandparent and, shortly after, her father. Her relationship with both could be generously described as 'strained', which made the whole thing even more emotionally complicated than it would have been if the relationship had been ideal. The grandmother had still not reconciled with the family after getting upset with everyone last year and declining to attend the wedding of Courtney's sister, and her will became contentious. 
• Pest problems and panic attacks - things took a turn for the weird in the first quarter of the year, when Courtney and I discovered mice in the flat... which then led to the discovery of how poorly converted it was, with lots of large gaps in the floor and skirting. It also led to me having panic attacks, and my overall mental health deteriorating to the point where I couldn't sleep, even with the help of reluctantly-prescribed sleeping pills. I was soon prescribed antidepressants and given some counselling to help with the anxiety. Both probably a good thing because, during summer, we had wasps trying to set up a nest right outside and - following a visit by an inexperienced pest controller - popping up out of the floor in my kitchen and hall, necessitating a return visit. Shortly after that, I found flies emerging from a thin gap in the base of my shower... Thankfully, I was able to take care of that myself.
• Not getting out as much - it certainly feels as though Courtney and I didn't get out as much as we did last year... Sure, I've got my twice-a-month computer club, and she's done more volunteering at the Science Museum, joined a local choir and met up with friends every so often, but we've been talking about going to the Barnes Wetlands Centre for years, and this summer would have presented an ideal opportunity... but, what with our mental health not being optimal, neither of us really felt like going out a lot of the time. Part of that was due to the pest problems - I didn't want to go out only to come back to a flat full of mice scurrying around, part of it was due to the stresses - both expected and unexpected - of the deaths in Courtney's family, some of which got dragged out over the rest of the year, and coincided with some strife in her workplace. Whatever the reason, there was a period of several months - disappointingly, mostly through the summer - where we barely left the flat except for necessities.
• UK politics, generally - the UK's Conservative Party is becoming ever more obvious in its desire to be a cheap (or rather, expensive) knock-off of the US Republican Party: out of touch with the populace, waging culture wars in the absence of sensible policies, keeping their rich donors happy at all costs, denying the ever more obvious and disastrous realities of Brexit, and holding on to power for dear life. The current PM may have lasted longer than his predecessor, but he's clearly an idiot, and his Home Secretary is the stuff of dystopian nightmares. The curtailment of HS2 and the deliberate sabotage of any future efforts really should have been the final nail in his coffin, but if there's one thing the Tories are good at, it's protecting their own... When it suits them, at least. Just one example of their bullshit came in the aftermath of an escaped prisoner, where the PM gleefully told journalists that there had been "ten times as many escapees under the last Labour government"... a claim which can be easily refuted by examining the government's own statistics. Similarly, the COVID enquiry revealed that BoJo's government was in even greater disarray, and that his leadership was even more questionable than previously thought... And yet he seems to be plotting a comeback? Worse still, after sacking the most monstrous Home Secretary in living history, Sunak started bringing back old Tory cronies like David Cameron, seemingly as a vain attempt to win back the less hard-line voters by 'getting the old band back together', albeit in different roles. Performative politics at its most egregious.
• TransFormers: Rise of the Beasts - even given all the glowing early reviews, I went into the movie with low expectations, and still came away disappointed. Despite being edited down to about two hours, it felt overlong and meandering, yet also disjointed and incomplete. The robots had barely any character, the humans added next to nothing, the titular beasts were completely misinterpreted for the big screen and only Airazor was present for more than about a quarter of the running time. The worst part of it was that so many were expecting this to be a continuation of the so-called 'Knightverse', but it's basically a reboot of the Bayverse, with the same McGuffin fixation and only marginally better robot designs, in that Scourge, Battletrap and Nightbird at least looked unique and robotic, rather than like insectoid monsters made of metal scraps. Let's call this 'strike one' for Hasbro in 2023.
• The Marvels - while I didn't hate the movie (quite enjoyed it, in fact) it felt like something developed for TV and hurriedly re-edited into a movie... with special effects to match. There's certainly a sense that Marvel Studios are running on fumes, creatively speaking, after churning out far too many movies, far too quickly to maintain any sense of consistent quality. However, it was nice to see a movie with a lighter tone, and the post-credits scene was a bit of fun.
• New TransFormers comics - I never really got back into TransFormers comics when Dreamwave or IDW launched their respective series, despite the high praise the latter received for their contribution to the lore. When it was announced that Hasbro weren't renewing their license, and that Image Comics (as Skybound Entertainment) would be picking things up and rebooting G1 for the umpteenth time, I can say with certainty that my interest was not piqued. Image have essentially made 'edgy' their business model, so it didn't seem like a good match... and the previews I've seen of the new TransFormers comics have been pretty much what I'd have expected... only with shittier art, harking back to the very worst of Marvel's run in the 1980s. Somehow, they decided that the G1 animation models would work alongside intricate technical detail in vehicles and transformations... and they launched straight into edginess with the likes of Starscream squashing a human in his cartoon hand, and Optimus Prime ripping off his own arm to beat Skywarp to death... And yet some fans are calling it "the best since Marvel"? How quickly IDW are forgotten... Oh, and 'strike two'.
• Hasbro's toy output, generally - to this day, I've bought only one figure from the Legacy toyline, and that was from its very first wave, a leftover from WFC: Kingdom (specifically Tarantulas), and the Studio Series figures from Rise of the Beasts have been uninspiring - both poorly designed and executed. One of the late reveals in December was next year's Titan class Armada Universe Tidal Wave... which looks OK, but it's so huge they had to add a miniature version to attach to Legacy Armada Megatron per the original toys... which doesn't have its own robot mode... and it's too small. Sure, it didn't work especially well on the original toys, but it feels to me that they should have just foregone the combination gimmick if they wanted to make the most of Tidal Wave as a Titan class figure. Then there's the Collaborative line, which limps on with more dire Jurassic Park, GI Joe and Universal Monsters crossovers. One has to wonder what the intended audience is... because it doesn't seem to be TransFormers fans, for the most part, even though some of them are evidently quite enthusiastic about these curious lines. The GI Joe crossovers have attracted a fair bit of scorn for their simplistic design and execution, but there's also been a bizarre amount of enthusiasm for them. On top of this, virtually every new release has seen many instances of breakages due either to poor design, sloppy assembly, low-quality plastic, or a combination of all three. This isn't just 'strike three', it's basically been the final nail in the coffin for my collecting. I've only had one full-on breakage so far, which was my own fault, but I've found substantial discolouration of the plastic on quite a few (including some of Takara Tomy's from the TF Legends line, circa Titans Return, but that's a good few years ago now...)
• TransFormers: Reactivate - first publicised with a pre-rendered CGI movie trailer, we still have yet to see any actual gameplay footage, yet the game has gone through several new titles, a new development team and is now being moved to a whole new game engine, all in the space of the five-plus years this has allegedly been in development. Doesn't bode well... nor does the suggestion that it features Autobots and Decepticons teaming up against some generic alien menace. With microtransactions. So far, it sounds very much like a generic mech shooter with the TransFormers license bolted on.
• Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction - off the back of watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, Courtney discovered that Jonathan Frakes was presenting a TV show that mixed 'true stories' of supernatural or otherwise bizarre occurrences in with selection of tales created wholly by the writers on the show. We watched a handful of episodes together, but I couldn't get into it at all - every story was cretinous, and the claim that some were 'based on true events' was frequently ridiculous in the extreme. Courtney enjoyed it for a little longer, because it was so bad, but eventually had to admit that it was the same shit in every episode, meaning it quickly got boring.
• The return of Doctor Who (and RTD) - I'll go into this a bit more below, since I made a prediction about it last year, but the first of the 60th Anniversary specials, The Star Beast, was predictable, anticlimactic, and lacking any sense of subtlety or nuance, particularly when it comes to the clumsy gender politics thrown in. The story might have benefitted by a longer runtime, but somehow the episode already felt bloated. Even when the villain of the piece - and their escape plan - was revealed, there was no tension, no sense of stakes... And the Sonic Screwdriver is rapidly becoming the deus ex machina to end all dei ex machina. The part that really aggravated me - through the sheer cheapness of its problem-solving - was the way the ground miraculously closed itself up once the villain's lethal craft was disabled. Rose was such a poorly-drawn character, her situation is revealed in the most heavy-handed terms available for the sake of expediency, but also she doesn't make sense: she's heckled by a bunch of her school contemporaries, speaks to a child clearly several years younger than her as if they're supposed to be the same age, and exactly how does Donna have such a grown-up child, when it's clearly not that many years since the Doctor crossed paths with the Noble family? Did they cast a 19-year-old actor in the role of a 15-year-old character purely for the sake of representation? Apparently so. What's really sad is that there were some good ideas in there: the suggestion that the human/Time Lord metacrisis was averted (or at least postponed) by Donna having a child was brilliant, and the idea of the Gallifreyan influence feeding into Jason/Rose's gender identity would have been a great nod to the idea that a Time Lord may regenerate into a male or female form... but the story's utilisation of it was a travesty, particularly in the "let it go" denouement, which somehow led to the absolutely unearned line from Rose "After all these years, I'm finally me." (with no indication of exactly what that meant). I also found the 'easter egg' that all her soft toy creations were based on creatures the Doctor had encountered was a huge waste, because they're barely seen until the 'easter egg' is literally rubbed in the audience's face. Chekhov's gun they ain't, but they - and Rose - could and really should have been. Wild Blue Yonder was an improvement, in that it felt like a mostly complete episode, despite (or perhaps because of) its minimal cast, and more akin to what I tend to expect from Doctor Who stories... but nothing about it felt like a 60th Anniversary celebration of Doctor Who. There were elements in common to the season 4 episode, Midnight, but it felt disjointed and unfinished, even while paying lip service to some of the more controversial decisions from the Chibnall era. Again, there were some great ideas... but it all needed further development, not to mention more time to improve the CGI, some of which is decidedly ropey... The opening scene featuring a bafflingly race-swapped Isaac Newton was utterly, utterly pointless, since it only served a running joke that wasn't even funny. Plus, if this scene was set in 1666, it wouldn't have been Sir Isaac Newton, as he wasn't knighted till 1705... talk about polluting the time-stream. Amusingly, RTD admitted in an interview that the fact that the plot to this episode was kept so secret might have contributed to the disappointment felt by the section of the audience that were expecting to see multiple Doctors in a bigger, more exciting story... but, were it not for the fact that this was billed as a 60th Anniversary Special, I'd honestly still count this among the best episodes he has ever written. Then we get onto The Giggle... which is definitely not among RTD's best. Again, the idea was great... but the execution was inconsistent and frequently heavy-handed in its messaging, while the ending was pure saccharine. It also featured a few conspicuous repeated motifs from RTD's original run - the gold tooth containing the Master being picked up by a female hand coming from out of frame and the musical number being directly ripped off from The Sound of Drums (S3 E12), while the idea of a duplicate Doctor going on to live his own life alongside his companion came from Doomsday (S2 E13). It just goes to show that RTD is so utterly fixated on David Tennant as the Doctor that he has to go on forever, even though a new Doctor has been cast. Seriously, Davies... let it go. Admittedly, the Christmas Special episode - Ncuti Gatwa's true introduction - was better than I'd expected but, at this point, that's not saying much... And magical time-travelling goblins in a flying galleon was a bit silly... but, then, rumour has it the now-rebooted, Disney-associated Doctor Who will move more into the realms of Fantasy rather than being exclusively Sci-Fi. I wonder if this means the next female Doctor will automatically be a Disney Princess. On first impressions, Gatwa comes across as having the potential to be the best Doctor since Matt Smith, but we now have to wait till May to see what happens next.

Predictions vs Reality

• Switching my focus - 2022 me was still being a bit of an optimist here... I didn't so much switch my focus as lose focus almost entirely. I started losing interest in Hasbro's output during the Prime Wars Trilogy, then the War For Cybertron Trilogy gave me very little to get excited about, and Legacy has been a mish-mash of clashing styles that (in typical Hasbro fashion) doesn't fit their own description of what Legacy was intended to represent. Meanwhile, Studio Series waded into Rise of the Beasts at least a year too early to present anything worth buying, and quality control continues to deteriorate across all lines. The non-transforming Flame Toys model kits and Third Party products are likely to become my main focus going forward... with an emphasis on the Femme-Bots.
• A bad year for Hasbro - by all accounts it's been a year of ups and downs for Hasbro, but overall possibly not as bad as I'd expected. Sure, the continuing fallout from their disastrous attempts to extend their monetisation of third-party D&D media and materials caused a massive backlash and, certainly my interest in their output has pretty much bottomed out. The appearance of positive financial performance seems to be coming more from cost-cutting than improved revenue. On 11th December, for example, it was reported that Hasbro were ditching about 20% of their Wizards of the Coast workforce - over a thousand people - as a cost-saving measure. To put that in perspective, not only was that just a couple of weeks before Christmas, it came ahead of the release of a new edition of the D&D rulesets, and shortly after the impressive reception of Baldur's Gate 3. Chances are, they'll soon get rid of a good chunk of their toy brand teams, TransFormers included, since toys just aren't selling as well as they used to. In the long term, I don't foresee this being a beneficial move for Hasbro (or their shareholders)... Honestly, they'd be better off getting rid of Chris Cocks... but, instead, they gave him a $9M bonus. Another textbook example of putting short-term gains ahead of long-term investment.
• Armada in Legacy - I predicted that a Legacy version of  Armada Optimus Prime would be "simplistic, ugly, and a QC nightmare", and I wasn't completely off the mark there. The most common breakage is the base robot's shin flaps (which conceal the combined form's fists), but overall build quality seems to be less than optimal, despite it being so chunky... But that seems to be true of the entire line, quite apart from the ongoing issue of rapidly discolouring plastic. Even when they get it 'right' the results are less than inspiring. Armada Megatron is essentially a slightly smaller version of the original, with improvements to articulation to offset the gutting of the Mini-Con gimmicks and the shoddy paint job. Armada hasn't taken centre-stage, as I might have hoped for the second year of Legacy, as the line remains just as bitty and unfocused as it has seemed from the start, though there are rumours of a Legacy Armada Jetfire, if not Overload as well. Meanwhile, the reveals of things like Tigerhawk and Silverbolt - both massively cut down versus the original toys - along with the bizarre Rock Lords hybrids, make it seem as though Hasbro is simply throwing all kinds of shit at the wall just to see what sticks.
• Rise of the Beasts will be a shitstorm - as the movie's release date approached, I started feeling slightly more optimistic about it, and initial reviews seemed overwhelmingly positive... But the delays and reshoots led to a movie that didn't even approach the best of the Bayverse, let alone exceed the expectations of what many people believed was supposed to be a sequel to Bumblebee. It wasn't quite as bad as those knockoff movies by The Asylum, but it was clear that the writers learned nothing from the team behind Bumblebee, and the whole thing seemed to be aiming to rely on spectacle, without having quite the right budget to achieve it or the coherent narrative to weave it all together. It wasn't the worst TransFormers movie so far, but it was dull, formulaic, and an utter waste of the titular beasts.
• I'm not going to like Doctor Who, am I..? - The idea of RTD returning as showrunner seemed bad enough (and killed off any suggestion of Christopher Ecclestone returning for the 60th Anniversary), but the news of Disney's involvement, and that Ncuti Gatwa's first season will be considered a new, rebooted 'Season 1' pretty much confirmed my worst fears. David Tennant's return as the 14th Doctor is essentially RTD's path to largely ignoring everything from Matt Smith to Jodie Whittaker, and continuing 'his' Doctor's story after Journey's End, back in 2008. He's apparently said that elements from Moffat and Chibnall's eras will be referred to - including the contentious 'Timeless Child' angle - but that's unlikely to prove significant. Additionally, the creation of the Whoniverse label, for both the BBC and Disney+, feels like a rather sad attempt to inflate the value of the brand by adding even more spinoffs than were already present. The new series kicked off with a contentious Children In Need short, which completely retconned Davros due to 'modern sensibilities' around associating evil characters with disability, even though the whole point of Davros, as was, was that he did not see himself as in any way disabled, despite having lost his organic eyes, one arm and being half Dalek. In isolation, I found the short reasonably amusing, albeit going for low-hanging fruit for its humour, but the idea of it now being canon, as RTD later implied, seemed like a bad sign. If nothing else, the idea that this was 'pre-injury Davros' makes no sense when his life support/mobility unit was an earlier version of the technology that later became the Mark III Travel Machine we all know and fear/love. Then, as the 60th Anniversary kicked off, all my worst fears were very much realised: clumsy writing, weak storytelling, stories that are lacking important exposition while instead being bloated with unnecessary waffle and unsubtle messaging targeted at the perceived 'audiences of today'. Audience reception was mixed, to say the least, but many commentators started talking about it as if the quality of RTD's writing had somehow deteriorated since he first brought the show back all those years ago... But they're only now starting to say what I'd been saying all along. This is the guy who gave us farting aliens that looked like giant, sickly, mutated babies with claws and a guy carrying on a sexual relationship with a paving slab. Some of the messaging felt like it was coming from the same malign Disney influence that has ruined most of their own output over the last couple of years, turning the company into a pale shadow of its former self. 'Bigeneration' is as big a problem for the ongoing story as the Timeless Child was: not least, it does a huge disservice to Ncuti Gatwa's efforts to leave the 10th/14th Doctor in play, even if he's ostensibly 'retired'. Having 14 split into two Doctors sends the message - however unintentionally - that 15, as the first ongoing Doctor who is (a) not white and (b) apparently gay, is effectively only half a Doctor, immediately a lesser being. Adding insult to injury, while I gather that Gatwa won't have a 'uniform' like most previous Doctors, the first publicised costume is basically what Lenny Henry wore for his spoof of the show back in the mid 1980s. Davies is only making matters worse for himself by responding like a petulant child to any and all criticism he finds on social media, some of which is perfectly valid and worthy of consideration... but, again, this is precisely what I expect from him, and I'm surprised that anyone could possibly be surprised by his current behaviour. On the upside, Gatwa's Christmas episode wasn't bad... Though I could have lived without the musical numbers, which seemed a bit on the silly side, quite apart from a song about eating babies being a touch tone-deaf on RTD's part.

Predictions for 2024
It was difficult enough to come up with predictions for this year... Considering I'm barely paying any attention to Hasbro's new releases, I'm not really interested enough to make much of a prediction on what's next for the TransFormers brand, so...

• Legacy part 3 is not the end of Legacy - bit of a no-brainer, really, because I gather Hasbro's TransFormers team have already said that they want to continue the format of Legacy beyond its planned 3-year arc... If that's the case, chances are I will not be buying any mainline TransFormers toys for the foreseeable future.
• Further cuts to Studio Series - for a line intended to bring the most screen-accurate versions of every movie (and now videogame) character to the fans, Studio Series has been failing spectacularly over the last year or so. Quite apart from the Rise of the Beasts toys being hopelessly inaccurate (Scourge's head, everything about Mirage except the head) and clumsily designed (both Scourge and Battletrap had the robot's hands poking out of their vehicle modes) because they were rushed out and based on concept art and/or early CGI, due to the lengthy development time of the toys not fitting in with the much-delayed film. Quite why they decided to release RotB toys so early is baffling enough, but the fact that some of the mainline toys were better than the Studio Series versions is mind-blowing. Then, the addition of videogame characters into the toyline has been poorly handled, with the new High Moon versions of Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Starscream being particularly poor compared to the versions released back in 2010.
• GI Joe Collaborative Optimus Prime will be a mess - just the idea that he's going to be a tank is bad enough (shades of Robot Masters Reverse/Rebirth Convoy), but that it's a tank TransFormer being developed by the same people that did Megatron, Bumblebee and Soundwave does not bode well.
• Hasbro to perform badly in the stock market - after the Open Game License debacle, and the 'overmonetisation' of Magic: The Gathering, Hasbro had their stock hammered down, but failed to learn any lessons from it. The now seem to be moving toward making D&D wholly electronic and online, when the game is traditionally very analogue and in-person - the very essence of social gaming - even as they continue to lose subscribers to D&D Beyond. The less one has to offer that people want to buy into, the more one's user base will shrink... and Wizards of the Coast are far from being the only players in town when it comes to roleplaying games. Making matters worse (for themselves) rumours began circulating that they were moving toward AI-generated art assets, and then they ditched over a thousand employees shortly before Christmas. It's hard to see how that could ever inspire long-term investor confidence in the company or its current leadership.
• More Tory scandals - pretty much inevitable, but I wonder how much longer Rishi Sunak is actually going to last as PM. Given the sort of stories coming out of the COVID enquiry, about how the top Tory politicians actually view the people of the country they supposedly lead, I'm hopeful that the next election will bring some real change. Of course, if the Tories win again, they'll take that as a mandate to carry on ripping us off and running the country into the ground.
• Doctor Who will become ever more divisive - if the rumours are to be believed and Disney's influence on the ongoing Doctor Who will push it further into the realms of Fantasy rather than remaining exclusively Sci-Fi, a lot more fans are going to be upset. While the Christmas episode was fun, I didn't appreciate the inclusion of magical, time-travelling goblins, or their flying wooden ship. Admittedly, the trailers had no obvious indications of the Fantasy elements, and many of the rumours have turned out to be utterly false (the story about Gatwa's Doctor wearing wellies, in particular), so time will tell. As it were.

So, not a great year... On balance, probably worse than 2022 for several specific reasons outlined above, but not without its highlights. As mentioned above, none of the very few Hasbro products I bought this year were acquired at their RRP, and that's set to continue. I'm vaguely interested in the newly-released Concept Art Megatron from the Studio Series line, but its underlying engineering is much the same as the Studio Series renditions of RotF Megatron and DotM Shockwave figures, so I'm very reluctant to pay the full £56 for it, especially with so much bare grey plastic in evidence.

Very little, if anything of what's been revealed so far for 2024 holds any interest for me, so there's a good chance it'll be another lean year in terms of official merchandise. Coupled with Hasbro's habit of pissing on any good will they generate in their myriad fandoms, they've done nothing to encourage my loyalty to their brands.

Licensed stuff, like Flame Toys' model kits - and particularly the Blackarachnia figure first revealed a couple of years back - is potentially more attractive since the Windblade and Arcee kits were great fun to put together. However, I can see myself going fully Third Party, finances permitting, unless the TransFormers brand starts to offer something new and innovative after Legacy concludes.

If nothing else, it'll be interesting to see how Chris Cocks earns his next ridiculous bonus in 2024, and what's left of Hasbro afterwards.