Am I just getting old or something?

No, it's probably more a comment on me. You see, there's this river called "mainstream entertainment" over there, which is kind of crowded, but I just happen to be over here, in a strange little side pond which only mixes in water from that stream over there occasionally.

But there's occasionally other sources of water flowing into my little pond, so I'm alright here.

I won't be any help either. I do not have the tactical ability required for the epic point-by-point break downs to participate in this thread, even if I knew both sides of the fight...

I was definitely of movie-watching age for Independence Day (I knew to call it ID4, right?), but I happened not to catch it for whatever reason. I think I got a disrecommendation.

Oh it was awful. Gloriously, hilariously awful. Jeff Goldbloom used kermet to hack into an alien spaceship's main frame.

I know ID4 but sadly not BSG. :( However, I shall propose another one while we wait for someone sufficiently versed in both.

Let's see... ah, yes: The Doctor vs. The Doctor



Originally I thought, "Timelord versus hologram? No contest," but there is the whole intangible nature of the latter... I'm sure someone here will make it interesting. I was going to suggest Q (Star Trek) versus Q (James Bond) versus Q (San Jose Earthquakes mascot), but that seemed even more unbalanced.

Hmmm...

For the purposes of avoiding confusion, Voyager's Doctor will be referred to exclusively as the EMH.

The T.A.R.D.I.S. is beginning to act up a little; Rose and the Doctor are on their way to a Welsh Eisteddfod in 1972, but it's a rough ride to get there and they end up displaced in both space and time, according to the T.A.R.D.I.S.' instruments; though the Doctor isn't sure how far out they are. He opens the door to see, and finds (much to his surprise) that the 1972 Welsh Eisteddfod is, in fact, outside the door; the readouts say that they're 400 years out and somewhere in the Delta Quadrant, but maybe the readouts are incorrect. He and Rose have a fairly pleasant time at first; they meet a lady by the name of Kathryn Janeway, and have a pleasant conversation - she says she'd bought her friend here to the Eisteddfod.

The Doctor keeps getting the feeling that something is wrong. The T.A.R.D.I.S. can't be that far out, can it? Then Janeway's friend turns up - and it's Seven of Nine. The Doctor panics on seeing her facial implants, which reaction cues Janeway's realisation that he is not just a Holodeck creation, but is rather a stowaway on Voyager. Worried about ship security, Seven attempts to take the Doctor into custody, but (fearing assimilation) he uses his sonic screwdriver to create a sonic feedback in her aural implants, incapacitating her for a few seconds. He and Rose run for it. They've got to get off the Holodeck; the Doctor's not sure who's real and who's not on here, but if a Borg drone assimilates him, then they're all in trouble. The Sonic Screwdriver makes quick work of the Holodeck door; the Doctor heads out, and locks it behind him to keep Seven trapped. They head out into the corridor - only to meet a Dalek coming the other way. It takes a shot at them - with a bullet, of all things - injuring Rose, and so they duck into the nearest room - sickbay. The Doctor is confused - the ship doesn't look like a ship in the process of being overtaken by the Borg (who he describes to Rose as 'somewhere between human and cyberman'), and yet there's a Borg drone on board; moreover, he realises belatedly, a Borg drone whose deeply entrenched implants may show a long time having been assimilated, but who also has hair. Borg treat 'hair' as inefficient. And why is the Dalek using bullets, instead of its own, more destructive disintegration ray? The Doctor is missing something important here.

He activates the computer, looking for some sort of clue, and accidentally activates the EMH as well. At the phrase "Please state the nature of the medical emergency." the Doctor recognises the EMH for what it is, and has it look after Rose's injured arm. The Doctor prepares to use his Sonic Screwdriver to override the computer's security protocol, and let him figure out what's going on, but as soon as he turns it on, the EMH neatly snatches it out of his hand, turns it off, and asks him to 'please refrain from making use of sonic technology near to delicate medical instruments'. The Doctor is taken aback - a 24th-century EMH Mark I should be incapable of recognising the danger in a Sonic Screwdriver. Well, except for the one from Voyager, which developed its own personality and wrote this holonovel called Photons Be Free which had influenced society in the future by...

At this point, the EMH stares at the Doctor in some surprise; he'd written the holonovel, but no-one had seen it yet. His earlier medical scan of Rose had turned up a large number of chronoton particles, demonstrating that the two were time travellers; but the notion that his book might one day be famous had simply not occurred to him. The Doctor, realising exactly which EMH Mark I he is in the presence of, attempts to shake his hand. The EMH grumbles that time-travelling fanboys are clearly a new hazard for authors, and asks if the Doctor is the one who'd stolen his mobile emitter.

At this point, the Dalek shoots his way in through the door of Sickbay, still using mere bullets. The Doctor finally realises why it wasn't using its disintegration beam; the disintegration beam has been re-configured for a hologrammic frequency, meaning that the EMH is the only one endangered by it. The Dalek plans to destroy both the EMH and the holonovel, using the resulting disruption in the timestream to power a device, connected to Voyager's warp core, that will trap everyone in this ship outside of time - forever. It's the same weapon that ended the Last Great Time War; and with the Doctor forevermore out of their metaphorical hair, the remaining Daleks will have the chance to remake time to their liking. It was the Daleks who forced the T.A.R.D.I.S. into the holodeck to begin with; the whole scenario is a trap. Snatching back his screwdriver, the Doctor deactivates the EMH before the Dalek can fire its modified weapon. The Dalek points out that the Doctor's actions are irrelevant; sooner or later, the EMH will have to be re-activated. In order to demonstrate its point, the Dalek fires another bullet into Rose's leg; it will keep shooting her until either she dies or the EMH is re-activated. And there are no other medical personnell on board; evenif there were, the Dalek had sealed off the entire deck.

The Doctor is thus faced with a choice; to save Rose's life, or to safeguard the rest of the universe. Rose urges him to choose the rest of the universe, but the Doctor says it's too late for that; the choice has already been made. He begins to make a speech, congratulating the Dalek on creating a trap that he couldn't escape from; a trap made of the Doctor's own stubborn refusal to let Rose die. He's stalling for time, of course; he decribes the nature of the Dalek's trap in detail, including how someone in Engineering could deactivate it. He finishes his speech with a comment that when he'd shut down the EMH - he'd shut down every hologram on the ship.

Suddenly, the Dalek looks worried; and a moment later, it is beamed away. Captain Janeway (still in her casual Eisteddfod clothes) turns up at the entrance of sickbay, and demands an explanation from the Doctor. He insists on first reactivting the EMH and having it treat Rose; no objections are made to this plan, but Rose is confused - what happened to the Dalek?

The answer is simple enough; the Dalek had previously stolen the EMH's moble emitter, and had used it to create a hologram in Engineering, hiding the device that was supposed to trap the Doctor forever outside of time. Once that hologram shut down, Torres managed to disengage the device (partially due to having been listening in to the Doctor's delaying speech); since it used the same technology as the 'pepper-bot robot' in sickbay, she'd taken the opportunity to beam it into the brig.

The Dalek itself, its plans ruined and facing an angry Doctor, decides that discretion is the better part of valour and uses an emergency temporal transport to escape. The Doctor manages to convince the Captain that he's simply a harmless traveller; however, since his T.A.R.D.I.S. on the holodeck is interfering with their warp drive, he's politely asked to 'harmlessly travel' somewhere else. Since it's clear that her crew can't fit into such a ridiculously small vehicle, she doesn't ask him for a lift back to the Alpha Quadrant; but she does ask him to take a number of personal messages from the crew back there, including a notification that the ship is actually still in existance. Only once the Doctor opens the door, and Janeway notices the interior size of the T.A.R.D.I.S., does she regret her decision not to ask for a lift; when Rose asks why the Doctor didn't offer, he explains that her trip home will be 'the beginning of the end' for the Borg, and is quite necessary. As he leaves, however, he does manage to create a 'subspace wavefront' that Voyager can ride along for some time, cutting a few months off their expected return time.

Edit: Forgot to suggest a replacement vs. How about The Doctor (Dr. Who) vs. Lord Vetinari (Discworld)?

Well, they're not running Mac OS in BSG, so they don't have the hardware compatibility with the ID4 aliens to upload a virus. However, it takes more than telepathy and city-sized spaceships to defeat Bill Adama. Starbuck will be smoking a celebratory cigar in five moves.

Hang on everyone, I'm formulating a response to the whole BSG vs ID4 debate, it'll take me a little bit though...

CCC, as nice as that story was, it didn't really pit Dr. Who against the EMH.

Yes, you're right. Though that's not really an easy pair of people to pit against each other; the EMH's default action in any situation is to provide medical care, while the Doctor doesn't generally attack anyone who doesn't attack him first. Besides, if they were to go one against the other for any reason, the Sonic Screwdriver can pretty much override the EMH in an instant.

It could be a competition of some sort

Hmmm... true.

Round 1: Chess

The EMH drew white, and the game continued without interruption until the 46th move. After the EMH moved Queen to e7, the Doctor registered a complaint, as follows:

Doctor: "I recognise that gambit. Did you install a copy of the Crafty Banana chess engine into your holomatrix before this game?"
EMH: "Well, yes, as it happens I did."
Doctor: "Do you think that's quite fair?"
EMH: "I don't see why not. You prepared for this match in advance, did you not? So did I."
Doctor: "What do the rules say about this?"
EMH: "They say I'm not allowed to connect to an external chess computer. They don't say anything about code integrated into my holomatrix."
Doctor: "Ah, hasn't that loophole been closed yet? ...do you think that's quite fair?"

This began an hour-long debate about the ethics of installing a chess engine into a computer-based opponent during a chess match, which only ended when the EMH's flag fell, causing him to lose on time.

Comment from the Doctor: "Good match, but he's a little bit too easy to distract."

Advantage: Doctor

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Round 2: Scrabble

After the Doctor had been reprimanded fifteen times for spelling words that "are going to be included in the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, or maybe the one after that", and after it had been discovered that the EMH had taken the precaution of incorporating an anagram engine into his holomatrix, the round was abandoned.

Draw

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Round 3: Badminton

Round interrupted by Dalek invasion. Despite the Doctor's innovative use of two racquets and a shuttlecock to force the Daleks into retreat, the game had to be abandoned when it was found that the shuttlecock had been exterminated. Before the invasion, the score had been 235 to 15 in favour of the EMH.

The EMH's comment: "It became a lot easier after the tenth game; I scored my first point when he began to suffer from fatigue. It was all downhill from there on."

Despite the interruption, this round was judged to go to the EMH.

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Round three-and-a-half: Repair

This wasn't an official round, but rather a side-effect of the Dalek invasion referenced above. At one point, the Daleks introduced the EMH to a corrupting memory-virus, which the Doctor cured within two minutes with the Sonic Screwdriver and some technobabble that not even Torres could understand. As he forced them into retreat, the Daleks managed to infect the Doctor with a fast-acting Timelord-specific degenerative plague; the EMH took fifteen hours to cure the Doctor (and the Doctor had to take a further week to fully recover).

The EMH's comment: "His anatomy was like nothing I've ever seen before, combining the best aspects of Human, Klingon, Cardassian, and Vulcan biology, among others. Frankly, given the unknowns, I should probably have received a major medical award for curing him at all. On the bright side, I have authored a paper on a new theory of ancestry for the major races of the Alpha Quadrant, which provides an innovative new explanation of what was until now thought to be a surprising amount of convergent evolution." (Note: Said paper has not been found, and the EMH does not remember its contents. Memory damage to the main computer is consistent with some sort of sonic device.)

Advantage: Doctor

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Round 4: Poker

The Doctor won handily here, amassing a fortune in virtual currency by means of a clever betting strategy and a series of near-perfect predictions of the cards in his opponent's hand.

The EMH's comment: "Are you sure he wasn't cheating?"

Advantage: Doctor

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Round 5: Pie-eating Contest

Chosen by the Doctor; as the EMH is unable to ingest non-holographic foods, he was forced to concede.

Advantage: Doctor

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Overall winner: The Doctor.

While writing one of my posts on the previous page, I kept having the line 'this is the most unconventional game of chess I've ever played' running through my head and I couldn't think of where it came from. I figured it was C&H, but couldn't find anything like it. Since then I'd been bothered, wondering and wondering where it came from. Now thanks to the Comic Strip Critic, I remember that it was the strip right after Gwynn Turned Around.

Phew. Finally got that resolved.

Batman's operations in Gotham City have proven disruptive to the economic interests of the Crown. Her Majesty's Secret Service has determined the Batman to represent a clear and present danger to the economic security of the Realm. Accordingly, MI6 has activated the double oh program and dispatched agent 007 to terminate Batman's activities by any means necessarily. What is the outcome of such an endeavor?