Science Fiction Trivia

[Nite Owl]

"Pardon me but your Regeneration is showing." - Doctor Who.

[spud42]

"On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you." HHGTG

[ffutures]

"Pardon me but your Regeneration is showing." - Doctor Who.

Not actually getting a feeling of doom here. Am I missing something?

"On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you." HHGTG

Same here - it's more a bit of advice than "hey, this person is definitely doomed for some reason".

Nice tries, but I don't think either quite meets the prompt. But since I didn't accept them people are still free to use these fandoms.

[Wildeblood]

Nice tries, but I don't think either quite meets the prompt.

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

[ffutures]

Nice tries, but I don't think either quite meets the prompt.

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

OK - That, on the other hand, would be a valid answer if you added the source...

[Nite Owl]

"Pardon me but your Regeneration is showing." - Doctor Who.

Not actually getting a feeling of doom here. Am I missing something?

Doom for the previous personality and physical appearance of The Doctor. Doom for anyone that is physically close by when The Doctor regenerates as the energy release is, generally, deadly in a given radius. The Doctor usually retreats to the Tardis and does the whole regeneration thing alone for that reason. Will accept your decision though.

Further Attempt.
"Is that a Black Hole in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" - Unspecified Science Fiction.

[ffutures]

OK - I think I'm going to accept the black hole (that's pretty much guaranteed to kill the person who has it, as well as irradiating everyone else in the near vicinity).

I'm still not convinced by the regeneration, the Doctor always seems to come back from it in some form and I don't recall anyone else being particularly damaged by it - his surroundings and the TARDIS yes, people in the near vicinity no. In the earlier series regeneration seemed to be pretty much changing shape, and you sometimes had people standing around watching, but of course they had a much smaller effects budget...

[Wildeblood]

Nice tries, but I don't think either quite meets the prompt.

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

OK - That, on the other hand, would be a valid answer if you added the source...

What "source"? I was merely commenting on your lack of faith.

But, if I'm welcome to join in your game, I'd probably suggest an example from Star Wars:-
"It's a trap!"

That seems about as unambiguous a foreboding of doom as foreboding can get.

[ffutures]

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

OK - That, on the other hand, would be a valid answer if you added the source...

What "source"? I was merely commenting on your lack of faith.

But, if I'm welcome to join in your game, I'd probably suggest an example from Star Wars:-
"It's a trap!"

That seems about as unambiguous a foreboding of doom as foreboding can get.

OK, that seems reasonably good - that's no.2 then.

Total so far
Nite Owl 1
Wildebloode 1

8 to go, and no more Star Wars or Doctor Who.

Incidentally, the line that put the idea for this round into my mind comes from Doctor Who, and gets used several times per series. What could be more obvious a guarantee of doom to come than a cheery "Hello, I'm the Doctor"?

[RockDoctor]

Not quite in the world of science fiction, but in the wonderful world of caving there is a whole genre of names for chambers, boulder chokes, and the like, through which you have to squeeze to try to access the more distant parts of a system. Names along lines like "the Sword of Damocles" (for a particularly wobbly 10m*10m*10m boulder you need to crawl under ; every time the cave floods, more of the mud holding it in place gets washed away, making every visit ... thought-provoking), or "Don't Look at the Roof" Chamber are a theme of dry cavers wit which don't quite make the threat explicit, but the threat is very definitely there.

Do you remember the case of a cave rescue in South Wales (Old) about 3 years ago which needed a "shout" of about 350 rescuers to extract a crushed and broken-backed caver to surface, then hospital? That was a well-known boulder choke that probably several thousand people had gone over the top of, before it bit the guy. The choke takes the stream, and people have been down through it to water level without finding air-filled cave, but that's a dead end and most people doing a tourist trip down that part of the system would just teeter over the top ... until it moved.

The Mine Exploration bodies are much less literate about it. They just call such stuff "deads", or "hanging death". They're the sort of people who'll call a tight cave "Knacker Trapper Pot"

[ffutures]

Speaking as a claustrophobe with weight issues and a bad back, I would hopefully never be close enough to any of those to be in danger, but I like the terminology. Do they have anything for "this whole cave is actually a giant spaceship-eating monster and we landed the ship in its throat"?

[RockDoctor]

Speaking as a claustrophobe with weight issues and a bad back, I would hopefully never be close enough to any of those to be in danger, but I like the terminology. Do they have anything for "this whole cave is actually a giant spaceship-eating monster and we landed the ship in its throat"?

Sorry, we had a Star Wars binge on the TV last week and "that" scene of Hollywood's finest asteroid belt still sticks in my craw. I mean, the Ooniverse's clusters are bad enough (survival time in the real world - a few dozen orbits of the primary), but ... oh, hang on, don't tell me that the "Space Serpents" OZP is some sort of 'omage to that thing.
None of which is addressing the problem at hand. SF imprecations of not-quite explicit doom.

Not a single phrase, but the whole raîson d'être of everyone's favourite Torry loon, Montgomery Scott (of Star Fleet : infamy, infamy, they've all got it infamy!) is to mutter doom-laden things in the background as the cuff-spangled idiot-up-top tries hard to get everyone killed, again. "Ye canna change the laws o' physics" is both a truism and a threat - the trying may well wake up the Elder Ghods of the universe, to swat those who try tinkering with their carefully erected clockwork. Quite what will happen if the dilithium crystals finally stop taking it is never spelled out, but the feeling one gets is that a cup of camomile tea and a double-strength dose of lithium salts are not the order of play.
Sorry - I should have checked. Is Star Trek on, or off, the table?

Ohh, that's odd - lithium carbonate is more soluble in cold water than hot water ; really hot camomile tea would be contraindicated for achieving a de-stressed infinite improbability.

[Wildeblood]

Sorry - I should have checked. Is Star Trek on, or off, the table?

"Miranda, don't go up there!"

It's not science-fiction, but all this talk of rock crevices and such has put me in mind of Picnic at Hanging Rock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picnic_at ... ock_(film)

The interjection, "Miranda, don't go up there!" enjoyed some currency as a catchphrase during the late 1970s, and any Australian woman named Miranda was born in 1976 or 77.

[ffutures]

Sorry - I should have checked. Is Star Trek on, or off, the table?

Still on the table - I did use red shirts as an example but apart from that you're fine. If you want to give me a particularly doom-laden phrase go right ahead.

[RockDoctor]

Sorry - I should have checked. Is Star Trek on, or off, the table?

Still on the table - I did use red shirts as an example but apart from that you're fine. If you want to give me a particularly doom-laden phrase go right ahead.

Well, in that case, "The dilithium crystals canna' take it!" seems pretty doomy. Montgomery Scott, fae Torry, of course.