Doctor Who 2011-1

First off, to damn with faint praise, Doctor Who has been better this year than for a while. For much of this first half of this year's series, I have been able to watch it with actual interest, rather than feeling that I've been suckered by a title borrowed from a series that was significant to me in my teen years, and that I'm being insulted by self-indulgent junk. It's become light science fantasy with a bit of style, some functional plots, and decent characteristation.

Well, the first half of the first half, anyway.

The core problem with NuWho resurfaced in episode 5. It wasn't just the skimpy, predictable, but painfully implausible plot, the ropey science and the frenetic hand-waving; it was the sense that all of these things were familiar. They weren't just repeating Who-at-its-worst; they looked like an almost-conscious homage to Who-at-its-worst. In other words, this was Who written by someone who'd seen far too much Who, and who thought that repeating stylistic stuff from over the last fifty years with nary a thought to how stupid it might look today was the way to go. Given that, the decision to stretch the story out over two episodes, when  many better plots have been jammed into one, was just adding insult to injury.

(I notice that some more serious fans are complaining about moral inconsistencies in the Doctor's behaviour at the end of this story. This seems to me to be missing a large point. Before you can worry about moral logic, you need simple consistent logic - without any and all inconsistencies being hand-waved away.)

Then, strangely enough, along came episode 7. Oh dear.

You could say that this made a similar mistake, seeming at times to be paying homage to the worst bits of Davies-era NuWho. But I'd be simpler than that. This episode resembled nothing but the worst sort of fanfic.

It was overloaded with guest appearances that made less and less sense the closer you looked at them, and introduced a whole bunch of new characters who the writer thought would be cool (a sword-wielding Silurian detective in Victorian London!) or funny (a Sontaran nurse). Unfortunately, none of it was half as clever as it thought it was, and surely even the youngest of fans will noticed that they were being pandered to - ineptly - by the end?

Okay, I'll watch the second half of the 2011 series when it shows in a few months. I'm hoping that the nature of this war against the Doctor will be explained in more detail, and that his enemies' need for a baroque and implausible plan in order to create a bizarre weapon to use against him will turn out to have an interesting explanation, instead of just being another stupidly complicated attempt to destroy him (when they could have shot him or blown him up at various points during this episode). I'm hoping that the Headless Monks will have an interesting explanation and history, instead of just being another bunch of nursery-scary, stylish, faintly surreal Moffat monsters. (Actually, it's a terrible thing how nursery-scary, stylish, faintly surreal Moffat monsters have gone from being wonderful to being a cliché in a few short years). We'll probably get some half-decent episodes. But frankly, I think that I'm going to be stuck damning with very faint praise again.

Dr Who 2010(a)

Generic criticism; "science fantasy" is a bastard genre that lacks any inherent discipline. If anything is possible, nothing means anything.

Case in point...

Oh, okay, the Christmas Special wasn't that bad. It was done with a certain amount of panache, and it had its moments. It was also interesting as perhaps the first Who Christmas Special that really tried to be about Christmas in some significant way - although I imagine that all the stuff about midwinter festivals may make it a hard sell in Southern Hemisphere markets.

But the structure was all over the shop. The snag with the 21st century Doctor-as-demigod pattern is that it's hard to present him with a truly worrying challenge, and this story got wildly arbitrary in the attempt to get around that. When your magic-wand-sorry-sonic-screwdriver can do anything to any machine, having it not work on some not-very-wizzy-looking contraption is just unconvincing. When your hero's vehicle has towed whole planets around, being unable to rescue one modest-looking spaceship which is crashing very slowly just looks incompetent. And when you're running round history as a plot convenience, having a heroine suffer from a 19th-century-opera terminal disease - one that gives her one day to live but no visible symptoms - is going to look plain goofy to even the eight-year-olds watching. Maybe it is incurable, in all of time and space, but somebody ought to think to try.

Which reminds me, general hint to TV writers; virtually everyone knows how long the programme they're watching will run for. Therefore, having someone announce that your hero has got "just under an hour" to solve a problem at the start of the episode slices suspension of disbelief into tiny bleeding ribbons. See Nick Lowe's The Well-Tempered Plot Device for further discussion.

Also on the matter of time; it's been observed before, by smarter people than me, that Steven Moffat really loves plots that play games with time and causality. Sometimes, this has produced very good stories (starting back with Coupling). But putting him in charge of a series about a guy with a time machine may be too much like putting a child in charge of a sweetshop. Sending the Doctor up and down someone's personal timeline is the kind of time-meddling that Doctor Who has customarily avoided - and allowing people to meet older and younger versions of themselves is usually, canonically, treated as a bad thing. This thing about time is beginning to look like Moffat's hubris.

(Also, I guess having the special effects shark spring forward with jaws agape may just have been a conscious reference to Back to the Future 2, but if so, it was tempting fate. Who FX aren't so good these days that you can afford to remind people of famous lines about crap special effects.)

But regarding science fantasy... The defence of such things, when they're compared to science fiction, is that (like most competent fantasy) they invoke poetic and emotional truths rather than brute rationalism. Well, maybe. But aside from the fact that, when you're deploying the rationalist paraphernalia of science fiction, this is in danger of looking like mawkish tosh, the fact is that you have to make the poetic truths convincing. Chucking in a lot of carol singing and a carriage pulled by a flying shark doesn't cut it.

In other words; Bah, humbug.

(The trailer for next year's episodes after the credits looked moderately amusing, by the way, with no daleks or cybermen even. But I did glimpse a bloody ood. Unless we're going to get a story in which an arch-villain intervenes in their evolutionary history to transform them into the most stupid race in the history of biology, I shall be very cross.)

Doctor Who 2010

So I've finally got around to watching the last episode of this year's season of Dr Who (definitely no question mark as it seems these days), by which time all the serious fans have already blogged about it, sometimes at extreme length and occasionally with useful insights. So anything I'm going to say is going to feel deeply superfluous.

But since when did that stop a blogger?

One thing that those fans spotted was that this season seems to have been largely about Steven Moffat doing the sort of things that Russell T Davies previously did with the show, but doing them well. Now, while this is vastly preferable to many other things (such as, doing them the way that Russell T Davies was doing them), it wasn't what some of us were at heart hoping for (which was, at minimum, him doing Steven Moffat things well). Still, this approach produced some episodes that I enjoyed well enough... Until the last two.

Though the two episodes in the story in question were annoying in different ways. The first was just padded - okay, so bits of it involved classic Who thrills, but all the stuff with the Romans felt rather desperate, and when you're playing for these stakes, some running around and screaming with one (1) damaged Cyberman feels a bit feeble. It also involved some amazing incidental mental thickness; okay, the Doctor might somehow might be expected not to notice the obvious about his little speech about what was in the Pandorica, but you'd have expected one of the two smart-arse companions present to react with "sounds like you".

The plot felt cobbled-together and implausible, too. Okay, hoping for plausibility in a Who plot is a bit forlorn, but there has to be some kind of break point, some chance that stuff might be explained in such a way to make one go "ah!". The Alliance of Enemies had some credibility problems, too; there's infinite comic potential in trying to imagine their planning meetings ("THIS MEETING IS CALLED TO ORDER!" Later. "We have a cunning plan. He's going to cause the end of the universe because of these crack thingies, so we're going to raid his assistant's brain through one of these cracks, construct a hideously complicated plot to attract his attention, and then capture him." "And then we exterminate him?" "No, we lock him in a box that any idiot with a sonic screwdriver can open." "Can't we exterminate him a little bit?" Later. "What are the Silurians doing here? We thought that he liked you lot." "You mean, apart from giving us a scientific name that puts us in the same genus as those monkeys?" "Yes." "Well, he put us into hibernation, and set the timer so that we woke up in the 31st century - just when he knew damn well that solar flares would be sterilising the solar system...").

The second part, on the other hand, showed the severe difficulties with fairytale-style wild science fantasy, by just not doing it very well. If anything is possible - anything that fairytale magic might bring about, anything that wide-screen baroque space opera might conceive - then the most that you can get on screen is pretty pictures and over-acting. This was all-too-Daviesian NuWho, the Doctor as a demigod who can save the entire universe with a bit of dubious technobabble and some pained claims about self-sacrifice, and the assistant du jour as the mostest important magic girl in all the universe who can restore things which have been wiped from history by wishing hard enough. It just wasn't satisfactory.

This series has also given too damn many hostages to fortune. Another thing that some proper fans noted about the whole series was that Steven Moffat seems to like time travel stories - that is, stories in which stuff happens in the wrong order, cause and effect are chopped up for dramatic or comic effect, and so on. Actually, I think that the time travel is just an excuse, a convenience; Moffat simply has a lot of fun tinkering with causality within narrative structures. My favourite script of his, ever, anywhere, remains episode 1 of season 4 of Coupling, "Nine and a Half Minutes", which is essentially Rashomon as an urban sex comedy. However, Who has usually been a little bit careful about time travel stories, in this strict sense; to this show, time travel is just a way to get our heroes into an infinite variety of places and times, and any suggestions about going back in time to stop bad things have been clubbed down with pronouncements about the Laws of Time or Causal Loops. And there are several good reasons for this caution, given Who's nature as a mass-market TV show; time travel stories tend either to confuse casual viewers by being difficult to follow, or to bug the bejasus out of attentive geek types by being sloppy and illogical. Furthermore; they present huge problems for the long-term design of the show, in the way that excessively powerful technology does; if the Doctor can use time travel to solve one problem, to determine which flat to rent to find the monster of the week, why doesn't he use it every time a problem is serious enough to, say, involve the deaths of a few dozen people? The rule has been broken on occasion, of course - Davies broke it once or twice - but Moffat seems happy to plain ignore it. It'll come back and bite him, I tell you.

Anyway, Steven Moffat is definitely engaged in reinvigorating a classic British popular culture hero for television in the 21st century, and doing a fine job of it from what I've seen so far. Unfortunately for this blog post, the hero is Sherlock Holmes. This jury of one is still out on his work on Who; let's hope that, now that he's worked through the unhappily established conventions of 21st-century Who in his first season, the second will do something really worthwhile. The presence of, for example, an actual married couple on the Tardis (a first, I think) does at least suggest that we might get some proper Moffat foibles instead of the tired old Davies foibles.

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010: Art in Standardised Forms, I Guess

Afternoon: Mmm - it's been a while since we got to the Fitzwilliam Museum, and they've got some temporary exhibitions on, some of them set to end in the near future. Plus, they've finished the last round of refurbishment.

And yes, the Greek and Roman galleries are nice these days - we just wandered through soaking up (mostly) a collection of partial and damaged sculpture that reminds one that this stuff is one of the foundations of Western art. Then, it was off through the rather less grabbing (but doubtless very, umm, comprehensive) porcelain collection to the south wing, which is where they tend to put the temporary shows. There was a room full of netsuke, which is an extraordinary form of craft, and maybe of true art - I mean, those things are just decorative toggles for bits of costume, they seem to use fairly standard subjects, there's no apparent attempt to evoke deep emotions - but it's all bogglingly fine and elegant and skilled, at a level of effect which makes much conscious art look cack-handed. There was a room full of monotype prints by Lino Mannocci, which might appeal to me, in a minimalist, allusive sort of way, when I'm in the right mood. There were a couple of rooms now holding the museum's collection of modern art, of varying levels of appeal, but hey - Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, oh my. And there was an exhibition of works by Sargent, Sickert & Spencer, unified by slightly more than the fact that they were three English-speaking artists of the late 19th/early 20th century whose names began with "S". Just to state what I'm qualified to state - i.e. the bleedin' obvious and personal - I guess that Sargent is the most instantly accessible, even if this exhibition (being based on the museum's own collection) didn't feature some of his most lushly gorgeous portraits; Sickert came across as the most interesting, if only for his London urban images; and Spencer is the most "spiritual", if mutant personal religious imagery and unflattering self-portraiture is what floats your boat.

There was also this year's sculpture promenade outside. This didn't grab me quite as much as last year's, but there's some reasonably cool things there.

Evening: Oh yeah, the new Dr Who[?] season opener. (I note that the standard logo for the series now uses the letters "DW", with no question mark. Am I alone in finding this somehow deeply naff?) It wasn't bad - not great, but not enough to make me hide behind the sofa and weep for lost childhood things. While Matt Smith is definitely playing a younger, mutated David Tennant, he's trying to make the part his own, and at least he seems to be emphasising "weird" over "cute". The plot was essentially routine Who - much more noohoo than klassikhoo, but relatively good noohoo...

But on the other hand, Steven Moffat frankly seemed to be coasting a bit at this point, making it "good noohoo" by repeating stuff from previous good noohoo rather than by being original (and it's his capacity for originality that makes me hope that his Who will be worth watching). Notably, we had the bright, sparky kid who meets the Doctor and then encounters this half-disbelieved childhood imaginary friend again in adulthood - which was great in "The Girl in the Fireplace", but not needed a second time. We also got a reiteration of some of noohoo's worst features, notably including gratuitous cameos by ludicrously over-qualified thespians who were then completely thrown away - Nina Wadia being the worst example here, although as a Green Wing addict, I was also unhappy to see Olivia Colman reduced to playing Monster's Temporary Shape (even if said shape could be interpreted as Harriet Schulenburg). Then there was "the Doctor faces down dangerous aliens and scares the cr*p out of them just by identifying himself", which seems painfully self-aware at best, implausible at worst - and which was in any case done much better and more convincingly by Neil Gaiman writing John Constantine twenty years ago. Plus, we got the all-too-classic ur-Who clunkiness of monsters who really, really can't run for toffee, a new Tardis control room that tips over from the steampunk style of the last series into junk-shop silliness, with old typewriter keyboards and all, and a Portentous Comment by the monster which makes it clear that this series will have an overarching plot theme. Sorry, I know that this is supposed to be a way to keep us watching, but when you've already had seasons where the overarching theme was The End Of The Universe Is Coming or The Doctor Is Going To Die, doing it again is just superfluous and suggests a lack of confidence.

And - oh yeah - there's the new assistant. Quite sparky, quite charming, but still stuck with being the sparky, charming eye candy who's along to keep the Doctor company. Having grown up with assistants who were trained scientists or strong-willed girl reporters or fully certified geniuses in their own right, I'm afraid I do have to regard a kissogram girl as a bit of an anti-feminist retreat. (And can one even find kissograms these days? Not that I've gone looking, but ... I have a nasty feeling that we might have to think of Ms Pond as a pre-watershed euphemism for a strippogram.)

But no, it wasn't a disaster. It was adequate science fantasy, which may be what we should be asking from Who these days, because getting anything more would be pure bonus. Let's hang in there and see - for now.

Expand, Contract (19) (and an apology of sorts)

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 9: Summoners is now out. And while this is, yes, a Dungeon Fantasy supplement, I'd like to think that its treatment of summoning magic, stats for spirits, and so forth might just make it moderately interesting to GURPS fantasy gamers in general.

Meanwhile, I've also recently had sight of much of the next issue of Pyramid, because this'll be the Transhuman Space issue. If I say it looks very promising, it's not just because it includes an article by me.

(And, on a completely unrelated matter, if anyone wonders - no I haven't been able to summons the enthusiasm to review the last couple of D[octor]r Who[?] episodes, although it might yet happen. But honestly - a ridiculously over-qualified array of thesps grab all those bit-parts and cameos so they can expand their CVs and look cool to their grandchildren without actually having to do very much, characters sprout super-powers for no particularly good reason other than plot, and we get subjected to the most protracted and hyper-active death scene in the history of time and space... Is anybody inspired?)

Doctor Who no particular date special, November 2009

Well, it was better than the last one. It had a fairly substantial plot, and an opportunity for some acting (from both the lead and the guest stars), and some decent special effects and some references for the old fans to catch. It even attempted some semi-serious hard SF details in its depiction of the near future, with a Mars station that looked like it might work, built at a date when such a thing might well happen. (The chance of keeping NooHoo's future history anywhere near KlassiKoo's skimpy near-future timeline is of course zero, thanks to the passage of time, and the Time War can be safely assumed to have sent waves of borrowed DC Comics cosmic korflu over history.) The attempts at robust logic didn't last long, mind you; we couldn't really expect any sensible depiction of Martian gravity (not on this budget, kid), but when we were told that there were serious mass constraints on what could be shipped to Mars, it was just plain annoying for the station to have big echoing voids and walls that were allegedly made of six feet of steel. (Err, what? I mean, Mars has radiation issues, but six feet of steel?) Nor did the character logic hold up; we had a first human colony on Mars, which suddenly and inexplicably found another (seemingly) human being on its doorstep, and within minutes horrible catastrophic things started happening, and yet after a token comment, nobody tried to blame or interrogate the impossible stranger...

But that was kind of the point. The Radio Times asked rhetorically if this was the scariest Who ever, but it was really just the most Doctor-Who-scary Who that the writers and director could manage - a very, very stock-classical Who plot, in basic, skimpy form. Station in deep space, the Doctor arrives, bad sh*t goes down (thanks to a monster whose nature remained under-explored, but which manifests as a variant on the modern shambling-zombie stereotype, yawn), the Doctor assists the humans as they're picked off one by one; all this was only padded out to an hour by the Doctor's recognition that he couldn't help this time, because this doomed station represented one of those graven-in-stone historic events, and his struggle with what this might really mean to him, particularly in the still-unshaped context of 21st-century NooHoo mythology.

From the start, NooHoo has spent (too) much time attempting ironic deconstructions of 20th-century KlassiKoo tropes; this episode attempted to escalate that deconstruction into actual classical tragic form, with a flawed hero escalating rapidly to Hubris and a flash of blue light as the Nemesis that strikes down his spirit. But what this really meant was just a script that gave David Tenant an excuse to engage in a lot of acting and some wild shifts of supposed motive, and a setup for the two-episode Christmas Special.

Ah yes, the teasers at the end. NooHoo has previously displayed a superhero-comic-style willingness to drag fan-favourite characters back despite having closed them out with loud assertions that they were gone, gone, sealed off by the laws of the multiverse and gone forever, really. Nobody took that claim seriously with regard to the Master, of course; he's just too coolly complete an antagonist for our hero, and there was a hint or two even at the time. But Donna (and her irritating grandpa)? Oh, come on guys; however skimpy the plot logic of her write-out, can't you stand by the integrity of your own closed-loop tragedy, for once? It's not like you had the unbearable pressure of the teen romance fanwank demand that brought back bloody Rose.

Oh, and at the end of the episode, we had a glimpse of an Ood - yes, the wettest alien race in the history of NooHoo or KlassiKoo (wetter by far than this episode's monsters, ho ho). Jeebus. That, after an episode which had mentioned perhaps the most interesting Who-aliens ever, aliens who haven't reappeared in NooHoo. Couldn't we have, say, a Who-New-Space-Opera exploration of the history of Mars, please? A fudge to explain what a high-tech culture was doing there a mere 10,000 years ago and how the same race came to be part of that multi-species commonwealth in the future, plus a CGI treatment of the freeze guns and cryonic technology?

No, of course we can't. Not this year. That would require a bit of cool-headed seriousness. But next year, the show gets a producer who has shown some capacity for seriousness and a real sense of style (even if it also gets an infant Doctor). So I guess I'm hanging in there, for now.

Doctor Who Easter Special 2009

So someone thinks of a whole load of incidents and scenes and images - not many of them very innovative, some of them seriously old - and then comes up with just enough plot to hold them together. It's a plot dependent on too many coincidences, naturally, but the point is to cram all those bits into an hour, not to tell a decent story, after all. Not actually the worst hour I've ever spent, I suppose, but hardly enough to sustain any mystique.

(Okay, the "guns that work!" line induced a smile. Only a very small one, though. Oh, and I now have to go with Andrew Rilstone's ideas about some characters representing the show's own fans and their foibles, which haven't always convinced me in the past; here, the metaphor just got painful.)

Yes, Well, Who Remembers Giant Robots?

Just for the record, this year's D[octo]r Who[?] Christmas Special was quite good. However, the sheer weight of refrigerator logic problems got to be a problem by the end. And lampshading the big one didn't actually help.

(Yes, "recent Dr Who episode suffers from logical coherence problems". Please try to act surprised.)

Sorry about all the geeky jargon there.

Anyway, if we're going to spend time and effort discussing the chances of supporting cast from previous episodes becoming the next Doctor - is it too late to start a claque for Dervla Kirwan?