Stuff I might have meant to mention yesterday (End of Time spoilers, like you haven't seen it already)

1) Back to The End of Time for a moment.

The drumming is the Master's double heartbeat, and it's driving him insane because the Time Lords made it so. Hmm. Is this the reason even the Delgado/Ainley versions were psychotic? It's not the first time they've tried to use him (The Five Doctors) to fight their battles, and thus it's not the first time that that didn't quite work out either.

2) I can't wait to see what the Grand Moff does with the show.

No, really. Of the six episodes (not counting "Time Crash") he's written, only "The Girl in the Fireplace" didn't really do it for me, and let's face it, that episode was part of Season 28 (Series 2), in which Billie the Dalek Slayer (I love that name) turned into a jealous clingy whiner who got left on a beach. Needless to say, not my favorite season by a long shot.

My first exposure to Mr. Moffat was when I watched the documentary on City of Death, and he said that Douglas Adams was a terrible choice for script editor. At the time, I had the same opinion of Douglas Adams that I currently have of Joss Whedon (see previous posts), so my reaction was "who the hell are you to say this?" Two things then happened. I can't remember which order they happened in, but 1) I saw "The Empty Child" and 2) I realized just how bad the rest of Season 17 was. It's actually amazing that there was a diamond in that rough.

So, onward! Just tell me when the episodes are going to start airing.

Who Review: The End of Time (SPOILERS)

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Both "Waters of Mars" and "The End of Time" are complete reversals (for me, at least) of the usual RTD story, where the first 2/3rds are awesome and the last 1/3rd is a massive fairytale ending; the further you got in both WoM and TEoT, the better those stories got.

I'd read somewhere that the Time Lords were coming back. Then I completely forgot about it before I watched the episode. So that reveal at the end of Part One was incredible. Though I'm not sure the Doctor really needed a reason to be afraid of the Time Lords; over the course of the classic series, they exiled him (maybe), killed him and exiled him again (The War Games), made him their errand boy, (UNIT era through Genesis of the Daleks), tried to kill him again (The Deadly Assassin), tried to kill him again, (Arc of Infinity), and tried to kill him yet again (Trial of a Time Lord). Why exactly would this guy be happy to see them at all?

Still: Timothy Dalton as Rassillon. Awesome. The Doctor and the Master both saying "get out of the way" (watch it, you'll see what I mean). Awesome.

Bottom line: Part One seems to be a lot of the standard RTD shark-jumping that usually goes on at the end of his episodes, and everything falls brilliantly into place in Part Two. It's a really clever trick on his part, get all the nonsense out of the way first so the epic, epic ending is what sticks in viewers' minds.

One last complaint: Tennant going from "I don't wanna die like that!" to "Okay, maybe I've lived too long," while letting him turn on a dime one last time (again, something Nu Who "borrowed" from Buffy), seemed kind of forced.

Xmas Breakage

Okay, regular updates (read: one a day no matter how boring) was one of my new year's resolutions and I've already broken that for 13 days running. I'm a bad person.

For Christmas I got all the remaining Doctor Who Key to Time serials that I didn't already have, and I'm seriously considering dashing through them all at some point in the future and doing Who Reviews every day for a week. Long story short: the first two are good, the middle three are so-so, and the last one had a lot of potential but didn't really seem to fulfil most of it. Since I don't really know Graham Williams' television background, or Tony Read's, I can't say for sure if they should have known better, but it seems like they just told their writers "Hey, make sure you include the Key to Time thing. No, we're not going to tell you how it ends." (Though the Doctor abandoning his quest and going fishing in the first part of Androids of Tara, while probably blatant filler, somewhat oddly manages to foreshadow the season's end. Sort of. I'm reaching.)

After that I started watching my Star Trek Deep Space Nine DVDs, nerd that I am, and found the writing suprisingly clunky compared to Doctor Who and the entire output of Joss Whedon. DS9 was once upon a time my favorite show, and now it's barely staying in the top five list (I like it more than Dollhouse, which I really only watched because it had Whedon's name on it, and haven't seen an episode in a while, which is a shame because as I understand it's actually gotten rather good. Too late, of course, but still).

I also got the third volume of About Time: the Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who and laughed out loud when it referred to Nu Who as Billie the Dalek Slayer. Again, going back at watching DS9 helped serve as a reminder of how Buffyesque Nu Who is.

I made another attempt to learn Megadeth's "Holy Wars," which ended in another miserable failure. And that was pretty much what happened on vacation. Also, the movie's undergone a massive overhaul. More on that next time.

I am le wrong

Well, okay technically, I was right, the phrase was in the episode. But let's face it, that's not what I mean. Then again, the only time I was able to accurately predict what insane plot twist Joss Whedon was throwing my way was, ironically, when Mal said "they're not gonna see this coming" in Serenity.

Whedonist ramblings, part 1

Dollhouse, that show about sex slaves that nobody watches and is thus never going to get another season, returns briefly to our screens for the next two months. Given what I know about who's going to be in these episodes (and who's not going to be in episodes after the ones airing tonight), I won't be at all surprised if we hear the line "there are three flowers in a vase" come up tonight. Just sayin'.

That was going to be the extent of my post until I read yet another cracked.com article making fun of Twilight. The fact that it threw Spike in there as an example of an anti-Edward at first didn't gel; as any Buffy fan can tell you, Spike was the most whipped former badass of all time until Edward came along. Then it occured to me that mid-Season Five Spike (I'm thinking specifically the episode "Triangle," where he wants credit for not feeding on bleeding disaster victims, but that just shows you how much of an unforgivable geek I am) is still more badass than Edward. When your main vampire is more pathetic than a chipped, whipped whiner, you're not doing anyone any favors. To round off my descent into unforgivable nerdhood: Spike may be love's bitch, but he's man enough to admit it.

Also? Football good. No beat scrawny geek up, cavemen. Please?

New Market Enterprises Product #807353076260

What follows is a work of fiction.

We here at New Market Enterprises have been working on a new sort of gun. It's part disintegrator, part mind-control ray, and its intended use is 1) to play inappropriate jokes on college drunkards and 2) to publicly embarass our enemies.

What Product #807353076260 does is remove the target's clothing, while inducing the target to think, no matter what evidence to the contrary, that they are still fully clothed. We're calling it the Emperor's New Gun.

Now some of you, our corporate financers, might be wondering why we've made such an immature piece of technology. Surely, you say, we're just going to go around zapping every hot girl we see. We would like to assure you that we are professional scientists and take our work very seriously. We would never use our science for nefarious purposes. Any e-mails you might have read to the contrary are blatant lies foisted on you by a vast right-wing conspiracy.

And at any rate, we've had some problems in the testing stage, so even if we wanted to (and we don't), we couldn't make the 6 o'clock news by turning innocent girls into indecent exposure criminals. Maybe that would be on late night news instead, because of the risque content. Anyway, that's not happening.

What happened was this: the blast radius is too big. Scientists could detect no change in the clothing of our (totally willing) test subject. Ethan Sanderson, after a minute of staring intently at the subject, abruptly stood up and ran to a supply closet. After a muffled discussion it was revealed that Doctor Sanderson was convinced that everyone had been hit by the ray, and that everyone was now naked an unaware of it.

It soon became evident, as personell not present during the initial test entered the testing area, that only the subject was no longer clothed. All of the scientists were hit merely by the mind-control ray and forced to believe, as the subject did, that she was still wearing clothes.

Doctor Lawrence Vaughan has suggested that we implement the device on a global scale, for no better reason than "it will make an excellent literary allegory." The Science Division was reminded that Doctor Vaughan's doctorate is in Literary Studies, and therefore "not real." His suggestion was ignored and he was sent back to the library.

We'd just like to point out again that we will not do as Doctor Vaughan suggests, nor will we employ the device at all outside of laboratory conditions in the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, it has been twenty-six hours and we have not been able to coax Doctor Sanderson out of the supply closet.

-Doctor Foster

Waters of Mars

What I didn't like about Waters of Mars:

1 - "I'm (person)." Boom "Person's name. Died 2059." Repeat about ten times in three minutes. This is my single biggest complaint about the episode. It got annoying the second time it happened.

2 - Doctor, this isn't Pompeii. There aren't going to be petrified bodies for people to find centuries later. All you have to the instant you know it's doomsday for Bowie Base is park the TARDIS inside the base, shepherd everyone in, set the auto-destruct, and drop the crew off somewhen else, well before or after their impact on history would be largely negated.

3 - RTD continuing his slide into the delusion that he can write a season finale like Joss Whedon.

4 - "Gadget gadget."

5 - Is this episode supposed to be a silly jab at the water-fearing aliens in Signs? Cuz that's what it feels like.

What I liked about Waters of Mars:

1 - The fact that the actors were all able to pull off being afraid of water. Bravo.

2 - "Name, Rank, Intention." "Doctor. Doctor. Fun."

3 - The last five minutes. I do not mind a bit of megalomania in my Doctor. And David Tennant is now officially giving Troughton a run for his money for the second-best slot behind Tom Baker.

4 - Gadget.

5 - It wasn't about a bus in the desert. The minor characters are all so brilliantly written and played that as they die off, you really wish you'd gotten to see more of them. I especially like the guy who blows himself up in the shuttle.


Now, I've heard the DWO Whocast about the episode, and they spend a bit of time ranting about the "it's just a theory" line re: fixed points in time. This didn't bother me. A) at the time, I thought the Doctor was just dumbing it all down for his would-be companion. B) it's a nice bit of foreshadowing for what he tries to do at the end of the episode.

And I'd also like to say that it's about damn time we got a "fixed point in time" after the present day. Nice touch.

4 sonic screwdrivers out of 5.

-James

Halloween playlist

"Fear of the Dark" Fear of the Dark Iron Maiden

"The Call of Ktulu" Ride the Lightning Metallica
(Turn up the bass frequencies for the first 2 1/2 minutes to hear Cliff Burton at his absolute best.)

"Highway to Hell" Highway to Hell AC/DC

"Dazed and Confused" Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin

"Black Sabbath" Black Sabbath Black Sabbath

"Hells Bells" Back in Black AC/DC

"The Right to Go Insane" Endgame Megadeth
(Okay, actually half the songs off Peace Sells would work as well, but I'm addicted to this one.)

"Children of the Damned" The Number of the Beast Iron Maiden

"Welcome to the Machine" Wish You Were Here Pink Floyd
(Odd man out? Just a bit. Tough.)

"The Thing That Should Not Be" Master of Puppets Metallica

"Still Life" Piece of Mind Iron Maiden

"Brain Damage/Eclipse" The Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd
(Because songs about going crazy are always good.)

I also understand that the original version of the Doctor Who theme frightened young children.

-James

(Edit: I'm listening to Megadeth Radio's Halloween mix. "Fear of the Dark" just came up. Nya ha.)

(Edit #2: It just came on again. There's a reason it's at the top of the list.)

Barry Letts 26 March 1925 – 9 October 2009

As you might have guesses by my last post, I am behind the times. News takes a while to reach my delicate ears. I found out that Barry Letts died only by reading Paul Cornell's blog, which I was only reading because a link from Whedonesque told me to go there for something completely unrelated.

So, this means that, to the best of my knowledge, the only living producer from Classic Who is Phillip Hinchcliffe. Derrick Sherwin might be, but he was the producer for exactly one serial (Spearhead from Space) before resigning from the post and letting Barry get a shot at it.

Now, the pacing of the show wasn't exactly stellar whem Mr. Letts was producing, and the switch to color meant that it really didn't hold up as well as it used to. The political subtext, as I stated in an older post, I tended to disagree with but didn't dislike. But still, Barry served as producer for 5 years and managed to not get the show cancelled, and nobody else can stake a similar claim (except RTD, if you count this year's specials as an actual season). On top of that, his last important act as producer was to cast Tom Baker. Of course, for most of his tenure, he was producing a show that really doesn't resemble the show that came before or after his term. The Doctor was for the most part stuck on Earth with a solid base of support and can't fly the TARDIS at all, as opposed to barely being able to fly it.

And yet it's easy to look back on those, the dandy-Doctor days, with considerable nostalgia, and we have Mr. Letts primarily to thank for that.

In other news, please please please tell me that this is not the title that's actually going to appear on-screen for the new series.

Fall Break or: Sometimes I Wonder If My Brain Is Doing Drugs Behind My Back

If I could remember a single thing about the drive home, I'd relate it.

Moving on: the average age of the items I purchased at Best Buy: 13.333333. Yikes. This is what happens when you're naturally behind the times, and also short on cash thanks to a speeding ticket. They were, in order of age:

Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here (1975)
I'll never tire of this band. Even though I don't own anything from before Meddle, but hey, I'm missing out on the one with the guy who went crazy from the drugs and the several that are meandering experimental wrecks. (I jest. Piper, at the very least, I intend to pick up one of these days, and the band themselves have pretty much disowned everything between Piper and Meddle.) Anyway, the album's only 5 songs long, but damn. These boys could write music. Or, more probably, these boys could jam flawlessly for hours on end and then edit it down to stick it on vinyl.

Serenity (even though the collector's edition came out in 07, I'm crediting this one as 2005, otherwise I have to go back and do the math again.)
It's one of those movies I honestly wish I hadn't known who was going to die beforehand. Oh, by the way, for anyone who hasn't seen it (and you're seriously depriving yourselves), spoiler alert: people die. Well, it's Joss Whedon. I won't claim to be surprised. Anyway, it's good. Really, really good. And for someone who grew up on Star Wars and felt badly cheated by the prequels, really really good is good enough for me.

Super Mario Galaxy (it says (C)2007 on the title screen, so I'll assume that's accurate).
Finally, I got a Wii game that requires the use of the Wii-mote and did not cause me to throw said Wii-mote down in frustration within two minutes. I'm considerably less apprehensive about the sequel now. Having said that, I hope they iron out the difficulty curve; the levels alternate between "I could have done that in my sleep" and "screw this, let's watch Serenity again." And back again. There is no middle ground. The Deep Dark Galaxy, for example, there's a trick you can use with the cannon to make levels one and two (and possibly three; I can't remember it) much easier. Otherwise in level two you're supposed to do this... you know what? I'm not even sure what you're supposed to do in level two. Oh, and they're not "galaxies;" they're star systems at best. Then again, "Super" Mario Sunshine proved that the developers never passed a 200-level Physics course, so I'm not really surprised that they got the nomenclature wrong here.

Okay, what else did I do? I did not do what I'd intended to do, which is get my guitar serviced. I decided to save that for Thanxgiving/Xmas instead. Good luck... I probably learned a new song, but at this point I don't remember what is and isn't in my repertoire. This may have something to do with the fact that I automatically assume that I can work out anything in my iTunes library that's lighter than Iron Maiden in less than three minutes. But enough about me; let's talk about me for a while.

On the way back the three noteworthy things were the three police cars pulling three people over in the construction zone on I-90. Rockford's getting a fat paycheck...

Also I did the bare minimum of homework.

-James

Who Review! The Deadly Assasin

The Deadly Assassin begins with a Star Wars-esque caption scroll providing a general background, segues into a Manchurian Candidate-esque political thriller, and then goes into a virtual reality world called the Matrix. It was first broadcast in 1976, meaning that it pre-dates both Star Wars and The Matrix.

Blah blah Time Lords blah blah boring MP soundalikes blah blah. The serial came under fire at the time for two reasons: 1) the third episode, which I'll get to later, and 2) the fact that it turned the Time Lords from the mystical all powerful race that they'd been ever since their introduction in 1969, into a bunch of doddering old men. This revision certainly goes a long way towards explaining why the Doctor left their society, but it left a lot of viewers upset that the great and powerful Time Lords had been reduced to a bigger version of Parliament.

The setup is excellent: the Doctor's coming back to Gallifrey because the President (not the Prime Minister! odd for a British show) of Gallifrey is resigning. En route he gets a vision of the assassination, and the astute viewer will note that in this vision, the Doctor is the one holding the gun. He gets to Gallifrey, sneaks past the guards for no adequately explained reason beyond the fact that the Doctor sneaks past the guards on every planet he ever goes to, and arrives in what appears to be the only large room on the planet. This is where the President will resign, but the Doctor notices a rifle protruding from the shadows up above. He goes to investigate, picks up the rifle, aims, fires, and the President drops dead, and the credits roll on Episode One. Brilliant! Did the Doctor just assassinate the President of Gallifrey? Tune in next week and find out!

Episode two: no. No he didn't. In fact, in a shot added to the reprise from the previous episode, we find that he was actually aiming at the real assassin. After being arrested and using a legal loophole to wriggle his way out of being vaporized on the spot, he enlists the security chief who arrested him to help prove his innocence, which he does by entering the Matrix. It's right about here that all the credibility of this serial begins to wash away.

Episode three is a big filler episode set in the Matrix, with the assassin hunting the Doctor. It ends with a "violent" fight and a freeze-frame of the Doctor's head being held underwater. This drew fire from some people who thought that children couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

Episode four contains a revelation that the New Who writers must by now be desperately wondering how to wriggle out of: Time Lords have a total of 13 lives. Also, the Master, who is the villain of the piece (this isn't a spoiler - he's called "Master" in the first episode and they find a trademark shrunken doll in episode two), holds a gun on the Doctor, says something along the lines of "No more delays, now you die," and stuns him. Stuns. Him. After saying he wouldn't delay the Doctor's execution any further. Then he returns to the aforementioned only big room on the planet where he raises a monolith that nobody noticed before, ever. He and the Doctor fight while the camera shakes a lot and styrofoam falls from on high, and then he falls down a big crack in the floor. End of story.

Rrrrgh.

Long story short, if he were still alive, Robert Holmes could probably sue the Wachowskis for $zillions, and the story goes all wonky about halfway through episode two and never really recovers.

I'm trying to figure out why this story is held in such high regard. It derailed the Time Lords forever, featured Tom Baker talking to himself because he didn't have a companion, and reintroduced the Master in his most absurd plot ever (I'm going to lure the one man who knows I exist to Gallifrey, frame him for a murder he can easily prove he didn't commit, and then while nobody's looking, steal stuff from the dead President, enter the grand chamber and blow up the planet).

Okay, the Master's mask is good by 1976 standards. Hell, if they could have just made the jaw move a bit more when he spoke, it might have even been good by 1977 (read: Star Wars) standards. It had tubes for pumping blood over the face and everything, but this wasn't used because of the poor lighting. It's the "the regeneration limit is capped at 12" story, the continuity fans' favorite story. I kinda like the sets on this verison of Gallifrey better than all the subsequent ones (espcially Arc of Infinity). And it's a story of political intrigue first broadcast in a time of political intrigue. We got a companion-less story, and the first story set mostly on the Doctor's home planet. And the acting, which is usually fairly good on Doctor Who, is better than average here. Is The Deadly Assassin well-remembered for the sum of these perks?

Bottom line: it's a good story, but it's no Talons of Weng-Chiang, which was broadcast only a few months later. I'm not entirely sure Deadly Assassin deserves to be on the top 10 list. Top 20, absolutely. Top 15, probably. Top 10 intact stories, maybe.