Captain's Log: Cosmos, Trek, Torchwood, Doctor Who & Harry Potter 

A powerful beam of energy blasts out from the center of a massive black hole as it rips apart and devours a star (as artistically envisioned above), to the amazement of earth astronomers.

And while budget cutbacks threaten the search for exoplanets that might host life, the Pentagon is pumping bucks into research on interstellar travel. "The Defense Department first proposed Star Wars," begins the AP story. "Now it wants Star Trek."

As a NASA satellite is set to make first contact (via a robot arm) with an asteroid, new research suggests asteroids may be incubators of life.  Meanwhile, out at the edge of the solar system, V'ger--sorry, a Voyager spacecraft--is making contact with a previously unknown phenomenon, and is described as "riding magnetic bubbles."  

In Star Trek news, the filmmakers in charge of the new Kirk crew wallow towards a less than promising-sounding script for the next movie (and fans notice how complicated and unfocused the process is when the filmmakers are making lots of other films rather than concentrating on Trek), while several of the principals in the last old (or "real") Kirk movie, Star Trek Generations, reveal that the stars as well as the director pleaded to change the manner of Kirk's death up to and including the day of shooting, all to no avail.  It was reshot later after a test audience hated it, and some fans still hate the result.

Oh, and a belated happy Captain Picard Day!

Over in the UK, things are not going well for the financially strapped BBC in the financially strapped country, and coincidentally or not, Doctor Who will not be back for a full season in 2012.  The current series six has been split in two, with the shows from the first half to be made available on DVD this summer.

 Meanwhile, the new Torchwood, the Doctor Who spinoff series that's become sort of American, will premiere on the U.S. Starz network on July 8, with Star Trek's Q, John De Lancie and Nana Visitor in the guest cast during the series. John Barrowman as Captain Jack and Eve Myles as Gwen Cooper are the last surviving original Brit cast members.

In advance of the last Harry Potter movie this summer, there's some buzz over the imminent announcement of what Pottermore is all about.  It's very probably not a new Harry book but some sort of Internet site.  Don't be too surprised if Google is involved. 

Another article notes the emergence of Hogwarts summer camps for kids.  The best part of this article for me is about the second grader who raised his reading to sixth grade level by reading the Harry books  .

And there's this pretty interesting piece on the origin of American Superheroes in the 1930s immigrant experience. As well as over on my Captain Future's Dreaming Up Daily site, my piece on the psychological function of the shadow, as demonstrated in the Star Trek episode, "The Enemy Within."

Captain's Log: Zarmina's World

Another milestone in exoplanet research was reached last week, when the first "earth-like" planet orbiting another star was discovered--at least in the sense that its composition and position suggest it could nurture life as we more or less know it. It's the "not too hot, not too cold" thesis that had headline writers dubbing it a Goldilock's planet.

"I call it Zarmina's World," said co-discoverer Stephen Vogt, after his wife. Sounds like the location of an original series Star Trek story, all right. It's well within warp range, though by conventional means it might take a generation ship to get there. It's the sixth planet out from Gliese 581, and about three times the size of Earth.

Maybe even more provocative are the rough calculations Vogt and another astronomer came up with. Since it took the discovery of about 500 planets before one was found that might turn out to be Class M, they've calculated that there could be some 40 billion planets in our universe with the potential for indigenous life.

In space exploration news, Congress finally passed a NASA authorization that, after all the fuss and retrenching, is pretty much what President Obama requested. "NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr. said the bill, which approves more than $58 billion in spending over the next three years, would foster the president's goals of extending the life of the space station, launching a commercial space transportation industry, fostering new technology and creating thousands of new jobs."

Hey--Look, up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, no--it's a comet. Comet Hartley is a green comet coming close to Earth, and it's getting in range to be visible: small telescopes see it, and binoculars eventually, and some claim it's already available to the naked eye. It reaches its closest point to Terra on October 20, and a couple of weeks later, the NASA spacecraft formerely known as Deep Impact will have its own close encounter with the comet's tail.

Finally, one of the privileges of running your own blog is ignoring the show biz news except for what interests you. So there are these tidbits: a new director has been mentioned for the next Superman movie: Robert Zemeckis, who made the Back to the Future trilogy. I guess the Batman guy caved...And a month or so shy of the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I movie, J.K. Rowling told Oprah that there might be more Harry Potter stories. Actually I knew this but was sworn to secrecy. Seriously. And it wasn't because I'm pals with J.K., because alas I'm not.

Captain's Update : Wired is now reporting that Zack Snyder ("The 300") will direct the next first Superman movie. I'm underwhelmed. This may be my last report on this film.

JK Rowling's Harry Potter, Doctor Who revived, and the fall and rise of Star Trek are among the stories leading a new prominence of science-fiction and fantasy storytelling in the decade just ending: see post below.

A Decade of Story

The past decade saw science fiction and fantasy storytelling come into prominence. A lot of it was bad or questionable, but some of it was among the most compelling storytelling of the decade, reaching the most people and influencing many lives.

Among the noteworthy events was the completion of the Star Wars saga and the successful reimagining of Battlestar Galactica. Of course, for many readers of this site, the big event was the fall and rise of Star Trek, largely chronicled in this blog's posts (of which, by the way, this is #1001. Patrick Stewart's knighthood was 1,000.) The rise of TV and film producer/director J.J. Abrams is a related phenomenon of the decade.

Another revival of the decade was Doctor Who. With the storytelling and creative guidance of writer-producer Russell T. Davies, and lead actors Christopher Eccleston and especially David Tennant, Doctor Who was a huge creative and popular success. Those of us outside it mostly have little idea of how pervasive the influence of Doctor Who is in the UK. What's also notable about this revival is how steeped the creators of the new series were in the stories and the tradition of Doctor Who, which ran new stories continuously from late 1963 to 1989--more than a quarter of a century--before being revived in 2005.

Right now, this New Year's weekend, the BBC is almost totally devoted to Doctor Who, as the David Tennant era ends with his final story on New Year's Day. In the U.S., the series is now carried on BBC America, which will run this episode, "The End of Time, Part 2," on Saturday. The previous story, "The Waters of Mars," was the highest rated show ever on BBC America, and it will also be showing nothing but Doctor Who for the first 46 hours of 2010.

But with major changes--a new exec producer, new Doctor and companion, new logo and redesigned TARDIS--how Doctor Who will fare in the new decade is an open question. This is especially true in the U.S., where BBC America is available to fewer viewers than the Sy-Fy network, which previously carried the series. For example, it's a premium channel on our local cable, and the additional money you have to pay to get the mostly garbage that goes with it just isn't worth it.

For all their creative and popular success, and the richness of tradition and past story they have, these sagas are all in some sense revivals or continuations, and this was pretty characteristic of the decade. However, it was an original story that was far and away the decade's most popular: the saga of Harry Potter.

This has been recognized in many end-of-decade evaluations. For example, Entertainment Weekly calls Harry Potter the greatest entertainer of the decade. JK Rowling was far and away the best selling author in the UK, by an order of magnitude. Though the book series was completed, the final two films will hit theatres in 2010 and 2011.

We recently watched all the Potter films in order, and it is amazing how unified they are, how much that became important in the 6th film was foreshadowed in the first. It's also interesting to note resemblances between these two titans of UK storytelling, Harry Potter and Doctor Who. Harry has his magic wand, while the Doctor has his magic sonic screwdriver, for instance. There's a bit of time travel in Harry Potter, and "magical creatures" in Who. And of course, there's David Tennant, who as the villainous Barty Crouch, Jr., does a kind of perverse regeneration, when he transforms from the good wizard he is impersonating back to his evil self.

Small wonder that Russell T. Davies considered a crossover story, in which the Doctor found himself in JK Rowling's Harry Potter universe. Davies also thought about a crossover episode with Star Trek, during the run of Enterprise. Though the Battlestar Galactica series had an actual tie to Star Trek, with former Trek writer Ron Moore, these three--Star Trek, Doctor Who and Harry Potter--have more in common in terms of approach and attitude. (They are similar as well to another saga successfully transferred to film in the past decade: Spiderman.) They all emphasize the possibility, the necessity as well as the difficulty of ethical choices. As Sirius Black says in a Harry Potter film, we all have good and bad within us, and our choices are who we really are. The same is said in different ways in Doctor Who, Star Trek and Spiderman.

The dominance of science fiction and fantasy in our storytelling can be healthy. There is a kind of distancing that allows us to talk about our contemporary world. They tell us not only what we're thinking but what we're feeling--our dreams and our nightmares. This isn't always comforting--as what the popularity of zombie and vampire stories may say about fears of the future--but it is useful, and important to talk about.

But for all the images from the cultural and contemporary unconscious, these sagas in particular (Star Trek, Doctor Who, Harry Potter) give important weight to consciousness. They provide models of action, attitude and ethics, however metaphorical, within complex story worlds that mirror the ambiguity of our own world while helping us to highlight what's most important. So it seems to me that the prominence of this kind of storytelling, and these three sagas in particular, represent one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dour and despicable decade.

Captain's Log: Local Nero and Who News

Not much new in the Star Trek universe, especially with the Paramount movie now a year away. There's speculation that the 24th century Spock will be traveling in a Vulcan Time Ship, and rumors persist that the villain is going to be a Romulan named Nero. I suppose he'll fiddle on the Vulcan harp while Romulus burns... Some of this reminds me of past promises: a bold new approach, Trek as you've never seen it, modernized for a new audience, with a bold Romulan villain and a story modelled on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That's what some are saying about the forthcoming new movie. That's also what Rick Berman et al were saying about the then-forthcoming new movie, Star Trek Nemesis.

There was a pretty neat NPR minseries on the cultural impact of Spock, especially as the embodiment of "the mystery of masculinity." Not exactly new ground either, but fun.

Some Doctor Who news, though. After the specials that will constitute the season next year, newly knighted exec producer and lead writer Russell T. Davis will be replaced by Stephen Moffat beginning in the 2010 season. Moffat is the author of some of the most praised and popular episodes of the new Who series, which also happen to be high among my favorites, like "The Empty Child" ("Are you my mummy?"), "The Girl in the Fireplace," and "Blink." He's also written Doctor Who novels, and is otherwise a rising writing star (including a forthcoming Spielberg film.) He's also a funny guy. His past Who work shows he can write scary and intelligent, but his background suggests he can write humor, too. His season 4 two-parter "Silence in the Library" was broadcast on the BBC but not yet in the U.S.

Since Moffat and his new producing partner have been appointed so early, they're already started on their first stories. Rumor has it that Moffat is looking to get edgy s/f writer Neil Gaiman to write an ep. Who will be Who is another question entirely. Rumors persist that David Tennant will end his run as the Doctor at some point next year, in one of the specials. That still doesn't make a lot of sense to me--the season is being shortened because he's unavailable part of the time, so if they're going to accomodate him for that, why wouldn't it be because he's coming back for the next season? Otherwise, why not replace him at the end of this season, and do a complete season next year with somebody else? In any case, the actors rumored to be his replacement haven't been very inspiring to me. (Though Daniel "Harry Potter" Radcliffe is an intriguing idea.)

But scanning Tennant gossip (in Wikipedia no less) suggests he's dated several of the more ravishing female guest stars of the past three seasons. Could the younger William Shatner possibly be a role model?

But it's a different Trek captain in Tennant's present. After winning every conceivable prize in England and the U.S. (except, today, the Tony) for playing the lead role in Macbeth on stage, Patrick Stewart returns to England to play the supporting role of Claudius to David Tennant's star role in Hamlet. The erstwhile Captain Picard has expressed a desire to appear in Doctor Who, so the first Trek/Who crossover may be in the works. (Especially since Moffat inserted Trek jokes in "The Empty Child.") But then, fourth Doctor Tom Baker has suggested he'd take a role in the new Who, and I don't think anybody believes that will happen. Though fifth Doctor Peter Davison and his daughter--playing the 10th and current Doctor's daughter--have appeared. So Who knows?

Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter in the latest movie, Harry Potter
and the Order of the Phoenix.

Captain's Log: Harry's Trek, 1950s Superman and Science Fiction Theatre

Before the Trek movie news obliterates other subjects in a few days, a couple of notes from the past week...

Harry's Trek

I saw the new Harry Potter movie and got the new Harry Potter book--I even witnessed my first (and the last one there will ever be) midnight bookstore event as the first copies went on sale. (I've got photos here and a description here.) By now it's the fastest selling book in history.

The movie--Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix--is from the longest book, and it's the shortest of the films. Director David Yates did a masterful job of carving out a taut narrative, yet not stinting on wondrous effects and character moments. Without giving anything away, what I've read of the new book (we're about a third through--we read it aloud) is prefigured nicely by the film's story, and (most impressively) by the visual touches, like the loudspeakers that spring up at Hogwarts when it's taken over by a dictatorial regime, visually reminiscent of the 1930s and the Nazis. Yet this takeover still has the flavor of school, under the power of an authoritarian principal or headmaster.

The connections to the soul of Star Trek continues to get stronger in each book and movie. The forces of darkness insist on racial purity while Harry and his side champion diversity-- striking a Star Trek theme. In the new movie Harry learns anew the value of friends in his battles and struggles, just as Trek heroes support each other in combat and in life.

When Harry (who is 15 at the time of this movie) and his young friends can't understand why some important people are denying the reality of the Dark Lord's return and the danger they're in, while demonizing guiltless scapegoats, they're told that fear makes people do strange things. That's Trek psychology, too--fear can lead to denial as well as to panic, to one-sidedness and designating familiar sorts of enemies, and the reversion to torture and violation of rights, to avoid dealing with complexities and overwhelming realities.

Then at one point, the wizard who is Harry's godfather tells him that people are not all good or all bad but a mixture. The difference is in what they choose to be. This is a succinct statement of a principle that Star Trek dramatized many times.

Daniel Radcliffe is maturing as an actor along with Harry (in fact all the kids are), Imelda Staunton does a fine star turn as Delores Umbridge, Helena Bonham Carter goes wickedly over the top as Bellatrix Lestrange, but the new wonder of this cast is Evanna Lynch as Luna Lovegood--she's a 15 year old amateur who insisted she was the only one who could play Luna, and she proved it.

Some reviewers pointed out that parts of the movie didn't advance the plot much, but were more illustrations of the book for people who read it. Since that's a big chunk of the global population, it wasn't much of a hindrance. A couple of reviews I read singled out the scene where the young wizards practice their defensive magic as being dull, just a bunch of kids with colored light shooting out of their wands. But I consider these scenes among the highlights. I guess it depends on your definition of movie magic. It is a bit reminiscent however of the criticism of Star Trek movies being too much for fans, and not enough movies in themselves. This didn't matter when TV Star Trek was popular, and it sure doesn't matter when Harry Potter books blanket the planet.

Look! Up in the Sky!

Apart from Potter (and the latest Doctor Who), I had a couple of other sci-fi experience this week, both from the 1950s. I rented some DVDs of the first season of the original TV Adventures of Superman with George Reeves. These shows were made in 1951 and first aired in 1952, when I saw them as a young child. Today they're a lot of fun for the glimpses of 1950s stuff (like 50s and late 40s' cars on "real" 1950s (backlot) streets) and the differences from later versions, as well as that standard opening that's become fixed in cultural consciousness. The opening didn't originate with the TV show or the comics--it's similar to the earlier Superman animated cartoons, as is the theme music, but it started with the radio show in 1940, though the intro was at times a bit longer. I've bolded some interesting differences in the radio intro but missing from TV:

Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound!" "Look! Up in the sky!""It's a bird!""It's a plane!""It's Superman!"

"Yes, it's Superman - strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman - defender of law and order. champion of equal rights, valiant, courageous fighter against the forces of hate and prejudice, who disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way."

Different from subsequent treatments, and even this series later on, each of these first season self-contained episodes was structured as a mystery. Clark Kent uses his intelligence to figure things out, and Superman usually comes in at the end to nab the bad guys, after using his flying speed to get there quickly. Lois and Clark do this to some extent, but the emphasis there is on their relationship. The emphasis in films is Superman's super powers. In this first year, it was solving crimes. It was fist fights and gun shot violent, and towards the end of the season, it got even rougher, with Superman cutting citizen's rights corners to muscle up against crime.

There's a B-movie feel to it all, with the same actors playing different villains and many repeated shots, especially of Superman taking off and flying (I noticed this as a kid but it didn't bother me--somehow it just added to the ritualistic quality of the show. Kids find repetitions comforting.) This was the only year that Phyllis Coates played Lois Lane--she got equal billing with George Reeves. A former chorus girl, she had an impressive body even in that 50s suit, but she played the role as a no-nonsense "career girl." She wasn't particularly nice to Clark, who was sometimes positioned as a kind of coward, in these times when a popular ad on the back of comic books showed a muscled he-man kick sand in the face of a skinny kid, as an ad for a muscle-building course. For his part, Clark does treat her like a little girl at times, also characteristic of the times. Still, what I learned from this series as a kid was that the hero rescues the girl, as well as the weaker and the oppressed.

Contrary to rumor, however, the proto-feminism of Coates' portrayal (which was part of the comic book as well) probably was not the reason she didn't return for the second season, when the show got a new producer and went in a lighter direction. Though I watched Superman for at least its first several seasons, and as a kid I did prefer Noel Neill as Lois, this first season made a deep impression on me. It's been fun to revisit it.

The DVDs come with some commentaries by author Gary Grossman--the first one was reasonably informative, but a later one was just bad--why don't people watch and listen to what they're commenting on before they start talking about it? He complained about a couple of plot points that were in fact dealt with in the episode. Disappointing since I admire his published work, particularly Saturday Morning TV.

Time is Just A Place

Science Fiction Theatre was another 1950s show--it ran from 1955 to 1957--and I remember watching it with great interest and a degree of awe. It was an anthology show, introduced by Truman Bradley, an authoritative presence, and it had a great, dramatic opening theme. Bradley talked real science related to the science fiction story.

I remember the mood of it all, but only one story has stayed with me--and it turns out to have been the second episode broadcast, called "Time is Just a Place," which I just saw on a DVD I got on Ebay. It was about a typical suburbanite (played by Don DeFoe, who turned up as a typical suburbanite as a regular on Ozzie and Harriet and other 50s sitcoms) who gets a new but reclusive neighbor (played by Warren Stevens, who would costar in Forbidden Planet a year later). He becomes curious about him when he sees a "sonic vacuum cleaner" scurrying along his floor by itself. ( I suppose you'd fix it with a sonic screwdriver? ) It turns out that Stevens and his wife are refugees from the future, who want to live in the "simpler" times of 1950 suburbia. But time travel is now illegal and they fear being found and brought back, which, during a thunderstorm, they are. Nothing is left of them but the burnt husk of the sonic vacuum.

I think this made such an impression on me as a child because the world of it was like so much of 50s TV--the California suburbia of sitcoms and contemporary dramas, which in its turn was like "real life," or at least what adults around me wanted it to be. But into this mundane context came something strange, advanced and mysterious. Something suggesting the future I longed for, from the Saturday morning science fiction serials. But it was something as familar, mundane and a jolt to the imagination about future possibilities, as a sonic vacuum cleaner.

It turns out, on this viewing, that this episode has quite a pedigree. It was directed by Jack Arnold, famed visionary director of the 1950s and a real precursor to Star Trek in many ways, with films like It Came from Outer Space, the first two Creature from the Black Lagoon movies, This Island Earth, and his most obscure gem, The Space Children. Though he had a long career, it was pretty undistinguished after this brief period.

Not only that, but the story was written by Jack Finney, author of the story that became Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the famous 1956 film, remade in an excellent version with Leonard Nimoy in 1978, and remade again in the 90s and in a film that's just finished production , with the current title of The Invasion.) But this S/F Theatre episode is much more characteristic of his work, which has the theme of people returning to simpler times, as in his most famous novel, Time and Again ( also in From Time to Time and his collection, About Time. And although the 1980 movie, Somewhere in Time starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour at her most radiant, was based directly on a novel by Trek writer Richard Matheson, the time travel method and much of the premise of the story is very similar to Finney's.)

Finney also wrote about old times erupting into the contemporary, as in the short story, "I Love Galesburg in the Springtime," a favorite of mine, since I went to college in Galesburg, where Finney did, too. Once again, there was the mood of the mysterious outside mundane normality in that memorable story, just as in the apparently memorable episode of an early science fiction TV show.

Captain's Log: Harry, The Doctor, and Will

Beyond the announcement of a date for the latest New Voyages episodes, "World Enough and Time" (August 23), there's been little news on the Trek front--though lots of rumors, leading up to the expected cast announcement for Trek XI. In fact, anticipation is probably the key word this week: with the 7th Harry Potter book coming on Saturday, and ComicCon (where announcements are likely) the following Thursday or so. (And by the way, I regard the "news" that Leonard Nimoy will appear in XI but not William Shatner as rumor, even if Shatner is the source. It still doesn't pass the smell test.)

But there were actual happenings, if not in the Trek universe per se. The latest Harry Potter movie opened hugely. I haven't seen it yet--probably will this coming week--and since the new book is the last (at least for awhile) I will probably check out the party at a local bookstore for the official unveiling late Friday night. This past Friday, the SciFi Channel showed the second episode of the third season of Doctor Who, called "The Shakespeare Code." Though it was seen in England last winter, it turned out to be very well timed for the U.S. Not only is this the prime Shakespeare season here, but the story relates to the premiere of the Potter movie and the Potter book.

There were other nice little references in Gareth Roberts' script, such as where the Doctor told Shakespeare his new companion, Martha is from: "Freedonia," which is the fictional country in the classic Marx Brothers film, Duck Soup. There was probably some Star Trek reference, too, because there almost always is, but one line that seemed to be a throwaway reference was to Harry Potter, and the Doctor's cheeky comment that he's read the seventh book, and "I cried."

But for Potter fans there turns out to be a marvellous payoff at the end. First of all, the story concerns witches and spells, which of course are explained as beings from another planet using some kind of esoteric technology. They use words to make things happen (the Doctor explains this by citing the math symbols that result in nuclear bombs--so they use words instead of numbers), and it is because Shakespeare is the premier wordsmith of all time, that they are using him to invade the Earth and stamp out humanity.

When the Doctor unexpectedly doesn't stop them from opening the gates to their fellow evildoers, it's up to Shakespeare to find the words to send them back and close them off. He declaims verses, looks to the Doctor for the proper number sequence, then stops when it's time to shout the final command. He's flummoxed, he turns to the Doctor, the Doctor doesn't know, they look at Martha, and she shouts, "Expellaramus!"

Well, Shakespeare could be expected to know the word, as Latin was the substance of his early education (according to Stephen Greenblatt's bestseller, Will in the World, in the first chapter which is about how even as a boy Shakespeare was "obsessed with the magic of words." Not too much of a stretch to imagine this book's influence on this episode.)

Shakespeare, yes--but Martha Jones, 21st century Londoner? There's but one source for her knowledge--the Harry Potter books, where it is a well known spell. No one in the story says a word about this, which is part of what makes it so delicious. Harry Potter rescues Doctor Who! And Shakespeare! And saves the world!

There's an inevitable running gag through the story of the Doctor feeding Shakespeare quotable lines--some of which turn up in his plays, some are by other people, and at least one he's already written by 1599, when the story takes place (and when indeed Shakespeare was famous.)

But this is not the first time the Doctor has helped Shakespeare out--or rather, not the last time he does. This story ends with Shakespeare talking of writing about "fathers and sons" in view of his own son Hamnet's death--the play of course being Hamlet. And in writing that, it will shortly be the Fourth Doctor who gives him a hand, almost literally.

It's one of my favorite exchanges of dialogue in the classic series. It was in "City of Death," written by Douglas Adams and Graham Williams, with Tom Baker as the Doctor. In a contemporary villa, a supposed Countess (but of course an alien) [update: as several Whovian readers have pointed out, the Countess is not an alien--her husband is; see the comments] shows off a collection of rare art objects, including the long-lost original manuscript of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The Doctor concurs that it is authentic, because he recognizes the handwriting. "Shakespeare's," the woman says. "No," the Doctor says, "mine." He had to lend a hand because Shakespeare "sprained his wrist writing sonnets." Then the Doctor reads aloud: "'... to take arms against a sea of troubles'--and stops, put out. "Take arms against a sea of troubles--that's a mixed metaphor. But he would insist!" "Oh, Doctor," the woman says. "I'm quite convinced that you're perfectly mad." The Doctor demurs. "Nobody's perfect."

Further update: There's another book--A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599 (the year of the episode) by James Shapiro that might be an even closer source--don't know really, especially since I haven't read it...Other "accurate" Shakespeare mythology: "Love's Labours Won" (the play done in the episode) was a title that appeared in one list of Shakespeare's plays, possibly written between 1598 and 1601, though no script was ever found and no further evidence that it ever existed...Also there's the joke in the ep when Shakespeare calls Martha his "dark lady," referring to the Dark Lady to whom he addressed many of his sonnets. It does seem true that the identity of that Dark Lady has never been discovered.

And as for the Harry Potter references, they do seem a bit like the Doctor had read the seventh book, for Harry's cry of "Expelliarmus" figures in the plot several times, including the final battle. Great book, by the way, but by now you knew that...