doctor who

Wednesday various

  • Jack of all trades, master of none? The people who multitask the most are the ones who are worst at it. I’d post some further thoughts on this, but I’ve got about fifteen dozen other things I need to do right now.

  • Zack Handlen looks for meaning in the films of Michael Bay. An unenviable task, to be sure:

    [Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen] is, by any sensible measurement, a lousy piece of work. But it has a personality behind it. That personality is childish, shallow, and has some definite issues with women, but every time Bay frames up those giants staring to the heavens, I don’t have a doubt in my mind that the son of a bitch means it. I sort of wish I could mean it too. Because sometimes the shit gets real, and that’s when winners have to fuck the prom queen, since fate rarely calls on us on a moment of our choosing to stop a giant asteroid from killing everyone we love.

  • Jonesing for some poetry? Swindle is “an automated daily aggregator of contemporary poetry,” pulling in poems from literary journals, magazines, and other RSS feeds. Its creator describes it (at Bookslut) as “a little like Google News, if Google News had been built by a virtually unpublished poet using a second-string web server and a three-year-old book about web programming.”

    • Then there’s The Longest Poem in the World, which, at about 4,000 verses a day, “aggregat[es] real-time public twitter updates and select[s] those that rhyme.” It’s an intriguing project, although any resemblance to good poetry is probably accidental. (There’s something reminiscent of flarf about these “verses.” I wonder if any of my tweets have ever turned up there. [via]

  • Meanwhile, on a somewhat related note, A Brief History of Appropriative Writing. This was interesting, more so than I expected actually, though I still have issues with appropriation without attribution or at least passing acknowledgment. Artists borrow or steal all the time — that’s the nature of art — but it’s good form, if nothing else, to acknowledge the debt where it exists. [via]

  • And finally, while I wouldn’t necessarily mind seeing Jack Harkness on Doctor Who again — and I think the ending of Children of Earth definitely made that a workable possibility — I definitely don’t want to see the two shows combined. Doctor Who can go into dark places — by its nature, there’s few places it can’t go — but it’s still at it’s heart a smart adventure show and at least partly aimed at kids. Torchwood, on the other hand, is best when it’s at its darkest…even it it’s at its worst when it’s just being dark (read: sexualized and “adult”) for its own sake. I don’t want the Doctor to be Torchwood‘s comic relief, any more than I want Captain Jack to be a dose of dreariness in Doctor Who. John Barrowman fits well into both worlds, but I’m not convinced the two worlds would fit well inside each other.

Oh, the things that I’ve seen (Pt. 2)

Some thoughts on the television I’ve been watching recently…

Torchwood: Children of Earth — It’s almost hard to believe Torchwood used to be a bad show. This miniseries was really just incredible: funny, scary, exciting and tragic — everything that redeemed the show for me in its surprisingly great second season but ramped up, with a tighter focus and even smarter, more effective writing. This was much more the Russell T. Davies of The Second Coming than, say, “Journey’s End,” although the miniseries was also reminiscent of Quatermass and the best of other old British sci-fi horror. It’s not absolutely perfect — the resolution of its fifth, final hour might be a little rushed — but even there it’s heartbreaking and well done. It’s powerful stuff and certainly some of the best television I’ve seen in awhile. However maybe rushed, Day Five left me genuinely shaken.

And then there’s Virtuality, which I didn’t include with yesterday’s movies, because, despite how Fox tried to sell it, this clearly wasn’t a movie. It was surprisingly entertaining pilot, though, despite the lack of resolution — and despite my fears that its VR-laden premise would seem hokey now that it’s not, you know, the 1990s any longer. (Remember VR.5, anyone?) But, that said, I think I can see why Fox has so far decided not to pick the show up. As Abigail Nussbaum writes:

The pilot feels several drafts short of completion–or, to be less charitable, it feels lazy, as though Moore and Taylor didn’t feel any obligation to hook their audience with a coherent story or a discernible direction for their show. Instead, they seem to have written the first chapter of a story, which makes gestures towards several different plotlines and takes it on faith that viewers will tune in next week to see which one of them the writers are actually interested in telling….Virtuality gets so bogged down in establishing each of these stories that it forgets to tell a story in its own right.

I think I’m more forgiving of the pilot’s faults than Nussbaum, if only because I didn’t feel as burned by Moore’s last project, Battlestar Galactica, as she did. (I still haven’t even finished watching BSG‘s final season.) But I think virtuality would have made for a much more compelling miniseries; the pilot leaves open a lot of questions, but I suspect there weren’t enough compelling answers to sustain anything longer-term.

And while I also enjoyed the pilot of Warehouse 13, the show might have difficulty keeping me interested week to week. It’s good companion programming to Syfy’s — yes, that’s their name, dumb as that is — Eureka, but I don’t think it has the same level of cleverness as that show, which is what keeps me coming back to Eureka despite its formulaic nature. (Eureka‘s fourth season premiere was a perfect case in point, perfectly entertaining even when not entirely what you’d call surprising.) I’ll watch at least another episode of Warehouse, but monster-of-the-week shows need to work extra hard to sustain my interest, and I don’t know yet if this one has it in it.

Beyond that, I watched the first two episodes of True Blood…and I think I’m finished with it. Lord knows Anna Paquin is attractive, but I’m not sure it’s worth enduring this show just to see her naked. (That’s not the only thing the show has going for it, but it’s damn close.) I finished watching the first season of The Mentalist, and while it continues to coast by on charm, and it finished well, I worry about its second season just being more of the same. Burn Notice, though, continues to be great fun, and I was really pleasantly surprised by Hung, thanks in large part to a likable performance by Thomas Jane. And while a lot of Top Chef fans have been put off by the lack of behind-the-scenes squabbles and drama in the Masters version, I’ve been finding it a lot of fun, watching chefs rise to the challenge rather than burn out under the pressure. It doesn’t hurt that the elimination challenges have thus far been really inventive and cool: cooking a gourmet meal in a dorm room, or for the writers of Lost, or for Neil Patrick Harris at the Magic Castle. It’s not always as exciting as Top Chef proper, but the next season of that is only as far away as August.

And I guess that just leaves Doctor Who. After finishing up the Peter Davison years (well, except for Snakedance), I tried and failed to really get into Colin Baker’s tenure as the Doctor. (I have it on pretty good authority that this isn’t at all uncommon.) So I doubled back and started watching some more Tom Baker episodes. I’d already seen and enjoyed Genesis of the Daleks, The Face of Evil and City of Death, which are often touted as some of Baker’s best, but I was still surprised by just how good The Ark in Space is. Some of the acting is a little over the top, and some of the effects are less than special, but much less so than for a lot of old-school Doctor Who. It’s quite solid science fiction.

Then for some reason, maybe because they’re available online via Netflix, I started watching the Key to Time story arc. The Ribos Operation and The Pirate Planet were both terrific. The Stones of Blood and The Androids of Tara…well, a little less so. I have two more episodes in the arc left, and then I’ll decide where to jump to next.

Doctor Who can be an acquired taste — it’s tough to look past the rubber suits and rock quarries — but it’s incredibly rewarding once you acquire it.

Movie signs

I recently — last Saturday and tonight, to be more precise — watched a couple of movies: Timecrimes (aka Los cronocrímenes) and The Man from Earth (aka Jerome Bixby’s The Man from Earth).

Both were solidly entertaining, Timecrimes for the enjoyable time travel puzzle it creates, and Man for the intriguing ideas it raises. In fact, it’s essentially nothing but ideas: 90 minutes of very good actors just talking to one another. Man has the feel of an old-school Twilight Zone or Star Trek episode — no wonder, given its late author’s background, and the fact that it was first conceived in the 1960s. But that’s not to say it feels padded out to feature length. I think it’s exactly the right length.

Timecrimes was a solid B, B-minus, and I think I liked it better before it was clearly a time travel movie. In its opening scenes, when you don’t quite know what’s going on, it’s actually quite atmospheric and scary. But it’s entertaining beyond that, if never entirely surprising or scary afterward.

(I did like how binoculars and rear-view mirrors were used — maybe intentionally, maybe not. I don’t think this qualifies as a spoiler. In theory, we use these things to see further, to magnify, but they cut off our peripheral vision, the binoculars especially. Anything that fall out of frame can sneak up on us. And in a movie like this, they often will.)

I’d recommend both movies. Both short and entertaining, interesting in their own ways.

Other than that, I’ve mainly been watching some television, including old-school Doctor Who. Having finished Peter Davison’s run on the show (well, aside from Snakedance, which I had trouble finding until recently), I’ve decided to risk Colin Baker’s interpretation. I’m worried, though, that Betty may be right about the character, certainly in her problems with his first episode. Still, it would be hard to disappoint after The Caves of Androzani, Davison’s last. Aside from the always low production values — and a completely superfluous man-in-rubber-suit monster — that was some really excellent work.

A little companionship

Now that the new Doctor has been chosen — and I’m cautiously optimistic about that choice, by the way — speculation on who will be his new companion has already begun. Most, if not all, of this speculation will prove to be wrong — did anyone suggest Matt Smith before his name was announced on Saturday? Did anyone even know who he was? — but that’s no reason for me not to make my own wild and totally inaccurate guesses, just like I did last week. It’s not yet known whether David Tennant will be joined by a companion (or two, or twelve) in his last few outings as the Doctor, but I’m not going to concern myself with that right now. These, instead, are my predictions for the companion that will join Mr. Smith on his adventures in the TARDIS. They are:

  1. David Tennant. A former Doctor as companion. It’s as madcap as it is unprecedented, but there are ways they could make it work. I mean, there is that half-human Doctor who ran off with Rose in the fourth season finale, “Journey’s End” — although maybe the less seen of him the better, hmm? Still, it would be a nice way of weaning fans off of Tennant and on to the new guy.

  2. Russell T. Davies. Either as another character or, in a bizarre postmodern twist, as himself. Either option would work equally well — which is to say not at all — but either way, it would finally let Davies himself moon over the Doctor in unrequited love, which has clearly been a dream of his since he was but a boy. Unrequited, I should say, until that fateful winter night when, on the run from the Cybermen and having drunk just a little too much mulled wine, the two of them… Well, I’ll just let you slash writers in the audience figure out the rest of that.

  3. Julia Sawalha. Maybe best known as Saffron in Absolutely Fabulous — at least on this side of the pond — she was Rowan Atkinson’s companion, Emma, in Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death. Which, as it just so happens, was written by a certain Steven Moffat. Full circle perhaps?

  4. A Dalek. Named Skippy. Again, think of the irony! British children love their irony!

  5. Any of the Doctor’s former companions. Or maybe all of them, through the magic of CGI and careful digital editing. Most of them are probably still alive if any new dialogue needs to be recorded. Elisabeth Sladen already has her own spinoff and working relationship with the BBC — and she looks phenomenal for a woman of 60, I might add! And if not her…well, there were several decades of companions to choose from! I ask only this: please, no Adric.

  6. The ones who got away. Any of the characters who were almost, but never quite companions — or for whom a life mucking about in space and time just wasn’t in the cards. Your Sally Sparrows, your Adam Mitchells, your Astrid Peths, your Madames de Pompadour…any of a dozen different returning favorites, given a second go-around. Hey, it happened with Donna Noble.
  7. Professor River Song. I’m actually not kidding about this one. As portrayed by Alex Kingston in the fourth season two-parter “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead,” the character’s most interesting feature is that she will, at some point in the Doctor’s future, get to know him extremely well. And in his audio commentary to “Silence,” Steven Moffat suggests he’s quite interested in revisiting the character at some point. Would she be his next companion, Matt Smith’s first? Too much is still unknown about what kind of Doctor he’ll be, where exactly Davies’ four movies will leave the series off, and what Steven Moffat has going on inside that head of his. But at this point, she’s just as likely as Lily Allen, don’t you think? Not that I don’t like Lily Allen…

Incidentally, it’s been pointed out that Matt Smith, the new Doctor, appeared in The Ruby in the Smoke and an episode of Secret Diary of a Call Girl, both starring Billie Piper. That’s not really relevant to this discussion, but it is an interesting little factoid.