Any writer will tell you that the germ of an idea often turns into something completely different. Also, that you may have a germ of an idea but it may take a while to put it into a coherent story. This was the case with When Angels Burn.
It was going to be called Curse of Lake Damon. It was something my son had an idea about as a child. Damon means demon in German. He envisioned a dark lake with creatures made of mist rising from the surface. This sayed with me for a few years before I began to put it all together.
As a Time Warriors story, it would go either the supernatural way or the sci fi way. I then got an idea of a young woman in a rowing boat at night who suddenly dissolves when a strange whispering reaches a crescendo. So I had a whispering lake, ghosts in the woods and there wa no other way round it, there was something alien at the bottom of the lake. I had two other ideas; a young mute boy screaming out in the night and a Persian kid sitting on a frozen vista before a floating fire. A figure approaches him and hands him what looks like a Doubloon and tells him “When Angels Burn.”
I needed a way in different from the usual stumbling into or being dragged into a story. This time I used Rachel’s fake memories given to her by the Ganti when they made her human as a doorway. What if Rachel had memories of this boy and the whispering lake? But she only had fragments so that was the central mystery.
So many images and ideas but how to put them all together? Little did I know that it would become a story about loss and grief for both bumans and Xerebans.
it wasn’t until I saw the image of the alien, the Galantufeen, my most exotic named alien to date and then it all fell into place.
Writing a series like the Time Warriors, you begin to develop your own universe and mythos. So the chance to bring Xereba back into the story was impossible to resist. It was also a chance to reaffirm the Time Warriors as a team and expand on them all as characters. I liked the Vienna backdrop as you want to see the world.
But I fear I have said too much. If you want to see how it all comes together check out The Time Warriors When Angels Burn & Other Stories now on sale on Amazon in both paperback and kindle.
Just as Tegan complained when she returned in the 13th Doctor final story, Power of the Doctor, that it had been nearly four decades since she had last heard from the Doctor, so it was for me when I met up with Janet Fielding in Lisburn for a comic con on 6th September 2025.
In my case, it had been an Ace situation, nearly three decades for me. We had last met at Panopticon in the Imperial College London back in the 80s. She was doing a panel with her Doctor, Peter Davison and fellow companion, Sarah Sutton who played Nyssa.
I asked a simple question, what was your favourite cliffhanger? For some reason, that pissed them off. Janet summoned me on stage where she threatened to throw a jug of water over me. I never understood why and that put me right off this tardis crew as the most unpleasant I had met.
I have never met Sarah Sutton again but I did meet Peter davison a few times. But all I had of Tegan was a black and white 10 x 8 of Janet which I bought on the day for three quid back then.
This time I wanted a photo with her and got a Doctor Who comic book signed.
It’s one of my favourite signatures to be honest. Janet was absolutely lovely. She didn’t want to drench me this time. We chatted about her return to the show and keeping it secret. Her time on the show and her era. We also talked about her time representing other actors and how the Dublin scene has decliend a bit. We had a great time chatting and I was so caught up, I forgot to get my photo so had to go back and tick that off the bucket list.
The fifth Doctor era is a favourite of mine and I am glad that I got her once again but also the fifth Doctor that day too.
Who doesn’t love Q from Star Trek? And who doesn’t love the stylish, eloquent John De Lancie?
I first met John many moons ago in Dublin at a small convention. He was open, affable, delightful and a genuine gentleman. As I said elsewhere, fans got very lucky at Dublin Comic Con Summer Edition 2025. I had lost my autograph of John so had to go to get one again.
John once wrote a Star Trek The Next Generation comic for DC comics called The Gift. The cover remains to this day, stunning as you can see below.
So this time when we met, I had an original copy and handed it to him to be signed. He cheekily asked should he write all over Patrick Stewart’s head so I said yeah.
John has that cheeky chappie grin that cemented him in Star Trek fans heart from the minute he appeared on screen. While we are both older, he still has it as you can see from the photo above.
He can hold an audience as his panel showed and just as it was years ago, he still can hold the fans in the palm of his hand. He is interested in fans and their lives, asking a friend of mine what hi did as a profession. When he said that he was a podiatrist, they had a discussion about private and public health care. We had a chat about diabetes and how insidious it is.
Meeting him tied in with his surprise appearance on Star Trek Strange New Worlds as the father of Trelane. While it may have broken continuity, a bit, it was a delight to at least, hear him on Trek once again.
He just has to smile at you once with that mischievous twinkle in the eye and you know Q is alive and well. A true gentleman.
The Mistress of the Dark herself is coming to Dublin! We’re thrilled to announce Cassandra Peterson, the iconic Elvira, as a guest at Dublin Comic Con – Summer Edition this August! Best known as the legendary horror host Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, Cassandra Peterson has become a true pop-culture icon across film, television, comics, and beyond.
This is an extremely rare convention appearance. Cassandra has not appeared at a European convention since 2017, and even before then, her appearances were few and far between. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for fans to meet the Queen of Halloween right here in Dublin.
We’re not big fans of corn fields between Children of the Corn, Signs and every other horror movie set in a field with plants higher than your head so we go visit Clown in a Cornfield to see can we beat that fear. Clowns? In a cornfield? A huge twist that will send you running. Stephen Carey and Owen Quinn check out if clowns will ever get a good rap.
Virtually every sci-fi show has done a body swap episode.
With the Time Warriors, I try to make every story as original as possible without falling into old tropes. And if you do a story which has been done so many times before, then how could I make it different?
So for To Meet In Dreams, I wanted something different than an alien device or teleport accident. I couldn’t really see the benefit or story if any of the Time Warriors switched bodies with each other.
I was familair with the concept of astral travelling so thought that maybe that would be a good device with which to make the body swap happen. It was always going to Jacke who was having a hard time after her split with Stephen at the climax of the Wolves of Chernobyl & Other Stories. But why would someone be swapping bodies?
I look around at the world where kids literally live in their phones and are losing the art of handwriting and painting and drawing with the advent of AI. One area we avoid is the future where Varran is afraid to go for fear of finding out something that could affect the present day. So I decided that we should see a possible future leading to the immortal line,
“Open your mouth and I’ll rip your balls off!”
That should really be a T-shirt.
But I still needed a new slant on body swap. It’s very easy to shoehorn characters into stories like a certain ethnicity or disabled etc but for this one, it was an ideal opportunity to have a little person as the bad guy who isn’t really a bad guy at all. It allowed me to explore the fact he gets to experience the world as a normal person while Jacke learns how hard it is to be disabled, even in the future.
Professor Eric Talman is a genius in his era, married with a husband, but he is desperate to bring back the art of handwriting and painting which has virtually all died out. And he has pinpointed the era where it all went wrong and he wants to change that. What do you do when you discover you have swapped bodies with a time traveller whose binman is desperate for a date.
It was time for Jacke to get over Stephen and the introduction of Deano the Muay Thai binman feels right for Jacke and the series as a whole.
But unable to reverse Talman’s body swap, will Jacke be trapped in a little person’s body in the future with no help from Tyran’s descendants? What will this mean for Talman’s husband, Mervin? What does it mean for their marriage?
To Meet In Dreams is a chance to revisit an old very used scenario through new eyes. It is also a chance to break the no visits to the future rule and expand the Time Warriors mythos. In dark times, life has a way of pushing you in the direction you need as Jacke discovers.
Find out in When Angels Burn & Other Stories now available in paperback and kindle on Amazon.
By Owen Quinn author of the Time Warriros and Zombie Blues
With Stargate SG1 a runaway success, it was only a matter of time before a spin off series was released. This came in the form of Stargate Atlantis which grew organically from the show’s own mythos.
The pilot starts off at the Ancient outpost in the Antarctica where the final battle against Anubis took place. Doctor Elizabeth Weir has been recruiting for this mission for months and Jack O’Neill (Richard Dean Anderson) and Daniel Jackson (Michael Shanks) are there to help see them off. Jack is flown in by pilot John Sheppard who just discovers the secrets of the existence of the Stargate project. Wandering around the base he meets the rest of his fellow travellers. The comedic duo of the series, Stargate’s guest star super complainer, genius and ever grumpy, Rodney McKay (David Hewlett) and Doctor Carson Beckett (Paul McGillion) are arguing because Carson has an Ancient gene that can control the great weapon hidden at the Antarctic and any Ancient tech. But he struggles to do it while Sheppard discovers it works naturally for him bringing him to Weir’s attention.
Thanks to Jack’s persuasion, Sheppard goes along. You can see the chemistry between this new team is right there from the start. It flows perfectly giving the audience the desire to go along with these people to what may be a one way ticket. Daniel is desperate to go but Jack refuses to let him go because he discovered that the gate can open up to eight symbols. This means that he believes that flying city of Atlantis lies at the other end but so far away that the expedition need to find ZMPs (a kind of crystalline super battery) at the other end. Unless the Atlantis crew find them then they cannot contact Earth or go home.
Torri Higginson is the perfect leader who got the job against military advice. She is joined by Robert Patrick as Colonel Sumner as they make the trip to a dark city. But once there danger is never far. Add in Aiden Ford as Sheppard’s new buddy played by Rainbow Sun Francks and our team are good to go.
With a brand new unexplored galaxy comes a brand new enemy and this one is more terrifying then the Goa’uld.
They find the city under the ocean and the shield keeping them safe is starting to fail because the city is reacting to their presence. Sheppard leads a small team to find a safe haven in case Rodney fails. But all he finds is a settlement of humans haunted by the shadow of the Wraith. Children are taught to not live in fear, they play games dressed as Wraith and new ally and final member of the new team, Teyla (Rachel Lutrell) shows Sheppard hieroglyphs that detail the story.
There is always a number of Wraith in existence Teyla tells Sheppard. She tells him that the Wraith defeated the Ancients centuries ago and again in Before I Sleep, we see this first-hand as the Ancients submerge Atlantis as they are powerless against the sheer millions of Wraith that want Atlantis for themselves. But they hibernate, allowing humans to breed over generations. Once a few centuries have passed the Wraith rise from hibernation and begin culling the human herds. They can make you see things that are not there making you fire your weapons betraying their victim’s location. They are hunters and when the village is attacked by two dart ships coming through the Stargate, Sheppard learns the ships can teleport their victims aboard keeping them in energy form until being reconstituted in the feeding cells. They also make you think you are seeing things and those effects of things running through the dark forest are effective.
Several people are taken including Sumner and Teyla. But any rescue is thwarted when when the city’s shields collapse but instead of drowning there is a power surge and Atlantis rises to the surface.
The real significance of this will not become clear to any of them until the episode Before I Sleep when they find a second Weir who watched them all die when the shields fell.
Weir and Sheppard argue over the rescue but Sheppard gets his way and takes a team to rescue the others. The village second in command is played by Christopher Heyerdahl who would later play recurring Wraith ally when it suits him Todd.
The spooky set up for the Wraiths pays off in spades when we discover three different kinds. There are the burly masked guards that are the foot soldiers. They follow the orders of a Wraith supervisor and the final one is the Queen, a serpentine like vampire creature. Sumner learns that these Wraith are the guardians for all the others who are in hibernation protecting them until there are sufficient humans for the awakening. Even their furniture seems gothic, and to his horror, she uses her mind manipulation to make Sumner give her the name of Earth. The wraith are beautifully designed and a stark difference from the Goa’uld. The body movements of the Queen are snake like but so like those of a classic vampire.
But the true nature of the Wraith is revealed to Sumner. As the Queen gloats, they don’t need their food to agree with them. She slams her hand, palm open onto his chest and begins to drain the life force right of Sumner aging him to death. But Sheppard puts a bullet in him to give him some form of dignity in death. The team set off explosives which cause the hibernation to start long before it was due to. Like a vampire, Sheppard stakes the Queen before they rescue the others.
If you ever wanted a formidable enemy then it’s the Wraith. As if they weren’t scary enough, our heroes have no backup from Earth. And will this cause them adversity from the humans that live here because they are now on the menu. Carson does an autopsy on what is left of one of them and his results show Wraith tissue is in a state of constant regeneration making them very old and very hard to kill.
There we have it. A powerful first episode that sets up our stay for the next five years in the Pegasus Galaxy. We have a new team that gel from the get go. We have the thread that they have no way home. We have an alien threat that may well be the source of vampires from our legends. All they have is what they brought from Earth, the secrets of Atlantis and their own bravery and their new friends in the form of Teyla and her villagers who are offered refuge aboard Atlantis.
The design of Atlantis is beautiful and realised to house great set pieces which would come to the fore later in the series. The sequence of it rising from the bottom of the ocean is thrilling and that matte shot of it sitting in the ocean with the wake echoing out across the ocean is done with great care. And that’s what I love about this two-part opener; the writers, designers, producers and all care about this product and making it top notch viewing as it all comes together.
This is a show that has been well thought out and put together in a thrilling rmultilayered ride that we don’t fully realise until later episodes.
Enjoy these episodes because by season three we start the down ward spiral because of poor writing decisions and behind the scenes contract issues. But as it stands The Rising is one of the best episodes of the Stargate franchise which still holds up today.
In the series finale of Stranger Things, it was the final battle with the evil Vecna. He had killed, tortured, scared and manipulated everyone from day one. He sent demogorgons and demodogs after innocent people leaving many dead in their wake. Although he wasn’t revealed until season four, we soon found out that Vecna had no conscience. He saw children as weak minded vessels to do with as he wished. The one thing he never counted on was kidnapping the son of one Joyce Byers, a wallflower that quickly became a tigeress.
Fan theory says that Vecna, aka Henry Keel, chose Will Byers as his first victim because at school, Joyce gave a young Henry Keel a part in a play where no-one else liked him. Whether this played a part in Vecna’s reasoning is uncertain. But the opening scene of season five, we see Will captured and Vecna tell him “At long last, they can begin. You and I are going to do such beautiful things together, William. Such beautiful things.” Jump to the climax of the fifth season mid-season finale, The Sorcerer, Vecna levitates Will off the ground and brings him face to face with him. Joyce and Mike are there too amid the carnage of the military base as Vecna takes Will. Joyce has jumped up to defend her son but has been swiped aside by Vecan, again, maybe because of the play. Now Joyce has seen the face of the monster that took her son and put them all through hell.
Vecna taunts Will that he chose the children because they are weak in body and mind, easily reshaped and easily controlled and he was the first and that he broke so easily. It was Will that showed him what he could achieve by taking kids as vessels. But as we know, Will unleashes the power of the hive mind, kills the demogorgons and gives them a way into Vecna’s head.
Now, when Will first vanished, Joyce became Hopper’s worst nightmare. She fought every step of the way to convince the Sheriff Jim Hopper something was seriously wrong and to make more effort into finding her son. At times, she appeared mentally unstable and irrational because only she knew that Will was still alive somewhere and talking to her through the lights. She put every friendship and relationship on the line to fight for her son and bring him home. Not even Hopper believed her, seeing her as a crank, a hysterical mother. But Joyce was relentless and never gave up hope. When the world was against her, she kept fighting for Will, intent on bringing him home. Even when Will’s body is found, she refises to accept it. She turns on her ex-husband, Will’s father, and even Jonathan doubts her. But when Hopper finds his home has been bugged, he finally starts to listen to Joyce. Will’s corpse is a fake and they are captured when trying to break into Hawkin’s Lab. Dr Brenner sends them into the Upside Down where she finds Will and brings hin home.
Did you know that Joyce was fashioned after Bill Neary, Richard Dretyfuss’ character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind?
Joyce may be a small lady but she’s a rottweiller where the people she loves are concerned. As we saw in season four when she and Murray headed to Russia to find the supposedly dead Hopper. So after all of this, Max, Max’s brother, Barb Holland, steaking the kids, nearly killing Mr and Mrs Wheeler and all the others Vecna has been hurting, Joyce can take no more. She is the one that is the motherly character in the show even giving Derek the name of Delightful Derek rather than Dipshit Derek. Vecna has hurt her child, used the fact he is gay against him and kept her away from Hopper for over a year so when they finally have him defeated, Joyce intends to make sure that his pathetic gurgling will be his last breaths. Vecna is a helpless being now and you’d expect Joyce’s mothering instincts to kick in but memories of how Will was after his rescue are too painful. There is a moment where he is reaching out to Joyce because of her act of kindness. Or maybe because she is the mother of them all? Joyce has had a fury build inside her for these last few years and it needs unleashed.
“You fucked with the wrong family!”
When Joyce snarls this, you know Vecna is screwed. His mewling turns to a deep growl of fury as Joyce lashes out.
She lashes out, chopping and chopping at his neck to kill him. Against her fury, we get flashbacks to Will being hurt, his post traumatic stress, Eddie’s death, Mrs Wheeler’s being attacked by the demogorgon from episode two, Max’s trauma and lying to Elle that she was responsible for creating Vecna. Joyce chops and chops until Vecna’s head falls to the floor., She is venting for all of them because she knows what Will’s friends means to him and he to them. They are all family and Vecna will never again hurt them.
The audience are fully with her as the flashbacks remind us just how much they have lost. It reminds us of their pain and terror and never giving up hope. When Joyce was the only one in the world to believe her son was alive, it was all because of Vecna. It is only just that Joyce is the one to deliver the killing blow. It is her job to protect the kids, not the other way round, so thematically only she or Hopper could take this final step. To have one of the kids do it would reduce them to Vecna’s level in the world’s eyes. And Joyce refuses to let that happen.
This is a powerfully emotional scene as any good parent would do the same. Vecna thrives on primal fear such as the loss of a child and cares nothing about the parents. In his last moments, Vecan died seeing the true power in the world; the raw power of just how far a mother will go for her child. There is not a force more powerful than this in the world. If only Vecna had taken Will’s offer to come back to the good side.
I was recently made aware of just how many movies and television shows the younger generation have never heard of, never mind seen. So to that end, we look back at some characters you really need to see before you kick the bucket.
I adore the Fog and while watching it recently I realised the real heroine of the movie was not Jamie Lee Curtis. Jamie only got on the movie poster because of her recent success from Halloween. The true heroine is DJ Stevie Wayne who spends a lot of her time in the lighthouse. If it wasn’t for Stevie then some of the characters including her own son would not have survived the attack by Captain Blake and his ghostly crew.
Played by Adrienne Barbeau, Stevie is a single mother raising her son Andy who is minded by Mrs Kobritz when Stevie is broadcasting. Judging from the photos her husband has died so she bought the lighthouse radio station in Antonia Bay. From the lighthouse, Stevie has a clear view of the surrounding area which is pivotal to her role in the movie. As Antonio Bay celebrates its 100th birthday, weird things begin to happen. Andy finds a piece of wood on the beah that he claims was a gold coin then turned into the wood. Inscribed on it are the words the Elizabeth Dane. She doesn’t realise it at the time but this is the name of Blake’s ship which the town’s founders led to crash on the rocks after betraying him.
Bringing it with her to the radio station, it suddenly leaks water and her equipment explodes on fire as a terrifying voice comes from the microphone swearing angry vengeance demonically. She is the one they call when she mentions the fog report and she is helpless to save weatherman Dan who has a crush on her but she keeps refusing to date. This is most likely because she is still grieving her husband.
What the Fog cleverly does is have different story strands going on before they come together in the movie’s climax. Andy and Mrs Kobritz are trapped at Stevie’s home, the town is celebrating its anniversary with a statue and candlelight procession, the crew of the Sea Grass have bene murdered but only one body recovered from a ship that is rusted with sea water erosion overnight, a dead body revives and Nick Castle (Tom Atkins) and hitchhiker Elizabeth Solley are central to unravelling the Sea Grass mystery. On top of that alcoholic priest Father Mallone (Hal Holbrook) finds a journal hidden in the walls of the church. In it his grandfather, one of the founding members of the town admits what they did to Captain Blake and his crew in order to prevent them spreading leprosy. He tells it to event organiser Kathy Williams and her assistant. All these pieces are brought together when the Fog attacks.
Trapped in the lighthouse Stevie is able to see it coming. She begs someone to get to her house and rescue Andy from the Fog. Nick and Elizabeth get there but the Fog is everywhere and Mrs Kobritz is dead. With seconds to spare they get Andy out but Stevie’s frantic calls over the radio echo as the ghosts close in. With her son safe, Stevie is able to give a second by second account of which parts of the town the Fog is and what streets are safe. It is through her direction that Nick, Andy, Kathy, Elizabeth and her assistant make it to the church where they learn the entire story of the strange happenings.
Stevie then faces the ghosts alone as they attack to the lighthouse. She fights heroically to the end and it is the very people she saved by sending them to the church that save her by giving Blake his gold and saving the town. The movie then ends with a monlogue from Stevie warning people the Fog could come again and for any ships at sea to look across the water and look for the Fog.
Adrienne Barbeau carries off the role perfectly and is the true heroine of the story. In a way the events have made her the watcher at the end of the world, looking out over the ocean, ever wary of seeing that glowing fog approaching Antonio Bay again.
Not all heroines need a gun or laser rifle; sometimes all they need is a brave heart and a microphone.
On this podcast, we look back at the 80s classic monster fest Pumpkinhead. Someone piss you off? Want a little payback? Call Pumpkinhead but beware, there is always a price to pay; a price that could cost you your soul!
The Time Warriors and Beyond 