2011 Hugos

So, in the category of Best Dramatic Presentation - Short, there are three (3!) Doctor Who episodes. "A Christmas Carol," "The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang," and "Vincent and the Doctor."

...wait, really? "Vincent and the Doctor?" You may or may not recall, but I didn't particularly think very highly of that episode. The other two, especially "A Christmas Carol," I can see. Hell, "A Christmas Carol" was... amazing. I think I can safely say that I liked "A Christmas Carol" an incredible amount. It was an even better tear-jerker than "Father's Day," and it may be blasphemous to say it... but I liked it better than "Blink," which officially makes it my favorite Nu Who episode ever.

So yeah, guess which one of those three I'm pulling for.

In long form: Inception. That is all. I think the others are all sequels or adaptations (not sure about How To Train Your Dragon, don't really care). Yes, Toy Story 3 made me bawl about as much as "A Christmas Carol," but still. Give Nolan his due.

Portal 2

Yes, the epic game is out, and single player has been beaten by yours truly. And it's generally pretty cool.

How does it compare to the original? Well, I never died 100 times in a row on the original because I fundamentally misunderstood one of the game mechanics (for the longest time I thought you had to bounce off the Repulsion Gel - I didn't know you could just jump off it). The boss fight was nice in that it was different but similar to the original, although the very last part wasn't necessarily the most intuitive.

Anyway, it is fairly awesome. Now get out there and die in a zillion amusing ways, for science!

New Doctor Who!!!

Yes indeed, we've got a new season off to a fantastic start.

Er...

Okay this isn't a review per se, mostly because I want to wait until the second half to see if something turns out to be a red herring or not. Also, I think it was a huge mistake to review the two-parters separately, as I did in Season 5. So we're going with the Season 2 approach: review the episodes together, and then give them separate scores. So these are just some impressions I had about the episode, and in no way constitute a full review.

Well, the "You can't remember the monsters when you can't see them" think was done pretty well, all things considered. I also liked how everything actually was introduced for the sake of new viewers.

What I didn't like was confirmation of something I'd suspected back when they did "The Time of Angels" and that's that, for the sake of the audience, we're just going to always have the Doctor meet earlier and earlier incarnations of River, as opposed to actually scattering around in her timeline a la The Time Traveller's Wife. Which is a book I heartily recommend, incidentally.

Now then, at one point, River mentions that her darkest day is still ahead of her. She then tells Rory that she means the day when the Doctor doesn't recognize her (and she thinks she'll die because of it... wow, Moff, pat your own back there, huh?), but I think she means the day the Doctor figures out who she is. (Yeah, she's already lived it, but the Doctor hasn't, and the way she said it the first time, it sounded more like she was talking relative to the Doctor's timeline.)

Anyway, if you're at all familiar with Moffatt's timey-wimey ball tricks, you'll love this thing.

And I guess if I'm talking about impressions, I'm glad they tacked on a little "in memory of Elisabeth Sladen" card at the end... I hope Nicholas Courtney gets one as well in the near future...

Who Review: Amy's Choice

(Between the first time I saw this and the time I sat down to write this review, I got around to seeing Inception, which I do not believe was out yet when this episode first aired in Britain. I will try to keep that in mind.)

So, there are two scenarios. In one, the Doctor and company are freezing to death on a paralyzed TARDIS. In the other, it's five years later and Amy is pregnant, while meanwhile a bunch of seniors with aliens in their throats want to kill everyone. The Doctor and friends fall asleep in one scenario and wake up in the other, ad nauseam. The Dream Lord emerges and tells them to figure out which one is reality and which one is fiction. The Doctor pulls out a little golden top and... oh wait, wrong dream-story from 2010.

(Hey, remember in The Deadly Assassin, when they had the title crawl six months before Star Wars and the Matrix 22 years before... The Matrix?)

It's worth pointing out that right after this episode, we go into a 2-parter that 1) kills Rory again, and 2) doesn't really do new fans any favors when it comes to re-introducing the Silurians. So when we eventually learn that the Dream Lord is the dark side of the Doctor's subconscious - his Mal, if you will/must - it's still not unreasonable for us older fans to think that hey, this might be the Valeyard. Moff doesn't seem to be the sort of person to force the whole "tortured Doctor" on us (compare Tennant's perpetual anguish about the destruction of Gallifrey to Smith's "there was a bad day"), but it is an interesting concept; here's the dark side of the Doctor that he's deliberately trying to keep under wraps, knowing full well he's only one more regeneration away from having to face the thing full-on.

(Of course, I was hoping the Dream Lord turned out to be either the Monk - which doesn't seem so likely in retrospect - or the Master of the Land of Fiction. Because Troughton's clearly the Doctor Smith is taking cues from, and The Mind Robber is one of my all-time favorite serials.)

So the Doctor is convinced that the TARDIS is real and Rory is convinced that Upper Leadworth is real, and it's up to Amy to decide. Meanwhile the Dream Lord does the whole "you can't go around with him forever" thing that Rose had to deal with back in "School Reunion," and that scene between him and her in the TARDIS takes on an extra creep factor once you know what the Dream Lord is. Of course, Amy's treating time-travel like her bachelorette party (complete with trying to jump in bed with the Doctor a few weeks previously), and is almost certainly not going to be as clingy as Rose was when it's time to go.

Eventually, Rory gets killed (for the first of three* times and counting) in Upper Leadworth, and Amy decides that that has to be a dream because she doesn't want to live without him. Yay, love.

*Did he die when the Doctor reset the Universe in "The Big Bang?" He's suddenly not Plastic Man anymore, so I assume some transformation took place.

They crash a van to kill themselves (this is strange to re-watch after the mini-episodes "Space" and "Time"), but then the Doctor decides to blow up the TARDIS as well, because the Dream Lord can't have power over anything that's not a dream.

He's right, and they wake up in reality. The Doctor explains that they all got affected by some psychic pollen (astonishingly, this is not the worst piece of technobabble in Who history) and that all is well, but then right before the episode ends he sees the Dream Lord's reflection in the console.

...and that distracts him from seeing whether or not his top fell over.

Okay, no seriously, how does he know he's out of the dream now? He could be in a dream within a dream...

And, hey, the Doctor clearly knows how to blow up the TARDIS. Which means the Dream Lord knows how to blow up the TARDIS. And the episode's "or is it?" ending leaves the door open for its return...

But a caveat about that. The ending to "Normal Again," the only good episode from Season 6 of Buffy that didn't feature a music demon, suggests that everything we know and love about the show is just the deranged thoughts of a seriously mentally disturbed girl. Deep Space Nine was originally going to end with the revelation that the 50's science-fiction writers in "Far Beyond the Stars" were real, and everything in the entire show just took place in Benny Russell's head. So will we see the Dream Lord again? I don't know, but my money's on him popping up again in Season Six...

Anyway, this was inventive and original, even if it got eclipsed by Inception about a month later. KAREN GILLAN'S LEGS looks good even when she's lugging a giant balloon around under her shirt, and Toby Jones is great as the Dream Lord. This was around the time that I started finally warming to Rory as well, though I must say that I didn't fully like him until after he was already dead. For the second time.

8 out of 10.

Now wake up and go back to the Who Review page.

Who Review: The Time Monster

My biggest problem with this story is not the horribly crap monster costume, nor all the awful technobabble, nor the inane idea to try to do the entire freakin Atlantis story in just 1 1/2 episodes...

It's that this story is set in a parallel universe where the phrase "groovy" and women's lib coexist. Screw the old UNIT debate as to whether these stories take place in the 70s or the 80s, I want to know whether these stories take place in the 60s or the 70s!

And yes, the women's lib thing is handled horribly. If you want to make Lady Scientist Whose Name I've Forgotten And Whose Only Plot-Relevant Purpose Is To Be Duped By The Master seem smart and liberated, then why on Earth would you pair her with Stu? No disrespect to Ian Collier, but Stu is not a character many of us menfolk would really want to be. His entire shtick is he's a bumbling coward who says very silly things.

EPISODES ONE and TWO:
So anyway, at the Institute Whose Only Plot-Relevant Purpose Is To Be Duped By The Master, the Master is hard at work trying to summon an ancient demon/god/monster "Chronovore" named, appropriately, Chronos. (Chronos, Cronos, see what they did there? Now they can bring in cod-Greeks.) He's doing this with the aid of a machine called TOMTIT and a magic crystal that can only be moved if it's not linked in time with its earlier self. Um, whatever that means.

EPISODE THREE:
Anyway, Chronos is manifested as a giant white bird-thing that looks for all the world like someone wrapped up in toilet paper and suspended from a wire. Hooray. The Master locks it in a room, which begs the question of why he wants to summon the thing in the first place, if four walls can hold it so easily, and then he drains it into the crystal, again, somehow. TOMTIT is the sonic screwdriver in this story; it does whatever the plot demands that it do.

The Master also gets up to shenanigans by unleashing a knight, some Roundheads and a doodlebug (look them up) on UNIT. Because again TOMTIT can do anything, but it apparently can't summon warriors from the future. At least in The War Games they provided some sort of explanation for why there weren't any soldiers from the First Earth-Draconia War involved. He's briefly hampered by the Doctor's newest invention, an automatic mobile constructed from a wine bottle and a cup of tea. But not for long because he does some stuff and the Doctor's new toy explodes. Then the Master takes the crystal and heads off to Atlantis. Um, because.

EPISODE FOUR:
The Doctor gives chase in his TARDIS, despite the fact that it's currently disabled by the Time Lords and won't be operational again until the end of the next serial, while meanwhile Lady Scientist and Stu manage to turn Sgt. Benton into a baby, because that entire episode was mindless, senseless, oh-God-please-just-let-the-credits-roll-now filler. The Doctor and the Master teleconference for a while before the Master sics Chronos on the Doctor. But this cliffhanger is quickly resolved by Jo pressing a button, and soon both TARDISes land in Atlantis, at the beginning of the fifth episode.

This serial started with a nightmare of the Doctor's; he's in a room in Atlantis and the Master is laughing at him. Yet in reality, neither he nor the Master ever visits this set. Which is sad, because it looks so grandiose on film. The Atlantis set from the videotaped studio sessions is bland and overlit, and a column visibly wobbles during the Minotaur sequence (less than half an hour after Barry Letts calmly insists, in the commentary track, that there were no wobbly sets during his time on Doctor Who).

EPISODE FIVE:
There's all sorts of inane political machinations going on in Atlantis, but the Master allies himself with Queen Cleavage (not her real name, but her most distinguishing feature after her accent) to overthrow the King Played By The Same Actor Who Will Go On To Be The Doctor's Mentor In Planet Of The Spiders. Meanwhile the Doctor and Jo fight Darth Vader with a bull's head. It's a stupid and pointless scene that only exists because they needed a cliffhanger - in other words, it's exactly as sad as the previous one.

EPISODE SIX:
The Doctor and Jo are arrested, and the Doctor does his famous sermon about the blackest day of his life (New Series fans take note). But then the King dies, and Queen Cleavage is all upset about this, despite the fact that she helped overthrow him, offscreen. The Master unleashes Chronos on Atlants, which may or may not destroy it. Then he runs off in his TARDIS, taking Jo hostage. But Jo activates a time-ram (explained two episodes ago, it seems like this involves materializing two TARDISes in the exact same spot, as opposed to one inside the other) and she and the two Time Lords end up in a void...

And then half of Jo disappears, because her outfit is the same as the CSO backdrop. Oops. Chronos turns out to be a girl who lets the Doctor go on his way for some reason. The Doctor pleads for the Master's life (presumably to put a stop to the only embarassing performance Roger Delgado ever gave - the Master beseeching the Doctor for mercy has to be seen to be believed), and Chronos lets him live. The Master escapes, obviously, and the Doctor and Jo return just in time to see the comedy scientists turn Benton back into his older self. His older, apparently naked, self. Even though we'd just seen a shot of the baby sitting on Benton's uniform.

And on that comedic note, this farce comes to an end.

The plot almost just manages to hold together until Episode Six, when suddenly everything has to be resolved and virtually nothing gels with what we've previously seen. This is particularly inane as we know that Episode Six was actually the third episode written, and that Three, Four and Five came afterwards.

If this serial is remembered for anything positive, it's the Doctor's "daisiest daisey" sermon about the blackest day of his life. And yet, if that had been cut in favor of maybe just a tad more exposition about, oh, what the Master was trying to accomplish, this might have held up better.

It's watchable, and even somewhat enjoyable (but, and I cannot stress this enough, not actually "good"), up until about the last five minutes. Then it subjects the audience to the Master begging for his life and Naked Benton. Seriously, just pretend the Master escaped from Atlantis alone, as opposed to taking Jo hostage, and end the story there.

3 out of 10.

Moffat's Folly (light spoilers)

Steven Moffat is a genius who has created some of the most memorably scary monsters Doctor Who has ever seen. When he says that the Season 6 monsters are going to be the scariest since the Weeping Angels, I believe him.

But I don't for one moment believe that they'll be scarier than the Angels. Because he can't do that. The Angels are (or were, up until "Flesh and Stone") in a league with only the Daleks.

The Daleks were terrifying back in 1963/4 because we didn't know they were men in tin cans. They look genuinely inhuman, and are thus terrifying.

The Angels took that concept one step further. They have decidedly humanoid features, but with one important exception: thanks to some very talented dancers and the magic of computer effects, they appear to be completely frozen. The first time I saw "Blink" I'd assumed that they were a mix of props and CGI, because I didn't for one second think that real people could freeze so effectively like that. You don't realize that they're people in suits.

And all that nonsense in "The Time of Angels" about the things that hold the image of an Angel become Angels themselves - that wasn't necessary. The Angels are already terrifying; the end of "Blink" revealed that any statue, anywhere could be an Angel in disguise. It's like saying the Daleks are extra scary because they can fly. Well, no, a Dalek is scary because it's a Nazi in an impenetrable suit of armor and it honestly believes you should die, and unless you're in Death to the Daleks, it's got the means of killing you at its disposal.

So the new monsters are called the Silence and their big shtick is they can make you forget you saw them. See, Moffat's got this whole notion that monsters aren't scary in and of themselves and thus need extra imbued powers. No four-year-old watching this is really going to get it. At all. A four-year-old watching "Blink" might not get why the Angels can't move on-screen, but they'll still be terrified.

Moffat's best monsters have been based on primal fears: the Vashta Nerada exploit a very basic fear of the dark (and, incidentally, this is why the fear-heavy "Silence in the Library" is a lot better than the technobabble-Matrix-whatever-filled "Forest of the Dead," lingering resentment about the River-Doctor plot being pinched from Audrey Niffeneger notwithstanding). The Weeping Angels are things that move when you're not looking at them; you turn back and bam! they're suddenly right in your face. The virus in "The Empty Child" was creepy primarily because it was a kid - no parent wants their kid turned into a monster, and no little boy wants that to happen to his best friend.

In contrast, Moffat's worst monsters - the clockwork droids in "Girl in the Fireplace" and the Smilers in "The Beast Below" have so flagrantly been people in suits, with nothing really to differentiate them from any other man-in-a-mask. Ooooh, their heads turn 'round. Scary. Not.

Moffat doesn't work on an intellectual level. No, I'm not saying his scripts are stupid; one thing I love about "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances" is that the Chekov's Gun is actually very subtly introduced early on. What I'm saying is that he doesn't, or shouldn't, go for your brain. Because the concept that my computer might become an Angel if I pause "Blink" for too long isn't nearly as frightening as "Blink" itself.

And that is why I think the Silence is/are going to be a dud. They rely on a high concept, rather than a basic primal fear, whereas Moffat is better with the latter.

Stuff

Item 1: I got Thin Lizzy's Black Rose. I take back what I said about it a few months ago. That album is pretty awesome.

Item 2: Now that I've seen Moon, I'm going to have to re-do my Best Sci-Fi Films of the 2000s list again.

Item 3: I whine a lot about how the Daleks are overused in New Who. Turns out that per their agreement with the Nation estate, they'll lose the rights if they don't use 'em once a year. Hrmph.

Blade Runner

http://io9.com/#!5788507/10-ways-of-looking-at-blade-runner

That is all.

Who Review: Horror of Fang Rock

After The Deadly Assassin, Phillip Hinchcliffe was fired from the role of Doctor Who's producer. He served out the rest of the season, and may or may not have had a hand in the original scripts for Season 15, but the BBC higher-ups were clear: Hinchcliffe, and the horror elements he'd brought, had to go.

And any scripts he might have set up for Season 15 fell through rather quickly. Horror of Fang Rock was a last minute replacement for a vampire story that Terrance Dicks was told he couldn't write because it would detract from a Dracula adaptation the BBC was doing at the time. (He put it on the backburner, though, and it eventually became Season 18's State of Decay.) So there was a clean slate when Williams started, and his sole mandate was "get rid of the horror."

Therefore it makes perfect sense that the first serial to be broadcast under the producership of Graham Williams is even more dire and grisly than The Talons of Weng-Chaing, Hinchcliffe's swan song as producer. This is a story in which (spoiler alert) nobody except the Doctor and Leela survive. An alien blob attacks a lighthouse, but because the lighthouse-crew alone can't carry the story, a boat crashes and four survivors join in the wacky murderous fun.

It's worth pointing out how well Leela's written here. The About Time books insist that she's caricatured to the point of parody in this serial, but think about it. She has no idea what the Doctor's talking about half the time. "Boiler pressure" is a phrase she's never heard before. For us to expect her to say "boiler pressure" and not "poiler bressure" would be like expecting an American tourist to be able to perfectly repeat a French phrase. It's entirely refreshing to have a writer who knows to write the companion as a character, and not as just some helpless damsel who screams every 25 minutes right before the credits come crashing in.

...which, funnily enough, is apparently exactly what Terrance Dicks, the writer, thought the companion should be. But he was a former script editor, and apparently Robert Holmes gave him a hard time on this story because he gave Holmes a hard time when he was script editor, so all the details are nicely ironed out and we find ourselves believing that yes, Leela really is not from our world. It's something that the new show has had to sacrifice in order to make Billie the Dalek Slayer, and it's refreshing now that Matt Smith is here to be mad and eccentric and alien. But speaking of eccentric, Tom Baker's kind of loopy here, especially right at the very end. Seven people have been murdered, and he's gleefully spouting eerie poetry. I've heard stories that he had a good working relationship with Hinchcliffe, and I've heard stories saying the exact opposite, but it's clear from his performances across his seven seasons that Williams simply had no control over him. Regardless of how harmonious or not the relationship between Baker and Hinchcliffe was, it worked in a way that subsequent Doctor-Producer relationships didn't - and not just through the end of Tom's run, but indeed all the way up through 2005 (there's a reason Eccleston quit after one season, folks, and fear of typecasting certainly wasn't it, or he'd never have taken the job in the first place).

So, despite the fact that the tone is almost exactly the same, the Doctor is now slightly different. Rumors suggest that Tom Baker was sliding into alcoholism right around this time; I can't confirm or deny them, but it's clear that he's not taking things seriously anymore.

The obvious comparison to make is between Horror of Fang Rock and Pyramids of Mars. In both stories, huge percentages of the guest-cast get slaughtered. But Pyramids is quite possibly Tom's best-ever performance as the Doctor, whereas Horror just features him gooning around. There are other problems. The first shot of the monster lacks any scale whatsoever, so we have no idea how big it is. The shipwreck is terribly unconvincing. There's some truly dreadful CSO throughout, to the point that during every scene set in the light room I just kept my eyes off the background entirely. This sort of thing was forgiveable back during Pertwee's run, but we're now looking at a post-Star Wars serial. Bad effects from here on out are no longer nostalgic; they're just embarassing.

One last thing needs to be pointed out. We've seen Hinchcliffe do "darkness" - by which I mean a lack of brightness in the image - correctly in both Genesis of the Daleks and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. When Williams gets a go at it, he superimposes videotaped fog effects over a filmed sequence, resulting in an incredibly grainy, distorted, dark image. Whoops.

Nevertheless, the script is great (though come on, this is Terrance Dicks edited by Robert Holmes. It was never going to be anything less than great). The execution's a bit of a let-down, but on the show's budget it came off about as well as can be expected. 8 out of 10.

An ode to the pyro who lives in my building

No, this has nothing to do with Team Fortress 2, fun though that game is. Rather, it has to do with the rat bastard who set off the fire alarm twice last week (the second time was technically this morning). No, I don't know if it was the same person both times and frankly I don't care.

See, prior to this year, I got caught in one, maybe two fire alarms in my entire college career. So that's two, max, in three years. Then this year, there was a drill early on. That annoyed me, because I'm now less likely to take all subsequent alarms seriously - after all, maybe the hall director just wants to get his rocks off looking at the kids who just got out of the shower when the alarm went off. I assume that's what a fire drill in college means, because we had to put up with the damn things all throughout grade and high school, so if we don't know to leave the building when the klaxon starts blaring, then frankly we're too dumb to live.

There was another fire alarm last semester that went off as I was playing guitar. I'll chalk that one up to my smokin' guitar solo, but still.

And now there have been two in the past week. What is this? Does someone have a bad microwave and is always burning their popcorn? That I could almost forgive. Is someone smoking weed? That I can't forgive.

I hate fire drills. I'll be up front about that. Whenever the fire alarm goes off, I take the three extra seconds to fish my key out of my pocket and lock my door. That's because I've got 2 guitars, an amp, 2 computers and a printer in my room, none of which is bolted down or particularly hard to carry. The reason I take the time to lock my door is that I never believe there's really a fire, and I don't want to come back to my room and find that some of my stuff has been stolen. Burned, I'm strangely fine with - rather than, say, unplug my better laptop and carry it out, as one girl did last night, I'll leave it in my room. That's the paradox. Every time I take those three extra seconds to lock my door, I'm saying "no, I don't think this is real. I'm risking letting all that stuff burn, plus giving myself slightly less of a chance to escape, precisely because I don't believe there's a fire."

Is that stupid? Eh. If I saw/smelled smoke, I probably wouldn't bother. After all, I don't want the firefighters to have to waste precious time hacking down my door in order to save my stuff. It's just that this building is made of brick, and was supposedly designed to be riotproof.

So congratulations, Mr/Ms Pyro. You, along with the morons at my previous schools (who unlike you might have actually had good intentions) have made me completely jaded to the notion of a fire alarm. If there's ever a real fire and someone doesn't take it seriously and gets burned for it, you'll bear some of the blame.

Villains that Actually Make Sense, Part 2

In the video game Half-Life 2, there are no children. I'd speculate that this is mostly because, while Valve was unabashedly out to scare the pants off its clients, they didn't want to put child characters in dangerous situations in a first-person shooter. They justified it by saying that Earth's conquerors had installed a "suppression field" that did, er, something to humanity's reproductive process. Their puppet, Doctor Breen, tried to justify that action in this way:

"I find it helpful at times like these to remind myself that our true enemy is Instinct. Instinct was our mother when we were an infant species. Instinct coddled us and kept us safe in those hardscrabble years when we hardened our sticks and cooked our first meals above a meager fire and started at the shadows that leapt upon the cavern's walls. But inseparable from Instinct is its dark twin, Superstition. Instinct is inextricably bound to unreasoning impulses, and today we clearly see its true nature. Instinct has just become aware of its irrelevance, and like a cornered beast, it will not go down without a bloody fight. Instinct would inflict a fatal injury on our species. Instinct creates its own oppressors, and bids us rise up against them. Instinct tells us that the unknown is a threat, rather than an opportunity. Instinct slyly and covertly compels us away from change and progress. Instinct, therefore, must be expunged. It must be fought tooth and nail, beginning with the basest of human urges: The urge to reproduce."

Yes, Breen is what happens when The Spock meets The Quisling meets Misanthrope Supreme. Intellect trumps emotion. Back when I first played Half-Life 2, I mentioned that I thought Breen had a point near the end of the game when he begs you to stop raising hell. And lets face it: alien invaders came and kicked humanity's ass in seven hours. Collaboration really was the only means of survival. Now, there's a great deal of speculation, mostly originating from sources outside of the game, that Breen was partially responsible for the whole invasion, in which case, well, I have considerably less sympathy.

But to return to his lecture on instinct, the man is actually spot on. (And this lecture comes so early in the game that, Big Brother references aside, I half thought I'd end up working for the man.) Granted, he was using it to justify what basically amounted to the extinction of the human species (see my previous post; if you can't keep replacing your fallen, you can't survive). But his basic thesis that instict is our enemy is correct. See, when someone pisses you off, instinct dictates that you punch him in the face. When someone you find attractive walks by, you want to jump into bed with them. And for eons, we did precisely that. And then we built civilizations and enforced codes of law to keep instinct at bay. "Do as you please" is not the law of the land, because such a law is simply anathema to any society that wishes to survive for more than one generation. We decreed that instinct was subordinate to a small but essential number of human rights; the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In that order.